Storiesonline.net ------- Deja Vu Ascendancy by AscendingAuthor Copyright© 2008 by AscendingAuthor ------- Description: A teenage boy's life goes from awful to all-powerful in exponential steps when he learns to use deja vu to merge his minds across parallel dimensions. He gains mental and physical skills, confidence, girlfriends, lovers, enemies and power... and keeps on gaining. A long, character-driven, semi-realistic story. Codes: mf ff Mult cons rom bi het ScFi humor ESP inc bro sis 1st slow ------- ------- Preamble Short Description: A teenage boy's life goes from awful to all-powerful in exponential steps, when he learns how to use déjà vu to merge his minds across multiple parallel dimensions. He gains mental and physical skills, confidence, girlfriends, lovers, enemies and power ... and keeps on gaining. A long, character-driven, semi-realistic story. Story Codes: mf, mff, ff, inc, ScFi, ESP, cons, rom, teen, 1st, long, slow, humor. Re. "ScFi": The core plot mechanism is a pseudo-scientific rationalization for a source of mental powers. Unlike most ScFi, this is not futuristic; instead being set in the present-day world. Your liking the sciences of mathematics, physics and biology would be advantageous. Some understanding of the martial arts concept of ki (also known as qi or chi) would also be helpful but isn't essential. Re. "ESP": That acronym is usually interpreted as telepathy, of which there's almost none herein. But there's a great deal of Extra-Sensory Perception, as well as other extraordinary mental abilities. Readers who enjoy stories that feature ESP should enjoy this one (I hope; I'm not a mind reader). Re. "long": Most novels are about 80,000 words long, with Lord of the Rings totaling about half a million. This story has 3.5 million of them. Re. "slow": Seriously, it's VERY slow, as I don't know how to do millions of fast words. As one indication, the first of the many sex scenes starts at about the 65,000th word because the main character starts a loner and it takes him a novel's worth of text to get his mojo working. The pace of the story picks up, and by the end it could be called "action packed", but the end is a long way ahead of you. Re. "humor": My good jokes are also about 65,000 words apart. But don't worry, I've filled the gaps with bad jokes; I can easily do millions of words of those. ------- Text Conventions I have used some unusual text conventions so please skim the following explanations: Indenting Long Speeches. In a written story a new paragraph usually indicates a new speaker, but sometimes one individual will be talking so much that their speech runs to multiple paragraphs. A common way of indicating a continuous speech is to leave the trailing quote mark off all but the last paragraph, but when I read stories I often miss that small indication and become confused over who's speaking. So this story uses an additional indication of a continuous speech: the first lines of the speech's second and subsequent paragraphs are indented. I wanted to use a tab for that, but Storiesonline strips those out so I've substituted something similar although slightly more intrusive. I hope you'll find the marker of a continuous speech helpful once you're used to it. The Vertical Bar ("|") is used when two characters talk simultaneously. I put their speech on the same line when the simultaneity has some significance. For example: "Shall we do it?" asked Tom. "Christ yes!" agreed Dick. | "Hell no!" refused Harry. | "I'll get the Vaseline," offered Nigel hopefully. Square Brackets ("[Text]") are used when the main character, Mark Anderson, wants to break the narrative of his autobiography in order to make a comment that is off topic or out of chronological sequence (usually about something coming up soon). Double Square Brackets ("[[text]]") are for when the comment is from Mark Anderson The Elder; the hero at the time he is writing his autobiography, rather than his thoughts at the time being written about. 'Squiggly' Brackets ("{Text}") indicate a sound, e.g., "{Sigh}", "{Groan}" or even someone blowing a "{Raspberry}." I don't bracket it when the sound is onomatopoeic, e.g., "Oh", "Ouch", and "Argh". There's a special case with "haha" as it can be pronounced as written (as it often is when used sarcastically), or it could be sounded as genuine laughter. I treat it as onomatopoeic, writing "haha" to represent genuine laughter. For sarcastic mockery of laughter or someone acknowledging that a joke has been noticed, I write "ha-ha". Less-Than and Greater-Than Signs ("") are used to delimit voices in the head, as per telepathy, e.g., Horizontal Lines are used to denote a break in the text greater than a paragraph but less than a chapter. For example, a single chapter may cover a 24-hour period and have three major scenes separated by horizontal lines. Single Caret on a line of its own ("^") is used to separate paragraphs, but not by as much as a horizontal line. They're used for several reasons: a shift of perspective within a scene, to isolate a multi-paragraph digression from the body of the text, and to separate items in a list where those items need multiple paragraphs as Storiesonline's rudimentary bullet-point system can't handle that. Capitalization for Emphasis. I've capitalized words to indicate their being emphasized, rather than using underlines or bolds - it seemed a DAMNED good idea at the time. I've promoted "OK" to the status of an ordinary word, writing it as "okay" to avoid its looking emphasized, and I've slightly abused the normal convention to write times less emphatically, e.g., "4 P.M." becomes "4pm". ------- Comments: After reading several online stories in the ScFi and ESP genres, I became bored by repeated uses of the same few inexplicable and inconsistent plot mechanisms, usually gifts from aliens, magic, or implausible science. Short stories need quickly explained mechanisms so the fault was mine for reading too many of them, but doing so made me wonder whether I could invent a mechanism that was at least a little explicable and somewhat self-consistent. Then I got distracted and forgot to think about it further. A couple of weeks later, into my mind popped this story's mechanism, the hero's character arc - I dislike stories in which the hero is always perfect - and much of the plot. I challenged myself to write the story in a way that made the mechanism seem plausible and which showed the protagonist's character develop. Those were my two primary objectives, above and beyond all other objectives such as entertaining readers. I wrote the story to challenge and entertain myself and for no other reason, so reading it is a different experience than you will be used to. Consider yourself warned. ^ This story traverses multiple dimensions. They are meant to be similar to, but variously different from, my world, so I've sprinkled cross-dimensional differences throughout the story. If you encounter something in my story that makes you think, "Stupid author, that's not right!" then you've either hit one such deliberate difference, or the author has been stupid again. Please let me know if any particular instance of my stupidity is excessively annoying, so that later readers can benefit from the correction. If you notice I've made any mistakes in describing the process of deflowering female virgins, my research would benefit from you sending me your of-age virgin daughters. I'm a very diligent researcher so I'll need several (just keep sending them; I'll tell you when to stop). ^ The only aspects of this story that I planned for it to contain were pretty girls and having godlike mental powers, both of which I'd like to have some of (just two or three, to start with). Everything else that happens herein does so because the story drove it; not because it drove the story. By which I specifically mean politics. An important theme in this story is power: the hero's lack of it initially, then his having it in abundance and eventually superabundance. When the hero gains enough power, he necessarily bumps into "The Government". Another important theme is overcoming adversity, so I've cast the Government as an adversary. In stories of this type, the Government is ALWAYS the hero's adversary. This story is set in contemporary America to give it an air of realism, not to make "A Statement" about contemporary American politics or politicians. Trying to represent politicians realistically isn't one of my objectives - not even politicians try to represent politicians realistically - so don't get your political panties in a twist over my fictional characters' fictional politics. I fear a negative reaction to my including politics as a plot device, but I have no such fear about my including murder, theft, under-age sex, anti-religious statements, or lying to mothers. It's ironic that politics is the least politic of all those - unless my mother reads this! ------- Your feedback is welcomed and appreciated, although not as much as your providing me with research assistants. ------- Legal Notices: Copyright© 2008, 2009 by AscendingAuthor. All rights reserved. This story and all parts thereof is copyrighted by the author. It may not in part or in full be distributed, reproduced or used as source material without the prior written permission of the author. This story is for YOUR personal non-profitable reading pleasure only. WARNING, this story contains graphic descriptions of sex involving adults and teens, including between siblings. If you find such material offensive, or if you're under the legal age required to read such material, STOP NOW, before you become a menace to society. This story is fictional (unfortunately) and many of the beliefs and behaviors described herein are not practiced, advocated or condoned by the author (some of them are though, especially the good ones). Any similarity between persons and events depicted in it, and actual persons and events, is purely coincidental. Some major public figures might appear similar and have the same names, but they're ALL from different parallel dimensions so are of no legal relevance in the author's dimension. ------- The following lists - of characters, chapters and images - are provided mostly to help readers locate something they have already read. I recommend that first-time readers do not read them because they contain many spoilers. Scroll down to view, or to avoid the spoilers: press your keyboard's "Home" key then click on "Next Chapter". ^ List of Characters: Each category has its own sort order; you'll work it out. The Andersons Mark Anderson: The protagonist. He's not perfect, but he's learning. Steven and Felicity Anderson: Mark's parents. Jobs: supervises a lawnmower assembly workcenter, and technical sales support for medical equipment. Felicity wears the trousers in the family. Steven is social but laid-back. Carol Anderson: Mark's sister, 20 months younger than him. Plush body, passive and caring personality. Donna Anderson: Mark's sister, 33 months younger than him. Enthusiastic about and good at sports, direct personality. Ron(ald) Fisher: A Black, petty criminal in an LA-ghetto gang. Mark turns Ron's life around (sort of). Three years older than Mark. The Williamses Julia Williams: Mark's first girlfriend, 15 months older than Mark. Relationship with Mark: scarily intense, ultra-loyal, manipulative, bossy and submissive (all at the same time). Prof and Vanessa Williams: Julia's parents. Nearly a generation older than Mark's parents. Lecturers in Mathematics and Ethics. Andrew and Robert Williams: a.k.a. "The Boys". Julia's fraternal twin brothers, ten years older than her. Doing PhDs in Forestry Economics and Geophysics. Girlfriends: Sophia and Ashley. Mark's Very Significant Girlfriends Ava West: Two years older than Mark. Joins with Mark and Julia after both her parents (Carson and Katie) are struck with cancer. Nevaeh Smith: a.k.a. "D-Cup". The same age as Carol Anderson. Very beautiful and exceptionally well built. A good, God-fearing Christian girl. Becomes Mark's girlfriend because God gives her to him. Mark's Significant Girlfriends Alexis Joseph: Tough, rough, black jeans and T-shirt. Some tattoos. Likes it rough. Parents Ben and Vicky, ex-hippies. Carina Durham: Member of Pipeline Group 1A. That group's first date is in her home. Helpful. Virgin but well educated and good attitude from parents (Justin and Kirsten). Diana and Claire Norris: A Cutie and Duckling. Delightfully enamoured of Mark, obedient and innocent (temporarily). Easily pushed into sisterly threesomes with each other and Mark. Mackenzie Norris is their older sister. Katelin Eaton: Only likes "normal" sex. Into dance. Brothers: Don, Junior, Wayne, Gunner. Parents: Senior, Janet. Martial arts and macho family. Lily Cheng: Helpful liaison. Hong Kong Chinese. VERY impressed by Mark, so uses him to get what she wants. Pat(ricia) Osmond: Liaison. Very pretty. Gets pushed into a threesome with Lily and Mark that succeeds well. Nice enough girl, but relatively inexperienced with relationships and doesn't really measure up attitudinally. Mark's Insignificant Girlfriends Adriana: A-List beauty at high school. Very beautiful and very fake. Thinks wheelbarrows are funny. Anna: Falls in love with Mark during Hot Tub Party. Virginal, silly. Out of her depth, left behind. Carly Pennington: a.k.a. "Klepto Carly" as a result of her trying to steal $80 from Mark. Is blackmailed into being a party gift. Chloe Moon: Failed girlfriend because of psychological problems caused by parents, religion and exceptionally large breasts. Cindy: Picks up Mark at the 10k running race, MS Animal Science (dairy), 22 years old when meet, walks out because Julia tries too hard and Mark is too young. Dakota: Short-term Liaison. Is fired when she tries to manipulate Mark. Laci Abbot: Hogs Mark's cock-time during Hot Tub Party. Has hots for him. Can't really keep up. Laila: Another short-term Liaison. Bi with lesbian preference. Has a regular threesome going with her 4-year older sister (Gabriella) and Hannah (a smart, humorous young woman). Leanna: Winner of the Aquatic Center RPS competition. Friend of Gina, an Italian (therefore a good cook and an enforced virgin). Linda Hogan: One of Julia's best friends pre-Mark. Doesn't have the drive necessary to earn a place beside Mark (in Julia's opinion). Mackenzie Norris: Won the quiz about Mark. Reasonably good looking and not totally repressed (did strip during Hot Tub Party, but didn't sit on Mark's cock). Too greatly programmed with her parents' attitudes. Selfishly possessive. Savannah Glass: Tall, attractive, Black girl. Arrogant, tries to be manipulative, believes she deserves the best, i.e., Mark and his wealthy lifestyle. Probably bi, but she uses sex so dishonestly it's hard to tell. Ancillary Characters Annette Neumeyer: A Queen Bitch of high school. Unintentionally gives Mark the chance to be cool, starting him on his path to godhood. Roy Smith: A boss at the local DMV. Issues Mark with his driving license. Sensei Nigel: Aikido instructor. Short, elderly, English man. Wife is Edith. Logan: OSU (Oregon State University) computer tech. Helps with Mark's systems a few times. Soccer Teammates: Max, Logan (a different guy from the above), Jason, Tristan and Peter. The other team members aren't mentioned much. Robert Moran: DHS (Department of Homeland Security) Portland. Senior agent. Kyler Wright: Manager, DHS's Sciences & Technology Directorate, Washington, DC. Armani Phillips: Security Manger, Eclipse's (CIA's cover name) Fort Dodge lab. Seth Byrd: On-site boss of Eclipse's lab. Jonathon Winters: Washington DC cameraman. Gets the job of making a list of life-or-death importance. Paul Olsen: Head of Security for the Anderson-Williams household. Robert Mueller: FBI Director. John Pistole: FBI Deputy Director. ^ List of Chapters: Author's Preamble <-- you are here Prologue Introduction ^ Part 1: My First Merge, to 2 Minds Chapter 1: It Began with an Ending Chapter 2: Arrival Chapter 3: The Second Day Chapter 4: Our First Day at School as an "Our" Chapter 5: The Next Week Chapter 6: The First Couple of Months Chapter 7: The Rest of the School Year Chapter 8: What I Did on My Summer Vacation Chapter 9: Committing Suicide for the Second Time ^ Part 2: My Second Merge, to 4 Minds Chapter 10: Two's Company; Four's Even More Company Chapter 11: Living in a Same-Sex Foursome Chapter 12: Getting My First Date Chapter 13: Back at School with Julia Chapter 14: Planning My First Date Chapter 15: Friday, the Day of My First Date Chapter 16: My First Date Chapter 17: Saturday Morning Lessons Chapter 18: Well-Fucked Chapter 19: Julia's Outpouring Chapter 20: I Treat Julia as a Sex Object Chapter 21: Monday Evening; Not Sore No More Chapter 22: Long Running Chapter 23: Family Dinner at the Williams' Chapter 24: Old Swimsuits Are Best Chapter 25: They're on to us, Guys! Chapter 26: Educational Offer ^ Part 3: Profound Aikido Discoveries Chapter 27: My First Aikido Lesson Chapter 28: Aikido Revelations Chapter 29: Biff Number Four Chapter 30: Biff Number Four; Aftermath Chapter 31: Progress Report Meeting Chapter 32: Quality Times With Carol Chapter 33: A Nice, Relaxing Movie Date Chapter 34: A Phone Call to Carol Turns My World Upside-Down Chapter 35: Julia's TK Unveiling Plan Chapter 36: First Explorations of Carol Chapter 37: Carol Gives Me a Backrub Chapter 38: I Give Carol Much More Than a Backrub Chapter 39: Carol Continues to Show How Good She Is Chapter 40: I Run Faster and Put My Foot in My Mouth Chapter 41: Stereo Vision is Great Chapter 42: Happy Carol, Curious Mom Chapter 43: It Works Better in the Movies Chapter 44: Showing the Renovations Chapter 45: Sensei's Tests Chapter 46: Not Cold Feet, Exactly ^ Part 4: Our Marriage Chapter 47: The Proposal Chapter 48: The Proposal Explained Chapter 49: Obtaining Parental Consent Chapter 50: The Ceremony Chapter 51: Carol's Deflowering; the Preliminaries Chapter 52: Carol's Deflowering; the Act Itself Chapter 53: You Can't Have Too Much Consummation Chapter 54: Honeymoon Breakfast Chapter 55: More About Carol Chapter 56: Honeymoon Lunch Chapter 57: Is No Sister Safe? Chapter 58: Honeymoon Dinner Chapter 59: Carol's Dream of Dying for Her Lord Chapter 60: Are You Insane! Chapter 61: Mansion Plan Chapter 62: Nubbins Inspection Chapter 63: The 10K Running Race Chapter 64: Donna's Gift Chapter 65: The Best Dress I Have Ever Seen in My Life Chapter 66: Short Date with Cindy Chapter 67: Mind-Games with Donna Chapter 68: Exercising with Donna Chapter 69: The Track Coach Can Take a Running Jump Chapter 70: Carol Decides to Become a Lesbian Chapter 71: Why Females Take So Long to Get Dressed Chapter 72: More on Carol's Lesbianism Plan Chapter 73: Julia Plans to Offer Herself as a Sex-Prize to Every Boy at School Chapter 74: My "I Love My Sister Carol" Speech Chapter 75: The Examiner From Hell Chapter 76: Starting to Plan My Coming Out Chapter 77: Less Than a Game of Bowling Chapter 78: Educational and Mansion Planning Chapter 79: "Donna's Ducklings" Named Chapter 80: Repeating My "I Love My Sister Carol" Speech ^ Part 5: Accumulating Second-Tier Girlfriends Chapter 81: Ava West's Letter Chapter 82: Lunch with the First Fourteen Chapter 83: The Biffs Plea Bargain Chapter 84: Shopping at "Raging Rocky's Rags" Chapter 85: Planning the Liaison Structure Chapter 86: Preparing Ava; Part One Chapter 87: Preparing Ava; Part Two Chapter 88: Picking Liaisons Chapter 89: Homosexual Clothes Make Girls Faint Chapter 90: First Time with a Liaison Chapter 91: First Time Training at Aikido Chapter 92: Lily and Pat's First Time; Part One Chapter 93: Lily and Pat's First Time; Part Two Chapter 94: Lily and Pat in the Morning Chapter 95: Prof's Degree Bombshell Chapter 96: School Before Lunch Chapter 97: Lunch with Carol's Friends Chapter 98: Dakota's Session Chapter 99: Prof Plans for Me to Become a Quadmillionaire Chapter 100: I Get Told Off for Not Having a Bigger One Chapter 101: Ava's Fitness Test Chapter 102: Ava Has a Tough Morning Chapter 103: I Have a Tough Morning Shopping ^ Part 6: The Incredibly Important Discovery of Blobs Chapter 104: Let There Be Light Chapter 105: Bowling Chapter 106: Food of the God, Pizza! Chapter 107: Chloe in the Parking Lot Chapter 108: Donna Gets Her Hands on Part Of Me Chapter 109: Hot Tub Party; a Tit in Each Hand Chapter 110: Hot Tub Party; Democracy in Action Chapter 111: Hot Tub Party; 8-Ball Demonstration Chapter 112: Hot Tub Party; Things Get Sexy Chapter 113: Hot Tub Party; Line Up for Gropes Chapter 114: Hot Tub Party; Two Identical Fucks Chapter 115: Hot Tub Party; 90-Second Notches Chapter 116: Hot Tub Party; Two New Abilities Discovered Chapter 117: Hot Tub Party; Pipeline Idea Suggested Chapter 118: Trial Run at the Spirit Mountain Casino Chapter 119: End of an Eventful Day Chapter 120: First Mass Lunch Chapter 121: Sleeping with Donna Chapter 122: Planning Plenty of Pretty Pussies Chapter 123: Chloe's Topless Proof of Trust Chapter 124: a Divine Being Gets a New Computer System ^ Part 7: Our Growing Relationships with Ava and Others Chapter 125: Planning for Ava's Thrashing Chapter 126: The Ava Plan Goes Perfectly Chapter 127: The Best Laid Plans of Mice, Mark and Julia Chapter 128: Ava's Commitment Chapter 129: Vanessa's Comments to Ava Chapter 130: Katelin's Prize is Delivered Chapter 131: Ava's Loose Threads Chapter 132: Katelin has a Good Morning Chapter 133: I Couldn't Even Eat the Pizza Chapter 134: No One Touches the Hair! Chapter 135: World-Record Marathon Chapter 136: Mr. and Mrs. West; the Easy Half Chapter 137: Mr. and Mrs. West; the Tricky Half Chapter 138: I Don't Put My Toys Away, or in Chloe's Case, Manage to Get Them Out Chapter 139: Half a Lunch with the Ducklings Chapter 140: I Decide to Become an Internet Millionaire Chapter 141: Visiting Katelin Eaton's Family Chapter 142: More Demonstrations Chapter 143: Helping the Police with Their Inquiries Chapter 144: Planning for Binion's Chapter 145: My Body Gets a Guard Chapter 146: Lunch with the Two Nice Eatons Chapter 147: Julia Bullshits Chloe Chapter 148: Nine Jostling Bullies Chapter 149: Dad Meets the "Killers" Chapter 150: The Business Takes a Small Step Forward Chapter 151: Chloe Learns "The Secret"; Part One Chapter 152: Chloe Learns "The Secret"; Part Two Chapter 153: Repeating the 10k at Donna's Athletic Club Chapter 154: Soccer Game Versus a Salem Team Chapter 155: The Evening Before Our First Anniversary Chapter 156: Planning for Two Dinner Parties Chapter 157: I Leak Chapter 158: My Second Foursome that Wasn't Really Chapter 159: My Stupid Way to Look Noble Chapter 160: More Shopping, Excellent! Chapter 161: My Idea of Window-Shopping Chapter 162: Discussions About Some Girls' Not-So-Private Parts Chapter 163: Donna Spills the Beans Chapter 164: Liaison Meeting; Pipeline Mathematics Chapter 165: Liaison Meeting; Carding Girls Chapter 166: Liaison Meeting; Lily's Offer Chapter 167: After the Liaison Meeting Chapter 168: Ruminations on G-String Bikinis Chapter 169: Dad and I Get Our Cars Washed Chapter 170: I Leak Better Chapter 171: Revenge Gropes Chapter 172: It Hurt My Head Chapter 173: Ridiculed Chapter 174: Poor Donna's Lesson Chapter 175: Aikido Training and Casino Preparation ^ Part 8: Action at Binion's Chapter 176: Heading to Vegas Chapter 177: Bet One Chapter 178: Bet Two Chapter 179: Leaving the Scene, Twice Chapter 180: On The Lam Chapter 181: Meanwhile, What Had Been Happening in Vegas Chapter 182: Meanwhile, What Had Been Happening in Corvallis Chapter 183: Meanwhile, a Few Loose Ends Chapter 184: The Non-Prodigal Son Returns Home ^ Part 9: A New Lifestyle Begins Chapter 185: A Breakfast for Millionaires Chapter 186: My First Day as a Millionaire Chapter 187: Anniversary Present Revealed Chapter 188: Getting Ready to Go to the Chengs' Chapter 189: Dinner With the Chengs; Creating a Family Heirloom Chapter 190: Dinner With the Chengs; Laps of My Lap Chapter 191: All Good Things Come to an End Chapter 192: More About Memories Chapter 193: Meeting the Norrises Chapter 194: Dinner With the Wests Chapter 195: Tit Flashing Chapter 196: More Macho Bullshit: the 'Castration' Attack Chapter 197: Aftermath of the So-Called Castration Attack Chapter 198: Parking Lot Fun and Games Chapter 199: I Smoothly Invite Chloe to Climb Onto My Cock Chapter 200: The End of Chloe Chapter 201: Giving Away Big Checks Chapter 202: Aikido; Lessons in Ki Chapter 203: Lily Returns Chapter 204: Discovering a New Way to Project Ki Chapter 205: It Didn't Hurt Me, So You'll Hardly Feel a Thing Chapter 206: Lily's Gifts Chapter 207: Ava's Clever Idea Chapter 208: Duckling Lunch Chapter 209: My Date With Mackenzie; The Dull Part Chapter 210: My Date With Mackenzie; The Magic Part Chapter 211: Unlucky 13th (Not for Me Though) Chapter 212: Pipeline Date 1A#1; The First Half Chapter 213: Pipeline Date 1A#1; The Second Half Chapter 214: Lily's Sexual Servitude Celebration Chapter 215: Flying to Rodeo Drive; Bad Use of a Bed Chapter 216: In Los Angeles; Very Good Use of a Bed Chapter 217: Sunday in Los Angeles; Doctor Mark Chapter 218: I Add "Typist" to My Job Skills Chapter 219: Aikido; External Ki Projection Chapter 220: Julia Thinks About My Image; I Think About My Proximity Range Chapter 221: A Signing of Appreciation Chapter 222: Two Wonderful Rights Become a Wrong Chapter 223: Alexis Reveals Her Ass and My Being Rich Chapter 224: Advanced Aikido Class Chapter 225: Kidnapped Chapter 226: Without Boss and Goon Chapter 227: One Way Out ^ Part 10: My Third Merge, to 8 Minds Chapter 228: I'll Get You Out Prof, I Promise Chapter 229: the Eyes Have It Chapter 230: Recovery and Discovering a Loss Chapter 231: The Long Haul; Part One Chapter 232: The Long Haul; Part Two Chapter 233: Going Back to Corvallis Chapter 234: Look Mom, No Hands! Chapter 235: Home at Last Chapter 236: Talks With My Fiancées; Part One Chapter 237: Talks With My Fiancées; Part Two Chapter 238: Talks With My Fiancées; Part Three Chapter 239: Exam Week's Monday Chapter 240: The Rest of Exam Week Chapter 241: Prof Is Welcomed Back to Corvallis ^ Part 11: Summer is for Spending Time With Girls Chapter 242: The First Saturday of Summer Vacation Chapter 243: Carol's Cuties; I Mismanage Them Chapter 244: Carol's Cuties; Carol Manages Them Very Well Chapter 245: Mansion Shopping Chapter 246: Mom Isn't Happy About Carol Showing Everyone Her Pussy Chapter 247: Mark's a Genius at Understanding Females Chapter 248: Some Debriefing and Briefing Chapter 249: Carol's Sex Education Begins Chapter 250: A Little Quality Time With Ava Chapter 251: I Invent Lazy Studying Chapter 252: Bikini and Car Shopping Chapter 253: The Aquatic Center; Arrival and Playing With Savannah Chapter 254: The Aquatic Center; The Group Gathers Chapter 255: The Aquatic Center; Rock, Paper, Scissors Chapter 256: The Aquatic Center; Several Conversations Chapter 257: The Aquatic Center; I Make a Splash Chapter 258: Satisfying Two Appetites Chapter 259: A Girl Accuses Me of Using Her for Sex (Oh, the Injustice!) Chapter 260: Mom Gets Led by the Nose Chapter 261: The Car that Best Projects the Right Image for Me is Chosen Chapter 262: I Nearly Get Arrested Buying My New Car Chapter 263: Seeking Parental Permission to Marry Chapter 264: Getting My New Car Chapter 265: Introducing What We Did for My Soccer Team; Part One Chapter 266: Introducing What We Did for My Soccer Team; Part Two Chapter 267: Lily's Plan Chapter 268: Scouting for a Private Swimming Spot Chapter 269: About Cuties and Ducklings, Especially Diana and Claire Norris Chapter 270: About Two More Girls: Savannah and Abigale Chapter 271: About Three More Girls: Gina, Leanna and Ava Chapter 272: Family Trip to Europe Chapter 273: Fooling Mrs. Norris (Diana's and Claire's Mother) Chapter 274: Two Important Meetings: With OSU and Mom Chapter 275: Our Marriage and Honeymoon Chapter 276: Touring the Mansion Chapter 277: Living in the Mansion Chapter 278: Life Outside the Mansion Chapter 279: Cuties and Ducklings Go Browsing While I Go Exploring Chapter 280: The Department of Horrendous Stupidity Chapter 281: My House-Warming Party Chapter 282: End of Summer Vacation; Miscellaneous Tidy Up ^ Part 12: Studying and Studied Chapter 283: A New Academic Year: Full-Time OSU, 12th Grade, My Poor Car Chapter 284: Pirate Party, Motivating Soccer Players Chapter 285: The Department of Horribly Suspicious People Strikes Again Chapter 286: The Interrogation Gets Personal Chapter 287: Handed Over Chapter 288: Life in the S&T Office Chapter 289: Starting Life in a Truly Scary Lab Chapter 290: Staying in the Truly Scary Lab Chapter 291: Planning to Get Out of the Truly Scary Lab ^ Part 13: My Fourth and Fifth Merges, to 16 and 32 Minds Chapter 292: Killing Some Time, Before It's Time for Some Killing Chapter 293: I Start Escaping from the CIA Chapter 294: Many of the CIA Do Not Escape from Me Chapter 295: Getting the Hell out of Dodge Chapter 296: Tidying Up Chapter 297: Obtaining My New Identity Chapter 298: The New Me Rejoins Society Chapter 299: I Get a Job and Do Some Interior Redecorating Chapter 300: I Get a Girlfriend Chapter 301: Garden Laborer by Day; Snooper by Night Chapter 302: Hollywood Makes Better Exoskeletons Chapter 303: The Painters' Union has a Leak Problem Chapter 304: For a Woman, There is Something Worse than a Ladder in Her Stocking Chapter 305: Working on Dual Sight Blobs Chapter 306: Ambushing Bush Chapter 307: Our Dodge-Gate Strategy Chapter 308: Our Dodge-Gate Coup De Grâce Chapter 309: Valuing My Death Chapter 310: Keeping an Eye on the Other Side Chapter 311: Negotiating Upward Chapter 312: We Become Very Rich Chapter 313: Meanwhile, Personal Stuff Chapter 314: Organizing the Money Chapter 315: My Fake Parents Arrive and Ava's Parents Leave Chapter 316: With the Pressure Off, We Start to Do Things Chapter 317: The OSU Browsing Trap is Sprung Chapter 318: The Trap Closes on Us Chapter 319: The Trap Turns on Them Chapter 320: The Second Settlement Chapter 321: Obtaining Our Next Home Chapter 322: Ron Reacquires a Previous Life's Hobby Chapter 323: Daddy, Can I Suck Your Lollypop Pwease? Chapter 324: Miscellaneous: Majestic Countdown, Personal Dissatisfaction, BBJ2 Obtained Chapter 325: Going to Paris Chapter 326: Finishing the DHS & CIA Lawsuit, and Other Miscellany Chapter 327: Construction of Our Hilltop Home Chapter 328: Individual Responsibilities for Preparing Our Hilltop Home ^ Part 14: My "Angel Plan" Chapter 329: Archangel Michael Appears in Public Chapter 330: Archangel Michael with the Police, FBI and Lifeguards Chapter 331: Archangel Michael's Press Interview Preliminaries Chapter 332: Archangel Michael's Press Interview Chapter 333: The Angel Heads Home Chapter 334: Archangel Michael's Second Appearance; Washington, DC Chapter 335: "Pick Someone to Resurrect, Jonathon Winters." Chapter 336: Air Force One and Two Chapter 337: USS Harry S. Truman Chapter 338: Aftermath of the Angel's Vandalism Chapter 339: Radar Blobs Chapter 340: Radio Blobs Chapter 341: Jonathon Makes Progress Chapter 342: The Angel Visits Memphis, but not Graceland Chapter 343: Introducing a Guardian Angel Chapter 344: The Easiest Way to Get Rich Chapter 345: "I'll Get the Ground Team to Park Safely Out of the Way." Chapter 346: Reaching My Return's Point-of-No-Return ^ Part 15: A Better Life Chapter 347: My Resurrection Chapter 348: The Resurrectee's First Press Conference Chapter 349: I'm Surrounded by Idiots Chapter 350: The Guardian Angel's First Public, and 1000 Pubic, Appearances Chapter 351: Saturday's Aftermath to the Resurrection Chapter 352: Post-Aftermath Press Conference Chapter 353: Sunday After the Resurrection Chapter 354: Donna's Sexual Advisors are Unmasked Chapter 355: Assassination Attempt Chapter 356: Multi-Denominational Religious Interview Chapter 357: Some Post-Resurrection Socializing and Making of Travel Plans Chapter 358: I Need a New Educational Process Chapter 359: Donna has a Very Good Day Chapter 360: Studying: Noumea, CNN's Tapes, New Special Abilities ^ Part 16: War! Chapter 361: War Comes to Us Chapter 362: We Get Out of Harm's Way Chapter 363: The Home Team Fights 'Back' Chapter 364: God's Servant Lands Some More Punches Chapter 365: I Acquire the Knockout Punch Chapter 366: I Deliver the Knockout Punch Chapter 367: Nuclear Aftermath Chapter 368: Northrop Grumman Integrated has a Bad Day Chapter 369: Returning Home; Part One: It Wasn't Easy Chapter 370: Returning Home; Part Two: It Gets Harder Chapter 371: Returning Home; Part Three: It Was Harder on the Fibbies Chapter 372: Super-Aikido Invented Chapter 373: Super-Aikido Tested Chapter 374: Super-Aikido Under Pressure Chapter 375: The FBI's Second Assassination Attempt Chapter 376: Two Bushes in the Hand Chapter 377: The President Capitulates Chapter 378: Aftermath to the President's Capitulation Chapter 379: Tongue Job ^ Part 17: Make Love, Not War (God Keeps On Helping) Chapter 380: I Pick Up D-Cup, With Some Help From God Chapter 381: D-Cup Gets Picked Up Even Farther Chapter 382: D-Cup's Slide Toward Depravity and My Bed Chapter 383: D-Cup Loses Something Very Precious to Her (Hint: It's Not Peter Harrison) Chapter 384: God and I Go Head-to-Head, and the Best Man Wins Chapter 385: D-Cup's Initial Orders Chapter 386: D-Cup's Corruption Comes to a Climax Chapter 387: Sondarm Christian School Visit; Inside Chapter 388: Sondarm Christian School Visit; Outside Chapter 389: Planning for the Costume Party Chapter 390: The Heavenly Costume Party Chapter 391: Donna's Sexual Education Begins (Her Sexual Training Having Started Long Ago) Chapter 392: SCS's Outside and My Get-Inside Projects Begin; the Pitch Chapter 393: SCS's Outside and My Get-Inside Projects Begin; the Clinch Chapter 394: Worrying News in Noumea Chapter 395: Dicing With Fate Chapter 396: Dicing With Death ^ Part 18: My Voyage of Discovery Chapter 397: Telling My Loved Ones About My Voyage Chapter 398: Starting the Goodbyes Chapter 399: Taking the Surveillers Down Chapter 400: Return to Sender Chapter 401: My Sixth Merge, to 64 Minds Chapter 402: Saying Goodbye Again Chapter 403: Seventh Merge to 96 Minds; Into the Unknown Chapter 404: the Start of a Social Interlude Chapter 405: Nevaeh Moves in, and Widening My SCS Project Chapter 406: Working on My SCS Project Chapter 407: Setting Up the Consummation of My SCS Project Chapter 408: Consummating My SCS Project Chapter 409: Government Issues Chapter 410: The Mossad Problem Solved Chapter 411: Eighth Merge to 128 Minds; We Slow Down Chapter 412: A Different Kind of Threesome Chapter 413: Ninth Merge to 160 Minds; in a Three-Way Chapter 414: Tenth Merge to 320 Minds; With Duplicate Marks Chapter 415: The Upgrades Chapter 416: The Upgrades; Meanwhile, on the Home Front Chapter 417: Multiple Sight Blobs: Good for Me, Expensive for Israel Chapter 418: Breakthrough ^ Part 19: Godhood Chapter 419: So Many Options; Introduction Chapter 420: So Many Options; Major Themes Chapter 421: Category #1; Revealing How I Became So Unique Chapter 422: Refuge's Stables and Other Aliens Chapter 423: Refuge's Beaches and Some of the Options With Copies Chapter 424: Mom and Dad's Bedroom, and a Discussion About Becoming Moms and Dad Chapter 425: Refuge's Williams' Bedroom and Some Unnecessary Apologies Chapter 426: Refuge's Temporary Castle and a Dinnertime Conversation Chapter 427: Options for W-Dimension Category #2 Chapter 428: Options for W-Dimension Categories #3, #4 and #6 Chapter 429: Category #5; The 42,000 Marks Turn Over New Leaves Chapter 430: 42,000 Marks; We Go Clothes Shopping Chapter 431: 42,000 Marks; Special Abilities Chapter 432: 42,000 Marks; Flying Family Chapter 433: Single-Minded Marks; Initial Introductions Chapter 434: Single-Minded Marks; The Williamses at Refuge Chapter 435: The End of the Beginning ^ Image List Chapter 2: "Northwest USA, indicating Corvallis." Chapter 245: "Corvallis, viewed from above SE Peoria Road." Chapter 327: "Our Chip Ross Property." Chapter 327: "Chip Ross Park View over Corvallis." Chapter 336: "Andrews Air Force Base, showing the location of Hangar One." Chapter 363: "Beale Air Force Base." Chapter 363: "Air Force Base's Alert Pad." Chapter 365: "Minot Air Force Base and its residential area." ------- Prologue Throughout history, religions have had creation myths. Most religions - including the Greek, Roman and the many animistic religions - had their gods emerging from an already existing place; be it from "the Sun", "out of Chaos", "the Aegean Sea", "Zeus's forehead", or from even more imaginative places. Religions that were more megalomaniacal had a pre-existing god who created the Universe. To quote one of the most pompous, "In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form ... And God said, Let there be lights..." My unpretentious Ascendancy fits the first category, as I recently came from an already existing place: from Corvallis, Oregon, USA. This is the story of how I became your god. It's an autobiography of my Ascendancy; my self-written Genesis. At the time I did not know I was heading for godhood. Unlike the claim that Jesus felt destined for greatness, I was mostly just trying to get by. And like most teenage boys, mostly failing. As I said just above, "unpretentious". I have chosen to write this narrative as an autobiography so I can recount my thoughts at the time. That approach will make it easier for you to understand me. Two facts combine to make that important for you: I'm allowing you to retain your freewill (with some minor exceptions), and I'm going to be an active god. Where's the fun in sitting on a cloud strumming a harp while looking down passively? I WILL be interacting with humanity on many of the Earths, sooner or later including yours. You'd be wise to read all of this and to learn about me from it. Your contrariness, incomprehension, or just plain laziness may result in your going against the plans of your new god. Guess which one of us would regret that the most? By the way, all the other creation myths? Wrong. That'll upset quite a few people, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I find it rather amusing that the existence of one of the world's richest, most powerful and longest lasting political organizations is dependant on their bearing false witness, ironically breaking one of their own self-proclaimed 'sacred' Commandments. ------- Introduction Human minds are just starting to appreciate one of the most fundamental facts about the Universe: that Consciousness is an incredibly important, intrinsic aspect of the Universe. As important and intrinsic as "up and down". Matter and Energy are interchangeable. If the conditions are right, Matter can change into Energy and vice versa, as per Einstein's E=MC^2. Put simply, Energy EQUALS Mass times a constant; similar to cents being worth the same as dollars, if you had 100 times as many of them. Space and Time are also not as separate as human sensory perception and 'commonsense' makes them appear. In reality, they are the conjoined entity of Space-Time. Not only are Matter-Energy and Space-Time both fundamental aspects of reality, the pairs are also interactive. Matter-Energy distorts Space-Time. Gravity, for example, is the affect of a mass (a "matter") on Space-Time, often pictured as a heavy ball sitting on a stretched-out sheet, bulging it downward. The sheet is easily pictured and imagined, but it suffers from being unable to accurately convey the effect of mass on either the third spatial dimension or on time. Mass-Energy does effect time though, for examples, black holes distort time near their event horizons in a dramatic fashion, as does accelerating a mass to near light-speed. Just as Matter-Energy distorts Space-Time, so too does Space-Time distort Matter-Energy. Spreading matter or energy out spatially and over time is an everyday event that we're all familiar with. Hot objects cooling down over time is a simple example. If you've ever owned an old car, you'll know that entropy is an annoying example. Matter-Energy and Space-Time are two fundamental and interactive aspects of the Universe. The third such aspect is Consciousness-Ki. Ki is a type of energy, accessible and controlled by consciousnesses, i.e., minds. It is capable of influencing the other fundamental aspects of the Universe, as will become apparent from my autobiography. Consciousness is fundamental to the Universe, in the same sense that Matter-Energy and Space-Time are, i.e., the Universe is made of all three of them. Not that the Universe has a mind, a personality, or any such high-level concept. Its Consciousness operates at a low, intrinsic level; far more pervasively and powerfully than you are aware. The Universe's Consciousness interacts with the two other fundamental aspects. For examples: Some forms of Matter-Energy don't decide where they are until they're consciously observed, in what human physicists know as the Wavefunction Collapse Model. "Decide" is Consciousness; "where they are" is Space-Time. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle describes the accuracy tradeoff intrinsic to knowing position and momentum of quantum particles. "Knowing" is Consciousness; "momentum" is both Matter-Energy and Space-Time. Humans know that conscious observance is a pervasive effect at what you call the quantum level, and you also know of it having some effects at the macro, human-observable, level, as demonstrated by the classic Two Slit Experiment when there are detectors on the slits. But humans haven't yet grasped more than the tiniest hint of the importance of Consciousness, and are still endlessly arguing about it eighty years after Heisenberg's work was first published; witness the ongoing arguments still arising out of the 70-year old "EPR Paradox". Humans don't understand the importance of Consciousness because your minds are not powerful enough to generate repeatable effects at the macro level, and you're unable to build intelligent machines to create such effects either. With the use of crude scientific instruments - such as non-conscious particle accelerators - humans are starting to indirectly study interactions with the Universe's Consciousness, but your approach is so primitive that it's comical, although not as comical as your responses to your rare direct interactions through psychic phenomena. The human mind (not brain, but mind) has been slowly increasing in capability over tens of thousands of years. It will take many more millennia to progress far enough to be able to generate repeatable, measurable, direct interactions with the Universe's Consciousness. Logic, scientific method, and other mental tools, are helping humans gain knowledge considerably faster than ability, but it will still take centuries before that knowledge starts to have any practical application. I, on the other hand, leaped over millennia of evolution. Successive "merges" doubled and redoubled my ability to directly interact with, and control, the Universe's Matter-Energy, Space-Time and Consciousness-Ki fundamentals. My first couple of merges took me to the distant limits of what humanity will ever be able to achieve. Subsequent merges took me far beyond that, to what can only be considered as godhood. ------- Part 1: My First Merge, to 2 Minds ------- Chapter 1: It Began with an Ending Wednesday, November 19, 2003 Sometimes in life a single event can be both good news and bad news for a participant; I just didn't expect this duality to arise out of my death. I didn't expect anything to arise out of my death; that pretty much defeated the purpose of it. My life was awful. It had never been good, and had gone seriously downhill when puberty cursed me. School sucked, my relationships with girls sucked (ha!, as if I had "relationships with"; "ridicule from" was as close as I got). I was as bad at sports as I was with girls, and last but not least in my litany of troubles, I seemed to be the favorite victim of every bully in town. And I wouldn't be surprised if a few out-of-town bullies made special trips in just to make my life miserable. Even my parents and little blisters - Carol and Donna, 2 and 3 years younger than me - had little time for me. The only thing I had going for me was that I was just a little bit smart, but that only meant that I was smart enough to recognize that I was a failure, and smart enough to imagine the unhappiness of my future. I'd decided that I'd had enough. November 19, 2003, was The Day. My fourteenth birthday had been ten days ago and it'd been pointless. Thanksgiving was in a week and I had less than nothing to be thankful for. My death, that I referred to earlier, was self-inflicted. I had long fantasized over which suicide method to use, and had narrowed my options down to two: shooting myself in the head, or sitting in a warm bath and slitting my wrists to bleed out. I wanted to go with the first option but I'd failed to get hold of a gun, so my success at death was looking to be pretty much the same as my success at life. I was having to go out by slitting my wrists. As it turned out I'm glad I didn't obtain a gun, as without a brain my autobiography would've stopped right here. That would've been such a pity. Lying bleeding to death in the bath, in the last few seconds of my life, I began to experience déjà vu. I've experienced this phenomenon a few times before, and have always found it to be strange, curious and little annoying. Annoying because the question, "Have I experienced this situation before?" was always irritatingly unanswered before the phenomenon ended. To experience it during my suicide was mildly pleasing, as the timing neatly answered that question. With obvious logic I was pretty sure I hadn't committed suicide before. ^ Author's note: If you don't understand why I've used "[[" just below, I strongly recommend you read the Text Conventions section in the Author's Preamble. It'll only take you a few seconds. [[I wrote above that events can be both good news and bad news. This is where the REALLY good part of my death kicked in. By kicking the bucket, I discovered that just like it says in science fiction books, there really are parallel dimensions. At the time I knew no more about déjà vu than you - my readers - do, but I'll provide you with some explanation now. The parallel dimensions truly are "parallel", not linearly, but in the sense that if something happens in one dimension, it probably happens in many of the other dimensions too. For the dimensions to stay somewhat consistent there has to be a synchronization process between them, which requires an exchange of information. There are innumerable such synchronizations occurring at any one moment, between any two random parallel dimensions, and for small volumes of space each time. (Actually the dimensions aren't chosen randomly as they have to be similar in some respects. And more accurately, "small volumes of space" should be "small volumes of Consciousness", as they aren't necessarily at the same spatial coordinates within their respective dimensions, but usually are.) The process is a two-way averaging of the two dimensions' Consciousnesses, although "averaging" is too crude a term as there are several natural laws which make the synchronization function more sophisticated than that. Looking at it from a greater perspective, all the dimensions were created at the same time so are the same age. They're each running on their own track, but there's a natural process that causes those tracks to converge: the Consciousness synchronizing process mentioned above. There's also a natural process that causes the tracks to diverge: the randomly probabilistic nature of wavefunction collapses (i.e., luck). The sophisticated averaging function referred to above operates to give order to the whole Universe. Not necessarily the same order for every dimension, but there is an overall structure to it all. As an analogy, in your body individual cells behave somewhat randomly. At a somewhat higher level, heart cells behave similarly to other heart cells but very differently to blood cells. At a higher level still, there's also a collective structure that keeps the whole body roughly in line. There are similarities and differences at many levels within the Universe, but there's also an overarching natural structure and process. When the volumes of space being synchronized include minds in both dimensions, déjà vu can occur. Having minds at both ends of the connection is considerably more likely than squaring the proportion of the Universe occupied by minds. If there's a mind at one end of the connection, having a mind at the other end is certain because the synchronization occurs between volumes of virtually identical Consciousness. (It would seem more natural for me to have written "brains" rather than "minds" above, but they're not synonymous and their differences become important later.) For déjà vu to occur, the two minds involved have to be virtually identical. So close to identical that déjà vu is not possible between different people. Bob's mind in one dimension cannot déjà vu with Fred's mind in another. It requires the 'same' 'individual' (to misuse both words) in both dimensions, Bob#1 to Bob#2. In addition, the two minds have to be on the same 'frequency' - in the same sort of mood, doing similar things, thinking similar thoughts, etc. It occurs at a much lower level than that, and "frequency" is a gross simplification of the complexity of the phenomenon, but it'll give you the general idea. Once the pre-conditions are met, the cross-dimensional synchronization process starts. There are various low-level functions that occur for a while, but they aren't relevant to this discussion. Critically important to the way my life turned out, is that toward the end of the synchronization process the Universe's Consciousness in dimension#1 makes a temporary local copy of dimension#2's synchronization volume, so the Consciousness can process them together. That occurs in the other direction too, and the copies are kept up to date during the comparison and averaging process by their being refreshed from their source dimensions periodically; about every 0.1 seconds, although that varies depending on the informational complexity of the volume being processed. The inter-dimensional transfer of information being so slow is why synchronization requires local copies to work from. Every location in the Universe is synchronized across dimensions, for example, between the 'same' rock in two different dimensions. It takes little time to synchronize the Consciousness of most such volumes, such as those rocks, because most volumes are relatively stable. In case you think otherwise, there is Consciousness inside rocks because the Universe is made of Consciousness just as it's made of Matter and Space. It's that Consciousness that would decide where the electron of one of the rock's atoms is, if it's observed. There's just as much Consciousness inside the same volume of a human mind as a rock, but it's much more changeable, so synchronizing minds takes longer than rocks (except for some people I've met). One of the side-effects of the process for creatures with minds, such as humans, is that during it our own consciousnesses become aware of the copy obtained from the other dimension. Déjà vu isn't you experiencing something that you've done before; it's the confusion caused by having two VERY slightly different minds sharing the same spatial volume, with one of them very slightly out of date because of the time required to inter-dimensionally copy it. You don't directly interact between the dimensions; the déjà vu sensation you get is local to your dimension. It comes from your being aware of the other you's mind-copy overlapping with your mind. The two minds are almost identical, so you're not aware that there are two of them, but something does feel familiar and slightly 'echoed'. Déjà vu's discomforting feeling is caused by the copy mind being repeatedly refreshed from its source mind. Those refreshes create moments of sudden disconnected consciousness-jumping amidst the moments of familiarity. Even with minds changing Consciousness values faster and more unpredictably than rocks' Consciousnesses do, the déjà vu link isn't held open for long. After about twenty seconds, or earlier if the two minds drift off the common 'frequency', the process starts coming to an end. During the termination stage, refreshing of the mind-copies continues, but the increasingly disrupted link corrupts the copied information so when it's applied to the mind-copies, the result is an unsustainable mess which very quickly becomes destructive to those copies, destroying them and ending the déjà vu feeling. I died during déjà vu, so naturally my brain and mind died too, as did the copy of the other Mark Anderson's mind in me. Minds are less dependent on brains than you think, but they're still partially dependent, so when the brain dies so do the mind(s) that are 'in' it (minds aren't really "in" brains; they're more "associated with", but the difference is immaterial so far). The "good news" part of the experience was that in the other dimension, the other Mark Anderson hadn't cut his wrists quite so deeply as I had, so he was further from death and his body was still keeping his brain alive. When the cross-dimensional link started terminating, the dissonance that it caused was not applied to the other dimension's copy of my mind because there was no longer an original mind to copy from. Without that dissonance, there was nothing to destroy my mind's copy. When the link ended, the copy of my mind was 'orphaned' in the other dimension, where its host was still providing it with all it needed to persist. It would remain active inside his brain for the rest of his life.]] ^ Which takes me to the "bad news" part of this experience. My mind was in a body that was lying in a bathtub of warm, red water; peacefully sliding toward death. I wanted to die, so everything was fine. Even the déjà vu was nice, as it amusingly answered the question "have I experienced this situation before?" This had occasionally puzzled me over the years, but not anymore, as I was pretty sure I'd never committed suicide before! Haha. So there I was, dying again, or dying still? It felt like I had already died. But how can I think anything at all if I'd already died? How can I invent a joke about déjà vu and not having experienced suicide before, only to have the newly invented joke seem familiar? Puzzling... But I was far too relaxed to think much about anything. I thought I had slipped into death already, but even though I obviously hadn't, my mind had slipped so far toward death that it didn't care. It only needed to wait a little longer. For quite a few seconds nothing happened, except the body kept bleeding. I felt sort of strange, but nothing I could figure out. Or bother trying to figure out. The body kept sending sensory input into my brain. Just as a few breaths of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation can get a body breathing for itself again, I think the sensory input got my mind's mental processes going a little better, especially when I noticed something weird. The bath I had originally sat down in had the faucets on the side of the bath down near my toes. Now they protruded from the wall about where my waist was. That was curious; I wasn't sure what to expect from death, but redesigned bathroom plumbing wasn't included. I looked at the faucets carefully, and did a deliberate blink, but they stayed where they were. I decided that loss of blood had affected my memory. Obviously the faucets hadn't moved, so I must be misremembering their location. I was satisfied with that conclusion until my looking around let me spot that the shirt I'd left on the floor was different from that I'd taken off. There also didn't seem to be as much blood in the water and my body didn't feel as weak as I seemed to remember. I'd heard that your life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die, but I'd never heard that the flashes were wrong about stupidly trivial details. I found it rather curious. I mumbled to myself, "Why are things different?" I heard - in my head but somehow still 'sounding' like me - an answer: ------- Chapter 2: Arrival Wednesday, November 19, 2003 (Continued) Everyone talks to themselves occasionally, but this didn't feel like that. Getting the response had been UNEXPECTED! Not to mention weird and very attention grabbing. So I asked, "Who said that?" "Me. Who are you?" "Me. Who're you?" "How did you move my mouth?" "It's my mouth. How did you move it? And how come I heard you say 'What?' without my mouth moving?" "It's my mouth. I've had it all my life." "So have I." "Maybe losing blood makes people schizo." "Then how do you explain the faucets and T-shirt?" "If you're going to use my mouth, then the least you can do is make sense." "Didn't you notice the faucets and shirt?" "What's to notice?" "They're different." "Sure. One pours water and the other is an article of clothing. I hope I'm not schizo because I'd hate to imagine any of my personalities could be as stupid as you." "I mean different from what they used to be. The faucets used to be at the foot of the tub and the shirt's got the wrong picture on it." "Trust my luck to get schizo with a nutcase. Please tell me your name isn't Mark Anderson?" "Yeah, it came with the mouth. You really didn't notice the faucet and shirt changing?" "They haven't. The faucets have always been were they are, and that shirt's definitely unchanged because I bought it specially." "Me too. I can see it's a Lord of the Rings souvenir, but I bought the one I did because it had Liz Jagger on it, not whoever that girl is. I don't even recognize her. What part did she play?" "Arwen. Don't you even..." "THAT'S who Liz Jagger played! That's why I bought it, because she's hot." "Never heard of her, and she certainly didn't play Arwen. Everyone knows Liv Tyler did that. And you shouldn't interrupt my mouth when I'm using it. That's just rude!" Okay, I'll admit it's not exactly a stunningly intelligent conversation, but I'd lost a lot of blood. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it, even though it was actually him that'd lost the blood. You might have noticed that we weren't nearly as freaked out as I imagine most people would be if someone else took over their mouth. We were a long way toward death so didn't have the motivation to care much about anything so were talking mostly out of idle, amused curiosity; and we were both feeling a strong, unthreatening sense of familiarity. Part of that came from our speaking the same way (grammar, humor, etc.), but there was a greater sense of familiarity than those commonalities could explain. The conversation didn't get any smarter, and often wandered off in particularly silly directions, so I'll stop quoting from it and just describe it more generally. We carried on discussing the shirt. The detrimentally changed shirt was one of my favorites. It was a somewhat dated, but much-liked souvenir of the Lord of the Rings III movie that pictured the Elven princess, Arwen, played by Liz Jagger; the very sexy daughter of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. I admit it's hard to imagine Mick Jagger having a gorgeous daughter, but something about her lips really appealed to me. The rest of her isn't bad either. My conversation partner had never heard of Liz Jagger (horror!). Apparently his version of the LOTR movies used some brunette who wasn't even Jagger's daughter. Some other rock singer's daughter apparently. I wasn't impressed by his delusional(?) version of reality. It seemed reasonable that misremembering the location of faucets could've been caused by blood loss causing some sort of brain damage, but the conversation we had about the T-shirt's provenance had too many self-consistent differences to be a simple glitch in a part of my memory. Not to mention that the conversation itself was becoming far too interesting to be something as simple as another brain disorder. We mentally sat up and started questioning our situation more thoughtfully. I followed up on the mouthless that I'd 'heard' back at the beginning, and we quickly discovered that we could 'think' our conversation at each other. It required us to consciously think what we wanted to say, but to stop just short of actually saying it. The words mentally 'sounded' and felt like our own, adding to the already strong feeling of familiarity. We initially put quite a lot of effort into projecting the words, but we quickly found out that we could reduce our mental effort. It became much more like the normal conscious thoughts you have with yourself, but with the intention of sending it to the other personality, whoever or whatever he or it was. We checked a few obvious things about our life: address and phone number, names of our family (Felicity, Steven, Carol and Donna), agreeing why we were committing suicide, and a few other pieces of biographic trivia. Everything was the same. We were so spaced out and relaxed that we were on the edge of falling asleep, but the phenomenon was interesting. Having so many similarities made the differences very intriguing. Why on Earth would the faucets move? We thought that something significant was happening. We agreed - hardly surprising since we seemed to be the same person - that this was not some hallucination caused by blood loss; the differences were too silly and self-consistent. Another interesting aspect was that when we had a difference, it was always me that had memories that didn't agree with the current reality. We didn't know what my being the wrong one meant, but it seemed to contradict something caused by blood loss because that'd surely cause random mistakes. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it woke us up and made us want to stop killing ourself. Curiosity and also enjoyment. This guy was fun to talk with and he had a good sense of humor. Not many people have the same sense of humor as me, but me did. We wanted to keep talking, so it seemed like a good idea to do something to stop ourselves from bleeding to death. We could always get back to that later if we wanted to, if this development turned out to be a fizzer in some way, or if it ended. Stopping the blood flow was critical, but also easily done. The/my/his/our body was very weak (we weren't really debating ownership anymore, as my errors made it seem likely that I was the odd man out, somehow). His body was even weaker than we thought when he tried to get it to move and do things, but that made it even more important that he did something to stop his body from getting even weaker. It being a cold day, there were several pieces of clothing lying beside the bath. One piece wrapped very tightly around each forearm would do the job. I provided moral support plus the suggestion to use the T-shirt, as my protest over the loss of Liz Jagger. Cleaning up was easy because we was in a bath. ^ [[I wrote "we" in the preceding paragraph because at the time we thought there were two of us. I didn't write "we were in a bath" because that creates the mental image of two bodies in the bath. I wrote "we was" in an attempt to capture the simultaneous dual and singular nature of our situation. My attempt is unsuccessful and annoying because English isn't designed to handle our situation. Reading strangely worded English would be too jarring for you so I'll not mix singular and plural wordings again. I'll write either "we were" or "he was". I could've done that without telling you, but I want you to appreciate the issue. In some respects it serves as an analogy for the issues that were facing us at the time. Having decided to be consistent when using singular or plural phrases, there still exists a question of which form to use. The obvious answer is to write in the singular (e.g., "he", "his") about things his body did because there's only one body; and to write in the plural (e.g., "we", "our") when I'm writing about our mental conversations or thought processes. That rule seems neat and tidy, but there was very little about our situation which could be called either neat or tidy. For example, soon he gets out of the bath, or do WE get out? He was operating the body as it seemed to be his and we thought that my trying to move any muscles might interfere rather than help. Interfering would've been bad since he was working on saving our life. Or "lives", that being another singular or plural problem. Writing, "soon he gets out of the bath" would follow the previous paragraph's rule because it was the body that got out, even though both of our minds were very eager to stop our dying. But what about doing an exam? Should I write "he did the exam" or "we did the exam"? Ignoring the problem of getting expelled for colluding on an exam, is that a body or a mind activity? The minds do the thinking but the hand does the writing. Some activities are both physical and mental so the rule can be difficult to apply. I'll do my best to write my autobiography - another word that has problems - carefully, but the only real solution to this problem is your understanding our situation, so you'll understand what is happening regardless of whether I write "he" or "we". Hopefully my explaining the rule I'm trying to follow will help you with that.]] ^ He pulled the plug and ran the misplaced faucets to wash the blood away. He had planned his suicide with plenty of spare time to ensure it worked. Actually, we suspected the truth was probably that, "we had planned our suicides" - plural. I had a memory that my bath had been bloodier than his, and I had an even vaguer memory of my body's succumbing to death. In this case it's only his suicide attempt that matters, as it appears to be his situation that we're in now. Although for all we know, that could change at any moment. Both of his parents work, and he'd biked to school with his sister Carol as normal, something his parents insisted they did together. His Corvallis is a bike-friendly town with many bike lanes, so kids biking to school is common practice. His Donna took a bus to her elementary school, but he and his Carol were in 8th and 7th grades respectively, so they biked to middle school together. ^ [[In the preceding paragraph, writing what "he" did, "his Corvallis", and all the other wordings necessary to treat us as two separate individuals, is annoyingly clumsy. He and I agreed about almost everything, for the obvious reason. So when we did something, we nearly always both wanted to do it. Plus there's the issue that every single thing I wrote about his doing in the above paragraph, I'd also done in my dimension. The exampled paragraph is how I thought of the situation at the time, as I believed we were different people in the same body, and for all I knew there might have been a large number of important differences between his life and mine. But at the time I'm writing this, I know that there were very few differences between our two dimensions, and what few there were didn't matter, not even the loss of the very hot Liz Jagger. So partly for logical reasons, including that this is MY autobiography, and mostly because it'll be much easier for you to read, when I'm talking in the singular, I will write "I", "me", "my", etc., rather than "he", "him", "his". I'll repeat the exampled paragraph in a moment, so you can see the improvement. The situation is confused, and while there are some languages which would have none of these difficulties, English certainly isn't one of them. To the extent that you get confused, welcome to my world! I was being confused by and stumbling over these and other issues much worse than you are.]] ^ Both of my parents work, and I'd biked to school with my sister Carol as normal, something Mom and Dad insist we do together. Corvallis is a bike-friendly town with many bike lanes, so kids biking to school is common practice. Donna takes a bus to her elementary school, but Carol and I are in 7th and 8th grades, so I bike with her. A Yahoo Maps view of the northwest United States, indicating the location of Corvallis. The local geography plays an important role in my autobiography, so please note the following: Corvallis lies within the north-south oriented Willamette Valley, enclosed on the west by the 200-mile long, 1,500-foot high Oregon Coast Range; on the east by the thousand-mile long, 4,500-foot high Cascade Range (some of the snow-covered highest peaks are just visible along the eastern edge of the image), and on the south by the short Calapooya Mountains, essentially a high spur of the Cascades that cuts west between Eugene and Roseburg. The Willamette River (not visible in the image) flows north along the entire length of the valley, passing immediately to the east of Corvallis, west of Salem and Oregon City, then feeds into the larger Columbia River at Portland. That river flows on to Longview, then heads west to the Pacific, serving as the Washington-Oregon state line. The Willamette Valley contains 70% of Oregon's 3.6 million population. Salem (40 miles north of Corvallis by road) is the state capital with a population of approximately 150,000. Eugene has slightly more people, and Portland has 550,000, making it the largest city in Oregon. Corvallis has a population of 55,000. The Preamble contains a chapter and image list. After Carol and I had arrived at school and locked up our bikes, I'd let Carol wander off to class, then had returned to my bike, unlocked it and returned home. I'd deliberately left an assignment at home to use as an excuse if questioned, but no one asked me why I was riding in the wrong direction. As soon as I'd gotten home, I'd carried out my plan: filling the bath, undressing, etc. I'd hated the idea of being found before I was dead and being made to live through the shame of the failure, so I hadn't delayed. I'd not had anything to delay for, and I'd been pleased my heart was beating with excitement (or tension, or whatever its reason was) because that would make my attempt succeed quicker. Because I'd been prompt, I now had plenty of time before anyone would be home. I was going to resume my life, at least long enough to explore how "my life" seems to have become "our lives". We had three things to think about: my injuries, how to explain skipping school, and how the population of my/our/his head seems to have increased. Obviously the most profound and interesting subject was this apparently second, but slightly different, me. But neither of us felt any sense of urgency about that. Whatever it was that was happening, it felt comfortable, non-threatening, fun and solid. When you have conscious thoughts you don't worry about them cutting off in mid-thought, and we felt almost that confident about each other's thoughts. Looking at it intellectually, we had no solid evidence to go on, but this felt reliable and permanent. So we saved the best topic to last, concentrating on the other issues first. Skipping school was a minor issue. My grades were reasonable, I didn't have a bad rep' with the school's authorities (with the school's girls yes, but with the school itself, no). There was no reason for anyone come down hard on me for missing a day. Worst case scenario, I'd tell them I felt like taking a day off and I'd take my lumps. It wouldn't kill me. My injuries were the most pressing issue, both because I had two bloody razor slices up my forearms (I'd heard that suicide cuts shouldn't be across the wrist, apparently up the forearms is the best way to go). I was also greatly weakened from the blood loss and wanted to recover from that as fast as possible. The family medicine cupboard was under the basin beside the bath, so I roughly finished washing the blood off my body and the sides of the bath, crawled out of it, and sat on the floor next to the cupboard. Suicide was off the agenda for the foreseeable future as life seemed more interesting now, so I needed to avoid future troubles by minimizing my suicide scars. Cleaning and drying the two cuts showed me that they were long, thin slices. Not as deep or long as I feared, and which one of me remembered. I disinfected the cuts out of habit because that's what Mom always does every time I fall over and injure myself. The cuts should be stitched but visiting a doctor wouldn't be a good idea. I held my arms over the bath while I unwrapped them, pressed the cut edges together as neatly as I could while I put several Band-Aids over them, and finally bandaging them securely. I left the bloodied clothes in the bath for the time being. My blood loss would be a temporary problem. I knew that new blood cells are manufactured very rapidly; I just needed plenty of liquids and food, especially iron. A few months ago one of us (who I'll call "#2", the owner of the body; "#1" being the point of view my autobiography started from) had overheard Mom tell Carol that there were iron tablets in the medicine cupboard, to be taken for a few days after each period. Yuck! I'd immediately lost interest in that conversation! I found the bottle and popped a few tablets. Then I cautiously stood up. The world started spinning enthusiastically, so I sat down again, very pleased that gravity wasn't fooled by the floor's rotations. I waited for the world to behave itself, then I stood much slower than I had the first time, keeping my head down and raising it very cautiously. I wobbled, but stayed more or less upright. I hung onto the walls to help me make my slow way to the kitchen. I had to bend over a couple of times to get enough blood to my brain, but I got to the kitchen without major mishap. I made a serious raid on the fridge. I thought of thawing and barely cooking some meat for the blood, but couldn't be bothered. I ate as much and as healthy as I could, including plenty of green vegetables as #1 remembered hearing somewhere that they were good for creating new blood. I drank a lot of water too, as blood would be made of water more than anything else. ^ [[In case you wonder about body control, as implied earlier, #2 was running it. He had been running his body his whole life and he naturally continued to do so. When we'd initially used the mouth to talk with, we'd both assumed it was our own mouth and neither of us had hesitated to use it. But by now I (#1) was very conscious that I was probably a visitor to #2's body, so it seemed obvious and right that I should leave the running of it to him. So far #2 hadn't done anything with the body that I objected to, and when I'd suggested a few minor ideas, such as holding his arms over the bath when he unwrapped them, he'd acted on my suggestions so I hadn't had any reason to raise the control issue. My contribution was just with our internal dialogue. With so much blood loss neither of us were thinking much or clearly. We were so physically and mentally weak that doing the immediate tasks was taxing us, requiring #2's total concentration most of the time, so even if I'd wanted to - which I didn't - now wasn't the time to make a fuss about who controlled the body. [As a brief aside, the body's weakness equally affected both of our minds, which was interesting. Later we'll get a great deal of proof that mind(s) can affect the body too.] As you've seen from the above, in this autobiography I sometimes need to identify specific minds. Calling them Mark wouldn't help you, so I'm using #1 and #2 as their 'names'. We didn't number ourselves at the time I'm writing about as there were only two of us. If one of us was mentally 'talking', then it must be to the other. We understood each other very well - no surprise there - so when talking with other people later, or thinking to ourself, or even sardonically asking rhetorical questions, the other mind knew whether or not it was being addressed.]] ^ We figured we'd recover faster if we slept for a while because we'd heard that most of a body's new cell generation occurs during sleep. Sleep was very welcome because our energy level was abysmal, but before we slept there were a few things we had to do. First some minor tidying up (at the speed I was moving, I couldn't write, "some quick tidying up"). Cleaning and returning the razor blade to its holder, ripping up the suicide note and flushing it, rinsing some of the blood out of the clothes I'd used around my arms then putting them in a plastic bag to hide under my bed until I had time to launder them properly, and finally cleaning the bath again. While doing those chores, we discussed how to ensure our suicide attempt wasn't discovered. The chores took a long time, so our terribly slow thinking had a chance to finally come up with something. There's a tactic that I'd read about in an old science fiction book; a Harry Harrison novel, I think. It'd made sense at the time I'd read it, and I'd noticed it happening in reality a few times since. Now seemed like a good time to for me to use it. In the book, an army commander screwed up really badly, and the army avoided trouble by giving him a medal and promoting him. In other words, when you should keep quiet about something because you've screwed up, making noise gives the illusion of innocence, hopefully preventing people getting suspicious. I made my way back to the phone in the kitchen to call the school, telling them I had to miss a day or two for personal reasons, that my parents would be in touch, and would they please inform my sister Carol that she'd have to make her own way home. She would anyway when she saw my bike was gone, but hopefully both the school and Mom (if she heard from them) would conclude that I wasn't trying to hide anything. I wobbled to my bedroom and lay on my bed while I thought about the situation. After a considerable amount of internal conversation, we came up with a plan. Maybe because I was thinking about how to cover my ass with my parents, the cover story that we worked out involved part of my anatomy not far removed from there. Teenagers hate being embarrassed and are excessively sensitive to it. Mom frequently tells me that when she's trying to reassure me after my latest humiliation. Between the two of me, we worked out that sensitivity to embarrassment would be a good basis for our excuse for skipping school and needing to rest for a day or two. We decided that our cover story would be: "When I was walking to my first class I tripped over and fell heavily, catching one of my balls REALLY BADLY on something. The pain was so excruciating that I shit myself. I was far too embarrassed to report it to the school, so I came home, cleaned myself, and went to bed still in pain." The bike trip home was short and mostly a slightly downhill slope, so the story was reasonable as I could get home with very little pedaling. I got up and deliberately dirtied my underwear, which felt very weird to do on purpose. I cleaned them poorly and put them in the laundry hamper. [As an aside, I couldn't count the number of times I've heard religious people use "It's an unnatural act" as justification for their condemning something or other. Mom has sometimes rebutted (not to their faces), "So is delaying going to the toilet until we're sitting on a porcelain throne. It's hard to toilet train children because it is unnatural." I was so well trained that it felt VERY unnatural to deliberately soil my underwear. I dressed in tracksuit pants, a long-sleeved shirt and tracksuit top to doubly hide my forearms, then climbed into my bed properly, ready to sleep. In working out our cover story, we'd realized that it had an impressive number of benefits: My parents would believe I'd tripped and fell badly as they knew I was badly coordinated. They also knew I was shy and embarrassed easily, so I would come home rather than report my accident to the school. I was the sort of guy that much preferred to sneak away from problems rather than face them head on. Nothing the school could tell them would contradict my story. I have no significant history of skipping school, mainly because I had few friends to skip it with, so they wouldn't immediately disbelieve me. The injury wouldn't be visible and was therefore not measurable, but I could wince whenever someone moved to touch it, and the amount of wince would let me control their opinion of the injury's severity. I could coordinate my fake ball recovery with my real blood loss recovery, or make it faster or slower, as needed. If I needed to get up and walk around, I had an excuse for doing so very slowly, which was truly all I was capable of at the moment. I'm sure they'd be sympathetic and write the school an appropriately vague note. By directing their concern to my injured ball, they wouldn't pay any attention to my forearms. I would like to say that I was an impressively good planner, as my plan explained and justified my earlier actions, provided me with flexibility for the next few days to let me behave as energetically as my blood loss permitted, and give me some control over the timing of my return to school. Unfortunately for my ego, several of the benefits listed above didn't occur to me until I'd already started carrying out the plan. Nonetheless, I thought we'd done an excellent job inventing this plan. Being able to internally talk back and forth made it easier to have good ideas. I shouldn't have any trouble carrying out the plan either, because I'm pretty good at lying. Lying makes it easier to avoid unpleasant situations so I get to practice it often. I was really tired and felt myself drifting off. I thought of leaving my sisters a note to ask them to be quiet so I could sleep longer, but I fell asleep. ^ ... and was woken by Mom wondering why I was asleep at this funny time because that's the sort of things that mothers do. The very first thing I did was ask, As you can tell, my blood loss wasn't affecting my sense of humor. I used my cover story to explain my being asleep to Mom. The alternative was to say: "I was asleep because I needed to rest after my failed suicide attempt. But don't worry, I won't try it again because I'm having too much fun talking to the other voice in my head." All things considered, lying seemed best Mom behaved as moms do: some solicitous questions, some genuine concern even after I'd honestly told her it wasn't too bad, and some wry amusement. Mom tried to hide her amusement, but I could see it. It amused me, as it meant my cunning plan was working. The genders truly are different. No way will a man participate in a medical discussion about a woman's 'bits'. If one of my sisters told Dad she had damaged an analogous body part (whatever that could be), he'd immediately go running for Mom. Yet after Mom was reassured, she'd had to work at hiding her amusement. I very sheepishly told Mom that I'd left my soiled underwear in the laundry and could she please wash them before my sisters saw them. Mom understood that I was more worried about being embarrassed by my sisters than I was over my injury, so that further allayed her fears and convinced her of my truthfulness. It also got her out of my room before she detected anything wrong or wondered why my arms were held under the sheet. I was very impressed by myself, which isn't something that happens to me very often. Having two of me was working out pretty well so far. We were particularly interested in #1's reaction to Mom, as she was the first other person that #1 had seen since his 'arrival'. He said she was indistinguishable from his Mom. I heard Mom telling my sisters not to bother me. I guessed they'd come home at their usual time, a couple of hours before Mom, but they hadn't disturbed me. They probably hadn't been interested enough in my absence from school to bother opening my door to ask me about it. I heard Mom tell them that I'd tripped and hurt myself at school. They didn't care, and I didn't see them; somewhat to #1's disappointment as he was very curious to see if any of the family differed from his versions. Dad arrived home a few minutes later and came in to see me. He was empathetic - ALL men would be - and fell in with my plan perfectly. He was also indistinguishable from #1's Dad. I asked for, and had, dinner in bed, "with a big glass of milk, please Mom." Unlike most kids, I have a taste for milk and plenty of liquid would help my body make new blood. I had no difficulties at all. Neither parent insisted on looking at the specific body part, instead accepting my assurances that I'd looked and it was fine; that it was sore but not swollen, and that it was getting better. No one tried to look at my arms. I don't think my parents told my sisters exactly what my injury was, probably to save me from the embarrassment of sisterly teasing; or even worse, Carol's likely spreading the story around at school. I was thankful for that. The story wasn't true, but I'd still have hated to face all the teasing had it got out. That was one flaw in my otherwise impressively good plan. After dinner, I needed to visit the bathroom again, to lock the door so I could check my forearms. I'd been worrying that I might have disturbed the wounds if I'd rolled on them when sleeping earlier; and the bathroom, the toilet (it's in its own small room, separate from the bathroom), my parents' bedroom and my sisters' bedroom (they shared one) were the only rooms with locks. I made my way to the bathroom myself. It's just up the hall from my room, so it wasn't far to go and I didn't meet anyone. I walked bow-legged in case anyone saw me, but otherwise I was moving freer than before. The food and rest had worked wonders on my blood loss. I uncovered my wounds and saw that they weren't nearly as well recovered as my blood supply. They were just starting to scab over and they screamed suspiciousness. I didn't dare let anyone catch even a momentary glimpse of them. I applied some fresh Band-Aids, rewrapped the bandages, popped a couple more iron tablets, then headed back to bed. On the way I called out, "Mom, I'm going back to sleep now. We'll see how I feel in the morning, okay?" Mom came down to my room to tuck me in. I could hear that Dad was watching sports on TV. He's big on sports, so disappointed by my total ineptitude at them. Mom asked, "How are you, honey?" "Getting better, but still having to walk like a cowboy." Using humor to discourage any thoughts Mom might be having of taking me to a doctor. "I can't go to school like this, but we'll see how I am in the morning." I already knew what I'd tell her in the morning: that I wanted to stay home. Both so that my wounds knitted sufficiently well that carrying a book bag wouldn't make them split open, and so I could have several hours of undistracted quality time with the other occupant of my head. "I'm feeling cold; maybe it's a little bit of shock. Is it okay if I sleep in my clothes tonight rather than changing into my PJs?" The loose sleeves of which could easily ride up and expose my forearms. "Sure honey. Goodnight, sleep well." Which I quickly did, as my body needed to rest and recover. ------- Chapter 3: The Second Day Thursday, November 20, 2003 I woke about 3am, having had enough sleep by then. I felt good, without any sense of weakness or tiredness. It was a good time to plan the future, and to start having quality time with my other self. Planning the next day (today now) was easy, as I needed to stay at home. It'd be fairly easy to get one more day off school, but beyond that would be difficult as Mom would start insisting on taking me to the doctor. I felt good enough to go back to school, but the scars were going to take months to fade so would be a long-term risk. We agreed that we'd probably get away with it though. Between long-sleeved shirts being normal attire in November and December, and people not looking closely at the undersides of other people's forearms, I was probably safe until late spring. There was only one serious problem: PE (Physical Education). After some back and forth discussion (can it be called that when no distance seems to be involved?) we worked out what we thought would be a good solution. It was to stretch the cover story I was already using. I'd make sure to show my parents that I was getting better, but that running or other vigorous physical activity still remained painful. I'd get Mom to write a vague note explaining my absence from school for some undisclosed medical reason, and to add that I was to be "excused from PE until further notice". I'd tell her that'd be when I judged I was cured enough, which I'd let her think would only be a few days, but I could delay for months if necessary. If the cuts healed fast enough I might be able to restart PE when the next term started after Christmas, but if not I'd keep relying on Mom's note. I'd prefer not to restart PE at all, as I didn't enjoy it, but it'd be best to get back to it as soon as the cuts were discreet enough. If Mom ever found out that I was permanently skipping PE - and moms are too good at finding out stuff like that - then I'd be in hot water. I had the idea of using the internet to research how to make cuts and scars heal as fast as possible. We've only got one computer and it's kept in a corner of the dining room so everyone can share it, so it'd be best to wait until everyone had gone to work or school. I also made a mental note to remember to wash the bloodstained clothes in the bag under my bed. Having two voices in my head might normally have been considered a problem, but we liked it. We thought our only problem was the scars. If they were recognized as suicide scars, they'd cause me a great deal of trouble. I started thinking of some possible solutions: Getting tattoos to cover/disguise/incorporate the scars. Putting a tattoo over the scar didn't seem likely to work as people would want to look at the tattoo, and I didn't think it'd be completely effective at hiding the scar tissue. I thought of getting some strong and prominent images on the top side of each forearm, with a low-key background that wrapped around my entire arm and obscured the scars on the underside. The strong image on the top side of my arm would draw people's attention away from the underside. The right matched pair of images, for both arms, could be artistically really cool, but I bet Mom wouldn't see them that way! Cover the scars with flesh-colored makeup. I'd seen skin-colored Band-Aids advertised on TV. I'd need so much of it I hoped I could find some flesh-colored tape. All these ideas had disadvantages, but no decision was needed yet so we changed the subject and started talking about the big issue. Why were there two of us? How did it happen? What did it mean? How long would it last? What problems could we expect? Etc. We had fun talking about our "merging", as we started calling it. I (as #1) was very pleased by that name, as #2's suggesting it implied he considered me as an equal partner in this thing. We wondered about the likelihood of merging. How many other people had it happened to? It seemed obvious that dying was involved in the process. We couldn't tell whether suicide was required or if any type of death would suffice. We thought that surely death was death, no matter how caused. It wasn't as if suiciding people wish their minds to leave their bodies because, judging from our experience, they just wished their current life to end. You'd think non-suicidal people would be more likely to have their minds live on because they'd be trying to hang onto life. Merging can't be as simple as one person dying so his bodiless mind somehow finds a home inside a parallel dimension's twin (as avid science fiction readers, the idea that #1 might have crossed to a parallel dimension had quickly occurred to us). If it only took dying to cross to a new dimension, then it should be a widely known event. Although it could only be widely known if such twins lived independent lives, including dying at random times. That appeared not to be the case, as our and our families' lives were so remarkably similar that it seemed likely that everyone's lives and deaths were too. Maybe cross-dimensional twins nearly always die at the same time, so even if one of them did momentarily have two minds, he'd die a moment later and have no time to tell anyone. It seemed silly of the Universe to do something so fantastic as to have a mind cross to a new dimension only to have it die a few seconds later. And wouldn't that presumably just result in their minds finding yet more twins, as it wasn't sensible to assume there were only two instances of parallel dimensions. Our not having heard about merging before implied that when people died in one dimension, they died in ALL dimensions. The obvious problem with this sensible idea being that we hadn't actually done that ourself; we'd died in #1's dimension but not #2's. It wasn't as if #2 had done anything extraordinary to break a Universal Law to permit his living, so people dying at different times had to be possible. Maybe the trick was to have the surviving twin extremely close to death when the other dies? That could be unlikely enough to explain why we hadn't heard about merging before. We started by calculating the odds of two individuals dying at the same time by assuming that one of them is dying (certain to happen sooner or later), and asking what's the chance the other is dying at the same time. Dying time divided by a life's duration, would be say 30 minutes (about how long we thought it'd take to bleed out sufficiently to die) divided by 70 years (life expectancy), gives roughly 1-in-1 million. That was a generous chance because we were allowing a full 30 minutes rather than the "instant of death". Allowing some time seemed fair as our deaths would've been separated by several minutes if #2 had let his body continue to bleed out. The above calculation was certainly wrong because every year of a person's life doesn't have an equal probability of their dying. We didn't know what the statistics for that were, but there was another factor operating which swamped that similarity: we didn't believe our assumption that the timing of the second death was independent of the first. Our two lives and two deaths were extraordinarily similar. It seemed far more likely that if one individual in one dimension was dying, then his partner in the other dimension was probably dying in very much the same way, at very much the same time. We only had one sample, so we were very much guessing in the dark, but we guessed that the chance of partners dying very close together was probably at least a thousand times more likely, so at least 1-in-1000 (0.1%). It was probably even higher than that, but that value was obviously already far too high because it would've created millions of merged people. We hadn't even heard of similar fictional ideas, so our calculation had to be wrong somewhere. We discussed blood loss being a possible prerequisite for merging. We knew lack of blood caused problems for the brain, so there was a faint connection, but it was hardly a clear cause-and-effect sequence. While tossing around possible ideas, one of us mentioned that he'd been experiencing déjà vu immediately before our merging. yelled the other, silently. We instantly knew we must have discovered an important factor. A déjà vu is so freakily unlikely and our having two of them is dramatically more so, they do involve brains, and they even involve a mental echo effect. Déjà vu MUST have been involved in our merging. We worked out the chance of one of us experiencing the phenomenon at any specific moment in time, such as when dying. How long it lasts versus how often it seems to occur, say 20 seconds per 2 years, or roughly 1-in-3 million. So the chance of both of us experiencing it at the same time was 1-in-3 million times 1-in-3 million, or about 1-in-1E13 ("1E13" means a one followed by thirteen zeroes). Figure in the odds of us both dying at almost the same time - call it the 0.1% we'd already guess at - then we had a chance of a merge as 1-in-1E16. Wow. No wonder we hadn't heard of it happening before! I knew the population of Earth was about 6 billion (6E9). Not only was my experience likely unique on Earth, but it'd take nearly two million Earth's full of people to make one of me! That made us feel amazingly special. I was a nobody at school, but absolutely unique on Earth. ^ [[We'd made several mistakes in our calculation. The first type of mistake was too quickly making a simple assumption. We'd guessed that two Mark Anderson's had a 0.1% chance of dying at the same time, but we'd not thought about how many parallel dimensions there are. If there are an infinite number, then other Mark Andersons dying at the same time would be a certainty. Or, for all we'd known at the time, déjà vu echoes might be caused by there being thousands of Marks linked together, and maybe every second Mark had gained an extra mind at the same time we had. There were several possible complications of this type, all of which we didn't think of. By stupid luck, we'd accidentally been right to visualize the problem as being between the two specific Marks having déjà vu together. But we'd failed to realize that déjà vu IS two minds synchronizing. We'd calculated that one person's chance of experiencing déjà vu while dying is 1-in-3E6, which is roughly correct. But then we'd squared the result to be the chance of the two minds experiencing it at the same time. It was wrong to do that. If one person is experiencing déjà vu, then his partner is ALWAYS doing so too, as that's what déjà vu is. So we got this term wrong by a factor of 3 million; oops. Our guess of the chance of partners dying close together being 0.1% was - quite frankly - ridiculous. We were just pulling a number out of our shared ass. There can be quite large differences between two different dimensions' versions of the 'same' person, but NOT if they're having a déjà vu experience, as the inter-dimensional synchronization process only works between extraordinarily similar volumes of Consciousness. In those cases it's virtually 100% that if one partner is dying, so is the other one. Multiplying a number by 100% achieves nothing, so this term is pointless. We should've left it up our ass. There is a death-related term that we should've used: the type of death required. It didn't have to be a suicide (we were right about that), but it did have to satisfy these requirements: The process of dying must not erratically change the mindset of either partner while he is dying, or the déjà vu link would be ruined. In practice, that means both participants had to accept their deaths because panic, excitement, fighting for survival, etc., would quickly ruin the link. The surviving participant had to be close enough to death to have the same accepting-death mindset as his partner, but also far enough away from it that he had time to change his mind about wanting to die, and to be able to stop it. Murders were too dramatic, and by definition rather difficult to call off, so they either failed to result in a merge at all, or the longest surviving partner outlasted his twin by no more than a second or two. Death by natural causes was even harder to call off, and suicides usually failed because they often couldn't be aborted (gunshots, hanging, etc.) or didn't want to be aborted. Not the true suicides anyway; the ones that were deliberately ineffective because they were really calls for help failed to create merges because neither partner died. Deaths which created a long-lasting merge were extraordinarily rare, about 1-in-100 million (1-in-1E8). Thus the chance of our having merged was: 1-in-3E6 (chance of a déjà vu) times 1-in-E8 (chance of dying in a suitable manner during the déjà vu but being able to survive thereafter), equaled 1-in-3E14. We had calculated the chance to be 1-in-E16, so we were only wrong by a factor of 33. Surprisingly close, but only by luck because we'd been miles off base in our thinking. In practice there was no significant difference between the two answers. We HAD merged so that chance didn't matter, and both numbers were so astronomically small that they might as well have been zero as far as our ever meeting anyone like us. There was no point in our running around the neighborhood asking if anyone else had merged. However, we later GREATLY appreciated that sharing déjà vu was 3 million times more likely than we'd calculated. It made the GREATEST POSSIBLE difference to our life, and to a surprisingly large number of other lives too. To put these numbers into context, the current population of Earth is 6E9. The last merge would NOT have been 3E14/6E9=50,000 generations ago because the Earth's population is rising rapidly. The total number of people who have EVER lived on Earth is approximately 1E11, the equivalent of just 17 generations of the current population, which gives you an idea how incredibly fast the population has been rising recently. With a 1-in-3E14 chance of a merge ever happening, and 1E11 people ever having lived on Earth, there was a 1-in-3,000 chance of it ever having occurred before, but that was just the start of the issue. If it did happen, the person would still need to be very lucky because either the cause of the aborted death could resume (whatever it was), or a new cause could develop. For example, mankind always has been and still is stupidly superstitious, so it's very easy to imagine the merged person dying because he either killed himself thinking he was cursed, or if he talked about having two minds, someone else killed him out of superstitious fear. Given some of the later things I lived through, being killed for superstitious reasons was all too likely.]] ^ Having completed our calculation, and having patted ourselves on our shared back for being so unique, our internal talk continued. One important subject was that #1 claimed his life was 99.9% the same as #2's. That was very interesting in two respects: that it was so high, and that it wasn't higher. In other words, that there were so many similarities was amazing, and that there were differences was amazing too, which meant it was totally amazing. If our lives had been completely different we might have thought that #1 was a ghost haunting #2 for some reason, or some other vaguely similar idea. But the enormous similarities in our two lives precluded that, to our mutual relief. , we had both thought to wonder about ourself and the other guy. We were pretty sure we were not. We had talked together so 'intimately' that delusion seemed wrong (you can't get much more intimate than sharing the same brain). The only explanation we could think of was that some sort of cross-dimensional mental travel had happened. Across which dimension? Obviously not the dimension of space (the x, y, z coordinates that we're all used to). We both lived at the same street number, street, city, state and country, went to schools with the same name, etc. To try and suggest that we lived in different places in the space dimension required a complete duplication of a great deal of geography, and was as silly as suggesting that the world contained two different United States of America. We discussed the solar system, and both of us had the same understanding of it, and of our place in the galaxy. We knew about Alpha Centauri and knew it was four point something light-years away from both of us, we knew of the Milky Way, astrological sign shapes, Big Dipper, Pole Star, etc. Some sort of duplication of the xyz geography was clearly ridiculous. The time dimension? We agreed on what year it was, and that George W. Bush was president. The same movies were playing, and the technology levels were the same. We'd already discussed when the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and many of our other comments made it obvious that our situation wasn't the result of some sort of time shift. Not normal space and not time, so it must be some other weird dimension. We checked a few physical constants. We both had pi memorized to twenty decimal places (told you I don't spend much time with girls), and they were both the same. We were happy about that, as the implications of living in a world where pi was different boggled both our minds. Our memories of the value of e were the same. The Periodic Table was the same ("Hi. He Likes Beer By Cupfuls, Not Over Frothing..."), the visible light spectrum was in the same order ("Virgins In Bed Give You Odd Reactions"; something I'm having to take on faith), and several other scientific lists were also identical. We'd previously noticed some differences between our two lives: the bath faucets had moved, this dimension's girls were on average less sexy than my old dimension's because there was no Liz Jagger in this one, and several others. We both thought the existence of such differences was greatly significant. We discussed science fiction books. My bedroom's bookshelves were overflowing with them (have I mentioned that I don't spend much time with girls?). Neither of us had previously thought parallel dimensions were a stupid concept, and now we accepted the reality of them, thereby adding a massive new concept to our knowledge of the Universe - how incredibly cool! We didn't have a clue what it meant, other than it had made our life pretty interesting. We had no idea of the practical consequences. We couldn't even think of a practical consequence. We couldn't think of a way of scoring chicks with it, although we assured each other that we'd give this a lot more thought. Regardless of there being no obvious practical benefit, we're now living with a true friend - it was hard to imagine how anyone could be truer - and that felt pretty damned good. So we decided on parallel dimensions, across which #1's mind had passed while dying during déjà vu, to enter #2's body while he was also but not quite dying and also experiencing déjà vu. [[As you can tell, we didn't yet know as much as has been explained to you, my reader.]] We couldn't see any way of learning more about the process, so our thoughts turned to other related matters. Although we had, between us, only experienced two instances of this new dimension, it did not seem at all likely that the Universe contained only two. Once we accepted the idea of multiple dimensions, there being just two instances was surely absurd. There certainly weren't only two possible values in the x, y, z or time dimensions! We didn't have enough information to decide anything meaningful about the number of parallel dimensions though, so that line of thought didn't last long. What did it all mean? We thought it meant nothing. Neither of us thought the Universe existed to give meaning to man, either individually or collectively. To think it did - as so many people seemed to - was arrogance of cosmic proportions. With a life that'd been as unenjoyable as mine, I also preferred to think there was no meaning behind it. We decided that the merging process was part of the natural structure of the Universe, and we'd just been phenomenally lucky. Could we think of any problems? Not really. We'd have to be careful not to refer to ourself out loud as "we", in case people thought we were trying to be the Queen of England. More seriously, we felt safe. We couldn't think of any reason why #1 might get 'sucked back' to his dimension. We were pretty sure he was dead there, so being sucked back seemed unlikely, especially as more time kept passing with no indication that #1's presence was weakening in any respect. We couldn't imagine any circumstance where we'd separate. There might be a time limit on it, but we couldn't think of a believable reason for one and it felt too strong and solid. So much time had gone past by now that it surely had to be permanent. Cross-dimensional travel seemed to require death, so if our body didn't die, we should remain a we. Avoiding death was something we were definitely planning to do for now, and probably forever if this panned out as good as it seemed. Having a built-in best friend was going to be enjoyable. The house was silent at this time of the early morning, but I still went to the lockable bathroom to check my wounds. They were fine, so I went back to bed. I just lay there, musing about inconsequential issues. For example, we noticed that we both fell asleep and woke up at the same time. Did that mean anything useful or important? Other than it implied both our minds were tied to the same body (where else?), we couldn't deduce anything useful from it, but we chatted about it for a while. We also noticed how well we cooperated. We didn't have arguments and we understood each other extremely well. We did, however, work out that we were capable of lying to each other, because: We each had knowledge the other didn't. Not much, but there had been cases of it, e.g., only one of us claimed to know that green vegetables were good for blood. We sometimes surprised each other with questions, suggestions, even jokes [later we competed on who could make our body laugh the most by telling each other jokes. It was fun as we had the same sense of humor. We knew many of the same jokes, but we each had some unique ones]. We couldn't access each other's memories. We could control what we told each other. So, logically speaking, deceit was therefore possible. Emotionally, it was never an issue, as we felt so natural together that trust was taken for granted. Although we didn't think of it at the time, we later realized that one of the main reasons for our great compatibility was that we both knew that we were dealing with 'ourself', and we were both acting for our singular best interest. When dealing with other people you often suspect their motives, suspect that what they're suggesting is for their benefit rather than yours, wonder whether they're being totally honest, etc. When you're about to act on one of your own ideas, it'd be ridiculous to have those worries about yourself. We trusted each other as much as we trusted ourself, "unquestionably". ------- The house eventually came to life. Mom knocked lightly and without waiting opened the door and popped her head in, saw I was awake and came in properly. I made a mental note to myself(s): be careful of exposing my forearms in my room. A closed door is not a guarantee of privacy from Mom. "How are you this morning, honey?" "I'm not sure, Mom. It still hurts a little, but much less than yesterday. I haven't tried walking yet, so I'll get up and see how it goes." "Okay. Come to breakfast soon." After making sure Mom closed the door behind her, I got up and walked around, bent over to touch my toes then stood upright again. The world stayed where it was, good. I prepared to change my clothes, laying out the new ones so I could change as quickly as possible to minimize the time my arms were bare. With my foot blocking the door, I changed clothes swiftly. With my arms well covered, I went to the kitchen. It was still early, so most of the family were still showering, dressing, etc., but I wanted to minimize the number of people looking at me when I walked in. I walked as if still sensitive in my nether region. Mom saw me and raised her eyebrow. I sat at the table and told her, "It's much better, but I'd hate to have to walk around school like this. I'd get horribly teased and bullied. Can I please have one more day off?" "Is there anything important happening today? Any tests, that sort of thing?" "No, just the usual. I'll call Brent and ask him to bring me his notes after school so I can catch up before I go back tomorrow. It won't cause any problems. I really don't want to go like this." "Do you think I should take you to see the Doctor?" I know Mom is usually busy at work, and she'd much prefer to avoid wasting all the time visiting a doctor would take, so this should be easy. "Nah. I could barely stand yesterday and today is ten times better. I'm sure tomorrow will be fine. I know you're only a female, Mom, but if you ask Dad he'll tell you that when a guy gets hit there it just takes a while before it gets better. It's happened to me often enough that I know it's no big deal." "All right, you've convinced me. Call Brent now," passing me the phone. I called him. "Brent? ... Yeah it's Mark. I fell and hurt my arms yesterday," Mom's eyebrows rose, "and I've got today off too. Could you drop your notes at my home after school today? Mom wants me to catch up. I'll give them back to you tomorrow at school; I should be back then ... Thanks Brent, see ya." (Brent is in all of my classes, is a reasonably good guy, and lives nearby.) Mom inquired about my lie, as moms do, "Arms?" Early in my conversation with Brent, #1 had suggested I use my arms as the excuse. It'd give me a reason to be protective of my arms at school, and also provide an excuse if someone saw a bandage. I answered Mom, "I had to tell him something, and no way could I tell him the truth. I'd be ridiculed and probably beaten up at school." "Okay. I don't like to hear you lie, but I must admit that even I can sympathize with you on that one." "Thanks. Can I ask you a favor please? Can you call school and tell them it's okay I was off yesterday and today? And can you PLEASE not tell them exactly what happened? Just say it was 'a medical problem'. If you told them the full reason, it'd get out and everyone would pick on me." "Okay, I'll do it from work." Mom put a bowl of cereal in front of me and I started eating, hoping she'd not tell them the reason as their ignorance of it would help my "no PE until further notice" idea. Dad came in next, asking, "How are ya this morning, sport?" "Way better, but Mom said I can take one more day off because it still hurts a bit and I have to walk really silly." "Haha. Been there; done that. You should be more careful of those things. You're going to need them one day." He doesn't intend to hurt me, but he really hasn't got a damned clue sometimes. No girl will let me even talk to her, let alone do anything that involves my balls. The next event of interest was the arrival of my sisters. #1 sat up (mentally anyway) and took notice for his first sighting of them. Carol walked in, asking, "Skipped school yesterday, eh?" "Yeah, doing it today too." It's generally best for me if I simply agree with Carol. She's somewhat smarter than me, and often mean to me, so quick agreements make life easier. Carol started talking to Mom about something else. She enjoys school and doesn't skip it, and she has no real interest in me, so my agreement ended our conversation. Whatever she was talking to Mom about (I'd tuned out) was more important than her brother's reason for missing school. My other sister, Donna, ran into the room. Donna's a tomboy. Despite there being only thirteen months between the two girls, they're very different. Carol had been jumped a grade at school, so is two ahead of Donna and only one behind me, putting us in 8th, 7th and 5th grades respectively. Another difference is that Mom deems Carol to be a young woman, while Donna is still a girl. Puberty had messed me up, blessed Carol, and is so far ignoring Donna, who is ignoring it right back. Physically, mentally and emotionally, there are big gaps between the girls. Both are quite attractive, although their bodies are totally different types. Carol is a lovely, young woman. Tall, a rounded face nicely framed by mid-shoulder-blade length, blond, wavy hair. Already an attractive figure, which is still developing. She is becoming quite something to look at, not that I get any chances to look at much of her. Donna is also tall, that being the only similarity between the two girls' figures. Donna's hair and skin are darker, although that's often due to dirt. She had no body shape; from her shoulders down to her hips is a hard, muscular square. That block of bone and muscle runs, jumps, swims, kicks and hits - sporting equipment mostly, me if she's pissed off at me for some reason. She's good at sports. If she isn't required to be doing anything else, she'll be outside burning off energy one way or another. She got such a good dose of Dad's sporting genes that I suspect Mom and Dad didn't give me or Carol any, saving them up to give them all to Donna. As I'm describing my family's looks, I'll be complete and mention me. At best I can say that I'm not outright ugly. I'd been average-ish looking until I hit my over-enthusiastic growth spurt a couple of years ago, when I'd got pimply, skinny and even clumsier. I've been a mess ever since. I don't even have blond hair like the girls, mine being mousy brown; more mousy than brown. My sisters got their good looks mostly from Dad. Mom was no slouch when she was young, but Dad was definitely "a very handsome man," to quote Mom. She's biased, but also inconveniently big on telling the truth. Dad's always been a good looking and very friendly guy - truly a Mr. Popular - but he cruises through life (I'm quoting what I've heard Dad and other adults saying about him). After he finished school, the father of one of his many ex-girlfriends offered him a job in a factory that made lawnmowers, and he's still there today. He's been promoted to a supervisor, but that's as far as he wants to go, insisting "I'm never going to sit behind a desk and push paper." Mom makes more money than Dad, which is good since he doesn't make much. I've heard Dad boast about Mom earning more than him several times. He's not upset; he likes it because it takes pressure off him. Mom's business card says "Technical Sales Support", for a company that sells medical equipment. She works pretty hard and her job can get stressful when her team is working on an important sale against several competitors. Her position is quite low, as she only started working for the company five years ago, and only recently got promoted to her current position. She takes it very seriously though, because that's the type of person Mom is. Before five years ago, Mom was a stay-at-home mom, raising us kids, but she had a job proofreading manuscripts for an English publishing house. Mom was English originally, including being born in England. She came to America, direct to Corvallis, when she was sixteen. That's what our computer was used for originally, for the publisher and Mom to email each other. Mom and Dad are both 34 years old. They went to the same school as I do, twenty years ahead of me. They were in the same year and became "playground sweethearts". They got married almost immediately after school and didn't wait long to start having us. I understand why Mom wanted to marry Dad, as he was very popular, very athletic, and captain of virtually every team he wanted to play in; but I don't really know why Dad picked Mom. I don't intend any insult to Mom by that; it's just that as the captain of every team he was in, Dad must've been spoiled for choice and I don't know why he singled out the 18-year old girl who turned into our Mom. I've heard Dad say he knew he was marrying up to someone stronger and cleverer than him, but he felt he could trust her to be good for him. I don't really understand most of his comments, other than Mom being stronger and cleverer than him because she's certainly both of those around the house. Mom's the boss and the brains of the family, even somewhat aggressively so - the "stronger" part of my previous comment is very true. Our family mostly has a "live and let live" policy though, where everyone does their own thing. This has NOT been ideal for me because I've not had the support and attention I've needed. Loneliness was a large part of the reason I killed myself (half successfully). I don't know why, but somehow Dad has failed to be a good role model for me. I see him socialize with ease, but I have no idea how he does it. I dearly wish I'd inherited some - or any - of his social ability, but it didn't happen. He's a very passive person in family situations, deferring to Mom on virtually every family issue, so I've never learned how to be assertive or confident with females. He's friendly, pleasant and fun, but somehow ineffective in the family. I think it would've been better for me if I'd been born a female, as Mom seems to be a more effective role model. Carol and Donna seem to be doing well, although Donna spends a lot more time doing sporting stuff with Dad than she spends with Mom. Until Mom started working full-time five years ago, we "did it hard" for money. In the last few years finances have improved, but they're still tight. One secondhand computer shared by all us kids, the girls share a bedroom, we don't buy name-brand anything, we take cut lunches to school, etc. I sat at the table and let everyone else's morning activities wash over me. When things wound down and Mom started cleaning up, I told her to leave it to me, "I can easily stand here and wash dishes, Mom," we don't have a dishwasher. "I'm going to be bored today so I might as well do something to help you." She gave me a somewhat surprised look, but smiled a "thank you," then went to get herself ready. I'd offered because I'd figured that it might be a good idea to get in to Mom's good graces, as I planned to need a favor or two in the next few days. #1 had been observing everybody so closely that he'd hardly talked to #2. When the kitchen was empty we started talking - internally, of course. We were VERY careful about that! #2: #1: #2: <"Virtually"? Were there some minor differences?> #1: [Since Carol had started developing, we've both become highly aware of how attractive she's becoming. She nearly always wears unflattering clothes, but we have a good imagination and there aren't any other attractive girls we get to look at up close.] After everyone had left to go to school or work, I grabbed the clothes out of the bag under my bed and put them into the clothes washer, then returned to the kitchen to eat some more. I was making myself eat and drink more than normal to help replace the blood. I'd spilled a great deal of it, and presumably had to eat and drink several times its weight to replace it. After I'd finished my extra breakfast, I washed the breakfast dishes. I locked myself in the bathroom, stripped, removed the bandages and Band-Aids, and inspected my arms very carefully. Because I'd sliced each arm with a single, very thin razor, they were healing easily - noticeably faster than my usual boyhood cuts. I'm very experienced in recovering from cuts or scrapes because I trip or get pushed over a lot. I took a careful shower, dried, then re-doctored my arms. I went online to research speeding the healing of cuts and minimizing scars. There were a wide variety of commercial products, all of which claimed to be "the best". I was seriously interested in this subject, so I spent quite a while searching for some definitive information about which products I should use to maximize my cuts' healing rate. But all I found were claims from everyone that their product was better than everyone else's, with no one making any attempt to provide any substantiation at all, so the only thing I learned was that the makers of such products lie. I'd ask a pharmacist. Seeing as how I was online already, I read up on "déjà vu", and was surprised by there being no definitive scientific knowledge about it. As far as I could tell, no one had ever properly studied it. There were some theories, ranging from a few that sounded plausible through to several that sounded extremely silly. All were vague, and none came close to what had happened to me. What scientific literature there was openly admitted that science didn't have a handle on the phenomenon. There were several psychic theories, which had initially caught my attention, but I'd soon realized they were "rubbish" (while #2 thought they were "trash". We had a dimensional difference with those two words). They did make me think about the psychic and spiritual possibilities though. Had my soul left my body somehow? Was this a religious experience, like some sort of Catholic Purgatory? Would I be meeting God soon? Or perhaps the Devil, if God knew some of the thoughts I'd been having about Carol recently. (I can't stop myself from making facetious comments about people's silly beliefs. They're such a good source of humor.) We almost immediately discounted the psychic and religious possibilities. What was happening to me felt real and solid, and it was obviously a previously undiscovered area of science. I'd always heard that psychic phenomena were intermittent, fuzzy, unreliable, etc. (especially "unreliable", totally so when they were being rigorously tested). Religious phenomena - not that I believe in them - are supposed to be full of angels, fluffy clouds, religious symbols, pearly gates (or sulphurous pits), etc. I hadn't "gone toward a bright light." Surely Heaven isn't indistinguishable from Earth but with relocated bathroom plumbing. My situation was solid, stable, reliable (I could talk with my other self whenever I wanted), and even down-to-earth. I'd just finished washing the dishes, whereas surely they have automatic dishwashers in Heaven. It definitely didn't seem to be either psychic or religious. I've always thought that people who believed in either of those piles of obvious crap were mentally weak, while I was feeling twice as mentally strong as normal. I was pretty sure I wasn't mentally ill, but would an insane person know he was? Maybe a quick online check would teach me something, so I looked up "schizophrenia". I learned that schizophrenia normally meant hearing external voices. My voice was internal, and not even a real "voice" as it wasn't a sound. The article I was reading briefly differentiated between schizophrenia and being delusional, which my symptoms fitted much better, so I clicked the link to "delusional". That quickly made me lose interest, as people are delusional about EVERYTHING! There were many hundreds of different categories, and an infinity of ways of expressing them. It was ridiculous and useless. If you could think of something - real or otherwise - people had delusions about it. All that it required was thinking about it too much. What does "too much" mean? My male classmates and I think about breasts a GREAT deal, which according to what I was reading would make all of us mentally ill. I decided to proceed on the basis that my experience was real, as it didn't feel like a mental illness. I must admit that attempting suicide was not an indication of glowing mental health, but since then I thought I'd acted calmly, rationally, effectively and sanely; although, I must admit, not very honestly. If this was a mental illness then I didn't want to be cured. (Note to self: reevaluate the "don't want to be cured" decision if I catch myself repeatedly banging my head on walls or intending to leap off tall buildings because I believe I can fly.) I thought about searching with key words that were very specific to my situation: "déjà vu + minds + death + dimensions", but suddenly felt scared. Maybe I'd seen too many conspiracy movies, but the idea of some secret organization having alarms built in Google was enough to stop me. "Better safe than sorry" (one of the more sensible of Mom's many frequently heard expressions). Apart from anything else, I was already bored with all the searching I'd done. We've only got a dialup connection, so browsing is a tedious process. I decided to bike to the shopping center to stock up on a few things. Before I left, I mentally noted the exact type of Band-Aid packet and iron tablets that I'd been using, checked that I was dressed with my arms well covered, then set off. It wasn't far and I didn't experience any fatigue or other blood loss problem. I went to a pharmacist, picked out the same type of Band-Aids and iron tablets as I'd been using, then told him, "My sister cut the back of her hand making dinner last night and asked me to get something to minimize her scar. You know how vain girls are about things like that." He recommended a cream and some "artificial skin", so I bought them. My cover story had a flaw because the packet sizes he gave me were too small for my real need, so I went to another pharmacy in the same mall and bought a couple of their Family Size packets. I also went into the bookshop and bought a couple of newly released sci-fi books, as I'd had a sudden burst of enthusiasm for the genre. I read the back of many of the books on display in the sci-fi and the mentally weak people's areas, to see if there was anything remotely similar to my situation, but there wasn't. The psychic books had all sorts of crap, but the few of them that had "déjà vu" in their indexes had very little to say about it, while still managing to pack in a considerable amount of lunacy. I wandered around the mall for a while, having a little fun. We both had the same taste in girls (of course), and it was fun to talk with each other about the females we saw. We got in to a little competition on which of us could first spot the most pretty girls. We shared the same vision input so you'd think we see things at the same time, but we'd quickly found that wasn't the case. That's how the game had started. We learned that 'seeing' was more a mental process than a physical one, as choosing where to pay attention was very important. As one example, imagine that one of us noticed that a fat lady was about to enter a store, which would then allow us to see the several people who were currently hidden behind her bulk. The mind that anticipated this and was ready to examine the about-to-be-revealed people had a headstart for spotting any pretty females. Or sometimes we'd be talking to each other and both of us would fail to see someone who had been in our field of vision the whole time (not if she had sexy tits though; we always noticed both of those very quickly). Paying attention was very important. We found the difference in our speed of spotting pretty girls mildly interesting, and looking at pretty girls at any time is fun, so we played the game for a while. One minor problem we had was in pointing out the girls one of us had spotted to the other. Saying, , or , or especially , just caused the other mind to say We could've physically pointed. Amusingly, two people have a small problem using pointing to pick someone out because it's difficult for the second person to sight accurately along the first person's arm, but we certainly didn't have a parallax problem. Pointing was too embarrassingly obvious though, so we initially answered with a description, such as , or After a while we adopted an easier method, we'd turn our head and look directly at the girl, so she was in the center of our field of vision. We'd done this several times by the time the game's appeal faded enough that the issue of body control became more interesting. We'd both been controlling the head, as we had the mouth originally, which was something important enough that we should think about it. We stopped the girl-spotting game, sat down on a nearby bench, and started talking about it. [[The word "talking" isn't ideal as it was being done internally, but "thinking at each other", "internally messaging" or other such alternatives are awkward. I'll continue to use "talking" to describe our internal conversations and will assume that you understand its silent nature.]] We realized that the sharing of body control had been going on unnoticed for some time. When #1 had been paying my family - especially Carol - a great deal of attention at breakfast, he'd often controlled our eyes to make them look at my family members. We'd never noticed a control conflict, so we tried an experiment, The arm rose, which meant #2 had won as that'd been his direction. But almost immediately after it rose, it lowered again. We realized its lowering was caused by #2's stopping the game because he thought he'd won, leaving #1 to take control of the arm. We repeated the test a couple more times - in different directions, for example - getting the same conclusion: #2 was in control whenever he wanted to be. We guessed because it was his body so at some deep level he had a greater degree of control, or perhaps just greater belief in his control. The arm test was a mutually exclusive test, as it was not possible for both of us to do what we wanted at the same time, so we tried a non-exclusive test: #1: Both body parts moved as instructed, and were then quickly returned, as we must have looked silly. #1: #2: #1: #2: We tried to design an experiment to see if the amount of motivation mattered. To see if #1 wanted something a lot, but #2 wanted the opposite only a little, whether #1 or #2 would win. But we had a problem trying to get the right motivation. The normal methods wouldn't work with us. #1: Nope, that wasn't going to work. #1: #2: #1: Nothing useful came to mind (to either mind), and it seemed like a good time to head home, so we did. When we got there I checked the house to make sure I was still alone, then locked myself in the bathroom. I replaced the Band-Aids and tablets that I'd used. I applied the cream and synthetic skin that I suspected was just a more expensive type of Band-Aid. It was skin-colored though, which was much less obvious than a white bandage. I had time to kill, so I looked through my large sci-fi book collection to see if any of them gave me any ideas applicable to my situation. None did, but we discovered another small difference between the dimensions: #2 had a book that #1 was sure had never been published in #1's original dimension. It was by a favorite author, so he would've known about it. #1 wanted to read it, so it got added to the two books we'd already bought. It was a good time to do a reading test we'd thought of earlier. I grabbed those new books and tried reading both of them at the same time, allocating one book per mind. We found it easy for each of us to pay attention to only his allocated book, but we couldn't overcome the physical restriction of having to move our eyeballs across both sets of pages. We tried controlling one eyeball each but we couldn't get that to happen. In the mall we'd easily been able to control different limbs at the same time, but that didn't extend to eyeballs. We wondered how to split our attention in a way that wasn't physically restricted? After a brief thought, I grabbed a deck of cards, shuffled them, and quickly turned them over one by one. Mind #1's job was to count the red cards as they were turned over, and #2's to count the blacks. It was trivially easy. By way of comparison, I repeated it, this time each mind accumulating counts of both the number of red and black cards. That was MUCH harder and slower. I repeated each test a few times, and learned that splitting the mental task allowed me to get through a deck in about one-sixth of the time. It might have been more, but was limited by the speed I could move my hands. I couldn't really say why doubling the mind-power for a mental task should give a six-fold improvement, but it undeniably did. What a pity scoring girls wasn't as easy as scoring cards. We did a few more tests, things like having #2 take the backseat for a thirty minutes to let #1 control our body the entire time, while we put my washing in the dryer and had more to eat and drink. Could #1 control it for that long? (Yes). Would it be hard work? (No). #1 found it to be no harder than controlling his own body had been, back when he'd had one. Then we just sat down to read one of my new books. Only one at this time because that was the only way we could both enjoy it. When we had been trying to read two books, we weren't aware of what the other was reading. Splitting our awareness meant we lost the ability to be aware of what each other was learning. It was something worth remembering, even though we didn't know what it signified. I wondered about how this split processing would compare with the processing of an ordinary mind. Would it look different in an EEG and other sorts of brain scans? Mental note to self: Try to avoid medical tests on my brain, unless I want to spend the rest of my life locked in a laboratory having my brain dissected. I went back to my book, and read until the girls got home from school. Carol knocked on my door and came in, "Your dweebie friend gave me his notes for you. Here ya go." Carol dropped them on my bed. "How are you today?" "Fine. Bored. I'll be back at school tomorrow." "Good. I've got homework to do. See ya." I finished the chapter in my book, then picked up Brent's notes and started reading them. It was just the usual school stuff. I read through and understood the material pretty quickly. It was a great help having two of us because when we didn't understand something immediately, we could work it out quicker together than either of us could alone. I was a study group all by myself. Around 5:30pm, I heard Carol and Donna go into the kitchen. One of the household rules is that if Mom isn't home by 5:30, which happens fairly often as her job is quite demanding, then the girls have to start preparing dinner. Mom always pulls out the makings in the morning in case this happens. I wandered down to the kitchen to spend some more time talking to people who knew me very well, because I was very curious to see if I could successfully hide my difference from them. Offering to help the girls immediately made them think that I was different. Carol asked suspiciously, "What do you want?" "Nothing. I'm bored is all." Christmas was coming up so we talked about what presents we wanted while I peeled potatoes. My sisters and I usually tell each other what presents to buy, as that's easiest. [[It also saved us having to think about each other; such were our relationships at the time.]] In a while, Dad got home, thanked us for getting dinner ready and asked how I was. "Fine thanks. I'm getting better." "Thanks for getting dinner ready, girls. I didn't know I had three of you though. You sure you didn't injure yourself more than you said, Mark?" "Dad! I'm fine; just bored and wanting to do something." Having pulled my leg, he grabbed his after-work beer and went to check whatever sport was on TV. Mom arrived not long after, also inquiring after my health, and for good measure, also asking about my schoolwork. "I'll easily finish Brent's notes before bedtime so I've got time to kill." "Will you be okay for school tomorrow?" "Sure. Can I go for a short bike ride while you're getting dinner ready, please? I've been sitting at home all day and I need to burn off some energy." I got permission, so went outside and got onto my bike. I deliberately sat awkwardly on the seat when I went past the kitchen window. I rode down the street, then a minute later returned home, pushing my bike up the drive. I put my bike away and went to my room. Almost immediately, Mom came in to find out what was wrong. "I've been walking around fine this afternoon, but it hurt when I sat on the seat and pedaled." After further conversation, during which I expressed considerable worry about my ball being too fragile for any rough activity, we agreed that I'd go back to school tomorrow, but Mom would write me a note excusing me from PE until I was better. I told her I didn't know how long it'd take, but I'd obviously know when it had happened, so the note was "until further notice." Snigger. I really was quite proud of myselves. At one stage, #1 had a bit of fun at #2's expense. During the conversation Mom asked, "Are you able to pee freely? Is there any pain?" Mom doesn't have any shame about medical issues. While #2 was thinking about how to answer, as he's not used to conversations on such topics, I took over and said, "Balls aren't involved in peeing, Mom. If you want to know how they're performing you'll have to ask about a different male bodily function." #2: Mom was surprised too, but once she was over the shock she laughed, then rose to the occasion by asking, "And how is that going recently?" "I haven't felt like it yet. I'll let you know." Mom laughed on her way out. #2: #1: #2: #1: #2: #1: #2: Nothing much happened for the rest of the evening. Just some more schoolwork to finish catching up, and then I spent some more time chatting to various family members. #1 watched attentively most of the time while #2 did most of the talking. We both felt it to be somewhat of a new experience to be consciously watching my family this way. I normally talk with them without paying much attention, but now #1 wanted to "get to know them". He was noticing things and talking to #2 about them, and we were getting more impressions from them than we would have normally. Went to bed at the usual time, after a visit to the bathroom to rub more cream into my forearms and to cover them again. ------- Chapter 4: Our First Day at School as an "Our" Friday, November 21, 2003 Other than tending my wounds and dressing to ensure they wouldn't be exposed, it started just like any other school day. When I got to school, I took Mom's note to the office. They told me that I was required to study in the library during PE periods, which I thought was an excellent alternative. I'd never been beaten up in the library. I found Brent in the usual place with the usual crowd, and handed his class notes back to him. The guys asked me where I'd been. "Fell, landed badly and hurt my arms. I couldn't write so I stayed home for a couple of days. Besides, I had a good book to read. It's by..." We talked about the usual stuff until we had to go to class. The first class was somewhat tedious; the teacher being slower and more pedantically repetitious than he usually was. I didn't bother writing as much as I usually do because it was easy. The second class was boring too, for the same reason. Not long in to the third, I could tell it was going to be the same. That was too coincidental; this wasn't about the classes, but me! It wasn't a large effect, but it was definitely noticeable and very interesting. I started deliberately observing my classmates, seeing that they were behaving normally. From what I could see, they didn't find the material to be any easier than normal. They were asking the usual number of questions, some of the questions were dumb, they sometimes struggled to answer the teacher's questions, etc. By the time I'd finished my third class, it was official: I could absorb the class material faster than I used to be able to. Much of that came from being my own study group because we could internally discuss what the teachers were saying and work out where they were heading before they got there. Even when we weren't helping each other understand the material, we thought we were comprehending it faster than normal. The effect wasn't anywhere near large enough for my having become suddenly hugely intelligent, but I did seem a little smarter. Other than the very useful "study group" effect, at a guess I might have been 5% smarter. I was eager to try to measure my improvement. The most obvious hypothesis that having twice as many minds made me twice as smart was clearly not the case. In some areas I was barely smarter at all, such as at performing calculations. My raw computational power had not changed. The best way I had to improve my performance was by using two methods at the same time. For example, doing 98 times 220. One mind would do the task as written, and the other would try to think of an alternative, such as doing 100 times 200, minus 2 times 200, then +10%. One mind would finish before the other, giving me a 50% chance of being slightly faster than I'd have gotten the answer pre-merge. Actually, it wasn't even as good as that, as it took time for us to decide which of us used what methods. We were usually about twice as quick at tasks that involved spotting patterns, relationships, etc. With two minds, we could think of twice as many possibilities in the same time, could generate even more ideas when we discussed the task with each other, and could quickly iterating to a good answer. Pure memory recall, of which there's a great deal at school, was usually unimproved. If we both knew the required fact - and if one of us did, then nearly always both of us did - then it didn't matter who retrieved it. Often we had semi-forgot something, and if left to ourselves we might have been reluctant to use what we semi-remembered, but when we both semi-remembered the same thing then it was usually correct, which helped me seem smarter. I never managed to achieve the six-fold improvement I had with the cards yesterday afternoon, but that was probably a unique sort of task. I often did no better at all because both minds attacked a problem in exactly the same way. That was a frequent event because we couldn't tell what each other was thinking and we tended to think the same way. #2 was usually the one that 'drove' the body so was the most involved in the immediate decisions, so we made #1 our 'mental supervisor'. When we had a large mental task to do, he was in charge of who did what as a way of making sure we didn't waste effort doing the same thing twice. That usually meant telling #1 to do the task in the most obvious way because that didn't need much explanation, leaving #2 to attempt the task in an unusual way. After further thought, the two of me decided that the above new ways of thinking weren't really an IQ improvement, but simply an advantage from having new methods available to us. #2 took our body to lunch with the usual bunch of guys, in the usual place and with the usual conversation. I certainly wasn't going to make it unusual by describing my recent thoughts. Rather than having both minds duplicate their focus on the conversation - which, quite frankly, didn't even justify one mind focusing on it - we deliberately tried to keep our attention on different things. #2 participated in the conversation, while #1 looked around, thinking about what he noticed. Several times #1 drew #2's attention to some of the social interactions going on around them. #2 was quite impressed by the effectiveness of #1's observation. I observed several things he normally wouldn't have noticed: Two guys who appeared to be greater friends than I had thought. Guys saying things that seemed to be lies, that other people didn't seem to notice so the pre-merge version of me probably wouldn't have either. In general, I saw dozens of interactions that I never would've noticed without having two concentrations. The vast majority of which had no special meaning, for example, one of the guys turning to look at a pretty girl; a VERY normal reaction, but one I wouldn't have noticed before. It was astonishing how much #1 could observe and draw #2's attention to, when #1 wasn't bothering to follow the conversation. I observed WAY more than the double you'd expect by my having two minds. To put some unmeasured but reasonably accurate numbers on it, when we used to be involved in conversations, maybe only 10% of our attention had been on observing the social dynamics going on around us. With my second mind mostly ignoring the conversation (say giving it 20% of its attention) my total social awareness increased from 10% to 90% (#2's 10%, plus #1's 80%), so I was nine times more observant, which had a huge affect on how much I noticed. We had PE in the afternoon, which meant that I went to the library. I'd been given a little homework in one of my earlier classes, much of which I had already done during the next class. That'd earned me some sharp questions from the teacher, but I'd proved I was paying attention by knowing the answers to the teacher's questions. That was easy, as only one of me had been doing the previous class's homework, with the other mind listening to the current class's teacher. What little homework I had left after that class, I quickly finished off in the library. My favorite subject is Mathematics. It wasn't on my schedule today so I didn't have my textbook with me, but there were copies in the library. I grabbed one, found the class's place in it, and started reading ahead. In thirty minutes I covered what I guessed would take the class the next two to three weeks. It wasn't effortless as I did have to think, sometimes quite hard, but it was relentless and far faster than the class would go. I re-read pieces out of other subjects' textbooks. Sometimes there was some improvement in my understanding; sometimes there was not. No subject had a performance gain as much as I'd achieved in Mathematics. I thought to test a learning problem I'd had recently. I'd been getting low grades in my least favorite subject: English. I'd had an assignment to analyze a short story a few weeks ago that I'd gotten a terrible grade for. According to the teacher's comments written on my assignment, I'd completely missed the point of the story. Hardly surprising, as it was an airy-fairy 'clever' story, deliberately written to be as abstruse as possible, thereby proving what a self-important jerk-off the author was; in my humble opinion, and as proved by my English teacher thinking he was a great author. I located the story in the library and reread it, curious to see how much my understanding had improved. It hadn't. I had no new insights at all, even after spending several minutes discussing it back and forth in an honest attempt to discover new insights. Damn! I hadn't expected that. In the time I had left I skimmed through a few other short stories by the same author, as I was holding a book of them. I felt no greater understanding than was usual for me when reading such crap. I didn't understand why my improvement was so irregular. I had two minds now, so why didn't everything improve by the same factor, ideally double? I had to go to my next class, but kept thinking about this problem as the classes didn't need much of my attention. The rest of the school day was uneventful and I biked home with Carol as usual. I pretended to have homework so I could spend some quiet time in my room. ------- Today had been a great day because I loved being much smarter; or perhaps "quicker" is a better description. But not understanding why I was smarter/quicker in some subjects but not others was frustrating. It was a problem I wanted to solve. I spent some time thinking about how to approach the problem, deciding to think about the most and least improved areas. If I could work out why those two were so different then I'd have a good chance of understanding the underlying process. Counting through the red and black cards with two minds, compared to using only one, showed the greatest quantifiable improvement. English showed virtually no improvement, quantitatively or qualitatively. It took us a while, but we eventually realized that it came down to mental skills. Splitting the job so each mind did one card color meant that each mind only had to use very simple, well-practiced existing skills: recognizing its designated color, counting upward in steps of one, and remembering that number until the next card of the right color came. All VERY basic, very often used, mental routines. Counting both colors in one mind was far slower because it required remembering two running totals, deciding which of the two to increment, and then incrementing it. Our minds aren't nearly so well trained at those tasks. I was able to learn so quickly when reading my math textbook because I was building on pre-existing knowledge and skills, as I'm good at math. When it came to analyzing the meaning of abstruse short stories, I had very little in the way of relevant knowledge or skills. I had little to work with, so being able to work in a variety of new two-mind ways didn't help. If the story had been written in Swahili, I would've understood nothing before the merge, and nothing after the merge. There would've been no improvement because I had a total absence of relevant skills or knowledge. I could probably learn Swahili faster now and then do better, so if I took the time to learn the skills needed to interpret short stories, then I'd get better at doing so. I didn't think English had teachable skills, and even if it did, I didn't think the subject was important enough for me to waste time learning whatever skills it has. I could speak the language and that was good enough for me. Actually, I could speak it pretty damned goodly, as I had a humongous vocab-thingy thanks to all the books I'd read. It was all the peculiar stuff they make you do in English classes that I didn't like or do well at. So I'd found out that I was now much smarter/quicker at some things, somewhat improved in some, and no worse off at anything. Cool! The improvement seemed to depend on two things: how good my skills and knowledge in the area were already (e.g., Math versus English), and whether the task could be divided in a way that made it much easier (e.g., counting cards or watching people in social settings, versus reading short stories written by some intellectually masturbating author). Especially if it could be divided down to simple steps which the brain was highly trained at. Now that I knew I was much more capable, what should I do about it? Should I hide or show my increased intelligence? Spending the rest of my life acting dumb was a stupid idea. Sitting through one day of school was boring enough. If I did better at school, I could get a better job, earn more money, and have a more enjoyable life. On the other hand were the two reasons I felt cautious. The immediate reason was that I'd be beaten up more. I was already the favorite victim of most of the school's assholes, plus several guys in my classes loved to push me around to prove what tough guys they were. As soon as I started doing noticeably better in class, they'd use that as a pretext to come down hard on me. The other bullies would hear about my becoming a smart-ass, as they would inevitably accuse me, so they'd go out of their way to pound on me too. The second reason for caution was because I didn't want anyone to know that I'd committed suicide and now had two minds in my head. Both of those minds thought it'd be a bad idea if those facts got out. There was no way anyone could suspect my bizarre path to being smart, and I'd be making damned sure I kept my mouth shut about it, but it'd still be a good idea not to become miraculously better at several school subjects in a single day. The beatings and humiliation at school were going to be a pain, but being the victim a few more times when I was already being picked on so much wasn't enough to counter the good reason, so I decided to cautiously show my increased academic capability by spreading my apparent improvement out. The current term was nearly over, so people would have very little chance to see me become suddenly smarter (I wasn't really smarter, but it would look that way to other people). Starting now and into the next term, I'd increasingly show my improved comprehension. By the time that people noticed I was doing much better at several subjects the transition wouldn't appear bizarrely abrupt, and no one would be able to tie it back to a specific time. My suicide cuts should be well on their way to being fully healed by then, so there'd be even less evidence to connect my increase in intelligence to how it'd happened. When I got home, I had an idea about one more area to test my abilities in. I checked that neither of my sisters were using the computer, then tried some of the games on it. It was a very old computer so none of the games were fancy. Mostly they were just the games that came with Windows. Solitaire was a little easier, but that got boring as there was no obvious way to use my dual minds to improve at the game, as it was too linear. We played Minesweeper next, and it was immediately obvious how to play it much better. We took turns controlling the hand with the mouse, so when one mind was busy revealing one area, the other mind was working out moves elsewhere on the board. When the first mind finished his area, the second mind would take over. We even got in the habit of saying , like they do on radios, so the next mind could immediately take control of the mouse and start clicking the squares he had prepared. We got pretty slick at it. I was better at a shooting game too. The mind in charge of the gun would tend to narrow his focus to the gun and target, so the second mind would watch the wider area and call out warnings about where threats were, for example, If I got too bored at school, maybe I could make a good living as a professional game player. I'd forgotten to take my salves and fresh Band-Aids to school, so I locked myself in the bathroom to take care of that little task. The wounds were healing very well, no doubt because the cuts were so thin. ------- Chapter 5: The Next Week Saturday, November 22 to Friday, November 28, 2003 None of the next few days at school were as surprising as the first, but they were still interesting. With practice, we got continually better at mentally coordinating ourselves. We discovered various techniques for different circumstances: for playing Minesweeper, doing math, reading textbooks, socializing at lunchtime, and many others. We got better at identifying the key aspects of situations to help us decide how to best split our attention. In Minesweeper, for example, each mind did the same task in different areas of the board. Whereas when socializing, usually #2 listened and spoke in the pre-merge manner, while #1 observed and thought about the social interactions, and we internally discussed our thoughts whenever one of us had something worth sharing. Sometimes we invented strange techniques. I could halve the time required to do some of my homework assignments by doing two at once. When I had an assignment that needed very little or very easy writing - such as writing a single number or answering a multi-choice handout - I'd allocate writing those answers to my left hand (I'm right handed) while my right hand would be working on something else that needed more writing. Each mind working on its assignment independent of the other, to the extent that I was sometimes writing with both hands at the same time. Needless to say, I only did this in my bedroom with the door shut! To my happy surprise, I rapidly became skillful at writing with my left hand. After only a few days, I was so good at left-handed writing that I was fully ambidextrous at it. I'd already found out that independent control didn't work on my eyeballs, but did work on ordinary limb movements such as raising or lowering arms. Those controls were consistent with the situation pre-merge, unlike my new writing ability. I'd heard stories about how the lefties of an earlier generation had hated being forced to write right-handed, and how many years it'd taken them to learn to do it, so my learning to write with my other hand so quickly was not consistent or normal. Obviously being able to write with both hands simultaneously was unusual too, but that was 'just' because I had two minds. What I didn't understand was how I was able to improve my left hand's writing ability so quickly. I also noticed that I was less clumsy these days. Putting that together with my new ambidexterity made me decide that I'd somehow gained increased physical coordination. I knew I had two conscious minds, so maybe two subconscious minds as well, and therefore twice as much coordination of my single body. I needed to test my physical coordination, ideally with tests I could do in my bedroom. I used a rolled up pair of socks as a hacky-sack, trying to keep it in the air for as many kicks as possible. I expected to achieve only two or three kicks, but I sometimes got up to five or even six. Not exactly impressive, but better than I thought I would have been pre-merge. Next I grabbed a few more pairs of socks to try juggling. I'd been no good at it before, but this time I improved rapidly and soon had three 'balls' going reliably. I tried four, but that was much harder. Then I had the idea of having each mind follow alternate balls, and taking turns controlling our hands as each mind needed them. After a little practice to get the timing right, I got that working quite well. Each mind had to keep track of and juggle only two balls, which was easy. It had to juggle them fast enough that the hands were available for the other mind's use, but it actually took quite a long time for the balls to complete a quarter-circuit, so it wasn't all that difficult. I thought that with more practice I could get very good at juggling, but I stopped anyway. I couldn't imagine girls throwing themselves at me if I juggled at school, and I could very easily imagine getting beaten up by a bully looking for an excuse. Because I'd juggled four balls in a very different way than I had tried pre-merge, it wasn't really a good test for whether my physical coordination had improved, but the three balls test had been considerably better than I'd achieved pre-merge, so I was reasonably confident that my hypothesis had been proved. Another development of the next few days was that I seemed to get even smarter. As best as I could judge, I was better at comprehending the teachers' points than I had been on my first day at school. The improvement still wasn't huge, or even medium, and I even doubted it at times - usually in English classes - but if real, it was very nice. ------- The minor aspects out of the way, it's time to mention a biggie: my observance of social interactions opened my eyes to something I found horrific. At first I thought I was overly sensitive to the issue, but as I saw more examples of it, I understood that I was seeing reality. People were hurting each other everywhere I looked! Not just deliberately saying hurtful things to someone - although there was certainly no shortage of that - but in many other ways too. A simple example would be a group where an idea had just been suggested and everyone's opinion was being sought. People would take turns speaking until it got to a Person V (for "Victim"). Rather than letting V speak, the next person would immediately give his opinion, cutting V out. In any group there were often individuals who were ignored. They weren't talked to, listened to, or even looked at. Everybody else was so busy talking among themselves that they simply didn't notice the non-participant(s). It wasn't that the person was too quiet. I saw several examples of Person V suggesting the group do something, and everyone either ignored the suggestion or rejected it out of hand. Yet when Person A (for "Anyone else") suggested exactly the same thing a minute later, everyone seemed to genuinely think that it was a marvelous suggestion, and they often happily rushed off to do it; every time with apparently no notion of the absurdity of what they'd just done. V was often visibly hurt, but I was the only person who noticed. I was astonished at how often illogical group behavior like that happened. Another common bizarre behavior was when Person V suggested a good idea to Person A. A would answer, but to B rather than V, as if B had suggested the idea. A and B would excitedly discuss the idea between the two of them, often ending in one of them congratulating the other for the idea. The congratulations would even be accepted! V would occasionally protest, "Hey, that was my idea," but this would always be ignored, dismissed or even punished with a scathing comment or a thump. I couldn't believe it when I first noticed the more extreme illogical behaviors. How could A sincerely congratulate B for an idea V suggested not one minute earlier? My first thought was that it was some sort of trick being played on V, but I had to discard that idea as these types of behaviors happened all over the school, involving unrelated groups of people. I never saw the perpetrators' expressions, such as them rolling their eyes when V wasn't looking, give them away. It was bizarre, especially as it was apparently unintended and unnoticed! Over time I worked out some explanations. Take the simplest possible example, an unpopular person not speaking up. If anyone did notice that Person V was quiet, the last thing they'd want to do would be to encourage V to speak. At any time, most people can't wait to talk. They'll interrupt, talk over each other, or use scorn or some other intrusive method to shut the current speaker up so they can get start talking themselves. Being able to speak, and being listened to, are tangible indications of status and are therefore valued; so the chance of someone wanting to give their turn to someone else is very low. The chance of them giving their turn to an unpopular person is vanishingly remote because it implies the giver is of lower status than the pathetic loser. What were much harder for me to understand were the many bizarre, reality-bending, behaviors. How could several people honestly congratulate one of their number for having a great idea, when they'd all booed Person V down for suggesting the exact same idea a minute earlier? I realized that people truly don't notice the vast majority of what goes on around them, ESPECIALLY when it's an unpopular person making a suggestion. An unpopular person's suggestion goes in one ear and out the other. While it's between ears the listener might give a pertinent comment about why it's a stupid idea, and then immediately forget the idea ever existed. And when someone more popular later suggests the same idea, it gets reacted to as if heard for the first time. I'm simplifying the case when I say that people don't notice Person V's comments. In reality they often do notice, but with only part of their brain, just enough of it to coordinate a sneering response, and then they forget it. The other side of the same coin is that people will leap at the chance to agree to the same idea from Mr. Popular. Those responses are also not the result of a conscious evaluation. When an unpopular person suggests something, people 'naturally' dislike his idea because they dislike him. But when a popular guy suggests the same idea, it is 'naturally' liked. Clearly his ideas are good ones, that's why he's already so popular and so worth sucking up to. For both the unpopular and popular guys, it wasn't about their ideas per se, but the status of the person suggesting them, and the responders' need to acquire status for themselves by showing scorn or by sucking up. The suggestion might logically have been identical, but none of the listeners' brains thought of them that way because their emotional reactions to the two originators were so different. Not only did people not notice a great deal of what was happening around them socially, but what little they did notice was HIGHLY distorted by their prejudices, status seeking, ego, etc. I could say a great deal more because there were countless examples of this appalling reality, but I'll restrain myself. I WANT to say more about how truly astonishing and appalling this phenomenon is, in large part because I was a Person V, so one reason I saw many examples of these behaviors was because I was so often on the receiving end of them. What it boils down to though, is that there is an INCREDIBLE amount of accidental cruelty inflicted on people in social interactions. Which brings me to deliberate cruelty. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how deliberately cruel kids can be. The horrific thing is that even when they're being deliberately cruel, they don't notice that they're causing even more hurt than they intend. When Person V talks and the guy standing next to him wants to speak himself, no problem: he just yells, "Stupid!" and punches V very hard in the arm. V will shut up (maybe moan and complain, but that's ignorable), letting the aggressor take over the conversation. The aggressor doesn't notice how hurt V is because the aggressor is too busy being the center of attention and talking to everyone else. People truly don't notice how cruel they are. I noticed, and was appalled! Girls weren't as bad as guys. First because girls are less prone to physical cruelty, which is something I've suffered badly from. Second, and I think more importantly, one of the biggest differences in the genders' status games is that boys are destructively status seeking INTRA-group, whereas girls destructively status-seek INTER-group. A group of boys will often cruelly compete with each other; a group of girls will usually be nice to each other while they are scorning people who are not with them at the time. Girls back-stab and boys front-stab. That's from what I could observe of the inner workings of groups of girls. My observations were necessarily limited because if I paused near a group of girls, it was me they turned on. Boys are the worst. Almost every boy, almost 100% of the time he's being social, is competing for status. Even frequently victimized boys, who should know not to, will try to victimize boys of lower status. The way boys try to gain status is almost entirely by destructively tearing other boys down, often belittling them with physical violence rather than raising themselves up by doing something good. Masculine status is DEFINITELY not gained by being nice, as other boys don't respect that; quite the opposite. Which was unfortunate because I became nicer by stopping my participation in the cruel, status-grabbing games. I had sometimes been unpleasant to other people in the past, which I stopped, making me less disliked by the few people lower on the status ladder than me but otherwise doing nothing to make me more popular among boys. The best that could be said was that I disappeared from people's radars even more, becoming even more inconsequential. The aggressive guys took that as an invitation to pick on me some more, but such is life at my school. [[While there are many elements of truth in the above, you should be aware that at this time of my life I was very sensitive to such negative issues, and too predisposed to dislike other kids. Some of them were making my life so much of a misery that they'd driven me to suicide, and the rest weren't helping at all, so I was only too willing to see the worst in all of them. There truly was an amazing amount of bad behavior to see, but it wasn't as pervasive as I thought at this time and I was too quickly dismissing the good.]] I'd previously wished to be popular, but not now. I could clearly see that so-called popularity was gained and maintained by trampling on other people's feelings, so I stopped valuing it. Plus I didn't want to be near the people who were considered popular because they traveled in groups, bringing too much unpleasantness with them. They didn't want to be with me either, so we had a mutually agreeable non-relationship. I sometimes got some satisfaction from seeing the effects of my being nice. For example, if we were in a class discussion and I could see that one person had something to say but was being left out, I'd sometimes butt in loudly enough to ask for their opinion. They visibly appreciated it. Supporting someone that everyone else was ignoring reduced my popularity even further, but I felt a little bit proud of myself - literally, as one of me would praise the other. Despite the few instances of nice acts that I performed, and my pulling back from all the bad acts I'd done out of ignorance previously, my social-life didn't improve. Quite the reverse: I became more detached and lonely. I disliked other kids before, and I disliked them even more now. ------- I noticed other things too, things I wouldn't have noticed had I not merged. When guys were boasting, I could very often spot when they were lying (perhaps I should say that I could often spot the few occasions when they were telling the truth). Another new experience for me was starting to understand meanings when people didn't say anything: when they looked at something expressionlessly, or when they turned away. I hardly ever used to think about that, but now I saw that I could sometimes learn quite a lot. A particularly strong example was when one of the guys in my class loudly boasted that he'd kissed one of the girls. One of the non-participating guys in the room said nothing, but a few seconds later he looked at the named girl and they exchanged very small smiles. I guessed they had a secret relationship they had faith in. I could often see when people were worried about something, when they needed reassurance, or when they'd been emotionally hurt. As one example, Mom had pushed Carol into wearing a new dress that was a bit too figure-hugging for Carol's comfort. Unfortunately Carol has very little comfort about that, and the more figure she's developing to have clothes hug, the less she wants that to happen. Carol had worn it into the living room to show the family. I made an encouraging remark about how nice and mature she looked, and then I turned back to the TV. Pre-merge I probably would've ogled her, not understanding that it would've been the wrong thing to do. As I started understanding people better, and the more I understood them, the easier it was for me to spot the even less obvious clues they were giving out, enabling me to understand them even better. This was especially true with my family because I spent so much time with them. Unfortunately many of the understandings weren't good ones. I found that I started disliking some of my previous 'friends'; the guys that I hung out with at school. I could see that several of them were totally full of shit, were too nasty to others, or had other defects that I didn't like. So I started spending less time with most of my old friends, and started preferring the company of less offensive people. I also got along somewhat better with my family, mostly because I stopped responding to my sisters' taunts. But the general trend was definitely toward me spending almost all my time with myself(s). I lost interest in the company of boys, and girls had never had any interest in my company, so being even more alone became normal for me. That was fine with me as I liked and enjoyed being with my- and my-other-self. Just as well, since neither of us could leave. Bullies still remained the main bane of my life. Bullying was something I saw, or had inflicted on me, several times a day. Usually it was no more than being pushed out of the way, belittled in passing, tripped over, etc., but occasionally one of the bullies would feel the need to take the time to "teach me a lesson." My new social awareness wasn't any help against a fist, but being more observant sometimes was. I several times noticed one of the bullies coming toward me in time to avoid the predictable pain and humiliation by quickly scuttling away, or by pedaling faster if it was happening outside of school. Being observant and good at scuttling helped for a few days, but then my being smarter started showing. That naturally angered the bullies in my classes, so they started seeking me out to inflict their revenge upon me. It was difficult for me to sneak away from bullies in my own classes, so I took some extra punishment. I'm sure you can easily imagine the situation: skinny, pimply loser versus bulked-up, thick-as-pig-shit, pissed-off-at-the-smart-ass, bully. If you've ever been to school, you'll know the sort of shit that was inflicted on me. I will mention one aspect that made it even worse. When getting my head flushed in a toilet, or whatever else was being done to me, I couldn't use my hands to help myself because I couldn't risk my forearms being exposed and the cuts seen, or risk the cuts being torn open and bleeding again, so I was even less able than normal to limit the harm bullies did to me. They had a lot of fun, especially as I seemed an even bigger wimp than before. The bullying had been unbearably unpleasant before, so its getting worse was bad news. At such times it was especially good to have a built-in friend. ------- One unexpected thing I noticed was that I seemed to be hungrier these days, which was handy at Thanksgiving! I didn't need to eat a huge amount extra, but it was noticeable. I originally thought it was to make up for the blood loss but it persisted. Mom also noticed because I started taking an extra sandwich to school and kept asking for seconds at dinner. She wrote it off to my adolescence as my beanpole body certainly needed filling out. I didn't notice it doing any of that though. Speaking of Thanksgiving, Mom's family all live in England so we don't see them for it, which is a pity because they're nice people. They're strange because they're English, but they're nice too. Dad's parents live in Seattle, WA. It's about four hours drive north of Corvallis, which is a pity - that it's not farther away - because none of us enjoy their company. Most years, his family members gather in Seattle for Thanksgiving and Christmas, although sometimes in one of my uncle's or aunt's places. Never in our house though: "It's too small," is what Dad's mother belittles every year. Thanksgiving was in Seattle again this year. We had a long drive, an unpleasant day - although with a lot of good food - then another long drive home. So pretty much a typical Thanksgiving. My suicide cuts were healing somewhat quicker than I'd expected. I'd had plenty of scrapes and cuts before - from falling off my bike, clumsily slicing my finger with a kitchen knife, being pushed over on a school path, and dozens of other causes - but no experience with healing long, thin cuts, so the speed these were healing was very pleasing. I feared their being discovered, so the sooner they faded the better. By the time I reached my second weekend of being merged, the cuts looked good enough that I decided to test them in public. I took the synthetic skin off but left a long-sleeved shirt on, then went for a bike ride to Philomath, a very small township six miles west of Corvallis, where I was unlikely to be recognized by anyone. When I arrived outside the bank, I chained my bike, pushed my sleeves up, and wandered through the few stores. Not many people saw me, but none of them reacted to my forearms. I wasn't going to walk around home without a long-sleeved shirt on, but it was nice to be able to relax in public. ------- Chapter 6: The First Couple of Months Saturday, November 29, 2003 to Saturday, January 31, 2004 I had planned otherwise, but I started showing my apparently increased intelligence at school much more than I'd intended. It started with the teachers seeing that I was bored. They assumed my not paying attention was because I was misbehaving and they used the time-honored tactic of challenging me to answer a question about whatever they were currently talking about. I didn't have any reason to give deliberately incorrect answers, and I was surprisingly unwilling to act dumb on purpose, so I answered their challenges correctly. I was also correctly answering their normal questions when called upon in class, doing better homework, and there were several tests near the end of the term which I got very high scores in because it's hard not to do really well in tests when there are two of you. When I'd first gone to school after merging and discovered that school was easier, I'd thought that I'd got smarter. Then I'd thought my academic improvement was just because there were two of me, each no smarter than before. My opinion continued to fluctuate. My current thinking is that I'm probably a bit smarter, maybe 5%, or even 10% in the good subjects, but the large improvement my teachers and classmates have noticed is mostly from my having two minds, enabling us both to work on a problem or to work on twice as many problems in the same time. Being better at school was a somewhat quantifiable, as I could estimate the reduction of my study time and my grade improvements were obvious, but it was hard to decide how much of the improvement was from an increased IQ, if any. My grades continued to improve as I discovered new ways to take advantage of having two minds. For example, my two minds could quiz each other while we were studying, looking for something that neither of us remembered or understood well. It was very hard to hide a gap in my knowledge from myself when he was trying to catch me out. The discovered gaps gave us very good indications on what we needed to study some more or ask the teacher about. My grades also benefited to a minor degree from the effect that the more I mastered of a subject, the easier it was for me to master the rest of that subject. But the main reason my grades improved was because I stopped holding myself back. I'd done such a poor job of hiding most of my improvement, that hiding the rest of it was pointless. I was happy to stop being cautious, as I didn't like pretending to be dumb and I particularly disliked giving deliberately incorrect answers in tests. So it didn't take long for my teachers and classmates to notice that I was doing VERY well. My Math teacher, Mr. Barrett, held me back after class one day, "Mark, I've noticed that you are understanding the course material very easily, and that the class doesn't seem to be a challenge to you anymore. Is that right?" "Yes sir. The material seems much easier than it used to be." "It's not because you learned this material somewhere else?" This was Mr. Barrett's first year at our school so he might've thought I'd done extra work last year, or transferred in from another school that'd already taught the current material, or something. "No sir. I understand it better now. I'd noticed my improvement too, and checked it by reading ahead in our textbook. I understood most of it fairly easily, for the next five chapters or so. I'm also doing better in most of my other subjects too, although Math is the one that I seem to have improved in the most." "Okay, I've seen this happen a few times before." My attention LEAPED up at that. I had VERY DEFINITELY decided not to tell anyone what had happened to me, but it'd be great to find out that I wasn't unique. Mr. Barrett explained, "Sometimes the IQ of young teenagers can suddenly increase with adolescence." He smiled when he added, "Although most teenagers seem to get stupider then. Brains go through a reorganization in much the same way as your bodies do. In your case it seems to have happened to good effect." My attention level returned to normal. His explanation was wrong - leaving out important little details like dying and having two minds - but it was still good to know because I'd be able to use it in the future. It was a pity he hadn't known of my real situation and mentioned it as a known phenomenon, as it would be great to have other people I could talk with about it. Mr. Barrett continued, "If you're finding the material so easy next term, I'll also give you material from next year's syllabus that you can work through at your own pace, including during class time if you wish. You can't ask me questions about the new material during class as that'd be unfair to the other students, but you can talk with me outside of class and I'll give you my email address too. Okay?" "Yes sir, thanks very much." "No problem. It's good to see a student enjoy math." [Mr. Barrett didn't teach the next year's material as that was high school which had separate teachers, but when the new term started and I was still so good at math, he got the notes from a 9th grade Math teacher.] Toward the end of the term, something similar happened in some of my other classes too (not English, obviously). I think the teachers must've had a little conference about me for most of them to copy Mr. Barrett so quickly. I was given the option of doing some extra material, maybe for extra credit. I was happy to agree, both to relieve the boredom, and to push myself to find out how much more capable I was. By the time school finished for the calendar year, my teachers and classmates had noticed that I was much smarter. I had the bruises to prove it. ^ Writing how we tried to catch each other out with gaps in our knowledge reminds me of a little incident that's worth mentioning. My minds sometimes competed with each other for the fun of it, but we had a problem rewarding the winner. The usual types of reward wouldn't work: "Loser does the winner's chores" wasn't much of an incentive. We tried letting the winner run the body for a time, but that was usually pointless as we both wanted to do the same things and we usually forgot that only one of us was supposed to be in charge. By now we totally trusted each other with our body, and both of us moved it as automatically as you move yours. I will mention that there was one major weirdness about our situation: our body would often be doing something that I (either of my two minds) hadn't made it do. Obviously my other mind was directing the body then. We'd long since stopped being surprised by that. Sometimes the other mind would request , but more often it'd either mentally tell the other mind what it wanted done next, or it'd just wait until the other mind had finished and would then take over for a while. We'd never made an issue out of it because it didn't even need to be said that we should be polite and trust each other. One day we were about to start a little competition about something and #2 said, #1 replied with, We were more mentally similar than any other two people could be, but we weren't quite identical. We knew some different facts, probably because we'd forgotten different things, had some different preferences and some different mental skills. None of these differences were major, but they added an interesting aspect to our relationship that we were glad of. We thought it was better than if we'd been totally identical, not that anyone had ever offered us a choice. ------- The Christmas break from school isn't something I look forward to. It's cold, wet and we often get stuck indoors, which frequently leads to trouble with my little sisters. Carol's an indoor type of girl, so she's around a lot, which causes trouble. When Donna's stuck inside she quickly gets frustrated at not being able to run around outside, and that frustration causes her to be a pain in the ass. So both my sisters are a pain over the Christmas break. Being the only boy and the eldest child, I always get grief from Mom: "You should know better, Mark. You're the eldest." Or, "You shouldn't pick on your sisters. You're much bigger than they are, so it's unfair and ungentlemanly." Etc., etc. I've been hearing it for years, and it'd gotten old when I was still young. There's the Christmas thing itself of course, so there's some pleasantness for a day or so, but it quickly wears off. I think it's a silly superstition anyway. No one in our family believes some guy rose from the dead 2,000 years ago, and in the unbelievable event that he did, it's got nothing to do with us. Apparently - the Christians insist - he died for my sins. I have trouble seeing ANY logic in that piece of ridiculousness. In the event that his getting himself killed 2,000 years ago somehow has any effect on my sins now, he should've asked me first because I would've told him that they weren't worth the bother. As it turned out, this Christmas was better than normal because I didn't fight with my sisters as much as I had the previous Christmases. My much greater awareness of the cost of being mean to people made me uninterested in participating in those 'games'. I was nice to them when we had to interact, otherwise I mostly enjoyed being alone with my other self. I did a lot of reading in my room, discussing the books with myself, who enjoyed talking about them just as much as I did. ------- By the time school restarted, my forearm scars had healed and faded so much they were inconspicuous, so I was back in PE. I was doing better in all my school subjects, even in English, not that it mattered. Some were improving only a little: English improving by what felt like about 20% although putting a percentage value on the improvement in such a wishy-washy subject isn't easy, while I seemed more than twice as good as before at Math, although I wasn't sure how "more than twice" could be possible. I understood all the math material quickly and easily, had no trouble with any of the homework, never got an answer wrong, etc. Math was great for being good at because in math everything has a right answer, and when you knew it, you knew that you had it pegged. I was quickly working my way through next year's syllabus too. I enjoy mathematics, so I often worked on it in the evenings after finishing the rest of my homework. Homework barely took any time these days because I usually did it in the next class, and if there was any left at the end of the day, I did it at double speed at home. Mr. Barrett helped me with next year's material from time to time too, especially when the textbook's explanation was poor. I was getting 100% in many of my quizzes in many subjects. Quiz techniques: each mind separately works out the answer, we compare our results, and write it down only if we agree. Or we leapfrog through the questions, taking turns to write down the answers like we did in Minesweeper (I kept finding ways to improve my life based on lessons I'd learned from Minesweeper. Who'd have thought that Minesweeper was a life-enhancing game?). Getting 100% on quizzes was actually quite easy, provided the subject was one that had right answers, as opposed to whatever the teacher's opinion was on the day. Guessing the English teacher's opinion wasn't easy, as anyone who chooses to teach English obviously thinks weirdly. Toward the end of January, I decided that I wanted to accelerate my school education. I was so much smarter (effectively if not in fact), and my school results were so good that staying in my grade was holding myself back. It was VERY boring, and I wasn't having any trouble with the extra work some of my teachers were giving me. Advancing out of middle school into high school would also have the considerable advantage of getting me out of the reach of most of the bullies who were making my life even more of a misery since I became someone that needed to be punished for becoming a smart-ass. So I talked to several of my teachers about it, and they encouraged me to seek "advancement" [[which is what this dimension calls skipping a grade. I'm now aware that other dimensions use different phrases]]. They could see that I was easily capable of handling the material, but said that there were two problems: First, my history was that of an average student, so it would be hard to convince the school administrators that I was smart enough now. Second, I was told that this school was reluctant to allow students to skip grades in high school because they thought all the final years were too important to skip any. I was 8th grade, the last middle-school grade, so if I didn't advance now I'd probably never be allowed to. I had to act quickly. I raised the issue with my family at the dinner table. "Mom, Dad, I've got something serious that I want to talk about." Mom inquired, "Oh?" "I've been doing really well at school recently. And I mean REALLY well. Mr. Barrett, my Math teacher, told me that sometimes a teenager can suddenly get smarter when his brain changes as part of adolescence. It seems mine did that a couple of months ago. Mr. Barrett has been giving me next year's material, including all their assignments, and I'm killing it. I've done two or three months of their work already, as well as doing this year's work too of course. I'm better in all my subjects, especially the science subjects but even in English. It's a bit early to be sure yet, but I think I'll finish the year as the school's top student in my grade." That last statement grabbed Mom's and Dad's attention. In all my previous years at school, I'd done okay, but only "okay"; on average averaging a little above average (you can tell that I'm good at math), so my claim seemed ridiculous. Mom and Dad had received some warning as a few times in the last month they'd asked me what grade I got on an assignment they'd previously seen me working on, but they had no idea of the big picture: that all my grades, for everything, had leaped up. Small leaps in a couple of cases, but still upward. With skepticism on Mom's face, "I'm glad you think you're doing well, but don't you think you are being too hopeful?" To my considerable surprise, Carol answered, "He's not. I've got some of the same teachers and they've made comments to me, and some of my friends have brothers or sisters in his class and they've talked too. He is doing extremely well these days. From what I've heard, if he keeps it up he does have a shot at being top student for his grade." Mom, still looking skeptical, "But I haven't seen you working any harder than normal, Mark?" "That's the point, I don't have to work harder; I'm doing better because I'm smarter." "Okay. I hope you're right. It'd be great. Let's see what happens." "I brought the subject up for a reason. I want to have a meeting with the school about my advancing a grade. If I wait too long it'll be too hard to change, so I want to do it now. I've talked to my teachers and they'll support me, so now I need your help to talk with the administration. Okay?" "You've caught us unprepared. If we have to support you at school, we need to know more about how you're doing." "I'll get some of my teachers and the guidance counselor to call here to tell you about it over the next few evenings. How does that sound?" "That sounds like a good idea. You do that." "You know I've got Mr. Barrett's home number. If I call him after dinner you can talk with him this evening. His class is the one I'm doing best in and he's the one who has given me the most help since I started doing really well at school." They agreed, and we went back to our dinner. When the dishes were done, I called Mr. Barrett. I explained that I was going to ask the teachers to bring my parents up to speed so they could support my request to be advanced a grade, and I was starting with him because I had his number. I was doing so much advanced work and he'd encouraged my success by offering his home phone number, with the painstaking crap that went with the need to avoid ridiculous accusations. He was happy to talk with my mom. I'd already had several one-on-one conversations with Mr. Barrett about my math ability, how well I was doing, etc., so I didn't need to listen to Mom's half of the conversation and it would've felt awkward to hang around the kitchen (where the phone was), so I went to the girls' bedroom, knocked, and entered after, "Come." "Carol, I just wanted to thank you for backing me up with Mom at dinner." "No problem." she said. "Happy to help." "How come, you didn't used to like helping me?" "You've changed. You're nicer now," accompanied by a smile. "I'm glad to see you succeeding at school." "Well thanks again. You surprised me and I appreciate it." Then I killed some time watching TV in the living room. After several minutes Mom came into the living room and told me, "Mr. Barrett is certainly in favor of your being advanced. He says that if you continue as you have been, you'll probably be the best Math student he's ever seen. That's impressive." "Yeah, but remember that Math is my best subject. I'm not as good at the others." "By the sounds of it, even if you were no good at any of the others you'd still have a great career ahead of you in mathematics. You're doing well. I hope you keep it up." "I intend to. I was lucky this happened to me," (I'd calculated "this" had happened with a 1-in-10,000,000,000,000,000 chance, so calling it "lucky" was the understatement of the year!) "and I intend to make the best of it." The next day at school I gave my teachers my phone number and asked them to call and talk with my mom. Over the next couple of evenings most of them and the counselor did. It was somewhat repetitious for Mom, as they all said much the same thing, although the counselor was noncommittal. A few days later we had a meeting between the school Principal (he thought he deserved a capital "P", like God), the middle-school guidance counselor, Mom and me. Mr. Barrett, being a nice guy, also sat in. Our school is a combined middle- and high-school. Each has their own Deputy Principal, but we were meeting with the Top Dog. I never bothered to ask why, but maybe it was because Mom had rung him first, or because I'd be jumping from one school to the other. We discussed my situation. The Principal was cautious, not wanting to let me jump ahead, "for Mark's own good". My improvement had been too recent, and he wasn't convinced enough. He preferred to wait a few more months to make sure. To me, that meant I'd have double the amount of work to catch up on, presuming he didn't use the amount of work as an excuse to say, "It's too late in the school year to advance Mark now." Next year I'd be in high school, where getting permission to skip a grade would be even harder. We'd reached somewhat of an impasse, when the counselor suggested that I do an intelligence test. The Principal quickly agreed; I thought mainly as a way to avoid having to make a decision. So the meeting ended without really achieving anything. I'd do the test, then we'd have to have another meeting to discuss the result. When we left the office Mr. Barrett told me quietly, "Don't worry Mark, I'm sure you'll score well." When we got home, I went online to research IQ tests. I had a major concern about whether my upcoming test would be structured in a way that let me use my two minds to good advantage. If it didn't, then I'd only get a result close to my original IQ of 105. I found many websites that had IQ tests, most of which appeared to be crap. I spent some time refining the list down to serious sites, looking at the types of questions they asked, and inventing some useful two-mind techniques for them. Having two minds was cool (very, very cool), but in one respect it wasn't as useful as it might seem. Everybody else has had all their life to learn how to use their brain. I only had the last couple of months to learn how to use what I had now. I had to invent all the techniques myself since there weren't any "Two Minds for Dummies" instruction manual. If I flunked this IQ test, it was going to give the Principal a reason to stop me advancing, possibly for all my remaining school years. It was important I do well, so I prepared myself as best I could. Both my sisters wanted to use the computer, especially Carol, but they nicely agreed to keep their time as short as possible, and they gave me time to print out several pages of questions to think about while they were using it. I was REALLY eager to ace this test. By bedtime I had invented several useful techniques, depending on each question's structure. There are some very weird questions in IQ tests: mentally unfolding a geometric shape, or rotating one to visualize its back, etc. Those types of questions had never come up in class before, so I had to invent ways of doing them which maximized the usefulness of having two minds. I went to bed somewhat nervous about the test tomorrow morning. Mr. Barrett had offered to let me miss his Math class, laughingly stating that he thought my missing one class wouldn't hurt my end-of-year result too badly. ^ The next morning, my test supervisor and I were sent to an empty classroom, and the rules for the IQ test were explained to me. It was an "Answer as many questions as you can in the time allowed" type of test, which suited me VERY nicely - phew! The obvious main strategy for me to use was leapfrogging. Having two minds meant that they could alternate questions through the test. Because it was a multi-choice test it had lots of thinking and minimal writing, so my speed would be doubled. I'd start each page by leapfrogging down it, skipping any questions that had a structure that I could do best with two minds cooperating together; similar to how counting red and black cards was six times faster with two minds than one. When the first pass down the page was finished we'd go back to do the questions that worked best with two minds. When the supervisor said, "Begin!" I POURED myself into the task, doing my highly motivated VERY best. Forty five minutes later, I was still powering through the many remaining questions when the supervisor called out, "Stop!" I put my pen down, breathed a sigh of relief, and had a quick internal conference. We thought we'd done well. Judging by our mental exhaustion - surely that must be singular as there's only one brain, which felt doubly worn out - it seemed that I'd answered heaps of questions. My answer sheet was taken away to be scored immediately and I went to my next class. I got called to the Principal's office just before school let out. I'd made a rather significant mistake, the details of which I didn't learn until later but I'll explain to you now. When I'd done my online research the previous night, I'd only spent time figuring out techniques for answering questions. I hadn't thought to research how the results are translated into an IQ score. I'd simply assumed what seemed obvious to me: that I'd get the easy questions right and the hard questions wrong, and where my results transitioned from mostly right to mostly wrong would indicate what my IQ was. In other words, it'd be based on the quality of my answers. I presumed there was some sort of bonus for answering lots of questions, but I hadn't given it much thought, only enough to assume it would be a secondary consideration. I'd gone full speed ahead to do as many questions as possible to compensate for my true IQ being decidedly average. It turned out that the type of test that I'd taken was cruder than I'd assumed: it was purely quantitative "all you can answer correctly in the time", calibrated so the number of right answers above the random guess 20% produced a roughly linear IQ result. I have trouble believing that IQ tests are designed that way because that implies that intelligence is more about the quantity of thinking than the quality of it, which seems the wrong way around to me. I see nothing wrong with a very intelligent person having a good, long think about an extremely difficult question and then producing the right answer, but apparently that's not what the IQ examiners think. It wasn't quite linear as there was also a bonus for doing more questions, because by the exam writers' logic, more questions answered meant more time 'wasted' reading and writing rather than thinking, and to compensate for the mental fatigue caused by doing more work in the same time. Put simply, getting more than a certain number of questions right is increasingly hard, and needs ever increasing amounts of IQ, like doubling the speed when your ride your bike requires much more than twice the effort because wind resistance increases faster. Because I'd mostly leapfrogged my way through the test, I'd answered twice as many questions as I would've been able to pre-merge. I'd answered slightly more accurately too, especially on the questions my minds had cooperated on. I gained even more time on those questions where my two minds were super-efficient, but I lost time whenever one mind finished the last question on a page and had to wait for the other mind to catch up so we could turn the page, and when one mind called for help to double-check something it thought worth the time. The net result was that I had answered somewhat fewer than twice the number of questions that I would've pre-merge, but that'd put me into the area of getting a substantial bonus, and it resulted in an IQ of over twice my old value of 105. The school scored me as having an IQ of 226. I didn't know much about high IQs, but I knew enough to know that was a truly RIDICULOUS score. The Principal also knew I wasn't that smart because it would've made me the smartest person on the planet. I truly wasn't smart at all, as I was just two averagely intelligent people cooperating unusually closely. What had happened was caused by a structural problem with the IQ test, as it simply wasn't designed to correctly score the IQ of people with two minds. Over the previous hour or so, the Principal had been grilling the supervisor because he believed she'd let me have too much time. She was insistent she had not, as proved by my presence in classes before and after the IQ test. That left the Principal double- and triple-checking the final score, scratching his head, calling the company that produced the tests for help, etc. To make it even more unbelievable, just a few weeks ago I was a completely normal boy, with a boringly normal intelligence. While it was true that some people get smarter as a result of adolescence, it was normally something like their gaining 5 or 10 points. An IQ going from 105 to 226 was clearly a mistake, which the Principal wanted to correct as it upset his bureaucratic sensibilities. Fortunately, it was well known that most IQ tests are designed to accurately measure the IQ of people near the average. The further away from average someone is, the less accurate their test result is, and once you get into genius territory, the normal IQ tests are very inaccurate. The Principle decided that was obviously the main explanation for my result. He told me he wanted me to do a test that was designed to measure the IQ of geniuses. I didn't like that idea at all. What I wanted was to do a test that would get me an IQ score sufficient for the advancement I wanted (say 140 to make sure of it), but there was no way I could guarantee to achieve that as I wouldn't have a clue how many questions that result needed. I couldn't simply go at 60% of the speed I had gone at last time (60% of 226 being roughly the IQ I wanted) because it was going to be a completely different type of test. 60% of full speed might produce an IQ result anywhere between 60 and God knows what, depending on the structure of that test. Because the first test's structure was almost perfect for a dual-minded person, the second test could only get worse. If they gave me a second test with VERY hard, genius-level questions, I'd do miserably, if not flunk it totally. I MIGHT be able to score an IQ of 115, as I thought my IQ might have increased somewhat and I'd get some bonus when my minds worked on problems together, but that was the best I could expect to do on such a test. An average IQ would ruin my chance of getting advanced a grade and get me accused of cheating on the first test, so I'd end up being worse off than if I'd not asked to be advanced at all. Doing another test was far too much risk, so I told the Principal that while I agreed that the IQ test was obviously not accurate, I wasn't eager to do another one. I'd talk with my parents about it first. I told him that I couldn't stay longer as school had just let out and I had to accompany my sister home. ^ When I met Carol at the bike rack she asked, "Did you do the test?" "Yeah." "Well? What'd you get?" "It's a long story. I'd prefer to go through it all just once, when Mom and Dad are home. Okay?" It wasn't okay with her; she wanted to know now, but tough cheese. When Mom got home, she also asked me about my test. I told her, "I need to have a discussion about it, so it's probably best to wait for dinnertime." We hold any family-wide discussions over the dinner table. Once we were all seated and the food was on the table, Mom turned to me and said, "So what's the story on your IQ test?" "I had it, and there is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that my IQ has definitely increased, and easily by enough to justify my advancing a grade. The bad news is that my new IQ score is 226." "What!" from Mom and Carol, both of whom understood the IQ points system. "Yeah, it's obviously wrong, but I don't know why. I know I'm smarter and doing much better at school, but 226 is ridiculous." Dad asked, "Doesn't that just mean you're twice as smart as average?" Mom answered, "It is twice the average, but in the same way a guy who was eleven feet tall would be twice as tall as average. Someone that tall would be tallest person in the world, and Mark's IQ score would make him smarter than anyone I've ever heard about. No offense to Mark, but that's not believable." Dad said, "So the school made a mistake with their test then?" "It looks that way," agreed Mom. I said, "The Principal wants me to take another IQ test, but I don't want to. If I did and got a much more realistic score, then there could be accusations of cheating on the first test, and who knows what sort of problems could come out of that, including not being able to advance a grade. -- "I think my IQ score is irrelevant anyway. I know I can do next year's work. My teachers and my classmates know it. Even Carol has heard people talking about it. I'm getting REALLY bored at school these days and I've proved myself capable of doing the work, so I should be advanced. But the Principal is focusing on the test rather than what's good for me. I want to refuse to do another test, and want to insist I get advanced a grade." [[You'll notice that the above paragraph has been unusually indented. By the time you get to the end of my autobiography, you'll know that many of the normal ways of doing things are going to change because I like my ideas better. That starts with this indenting. In a written story, a new paragraph usually indicates a new speaker, but sometimes one individual will be talking so much that their speech runs to multiple paragraphs, as it did for two paragraphs above. A common way of indicating a continuous speech is to leave the trailing quote mark off all but the last paragraph, but I think that's too subtle and can confuse readers over who's speaking. So my autobiography uses an additional indication of a continuous speech: the first lines of the speech's second and subsequent paragraphs are indented as above. This is likely to be the least of all my changes to your life.]] There was more discussion, especially because Mom thought it wrong not to correct such an incorrect result, but she eventually agreed with what I wanted, which meant Dad agreed too. Mom also had some reservations about my advancing a grade, saying she'd closely monitor my workload and results until she was happy that I was managing. "Talk with the Principal tomorrow, Mark. If he doesn't agree with what you want, which he probably won't, get him to call me at work and we'll arrange another meeting. Okay?" "Will do. Thanks Mom." I talked to the Principal the next day. As Mom predicted, he was not cooperative. He much preferred to test me again, and he did not hesitate to use his control over my advancement to try to force me to take another test. So I asked him to call Mom, and another meeting was scheduled. I think she'd talked to her boss at work about why, and he was happy to let her take time off for another meeting. So the following Monday morning had Mom and me in the Principal's office again, this time with the middle school's Deputy Principal as well. The Principal's position was: "Mark's IQ test result is clearly incorrect, and until we get a usable IQ score I cannot advance him to the next grade." Mom responded, "In our last meeting you said that you would advance Mark if the result of the IQ test was sufficiently high to confirm his recent school performance. Are you saying that 226 is not sufficiently high, or have you arbitrarily changed your mind?" "No, Mrs. Anderson. I am saying that the result was not accurate." "You are saying that on an IQ test provided by the school, supervised by the school and marked by the school, you think the wrong result was obtained. Exactly what error did your school make, and who made it?" "We haven't identified a specific problem. Nonetheless, it's clear that the result is not reliable and another test is necessary." "Mark doesn't want to do another test, and I agree with his reasoning and support his decision, especially as it'd probably be a waste of his time and effort as you haven't identified why you got the last one wrong. -- "Last meeting you said you wanted an IQ test as confirmation of his recent grades, and now you have one. All of his teachers have told me that he can easily be advanced, he feels he can do the work, and in some classes he has already started doing so. I'm sure his teachers have told you the same thing. We reluctantly agreed to his being tested the first time, he was tested and his score confirms his academic achievements. You have no reason to hold him back, and an abundance of reasons to advance him. The longer you delay advancing him the harder it will be for him, so your recalcitrance is jeopardizing his schooling, exactly the opposite of what your primary job is." "Nonetheless, I'm not comfortable advancing him based on a test which is clearly incorrect." "Your comfort is of little concern to me; my son's scholastic success is my only concern. Mark's results, his teachers, and your IQ test all confirm that Mark should be advanced. If you refuse to do so I will complain to the Board of Education. I have no doubt that you will become a laughing stock for trying to hold back a student with an IQ score of 226 whose teachers are all saying he can do the next grade's work. If Mark is anywhere near as smart as that, you have a very good chance of coming out of this looking like a buffoon of a Principal who is more concerned about keeping his precious paperwork neat and tidy than what was best for his students." #2: Being thought of as a buffoon was a prospect that clearly didn't appeal to the Principal; he blustered and postured some more, and then he caved. Begrudging consent was given, with some weak threats to keep a very close eye on my work and at the first sign of my struggling to put me back "for his own good." Even at the age of fourteen, I knew that expression meant "as an excuse to do what I want to do, regardless of his needs." I was VERY surprised and impressed by how well Mom had gotten what we wanted out of the Principal. [Mom later told me that she'd thought the Principal was weak-willed, so she'd tried hitting him hard with a credible threat. His backing down had proved Mom right.] It was agreed that starting the following Monday - because the Principal insisted that it somehow it couldn't be done any sooner - I would be advanced a grade, which would take me out of middle school and into high school. That was a move of only a hundred yards, as our school contains both of those 'schools'. There's just the one administration and one Principal, although he has the two Deputy Principals. The admin buildings are in the center, with the two schools laid out to either side. Most of the facilities are separate, with the two 'schools' having their own teachers, student lunchrooms, street entrances, bike racks, student parking lot (for the high school), etc. There is one centrally located bike rack where kids from the one family who bike together could arrive and depart from the same place, even if they go to different 'schools'. Carol and I would start using that rack, as would Donna when she joined us next year. I'd often cursed my school for being a combined one, as some of the bullies that attacked me were high-school students visiting their younger siblings at middle school at lunchtime, or encountered on the way to or from school, but it made my advancement purely an internal matter, so much easier to obtain. Over the next few days, my current teachers gave me copies of most of the material they were going to cover for the rest of the year. [I worked my way through most of it over the next month or so. I didn't bother to learn every detail; instead skimming to get a good overview. If my new grade's material needed me to know something I'd missed from the previous grade, I'd read up on it. I unashamedly cut even more corners with English, as my new grade's English didn't build on my previous grade's. English doesn't really have 'knowledge', so it can't build on itself like a proper subject can. Instead it just flounders around year after year, doing increasingly useless stuff.] And so I became a freshman. ------- Chapter 7: The Rest of the School Year Monday, February 2 to mid-June, 2004 For the last half of the school year, there was the good news and the bad news. All the girls in my new classes were a year older and much nicer to look at, the extra year's growth making a delightfully noticeable difference to them. Being much more status-conscious high-school students, a lot of them dressed much nicer too, sometimes "nicer" in ways that teenage boys very much appreciated and admired. Not so good was that all the guys in my new classes were a year older too, including those that took exception to a young kid being smarter than them. I had thought the bullying intolerably unpleasant pre-merge, and it'd gotten worse when my 226 IQ (hehe) started showing up, but it quickly became WAY worse after becoming a freshman. Enough of the high-school bullies knew me already, and apparently my being smart enough to be jumped a grade really ticked off those morons, so I got lots of very unwelcome attention. And God help me if I was spotted "appreciating and admiring" any of the girls in my new classes; one of the guys was sure to "teach me a lesson." Despite my being so smart, they felt the need to teach me that lesson extremely frequently. Often preemptively, just in case. [This school has an unusually serious problem with bullying. I learned later that the main reason bullying was so bad here was the Principal's being so weak. It was good for me that Mom had been able to push him in to advancing me, but bad in almost every other way. The testosterone-hyped football coaches had been pushing the Principal around for years, getting all sorts of dispensations for "their boys". Naturally, the power went straight to those boys' heads, no doubt aided by the suction effect of a vacuum. Once a culture of jock-centered violence was established, it got worse year by year, as many of the other boys enjoyed it and joined in. It was especially bad in high school, where the older jocks weren't restrained effectively, if at all.] Without my in-built friend, the bullying would have been intolerable, but he made a world of difference. As bad as being a smart student made the bullying, all things considered, I was much happier than I had been pre-merge, for several reasons: I had some excellent, self-contained companionship, which was a wonderful cure for loneliness. The mere fact that I had an in-built companion made me special and - I thought - unique. That made me feel much better about myself. I was enjoying being smart. My new classmates being a year ahead of me just made them more knowledgeable than me, not smarter or able to go faster so I quickly caught up on their lead and then got ahead of most of them in most subjects. I didn't have any trouble with my scars in PE. They'd faded nicely, and while they were still visible I had a way of making sure I kept them facing away from anybody near me. Whenever I had to bare my forearms, I allocated one mind to concentrate on keeping my forearms hidden. Regardless of whether #1 or #2 was doing that, he had more control over my forearms than the general body movements made by the other mind. To my surprise PE changed from being a problem into something enjoyable, as I became not only less clumsy but increasingly physically adroit, and I discovered some real skill at soccer. I trained my feet to be ambidextrous (doesn't that word apply just to hands? Told you English ain't my best subject). I could kick with either foot, and could run and dribble very fast and skillfully. With two minds I could also keep a very good awareness of where the other players and the ball were. To further surprise me, I had quick reaction times. I seemed to react faster to ball movements than the other players did. I guess whatever mind worked out the trajectory of the ball first started my body moving first. And having one mind watch the ball while the other watched the players meant that I nearly always knew where the ball was and could react quickly to its sudden changes in direction. So having two minds made me much more physically skillful. Not something I'd thought would ever happen to me, but very welcome. My increased food intake was starting to show up on my body. I was still skinny, but with a slowly increasing amount of muscle under my skin. Not much, but more than I'd ever had before. Not being clumsy anymore, I was getting somewhat more exercise these days. Not weight training or anything deliberate and pointless like that. Because I enjoyed soccer and enjoyed getting better at it, I was doing quite a lot of soccer practice. It's a good game because it genuinely requires skill, rather than football's simply running into your opponents, which any moron can do. I was also doing more "goofing around" with Donna at home (that's what our family called doing some sort of sporting activity for fun, usually with Donna), and there was the usual biking around. None of it was serious exercise, but it was nice that it was producing some muscles. Even more than I thought it should, but I assumed that was because my body had finally pulled finger and was catching up to the increased musculature that's supposed to come with adolescence. Better late than never. ------- As I settled into my new grade, I noticed considerably more loneliness or sadness in high-school kids than I'd seen in middle school. I noticed kids get rebuffed, or sitting in a corner, or just not connecting to what was going on around them. I found it easier to approach someone and ask to sit with them during lunch, or to ask for their help in a subject if they were in one of my classes. I didn't really need much help with that, but it was a believable excuse. Having two of me agree to go and talk with someone made it easier to do so. I didn't feel so self-conscious or worry about rejection. I was often told to go away, sometimes rudely, but it was much easier to handle because I was not lonely: there were two of me so we'd wander off talking to ourself. Rejection was far less painful than it'd been pre-merge because we supported each other. By the way "talking to ourself" wasn't something we ever accidentally did out loud. The mental communication process was easier and somewhat faster than out-loud speech, and it quickly became second nature with us. The greatest problem we had was avoiding saying "we" in reference to myself when talking to someone else. When we made that mistake, the other person usually assumed I was talking about me and them, which covered the mistake but occasionally resulted in a meaning that I didn't want. Of course, everything wasn't perfect; far from it. I liked looking at the girls in my classes, but NO 15-year old girl is going to talk with a 14-year old, nerdy, pimply, beanpole; even if the guys in the class let me get close enough to try, which they most definitely did not. Being romantically linked to one of these girls was NEVER going to happen. Possessing ambidextrous feet wasn't quite cool enough, and I doubted if my being able to juggle four pairs of socks would make up the difference. I came to hate bullies even more, as hard to imagine as that is. It was much more of a problem in high school than I'd anticipated, especially as so many of the jocks thought they were minor gods and therefore entitled to walk over the top of everyone else. Plus there were many non-football-playing thugs too, who just liked beating people up. Aggressiveness was common, and it was a very rare day that I wasn't on the receiving end of at least one painful incident. There were even female bullies. A surprising number of them were physically aggressive, but even more common were the beautiful-but-nasty bitches who made themselves feel better by making everyone else feel worse, and who seemed to devote their every waking moment to putting everyone else down in as snide a manner as possible. That hadn't been much of a problem in middle school, but it was far more prevalent in high school. I could see and comprehend the effects of their actions, and I hated them. I didn't like the life that I was in, but I loved that there were two of me in it. That made a HUGE difference. ------- I was getting along with some people better. Particularly with Mom and Carol, as they both made an effort to emotionally help me advance grades. Mom because that's what moms do, and because she wanted to monitor my progress after the grade advancement. Carol because she was a studious person who agreed with some of my new values of trying to excel academically. The more time I spent with them, the better we got along. With Carol, that made a very pleasant change from the pre-merge days. Donna was fun too. Donna and Dad like physical activity, and I got to enjoy joining in. Whether goofing off around home with a ball - whether a soccer ball, basketball, baseball, or whatever - we did more things together, and I discovered a generally increasing level of physical coordination, and eventually even skill at physical activities. It's certainly far more enjoyable to do friendly sports when you don't keep missing every ball and falling on your face, as I used to. Donna and I often went outside and did some sporting stuff together when she wanted to burn off some excess energy, which was a frequent need of hers. One incident particularly improved my relationship with Carol. One morning at breakfast Carol looked very tired and obviously hadn't had enough sleep the night before. When Mom asked her why, Carol answered, "I have a Math assignment due today. I've already done most of it, but I stupidly left the last few questions till last night and then couldn't understand them. I tried for ages but I couldn't get it, and it was too late to call anyone." I could see Carol was frustrated and upset with herself, so I said, "You could've asked me. I would've been happy to help, especially with Math." Carol looked at me strangely, as my helping her had not featured heavily in our past relationship. "You were asleep." "Next time wake me up. There's no point in you banging your head against a brick wall for hours, especially on something I find as easy as Math. It probably wouldn't take me more than a few minutes to show you what you needed to know." "Are you serious?" "Sure." Carol immediately pulled out her assignment and we started going over the troublesome questions. From that day on she politely asked for my help when she needed it. Very cautiously at first, but that improved when she saw that I was truly willing to help her. I must admit that I asked her help with English a time or six too. We got along better. I was also amused when toward the end of the school year, my helpfulness got extended beyond homework. Boys frequently try to hit on Carol, which annoys her when they persist too much, as boys have been known to do. I couldn't blame them at all, as Carol has grown herself an exceptionally good figure and very pretty face. She was nearly thirteen now, and even with her having been advanced a year she was still more developed than nearly all the girls in her grade. I hadn't seen hardly any of those girls, but I had no doubt Carol was more developed than them because she was also more developed than nearly all the girls in my grade. Carol could normally get individual boys to stop hassling her, but sometimes one of them wouldn't get the message. One guy had been bothering her at school and also often calling her at home. She eventually complained about him in my hearing, which I took as a request for help. It'd be easy and I was happy to help. After being humiliated in public by bullies for years, I knew how much humiliation hurt and how effective it was against kids. It wasn't for nothing that it was one of the teachers' favorite means of control. I asked Carol, "Which classroom will the boy be in after lunch tomorrow?". I walked into that room a couple of minutes before the bell for the start of class. Being much taller than these kids, I looked authoritative and quickly quieted the class down. Then I asked, "Which of you is Ed Miller?" He curiously identified himself, along with half the class pointing him out. Since the teacher wasn't in the room yet, I didn't have to use the polite version I'd mentally prepared, instead using the much more effective, highly insulting version. "I'm Mark Anderson. The embarrassed looking Carol over there is my little sister. I like my sister very much and I don't like to see her unhappy, but far too many evenings you call her up and make an annoyingly stupid nuisance of yourself..." "Oh," as poor little Ed Miller realized what sort of conversation this was going to be. " ... Your phone calls put her in a bad mood. She rants and raves around the house, she upsets our dinners complaining about what an obnoxious pain you are, and my whole family is sick of hearing her tell us she doesn't like you." None of that really happens; Carol just grumbles for a few seconds then goes back to her room. My speech sounded good though. -- Most of the class was starting to laugh and jeer at my victim, so I spoke louder and started wrapping it up. "We've all heard her tell you over and over again to stop calling her. How can you be so stupid that you don't understand what 'Stop' means?" He was too busy being embarrassed to answer. I resumed, "I'm going to start repeating all the bad things Carol has said to us you. I'll keep talking until you say stop." I looked at the whole room and recited a list of invented insults. "Carol says you're annoying, your breath sometimes stinks, you're ugly, she doesn't like..." "Stop! Please stop." "Oh, so you do know what it means. I've got a VERY long list of bad things Carol has said about you. Shall I ignore your saying 'stop' and keep telling you what the list is, just like you ignored Carol telling you to stop bugging her?" He didn't answer, so after a the room had finished laughing, I carried on making up the list, "She doesn't like your stupid sense of humor. She says you've got no clue how to talk nicely to a girl. Your face always looks..." "PLEASE stop! I won't call again, I promise." "But I haven't even started on what she thinks of your face..." "{Groan}." " ... She says your nose makes you look like an ugly horse. Your pimples..." "{Groan}. PLEASE stop." He was on the verge of tears so I think he'd probably got the message by now. That and the teacher just coming in meant this would be a good time to stop. I'd intended to threaten the boy with my coming to his classes day after day, just like he'd annoyed Carol day after day, but the teacher wouldn't have stood for that. "Okay. Unlike you, I do know what 'stop' means. Are you going to stop making a nuisance of yourself with Carol, or will I have to come down here again?" (Middle school is always referred to as "down" from the high school's perspective. It's on the same level geographically, but it's a status thing.) "I'll stop!" "Good. And to all the other boys who're laughing at Ed. I know some of you have been slow to take 'No' for an answer in the past too. I'll come down here again if any of you annoy my sister." The mocking laughter from all the other boys cut off. -- "By all means talk with Carol if she enjoys your company - she's a nice girl and pleasant to talk with - but if she tells you to stop, I strongly suggest you do as she requests. There are plenty of other pretty girls to choose from, so don't annoy my sister." The bell rang, which wasn't quite perfect timing because I had one more thing to say. I waved a "Thanks" at the teacher for letting me speak when he could have shut me down. I edged toward the door. When the bells stopped, I spoke toward Carol, "Sorry to embarrass you, Carol. I just didn't like to see you get annoyed every day." I'd said that to let the class know that none of this had been her idea, so not to blame her for it. That was mostly a lie, but it'd ease her embarrassment. #1 took control of my mouth to add, "To be fair to the boys, you are the prettiest girl in the class." Which embarrassed her all over again. I waved goodbye then left, happy about how well it'd worked, and at how well I'd done. This was the first time I'd ever done what I guessed could be called "public speaking". Admittedly only to middle-school kids two grades behind me, but it still counted. Having two minds made doing it MUCH easier. I was late to my class, but I got away with it by saying, "I had to deliver a message to my sister's class in middle school. Sorry." Carol gave me a big hug the next time we met, thanking me very much, laughing at my crushing poor Ed Miller, and then telling me, "It's great now. None of the boys are brave enough to talk with me, especially Ed. He's terrified of even looking at me." She seemed happy, but I still said, "I didn't want none of the boys to talk with you; just for them to stop annoying you." "It's perfect. I can talk with them if I want, but they won't bother me. I should've asked you to help me months ago." I stopped worrying about the boys' reluctance to talk with Carol, not because of Carol's explanation, but because I remembered that she had large breasts. It wouldn't take long for the boys to start talking to her again. Carol added, "The girls said I was very lucky to have such a nice brother. They all think you're much nicer than their brothers and I agree." "Did you tell them the reason I'm such a nice brother to you?" I was setting her up so I could say my niceness was due to my having such a great sister, but Carol saw the 'trap' and told me, "I know what you're going to say but I'm not going to fall for it. You're the one that's changed recently, not me. I HAVE got a very nice brother, and all the girls in my class agree with me, so there!" [[In hindsight, Carol could have gotten me dates with some of the girls in her class if I'd thought to ask her to. Several of her friends would've happily agreed, even though I'd publicly said that none of them were as pretty as my sister (I know by now - the time I'm authoring this autobiography - that reverse logic works better on girls than every form of forward logic). But back then I was too green to even think of asking Carol to hook me up. The dates wouldn't have been much, as I was only fourteen and the girls thirteen, but I still would've been blown away with happiness, and what I'd learned over the months of being observant would've made me a nicer boyfriend than most. If I'd gone down that path I wouldn't have mentioned a certain other girl's name in public (it's coming up), and my life would have been VERY different. Chances are YOUR life would be different too, but that's an issue for after the end of my autobiography.]] ------- The school year passed quickly, with me spending most of my time studying. I'd missed many months of 8th grade material, quite a lot of which I had to read up on, plus I had to catch up all the 9th grade work from the beginning of the year. Mostly I studied because I enjoyed it. It didn't take long for Mom to recognize that I was easily capable of handling the jump to high school. What few friends I'd had, I'd left behind in middle school. I didn't connect to anyone in my new grade. Half of them were girls of course, and neither they nor many of the guys would permit me to do anything that even hinted at "connecting". I was a middle-school interloper who'd joined them halfway through the year, so there was no reason for the decent guys to have anything to do with me either. They already had their friendship groups, none of which were anything to do with me. I lived alone, especially after my first couple of vague attempts to chat with someone ended painfully. I was happy with my in-built friend, and we had lots of fun alone together. I enjoyed "keeping my own company" - a phrase that had especially strong relevance to me. My life was on track, as far as I could tell at fourteen. I was conquering school academically, especially in the subjects that interested me the most: Math and the sciences. I'd always enjoyed those subjects, and was doing so even more now as those subjects seemed to suit having two minds much more than the wishy-washy subjects did. My doing so well in the sciences was very satisfying. I was looking forward to my adult future and had some fun dreaming about it. What sort of career would I have? How could I use my unique advantage? I had LOTS of silly dreams and schemes about how to maximize the benefits of having two minds. Admittedly I had no real idea about what would happen out in the adult world, but it was fun to speculate on having a really interesting, successful life. My learning curve for dual-mind techniques flattened off. After a few months I pretty much stopped developing new ways of approaching problems. I seemed to have a large enough repertoire to meet nearly all the types of problems I encountered at school. Occasionally a very unusually structured task or problem would turn up, but these we so rare that it wasn't worth the bother of trying to invent a new approach, and I usually just did them the same way everyone else did. My physical coordination similarly slowed its improvement, then leveled off. Likewise the changes to my body, which was still very slim but looked somewhat fit rather than gaunt. As best I could tell, my social skills differed by continually getting better. Maybe a good part of that was just my maturing, but I increasingly understood the social interactions going on around me. Don't let that make you think I was the life of the party, or anything remotely approaching that. I was still VERY much a loner. Advancing a grade had made that even truer than before, as did my better understanding the social dynamics going on around me, as they made me truly happy to remain a loner. The worst problem my uniqueness caused was a very minor one: #1 occasionally mentioning to someone something their counterpart had done in #1's world, only to confuse the person here because they hadn't done it in this dimension. That was very rare and easily explained away with something like, "Sorry, I got you confused with someone else," or, "I must have dreamed it." All was going well; well enough anyway. Mentally I was incredibly happy. Physically I was getting way too much attention from guys I didn't want (bullies), and way too little attention from girls that I did want (most of them), but the year moved along mostly happily. The end-of-year exams arrived. By then it was clear that they were going to be easy for me. Especially as my ability to leapfrog questions gave me a huge time advantage. That wasn't so useful in subjects that had long stretches of writing, such as in English, as I didn't write with both hands simultaneously when anyone could see me. But even in subjects like English, having two minds to think about what to write was a big help. I got top of my class in the good subjects and ended up with the third highest total score for the 9th grade. Skipping a grade and the soft subjects had held me back, but my final results were nonetheless extremely impressive. So 9th Grade was over with. ------- Chapter 8: What I Did on My Summer Vacation Mid-June to mid-September, 2004 Summer vacation was fun. With both Mom and Dad having jobs that didn't permit them to take three months vacation, we kids spent a lot of unsupervised time doing whatever we wanted. Carol and Donna had their own social circles, and I socialized mostly with Brent as he lived just up the street from me. We were the same age and had some of the same interests, so that was good enough. We both had plenty of time to kill. I had a summer job working in a warehouse that Dad had found for me a couple of years ago. It was a part-time job: some days they'd ask me to come in, some days not. They were flexible too, so if I preferred to come in one day because the weather was poor, or not to come in because I had a soccer game, they'd nearly always agree. It was fairly boring work but it was only for about two days per week and I could talk with myself now. I got some pretty decent pocket money for it, so was glad to have the job. I spent quite a lot of time in the Public Library reading through books that caught my interest, mostly about psychology and brain development. I was particularly fascinated by brains, although perhaps that was because my brain was biased. It thought the brain was the third most fascinating part of a human body, just below breasts. I tried other subjects that I thought might be interesting, such as philosophy, but found them to be too inapplicable and weird. There was one topic that I did find very interesting: interpersonal communication, especially in groups. I'd observed a lot of inexplicable behavior in conversations at school, as described earlier, and I was interested to see any explanation for it. The books I read didn't provide me with the explanations I wanted because they were mostly talking about adult communications and what psychology the books gave didn't apply to kids my age. But where the books were interesting was in providing new techniques to study how people communicated in groups. For example, and there were many ideas like this, an observer of a group's interaction can use a piece of paper to write people's initials laid out to represent where they were standing or sitting relative to each other, and then draw a line between the speaker and who they're talking to, with an arrowhead to indicate which of them was being talked at. I surreptitiously did that, and several other techniques I'd read about, when I had chances to [mostly when school restarted] and it was amazing how such a simple thing could make me aware of layers of interpersonal dynamics that I'd had no idea about before. They were amazingly revealing. Mainly I just browsed to find anything that seemed pertinent to my life. I didn't understand most of what I read, and what I did understand didn't seem to have much relevance to me. I didn't mind, as I was enjoying having a laid-back time with no bullies except on the infrequent occasions when I encountered them around town somewhere. The most important event of the summer happened after a soccer game. Before the school year had ended, I'd gotten so good at soccer that the coach had invited me to join some of the high-school team's training, and had penciled me in for next year's team. The team had agreed to meet up occasionally during summer for fun games, and we had our first such game one Friday in late June. It was doubly fun as it was versus a girls' team. For the first time I regretted that soccer wasn't a contact sport. We all had pizza together afterward and then went to a romantic comedy movie. It was a chick flick, but majority rules and the guys had voted in favor of sucking up to the girls. In the movie theater, the girls sat with the girls, the boys with the boys, and I wasn't forceful enough to be sitting on the highly competed-for border. Fifteen minutes into the movie, IT happened: I got another déjà vu experience. Not just normal déjà vu - which is abnormal enough - but a four-way déjà vu. We (#1 and #2) were déjà vu'ing with another pair of Mark Anderson minds also sharing the one body. All four of us were gobsmacked! We only had two gobs between us, so they were VERY smacked (which makes no literal sense at all, but that's how that expression of Mom's goes. "Gobsmacked" means "thunderstruck" or "flabbergasted", the latter being another favorite of mine because I like silly sounding words). It wasn't a normal déjà vu in another important respect too, as there was more and clearer communication in this one. ^ [[There being two minds at either end meant there was twice as much of the Universe's Consciousness that was changing during the déjà vu, so twice as much to refresh, which took twice as long. The time between the weird mentally disconnecting sensations caused by the refreshes was now long enough to allow communication. With only one mind, the copying time had been less than our mental reaction times, effectively prohibiting mental conversation, but with two minds on each end the copying time was longer than our reaction time, permitting a conversation that was like having a conversation over a phone line that disconnected every quarter second. I'll put some numbers on it to illustrate the communication improvement. Let's say it takes 0.15 seconds to react to the opportunity to transfer a thought from one mind to another. With a single mind in a déjà vu link, the "refreshing copies" occur every 0.1 seconds, ruining any chance of communicating, as you know from your own déjà vu's. With two minds on each end, the copying takes 0.19 seconds (not quite double, as the copying time doesn't increase linearly), giving 0.04 seconds longer than mental reaction time in which to exchange some thoughts. That's short and very inconvenient, but conversation is doable.]] ^ What had happened to us - our half-successful suicide, déjà vu, merging, increased IQ, school advancement - had also happened to them. Same miracle, same result. , , Questions were flying, but long before we could make any real progress with the extremely difficult, stop-start conversation, the phenomenon stopped. The rest of the movie I sat there with eyes open, facing the screen and not seeing a damned thing. I was totally involved in my thoughts. Some of the conclusions were so obvious I should have thought of them before. Whatever dimension #1's mind had crossed was presumably a continuum, just as the X-, Y-, Z- and T-dimensions are. We decided to call our newly discovered dimension the "W-Dimension", as "X", "Y", "Z" and "T" were already taken and "W" for "Wow" or "Weird" seemed appropriate. Whether the W-Dimension's continuum of possible values extended forever we had no idea about, but it obviously had at least four possible instances, and almost certainly far more. As déjà vu still worked across the W-Dimension, did that mean that déjà vu plus dying would work again? If I died during another déjà vu would I merge and have four minds? Did I want four minds? How much better than two would having four be? Was it worth the risk? If it was worth the risk, how could we do it? Oh boy! Needless to say, I was not the best conversationalist when the movie finished; not that anyone noticed because I hadn't been one previously. I quickly made an excuse and went home. I distractedly wandered past whoever was at home and shut myself in my room. I had HEAPS to think about: Would merging occur again if I died while déjà vu'ing? We thought it would, or at least, we could think of no reason why it wouldn't. Tonight's déjà vu involved all four minds, with all of us communicating with each other. If one body died, we thought both minds would "cross over", to use an appropriate phrase in a way we thought far more accurate than how it was usually employed. #2 asked whether it'd matter whether his body or the other body died? #1 thought it didn't matter, as not being in his original body wasn't disadvantaging him in any way, not even emotionally. We were, in every way that mattered, the same individual, and that'd be the case if we merged into another body or they merged into ours. On the bright side, it'd halve the number of virginities we had to lose, hopefully making losing them twice as easy. Unless it meant we'd make twice as much progress toward that goalmouth, because twice zero would be a very depressing lack of progress. Presuming the process was repeatable, did we want to "double up" again? It had a great deal of appeal, but it had some aspects that were so worrying that it wasn't the sort of question to rush. We put off deciding it for a while. If we wanted to, how could we possibly do it? Déjà vu doesn't come on demand, so we couldn't arrange a convenient suicide and then start a déjà vu. Nor does it operate on a known schedule. It's random as far as we could tell, and there'd been nothing in any of the medical literature we'd read that'd said otherwise. Everything we'd read blamed the infrequent irregularity of déjà vu for the lack of progress in understanding it. Our first merge had happened because we were lucky that we were already dying when déjà vu arrived, but the chance of that happening was far too low to hope for luck again. Deliberately having another merge could only be done by waiting for déjà vu to come and then trying to die. Dying on demand - at any random time and place - didn't seem like an easy task but at least it had some possibilities, whereas trying to create déjà vu on demand did not. Even if we could do it, did we want to hurt our family? To make this work, one body was going to have to die. That family would be hurt. There was no easy answer to that. We had plenty of time to think about these issues as judging by our experiences so far in our two lives, déjà vu's never happened in rapid succession. They were highly erratic, and could arrive within a few months of the previous one - as had just happened - but in all likelihood the next one wouldn't be for at least eighteen months, and probably longer. All things considered - both the good and the bad - I was enjoying my life now and didn't want to mess it up or lose it. I resumed my already abnormal 'normal' life. As it turned out, I arrived at my most important answer in just a few weeks. I couldn't stop thinking about it. My minds would frequently wander into daydreams about merging again. There were three major issues: First, my life was bearable and even enjoyable because I had an in-built friend. Merging again would triple the number of in-built friends each of us had (from one to three). As having one internal best friend was already making my life bearable despite all the bullying, rejection, loneliness, etc., having three best friends would make our life very happy. We doubted the improvement would be linear, but it still had to be MUCH more interesting and fun. Second, going from one mind to two had dramatically improved: My apparent IQ. I knew my real IQ hadn't improved 120 points, but I was still blitzing school whatever the cause. My physical coordination. At least, I thought it had. I wasn't sure of this point, but it seemed likely. I was getting better at understanding people, although I still mostly kept to myself. Would going from two to four minds improve those aspects even further? Maybe even enough to actually get a girlfriend? I made a mental note that if I did merge again, I should avoid doing any more IQ tests! A result of 450 or so might cause trouble. Third, if I went to four minds and found that it was great, I'd then have the possibility of going to eight in another couple of years, then sixteen, etc. That was exponentially fascinating and mind-boggling, but it couldn't happen unless I took the next step. It was a bit of an exaggeration to say, "I couldn't stop thinking about it," but it often felt that way. I sometimes had to force myself to live in the current world, as I was too easily distracted imagining an alternative one. So after a few weeks it was obvious what my decision was. It was far too tempting and I couldn't imagine permanently turning it down. I was generally enjoying my life now, but I knew that was solely because of my in-built friend, and that my life actually sucked otherwise. Having three times as many of them was incredibly appealing. It was exciting, unique, wonderful, and potentially enormously rewarding. It would improve my life, so the sooner it was done, the better. There was a risk that maybe I'd just die, but quite frankly that didn't worry me much. I wouldn't be around to miss it, so the choice between not missing something or having a wonderful life was an easy one, especially when I thought the odds were very much in favor of the merge happening again. So I stopped wondering about it, and decided to work on trying to make it happen. I had a rather important practical difficulty: how to die on demand. I couldn't walk around with a razor blade ready to slit my wrists when I felt déjà vu starting. It would be too easy for a bystander to fix by bandaging my arms, and it was far too slow even if I was alone at the time. I felt sure I had to die while déjà vu was active, which gave me about twenty seconds. Carrying a gun with me every waking moment didn't seem too doable either, as my school tends to frown on students carrying guns in their bags; although it'd certainly help with my bullying problem. I also had to consider the very real requirement that the body that got the four minds had to stop itself dying. Failing to backpedal from that would be such a pity! So the deaths had to be quickly achieved, take different times at the two ends of the link, and be easily reversed. After some thought, we decided that poison had possibilities. There were several reasons that recommended it: Hopefully I could carry around a potent dose in a small vial without much risk of detection, I could create a method of putting a random dosage into the vial to cause a random dying time, and poison has antidotes to give reversibility. VERY hopefully the other body would use the same random method for determining dosage, but would get a different random number and therefore a different dying time. There were some random - it seemed - differences between #1 and #2's dimensions, so hopefully variations were permitted. The major drain on my enthusiasm for another merge was the effect my next suicide would have on my family. I might get lucky by being the surviving body, but I might not. I certainly couldn't cheat on the dosage to give myself so little that my body died the slower of the two, or didn't die at all. It seemed far too likely that if I cheated, so would the other Mark. I had to be disciplined. I would only be cheating myself anyway, so there was no real point. Whether it was my family or his family that suffered, they were probably close enough to identical so favoring one over the other made no sense. No matter which direction the merge went, one of my families was going to be hurt, and there was nothing I could do about that other than not merge. The idea occurred of making my family hate me first, so they would be hurt less. But that didn't seem doable, and it meant that post-merge they'd still be hating me, which was not a pleasant thought. I was enjoying my less antagonistic family life and didn't want to lose it. Then there was the fact that I wouldn't see the hurt my dying caused. Whichever dimension I ended up in, that family would never know the other body had died. Somewhat shamefully, that made it easier to decide to try to carry out this act. I did the necessary research. The research itself was surprisingly easy as there's an enormous amount of highly detailed, very specific information about poisons available online. I needed a very fast acting, easily countered poison, and there were quite a few choices given that I was willing to take a large dose. The right sorts of poisons quickly enter the bloodstream, and that flows so fast that the poisons almost instantly attack whatever organ(s) they're effective against. I excluded the few agents that attacked the brain in case that screwed up the déjà vu before death occurred, otherwise I listed those agents that'd do the job, with those that caused numbness rather than pain going to the top of the list. Then I set about trying to get one of them. Obtaining the poison and antidote was an interesting exercise, but it only required careful preparation, and was not as hard as you would normally hope. Poisons that can be used to murder people have all sorts of controls on their availability, but I didn't need a tasteless or readily dissolved poison, presuming poisoners valued those properties. I didn't care if the 'victim' detected the poison. Nor did I care much about the dosage size provided it wasn't too large to carry around, nor if less-than-toxic dosages quickly flushed from the system, nor if it was easily discovered in an autopsy. All I wanted was an obtainable poison/antidote combination that worked very quickly, and ideally not too painfully. There were several suitable poisons, and it wasn't overly hard for me to obtain a suitable one. Before I'd gotten hold of the poison I'd intended to create a random lethal dosage, so when I déjà vu'd with another Mark one of us would die faster than the other, and the slowpoke would take the antidote when the two new minds arrived. Then I worried about both dimensions having the same random numbers. I thought of creating a multi-stage random process: start with dice, that let me randomly choose a book in the library, its ISBN number would indicate how many random Excel numbers I'd generate before choosing the next one, which would take me to a random page in the phone book, etc. I'd arrange them in a LONG sequence so the final result was as random as possible. Hopefully somewhere along this chain, there'd be a dimensional difference that'd result in me and the other Mark that I déjà vu'd with arriving at different final values. To increase the chance of the random dosage being unique, I'd decided to derive three of them, and to carry them all around with me. When I déjà vu'd, we (in this context "we" means the other Mark and me, not #1 and #2) would compare our P1 dosages, and if necessary our P2 and P3 dosages. If any of those were sufficiently different, we'd take that dosage number. It was while thinking about what to do if the three dosages were all the same that I had a better idea for how to do things. I'd been thinking that one of us would flip a coin with the loser taking the largest dosage of the three he had, while the winner took the smallest (unlike two people conversing with phones, with déjà vu both ends could sense what each other were doing so cheating wasn't possible; I wouldn't have anyway). I realized a better way would be for us to prepare just two non-random dosages each, one calculated to be quickly fatal, the other slower, with a random method used at the beginning of the déjà vu to decide which of us took the big one. Flipping a coin would take time, which we wouldn't have much of, so I thought about alternatives. Playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors" might go on all day if we kept choosing the same shapes, so that was rejected. I decided that the best and quickest method was that the 'winner' - the person who wouldn't die - would be the first of us to realize we were in a déjà vu as indicated by his sending a message to the other Mark. If that was simultaneous, which it hadn't been in the movie theater last time, then we'd flip the lid of the container we'd be keeping the poison in, as an quick and easy substitute for a coin. That decided, when I finally chose the poison I'd obtain, I calculated the dosage size required for a very quick death. It turned out to be a lump of paste the size of a small potato, about three easily swallowed mouthfuls' worth. Eating more would speed up the death, but by the time three mouthfuls had been swallowed, that Mark would be so close to death that the fourth swallow would be pointless. Eating one mouthful would cause death too, but it'd take thirty or forty seconds, so that became the second dosage. Depending on which Mark messaged the other first, I'd either eat all of the poison or just one mouthful. The problem of being unable to calculate different random dosages because the enormous similarity in the dimensions might extend to random numbers had required some thought to solve. The amazing similarities between dimensions otherwise worked very well for us, as I felt fairly safe in assuming that the next Mark I déjà vu'd with would also have decided to merge, and in the same way I had. My next problem was how to have the poison with me 24/7, that being necessary because déjà vu's are very unhelpful in their unpredictable timing. I started pretending to have allergy problems and became very good at sneezing whenever I was around my family. I was soon carrying a small plastic bottle of perfectly ordinary hay fever medication around with me. The dosage of poison I required was quite substantial, so a small vial of hay fever pills wasn't large enough. I kept sneezing and 'had' to graduate to a much larger vial; more of a small jar really. In it I kept two different types of pills, each type wrapped in cloth to keep them from mixing. I explained to Mom that each of the pills worked better than the other at different times so I wanted to keep them both with me, and in the same container so I didn't need to carry two vials around. After a few weeks, my jar was so familiar to my family that they stopped paying any attention to it. During that time I'd obtained my poison and made up the full dose, wrapping it in black cellophane to keep the moisture in. I removed the second set of pills from my jar and used the cloth to wrap up and disguise my poison. Then there was the issue of the antidote. Back when I'd hatched this plan I'd debated whether I needed any antidote at all. Not because I wanted to die, but maybe I wouldn't take the poison in the first place as one option was that only one of us took poison while the other one of us took nothing. The poison-taker would die, the other Mark would gain two more minds, and neither Mark would need an antidote. As implied by the preceding paragraphs, I'd already decided that both Marks would take poison, because for merging to happen we might both have to be near death. It'd be tragic to have one Mark die and no merge happen, so both of us will poison ourselves and then one of us will take the antidote. It'll be unpleasant for the Mark that survived, but some unpleasantness was a small price to pay for doing all that I could to ensure the suicide only killed the body and not the minds. So I needed to obtain the antidote. I had more trouble getting that than the poison, as it was a three-stage process. The first stage was an ingested liquid that countered the poison's effects for a while, but didn't do anything to the poison itself. The first stage would wear off in half an hour, by which time it'd be a really good idea to have progressed to the second stage of the antidote. Stage two was delivered by an injection and it chemically reacted with the poison to turn it into a far less harmful molecule. The third stage was also delivered by injection half an hour after the second, and it caused the body to expel the modified poison's molecules. That wouldn't be pleasant either, but it'd be better than leaving the modified molecules in my body, as that promised a long, lingering illness and death. Poisons have many practical uses: snake antivenom, herbicides, rodent control, medicines, etc., which makes them not too difficult to get hold of. The poison I'd chosen had been obtained without much trouble (for an obvious reason I'm not giving its name or method of procurement). But one of the antidote stages I needed was especially troublesome to obtain as it had no public use. It took a large chunk of my vacation income for me to get everything together. The first antidote stage was liquid, which came in small vial which seemed too fragile to me, so after removing the label I put the vial inside a slightly larger plastic one as additional protection. It'd be a REAL bummer to have the other Mark's minds merge across to me, then my being half-dead made me so addled that I stupidly took a second bite of the poison rather than the antidote. So I wrapped the vial in a piece of white cellophane (to differentiate it from the black cellophane the poison was in), wrote a big "A" on two sides of it, and tied a piece of gold ribbon around its middle as an additional indicator. Then I added it to my hay fever jar. I was sure enough of their likely response not to bother to ask Mom and Dad whether I could keep a syringe and strange, unexplained pharmaceuticals in my room, so had a problem about where to keep the second and third stages of the antidote. It'd taken me several weeks to get everything, but it could take another two years or more before my next déjà vu, so I needed a very good hiding place. Hiding it in the house was never a possibility as Mom was far too nosey and good at finding things I didn't want found. She wouldn't even let me keep my meager porn collection in my bedroom. (With Dad's cooperation and Mom's "I don't want to know" blind eye, it was hidden in the garage, which was hardly 'handy'.) I buried the second and third antidote stages and the syringe in our backyard, in an area where none of our neighbors could see me, and in a location where Mom was very unlikely to suddenly decide she needed to establish a new garden. It was behind some bushes, so out of sight of where Mom and Dad would likely be if they were at home; their seeing me dig up some drugs and shoot-up with them being less than ideal, especially if they intervened to stop me. I had to take the second stage antidote within half an hour of the poison, and parents can be inconveniently unpredictable at times, so my plan wasn't perfect. If the presence of Mom and Dad risked them interfering, I'd have to call off the suicide for that déjà vu, and wait to see if I had better luck a couple of years later. It would also be a bummer if, when I dug the stuff up, it was either already damaged or I smashed something with the spade, so I'd buried them inside multiple layers of protection. I was now ready and waiting; excited and not a little scared. I got back into vacation mode, although it felt very weird knowing that my life was going to either end or change amazingly some time in the next couple of years, more or less. I enjoyed the rest of the summer vacation. Mostly I kept to myself. I would've anyway, but with my decision to merge again it wasn't worth trying to do otherwise and it also seemed best not to. Eventually school restarted. ------- Chapter 9: Committing Suicide for the Second Time Mid-September to Tuesday, February 22, 2005, My vague plan - made back when I started pulling ahead of my 9th grade classmates - was to take as many Advanced Placement subjects as humanly possible in my senior year, which would make that year a busy one. But that was over two years away and what to do about the intervening period wasn't obvious. (For those of you who aren't American or who live in dimensions that use a different nomenclature, in most dimensions students in American school grades 9 through 12 are often called: freshmen (regardless of their gender), sophomores, juniors and seniors respectively. This dimension was typical in most school issues: those grade names, the dates school terms started and stopped throughout the year, class times, etc.) Although I had done exceptionally well in my 9th grade final exams, I didn't bother to ask to be skipped another grade, as I was sure the Principal wouldn't agree to that. I'd encountered him around school a few times since he'd advanced me, and he clearly hadn't enjoyed being proved wrong. A better man, such as Mr. Barrett, would've celebrated my success, but the Principal wasn't a "better man". Whether he was bent out of shape because I'd somehow got the better of him via my mom, or he didn't appreciate that I'd inconvenienced him, or some other reason, I didn't know. But I did know that he scowled at me whenever we encountered each other so I didn't bother asking him permission to jump another grade. I couldn't get motivated to think of what else I could do during the two years until 12th grade. I was going to commit suicide again sooner or later, and there was a 50% chance I'd be leaving this dimension, so why bother busting a gut to do anything? I knew that was probably poor logic, as whoever I merged with would probably think the same, but that "probably" gave me the excuse to be lazy. I was somewhat distracted by the thought of my dying and the new life that'd create for me, and I was more than a little lazy after the long summer vacation, so I basically did nothing about it. I started 10th grade just as any other student would, although I was still only fourteen, my fifteenth birthday being a couple of months away in November. I hadn't thought things through as well as I should have - mostly because I hadn't bothered thinking things through at all - because I soon found myself bored stiff at school. There just wasn't enough challenge in 10th grade. I spent some time in the school library reading ahead of this year's work to check that it was going to be as easy as I thought. It was. I read some of next year's textbooks too, and they didn't look hard either. I figured that as I'd done two grades of work last year, I could do two this year, so I decided to also work my way through the 11th grade material. From the office and teachers, I got detailed information about what each of next year's classes were going to cover during their year, and I just worked my way through it at my own pace. Some subjects had a very detailed syllabus, others less so, but whatever they had guided my reading of their textbooks. I found out what the 11th grade teachers' schedules were and I'd occasionally pop into their rooms before or after one of their classes to ask a specific question about something that had me blocked. I never took much of their time, and they were helpful enough. I even read through the 11th grade English material, but I mostly just read what was required rather than did anything about it. I certainly didn't bother writing any of the stupid assignments. Even though I had two minds, it was still challenging. One way of looking at it is that I was doing two years' of work with two minds, so the equivalent of a year's work per mind. That would imply that it should be as challenging for my average intelligence as for any other average student, but that wasn't the case at all, for three major reasons: I didn't have to write assignments or take tests for my 11th grade work, so that saved a lot of effort. I could progress at my own pace, not the pace of the slowest student in the class. I could sit in a 10th grade class and pay attention to the teacher with one mind (actually less than half a mind because teachers are so repetitive and slow), while the other mind-and-a-half did my 11th grade work. I could get considerably more than two classes' worth of work done during one class. Mostly I was doing 11th grade work to relieve my boredom while I waited for my next déjà vu, but I also vaguely intended that at the end of the year, I'd ask the Principal to let me take both sets of exams. Then we could look at my results and maybe get his permission for me to jump from 10th grade straight to 12th. If he refused, maybe I could talk him into me doing 11th and 12th grade simultaneously. I didn't particularly care either way because the next déjà vu would be coming along sometime around then. ------- I expected to wait a couple of years, and even then wasn't sure I'd go through with it on the first chance. Some circumstances were unacceptable, such as in the middle of dinner with my family; while other circumstances were undoable, such as in the middle of a PE class as it'd take me too long to get to my jar. On February 22nd, only eight months after the movie theater déjà vu and fifteen months since my first merge, I was shopping for some new pants (I was fifteen now and my body had filled out a bit and grown a little taller), when I felt déjà vu. (To avoid a VERY disjointed dialogue, I'm leaving out the VERY frequent and annoying breaks, restarts, confusions and repeats caused by the synchronization process. A verbatim transcript would be even more confusing because each of my minds tried talking to each of his, so there were often two attempted conversations going on simultaneously. Communication was almost impossible, and I'll spare you from having to read through pages of mess to extract a small amount of meaning.) One Of My Minds: One Of His Minds: Another Of His Minds: One Of My Minds: Another Of My Minds: I was also looking for the nearest changing room. It was too far away. Kmart's clothing area was wide open, so hardly an ideal place to do what I wanted. I rushed toward a nearby corner to get behind a display rack, opening my hay fever bottle and dumping the poison into my hand as I moved; as was he. One Of His Minds: He was probably being unfair about his life, but if it helped him to think that way, I wasn't going to argue. The conversation had taken quite a while because of its being so disjointed, so we were now in position behind the corner rack. One Of My Minds: One Of His Minds: There was no need to answer as he could tell what I was doing and even feel my emotions, as it's a VERY intimate connection. I took a bite of a third of the poison. I'd made it up as a very moist paste so it would be easy to swallow and quick to take effect. He followed right behind my lead, biting and swallowing faster to get all of his dose down as quickly as possible. I provided the other Mark with moral support while I rewrapped my poison and put it in a pocket, then got my antidote out, VERY careful that I had the WHITE cellophane-wrapped package and that it was a vial of liquid I held in my hand rather than a lump of paste. The poison shouldn't affect my mental faculties, but being careful seemed like a good idea. The drug quickly took effect, dragging us down. I flopped back, leaning against the wall with the arm holding the vial supported by my knees as it held the antidote ready near my mouth. It got darker, colder, and with pins-and-needles increasingly severe at my extremities. prayed all four of us. I felt heavier, darker, weaker. Especially weaker, and weaker... Then the déjà vu stopped. | | Never has the sound of multiple replies been so welcome. Actually, I'd never had multiple replies before, so it was the most welcome occurrence for that reason as well, but this isn't the time to quibble. Four minds demanded, Four minds ordered my mouth to open and to tip the vial in. That went fine; the problem was that too much of my body was numb and I couldn't swallow. It was a life-or-death situation four times over, and we FIERCELY urged our throat to get it down. We choked and coughed, spraying the liquid out of our mouth. Fortunately the hand holding the vial was still poised in front of it, and much of the liquid was blocked and ran back into my mouth where the choking continued. Outside of my control, the choking coughs suddenly included a gulping, and a goodly proportion of the antidote went down. The next cough sprayed some of it out my nose, but the next involuntary gulp swallowed some more. The cycle repeated a few more times, although all of the antidote was either swallowed or sprayed by then. We were hoping for mostly the former. Several seconds had passed, and we hadn't, which was a VERY good sign. We started feeling less bad too, and after a few seconds were able to breathe easier, and even swallow voluntarily. Our body was still very numb and we weren't going to be moving until most of that cleared, so we lay there conversing with ourselves, starting to find out what it's like to have four minds. It quickly felt WAY different than having two. With two minds there's just one channel of communication. When one of us talked, the other listened. Pretty simple really. But now there were multiple lines of communication. One of the first things we discovered was that we could all 'hear' whatever thoughts any one of us wanted the others to hear. So the first deliberate experiment we did was to try to target that. The experiment started with one of us saying, said another one of us. That trial was successful, which started a discussion about how the sender had differentiated who to send the message to. He said, I'll spare you the silly naming jokes we couldn't resist exchanging. Normally my jokes are very funny, so the temporary loss of my high-quality humor must've been an undocumented side-effect of the poison. Once we'd calmed down, we adopted a numbering scheme. We decided that "#1" was the 'owner' (original possessor) of the body we were in now, "#2" was the first one of us to merge with him, "#3" was the owner of the body who'd just died, and "#4" was the second mind to have joined #3. That scheme would work for any future merges. Presuming another merge happened some time in the future, then the four new arrivals would simply be their old names plus four. [[I've already introduced you to this style of naming, although it was only invented at this point. Because it seemed natural at the time, I chose to use the name #1 for the Mark that I started this autobiography from the perspective of; but the scheme we just invented named that Mark #2. You should understand by now that it makes no real difference what we're called or who owns the body, so to be consistent with our future conversations, #2 is now the name of my autobiography's original Mark, and #1 the name of our current body's original owner.]] Because our internal voices 'sounded' the same, we couldn't tell who was talking, so we agreed to prefix whatever we said with our name. [[I've already adopted this format, for example, #1: Strictly speaking the "#1" should be inside the delimiters - <#1: Hello.> - as the name was part of what was sent, but I think it's easier for you to read with it moved to the outside as it's not part of the message's meaning and you're used to the speaker going outside the delimiters, for example: Tom said, "Hello."]] We tried experiments where one of us sent messages to one, two or all three of the others, simply by mentally directing his communication to the names of the intended recipients, and it worked faultlessly and easily. Somewhat to our surprise because we'd imagined there would probably be quite a lot of confusion around this issue until we got ourselves very familiar with our new names/numbers. Apparently familiarity wasn't required. [[It was a learned skill, as we'd thought, but it took almost zero time to learn because it was trivially easy for our subconsciouses to keep deliberate, intentional track of each other.]] Having four minds was a very different experience than two. It even felt somewhat like being in a crowd. Having so many people in my head would have been quite scary if not for trust. That feeling was there, in spades, right from the start. I'll repeat the description I used after the first merger, as it's so perfect: If someone suggests you do something, you often think carefully before you do what they want. Are they trying to take advantage of you? What will you get out of doing it? Questions like that. But you NEVER think those sorts of questions when you're acting on one of your own ideas. Your idea might be silly, even be wrong, but you're never trying to take advantage of yourself. The possibility is nonsense as you trust yourself unquestionably. We trusted ourselves that way - immediately, automatically, fully and unquestionably. It was a very good feeling. We had some very mixed feelings about what had happened. Unlike the first accidental merge, this one was entirely deliberate, and with the full knowledge that one set of parents and sisters was going to be grieving soon. That the merge had worked was incredibly exciting and a huge relief, but it was also sad to think about the effects on the other dimension's family. We felt far more sympathy for them now than we had after our original suicides, when we'd barely felt any at all, such was my disconnection from each of my families at that time. To add to our guilt, the first time we'd suicided it'd been to make everything end, but now we'd done it to improve our own life, which made us feel guiltier about hurting one of our families. Obviously not enough to have stopped us, but the guilt was still there. [In subsequent months, the four of us got to know our current family much better. From them we learned that for the months before this merge they'd liked me a great deal more than we'd thought. We sort of knew that, but we'd been so used to being a rejected loner that we hadn't made the effort to connect to them as we should have. If #3's family had been the same - and we were pretty sure it had been - then #3 and #4 shouldn't have suicided. They and we hadn't needed another merge to have a happy life; all we'd needed to do was make an effort to be social with our family(ies) and other people. So, over the months, we came to realize that #3's family had been hurt more than we'd thought at the time, and for a selfish reason too. But there was nothing we could do about that. #3's body was dead, and it was impossible to undo his suicide or go back.] [[The reality of the situation turned out to be somewhat stranger than what we thought.]] We lay on the floor behind the clothing rack with thoughts buzzing through our head. With four minds, we could generate a LOT of thoughts. "All you all right, young man?" asked an old granny leaning on her cane and peering down at me. "Yes ma'am. Thank you. I just had a dizzy spell. I get them occasionally. They aren't serious and I have medication for them." I briefly waved the antidote vial. "I just need to stay down until it passes, which it nearly has." We hadn't been thinking about our physical condition, being far too excited about the mental situation. But now that we checked, it was clear that the antidote was not doing a very good job of countering the poison's effects. We didn't appear to be dying, which we all agreed was a good thing, but the antidote was slow to reverse the other effects. We still felt numb, our extremities were tingling, and we didn't feel good enough to attempt to stand up. Granny said, "I'll just go and get an assistant for you." And off she slowly went. #3: While she was doddering away to get help, I put the vial and remaining poison back into my hay fever jar and put it in my pocket. Then I sat up to look better for whoever came next. A salesman arrived and was very solicitous. He was particularly eager to call someone: his boss, emergency services, my parents, or anyone. I was particularly eager that he call no one. I assured him that I was very experienced with this problem, it was a small issue and was steadily going away. After a couple of minutes of refused offers to call for help, I got him to assist me to my feet and I gingerly walked far enough away for him to lose sight of me. It's not much fun walking when you've got bad pins and needles so I was happy to stop, lean on a display of electric frying pans, and wait for the recovery to progress further. After a few more minutes, we thought it'd be a good idea if all four of us got on our bike and rode home. Hopefully I'd feel better after the next two stages of antidote. Riding home was uncomfortable but it wasn't too bad; certainly not bad enough to keep me from getting to the permanent antidotes. I did that as fast as possible because I'd been doing my shopping after school. If I wasted too much time I wouldn't beat my parents home. It was worth aggravating my pins and needles to ensure I had privacy and wasn't prevented from doing what I had to. When I got home I quickly checked out who was there. Carol was in her room doing homework, which was typical of her; and Donna was not at home, which probably meant that she was playing at a friend's place somewhere, which was also typical of her. Time for some digging then. Digging with pins and needles is even worse than pedaling a bike, but I gritted my teeth to the jarring sensations on my foot and kept digging. I was quite pleased to find that my cache of drugs hadn't been consumed by ravenous earthworms, or suffered any equally disastrous fate. I'd already written "2nd" and "3rd" on the vials to make it easy for me to do them in the right sequence. I'd read up on how to use a syringe, and I'd seen them used plenty of times on TV, so I simply sat down and got busy loading the syringe with the contents of the "2nd" vial. I get queasy and faint at the sight of an operation on TV, and have to very quickly look away or I'd either pass out or throw up. Ditto for horror movies, which after fainting when I forced myself to watch one I've never watched again. But for some reason seeing my own blood doesn't worry me in the slightest. When my pimples had first gotten bad, my method for getting rid of them was to use one of Dad's razor blades to start a slice about a quarter inch above the pimple, inserting the blade deep enough into my skin to draw blood, and then sliding it down through the center of pimple and about a quarter inch beyond. Then I'd wash the cut under a faucet to get rid of all the pimple's contents, and wait for the cut to heal normally. I had no problem at all doing that to myself, and it did an excellent job of removing the pimples, until Mom discovered what I was doing and freaked out. Apparently it was "BAD", although I never found out why. I did find out that I wasn't allowed to keep doing it though. The cuts in my face took a few days to heal so I couldn't do it again without Mom spotting my spot-removal technique, so that was the end of that. Clearasil didn't work nearly as well and it cost a lot more, but that's what I'd ended up using. Anyhow, my inexplicably not flaking out at the sight of my own blood meant I had no hesitation in sticking a syringe into myself. I clenched my fist and slapped my elbow's inside a few times to make a vein pop up, did the procedure to get air out of the syringe, then injected myself in the vein very carefully, because it'd be a pity to inject the antidote into somewhere other than a vein! I put the stuff back into the box and walked to my bedroom window which is conveniently at the rear of the house, and pushed the box inside. I returned to the hole and filled it back in, borrowing some extra soil from Mom's garden to fill in the gap the box had occupied. I carefully put the sod back on top and patted it down so the lawn looked undisturbed. I wasn't feeling any better yet, but I knew the second stage antidote was slow to act. I returned the spade to the garage then went inside to my room. If they weren't held up at work, Mom and Dad would be home soon. Dad is rarely late, but he wasn't likely to intrude on my room anyway. It was Mom that worried me, as usual. I hid the small box inside a hiking boot, where Mom was relatively unlikely to stick her nose this evening. I already had a long-sleeved shirt on so I didn't have to put one on to cover the needle hole in my arm, but the spade work must've made it bleed a little because I noticed that a spot of blood had seeped through and was now visible. I went to our medicine cabinet in the bathroom, locked the door, extracted a Band-Aid and applied it over my puncture wound. Back in my room, I changed my shirt, putting the worn one back in my drawer under the others rather than in the hamper. Something unusual was going to happen soon, and I didn't want Mom to spot the spot and gain any suspicions until the needle holes were healed. I have a small work desk in my room, which I sat at and pretended to be doing homework while I was really talking to myself: #1 and #2 getting to know #3 and #4, and vice versa. We already knew we were 99.99% the same as each other, but it was interesting to talk about our lives to try to find differences, and to talk about our future. Mostly I was just killing time, which would hopefully be the only thing I killed. I slowly felt better, which was a very welcome sensation indeed. I heard Dad and Donna arrive home, Donna being particularly easy to hear as she ran down the hall and into her room. Mom arrived a few minutes later, popping into my room the way moms do (mine anyway). "I'm just doing a spot of homework, Mom." "Dinner will be half an hour." "Good, I'm hungry." I was normally hungry at dinnertime, so the exchange was very routine. Mom left to start cooking. Ten minutes later it was time for the third stage. I'd rather wait until after dinner because then the family settles down for the evening and I was less likely to be interrupted. At the moment there was a danger that Mom would suddenly pop in to ask me to set the table, take out the trash, or another such chore. I'd also be doing some throwing up soon which would be less suspicious after a meal, not that Mom's cooking is normally that bad. The literature I'd read had been definite about when to inject the third stage, but it hadn't commented on the disadvantages of doing it at any other time. I could imagine that doing it early might be bad if all the original poison hadn't been transformed by the antidote's second stage, but I couldn't imagine what problem there would be from my being late. I knew the modified poison was still weakly poisonous, but so weakly that it'd take several days to damage me badly, so presumably waiting another hour wouldn't be a big deal. Despite the risk of Mom catching me, the risk from having scarily powerful drugs in my body any longer than the recommended period carried the argument. I placed my chair in front of my door to impede anyone's entry, put a pile of schoolwork and notes on my bed to explain why I was sitting on my bed and possibly to hide my drug kit under if someone tried the door. I removed the little box from my boot, extracted just the syringe and "3rd" vial from it, putting everything else back in my boot. I sat on the bed in such a way that my body shielded the view of anyone entering the room, filled the syringe, pulled up my sleeve, pumped my vein up, and removed the Band-Aid. I'd heard a joke a few years ago: "When you're jacking off, what's the most sensitive part of your body?" That part was VERY sensitive now; I was STRAINING my ears to hear if anyone was coming. Hearing nothing of concern, I held the syringe vertical to squirt out the air and a small amount of the liquid onto the carpet where it wouldn't be noticed, then injected myself as quickly as I could. The moment the plunger was all the way home, I pulled the needle out, slapped the Band-Aid back on and pulled the sleeve down. I grabbed the syringe and vial and hurriedly put it back in the box and back in my boot, pushing both boots to the rear of my closet and placing another pair of shoes on top of them. Then I made a quick trip to the toilet. From what I'd read, I knew that it wouldn't take long for the third stage to convince my body to purge itself, and I didn't want that to happen in my room or the hallway. I made it to the toilet with no problems, locked the door, then reconsidered and unlocked it. I sat on the floor by the toilet while I waited for the purging to begin. Five minutes passed, then, I discovered a small technical difficulty with my plan. The documents I'd read described the final antidote's action as a "purge", which I'd assumed that meant I'd vomit up what I'd swallowed down. That turned out to be only half correct. The feeling in my guts let me know that it'd be a REALLY good idea if I got my pants down and sat on the toilet as quickly as possible. I also got that half right. My body simultaneously and violently erupted at both ends. My failure to sit down fast enough caused the result I'm sure you can imagine, but that was the least of my worries. The "purging" was continuous and spectacular, and I was unfortunately unable to point both ends of my body into the toilet bowl at the same time. My mouth sprayed vomit in whatever directions my paroxysms sent the emissions, which seemed to be all of them. When I'd been walking to the toilet, I'd made a mental note to try to keep my shirt clean so Mom wouldn't have reason to take it off me, because she'd see the Band-Aid on my arm and might get suspicious. Forget that! Two seconds after the purging drug hit, NOTHING in the room was clean, not even the ceiling, which was impressive considering I was sitting down. Admittedly it's only a small room, but it was SPLATTERED. (Our toilet is a separate room next to the bathroom. It contains just the toilet bowl and nothing else; we have to use the sink in the bathroom to wash our hands.) I'd unlocked the door as I'd suspected that I might feel pretty bad and need help after the worst was over. I'd just been playing safe as I knew from previous bouts of vomiting that after the first couple of chucks I'd feel somewhat better. Forget that too! I felt like SHIT when the drug hit me, and I went rapidly downhill from there. My body didn't want ANYTHING to be inside it and it was continuously doing its violent best to get rid of it all. As far as I could tell in my misery, the only stuff my body couldn't explosively expel was the stuff that I'd just injected because that was still working to FULL effect! For the first five minutes I was unable to do anything other than convulsively relocate the insides of my body to all over the room. It was all I could do to stay on the toilet because my body seriously wanted to fall onto the floor where it could writhe much more effectively. But after a very long five minutes, there were brief gaps in my convulsions. In one of the gaps I tried to call for Mom. Nothing more than a croak and another mouthful of vomit emerged. I waited a few more minutes, until my stomach stopped churning quite so violently, and I tried calling again. It was only half the failure it was last time: no vomit, but no volume either. I tried again, but I still couldn't get any volume. If I tried, it just turned into another bout of convulsions with perhaps a small amount of disgusting material. I started banging on the wall repeatedly. Donna was sent to investigate. Donna tends to throw doors open forcefully, a habit that proved to be a VERY bad mistake today. She took one look - another bad mistake - covered her mouth and nose, and went running for Mom. Mom arrived a few seconds later and blanched at the sight and smell. Perhaps unnecessarily, I manage to croak out, "I don't feel so good." Then I threw up again, providing further unnecessary proof. I had no idea where it was all coming from, but keep coming it did, still from both ends. It was two further hours before my body had calmed down enough that I could safely leave the room. Mom made me strip naked first and put my clothes into a garbage bag. I removed the Band-Aid and dropped it into the bag too, confident that Mom wouldn't be going through the contents until they'd been hosed down (Mom wouldn't burn them as the Andersons are very frugal). There was also no way she'd see the small puncture holes in my elbow because no one wanted to be in the same house as me, let alone look at me close enough to see details that small. Mom had laid newspapers on the floor from the toilet to the bathroom's shower stall. I was sent there to wash thoroughly. Mom emphasized the "thoroughly", adding, "several times, and in your ears too." Apparently it'd gotten EVERYWHERE. During my thorough shower, Dad bought in my PJs, leaving them for me to get dressed in. Weak as a kitten, I walked back to my bedroom, making sure to hold my breath and not look at Mom's slow cleaning of the disaster area as I passed it, in case it set me off again. I climbed into bed and quickly fell asleep, but not before I made two mental notes: First, if I ever want to merge again, to make a few alterations to my method. Second, I made a very strong commitment to never be a mother. I didn't know how she could stomach cleaning up that mess. Admittedly I couldn't stomach anything at the moment, but I felt sure my opinion would've been the same under any circumstances. Despite the horrendous cleanup and how appalling bad I'd felt while I was creating that horror, my plan otherwise worked perfectly. That's stretching the meaning of "perfectly" a long way, but I did get away with it. Mom and Dad had been concerned at my apparent illness, especially when it took so long for my intestines to stop expelling the rest of me, but they accepted my assurances that I was slowly getting better. Naturally I'd just shrugged when asked what I thought might've caused it. I'd just said, "It came on suddenly," which had been the understatement of the year. It'd also "came out" suddenly, but Mom already knew that. ^ Ravenous hunger woke me at 3am. Judging by the amount of body matter I'd ejected, I'd lost a significant proportion of my body's mass which my body was now very eager to replace. I was far too hungry to wait until breakfast time, so I got up to raid the kitchen. Mere leftovers - of which there was a considerable amount as the family seemed to have lost their appetites last night - wasn't enough for me. I was working my way through them while making myself some sandwiches when Mom got up to investigate the noise. Mothers are good at worrying about sick kids. She was happy to see me up and about, although she became concerned when she saw how much I was intending to eat. She worried that it might make me sick again, I protested that I'd get sick from hunger if I didn't get a lot of food into me to replace what I'd lost. To change the subject, I apologized for the mess I'd made last evening. That started Mom asking about my illness again, how I felt now, had I eaten anything strange before dinner, etc. "I've got no idea what it was about. I think it was just one of those 24-hour bugs that my body decided to condense into two hours because it was more spectacular that way. It came out of nowhere and has gone back there because I feel fine now. What I've already eaten is sitting in my stomach very easily, except my stomach is demanding more." Which was a silly thing for me to mention because Mom wouldn't let me eat what I planned. She insisted on half now, and then she'd see how I felt at breakfast time. I guess she didn't want to do another cleanup, which was understandable. So I went back to bed hungry but with the edge taken off. I started breakfast a few minutes before Mom arrived, having everything I'd missed out on last night plus my normal breakfast too. Mom, Dad and the girls were very solicitous when they each arrived, and after learning that I was fine, they teased me on how spectacular the mess had been. My stomach truly was settled now, so that even their reminders couldn't put me off my greatly enlarged breakfast. Disposing of the drug kit was simply a matter of bagging it up and putting it in my backpack. On the way to school, I told Carol and Donna to ride on without me because I was stopping at a store to buy some more breakfast (Donna was now going to middle school so rode with us, although usually ahead of us. We were in the 10th, 8th and 6th grades). Outside the store, I opened up my backpack and the box within it, reaching in to wipe my fingerprints off everything. Then I closed the box, picked up the plastic bag it was in and dumped the lot into the trashcan. Then I went inside to buy some more breakfast because I truly was hungry and I like to be honest when it suits me. I also bought several snack bars to take to school as I had a feeling my body would be craving food all day. ^ [I'll end this chapter with a digression that has a little relevance later. In writing about my not getting freaked out by the sight of my own blood, I was reminded of another example: I'd gotten appendicitis a couple of years ago, and had needed an appendectomy, as is usual. The anesthetist was a young doctor (I presume anesthetists are doctors?) who quickly proved himself to be terrible at his job. When it was time to put me under, he did it in a way I'd never seen before. Rather than injecting me with one of the usual types of syringes or using gas - those being the two methods I'd seen on TV - he first injected me with something that looked exactly like the nib of an old-fashioned fountain pen, and it was about as blunt as one of those too. Once he had forced that into my vein, he then had to screw the vial part of the syringe onto it, during which the nib dropped out of my arm, so he had to try again. One the next attempt he got the nib in, vial on, and then noticed that he'd missed the vein, so he had to try again. The third attempt was a repeat of the first one. For the fourth attempt, he thought he'd better try my other arm, but he missed the vein again. He was getting better though because he noticed he'd missed before he tried to screw the vial onto it. I was starting to think about getting up and running away, and probably would have if it hadn't been for the acute pain in my stomach. He lucked into getting it right on his fifth try. He pushed the plunger home, and I lost track of my fifth countdown somewhere about 92, as best I can remember. I woke up, somewhat to my surprise, and everything seemed exactly as it should be. I checked, and was pleased that they hadn't incompetently amputated a leg or other important appendage, there just being the one incision in the area I vaguely knew to be correct for an appendix. I was discharged from the hospital in due course and told to convalesce at home. A few days later my dissolving stitches started dissolving, as they do. It became apparent that my surgeon had been as incompetent as my anesthetist because the wound hadn't healed at all. He'd stitched me up with the layers on each side of my incision not lined up so they'd not been able to join, so when the stitches started dissolving, the wound started gaping. I was too sore to lay on my stomach so I can't write, "It was fortunate that I was lying on my back because if I'd been lying on my front my guts might've oozed out," but I enjoyed imagining it at the time. Another problem with that image was the hole's being too small for any oozing to happen, as only one stitch had dissolved enough to break so far, but that didn't constrain my imagination because the narrow gap was 'fixable'. I played around with the wound for several hours, and was able to 'encourage' most of the remaining stitches to break, resulting in the incision opening up very widely; and I thought, very fascinatingly. I had a small flashlight in my bedside drawer and I'd been using it to look at my intestines. When Mom got home and came in to see how I was, I got the flashlight and showed her my intestines, asking her, "Is this supposed to happen?" Mom was of the very strong opinion that it wasn't! She told me to hold it shut and not roll over (I'd already worked that out; did she think I was stupid?), while she rushed to phone the hospital. They sent a nurse around to have a look. The nurse didn't think it was a big deal, just slapping some butterfly stitches on it (they're thin, vaguely butterfly-shaped adhesive Band-Aids; not stitches in the suture sense), said she'd be back in a few days to check, and left us. Mom spent the next ten minutes firmly telling me to leave the Band-Aids alone. Totally unnecessarily as I'd already gotten bored of looking at my guts because they didn't do anything. The wound slowly healed and all was well. Apart from the interesting memory, the experience only left me with a huge - for an appendectomy - scar. It was six inches long and heavily ridged. I compared mine to many of the other guys' appendix scars at school or at the pools, and mine was far bigger and more visible than anyone else's. Not that I cared; I just thought it was interesting. I got to tell my story about seeing my guts several times, and it was fun to impress the guys and gross-out the girls. A year later Carol got bad stomach pains and was - against her strident denials - diagnosed with appendicitis. She was seriously distraught, with crying and everything, over the prospect of getting the same sort of scar as I had. Girls clearly don't think sensibly because Carol NEVER shows her body off. I'd not seen her abdomen since her tits started growing, as she never wears bare midriff clothes or a bikini. Nonetheless she was bawling her eyes out over the prospect of getting a scar that no one would see. Then her stomach made a small recovery and she was taken off the surgical list, much to her ENORMOUS relief. She was still in some discomfort though, so they kept her in the hospital for observation. A few hours later the pain returned, as did the diagnosis and the tears. The hospital decided to get cracking and started prepping her for surgery. She was wheeled out of the room bawling and beseeching Mom and every hospital employee within earshot that they give her a "bikini scar". That's what she kept calling it, as her voice diminished down the length of the hallway. After they put her under, the hospital again changed their mind about her diagnosis, deciding that she didn't have appendicitis at all. She was wheeled back to the recovery room. When she woke up she IMMEDIATELY ducked her head under the sheets to determine how badly her life would be ruined by the scar. She was VERY impressed by her surgeon! When a nurse noticed she was awake, Carol was told the operation hadn't gone ahead, that they'd decided she had something else - I never heard what - and they'd started treating it while she was under. She was discharged a couple of days later as right as rain, without her life being ruined by a small length of bumpy skin. I recounted that digression mostly because I think it's amusing. I still chuckle when I think of Carol's absurd overreaction. I've never seen Carol's belly since then, and I'm sure that no one has, other than Donna, probably Mom, and the girls she showers with after gym; none of whom would ruin Carol's life if they saw a short scar on her belly. Unlike the insignificance of Carol's scar, even if she'd gotten one, my scar does have a small significance later in my autobiography.] ------- Part 2: My Second Merge, to 4 Minds ------- Chapter 10: Two's Company; Four's Even More Company Wednesday, February 23, 2005 [[I ended the last chapter with a small digression. Being in the mood for them, I'll add another one, more relevant to my recent merging. Earlier, I calculated the chance of someone merging to be equivalent to 1-in-3E14; 3E14 being 3,000 times the number of people that have ever lived on Earth. There are considerably more than 3,000 w-dimensions, so it's certain that I was not the first person to have merged (this logic is wrong as the dimensions aren't independent, but it's simple and the conclusion is roughly correct for more complicated reasons, so I'm using it as is). Merging once is useful, but its effects aren't profound. What is far more important is whether anyone has merged at least twice. The first merge just requires luck, while the second merge requires a completely different approach, which if mastered can be used in any number of subsequent merges. The first requirement for anyone to merge twice, is that they first merge once. That just required luck, and statistically speaking is certain to have happened many times throughout the Universe. The second requirement, is that the newly two-minded persons had to survive the months or years after their first merges. In many historic societies, recovering from the source of death that had enabled the first merge would have been very unlikely, as none of the usual causes - wounds, diseases, starvation or exposure - were effectively treatable near the point of death. That wasn't possible until very recently. The surviving two-minded individual might last a few minutes or possibly even hours, but would very likely die long before he could merge again. Those few who managed to overcome the initial causes of their partners' deaths might then be killed by new causes, especially if they thought themselves insane and/or superstitious issues got involved. They could easily have been murdered, driven from their community, or these days, locked up for their own good, the latter removing nearly all opportunities to merge again. It's difficult to judge the probability of someone surviving the period between déjà vu's as there are so many unknowns but I have to think the chance of it is very low. I'd confidently guess it to be sub-1%. The third requirement is that they had to want to, and then successfully accomplish, a second half-suicide during a later déjà vu. Arranging for the second half-reversible death to occur during an unpredictable déjà vu would have been extremely difficult even just a few years ago. It's very difficult to imagine how anyone before the modern age could create a suicide that met the requirements of a merge. For my second suicide, I had the assistance of the internet and modern pharmacology, those being unavailable to virtually everyone even just a few years ago. Most methods I can think of that would cause a person's death within the thirty seconds required (e.g., falling on a sword) would almost certainly sever the déjà vu link, and would require modern medical care to recover from. In other words, I believe it is virtually impossible for anyone to have achieved a second merge. I believe the third probability to be zero, or so close to it that it makes no difference. In summary, the modern age being such a tiny proportion of humanity's existence, I believe I am the first human to have achieved two déjà vu merges.]] ^ We soon learned that having four minds was everything we'd experienced from the first merge, only much more so. Communicating among myselves was a richer, more complex, more interesting process than it had been before the latest merge. For example, we could generate ideas quicker than we had before, sometimes even without all of my minds participating. Previously if something was happening that kept one mind busy (something tricky at school say), the other mind was effectively on its own. Now something that kept one mind busy still left three to do other things. So a new mental structure became possible: we could form committees! Unlike the jokes I'd heard on TV, our committees will be very effective. We'll be able to divide up our mind-power in the best way possible, depending on the structure of the task or tasks to be worked on. School was going to be even easier now. Starting after our 3am half-breakfast, we tried several types of tasks, and we were definitely much improved at some of them. We were up to date with our schoolwork, but we redid some old work just to see how it went. Being able to leapfrog four steps at a time, for example, made some work doable in an astonishingly short time, provided there wasn't too much writing involved. Not that I was going to test it when Mom might get up to check on the noise, but I could easily imagine that I was now the world's best Minesweeper player! Riches, fame and beautiful groupies awaited me! We learned that the w-dimensions we had personal experience of - four now - all had slight differences, which #3 and #4 had also previously spotted for themselves. Lord Of The Ring's Arwen was played by the same actress in #3's dimension as here (Liv Tyler), but by a third girl in #4's dimension; yet another daughter of Mick Jagger's although she didn't call herself a Jagger. He seems to have sown his oats (and that wasn't all) in lots of dimensions, the lucky bastard! Some of the differences weren't minor either. In #3's dimension the minimum age to get a driving license was fifteen, so #3 and #4 had their license, although they'd failed to bring it with them (their first merge had occurred at the same time as mine and #1's, shortly after we'd turned fourteen). Other than #3, the rest of us had sixteen as the minimum ages in our original dimensions, including the one we were in now. Surely that'd make a huge difference to what happened in each dimension? Imagine all the different road deaths and the ripple effects of those. Girls might date different guys because they had a cooler car, get married differently, have different children, etc. We (#1 and #2) had assumed the differences would always be minor, but that one was astonishingly large in its flow-on effects. One consequence of it was that we didn't expect any difficulty in getting our license in this dimension when the time came; we'd just let #3 or #4 do the driving, presuming the road rules were the same. Those two assured #1 and #2 that we all drove on the same side of the road. Both pairs of minds had experienced a non-merging déjà vu eight months ago in the movie theater. From what we could recall of our conversations back then, we were pretty sure that the minds we were with now were not the same ones we'd déjà vu'd with back then. That meant we had collectively experienced eight minds, the four in my head now, and the two sets of two that we'd each déjà vu'd with eight months previously. There were more Mark-minds out there, and it seemed safe to assume that we could, if we wished, merge again - to eight minds per body, then sixteen, thirty two, etc. We all agreed that we'd definitely get used to having four minds first, and if we did decide to merge again, we'd definitely prefer to find a poison with a less distressing antidote. We had a feeling that having four minds would take a lot of getting used to, and that it'd be very enjoyable, so we wouldn't be in any hurry to even think about merging again. We tried to think about the science behind merging. For example, how many dimensions are there? (Or quanta in the W-Dimension, or alternate realities, or however you want to express it.) Probably not an infinite number because that's obviously a silly idea, plus if each specific mind has a finite chance of experiencing déjà vu, given an infinite number of other minds for it to occur with shouldn't each specific mind therefore be experiencing déjà vu all the time? That logic wasn't compelling because déjà vu might only be possible between nearby dimensions, whatever "nearby" means in this context. We didn't have enough information to work with, #3's and #4's experiences being so similar to #1's and #2's that they didn't add much in the way of scientifically useful information. There was at least one more body out there, two if our theater déjà vu partners hadn't merged, but probably far more than that. We could almost certainly merge again if we wanted to, but there was at least one large-scale concern: however many Mark Andersons there were out there, that number was halving each time. If there was a finite limit of some sort, killing off half the surviving Mark Andersons each merge was not a comfortable thought. We weren't sure how it mattered, but it seemed a good thing to be cautious about, especially as there was no way of reversing merges. Another issue that came to mind was that science fiction books sometimes talk about information being able to cross dimensions, but not matter. That seemed to be the case here too, assuming our minds were purely information. But nonetheless we wondered whether it was possible to transfer matter? Certainly our body hadn't "crossed over", although it was amusing to think of there being four different Mark Andersons in the same house. Mom would REALLY notice the increase in the grocery bill then! Our clothes didn't cross over, nor anything else material that we could think of. The merge seemed to occur at the point of death - as best we could tell - and it was hard to imagine how we could transfer matter at the moment one body died. Even that we called the effect a "merge" seemed to imply an event that didn't create anything more than had existed previously; it just squeezed more information into the same matter. We did spend some time trying to think of a way of testing the transfer of matter, but came up empty handed. The last deliberate experiment I tried at home that morning was juggling. Four balls of socks were quickly rotating around. Each ball had a mind allocated to it, and it took control of the hands as its ball was in the right position. It was quite easy. We tried eight balls and even that was fairly simple once I learned how to start them into motion without screwing it up. I had to move fast, and there was no time for any fumbles or mis-movements, but it didn't take long to learn; the minds just concentrated on their balls:1 & 5, 2 & 6, etc. The post-merge period was much easier this time. The first and second stages of the antidote had left me feeling poor, and the third stage had been horrendous for a couple of hours, but after that the recovery period just required some eating. We didn't have to go through any of the long-term hassles we had after the first merge, as there was no blood loss, no scars to worry about, the syringe injection holes were inconsequential, no cover story beyond "I didn't feel good but I'm better now" was needed, etc. There were no external differences for anyone to see, so we could just carry on with our rather interesting life, and have heaps of fun finding out about ourselves. ------- Chapter 11: Living in a Same-Sex Foursome Thursday, February 24 to Monday, March 21, 2005 Some of the consequences of the latest merge were as expected. One of those was that I quickly found my schoolwork even easier, usually to a ridiculous degree. I self-studied more and more. I only needed one mind to be tuned into the teacher in any class while my other three minds did other schoolwork. The teachers eventually gave up trying to catch me out with ambush questions when I looked inattentive. Sooner or later they all let me work on whatever I wanted during class time, as I was completely on top of everything they were teaching. Also as expected, at least initially, was how our memories worked. Memory is a strange phenomenon at the best of times, particularly because the perspective of the viewer distorts the memory so much. Whether we had two or four minds, our memories were private to each mind. Not just the memories of pre-merge events, but memories created post-merge too. If we each recalled a fact, such as the value of pi, then the memories were identical. But if we witnessed an event that could be interpreted in many different ways, such as a social interaction, then we each colored it by our perceptions at the time. For example, if we saw one of the bullies we were scared of talking to a pretty girl, when one of us later described his memory he might describe how big and scary the bully was because that's what he was thinking at the time. Another of us, who might have been hornier than the first mind at the time (yes, that's possible, as horniness is at least as much mental as physical), and therefore more focused on the girl, might've perceived the bully as being less intimidating, and girl's skirt as shorter, neckline lower, etc. His descriptions would be different from the first. Same event but different memories. With four minds such differences happened noticeably more often than it had with two. We didn't argue as much as you might expect when we disagreed about something we remembered. We knew each other to be telling the truth as he knew it, that the differences were only in perception, and that no one of us was intrinsically more right than the others. Back when we had two minds, if a memory difference was important, which it rarely was, we either compromised or just picked one. Having four now gave us an additional option of voting on which memory was the most accurate, but it was rarely important enough to worry about. While on the topic of memory, we never noticed any memory capacity problems, even though we were 'recording' four times as much of it now. Maybe we'd run out of 'storage space' in a few years, but there was no sign of that yet. We did start using a nice little memory trick to make our life easier. So much of schoolwork is memorization. If we were given a whole bunch of stuff to memorize, we just divided it into quarters and we each memorized our share. You might think that got the job done in a quarter of the time, but it was much faster than that because it gets increasingly harder and slower to memorize more and more facts. Time yourself memorizing a 20-digit number, then time memorizing a 5-digit one. I bet the second time is far less than a quarter of the first, and more accurate too. Later, when we needed to recall one of the facts, it was simply a matter of, More often than not the possessor of this fact would see the need coming and just volunteer the knowledge at the right time, slotting it neatly in to the flow of whatever we were doing at the time: writing homework, answering a question in class, or whatever. We got so slick at it that there was no discernible pause. Speaking of being geniuses, we'd expected our IQ to rise. I'm talking about our real IQ, not the result of any school IQ test - not that we were going to do another one of those! After our first merge we had the impression that we'd probably gotten smarter, and we'd guessed it'd been by about 5%, although that was a difficult thing to measure. We were hoping for at least another 5% from the last merge, or to be even more hopeful, maybe even a 10% gain as twice as many of us had arrived. To our considerable disappointment we couldn't 'feel' any improvement at all. We couldn't decide whether we'd gotten smarter but weren't able to detect it, or we hadn't gotten smarter. Now there was even more doubt about whether we'd gotten smarter last time or we'd only thought so because having two minds made us seem so much smarter that we fooled not only everyone else, but ourselves as well. A week after the merge, #1 did an online IQ test, with the other minds not participating. They even refused to read the questions. He scored a disappointing 108. IQ tests produce erratic results, so his IQ might've been 105 (our original IQ) or possibly even 110 (what we thought the first merge might have done), although the upper guess was getting unlikely as the site said that variations of plus or minus 5 points were possible. One thing was for sure, we didn't have IQs of 120 the way we'd been hoping. ------- Bandwidth and structure became concepts that we thought about a great deal. [[I've inserted the word "bandwidth" into the text here. I didn't understand this term at the time, instead using a long-winded phrase when I thought about it. I'll assume you either understand the word, or will quickly come to understand it from the context below.]] A teacher standing in front of the class verbally introducing new material did not offer much opportunity for me to excel. It took me somewhat less time to comprehend the new material than most students took because when the first of my minds 'got it', it could teach it to the other minds much faster than the teacher could, as my first mind understood the other minds so knew how best to explain the point. Generally, we were probably about twice as fast as the average student, which was disappointingly slow considering how much mind-power we had. Compare this to working my way through a whole lot of homework questions. For those, I could simply allocate one question per mind and just record the answers as they came back, again depending on the output bandwidth required by the answers, e.g., too much writing slowed me down, although I was very good at writing with both hands simultaneously when alone in my room. Assuming I wasn't constrained by my writing bandwidth, then I was up to four times faster at homework. Plus there were some tasks in which four minds got the job done considerably faster than by just a factor of four. It all depended on the structures and bandwidths involved, such as memorization being so greatly improved by the Divide and Conquer tactic, as already mentioned. Creativity was another area we got better at because my minds could give each other ideas. We sought ways of improving on whatever our limits were. One thing I have long been aware of is that we tend to consciously think at the same speed at which we talk. I have always thought that was very ineffective, and even stupid. Talking, being a very crude, mechanical process, is naturally limited in what speeds it can achieve (bandwidth again). Listening is also mechanically constrained. I've listened to sped-up tapes of people talking, and it doesn't take much of an increase in tape speed before the recorded speech becomes unintelligible. A factor of two is difficult to make out, a factor of three is on the very edge of comprehensibility. We can't speak or listen much faster than the normal rate. I don't know whether evolution has constrained our listening speed to our speaking speed, or vice versa. They seem a fairly well-matched pair, and evolution hasn't seen it desirable to improve them. But surely we should be able to think faster than that. Why should thinking speed be constrained by the crude mechanical limits of speech and hearing? Maybe subconscious thinking is faster. Ideas do pop up out of nowhere, so maybe there is some very quick thinking going on underneath. But I can't tell, as it's subconscious. All I know is that conscious thinking is slower than it could be, and that it would be very advantageous to be able to think faster. So we tried to improve our thinking speed, figuring that if anyone on the planet could do so, surely it was us. We managed to get some speed improvement when recalling some memories. If one of us had listened to a conversation and wanted to replay it later for the others (listening, like seeing, is as much dependent on paying attention as the physical processes involved), we learned how to sort of dump the whole conversation out of memory into consciousness, rather than replaying it at verbal speeds. It was more of a very fast playback than an instant dump, but the important aspect was that it was much faster. We also slowly but steadily got faster at talking to each other, so we internally gabbled. But other than those rather disappointingly small-scale improvements, we were stuck. I remember reading a sci-fi book, whose name I've long forgotten, where creatures didn't speak, but instead had a color screen on their chests. They had evolved from a fish species that had light-emitting cells, as many deep-water fish do. They could flash pictures very, very rapidly. The pictures were seen by eyes, which are also high-speed devices, so the fictitious creatures had a very high communication bandwidth; far faster than human speech. It was limited by line-of-sight, but otherwise quite incredible. That's the sort of speed we thought we should be able to get. Voices, ears, eyes, fishy color cells, etc., are all just devices to get thoughts from one mind into another. A thought gets composed into words, is spoken, gets heard, gets interpreted, and the thought is now in the receiving mind. When my minds communicate together they don't use any external medium - sound waves or photons - because we communicate internally, therefore we should be able to do so incredibly rapidly. But we tried and couldn't make it happen. Maybe, like the flashing fishes, we need to evolve? Which would be a pity since our having multiple minds wasn't genetic, so wasn't going to be inheritable. Our not having a girlfriend wasn't helping evolution along either. Unlike internal communication speed, one thing that I did get much better at was eating. My immediately post-merge hunger was obviously to fill the vacuum created by my body expelling everything in its entire digestive tract, but even after that'd been refilled, and the results were coming out of the other end normally, I was still eating much more than usual. My food consumption increased something like 25%, without my putting on any extra weight. I'd had a small appetite increase after the first merge, but we'd just put that down to replacing blood then to normal adolescence. This increase was more substantial, and its also coinciding with the second merge made it obviously a related effect. We decided that we were probably burning more energy from the four minds' worth of thinking that was going on. An MRI of our brain would probably blow its dials! We remembered hearing somewhere that the brain uses about 20% of the body's energy. Judging by how much food I was eating now - about 25% more than normal - it appeared that each additional mind beyond the first required 8% more food. If one mind used 20% of the total food, and we were now eating 8% more food per mind, that meant 40% of the energy needed for the brain was needed to support a mind's thinking, thus only 60% required to support the physical matter of the brain, which seemed too little to us. Thinking might have needed 5%, or maybe 10%, of the brain's energy, but 40% was huge. Surely thinking isn't so difficult that it needed so much energy, otherwise people would get hungry after some thinking just like happens after physical work. On the other hand, we couldn't argue with the fact that we needed to eat 25% more food than previously. Mom had already been lightheartedly grumbling about three teenage kids eating her out of house and home, and my 25% increase was not welcomed as it increased Mom's weekly grocery bill noticeably. I had to suffer the indignity of eating a worm tablet in case I had worms, but it had no affect on my hunger. I wasn't getting fat so Mom had to accept that I needed the extra food. She grumbled, but she kept more snacks in the kitchen and increased my meal sizes. She even bought me a larger plate to have my meals on, perhaps in an attempt to shame me into cutting back. If so, it didn't work, just making it easier for me to load up my plate with more food. When I was hungry, shame had no chance of ruining my appetite, and I got VERY hungry these days. ------- Going from one to two minds had been a big emotional transition; it had turned me from being suicidal into enjoying myself. I hadn't enjoyed my life, but I had enjoyed myself, which was a significant change. Compared to that transition, going from two to four minds was emotionally easy, so we adapted to it sooner than we'd expected. We started getting quite well known. Mostly for being awesomely smart because we started screaming through the school syllabi. One mind would listen to the teacher, while three minds worked on something else. I could get a great deal of work done in a class, and even more in the privacy of my bedroom. We also got a reputation for being somewhat weird. Sometimes, for example, we would suddenly laugh for no apparent reason. Of course it was because one of the minds shared something funny and we couldn't help ourselves reacting to it (we agreed that all four of us had unusually good senses of humor). When that happened I'd quite honestly explain to whoever was looking at me strangely, "Sorry, I just thought of something funny." Another effect of multiple minds was contradicting myself. I'd say or do something, and then another of my minds would provide a reason why the just-said or -done thing was wrong, so I'd take it back and then say or do something else. I also became verbose in a disjointed way. If a teacher asked me a question I'd sometimes answer it with a whole bunch of different points that had no logical progression because they'd been suggested by different minds thinking independently. Incidents like these - and there were quite a few of them - gave me a reputation for being somewhat of a weird genius. Bullying didn't get any worse, fortunately. If anything, it became somewhat less of a problem. I had filled out a little over the previous months and had grown an inch or so, which made some of the smaller bullies more cautious. More importantly, I was getting even more physically coordinated. I could now run away pretty fast, which was often helpful. When I was jostled in the hallways - a VERY frequent occurrence - I hardly ever fell over anymore as I had developed quite superb agility. Often I could 'dance around' the jostling. Sometimes so well that the bully-du-jour would stumble when he tried to put too much of his weight onto me, only to find that I wasn't there anymore. Of course, as is the nature of bullies, they often got angry at that. Being light on my feet was no use when two slabs of muscle picked me up and hung me from some coat hooks, or whatever else they wanted to do to me. There were still many occasions when I had no choice but to suffer whatever was inflicted on me, but the number of such incidents reduced somewhat. My soccer prowess improved markedly after doubling the population of my head. After my first merge, I'd suspected my loss of clumsiness had been due to the merge, but my latest sudden and dramatic improvement in athleticism was far beyond a loss of clumsiness aided by my being more aware of the ball and player positions. My feet were fully ambidextrous, I could dribble very fast, had superb ball control, could change directions on a dime, could do some very athletic leaps to get my head to the ball first, and other soccer related skills, all done to a superb degree. People started commenting on it. I'd hoped for some athleticism improvement, but it was far more than I'd dreamed of. After the first merge it'd taken many weeks for my body to gain coordination, so I'd expected slow improvement this time too, but my new skills arrived quickly. But the most surprising aspect was how much skill arrived. The first merge had removed my clumsiness, whereas I was now VERY skillful. Gaining that much skill had to be more difficult as diminishing returns must've set in. An inexperienced weightlifter can probably be trained to increase his maximum lift by 10% quite easily, but adding successive improvements of the same amount must get increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible. Removing my clumsiness I was prepared to accept as a fairly easy development, but I now had a very high degree of athletic skill; far more than I thought doubling my number of minds should've produced because of the difficulty in achieving so much skill. But I couldn't argue with reality. In total, I became a somewhat weird genius who was also graceful. It's not a combination you hear of very often. Clearly when merging added more minds, it wasn't just adding the conscious minds, but also memories (that was obvious), subconsciouses, and - it appeared - those parts of our mind that dealt with body coordination. I hadn't expected adding two more minds to make much difference to that, but it made a huge amount. I guess that my having only one body meant it was getting four times the normal amount of coordination. The thought occurred to me that if those body controls didn't cooperate as well as they clearly did, then I might've turned into a constantly twitching spastic. It was VERY good that the reverse was happening! I also guessed that's why I needed so much extra food (+8% per mind), not just to fuel the conscious thinking, but all the processes going on underneath. [I later found that the mathematics behind my food consumption was more complicated than "+8% per mind", but that explanation is best later.] ^ My conclusion that my body control had increased significantly was confirmed a couple of weeks after the second merge, when I was talking to a guy in the schoolyard one morning before classes started. Adam suddenly told me, "Dude, your eyes are weird." "What do you mean?" "They're moving around in different directions. It's weirding me out." #2: Debbie Kneedmire was well worth keeping track of. I would normally have happily used all my eyes to watch her, but I'd also been interested in my conversation with Adam, so I'd apparently kept track of both events. I asked Adam, "What did my eyes do?" "Dude, you were looking at me normally, then your left eye wandered across me while your other eye kept looking straight ahead. I've never seen anything like that before, it was wild. How did you do that? It was way stranger than going cross-eyed." "I was watching Debbie Kneedmire arrive. She walked across the drive behind you." "Okay, I understand looking at Debbie; I do a lot of that myself. But the eye thing, dude, just too weird for words. You should go on Letterman or something." I didn't want to go on "Letterman or something", and was saved from having to respond by the bell. I was very interested though. I had five minutes to get to my first class, but instead I made a beeline for the nearest bathroom, stood in front of a mirror, looked straight at myself, then one of my minds swiveled one eyeball to the side. Adam was right, it did look very "weird, dude." Some quick experiments soon showed me that different minds could independently control each eyeball. The great thing was that all four of us could see whatever the eyes were looking at, not just the mind that was controlling them. That may sound obvious, but it was well worth confirming and was good news. If the left eye was hard left, and the right eye hard right, that could be useful on the soccer field, although I'd presumably lose depth of field accuracy in the areas that were only being observed by one eye, and it risked "weirding out" any dudes that saw it. I nearly missed the start of the class because I was too busy making my eyeballs do little synchronized dances, but one of the advantages of four minds is that I usually don't miss things, as one or other of them won't be sufficiently distracted and will remind us. I went to class wondering what possible use I could get out of independently controllable eyeballs. Even with my ambidextrous feet and juggling, I doubted I was cool enough yet to score with any of the girls in my class. One of the very first things I did in class was repeat an experiment I'd failed at a while ago. I put two open books side by side, and asked #3 to read the left book with the left eye and #4 to read the right book with the right eye. And they could! It was as easy for them as reading had ever been. They even each controlled the hand on the same side as 'their' eye to turn the pages of their book, so both books could now be read fully independently. This was an EXCEPTIONALLY useful new technique. There's a great deal of reading to do in school, and now I could do it in half the time. We already knew that back when we'd had 'only' two minds, if one of our minds got distracted and lost attention when we were reading a book, then it failed to absorb that text, even though our eyes had been pointing at it and the other mind had carried on reading normally. Just the same as if you daydream while reading, having the book open in front of you doesn't get any meaning into your head unless you're concentrating on it. It was the same with two books. #3 was concentrating on reading the left book so he didn't know what #4 was reading, and vice versa. Whatever each mind was reading got fed into his own conscious mind, then his own memory, but not into anyone else's consciousness or memory. Even though #1 and #2 were seeing the pages because my eyeballs were pointing at them, unless each of us consciously read the pages, we absorbed nothing. Nor could #1 or #2 usefully read both books at the same time. They could physically see them, just like you could physically see two windows on your computer screen if you put them side by side, but understanding both stories when the eyeballs were scanning it a line at a time was too difficult. #1 and #2 had to pick which eyeball's image to concentrate on. The new technique was useful, as it gave us choices. If memory and accuracy were important, all four minds would read the one source. If we preferred speed (e.g., to read a newspaper), then we'd create two teams of an eye and mind each (perhaps for the facing pages of the paper), and the two spare minds could do whatever they wanted, either reading one of the two sources or anything else that didn't need an eyeball. If either reading mind saw anything useful he could share it, either getting everyone to read the words again, or just 'tell' us the key points. In the case of a picture or graph, for example, it would be quicker if we all 'read' it again rather than have it described to us. That sounds quite complex, but it became second nature to us very quickly. Just as you will read faster or slower depending on your interest in the material, and it doesn't require any effort from you to manage the speed-setting process, the same became true for us. Our process had more options, but they were options for doing what we already knew how to do (move eyeballs and read), so they didn't take much time to learn to manage. You have many options for what your eyes look at, and you don't find the number of options burdensome (especially at this moment, I hope). I quickly realized that independent eyeball control meant not only could we do our homework faster, but there'd be less of it to take home because we'd be able to do more of it at school. To explain: we already did quite a lot of our schoolwork in class these days. Generally one mind would follow the teacher while the other three minds did the 11th grade material or 10th grade homework. Because our memories are independent, that would've required us to permanently allocate individual minds to individual subjects, which we didn't want to do as it'd reduce our flexibility and exam proficiency too much, and also because no one wanted to be stuck with English. Instead, the mind paying attention in each class would summon the other minds whenever the teacher said something useful, difficult or important. That wasn't often, so the three minds could spend most of the class time doing productive work. That process had previously been annoyingly limited by my eyes being able only to look in one direction at a time, so whenever the teacher was writing on the board - something they did a lot of - we usually had to stop working on the other subjects. Now that I had independent control of my eyeballs I could do both, so my work in class was going to flow much smoother and I'd get a lot more done. I was puzzled by my "Two Book Reading Experiment" failing not long after my first merge. Or alternatively, I was puzzled by being able to do it now. I have four minds now, but I didn't think that was the cause of the change because I only need two minds to read two books. I guessed it took a while for some of my abilities to develop. Ambidexterity took a while to show up, and independent eyeballs took even longer. There's obviously more involved in merging than just two conscious minds joining, and I guessed that there must be a lot happening 'underneath'. It was annoying not knowing what's happening 'down there'. I declared the eyeball situation a wonderful success, and started paying some attention to the teacher. For all of three or four seconds, because it occurred to me that if I could independently control my eyeballs, maybe I could consciously control other parts of my body that normally couldn't be. Like what? And how could I test them? Sitting in class severely reduced the number of muscle movements I could perform without looking like a complete dork. I thought about increasing or decreasing my heart rate, as I could do that without disrupting the class at all, but it seemed much too risky. And don't hearts actually pulse in some sort of complicated rhythm, so getting mine to change speed could be quite tricky. I didn't have a clue how to do that, but now that I thought about it, I also didn't have a clue how to control my eye muscles either. When I move my eyeballs, I don't think about which muscles to contract, how much, etc., I just 'look' at something and the eyeball 'moves itself'. Obviously there's a lot of muscular control involved, but it's subconscious, as it is with my heart muscles. While my attention was wandering, one part of my body effectively put its 'hand' up to volunteer for the control test. I was looking at back of one of the girls in front of me. She was wearing a translucent blouse and I could clearly see her bra straps go over her shoulders so I got an erection. Yes, I know it's pathetic. We'll just accept that and move on. I can't tell you the number of times I've been humiliated at school because I'd got a woody. For all the usual reasons a teenage boy gets embarrassed at such times, plus at my school one of the favorite tactics of the Queen B's - where "B" is for "Bitch" - is to harden-then-humiliate their victims. It ridicules their victims while also pandering to the Bitches' egos. It's even something the top Bitches (I'd write "and cheerleaders" but it's effectively the same group) compete with, so it was distressingly common. They never do it to guys who'd enjoy it, only to guys like me who were awkward and incompetent near a sexy girl. I would LOVE to have conscious control over my useless source of embarrassment, so I tried softening my cock, and it was EASY! All I had to do was recall what it felt like when it was going down, and down it went. I was VERY happy! Being able to go soft on demand was definitely going to make my life considerably less humiliating. I was smiling so much the teacher said, "Mark, you seem to be in a great mood. How come you're so happy this morning?" I thought it best to answer, "I had a nice breakfast, ma'am." What other useful tricks could I do now? From the successful cock-softening test, I'd learned that I just had to remember what something felt like. For several months before my first suicide I'd had a nervous twitch. A small muscle above my left eyebrow would repeatedly twitch when I was stressed. It'd stopped after my merge, but I still remembered what it felt like. I tried to make it happen, and it immediately did. With that additional skill, I'd be a big hit on "Letterman or something", even without demonstrating how I could make my cock droop. I had trouble thinking of anything else that I could do. I could remember what it felt like to bend my leg, but that and so many other muscular movements were already consciously controllable. There weren't that many subconscious movements that mattered. I kept thinking about my heart rate, and that I certainly knew what a faster heartbeat felt like. I couldn't resist trying: I imagined what it felt like beating just a little faster, and it did. I quickly stopped influencing it, and it returned to normal. Another successful test. #3: #1: We discussed it for some time - the teacher being even more boring than normal - and we decided that almost certainly the Sending-Mark had to die to release his minds so they could cross the w-dimension, but we weren't nearly so sure about the Receiving-Mark having to be near death. Maybe he did have to be, to make it possible for the new minds to "get in", whatever that meant, or maybe it made no difference. If the Receiver didn't have to be dying, then that potentially meant a huge increase in the number of people that might have survived merging. On further thought, we suspected our first thought was wrong, because it appeared the dimensions were so similar that if one person in the déjà vu link was dying, it seemed certain that the other person was too, regardless of whether it was necessary for the merging to work. [[We were more wrong than right with these guesses. For example, in #3's native dimension, many 15-year olds would die in car crashes who wouldn't be dying in dimensions where they weren't allowed to drive. The situation was more complex than we thought at this time.]] Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to find out the truth without carrying out an experiment, and that was too serious and irrevocable to do out of curiosity. It'd be even more irrevocable if a death occurred but the merge didn't happen. It wasn't possible to get any further with that issue, so I returned to thinking about my normally subconsciously controlled muscles. Another movement occurred to me: Swallowing involves a succession of muscular contractions, and presumably throwing up was the same cycle in reverse. Swallowing I could do voluntarily, but throwing up was not under my conscious control so theoretically I could experiment with it, but I didn't want to throw up my nice breakfast in class, so I skipped that. Then I remembered that much the same process happens at the other end of my digestive tract, and I REALLY didn't want to experiment with that in class! I couldn't think of anything else to try, so I actually tuned into the lesson for a while. ------- Later that evening I was goofing off with Donna, shooting some hoops over our garage door. We weren't playing seriously; just killing a few minutes before dinner, and Donna did something amusing. In retaliation I waved my eyeballs all over the place and she cracked up. When she recovered she asked, "How can you do that? It looks so funny." "I only discovered it this morning in school. Weird isn't it?" "It's great. Can you wiggle your ears too?" I was just about to answer "No" because I had no memory of ear wiggling to work with, when my ears wiggled. Donna cracked up again. "You could be a great clown." And she started laughing again. We went back to goofing off with the basketball, but I was a bit puzzled. Apparently I have more subconscious control than I'd thought, but I'm not sure how. I tried the ears a few more times and they always moved, but now I knew what it felt like. As best we could tell, when Donna asked about it, we just imagined it happening and it did. None of us could even say which of us had made it happen because it was obviously something I'd done subconsciously. It hardly seemed an important issue, so we let it drop. Then I thought to imagine myself floating in the air, but that VERY hopeful fantasy didn't work, so we let that idea drop too. ------- I'll mention my sporting prowess again. Back in the days when the population of my head was one, I was inept, clumsy and uncoordinated; usually all at the same time. I did as little sport as I could, and I did it badly. I'd still run around to burn off energy like any other kid, but the deliberate pursuit of skill at any recognized sport was completely off the agenda. I was no good at any of them, I was ridiculed whenever forced to participate, and junior-jocks were a serious source of trouble in my life. As far as I was concerned, if I woke up one morning and the whole concept of "sport" no longer existed, the world would be a far better place. Certainly my world would be, especially if whatever took "sport" away also took all the jocks with it. I had another game of soccer a week and a half after my latest merge. My teammates and coach were very surprised by my sudden increase in skill. Even I was surprised (for reasons already given: how soon after my merge the skill increase arrived, and how large the improvement was). My increased athleticism was also quickly apparent too in PE classes. I got better at virtually every sport: basketball - which I mostly played at home with Donna because it was an important game at school and therefore attracted jocks - baseball, tennis and table tennis, those being the sports our school offered in PE classes. The only sports our school took seriously were football, and to a lesser extent basketball. Whenever I had to do anything in PE related to those two sports, I deliberately did them poorly because I had WAY less than no interest in being asked to join the teams of either of those sports. I hated those guys, especially the football morons. Had I been stupid enough to play with them, they would've felt compelled to beat me up to "teach me a lesson," and to keep beating me up every chance they got. There was NO WAY I was going anywhere near those fuckwits. When I'd had one mind Donna had easily wiped the floor with me at one-on-one home basketball, not that I'd played with her often. With two minds it was a fairly even competition. I was considerably taller than Donna, but she was considerably more athletic and practiced. When I got four minds, I very quickly became skilled enough to leave her in my dust: my shooting accuracy became superb, I could dodge all around her, I learned to do all sorts of tricky ball moves and even a few freaky things. For example, there's a tree beside our 'court'. When Donna was defending, I could throw the ball at the tree trunk, then move to where the rebound off the rounded trunk would send the ball. The tree almost became a second team member for me, as it could pass the ball to wherever I wanted it to. Donna declared using the tree to be illegal. One weekend Dad saw Donna and me playing and he couldn't resist taking me on. Dad has always been very good athletically. Football had been his main sport, but he was no slouch at basketball or any other sport. Previously there had NEVER been any chance whatsoever of my even making him try hard, let alone beating him, at ANY athletic competition, so trying my newfound skills against him was going to be a very interesting test. I did my best, and not only beat him, but I ran so many circles around him that I made him look silly. That's no problem with Dad as he's laid-back and doesn't have an ego that takes offense from such things. After he got over his surprise, he pulled out his A-game, and I ran circles around that too. After the shock wore off, Dad started getting excited about my possible future as a pro basketball player. Needless to say, I was not similarly excited, basketball jocks being half as evil as football jocks, or sometimes equally evil when jocks belonged to both teams. Not getting much enthusiasm from me, Dad went to talk with Mom about my pro basketball career. He returned fifteen minutes later and apologized for getting carried away. Over dinner that evening Mom said, "Mark, your father came in this afternoon over the moon about how good you were at basketball, and what a great future you could have in that sport. What do you think of that?" "I'm sorry, Dad, but I have no interest at all in pursuing any sport professionally. I don't like organized sports, don't like the jocks at school, and don't like aggressive competitiveness they all attack each other with. I enjoy goofing off with Donna," that earned me a smile from her, "and getting a bit of exercise is good, but it's just fun. My future is in my head, not my hands." "Yeah, that's pretty much what your mother said." Carol piped in with, "It's not like he's going to have any trouble getting a college scholarship, is it?" I hadn't really thought about that much, and we'd never discussed it as a family. There'd been quite a lot going on behind the scenes though. We're not a wealthy family and college educations aren't cheap. Carol had long since set her sights firmly on college, was excessively conscientious about working toward it, and we all knew it. It was an accepted fact that Carol was going to college. I didn't know about it, but Mom and Dad had been quietly and deliberately accumulating Carol's college fund for several years. They had a special account for it. Neither Donna nor I had previously shown any inclinations toward college, or to anything else for that matter. We just tended to take each day as it came. The original me could well have just finished school then drifted in to working for the same factory as Dad, for example. The one thing I'd known was that I was never going to be a lumberjack. Giving the old me a large chainsaw would've been a bloody bad idea. And no one had any idea what 12-year old Donna was going to do. As a result of our meeting with the Principal, Mom had kept a pretty close eye on my schoolwork after I skipped ahead a grade. She was initially quite concerned about my advancement, but she'd relaxed when I'd easily coped. But behind the scenes, she and Dad worried about whether they'd need another college fund. Mom's level of supervision of me had dropped off over the months, but she still did some, so she could keep track of how much she and Dad had to worry about money. While I remember to mention it, an amusing consequence of her supervision of my schoolwork was that I'd had to ask her to knock on my bedroom door and wait for the "Okay" before entering: "Mom, you can't just knock and immediately walk into a teenage boy's bedroom like that. You never know what embarrassment you might cause." With a look of contrition on her face, but a smile on her lips, Mom agreed. Of course the real reason for my request wasn't what I'd let her believe; it was so I could write with two hands simultaneously. I thought that skill sufficiently strange to want to keep it hidden. Well, okay, the other reason applied sometimes too. Mom still lightly supervised my work, and she'd seen the acceleration that the second merge had caused. She didn't know the reason, but she'd noticed the result. The first jump in school performance was unusual enough, especially with the 226 IQ test result, but after a while that increase in intellectual ability had become accepted. Mom even came to believe that maybe the 226 IQ score had been 'roughly' correct, so that something like 160 or so was my real IQ. No one expected another major change to my IQ, and certainly not another major increase, but Mom saw enough to know that's what had happened. She wondered what my IQ was now. Whatever it was, it was clearly well into the realms of "freaky". Mom worried about that. She'd even found out that an IQ of 226, if it was true, would make me the highest IQ scorer in the world, so "freaky" certainly applied, especially as I'd been boringly average until shortly after my fourteenth birthday. When I had been doing well with two minds, Mom and Dad had worried about a college fund for me, but in most ways that was an easy worry because it's the sort of worry that millions of other parents have. It was now clear that funding my college education was not going to be a problem because scholarships would take care of that, but Mom was more worried, not less. Mom was smart enough to realize that the problems facing her now - how to be a good parent to someone with such an unprecedented high IQ (she thought) - were much harder and more important than finding a few thousand dollars. She was my mom and she didn't know what was best for me. She couldn't understand what my future would be, and she knew she'd have trouble guiding me into it, but whatever it was, it was clearly going to be intellectually spectacular. So when Dad came in all excited that I might have a career as a pro basketball player, you can imagine that Mom had trouble not laughing too much as she burst Dad's bubble. [[At this time - while I'm writing this part of my autobiography - I'm curious about what Mom said to Dad, so I found out (I won't tell you how I did that; it'll become obvious later). I'll reproduce the conversation below.]] "Steven," (that's Dad's name), "Mark is very smart, right?" "Yes, I know." "He's very, very smart; smarter than anyone you've ever met in your entire life, or ever will. Do you understand that?" Dad objected, "Charles van Crasbeek" (the owner of the factory Dad works at) "is a very successful guy, and he's very smart." "Yes I know, I've met him. But let me tell you that Mark is certainly smarter than him, smarter than anyone in this town including all the university professors," Corvallis is a university town: we have the Oregon State University (OSU), so lots of professors, "and I wouldn't be surprised if he was the smartest guy alive in America today." "Oh." Mom enjoyed the next bit, "And you want him to run around a room with a bunch of sweaty men chasing a bouncing ball." Mom likes to say, "Sport is silly. A bunch of grown men running around a field chasing a ball. Why not give them all a ball each? That way everyone's happy." Usually contracted to "Give them all a ball!" Dad's being particularly good at chasing a ball around a field as a high-schooler hadn't impressed teenage-Mom at all. "I know he's smart and doing really well, but I guess I didn't really understand." Mom said, "I can't say I do either, and I have no idea of what his future will be like, but I know that IQs of 226 are almost impossibly high and his might be even higher now. We didn't believe that test, but his teachers say he's devouring his schoolwork and doing a lot extra just for the fun of it, especially recently." "What do we do then?" What they did was just continue to support me, as good parents do, a little more closely and more carefully though. ------- As mentioned, my newfound sporting prowess applied to all the games I tried, but the only one I played with any frequency was soccer. It wasn't an important sport, so the serious jocks didn't take it. There was no serious competitiveness involved because we just played for fun, which suited me very nicely. We played it as a game of skill. We didn't go in for hard tackles and it was very much a non-contact sport, which was one of the major reasons I liked it. I liked it even more when my new skill level made me shine at it. I became so good that we started getting quite a few spectators coming to our games. I overheard one spectator describe me as, "a thing of beauty to watch," which CERTAINLY wasn't how I've normally thought of myself! Coach quickly changed my position to Center Forward (a.k.a. - "also known as" - Striker), where I could make the most use of my skills. I could attack up the left or right easily because of my ambidextrous feet, I was surrounded by players so my situational awareness helped a great deal, and I scored quite a few goals, which was great for my self-esteem. The rest of the team valued my involvement. After the second merge, I moved up from only just being on the team, to being their best player, and they appreciated it. The extra attention our successes brought to the team made them very happy. I got along well with all of them because we were all on the same side. I still preferred to spend time by myself - just the four of me - but socializing with the team was enjoyable too. My being much more socially observant meant I got good at being nice to people. I certainly wasn't an enthusiastic people person, but when people talked to me, I was fine to talk back. It was out of my soccer performances that my nickname was coined. I learned of it when during lunchtime one of my teammates said, "Can I join you, Egg?" "Egg? What're you talking about?" "That's your nickname. Haven't you heard?" "No. Why do people call me an egg?" "Eccentric Graceful Genius. Sort of a play on Egghead, but just Egg for you." I didn't really know how to take that. It was sort of an insult, but not quite; sort of a compliment, but not quite. But as is the nature of nicknames, no one asked my opinion. ------- Chapter 12: Getting My First Date Tuesday, March 22 to Monday, March 28, 2005 My first ever date with a girl - an event of such importance that how this very unlikely event came about deserves its own chapter. I was at my locker after the first class on Tuesday morning when I noticed one of the Queen Bitches - Annette Neumeyer - and her coterie sashaying down the corridor; senior beauty queens all, fully and overly aware of their status at the very pinnacle of school society. They were gorgeous, ruled the school, and everyone owed them homage, especially to their Queen. Annette - never Anne or Annie if you know what's good for you - spotted me and obviously decided to single me out for some special attention. It'd be a vicious put-down because it's not like the Bitches have a wide range of behaviors when they're dealing with guys like me. People around me noticed Annette's sudden attention on me; Annette made it obvious by staring fixedly at me as she advanced. That was the point: to get as much attention on her triumph as possible. The spectators knew the game was starting, who the victim was going to be, what the game would generally be, and that I'd be terribly humiliated as usual. Despite its being very predictable, most people couldn't help watching; especially the guys because guys have trouble not watching Annette at any time, and can't possibly look away when there's the hope that she'll do something sexy. Provided you aren't her current victim, it's great seeing Annette in action. As she neared me, Annette's gyrations went into overdrive and she was looking me straight in the eyes while licking her lips - so it was going to be "Harden then Humiliate". I'd never been on the receiving end of it before from Annette, but had from a couple of other Bitches and I'd seen it done to other guys many times, so I knew how it'd go. I had a panicky internal chat. Normally I would've run away, but this time I decided to gird my loins and stand up to Annette. Having four minds gave me a great deal of internal support, plus I had a secret weapon this time - I wasn't going to be "standing up" to Annette in the way she expected. Annette arrived in front of me, put her hand on my chest, and exhaled throatily, "Oh Mark, you're such a great soccer player." Then she looked down ready to point out her effect on me to everyone. To her surprise there was nothing to poke fun at, although that did take REPEATED mental commands to my cock to stay soft. Annette frowned. It was such a pity, if you'll excuse my sarcasm, to see such a pretty little head so worried. "What's the matter, Mark? Can't you get it hard anymore?" "I don't think that's the problem, Annette. You're past your prime now so not as attractive as you used to be. I still get hard for pretty girls, but you don't do it for me these days." Our audience was stunned into silence. I was pretty stunned myself. This was the first time I'd actually been able to talk back to anyone like her. Normally I turned into a stammering, red-faced wreck, but it was amazing how much confidence being able to stay soft and having four minds supporting each other provided. Annette was also surprised by my unexpected response. She replied with a weak, "No pretty girl would ever talk with you, Dork." One of my minds came up with the obvious reply, "You're talking to me, Annette." The audience's mocking laughter helped her realize my implication. "You stupid dork. Come on girls, we've got better things to do." And she flounced off. Straight to the girls' bathroom, presumably to check her makeup. She was pursued by a great deal of laughter, and would have heard many people telling me, "Well done", "You got her", and the like. The laughter died down and I went to my next class feeling quite proud of myself. After an hour or two of reveling in my victory, I was able to forget about the incident for whole minutes at a time. I didn't see Annette again that day. She was a senior so I'd only ever caught occasional glimpses of her in a hallway anyway. I had some fun fantasizing about what I'd say the next time we passed each other. ^ The next day, at my locker again and at the same time as the previous incident, there was a sudden hush. I looked up and walking toward me was Annette Neumeyer and her girls, but not the Annette Neumeyer of yesterday. Today she'd gone to extremes to turn her sex appeal up as far as it went, and it went up a LONG way! She was wearing bright red high-heeled shoes, a tiny black miniskirt, and a very low-cut, light red, translucent blouse. It was extremely obvious that she wasn't wearing a bra; both because the movements in her blouse were large enough to register as seismic events, and because her prominent nipples were very clearly visible. School dress code regulations were being destroyed. She was loaded for bear, I was in her sights, and both large-caliber bullets were aimed straight at me. Her hair was glowing blond, her makeup was perfect, her earrings matched wonderfully. She was spectacular. Her body was my perfect fantasy: tall, blond, big-titted and braless. But she was out to tear me down and everyone knew it. I had publicly suggested that she was no longer desirable and I had no doubt that she was going to make me pay for that. I felt my body start to react. Not just the "gallant reaction", but panic too. In fact, panic mostly. My heart started racing and without thinking much about it, I just thought, (An English quote! Imagine that.) And my heart DID still, slowing right down to normal. [[Fortunately not literally becoming "still", because my subconsciouses weren't that stupid.]] My body was tense, so I tried, That worked wonderfully, so I added, , , and even It all worked, although another irresistible glance at Annette's nipples required, Having control of my subconscious reactions was wonderful. That relaxation process had taken just a couple of seconds. Annette was still heading my way, although significant parts of her were swaying to the left and right a great deal too. I had a quick look around and I appeared to be the only guy who didn't have a woody. I hoped she wouldn't notice theirs as that would reduce the effectiveness of my put-down. I'd use the same theme as had apparently worked so well yesterday, judging by Annette's feeling it necessary to come after me again so excessively. I just had to work out how to word it. I leaned back casually on my locker. I was feigning casualness but it actually wasn't that hard to do once all the symptoms of nervousness were turned off. I smiled pleasantly at Annette as she neared me - - and as I internally discussed what to say. I didn't know what she intended to say - no doubt something devastating - so before she could open her mouth I preempted her by calling out, "Hi Annie. You're looking nicer today. It's good that you're making an effort while you still can." Her mouth stayed open but nothing came out; she had no idea what to say. In the considerable list of what Annette had going for her, her IQ wouldn't appear; she'd probably have trouble spelling it. Whatever she'd intended to say, I'd derailed it and she didn't know how to reply. Just calling me "Dork" and flouncing off wasn't going to work because she'd invested everything she had into this encounter, and she had to defeat me face to face rather than repeating yesterday's retreat. I was surprised she cared about my opinion, but as she'd praised my soccer skills last time I guess that'd gotten to her in some way. She looked between my legs, but there was nothing to ridicule. She looked back up with the first signs of panic in her eyes. This was going much better than I'd expected, probably because Annette had no experience dealing with guys who failed to respond to her bait. After another moment or two of indecision, Annette grabbed my head on both sides and launched her face at mine. Before I knew what had happened, I was in the sexiest kiss of my entire life (yeah, we both know how much competition it had). Having four minds is definitely useful. It took two of them just to stop my legs turning to jelly. Her tongue was in my mouth and probing every corner, her breasts were heaving and rubbing against me, and one of her bare legs was blatantly rubbing my crotch, a dirty trick that I particularly enjoyed. Two minds to stop my legs collapsing, one mind to keep my cock soft, and the lucky last mind was thoroughly enjoying himself. Her leg rubbed, rubbed some more, and kept rubbing, but it got no reaction. After what was, in my opinion, far too short a time, Annette broke off and stood back. She looked down in dismay at my lack of reaction. "You're a queer aren't you? That's why you play soccer." "Haha. No, I assure you that I definitely like girls. When I think of a lovely girl like Julia Williams I get very turned on. She's wonderful and easily has what it takes to push my buttons. It's just that you no longer do. I'm sorry you're past your bloom, Annie, but at least you had a few good years." Another of my minds had worked out something to add, so, "Oh, and by the way, Annie, please don't try to kiss me again. I didn't find it pleasant and I don't think forcing kisses on unwilling recipients is acceptable behavior. I don't want to be sexually harassed by you, and I will complain if you do it again. You KNOW I don't like you; that was the whole point of this childish exhibition of yours." The bit about me not finding it pleasant was a TOTAL lie of course, it was pleasant to a mind-blowing degree, and easily capable of blowing something else of mine had it not been for my wonderful new ability to control that part of my anatomy. I'd be using Annette's kiss as a jack-off fantasy for the rest of my life. Yet another of my minds couldn't resist adding, "And speaking of childish exhibitions, you might want to get changed before a teacher sees what a fool you've made of yourself by dressing that way." #4: I stood up and walked off without looking back. I realized after a few steps that I was walking the wrong way for my next class and that I'd left my bag and books behind, but carrying on seemed the best idea. Thus I never saw how Annette made her escape, but I certainly heard all the laughter that followed her. Other than the group of Queen-suck-ups she'd brought with her, no one else had been on her side as plenty of the crowd had seen or received her cruelty before. They did not stint on their laughter. I wandered away for a couple few minutes, to collect myself as much as to let her clear the area, then I cut back to get my gear. I started receiving plenty of back slaps, congratulations, and the like. Adam, true to form, said, "Dude, if that'd been me I would've blown off in me jockeys. So cool." If I'd been just one of me, I would've done that too. News of the incident must've spread around school like wildfire because I was getting congratulations from all over the place. Many from people I didn't know. It was safe to assume they knew Annette because there are no blind students at our school, but what puzzled me was that they knew who I was, as indicated by their knowing which back to slap. Apparently Egg - a name I heard dozens of times that morning, as in "Way to go Egg!" - was somewhat better known than I'd thought. Who would've guessed! I'd become somewhat more than a nobody. ^ Two hours later I rounded a corner and walked into a giant slab of meat. It picked me up by the neck and carried me into the nearby boys' bathroom, where it told me off for humiliating his girlfriend. I'm sure he didn't use the word "humiliating" as that had far too many syllables, but I couldn't make out what he said over the ringing in my ears caused by the impacts of his fist on my head. Apparently Biff (or whatever his name was. Aren't they all called Biff?) was not pleased because he did a damned good job on me, then left me lying on the bathroom floor. I skipped my next class. Actually, there was very little "skipping" involved; I "lay still and groaned" my next class. I did eventually recover mid-period, but decided I liked the idea of sitting quietly for the rest of it as I still hurt. At the time I was being pummeled, I'd thought I was going to have to go home or even to the hospital, but after a good rest I tidied myself up and painfully headed to my next class. I guess years of experience at getting beat up had helped. Lunch, and after lunch, were repeats of all the congratulatory calls, handshakes and backslaps. I really could have done without the backslaps as my back felt like it was covered in bruises from the kicks I'd received when lying on the bathroom floor. I was walking down a hallway mid-afternoon when I felt an incredible pain in my side. I fell to the floor in agony. On the way down I looked back and there was another giant slab of meat standing beside me. The bastard had just rabbit punched me in a place that hurt like fuck. He knelt down beside me and asked in a loud voice, "Are you okay?" Meanwhile his knee, with all his weight on it, was grinding into my forearm. He leaned over and whispered, "That's for embarrassing my girlfriend." How many boyfriends did the Bitch have? And why did they all have to be so big and violent? He helped me to my feet, damned near removing my entire arm when he did so. "There you are", he said loudly. "Stay away from her," he whispered. I made a mental note to do what he suggested. I stood there a bit shaken while he rolled away. Collecting myself, I asked the guy next to me if he knew who that big guy walking away was. "One of our offensive linesman. He's good too. He likes to be called Biff after that guy in 'Back To The Future'." "Thanks." Mental note to self: Never EVER try out for the football team. Unless I changed my name to Biff first, as that'd probably confuse them enough. The rest of the school day was uneventful, and more importantly, un-injurious. I walked through it gingerly, but managed. I did not see Annette, and was happy that I had abided by Biff#2's instruction. I met my sisters at the bike rack as usual, and they were both full of questions about the Annette put-down. Both of them had heard all about it, several times, and were thrilled to be associated to the hero by birth. We were riding home together with the girls still asking me questions, when a car overtook us and suddenly swerved into the bike lane RIGHT in front of us. I was between the girls so there was no way I could swerve until they did. They managed to peel off, but by then I had no time left so my bike and I crashed straight into the side of the car. Several slabs of meat piled out of the car and one of them - who, for the sake of convenience, I'll call Biff#3 - advanced straight at me. "You pissed off my girl, asshole, which means you've pissed me off. You gonna pay for that." Whereupon he immediately started in on my payment plan. As my head spun around a few times, I caught sight of Donna screaming and charging in to save me. One of the spare slabs pushed her down and sat on her. Carol just stood there watching. After a short while, which felt like a long while, Biff#3 put in a few last hard kicks, they got in their car and drove off. Carol told Donna to go into the nearest house to call for the police and an ambulance, and Donna shot off to do so. Carol opened her book bag, took out a pen, and started writing. By the time the police arrived Carol had written down the car's plate number and descriptions of all four assholes. From their jersey numbers (morons!) down to facial features. Biff#3 had: "thick lips, a narrow nose, a mole on his right ear." I didn't know all this as I was in far too much pain to notice. That I had a broken right forearm was obvious to all, especially me. The ambulance guys did their job really well, especially the painkilling part of their job; they did that wonderfully. The ambulance took me to the hospital. I had bruises from top to bottom from the three assaults. I had been punched and kicked all over, an arm broken, and who knows what else. I didn't need to tell them any of that, they could see it when my shirt was removed, and they followed the bruises south far enough to take my jeans off too. During my admission, several tests were ordered. I had been hit in the head several times - there were plenty of bruises and bleeding bits to attest to that - and an MRI was included. When I heard that mentioned I objected. The A&E doctor ignored my refusal so I repeated it REALLY loudly, which got his attention. I repeated my refusal again, and he said he'd talk with my parents about it. The first tests were just getting under way when Dad arrived, quickly followed by Mom. Upon Mom's arrival, and once the initial parental comments were out of the way, I said, "Mom, Dad, I do NOT want an MRI. I SERIOUSLY do not want it. I have my reasons and they are VERY strong ones." I looked straight and hard at Mom. After she realized that I was very serious, I added, "It's not necessary for me to have one done. A black eye and busted lip aren't big deals. They're just ordering it out of habit. I have no head injury symptoms, my head feels fine. I do not need an MRI and I do not want it." The doctor started in with, "They're perfectly safe, you've got nothing to worry about." Mom looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then turned to face the doctor and held up her palm, stopping him in mid-sentence. "We refuse consent. You may not MRI his head." The doctor opened his mouth to argue, but Dad preempted him with that wonderful expression: "What part of 'No' don't you understand?" Dad wouldn't have understood why I didn't want it, but he was happy to back Mom up. Mom was very aware that my intelligence was somewhere north of extraordinary (she was wrong, but that didn't matter now). She was willing to do as I asked, no doubt intending to ask me about my refusal at the first opportunity, and get the MRI reinstated if she wasn't convinced. The Doc gave up. I guess he had more important things to worry about than parents who need to get their head examined. As soon as the doctor left, Mom asked me about my refusal. By then I'd prepared my answer, "Mom, I know MRIs are safe, I wasn't worried about that. I am worried that if they scan my brain they might get intrigued and want to investigate further. I know there's something amazingly special about my brain, and I very much don't want them to get excited about it. Maybe no harm would come of it, but maybe it would, and there's no need for us to take that risk. I just got punched around; it's no big deal. My brain is my business; not theirs. They can play with it all they want after I've finished with it." There was the predictable, "Are you sure..." and "What if..."-type comments, but Mom agreed to stick to my guns for the moment. I didn't seem to be brain damaged, but she'd revisit her decision if anything happened to make an MRI seem useful. One of the useful consequences of Mom working in the medical field is that she doesn't unhesitatingly obey doctors the way most people do, so standing up to one wasn't difficult for her. The other tests were performed, I was treated, and the hospital decided to keep me in for observation for a day or two. ------- Meanwhile the police had easily identified the culprits from Carol's descriptions. Heck, they knew most of their names just from their jersey numbers. Their car was found at the first place the cops looked: the registered address of the car's owner. They were being talked to even before my tests had started. It was obviously going to be a simple case. The cops already had Carol's notes, Donna had clawed the guy who'd sat on her, which would've provided DNA evidence from under her fingernails had it been needed. The cops had taken the samples but hadn't bothered ordering the tests because there were so many other witnesses. The witnesses hadn't been on the spot initially, but everyone had been going home from school so there'd been plenty of other kids arriving during the 'fight', who'd easily identified the culprits and their car. The perpetrators' defense that I'd ridden into their car and damaged it wasn't worth the paper it was briefly noted on. ^ The next event of consequence was the next evening, a Thursday. My whole family came to visit me accompanied by a couple of cops. The police hadn't interviewed me yet as they preferred to do so in my parents' presence, and my parents had requested that it be done after they got off work. The police weren't fussed, as neither the assailants nor I were going anywhere, and they had no shortage of other witnesses to interview. After the introductions, they started asking me questions about the incident. It didn't take me long to realize that they had no idea that "the incident" was the third of the day. I told them about Annette Neumeyer and Biffs #1, 2 and 3. It got them very interested. The carload of meats had all dummied up - they didn't know many words anyway - so they hadn't implicated anyone else. Neither Carol nor Donna had heard Biff#3's comment about my pissing off his girlfriend, so it hadn't occurred to them that Annette had any role to play, and no one else the police had talked to knew of the Biff#1 and #2 attacks. So my story widened the investigation considerably. I truthfully answered every subsequent question they asked me. They never asked any hard questions, like, "How is it possible that your cock was soft after Annette rubbed all over you?" How many minds I had never came up in conversation either, so that was good. Otherwise, I had no hesitation in describing every Biff attack in as much detail as I could remember, and with four memories, I could remember damned near everything. The Biffs were perfect examples of the asshole-jock-bullies that had tormented me for years. Revenge was sweet, Baby. ^ [To jump ahead and explain most of the future developments of the case. Annette was quickly added to the investigation. It was soon discovered that after her sexual harassment of me - that's how the police initially classified it, and there were MANY enthusiastic witnesses to the effect - she'd gone home to get changed, then had returned to school. She'd gone around all her boyfriends complaining about me. Her boyfriends knew about each other, but she had each of them convinced that he was her favorite and main boyfriend, proving yet again how moronic football jocks are. There was considerable speculation, especially media speculation, over whether to charge her with a sexual crime for her uninvited kiss and blatant rubbing of my genitalia, especially as she was legally an adult at eighteen and I was a minor. That the alleged sexual assailant was a gorgeous, 18-year old female, and the 'victim' (cough, cough) a 15-year old male, certainly stimulated a great deal of prurient public interest. Of more interest to the police, although less to the local newspaper, was the question about whether she'd incited the various Biffs to violence. The police eventually decided not to file any charges against Annette. It appeared that although she had complained to her boyfriends about me, she hadn't asked them to attack me. The Biffs had each worked out that clever idea all by themselves. The cops didn't have any trouble believing that three jocks could arrive at the same basic plan independently, as beating someone up is pretty much the only plan jocks know. A sexual charge against Annette was problematic because I hadn't tried to fight her off. I'd even left my hands by my side while she was writhing all over me. So, legally speaking, she got off. She lost in every other sense though. She was expelled from school. She was never charged with anything, but the expulsion was for her extreme dress violation (much reported on, as a couple of the guys had managed to snap highly cherished photos with their cellphones), leaving school without permission, repeated lewd behaviors, bringing the school into disrepute, and a few other concocted excuses. In reality her expulsion was because of my IQ. The assailants had the book thrown at them because I was so smart. The media had a great deal of fun with the story, and did so by deliberately casting Annette in a bad light because that was more entertaining and would sell more papers. It turned Annette into the laughing stock of the whole town. They published several photos of her, so she was recognized and ridiculed wherever she went. All three of her boyfriends had been arrested and were in trouble, and no other boy would be seen dead talking to her. It didn't take long for Annette Neumeyer to decide to go to a school in a different city, where there'd be no chance of her being a Queen B for the rest of her senior year. [[Actually, she tried to claim great social importance, and even did quite well the first few days, then one of her rivals googled "Annette Neumeyer" and the mocking attitude of the widely distributed copies of the newspaper stories ruined Annette's attempt to climb her new school's social ladder.]] Meanwhile, Biffs #1 and #2 were "helping police with their inquiries." Several weeks later, Biff#3 got sentenced to a lengthy stretch of jail time. Biffs #1 and #2 (I learned their real names, but who cares), as well as the meat that sat on Donna - his charge sheet read: "assaulted Miss Donna Anderson, female, aged 12 years" - escaped jail time, but they did end up with assault convictions. It was a highly publicized case so the cops didn't go soft on them. The two other occupants of the car hadn't actually attacked anyone, so they were just convicted of aiding the assault and subsequent flight from the scene of the crime. All the Biffs and the spare meats were expelled from school.] ^ After interviewing me in my hospital room, the detectives left. Once things had settled down, Carol said, "A girl called Julia Williams talked to me today at school?" Carol had a strange look on her face, and clearly expected some unusual response from me, but I had no idea what. I said, "She's in some of my classes. A nice girl; pretty and extremely smart. Very bossy though. Why was she talking to you?" "She wanted to find out if what you said about her was true." "When did I say anything about her?" "Didn't you tell Annette that 'Julia Williams is a wonderful girl', and that she 'pushed your buttons'?" "That's right, I did! I'd forgotten that." I'd forgotten because I'd plucked Julia's name out of thin air to throw at Annette, then hadn't given her another thought. "That story's all over school, and she's definitely heard about it. Probably a hundred times by now. Julia knows all about her effect on your buttons." "Uh oh." I felt very embarrassed. Julia wasn't the slightest bit special to me and had no more effect on my buttons than any of the hundreds of other pretty girls at school, any one of which I would've been delighted to have play with my buttons, or even just one button (my buttons are desperate). Don't get me wrong, Julia's a nice girl, and pretty, it's just that I'd never had anything to do with her. If anything, I tend to avoid her as she's a very in-your-face sort of person, something she manages to achieve despite being significantly shorter than everyone else. We'd never talked, and I only knew her from seeing her in class. I should have written that Julia and I had "never talked normally". She'd several times talked AT me, but she does that to everyone. Julia is - I'll diplomatically say - "busy" in school. She LOVES to organize things, and especially to organize people. She intrudes on everyone's consciousness so often it wasn't surprising that hers was the first semi-random name I thought to use against Annette. Julia is pretty, but not A-list pretty, and she doesn't participate in the Queen Bitch games. She has no figure to speak of, being very slim. She's also very smart which might've been a good dig at Annette's stupidity if Annette knew that much about Julia, which she probably did because Julia gets into as many faces as she can. I'd used Julia's name purely because it was believable that I might find her more attractive than Annette, but in ways opposite to Annette, which I'd hoped would be a slap in her face. As is clear from my description of Julia, there was no romantic or button-oriented connection between us. I was surprised she even knew I existed, other than as a class member she sometimes unsuccessfully tried to get involved in her various projects. So I asked Carol, "Why did she approach you?" "She wanted to know if it was true what you said about her. That you said she was wonderful." "I hope she wasn't too angry. It really was stupid of me to mention her name in public like that, and I'm really sorry I dragged her into this mess. Can you please find her tomorrow and tell her that I'm very sorry, and that I'll apologize to her in person when I get back to school." With a smile on her face Carol said, "I could do that, but I think she'd prefer it if you asked her for a date." I'd been terribly hasty in refusing the MRI, as I obviously did have brain damage after all. My whole family was laughing at me about it. "What! Why would she want that? I doubt she even knows I exist, apart from all the embarrassment I caused her by using her name." "That's where you're wrong, Egg," that was first time anyone in my family had used that nickname, and I could see that Mom and Dad were a little puzzled by it. Donna wasn't though. "She knows who you are. A lot of people know who you are, especially the people who value intelligence and studying, which includes Julia from what I've heard about her. You're so smart that people are in awe of you, you study hard, and you float around the soccer field like a dream. -- "But that's the least of it. Let me tell you as a girl that when the most beautiful girl in school dresses like a slut, rubs herself all over you, kisses you as if her life depended on it, and it has no effect on you at all; but you tell everyone that Julia Williams is wonderful and she turns you on, that got her attention BIG time, Big Brother. I bet you got her panties wet too." "CAROL!" exclaimed Mom in shock. Accompanied by a loud laugh from Donna and a chuckle from Dad. I guess he'd caused more than a few wet panties in his time, and wasn't shocked at all. I liked to think he was a little bit proud though. I liked to think that a LOT! -- Before I could recover from my shock, Mom added, "Carol, you shouldn't be talking to your brother like that." Carol looked down bashfully, but with a smile on her face she said, "I'm teaching him a lesson about girls." "You certainly are!" I got my words in, "Teach me about Julia then. She's sixteen and she's beautiful." Finding out Julia fancied me had instantly upgraded my opinion of her looks from pretty to beautiful. That's what happens inside a boy's mind whenever he learns that a girl might have wet panties for him. "She could get any guy she wanted, so why would she want a date with me?" "Maybe she's smart. You did very good with Annette. I know you got beaten up and that part wasn't good, but you definitely got Julia's attention and interest. She wants a date with you. She's nervous about it, but she wants one. I think she's scared of how smart you are." Drawing on my many years of English education, I said, "Oh." I'd picked Julia's name out of the air so it certainly wasn't fair to let her think romantically about me. Clearly the right thing to do was ask Carol to let Julia know as soon as possible that it was all a mistake. Did I do the right thing? Good God NO! A date with a beautiful, 16-year old girl WHOSE PANTIES I (might) GET WET! Do you think I'm INSANE! I just about wet my own panties with excitement. All four of my minds were leaping for joy, not an honorable soul among them. "Oh boy. I've never had a date before, and she's WAY out of my league. What do I do? HELP!" Mom laughed - that was nice of her - then added, "Your father's the expert at dating teenage girls. He's a little out of practice now, but I'm sure he can remember a pointer or two that he'd love to pass on. -- "No worries, Mark, we'll all help you. Let's hold the date off for a few days so you can recover. You'll be too sore to enjoy yourself for a while anyway. Carol can tell Julia that you'll ask her out and that you're looking forward to the date. That's a safe assumption isn't it?" "GOD YES!" That earned me a few more laughs. "Okay. We'll ask Julia to leave you alone for a few days, until you're back in school, and that you'll talk with her then. Okay?" "Very okay, Mom." I prefer tall, blond, and most importantly, big-titted girls; so naturally Julia was short, dark-haired and very small-titted. That's how my life goes. But as Mom would say, "Beggars can't be choosers." When it comes to girls, I was the most impoverished, desperate beggar imaginable. ^ A doctor checked me over not long afterward, and pronounced himself very happy with my progress. He even seemed somewhat surprised how quickly my bruises had faded, and how much better I was now. My years of experience at getting beaten up coming in useful again. He discharged me, and we all went home that evening. Carol met with Julia the next day, and as instructed, assured her that I was looking forward to asking her for a date when I got back to school. Julia later told me that Carol's exact words were, "Mark's buttons can't wait to have a date with you." Not the phrasing I would've chosen, and quite surprising wording for Carol to use, but certainly accurate. Julia was fine with the plan of her leaving me alone for a few days so I could recover before our first meeting. Carol and Julia exchanged phone numbers, and I later learned, a GREAT deal of personal information about me. I had Friday off school and then it was the weekend. By mid-Saturday it was clear that I would be recovered enough to go to school on Monday, so on Sunday Carol called Julia to let her know to meet me outside the school gates early Monday morning, rather than have me approach her in a crowded classroom. I spent some time having a serious talk with Dad about how to talk with girlfriends, in the hope that I might have one soon, as hard to believe as that was. On Monday morning Mom drove us all to school. Bike riding was a bit difficult with my right arm in a cast and sling, so Mom said she'd take me to school the first few days. The girls weren't going to miss out on this meeting, so they piled into the car too. We parked and they all - even Mom - waited a small distance away while I approached the nervously smiling Julia to speak my carefully prepared and rehearsed speech. I took a deep breath and recited, "Julia. First of all I would like to apologize to you for using your name in my confrontation with Annette. It could've caused you great embarrassment and it was inconsiderate of me to do so. In my defense, Annette did have me somewhat flustered at the time, but nonetheless it was wrong of me and I am ashamed that I let it slip. -- "However, I am reliably informed by my lovely sister - the one with the straining ears just over there - that you were flattered rather than embarrassed. As surprised as I am by that, I'm going to seize the moment and ask you to come on a date with me. Would you be my date this Friday please?" Phew, and big replacement breath. "I would be delighted to." Julia grabbed my hand and walked me into school, commenting, "That was easy." To tell you the truth, it was easy. One lesson I'd learned from the Annette encounter was that I could control my nervousness. Heartbeat, perspiration, and all the other symptoms were controllable. Getting rid of those made asking Julia for a date much easier. I only had to worry about my mental state, and my family had helped me prepare over the weekend, so that was quite easy too. I was sufficiently relaxed that I could add the impromptu bit about Carol's straining ears. Knowing - although not quite believing - that Julia was going to say "Yes" helped even more. One of Dad's recent lessons in girlfriend treatment was to act on opportunities to convey an honest compliment, so I said, "It was hard enough, but thank you for making it so easy." Julia seemed surprised by my answer. After a hesitation, she grabbed my arm even closer, and I didn't even think to look back at my family as I floated up the stairs. Julia added an after-thought, "I've a feeling things might continue to be easy for you." That sounded REALLY good! I just wished I knew EXACTLY what it meant. And then I wished I could believe it because it sounded too good to be true. As much as I wanted to believe it, I must've misunderstood, probably as a result of my brain damage. ------- Chapter 13: Back at School with Julia Monday, March 28 to Thursday, March 31, 2005 Julia walked me into school, firmly attached to my good arm. I felt no pain whatsoever. We were early, but the school was filling quickly. Virtually everyone knew who we were. I was aware by now that the press were ALL OVER this story. It'd been front-page news day after day because prurience sells big time. The press had been bothering us repeatedly at home, annoying Mom and Dad several times. Julia's role in the Annette incident was very well known around school, and she got lots of inquiries about the state of my buttons. She handled these inquiries with considerably aplomb. My favorite was, "Mark's buttons are no one's business but mine." Said with a promising smile on her face. It was a HUGE improvement over their being no one's business. They were very happy buttons. I got even more attention. All of it good-natured and it felt great. I knew for certain that I was no longer a nobody in this school. Everybody knew who I was, and that I was sitting with my arm around one of the prettiest girls in school. Life was great! I had nothing to fear from any of the participants in the assaults: the Biffs, Annette or the spare meats from the car. None of them was at school, having been either suspended or expelled already. None were in custody as their parents had bailed them, but they'd all been warned to stay away from school and me. Even jocks wouldn't be stupid enough to do that where every kid would recognize them. Nor was I worried about the other jocks attempting anything. They'd ALL - with no excuses accepted - been summoned to a special meeting at school on Saturday afternoon. Their parents had been urged to attend, and most did. Some Department of Education big wigs, the Principal, all their coaches and some policemen had collectively read the jocks the riot act, including warning them to not even think about trying to hassle me. They were strongly advised to run the other way if they saw me coming. Jocks in my classes - not that many 10th graders were serious jock material yet - were singled out for especially fierce treatment over whether they could be trusted to behave. The grilling helped reinforce the idea that misbehaving would be an exceptionally bad choice. They were yelled at, threatened, lectured to, over and over again, until - even as dumb and testosterone pumped as they were - they got the message that their lives would be ruined if a hair on my head was disturbed. The school's reaction was WAY over the top because of my 226 IQ. Much to my regret the short football season was over already, so having six jocks kicked out of school didn't have any serious affect on the rest of the team. If football had been played for all of the school year, as my school does with soccer, it would've ruined the jocks' final games as Annette's boyfriends had all been star players (that'd been her criterion for picking them; nothing less than the best for her. What her sole criterion lacked in intelligence, she made up for with quantity). I couldn't even cheer myself up with thoughts that the football team's next season would be damaged, as most of the six assholes were seniors so wouldn't have been back anyway. I knew about this meeting, as the Principal had called to ask Mom to ask me whether I wanted the soccer team to be 'invited' too. I easily said "No" to that. My soccer teammates were the opposite of the football jocks. I wish I'd been there to see the football players' meeting though, as I would've REALLY enjoyed it. ^ One meeting that I didn't know about at the time happened the Friday morning after "The Annette Neumeyer Incident". After my little bombshell to the detectives on Thursday evening at the hospital - that Annette, Biff#1 and Biff#2 had also assaulted me; each in his or her own way fortunately - Mom had stormed into the school the next morning, demanded to see the Principal, who hadn't dared refuse to see her, whereupon Mom tore him a new one. She ripped him up, then ripped him down. A 15-year old boy had been sexually assaulted by a senior, then physically assaulted twice on school property, and then again on the way home from school by four more members of the same school team, all of the assaults carried out by guys who weighed twice what I did, and most of whom were seniors. The school had not only failed to stop any of the assaults, but it didn't even know about them afterward. It was inexcusable! And not just any 15-year old boy, but a certifiable genius. A 226 IQ student who was screaming through the school syllabus and was clearly going on to be of national importance, if not international importance. Mom demanded that he explain how six members of the same school team, even while wearing their jerseys, could commit crimes of violence. "What sort of training does this school give its football players that so many of them believe criminal assaults are acceptable?" Mom was screaming at him, and the Principal had to take it. He tried to downplay it as "Boys will be boys," but Mom wasn't standing for that crap! Six members of the same school team had committed three separate crimes of violence, so clearly the school was at fault. Plus some of the "boys" were legally adults. Mom gave the Principal a VERY hard time, and there wasn't anything he could say to stop her. Immediately after she left his office, Mom called the Corvallis Board of Education, informed them of additional assaults carried out by Annette, Biff#1 and #2, and then screamed at them for a while. The Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education had known of my IQ test result even before I did, and had been excitedly following my academic achievements ever since, and both had already sent a couple of people to the school to talk with the Principal about the Biff#3 assault. News of the additional assaults was sent to these people, who then went back to the school and piled into the Principal yet again. Then the police following up on my interview arrived to grill the Principal. They were less than impressed by his previous ignorance of the assaults, other than what Mom had screamed at him, and his inability to explain why six members of the football team had been so violent. The Principal had to call in the football coaches. (Jocks are so stupid they need several coaches. There's one for telling them how to run forward, another for telling them how to stand still, etc.) The coaches spent a very unpleasant time trying to explain how such a large proportion of the one team could be criminals. That led to the previously mentioned Saturday meeting/riot-act-reading. All things considered, the Principal was not having a good week. I didn't know about these behind-the-scenes activities. For example, I had no idea that the Oregon Board of Education had ever heard of me, let alone were sending people to Corvallis because of me. I hadn't realized the impact an IQ score of 226 followed by my substantiating academic achievements would have. People had noticed and had been watching. After the assaults, some of these people started standing over the Principal's shoulder and watching a lot closer. This is why the six meats and Annette were expelled from school so rapidly: the Principal had to be seen to be doing something. I was thankful that the press never cottoned on to how smart I was. I was repeatedly described as "an honors student", even though there was no formal reality behind that title. My IQ score, unbeknownst to me, was reasonably well known within the education system, but not 'without it' (that should be the opposite of "within it"; blame English if it's not). One of the words that Mom particular enjoyed yelling at anyone to do with the school was "sue". Several lawyers had already called Mom and Dad to offer their services for a suitable percentage. We hadn't retained any, but that didn't stop Mom yelling the word. She got particular enjoyment from watching the reaction it got. My school already had a reputation for being lax on bullying, so they were on very thin ice in terms of defending themselves from such a suit. The Corvallis Board of Education volunteered to pay all my medical bills. I even got a new bike out of it too, as the front wheel of mine had been damaged hitting the car. That was excessive, but I think deliberately so, as a result of Mom's use of that highly feared, three-lettered word. So you can imagine how forcefully the football jocks were told to leave me alone in their Saturday meeting! ------- On the topic of the meetings that resulted from my being assaulted, I'll jump ahead a couple of days. There was yet another meeting in my home on the Wednesday evening after I'd returned to school, to discuss my future educational needs. Present were my parents and me, two people from the Oregon Board of Education, a representative of the Corvallis Board, the Principal and the high school's Deputy Principal. It soon became apparent that our school's Principals were there so they knew what they were required to do. In effect to say "Yes" to anything we decided, and then to make sure it happened. Their opinions were not sought, in part because in Mom's first tirade to the Corvallis Board's people had let 'slip' how difficult the Principal had made it for me to advance a year. I was presented with a list of educational options. Everything from home-study with or without tutors supplied by the state; changing schools to either a public or private school; or staying where I was, changing to the 11th grade or not. The choice was wide open. There was a considerable amount of discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of each possibility, and no shortage of advice from those who, in their opinion, knew what was best for my future. To be fair, they probably did know what was best, but it made no difference to me. The educationalists couldn't, and my parents wouldn't, force a decision on me, which meant it was my decision. That made most of the meeting a total waste of time because I was staying EXACTLY where I was: in the same school as my girlfriend of three days. That might not have been the most mature decision I could have made, but I was happy to live with the consequences. In fact, I was eagerly looking forward to them, my buttons especially so. That decision having been made - although I might have been somewhat vague about my reasons - we ended up agreeing that I would carry on in my current classes, and would continue self-studying next year's material too. I was promised that I'd be allowed to take both sets of exams at year end, and my 11th grade results would be entirely dependent on its exams so I wouldn't be penalized for not having done coursework during the year. We'd discuss what grade I got into next year after getting the 11th grade results. I was told that if I changed my mind, or had any other request, not to hesitate to ask the Principal. And then he was told to say "Yes" to anything I asked for. That might have been a bit theatrical, but it got the right sort of message across to both of us. There was also a little meeting at school, where my teachers from both years were encouraged to provide me with every assistance, and if they felt they didn't have enough resources to help me as best they could, not to hesitate to ask the Principal. That the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education would be frequently checking up on everyone involved with me was made clear to my teachers. I was given better access to next year's teachers, and was 'allowed to', if I wished, do their assignments and take their quizzes, that not the sort of thing that would normally be thought of as desirable. Mostly I didn't, as the main purposes of those things didn't apply to me: to check I was doing the work, making sure I was remembering it, finding gaps in my comprehension, etc. With four minds on the job, those weren't issues for me in most of my subjects. I did have to check with the 11th grade English teacher unreasonably frequently, as there's often no way of telling what some 'clever' things mean in English. I had known that the ability to make my cock go soft on demand was going to make my life better, but I'd never dreamed it was going to make it this good this quickly: it'd gotten me a great deal of special treatment, made me a somebody, and earned me a gorgeous girlfriend! It really is a WONDERFUL ability. ------- Anyway, there I was on Monday morning: sitting in school before the first class, surrounded by well-wishers, with my right arm in a sling, my left arm around a very pretty girl, and with a large smile on my face. Possibly the largest smile I had ever had. I could have sat there forever, but the bell for the start of class rang. In my first class the teacher asked, "Will you have any trouble writing, Mark?" "No. I'll be fine. Don't worry about it." When it came time to write something I picked up my pen with my left hand and wrote away as if I had always been left-handed. I could see the teacher look at me doing so, and frown as he puzzled over his previous impression that I was right-handed. I could see him give up on the effort, and it made me smile. Several of my classmates did remember that I was right-handed, so word of my instant left-handedness spread. This built on recent talk about my very weird eyes, plus my occasional random chuckles and some other usual behaviors that resulted from my four-way mind. Out of such incidents the "Egg" reputation grew. ^ [As a little expansion on the weird eye issue mentioned just above. In class I was routinely using one eye to watch the teacher, and the other to do whatever other work I wanted to catch up on, usually either 11th grade reading or 10th grade homework. Nearly all the time my head was facing down because I was either writing on, or reading from, pages on my desk, with just the one eyeball looking up at the teacher. My head's position meant not many people could see both eyeballs at the same time, but they could occasionally, and the people sitting on the side of my teacher-watching eye could see me writing or turning pages of a book while apparently looking at the board. The "E" of my nickname was very well established by now. It nearly got even weirder in class one day, before my arm was broken, when the mind that was reading from an 11th grade textbook picked up a pen and started making notes in the margin. One of the non-studying minds quickly pointed out that another mind was also writing notes with the other hand at the same time. I often wrote with both hands in my room at home so it wasn't something I paid much attention to, but I thought it was too strange for school. I immediately stopped and put all but one pen back into my bag. Fortunately no one noticed. Thereafter I kept only one pen on my desk.] ------- I quickly found out that my new girlfriend - I LOVED thinking that - had a life that was VERY different from mine. I was amazed she had time for doing any schoolwork at all because she was involved in God knows how many other activities. Julia was attached to my arm, which meant I got dragged from meeting to meeting. I lost track of how many times she said to me, "Oh there's [whomever]. I have to talk with him/her about [whatever]." Whereupon I'd be dragged across a room yet again. She was in clubs, societies, committees and subcommittees, for both in-school and out-of-school activities. As far as I could tell, if someone somewhere was thinking about organizing something, Julia wanted to know about it, and preferably be in charge of it. Whenever I was with her, she was in an almost constant flurry of activity, except for those inconvenient periods called "class" when the teachers insisted on everyone paying attention to them. [After a few more days of listening to all the stuff Julia was involved in organizing, I wouldn't have been surprised to discover that Corvallis's Mayor and the city council followed her orders. I'd known Julia was a busybody, but I'd had NO IDEA! It would've been quite a worry except that she was my girlfriend (yippee!), and could therefore do no wrong.] The weather didn't permit sitting outside for lunch, so Julia latched onto my arm and we went to the lunchroom. In the past there had never been any interest from anyone else in sitting next to me. Today was very different. Even before Julia and I had found a table, a large crowd of people started gathering around us, the lucky ones, they seemed to think, managing to get a seat near us. To my surprise, Carol arrived a few minutes later. Normally middle-school students eat in their own lunchroom, but Carol explained that she'd come to ours in case I wasn't managing with one arm, which was very nice of her, especially given how hungry I get these days. She quickly saw that I was fine, and even if I hadn't been, there were plenty of volunteers who would've helped me, if they'd been able to beat Julia to the task. That was unlikely, given how close to me Julia was sitting. It was wonderful. The trouble was that there was no spare seat at our table. I asked for the people on my right to scoot over to make room for Carol next to me, but they weren't willing to be 'demoted' further from my august presence - sheesh! I tried a couple of times to get them to move, without success. Then Julia loudly took over. In seconds she had them scooted sideways far enough to let Carol insert a chair next to me. It was a nice lunch. Carol had fun teasing me by telling Julia about how much I eat, but she also made sure I had plenty to eat too, which I appreciated. So Julia started making sure that I was eating plenty, which I appreciated even more. Carol's advice to Julia included, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. This man has a good heart, but he has an incredible stomach, so you've got your work cut out for you." There were several quips of that nature, mostly designed to tease me rather than inform Julia, as Carol had already passed on a great deal of detailed information about me to Julia. The girls got along well together, happily chatting back and forth across me, usually at my expense. We kind of tuned everyone else out, and were happy just with each other; and in my case, with my food. It was a pleasure to ignore the other kids as they were just repeating the same stuff over and over again, about my put-down of Annette, my beatings, and the newspaper stories about them. That was already very tiresome after the repetitions in all of my classes this morning. When I was busy eating, and often when I wasn't, Julia and Carol chatted back and forth with each other. Even though there was a three-year gap between the girls, they had no difficulty working together to tease me. Julia was hugging my arm so it didn't matter what the girls said, I enjoyed it anyway. When I was talked to, I talked back. That sounds trivially obvious, but not long ago I would've been tongue-tied and red-faced. I would've stammered then scurried away after a few seconds, probably tripping over something on the way. This was better. It's not in my nature to initiate conversation much, but when someone talks to me now, my having four minds on the job means one of them can usually think of something good to say back. The greatest change to my attitude - as demonstrated with Annette - is that I no longer feel very self-conscious. I have so many consciouses now that I am no longer a lonely "self". I'm much more confident now than I used to be, which was a total lack of confidence, and I observe people a great deal, so I've learned a lot. I'm sure that even if all my extra minds suddenly left me, I'd not revert to the tongue-tied, red-face boy I used to be. I'd lose every one of the "Egg" letters, but my personality had already changed. #1: It really is hard to believe my good luck sometimes. What a life! I had a sudden urge to act on another of Dad's pieces of advice: to express heartfelt thank yous to a girlfriend whenever I felt the urge. I turned to Julia and said, "Julia, I'd like to say thank you very, very much for being my girlfriend. I can't believe how lucky I am. That you're willing to be with a boy who's younger than you and very inexperienced says very good things about your motivation and character. You're a wonderful person and I am so glad that I know you." For the first time during lunch, both the girls were quiet, stuck in an "Aw, shucks" moment. Julia looked down, then looked straight up into my eyes with a completely different expression on her face. Her eyes were moist. She grasped my left arm with both of her hands, and just hugged me, looked at me, and said nothing. It was a great moment. Carol told me, "You may think you've been lucky already, but I think there's some more luck coming your way soon." Julia took a second to process what Carol has just said, then she smiled, caught my attention. With her eyes twinkling (how do they do that?), she nodded very deliberately. #3: #4: #1: Carol laughed and gave me a quick but careful hug (she was sitting on my broken arm's side). The "moist eye" mood broken, we returned to normal. I had been anyway, but now I was even MORE eager for Friday's date. With more thought, I began doubting that I'd read Julia's signal correctly - my signal-reading skill not being well practiced - as her being that easy seemed so unlike any girl I'd ever heard of. Julia had NEVER acted slutishly or sexually easy at school (I would've noticed any girl in my class doing that), but it was a great feeling that I might possibly be "getting lucky" however Julia meant that - it still sounded wonderful. [[Carol and Julia had been talking to each other a great deal more than I was aware. Julia knew far more about me than I thought she did, and Carol knew far more about Julia's feelings for me than I knew myself. Because of a massive misunderstanding of Julia's (it'll come up later), she had some serious plans for me. And because of what Carol had told Julia about me, Julia was more confident in her plan than she would've been without Carol's encouragement. Meanwhile I had no idea of anything, including that Julia even had a plan, as I was too focused on being aware that Julia was hugging my arm. There were probably several other things that the girls knew far more about than I did, as I was too busy being happy about having a girlfriend to have a clue about anything else.]] We chatted away happily for the rest of lunch, sometimes including the others who'd sat at our table. That seemed only fair, as they'd sat here so they could talk with the illustrious personages that Julia and I were now (haha). Carol left slightly early as she had a longer walk back to her 'school'. She gave me a nice pat on the shoulder and a, "See you after school, Egg," as she left. In every class that I shared with Julia she organized - her favorite activity - to swap seats with someone so she could sit next to me. I didn't have to do a thing; she got it done. Julia was VERY determined on me. It was a great feeling. I was amused by one aspect of it: The first few times I'd vaguely tried to talk with one of the pretty girls in any of my 10th grade classes, there'd been one or more of the boys who'd at least frowned on it, and sometimes had expressed his displeasure considerably more effectively. That didn't happen at all now. My having humiliated Annette would've helped somewhat, but the main reason was clearly that the guys in the class were afraid of Julia. Seriously! She's a tiny girl, but she has a very large presence and absolutely no compunction about ordering guys twice her size around, and the guys knew that if they got between me and Julia, she'd get in their faces and would very loudly and quickly make them regret it. ------- On Monday and Tuesday, the fame was a bit overwhelming. Other than when class was in session, there was generally a throng of well-wishers around me, all talking at once and asking questions. It was a circus. Fame gets tiresome pretty fast. Articles were appearing in the paper every day, many with pictures of Annette dressed extremely attractively, in addition to the repeatedly printed copies of her in the clothes she'd been in for her "alleged sexual assault" on me (the cops hadn't yet decided not to charge her). She'd evidently been a highly photographed girl. The constant newspaper stories meant many of the students wanted to discuss that morning's story with me. Many of the witnesses to either or both of my encounters with Annette had been interviewed by the police, and they were excited to share their experiences with me too, which was tedious as they were all saying much the same stuff. My parents were getting sick of it too. They were getting lots of phone calls at home, workmates were interrupting their jobs to talk about the case, and those sorts of thing. None of the interruptions was too bad individually, but collectively they added up to a real pain. The thronging was down to more manageable proportions by Wednesday, and its nature changed in another way too. In one such group I became aware of a girl standing close by my left. I vaguely recognized her, although I didn't know her name. She was one or two grades ahead of me; I wasn't sure which. She could even have been in one or more of my 11th grade classes as I didn't go to those classes [I started doing so occasionally after this evening's educational meeting because the school was effectively told to let me do whatever I wanted educationally and it was sometimes helpful for me to attend those classes]. When she saw that she had my attention, the girl leaned forward to push her breasts against me, and said, "I'd love to get to know you better. You should give me a call some time." I felt her hand push a piece of paper into one of my pockets. She gave me a confident smile and walked off. Although I had never been on the receiving end of such an experience before, I recognized what it'd been: she'd made a pass at me. At ME! It was even a premeditated pass as the note was ready. It was also a very sexual one as she hadn't leaned forward AND her breasts touched me, she'd leaned forward TO touch her breasts to me; I could tell the difference somehow, and that difference had my head spinning. There was an excited internal debate about what to do about the girl (did I mention that she'd deliberately pressed her breasts against me!). After a considerable discussion, we had to reluctantly admit that it wasn't going to work. Julia was glued to my arm every moment she could, although her schedule had forced her to be elsewhere at the moment, so there was a great risk of the two of them finding out about each other sooner rather than later. If I dumped Julia in favor of another girl, Mom would kill me. And then Carol probably would too. Mom and Dad had spent a lot of time reassuring me and getting me ready to ask Julia for our first date, and on checking how we were getting along for the last couple of days, so they wouldn't be impressed with my dumping Julia for a new girl, especially because I didn't even know her name. It might be on the note, but Mom was bound to ask me dozens of questions about the new girl, and she wouldn't be too impressed by my answers, regardless of how much I'd enjoyed being (im)pressed by the girl's pass at me. Although I REALLY like the new girl, whatever her name is, and her attitude couldn't be faulted, I was going to have to reluctantly pass on the pass. As I was sadly not going to "get to know her better", the only question remaining was what to do about her. Do I ignore her? Call her and say "No"? Talk with Mom about it? Talk with Julia about it? I had no idea of the correct etiquette, but I could easily imagine doing something terribly wrong. How best to turn down sexual invitations from pretty girls was not a subject I'd spent much time learning about. I was imagining all the trouble I could get into, when the best approach occurred to me, #3: I had no doubt that he would. Julia wasn't around, which I guessed the other girl might have planned for, but Julia was in my next class. Having decided what to do, I strode off with a smile on my face, leaving the throng in my wake. We had the "Educational Options" meeting that evening (which I described above), so I didn't have a chance to talk with Dad. To tell you the truth - which I will because I'm a little bit proud of myself over this - I forgot about the girl. I ended up throwing my jeans into the wash and getting them back a couple of days later with a sodden ball of illegible paper in the pocket. I was somewhat sorry about that, but only because I regretted not reading what it said, as it might've been very good for my ego. ------- The next morning, Thursday, Mom told us we were back to biking to school. Being our taxi was disrupting her work too much, and it'd been getting disrupted too much recently. At school, I was suddenly reminded that I needed to talk with Dad, as more girls were paying me more attention. Some of them even seemed what I'll describe as "too interested," ridiculous as that concept is. Some of them even gave me the feeling that they were being predatory. They hadn't swooped on their prey yet, but they were lining it up. It was not a comfortable feeling for the prey because I was worried about Julia's reaction. It didn't take me long to realize that Julia was fully aware of this, and I suspected probably had been since Monday. Her sitting so close to me, holding my arm, and never missing a chance to be beside me, suddenly took on additional meaning; as in: "Stay away, he's mine!" I didn't know what I should do about it. Should I talk with Julia? Try to reassure her? I didn't know, but I was going to talk with Dad asap (asap means "as soon as possible". Dad often says "asap" as a word, pronouncing it "a-sap", so I do too). I noticed that when a pretty girl talked to me, especially a predatory one (I got better at spotting those, or at least thinking that I was better), Julia usually did something to get my attention. She'd give me an extra hug, or ask me a question, or brush dust of my jacket sleeve, or something. So whenever she did something like that, I turned to give her my full attention, even if the other girl was in mid-sentence. I think it was the right message to send to Julia. I didn't let her know that I had gained some understanding of what was going on, as I wasn't brave enough to discuss the issue yet, but showing Julia that whenever she wanted my attention she got all of it seemed like a good move. I hoped it was, as it was the best idea I could come up with. As a result of last evening's educational meeting, my 11th grade teachers were today giving me MUCH more material than I'd had before, as I'd previously been mostly working off library copies of their listed textbooks. That increased my workload for a while, plus I was still trying to catch up on what I'd missed the previous week, but I was going to make damned sure I had a father-son chat with Dad tonight. I had to because the number of girls hitting on me had gotten 'worse' in the sense that I might be forced to do or say something to one of them, which pretty much guaranteed that I'd upset Julia and my entire family. As my sisters, Julia and I were leaving school (Julia also bikes), I was accosted by the press. A reporter and a photographer got in the way of my bike as we were walking them out the school's driveway (the school rule is to push them to the street before mounting, for safety reasons). The reporter stood in front of me and wouldn't stop asking me questions. Every time I tried to get around him, he moved to block me and kept asking questions. The girls were free to go, but not me. I couldn't avoid the asshole because my mobility was hampered by the crowd, my bike, book bag, and having only one usable arm. We were getting more and more pissed off with them. Especially Donna, who built up to a screaming anger, picked up her bike and threw it at the main nuisance. He fell over with her bike on top of him, which created a chance for me to get away. The girls yelled for me to go, but right then a teacher came running down the drive. Kids leaving past us had told the teacher on duty at the gate what was happening. To cut a long story short, the Principal had to be called, and then my parents had to come because the journalist was screaming about being injured by Donna and was threatening to sue everybody but especially the Andersons. So my parents got to yell at the Principal again for not providing a safe environment for the children even on school grounds. The "gentlemen of the press" were defending themselves by loudly proclaiming the "right of the public to know", which everyone else was ignoring. The girls were upset, other than Donna who was livid and wanted to launch more bikes at the assholes. There was a lot of yelling. I heard Dad use the word "clusterfuck" at one stage, which is very unlike him if Mom is nearby. Julia had to leave to ride to her home, the rest of us wasted another hour. Only two things of consequence came out of it: Mom insisted that as the school was doing such a terrible job of providing a safe environment for me, it would be providing us with car transport to and from school every day until the trial was over. Mom making sure to tell the Principal, "If you don't agree, I'll call the Oregon Board of Education yet again." He agreed. One of the driving instructors was subsequently given this job, a guy called Ryan Moore. Donna announced that she was going to learn a martial art. Twice within a week she'd been helpless, the first being the Biff#3 assault, and she was not happy about it. Personally I thought she did great by throwing her bike at the reporter, but she was obviously frustrated not to have done more. By the look of her, anything short of tearing the reporter's head off was unsatisfactory. Donna was only a 12-year old girl, and the idea of her fighting adults may seem somewhat silly, but not to us. Donna is tall for her age, solid, strong, and very capable athletically. She wins prizes in swimming and running, and her various teams value her membership. She was never going to be able to stand up to the size of guy who held her down while Biff#3 took his shots at me, but I wouldn't bet on the media weasels' chances if they make a similar nuisances of themselves in a year or two. I felt sorry for the Principal as he was hardly to blame for the reporters' behavior. But then I remembered that if the Principal had kept a tight rein on the school's jocks in the first place, none of this would've happened, so I stopped feeling sorry for him. I did feel ashamed about how much trouble I was causing my parents. I didn't really feel it was my fault, but it was still always me at the center of it. I resolved to try my best to cause as little future disruption as I could. [Something I spectacularly failed at.] ------- Chapter 14: Planning My First Date Thursday, March 31, 2005 (Continued) Dinner and the dishes were finished later than normal, and I was about to talk with Dad about the problems caused by predatory girls, when I was buttonholed by all the females to talk about my date tomorrow. #3: If I wrote that, "I was looking forward to it", that'd be the same as saying, "the Pacific Ocean is damp." I had spent years desperately longing for tomorrow night. I would've been wildly excited by a date with anyone, let alone Julia: a 16-year old beauty who'd hinted that 'things' might be easily going my way. Plus she'd been very affectionate and there'd been heaps of clingy, physical contact. I didn't exactly have a lot of experience to draw on, but all that seemed to be very encouraging; the "getting lucky" nod especially so. We hadn't kissed yet, just plenty of handholding and arm grabbing. Especially the arm grabbing; Julia seems to really enjoy that. It must be a female thing because I couldn't imagine my grabbing her arm like that. I don't know how it came to happen, but we seemed to be waiting for our first date before doing anything more than arm grabbing. We never discussed it; it just happened that way. I found that quite strange as I would've thought I'd be uncontrollably eager, especially the "uncontrollable" and the "eager" parts. Instead I didn't even think to question waiting for Friday night. That didn't stop me anticipating Friday though. Boy oh boy was I ever anticipating it! Apparently the women of the house were anticipating it almost as much as me. Even Donna got into the act. After the dishes were done, I was sat back down at the kitchen table, surrounded by the females, and Carol asked, "What are your plans for your date?" "Um, I don't exactly have a plan yet. I've been too busy." "Haven't you been thinking about what you want to do tomorrow night?" What I wanted to do tomorrow night was very much in my thoughts. Recalling them made me blush, which wasn't really the type of answer my audience was hoping for. Mom asked, "Have you told her what time the date will be, where you'll meet her, or anything like that?" "Um, no. All I've done was on Monday morning, when I asked her to be my date on Friday." Having successfully destroyed any possible claim I might have had to being a participant in the planning of my own date, I was cut out of the process. Mom and Carol immediately launched into the meticulous planning of the entire night. Donna watched with amusement. I watched with, I must admit, mostly relief. It was agreed, without any input from me, that I didn't need to try to impress Julia and did not need a "busy date" where we did lots of things. What I needed was a date that gave us lots of time to talk quietly together, to get to know each other. So far Julia and I hadn't had any chance for quiet conversation. School was a madhouse, partly because of the newspaper articles about me, but mostly because Julia was far too busy organizing everybody and everything. By the terms of our unspoken agreement, we weren't seeing each other outside of school until our date. Julia and I talked on the phone every evening, but at my house we only have one line and one usable phone, which is in the kitchen; the extension in my parents' bedroom being out of bounds. One line for five people and our dial-up internet access was impractical, so phone usage rules are enforced. Up until a few days ago this had only mattered to my sisters as I'd not needed to use the phone much. I was distressed to learn that all the hours I'd not used over the past several years did not entitle me any free minutes now. My evening conversations were sympathetically restricted to the 15-minute limit. The phone's in the kitchen, so the location was restrictive too. I was looking forward to being able to talk privately with Julia. Being a university town, Corvallis has many eating establishments for college students, but the females unanimously decided that a more upmarket, formal restaurant was going to be the venue. I was informed that my plan for my date was "a nice, long, friendly meal, and - weather permitting - a hand-in-hand walk afterward." My current criterion for judging restaurants is on their servings' sizes, so I was also left out of the discussion of which restaurant to choose. Mom did suggest that I have a small meal before my date so I didn't horrify the poor girl. I was going to pre-eat anyway, as paying for the date was starting to worry me. With the amount I've been eating for the last month I'd need to order two mains in a restaurant, and that'd be costly in an upmarket one. It'd be better to eat some of Mom's food first. "By the way, Mark, have you noticed that tomorrow will be April Fools' Day?" "I hadn't thought of that." "I probably don't have to tell you this, but to be safe, your first date with a very nice girl, in a fancy restaurant, would be an excellent occasion NOT to do any April Fools' pranks." "It'd be a FOOL-ish mistake, wouldn't it?" In a VERY dry tone, Mom replied, "It certainly would. You should forget that word even exists, including no more silly puns." Donna particularly enjoyed sniggering at that put-down. "If you're not sure how to act any time during the date, would you like some advice on how to decide?" "Of course. I'd love that advice. I worry a lot about messing up." "Imagine Julia twenty years from now, at my age, sitting comfortably at home with a coffee in her hand, thinking back on her first date with you. You should plan on her remembering every single thing you do and say; trust me on that. If you're thinking about doing something, but aren't sure whether it's a good idea or not, ask yourself, 'Would that twenty-years-from-now Julia think back about that something and smile fondly, or not?' If the answer is, 'Not', then don't do it. Okay?" "That sounds like good advice, thanks." I wasn't sure what I thought of the implication that Julia and I would still be together when we were that old, but I was smart enough to see that acting on the assumption was a good way to behave. "Different dates can have different purposes, but if you treat this date as if its purpose is to create fond memories, you'll do fine. Don't overdo it, don't try to make every action something major, just talk and be yourself most of the time. But use that method to help you decide if you are unsure about something." "Thanks." "I don't think you need much help anyway. From what I've seen and heard, this girl is putty in your hands already. I'm proud of you." "Aw, shucks, Mom." "Isn't he sweet?" from Carol. That got agreement from Mom, "Yes he is. Julia thinks so too." Then they got back down to business. The restaurant still had to be chosen. A suitable one was eventually selected, and the booking made by Mom, but in Julia's name. I thought that was strange, but what do I know about such things? Mom knew the restaurant fairly well because her work sometimes had sales' lunches there. One of its deciding factors was that it was a little out of town, and had a very large garden with several paths through it, with views back over of the city. Mom's advice was to, "After your dinner, turn left when you walk out of their front door and follow the path up the hill. There are benches scattered around that you can sit on and look at the view, if it's not too cold." That was welcome news, as I'd been worrying about when I would get a chance to kiss Julia the way I wanted, which I intended to be in a way that would not have been acceptable in a restaurant. I couldn't wait to 'look at the view' with Julia (cough, cough). Then the planning committee moved on to the transport arrangements. Julia didn't have her license. The minimum driving age was sixteen in this dimension but she hadn't bothered getting it yet. Even if she had, the first six months are restricted so chances are she wouldn't have been allowed to drive me anyway. Although Corvallis is very biking-friendly, I didn't want to use our bikes on this date! Mom said she'd drive me around to Julia's to pick her up, and then drive us to the restaurant, and we'd take a taxi home from there. Carol announced she was coming with Mom, "I want to see what Julia will be wearing." Now that Carol had mentioned it, I was looking forward to seeing that too, but I'm sure not with the same motivation as Carol. Having the transport arrangements taken care of made me relieved, until Mom said, "Have you met Julia's parents yet?" I hadn't. I'd never even thought of that. Suddenly another huge worry opened up in front of me. What if they didn't like me? What if they wouldn't let me date their daughter? Oh my God, I'm in the newspapers every day! What will they think of that? My face fell. "I've never talked to Julia about her parents. I've got no idea whether they'll let me date her, or anything. I'm stuck." "Then call her now and ask. You need to tell her what the date details are anyway, that it's a dinner date, where it is, what time, and what the transport arrangements are." The phone was within easy reach so I grabbed it and called her. When I blurted out my concern, Julia said, "No worries, Mark, they're fine with you." "How can they be? I'm in the newspapers every day, there's this sex scandal thing about Annette Neumeyer rubbing herself all over me, I get repeatedly beaten up, I even get my little sister beaten up," which was a panicky exaggeration of the Biff#3 incident. "They can't be happy that you're dating me?" "They're fine. My mother's proud of me. I've told them all about you, and Mom thinks it's very romantic." "Oh." "Two more things. They know the media circus is just a circus. There's no substance; it just noisy entertainment. All that happened is that the school bitch twice came up to you and tried to humiliate you, and you verbally defeated her. That she got you beaten up and that the police got involved is nothing to do with what sort of person you are; it's all about what sort of people Annette and the football players are. My parents understand that and your actions look fine to them. They're impressed that you didn't cave in to the bitch." "Phew, you make it sound simple." "It is, as far as they're concerned. But I haven't finished yet; remember I had 'Two things'? The second is that my parents both lecture at OSU. They're both academics and value education. I've told them about how well you're doing at school. And here's the best bit: Dad is a professor of mathematics. He wants to meet you. Not as a father protecting his daughter, but as a professor meeting a possible prodigy. You've got no worries with my parents, just so long as you keep their daughter happy, haha." "That's a weight off my mind; that's wonderful." "I'll add a third reason. Dad half-jokingly mentioned to Mom that he feels quite comfortable about his daughter going out with a guy who doesn't get a hard-on when the school slut rubs herself all over him. Dad joked that he couldn't imagine a more ideal suitor for his one-and-only little girl." I hoped he continued to think I was 'safe' that way. What he didn't know wasn't going to hurt him. "You told me you'd make things easy for me, but I had no idea how good you were at it. Five minutes ago I was worried sick about meeting your parents, now I'm looking forward to it." "Thank you, I hope I can keep doing it. I must warn you that my mother has grounds for concern though." "Uh oh. Why?" "When she told me Dad's joke about you being safe because you didn't get hard, I told her that you were getting your buttons well and truly pushed Friday night, and I'd let her know how well you responded. Mom's grounds for concern aren't FOR her daughter, they're ABOUT her daughter, haha." "I think I'm going to enjoy this date!" "I think you are too. I'll arrange a dinner at my house sometime next week so you can meet my parents and brothers properly. Tomorrow night you can just come in, say a quick 'Hello', and then we can leave. Don't worry about it." And I didn't; she'd made my worry go away. After we ended our call Mom asked, "All taken care of?" "Yep, no worries there. Her parents even seem happy that she's dating me." "Then why didn't you tell her about the transport arrangements and what the date will be?" "Because I'm a flustered idiot. I'll call her back and try again." After which, I was feeling great. The date's planning was all done, and it was going to be a very good one, I was very happy with the restaurant and walking idea, I had no worries, only eager anticipation. You can't beat having wonderful family support and a great girlfriend. I got up to leave the table, and Carol called out, "Where do you think you're going?" "The date's all planned, so I thought I go and do some homework." "What clothes have you picked out to wear?" asked Carol, knowing damned well what the answer was. "Oh," I said, slumping back into my chair. "Don't sit there! We need to check out your closet." So I stood up again. The entire planning committee, together with its helpless victim and the cheering section (Donna) relocated to my bedroom. Where - it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say - every single article of clothing I owned was critically reviewed for its suitability for the great occasion. Including my underwear! They had no shame and no mercy, and I was offered no choice. I'll skip past all the mortification, and just say that a COMPLETE outfit was selected for me. Females are weird (I mention this fact in case you're not yet aware of it, in which case you must be weird). I cannot imagine how they could go through my underwear drawer so unselfconsciously. Maybe males and females live in different dimensions because they sure seem to operate in a different world sometimes. I was mighty glad Dad had suggested I keep any porn I had in the garage rather than in my room, as it would've been found where I used to keep it. There's a story behind that, but it pre-dates my first merge so it's outside the scope of this autobiography. While we were tidying up the mess they'd made in my room, Mom asked me, "Are you intending to take a little present to Mrs. Williams?" In all honesty, no, I wasn't "intending to", but I'd learned a thing or two tonight already, "What do you think is best, Mom?" Which started a complicated discussion on the pros and cons of various small gifts and of no gift. After a while I mentioned what Julia had said about my having dinner at her house in a few days. The committee said that was the best time to take a gift, and not to worry about it tomorrow. Mom did add, "Do you think you should take Julia some flowers or something?" "Umm. I don't think so. I could take her something when I have dinner at their house." "You're probably right." Which officially made my answer a lucky guess. Mom said, "Do you need a haircut? Let me have a look." Was there no end to it? "No, you'll do. Fingernails? They're okay too. I think we're about done here. Can you think of anything we've missed, Mark?" My plan had been, as much as I had thought about it: "Take Julia somewhere and kiss her a lot." What was the chance that I could think of anything that Mom and Carol had missed? "I can't think of anything else, Mom. Thank you all very much. You've helped me enormously and I'm sure I'll have a fantastic date." "It's our pleasure, honey. Now stay here and I'll send your dad in. Come on girls." Was there no end to it? (And, yes, I am aware that this is not the first time I'd thought that. I suspected it wouldn't be the last either.) All this time Dad had been very wisely sitting in the living room watching TV. But shortly after the committee's departure from my bedroom, he knocked and entered, shutting the door behind him. I could tell it was time for 'That' discussion. "Relax Mark. This isn't going to be nearly as bad as you think." That was nice to know. I hoped I could believe him. "First, here's a hundred bucks," withdrawing and offering two $50 notes from his pocket. So far Dad was right about this conversation not being as bad as I'd thought. "I know you've got some money saved, but Fely has picked out a nice restaurant and we don't want you to sweat it. You're not going to get this every time you go on a date - that's for sure! - but the first formal date with your first girlfriend is a big deal, and we want you to have a good time, so here ya go." "Thanks very much, that's great. I was starting to worry about the cost." "No problem. Now, rubbers. Do you have your own or do you need some from me?" #1: "Ah, Dad, I've never really needed any. Umm, do you think I should?" "I have heard comments that you've got some luck coming your way soon." "I'm only fifteen. Should I, umm, be doing that already?" "From what I've heard, you aren't going to make it to eighteen, so you might as well give it up whenever Julia decides. I got the impression it won't take long." He gives a chuckle, but laughter was bit beyond me at the moment, although I was VERY happy that Dad had confirmed my hope. -- "To be serious, and it should be treated seriously, your mother and I don't think a single age is suitable for all people. We're your parents, and it's part of our job to guide you about sex. If we thought it was too early for you, we'd put a stop to it. If we thought the girl was wrong for some reason, we'd put a stop to it. You should remember that we'll stop you if you don't measure up, especially about something as serious as sex. You got that?" "Yes sir." "Good. Now it's coming early for you, probably earlier than you expected, huh?" A nod was my understated answer. "Fely and I think you'll be okay, as you've shown a lot of maturity recently. This is not a one-time conversation either. After you've done the deed and you've wiped the smile off your face, we'll talk again. About things like no blabbing at school, about continuing to show respect for the girl, and more. But for the moment, yeah, we're okay with it if it happens. Don't force it before you're both ready, but if you both want to, then that's okay with us. And we'd prefer you not to tell your sisters that you've had sex; though I figure Carol will find out before I do, as closely as she's been watching you two. You got all that?" "Yes Dad, I think so, thank you. Julia has been hinting to me. Nothing definite, but knowing where I stand with you guys is one less worry." "If you screw-up immaturely in any way, you should worry. You'd be in for a heap of worry. But we think you'll be okay. You've got a girl who's older than you, and judging by her confidence, more experienced than you. As long as you're happy to go along with her wishes - and I can't imagine you wouldn't be - then you'll be fine. It'll teach you an important lesson in life too: find the right girl, and then go along with her wishes. It's worked out well for me." "Haha. Good one, Dad. Umm, in that case, can I please borrow a rubber from you please?" "Heck boy! If you need one rubber, you'll need several. Here, have these." Dad pulled a handful of rubbers out of his other pocket, and put them in my hands. "Put a few in your wallet, the rest in your bedside table." I started moving to do so and Dad added, "When the time comes to use one, make sure you do. I mean it! If you fail to use one when you should, that'd put you deep into the 'failing to meet our expectations' and 'behaving immaturely' categories that I mentioned just before. In other words, you'd be in deep shit." "Yes Dad." "You don't want to be in the shit, do you?" "No Dad." "Good. Make sure you remember. It looks like there's going to be a lot of new stuff going on in your life soon, and you're bound to have some questions about it. Believe me, some of it will confuse the hell out of you. Some of it still confuses me, so you've got no chance. So just ask away if you need any help from your mother or me. We've both been there before, and not so long ago that we've forgotten what it was like. Okay?" "Yes Dad, thanks. And thank Mom for me too please." "No worries. Pleasant dreams." I looked at my watch, and it was late already, too late to call Julia. It'd taken five people most of the evening to plan my date. I'd had no idea that dates were so complicated. While getting ready for bed, I had a chuckle about Dad. There's a guy who knows how to prepare to see his son: two $50 bills in one pocket, and a handful of rubbers in the other. I could've done worse than have him as a Dad, that's for sure. I tossed and turned trying to get to sleep, but I couldn't; I was way too excited. There were too many thoughts flying around my head. That's a perfectly ordinary cliché and you probably didn't give it much thought when you read it. Now imagine what it was like for me: I had four minds firing thoughts all over the place. One would get calmed down, and then another would say something to set it off again. We'd think about all the fantastic things that could happen tomorrow night, then we'd think about what Julia's breast felt like when she grabbed my arm and hugged it close, and then we'd think of a hundred things that could go wrong on the date, and then we'd worry about what to do if... Then I remembered that I'd forgotten to ask Dad about other girls chasing me, and I started worrying about all of that. And then I started fantasizing about that too, which certainly didn't help me get to sleep. Now imagine the above, but with all four minds doing it, in different orders, worrying about different things, excited about different things, and telling each other about it. It took me an embarrassingly long time of tossing and turning before I remembered that I have control over many of the subconscious actions of my body. I wondered if I could order myself to sleep. #2: ------- Chapter 15: Friday, the Day of My First Date Friday, April 1, 2005 The next thing I knew, I was waking up at my usual time the next morning. #1: I can't tell you much about what I did at school on Friday, as I wasn't able to pay attention most of the time. I know the school's car came to get us at the agreed upon time, and delivered us there. I did meet Julia before first class and apologized for not calling her to say "goodnight." I'd always thought people seemed weak doing "goodnight" phone calls on TV, but now I felt the need. "It was my mom's and sisters' faults. They kept wanting to talk about my plans for our date." That was sort of true, but not really. Julia gushed, "I've checked the weather forecast and it looks fine. I'm REALLY hoping we can walk in the garden. I'm so looking forward to getting some time alone with you. I'm glad you chose that restaurant." Julia was as excited as I was, which amazed and delighted me. "Umm, Mom chose that one. I don't know many restaurants." I was feeling guilty over my previous dishonesty. At lunch I was approached by an attractive, but rough-looking freshman girl, who asked, "Egg, what are your plans this weekend?" "Ahh, I don't know, I haven't thought about it." That was true, as none of my thinking had gotten past Friday evening. "Would you like to come for a nature walk with me on Saturday? It'll be fun, I promise." Julia was attached to my left arm as usual. Suddenly her hands tightened into claws (ouch!) and I felt her getting up. I felt panic. What do I say? Julia was about to do something, and I was expecting it to be bad, if not violently bad. People were listening, but if I said the wrong thing it might be me that Julia gets violent with. I tried a very definite, "No way! I don't even know your name and I have a girlfriend." Who was now mostly out of her seat and about to step behind me so she'd have a clear run at her target. "I'm Betty. I'm not worried about your girlfriend; I'm twice as much girl as she is. I'll show you a much better time." It's true that Julia is probably the shortest girl in 10th grade, and it could be that Betty is "twice as much girl" as Julia - what Betty lost by not being fully twice as tall as Julia she made up for by being amply packed out in the other two directions - but I don't think that total volume is the best way to choose girlfriends. Other than for breasts of course, but this probably wasn't a good time to start eyeing Betty's breasts. I could see bloodshed coming, but having my right arm in a sling made it almost impossible for me to stop Julia walking around behind me. Some of the spectators were even starting to laugh; a great help that was! I yelled, "JULIA STOP!" In the moment that she paused - and I could see it was only going to be for a moment - I gracefully (it's my middle name after all) swung both legs over the seat stood up and put my left arm all the way around her. She was as stiff as a board in my hug, and I could see that she was entirely focused on clawing Betty's eyes out. So I picked Julia up and started walking away. So focused on Betty was she, that Julia didn't realize what I was doing for a few seconds. When she did realize, her head suddenly turned to look straight at me. Before she could say anything bad, and I knew it was going to be bad, my mouth opened and the first words that came out were, "I love you, Julia Williams." I don't know where those words came from - I certainly hadn't planned them - but they sure had a good effect. Julia screeched with joy, wrapped her legs around me, wrapped her arms even tighter around me, and started kissing me. Then removed her lips to say, "I love you too", and immediately resumed her kissing - our first kisses! I wasn't really enjoying them though. First, I was still in shock about what I'd said. I hadn't intended to say it, and I was very unsure whether it was true. I was thrilled beyond words to have Julia as my girlfriend, and was thoroughly enjoying all the attention and affection she was showering me with, but the "L" word was WAY too uncomfortable. Second, having a girl up in the air, with her legs and everything else wrapped around me, smothering me with kisses, was slightly in excess of the level of PDA (Public Display of Affection) tolerated by the school. The catcalls and whistles weren't helping either. When I could get my lips back, I urged, "Get down, Julia, or we'll get in trouble." She lowered her landing gear and I set her on her feet, but she was still glued to my arm. I tried, "I haven't had a chance to eat my lunch yet and I'm hungry. Can we go back to our table please?" I looked back at our table, and Betty was still standing there watching us. Even after seeing our PDA she was still waiting. I added "stupid" to my already low opinion of her. I walked back to the table. I think Julia had forgotten about Betty, as all Julia did was hold my left arm in both of her hands, and stare into my eyes as we walked. I'm surprised she didn't trip over, but we got to our seat. As soon as we were close enough I addressed Betty, "Go away stupid girl. I wouldn't go out with you if you were the last girl on Earth." That probably wasn't strictly true, as she was pretty enough and - I couldn't help noticing - well stacked, but the situation seemed to call for a strong statement. #3: We laughed out loud at that, but rather than making me seem strange - as it normally did - this time it made our put-down of Betty seem even cooler. "Your loss then." Betty turned and sashayed away, waving her not-inconsiderable ass. Offering me a last-chance inducement perhaps. We sat down in our original seats, Julia, still hanging on to my arm fiercely. #3: Julia leaned forward and whispered, "The only doubt about tonight, is how often you're going to get lucky." I blushed, and after a few seconds, I took a risk in whispering back, "My Dad gave me some rubbers last night." "Bring them ALL! I've already gotten a box for you too." That certainly made things clear! Her previous comments about "getting lucky" and "making it easy" had been exciting but indefinite, so I hadn't been sure what they meant even after spending hours fantasizing about them. "Bring all your rubbers" had just the right amount of ambiguity: none at all! My virginity was on death row, with only a few hours of life left. It was going to get a last meal, but it wasn't going to be lodging any last minute appeals (you can probably tell that I was frazzled again). #1: #4: From what I could remember of Julia's attitude to the guys in our common classes this year, she hadn't shown much, if any, romantic interest in them. She'd been flirted with sometimes because every girl is, even the small-titted ones like Julia, but I couldn't recall noticing anything ever come of it. I'd certainly not seen her behave as determinedly in a relationship as she's doing with me these days. From what I'd noticed before, she was generally polite to guys - except when she was ordering them around - and romantically uninterested. Her behavior with me was a complete turnaround. In my opinion, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving and desperate guy. I thought I'd try a little trick, and I successfully made my stomach rumble. Julia took the hint and relaxed her grip on my arm. I quickly took the opportunity and started eating, making a little time to say, "Good, I need to keep my strength up," which earned me a laugh from her. I presume various other things happened that day, but I didn't notice. At least I wasn't so distracted that I missed the car ride home. I did miss seeing Julia off at the bike rack though as she'd told me she was leaving school early that day, "to get ready for our date." We had plenty of rubbers but apparently she needed to get something else ready. ------- I had an early dinner while the family tried to tease me, but most of their comments just washed over me. My euphoria couldn't be dented. Then I started getting ready: showering, dressing and fantasizing. The females checked and double-check that everything was as it should be: that my clothes were clean and neat, no dust or stray hairs marred my perfection, etc. They all commented on how handsome I looked. When I made the effort to really look at myself in the mirror, I was surprised that they weren't exaggerating as much as I'd thought. My pimples had been clearing up for the last couple of months and were now about two-thirds gone. I had filled out some more, so I was now slim rather than skinny. My clothes weren't a formal suit, but they matched well especially after Mom had added one of Dad's ties. My face even seemed a little more angular and masculine than I'd noticed before. The only trouble was my sling. Mom had changed it for a more subdued color, but nothing could be done beyond that. Carol said I was "A dish," which was laying it on too thick but the sisterly loyalty pleased me. Mom and Carol had dressed up a little too, to look better for their brief visit to the Williams', and at the appropriate time we headed for the door. As we were leaving Dad said, "Got everything you need, Mark?" "Yes Dad, bye." "Mark, have you got EVERYTHING you need?" Ah! The penny dropped. "Yes I do, thanks." Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I added, "And Julia is bringing some too." "She told you that?" "Umm, yes she did." "So you don't need my wishes to 'Have a good night' then?" I looked a little bashful, unsure what to say. Dad just laughed and added, "Go on, off with you. Unless you'd rather stay here and talk with me? Haha." So I made my escape. Mom and Carol were already sitting in the front of the car, so I got in the back and off we went. Corvallis is a small city, nearly all of its buildings within a two-mile by two-mile area, so it didn't take us long to get to Julia's place, even though they were living in a better part of the town than us. I'd already realized they had much more money than us, as Julia always dresses in new looking clothes, and seems to have heaps of them because they rarely repeat. Arriving at their very nice home confirmed I was 'dating up', other than her being so short. I was told to lead the way. I headed for the front door, pressing the doorbell with Mom and Carol standing behind me. Mr. and Mrs. Williams both answered the door. We were all invited in, and as we were entering, Mrs. Williams informed us, "Julia will be down shortly." Introductions were made. Mr. and Mrs. Williams were Archibald - "call me 'Prof', for obvious reasons" - and Vanessa. I in turn said, "Meet my mother, Felicity, and my elder little sister, Carol." "Good to see you again," said Mrs. Williams to Mom, which surprised me considerably because I had no idea they'd ever met, but in the slight chaos of the introductions I never got a chance to ask Mom about it. Mrs. Williams, Mom and Carol headed for the kitchen while Mr. Williams led me into the living room. "Have a seat, Mark." "Thank you, sir." "It's fine to call me 'Prof'. Maybe one day I'll be your professor if you go to OSU, although I doubt that." He even looked a bit like a short, black-haired version of the professor from 'Back To The Future'. Between him and the Biffs I'm working my way through the cast of that movie. I wasn't sure how to respond to that, so instead I just said, "Thank you for letting me date your daughter, sir." "You don't have to thank me. It's more than my life's worth to stand between you and the two women I live with. I'm only a little fellow, so I wouldn't have a chance." "I was afraid all the publicity might've given you a bad idea about me?" "I've spent all my working life at OSU, dealing with thousands of walking bags of hormones every year. You wouldn't believe some of the stupidities I've seen them do. You've done nothing to worry about. You controlled yourself much better than most teenagers do. The only person I can think of who's having trouble controlling herself is coming down the stairs now." I was beginning to suspect where Julia gets her openness. I got up and walked to the door so I could see the stairs. Making her entrance down them was a VERY beautiful girl. The women had already come out of the kitchen to meet Julia (they all have a type of ESP for timing things like that). They met her at the bottom of the stairs where they gushed about her dress, jewelry, makeup, etc. They got to her before me, so while all their gushing is going on let me describe Julia. Julia is petite, as I've said already. She's tiny: 4 feet 8 inches short, and 70 pounds light. She has a triangular face: narrow at the chin, thin cheekbones, and a truly button nose which I'm positive would look silly on anyone else but it seemed fine on her face, although quite unusual. Her head widens higher up, an effect that's accentuated by the framing of a fringe across the middle of her forehead. She has straight, black hair which is short and cut to curve in toward her chin on both sides, creating a look that seems Japanese to me. She has a very slight build, with particularly slim arms and legs. I know my thumb and forefinger easily meet and overlap when they circle her upper-arm, and they'd probably get close to meeting around her upper-leg too, although I haven't tried that experiment yet. Julia was wearing a dress short enough for that experiment to be doable tonight. It was what I've seen TV shows call a "little black number". How something that small and simple looking could create such a sophisticated, elegant-sexy image completely escapes me (given my knowledge of female clothing design, that's not saying much, or anything at all really). Her dress lay on her body in a way that seemed to fit closely, but also to 'float', which was another thing I didn't understand could be possible. One thing I did understand about the dress was that Julia looked very, very good in it. The dress molded to her chest making it obvious that she wasn't wearing a bra, but somehow that wasn't brazenly sexy; perhaps because her breasts were too small to achieve any degree of brazenness. Her body just seemed to suit the dress. I have zero experience with breasts - wishing doesn't count as experience - so don't ask me her size. She's a very small girl and her breasts still look small on her. It matters not because she's beautiful. The dress ended maybe half an inch above mid-thigh, half an inch being a significant distance on Julia; it was short, but elegantly so. High-heel black shoes completed the look. I know even less about makeup than I do about breast sizes. I presume she was wearing some as her face looked glowingly better than I'd seen it before. I could discern some light pink lipstick, and that was all. The rest was done by magic. Her slimness wasn't in any way anorexic or unhealthy. I've seen pictures of models carrying more weight than Julia who've looked so skinny that they were ugly to my eyes. Julia's size was exactly what was perfect for her. Not just to my eyes either, as I'd seen other guys show interest in her since I started in her grade. I'm not an expert in these matters, but it seemed to me that Julia had gone "all out" to look as good as it was possible for her to look. Judging by all the gushing from the females, they also thought she'd succeeded. Eventually I realized that I was standing still and staring like a dummy. After some effort I got my legs moving and I headed toward her. When I'd been at home the weekend after my arm was broken, and needing to prepare for the start of my very first girlfriend relationship, one of Dad's pieces of advice was, "When it's time to give your girl a compliment, make it a full-on, strong, heartfelt one. No half-measures. If you feel something, then pour it out. You can't compliment a woman too strongly if she can see you're telling the truth. Most guys are too weak and scared to do it properly, but if done that way, her heart will swell." I'd been lucky that I'd seen him compliment Mom this way many times, so I'd seen the technique in action. Now seemed like an EXCELLENT time for a compliment, plus Julia had made it clear right from the start that she was mine, so I felt safe enough to do it. I looked her in the eyes and with GREAT sincerity declared, "I was so overwhelmed when I saw you, I couldn't move. I have NEVER seen anyone look as good as you do now!" I'd put a great deal of feeling into it, and I'd done good judging by how all the females reacted. Dad was due some more "thank yous" from me. If anything, Dad had understated how well females responded to it. They all thought I was wonderful, from Mrs. Williams down to Carol. Their responses made me feel like a king among men. It's never a good thing to rest on your laurels, as I nearly made a mistake just a few seconds later. Julia had a coat and handbag on a hook by the front door. As we were leaving she took the coat down and started putting it on. Mom gave me a REALLY dirty look and nodded sharply toward the coat. I suddenly recognized my failure, and leaped forward to help Julia put it on. It's hard work being a boyfriend: relax for five seconds and you'll make a mistake. You've got to be on your toes the whole time. That's what I've learned from the first thirty seconds of my first date. I had a little smile to myself when I saw her handbag. It was a black one, but too large to go with her dress. I guess she'd forgotten to plan ahead about that, and had to use whatever was available. It was good to know I wasn't the only one who had trouble managing all the complexities involved in planning a date. I ignored her oversight, of course. After the goodbyes and similar exchanges, we started leaving. Having learned my lesson from my coat near-failure, I extended my arm to her, she took it, and I escorted her out to the car. Still very much on my toes, I opened the rear door for her, and tried not to look too hard at her legs as she entered the car. Hey, it's not my fault that when I politely turned my head away, one eyeball didn't rotate with it. The rest of us got in with much less ceremony, and I sat back holding Julia's hand. I was with my girl and my first ever date had started. ------- Chapter 16: My First Date Friday, April 1, 2005 (Continued) For most of the short journey, Carol sat turned around in her seat looking back at us. She kept an almost nonstop gush going: "Julia looks so beautiful", "Your dress is wonderful, Julia", "Mark is so lucky", "Julia is so lucky", "You two look so good together", "I wish I was older", "I'm going to wait up until you get home, to hear how it went." Mom quickly responded to that one, "No you won't, Carol. Mark won't be home till well after your bedtime, and you're not keeping Donna awake so late either. You can talk with him in the morning, and not too early. Wait until he gets up himself." Which reminded me that neither Mom nor Dad had mentioned a time that I had to be home by. That was unusual. I kept my mouth shut. After a few minutes, Mom said, "Oops. I've taken a wrong turning. Hang on, I just need to back up and turn around." Whereupon she carefully did so. Normally I would've thought this quite strange, but I had other things on my mind. Julia just sat quietly with her head leaning on my arm. We arrived at about the time the bouncing Carol was saying, "I wish I was coming with you." Mom laughed, and said, "What a pity Mark only reserved a table for two. Oh well, I'll guess they'll have to manage as best as they can without you." I noticed Mom said that I'd reserved the table. Wasn't that nice? Carol's being the intermediary in getting Julia and me together had given her an interest in our relationship. Now that the first date was about to happen, that interest was boiling over. Fortunately both Carol and Mom realized Carol had gone too far because one thing was for sure: as nice as Carol was, there was NO WAY I wanted her on this date! ------- The dinner was everything I hoped it would be. The décor romantic, the food delicious, and the service great. They easily recognized what sort of date we were on, and showed discretion and especially patience. We asked for the dessert menu, then talked for forty five minutes before even opening it, but they stayed well away from our table until they could see we were ready. We talked and talked and talked. Julia was a very easy to talk with: two-thirds of those "talkeds" were hers. I learned lots of things about her. One of which was that she'd be plaguing her older brothers over the past week on how to "make Mark happy." I winced because the context of our discussion was about sex, and "make Mark happy" was exact the phrase she'd used with her brothers. I got the impression they were looking forward to this date almost as much as me, hoping that it would bring the embarrassing questions to an end. Unusually, her brothers were fraternal twins, 26 years old, both doing PhDs at OSU but in quite different subjects: Andrew's in Forestry Economics, Robert's in Geophysics. That explained why her parents had been considerably older than mine. Apparently Julia's arrival ten years after her brothers had been a welcome surprise. I thought so too. Her brothers hadn't been home tonight but would be next Wednesday, which is when I'll be having dinner with all the Williamses at their home. Julia had already arranged that as she'd assumed I'd enjoy my first date with her. It was probably the safest assumption ever! As enjoyable as the conversation was, we were both looking forward to our walk in the garden. When I suggested that dinner was at an end, Julia went to the restroom while I retrieved our coats and paid the bill. More thanks and only a small amount of change were due to Dad. All four minds reminded me to help Julia put her coat on. We left the restaurant building, and turned to walk along their garden path, Julia glued to my left arm. I didn't really know what was going to happen, but I knew something was. My heart was pounding, and I let it keep doing so because I was enjoying every one of my symptoms of nervousness this time. The anticipation was building. There wasn't much to see in the garden at night, but they had some subdued lighting scattered around so we had no difficulty following the path. I had thought we were going to walk up the hill so we could look at the view, but Julia steered us around its base. We passed a couple of seats but kept walking. When we got to the third seat Julia had a look around, and declared, "This is a good place." She took off her coat and laid it on the seat. "Put your coat on top of mine, darling." When I'd done so, Julia said, "Sit there," pointing to a spot in the middle of the coats. I'd assumed I'd sit on the right side of the pile we'd made, so she could sit on the left (the side of my good hand), but she'd indicated that I should sit in the middle. Who was I to argue? I sat exactly where she'd pointed. Incredibly beautiful, gorgeously dressed girls who call me "darling", who provide rubbers for me to use, and an opportunity for me to use them, get my instant obedience. It's a new rule of mine. Julia placed her handbag on the seat beside me, moved to stand facing me with her legs either side of mine, then she hitched her skirt up slightly, knelt on the seat to either side of my thighs and sat on my legs, face to face with me. I was in heaven, a gorgeous girl was sitting firmly on my lap, with her body pressed up against mine, her arms over my shoulders, fingers in my hair and holding my head. This was VERY nice! She looked me straight in the eyes and stated, "I love you, Mark Anderson. You are mine." Before I had a chance to even start thinking about a reply, she was kissing me. I guess this could be called the third time I'd been kissed sexually. Annette's sexual attack on my lips was the first, but that was more "attack" than "sexual". It hadn't been an experience I could relax in. My second kiss was when I'd told Julia that I loved her in the lunchroom, to divert her from attacking Betty, and that was also not an occasion that was good for me. This occasion was GOOD for me! I totally surrendered to the experience. It was thrilling beyond words. Julia was putting everything she had into the kiss. Her body was twisting and turning and rubbing; especially rubbing. Her hands were running though my hair, then grabbing and pulling or pushing, then running up and down my neck. And I haven't even gotten to what her lips and tongue were doing yet! My entire Universe narrowed down to what she was doing to me, especially to my mouth. It took me AGES to remember that I had arms and hands too. A marching band could have passed back and forth along the path without me noticing. I carefully extracted my right arm from its sling between our bodies, and placed it around her side. I couldn't do much with it, but I could use my hand to push her even closer. My left arm and hand did their best to make up for my right arm's deficiency. I ran my left hand up Julia's back, and especially through her hair and up and down her neck because I loved how it felt when she was doing that to me. When I'd removed my right arm from between us, I think Julia had tried to redouble her efforts, but it simply wasn't possible. She did scoot even harder up against me though, and that was even better. The kiss lasted a LONG time, but I was still sorry when it ended. Julia pushed herself back several inches along my legs, and held herself away from me with her hands on my shoulders. What a sight she was: hair mussed up, lipstick smeared, and panting like she'd been running a race. I discovered that panting is VERY sexy. Still looking me in the eyes, her hands came off my shoulders and moved down to my belt. She undid it, then moved on to the fly. When her hand first touched my pants it made me aware of the situation down there. I could feel the sticky evidence of an embarrassing lack of control. I was still trying to think of what to say while she was finding the zip and lowering it. I had to say something quickly, "Ahh, honey, umm..." "Yes?" "Sorry, but I've had an, umm, loss of control, I guess. An accident." -- She looked puzzled, so I intelligently added, "In my pants." I had no idea when it'd happened, as I'd been totally oblivious to anything beyond the kiss. You could ask the marching band. She looked down, then rubbed her hand over the outside of my underwear. I was about to tell her to stop because it'd be wet, when she said, "You're still hard." She was right. I hadn't noticed that either. I nodded. She continued, "It doesn't matter then." She finished lowering my zip, then raised herself on her knees to take her weight off me, and grabbed the top of my pants. "Lift up a little." Oh boy! I put my elbows on the back of the seat and lifted myself. I didn't know whether that was a good thing to do with a broken arm; I didn't care. As soon as I'd lifted, Julia pulled and my pants came down. A few more tugs and some small rearrangements of her weight, got my pants and underwear below my knees. It was a good thing three-quarters of the rest of my family had pawed through my underwear drawer to choose my best pair. Julia lowered her weight back onto my now bare legs. I still had my elbows on the seat back, but she didn't look like she needed any help from me. My shirt had covered me, but Julia reached forward and undid the bottom few buttons then pushed it to either side. Then with no hesitation at all she reached down and grasped my cock with both of her small hands, rubbing it up and down for a few seconds. She declared firmly, "Mine!" Up until this point of my life I'd always operated on the assumption that it was actually mine. I liked her idea better, so I nodded. Julia let go, much to my regret, and swiveled slightly. She reached into her handbag and pulled out a small towel and wiped her hands, then reached in again and pulled out a large Ziploc plastic bag. She placed the bag flat on the seat and put the towel on top of it. Then back into her handbag again and out came a box of rubbers. That reminded me of mine, which I now realized were in my wallet, in my jacket pocket, somewhere under both of us. The only way to get them out would require a major disruption - so much for my planning ability. While Julia was removing a rubber from its foil, I remembered my early thinking that she was carrying a handbag that was too large because she'd not planned ahead. I mentally ate those words now. This girl was ORGANIZED! I wouldn't have been surprised if she next pulled a checklist for what we were doing out of her bag, but she didn't. She probably had it memorized. The foil removed, put neatly into a little trash bag also extracted from her well-stocked handbag, she brought the rubber close to her eyes, studied it for a second, turned it over, then delightfully installed it on its intended, rock-hard destination. Then she looked up to my eyes, smiled, and said, "Give me your left hand, darling." It didn't have anything better to do, so I gave it to her. She held my hand with her right hand, rotated mine so its palm was uppermost and flat. Then she resumed staring straight into my eyes as her right hand moved my left down toward the junction of her legs. Her legs were spread on either side of mine, which had hitched her skirt right up to the very top of her thighs. Her skirt was only just covering her important little place, but as she moved my left hand downward, she used her left hand to lift the front of her skirt. Still staring me straight in my eyes, she pushed my hand directly on to her pussy, saying, "Yours." My minds overloaded and shutdown. I just sat there, not moving, not even my left hand. I'd never even seen a live pussy, let alone had my hand placed on one and been told it was mine. The orchestration involved in this evening was awesome and overwhelming. After looking into my unseeing eyes for several seconds, her right hand started moving my left hand up and down. The feelings I was getting from those fingers woke me up. "Uh, where are your panties?' Perhaps not the smartest thing I could have said, but I was still overwhelmed. Probably over-overwhelmed. "In my handbag. I took them off while you were paying the bill." "Oh." She was still moving my left hand. I realized that it was having a very good time, and that the rest of me should really start participating. My minds got fully back from wherever they'd stupidly gone because right here was definitely the best place to be. I sat up straighter, smiled at Julia, and started moving my hand myself. I held my hand out flat with the fingers squeezed tight together, and just rubbed the whole hand - palm and fingers - forward and back. As far past and underneath her pussy as I could reach without pushing against her weight, then back and up, to entirely above her pussy, until my fingers were sliding over her hairs. Then down again. As I slid my hand back and forth she started hissing and rocking. Both her hands came up and grasped my shoulders hard while she added panting to the sounds she was making. Her pussy, already wet, was rapidly getting wetter and wetter. I could feel her juices running across the skin of my legs, and down onto the clothes below. I knew there were clothes down there, but in my state I couldn't make the effort to remember what and whose they were. I just knew we were making a mess and I thought it was wonderful. I wondered about bending a finger and inserting it into her pussy. I knew this was possible - I'd read about it - but I didn't know how to do it. I was scared of doing it wrong, hurting her, breaking the mood, and looking like a fool, so I didn't dare do it. Not that it mattered much because what was happening already was utterly fantastic and I would happily keep doing it all night. I was so immersed in rubbing her that I wasn't thinking about time, or anything else. My entire focus was on my hand and fingers that I was rubbing her with. Time was still affecting Julia though, as she was getting more and more aroused. After some time, quite a while I guess, Julia suddenly reached down and grabbed my cock. That surprised me greatly as I'd forgotten I had one! That sounds silly, but I had totally forgotten about anything outside of her pussy and my left palm and fingers. Her touch quickly reminded me though. As soon as she touched it I sucked my breath in. It was very hard and very close to cumming again. She saw that her touch had made me jump. "Now?" she asked. I wanted it now. I very, very wanted it right now! In my need I never thought about her, whether it was a good idea, or anything else; I just nodded while holding my breath. It felt as if my holding my breath was the only thing holding my cock back from exploding. Julia let go of my cock. Thank God, now I could breathe. (Not that I believe God has anything to do with cocks, or breathing either come to that, His being fictional.) She grabbed my shoulders and slid herself forward as she lifted her ass a few inches. My left hand was dislodged and I pulled it away to make room. When she was fully forward she looked down and grabbed the base of my cock with her right hand, angled it up appropriately, lifted her skirt with her other hand, and made to lower herself onto me. I watched avidly. Yes! Good riddance virginity! As her knees bent, lowering her body onto mine, her pussy passed too far in front of my cock causing her to sit on my upper-thighs. Damn! She rose up and jerked herself closer. I sucked in my breath again, for a different reason than last time. As much as I wished her to succeed in bringing her pussy within striking distance, I wished she'd used a different handhold to jerk from. She was still holding my cock; ouch! I don't think she noticed. She pointed everything in the right direction, and lowered herself again. And again she passed in front. Oh the FRUSTRATION! From her, "Aaarrgghh." She started raising herself again, and I immediately imagined an even more desperately frustrated jerk on my cock. #4: #1, #2, #3: I realized what the problem was: I was sitting too far back in the seat and her knees were up against the backrest already, so she couldn't move herself forward enough to get our parts to line up - no matter how hard she jerked on my cock! I jerked my pelvis forward as quick as I could. I felt my ass slide forward several inches and knew we'd be okay now. I smiled at her and said, "Try that." It was about time that I did something to help this date be successful. I did - so very much - want this date to be successful; my virginity was seconds and inches away from being lost. All I could see on Julia's face was desire, frustration and determination; especially determination. Everything else seemed absent. She was an over-wound spring. I don't think she'd seen my smile or heard my words. But my words were unnecessary, as I had no doubt she was going to try again. And, if necessary, again and again. It was actually a little frightening. I'm not sure she even recognized me anymore, such was her focus. But then I remembered that I'd been too focused not long ago myself. I leaned my back against the seat to give her as much room as possible. I watched her starting to lower herself the third time. This time I knew it was going to happen; an earthquake couldn't dislodge Julia now. #4: #1, #2, #3: She lowered herself again, her head leaning forward and watching intently. Adjusting the angle of my cock as she got closer and closer, we finally made contact, my cock dead center just touching her pussy. She exhaled a huge sigh of satisfaction and relief. I might've done something similar myself. She lowered herself just a little more, and my cock penetrated her pussy lips slightly. #1, #2, #3: #4: #1, #2: <{Groan}.> #3: Julia paused for a moment, then made sure of her right hand's grip on the base of my cock, she ascended so my cock was only just touching her, rubbed it around her pussy, then descended just as barely as last time. She repeated this cycle three or four times. When she was confident that all was well, she looked up at me. I could see she recognized who I was this time. She was back to normal now, fully aware and happy. She smiled at me and said, "Are you ready?" I could hardly speak, and I didn't dare say more than the bare minimum in case I fucked up my fuck, "Yes." "Me too. Here we go." She lowered herself just a little more, so my cock would be held between her lips, then she removed her right hand and put it on my shoulder. Her left hand was still holding her dress up, but neither of us needed it raised so we could see down there as we were looking into each other's eyes now. She'd moved slightly while doing that and I'd felt the far end of her vagina with the tip of my cock. #4: My eyes flicked down, and sure enough, she was still poised well above my legs, and nearly all of my cock was still outside her. I looked up, and she was biting her bottom lip, and had a look of intense concentration on her face. Just about the time comprehension hit me, she dropped all of her weight onto me. My cock drove up into her. She cried out, shuddered, then leaned forward and wrapped both her arms tight around me. She didn't move, just lying against me while holding me as tight as she could and sobbing into my chest. #2: #4: We all agreed that it was unexpected. #2: #4: So we put our arms around her and held her gently. Our right arm wasn't much use, but we could rub up and down her back with our left hand. We sat as still as possible, and waited for the sobbing to stop. After a minute her sobs started easing off. And after a couple more minutes she relaxed her two arms, and gingerly sat up and looked at me. She had tear trails running down her cheeks, with tears still running in them. But she had a quivering smile on her face. It looked fragile, as if it could be broken in a second, but at least it was a smile. Her eyes gained strength, she sat up straighter and her smile firmed. She reached out with both of her hands and grabbed my left arm and pushed it back toward me until my hand came in to view from behind her. She took hold of its wrist with her left hand, and she put her right hand around the back of mine and interleaved her fingers with mine. She then put her left hand behind her right, then moved all three hands until they were in front of her upper-chest. She gave me a truly radiant smile; her face glowing with joy. Looking into my eyes, she pushed my palm forward with her two hands until it rested over her heart, and then she said, "I am yours FOREVER!" #4: #1: Then, still pressing my palm to her heart, she started raising and lowering herself on my cock, fucking me. #4: #1: #3: #1: #4: #1: #2: #1: #2: #4: #3: We paid attention, and sure enough, I was just about to blow. #2: Julia had obviously got into the swing of it, and was starting to have a great time raising and dropping herself on my cock. She was showing considerable enthusiasm for the activity, and had a HUGE smile on her face. It was clear that there was no polite way to ask her to stop. I was amazed I hadn't gone off already. I'd barely escaped blowing a few minutes ago when she'd grabbed my cock before sliding forward. All the worry must have held it back. I decided to accept the inevitable, so I just mentally leaned back and enjoyed myself. The enjoyment was fantastically intense - oh so intense - but all too short. Only a few seconds later, I groaned out loud as I released. I'm not sure whether it was a groan of relief, or of frustration that it was over so quick. #4: #1: So I ordered my cock to soften. As it obeyed, and she felt it, Julia's movements slowed and stopped. She leaned forward and hugged me tightly again, her head resting on my panting chest. Hers was panting too. No sobs from her during this hug though, so that was an improvement. #2: "Julia, honey, I'm sorry I came too soon. Before you could I mean. I'm sorry." Julia leaned back and looked up at me. Her face had a huge smile across it. I'd never seen her look happier than she'd been for the past few minutes. "Mark, you silly, wonderful man. It doesn't matter at all; not even a tiny bit. Today is the best, most fantastic, awesome, incredible day of my entire life..." She had a HUGE smile, so she really meant it. " ... except for our wedding day, of course." #3: <"Our WEDDING day." Oh boy, how did that happen. We're fifteen for Chrissakes! What do we say now?> Fortunately she didn't wait for a response, just threw herself forward into another hug. I hugged her back and said nothing, largely because not a single one of my minds could think of anything to say. Silence seemed like a very good choice. We hugged. I tried to plan something. Anything at all would at least have given me a choice, but all my minds were overwhelmed. I sat there achieving nothing while I recovered from the physical experience. My mental and emotional recovery was going to take somewhat longer. After a few minutes Julia started producing a happy little humming sound into my chest, which I thought was quite cute. Then she started rocking her pelvis forward and back. I realized my cock was already half-hard and Julia had started responding to it. And it felt good! My cock rapidly hardened again. #1: #2, #3, #4: #1: I tried to grab her hips to hold her still. It was hard to do with a broken arm, so I asked, "Julia, please hold still for a second." Julia stopped, and looked up at me. Having a happy, little pixie in your lap, looking up into your eyes, is so sexy ... My cock immediately hardened even further, and I could see from Julia's smile that she felt it. #1: <#4, You are hereby put in charge of cock softening. Make it go down slowly, and keep it there, okay?> #4: #1, #2, #3: <{Groan}.> "Julia, I think we should stop." Her smile started slipping. "It's been great, honestly, but we should probably stop." "But I felt you get hard again, and I want to give you the best time possible. I've brought lots more condoms." I was sure she had. "I think I've had enough, honestly Julia. I'm happy now." "But my brothers say that young guys can recover quickly and do it several times a night. And you've only done it once." I wasn't going to remind her that it was actually twice, counting the time I blew in my shorts. I asked her, "You talk with your brothers about things like that?" "I've been asking them questions about how I can be the best wife for you, ever since I knew you loved me. I want to try very, very hard to deserve your love." #3: #1: "When did you know I loved you?" I was using her wording, not mine! "When you told Annette and the whole school. Then in the lunchroom. And you've been absolutely wonderful to me every day since. I know you're shy, and would've been too shy to ever talk with me if it hadn't been for Annette making you blurt it out, but I think that's wonderful. So does Mom. It's just SO romantic. We just melt when we think about it. You even got beaten up and your arm broken because your love of me was so strong you couldn't respond to Annette. That's unbelievable for a teenage boy. It's like a fairy tale. I'm so happy." I tried to think of something intelligent to say in response, but the best I could do was, "Um, yes." My mind was spinning around, and landed on the topic of her surprising virginity. "I was, ahh, surprised that you were a virgin, Julia. I mean, you were so confident, and so, um, pushy. Sorry, I mean that nicely. And so beautiful, surely you've had boyfriends before? I've seen plenty of guys talking to you." "Oh you, silly! {Giggle}. When I heard about what you said to Annette, and that you couldn't respond to her because of me, you'd obviously already fallen in love with me but had been too shy to mention it. Mom and I talked about it for ages that night. Especially after I told her what an incredible genius you were at school, she agreed I had to be the one to overcome your shyness. Mom said my being older than you, and your being in an older class, was probably very scary for you. So we decided not to let you hide behind your shyness. It's not like me to be so forward, but I must admit that I've quite enjoyed shamelessly showing my feelings for you." That explained, sort of, the pushiness. Which left... "But how come you were a virgin?" I hurriedly added, "Nothing wrong with that, of course, I was just surprised." "I've been saving myself for Mr. Right my whole life. Waiting to give myself to him totally. I was never going to waste myself on any stupid boy!" "{Gulp}. And I'm Mr. Right?" "No." "Huh? What..." "Sorry, that's just a little joke I've been telling myself for the last week. For all my life, since I was a little girl, I've been waiting to meet my Mr. Right. I've read books about how to find Mr. Right, I talked to Mom and Dad about finding Mr. Right, I've even had dreams about what Mr. Right would look like and be like. Then I find out you've silently loved me so much that I've ruined you for other girls, even girls as sexy as Annette Neumeyer; and girls don't come any more blatantly sexy than her! With you being a genius, being so nice to people, working so hard, being a dream on the soccer field, and the way you move, I realized you weren't Mr. Right at all. You're Mr. Perfect. I've been calling you Mr. Perfect for the last week." "Oh." #2: "Isn't that wonderful?" Julia exclaimed happily. "Umm, it's certainly amazing all right. Mind blowing really. This night has been way different than I expected." "It's been the best night of my life. Everything I ever dreamed it would be, only better. I love you, Mr. Perfect! And now you don't have to be shy with me. I am yours and you are mine. It's so wonderful. I am so happy! I can't wait to tell Mom." "You'll tell your Mom about this?" "Maybe not everything, but I'm certainly going to tell her your buttons worked wonderfully!" "Ahh, don't you think that's a bit too much detail?" "Of course not. I'm going to get her to put me on the pill next week. Plus she wants to know when she's going to have grandchildren, and neither of my brothers is even married yet. I'm hoping we beat them." "Children! I haven't even thought about that yet!" "We're too young now, but we've got our whole lives ahead of us. We can start practicing now if you like though, I've got lots more condoms in my bag?" said with more twinkles in her eyes. #4 must have gotten distracted because it was immediately apparent to both Julia and all of me that my cock thought that was an EXCELLENT idea. Which brought a smile to Julia's face, and a "Yep, very quick buttons too." But I shook my head, "I think it's probably late, Julia." I didn't know what time it was, but I needed an excuse and that one had to be roughly believable. "I think we should be getting home." "Are you sure?" "I think so, yes. It's been a wonderful evening, but I don't think I can handle any more." "Okay, darling." Julia was sad, but also happy, somehow. Julia raised herself, fumbling for the rubber to hold it on. When she was off, she removed the rubber, causing a small flood. She wrapped it inside the little trash bag she had in her handbag. I mentally shook my head again, recalling my error in thinking she'd failed to plan the right handbag. I suddenly remembered that it was April Fools' Day, and I was pretty sure I knew who the Fool was. Then Julia picked up the towel and started wiping me clean. I quite enjoyed the process, and let my cock show its appreciation, figuring it was safe now. Julia appreciated my show of appreciation. She looked up at me and declared, "Annette Neumeyer, eat your heart out." Then returned to her task. After cleaning me, which took quite a while as I was very messy, Julia put the soiled towel into the large Ziploc bag she had, and sealed it. Even in the dim light we had, I could see that some of the stains were dark from Julia's blood; not that I'd had any doubt at all about that status. She then removed another towel from her handbag, and cleaned herself, standing beside the seat so she could lift up her dress and clean properly. I should have been too worried to enjoy that, but I couldn't help admire the view. After that was taken care of, and the dress unfortunately lowered, she offered me her hand to help me rise. I did so, and only now pulled up my underwear and pants. While I was fussing around doing up my fly and belt, Julia said, "Oh no!" and burst into tears. #1: She was standing there, holding my jacket, crying. "Julia, what's the matter?" "Your jacket is ruined. It's drenched in our mess. Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so stupid. I didn't realize our mess would run down onto it." And she started crying again. "Julia, it's all right. Truly, it is." #1: "No it's not. I ruined the night. I so wanted it to be perfect, and I messed up." "It WAS perfect, Julia." "No it wasn't. I ruined your jacket." "It WAS perfect, Julia. Do you know how I know it was?" {Sniff}. "N... , no?" "Because you were here." One of the disadvantages of living in a house with three females is that I often get outvoted on what TV program is going to be watched, resulting in my seeing far too many romantic programs. I'd heard that line a few weeks previously and thought it was sickeningly schmaltzy, but it somehow popped out now. "Oh... , you..." And she launched herself at me. Hugging me fiercely and crying even MORE. That was the opposite of what I had intended, but they seemed to be happy tears this time. When she'd cried sufficiently, she released me, and we got back to business. She was still holding my jacket so I put out my hand, asking for it. She shook her head, and said, "You're MY man! I messed up your jacket and I will fix it. This is my responsibility." I thought that I should take my jacket back, but I realized that I didn't have a clue how to clean it myself. I could remember how much liquid had been running over my legs, so it DEFINITELY needed cleaning, and I somehow didn't want to give my REALLY smelly and probably blood stained jacket to Mom. I took the cowardly way out, agreeing with Julia, "Thanks, I appreciate that. Can I wear it for now though please, as I'm starting to feel the cold?" I think we were both suddenly aware of how cold it was, so we quickly put on our jacket and coat, then hand-in-hand hurried back to the restaurant to call a taxi. After only a couple of steps Julia said, "Ouch," and stopped walking. "What's the matter, honey?" "I'm a bit sore down there. We'll have to walk slowly." "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you." "You didn't hurt me. If I recall correctly, I was the one doing all the bouncing up and down." Smiled straight at me. "Also, I'm very small, it might take me quite a few times to get used to you. Hopefully lots and lots of times." I still found comments like that hard to take. Nice to hear; but hard to take. "I'm still sorry though. I can save you the painful walk." I bent down and picked her up. She was so light that I could do it with just my left arm. Julia thought that was just dandy, and snuggled in for her ride. When we got close to the restaurant, Julia said, "Wait a minute. You can't go in. Your jacket is a disaster, and the front of your pants has a {giggle} dark patch. I'll have to make the call. How is my makeup?" What do I know about makeup? Not much, but when I looked closely, I knew enough to see that it was smeared more than a little. Guessing that if even I could see it wasn't right, then anyone else would think it was a disaster, I said, "Ah, it's a bit messed up, sorry." She took some wet wipes out of her handbag, and scrubbed her face clean. "Do I look clean now?" "Yes. You look good, Julia." She pulled a brush out of her handbag - they can hold a lot of stuff! - and quickly brushed her hair. All set she asked me to wait while she made the call. She returned a few minutes later, and I asked, "No problems?" "No, the taxi will be here shortly. The maitre d' had thought we'd already left but I told him we'd been enjoying the garden. He said we should keep an eye on the time if we come back again because they turn the garden lights off in fifteen minutes. That's worth remembering, isn't it?" Imagining how difficult the clean up would've been without any light, I agreed. Although I wouldn't have been surprised if Julia had an outdoor lighting system in her handbag, stored just behind the kitchen sink. The taxi arrived. We got in and headed to Julia's house. We just sat there, with Julia grasping my arm tightly with her head resting on my upper-arm, in the way that she does. I suddenly became aware that my arm was being hugged against her breast, and that I'd spent all evening with her braless and I'd never thought to touch her breasts. I could have, at any time, and it never occurred to me! And now I was in a taxi barely a minute or two from her house. I REALLY like breasts too. Damn! #1: #4: I think I saw the driver sniff, and when we arrived at Julia's house he smiled when he saw me remove my wallet from the jacket's pocket, take my jacket off, and give the smelly disaster to Julia. I am sure he knew exactly why. I'd lost track of the number of times having a girlfriend had caused me embarrassment: Mom and my sisters pawing through my underwear drawer, Dad asking me about rubbers, catcalls at school, cumming in my shorts, staining the front of my pants, etc., etc. There was no end to it. The driver didn't even reach the top twenty on that list, so I ignored him. I unashamedly kissed her goodnight, thanked her very much for a wonderful evening. She said she would come over to see me tomorrow, and then I watched as an ecstatically happy girl unlocked her door and shut it behind her. I shivered and jumped back into the taxi. A few minutes later he dropped me off in front of my house. Which I was very happy to see had no inside lights on. I'd suddenly realized that in a lightened room my wet spot would be readily apparent, and I couldn't really take my pants off before I went in. I got inside, turned off the porch light, and headed for my room. As I passed my parents' room, Mom whispered just loud enough for me to hear, "Goodnight Mark." I should have known they wouldn't be asleep before I got home. It didn't sound like a question, so I just quietly answered, "Goodnight Mom." So that was my first date. I didn't know what I thought about it, as way too many strange and intense things had happened. Some of it was wonderful beyond words, but some of it was scary as hell. And some of it was both at the same time. I lay awake for a long time, trying to untangle my very tangled thoughts. Everything that'd happened was a new experience for me, which made it very difficult to understand and decide what to do. I could think of good reasons to break up with Julia, especially because she was so scarily over the top. And I could think of good reasons not to. And there were both selfish and unselfish reasons for both decisions. Trying to weigh up all the reasons wasn't easy. After a great deal of thought, it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to keep Julia as my girlfriend and to try to calm her down. That seemed the kindest thing to do, and it meant I could keep her as my girlfriend and LOVER! ------- Chapter 17: Saturday Morning Lessons Saturday, April 2, 2005 The sound of a door slamming and feet running along the hallway outside my bedroom door woke me far too early on Saturday morning. A few seconds later, the running feet returned, and the same door was opened and then slammed again. It was my sisters' bedroom door. A radio came on and was turned up very loudly, and I got the message that it was time for me to get up and be debriefed. God knows how I would describe my date to Carol. I got dressed, then still sleepily opened my bedroom door. Carol's door flew open about two and a half nanoseconds later (they have an ESP for this sort of thing), and Carol ran to grab my arm and drag me to the kitchen, "Come on, Sleepyhead! I want to know EVERYTHING. Walk faster. Start talking. Here, sit down and talk. I'll get your breakfast; you just talk." "What would you like to know?" "I already said that: EVERYTHING." "You'll need to be more specific, CAROL, as I can't think clearly yet, CAROL, because someone woke me too early, CAROL." "What did you talk about?" I smiled as I said, "Mostly about how lucky she is not to have any sisters." "Argh. You meanie!" "Okay, okay, I'll spill the beans. We started talking about family. I learned that she's got two much older brothers, who're twins that are going to OSU. She learned that I think I have two lovely sisters." "You say the nicest things." I thought so too, in two respects. I have gotten better at saying nice things over the last year or so. And over that same time period my sisters have become much nicer. I knew those two events were connected. By treating my sisters nicer, including complimenting them at the right times, they are naturally treating me nicer. It's hardly rocket science, which makes me wonder why I'd wasted so many years ignoring them, except to fight with. Although they're not perfect sisters, as I had to ask, "If I keep saying nice things will I get some breakfast? I get hungry you know." Carol resumed putting my breakfast together, "Sorry, it's coming." "Then we spent some time talking about our hobbies, what subjects we like at school, that sort of thing. We'd not been in the same classes before this year, so we hardly knew anything about each other. We spent quite a lot of time talking about this stuff because we want to get to know each other much better." "Did you kiss her?" "I'm not going to answer that unless you bring me my breakfast." "Sorry, here it comes." And, happily for me, it finally arrived. I had a few mouthfuls while I thought. Carol was moving from foot to foot impatiently, waiting for me to answer this important question. "Carol, a gentleman shouldn't 'kiss and tell', and I like to think that I am a gentleman." I could see Carol was about to argue with me. Not about that I was a gentleman, I hoped, but because she thought I was refusing to divulge this critical piece of information. I quickly continued, "but I will answer you." Now she was smiling. -- "Julia will be visiting this house sometimes. Today, she said, although I don't know when because it'd be rude to wake her up this early to ask her. I'm sure you'll see us kissing lots of times, so I'll tell you that, yes, I did kiss her last night. And she kissed me too. It was very nice." "Wow, that's so cool. She's very beautiful isn't she? Did you see her in that dress last night?" "Yes, I did see her in that dress last night, and yes, she is very beautiful. Especially last night." "Umm, did you do more? Than kiss I mean. Did you do more than kiss?" Carol was blushing cutely. "Yes we did." Carol's eyes flew open. I added, "We held hands too." "Argh, you meanie. You know what I mean." "Yes, I do. And you also know that I wouldn't answer that question." "She wants you to, you know? I've heard some of the things she's said to you, about getting lucky and stuff like that. She thinks you're hot." "She's never said that to me." "She told me." "When?" "When you were off school just after you got your arm broken. We talked about you. She gave me her phone number too." "Yes, I remember that." "So did you show her how hot you are?" "You'll have to ask her that." "I can ask her?" "Sure, you can ASK her. Whether she answers is up to her. Now no more questions about how hot I am." "When is she coming here?" "I don't know, she just said she would come some time today." "You two are so lucky." "I agree we are. I'm certainly lucky to have a girlfriend as beautiful and wonderful as Julia. And I agree that she's lucky too, to have such of a wonderful dream of a boyfriend." My tease fell flat when Carol said, "I agree. You'd be a wonderful boyfriend." "Thank you. Where're the others?" "Mom and Donna have gone to the library. Mom said they wouldn't be long. Dad's in the garage fixing the lawnmower." You'd think that Dad's working in a factory that made lawnmowers would mean he got enough of them during the week, but he likes playing around with ours. Carol added, "Dad said for you to go and see him when you were up." "Thanks. So if you are the only one in the house, why were you running around earlier?" "To wake you up, silly. It was time you got up to answer my questions." "Why didn't you just knock on my door to wake me?" "Mom told me to leave you alone until you came out of your room yourself." "Oh, silly me." Carol smiled as she answered, "That's what I said." I rinsed my dishes, put them away, and then went to see Dad. ^ "Ah, hi Mark, I see Carol got you up already." "Yes, she was very impatient. I would've preferred some more sleep though." "You were late last night, so I guess you had a good time?" "I'm not sure 'good' is the right word for it. Good parts for sure, but 'confusing' would be a better description." "You wouldn't be the first guy in the world to find a female confusing. Which of the many ways they've got to confuse us did you suffer from you last night?" "Pretty much all of them, I think. It's not just last night either. I'll try to be chronological. First, I'm confused by girls liking me. They never used to, but in the last week I've been getting chased. Why did Annette Neumeyer care so much about my opinion of her that she had to come back the second time dressed so sexy and kiss me? -- "A few days ago, another girl I barely knew slipped her phone number into my pocket and told me to call her. Then I was in the lunchroom Friday with Julia beside me and another girl who I didn't know at all asked me to go for a nature walk with her today, even though Julia was right next to me. When I said Julia was my girlfriend, she just said that she was twice the girl Julia is. And lastly, Julia. She likes me a LOT. How can I be un-likable two weeks ago and so likable now?" Dad answered, "Fame. Many girls will chase a guy just because he's famous in the small world of school. I had plenty of that during my school years, and it can go to your head, but it's fake and meaningless. You don't know them and they don't know you, so it's nothing to do with your being likable. With Julia on the scene, don't even think about it. One caring girlfriend is worth more than any number of one-night stands, which is all a fame-groupie will ever be, no matter how many nights they last, how sincere they seem or what sweet words they whisper in your ear. The moment your fame goes, so will they. -- "I had lots of girls chase me when I was the football captain. Some of them chased me very hard, but they were all attracted to fame and were into ego, like the groupies that chase after rock or movie stars. None of them would've stayed with me after two years in a lawnmower factory, let alone twenty. Instead I married your mother, and you know how happy I am with that decision. Follow my example, Mark." "Okay, no groupies. I got that." "Annette was just a crazy, mixed up, bitch. She was concerned about her status, enjoyed being cruel, and God knows what else was going through her head. It was nothing to do with liking you, that's for sure. Forget about her. Don't waste breath talking about her. -- "The unknown girls who come on to you aren't the free fun they seem to be offering. They want the reflected glory of being with you, which means that has to become widely known. Don't think for a second that you'll be able to play with any of them behind Julia's back. If you give any of them the time of day you're killing your relationship with Julia, and damaging your reputation with the nice girls at school too. That just leaves Julia..." "Back up a little and tell me what to do about the fame-groupies. The girl who gave me her number: do I call her to say 'No', do I refuse her in school, ignore her, or what? And what about other girls?" "You throw the paper away and pretend she never gave it to you. Avoid her if you can, to discourage her from trying again. Do NOT call her. That's the worst thing you can do as it'd encourage her and piss Julia off badly. If any girls come on to you at school, loudly and firmly tell them you're not interested. If they give you a paper with their phone number on it, give it back without looking at it. Or if you want to be cute, give it to Julia and tell her to get rid of it for you. When any girl comes onto you, the only opinion you worry about is Julia's. -- "You can't cheat on girls because they're unbelievably good at spotting that. If you want to break up with Julia, then break up honestly and THEN look for another girlfriend. You'll get much better ones that way, as any girl who'd go out with you while you had another girlfriend won't think twice of playing around behind your back either." "Okay. I wasn't intending to play around; I just didn't know how to reject the others. I'll take my cue from how firm your opinion is." "Good. There's only one girl in your list that could work out to be a good girlfriend, and you're already going out with her. None of the other girls like you for you, so congratulations on picking the right one. From what I've seen and heard, Julia likes you very much." "I'll say! That's the thing that worries me the most actually. I'm worried she likes me too much." "You're a hard guy to please. You want a girl to like you, but not too much, and not too little either I guess. What about if you got busy and didn't have so much time for her for a week or two? Would you prefer her to automatically like you less until you were more available? People's emotions don't match your needs, Mark. Your Mom and I love you the same day after day, regardless of what you need that day. Your sisters love you and you them, yet none of you need each other. It's not about your needs or wants. Julia chooses how much she likes or loves you. Your choice is how you behave toward her. If you like her, you'll act nicely toward her, and she'll choose how much to like you as a result. From what I've heard, Julia thinks almost everything you do is wonderful?" "Yes, she's blown away by me. I've never had that before." "You must be treating her right then. Don't let it go to your head though, and don't take advantage of her for being so enthusiastic for you. Good relationships have give and take in them, even if the feelings aren't equal on both sides, like with you and Julia now. Do you get what I mean?" "I think so. So far I haven't had a chance to take advantage of her, as she's been the one to choose what we do. She's very organized and she knows what she wants." "Sounds like you've got a tiger by the tail then. A very pretty tiger." "I'll say. You should've seen her last night." "Carol told me a time or six. Well that's it then: makes sure the give and take goes in both directions, and let her choose how much to like you as a result. Okay?" "Yes Dad. That reassures me a bit. It's not easy though." "Welcome to a man's life, son." "Yeah, I'm beginning to see that it's much more complicated than I expected." "It certainly is. One last question: Did you wear a rubber?" "Umm, yes. Julia was even more prepared than I was about that." "Hang on to that tiger, son. Good. Go and have a shower before Fely gets home." "That's all? You don't have any more questions about last night?" "Do you want me to ask any more questions?" "Going for my shower now, Dad. Bye! Oh, and while I remember, thanks for the money you gave me for the dinner. I'll put the change on your bed." "I'm sure there's not much left, so keep it. You're about to find out that having a girlfriend is expensive. You'll need all the money you've got." "Thanks Dad, bye." #1: #3: #4: #1: #2: #3: #1: #3: #4: ^ By the time I'd showered and re-dressed, Mom and Donna were home. Mom was in the kitchen when I went there looking for a snack. "Good morning, sleepyhead. How are you this morning?" "I'm good thanks, Mom. A bit tired, but good. Oh, and sorry for making you wait up late for me last night." "That's okay; it wasn't too bad. We'd guessed you'd be late. In the future we'll be a bit stricter, but we thought this was a special night and Julia is older and her parents trust her a great deal. We thought you'd be safe with her. Well, safe in some ways anyway, haha." "You know one of the first things I've learned from having a girlfriend?" "No, what?" "That I get teased and embarrassed a LOT more." "We do it to stop you getting a big head from going out with such a beautiful girl." "She is beautiful, isn't she?" "She certainly is." "Last night Julia said she'd come over here sometime today. Is that okay with you, please?" "Sure. I imagine we'll be seeing quite a lot of her from now on. Just so long as you get your chores done and don't let your schoolwork suffer, that's fine with us. Fine with Carol too I'm guessing. She's really proud of you and quite excited by Julia. I expect Carol will start begging us to let her date soon." "Julia told me that I'm invited to dinner at her house on Wednesday to meet her family. Is that still okay with you too?" "Yes, it's fine. Your father will drive you over and they'll drive you back." "Wow, you guys are planning ahead." "I've had several conversations with Vanessa. You don't think we'd let you go out on the sort of date last night obviously was without doing a lot of checking first, do you? The same for Vanessa wanting to check on you." "Um, I never thought of it." "That's what parents do, dear. We didn't expect to be doing it quite so soon, but that seems to be a common complaint of parents everywhere. We didn't think Julia was going to let us wait; she seems to have set her sights on you." "I'll say! It's amazing that she has, but it's also quite scary too." "Yes, relationships can be. Here's something to think about: from what I know about Julia, she's dated very little for such an attractive girl. Barely more than you have," Mom smiled at me, as we both knew how much that was, "and she's made no secret about how deeply hooked on you she is, so think about how scary this is for her." "Umm, yes. I can see what you mean. Except that she seems so organized and confident." "Sometimes people can act confident even though underneath they're very nervous. Sometimes they even overdo their confident act precisely because they are so scared. I wouldn't be surprised if Julia was doing that." I remembered how she suddenly burst into tears over getting my jacket wet. "I think you might be right. Last night everything was going great and we were both very happy, and then one little thing went wrong and she burst into tears saying that she'd ruined the whole date. It was a huge overreaction. That sounds like what you're talking about, doesn't it?" "Yes it does. She sounds very worried about failing with you. Vanessa has told me that Julia is trying very hard to be the best she can for you. And if she's trying that hard, there must be a considerable amount of fear underneath it all." "I think you're right." "Which means it's even more important that you treat her right. How did you handle the thing she was crying about last night?" I didn't want to tell Mom about my jacket being soaked by our mess, so I had to be deliberately vague on the details, "Umm, I didn't really fix the problem, as such, but I complimented her to make her stop being upset about it. I think she was even happier than she'd been before the problem happened." "That's perfect then. I'll tell you something worth remembering about females that most men don't really get, even if they think they know it. When their partner has a problem, most men like to grab hold of the problem with their hands and fix it. Your father does that because he's such a hands-on type of guy. Men concentrate on the problem, not the girl, assuming that when the problem has been dealt with the girl will be happy again. But very often reassuring the girl is more important. It sounds like the problem last night was just like that, and that you did exactly the right thing." #1: Laughter from Mom, "Haha, Mark. I can see your chest swelling with pride. This from a boy who has a grand total of ONE date under his belt. You're not quite an expert yet, you know. You're going to make lots of mistakes yet." "I'll try hard not to. I don't want to hurt Julia." "That's good. Trying will help, but you WILL make mistakes. Even after twenty years of marriage and knowing each other as well as we do, your father and I still make mistakes with each other. Start practicing how to apologize, you'll be doing it sooner rather than later. Very soon, in fact; I guarantee it." "I don't think so. Everything is great at the moment." "Do you want to make a bet with me that you won't be apologizing to Julia within five minutes?" This got my attention MUCH stronger than you'd expect because Mom is very anti-betting. "Uh oh. What have I done?" "Haven't done, in this case. Julia will have been up for an hour by now, if not two, waiting for you to call her to reassure her that you still love her. She'll be sitting there, looking at the clock ticking minute after minute, wondering if you're going to call. How do you think she feels?" "But... , but she said she'd come over sometime today. I'm waiting for her." "You may think you're waiting for her, but believe me, she's waiting for you a great deal harder. With increasing anxiety and panic." "But why? I mean, when I said goodnight to her last night, everything was great. I don't understand what could've happened while I was sleeping." "That's not it. Guys often lose interest in a girl once they've scored with her. Julia will be worried sick that she's opened her heart and body to a guy who'll lose interest in her after getting what he wants. And as scary as that is for any women, it is far more so when she's given her virginity as well as her heart. Believe me, 'anxious' doesn't come close to how Julia's feeling now." "Mom, how can you POSSIBLY know that we had, um, sex? And how did you know she was a virgin? I didn't even know that until we were doing it. And then I was amazed because she'd been so confident and everything." "Haha. Poor Mark, you really don't know how mothers operate do you? For the last week Julia's been desperately trying to find out how to be the best possible girlfriend she can for you, how to offer herself to you, and how to make sure you wanted to accept her. She's been asking her whole family endless questions, especially about sex. Not that she was anything other than open about it, but how hard do you think it was for her mother to figure out what Julia had planned?" "Ahh, probably not that hard." "No, not hard at all. And once Julia's intention was clear, imagine what her mother worries about next: is the boy good enough for her daughter's offer? So what does Vanessa do next?" "I have no idea." "She calls the boy's mother to discuss it with her..." #3: <{Groan}.> " ... Vanessa and I had a lunch on Thursday to discuss your and Julia's relationship. We could see how thrilled you two are to be together. I convinced Vanessa that you weren't the schoolyard Casanova," Mom smiled at me, "and that you are mature enough to treat Julia with respect. So we agreed to let Julia proceed with her plan." "I had NO idea that any of that sort of stuff went on. There's a lot of tricky stuff involved in being a mom, isn't there?" "There certainly is. It wasn't hard though, Mrs. Williams has a very high opinion of you. Almost as high as Julia's. I should let her pay your grocery bills. That'd bring her down to Earth in a hurry." I looked suitably sheepish, although it did remind me that I wouldn't mind another snack. The breakfast Carol had made hadn't been large enough. Mom continued, "So I knew what the plan was for last night. The only question was whether the plan was carried out or not. It was easy to see that it was." "How could you tell?" "You doubt the ability of mothers to know what their children are up to?" "NEVER again, Mom, I promise." "Good. But I'm not going to tell you how I knew. I've given away enough secrets for one day. It'll do you good not to know all my tricks." "Thanks VERY much! I'll go call Julia right this second and apologize to her. You were right about that. I'm glad I didn't take your offer of a bet." "Two quick things before you get on the phone." "Yes." "Vanessa and I, and the fathers too, have put a lot of faith in you. That you'll treat Julia kindly, with respect, and in ways to make us proud of our decision to support you. Don't let us down!" #3: "No, Mom. I definitely will do my best." "No one knows how far the relationship will go, that's between you and her. We only require that you treat her well." "I will." "We've also put our faith in Julia too, not to hurt or mistreat our wonderful son. Relationships go both ways, so she's equally responsible for it. But she offered you something she held very precious: her virginity. You probably couldn't get rid of yours fast enough, but her giving hers to you was a very big step for her, so please show us all that you're up to the honor that's been given you." "You know, I was scared about messing up before this talk, and I was hoping you could make me feel easier. Instead you've made me even more scared about stuff I didn't even know I had to be scared about. But somehow it's doesn't feel so bad." "That's because you're starting to understand why. If you understand what you're doing it's easier to stand up to scary things." "Yes, that's exactly right. I am more scared, but I know I can do it." "Don't get overconfident. There are plenty of ways you can mess up yet. I'll tell you one. For the last few days, Julia has been getting increasingly worried about the girls that are approaching you at school. She also overhears other girls talking about how hot you are," Mom smiled at her "hot" son, "and how much they'd like to date you. She's been getting frantic about it. -- "She nearly canceled her date with you at the last minute because she didn't believe you'd stay with her when you can have your pick from many other girls at school, but her mother talked her into going ahead. Vanessa did that knowing Julia would most likely give her virginity to you. As I said, her mother REALLY likes you. My point is that Julia was extremely nervous and scared before your date, and is doubtless even more worried now about her future with you, so imagine how she'd feel if you paid ANY attention to any other girl at school." "Oh my God! That's terrible. I could easily have done that accidentally. Not date one obviously, but I could have talked to one too much. That would've been horrible. Why didn't you warn me about that earlier?" "Because there are no end of things that can go wrong. I could tell you that one, then what about the next one, and the next one? There are too many of them. I only told you that one because you were getting cocky. You thought you understood what was going on. Believe me, you do NOT understand everything, and you WILL make mistakes. Being scared of messing up is your best defense. It's like your nearly failing to help Julia with her coat last night. You nearly made a mistake, and getting so close to making one scared you. You had no trouble remembering to open the car door for her because you were scared and on your toes. Staying scared and on your toes is a good idea." "Thanks for this conversation. You've really opened my eyes." "Good, keep them open and learn, and you'll become a good boyfriend. One last thing before you call Julia. On Thursday night, when we were planning your date, we agreed you'd take a small 'Thank You' gift to Mrs. Williams when you have dinner with them this coming Wednesday. Remember?" "Yes." "Think back on the conversation we just had. Do you see just how much you owe Vanessa? She put a lot of trust in you, and effectively gave you her only daughter. She took a large personal risk on Friday when she talked Julia out of canceling. Can you imagine how bad Vanessa would feel if you discarded her daughter now? So when you give your gift to her, mean it! Meanwhile, you've got TWO very anxious and worried females sitting by the phone at the Williams' house. I'll leave you to give them a call." "Thanks Mom!" I rushed to the phone to call Julia. "Julia? It's Mark. I am SO SORRY I didn't call earlier. I'M REALLY, REALLY SORRY. Please forgive me. I should have called ages ago. Please tell your mother that I'm very sorry to her too. I'll never do it again, I promise." #2: "Please tell your dad I'm sorry too. I never want to hurt you. I'm so sorry ... What's that? 'When can you come over?' Come right now, I want to apologize to you in person ... Good, see you soon. And I'm so sorry. Make sure you tell your mother please ... Oh, she's sitting next to you. In that case please also tell her, 'Thank you very, very much from Mark' ... Why are you laughing? You're happy? Oh that's good, see you soon then ... And I am too..." {Click}. #4: #1: #4: #3: #2: ^ I walked into the living room where Mom and Donna were watching TV. Mom asked, "How did it go?" "I made it very clear to her who's the boss of this relationship!" "WHAT!" "I repeatedly apologized, groveled and begged for forgiveness. She should be in absolutely no doubt now!" "Haha, very good. You're learning." #4: #1: "Julia is coming over now. She should be here soon." "That's fine. She can have lunch with us then. Donna wants to show you something." "Oh, what's that, Don?" "I got this tape from the library that's got samples of lots of different martial arts on it. I wanted to see which one I want to do..." "That's right, I'd forgotten you wanted to learn how to fight." " ... and I was watching one where they moved like you do. It's near the beginning. Hang on while I find it." We have an old VCR machine that Dad bought from a co-worker who was moving overseas somewhere that didn't use the same power as we do. That and a smallish TV is the extent of our "entertainment system". After some back and forth, Donna found the start of the right clip, and hit "Play". Then, "Hang on, I'll fast-forward to the best bit..." After another twenty seconds of fiddling around, Donna said, "There!" The scene was one old guy in the middle of a room with many attackers in a large circle around him. One or more of the attackers would take turns charging in and attempting to grab the old guy, punch him, or stab him with the fake knives some of them had. The old guy spun and twisted around within the charging groups, always finding gaps to move into, eluding their attacks, and effortlessly sending them flying through the air. It looked like ballet without the pink tutus and pointy shoes. Donna pointed out, "See the way he moves? He looks like you playing soccer when you're surrounded by several defenders and are trying to get through them to get a shot at goal. Not exactly the same, but close. I think you'd be good at this." "What's it called?" "I forget. The name comes on at the beginning and end of each style. Do you want me to rewind to the beginning so you can see all of it?" "To the beginning of this style, yes please. If it's not holding you up?" "No, that's fine. I think I've already picked the one I want." "What's the name of your one?" "Karate." "Why do you like that one best?" "You hit people and hurt them or break them. That's what I want to be able to do." Mom laughed, which probably needs some explanation. Donna's not violent, but she is extremely direct and unsubtle. If she wants to do something her approach is to charge straight at it. If someone was in her way - a newspaper reporter for example - and wasn't wise enough to get out of her way, then she'd hit him until he fell down. Obstruction removed; problem solved. Donna found the start of the style I was interested in and played it all. The style was called Aikido. I was DEFINITELY interested in knowing more because their moving like me might be because they'd merged too. Seeing my interest, Mom opened a large envelope and starting looking through several pages of paper, explaining, "This envelope came with the tape. It's got the details for all the clubs in Corvallis for each style. I'll just find the Aikido pages ... There's only one, here you go," passing it to me. It had all the usual details: address, phone, contact names, days of the week and times for the various classes, costs, and some text describing the philosophy of Aikido. It's a purely defensive martial art, without punches or kicks. That suited me nicely as I'm not aggressive. Mom asked, "Interested?" "Yes. Enough to check it out at least. I'd be a 'Beginning Teen (9-15)', and that class only meets once per week, Thursdays, 5:45 to 6:45pm. I think I'll go have a look." "Okay. Give me the sheet and I'll call them to get all the details." I handed over the sheet, saying, "All the details are listed on the sheet already." Mom looked at it briefly, then started reciting: "Does your cast mean you shouldn't attend until it's off, or can you either watch or participate with it on? What clothes to wear? Whether to eat dinner before or not? Where to park? Can parents come and watch? Whether..." "Okay Mom, I get the idea: NOT all the details are listed. I'm glad I'm not a parent. It's a lot of work." Mom looks straight at me. "I am glad you are not a parent too. And I hope you stay that way for several more years." Getting the hint, I looked at Donna. She was watching her tape again. I looked back at Mom and said, "You're too late, Dad's already checked up on me this morning. And, yes, we remembered." "Oh, you've already talked to your father? You were in the shower when I got home so I assumed you'd just got up." "No. I'd already been up, had breakfast and talked to Dad in the garage." "And then you had your shower?" "Yes." "You really weren't trying to keep last night's activities a secret were you?" "What do you mean?" Mom made loud "{sniff}, {sniff}" sounds. "Oh. OH! No wonder he told me to take a shower. I'll remember that next time... , oops!" "No need for the 'oops'. What're the chances we'd think that once you'd gotten a taste you wouldn't be wanting to do it again?" "You're not that silly are you?" "Not by a long chalk, buster. But it does remind me that I need to have a talk with your dad and the Williamses about the bedroom rules." "What are 'bedroom rules'?" "Let's move this discussion into the kitchen, so we're not disturbing Donna. Better still, let's go to your room." In my room Mom continued, "Bedroom rules are such as: Is Julia allowed in your bedroom with you? With the door closed? Can she stay overnight? Things like that. Same for you when you're over there." I hadn't thought about any of that. But I definitely liked the sound of the 'overnight' option. I sat up straight and said, "I..." Mom interrupted. "This may surprise you, but you're not going to be involved in this discussion. This isn't about what you and Julia want. We all know what you WANT. This is about what you'll be ALLOWED. The four parents will decide this and let you two know." "Oh." "From our discussion before you phoned Julia, you remember how important the parents are in your having a relationship with her?" "Yes I do. VERY important." "Good. Don't forget it. It's important you don't. You REALLY don't want Julia's parents to think you're untrustworthy. Can you imagine how bad that'd be for you?" "Very bad." "We don't want to find out that Julia is untrustworthy either. All four parents are sticking our necks out for you because you're both well under the age of consent. So let me stress that you and Julia being trustworthy is very important. Got that?" "I got it big time, Mom." "Your job is not only being trustworthy yourself, but helping ensure Julia is too. Don't let her break the rules her parents put on her. It's a responsibility you have to take seriously. This isn't like asking you to rake up the leaves sometime during the weekend and you forget. Forget to put a condom on, for example, and both your lives could change dramatically for the worse, not the least because of how we parents would be forced to considerably downgrade our opinions of you. You're starting to get into adult responsibilities now, where making a mistake can ruin lives." "You can be quite scary when you try." "That's fair because what you and Julia are doing scares the heck out of us." "Really?" "Really. There are dozens of reasons for us to be scared. You should spend some time thinking about that. Let me add another obvious instruction: No blabbing. Not to your friends at school, not to impress anybody, to nobody, got it?" "It's got." "If anyone outside the two families asks, you're planning to die a virgin. Okay?" "Yes. What about Carol and Donna though? Carol asked me outright this morning. I teased her and refused to answer, but she wants to know." "I'll talk with them, but I'm surprised Carol didn't smell the answer on you." "Eww, Mom." "No 'Eww' about it. She knows what it smells like; she makes the same smells herself." "Eww and eww again. Too much information." "Haha." And then Mom laughed again even louder, "HAHA. I just thought of an image that it'll be good for you to hear. Sex is messy. You've just started finding that out, but you'll find out more. Not so messy for the man, as he can ejaculate away from his body and keep himself completely clean. But for a woman, the mess flows over her body, and there's nothing she can do about that. She's going to make a mess, and I was in the process of rubbing your face in it. Get the joke?" "Not really. What joke?" "You're going to get your face rubbed in the mess. Where does the mess come out of a woman? Now rub your face there. Got it?" "Eww." "Yep, you got it. I hope you're not thinking 'Eww' at the time though. If that thought crosses you mind, get rid of it as fast as you can." "What do you mean?" "Has she sucked your cock yet?" "MOM! NO. I haven't even thought about her doing that." "Okay, but now I've mentioned it, think about it. Do you like the idea? And if you tell me anything other than 'Yes', you're lying." "In that case, yes." "Julia would have the same good feelings if you were doing that to her. It's equally good both ways. But you'll ruin all her pleasure from that act if you keep yelling out 'Eww' and pulling away in disgust. The job of a good boyfriend is to give his girlfriend pleasure, not to ruin it. If you ruin it you're a bad boyfriend, as simple as that. -- "Not only that, but by going 'Eww' you'll make her think there's something wrong with her body, and that's a horrible thing to do to a girl. It's not like she can change bodies. It's hers for life. It's a very bad thing to do to a girl, so don't do it. Got that?" "Yes Mom. I never expected to be talking about this stuff with you, but yes, I understand." "First, it's not 'this stuff', it's pussy juice or any number of other terms I'm sure you've heard. Don't call it 'this stuff' when you are with Julia. Got that?" "Yes Mom. It's 'pussy juice'. I less-than-never expected to be talking to you about pussy juice." "Excellent, now you're getting the idea. -- "Time for a pop quiz: What do you do if you find your face near her pussy juice, or if she asks you to lick her pussy?" "I don't go 'Eww'." "I'll give you 25% for that answer. Care to try again?" "Umm. No, I can't think of the answer." "You put a great, big smile on your face, in a very enthusiastic voice you say, 'Yummy! Julia-flavored pussy juice, my favorite!', and you dive right in. It's not just about the absence of negative messages, it's about giving positive messages too. It's just another way of complimenting her, her body, and how much she turns you on. Quite simple really. Understand?" "Yes Mom. I LOVE Julia's pussy juice!" #4: "That's my boy! It's not just about your complimenting her; it's more about getting your mindset right. If you like her, then you want her to be happy. The more you like her, the more important that is to you. I know she's trying very, VERY, hard to make you happy, so I sincerely hope you want to make her happy back?" "Yes, I want her to be happy." "Good. You'd better. If she asks you to lick her pussy, then she's asking you to make her happy in a very personal way. She'll be watching your reaction VERY closely, so make sure to be enthusiastic. Pussy juice tastes fine, but in the unlikely event you don't enjoy the taste, your pleasure at making her happy should far exceed any problem you have." "I know almost nothing about this stuff - sorry - about making love. Quite frankly I'm horrified about how little I know. You keep telling me about something that seems to me to be a small, almost totally unimportant issue, but when you explain it to me, it turns out to be incredibly important. If you hadn't told me I'm sure I would've screwed up big time. I don't know that I would've said 'Eww' to her. I might have - and that's scary - but even if I hadn't, I wouldn't have done anything like what you described. I don't think I'm going to be a very good boyfriend or lover, and that upsets me." "I can get rid of that upset easily." "I hope so, but I doubt it. Every time I find out anything, it just makes me so much more aware of how incredibly important all of this is, and how many ways there are to go wrong. Ways that I have absolutely no idea about." "You're worried about not being a very good boyfriend or lover. Do you know who makes the worst boyfriends or lovers?" After a couple of seconds' thought, "No. I can't think of the answer." "Those boys who think they are the best." "I don't understand your point. You mean playboys or Casanovas or something?" "Let me give you the one word that'll explain it all to you: Jocks." "Ah. I get it." "Not all jocks. I use the word the way you usually use it. Guys who're sure they're God's gift to women are the worst boyfriends and lovers. They don't care about the girl, her pleasure, her needs, and especially they don't care about getting better because they already think they're the best. So they're terrible. Same for the other gender. How good a girlfriend and lover do you think Annette Neumeyer is?" "I'm sure she'd be a terrible girlfriend. I have trouble imagining her as a bad lover though; she's so beautiful and sexy." "Yeah, that's a common male mistake. Guys have trouble seeing past 'sexy'. With a little more experience I think you'll work it out, but I'll give you the short version: Being a good lover is all about giving, which is something I hope you learn quickly. How good at giving do you think Annette is?" "Terrible." "So she will be a terrible lover, trust me on that. So moving along. The best boyfriends and lovers are those that know they need to get better, and who try their best to do so. I haven't told you anything about how to lick a girl's pussy, other than enthusiastically. Because you know you need to learn, you will learn. In a month or two I expect to see Julia walking out of your room with big smiles on her face." "But I know almost nothing about how to make love. Last night I wanted to put my fingers inside Julia, but I didn't have a clue how many, where to put them exactly, how to give her pleasure, how not to hurt her, or anything like that. I would've looked like a fool. Not knowing any of that is depressing." "So what did you do?" "I just rubbed the outside." "Did she like it?" "Yes. I liked it too." "So you kept within your capabilities and you both enjoyed it. Sounds perfect to me. For the next time, what's to stop you saying to Julia, 'Can you please show me how to finger your pussy. I'd like to learn how to do it to give you pleasure and not hurt you'?" "You make it sound easy. And I guess it is, isn't it?" "Sure. You're allowed to ask each other for help. Who better to ask? It's not rocket science, is it?" "No." "Would you be pleased if she asked you how best to rub your cock?" "I'LL SAY!" "Haha. There you go then. Last night wouldn't have been a good night to be asking each other learning questions. For a good experimentation session you want plenty of time, privacy and comfort. Last night I doubt you had any of those. Remind me to get the details from you one day, although I am sure Vanessa has them by now, so I could just ask her." "Mom! Surely Julia wouldn't tell her mother that level of detail. Or that Mrs. Williams would talk with you about them. Would they?" "I am positive they would. That's why I said it. I'm pulling your leg, but with the truth. It's good for you to learn some of how women operate. Anyway, back to learning. You were both, until a few hours ago, virgins. Would you blame her for not knowing how to do a particular technique on you?" "Of course not!" "Then why blame yourself for not knowing a technique?" "You're right. I was being hard on myself." "Yes you were. Neither of you should blame yourself or the other person for not knowing a technique. Here comes a trickier question: who's to blame if one of you doesn't know a technique in three month's time?" I thought about it for a few seconds, then, "Okay, I can think of two answers. First, I'm sure there will be some techniques we won't know in three months. We can't learn everything in that time, so that answer would be that no one is to blame. The second answer is the one I think you're angling for: that we're both to blame. If we don't know a technique that we wanted to learn, then it's probably both of our faults for not teaching each other. How's that?" "Good. Throw away all your anxieties about what you should or shouldn't know. You and Julia are going to enjoy learning together." "I've just thought of a third 'Who's to blame' answer, and I think it's my favorite. Can I add it to my list now?" "I know I'm going to regret this, but okay." "It's the parents' fault for not letting Julia sleep over enough nights for us to practice." "Haha. I admire you dedication toward practicing new skills. Seriously, sleeping over - as you euphemistically put it - is a big deal. Sleeping with your love is a very nice feeling, but you're only fifteen and a half and Julia isn't much older, and you're both very intense people. It's scary for both sets of parents. You're probably going to have to work hard to earn her parents' consent for that. By 'work hard' I mean earning their trust, demonstrating commitment, maturity, and those sorts of traits; none of which 15-year old boys are well known for, so don't get your hopes up for it happening soon." "I don't mean to be rude, but, 'sheesh!' This dating stuff is HARD work! It's big, scary and intense in all sorts of directions I never expected." "You're getting a crash course, and they're hard work. It's good you're scared and on your toes. When some pretty girl flirts with you at school, are you going to have any trouble immediately telling her to take a hike?" "Heavens no!" "There you go then. I'll call you when Julia comes. Or maybe I'll just send her in here. Let me think about that." "You're a tease." "Guilty as charged." Mom got up to leave. I commented, "You know, my conversation with you was very different from my talk with Dad. Yours was, umm, surprisingly frank." "Your dad means well, but he suffers from the nearly incurable problem of being a male. He talked a lot of generalities, didn't he?" "Yes. Pretty much all general. Except for my using a rubber, he asked outright about that." "Yes. That's a 'thing'. He has no trouble talking about things. It's the human aspects that men have trouble with. He'll do fine if you need to know something specific. If you walked up to him and asked about cock sizes, he'll give you a good answer. You just have to start the subject and be specific." "Okay, thanks Mom." She left the room and closed my door behind her. I'd gotten far too little sleep last night, so I easily fell asleep again. It was easy without Carol running up and down the hallway slamming doors. ------- Chapter 18: Well-Fucked Saturday, April 2, 2005 (Continued) There was a knock on my door a little later. After I woke enough to focus on my watch, I worked out that I'd only managed to get an extra half an hour's sleep. I called out, "Yes?" "Julia's here. Come to the kitchen, honey." Half a second later I was in the kitchen. Everyone was there: Mr., Mrs. and Miss Williams, Mom and Dad, Carol and Donna. Carol was busy telling Julia how beautiful she looked last night. Not being able to get a word in edgewise, I just moved to Julia, who moved to me, and we gave each other a big smile and hug. Carol paused, giving me a chance to say, "I'm so sorry I didn't call you earlier. I was stupid. I'm sorry for any worry I caused you." "That's okay. Your mother's already explained the two reasons to me." "What two reasons? This is news to me." Julia smiled at Mom, then answered me, "Reason number two is that you thought I was going to call you because I had said that I'd come over sometime." "Yes, that's right." "And reason number one, which your mom stressed I should never forget, is that you're a male and therefore thoughtless. You didn't intend to be mean, it's just that you never thought about what you were doing. Your mom said that guys do this all the time and that we girls have to learn to make allowances and be forgiving. So I forgive you, haha." "Thank you, MOTHER. I am so glad that you're on my side." -- I turned to Julia, "Umm, I think my mom knows what she's talking about, but I will try to do better in the future. If you'll still have me?" There was no harm in getting some extra reassurance. Julia leaned forward, cupped her hand to my ear, and whispered quietly, "I'd like to have you now." I felt my face go red, and everyone laughed at me. A self-satisfied smirk on Julia face didn't help either. Yep, having a girlfriend is one embarrassment after another. #3: #2: #3: #1: #3: Mom said, "Mr. and Mrs. Williams brought Julia over, rather than her biking. We're going to have a parents' talk in the living room in a few minutes, so please do not disturb us. Okay?" A chorus of, "Yes Moms." "Mark, Julia has brought her schoolwork over, so you can study together if you wish. You can go into your room, but for the present leave your door wide open. -- "And girls," looking mostly at Carol, "that doesn't mean you can go running into and out of Mark's room. It's still his room, okay?" "Yes, Mom." "What are you girls going to be doing?" Donna answered, "I've got a soccer game soon." Donna had added that sport to her list after seeing me play a couple of times recently. Carol said, "I want to talk with Julia about clothes, makeup and stuff." I didn't like the sound of that! Mom was on my side, saying, "Haha. Julia has come over to be with Mark. Do you think Mark's going to want to listen to a conversation about makeup?" "Um, probably not." "Julia is MARK'S girlfriend, not yours. I'm sorry, but I'm sure she's looking forward to being with him. You'll have chances to talk with her later." Julia piped in with, "I'm sure we will, Carol. I'll be coming over here lots of days, if Mark will let me, so we'll have lots of chances to talk. And maybe you could come to my home one day and I could show you my clothes and give you some makeup lessons?" "{Shriek!} Oh, that would be SO cool! I'd love that. Can I go please, Mom?" "ONE day yes, but not today. Now help me make some coffees, then back to your studying, okay?" Carol usually has some studying to get back to; she's a very diligent student. Julia couldn't resist adding, "Besides Carol, I want to catch up with Mark. He made me wait HOURS before he called me this morning." Guilt-trip successfully inserted, we broke up, wandering off in our various directions. Julia and I headed straight for my bedroom, her schoolwork left forgotten in the kitchen. We lay on my bed - with the door open unfortunately - and mostly talked. What I had to say boiled down to, "I'm sorry I made you wait," and, "I'll try to be a better boyfriend." Julia's talk boiled down to, "I'm going to be the best girlfriend ever!", "I'm so happy I'm yours," and, "We're SO good together." I must confess that I couldn't resist putting my hand over her breasts for a feel. I'd been kicking myself for forgetting last night, so I made up for it now, even though they were encased in a damned bra. I kept telling myself that it's the thought that counts, while I kept kicking myself. Julia loved it, making "hmmm" sounds as she snuggled even more firmly into my arms. I couldn't do much more, and I probably shouldn't even be doing that with an open door and four parents in the house, but I'm only a guy, a defect that had been pointed out to me several times recently. Thanks to Mom's talk, I realized that I should give Julia lots of reassurances that I wasn't going to lose interest in her. I honestly wasn't either. Being scared off by her intensity was a possibility, but not losing interest. So I talked about things we could do in the future: how much I was looking forward to studying with her for the rest of our schooling, how I was glad she and Carol could be friends, and anything else I could think of that emphasized an ongoing relationship. Julia was VERY happy with my reassurances. I began to get some understanding of just how worried she had been this morning, and how horrible it would've been if I had just waited for her to call me. Not wanting to disturb her by phoning, I would've waited for hours if not for Mom's advice. I resolved to thank Mom again at the first opportunity. Donna called out "Bye" as she walked past my room. She seemed quite indifferent to my lying on my bed with a beautiful girl in my arms, as if it were an everyday event. It was incredible to believe that it could become one. I awaited the result of the parental conference with some trepidation. What the "Bedroom Rules" would be was very much in my mind. After more than an hour - which is a very long time to wait while something so critical is being decided - I heard the living room door open and Mom called out for Julia and me to join them. When we had, I said, "Before we start, can I say something to you all please?" Dad said, "Our minds are made up." "This is about something else. I just want to say it while you're all here." "Okay then." Taking a deep breath, I started. "I had a very good talk with Mom this morning. Until that talk I was blind to so many important things. Mom made me see how much of our happiness," giving Julia, standing beside me, a quick hug, "is due to our parents, and how much I have to be thankful for. I'd like to say now how thankful I am to all of you, especially our mothers. Thank you all very, very much indeed, especially you Mrs. Williams, and you Mom. Thank you." I could see that this speech was definitely scoring me some points with the parental units. Lots of smiles, and "You're welcomes." Julia was grasping my arm again. I continued, "I'd like to add some apologies too, especially to Julia and Mrs. Williams. I should've called much earlier this morning. I know now how thoughtless I was, and I'm sorry. I'll try my best not to be so thoughtless in the future, but - as my mother has pointed out to me several times - I'm only a male so I will make mistakes. I apologize in advance for such mistakes. I really don't know what I'm doing as all this is just so new to me. Last night was my first-ever date, Julia is my first girlfriend, and - umm - other firsts," that got several good laughs, "but I will try. If I make ... No, WHEN I make such mistakes, please know that they're not intentional, and as soon as Mom points out how stupid I was, I'll apologize as hard as I can." Yep, I could see my brownie points scores going through the roof with the parents. That struck me as an EXTREMELY good situation to be in. Mrs. Williams responded, "We accept your apology for being a male, Mark. I don't think there's much we can do about it, as it's doubtlessly an important contributing factor to Julia's attraction for you. Fortunately, after several years of hard work, some males can be trained into being most satisfactory partners." She hugged her own husband briefly. "Judging from that little speech, your training is already well underway. Well done and good speech." Julia was squeezing my arm even tighter. I'm sure that when my cast is finally removed from my right arm, it'll be my left arm that's the skinnier of the two, from all the squeezing. With a look of pride on her face, Mom presented the Bedroom Rules to us, with some confirmatory expansions from the other parents: We are not allowed to stay with each other overnight, in either house. We are not allowed sex anywhere other than in Julia's room, and only with the drapes closed and her stereo on. It was stressed that this meant not in my room or anywhere else. "Sex", it was made clear to us, was any contact of either person's genitals. Mr. Williams added, "Clinton's definition notwithstanding." It was greeted with no laughter from the other parents, as they were in a too-serious mood. And in case we were in any doubt, Mrs. Williams added in a no-nonsense voice, "That means keeping your hands out of each other's pants or panties. Hands out, faces out," I blushed, "and everything out. They're a no-go zone other than in Julia's room. Clear?" Julia and I nodded. We are allowed in my bedroom, and we can make-out there a little, but the door had to be fully open and all the lights on if it's nighttime. Absolutely no blabbing about having sex by either of us to anyone outside the families, and we were told to actively deny it if asked. Dad added, "We're aware we're telling you to lie, but you tell everyone that you're waiting until Mark's eighteen, even if every other boy and girl in your classes are going at it like rabbits." Treat Carol and Donna appropriately. Mom expanded, "We cannot realistically keep it from them, especially Carol, and especially with Mark's lack of discretion, {sniff}, {sniff}." Which caused me to blush yet again. "I'll talk with Carol about it myself, but keep that aspect or your relationship low key, especially in front of Donna." The rules would be reviewed in about two months, after the trials of the jocks who'd assaulted me (the Biffs). The rules might be relaxed then, but only if we abided by them PERFECTLY in the meanwhile. #1: #2: #4: #3: #1, #2, #4: "Thank you, Mom and Dad, Mr. and Mrs. Williams. I'll definitely abide by your rules." Julia agreed also. Mom offered, "Let's move to the kitchen and have lunch." We all did, with the guys sitting while the women pulled out the makings. Bless them! I was very hungry. Julia sat in my lap, hand-feeding me. Ostensibly because of my broken arm, but that was a transparency everyone saw through. Toward the end of lunch, Mrs. Williams - Vanessa - said, "We'll go back home after lunch. Would you two like to stay here or come back with us?" I started shrugging, then realized how incredibly stupid I was. I was just about to answer when Julia suddenly started bouncing with glee on my lap, "{Squeak}. Home! Now! Quickly!" There was laughter from around the table. I couldn't resist, so with mock casualness, "Hmm. I've got quite a few chores to do this weekend. What do you think, Dad, should I stay here and do them?" I've been teased SO many times because of this relationship that it was great to finally be the teaser rather than teasee. Unfortunately my tease probably wasn't as effective as it could've been, due to the fact that Julia was sitting on proof of my lack of interest in doing chores. She just wiggled on my lap, looked at me, and said, "Goody". Then she turned to her mother and said, "Eat faster, Mom." I knew that being a good boyfriend included supporting my girlfriend, so I said, "Yes, please eat faster, Vanessa." Carol was very interested in Julia's and my relationship, but she hadn't heard the Bedroom Rules so was puzzled by the laughter. I wasn't going to explain. ^ It took FAR too long to get to Julia's house, but I was eventually being dragged upstairs to her room. Okay, maybe not "dragged". It was true that Julia was in front, but only because I didn't know the way. Prof called out, "Don't forget to pull the drapes and turn your stereo on." I don't know why that was important to him, but I was more than happy to comply in return for what would follow. Then we stripped each other. It was intense. I had seen almost nothing of Julia's body last night, but now I was going to see EVERYTHING. And we had HOURS of privacy with which to enjoy each other. I was very excited, and I could see that Julia was the same. We fell into a game where we took turns removing one article of clothing from each other. My shoe, her shoe, my other shoe, etc. The anticipation was incredible. This was much more exciting than last night; I was shaking all over. Looking at Julia slowly getting more naked was a VERY sexy experience. She seemed equally thrilled to be looking at me, but I knew who was getting the best end of this deal! The confusing thing was Julia's confidence that it was her. When my shirt came off, Julia exclaimed, "Mark! Your body is AMAZING! I had NO IDEA you looked so good. How do you find time to exercise so much with all your schoolwork?" "Um, I don't exercise much, just soccer and goofing around with Donna. I appreciate your strange enthusiasm, but my body isn't anything great." "I'm standing here looking right at it, so you can't tell me it's not amazing. Your torso tapers so much it's erotic, and your muscles look great. You're a HUNK! I never knew that about you. Lucky me! Haha." "Haha. I'm not a 'hunk'. I'm just skinny so what muscles I've got have to stick out." "That's absurd. You can't get shoulders that wide by under-eating." #2: "I must have wide-shoulder genes then. The buttons on this blouse are difficult to undo." "Your hands are shaking too much. Let me help." Do you know how hard it is to undo a bra when your hands are shaking? The single most important item of female apparel, and it's impossible for an excited boy to get it off! The bastards who design those things should be shot! Julia took pity on me with that too, and unhooked it herself. I suspect she was feeling a degree of impatience too. As her breasts came into view I nearly blew in my shorts again. Luckily #2 felt it coming and just in time did our subconscious control trick on it, softening it a little. Not enough for Julia to see me go limp - that'd be bad! - but enough to avoid making a mess. #2 - after he identified himself as the going soft initiator because we can't tell who does things with our body - received some very effusive When Julia and I were naked, apart from that DAMNED sling, we just stood back from each other and stared. Wow! Julia insisted forcefully, "You ARE a hunk. You've been keeping that very well hidden. Did you think I wouldn't love you if you were buff?" "Ahh, no. I can't say I thought that." #1: We stared at each other for another five years, then Julia said, "I love you, Mark." "I love you too, Julia." I'd been staring at her naked body for several minutes. It made it surprisingly easy to say I loved her. "Show me." I moved to her, took her hand and led her to the bed. She moved to the center - she has a very nice room because it has a double bed - lay on her back and spread her legs. Even with my dearth of sexual experience, there was no mistaking what she wanted next. #2: We all immediately remembered that we'd left my wallet at home. All my rubbers were in my bedroom. #1, #2, #3, #4: Then I remembered how superbly prepared Julia was, hopefully. "I'm VERY sorry, but I forgot to bring my wallet. Do you have a rubber? PLEASE tell me you do!" Julia still had several spare from last night, so she grabbed them and dumped them in her bedside drawer, "For future use." She kept one out, opened the foil and gave it to me. I'd never put a rubber on before, so of course I got it wrong. Fortunately Julia knew how. She laughingly told me about her asking Andrew (one of her brothers) about it, so no wonder her parents had known what she'd been planning for our date. I was eventually in a position to respond to her "Show me" request. The missionary position, in fact, with my broken arm resting on one of her knees. No foreplay, no side-trips. Neither of us was complaining though, we were far too busy being excited. It took less than a minute after we started before I felt myself about to cum. Even with my never having seen a girl orgasm in person, I knew I was going to finish WAY too early for Julia. I had to do something to stop my cumming, especially after being too early twice last night; the first being so early that Julia hadn't even known about it. So I used what has to be the best skill I have, I went soft on command. Not totally soft of course, that would've been just as bad, although VERY temporary. I simply started the "Go-soft" process, applying it slowly enough to remove the tingling tension that'd been building at the base of my balls. Once I'd stopped tingling, I stopped the "Go-soft". I hadn't done it enough to affect my cock, so it stayed hard. Several seconds later I felt the tingling start again, so I removed it again. Being able to issue small go-soft commands was doing wonders for my performance anxiety, and it let me REALLY enjoy myself. Julia too. After a few minutes I could see that Julia was getting very tingly herself, or however it works for girls. She started calling out, "Yes, yes, yes." I sped up, going faster and faster. I'm not totally ignorant, and I knew speeding up was probably a good idea. I was having a blast seeing how much pleasure Julia was getting, although it required increasingly frequent go-softs to stop me having too much of a "blast". (I'll adopt the terminology I invented for myself at this time. "Go-soft" will mean going all the way soft, down to limp-noodle status. "Mini-go-soft" will be what I do when I back off from the tingling just far enough for it to stop for a short while.) Soon Julia was chanting louder and louder, "Yes, Yes, YES, YES, YYEESS!" I couldn't believe the volume she was putting out, and it kept RISING! She was screaming at the top of her voice. Her last yell was REALLY LOUD, as her body thrashed in her climax. It was deafeningly LOUD, but it was also music to my ears, once they stop ringing. I was a good lover! It was wonderful. #4: #1: I wanted to hear her scream again, in part to check whether the first time had damaged my hearing. I was still inside her, but I waited almost motionless for Julia. I slowed my movements right down to a bare crawl, just enough to keep me hard (you can imagine how little movement that required!). It took her a minute or so, but when Julia started looking fully aware again, I slowly picked up the speed of my thrusts. She looked a bit surprised that we weren't stopping, but she soon started grinning again. Me too. My thrusts got faster and faster, to her enthusiastic encouragement. Whenever I needed to - which was VERY often - I did a mini-go-soft. With all the practice I was getting with them, I was soon able to do them without needing to slow my thrusting. One mind kept my body moving, another mind concentrated on getting my cock and balls to back off the right amount. It was fantastic to be able to control myself so well. Julia got more and more aroused, and after a few more minutes she screamed another orgasm. This was so neat! I decided to do her one more time. I'd come twice the previous night and she not at all, so I'd let myself cum just after her on the next one, to give us three orgasms each. When she got her breath back, I started accelerating again. Julia looked a bit shocked, but shock was soon replaced with pleasure, and she got more and more into it. By this time I'd done something like four or five dozen mini-go-softs, so my body was DESPERATELY ready to cum. When she was quite close I suddenly decided to see if I could make this last one especially good. I rocketed my thrusting up to the highest speed I could do. Julia's body took a second to respond, and then her arousal rocketed upward too. She blasted straight into a ripper of an orgasm, surprising me with how quickly it arrived. I kept thrusting, urging my own cum to arrive. Between my body being so ready, the spasms in Julia's pussy from her orgasm, and my knowing that this time I was going all the way, it took next to no time for me to cum too. Julia was still bouncing at the end of her orgasm when I had far and away the best cum of my whole life. Admittedly that'd been a pathetically easy standard to surpass, but never again. I collapsed on top of her, and felt her grunt. The poor girl, I was double her weight. I rolled off to my left, and just lay there panting, smiling, and oh so happy with my life. What a day! Sex is WONDERFUL! I can't believe how useful going soft on command is! The day I accidentally discovered that skill has got to be one of the very best in my life - it's led to my having some FANTASTIC times with Julia. I bet every guy wished he had that ability! Julia was still out of it, looking like she was sleeping. For the first time I took notice of her room. I couldn't believe I'd missed this much pink before! To describe it as a "girly room" wouldn't do it enough injustice. Her dressing table mirror was large, heart-shaped, with alternating white and pink little hearts around the edge. EVERYTHING had frilly edges. I suspect that even the frilly edges fractally had their own frilly edges. Even her computer monitor had a frilly pink dust cover! There was a small bookshelf, and most of the books even had pink spines. How over the top does someone have to be to buy books based on the color of their spines? There were little knickknacks scattered around the room, displays of cute little things, with hearts featuring heavily. (Got the image of this room in your mind? Now make it about two times pinker and three times frillier, and you'll have it about right.) Even without any posters of the latest boy-band heartthrobs, it was still a horrifyingly girly room. No self-respecting guy would be seen dead in a room like this. I was here for the sex though, which beats self-respect every time. After my brain stopped reeling from all that pink, I narrowed my focus to the only thing in this room that I really enjoyed looking at, but she was still sleeping. I shook her a bit, but got no response. I shook her a bit more, but still no response. I got a bit panicky then, and checked to make sure she was breathing. She was fine, thank God! I gave her an impolitely big shake, and again no response. She'd passed out! While I was trying to decide how much to freak out, her breathing suddenly deepened and she started stirring. Her eyes fluttered for several seconds, then opened wide at the same time as she took a deep breath. I took her a few seconds to wake up enough, and then she said, "WOW! I didn't know it was possible to feel that wonderful. Oh my God, that was incredible! No wonder people like sex! I can't believe how you made me feel. Today is the best day of my life! I know I said that last night about yesterday, but I didn't know you could do this then." "I take it you enjoyed it then?" "You have no idea! Or perhaps you do, I don't know. I sure didn't know that was possible. Thank you so much, and by the way, you are NEVER, EVER, EVER getting away from me. I am yours for life." I mentally cringed, but my conversation with Mom had taught me that I had to keep a happy face. If I showed even a small amount of doubt, it'd upset Julia, Vanessa and Mom greatly. So I said, "Good. I enjoyed it very much myself. It was a HUGE buzz to see you have such a good time, especially after you didn't cum last night." "If I never cum again, my life will have been worthwhile." We exchanged similar enthusiastic announcements of happiness, until Julia reached across to her vanity and retrieved a box of tissues. She removed my rubber, carefully wrapped it in a tissue and dropped in her wastepaper basket. Then she cleaned my cock with a couple more. I helped by lying still and basking in my happiness. Julia was about to start cleaning herself when I remembered Mom's "Pussy Juice" talk. I called, "Stop!" "What? Why?" "You're wasting it. Don't do that." I hadn't intended anything more than asking if I could lick her, to show my appreciation for her taste. But I could see she didn't understand what I was saying, and an evil idea occurred to me. I knew I was going to enjoy this. She was temporarily motionless, with the box of tissues in one hand, and a single, partly used tissue in the other. In other words, both her hands were full, snigger. I rolled over, raised myself into a kneeling position, and moved so that I was between her legs. "I'll need a tissue", I said out loud, and I pulled a new one out of the box so she would assume I was going to continue wiping her in much the same way as she had been. That should maximize the surprise nicely. I moved down so my head was above my target area. "Now let's see," as I lowered my head. Julia was still clueless, excellent! I quickly extended my tongue and did my best to wipe it over as much of the "target area" as I could. "Eeekk!" I would've laughed, but my mouth was busy with the second lick. Julia bucked her hips into the air. To hold her down I had to drop my tissue. No loss, as I'd never intended to use it. Another wipe of my tongue. Another "Eeekk!" and buck of her hips. This was fun. And I was pleased to note the taste was fine, not that I would've dared stop if it wasn't, not after Mom's lesson. I got down to serious business, licking as rapidly as I could. "Eeekk! What Eeek! are Eeek! you doing? Eek! {Pant}." My response was more licks. I thought that if I gave her enough clues she'd be able to work it out for herself. She responded with another "Eek!" then they morphed into sounds that meant she was over the shock, and was starting to have a very good time. As was I. I'd been nervous and worried, but those emotions dissipated as Julia started enjoying what I was doing. She was over the shock completely now, and I just kept licking. Every time she gave an especially strong gasp, pant or buck, I increased the frequency of my previous action. Before long she was doing a lot of gasping, panting and bucking. And not long after that, she added screaming and even more frantic bucks. She did some more screaming, then some more, and then she really SCREAMED, arched her back, held it for a second, and then collapsed. Drawing on my extensive sexual experience, I knew I'd done good. I think most of the neighborhood knew I'd done good. I moved back up to be beside her. She was motionless, lying on her back, her elbows on the mattress but both of her hands still up in the air holding the box and tissue. She looked quite silly, and also dazed and happy. I removed the box and tissue from her nerveless hands, and said, "You won't need these ever again. From now on I will clean you my way." "Oh." I waited for her. Basking in the joy of a job well done. After a sizable pause, a somewhat timorous Julia said, "Gosh, that was a shock. I never thought of you doing that. You didn't have to surprise me, you know? I'd have let you if you asked." "Last night you put my hand on your pussy and told me it was mine. Surely I don't need to ask your permission to lick my own pussy do I?" "Haha, no. I guess not." "Good. Because I intend to lick my pussy a lot. I find I enjoy it very, very much. My pussy is DELICIOUS!" "Really?" "Really truly. In fact, I think I am getting a little thirsty. I wonder if I can find anything to drink down here?" I started moving my head back down toward my well-targeted area. "Have mercy! Please! I need to rest. You're a brute." "Seriously?" "Yes, seriously. You don't know how good you are. ALL the best orgasms in my life have occurred in the last... , however long it's been. I need to recover, please?" She certainly knew how to make me happy! "Okay, honey. But there's still so much I want to do with you." "I'm almost too scared to ask, but what?" "I'd like you to teach me how to finger you. I'd really like to do that, but I'm too scared of hurting you." "Well. Hmmm. Now you're asking for some pretty serious tutoring there. Very intimate too. Not the sort of thing I'd do without some suitable recompense being agreed upon first." #2: "Like what?" "I think I might be persuaded to so tutor you, in exchange for you showing me how to use my hands to pleasure your cock. My mouth too." "Your mouth too? You drive a hard bargain, young lady. I'll have to think about that... , for about a millisecond - DEAL!" Mom was right, asking for help was easy. Getting it was going to be fun too. She's a good negotiator, that Julia. Not only did I have to teach her hands AND her mouth, but I also had to teach her first. She claimed to be too tired "down there" to teach me yet. So, feeling like the luckiest guy on the planet, I taught her what she insisted on knowing. Two seconds into the first lesson I was one very happy teacher, as her hands felt wonderful on me. Before long her mouth got involved too. After an, "Oww, keep your teeth well away please," all the rest of my lesson was a sequence of moans. I admit that might not have been the best teaching style, but it was my first day on the job. Julia was not only a good negotiator, but a most diligent student too. In a surprisingly short time, considering I had cum not long ago, I felt the familiar tightening starting to happen. I had a momentary thought to prolong the experience by doing some mini-go-softs (so useful!), but that would've been mean to Julia. So like the dedicated teacher that I am, I sacrificed my desires to those of my student, and decided to let nature take its course. I did, however, warn Julia that I was getting close, "Julia, you're doing fantastic, I'm gonna cum very soon. Take your mouth off and just use your hands if you like." She pulled her mouth back just far enough to talk, "No way. My brothers say guys love it when a girl swallows." And she enthusiastically reattached her mouth. I could've done without her mentioning her brothers, but she had a good way of distracting me. Very soon I cried, "Here it comes ... Ahhhhhh." What a girl! She took it without hesitation or difficulty. She accumulated it in her mouth, and when I'd finished, she looked at me while she swallowed it. I had to ask, "What do you think of the taste?" I'd tried tasting a few drops of myself myself (if you follow that), but I'd rather leave it than take it. "Hmm. Not sure. I think I'll have to try it again to be sure. Maybe another twenty or thirty tests might be enough, or maybe another hundred. I'm not sure. It might need a LOT of tests." With a big smile on her face. She then added, "I feel inspired, let's do another test now." And she reattached her mouth to my much-reduced cock, and started sucking it back into life. "Hey, not fair. You're reneging on our deal!" "{Slurp}. What deal? {Suck}." "I want to learn how to finger you, please." "Well, seeing how you asked so nicely. And I must admit that I'm looking forward to it myself. No one else has ever touched me there before, and I want to see if you're as good with your fingers are you are with everything else you put down there." Now that made me feel GOOD! So the teacher and student changed hats, so to speak, and school was in session again. The next several minutes were very confusing for me. Julia would instruct me to do something, and I'd barely get started on it, then she'd tell me to do something quite different. At first I thought I must be doing it wrong, but she assured me I was picking it up fine. A minute later she change to a different motion on a different place, and shortly after that it was best if I used both hands to do two simultaneous new things. Between the frequent changes, and the need for her to explain in detail where and what I had to do each time, it was a VERY different lesson compared to my teaching her, when I'd just groaned in various ways. It was SO much more complex than for a guy. With me, just grab it and rhythmically tug it until I cum. Guys are simple and straightforward; and apparently girls are erratic, complex, difficult, and time-consuming. What a surprise! I'd had NO IDEA there was so much to learn! First there's all the different parts and areas (the clit, above the clit, beside it, outside of the lips, on the outer lips, inside the outer lips but not inside the pussy itself, etc., etc.) With a guy, just grab the one bit he's got and tug on it, but that approach isn't even close to what you should do with a girl. Not with Julia anyway. I've got no idea whether other girls might be different, and I probably never will, given Julia's intensity and jealousy. Second, not only are there so many different parts and areas, but many different ways of rubbing them, rubbing beside them, pressing on them hard, medium or soft; sliding my finger(s) over the surface or pressing hard enough to remain in contact with the surface while moving her skin back and forth, rubbing, squeezing, flicking, pressing, when to touch and not touch in all the various ways; how to build her up, how to hold her there, how to change to re-build from a different 'direction', and much more. And I haven't even mentioned what I could do with my tongue and lips yet! Julia was a good teacher, and we both had a great time playing with her button and its MANY related areas, but it really was a CRAZY system. The point of sex is to have a good time, so why are girls' pussies so complicated that it takes rocket scientists to get them to blast off? It was fun though, once I got over the shock of the ridiculousness of the process. I was thoroughly enjoying both the learning and the practice. Putting new knowledge to use and seeing her body react gave me a lot of pleasure and confidence. The trouble was that the teacher and pupil both found the lesson to be very exciting. Before we reached the end of the slow (because girls are so complicated) lesson, we had to get another rubber out and slake our passions in the traditional manner. This time I didn't have to do any of my mini-go-softs on the way to Julia first orgasm. I was excited, but she was WAY closer because of the thrill of educating young minds, fingers and tongue. She went off, and I slowed right down while she was largely out of it. I didn't mind waiting, as I suddenly realized I could lean forward and suck on her nipples while still keeping my cock inside her. #3: So I had a very good time waiting for her. When Julia started stirring, she felt me sucking on one of her nipples and fingering the other, causing her to smile from ear to ear. Seeing that she was back with me, I started making my thrusts of slowly increasing depth and speed. I kept sucking on her, but soon I needed to move my pelvis too fast to allow me to lean over so much, so I leaned back and just used my fingers on her nipples. Shortly after that she realized I was taking her all the way again. She looked a bit dazed, smiled bravely, and was soon calling out her by now familiar, "yes, Yes, YES" progression. It slowly built to be even more enthusiastic, loud, expressions of the affirmative. Ending in a very loud, long, "YYEEEEESS!" I was feeling a bit selfish about how much pleasure I was getting from her, and thought I should probably give her a rest, so this time I stopped the go-softs near the end, to let myself release shortly after her cum. I flopped on my side, got my breath back, removed my rubber, used one of the tissues, and then announced in a loud voice, "Now to clean you. Yummy, Julia-flavored pussy juice; my favorite!" There was a very weak, "Oh no..." from the prostrate Julia. I moved down between her legs, spread them, and cleaned her MOST diligently, using my new found fingering knowledge to check in all the places that I'd been too scared to explore the previous time. If that created some more juice, I was only too happy to lick that up too. Using my tongue, fingers and so much newfound knowledge, it didn't take long before Julia was climbing toward another climax. She started bucking a bit, but fortunately not too strongly so I could hold her down just by resting my right arm on top of her belly. I continue to lick her, and use my left hand's fingers on her, as she'd shown me. Her body started bucking stronger and stronger, and I had to use my one good hand to hold her down. That meant my fingers couldn't help finish her off, which I'd been particularly looking forward to, as proof that I knew what I was doing with them. She had to settle for my tongue and some ideas I had about sucking with my mouth and using my lips as substitutes for fingers. For a tiny girl, she can make an AMAZING amount of noise. I cuddled with her while she recovered. It took quite a while. When she was stirring, and starting to sit up a little, I said "Are you ready to go on with my fingering lessons?" I meant it as a serious inquiry. I was looking forward to learning and practicing some more. Julia was NOT ready. She told me the bad news, "I can't! I truly can't. You're killing me. I feel exhausted. Sore and exhausted. I'm dead, just put me out of my misery now." "Oh, I'm so sorry. Did I get too carried away? What can I do?" "No more sex please. Let me rest. Three or four months should be enough." My face fell. "Haha. Sorry Mark, your face is so funny. I didn't mean three or four months; I was joking. Just come up here and cuddle. We can talk. I like talking to you." "But I wanted to try the doggy position soon." "{Groan}." Oh well. I did like talking to her too, so that was fine. Maybe after a little while she would be ready to go again. As it turned out, no she wouldn't. We did a lot of talking though. Lots of kissing too, which was really nice. No passionate kissing though, because Julia couldn't do passionate anymore. At one stage I wondered out loud what we could do tomorrow (Sunday). She didn't respond, which disappointed me because I'd been hoping she'd suggest coming back here. So I suggested we go for a nature walk, as there are lots of good walks around Corvallis and it'd give me a chance to get her alone, and perhaps do something 'natural'. "{Groan}." "Oh, is it that bad?" "I'll be fine. I'm just exhausted and sore. The exhaustion will be gone after a good night's sleep. The soreness feels like it might take a little longer, but it's just muscle soreness so it won't kill me, even though it's half the muscles in my entire body. Nobody warned me about this. Mom said I'd be a bit sore for a little while after losing my hymen, and I was. And that my being small might make me sore too, but that's doesn't explain why EVERYTHING else is sore. My stomach is sore, my sides, my legs, my neck. My NECK! For goodness sake, how did my neck get sore?" "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you." "There's no need to apologize. It's a good hurt. I enjoyed it VERY much. I cannot express how much I enjoyed it. I just can't handle any more. I've never done this before, and I think my body needs to build up conditioning. You obviously don't though. Now that I think about it, I've seen you run around for PE and not look tired at the end. You must be awesomely fit. Your body certainly looks that way. Much fitter than me, that's for sure. I HAVE TO get fitter." #2: #1: #4: Then Julia gave a loud, "{GROAN}. Oh God! I just realized that I spent nearly all the time lying on my back and you did all the work, which means I'm even less fit than I thought. I never realized having a boyfriend was going to be such hard work!" #4: We talked some more. During our conversation my stomach let us know, quite loudly, that it was time to feed it. Julia giggled. "That's right! I forgot that you like to eat a lot. Now I know where some of that energy goes, haha, ouch! Would you like something to eat?" "Yes I would. Now that I think of it, I'm quite hungry. Look: it's 4:30. I usually have a mid-afternoon snack and I missed that today. I was too delightfully distracted by your wonderful body." "You say the nicest things, even if it is now a 'wonderfully worn out body'. Umm, darling, I have a problem. I should get up and feed you, but I can't move. I can't just send you down to the kitchen because you've never been here before and I should at least show you around. I can't let you go hungry. I feel terrible." "You really can't get up?" "I suppose I can. I really don't want to though, but I'm going to have to sooner or later. You'll have to help me get dressed because I'm too sore to do it myself." "You want me to cover that beautiful body? No way! I'd rather carry you down to the kitchen naked!" "This beautiful body - thank you - needs to be covered, if only to remove temptation from your eyes." She directed me to where she kept a sweatsuit. I put it on her, complaining about the sacrilege resulting from covering such beauty. I got a kiss for that. I dressed myself, then carried her down to the kitchen, following her directions although it was where I'd seen the women go when we'd come here before our date yesterday. Julia appreciated my carrying her to the kitchen; which was fair because I appreciated that it was to the kitchen that I was carrying her. I deposited her on a stool, and she pointed out where I had to go to gather the ingredients for a Mark-sized snack. Her parents came in while I was eating it. Mr. Williams - Prof - said, "Glad to see you're alive, Julia. I feared you were being murdered after hearing all those screams." I immediately knew this was going to be yet another of those "Let's Embarrass Mark" conversations that I seem to be suffering from so often these days. "Mom and Dad, you've got NO idea! I had no idea! That man there," Julia pointed at me, "done near fucked me to death." All three of us were shocked silent. That was not Julia's normal language. And I for sure didn't know how to respond to that. How do you look at the parents of a girl who just made an accusation like that? I hung my head. Julia continued, "I'm sorry, but there's no other way to describe it. Nothing you told me prepared me for this, Mom. I loved it, but he's unstoppable. I seriously need to get fitter; much, much fitter." "We did hear a lot of screaming." "Oh I screamed all right! It was awesome. But I'm all screamed out now, and everything else out too. I'm exhausted. I desperately need to rest. I'm going to soak in the hot tub for a while," #3: " ... then crash in my bed. I need a good night's sleep." I had to speak, "I'm so sorry, Julia. I had no idea that I was so rough on you. Now I'm worried that you won't want to keep seeing me, and..." "Stop right there! I want to keep dating you all right! Every fiber of my being wants to keep dating you. It's just that those fibers are exhausted. Stop worrying. I told you upstairs that today has been the best day of my entire life. You were awesome! And you weren't rough. You were never rough. You were wonderfully considerate. There was just so much of it and I'm not used to it." "I don't see how I can be considerate if I leave you in this state, but I'll take your word for it that you're happy with me." "I'm a lot more than that, but when you've finished your snack I'd like Dad to take you home and Mom to help me get into the tub. I'll talk with you tomorrow, darling; I guarantee it. I'll be wanting a lot more of what you gave me today, okay?" "Okay, but I'm sorry." "Dad, take him home before I take him back upstairs to show him that he's got nothing to apologize for." I quickly finished my last mouthful, then Prof took me to the garage and we got in his car. He told me to put my seatbelt on, then he started the car and away we went. The car ride home with Prof was hard on me. I kept trying to apologize to him for wrecking his daughter so badly. He kept brushing my apologies away, so I tried harder to reassure him that I didn't think I had been rough, had only being trying to make Julia happy, etc. Eventually he interrupted me quite forcefully, and said, "Mark, shut up and listen to me for a while. I have three thoughts on what I've witnessed today. Are you listening to me?" "Yes, sir." "One: Julia knows her body better than anyone. If what you did to it - and from what I heard, you did a lot to it - has given her 'the best day of her life', then you should shut up with the apologies. Okay?" "Yes, sir." "Two: I must admit to being a little curious. I'm not upset, angry or any of the other things you seem so worried about, but I am curious. I wouldn't have thought Julia was so far out of condition that she could get that exhausted. I've heard young guys boast of their prowess with girls all too often, but I've never heard any girl talk about being as well-fucked - by one guy - as I saw my daughter was just now." "SIR!" "What Mark? You don't think I could see that my daughter was well fucked? That's exactly what she was and she loved it. She wasn't beaten up and you weren't bad to her; you just fucked her very well. And before you say what I know you are going to say next, you don't have to apologize for it, so don't!" "No sir. Umm, yes sir." "She wants you to come back and do it to her again. So it's not a problem. Which takes us to number three. Which is, as far as I'm concerned, the ONLY thing that I'm worrying about because of what happened today. Do you know what number three is?" "Ah, no, sir." "What's it going to cost me to soundproof that room?" -- He was looking at my face when he said that, and he obviously saw what he expected to see because he laughed, "Haha. I enjoyed that. You're a very interesting young man, with some unusual abilities in the classroom, and so we've heard, in the bedroom too, but you're too willing to think you've done something wrong and then apologize for it. It's too easy to jerk your chain. Toughen up! Don't get arrogant - keep making sure Julia is happy - but if she is, don't apologize for it. Can you take that onboard?" "I'll try, sir." "Call me Prof." "Yes sir. I mean, I'll try Prof." "That's better. You might as well get used to that name as I've a feeling we're going to know each other for a long time. My little girl is NEVER going to let you get away after today's performance. Haha." "Actually, she said that herself, when we were in her room." "And you still felt you had to apologize a dozen times! I've just downgraded my opinion of your academic potential because you're obviously a slow learner." We drove in silence for a little while, and then Prof thought of another questions, "Aren't you tired, Mark?" In truth I wasn't tired at all, and just answered, "We've been in bed. It's really not that tiring. Maybe it's different for girls." "It is. The female of our species can EASILY outlast the male." I protested, "But that's not what..." Prof interrupted, "No it's not, which makes me even more curious. By the way, I just realized we weren't very good hosts in one respect: we should have let you shower before we left. You might not be able to smell yourself, but you need a shower." "Oh. Yes, Mom had warned me about that too." "We're nearly there. Here's a little homework assignment for you: how you are going to describe today's events to your parents?" #2: Prof then made it even worse by adding, "When I next call your parents, I'm going to ask them to tell me exactly how you described today. If you're too apologetic I won't be pleased because that will mean you weren't listening to me just now. Don't overshoot into arrogance either. Right, here's your stop." "Thanks for the lift." "No problem, see you tomorrow." "I'm not sure about that, sir, er, Prof. I don't know whether Julia will be up to it." "You've got a lot to learn about girls, Mark. See you tomorrow, bye." And he drove off, waving to me and to Mom in the kitchen window. I headed in, worrying about my 'homework assignment' as I went. ------- I saw Mom in the window, and I gestured for her to come out to me. She was a bit puzzled, but did so. "Prof just reminded me that I need a shower. I forgot to have one before I left. I remember you talking about Carol recognizing the smell and thought I should check with you that I can run through to the shower without meeting her?" "You're fine. The girls aren't home but they are due soon, so go have a shower and we'll talk about it afterward." "Why do you think we need to talk?" "You're home much earlier than I expected. I thought you'd be there until midnight and we'd have to come drag you home. Julia didn't come to see you off either, which I would've thought she'd do." "Oh." "Don't worry, I'm sure it's nothing bad." "How can you tell that?" "Prof was smiling and waved happily." "Not much escapes you, does it?" "Best you remember that." After showering and dressing in fresh clothes, I went back to the kitchen, was put to work with a potato peeler, and asked, "So why are you home early?" "Umm, because I kind of wore Julia out. We went to her room - as you knew we would - and I was overly enthusiastic. I did too much to her and she got sore and tired. Exhausted really. She had to tell me to stop. And then she sent me home so she could rest." "You weren't too rough on her, I hope? You'll be in big trouble if you were. Deliberately I mean. Accidentally might be okay the first time, but deliberately rough would be a different matter entirely." "She assured me I wasn't. She said I was wonderful, but that I just tired her out too much." "She's happy with you?" "Very happy. She said she'd never let me go now." "You're saying you had so much sex that you exhausted her?" "Um, yes. Prof said she was 'well fucked'." "Haha. No wonder he was happy." "Why would HE be happy?" "Don't you think the happiness of his daughter is important to him?" "Oh. I never thought of that." "Because I can promise you that right now his daughter is very, very happy indeed. Haha." My chest swelled with pride. Until Mom said, "Don't get too cocky, it won't last long." "What do you mean?" "After another time or two she'll get used to it and then you'll be at her mercy. Women can always outlast men." "That's what Prof said." "He's right. Julia's new to it and she's very small so it'll take her a little while to adapt. It won't take long, as it's not as if you had a huge cock. Soon you'll be eating humble pie." "Ahh, Mom, how do you know how big my, um, cock is?" "What, you don't you think I've kept an eye on your 'development'?" "Mom!" "Okay, how about this then. Teenage boys get erections at the drop of a hat, or when the wind changes direction, or just because it's fifteen minutes since the last one. So what do you think happens when we're all at the Aquatic Center, you're in your swimsuit, and a pretty girl walks past in a small bikini? You think you haven't given me opportunities to check your 'development'?" "I guess I probably have." "You guess right. So - if you'll excuse the pun - don't get cocky. In a few days Julia will have you begging for mercy if she wants to." "You've burst my bubble. I was starting to think I was some sort of superman lover." "You should be so lucky! Or maybe that should be: 'Julia should be so lucky.' Just make her happy, Mark. That's all you have to do. You've started well, just keep it up - excuse that pun too." "Yes, thank you Mom. I'll try to 'keep it up' as often as I can." #3: #2: #1: #4: #1: #4: #1: #4: ------- Chapter 19: Julia's Outpouring Sunday, April 3, 2005 Sunday morning, as soon as I could, I asked Mom, "Should I call Julia now? I made her wait too long yesterday and don't want to make that mistake again." "Good boy. You're learning and thinking about how to be a good boyfriend. I'm proud of you." "Thanks." "But in this case I suggest you wait for her to call you, even if it takes a few hours. Yesterday morning she was desperately anxious to know whether you loved her or not. I don't think she fears that now, and she probably needs a sleep-in after the excitement of the last few days, so let her catch up on her sleep and she'll call you. From what I've heard, she will DEFINITELY be calling you! Haha." Dad came in part way through Mom's explanation. After she'd finished, Dad said, "I heard you had a good afternoon, Mark?" "I certainly did, Dad. It was awesome. I got a bit carried away though." "So Fely told me. Don't let it go to your head, there's nothing worse than an arrogant boyfriend." "Mom told me that yesterday." "She's right. When I was a little older than you are now, I nearly was. Your mother turned my life around." Dad gave Mom a tight hug, decided it wasn't enough, and gave her a big kiss. Mom seemed to like that. Not long ago I would've made an 'Eww' sound, but now I had a much better appreciation of how important such statements are. After his kiss Dad continued, "Arrogance would be wrong anyway, in a few days Julia will be able to screw you into the ground. Women can easily outlast guys in the sack." "Mom and Prof both said that yesterday." "It's a well-known fact. You can't compete with a woman so don't even try. Anyway, it's not a competition. Love is all about giving not winning. You don't want to go down that road; it's bad, wrong, and you'll lose. Boy-oh-boy will you ever lose, {chuckle}." #3: #2: #4: #2: #1: #2, #3, #4: #4: ------- I did things around the house, some chores, some homework, chatted with the girls a bit. Carol was particularly eager to know when she could go to Julia's to look at her clothes and makeup. I was trying to be productive while I hung around waiting for Julia to phone me. There were a few false alarms caused by phone calls from other people, but about 11am Mom yelled from the kitchen, "Mark! Julia's on the phone." I rushed to it, and said, "Hi." From Julia, "Hello Lover." "That sounds good! How are you? I was worried." "I'm great! Very happy. Walking funny though." "I hope you're on the phone in your bedroom?" "Why? You think my family can't see I'm walking funny?" "You mean you really are? I thought you were joking." "I really am. I love it. Every step I take reminds me of how good you are, My Lover." "Oh." "Anyway, the reason I called is to see if you want to come over after lunch? I've asked Dad to put chains on my bedroom door so you can't get me in there today because I need at least another day off. But you can come over and we can study, chat, and just hang out. That okay with you?" "I'd love to come over..." #2: " ... What time do you want me to get there?" "Dad said he'd collect you at 1pm. He said he wanted to check the homework he gave you, whatever that means." "Oh, he was serious about that then? I thought he was mostly joking." "That's what he said, and he is going to come and get you, if that's okay with you?" I asked Mom, she nodded, so I told Julia, "It's fine with me. I'll get my schoolbag ready and see you after 1." "Good. I love you, Lover." "Ahh. I love you too, Julia." #1: ^ Prof arrived right on time. Mom just waved him in as he walked up the drive. He let himself in and joined us in the kitchen, where we were just finishing the lunch dishes. Coffees were offered and accepted. I had my standard milk. After the usual pleasantries, Prof asked Mom and Dad, "Did Mark tell you about his little homework assignment yesterday?" Mom answered, "No." "At my home after wearing Julia out, he wouldn't stop apologizing to her, Vanessa and me. If it moved, he apologized to it, over and over again. It got tiresome so I stopped him. It was ridiculous that he was apologizing for making Julia so happy. He doesn't listen to other people properly..." #1: " ... They keep telling him everything is fine, and he keeps apologizing. So they tell him it's fine again, and he apologizes again. He doesn't listen. So I told him to think carefully about how he described the day to you, and that I would check up, which I'm doing now. I told him that if he blamed himself for doing some imagined wrong to Julia, then I wouldn't be pleased. So how did he describe what he did to my very happy daughter?" Mom said, "He said he 'was too enthusiastic', and that he 'wore her out'. But that 'she was very happy.' Is that an accurate summary of what you told me Mark?" "Um, I think so, Mom." Prof said, "That's much better than his attitude at our home but it's still not very accurate, is it Mark?" "I think it is. I thought about what to say, like you asked me to, and I think that's a good description." Prof turned to Mom and Dad to say, "Excuse me, I should ask your permission before I start parenting Mark. Both my ladies have made it very clear to me that it is both of their intentions that he becomes my son-in-law. If both of them insist on something, I am NOT going to argue." Mom and Dad chuckled in agreement, which was scary in several ways. #3: #4: Prof continued, "He's a good boy, but for my little girl's sake he needs a thing or two pointed out, so with your permission?" Mom, "Be our guest. We also think he hasn't got a chance of getting away, especially as he doesn't want to." #1: #2: Prof turned back to me, "Okay Mark. So you think your description was accurate, yes?" I nodded. "Julia was there too, of course. So she has at least as much right as you do to have her description of the afternoon accepted as accurate, yes?" I reluctantly nodded. "Probably even more right, as we're talking about the effect on her body, and who better than her to know, yes?" I gave an even more reluctant nod as I could see where this was going. "Okay. Now tell us how you think Julia has been describing the afternoon." #3: #4: #1: "If you'll excuse me borrowing your phrase, sir, I think she will have been saying that she was well fucked." "You're trying, that's good. At least there was no apology in that sentence. But that's still not a very good description of what she's been saying. Care to try again?" #3: #2: "Umm..." I couldn't bring myself to get any more detailed than that. "Okay, Mark. I can see you're embarrassed..." #4: " ... so I'll let you off. I'm sure you'll get the answer when you get back to my place. Just think about Julia's description being ENORMOUSLY better than yours, and ask yourself why yours is so poor. You need to think about what other people are thinking about you, rather than assuming you've done something wrong. Got that?" "Yes, sir. I'll try." "Good. Lesson over for now." #3: Dad asked, "Was he really that good?" #3: "Let me describe my night. Julia and her mother sat in the hot tub going through the events of afternoon, from beginning to end. They were engrossed. The only way I was getting any dinner was if I made it myself, which doesn't happen often." -- Turning to me Prof added, "So you owe me for making me dust off my rusty skills and cook the family dinner." -- He turned back to my parents, "The conversation continued over the dinner table, which I could've done without. I'll save you all the gory details, but it boils down to the following. Julia had several orgasms to each of Mark's, and how many virginal 15-year old boys can do that? He was gentle, but VERY vigorous. Julia has nothing to compare that with so we don't know how vigorous that was, but we're led to believe that 'VERY' is probably an understatement. When she said 'Stop', which she had to do more than once, he did, and either waited until she was ready again or stopped for good when she'd reached the end of her rope. Mark was also humorous - they had some good jokes going - affectionate and caring. -- "I could go on for hours if I was to continue to quote Julia. She was already locked onto Mark, but she's even more so now. She's bursting to express her feelings but doesn't have the vocabulary for it. As far as she's concerned, it was four hours of unimprovable perfection." -- Prof turned to me. I was well past mere embarrassment already. Admittedly in a proud sort of way, but I'd much prefer Prof to direct his comments elsewhere. He said, "I wouldn't normally say those sorts of thing in front of someone in case their ego swelled too much, but your problem is too little ego so maybe this'll help, and as soon as you get to my house Vanessa and Julia are going to express the same sentiments anyway. -- "However - and this is a big 'however', so pay attention - I don't know how you had this much effect on my daughter. Certainly she and her mother have always been over-the-top romantics, but this goes beyond that. Julia is totally bowled over by you; head-over-heels irrationally bowled over. So be damned careful you don't abuse her vulnerability, boy!" "(Gulp). Yes, sir." "And start carrying a good supply of handkerchiefs." "Sir?" "You'll see." Mom asked, "Was he really that good? Julia's not exaggerating?" "Julia's certainly not exaggerating about her feelings, and I doubt she's exaggerating about his physical performance either. She's inexperienced so she doesn't have any way of comparing, but I overheard more than enough details last night to make significant exaggeration unlikely." Mom said, "Mark told us a much-diminished version of this, and we assumed his wearing Julia out was just his first-time exuberance and her being new to it. That's not what you've described though?" "No, I don't think that's what it was," agreed Prof. "Time will tell though. One thing's for sure, he'll get plenty more 'times'." Dad chuckled to himself, then said, "I don't suppose I can claim he's a chip off the old block, can I?" The adults laughed, and Mom said, "That depends, dear, what were you like at fifteen and a half?" "Four hours, didn't you say Prof?" "About that, yes." "At that age I think my record was about four minutes." The adults laughed again. I wasn't capable of laughter though; I was too embarrassed, somewhat freaked out, and VERY scared of Prof's dire warning. Also: Dad had been sexually active at my age! He'd kept that quiet. Can't say I was surprised that he had been, but I was surprised that my parents were willing to be open about it in front of me now. There was a pause, then Mom said to Prof, "You say Vanessa is an over-the-top romantic?" "Yes. I was wondering if you'd spot that." "So how was your night then?" "About what you'd expect. This morning too." All the adults laughed again. #4: I must have looked puzzled because Prof explained it to me, "Vanessa was very loving to me last night, then again this morning. And I'm sure we still haven't finished working through the charge." Now I added embarrassment to my look of puzzlement. "Mark, you've got a lot to learn about women..." #3: " ... When a woman hears something romantic she gets romantic herself. The more she hears, the more romantic she gets. Last night Vanessa spent about three hours talking to her much-loved daughter about what a superb love and lover you are. Not to mention that she'd heard four hours of her daughter's passionate screams. Vanessa built up a great deal of romantic pressure that needed to be relieved. We're still working our way through it. I expect it'll take a few more days even if you don't come back. Take it from me, my boy, you've more than paid me back for the cost of soundproofing my daughter's room. Haha." All the adults laughed again. It was one of those types of conversations, that only the adults find funny while I felt as awkward as hell. Dad raised his eyebrows, "Soundproofing her room?" Prof chuckled, "One of the things a father never imagines he's going to learn about his little girl: she's LOUD." More adult laughter. Prof continued, "I'm surprised the neighbors on that side haven't complained. It can only be embarrassment that's holding them back. I called a couple of firms this morning to get quotes." #1: "Ahh, sir, we could try to be quieter." "What sort of father would I be to hold my daughter back from expressing her happiness in her own room? Getting soundproofing is better. I might have to get you some earmuffs though since you'll be inside the room. They'll help protect your head when she clamps it between her thighs." Once again the adults laughed at my embarrassment. "She told you that I was down there." "She didn't just tell me - well Vanessa mostly - that you were down there, she described in detail what you did and its effect on her. -- "Don't look so embarrassed. Most of their talk isn't so physical. Mostly they talk about feelings, emotions, dreams and plans. Fairly boring really. I did tell you they spent three hours discussing it last night." "I thought you were exaggerating. We were only in there for four hours, so how can they spend three hours talking about it?" "Three hours last night. Probably another three hours already today, and doubtless as many hours again over the next week or so." "But that makes no sense at all. That's much longer than we took in the first place." "You've got a lot to learn about women." #2: <{Groan}.> Prof added, "I think we've kept the impatient members of my family waiting too long already. I'll be in trouble if I don't deliver you soon. Let's get on our way, Mark." I grabbed my schoolbag and we left. ^ When we pulled up outside the Williams' house, Julia came running out - with a noticeably sore-muscle, limping style of run - falling into my arms when I moved to meet her. Having only one good arm I had to drop my schoolbag quickly in order to catch her. She made up for it by kissing me several times. "Let's take it inside, kids." Julia reluctantly allowed me to lower her, but hugged my arm tightly. "Ah, honey, I need my arm back so I can pick up my schoolbag." She picked it up for me, draped the strap over my shoulder, and then reattached herself to my arm. We walked toward the house. Julia said, "Sorry Mark, but my brothers insist on being silly. Sorry, but I couldn't stop them." "What do you mean?" "You'll see when we get inside. It's not bad; they're just being silly." As we got closer to the front door I could hear military marching music playing. Just inside the front door, on either side, were Julia's two brothers, standing at attention with a broom each held over their right shoulders. As I reached them they stamped one heel on the floor and saluted smartly. Then laughed and broke formation. One of them advanced on me and offered a handshake, "You're obviously the Mark that we've heard so much about. I'm Robert, he's Andrew. 'All welcome the conquering hero.' Haha." I shook hands with them both, clumsily offering my left hand, temporarily released for the purpose by Julia. I asked, "What's with the army stuff?" "Just having a bit of fun. We got home last night and Mom and Sis were in a complete tizzy. You'd think Jesus Christ himself had just left. Except that some of the things they were saying about you would've been MOST inappropriate for him, haha. -- "We decided you'd conquered the women of this family, so we're saluting their hero. But mostly we're teasing Sis. She's been plaguing us all week with embarrassing questions so we're getting a bit of lighthearted payback. -- "It's good to meet you at last. Come in, come in. I'll turn the music off." As we wandered toward the living room, Andrew added, "Judging by some of the things we've been hearing, we should be asking you for advice about how to make a girl happy." Robert called out, on his way to and from the stereo, "That's for sure. I had to carry Julia up to bed last night. The poor little girl couldn't even walk. You wouldn't know anything about that would you? She couldn't stop smiling though, so it can't have been too bad." We chatted away for a while. They were nice guys, much to my relief. When Julia had told me they were going to be silly, I'd gotten worried. I knew they were much older, so presumably bigger than me, and there were two of them (they were actually shorter than me, but they still had me outnumbered). I'd feared they taken exception to the state I'd left Julia in, but it was quite the opposite. Mrs. Williams - Vanessa (I have to get into that habit) - brought me some milk and cookies. Lunch was only half an hour ago, but there's always room for a snack. Especially as she was very eager to please and I didn't want to disappoint her by rejecting her offering. Julia curled up on my lap, with my arm-and-a-half around her, and just radiated happiness. After a while Robert and Andrew excused themselves to get back to whatever they do when they're not teasing their sister's new boyfriend. As soon as we were alone, I asked Julia, "How are you? Are you still sore?" "A little. But it's a wonderful reminder. I am SO happy, My Love. I can't believe how fantastic you are. I'm the luckiest girl ever..." She went on with this theme for a while. I was eventually forced to kiss her, and then we went with that theme for a while, which was personally much more enjoyable for me. We even studied for a while, between kisses. We had some common classes so we could discuss those, but mostly we worked individually, especially as I was doing two grades. In practical terms studying here was a nuisance, as I have a very useful setup for myself at home: a desk just wide and deep enough for two books side by side and with a pad for each, a pen in each hand, and a shelf immediately above where everything else I might need is. All in privacy so I can effectively split myself down the middle and work as if two people. It's very efficient but too freaky to do here. The kisses and cookie service were good though. Vanessa kept me well supplied with snacks, which was great. My stomach didn't have to rumble to remind Julia to feed it. After a reasonable amount of work, Julia suggested, "Shall we adjourn to my room?" It was an especially reasonable amount after the invitation. "Oh, I thought you were too sore?" "We can't do much, but I noticed last night that the only places on me that weren't sore were my ears and breasts. I think you ignored those areas, they're offended, and they demanded some attention. Let's go to my room and you can decide which of those areas you want to pay attention to. Although if it's just my ears, we could stay here?" We went to her room. I noticed her walking a bit funny, particularly going up the stairs. I offered, "Do you want me to carry you?" "No thanks, love. Walking is good for my muscles; it stops them seizing up." When we got near her room I saw a cute sign on the outside of its door. The border was small cherubs, hearts, vines, and that sort of girly stuff. The words in the middle read: The "He Showed Me" Room. I stopped in the hallway outside her door and said, "What does that mean?" pointing to the sign. "I made it this morning. Remember when we got undressed yesterday?" "I'll NEVER forget that!" Which earned me a big smile. "I said I loved you. You said you loved me. Then I said, 'Show me.' For the next four hours you did. No girl has ever been better shown. It was perfect, awesome, overwhelming ... Just indescribable. I only wish that I deserved the love you have for me. I feel so inadequate for you, but I promise I'll try as hard as I can to be good enough for you. I know I'm not, but please, PLEASE let me try. I will try and try and try until I burst. Please let me try! I don't want to lose you, oh..." And then she burst into tears and threw herself at me, burying her face in my chest and wrapping her arms tightly around my waist. #2: #1: I lifted her up with my left hand, managed to open the door with my right, and carried the sobbing girl into her room, closing the door with my foot behind me. I laid her on her bed then lay alongside her. I cuddled her, stroked her hair, kissed her tears, and made reassuring noises, "There, there." #4: #2: Slowly her sobs diminished, and her face lifted from my chest. She smiled at me very weakly. She looked so sad. I wasn't really comfortable doing so, but I thought it might help so I said, "Shhh, it's all right, I love you." Whereupon she cried out loudly, "I know you do! It's so unfair." And she burst into loud sobs and buried her face back into my chest again. This time I was much smarter; I just repeated, "There, there." #4: #1: <{GROWL}.> I decided to wait until she recovered. I was waiting quite a while, but I couldn't think of anything else safe to do. I had no clue what went wrong last time, but felt sure that if I opened my mouth again - other than to say "There, there" - I'd make it worse. I don't know how, but I was sure I would. I was discovering that I had a lot to learn about girls. "There, there." Slowly the sobbing stopped, and she eventually pulled her face away from my chest. I looked at her and said nothing. "I'm sorry," she half-said, half-sobbed. Taking a considerable risk, I asked, "Why?" "For everything." #4: Fortunately she continued, "I'm not good enough for you in any way. I feel so inadequate." I knew how to respond to that! "NO WAY are you inadequate! I think you're WONDERFUL." "I know you do; that's why I feel so bad." Whereupon she started crying again. #1: #2, #3, #4: #3: "There, there." She recovered faster this time. "{Sob}. I don't deserve you. {Sniff}." #1: #2, #3, #4: #1: For that lack of any other idea, I hesitantly advanced, "Umm, why not?" "Your love for me is just incredible. YOU are so incredible! I'm not good enough for you and your love. It's just not possible that I could be so lucky. I don't deserve you and I feel terrible." #4: #1: #4: #3: #4: #2: #3: #1, #2, #4: "Julia, I really do not understand. Can you explain it to me, PLEASE?" "{Sniff}. Okay. You're such an incredible student at school: skipping grades, doing two at once, studying hard. You're incredibly focused and such a genius. Plus I've been told you're easily the star of your soccer team, score more goals than anyone, and move like a dream. All the time I was so stupid; I never noticed how you felt about me." #3: #1: "Umm, carry on." "And then that horrible Annette tricked you in to announcing that you loved me. Not only that you loved me, but you loved me so much that no other girl could get you hard. I know what boys are like: they get hard at ANYTHING. But I'd spoiled you for other girls and I didn't even know it. How stupid can I be! I feel horrible. Ohh, {sob}, I nearly ruined your whole life. {Sob, sob}..." #1: "There, there." "Thanks, {sniff}. The school year was two-thirds over. I never would've known if Annette hadn't confronted you, next year you would've jumped a grade ahead of me and I never would've known. Your wonderful life would've been ruined, and it would've been my fault. I don't know how I could've been so blind! And I HATE it that it took that bitch Annette to save me from the worst mistake of my life..." #2: #1: #4: #2: " ... So many people told me what you told Annette, and my heart just broke. It was so incredibly romantic. I bawled my eyes out..." #4: " ... When I got home, I told Mom all about it, and she cried with me. When I described your academic performance, how hardworking and dedicated you are, and everything else I've heard about you, we cried some more. -- "Mom and I knew you could be my Mr. Right, and that I had to talk with you to see if I was good enough for you. But when I went to school the next day I found out that you'd been attacked on your way home. All because of me! {Sob}. I felt so bad. -- "I was frantic until I learned about Carol and found her. When she said you were okay I nearly burst into tears in relief. I wanted to tell her how I felt about you, but was too scared that you'd hate me for all the trouble I'd caused you?..." #4: #2: " ... Carol and your family have been so wonderful to me. They could've hated me for all the trouble I'd caused you, but they've been wonderful. And then, when you were healed enough, you met me before school and you were just awesome. You didn't treat me with anger or hate, even though you should've. You treated me wonderfully. I simply cannot believe that anyone could be so nice. You've allowed me to be with you, even though you could have your pick of hundreds of other girls..." #1: #3: #1: " ... You were such a gentleman. I couldn't believe how polite and well behaved you were. No! More than that, you behaved elegantly! How can a 15-year old boy be so sophisticated?..." #1: #3: " ... I was a mess, and desperate. I was throwing myself at you and you did nothing. Any other boy would've tried to feel me up, or do even more, but you wouldn't even kiss me. You walked around holding my hand and behaving as if you were totally satisfied by just that. And all the time I knew that I was the only girl who aroused you. I was stunned by your self-control. You could have had me whenever you wanted, and you waited until our date. That was SO impressive. Mom and I cried our eyes out every night..." #4: #3: #2: " ... Every day - NO, 'every hour' I found out that you were even better than I thought you were. I kept waiting for you to cancel our date. All those other girls were throwing themselves at you, promising to do whatever you wanted, and you just wanted to go out with me. I don't understand how you can love me that much. I know you do - Annette proved that, and all the other girls you've turned down too - but I just can't understand how you can love me that much. I truly don't deserve it. I feel so undeserving and guilty..." #4: #1: #4: " ... I tried SO HARD to make our date the best I possibly could. It was agony. I knew no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn't be good enough for you. I did the best I could and I kept messing everything up. I couldn't even get you inside me. The single most important part way I had to show you how much you meant to me, and I couldn't do it. I nearly died. But then you fixed it so effortlessly and suddenly everything was perfect again. It was incredible! I offered myself to you, and you ACCEPTED! My heart nearly burst. I couldn't believe that it was humanly possible to be so happy. -- "Then I discovered that I'd ruined your jacket. My whole world collapsed. There you were, the perfect man and I was just a silly girl, making stupid mistakes all over the place. I knew I wasn't good enough for you, but you told me the night was perfect because I was there. That was the MOST perfect thing you could have said. There isn't a sentence in any language that you could've said better than that. What a night! -- "On Saturday morning Mom couldn't believe how wonderful you were. No, sorry I said that wrong. Of course she believed; she was just as stunned at your awesomeness as I was. I told her all about our date, about my offering myself to you and your accepting unworthy me. How you made everything right whenever I messed it up, and how you still thought I was perfect. I don't deserve such love. -- "Then on Saturday afternoon, I said to you 'Show me your love', and you did. You let your love for me POUR out in your passion, and it went far, far beyond incredible. You gave me so much pleasure, and took so little for yourself. To my everlasting shame I couldn't give you all that you wanted and had to keep asking you to stop, which you always did! I know it must have been agony for you to stop, with all the amazing love for me that you've kept bottled up for so long. -- "I don't know why you love me so much, but you've proved that you love me beyond any human limit. How can you have so much control to stop just because I was tired and asked you to? You'd wanted me for nearly a whole year and so much that no other girl could make you hard, yet when I asked you to, you stopped even though I was lying naked beneath you and you could've easily kept going. But you didn't. How can you keep doing these things? Every day you impress me more and more. I can't imagine how you can do that because every day I already think you are the most awesome person alive. Please don't get any better or I'll explode; I swear it. -- "I know I don't deserve you. If I tried hard my entire life I wouldn't be good enough to deserve you. But I so much want to try to make you happy, to at least be a little bit good for you. See over there." Julia pointed to a freestanding coat-rack that I'd noticed yesterday. It'd had girly things on it then, and now also a man's robe. "Yes, I see it." "I got Mom to take me shopping this morning. I bought that for you so you can wear it when you need to take a shower. I'm hoping you'll need to take lots of showers here," Julia tried for a brave smile. -- "I cleared out one of my drawers, that one over there, and now there are some socks, underwear and T-shirts in there for you. I'm sorry I don't know what size pants you take, but if you tell me I'll get some for you. Or anything else you want, just tell me and I'll get it." #4: #1: "I'm trying to be the best possible girlfriend I can for you. Last night when I was telling Mom about all the parts of my body that were sore, I realized my breasts weren't and I invented that tease for you, the breasts-or-ears one. You responded just the way that I knew you would. You're so wonderful. I brought you up here to try to show you how much I love you, even though my body isn't good enough for you..." The sudden idea that her body wasn't good enough for me was so preposterous that I couldn't help exclaiming, "Huh!" "I know. I'm sorry. I know I'm inadequate. Boys like big-breasted girls but I'm tiny. I can't keep up with you physically either. I'm so useless I even had to ask you to stop yesterday and I'm too sore to do anything today. I'm so inadequate I feel terrible about wanting to be your girlfriend. It's completely unfair for you to want me, and it's unbelievable that you do. I promise that I'll work my absolute hardest not to be so useless. I'll start fitness training very hard, so at least I'll be able to keep up with you in bed, even if I'm not much good for anything else. -- "I wanted to bring you up here to show you as much love as I could. I had the sign ready because I thought it would help me explain that I understand how much you love me, but when I saw the sign just now, while I standing beside you, I suddenly felt so inadequate and unworthy. I'm sorry, but you're so much better than me, at everything: your body, your brain, your elegance, your kindness. Just everything. -- "Now my crying has ruined the mood. I'm so sorry. I keep doing this; trying my best to do something nice for you, and then messing it up. Please will you give me another chance? Will you let me try to be your girlfriend? I know I won't be as good as you deserve, but I promise to try very, very hard. Please let me try. I'll die without you. Oh, please? {Sob}." #3: #1: #2: #4: #2: "Julia. First, thank you for doing as I asked, and explaining your feelings. It is good to know that if I ask you to explain your feelings, that you will..." #3: #2: #1: #3: #1: "I've listened carefully to everything you've said," a very nervous Julia was looking up at me, "and I've thought about it very seriously. Weighed up all the pros and cons, as it were. And what I'd like to know is... , where are the breasts that I came up here to play with?" "Huh?" "I came up here to play with your breasts. Where are they?" "You want to play with my breasts?" "Yes, that's why I came up here." "But everything I just said... ?" "I want to play with your breasts please." "I don't understand." "I want to play with your breasts." "You still want to..." "Yes, more than ever, starting with your breasts." "More than ever?" "For a girlfriend who promised to do whatever I wanted, you're taking a remarkably long time to..." "Eeekk! I get it! You're a monster! You're horrible..." "For a girlfriend who promised to do whatever..." Her shirt was off and flying across the room. Julie threw herself onto me, screaming for joy. Not as loud as yesterday's joy, and for a different reason, but equally satisfying to hear. She frantically rained kisses all over my face. After the tension had drained out of her and she felt more secure, she hugged me, looked up into my face, and said with awe in her voice, "I can't believe how wonderful you are." "I had no choice, you've got wonderful breasts." #3: #1: #2: #1, #3: #4: I never did get around to Julia's ears, but we still managed to have a good time anyway. She seemed much calmer and more confident. The "calmer" was particularly welcome. In one quiet, cuddly moment, Julia confidently said, "I AM going to be a good girlfriend for you, just you wait and see." I responded with, "I hope so, but there's lots of room for improvement yet." "Oh, what do you mean?" "For example, do you know how long I had to wait after I said I'd like to play with your breast before I finally got my hands on them?" I was teasing her to keep the conversation light. I'd had more than enough intensity already today. "That's not fair, you were teasing me. But I promise I'll be much faster next time. You can play with my breasts whenever you like." I liked the sound of that! One of my minds, probably #4, asked, "Even at school?" That shocked her. To my surprise, she took the time to think about it, then said, "For you, I will." That was NOT how Julia behaves at school! I'd just been teasing her, so her agreement took me by surprise. My cock had a different reaction, very quickly reacting in interest. I was lying against Julia at the time, and even though I still had my pants on, she clearly felt it, as indicated by the sudden smile on her face. I asked, "You wouldn't be worried about getting into trouble?" "A little, but you're my future." #3: #1: My cock had almost as quickly gone soft (its mood had been changed too). Julia felt it fade, and moved to put her hand on it and squeeze lightly through my pants. It stopped going soft. Julia asked, "Why did it go away?" No way was I going to say, "The idea of a future with you scares me." Instead I said, "I just remembered that you were sore and I didn't want to hurt you." "I can't believe how considerate you are..." #4: " ... I'd like to say I'm tempted to take advantage of that," giving 'that' another squeeze, "but I know it would be foolish of me. I should wait until tomorrow. But I'll definitely remember what made you hard." "What do you mean?" "The idea of playing with my breasts at school." And damned if I didn't immediately go hard again. Which she could hardly miss since she had me in the palm of her hand. "Hmmm. Maybe play with my pussy too." It was a statement, not a question. Nonetheless, the answer was obvious, as there was an ever-increasing amount of me in the palm of her hand. She started rubbing my cock more vigorously, then her fingers grasped my zip and pulled it down. I said, "But honey, we can't. You're too sore." "WE can't, but I can," as she lowered her head. "Oh." I hadn't thought of that. The whole time we'd been kissing, playing with her breasts, sucking her nipples, and generally having a very pleasant time, and I'd not thought of her doing that to me. Four minds and they're ALL stupid! The delightful, topless, scarily intense pixie went down on me. It was very nice, but you probably knew that already. About halfway through, Julia looked up at me and said, "I'd like to do this for you at school too." Suddenly I wasn't "halfway through" anymore. After she'd swallowed (her brothers were right; guys love it when the girl swallows. This guy anyway.) I said, "I like the way you try to be a good girlfriend. I like it very, very much. I love you." #2: #1: #3: #2: #4: #2: We hugged for a while. During which I remembered that there were still several weekend chores that I hadn't done. And then I remembered that Julia had said that she wouldn't be sore tomorrow. Suddenly I wanted to get all my chores done today, so I wouldn't have to do them tomorrow. "I think I should go home to do my chores." "Aww. Why? Can't you stay here longer?" "If I go home now I can do all my chores, so I won't have to do them tomorrow." She looked puzzled. "You know? Tomorrow, the day you won't be sore." Vanessa was nice enough to offer to drive me home; in fact, she insisted on it, even though one of the brothers volunteered. When I first got in her car, Vanessa didn't start it until my seatbelt was on, the same as with Prof. I need to get better at putting that on immediately so I won't hold them up. Other than the slight hiccup over the seatbelt, I got the feeling that Vanessa was going to make it as easy as possible for me to get back and forth to her daughter's bedroom. An impression that was only enhanced by her spending the drive thanking me for being so wonderful to her little girl, how happy they were, if I needed anything don't hesitate to ask her or Prof, what an amazing young man I was, how lucky Julia was, etc. Only arrival at my home stopped her. I thought Vanessa was probably unique among girlfriends' mothers and I'm not even counting all the snacks she's brought me. I'm SO lucky. At home I did all my chores and plenty of study. I'd had to go a whole day with only one blowjob to tide me over, so I was REALLY looking forward to tomorrow evening. ------- Chapter 20: I Treat Julia as a Sex Object Monday, April 4, 2005 When I awoke Monday morning, I think the first conscious thought any of us had was, It's such a nice way to wake up, knowing you've got full-on sex to look forward to later the same day. I was the first one to the breakfast table this morning, after Mom of course, so I oh so casually told Mom, "I'll probably go to Julia's after school today." Probably indeed! Wild horses couldn't keep me away. Mom replied, "Is she over her soreness?" It's hard to sneak one past my mom. Figuring there was no point in trying to, I said, "I hope so!" "We should have a little discussion about how often you should go over there. You don't want to make a nuisance of yourself. She can come here you know." "Only if she can bring her bedroom!" "Haha. Nevertheless, I know if you or Julia are left to choose, you'll be over there every evening. I can just imagine you two concocting a 'fair' system: where she invites you over on odd days, and you invite yourself on even days. I think not. We'll have to make some guidelines for schooldays and weekends. You're going over for their family dinner on Wednesday, aren't you?" "Yes, as far as I know." "That'll be twice this week already. Twice more for her coming here makes four. Out of five days, that doesn't leave you with any time for study and everything else. Don't forget you have Aikido this Thursday too." Because of my cast I couldn't participate, but I was going to watch to see if I liked the look of it. -- "Four times during the week is too many, so it has to be once per week in each direction. I won't count your dinner with them on Wednesday because I know Julia's family want to meet you properly. So that evening plus one other weekday evening this week." "Only one evening per week, Mom, that's terrible!" "One evening each way during the school week. For the weekends you've got soccer when your cast comes off, chores and various other things to do, but you can probably spend a whole day together. Try to split it up a bit, and spend part of it here so you aren't taking too much advantage of the Williamses." "But that means only two times a week at her place. That's horrible. I want to see her more than that!" "You can see her here, that's three times per week." "But it's only at her house that we can, you know, go to her room. Unless you let me do that here?" "Mark, when we gave you the bedroom rules, when did we say they would be reviewed?" "Umm, about two months." "It's barely been one and half days and you're already trying to renegotiate. I am NOT impressed. If you're not careful the deal will be renegotiated all right, and not in the direction you want!" "Sorry Mom. But twice per week is so little." "It's three times, Mark, unless you're telling me that the only interest you have in Julia is for sex." Mom's face was hardening into her steely glare. It was scary as hell. "In which case you are going to be in more trouble than you have EVER been in your entire life. WELL?" "No, no Mom. It's not just for sex, honest! I love being with her." "You have disappointed me. You were ONLY counting the opportunities for sex, and completely disregarding spending time with that lovely girl. You've disappointed and angered me! You're that close," holding up her hand with a thumb and forefinger very close together, "to having your privileges revoked. 'Privileges' - got that?" "Yes, Mom. I'm very sorry." "So you should be. One night each way during the week. No more than one day total together over the weekend, and I'm going to talk with Vanessa to make sure a large portion of that is outside the bedroom. You are going to learn that the most important thing is to get along with her as a person, not as a sex object, got that?" "{Gulp}. Yes, Mom." "Is Mark in trouble, Mom?" From Donna, as she and Carol entered the kitchen. "Yes he is. He was treating Julia badly." A sharp intake of breath from Carol, who didn't like the sound of that at all. "I wasn't treating her badly! She's not even here. That's not fair." "You were treating her badly in your thoughts." "That's just in my thoughts. That doesn't hurt her." "If you think bad thoughts about her, how long do you think it'll take to show up in your actions toward her?" #4: "I'm sorry Mom. You're right and I was wrong." "Damned right. You've had enough breakfast, clear off back to your room. I don't want to see your face for a while. Think about your attitude, young man." I scuttled away. I'd lost my appetite anyway, that being a strong indication of how badly I felt it. It's scary being on the receiving end of Mom's anger when I've screwed up. [[In large part because I was a wimp who couldn't stand up to anyone's anger.]] I kept a low profile until the school's car arrived. Mom sent me off, as normal, but I still felt ashamed. In the car the girls wanted to know what I'd done. They'd heard the last part of Mom's talk before they'd walked into the kitchen, about " ... her as a person, not as a sex object," and it wasn't hard for them to fill in the gaps. Carol was particularly concerned. I don't know what the driver thought. I just said, "Mom strongly and correctly pointed out that I was doing something wrong. If you want to know more than that, you can ask Mom." They'd obviously already tried that and been unsuccessful. They tried to cajole more out of me, but I didn't want to talk about it. ^ We arrived at school before Julia, so I waited for her at our new meeting spot, a quiet spot midway between the bike racks and where Mr. Moore (the driver of the car our school provides) drops us off. Not being in a high-traffic area meant we could get gushy with each other without too much embarrassment. A few minutes later Julia came running toward me. I liked looking at her, particularly as she was wearing a shorter skirt than normal. She normally dresses quite conservatively, but today her skirt was above her knees. She looked good! I also noticed that she was moving without any soreness, and I smiled at what that meant. Then I realized I'd been thinking sexually, and I wondered how right Mom was, which depressed me. Julia ran to me and hugged me, and I didn't return her hug with the enthusiasm she expected. She looked at me, and saw that I was sad, "What's wrong?" "Mom caught me mistreating you this morning and told me off for it big time. She was right and it saddens me. I want to apologize to you." "But I've only just got here. How could you have mistreated me?" I smiled, "Funnily enough, that's exactly the same defense I tried. Mom shot me down in flames. She pointed out that I was thinking bad thoughts about you, and that they'd soon show up in how I treated you when we were together." A rapidly concerned Julia asked, "What bad thoughts were you having about me?" "Mom caught me valuing you too highly as a sex object rather than a person whose company I enjoy." "Oh that's okay then. I don't mind that all. You can treat me as a sex object as much as you like. You're very good at it." "Unfortunately that's not what Mom meant. I'm afraid that what I did was treat you as a sex object RATHER than a person whose company I enjoy. Mom and I were discussing how many days a week you and I can visit each other, and I was too focused on the days we could spend at your house and too dismissive of the days we could spend at mine. I made Mom think that my ONLY interest in you was sexual. She got quite angry with me. I'm sad to say she was right to because I was refusing to value the days you would spend at my home. I'm ashamed of myself and I want to apologize to you. Please forgive me, Julia? I promise I will value you as a person, and that I DO value you as a person." I knew Mom's accusation had been on target and I was expecting Julia to get quite upset with me. I awaited her response - more likely explosion - with considerable concern. "You don't need to apologize to me, and don't worry about your mom: I'll give her a call and fix it. Let's go in." #1: #2: #4: #1: "Julia, hang on. I didn't expect your answers. I thought I was going to be in trouble with you, can you explain please?" "What part do you want me to explain?" "Umm, all of it actually. Why don't I need to apologize to you, and how can you fix it with Mom?" "Your mom's the easiest one to explain. I'll call her and thank her for protecting me. That way she'll know you told me everything. It could take longer to explain why no apology is necessary because there are several reasons. How many do you want?" #4: "I still don't get how your thanking Mom for protecting you fixes my mistake this morning?" "I'll make sure she knows you told me everything." "Yes..." "That's it really. I won't have to do anything else." #2: <{Groan}.> "I can see you're puzzled. You don't really understand how mothers work do you?..." #4: " ... I'll take it step by step..." #2: " ... even though it's quite simple. I'll mention to her that you told me you'd been thinking of me as a sex object. Saying that to any girl automatically puts her on alert that she's being used, and she'll immediately become very cautious about giving you sex. You'd never say that to someone you were using as a sex object because it'd defeat the entire purpose of that relationship. That your mother knows you told me this proves you're not seeing me as a sex object, even though that's EXACTLY what I want you to do to me tonight, haha. -- "Second, that you explained it to me so we could discuss it means you're treating me as a full partner in the relationship, as a respected person, exactly the thing that your mother thought you were guilty of not doing. -- "Then there are issues such as your demonstrating your honesty; mothers like to see that. Also, that you came up to me and apologized means you listened to your mom and understood her point, which is another thing mothers like. -- "That I called her to thank her, lets her know that I accepted your apology and that you have my trust. My thanking her also means that we both value her involvement in our relationship, which we wouldn't do if it was just a sexual one but would do if it was one in which people and personal development was important, again being exactly what she was worrying about. There's more, but you can see that it's really quite simple." "Ahh, honey, that was very impressive thinking. How can you think it's simple?" "It's just a mirror. Mirrors are simple. Take the things she was concerned about - too much sex object and not enough human respect - turn them around and reflect them back. In this case, show her that sex isn't the main issue and respect is given between us. Her concerns are canceled by more of the good stuff and she ends up respecting you even more than before you made the mistake. Thus 'problem fixed'. Like I said, it's simple." #1: #4: #3: #4: #1: "Thanks very much. That was a good explanation, I understand much better now. And I think it's an excellent idea that you call Mom to thank her..." #4: #1: " ... but what about the 'no apology needed' explanation. We have just a little time before class, so can you give me some quick reasons please?" "Certainly, my love. Here we go: You don't need to apologize for treating me as a sex object because you don't. I threw myself at you and to my intense frustration you responded better than a perfect gentleman. You ALWAYS listen to me and think about my views. You are enormously careful of my needs, and then apologize for the slightest mistake you think you might've made, even to the extent of apologizing for giving me what has to be the best sex it's possible for a woman to have. Lastly, you don't need to apologize for treating me as a sex object because I hope you'll do that sometimes. I know it's not your basic character, but it'll be fun sometimes because you're VERY good at sex. In short, you have my complete and total trust and commitment, and you can treat me in any way you want because I know you'll treat me very well, so no apology is needed, like I said." #3: "Um, thanks." "You're welcome, my love. I'm happy to help you in any way you want. In return I hope you'll fuck my head off tonight?" "Julia!" I looked around frantically to make sure she hadn't been overheard. And because I'd flashed on a memory of our doing what she'd suggested, I also had to issue a rapid go-soft command too. I warned her, "Someone might hear." "If I could get hold of the school's PA system, I'd announce that you were the best lover in the entire world! I am so happy, proud and lucky." She obviously considered that the end of the conversation, as she grasped my left arm and we walked toward our first class, dragging my over-inflated ego behind her. #2: #2: ------- I had a girl flirt with me later that morning, fortunately not when Julia was around. It took me by surprise as so much had happened since last Friday at school that I'd forgotten about the 'real world'. Once I recognized what was happening, I told her not to bother. I'd like to be able to say that I handled it firmly, quickly, effectively and kindly, but it didn't quite work out that way. I started very firmly and quickly, but then I felt I'd been too cruel, so I tried to backtrack a little to make her feel better. Then I realized I shouldn't be complimenting her for being good looking, so I tried to backtrack on my backtrack, which just caused me to vacillate around, going nowhere. She eventually lost interest in flirting with me, for one reason or another. Everything Mom and Dad had told me had made me too conscious of what was at stake, and too self-conscious of how important it was that I do the right thing. Consequently I had done the right thing very poorly. I resolved to work on my Pretty Girl Rejection Technique as it obviously wasn't coming naturally. At lunch a similar thing happened, this time when Julia was standing beside me. We were standing in line, when the girl behind me said, "Hi Egg. How was your weekend." "Fine, thanks." I'd answered without thinking, but then realized that it'd been one hell of a lot better than "Fine". I was still thinking about that when she went on, "What did you think of the newspaper story on Saturday?" There'd been another story about the aftermath of the Annette and Biffs incidents. I told her what I'd told dozens of people already today, "I didn't see it. I don't read them." "Wow, Egg, you're sooo cool." She gushed, as she put her hand on my arm. I stepped straight back, as per Dad's advice to make sure girls miss when they throw themselves at me. In this case, even just a 'thrown' hand. #2: I looked toward Julia, to see if she had been watching. By the way Julia was standing I could see that she'd been watching the WHOLE time. She'd probably been aware of what was happening even before I was. (I think they go to special classes, or something.) Still looking at Julia I said, "Shall I tell her, or do you want to?" "You'll let me?" "Be my guest." "Oh goody." Turning to whoever she was, Julia's entire demeanor changed, into a really scary-looking homicidal pixie (you had to be there). Julia snarled, "Get lost, bitch! He's mine!" Whoever-she-was clearly wasn't expecting that much invective. Me neither! She took a step back and said, "Oh. I didn't know." "He's holding my hand, slut." Julia lifted our still held hands. Whoever-she-was turned and started walking away, and was followed by a, "And tell your slutty girlfriends!" Then a sweetness and light Julia gave me a lovely smile and hugged my arm, "Thanks, I enjoyed that." "Yes, I could see that. I don't think she enjoyed it though." "Good. I don't want her near you. She's trash." "You know her?" "I've seen her around, just enough to know that she's trash. Her boyfriend's a stoner." "If she's got a boyfriend, why was she flirting with me then?" "She was trying to trade up. Way, way up. You're so far out of her league she's delusional. Forget about her. Let's get some food for you." Now that she mentioned it, I was hungry. We resumed lining up, which just meant turning around. The Andersons have always taken bagged lunches to school every day - and Julia does now to stay with me at lunchtime - but I'd gotten hungry and had eaten most of mine mid-morning so we were buying me some more. ------- The rest of the day was good. School was school of course, and not much can be done about that, but Julia was with me as much as she could and we were both looking forward to our after-school activities. I was first to arrive at the car rendezvous point. While waiting, I became a little confused about the transport arrangements. Would the car driver take me to Julia's place after dropping my sisters at home, or would I have to bike from my home to hers? This was the first time I could have gone directly to her place from school, and I didn't know what I could ask the driver to do. It would also be nice to offer Julia a lift, but she had to bike home as she'd biked to school. Then I flashed to the short-ish skirt she was wearing today, and I wondered what she'd look like on her bike? I was still thinking about this when Carol next arrived. She skipped up to me (skipped!) and hugged my left arm just like Julia does. The trouble was that Carol is considerably better endowed than Julia, and I was instantly aware of it. A quick command had to be sent to my cock. #1: #4: #1, #2, #3: Fortunately, but sadly, the wonderfully endowed Carol let go, and said, "Mom said you're going to Julia's?" "Yes, although I think I'll need to go home with you first, and bike from there. I'm not sure the school's driver would like being made to go to two different places. That'll give Julia time to get home anyway." "When you see Julia can you please remind her for me that she offered for me to come over one day and look at her clothes and do some makeup. I'd love to visit with her. She's such a wonderful girl, and so beautiful." "Yes I'll remind her. It'll be good for my two favorite girls to spend time together." "{Squeak}. I'm your second favorite girl! Really?" I had a quick think, and to my surprise she was. I hadn't thought about that before. Of course, there were EXTREMELY few girls to choose between. I flashed back to Julia's "Get lost, bitch! He's mine!" and knew that there definitely weren't going to be any more added soon, or possibly ever. "Carol. I didn't deliberately think about it before I spoke; I just opened my mouth, and it came out. But now that I've thought about it, I can tell you that it's definitely true. You are one of my two favorite girls." "Oh that is wonderful." #1: #3: Carol added, "Do you know that you're my favorite boy?" "Am I? Thank you, but you'll meet another boy to be your number one favorite soon. Then I'll be happy to be your number two." "Maybe. I hope so, but I won't be as lucky as Julia." "I'm not that great; there are LOTS of boys better than me. You'll have no trouble finding one either. You're beautiful, smart and nice. You'll have your pick of half the boys in school. You'll easily find a boy much better than me." Nervously, "You think I'm beautiful?" "Heavens yes!" A very happy Carol grasped my arm even tighter. Mmm. We stood there, in the same pose, for a minute or so; Carol obviously very happy and me quite enjoying myself too. Donna ran up. "How come you're hugging Mark so lovey-dovey?" "He said some very nice things to me and I think he's wonderful." "Yeah, he's pretty good now. Much better than he used to be, that's for sure! -- "I'm not going home with you guys. I've got a hockey game. Someone else will give me a lift home afterward. Please tell Mom. Bye." And she ran off. Running is Donna's usual form of locomotion. I couldn't help asking Carol, "I'm much better than I used to be?" I knew I was less nasty, but both girls had just treated me much more positively than just being "less nasty" would justify, so I was curious what they thought. A large part of my reason for asking was that I was hungry to understand girls. I knew I was on thin ice with Julia. For all of Julia's enthusiasm for me, I knew I would repeatedly screw-up with her, and it'd be very good if I could learn enough to reduce the number of times I'll hurt her, and the chance of my losing her entirely. Especially because Julia was so intense that my inevitable screwups are going to hurt her badly. Carol enthused, "That's for sure!" "Ahh, can you please explain it to me?" Asking for an explanation is - I've learned - an essential technique when dealing with females. There is just SO much they say or do that's impossible to understand without a detailed explanation. "You're far better. Even unbelievably better. A couple of years ago we didn't like you, and now we love you. That's a big change!" "But better how? I'm sorry to keep asking, but I'm operating in the dark when it comes to girls, and I especially don't understand why Julia thinks so highly of me, so any light you could shed would be very welcome." "She likes you so much because you're so wonderful. You're better than you used to be in every way. You never say an unkind word now, but you used to be mean to us all the time; even physically fight with us, which you haven't done for a long time. You say lots of nice compliments. Not just flattery either; your compliments are about something you've noticed and thought about - you're VERY good at giving compliments. You've turned into a genius. From ordinary to genius is unbelievable, but you did it. You used to be so clumsy and useless at sports, and now I've heard that you're your team's best player by far, and you can do every other sport you want to. Dad said you could even be a pro basketball player. -- "Now you're a genius, athletic, fit, strong, and handsome. You've changed all right, big brother - you've changed TOTALLY! But mostly it's because you're SO nice now. You never used to be nice, or hardly ever, now you're easily the nicest boy out of all the boys I know. They're horrible unless they're pretending to be nice to cop a feel. That's why I say I won't be as lucky as Julia; it's SO unfair that you're my brother!" #1: <"Athletic" and "genius" we know about. That's just having more minds. But her opinion of our niceness is WAY over the top, and claiming we're "handsome" is just plain silly.> #3: ^ [You might have noticed that I've recently gotten into the habit of starting sentences with "And" or "But". That happens VERY often with me when I speak out loud because my non-speaking minds so often think of additional ideas while the speaking mind is busy concentrating on what he's saying. When the speaker finishes, another mind takes control of our mouth and carries on speaking. It's often too difficult to try to connect the new sentence with the previous one because the additional thought can be quite different, so the new mind just says "And" (if the new sentence agrees with the previous one) or "But" (if it disagrees) and then states its thought. Speaking that way has become such a habit with us that it has also become part of how each of our minds think. You'll see it occur in my internal and external dialogue many times hereafter. Another similar technique that I picked up - mostly from the Williamses as they're a very thoughtful, deliberate family - and that also became a heavily used habit of mine, was to enumerate my points. If I was discussing something that I knew I'd want to make a lot of individual points about, one of my minds would start by saying "First," and then give his point. The next point would be introduced with "Second," regardless of whether the same or a new mind was talking. Obviously the count would keep going up for as long as we had ideas. Unlike when most people enumerate their points, which usually happens when they've preplanned them, we wouldn't introduce the last point with "Last" or "Lastly". That's because we usually didn't know it'd be the last point, not unless we'd already discussed the issue internally and agreed there'd be no more. Enumerating points saved us from having a long succession of "ands" and "buts", which would've sounded messy and potentially been confusing. You'll encounter other ways in which my thinking and speech appear unusual, but if you think about them, you should be able to understand how they are a consequence of my weird mental situation. I'll also mention that my writing uses a lot of bullet points. That's partly because my minds usually think of multiple points, but it's mostly because I simply like them: I think they aid easy comprehension and logical presentation, and I like to think that I'm a logical guy. At the risk of diminishing some of your sense of anticipation about my future, I'll add that I started writing this document shortly after completing a business degree, during which we were encouraged to use bullet points. Some of that encouragement has stuck, probably because I agreed with it.] ^ The car arrived, Carol and I got in and Carol told the driver to go without Donna. Having the teacher in the car stilted our conversation, so we sat in silence for a while. I couldn't resist restarting it though. I asked, "I understand the intelligence and athleticism. Not understand it exactly, but I accept what you say about those. But I don't agree with how nice and handsome I am. You're exaggerating those." Carol looked thoughtful, saying nothing for several seconds, then she took out a piece of paper out of her bag and wrote something on it without letting me see it. Then she folded it into her pocket. She never answered my question, so we just sat in silence. When it was obvious the conversation was over, my thoughts turned to seeing Julia shortly. When we got home, I ran out of the car, yelling back to Carol, "I've got to get ready to go to Julia's." I ran to my bedroom, dropped my bag, quickly changed clothes, and headed out to get my bike. When I was passing through the kitchen on the way out, Carol was still standing there, so I told her, "I'm off to Julia's. See you later. Bye." Carol said, "Stop for a second please. Back at school you said that I'm 'beautiful, smart and nice'. I disagree that I'm smart. I have to work very hard to get the grades I get, and my grades aren't nearly as good as yours. I'm not smart." #4: In terms of pure IQ, Carol is smart, but not impressively so. I don't know her IQ, but I'd guess something like 115. The main thing about her smartness is how hard she works at it. She's a VERY studious and diligent student. I think way too much, as it eats into a lot of the time that she could use for more fun things, but that's her choice. It's a decision she made several years ago and has stuck firmly to ever since. "Carol, that's simply untrue. You ARE very smart. Yes, you do a great deal of study, but in my book that proves you're smart. Far smarter than most people. There are kids in all my classes who're smart when they want to be, but they spend most of their time fooling around. They don't apply themselves at all. They're wasting their potential, learning bad habits, getting low grades, etc. You'll have a better life than those people will because you're working hard at doing the right things. That makes you far smarter than those intelligent clowns. You're planning far ahead and executing that plan diligently, while the clowns don't think beyond the present. You should be proud of how well you are doing." I paused for a little while, but she didn't respond, so I added, "Have I reassured you? When I said you were beautiful, smart and nice, I meant all of them. They're all true, including smart. Okay?" "I didn't need the reassurance, I already knew everything you said. That's what's kept me so studious for years. I chose to be studious back when I didn't like you so I've never discussed my reasons with you, not even when you used to abuse me about studying so much. From what you just said, you understand my reasons. You worked them out for yourself." Carol handed over the piece of paper that'd been in her pocket, saying, "Read it." I opened it, and it read: He will compliment me in a way that shows he has watched, understood, and valued me for who I am. Carol rubbed it in, "At school you denied you were good at compliments. Now try to deny it!" "Umm. I can't. You got me good. And you certainly proved you're smart too!" Carol responded, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you how wonderful I think you are. So I thought of a way of proving it. Have I proved it now?" "I'm forced to admit you've done a pretty good job, yes." "It gets even better. In the car I was planning to ask you as soon as we got out, but when I saw you running to get ready to go see Julia, I thought of deliberately waiting here to catch you as you were just about to leave. I did, and you stopped to reassure me. You didn't know what was wrong, but you thought I needed your help. Yes?" "Yes, that's right. How's that important?" "Two years ago you wouldn't give me the time of day even if you had nothing else to do. Today you were on your way to have sex with a beautiful and wonderful girl. But you stopped to reassure me. You didn't show any impatience at the delay, let alone any anger. You STOPPED what you were doing to reassure me because I'm important to you. Do you know how good it makes me feel to be that valuable to you? Is it any wonder that Julia, Donna and I love you so much?" "Umm. All this has kind of taken me by surprise. I didn't think I was as good as you think, but you've been very convincing. I will think about what you've said. Thank you very much for making so much effort to open my eyes to this. I wouldn't have believed you if you just told me, but you did well 'trapping' me the way you did." "You're very welcome. A girl should look after her favorite." I was feeling considerable appreciation at how much care Carol had shown me, so I opened my arms to give her a hug, and she quickly jumped forward into my arms, threw her arms around my torso, and hugged me tightly. I put my arms around her too, and held her. It was a full-body hug, the first we'd ever had, and it felt very nice. I really like Carol as a person these days, above and beyond as a sister, and it was great that we were getting along so well. I just stood still and enjoyed it for a while. Carol wasn't moving, so I held her for a bit longer, and still she wasn't moving. Then I thought of Julia. I was supposed to be on my way to see her. Well, not just to 'see her'; to do more than that really. I started getting hard at the thought of what was waiting for me, which I killed with a go-soft before Carol could feel anything. It was time to let go anyway. I let go of Carol and stood back. She reluctantly dropped her arms, saying, "That was nice. You're a very good person, Mark." "Not nearly as nice as you. Thanks for your very effective and caring answer to my question. Remember that back at school I said that you're 'beautiful, smart and nice'? You've just shown me that I was underestimating you considerably. You're far smarter and nicer than I knew. Just as beautiful though; there was never any chance of anyone underestimating your beauty." Carol smiled then said, "If you were willing to delay having sex with Julia to help me, then it's even easier for me to make an effort to help you. It's not like I have anyone who wants to have sex with me, is it?" #4: #1: #2: #4: "I'm a bit worried about making Julia wait longer because she might be worried about why I'm late. It's not just that I want sex with her you know, it's also because ... Hey! You knew that Julia and I are having sex! How did you know that? I thought it was supposed to be a secret." "Mom and Dad told me on Saturday. They figured I'd keep asking questions and making a nuisance of myself, and that I'd find out sooner or later anyway. But mainly they wanted to make sure I didn't blab about it. They don't want anyone outside the two families to know. That's why I haven't been asking you lots of questions like I did on Saturday morning. Donna doesn't know though." "Oh. That's okay then. It's nice I don't have to keep secrets from you..." #3: #2: #3: #2: #4: Carol interrupted me with, "While I remember it, I overheard you get in trouble with Mom this morning because she thought you were treating Julia as a sex object. When Mom gets home I'm going to tell her that you stopped to reassure me, rather than rush off to Julia's, and that you are a FAR better person than she was giving you credit for." "Thank you very much. It's very nice of you, but I was in the wrong and Mom correctly caught me. I'm trying to do better now, but I certainly appreciate your offer because I'm sure it'll help. I talked to Julia about it this morning and she's also going to talk with Mom about it. I'm sure that between the two of you, you'll convince Mom that everything is okay now. And now I think I'll go to Julia's place because she wants me to treat her as a sex object." "Huh?" "I'm partly pulling your leg. When I told Julia this morning what Mom had caught me doing, Julia said she liked me treating her as a sex object. When I explained that I had not treated her properly as a person, she wasn't in the least upset. She just said she trusted me and that she still wanted me to come to her house tonight to treat her like a sex object. She likes having sex with me. Amazing isn't it?" "You and her are SO lucky! {Sniff}. {Sniff, sniff}." #1: #4: "Carol, honey, come here." I opened my arms to her. With a sob, she quickly buried herself in my arms. "It's all right, honey. I love you. I think you're wonderful." "{Sob}." "Today you've amazed me. I've always thought you were a really nice girl but today you've blown me away. You brought some really important things to my attention, and you did it in a very intelligent and an awesomely caring way." "{Sniff}." "Then you volunteered to help me get back into Mom's good graces. All of this just because you cared for me. Not only are you a wonderful sister, but you are a seriously fantastic young woman. Any boy who can't see that is a complete moron. If any boy hurts you, you tell me and I'll go punch his lights out." "{Sniff}. You've never punched anyone's lights out." "For you, honey, I'll learn. Okay? Any boy who upsets one of my favorite girls is going to wish he was never born! And if he's bigger than me, I'll get Donna to help, and that'll teach him!" That earned me the beginnings of a fragile smile. Carol looked stronger, so I pushed her weight back off me a bit, standing her up, and said, "Do you want me to call Julia and say I have to stay home to look after my lovely sister?" "You'd do that for me? {Sniff}." "Of course. I can see her any time. No way would I leave you alone when you're so unhappy. I've got the job as your number one favorite and I don't want to lose it." #2: #4: Carol liked my line. I could see her collect herself, then she said, "Thanks. I'll be fine. There's just so much happening that it's hard for me. I just need some time to get used to my feelings. You go see Julia; I'll go do my homework. Go on, I'm okay." I could see she was going to be okay and I did want to see Julia - did I ever! In parting, I suggested, "Carol, there's been a lot happening in my life recently too." I had no idea there was ANYTHING happening in Carol's. I must've been far too self-absorbed recently. I made a mental note to try to do better. "I've found Mom to be very easy to talk with and very helpful. Maybe you can talk with Mom about it; that's if you haven't done so already?" "I don't think I can, but I'll think about it. Thank you for caring." "That's what good brothers do. Look after yourself, bye." ^ [[This was about a month and a half after my last merge. At this time I thought that having four minds had made me far more adept at seeing and understanding social interactions. I had modified my behavior to stop causing hurt or offense to people, and to occasionally intervene to stop others doing so or to assist someone who was suffering from hurt. Notice the focus on hurt. I was still far too sensitive to that. So much so that I was still holding myself aloof from people because I saw them as sources of hurt, especially the kids at school. I thought I was adept at understanding people, but in reality I was adept at seeing interactions but was not good at understanding them. I kept seeing hurt being caused, and that reinforced my desire to be a loner, and being a loner meant I didn't participate in social interactions myself. Because I almost never did anything with my observations, I never discovered how little I understood. It's amusing to think of my second suicide as a "safe option", but I'd taken the physical risk to gain two friends in preference to taking the emotional risk of putting myself forward to make friends in the usual manner. Once I had three internal friends, I'd self-deluded myself that I didn't need any more. Julia was becoming my friend, but that was on her initiative. The closest I came to creating that relationship was to let my horny hormones control me. Julia had broken through my self-delusion, and I welcomed having her in my life, but I'd failed to generalize my happy reaction to her because the sexual aspects of our relationship were obviously not generalizable. Otherwise my only other friends were in my family. My family could be my friends because unlike the kids at school, our family interactions were honest and safe. At school people put on all sorts of acts, most of which I didn't like and wished to avoid. But inside the family, no one put on acts. They were honest with me, in my life every day, and wouldn't attack me in some way to look cool in each other's eyes. There was no reason not to be friendlier with them, so I had been. They'd returned the attention, and we'd grown closer. I'd become especially friendly with Carol and Donna. There was an additional factor relevant to Carol's and my relationship. My liking of her had a too-large proportion of sexual motivation. It shouldn't have, but it did. For three-quarters of the minds in my head, Carol wasn't REALLY our sister (that was their excuse). She was also beautiful and had been nice to me for many months. All a beautiful girl needs to do to make any guy hot for her is be nice to him. She doesn't have to be sexual; just nice. That's another thing that shouldn't be the case, but is. I was fully aware of how desirable Carol was, but I'd firmly decided to do absolutely nothing about it. I was unaware that my interactions with her had a faint sexual undertone though. There weren't any of the usual teenage male innuendoes and other crude flirting methods, but I did spend more time with Carol than Donna, I smiled at her very often, and I paid her too much attention. Until my VERY recent relationship with Julia, Carol was the only beautiful girl who'd give me the time of day, my hormones often got slightly out of control, and I showed just a little too much interest in her friendship and happiness. Carol's liking of me had started with her liking me (sometimes girls can be totally straightforward. It's very confusing). As I got better at being nice to people, especially after my last merge, Carol REALLY started liking me. She subconsciously picked up on my being so attentive to her too. She was also feeling lonely toward boys, which is a human need in a young woman, but one she'd withdrawn from. That'd happened because she'd been the first girl in her class to develop breasts (ignoring the fat girls), and the boys had picked on her terribly at the time. Since then, Carol hadn't seen any reason to change her low opinion of boys. I was behaving the opposite of the boys she saw flirting, which made me the only guy Carol positively liked being with. Julia had spent a couple of lunchtimes with Carol to pick Carol's brains about me. Carol had seen how confident Julia was with the large number of people she interacted with, which made Carol envious because Carol, like me, was lacking in social confidence. So Carol spent a few days 'wanting to be' Julia. Then Julia started a sexual relationship with me, which messed up Carol's head a little, especially because Carol did truly love me as a person. My suddenly becoming a good boyfriend to Julia had raised Carol's opinion of me a great deal because Carol had an over-inflated opinion of Julia. In addition, Julia had an over-inflated and romantic opinion of me, which she'd shared with Carol. Suddenly I was a wonderful boyfriend and in a sexual relationship, which made Carol think of me in new ways. Initially not consciously for herself, but some of those emotions leaked inward anyway. Carol's feelings for me wouldn't have had any tinge of impropriety without my relationship with Julia starting. Amusingly, my relationship with Julia made it less likely for me to misbehave with Carol, as I no longer felt so horny and frustrated. The single event of my starting a relationship with Julia moved Carol's and my attitudes to our relationship in opposite directions. Life is full of people being out of alignment with each other. All of which didn't matter at the moment. I'd had surges of lust for Carol in recent years, and had done nothing of any significance as a result of them. Carol was feeling some longings of her own now, but Carol was a sensible girl so they also would've amounted to nothing. We were just kids going through a phase. We were in a slightly unusual situation (especially me), and we were lonelier than most kids, Carol was more beautiful than most girls, and I was treating her nicer than most brothers would have, but none of these things would've had any effect because neither Carol nor I would have done ANYTHING about our temporary feelings. We couldn't even bring ourselves to approach people with whom we could have developed acceptable relationships, so there was NO CHANCE of us approaching each other.]] ------- Chapter 21: Monday Evening; Not Sore No More Monday, April 4, 2005 (Continued) I left Carol and rushed around to Julia's. She was waiting outside her front door for me, so even my pathetically low level of understanding females didn't prevent me getting the distinct impression that she'd been waiting for me somewhat longer than she'd expected. A very rapid explanation was definitely a good idea. Running up to her, "I'm very sorry I'm late, honey. Carol had some personal troubles at home and was quite upset. There was no one else at home so I had to stay to look after her. Some guy rejected her recently. I think the guy she wanted as her first boyfriend. I'm guessing she even tried to get a bit sexy with him but he refused her. Poor Carol was quite upset. She's too young yet, but it still hurt her. There was some crying involved, which always gets to me." Julia liked my explanation enough to give me some kisses, then ask, "Is she all right now?" "I think she's fine, but Mom and Dad won't be home for a couple of hours and Donna is playing field hockey at school. Do you mind if we go inside and I call her to check?" Julia thought that was a good idea, although it required that I kiss her a few more times first. We went into the kitchen, where I called Carol while Julia made me a snack, "Because you're going to need your strength shortly." While I was busy on the phone, Andrew wandered in and started eating my snack! He winked at me, as if that helped! Fortunately Julia made me another one, and kept it out of Andrew's reach until he'd wandered off with the coffee he'd come down to make, my snack having been a nice bonus for him. Carol was fine. She was pleased that I'd called to check on her. She told me I was wonderful, which was nice of her. Immediately after I hung up, I remembered that Carol had asked me about her spending some quality girly time with Julia. I should've done it while Carol was on the phone, but asking Julia now was fine too. I said, "Remember your offer to have Carol over one evening to look at your clothes, discuss makeup, and whatever other girly things you do at such times? Things that I'm sure no guy wants to be involved in. Before I left home Carol asked me to remind you about that." "I'll ask Mom when she gets home when a good time is. I'll invite Carol over for dinner and she can even spend the night if she wants. She was very helpful getting us together when you were off school so I'm happy to return the favor, especially if she's depressed about something. I'll cheer her up right now by calling and telling her." Julia grabbed the phone and started dialing. I suddenly had a silly thought: I felt a surge of pride that such a beautiful girl knew my home number from memory. How cool! Then I felt silly because we were about to go up to her room to have sex which was surely just a little bit more significant. I watched as Julia hit "Redial" and I felt disappointed. Julia told Carol what she'd told me. I could hear Carol's squeals of joy from where I was standing. They started talking about the "fun things" they could do. None of them sounded like fun to me, so I tuned out to give my snack the attention it deserved. My ears did catch one sentence from Julia though, "Yes, he is wonderful." It was good that my two favorite girls agreed on that. After Julia hung up, she said, "I don't think Carol is depressed anymore, haha. She was very excited. I'm glad I can do something nice for her." "You mentioned something like that before, that you owed her a lot. I'm not aware that you owe her much. How did that happen?" "I owe Carol HEAPS! The day you told Annette your feelings for me, and so many people told me the story, my heart almost burst. I rushed home to tell Mom, not knowing what else to do. Mom was very excited too, and we knew I had to talk with you the next day. But you'd been attacked and were in the hospital because of me. I was frantic with worry. That someone as incredible as you loved me was amazing, but I'd gotten you beaten up. I found out about Carol and approached her, scared she'd scratch my eyes out for causing her brother to be hospitalized. -- "Carol was the opposite of angry; she was wonderfully kind and helpful. She talked to me, then she talked to you, and when you told her that you wanted to date me, she passed that message on. If she wasn't so nice she could have easily have messed things up between us. Instead she tried as hard as she could to help. After you agreed to date me, Carol spent ages helping me get to know you, what you liked and disliked, your hobbies, favorite foods, TV programs, etc. Without her help I might never have been able to convince you to let me be your girlfriend. Having a girly night with her doesn't come close to repaying what I owe." #4: #1: "I remember you did talk about some of that before, but I didn't realize how much Carol helped. What a neat sister. Hmmm, I have two statements to make. Are you listening?" "Yes." "Number One: What is my favorite food?" Julia unhesitatingly recited, "Roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings and lots of gravy." "Correct. Don't forget it; food is very important to me." Julia was smiling at me. I hope she realized I was being serious. "Number Two: As much as you think you owe Carol a favor for bringing us together, I owe her a bigger one." Julia gave me a VERY big smile, nicely accompanied by a very big hug and kiss. Once again, I hope she realized I was being serious. Possibly even more serious than about my favorite dinner. While Julia was cleaning and putting away my snack plate, I held up my hand and counted off my fingers as I said, "Now let's see: Go to Julia's - done. Check on Carol - done. Eat snack - done. Hmmm. I felt sure there was something else I was supposed to do. What was it? Hmmm. Can't rightly remember. I seem to recall it was something to do with treating or mistreating an object. I'm confused over which it was though, but maybe I'll work it out when I see the object in question. Do you have any objects around here, ma'am, that need something done to them?" Getting into the spirit of it, Julia responded, "You know, I believe we do have such an object. In one of the upstairs rooms I think. Fair crying out for some hard objectification it is. Follow me, kind sir." I was composing my reply while we were walking up the stairs, when I noticed that Julia was walking somewhat funny. She still had some muscle tenderness, and I felt terrible. If I hadn't noticed, I would've been equally hard on her again today, and probably hurt her all over again. I felt like a heel. I resolved to be a tender lover this time. This distracted me from my composing, and we arrived at the "He Showed Me" room without any further brilliant repartee from me. I thought of a fairly good one just as we were about to enter her bedroom. I motioned Julia back from the door, saying, "Stand back, ma'am. Sometimes these objects can be pretty wild. You wouldn't believe how wild the one I had to deal with last Saturday was. Let me go first to make sure the room is safe. You wait out here and I'll call you when the coast is clear." I opened the door just the bare amount necessary, slipped in, and closed it behind me on a surprised but amused looking Julia. I called out in a voice loud enough for Julia to hear, "Here, Object. Come on, Object. It's no use hiding, I'll find you. Where are you, Object?" While calling, I was gathering my robe. I positioned myself in the middle of the room, and called out to Julia. "It appears safe, ma'am. You can come in now." Then I quickly ran so that I was hiding behind the door when it opened. Julia entered cautiously, not sure what to expect. She didn't see me anywhere, so she advanced farther into the room. As soon as she was in far enough, I threw my robe over her head and wrapped my arms around her so I had her pinned and blinded. I lifted her off the ground and called out, as if to someone outside the room. "Ma'am, I've captured the Object. Quite a handful it is too. Let's see what type of Object it is." I turned her upside-down, her skirt very conveniently falling down to expose her panties. Julia's legs were kicking back and forth, giving me a very attractive view, and she was sort-of-screaming, sort-of-laughing. She couldn't make up her mind. I admired the view while she tried to decide. "Ma'am, stay out there. This one looks dangerous. I have my suspicions, let me check ... Yes ma'am, you were very lucky you called me, this is one of the worst types of Objects there are. This is one of the dreaded Sex Objects. You have no idea how much damage these beasties can do." I removed my right arm from its sling. I was holding Julia vertically upside-down with my left arm around her waist in a way that also held the robe tight around her body. She's so much smaller than me that this was quite easy. I moved my right hand up near her crotch to make sure it could reach, then I called out, "I'm about to attempt to determine its gender, ma'am. Cross your fingers and hope for a male because they're much easier to deal with. We really don't want a female - they've been known to be fatal to their helpless victims and are extremely hard to deal with." I occasionally had to pause my speech as sometimes Julia's giggles, screams and now hiccups were too loud. I didn't want her to miss any of this. "Testing now, ma'am". My right hand pulled Julia's panties to the side and I immediately licked her pussy. Her screams doubled their volume. Her hiccups and laughter too. I licked a few times, but her legs were waving back and forth so much my face decided to retreat to a safe distance. "Ma'am, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is REALLY bad. I'm afraid that what we've got here tastes like a female Sex Object. And it smells like one too." That got another shriek from Julia. "That confirms it, ma'am. The smell is unmistakable. This is definitely a female Sex Object. A young one by the look of it. We're going to have to proceed very, very cautiously. The good news is that you're very lucky you called me. I happen to be one of the world's leading experts on the handling of female Sex Objects. If anyone can subdue this particular Object, then it's me, ma'am. Sometimes we have to send in a whole team to subdue one of these, but I think I can handle this one. Fortunately it's quite small, although it's very vigorous." I was at a bit of a loss now. I couldn't think what to do next, which was a real pity because I was enjoying myself immensely, and from what I could see and hear, so was Julia. I saw the robe's belt hanging down, which gave me the idea of tying it around her upper-body to hold her helpless, but I certainly couldn't do that while holding her upside-down the way I was, especially with only one and a half good arms. If I dropped her on the bed first she'd probably squirm away before I could tie her. I was thinking this through when I had an idea, #4: #2: #1: #2: #1, #3, #4: "Don't come in yet, ma'am. It's going to get pretty messy in here shortly, and you really don't want to see it." Before Julia had time to think about what could be happening, I pulled her panties to the side again, and - to borrow Mom's joking reference - rubbed my face in it. That's about all the technique I could use as Julia was thrashing around, waving her legs, and generally being most uncooperative. Not unappreciative though, judging by the amount of liquid I was able to rub my face in. I walked slowly over to the bed while enthusiastically re-determining the gender of the Object. When I was in position I lined everything up carefully. I didn't want to drop her on her head, as even on the bed that could hurt. I wanted to lay her on her back, quickly but carefully. I also made sure I knew where the ends of the belt were, so once I had her entirely on the bed I could quickly grab the ends and tie them. I gave her several extra-enthusiastic licks, then quickly lowered her on to her back. I grabbed the belt and managed to wrap it twice around her body and arms, and tie a reef knot. That barely took two or three seconds, and Julia hadn't even tried to stop me. I gave the robe some tugs to make sure there was a large spare volume around her head, with a sleeve nearby so air supply wasn't going to be a problem. I grasped a bunch of the robe about where the knot was. That hand could easily control her, so she couldn't roll off the bed, get away or hurt herself. "Ma'am, I have the female Sex Object tied up. I'm ready to start subduing her now. This can be quite spectacular so you can come in and watch if you like." She wasn't moving much, so I used my right hand to hold her down, and my left hand to start removing her panties. She kicked, screamed, laughed and hiccuped, but somehow never separated her legs enough to make removing her panties difficult. In a few seconds they were off. "Look at this, ma'am. See the Object's pussy?" As I was rubbing my finger up and down it. "Look at it closely, ma'am. This is the most dangerous part of a female Sex Object. Sure they have other parts that are very effective, but this part right here," I inserted a couple of fingers and started pumping, "is the one that causes by far the most trouble. And by the look of it, this particular female Sex Object has an especially fine pussy. Imagine the trouble this one could cause on an unsuspecting individual. It's a very good thing that we've got her under control now." I had to stop playing with pussy to very quickly remove my pants. Soon I was naked from the waist down and very erect. Julia was also very ready, but there was no harm in using my fingers to check again. "Ma'am, there's another reason we were lucky to capture this one when we did. She's of breeding age and if we hadn't..." #4: I'd been planning to climb up between her legs and to start screwing her. Getting a rubber out of its foil packet and onto my cock while holding Julia down was going to be difficult. For a second I was tempted to do without the rubber, but I remembered the grim look on Dad's face when he'd talked about failing to live up to his expectations. Damn! Oh well, I'll just eat her to orgasm and then untie her so we can screw normally after that. "Uh oh, ma'am. It looks like it's time to get down to business. This is the part of my job that I most enjoy. It's messy, but I personally find it very satisfying." I had moved to between Julia's legs, and at this point wrapped by my hands around her thighs, spread her legs and put lips and tongue to work, to do the best job I could. I started off slow, but very quickly recognized that Julia was in absolutely no need of any slow-building foreplay play. She was hot and wet already, so I just went for bringing her to a climax quickly. Within a minute she was bucking hard enough that I had to seriously hang on with both hands. I wished I'd brought some protective gear, as my face got pounded by her lower torso several times. Her various screams and laughs were replaced with her now trademark succession of yeses, in this case: "Yes, Yes, {hiccup}, Yes, YES, YES, {HICCUP}, YES..." She was getting closer and closer, and the two parts of her chant were getting louder and louder. I had just started wondering whether the soundproofing provided by the robe would save the neighbors further embarrassment, when my head was slammed HARD between two thighs. The only sound I could hear was the ringing in my ears, and the only thing I could think was Then her thighs - with my head FIRMLY encased - rocketed up in the air, then down again, then up again, then down again. Now my only thought was a serious, Then Julia collapsed, her whole body going limp. Most importantly, her limpness included her thighs. #2: I cautiously moved my head to see whether it was still attached to my neck. It was. I couldn't believe it, so I repeated the test. Inexplicably, my head didn't roll off my neck and fall to the floor. I slid off the end of the bed, got a rubber, and then sat beside the unmoving Julia. I untied the robe, and started loosening it enough to find a hole to move over her head. When I saw her face, she was awake, but only sort of. She came around enough to recognize me, turned her head to look at me, smiled, and said, "{Hiccup}." We laughed, and she started trying to disentangle herself from the robe, so I helped. When the robe was removed, I took the liberty of continuing to remove articles of her clothing. Soon she was naked, exactly the way I like her. She pulled my shirt over my head, and now I was in the same state. A delightfully naked Julia stood up on the other side of the bed from me, pulled back the covers and slid in. "Come in, you wonderful man." I accepted her invitation. We cuddled. She hiccuped. We laughed. She ventured, "That was a lot of fun." "It certainly was. I don't know where all that came from. I just made it up as I went, but it was a lot of fun." "I was laughing and screaming. I didn't know which to do more, or next, I was a helpless mess." "So helpless you nearly pulled my head off my shoulders." "What? When?" "When you clamped my head between your thighs." "Did I do that?" "Did you ever! During your orgasm." "I don't remember. Anyway, it was your fault. I was your innocent, helpless victim. I was tied down so there was nothing I could do to protect myself from the 'World's Leading Expert Female Sex Object Handler'." "That'll teach you to be a sex object. I hoped you learned your lesson?" "Absolutely: 'Always employ an Expert.' Several times if necessary." Which reminded me, "Speaking of several times, I have this little problem." Julia asked, with I suspect mock concern, "Oh?" "Give me your hand." She did, and I moved it under the covers, to the problem area. "Oh no," she said. "That's a BIG problem." We both thought that the problem should be fixed immediately. Julia put the rubber on me, claiming it was "girl's work." When she was spreading and lifting her legs I saw her wince a little, which immediately reminded me that I had forgotten my resolution to be tender today. I made the resolution again, additionally resolving to remember it this time. "Are you still a little bit sore?" "From all the laughing. You had me laughing so hard for so long. It was wonderful. Don't worry about it, let's get that big problem taken care of." I slowly inserted myself into her. I was still hard and she was still VERY wet, so I slid in easily. I took the weight of her legs on my arms, not that they weighed much, in order to ease the strain on her stomach, and then I started sliding back and forth. I didn't thrust; I EASED back and forth. I was determined to go easy on her this time. It was very nice. It's wonderful to have her in front of me like this, and for me to be able to look at all of her so well. I also really enjoyed watching and feeling my cock slide in and out of her pussy. I didn't reach for her breasts because I didn't want to stretch her legs and stomach muscles too much, so I just rocked back and forth, enjoying the experience. After a few minutes Julia requested, "Faster." So I sped up just a little. Not much, as I was determined to be gentle this time. Another minute later Julia again requested, "Faster please." I increased my speed just a little. After a few seconds she looked puzzled, "Even faster please." I moved just a little faster. "Come on Mark, much faster. I'm ready, let's move it up." I reluctantly increased my speed a little. It wasn't a very smart thing to do. "Mark! What are you doing? Fuck me. Get moving. I know you can." "I'm sorry, but I don't want to go any faster." "Why not? I need you to go faster. I REALLY need you to." "I don't want to hurt you. On Saturday I was too rough, and already today you are sore. And I saw you even had some trouble walking up the stairs. I promised myself I would be tender to you today." "I don't want you to be tender. Tender is the last thing I want now. I'm fine. Let's go." "I don't want to hurt you." "Argh! I'm HORNY! I haven't had you for two days and I've been thinking about you every second. We've started playing and I'm very worked up. I'm desperate for you to FUCK me. FUCK me Mark, fuck me until you can't move anymore!" "I really don't want..." "I WANT you to! I'm REALLY horny, and I want you NOW!" "But I don't want to hurt..." Julia screamed, "ARRGGHH!" Julia lay there, clearly pissed off and frustrated. I sat at her feet feeling sick. I hated telling her "No." Believe me, I REALLY hated it! But I knew I would hate hurting her too. I didn't know what to do, or what to say. Julia worked out what to do though. She suddenly jumped out of bed, marched to the door, yanked it open, and yelled very loudly, "ANDREW?" I heard Andrew's muffled answer, "Yes." I said, "Julia, you're naked!" She ignored me, continuing her yelled conversation with Andrew, "Please get Daddy's gun and bring it here." "Get his gun! Are you sure?" "Absolutely. Quickly please." I was freaking out. I exclaimed, "Julia, what are you doing? Why do you need a gun? And you're naked? What are you doing? Julia glared at me, "You're going to fuck me." Andrew called out, "Okay, if you insist, but you better have a good reason, sis." And I could hear Andrew leave his room and rush somewhere. This was not good! "Julia, honey, what are you doing?" "If you won't fuck me voluntarily, then you are going to fuck me at gunpoint." "What! Are you insane!" "Yes. I'm insane in love with you. In passion for you. In desire for you. My body is screaming at me to be fucked by you. I AM insane for you." "I'VE GOT IT, I'M COMING." #4: #1: #3: #2: #4: Andrew arrived in the room's doorway, "What's the trouble?" Julia ignored Andrew's question, telling him, "Come in and stand here." Julia walked toward the bed, pointing to a spot about halfway into the room. A very concerned looking - and armed! - Andrew followed her. He stood where Julia had pointed. By now he'd seen that Julia clearly wasn't in danger, not with her walking around the room while I was still kneeling at the foot of the bed. Andrew asked, "Julia, what's going on?" "He won't fuck me properly. Your job is to make him do it right." "Julia! You can't force a person to have sex with you by pointing a gun at him! Or asking me to point a gun at him. Have you got any idea how many laws that breaks?" I was happy to note that his gun was not pointing anywhere near anyone. That was a relief, so far. "He'll have sex with me, he just won't move fast enough." "What?" "He won't move fast. Whenever I tell him to go faster he refuses. He's says he's too scared of straining my muscles for God's sake! Your job is to watch him. If I tell him to go faster, and he doesn't, shoot him. Not dead obviously, just somewhere where it will hurt. Preferably a lot." Andrew started laughing, I suspected as much as from relief as anything. Julia walked to the bed, lay on her back and spread her legs in front on me. Demanding of me, "Come on! Do it now!" Then she turned to Andrew and said to him, "Are you ready?" "Sis, I'm not going to point a gun at Mark. Look at the poor guy, he can't do a thing with you at any speed. You've scared him into uselessness." "Argghhh! That's not fair. I want him to fuck me." "You sure do, but it's not going to happen now. Put your legs down, Julia; I'm not used to seeing you like that. You've overreacted badly. You do NOT use firearms this way! Not to mention you had me worried sick about why you needed it. I won't tell Dad about this provided you NEVER try to pull a stunt this stupid again, and the only reason I'm saying that is that I can't believe you were serious. You do NOT fix relationship troubles with a gun!" "Yes, sorry Andrew. I just got worked up and frustrated." "Buy a vibrator. It'll work much better than a gun and break a lot less laws. Okay?" "Yes." That seemed to be the end of their conversation, and it seemed safe to speak, so I said, "Thank you, Andrew. I was mighty scared for a while there." "I was never going to shoot you for such a ridiculous reason, as I'm sure Julia knew. She was just being overly dramatic. But if I was tempted to use the gun, I'd shoot you for being so selfish that you drove my sister to pull this stunt. As far as I'm concerned, this fiasco was mostly your fault." "I don't understand. I wasn't being selfish; I was trying not to hurt her. That's not selfish." "You're allowed NOT have sex with my sister, or she with you, otherwise it's rape. If you're having sex, you're allowed to insist on going slow if you're injured so you can't safely go faster. But for you to decide how fast the sex will be because you think you're a better judge of her body than she is, is arrogant selfishness. It's HER body; not yours. If she makes you go too fast, then she'll learn not to make that mistake again. It's just about sore muscles, for goodness sake. Worst that happens is she has to spend a day off school, which is hardly the end of the world. It's her body, her choice, her consequences, her learning experience. I bet you felt all noble and self-sacrificing while you were doing it too. Feeling full of yourself while you were pissing off Julia about something that's her right to decide WAS being selfish." "{Gulp}. I really messed up. I'm so sorry, Julia. I never meant to be selfish to you. I was trying to be considerate but I got it completely wrong." I was talking to Julia, but Andrew answered, "Yes, you got it wrong. At least you had good intentions, so you were stupid rather than nasty, and stupid is fixable. So how are you going to make good to Julia?" "I don't know. How do you suggest?" "Obviously you give her what she wanted. You fuck her as fast as she wants until she asks you to stop. And I can't believe I'm advising a boy to screw my little sister." "Unfortunately there's no way I can do what you suggest. I'm useless that way now." "Right, and that's entirely Julia's fault. She scared you into useless with her stupid stunt. She was wrong to do that, so the way she makes good is to get you back into the mood. Got that you two? Julia turns you on, you screw her until she begs you to stop. Which is what you should've been doing without going through this drama. Honestly you two, you love each other and should be fucking like rabbits. How can you possibly get that wrong? You're both too stupid for your own good." Andrew left, shutting the door behind him. We both turned to each other and started trying to out-self-blame and out-apologize the other Once we called that a draw, we started trying to do what Andrew had said. It turned out that it really isn't all that difficult for a beautiful, naked, 16-year old girl to get a 15-year old boy horny again. Who'd have thought? Having accomplished that extremely easy task, Julia took considerable delight in telling me, "Well, I've done MY job, now it's YOUR turn. I INSIST you fuck me until I beg you to stop. Do NOT be gentle with me. Fuck me like you know I want to be fucked." Which is exactly what I did. I was determined to make good, if not 'make great', to prove that I'd learned from my mistake, so I made frequent use of mini-go-softs. To make me feel worse, Julia's previous soreness was quickly forgotten as she got into it and had a great time. She was either fucking me as much as I was fucking her, or when I was on top she was simply urging me to go faster. She was determined to enjoy her victory. I quite enjoyed it too. When it was obvious that Julia was proving her point by making this last a long time, I even let myself cum a couple of widely separated times. Julia had MANY orgasms, while I just had a couple because I didn't want to run out of steam (well, not exactly "steam"). We covered Missionary, Doggie - good, I'd been looking forward to trying that one - Girl-On-Top, and a few other positions that I didn't know the names of. I also got her off a few extra times by going down on her. I wouldn't let her go down on me though, "Because Andrew told me to screw you until you begged me to stop. So roll over and put your legs in the air..." After two hours of virtually nonstop sex, with only small rests after each orgasm, Julia was starting to look worn out. I worried about her being even sorer tomorrow, so asked her, "Should I keep going?" "I haven't begged you to stop yet, dammit!" I thought she was wrong to continue. I'd incorrectly thought that two hours ago, but this time I was much surer. Julia was being stubborn, and she was going to pay for it later if she didn't stop soon. But as Andrew had pointed out, it was her that had to learn her limits, so I went back to pushing her buttons. She bravely kept on proving her point, whatever it was. By now I didn't have a clue what was going through her head, but I knew that the contents of her head weren't my responsibility. From time to time I asked her if she wanted to keep going, and she always insisted on it, so I kept fucking her. We kept at it right through dinnertime. I think her frequent screams and nearly continual groans convinced the family to leave us alone. After four hours it was clear that Julia was going to be VERY sore tomorrow, and that she knew it. The small rests that were essential after each of her orgasms were getting longer, and she groaned at the start of each new fuck, but for some inexplicable reason she wouldn't ask me to stop. There are a lot of things that girls do that are inexplicable to me, but I was pretty sure that whatever Julia's reason was for being so mule-headed, it wouldn't be something that I'd be impressed by afterward. It'd gone on for far too long already, but sore muscles weren't going to kill her. I'd particularly agreed with Andrew's point about learning, so I flipped Julia over and starting again. And again. I never bothered counting how many agains there were, but it was heading for a big number. The only limit was going to be her body, and she was stupidly insisting on proving some sort of point about that being her right to control. Just short of six hours she couldn't take any more. She croaked a begging, "Stop. No more," then she collapsed, utterly exhausted. I left her lying where she was, pulled the covers over her, put my robe on, and went to see if I could find some food. ^ The rest of the family was sitting around the dining table, clearly expecting me, probably because of the sudden silence. They were also silent, looking at me as I walked in. Vanessa said, "Your dinner's being reheated in the microwave. It'll be ready in a couple of minutes. Do you want a drink?" "Yes please. Some milk would be nice." After bringing me my milk, Vanessa asked me, "Should I go and check on her?" "If you wish, but she's probably asleep and won't be moving for a long time. I don't think she'll be going to school tomorrow either. Sorry about that." Andrew spoke up, "I think she learned enough lessons tonight that she can take tomorrow off." The family chuckled and nodded to this, making it clear that they knew the basics of what had been going on. I just hoped Andrew hadn't mentioned the gun because that'd probably get Julia into big trouble. "I learned some lessons tonight too, thanks to Andrew: Julia is in charge of her body, Julia sets her own limits, and some lessons required a payment of pain first, so protecting people from that pain is damaging them. I've also got a nagging feeling that there's a bigger lesson in tonight for me, but I can't identify it yet." Vanessa put my dinner in front of me, and said, "I'll just go look in on Julia." I just nodded at her, then started eating. Prof said, "You could have kept going, couldn't you?" "Yes, although I was getting quite hungry." Robert laughed, "Next time we'll bring you snacks to keep you going." "I don't think there'll be another time." Robert said, "You don't know women. She'll get her strength back and want a rematch." Prof spoke up, "It wasn't a match, was it Mark?" "No, it should've been about Julia finding her body's limits, but I think it was the limit of her stubbornness that kept her going. I hope she's learned that lesson well enough not to need repeating it." Prof remembered, "Your mother called an hour ago. We told her that we'd bring you home, but that it could be quite late so not to wait up for you." I suddenly realized what the lesson for me was, and I wanted to go home and think about it. "Can you take me home now please, Prof?" "Finish your dinner first and I suggest you take a quick shower and put some clothes on." All good ideas. While I was eating Robert asked, "Aren't you sore?" "No, I'm fine. Julia's the one with the sore muscles." "Not even your stomach muscles?" #4: None of my minds could be bothered worrying about our shared stomach muscles, so I just said, "No." "What about rubbed raw? After this long you must be bleeding." I had no idea what he was talking about. I must have looked puzzled because he added, "When a guy has lots of sex his cock gets rubbed raw; the skin gets rubbed off it. That hasn't happened to you?" I hadn't noticed any problem like that, and almost opened my robe to check, until I realized that exposing myself around the dinner table wouldn't be a good look. Probably not a good smell either. So I just shrugged, and said, "Oh, I didn't know that. No, I don't have any problems like that. I feel fine. Wouldn't wearing a rubber protect from that?" "Yeah, it probably would. I'd forgotten about those." That appeared to be the end of that issue, so I turned my attention to my dinner. It was a nice, big one and I was hungry. They let me eat, just talking and joking among themselves mostly, with an occasional comment from me. I was pleased that the atmosphere was friendly. Certainly not angry or condemning as it easily could have been. Dinner consumed, I stood, and that broke up the little gathering. But before they headed off, first Andrew, then Robert, shook my hand. Andrew just said, "Awesome, dude." Robert was more loquacious, "I don't know what's going on but you've certainly livened up this household, although at the cost of making it hard for me to concentrate on my studies, haha. I can see Mom and Dad are 100% behind you, which in itself is fascinating because I can't imagine how either of them could let someone do what you just did to Julia. Yep, interesting times in the Williams' household. Please don't boast about what you did tonight. If word of what you can do gets around the rest of us guys won't have a chance, haha. Goodnight Mark." In the car on the way back to my home, Prof asked, "Do you want to talk about it?" "No thanks. Not yet anyway." "My door's open, son." "Thanks Prof. If I talk with anyone, it'll be you." That just came out without my thinking about it, but he seemed to have the right attitude and be very perceptive and understanding. I could even imagine talking to him about my merges before I would to Mom or Dad, which was surprising, but felt right. Not that I'd EVER talk with ANYONE about them, as that'd be a PHENOMENALLY bad thing to do. (See if you can think of how bad it could be? The reason is given later.) After a few minutes' silence, I started worrying about Julia getting in trouble for the "gun stunt", as Andrew had called it. I asked, "Prof, Andrew told you what I was doing with Julia, didn't he?" I knew he had, as it'd been obvious by my reception around the dinner table afterward, but I was just leading up to my real question. Prof answered, "He told us the some of it, yes. What lessons he'd pointed out, and what he told you two to do. He had a lot of fun describing the image of Julia on her back with her legs spread. We all thought that was very funny." "You weren't concerned, you know, about the nudity?" "Not at all. Quite proud that our children are that comfortable with each other. The Boys are very protective of their little sister." (I'd learned from my first date with Julia that the Williamses often referred to Andrew and Robert collectively as "The Boys".) "She's so much younger than them that they feel almost as much responsibility for her as Vanessa and I do. She knows it and trusts them totally. It wasn't hard for her to do that, but it was very funny." "Did Andrew tell you, umm, everything that happened in the room when he joined us." "No he didn't. He did tell us that there was something he wasn't going to tell us. If that's what you're worried about, don't, your secret's safe; Andrew won't tell." "It's not exactly my secret." "It doesn't matter. Andrew is an adult, he made a decision and told us he'd done so but not what it was, but that he'll take responsibility for it if he's proved wrong. We can't ask any more of him than that. It's important he learns to make decisions and that he can see we trust him to." "Yes, that's one of the important things he taught me." Prof, ever the teacher, offered, "I can see we don't need to review the lessons he taught you, do we?" "No, I learned them. Julia too hopefully." Prof, the parent, "Yes, how long she took to do that puzzles me. I got home about 5:30. At about 6-ish she got the lesson, yet she kept going for another four hours. She can get carried away at times, but she's not stupid or egotistically thick headed, so why go on? She's going to pay for that tomorrow." "I agree with your estimate of the time, but how do you know when she saw the lesson?" "Her cries changed from passionate to desperate. Carrying on once she'd reached her limit wasn't smart; a thought that I'm sure will occur to her when she wakes up, haha." "You really don't mind that I have made your daughter very sore, do you?" "Andrew was very clear to us that Julia DEMANDED the right to make decisions for her own body, even blatantly exposing herself to Andrew to help make the point. You didn't make her sore; she did." "I agree. I've learned not to apologize for things like that; that's another lesson from you. I'm sure I'll still have plenty of opportunities for apologizing though, it seems to be a frequent requirement when dealing with females." "You got that right! It'll come the other way at least once because I'll make sure Julia apologizes to you for tonight." "Oh, why?" "For hurting you. You should have enjoyed tonight, but instead you were forced to hurt someone you care for. She'll apologize to you." For the last four hours I'd known I wasn't enjoying myself, but I was quite impressed that Prof could see that too. -- "I suspect that tonight has been more valuable to you than to her. Your demeanor has changed; you're much more thoughtful and mature-seeming. Don't forget you're only fifteen, you're allowed to have fun and to take time to grow." He parked outside my home and I said, "Goodnight Prof. Thanks for everything." "You're welcome, Mark. You're an interesting fellow. I'm going to enjoy watching Julia flounder around with you." "What do you mean?" "Normally women can't wait to start changing their guys. Young guys being how they are, they usually do need some training to be good at caring relationships. You have much to learn yet, and the womenfolk will teach you, but I think they might've taken a bite of something that's larger than they expected. It will be fun to watch. Goodnight." ^ As I lay in bed, I knew I had much to think about, but I was annoyed by again having the feeling that I was missing important parts of it. The insight I'd had at their dinner table was one lesson, but I had the feeling that there were more that should come out of this evening's activities, but I couldn't put my finger on them. I knew I didn't have to worry about Julia. She'd be very, very sore, but as she'd pointed out last time, it was only muscle soreness. I felt sorry for the pain she was going to feel, but I wasn't worried about it, especially with her parents being so solidly behind me, even to the extent of making Julia apologize to me. He'd probably also be asking her why she'd been so stupid as to carry on for the unnecessary four hours. I was curious to know the reason too, and was hoping it wasn't something that could make her hard to get on with in the future. I knew she wasn't stupid - I knew from the classes we shared that she was actually an extremely smart girl - but maybe she had a terrible pride, or stubbornness, or something else that'd make my life difficult in the future. Unable to articulate the out-of-reach lesson(s), I thought about the one insight I had identified: I should find my limits. At the Williams' table we'd been discussing the cost to Julia of her finding her limits. It'd been an unspoken and accepted assumption that people need to find their limits, but I knew I hadn't done hardly anything to find my own since I started merging. I'd tested a few things shortly after the first merge, but since then I'd just cruised along with whatever abilities showed up. The single exception to this is that I'd put quite a lot of effort into developing multi-mind thinking systems, but that was about the only proactive steps I'd taken. Although I'd wondered about my physical fitness from time to time, I'd never done anything to test its limits, and I was starting to suspect that it was unusual. When I was with Julia tonight, I felt that I could have kept going for as long as necessary. A few more hours would've been no problem for me. I would've gotten too hungry after several more hours, but it felt to me that hunger would've been the only real constraint. With Robert bringing me snacks (haha), I felt I could've carried on almost indefinitely, just so long as I still felt sexual attraction for Julia, which wouldn't have been a problem. I couldn't test my sexual limits now, as my sole research assistant wasn't going to be willing to participate in that test anytime soon; or ever, if she'd learned what was best for her. I could go for a run in the morning though, as a simple and easy test. It'd be interesting to see what I could learn from that. It was obvious to me that my sexual performance was directly attributable to the incredibly useful go-soft command. Go-softs obviously wouldn't enhance my running performance, but I still expected my limits to have improved in that area because I knew from my soccer games that my fitness level seemed to have improved shortly after each of my two merges. I had no idea why though. I tried to guess what my running test would show, but I soon gave up on guessing. Tomorrow would tell. I set my internal alarm clock for 5:30am and ordered myself to fall asleep. It's not in the same league as the go-soft superhero ability, but Instant Sleep is useful when it's already late and my mind is too busy to let me fall asleep easily. ------- Chapter 22: Long Running Tuesday, April 5, 2005 I woke at 5:30 feeling surprisingly rested. I'd thought I might be too tired to run after so much sex and so little sleep, but I felt fine. I quickly changed, wrote a "Gone Running" note on a sticky, stuck it on the outside of my bedroom door, and headed out. I did some warm-ups because my soccer coach makes a big issue about them, then started the course I had planned. Roughly a mile, I guessed, in a loop that ended back at home. It had some small inclines to test myself on, and I could run it the other way around for some variety. The first loop I used mostly as a warm up. The sling quickly became a nuisance so I tried jogging with my arm out of it, which worked much better. When I was warmed up, I stopped facing a level stretch of the street, got into position for a sprint start, and then took off as fast as I could. I didn't have a stopwatch or an accurate measure of distance, but I was hopefully expecting a substantial change, so eyeballing it should be good enough. Both my eyeballs agreed that my sprint had been nothing special. I thought I'd run well, but not exceptionally so. There were bound to be plenty of guys at school who could've beaten me. I tried sprints under a variety of conditions: uphill, downhill, and flat. Short, medium and long sprint distances. My impressions were the same: I was good, but certainly not great. I was quite disappointed that there hadn't been any dramatic improvement. I hadn't expected the same sort of improvement that I seemed capable of in lovemaking, compared with what I vaguely understood was sexually normal for guys, based mostly on TV sitcom jokes. My sexual ability was because of go-softs and there wasn't any equivalent ability for running. Go-soft was the conscious control of a normally subconsciously controlled body part, and running didn't offer anything like that. Oh well, if sprinting wasn't on the cards, I'd try some long-distance running, even though there were no subconsciously controlled body parts in that either. I had to do something to kill the time until breakfast, so it might as well be running the loop. Maybe something more useful would occur to me while I was out here. I got into a rhythm and just jogged around the loop without pushing it or difficulty. After a couple of loops that were no strain at all, I thought that I should increase my speed. After another loop that didn't fatigue me, I increased it again. There were a couple of small uphill sections during which I started feeling a little tired, but that feeling disappeared shortly after cresting the hills. Otherwise I felt no tiredness, so I sped up again. The uphill fatigue got worse and took longer to fade away after the hill. I'd been trying to maintain a fixed speed, but I began suspecting I might do better if I maintained a fixed effort by slowing on the uphill sections. I increased my basic pace yet again, trying to maintain that exact effort on the hills. I completed another loop with no sign of tiredness, so I sped up again. I was now going quite a lot faster than I'd expected to be able to maintain for several miles, and I seemed to be maintaining it just fine. Another jogger came in from a side street to join me. I was interested that he had to speed up to match me. We jogged along, talking ("I haven't seen you out here before", "No, it's my first time"; that sort of thing). I noticed that he was panting while he was talking, and that I was not. I didn't know how far he'd already come, but surely I'd come far enough by now that I should be breathing harder. Soon he said, "Too fast for me," and slowed up to let me pull away. #2: After another three loops, including another speed increase, I started experiencing difficulty maintaining my pace. I forced myself to maintain it, but I got increasingly tired so I dropped down to a slow jog to recover. When I no longer felt any fatigue, I sped back up to a pace that felt just under the previous attempt. I started feeling a bit of fatigue, so I dropped back half a notch, and that felt comfortable. I ran several loops at that level of effort, and didn't seem to get tired, but if I sped up just a little, I could feel the fatigue start to accumulate. I dropped back to the fastest, non-fatiguing pace, and I kept running loops. I kept waiting for my body to run out of endurance but it didn't happen. It seemed that I could run at this effort level forever. For the distance I was covering, I was running FAST. Not super-fast; maybe 60 to 65% of my sprinting speed. I had the impression that my sprinting speed wasn't anything special, but maintaining 60% of it for a long time was starting to look very special indeed. I realized this was how I felt during sex (2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours; no problem!). I couldn't see how the two exercises could be related, but I seemed to have abnormal endurance at both of them. Another runner joined me. A very fit looking guy who seemed determined to stay with me. He recognized it when we started repeating my loop, and he gasped, "You running this circuit?" "Yeah." "How many?" "I don't know, I don't count. I'm just running for fun." "How many already?" "I'm not sure." "Guess." "Maybe fifteen or twenty, I don't know." "Today?" "Yes." "This pace?" "Yeah, mostly." "{Groan}." He dropped back after that. I ran until I was my normal wakeup time, finishing with a warming-down jog and walk back home. I let myself in and walked down the hall to the shower. I didn't feel strained at all, which made it a very interesting morning. It looked like "finding my limits" had to be treated more seriously than before, especially because I had no idea why I should be able to run without an apparent distance limit. ------- When the girls arrived for breakfast, Mom told me, "When I got home yesterday, Carol told me off for being hard on you yesterday morning. She said you were 'a wonderful human being who definitely wasn't mistreating Julia'. It's not often Carol feels strongly enough about something to tell me off. She told me about your staying to reassure her rather than going to Julia's. I'm very pleased that reassuring Carol was that important to you." "What I did was nothing much, just a little reassurance like you said. What Carol did was FAR better! She put a considerable amount of thought into convincing me about something important to me. It was entirely for my benefit; not hers. I was VERY impressed by her intelligence and caring. And she also volunteered to tell you off too, for which she deserves great praise, haha. I've always thought Carol was a lovely person, but yesterday she jumped way up in my opinion and blew me away with how nice she is." I'd been looking at Mom while I was talking, but I looked at Carol now. She was bright red and looking down, but I could see that she was smiling. Then I remembered that she had self-esteem problems because of the asshole that'd rejected her, so I stood up from my only-just-started breakfast - which is not the sort of sacrifice I make lightly - and walked around to the other side of the table where Carol sits. I put my one and a half useful arms around her, as best I could while she was sitting, and said, "Thank you very much for being such an incredible sister and wonderful person. I am very lucky to have your friendship." Carol burst into tears. Happy tears though. I'm learning: a few days ago tears from a female would've made me a helpless wreck, but now I can even categorize them! She leaped to her feet and ran crying to her room. It looked otherwise, but I thought I'd done good. Mom asked me, "That was a bit over the top, wasn't it?" "No it wasn't. I never realized how much Carol cared for me until yesterday. She tried very hard and very well to help me. She was fantastic. I couldn't ask for a better sister." I realized I might have insulted Donna, and gave her a quick look, but she seemed very happy so I left it alone. Mom said, "Well Carol spent yesterday afternoon telling me how nice you are, and you spend this morning telling me how nice she is. I must say it is great to see you two get on so well these days." "The pleasure is mine." Mom continued, "The other thing Carol couldn't stop talking about was having a sleepover with Julia." "Yes, Julia's very happy for Carol to visit and even suggested the sleepover, which I thought was pretty cool of her. It won't be for a few days though because Julia's very sore and will probably miss a day or two of..." About this time I realized that my mouth had just created a BIG problem for me. The temperature of the room plummeted as Mom's face turned to gray stone, glaring RIGHT at me, "She's sore AGAIN! She's going to miss school! And after I warned you last time. I can't believe that a son of mine..." Mom was getting REALLY upset, so I had to act or God knows what sort of punishment she might inflict on me! "MOM! STOP! You have to STOP. It's not like it sounds. Call Vanessa or Prof. Call them now! They're okay with it, they REALLY are." Not wanting to wait, I reached for the handset, but Mom GRABBED it from my hand and dialed Julia's number herself. I was surprised she knew it, but now wasn't the time to ask about that. Mom was madder than I think I've ever seen before. She was SERIOUSLY pissed! "Hello Vanessa, my son just told me that he beat up your daughter AGAIN last night and I've called to ... Sorry, what was that? ... It may well have been Julia's fault but that doesn't excuse him from ... What do you mean he had no choice? ... Prof wants to talk with me, well okay..." During the rest of the conversation Mom was mostly silent, just an occasional "Okay" or the like. Dad was looking at me with his eyebrows raised. I was curious too, about: (a) whether I would live, and (b) would resuming eating my breakfast inflame Mom. After a couple of minutes, Mom said, "Okay, bye." Mom turned to Dad and I, saying, "Prof said, there wasn't time to explain properly, but they know exactly what happened, exactly why, and they would've been disappointed in Mark if he'd done any different. As it is they're very proud of him. Then he said that if we didn't want Mark anymore, he'd be over in a flash to adopt him, although that'd mean he could no longer marry Julia which would disappoint Julia and Vanessa something fierce. Then he told me to 'Listen to my son because he knew what he was doing.' If I didn't know that family I'd think they were all insane. How can they allow their daughter to get so badly treated that she's going to miss school?" Mom had intended it as a rhetorical question, but I knew the answer would work well so I replied, "If I had refused to do something she had every right to insist I do, then I would've been robbing her of the learning necessary to make better decisions in the future." Mom hadn't tracked that, "Huh?" "Her body, her choice, her consequences, her right. The Williamses are very big on personal responsibility. This was Julia's responsibility. She got a lesson by her own choice, and she'll learn." "Well I don't know what to think. If anyone did that to one of my girls, I'd kill them." "In that case you don't understand what I did. The Williamses don't want to kill me do they?" "You hurt Julia, badly." "No I didn't, Mom. Julia hurt Julia. It's all about personal responsibility. Prof told me in the car on the way back here that he'll make sure Julia apologizes to me for hurting me." "SHE has to apologize to YOU?" "Yes, she has to take responsibility for hurting me." "How did she hurt you?" "By making me help her hurt herself." Mom gave herself a shake. "Okay, I don't understand this. To my mind you hurt her, but the Williamses and you seem confident that what happened was okay." "It wasn't 'okay'; it was right. Talk with Prof, he's good at explaining things like this." Mom gave up. "I think I'll go check on Carol." After she left, and I was safely back in my seat eating my breakfast, Dad observed, "It's not often I see your mother out of her depth." "That's how you learn to swim." Dad looked at me quite strangely, and before he could say anything, I thought a lightening of the mood was in order, "Dad, I've gone from never having a girlfriend to going out with a beautiful 16-year old girl who worships the ground I walk on. I've been out of my depth continuously since Friday night. I am now VERY familiar with 'sink or swim'." Dad chuckled and all was well. Donna spoke up, "Can I ask about something normal?" #3: Dad, "Sure, pumpkin." "Mark, you had a sign on your door saying you'd gone running. When you go again can I come with you please?" "That'd be great. What sort of running do you want to do?" "How do you mean?" "Like sprints, long distance, hills, cross-country, or what?" "I just like running. I'd like to go running with you because we don't goof around so much anymore." "We don't?" "No, you goof around with Julia all the time now." "In that case I'm making a mistake. I'll find time to goof off with you. And we can definitely go running together. When do you want to go?" "Whenever you do." "Let's go tomorrow morning then?" Donna smiled happily. "I'm pretty fast though, you might have trouble keeping up." Donna laughingly told me, "Now you're being silly. No one can beat me at running." She's not too far wrong. She wins running races; in her age group of course, as she's only twelve. And my memories of the times we've run anywhere ("Race you to the store!") are always of her getting the first ice cream. This could be interesting. "Okay, see you at 5:30 tomorrow morning." "{Gulp}, 5:30?" "Let's make it 6 then?" "No, we'll do it at your time." "I don't have 'a time'. I've only been out running once, just this morning. We can go any time. The idea is to have fun and 5:30 is obviously not fun for you, so we'll make it 6. No problem; we're just goofing off together." "You've only been running once and you think you can run faster than me. You ARE silly." I took that as confirmation of 6am. I had a feeling I wasn't going to be the one feeling silly at 7am. Mom and Carol had returned near the end of Donna and my conversation. As Carol was sitting down I said, "How are you, beautiful, okay now?" Carol looked at Mom and said, "See?" I looked at Mom to explain the puzzle that was a girl's thoughts. Mom explained, "Carol likes the way you are so nice to her, and I see you are. It is very nice to see." "It's very easy to be nice to Carol, she is..." Mom held her hand up. "If you start complimenting Carol again, she's going to burst into tears again and miss her breakfast. The car must be nearly here as it is." I thought it probably was a good idea to lighten the mood, so, "In the last week or so, I've noticed that girls do a lot of bursting. I'm going to have to start carrying around some handkerchiefs just like Prof said. And tomorrow morning Donna is going to burst a gut trying to keep up with me." "Am not, you goof." "Will too, goofball." The car arrived a couple of minutes later, and there was the usual mini-chaos. Donna was first out the door as always, and into the front seat of the car. I think she prefers front seats because they arrive at the destinations a second or two before the back ones. I followed Donna out but Carol was delayed by Mom giving her some snack bars as she'd missed most of her breakfast. I threw my bag into the car. Without thought it just seemed right to wait and hold the car door open for Carol, as a gentleman should. She smiled at me as she entered and sat, saying, "To what do I owe this honor?" I was closing the door, so held my answer until I had gotten in the other side. "Because I have realized, especially after yesterday, that I have not been appreciating you enough." "You appreciate me all the time." "Not enough." For a second I thought she might have another burst, but she held it back. She did reach over and put her hand on top of the back of mine. I turned mine over, and we held hands all the way to school. It was nice. Several times on the way to school Donna turned around to talk with us. She saw our hands and seemed perfectly fine about it. ------- Julia was not at school. I went to the office and got her class schedule for the next two days. In the classes I shared with her, I made sure I made good notes; much fuller than I normally do these days as my memory seems quite a lot better than it used to be. For the other classes, I made sure I was in them when they started, announced I was Julia Williams' boyfriend - which still gave me a buzz to say - that she was off school today, and asked for someone to makes notes and collect material for me to pass on to her. The school had created a large mailbox for me by the office, for the next year's teachers to use as I hardly ever went to their classes. I asked whoever had volunteered to take notes for Julia to drop the notes in my mailbox. These announcements meant I was late to my classes, but my teachers cut me a LOT of slack these days. This was the first time I'd used my status in the school for other than my direct academic benefit, and I enjoyed doing so for Julia. At lunchtime I borrowed a classmate's cellphone to call Julia. She apologized to me for ruining the evening. We had a little "No you didn't"; "Yes I did" argument about that (you know how they go). Julia also said that she'd been doing lots of thinking - "I might as well think, I can't move" - and that she had lots to talk with me about. She was happy and we were fine. I told her I was getting her notes. We kept the conversation short (I did mention that it was LUNCH time, didn't I?) I had PE after lunch. I approached the coach and told him that I wanted to run laps of the track all period, and asked to borrow a stopwatch. It was a somewhat unusual request, but I was going to get enough exercise and my cast made it difficult for him to know what to do with me, so he easily consented. After some trial and error, I found my optimal running rate - the fastest speed at which I seemed not to get tired - and I just ran at it. On the flat track I was capable of sitting at the right speed and getting lap times that were very consistent. Every now and then I'd increase my speed a smidgen to check that I started feeling fatigue. I always did, whereupon I'd slow down two smidgens until it drained away, then I'd increase to my optimal rate again. By the end of the period, there'd been no variation whatsoever in my optimal speed, or any sign of me running out of endurance. I considered continuing to run until the end of the next period. Skipping classes was something I could easily do because my 10th grade teacher would assume I was at an 11th grade class, but I wanted to get notes for Julia, plus there really was no point. All my lap times were the same, so there was little point in doing more. The only reason I could think of for continuing was the idea I'd had that maybe I'd hit some sort of distance limit and would either start experiencing normal fatigue then, or maybe suddenly feel a huge amount of fatigue. Neither of those possibilities seemed likely though, as my "Infinite Endurance" felt too consistent. If I did hit a limit, the six hours of sex I'd had with Julia implied it'd take much longer to show up than one more period of running, and I didn't want to miss so many classes. At the end of period I returned the stopwatch to the coach. He asked me how many laps I done and I told him I hadn't counted, which was true. The only thing I'd been interested in was the lap time and track circumference. It seemed that everything else was pure, linear extrapolation. I don't know how, or why, or anything else really, but it appeared that I could run at my optimal speed forever, other than stopping for the essentials of food, sleep and sex. My optimal speed was the equivalent of 100 meters per 16.15 seconds. I knew that was a terrible 100m sprint time, but I wasn't sprinting. My technique - if you can call something that never varied a "technique" - would pay dividends in the longer races; the longer the better. I didn't know what marathon running times were, but Donna would. When we left school at the end of the day, I again held the car door for Carol. She'd obviously liked it, so I was going to do it all the time from now on. She held my hand again, which was still nice. At home I immediately called Julia. She apologized again, but neither of us made an issue about it. She also repeated that she'd been doing lots of thinking and was looking forward to talking to me about her thoughts. She'd spent some time in the hot tub, and to her amusement, her brothers had gotten together and booked a home-visit massage therapist for 4:15; "A real one," Julia hastened to emphasize. She was looking forward to that. Lastly, her Mom had called her earlier to suggest that my Wednesday night dinner at their house be widened to include inviting my whole family. The original purpose of letting me meet the Williams family was redundant now, so why didn't our families get to know each other? I thought it was a good idea, and said I'd let Mom know. I decided that it might be better to keep my running rate quiet rather than asking Donna for the world record time, so I went online and looked up the records for 5k, 10k and marathon distances, and then calculated my times assuming a linear extrapolation of my optimal speed: 5k: World record 13.5 min. Me 13.5 min. 10k: World record 28 min. Me 27 min. Marathon: World record 2h:05m. Me 1h:54m. Assuming my linear extrapolation applied: wow, Wow and WOW. Especially for marathons; I was the fastest marathon runner in the world by eleven minutes! I knew how multiple minds made me better at schoolwork, and I knew how go-softs extended my sexual performance by giving me conscious control over a normally subconsciously controlled body part, but I didn't understand how I could run the world's fastest marathon. How on Earth can having four minds help a marathon at all, let alone that much? Donna was in for a BIG surprise tomorrow morning. I'd never wanted to run in races before, running away from bullies being the extent of my interest in that sport, but suddenly I was eager to run a marathon to prove I could do it in a world record. It'd only take two hours, so why not? Surely I could spare two hours? Even better, I wouldn't even be tired at the end of it. #1: I was itching to bike to a nearby athletic field and run around its track for two hours, but the risk of someone seeing my performance was too high. I didn't want the attention being observed running a world-record marathon could cause. What I really needed was a 26-mile road run, so no one would see more than a tiny segment of it. Or I could use my bike's odometer to measure out a bigger loop, say 5 miles, and then run around it the requisite number of times. It was mostly silly of me, but for some reason I really wanted to beat the world record, as if it made any difference whether I ran a 2h:04m or a 2h:06m marathon, or even a 2h:30m one because no way could a normal Mark Anderson run times anywhere near those. I decided to shelve the marathon idea until later. I had built up some nervous energy that wanted physical expression, so I thought I'd make up with Donna by asking if she wanted to goof around outside doing something. I wandered down to the girls' room, knocked and was granted permission to enter. When I saw Carol studying as usual, and I remembered the Wednesday dinner so I said, "Carol, sweetie, I've been invited to have dinner with the Williams family tomorrow night, but they're now suggesting all of us come rather than just me. We need to check with Mom first, but I expect we'll be going there tomorrow night for dinner. So you'll be able to visit with Julia somewhat. Not a full girly night, but a start. And when you're there you can see if you can pick a night to stay over that's good for you, her and the two moms." Carol leaped out of her seat and into my arms and gave me a big hug. "Thank you, thank you. You are so nice." "I didn't do anything, I just passed Julia's mom's invitation on." "You did much more than that, and you know it. You're so helpful." "No, you're so helpful." "No you are." "No you are." Donna spoke up, "You two are so cute. I hope you'll hug me like that when I'm pretty, Mark." Without doubt I have a lot to learn about girls, but I immediately knew what to do about Donna's comment. I let go of Carol, saying, "Excuse me, Carol." -- I walked over to Donna, who was sitting on her bed reading a "Runner's World" magazine, and said, "Please stand, Donna" offering her my hand to make it easier for her. "Why?" "Why not stand and see?" She did, and I immediately put my arms around her and did as good job of hugging her as I could. "What are you doing?" "You said I was allowed to hug you when you were pretty. You're pretty now, so I'm hugging you." "I'm not pretty." But her arms went around me, which was nice. "You must be, I'm hugging you." "You're being silly." Even I have to admit that it was a silly statement, so I regrouped and tried again, "Have you heard that lots of girls are chasing me at school?" [They still are, by the way, I just haven't bothered continuing to mention it; they've just become a background nuisance, for the few seconds it takes for me to tell them "No thanks; I'm VERY taken." I'm getting better at rejections.] "Yes. I've heard girls talking about how dreamy you are." That was nice for my ego, but I got on with the convincing, "So I could have my choice for girlfriend out of lots and lots of girls, yes?" Nod. "So, of course, I would choose a very, very pretty one, wouldn't I?" Nod. "And you agree that Julia is very pretty don't you?" Nod. "So I am very good at picking pretty girls aren't I?" "Yes." "Now you know I think Carol is very pretty too?" "Carol's beautiful." "Yes she is, very beautiful. And you've heard me say that before, haven't you?" "Yes." "So that makes me an expert on pretty girls. I know how to recognize pretty girls, and I know that you are pretty, so I'm giving you a hug because you said I could." "You're so nice." "I am ALWAYS nice to pretty girls. But I should apologize to this pretty girl. I didn't know you wanted me to hug you, and I am sorry that I did not do so before. From now on I will hug you much more often, and you can hug me whenever you want. Okay?" "Are you sure?" "I certainly am!" "Even though I don't have any breasts?" I nearly laughed at the unexpectedness of that. I managed to hold my laughter, to say, "I like hugging all pretty girls, regardless of how big their breasts are. Carol has big breasts and I like hugging her. Julia has very small breasts and I like hugging her. Julia's breasts are so small that yours are only a little bit smaller than hers, almost the same size really, so there's no reason at all why I wouldn't want to hug you. And you know what?" "What." "Now that I am hugging you, I find that I like it. I don't care whether you have breasts or not yet. I like hugging you so I am going to keep doing it. So there!" "{Giggle}. Really?" "Really, truly. If I can catch you that is. Normally you're moving too fast to catch for a hug. But if I can catch you, I'm definitely going to hug you. You have been warned, so watch out!" "{Giggle}. Thank you. Okay, I'm feeling better now." Donna let go and stepped back. "Actually, I came in here to talk with you. I told Carol about the dinner first because I was then going to ask you if you wanted to go outside and goof around. So do you want to?" "Really?" "Really, truly. Of course I am perfectly happy to go back to hugging you." "NO! Let's go play basketball. I've been practicing." Zoom; she was out the door. I smiled. It's nice to get something like that right. I followed after Donna. As I was walking through the doorway, I looked back at Carol. Carol smiled at me, and said, "I love you." I was through her bedroom doorway and out of sight before she'd finished, too late for me to respond. But I floated very happily out of the house, to goof off with a similarly happy Donna. We spent quite a while goofing off, until Mom called us in for dinner. ^ At dinner I told Mom about Vanessa's invitation to all of us, and Mom liked the idea. I had guessed she would, if only to have a face-to-face talk with Prof and Vanessa about why it was okay for me to beat up their daughter. Mom later phoned our acceptance through. I heard her say, "We'll talk about it tomorrow", and I had no doubt what "it" was. I wasn't in a studying mood, so somewhat unusually for me, I went to watch some TV. Mom, Dad and Donna were there; Carol was studying. At one stage Donna had gotten up (go to the toilet or some such), and on her return she walked near me. I called out "Look! A pretty girl." Grabbed her, and pulled her into my lap with my arms around her in a hug. Any sort of physical tomfoolery like this between Donna and anyone else usually resulted in a wrestling match, but this time she just snuggled in. She permitted me to hug her for about five minutes before she had to get up and move around again. That's a very long time for Donna to stay still. Mom's eyebrow had gone up, so I knew I'd be questioned about it at an opportune time. It didn't worry me, as I was quite proud of myself. I got bored with TV, so I got a fiction book out of my room and read it in the living room while the others watched the idiot box. Later in the evening Mom got her chance to privately ask me where the hug had come from. "Donna was feeling left out after school because she wasn't getting any hugs, and she thought it was because she wasn't pretty. I assured her that she was pretty, and that the only reason I hadn't hugged her is because I didn't know she wanted to be. I told her I liked hugging pretty girls, so she'd better watch out because if I could catch her I was going to grab her and hug her. Then she wanted to play basketball, so I knew she was feeling better. The hug you saw was just my keeping her happy." "You love your sisters, don't you?" "I love them heaps, Mom. I'm having such a good time with them, and I can see they are with me too. And it just keeps getting better. Yesterday Carol was wonderful to me, for no other reason than she cared for me. Today I helped Donna feel better about herself, and it felt so good to me. Tomorrow morning Donna and I are going running together just because she wanted to be with me. That's a nice feeling." "You're becoming a remarkably nice young man. It's a pleasure seeing you develop so well. Do you know most parents dread their children becoming teenagers, but ours are a joy to be around." "So you're not going to adopt me out to the Williamses then?" I'd intended it as a joke, but the reminder was probably not the smartest move. Mom frowned, and said, "I still have a problem understanding how your actions could be anything other than terrible, but everyone else seems proud of you so I'm forced to suspend judgment until I can learn more. It's also very hard for me to imagine how someone who treats his sisters so lovingly could mistreat Julia. I look forward to talking to Vanessa and Prof about it tomorrow evening." I was suddenly reminded that I hadn't delivered Julia's class work to her. "Darn! I forgot to deliver Julia's notes to her." I'd forgotten because I'd spent so long goofing off with Donna; not that I begrudged that. -- Mom and Dad looked at me, so I explained further. "I got notes from all her classes today, but I forgot to take them around. They're still in my room." Mom said, "It's too late for her to do anything with them tonight. I'll drop them in tomorrow morning." Dad said, "Let me, it's not so far out of my way." Mom answered, "It's okay, I'll do it." Dad was about to protest again, when I interrupted, "Dad, Mom wants some one-on-one time with Julia, to check up on me." Mom laughed, "Well spotted." "It wasn't hard. I always assume that whenever any two females I know get together, it's to check up on me. You know how egotistical I am." Dad and Mom laughed. Dad said, "Seeing how well you're getting along with your sisters, getting Julia to eat out of your hands, and now seeing through Fely, I think I'm going to have to come to you for advice on females from now on, Mark." I burst out laughing at that. Dad is, and always has been, very popular with females. He's quiet about parenting issues, but he's very lively everywhere else, including in social settings among a group of women. Plus he's married now, so there's no reason for him to need advice about women. "I'll just go call Julia, to let her know you'll be bringing her notes around in the morning, Mom." Mom said, "Warning her, you mean." "No Mom. That would imply I'm feeling guilty, which I'm not. Why should she need warning that you're going to be asking questions about something everybody but you praise me for? -- "I'm looking forward to you getting past this, so you can stop worrying about it. I like it better when you're proud of me, rather than thinking poorly of me. And I ESPECIALLY don't like that you think I'm a bully. I was calling Julia to apologize for not bringing her notes around. She knew I was collecting them so I'm calling to reassure her that I haven't forgotten her." "Oh, sorry." "No apology needed; you're just being a concerned Mom. That's your job and you do it well. Perhaps just a little too much of it in this case though." As I was leaving the room, I heard Dad tell Mom, "Can you believe that Friday was his first date, and he didn't have a clue that he had to call the girl Saturday morning. And now it's only Tuesday and he knows exactly what he is doing and why. That boy's a fast learner!" Mom said, "Yeah. He's learning fast enough to catch me making mistakes too. He's doing very well." ^ I had a nice talk with Julia. She was happy and looking forward to the dinner party. She'd enjoyed her massage but was still sore and likely wouldn't be going to school tomorrow. She was dismissive about the physical soreness. The impression I got from her was: "Lesson learned; already moved on." I explained that the reason I hadn't brought her notes around was so that I could spend some quality time with Donna. That Donna had been worried about being pretty, and I'd also been neglecting her recently. "Was that okay?" "It's one of the many reasons I love you." On that nice note, the call was ended, as our family's 15-minute phone limit is taken seriously. I hadn't done much study this evening, so I did a bit before bed, setting my head to go off at five minutes before 6am. I've always been able to wake up at whatever time I want, so that's not anything new as the result of my merges. ------- Chapter 23: Family Dinner at the Williams' Wednesday, April 6, 2005 I was outside my sisters' bedroom door at 6am, when a bleary-eyed Donna came out. She'd be firing on all cylinders in a few more seconds. We headed outside. Once we were on the sidewalk, I said, "First point of business. No pretty girls have hugged me today, and I need one to before I can run properly." And I gave her a quick hug. I could see she really wasn't in the mood, but that was okay, they're there for when she is. She said, "You're just trying to make me go easy on you." "Not true, I just wanted a hug, but let's stretch while we talk." We started stretching while I asked, "Where do you want to run?" Donna said, "I don't mind, go wherever you want. I'll just run with you." "But what if I run faster?" "Ha! Like that's gonna happen." #1: #3: "The main reason I'm running today is to spend time with you. Let's not go so fast that we can't talk. I haven't had much chance to talk with you recently, and would like to catch up with what you're doing." I set off at a slow pace and Donna fell in beside me. We chatted away about such things as: She was looking forward to her first karate lesson on Thursday, the same day as my first Aikido class. Not quite the same time, and not quite at the same place, so Mom's taxi service was going to be busy. Which reminded me to thank Donna for bringing Aikido to my attention. Considering myself an expert on cross-gender relationships now (sure!), I asked her if her concern about being pretty was because there was a boy she was interested in. Not really, it seemed. She'd just seen Carol and me get lovey-dovey and she'd felt left out. After a little more questioning, I thought she might have a little bit of prettiness concern, but it wasn't a big deal as she was into sports rather than boys, and enjoying her life as it was. There was quite a lot of chatting for the first several minutes. None of it was important in content, Donna being only twelve, but it was reasonably important to be a good Big Brother. After a while we tended to run mostly in silence, just enjoying each other's company. The pace I had picked was easily comfortable for both of us - of course it was for me! - and we could easily speak whenever stray thoughts occurred to either of us. When we got toward the end of our time Donna said, "You've run better than I thought you would." "Listen to me talking. I have no shortage of breath. I could run faster than this but I'm happy as it is. I've enjoyed this morning with you. We should do this more often. Are you tired?" "Not really, I could go faster." I offered, "Okay, maybe the next morning we could go a little faster. But I enjoy running WITH you, so I don't want to run AHEAD of you." Donna couldn't resist, "You just don't want to run BEHIND me." "That's true. I enjoy running WITH you." Donna suggested, "Shall we have a race to see who is faster?" Donna is very competitive, but I was feeling very mellow. "I know you enjoy races, but I like being nice with my sisters. I used to be mean to you by arguing and fighting a lot, but this is much nicer. I'll tell you what, I'll go faster, and you try to stay up, okay? As soon as you slow down, I'll slow down to your speed." I steadily increased my pace, with Donna matching me all the way up to my optimal speed. Poor Donna; she did her best to hang on, but we'd run a fair distance already and I was going way too fast for her. It didn't take long for her to start struggling, so I immediately slowed down. She protested, "No! {Pant}. Keep going! {Pant}." I ignored her request, stopping as she did, saying, "I'm not going to run off into the distance. The idea is we stay together." It took her a few seconds to catch her breath, and then Donna used it to rave about how good I was at running, marvel at my not being tired, wanting to know how I got so good, wanting to know how my times for various distances, etc. It was good to see her so happy. One of the most exciting aspects for Donna was, "You could win LOTS of races!" "I'm studying two grades, I've got a wonderful girlfriend, two wonderful sisters, one of whom told me last night that I was neglecting her. I play soccer - or will when my cast comes off - and I'm hoping that I'll like Aikido. I don't have the time for another organized sport. Especially because I've got TWO sisters! You've only got one so it's not so bad for you, but I've got two! Believe me, they're a LOT of work. I've got to keep chasing them so I can get hugs." "Haha. You're funny. But you could WIN! You're REALLY good! You've got to come to the club and be timed running properly over..." "I'm glad you're happy, but running competitively doesn't appeal to me. Remember Dad had to give up on the idea of me being a pro basketball player? Same thing for running. I like using my mind, not my body. -- "I tell you what though; I'm thinking about entering ONE real race, just to see how good I am. I'll make sure you can come watch me win, okay?" I'd had the thought while running with Donna, that if I entered a race I could pace myself ahead of the second best runner (i.e., the guy who would've won, if not for me being so freaky). That'd let me finish in first place, but not in some trouble-making, world-record time. It might be a bit complex if the other runners varied their pace much, as I'd prefer to hold mine constant, but I thought that in a long race there shouldn't be too much variation. If there was a sprint at the end, I could sprint too. Maybe not as fast as them, but I'd make sure I had a reasonable lead going into the finish. It seemed fairly straightforward and doable. How I performed in a real race, and my knowing roughly how much slower than optimal I'd run it, would be a pretty good test of my running ability. I didn't HAVE to run a world record; that was mostly ego. I just wanted to confirm that I could, which was still ego, but a less extreme version. "That'd be GREAT! What distance?" "A long way, preferably a marathon." "You can't run a marathon without months of training, but there's an Open Men's 10k coming soon. How about that?" Without sprinting at the end, my extrapolated time for that distance was one minute under the world record, so it'd do. I let Donna's comment about my training requirements for a marathon go past unchallenged, instead just saying, "That'd be fine." "I'll check at the club if registrations are still open." "Thanks. Are you rested enough to jog home?" ^ I let Donna have the first shower as my cast slows me down. After I washed, I headed to the breakfast table. Walking down the hallway toward the kitchen, I heard Donna say, " ... in a 10k Men's race we're hosting. Seeing as how I'm training him, I should have a bet on him to place. How about ten dollars?" I arrived in time to see Donna's poor attempt to keep her anticipation off her face. Her expression wasn't her real problem; Mom's expression was. Mom doesn't allow gambling, not even allowing Dad to have bets on the Superbowl. Occasionally there'll be a silly little fun bet in the family, but "fun" is the key word, and Mom draws the line at about a dime's worth of real money. Donna's greed taking her over Mom's line by a factor of hundred wasn't the smartest thing she's ever done. Dad said, "Just a fun, family bet you mean? Not really caring who wins or loses, right?" Donna agreed hopefully, "That's right." "Okay. I bet you ten dollars Mark will come third or better," Dad agreed evilly. "Umm. That's what I wanted to bet on. You..." "It doesn't matter; it's just a family bet." Dad had given me a wink as he said the last, so I said, "I'll bet you another ten dollars that I win, Donna." Poor Donna - and she was currently worrying about that becoming literally true - said in panic, "But I wanted to bet ON Mark! I'm training him, so I should be ON him." I said, "I don't need any training, so it doesn't matter which way you bet." Donna was frantically trying to think of a comeback, when Mom declared, "Shame on you for trying to trick money out of your own family, Donna! You know I don't allow bets." While Mom was telling her off, Donna hung her head. She spent a couple of seconds being sorry for herself: that it hadn't worked. In mid-rebuke, Donna suddenly lifted up her head and announced, "Okay, all bets are off. Sorry Mom." Then she got busy with her breakfast to make it harder for Dad or me to insist the bets were still alive. I copied her, also getting busy with my breakfast. I'm very hungry in the mornings. When Mom finished telling Donna off for gambling, Dad asked me, "Are you really so good at running that Donna thinks you'd place in an organized race?" Dad was surprised because I have zero history of running. I explained, "I think I'm even better than Donna thinks I am; I think I'll win rather than just place. My wanting to enter a race is just a one-time thing; just to check I'm as good as I think I am. I don't have the time or interest to take running seriously." "How'd you get good enough to impress Donna so quickly?" I shrugged, "It's a mystery to me too. Part of the reason I'm entering the race is to help me believe that I really am as good as I think I am." Donna didn't mind participating in this conversation, so she stopped eating to say, "He's AMAZINGLY good. He ran the last two or three miles at a 10k winning pace, without running out of wind or getting tired, and that was after nearly an hour of jogging! I can't extrapolate his 10k time from that, but it's gotta be something that puts him into the first three places..." She started talking about my running style, dropped in technical terms like VO2, made anatomical comments, and mentioned other things I had no idea about. I was surprised at how knowledgeable Donna was, but I guess she'd picked up quite a fair amount from her several years of club running. Dad asked her, "Do you really think he could place?" You can tell that Donna is NOT the smart one of our family, by her immediately hopeful answer, "Do you wanna bet?" She got rebuked by Mom again, much more sternly than last time. Donna would NOT be using that immoral three-lettered word for a while. Dad asked me, "How much training are you going to do?" "I'm not really that interested. I'd like to go out with Donna in the mornings whenever she wants. Otherwise just as the mood strikes me. Nothing planned." Dad obviously thought this was a bit casual, but he didn't make an issue out of it. He asked Donna, "Do you want to go running with Mark again?" "Yes, he was fun to run with. And kind: I kept wanting to race because I thought I'd win, but he just made sure we had fun. He could've beaten me easily." Mom couldn't resist. "You mean, if at the start of the run he'd asked you to bet ten dollars on who won, you would've bet on yourself?" "Um, yes." "You would've lost your ten dollars then, wouldn't you?" "No. If he'd offered ten, I'd have tried to talk him into twenty." After we laughed, and Mom had added the obligatory "Let that be a lesson to you"-type of comment to Donna, Dad continued his original theme with me, "So how often are you going to run in the mornings?" My answer was easy, "I'll run whenever Donna wants. She's the serious runner of the family and knows much more about it than I do." Donna was pleased that I deferred to her for the decision. "Do you want me to plan some training runs for you?" "Nope. I want to have more fun runs like this morning. I couldn't care less about training." [I have a bit of a thing about logic, so I don't say, "I could care less" like most people do. It's illogical, so I stick to the 'correct' version of "I COULDN'T care less," even if most people use the fractionally shorter version. I'll retain their wording when I'm quoting their speech, in the interests of making this document as accurate as possible. It's weird how expressions change like that. "Head over heels" is another example. It used to be "Heels over head", which makes perfect sense rather than the current version which means nothing. I'll stick to the current phrase for that expression herein, as it's so well established. That illogical versions of expressions can become the preferred form has me scratching my heels in puzzlement.] Donna clearly thought I was silly not to train properly, but she said, "How about Monday and Wednesday mornings for about an hour?" "Sounds perfect to me, sweetie. We'll do that." I'd recently started calling my sisters "Sweetie" sometimes. I'd never done it before, but it seems appropriate these days and I enjoy it. I finished my meal, paying even more attention to it than normal. One little thing that had been puzzling me was that after a run I was not as hungry as I expected. I normally eat a lot, as I believe I've mentioned, but the long run hadn't increased my appetite. It didn't make sense, scientifically speaking, as the energy stored in my body presumably had to be replaced. I couldn't argue with the fact that I wasn't hungrier than normal, but maybe it took a while to show up and I'd be hungrier by lunchtime. [As it turned out, no. Over the next day or two, my hunger was no more than it normally would have been.] When I was carrying my dish to the sink, I passed Carol's chair, so I transferred my dish into my right hand so I could give her shoulder a little squeeze on the way past. She sat up straighter, and even from the back I could tell she smiled. We were ready before the car, for a change. While we were waiting, I remembered to ask Mom whether I could get the driver to take me on to Julia's house after dropping Donna and Carol off here. She said she'd talk with the Principal about it. [The answer came back "Yes," Mom adding, "The Principal didn't have much choice, but you shouldn't abuse it and should be considerate toward the driver as none of this was his fault."] Mom reminded us, "We're going to the Williams' for dinner tonight, so make sure you're home in plenty of time." Mom also asked me to phone Julia to see whether she was going to be home shortly. I did, and Julia was. I relayed that answer to Mom, who immediately left to deliver Julia's notes to her, that not being the real reason for the visit. I kept chatting to Julia, and an important topic came up during our conversation, but I'd barely started talking about how Julia would be helping her mother with the dinner preparations in the afternoon when the school's car arrived. I quickly said to Julia, "I've got to go, the car's here. I always open the door for Carol. Bye." I raced to get ahead of Carol to open the door for her. She helped by walking very slowly. Carol clearly liked my attentions, which was very fine with me. In the car we held hands, as we do these days. [Later that evening, before dinner, Julia asked me to explain my "open the door for Carol" comment, which I did. Julia thought I was very nice. I got a hug for it.] ------- I was walking down a corridor, slightly late for my next class after delivering a note-taking request to one of Julia's, when I had another déjà vu. Déjà vu is weird anyway, but you should try it with four minds on either side of the link. [[Actually, you can't, as I've made that impossible now.]] I/we stopped walking, and just stood in the corridor(s). It was sort of chaotic, sort of not. With eight minds involved, and our knowing that time would run out very soon, there were thoughts firing back and forth as fast as we could. In one respect it was similar to how we normally talk internally, although there was more of it, but the most noticeable aspect of the process is how goddamn disjointed and difficult talking across the link is. Fortunately, this time the distortion was far less than it'd been in the movie theater and just before we'd suicided in the menswear store. [[I previously put some numbers on it. A "refreshing copy" (copying the minds from one w-dimension to the other) takes 0.1 seconds with one mind on each end, but the mental reaction time to exchange a thought is 0.15 seconds, making deliberate cross-dimensional communication impossible. With two minds on each end the refreshing interval is 0.19 seconds, giving intervals of 0.04 seconds to communicate within. With four minds on each end, copying time is about 0.35 seconds, giving 0.20 seconds to exchange thoughts. That's five times longer than with two minds, making it much easier to work with.]] Time was something we all knew was important, as the phenomenon only lasts what feels like twenty seconds. So we very quickly compared notes, and both groups had had very similar experiences: bathtub and poison suicides, both had wonderful families now, both had Julias, both were apparently geniuses, both good runners. The other Mark hadn't had a morning run with his Donna, so differences existed. We told him that a non-competitive run was fun. The previous paragraph makes it seem as if the topics were quickly raised and agreed on, but the disjointed communication made the actual process awkward. We could talk internally normally, as could the other Mark, but exchanging messages across the déjà vu link was often difficult. It wasn't like talking on a radio or telephone with a time delay, echo or static. None of those effects were occurring, as we always had crystal clear, immediate responses; it's more that communications across the w-dimension seemed to lose many of the messages, so a great deal of stop-start repetition was required. We knew it wasn't as simple as messages getting lost. Had that been the case we would NOT have risked our second suicide, in case our minds had become lost! We knew it was something else because sometimes the sender of the message would forget not just the last message he sent but the one before that too, or we'd receive a message that had little to do with the current topic. There was something else causing the communication problems other than simple dropped messages. It seemed to be with us, the Marks, rather than the transmission process itself. Making it harder for us to understand the problem was that when we'd déjà vu'd with two minds, the proportion of mix-up types had been very different from now. Back then there'd been almost no cases of a mind forgetting an earlier message, but that was the most common problem now. Despite these clues, we couldn't guess at an explanation. [We discussed it several times over the next days, and after later déjà vu's too, but failed to think of a plausible reason.] [[We failed because we had the wrong mental model for the process. We weren't communicating "across the w-dimension" at all, but with the copies of the other Mark's minds that 'were in our head' (that's inaccurate, as neither the local minds nor the copies were in our heads, minds being information rather than a lump of biology. Minds interact with, but are not inside, brains). The communication difficulties were caused by the arrival of the regular refreshes from the original minds. Because our minds and the copies of our minds were so similar, there were effectively two almost identical conversations going on in each w-dimension. Had they been totally identical, the refreshes would've just caused the apparent loss of some messages (those made during the copying time), but there were random variations between the dimensions. For example, if #1A and #2B 'spoke' at once, in one dimension #1A could give way to #2B, and in the other dimension, #2B might give way. Then a refresh could arrive, confusing us. It was very annoying.]] Both Marks had noticed increased control of subconscious functions. He'd discovered go-softs too, so I guess teenage boys are troubled by their erections throughout the Universe. Neither of us had a clue about why we could run so well. We both ate like pigs, but not much more after a big run. He'd discovered that he was reasonably good at weightlifting, by getting all his muscles to act in concert. Not a big improvement over normal, but noticeable. It didn't seem useful though, especially as weightlifting wasn't something we wanted to do. Someone suggested holding our breath underwater. Neither of us had tried that, but we agreed it sounded interesting and worth trying. We 'talked' as quickly as we could, expecting to lose the connection in about twenty seconds or so. But when that time was up the connection persisted. We weren't sure what to talk about. We strongly suspected that we'd never encounter these particular minds again, so surely this was a valuable opportunity not to be wasted. We agreed our life was great, and we had ABSOLUTELY no intention of committing suicide again, either out of depression - having a lover is making a HUGE difference to our happiness! - or to double the number of minds we had already. My side of the link said, #4: The other side of the link didn't get the joke, confirming that they had the sanest #4. We thought the Williams family were great, Julia was a beautiful girlfriend and worryingly intense and devoted to us, we loved Carol and Donna, we were great at soccer, and ... We were still trying to find a useful topic when the phenomenon cut out. #1: #3: #4: #2, #3: <{Groan}.> #1: [That's exactly one of the sorts of comments that we'd trained ourselves never to say to anyone else, as we saw that jokes like that often hurt the recipient. We could say it internally because we knew each other VERY well. #4 KNEW we were joking, and that he was a valued member of our head. He was 99% the same as the rest of us, and even his variation wasn't in conflict with our majority's personality.] #4: #1: #3: #2: #4: [[There's enough randomness involved in the slit wrists suicide method to result in quite a variation in the times of death. You try giving yourself two identical bloodletting slices with a razor blade, and I think you'll find they're not identical. Plus there are variations in the dying speed caused by the temperature of the water, how the Mark was sitting, how excited he was, and several other factors. In some dimensions their Marks simply died because they didn't have a déjà vu, or their and their partner's times of death were after their déjà vu's narrow window closed. In other dimensions, the just-merged surviving Mark died because his blood loss was too advanced. For this conversation to have occurred - more relevantly, for this autobiography to have been written - somewhere across the entire W-Dimension there had to be a pairing of Marks such that one Mark died from blood loss during the déjà vu period, and his déjà vu partner had enough blood left to abort his suicide. Given the randomness inherent in the suicide method, it's not surprising that at least four such pairings happened: two each in me and the Mark I just finished déjà vu'ing with.]] #2: #4: #1: #1: #2: #1: #3: #1: #3: #4: #1: #3: < ... If we merge again, that'd be 8 minds, 2 years over 64 is 1/32nd of a year. A bit more than 1.5 weeks between déjà vu's.> #1: #4: #1: #2, #3, #4: #1: #4: #1: #4: #2: The rest of the school day was just the usual. I collected all the notes for Julia, and we took the car home. ^ I called Julia when we got home from school, to make sure all was well with her. She was happy. At one point she laughingly said, "I know the real reason you're calling, and let me assure you that it will be very good." That confused me. I didn't have a "real reason" for calling her, other than just checking up on her and letting her know I cared. So I asked, "Real reason?" With a humorous tone, she said, "You're just calling to make sure dinner is going to be good. I know how important food is to you. It must be really scary to be relying on someone else to cook for you, haha." "Ah. You know me well. So now that we have uncovered the main reason for my call, tell me all about it. What are we having for dinner? What's the main course, what about dessert, I hope you've got a big enough plate for me... ?" "I'm telling you nothing. You'll just have to wait and see." Damn! I started worrying, but then realized that I could rely on Vanessa to look after me. I felt much better after that. Julia passed on a suggestion from her mom that we bring swimsuits with us so we could soak in the hot tub after dinner. I've never seen Julia in a swimsuit but I could imagine she'd look sexy, so I confirmed that it was an excellent idea. [[You can tell I'm getting more emotional about Julia. She's a very small, slim girl, with an even smaller figure. What she has is very nice, but my thinking she'd look sexy in a swimsuit was objectively an overstatement. It was great that I subjectively thought so though.]] I told her I had her notes from today, and that I'd bring them tonight. Which reminded me to ask how she got on with my mom this morning. Julia laughed, "It was quite funny. Your poor mom is quite confused. Remember I said I'd call her to fix her thinking you were treating me as a sex object?" "Yes. I'd forgotten about that." "I hadn't forgotten, but I hadn't had a chance to do so. Either you were over here, or I was sleeping, or she was at work. So when she came this morning I told her that the sex object problem wasn't a problem, and that you are a mature, intelligent gentleman who truly values me for who I am. Then I told her that it was perfectly correct for you to fuck me to within an inch of my life, leaving me helpless in bed for two days to recover. Your mom had some trouble reconciling those two statements, haha. -- "She knows that she shouldn't be angry with you because everyone - especially the 'victim' - keeps telling her that, but she doesn't really understand why. She's still not proud of you, which is a pity because she should be. Mom and Dad will talk with her tonight so that should help. They're both good at things like this. How's your dad handling it?" I was so used to Mom taking the lead on family matters that Julia's question took me by surprise. I answered, "I hadn't thought about that. Dad's very laid-back. Mom makes all the family decisions, including the discipline ones like this seems to be. Dad keeps track of what's happening but he always lets Mom run things. I don't think he's worried in this case. I just screwed you too much and you're still happy. I can't see him getting worked up over that. It'd be a different story if you were unhappy with me, but that's not the case." "I'll say! I'm in awe of you! -- "Your family's different from mine; my dad's the boss if there's a difference of opinion. That's unusual though. They usually know which one of them is best to decide something. What about your mom not being happy with you now? I'm disappointed I couldn't convince her this morning and we don't want her to have worries about you." "Let's just leave it to Prof for now. If anyone can explain it, he can." -- Because it was important to me and I'd been worrying about it, I added, "Does your mom know that I eat so much? That I need a bigger plate than anyone else?" I'd been trying to decide whether I needed to have a meal at home before going to the Williams'. Not only to avoid my going hungry, but to avoid embarrassing Vanessa too. Also so I wouldn't go hungry. "Carol told me about your big plate. I told Mom, and we bought you one the same day we got your robe." "Wow. You're seriously good at looking after me!" Julia's somewhat cryptic response was, "And that was before." "Before what?" "Before Monday when you gave me exactly what I demanded and fucked me ceaselessly for six hours. You do remember that, don't you?" #1: "I remember screwing someone. Was that you?" "For the first hundred orgasms it was. I've got no idea what you did after I passed out. I wouldn't be surprised if you'd screwed half the women in town." "I was going to but your mom had saved dinner for me and it would've been rude of me not to eat it. The other women will ... Hey, now that I think about it, it WAS on a big plate. I had other things on my mind and didn't notice. Thank you very much for looking after my stomach so well." Her response was even better, "Thank you for looking after my pussy so well." We continued in this manner for a while. It was nice joking around with her, especially with her willing to be so frank. Her family was open, but the Julia I'd observed at school never talked like this. Eventually she said that she should go check on some aspect of the dinner preparation, which I agreed was very important, so we hung up. I told the girls about taking swimsuits, and they both liked the idea of lazing around in a hot tub. Although, in practice, Donna would probably "laze around" for about two minutes and then try to swim laps. ^ When Mom got home, I helped her unload the car. Mom normally does the weekly grocery shopping on Wednesday evenings, and since half of the groceries are for me (not much of an exaggeration) I'm happy to help with the carrying. I certainly help with the consuming! I told Mom about the swimsuits and hot tub, and her reply was, "Good idea." Then I asked her, "How was your conversation with Julia this morning?" Mom laughed, "She's a MOST unusual girl! Confusing too. In one breath she was dismissive of the whole thing, saying something like, 'Don't worry about it, it was just some sore muscles that I caused myself, ' then a minute later she was saying, 'It was the most important event in my life.' I wish she'd make up her mind." #2: <"The most important event of Julia's life"? That's OTT, even for Julia.> ("OTT" is the acronym for "Over The Top", meaning "excessive".) #3: #4: Mom continued, "I'll say one thing though, she's certainly devoted to you. She's obviously a smart girl and mature for her age, but her dedication to you makes me a bit uncomfortable. You know that you could hurt her very badly, don't you?" "Yeah, I know. To be honest, her intensity scares me too, but I can't think of anything I can do about it. I talked to Dad about it on Saturday morning, and he said it's her choice how she feels about me. I can't control that. I just act the way I act, and it's her choice how she responds." "Just make sure you act properly!" "Somehow I knew you were going to say that. I am trying to, Mom. I've learned it can be quite a responsibility, sometimes not a pleasant one either." Mom asked, "What do you mean?" "The sex on Monday night. That was not pleasant. The first hour or two was, but after that, no. That's why Prof said he'd make sure she apologized to me, although that's all done now." "As I said before, 'most confusing'. I don't understand what happened, but I do understand that you're growing up faster than I expected. I have to accept that this sort of thing is going to happen more often, that you'll be making more of your own moral judgments." #4: "I'm just fifteen! I would've screwed up terribly without your guidance when I started dating Julia. I know you don't understand this ONE issue yet, but I'm sure there'll be thousands of times you stop me making major errors. Monday night wouldn't have happened, for example, if Andrew hadn't convinced me that I was selfish to refuse her. He was quite scathing toward me, and he was right. So I definitely need lots of help." "Yes, I was surprised when Julia told me that she'd called Andrew into the room to try to force you to have vigorous sex with her. And then I was astonished that he agreed with her and talked you into doing it..." #3: " ... I'd think that family was crazy if I didn't know better." We continued unpacking groceries for a while, then Mom added, "Remember when we were talking a few days ago when I described how important Vanessa had been in making your relationship with Julia happen, especially when Julia wanted to cancel on Friday afternoon?" "I sure do! She was INCREDIBLY important. And I've learned even more since then. Julia talks with her mother about our WHOLE relationship, and her mother could easily have stopped it but has encouraged it. I owe her heaps." Mom continued, "And do you remember that we agreed before your First Date that you'd buy Vanessa a gift to show your appreciation this Wednesday?" Mom didn't have to ask me whether I'd remembered; the horror was written on my face. Upon seeing it, Mom - somewhat meanly I thought - rubbed it in with, "Welcome to the world of taking responsibility for your actions." -- Seeing my anguish, Mom added, "Stop worrying about it. Vanessa doesn't expect one, so you won't be letting her down. I don't think you can do any wrong in her book anyway; she's almost as enthusiastic about your going out with her daughter as her daughter is, and that's saying something! Just remember to show your appreciation to her at some stage." "I definitely will." #1: #4: #1: I studied until it was time to get ready to leave. I'm a guy, so that means about two minutes before we departed. ^ When we got into Dad's car to leave, I held the car door open for Carol, who gave me a happy smile acknowledging it. When we were sitting, we naturally held hands. I was too busy responding to Carol's excited conversation about going to Julia's to think about our holding hands in the presence of our parents. A few seconds later, Carol squeezed my hand and said, "Because I love him." I turned around to see Mom looking back at us, with her eyebrows still raised (for some reason, of everyone on the planet, only mothers seem to communicate with eyebrows. They use them to great effect and in a multitude of different situations). I smiled at Mom, and said, "I've gotten into the habit of holding the car door open for Carol when we go to and from school, and she thanks me by holding my hand. It's nice." Mom beamed, "I'm amazed at how well you all get on these days. You know, I can't remember the last time any of you had an argument together. It's quite a while ago." I replied, "I can't imagine why I would ever want to argue with either of them again. I've discovered that they are both fantastic people. I enjoy their company very much." Carol said to Mom, "See! He's always so nice. He means it too." And Donna, who also wanted to express her positive feelings for me, but who has different priorities, added, "Yes, and he runs really well, is awesome at sports, and likes to goof off with me." We all chuckled, except for Donna, who never intended it as a joke. Mom said, "Well, I think you're all wonderful and I'm very proud of you." Carol and I squeezed each other's hand a couple of times. Then Donna spoke up, "That reminds me, Mark. I checked with the club. The 10k Men's Open is on the Saturday after next. It's attracted some very good runners; much better ones than I thought. Do you want me to get you a registration pack. You have to decide very soon because entries close in a few days." "Yes, that's great. Thanks very much, Donna." "Some of them will be VERY good runners?" "I don't care. I just want to test myself. I doesn't matter how many people beat me." #1: #3: ^ The Williams' house is much bigger and better than ours, so the Anderson females got all excited about being offered "The Grand Tour". The moms went kitchen-ward to drop various things off, then onward to explore. I got a very brief kiss and a "Catch you later" from the girl who'd previously assured me that I was the center of her universe. The girls rushed off to see upstairs. I chuckled to myself; I'd been here a few times now and hadn't seen even a third of the house, and it never would've occurred to me to want to. I guess females must think differently, haha. The five guys watched the females rush off. The expected number of us had wanted to join the Tour, so there were plenty of hands to grab the remaining stuff from the car - beer, wine, swimwear and towels - and take them inside. Swimwear was deposited in the hot tub room: a room that contained a family-sized hot tub in one corner, and a few exercise machines (treadmill, stationary bicycle, rowing machine and a small weight machine) on the other. It also had a TV mounted on a wall facing the exercise machines, as well as a stereo, a small fridge, and lots of towels, cubbyholes and hooks for clothes. It was a good setup, and I wished we had one of these at our place. We walked out the opposite door from that we'd entered and were now in what Prof called the "Guys' Room". A pool table sat in the first third, with the far end of the room having a bar, another stereo, a larger wall-mounted TV, with sofas to watch it from. We all pulled up a stool next to the bar, except for Prof who played bartender (beer for Dad, wine for the Williams men, and a pop for me). While I was at it, I wished we had one of these rooms at our place too. Maybe there was some merit in the women's idea of checking out a house the first moment they arrived. Robert saw me looking at the table, and said, "Do you want a game, Mark?" "I've never played before." "No problem, I'll show you." Robert spread some balls randomly around the table, then placed the white one, "It's called the cue ball." They showed me how to stand, hold "the cue stick," and shoot. I practiced just hitting the cue ball a few times, then he got me to aim to hit other balls with it, to try to sink them. It seemed pretty simple, and I'd seen the game in various TV shows or movies so the concept was familiar. Robert "racked" the balls and got me to break. We played one game for fun, ignoring most of the rules. He let me sink any ball I wanted, to let me get some practice. As I always do when I encounter something new, whether a mental or physical activity, I thought of ways to use my special abilities. For example, I put just one mind on moving my right arm when shooting. With that mind concentrating on that arm and nothing else, the action could be made extremely smooth and even. I also used my split-eyeball trick to leave one eye on the cue ball when shooting to make sure the cue hit it perfectly, while my other eye was lined up on the intended path of the cue ball. After playing a few shots I had one at a narrow angle to the side of the table, so the width of my body was a nuisance. I asked, "Am I allowed to shoot left-handed?" "Sure, if you think you can. It's surprisingly awkward though." I swapped hands, took a few practice swings to get the feel of it, and then I sunk the ball. Thereafter I used whatever hand was most convenient, to the considerable amusement and amazement of my spectators. After a couple of successful left-handed shots, Prof asked Dad, "He's ambidextrous?" Dad answered, "Yes, totally." The girls wandered through during our practice game, my sisters gushing about how nice the house was. I said, "The only rooms that really matter are Julia's bedroom and the kitchen." Julia laughed, and said, "Which is the most important?" "Hmmm. That's a very hard question. Can I think about it for a while and get back to you after dinner?" The girls continued their tour after I got ONE quick kiss from Julia! "Center of her universe" - phooey! I was getting the hang of the game and sinking most of my shots toward the end of the practice game, but that was with being allowed to shoot anything I wanted, and with Robert was just making long-odds shots for fun. As the last ball dropped, Dad suggested, "Show him how to spin the cue ball." Robert said, "That's a bit advanced for a beginner." -- Robert turned to me, "Wouldn't you want to play an ordinary game first?" "I don't mind either way." Dad said, "Show him. It won't take him long to pick it up." So Robert showed me how striking the cue ball in different places or angles can affect its behavior. For example, if you strike it above its center it tends to roll farther forward after hitting its target. You can also make it veer to the left, right or even backward after hitting its target. That way you can better position the cue ball for your next shot, which I thought was a clever idea. Robert scattered some balls around and I shot several times, trying to do different things with the cue ball. It was a pretty easy concept to understand, and easy to execute, so I didn't need much practice. When we were about ready to start, Dad said, "Ten dollars on Mark to win best of five against Robert." There was a second of shocked silence, then both brothers couldn't accept fast enough. Dad covered both bets. Looking at me he said, "Don't tell your mother, and half of this is yours if you win." Properly cautioned and motivated, we flipped for the break, Robert winning. Before he shot Prof asked, "Can I get in on that action?" Dad said "Sure, I'll take that." Prof said, "No, I want to bet ON Mark. Will my boys take my bet?" The Boys were more than little suspicious now. Andrew asked me, "Are you sure you've never played before?" "I swear. Never had one of these stick thingies in my hand ever before." I knew the correct term was "cue stick", but it made my point. Dad said, "This isn't a setup. To the best of my knowledge he's never played before. So what if he has? You're not scared of a 15-year old are you?" The Boys covered their father's bet. I lost the first game, and that was the last game of 8-ball that I ever lost. [To be strictly accurate, the last non-handicapped game.] The Boys were incredulous. I explained, "I pick up sports easily. Good genes I guess." Dad laughed at that. They asked their dad how come he knew to bet on me. Prof's answer was, "You guys must be deaf. Haven't you heard how good he is with his balls and putting things into holes?" Everyone else laughed at the joke and my embarrassment. To my delight Prof gave me half his winnings too. When I thanked him, he said, "No problem, use it to buy your own rubbers. I've a feeling that's going to be quite an expense." Everyone except me thought that was funny, as was my being embarrassed again. The mothers wandered in. No one volunteered to explain the laughter, and when it ceased Vanessa gave us a thirty-minute warning for dinner. The guys recharged their drinks and Andrew, obviously feeling brave, said to me, "Do you want another best of five against me, Mark?" Dad started opening his mouth, and both of The Boys said, "No" before Dad got the first word out. Prof laughed and said, "They're not that stupid." I won Andrew's challenge three nil. We headed to the dining room. We met everyone else there, and Robert said, "Julia, your boyfriend cleaned our clock at 8-ball, and he'd NEVER played before!" Julia said, "Darn! I just thought to bet on him. I suppose it's too late now?" Andrew agreed, "Yep. We already paid for that lesson." Prof laughed and winked at Julia, saying, "Julia, shame on you for missing a perfect opportunity. I'm worried that too much sex seems to be addling your brains. Maybe we should restrict that to school vacations only?" Julia knew what she thought of that, "Like hell! An addled brain is a price I'm more than happy to pay. Although I'm feeling silly for missing my chance to make some easy money from The Boys." Robert asked her, "You would've bet on Mark knowing he'd never played before?" "I can't believe I saw you teaching him and I didn't think of it. If you teach him any other games, let me know." "I wish I had a girlfriend with that much confidence in me." "It's easy, just screw her nonstop for six hours." I looked around, and Donna was out of earshot. Phew. She was over by the kitchen. Hmm, kitchen; I'm hungry. What's that smell, {sniff}, {sniff}. A big smile came to my face. I grabbed Julia and gave her a big kiss, "Darling! You remembered!" Robert looked an inquiry at her. Julia answered with, "We're having his favorite meal tonight." I joined in and we both recited, "Roast chicken dinner, with all the trimmings and lots of gravy." I gave her a big hug in appreciation. Julia added, "Carol told me, even before my first date with Mark, that he takes his food VERY seriously. And that the way to his heart is through his stomach. It was very good advice." "I can confirm that. It's been VERY good advice! Roast chicken, yummy!" Julia's mentioning Carol reminded me how much Julia valued Carol's getting our relationship started. Julia said she "owed Carol heaps" and I felt the same. I'm sure Julia and I would've gotten together anyway, as she's not exactly reluctant to approach people, and I'm sure you know what answer I would've given her. I would NEVER have turned down a girl even half as beautiful as Julia, or probably damned near any girl at all! But regardless of when we got together, we had an opportunity to praise Carol's selfless caring. I pulled Julia to one side and suggested we make a little speech each to Carol while everyone was at dinner, maybe between the two courses. Julia agreed it was a good idea. Soon we were asked to sit and dinner was served - two roast chickens, with all the trimmings and lots of gravy. Joy! The first bird was put in front of Prof to carve. He formally intoned, "In honor of Mark's bringing these two families together, he will be served first. Bring 'The Mark Plate' please." My large plate was ceremoniously produced, placed in front of Prof who loaded it with a substantial proportion of the chicken. The plate was then passed to Vanessa, who loaded it with the roast veggies, and poured a large amount of gravy on top. Vanessa then carried it around and placed it in front of me. "Welcome to our home, Mark." I had to sit - smelling and looking at my food - until everyone else was served. It was torture. But, BOY, did it taste good when we were FINALLY able to start. I was unstinting in my praise, partly in the hope that I'd get invited back for leftovers tomorrow. When the first course was finished and most of the clearing done, I gave Julia's hand a squeeze and we got to our feet and walked around to behind Carol's seat. I announced, "Can I have your attention please? Julia and I would like to say a few words." -- I saw a look of panic appear on Mom's face, and suddenly realized that she must think we were announcing our intent to marry. That people assumed Julia and I were so serious FREAKED me out! It'd be years before I was ready to face that issue. I laughingly added, "Relax Mom, it's nothing serious." Mom looked relieved. "Would everyone take a seat please? Julia and I would like to thank Carol for the role she had in helping our relationship start." A little, "Oh" escaped a blushing Carol. We were standing slightly behind and bracketing her chair. She'd looked up at us when we'd approached her, but now she looked back at the table and lowered her head. Julia led off, "Umm, when I learned of Mark's feelings for me I was desperate to talk with him, but he was in the hospital. I heard that he had two sisters at school, and I found Carol. I was very worried about introducing myself to her because she might've blamed me for Mark's being hospitalized. Instead Carol was wonderfully friendly and helpful." -- Julia moved forward and put her hands on Carol's shoulders. "With her help, going back and forth between us, Mark agreed to date me. Carol kept helping me after that too. I was very nervous about my date with Mark, but Carol spent a lot of time talking to me about Mark, telling me about his likes, dislikes, and much more. -- "On the Friday afternoon before my first date with Mark, I got so nervous that I very nearly canceled. Without all the help that Carol had given me, I know I wouldn't have been brave enough and I would've hidden in my room, which would've been the biggest mistake of my life. Because of Carol's help, my life is filled with joy. -- "I don't know whether I'll ever be able to persuade Mark to marry me, Carol, but from this day forth I consider you to be my sister." Julia leaned over and gave Carol a kiss on her bright red cheek. Poor Carol was overwhelmed with happiness and embarrassment. She burst into tears. Prof leaped to his feet and, with a dramatic flourish, produced a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Carol, who made very good use of it. #1: Robert spoke up, "That's great news; now I've got TWO beautiful sisters!" Carol sobbed some more. I moved forward and placed a hand on each of her shoulders. I've started removing my right arm from its sling more and more often, as it's too much of a nuisance. This is especially true at important times like this: a roast chicken dinner. I just held her shoulders, squeezing occasionally. Julia was sill kneeling beside Carol holding her left hand, and Carol's right hand was tightly holding Julia's too, when Carol didn't need to use it for the hanky. I waited a little while, until Carol had recovered somewhat, then I said, "I'm sorry Carol, but your ordeal isn't over because now I want to say a few words about you." "Oh, {sniff}." Julia and I had not planned what to say so I had no prior warning of her speech's content, but with four minds on the job I could easily run with it. [While I think to mention it, public speaking became so much easier with multiple minds. I don't feel alone and thinking up material is far easier. It makes a surprisingly huge and helpful difference. Being able to suppress the symptoms of nervousness was a big help too.] I started, "All the things Julia said about Carol helping our relationship start are absolutely true, and helped me just as much. I was terrified of asking Julia for a date. There I was, a geeky, pimply 15-year old beanpole, about to ask a gorgeous 16-year old girl for a date. But by the time Carol had finished shuttling back and forth between us, it was already agreed. All I had to do was stroll up to Julia and say, 'Hey, you wanna date?' and she'd say, 'Yes.' It doesn't get much easier than that. Carol 'picked up' Julia for me. She even picked up a beautiful girl! What a great sister I have!" That got a few laughs. -- "Of course, Mom and Dad made me prepare a much better speech than 'Hey, you wanna date?', and made me practice saying it, but none of that matters. The fact is that Carol made it happen. She did it with no thought of gain for herself. She spent a lot of time helping my relationship with Julia purely because Carol is a wonderfully caring and unselfish sister. For that she has my enormous gratitude. -- "I fully understand Julia wanting to claim Carol as her sister because Carol IS my sister, and that's something I will be eternally grateful for. She is an incredible young woman, and my life is improved immeasurably by her being in my life every day. My heart lifts every morning when I see her for the first time, and it lifts again every time I catch sight of her. I am blessed to have her as my sister, and I love her very much." I put my left arm around her shoulder, and kissed her other, very wet, cheek. While Carol was sobbing anew, the parents and Julia's brothers all started congratulating Carol on being so nice, and Julia and I on our nice speeches, when I stood up straight and said, "Hang on! There is still one VERY important thing that I haven't yet thanked Carol for." Silence descended, and I continued, "For her telling Julia, so Julia could tell Vanessa, that roast chicken is my favorite meal." They'd teased me for taking seconds and thirds of it, so I got lots of laughter. This got the table back to a more appropriate mood, and we all resumed our happy meal. Except that Carol was still affected, so Vanessa suggested that Julia take Carol to freshen up. The two of them walked off hand in hand, Julia looking very happy and Carol looking ecstatic, but still clutching Prof's hanky just in case. We passed the time waiting for the girls to return by replenishing our glasses and doing a little tidying up (that's my euphemism for my having another helping). I particularly enjoyed tidying up the chicken. The girls still hadn't returned, so I took the opportunity to walk around to Vanessa's seat and crouch down to her level. When I had her attention I said, "I won't make a speech about it, but I want to express my appreciation for all you've done for me. From the first moment that Julia talked to you about me, you've shown me unswerving support, and I know there've been times that it couldn't have been easy. I know you had to push your daughter out the door on our first date, and that must have been very hard for you to do, knowing that your daughter was intending to offer her virginity to me that night. Julia has had to miss school because of my apparent violence. That you understood and supported me at those and other times means a great deal to me." #4: "And I won't forget to mention the delicious food you've made for me either. This is no small favor, as you will discover if I keep coming over here. You've been more than 'a help', you've been essential in my having a relationship with Julia, and I have a feeling that Prof could well be very important in my future too. So thank you very much to the both of you." I might not have been standing to make a speech, but everyone was listening so it was effectively the same thing. It was - if I may say so myself (all four of myselves) - well done. I could see Mom approved, which was good after her reminding me of the gift I'd failed to provide. This was better than a bunch of flowers, especially as the Williams' property had quite a big flower garden on it. Standing up, I addressed them all, as I might as well make it in to a speech now, "Let me add that a week ago I knew nothing about females. Over the last week my mother has been giving me a 'crash course' - as she described it - in how to navigate the perilous waters of relationships with females. That I have survived thus far owes a great deal to her help, so I'd like to thank her too. Thanks very much Mom." I said as I moved to give her a hug. While still holding Mom, I looked at Vanessa and said, "I have thanked you for the food, haven't I? I'd hate to forget that." Vanessa's roast chicken was even better than Mom's, so my appreciation was VERY heartfelt. Carol and Julia had returned shortly before I finished speaking. Having finished my speechifying, I walked around to the girls. As I walked past Donna, a thought occurred to one of us, #1: #2: #1: When I got around to Carol, I gave her a big hug, asking, "How are you, honey?" "I am so happy I could burst." "Now you've got some idea of how much happiness you bring me." "Really?" "Truly." Carol hugged me some more. I freed an arm, and included Julia. We had a three-way, very happy, hug. Seizing his opportunity, Prof stood and made a speech praising me. I learned that when it comes to speeches of praise, it is far better to give than to receive. There was stuff about how much happiness I was bringing into their house, how nice I was, and other embarrassing stuff I preferred not to listen to. My hug-mates gave me extra squeezes, or whispered their agreement at appropriate moments, but otherwise I could've done without it. I liked the way it ended though, with Prof saying, "I'll stop now, as I can see that dessert is ready." Vanessa was delivering it. I told Carol, "Carol, I've got to get back to my seat. I've caught Andrew stealing my food before, and I can't take the risk of giving him an undefended target. We'll talk later, sweetie. As I said, I'm lucky enough to see you every day." We broke up the hug, and I went to protect my dessert in the best way possible, by eating it myself. ------- Chapter 24: Old Swimsuits Are Best Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (Continued) After dinner, the adults said they'd do the dishes so they could chat, sending us kids to play in the hot tub. I thought that was an excellent idea. As we were leaving the room, I told Julia, "Goody. I'm looking forward to seeing what you look like in swimsuit. Very eager indeed. Walk faster!" "You can see me naked any time you want, and you're getting excited about seeing me in a swimsuit?" "I certainly am. Quite excited." "In that case I'm going to wear a different suit than I intended." "Huh?" "I was going to wear what I normally wear in the tub. Now I'm going to get the sexiest suit I've got." "Why are we walking so SLOWLY!" I grabbed her hand, and dragged her - laughing - to get my gear from the hot tub room. We caught up with Carol in the room. Donna was already in the pool, playing with the bubbles. I picked up my bag, and Julia said to Carol, "Sister, we'll get changed in my room, okay?" Carol smiled and happily grabbed her bag. "You can get changed in the Guys' Room Mark," said Julia and her and Carol left the room. I got changed, rubber-banded some plastic I'd brought around my cast, then returned to the hot tub room to join Donna. When I walked into the room, Donna glanced at me, then did a double-take. "Wow. You look GOOD! Move your arm out of the way so I can see you properly." #1: #3: I moved my slung arm (is that what you call an arm in a sling?) out to the side so Donna could see all of my torso. "You're sexy! You could get lots of girlfriends if you showed off your body." "I don't think it's that impressive. And I wouldn't want to go out with girls who were attracted to me just because of it." #1: #2: "You must've been doing a LOT of training since last summer. How come you've never said anything?" #1: #3: "There isn't any single explanation, Donna. I think it's mostly because my body's finally catching up on its muscular growth after being such a beanpole earlier. My adolescence must've left all the good growth to the end. -- "I've been doing some more general exercise, but nothing major. I think it's mainly because Dad's athletic genes are finally showing themselves. I wish I'd looked like this a couple of years ago though because it would've put some of the smaller bullies off." "They wouldn't dare fight you if they could see you now." That was definitely an exaggeration because some of the bullies are built like tanks, but that didn't invalidate Donna's being so impressed. I was in the hot tub by now, with my right arm over the edge of the pool to keep it dry. I was REALLY looking forward to getting rid of this damned nuisance of a cast. I was worried that Donna might've felt left out earlier. She was moving actively around the pool so I didn't try to hug her. Instead I just asked, "How are you going? I've been a bit busy making speeches and eating my dinner to talk with you. Are you enjoying the evening?" "It's good. I like Julia's family; they're all nice. The Boys have been looking after me. I wish we had a pool like this at home, only bigger so I could swim in it." "When I saw it I also wished we had one at home. We think the same." "Except you think about food a lot more than me." "That's VERY true!" "You and Julia made lovely speeches to Carol. That was very nice. You made her very happy." "Good. She has made us very happy too, so that's only fair. I was a bit worried about leaving you out though. That didn't upset you?" "I didn't matter. Carol did help you and Julia get together. You always thank me when I do something for you, so I know you're fair." "Like when?" "You thanked me several times for having a good run with you. You let me choose what days we'll run because you said I know more about it than you. Most older brothers would boss their little sisters around but you don't. You've thanked me for finding Aikido for you too, and I hope you like it because that'd make me happy to have helped you. You do it all the time. You're a VERY good brother. I'm very glad you're mine." I was about to make the obvious reply, when Carol and Julia walked in. I failed to answer Donna's last comment because I was rendered incapable of speech by the sight of Julia's VERY sexy swimsuit. Very sexy and very small, those being two not entirely unrelated attributes. I've got no idea of the right names to describe how a bikini is made, so let me just say the bikini top was very small, and the bikini bottom was very small too. That was all my brain was capable of focusing on for a while. Then Julia did a slow spin. It turns out that the bikini bottom was very, VERY small. Oh boy! Donna's loud laughing distracted me. I turned to look at her; a STUPID thing to do: why would I EVER want to look away from Julia? Donna stopped laughing long enough to say, "You look silly." "Me? Why?" "You should have seen your face when Julia walked in, haha." I turned back to look at Julia again. Getting laughed at was a price I was willing to pay. She spun again, just in case I hadn't noticed the first time how good half her ass looked not in her swimsuit. I had noticed the first time, but was more than willing to notice again. Yep, just as good the second time around. Julia asked, "I can see by the 'silly look on your face' that you approve?" "Do I EVER! You look spectacular! I didn't know they made bathing suits that sexy! Surely that's illegal? Wearing that in public would cause a riot. You should've warned me, I nearly had a heart attack..." [[In truth it was sexy, but not THAT sexy. Not having much in the way of breast, Julia had chosen a suit that maximized her sexiness by being cut to expose her ass nicely. Probably only about a quarter of it was exposed, but I was greatly biased. This was MY girl, and having a girlfriend dressed revealingly short-circuited my brain.]] Julia interrupted my gushing with, "Yep, I can see you approve. Good." She climbed into the pool, and I gave her my hand to help her in. It was a pleasure watching her move. Once in the pool she settled onto my lap I then became aware that Carol was still standing a couple of yards away from the tub. She was wearing my robe. It looked better on her than it did on me, and I say that without ever having looked at myself in a mirror while wearing it. I was just about to open my mouth to say something to Carol about getting into the pool, when Julia explained, "Carol's a little embarrassed." I looked at Julia, "Why?" "The swimsuit she bought is last year's and she's grown quite a lot over winter. It's tight on her so she wore your robe down in case someone saw her. You don't mind do you?" "Of course not. She can have whatever she wants of mine, especially if it would save her embarrassment." "Promise not to laugh at her?" "I promise." Thus reassured, Carol took off the robe, exposing the one-piece swimsuit she was wearing. Carol turned to hang the robe on a peg, then turned back to come to the tub. Those turns gave me a good view of all of her. I was GOBSMACKED. She was GORGEOUS! And SEXY. Have I mentioned sexy? My God, was she ever SEXY! I guess that from a purely theoretical point of view the suit did look silly on her, as it was stretched in ways it wasn't designed to. Her chest 'bulged' - such an ugly word for such a WONDERFUL effect - much more than the suit was designed to accommodate, and that had all sorts of interesting consequences. My favorite was its effect on the cutout areas under each of her armpits (don't ask me the technical term); they were stretched forward from where they should've been, showing an intriguing amount of the sides of her breasts which I'd had a wonderful view of when she'd hung up the robe. And then I unintentionally (honest!) looked at her crotch, and was amazed at how sexy it looked with the swimsuit pulled so tight. It was awesomely explicit and incredibly sexy. Wow! Yeah, 'theoretically' the swimsuit looked silly. I suppose that another girl looking at Carol in it might think she looked silly. But if you were male and had a pulse, that adjective wouldn't cross your mind. It'd be crowded out by a rush of other, very different, adjectives. (Now that I think about it, no adjectives would cross your mind if you didn't have pulse, but you're not likely to be reading this, so I'll shut up now.) ^ The only other time I've described Carol in this autobiography was shortly after my first merge, when #2 [[I called him #1 then]] saw her for the first time. That'd been a year and half ago. Since then several very nice things had happened to Carol's body. I'd noticed them happening of course, but Carol nearly always dresses very boringly so I'd never seen her in ANYTHING that showed her figure like it was showing now. Even when I'd seen her in this same swimsuit last summer, that'd been nine months ago and all I'd thought then was that there was a very nice body underneath a boring swimsuit. Her very long blond hair (it was pinned up now, but if she let it down it'd be only a few inches short of her waist) and her pretty face were the only ways she'd shown her beauty to me before. [[Growing her hair long was the only way Carol felt comfortable contributing to her beauty.]] Those were blown out of the water now. A spectacular body was bulging out of a VERY un-boring swimsuit. Carol was taller now than eighteen months ago. I'll guess by an inch or two, but that's only a guess. I'd been growing taller at the same time so it was hard to judge, and who pays attention to height? The extra height looked damned good on her now though, especially in a suit designed for a shorter person. "Plush" describes Carol well. I want to say "voluptuous" but can't quite because it implies a degree of conscious sensuality. Carol denies her beauty rather than delights in it, so while "voluptuous" is a perfect description of her body, it isn't of her personality. Carol isn't chubby, having just a little extra padding all over her body, making her well rounded; with her best places being VERY well rounded. Her breasts - being the best of the "best places" - are truly SUPERB. Carol's not even fourteen yet but her breasts are larger than most adult women's, and they'd felt fantastic when she'd hugged my arm against them when we'd been waiting for the car at school. It's a great pity she dresses in shapeless clothes because she'd look incredible in the right outfits. Carol is beautiful. Mom and Dad were both very good looking in their old photographs. They're over thirty now so that doesn't matter anymore, but it's no surprise that Carol looks so good (and very unfair that I look so blah). She has a nicely rounded face, blue eyes and very pale skin, like Mom's. On cold days her cheeks turn pink, making her look very cute. She also blushes vividly, and was halfway there now. In short, she's beautiful and has a KILLER figure! Oh boy, does she ever. ^ Having turned back toward the tub, Carol looked at me to make sure I wasn't laughing at her. I had no trouble at all not laughing. It was not drooling that I was struggling with. It took an enormous amount of self-control to casually say, "You look good, Carol. Come and join us." She did. I couldn't help watching her all the way. Watching her bend over to hold the side of the tub while she climbed over it was so spectacular I nearly groaned, but caught myself just in time. Julia said, "She's very pretty isn't she?" "I'LL SAY!" Carol looked up at me, "You think I'm pretty?" "You're GORGEOUS!" I finally realized that I might've been more than a little over-emphatic. I resolved to mind my tongue, just as soon as I could roll it back into my mouth. Fortunately normality returned. Carol settled into the pool, saying, "Oh, this is nice." Donna asked, "Mom said the adults are having a meeting. What about?" Julia answered, "Mark." Donna's response was, "That'll be a boring meeting. Glad I'm here instead." Then she poked her tongue out at me. "Scamp! It's a good thing Julia is so heavy that I can't get up to chase you, or you'd be in trouble." "Hey, who you calling heavy?" protested Julia. "I saw how much dessert you had." You get the idea: it was the sound of normality returning. It required a very deliberate effort from me because I was still gobsmacked by how sexy Carol looked. I'd forgotten about the parental meeting. I hope they could reassure Mom that I hadn't been a bully to Julia. I DETEST bullies with a passion, so I'd hate to be thought one by anyone, especially inside my family. Julia was sitting on my lap and Carol came over and sat next to us so we could chat easily, leaving the rest of the pool free for Donna to move around in. After several minutes of chat - don't ask me about what, I was having trouble paying attention - Julia said, "Carol, that swimsuit looks too tight to be comfortable. Try this." Julia leaned over and pushed both straps off Carol's shoulders so they hung around her upper-arms. THAT got my attention! I imagine it did relieve a lot of the pressure and feel more comfortable. Unfortunately (because I must try not to think "fortunately") it also exposed a lot more of Carol's breasts. Not to mention - but I will because it was something I couldn't stop thinking about - that without the straps to hold it up, Carol's top might fall down at any moment, totally exposing her visibly fantastic breasts. Carol said, "That feels better," and left the suit that way. EVERY time she moved my eyes couldn't help darting to her, hoping the top was going to fall. It didn't, to my intense disappointment (that should've been "to my relief", what with my being her brother and all. It should've been, but it wasn't). After several more minutes Donna got bored and asked Julia, "Can I go and play on the pool table?" Julia said, "That's fine. Help yourself." I couldn't help asking, "You know how to play?" "Sure. They have a table at the club." Whichever club that might have been, as Donna belongs to several sports clubs. Julia, Carol, and occasionally I - in an attempt to seem normal - chatted while Donna got out of the tub and dried herself off. When Donna was reasonably dry, she suddenly reached up and pulled her swimsuit off. In half a second she was naked and I was looking at a couple of very muscular buttocks. She looked over her shoulder at me, and caught me staring at her. I was looking in shock more than for any other reason because Donna had NEVER done anything like this in front of me before, but it was still very embarrassing to be caught looking. I quickly looked down while apologizing, "I'm sorry, Donna. I shouldn't have looked." I would've said more, but Donna just laughed at me, "I was just checking that you really think I'm pretty. You could've been looking at Julia or Carol. Thanks for looking at me." She wrapped herself in a towel, grabbed her clothes and took them into the Guys' Room. I thought to yell out "You minx", but she'd already been out of the room for five seconds before the thought occurred. Julia's and Carol's laughing at me hadn't helped my recovery process at all. When Carol stopped laughing at me, she said, "It's good that she feels reassured. I worry about her sometimes. She's a bit late maturing and it might be starting to upset her." "Yeah, reassuring her, that was my plan the whole time." Julia broke in, "Speaking of maturing, Carol your body is superb. I'm going to take you shopping for a new swimsuit. Not just any old swimsuit either, we are going to get you the sexiest swimsuit in Corvallis." Carol squealed with delight and leaned forward to give Julia a big hug. My eyes darted, but her top did NOT fall down. Damn! Julia continued, "If we can't find a sexy enough one in Corvallis, we'll go to Salem and find one there." "{Gulp}. You really mean you want to get a SEXY one for me? Sexy? I've never had sexy swimsuit before..." #4: " ... and I don't think Mom would let me wear one like that." "Then we'll get you two. A half-sexy one you can wear when your parents are around, and a very sexy one you can keep here." #1, #2, #3: | #4: Carol asked, "Keep here?" Julia explained, "Yes. Now that I think about it, that's what we'll do. I made room in one of my drawers for Mark to keep some clothes, but you'll need at least two drawers and I can't spare even one more. I'll buy another set of drawers for us because I can always make good use of it. You'll need some closet space too. Mine's already jam-packed, but I know Dad's having my walls pulled apart in a day or two so I'll get them to make some new closets when they rebuild them. That's a wonderful idea because I need more closet space anyway. I'll talk with him as soon as their meeting is over." #1: Carol was confused, and she wasn't the only one. Carol asked, "I don't understand. What do you mean about my having clothes here and pulling down walls?" Julia answered, "When I said in my little speech that I consider you my sister, I wasn't just saying nice words; I meant it, and I mean it far more now. I just realized it's the perfect solution. You and I are going to be spending a lot of time together. We are now sisters and best friends. That's if you want to be my friend?" Carol gushed her happiness, "I would LOVE to be your friend. You are WONDERFUL; so nice and confident and older than me. I can't believe you're doing this..." Julia interrupted, "I just remembered that you study a lot. I'll get Dad to get another computer and desk and we'll set them up next to mine so we can study together." #3: "My own computer? And building a new closet for me?" Julia explained, "We're not really building a new closet for you. My walls have to be opened up, and I would've had the idea to get extra closets for me added when the walls are rebuilt. You'll just be using some of that new space." "Why are your walls being opened up?" "When they put the soundproofing in. Adding more closets afterward should be easy." "Why do you need soundproofing?" #3: I held my breath while Julia answered, "Because Mark is an absolutely incredible lover. He makes me scream in passion so often and so loud that Dad is worried that the fantastic sex Mark gives me might be upsetting the neighbors." #4: Carol, to my intense embarrassment, wanted to know more! She took a breath and leaned forward (her suit didn't fall, dammit) to ask more questions. I had to intrude, "Julia, please! I don't really think you should be discussing this with my sister." "Okay." #1: Then Julia added, "Don't worry Carol, I'll tell you later..." #1: <{Groan}.> " ... Mark's an EXCEPTIONALLY good lover." #1: #4: Julia continued, "The BEST part is going to be filling your new closet. You and I need to do a great deal of important shopping, sister. We need to get you a whole heap of things: sleepwear, lingerie, school clothes, special-events clothes, swimsuits, casualwear, and others. Then you'll need cosmetics, brushes, shampoos and everything else you need to stay here as often as you like. This is going to be SO much fun!" "But it sounds so expensive. I couldn't ask your dad to spend all that..." "Carol, honey, YOU are not asking him to do anything. Plus he has already offered to do this..." #3: " ... Several days ago Dad and Mom told Mark not to hesitate to ask for anything he wanted. I'm going to tell them this is what he wants, and they'll do it. Don't worry about it; it won't be very expensive. Dad gets computers cheap through OSU, the walls have to be rebuilt anyway and they'd be rebuilt with new closets even without your needing one, and buying clothes with you will just be plain FUN. I'm going to enjoy that SO much!" #1: #2: #3: #2: Carol, incredulous but worried, commented, "I can't imagine Mom and Dad agreeing to your spending any money on me. Mom's already agreed to my sleeping over some nights, but building new closets and buying new clothes and computers! I don't think they'd be happy with that." "I'll talk with my parents, and I think they'll be able to get approval from yours. I'll talk with them right after their meeting because I can't wait to start shopping with you." Money conscious Carol suggested, "I could bring some of my clothes from home..." Julia, who was obviously unconcerned about spending money, said, "No. You need new. You can bring a few favorites from your home if you want, but you need new everything. You've grown and most of your clothes won't flatter your new figure enough. You've got a superb figure and we can make you look fantastic." "Ahh, I don't really dress like that." "Don't worry, I'll make sure my new sister looks fantastic. Nothing too sexy for when we're out in public, but when you're here with Mark and me, we can dress you as sexy as we want." Carol nervously asked, "With Mark?" "Absolutely. Like when we're in the hot tub together. I'll wear my sexiest bikini like I am now, and we'll find swimsuits equally sexy for you, and we can sit either side of Mark. When he has his cast off he can put an arm around each of us and cuddle us close. Wouldn't you like to cuddle with Mark like that?" #4: I was very interested to hear Carol's answer. In a quiet voice, head lowered but eyes looking up at me, "Yes, if he'd want to?" I knew the answer to that already, "Carol, one of my favorite times of the day is riding in the car with you and holding your hand." Carol sighed, then leaned in toward us. I was a bit slow getting my right arm into action, but Julia caught Carol and held her close. Julia said to her, "We are going to have such a GREAT life together, sister." Carol burst into tears. Our being in a pool meant that for once my lack of a handkerchief didn't matter. While Carol was crying Julia looked at me and asked, "Happy?" "Yes, because Carol is, but I'm very confused too." "I think you'll understand in time. I hope so. I think this is wonderful. Sometimes I can't believe how clever I am." #2: Carol looked up and said to Julia, "I can't believe how wonderful you are to me." "It's my pleasure, sister. It makes me happy to make you happy, and it makes Mark happy too, so everyone wins. Except maybe Mom and Dad because they have to pay for it, haha." "Are you sure they won't mind paying for me? It sounds very expensive." "I'm sure it'll only be a few thousand. Don't worry about it." It's nice to have a girlfriend who can throw around "a few thousand" and not worry about it. That CERTAINLY wasn't the case in my family. We didn't even throw around a few ten! (Isn't it strange that "throwing around" works grammatically with "million", "thousand" and even "hundred", but doesn't work with "ten". I'll leave you to admire the English language while I get back to admiring Carol's breasts.) -- "Computers don't cost much, they're rebuilding the walls anyway and I'd like to have another set of drawers too. Buying our new clothes will be the most expensive, but that's going to be FUN. You and I will have a shopping frenzy, and then we can come back to my room and give Mark a fashion show of what we've bought. He can pick which of us is the prettiest in each outfit. It'll be so much fun!" I thought so too. Carol said, "That's not fair! He's always going to pick you because you're his girlfriend." Julia gave a prolonged laugh. "I don't think that's going to help me much. He thinks you're BEAUTIFUL, Carol. I'll be surprised if he votes for me at all, except out of politeness." Carol looked at me, and asked, "You really think I'm beautiful?" "Very, very beautiful. On the inside and outside." Carol put an arm around me. Then Julia moved her arms so that she also had an arm around each of us. We hugged for a while. Julia said, "I like three-way hugs with you two." At the same time, Carol and I both said, "Me too." We all chuckled, and kept hugging for a while. Julia said, "Carol, I have already promised Mark that I will try very hard to be the best girlfriend I can for him. I want to promise you exactly the same, that I will be the best girlfriend and sister I can for you." "This is the best day of my life! I'd LOVE to have you as a sister. But I don't understand why someone as wonderful as you would want to spend time with me. You're much smarter than I am, you're older, more beautiful and much more confident. You've got friends your own age and are busy with all your clubs and committees. I'm not even in high school yet, so why should you want to spend time with me?" "There are many reasons: how nice you are, how caring, how lovely, how much fun we're going to have together - LOTS of reasons. But there's one main reason that's far more important than anything else, against which our age difference means nothing. We have the most important thing in common, and no one else does. Can you guess what it is?" "Ahh, no?" "We love Mark and Mark loves us. I know Mark loves you and me more than anyone else. I know I love Mark more than anyone. The only thing I'm not certain about is your love for Mark. Do you love him more than anyone else?" "Oh YES! He's the most wonderful person I know by MILES! Sometimes he's so nice to me I feel like exploding. I do explode sometimes, I burst into tears at breakfast yesterday. He's always doing and saying little things that prove he's watching and thinking about us. Donna and me, I mean. He respects us and lets us speak rather than boss us around like most big brothers do. Every day he does little things that show he loves me. He holds my hand now, to share his feelings for me and make me happier. How many brothers do that!" Julia pulled Carol back into her hug, which was probably the only thing that could've stopped Carol's gushing. #3: #2: #4: #3: #2: Carol was beside me and Julia was on my lap, and we were all hugging. It was very pleasant, especially now that I'd decided to give up worrying about whatever Julia's plan was. Julia and I were smiling, while Carol was on the verge of crying. She kept fervently thanking Julia and me - I had NO IDEA what she was thanking me for! Carol gushed about how much she appreciated it, how wonderful it'd be to have Julia's friendship and spend time with us, how she normally felt lonely because she didn't have many good friends, etc. [Carol does have some girlfriends, but she studies too much to socialize with them as often as most girls socialize, and she also doesn't enjoy their going on about boys all the time. So her relationships aren't strong ones, and her friends don't visit us at home very often, to my regret.] Julia didn't do anything else weird, so the conversation returned to normal, which unfortunately mostly meant the girls started talking about clothes shopping. That's got to be the dullest topic ever. As much as I wanted to ask Julia what on Earth she was thinking about with Carol, it'd be best if I suffered through their existing conversation and waited until Julia and I were alone before asking for the explanation. After a tediously long ten minutes or so, Donna opened the door from the Guys' Room, stuck her head in and said, "Can someone play with me please?" I volunteered, "I'll play with you. I make it a rule to always play with girls who show me their pretty bottoms. Please wait in here so I can get dressed in the other room." I picked up Julia and moved myself from under her, putting her back in my place. "If you will excuse me ladies. I was about soaked out anyway." My last comment was a believable excuse because we'd been in the hot tub quite a while by now. I was using it not to avoid the clothes shopping conversation, although that was a nice bonus. I was leaving because I was scared by the amount of lust I was feeling for Carol. I'd been having a great deal of trouble acting normal so the girls wouldn't catch my interest in Carol's chest, and the thought had crossed my mind that unless Carol put her straps back on, then she'd almost certainly expose herself when she climbed over the tub's edge. She was so excited about Julia's offer and the clothes shopping discussion that pulling her straps up might not occur to her, and I was uncomfortable with how much I wanted to see the consequences of that. It'd be best if I got out first, and fled the scene of my mental crime. Julia said, "Yes, you go and beat the pants off her. We'll stay here and talk about you." I leaned down to kiss Julia on the lips, but doing it in front of Carol suddenly felt awkward so I changed target to kiss Julia's cheek, then did the same to Carol's. That gave me time to do a very necessary go-soft. I got out, then turned to the two of them and said, "I have enjoyed being this close to you two and hope we can do it again. Julia, I sometimes don't know what you're doing, but I know you've got good intentions and you've made Carol happy, so thank you for that." A nice little speech I thought. It'd raised the tone nicely from Julia's "beat the pants off her" comment. Julia responded, "Are you going to dry yourself like Donna did? Carol and I want to see your ass." Carol giggled, which sounded suspiciously like agreement to me. I growled my answer to Julia, threatening her with, "Do you want another 'Sex Object' hunt?" Julia laughed, so I turned and started toweling myself dry. When I glanced back, Julia was quietly talking into Carol's ear. #1: #2: #4: Just as I was about to leave the room to go get changed - with, I'll stress, my ass fully covered - when Carol burst out with a loud, "He didn't!" The "He" in question didn't hang around to find out whether he did or not. I left the room quickly, to the sound of Carol's giggles and Julia saying in a deliberately loud voice, "Wait till I tell you what he did next!" I shut the door on the sound of both of them laughing at me, while Donna was getting off the treadmill to find out from the other girls what was so funny. ^ When I'd changed, I cracked the door open to see the three girls in a huddle, looking worryingly amused. There was nothing I could do about that, so I just said, "Are you ready for a game, Donna?" "In a minute, I just want to hear the end of the story. You're very funny." #1: #4: There was nothing I could say on the Sex Object Hunt topic, so I just said, "I'll get the table ready. Come through when you want to." Then I closed the door to hide. Donna came through only a minute later, saying, "Julia's story was very funny. You're very nice to her, and to me too. Thanks for playing with me." "No problem. They were starting to gang up on me so it was a good time for me to run away. Besides, not a single one of them showed me her bottom, so I volunteered to be with you." "Julia showed you some of hers." "That's true. Maybe I should have said that I'll play with whatever girl shows me the MOST bottom. How does that sound?" "So all I have to do to get you to play with me again is to show you my bottom?" "I think Mom and Dad would kill us, which would be worse for you because at least I'd die happy, haha. -- "Actually I'm a little sad that you had to do that to check whether I thought you were pretty. You should know already that I think you are. And even if you weren't, I'd still love you just as much." "I guess. It's just that Carol and Julia are so beautiful." "Everybody is different, sweetie. You're far better than both of them at sports, and they probably envy you for that. Your body is beautiful at what it does. Julia and Carol's bodies are both beautiful too, but very differently from each other and from you. How could you choose which was the most beautiful between a racehorse, dolphin and hawk? All three are beautiful at what they do. It'd be wrong for one of them to envy the others." "I'm the racehorse?" "Actually, I just tried to pick three beautiful but very different animals. I wasn't trying to make them appropriate to each of you. But racehorse is certainly the best one for you. Probably Carol would be the dolphin, and Julia the hawk. So come on racehorse, giddyup and shoot." We played, Donna quickly finding out that I was too good at 8-ball for her. "Andrew said you were very good." We evened it up by my not being allowed to make any simple shots. I wasn't allowed to do "cue ball to target ball to pocket." Some other ball or a cushion had to get involved somewhere. A while later an amusing thought struck me, "Donna, when you get a little older and interested in boys, please don't go around school showing all the boys your bare bottom to find out which ones like you, okay?" "Haha. That would be silly!" We goofed around for another fifteen minutes or so, then Julia and Carol joined us. Julia took her usual position grasping my left arm with both of her hands. Carol came around the other side, and hugged my right arm. I could get used to this! Carol said, "Julia's been telling me some very good stories about you. I loved the Object Hunt; it was hysterical. You're such a good boyfriend, and so funny too." "Yeah," agreed Donna. "I never knew you could be so funny. How come you don't make jokes like that at home?" #4: "Julia motivates me. She's a very good Object." Julia said, "A well-tamed Object now. Anyway, I came to see if I could borrow Mark. I haven't had any time alone with him since Monday and I miss that. Can I leave you two to play by yourselves for a while please?" Donna pleaded, "Can we finish the game first? I'm winning and it's HARD to beat Mark!" As it was our last game, I let Donna win, making sure Donna didn't pick up on that because she gets angry when that happens. Then Julia and I went to her room. ------- Chapter 25: They're on to us, Guys! Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (Continued) We lay on Julia's bed, holding each other with our faces an inch apart. It's a wonderful position to talk with your girlfriend in. Julia asked me, "How has your evening been?" "Some things stand out. First, learning 8-ball so quickly was interesting, to put it mildly. Your brothers were shocked, so that was fun. Dad and Prof bet on me before my first game. Talk about having faith in me! When they gave me half their winnings your father said I should spend it on rubbers. Not the sort of suggestion I expect from my girlfriend's dad, haha. -- "Second, dinner was lovely. My favorite, perfectly done, and a LOT of it on my big plate. I couldn't ask for better than that. Dinner was perfect, and I really enjoyed the speeches we made praising Carol. She was horribly embarrassed but loved us for them. I was glad I had a good chance to thank your mom too. You missed most of that because you were away with Carol then, but knowing how you and your mother gossip, she'll fill you in. -- "But third, and most confusingly, I didn't understand your conversation with Carol in the hot tub. I didn't understand it at all. It's fantastic that Carol said today was the best day of her life, but I don't understand your thinking. Nor your generosity on behalf of your parents?" Julia explained, "I should've talked to Mom and Dad before I told Carol, but I got too excited when I realized how good it could be. I believe I've acted in accordance with my parents' wishes so they should back me up. I think they'll persuade yours enough for Carol to spend a good amount of time here. Supporting Carol is the same as supporting you because you care for each other so much. By making her happy, I'm making you happy, which is what I live for! There's more to it than that but that's good enough by itself, and if more happens that's even better. I'm sure my parents will want to spend time with her too, so it'll work out perfectly." After that explanation I still had more questions than answers, that being the typical result of listening to a female 'explain' something. "Honey, why is it so important for Carol to spend time here? And why would your parents be willing to spend so much money on her?" "YOU are what's important. You're more than a prodigy and my family knows it. Especially Dad; he's getting very excited about you. Dad's a relaxed, dry sort of guy who doesn't get excited by much, but he is about you. Seeing you beat The Boys would've had him nearly wetting himself. My brothers have competed over that table for years and they're very good players. They've spent thousands of hours practicing that game, but you could beat them after a few minutes. I'm surprised Dad didn't really wet his pants. -- "In the last few days you've fascinated my parents. You started as a wonderful boy their daughter wanted to date - still does, in case you were in any doubt about that," the look on her face made having any doubts impossible, "and then they saw some of your abilities and your character. You're most of what we talk about in this house now. My parents think you're a good person with incredible potential, and they want to help you any way they can. They're excited about it. -- "I think the same, but much more so. I'm in AWE of you. I've had more experience of you and I know better how miraculous you are. I fully intend to spend the rest of my life looking after you. I will support you far better than a normal girlfriend would because I know you are far more than a normal boy." #2: #3: #2: #4: #1: #2: #3: #4: "Julia, why do you think I'm 'more than a normal boy, ' as you put it?" "Monday night's sex. Not the Sex Object game; that was ordinary boy-girl fun. You were hilarious and I loved it, even though I nearly wet my panties from it. It was after Andrew left that everything changed for me. You just flipped me over and starting fucking me. You had no doubt that you could go for as long as it took for me to beg you to stop. -- "After a while I could see that you weren't getting tired and you weren't intending to stop. I didn't believe it, but you kept going like a machine. I realized that something much more important than sex was happening, and then I realized that my view of our relationship was very wrong. -- "All my life I've dreamed of finding my Mr. Right. I'd found him and he loved me even more than I loved him, so I was gloriously happy with a head full of dreams and hopes for our future together. But then I began to find out that my Mr. Right was so fantastic and capable that he might be far beyond me. I had dreams of us being partners for life, but how could I be a partner to you when you were so much greater than me? I've seen how easily you do two grades at once, but I'd assumed that meant you were twice as smart as anyone else. Then you showed me that you seemed to have no physical limit. If you were superhumanly physical, you were probably superhumanly intelligent too, just without a chance to show it yet. -- "I didn't want to believe you were superhuman because I selfishly wanted you to be mine and I wanted to keep all my dreams for us. MY dreams! I hadn't even discussed them with you so I was being selfish. I knew it but I didn't want to give up on them. I refused to beg you to stop because it meant admitting that I couldn't keep up with you; that you were beyond me. It meant the end of my dreams, so I hung on hoping that you'd get tired or I'd be able to keep going for as long you did. After two hours it was obvious that neither of those was going to happen. I was worn out and you looked as fresh as a daisy. -- "I'm very ashamed that rather than acknowledging your superiority, I clung to a tiny shred of unrealistic hope. I refused to ask you to stop. I stupidly thought that if I never gave up, then you'd eventually have to. It took me hours to realize how stupid that idea was. That I hoped you'd fail was small-minded, selfish and stupid of me, so I'm glad I paid for it with as much pain as I did. Hopefully I'll never forget that punishment because I never want to behave so shamefully again. -- "Those hours opened my eyes. When my brain finally caught up, I changed every idea I'd had about my future. All the hopes and dreams I had are gone now. You destroyed them. MY dreams were selfishly mine. They weren't yours, and they can't even be ours because they'd hold you back. I love you more than I can express, especially now that I've had a chance to think about our future. I'm totally yours now but you aren't mine. I won't tie you down or hold you back in any way. You pursue your dreams and follow your path and I'll do everything I can to help you for the rest of my life, or for as long as you'll let me. The only dream I have now is to help you achieve your dreams." #3: #1: "Julia darling, it was just sex. You don't have to upset your whole life because I am fitter than you expected. I probably get it from playing soccer..." She interrupted me, "It was NOT just sex. First your 'fitness', as you called it, is not natural. Maybe someone who'd spent months training or who had a great deal of sex every day could have that much endurance, but you haven't done that training. You never go to a gym, you play soccer once or twice a week but not recently. You've had no experience of sex to condition your body, and you have a broken arm for goodness sake. You are fit, but it's not natural. -- "Second, do you have any idea just how good you are at sex? You know EXACTLY how to push my buttons, which is amusing because that's what you told Annette I did to you..." #4: [[That explanation is partly true, but isn't the main reason. Everybody has an almost entirely subconscious sense of other consciouses near their body. For example, when someone is standing close behind you and staring at your back, you can sometimes sense it. With my having four subconsciouses, they picked up a lot more information than normal about Julia's reactions - sixteen times as much, as will be explained later. That greatly increased subconscious information helped me learn to manipulate Julia's "buttons" very effectively. I consciously discovered that sense soon after this point in my autobiography, and I named it my "Proximity Sense". It subsequently changed my life in many important ways, even more important than making me a good lover.]] " ... I've talked to my family about this. They ALL assure me that NO 15-year old virgin learns his way around a woman's body the way you have around mine, or can have sex for six hours nonstop. My brothers are VERY envious! -- "There are many other reasons too. I see you at school every day. You'll be listening to a teacher, reading one of your textbooks from 11th grade, and still look bored because it's too easy. And I won't go on about how strange it looks when you do two things at once; that's VERY impressive! -- "You give really nice speeches. You know exactly what to say to the person, you sprinkle jokes through your speeches, so both the recipient and audience enjoy them. Fifteen-year old boys don't even notice the things you talk about, let alone give such great speeches about them. -- "You have an enormous range of abilities. Sex is included, and sex is what opened my eyes to just how special you are, but it's just an example. I would've enjoyed seeing you beat my brothers at 8-ball, but it wasn't necessary because I already have total belief in your superiority." #1: #4: #2: #4: #1: #3, #4: #4: #1, #2, #3: <{Groan}.> #2: #1, #3, #4: #4: ^ [We'd long since decided that our "Déjà Vu Merging" had to be a secret that we take to our grave. We'd even decided to kill ourselves if that's what it took to avoid divulging it; and I mean TRULY kill ourselves, all our minds as well as our body. In case you haven't realized the reasons for our being so determined that it remain a secret, imagine what would happen if news of the effects of déjà vu merging got out. It provides amazing mental, physical and social advantages, which when they became known, would encourage some people to do the same as I have. Most people wouldn't believe it initially, but when people turned up who could run marathons so far under the world record, who could have sex for hours on end, were apparently super-intelligent, could read two books at once, who presumably would blow the dial in MRI scans, plus God knows whatever else I haven't found out about yet, then even the skeptical people would have to admit it was real. That would cause a wave of new suicides, which would be rationalized as not being suicides because the minds would live on. Those that managed to get to new dimensions would spread the knowledge throughout those Earths, starting new waves of mostly hysterical suicides in all of them. It'd quickly spread throughout all of the W-Dimension, however big that is. Once it caught on in each Earth, it'd cause massive chaos and hysteria, especially among religious people. Because people turn into idiots when they get hysterical, especially religious people, there'd be people committing suicide all over the place, most of whom would stupidly do so outside of déjà vu. That wouldn't make any difference to their Earth because their bodies would still be dying whether or not their minds lived on elsewhere. Because multiple minds make people far more capable, soon multi-minded people would be taking over everything: sports, business, government - EVERYTHING! Rather than an "arms race" there'd be a "minds race". How many minds would it take to be successful? 4? 8? 16? 1024? Reaching 1024 minds requires only ten suicides, by which time on 1024 Earths, 1023 versions of that person are dead. If the people average ten merges, every survivor would have 1023 bodies to bury, and he'd be too busy burying bodies to do anything else. The population of America would be 300,000 and would fit into a single small city: say Toledo, Ohio. Except that America and every other country in the world would've collapsed by then. It'd be impossible to stop people suiciding. What could the Government(s) do? Pass a law against committing suicide? Make everybody live in padded cells 24/7? Ask people not to? Suicide is easy and the payoff for having more minds is huge. Everyone would think that no one else should be allowed to do it, but they'd still do it themselves, in an amusing variation of being two-faced. Soon every Earth in every w-dimension would be experiencing massive social collapse as large proportions of their populations suicided. There'd be wars, famines, riots, crime waves and total anarchy. All of which would encourage people to suicide as a way of escaping from the misery, thereby making it worse for everyone else. It'd be a calamitous downward spiral. If I let word of déjà vu merging get out, I'll be responsible for the destruction of human civilization and the death of billions of people on the Earth of every w-dimension. Depending on how many Earths there are, there'd be millions, billions, trillions, or God-knows-what-illions of people dying because I couldn't keep my mouth shut. I'll kill myself rather than reveal that secret.] [[So you might be a little surprised that I am including exact details of it in my internet-published autobiography! I've made a change to the way déjà vu functions. From a few minutes before I started typing my autobiography, copies of minds that déjà vu creates across the W-Dimension require constant renewal to continue to exist. So if one body dies, the copy of its mind will fade within a few seconds. The path I traveled has been closed.]] ^ I sat up cross-legged on the bed and looked at Julia square on, as it seemed more appropriate to look serious rather than cuddly. I said, "Julia, I'm blown away by your faith in me and your willingness to devote yourself to me. I find your attitude quite overwhelming, to be honest." She butted in with, "Not half as overwhelming as I find you!" I carried on, "Okay, I'll accept that. I don't understand why I am as I am..." #2: " ... but you're right that I'm not 'normal', as you so flatteringly put it. I do seem to be better at some things than some people." I was interrupted by a brief raspberry, a "{Brief Raspberry}." I tried again, "How about, 'Better at MOST things than MOST people.' I think that's excessive, but are you happy with that?" Julia nodded, but couldn't resist adding, "Only if you add also being the world's best lover." "Personally I think I need more practice, but thank you for the compliment. -- "More seriously, I must admit that I'm often unsure what to do about my abilities. I'm only fifteen and don't have any idea how my life will develop. It's a bit scary at times to be doing this alone, so I'm happy to have your support. I think you're overstating the situation greatly, but there's enough truth in what you're saying that I would very much value your support. Especially because - despite your saying otherwise in your explanation - I know you're not selfish, so you'll be acting in my best interests. I'm not happy that you'll be doing that at the expense of your own interests and dreams though." Julia announced proudly, "Your interests ARE my interests now!" "Which is exactly my point, as you're well aware. Replacing all your previous dreams with mine - and I don't even know what mine are - is over the top. You're getting carried away, Julia." "It's not possible to get too carried away when it comes to how amazing you are! I'm sure you're going to achieve some amazing accomplishments in your life, and I'm very excited about being part of them. I laugh at my dreams now. They were so small-minded and mundane compared with what being part of your life is going to entail." #4: #3: I asked her, "What do you think we should do now? I'm at a loss to know how to react to your offer." Julia answered, "Whatever you want. You're the boss. You know your needs better than I do so I'll just try to help you. Sometimes I might anticipate your having a particular need," Julia had smug smile on her face when she said that, but I couldn't think why. "Mostly I'll just do whatever you want me to do. Very happily because I'm looking forward to serving you in your life. It's very exciting." I was still trying to get my head around what she was offering, "Do you mean I can ask you to do anything I want?" "Yes please, especially sexual. I want you to ask me to do lots and lots of sexual things for you. You're laughing but I'm not joking. You give me the most pleasure I've ever had, and I want more of it please. -- "But to answer you fully, yes, you can ask me anything and I'll do as much as I can. I know my parents want to talk with you about responsibility and such topics. We're both young and have years of growing up to do yet, and they don't want to see you develop into a spoiled brat or a big-headed know-it-all, but I can't imagine that happening to you. I'll take the small risk of spoiling you, and simply say that I'll do whatever you want. I can't imagine me refusing you anything, especially sexual. Have I mentioned sex enough yet? Have you got the hint?" "Oh, you want sex?" "Now more than ever. It's been two days and I'm nearly over my soreness. That's a long time to do without something as wonderful as sex with you. Thinking about how wonderful our life together is going to be is very exciting. I'm very wet now." -- She paused for a second, then cried, "Argh. You still haven't moved," then she launched herself at me. My excuses are that I was a bit overwhelmed by the whole conversation and that I was waiting for her to ask me details about how I had these abilities. Or maybe I was being particularly stupid. Take your pick. While pulling my pants down, she yelled, "I want to be fucked. No fooling around. Grab a condom." #4: I reached into her bedside table for a rubber while she was pulling my underwear down. Excellent teamwork, I thought. I noticed our rubber supply was getting low, and remembered what I had to spend my 8-ball winnings on. By the time I had the rubber on, Julia was on her back with her legs in the air. The only item of clothing she'd removed was her panties. Her blouse was still on, and her skirt was just pulled up above her waist. I had the impression she was in a hurry. "Hurry!" she demanded. So far my being the boss of this relationship was working out just fine. She was wet, just like she'd said. I slid all the way in on the first stroke. "Faster!" she demanded. I couldn't resist. I pulled back as slowly as I'd entered, saying, "Don't you think I should go slowly, darling? I wouldn't want to give you sore muscles." It probably would've worked better if I hadn't been grinning from ear to ear. "Bastard!" she yelled, as she tried to thrust her hips up against me. I took pity, took a breath, and took vigorous action. VERY vigorous; getting up to full speed within a few strokes. I was hammering away, and Julia was getting more and more positive ("yes, yes, Yes!"). Life is GREAT, especially with mini-go-softs. For a 15-year old boy, go-softs are a godsend. I'd already done six of them. Speaking of mini-go-softs, I did some experimenting with them. I waited until I was VERY close to the point of going off myself, then did the smallest mini-go-soft I could. I had to repeat it almost immediately but I didn't mind that. I kept trying to make the 'mini' as small as possible; into a 'micro' as it were. I was almost able to hold myself just below my own orgasm. It was a WONDERFULLY feeling. I couldn't quite do it as perfectly as I wanted yet - erring on the side of doing it too much for an obvious reason - but I resolved to practice this new skill at every opportunity, and perhaps to even create a few extra opportunities. Julia was getting more and more frantic. I love watching that so I stopped distracting myself to enjoy the view. Just before her final scream, I remembered that my parents were downstairs. They were almost in the opposite corner of the house, but I knew Julia's screams are very loud. Oh well, it'd be a terrible thing to stop her now. I gave a few more hard thrusts, and she let my parents know that she approved of their son very much indeed. God knows what Carol and Donna thought. I would've worried about what Mom thought about Carol and Donna hearing, but I had the excuse that Mom and Dad had given Julia and me permission to have sex in her room, and Mom could hardly blame me for how loud Julia was, I hoped. For several seconds after Julia finishes a particularly good orgasm, she's only semi-conscious and sometimes not even that. It's a good time for me to quickly dispose of my rubber and wipe myself with a couple of tissues. I can be between her unresisting legs and licking up her juices when she regains awareness. When Julia comes back to awareness she initially has no idea of where she is. I like that the first thing she becomes aware of is my tongue licking her. It always puts a very big smile on her face. For several reasons my mother is the last subject I want on my mind at such a time, but I'm very glad she alerted me to the importance of doing a good job down here. I made a mental note to tell Julia to thank Mom. I've learned to be able to tell how sensitive Julia is from her physical reaction to my licking of her clit even before she's consciously aware. After a fuck like we just had, in which her climax was more emotionally than physically inspired, her pussy is not too sensitive for some serious follow-up action. So this time she awoke to exactly that. The last command she had given to the boss of our relationship was "Hurry!" so I continued to follow that instruction. I cleaned her previous emissions thoroughly, probably using more swipes of my tongue than I strictly needed but such is my dedication to that job. She gained full consciousness partway through that process, so I increasingly attended to her clit: licking it in passing several times, then visiting it for a while, then paying it some serious attention. After a while I had my mouth sealed over her pussy with some suction applied and my tongue rotating around it. Julia was responding very happily. I concentrated more and harder on her clit, in the ways she likes, leading up to increasingly hard licks, 'bites' - with my lips; not teeth - and quite firm sucks and licks of just her clit. Julia got more enthusiastic and noisy. When she got very noisy, I pulled my head back at just the right time, leaving a couple of fingers behind to help her hit her peak. I've learned by having my face bashed repeatedly that I can't hold her with only one good arm when her orgasm hits her, so when she's just about to blow I get my face out of the danger zone. I leaned back and left her to her two or three full-body bucks. When she had finished advertising my oral expertise to the neighborhood and had collapsed, I grabbed a couple of pillows, put one on top of the other, then flipped her over onto them while making sure her skirt stayed pulled up above her waist. Her rear end was nicely elevated and her clit was not in contact with the pillow as it'd be too sensitive after being worked on so much recently. I checked to see that her head was turned to allow her to breathe easily. Her last orgasm hadn't been powerful enough to make her pass out so she'd turned her head herself. I discarded my shirt, grabbed our second-to-last rubber and put it on. I parted her legs and entered her pussy, slowly stroking and waiting for her to react. I decided that it was time for the supposed boss to assert his authority, so I overrode her "Hurry!" command. This one was going to be nice and slow. I didn't hasten my strokes, keeping them long and slow, pausing for a second at each reversal of direction. I ran my hands up her legs, over her ass, and across her back, and down again. Just rubbing as much of her as I could, trying to make this a sensual experience. She seemed to be lazily basking in the sensations, making me ask, "How are you feeling, My Beautiful Lover?" "Very well loved. Very happy and very content. Very happy to let you do all the work too, you do it so well. I hope you don't want me to move. I want to just keep lying here and enjoying this." "The occasional moan to inspire me is all I require. Leave all the rest to me." I spent the next several minutes slowly stroking in and out, picking up speed very slowly because there was no hurry. It was delightful. I just kind of turned off my thinking and enjoyed the moments. By accident, when my hands were both massaging her ass, her rosebud came into view as her cheeks were parted. Without thought I ran one of my fingers over it. Julia gave a small, happy, "Hmmm." That got my attention! I moved my hands to a better position and ran my left index finger along her butt crack until it reached her asshole. I held it there, gently pushing enough to flex her opening but not to penetrate it, watching closely to see her reaction. She "Hmmm'd" again. This looked interesting, so I pressed a little harder. Julia was definitely receptive, even wiggling her ass slightly. That was an unmistakable invitation, so I pushed even harder. #4: #2: #4: It sounded like good advice, so I removed my finger - Julia made a disappointed sound - and rubbed it back and forth in the juices that were leaking out of her pussy. Placing my finger back on her asshole got an "Oh yes!" from Julia, who now understood what was about to happen. I pushed hard enough to penetrate to the first knuckle. I could tell by her body language and hmmm'ing that Julia approved, but I felt I should ask to make sure. I couldn't remember Mom ever mentioning it, but I assumed it'd be polite to ask before sticking my finger much farther up someone's asshole. So I checked, "I can see you like this, don't you?" "Yes. I like the sensations it gives me, I like you penetrating me. I like you taking me. I like it all. More please." I've never previously refused a polite, ass-penetration request from a beautiful girl, and didn't see any reason to do so now, so I slowly pushed my finger all the way in. Feeling my cock sliding in and out 'next door' was a strange feeling, but my cock and finger enjoyed feeling each other. Julia enjoyed the dual sensations too, getting more and more voluble in her approval. "Oh I like that. More. Both at the same time feels great. Yes, harder darling - harder with both - yes, just like that. She started humping back. We stumbled a bit trying to find a good rhythm for my cock, my finger, and her humps, but we eventually got synchronized at a good, medium-speed frequency, and just let ourselves enjoy it for a while. Julia was clearly getting-off on the dual stimulations. For me it was mostly the perversion of it, combined with watching the effect it was having on her. I do like a nice bit of mutually enjoyable perversion. Her moans were telling me that she was getting hotter and hotter. After a while the constant frequency wasn't fast enough for her. "Faster. Fuck me. I want you to fuck me, both holes at once. God, I love what you do to my body. Faster, harder, yes, yes." She stopped humping me, spread her legs wider and arched her ass higher in the air to give me a better angle. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me you wonderful man. Yes like that, harder, harder, yes, harder, yes, yes, Yes, Yes, YES, YES, YYEESS!, YYYEESSS! ARRGGHH!" Just a few seconds before the end I realized I should let myself cum this time too. She might need a rest after this one and I didn't want to miss out on having a cum, so I let mine happen along with hers. It's very easy for me to tell when Julia is about to go off: it happens about three seconds after my ears start hurting. She must've particularly enjoyed that one because she collapsed into a post-coital nap. I disposed of the rubber, wiped my cock and finger, and lay beside her, pulling her off the pillows and on to her side so we were spooning. I wrapped my arms around her, and held her as she awoke. "I liked that," she announced. I resisted making a smart-ass comment, just saying, "I'm glad. I enjoyed it too, and I loved seeing you get off on it. I think we'll be doing a lot more of that." "Goody. That was my hope too." We spooned for a few seconds more, then she emphatically added, "We are going to do EVERYTHING. I want to try everything with you. You keep bringing me more and more pleasure. It's unbelievable. You're not Mr. Right, you're Mr. Fucking Awesome." We contemplated my fucking awesomeness for a minute or two, then another thought crossed Julia's mind. "You know, I hardly ever get to see you cum. You cum at the same time as me sometimes don't you? You've told me you do." "Yes, when I want to, I cum with you. I did that time. Guys can't cum as often as girls so I spread mine out." "I miss seeing you do it. When mine starts I can't see or remember anything. Can you please sometimes cum before me when we're having sex? Just before me would be great, to give me an extra thrill just as I climax." "I would be delighted to do that. I simply never thought of it before. When I cum in the future, I'll do most of them just before you. Don't wait for me though, as I don't let myself cum most of the times you climax." "Ha! As if I could 'wait'. When you get me that excited there's nothing I can do to stop myself. Not like you. Do you know how unique you are? Most guys can't control when they cum, other than by slowing down their movements which slows the girl down too. You can thrust at full speed and simply choose whether you want to cum or not. That's incredible. I'm such a lucky girl!" "I'm curious how you know so much about how guys work?" "I've talked to my family about it, especially Mom. She's explained how lucky I am in considerable detail. All the males in this family are envious of your sexual abilities. Andrew and Robert shake their heads at your never needing to stop. Other guys HAVE to rest after a couple of cums. {Sigh}. It's so good being me." She put her arms over mine and held them tight into her body while she thought about how good it was being her, and I thought about how good it was being me. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door, followed by Vanessa cracking it an inch and calling through, "Does the absence of screams mean you've finished ravishing my little girl?" We laughed and Julia cried out, "Temporarily, I hope. If you give us a few seconds we'll get under the covers and you can come in." "No need. I've just come up to request your presence in the living room. We've finished our little chat and want to talk with the two of you for a while. Can you come down soon please? Before any more ravishing." "We'll have a very quick shower then come down." "Thanks. See you then." ------- Chapter 26: Educational Offer Wednesday, April 6, 2005 (Continued) Julia and I quickly showered the parts of us that most needed it, then dressed and went to join our parents in the living room. I had no idea what to expect. From Julia's comments it seemed that Prof and Vanessa were very happy to help me, but I didn't know what they were going to be telling my parents, or how Mom and Dad would react. When we entered the living room I nervously looked at the four parents. They were smiling and relaxed, which eased my concern a great deal. I sat down and Julia curled up on my lap. Mom led off, talking to me, "Andrew and Robert are entertaining Carol and Donna in the Guys' Room for a while, so Prof can make his offer to you. Your father and I have discussed it with him and we're in general agreement, but the decision is yours. I'll let Prof tell you himself." Prof took over, "As you know, I'm a real Professor of Mathematics at OSU. My department and I are quite excited about your potential future in mathematics, and we want to help your education in that direction. What we're offering has several components. First, immediate access to our department's courses. You can audit whichever of those you want, you'll have access to our lecturers, library, computer labs, etc. All the usual accesses that a student would have, although the staff you deal with should give you more attention than is normal. When enrollments open, you can enroll in any Math courses free of charge and Vanessa and I will pay for any textbooks you need. We get those at the staff rate so they don't cost much. If you want to enroll in other departments, we'll try to get you special treatment but we can't guarantee that. -- "Second, my department will be providing you with a computer of your own with access to all our online materials. You can even order our library books online and I'll bring them back and forth, as that'll be more convenient for you. We're going to change our spare bedroom into a study for you because the Department wants me to supervise. We'll get a good desk, some bookshelves put up, some better lighting, and the usual study things. Anything you particularly want, just let us know. Julia will be happy to know that you'll be spending more time here, just make sure not all of it's with her. I doubt your grades would suffer much, but hers might." Prof gave a small grin, but he clearly meant what he'd said. -- "Third, these arrangements apply while you're at school, so the rest of this school year and all next year assuming you do 12th grade then. We'll reconsider your options after you graduate school. None of this binds you to OSU. If, when you're older, you want to do something other than Mathematics or go to a different college or university, that's fine with us. In fact, we'd probably be disappointed if you went to OSU, as there are better universities nationally and internationally for someone with your abilities." Mom reacted to one word, "Internationally?" Prof said, "Yes. As smart as Mark is, and presuming he does even better with access to these sorts of facilities, I expect there will be international competition for his attendance. In a couple of years he might be anywhere. Cambridge has a very good Math program, for example. Anything's possible. That's why I say it's not likely he'll end up going to OSU." Mom said, "Oh, I hadn't realized that we might lose him in a year and a half. That's a shock." "There's no knowing what will happen this early yet, Felicity. We've still got our boys home at 26, although they'll graduate soon and we expect one or both to move out not long after at. Mark will have many choices, and we don't know which he'll take. He'll still be young, so maybe he'll choose to stay at home for an extra year. Or maybe he'll do his undergraduate degree at OSU. That'd be great for us, as we'd certainly love to design a course for him." "You'd design his own course?" "That's not as impressive as it seems as college courses are quite flexible, but even if they weren't, they would be for Mark. There aren't enough mathematicians in the world as good as Mark has the potential to become. My department would be thrilled to help nurture one more. Or maybe he'll decide to be a professional 8-ball player? We just don't know what he'll do. We can guide, but it's his choice." #1: I felt obliged to speak up, "Prof, your offer is very generous, but I'm afraid I'll be wasting it. I seriously doubt that I'll be as good a mathematician as you say." Vanessa spoke up, "We're just putting opportunities in front of you. Which ones you accept, and how well you do at them is not the issue. We know you're smart, self-motivated to study well, and of good character. That's ALL we need to know. I cannot imagine you disappointing us regardless of which direction you end up going in. Prof would get a thrill out of your becoming a world-class mathematician, but despite his enthusiasm for math, we're mostly concerned just that you have good opportunities. If math doesn't attract you, don't worry about it, and don't feel pressured to go down that path just because Prof is a mathematician. That would disappoint us both." "But what about the money that will be spent on me? I don't feel comfortable taking advantage of that and not being as good as you hope." Vanessa answered again, "What 'we hope' is that you try. That's all we're asking. Don't worry about the money. You'd be surprised how little this will cost. If you end up world-class anything, OSU will recoup their investment thousands of times over from their marketing program about their involvement with you. They're spending a small amount of petty cash on the chance of getting themselves in the history books for recognizing and nurturing your abilities. As for the money Prof and I will spend, it'll be money we'll enjoy spending. We'll enjoy seeing what you can do and seeing our daughter happy." Julia, who had just been lying on my lap, whispered in my ear, "Don't make it too hard. Just say 'Yes'." I told the parents, "I'd like to say yes, but I still have some worries. What about how I split my time between here and home. How much time will I have to spend here?" Vanessa responded again. "You won't 'have to' do anything, Mark. Come and go as you wish. We trust your self-motivation. We think you'll be able to study better here, with your own computer, three college graduate males to answer any questions you might have, and more access to OSU website, but it's up to you how you allocate your time." Prof spoke up again. "One thing we've been thinking about is how to make it easier for you to go back and forth between your home and here. It's a pity Julia didn't get her license when she first could because the six months provisional period would be up already and she could drive you. We'll get her to go for her license soon, but that won't help you for six months. I'm going to try to get an exemption for you, so you can get a license immediately, hopefully an unrestricted one but even provisional would be better than nothing. I'll book some driving lessons for you, which will give us time to try to get the DMV side of things arranged." #4: #1: #4: #3: #2: "You won't need to book any lessons for me, Prof. I can already drive." Dad thought that was interesting, "Really? When have you ever driven?" #3: #4: "I've been watching you carefully. I have no doubt I can drive. Take me to a large parking lot on the way home and I'll drive around it to show you. I should flick through the Driver Manual just to make sure I know that side of things, but I don't expect any problems there either. I could probably take my practical test tomorrow if we needed to. The theory I'd need a few days to bone up on." (#3 and #4 had been amused to learn that the "Oregon Driver Manual" is called exactly that, they suspected because the author of it couldn't decide where to put the apostrophe in Drivers. It's very rare that I get to enjoy feeling superior over someone else because of my grammatical knowledge.) Dad commented, "You're a constant surprise. Most kids sweat bullets worrying about getting their license, but you just wave your hand and say 'No problem'. But after your 8-ball demonstration I'm inclined to believe you. It might not matter though; Prof, how can you get a license for Mark at fifteen?" Prof answered. "I don't know that I can, but I think that if the law allows it, then we have a good shot at it. Mark's only seven months away from his sixteenth birthday so if there's any flexibility in the system then we're not asking for much. I think I can get OSU's Dean onto the case, and he'll probably have enough pull." (Corvallis is a university town, with OSU contributing as much to the city's economy as all other employers combined.) -- "He'll emphasize Mark's academic potential, and how essential his being able to study effectively is. It doesn't sound like much, but the Dean can motivate the right politician by talking about an Einstein in the making that will make Corvallis world famous forever. That should provide enough grease. Especially as Mark's IQ score is higher than the estimates of Einstein's." ^ [[Because of how language is stored in human minds, it is less rigorously synchronized, allowing more than the usual degree of inter-dimensional inconsistency. In most w-dimensions, the job title of the number one boss of OSU is "President" not "Dean". "Dean" is the original English term for that position, but some time ago in most dimensions American universities decided to change the title to "President", exactly as most Americas changed from "knickers" to "panties", although university Presidents would probably object to being likened to panties. In this w-dimension they kept "Dean". Language drift is especially common with trendy words, or those where the variations are subtle. For example, in all the dimensions encountered so far in my autobiography, Americans use "Mom", but across the entire W-Dimension most Americas use "Mum", and some dimensions even favor "Mam". When my 'immigrant' minds were speaking, they would occasionally use a word or phrase 'incorrectly' for the current dimension, causing a small amount of confusion. It was never more than a momentary nuisance, but I found it interesting and Prof's mentioning the Dean of OSU reminded me of it.]] ^ Dad, "Really?" #3: #4: #3: #4: #1: #2: Prof answered Dad, "Yes. History books might one day be written about Mark. If he's anything like another Einstein, a large number of them will be written, plus documentary programs filmed. It's easy to make that comparison to a politician, as even the dumbest politician has heard of Einstein. Politicos would love to be immortalized in history as someone who helped the next Einstein, and they'd hate to be immortalized as someone who hindered him. The Dean should easily be able to use their vanity." Julia spoke up for the first time, "I'm tired of waiting. Is it official yet? Is Mark going to be spending more time here?" Everyone looked at me. I looked at Mom and Dad, asking them, "It sounds good to me. Is it okay with you guys?" Mom said, "There are still some issues, like your not getting out of your chores and being home often enough to spend time with us and your sisters, but other than those sorts of things, it's okay with us. In fact I'm relieved, as I was getting very worried about how to plan for your education." Julia said, "Yippee!" and gave me a BIG kiss, tongue and all, in front of everyone. Females have no shame. Unfortunately I do, and my face went red yet again. Mom said, "Yes, that's another thing we have to make sure is balanced properly. Homework first, recreation afterward." Dad spoke up. "Mark, the bedroom rules won't be changing. You still won't be able to stay here overnight, sorry. At least, not until the trial is over." "You keep saying the trial's relevant, but I don't understand what it's got to do with my staying here overnight?" Mom answered, "That's to protect you and us. You've had reporters chase you, and soon the various defense lawyers will be looking for material to attack you with. It's a standard tactic of our justice system to besmirch the victim as much as possible to make the crime seem as if it was more deserved. If they could prove you stayed with Julia overnight, they'd find a way to use it to make you seem worse than the boys who attacked you. With the media's interest in the story, it'd be trumpeted loudly, and we could be in a lot of trouble. -- "We've taken a calculated risk letting you have sex in Julia's room because it's upstairs and can be closed off. That's why her drapes are permanently closed now." Now that Mom mentioned it, I had noticed they were always drawn shut, but I'd never bothered to ask about it. Prof added, "Remember that we originally asked you to make sure Julia's stereo was on? That was before anyone knew how loud she is. No stereo could drown out someone having that much fun, so we're having to soundproof her room." "How come you never explained the trial issue before?" I'd been looking at Mom, but Prof answered, "It would've upset your enjoyment of each other. It doesn't matter now because her room will be soundproofed before you get back here again, and then you'll be safe from anything but an extreme level of snooping. I'm also getting a couple of motion sensors put up outside Julia's room, with a light that'll come on in the room to tell you to cool it. You should be fine after that." "I never thought of any of this." Dad said, "It's just the sort of crap we have to put up with because of how things get done these days." Mom added, "That's why we haven't encouraged you to go out on public dates. Remember how your first date's restaurant booking was made in Julia's name? That was to reduce the chance of anyone seeing your name on the booking sheet and trying to earn a bit extra by tipping off a reporter that you would be there. I'm sure you didn't want reporters all over you on that date! -- "I thought we were being followed that night too, so I did some creative driving to make sure we weren't. Your date was only one day after those reporters bothered you at school, so we were paranoid, but better safe than sorry when it comes to the press." "Wow. It's horrible that you have to worry about that sort of stuff." "It certainly is, but it won't last much longer. You'll be old news after the trial, and no one will care. You can start behaving like any other teenager, and will probably be allowed to stay overnight from time to time. We'll discuss that at the time because you won't be given free rein." After my last 'screw-up' of treating Julia as a sex object when talking to Mom, I didn't dare make an issue of being able to have more sex with Julia, and it would have been especially stupid to do it about something two months away (that's when the trial was expected). Instead, I went with something the talk about "staying overnight" had reminded me of: Carol's sleepover. "Mom, I've just remembered that I'd suggested to Carol that while everyone was together tonight, she arrange a sleepover night with Julia and Vanessa. She's very excited about that, so please don't forget." Julia jumped in, "Oh! That reminds me. When we were in the hot tub I got carried away talking to my new sister - that's Carol, like I said in my speech at dinner. Did she tell you about that while Mark and I were upstairs?" Mom answered, "No?" "I said quite a lot, so I'd better explain. In my speech I said I considered her my sister. The more I thought about that afterward, the more it appealed to me. I've never had a sister, and she's such a lovely girl that I'd love to spend more time with her. So I took her sleepover idea and extended it. I'd like her to visit with me quite often, staying over whenever she can. I even said we'd set up a computer next to mine so we could study together. Oh Dad, while I remember, I also said that when you get my walls rebuilt I'd like to have more closets added please, so Carol and I will have room to hang some clothes. I need a lot more room anyway, so that's a good idea regardless. -- "I couldn't work out a way around the problem of wanting to make love to Mark in my room if Carol was here as well because I was imagining her computer being set up next to mine, but if you're changing the spare room into a study for Mark, we could put Carol's and my computers in there too so we could study together, and that'd also leave the bedroom free for Mark and me. What do you think? Does that sound good?" The parents laughed. Vanessa said, "You're quite enthusiastic about Carol, aren't you?" "Oh yes! She's a lovely girl. I'll love to have her come over as often as she can. That'll be neat and I know she's very excited too, but I'm worried about Felicity and Steven. If Mark and Carol come over here more, you're home is suddenly going to feel lonely. What do you think, Felicity?" Mom answered, "Thank you for being so loving toward Carol. We appreciate it. I must admit that my first reaction was just as you said: suddenly my home felt empty. But Carol's coming here sometimes would be good for her. She spends so much time studying that she doesn't have enough social life, so it'll be great if she could spend time with you. She doesn't need another computer though, that's definitely going WAY too far." I spoke up, "Carol can share my computer. We're used to that anyway, so no problem. We could have our own study areas side by side with the computer in the middle so either one of us could use it." I had thought about my "Split Down The Middle" study method, and decided that I didn't mind if Julia or Carol knew that I did it. I'd been caught doing it briefly a few times at school so it wasn't that big a deal. Best not advertised, but not too bad to be open about with my favorite two girls. Prof added. "If Mark can get an unrestricted license he'll be able to drive Carol back and forth, which will be convenient." Mom said, "I won't be comfortable about him driving Carol until he's had several months experience." Prof said, "Felicity, Mark learned the physical coordination required to beat The Boys at 8-ball in a few minutes. He'll be driving better than you or Steven after a day or two. I'll trust him to drive Julia more than I trust myself or Vanessa. Mark's not an ordinary boy. We'll buy a car next week for Julia and Mark to share. Even if Mark can't get his license yet, Julia needs to start working on getting hers." Dad said, "That'd work out nicely. It'll be good to be freed up from having to play taxi so often." Julia jumped to her feet, "Can I tell Carol please? That she can be my part-time sister!" Julia stood shuffling from foot to foot, waiting for the answer. Prof summarized, "Have we taken care of business here now? I can get my Department's actions under way tomorrow so Mark can start auditing our courses, and I'll talk with the Dean about Mark's license. Mark, you read up on the Road Code. -- "The builders and electrician start tomorrow so you need to tell me what additions you want in your room, Julia. Give me a drawing please, so I can get the builders to quote against it. With more closets your room will be narrower for most of its length, but you'll gain by moving your study desk out and it's fairly large room anyway, so that should be okay. -- "The spare room can be turned into a study just by buying the right furniture. It won't need the builders to do anything. I'll give fitting that out to The Boys to do: moving Julia's existing desk and computer in there, getting three new desks - one each for Mark and Carol, plus a small one for the computer between them. We have to check we have enough internet capacity too. -- "Andrew likes playing around with cars so I'll get him to pick up one for you Julia. We'll talk with him about what you want. Anything else?" No one had any suggestions. "If that's all, it should all be taken care of by early next week. Why don't we have an informal dinner here next Wednesday, as a sort of unveiling. That'll be a good night for Carol to stay over, as Julia's room will be a work-in-progress between now and then." Mom said, "My head's spinning a bit. That's a lot of changes for me to get used to. Mark's often commented about how organized Julia can be at times. Now I know where she gets it from." Vanessa added, "Hopefully Mark will learn the same skills. He'll need them later." Mom, "How do you mean?" Vanessa answered, "We don't know what direction Mark will choose to go in, but if he chooses business he could end up running a company bigger than Microsoft. He'll need organizational skills to run a billion dollar company." Mom and Dad, "Oh dear." I didn't say it; I just thought it. #2: #4: #1: I walked up to them, and put my arm and half around them as best I could. "I'm only fifteen, for goodness sake. I've got a lot of childhood left, and I'm not in any hurry to become an adult. Quite frankly, everything I've learned about being an adult recently has scared me away from ever wanting to be one. You're not going to be losing me any time soon, Mom and Dad." #1: "So, can I tell Carol, PLEASE?" from Julia. Mom and Dad looked at each other for a second, then Mom turned to Julia, "Go for it." Julia yelled, "Whee!" ran back to me, grabbed my hand and started dragging me all the way to the Guys' Room, the adults following more slowly. When we got there the girls were watching a movie, and The Boys were playing 8-ball. Robert saw Julia and me enter, and said, "Ah, you caught us practicing." "Let me know when you're ready and we'll go for another ten dollars." Then I quickly looked around. Phew, Mom wasn't close enough to hear. Julia pulled me closer to where Carol was sitting. Carol looked up at us, and realized we wanted her attention. Julia put a hand on Carol's shoulder and said, "Do you remember what we talked about in the tub?" Carol looked a bit puzzled, looked briefly at Donna, then back up at Julia. Still with the puzzled look on her face, Carol asked, "Object?" Julia laughed, then said, "No, that's not what I meant, SISTER. Can you think what else we talked about, SISTER?" Carol advanced a hesitant guess: "Sister?" "YES! All our parents have agreed. You can spend a lot of time here, have your own closet and study desk, and everything else. You can be my part-time sister." Carol leaped to her feet, bursting into tears and crushing Julia in a hug. It was very nice to see how happy Carol was. I sensed movement behind me, and saw that our parents were close enough to have heard too, which made me happy. Prof strode smartly forward, and with a flourish produced a fresh handkerchief and offered it to Carol, who made good use of it again. #4: #2: Carol's joy at Julia's invitation clearly affected my parents. I could see that they felt very happy with their decision to let her be Julia's part-time sister. It made me feel great too. I looked at them, and said quietly, "It's a very good thing, isn't it?" Mom quietly returned, "Yes. I think Carol's been lonelier than we knew. We like your choice of girlfriend, Mark. You've chosen a gem with her. With an amazing family too." While Carol was recovering, Mom and Dad explained to her that Julia's bedroom was being rebuilt, that we'd all be back next Wednesday evening, and she could stay overnight then. There were lots of hugs between the two girls, lots of, "We're going to have such a great time together", etc. I went and sat by Donna, who'd turned off the TV and was just watching. "How are you, racehorse?" "I'm happy for Carol. Look how happy she is! But I'm going to miss her when she's sleeping here. We've always slept in the same room so it's going to feel empty without her." "Yes, I can imagine. I'm going to feel like our home is emptier just knowing she is not across the hall from me. It's going to be worse for you." "Sometimes we argue a bit or get in each other's way, but I'm going to miss her." "I'll try to make sure I spend more time with you on those afternoons. We can do more goofing off. And make sure you come and see me if you are feeling sad and want some company. We can cheer each other up." In the general milling around I said to The Boys, "Prof says he's going to turn the spare bedroom into a study for me, Carol and Julia, and that he'd get you guys to do the furniture arranging. I'm quite fussy about how I like my study area laid out. Can I give you a call tomorrow evening to discuss it please?" Robert answered, "I'll be home after 6, so call me then. If I'm not just describe it to Mom or Dad and they'll pass it on." Prof thought of another thing, and I heard him ask my parents, "Do you mind if we get a couple of cellphones for Mark and Carol? Everyone in our family has one, and I'd feel better knowing they could contact us in an emergency." Dad answered, "That's a good idea, especially if Mark starts driving. We can afford that, so leave that one to us." Prof agreed. We ended the evening soon after that. As we were leaving Vanessa gave me a good-sized container of leftovers. I proudly announced, "I love this family!" Then made my belly rumble. I thought it was a good note to finish on. Julia gave me a goodnight kiss, and said, "Talk with you tomorrow, darling. I am so glad things are working out so well. This has been such a fantastic evening." I held the car door open for Carol, of course. Once we were seated, she burst into tears again and hugged me with both her arms, wetting my shirt, and reminding me to get some hankies. She thanked me repeatedly for letting Julia be her friend. I protested, "I didn't 'let Julia be your friend.' Apart from anything else, I'd be far too scared to get in the way of anything Julia wanted. But in this case it was very easy. The whole idea was Julia's because of how wonderful you are, and I'm very happy to see so much happiness between two of my favorite girls." Nonetheless, she held me close until Dad said, "We're in a parking lot, Mark. Want to take the family for a drive?" He got out of the car to swap seats with me. Carol and Donna looked confused. I got into the driver's seat, made minimal adjustments to the seat position and mirrors, then drove around easily, pretending the parking lot was streets, with all the necessary give ways, indications, checking of mirrors, etc. Even some three-point turns, parallel parking and the like. I had a little bit of awkwardness initially, for the first thirty seconds or so, but after that it was easy. Donna was the first to speak, not caring about my concentrating on my task, "When did you learn to drive?" Only two of my minds were concentrating - the ones that had the license and driving experience - so it was easy for another of my minds to answer her, "Just from watching Mom and Dad. We were discussing my learning to drive with Prof and Vanessa tonight while you were watching your movie, and I said I thought I could do it already. So we agreed to try this on the way home. Seems pretty easy to me." Dad said, "You sure you've never driven before? You haven't sneaked this car out when we've been away or anything?" "No Dad." Strictly speaking, I hadn't driven THIS car, merely an identical one in another dimension. "No way would I sneak a drive in your car. I just pick this sort of stuff up quickly, same as I learned 8-ball, okay?" Dad answered, "It took me months to learn." Mom added, "Me too." I said, "So I can't claim good genes this time, huh?" Mom said, "The best genes in this family are sitting in the driver's seat. You're an amazing boy. I'm glad we've got Prof and Vanessa's help with you, quite frankly. Your father and I aren't prepared for some of the decisions you're going to be facing in the next few years. Prof sees the educational big picture much better than we do, and he can actively help too, which is a relief." "I'm still years away from being an adult, Mom. I know I've learned a huge amount from the crash course in dating that you and Julia have subjected me to, but I know I'll need you guys for a LONG TIME yet. It's good to get Prof's academic help though, even though I get the impression that he and Vanessa are going to be expecting a lot from me. I hope I don't let them down." "They seem to have a very good attitude to that. They both commented that you're still a kid who should be having fun as much as anything else, and I can't see them letting you neglect Julia either, so I don't think you've got much to worry about. -- "Stop the car and swap seats, Mark. I'm tired; let's go home." ------- Lying in bed that night I made a mental list of things I should think about: How could I run long distance without getting tired. That seemed to break several biological, chemical and physical laws. Preparing for our next six-weekly déjà vu, assuming we've gotten the frequency calculation right. My relationship with the Williams family, especially Julia, now that they have some ideas of my capabilities. How I wanted my new educational work to fit in. Life was getting complicated. While I was thinking about this afternoon's déjà vu, I remembered the underwater breath-holding test. The Williams' house had a hot tub, so I could test myself at their place very easily with Julia sitting next to me, to lift my head out of the water if I looked like I was about to drown. It was comforting that I could get help from Julia now. It'd been a long day, and I couldn't be bothered thinking anymore, so I sent myself to sleep. ------- Part 3: Profound Aikido Discoveries ------- Chapter 27: My First Aikido Lesson Thursday, April 7, 2005 Before I headed through to breakfast, I had the idea of slipping Dad my 8-ball winnings for him to buy me some more rubbers, but I remembered that I hadn't used any of the rubbers that he'd given me for my first date. I collected them all to give to Julia at school. I might as well keep them all at her place as I wasn't going to need them anywhere else, especially after the scare Mom and Dad gave me last night about reporters and lawyers. I was gathering my breakfast when Carol walked into the kitchen. I put my arm around her, and said, "I'm going to miss seeing your face on those mornings you're at Julia's." She hugged me back and said, "I'll miss your face too." The literal idea of anyone missing my face surprised me, "Haha. Thanks for the sentiment, but I know which one of us has got a face that is FAR better to look at than the other." Carol looked puzzled for a moment, then, "You aren't fair to yourself. You're a good looking guy." Chuckling, I said, "Thanks, sis. I appreciate your loyalty, but you'll never convince me that my face comes close to your beauty." During breakfast Mom said to Donna and me, "Remember you two have martial arts tonight. I'll drop Mark off at his, then I'll stay with Donna. That'll mean I'll be a few minutes late picking you up again, Mark, because Donna's class runs fifteen minutes after yours." "That's fine." In the car on the way to school, Carol said, "You might miss my face in the mornings, but we'll see more of each other at Julia's. We'll be able to study together, so it'll be easier for me to get your help with my homework. My grades should improve, haha." I met up with Julia at school and slipped her the rubbers when we weren't being observed. She said, "I'm looking forward to not having to use these soon." She saw my horrified expression and quickly explained, "I've already gotten my pills. My period starts in a day or two and I begin taking them then. Soon we won't have to worry about condoms. It'll be great to be able to feel the real you." Stopping to put rubbers on and disposing of them afterward was a nuisance, so I nodded happily. Julia continued, "Breakfast was very happy this morning. My family is looking forward to being involved in your life. Dad's given The Boys their orders this morning. Robert asked me to remind you to call him about your study layout tonight. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my life! It's great and going to get even better. How fantastic is that!" "I don't understand how fantastic it is. I don't really know what's happening at your house. You all think I'm a bigger deal than I am, and I don't understand why?" Julia reassured me, "Don't worry, Mom and Dad will answer your questions and no one will push you to do anything you don't want to. It's a win-win for everyone, especially you and me. When you come over on the weekend we can all have a good talk about it." I drew out a rough plan for how I'd like my study laid out. Nothing fancy, just to ensure that there was enough room for two sets of work to be done at the same time, and that each hand could reach for whatever its mind needed without needing the whole body to get up and move. That mostly just needed a deep enough desk area with some handy shelves. I gave the plan to Julia, asking her, "Please pass this on to Robert, as I have Aikido tonight. He can call me after 7 if he has any questions." ------- It was a nice day, so Julia and I were reclined on the grass in our usual outdoor lunchtime spot when we saw Carol looking for us about fifteen minutes into lunchtime. We called and waved her over to us. As she was about to sit down next to Julia, Julia said, "Sister, sit on the other side of Mark please." Carol moved to do so, while asking, "Why?" Julia leaned toward Carol across my front, so Carol matched her. Julia answered, "Several reasons. To protect him from other girls. You would not believe how many other girls find him irresistible! He's a hunk and one of the nicest guys ever, and there are dozens of girls whose panties get wet whenever they think about him." Carol blushed at what was obviously a VERY bizarre exaggeration, but Julia carried on before I could disagree with her, "He's got the two of us, and doesn't need any more for now. And anyway, none of the others are good enough for him. -- "I want us to get in the habit of sitting and standing on either side of him. He's the most important and most wonderful of the three of us, so he should be the center of our attention. Do you agree with me so far, sister?" "Yes." "Good. And the third reason is so we can talk back and forth across him, and have a lot of fun teasing him. Haha." Carol laughed at that too, until Julia continued, "I think it's only fair. I let him do absolutely anything and everything he wants to my body, so it's only fair I get to tease him sometimes." Mom wanted Julia's and my being lovers kept low key in front of my sisters, so this was certainly not the time or place for such a discussion. I tried to, "Shush Julia." Carol just tremulously asked, "Anything?" "Shusshh!" "Yes, and he does it exquisitely. He's a superb lover." "Julia! Shush. You can't talk like this at school. Please stop." Fortunately, Julia responded, "Yes Mark, I'll stop." Then Julia looked at Carol again, and said, "You see how much fun he is to tease? Haha." Carol, seeing my discomfort, laughed back. Then Julia added, "The best part is that every word I said is true. Anyway, my beautiful sister, did you come here to talk with us about something?" Carol had come mainly to thank Julia for her friendship and kindness. The two girls - one of them in danger of being demoted to my second favorite after the embarrassment she'd caused me - gushed at each other while eating their lunches, leaning across me to talk with each other. It was quite distracting for me, and it takes a lot to distract me from lunch because I'm usually very hungry by then. Carol said, "I'm SO looking forward to my sleepover with you!" Julia had a higher priority, "I'm even more looking forward to the Saturday after that. That's when we'll go shopping for you. We're going to buy you so many beautiful clothes, new swimsuits, nightwear, clothes to wear to school, and heaps more. I need to start making a list because there's so much to get." Poor Carol (literally "poor") still couldn't believe her good fortune, "Are you sure? It sounds VERY expensive." "I am absolutely positive. I've already talked to Daddy about this and the money is all taken care of. We've got lots of lovely things to buy for you, but I'll tell you the single most important purchase we are definitely making. Do you remember the dress I wore on my first date with Mark?" "Do I ever! It was gorgeous!" "On the Saturday after next, you and I are going back to that boutique and we're getting one at least as good for you." Carol had to catch her breath before she could respond. She gasped, "I've never, EVER had anything like that before." "And that's not all." Carol was almost too afraid to ask, "It's not?" "No. We're going to save those dresses until Mark gets his cast taken off. Then we're dressing in them and are taking him out to celebrate. He'll have two arms then, and I want them around each of us all night. We can take turns feeding him. We are going to show him how much we love him." "Oh my," said Carol weakly, as she leaned against me for support. #3: #4: #2: < "Cramp our style"?> #1: #2: #1: #3: Julia continued, "I wish we could walk through school dressed like that, with Mark's arms around us both. That'd teach the hundreds of other girls who want him, that he's OURS." #4: <"Hundreds of girls" - ha! Not that it matters because I pity the poor girl who tries to get to us through Julia. Julia will rip her to shreds.> "There's still more, my beautiful sister." "There is?" "After we come back from dinner, we're going to the hot tub. I'm going to put on some soft music, light candles around the tub, turn the lights off, then we are going to sit on either side of Mark, so he can put his arms around us, and we are going to take turns feeding him grapes. How does that sound?" "Dreamy." "Yes, exactly right. 'Dreamy' is the perfect word. But I do have one question I haven't decided yet. I haven't decided whether we should wear swimsuits or be naked." "{Gasp}. Naked? With Mark?" "Yes. I'm still thinking about that. I'll let you know what I decide." "Oh," Carol blushed while thinking about it, then she added, "Umm. Do you mean Mark would be naked too?" "Especially Mark. He looks very good naked because he's got a great body." I opened my mouth, but before I could speak Julia squeezed my arm hard. Clearly a message for me not to say what she knew I was about to say. I closed my mouth. Julia must know what she was doing, but damned if I did. It must be something to do with the boy that'd turned Carol down, but I couldn't see how teasing Carol about being naked helped with that. I can't understand one girl, so I had no chance of deciphering what one girl was doing for another. I did what I do best, sat quietly and observed. Carol tentatively suggested, "I don't think Mom would approve of us being naked like that." Julia answered, "We do things differently in my house. If we have our meals at different times than your family, you wouldn't insist on our changing to your usual time whenever you're at our place. Mark and you will adjust to my family's behaviors, one of which is being treated as more adult than you're used to. Being comfortable with each other's bodies is part of being trustworthy and mature. Andrew came into my bedroom when Mark and I were making love a few days ago..." #3: " ... and no one worried about it. Mom even told me later that she was proud we trusted each other that much. Don't worry about us being naked in the hot tub. There are bound to be many times we see each other's bodies. If Mark and I are having sex in my room and you want to talk with one of us, just come in and talk with us. That'd be..." "Oh no, I couldn't! Not if you were... , you know." "Mark and I have sex VERY often! He's very, very good at making a girl feel wonderful. I like talking to you too, so there'll be times we'll be doing both at the same time. It's perfectly fine for you to see us making love. Plus your clothes will be hanging up in my room so if Mark and I are in there together and you need to get changed, you'll have to come in. You can't wait for us to finish because Mark can go for HOURS! He's an INCREDIBLE lover! I've talked to Mom, Dad and my brothers about how Mark makes love, and they all say he's far better than anyone they've ever heard of. My brothers are green with envy over how good he is. -- "I just realized that as your older sister, one of my responsibilities will be helping you learn about sex. That'll work out perfectly because Mark and I will be able to show you how it should be done. That'll be far better than you learning from some boy fumbling with you in the back row of the movies, or something equally immature. So I don't think you'll have to worry about seeing us naked in the hot tub Carol, haha. Over the next week or two you should think about sex quite often. Make a mental list of anything you want to know about or see, and Mark and I will make sure you understand it. -- "Enough about that. Have you seen the new season's range at..." Julia went on to talk about clothes shopping and fashion. I had what could be called a difficult decision: did I listen to the girls talking about clothes shopping, or did I think about sex and naked bodies. I chose the latter. (It COULD be called "a difficult decision". It wasn't of course, but it COULD be called that, if you didn't mind being totally wrong.) #1: #4: #2: I hadn't had anything to do with Julia until recently, and knew hardly anything about her, but I did know she never wore revealing clothes to school. Guys tend to notice things like that. I guess we must be observant, or something. #1: #4: #1, #2, #3: #3: #2: #1: #4: The rest of our lunchtime conversation was sane, although much of it was about the girls' planning a shopping frenzy, so "sane" isn't the most accurate description. Carol left a few minutes early because of her longer walk back to middle school. When Carol was out of earshot, I asked Julia, "I'm completely mystified about why you want us to make love in front of Carol. Mystified and anticipating being terribly embarrassed too. I presume you've got a good reason for it?" "I think I have, although I'm not totally sure yet. I'll have a long talk with Carol on the night she sleeps over with me, and then I'll know better." "You didn't actually say anything about your reason?" "I know. I need to do some more checking first. I think I'm right, but it'd be better if I kept it to myself in case I'm wrong." "Oh. Okay, I guess." We started walking back toward our lockers, and I thought to add, "Maybe you intend the best, but I sincerely hope I don't get used as a naked Sex-Education dummy for Carol." "It won't be like that. What I said was mostly a trick for me to learn more about Carol. I've haven't spent much time with her so I don't know her well enough yet." "Oh." #3: #4: #1: #4: #2: Julia said, "Would I be correct in guessing that Carol's moods have been up and down during the last week or so?" "Yes, quite a lot. She told me that there's been a lot going on in her life recently. I don't know what though. Remember I told you that some guy must've rejected her, but I'm thinking I might've been wrong about that. She made one bitter-sounding comment to me about not being able to get any sex, but I might've been reading too much into a single comment because I can't imagine any guy refusing an invitation to have sex with Carol. Guys normally leap at the chance to have sex with anything, so an invitation from Carol would be a dream come true." "It IS hard to believe. She's very beautiful?" "I'll say! Beautiful, a great figure, and a very sweet personality. God knows why a boy would turn her down. I know there have been plenty of boys interested in her because she gets phone calls from them sometimes and she complains about being hassled at school. She's never shown much interest in any guy that I've seen, and what interest she has shown has never lasted long. Which makes me even more confused about what's going on with her. It must have been something in school because I haven't noticed her doing much of anything else for the last week or so. I'm pretty much in the dark, so I hope you can find out what the situation is and help her with it." "I've got a theory which I'm fairly sure of, but I need to spend some more time with her to make certain. If I'm right, I think it'll be easy to solve." I asked happily, "Really?" Julia nodded, "Yeah. I'm almost certain about the solution already, but I need to confirm the problem is what I think it is first." "GREAT! I feel much better with you helping, even though I'm totally mystified about whatever it is you're doing. All I could think of was to ask Carol who the guy was and then beat him up, which is pretty stupid. I'd feel better, but I can't see it helping Carol. I'm sure you can do MUCH better than that. If there's anything I can do to help - beating him up or otherwise - please let me know." "Now that you mention it, there might be something you can do. If I ask you to do something for her in the next week or two, you'll do it won't you? Even if it seems a bit strange to you." "EVERYTHING girls do seems strange to me! It'd be strange if what you asked for wasn't strange. Of course I'll do it." "It truly might seem strange, but if I wink at you when asking you to do something, then I know what I'm doing and I want you do it without arguing. Okay?" "Sure. I'm sure you understand whatever Carol's having trouble with better than I do, so I'm happy to help you help her. Carol means a great deal to me." "I know, that's why it's so perfect." I didn't understand that statement, but I'm getting quite used to that when talking to Julia. We were about to go into a classroom block, so we had no privacy for further conversation. ------- We had an early dinner, except for Donna who would have hers after we returned, mostly of Vanessa's roast chicken leftovers - yippee! Then Mom took Donna and me to our two martial arts classes. We went to mine first because it started slightly earlier than Donna's. Mom and Donna came in to make sure I was settled in properly. I was just going to sit on the side and observe, so not much was required. We introduced ourselves to the sensei, who was almost the opposite of what I'd expected. Instead of some fit, energetic Japanese man, he was a 65-year old (I guessed), short, English gentleman called Sensei Nigel. He had a very noticeable, well-spoken English accent, and it was easy to see that the arriving students treated him with respect, liking and humor, so it looked like it might be an enjoyable training environment. Mom and Sensei had a brief conversation about their places of origin in England, while Donna wished me good luck and hoped I would enjoy Aikido. She was sincere, as she was proud that she'd found it for me. Then they left. There was one other beginner tonight, although she was participating rather than observing the way I was. I still had another sixteen days before the damned cast came off. All the students were lined up along one edge of the exercise mats, and they bowed to Sensei, who bowed back. After warming up, the class started. To condense highly, there were three types of activities during the class: For most of the class time, Sensei would demonstrate a technique using a student he'd pick. Everyone else watched, then all the students paired up to practice what he'd just shown. He'd walk among the pairs helping out. Because I was looking for it, I noticed he walked gracefully, even when threading his way between the constantly moving pairs of students. None of the students were similarly graceful, but they were beginners so that didn't signify anything. Sensei would sometimes digress for a minute or two to discuss some philosophical aspect of the art. Near the end of the class he got everyone to sit along the edge of the mat, kneeling on their heels in a position called "Seiza". He spent several minutes talking about an aspect of Aikido. Tonight he started the final segment of the class with a demonstration of "ki", the mental energy of Aikido and its middle syllable. He got two of the biggest students to stand either side of him, grasp his arms and lift him in the air. A feat they performed easily. Then he said he'd use ki to prevent their lifting him. He stood still in exactly the same stance as when they'd lifted him, but this time they couldn't budge him, not even lifting him an inch. He just stood there, and they grunted and groaned to no effect. Even just one of the lifters should have been able to lift him, let alone two with good grips on his arms. I was impressed. It occurred to me that the whole demonstration could have been a fake, but I didn't get that feeling as Sensei - as I'd learned he was referred to as - seemed an open and honest guy. When they gave up, panting, he told the class that he'd projected his ki down into the Earth, and that made him seem heavier. Not "heavier" that would register on a set of scales, but in the sense that when the lifters tried to raise him, their mental and physical powers were redirected downward by his ki flow, rendering their efforts much less effective. He went on to describe how to find and develop our ki. The first step is to "center yourself": to "put your consciousness into your center." Sensei explained that our "centers" were our center of gravity, an inch or two below our navel and halfway between our front and back. "Imagine your mind is at your center," he instructed. All the students seemed to be doing that, judging by their stillness and looks of concentration. Even though I was only observing, I thought I might as well give it a try. I tried to imagine my minds were located in my center. The instant I did that, #2: #1: #4: #3: Sensei Nigel was saying, "The ancient Greeks thought consciousness floated six inches above their heads. At other times people have thought it was rooted in their hearts. In the modern western world we imagine that consciousness is located in our brains. However, consciousness should be located at our centers. There your consciousness can connect to the Universe's energy flows to supply you with ki to project in the techniques. While centered, our consciousness aligns our body's own energy flows to those of the Universe, so we breathe, move and exist in better harmony with the Universe..." I would've thought Sensei was talking spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo, otherwise known as "crap", except I could feel something. I couldn't tell whether his comments were right, but what I was feeling had some resemblance to what he was describing. I'd been sitting motionless, listening to him and concentrating on imagining my consciousness at my center. Without thinking I shifted in my chair as one ass cheek was getting sore after the nearly hour-long lesson. As soon as I leaned my body sideways something VERY unusual happened: The simplest explanation would be to say that I saw two flashes of light from places in my body. Except I didn't "see" them and they weren't "flashes of light", which pretty much destroys my entire description but it somehow still seems a good one. However I sensed them, it wasn't with my eyes because I wasn't looking in the right direction and one of the flashes was actually inside my body! That implied they were something other than light, but don't ask me what! It wasn't like sight because with normal sight you can see different 'stuff' in all of your field of view. Whatever it was that I'd sensed, I'd only sensed the flashes and nothing else. It was like seeing an almost empty radar image because everything else was blank except where the flashes were. I'd received an accurate 3D image of where the flashes had started from and gone to. They'd been like a couple of skyrockets because they'd blasted trails of what had seemed like light which had clearly been going in particular directions, and had then gone 'dark'. One flash had started at my right buttock and had risen vertically through my body for a couple of inches. The other flash had emerged from my left shoulder and had flown about six inches to the left, angled down a little. Both flashes had been three or four inches in diameter. They'd lasted about a quarter of a second; much longer than a true flash of light would've lasted, but still a very short time. One weird aspect was that their length had been reached almost instantly, and then the entire 'flash' had persisted where it was for the quarter second, as if it'd been a frozen there. But somehow I could still sense that whatever the flashes were, they were still flowing in the directions I'd sensed. I guess like fountain of water can flow upward but also appear to be suspended. It's taken several paragraphs to describe my initial impression from that fraction of a second. My very first reaction to the shock of the flashes was to jerk my head to my left to look at the flash shooting out of that shoulder. The instant I started turned my head another flash flew out of the left side of my face, which caused me to jerk my head back in shock. Instantly the flash going out the left of my face ceased and a new flash shot out of the back of my head. That's another proof that my new sense wasn't sight, as I obviously couldn't see the flash going straight backward from the back of my head. Then all the remaining flashes disappeared. I was still jerking my head back, and I automatically resumed its left turn to look behind me to see if I could see the last flash. Stupid in hindsight, but I'd had no time to think about any of this. I saw nothing, with either my eyes or any other sense. I quickly looked all around me, and saw nothing. I looked at my nearest neighbor, sitting maybe six feet away. She was looking at me with some curiosity, but not a great deal. Probably because of my sudden head jerks, I thought. She wasn't reacting the way she should have if she'd seen weird flashes. No one was. I was sitting behind the Aikido students but those at the end of the row would have seen the flashes out of the corner of their eyes, there were a few other spectators sitting along the same wall that I was, and Sensei was roughly facing me, but none of them reacted as if they'd seen something strange. Sensei was still talking, nothing else was happening, there were no more flashes, and after a couple of seconds I was thoroughly confused about what the hell had happened. Sensei was saying, " ... Try to keep your consciousness at your center for as long as you can. It takes concentration to hold it there, so if you lose concentration your consciousness will leave your center. Initially you will manage to 'hold center' for only a few seconds, as any distraction will cause you to 'lose center'..." #1: #3: #4: #1: #2: #4: #3: #4: #1: #3: Meanwhile Sensei had been saying, " ... Try to get in to the habit of checking frequently whether you are concentrating on being centered, and if not, concentrate to recenter yourself. Initially you will have to recenter yourself hundreds of times a day, but if you are diligent, that number will reduce. As you advance in Aikido, you will be able to stay centered for longer. The long-term goal is to be permanently centered, although very few Aikido practitioners have ever achieved that..." We imagined our consciousness being below our belly button again, and the slightly light-bodied/light-headed/good feeling immediately came back. No flashes though. After a second of nothing happening, we thoughtlessly turned our head to look around. The instant we turned our head another flash shot out of the side of our face, in the direction we were turning it. It almost immediately disappeared again. #3: We recentered again. This time the flash came out of our face even before we moved our head, which surprised us all so we lost center again. #1: #2: #1: #4: We recentered ourselves. We all noted the slight change of feeling that being centered produced, and were just starting to think about moving our head when our face flashed again. It was less than a second before the flash cut out, but this time not because we'd been distracted. We could feel we were still centered, but for whatever reason there was no flash happening. After a second, our face flashed again, a fraction of a second before whichever one of us started turning our head to the left. This flash lasted about two seconds, that being how long it took to slowly rotate our head to the left. The flash always extended out of the side of our face, and as our head rotated, so did the flash. By the time we'd rotated our head so it was facing hard left, the flash was pointing at the wall behind us, and it cut out at the same time as our head stopped turning. After a moment, our head started slowly turning to the right, producing the flash from that side too. When the head stopped in the central position the flash stopped. #4: #1: #4: Immediately there was a flash upward from our ENTIRE forearm. Not just a three- or four-inch diameter flash as before, but a flash the length and width of our entire forearm and rising vertically, with the hand end of the forearm being much 'stronger' than the elbow end (or 'brighter'; neither word is perfectly correct as we're not dealing with light). It was longer too, extending upward about two feet. The size of the new flash was so surprising that we lost center again, instantly cutting off the flash. #3: Sensei was saying, " ... An achievable goal for all of you is to be able to hold center for several minutes at a time, that way you will be able to center yourself before you start practicing a technique, and hold center while training, so you can use your ki during the technique. That becomes important in the higher grades, so please practice centering yourselves as often as you can every day. Like everything else, the more you practice, the better you will get." #2: We resumed our experiments, while being careful to design them so our physical movements looked reasonably natural. After a few more minutes of trials, errors, distractions and recenterings, we discovered that the flashes corresponded with INTENDED body movements. If any one of us intended to move any part of our body, then the flashes showed the intended movement. If the movement was planned in advance, the flashes could start well ahead of the movement, or they could start exactly with the movement if it was a spontaneous action. As soon as I formed the intention, or started making the movement, then the flash appeared. I was happy to note that if I intended a movement, then canceled the intention, the flash simply stopped without destroying the fabric of space-time in a disastrous Universe-consuming paradox. It was good to get that confirmed. Calling them "flashes" was inappropriate on long, slow body movements, but even in those cases they easily conveyed the impression of rapid motion in the intended direction. They could be quite long. For example, when we moved our right hand as far to the right as we could reach, and then intended to move it across our body and as far left as we could reach with it, the long, curving 'flash' of our arm's intended movement must have been something like five feet long. Somewhat surprisingly, flashes didn't actually correspond to muscle movements. For example, turning our head was done using neck muscles, but the flash clearly came from the side of our face rather than the neck. The flashes seemed to indicate intent, rather than what was actually involved in producing the movement. We tried an experiment where one mind intended to raise an arm, but three minds intended to lower it. There was a 'dim' (not the right word) flash going upward, and a three-times 'brighter' flash going down. Moving many of our body parts at the same time resulted in all the flashes being fairly dim, as if there was a limited supply of 'brightness' and we were spreading it out. Small movements, like intending to lift my hand only two inches, produced the normal 'brightness' of flash, although they were only as long as the intended movement. I mentioned earlier that lifting my arm produced a very large flash, as did moving my leg or leaning my torso in any direction. That didn't scale down all the way as there seemed to be a minimum size flash of about a couple of inches in diameter and a couple of inches long. Movements smaller than this didn't produce a flash (e.g., lifting a little finger or breathing). The 'picture' formed by the flash wasn't very precise either. If one of my minds intended to move my hand to touch my nose, the other minds couldn't tell whether the first mind was intending to touch my nose, either eyebrow, cheek, or anything else in the immediate area. We also learned that closing our eyes made no difference to our ability to sense the flashes, that no one else in the room reacted to any of our flashes, and that only one of our minds had to be concentrating on being centered for all this stuff to happen. We did prefer that all of us to concentrate on being centered though, as that made it less likely for us to lose center. As long as one of us kept it, the flashes continued. We'd kept one ear listening to Sensei because it'd been his teachings that'd led us to whatever these flashes were, and he'd kept talking about the subject. He several times referred to ki as an energy or a force, which didn't inspire much confidence in me. In physics those two words are distinct and aren't interchangeable, but in everyday English they're usually treated as the same thing. That Sensei was talking about ki so imprecisely implied he didn't know the science behind it. He also talked about "projecting" ki many times, making it even more likely that what we were somehow sensing was presumably ki, because it sure as hell was projecting. Which raised the question of why we couldn't see anyone else's ki. It seemed likely that in a class full of students who were following Sensei's instructions to center themselves, some of them would've been succeeding as it's quite easy to imagine your mind at your center; it's just DAMNED hard to keep imagining it there when you get distracted. There were enough students making small body movements, and Sensei himself, that we should have sensed flashes from several of them, but the only flashes were ours. Then Sensei's lesson ended and the students did an exchange of bowing with Sensei to end the class. All the students started getting to their feet. There was a great deal of movement now, but still no flashes. Perhaps because no one was centered. I just sat in my chair, concentrating on staying centered while waiting to sense flashes from anybody else. I had just about decided that it wasn't going to happen, when it started happening right in front of me. Some students were about to pass in front of me on their way out of the room, and their flashes - I should probably start thinking of it as, "their ki" - showed up in front of me. The intended movements of their legs were clearly showing, but only if they were very close to me. #1: We did that, concentrating on keeping our minds at our center. After I'd take a few steps, there were ki flashes going off ALL around me, from every foot, leg, arm head and body movement in my proximity, 360 degrees all around me. There was so much of it I was swamped and distracted. It all vanished when I lost center. I recentered, and was immediately swamped with ki projections flashing all around me again. I lost center again. [[For those of my readers who have no idea what "being centered" is, and are unable to understand my point about it being difficult to hold, imagine a pink elephant (to borrow an image Sensei uses later). It doesn't matter where it is or what it's doing, just that you have an image of it. Now go make yourself a cup of coffee and do a few other routine things, ideally including talking to other people, while you try to hold the pink elephant image. When you notice that you've forgotten about it, re-imagine it and try to hold the image again. You'll find that the proportion of the day that you're successfully thinking of a pink elephant will be very small.]] #2: We tried that. We did get distracted into losing center, but it took several seconds this time. We recentered and lasted even longer. We stood still and tried to understand the concept, rather than trying to follow every flash going off around us. As expected, it was like a 3D radar image, with a range of about three feet from our center. We could sense that every single person who got close enough was projecting ki, even students who were in animated conversation with each other, so almost certainly weren't centered. I hadn't seen flashes from anyone else when I'd been experimenting in my chair simply because no one else had been close enough. The hadn't seen me because they obviously couldn't see anyone, otherwise it'd be a well-known effect and Sensei would have mentioned it during his lesson. The three-foot range was clearly delimited. If someone's foot was four feet away and they were about to stride into range, then I assumed there'd be ki projecting from their striding foot toward where they were about to place it. I couldn't sense the first twelve inches of the projection because it was too far away, but that part of the projection that was within my range was sense-able, starting in midair. I could easily tell from the projection's location and direction that it was originating from the person's foot, I just couldn't see it coming out of their foot until their projection was within three feet of my center. I've seen science fiction or fantasy movies where the hero is standing inside some sort of protective spherical force field, with laser blasts from the baddies or fiery breath from dragons being aimed at him. In those pictures, outside of the sphere there is a chaos of fire, and inside it is quiet and peaceful. My situation was the reverse. Outside of my sensory range there was nothing, inside of that range there was a chaos of flashing ki projections. It was VERY distracting, even though none of the projections were aimed at me, as no one was intending to walk through me. Each person's ki was a single 'color', and everyone's was different, so they were individual in 'look' (or 'tone', 'texture', 'flavor', or 'smell'. Take your pick, as all those terms are wrong. The least incorrect metaphor is visual, so I'll use that). Everyone's brightness seemed similar, but with one very noticeable exception: my ki was FAR brighter. My having four minds would make my having four times as much brightness seem likely, but my flashes were much brighter than even that. Needless to say, this was BLOWING us away! As best we could tell, this was ki, everybody projected it when they intended to move their bodies in any way, we appeared to be the only person who could sense it, and we produced ten to twenty times more than anyone else. When Sensei had been talking about ki, he hadn't said ANYTHING about it being as dramatic as this. He'd talked about projecting ki in a way that made it sound that if you weren't concentrating hard on being centered, then nothing happened. Assuming it was ki and not something else that was flashing all around me, Sensei's comments seemed overwhelmingly untrue because every moving person was projecting it. From how difficult I knew holding center was, I was sure that most of the people around me wouldn't be centered. Sensei had never said anything about sensing amazing flashes, which was a ridiculous omission if anyone could have the same experience as me. He'd even said that one of the major problems with getting better at being centered was that you didn't notice when you'd lost it. There was NO WAY you could fail to notice its disappearing if someone was moving within three feet of you, or you were moving or intending to move yourself, because it'd be like a flare going out in a dark room. Sensei also hadn't made a single comment about there being a range limit with ki, whereas range was obviously very significant. Clearly there must be something, or some things, unique about me. Nearly everyone had gone, so I walked toward Sensei, deliberately approaching him while he was talking to another student to give me time to study him with my new sense. I stopped when he was just inside my three-foot range. I could sense the ki of his small movements, and it appeared to be the same strength as everyone else's. I deliberately scratched my nose so he'd have an easy movement of mine to sense that my ki was so strong. He wasn't looking at me, but that wouldn't matter if his ki-sensing ability was spherical like mine. As I expected, he didn't react. Either he wasn't centered, or if he was, he didn't have this ki-sensing sense. I waited until he finished his conversation with the other student. When it was my turn to speak, I reintroduced myself. The process of shaking hands should have given him a clear message had he been able to sense anything, but he failed to react to my ki. I said, "I'm definitely interested in learning more about Aikido, especially ki. Can I ask you a couple of questions about it please?" Sensei nodded, adding, "It is a difficult concept for beginners to grasp." "You said we have to be centered to project ki. Does that mean that people who aren't centered don't project ki? That'd be nearly everyone, wouldn't it?" "It would be the large majority of people, yes. However, I simplified the explanation you are quoting. Everybody has ki. The reason aikidoka - that is the Japanese word for practitioners of Aikido - need to be centered is so they can project more ki than they could naturally. If I am employing a technique on an opponent without being centered, then his and my ki will be equal, leaving me only able to control him through physical force. If I center myself I can project more ki than my opponent, so my ki can overcome his. That makes all of our techniques easier and more effective." #1: #4: < Maybe we were producing so much because we were centered at the time? So it'd be nothing to do with our having four minds. Ask about the increase when centered.> I asked, "How much more ki does being centered produce?" "I cannot give you a definitive answer. Ki cannot be seen or measured, which makes comparing the amount projected very difficult. We can feel the effects when we train though, so we know that being centered and projecting ki properly does make a noticeable difference. Even if we could measure ki, your question would not have a single answer because advanced aikidoka can project more than beginners can." "If you cannot see ki, how do you know if a student is centered or is projecting ki correctly?" "Not easily. I have to watch very carefully and train with the student myself so I can feel the effects of his ki. Even then it is still very subtle. Ki is very important, but its intangibility makes it difficult to teach and learn." #3: I said, "Thanks Sensei. I'll have my cast on for two more classes, then hopefully off for the third class from now. Until I can join the class properly, I wonder if you can recommend some good books that I can buy or get from the library?" "I can do better than that. We have a small library of our own. Would you like to borrow a book or two?" "VERY much! I'm definitely interested in Aikido." #1: Sensei led me to their library, containing something like fifty books. I had to write my contact details down, then he asked me, "Do you know what type of book you are interested in, or would you like a beginner's introduction to Aikido?" Without hesitation I said, "I'm interested in ki. The best book or books on that would be greatly appreciated please." Sensei pulled out two, and gave them to me. They were worn, but that did not worry me at all. Sensei noted their titles beside my name then said, "Developing ki is the hardest skill in Aikido, taking the longest to become proficient at, so do not expect any sudden results. Developing ki is a lifelong journey, and the first steps are very small. Staying centered for even a second or two is difficult initially." His comment reminded me to check, and I was not centered. My excitement over getting the books had distracted me. Even the absence of the flashes hadn't reminded me. So much for my thinking that'd I'd instantly notice the 'flare' going out. I guess it was because my whole life I've never seen them, so their absence doesn't get my attention. I recentered myself. I must have shown something on my face because Sensei asked, "My comment amused you?" "Since you explained the concept at the end of the class I've been trying to stay centered. You were certainly right about it being very easy to get distracted and to lose it. I was excited over getting these books and I lost my concentration without realizing it." "You were centered before I gave you the books?" #1: #3: "For some of the time I was. You said it was important and I was sitting in my chair with nothing better to do, so I've been practicing it as best I can. I've had plenty of recentering practice already because it sure is a slippery thing to hang on to." Sensei smiled, "Yes, 'slippery' is a good description. You speak as if you can clearly tell whether you are centered or not?" #1: I answered, "It's just like you said: there's a faint but noticeable feeling of my body being a little lighter than normal, and it feels a little smoother to move. I don't know anything about this stuff, but the feeling I had would seem consistent with what you said about moving in accordance with the Universe." "I'm surprised to hear you say that. Most students take a year or two before they develop those feelings. Have you studied any other martial arts?" "No, this is my first martial arts lesson of any type. I guess I just picked up that point quicker than most people. I'm fairly smart at school and tend to learn things pretty quickly." "It will be interesting to see how your ki development progresses once you start the classes. Will you be coming next week?" "Wild horses couldn't keep me away." Sensei responded somewhat differently than I expected. He smiled and asked, "Have you heard the Aikido 'Wild Horse' parable?" "No. That was just a silly expression of my mothers. I'm embarrassed it slipped out." I nearly poked fun at Mom for being English, but remembered just in time that Sensei was too. "Let me tell you the parable; actually called the 'Wild Stallion Parable'. It will tell you something about the philosophy of Aikido. Three warriors are tasked with entering a narrow, sheer-sided gorge. Tethered on a long rope in the mouth of the gorge is a wild stallion that violently attacks all who come within its range. -- "The first warrior is a fighter. He advances straight toward the stallion to join combat. The stallion rears up and plunges down with his hooves, attempts to bite the warrior, turns and tries to kick with his rear hooves, even tries to roll on the warrior. Even though the stallion is far stronger and heavier, the warrior manages to block or avoid all the stallions attacks for many minutes, until he has worked his way into the gorge far enough to exceed the length of the tether, permitting him to walk farther in unscathed. -- "The second warrior approaches, stopping short of the stallion. Being superbly athletic and strong, he climbs several yards up one side of the gorge, a near-impossible feat. Then he climbs sideways into the gorge until he is past the length of the tether. He descends to the floor and proceeds with his task without the need for combat. -- "The third warrior is a practitioner of Aikido. He centers himself and calmly approaches the stallion. As the stallion prepares to attack, the third warrior stands just out of reach and radiates calmness, peacefulness and gentleness. The stallion settles. Soon the third warrior is able to advance on the stallion, stroke him, and walk past unhindered. In some versions he removes the tether, mounts and rides the stallion into the gorge, but I think that ending excessively dramatic and inappropriate. The point is that the third approach epitomizes a perfect 'battle' for an Aikido warrior. -- "Aikido strives to be a gentle martial art. Good practitioners can deflect or throw opponents with minimal force, even without touching them, and expert practitioners can defuse a potentially violent situation so no combat ensues. That is why the development of ki is important, because it reduces the amount of physical force required, and the gentlest form of combat is one that requires no physical conflict at all." It definitely sounded like Aikido suited my personality because I strongly dislike aggression, but the last few comments seemed logically impossible. I asked, "I like the parable, but I can't understand how it's possible to throw someone without touching them?" "I can demonstrate that easily back on the mats." He led the way back into the training room. I put my books down and we stepped onto the padded mats that everyone trains on. He stood in front of me and extended his right arm forward several inches, toward my left hand (my right being in its sling). That caused his hand to rise somewhat, to be about six inches below where it'd be to offer a handshake. His hand was palm down, and bent back under his wrist. I'd noticed that this was the standard starting position for some of the techniques they'd used during their training session. I recentered myself yet again, {sigh}. Sensei instructed, "Grab my right wrist." He just stood there quietly, waiting for me to move. That sounded perfectly simple, so I took a small step forward and reached my left hand out to grasp his wrist. I had a few moments of seeing his ki flowing down his hand as he lowered it ahead of my attempted grasp. I noticed that his ki was a few times brighter than other people's, but nowhere near as bright as mine, then the next thing I know I'm lying on the mat. He hadn't touched me, merely moved his arm away as I'd reached for it, and I'd somehow fallen over, although I had no memory of how or why. I climbed back to my feet, asking, "How on Earth did you do that?" "I moved my wrist away and down from your hand, but at a speed sufficient to keep it just beyond your reach to encourage you to keep reaching for it. At the same time I projected my ki down my hand so it would mentally push your ki farther forward and down than you wanted it. As a result you bent over and leaned forward too much. My ki disrupted your body's ability to recognize that it was off balance, so you kept reaching forward until you toppled over. -- "The answer to your question about how it is possible to throw someone without touching them, is by getting them to throw themselves. A small throw this time, and one that caused you to land on your left side first because we have to be careful of your injured arm." I half-remembered what he'd described. Sensei had moved his hand away in front of my hand, and he had projected ki out of the backward and downward pointing fingers of his hand, but neither of those facts had been something I'd thought about at the time. It felt like I'd been hypnotized or something, because I'd gone from reaching for his hand to lying on the mat with almost no conscious thought in between. It was DEFINITELY weird, and impressive too. "I can't say I understood your explanation, but you've convinced me to be VERY interested in Aikido. I'll definitely be here next week Sensei." "Good. If you will excuse me, I see some students from the next class wanting to talk with me. Good evening, Mark." ------- Chapter 28: Aikido Revelations Thursday, April 7, 2005 (Continued) I had to wait for Mom and Donna to come get me, so I walked back to my seat with the books. As I was sitting down I remembered to think about whether I was centered: nope, I wasn't. So I centered myself again, shaking my head to myself over how slippery keeping center is. #1: #2: #3: #2: #4: #3: #4: #3: #2: We felt the subtle sensation being centered causes. One of us raised our hand, our sensing the flashes from it confirming that we were centered. #1: #1 had closed our hand in to a fist, holding it stationary with one finger extended to point at the books we'd dropped onto the seat next to us. We all sensed a lump of ki (presumably) appear in front of the top book and then poke it, sliding the book a few inches away from us. #4: | #1: | #3: #2: We all sensed ourselves lose center from the shock. The lump of ki and the flashes from our hand as we were yanking in back disappeared from our awareness. #2: #1: #2: #3: #1: #2: #2 centered himself/us. #1: We all sensed, with whatever the new sense is, the lump of ki come into existence, then felt it poke against our knee, about as hard as a real finger would. #1: #3: #1: #4: #1: #4: #1: #3: #1: We all felt the pressure on our knee while our hand went into our pocket. #1: #3: #1: We all sensed the finger float over the top of our knee and diagonally down to the edge of the mat. Actually, it was more like a fingertip than a finger, as it was a rod about half an inch in diameter and an inch long. It poked the edge of the mat. We all sensed the lump moving, saw the mat's edge move, and all felt what we probably would've felt had we poked it with a real finger. #4: #1: #4: #1: It floated up to our knee again, where it started pushing with a steadily increasing force. #1: #3: #4: #1: Flying the fingertip around had previously involved two senses: sight, as #1 had to know where the edge of the mat was to fly the fingertip there; and the new sense because that's the only sense the fingertip 'appeared' in, as ki is invisible to ordinary sight. Flying it behind our neck meant navigating by the new sense alone. [[It also involved understanding where our body is, which is the sense of proprioception.]] #1 did it quickly and easily. Right after he finished we lost center again. #2: #1: Over the next few minutes we discovered some VERY interesting things: Our body had to be centered to create them, which required just one mind. [[More accurately, it's the brain that needs to be centered. Any one mind thinking of having its consciousness in our center causes part of our brain to go in to a specific "altered state of consciousness" which is similar to, but not quite the same, as a meditative state. The important difference being that it better syncs our brain to the Universe's Consciousness, permitting ki abilities such as sensing the flashes and using magical fingertips.]] All four of us could create the 'fingertips'. Each of us could create up to four of them at once, so sixteen in total. We could poke indentations in drapes hanging on the far side of the room, so they could be used a long way from us. Even at that distance we sensed the location of the fingertip, far farther than the previous three-foot ki-sensing limit we thought we had. The maximum force each fingertip could exert reduced what felt like linearly when the controlling mind created two, three or four fingertip, but doesn't reduce if other minds create fingertips. We all had the same maximum force, maximum number of fingertips, could move them at the same speed, etc. We can't control each other's fingertips or know which one of us created them, although we sense where they are and feel what they touch. That's consistent with most of what we do: we can't tell who does something with our body, but we can all sense it happening as all our senses - the traditional ones and the new one - are shared. We could create a 'fingertip' inside our mouth with the mouth shut. The fingertips can move very quickly through the air, essentially as fast as our eyes can traverse across the room. If they went out of sight they sometimes automatically ceased to exist even though we were still centered and still concentrating correctly. Sometimes they stayed active, such as when in our mouth. We didn't have time to find out what determined whether they stayed or canceled before Mom arrived. We could make them cease to exist just by willing it. They were invisible, but we could feel them with our hands. We moved a 'fingertip' so it was in front of us, then we pinched it between two real fingers. It was solid and could be squeezed so its shape was distorted. It immediately returned to its 'natural' shape when the squeezing was relaxed. Strangely, when it was squeezed in one direction, it didn't bulge in the others; all that happened was that the squeezed axis got narrower. A little naughtily, I tapped one of the next class's newly arrived students on the shoulder. He immediately looked, and was very puzzled by no one being near him. I moved a fingertip so it was hovering in front of Sensei, who showed no awareness at all of it. #2: #1, #3, #4: During the experimentation we had the following little discussion, #3: #2, #4: #1: #3: #1: #3: #1: #4: #2: #1, #3: #4: #2: [[The obvious alternative name for "proximity" that #3 had expected was either "ki-dar" or "kidar", contractions of "ki-radar", and not to be confused with "gaydar". We got used to "proximity" and that's what it remained. By the way, we were teasing #4 about English. Partly because we didn't adopt his verb forms anyway, but mostly because it would've been unfair to inflict all the reading and writing crap we have to do for English on one mind.]] Mom and Donna arrived before I could do any more experimenting. Donna rushed up to me, very excited over having, "The BEST time at Karate." She enthused all the way back to the car, and was still enthusing on the way home. Meanwhile I'd been intrigued by watching Mom's and Donna's ki. It functioned the same as everyone else's that I'd experienced, but was still fascinated me because it was from my mother and sister. As everyone else's had, theirs had an individual 'color' too. When Mom got a chance to get a word in, she asked, "Mark, how was Aikido?" Donna realized she wanted to hear the answer to this too, so she quieted down. "It's UNBELIEVABLY good. I am seriously, SERIOUSLY interested in pursuing Aikido. I think it's going to be important in my life." I put my hand on Donna's shoulder, she'd beaten me back to the car so she was in the front. "Thank you very, VERY much, Donna. You've done me a huge favor noticing how Aikido people moved in that video and taking the trouble to show it to me. I think there are some very important connections between Aikido and me. I've only just started learning how or why, but I'm extremely happy that you noticed and cared enough to bring it to my attention. You did a VERY good thing for me." Donna basked in my praise, very pleased to have helped me. Then I realized that I wasn't centered. I recentered, grumbling to myselves about how difficult it was. #3: We discussed that back and forth for a little while. It seemed reasonable, but we held off experimenting until I was alone in my bedroom because that'd be easier than in the conversation-filled car. When we got home, I told Mom and Dad that I had some stuff to do in my room. #1: That was an easy test to try. I could lift the cover of the top book because it had an edge that projected out from the pages, giving me a lip to push against, but I couldn't turn individual pages because I couldn't create the TK-fingertip inside the microscopic gap between them. [[It occurs far too fast for me to detect, but what happens is that fingertips are created from an extremely rapidly expanding point source. Pushing the air molecules out of the way as it expands to its fingertip size is easy, and pushing pages out of the way would also be easy if all the pushing was vertical, but it's in all directions. Trying to push paper molecules horizontally (straight into other paper molecules bound in a solid) required far more force than the fingertip could exert, which meant the fingertip couldn't come into existence.]] #3: #2: We couldn't see how the forces could do anything other than accumulate arithmetically, but we didn't have a clue how all this stuff worked anyway, so we all agreed that caution would be an excellent idea. We slowly and carefully performed the test. We had no trouble doing it with one, two and then three minds contributing a fingertip each to the stack, and those tests felt like the forces added together arithmetically. Four minds would be even more conclusive, as any increasing non-linear function would be maximized then. We tried using four, but that was trickier as the fourth mind was also concentrating on being centered. The first time we assembled a stack of four fingertips, the fourth mind concentrated on it too much and lost center. He recentered and we started again. After a couple of practices we were able to do the simple experiment while we all concentrated on retaining center. Whatever force one mind could generate, four minds stacking their fingertips generated four times as much total push. Each mind could create four fingertips, and we were pretty sure that the force they generated reduced proportionately. We tried it with a stack of sixteen fingertips to make sure, and after some decentering problems were overcome, it felt like the force was the same as from a stack created with one fingertip from each mind #4: #1: #4: #2: #4: #2: #1: #2: #4: #1: #3: #2: #1: #2: #4: #1: #4: We agreed to rotate the "Keeping Centered Duty" on an hourly basis, with #1 getting first turn. The three of us not on centering duty could easily do spot checks for our being centered just by moving any part of our body. If it didn't flash, we'd remind the mind on duty. (The light-bodied sensation was too subtle to be a reliable indicator, especially if there were distracting things going on.) If we lost center, we knew who was solely to blame, which should encourage him to do better. We grabbed the top Aikido book and opened it. #1: #2: #4: #1: #4: #2: <#1, re-center yourself - because you've lost it again - and let us get on with our work.> #1: We read, and from time to time one of the reading minds - #2, #3 or #4 - would think to check we were centered, and we always were. #1 was doing a good job, and for much longer than we'd managed before. We were off to a good start. After some interesting, but not useful reading, one of us remembered that we should make our nightly call to Julia. So we got up and walked to the phone in the kitchen. Halfway there, #3: #1: #3: #1: #4: #1: Everything was good with Julia, although her bedroom was a mess as the builders were doing their thing. Robert had told her that my construction requests for the study were simple, so no worries there either. All the other tasks on Prof's list were being worked on too. They were already checking up on cars for Julia, which was hopefully also for me, and getting her ready to get her driving Instruction Permit. She said we could have a progress report meeting with the family when I came around on Saturday. I don't think I've ever attended a "Progress Report Meeting" before, so another virginity was about to be lost; not an as eagerly anticipated one though. Julia and I hadn't previously discussed what day she could visit my home after school, but she raised that point and suggested that we skip it this week, as she needed to catch up on the work she'd accumulated by missing school recently, and the week was nearly over anyway. Seeing that her missing school was my fault - by being irresistibly sexy, hehe - I agreed. I'd see her at school anyway. I also told her, "Karate seems to suit Donna, and Aikido DEFINITELY suits me. I'm VERY interested in it, and it'll henceforth be a regular and serious pursuit of mine. I can't wait for my cast to come off so I can train properly." I chuckled to myself for saying "henceforth". Thinking of Sensei Nigel must've put me in an upper-class English mood. On the way back to our room, #3: Then Dad called out, "Mark! I've got a copy of the Oregon Driver Manual and a cellphone here for you." Excellent. So I walked into the living room to get them. Halfway there, #3: #1: When he was handing them over, Dad said, "I got shamed into being efficient by the Williamses being so organized, haha. Carol's already got her phone, and I've passed your and her phone numbers on to Vanessa. She's making up a master list of all the phone numbers we'll need for each other. She'll give that to Julia to give to you tomorrow. Bring it home please, so your mother and I can add the numbers to our phones." "Okay. I know what you mean about that family being organized. Julia just told me they're already working on everything else on their list. I got invited to a 'Progress Report Meeting' with them on Saturday. That's what Julia actually called it. What a family!" We chuckled, and I took my new stuff back to my room. In addition to my two school grades, I now had Aikido books, the Driver Manual, and the phone's manual to study. I unpacked the phone and started it charging, then thought I'd check in on the girls. I knocked on their door, and entered on their, "Come in". Both girls were sitting on their beds, studying. I noticed they both gave me big smiles when I walked in, which made me feel nice. I told them, "When you two saw who was coming in, you both immediately smiled. Carol told me a couple of days ago how much you thought I'd improved, and it's very nice to be on the receiving end of that. Not long ago you used to scream for Mom whenever I walked into your room; now I get big smiles. We're lucky to be getting along so well together." Carol disagreed, "It's not luck; it's you! You used to come into our room to annoy us, but now you say nice things all the time." "Yeah," agreed Donna. "You say just as many good things about me as I do about you, but let's not fight about why we don't fight anymore, haha." -- There was definitely something incredibly important about ki, and I had a feeling that my having four minds gave me a huge advantage with it. I was feeling so excited about it that I wanted to thank Donna again, so I said, "I just popped in to thank Donna again for finding Aikido for me, and caring enough about me to show it to me. You've done a VERY good thing for me, Donna, and I won't forget it. I hope one day I can do you a favor just as big. So thank you again." Donna asked, "It's that good?" "And then some! You did a HUGELY good thing for me." Donna accepted that and I couldn't say much more without sounding weird or giving away too much information. -- "Otherwise I just wanted to check in with you. I've just got off the phone with Julia, and realized I hadn't seen Carol for a while. I find I miss you guys if I haven't seen you for a while, so I like to just stick my head in to make sure everything's good. I hope you don't mind?" Not only didn't they mind, they thought I was very nice for doing so. Just as I was about to go back to my room, Carol asked me, "Do you mind if I call Julia?" "Of course not. Why would you think I could mind?" "She's your girlfriend." "She's just as much your girlfriend as she is mine. You got her home phone number even before I did, so maybe I should ask for your permission before I call her?" Carol laughed at that idea. I continued, "Seriously Carol, you do not have to ask me for anything like that. Julia is thrilled to have your friendship. I'd never get between you two. I think it's wonderful that you're such good friends." I didn't understand Julia's sudden enthusiasm for Carol's friendship, but I certainly wasn't going to do anything to discourage it. It was making Carol VERY happy, and it'd be good for her to have help getting over whatever it was that she was upset about recently. "Okay, I'll call her now." Carol jumped to her feet and rushed past me, stopping briefly to give me a kiss on the cheek, adding, "Thanks for being such a wonderful guy." "My pleasure." After Carol disappeared toward the kitchen (for the phone), I said, "See you later, racehorse," to Donna, and went to back my room. We put #2 on duty to relieve #1, assigning our drivers (#3 and #4) to read through the Driver Manual using one eye, while #1 continued reading the Aikido book using the other eye. We would normally have finished it by now, but we wanted it read very carefully in case even a single sentence contained an important piece of information, clue or idea. [A little explanation about being on centering duty. That mind didn't try to cut off any sensory input; it just adopted an "I don't care what's happening" attitude. It ignored everything, relying on the rest of us to do what needed doing. That worked well enough that we didn't think it was necessary to try the scary "cut off sensory input" thing. To attract the attention of a mind that was on duty, it was only necessary to internally 'yell' his name/number at him.] Unfortunately, and very disappointingly, the Aikido book turned out to be of no use to us. A large portion of it was devoted to how to start developing ki, which sounded perfect, but we were already past that point. It had a couple of chapters on meditation for example, as a way of avoiding distractions for long enough to spend a decent amount of time centered. We already had that covered by having one mind on centering duty. Which reminded us that it was about time to swap jobs, so #3 took over the duty, leaving #4 on the Driver Manual. That looked to be the exact same book as they'd had in their previous dimension. The Aikido book had a significant section on where the center was and how to know that you were actually centered. We knew how to do that because we could see the flashes, and if we were peaceful and thoughtful, we could feel the subtler effects. Apparently a normal beginner couldn't see or feel any effect, so these chapters would be important to them, but not to us. A chapter talked about what ki is. The book described it as a living force or living energy (the terms were used interchangeably). It came, the book said, from living creatures and from the Universe (both sources were credited, but not reconciled) and affected living creatures. The book also said that ki permeated the Universe, although how, why and where all that ki came from was never made clear. There were several mentions of "moving in harmony with the Universal Ki" and the like, although it seemed the author had no clear idea what that actually meant. He certainly didn't provide a coherent explanation. Further into the book it talked about how ki worked in techniques. I gathered that when Sensei was doing his "Make Himself Too Heavy To Lift" demonstration, the ki he was using didn't make him heavier at all. Rather his downward directed ki negated the upward ki of the lifters, which somehow made their lifting ineffective. The book advised the students to imagine ki flowing down their arms and out their hands as if water from a high-pressure hose. #1: We tried doing what the book said, laughing to ourselves about how to explain flooding my room with water if we somehow did it much more realistically than the book said. I needn't have worried because it worked just like the book said. It was identical to what it'd be if I was intending to move my hand forward, except I had no such intention, instead only wanting to do the ki-projecting (what I'd been calling "flashing") aspect of it. The only difference between deliberately projecting ki, and having ki project automatically when I intended to move a body part, was that there seemed to be slightly more ki in the former exercise. I decided that was probably because I was concentrating solely on it. I knew that if I split my attention/intentions by doing several things at once, the ki was reduced. I was concentrating exclusively now, so it made the ki as strong as it could be. ^ [[I was right, but would become wrong as I got better at consciously projecting ki. Everybody has a natural amount of ki; in fact, every creature with a mind does. The strength of their ki initially depending on the strength of their mind. Ki is partly a "life force", but it's more accurately called a "mind force". It wasn't surprising or significant that the books got that wrong, as the two are much the same thing, except for creatures without minds and me having more than the usual number. My four minds meant I had a fourfold increase in the "mind force" - effectively "willpower" to misuse that word slightly - that I could direct at the Universe's Consciousness, which provided sixteen times as much ki as for a normal human. The amount of ki that a mind - or an intimately connected group of minds - can obtain from the Universe obeys a square law because its Consciousness is very highly responsive to minds. Ki is normally and naturally tapped from the Universe by our subconscious minds, but deliberately projecting ki was an action of our conscious minds, which when centered tap additional ki from the Universe. I was totally inexperienced so I couldn't consciously tap any additional ki, but as I got better at consciously projecting ki, the amount of it that I could tap from the Universe increased. That is why Sensei's ki was stronger than that of his beginner students when he was consciously projecting ki in a technique, but not when he was doing something natural like getting the books out of his library for me.]] ^ Even though I could sense that my TK-fingertips were something similar to lumps of solid ki, there was absolutely no mention in the book of anything remotely similar to my telekinetic ability. The books repeatedly and consistently stated that ki was intangible. There was no mention of it being a very tangible force. The rest of the book was about the philosophy of Aikido. Nice sounding stuff, but not relevant to my current activities. Thinking about my proximity sense made me think of two experiments I wanted to do. The first was to do with the TK-fingertips sometimes canceling on me when they were out of sight. Some experiments showed me that they always canceled when they were out of sight and out of my proximity range, but they only sometimes canceled when they were out of sight within my proximity range. They canceled when within three feet of my center if I was even slightly confused about where they were, but didn't cancel otherwise. So they were fine inside my mouth or touching the back of my neck, but I lost them if I moved them under my bed while I was lying on it, for example. The second idea for an experiment stemmed from me being pretty sure I'd be able to detect someone sneaking up behind me, and even know who it was if I had previously memorized the 'look' of their individual ki. I had two helpful girls across the hallway, so I thought I'd ask them for a little favor. I knocked on their door again. They usually keep it closed; a habit that having a brat of a brother for many years had doubtless helped form. I entered when they granted permission. "Girls, I've come to ask a little favor. It's easy and shouldn't take long. Are you free to help me for a few minutes please?" "Sure," x 2. ("x 2" meaning "from both of them." Mathematics is so much more efficient than English.) [[Which is why Mathematics is used across the width of the Universe, and English across a paltry few thousand miles.]] "I learned something at Aikido that I want to test myself with. I want to stand halfway up the hallway facing away from your room. I'll have my eyes closed so I can't see anything, and we'll turn your radio on quite loud so I can't hear you. What I want is for one of you try to sneak up slowly behind me and stop just before you touch me. What I'm trying to do is feel you coming. If I can, I'll call out "Hello", and if I can, your name too. After I make a guess tell me whether I was right or wrong, then go back into your room and we'll do it again. Each time wait a different amount of time so I don't know when you're coming, and choose a random one of you to come each time, maybe flip a coin each time. Understand?" After a little more explanation they understood what I wanted. I moved into position in the hallway. On the way we realized we weren't centered, so #4 got a reprimand. #4: #1: #4: My sisters' radio came on, and I stood in position with my eyes shut, concentrating on my proximity sense. After several seconds I sensed Donna's ki entering my range. I didn't hear her, or any other traditional clue, but it was unmistakably Donna's 'color' of ki. I called out, "Donna." "You got it right! Stay there and we'll try again." I sensed the beginning of her run back toward her room. Over the next couple of minutes, I successively called, "Donna", "Carol", "Donna". I was getting them right every time. It was easy. Only slightly harder than it would be to identify the girls by sight, which is trivially easy. On the sixth test I announced, "Carol. And are you standing about two to three feet behind me?" Because that's about how far it seemed. My proximity sense is like radar in that there's a way of getting the impression of distance. [[You have something similar, but much poorer. If you aren't distracted, and someone is standing IMMEDIATELY behind you, you can sometimes feel their presence more than if they were standing farther back. And sometimes not, because your version of my proximity sense is pretty pathetic.]] "Yes." "Keep moving slowly closer, sweetie, and I'll call out just before I think you're about to touch me." I could feel her get closer, and at what I thought was the right time, I called out, "Now." I can only detect movements or intended movements, which means I can't detect a torso unless it's moving relative to the rest of the body. I was sensing Carol's leg, arm, and occasional head movements, with a blank in the middle of her body. That blank made it a little difficult to know when to stop her because I couldn't accurately judge when her breasts would've bumped into my back (I resisted the temptation to call too late). Carol confirmed she was very close behind me, which I could also tell from her voice. I turned careful not to bump her, and I'd certainly called it correctly as Carol would've been only an inch or two away from me. "Thanks. I'm going to do the next few turned around so I'm facing your room. I'll still have my eyes shut, I just want to make sure it works to the front too. Okay?" "Sure." As expected, my facing made no difference. I even tried a couple turned sideways, but I always detected and identified the girl accurately. I declared the test over and accompanied Carol back to her room to thank Donna. "Thank you both, that worked great." Carol went to turn the music down while Donna said, "That was very clever. We never learned anything like that in Karate." Carol said, "I have a feeling that was more because of Mark than Aikido. I can't imagine any normal person learning how to do that by watching one class for an hour. Am I right, Mark?" "Sensei might be able to, but the other students probably can't." I didn't know whether Sensei could, but I wanted to downplay my ability, as Carol was looking too impressed. She confirmed my impression by what she said now, "Julia keeps telling me how special you are, and she's right. Last night Andrew and Robert told us how amazed they were by your beating them at 8-ball. You drove Dad's car without any lessons, and now you can tell when we are behind you and who we are, which is like magic. You're special all right! Not just incredibly nice, but special in other ways too." Donna jumped in with, "Don't forget how incredible he is with running!" Carol asked her, "Is he really that good? Incredible?" Donna confirmed, "I think so. He's very, very good. I'm sure he'll do very well in the 10k." Carol asked me, "Is it okay for me to talk with Julia about what we just did?" "Thanks for asking for permission, Carol. You're right that I wouldn't like to have some of the things I can do talked about. I know some people have some ideas - that's why I'm called 'Egg' - but I'd much prefer to keep things quiet rather than have them known. I'd definitely appreciate both of you not talking about what we just did. Except to Julia is okay. I don't really have any secrets from her, or you two either, come to that. I like trusting my favorite girls." I smiled at them both. #2: Carol said, "I'd never tell anyone else anyway. Julia already asked me to have lunch with you two again tomorrow to help her with something, so I'll probably mention it to her then, so she knows that I agree with her about how special you are." #4: #1: I thanked the girls again, and went back to my room. #3 or #4 continued to read the Driver Manual, complaining about how boring it was, while we skimmed through the second Aikido book. It was effectively the same as the first, although it had a couple of chapters at the end about using ki to assist people heal after an injury or illness. That sounded very spiritualistic and not believable. I already knew that ki was all about intentions, which made it a mental effect. That was also consistent with how Sensei talked about it helping during Aikido techniques. Healing someone faster than normal was obviously wishful thinking and nothing to do with ki. I was disappointed that neither book had been helpful. I guess I should've expected that, as my situation was not only strange, but probably unique. I expected that I'd have to develop my abilities myself, with no outside assistance beyond some vague comments from Sensei or books. After spending the few hours of disappointing reading, I'd lost my immediate excitement about my new abilities. They were certainly incredible, and I was thrilled to have them, but they were something that I was going to have to work on developing for months or years. Sensei had several times emphasized that developing ki was a lifelong, never-ending exercise, so dropping everything to work on them would be foolish. I did expect to learn faster than other people, but I also had even more abilities to practice, so this was going to be a long-term project. I had a strong suspicion that Prof would soon be loading me down with college work. He'd looked gleeful at the thought of my doing some of OSU's Math courses, which worried me considerably because I knew my IQ was truly only 105 or so. With the college threat looming, it made good sense for me to hit the schoolbooks, to get as far ahead in my schoolwork as I could before Prof loaded me down with difficult college work. Doing ki experiments was still highly tempting, so I decided to ration myself. I'd experiment in one ki area per evening, but otherwise do my schoolwork. I decided to reward myself for discovering these new abilities by not counting the cancellation experiments I'd already done, so I could experiment with something else that I REALLY wanted to try: If I could create fingertips, could I create eyeballs? The thought of sending an invisible eyeball into the girls' showers in the school's gym never crossed my mind. There was absolutely no "crossing" of minds at all - that thought entered all of my minds and lodged immovably at the front of all of our thoughts. #4 was more than happy to be distracted from reading the boring Driver Manual to help us work on developing a technique to look at naked girls. He's a helpful guy. To cut a long story short, we created many, many lumps of ki, all of which functioned exactly the same as fingertips, and none of which functioned as Peeping Toms. All we managed to do was create fingertips of a variety of sizes and shapes, including vaguely eyeball-sized and -shaped, but without any such functionality. We also tried ears and even lips, but we just got more shapes that functioned only as fingertips. They were lumps of ki. Even the variation in size and shape was boring, as not much variation of either was possible. We could make them a little longer or shorter, could make them somewhat wider, and could slightly distort their shapes, but that was about it. It was a very disappointing waste of time. I ran out of ideas, and sadly had to turn to my schoolwork. I worked for a couple of hours, then went to sleep fairly late. ------- Chapter 29: Biff Number Four Friday, April 8, 2005 I leaped out of bed in the morning, eager for breakfast, as usual. I was at the table before I remembered that we needed to have someone on centering duty. #3 was picked as #2 had been on the last duty last night. While eating I concentrated on my proximity sense, to see if I could still detect Mom and Dad when they were in range. Yep, no problems. Their individual 'colors' were unchanged from last evening, which was something I'd wondered about yesterday. [Initially my proximity sense was difficult to use, so I ignored it most of the time. When I wanted to use it, I'd briefly shut my eyes to block out the visual distractions. Over several days I got better at 'reading' the new sense. Soon I could leave my eyes open while I concentrated fairly hard on reading it. After some more days it steadily became just another sense. Your smell, hearing and sight don't conflict with each other; and nor did my proximity sense once I got used to it (admittedly the sight of a girl in a low-cut top has been known to distract me from my conversation, but those are two special cases). After two or three weeks, I could use all my senses, including proximity, all the time and without any problems (becoming distracted by seeing girls in low-cut tops is NOT a "problem").] Dad reminded me to get the list of phone numbers from Julia, which reminded me to grab my phone too, although I hadn't gotten around to reading any further in the manual than the initial charging instructions. The car ride was normal, Donna mentioning that she had a game after school, so not to wait for her when we came home. Julia met us at school, giving Carol and me copies of the phone numbers. We went together to our first class with Julia attached to my left arm as normal. A brand new sense and having telekinesis were incredible developments, even with their both having limitations: proximity had only a three-foot range, my TK was very weak and I dared not risk revealing it in public. Another limitation was that both were totally dependent on my being centered, which was a problem because I could very easily imagine that in any interesting situation, the very first thing that would happen would be my losing center yet again. I DEFINITELY had to get better at holding center. Plus I wanted to practice at proximity and TK. "Practice makes perfect" is something both Mom and Dad have been known to tell me from time to time, and a few extra times too. I wanted to increase the range of proximity because three feet measured from my center wasn't very far at all. I also wanted to increase my TK force because it was very weak, at what felt like about ten pounds. I very much wanted it to be about twenty times stronger. (Can you guess my main reason? It's mentioned later.) Practicing my proximity sense was easy, as it was automatically active whenever I was centered. I practiced TK by continually pushing as hard as I could against the ground or walls, pathetically weak as that was. Another reason I wanted to work on these new ki abilities was the hope that I might discover new ones. It seemed unlikely that I'd discovered everything there was to discover in the first five minutes after learning how to center myself. On the other hand, proximity and TK might be the only ki abilities there are. I didn't know, but I was going to experiment and keep my eyes open for anything interesting, especially for something that allowed me to keep more eyes open inside the girls' shower room. So I had the best (for a teenage boy) motivation to keep center during school. Despite that motivation, #4 lost center three times before the first class even started, and once during the class too. There was just so much going on around us that it was too easy for something to catch his attention. My first class's teacher asking a question that only #4 knew the answer to didn't help either. He tried to hold center while answering the question, but he and the teacher got into a conversation and he lost it. We decided that when the person on duty had to participate, then the duty mind would try to hold center, but the next mind (#1 in this case as we use a wrap-around sequence) would also start concentrating on holding center too, as a backstop. We wanted to get GOOD at this, so good that we NEVER lost our center, and we knew we had to develop tactics for handling distractions. We swapped duty midway through the first class, and #1 had a failure almost immediately after he went on duty. After that he was fine, not failing again. It just required a slightly different attitude to ignore school stuff. It's usually pretty easy to ignore teachers, but everything else that's going on and internal thoughts can be distracting. I had PE next, and finished it a little early to go meet Julia at her locker. Walking down the crowded hallway toward Julia's locker felt GREAT! Not because Julia was missing - I normally love her holding on to my arm - but for an entirely different reason, #2: #4: Being centered and with our proximity sense going meant we could move through the crowd MUCH better. We avoided collisions when we sensed someone about to move into our path, we flitted through gaps easier, and generally just 'flowed' along smoother (that's both what happened and how it felt). Without Julia restricting my movement, I could flow freely down the hallway, and it felt very nice. #3: I stopped feeling "cool" when I got to Julia's locker. A football-jersey-wearing slab of meat was leaning on her locker and he had a paw wrapped around one of Julia's upper-arms. She was trying to pull away, but he wasn't allowing it. #3: We all agreed. #3: #1: I stopped several feet away and called out loudly, "What's going on here?" Biff#4 turned and looked at me, "Get lost, runt. You're not allowed anywhere near us." #2: <"WE'RE not allowed anywhere near THEM"! It's them that aren't allowed near us! Is this guy a moron?> #4: [Until we discovered the need to have someone on centering duty we nearly always shared our internal communications fully, sending our messages to the other three minds. There were a few exceptions, such as #3 and #4 discussing driving issues without bothering the others with them, but generally we shared everything. But none of us wanted to distract #1 now, so he was excluded from our communication. We'd started doing that shortly after we invented the "On Duty" job, and you should understand that excluding the on-duty mind was now our standard operating procedure for internal conversations.] "Julia, what's he doing to you?" "He's insisting I go on a date with him, and he won't let my arm go until I agree. He's hurting me. He says I'm too pretty to be wasted on you. He's got no idea how wonderful you are. A million of him wouldn't be worth your spit." #4: #2: #3: #4: #3: #4: I called out, "Julia, start struggling as hard as you can to get away. Go!" Julia started screaming and kicking, pulling her trapped arm as hard as she could and punching him with her free hand. Of course, his being a moronic slab of meat and probably more than three times as massive as Julia meant her efforts were completely ineffective, except that they distracted Biff for a few seconds. When he looked back at me, I was holding up my open cellphone as if I was filming him. It wasn't even turned on, and I didn't know whether it had a camera or not, but I figured Biff didn't know any better either. Biff was clearly puzzled. Doubtless because in his world the only answer to any problem is to run into it. He knew I had a problem with him, so my not attacking him was incomprehensible. "What're you doing?" "I'm filming you assaulting my girlfriend. I'm going to take this to the police and you'll be expelled from school and spend the next five years in jail." I would have said a higher, scarier number of years, but I suspected he might be unfamiliar with really big numbers, like six. It took him a while, but he eventually worked out that this was not good. He dropped Julia and advanced on me. "Give me that phone." #3: With proximity telling me of his intention to grab me with his right hand, it was very easy to move out of its way before it reached me. Then when he tried to cut in front of me, I changed direction and ducked around someone else in the hallway. There was a substantial crowd of watchers by now, and I ducked in and around them. I knew how he and they were going to move (those within three feet of me, or with intentions that passed that close to me), giving my existing athleticism a large boost. This was sweet! I could've stayed out of the stupid ox's reach all day. He lumbered after me, ineffectually every time. I closed my phone and put it in my left pocket while he was watching me do so. There were several more seconds of my avoiding him, with more and more of the spectators laughing at him. #4: #3: So the next time he came at me, I stumbled and he got hold of my left arm. He pulled me in closer and started throwing solid punches at my torso. He was most definitely within my proximity range, so I sensed the punches coming and twisted to make them glance off me so they didn't hurt nearly as much as they would have otherwise. It was fantastic that I could do that even though his punching fist was out of my sight. While we were jostling around, he wrenched my left arm painfully. #2: #4: #3: Biff punched me with his free hand a few more times, but when those didn't incapacitate me he changed to try to get the phone out of my pocket. Even though I was held, I could still dance around enough to make that too hard for him. He needed both his hands to hold me still enough to make my pocket accessible, but that left him with no spare hand to grab the phone with. Every time he got me immobile, then let go with one hand, I was able to start twisting around too much. The frustration of two being less than three was obvious on his face. He eventually worked out an effective tactic: he picked me up, turned me horizontal, and threw me onto the floor. #1, #2, #3, #4: #2: Biff knelt on me in the opposite orientation, so he had one knee on my chest, that leg extended over my face, and his hands were trying to find out which pocket I had put the phone in. He'd seen me put it in, but my lying flat and his facing the other way clearly confounded his ability to work out where my left side was now. I had a clear line of sight to his crotch, as his legs were split apart. I was debating whether now was a good time to TK-punch his balls: Was there enough evidence for the police yet? Was the phone in danger of being broken? When would a teacher get here? Would TK-punching his balls have enough force to hurt him? Then I hear a loud, authoritative, teacher-voice yell, "STOP THAT THIS INSTANT!" The only thing I was doing was looking at Biff's balls, admittedly covered but nonetheless not pleasant to contemplate, so I was happy to stop. One good thing about jocks - probably the only good thing - is that they're used to following orders. I guess because of the years of football drills, and their not actually having any brains of their own. "STAND UP!" Of necessity, I let Biff get up first, then stood myself. I did a mental check of my body, finding nothing too badly hurt. I'd had many worse beatings before, so I was quite happy with myself. We sent a quick to #1. I turned to the large audience and asked, "Do any of you have a cellphone?" One guy near me said, "Yes." I asked, "Can I borrow it please?" He opened it and offered it to me. I said, "Hang on a second please, I have to look up a number." I pulled out my wallet and started extracting the card one of the detectives had given me back when I was interviewed in the hospital. I'd kept it just in case. This was a "case". The teacher (I didn't know him) told me to, "Stop what you're doing. I'll take care of this." I looked him in the eye and said, "This is the fourth time I've been assaulted by the school's football team in the last two weeks, the last time breaking my arm and sending me to the hospital. Six of them have been arrested, spent time in jail, and have their trial coming up shortly. It's been in the papers, so I doubt you've missed it. My parents seriously considered suing the school at that time, but chose not to despite several lawyers calling them and begging for the job. Now yet another one of the school's football team has assaulted me on school grounds, so I'm calling the police to report it. If you attempt to stop me I'll tell the police you did so and I'll have the school sued for deliberately creating a violent football team and then attempting to cover up their criminal behavior and for preventing the reporting of a crime. I appreciate that you stopped the assault, but leave it to the police now." He wisely said nothing. Definitely a smart idea, I thought. I added, "I suggest you send someone to fetch the Principal. He's going to need to know about this because the school is going to be in a whole heap of trouble now." While the teacher was finding a student to go do this - none of them wanted to leave as this was the best fun they'd had all day - I found the number for the police station. After getting some help from the owner of the phone (I'm not very technically adept, and don't appreciate that every cellphone works differently), I placed the call. The detective wasn't in, so I just talked to whoever took this type of call. Julia had walked around to stand beside me and put her arm around me. I noticed that she had a substantial collection of bruises on her arm from where Biff had squeezed it. She was obviously fine, but I reported TWO assaults. When I ended that call and handed his phone back, the guy asked me, "Why didn't you use your phone?" I couldn't help answering quite loudly, "I only got it last night. I don't even know how to turn it on yet." There was laughter from the crowd. One of the dumber ones disagreed, "But I saw you filming him." "Total bluff, to make him let go of Julia. It wasn't even turned on. I don't think it even has a camera." Everyone thought this was very funny, except Biff. Well aware of the procedure now I said, "The police will be here shortly. Biff here," I indicated the moron in case there was any doubt who "Biff" was, "will be arrested and will spend some time in jail for his unprovoked assault on my tiny girlfriend and beating up defenseless a boy with a broken arm. The police will need witness statements for evidence against him. I'd appreciate it if some of you who saw it help out." There were enough kids who said they'd help. My being funny with my camera trick meant it was cool to help me, but I think it was mostly that the previous Biff assaults had made me locally famous, and people wanted to be famous-by-association by helping me with this latest assault. I turned to the teacher who'd stopped the fight, "I'm sorry I spoke harshly to you; I was a bit stressed at the time. Thanks for stopping the assault. I suggest you ask someone for a pen and paper to record the witnesses' details while they're still here." Then I turned to Julia and ignored everyone else. "My hero," she gushed at me. "How's your arm?" I asked back. We exchanged that sort of thing, and hugs, back and forth. It was nice. By now the hallway was packed solid, and several teachers were converging on the scene. From one end of the hallway we heard the Principal demanding, "Make way for the Principal," (he's more than a little self-important) as he worked his way through the crowd. I was standing close enough to Biff for him to be in my proximity sense range. I could sense his intending to run, scared by the Principal's voice I guessed. Knowing what he seemed about to do, I had time to decide how to react: I'd use TK to trip him up. When he started running, I three-mind TK-pushed on the outside of his rear ankle to tangle it behind his forward leg. It didn't work because I hadn't allowed enough time. I'd started pushing when his rear leg was too close to his forward leg, so I couldn't accelerate it inward far enough before it got past his forward leg. Before I could try again what would've been two steps later, the crowd had slowed him down enough that the Principal had seen him, and had yelled out Biff's real name and demanded that he stop. Biff, seeing no hope, did so. Life was now too complex for his tiny brain to handle, so it stopped trying. #2: [Over the next few days, when I saw jocks hurrying somewhere I often practiced tripping them up using this technique, applying my sideways force to the sole of their shoes so they couldn't feel it directly. I soon got the timings down pat, although I did practice several more times just to make sure (snigger).] [[It never occurred to me at this time "to take the battle to the enemy". There were a few of the jocks who were extreme assholes, and who I'd have loved the opportunity to get some revenge on, but I never thought of proactively seeking it. Football season hadn't started yet, but I never thought to trip the main assholes during the practices or trial games, or waiting until their real games and doing it then. Between trips, nudging the ball at the wrong time (e.g., as an asshole was about to catch it or had just thrown it), and other tactics, I could've made my main persecutors look like clumsy idiots, and probably got them kicked off the team if I sabotaged them for long enough. But it simply never occurred to me. Not that those 'attacks' would have been evidence of a good character, my not even having the ideas was evidence that my character was too passive at this time in my life.]] The Principal arrived, "What's going on here?" He demanded. I had pleasure in informing him, "My girlfriend," I still got a thrill out of saying that, "and I were the victims of yet another unprovoked assault by a member of this school's football team. Not two weeks after you promised it'd never happen again. There were dozens of witnesses that neither she nor I provoked him or fought back." Not strictly true, as Julia had punched Biff with her free hand, but I didn't think anyone would count that. "I've called the police and they're on their way here again. We'll be laying assault complaints against our assailant." Then I very much enjoyed adding, "Do you want to call my mother, or shall I?" -- He looked decidedly unhappy at that thought, which inspired me to make another addition, "Let's go to your office. I'll call my mom and you can call the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education." That didn't cheer him up at all. Good. He made the necessary orders, then Julia and I followed him to his office. On the way I realized I could add Attempted Theft of my cellphone to my list of charges. Or was that Theft with Menace? I'm sure the police would know. #4: In the Principal's office, I called Mom using his phone. I could probably work out how to use my new one, but I might as well use his dime. I got hold of Mom and told her, "Julia and I are in the Principal's office with the Principal. We've both been assaulted by a member of the school's football team YET AGAIN, and we're waiting for the police to arrive. Not badly assaulted, so we won't require hospitalization THIS time." Mom has some questions, as moms do at such times. As soon as I had a chance to get it into the conversation, I said in a voice loud enough for the Principal to clearly hear, "Mom, I suggest you alert your lawyer that he's going to be busy for the next few days. It's clear to me now that the school is not only negligent, but so many of the school's football team committing violent assaults is clearly the result of the school's having created a deliberately violent culture in that team, so we should sue the school the way your lawyer suggested before. The lawsuit he wanted to file needs to be updated as a result of these fourth and fifth assaults. I'm still in a cast from the last assault, for goodness sake! This is certainly an extremely dangerous school." We had no such lawyer, let alone a prepared lawsuit, but it sounded good and Mom would realize I was having some fun. Mom confirmed she understood my point, and I could tell she was starting to relax from her initial high level of worry. I reassured her a couple more times, even suggesting that she not come to school if she was busy at work. Which gave me the idea to add, "These continuous disruptions to your work must be damaging your career. Maybe our lawyer can add something to the suit to compensate you for that." Mom chuckled a bit at that, adding, "I'm not too busy so I'll come shortly. Should I call your father?" "There's no need." Which would reassure her further. I was milking the situation, but I had no regret about making the Principal's life as miserable as possible. I've been bullied at this school on many hundreds of occasions over the years, some of them extremely painful both physically and emotionally. Those incidents had contributed significantly to my committing suicide the first and second times, and had been prominently mentioned in my bathtub suicide note. I know my suicides are working out surprisingly well for me, but that doesn't let the school off. Plus I wanted to make damned sure I wasn't going to be assaulted YET again, and it'd also be a worthwhile goal to get the worst bullies out of the school so other students aren't attacked by them. Julia called her parents next. Her Mom was not giving a lecture, so Julia was able to talk with her. Julia insisted that she was fine, "Only a bruised arm because Mark rescued me. There's no need for you to come, Mom. Felicity's on her way, and there's no need for any more than that." One of Julia's comments was, "We'll both be pressing charges against the assailant. Corvallis will need to build another jail for all the criminals this school is training in its football team." The Principal didn't like that comment at all, which meant I did. Shortly after Julia hung up, I thought about lunch (I was hungry), then remembered that we had planned to have lunch with Carol, which reminded me of Carol. I turned to the Principal and said, "Why aren't my sisters here yet?" He looked confused, and I immediately added, "For goodness sake, don't tell me you haven't sent instructions for my sisters to come see their brother? I know that you know I have sisters because you arranged the car for us after the debacle with the reporters. My sisters will have heard by now that their brother has been assaulted for the fourth time, and the last time required my hospitalization. They must be frantic with worry. Good grief!" He got his secretary to get my sisters brought to his office asap. In retrospect, I'd gotten a bit carried away, but I also think the Principal never caught on. The various Boards of Education had been all over his ass as a result of the previous assaults. I think he spent most of this morning planning his retirement rather than listening to me too closely. He really was quite a weak individual, which is how bullying got to be such a problem in the first place. I'd started wondering whether we could actually sue some money out of the school, especially because of the expenses the Williamses were incurring because of Carol and me, but then I remembered my roulette idea. I imagined casinos could afford to lose money much more than our school could. Winning money from a casino would also be quicker and more fun than working through a lawsuit. That a lawsuit might keep the Bedroom Rules in place for potentially a year or more occurred to me, so I lost interest in abusing the Principal any more. Well, maybe just a little bit more. Apart from being enjoyable, it might help reduce the amount of future bullying. The next event of note was the arrival of the police. The Principal wanted to go with them when they went to Biff. I said, "I'm tired of being in this room. Do you have an empty office somewhere where we can wait alone. Send my sisters to us when they come. Also some food and drink. I'm feeling faint. Probably from shock or something." Julia almost laughed out loud, but she managed to hold it in. It's great having a smart girlfriend. Or any girlfriend at all, come to that. We were taken to a nearby empty office and left there. As soon as we were alone, Julia climbed on to my lap and said, "That camera trick was very clever. Thank you for that." "Yes, I must admit that I quite enjoyed that myself. Especially telling him afterward." Julia continued, "But I don't understand why you let him beat you up. That was risky." "How do you know I let him?" "You were dodging him easily. It was a pleasure to watch you because it was so easy for you. You could have stayed out of his reach until a teacher arrived, but you stumbled and he caught you. You NEVER stumble; so it was deliberate." "Ahh, you got me there. Yes it was. Let's keep that quiet though. It'd complicate the case if they knew I allowed myself to get caught." "But why did you do it?" "After the last attacks the whole football team was told as hard as possible to leave me alone. Yet it's only two weeks later and another one of them thought attacking me was a good idea. They're stupid, arrogant and violent. The most stupid of them are incapable of learning, so they have to be eliminated. If I'd just dodged him until a teacher arrived he'd get off without much punishment. All he did was hold your arm, which - I'm sorry to say - was not serious enough. He would've stupidly tried again in a few days because that's what idiots like him do. Also, other jocks might've been encouraged by his not being punished badly. -- "This way there's one less violent moron in school, and the other slightly less moronic jocks might get a glimmer of an idea that it's not a good idea to try to hassle us. I'll keep sending them to jail as long as they keep coming, even if Corvallis has to build another jail. I liked that comment of yours by the way. It was very funny and pulled the Principal's tail nicely." "It's a pity he won't get the electric chair. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who attempts to attack you should never see the light of day again. I'd pull the switch myself if they'd let me. You're immensely more valuable than any number of apes. I don't understand why you'd take the risk of being injured again though? The last time they broke your arm, and this time could've been worse." #2: #3: #4: We called #1, had a little internal meeting, and he also agreed with telling Julia. We decided to demonstrate it to her. #2: #3, #4: #2 centered himself. I answered Julia's question, "Actually Julia, I was pretty safe. Remember how fast and how well I learned 8-ball?" "Yes indeed. I'm still disappointed in myself for not realizing I could've made some money off my brothers." "I learn some things very quickly." I put on an exaggerated strident tone, "I spent a WHOLE hour watching Aikido last night, so just imagine how much I know now!" "I don't understand. He was on top of you and you only had one arm, so how could you defend yourself?" "I'll show you. Stand up and walk across to the far side of the room, good. Now turn to face me and hold your hand up so the palm is facing me. Good." I waited about a second, and then gave her palm a moderately hard TK-push for a second, which pushed her hand back sharply. A look of total astonishment appeared on her face. "You did that! From across the room? How? I didn't even see you move." Her voice was rising in pitch, and I suddenly realized that she could freak out on me. #3: "PLEASE don't yell across the room, darling. Come back and sit on my lap NOW, Julia." Walking back, she couldn't help exclaiming too loudly for my liking, "You really did THAT?" The LAST THING I needed was Julia getting hysterical over my TK in the middle of a school office, so I had to lighten the mood. I frantically tried to defuse the situation, "You doubt me! That's going to cost you a big kiss." She curled up on my lap again, and delivered on her penalty. I was very impressed that she had. It made me realize how much faith Julia had in me. I think if someone had sprung that on me, I would've run around in circles screaming my head off. I certainly would've hesitated to sit on their lap! But Julia hadn't shown any hesitation at all. My demonstration had been stupidly done, but fortunately Julia was handling it amazingly well. I spoke, "I just realized how scary that experience must have been for you. I'm stunned that you can come back to me and sit on my lap. I think this is the first time that I have truly appreciated how much faith you have in me. I'm very honored by your faith and amazed by you. Thank you very much." I got another kiss for that. She added, "I am glad you're starting to understand my feelings for you." #3: #4: #1: "I'm glad you've got those feelings too. But let's get back to my explanation about my being able to defend myself?" "Yes please! I'm VERY interested in that!" "That push that I gave you wouldn't have defended me from that slab of meat. But imagine a sudden push, twice as hard in one of his eyeballs." Julia clearly could imagine it; her face registered the shock of it. "That would burst his eye?" "Yes, I think it would. And if necessary I could do the other eyeball half a second later. I could do it from several feet away too, as I just demonstrated. I nearly did exactly that to him when I saw him holding you. If he'd been causing you serious pain, your face would've been the last thing he ever saw." #4: Julia shuddered on my lap. "You're beyond awesome. What you just did is impossible, but I have no doubt that you can do it. My God! What a man you are!" Julia's voice was rising in volume and frequency. #4: < She's getting too excited. We need to calm her down.> "Julia!" "Yes?" "Think about this. If I play your brothers at 8-ball again, every time they sink a ball I can make it jump straight out of the pocket and back onto the table again. Wouldn't that be funny?" "Haha. That'd be priceless." "Let me show you something else I can do. Just stand up in front of me, facing me. Yes, just like that." #3 and #4 pinched the left and right sides of the hem of her skirt, and moved their fingertips to lift it. The first attempt failed, but we quickly realized what we'd done wrong and corrected our procedure. It worked fine the second time. It required four fingertips per mind. The first two to pinch the hem and clamp it together by having both fingertips pressing toward each other. Those two couldn't then lift because that'd mean they were no longer clamping together, so the cloth would slip through easily (that'd been our first failure). The correct technique was to have two more fingertips under the clamping pair, and for the new fingertips to push everything upward. Julia's face showed a look of surprise, and then delight. When the dress was high enough that her panties were exposed, #1 lightly rubbed her panties in front of her pussy. Julia smiled and spread her legs wider. #4: #1: I rubbed for several seconds. It was fun to watch the indentation move back and forth, especially when a wet patch started forming. Unfortunately, we heard, "They're in there" from the reception area outside, then footsteps moving rapidly toward our door. #3 and #4 dropped Julia's skirt. The door opened and Carol rushed in. She ran straight toward us, without closing the door behind her. I preferred privacy, so I TK-pushed the door magically shut. TK is really cool! A clearly distraught Carol threw an arm around each of us and started sobbing, "I was so upset. Are you two okay? Are you hurt?" Julia defused Carol's upset very well, "I'm having a great time! Mark was playing with my pussy." It wasn't quite the sort of comment that Carol had expected. She stopped being frantic to ask, "Huh?" Julia answered, "We're perfectly fine and there's nothing to worry about. We were just enjoying ourselves. Mark was playing with my pussy until you came in." Julia looked at me and said, "I guess we'll have to stop that now, Donna and other people are bound to start arriving soon. What a pity, I was getting very turned on." I said to Julia, "We should not talk about THIS," at the same time as I gave her nose a small but definitely noticeable TK-push, "while we're in school. Later, okay?" Julia nodded. #3: #1: #3, #4: I added, "Julia, we'll tell Carol EVERYTHING later, when we're together in your soundproof room. All right?" Julia answered, "That's WONDERFUL, darling! The best thing you could've said. I'm SO happy." And Julia jumped up into my lap and snuggled in as best she could, which is VERY good. Carol could see all the happiness going on. Clearly we were fine. But she still said, "I was worried but you seem okay, even happy?" Julia answered, "We've got a couple of bruises but nothing to worry about. I'm very, VERY happy. This man of ours keeps getting better and better in absolutely astonishing ways. We'll tell you about it later. We weren't in any danger. Come here and give me a hug, my big little sister." Carol stepped next to us, and we enjoyed a group hug for a little while. A thought suddenly occurred to me, "Julia, we won't get you to make an assault charge. You'll just be a witness. We don't want to start another media circus. Without a pretty girl involved this is just a boring story, so will come and go quickly. If you were one of the victims there could be press all around your house, trying to photograph you, maybe outside your bedroom. The fuckwit is in enough trouble just with my charge. If not we can always add your charge later, I think." Julia understood, "Yes. Good point. I'm sure my parents would be happy too." Donna came in next and we easily reassured her. Without, I was glad, any reference to pussy rubbing. Then the school nurse came to check our injuries. Julia just had her squeezed arm and I just had a few bruises here and there. The police arrived, closely followed - to my surprised delight - by some cafeteria snacks. I happily took one, and then the damned police started helping themselves too! I blamed the stupid English language as the office lady that'd delivered them had made the mistake of saying "These are for you," and the cops greedily assumed she meant the plural "you" rather than the singular. ["Thou" used to be the singular version of "you", but it inexplicably dropped out of usage and is now archaic. English has many imprecisions like that, often leading to misunderstandings as tragic as the current one.] My girls - bless them - grabbed several of the snacks and put them in their pockets, obviously saving them for me. The police didn't appreciate Julia's refusal to make a complaint. Her bruise was more graphic than any of mine, plus her being such a tiny girl and the alleged assailant a big male would've made the district attorney's job easier. The police wanted to photograph her arm but she refused, which annoyed the cops even more. We insisted that she was just a witness, like plenty of others. We couldn't give them our reason as it was: "So we can continue to have underage sex," so the cops continued to be annoyed. They were eating some of my snacks so I had no sympathy for them. I, unlike Julia, was only too willing to cooperate. It was a simple story: I'd arrived to see the football player holding Julia's arm in a very painful looking way, and she'd called out to me that he was hurting her and refusing to let her go unless she agreed to go on a date with him. I was scared he'd break her arm as she was so tiny compared with him so I used the camera trick to lure him away. I'd been amazed and horrified when he'd attacked me, a boy with an arm in a cast! I'd tried to stay out of his reach until a teacher arrived, but I'd stumbled and he'd gotten hold of me. He'd held me still while he'd punched me several times, then he'd picked me up and thrown me on the floor before dropping his weight on top of me. I'd never attempted to hit him, not even once. It was a totally one-sided assault. The cops thought my camera trick was very funny, but their admiration didn't extend far enough for them to stop eating my snacks. I added that he'd tried to steal my phone, and tried to stress that attempted theft, but they weren't interested in it. Mom arrived, and among other things, told the Principal that she was looking forward to having a talk with him shortly. That will be today's second "one-sided assault". Mom sent Carol and Donna back to their classes, as "Julia and Mark are obviously okay." My sisters protested, but protests have a way of not working on mothers. Just before my sisters left, Carol asked, "Julia, that thing you were going to do at lunch. Can we do it next week please?" Julia's answer was "Sure, sweetie. I wouldn't do it without you anyway." (Julia had started copying my calling Carol "Sweetie".) I had no idea what they were talking about, and there was too much going on to ask them. Just one more of life's many little mysteries, I've noticed nearly all of which involve females. ------- Chapter 30: Biff Number Four; Aftermath Friday, April 8, 2005 (Continued) and a look forward. [I'll jump ahead to describe the aftermath of the latest jock stupidity. I won't bother describing the rest of the crap that went on regarding Biff#4. Especially with the school's strong encouragement that the police do so, Biff#4 was arrested, charged and convicted. Most importantly for Julia and me, he was also expelled, so there was one less violent moron in school. By the time I graduated in just over a year - I had no doubt I'd easily pass the 11th grade exams - this might be a decent place. It came out that Biff#4's plan had been - and you'll need to play attention here because it was quite complicated: He was a very good 11th grade football player, and had been hoping to obtain a good college scholarship next year. It was my fault, presumably by putting my body in the way of their fists, that six of his fellow teammates had been expelled: Biffs #1, 2 and 3, plus the three extra meats in Biff#3's assault. The loss of so many players and subsequent grief from the Principal and coaches had greatly upset the remaining team, and would've harmed its performance next year as a couple of the expelled players had not been seniors. Biff#4 thought being in a losing team with a bad reputation would hurt his scholarship chances, and it also wasn't fair that I'd caused his team so much trouble. He knew he was not allowed to approach me, so he decided to "teach me a lesson" by stealing my girl. All he needed to do was get Julia to have one date with him then she'd never go back to me because he was a football star and I was a nobody. He'd approached Julia and told her that they were going on a date that night. He couldn't understand why she'd refused, so in the time-honored jock fashion he'd kept repeating himself, raising his voice to help her understand and grabbing her arm to stop her leaving before she realized how lucky she was. Then I'd arrived and had tricked him with the fake camera. Which was a dirty trick and unfair, especially because I wasn't allowed to hassle the football team. I don't think he ever grasped the concept that the "no hassle" restriction only went the other way. Because I'd broken the "no hassle" rule, it was okay for him to try to get the camera off me. And anyway, it wasn't really a camera or even turned on. It was also my fault because I hadn't handed it over when he'd asked me for it. If I'd done that he wouldn't have needed to punch me at all. It was clearly the work of a strategic genius, so it was a pity that society would have to muddle along without his contribution for a little while. In truth, chasing a bag of air around a field was about all that he was good for. He'd be out of his depth at any activity that involved real thinking, such as life. The local paper had some laughs at Biff#4's expense, but mostly what it did was give the school and its Principal a VERY hard time. This was the fourth separate and serious assault involving the seventh football team member. These numbers were just too large to be dismissed as random "boys will be boys" behavior. Clearly something stank in the school's football culture. The police also made statements that they were unhappy with the amount of police resources that were being spent on the violent individuals in this school's football team. I was the common factor to all the assaults, so the newspaper wanted to interview me. My answer was, "Because of the appallingly intrusive and obnoxious behavior of your reporters last time they wanted to interview me, you can take a running jump into the river." As I had hoped, the story's lack of prurience meant it was front-page material only briefly, although one article suggested that Biff#4 was another of Annette's boyfriends, thereby giving themselves an excuse to print another sexy picture of her. Much longer lasting was a flurry of "Letters to the Editor" over what was wrong at the school. I was quite glad to hear about those letters, as the school's lax response to bullying desperately needed fixing. The head football coach was encouraged to look for employment elsewhere. He was given plenty of free time to do so, and told not to expect a reference any time soon. In other words, he was fired. He'd been given formal warning after the previous flurry of assaults that another such incident would cost him his job. The school administration had to blame someone, so they chose the head coach as the scapegoat. Fairly in fact, but that was mostly by coincidence. He was the main creator of the bullying culture at the school (him and teenage testosterone), as his ability to browbeat the Principal into overlooking all such incidents involving "his boys" had allowed it to grow unchecked for several years. There were plenty of other historic examples that could've been used to justify his dismissal had he been stupid enough to fight it, but surprisingly for a football coach, he wasn't that stupid. What with the head coach gone and one less good player, the football team wouldn't have a good next season. Their spirits were further dampened by an idea of one of the anti-bullying social workers/experts that was sent to the school to help fix the football team's cultural problems. The football players were summoned to yet another meeting, and told that the football team had brought such shame and disgrace to the school, and to Corvallis as a whole, that football jerseys were no longer acceptable dress anywhere other than on the field during a game. The season being over, there were no games. Any student seen wearing a football jersey at school would immediately be sent home to get changed. Repeat breaches of the school's dress code would lead to suspension and even expulsion. Thus jocks had to dress normally, which did much to break up their "we are special and better than anyone else" culture. Many of the privileges extended to the team were removed. Even the cheerleaders were told they wouldn't be cheering any of the football team's games or other football events until further notice, which wouldn't be for at least a full year. They were told to concentrate on the games of other sports. My soccer teammates were very happy with me, and asked me to get beaten up by the basketball team a few times. There was much protest from the surviving football players about the unfairness of their having to suffer because the actions of a few. They were asked how many times they'd stood by while one of their teammates bullied another student? Had they ever physically dominated another student themselves? Had they ever swaggered down a hallway expecting all the other kids to get out of their way? Had they ever treated a girl without respect because of how important they considered themselves? That sort of thing. Most of them must have done those things because the volume of protests dropped considerably. It was also pointed out that seven assailants was clearly not the "actions of a few". An anti-bullying campaign was started up at school: talks in class, posters, etc. "Zero tolerance" became an oft-heard phrase. There were of course still incidents of bullying, as jocks weren't the only bullies, I wasn't the only victim, and bullies are not quick learners. Bullying behavior did get jumped on though. The book was thrown at them, and their punishments well publicized. "Stop bully!" became a cry that caused fear in many thugs' hearts. So eventually a good result started happening, and about time. Over the summer vacation, some of the jocks - not all of them, but quite a few - got together and spent a fair bit of time doing a variety of community volunteer work as a way of apologizing to the community and trying to repair their reputation. Which just goes to show that not all jocks are as stupid and bad as the ones that kept intruding into my life.] ------- Mom and the Principal had their little chat, the first of a few over the next several days, generally on the phone. Mostly Mom did the chatting and the Principal did the wincing. Mom kept Vanessa informed of subsequent developments. Julia got to go back to class before I did, but when I joined her mid-class, I used TK to lightly stroke her cheek. She loved it. I made a mental note to make sure we told Carol about TK in a nice way and in a safe environment. My doing so with Julia at school after an assault had been VERY stupid. If she'd freaked out, which I should have expected her to, I might not have been able to contain her hysteria before too many people heard too much. Plus it was unfair to freak out Julia that way. After that class, Julia rushed to grab me and several other people gathered around. They'd all heard about it, especially the camera bluff. There were lots of congratulatory comments, hopes that I hadn't been too badly hurt, and that sort of thing. Julia's rather livid bruise got her much sympathy too. She was dismissive of her injury and happy just hugging her "awesome man". While Julia was hugging me, I somehow became aware that she wasn't wearing a bra. This was a first for her at school! I would've put a big grin on my face, but one had already gotten there all by itself. I gently moved my arm back and forth. Pretty soon Julia realized that I knew, so she helped by unobtrusively rubbing herself against me too. Julia's top wasn't particularly attractive to look at, some smock type of dress with a big bow on the front under her breasts, but she sure felt nice under it. Several go-softs were required. (The way my life has been going recently, it might be easier to tell you when go-softs aren't required.) When we were walking to our next class, cutting across an open area of grass without anyone else close to us, I decided to show my appreciation for Julia's lack of an undergarment. I looked down at her, saw where one of her nipples was advertising its presence (she was still very excited by my "awesomeness"). I used TK to apply a quick but reasonably strong pinch the outside of her dress, over the nipple. The dress fabric moved of course, but no one else noticed. Julia sure did though! She gasped and her steps stumbled. She stopped us, demanding, "Do it again." I over-complied. I got two minds involved, and pinched both her nipples at the same time, and several more times when I saw that Julia liked it a great deal. Julia moved her arms up and grasped my arms, her forearms blocking anyone else from seeing the rather strange movements of the front of her dress. Julia was really getting into it, so I pinched again, and did not release. I held both nipples and gently pulled and pushed them, varying the amount of squeeze as well. I could even rotate them by using other fingertips to spin the clamping pair. Everything I did delighted Julia. She breathed at me, "I want to fuck you so bad it's hurting. My juices are running down my leg. I have to go to the bathroom to frig myself silly." "So I don't have to worry about you complaining of invisible sexual harassment then?" "Do you have ANY idea how loving a powerful man affects a woman?" #3: "Umm, no?" "It's the best aphrodisiac there is BAR NONE! When you do that to me, you're proving to me that you are the most powerful man EVER! What you can do is unbelievable. I'm in love with a GOD! Do it again my love - harder, harder, HARDER! IieeeEEE..." I realized what Julia was about to do - was already doing - and I remembered how loud she gets. I quickly clamped my hand over her mouth as she screamed into my hand. "Shush," I said. I'm sure it helped. No more than twenty or thirty people looked around at us as Julia slumped. My right arm was still in the damned sling, but I managed to catch her about halfway down. I eased her to the grass and sat beside her, holding her. I called out to our audience, "She's just overcome." I didn't specify by what. [[At the time, I'd thought I was very clever for making Julia orgasm so easily. Later I had learned enough to know that her orgasm had been 95% emotional. As she'd said, but I hadn't understood, a powerful man is the best aphrodisiac for a girl like Julia, who is very aware of the uses of power and authority over other people. Julia had just learned that her boyfriend was superhuman, and it'd affected her VERY strongly. Using my superhuman power to tweak her nipples pushed her buttons VERY effectively. (Actually it pulled and squeezed her buttons, but I'm sure you take my point.)]] Julia was only out of it for a few seconds, then she announced, "I am SO glad I'm your girlfriend." "Me too, but we really should get to class. Quite a few people are looking at us." "You have to give me a minute. My legs won't have enough strength yet. And I better clean up before class. Can you smell me?" Now that she mentioned it, yes I could. Seeing me sniff and smile, Julia added, "That's all your fault. That's what happens to me for being out with the MOST FANTASTIC guy in the whole world!" I'd learned not to argue with her when she makes such pronouncements, even though they're embarrassingly wild exaggerations. She saw my expression, and added, "The amazing thing is that you really don't see how fantastic you are, do you?" "Um, no, not really. I know I can do some special things that other people can't, but that doesn't make me 'the most fantastic guy in the whole world.' That's an exaggeration. I'm just an ordinary guy with a few extra tricks." Julia gave me her reasoning, "Look what you did back at the fight: Rather than charging in which might've got me hurt, or destroying him as you easily could have, you intelligently tricked him into letting me go, so I was safe. Then you avoided a fight for a while, until you realized we were safer in the long run if you let him beat you up a little. Today you were intelligent, compassionate, willing to sacrifice yourself, and powerful. And let's not forget what you just did with my nipples, so you were also awesomely sexy. I had an orgasm without you even touching me. How many guys could make their girls orgasm without touching them?" "To me it does feel like touch, with my mind rather than my fingers. Obviously you can't see anything, so it looks like magic to you." Julia agreed, "Yes, that's exactly what it is. No one can see anything. Except a very happy girl being made to orgasm without anyone touching her. This is a very good skill for a boyfriend to have! You're REALLY over-delivering in the 'Make Your Girlfriend Orgasm' department, haha." I was still thinking about what to say next, when Julia interrupted, "Oh gosh! I was just thinking that you get better and better every day. Then I remembered that a couple of days ago I told you not to get any better or I'd explode. And now you've gotten FAR better. That no-touching touching you do is impossible, but you do it for fun, just to give me a very good time. How can you keep getting so much more amazing? And to think I wanted to keep you for myself." And Julia shook her head to indicate disbelief in herself. #4: #3: Julia continued, "Darling, what do you want my parents and brothers to know about what you can do? I'm stunned that you have so much trust in me, and I think it's wonderful that you're going to tell Carol. I think that's PERFECT. But beyond her, who do you want to tell?" "Um, I haven't really decided anything, other than to trust you and Carol. I think Donna is still a little flighty, although I got her to help me with a small new thing last night, to do with telling who's very close behind me. You and Carol are both very loyal to me, which makes me feel very good about your knowing. It's a relief for me to be able to talk with someone about these things, or to ask for help like I did with Donna and Carol last night, or to try things out that I haven't done before, like playing with nipples!" Julia offered, "I am VERY happy to help you try out those types of things!" "Yes, I could see that. I also want to try my no-touching touch, as you call it, up your ass next time we're naked." "Yes please! I knew I was going to have a good life with you, haha." "With regard to telling anyone else, I haven't thought it through yet. I haven't had time because I've only just started learning these new things. They emerged out of something I learned from Aikido last evening. I didn't tell my parents this morning, but I didn't really think about that. I can always tell them later if I decide to, but it's probably best to be cautious, I think." Julia suggested, "I agree. The no-touching touching is superhuman, so that has to be kept quiet. Otherwise hundreds of girls will be offering you their nipples and assholes, haha. -- "Seriously, it's an important secret. If that became public knowledge there'd be some major problems. Normally I tell my parents about things you and I do, but I won't tell them about that. That secret is so important it has to be your decision who you tell it to. Let's talk about it more when you come over tomorrow. I know my parents are eager to help you, but you don't need to tell them everything that you're capable of." We got up and went to class. In Julia's case, via the girls' bathroom. ------- When I got to the place where we wait for the school's car, both of my sisters were already there. Donna just wanted to check that I was okay before she shot off to her game. I assured her that I was, that the bully had been weaker than he looked as even the few bruises he'd given me didn't hurt. Before she left Donna said, "I've had lots of people tell me about your camera trick. Everyone thinks that was very funny and clever. It's fun being your sister." "People don't care that I lost the fight?" That had been worrying me somewhat, as I'd behaved like a wimp. Carol answered, "No. You get major credit for bravely and cleverly protecting your girlfriend. ALL the girls thought that was very cool. You've got a broken arm so no one blames you for losing the fight. You're walking around while he got carted away by the police, so it's obvious who really won. Everyone thinks you did very well and I agree." Carol attached herself to my arm, in the way that Julia had taught her by example. #4: #1: #3: #4: #1: Carol said, "Lots of girls have told me how impressed they are by your saving your girlfriend even though you had a broken arm. That you took a beating for it makes it even more romantic. I've never been so popular." #3: "Carol, sweetie, why have you never been so popular? I think you're a wonderful person, of course, so I'm not disagreeing at all. It's just that I don't understand your statement." "Because all the girls think you're so romantic." #4: Seeing my confusion, Carol added, "I'm popular because they're trying to use me to meet you. Half the girls in my classes want to visit us at home. Ha! As if I'd let them!" And she grasped my arm even harder. #4: #3: #4: So I made the only response to Carol that I could, "Those sluts! Thanks for keeping them away from me, honey." #4: <{Groan}. Did you have to say "sluts"? Now I'm REALLY depressed.> Pleased by my response, Carol added, "My pleasure. Donna is doing the same for all the girls in her classes too." #4: <{Groan}.> "I must remember to praise her too." #4: #1: #4: No one argued back, but one of us got revenge by saying, "I'm glad you're protecting Julia, honey. She's the only girl I'll ever want or need..." #4: " ... I certainly don't need a whole lot of sluts hanging around me at home." #4: <{Groan}.> Carol held me until the car arrived, then we went home in our usual fashion, except for #4 being sadder than usual. ------- Later that night, Mom, Dad and I had a talk about what I wanted from the school. Did I want to change schools? Get home-schooled? Options like that. I replied, "I'm perfectly happy where I am. There are only a couple of months left in the school year so it's not sensible to make any major changes. I'll talk with Prof when I go around to their place tomorrow because he has some ideas about my future education, but unless he comes up with a good reason the status quo is fine by me." Mom asked, "Aren't you worried about being assaulted again?" "No. A little bit worried that Julia might be hassled again, but I'm not worried for myself. I didn't want to talk about this at school but I deliberately let that guy get hold of me today. I could've avoided him all day long if I'd wanted to, but it was better to let him get a few punches in. Now he's gone and the rest of the jocks will be warned yet again. Hopefully they'll stop wasting my time from now on." "But you could have been badly hurt! Your arm was broken last time and something like that could have happened again." "Unlikely. I learned some very useful things at Aikido last night. Bullies aren't really a worry for me anymore." -- Dad opened his mouth. I beat him to it by saying, "Remember how fast I learned 8-ball, Dad? Same thing with self-defense. Okay?" Dad changed what he said to, "Are you sure? Some of the football players are pretty big guys." "Just means they'll make more noise when they hit the floor." "Are you sure?" "Positive, just like I was about driving your car." "So you could have taken him out today but you let him beat you instead?" "Yep. I could have ruined his day whenever I wanted. I would've if he'd hurt Julia more or if he'd started hurting me too much, but there was no need to do more than look like a helpless victim." "Congratulations on your self-control then. Not many guys would've done that. Well done." "It was just a, 'lose a small battle to win the war' situation. No big deal. If another jock attacks I'll do the same thing, and keep sending them to jail until the school runs out of jocks. It doesn't worry me. You know I used to hate and fear bullies. I no longer fear them at all. At worst, they're just a nuisance and a waste of time." Mom rejoined the conversation, "All that macho attitude aside, you're happy staying where you are? No changes required? We've got the school over a barrel now. I know you know that because you were pulling the Principal's leg about our lawyer." "I'm happy to stay where I am. I hope the school tries harder to stop bullies, and I'd certainly like to see the jocks suffer for all the crap they've been inflicting on people for years. Hopefully they'll get the message if it's banged into their heads often enough. I've even mostly changed my mind about suing the school. It'd just be too much of a hassle. If you want to push them, go ahead. I'll back you up of course, pretending outrage or whatever. But otherwise I really don't care." Mom summarized, "Okay. Here's what I think we should do. I'll yell and scream for a while, but we'll end up reaching an out-of-court settlement for some strong anti-bullying programs and a cash payment. We won't push as hard as we could, but it should hit them where it hurts hard enough that they try very hard to not have another repeat. Do you both agree?" We did. I asked, "As we're talking about money, is the family okay for money? If we need some, I have an idea which I think can get us some." Mom said, "What do you mean? Like borrow it from the Williams?" "No. I think I can make money. Earn it, although 'earn' isn't exactly the right word. Just a moneymaking scheme I thought of recently is all. I'm pretty sure it'd work without much difficulty. So do you want me to get some money for you guys? You keep saying I'm eating you out of house and home, Mom." "I hope you're not thinking of anything illegal?" "Mom, when have I EVER done anything illegal?" "Other than wanting to have underage sex every day?" "Haha. Yeah, you got me on that one. But that's my only criminal activity and I strongly believe in picking only one crime and practicing it until I'm perfect, haha. I'm sure there isn't a law against my moneymaking scheme." Julia's and my having sex wasn't actually a crime by Oregonian law, as we were within three years of each other and over 12-years old, but the whole "Teenagers Shouldn't Have Sex!" social hysteria was so loud that our having sex seemed to be a crime. -- "It's a bit of a nuisance to set up. I need a partner and I'm not sure who I'd use, and I'd need to spend some time doing some research and practice. It's a distraction I could do without, but if we needed it I could get you some money. I'd prefer just to keep it in reserve and use it if one of you lost your job for any reason, or something like that." Dad asked, "I've got to ask what it is? But I've a feeling you don't want to tell us?" "I'm afraid you're right, Dad. Sorry to tease you, but it's the sort of scheme that's best not talked about. I'm sure it's not illegal, but it is best kept quiet." [[I was right that there was no law against using telekinesis, but there was a law against influencing roulette balls by any means, so I was wrong about it being legal. Oh well, never mind.]] Mom said, "We're doing okay for money now. We could have used it a few years ago, but we're okay now. We're even putting some away for Carol's college fund..." I interrupted, "THAT'S what I'll get her! That'd be something she'd really appreciate. It's years before she needs it, but I'm going to keep that in mind and do it when the time is right. It'll be so good for her to know that her college funding is secure. Don't tell Carol anything, okay?" Dad laughed, "What could we tell her? YOU haven't told US anything!" "Good. You'll have no trouble keeping it a secret then. But I won't forget. I wonder what I can get for Donna?" Mom, "She's often needing new pairs of running shoes! Good ones are expensive." "Haha. I think I should be able to do better than that. I'll keep thinking about it." Mom, who was operating in the dark when it came to my capabilities, said, "You are aware of how much colleges cost, aren't you? They're not cheap. Not the sort of money a 15-year old can make if he feels like it." "The number I've often heard is $50,000 for a top college. That's about right isn't it?" "That's a top one. $20,000 would be fine for Carol at OSU if she lives at home." "If I can make 20, then I can certainly make 50, so why bother scrimping. When I do it, I'll just get her $60,000, so she's got nothing to worry about. But don't tell her yet, okay? We should wait until I get it." Dad, "Okay, we won't tell her until her 15-year old brother has made $60,000 for her. Have we mentioned lately that we think you're weird?" "I blame my upbringing. My mind has been unbalanced by having to do too many chores. Do we have anything else to discuss? No? I'll get to my schoolwork then." When I got back to my room and opened my school bag, I saw the manual for my cellphone. I checked, and it didn't have a camera. I was just a basic cellphone, which made sense as Dad wouldn't have bought anything fancy. I read the pages of my manual that talked about turning the phone on, entering phone numbers and making calls. I entered the numbers off Julia's list, plus the police station's number too, just in case of another case. Then I gave Mom and Dad the list. While I was doing that, which barely required one mind, the other two active minds - the fourth being on centering duty - had decided they wanted to do some important TK practicing. After the cellphone was finished with, we got a shirt out of my closet and hung it from the door handle. We then stood back and practiced lifting up the entire hem, as if it were a sexy girlfriend's skirt or dress. I had a feeling that Julia would love it if I did that even more effectively than just lifting the front, although that'd still been very good. It was quite tricky, as each mind had to form two TK-points, pinch them together, then raise them; ideally at the same time as the other side was being raised. It required a fair bit of concentration, but with practice we got quite slick at it. #1 swapped with the on-duty #4, to give him a chance to practice too. As #2 pointed out: <#4's got the dirtiest mind of all of us, so he's the one most likely to use this skill.> #4: The rest of us agreed that was a good thing to wonder about. But we weren't going to learn how by using a coat hanger on a door handle. #4: #1, #2, #3: #4: #1: #4: #2: #4: We ignored #4's sort of true, sort of not true excuse, instead discussing how to practice pulling down non-sisters' panties. #4: #3: #4: #3: In the ensuing discussion we learned that #1, #2 and #3 had been pinching the shirt by pushing two fingers together from the outside, so the shirt's material formed a loop between them, which is what they clamped and lifted. They didn't think they could do this to the underwear because they were too tight so no loop of spare material would be formed. But when #4 had pulled up the hem of the shirt, he'd put one finger on the outside and one on the inside and clamped the hem that way. #4's method was easier as there was no need to create a fold of cloth, but the rest of us were surprised he could do it because he couldn't see inside the shirt, and we needed line of sight for TK to work outside of our three-foot proximity range. #4 was surprised too. He hadn't thought about it; just done it. The rest of us tried #4's way on the shirt, and it was definitely easier. #2: Some experimentation taught us that we didn't need line of sight, as such. What we needed was to know where the TK-fingertip was. We could clearly see the front of the shirt, and it had almost zero thickness, so gripping inside and outside the front hem was easy. We couldn't grab the hem of the back of the shirt because we couldn't see it. We knew roughly where it was - presumably hanging down two or three inches behind the front, but that wasn't accurate enough. We'd previously discovered the need to know exactly where distant TK-fingertips were, but it appeared that the degree of "exactness" was significantly less than we'd thought. [[No, we'd just got better with practice. We'd been practicing ALL day at school, creating and moving TK-fingertips so we could push them against solid objects in an attempt to make them stronger. We were so focused on improving strength that we didn't think of other aspects improving.]] #2: #4: #2: We did some non-surgical experiments, which taught us that we couldn't create TK-fingertips inside any sort of solid. We did discover a small, interesting fact. TK-fingertips didn't cancel the moment we lost track of them. They lasted about half a second. That was easily confirmed by blinking slowly or waving my hand in front of my face. If I did those actions too slowly while the TK-fingertip was outside of my proximity range, then the obscured TK-fingertip canceled. Inside our proximity range, the fingertips remained active no matter how long I closed my eyes. We got back to our panty-pulling exercise, and that important skill was soon acquired. The 'inside' fingertips of each clamping pair had to be pushed into my flesh just above the waistband, then pushed down half-inch or so, to be inside the underwear. It felt weird, but it worked fine. Pulling underwear back up was harder, and a lack of motivation meant we didn't bother solving that direction's problems. We got into difficulty when we imagined putting the whole procedure together: two minds were required to lift the skirt and hold it up, then two more minds were required to pull the panties down. Unfortunately we only had three minds to work with, as one was required to be on duty. He couldn't participate because the task required too much concentration, so he'd lose center and all our fingertips would cancel. #1: One panty removal method was to have one mind alternate its pulling-down tugs from side to side, but that wasn't nearly as impressively dramatic as we wanted. Theoretically the mind on duty should be able to do other things, as that's how other aikidoka have to operate as they have only one mind. But we didn't think we were good enough for that yet, especially on something that required as much attention as this four-fingertip per mind activity. It was a very good example for why we had to get better at keeping center: so we could do complex TK tasks in the future, perhaps emergency ones like a more dangerous version of Biff#4. The best we could come up with, was that once Julia's skirt or dress was raised, one of the minds had to be freed up to help with the panties. We decided that if the skirt was tight or short enough, holding it up on one side should be sufficient. If it was long and loose, both skirt-raising minds would move their 'handfuls' around to the front and hold them together so the third mind could pinch all the material, and hold it up in front of my helpless victim, freeing up the two original skirt-raisers to become the panty-removers. Complicated, but we thought it'd work. We practiced the 'handover' routine on my shirt, and it worked fine. I was looking forward to springing this on Julia. It may seem a silly exercise, but we'd learned several useful things in the process - not to mention how to magically expose Julia - so we were happy. I had no doubt that it'd make her happy too. We had previously decided that we had to ration how much time we spent experimenting with TK every day or we'd not get anything else done, so we did schoolwork for the rest of the evening. ------- Chapter 31: Progress Report Meeting Saturday, April 9, 2005 Saturday morning I woke up feeling energetic and decided that I wanted to go for a run. It felt like I wanted to burn off some energy, although it seemed that I could run without using ANY energy. Despite the impossible physics, not playing soccer while my arm was healing meant I didn't get enough running around, and I felt like it this morning. It was about the time we normally get up for school, so I lightly tapped on the girls' door in case they were asleep. Donna, whose bed is closest to the door, called out to enter. I invited her to come on a run with me, but she had to decline because she didn't want to be tired when she got went to her athletic club soon ("The Corvallis Athletic Club". I think it's just a running club with a more impressive sounding name). She was going to take my 10k registration with her too. Mom had given it to me to fill out last night, and Dad was paying the entry fee, happy about my new sporting interest. The race was next Saturday. I was about to turn to leave after Donna's declining, when Carol surprised me by asking if she could bike alongside me. Donna and I are slim and running suited us, but Carol wasn't really the running type, being too "plush", which wasn't an issue for biking. I was happy to have her with me and we could easily find somewhere suitable for us to run and ride together. I left her to get up and dressed while I had a snack or two. Carol joined me, and we hit the street. I settled into my optimal rate that Carol easily matched, and we started chatting. It turned out to be very one sided as Carol had a great deal to say. I'd hoped that she'd talk about the guy that'd rejected her, but she was far too busy raving about how wonderful Julia was, how much she enjoyed being friends with Julia and me, how happy it made her to have such a great brother, especially one who had such a great girlfriend, etc. She was considerably more than happy, so I didn't think I should remind her of the asshole. For the first fifteen minutes of our bike/run, my contribution was limited to managing a quick, "She's your girlfriend too," but it barely caused Carol to pause. She was counting down the hours until her sleepover with Julia on Wednesday night. She was also eager to go shopping with Julia next Saturday and to have a fashion parade for me afterward. I must admit that I stumbled a bit at that thought; so much for Julia's claim that I never do that. After Carol's gushing had vented sufficiently, we talked a little about the most recent "Jock Attack", but it didn't need much discussion. I insisted that I had been safe and not worried. Carol was very happy that I'd rescued Julia so well. Some guy jogged up and joined us while we were cruising along. When he learned that Carol was my sister, he put a lot of effort into trying to chat her up. I wasn't at all surprised, given the tight shorts and tight T-shirt Carol was wearing. I can't recall having seen her dressed in such tight clothes before, and she looked very good (#4 told the rest of us she looked , while the rest of us kept our thoughts to ourselves). I could understand the jogger's interest, even though I tried not to notice how good Carol looked, and had repeatedly "tried not to notice" from the moment she'd walked into the kitchen. I guess she must've grown in the last few months, so it was just as well that she was going shopping for some new clothes soon. The stranger tried to get Carol into conversation with him several times, but she was completely uninterested, even cold. It didn't take long before her lack of encouragement and the pace I was setting caused him to fall back. After he was gone, I commented to Carol, "He seemed like a nice guy - fit and good looking too - but you weren't interested in him?" Carol looked down at me for a while, and I could see her thinking about what to say. But in the end she just said, "No, I wasn't interested in him." She said it with an air of finality, so I didn't pursue the topic further. The unknown asshole had obviously had a bad effect on Carol's attitude to guys. After an hour or so of exercise, I suggested heading back home. Carol said, "Thank goodness; I was getting tired. How can I get more tired on a bike than you running? I'm not that unfit because we've only been using the car for a week, and you've been using it too." "I just like running, I guess. Talking to you is nice too. It makes the time go quickly." On the way back home Carol tapped her bike's speedometer, and said, "You've kept up this average speed, about 13 miles per hour, for about an hour, and you don't appear to be tired. Could you keep running this speed for another hour if you wanted to?" "Probably." With a probability of 1.0. "A marathon is 26 miles. I'm guessing you could do a marathon in about two hours. Do you know what the times marathons are normally run in?" She'd be able to find out for herself, so I said, "I think I've heard that the record is just over two hours." She looked at me, and said, "Does that mean what I think it means?" "Um, probably." With the same probability value as previously. After a pause, Carol said, "Julia keeps telling me how special you are, and I've been enthusiastically agreeing, but I haven't been agreeing for enough reasons. I've been thinking you're special because you are the nicest, most caring, most loving guy I've ever met. But she also means for things like world-record marathon times, driving cars on the first attempt, being an expert 8-ball player first up, and the world's best lover. There's much more to you than just being super-nice isn't there?" I could have done without my sister mentioning my lovemaking prowess, but otherwise, "Yes there is. I've been waiting for a good moment - probably when you, Julia and I are alone in her room - to talk more about it. There are a couple more things I'd like to share with you. Maybe we'll get a chance Wednesday evening, although there will be a lot of parents around and I'd rather do this with as much privacy as possible, and with plenty of time. If we can't do it Wednesday, maybe you and I go around there on Thursday evening, and spend some quality time talking together with Julia." #2: Carol said, "That's wonderful. I'd like to know you better, Mark." "You sound very positive. I thought you might be a bit scared. Some of the things I do scare me, so they must seem even stranger and perhaps threatening from your point of view?" Carol's answer was an eloquent, "{Raspberry}. As if you'd do anything to hurt me!" #2: That ended that conversation, except I added, "Please don't tell anyone what you discovered about how well I can run." "Can I tell Julia please? Julia and I like to talk about you." I can't say I was in favor of the reason, but I said, "Sure. I don't have any secrets from Julia." "Can I tell people you're a good runner? Donna said that at breakfast after your last run, and if you enter that 10k race it's going to be public knowledge isn't it?" "Umm, yeah, you're right. No details though. I do NOT want anyone other than Julia to know anything about world records! Not even Donna, unfortunately, in case she bragged about her brother at her running club." "I understand," agreed Carol. "No details about your running; only details about what a wonderful person you are." "Ahh, yeah. Something like that." When we got home, Mom said that Julia had called, and had asked me to call her back. I called back and Vanessa answered, "Julia has gone to look at cars, but we wanted you to come over at lunchtime. Is that all right with you?" Being invited for a meal is always "all right with me", so I accepted gladly. ^ I had an interesting little idea while riding to the Williams' place. I had just rolled down a little hill and was coasting along a flat section, when I wondered what would happen if I TK-pushed the bike forward. So I tried it. I TK-pushed against the front fork, just below where it met the handlebars, where the push shouldn't unbalance the bike. I steadily increased the push until I had a three-mind, max-force push going. The bike didn't speed up, but the deceleration rate reduced noticeably. Wind resistance is a drag (by definition, and with the pun intended), and my TK force wasn't strong enough to overcome it at these speeds, but as the bike slowed wind resistance reduced, until I was going slow enough that my TK force equaled the wind resistance plus whatever friction the bike had. I coasted along 'for free', having to do no more than concentrate a little. It was much slower than I normally would've ridden, but it was fun to see it happening. Anyone watching me might find it strange that I was rolling along endlessly without pedaling, so I started doing so. Normally I'd ride along at about fifteen miles per hour, more if I was heading for sex, so I tried pedaling as hard as I normally would while having the TK-assist going too. At that speed the wind resistance was a major drag, so my TK-assist seemed to add only a single mph or two to my speed. I wondered whether I could set a world record in biking too, but I knew that the slight boost TK gave me wasn't nearly enough to close the performance gap between me and world-class cyclists. Then I realized that my world-record running rates weren't because of TK at all, but were because I could run a very decent speed without getting tired. So there were two questions: Could I ride at a very decent speed without getting tired? Could I use TK to help me run faster? The first question I'd have to do by experiment. I hadn't done any long distance riding since my first merge, so I hadn't found out whether I had a tireless biking rate. I'd be at the Williams' house too soon to test it this trip. The experiment would have to wait, as it would've been rude to be late to lunch. The second question's answer seemed fairly obvious. A boosting push by TK when I was running would have much less effect on my speed than the same push when biking because bike riding gets much more speed out of the same energy than running does. TK barely affected my biking speed, so it'd be pretty useless when running. I made a mental note to try it though, probably the next time I went running with Donna, early Monday morning. When I got to the Williams', there was a car parked in the drive that I hadn't seen before. "Our new car," announced Julia, who'd run out of the house upon seeing me arrive. After an enthusiastic welcoming kiss she added, "We bought it this morning." It was an old-ish but tidy, small, 4-door car. When I walked around it, I saw it was a Honda Civic. Its make and model was something I was indifferent about. I'd never gotten 'into' cars the way lots of guys do. Probably because Dad never made a big deal out of them and I didn't hang around with other guys who did. I queried, "How come you said 'our new car'? It's not my car in any way." Julia laughed, "I've given you my body, heart and soul. Do you think half of an old car matters to me? It's in my name because that was easier, but I could care less who drives it the most, whether we keep it at your house or mine, or whatever. It's our car; we can do whatever we want with it, or get another one if we need two. It's just a car." It wasn't worth arguing about, especially as I don't have a license anyway. I changed the subject, "How's your arm?" Julia pulled up her sleeve to show me the bruise. It hadn't had much time to heal yet so still looked just the same. "It doesn't hurt unless I press it. It'll be fine. How are your bruises?" "I forgot about them. I went for a run for an hour this morning and they never gave me any trouble. Carol rode alongside me on her bike which was nice. She's never done that before so I was a bit surprised, but it was nice." "Good girl. She did it because I told her to. I told her to get more exercise, especially with you if she could. I'll give her a call shortly to tell her I'm happy with her." Those comments confused me. They made sense, but also seemed somewhat bizarre at the same time. I had to ask, "How come you're telling her to get exercise? Not that I'm complaining or anything; it just seems a little strange." Julia explained, "She's too passive and needs pushes to help her along. She looks up to me so I'm taking advantage of that to push her in the directions I want; in the direction that'll be the best for all of us, especially her." As you can see, it was a 'female type of explanation'. In other words, it explained nothing. I just looked more confused. Julia saw it and said, "Don't worry, darling. Just leave it to me. She'll be happy, I promise." The response to that was easy, "I'm sure she will. I've already seen how happy Carol's been since you became her friend, and it's very good to see. I'm getting used to not understanding you so one more thing not to understand you about is no problem." "Good attitude, haha. Have I mentioned how much I love my life? It's so good being your girl!" Lunch was ready, and it would've been rude to keep it waiting, so we went inside. Toward the end of lunch, while everyone was around the dinner table, Prof gave his Progress Report, "Mark, here's the status on the items we agreed to do at last Wednesday's dinner: -- "The Math Department bureaucracy have moved their pieces of paper around, not that there was much to do. You can audit any courses of ours you want. I've left overviews of all of them, lecture times, etc., plus some orientation material for the university itself and degree information in Julia's temporary bedroom, on the safe bet that you'll end up in that room sometime today. -- "I've talked to the Dean. He's agreed it would be useful for you to have a license so you could get back and forth to OSU quickly and easily. To a large degree that's a fake excuse because OSU is close enough for you to bike there. The fakeness of that doesn't worry him because if you do well enough to become famous, it'll be an excellent example of OSU's going out of their way to help you. It wasn't hard to convince him that someone with your IQ could be trusted driving a car a few months early, compared with half the drivers on the road these days. -- "He's very experienced at getting bureaucrats to do what he wants, and to using his clout in this town, so I expect he'll get that done in the next week or two. I must remember to email him about your most recent fracas at school, as that might give him another justification. -- "Julia's room is mostly done. They're about halfway through putting it back together. That should be finished Monday. It has a great deal more closet space, the cost of filling it being something I'm very worried about." His smile proving that he wasn't really worried. -- "Everything needed for the study has been ordered for delivery Monday afternoon, and won't take long to install. The computer comes pre-loaded from OSU with various software packages, I'll leave you to let me know if you need any more. The internet is already connected and we've ordered a router so both computers can use the same wall socket. -- "You saw parked outside the status report on getting a car for you and Julia. -- "And that's about it. Everything should be done by when your family comes around for dinner on Wednesday. We're looking forward to having you and Carol spend time here, and to helping you. I'll let you read the material that's in Julia's room first, and get your study set up, but in about a week we should sit down and have a discussion about your educational choices. The school year is nearly finished and you've got a double-dose of exams shortly, so I don't expect much to happen until after those, but there's no reason we shouldn't do some planning soon. Do you have any questions?" "Ahh, no. Wait, yes I do. Why are you going to so much trouble for me? I don't want to seem ungrateful, but you barely know me and I'm getting overwhelmed by how much you're doing and how quickly too." Julia started answering, but Prof cut her off with, "Let me, Julia. Mark knows love motivates you. He needs to hear about Vanessa's and my motivations." Julia relaxed and Prof carried on, "I'll start generally. A key word is 'support'. Vanessa and I want to support your education. We're not making your choices for you or forcing you in any particular direction. We're encouraging you to make your own choices, and even your own mistakes. You'll set your own direction and you'll go down it as far as you want and can. We want to do what we can to ensure that there are no unnecessary constraints on what you can achieve academically. -- "We've learned enough about your academic accomplishments - mostly from Julia's boasting about them to us - that we're VERY excited about your potential. You have the highest-ever-recorded IQ, Mark! With your cutting a swathe through your schoolwork confirming its accuracy." [[In other dimensions my IQ result was only the second highest. Not that the distinction matters, as my score was a - currently very guilt-inducing - fiction anyway.]] -- "In all seriousness, what we're doing for you now is far less than we're willing to do, especially as OSU is paying for most of it. In a year you're going to be receiving offers with inducements running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Countless organizations are going to be competing for you and they're going to be bidding a great deal in the hope of winning you. When that's happening, you'll realize that what's being offered to you now isn't anything special. It may seem a lot compared to what's been spent on your education previously, but in truth it's almost embarrassingly small, especially as Vanessa and I are going to be getting a great deal of personal satisfaction and pleasure out of helping you. -- "We know you're special and unique. We believe you have incredible potential and are a good person. Julia insists you're the BEST person. You're still young and have a lot learning to do. As much as we can, we'll help with that. After all, it's possible that you might become our son-in-law." I try not to show any unease at statements like that, especially when I'm in front of Julia's family, but so much of what Prof was saying was making me uneasy - if not outright guilty - so I probably showed something. Prof responded, "Don't worry about it, Mark. You're only fifteen and there are several years before that can happen, regardless of how eager this family's females are. Take your time to do what you want. Don't let them push you around. It took Vanessa ten years to convince me to marry her, and people are even slower to marry these days, so there's plenty of time before you have to face that decision." -- "Let me finish my explanation. Your academic potential alone would justify far more expense and effort than what we've talked about today. You don't currently need any more, so that's not an issue, but if you did it would be easy to get it for you. If not from us, then from OSU, your school, the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education, and I'm sure many other organizations if we sought them out. You know your school and the Boards of Education are already giving you special treatment, but your low opinion of yourself is preventing you from realizing how appropriate such reactions are. #1: #3: #4: #1: Prof was still speaking, "In addition to your academic potential, there's also your physical abilities. We're all amazed by your being a physical genius too. Julia is particularly appreciative of that, but we're all impressed beyond words at it. The phenomenal speed at which you pick up physical skills, and the degree to which you develop them, is mind-boggling in itself. Perhaps we should be doing something about that aspect, but it's not something that appeals to Vanessa or me, so we've not done so. That omission should convince you that a large part of our motivation is for our own selfish pleasure. You don't have to feel guilty about our helping you academically..." #4: " ... Your possibly becoming our son-in-law is icing on the cake, if you'll excuse an attempt at a small joke. You more than justify our support because of each of your academic, physical and matrimonial potentials. -- "Then there's the unnaturalness of what's happened to you. Intellectual and physical genius doesn't develop almost overnight as yours did. I can see you're looking uncomfortable already, but hear me out on this. You only have to listen; not talk. We're not going to be pressuring you. We've seen that you become uncomfortable when the topic of conversation skirts close to how you get to be so good at anything, Julia has warned us away from pushing you about it, and we've decided to respect your privacy on this topic, but it's one we need to say a few words about. -- "Vanessa and I have discussed the issue several times because the stakes are potentially very large and the correct decision isn't obvious. Something happened to you and it's had an unbelievably profound effect. We understand that you don't want to talk about it, and we assume you're in a position to judge whether or not you should. You don't strike us as a selfish person, so we're assuming your reasons for keeping it secret are good ones. -- "I'm sure you've thought about it so I'll cut straight to perhaps the major reason for our decision not to press you about it. Whatever your secret is, it's a big one. Perhaps the biggest ever. Whatever it is, once it's let out there'll be no way call it back. That argues for a great deal of caution. You're far too young to be the center of the storm your secret would unleash, so we agree to your keeping it secret. We won't pressure you for it, and we won't raise the issue again in the foreseeable future because we can see that doing so would only drive you away. Naturally we're enormously fascinated, and we hope that you'll one day confide in us, but in the meanwhile it is YOUR secret. Our doors are open if you feel the need to discuss any aspects of the situation, even just the fringes of it. It seems likely that you're carrying a burden that no 15-year old should have to. -- "I'll leave that topic there. In answer to your first question about why we're helping you, I think you should be able to see that our reasons for doing so FAR exceed the picayune effort we're going to. If you need support for anything, don't hesitate to ask for it because Vanessa and I will provide you with a GREAT deal more than we are already. Ok, son?" #1: #4: #3: [[Mom and Dad DID have a clue. Mom about my intellectual abilities and Dad about my physical. They didn't understand as much as Prof and Vanessa did, especially about the future implications, and they'd seen my abilities show themselves slower since my first merge so they hadn't had the jolting experience the Williamses had. Mom and Dad's response was to keep an eye on me and worry more, rather than discuss it.]] I said, "Thank you, and can we please change the subject now?" Vanessa agreed, "Yes, after I make one point. Prof and I are taking the long view with you. We suspect you're going to have a busy and stressful life, so try to avoid feeling pressured while you're so young. Let the issue sit for a few years, don't study too hard, and get some fun while you can. I know Julia will be volunteering to help with that." Robert said, "If you're looking for a change of subject, Andrew and I have got one. We've got an idea to make some money using your 8-ball expertise. Would you help us with that?" They were helping with Julia's/my car, and with setting up the study for me, so I easily agreed: "Sure." "Let's discuss it in the Guys' Room." So the three of us, plus Julia attached to my arm as usual, relocated there. Robert led off, "Andrew and I were discussing last night how to maximize how much we can win from our 8-ball 'friends'. We decided that we'd invite several of them around, have a few minor games to get them warmed up, then try to get them all to place very large wagers on a 'Their Champion versus Our Champion' match. We'd suggest each side picks their best player in the room. We thought of having you hang around with us, maybe sitting in the corner doing schoolwork and we'd introduce you as our little sister's boyfriend that we're minding for a while. -- "Andrew and I could get moderately drunk and they'd think they could eat us alive. They'd offer large bets. Then we'd name you as our champion. We'll only get to do this once, so we think that gives us the best return. Our main worry is who to invite. We don't want to invite anyone too good, otherwise they might beat you." When Julia heard Robert's last statement, she snorted at it, declaring, "Invite EVERYONE. There's NO possibility of Mark losing." Andrew said, "Some of the guys we could invite are sharks Julia. They can eat us alive. If one of those guys is here, and the others know they can pick him as their champion, they'll make heavy wagers against us. It's great you've got faith in your boyfriend, but those wagers would wipe us out if we lost. Mark's good, but he's not that good." "Yes he is. Listen to me: he CANNOT lose. He's a LOT better now than he was last time you played him. Invite everyone. If you lose I'll sell my car and pay you back." "Sis, if we lose, your car wouldn't come close to covering it. These guys won't show any mercy. They'll be sure we'll lose and they'll bet thousands. As much as they think we can pay, and then some." Julia looked at me and said, "It's up to you. You can forget the whole idea, do it partly just by inviting the easy players, or do it the full hog by inviting everyone. But if you go the full hog, you're going to have to show them that they can have faith in you. What do you want to do?" In other words, did I want to show my TK to her brothers? I didn't know them that well. I thought the Williams family was wonderful, but as individuals I didn't know Andrew and Robert well enough. I was thinking about the arguments both ways, when I realized that in the real game I wouldn't be able to show obvious TK either, so there was no need to show it now. So I said, "Why don't we have a few games, and you can decide for yourselves?" The balls were racked and I won the break versus Andrew. I was a very good player without TK because of my ambidexterity and other benefits of being so fantastically coordinated. This time I was going to use TK as well. [[I also had very accurate eyesight, although I didn't know that yet. My body's improvements were more thorough than I'd realized.]] I briefly studied the racked balls to see where all the "Unders" were, as I'd picked them as my targets. I broke, and had one mind control each of three Under balls. One was pocketed, and two rolled up table, clear of the bunch. I'd left the cue ball in a good position, aided by an assist from one mind while its Under ball was rolling smoothly. I sunk one of the exposed Unders, making sure that another Under or two was knocked out of the bunch. I repeated that process until all the Unders were clear and conveniently placed for relatively easy sinks. I just worked my through them, exposing the Black at a good time, then sinking that ball at the end. On the next game, I didn't interfere with Andrew's break, and he sunk a ball. His next shot was a long one, so while the cue ball was en route to its target, I gave it a few sideways TK-pushes, using a tiny fraction of a single mind's maximum force. As soon as I could see that it was going to hit the target ball very slightly to the side of where Andrew had wanted it to, I left it alone. Sure enough, the target ball was sent in the wrong direction, missing the intended pocket. My turn again. I repeated my previous performance, cleaning the table of my balls. Long, slow rolls of either the cue or target ball were my favorite, as there was plenty of time for minor adjustments. Long rolls alongside a cushion were very easy too, as my targets always seemed to drop into the corner pocket at the end, and my opponent's almost never did. One of the biggest helps was controlling where the cue ball stopped, ready for the next shot. That alone made the game far easier. Andrew having been dispatched, it was now Robert's turn, for the same result. I never did any obvious TK'ing. I never, for example, did nothing like making a ball that'd already stopped start rolling again, or leap out of the pocket as I'd joked with Julia. The nudges I gave to moving balls were subtle, but that's all it took. I could be less subtle with the cue ball to ensure it was always well placed for me or badly placed for my opponent because people expect the cue ball to be given spin and move more strangely than the other balls. I was being very cautious, so I couldn't clean the table every time it was my turn, especially if my opponent left me in a bad position, but my opponent never had a good run, could never sink more than two or three balls in a row. I even once nudged the cue ball as Andrew was shooting, just a fraction of a second before the cue stick hit it. The result was an apparent miscue. [I'm not sure whether "clean the table" is the right phrase for 8-ball. I've picked it up somewhere, probably off TV. I'm not even sure whether the phrase is "clean the table" or "clear the table". Maybe it comes from snooker, where I've seen that they do literally clear the table of every single non-cue ball. In 8-ball you only want to sink your balls (Unders or Overs) and then the Black, so just eight out of the fifteen balls. Maybe there's a better term than "clear the table" for 8-ball, but don't ask me what it is; I only learned this game a few days ago.] [[It's either "run the table" or "run out the table", depending on whether it happens off the break or not. I didn't know that at the time and I prefer to report my then current thinking.]] All in all, it was quite a lot of fun. I had to be careful of a few things, such as not curving a ball in an obvious way if either of The Boys was looking directly along the line of its travel, but I could still do plenty. I played four "best of three" matches, two against each brother. I never lost a game. Julia thought it was very funny. Prof had joined us halfway through as he'd been wondering where everyone had gotten to. The Boys explained the details of their moneymaking scheme to him. After the four matches, they wanted to play some more, but I didn't as I worried they might start noticing things I'd preferred they not notice. I said, "As much as I enjoy your company, I quite like spending time alone with Julia." The Boys decided they couldn't compete with that, so they gave up asking for another game. We had a quick discussion about whether I was good enough to take on the town's best. Somewhat to my surprise, The Boys were bullish on the idea. They particularly admired how well I placed the cue ball for the next shot; the sign of a very good player, apparently. Even more unexpected were Prof's comments, "I also think Mark could win the match, but I recommend you don't do it. You don't need the money that much, and if you financially hurt these guys as much as you're planning to, they're going to be angry at you two for pulling a ringer on them. It would be 'legal' under your rules, but they might get angry enough to do something unpleasant, possibly to Mark. You could limit the bets to small enough not to make anyone angry, but then why bother doing it? It sounds like fun, but I don't think it's worth the risk." The Boys dithered for a little while, but reluctantly agreed that their father was right, Andrew saying, "Pity; it would've been great to take a bundle off them." After that Julia said, "If you've finished with my boyfriend, I want to take him upstairs for a different type of game." The Boys were positive they couldn't compete with that, so they just thanked me for being open to their idea, and then let me go. During my walk upstairs, I appreciated the quality of Prof's advice. I'd also gotten quite excited at the plan. It would've been fun, and by the sounds of it quite profitable too. I'd been wondering what my share would be, but Prof's fears were sensible ones. I could easily imagine a large group of men getting angry at being taken by a ringer. One way around the ringer problem was to use my TK to assist Robert's or Andrew's play to make their balls sink more often and their opponent's less often, but it was not a certain winner and I'd have to divulge my TK ability to The Boys. If I needed money, including giving the Williamses some, my roulette idea sounded easier and safer, without having a large bunch of angry, rough guys after us! When we got to her temporary room, Julia could see that I was still in a thoughtful mood. "What are you thinking about?" "How great your family is, especially Prof. And you, of course. Sorry, I didn't mean to leave you out. But Prof has gone to a lot of trouble and expense, and is looking after me very well. It takes some getting used to." Julia explained, "All of us, but Dad the most, are excited by your potential and are pleased that we can contribute. We know something special happened to you late-2003 and we..." I interrupted, "What! How do you know the date?" #1: "The date's the ONLY thing we know, but that was easy. Everyone in your family makes comments about when you changed. Your sisters didn't like you two years ago, your mom talks about when you started doing well at school and asked to be advanced a grade. That's one of the reasons my family is so happy to have Carol spend time here. It's great that they're as eager as me." #3: #4: I asked, "What has the date got to do with Carol being here?" Julia explained, "Carol is twenty months younger than you. Your change was about sixteen months ago. Dad's favorite theory for your change is genetic, in which case Carol might have the same change very shortly. Especially as girls that age are more developed than boys..." #4: #3: " ... so she might start changing any day now. Dad says your abilities might be result of a mutation, in which case it might or might not appear in Carol, depending on whether the mutation is in you or one of your parents. We're all very curious to see if Carol changes the way you did." #1: #3: #1: I asked, "I don't know whether or not what happened to me will happen to Carol, or to Donna later. Would it upset your family much if it didn't?" Julia answered without hesitation, "No. Two miracles would be better than one, but one miracle is still blowing their minds. Dad talks about 'wetting his pants with excitement', and Dad hardly ever gets that excited. I'm VERY happy to have Carol here as much as possible, even if she doesn't change the same way you did. In some ways it would be good if she changes like you, as it'd give you someone else to share the experience with, but in other ways it'd cause problems. I like everything just the way it's going now, with me serving you, and Carol serving me." "Huh! What do you mean 'Carol serving you'?" "Not exactly 'serving me' - not in the sense that I serve you - but I am training her to follow my instructions. She's making that very easy." "Why would you want Carol to follow your instructions?" "Because I think it'll be perfect for everyone, including her. You know she's happier lately, so please leave it to me. I think you'll be happy with the outcome, but it's too soon to tell you. I'd rather talk about my family a little, okay?" I definitely didn't like the idea of Carol being pushed into serving anyone, but the kind of person Julia is swung the balance. I knew she wouldn't be doing it for selfish reasons. For confusingly impenetrable feminine reasons yes, but not selfish ones. I knew Julia was generous, was making Carol extremely happy, and that I didn't understand anything about what was going on so it'd be silly for me to argue with it, so I said, "Yes, okay, for the moment. Please don't do anything to hurt Carol though." "Of course not. I know how important she is to you, and you know how important you are to me. To talk about my family: Dad and Mom told you they're eager to help. They're considerably more than that. They know you're special, even without their knowing about your extraordinary 'no-touching touching'. I'm thrilled that you're going to tell Carol about it, but I'm glad you've kept it from everyone else. No one else needs to know, so it's best to keep that quiet." I didn't think Carol "needs to know" either, but as Julia and I both want me to tell Carol, the reasons didn't matter. My feeling indebted to Prof and Vanessa, although mostly in anticipation, spurred me to say, "I hope I don't let your mother and father down. They've gone to a lot of effort for me." Julia said, "They've really gone to the effort for themselves. They're enjoying helping you. It's a win-win deal. You don't owe them any more than to try and to listen to them when they give you advice. They know how studious you are, so I don't think they're worried about their efforts going to waste. They're more likely to be worried about you working too hard, and not playing enough. I'll say that again: not playing enough! Do you get the hint?" I showed her that I got the hint in the way that she wanted: I pushed her flat on the bed, and commenced to have my evil way with her. Not as evil as I would've liked unfortunately, as she reminded me that it was her time of the month. That was a problem I'd never encountered before, so I was uncertain about what to do, or not to do. She reassured me that "playing around" would be most appreciated, so we did that for a while. There was still plenty of fun to be had, especially with the aid of lots of TK. I pulled on her nipples while she was watching them closely, and she got very excited very quickly. At one time I had her lying on her stomach, so I pulled the back of her panties down, parted her ass cheeks and used TK to probe her hole. To both of our disappointments, TK couldn't do as much to her as I'd thought it'd be able to. It could penetrate her using narrow fingertips and most of my weak maximum force. But once inside, her asshole closed up behind it causing the fingertip to cancel. She was within my proximity range, but I think the main problem was that she wasn't perfectly still. Her body's movements confused my exactly knowledge of where the fingertip was, and I lost it. [[Later in my autobiography you'll learn that my expectations for my special abilities substantially affected how they worked. They were mental abilities, so very vulnerable to my mental expectations. I pessimistically expected the fingertips to cancel when they disappeared into a moving Julia even though they were within my proximity range, so they did cancel.]] I gave up on using TK-fingertips and used my real ones instead. Julia spread her legs wide and made encouraging moans. Soon she was humping herself back and forth onto one of my fingers. After a couple of minutes of this, she said, "I'll go and see if Mom has any lubricant." She jumped to her feet, pulled up her panties and smoothed down her skirt, then went in search of Vanessa. #2: She returned with a small container, and after she explained how to use its contents, I learned the answer was "Nothing." The discussion also taught me EXACTLY where my cock was going next. My first thought was, "I hope she didn't tell Vanessa that!" My second thought was that I feared she had. My third thought was to wonder why Vanessa had this lubricant. I tried VERY hard not to have any more thoughts! We enjoyed the mutual slathering. Julia slathered my rubber-covered cock very thoroughly, so much so that I had to do a few mini-go-softs. When she was satisfied that I couldn't possibly be any better lubricated, she removed her panties, placed herself belly-down on a couple of towel-covered pillows, spread her legs, and invited some return slathering. I had never slathered anyone before, but I still knew I was going to enjoy this. I had great fun pushing the lubricant in and around her asshole, doing as good a job of applying it to her as she had on me. We both enjoyed it very much, especially when I started pistoning my forefinger in and out quite rapidly. After a few minutes of that, Julia enthusiastically demanded, "Use two fingers!" I worked another one in, and soon had them both pistoning. I had to make sure not to pull them all the way out, as getting them back in was a deliberate procedure. But if I kept them both inside, I could thrust back and forth to her considerable and oft-expressed enjoyment. After a couple of minutes of this, my demanding girlfriend made yet another demand, "Fuck me!" I withdrew my fingers, used my TK to hold her asshole open as I inserted the head of my cock. That blocked my line of sight for the TK-fingertip, but my cock was in now. It was now a simple matter for me to lean forward and slowly push myself all the way in. Thank goodness for the lubrication because without it I wouldn't have been able to move at all; Julia was TIGHT! When I started leaning forward to push myself into her, all I achieved was to push her body down into the pillows she was lying on. I kept pushing down until the pillows were highly compressed, and then good things began happening. "Ohh, ohh, ohh," from Julia. When I 'bottomed out', Julia requested, "Please just hold still. I need a little while to get used to it." No problem. I spent the time massaging her back and ass. In a couple of minutes she started some small exploratory movements of her hips up and down, so I took that as my cue to get down to business. "Slowly, darling", she urged. Fast wasn't possible anyway, with her being so tight. I was half expecting that pulling back would lift her whole body with me, so tightly was she clamped to me, but that wasn't the case. Julia did rise as my weight came off her, but my cock slid very enjoyably backward too. When I had it most of the way out, I reversed direction, starting some very slow thrusts. It felt delicious to me, and I could easily see and hear that Julia was enjoying herself too. I was able to slowly increase the frequency of my thrusts as she adapted. After about ten minutes we had a good speed going, and it felt wonderful. I felt my orgasm approach, and had to do the first of many mini-go-softs. I was able to keep increasing my speed, and soon she was being bounced up and down very energetically. She was moaning, calling out her enjoyment, and making several short statements upon my suitability as her boyfriend, such as "You're fucking fantastic," and that sort of thing. I increased my thrusting speed to as fast as I could get it, until her body's bouncing on the pillows became a nuisance. I'd been supporting my weight on my arms, with my hands placed on the bed to either side of Julia's hips, but now I moved my hands to her back and put my weight on them, holding her down. Without her bouncing around I was able to thrust much faster, a development that Julia expressed considerable satisfaction with. I was having a grand time. She was incredibly tight and it felt MARVELOUS. I was having to employ micro-go-softs continually to avoid blowing off. Julia was getting thrills from it, but was not approaching her orgasm. She was excited and having a great time, but it just wasn't orgasm-great in the right places. After a while she decided to take matters in to her own hand, and when my weight was momentarily off her, she snaked her right arm around to get her hand between her legs and started frigging herself. As soon as she started that, I felt her body react by climbing straight to an orgasm. She started calling out her usual, "yes, yes, yes, Yes, YES!" progression. Realizing that there was no reason to hold myself back, I decided to let myself cum, and to let her know about it too. So I called out, "I'm going to cum, I'm close, here it comes, here it comes..." I repeated variations on that until I judged Julia was two or three seconds away from her climax, I yelled, "I'm CUMMING!" I stopped my go-softs, gave one very hard thrust, and blew my load a second before she did her much noisier version of the same. I collapsed on top of her, still with my cock inside her. She "oomphed" as my weight forced the breath out of her, so I rolled us both onto our sides, and spooned her while she recovered. The neighbors would be happy when the builders finished Julia's room. While waiting, my cock shriveled and popped out. I just held her. When she revived her first comment was, "That was good!" "Yes. The neighbors and I could tell." With a puzzled tone, Julia said, "Was I noisy?" She really doesn't have any idea how much noise she makes. I find her noise very enjoyable and great for my ego, so I didn't want to make her self-conscious about it. I even felt a bit guilty for starting to tease her, so I just said, "No more than usual. I just took it to mean you enjoyed yourself as much as normal." "I sure did. It felt different, but very good. You came just before me, didn't you? You enjoyed it too?" I answered very truthfully, "I enjoyed it VERY much." "You don't mind that I had to fiddle with myself?" "I thought it was hot. I'd like to see you doing that when you're lying on your back, so I can watch properly." "{Giggle}. Whatever my man wants. I'd be curious to see you do yourself too, I've never seen that before." "Your wish is my command, but not for a while." We relaxed for a while, then Julia said, "I should get a couple of fresh towels." As she moved to swing her legs off the bed she winced, and added, "Maybe not. Would you go please darling; you've found yet another delightful way to make me sore." My robe hadn't been transferred to this room, and I really needed to clean myself before dressing. Seeing my predicament, Julia said, "Run to the bathroom naked. Just look out the door first to make sure no one is there. It should be safe." So that's exactly what I did, running naked down the hallway while holding my rubber onto my flaccid cock. Very dignified, I was not. In the bathroom, I flushed the rubber and had a very quick shower, then returned to Julia wrapped in a towel, carrying one for her. I gave her the towel, and she wiped herself clean. Then she gingerly stood and took a few steps. She walked very funny, and I couldn't help giving a little laugh. "You heartless beast. It's worth it though, for how good you make me feel. We'll just have to keep practicing until my muscles get used to you." Julia said, as she waddled back to the bed and lay down. "That sounds like a good plan." I agreed. Julia asked me if it was okay for her to have a little nap. Figuring I was partly responsible, I said, "Sure. Your dad's left me a BIG pile of reading material, I'll browse through that." I got dressed and sat next to her on the bed reading while she had her little nap. Julia started rousing a couple of hours later, so I put my reading down and stood next to the bed. When her eyes opened I used my TK to pull the covers off her. I initially tried grabbing them all at once and pulling them down, but my TK wasn't strong enough. So I grabbed the top one and peeled it down to the bottom of the bed, and repeated this with each layer. Julia just lay there with her eyes wide open, amazed by what I could do. I was pretty amazed by that myself. When she was fully exposed I sat cross-legged on the bed, facing her. I noticed her legs were too close together for my purposes, so I used two minds to push outward on each inner-knee. She could've easily resisted me, but that's not my Julia; as soon as she understood what I wanted, she opened her legs for me. I smiled at her and said, "Good girl," on the basis that pretty naked girls should always be thanked for opening their legs for me. Three minds' worth of TK-fingertips went to 'work', one for each nipple, and one for her clit. I sat still looking at her, and she lay still looking either at me or down at what was being done to her body. We were both motionless, other than the parts of her that were being moved around. As we were so still and there were no other distractions, I decided to try a little experiment. We got the mind 'on duty' to stay centered, but to try to stroke her cheek as well. He was able to do it, but only for a few seconds before he lost center, which caused all of our TK-fingertips to cancel. He recentered himself and the other three of us got back to our 'job'. I wasn't able to get Julia off, not like I'd done at school, but she still reveled in the demonstration of my ability. She exclaimed, "I still can't believe that you can do this! It blows my mind that you're so amazing. Blows my mind AND excites my body." Fishing for compliments, I asked, "Oh, so you like it then?" "You've got no idea how great it feels to have my man use that power on me. The physical sensations aren't as good as when you use your fingers and mouth, but the mental thrill of seeing you doing it without moving your body is incredibly erotic. I never thought that seeing someone sit completely still could be sexy, but what you do is a mind-blowing sexual high. Women want a powerful man to love them, and you are the most powerful ever." [[Julia's claim wasn't true of all women, but was for most, and it was especially true for Julia.]] #3: #4: #1: #4: #3: #1: While we had been thinking, Julia thoughts have drifted too. She asked, "You're still intending to show Carol that you have your 'no-touching touching' ability, aren't you?" "Yes. I was thinking either Wednesday evening when we're all here for dinner; or if that's too busy, probably Carol and I will come over Thursday evening after Aikido, which finishes at 6:45. I'd much rather tell Carol in a nice, safe place rather than the middle of school. I made that mistake with you. Thank goodness you were very sensible." "It wasn't that I was sensible; it was because I'm yours." "That's probably a very accurate distinction because you can't be sensible if you're my girlfriend." "Haha. I set myself up for that, even though I can't believe how lucky I am to be your girlfriend." "I'll stick to the topic of Carol. I'd feel much better telling her in the most private and safest place I know, which is with you in your room. Your house is much bigger than ours so there aren't others in earshot all the time, and your room will be soundproofed too. There isn't enough privacy at my place." Julia said, "Good. I'm pleased you feel good about my room. Hopefully you'll spend a lot of time doing private things in it, haha. Seriously though, can we plan for definitely Thursday evening? I need to get a few things arranged first." "What do you need to do? I thought I'd just sit Carol down and show her, like I did to you. It doesn't need any arranging, surely?" Julia explained, "Your 'no-touching touching' ability is PROFOUND, darling! It proves that you're greater than ANY other human being. It deserves to be presented in a way that creates exactly the right impression and that furthers your goals." #3: #1: I answered, as I so often do to Julia explanations, "I don't really understand what you mean, but I'm getting used to that. You just do whatever you think is best, okay?" "That'd be perfect. I've got a good idea for what I want to do, I just need to think it through some more to make sure it'll have the effect I want. I'll call Carol later to make sure she keeps Thursday evening free. I think she'll need to do some preparations too, so I better give her a few days notice for those." #4: #3: "Ahh, okay. Thanks. Nice to know I can rely on you..." #4: < ... to complicate things.> " ... By the way, the correct name of my 'no-touching touching' ability is telekinesis, or TK for short. That's much easier to say." "TK it is then." Julia looked disappointed, which I understood when she asked, "If there's a name for it, does that mean other people can do it?" #3: #1: I explained, "It's a common fantasy, I think, like being able to fly or predict the future. Just because there's a term for it doesn't mean that people have got it. It's just like 'female logic'." I got hit with a pillow for that. My belly picked this time to rumble. It had missed its mid-afternoon snack and it wasn't happy. Julia took the hint, dressed, and we went downstairs. I got a laugh out of watching her walk. Vanessa said, "Dinner's only an hour away. I've used a bigger pot than normal expecting you to still be here?" "I'll very happily stay for dinner, thanks very much. I'll call Mom to let her know." I moved to the phone to do that, while Julia said, "I'll make you a snack to keep you going." She's a WONDERFUL girlfriend. Prof wandered in, which reminded me of all the material he'd given me to read, which made me think about how I was going to get it home as it was too large to easily carry on my bike when I rode back. I mentioned this, and Vanessa volunteered to drive me home later and pick me up tomorrow, so I could ride the bike home then. She also suggested Julia and I went out and did a normal dating thing tomorrow, "Go to a movie or something like that. You should learn to relate to each other outside of the school and bedroom environments." Julia and I looked at each other and agreed that was a good idea. Vanessa must have deliberately saved it, because she had an amused look on her face when at the dinner table later, she looked at me and commented, "I saw by the way Julia was walking that you found a good use for the lubricant?" In front of EVERYBODY! I hadn't been embarrassed for a few hours, so I don't know why it took me by surprise. Julia loudly added, "He found a GREAT use for it! Can I keep the bottle please? And can you add a couple more to the shopping list? We're going to be doing that a lot more!" The embarrassment was almost enough to put me off my dinner. Almost. It was a very nice dinner too. Vanessa has some wonderful cooking skills, although her dinnertime conversation skills leave much to be desired, especially in their lack of discretion. I was feeling a little guilty at Julia and me spending all our time in her room, so we put the dishes in the dishwasher and did the other post-dinner tidying up, after which we agreed that I should head home so we could both do some schoolwork. Julia came with me when her mother drove me home, getting us to sit in the back together. I would've thought that meant her intention was so we could cuddle affectionately - but not TOO affectionately given Vanessa being in the front seat - but that's not the way it happened. Instead Julia and Vanessa started discussing how much Julia enjoyed having sex with me. With detailed descriptions of how she felt about any and every form of sex. It was very embarrassing, which was particularly unfair as I'd already received my daily quota of embarrassment. At one stage Vanessa half turned around to me and sincerely said, "Sorry to talk like this in front of you, we shouldn't rub your face in it." #1: #4: #1: #4: #1, #2: #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #1, #2: #1: #4: #2: #4: #1: #2: #4: #1: #4: #2: #4: < ... Carol is my favorite fantasy.> {Silence}. #4: #2: #1: #2: #1: #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: Julia put her hand on my crotch, squeezing it affectionately. Julia said, "Mom, our talking has gotten my darling boyfriend hard again. It seems such a pity to waste it, I wonder whether we should turn around and go back home?" Vanessa just laughed, "Haha. Like you haven't had enough already! He'll have to save that one for later." Julia reluctantly agreed, "I suppose you're right, but it's too bad. Maybe Mark will get his license soon, and then it'll just be him and me in the car so we could pull over and I could give him a blowjob." Now I was REALLY hard! #2: #1: #4: We pulled up in front of my home shortly after that. I kissed Julia goodnight, thanked Vanessa for the lovely meal and lift, and said I'd see them tomorrow, all while doing go-softs as intently as I could. I made the goodbyes lasted long enough that I could get out of the car with some dignity. ------- Chapter 32: Quality Times With Carol Saturday, April 9, 2005 (Continued) I went in carrying the two bags of Prof's material. As I went through the kitchen, Mom saw the bags and raised an eyebrow in the way that mothers do. In this case clearly conveying, "I didn't see you with those bags this morning, so I'm curious what is in them. Please tell me?" All that from a single eyebrow. I answered her eyebrow with, "It's a pile of information Prof gave me about OSU, the Math Department, all the courses they offer, and a bunch of other stuff to help me decide which courses to audit or take when enrollments open. I've started reading through the parts that interest me and there's a lot of information and possibilities. There's so much choice that I have to read and try to understand a lot of it before I can begin choosing. It's going to take me a while." Mom started asking me more questions: "How are the Williamses?", "How's the work on the house going?" Those sorts of things. After a couple of minutes of answering Mom's questions I said, "Let me dump this stuff in my room and I'll be back in a second." I felt a bit guilty about spending so much time at the Williams', and I'd be there more tomorrow, so after getting rid of the bags I visited with Mom for a while. Dad wandered through and asked how the soundproofing was coming along. I could tell he got a chuckle out of them having to soundproof her room because of how much noise his son got out of Julia. Vicarious ego, I guess, in a humorous way. Carol had been studying in her room and she came out for a drink, and gave me a big smile when she saw me. "Hello, Mark." "Hi sweetie. How are you? ... Good. While I remember to mention it, Julia's planning on your visiting her Thursday evening. She said something about your needing to prepare somehow. I don't know the details so you should call her to find out." I was careful with my language. It was to demonstrate my TK to Carol, so I'd obviously be there, but I left my involvement out to avoid any questions from Mom. "Thanks. I'll do that now." She gave me a quick hug and then moved to the phone. #4: #1: I told Mom that I'd left my bike at the Williams', why, and that Julia and I were going to the movies tomorrow. While I was explaining all of this, Carol had called Julia. I was curious about the "preparations", so I listened in. I had one mind talking to Mom, and the other two active minds listening to Carol. One of the advantages of having multiple minds is how easy it is for me to pay attention to multiple conversations at the same time. I heard Carol say, "Sure. I can come over right after school. The school car can take me there after it drops everyone else off here. Mark said something about me needing to prepare?" After a pause of several seconds for Julia to talk, Carol said, "Oh. I don't think I have any like that. Are you sure that I need..." (Short pause.) "I'm sorry. Of course I will. I'll get a pair after school on Monday ... Okay, several pairs." (Pause.) "Oh, I've never done that before. I'm not sure ... On Wednesday night? Thanks, that'd be good. Umm, how about I call you back on my cellphone? Okay, thanks." Carol hung up our phone and started walking to her bedroom. I heard her cellphone start ringing before she got there. She entered her room and shut the door behind her before answering it. #4: #1: I continued my chat with Mom for a while, and then excused myself to do some study. I worked for an hour or so, but didn't really have my full concentration. I didn't have anything pressing to study, just working my way through some of next year's material. I kept thinking about TK-related issues. I was thinking/daydreaming about them when there was a knock on my door. Carol called out, "It's just me." "Come in." I had been sitting at my desk, so when she came in I just swiveled my chair around to face her. Carol walked forward until she was beside my knees, then she knelt on the floor beside but facing me. She was sitting on her ankles but was able to lean forward to rest her cheek on my thigh, and look up at me smiling. I was very surprised at her posture, as she'd never done anything like this before. #4: I was struggling to think of something to say when Carol spoke, "I came in to say how much I love you, and that I told Julia you pop into Donna's and my room each night to check in with us. Julia pointed out that I should be coming to you to ask if you needed anything. She's right, so I'm going to be doing that from now on. Is there anything I can do for you, my darling Mark?" I was flummoxed and not sure how to respond. I mentally cast around for something to say, and remembered that just before she'd come in I'd been thinking about using a glass of milk for some TK experiments. To stick a TK-fingertip in to easily observe the shape of the hole it made in the milk, and to experiment with that. So I said, "Ahh, maybe a glass of milk?" The moment I said it I felt lazy and selfish. I should do my own fetching, but before I could countermand myself, Carol gave me a big smile, saying, "Coming right away, darling," as she jumped to her feet and dashed off to get it. She quickly returned with my request, put it on my desk then knelt down beside me again, looking at me with an even happier smile on her face. By then I'd collected my small amount of wits. "Thank you very much, Carol. But I don't think you should be waiting on me like this. I can get my own drinks." "Oh no! I'm HAPPY to do this for you. Julia is right that I should be looking after you better. You are very special and I want to repay you for all the love and caring you show me even though I'm no one special. This is the only way I can show my appreciation, so please let me keep doing it?" She looked quite upset that I might stop her waiting on me. "Whoa, Carol! You ARE very special. I think you're a FANTASTIC person. As far as I'm concerned I'm the one that should be thanking you." "I knew you'd say that! I know you even think that. That's how wonderfully unselfish you are..." #1: " ... but you're being silly. I looked up marathons a little while ago. From what I could tell from my bikes speedo', you ran a half-marathon in the same time as the world record, and if you'd kept it up for another hour you would've easily beat the full marathon's record. People can't just go out and run close to a world record like you can, let alone possibly faster than the record. There's something very, very special about you. -- "Not just running either. You drove Dad's car on the first attempt, you beat Julia's brothers at 8-ball, you're a genius, especially in the last few days you float when you walk..." #3: #1: " ... and Julia tells me that you're going to show me something totally awesome on Thursday. I'm excited over that, although I don't know how I could possibly think any more of you than I do now. Julia is right that you're special in extraordinary ways, as well as being a very nice person, so I'm going to do things for you. I'm just an ordinary person, not like you. I'm younger than you too, so there's almost nothing I can do for you to show you how I feel. Small things like getting you a drink are about all I can do, so I'm going to be doing them from now on." #4: #1: #3: I spoke, "It's true I can do a few things like running fast and whatnot, but most of them don't matter much, and they don't make me as nice a person as you are." Carol tried to argue, but she didn't have a chance of convincing me otherwise, so I just carried on, " ... You're NEVER going to convince me that you're not a nicer and more caring person than me, so let's not argue about it. You say you want to pop into my room to talk with me from time to time. That's fine with me..." #4: #3: #4: " ... as long as you don't mind if I continue to pop into your room to check on both of my sisters?" "Of course not, darling. I'd never object to anything you do, and I know Donna likes you for doing it too." Every time Carol said "darling" it struck me as being highly weird, and she'd said it enough times now that I had to ask, "Why do you keep calling me 'darling'? You've never done that before." "I don't know what else to call you. 'Mark' or 'Brother' says nothing about how I feel about you. I tried 'Big Brother' before but it doesn't express enough. 'Darling' is the best I can think of, even though I'm just your sister." "You are not JUST my sister, or JUST anything. You're a wonderful person. I'm very happy that you're my sister; I can't imagine a better sister than you." "And no one could be a better brother. Julia keeps telling me it'll be okay, and that I'll understand more on Thursday, but I don't see how." #3: #1: #4: "I'm somewhat confused. Females often do that to me, so between you and Julia I don't have a chance. I'm curious about what preparations you have to do for Thursday. What has Julia asked you to do?" Carol turned bright red and looked down. Bright red was very noticeable on Carol because she has such fair skin. While it was nice that someone other than me was embarrassed for once, I didn't really want it to be Carol. Julia would be my pick, but it's damned hard to embarrass her. I haven't done it yet, so it might not even be possible. I was still trying to understand how I'd caused Carol this embarrassment, when she spoke, "Julia told me what to say if you asked about that. She told me to say her words as exactly as I can, so here goes: 'Mark, I've instructed Carol not to discuss her preparations for Thursday evening with you. Please do not insist that she tells you because Thursday will go better if you don't know in advance.' Julia also told me to tell you that she is winking at you, whatever that means." #4: #3: #1: #3, #4: I answered, "That's okay, Carol. I won't ask you again. You can stop blushing." #4: I reached down to her arm and pulled her up and into my lap. She came easily, settled in and leaned her back against my chest. She's harder to cuddle than Julia, being so much larger, but it was still nice. I pulled my right arm from its sling and put it around her too. Carol grabbed my arm and held it close, the way Julia has demonstrated several times. It is a very nice feeling to be held like that, but I couldn't help noticing that my two arms were pushing her breasts together, and creating a LARGE gap down the front of her shirt. The view was spectacular. #3: #4: #3: #4: #3: #1: After a few minutes of sightseeing, I started wondering what to do. Carol seemed happy to stay on my lap forever. Eventually she said, "I shouldn't sit here all night, even though it feels so good. You've got things to do. Is there anything else I can do for you, darling?" #4: #4 knew the answer to that already, so we ignored him. To Carol we said, "I can't think of anything, sweetie. Is there anything I can do for you?" She opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it. "No," she said, "there's nothing. I'll let you get back to your work." Carol stood, turned to face me, and leaned over and kissed my cheek. I didn't feel the kiss because Carol's leaning over made the front of her shirt fall forward. I was sitting at the perfect height to see two beautiful milky-white globes, clearly visible through the large gap. I could even see them swinging, which was truly a glorious experience. They were enclosed in a bra of course, but I was very happy to see it was a fairly low-cut bra. A lovely bra; the best one I'd ever seen. About the time that I became aware that Carol's arms were around my shoulders and neck, and that she was kissing my cheek, her kiss stopped. She started standing up, and #3 suddenly noticed, #3: There wasn't time for a go-soft, so I crossed my legs quickly, using TK to push my cock under the upper-leg as it came over. #3: #4: #3: #4: She finished straightening up - so sad! - and said, "See you later, darling." And then she walked out of my room into hers. #4: #3: <{Sigh}.> #1: #4: #1: #4: No one argued with #4. A minute later we forced ourselves to forget Carol's wonderfully large, wobbling, milky-white breasts, instead turning to our experimental glass of milk. That reminded us of ... Oh well. Another minute or two later, I started my experiments. I formed a TK-fingertip and poked the very tip of it into the milk. It made a small, flattened cone-shaped indentation in the milk, very much like the tip of a real finger would, except the indentation was easier to see because this fingertip was invisible. I willed it slowly deeper - that's all it takes to make it move; just willing it to do so. When it reached about half an inch into the milk, the milk suddenly swept over the top. In other words, the fingertip was half an inch long. When it canceled, the level of milk in the glass suddenly dropped, which made sense. A lot of stuff about my abilities didn't make sense, but that did. I created a new fingertip, then lowered it about a quarter inch into the milk. Then I imagined the fingertip widening. As simple as that it did, as I'd expected because I'd changed their sizes when I'd been playing around trying to make eyeballs or ears. I continued increasing its width, moving it to the center of the glass to give it more room. It widened to about two inches in diameter, most of the width of the glass, but it stalled at that size. Making the fingertip two inches wide didn't seem to change any of its other properties, as far as I could tell. It still took half an inch to sink it in the milk, and pushing on my thigh with one that wide felt like it exerted the same force as a finger-sized fingertip. I tried creating a two-inch wide fingertip. That worked first time. Just in case fingertips could expand by a factor of four, I put it in the glass and tried to widen it, but it didn't budge. I canceled it and tried to create a four-inch wide fingertip. Nothing happened. The sudden thought of a needle distracted me. If going wider didn't reduce my total force, would going narrower also retain the same force? If that was the case, I'd be able to create a needle. My TK-push was weak, but on a very narrow point it'd be an excellent way of defending myself short of destroying someone's eyeballs, and it'd probably make doing that even easier too. I created another finger and inserted it a quarter inch into the milk again. I tried narrowing it, but nothing happened. Damn. I tried widening it, which worked fine, then I narrowed it down from its widest. It narrowed down to its original size and then stopped. I tried several more approaches, but it appeared that the default size that I created them at, half an inch wide, was the narrowest they got. Some quick experiments showed that I could create fingertips of any size between half an inch and two inches wide. Regardless of what size they were created at, those were the fingertips' minimum and maximum sizes respectively. The needle idea was 'pointless'. I wondered about different shapes, and tried forming a square rather than a circular cross-section. It partly worked, in that I created a slightly squared circular fingertip. I tried a triangle, and that was still very circle-like. I could create circular fingertips, and could influence the shape a little away from a circle, but not much. That'd been the case when I'd played around trying to create the invisible Peeping Tom eyes, but it was easier to see the effect in the milk. I also gave some thought to how hard I could push with TK. The easiest way of measuring that was to push down on a set of scales to 'weigh' our push, as it were. Our bathroom scales would be too inaccurate for the very weak pushes I could perform. I made a mental note to try this in one of the science labs at school, as they had suitably precise scales. ["Weight" has two different meanings. In science, weight is a force pressing down ("pressing" clearly being a word that means exerting a force), the SI unit of measure for which is the newton. In everyday use weight is a mass, for which the SI unit is the kilogram. Accurately, Weight = Mass times g (the gravitational constant). On Earth g = 32.2 feet/sec/sec or 9.8 meters/sec/sec. By weighing my TK force on a set of scales, I'd be taking advantage of the facts that scales are calibrated for a constant gravitational field, and that gravity is a force. I'd be measuring my TK the easy way, but I'd have to be aware that the result (in pounds, or kilograms if I converted it) would be the wrong unit for a force. The difference won't matter often in this autobiography, and when it does, multiplying by g fixes it.] I couldn't think of any other milk-related experiments to do, so I drank it. I stood to return the glass to the kitchen to wash it and put it away. Mom doesn't like dirty dishes in our rooms and has ingrained the "clean up immediately" habit in all of us. But I suddenly wondered about leaving it for Carol. Not because I was lazy, but because she really seemed happy to do something for me. I couldn't think of anything else for her to do if she came back later tonight. She had said, "See you later," which seemed to signal the intent to come back, so I decided to keep my empty glass as a pathetic way of making her happy if she did return. I studied until about 8:30, then remembered that I hadn't seen Donna today, so I took my glass to the kitchen, washed and put it away, then went to the girls' room and knocked on the door. When I entered, I couldn't help myself from immediately checking what clothes Carol was wearing. Happily she hadn't changed. I turned to Donna, and said, "I haven't seen you all day, Donna. I thought I'd pop in and see how your day has been?" She was lying on her bed, reading "Runner's World", and I remembered that she'd been to her athletic club this morning, so I added, "How was the Club this morning?" Donna smiled at me and put her magazine down. "Good. I gave your Registration to them. It's going to be neat when you surprise them next Saturday. It's a pity Carol will be shopping with Julia because she'll miss it." Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that. I asked Carol, "Will you be shopping in the morning or afternoon? The run's in the morning, so I hope you can make it?" "Haha. We'll be shopping ALL day! Shopping is serious business, and Julia seems to take it even more seriously than me. She's excited about buying me lots of different outfits, so it's going to be a very long and busy day. One day probably won't be enough, but we'll try to get as much done as we can on Saturday. If we watched you in the morning we wouldn't have time to do even the first pass through all the stores, let alone buy anything. Sorry." #2: "Oh, that's a pity. I was hoping to have you and Julia watch me race, but I guess that'd be boring for you anyway." #2: "I'd like to watch especially after seeing how fantastically you can run, but Julia is very worked up about our shopping and it's bound to take all day. Our missing your race won't be all bad for you because Julia keeps saying she's going to buy some sexy clothes for me. She's bound to get some for herself too, so you'll have some fun looking at her." #4: #2: #4: Donna said to Carol, "Julia's going to get you some sexy clothes? That'll be good to see, you hardly ever dress sexy and you're very beautiful. I hope you show me too, please." Carol said, "Sure. I hope they're not too sexy though. Thank you for your compliment too." Donna replied, "You ARE beautiful. Isn't she, Mark?" "I'll say! VERY beautiful." Carol blushed, but unlike what happened every time I blushed, she looked pleased. She looked up at me and said, "Are you sure you think I'm beautiful?" Donna interrupted with a laugh and a, "Now you're just fishing for compliments! You know he thinks you're beautiful. You can see it in his face whenever he looks at you." #4: #1: Carol looked at me, and asked yet again, "Really?" I answered with, "Truly." | Donna just laughed again. I added, "I mainly came in here to see how Donna is. Having established that I think Carol is very beautiful; Donna, how was the rest of your Club meeting?" Donna swung her legs to the floor and described her meeting to me, talking about the training they do, working on techniques, practicing, etc. Donna couldn't resist adding, "You know, all that stuff you don't have to worry about. You just run like a dream." I got tired of standing so I sat next to Donna on her bed. Carol came over and sat next to me, putting her arm around me and just sitting silently. I didn't dare turn to look at her, knowing that if I did I wouldn't be able to resist looking down at her breasts. There was no way I wouldn't be caught, and that'd have all sorts of bad consequences. I kept my head firmly pointing at Donna, even #4 agreeing that we had to play it cool or the girls would kill us, then tell Mom and Dad, who'd kill us again. Donna had played soccer in the afternoon, so we chatted about that too. She asked me, "When will you play again?" I answered, "As soon as I get this damned cast off, in two more weeks unfortunately. It's booked for a Saturday, but now that you remind me I'll try to get it done on the Friday so I can play that weekend. I'll ask Mom about that. Thanks for the reminder; I'm looking forward to being able to play again." When it was time for me to go, I stood and VERY carefully controlled where I didn't look. I wished Donna, "Goodnight," and I added, "and a goodnight to you too, beautiful." Carol smiled, and said, "You too, handsome." I thought that was quite funny, and chuckled out loud as I left the room. I went and asked Mom about moving the cast-removal day forward by one so I could play soccer that Saturday. "One day should be okay. I don't imagine they'd object to that. I'll call tomorrow to make sure. How is your arm? No problems?" "It's fine. In fact, it feels perfect. No pain or anything. As far as I can tell it's healed already and the cast is just a nuisance. I've started taking it out of the sling more often than not as that makes it easier to do things." "Be careful of it. It feels strong because the cast is providing so much support, but without it your bone would be so weak it'd easily break again. I'll talk with them tomorrow about moving it forward a day, and let you know when you come back from the Williams'." "Thanks, Mom." I went back to my room. I'm getting into the habit of working quite late at night if I have stuff to do, as I'm finding that I'm not tired the next morning. Prof had given me lots of stuff to read and there's always some school stuff I can work on, so I settled down for a good session. About 10pm there was a knock on my door. "Enter." My door opened quietly, Carol came in and shut it behind her. To my shame, my first reaction was disappointment at her having changed clothes. Now she was wearing one of her nighties: long, flannel and definitely not sexy. It was buttoned from just below her neck to all the way down to mid calf. It even had long sleeves so it was really just a big, unsexy bag. Then I felt bad for treating her as a sex object. She was my wonderful sister and I shouldn't be disappointed to see her, no matter how little of her I was seeing. I told myself that very firmly and several times, because I didn't seem to be convincing myself. I'd given up by the time she'd turned back to me after closing my door. She said, "I was just about to go to bed, and thought I'd come and see you again. You don't mind me visiting you this late?" "Not at all, sweetie. I'll stay up for at least another couple of hours yet; I've got plenty of work to do. I am happy to take a little break. What can I do for you?" Carol laughed, "Haha, you got that the wrong way around, darling. I'm supposed to be helping you. That's what Julia and I want to do. Is there anything you want me to do, or can I just come and sit in your lap again?" "I can't think of anything for you to do, so sitting on my lap is my choice." #2: #4: "Goody," she said as she climbed on. She leaned her back against me, and reached around for my left arm and pulled it in front of her then hugged it. I'd moved my right around to hug her with too. #4: #2: #4: #3: #4: Carol jerked up exclaiming, "I forgot your milk glass! I should have cleaned it up for you. I'm sorry. I'll get better with practice though." "Carol, you don't have to clean up my dirty dishes. It took only a moment for me to return it." "I don't have to, but I want to. Julia says you're special, valuable, that you shouldn't have to do silly little things, and that I should do them for you. I agree with her. If you're busy - and I see you've been doing lots of work - then I'd like to do those things for you. Please let me? There's not much I can do for you, but I can do that." "I can see you want to, but I don't really understand it. And I don't need it." Carol started getting agitated and opened her mouth to remonstrate, so I hurriedly cut her off with, "But if it makes you happy, then okay. There's not much that needs doing anyway, so if you want to spend a couple of minutes a day doing something for me, that's fine. It'll feel very strange, but anything to make you happy." "Thank you, darling," and she grabbed my arm and rearranged it so it was hugging her better, I presumed. I couldn't tell that it was any different, but having it rubbed over her breast a couple of times sure felt fine to me. I moved my right hand, reaching it around her front and hugging her on her left side. It had that breast's weight resting on it, so it'd probably been #4 who had moved our hand. We all enjoyed the feel of her breast, even through the nightie. Happily Carol didn't object, so I'd gotten away with it. We just sat for a minute or two, thinking our own thoughts. Then Carol said, "I like being with you, darling. Julia keeps telling me that I'm lucky to be your sister and living in the same house as you. She really wishes she could live with you and envies me. I envy her, but she's right about being with you. It's nice to be able to come into your room and cuddle. I'm glad I can do that." #3: #4: I chuckled at #4's comment and Carol asked, "What's so funny?" "I was just thinking about Julia's wanting to live with me. I don't have anywhere near enough closet space. It'd be a disaster for her, haha." Carol didn't see the joke, "She wouldn't move here; you'd obviously move there. They've got plenty of space, plus the Guys' Room, the hot tub, and everything." "Honey, I love my family. I don't want to leave." Carol, who had been leaning back on me, sat up and turned around to look me straight in the face. "You mean that? You really don't want to go and live with Julia in their wonderful home because you want to stay with us?" "I mean it, that's why I laughed about her not having enough closet space here. I'd already thought about my moving there and rejected it. I love you guys, especially you, sweetie." "{Sob}. Especially me? Really?" It was sort of true because Carol is a very nice person and is closest to my own age, but it was also something that I'd said just because it seemed a nice thing to say. I'd only just started thinking about how to answer her question, when her sobs got out of control. Carol burst into tears and threw her arms around me, crying onto my shoulder. I could even feel her tears running down my cheek where her face pressed against mine. "There, there," as my right arm held her close and my left hand stroked her head. #4: #3: #2: #4: "There, there." "{Sniff}. Thank you. I can't believe that you wouldn't leap at the chance to live with Julia. She's so perfect and her family is so nice. And then you say it's because of 'especially me'. I feel so bad that I can't do more for you and I feel so inferior to Julia, but you say you love me so much anyway. I can't tell you how much that means to me." "You don't have to do more for me. You've been doing plenty of good things toward me for years. I already love you for being the wonderful person you are." "I know you do. I can't believe it, but I know you do. I love you so much, darling." And to my great surprise she grabbed my head with both her hands and kissed me right on the lips. I couldn't work out how to react; I was shocked into immovability. Not displeased - who would be, being kissed by such a wonderful, beautiful girl? - but certainly shocked. I realized I hadn't seen it coming in proximity either because we'd lost center. #1: After a couple of seconds of shock, I started thinking again. Carol's kiss wasn't a sexy kiss, and certainly not a French kiss, it was just her mashing her lips up against mine. Obviously just an overdose of happiness that she couldn't express in any other way. I rearranged my arms into a more comfortable position, and my doing so brought her to her senses. She pulled back and said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I got carried away." "Why are you sorry? I'm not. I was kissed by a beautiful girl that I love very much. That made me happy, not sorry." "You didn't mind?" I repeated, "It made me happy." To prove the point I leaned forward and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. "See?" Carol laughed happily and with a big grin on her face, said, "You always make me feel so loved and special, even though it's you who're so fantastic. I'm so lucky." She turned around so her back was to me again, and leaned against my chest, grabbing one of my arms and holding it tight to her. The 'problem' was that she'd placed my hand full against the side of her breast. #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: Carol happily snuggled further into my lap. I could almost imagine her purring as she was radiating that sort of contentment. I held her, with my terror and enjoyment continuing. I was happy for her too. It was a good feeling to make her so happy. Minutes passed. I was acutely conscious of every moment, yet it was over far too fast when Carol sat up. Her movement pulled my hand across her breast before I could think to move it away, but I did so immediately after that. She turned to me and said, "Thank you for making me feel so good, darling. I really had been worried about losing you to Julia, and now I feel a lot better." "You will never lose me to Julia, sweetie. Julia's and my relationship is extremely good, and I think she's wonderful, but I know from other guys that girlfriends don't necessarily last forever. Sisters do though. You're my sister for life and I'm very happy about that. We have the same blood in our veins, so part of me is in you and you in me. Nothing can change that." "You are always so nice to me. Beyond nice, you make me feel special." -- I opened my mouth to reply, but Carol interrupted me, "I know what you're going to say: that you think I'm special. The amazing thing is I know you mean it, even though I'm just a very ordinary girl. I think I'll go to bed now and have some marvelous dreams because of how great I'm feeling." -- Carol stood up, looked at me for a second, and added, "That was the first time I've ever kissed a boy. I hope it wasn't too bad?" "How could being kissed by a girl I love ever be bad? It was lovely Carol, because you are." "You are very, very good at making me feel good. I think I've wasted enough of your time now. Goodnight, darling." She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, then said, "I'm going to float off to sleep feeling better than I ever have before. Goodnight, darling." #4: #1: "Goodnight sweetie." Carol left the room. #4: #3: #4: We decided we weren't all that interested in studying, so we went to bed instead. We lay awake for a while, each thinking our private, unshared thoughts about Carol. We eventually fell asleep, feeling pretty good about ourselves. ------- Chapter 33: A Nice, Relaxing Movie Date Sunday, April 10, 2005 I was the first non-mother to breakfast, as usual. When Donna joined us I checked, "We agreed to have runs Monday and Wednesday mornings, so are we going to run tomorrow morning?" Donna said, "Sure, I'd like that. Yesterday Carol said that you're an incredible runner. You went at my speed last time, so next time I want to see what you can do." Donna paused, and I could see she was thinking of something. She added to Mom, "Would it be okay if I bet on Mark for the race on Saturday?" Mom asked, "Bet with whom?" "Any of the Club who want to bet with me. There'll be some very good runners in that race so I'd get good odds." "What do you know about getting odds, young lady?" You could see Donna realize that she'd said far too much. She tried to back up. "Umm, not much. I've heard people talking at the Club, is all." "I'm not sure I believe that. You know my opinions on betting, don't you Donna?" Hesitantly, "Yeeess." "So what do you think my answer is about your betting on Mark? Regardless of good odds or not." "Umm, I guess you don't agree." "You guess right." So that ended that conversation. Donna really shouldn't have mentioned betting to Mom. Carol came in soon after that. Looking very happy and giving me a big smile when she saw me. I asked her, "How was your sleep, sweetie?" She rushed around the table to where I was sitting, gave me a big hug from behind, kissed me on the top of the head, and said, "Wonderful, thank you very much. I felt so happy." She was still hugging me when I saw Mom raise her eyebrow at her. Carol answered, "He said some very nice things to me just before I went to bed. I felt so happy that I told him I was going to have the best dreams. I can't remember if I had any, but I know I was feeling wonderful. It's an amazing feeling to know you're loved." Which got me another hug then Carol went to her seat. "You kids are amazing." Carol added, "Especially Mark." I disagreed, "Especially Carol." "Especially Mark." "Carol." "Mark." I poked my tongue out at her, and she poked hers right back. The family was amused. After breakfast I called Julia, and we agreed that Vanessa would pick me up after lunch, about 2pm. I spent the rest of the morning washing my parents' cars, doing yard work, and sundry other chores. Mid-morning Carol brought out two glasses of fruit juice and a plate with a few sandwiches for Dad and me. It was very nice, especially as I got to eat most of the sandwiches. I gave her a hug and a, "Thanks sweetie." I was amused to notice that she hung around to take the dishes away too, although "amused" probably isn't the right word. I'm so mixed up about whatever it is that's going on with Carol that I'm not sure what my emotions are, except for one of them which is easy to identify. I'm doing my best to repress that one! After finishing outside, I had a shower and then it was lunchtime. At the table I said, "I was thinking about Carol going shopping next Saturday, and I think I need to soon too. My clothes aren't fitting so well anymore. Maybe I'll go out Saturday afternoon, after my race." For the last couple of years Mom has let me buy a lot of my own clothes. We agree on what I'm going to be buying, and she gives me an appropriate amount of money and leaves me to it. I keep the receipts and return any change. I was really just starting the conversation to make up a list of what I needed and to agree on a budget, but before Mom could respond Carol jumped in. Carol enthused, "Don't do it Saturday! I want to help. Can you do it some other day please?" "Sure. We can do it the following Saturday, if you like?" "Yes please. I'd love to help get you some good clothes." Mom and Dad were looking on with pleased amusement. Carol had never volunteered to help me with clothes shopping before. Mom asked me, "What do you think you need?" "Quite a lot. I'm getting taller again, so my pants are starting to look silly. Also my shirts are getting too tight across my shoulders. Doesn't matter for T-shirts, but some of my good shirts are getting uncomfortable." Mom said, "I thought you'd finished your growth spurt already. Let's measure you in the doorway after lunch." That's what we did. The doorway from the kitchen into the living room is the family measuring post/archive. I backed up against it and had my height scribed. Mom confirmed, "You're right; you've grown the best part of an inch. That must be why you've been eating so much recently." I wisely decided not to tell her it was because I had three extra minds. "If you're still growing it'd be best to just get the minimum you need until you've stopped." Mom, Carol and I went to my room and sorted through my clothes to work out what I needed to buy. Mom selected a shirt and pair of pants, and asked me to try them on so she could see how badly they fit. I made them turn their backs, to their amusement. Some of my existing pants could have their hems turned down as Mom is quite handy on a sewing machine. She used it quite often to save money. After Mom decided which items could be adjusted, I just needed a couple of pairs of pants and a couple of good shirts. That having been established, I shooed the females out of my room while I got dressed nicely for my second official date with Julia. I read for a little while, until Vanessa and Julia came to collect me. ^ Vanessa took us into town and dropped us outside the theater. We bought our tickets but had some time to kill so we walked to a burger joint. A couple of times during our walk people yelled out, "Hi Egg," or something similar. Most of the greeters I only knew by sight, not by name. It was a strange feeling to be so well known. At the burger joint, we got a shake each and sat talking in a stall. I mentioned to Julia that I'd asked Carol about the "preparations" for Thursday evening, and that Carol had gone red and repeated the "wink message." Julia was pleased that I hadn't pressed Carol for the details. I rather foolishly asked, "Don't you think you're taking my showing TK to Carol too seriously?" As it turned out, Julia most emphatically did not think she was taking it too seriously. She looked around to make sure we couldn't be overheard, then quietly yelled at me, "Are you KIDDING! You can do something that no one else in the world can do. That makes you superhuman and Carol will only be the second person ever to see it. It's not possible to overstate how important this is..." Julia clearly wanted to carry on praising me, so I cut her off, "Okay, okay. I get the idea. I don't think it makes me a better person in any way, but I know I'm never going to convince you of that so I'll let you plan Thursday the way you want. As if I had any choice!" Julia asked, "How are you getting along with Carol the last few days?" "Amazingly. She's very affectionate and wanting to do little things for me. Fetches me drinks, wants to help me shopping for new clothes in a couple of weeks, and I'm sure anything else I could think of. She came into my room twice last evening to sit on my lap and cuddle for a little while. She says she'll be doing it every evening. She's very nice to be with, but I worry she's going overboard with her waiting on me. I got the impression you're the one who pushed her into that?" Most of Julia's opinions about anything are firm, and were even more so on this one. "She's NOT going overboard. It's not possible to go overboard with how important you are. She's doing exactly what she needs to do. Please don't hesitate to ask her to do things for you. If you don't need anything, try to make something up, at least one or two such requests per day. You'll see that it'll make her very happy, and you do want Carol to be happy, don't you?" [[You don't know Julia well enough to appreciate the significance of this yet, but notice that she talked about Carol rather than responding to my comment about me buying clothes in a couple of weeks. Once you get to know Julia better, you'll understand that her choice of topic proved how important she considered Carol.]] I answered, "You know the answer to that! Carol's not normally a noticeably happy person, but the last few days she's been happier than I've ever seen her, including her loving doing little things for me. But I find it strange and somewhat uncomfortable. It's nice that she cares for me so much that she wants to look after me, but it still feels weird. A couple of years ago she could barely bring herself to talk with me, and preferred to have as little to do with me as possible, and now she can't find enough ways to help me." "Because YOU are not the same person you were two years ago. You are VERY much better. Carol and I love you so much our hearts feel like bursting. I can express my love by," Julia looked around to make sure no one was listening, then seeing it was safe she continued, "taking you to bed and screwing your brains out. You always screw my brains out, but at least I can express my feelings. Poor Carol can't. -- "I've spent a lot of time talking to her and thinking about her since Wednesday, and I understand her fairly well now. She's bursting with love for you, but doesn't have any way of showing it. I feel sorry for her as it must be horribly frustrating. So it's important you give her ways to express her love. She's a very quiet, passive girl, so the best way she's got to express herself is to serve you, just as I make her do things for me. It makes her feel loved, needed, valued and secure. Those are very important to her because she's never felt the way she does now, so please find things for her to do and give her lots of affection." Much of what Julia said made sense. I know Carol is a passive person; like me in that respect. She does spend a lot of time alone and must feel lonely. Plus she's got a long-term habit of putting herself down, so giving her some positive messages would be very good. I still think Carol is WAY overdoing it with me, but Julia seems to know what she's doing, as proved by Carol's extraordinary happiness these days, so I answered, "I see that Carol is VERY happy recently. I don't understand her as well as you do, but I can't argue with your making her happy. So I'll try to find things for her to do, the way you say. The trouble is about the only thing I can think of is getting me a drink." "Ask her to polish your shoes when they need it. Ask her even if you think they don't need it, as doing them will make her happy. If you're in the living room and want something from your room, ask her to get it for you. Have her do your laundry and ironing for you. If you have a sore back, ask her to give you a backrub. Ask her to make snacks for you - I know you'll like that one! There are lots of things you could ask for." "The girls already do the laundry because Mom gave them that job a few years ago. I don't get sore backs, but I get your general idea." "You don't need to have a sore back to ask for a backrub. Just ask for one whenever you feel like it." "Why would I ask and why would she give me one if there was no reason?" "You'd ask because it's relaxing and pleasurable to receive a backrub. It'd also give Carol a chance to do something for you, which would make her happy. She wants chances to express herself." "It seems very selfish to me. It's a very one-sided deal." "You're right. She will get FAR more pleasure out of it than you! But it's the least you can do for her." "How could she get more pleasure than me? She'd be the one doing all the work and I'd just be lying there enjoying myself." Julia's answer turned out to be very convincing. She started it by asking to borrow my cellphone. I handed it over, a bit puzzled why she wasn't using her own. I sat and watched while she typed a text message then sent it. Julia said, "This is what I sent to Carol." The screen read, "Come to my room tonight and spend at least 30 min giving me the best backrub you can. What do you think?" #1: I would've been sure that Carol would be angry, except that Julia was obviously convinced Carol would be happy. After some more thought, I had Carol's likely reaction narrowed down to probably somewhere between angry and happy, although I wasn't sure. Carol replied very quickly, her text reading, "THANK YOU! I am SO happy! Will study n practice on Donna 2b best I can. I LOVE u. xxx." I showed the message to Julia, who had the decency not to say, "I told you so." Her smug look of superiority said it for her. I'd been soundly outsmarted. I wasn't ashamed as it just meant Julia understood a girl better than I did, which was hardly surprising. That I'd lived with Carol all her life and Julia had only known her half a week gave me a headstart, but their both being girls counted for far more than thirteen years of living in the same house. So I said, "You were right. Carol really does want to please me, and she's obviously very happy to do so." Julia's response was, "All you have to do is lie back, enjoy it, and give her HEAPS of appreciation. She lives for appreciation from the both of us, especially from you. I'll call her later and praise her for looking after you so well the last few days. It's important to reward her for being so caring toward you. You're not asking her to do things for your benefit, but for hers. If you want Carol to be happy, then that's a very good way of doing it." "I can see that. I can also see that I would never have known that without your help. You're very good to Carol and me. Thank you very much." "Think about this: I'm making you and Carol very happy. You're making Carol and me very happy, especially recently because we're both bursting with happiness because of you. To complete the third leg of the symmetry, Carol can also make you very happy. She hasn't had a chance yet, but she will. She'll also make me happy in some ways, but that doesn't matter because my life is focused on you, so if she makes you happy then I'm automatically very happy. -- "I'm delighted to have her onboard. Especially since I've known about your TK, but even before then I already knew you're an incredible guy. I know you don't appreciate how important that makes you, and how much responsibility that puts on me. My brain goes in to a complete spin when I try to think about what you're going to be doing in just a few years from now, and how I can keep up with you and be helpful for you. -- "One thing I'm very sure of is that you'll need some people that you can absolutely trust around you, so I was feeling very uncomfortable being the only one. Sharing that with Carol means she's making me feel much better. So the three of us are all wonderful for each other. That's why I want the three of us to spend as much time together as possible, including Carol coming to my home so much. We three are perfect together - we're a match made in heaven!" Listening to Julia's three-sided symmetry explanation I'd had the thought that it was true that we all cared for each other, but we each believe the other two to be better than ourself. I'm just a very ordinary boy with some freaky abilities, whereas Julia and Carol are both much better quality people than I am. I know Carol thinks exactly the same thing about Julia and me, only more so. And Julia somehow thinks I walk on water. Julia's opinion of Carol is the only one that doesn't fit that pattern, but Julia obviously values Carol's inclusion because I like Carol so much, which is all the reason Julia needs. Carol's being my sister also wonderfully avoids Julia's homicidal jealousy. Thinking about Julia not looking up to Carol made me remember that Julia actually bosses Carol around. Remembering that gave me a momentary negative emotional reaction - as had happened the other times I'd thought of that - but this time I suddenly realized that it truly did make Carol happy. The text message my phone had sent Carol had been very commanding, but Carol had loved it. For the first time I accepted what Julia had been telling me about that. I appreciated the thought briefly, including making a mental note to watch how Julia treats Carol in the future, and try to learn to do the same. Carol was thriving on it, and I wanted to see her thrive some more. Julia had leaned back and had watched me think. I was just about to thank Julia, when she suddenly sat up. I could almost see the lightbulb go on above her head. She was suddenly focused on whatever she'd thought of, so I stayed quiet to let her think, as she'd done for me. After a few seconds she quietly said to herself, "Oh, that's GOOD!" I asked, "What's good?" She answered me, "I just had a FANTASTIC idea for our ceremony on Thursday. I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it before - it's SO OBVIOUS! -- "I might have to miss part of school tomorrow morning. I need to talk with Mom tonight too; she'll have some ideas. I need to have a serious talk with both my parents. This keeps getting better and better. Don't worry if you don't see me at school tomorrow morning, darling." One of the many weird things about females is that they believe their explanations explain things. All I understood was that Julia might miss some school, and that "showing Carol my TK" on Thursday evening had apparently been elevated to the status of a ceremony, whatever that meant. My TK demonstration was shaping up to be just like my First Date, although hopefully without the premature ejaculation. I'd thought that date was going to be simple, but it had required several people many hours to make it happen so well. The same thing was apparently happening with my TK demonstration. Having learned my lesson, I kept quiet. #4: #1: As I didn't have a clue what the ceremony idea meant, and I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to, I reverted to the previous topic. "Julia, about your explanation of Carol's personality and needs. I'm starting to understand your thinking about her. I am very impressed at how much Carol is thriving under your 'command'. I understand you want me to be more commanding toward her too. I will try. It's strange for me, but I can see that she loves it. You are a very impressive young woman. I'm so glad you want to be my girlfriend." "I am many things toward you. Girlfriend is the least of them, as you'll discover." I hope she didn't expect a reply because I didn't have a clue what she meant, yet again. I looked at my watch, and it was about time to wander back to the theater. We stood, Julia grabbed my arm as she always does, and we started walking with Julia deep in thought. I amused myself by thinking about the way Julia holds my arm. I very much enjoy it, so much so that holding hands seems weak in comparison. It works perfectly when we're sitting as she can easily grab my upper-arm and hug it to her. But when we're walking, especially if she's wearing flat shoes, she's so much shorter than me that my upper-arm is too far above her for her to reach comfortably. She'd also end up hugging it to her head, which neither of us would enjoy as much as having it hugged to her chest. When we walk she usually holds my forearm. It's nice, and definitely better than holding hands, but somehow not quite as nice as the upper-arm hug when we're sitting. My growing taller was going to make Julia's hugging style a little harder for her, but it shouldn't make much difference. Otherwise I'm extremely happy about growing taller. With the baggy clothes I wear hiding that I'm skinny, taller makes me look less of a wimp. I was heartily sick of years of being vulnerable and victimized, so every inch of non-wimpishness that I could gain was welcome. Julia said, "I hope Carol is good at giving backrubs." The way she'd said it required me to ask, "Why?" "Because when she comes over on Wednesday evening for her sleepover, I'm going to command her to spend an hour giving me a full body massage. Back and front, while naked." #4: #1: #2: "Did you mean you or Carol naked?" "Both of course." #4: We looked down, and sure enough, my pants were 'tented'. Definitely unsuitable for walking around in public! Just as I was issuing an emergency go-soft command, Julia spotted my 'tent', "I can see what you think of that. Good!" Oh dear. I flushed with embarrassment. I should've known that was going to happen some time today. I concentrated on doing the go-soft as quickly as I could. A few steps later Julia added, "When you're cuddling with Carol after your backrub tonight, would you please tell her, 'You will be giving Julia a full body massage on Wednesday night, back and front, with both of you naked.' Those exact words please, especially that, 'she WILL be giving it.' Don't say that I'll be asking or anything wishy-washy like that. State it as a certainty. Will you do that for me please?" "Far be it from me to disagree with anything you suggest for Carol, so I'll do exactly as you ask. Can I ask some questions though, please?" "Of course. You are the boss after all." Somehow I doubted it, but I'd stick to one topic at a time. I asked, "Why do you want me to tell her that?" "Carol will spend from when you tell her until Wednesday night eagerly anticipating serving me so intimately. I've never told her to do anything like that before and it'll please her very much. She loves to make you and me happy, and this will be the most intimate occasion so far. The nakedness and touching aspects will make her think of sexual things, but that's not the main reason. Her being exposed will reinforce her vulnerability. She sees herself as being weak, so that'll confirm her opinion of her role in life. My willingness to be naked with her and allow her to touch my body so intimately will tell her that I trust her a great deal, which will make her proud and happy." "I think I understand. My first thought was that it was a hot sexual image, but that's not it at all, is it?" Julia laughed, "I saw your pants so you don't have to tell me what your first thought was! Haha. I'm glad you find it a turn-on. She will too. Not as much as you, but she'll still get excited by it. She's young, inexperienced, and at her age easily turned on, so her mind will skitter all over the place. She'll have some sexual thoughts, but that isn't the main issue." -- Julia paused briefly, then carried on with, "I was just thinking about the sexual aspect. I didn't plan it, but I just noticed that the words I asked you to tell her don't say whether the command is yours or mine. She'll be intrigued by that uncertainty. It's accidentally quite delicious. If she tries to get more information out of you - which I expect she will - try to keep the uncertainty going. Can you please say something like, 'I have told you what will be happening and that's all you need to know.'" "I understand what you mean, and that you're cunning and doing something for her, but I don't understand why the uncertainty over who made the command is important?" "It's not that important. If you told her it was either of our ideas, that'd still be good. The role Carol wants for herself is to serve both of us, but she'll still need to know which of us this command came from so she'll know what it means, because that tells her who she is. That wording prevents her knowing that, so she might even get a little desperate and panicky trying to find out. If we don't let her know, it'll be a cute way of telling her that it doesn't matter which of us gives her commands because we're both her boss. When that sinks in, it'll reinforce her desire to serve us." "Are you sure we should be doing those sorts of things to my sister? I REALLY don't want anything bad to happen to her." "Yes, I am sure, but I'm sorry I sprung it on you so suddenly. I've been thinking about this for several days but I realize it's the first you've been aware of it. -- "From the night of our first date I got the impression that she was very needy and that she desperately wanted someone to look up to. I didn't do anything about it, not even thinking about it, until we had your family over for dinner last Wednesday. That was only four days ago, but when I realized how perfect she could be I started pushing her every chance I had, and I made sure I had plenty of chances. I talk with her several times a day. To my surprise and delight, whenever I pushed her she happily did whatever I commanded. She hasn't said no to me yet and I don't think she ever will. Some of the things I've told her to do are things that a normal person would question, but she's delighted to do them. Not just willing to do them, but delighted. -- "She has a low opinion of herself and wants to be dependent on someone she respects and considers much more capable than herself. Her only way of feeling worthwhile in a relationship with a superior person is to serve him or her. That's her personality and we're not going to be able to change it." We'd stopped walking by now, and had pulled off the main sidewalk to make it easier to talk. Just as well considering how personal the discussion was getting. Julia's face took on a serious look while she said, "You need to be aware of an important issue: Carol wants to serve. If we reject her, or even just don't give her enough of what she needs, then she'll find someone else or someone else will find her. Perhaps someone who doesn't love her for herself, but who just wants to use her. She's very beautiful and very passive, so could easily be taken advantage of if she met a guy who was smart enough to work out how to manipulate her. -- "At her age the boys are clueless, but once she gets into high school some of the seniors could hit on her. Some of them can be very commanding because they're arrogant. If she decided to serve someone, she wouldn't have any defense against being abused and hurt. It's scary how vulnerable she is. She needs to have someone - or two someones - who have her best interests in heart. Can you think of any two people like that?" #2: #1: #4: #2: "Julia, I think I understand what you're saying. I'm definitely going to give it more thought, but everything you've said sounds correct to me. I'll be observing Carol with my eyes very much opened now, hoping to understand her better. Thank you very much for that. I owe you a great deal for what you've just said. You just might've saved Carol's life. I don't know how, but I'll try to find some way to pay you back." "Mark, darling, you don't understand my role in our relationship. You do NOT have to pay me back. If Carol brought you a drink, would you have to pay her back? I'll answer for you since the movie's starting soon. You don't have to pay her back because what you're providing her - love, protection, a safe environment in which to serve and give her love - are of far greater value than what she does for you, such as bringing you drinks." "Yes. I know what you mean. I am very conscious - now - that our relationship to Carol is different from hers to us." "Exactly right. The drink is trivial. Her role is to serve you, and it is the server not the boss who gains the most benefit from their relationship. Can you see that in Carol's case?" "Yes, I can. She needs us more than we need her. We love her, of course, but her needs are much stronger than ours." "Exactly! Very well put. Carol serves us, and therefore we don't have to pay her back for what she does. For us to try to pay her back devalues what she's doing for us. It devalues her expression of love. She does NOT want us to try to pay her back!" I nodded my head, I could see that. Julia continued, "As I've told you before, but you don't get yet, I SERVE YOU! You're the boss and my role in life is to serve you. That is the totality of my life now. I don't have and don't want anything else. I'm not your 'girlfriend', as you called me just a few minutes ago. Remember I said that was the least of what I am to you?" "I remember. I had no idea what you meant when you said that though?" "I didn't know that I would be explaining it so soon after my statement, but you showed such a wonderful understanding of Carol's chosen path in life. I serve you, Mark. You have chosen to treat me as your girlfriend, so that's what I am being to you, but I will be whatever you want. If you want me as your wife, the answer is yes and always will be. If you want me to have your children, the answer is yes. If you want me to rob banks for you, the answer is yes. Whatever you want me to be, the answer is yes. -- "To the best of my ability I will give you everything that you want or need to make your life better. Remember that I told you I am yours body, mind, soul? I meant it and still do. That's why you don't need to pay me back for anything I do. We don't need to pay Carol back, and you don't need to pay me back. It's as simple as that." #4: I replied to Julia, "I think I understand why Carol gets more from us than we get from her, and that understanding means I'm happy with it and accept that we have to look after her. That's presuming Carol agrees of course, which it certainly looks like she does. But I have no idea what you get from me. To me it seems that you are constantly doing me HUGE favors - like making Carol so happy - but I don't seem to do anything for you." Julia attempted to make this dumb male understand a female. "If you tried to pay Carol back for getting you a drink, she'd think you were crazy. She's bursting with frustration about not being able to do a hundred times more than she's doing now. She'd be very unhappy if you insisted on paying her back, as it completely ruins her ability to give you anything if you keep paying for it. Can you see that?" "Yes." "Same for me. What you give me is HUGELY more than what little I can do for you. For you to worry about it is as silly as you trying to make things equal with Carol by getting her a drink every time she got you one, or mirroring all of her other services to you. That'd be silly, wouldn't it?" "Yes. What I provide her is love, protection, allowing her to be who she wants to be in a safe environment, like you said before. My paying her back with a drink would be silly." "The best way you can make Carol happy is to ask her to do more for you. That will enable her to express her love more often to you, and will make her happier at the same time. You need to find more ways for Carol to serve you. -- "I have the same problem too, you don't let me serve you nearly as much as I want. I'm not as dependent and needy as Carol - we are very different in that respect - but we both need to serve you. What I get back is your love. I KNOW you love me totally. Your speech to Annette, your not getting hard with her, and everything you've done since proves that. I've got the total, unconditional love of the most fantastic man on the planet. -- "Many women think their man is the best, but I KNOW you are. Your TK stands out, but your genius, sporting prowess, your car driving on the first attempt, 8-ball expertise - just everything you do. You are superior to EVERY other human being, and you love ME! -- "Oh, I forgot to say how great you are at sex! I can't imagine how I forgot that! That alone would have me following you around begging to do anything for you, haha. -- "Carol considers that what we give her is a hundred times more than what she gives us. It upsets her that she gives us so little. I consider that what you give me is a hundred times more than what I give you. It's impossible for you to ever convince me otherwise, so don't even try. The idea of your trying to pay me back is wrong. You are not valuing yourself and your actions highly enough, not by a LONG shot. I don't know what happened to your ego, but not having one is causing you to undervalue yourself very badly. You're the most amazing human being alive, for goodness sake." #2: I had to say, "I honestly can't see that I give you much. I know I must be disappointing and frustrating you, but I don't see it. However, I can accept that if you say you get a hundred times more from me than you give me, then you get at least enough that I don't need to pay you back." Julia accepted that, "Okay. I've achieved some success then. Although I have no doubt you'll still feel guilty about taking advantage of me..." #4: " ... But try to remember that Carol and I both want to be used more often. We want to do more for you. Try to find ways for us to do that please." "Like what? I can think of a few ideas for Carol along the lines of the suggestions you made, but I can't think of anything more for you. You seem to spend nearly all your time helping me already." Julia agreed, "That's true. Carol's so dependent and young that she needs to be told what to do, but I can guess what you want or need and get it for you. All the time I've devoted to Carol, for example, is for you. I don't intend to sound mean to her, but if she wasn't of benefit to you, I wouldn't have spent the time I have with her. I would've spent my time doing other things for you. Happily, all three of us will benefit from what I'm doing with her. Good relationships are like that. I can do things on my own initiative, but I'm sure there are ideas that cross your mind that you dismiss far too quickly because you don't appreciate my willingness to do things for you. It'd make it easier for Carol and me if you gave voice to those ideas. -- "Your timeframe is also too short. In addition to you being fantastic at sex and the other things I mentioned, I am salivating at the thought of how interesting our life together is going to be. I don't know whether you've noticed this about me, but I REALLY enjoy being bossy, haha. If I can stay close to you, I'm going to get involved in some incredible events. I love making plans and getting them carried out successfully, and I can't imagine how I could have a better life than being your trusted helper." [[This was Julia's main reason and the source of many of her strong, positive emotions about me.]] "Plus your lover too of course. We MUSTN'T forget that, haha. -- "We're going to miss the start of the movie, which is fine because this is much more important. Unlike Carol, you don't need to give me explicit orders. I will do my best to make your life better in every way I can. If you want something then please let me know, otherwise I'll do what I can to make you happy. Continuing to treat me as your girlfriend is wonderful, but if you ever want to give me a command then don't hesitate to speak up and I will obey you. Especially because your lack of initiative worries me so I want you to practice on me. Otherwise I'll have to keep springing my surprises on you. As fun as that is, I would rather do things I am certain you want done because you've told me that you do. Okay?" "I think I understand everything you said, Julia. Your reminding me that I am young makes me feel better too, because I don't feel anywhere near ready for the big dreams you seem to have for me. And I CERTAINLY don't feel ready to be the boss of them. You're much better at understanding people, managing them, having ideas, and everything else like that. You'd be a FAR better boss than I would." Julia scoffed, "That will NEVER happen! I know I tend to get a bit bossy with people, including you, but I'll give way to you every time if you insist on something. You are my boss, I'm your cheeky helper, and Carol's our placid helper. I've already told Carol that you're her top boss. She and I both know that's obvious. I'm very happy to be your sub-boss though. That's going to be a great deal of fun." #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: The "Who's the boss" discussion was at its end so I said, "This seems like a good point to go see our movie?" "Yep, let's go." Julia grabbed my arm and we started walking quickly. I was thinking through the conversation as we walked, and a simple question occurred to me. I asked, "You asked me to tell Carol about her massaging you when Carol and I are cuddling after my backrub. Wouldn't it be better for me to tell her while she is giving me my backrub, in case she finishes it after her bedtime and walks out rather than stays to cuddle?" Julia rolled her eyes at me, "I'll give you two reasons: The first one you didn't know, but she won't walk out without cuddling you because I've given her an order to cuddle with you every time she gets a chance. She would never disobey that order because she LOVES cuddling you! She'd spend all day holding you if she wasn't concerned about 'wasting your valuable time, ' as she keeps saying. She considers you so fantastic that almost any time you spend with her makes her feel guilty for wasting your time. That girl doesn't have a high opinion of herself. She's a lot like you in that respect." "Why did you order her to cuddle me then, if it causes her such conflict?" "The same reason I do everything these days: for your benefit. You like cuddling her so I ordered her to cuddle you. When she sees how much you enjoy it, she'll realize she's doing a good thing and she'll be less conflicted about wasting your time. Then her cuddles will get better for both of you." "Oh, I didn't realize she was just following orders." "Mark, you keep refusing to see your value. Carol LOVES cuddling you. It's the best part of her day. It'd be like me starving you all day and then ordering you to eat a 'roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings and plenty of gravy.' You'd carry out my order with a big smile on your face. I've simply ordered her to do something she's been dreaming about but would never have the confidence to do for herself. That is why the three of us are such a win-win-win setup: we please each other so much." "Okay, I understand now. Thank you for being so smart." "That didn't need any smarts. I know how wonderful you are to cuddle with, and I know how much you and Carol love each other. Putting those two together didn't require any brains at all. Remember I said there were two reasons why you could tell her after your backrub? The second reason is obvious to me, but you need to have it repeated a few more times: Carol serves you. You're her boss. If she starts walking out, all you'd have to do is say, 'Come back' and she will. It's not complicated." "Ah no. Now that you mention it, that's fairly foolproof, even if this fool didn't think of it." "She will do whatever you tell her to do. If you told her to wait, and then you went to bed and slept until the morning, when you woke up she'd still be there waiting for you." "Surely you're exaggerating! That'd be silly. She should go to bed when she sees me fall asleep." Julia answered, "If you told me to wait and then you fell asleep, I'd go to bed. I'm smart enough and independent enough to know that my getting sleep is better, including better for you. Carol is intellectually smart, but she's not using it to think about herself. It's an Anderson family failing because you're an incredible genius and you don't recognize more than a fraction of your value. -- "Carol is constantly thinking that she's not worthy of having a good friend, and is even less worthy of you. She thinks there's nothing she can do for you, and in a practical sense that's largely true. She's young, inexperienced and doesn't have access to any of the resources I have through my family. All her resources you have already so there's very little she can practically do for you, and she's very aware of that. -- "Just like you don't, she's not valuing her emotional contribution. She's someone you love and trust, who you can open up to about your abilities. That means a lot to you, but she doesn't see it. Because she doesn't believe she has any value to you, she'd stand exactly where you asked her to stand until morning to prove her worth through her total obedience. She sees that as about all she has to offer us. That's why I don't think she'll ever say no to me, and especially not to you. It makes her feel very good about herself to be obedient to us, so she'd be waiting for you when you woke in the morning. She'd be proud of the chance to prove her devotion. If you'll excuse a little joke, she wouldn't dream of going to sleep." -- I was about to comment, when Julia added one more thing, "While I remember to mention it, there's a third reason not to tell Carol about my massage until after yours is over. It's actually my first reason because I knew she wouldn't leave before your cuddle. It's that when she's giving you your backrub, that's all she should be thinking about. That way she can do the best job she can, so you'll enjoy it as much as possible. When your enjoyment is over, then you can distract her." "I think you're right about her standing on the spot all night. I think I can imagine that. I'll even try to give her a chance to show me her devotion in that way. Nothing as exhaustive as all night of course, but I'll try to think of something similar. -- "Everything you've said makes a lot of sense and I can see you're right about her. But what amazes me is that I had NO IDEA about ANY of it! I've lived with her all my life and you only met her a week and a half ago, and you said it was only four days ago that you started thinking about her. I thought I was pretty good at spotting some social interaction stuff, but I completely missed all of this." "It was far easier than it seems for me to connect the dots, as I was given a couple of big clues. Plus there was also a strong reason why you didn't notice. I'd rather not explain those reasons for a few days, if you don't mind, darling?" "This is one of those situations where I can command you to tell, but it'd be better for me if I waited. Yes?" "Exactly right. If you knew the answers in detail, it'd make it much harder for me to make you happy. I think I'll be able to tell you later in the week though. Okay?" "Of course. I've learned to trust your judgment about these things." "Good. You're right that I've spent little time with Carol, but I have spent quite a long time talking to her on the phone and her situation is very easy for me to understand. I'm confident I know how she'll react to my plan for unveiling your TK, but I won't be totally sure until Wednesday night. Her sleepover will give me plenty of time to check that my final plan will work. Another part of my trouble is that my plan keeps growing. I had two wonderful ideas just half an hour ago that will make it amazingly better. I think everything will go well on Thursday, but if I become unsure or think it's too risky, we could postpone couldn't we? There's nothing special about Thursday?" "No, nothing special. We can easily postpone if you want." Julia said, "I'd prefer as soon as possible after Wednesday, so ideally Thursday. I'm very eager to do this. I'll let you know Thursday morning if we need to postpone, but I hope not. I think we're all talked out on this now. Shall we go and see three-quarters of a movie?" ^ [[This would be an opportune point to modestly correct a wrong impression my writing has probably given you about myself. My sisters' love for me makes me seem either like some sort of saint (of a no-celibacy-required faith), or superbly gifted when dealing with people. Neither was remotely close to the truth. I was basically just a "one-trick wonder" because of my ability to have other minds observe while one mind talked. That and my being overly sensitive to hurt made me VERY careful about what I said. You'd be amazed at how often people say hurtful things, and what a difference stopping saying them makes. I'd deliberately made myself nicer by being less hurtful, but I accidentally gained another boost to how well I got along with my sisters. With observing them so much I also became better at giving compliments because I better knew what they did and valued. The ability to give compliments extended to include the saying of non-compliments, such as talking to them about something they enjoyed, and doing things that I'd noticed they particularly enjoyed. Donna and Carol were very different in their interests, but I got to know each of them much better in these respects. That was about the extent of how I'd changed. I ONLY knew them better in the respect of what they reacted to, and it was only my immediate family that I made so much relationship progress with. I did not understand my sisters, didn't know their goals in life, etc. All I'd done was notice what hurt them and what made them happy. I felt safe talking to my sisters because we weren't playing any games with each other. The kids at school all had macho games and other crap to be aware of. The girls didn't have macho games, but they clearly didn't want to have anything to do with me so I never tried to approach them. I had three friends in my head and that was good enough for me, I pathetically convinced myself at the time. I'd started a nobody when I'd advanced into high school mid-year, and I'd avoided making friends since then, so I was still mostly a nobody. I was a well-known nobody very recently, as a result of Annette Neumeyer and the publicity about all the Biffs, but my being scared of being hurt meant I continued to avoid making friends. I had been one of the favorite victims for bullies at school, of which there is a considerable number because guys like physically intimidating and even attacking other guys. Those attacks on me were still happening. They'd diminished in number, especially with the footballers warned to avoid me, but there were still far too many other bullies. Such attacks only reinforced my not wanting anything to do with the school crowd. None of them could come close to me academically, and that did much to discourage anyone from trying to approach me. Between my making no effort to approach anyone, and my being so difficult for them to approach, there hadn't been a great deal of "approaching" happening. The only semi-exception to this was that I got along well with my soccer team, but even with them I made no effort to develop friendships. That simply wasn't my mindset. I had convinced myself that my internal friends were all that I needed. Having so few external friends meant - until Julia's typically unsubtle entry into my life - that Carol and Donna were the people I interacted with the most. I had plenty of time for them, and I always seemed happy to have them talk with me because I either was or because doing otherwise would have hurt them, making them like me even more. External to me was also the effect that people Donna's and Carol's ages are extremely easy to befriend. They have a psychological need to establish friendships as a consequence of adolescence changing both their physical bodies and brains. Brains go through several major transformations during adolescence, changing even more than bodies do. Before adolescence people primarily adhere to their parents, but with adolescence those ties weaken considerably and children seek friendships from others, especially their peers or near-peers. Carol had that peer-bonding need, but like me had pulled back from much of it, so she was even hungrier for friendship. Because she had such a fantastic body, I was more than happy to give it to her. Yes, that is pathetic, but boys of the age I am at this point are pathetic when it comes to sex, and I was far more pathetic than most about that and other friendship issues. In short, I was certainly neither a "saint" nor "superbly gifted with people". I was pathetic, with a peculiarity that improved one tiny corner of my greatly flawed personality.]] ^ Julia and I couldn't get interested in the movie. Either the first quarter was essential or it was just a mediocre movie. Or maybe the intensity of our previous discussions had ruined our mood for frivolous movies. After fifteen minutes, Julia excused herself to go to the toilet. On her return she draped my left hand over her shoulder, as before, but then opened the top of her blouse and put my hand on her naked breast. I suddenly started enjoying myself a whole lot more. She leaned over to me and said, "I went to the bathroom to take my bra off." "Good girl!" Between that, my left hand playing with her breasts and nipples, and our kissing, the movie barely got any of my four attentions. I used my TK to squeeze and pull her right nipple, from outside of her blouse. As had been the case previously, this immediately got her hot. She started groaning quietly. I knew that when it came to sex, quiet was not something Julia could maintain for long. I stopped TK to say something, but Julia was already leaning toward me to say, "You've got to take me somewhere to fuck me. I need it bad." I thought going before we were kicked out was an excellent idea. We were already sitting by an aisle so it was an easy matter of getting up and leaving. Julia was eagerly pulling me forward the whole time. We'd planned to catch a bus home after the movie, but Julia grabbed a taxi. Apparently she was in a hurry. ------- Chapter 34: A Phone Call to Carol Turns My World Upside-Down Sunday, April 10, 2005 (Continued) We encountered Vanessa and Andrew as we entered the house. Vanessa opened her mouth to say something but Julia jumped in first with, "Can't talk now, I'm super horny. We'll talk later." I barely had time to flush before I was being dragged upstairs. I heard Vanessa say to Andrew, "It must've been a good movie. Maybe you should take Sophia." As soon as we were in her room, Julia declared, "I've got a tampon in, so I need you to get me off in some other ways. Hurry up." We stripped quickly, Julia leaving her panties on which was going to make getting her off somewhat difficult, especially as she was demanding "ways": a plural number of "gettings off". It turned out that I was very wrong about the difficult expectation because TK pushed Julia's buttons very well. She especially loved me using it on her nipples, clit, and asshole. Between TK, my real fingers and my mouth, I gave her two cums in the first ten minutes. Mainly because Julia had been 75% of the way there even before we'd gotten out of the taxi. I didn't know why she was so horny, but that didn't stop me having a great time with her. [[What got her so excited was how well her current plan for me was working out. Her excitement wasn't from the plan itself, although it did have some aspects that appealed to Julia considerably, but from it being so easy to make me do what she wanted. Julia was sure my abilities would mean that I'd be having an amazingly incredible life, so my letting her be my boss (never mind her saying that I was hers), meant she was VERY excited about the rest of her life with me. Despite her joy over the long term, she was thinking of my personality in the short term only, by not realizing that it might change away from my always be so easy for her to manipulate. Julia is a very smart girl, but she has her weaknesses too, including thoughtless overconfidence about her own plans.]] Not knowing how the time-of-the-month thing worked - and not wanting to! - nor wanting to get blood anywhere, I wasn't sure what we could do beyond the touching we'd been doing. I had an idea and asked whether it was practical, in the non-gross sense. Julia thought it was a great idea. I'd realized that it might be possible to screw her in the ass from the front, if I lifted her legs high enough. So I pulled her panties off to do that. I put her on her back with her legs straight up in the air and I knelt immediately below her so her legs could rest on my chest. That didn't give me a good enough angle, so I pushed on her legs so her knees moved toward her head. That raised her asshole nicely. I grabbed a couple of pillows and wedged them under her back to help her hold that angle. I left Julia in that position while I quickly went to her drawer to get a rubber and the lubricant. I was amused to see three containers of it. Vanessa was certainly helpful. [[This is a very strange time to do so, but I'll pause for a brief moment to mention Vanessa's attitude to me (the me of the point in time I'm writing about) because her and my relationship had changed substantially. When I'd first met her, Vanessa had been a very supportive mother, focused on her daughter's romantic happiness. Recently added to that is her having considerable interest in me personally, separate from my relationship with Julia. Vanessa treats me quite differently depending on the issue being discussed. As this autobiography is describing the journey my powers set me on, most of the interactions with Vanessa that I'll be recording herein will be with her in her new role. Prof hadn't changed as much because his early behavior hadn't been so wrapped up in the romance of it all.]] I got back into position, put the rubber on, and then had fun lubricating her asshole using TK. I could create a TK-fingertip and move it as deep into her as I could just short of it disappearing from sight, because that'd make it cancel. I'd fill the hole it held open behind it with lubricant, block the entrance with another TK-fingertip, cancel the deepest one, and then push the outside one further in. Repeating the process a few times, including the last couple where I pushed a stack of TK-fingertips in as deep as I could, getting some extra distance during the half a second they could be out of sight before they canceled. Then I lubricated the rubber, placed myself at her entrance (or should that be "her exit"?) and pushed myself into her. We both had a great time. It was slow at the beginning but it felt great to me. Julia loved it too, probably mainly because of my using TK to play with her nipples and clit. She gets off EMOTIONALLY from my ability to get her off PHYSICALLY by an impossible MENTAL ability. That leaves out SPIRITUALITY, but it can't hold a candle to fucking so who cares. Toward the end, Julia requested, "Cum with me this time!" I tend to do what Julia asks me, especially requests like that, so I nodded. I made my thrusts more vigorous and started groaning to let her know I was close and to encourage her orgasm. The closer she got, the louder my groans got, up until the point when her cries drowned me out. It was pointless me trying to be heard over Julia's own shrieks. Instead I stopped my go-softs, did a couple of particularly hard thrusts, and then groaned as my climax hit me. Julia yelled hers a second later. Not as loud as she normally yells, but backdoor sex isn't as exciting for her. I imagine that the neighbors would like us to have more of it. I noticed that this room was better equipped now. A box of tissues and the stand holding my robe were both close to hand. I cleaned us off - Mom had been right that sex is a messy business - then got back on the bed to cuddle with her. "Mmm," as she wiggled her ass against me and pulled my arms tighter around her. We lay there for a few minutes. There are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon, so I was content. After about ten minutes, Julia rolled over to face me. I saw her wince a little, which brought back lots of memories of making her sore. I raised an eyebrow to ask her how she felt. She apparently didn't notice, so I guess it only works for moms. I verbally asked her, "Are you sore?" "Just a little, nothing like the time when I was stupid. I know better now. It feels nice. You're extraordinarily good at sex, you know? You gave me what I wanted and satisfied me perfectly. I was desperately horny, and now I am blissfully happy. I'm unbelievably lucky." I knew she was unbelievably convinced of that, so it was unbelievably pointless arguing with her about it. Julia continued, "I spent this morning calling around many of the committees that I'm involved in to resign from them..." "Oh!" I interrupted in surprise. Julia lives for that sort of stuff. She's inundated with it every day at school and gets many phone calls outside of school hours about her projects. Whenever we come out of her bedroom after a long session, there's nearly always a stack of messages for Julia, and she often ignores or turns off her cellphone when we're 'busy'. All day at school I get dragged from one informal meeting to the next, so I've overheard enough of her discussions (actually "more than enough") to know how much she revels in her many committees. Seeing my surprise, Julia explained, "I want to spend more time with you. Especially after seeing your TK, I know you're far more important than everything else I was doing." #1: #3: "Ahh, what proportion of your committees are you resigning from Julia?" "All of them of course. None of them are as important as you. Why would I waste my time arguing over the size of a banner when I can spend it with you?" #1: "I don't think you needed to resign from all of them. The most important thing you do for me is something I can easily take care of myself, now that I know where everything is." I knew that'd puzzle her. Sure enough, Julia frowned in uncertainty, then asked, "What do you mean?" "Now that I know my way around your kitchen, I can make my own snacks. And I won't let Andrew steal them either!" "Haha. I wouldn't be surprised if you thought that was the most important thing I do for you, but funnily enough it's not what I think is important..." "Oh dear, we're about to have our first serious argument." "Haha. Okay, okay, your snacks ARE important. But there are OTHER important things I want to spend time doing for you." "Like what?" "Anything and everything you want me to do, or I can see that needs doing." #2: "Ahh, darling, what if there's nothing that needs doing? Won't you get terribly bored, or something?" "There's PLENTY to do, Mark. I've got several ideas already..." #1: "Ahh, Julia. Can I be perfectly blunt?" "Of course." "I'm a LITTLE worried - not much, just a little - about your getting bored with nothing else to do and filling the vacuum by ordering me around a little more than I'd like." Julia IMMEDIATELY responded; far too quickly for it to reassure me, "You don't have to worry about that. You're the boss. If you don't like what I'm doing, just order me to stop." #1: I'd heard somewhere that relationships are about compromise, so I tried a compromise solution, "Wouldn't it be better to resign from just half of your groups, and see how that goes first? That way if you're not busy with me you won't be totally bored, but if you are busy then you can resign from more. That would allow you to feel out the right balance." "I already know I'll be busy with you. Plus I need to be with you as much as I can to see what your needs are. I WANT to be with you: you're the most important part of my life." #2: I gave in, "Okay. Just so long as you're happy. I wouldn't want you to be unhappy. And I had been worrying about your being so busy you wouldn't have time for me, so that's one less thing to worry about." Julia isn't stupid. She merely said, "I'll make you happy, Mark. That's very important to me. I wouldn't be a good girlfriend if I didn't do that." My four averagely smart minds couldn't think of an answer any better than, "I'm not used to a having a girlfriend. I'm sorry if I don't express myself very well. I'm trying to get used to it, but there's so much change going on it's scary at times." Julia exclaimed, "Imagine how I feel!" There was no possibility of that. I can't even imagine how she thinks, so her feelings are totally beyond me. I said nothing, cuddling her instead. After another couple of minutes of cuddling, Julia asked, "Shall we sit in the hot tub?" "Good idea!" Julia, still the organizer even without a committee to belong to, said, "Let's grab a quick shower. Then you go to the tub and I'll bring us both a snack." "Have I ever said that I like your plans?" "Especially the ones involving food, I've noticed." "They're certainly very good ones, although - as unlikely as this seems - the plans that involve sex are even better." "Haha." Julia stood up, without too much wincing I was pleased to notice. We put on our robes and went to have a shower together. That was fun, even with the nuisance caused by my damned cast. The part that I particularly enjoyed was when Julia soaped up my cock until it was fully hard, which didn't take long, then said, "I should still be lubricated inside my ass. I want to feel what it is like for you to be inside me without a rubber." #4: Julia turned around, opened her legs, and bent over. She was so much shorter than me that we didn't line up. It'd be difficult to do it by bending my knees that far so I had to lift her, which meant I had to turn the water off first - damned cast! I turned it off, then put my hands firmly around her waist from both sides to lift her because she was very slippery and I didn't want to drop her. I used TK to push the shaft of my cock down until it was at the right angle, and then I lowered her onto it. I couldn't use TK to open her up, as that part of her was out of sight, but the weight of her and the lubrication meant I slid in fairly easily anyway. I kept my right arm around her waist, but moved my left arm so it was under the underside of both of her legs. I braced myself, then lifted her up and away from me (not too far though, I didn't want to fall out), then I let her drop down and toward me again. Julia is very light and I used a three-mind TK-push up against the underside of my left arm to help. I hadn't gotten around to weighing my force yet, but I guessed it was lifting something like 10% of her weight, which was a useful help. Julia loved what I was doing to her. She kept saying things like, "I can't believe you can lift me up so easily and fuck me like this. My god! You're awesome." She seemed to get as excited by my lifting her as by the cock in her ass, which made for yet another way in which we thought differently. I could feel nice sensations coming from my cock. This was the first time I had been in her without a rubber, so with that increase in sensation and the tightness of her ass I was really enjoying myself. But I couldn't lift and drop her fast enough to bring either of us to an orgasm. Then the obvious solution occurred to me: I held her suspended at the right height and started thrusting my hips back and forth. That was much easier! #2: Judging by her cries, it was much more to Julia's liking too, and she'd been pretty happy with the previous method. With a little bit of rearrangement, I could even get my left fingers near her pussy, so I started playing with that again, carefully checking whether her clit was too sensitive or not. Or not, as it turned out, so I took full advantage of that. I could thrust as fast as I wanted. To be honest, having her dangling in midair - at my mercy as it were - was a turn-on too, so I had no trouble reaching my orgasm. I started micro-go-softs just before it, and kept thrusting faster and faster. Taking nearly all her weight on my right arm, I used my left to diddle her as fast as I could. Within seconds she was starting her screams. I let myself climax about the same time she did, and got quite a thrill at the idea of blowing my load into her body for the first time. I was left holding a totally limp handful of girl, folded over my arm. Quite silly really, now that the moment was over. So I lifted her up and turned her around so she was facing me, and held her like you would a baby. It didn't take her long to recover, and then she was delighted to find herself still in my arms. She threw her arms around me and started kissing me very happily. These were our first kisses for a long time, as we'd been too busy screwing. After enough kisses to make up for lost time, Julia said, "I thought we'd just fool around. I never expected it to be that good. I can't believe you can just pick me up and fuck me like that. You're amazingly strong!" "Haha. No I'm not. You're amazingly light, is all." "You ARE strong. You picked me up and threw me around like I was a rag doll. I can see the muscles on you, you're 'cut'. You've got an impressive physique." I have filled out somewhat in the last month or two but Julia was mostly exaggerating. Still, it was nice to have her so impressed with me, if only because of her rose-tinted glasses. I asked, "Shall we finish cleaning and go to the hot tub? I seem to remember you saying something about food too. Surely I've earned it by now, or are you going to keep taking advantage of my starving body?" "I don't think my body could take advantage of your body anymore. You've satisfied my hunger wonderfully, so let's hurry up and satisfy yours." She was most diligent in making sure my cock was clean, "After your sticking it up that nasty place so thoroughly." So I returned the favor by making her bend over so I could TK her asshole open and squirt water up her. My TK-fingertip blocked the water, so after the outside of her asshole was thoroughly clean, I removed my TK-fingertip and used my own fingers to hold her open. Then I got tempted to play around, so had to wash my fingers afterward anyway. Life is good! And about to get better because it was snack time. I was hungry! We dried and put on our robes. When we walked out of the bathroom, Julia turned to walk downstairs, rather than back to her room. I stood in the doorway, a little confused, and called out, "What about swimsuits for the tub?" "I'm going naked. You can be a coward if you want." Not put like that, I couldn't. Plus I figured I'd be under the water enough. Not to mention - but I will, in case you think I'm REALLY stupid - that I quite enjoy being with Julia when we're both naked. So we went to the kitchen and Julia started making me a snack. I asked, "Quite a big one please. I seem to have used up a lot of energy recently." The excuse was fake but the hunger was sincere. Vanessa wandered in. After the usual greeting and a comment about our reaction to the movie designed to embarrass me, she asked, "Are you staying for dinner, Mark?" Before I could answer - and I can normally answer that question very quickly - Julia said, "I have a couple of important issues I'd like to have a family meeting about tonight, without Mark being here. Can I please suggest that he goes home after our soak in the tub. If that's okay with you, Mark?" That was fine by me as the day had been a lot of fun already, although intense about Carol. Which reminded me that I would like to go home to check that she was okay, especially about my demanding text message. So I answered, "Yes, that's fine. I'd like to get home fairly early to check on Carol." "Good idea." I called Mom to let her know I'd be home for dinner. You can imagine what a disaster it'd be if both families thought I was eating dinner with the other! My snack complete, I ate it over the sink while Julia washed and put the few dishes away. We were getting some drinks ready to take to the tub when Vanessa said, "Hang on a second you two, I just realized something. We heard you making love in the shower. Remember the 'Bedroom Rules'? Julia's room only." Uh oh! I'd completely forgotten that. So had Julia, by the look on her face. Vanessa added, "Don't worry. We insisted on Julia's room because we thought no one would know, especially with her stereo on. Since then we've learned that Julia makes so much noise it doesn't matter which room of the house you're in. It probably doesn't matter what county either. But once your room is ready again, Julia, please keep it in there. In fact, not 'please' - we insist. We're taking only a small risk now, but the risk will get greater the closer to the trial we get. It's important that you both remember that." We both apologized profusely and promised we'd remember. With a smile on her face, Vanessa added, "No sex in the hot tub please. I don't mind a little hanky-panky, but nothing that makes any noise. Okay?" "Yes." Julia added, "I don't think I can make any more noise now anyway." Vanessa said, "Okay, you can go." We started making our way to the tub, when Vanessa called out an addition, "I might pop in myself later, to see what Mark uses to make my daughter so happy, haha." I wanted to go back upstairs to get something to wear. Julia dragged my arm toward the hot tub, saying, "Come on, she's joking." "Are you sure?" "Reasonably sure." "Can you put a numerical percentage value on 'reasonably' please?" Julia was too busy dragging me to the tub to answer my 100% reasonable request. We had a good time. Julia started rubbing my cock to get it hard. One and half seconds later she sat on my lap with it sticking up between her legs. She'd rub either leg up and down against it, or give it a few strokes with her hand. I was hard for a long time. Julia asked politely, "Can I please give you a blowjob in my room before you go, darling?" I got even harder. You know how obliging I am toward Julia, so I'll assume you can work out how I answered. There was lots of kissing, cuddling and a small amount of hanky-panky. Mostly hanky, in case Vanessa came in. She didn't, much to my relief. ^ Once we'd relaxed, Julia retrieved her cellphone out of her robe pocket and made a call. She told me "Carol" while it was ringing, then put her finger to her lips to command me to silence. As I feel secure about being the boss of our relationship, I decided to follow her request. Just this once, you understand. Julia spoke - all the following quotes are from Julia's half of the conversation, as I could hear only her side of it: "Hello, my beautiful sister. How are you today?" "Good... , good. How far? Good. Keep getting plenty of exercise. Mark and I want you to be beautiful, healthy and fit. Yes, of course you will. What else have you been doing?" "Learning how to give backrubs. That's excellent, sister. Isn't it wonderful that he wants to spend more time with you? You're so lucky to be able to serve him at nights. I wish I could." "Yes, I know you wish you were me. But then who'd look after Mark when he's in his home? Surely you don't want him to be lonely?" "No, of course you don't. Mark told me earlier today that you've started coming to his room to see if he needs anything. He said he's very pleased with you. If Mark's pleased with you, then I'm even more pleased with you, so well done, Beautiful. I'm proud of you, keep it up. "Yes, yes, we're both very happy with you. Except for one small thing, Mark did have one small complaint." "Yes, I'm sorry, but he did. He said you didn't cuddle him long enough. You kept saying you were wasting his time and leaving. Did you say that?" "You did! Why do you think that you're a better judge of what Mark should do with his time than Mark?" "Yes, yes, I understand that's not what you meant. I even understand that you were trying to be nice. But making his decisions for him is not your role. Your role is simply to make him happy, or me happy if he's busy elsewhere. What worries me the most is that when you're cuddling him you shouldn't be thinking about anything else, your ENTIRE attention should be on cuddling him as best you can. You shouldn't be worried about the time or looking at your watch. How can you give him the best cuddle if you're so distracted?" "That's right, you can't. So when you're doing anything for our man, please don't think about anything else. Concentrate on doing whatever it is you're doing. If our man wants you to sit on his lap and cuddle, then that's what you do for as long as HE wants. How long isn't your decision, okay?" "Yes, I know you'll try. That's one of the things about you that I love so much: you try very, very hard to be good at caring for Mark. He's often said that you're beautiful on the outside, and the MOST beautiful person on the inside that he's ever met. I agree with him." "Yes, we both think that. Correction, we both KNOW that. You're a beautiful person inside and out." "You're welcome, my little princess. You just need some instructions on how to care for us properly. Just make sure you follow my instructions and you'll become a very, very valuable part of Mark's and my life. So the next time you're cuddling him, how long will it be for?" "That's right, as long as he wants. And what will you be concentrating on?" "That's right, giving him the best possible cuddle you can. And I'll remind you, not even thinking of anything else." "Yes, that's right, good girl! And the same applies when you're doing something for me too. Just concentrate on doing it as well as you can." "Of course you will. You're a wonderful girl. When Mark told me he was disappointed that you didn't cuddle him for long enough, I suggested to him that because you were just starting to learn how to serve him, you probably needed stronger commands than he'd normally give you. He's not a bossy person but I suggested that he should be more explicit with you. That'll make it easier for you to learn what he wants and needs. So expect him to give you stronger commands in the future." "Yes, of course you'll obey them. I never had any doubt about that, sweetie. He's the most wonderful and incredible man you'll ever meet in your entire life. Let me mention something else. Mark said he asked you to bring him a drink, and that you did, which is good. But let me ask you this: how many glasses does he drink every night, and what times does he get thirsty?" "I didn't expect you to know yet because you've only just started serving Mark, but what I'm doing is illustrating how you can pay attention to his needs so you can learn what he wants and when he wants it, so you can anticipate those needs in the future." "Yes, that's right. I think that's what a perfect and totally loving serving girl would do. Let me ask you another similar question. We know Mark's favorite meal is 'roast chicken with all the trimmings and plenty of gravy', but do you know how to cook it the way he likes?" "Of course your mom always cooks it, but Mark's not going to live at home all his life. Don't you want to be with him five years from now? Ten years? I want to be with him forever wherever he goes in his life, and knowing Mark, I'm sure he'll want someone who can be a good cook with him. That will be you, sweetie." "Yes, of course you'll go with him. Don't you want to spend your life with Mark and me?" "Good. I was hoping you'd want to. Mark's a wonderful guy now, and he's going to become even better once he becomes more self-confident and knowledgeable about people. Living with him will be a fantastic life for us." "Yes. So we need you to look after us, especially him, including cooking his meals. If you don't want the honor, I know hundreds of other girls will, and that'll be thousands of other girls once he gets better known." "You hadn't thought of cooking for him? Oh dear. Food is very important to Mark..." "Haha. Yes, that's for sure. Don't worry sweetie, I'll let you know what you need to do. There'll be thousands of girls chasing Mark soon. You've already seen that start happening at school. But you have some HUGE advantages over them. So much advantage that they could never take Mark away from you if you do the right things first. Mark already loves you very much. That gives you a huge headstart over all the other girls, but don't waste it! He knows you and trusts you, and trust is very important in relationships as you know. -- "Another advantage you have is that you're very beautiful, and he likes looking at you..." "Yes he does." "I'm TELLING YOU that Mark admires your beauty. Accept it. And you have one other great advantage over every other girl, even over me. You see him every day so you can learn his likes and dislikes very quickly. If you're smart and motivated - which I know you are - you'll learn how to take care of all his likes, and how to keep his dislikes away from him. I figure you've got the rest of this school year, then next year he'll do 12th grade, then the year after that he'll be leaving Corvallis. That's one and a quarter years, maybe less if he doesn't hang around for summer vacation after 12th grade. That's how long you've got to learn how to look after our man properly." "Yes, it is scary. After that he'll have gone and you'll never get another chance. You have to make him want to take you with him. You have to be essential in his life. We both know that Mark thinks food is very important, haha, so get your mother to start teaching you how to cook. Don't tell her it's so you can serve Mark - she's not ready for that yet - but tell her you want to learn how to cook. Okay?" "Good. I should mention you've got one other big advantage over every other girl: you've got me helping you! I don't want all those sluts to get their hands on Mark, they're not good enough. I want YOU to succeed. I want him to have girls he loves and that love him, which means you and me. If you do what you're told, you can easily be perfect for him. But you have to start doing things for him, sweetie. There'll be thousands of girls chasing him. Most of them will just be stupid sluts, and I don't care about them because you and I are easily beautiful enough and sexy enough to keep his mind off the sluts. -- "What worries me is that out of those thousands of girls, there'll be some who're very cunning. They worry me very much. You and I have to be a team together. A team that can beat anyone else that tries, no matter how wonderful they pretend to be. Mark has told me many, many times how wonderful you are, how beautiful, how caring, and mostly how much he loves you, so I know you can do this, darling. You can become the perfect girl for Mark and me. The three of us can be together forever. So please try your hardest, okay? This is the most important thing you'll ever do in your life, but you're doing it for the most wonderful human being on the planet, and that makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?" "There, there, honey. Don't cry. Remember that he loves you, so you're more than halfway there already. I'm determined that you're going to share Mark's and my lives, darling. So please do your best. I know Mark loves you, so you should succeed, especially if you follow my instructions." "Okay. Blow your nose. Are you better now. Good. Tell me about Mark's request for a backrub. He sent you a text message you said?" "You saved it? Wonderful, please read it to me." "Did you notice he had to tell you to spend at least thirty minutes? He was worried about your running away again after five minutes because you thought you were wasting his time. Isn't that sad?" "Yes, I know you won't make that mistake again. Mark and I are so lucky that you are so smart and eager to learn. His message says at least thirty minutes, so how long will massage him for?" "That's a VERY good answer, darling. 'For as long as he wants' is PERFECT. You're learning wonderfully. I'm very pleased with you. Do you think you'll be able to give him an enjoyable backrub?" "If Donna says you're very good, that's great. Donna has a strong back like Mark's, so that should work out well. I have one more question for you, honey. Do you know why our man asked, 'What do you think?' at the end of his message?" "Yes, I'm sure you told him how happy you are. And that you love him. That's great. It's always good to say that. But I'm worried about why he had to ask. To me it seems that he was worried about whether you would give him a backrub or not. Do you think he might have been worried about that?" "Well, have you convinced him you'll do anything for him?" "You don't know how. Hmm, maybe I should suggest to him that he orders you to do something to prove your obedience. Does that sound like a good idea?" "Yes, I agree. What sort of thing though? It'd have to be something you wouldn't normally do. Hmmm. -- "I know! To strip naked and to run around the block that your house is on at lunchtime on a Saturday, when there are lots of people around. That'd be perfect." "Why are you screeching, honey? You think that's terrible? You're wrong, it's a perfect way to prove your obedience." "You'd die of embarrassment. Oh dear. You're wrong, Carol. I'll tell you what, if he asks you to do that, give me a call and I'll come and do it with you. Yes, I'll strip naked and run around the block with you. I'll run around twice." "To prove my loyalty and obedience to Mark, of course." "No, I wouldn't be embarrassed AT ALL. Not even the tiniest bit. I would be far too busy being PROUD. Proud of the opportunity to show Mark how perfect I am for him. How obedient and willing to do absolutely anything he wants me to do. I'd do it twice just to make him even happier with me. I wouldn't dream of saying 'No' to him. Not to Mark! Never! I could care less if people laughed at me. The only person whose opinion matters to me is Mark, and if he told me to do it, then I'd do it. Do you understand, My Love?" "You do. Good. But you're not sure whether you could do it or not. I think you need to think about whether you really love Mark or not." "You say you do, but it sounds like only if he asks you to do easy things, things you want to do anyway. That's not very convincing. Certainly doesn't sound like the sort of love that someone as wonderful as Mark deserves. He's the most amazing man on the whole planet, and you'll only do easy things. Tsk, tsk, Carol. I'm disappointed." "You WILL do it, you say? Good girl, I'm proud of you." "Yes, I am sure he'd let you wear shoes if your feet are soft. But he hasn't actually asked us to do this. It was just me thinking about what I could suggest him to ask. He has to be the one to decide what we'll do. Next time I talk with him, I'm going to tell him, 'Mark, I'm worried that one day you might doubt Carol's and my obedience. If you ever have such a doubt, please ask us to prove our obedience to you. You can tell us to do absolutely anything, and we'll do it, with pride at being your girls.' How does that sound, honey?" "I don't know what he'd ask for. It could be anything. But no matter what he asks you, I will come and do it with you." "The most important reason is because Mark loves you so much, which makes you the best girl to serve Mark during his life. So if you need help to prove yourself to Mark, then I'll help you. There are other reasons too, like our being sisters and my liking you so much. I want to show you how it's possible to do absolutely anything for Mark, and to do it with pride. "It's easy, darling. Your body belongs to Mark and me. You simply don't have to worry about anyone else anymore, only about us. If we want your body to run around naked, then it will. It's not your decision so why should you care. We'll make the decisions, your job is just to do them as best you can, like giving Mark the best cuddles you can. Just concentrate on doing whatever we want as perfectly as you can, and be proud of it. Leave everything else up to us. You agree with me, don't you?" "Good girl. You make me very happy. I'll tell you one thing I've just decided. I'm in my hot tub naked, and I've decided that from now on I'm going to be naked in the hot tub when Mark's going to join me. I know he likes to see me naked, so I will be naked because I want to make him happy. I don't care who else sees me. Do you understand that?" "Good. I know that Mark likes looking at you too. You foolishly tried to argue with me about this before but I know my man. He likes looking at you, so when you and Mark will be in this hot tub, then you'll be naked just like me. We're both his girls, and we'll do this the same, just as I would run around your block naked with you." "He DOES like looking at you, Carol. He's far too much of a gentleman to show it, but he does. If he truly doesn't enjoy looking at you, he can easily command you to put a swimsuit on, but I'm sure he won't. I am giving you an order to be naked with Mark in the hot tub from now on Carol, so this topic has ended now. Is there anything ELSE you want to talk about, honey?" "Haha. Good girl. I totally understand your interest because he does have a gorgeous body. Whether he goes naked is up to Mark because he's our boss, but I guess he'll be naked. When he's in my room he's naked most of the time. So when you come in and out you'll see us naked lots of times. So either in the pool, or in our bedroom, you'll get your wish to see him naked. -- "If you want to see him naked, why don't you ask him to strip tonight when you are giving him a backrub?" "Of course you can! What's he going to enjoy more: a massage just on his back, or a massage on his whole body? Obviously on his whole body. Your role as his perfect serving girl is to make him as happy as you can, so you should offer to massage his whole body. Remember that you don't have to worry about making decisions, sweetie. All you need to do is ask him what he would prefer, then simply do whatever he says. That's very easy for you." "He knows you've never done anything like that before, so he won't be mean to you. You know he's a very kind man. It's only important that you try your best to make him happy." "No, you shouldn't be embarrassed. If you're trying to make him happy, then you should only feel pride. And love of course, always love for him and me. Forget embarrassment, it doesn't exist between the three of us. Love is far stronger than embarrassment. You know that don't you?" "Yes. Good. Concentrate on the love you have for him, and for me, and do everything you can to make him happy. It's very easy. What clothes are you going to wear when you massage him?" "Yes, good choice. I agree with no bra, and I think no panties as well. Just the long T-shirt." "Yes, I am sure you'll get wet. I always get wet whenever I see his body or just think about him. We're the same. You'll be touching his body so you'll get very wet. But I said no panties because I want him to smell you. Do you know why?" "For the most important reason: it'll make him happy." "Yes it will, Carol. It'll make him VERY happy. He loves you, he thinks you're beautiful, and when he learns that he turns you on he'll be very happy. Also, he LOVES pussy juice. He can never get enough of mine. He spends ages licking my pussy and he's VERY, VERY good at it. He gives me incredible orgasms with his tongue and fingers. Believe me, he loves the smell of pussy juice, and he'll love yours too. If I were you I'd play with myself before I went to his room, to make sure I was as juicy as possible. What time are you going to give him his massage?" "You don't know. Hmm. His text message told you to come to his room but it didn't specify a time. I recommend doing this quite late, after your parents have gone to bed. I know he'll be up late tonight reading through all the stuff Dad gave him, so a late massage will work well. That's excellent. That's all agreed then. One last question then I have to go. What will you do if he commands you to take your T-shirt off?" "Excellent. You are very, very good at obeying commands, darling. You're not so good at planning, but luckily that's my forte and I'm very determined that you should win our man ahead of all those thousands of sluts. Your self-confidence is too low now, but that'll quickly improve when you see how much he enjoys your company. I still can't believe you stopped cuddling him because you were worried about wasting his time. When I'm cuddled up in his lap I hate to leave. I'd stay there all day and night if I could. I also can't believe you didn't know that he'd love to smell your pussy juice. I know he'll be delighted by that. So we need to work on your self-confidence, sweetie. I have some ideas on that, and we'll talk about that next time. Make sure you have a shower and brush your hair, so you look as beautiful and smell as sweet as possible for our man." "You have already, that's great. Good girl. I'm very proud of you. You're doing very well. I envy you because you're going to have a very exciting night." "I bet you are. That's what I'd be doing too. I'll hang up shortly so you can use both hands, but can I make one request please, sweetie. When you are just about to leave his room tonight, when everything else is finished, would you please give him a big kiss on the lips for me, and tell him Julia sends her love. I'm not ordering you to do this, as this is between two girls who both worship their man. In this way we're equals, so I am asking you as a favor for me please?" "Thank you, darling. I love you too. Goodnight." ------- Chapter 35: Julia's TK Unveiling Plan Sunday, April 10, 2005 (Continued) Julia turned to me and said, "I'm amazed you sat through it. I had my finger on the mute button expecting you to explode at any time." She looked at me expectantly. "I nearly did. I was quiet at first because before the movie you totally convinced me that you understood Carol, so I believed you knew what you were doing. By the time the conversation got VERY shocking, I'd already heard that Carol was mostly agreeing. She dragged her heels sometimes, but only for a little while. I was shocked at what she was agreeing to. I thought you'd opened my eyes about Carol before we went to the movie, but I obviously knew NOTHING! She was masturbating at the end?" "Yes indeed. She has the hots for you." ^ [[Carol's "hots" were well down the road of being deliberately created by Julia. Until a few days ago Carol's feelings for me had been almost entirely non-sexual, just the occasional mood swings and hormone surges that come with adolescence. Carol's true emotions for me never would've included "the hots" if not for Julia's deliberate manipulations. Julia and I having a relationship that was obviously sexual was something that had made Carol think of sex with me, and she'd had flashes of being envious of Julia, as is natural for girls her age who have a brother they like. She would've easily pushed those feelings aside, just as I would've pushed my feeling aside when Carol started having a sexual relationship with a boy. Neither of us would EVER have acted on such thoughts, and we'd have outgrown them quickly. That wasn't Julia's plan though. When Julia had seen my lustful reaction to Carol's too-small swimsuit in the hot tub last Wednesday (boys are pathetic about sex) Julia recognized what it was (a boy being pathetic about sex) but she wasn't threatened enough to react as she would've if a non-sister been involved. After a little thought, Carol's unique position in my life made Julia realize several interesting aspects. I hadn't been paying much attention to the conversation in the hot tub so I'd failed to pick up on several of Julia's comments and questions, as she subtly checked out some of her thoughts about Carol and me. Mostly then, but also over the next few days, Julia learned enough to refine her thoughts and to become so excited about some of them that she started deliberately pouring gasoline onto the intermittent sparks of Carol's desire for me. Julia had several reasons, in ascending order of importance to her: Julia wanted to do things to make me happy, which included giving Carol to me. Carol wouldn't try to take me away from Julia, Carol obviously couldn't ever marry me, and Julia had already decided that I was too important to be tied down to the more-or-less ordinary, although highly capable girl that Julia considered herself to be. Seeing my attraction for Carol made Julia realize her "not tied down" decision meant she shouldn't be jealous either. It was relatively easy for Julia not to be jealous of Carol, given Carol's inability to claim me for her own. Julia soon learned that Carol was loyal to me and that I trusted her a great deal, as strongly indicated by my willingness to show her my TK ability. After learning of my TK herself, Julia felt certain I'd need TOTALLY loyal and trustworthy confidantes in the future, and those almost-impossible-to-find traits were already present in my sister. Not only was Carol loyal and trustworthy toward me, but Julia quickly discovered that Carol would do whatever Julia told her to, making Carol a godsend to be snapped up as quickly as possible. Julia and her parents considered genetics the most likely source of my uniqueness, there being no other even faintly believable possibility, so there was an exciting chance that Carol could develop as I had, which made keeping her close - and even better, under Julia's thumb - irresistible to Julia. Pushing Carol and me into having a sexual relationship also offered the fascinating possibility of our having superhuman babies together. Julia had already been greatly excited about being involved in my life, so being the kingpin (queenpin?) of a whole family of superhuman people was hugely compelling for her. That could make Julia EXTREMELY important. In her fantasies, it could make her important enough that Presidents and Prime Ministers would want to talk with her. (Our fantasies were another way in which Julia and I differed.) Julia had realized much better than I had how incredible I was. She was VERY excited about it, and had thrown herself TOTALLY into serving me (that's what she told herself. In reality her serving me would be in ways she thought suitable and enjoyed). Julia tends to get carried away with her enthusiasms, so much so that the only thing that Julia now thought mattered was what was good for me. What was good for Carol barely registered with Julia, except as a carrot to manipulate Carol and me into behaving the way Julia wanted us to. Making me happy in the short and long term was Julia's top priority; truthfulness was not. Not to Carol, and even not to me if Julia thought she knew better than I what was good for me. Julia knew I would want to protect Carol, so Julia's description of Carol's personality exaggerated her vulnerability and dependency, the latter being something Julia was encouraging the growth of as fast as possible. There were some elements of truth in what Julia had said, but sexually speaking Carol was really just a young, inexperienced girl. She was mostly 'unformed clay', ready to be molded by her first few experiences. Julia had gained complete control of those and was heavily involved in manipulating them for her own purposes. As manipulative as Julia was being, she was sincerely doing it for my benefit. It was being done in a way that gave Julia a great deal of control, but the Anderson kids weren't exactly making that hard. If you'd seen Carol in her too-small swimsuit, it'd be hard to argue that it wasn't going to be for my benefit.]] ^ I said, "I'll avoid talking about my 'hotness' for the moment, and stick to the call. Obviously Carol's masturbating at the end tells me she liked what was going on. You knew that, didn't you? That's why you talked about sex so much: running around the block naked, my licking your pussy, naked in the hot tub and things like that. You knew they'd turn her on?" "I knew YOU turn her on, yes. As you said, my imagery was deliberate. The whole conversation was deliberate, even more than you understand, but I'll explain that when you've finished your comments. In another respect, it wasn't as planned as you might think because it was merely an off-the-cuff repeat of previous conversations I've had with her. I usually talk with Carol several times a day so we've done this quite often. The topics change but the structure of the conversations is much the same, although they haven't been that blatant before." [[Julia's last statement was as wrong as it's possible to be, as almost every one of the girls' prior conversations had been FAR more blatant! Julia repeatedly talked to Carol at length and with explicit detail about what a fantastic lover I was, as part of Julia's campaign to get Carol sexually turned on to me. Julia had toned down the sexual content of the conversation I'd just heard because she'd rightly feared that I'd react badly to her usual level of explicitness.]] I continued, "Okay. I had another reason for not exploding. From what you said in town, I understand that Carol wants to give control over herself to someone, and it's much more control than I'd previously understood. If it's not to us it'll be to someone else, which scares the crap out of me. As your conversation got more extreme, Carol's compliance with it made me repeatedly increase my belief that she has to be compliant to us to save her from being that compliant with anyone else. When you told her that she didn't need to make any decisions, that we will make them for her, that statement rang warning bells in my head. Is what she wants really that extreme?" "Yes. Every time I've made a decision for her, she's given me even more control over the rest of her decisions. I'm sure you noticed that my plan for her is to be our housewife. She will look after us. When you leave Corvallis we'll both go with you. I believe that when she graduates school she'll prefer to be our full-time housewife rather than go to college. I haven't discussed that outcome with her, but it's based on my suspicion that she never really wanted to go to college. I think her studying so much was a way of staying private, of staying away from people. She doesn't want to be in a crowd, and she doesn't enjoy being with boys her own age. She wants to be with one person who she respects highly and who is her entire life. It will be two of us, but that's fine because she's capable of focusing on two, especially as it's clear that you're the top boss." "When we were in town, I made a little commitment to myself to watch how you handled Carol so I could learn how I should do it. I noticed you talked to her like she was a little girl. You gave her lots of immediate feedback, positive or negative. You could call her 'good girl' and thirty seconds later be criticizing her, then another thirty seconds later be telling her 'good girl' again. It seems rather strange. Certainly not the way I'd normally talk with anyone?" Julia agreed, "You're right about her being childlike. I never thought of it that way, but that's a good description: children depend on their parents for approval, and that's what Carol's doing with us. I learned to talk with her that way because I noticed that she reacted instantly to every compliment or critical word I said. Mature people average out a whole conversation, or even several conversations, but Carol reacted instantly to every little expression or opinion about her. I think because she's already emotionally dependent on us. She hangs on our every word, desperate for our approval. -- "I think she's had a low opinion of herself for years, and now she's finally found someone she's willing to depend on. Two someones: you and me. Our opinions are very important to her because she's emotionally out on a limb for the first time in her life, so is feeling very insecure. Hopefully she'll be less immediately sensitive once she feels more secure in our relationship, but until then we should be careful not to make sarcastic comments or use derogatory humor on her. That could hurt her even if we're only joking." "Okay. Now I've answered your question about why I didn't explode. To my amazement I find that I've only got two questions for you: Do you REALLY want Carol and me to get sexual? Because it SURE sounded like it! And what the fuck do I do when I get home and from now on?" "How you should treat Carol is easy. I'm the one pushing her along. Every conversation I have with her I push her further. I went further in the last conversation than I intended at its start, but I'm in a hurry, which I'll explain shortly. But, honestly, if I hadn't pushed that much this conversation, I would've reached the same place in another couple of calls. I'm even a little unsure whether the reality is I'm pushing her or she's pulling me. She started worshipping you and me before I was fully aware of it, so all I've really done is give her what she already wanted. -- "She doesn't expect much from you because she thinks she's mostly worthless and you're the most amazing guy in the world. She's amazed you want to spend any time with her at all, so there's no expectation or need for you to do anything. Carol looks to me for all her guidance. My role is half her sister, half her boss, so I'm managing her. That's my role in your life: to do things for you." [[Julia's self-appointed role, which 'coincidentally' happens to involve managing people.]] -- "When you're with Carol, you just need to be very honest and direct. If she pleases you, smile; if not, frown. Make time to be with her, especially to command her to do things for you. I promise that she'll notice every single smile or frown you make. She lives for those. -- "I'm not the least surprised that she saved your text message. I don't think she'll ever delete any of them. She'll spend hours some days reading through them and reliving the events, such is her devotion to you. I suggest you never send her any criticizing texts because it would hurt her for a long time. When you need to tell her off, do it verbally so there's no permanent record. -- "A threat of a little humiliation works well on her too, like my example of making her run around naked. We'd never do that to her, but the thought has a big effect on her. While I remember it, my request for you to tell Carol that she's going to be massaging me is much less important now. She's past that point now, especially with your getting a full body massage tonight. Tell her if you remember, but don't worry about it much." "Okay, but what about the sexual atmosphere you've created between Carol and me. Why, and what's your plan?" "I didn't tell you before because you wouldn't have believed me and we might have had a bad argument about it. But now you understand Carol enough to accept it. Carol will do whatever you want her to do, including sex. She's far too scared of your disapproval to initiate sex herself, but she'd leap at the chance to have it with you if you told her to, as was obvious from the call. It's one of the few ways she can give you something and she truly wants to be your lover. She wants that so much she's very frustrated about being your sister." [[She hadn't been a week ago, before Julia went to work on her.]] -- "She's never going to have any boyfriends. She's going to devote herself to you and no other boy will ever come close to you in her eyes. It would be very cruel of you to keep her a virgin all her life, and not to share your love with her as deeply and completely as you can. If you love Carol then you'll love her in every way you can. Luckily I know you love her even more than me..." "WHAT! NO WAY! You're..." "STOP, Mark! I'll prove it to you. Remember the very sexy bikini I wore in the hot tub last time?" "Do I ever! You looked fantastic in it. I almost sorry you're not wearing it now." "Haha. Thank you. I also remember the look on your face when I walked in. You mouth dropped open and I swear you drooled. I gave your two spins and your eyes were locked on me. You were madly in lust for my poor, little, innocent, but oh-so-well-presented body. Correct?" "Absolutely! Except the 'innocent' part obviously. But the rest of it is completely true." "I climbed into the pool and sat in your lap, and you were very happy weren't you." "Yes, absolutely." Julia continued, "And then Carol took off her robe, hung it up and got into the pool. Remember that?" "Umm, yes." "We were in the pool for maybe thirty or forty five minutes. What did you and I talk about in that time?" "Umm. I can't remember." "Where were the catches on my bikini, to undo it?" "I don't know. I never looked." "What did my nipples feel like through the material of my top?" "Um, I don't think I touched them." "How easy was it for you to get your hand into my bikini bottom?" "Umm. I didn't try." "So let me summarize. Your lover, who lets you do anything and everything to her body, turned up in the sexiest bikini you've ever seen, sat on your lap for more than half an hour, but you can't recall talking to me and you didn't once try to touch or kiss me. It's very strange because you were as hard as I've ever felt you, and you normally love to play around when you're turned on. Gee, I wonder what the huge distraction was? It must've been something very powerful because it kept you distracted and rock hard for more than half an hour. I wonder what that was?" "You know what it was." "Yes I do, and so do you. What was it, Mark?" "It was Carol." "That's only half the answer?" "It was Carol in that too-tight swimsuit she was wearing." "Yes. Thanks for admitting it so easily. As blown away by me as you were, the moment you saw Carol's body displayed like that you lost all interest in me, and focused entirely on her. You couldn't keep your eyes off her the whole time." "I'm very sorry Julia. Please forgive me..." "Stop! I knew you'd say that, and go on saying it for years probably, unless I stop you. So let me save both of us a great deal of time by asking you one key question: what is my chosen role in life?" "Umm. I guess, to serve me?" "Yes. But the more correct answer is: 'To make you happy by serving you.' If my serving you didn't make your happy, I might as well die as I'd no longer have a purpose in life. That sounds dramatic but it's how I feel. More than anything I want you to be happy. Seeing you happy makes me happy. It's my purpose in life. Okay?" [[Carol, in Julia's eyes, was certainly a very good way of making me happy, and Julia truly did want me to be happy. Because Julia considered me a superhuman with incredible potential and an amazing future that she would share in, Julia was willing to do almost anything to achieve my "happiness", by which Julia mostly thought "success". The type of success Julia was starting to push me toward was what Julia defined as success. The direction of her push isn't clear to you yet, but it will become so soon so I'll let it unfold in its own time. To be fair to Julia, I had no goals of my own so it's no wonder she used her own.]] I answered, "Yes. You've told me before." "And now I'm proving it to you. Were you happy when we were in the tub with Carol? And if you answer anything other than 'Good heavens, yes!', then you're not giving the right answer." "How do you know I was so happy?" "I was sitting on your lap. Your 'happiness' was sticking into my ass the whole time. I'm delightfully aware how sexy you think I am, but you ignored me so you must have had exceptionally strong feelings for Carol. You think I'm very sexy, but you think Carol is even sexier." I made a last second attempt to save myself, "It's not really my fault. Her top was nearly falling off the whole time. It was very distracting." "Shame on you! Carol's top was so tight that there was no chance whatsoever of it coming off in the first five minutes, but you were fixated by her from the instant she took your robe off. It was ME who pushed her straps off her shoulders after five minutes because I could see how much you were enjoying looking at her." [[And to test us too.]] "You did! I remember that! Why would you do that?" "What's my purpose in life?" "Oh, yes: you did it to make me happy." "Yes. The next time you're in this hot tub with Carol and me, we'll both be naked. You too if you wish. I arranged that to make you happy. Neither you nor Carol would've let me pull Carol's straps all the way down last Wednesday, or would've enjoyed it if I had. Not to mention that the parents wouldn't have approved, although I'm pretty sure my brothers would've, haha. But both you and Carol will now enjoy her going naked. She'll enjoy it because she'll know it pleases you, and she'll be praying it'll lead to sex with you. I don't think I need to tell you why you'll enjoy it. -- "There's one thing I need to remind you of. The incident with Carol's sexy swimsuit was last Wednesday. The previous Monday you taught me that you don't have any sexual limits. You're an awesomely good fucking machine. That woke me up to the fact that you're greater than an ordinary man. Remember me telling you that?" "Yes." "That was before I knew about your TK! That takes my opinion of you up to a whole new level. I stupidly wouldn't ask you to stop fucking me because I didn't want to share you, but you convinced me 'the hard way' - haha - that you're too much man for one woman. Then you very conveniently showed me on Wednesday who you want your second woman to be: Carol. -- "I think she's perfect. You love each other, trust each other, you enjoy each other's company, you lust after each other, you know each other very well, and many other very important relationship prerequisites." [[Carol was perfect for other very important reasons, but Julia omitted mentioning the ones she thought I might object to, such as Carol's subservience to Julia and the genetic possibilities for the next generation.]] -- "Your being brother and sister complicates the situation, but it also removes many of the concerns about loyalty, or that one of you is using the other, or many of the other usual relationship worries. All things considered, I'm extremely happy that Carol's going to be your second woman." "I don't understand 'second woman'. You've obviously got something in mind, which will be interesting because there's no way my sister can be my girlfriend?" "First let me make sure of something. Right now Carol can be pushed in almost any direction you could want: sexual or non-sexual, serving you or not-serving you, a permanent or temporary relationship, your pure sister or as much your girlfriend as I am, or several other possibilities. I know you desire her, and I know you want to keep her safe from being misused by someone who doesn't care for her, but those are pieces of the picture. We haven't discussed the big picture yet. Given how much you two love each other, I've been operating on the assumption that you want her to be your lover in every sense of the word, but now would be a very good time to confirm that assumption. What do you want, Mark? NOT what you think your parents or society will accept, but what do you WANT?" "A chance to catch my breath would be good. How could Carol and I possibly be lovers? Mom would have the greatest screaming fit she's ever had. I can't imagine how bad that'd get." "Listen to me, darling. My job is to help you achieve your goals. If you told me you wanted a house on the moon, I'd do my best to get one for you. I don't expect I'd succeed, but I'd do my best to make it happen, even if it took many years. If you tell me you want Carol as your lover, I'll do my best to get her for you. How far I get and how long it takes me is something I don't know yet. I agree it's not easy, but that's why you've got me on the job, haha. All I want from you now is for you to tell me what your goal for Carol is?" "This is serious stuff, Julia. What you're talking about could disrupt all our lives big time." "Your life is going to be full of very big decisions. You're going to be a very powerful and important man. I agree this is a big decision, but you can't run away from it just because it's big. Carol's relationship with you, and effectively the direction of her life, is up in the air at the moment. It has to come down somewhere, and that's your choice. It'd be cruel to leave her dangling the way she is now for long, and she is going to come down in one direction soon. She wants you to decide her fate and she's far too vulnerable to let anyone else have that much control over her. It's your relationship with her that's at stake, so it's best if you decide." "I wish you hadn't created this situation. I never wanted you to put Carol in a situation where she's dangling the way..." "Fine. That's what I'll do." "Huh? What do you mean?" "Before I started dangling her, Carol was your sister and nothing else, so I'll push her back into that position. Then life will carry on just as before. I hope whatever guy first gets Carol's loyalty is not screwing up her head just so he can screw her body." "Ahh Julia, I didn't mean..." "I know. What you meant was that you wanted to avoid having to make a decision, even if some of the outcomes could make you and your sister very happy. You prefer to achieve nothing than be forced to make a decision. Have I described what you meant correctly?" Julia smiled at me in a way that meant, "We both know I'm right, we both know you're a wimp, and I love you." I took a deep breath in preparation for having to face the decision. Julia wasn't going to let me wiggle out of it, which I now realized was a stupid thing for me to have wished for. "Okay, you're right that what I said was stupid. To be fair to me - because someone should be - you've hit me with a lot of stuff and it's scarily serious stuff. I understand that the direction of Carol's life is in the balance at the moment, and that I have to decide which way it goes. I've heard people say on TV that 'not deciding is deciding.' Now I know EXACTLY what that means!" "That's right. You have power over Carol. Not because you deliberately sought it, or even because I've grabbed it for you over the last few days, but because of Carol's subservience and her deciding to love you as much as she does. I've heard Mom say hundreds of times that with power comes responsibility. If you do nothing, then one day Carol will meet a man who knows how to manipulate her to do as he wishes. If something bad happens to her that you could've stopped, then that would be your responsibility. You're responsible for not making a decision just as much as for making one. That's because responsibility doesn't come from decisions but from power. Carol's love for you has given you power over her, and you can't run away from it. All you can do is fail her by refusing to make necessary decisions." "I've heard those words before but they've never made as much sense to me as they do now. I understand that whether or not Carol is 'dangling' isn't the issue..." "That's right. What I've done is increase your options, which is always a good thing. So let's get back to my questions: what do you want to achieve with Carol?" "Ahh. I mostly want her to have a happy life..." "Good, that's what I thought. That's the way I'm already going. In that case, can you please restrain yourself from having sex with Carol yet. You're the boss so you can if you insist, but my way will be much more meaningful for her, so she'll be happier in the long run. Is that okay?" "I must be getting a little bit better at this because this time I know you're deliberately pulling my leg by not telling me what 'Carol having a happy life' means in concrete terms. Exactly what are you trying to achieve?" "You know Carol well enough to know what would make her happiest." "To be my girlfriend?" "Close, but not what I'm intending to do." "Ahh. Girlfriend with benefits, I meant. That phone call taught me that she wants to have sex with me." "Yes. I was assuming that 'girlfriend' meant with sex. A girlfriend would have to be crazy not to have sex with you, and I'm sure Carol isn't going to be crazy. I've seen how much you're attracted to her so sex is clearly going to happen, but there's something that'd make her happier even than being your girlfriend-with-sex." "Hmm. I heard you calling her our 'Serving Girl'. Is that what you mean?" "No, I mean wife." "WHAT! Carol can't be my WIFE! She's my sister for goodness sake!" "I'm aware of that. I didn't say it'd be easy, I just said that's what she'd like the most. I know how much you love her, so I figured you wouldn't object to the possibility. Let me explain what I've got in mind otherwise we'll waste a lot of time on misapprehensions." "Okay." "On Thursday, when you show her your TK, I'm going to have a type of marriage ceremony for the THREE of us. I'm even going to get three rings, although I only thought of that and some related ideas when we were having our shakes in town today. At the conclusion of the ceremony - as part of it really, to consummate it - you will take Carol's virginity. Then the three of us will consider ourselves married to each other. -- "It will have to differ from a normal marriage in several respects. Carol and I will be your and each other's wives. You will be our 'Lord'. Not our husband because the modern belief is that husbands and wives are equal. That's unsuitable for us. -- "The family conference I asked my parents for tonight is to set everything up. I want them to witness the middle part of our marriage ceremony, by which I mean after the TK demonstration to Carol, but before the consummation. It'll include an exchange of vows and rings, and as much of the normal wedding process as possible to make it more real for us. I'll get Mom to help with all of that, and she'll also help to get birth control pills for Carol. Dad will..." "Hang on! You mean your parents will know Carol and I will be having sex?" "Yes. It's not the sort of thing they can miss, given how good you are at it. The three of us are going to be coming out of the bedroom with 'we've just been fucked' looks on our faces. Knowing you, Carol and I will be walking gingerly. Not to mention the state of the sheets afterward. Obviously my parents need to know. I'm also going to get Dad to buy us a bigger bed, to be delivered after this Wednesday so your parents won't see it and be curious about my bed getting much larger at the same time you and Carol start spending time here. I'll make sure that it gets delivered and set up Thursday during the day so we can christen it by your taking Carol for the first time." "Small point, Julia: why ON EARTH would your parents consent to me having sex with my sister, especially inside their own home? Not only is it illegal and immoral, there's also the small matter of their repeatedly saying that they want me to marry their daughter. Your parents have been surprisingly tolerant to you and I having sex, but it's a MIGHTY big leap for them to allow me and Carol to do so." "I must admit I'm not totally sure I can convince them, but I am reasonably hopeful. Their reason for agreeing will be because of how special you are. They know you're awesomely special, and believe Carol might go through the same changes in a few months. They've also heard some parts of my conversations with Carol over the last few days, so they know something is happening with her but not exactly what. They haven't stopped me and they see how happy Carol is, so that gives me hope they'll agree. I'll tell them that I have convinced Carol to breed with you, to see if you can create a race of super-babies." "What! You CAN'T be serious!" "Totally serious. You're obviously incredibly special and it could easily be genetic. If it is, Carol may have it dominant, recessive or not at all. If she has it dominant or recessive, your babies could be even more amazing than you are, which could change humanity forever. This is far, far too important to worry about some stupid incest laws. My parents are both well aware how important a single genius can be to humanity, Einstein being Dad's favorite example. -- "You could change the world, and that's even more true of your children with Carol if she has the same gene. Even if Carol doesn't show the abilities herself, she might be recessive, in which case breeding with her is still a great idea. My parents will be very excited over you and Carol having babies, so I'm reasonably sure they'll agree. They're both smart enough to see that the big picture is far more important than a single law that no one wants to be protected by." "Um, but what about if it's not genetic? In that case your argument collapses." "I'd like it to be genetic and none of us can imagine what else it could be, but whether or not it is won't change my actions." "I don't understand?" "I'm using it as an excuse to motivate my parents. Just so long as they believe it might be genetic, that's all I need to get you what you want. I want Carol as our wife so you'll be happy. That's my goal in life, remember?" "Yeah, you've mentioned it a few times but I didn't understand how far you'd take it until now. You'd lie to your parents over something this huge to make me happy?" "Not lie exactly. You haven't told me it's not genetic, so make sure you don't tell me that, okay?" "Um, okay." "In all seriousness, I've given a lot of thought to whether I want to know about the source of your abilities, especially after you showed me your TK power. Normally I want to know everything that's going on, but I've realized that if your abilities come from an external source then that's too scary for me. I have a high opinion of myself, but it's not high enough to think I measure up to a secret that large. I've seen how nervous and reluctant you react - like you're looking now - whenever our conversations have approached the topic of your abilities. That's put me off being nosey by interrogating you about it. -- "I've never been shy about taking on responsibilities before, but since seeing your superhuman TK power, I've decided that I'm going to be happy enough dedicating myself to looking after you. You're so intellectually capable that's going to be a lifelong challenge for me to live up to as it is, even without the complications caused by your having superhuman abilities. -- "The only strong temptation I feel is that I'd very much like to be as intelligent as you, but I figured that you'd have told me if that was possible?" #2: #1: ^ [#2 was more joking than being logically correct. I didn't think I was more intelligent than I used to be, but for Julia to appear more intelligent the way I do she'd have to merge twice. If in every dimension that a Mark knew about déjà vu merges he told Julia about them, three out of four Julias wouldn't get told because there was no Mark in those dimensions. Assuming the informed Julias could find a way of merging in their next two déjà vu's even if they were linked to ignorant Julias, that would increase the number of Julias who knew about déjà vu merges but it wouldn't inform all of them, especially as some of those merges would be between already informed Julias. After two merges, Julia would be as seemingly intelligent as me - actually more so as each of her minds is much smarter than each of mine - but there'd still be some dimensions with Julias who were still ignorant of merges, and other dimensions where Mark still had Julia as a girlfriend because she'd been merged into twice. Simplistically, the latter has a 1-in-16 probability, so #2's joke wasn't correct. It was correct enough that I certainly wasn't going to suggest merging to Julia, apart from all the other good reasons I had not to do so.] [[The multi-dimensional reality is somewhat more complicated than described above, but as I understood the situation at the time, the above explanation is good enough.]] ^ I answered, "I've told you everything I can, Julia, which is nothing. Sorry, but that's a decision that isn't going to change." "That's okay. I know you'd share if you could. I'm scared about what could have affected you so much, so I tell myself that it's better that I don't know. I'm even proud of myself for believing that, tempting though your abilities are. -- "So putting that issue aside, I will truthfully be suggesting to my parents that breeding you and Carol COULD be a fantastic thing to do. My parents can make their own decisions based on their genetic theories. Letting my parents possibly mislead themselves so I can make my man happy is an easy decision for me. There's nothing I won't do for you since learning that you're superhuman. My parents will get a great deal of excitement and fun from having you in their lives. That they possibly get tricked into helping you do some mutually enjoyable things with Carol doesn't concern me and I doubt it would concern them either, especially after she turns sixteen." "What's special about sixteen?" "Having consensual sex with a sibling under sixteen is the Class A felony of rape in the first degree. Once Carol turns sixteen your having sex with her isn't a crime in Oregon at all, although you'd obviously want to continue keeping it quiet to avoid the public outcry and Child Protective Services getting involved. After she's eighteen, you've only got public outrage to worry about. It's only the first two and quarter years that you and Carol are going to have to be very careful, which makes it even more important to have my parents on our side, so you'll have somewhere safe to behave as you'll want." #2: #3: "How do you know all that scary stuff about the law? I can't imagine you talked to a lawyer about it." "I looked it up online once I knew that you and Carol should be lovers. -- "There's another issue that has a much greater effect on me. In the last few days I've realized that I'm not going to tie you down to me. You're a superhuman and you keep getting even more super, so an ordinary marriage to me, a 9-to-5 job, a white picket fence, and 2.3 children are not in our future. So I'll be going into our ceremony on Thursday believing that it's going to be the ONLY marriage I'll ever have in my life. In my heart and mind it WILL be my marriage to you, with all the emotions that will go with that. It will also be my marriage to Carol, which is NOT something I ever thought I'd be doing! It's a very good example of my doing ANYTHING for you because it's so far outside what I'd normally do in my life. -- "I have to take my marriage to Carol seriously because the three of us are going to be together for a long time. I can't imagine you or Carol ever wanting to separate, and I'm NEVER going to want to leave you, which means I'm entering a lifelong relationship with Carol. I knew I'd be having an unusual life with you, but I was expecting that to start slowly a few years from now. Instead it's going to become very unusual in just four days. Thank goodness you chose Carol. Of all the girls I know, Carol is the only one who'll be the perfect wife for us." "You're a VERY strange girl, Julia..." "No I'm not. I'm very ordinary, although perhaps more organized than most..." #3: <"More organiz-ING" would've been more accurate. And I also disagree that she's "ordinary". She's far too busy being weird.> " ... It's you that's the unusual one. You're a UNIQUE superhuman who ... Which reminds me, are you unique? Are there any other people like you? Is it ok for me to ask you questions like that?" "I don't really want you to ask me ANY questions in that general area. As far as I know there isn't anyone else, but can you please not ask those sorts of things again. I don't mind questions like how hard TK can push your hand, but about the overview makes me very uncomfortable. Not to mention there's the risk of our being overheard. I'd much prefer you not to say ANYTHING about any of it." "Ok. Sorry, darling. I was saying that it's your being so amazing that makes me behave differently. It's glaringly obvious that you're the unusual one out of the two of us." "I'll admit there are a few unusual things about me, although I'm still a very ordinary boy in almost every respect. And you can't tell me that your suggesting a three-way marriage with me and my sister makes you normal! You just said 'Carol would be the perfect wife for US'. You've got to be very unusual to think she be the perfect wife for you. And how is that possible anyway?" "I've been thinking about that for the last several days, and there are many reasons. The most important is that she's totally devoted and loyal to you. I cannot possibly overstate how essential that is! She's going to know things about you that will put your life in her hands. I'd be terrified of any other girl having that much power over you, but I trust Carol's devotion to you. That will make me feel very happy in the future. -- "Second, you love her more than anyone else in the world, even more than me. Don't object to that please. I know it and I'm fine with it. I even quite like it now that I've thought about it for the last few days, as I'll explain next. -- "Third, she's no threat to my relationship with you. She and I are too different and provide you with different services. She'll be a perfect housewife, while my contribution to your life will be outside of our home. There should be no overlap, so no conflict. You've even got more than enough sexual stamina to wear both of us out, so no problems there either, haha. -- "Fourth, she's so obedient. I LIKE being in charge, in case you haven't noticed, haha. I love being in charge of her, and I'll continue to be in charge even when she's my wife. That's another reason she's not a threat to me: because she obeys me so easily. -- "Fifth, she's gorgeous and I think she's sexy. I'm curious and even quite excited about having sex with her. I've got a feeling that I'm going to like that." "Really? I had no idea you were interested in girls." "Nor did I until very recently, but I'm interested now. To be honest, it's mostly because I know Carol's going to be very important to both of us and the power I have over her excites me. It's also been a turn-on for me to push her buttons on your behalf. I'm seducing her at one remove, which has been fun and is making me wonder about seducing her myself. There's so much sex and sexual excitement going on around me these days that I'm spilling over with horniness, so it's all your fault, haha. -- "Another reason is that I like her. Mostly because I LOVE the attitude she has toward you, but she's otherwise a nice girl. I don't know her well yet, but I haven't found anything to dislike about her, and I do honestly like her in many ways. -- "Lastly, we'll both be your wives. We are NOT going to have a silly alternating-nights system for sleeping with you, or have one of us leave the room whenever you have sex with the other. Both of those are lonely and divisive and I refuse to be kept away from you half the time. When we have the opportunity to do so, we'll both sleep with you at night. That'll be only occasionally until we have our own home, but then we'll both sleep with you every night. It's obvious that our three-way marriage is going to be much better if it includes three-way sex. Nothing else will work nearly as well. It's also best for you that way, which is very important to me. You remember my role in life, don't you?" "I seem to recall it's something to do with making someone happy. Me, if I remember correctly." "I don't see any other guys around at the moment, so we might as well make it you. I'm assuming that you want an all-the-way, three-way marriage. I could make jokes about guys wanting two girls at once, but I think I'd rather not crack cheap jokes about the design of our marriage. If you want a different structure, please tell me because I've got a great deal of planning to do before Thursday?" "Ahh, no. I think the structure you've got in mind would suit me very, very well. In fact, I think you've blown my mind. My brain is spinning in circles yelling 'yahoo' and 'yippee'. I think I need to sit down." (I was already sitting down.) "Haha. I need to give you one caution though, I don't know how Carol will react to a three-way marriage..." "Oh, you're right. My brain was too busy spinning to think of that. Which is embarrassingly selfish of me." "It would've occurred to you soon. When I asked you earlier what you most wanted, your answer was to make Carol's life happy, so I don't think you've got a serious problem with selfishness. I haven't made any effort to find out what Carol's attitude to sex with me is, but I'll do so over the next couple of days. I'd be surprised if it's a problem, but I'll know for sure before Thursday." This was an issue of considerable interest to me, for a variety of reasons, including that I genuinely cared for Carol, so I had to ask, "Why don't you think it'll be a problem? And how will you know for sure?" "The second question's the easiest: because I'll try to have sex with her when she's sleeping over on Wednesday night." "Oh. Umm, you're not going to order her to do it, are you? I wouldn't like her to be forced in to anything she wouldn't want to do." "No Mark, I'm not going to rape my future wife and a girl you love. My purpose is not to have sex with her, but to find out her attitude to having sex with me. Ordering her would not be a good way of doing that. I'll be gentle. I might not even need to do it because I'll start teasing her on the phone before then and that could tell me all I need to know. -- "You also asked about why I thought she wouldn't have a problem with it. I don't have any strong reasons, but I do have several small ones. From what you've told me about her I know she's never been close to any boy, so she doesn't seem to be strongly boy-oriented..." "There was the boy that turned her down." #1: "That was probably you. I haven't asked her outright, but it's very clear that the only guy she's fancied recently is you." "Yes, sorry. I realized that myself as soon as I said it. I was so used to worrying about that guy that he's become a habit. Thank goodness I didn't have to beat him up!" "I'm sure you'd convince him of the error of his ways, haha. Back to Carol's orientation. She doesn't seem to have a strong sex-drive toward boys, even though her body has been ready for sex for several years. She's got the hots for you, so she is straight, just not strongly so. When I've talked to her about seeing you and me having sex together, she's never made any comments about being uncomfortable in my presence. She seemed indifferent to it, other than not wanting to be impolite by intruding on our intimacy. She's been excited about seeing your body and uncaring about seeing mine, which is fine by me. We just want her to be tolerant; she doesn't need to be enthusiastic. She's also very malleable. If I told her enough times that something was perfectly fine and acceptable, she's likely to end up believing it. -- "Lastly is something I think will have the biggest effect: she'll likely have a much more positive attitude to me than girls in general because she looks up to me so much..." "Not to mention how sexy you are!" "Good boy. This is a very good time to give me some reassurance. I'm determined to do this because I'm sure it's the right thing to do, but it still makes me nervous about losing you." "That ain't EVER gonna happen! You blow me away with how dedicated you are. I'd have to be insane to even think about losing you. I'll admit I don't understand girls because that requires a very weird mind, but I understand myself well enough to know I NEVER want to lose you. You're awesome. Not to mention that your mother's roast chicken is even better than my mom's, so obviously I can't break up with you, haha. Not unless your mother would keep feeding me if we broke up. Do you think she would?" I put on a "I'm very interested" expression. Julia said, "I'd tell her not to." "Darn! I guess that means I'll be forced to keep having sex with you, {sigh}." "I'm afraid so. You're not going to have any choice about that." "I was afraid you'd say that. Looks like you've gotten me over a barrel then. Or maybe over a chicken coop. You've got me in any event. Seriously, I don't know how you could possibly worry about this..." #3: #2: " ... I'm far more worried about your finding a better boyfriend. Someone who's not a..." Julia interrupted, "HA! As if that could EVER happen!..." "Sure it could. I'm a wimp, I don't understand girls, and you feel insecure about my feelings for you. Obviously I'm not a very good boyfriend, so it's FAR more likely you'll want to change before I would." After that, the conversation got too incoherent to quote. It was mostly our giving each other lots of hugs, kisses and reassurances - especially me giving them to Julia. She seemed okay. I made a mental note to make sure I said plenty of reassuring things to her in the future, especially over the next few days. Her arranging for us to marry my sister was WAY above and beyond the call of duty for a normal girlfriend, so I definitely needed to make sure I showed her how much I appreciated her for it. When we got back on track, Julia said, "I just thought of another reason why my parents should agree to you and Carol getting together. It's a negative reason so I'd rather not bring it up with them, but if they're uncooperative I'll point out that they're risking your breaking up with them. You could choose to spend your time with Carol elsewhere rather than in this house, so they wouldn't see you nearly as often. -- "Something else occurred to me too. I have a small sexual tease planned for you at school tomorrow. I just thought to do it to Carol as well, to see how she reacts. It'll give us a clue about her orientation, although I'm sure that'll be easy to find out. It'll still be fun to tease her though." "What will you be doing?" "You don't expect me to tell you, do you? That'd ruin most of my fun. You'll have to wait and see." #4: Julia got back on to the topic of her parents' consent, "I think my parents will probably agree with my plan, but if they're too reluctant your TK power would easily tip the balance. That's not just special; that's mind blowing. Telling anyone about that is your decision though?" "I've already thought about showing your dad. He's very perceptive and wise, and I think he might be very helpful in my life. He'd be a lot better than my dad at seeing some of its implications." Julia said, "I suggest you leave me to talk with my family. I won't even hint about TK, so if they're convinced without it then we're fine. If they're not convinced then I still won't tell them, but you and I will discuss it at school tomorrow. Okay?" "Yes, fine by me. I'm assuming that your telling your parents about Carol and me isn't going to cause them to kick me out so I never see you again?" "Aren't you sweet? No, that won't happen. I'll be presenting this as my plan, as something that I'm pushing you and Carol into it. They've heard me managing Carol so they know I've been up to something. I can even say I did so because of all their talk about genetics, so if they blame anyone they'll blame themselves. They don't throw blame around so I'm not worried about that issue. -- "I'll be telling the truth because I have been doing my best to get you two together. They just don't need to know how easy it was to push you, or how knowledgeable you are about my plan. Another reason they won't kick you out is because I'd go with you if they did. If they don't know that already, they'll know it one second after they first mention the idea. -- "I'll call you tonight if we reach a decision early enough, otherwise I'll text you a simple message so I don't interrupt your massage. Don't call me back because it's important you give your time to Carol. I'll talk with you in school tomorrow." "You're an amazing girl, Julia. I cannot imagine how any girl would want her boyfriend to take another lover." "Because you are not just a boyfriend but also a superman, so the normal rules don't apply. Plus Carol will make our lives better. I'm doing it for you, but I'm looking forward to having her join us too. She doesn't compete with me and she'll be someone I can emotionally unwind with. I worry about my stressing out with everything I'll need to do for you in the future, so it'll be great for me to have her around. In a few years she'll be helpful in her own right too, so I think the three of us will work out very well together." "It certainly sounds good to me, but how could it not! One of the things that strikes me about all of this is how useless I am at making plans compared with you. Last night all I could think about was to make sure I didn't succumb to the temptation of getting a feel of Carol, and meanwhile you've got a lifelong plan well in progress and on the way to being successfully carried out. The difference between our planning abilities is ridiculous! I REALLY think you should be the boss in this relationship." Julia laughed, "Haha. That's as silly as asking Carol to be boss. Maybe not quite that silly, but definitely getting there. All my plans have the single goal of making you happy. The boss doesn't have to be the person making the plans and certainly not the person carrying them out. Your job is to provide the reason for the plans, by letting me know what makes you happy. I'm sure the President doesn't make plans for the country, he has thousands of staff to do that for him. The job of the President and you is to choose the goals. Oh, another part of your job is to motivate your helpers. I do enjoy our motivation sessions, haha." "Funnily enough, those sessions motivate me too. That was a very good explanation. I think I've finally grasped why you think I should be the boss. I never understood that before. I still think you'd be a much better boss than me, but at least I can see that there's a reason for your wanting it the way you do. I guess I'll have to accept that I've got the best Boss' Assistant ever! I can't imagine a better one." "A minute ago you didn't even know what the boss's role was, and I'm sure you've got even less of an idea about an assistant. You'll learn though. You'll become a very powerful man and will have many assistants. I'll make sure you learn how to be a good boss. You'll need to learn that because it's an essential part of becoming successful. We can learn together because I've still got a great deal to learn. Once you get into it, you'll love being a boss. It's a thrill deciding what to do, how to do it, and making people do it for you. You'll get a huge feeling of accomplishment knowing that you're responsible for achieving the results." I thought there was zero chance of me ever getting interested in being a boss, but we didn't need to discuss that now. "Okay. I've got HEAPS of worries about loose threads we haven't discussed. One is that Carol is too young for 'breeding', as you so delicately put it. She's not even fourteen yet. How can you convince your parents it's okay for us to have sex together when she's so young?" Julia answered, "By being creative. I'll say that I had to bring you two together now because it was already almost too late. I'll say that Carol was getting interested in other boys, maybe in one particular boy, so if I'd delayed she might have gotten too involved with someone else and we could lose her. -- "I can also use what Dad's said about your leaving Corvallis to go to a better university in just over a year. I can say that we had to get you and Carol deeply attached now or risk you leaving her behind when you go. It's all fiction, but it gets us what we want. It's not like other people's emotions can be turned on or off whenever they want, so if they want you and Carol to ever get together, they'll have to seize the moment and agree to allow it now. I think they will because they'll be very excited about the future it offers. -- "Once they accept that it's happening, they'll swing into action. Mom and Dad are good about things like that. Mom will help Carol get birth control pills until she and you are ready to have children. They'll probably want to talk with you about your 'responsibility to humanity, ' or 'giving humanity a wonderful gift, ' or some such justification for your having children with Carol. You'll need to play along with them, which will be easy. -- "If you do want children with Carol in the next few years, we could swap her ID with mine. She looks older than I do and she doesn't look like your sister because you have such different builds and facial features: hers are soft in contrast to yours being chiseled. We might have to move to where the age of consent is sixteen if her pregnancy happened before I turned eighteen, but there are plenty of states with ages of consent of sixteen. -- "If we don't want to swap IDs, Hawaii and Canada have ages of fourteen, and there are many states we could move to if she's pregnant after she's sixteen. She can have a baby under her own name as long as she keeps quiet about who the father is. I'll explain all that to my parents so they'll know you two having babies is quite easy to achieve in practice. Mom and Dad love getting around bureaucrats so they'll like that aspect." "Oh. Umm, what about the risk of birth defects? Isn't that a serious problem?" "I don't think so. I haven't had a chance to research it because that's a bigger subject, but I know there've been many historic human societies where sibling marriages were practiced. Some of them lasted many generations so I doubt they had any major problems or they wouldn't have done it so often. I'm assuming my parents will think that's a small risk compared with the benefit to humanity of babies even more special than you are." I asked about my last MAJOR worry, "Okay, I can see you've got your parents well planned out, but mine are a WHOLE different situation. How on Earth are you going to handle them?" "Unfortunately I haven't thought of a good plan for them yet. They're used to you and your sisters being affectionate, and my parents will help us hide it, so we should be able to keep it from them for some time. The longer we can delay their discovering it, the older Carol will be and the less in need of their protection. -- "We'll try VERY hard to convince your parents to let Carol come with us when you leave Corvallis in a year's time. I think we'll have a good chance of that because the three of us will have proved that we have a great relationship by then. At worst we might have to wait a year or so before she can join us, but I hope not. Once we're living elsewhere, it'll be much easier for us to keep our three-way relationship secret, and that'll be the case until Carol's eighteen and able to enforce her own decisions. -- "Failing that, we'll have to have a serious talk with both families together, and hopefully Mom and Dad will be able to convince your parents to stop thinking protectively about Carol and to start thinking of humanity as a whole. That's going to be difficult so keeping it secret would be much better. -- "For now, all I can think of is to take it one step at a time. You and Carol have essentially agreed already, my parents this evening, and then your parents whenever we need to." I'd thought of yet another last worry (that often happens with me, with one of the non-speaking minds suggesting something after the speaking mind thought he'd nearly finished), "What will your parents think about your joining in with Carol and me? About our having threesomes?" "I'm going to make it EXTREMELY clear to them that they don't have a choice! You'll be spending a lot of time with Carol, and I'm NOT going to be excluded from something so important to you! They know you're my man for life so I don't think they'll interfere with our sex-life, even if it becomes unusual. They're not hung up about sex so they should behave rationally. If there's one thing my parents are good at, it's being rational, especially Dad, and he'll carry the day with Mom if necessary. They don't have much choice about it. I'm eighteen in not much more than a year so there'd be little point in their causing a major disruption for such a short time. They also know I'm the only reason you're in their lives, so they shouldn't want to drive a wedge between us." I was frazzled. I had more questions but they could keep because I needed a break. On second thought, some of them I didn't want to ask at all. For example, I didn't want to be pressured - by knowing the Williamses had expectations they wanted me to meet - into doing anything with Donna. She's a nice girl and good fun, but I don't have any sexual attraction for her at all. There was just too much stuff like that, and I couldn't handle any more. What a day! My entire understanding of Carol had been DRASTICALLY changed, and Julia had stunned me with her bizarre and incredible plan. And I realized that she'd need a rest before confronting her parents. That was going to be a VERY important discussion! It was definitely time to stop, but I couldn't resist doing so with a little tease, "Julia, I notice that your plan involves you and me getting married in your ceremony. Even though it won't be legal, I'm impressed that even among all your clever maneuvering you've managed to insert something that increases our commitment to each other." Now that I was into my tease I decided to change its ending, so I concluded with, "Julia Williams, you have more than proved your love for me, and I will be more than happy to marry you, in this or any other way you want." #1: #3: Fortunately not. Julia face melted the way happy females do, tears and gushy emotions pouring out of her. "Oh, you're so WONDERFUL", "I love you", "You're the best guy EVER!", and stuff like that. Fortunately nothing like, "Let's get married for real in a church next week." Several gushing sentiments later Julia even said, "Carol and I are so lucky!" which was very reassuring. #3: #1: #3: I've used this hot tub twice, and now both times someone has cried. Hopefully next time will be very different. I was thinking that we'd all be naked, including Carol. Crying girls wasn't what I was looking forward to. After many more hugs, kisses, tears and sweet nothings whispered back and forth, we got out, dressed, and I made my departure. It was going to be an interesting evening in both households tonight. On the way out I ran into Prof. He asked, "What do you think of the college material I got for you?" "I've read quite a lot of it but I don't have any decision or even questions yet. I think I need to read it all first, before I can start to think about my choices. There's so much more choice than school, so it takes a bit of getting used to." "That's true. Your new study will be ready by Wednesday. We should sit down together soon after that for some planning, or at least my reviewing your choices so you can think about them further." "That sounds good to me. I'm not sure when that'll be though. Julia's got me frazzled at the moment." I thought that'd play into her planned conversation with her parents well. "That's fine." After saying goodbye, I rode my bike home a frazzled but happy man ("boy" really, but it seems reasonable to promote myself as I'm getting married soon). Halfway home I remembered that Julia had offered to give me a blowjob in her room before I left, but I'd forgotten about it. THAT'S how frazzled I was! ------- Chapter 36: First Explorations of Carol Sunday, April 10, 2005 (Continued) I got home just before dinnertime, that being an excellent habit to get into. I was impressed with Julia when I saw that Carol was doing some cooking in the kitchen with Mom. Mom was in Teaching Mode, telling Carol what needed to be done, why, in what order, and that sort of thing. Seeing me watching her, Carol proudly announced, "I've decided I want to be a much better cook. Mom's going to be giving me lots of lessons from now on." I would write "her chest swelled with pride," but good brothers don't notice such things. #2: #4: I knew I had to reinforce Julia's instructions to Carol, so I just said, "Good for you, sweetie. I'm pleased." I could see that my approval meant more to Carol than it should, although I was very happy with it. I had no doubt that Julia's analysis of Carol was right, but it was still good to see some confirmation. #1: #2: <"Having more cooks in the house! That means more food for me, so this is a very good thing." Mom will laugh at that.> Unfortunately no one asked why I was pleased and the moment had passed for me to use my joke. Oh well, next time. At dinner I made sure to casually mention, "I'll be working in my room quite late tonight. I've got lots of stuff from Prof to read and he wants to talk with me about it soon." I saw that Carol noticed what I'd said, which was my intention. One late-night massage coming up! Hopefully after our parents were asleep. Their bedroom is across the hall and at the other end of it from mine, so if we're careful they shouldn't hear anything suspicious and come to check it out. Donna was chatty but made no reference to my getting a backrub from Carol, which was helpful of her and a relief. Donna and I agreed that we'd get up at 6am for our run. When Carol heard that she asked, "Can I come with you on my bike please? I need to get more exercise." Before I could answer, Mom said, "You're getting serious about exercise, Carol. You went for a long ride this morning and now you want to go tomorrow morning as well." "Yes. I spend too much time studying. I want to make sure I'm beautiful, healthy and fit." I was again quite impressed with Julia when I realized that the words Carol had used - "beautiful, healthy and fit" - were identical to what Julia had told Carol we wanted of her. Carol certainly seemed to be taking Julia's instructions to heart. It was also very unlike Carol to describe herself as beautiful or to say she wanted to be beautiful. Mom made no comment on it though. In answer to Carol's request to come with us, I said to Donna, "I asked you to run with me in the mornings as a way of our spending some time together because we don't get much chance to normally. I love Carol but I already see her more than I see you, and Carol and I will be spending a lot of time studying together at Julia's, so it's up to you whether you want Carol to come running with us or not?" Donna is a good sort. Her immediate answer was, "Sure she can come. We don't talk that much anyway." Donna's answer had taken quarter the time of my carefully worded question, which was typical of her. [[It was even more typical of me, but I'm writing my thoughts at the time.]] Knowing that Carol and I might have a late night tonight, and guessing she might have trouble sleeping afterward, I said to her, "Don't worry if you sleep in tomorrow morning. We'll be running again Wednesday and you can join us then. It can be a good idea not to train every day, so see how you feel in the morning." One of my minds added a good idea, "And I'd be happy to go out with you any morning you want to; it doesn't have to be with Donna. Just do what feels good for you." It might be very convenient for Carol and me to be able to get out of the house for an hour or so. Who knows what we could do! Mom also told me that I could get my cast off the day before the original schedule. She or Dad would take me to the hospital on Friday after school. Which made me realize I'd been stupid not to get it done another day earlier, on Thursday, so I could train properly at Aikido. I didn't want to annoy Mom by making her call the hospital yet again, so I accepted that the cost of my stupidity would be losing a training session. I was sure Julia wouldn't have made that sort of mistake. I'd spent so much time with Julia this weekend that I hadn't done much studying, so after the dishes were done I went to my room. I tried to apply myself, but I mostly just wasted time because all three of my active concentrations were appalling. After half an hour of it, there was a quiet knock on my door. I said, "Enter," and Carol came in and shut the door behind her. I had swiveled my chair around to face her and she walked up to me. Rather than kneeling beside me as she had last time, this time Carol asked, "Can I sit in your lap please, Mark?" "Of course. I like cuddling you." "Julia told me you did." "Julia told you correctly. I like it very much." Already my cock was getting hard because the power I apparently had over Carol and the expectation of what was going to happen later were VERY stimulating. I'd been daydreaming about it so my cock was already half-hard. A go-soft was urgently applied, and I expected to need to continually apply it too. For a second I'd thought about letting Carol see the shape of my erection through my clothes, even to have her sit on me while I was hard, but it seemed too soon to be that blatant. I was definitely looking forward to getting even more blatant later though. Carol sat sideways on me, her knees pointing to my right. She put her arms fully around my shoulders and held herself close to me, her chin resting on my right shoulder, her right cheek pressed against mine. I reached across her front with my straight right arm, running it diagonally down so its hand was placed on the left side of her waist. This placed my upper-arm directly across Carol's right breast. She was wearing the same clothes as she'd worn to dinner: jeans, a T-shirt, and naturally a bra. I wasn't disappointed as I knew I would be seeing far more of her later tonight if I wanted to, which you can safely assume that I did. Carol accepted my arm's contact with her breast with no sign of displeasure or concern. She showed no awareness of that contact, seeming happy just to be cuddling me. I thought of rubbing my arm back and forth, but it seemed far too crude and immature. It would've been wonderful, but I had to resist. Instead I put my left hand on her back and lightly moved it up and down, rubbing her neck, shoulders and all of her back. I did this for a few minutes. Carol's occasional, soft, "Mmm" sounds indicating she was happy with my actions. After five minutes or so, I confidently - mostly an 'acted' confidence as I didn't feel nearly so self-assured - grasped the back of her shirt with my left hand, just above where it tucked into her jeans, and started pulling it out of her jeans. There was no sensible excuse for me doing this. Over the past year or two I had occasionally given Carol brief rubs on her back through her clothes as extended, affectionate pats, but I had never even thought of going under her clothes. We'd never had skin contact of this type before, but she'd never agreed to massage me before either, especially with her apparent willingness that we both be naked at the time. That and Julia's confident descriptions of Carol's "hots" for me gave me the necessary confidence to try this now. As soon as Carol realized what I was attempting, she pushed her head slight away from my shoulders, which sat her up straighter, and then she sucked her belly. For a second I thought she was drawing a big breath to scream with, but it became clear that she was helpfully making it easier for me to pull her T-shirt out, which I resumed doing. When it was fully untucked from her back, I put my left hand under it and lay it on her bare back. Carol gave a louder, "Mmm," and leaned into her cuddle with me again. #4: #1: #4: #1: I started rubbing Carol's back. When my hand reached high on her back, my forearm raised her T-shirt, pulling more of it out of her jeans. It was now only tucked in at the front, which was a pity because it was her front that I most wanted to rub. Unfortunately that was yet another HIGHLY desirable activity that it was too soon for. I kept rubbing her back. Whenever my hand reached her bra strap I just rubbed over it. After a few more minutes of Carol clearly being happy with my current actions, I moved my hand to her strap and pushed my fingers under it. Carol's hands tightened briefly around my shoulders. That was her only reaction, which meant she was passively accepting everything I was doing. Goody! When I had the full length of my fingers under the strap, I pushed my hand sideways around the outside of her back, until my fingers reached the bra's cup. Then I bravely girded my loins - only mentally, as my loins were otherwise far too busy doing continual go-softs - and I pushed my fingers under the outside edge of her cup, putting them in contact with the side of Carol's breast. Carol tensed, but she kept hugging me, now tighter than ever. She neither screamed for Mom and Dad nor killed me, so I breathed a slow sigh of relief, trying to hide it so she didn't realize how nervous I was. Julia had shown me that Carol wanted to be commanded, which meant I had to pretend to have some confidence. In reality I had none at all. If Carol had made the slightest negative response, I would've collapsed into begging apologies. To my amazement, Carol was accepting what I was doing now, even though it FAR exceeded anything that could remotely be considered brotherly. Having determined that she was so accepting, I moved my hand back the way it came. Carol gave a brief moan of disappointment, which was music to my ears. I was now sure that Julia was right about Carol wanting sex with me, which made it unanimous. I was still very scared, but also convinced. Some amazing feelings were flowing through me. I removed my fingers from under her bra entirely. It was too tight and uncomfortable to force my hand around under it. I reverted to just rubbing all over her back. I wanted to rub her front, especially two specific regions on her front, but that required my other hand and the damned cast made that awkward. I removed my left hand from her back entirely, pulled my face away from hers slightly, kissed her cheek, then said, "Swing your legs around the other way, darling." I pushed her knees away with my right hand, to give her the idea. Carol quickly turned around, sideways on me again, this time with her legs out to my left. I put my right hand on her far shoulder just to hold her, then my left hand started pulling her T-shirt out of the front of her jeans. She looked down at my hand in disbelief at what was happening, then she immediately sucked in her belly to make it easier for me. We both knew I was about to rub her breasts, and she was helping me! If not for my ability to control my body, I'd be a nervous wreck by now, with messy underwear. Her T-shirt was soon loose, and I inserted my hand under it. I placed it on her belly, feeling it flutter in what I hoped was nervous excitement. I moved my hand back and forth, sideways across her tummy, staying below her breasts. She placed her arms around my shoulders and tightened them. Then she started kissing my cheek, over and over again, and making a soft groaning/moaning sound. I was looking down at where my left hand disappeared under her shirt. I stopped my hand when it was on her belly button, and then moved it slowly up toward her neck. It soon reached the center of her bra, then passed over it, putting my hand into her substantial cleavage. My fingers slid slowly north, rubbing the inside swells of both her breasts as they passed. Carol stiffened, sharply inhaled, and held her breath. But as my hand continued to slide upward, she exhaled and relaxed most of her tension. When my hand reached her neck, I slid it sideways toward her far shoulder, until I reached the bra strap. I moved my hand down her chest just a little, then inserted most of my hand under the strap. Carol didn't react to that, probably expecting me to keep moving my hand outward toward her shoulder, but that's not what I did. I had discovered from a delightful play session with Julia that I could easily enter the cup of her bra from the top, and this is what I intended to do with Carol. I moved my hand slowly down, inside her bra strap. It took Carol an inch or so of my slow sliding to realize that I intended my hand to go south. She couldn't help herself exclaiming, "Oh!" Neither of us wanted to risk ruining what was happening by speaking, so Carol quickly closed her mouth and I ignored her exclamation. I certainly wasn't going to take the time to pat myself on the back for judging her acceptance correctly. I kept sliding my hand slowly down. Within a few inches I encountered the top swell of that breast, and kept on moving down. Carol's heavier breathing meant I was trying to keep in contact with a moving target, but that was more than okay with me. I couldn't believe how good it felt to have the bulge of Carol's breast under my hand, as I kept sliding over more and more of it. Soon my hand was entirely on her breast, and what a WONDERFUL feeling that was! The only other breasts I have ever had my hand on were Julia's, and they easily fit within my hand. Carol's breast was much, much larger. I had a complete handful, and there was plenty left over. It was a wonderful, glorious, very sexy feeling. Carol thought so too, as her breaths were fast, shallow gasps. I continued moving my hand down, and very soon the edge of it contacted Carol's hard nipple, which drew a long groan from Carol. I moved my hand farther down, so her nipple 'bounced' from finger to finger at about the level that rings are worn, causing Carol to bite her lower lip to stop herself from groaning even louder. When my hand was entirely within her bra, I stopped moving it any farther south. I spent a few seconds enjoying the thrilling sensation of having such a wonderfully overflowing handful of breast. I lightly, rhythmically squeezed it, and moved my hand around a little, rubbing its peak. Then I moved my hand toward me a little, so I could grasp her nipple with my thumb and forefinger. I was surprised that Carol's nipple felt noticeably smaller than Julia's. Surprised, but still WAY over-the-moon delighted. I manipulated it in all the ways that Julia and I loved: squeezing, rolling, pulling and pushing. When I first squeezed her nipple, Carol jerked upright, held it for a second, and then slumped against my chest, abandoning herself entirely to the sensations my hand was giving her. I continued my nipple play, both of us enjoying ourselves immensely. This was an incredible turn-on for me. I couldn't believe how fantastic a handful of large breast felt, plus its being Carol's breast blew my mind. PLUS this meant that Carol's entire body was mine. I was more aroused than I've EVER been in my life. God knows how many times I would've blown off in my pants by now without the nonstop go-softs I was doing. Given how excited Carol obviously was by this 'hug', I suspected that I could get Carol off just by playing with the one nipple, but I didn't dare try to give her an orgasm. If she was anything close to being as loud as Julia, Mom and Dad would rush into my room to investigate, and then they'd kill me! So I enjoyed myself immensely for a couple of minutes, deliberately keeping to a slow pace while I planned what to do next. Carol was very happy. She was exhaling, "Oh Mark," and similar phrases, now believing that this really was happening to her. I had to stop it though. I'd already gotten her so worked up that stopping would be a cruel let down, but every second was making it worse. I very reluctantly gave her nipple a last squeeze, then pulled my hand out. All the way out, even out of her T-shirt. I put my arms around her and hugged her tight. It took Carol several seconds to summon the courage to look at me to ask, "You've stopped?" "Yes, sweetie." "Why?" For the last couple of minutes, as well as enjoying myself IMMENSELY, I'd been frantically trying to come up with what I could say to her. I couldn't just pretend that nothing had happened. Obviously the best way to proceed was build on what Julia had already been telling her. "I'm VERY pleased with you, Carol. EXTRAORDINARILY pleased with your devotion to me, your obedience, your beauty, certainly with your body, and more than anything else, with your love. But I know that there are going to be many girls who'll let me play with their bodies and will do much more than that for me. You've not yet proved yourself enough. You must do more than that to show me that you're good enough." I couldn't believe the crap I was spouting, but Julia did and Carol was. I'd intended to say that there'd be "thousands of girls", the way Julia had, but it was so ridiculous I couldn't bring myself to say more than "many girls". During her phone call to Carol, Julia had made a very big deal of there being unbelievable numbers of girls interested in me, so I knew there must be some important reason for Julia's claim. Personally I was still having trouble believing that one girl, Julia, was interested in me. That Carol was a second girl was still making my head spin. It was affecting other parts of my anatomy too. "Please. I want to. Please tell me how?" "What time are you coming to give me my backrub?" "What time do you want me to?" "Asking me is a good idea, but this time I want you to choose a time, sweetie. I could tell you exactly what to do but I want to find out if you can please me with your own decisions. This is a test, just as my playing with your nipple was a test - which you passed absolutely perfectly, by the way. You could not have done any better at all. You were perfect and I'm very pleased with you." #1: I could tell that, "I'm pleased with you," was going to be a phrase I'd be using on Carol very often. As Julia had said, Carol did need the positive feedback. Not to mention that she was currently pleasing me so much I was struggling not to mess my shorts! Carol was visibly delighted by my praise, so I laid it on even thicker. "I'm INCREDIBLY pleased with you, darling. You're fantastic. You make me so proud of you my heart is nearly bursting." Well, not my heart exactly, but the precise organ didn't matter. I tacked on an additional piece of praise, "Julia will also be extremely proud of you when I tell her." Carol asked in surprise, "You'll tell Julia?" "Of course." Julia had to be totally involved because I didn't understand ANYTHING about a girl unless Julia explained it to me first. I was going to need a lot of help with Carol to make sure I didn't mess things up. -- I didn't want to admit to overhearing Julia's phone call with Carol, and it'd probably be best if I didn't say anything that'd let Carol know that Julia and I had a plan for her, so I explained, "Julia's very interested in what I think of you and I think she'll be very pleased by your being so cooperative, especially because you were so enthusiastic about it. Julia and I are looking for someone to serve both of us, so Julia really does need to know because it's just as much her decision as mine." I couldn't resist adding, "And who knows, maybe she'll be so pleased by how much you liked it that she'll want to do the same thing to you." The major reason I'd had so much difficulty concentrating on my study earlier was because I couldn't stop thinking about the threesome sex that Julia had virtually promised me would be happening soon. If not for go-softs, I would've messed every pair of underwear I owned. Carol couldn't believe her ears. "What! You mean Julia would do what you just did?" "That's what I meant, yes. I enjoyed it, and maybe she would too." "But Julia's a GIRL!" After a brief pause, Carol thought she should add, "And so am I." Following Julia's lead to use sexual imagery, I said, "I've spent hours between Julia's legs, licking her pussy, drinking her pussy juices, and giving her dozens of orgasms, and from what I noticed when I was down there, I think you're probably right that Julia's a girl, haha. I haven't done that with you yet, but you certainly felt like a girl when I checked to make sure a minute ago. So I think you were definitely right that both of you are girls." I lightly stressed the "yet" when I mentioned my not going down on Carol, curious to see how she'd react to that. I think she missed it though because she asked, "But why would Julia want to do that to me? Girls aren't normally interested in girls, especially when she's got you instead." "I said that Julia MIGHT like to do that to you. I don't know for a fact. I do know that Julia's a very unusual girl, so maybe she's unusual that way too. I'm sure you can imagine that when I am alone with her and sex is on our mind, we spend our time exploring each other's bodies and giving each other as much pleasure as possible. When my cock is going in and out of her, it's never crossed my mind to stop to ask her whether she finds girls sexy or not. I'm far too busy making sure she finds one particular boy sexy. If Julia does have any interest in girls, I'm sure she'd be very interested in you. You're a very sexy girl, sweetie." "Really? You think I'm sexy?" #2: "I think you are a wonderful girl in many ways. That's why you're one of my top two favorite girls. Of course your personality is far more important than your sexiness, but I'd have to be blind and crazy not to think you're very sexy. But I don't want to talk about that too much or I'll have trouble getting back to my studying. I was talking about Julia. I don't know whether Julia has feelings like that for girls, but that doesn't matter at the moment. Because Julia is a girl though, you'll probably have to try even harder to please her, so you'd better listen very, very carefully to everything she tells you to do." "I'm trying my ABSOLUTE hardest now. I REALLY want you and Julia to like me." "I know you're trying hard, sweetie. Julia and I are both proud of you for it. But you do make mistakes sometimes. When I was cuddling you last night I thought about testing your attitude to me by touching your breast, but you ran away too quickly, before I had a chance. That was very disappointing to me." I had thought about playing with her breast, and had been too terrified to do anything about it. Carol could have sat in my lap all night and I wouldn't have dared touch it even from outside her shirt, let alone what I'd done with her a couple of minutes ago. Carol's face fell. She looked like she was about to cry as she begged, "I know, Julia told me. I am SO SORRY! I will never leave you too early again. I will always stay until you tell me you are finished. PLEASE believe me?" "I believe you, darling. After all, you sat still tonight and let me play with your body as much as I wanted. You passed that test perfectly, so I do believe you. Let's forget about last night's bad mistake. I am sure you won't repeat it." A much-relieved Carol gave me a happy smile. I hugged her tight and she hugged me back. Carol said, "I love you very, very much, Mark. I don't know how I can hold it in sometimes. I feel like exploding. I don't understand what's happening now. Julia says she'll help, umm. Julia says I can be your girlfriend, but I don't understand how that's possible. You talk about testing me, but why and what for? You're the nicest person I've ever met and I know you're special in very strange ways. I'll already do whatever you tell me, so why do I need to be tested?" Carol's question had initially had me worried about how to answer because I only had a vague idea of what Julia was doing, but Carol had talked long enough to give me time to come up with something I thought was a pretty good answer. I pretended to explain, "Finding girls who'll do what I and Julia tell them isn't that hard. Julia knows there are going to be quite a few of them soon. Obedience is a very important trait for us, but it's not the only trait. You're right that I am special in some mysterious ways, so another trait that's important is how well a girl can handle mystery. If a girl is obedient but very nosey, that'd be no good for us. We don't want someone who's going to stick her nose into places we don't want it. We want someone who respects other people's secrets because that's the sort of person who's also going to be good at keeping secrets herself. That's why Julia and I haven't explained to you what's going on. By keeping it a mystery, we're seeing how you react to mystery. Even the way we're testing you is a test. Do you understand?" "I think so, but it's very confusing. This isn't easy for me. I've been feeling very strong emotions that I've never felt before. Some of them are wonderful, but some are very scary or very confusing. I don't know what to think about your touching my breast so sexually. You've NEVER done anything like that before! I don't want to do anything wrong, but I don't know what to do?" Poor Carol. It was no wonder she couldn't make sense of it, because it didn't have any sense. It was literally a nonsense. What I was doing was mainly because I couldn't resist the sexual pleasure I was getting from her and had to think up some bullshit reasons to explain my actions. It'd also be good to ramp up Carol's excitement so she'd get the maximum enjoyment out of the culmination on Thursday, but it was my excitement that was most on my mind. Also my stupidity, as I stupidly hadn't asked Julia enough about what Julia was doing with Carol. I knew Julia was teasing Carol to find out how interested in me Carol was, and soon whether Carol was bisexual or not, but I didn't know what reason Julia was giving Carol, so I was having to guess my way through Carol's questions. It was no wonder Carol was getting frazzled. I didn't understand Julia's plan anywhere near well enough to be confident about not ruining it by telling Carol any of the truth, so the best I could do was try to ease Carol's worries. I said, "I know you don't, sweetie, and I apologize for that. Unfortunately that's part of the test so I can't really explain what's going on now. If I did Julia would see that you weren't confused anymore. I'm not supposed to tell you that part of the test is seeing how you handle not understanding what's going on. Please don't tell Julia I told you about that. I'm VERY eager for you to pass the tests so I'm helping you as much as I can, but I really shouldn't. It's just that I love you so much." I paused to give her a squeeze. I could see the reassurance was helping, 90% of the help coming from my last sentence. Logically speaking, the most reassuring statement should have been "I'm helping you." I'd heard Julia tell her the same thing, so between both of us each secretly helping her, there was no chance at all of Carol failing our tests. I guess girls prefer "I love you"-type reassurances over the logical variety. Carol brightened a little, replying with a heartfelt, "I love you too. I love you so much that it's too much for me sometimes." "I know, sweetie. It's very nice that someone I love so much, loves me back like that. If I'd known you loved me that much, I would've started feeling your breasts ten years ago." The idiocy of that statement (and perhaps me) lightened the mood a little. -- "Because I am so special, it's very important to Julia and me that we test you. I'm sorry I can't tell you why now, but I promise that you will understand later. I'm also sorry that you find the testing hard, but unfortunately it has to be. There'd be no point in using tests that every girl could pass. The only things I can say that might help is that it won't last long, and you shouldn't worry about the big picture. You don't know nearly enough to work it out, so it's not worth worrying about. -- "My advice is that you should just concentrate on the present without worrying about the future. Right now you're doing a very good job of being cuddly. I'm enjoying having my arms around you, and you seemed to have completely gotten past wanting to rush away after a minute or two. I'm very happy that you're doing so well. I'd like to talk with you about the next little test. Can you forget about everything else that confuses you and just concentrate on the backrub?" "Yes. I'll be okay, thanks. I'm very glad you love me." "I'm even gladder that YOU love ME!" I poked my tongue out at her, to remind her of our back-and-forth fake argument game. I didn't want to play the full version of it now, just wanted to get a smile from her, which I did. -- "I haven't given you specific instructions for the backrub. I only said, 'A backrub for at least thirty minutes some time tonight.' All the rest is up to you. It's important that Julia and I see that you're good at making decisions for yourself about how best to please us. For example, I was VERY pleased and surprised to see that you were learning to cook better. If I ordered you to cook me my favorite meal I wouldn't tell you how many potatoes or how much gravy, or details like that. I'd expect you to be able to decide things like that yourself. The same with the backrub. I want you to work out how to make me happy. Do you understand?" "Yes, but it makes me very nervous because there are so many things I could do wrong. I don't know how to decide what to do. Also, I don't know how to cook your favorite meal yet, but I am going to learn as fast as I can. Please don't ask me to do it yet. I'm not ready." "Don't worry about that. I've got Mom and Vanessa cooking for me these days, so that's very well covered now. Maybe in a year or so it might be an issue, but I shouldn't talk about that yet. There are other tests that are more relevant now. Let's concentrate on the backrub now. What time will you be coming to my room? If you need some time to think, I am perfectly happy sitting here, holding you until you're ready to tell me." I shut up, gave her a squeeze, and just waited. After a few seconds, Carol said, "I heard you say at dinner that you will be working late tonight on what Prof gave you. Would it be okay if I came quite late, about 11? Is that too late? You said you'd be working late." "Let's make it 11:30 just to play safe. I'm impressed that you listened to me at dinner, that you remembered what I said, and you considered that as part of you plan for tonight. Well done!" My praise visibly made Carol happy. During this conversation I'd been trying to work out how to justify the "testing" nonsense to Carol. One of the advantages of having several minds is that we can leave running the body to one of them, while the others concentrate solely on a specific task. In this case: thinking of a good answer to, "How the hell do we justify our testing to Carol?" #1 had arrived at a suitable excuse, and now was a good time to work it into the conversation. "I don't know how much Julia has told you about why we're testing you, but I'll tell you my reasons. Julia probably has other reasons, but these are mine. It's obvious to Julia and me that we're going to have EXTREMELY busy lives. I can easily do twice as much work as anyone else, as you've seen from my doing two grades per year for the last couple of years. Julia is also an amazingly busy girl. She keeps saying that I'm going to be a very important and powerful man, and with her helping me that could be true. -- "Julia and I have decided we want to find a girl to look after us. The easiest way of explaining her role would be to say that if we lived in our own house already, that girl would be our housewife, to look after and love us. Especially the loving part. That's much more important than cooking and stuff. We want to find that person as soon as possible because things are already happening very quickly. On my desk is a lot of college material Prof has me looking at, I've only got one more year of school left, and quite frankly I never know what Julia's going to do next. I think you're discovering for yourself how confusing Julia can be, aren't you?" Carol complained, "Julia AND you! I don't know ANYTHING about what's going on." "I'm sure you know one thing, darling: if it works out well, you could be very, very happy." "Umm, yeah. But I don't see how. I want to be your girlfriend but I can't." "Let me finish my explanation and you might get a better idea. As I said, Julia and I want someone to look after us. That's a lot trickier than just hiring someone to cook our meals and do the housework because of the special things there are about me. We need someone we can TOTALLY trust. Not just trust a little, but trust with our lives. That person will know very important things about me. We need someone who loves us and who'll never..." "That's ME! I'd NEVER tell anybody anything you didn't want me to, and I love you so much it hurts! PLEASE let me be that person?" "There's more, sweetie. That person would also have to love me AND be my lover. Could you do that?" It took Carol's stunned brain a couple of seconds to recover from the shock and to double-check its memory to confirm it'd really heard what it thought it'd heard. Then her face lit up, she squealed "YES!" and she launched herself at me. She was already in my lap, so in an instant her arms were around my neck and she was alternating kisses with begging: "Yes," kiss. "Please let me," kiss. "I can do it," kiss. I enjoyed the kisses while keeping an eye on the door in case someone came to investigate the squeal, something that was quite likely if they heard it because Carol isn't the squealing type. If Mom or Dad came in, I decided to tell them Carol had overreacted because of something to do with Julia saying how much she liked Carol. After several undisturbed seconds I decided that no one was coming. I pushed Carol back a bit so I could talk with her again. I said, "I don't know whether you've noticed or not, but Julia likes to be bossy?" "{Giggle}. Yeah, I noticed." "So whoever we choose can't be another bossy girl because that'd cause BIG trouble. The new girl has to be quietly obedient." "Julia's already been telling me how good I am at doing what she tells me." "Yes, I know. You fit that need of Julia's and mine very well, but there are a lot of other things we're looking for. As I said before, we don't want someone who's nosey. We also want someone who's discreet. Let's say some of your friends are saying bad things about me at school. We don't want you to get so worked up that you argued with them by saying, "Mark can run a marathon in a world-record time," or any other boasts like that. Whoever we pick will learn things about me which could cause a great deal of trouble if they were talked about." "I'd NEVER do anything like that. I don't want to get you in trouble. I LOVE you! And, {giggle}, your example wasn't very good. When girls talk about you, they say nice things about you. Some of them think you're dreamy." "Haha. They don't even know who I am!" "Donna and I have told them about you and how nice you treat us, and they've heard about how you came to Julia's rescue. They've seen you around and some of them have brothers or sisters in your classes. People talk about you quite often these days, Mark. I'm VERY proud of you!" #1: "I think you're obviously exaggerating, but thank you for your loyalty..." "I'm not exaggerating. Some of the girls in my class think you're very nice. They keep asking me if you're going to break up with Julia and things like that. Some of them want me to introduce them to you so they can flirt with you." "I don't want to get distracted by that topic, Carol. Not to mention that I won't be breaking up with Julia so none of it matters. Talking about your testing is more important so let's stick with that. I've got one more thing to say about what the tests are about. It's a little bit of bad news but mostly a great deal of good news. Julia and I are hoping to find someone fairly soon, to give us plenty of time to make sure they're exactly what we want before I finish school. That still gives us several months though, during which Julia is intending to check out many of her girlfriends, some of our classmates, etc." I made a mental note to make sure I told Julia about her having that intention. "Oh." Carol was very disappointed by that news. "That WAS our plan, but Julia and I are amazed when we think about you. We think the perfect girl might be right under my nose. Literally, at the moment, haha. That's why we're testing you first. We both think you're a wonderful person and I love you heaps. There's no doubt about how strong my feelings are for you." [[I have to interrupt because reviewing my memories of this makes me cringe with embarrassment. It's scary how much naïveté and self-delusion Carol and I had. Admittedly Julia had helped getting us to act on our self-delusions, but I can't really blame her for them, as Carol and I were desperately eager to run 'up the garden path' as fast as possible. Julia had plenty of her own self-delusions too. She was very naïve with her idea that we'd live happily ever after in an ideal status quo, with Julia being the chief organizer. The world isn't that obliging.]] -- "As Julia is getting to know you, she's appreciating and liking you more and more too. The emotions we all have are wonderful, so the only remaining questions are about things like can you keep secrets, are you obedient to Julia and me, and stuff like that. They're important, so the tests are important, but we're REALLY hoping you do well. I shouldn't be telling you all of this because it's kind of unfair to the other girls we were intending to test later, but I VERY MUCH want you to do well..." "Me too! I DESPERATELY want to be with you and Julia. I'll try my ABSOLUTE hardest and do anything you want. Just tell me and I'll do it. I can't do much, but I'll try very, very hard. Honest I will." "I know you will. That's one reason we're are so impressed by you. When you said you couldn't do much you reminded me of something that I should tell you. Julia and I know you're young at the moment. We all are, but our age isn't important. What Julia and I are talking about isn't something that we only want for a few months or a few years. We're not playing around, and we'd NEVER play around with you. This is a VERY long-term thing. At least for many years, and if it works well, it could and should last for the rest of our lives." "All our lives?" #1: #2: #1, #4: "Yep. When we get old enough to leave home in a few years, you, Julia and I will almost certainly all live in the same house, and that's how we'll live for the rest of our lives, for as long as each of us wants to be with the others. That's why we're not worried about your not being able to do much now, because we're thinking long term. I want to make sure you understand that this isn't merely a bit of fun. This is a serious, and hopefully a long-term decision. We want mutually loving relationships, not a part-time job. You need to be aware of that and give it a lot of thought." "I don't need to think about it at all! It sounds wonderful! I can't imagine anything I'd rather do than spend the rest of my life with you and Julia. That's a dream come true for me." #1: #2: "That's great to hear. I've said all I can about why we're testing you, so let me change the subject by talking about the backrub test. I want to suggest one thing. Okay?" "Of course. I'll do whatever you want. I'm want to do everything perfectly so I can live with you and Julia." "That's great. When you come back tonight, please don't wear jeans. Wear a dress or a skirt or something like that. I might want to rub your bare legs, because you have beautiful legs, just like every other part of your body. I might want to rub even higher than your legs, if you understand what I mean?" -- I interpreted Carol's blushing scarlet as indication that she understood, and her lack of protest meant I could carry on. "Jeans stop me from doing that. In fact, not just tonight, but as much as possible you should avoid wearing jeans when I might want to play with you. And you are so sexy, that could be almost any time." "I won't wear them near you again. I've already decided what to wear tonight, and it's not jeans. I'm sorry I'm wearing them now. Do you want me to take them off?" Her hands even reached for the button above her zipper. #4: #1: <"OUR girl." Don't be greedy! Didn't your mother ever tell you to share? Haha. She's certainly making it easy for us.> I stopped her, "Not now. Later tonight is fine. It would also be a good idea not to wear jeans when you're with Julia, in case she wants to touch you there too." I could see the sexual meaning missed Carol initially, and then it struck her, "Oh!" After a pause she added, "Really? Are you sure?" "No I'm not, but I mentioned it for a few reasons. First, so you understand that your role will be to do WHATEVER Julia or I want, even if that included things you'd never normally think of. Saying Julia might be interested in your body was a good way for me to shock you into realizing how big 'whatever' could be. -- "Second, whenever I've been making love to Julia the last thing I wanted to do was stop to ask her whether she wanted to make love to anyone else, male or female. So I don't know whether Julia thinks girls are sexy or not. But I have noticed that Julia seems very eager for you to pass our tests. Originally I thought it was just because she liked you so much, but lately I've begun to suspect that she might like you that way too. I could very easily be wrong about that, but I could be right too, so it's something you should think about. How would you feel about Julia wanting to kiss you or touch your body?" I watched Carol VERY closely! This was an answer that was going to have DRAMATIC effects on my sex-life. "I don't know. I've NEVER done anything like that before." It was probably wishful thinking on my part - because I was REALLY wishing for Carol to be enthusiastic about the idea - but I thought I might've detected a smile on the ends of her lips. Or perhaps not. In either event, Carol wasn't objecting so there was still hope. I thought it might be revealing to try some of Julia's sexual imagery tactic. "Julia and I sleep naked, sweetie, and when we're all in the same house at night you'll be sleeping in the same bed with us. So you're going to see us have sex very often. We get very carried away when we get turned on, and having someone as beautiful as you next to us is almost certainly going to mean that one of us won't be able to resist grabbing you. If Julia is lying on her side facing you, and I'm making love to her from behind, it's quite likely that Julia will get so aroused and amorous from all the sex I'm giving her from behind that she won't be able to stop herself from grabbing you and kissing you over and over again." "Oh." I was delighted to see that Carol was deliberately trying to picture that scene, and by the look on her face, she liked what she was imagining. I ramped up the image, "Or maybe she'd push your head down to make you suck on her nipples. She loves having her nipples sucked when I'm making love to her." "Oh. Umm." Carol couldn't decide what to follow the "umm" with, but I knew what I wanted to add. It was something I was particularly looking forward to happening. I said, "Or maybe she'd push your head down even farther, so you could lick my cock and Julia's pussy at the same time as I went in and out of her." "Oh God! Really?" With a look of delight on her face, very similar to how I imagine mine looks when I see a roast chicken. "You will be doing EVERYTHING one of us wants you to do, so that could easily happen. We love sex and are often very horny. Sometimes so horny we can't help ourselves. If we saw that you enjoyed doing things like that, then I'm sure we would get you to do them very often. I don't know whether you're aware of it or not, but I can tell by the look on your face that you're very excited by what I just described." "Ahh, umm, I'm not ... I don't know..." "If I got you to take your jeans off now, would your pussy be wet or dry? Or maybe VERY wet?" Carol was blushing and not wanting to admit her feelings, "Umm. I'm not sure." Shame was clearly written across her face. "There's another trait that's EXTREMELY important in whatever girl we pick, and that's honesty. You're normally a very honest girl, but this time you're not being honest. When you said, 'I'm not sure, ' you weren't telling the truth, were you?" Carol reluctantly admitted, "I'm sorry. It's so embarrassing..." I could tell that by the color of her face, and it suddenly reminded me about Julia's silly "Run naked around the block" tease, and what that had been intended to teach. I interrupted Carol. "I don't know how much you've talked to Julia about how she thinks of me so you may not know this, but Julia tells me over and over again that her only purpose in life is to serve me. She's very dramatic about it, but she definitely means it. She doesn't care about embarrassment or anything else. If I asked her to do something that should be embarrassing, I doubt she'd care at all. The ONLY thing she cares about is making me happy. Do you understand what I mean?" "I do! Julia's told me the same thing. She'd run around naked in public if you asked her to. She even said she'd be too busy being proud to be embarrassed." "So you understand what I mean, good. What answer do you think would make me happiest: your being dry, wet or very wet at the idea of my two favorite girls getting pleasure and happiness from each other?" Carol hung her head with shame, "Very wet." "Yes indeed. I think that's wonderful. The ONLY sad thing about your answer is that you're embarrassed about it. If I was having this conversation with Julia, she'd be celebrating that she'd found a new way to make me happy. Which, now that I think about it, probably makes it more likely that Julia will want to have sex with you, because she'll see that it makes me happy. -- "I know this is very new and confusing for you, and you aren't my girlfriend yet, so I'm not going to unfairly judge you. On the other hand, I would be very pleased if after some time to think about it, you stopped seeing it as something to be ashamed of and started seeing it as a good, loving, sharing thing. Can you imagine how wonderful it'd be if the three of us lived together and happily and enthusiastically loved each other in every way possible?" "I'm sorry, but this is all too much for me. I just want to be your girlfriend but you've told me so much I feel dizzy. You've said so much more than I dreamed, but I still don't know how I can even be your girlfriend." "I'm sorry, sweetie. I didn't mean to overwhelm you. My advice for you is not to worry about how any of this happens. Julia and I will arrange that. All you have to think about is doing as well as you can on each test. If you pass the tests, we'll do everything we can to make you my girlfriend as quickly as possible. Julia is VERY good at managing people so you can safely leave it to her." I desperately wanted to keep talking to Carol, to talk her into enthusiastically leaping at what I wanted. Not to mention the fact that I REALLY wanted to strip her naked and run my hands all over her body. I knew I had to give her time, but controlling myself was a bitch! I hated to do it, but I said, "Carol, darling, it's time you went back to your own room. I'll see you later tonight, provided you don't fall asleep and forget about me." I smiled to show I was teasing, but Carol was so frazzled she didn't pick up on that. "OH NO! I would NEVER do that! I..." I kissed her on the lips, which distracted her very well. Then I said, "I know you wouldn't, sweetie. I foolishly tried to tease you when you were overwhelmed, which was silly of me. Go back to your room and think about some of the things we've talked about, and when you come back tonight, please do the best possible job you can because I REALLY want to be able to pick you. I love you very, very much." I gave her a last squeeze of my hug, then removed my arms from around her and patted her ass a couple of times to prompt her to stand up. She did so, then turned and threw her arms around my neck again, and hugged me as tight as she could. She was almost sobbing when she pleaded, "Please pick me. I love you and Julia SO much. Please! I'd die without you." #1: "I really want to pick you too. Julia and I have to pick the best girl for the job. I will be a very important and very powerful man in the future, and Julia will be working right beside me, so it's essential that we have the most perfect person we can find to serve us. We both think you're lovely, loyal, caring, beautiful and wonderful in many other ways, but we still need someone who can prove she's totally obedient." I was quite proud of that last point. Obedience is easy to do, as it doesn't require anything other than following instructions. By giving Carol an easy-to-do thing to think about as she left, she'd be in a happier frame of mind. Plus I quite liked the idea of her doing whatever I wanted. Carol was very quick to insist, "That's me! I can be totally obedient. I can! I will do absolutely anything you want. You can ask anything. I will even take off all my clothes and run around our block for you." I was pretending not to know about her phone conversation with Julia, so I laughingly said, "Where on Earth did that idea come from? Why would I want you to run around the block naked?" "Julia said it might be a way for us to prove our loyalty and obedience to you." "Hmm. I don't think so. If I want you to prove your loyalty to me when other people can see, it won't be by making you run around naked." "It wouldn't?" I answered, "No. That's not nearly sexual enough. I would command you to do something much more sexual." I didn't have a clue what that'd be. I didn't even bother trying to think of anything because all I was doing was getting her attention so that when I said the second half she'd be very cheered up. (I was about to say, "But I have no doubts about your loyalty, Carol. That's one of the wonderful things about your being my sister and my knowing we love each other so much.") I'd paused after the first half, to let it scare Carol briefly. During that pause Carol had a frisson from whatever image that created in her mind. She shivered then gasped, "In public?" She had an excited look on her face, so I couldn't resist answering, "Yes, of course in public. I already know that you'll obediently carry out absolutely any sexual command I give you in private - WON'T YOU, Carol?" Carol gave more than a little shudder, looked down, then shamefully confessed, "Yes". "I could even tell Julia to strip naked, lie on her back, spread her legs, then order you to lick her pussy until she had an orgasm, couldn't I?" Carol clamped her legs together and bit her lower lip for several seconds. She was clearly enjoying a sexual rush. And I was hugely enjoying her rush too. Everything was going wonderfully! Eventually Carol answered, "Yes." "So if I wanted you to prove your total obedience to me, it would have to be very sexual and IN PUBLIC, wouldn't it?" "Ohh..." Whatever Carol was imagining was obviously turning her on a great deal. "If I asked you to take your jeans off now, what would your pussy be like?" "Very wet." "Good for you, for admitting it so quickly. My opinion of you keeps getting better and better..." #4: " ... I can't see how it's possible for you to fail our tests, provided you keep trying your best. I think 'your best' is exactly what we're looking for." "Oh, I HOPE so. I don't know how you can make Mom and Dad agree, but I want what you said very, very much." I didn't know how to make Mom and Dad agree either, so I hoped it wouldn't come up for a long time. In ten years would be good. Twenty would be better. "By the look on your face now, I think you might be too sexually excited to think clearly. I want you to pass the backrub test later, so I suggest you go back to your room and masturbate yourself." "Ahh." "Yes, sweetie?" "Umm, I've been doing that a lot the last couple of days. Julia tells me things that get me very excited." #1: #4: #2: "Do you think about me and you doing things together when you're playing with yourself?" Carol's shade of red deepened as she shyly admitted, "Yeah. Sorry." "There's absolutely no need to be sorry. I'm glad I bring you so much pleasure. This time I don't want you to think about me though." I paused just long enough for Carol to start to worry, then added, "I want you to think about me, you AND Julia." "Ohh!" Carol was so flustered she didn't even try to hide that my suggestion excited her. Excellent! Remembering that Julia had said that Carol liked to follow orders - and that certainly seemed to be proving the case this evening - I added, "Imagine that the three of us are naked, and Julia and I are ordering you to do a whole list of very, very sexual things for us." "OHH!" Carol was starting to grind her legs together in an obviously sexual way. I was momentarily distracted by the thought that I wished I could give myself sexual stimulation just by squeezing my legs together. I pushed Carol upright, saying, "In your room, darling. It's probably a bit early to risk Mom popping her head in the door to ask me something, and her seeing you in the middle of a climax." I pushed her out the door. Leaving her to her own devices after that, while I went to the kitchen for a drink. I didn't know how loud Carol's orgasms were, but if they were anything like Julia's I wanted to be in the kitchen or living room so Mom and Dad would see that I was totally innocent. I got myself a snack and chatted with Mom about the college material for several minutes. There were no sonic booms or sounds like 747s taking off, so Carol either hadn't climaxed - which I very much doubted given the mood I'd left her in and Donna being in the living room - or Carol was a GREAT deal quieter than Julia. I ran out of easy conversation, so I went back to my room. It was SO GOOD to finally stop the go-softs! My cock went from artificially limp to rock hard so fast it almost caused a sonic boom of its own. I would write that, "I jacked myself off," except that'd be misleading because I blew off almost the instant my hand touched my cock - no "jack" required. I'd barely started thinking about the first of the many new fantasies I had so I jacked myself off again. And again. Did they EVER feel good! ------- Chapter 37: Carol Gives Me a Backrub Sunday, April 10, 2005 (Continued) I wiped my hands and sent a text message to Julia, saying "Rub starts at 11:30 so you can call before. Had long talk with Carol, looks v good for 3 at once. I love and impressed by you. Great future ahead at this end, hope all well your end?" About ten minutes later Julia called back. She explained that her family were still discussing the issue, but accepted the major elements of the plan. They were mainly discussing minor details. I was ENORMOUSLY relieved, but had to double-check, "You mean they're happy with Carol and me having sex in their home?" "Not happy, but they've agreed to it. They're very worried about your parents not knowing, but the genetic logic is hard to argue with. Once my parents make a decision they do their best by it, so they'll support you and Carol properly. Mom almost cried when I described my ideas for our three-way wedding. She's very enthusiastic to help prepare that. She and I are going to have a busy next few days." "What about their daughter having three-way sex? I thought that'd cause all sorts of problems." "I knew they wouldn't get upset about bisexual sex, and I didn't think they'd object to our threesome. I tried to be very determined but they caved in so quickly they robbed me of the fun of getting explicit on them. They've agreed to get a bigger bed for delivery during the day on Thursday, so they're fine with it. Mom thinks it's such a good idea she probably would've gently suggested it to me anyway. It's obviously the best way to make sure the three of us bond well and that our relationship works without barriers. Mom said it was 'Open and honest in every direction and manner.' I wasn't going to give them a choice, but they didn't need one. -- "There's one main thing that worries them: they're very uncomfortable about deceiving your parents. I haven't even hinted at your TK, but if you showed it to them it'd go a long way toward convincing them that the genetic possibility is even more important than they think now. It'd make them feel a lot better about their decision to support you." "I'd be surprised if I didn't end up showing it to your father sooner or later anyway, so we might as well make it sooner. And it seems to me that it wouldn't be right not to include your mother, unless you think it'd be okay to show one without the other? "No, please show them both. I'd be very uncomfortable asking Dad to keep something that important from Mom, especially as it's an important reason for why we're doing the things we are." "That's what I thought. I'm happy to show them both, although I do think your mom owes me some more roast chicken dinners for it, haha. I'm not so happy about showing your brothers though, sorry. I hardly known them, and it's a big secret to trust them with." "Don't worry about them. I'm very happy that you're showing Mom and Dad. Thanks very much for that. I know it'll blow their minds, and it'll make a huge difference to how they see you. At the moment they think you're just a top quality human in several areas, but that puts you straight into the superhuman category, which blows away worrying about many of the usual rules. -- "Superhuman is UNBELIEVABLE, Mark. You seem so casual about it, but it's the most incredible thing I have EVER heard of, let alone been right in the middle of! Mom and Dad will think the same. The idea of you and Carol having babies will be irresistible to them. I wouldn't be surprised if oysters were on the menu every night you and Carol are over here for dinner, haha. -- "My brothers were included in the family discussion, so they know everything that Mom and Dad know so far, including why Mom and Dad are uncomfortable with their decision. After you show your TK to Mom and Dad, what I'm sure will happen is that they'll tell The Boys that something else came up which completely confirmed their decision, but there's a good reason not to tell The Boys what it is. Andrew and Robert will respect that. By the way, they're amazed at what their little sister is doing. Their teenage years were NOTHING like mine are turning into, haha. -- "After we hang up I'll tell just Mom and Dad that you have a superhuman ability. Not what it is, but that you've agreed to show it to them after the ceremony. That's because I want to tell Carol that she's the second person after me to know about it. Mom and Dad knowing that you have a superhuman ability will be enough for me to relieve their worries until the ceremony, and after that they'll be blown away by you. -- "With your agreeing to a TK demonstration, it'll be an easy sell at this end. They're already okay with my three-way marriage idea, so TK will make them want to stand behind you when you're having sex with Carol, so they can cheer you on, haha. You say everything's good at your end?" I quickly outlined the latest developments with Carol: Her getting cooking lessons from Mom. Her exercising, to be "beautiful, healthy and fit". Her sitting on my lap in my room. My loosening her T-shirt and her assistance by sucking in her tummy. My rubbing Carol's breast and our delight at my playing with her nipple. My invented justification for our testing Carol. Julia said, "Good. I'll stay consistent with that." Carol's sexual orientation being mostly me, but definitely could include Julia. Reading between the lines, Carol's sexual horizons seemed to widen when being ordered to do things or doing things in public. I couldn't resist explaining the last point in more detail (I quite enjoy thinking about sex), "I suggested to Carol that she shouldn't wear jeans around me in the future, only dresses or skirts, so I could run my hand all the way to the top of her legs. She easily agreed to that. Then I added that you might want to feel up Carol's legs too, so it'll be interesting to see how she dresses around you in the future. I've a feeling you won't be seeing any jeans. Later I got her to confirm that she'd perform whatever sexual activity I order her to do in private, including getting you off by licking your pussy. By then Carol was very turned on by our discussion and I could see she liked the idea of doing that. I'm pretty sure she'll be agreeable to having sex with you during your sleepover on Wednesday." Julia said, "Good. I like the idea of the three of us being that close." "Imagine how I feel!" "Haha. Would 'happy' be a good guess?" "I think you undershot the mark, AND the anderson, that's how bad a shot you are." "That's such a bad joke, it's ALMOST funny." "Unlike the rest of my jokes then. I've got a small question to ask you and changing the subject seems like a good idea. When I was talking to Carol about our justification I followed your lead by talking about dozens of girls being interested in me, but I didn't understand why. On the phone with her you talked about ridiculous numbers of girls. What was up with that?" "You don't realize how good your reputation is, Mark. You're the smartest person at school by such a wide margin there's no competition. People can tell by the way you move that you're athletic and you don't wear glasses so you don't look even slightly geeky. -- "Lastly, you're NICE. You're NEVER rude or impolite to anyone, and I can't recall you ever doing or being involved in anything unpleasant all year, which is unusual because most guys get carried away sometimes, especially the ones who are trying to get girls' attention. But most important, you're always attentive and respectful toward me. Other girls naturally pay a lot of attention to how a guy treats his girlfriend when they're thinking about that guy's desirability as their boyfriend. -- "You're not interested in the sluts that hit on you. Every girl at school knows you not only refused to 'respond' to Annette Neumeyer, but you shot her down. Any girl who has got half a brain - which is most of them when it comes to letting a boy get close - knows you'd be a very good catch. I predict there'll be more girls coming to your soccer games after your cast comes off because they'll be checking you out now that word about you has spread so widely, especially after you cleverly and bravely used your phone to draw Carlo Brown off me. You had no way of defending yourself with only one arm, but you didn't hesitate to step in to protect me." (Carlo Brown is Biff#4.) -- "If I'd told Carol two years ago that hundreds of girls were interested in you, she would've laughed in my face. I've been saying that to her recently and she's never demurred. Not just because of her own feelings either. She's heard enough girls talking about you to believe it. -- "As much as I'd like to keep telling you how wonderful you are and how lucky I am, I should get back to my parents so I can tell them about your special ability and discuss the consequences. Plus Mom and I have an ENORMOUS amount of wedding planning to do, so I probably won't call you again tonight. Have fun with Carol, but not too much fun please because I'd very much like to save that for Thursday." "I'll behave myself, darling. Or to be more accurate, I won't misbehave too much. Can I quickly ask you something please. You don't sound the slightest bit jealous. You even sound happy. At school I thought you were going to claw the eyes out of some of the girls who've stupidly tried to come on to me. How come you've changed so much?" "Many reasons. The main one is that jealousy is when the person wants to hang on to something for themselves. I don't think I'm losing you. I'm gaining Carol and helping you, so I'm happy. Especially because I know you'll be VERY happy. My family is waiting for me and there's no urgency to talk about my non-jealousy. I'll talk with you tomorrow. Goodnight, love." I decided a shower would be a good idea. I enjoyed jacking myself off during it too, as I still had a LONG list of Carol and Julia fantasies that I hadn't used yet. After showering I dressed myself in clean underwear, a T-shirt and tracksuit pants. I made myself a snack, and then worked - with steadily decreasing concentration - until 10pm, when I heard my parents go to bed. Thereafter I had almost no concentration at all. At 11pm it was time to change which mind was on duty, but we had a mutiny! The mind whose turn it was - amusingly #4 - expressed considerable reluctance to ignore the next hour's events. You can probably guess how many of my other minds were willing to swap duties with him. After teasing #4 a little, we agreed that just this once it'd be fine to have no mind on centering duty. ------- At 11:30 exactly (promptness, a good trait in a serving girl), there was a faint knock on the door, and Carol quietly opened my door and equally quietly shut it behind her (discretion, another good trait). The T-shirt she was wearing clearly showed two hard nipples. The sexual excitement they advertised was another good trait (and the nipples themselves were looking promising too). Already Carol had more than enough good traits to be offered the job, and she'd been in my room for barely a second. From the conversation I'd overheard between Julia and Carol, I knew that Carol should be going completely commando under her T-shirt. That she was not wearing a bra was wonderfully obvious. Her large, unrestrained breasts were pushing the T-shirt out from her torso a considerable distance, with her small but delightfully erect nipples proudly declaring, "Look, no bra!" Carol's T-shirt was not a long one, so it covered her crotch and only a couple of inches more. I knew that some very interesting parts of her were going to be uncovered whenever she bent over to massage me. Given that she was going to be bending over the entire time, it was going to be very easy for me to confirm that Carol had followed the rest of Julia's lack-of-clothing advice. This was going to be a GREAT night, although I was worried about how great to make it. I had already decided on the first thing to do though, assuming that Carol was as eager as she'd been when she'd left. I had previously noted how well sexual imagery worked on Carol (on me too, come to that), and I had thought up a good one to use. As Carol was entering my room and shutting the door behind her, I'd closed my books, put down my pen, and stood up. She closed the door behind her then turned to face me, with a nervous, excited look on her face. I walked the few steps required to reach her, then raised both my hands and simultaneously pinched both her nipples between each thumb and forefinger, giving them a few little squeezes and rolling them gently. I said, "Good. I'm glad to see that you're sexually excited at the thought of seeing my body. That'll make your job as our serving girl more enjoyable to you." Poor Carol hadn't expected to be touched so intimately so quickly. Her breathing got ragged, and I could see her legs shake. She stammered, "Wh ... Why?" "Part of your duties will be to serve Julia and me with our meals. We make love a great deal and for some of our meals we'll be too busy having sex to come to the table, so you'll have to bring our meals to us. When you do so you'll see me fucking her, maybe her underneath me and me thrusting my cock in and out of her. Maybe her on top of me, with her bouncing up and down on my cock, with her breasts bouncing up and down in rhythm with her movements. Maybe I'll be kneeling between her knees licking her pussy. I LOVE licking her pussy because she tastes delicious. You'll discover that for yourself if she ever orders you to lick her pussy." "{Gasp}." "Julia loves having her pussy licked, and I can always bring her to a climax by licking and fingering her. Or maybe I'll be lying down, and she'll be sucking my cock. We do that sometimes, although I prefer to lick her because her pussy is so delicious. Another thing we do sometimes is for her to be lying face down on the bed with her belly on two pillows to hold her lovely ass up in the air, so I can fuck her in her asshole." "{Gasp}. In her ... bottom?" Julia had already given Carol highly complimentary and PRECISE details of everything we'd done. Carol wasn't surprised by what I was saying, but needed to stall for time to recover from the suddenness of my sexual imagery assault. "Absolutely, Julia loves that sometimes. She says I'm an incredibly good lover, the best in the world she insists, and she loves me to fuck her every way we can think of. And I think she is very sexy too, so I love to fuck her as often as possible, often for several hours." Poor Carol. I almost felt sorry for her, especially as my hands were still playing with her breasts. I was enjoying myself immensely, sometimes indulging in stimulating her nipples, or something that was a new experience for me, cupping a breast in my hand so I could feel how heavy it was, while still being able to flick her nipples with my thumbs. I was enjoying their "heft" (that word seems so perfect for what I was doing, and Carol's breasts had a fantastic amount of "heft"). Carol was getting more and more flustered. During my story she'd blindly reached backward with both of her hands to find the door handle, then grasped it and put most of her weight on it. That was the only way she could hold herself up. I didn't mind, as it caused her breasts to be pushed out and made even more available. She made a groaning sound, which was music to my ears. I went in for the kill, "So imagine it's breakfast time, and you've brought our breakfast to our bedroom, only to discover that we are making love yet again, as we so often will be. We don't want our breakfast to be ruined by leaving it to sit beside the bed, maybe for hours, and we do need our food because we make love very vigorously, so obviously you'll have to feed us while we're making love." "Oh." I didn't think Carol would know what the "69 position" was, so I continued with, "Imagine Julia is lying on her back, and I am positioned so my knees are either side of her head. She will be sucking my cock, and I will have my head between her legs licking her pussy. Julia and I like that position, so we do it quite often. When Julia needs to be fed, I won't be able to help you as my face will be buried between her legs, licking and sucking, nibbling, rubbing, drinking, flicking, and just being very busy giving her as much sexual stimulation as possible. -- "Julia loves me doing those things to her and she bucks her hips like a wild horse, so I have to wrap both my arms tightly around her upper-thighs in order to hang on, otherwise she bucks me off. That also means I can use the fingers of one hand on her pussy, penetrating in and out of her cunt, or rubbing her clit, or lots of other things. And I can use my other hand to thrust fingers in and out of her asshole. So you can imagine that I cannot help you feed Julia because I'll be far too busy." I doubted Carol could understand very much at all now, judging by the very glazed look on her face. "Julia's mouth will also be extremely busy sucking and licking my cock, moving from the very end of my cock, and swallowing more and more of it until it's entirely in her mouth and down her throat, then pulling back until she is only sucking the very end of it. Maybe she'll even be pulling her mouth entirely off, so she can lick it up its sides, or to lick my balls, leaving my very wet cock waving in the breeze temporarily. Her hands will be busy playing with my cock, lightly rubbing my balls and fingering my asshole too, maybe thrusting fingers into my asshole, exactly as I do to her." "Oh, oh, oh." Carol's legs were having considerably trouble holding her up now. They were quivering, half failing, then she'd force herself upright again. I started the coup de grâce, "So when you will be feeding Julia, often my cock will be in her mouth. You'll have to sit very close to Julia's head, with your face very close to where my cock is going into and out of her mouth. That way you'll be able to see clearly when to take hold of my cock to pull it to one side while you feed Julia a spoonful of food with your other hand. Then when she has swallowed her food, you can put my cock back in her mouth. "I ... I'd touch you?" "Certainly. You'll be my serving girl, so you'll have to serve me in every possible way. It can be quite a disappointment for me if my cock suddenly gets no action once I'm very excited, so when you're holding it while Julia is swallowing her food, you'll probably have to rub your hand up and down it to keep me stimulated. And if my cock dries out too much you'll have to put it in your mouth to suck it and lick it so it stays nice and wet until Julia is ready. Now you understand why I said it was good that you're sexually excited by me." "Oh, Oh, Oh." Carol's legs were wobbling badly, and she was having trouble holding herself up. I also noticed that the question about whether she was wearing panties was now answered, as I could see pussy juice running down her leg. The smell was very noticeably too. Carol must have decided she needed to have a seat, as she slumped to the floor. I helped by supporting the considerable weight of her breasts. Unfortunately Carol crumbled demurely, so I didn't get to see where the pussy juice running down her leg was coming from. Never mind, there was no doubt I would be later. I bent over to whisper in Carol's ear, "You smell wonderful, darling." She got it immediately, "Oh no!" Carol looked uncomfortable about it, so I added, "I LOVE the smell of your pussy juice, and I'm EXTREMELY happy that I excite you so much. Remember, your job is to make me happy, and you're doing it fantastically well so far." I left her to think about that while I went to my bed to turn the bedside light on. I angled it to point at the wall, so the atmosphere would be as "romantic" as possible, although I wasn't sure that what was happening could be called "romance". Then I went back to the door to turn the room's main light off. I said to Carol, "Take your time, and when you're ready we'll start my backrub." I pulled off my T-shirt on the way to my bed, then I lay face down on the bed, waiting for her. While I was waiting I chuckled to myself over the "Serving Food While Julia And I Fucked" tease. I was proud of that one, and was looking forward to describing it to Julia. I reached down and rearranged my cock, to make room for its rapid growth. I'd been using go-softs so far, but it was okay to relax that while I was face down on the bed. I'd decided that this session would be about turning Carol on physically and mentally. It would be best NOT to allow my physical desire to rear its ugly head (so to speak). If I got her to start pleasuring me sexually, it'd be impossible for me to stop short of making love to her, probably all night long, or until Mom or Dad came to investigate the noise. It'd be best to hold a very firm line about not allowing mutual sex acts to happen. Carol still hadn't found the will to rise yet. She was just sitting there, breathing heavily. So I waited some more. I tried to think of other things to do to her, but I think I had to let her set the pace for a while, if only to give her time to recover. In another minute or so, Carol climbed to her feet, and made her way over to me. I turned my head to watch her, and I could see that she was struggling physically and emotionally. It'd been too much, too fast. I felt a little guilty and sorry for her. I started doing a go-soft while I patted the side of my bed, saying, "Sit here for a minute's rest, Carol." She seemed happy at that idea, sitting where I'd indicated. By then I was soft enough that my tracksuit pants would hide what was left of my erection, so I rolled over and reached for her hand. "I love you very much, Carol. You're an incredible woman and I'm amazed by how much you care for Julia and me, and how hard you're trying. So take your time to rest and recover. I realize that was quite intense for you and I don't want you to rush yourself. Take as long as you need before you start. I'll just lie here, holding your hand, thinking very nice thoughts about you." Carol made to respond, but I squeezed her hand and interrupted her, "There's no need to talk, honey. I know you love Julia and me. You don't need to speak, just rest. It's important to me that you do well tonight, and I don't want you to start until you're ready to do your best. Do you want to lie down beside me, so we can cuddle until you're ready?" Carol liked that idea, so we lay down and spooned. I was a good boy, wrapping my arms around non-sexual places and just holding her. I was fully aware that it would've been trivially easy for me to place my hand over her breasts again or move my hand to her upper-thigh and push her T-shirt up enough for me to reach her pussy. I thought about doing those things, but only to enjoy the thoughts. I had no intention of doing them now; there was plenty of time for them later. Maybe tonight, maybe another day. Thursday, our wedding day, was only four days away. I could feel her heartbeat racing, but it slowed over the next few minutes, until Carol said, "I'm ready." I answered, "I am almost sorry. I like holding you very much." "I like it very much too, but I have to give you a backrub." Carol pushed herself to her feet, and I rolled onto my stomach. #1: Carol grasped my near side arm (my right), and stretched it out flat on the bed, just out from my body. Then she started massaging the palm of my hand. The way her thumbs felt digging into and rubbing along my palm was surprisingly pleasant. I was quite impressed, not that it mattered as there was no way she was going to fail this test no matter how bad she was. How good it felt was a nice bonus though. Carol asked me, "Do you mind if I take more than thirty minutes please? I'd like to do as good a job as I can, and it might take longer." "You can take as long as you want: forty five minutes, an hour, two hours. Any length of time is fine with me. I want you to do the best you can, so rushing it wouldn't be a good idea. I'm already enjoying myself because you're good at this, so the longer the better." "You already like what I'm doing?" "Yes. I'm surprised how nice my palm feels with you massaging it like that." "Good. Donna said this felt nice too. You know I can't do this arm properly because of your cast, but I will do the best I can." "Of course the cast makes it harder for you. Don't worry about that, it certainly isn't your fault." "Thank you." I just put my head back on my pillow, and let her carry on. She did a very good job on my hand: some more on my palm, my fingers individually (which also felt nice), and the back of the hand (which was okay), then she jumped the cast and moved to my upper-arm. Unfortunately she wasn't nearly as good with that area, but I didn't really care. In all honesty, I was far more interested in what I could do to her body than she to mine. And regardless of who was doing what, upper-arms didn't figure highly in my list of priorities. After finishing my right arm, Carol placed it gently on the bed, then moved to the other side of my bed and repeated the hand massage on my left. It felt just as good. I already knew that one of my future commands to her was going to be for more of these hand massages. She then moved up my arm, and started massaging my forearm and upper-arm. She could do much longer strokes on this arm, and the result was much more pleasant. I had turned my head to continue to watch her when she changed sides, as it was a great pleasure to watch her large breasts and still erect nipples. Her arm movements made them wobble in an extremely delightful fashion. Watching her on this side was even better, as she put quite a lot more movement into her massage. Then Carol used a technique she hadn't tried on the right side: she lifted my arm, sat on the edge of the bed with the bedside knee raised so its upper-leg was on the bed, while the other leg stayed off the bed. She laid my arm on her lap to give her a good angle on massaging my forearm. The way she was sitting gave me a view straight up between her legs. I think she was so intent on doing a good job of massaging me that she didn't notice. I noticed all right though! It was a very nice pussy. Much whiter and pinker than Julia's, and Carol's blond hair was much sparser than Julia's dark hair so I got a very good view. Her lips were engorged and her pussy was slick with moisture. She wasn't dripping anymore, but she still looked mighty fine to me. I couldn't wait to get my face in there! After five minutes on my arm, Carol removed my view by standing, and did another five minutes from a different angle. It was nice. Not as great, but nice. When Carol finished that arm, she placed it gently beside me, and said, "Darling, I would like to do your legs too. Is that okay with you?" "That would be wonderful. Especially if you can do as good a job as you did on my arms." "I am glad you're enjoying this." Was I ever! "I could do a better job on your legs if we took your pants off. Is that all right?" It was considerably more than all right, so I said, "It's wonderful. I'll just raise my hips because I am too relaxed to get up. You pull them down, okay?" "Yes. I'm glad you're relaxed." I was also hard, so I had to make sure my pants didn't snag on any masculine protuberances. Carol took hold of my waistband at each hip, I raised myself a few inches, and she pulled my pants down. I was somewhat disappointed that my underwear remained in place, and I imagined Carol was too. When my hips were clear I lowered my protuberance back onto the bed. Carol completed the removal process over each knee and ankle. Carol folded my pants up and put them on my chair, picked up my shirt from the floor where I'd dropped it and did the same with it. More bonus points were awarded to my potential servant; not that she needed bonus points, but I could compliment her on doing so later to make her feel better about herself. Unfortunately she'd been side on to me when she'd bent to pick up my shirt, so I hadn't gotten as much view as I wanted, but good things come to those who wait and who have Julia working for them. Carol repeated her palm massaging techniques on the underside of my right foot. It wasn't as effective there but still felt nice. Sadly I couldn't watch her, as she was standing right behind me and it strained my neck a bit much to turn my head so far. So I just closed my eyes and relaxed, enjoying the massage's sensations. After massaging my foot thoroughly, Carol moved on to my calf, then progressively higher up my leg. I wondered how far up my leg she would go. Would she touch me between my legs? As she got higher she moved my legs farther apart, in order to make room for a hand between my legs. Once she got above mid-thigh, it started feeling very sexual. She stroked higher and higher, until she was stopping JUST short. After half a dozen strokes that didn't rise any farther, I think she summoned up courage because the next stroke went all the way to the top, and I felt her hand pressed up against my underwear, rubbing the area between my balls and asshole. It felt REALLY nice. This was a development that I definitely wanted to encourage, so I said, "Mmm, that feels fantastic." "You really like it?" "Really, truly, and a lot. You are doing a marvelous job. I feel wonderful." She didn't say anything. My eyes were shut, but I swear I could detect her happiness. I could certainly detect mine. Carol stroked up and down my leg several more times, always right to the top. Then she started doing horizontal strokes around my thigh, starting just above the knee, giving a couple of horizontal rubs, then moving a little 'north', and repeating. When she had worked her way up to the very top of my thigh, her horizontal rubs suddenly became far more enjoyable. The inside hand was rubbing against my underwear from asshole to balls. I wasn't sure whether she was doing it for her pleasure or mine, but I didn't care either way. My saying, "Mmm, that feels fantastic" might have been the explanation why this part of my thigh apparently needed a dozen horizontal rubs, compared with everywhere else's two. I was almost sorry that she eventually moved to my other leg, although I was cheered up by the fact that it had an upper-thigh too. After massaging that leg's foot, Carol slowly moved north. Because my legs were spread now, it was most convenient for her to straddle my leg as she slowly worked her way north. When she finally performed her first horizontal rubbing of my upper-thigh, I gave her yet more encouragement, "This is wonderful, darling." That earned me over two dozen horizontal rubbings of my upper-thigh, the last few of which were much more like gropings, to which she was more than welcome. Unfortunately, but probably for the best, my cock was pointing directly upward under my stomach, so it was out of her reach. All good things must come to an end. Carol slid her legs forward, until her right knee was fairly well lodged between my legs just below my crotch, and her left was against the outside of my left leg. She leaned forward and started rubbing my back, in accordance with the ostensible reason for her visit, ha-ha. The backrub was nice, but somewhat disappointing after the sexually stimulating upper-thigh rubs. It wasn't as restful either because Carol started talking, "I couldn't see you properly in the hot tub because Julia was sitting on you, and you grabbed a towel too quickly when you got out. Now I can see that you've got a REALLY good physique, and I can feel your muscles too. How did your body get so good since last summer?" I gave Carol the same vague answer I'd given Donna, and then pleaded my being relaxed as a reason to drop the conversation. Carol agreed with, "Okay, but I'm amazed by your build. Julia is very lucky to have you." Even with the talking, the massage was still lovely, and I enjoyed the pressure of Carol's body sitting on my upper-leg. Every time her rubbing reached my shoulders she had to raise herself and lean forward at quite an angle, but as her hands descended she sat back down. I liked the thought of her bare pussy making repeated contact with the back of my thigh. I couldn't feel it very well as the back of my thigh wasn't sensitive enough, but I could feel some of her soft hair and a little moisture. After several strokes Carol discovered that rather than raising herself to reach my upper-back, she could reach just by tilting forward then sliding a little, which stimulated her clit and immediately became her new style. I soon felt her pussy moisten up and I loved the idea of my sister getting thrills on my leg. It was depraved and perverted, and therefore very exciting. After five minutes or so I felt her hips motions get even stronger. As well as her tilting forward and then upright as she slid her hands up and down my back, her hips started rocking forward and back. She was deliberately rubbing her pussy against my leg in a totally unnecessary - for MY massage - motion. This was even more depraved, so I liked it even more. Carol started making little rhythmic humming sounds, in sync with her forward and backward thrusts, and the amount of moisture on my leg increased rapidly. My leg under her was wet, her hand movements becoming weaker, and failing to reach all the way to my shoulders. Then not even to my shoulder blades. Soon her hands were stationary on the small of my back, just supporting her weight while she humped my leg. I lay still, enjoying myself and feeling her enjoying herself more and more. She was definitely working her way toward an orgasm, which I thought was great. It didn't take Carol very long at all to start making groaning sounds. I realized that I might have to roll over to grab her mouth if she started becoming too loud, so I started a much-needed go-soft. Carol managed to keep about a hundred decibels quieter than Julia all the way through. Even during her climax she was quiet enough that no one outside of my room would've heard. [Much later I got a chance to ask her about being so quiet during climaxes. Her answer: "I share my room."] I'd really enjoyed her frantic hip movements at the end, her hissing groans, and her slumping onto me when she'd finished. I'd lain still while she was doing it because I hadn't wanted to distract her, and I was lying still now because I was enjoying the feeling of her body lying on top of mine while she rested. ------- Chapter 38: I Give Carol Much More Than a Backrub Sunday, April 10, 2005 (Continued) Everything was good with the world, until Carol suddenly sat up with an anguished cry of, "Oh, NO!" She burst into tears, sobbing repeated, "Oh nos." I'd only ever seen one other girl orgasm before, but I was pretty sure this wasn't normal. Fortunately I was currently soft, so I was able to twist around. The leg she had pinned was well lubricated, so easily rotated. I sat up and put my arms around her, and wished my underwear had a pocket with a hanky in it. "What's wrong, sweetie?" "{Sob}. I've failed you. {Sob}." #1: After a dozen semi-coherently answered questions, I was able to work out that Carol was upset because she thought she'd failed the backrub test by getting rather spectacularly distracted. As soon as I managed put that together I said, "You had two jobs here tonight, Carol: to give me a backrub and to make me happy. When you walked into the room I twiddled your nipples so much you had to sit on the floor for a couple of minutes. That delayed my massage, but I did it because I enjoyed it so much. What you just did delayed my massage by another couple of minutes, and I enjoyed that too." -- As often happens with me, one of my non-speaking minds thought of a better way of wording it. I changed tack a little. "Carol, what do you think made me the happiest: having my back rubbed, or seeing my sister who I love very much get so excited that she had a wonderful orgasm?" Carol was still sobbing and sniffing somewhat, so I had to repeat myself and prod her into answering, but she finally said, "You didn't mind?" "I enjoyed it and it made me happy. This has been the most enjoyable massage I've ever had." "I haven't failed the test?" I had a better idea, so I said, "You passed it. The massage test is finished, so you don't have to worry about that anymore." It took some more reassurances, but eventually Carol's panic left her, and she even smiled when she asked me, "Did you really enjoy it?" Now that she was happy it was time for me to start my evil idea (I do love evil ideas that include beautiful, naked girls). "I had a great time and you are good at massages, so I'll definitely be wanting some more from you in the future." "Any time. Ask me whenever you want." "I will, sweetie. We've got a problem though. When Julia asks me tomorrow how the massage went, I'll have to say that I enjoyed it but you stopped partway through to masturbate yourself on my leg. Julia won't be impressed by your being so easily distracted and unreliable." "Oh. Umm, I don't normally behave like that. It's just that there's been so much happening recently..." "There's going to be even more happening in the future, sweetie." I was talking crap but it sounded good, to me anyway. "I don't want Julia to think you're unreliable. Maybe you could go back to the hallway then come back in here to give me a full massage without any monkey business so when Julia asks me how it went I could pretend the first massage never happened, just tell ourselves it was a practice session, or something like that." Carol brightened up immediately, "Yes, yes. I can do that. I know I'll do it right the second time. I promise. That's so good. You're so clever." And she hugged me back. I burst her bubble though, "I'm sorry, but I just realized we can't do that." "Why not?" With tears threatening to break out again. "Julia has a right to know the truth about what happened. We don't want to start your relationship with her based on a lie, do we? And what would happen if she asked you to do something really important, and you stopped halfway through it so you could masturbate?" "I'd never do that if I had to do something important." "Darling, you knew this test was important, but you couldn't help yourself. No, my first idea is no good. I'll have to think of something else." I didn't want to be cruel, so I only waited long enough for Carol to start worrying a little, then explained my Machiavellian plan, "The issue isn't whether you can give good massages or not. You've already massaged me enough for me to know that you give WONDERFUL massages. My concern, and Julia's concern when she hears about what you did, is whether you're strong enough to resist sexual temptation. That's what went wrong, isn't it?" Carol hesitantly agreed, "Yes. You're just too sexy and your body's so wonderful that I couldn't help myself." I could add faulty eyesight to the list of her problems, but I decided to proceed as is. "Regardless of the reason, it's your ability to control yourself sexually that's the issue. That's what you need to prove to Julia and me. You easily passed the massage test, but now you need a sexual control test. Understand?" "Not really." Which was hardly surprising. "Carol, get up, stand beside the bed and remove your T-shirt." She was uncertain how standing and stripping herself naked was going to help, but - bless her - she did exactly as I requested. In seconds she was standing beside the bed, holding her T-shirt in her hand. In those same seconds I went from sitting on my bed to being in Heaven. I have NEVER looked on a girls' body with the desire I had for Carol's now, not even the college girls in their bikinis last summer. Her body was easily the best I've EVER seen, especially with her pussy juice smeared around her upper-thighs and her anxiously breathing heavier than normal. I wanted to stare at her all night, but much better would be happening soon so I tore my eyes off her and proceeded with my plan. "I'm very happy that you did exactly as I asked without delay or questioning me. I'm very, very impressed by your obedience. I'll make sure I tell Julia how well you did just now." #4: My praise made Carol stand straighter, achieving the impossible of making her look even better. I continued, "You have to convince us that you can control your sexual urges, therefore this test is in two parts. First, you are forbidden to orgasm until I give you permission. It'll be days, or maybe even weeks before I give that permission." It was going to be Thursday night, but no need to mention that now. "You may not masturbate at all, and you may not have an orgasm for any other reason, no matter what someone else is doing to your body. Do you understand?" Carol was puzzled about the reason, but she understood the rule, so she gave a doubtful sounding, "Yes." "This will last for however long it takes for us to decide that you have enough self-discipline to control your body. To see that it doesn't control you. Do you understand that?" "Yes." "Good. The second part of the test is that I am going to be trying to make you orgasm." "Oh." "Exactly. The reason you are naked now, is because I am going to start playing with your body, and you must NOT orgasm. Got that?" "Ahh, yes. Umm, what are you going to do?" "Whatever I want. Before I start, I want you to know that I'll be asking you several times a day whether you've had any orgasms, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to read it in your face if you try to lie, so I hope you won't ruin the trust we have between us by doing that. I'll also be telling Julia all about this, and I'm sure she'll be checking on you too. She'll also strip you naked and play with your body too, to see whether you can control yourself. We need to make sure you can control yourself around both of us." "Oh." I added, "Whenever we can, both of us will be requiring you to strip naked and make your body available for us to play with in whatever ways we want. Every night I want you to come in here after Mom and Dad have gone to sleep, strip yourself, and stand so that I can do anything at all I want to do to you. Understand?" "Yes." Carol understood all right. What she had major problems with was deciding what she thought about it. She didn't look about to object, she just looked confused about what it all meant. "I'll do things during the day to test you too. If you're washing the dishes, I might walk up behind you and reach my arms around to squeeze your breasts and nipples. Or I might lift your dress, push your panties to the side, and slide my fingers in and out of your pussy, or your asshole. Do you understand?" "Oh yes!" Carol shivered in excitement. She seemed to be giving up on understanding, and just accepting my silly instructions. "And Julia will be doing the same things to you. I will be asking her to, and Julia ALWAYS does what I ask her, so she'll be doing those things to your body too. Okay?" Carol seemed to think it was even better than just "okay." Her face flushed and I could see clear signs of arousal appearing through her sparse pussy hair. Most of it was her reacting to my saying I'd be doing those things, but when I'd mentioned Julia's doing them, Carol had continued to get excited rather than showing any negative reaction at all. Excellent! "Move away from the bed slightly, spread your legs, and put your hands on your hips." Carol obeyed immediately, a look of excited anticipation on her face. I tried not to look the same. I added, "I'm going to wait for a minute or two for you to compose yourself. It's very important that you not have an orgasm and I can tell from how puffy your pussy lips are that you're very excited now. Just stand there for a while. Tell me when you're ready." It'd be an exaggeration to say she nearly failed the test right then, but my reference to her puffy pussy lips dramatically increased Carol's arousal. She groaned, flushed bright red, and visibly struggled to fight down the surges she was feeling. Not that I had any objection whatsoever to Carol's getting sexually excited, but her response did seem a weird overreaction. I certainly wouldn't feel that way if someone said the equivalent about my cock. That was why I'd discovered the wonderful go-soft ability, because of the embarrassment of getting woodies at all the wrong times. #4: #1: #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #1: I moved so my face was only a few inches in front of her pussy. I looked at her for a few seconds, then said, "You're supposed to be calming down, so why is your pussy looking EVEN more aroused and leaking more juice than before? Are you so sex-crazy that you get off on your brother looking at you?" #4: Carol's flush deepened and she had to work hard to get an answer out, "No. It's just..." "Then why is there pussy juice running down your leg? You don't normally walk around in public with pussy juice running down your legs, do you? Because if you did, with the amount of juice you're leaking now every classroom you went into would quickly fill with your smell, and all of your classmates would be sniffing around to find out where it was coming from." "{Groan}." "Can you imagine how embarrassing it'd be for the person who sat in your puddle during the next class." "{Groan}." "So what's the explanation for there being so much liquid pouring out of your pussy?" "Ahh. Umm..." After a pause, Carol gave up trying to find an acceptable answer. She hung her head in shame. I was time to give her a break, so I stood then said, "I'll give you a couple of minutes to calm down because the way you look now you couldn't stop yourself from climaxing if your whole class was watching you." "{GROAN}." I took her T-shirt out of her hands, saying, "You won't be needing this. Try to calm down because you don't want to fail the test, do you?" "N ... No. The things you said were, umm, they affected me A LOT!" "So I smelled." "Oh." I folded up her T-shirt and put it on my little desk. Carol's eyes followed me, so I said, "I recommend you not look at me. You do need to calm down and you seem to have trouble doing that when you're looking at me." "But you look so fantastic." "That's why you shouldn't look." Which I said just because it was an easy answer, not because I thought I looked "fantastic." Carol followed my recommendation. I didn't mind if she failed the so-called test. I preferred her to get more and more worked up until Thursday so she'd go off big time on that special night, but if she had an 'accidental' orgasm earlier I'd simply tell her that rather than failing the test, she'd just passed the "Real Test". I'd give her some bullshit about Julia and my loving sex, and wanting someone to serve us who liked sex as much as we did, so the real test was to find out if she was sexual enough for us, despite being given a very strong reason to try to control herself. There was NO WAY Carol was going to fail any of our tests, even if I had to turn them inside out for her. I made a mental note to tell Julia about the new test and the inside out version of it, in case Carol lapsed when she was with Julia. I stayed behind Carol for a couple of minutes, admiring the view. Her body was totally unlike Julia's, other than the highly appreciated commonality of both their bodies being female. Julia was short and very, very slim. Even her bones were delicate and she had very little muscle. Carol had much more of everything, especially the good parts. She was much bigger than Julia in all three dimensions: much taller, much wider, and my personal favorite, much more 'stacked' than Julia. Carol's breasts were particularly spectacular. I was trying to stay out of Carol's sight behind her, but I hadn't been able to resist moving around her enough to look at her breasts in profile. Ignoring the girls in my grade who were fat (when it came to thinking about naked bodies, ignoring fat girls was my strong preference), there weren't many girls who had breasts larger than Carol's. One girl called Chloe blew every other girl at school out of the water size-wise, and there were several others larger than Carol, but she was considerably larger than average and still had more growing to do, hopefully. Weirdly, Carol's nipples and the colored area around them were MUCH smaller than Julia's, maybe only a third the size. I don't know how that works, but I didn't care - both girls had BEAUTIFUL nipples. Beautiful breasts too. And Carol had a great deal more "beautiful breast" than Julia did. Carol looked like she'd calmed by now. I don't know how she managed to control herself because without constant go-softs I would've blown myself empty by now. I walked around to the front of her, "Are you calm enough to stop yourself from having an orgasm?" Carol took a deep breath - which nearly caused me to have an orgasm - then said, "I'll try, but PLEASE don't talk like you did before." "The idea is to test your self-control, so I have to arouse you. It wouldn't be much of a test if I didn't. Keep the position you're in and I'll start testing you." I'd chosen her position because it presented her body wonderfully, so I was eager for her to stay as she was. I walked around to her front, reached up with both my hands and started playing with her breasts (have I mentioned that I REALLY liked breasts?). With her hands out to the side on her hips, her breasts looked EVEN more perfect. That may be an illogical description, but it's also totally accurate. Carol gave a sharp inhalation when I grasped her nipples, so I said, "Fight it, darling." She relaxed somewhat. I played with her breasts and nipples for a couple of minutes, having an incredibly good time. I can't say "I kept a close eye on her level of arousal," because my eyes were busy elsewhere, but from time to time I'd glance at Carol's face, and she seemed to have herself under control. So I sent one hand sliding down her belly toward her pussy. She knew where it was going, quietly moaning, "Oh no," while she stayed completely and delightfully stationary. I quickly discovered that she hadn't dried out from the embarrassment stimulations of a few minutes ago. I couldn't resist, so I knelt in front of her, moved my face close enough then licked the length of her pussy. Carol was shocked, but before she could do more than gasp I exclaimed, "Carol! Your pussy juice is delicious! Why on Earth didn't you tell me how good you tasted sooner?" Probably because that's not the sort of thing sisters normally tell their brothers, but it was a fun thing for me to say anyway. I should mention that I genuinely thought it was lovely, although I think I was probably very biased. Thanks initially to Mom and later to my own experiences, I fully appreciate how much pleasure I can give to a girl by praising her pussy juice. Pleasing Julia and now Carol meant so much to me that I'm sure my judgment of the taste was not even remotely objective. Carol hadn't come up with an answer, so I filled the gap by saying, "Wait till I tell Julia how good you taste. She'll want to drink from you too." I got back to taking more licks of my own, which soon resulted in Carol starting to make "Oh, oh, oh" moans. I realized she'd forgotten that she wasn't supposed to have orgasms. Something must have distracted her, snigger. I was in a good position to reach out with one hand and pinch her ass. "Ouch!" "You were enjoying yourself too much and allowing yourself to get aroused. You've got to fight it. Don't give in to the sensations." "Sorry. I'll try harder. Thanks for helping me." "That's all right, darling. I want to help." Considering that I'd caused 100% of the problem she was facing, helping was the least I could do. I thought it might be safer to leave her pussy alone for a while, and wondered what to do next, when the obvious occurred to me. I didn't know why I hadn't thought of it before. I raised myself to the correct height and lowered my mouth over a nipple. That produced another "Oh" from her. But only one, and when I looked at her face - without releasing her nipple - I could see that she was still in control. I went back to giving her nipples my full attention, mouthing one and fingering the other. Once again it was a very different experience than with Julia, so much more breast, but so little nipple. I was finding it a bit awkward, being bent over at this angle, so I stood up and commanded, "Lie on the bed, darling. On your back." Without hesitation she did so. Unhesitant, total obedience is another good trait in a serving girl. As are nakedness and large breasts. I climbed on to the bed beside her. It was a little perilous as I only had a single bed, but she moved sideways to make more room for me. Then I attached myself to her nipples again, mouth on one, fingers on the other. I did my best to stimulate her, which was a great deal of fun. I played with her breasts and nipples in every way I could think of, short of using TK. With Carol having so much more breast than Julia, I was a very happy man. I discovered that the underside of Carol's breasts were more sensitive than the tops or sides, so I had a lot of fun licking and kissing their two undersides, often while using my fingers on her nipples, especially rhythmically squeezing them in sync with my licks. My stimulations were effective, and I could sense that Carol was getting more and more aroused. I let that continue for a while, finding out that as her arousal built she preferred harder squeezes and even small bites on her breasts. By the time she was getting seriously aroused, her preferences were clearly for quite rough treatment, far rougher than Julia liked. I filed this information away for another day, as it was time to ease Carol back, before she lost control entirely. I stopped playing with her breasts, eliciting a disappointed moan from her, and I moved up to lay alongside her. As I put my arms around her, I said, "You have wonderful breasts, and I could play with them for hours, but I think I should stop to ask how you are?" Yeah, and to stop so she doesn't fail this test. She wrapped her arms around my neck and squeezed me hard, pulling her head up against mine. She said, "I'm in Heaven. This is so wonderful. I love you so much I could burst! Even though I'm not allowed to burst, haha. I have never felt anything like this before. It's beyond my wildest dreams. I love you, Mark. Love you, love you, love you!" I guess that answered my question. I'd been worried about what she thought about all this. It seemed to me that the supposed pretext ("letting your brother do whatever sexual activity he wants to your body to test whether you are good enough to be his serving girl") wouldn't be even remotely believable. But Carol didn't seem to have any problems with it. Julia had told me that Carol wanted to serve us, but I'd still doubted that she'd swallow the pretext so easily. She was so eager I probably didn't need any excuse. I could've simply told her what to do and she would've done it. "I love you too, Carol. I'm very, very pleased by your obedience, and also by the little things you do. Folding up my clothes and putting them carefully on my chair, moving sideways to make room for me on my bed, and things like that. They tell me you're trying as hard as you can to be good for Julia and me. Even if you make little mistakes now, I can see that you'll quickly learn to do better and better. That makes me very happy, and makes it much more likely that we'll pick you." "Thank you so much. I REALLY want to be with you and Julia. I'm trying my ABSOLUTE hardest and best." "Your best is VERY good. Now, if you'll excuse me, I can't resist that delicious pussy of yours any longer. I have to go down and drink some more of that. Yummy!" "{Giggle}. Really?" By now I had gotten myself into position, so I looked up at her and said, "Let me answer that question this way." I covered her pussy with my mouth and started lapping it with my tongue. After a few tongue swipes I said, still with my mouth sealed over her pussy, "Mmm. Delicious." This came out highly muffled, but she understood it enough. Carol giggled and gave a wonderful smile. Her heart was radiating from her face. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but it seems to describe how she looked. I licked her pussy for a while, very much enjoying myself, but seeing how happy she was sort of made me feel bad. Stimulating her but not allowing her to climax seemed mean. I licked up all the juice I could find, as there was quite a lot smeared around her thighs. I even a made a little joke out of it, saying "I think there's a trail of this delicious juice that run all the way down your leg." I backed off the bed entirely, then picked up one of her feet and examined the inside of her foot. "Yes! There's some pussy juice down here. Excellent." There wasn't, but that didn't matter. I licked the inside of her foot, which made her giggle, then I licked all the way up the inside of her leg, making her giggle even more. When I got to the fountainhead, I decided it needed some more cleaning up, so I resumed licking there. I remembered how wrong I'd been about Julia's virginity when I'd been certain she was experienced, but there was no doubt about Carol's virginity, I was looking it right in the eye. Not that I'd ever imagined her to be otherwise, but it was good to know that I wasn't wrong about every girl I got this near to. Seeing as how I was in the area, I gave in to the temptation and used one of my fingers to lightly rub Carol's clit. That got an instant reaction - she went rigid, sucked in her breath, and bit down on her lower lip. It didn't take a rocket scientist (maybe a "pussy scientist") to see that if I kept this up for long - or even "for short" - Carol would have a very big climax, so I played safe by backing off from everything. A pity, as I would've loved to give her a huge orgasm. She certainly deserved it for giving herself to me so unconditionally. I moved back up to cuddle her, and she relaxed when she realized I had stopped. I held her in my arms again, although one of my hands couldn't resist moving down and cupping one of her breasts, and playing with it slowly. I held her for a few seconds, loving the feeling of her bare back on my chest, and of holding her in my arms. When we were nicely settled and comfortable, I said, "I'm canceling one part of the test we're doing now." Carol just arched one of her eyebrows at me. Thinking she must be a destined to be a mother reminded me that, according to the Williams' genetic hypothesis, Carol and I were supposed to be having sex so we could later have babies. I was feeling so good about Carol now that I like the sound of that. It was too soon by several years, but it was definitely appealing. I answered her eyebrow, "I said earlier that you weren't allowed to masturbate. I'm canceling that. The test we're doing only applies when you're with Julia or me. You are forbidden to climax then, but you're allowed to when you're not with us. It was unfair of me to attempt to control you on your own time, as that doesn't stop you serving us at all. I can see that you need to give yourself a release. Probably many releases." Carol giggled an acknowledgment of that. I knew she must be desperate for release. God knows I would've been in her position! To deprive her of them was cruel. I loved her and was very uncomfortable being mean to her. A little meanness as a way to make her wedding night even more enjoyable would work out for the best, but the blanket restriction had been too much. I was a very happy guy just to be cuddling her now. I said, "Darling, I think the night is over for us. I'm EXTREMELY happy with you tonight. You passed the massage test, apart from one self-control problem. I think you've already shown me that you have enough control to never repeat that mistake again." That was a load of crap, of course, I could have taken her to orgasm after orgasm and she would've been completely unable to hold herself back, but she didn't need to know that. "Julia and I will need to keep testing you for a while longer, but you're doing very well and I hope it won't take long until we are both fully reassured." "Oh thank you. I so much want you and Julia to pick me. I'll do anything for you. Really I will." "I know you will. It's one of the reasons we both love you so much. No one could try harder than you are. Let's just cuddle for a couple of minutes, then I'll let you go back to your room." I couldn't bring myself to let her go immediately. I was enjoying holding her far too much. So I'd given myself a couple more minutes of her company. We just lay there, holding each other, with one of my hands lightly caressing her breasts. She showed her contentment by making small, appreciative noises. I still had trouble believing that I could do this to her, and although it was a stupid question, I couldn't help asking, "Do you really like me touching you like this?" As I gave her breast a noticeable squeeze, in the remote chance that she didn't know what I was asking about. "Oh, yes! Very much. It's WONDERFUL. Nothing has ever made me feel as good as you have tonight. I didn't believe anyone could feel this good, or make me feel this good. You are my Heaven. I never want to leave you. I'll die if you don't pick me." #1: "I'll try my hardest to make sure we pick you. Julia is 100% obedient to me, but for something as important as who's going to live with us and serve us for hopefully the rest of our lives, I really need for Julia to agree with me rather than my overriding her wishes. You understand that don't you?" I've never insisted on anything that Julia objected to, and I'd be too scared to do so if it ever happened. Julia seems to be invariably right, so I'd be stupid not to do what she thought was best. That I'm lying here playing with Carol's naked body with the taste of her pussy juice still on my tongue is a pretty convincing demonstration of how much smarter than me Julia is. That's especially true about girls, and probably everything else except Mathematics and Physics, both of which are unlikely to provide me with a big-titted source of delicious pussy juice. "Yeah. You have to do that." "So you have to keep trying hard the way you have been, but I believe you'll be okay. Especially as I know Julia is very eager for you to be picked too. Julia has said positive things about you many times, so she obviously has a high opinion of you. And she also keeps mentioning how beautiful and sexy you are, so I have a feeling that Julia might be sexually interested in you. You wouldn't mind that, would you?" "Umm. No. Not really, I guess. But I'm not sure about what to do, or anything like that." I realized I'd worded my question badly, so I tried again, "I think Julia is going to order you to lick her between her legs, and order you to sit on her face so she can lick and finger you. I wouldn't be surprised if she starts making you go naked in places like the hot tub so she can look at your body as often as she can, and play with it more often. If we pick you, I think Julia is going to use you as her sexual plaything, Carol, and you won't have any say over that. You'll have to do everything Julia says, no matter how sexual it is, or how much embarrassment it causes you in public..." "{Gasp}. In public?" "Yes. I wouldn't be surprised if Julia puts her hand up your skirt and plays with your pussy in public." "Oh God! Do you think so?" #4: "Julia is very sexual, you're very beautiful, and Julia loves giving orders. Those three things mean that it's almost certain that Julia's going to be ordering you to perform all sorts of sexual activities, sweetie. I'm sure you understand how important honesty is, so tell me truthfully how Julia ordering you to do sexy things, including in public, makes you feel?" "You know already, don't you?" "I'd like to hear you say it, sweetie." Carol took a breath, then launched into it, "The last few days have been the MOST EXCITING IN MY WHOLE LIFE! I have NEVER played with myself so much! Every day Julia tells me the most amazing things, and she gets me really hot with what she says. And now you're doing it too, only you're doing it MUCH more! AND you're touching me, licking me, teasing me. I feel like BURSTING, Mark! What the two of you are doing to me is driving me crazy. I'm a complete mess, especially after tonight. I'm going mad with lust..." Carol sounded like she could keep repeating variations on the theme for hours, but I cut her off with a joking, "So you enjoy it then?" "Oh, God YES! I have NEVER had feelings like these. My heart's bursting, my cunny's on fire and my head's spinning. I don't think I can stand any more of this." "You'll stand it for as long as we want to keep testing you Carol. That's our choice, not yours. You'll just have to 'jill off' - or whatever you girls call it - more often. Thank you for your honesty too. That was a VERY forthright answer! Haha. I'll tell Julia that you are very honest, sincere and will follow every one of Julia's sexual orders." "{Groan}. Please don't tell her. It's SO embarrassing!" "There are no secrets between Julia and me, especially when it comes to you. I'll be telling her EVERYTHING, from how delicious your very wet pussy is, through to how much you enjoy being ordered to do embarrassing sexual things in public." "{Groan}. I'd DIE if you did that. Why are you doing this to me?" If she died, she'd be dying happy judging by how her body was reacting to this conversation. I replied to the sensible half of her statement, "We're doing it for many reasons, Carol. Mostly because we love you. The other reasons I think I'll keep secret for now. Remember I said at the beginning of this evening that we don't want someone nosey? You'll just have to wait until I tell you what our other reasons are." "Oh." We lay still for a while, Carol thinking. Eventually Carol cautiously asked, "You said Julia loves me. I don't understand why she even wants to spend any time with me. She's much smarter than me, she's much better looking and more confident, she can..." "What! Carol, Julia is NOT 'much better looking' than you! She's not even a little bit better looking. Even though she's my girlfriend and I'm totally loyal to her..." #3: " ... there's no competition between her beauty and yours. YOU are FAR more beautiful than Julia. Every square inch of you is more beautiful than the same part on Julia. Although I quite like her cute little nose..." "What's wrong with my nose?" #1: #2: #3: "It's the one part of your body that's similar to mine, so it reminds me of my nose and how ugly and unattractive I am." Carol spun around so she could face me, then said, "You're NOT ugly, Mark. That's SILLY! You look FANTASTIC! Your face has firmed up and got a very good masculine look to it these days..." #2: #3: #1: #3: #2: #4: #3: We had to listen to some more reassurances from Carol. Stuff about how some of the girls in her class had told her they thought I was handsome, and how impressive my body was now that she'd seen me without my baggy clothes on. It was obviously just her trying hard to reassure me, so I mostly ignored the fluff she was saying. When I got a chance, I said, "Thank you for your nice comments, but I'd MUCH rather think about your looks than mine. But before you start again, let me answer your question about why Julia likes you so much. Julia's wanting to spend time with you has got nothing to do with how smart you are. Liking someone isn't an IQ test. And it's got nothing to do with how beautiful you are. It's because of how nice you are under your skin. Look at how fast you spun around to reassure me. You're a very caring, generous person. Julia doesn't want a friend who is another girl just like her. Two Julia's would have TERRIBLE arguments! She likes you for all the same reasons I do." -- I was on thin ice here because Julia didn't really know Carol yet, let alone love her. I'd gotten carried away building that up. It was best I got off this subject, so I summarized, "She likes you, likes talking to you and spending time with you, so that's all that matters. Personally I think she's got EXCELLENT taste, but I'm VERY biased about you." "{Giggle}. You do love me, don't you?" I spoke as sincerely and with as much feeling as I could, "More than I can put into words." Carol thought for a couple of seconds, then seriously asked, "I've been too scared to ask you all night, but I think I will now." Carol stopped. After a couple of seconds I asked, "What, sweetie?" "Ahh. I don't think I want to now. Sorry, I've changed my mind." "You don't have to be scared of asking me questions?" "No. It's all right. There's no hurry." I was curious about her hesitation, but it was past time to send her back to her room so it'd be best not to start what sounded like a major topic. Instead I said, "In that case this might be a good time for us to stop, sweetie. It's been a VERY wonderful visit, but it's very late now. Don't worry about getting up for our run tomorrow morning either." I checked my clock, "Make that THIS morning. Sleep a bit longer. I've a feeling you'll need it." [Several days after this I asked her what she'd been too scared to mention. Carol had wanted to know how it was possible that I could say that I desired her sexually. Brothers aren't supposed to feel that way about sisters, and Carol didn't understand how I could have those emotions. She was assuming I had as little desire for her as she'd had for me until very recently. She knew that her desire for me was mainly because I was so extraordinarily nice to her and Donna, and because of she respected my accomplishments, mostly my success at school and in having Julia for my girlfriend. Those reasons didn't reverse to explain why I fancied Carol. She feared I didn't, and she was too scared to voice her worry. She believed she didn't deserve to be desired. Sometimes people can be blind or stupid about their own attractiveness, even their extreme attractiveness, in Carol's case.] Carol assured me, "I can get up in time. Really I can." "If you went to sleep immediately, you probably could. But I suspect you're going to have trouble getting to sleep, won't you?" "Umm, yeah." I was VERY sad to be sending her away, and I was VERY tempted to get one last pussy lick, nipple suck, or even a kiss, although I'd been deliberately keeping away from showing my romantic feelings for Carol or I'd lose control entirely. Instead I got off the bed and took the couple of steps required for me to pick up her T-shirt. "I'm sorry to have to do this, but it's time you left, sweetie." "{Sigh}. Okay." Carol got off my bed (there should be a law against that happening!), took the T-shirt out of my hands and put it on (another act there needs to be a law against). Carol stepped toward me, put her hands around me and hugged me. I hugged her back with my 1.5 arms, while she said, "I love you very, very much Mark. I don't understand what's happening, or how you and Julia can have me as your serving girl, or girlfriend, or anything else, but I know I want to be with you always. Whatever you want me to do, just tell me and I'll do it. I don't care what it is. I don't understand anything, but I know I love and trust you, so I'll do what you want." I couldn't help immediately responding, "You trust me, even after what I've done tonight?" A stupid question, but Carol's mentioning "trust" had caught me by surprise. "Of course. I don't know why you did those things to me, but I know it wasn't what it looked like. Nothing you did changed that I trust you. In fact, I trust you even more now." [Carol had noticed that I'd NEVER got hard. She'd led an unusually sheltered life when it came to boys, but not so sheltered that she didn't know how teenage boys' cocks misbehave at the drop of a hat. As I hadn't asked her to touch me sexually, she'd concluded that I obviously hadn't done it for my own sexual pleasure. (This was partly why she'd been so scared of asking me about my desiring her, as I commented above.) That I could do so many sexual things to her and not get hard made Carol trust me even more. Unfortunately it also worried her greatly because she wanted me to desire her. She was a VERY confused girl at this moment.] #1: I let it go, saying, "That's good to know. You've impressed me in MANY ways tonight too. All things considered, it's been an amazing night." "Has it ever! It's been the most amazing time I've ever had. Thank you very much." GOD KNOWS why she's thanking me! (I think you have to be at least a god to have a chance of understanding females.) [[It helps, but it's not really enough.]] Perhaps cruelly, I decided to leave her with a thought, "If you pass all the tests as well as you've been doing, then you're going to have many nights far more sexual than this Carol, including many with Julia and me at the same time. You might want to think about that before you go to sleep." I gave her a last squeeze then maneuvered her out of my room. ^ While I was getting changed into my PJs, I thought about how nice it would've been to give her a very loving kiss goodnight. After Thursday I wouldn't need to stay in control of myself, so that was one thing to look forward to, among others. Just before I went to sleep I remembered that Julia had asked Carol to kiss me at the end of the massage session. Carol had obviously forgotten, which was hardly surprising. I hope she wasn't too hard on herself when she remembered. Speaking of "hard", I was SORELY tempted to jack myself off, but instead I decided to sleep it off. #4: #3: #1: #2: #4: #2: #1: I set my head for the right time to wake up, and firmly ordered myself to sleep. [We subsequently did get Julia to show us the law. She had it right. Oregon law states, "A person who has sexual intercourse with another person commits the crime of rape in the first degree if: ... c) The victim" (a ridiculous term for Carol and me) "is under 16 years of age and is the person's sibling." The clause that permits underage kids to have consensual sex if their ages are within three years of each other doesn't apply to rape in the first degree. That means that if Carol and I have sex then we're simultaneously raping each other. As would be two unrelated 11-year olds, because the law contains, "a) The victim is under 12 years of age." If Carol and I had been unrelated, our having sex with each other would change from being two first-degree rapes to not even being a single misdemeanor. I was not impressed by the law's logic, but I resolved to be VERY careful of it.] ------- Chapter 39: Carol Continues to Show How Good She Is Monday, April 11, 2005 I awoke at the right time. Feeling bright, breezy and VERY happy. I dressed in my running gear and walked to the hallway outside of Donna's room. I heard movement so I waited. Donna emerged alone - I wasn't surprised to see - shutting the door behind her. We nodded, then silently walked out the front door. Once outside I wondered whether she'd ask me any questions about Carol's late comings and goings and cummings (I assumed), but there was no sign Donna was aware that anything had happened. I wasn't going to say anything, so we just warmed up. I offered, "Would you like to bet $10 on beating me?" Donna laughed a bit, then said, "Gee, I'd like to, but Mom won't let me bet. What a pity." Then she laughed again. I was glad she was in a good mood. It was far better than her being angry with me over something she might've suspected about Carol. "How about you set the speed and I'll just run alongside you?" "Okay." There was no argument about her being too fast for me this time. So we set off. We chatted occasionally, when a subject crossed any of our five minds. We talked about our respective martial arts a little. Donna was still very happy and proud that she'd found Aikido for me, and expressed her pleasure at this most enthusiastically. I couldn't understand why she was so pleased by this, so I asked her why. "Because you're such a wonderful brother. You treat me great, so it's nice to do something good for you. You said Aikido might be important to you, so I'm happy that I found it for you." "I'm happy you found it too, but I think you're feeling too obligated to me. I don't treat you that nicely. We don't spend much time together, so I don't even get much chance to." "But when we ARE together, you're ALWAYS nice to me. You remember when I showed you the martial arts tape, the one with Aikido and Karate on it?" "Sure." "You let me find the right parts of the tape to play. Right?" "Sure. How does that matter?" "You're a big brother. Any other big brother would've grabbed the remote out of my hands." "But I didn't know where it was in the tape." "Doesn't matter. Big brothers don't let their little sisters control the remote. Even Dad probably would've taken it from me. You know how he likes to hold the remote." That's true. Dad's unable to watch TV unless the remote's in his hand, even if he's watching a live game that'll last for hours. "Okay, I'll confess that I'm nice, haha." "Good. And don't forget you let me come running with you, and you asked my permission about Carol joining us, and dozens of other things. You're VERY nice." "Okay, I'm very nice. You win. Maybe we should have bet on your forcing me to admit that, you might have won ten dollars." "That's okay. I don't want to make money from you anymore. You're too nice to me." Which seemed a good point to let that conversation die. A few minutes later Donna asked me, "When you run the 10k on Saturday, you're going to win aren't you?" "I think so." "You're not going to be modest by deliberately coming in second or third or anything like that are you? You're definitely going to win?" "Yes. I thought about that, and I want to win. If only so you'll be proud of me. Why do you want to know?" "I just had a good idea. Can I keep it secret for now? I'll tell you later, okay?" #3: "Sure." "The look on some of their faces when you win will be fun to see. I'm going to enjoy that." A minute or so later Donna added, "I just remembered you asked about running a marathon, and I said you hadn't trained enough. You could run a marathon, couldn't you?" "I think so. It'd probably be even easier for me to win than a 10k." Donna pointed out, "But you didn't argue with me when I said you couldn't. See! Told you you're nice." I had to admit she was right yet again, "I already gave up on that." "I know, I just didn't think about that time before. Do you want me to find a marathon for you?" "I don't think so, thanks. One real race is all I need, just to see that I'm right about how good I am. After that race I can do any testing I want by myself. I probably will run 26 miles some time soon, but I'll measure it out with Carol and Julia's help, and just run it myself." "And my help too!" Donna insisted. "Okay, and your help too. I should have thought of that already. Sorry, of course you can help." Donna emphasized her usefulness, "Just like I helped you with the sneaking up behind thing." "Yes, just like that." Donna concluded, "Good." For the next fifteen minutes we ran in silence, until Donna said, "Can you run ahead of me, just let me follow behind by a few yards?" I didn't know why, but it was a simple enough request. "Sure." Donna slowed down until I'd pulled ahead a few yards, then she resumed my speed. We ran for a few more minutes, and then she sped up to get alongside me again. Donna declared, "You're running better than last time." "How do you mean?" "I don't know how, but you look smoother, like it's taking less effort. You looked superb when you were running before, but now you're even smoother. You look awesome, you know?" #3: #4: #3: #1, #4: #3: I answered Donna, "I hadn't noticed, but I think you're right. I'll do some timing tests at school in PE later today. You know something good?" "What?" "If you're right about me being better, and I'm right about the reason, which I'm pretty sure I am, it's because of something I learned at Aikido last week. So you see how good it was that you found Aikido for me? I may be nice, but you're wonderful!" "No way! I just pointed it out to you. You're the one learning how to run better." I had a firm opinion on this. "No, Donna. You did EXACTLY the right thing with this, and you did it for exactly the right reasons too. Remember why you spotted Aikido? You said it was because they moved like me. You were right, and what I learned last week about how they moved has made me move even better. You spotted exactly the right thing, were smart enough to recognize it, and then you were kind enough to tell me about it. You did a lot. I may be a good big brother, but you're at least as good a little sister. Very well done, and thank you very much." Donna knew she had done good, and blushed slightly with pleasure. Nothing more was said on the topic. If she was right, I was going to thank her again after school. The discussion had reminded me about using TK to push me from behind, similar to what I'd done on my bike. A moment later I had three minds of TK pushing me from behind. It unbalanced me a little, so I moved it down to the small of my back on my spine, pushing mostly forward but slightly upward too, to make me lighter on my feet. It helped a little, once I got used to it, but it didn't help much. Maybe I'd use it in the race if I got behind, but it probably wasn't needed. After a few minutes I discontinued it, as it felt slightly unbalancing and annoying. That was just because it was unusual. Had the push been more effective I would have kept it going to get used to it, but it wasn't worth the bother so I canceled it. Thinking about TK did remind me to try the scales experiment at school though, so I made a mental note to do that. I asked Donna, "Do you mind that Carol and I will be spending quite a lot of time at the Williams', probably from Wednesday on?" Her answer, "I don't mind. I'll miss you guys though, especially Carol. It'll be good for her though. She doesn't have many friends and Julia is wonderful." #1: Donna added, "Besides, it'll give you two more time to kiss and cuddle." "Ehh. You mean me and Julia?" "No, you and Carol. You can do that easier at Julia's home, I guess." #4: #1: "How do you know about that?" "We share a room together. She can't keep a secret that big. She's all moony over you, and even sighs sometimes when I say your name. She spent most of Sunday reading online about massaging then practicing on me so she'd be good enough for you. She was very worried about that. I can tell what's up." "You certainly can. You're right, we do cuddle a lot. We don't kiss much though." #4: #1: "I'm sure she'd be happy to kiss if you wanted." I had to ask, "You don't mind?" "I think it's your choice. She's very nice to me, and you're incredibly nice too. Whatever you do is fine by me. Don't let Mom or Dad catch you though, or you might get in big trouble." "Will you tell them?" "Nope. That's why I'm telling you. I'll tell Carol later too. Carol is happier than ever so I'm not going to tell on you. If she wasn't happy I'd tell on you right away, but not now." I needed to make absolutely sure I was safe. I was doing a whole lot more than "kissing and cuddling" and the idea of being caught by Mom or Dad was terrifying, so I asked, "What about if Carol and I have an argument one day, and she's unhappy with me, you won't tell then will you, just because of one argument?" "Of course not. Best friends have arguments sometimes. Anyway, if you get her too upset she can tell Mom herself. That's what I'm telling you. I'll keep quiet, so don't worry about me." I couldn't thank Donna enough. "Donna, sweetie, whatever good things you think I've done you as a nice brother, BELIEVE ME, you just paid them all back and a lot more. You don't have to worry about paying me back for anything ever again! Thank you very, VERY much." "No problem. I think it's good." There was nothing else I could add, so we ran in silence. It occurred to me to wonder why Donna thought Carol and I could "kiss and cuddle easier at Julia's", but I wasn't brave enough to ask. I turned for home a bit earlier than I normally would have, as I wanted to give Donna and Carol a good chance to talk. As we were walking toward the front door, Donna said, "Can I have first shower please, so I can talk with Carol while you are showering?" That was fine by me. Pretty much anything Donna ever asks me for is going to be fine from now on. ------- I went to my room and packed my school bag. I also picked up my phone to send Julia a text message, to see that there was already one from her: "Everything good this end. I'm missing school this morn, see you at lunch, usual spot." I sent back, "All good here. I need to talk with you about Carol, will call you near end of 2nd class." My second class today was PE. I figured I could do my lap timing test in plenty of time to cut the end and talk with Julia. Julia confirmed with "Okay. Love you." Donna had finished showering by the time I was ready, so I showered, dressed in my room, and went to breakfast. Mom and Dad were already there, and after "Good mornings" all round, Mom asked, "How was your run this morning?" "Good. We didn't push ourselves, just jogged along chatting sometimes. It was nice." "Did Carol go with you?" "No. Just Donna and me." Mom declared, "That's good. She shouldn't exercise every day starting from scratch. Don't let her overexert herself. She'd go out with you every day if you let her, so be a little careful please?" "Okay, Mom." #3: #2: #3: I continued eating my breakfast. One of my rules of life is not to let little worries get in the way of my eating. The girls were taking longer to appear than normal, and Mom had already muttered, "What's keeping the girls." When we heard their door open and the sounds of the two of them coming, with giggles. #3: They formation-marched into the room, Donna leading, Carol following, in step and with exaggerated arm and leg movements. They called out in ragged unison, "Good Morning Mom and Dad." They continued to march around to where I was sitting, which was the far side of the table compared to where they entered the room. Donna stood on one side of me, Carol on the other. I was swiveling my head back and forth, trying to work out what was going on. Donna said, "Keep your head still, Mark." I did so, and both of them leaned down to kiss one of my cheeks each. "Good morning, Wonderful Brother" they said in unison again. Then they burst into giggles and went to get their breakfasts. Donna looked back, and said, "Isn't that cute? He's blushing." That helped, not! Mom chuckled, "I'd say, 'Don't tease your brother, ' but I think he liked it! You three take the cake." Which momentarily got my hopes up, but then I realized it was just another of Mom's expressions. Donna explained, "He said some very nice things to me this morning..." Carol interrupted with, "He always says very nice things." Donna resumed, "Yeah. So we decided that we are going to greet him that way every morning from now on. To tell him every day we think he's a wonderful brother." A second later she added, "Look! He's blushing again. Isn't he so cute?" Almost everyone in the room thought that was very funny. I consoled myself by eating and with the thought that Donna's chat with Carol must've gone well. The rest of breakfast was normal, except maybe a bit happier. Mom hurried the girls along so they'd be ready when the car arrived. I helped dry the dishes while the girls were still catching up (about the only good consequence of having the cast was that it got me out of washing the dishes, unfortunately just moving me sideways to double my dish-drying duty). We were ready when the car arrived. I offered my arm to Carol, and escorted her to the car, Donna already being in the front seat by then. As I held the door open for Carol, I said, "Here you are, my wonderful sister." "Why thank you, my wonderful brother." As she climbed in to sit behind our driver, Mr. Moore, I noticed that Carol's fairly short skirt (for Carol) rode up on her thighs a long way. She did nothing about pushing it down. I got the feeling it was deliberate, which was very fine with me. By the time I'd walked around to the other side of the car and got in, Carol's skirt had somehow managed to ride up even farther. She saw me looking, and pulled her skirt even higher. I couldn't help laughing in delight. What a great girl! Donna heard my laugh, and turned around in her seat to see what caused it. Because Carol was sitting behind the driver, diagonally across from Donna, Donna easily saw what I was laughing at. This gave me a brief surge of panic, but Donna immediately laughed too. Phew! I don't know what Donna thought was going on, but I was certainly happy that she laughed at it. I waited until Donna had turned around, and said, "I think I left something in your bag, Carol. Let me have a look." Carol looked confused because we never touch each other's bags. It was on the floor at her feet, and I leaned over to her side of the seat. Unfortunately it was my cast-hampered right arm that had the best angle, but so be it. When my upper-body was over her legs, my right hand snaked under my body to rest on just above the knee on Carol's right leg's inner-thigh. Then I confidently slid my palm up her inner-thigh. Carol's legs flew open (have I mentioned that I think she's a great girl?). I momentarily lost contact, but re-established it quickly, then resumed my 'northward' slide. She put a hand lightly on my shoulder, but otherwise just waited for me. My hand got so far up that it was being pressed between both her thighs, but I kept pushing. Very soon after that it arrived at its destination. Imagine my surprise and delight when I realized I was not feeling panties, but hairs and flesh. I wiggled my fingers to make sure. Yes, definitely a pussy. I wiggled them some more to make doubly sure (I like to know what I'm dealing with, especially when it's a pussy). Carol's breathing became a bit erratic and she pressed her hand against my shoulder harder, but otherwise she didn't react. Which I considered a personal challenge. I rotated my hand so my thumb was uppermost. It was about to go clit hunting. Just as I was about to move it, Carol said, "Can't you find what you expected, big brother?" "I think this is even better," as I moved my thumb into contact with her clit and started rubbing it lightly. I turned my head to look up at Carol's face. It appeared to me that she thought it was better too. I let my forefinger stroke up and down her pussy lips, as my thumb slid forward and back. Carol's face went vacant as all her awareness focused on her pussy. I gave her a few more rubs, then regretfully said, "No. I'll have to do without for the rest of the day. I'll get it when I get home this afternoon." I withdrew my hand. I couldn't take it further unfortunately, not with a teacher driving the car. Damn! Before I sat up straight and while Carol was watching, I moved my right hand to my mouth and licked my finger. I gave her a wink. It was the first time I'd ever done that to a girl, but I'd been having quite a few firsts recently. I sat up, just in time remembering to do a go-soft in case the driver looked back at me. When I was settled I looked at Carol. She mouthed a silent, "Thank you." Fortunately I already knew that girls have got strange mental processes, so Carol's thanking me didn't cause my brain to overload trying to find an impossible reason. I just smiled and nodded at her. Then she lifted her skirt so her pussy was fully exposed, an action that caught my attention very effectively. I stared at it for a few seconds, then when I looked at her face again, she repeated her silent, "Thank you." She had a great way of showing her appreciation. She lowered her skirt so that it was once again respectable. Still very short and very exciting, but respectable. The rest of the trip was uneventful. Just as well, as it was too dangerous to do that sort of thing too often. I'd better have a talk with her about it sometime soon. In about a week or two seemed best, all things considered. When the car pulled up at school, Donna was out and gone at her usual speed. I made a point of sucking my finger while Carol and I waited for the car to move off from between us. Then we joined up. She had a very happy smile on her face. I imagine mine was similar. I had to tell her, "Carol, darling, you constantly amaze and delight me! What made you not wear panties today?" Carol answered, "I have them in my pocket. I'll put them on soon, but I wanted to be as open to you as I could. You said you might want to play with my body at any time, so I want to show you how easy that would be. I was just going to raise my skirt higher and higher in the car until you could see everything. I never expected you to lean over me and put your hand up me like that. That was wonderful! I loved you doing that! I love you very, very much, Mark." "Yes, I can see that you do. I think we're so lucky to love each other so much." We were standing still, and Carol was holding my upper-arm to the side of her chest, as both she and Julia have been doing for some time now. I kept a look out around me, to make sure no one could overhear us. Fortunately we get dropped off away from most of the other students, heading toward the staff parking lot. I added, "Tell me about your chat with Donna. On our run she said she was going to talk with you, and my morning kisses certainly made me think the talk went well." "Yes. Isn't she fantastic?" I nodded with strong agreement. "She says she's happy to see me so happy. She's going to help us, so we don't have to try to hide our feelings from her. That's wonderful, isn't it?" "It certainly is. Especially for you. It must have been hard for you to share a room with her." I wasn't sure how it would be hard, but Donna had mentioned it, and it obviously wouldn't have helped. Carol agreed, "I'll say. Now I can dress in sexy clothes before I visit you in the evenings and not worry about making her suspicious. And I can take care of myself under the bedclothes without worrying too much. It's much better this way." #3: #4: #3: <{Groan}.> I thought of asking how her "one fingered exercising" had gone last night, but I was a bit wary of getting into such a conversation with so many people in the general area. I decided to play safe and just ask, "I'm glad you're happier. What's the story with my morning kisses though?" [Before we'd gone to sleep, #4 had joked about Carol doing "one fingered exercises". He'd listed several other names for female masturbation, which we had to groan through as it's hard to shut #4 up when he gets enthusiastic about a subject. "Jilling off" is the term that seemed most natural to us because we usually call what we do "jacking off", but we particularly liked his "ménage à moi". It was FAR more elevated than his many other suggestions.] "That was Donna's idea. She says I'm too obvious in what I think of you. She suggested that if we both gave you morning kisses, and played other silly games like that, then Mom and Dad won't be suspicious of you and me. I think she's right. Sometimes I love you so much I feel like bursting, so something must show. She's a good sister." "She certainly is. Let's go to class. I'll see you later." Carol disagreed. "You'll see me at lunch. I'm going to be eating lunches with you and Julia from now on. Julia told me to, do you remember?" There'd been so much happening that I wasn't sure even with my four memories, but I wasn't going to argue. "Good. See you at lunchtime." I nearly bent down to kiss her cheek but then remembered where we were, so I settled with a big smile. We started walking to our classes. We walked the first few yards together, when I thought to mention, "I'm not sure Julia will be here for lunch, she said she was going to miss school this morning. She said she'd try to be here for lunch though." Carol said, "I'll come anyway." ------- I repeated my lap-timing test in PE during second period. Once onto the track, I ran up to what I had thought was my optimal speed, then I increased my speed by what felt like another 10%. It didn't take long before I felt fatigue accumulating, so I dropped back below my previous optimal rate until I felt rested again. Then I increased by about half as much above optimal as before. It took longer, but that was slowly tiring too. I reduced my speed to rest again. When the fatigue was gone I increased by half as much as I had last time. It seemed a pretty pathetic improvement, about 2.5% as best I could estimate, but I was able to run four laps without fatigue. The second and subsequent laps I timed, and they came out at about 15.75 seconds per 100 meters. I sped up slightly, and the next few laps were at a rate of 15.55 seconds per 100 meters. Still no problem. I increased again, and covered the next few laps at 15.45. I tried one more increase, and ran a couple of laps at the rate of 15.40 per 100 but started detecting fatigue. Another lap to make sure. Yes, definitely fatiguing. I slowed to clear it, then I ran several laps at 15.45 seconds per 100 meters without any fatigue. This was now my new optimal running rate. (You may find it unbelievable that I could run such fine distinctions of time. I had a huge degree of control over my body, and could maintain a specific speed extremely accurately, or deliberately increase it a small fraction then maintain that.) I might be able to squeeze another second or two off my 100-meter rate, particularly if I used TK to push myself, but I didn't care enough to worry about it. I had proved that I was somehow moving better when centered. (I was centered throughout all of this because I'm always centered these days. Sometimes there were momentary distractions, but I've been getting better at keeping concentration when on duty, and such lapses are rare now.) I kept the same pace going for a couple more laps to definitely confirm that this pace was not tiring, and then I got #1 to lose center. I kept running the same rate, which required careful timekeeping as it felt harder and my body wanted to slow down. Keeping strictly to my new optimal rate, I soon felt fatigue slowly accumulate. I put #1 back on duty while maintaining the pace. The fatigue seemed to stay constant. I slowed a small amount and the fatigue slowly drained away. Interesting. I didn't know why it worked as it did, but it was a nice, little improvement and more information about my abilities. I slowed a bit to clear all my fatigue quicker, and then resumed my new optimal rate, timing my laps to be sure I was running the right speed. While I kept running laps to help reinforce what the new optimal rate felt like, we did some mental calculations: #4: #2: <16.15 down to 15.45 is 0.7 seconds faster per 100 meters. There are 421.95 lots of 100 meters in a marathon, call that 400 plus 5%, so 400 x 0.7 seconds is 280 seconds. 5% is another 14 seconds, giving 294 seconds. Close enough to 300 seconds, or 5 minutes. And 10k would improve about a quarter of that, so about 1.25 minutes faster.> #3: #4: #2: #4: #2: I stopped early. Making sure I was well away from any possible eavesdroppers, I called Julia. I updated her on the "backrub test" events: My teasing story of having Carol pull my cock out of Julia's mouth while Carol fed her breakfast, including Carol's excitement at the thought of that. Carol's coming into my room wearing only a very flattering T-shirt. Her massage had been enjoyable, but she'd humped herself on my leg near the end of it. I described my "No Climax" test/tease of Carol's sexual self-control, how hard I'd had to try to stop her cumming, and my inside-out version of the test in case Carol orgasmed accidentally. That Carol had been putty in my hands, and I'd discovered that she'd do sexual things with Julia, especially if they included public embarrassment. I described that my overall plan was to build Carol up, so her wedding would be the best possible event for her, which Julia thought was excellent. I tacked on a brief description of Carol's going without panties in the car. Julia responded, "She's working out fantastically well. Congratulations on doing so well with her." "You don't have to congratulate me. It was you who set it all up. You've gotten her so eager that she's desperate to do anything at all that I want. My ONLY problem was holding myself back from having sex with her." "Yeah, you must have found that frustrating." "I'll say! I didn't dare let her touch me at all, other than the backrub itself, or I would've lost control. How did you get on with your family?" "Everything's great with them. I told Mom and Dad - but not The Boys - that you have a superhuman ability that you'll show them after the wedding. Once I convinced them that what you can do is something far beyond what any other human can, they got very excited and they're very much looking forward to your demonstration. I didn't give them any hints, except I couldn't resist saying that I LOVED it! So they know it's something sexual but I insisted that was just a side benefit. They're going to get a big surprise when you do it to them. I did tell them you said it was even rarer than 'female logic', so don't expect any more roast chicken dinners from Mom anytime soon, haha." I ignored Julia's bad taste joke (at least I hoped it was a joke. It was important enough that I'd check with Vanessa personally on Thursday). I said, "You haven't said if their knowing about my ability made them accept Carol and me any easier?" "You're the only one who thinks doing something that no one else in the world can do is unimportant. Just my saying that you have a 'superhuman ability' was all they needed to hear, once I'd explained to them that I meant that literally. They already agreed to what I wanted just knowing that you were exceptional, but 'exceptional' and 'superhuman' have TOTALLY different implications. If you're a superhuman then trying to get you to breed true is imperative, so their reservations disappeared once I convinced them that your ability is something so profound." I didn't think my TK was that big a deal. I knew people would go crazy if it was public knowledge, but that didn't change that it wasn't particularly useful. It had too many restrictions, especially its being such a weak force and not working out of sight other than when it was very close to me. Changing the subject, I asked "Good to know everything's on track with your parents. What are you up to this morning that you have to miss school for?" "It's one of those things that I'll tell you if you insist, but you'll enjoy it more if you don't know." I knew the correct response to these situations, "I'll just leave you to do whatever you think is best." It's great being a boss with an assistant who requires such little supervision - that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. Julia said, "I've already done the most important item on my list for today, and I should be back for lunch." I knew better than to ask what that the most important item was. No doubt it was well contained by the "better if you don't know" category. Julia added, "Do you know Carol's dress size?" "It's 'Perfect'!" "Haha. That may be true, but it's not usable. I take it you don't know?" "No I don't, sorry. She'll be having lunch with us, so can you ask her then?" "I'll guess her size. That'll be fine for what I need this morning. Did you like playing with Carol? Are you looking forward to having her as one of your lovers?" "My God, yes! I got incredibly excited with her last night, and I'm excited now just thinking about her. Waiting until Thursday is going to feel like forever. You've done me a HUGE favor, Julia. Thank you VERY, VERY much." "Anything for my man." It appeared she literally did mean "anything", even though it included having her share of me reduced. In case she needed reassurance, I said, "I am very much looking forward to OUR marriage too. I'm looking forward to the day when we can all live together as husband and wives." "It'll be 'Lord and wives', and I'm looking forward to that very much too. That's something I desire more than I could possibly say. You're my life now, and I long for the day we can live together." "Me too." ------- I'd had many people ask me during the morning why Julia was resigning from whatever committee or other such group the inquirer was in. Some of them were quite upset about it. It was a little difficult to explain so my oft-repeated response was, "You'll have to ask her." Which caused them to say they wanted to but she wasn't at school, then they asked me about that. Most of them were VERY curious, and it happened so often that it was annoying. ------- Since I'd discovered TK I've been VERY diligently trying to strengthen it by pressing it against walls or the ground almost continuously. It amused me to think that I was exercising it like a weightlifter does, but "practicing" rather than "exercising" was probably a better description of what I was doing. I had gained a rough feel for the amount of force TK could exert by pressing against my leg, but after several days of practice there wasn't any noticeable improvement. Over the weekend I'd decided I needed to measure my force more precisely, as it seemed that it was going to be fairly constant and any improvement was going to be minor. The first chance I got today I slipped out of half of one of my classes to go to the room we use for our Physics lessons. It has all its dangerous and valuable apparatuses in an internal locked storeroom, but the main room itself is unlocked. I performed various 'weighing' experiments with my TK. [[I put 'weighing' in apostrophes because I wasn't actually weighing my TK. I was using scales to measure the force of my downward pushes.]] A one-mind TK-push down onto the scales produced a 'weight' of nearly 1,600 grams, or about 3.5 pounds. Altering the size of the TK-fingertip made no difference to its force. Two and three minds linearly increased 3.5 pounds to 7 and 10.5 respectively. We even tried a four-mind push, with #1 carefully keeping center while adding to our push, and the resultant 14.1 pounds was exactly four times that of a single mind's push (when calculated with enough decimal places). We'd previously discovered that a mind could create up to four fingertips, and we confirmed our belief that one mind exerted a maximum of 3.5 pounds regardless of whether it created one, two, three or four fingertips. Each mind's fingertip's maximum force was 3.5 pounds divided by the number of fingertips that mind had going, regardless of whether one or more of them were pushing anything at the time. Some experimentation with a ruler showed us that multiple fingers from one mind had unchanged minimum and maximum sizes. We next tried 'taking a run' at the scales, i.e., creating a TK-point well above the scales then moving it as fast as possible into the scale's pan. 'Crashing' it in, as it were. This made no difference, 3.5 pounds was the scale's peak measure. That'd been what we expected as the fingertips didn't seem to have any mass, judging by their being able to accelerate around a room as fast as our eyeballs could traverse. No mass meant no momentum, so "taking a run at the scales" achieved nothing. We put a weight on the scales, and then pushed up against it with our TK. The weight's weight reduced by 3.5 pounds per mind pushing, as expected. As pushing up and pushing down produced the same result, that helped confirm that my fingertips had no, or only an insignificant, mass. The scales were very precise, so if the fingertips had any weight, it must have been tiny fractions of a gram. We tried pushing down on the pan for a couple of minutes with one mind to see if my maximum force fluctuated at all, but it was rock steady. I found a piece of solid looking equipment, put it on the floor, and tried one-mind pushing it sideways. It slid too easily for our purposes so I replaced it with something bigger. This pushed sideways much slower, good. I physically carried it to the floor at one end of the room, looked around to make sure no one was looking in a window, and then pushed it sideways with one, long, continual push. We were pleased to see that it accelerated across the floor, picking up quite a respectable speed until we had to do a three-mind reverse push to brake it to a stop. We repeated the experiment back toward us. As best we could tell with this rather crude test, the acceleration was constant. Theoretically it should have been, but it was worth testing as I don't think Newton knew about TK when he formulated his second law (F=ma. In this case rearranged to: force/mass = acceleration). Our experiment's force and mass were constant, so acceleration should have been too, variations in floor friction not really having much chance to be noticeable. No other quick experiments suggested themselves to us, so I headed off to where my next class would be. ------- It was a nice enough day so I went to our usual outside place for lunch, where I was very happy to see Julia already waiting for me. She gave me a kiss on the lips, which was not usual for us at school, but she was obviously in a very happy mood. As soon as we were settled, and while I remembered, I told Julia, "I forgot to mention on the phone that Donna has been exceptionally nice. She's spotted that Carol and me are getting 'kissy and cuddly' with each other, and she said she'd not tell Mom and Dad because Carol's been so happy about it." "That's great. That'll make it easier for you and Carol." "I'll say! Donna couldn't tell on us for anything more than kissing and cuddling at the moment, but the last thing we need is Mom and Dad getting suspicious." A couple of girls came over and started sitting down. As a result of my 'fame' (ha!) I'd been crowded by silly people for several days. I'd gotten quite sick of it and protective of my isolation, so I said, "I'm sorry girls, we prefer to have lunch by ourselves. Please sit elsewhere." One of them said, "We can sit wherever we like!" "That's true, but if you sit here we'll just stand up and move somewhere else." The other girl took her friend by the arm, and said, "Come on, Sharon," and they walked off. Sharon wasn't happy over my rejection. Carol turned up as the rejects were leaving. They, especially Sharon, looked put out that Carol was allowed to join me, and not them. I called out, "She's my sister and my girlfriend's best friend. I know when I'm beaten." Non-Sharon laughed, and they kept walking. Carol asked Julia, "Am I really your best friend?" Julia's answer was fairly predictable, "Yes you are, and a lot more besides." Carol seems to need a lot of reassurance, but that's okay. When it's my turn to give it, I am happy to make her feel good. Julia directed Carol to sit next to her rather than on the other side of me. The new arrangement was unusual, but I had food waiting for me so had better things to do than worry about it. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Carol, and looked up to see what the cause was. I couldn't see anything. Julia was kneeling between Carol and me, facing Carol so her back was to me. Carol was staring fixedly at Julia's neck, as best I could tell from where I was. Julia asked Carol, "What do you think? Does it work well?" Carol, "{Gulp}. Very well. I can see everything." Carol's stare was immovable and her face was going red. "Do you like it?" "Umm. Yes. It, umm," semi-responded Carol. Julia asked, "What about if I do this?" As she swayed from side-to-side a little. Carol, in a slightly shaking voice, said, "That's very... , um, good." "Should I lean forward a bit more?" Julia did so. "Oh!" "That's better?" Carol's answer seemed to convey that it was much better, "I can even see your bellybutton." Now I knew for sure. This was the little tease Julia had said she'd do, that'd help show me that Carol was bisexual. We both knew we didn't need to prove that anymore, but Julia must have wanted to go ahead with it anyway. I pretended to ignore what they were doing. "Do you think he'll like it?" "Oh yes!" "Good. Thanks for your help, darling." "Umm. Okay." Carol was still staring at what I now knew were Julia's breasts. Julia made some arm movements for a couple of seconds, and when she turned to me, all was normal. She saw me look at her chest then back at her face, so she knew that I knew. This was mostly for Carol's benefit so we didn't talk about it. I noticed that Julia was wearing the same dress she'd worn on Friday, the large smock thing with the bow under her breasts. I remembered it vividly because last Friday she hadn't been wearing a bra under it, a fact I'd been delighted to discover when she hugged my arm in her usual fashion. Now I realized that with the bow undone, and her leaning forward, it must fall a long way open. She'd obviously intended to perform the trick on Friday, but Biff#4 had messed that up. I killed time while waiting for Julia's 'surprise' tease of me by asking, "Carol, how did you sleep last night?" Carol blushed again. I felt sorry for her, but not enough to stop me (hehe). I added, "Were you feeling so sleepy that you didn't join Donna and me this morning?" Carol just looked down at her lap. I continued twisting the knife, "Did you think about you, me and Julia having sex together?" "{Groan}." I turned to Julia, and said, "Julia, did I tell you about that? What I asked Carol to think about when she went to bed." Carol squeaked out an, "Oh, no." Her face was now bright red. Julia joined in, obviously knowing what I was doing, "You didn't tell me. What was it? It sounds interesting." Sex was going to become a significant part of Carol's life, starting from last night. Including being teased about it because she obviously enjoyed that. So I explained, "Just before Carol left my room I suggested she think about the three of us having sex together. I could tell that Carol found that idea very exciting, and I imagine she fingered herself in bed while thinking about it, didn't you Carol?" Poor Carol much preferred not to answer. After a few seconds of silent squirming, I had to add, "You MUST obey me and Julia, Carol. Answer my question truthfully. Did you get yourself off thinking of Julia and me having sex with you?" It took her a second to summon her courage, but she finally and shamefully admitted, "Yes." Julia casually commented, "The thought of the three of us together excites me too." Carol couldn't help herself exclaiming, "It does?" "Yes. You are very beautiful and I like you very much. I've never had sex with a girl before but I'd very much like to lie you down in the middle of the bed with Mark and me on either side of you, both of us sucking on one of your nipples while we have a hand playing in your pussy." "OH!" I added, "Remember what I told you about how delicious Carol's pussy juices are, Julia, so we should make sure we both lick her out too." I hadn't gotten around to telling Julia about the taste of Carol's juice, but I knew it'd push Carol's buttons if she thought I had. "Oh God!" moaned Carol. Julia said, "Mmm, I can't wait. Maybe we can do that on Wednesday night when you sleepover, Carol. Would you like me to lick your pussy and drink your juices on Wednesday?" Carol face was hanging down. Her only reaction was to get even redder. Julia said, "Carol, at all times you must answer both of us truthfully. That's very important. Do you want me to lick your pussy?" Carol kept her face downward, but she forced herself to mumble, "Yeah. I'm sorry." Julia asked, "What are your sorry for?" "For thinking of you like that. I shouldn't want you to do that." "I've been wanting to do that for several days, darling. Your wanting..." "You have! Really?" Julia's response was wonderful, "Yes, since Wednesday night when I realized how wonderful you are. I think Mark has EXCELLENT taste in girlfriends - if I may say so myself - and on Wednesday I saw from the way that the two of you are together that he loves you very much. A guy doesn't love a girl as much as Mark loves you without exceptionally good reasons. Mark opened my eyes to you, and it didn't take very long for me to see for myself what a lovely person you are. I'm proud and happy to have you as my friend, my sister, and my lover." "Oh, wow!" Carol struggled to work out what to say next. After a couple of seconds she asked me, "Mark, do you really love me that much?" "More, my love. You're the loveliest, kindest, most caring person I know." We took a break for Carol to have a good cry. Julia cuddled her, calming her with sweet expressions of affection. When Carol had recovered sufficiently, Julia told her, "I'm very glad you and Mark love each other so much. I could talk for hours about how wonderful that is, and what joy it's going to bring all of us, but I want to finish what I was saying before. On Wednesday night I honestly want to lick your pussy. Will you please let me do that?" "Oh. Umm, yes, if you want to?" "Yes, I do. I'm looking forward to it very much. I'm also looking forward to your doing the same to me, but unfortunately we can't do that yet." "We can't?" "No. That's one of the jobs Mark's and my serving girl will do, so I couldn't ask you to do that unless we pick you. I hope we do because I'd love for us to lick each other's pussies." Carol, bless her, tried, "Umm, we could, you know, anyway?" Julia was firm. "No, we can't, sweetie. We can only do that to the girl we pick, once we've picked her. I don't want to take advantage of anyone just because they're eager to be picked. That wouldn't be moral. I very much hope we do pick you though." #1: Carol had the same hope, "Me too. Please pick me. I really want to serve you and Mark. Please?" Julia reassured her, "You're doing very well so far. I'm just sorry you have to suffer the indignity of the 'Sexual Self-Control Test', having Mark and me licking your nipples and pussy." Carol insisted, "That's okay. I know I have to pass that test because, umm, just because. I don't mind you doing it to me. I'm sure I'll pass it." I said, "Yes, we're sure you will too. We love how eager you are to serve us. You make us very happy." All very, very true statements. Julia spoke up, "Oh, while I remember to mention it, I did some shopping for you this morning, Carol." Gleefully Carol asked, "You did?" Julia explained, "Do you remember that on Saturday morning I asked you to buy some G-string panties, two sizes small, with light coloring and a plain panel so your pussy shape could be very easily seen?" Carol's going bright red again could probably be taken as an indication that she remembered. She gave me a nervous glance, and I just smiled at her. I didn't know what this was about, but I definitely wanted to. Julia continued, "I bought several pairs for you this morning. Hang on, I'll get them out of my bag." Julia pulled a paper bag out of her school bag, opened it, and started pulling out and passing panties one by one to Carol. Carol was sitting there, with her outstretched hand slowly accumulating panties. She listening to what Julia was saying and looking around nervously to see if anyone could see what she was holding, while looking increasingly embarrassed. Julia was saying things like, "This one matches your eyes beautifully", "This one would look great with that red skirt you've got", "This one will get very see-through when your pussy is wet, so we'll save that one for a special occasion", "This one I want you to save and bring to my house on Wednesday night and leave it there, as you'll be wearing it Thursday evening", "This one matches your skin color so you'll look naked from a distance. We'll have to think of a way for you to show that one off in public so people will think you're walking around naked. You don't mind people thinking you're walking around naked do you, sweetie?" And so on, with every pair having a comment made on them. I'd particularly looked at the "Thursday evening" pair, but why Julia had picked them out specifically wasn't apparent to me. They were just glossy white panties, as tiny as all the others, which was VERY tiny. Carol was going to look great in ANY these! When Julia handed over the last pair, she folded up the paper bag and put it back in her schoolbag. Carol's hand was still outstretched, full of about a dozen pairs of panties. Carol said, "Um, can I have the bag please, to put these in?" Julia's answer was, "No, sorry. I need it." "Okay. Umm." I could see Carol's problem: she hadn't bought her bag to lunch, just a couple of pieces of fruit. She'd have to carry the panties back to her locker, and then stow them loose in her bag. Carol started putting them into her pocket. Unfortunately the panties were so small that they easily fit. (Obviously my "unfortunately the panties were so small" comment applies ONLY in this context. In all other contexts their smallness was a fantastically fortunate aspect.) Julia watched Carol pocket them all, then said, "Mark, which was your favorite color? We'll get Carol to immediately take off her current panties and put your favorite pair on." You can tell why I like Julia, can't you? I was thinking about my answer, when Carol hesitantly said, "Um, I can't do half of that." We both looked at her, and I could see she had a proud smile on her red face. Before either of us could question her further, Carol added, "I'm not wearing any panties." Julia said, "Good girl! Show us." I expected Carol to protest, or delay in some way, but she didn't. She looked around to see where other people where, then she stood, moved location slightly so when she flashed us no one would be able to see, sat down, spread her legs and pulled her skirt up to clearly and wonderfully show Julia and me that she'd told the truth. I was just admiring the view speechlessly, but Julia said, "You have a beautiful pussy, Carol. I'm looking forward to licking and playing with it as part of your test, and for my own pleasure. I must add my congratulations for your attitude and obedience. Your willingness to please us is extraordinary and delightful. Don't you agree, Mark?" I agreed with enthusiastic vehemence. Carol was very happy and proud. Julia asked, "Not that I'm complaining at all, but why aren't you wearing panties?" "Mark said my test included you and him doing whatever you wanted to my body, whenever you wanted. I want to be as helpful as possible, and I want you to see how cooperative I can be so you'll pick me." Julia laughed, "I can see that very clearly indeed." Carol's pussy was still being displayed to us. Her pride in meeting our requests was greater than her embarrassment, which was great for us, and it obviously made her happy too. Julia added, "I see you're quite wet, darling. This excites you, doesn't it?" Carol nodded. Julia asked, "Have you deliberately exposed yourself in public before?" "No. I don't even like wearing revealing clothes, but when you or Mark ask me to show myself, I love it!" "Good. You'll be a great serving girl if we pick you. What I want you to do now is to put one of your fingers in your pussy and get it as wet as you can, then let me suck on it. I want to taste you." I thought Carol must have been gaining confidence because she didn't hesitate to obey. She looked around quickly, saw no problem, and complied. She smiled at Julia proudly while preparing her finger. We were both smiling proudly back at her too, although my smile might've been more "lecherous" than "proud". When Carol deemed her finger sufficiently wet, she offered it to Julia, who made a big deal about cleaning it. Julia commented, "You were right, Mark, Carol's juice is delicious. I'm looking forward to tasting much more of it on Wednesday night and Thursday morning before school." Carol looked so happy it made me feel very good. Isn't it great to see your sister so happy over your girlfriend wanting to drink her pussy juice? I felt guilty every time one of us said something like, "If we pick you as our serving girl." I felt bad for all the unnecessary concern Carol was feeling because of it. So I suggested, "Julia, would it be okay with you if we somehow speed up the decision about whether Carol becomes our serving girl? She's doing so well and trying so hard that I'm uncomfortable with how much we're putting her through. What do you think?" Carol held her breath and stared at Julia, awaiting Julia's decision. Julia considered, "Hmm. I must admit that I can't imagine any other girl doing even half as well as Carol. She's doing fantastically well, she's very obedient, and she's trying as hard as she can. Plus there are very good emotions between the three of us. I think we should be able to speed up our decision considerably." As soon as she heard the last statement, Carol leaped forward and threw her arms around me, "Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. You won't regret it, I promise. I'll be the best serving girl ever!" After thanking me profusely, Carol detached herself from me, attached herself to Julia, and repeated the same sentiments several more times. Carol was VERY happy, which certainly made me feel pretty damned good too. When Carol had calmed down somewhat, I said, "Honey, just to make sure you understand, we'll keep testing you for a little longer, maybe just a few more days, but you're doing so well I think it's almost certain we'll pick you." Carol answered, "I understand. I just have to avoid making any mistakes for a few more days, and then you'll pick me. I'll be trying very, very hard. Thank you for thinking I'm so good." Julia said, "We think you're much better than just 'good', darling. You're obedient, which is great, but you're also smart enough to realize that you can think about what we'd like, and do that before we've asked. Like your not wearing panties now. That attitude is very impressive." #2: After we settled down, Carol asked, "Would you like me to open my legs again, so you can look at me some more?" #1: #3: Julia answered, "Thank you for thinking to offer that, darling, but there's no need. I think that the next time I see your beautiful pussy, I want it to be in private so I can do whatever I want to it." It probably was better to play safe. Julia was right, but I was sorry not to get more looks. We both smiled at Carol, and I added, "You're wonderful. I love you very much." Carol was telling me how much she loved me back, when a movement of Julia's caught my attention. She was leaning toward me, with the front of her dress WAY open. It was true, I could see her belly button, not that I wasted much time looking at that! I guess the surprise must have registered on my face, as both Carol and Julia started laughing at me. I didn't let it distract me. Once I got over the surprise enough to think of TK, I checked Carol's location. In one respect it was unfortunate that Julia's dress was open so much because Carol could probably see Julia's nipples, preventing me doing as much as I wanted to. Goodness knows what Carol would've thought of Julia's nipples if I'd not toned down my response. I just gave them a couple of light TK-squeezes, then said to Julia, "You got me wonderfully with that. What a delightful surprise. First seeing Carol's lovely pussy, then your wonderful breasts. This has been a GREAT lunchtime!" Julia retied her dress's bow, and we settled down again. As I wasn't keeping any secrets from 'my two girls' - other than the essential "Avoid Causing Humanity To Self-Destruct Across The Entire W-Dimension" which is so important I consider it far more than a mere "secret" - I told them, "In our run this morning Donna said I was running better, and when I timed it during PE she was right. I'm about 3% faster, which doesn't sound like much but it has a very significant effect on the world records I could theoretically set. What's really nice though, is that my speed increase came from what I learned at Aikido. When Donna spotted on the video that they moved like me, she was exactly right. She's going to get heaps of thank yous at dinner tonight, and I'll make sure I thank her privately for helping Carol and me too." Carol said, "She'll be so pleased she's helped you." "She's pleasing me a great deal, so I'm happy that she'll get some of that back." We talked about Donna for a while then some other topics until a few minutes before lunchtime ended, when Carol had to leave us. She said, "I'd better head back. I need to go to the bathroom to clean myself and put my panties on. I love you two so much. Bye." I said, "We love you too, darling." And off she went. When I turned around to Julia, she was once again leaning toward me with her dress open. I nearly swallowed my tongue in shock. When I got it back, I laughed while Julia redid the bow. Julia said, "Before she arrived you said that it was me that set everything up for Carol being so cooperative. All I did was use the motivation her love for you created. It's very nice to see how much she loves you." "It's very nice to see how much YOU love me. What you are doing to bring the three of us together is beyond my wildest dreams. I used to think I had some wild dreams, but that was amateur stuff compared to what you're doing for me now. Thank you very, VERY much for how fantastic you're making my life." Predictably Julia mirrored my comment, "Thank YOU, 'very, very much for how fantastic you're making MY life.' I've got the best man on the planet, and you've got two ordinary girls who're trying their hardest. I know I can never give you as much as you're giving me, but I'm enjoying trying to." "'Two ordinary girls.' You've got to be joking! I think I'm a dull, boring guy, whereas you're incredible in your dedication and what you can accomplish. Although you don't seem to be very good at tying bows..." The rest of our mutual admiration conversation was predictable enough that it doesn't need recording here. We were both VERY happy with each other. ------- Chapter 40: I Run Faster and Put My Foot in My Mouth Monday, April 11, 2005 (Continued) Julia had a very busy afternoon dealing with the many people who were dismayed or panicked over whichever of her club or committee resignations was relevant to them. She also had to do a lot of talking to hand over what she'd been doing in each case. It was all very boring stuff compared with what she was doing for me! The afternoon had its good points though, such as when I met Julia outside one classroom and we went in together. We were earlier than most of the other students, so after dropping our bags by our desks I turned to talk with her. She leaned forward over my desk and her dress fell forward again, giving me a clear view of her belly button and other anatomically significant features. #2: I TK-tweaked one of her nipples to teach her a lesson. She just made a quiet, appreciative, "Mmmmm'ing" sound, the slut! After giving me a few more seconds to appreciate her charms, she started doing up her bow. I TK'd a soft stroke along her cheek and whispered, "I love you." One of us should maintain the moral high ground, and I'm happy to say that it didn't look like it was going to be the slut. ------- I was waiting for the car, when Carol happily ran up to me and grabbed my arm in the Julia-inspired fashion, which I have to admit did feel better when Carol did it. Carol announced, "I had the best day, thank you so much!" After a quick look around, "You're welcome, Sweet Pussy." Carol acquired a small blush, but only a small one. I obviously reminded her of something because she replied, "Isn't it wonderful that Julia likes me like that? Oh, I just thought, you don't mind do you? That your girlfriend likes me that way." I gave that question all the mature thought it required, "Sweetie - and when I call you that in the future you'll know exactly what part of you I'm calling 'Sweet' - I think it's FANTASTIC!" "Good. You've certainly got a one-track mind for my juice." "And for the rest of you too. I'm surprised you said it was wonderful that Julia liked you that way? That's the first time I've heard you be so positive about it?" Carol had gotten a worried expression on her face from early on in my comment. I figured it was about the bisexuality thing, so I completed my question and listened to her answer carefully. [Carol had spent the afternoon thinking about how good the three of us could be together, but she still thought that I didn't want her sexually. My comment's first sentence about my having a one-track mind for her body conflicted with my never getting hard with her, so she was quite confused. She was also too scared to ask about it. She thought that I was only saying and doing such things to give her pleasure because I cared for her personally, but not bodily. She knew I could do some special things, like run a world record marathon, but she never guessed about my wonderful cock-softening ability. (She explained her current confusion to Julia and me later. I'm giving you the explanation now to make her behavior easier to understand.)] Carol answered, "I've been thinking about it. I think it'd be good. Every day I want more and more to be your and Julia's serving girl. I can't believe how much I want it. Thinking about it makes me feel things I've never felt before. Lunch was incredible. I missed my class after lunch because I spent all the time in the bathroom playing with myself. I couldn't stop. I kept tasting myself too. I've never done that so much before, but you and Julia keep telling me how delicious I am. It was the best lunch I've ever had..." I'm sure she could have gone on for hours, but I'd gotten her drift by now and it wasn't the sort of conversation it'd be safe to get carried away with at school. So I interrupted her with, "I love seeing you so happy, sweetie. That's one reason why I'm very happy that Julia and you like each other that way." (I'm sure you can think of some of my other reasons for yourself.) -- "While I think of it, let's not say 'that way' because it sounds immature. You and Julia like each other sexually. I love seeing you both so happy." This was me trying to act mature. It wasn't a concept I was very familiar with so I was struggling to find good tricks to use. "I AM so happy. Everything's wonderful. You're wonderful, Julia's wonderful. I can't believe how good my life is becoming!" It ain't too bad being in my shoes either! And Julia has been expressing a considerable amount of happiness too. So I said, "I think Julia and I are just as happy, if not more so. As you said, 'everything's wonderful', for all three of us." "You know, you and Julia are the first people that have thought I was sexy. I mean not just my body being sexy, but all of me. For years lots of boys have chased after me, but they've just been stupid boys. Trying to trick me by pretending to be nice, or 'accidentally' bumping into me to get feels, or lots of other immature stuff. They were only thinking about my body. You and Julia are so different. You're so mature and confident in how you tell me what you want me to do, and you're so understanding of me as a person. I love it that you want to spend time with me because of me. It melts me inside. I can't help it, and don't want to. I love you two so much." #4: #1: #2: #4: "I just thought of something I should've mentioned before. Part of being our serving girl, even right now while we're testing you, is that you're not allowed to have any boyfriends. Or sexual girlfriends, come to that. Ordinary girlfriends are okay, of course, but no romantic or sexual relationships with anyone else, okay?" Carol responded immediately, "That's easy, there's no one else who interests me, boy or girl. I didn't even know I wanted any girl like that until Julia." The car pulled up and Donna came running from the other direction. I opened the door for Carol as usual, and by the time I was in the car, so was Donna. ------- I was looking forward to thanking Donna for the Aikido and running faster thing, so I asked her if she wanted to goof around at something. Donna thought that sounded like fun, so we went straight outside again after dropping off our school gear. I started off by telling her, "Donna, remember how this morning you said I was running better?" "Sure. You float along the ground." Unfortunately that wasn't literally true - I run by placing foot after foot on the ground just like everyone else does - but I understood she meant that I was even more graceful than before. "Well, I did some timing tests at PE today, and you were right, I am running better. A few percent better. It doesn't sound like much, but it'll reduce my 10k time by a minute. The best part is that I know why I am faster, and it's because of what I learned in Aikido. I know I keep thanking you for finding Aikido for me, but I keep discovering that Aikido is more and more useful to me. Who would've thought that I could learn to run faster from it? So - once again - thank you for being so observant, smart, and especially for caring enough to tell me about it. You are a wonderful sister." To be perfectly honest, which wasn't something that should stand in the way of a well-deserved compliment, Donna had noticed that the aikidoka on the video moved gracefully. She had already noticed that I moved gracefully, so she drew the similarity to my attention. At that time my gracefulness was caused by my four minds giving me superb subconscious control of my body (sense of balance, reaction time, muscular control, proprioception sense, etc.), which was almost certainly not why the aikidoka in the video were graceful. Judging from Sensei's abilities and comments, and the two books I'd read, it didn't appear that top level aikidoka had multiple minds. So Donna got the cause of the gracefulness coincidence wrong. Now that I'd gained extra gracefulness by discovering whatever "moving in harmony with the Universe" was, Donna was correct, but too late to make my praise of her totally accurate, which didn't concern me at all. Donna, being Donna, said, "Good," handed me the ball, and said, "You start." I probably could've gotten a more verbose response out of her, but she'd rather play. I could see she was very happy though, which was all I wanted. I had to add, "Okay, I'll start. But don't think I'm going to take it easy on you just because you're a wonderful sister." We have a variety of handicaps on me to give her a chance when we play goof off games. For basketball I have to hold the back waistband of my pants with one hand all game (or have one arm unusable in a sling), so my "go easy on her" comment wasn't as silly as it seemed. With my handicaps, we have close games. After playing for a while, we needed a little rest, so we went inside for a drink. Donna asked me, "You'll win the 10k even easier now won't you?" "Yes, that's right. I worked out that I can finish it about one minute faster than I could before my Aikido lesson..." I was about to carry on to explain that one minute didn't sound like much but was actually very significant, etc., when Donna jumped in with, "Wow! That's great." I should've realized that Donna knew all about the importance of running times as she'd been in an athletic club for several years (d'oh!). Donna went on to say, "Good. I'm going to do something nice for you. Does that mean that after you go to Aikido this Thursday you'll be able to run even faster?" "No, the improvement was a oncer. Um, that's a silly word I use to mean it just happens one time. I won't get any faster from now on, but I'm fast enough already, I think." "I think so too. If Carol joins us on Wednesday morning, let's get her to measure 10k with her bike's speedo' and see how fast you can run it, okay?" "Sure, if you want me..." "I do. I'm REALLY want to see how fast you can do it." "We'll do that then. Carol can measure how far our usual loop is, and I'll just run it the number of times needed. I'll make sure I'm wearing my watch to time it. Also, what do you mean about doing something nice for me? You don't need to do anything for me, I already owe you big time for finding Aikido for me and for being VERY discreet about Carol and me." Her answer was a less than enlightening, "Don't be silly!" She put down her glass and went outside. I guessed the conversation was over, so I followed her. Donna and I had a good time playing, and were still doing so when Mom got home. Shortly after that Mom called out that dinner would be in half an hour or so, and we should come in to shower. Donna had been beating me for most of the time, but I had recently pulled ahead because she'd gotten tired, which isn't a problem that affects me much. Donna was happy to call a stop, so we went inside. I helped Mom in the kitchen until Donna had finished her shower, then had one myself. By the time I was dressed in fresh clothes it was dinnertime. I arrived to hear Donna telling Mom, " ... not feeling well. She asked me to bring her a small plate of food. Is that okay?" Mom said, "I'll take her one." Mom made up a plate and took it to Carol. The rest of us finished dishing up all the other plates, and took our food to the table. Mom returned without the plate and said, "Carol's upset about something but wouldn't tell me what. She just needs some time, I think." #3: #1: We had our dinner. I couldn't help thinking it was such a pity. Carol had had such a wonderful lunchtime, and had been fill of happiness. Probably her lack of sleep for the last few nights had caught up with her. I was assigned to the kitchen to help with the dishes, after which I was tempted to check on Carol. Donna beat me to the room and I figured it might be hard for Carol to talk in front of Donna, so I diverted to my room and did some schoolwork. About 7 o'clock there was a knock on my door and Carol came in, closing the door behind her. She looked liked she'd been doing a lot of crying, which instantly made me feel bad for not making more effort to see her. I waited for her to walk to me, but she just stood by the door, tried to put on a brave face, and said, "I agree to all your rules. I love you and Julia very much, and want to spend the rest of my life serving you." Before I could say anything, her face started collapsing into tears again. She turned to open the door, so I called out, "Carol, stop, we need to talk." She answered, "I'll come back at 10:30 because you said you have to see me naked every night. I can talk then." The tears started rolling down her face, and she fled my room. #4: #3: #4: #1, #3: I spent some time trying to work out what could have upset Carol so much, but nothing made much sense and I eventually got back to my schoolwork. Then I spent some time thinking about what I'd learned about my abilities today. I gained no new insights, but I spent some time thinking about what I did know in case that led to a good idea. It didn't, so I killed the remaining time reading OSU material. Julia called my cellphone mid-evening. I told her that Carol was upset about something and was crying, but she was coming to my room later tonight so I'd find out what the problem was then. Julia had been out for a driving lesson with Robert, and told me she was doing well. Also, her Mom had our wedding preparations well in hand. I ended by thanking her very much for the surprise looks at her belly button. "You enjoyed seeing my belly button, did you?" "Oh yes! You have a very sexy belly button. You need to stay bent over for longer though, as sometimes my view of your button was obscured by some other things that hung down in the way. Can't remember what they're called, "broobies" and "nibbles" maybe. Something like that anyway. They robbed me of valuable belly button watching time, so I demand that time be made up." "Haha. So you 'demand' more time do you? I'll see what I can arrange. Can't have you feeling deprived. Depraved is good, but not deprived. Haha." "Good, I'd appreciate that very much, thank you." On that silly note, we finished the call. ^ Carol came in at 10:30, on the dot as expected. She was wearing a T-shirt that stopped well above her pussy. She gave me a slow spin and I got to admire her ass all over again. I was stunned by her brazen sexuality. Not that I'd had any doubts, but if I'd had, this display would've removed them all. She was mine, and was making no bones about it; just a boner, if I wasn't careful. "Wow, Carol. Just wow!" I looked at her some more. She was a glorious sight, that's for sure! The T-shirt was even tighter across the chest than last night's, so it was instantly obvious that she was bra-less, even though her nipples weren't erect. I finally recovered from the shock enough to look at her face properly (I'd been distracted). I could see that she was determined, and smiling, but it seemed a shallow smile. Not brittle, not on the verge of tears, but there was sadness underneath it. After her spin, she stood facing me for a few seconds, to give me a good look, then she walked toward me and started pulling her T-shirt off. I quickly said, "Leave it on for a while Carol, just come and sit on my lap." I patted my lap, which quickly brought to my attention the need for a go-soft. I held it down between my legs with TK to give it time to soften while Carol climbed on my lap. She snuggled in, and I put my arms around her. I held her for a while, and rubbed my hand up and down her back gently. She seemed content, but not much more than that, and certainly not the very happy girl she'd been at lunch or when we were waiting for the car. When I thought we were both well settled, I said, "Carol, darling, your happiness is one of the most important things in my life. Please explain to me why you were so unhappy since we got home?" "I'm okay now, Mark. You don't have to worry about me." #3: #4: #3: "Sweetie..." #3: " ... I can see that you're not happy. I know you too well for me to believe you're okay. I AM worrying about you, even though you told me not to, so you have to explain, please." "It's just that you gave me a hard choice, and it was difficult to make. I'm sorry I hesitated, I don't want you to think I don't love you and Julia enough. I really do you know. That's why I've agreed to everything you said." #4: I did what I usually do in such circumstances, asked to have the explanation explained to me. "Carol, I'm sorry, but I'm just a silly guy. Even Donna called me silly this evening, so it's unanimous. I didn't understand your explanation. Can you please explain it another way?" She smiled at me, and said, "You're not silly, you're a genius..." "Not when it comes to females I'm not. Then I'm a moron." Carol tried again. "You said that to be with you and Julia - to be your serving girl - I can't have a boyfriend. I'm sorry how long it took me, but I agree to give up having a boyfriend in order to be with you and Julia. Giving up a sexual girlfriend other than Julia too, although that doesn't worry me." #2: "Why was it so hard for you to give up boyfriends, Carol? You don't have one, do you?" Carol unhesitatingly answered, "Of course not. I was thinking about the future. One day I wanted to get married and have a family, but you're right that I can't do that and serve you and Julia. I was stupid in not thinking about that before. You were right that I have to make a choice, and I've chosen you and Julia. I want to spend my life with you two. I'm sorry I didn't realize that sooner, but I'm okay now, I've made my choice. If you still want me, I mean? I didn't hesitate too long did I?" #3: #2: #3, #4: "Carol, my love. You know how Donna called me silly? Well she was wrong. I'm not silly; I'm far, far stupider than that. Let me tell you how stupid I am. The 'No Boyfriend' rule was something I made up while we were waiting for the car. I'd never thought of it before, but then I suddenly realized how beautiful and wonderful you are, and I worried about some high-school guy strutting up to you and asking you for a date. I was worried you'd agree to date a jock, or some other confident-seeming guy, and Julia and I would lose you. -- "I was just being short-sighted and selfish. I didn't even think about the future beyond the next few weeks. I feel really horrible for how bad I have made you feel. It was never my intention to force you into a choice like that. You have my promise that I will never, ever stop you marrying a man you love, or from being a mother. I love you too much to take something so wonderful from you. I am very, very sorry. Please forgive me?" Carol visibly perked up. She was smiling honestly again, but still puzzled, "But how can I get married and be a mother, and still serve you and Julia properly? I'd love to serve you and Julia for the rest of my life. Really, I would!" "I know you would. I know that the idea of serving us brings you a great deal of happiness. And it makes us very happy too. All I can say is I won't restrict you in any way about marriage and motherhood. It should be, and it will be, your choice. If you want to stay with us, you can. If you want to get married, you can. If that happens we'll be very happy for you, and I'm sure we will spend the rest of our lives being your very, very close friends. Both of us want you to be happy. We NEED you to be happy, and we'll do everything we can to help make that happen." "I don't have to choose?" "Definitely not. You can do whatever you want. I apologize very, very much for making you think you had to choose. I was stupid and selfish. When we were waiting for the car I just had a sudden image of a high-school jock telling you to go on a date with him. I know you like following commands, and I feared you'd follow his." Carol accepted my apology in her own way, "Donna was right, you ARE silly! Haha. As if I would listen to anyone else when I have the two most fantastic people in the world as my best friends already. I'd laugh in the face of anyone who tried to pick me up now." I wanted to be sure, which only just confirms that I truly am very silly, "What if the guy who tried to get you was a really successful jock? Captain of the team even?" "You are a 'really successful jock' at soccer and running. You could be captain of your soccer team any time you wanted." I don't consider myself a jock - of course not, it's a pejorative term! - but I understand that other people have different opinions, although why completely escapes me. I tried a different angle, "What if he was REALLY handsome?" "You are!" Carol was obviously greatly biased, but the only thing that mattered was that Carol thought this was true, because her misperception made her safer. I admitted defeat, "I give up. I should've known you wouldn't make a bad decision like dating a jock. My apologies again for being so selfish that I hurt you so much." "You weren't selfish." "I most certainly was! I wanted you to myself. For Julia and me, and I made you promise not to date anyone else." Carol disagreed with me some more, "But not because you were selfish. The INSTANT you realized what it meant for my future you canceled my promise. You told me it was my choice, so you weren't trying to keep me for yourself. You said over and over that my happiness is ultra-important to you. That's not being selfish; that's being loving. And now I love you even more than I did before because you've shown me how important my happiness is to you. You can still apologize for being silly if you like. That was true, haha." She was right both times, about me being silly and not being selfish. I was impressed, and told her so, "You said I was a genius, but about things like this I'm not. You're much smarter than I am. You were right and I was silly. I'm VERY sorry my silliness hurt you so unnecessarily, Carol. I feel like a heel for doing that to someone I love so much." Carol was magnanimous in victory. "I accept your apology for silliness. But it showed me something about how much you love me, so it was worth it, even though I cried a lot. There's a saying I can't remember properly, something like, 'Don't keep something you love in a cage. If you truly love it, then set it free. If it returns you have true love.' That's what you did with me. You set me free, and showed me that you truly love me. I feel very, very good about that." The old Carol was back, she was hugging me and smiling, with nothing in her face except happiness. All her sadness had gone. We hugged in silence for a while, then Carol added, "You weren't being selfish, you were trying to protect me from being taken advantage of." "Yes, you're right, as usual. Sorry I was such an idiot." Carol snuggled in even closer, and continued, "I am glad you're protecting me. The last week has been very scary for me. I never knew that I'd enjoy being bossed around so much. I was astonished at how much I loved Julia and you doing it to me, and how good it made me feel. I hope you and Julia will keep an eye on me just in case I get in trouble because of it, but I don't think I will. I think I'm safe now - even without your 'no boyfriend' rule - because I love you and Julia so much. I can't imagine that anyone else could affect me at all, not even a handsome captain of the football team." "You knew we were deliberately commanding you?" "Of course. Every time you or Julia give me a command it sends jolts of pleasure through me, which is hard not to notice! It didn't take me long to work out what was going on. It was just hard to get used to, especially after you joined in and you started telling me to do even more extreme things. It was hugely exciting for me, but very confusing. Well not 'confusing' exactly. Just hard to get used to, I guess. -- "This afternoon was good for me, even though I cried a lot. I spent hours thinking about my future, about the choice between a normal future with a husband and children, or a future with you two. I realized that nothing could make me happier than being with you. You both understand and care for me, and make me very happy, so I chose you two." #3: #2: #4: #3: #2: #3: #4: #2: #4: #2: I said, "Carol. You said my silliness helped you understand how much I love you. I understand that it did, which was a lucky good result out of a stupid mistake of mine. Your making the choice you did - choosing Julia and me over a husband and family - also showed me how much you love Julia and me. You were giving up a great deal, weren't you?" "Yes, but I was gaining more. Julia has told me several times that your life is going to be very special and I'm starting to get that. You didn't mean to, but you forced me to choose between an ordinary life away from you, or being part of your and Julia's special life. I had to think about what sort of person I am, and what I wanted. -- "I'm never going to trust a guy more than I trust you, Mark. I know you love me, care for me and want me to be happy. I've seen in the last few days that you and Julia REALLY know how to make me happy! Boy oh boy, do you ever! I had to do a lot of crying, but after that it was easy. I'm happy with my choice. I love you and Julia very much, and I know I'll love my life serving you two. More than I would being in an ordinary marriage and life. I'm not going to miss out totally on the traditional things, as I obviously won't be totally without children." #4: So I asked, "Why won't you be without children?" "I'll help with yours and Julia's, of course. I'll enjoy that." #4: #3: #2: #4: #2: #3: #1: I said, "Let's worry about the future later. It's going to be a few years before we even start thinking about children." #2: Carol accepted my answer. She hugged me closer, putting her head on my shoulder, her face against mine. I held her close, just rubbing her back. I suddenly remembered that she was wearing a T-shirt that was indecently short. I was rather proud that I had completely forgotten about that. Her happiness was far more important to me than her body, which was as it should be. Now that she was happy, my awareness of how sexy she was returned. I felt my cock stirring, and go-softs were immediately resumed. When Carol had said earlier in the evening that she'd see me at 10:30, I hadn't asked her to make it safely later. She'd been so upset then that I hadn't wanted to delay her return. Mom and Dad had gone to their room, but they might still be awake so we'd have to keep the noise level way down. Carol moved her head a little, and gave me several soft kisses on my cheek, then she said, "Shall we start the testing now? You know, of my self-control." I'd lost all interest in that tease. I'd enjoyed it for a while, but her crying all afternoon took away the pleasure I'd had in it. That the outcome had been good was no thanks to me - it was just blind luck - and I didn't want to risk hurting her again. Quite the opposite, I wanted her to feel better. I said, "I don't think I want to test you anymore." "You don't?" "No. As far as I'm concerned you've passed everything. I'm very happy for you to be our serving girl, as we call it. I know Julia's looking forward to testing you - playing with you really - on Wednesday night, but I've made up my mind already. I'm just sorry I put you through so much." "It was all right. I didn't mind. I'm overjoyed that you're happy with me, but I don't mind if you test me some more." "There's no need, honey. I know you're fantastic. I could never find anyone better, so making you do any more tests is pointless and mean to you." "Oh no, it's not mean. You are never mean to me. You can test me some more, especially as I am all ready for it, wearing this T-shirt and everything." I was about to reassure her, again, that further testing was unnecessary, when, #3: #4: #3: #4: "You're absolutely right, SWEETIE. All this talking has made me thirsty, for something SWEET. I wonder where I can find something sweet to drink?" Carol's giggle let me know I was on the right track. I picked her up as I stood. Not an easy task as there is a lot more of her than Julia, but I didn't have far to go. I took a couple of steps and lowered her quietly onto my bed. Carol declared, "Oh, goody." #4: #3: I informed her, "I need an appetizer before the main course. Off with that T-shirt!" It was on the floor in half a moment, and my lips were on one of her nipples while her arms were still coming down. I had intended to just spend a few seconds on each, before moving down to her pussy, but Carol's got REALLY great breasts, and I got rather more involved with them than I'd intended. I couldn't get enough of them. There was so much of them that "I couldn't get enough of them" is true in two respects. After much licking, sucking and nipping (an ideal term, considering my usual target), I noticed that Carol was starting to get very aroused, possibly enough that I could give her an orgasm soon. This made me wonder whether to start giving her orgasms before our wedding? I decided not to. First because I wanted our wedding to be as special as possible for her. Second because if I started giving her orgasms, I wasn't going to be able to stop at just one or two, I would want to do it to her over and over, very likely attracting Mom's or Dad's curiosity. That'd be a REALLY bad idea! I regretfully removed my mouth from her breast, and said, "I told you that I consider the test, all the tests, over. I am doing this only to apologize to you for my silliness. So if you orgasm it won't change that I want you as my serving girl, so don't worry about that at all. Okay?" That was obviously okay with her because she smiled from ear to ear while nodding happily. I continued, "But, unfortunately, I am worried about Mom or Dad coming to check out our noise. I also think I need to talk with Julia before I start giving you orgasms. So tonight I'm just going to play with you a bit. You just relax and enjoy it, but I won't do more than I've done before. I hope that's okay with you?" "Everything you do with me is more than okay. You can do whatever you want, and I'll love it." No problem there then, so back to 'work' I went. A little more time spent on her breasts, and I decided it was probably time for the main course. I sent an exploratory hand down there, to check for moisture. We hadn't been playing around long, but already she was nicely wet (all types of wet are "nicely" down there). So I kissed goodbye to her breasts, and my mouth headed south to see if I could make her even more nicely wet. Carol responded wonderfully, causing me to fight a thoroughly enjoyable losing battle when trying to lick up all her moisture. I didn't try to build her arousal toward a climax, instead I spent my time keeping the sex fairly constant and trying to make it fun for her. Lots of light touches, comments, quiet jokes, etc. We enjoyed ourselves a great deal. It was the nicest time I've ever had with a naked girl while my clothes were on. I thought about whether to take off at least my shirt so I could get some skin-to-skin contact, but it didn't seem like a good thing to do. I didn't know what she expected in the way of sexual contact between us in the years ahead, but I decided that I wanted her to expect as little as possible. That way the consequences of our wedding would be as big an improvement as possible, assuming she'd consent to informally marrying Julia and me, which seemed very likely. For that reason I wanted to do almost nothing sexual with her from now until Thursday, but I also wanted to cheer her up after her bad afternoon. Giving her pleasure while keeping all my clothes on sounded like a good middle position, plus a hell of a good time (although, I hoped no literal "Hell" would ever be involved). I didn't pleasure her for as long as I would've liked (the rest of my life!), as I figured she'd had an emotionally hard afternoon and a late night the previous night, so I should let her get back to her bed soon. So after a few cycles of cleaning her up and then used my fingers to help her produce some more juice, I moved back up to lay alongside her. I put one hand behind her head and around her far shoulder. My other hand cupped and lightly caressed her breasts (they're irresistible). I asked her, "How are you feeling, sweetie?" "Never more loved." I told her I loved her too, she insisted not as much as she loved me, I insisted I loved her more ... You get the idea. She won the exchange, when she thanked me for, "Understanding, protecting and loving me so much; and for giving me so much pleasure." I could only tell her, "It's Julia's and my very great pleasure." I was aware that she was probably quite tired, and she was going to have very late nights on Wednesday and Thursday, which just left her Tuesday (tomorrow) to catch up on her sleep. I said, "Last night and tonight are both well past your normal bedtime. Because of my stupidity you've had an emotionally very hard day today, and I guess Julia is going to keep you very busy Wednesday night, so I suggest that tomorrow night you dress normally, and pop in to see me about 7 o'clock or so. We'll have a quick cuddle, but you should have a very early night. You need to catch up on your sleep. We don't want your schoolwork to suffer or for you to get sick." She regretfully conceded my point. Before I sent her off to bed, I made her put her T-shirt back on and give me a couple of more spins. She was a fantastic sight. Just before she left, Carol said, "I want you to know that I am overflowing with happiness and love for you and Julia. My life with you two is going to be far better than anything I'd ever dreamed of. I always felt that I didn't really connect with life properly. It never seemed to grab my attention and interest much, but it SURE HAS now! Remember what I wrote when I tricked you into stopping to reassure me rather than going to Julia's?" I nodded. "You've done that again with me recently. Thank you VERY much for discovering how to give me so much pleasure. I'm going to be grateful to you my whole life." In my usual way, I answered, "It was Julia who discovered your need to serve us, and how to make it sexual. She had to tell me what to do. So it's her you should be thanking, not me. Also, she wouldn't have bothered thinking about it if she hadn't already found out what a wonderful person you are, so most of the reason is because you're such a wonderful, nice person." Carol's dismissed my opinion, "In other words, everyone else did everything, and you're refusing to take any of the credit. I don't believe it. As Julia would say: {Raspberry}, haha. -- "NONE of this would be happening without you. YOU have changed my life into something that has me so excited I can't sleep. I'm committing my life to being the best serving girl you and Julia could ever have, and I'm going to love doing so. I owe you everything." Carol reached out and grabbed either side of my head, and kissed me full on the lips. It took me by surprise because I had no warning from my proximity sense. We'd decided not to have any mind on duty during Carol's visit. It'd been another, situation. Carol quickly finished her kiss, and started backing up. I had no hesitation in saying, "I command you to come back and do that again. I wasn't ready." Carol laughed, then complied. I held her in my arms and kissed back enthusiastically. It was definitely a kiss I enjoyed VERY much, even though we didn't French kiss. That seemed too intimate and passionate, so best saved for our wedding night. Despite Donna's comment about Carol and me getting "kissy and cuddly," we'd done almost no kissing. All the time spent eating her out or playing with her breasts couldn't be considered wasted though! When we'd finished, and Carol had turned around, I couldn't resist a last hug from behind (grope, really). I ran one arm around her waist and up the front of her T-shirt to fondle a breast, and the other hand went around her waist and down to cup her pussy. I hugged her to me, while I spent a few seconds playing. I whispered in her ear, "I love you very much, and will try to make your life as good for you as I can." Then I made it as good as possible for both of us by fondling her a bit longer. Eventually, and sadly, I let her go, sending her off to bed with a pat on her bare bottom. It was hard to watch her leave. Two seconds after she was out of the door, something else was hard. I'd like to write that we spent some time intelligently and responsibly discussing the sister that we loved very much, but mostly I behaved like a horny 15-year old boy. Everything was on track, Julia was in charge, and there was no need for any of my minds to pretend to be intelligent. It'd probably be best if we kept a low profile for the next few days, rather than risk making another mistake like the messed-up "protect Carol from jocks" comment. So we mostly talked about how good it was going to be, with occasional references to Carol's glorious tits and pussy. That I'd be having threesomes some time soon came in for more than a few comments too, although I wasn't sure when that'd be. I'd have to check with Julia. After I'd worn my cock out, #2: #3: #2: #4: #2: #4: #1: #4: We sent ourselves to sleep. ------- Chapter 41: Stereo Vision is Great Tuesday, April 12, 2005 Carol and Donna repeated their new tradition of a morning march in from their room to kiss me on both cheeks. This morning was quite different though, Carol was bouncing with happiness. She'd started behind Donna, but rushed ahead and started kissing my cheek even before Donna was in position. As soon as Donna had planted her kiss, Carol ran around the table kissing everyone's cheeks, declaring - every time her lips weren't otherwise busy - "I'm SO happy!", "What a wonderful family I have", "I love my life", 'Thank you, my wonderful Mother", "I love you, Dad", "Donna is the best sister, ever!", and a few more along the same lines. When Carol got around to me on her second orbit, I got my cheeks well and truly wetted by several more kisses, and got told, "I love you, Mark. You're the best." The rest of the family were chuckling and bemused. After Carol had finished all her kissing, and had bounced her way to her seat, Mom said, "That's the most dramatic recovery from depression I've ever seen. I take it that everything's fine now?" The question was directed at Carol, who answered, "Everything's wonderful! I'm VERY happy!" Mom, "Yes, we can see that. What upset you so much yesterday then?" Carol paused to work out how to answer, then said, "Just some silliness." I couldn't help chucking, as it was my silliness that she was referring to. Carol gave me a big smile, very proud of herself for getting that little dig in. I said, "It's great to see you so happy." "It's great to BE so happy! Now I'm hungry. I didn't eat enough last night." The rest of breakfast was closer to normal, although more upbeat. I escorted Carol out to the car on my arm, as we'd recently started doing. Once in the car, she caught my eye then looked down. When I followed her glaze she started slowly pulling her skirt higher, and kept pulling! I watched this development with great interest. Soon it was high enough for me to see no panties at all. Carol placed a finger on her clit and rubbed it lightly, giving me a huge smile the whole time. Apparently when I had said the tests were over, she hadn't realized that she no longer needed to "make herself available to Julia and me at any time." Or, perhaps - and this seemed much more likely - she did realize but was doing it because she wanted to. Carol is always a pleasure to look at when she's in a car as the seatbelt accentuates her breasts marvelously, but rubbing her exposed clit took the pleasure I got from looking at her to a whole new level. I was tempted to 'look in her schoolbag again', but the driver was a teacher so I should play safe. I suddenly thought that when I got my license I'd be able to drive Carol to school. Who knows what that might permit! I chuckled at the thought, which made Donna turn around. I expected Carol to frantically cover up, but she did no such thing. She kept rubbing her clit, keeping her hand flat on her tummy so my view of the rest of her pussy wasn't obscured. Donna would have an even better view. By the time I realized Carol wasn't going to cover up, it was too late. Donna had got a full look. I cringed, waiting for the explosion. Donna asked Carol, in a quiet voice, "You're very happy aren't you?" Carol gushed, "You have NO idea!" Donna said, "Good", and turned back to be looking forward again. #1: #2: #3: I looked at Carol, who was still looking at me, so getting her attention was easy. I sniffed a couple of times, then nodded at the teacher, then down at her lap. Carol got the message, and covered up. She leaned against her door, sucking her finger in case I needed reminding of what I'd just seen. On arrival at school we got out of the car as usual, but VERY unusually, Donna hung around. After the car had moved off and we'd joined up, Donna told me, "A few weeks ago Carol wouldn't say boo to a goose," (another expression you can blame on my mother, although you shouldn't blame her too much as it's probably true that Carol wouldn't do that. It's presumably a common hobby of the English, given how often Mom uses the expression), "and now she rubs her cunny for you only two feet behind a teacher. Not to mention walking around with no panties on, which is very funny. I hope you don't do that on a windy day, Carol." Carol's reply was, "It'd be worth it." I'm sure she didn't mean that, as she was holding her dress down carefully. Donna added, "I love you two heaps so please don't get in trouble at school or home." It's not like Donna to talk like this. It was much more mature that she normally seems. I said, "Thank you, Donna. I greatly appreciate your concern and help. Carol and I had a good talk last night and I think Carol's bounce back is somewhat of an overreaction to her new emotions. Hopefully she'll settle down soon." I was looking at Carol when I said the last part, so it was really more of a suggestion to Carol than answer to Donna. Carol's response was very definite though, "We didn't just have a 'good talk last night'; we had the most fantastic talk. Mark said that I can spend the rest of my life with him and Julia. I'm overjoyed and so happy I could burst. I can't tell you how wonderful I feel. I am going to have a fantastic life. -- "I'm not overreacting; I can't react enough. But I will settle down, in about twenty years or so, haha." And she grabbed my arm. This would ordinarily be very welcome, but I was very conscious that she had no panties on, and no hands holding down her fairly short skirt. I said, "I like you holding my arm, but I think you'd better hold your skirt." "Oh yeah, I forgot. I'd better go and put them on. See you at lunchtime, love." As she walked off, holding her skirt carefully. Donna called out to us both, "Good luck you two," and she shot off. #1: #3: ------- Many people still wanted to talk with Julia about the handover processes for the various committee jobs she was stopping, often including wanting to know why she was stopping. Julia was attached to my arm, so I was necessarily dragged along to these discussions, which made it easy for Julia to indicate me when she said, "I want to concentrate on my boyfriend, Mark." Most of the people having to take up the slack caused by Julia's sudden departures were less than impressed. A couple of senior girls even went so far as saying, "Why would you want to spend time with him? He's not anything special." They didn't know me so were obviously judging me purely by looks. Even though I don't look like "anything special", saying so right in front of me was excessive even for seniors (those seniors that want to - which is quite a few of them - believe themselves too important to worry about the normal rules of politeness). Julia's usual answer was along the lines of, "Mark's important to me." To the two stuck up bitches Julia said, "I'd rather spend time with Mark than with you," then we walked away. The remaining questions they had for Julia about whatever their project was went unanswered. Julia couldn't resist telling me, "They're so superficial. They're going to be eating their words in a few years when they're nobodies and you're world famous." With all the committee discussions, I didn't get a good chance to talk with Julia privately until we were waiting to start the last period before lunch. I quickly told her about last night's developments: My massive mistake with my "no boyfriend" off-the-cuff rule and how that had luckily worked out well, including Carol's extreme happiness now. My canceling the rest of my tests, but Carol wanting to carry on with them for fun anyway. I described my intent of not giving Carol any orgasms until Thursday. Julia wanted Carol to still be a virgin on our wedding night. Orgasms weren't a big deal, but withholding them from Carol to let the pressure mount before the wedding would work nicely. In the brief discussion we had about that, I learned that girl-on-girl sex didn't count, "Unless you want to me abstain too?" asked Julia. Knowing what would work out best, I confidently answered, "Whatever you think is best." Then I mentioned the AMAZING news that Carol knew we'd been ordering her around deliberately because we knew of Carol's need for it. Julia said, "Of course. I thought you understood that?" [[Which was a particularly sneaky deflection from Julia, as she'd deliberately overplayed the point of Carol's vulnerability to me originally.]] "Ah, no. I thought she had no idea. That she was just doing what we said without thinking about it. Even when it got sexual." "You've got a lot to learn about girls, Mark." It had been several days since this had been pointed out to me, which was much longer than usual. I had a momentary hope that I was getting better, but then I told myself not to be so stupid. The only thing I knew about girls was that I knew nothing. Probably everyone had been too busy recently to point out to me how much I had to learn about girls. I know Julia didn't mean it in any nasty way - she'd never talk with me like that - so I just asked her, "You are doubtless correct. Which of my many areas of ignorance about females did I fall into this time?" "Getting sexual would be the biggest one. No girl 'accidentally' repeats sexual activities. She knew what she was doing and why. We pushed her into it, but she chose to allow us to push her and she could've stopped us at any time. You would've stopped the instant she said, "Stop", wouldn't you?" "Heavens, yes. I would've stopped then run backward half a mile, apologizing all the way. The thought of making her unhappy by abusing her sexually horrifies me." "She knew that. She deliberately put herself into your hands. She's fully aware that she loves you, trusts you, and is excited by you. She decided to proceed." "I had no idea. I thought I knew much more about what we were doing than she did, but it was the other way around. I DO have a lot to learn about girls!" Julia agreed, "Haha. Don't learn too much more, you've already got half the girls in school drooling over you. Carol knew what she was doing, but she doesn't know what WE are doing: that we're going to commit ourselves to her in our marriage and ask her to do the same to us. That's going to blow her away. I'm looking forward to our proposing to her. Mom and I have a wonderful ceremony planned." Which made me realize I knew nothing about it, and it was only two days away. "That reminds me, I don't know what's involved. Don't I need to know what to do?" "No. Just follow my prompts at the time. The only thing we need to do is have some nice clothes for you to wear. Can you bring some to school in a bag tomorrow, and I'll have them ready for you when you arrive on Thursday afternoon?" "Sure. I'm a bit nervous mentioning it, but there's one large issue I want to ask you about. I'll understand if you get angry, but I'd like to mention it now, if it's okay?" "I can't imagine what you could ask about that could get me angry at you. All I want is for you to be happy, so ask away." "It's a biggie, so I'll understand if you're upset. Okay, here goes. After the three of us are married, and I think as soon as we practically can, and if she agrees, I'd like Carol to have some of my children. Two or three probably." I waited for the explosion. Julia just stood there looking at me, and seemed perfectly fine. She also wasn't saying anything, or moving, or anything. Just standing there looking at me. And still looking. Waiting apparently. This was confusing. #1: I couldn't bear the suspense, "Julia, how come you're not saying anything?" She helpfully said, "About what?" #2: I was lost, but tried, "About what I just said, about Carol having my babies, if she'll agree." "Oh that. Don't worry, she'll agree all right. She'll love to. It'll be fantastic news for her. That was the bell, so we should go to class." #1: "Umm, darling, I kind of expected you to react different. And more. Much, much more. How come you're not reacting?" Julia cracked up. She burst out laughing and couldn't stop herself for quite a few seconds. Again not the reaction I expected. #1: #2: When Julia was only half out of control with laughter, she managed to gasp, "You should see the look on your face." More laughter. "I almost feel sorry for you." A variety of thoughts crossed my mind in response to that. Let's just say that I DID feel sorry for me. When Julia calmed down, she said, "I'm sorry. I wasn't intending to do that, I just couldn't resist. You were a sitting target." #1: Julia continued, "You told me you wanted Carol to have your babies. That's all you said. You didn't ask me my opinion, or anything, you just stated your desire. Then you stood there looking very worried. It really was very cute." #2: I made one last attempt, "We had better get to class, can you please explain quickly, or shall we save it for lunch?" She took the path that rubbed it in the most. "It's simple..." #1: " ... My role in life is to make you happy, including to help you achieve your goals. You told me what you wanted: for Carol to have your babies. I understand what you want, and I'll work to make it happen. Consider it done, I just need to take care of the details, haha. Practically that's all I need, just to know what would make you happy. -- "Second, you shouldn't have worried about me being jealous or angry. I'm happy if I can make you happy, as I've told you many times. You don't understand how much greater and more important than me I think you are. My being jealous, which means wanting to keep you for myself, is ridiculous. I confess that I was very jealous when we first started dating, but I'm ashamed of myself now. I should've remembered that Annette proved you were unable to wander away from me. Carol's obviously a special exception, and I'm very happy with that. -- "Lastly, in case you're curious about my opinion, I think it's wonderful! Carol will be a wonderful mother and much better at that than me. Remember I said her role is your wife in the house and my role is your wife outside the house. Your choice is perfect. Shall we go to class now?" [[The last point is the main one. Julia's self-appointed role in my life is organizing everything that such a superhumanly impressive man will need organizing when he's an adult; hopefully an enormous amount and involving bossing lots of people around. Being an ordinary mother wasn't Julia's goal at all.]] I thought I saw something she was trying to avoid discussing, "You make it sound so simple, but before you insist it is, let me ask about you. Don't you want babies with me?" Julia's answer was another question, "Do you want to have babies with me?" "Um, sorry, not really. Not yet anyway." "Then I am happy to NOT have babies for you. When you want to have them, let me know, and then I will be happy TO have them for you. Get it? What you want makes me happy. It's simple." #1: #2: #1: Julia added, "Mark, I'm just another Carol because we both live to serve you. I'll do it in more sophisticated ways than she can yet, but we're really the same. I know you're far more important than I am, so the only sensible thing for me to do is focus on your goals. Holding you back to achieve my goals - if I had any left - would be stupid and selfish of me. That we love each other makes this my pleasure as well as my choice. You won't make the best use of me until you understand that I will do ANYTHING for you. We're only in school so it doesn't really matter now, but it might in the future so I'm trying to teach you. I know you're going to have an extraordinary future, so I am helping as best I can to make you ready for it, even if I sometimes tease you. Sorry about that." "I saw how much you were laughing at me so I don't believe you're sorry at all. I've a good mind to order you to strip naked right here, if only to show you that I understand your lesson, haha." Julia's only response was to start removing her clothes. She moved very quickly and had all the buttons of her blouse undone before I could recover and yell "Stop!" Julia stopped. I gave a quick look around. It seemed okay. There were some people several yards behind her, but they wouldn't have seen anything from behind. There were a couple of guys in the other direction, who maybe could have seen her unbuttoning, but they were a long way away and didn't seem to have noticed. While I was looking at them, I heard Julia say, "Are you sure?" When I looked back at her, she was holding her blouse wide open, ready to slide it off her arms. I was thankful she was wearing a bra (or was I "disappointed"? I'm of two minds on that issue, and four minds' worth of embarrassed). I thought again of the guys she was facing, and looked at them. They were running toward us with their eyes glued to Julia. I had a feeling they'd noticed. "You can get dressed now, Julia. I understand that you'll do anything I want, and just because you like to drive that point home, you'll call any hint of a bluff of mine." She nodded happily while doing up her buttons. The guys running toward us slowed down when they saw the fun was over. Tough cheese; they can get their own serving girls. Julia said, "I was thinking about what I said earlier, about putting your goals ahead of mine. I honestly can't think of any goals of mine anymore. I wanted to find Mr. Right, and I found, 'Mr. The Most Wonderful Guy On The Whole Planet', and he even comes with his sister, Miss Right, who is also wonderful in her own way. I can't think of anything else I want. I didn't have a specific career goal, other than something in management, which I'll get plenty of through you. I think I've overachieved in what I wanted for my life already, so now I'm working on your goals." I commented, "I'm sure you'll work on my goals in your own way though. I never know what you're doing until you spring it on me." Julia laughed, "Good. That gives me opportunities to express my personal creativity." We were late getting into class. I apologized to the teacher without explanation. #1: ^ The day was nice enough to have lunch outside, so I met Julia in our usual spot. We chatted - which means mostly Julia chatted and I ate - until Carol arrived. Carol rushed up and gave me a big hug and kiss on the cheek. She was obviously still in a very good mood. After kissing me, she rushed over to Julia, hugging and kissing her. Carol enthusiastically asked Julia, "Have you heard that news? Isn't it great? Mark says he's happy that I can serve you and him. I'm SO excited and happy. I'm going to spend my life with you! Yipppeeee!" That wasn't quite what I'd said, but I wasn't the least bit tempted to correct her. I think Julia probably understood enough about girls to pick up on the fact that Carol was happy. Julia stretched up, and licked the length of one side of Carol's face. The shock stopped Carol in mid-word. Julia said, "I am looking forward to doing that between you legs tomorrow night." Carol blushed. She'd been doing that quite often recently, and I SUDDENLY realized why: she has a girlfriend! Just like I'd discovered for myself, having a girlfriend causes no end of embarrassment, apparently even a same-sex girlfriend. Carol recovered from her blush quickly, and sheepishly asked, "Can I do that to you too?" I liked Julia's answer, "I'm going to command you to. You'll have to lick me to orgasm BEFORE I'll lick you." "But, but I've never done that before. I don't know how. I might not be able to." "I hope you're a slow learner because I'm going to enjoy teaching you. But I'm so hot for you I don't think it'll take you long to make me cum." As usual, an unbelieving Carol needed reassurance, "You're hot for me?" "Scorching!" "Wow. Umm, I'm getting hot for you too, you know. Now that I'm getting used to the idea." "Good. Part of your job as my serving girl will be to give me lots of sex when Mark is unavailable. Your tongue and fingers are going to be very busy." "Wow." "You may not know how to lick a pussy now, but you are going to be getting a great deal of practice very quickly. Very soon you are going to be an expert pussy-licker." Carol smiled at the idea, as did I, then she declared, "I'll try very hard to make you happy. I can't wait to start." Julia's answer was wonderful, "Let me give you a taste. Give me your right hand." Carol offered it. Julia continued, "Close all your fingers except the two long ones. Yes, just like that. Hold that shape. Now lean over, I want to whisper in your ear." Carol leaned over. As she did so, Julia moved their hands under Julia's skirt, sticking it up, then moving it back and forth. All while whispering in Carol's ear. I checked around, Julia's back was to the rest of the school. There were a few kids off to a side, but I moved to block their line of sight. After several seconds, Julia pulled her head away from Carol's ear, and said, "Lick your finger. Taste me." I think we'd have had trouble trying to stop Carol from doing so. She eagerly brought the glistening finger to her mouth, then carefully licked a pool of juice from her palm. #3: #4: #1: #4: #1, #3: [[It took me a long time to learn the real reason, but it was quite revealing of Julia's personality so I'll explain it now. Julia was suddenly so excited about Carol mostly because of my recent conversation about wanting Carol to have my babies. That had showed Julia how strongly I thought about Carol, and that had made Julia very excited about how well her plans were working out, especially her plan to be managing both of us. Julia was LOVING the situation she had created for herself. In case that makes you think poorly of Julia, let me point out how unjealous she was: Julia was hugely delighted that I loved Carol so much. In my eyes that is far more to Julia's credit than the manipulations she was applying to Carol and me, especially as those manipulations were to our benefit as much as Julia's, as Carol's overflowing joyfulness very clearly showed.]] #1: Carol declared, "It's good!" and proceeded to lick her hand clean. Julia said, "I'm glad you like it because you're going to be drinking it for the rest of your life." "Wow." Julia got us to sit down, being very specific about where she wanted me to sit. I soon found out why. The two girls sat side by side, facing me with their back to the school. They both crossed their legs and pulled their skirts up. Stereo naked pussies! Julia, obviously inspired by Carol's example yesterday, was also sans-panties. My head was swiveling back and forth. Then I remembered my eye trick, so I held my head still while I pointed one eyeball at each pussy. Carol exclaimed, "Mark, what's wrong with your eyes?" I hadn't thought about Carol not knowing about it. Before I could answer, Julia did, "Carol, our man is VERY special in many unusual ways. One of them is that he can move each of his eyes in any direction he wants. He can look at two things at once, and he can even read two different books at the same time." #1: Carol was amazed, "Really? You can read two books at the same time?" I said, "Yes." I gave her a demonstration of my eyeballs independent movement by dancing each of them around for a few seconds. Carol laughed, "That's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I've never heard of anybody who can read two books at once. I can't even begin to be able to do that." Julia drove the lesson home, "I keep telling you that our man is a truly exceptional person. We're so lucky to be able to serve him." Carol said, "We certainly ... Oh no!" Carol clamped her legs together, saying "Quickly, close your legs." To Julia, presumably. Julia complied, while Carol said, "See those two girls, one in the cerise skirt, the other with a vermilion sweater?" I looked around. I don't know why I bothered because I didn't have any idea what "cerise" or "vermilion" looked like. I recognized them as the names of colors, but I didn't know what colors. Julia said, "Yes." Before I could work out which two, Carol said, "Don't look at them, you'll only encourage them to come over." Julia quickly looked away. Carol continued. "They're in my class. This morning they asked me why I wasn't having lunch in my usual place recently. When I said I'm having lunch with my brother in high school from now on, they wanted to come with me. They like Mark and were trying to use me to get to him. I told them no way, but they've come looking for us anyway. And they've seen us; here they come." I looked where Carol was looking, and two girls in red clothes were walking toward us. They were still a long way away but they were coming straight at us. #1: None of us thought that needed an answer. Julia said to me, "Swivel so you're facing them Mark." Being the boss, I immediately obeyed her. She got up and sat between my legs, so she was also facing them. "Give me your left hand." (See my previous comment about being the boss.) Julia hitched up her skirt and placed my hand above her pussy, and told me to rub her clit. I started doing so (being a very happy boss). Julia leaned back on my chest, looking up at my face. I pretended to be looking down at Julia, but was watching the girls by looking upward as much as I could. I gave Julia a running commentary on them. They were soon close enough to see where my hand was. That was easy, as my hand was at the end of my arm, and the direction of my arm was obvious. The girls faltered when they realized where my hand was, but then they resumed walking toward us. As they got closer Julia's legs opened increasingly wider, and she started groaning. Rather theatrically, I thought. One of them stopped dead (the one in the red dress), I suspect because she'd just got close enough to notice that Julia wasn't wearing any panties. She tugged on the arm of her friend (the other one in red). The friend obviously asked what was up, and a few words were said by the observant one. The friend's head whipped around to point straight at Julia. She took a couple of steps closer to be sure, and then was sure. They turned around and left much faster than they'd approached. Julia said, "Why have you stopped. Keep rubbing please, it feels very nice." The stupid boss said, "Why? They're going already." "I don't care about them, I could've yelled out, 'Get lost sluts, he's mine' if I wanted to get rid of them. I just wanted you to rub my pussy. Please carry on." I laughed, then said, "For fooling me like that, you're going to have to let me rub your pussy." "Excellent plan. That'll teach me a valuable lesson. I'm not sure what lesson, maybe that it's a good idea not to wear panties around you. What do you think Carol, does that sound like the lesson?" Carol answered, "I already learned that lesson. I learned it even before you. I like not wearing panties around Mark. He gets a really silly look on his face when he stares at my pussy." Julia, bless her, said, "In that case, sweetie, why don't you move so our man can see your pussy again." Carol thought that was an idea worth acting on immediately. It took me five more minutes to remember that I still had some uneaten lunch, that's how good an idea it was! My lunch was out of reach, but Carol saw me looking at it and went to get it for me, saying, "After all, I am your serving girl. Your panty-less serving girl." "That's my number one favorite type!" ^ The rest of lunchtime was pleasant, even though Julia regretfully suggested that we should behave more modestly. I asked for another minute, and spent it gently inserting my fingers into and out of her pussy. When time was up I pulled them out and Julia covered up. I turned and offered my fingers to Carol, who sucked them gratefully. I said to Julia, "Carol's been so good, even fetching my lunch for me so I could keep rubbing you, that I thought she deserved a little bonus." Julia said, "I think that's an excellent way to reward our serving girl for doing good quality work. More employers should do that for their staff." When Carol had to go, Julia said, "Please tell us what those two girls say to you when you get back to class. That should be good for a laugh." Carol agreed, "I will. Thanks for a great time you two. I can see we are going to have a great time together." I added, "Tasty too." Carol didn't even blush, "Yes. Very tasty. I can't wait to get my lips on your pussy, Julia." Julia mirrored that sentiment, "I can't wait either. Tomorrow afternoon isn't far away. Have a great afternoon my lovely serving girl. I love you." Which started everyone telling everyone else that we all loved each other. When all the combinations were done, Carol left. When she was out of earshot, Julia said, "I've got one major problem with our wedding that I can't think of a solution to. Maybe you can help me." I knew we were in trouble if Julia was asking for my help. "I'll try. What's the problem?" "I'm staying away from your home and not inviting you to mine so we don't make your mother concerned about us spending too much time together. She worried about that before so I'm being careful. There should be no problem with you and Carol coming to my place right after school on Thursday. -- "At my place there'll be several stages to the evening. The first is showing your TK to Carol, discussing what it means, and then proposing to her. We can do that as soon as we get home from school. Then there'll be the wedding ceremony itself, which my family will witness. Before that begins you'll have to show your TK to my parents so they can be in favor of the marriage, and then we'll invite The Boys in and do the marriage ceremony. We can do that as soon as they're all home, which they assure me will be promptly. The last part is the consummation of our marriage. Your making love to Carol is the most important part of that, although all of us should bring each other to orgasm, to show our marriage flows in all directions. -- "That will only take us into the early evening. After that you and/or Carol could go home, depending on what your mother wants, but I don't want either of you to leave. It's our wedding and I want both of you to stay overnight. My problem is how to get your parents to agree to that?" It was a problem I definitely wanted to solve. Sleeping with my two favorite girls was my idea of heaven. Unfortunately I couldn't think of a solution. The only thing I thought of was another problem, I'd completely forgotten that Thursday was my Aikido night. Mom would expect to drive me back and forth, just like she had the previous week. Julia added, "Mom thinks the same as me, that we should all spend the night together, so she'll help if she can." I could only say, "I can't think of a solution yet. I agree about wanting us all to stay overnight, so I'll think hard. I'll let you know if I think of anything." We headed off to class. The rest of the school day was uneventful, with no more girls showing me their pussies. ------- Chapter 42: Happy Carol, Curious Mum Tuesday, April 12, 2005 (Continued) On the way to the car pick-up point, Donna found me and let me know she had a sports thing to do and she'd get a ride home from someone else. I saw Carol waiting at the usual place. You could see, even from a distance, that she was still very happy. It was good to see. And then she saw me and her visible happiness rose even higher. She rushed to me, and we walked back to our waiting spot with her attached to my arm. On the way we passed one of my soccer teammates, who said, "Hi Egg. I thought you had a new girlfriend, but isn't this your sister?" "Yes. Carol this is Robbie; Robbie, Carol." Robbie said, "Hi," to Carol. Then to me, "You two are very friendly. She's almost as friendly as a girlfriend." My answer was automatic, "Carol's better than a girlfriend. She's my sister." Robbie chuckled, "You can have my sister then." He wandered off, chuckling to himself. Carol hugged my arm even tighter and said, "I wish I could kiss you here. Just wait till we get home, and I'm going to thank you for that." While we were waiting for the car, Carol suddenly spoke up, and said, "Oh yeah, I just remembered the two girls from lunch. Do you remember them?" I couldn't resist, "You mean the two girls wearing red clothes?" Carol didn't rise to the bait at all, instead immediately agreeing, "Yeah, those two. I saw them later. I had planned all sorts of nasty things to say to them, but in the end I just told them 'Mark can choose almost any girl in school as his girlfriend, and the girl he's with is so fantastic she's now my best friend, even though she's years older than me. That you two thought you had a chance gave us all a big laugh after you ran away.' -- "I thought that might be enough to put them off, but Judy asked whether it was true you were rubbing your girlfriend's pussy and that she wasn't wearing any panties. I didn't want to get Julia in trouble, so I said, 'Lots of the older girls don't wear panties at school. Forget Mark, young girls like you don't have a chance to compete with the girls he can choose. He could have a different girl for every day of the month, none of them with panties on, so you two don't have a chance.' They looked pathetic when they walked away. I don't think they'll be bothering us again." I said, "Sounds like you enjoyed yourself." "Not really. I realize it's going to happen often, especially when you're a senior next year. Julia pointed out that I can't afford to get worked up each time because there'll be too many." I offered, "You don't need to worry about it, sweetie. I send them packing myself, and the fame crap is dying down now. I doubt very much it's going to be an issue next week, let alone next year. It's just a temporary nuisance and not worth getting fussed about. I've got the two best girls already, so my life is complete. Next year most of the people hanging around us are going to be guys, trying to get close to you." Carol opinion of that was succinct, "HA! No guy can compete with you." On that elegantly expressed opinion, the car arrived, and we headed home. We were the only two at home and we took full advantage of that situation in my room, during which Carol thanked me for my, "Carol's better than a girlfriend. She's my sister," comment - over and over again. It was great to have the opportunity, as Carol needed to go to bed early tonight to catch up on her sleep. We did no more than we'd done before, but we did it several times. I must not have a very good imagination. Here I was with a live-in serving girl - not quite officially appointed yet but nearly - and the only thing I could think to do with her was sexual play. She hadn't brought me any more than the one glass of milk. Somehow I didn't think I was wasting her talents though. We heard Donna come home a little more than an hour after us, so that stopped our play. Mom was due soon anyway. I followed Carol back into her room, where Donna was. Carol gave Donna a spin, dressed only in the vest/undershirt thing she'd worn to my room. I don't know what that garment should be called. On a guy it'd be a "sleeveless singlet", but on Carol that name was just 'wrong' - it was far too awesomely sexy for such a boring name. It hugged her figure to perfection, was slightly see-through, and stopped at her waist, so her hips and below were unashamedly naked. After her spin, Carol gave Donna an enthusiastic hug and kiss on the cheek, and declared, "I am SO happy." Then she ran back to me, and hugged me and kissed me on the lips. "Thank you for making me so happy." Then she ran back to Donna and hugged her again, "He's so wonderful." We got the idea that Carol was happy. Donna and I laughed at her antics. Carol said, "You can't tease me, I'm too happy!" I said to her, "I'll leave you to put on just a few more clothes, for when Mom or Dad get home." Carol, who had managed to dress herself successfully for years, said in a pleading, little girl, tone of voice, "Can't you stay and help me?" Donna and I laughed some more. "If I stayed to help you, you'd end up wearing even less than you are now, and you know it, you shamelessly happy hussy! I'll meet you in the kitchen when you've dressed." And I closed their door behind me. In the kitchen I called Julia and told her I hadn't had any ideas about our being able to sleep all night Thursday. I had a solution to the Aikido problem though. I'd call Mom from Julia's to tell her that one of The Boys would take me to Aikido and watch me as he was interested too. Mom would be busy with Donna's class so that should work okay. With luck I wouldn't even need to specify which of The Boys it was, making it harder for Mom to later discover that it'd been a lie. A more respectably, but sadly far less sexily dressed Carol came in shortly thereafter, so I finished my talk with Julia and gave the phone to Carol. I heard Carol start the story about the two girls in the reddish clothes. While I remembered, I went to my room and packed my wedding clothes into a couple of bags to give to Julia tomorrow. The bags weren't big enough to also fit my pajamas into. Oh well. I put the bags beside my doorway so I didn't forget them tomorrow, and got down to doing some schoolwork. Carol came in a while later with a nice little snack for me, which I thought was the second best use of a serving girl. We chatted a bit, then we heard Mom come home. Carol rushed out to the kitchen to greet her. I half-heard Mom mumble something to Carol, and Carol's response was a loud and enthusiastic, "I've had the BEST day, Mom. I had a great lunch with Mark and Julia. It was a great day. I'm so happy!" A few minutes later Mom came stood in my open doorway, and said, "Your father and I are going out to dinner tonight but I'll cook you three something before we go. Carol's starting that already. You're all right minding the girls tonight, aren't you?" "Sure, no problem, Mom." No problem at all, even if I had to mind one of them very closely indeed. I thought Mom was about to leave, but she came in and sat on my bed. "How are your studies going, Mark?" We chatted about that and a few other such issues. After a couple of minutes, Mom stood up, smoothed my bedspread, and then left. Carol did most of the cooking while Mom and Dad got cleaned up. They left while Carol and I were doing the dinner dishes. After the coast was clear, I moved behind Carol, lifted her skirt (she no longer wears jeans) and started fingering her pussy from behind. She wasn't wearing panties either; she's a WONDERFUL girl! I've always had a fantasy about coming up behind a girl to grope her while she's working on something like washing the dishes or cooking. For some reason I find it very sexy. Don't ask me why. I'm just a pervert, I guess. Carol bent over the sink and spread her legs. Very few dishes got washed for the next fifteen minutes, while I was on my knees between Carol's legs, my mouth and tongue 'washing' her. It was just my way for thanking her for a nice dinner. Donna wandered in after ten minutes, and merely commented, "I can see why Carol is so happy these days." I found these sorts of comments from Donna quite surprising. They were mature and approving, not giggly as I'd expected. My opinion of Donna had been rising as a result of her recent reactions to Carol and my 'affair' (or whatever the best word for our behavior was; we don't seem to have discussed the correct word in any of my English classes). [Speaking of English, I'm going to have another little rant. I wrote above about not knowing the "correct" word. As far as I can tell, "correct" isn't a concept that applies much to English; it's far too much a matter of opinion. I was very recently told off by my English teacher for using too many semicolons. Apparently, "it looks pretentious even when it's correct"! I started querying her on each of my uses, but she interrupted to say that individually they were used correctly, but collectively there were far too many so I should remove most of them. Whoever heard of anything so ridiculous! I can't imagine a mathematician arbitrarily changing a correct set of workings because he thought it contained "too many" ones. I LIKE semicolons; they have a logical purpose and they fulfill it well. I hope my current English teacher reads my autobiography because I'm pretentiously using a shit load of them herein.] I kept my game with Carol short, only playing for fifteen minutes. Too long increased the risk. ^ About 7:30pm the phone rang and Donna answered it. It was Sensei Nigel wanting to know whether I was coming to class on Thursday evening. I very profusely said, "I'm REALLY sorry, Sensei, but I have something else really important that I have to do on Thursday evening." I thought it best to be non-specific, leaving out details like, "I'm marrying my 13-year old sister and 16-year old girlfriend." He seemed disappointed, but I assured him that I was DEFINITELY going to become a regular student, and that even with my still having my cast on missing a class was a one-time event, to put it mildly! He asked, "Have the books been useful?" "I feel guilty for having them so long, and now for another week. I read them both in the first couple of days and haven't looked at them since because they weren't useful, unfortunately. Do you want me to drop them off earlier, if other students are waiting for them?" Sensei answered, "No one is waiting for them so next Thursday is acceptable. I am disappointed though. From our talk after the last lesson I thought you might have some aptitude for developing ki." "I AM developing my ki. I just didn't find the books very helpful. They're a bit vague so I've been mostly practicing by myself. Just doing what felt right to me rather than using the books' techniques." Sensei was puzzled, "I am not aware that there are any techniques other than what the books talk about. I agree they are vague, but it is difficult to be specific about developing ki. It requires years of practice to gain the self-discipline necessary to hold center for any length of time, and there is not much any author can say to change that process. You imply that you are developing your ki using different techniques?" I certainly didn't want to explain my three-minds-off-duty/one-mind-on-duty technique, so I tried to leap over the issue, "Not so much different techniques. More that the books' techniques don't really apply anymore. More than half of both books is about how to find your center, center yourself and train to hold it; none of which worries me now. Otherwise the books are mostly about the philosophy of Aikido, which is very nice but not what I borrowed them for." I hadn't thought about the books for days, being somewhat distracted, and now I wasn't sure what else I could say about them. Sensei filled the gap in the conversation. "Last week you said you already knew how to center yourself so I know you did not need to learn that from the books, but there is still a considerable amount of material on improving your ability to hold center. Do you have your own techniques for that?" "Umm, no, not really. It's more that I don't need techniques for improving because I'm already pretty good at holding center." "How long can you hold it for?" #1: #2: I answered, "Giving you a duration is a little tricky. Yesterday I lost center a few times, but mostly in the morning. I haven't lost it at all today, although I did deliberately uncenter myself for an hour or so after school when I wanted to concentrate on something else." That'd been my playing with Carol. We'd decided it was okay for all four of our minds to participate in that just one more time. -- "I should easily be able to hold center until I go to sleep. I presume I lose it then; I've never thought about that. From now on I should be able to hold it pretty much all the time that I'm awake." "In that case I suggest you reread the books because you have misinterpreted what being centered means." "Haha. I understand what you're saying, but I'm very sure I haven't misinterpreted that, Sensei. Remember that you agreed with my describing it as slippery last week. I know what being centered is. It's a slippery, tricky thing and I understand why it takes most people a long time to get good at holding it, but I have an unusually high IQ so some mental tasks are easier for me." "Mark, there are only a handful of aikidoka masters who can hold center for hours on end, something that has taken them a lifetime of training to achieve, so you have made a mistake." "I'm sure I haven't, Sensei. It's very easy to tell when I'm centered and the experience is entirely consistent with how the books described it." "Describe how you know that please?" #1: #3: "Other than knowing that I'm thinking of my center, which isn't a convincing example, there are other reasons. It feels good. My body feels lighter and more energetic. Not dramatically so, but noticeably. I also move better now; some people have already commented that I'm moving more gracefully, which I recognize as being like you do when you're walking around the pairs practicing on the mats. I also run better. Only by a very small amount, but I can run slightly faster than before. I like long-distance running, and being centered has helped with that." Sensei asked, "What do you understand about how I move around the mats when the students are practicing?" "You move gracefully. You avoid them because you can sense their movements better than your eyes can, from the front but also when they're behind you too. You can move through them more harmoniously. That's correct, isn't it?" Sensei confirmed, "Yes. That is correct. Are you telling me that you can do this too?" "Sure. Not on your mats because I haven't had a chance to do that yet, but it's the same thing as walking down a crowded corridor at school." "Yes, it would be exactly the same. Nonetheless, it takes many years to learn to hold center for any appreciable length of time. No one has learned as fast as you are claiming to, young man. You sound very sincere and as if you understand, so I am quite puzzled. Are you sure you cannot come on Thursday evening?" "Very sure, I'm sorry. There's a small chance my other engagement might be canceled or postponed, but I don't think so. If it is, I'll come, but it's very unlikely." #2: #1: #3: #2: #1, #3: Sensei asked, "How skillful do you believe you are at projecting ki?" "I don't know. Centering is an on/off thing so it's easy to know how good I am at it. But I don't even know what skillful means when it comes to projecting ki, so I can't give you an answer. Maybe you'll be able to tell me after I start training." "I had expected a different type of answer from you, but that was a good one. You mentioned something about long-distance running earlier. Would you explain that more fully please?" "There's not much to explain. The books talked about moving in harmony with the Universe, and moving did seem smoother when I was centered so I thought I'd test it. I like running so I did some stopwatch trials around a track, comparing centered and uncentered times. I'm a couple percent faster for the same amount of effort when centered. It's a very small improvement, but it is noticeable." "I have not heard of anyone testing their ki so scientifically before. If you can remain centered so long, maybe your attitude is part of the reason. However, I am puzzled by your running result. When I move around students on the mats I am reacting harmoniously to their ki flows. 'Moving in harmony with the Universe' is a grandiose description, but it has the correct connotation of moving in harmony with the ki that is flowing around one. The philosophy of Aikido has it that ki flows into and out of every living creature - which is how the wild stallion was calmed in the parable I told you - but when you are out running by yourself, where is the ki coming from that you are moving in harmony with well enough to increase your speed?" "The books talk about ki 'coming from the Universe'. I assumed it was from that, even though I don't know what that means. I would've suspected it of being philosophical rather than scientific, but I scientifically measured a significant difference in my speed so there is something happening." Sensei said, "I had forgotten the books included that. When we train we are solely concerned with the ki that flows out of the participants, not 'out of the Universe', whatever that means. I had always assumed it meant that the Universe was the source of the ki we all project, but that does not accord with your claim. I will ask around to see if anyone else thinks they move measurably better alone when centered compared with uncentered, especially when running alone. You have made me curious enough that I would like to try that myself, but I fear my long-distance running days are behind me. You were running alone, were you not?" "Yes Sensei. There was no one within a hundred yards of me." "It occurs to me that maybe you were running faster because you thought you should be running faster?" "I don't believe so. I think my experiment was objective enough." "Well, this has been an interesting conversation. It is not often that a new student causes me to reexamine some of my understandings about Aikido, and if your claim of remaining centered all day is even one-quarter true, you will have exceeded my ability in that respect by a considerable margin. Let me ask you whether you are centered now, Mark?" "Without wishing to be boastful, the answer is, 'Of course.' It would take a pretty major distraction for me to lose center, and nothing we've said has come close to that." "I asked because I became aware that I was not centered. Conversation does distract me..." #2: #1: " ... Would it be acceptable for me to call you tomorrow evening, at about this time? To discuss whatever feedback I get from the students I will ask to reproduce your running test." "Sure. That'd be fine. I won't be home Thursday evening, but tomorrow I will be. Let me give you my cellphone number too, I've a feeling we might have a few interesting conversations in the future." We exchanged cellphone numbers. He assured me that he would be happy to receive my calls if I had any questions. He added that it was turned off or ignored during lessons, but I could leave a message and he'd return my call. After I hung up, I had a little talk among myself. #1: #3: #2: #1: #3: #1: ^ Carol came into my room at about 8:30pm. She was wearing her long nightie again. It covered everything, but last time she hadn't worn a bra under it so I was very eager to have her sit on my lap. I could've asked her to take it off, but I was excited about feeling her through it. My excitement seemed illogical, so maybe I've been spending too much time around females recently, not that I wanted to cut back on that. I patted my lap, and she climbed onboard happily. Everything she does is "happily" these days, especially if I'm involved. I put my arms around her, and thoroughly enjoyed placing one hand directly on a breast, and caressing it through her nightie. She sighed happily. I asked her, "How are you feeling?" "I feel wonderful. It's such a good feeling knowing that the three of us will be together for a long time. I'm jumping ahead a bit because Julia hasn't agreed yet, but it sounds like she will. From what she was saying on the phone a little while ago, we're going to be too busy to do any talking tomorrow anyway. She's very horny and so am I. We're going to be having a very good time with each other. You really don't mind that your girlfriend and I will be doing sexual things together?" Let's see, do I mind that? Hmmm. I can only assume that females have trouble understanding males sometimes. Not as often as the other way around obviously, since guys are far more logical and straightforward. I answered, "Sweetie, it is the single greatest erotic image I can imagine. I CAN'T wait to see it for myself. One day VERY soon I'm definitely going to order you to go down on Julia when I'm watching." Carol thought that was an excellent idea, "That's an order of yours that I will be very happy to obey as many times as you want me to." "You're even going to practice very hard in advance too, aren't you? To make sure you're ready in case I give such an order." "Oh yes! I am going to practice VERY diligently, haha." "How's your schoolwork? I'm a bit worried about you doing a lot less studying than you used to." Carol said, "It's okay. I don't have any outstanding assignments or anything. I've just been doing less review than I used to. I don't really care. I've got FAR better things to think about now." She kissed my cheek a few times. I'm not sure why, but I didn't let that stop me enjoying it. Once again, Julia had called it right. Only one data point so far, but I could easily imagine Carol sliding into not caring about college. In which case motherhood loomed, sometimes soon after four years plus nine months. I immediately felt selfish about that, as it would be better for Carol if she went to college first. I made a mental note to discuss that seriously before I turned Carol into a mother, but until then I could enjoy thinking about what was becoming my fantasy. I suddenly worried whether her period might intrude on our wedding night. Feeling more than a little strange, I asked her, "Carol, when's your next period." She didn't make a fuss, didn't ask me why, or anything like that; she simply answered, "I'm mid-cycle." She was wonderfully cooperative. The only problem was I wasn't exactly sure what "mid-cycle" meant. I had a feeling I knew, but I also had a feeling I could easily be wrong as it was hardly a subject that I knew much about (i.e., it was to do with females). So I played safe and asked her, "That means it's a couple of weeks away, doesn't it?" She nodded. As I understood it, I thought that meant we'd be "all systems are go" on Thursday night. I waited for her to ask me why I wanted to know such a deeply personal thing, but she didn't. I'd never dreamed of asking any girl this before, and it felt very invasive, but Carol wasn't concerned. Either she had complete trust in me, or I didn't understand females. In this case, I would've thought it was probably both, except that suspicion was based on my understanding of Carol. I just mentally shrugged and let it go. My mind skittered again, "If you get in trouble with any of your schoolwork, don't hesitate to ask for my help. Assignments, reviewing, or anything you want." "Thank you, darling," and a kiss, were her only responses. Then she snuggled in again. I figured something out, "You came in here to say goodnight, didn't you? You're going to bed now?" "Yes, soon. I am quite tired. You've kept me up late the last few nights, although I wish you'd kept me up later. I don't know how well I'll sleep though, Julia has gotten me very worked up about tomorrow. Can you imagine what I'm going to be doing this time tomorrow night?" As it turned out, yes, I could imagine it. Some even more emphatic go-soft commands were urgently required. Carol kept cuddling me, so I asked, "Are you staying on my lap even though you want to go to bed because Julia told you not to run away from my cuddles too quickly?" "Not really. Julia told me off for making your decisions for you; for trying to control your time for you. I'm not staying here because of what she told me. I'm staying here because I love being with you like this. It feels wonderful and I never want it to stop. But I will have to get up soon." Good, for several reasons. Including that I was glad she wasn't so literal as to never leave my lap unless I told her to. I didn't want a serving girl as dumb as that. Which, for a minute, I had thought might be the case. Carol added, "Plus I appreciate very much that you make an effort to rub my breasts and do other sexy things for me. It does make me feel so wonderful. It's so kind of you. So I hope you won't mind if I sit here a bit longer and enjoy it?" That question was almost as silly as asking whether I minded her and Julia playing around together. She seemed to think that I was doing her a favor! Which made no sense at all. I'd cut off my right arm to be able to play with her body; of necessity with my left hand but it'd be worth it. I didn't understand her attitude, but I certainly knew that I didn't mind continuing to do it (for her?) a while longer. "Stay as long as you want, sweetie. You are my pleasure." I'm not sure what the last sentence meant, it just came out that way, but it felt fine and Carol seemed happy. I continued to do her the favor of caressing her breasts through her nightie. After not long enough, Carol stood up. She leaned forward and gave me a strong hug, and said, "I'll try to sleep now. Please know that I love you so much my whole chest feels like it's too full and that it's going to burst. I can't believe how good you are to me and how much you care for my happiness. You even put your face between my legs, you know, other nights and while we were doing the dishes. I can't believe you do that for me. I love you very much." This was another girly statement. I understood every word but not the meaning. Carol was heading off to bed for some much-needed sleep so I just made a mental note to ask Julia about it. "Goodnight, sweetie. I love you too. Sleep well." ^ I did a bit more schoolwork, then decided it was time for a snack. I was making it when Mom and Dad got home. They hung around asking me how the evening went. I told them about Sensei Nigel's call. Not the details, just that we'd talked about Aikido and he was very helpful. There was something weird with Mom and Dad: their body language was different from normal and their tones of voice seemed strange, in a way I couldn't put my finger on. I couldn't say what and I had no idea why, but something was different. Mom asked about the girls. I said, "They're in their room. Carol's probably asleep and I don't know about Donna." I suddenly realized I hadn't talked to Donna all night and felt a bit guilty about that, but it was probably too late now. Mom asked, just a tiny bit sharply I thought, "Why is Carol asleep so early?" I shrugged and said, "I guess because the last few days have been quite emotional for her: happy then depressed then happy again. She might've lost some sleep. She also said she expected to lose sleep at Julia's tomorrow night, so she's probably stocking up. She did a lot of schoolwork this evening and told me she was fully up to date on that, no outstanding assignments or anything." #3: #1: When they moved to their bedroom, I checked my fly (it was decent), then went to the bathroom to check my face in the mirror in case I had a snotty nose (it was clean). I was stumped for an explanation for Mom's and Dad's attitudes seeming different. The mirror told me that my pimples had reduced noticeably since the last time I'd looked at my face, but that wouldn't be the explanation. I headed back to my room, none the wiser about anything. Once there, I remembered that tomorrow was another morning run day. I dithered a bit about whether to check with Donna, and Carol if she was awake, and decided to lightly knock on their door. I did so, and Mom answered, "Come." I opened, a little surprised to see Mom there, but I guess she was checking up on the girls. Carol and Donna were both awake, and Carol gave me a big smile. I said, "I just popped in to check about running tomorrow morning. We on at the usual time, Donna?" Donna said, "Yep. That'd be good." So I turned to Carol, "Do you want to come cycling with us, sweetie?" Carol blushed a little, reminding me about my joking re-definition of "Sweetie". Her answer was, "I think I'd prefer to sleep in, if that's okay with you?" Carol looked concerned about letting me down, so I hastened to reassure her, "That's perfectly okay. See you at breakfast tomorrow. Goodnight." I went back to my room and thought to browse through the two Aikido books, in case something leaped out in light of what I'd learned about my abilities since I first read them. I was simultaneously reading them both when there was a knock on my door. Mom came in and sat on my bed again. Normally she just stands to talk with me, so her recent behavior of sitting on my bed was new. I couldn't see any significance in it though. She saw I was rereading the Aikido books and asked why. I said, "I've been practicing some of what they talk about, and thought I'd review them to see if any parts of them had new relevance to me after a week of practice, but so far not." "Do you like Aikido?" "Very much. I think I forgot to mention it to you, but when I went running with Donna last Monday morning she said she thought I was running better. I tested it at PE and confirmed that Aikido has taught me to run a little bit faster. Just from something I learned watching it from the sidelines, which is pretty cool. I'm looking forward to getting this cast off so I can train properly, because I think I can learn a lot there. Sensei Nigel seems very happy to help too. He strikes me as a really nice guy. Donna was very smart to spot that they moved like me in that video, and very nice to tell me." "You like Donna?" "I'll say! Especially recently." I thought I'd better stop there, as the recent reasons were not for a mother's ears. "And you like Carol?" "Absolutely, even more so. Carol and I spend more time together as she's closer to my age and smart. I love both my sisters. They're wonderful people, very caring and helpful. They couldn't be any better." Mom smiled, and said, "They say the same about you." "Yeah, they tell me that often, but I know who gets the best end of that stick. Oh, that reminds me. As you're our family's resident expert of strange expressions, I heard a silly one recently. Do you know what, 'Christ on a biscuit' means? As an expression of surprise." "No, I've never heard it before. Where did you hear it?" "Some weirdo at school. Don't worry about it, it doesn't matter." #3: #2: #3: Mom asked another question, "How is everything else going?" "Great. Everything's going great. Did you have something specific in mind?" "Not really. What about Julia and your relationship with her?" I had no problem answering that question, "Julia is fantastic! She amazes me every day." I immediately thought of her going without her panties at lunch today, but she'd also done other surprising things: her attitude to my wanting Carol to have my babies (best not mention that example to Mom), her willingness to strip in the school corridor to prove she obeys me, her mutual sexuality and friendship with Carol, and her explanations whenever I got lost (a frequent occurrence). "Julia seems to get better for me every day. She knows how to bring lots of happiness into my life. Lots of teases too, but that seems to come with having a girlfriend." "What do you think about how Julia and Carol get on together?" "Again fantastic. Everything's fantastic. They get on great together, which is not so good because Julia has already encouraged Carol to blow raspberries at me and is teaching her how to tease me, which is the last thing I need! Haha. -- "No, seriously, they're great. Carol is overjoyed with Julia wanting to be her friend, Julia being so much older. It's great to see how happy that makes Carol. I've just started detecting signs that Carol might be gaining in confidence too, which I hope continues. As I said, 'Julia has brought lots of happiness into my life', including making Carol very happy, which makes me happy. I've a feeling those two are going to be best friends for a long time." #4: Mom said, "There seems to be a great deal of happiness going on around here. Even Donna is saying she's happy." "It's impossible to miss that Carol is happy because she's bouncing around telling everyone, but I'm a bit surprised at Donna. Why is she so happy?" "I asked her the same thing, and she said because her brother and sister were so happy. It seems that happiness is infectious." "Good." Mom said, "It certainly seems that way. I hope it lasts." She stood up and brushed my bed flat, came over and kissed me on the top of the head, then headed out the door. I let her go. I'd been tempted to ask her "Why the inquisition?", but I'd been too scared of the answer. I didn't want to bring things to any sort of head so close to our wedding ceremony. #4: #1: #2: We resumed skimming the Aikido books, but didn't find anything of interest. We did a bit more schoolwork, then went to bed. ------- Chapter 43: It Works Better in the Movies Wednesday, April 13, 2005 I woke and we all immediately thought, After a few seconds of celebrating that imminent event, we became aware that it was raining. Only dummies go running in the rain for fun, so all I had to do was let Donna know it was off, then I could snuggle back into my bed. #1: #4: #1: #3: #2: #1: I went and knocked very lightly on the girls' door. Donna opened it for me, and I whispered, "I don't want to run in the rain. Another day, okay?" Donna just nodded, so I turned and headed back toward my room. To my surprise Donna followed me. When I paused in the hallway, she motioned for me to continue. Once in my room, she shut the door, and quietly said, "Mom was asking questions last night about how we're getting along with you and Julia. She was nosey, but I didn't tell her anything about you and Carol. I hardly ever see Julia so I couldn't say much about her. I said that you were the best brother ever and Carol's the best sister." "Thanks very much, Donna. That's very good of you. I could get into lots of trouble if Mom and Dad knew what I'd been doing to Carol." "Yeah, I know. But it's silly to get in trouble for making her so happy. And you're not doing anything TO Carol, you're doing it FOR her. She keeps telling me what a great brother you are for making her feel so good and for sharing your girlfriend with her. She feels really sad for you that she can spend the night with Julia but you can't. It's not fair that she gets so much and you get so little." #4: #2: #4: #1: "I enjoy what I do 'for' Carol. You're right that I do a lot of it to make her happy, but I HUGELY enjoy myself too. But regardless, thank you very much for keeping it quiet. I appreciate it very much. I'm sure Carol does too." "Can I ask something else?" "Of course." "I was going to ask you on our run, but you are definitely going to win on Saturday, aren't you? I want you to win." If I'd had any uncertainty, that would've removed them all. "Sweetie, if you want me to win, then I definitely will. I'll make sure of it for you. I owe you a LOT!" Donna wanted more certainty, "I don't just mean that you'll try your best to win, to humor me or whatever. I want to know whether you'll really, truly win?" "I timed myself at school and I'm very confident that I can win. The only way I could lose is if I got tripped and was too badly injured to continue, or something like that. That's not likely because I'm graceful on my feet, that being my middle name, remember?" "What was your time?" I should've expected Donna to ask that. When I'd been doing my time trials at school I hadn't actually timed a 10k distance, but I'd run for longer than the race would take so I knew my body could hold the optimal running rate at least that long. I could give her my calculated 10k time but I didn't want to tell her a time that was less than the world record, so I just said, "Just take it from me that I'm confident that I can win." "I know you're a great runner but you haven't done ANY training! If I hadn't seen you running I wouldn't believe you, but you never boast. Are you REALLY sure? There's going to be some VERY good runners in the race." "They won't be as good as me. I'll make sure I win for you." "Okay, please make sure you do." "For you, sweetie, I guarantee it. You've been wonderful to me recently, so I'll do my best and that's easily good enough." She gave me a kiss on the cheek then went back to her room. #4: #1: #2: #4: #2: #1: #2, #4: I went back to bed, but wasn't tired so I didn't fall back sleep. We could have ordered ourselves to sleep, but it was more enjoyable to spend the time daydreaming. After some VERY pleasant daydreams/fantasies, #1 commented, #1: I could see our desk across the room, with a pen lying on it. The pen weighed far less than 3.5 pounds, so one mind created two fingers which pinched it. I saw the pen move a fraction, and felt I had a good grip. I commanded it to lift, which resulted in my two TK-fingertips flying up in the air, leaving the pen wobbling on the desk. #1: #2: I moved the two fingertips back to the pen and gripped it again. I tried a slightly different solution this time. We didn't want to use other fingertips to push with because that used up our practical maximum of twelve fingertips too quickly (sixteen was our true maximum, but the mind on duty could only do very simple things without losing center). We wanted to lift the pen by vectoring the push, as that'd be more efficient, so I pinched the pen again, then changed the direction the fingertips pushed so each of them was pushing toward the other, but also forty five degrees upward from the desk; half holding the pen, half raising it. It almost worked. The end of the pen I was holding rose, but as more of it cleared the desk, it swiveled in my grip and fell out. I tried yet again, this time holding the pen as close to the center as possible, so it wouldn't swivel. That worked, and the pen slowly moved upward. When it was several inches high I wanted to stop its rising, so I reduced the force both fingertips were pushing with. The pen fell through my fingertips, dropping to the desk. #1: That made sense, so we did it again. When the pen was high enough we maintained our force, but rotated the vector of the push around to zero degrees. The pen fell to the desk again. #4: #2: #1: #4: Nonetheless we tried again. When the pen was about a foot off the desk we started rotating our angle back toward horizontal. The pen's upward motion slowed, then it started dropping, so we increased the angle until it started rising again. That meant we had to reduce the angle, etc., etc. Eventually we had it almost stationary. It was rising very slowly, but when we reduced the angle, the pen slowly fell. Our control was not fine enough. The obvious next step was to 'float' it to me, so I moved the fingers toward me. Immediately the pen fell to the desk again. #4: Again the problem was obvious. We were holding the pen in the air with a pinch of two fingertips pressed toward each other. The moment we moved both the fingertips in the same direction (toward us) there was not enough pinch pressure to hold the pen, so it fell out of our grip. #4: #1: #4: #1: #2: #1: So we tried that. We got the pen about a foot above the desk, and then reduced the upward vector so it was held reasonably stationary. But then we noticed that the 'outside' finger (the one farther away from us, the one that had to push the pen toward us) was not aimed directly at us. If it pushed, the pen would miss us by a couple of feet. So we had to do a careful swivel to get to two fingertips on the right line. Swiveling was tricky, requiring another fingertip to push on one end of the pen while the two gripping fingertips maintained their grip. To our considerable surprise we managed this without dropping the pen. Then we made the outside gripping fingertip push harder, while maintaining the same pressure against the pen with the inward one. The pen started moving toward us but rising too. #1: We all knew this meant more struggling to find the best angle. When we tried that, the pen fell to the floor. I got up and put it back on the desk. We tried again, successfully managing to get it moving toward us again although still rising. We even got the outside fingertip at the right angle to zero the pen's vertical velocity without dropping it, although there was a great deal of bobbing up and down involved. When we finally got the pen vertically stationary, it was moving horizontally faster than the slow speed we were comfortable with, so we tried to slow the horizontal movement, instantly resulting in the pen falling to the floor again. #4: #2: #1: #4: We can all sense each other's fingertips, just as we share every other sense. Although we can each control the shared body, we cannot control each other's fingertips. We can't even tell who owns each fingertip, other than each mind knowing which fingertips it created. We guessed the mutual ignorance was because the creation and control of fingertips is purely a 'mind' function, rather than a brain or body function. #4 created the four vertically oriented fingertips, one pair at each end of the pen, with each member of a pair on opposite sides of the pen. He angled them inward and brought each pair together to touch their bottom edges, which pushed the pen up a fraction, until it was nicely nestled in the two V's. #4: We all sensed the fingertips move, and they smoothly did what he'd predicted. Even better, when he got it about a foot of the table, the pen stopped still. It did not bobble up and down for a minute or two like it always had previously. #1: #4: #1: #4: #2 formed a finger, and pushed. Because the pen was light and #4 wasn't exerting any sideways net force on it, #2's push on the barrel was easily able to move it. #4: #1: We tried #1's suggestion, and it worked pretty well. The pen had acquired a reasonable horizontal speed now, and was soon within reach. I raised a real, physical hand, and plucked it out of the air. Success at long last! [The preceding paragraphs mention a concept that became essential to my use of TK, so I'll explain it. Flying things around required very accurate "flying in formation" by all the TK-fingertips involved. Fortunately I had some degree of skill at that. Hold your two hands out in front of you with just your index fingers extended, so they're held beside each other and about two inches apart. Now write your name in the air, trying to move both fingers in perfect synchronization. Their relative distances will wobble around somewhat, but not excessively, especially if you write very slowly and carefully. Now imagine the pen is being pushed slightly off-center. That would normally cause it to rotate, but the mind that was providing the two V's would be concentrating on keeping them at the right distance and orientation, which canceled out the slow rotation. If he tried to cancel the rotation by deliberately pushing against it, he'd cause erratic movements, but by concentrating solely on keeping formation, small corrections were applied subconsciously. Similarly if the pen was being pushed by two fingertips. The owner of those would concentrate on keeping them in deliberate formation, which prevented any rotation. Concentrating on staying in formation rather than applying specific forces made flying things around MUCH easier. Our current TK movements were VERY slow and deliberate, but as we got more skilled at "flying in formation" - that being another algorithm our brain had quite a lot of practice at - our movements sped up.] After a moment to congratulate ourselves, we used TK to send the pen back up and experimented some more. For example, we found it was a good idea for the mind holding the pen up to rotate it around so the pen was pointing sideways to the intended direction, that way the pushing mind's fingertips had no risk of sliding off the pen. Cornering was another problem. Ideally it would've been a matter of the mind holding up the pen rotating it by ninety degrees, then the pushing mind resuming his push in the new direction, but unfortunately this didn't stop the pen's motion in the original direction. Its velocity in that direction would remain unchanged until it crashed into the wall, as the two V's holding the pen up weren't exerting any net horizontal force, and were letting the pen push them around horizontally. The intellectually simplest way was to decelerate the pen in the original direction until it was as near to motionless as made no difference, then rotate the pen ninety degrees and start accelerating it in the new direction. That was hardly impressive and very slow. So much for our fantasy of making the pen zoom all around the room. The best we could do was to rotate the pen forty five degrees, to be halfway between the old and new directions, then push perpendicularly into the pen until the original direction was completely canceled. Then rotate the pen so it was side-on to the desired direction and apply whatever pushing was then required. We could do it, but it was very tricky, detailed, and demanded a very high level of concentration to keep everything working properly. The slightest mistake usually resulted in the pen being dropped. We made a mental note not to do this with Mom's best china. We practiced it by flying the pen around the room for several minutes. It was doable, but hard work and not impressive. Next we practiced "arcing" the pen to us. Starting from the desk, accelerating it upward and toward us. Then at the halfway point, removing the upward force so gravity took over, and reversing the direction of the horizontal pushing to decelerate it. With some practice, and a few more drops, we got it looking quite cool. But that was about the only smooth looking thing we could do, and it was only possible because gravity was doing the only 'cornering' (vertical in this case) for us. Telekinetically flying things around was FAR easier in the movies. I returned the pen to my desk, even carefully rotating it vertically and dropping it into the mug I use to hold all my pens. I had a book lying on my desk and I tried playing with that next. The first problem was getting TK-points underneath it. That required having some fingertips holding position against the back of it while other fingertips pushed forty five degrees inward and upward from the front. That lifted the front half the book up an inch or so to let me create new fingertips under the book. Then the same thing was done from the other direction to get fingertips under the other side of the book. It was a tedious process, but doable, although we had to be careful not to have fingertips go out of sight because they'd cancel on us. To get around that we used maximum-sized fingertips (two inches) and had them overlap the edges of the book so we knew where they were. Once we had several fingertips under the book, we performed a straight upward push. As soon as it was at the desired height we stopped pushing and gravity braked its upward motion. If we had max-pushed a light object (which permits a fast acceleration) then it would've continued upward when we stopped pushing. We would've 'thrown' it up. But with a comparatively heavy book and a push not much stronger than gravity, the book stopped as soon as we stopped pushing. Then I canceled one mind's fingers, leaving eight well spread fingertips to hold the book up, as it was fairly heavy. Then the free mind pushed from behind, to accelerate it toward me. Stability was again helped by having several evenly spaced pushing fingers, and by having the 'holding up' fingers tilt inward slightly where they overlapped the edges, that way they could dampen any horizontal spin. When the book was halfway to me, I canceled the pushing fingers and recreated them at the front. They started the braking process, hoping to halt the book just above my hand. That'd leave a simple lowering job, or an even simpler drop if I canceled all the TK-points. Aiming for an exact stopping point was not easy, particularly with a fairly massive object. It requires an exact estimation of the correct turnover point (where I change from acceleration to deceleration) to avoid undershooting or overshooting the desired stopping point, and it requires getting the pushing angle exact too, otherwise I'd miss to the left or right. It was virtually impossible to stop on an exact spot. Imagine that I've brought the book to a perfect halt one foot horizontally away from where I want it. Then I have to repeat the whole horizontal movement process again: apply a little 'thrust' toward the correct point, start braking halfway, and hopefully get it to stop at the right spot. If it's still wrong, say by three inches, I might have to do a third iteration. The process is very much like golf putting. In some ways TK is even worse than golf because the object won't immediately stop (fall into the hole) if it 'rolls' over the target spot. With TK, it'll keep flying past. TK has some advantages though. The biggest help is that if an object is being moved toward me, I can just snatch the object out of the air when it's close enough. This is a BIG help as it eliminates ALL the fine-tuning. The process is also easier if the object is very light because the amount of acceleration I have then is so large that I can move it around much quicker. A really heavy object, say that required 2.5 minds just to hold it up, leaving only half a mind to push it, would be so slow to accelerate through the iterations that I'd be better off getting up and fetching it manually. I returned the book to my desk, which was a trickier navigation job as the desk couldn't "snatch it out of the air". I had an eraser on my desk, so I tried that next. I was eager to see if I could move it around in a simpler way than the fairly tedious way we'd used so far. I tried holding it with one mind, pinching it between two fingers and moving it. After the practice I'd had, and with my increased knowledge of what I was doing, I managed it much better than I did with the pen at the beginning. I tried the pen again, and also did much better, although the pen's slipperiness caused me some problems. When moving things around with one mind, the trick is not to think of the object itself, but once the pinch is applied, to think of the two fingers as a unit - to keep them in rigid formation every move they make, especially when changing direction. If that can be achieved, then the object must go along for the ride. I decided not to play with this anymore. The last thing I needed was to get in the habit of fetching things this way, then to absent-mindedly float a pen to me at school. Anyone watching would freak out, and God knows what sort of trouble could come out of that. Then I thought about doing an acceleration test on a floating object. Could I hold up a needle, for example, and propel it fast enough to be a weapon? Maybe I should keep a few ball bearings in my pockets as weapons. But the physics was quickly obvious to me, even without doing an experiment. It'd be the same a pushing something across a floor, except I'd need some of my force to hold it up against gravity. How fast I could accelerate my 'weapon' would depend on its weight. A heavy rock would take far too many seconds to get moving fast enough to do damage. A thin needle wouldn't have that problem, but it'd be so light that when it hit someone, it wouldn't have enough momentum to penetrate far. I thought about blinking. I held up a pen with TK, then blinked. The pen did not fall. Good, as it would be a real nuisance to drop anything I'm carrying whenever I blink. I confirmed the half-second grace period by deliberately closing and opening my eyes. Keeping my eyes closed for longer than what seemed about a half of a second caused the pen to drop. (Actually a full blinking cycle takes about half a second, but for nearly all of that time the eyes are only partly closed, so vision is possible.) I double-checked this by holding the pen in the air and waving a hand across my line of sight at various speeds. Once again, the TK-points canceled and the pen fell only if my sight of the TK-points holding the pen was obscured for more than about half a second. Unless it was within my proximity range, in which case they didn't cancel no matter how long I didn't have line of sight. Whether or not they were holding anything didn't change the half-second delay before TK-points canceled. Just for fun, I tried the weapon idea by accelerating a pen as fast as I could, sharp end first, from across the room into my chest. I got the pen up to an impressive speed, but it didn't hurt at all. It was a useless weapon. A ball bearing in the eye might work, although hitting a moving target would be problematic. It'd be much easier to just poke the troublemaker in the eye with my TK-fingertips. I wondered about using a sharp knife outdoors. From far enough away, aimed at a stationary target, I could probably get the knife up to a very high speed. High enough to do some serious damage if it hit the right spot. It would probably be only a one shot weapon though. Presuming I could pull the knife out again, it'd take several seconds to accelerate the knife far enough away, brake it, then accelerate it back at my target. Using rocks would avoid the problem of extracting the knife from the body after each attack, but they would probably take a longer run-up to get the velocity higher enough to do damage. As an attack method it was tedious and impractical unless the target was conveniently not moving, in which case I could simply walk away. A long distance rock attack made me wonder how far away my TK worked. I'd been thinking "line of sight", but what about one mile, or five miles, or more. I suddenly thought that I could see the moon on a clear night. Did that mean I could TK something on the moon? Maybe I could make some extra income selling moon rocks I fetched back (haha). They'd have to be really small rocks for me to be able to bring them back fast enough before the Earth rotated to obscure my line of sight (haha again). I could see the sun too, and even stars. Even more distant stars, if I looked through a telescope. I somehow doubted my TK worked across interstellar distances. I wondered what range it had, and whether that range was improved by my looking through a telescope. The range tests would be easy: when I was next outside I would try touching remote things with TK. If I got the tactile feedback it was working; if not, it wasn't. I didn't have a telescope or a camera with a zoom lens available (I guessed they were functionally equivalent for the purposes of my experiment) but made a mental note to try to get one soon. The little mental joke about only bringing back really small rocks from the moon prompted another experiment. If I picked up something small, say a needle, and moved it away, soon I wouldn't be able to see it. Would it then drop? This was easily tested. I pulled a hair from my head, held it just in front of my eyes and grasped it with TK. I floated it across my room. When it was only a foot or two away I could no longer see it, but I could still feel it in the TK-fingertips. Only just, but I could. So I continued floating it all the way to the far corner of my room. I could feel it the whole way, so I was still carrying it, even though it was completely invisible. I floated it back. That didn't take long as its maximum possible acceleration was probably thousands of g's; not that I needed to use anything like that. When it was close enough, I could see it. Whether I could pick up an invisibly small object was the next test. I flew my hair to my desk and placed it carefully. I let go, canceled those fingertips, and created a new one near me. I sent it to the desk, then felt around with it. Soon I thought I had found the hair. I created a second fingertip and used it to pick the hair up. That was tricky, as I had to slide the hair to the edge to get a fingertip under it, but I got it done. Then I fetched it back to me. Yes, it was a hair. It might possibly have been a different one, but that didn't matter as the experiment was a success either way. In the course of all this experimentation I'd gained some skill at flying things around. It was still a VERY annoyingly complex and deliberate process - it was far easier in the movies - but at least it was now reasonably smooth. I'd made some improvements along the way. For example, when using V's to hold up a pen, it was easier if the horizontal pushing fingertips pushed against the fingertips that were part of the V's, rather than against the pen itself. I'd also got somewhat better at estimating accelerations, turn-around points, angles, weights, vectors, how gravity compared to my forces, etc. (I did say it was complex). More practice would make me even better at those. The trouble was that I could never fly things around in public. TK was super-cool, but it was also very nearly completely useless. It was close enough to breakfast time that I felt like moving food into my mouth, so I got up and got dressed. (Note: I have often used the word "float" above. That is, to put it mildly, wishful thinking. Hollywood's special effects have objects floating effortless and gracefully around the room, whereas when I do it, it's neither effortless to manage nor graceful to look at. Nonetheless, I will persist in using "float" to describe the action. A much more accurate word would be "carry", but if you read a sentence such as "I carried the pen to me", you're going to be slightly confused about which method of carrying I was using. I will inaccurately write "I floated the pen to me" because you will understand that easier. And also because it sounds much cooler.) ------- [A small physics lesson. According to Newton, F=ma, i.e., Force = mass multiplied by acceleration. All the following ignores air resistance, which is ignorable at low speeds. Let's say I have a 3.5 pound object that I'm pushing upward with a one-mind max push, which has a force of 3.5 pounds. What is the acceleration? a = F/m = 3.5 pounds/3.5 pounds = 1. But 1 WHAT? The way I've done the calculation, having pounds on the top and on the bottom means the answer has no units, which cannot be an acceleration because that has a unit of a distance per unit time squared. Earlier in this autobiography, when I was using scales to measure my force, I mentioned that Weight = Mass times g, but I lazily ignored gravity as it's a constant force we're all used to. If gravity was put back in properly, the full answer to the above calculation is 1 g. If I push a 3.5 pound object upward with a 3.5 pound force, then I'm clearly equaling gravity, so I must be pushing upward with a force of one gravity (1 g). To give you two simple examples. Imagine the 3.5-pound object is being held stationary in midair with an upward force of 3.5 pounds. Then I use my remaining active minds (two of them) to give it a max sideways push for one second. Thus the object is accelerated sideways at 2 g for one second. 2 g in imperial units is 64 ft/s/s, so after 1 second the object is traveling with a speed of 64 ft per second. It started with a speed of zero, after 1 second it had a speed of 64 ft/s, so it's average speed was (0+64)/2 = 32 ft/s. In other words, in that one second it covered 32 feet. Without any further sideways forces acting on it after the one second, it will continue at its 64 ft/s sideways speed, so will travel 64 feet every second from then on, until it hits a wall. Now imagine a second object that weighs 10 pounds. Presuming one mind is on centering duty, my maximum force from the remaining three minds is 10.5 pounds. 10 pounds of force are required to cancel out gravity, leaving 0.5 pounds of force for sideways acceleration. a = F/m = 0.5/10 = 0.05 g. After the one second of sideways acceleration, the object is moving 1.6 ft/s, so in the first second it moved 0.8 feet (about 9.5 inches), and every second thereafter it travels another 1.6 feet (19 inches). The second object weighs less than three times more than the first, but its speed after one second of acceleration is one-FORTIETH of the first object's. In other words, as objects get heavier, my ability to fly them around gets MUCH slower. The two key facts are: If I am pushing an object that weighs less than my force, then it's possible for me to fly it around. If it's light enough that I can cancel out its weight AND push it sideways with a force about as much as it weighs (i.e., the object weighs 5 pounds or less), then it can fly the length of a room in a second. If it weighs near the limit of my total force, then it CRAWLS through the air. You don't need to remember or understand these calculations, as I'll do them for you when they come up.] ^ Physics formulas (for your interest): s = 0.5(u + v)t s = ut + 0.5at^2 v = u + at v^2 = u^2 + 2as a = acceleration. SI unit: meters per second per second. (Note that 1 g is approximately 32 feet/s/s or 10 meters/s/s.) s = distance. SI unit: meters. (Note 1 m is approximately 1 yard. 1000 meters = 1 kilometer = 5/8ths mile.) t = time. SI unit: seconds. u = initial velocity (the velocity an object had before applying the force we're about to calculate the effects of). SI unit: meters per second (1 m/s is approximately equal to 2 miles per hour). v = final velocity (the velocity the object has after the force has been applied). ------- [While I'm digressing for an explanation of physics, I'll explain something else: "Inactive On Duty" versus "Active On Duty". My terminology at the time was erratic because I also sometimes call these "Inactive Centering" and "Active Centering" respectively. (The latter two terms should really have been called "Inactive while Centering" and "Active while Centering", but we implicitly understood that.) In the above section I talked about using three minds to push objects, giving me a maximum force of 10.5 pounds. Ideally I'd like to be able to use all four of my minds, as that'd give me a maximum force of 14.1 pounds. The extra force would make a substantial difference when pushing heavier objects, especially if they weighed between 10.5 and 14.1 pounds! There's one MAJOR problem though, to be able to use TK-fingertips I have to be centered, which means at least one mind has to be imagining that it's located at my center. That requires SOME concentration, although not total or aikidoka could never use ki in any of their techniques. It is currently our practice to have one mind "On Duty" at all times, except when getting sexual with Carol. When we say "On Duty" we nearly always mean "Inactive On Duty", i.e., that mind does nothing other than concentrate on maintaining center. Ideally it doesn't even think! It's as mentally inactive as it can possibly be about everything except keeping center. That leaves three minds for flying objects around and doing everything else. Because maintaining center doesn't take total concentration, it's sometimes possible for that mind to participate. We call this "Active On Duty", i.e., it is active in our life at the same time as it is on duty. The trouble is that it's VERY easy to be distracted from maintaining center, so we hardly ever do "Active On Duty" as it's FAR too unreliable. If that mind had a task to do that was undemanding and very routine, then it could probably maintain center okay, provided nothing even slightly surprising happened. If it does, we can pretty much assume that the on-duty mind is going to lose center almost immediately. We didn't even think about trying to do Active On Duty when playing with Carol. That mind would've lost center hundreds of times per hour. And we almost certainly can't use Active On Duty for flying objects around either because flying objects is COMPLEX! It's pain-in-the-ass complex and NOTHING like it looks in the movies. The concentration required to participate in flying something would destroy that mind's ability to remain centered, which would cancel every fingertip, causing the object to fall, which totally defeats the purpose. We know if aikidoka practice for decades they can get better at maintaining center while doing other things, and we'd like to be able to do that too, so we will practice that. Hopefully one day we'll be able to have all four minds Active all the time, even when playing with Carol or flying things, but in the meantime we're going to take the easy way, by using Inactive On Duty 99% of the time.] ------- When Mom and Dad joined me for breakfast, I thought their body language was still a bit peculiar, but there was no way I was going to take the risk of raising the issue of their thoughts about my relationships with my sisters, especially if there was an issue. They didn't say anything unusual. They just seemed to look at me closer than usual, which I could easily put up with as it wasn't going to stop the wedding. Donna and Carol repeated their marching in and brother kissing tradition. Carol was more controlled this time, but still clearly a very happy girl. I had the urge to sit her on my lap and hand feed her, but fought the urge off. It would've been nice though. Mom said to all us kids, "We've got dinner at the Williams' home tonight, so..." I'd forgotten. I'd been thinking of Wednesday as Carol's night alone with Julia and had forgotten the dinner. The annoying thing about this was that I'd told Sensei he could call me tonight. I definitely didn't want to tell him he couldn't as he'd start to think I was unreliable, so I decided to send him a text message saying that he could call me on my cellphone if he wanted. [I did that in the car on the way to school.] Mom carried on, " ... make sure you're home from school in reasonable time, get showered and dressed. We'll be leaving soon after your dad and I get home." Carol asked, "Julia wants me to come to her house right after school. I'd like to do that, so is that okay with you, please Mom?" With the school's car providing our transport, "going straight to Julia's" meant via our home to drop Donna and me off, but that was understood. Mom laughed, "All evening and night together isn't enough? You want the afternoon as well." Carol blushed and looked down, but then she raised her head and said, "Yes, please." #2: Mom said, "That's okay, honey. I'm glad you like her so much..." #4: " ... In that case, do you have everything you need for the night?" "Yes. Julia called me last night to make sure. I've got everything she wanted. I'm so looking forward to it!" The rest of breakfast was normal. When the car arrived I ducked back to my room to grab my two bags of clothes. Then I wondered why I was doing it. Why couldn't I take them when we went to dinner? Had Julia forgotten I was coming to dinner when she asked me to bring them, or did she have another reason? I didn't know and decided to play safe by taking them to school as she'd asked me. Mom made no comment when I carried the bags to the car, which was something I had worried about a little. I would have said they were just to keep at Julia's in case I needed them, but I was glad not to be asked. The ride to school was normal too, including Carol briefly showing me her naked pussy as normal. I hope it never got so "normal" that it stopped giving me such a thrill. At times like this I'm very thankful that three-quarters of my minds don't quite consider this Carol to be my sister. The remaining quarter, #1, had to go along with the majority. You probably won't be surprised that it took very little time to corrupt #1 into enjoying Carol's body as much as the rest of us. ------- Chapter 44: Showing the Renovations Wednesday, April 13, 2005 (Continued) Julia was waiting for us at the car drop-off place when we arrived at school. This was unusual as we tended to arrive fairly early and where she leaves her bike is a bit of a walk away. After the car had gone, Donna being long gone by then too, Julia greeted us both with kisses on the cheeks. Carol was already holding one of my arms so Julia grabbed the other and we started walking. Julia leaned forward and smiled at Carol, saying, "Good morning my beautiful, sexy girlfriend. Are you looking forward to this afternoon?" Carol answered, "You know I am! I'm so excited I had to relieve myself last night and this morning. I haven't got any panties on now, and since seeing you I can feel myself getting wetter and wetter." There was no doubt that Carol has gained more than a little confidence recently. Julia said, "What a pity you've got to go in a different direction than us. I'd love to take you to the bathroom and lick you dry." "That would be wonderful, but I don't think you could make me dry. I'm going to be wet all day." "Good, that means we can start the instant we get home. No need to get you into the mood first." "I'm in the mood now!" "Haha. Good girl. I'm very pleased that we're girlfriends and that you're my serving girl." "Me too! Mom says I can come to your house right after school, so that's perfect. I'd better go now. See you at lunchtime. I love you both, bye." Julia swapped arms to my cast-less one, and said, "I have some great news! Mom says that you and Carol will probably be able to stay overnight on Thursday. She wouldn't say how, just that you probably could. She asked me to tell you to just assume it was happening that way, not to talk with your parents about it or anything, just come to our house after school as planned and to get on with the wedding. Isn't that great?" I couldn't believe how lucky we were. Unfortunately, I literally couldn't believe it. There had to be a loophole somewhere, "All three of us can sleep in the same bed all night? Naked?" I have no idea why I asked about "naked". It was a stupid question. It was probably because that word was floating around my head a lot these days. Julia assured me it was true, "Yes, all three of us, all night, naked. I like the way you think! Very, very naked. Don't get your hopes too high because Mom only said 'probably', so it's not definite. She wouldn't tell me how it was possible so I can't guess how likely it is. I didn't know how to make it happen myself, and you didn't either, did you?" I shook my head. "So that's a big improvement. I think that if Mom said 'probably' then there has to be a very good chance because I don't think she'd mention it otherwise." "That's WONDERFUL news! It's going to be incredible to be able to sleep with the two of you. Especially naked, haha. How are all the other preparations going? I'm not doing anything and it feels weird not knowing what's happening. And, yes, before you remind me, I know it's your 'job' to do all the managing in our relationship. I think you made that rule up just because you like doing it so much." "You're might be right. In this case I have a good excuse because it's traditional for the girl and her mother to organize her wedding. The groom just has to turn up on the correct day. In our case, the other wife too, haha. But things are going well. Our bed is being swapped for a bigger one just before lunch on Thursday, and Andrew is going to set it up for us. We have the linen and bedclothes already so it won't take him long. -- "I originally planned to have the entire wedding in our room, from showing your TK to Carol through to your taking her virginity and all the good fun that we'll have after that, but this morning Mom said we are going to have the ceremony in the living room. She's going to set it up for us, with lots of flowers and candles. She said we couldn't do that in our bedroom without Carol wondering about it too early, which makes sense. So we'll take Carol to my room first, show her your TK, talk about it, propose, and then go to the living room. I've got it all planned, so don't worry about it." "I'm sure you do. You're right that I should let you do all the preliminary work, that way I can save all my energy for later in the evening. It's going to be a lot of hard work making two girls happy." "I like the sound of 'HARD work', but Carol won't want too much as she'll be so overwrought and losing her virginity will make her sore. We'll have to be careful not to get too carried away with her. If you have any spare energy left over, I recommend you should use it up on me, haha." We were approaching a crowded area so we had to end that conversation there. I did add, "Julia, the plastic bags attached to my schoolbag are my clothes for tomorrow night. How about we put them in your locker?" Julia nodded and I added, "I wasn't sure whether to bring them tonight, or wait until we come to your house for dinner. Had you forgotten about that?" Julia looked blank for a second, then said, "You're right! I'd forgotten your whole family is coming over for dinner tonight. Damn, I wanted to spend all the time with Carol. That and our," Julia did a quick look around, but there were too many people nearby, "wedding are all I've been thinking of. Oh well, I'll have to take them now. I think it's funny that I was so focused." "Even funnier is that I forgot about it too, until Mom mentioned it during breakfast this morning. You and I must have one-tracked minds." Five of them, as all four of mine were on the same track. ^ Lunch was fun, and the girls teased me and flashed me (can it be called a "flash" if it lasts five minutes?). We all had a good time, especially as there were no interruptions this time. Carol's prediction that the girls in red were scared off seemed accurate. Julia told Carol that she'd pedal home as fast as she could, but if the car beat her, to wait outside the front door as no one would be at home. Carol demonstrated more confidence by saying, "Don't pedal too fast. I wouldn't want you to be too tired when you arrived." Which gave me an idea, I said (and this'll give you an idea what an unbossy boss I am). "Girls, with your permission, I think Julia should ride the car home, from school to my place to drop me off, then on to her place. Carol will ride Julia's bike to Julia's home. After all, Carol is our serving girl." Carol said, "Yes. That's right. I'll do that." Julia was about to argue, I think, but I whispered to her, "That way you can carry my clothes bags in the car. They'd be awkward on the bike." Julia said to me, "Good idea. We'll do that." We were only sitting around anyway, so we walked to Julia's bike to show Carol where it was, and Julia told her the combination for the lock. Julia cautioned Carol, "Don't pedal home too fast. You're going to be doing lots of serving when you get to my room and I wouldn't want you to be too tired." Carol and I laughed. Julia offered to take Carol's schoolbag in the car, but Carol said she was used to biking with it and it wasn't far, so no problem. Then Carol headed back to her area of the school, so we slowly did too, stopping for only a few minutes in an unobserved area for some serious kissing and pussy fondling. As we were relatively private, Julia then took her panties out of her pocket and put them on while I watched. I was surprised at how sexy that looked. In the afternoon I got deliberately jostled by a guy in an 11th grade Math class I sat in on. Not a jock, just a big, ordinary guy. It hadn't happened for a while, and was a bit of a shock. I was tempted to TK-float a pin onto his chair, but I didn't have a pin and didn't know which was his chair until he'd sat on it. I noted the idea for possible future use, even though it was very juvenile (which didn't mean I wasn't going to do it). Too late I thought of knocking his chair away as he'd been about to sit down. Oh well, I'll save that juvenile prank for if he pushed me around again. I carried my bags to the car pick-up point with Julia. Donna was already there. When the car arrived, I felt guilty so explained to Mr. Moore that we wanted him to go to our usual home, then take Julia on to her home, and that it would've been Carol normally but she'd swapped with Julia and we would've gone to Julia's place anyway, etc. I'd barely talked to the guy before as he wasn't one of my teachers, so I felt I needed to explain the situation to him, even though it turned out to be a long-winded, weak explanation. He assured us, "It's not a problem. You're nice kids and you always try to be on time, so don't worry about it." His speech exceeded the total of what he'd said to us since he got the job. I guess he spends all day talking to kids so a bit of silence was probably quite welcome. We sat back and he took Donna and me to our home. On the way I wondered whether he would've thought of us as "nice kids" if he'd seen Carol flashing me, or me fingering her while pretending to look in her bag. I gave Julia a quick kiss as I got out and said, "Have a good time." "You bet!" ^ It would've been rude to ignore Donna, our being the only two in the house and I felt a bit guilty about not spending any time with her yesterday, so I asked her if she wanted to goof around. I got the expected answer, so we did that for about an hour, and then we needed to get ready for the dinner. Mom and Dad came home promptly, and they got ready too. Apparently Vanessa had planned an early dinner so we didn't waste time. For once Donna had to sit in the backseat, and to my surprise she put her arm through mine and cuddled very much like Julia or Carol would have. I must have looked a little surprised, so she said, "Julia and Carol aren't the only ones who like you, you know." "I know. They're not the only ones I like either." I put my hand on her jeans and momentarily squeezed her leg. Mom had turned around at our voices, and smiled at us. She turned to Dad and said, "They really do get along well." Dad just nodded. I thought it was a bit of a funny comment as we'd been getting along well for months, and extremely well for weeks, so it didn't deserve a comment now. But who understands mothers? Andrew opened the door as we approached, and shepherded us into the dining room. Vanessa, Prof and Robert came out and all the usual greetings were exchanged. Vanessa said "The two girls will be down shortly. They know you're here. Dinner will be ready soon. We're going to have an early one; nothing fancy, just what we'd normally have. Then we'll take you upstairs to show you the study and the changes to Julia's room. Then the parents will adjourn to the living room and the kids can entertain themselves in the Guys' Room or the hot tub." We'd forgotten about swimsuits, so the hot tub was out. Probably just as well, unless Julia revoked her instruction to Carol to be naked next time we were in the tub. The Boys (it felt strange for 15-year old me to refer to the 26-year old Andrew and Robert as "The Boys", but the Williamses usually do so I've picked it up) took drinks orders and went to get them. We had started on the drinks when Carol and Julia arrived. Freshly showered I noticed, and the reason made me envious of both of them. Julia came around to sit on my lap, and Carol came and gave me a hug, and said, "I'm having the BEST time!" I was envious all over again. Carol stood beside me, hugging me, rather than sitting down. Dinner started coming out of the kitchen soon after. Carol and Mom leaped up to help. Julia asked her Mom, "Can I stay here? I miss my man." Vanessa laughed, "It's got to be, what?, nearly three hours since you last saw him? You poor thing. Lucky for you I've got enough helpers already." Julia had no shame, about this or pretty much anything else, so she just said, "Good," and snuggled in closer to me. Dinner was nice. Despite Vanessa's comment that it was "nothing fancy", it was still very nice. Nicer than we'd have at home, so the "Mark plate" got a good workout, especially as I'd been too busy goofing off with Donna to have a snack when I'd got home. Prof addressed us all briefly, saying, "Other than the room changes, which you'll see shortly, the main outstanding item is Mark's license. The Dean has come through, and Mark can take the tests for it when his cast comes off. If he does well enough they'll issue him with an unrestricted license. The DMV has the paperwork and I have a letter from them telling Mark who he has to contact. I'll give that to you later, Mark. It would be ideal if you ace the theory and practice, and don't have an accident at least until you're sixteen and half when you would've had your full license anyway, so study up. On the weekend I'll take you somewhere quiet, as I do with Julia already, and you can get used to her car." I was very happy with that news. I'd been told it was likely, but actually hearing I could get my license as soon as the damned cast came off was fantastic. "Thank you VERY much Prof. That'll be fantastic." I was going to say more, when Prof FIRMLY added, "After you get your license, I'm going to require you take me for some drives before I let you drive Julia or anyone else from my family. You'll have to pass a 'Prof Test', and I'm not joking about that. We take car safety VERY seriously in this family so there'll be NO skylarking of any form. One speeding ticket, or any other problem like that, and you'll lose access to that car and Julia as a passenger. You can wait the eight months or so it'll take before she can drive you. Is that clear?" "Yes, sir." The ONLY possible thing to say. Prof continued, just in case I hadn't gotten the message yet, "In baseball they give you three strikes before you're out. Cars kill people so I'm giving you only one strike, at the most. If I see or hear about any immaturity with a car, at all, you are 'out'. If you even look like you're thinking about speeding, you'll be 'out'. Clear?" "Yes, sir." He continued even further, "'Out' means you will never drive any member of this family, including Julia, and you won't be allowed to drive any of our cars either, even if you are by yourself. Having said that, and assuming you're not stupid, it'll be convenient for you to be able to go back and forth to OSU easily, and for you and Julia to go wherever else you want. Just so long as you drive responsibly." "Yes, sir." #3: #2: The atmosphere around the table had been chilled, but it recovered fairly quickly. Prof's words of warning hadn't been so bad that I lost my appetite, so I cheered myself up with another helping from the best dishes. After dinner, and after the dishes were loaded into the dishwasher (I wish we had one of those, except for when I got to sneak up behind Carol and take advantage of her), we all trouped upstairs. First stop was the study. One long wall for Carol's and my desks, with a half-desk between them with the new computer on it. Prof pointed out that the desks were specially chosen to have no drawers on the sides nearest the computer, and that a leg had been removed and replaced with an "angle bracket". I looked puzzled at that term and he told me to look under the desk, and then I understood. Likewise with the computer's desk. Our chairs were wheeled so we could roll to and from the computer easily. The chairs were very comfortable too. Julia's desk and computer were along the next wall around from Carol's and my desks. There were shelves for every desk, including some exactly where I wanted them so either hand could reach without my having to get up. The third wall had more shelves and a "stationery cupboard". I'd never had one of those before. It contained pads, various colored pens, highlighters, paper for the printer, and several more items. Andrew said, "Anything else you want, just let us know. Also the computers are networked, so you can share files easily, and they share the printer. They're both cabled to the 'net, so you've got full-time access. I understand you've only got dial-up at home, so you'll find this a big improvement. We can easily add more computers to the network if you and Carol want your own, so no worries there." I could see Dad was about to object, and so could Prof, who got in first, "Don't worry about it. We'll see how this set up works out first." Andrew resumed, "Does your computer at home have USB ports?" "I think it has one, on the back." [It was so old that it didn't, but that didn't matter.] "There are a couple of memory sticks, a pink one and blue one, in the cupboard, so you can easily transfer your work between here and home. You might find that easier than emailing it. Just put your sticks on a key-chain and you'll be fine." Vanessa said, "We haven't tried to decorate the room so it looks somewhat spartan." Personally I thought it looked great, but I wasn't going to argue with her. "Once you're settled in, if you want some posters for the walls, a little stereo, some flower arrangements, or anything else, just let Julia or me know." I was NOT going to let Julia do ANY of the decorating. I did NOT want to do my schoolwork in a sea of frilly pink! Prof said, "The shelves behind the Andersons' computer have got the manuals for all the packages it comes with, and all the instructions for how to access OSU's sites. I'll take you through that sometime soon, not tonight though. Again, if you need anything else, just let us know." By now Carol was holding my arm and clearly affected by how much they'd done for us, and the caring it represented. As an aside, this was obviously the first time she'd seen this room. I wonder what she'd spent all her time here doing, snigger. Julia was holding my other arm, looking proud as punch (I made a mental note to ask Mom to explain that expression to me one day). She asked me, "Is this good?" At home we have one old computer on a tiny desk by the kitchen table, with dial-up that we get told to get off if we're connected for more than half an hour. Carol and I also have a desk in our rooms. Both were reasonable desks, smallish, but workable. But compared with this: no comparison! I had no problem answering, "This is very, very good. Amazing. I'm sure I can work much easier here. Thank you so much, Prof and Vanessa. And Andrew and Robert too, for setting it up so well. This is wonderful." Dad looked a bit uncomfortable, probably for exactly the same reason I was so pleased: this was a GREAT room to study in. Dad started speaking to Prof and Vanessa, "I really think you've done too much. This is..." Prof held up his hand, and when Dad faltered, politely interrupted, "I'm sorry, but I disagree. Studying is important. We want the kids to do the best they can and a poor study environment can be a liability. In truth this room cost us very little. OSU provided the computer system and software, and all the furniture is standard stuff straight out of an office-furniture showroom. All we've done is have Andrew remove a couple of legs and put on some angle brackets. Vanessa's and my study is considerably better and much more expensive than this. I wouldn't be surprised if Vanessa buys a painting for one of the walls in here that costs us more than everything else we've spent for this. It really was much cheaper than you think, so don't worry about it." Dad gave up, and Prof continued to the kids, "Having said that, we expect you all to work when you are in here. It isn't a play room; it's for studying, okay? I'd prefer you to not even have a stereo in here, but I know youngsters seem to be incapable of thinking without some noise." I answered, "Actually, I study in silence. Always have. Carol's the same I think?" Carol nodded. Julia continued, "And I don't care either way, so we'll be stereo-free in here." I resumed, "I will make good use of this room, and I'm sure Carol will too. Thank you very much." Carol nodded vigorously. If Julia's belief was correct about Carol losing interest in college, Carol would get less use out of it than she expected. She still had several years of school to go so she'd still use it a fair amount, just less than she thought. She had additional interests now: Julia and me. Yippee! I also wondered what Prof's and Vanessa's study was like, that it was so much better than this. I hadn't gone on the house tour with the females last Wednesday, so I hadn't seen it. Probably a good idea not to, as it might reduce my happiness with this room and make my setup at home look sick. I caught up mid-conversation with Vanessa saying to Mom, "One, or probably both, of The Boys will be moving out when they graduate. We're not sure when that'll be, as they've got to finish their dissertations first, defend them and find jobs, but it'll be in a few months and will give us a spare room back. If we have to accommodate someone in the meantime, The Boys can double-up for the duration." Prof said, "Let's have a quick look at Julia's room then. Not so much to see there, but while we're in the area." To my complete lack of surprise, Carol was familiar with all the changes. The bed looked as if it had been freshly made (another snigger). The window was open when we got to the room, and Prof said, "triple-paned window," as he closed it. The room was noticeably smaller than it used to be because one entire wall was now closets, nearly tripling the old amount, and there were now two sets of drawers in the room. Julia took over as the presenter, "I'll keep my old drawers and use a drawer or two of the new set. I've moved Mark's stuff across to this drawer," She opened one, to show some socks, underwear and handkerchiefs. #2: #3: #1: Julia continued, "Carol can have these drawers," indicating about half the drawers in the unit. Julia opened one of the closet doors. "My clothes already fill about half the closet space because they were previously doubled-up on hangers and can now be spread out better. Mark's robe is at the far end, and he should probably store a few changes of clothes here, in case we go out to dinner after studying or he needs to put on something warmer. He and I will go shopping soon. The rest of the space is for Carol. Starting to fill that space is the part that I'm the most looking forward to. We're going to have a FANTASTIC time shopping on Saturday. I can't wait." Carol looked eager too. Again Mom and Dad looked a little uncertain. Vanessa responded, "You'll be very badly disappointing two very excited girls if you say anything." Mom and Dad still looked like they wanted to draw a line somewhere, but Prof said, "We'll talk about it later." That temporarily allayed the situation. I looked around the room, and saw that some of the space-filling stuff that used to be in it had been removed. Julia's computer and study material were all in the study now, of course. She'd had a coat rack that used to have my robe on it, as well as useless girly frilly stuff that'd been on it just to look frilly, but the rack was entirely gone now. A large, comfortable chair she'd had in the corner was gone too. Those removals created quite a lot of usable space. I could imagine a larger bed, and the room could handle it fine. Prof said, "Shall we test the soundproofing?" Dad agreed, "Yes, I'm curious about that." Prof said, "We can either turn her stereo up really loudly, or leave Julia alone in the room with Mark for a while. Which would you prefer, Julia?" Julia cried, "Mark! Mark! Mark!" Everyone else laughed, I just went red. Despite my embarrassment I would've happily done my part but Dad nixed the idea, "Haha. I think the stereo will be a good enough test for now." Julia said, "Darn! I should've moved the stereo into the study yesterday." So the stereo was turned on REALLY loudly. It was uncomfortable in the room and we got out quickly. Prof closed the door and the volume dropped dramatically, allowing him to say, "Sound baffled door." I was amused to notice that the sign declaring the "He Showed Me Room" and been reattached to the outside of the new door. No one asked what it meant, which I feared meant they all knew. Prof continued, "We didn't soundproof the floor so it still picks up the vibrations from the stereo. It'll be quieter than it sounds now if, just as a wild example, the source of the sound was on the bed. The ceiling was redone with acoustic tiles, which will work very well if the source of the sound is lying on her back shouting up, haha." You could tell Prof was enjoying himself at Julia's expense. She wasn't taking it lying down though, "That covers three out of my ten favorite positions." All the Williamses laughed. Mom and Dad were a bit hesitant as they weren't used to such humor in front of the children. The Williams' children were much older than the Anderson kids so I guess they'd grown into it more. Mom glanced at Carol and Donna a couple of times, but neither of the girls looked upset, or confused, or whatever it was that Mom was worried about. Mostly the girls just laughed along. They seemed to understand the jokes, even Donna. Prof invited us to walk around the outside of the house, to listen to the sound levels. All the guys thought that was a good idea, none of the females did, except Julia, who said, "I'll come too. I want to know how loud I can scream." Vanessa said, "As loud as you want was our goal. I'll go start the coffee." So we split up along gender lines, other than Julia. And then Carol chose to follow Julia too. I don't think Carol wanted to let Julia out of her sight. The neighbors were never going to be bothered again, as we could barely hear the music even standing below the bedroom window. From a few yards farther away it was silent. Prof said, "Unless he's equipped with some very fancy listening gear, no reporter is going to be able to discover anything. We'll leave Julia's drapes closed until after the trial. You can see that there's nowhere a photographer can position himself to get a good angle into the room, unless he brings a big step ladder and the motion sensors will pick that up unless he erects it in one of our neighbors' properties. The drapes being drawn will defeat that. We're about as protected as we can be, although we'll get the kids to cool it for the last week of the run up and during the trial itself. They should be able to control their hormones that long. Julia said, "You hear that, Mark? We'd better make sure we stock up in advance." I thought that sounded very prudent. ^ We were heading back inside when my cellphone rang. I answered it, and it was Sensei Nigel as expected. I explained to him that my family and I were at my girlfriend's home for dinner - I STILL got a thrill from saying "my girlfriend" - but that I could chat for a while. Sensei started off by telling me, "I asked three of my advanced students to try your running experiment. None of them detected a quantifiable difference. Aikidoka like the feeling of moving when centered, as it does feel qualitatively better, but my three helpers could not measure any improvement. None of us could recall anyone ever suggesting such an effect either. As far as we are aware, ki is a person-to-person effect, although you were correct to point out that the philosophical books do mention Universal ki." There wasn't much I could say to that, which left me with a problem. I had an internal debate about it. My credibility with Sensei was in trouble, which was a big worry because Sensei ran the only Aikido dojo in town. I liked Sensei's style: he was polite, open-minded, wasn't accusatory, and I particularly liked that he got his students to test my running claim rather than thoughtlessly assuming that he knew better than a 15-year old. Most adults tend not to be so open-minded, I've noticed. When I train with him, he's going to see how well I move, how quickly I learn the physical movements, how amazingly strong my ki is, and how I'm always centered. He's going to be very impressed, but that's assuming he doesn't ban me now for being a wild exaggerator. I needed to do something to get some credibility. I was willing to say something slightly extraordinary to make sure I could get into his classes, especially as he'd discover some of my extraordinariness if he lets me train with him. I just had to choose what to say. Nothing too exceptional and it had to be consistent with known Aikido abilities. The difference between Sensei's and my proximity sense has been puzzling me, so I decided to go in that direction. I even had cute opening line. I asked, "Can ki predict the future at all?" Sensei immediately said, "No. What makes you ask that?" "I got in a fight at school a few days ago. It wasn't my doing. A bully got very nasty to my girlfriend because she wouldn't date him. When I arrived I used my cellphone to pretend to film him hurting her, so he'd let her go. He did, but he attacked me to get my phone off me. A teacher broke up the fight before much happened, and while we were both standing there the Principal arrived. I sensed the bully start to run with my proximity sense, before he actually did run. Maybe two or three seconds in advance. Isn't that predicting the future?" "No. You would have been detecting his intentions. He was thinking about what to do and projecting his ki that way, which is what you sensed. That is how I move around the mats gracefully, to use your example from our last conversation. I can feel where people are intending to move, my ki reacts to it and steers me away, providing I am moving well. If I am not listening to my ki properly, maybe because I am too focused on walking a particular path, I might get bumped. Only intention can be detected, so I can still get bumped if people move in unintended directions. Does that answer your question?" "Yes, thank you." "I have a question then. You said 'my proximity sense'. What does that mean to you?" I explained, "I can sense people in my proximity, so I call it a proximity sense. It seems to me that ki has multiple effects and to call them all ki is confusing, so I'm inventing my own terms. That's okay, isn't it?" "Certainly. You may call them whatever you wish, if it helps you. You are also right that we tend to call them all ki. Maybe because most of us never get beyond a very weak level of ability, or maybe because we are not as scientific as you. Please tell me more of your proximity sense?" "I can sense people within about three feet of me, even when they're behind me. At first it took a lot of concentration and I did it with my eyes closed, but it's getting easier reasonably steadily as I'm getting used to it. I discovered it after I listened to your class. When I centered myself I could sense the people around me." "What can you sense from them?" I tried to stay within the bounds of what Sensei had admitted, "Their intention to move, now that you've explained how that works, like with the bully I told you about. That makes it much easier for me to walk down corridors. Sometimes when people meet head-on down a corridor they do a silly dance where they both move sideways the same way and keep blocking each other. That can sometimes repeat three or four times and be a nuisance. That doesn't happen to me any longer because I always move the correct way to get around someone. I thread my way through a crowd much easier." I've many times heard people think they were being watched, or things like that, so I thought it acceptable to add, "Also, if I know the person well, I can tell who they are from my proximity sense. I got my sisters - I have two of them - to randomly sneak up behind me, and I could always tell which of them it was. That's the same thing isn't it?" "Umm. It sounds like it. Can I ask you a favor please, Mark?" I expected that I'd be asking him lots of questions and maybe some favors in the future, so I said, "Sure. I expect you to help train me which is a big favor as far as I'm concerned, and you lent me the books so I'm happy to help you if I can." "Can I come to where you are and test some of your claims? It will take only a few minutes of your time. Some of your claims are too extraordinary and before I invest more of my time and my students' time on pursuing your ideas, I want to make sure they are true. Especially as you will not be coming to class tomorrow night." #1: #2: #1: "Sensei, that's fine with me. I have to ask the Williamses, whose house I'm at now. Also, if they do agree and you come here, please don't mention that I won't be at your class tomorrow. It'll ruin the surprise for some of the people who are here now." #4: Sensei said, "That is fine. I can come immediately, if that is convenient?" "Okay. Just hold on. It won't take me long to ask." I covered the microphone and went to the living room, where I expected all the adults to be. The living room door was shut so I knocked on it and was told to enter. The four parents were there. "I've got my Aikido sensei on the phone. We've been talking the last couple of evenings and he wants to come here now to test my progress. It'll only take a few minutes. He's a good guy. Would that be okay, please? You don't need me for anything do you?" Prof said, "That'll be fine. Give him the address and let him know he's welcome." I ducked out of the room, shut the door behind me and conveyed the information to Sensei. He said, "I will be there in about fifteen minutes." I suddenly had an idea, and asked, "Are you at the dojo now?" "Yes." "Can I ask you a little favor then please? Can you bring me some more books. I'd like to read a lot more books about Aikido. I'm sorry I didn't know you were coming tonight, otherwise I would've brought the other two with me to give back to you." Sensei said, "Mark, if you pass the tests I want to try on you, you can have ALL the books. I will bring a good number with me. See you soon." I popped back into the living room to say, "Sensei will be here in about fifteen minutes. I'll meet him at the front door so it doesn't interrupt you. You can go on talking about whatever you are talking about. Is everybody else in the Guys' Room?" Vanessa said, "There or the hot tub." Mom spoke up, and asked, "Isn't it peculiar for your teacher to want to test you after you watched one class? What is he going to be testing you on?" "Ahh, I don't know what the tests are, other than they're about some of the things I've told him that I can do. I learn this stuff quicker than most students and I've been reading and practicing a lot since last class, so I guess he just thought it was time to test me." Mom declared, "It'll be interesting to see." #1: #2: I teased Mom, "Would you like to be invited to watch, Mom?" "Yes we would. It goes with the territory of being parents, just like cooking your meals for you." "Low blow, Mom. I think we can safely assume you're invited then. I'll go check on the girls. Okay?" I received a nod, so I wandered off to find 'my girls'. I was relieved, but disappointed, that they weren't in the hot tub. Instead Donna was playing a game of 8-ball with Andrew and Robert, and my girls were sitting arm in arm watching a movie. I chatted with Carol and Julia, telling them about Sensei coming to test my Aikido skills, so they'd know why I was not with them soon. They immediately wanted to watch the tests too. I didn't mind Julia and Carol knowing everything, but none of Andrew, Robert or Donna were going to be my wife so I preferred not to be weirdly impressive in front of them. I don't think they'd heard my conversation over the sound of the movie, so I said, "Okay, but just you two. I'd like to keep it low key." I quietly asked Carol how her day was going. She let me know that it was going very, very well. I had to laugh when Carol said, "Julia is LOUD!" I didn't ask for details, as they'd just make me more envious. We chatted, avoiding the good stuff. Things like Carol finding it difficult to ride Julia's small bike home, even with the seat raised, but fortunately it hadn't been far (Julia lives just over a mile from school). We agreed the study was great, and we were looking forward to doing our schoolwork here some nights. Things like that. After ten minutes, we paused the movie and I told The Boys and Donna, "We'll be back soon." One girl on either side walked me back to the kitchen to see when Sensei arrived. Walking three-wide through doorways and hallways wasn't easy, but the girls did their best. We hung around in the kitchen to see when Sensei arrived, with me making good use of the time by asking my girls to make me a snack. ------- Chapter 45: Sensei's Tests Wednesday, April 13, 2005 (Continued) When Sensei arrived, my girls and I went out to greet him. I did the introductions, including Mom when she came out a few seconds later in case Sensei didn't remember her from when she'd delivered me to the dojo. Mom directed us into the living room, where three more introductions were made. Sensei was still wearing his Aikido clothes, a white gi with loose black pants over the top of the gi's white pants, so he certainly looked the part of being my sensei, other than his being about as un-Japanese as you could get. He addressed everyone, "Mark and I met at his first Aikido class last Thursday. After class we had a good conversation, from which I understood that he had a level of ki awareness that normally takes students several years to develop. 'Ki' is mental or spiritual energy, and is an intrinsic and important aspect of Aikido. I lent him two books on ki development and we have had two phone conversations on the topic, last night and twenty minutes ago. During those conversations Mark described some of his abilities with ki. He sounded sincere and believable, except that many of his claims either take many years to master, or are beyond what I am aware can be done. He claims these abilities after one week, so I am disinclined to believe him, which contrasts with the sincerity and considerable understanding his conversations convey. Fortunately it is relatively easy to test a student's ki, so I have asked him to allow me to administer some of these tests. With your permission I will proceed?" Mom asked, "You won't hurt him?" Sensei replied, "No. We test all our students this way when we think they might be sufficiently advanced. The tests are mostly mental." Mom nodded her consent. For the first test Sensei stood facing me, instructed me to grasp the lapels of his gi tightly with one hand and not to let go. He added, "With your left hand, as your right arm is in a cast." Something rather interesting happened as we were getting into position. Sensei was moving near me so I was detecting his ki as always happens with people near me these days, but it suddenly got a whole lot 'brighter'. Sensei started giving off about three times more ki than he used to. Almost immediately he asked me, "Are you centered, Mark?" #1: #4: "I'm always centered these days, Sensei." "We will proceed then." Sensei raised one of his arms high in the air between us, held it stationary for a second, and then let his arm drop onto my left arm. It didn't land heavily because he'd just dropped it under its own weight rather than using muscular force to zoom it down. It simply flopped down onto my left arm and lay there for a second. Sensei said, "Very good, most impressive." Dad didn't quite snort, but I could hear his disbelief when he asked, "What was impressive about that?" Sensei smiled, and said, "It would be easier if I showed you. Would you like to take Mark's place and I will repeat the test with you." Sensei turned to face Dad, who wasn't slow to approach and take the same grip I had. Sensei said, "Is that your strongest arm?" Dad nodded and replied, "Yes, I'm right handed." Sensei said, "Good. You look like a strong fellow. Do you work out?" "I don't go to a gym but I do lots of lifting at work. I think I'm pretty strong." "Good. Do not lose your grip." Sensei raised his arm, held it a couple of seconds, and then dropped it, exactly as before. Except that Dad's arm was brushed away effortlessly. Dad looked very surprised. Dad's not a bulky guy, but he's tall and quite strong while Sensei is quite small (not as small as Prof, but still small), and we'd all seen that Sensei's arm had just effortlessly brushed Dad's away. Dad said, "Can I try again?" Sensei nodded. Dad took a very strong grip, even spreading his legs and hunching down to make himself as solid as he could. Sensei raised his arm, then swept it down again. Dad's Herculean stance made no difference; his grip was once again swept away effortlessly. Dad's no dummy. Rather than trying again, he just said, "I don't understand. How did you do that?" Sensei explained, "It is not about physical strength; it is about mental energy, which we call ki. I directed my ki down through your arm to the floor. The ki you had focused on your grip got swept downward, so your hand's muscles simply let go when the weight of my arm pushed your arm down. I broke your grip with mental energy, not physical force. However, I could not overcome Mark's ki since his was too strong for me. I have trained for thirty years while he has merely observed one class." Dad tried one last time, "How do we know that exhibition wasn't faked?" "I am not testing him for your benefit but for mine. Nor was I aware that I'd be testing him in front of other people. Mark passed my test, which is all I care about. I am very happy that he passed as it now appears most likely that he was telling the truth, which is very exciting for me. I will do some more tests however, to make sure. The next test is one Mark witnessed last week. I will do it because you will be able to see its effect and know it is not faked. Mark, am I correct in thinking that your broken arm is well healed now?" (I had it out of its sling and was using it as much as possible.) "Yes. It feels perfect, the cast is just a nuisance. It's due off in a week and a half." "I am not surprised. People with strong ki heal faster, and can help other people heal too. Your ki seems exceptionally strong..." #3: #4: #3: " ... Stand behind me Mark, grip my forearms and lift me in the air, just as you saw demonstrated last Thursday." Sensei held his elbows against his ribs and bent his lower-arm forward at ninety degrees to offer me easy 'handles' for my lift. I took my grip and a good stance, and lifted him a few inches fairly easily. It was a little awkward, but he's a small guy so the physical strength required wasn't anything major. "Very good, impressive again. For your father's benefit, would he like to try lifting me?" My father would indeed like to try. He replaced me, but no matter how much he grunted and strained, he couldn't lift Sensei off the floor. Dad muttered, "I should be able to lift you easily. This is another of your mental tricks, isn't it?" "Yes. I said I was testing Mark's ki, which is a mental rather than physical energy. All my tests tonight are mental. I would request that you not think of them as 'tricks' though. I have devoted a large portion of my life to learning them, and they are considerably more important to me than 'tricks'." Dad apologized, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make light of your achievements. I am very impressed that you broke my hold so easily, and that I couldn't lift you." Sensei nodded, then started walking around me. He asked again, "Are you still centered?" "Sensei, I'm ALWAYS centered unless I deliberately choose not to be, which I certainly won't do while you're testing me. I haven't accidentally lost center at any time today, and I'm very unlikely to do it now." "You are not exaggerating?" I just shook my head. "All right then. Stand relaxed and keep your body loose, not rigid." I did as he asked, as he continued to circle me. On one of his orbits, while he was in front of me, I suddenly felt he was punching me hard in the stomach, and I jerked back. I almost immediately realized that he had not moved his fists at all, he was still just walking around me. He had merely intended to punch me. Sensei said, "Very good, excellent. Exactly as you said with the bully at school." I nodded. Prof said, "It's my turn to look foolish by asking for an explanation. What happened then?" Sensei answered as he was continuing to circle me, "I was going to punch Mark in the stomach. He sensed my intention and pulled away." "I didn't see you make any such move?" "No, I deliberately did not. I just projected the mental intention and Mark detected that. This is not a test of his observation skills, but of his ki." Sensei was behind me, and I suddenly felt another punch coming, and jerked away from that. Sensei said, "This time I was behind Mark so he had no visual cues. I am aware that this looks quite peculiar from your perspective, but it is great from mine. I can see that Mark reacts the instant I project my intent. He passes this test perfectly too. I have two further tests, of your 'proximity sense', as you call it, Mark. -- "Please shut your eyes. I am going to stand behind you and move around as quietly as I can. I want you to repeatedly call out 'yes, yes, yes' whenever you can sense me, and 'no, no, no' when you cannot. So if I walk from out of your sense, into it, then out again, you will call 'no, no, yes, yes, no, no.' Do you understand?" "Yes, that sounds easy." I shut my eyes and started saying, "Yes, yes, yes" as he was within range. Over the couple of minutes he moved in and out of range and I kept him informed. He moved around to my front too, and repeated the process all around me. After a little more of that he said, "If you can point to where I am, that would be good too." So I held up one hand, and if he was within range I pointed at him. When he was out of range I simply folded my finger into my fist, until he next stepped close enough. After a few minutes of this, Sensei said, "You may open your eyes, Mark." When I looked around, everyone else in the room was looking at me with a degree of amazement. Not so much Julia, who was mostly showing pride. She already thought I was awesome, and didn't need any further proof. I guess that from everyone's perspective, the last test must have been the most impressive to observe. My sensing range is a three feet sphere centered on my center, but Sensei wasn't able to determine that. There were two complications. First he tended to measure my range by measuring the gap between us (skin to skin), so when he approached me from the side, my range appeared to be not much more than two feet as my center is the best part of twelve inches in from the outside of my hip. Second, and more significantly, he could be four feet away and intending to move inside my range, and I'd detect that part of his ki's flash that was within range. Because I only sense ki with proximity, sometimes I couldn't tell whether his body was slightly out of range or slightly in, so to play safe I call out 'yes', resulting in an erratic range. Sensei said, "You ability to sense my presence is considerably more exact than nearly all aikidoka. I have one more test, which is not even a modification of one we do on our students. I have invented it as a result of what you said on the phone about being able to identify who is standing behind you. Can we get you to face the wall with your eyes shut, while we will take turns approaching you from behind. Once you detect us can you call out our names? Is that a fair and acceptable test?" I answered, "It's fair. Do you mind if I walk around the room, past everyone first to make sure I know what everyone feels like? I haven't thought about this before, but I probably need to make sure I know what everyone feels like when they're close enough to me, similar to recognizing faces." "As you wish." I started doing that, walking up to each person to make sure I could recognize their ki's 'image' in my proximity sense. I quickly found out that I already knew what each person I visited 'looked' like in proximity, but I did everyone anyway, just to play safe. Sensei said, "I am going to stand immediately in front of you, Mark, humming to drown out any sound cues you might receive and to make sure your eyes are shut. That will not interfere, will it?" "No. That'll be fine." Sensei positioned me, then walked behind me, asking, "Call out when I am too far away for you to sense please, Mark." He slowly backed away and I let him know when he passed out of my range. Sensei placed a handkerchief on the floor (I looked around to see what he was doing), and he said to the others, "If you would, I would like you to mill around about there." Indicating a spot a few feet out of my range. "Keep moving so Mark cannot get a fix on each of you. Then one of you move forward as quietly as you can and step over the line. Stay there until he calls a name, then return to the group. Then someone else step forward. Do you all understand?" They all did. Carol stating, "Donna and I already did this with Mark at home. I know he can do it. He's very clever." Sensei then said, "Let me check I know everyone's name." He called them all out correctly, which I thought was pretty impressive because I'm terrible at remembering new people's names. He moved around to the front of me, told me to shut my eyes, and we did the test. I had no problems. I was even amused that Carol was the first to step over. I thought it was a message of confidence, not that I needed it. After a dozen correct identifications, Sensei called out, "Do two at a time from now on please." I thought that was a clever idea. They started doing that, and I showed off a little by not just calling out the two names, but saying, "On my right Carol, on my left Dad." There was an exclamation of surprise from someone the first time I did this. After a few of these, the sneaky devils did a threesome on me. I had no warning, and laughed when three of them stepped over the line together. "Haha. You smart alecs! From my right: Dad, Mom and Prof. Can't you count to two, Prof? I thought you were a professor of mathematics." They did a couple threesomes, then some random mixes of one, two or three, and even four once, but it was obvious from the comments I could hear that I had it nailed. It ended with all six of them stepping over the line at once. Sensei called out, "Enough. There are no more tests. Congratulations Mark." I opened my eyes and turned. Everyone crowded around me and patted me on the back, Julia kissing me, and Carol gave me a quick peck too. Sensei said, "Shall we take seats to discuss the ramifications?" I got a seat, and a girl perched of both of my legs. Hugs and kisses from both, although Carol had to restrain her congratulations. In a gap, Carol announced to the room, "I knew he'd pass. My brother is very special!" After a bit of laughter, Sensei said, "I am largely at a loss about what to do now. There has never been a student like Mark. I do not mean just in our dojo, but to the best of my knowledge, anywhere in the world. Mark sounded sincere and knowledgeable on the phone, but I simply did not believe him. My apologies for that Mark." "No problem, Sensei. I know I'm somewhat unusual." That caused a variety of reactions from my audience, especially Carol and Julia. After the half-joking agreements and chuckles died down, Sensei continued, "What you saw may have seemed mysterious or even supernatural, but that is not the case. Students who apply themselves diligently for a number of years can expect to develop their skills to levels similar to Mark's. It might take them several decades, but most of what Mark did is achievable by anyone with the right attitude. I can do most of what he did, for example, and there is nothing supernatural about me. In addition to his learning those skills so quickly, there are three ways in which Mark showed exceptional ability. -- "First, the precision of his 'proximity sense', as he calls it. Most advanced aikidoka get a feeling for when there is someone close to them. Often that feeling can be quite accurate, but not to the degree of accuracy that Mark exhibited. Especially his ability to point exactly to the location of the person. -- "Second, also to do with Mark's proximity sense, is his ability to flawlessly identify anyone within its range. I have never heard of anyone being able to do that so perfectly. If I tried, I might do better than 50/50, but I would mostly be guessing. Without doubt, that ability of Mark's is exceptionally advanced. -- "Third, and to me perhaps the most important of all, is Mark's claim to be centered all the time. I will explain what that means. To use ki requires that the mind be in an altered state of consciousness. Not in the drugged sense. Recreational drugs are inimical to Aikido. I mean in a way that is very similar to meditation. Most aikidoka develop their ki with regular meditation sessions because of that similarity. -- "Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to maintain a meditative frame of mind while going about one's daily business. It takes years of diligent practice to be able to increase one's ability to hold center, which is what we call being in the state necessary for sensing and using ki. I have been practicing Aikido for thirty years, and can achieve a total of one to two hours of holding center per day, which unless I am meditating are usually in blocks of five to ten minute because I am constantly being distracted. Mark claims he can remain in this state permanently, which is incredible. -- "To help you understand how difficult that is, if I asked you to visualize a pink elephant standing beside you, I am sure you could all do so. Now imagine trying to keep that image in your mind every waking second while you are going about your daily business. You will get distracted and forget to think about it, finding it almost impossible to maintain it for more than a few minutes a day. -- "According to Mark, he can do the equivalent of that faultlessly. I cannot test his claim easily, but I have no reason to doubt him after his test performances. There may be one or two of the very best aikidoka who could claim to be permanently centered, but it is hard to believe. It is simply too difficult to maintain that concentration every waking moment. -- "In our phone conversation yesterday, Mark said he could run faster when centered. I did not try to test him on that, partly because I cannot think of how to. However, after these tests I am inclined to believe that claim too. No other aikidoka has ever mentioned this as far as I am aware. I can detect ki in other people, I can influence their ki such as getting Steven to let go of my lapel, and to a small degree I can promote healing and keep myself healthy, but running faster does not fit this pattern. I do not understand how he can do that. -- "Mark passed my tests with flying colors. The question is what happens now?" Sensei's opening up the discussion resulted in a fairly chaotic period. My girls congratulated and praised me while Mom and Dad asked lots of questions. They didn't understand the situation, so they couldn't give advice, make judgments, etc.; the things that parents like to do. There were questions like Dad asking Sensei, "Is Mark really that unusual?" "Exceptional. He has learned more about ki in one week than most aikidoka learn in thirty years." Unfortunately I couldn't answer nearly all of the questions they asked of me, such as, "How did you get so good so quickly?", "What do you hope to learn from Aikido?", etc. I usually didn't have good answers because I either genuinely didn't know, or didn't want to say things like, "I want to find out if any other aikidoka have multiple minds." About the only thing I could usefully say was, "I seem to have a natural aptitude for Aikido, and I'd like to go to classes so I can learn more." No one had any objection to that, but Sensei had a problem. He said, "Complicating this issue for me as Mark's teacher, is that Mark has not had any training in the forms, which are the physical movements of Aikido. Aikido is taught as a martial art because learning those techniques is the best way we know to develop the internal abilities we strive for, many of which Mark already has in abundance. In many respects, Mark is now one of the best aikidoka in the world, but he has no knowledge of how to do the most basic of physical movements. He is like a world-class poet who does not know the alphabet. It seems absurd to spend time teaching him the alphabet when he can already make beautiful poetry, but it also seems absurd for him not to know the alphabet. The only way I know how to teach Aikido is through the forms, which is a failing of the teacher rather than the student. Nonetheless I think I must start by teaching Mark the forms. With his ki he will almost certainly learn them faster than normal students. They will still take him a significant time to learn because they are predominately a physical exercise..." Julia interrupted, "No they won't. He's just as good physically." I had a horrible image of Julia telling Sensei what a great lover I was, and I turned a light red (perhaps closer to cerise than vermilion, or perhaps not - it's hard for me to tell, what with my being a guy). I knew Julia was proud of my bedroom skills and I certainly knew she had no shame, so it was all too easy to imagine her boasting about me that way. Sensei said, "I am not sure I understand what you mean. Physical skills take time to develop." Julia disagreed, to my dismay, "Not for Mark. Tell him about 8-ball, Dad." #1: Prof said, "I'm not sure that's something Mark could repeat in all other physical activities, but to follow my daughter's order: Julia has two older brothers, who are entertaining Mark's youngest sister in another room at the moment. Andrew and Robert have played 8-ball and similar games all their life. They're very competitive and have become very good. Mark was beating them within thirty minutes of his first learning the game. He's also ambidextrous, an exceptional soccer player, and very good at other physical activities." Julia took a breath to add more. I played safe by clamping a hand over her mouth. I said, "I think Sensei has the idea now. No further examples are necessary." I took my hand away, and Julia looked at me and said, "Spoilsport." Everyone in the room, other than Sensei, knew what Julia would be happy to proclaim. Vanessa, who was behind Sensei somewhat, made a zipping motion across her mouth when she'd caught Julia's eye, and Julia got the message: no one outside the family was supposed to know about that, for reasons much more important than my embarrassment. Just as well, because no one else seemed to think that my embarrassment had any importance at all. Sensei pressed on anyway, "Regardless of his physical prowess, I think Mark needs to learn the physical forms. It is what Aikido is built on and it would not be possible to place Mark in a class if he did not know the forms. If he is as good as his young lady says, he will advance rapidly. I will consider this issue some more, but I do not see any practical alternative as even the world's best masters teach using the forms. -- "You might consider having your arm X-rayed soon, Mark, as I expect your cast could come off sooner than you expect given the strength of you ki. That way you could start training earlier." I definitely wanted the cast off as soon as possible, although I was somewhat weirded out by his being so confident of my bones healing faster than normal. Mental abilities were one thing, but healing broken bones faster was something else entirely, and FAR more real. Sensei told the room, "Mark asked me to bring some Aikido books for him to read. I did, but I left them in my car because I expected Mark to fail the tests. I will fetch them now. I will wait by my car so you may have a private discussion if you wish. Come and get me when you are ready." He made a slight bow as he left the room, probably a habit formed over the years of Aikido practice. I'd seen last week that they bowed a lot. There was a small burst of noise after he left, things like: "That's amazing", "Who'd have thought Mark could do those things?", "I KNEW he could!" (from both Carol and Julia). Once things settled down, Mom asked, "What do you want to do, Mark?" "Go to Aikido classes, of course. I already knew that. Tonight was just Sensei checking that I could do what I said. Nothing he said changed my mind. He seems like a good teacher, so I'm even more interested than I was previously." Mom said, "I find it incredible that you can be world class in something you've only watched for an hour." "Don't forget I read a couple of books, Mom." It was easier for me to joke than admit I was awesome. That isn't even close to my style. Mom laughed, "Haha. Yes, silly me, how could I forget that you also read two books." Julia gave me a big hug, and said, "Isn't our man awesome?" I hoped no one interpreted the "our" the way Julia probably meant it. Although I was impressed that Julia was already mentally sharing me with Carol, I made a mental note to warn her about speaking like that in front of my parents because we didn't want them to find out about Carol's and my new relationship for several more years. Carol said, "Yes!" And hugged me tight. It was also nice that Carol felt included in the "our", necessitating another mental warning note for Carol. Mom said, "Mark, why don't you go and get your teacher. Take Carol and Julia with you to help carry the books. You'll have to anyway, as I think they're permanently attached to your arms." I went out with the two girls attached. Sensei had a dozen books ready. The girls' hands were full of whichever one of my arms they were laying claim to, so Sensei and I had to carry the books back ourselves. I left them on the table by the front door, so I wouldn't forget them when it came time to leave. We took Sensei back into the living room. Once he was settled, Mom said, "Mark wants to carry on with your classes, so I'll arrange to get his arm X-rayed and cast removed so he can start as soon as possible. You were serious about his arm healing faster?" Sensei nodded, "I expect his arm may either be healed enough for the cast to be removed now, or its X-ray will show that it is healing faster than expected so the cast's removal date can be moved forward. In all honesty, it is another test of his ki. I think it is quite possible and it is worth finding out." #4: Mom said, "Fair enough. I'm sure Mark wants to get rid of it as soon as he can. How will your classes work once he starts training?" Sensei explained, "I would start Mark in the beginners' class, which is what he is for the physical forms. We usually have grading examinations whenever there are enough students ready to be advanced to the next belt, which is usually every three to six months. How fast students advance is an individual matter, so if Mark learns quickly, he can advance quickly. If he is so good that waiting three months between grading exams would slow him down, I can easily test him individually as it is a simple procedure taking only a few minutes. When Mark reaches a certain level we will move him to an intermediate class, and eventually to an advanced class. -- "It is not until a student reaches black belt, usually in seven to ten years, that we consider that Aikido training really begins. At that level the physical movements are being performed well enough that we can start concentrating on the mastery of ki. Mark is already ahead of most black-belt aikidoka in this respect, but he cannot train with them until he knows the forms. That entails learning a large number of physical movements extremely well. To use a simple analogy, he has to learn several dozen complicated dances perfectly - even to the angle that he holds his wrist, turns a foot, or tilts his head - for every movement of every dance. Once he knows the dances well enough, then he has to be able to adapt all of the moves to different partners: tall or short, fat or thin, young or old, strong or weak, fast moving or slow, etc. There are a great number of variations, which is why it normally takes seven to ten years to learn the forms well enough that applying them correctly is automatic. Even with Mark's ki being so amazingly well developed, I estimate it will still take him three or four years to learn the physical skills required to reach black belt." Julia corrected Sensei, "Less than a year." Carol had another opinion, "Six months." Sensei chuckled, "You have wonderful confidence in Mark's ability. But you have never seen an Aikido class, have you?" Julia responded, "We've seen Mark. You've never seen him learn anything, have you?" Sensei replied, "Touché, young lady. In any event, Mark will advance at his own pace, so we will see." Mom tried to start a discussion about what the options might be, but there weren't any. Sensei didn't know any other way to teach Aikido, and I knew so little about Aikido that I had nothing to say beyond, "I'll do whatever Sensei recommends." We wasted a few minutes getting nowhere before we agreed to Sensei's plan and he started taking his leave. I spoke up, "Before you go Sensei, can I ask a favor please?" "Of course." "I want to keep knowledge of my abilities low key. Preferably very low key. I don't want to be considered a freak of some sort. Obviously if I'm training with other students they'll see me learn and progress, but please don't make a big deal out of me if you can avoid it. Don't advertise my skills, keep what you've learned about me this evening to yourself, and those sorts of things. I know I'm unusual, but I very much want as few other people as possible to be aware of that." Sensei agreed, "That is a prudent request, Mark. I will be properly circumspect." I couldn't have asked for more. In fact, I couldn't have asked for exactly that either, as he spoke a funny version of English. Sensei politely made his departure, after apologizing to everyone for intruding and taking so much time. After he'd left, Dad said, "The English talk funny, don't they? But he knows his stuff. I don't know how he could break my grip on his collar so easily. He didn't look like he even tried hard." There wasn't much we could add, so after a couple of minutes the adults suggested the kids go play. Julia had a gleam in her eye when she agreed, and I know I always enjoy myself when she gets a gleam. As Carol and Julia were dragging me from the room, I heard Prof say, "If I'd had any last minute doubts, that would've settled them." The door's closing cut off my hearing any more, which was a pity because it sounded interesting. [[It would've been too, both my parents had been VERY impressed and they had quite a lot to say about it. Dad especially so, having twice failed to 'beat' Sensei. What they said would've shocked me greatly. Not overhearing it now slightly postponed my shock.]] The girls weren't in the mood for dillydallying around, so I followed them upstairs. ^ The girls took me up to Julia's room, and as soon as the door was closed they started expressing how impressed they were with me. Not many words, but lots of hugging and kissing were involved. At times like this, I'm very glad they think I'm so impressive. Both of them had their arms around my waist, hugging me from different directions, and both were kissing me on whatever part of my cheek or lips they could reach. I was rotating my head from one to the other, when #4 had a stupendously good idea, #4: The rest of us wondered that too. When we'd finished imagining it, I said, "Thank you very much for your kisses girls, but what I'd really like to see is you two kissing each other." Sometimes I LOVE being the boss! Carol giggled while Julia smiled evilly at me, and then followed it up with an evil comment, "I've been kissing Carol all afternoon and can do it again after you leave. I wouldn't want you to feel left out or ignored, so don't you think it'd be better for us to kiss you while you're here?" I couldn't think of a logical retort, so I expressed my feelings, "GRRR!" "Haha. Wouldn't you find it boring to watch two girls kiss?" "About as boring as you must find my putting my cock into the same old holes every time. Maybe I should stop bothering to do that, as we seemed to be so concerned about not boring each other?" "Haha. I'm not quite bored with that yet, so maybe I will kiss Carol after all." Julia took a couple of steps away from me, and called to Carol, "Come here, lover." Carol giggled as she moved to Julia, putting her arms around Julia's waist. Julia looked at me to make sure I was watching (what was she thinking!). She teased me by slowly reaching up to Carol's head, and just as slowly pulling it down toward her face. Just before their lips contacted, Julia turned to me again. I didn't wait for whatever it was she was about to say. I preempted her comment with a heartfelt, "GRRR!" Julia looked back at Carol, saying, "He's starting to act like a beast, so I think we better make it a good one, darling." Then they FINALLY started kissing. Straight into full-on passionately kissing. God, it was HOT! The hottest thing I have EVER seen! And then Julia heated it up even more, by taking one of her hands from around Carol's head and placing it on Carol's breast. I had a perfect view as Julia started kneading it, paying particular attention to tweaking Carol's nipple through her top and bra. #2: They were still on their first kiss; it was a very long, very passionate, very HOT kiss. Their tongues were dancing around each other's and into and out of each other's mouths. Carol's hands were roaming over Julia's back while Julia's left hand was doing highly exciting things to Carol's breast. I could see that Carol thought it was exciting too, as she started rhythmically groaning into her kiss, in sync with Julia's quite hard tugs on Carol's nipple. Julia had discovered Carol likes to be played with forcefully when she gets worked up, making me wish I could've seen Julia learn that lesson! Julia moved her other hand down to Carol's unmolested breast, and started mauling both of them. For another thirty seconds or so they kept kissing, while Julia was giving both of Carol's breasts a very good work-over. Carol was getting more and more excited, and she started having trouble keeping up her half of the kiss. Julia whispered something in Carol's ear, and one of Carol's hands slid under Julia's skirt, and then up between Julia's legs. Carol's hand started moving back and forth rapidly, rubbing Julia's pussy and blowing my mind. I groaned from the overload of lust. #4: #2: Fortunately there were fresh underwear in "my drawer". Before my pants showed a wet spot I quickly unzipped my fly. At the sound both girls immediately stopped what they were doing, and looked at me with a great deal of excitement on their faces. "I'm sorry girls, but I just blew in my shorts. That was the sexiest, hottest, most erotic, fantastic thing I have EVER seen. I came just from watching you two. I have to change my shorts before my pants get wet." Julia said, "Awww. We were hoping you were undressing to join in." Julia must have been right about the "we" part because Carol was looking very enthusiastic. I sadly said, "Boy oh boy, do I EVER wish I could, but not with our parents in the house. Even with the soundproofing it's not safe, they could come in at any time." I walked to my drawer and removed a new pair of shorts, sneaking a couple of hankies while I had the chance. I changed as quickly as possible to minimize the chance of my parents catching me with my pants down. I was already lowering my pants when I realized that Carol was about to see me bottomless for the first time. I looked at her, to find that she was looking fixedly right back at me. Not at my eyes either, her gaze was aimed lower. Being the corrupting influence that I am, I did not turn my back, so Carol saw me in a half-profile. I had removed my soiled underwear, and wiped myself with them, then Julia said, "Give me those." Thoughtlessly assuming she was going to put them in her laundry basket, I considerately rolled them up and handed them to her, making sure she didn't get her hand all messy. After I'd put on fresh shorts and was pulling up my pants, I looked at the girls. Julia was standing by Carol, had unwrapped my shorts, and was running an extended finger through my cum to scoop it up. #4: #3: #1: #2: I watched in shock as Julia held it up to Carol's mouth, saying, "Have your first taste of our man." Carol reached out with one hand to grasp Julia's wrist, then she held it still while she leaned down and licked the first sample off Julia's finger. Carol had a look of intense concentration on her face. After the first taste Carol's face relaxed and she said, "It's not too bad." Personally I thought it was not particularly pleasant, but Carol's taste sense - like females' color sense - must have been weird because she proceeded to lick Julia's finger clean. "It's okay," she declared at the end. Julia said, "Good. Just as well as you're going to be drinking a great deal of it." An astonished, and I dared hope, pleased looking Carol asked, "I am?" #4: Julia explained, "A great deal. Every time our man cums in my pussy, it will be your job to lick it out. I started the pill last Friday. My period finished yesterday, so I'm safe now. Mark won't be using condoms with me anymore, which means plenty of pussy licking and sperm drinking for you, sweetie." #3: #1: #3: #4: Carol said, "Oh goody! I can't wait. Do you think we can do that now?" Julia answered, "Not tonight, sweetie. Maybe tomorrow though." #4: Carol asked, "Can I come here again tomorrow?" Julia answered, "Yes. Dad's going to take you and Mark through the procedures he wants to use in the study. Use of the computer, how you study, what software you need, that sort of thing. Mark also needs to be shown how to access all the OSU information. Dad's probably already told your parents that he needs you tomorrow evening. You'll both be coming here straight from school, and be here for dinner, which will make Mark happy." #1: Julia asked Carol, "Darling, you got very excited when I was kissing you. Even more excited than when I was kissing you earlier. You liked kissing in front of our man, didn't you?" Carol blushed again (I could've told her that having a girlfriend was very embarrassing). She nodded and replied, "Yes. I know he only thinks of me as his sister, but I can't help the way he makes me feel." I was about to protest VERY loudly, but Julia made strong "shut up" motions at me. I got the hint, especially after I realized Julia was right, as it would be better to save that sort of talk for tomorrow. I said, "I think I'll go and check on Donna and The Boys. I haven't seen them since before Sensei arrived and feel guilty leaving them to look after Donna so long. Do you want to come?" Carol said, "Yes." Julia said, "No. I'm too horny. I want Carol and me to get each other off again before we go downstairs." #1: Carol was conflicted, "Umm, I have to do what Mark says." I said, "It's true you have to obey us, but I'm not ordering you to come with me. I just asked if you wanted to. You were extremely turned on a minute ago so it'd be nice for you to finish that off. And for some reason, I'm getting a subtle clue that Julia wants you to return the favor." Julia was half-stripped already and would be fully naked in a few more seconds. I added, "Ahh Julia, aren't you worried about someone coming in while you and Carol are, you know?" Julia answered, "The new door's got a lock on it. Please flick it on your way out." I looked at the door, and it clearly had a lock. #4: #2: #4: #2: ^ I wandered off to find the other non-parents. They were probably still in the Guys' Room, so I headed that way but found them in the hot tub. Donna proudly declared, "We're having a competition on who can hold their breath the longest, and I'm winning!" The bubbles were turned off, and I could easily see that Robert was holding a watch up, staring at it intently, while Andrew was entirely submerged and motionless. While I watched I saw Robert give Andrew a nudge out of Donna's sight, and Andrew shot to the surface, theatrically gasping for breath. Donna shrieked, "How long? How long?" Robert said, "One minute and four seconds." Donna bounced up and down, shrieking some more, "Yippee; I'm still winning." It was then that I noticed that Donna was topless. She'd been sitting where I could only see her back, so her body had been hidden by the side of the tub and her arm, but her jumping up and down certainly 'exposed' her state of undress. I was a bit flummoxed, not that Donna had anything to see. #4: #1: #4: #2: <"Nubbins", "buds". Where on Earth do you get these words from?> #4: #1: #4: I noticed that there was a wet T-shirt draped over the side of the tub. I guess Donna had been wearing it, and had found it uncomfortable, or something. I was still thinking about that, which means not really thinking, as I was still flummoxed. The females in my family have never wandered around topless, so I was somewhat shocked. Donna faced me and said, "Yippee, I'm winning. And look! My tits have started growing." She pointed to her nipples. I guess to be helpful in case I was unaware of where tits grew from. "Umm, congratulations. I guess." Her proud demonstration seemed somewhat premature (literally pre-mature). Her "nubbins" - which I have to admit does seem an appropriate word, although I've got no idea why - were barely noticeable. She added, "It's my turn now, I want to beat one minute and twenty seconds. The dads are in the next room," pointing to the Guys' Room. She turned around and started taking some deep breaths. Robert held up his watch in front of him, saying, "Ready, set, go!" Donna submerged herself noisily. It seemed like a good time for me to retreat out of the room, so I went through to the Guys' Room. ^ Dad and Prof were standing around the table playing a game of 8-ball. The TV showed some guys running around a field chasing a bag of air. The dads were just holding their cues chatting when I came in. As the door closed, Dad said, "Did your sister proudly show you her newly discovered maturity?" Assuming (and hoping) he meant Donna, I laughed, and said, "Yes. Took me by surprise too. When you brought me up, you never told me what to say in such circumstances." "Did I leave commenting on your sisters' breasts out of your upbringing. What a mistake to make! Haha. -- "When I was young I always got slapped when I commented on a girl's breasts. Now I'm older, I imagine your mother would slap me, so I have no idea how to talk about that issue. You'll have to figure out your own answers. Donna's a hard case, isn't she?" I agreed, "Yes. There's certainly nothing subtle about her. I see you're playing 8-ball. Is it still $10 a game?" Prof and Dad weren't born yesterday. All I got out of them was a couple of laughs. Dad said, "We're going to head back home shortly, can you tell Donna and Carol please?" "Sure." I returned back the way I came. Robert was under the water. I told Donna we'd be leaving soon, and she said she'd get out after her next turn. At not much more than a minute each I figured that was fine. I headed back upstairs, wondering if Julia had had enough time to make good on her promise to Carol. I walked slowly. When I got to their door it occurred to me that knocking on a soundproof door could be futile, but I couldn't think what else to do, so I knocked hard. About thirty seconds later I was thinking what Plan B should be, when Julia opened the door a crack. As she let me in, she said, "We need to invent a special knock for you, so Carol doesn't have to frantically get dressed. Two knocks, a gap, three more, okay?" I nodded. Obviously the knocks could be heard. "Dad says we're leaving soon. Sorry about that. Did you have enough time, Carol?" Julia laughed and Carol blushed. Julia said, "We were working on her third. She was VERY ready!" I said, "Take a couple of minutes to get dressed properly, Carol," her rushed job had produced an untidy result, "then come down to see us off. I'll wait downstairs." Julia gave me a kiss, and I said, "Mmm. Delicious!" In truth, there wasn't much to taste as Julia must have wiped her face well, but it's the thought that counts. After the second it took for her to work out what I was referring to, Carol blushed and smiled. Julia followed up with, "You were right, she is delicious. I enjoy licking her very much. Thank you for having such a sexy, tasty sister." I figured it was a rhetorical comment, as it was highly doubtful that I was responsible for Carol's sexiness or the taste of her pussy juice. I left them to get straightened out. I headed downstairs again. Julia and Carol came down not long after to see the rest of the Andersons off. I tried to think of a reason why Mom should let me stay behind overnight with Julia and Carol, but it was obviously impossible. Wonderful to fantasize over though. ^ I remembered to grab my new pile of Aikido books, and our departure was uneventful. Once the car was rolling, I asked Mom, "How come we're leaving so early?" "We've got a busy day tomorrow." The only people I knew who'd be having a busy day tomorrow were Carol, Julia and me, and I sure as shit hoped Mom didn't know about our plans. After a moment of panic, I realized that either Mom and Dad had something on that I wasn't aware of, or maybe Prof had laid it on pretty thick about how much study preparation we had to do. Very thick indeed, if Mom thought everyone needed to get to bed early. I bet Carol and Julia were already back in bed, which made me envious all over again, and gave me something more enjoyable to think about than worrying about Mom. Mom changed the subject, and added, "Donna, what on Earth made you take off your top in the hot tub? That's not like you." "I wanted to show off that my titties are growing, of course." #1: <"Of course." Haha. Doesn't every girl do that?> #4: Mom, clearly being facetious, said, "Are you going to give us and the Williamses progress reports as they grow?" "You mean show them off again?" The trouble with Donna's question was that she sounded quite enthusiastic. I suspected that Donna didn't yet know what "facetious" meant. Mom, sensing her humorous comment had been misinterpreted, said, "I was joking, honey." Donna said, "I think it's a good idea. Andrew and Robert were very complimentary about my tits, and I liked the look on Mark's and Dad's faces. So thanks, Mom." Perhaps she didn't know "facetious", but she still knew how to pull Mom's leg. Mom said no more on the topic, probably wisely. When it was clear that Donna's "Progress Reporting Meeting" was at an end, I asked, "Donna, who won the breath-holding competition?" "I did!" she squealed, squeezing my arm (she'd was sitting next to me, again using the officially approved Julia and Carol arm hugging technique). "Andrew and Robert complained that I get so much exercise but they have to do schoolwork all the time. They kept saying that gave me an unfair advantage, but they were just feeling sorry for themselves because I was better than both of them! I was so close to breaking one minute thirty. A few more tries and I would've done it. They couldn't even do one minute fifteen, the sissies. We left too early." The Boys had certainly done a good job of 'babysitting' Donna, not that I'd dare use that term anywhere around her. Now that I thought of it, they'd done it during both of our family dinners. They made it much easier for us to do everything else we needed to. I also made a mental note that when I got around to finding out how long I could hold my breath, not to do it around Donna. I didn't want to reduce her thrill in being the best at that if I was somehow good at it. When we got home, I went to my room to start reading the new Aikido books two at a time. Nothing I saw grabbed my interest. There were lots of chapters on how to perform the various physical combat techniques. I skimmed them very quickly, almost as fast as I could turn the pages. Sensei would be showing me these moves in person when I started training, so reading them in a book was pointless. After browsing through half the books, I started having trouble concentrating and decided to have an early night. As Mom had said, I had a busy evening tomorrow. ------- Chapter 46: Not Cold Feet, Exactly Thursday, April 14, 2005 I woke in a great mood, although not as good a mood as I expected to be in later this evening. At breakfast, Donna did her best to march in and give me my morning kiss. She compensated for Carol's absence by kissing both cheeks. Once we were all settled down, Mom led the discussion, "Mark, I'll call the hospital to see about getting your cast removed as soon as possible. Your school has already agreed to pick up the medical bills so I'm not worried about unnecessary expenses if the hospital needs more X-rays to consider taking it off early. -- "On the topic of the school, there's nothing definite to report about the settlement yet, but we're probably only about a week or two away from concluding it. I could do it faster, but I like making them sweat. You should be seeing some anti-bullying programs starting at school soon too." (Mom and Dad had a lawyer, and they were collectively negotiating with the Principal and the Corvallis Board of Education over an out-of-court settlement for the school having trained the gang of thugs who kept beating me up.) I just said, "Good. Thanks." Turning to Donna, Mom continued with, "Do you have anything important at school after lunch? No tests, no after school games, or the like?" Donna said, "Nothing special, just the usual boring stuff." "Good. I'll pick you up at school. Meet me outside the school gates at the beginning of lunchtime, okay?" "Okay. Why?" "We have some shopping to do." Donna looked more than a little puzzled. Normally the only time Donna likes to go shopping is for running shoes, which didn't appear to be the case now because Donna always announces the need for new ones herself. Mom was going to have to take time off work to do this, and that wasn't usual. What could be so important? #4: #3: #4: "Uh, okay." Donna was confused too, but she wasn't going to disagree with an afternoon off school for shopping. Donna does have female genes after all, as indicated by her nubbins. I wasn't going to ask questions. It sounded like an embarrassing girly issue, and I was also very much in the mode of saying as little as possible to Mom or Dad, to avoid any last minute screwups that might disastrously affect my wedding. I suddenly had a thought, and blurted it out, "How is Carol getting to school this morning? The car just comes here, and her bike's here too." Mom said, "I'm sure the Williamses can find a solution to that problem themselves." It was probably within their organizational abilities so I said nothing, and continued to say as much nothing as I could. After breakfast I waited outside with Donna for the car. I wasn't going to stay inside and risk putting my foot in my mouth. The car drove up, I waved goodbye to Mom silently, and we left. I sat in the backseat by myself, missing Carol. If I wanted a pantiless flash, I'd have to do it to myself, which didn't have quite the same appeal. On the way to school, I kept worrying about Mom being "on the loose" with Donna when the wedding would be happening. Taking Donna shopping obviously didn't have anything to do with us, but there was too much at stake to feel comfortable with having Mom not tied down at work like normal. After some worrying, I decided we must be okay. It wouldn't take long after we got to Julia's to get to the proposal. I couldn't imagine that Carol would refuse because she was already raving over how excited she was to be able to have a life with Julia and me. Apparently we'd have to wait for the Williamses to come home to show Prof and Vanessa my TK, and then to have the ceremony, from what little Julia had told me about how it was going to happen. Julia had said they'd get home quickly, so with any luck we'd also get the ceremony over with pretty quickly too. Then if I had anything to do with it - which I was going to make sure I did - we'd be very quickly back in Julia's room with the door firmly locked behind us. Carol needed to be deflowered, and I was just the brother for the job. It should be done before dinnertime, although I wouldn't mind doing it again a few extra times after dinner. We were nearly home, in the baseball metaphor sense. Carol and Julia were standing where the car drops us off, and enthusiastically greeted me the moment I got out of the car. After Donna was out of earshot (about 1.5 seconds after the car stopped, or about 2.0 seconds after she opened the door), I asked my girls, "How are the two lovers?" The two lovers repeatedly told me how incredible their partner was, how much fun they'd had last night and this morning, how wonderful sex with each other was, how much they wanted more of this, how in love they were with each other, etc., etc. I was pretty sure they'd had a good time. I wasn't envious anymore. My turn with them both was so close I could almost feel it, helped by their both holding one of my arms each against their breasts. Life was good, and very soon about to get a whole lot gooder! It was stunning that my first date with Julia was only thirteen days ago; not even two weeks. My life had been totally turned around in that time. Carol's life too. Julia is AMAZING! Before Carol headed off to middle school, I said, "Carol, I'm thrilled that you had such a great night, and that you and Julia love each other so much. And so often, haha. It brings me great pleasure to see you so happy. I love you very much." Carol responded, "Thank you SO much, Mark. I can't believe how wonderful my life is now. How much it's changed in the last week. I owe it all to you. I owe you EVERYTHING! I wish I could thank you properly, but there's no way I can. I love you so much for that and everything else." She threw both her arms around me and hugged me tight. Carol seemed on the verge of tears. I finally had a handkerchief in my pocket, but I tried to calm her down by deflecting some of the credit back on her. "I haven't done much. Julia and you started becoming best friends when you first met, so you didn't need me at all. And remember, it was you who first got Julia's phone number and you talked to her a lot more than I did in the beginning." Carol said, "I'm not falling for that one again! Julia explained all about your secretly loving her for months, so much that Annette or any other girl couldn't excite you. I think that's incredibly romantic. We both bawled our eyes out about that last night; it's so beautiful. So without your love for Julia, you wouldn't have mentioned her to Annette and I wouldn't have met her. So I owe everything to YOU. You are the reason why I'm so happy." #1: <(a) We're never going to be able to forget that are we? And (b) I hope she's exaggerating about their "bawling their eyes out". That's just silly so long after the event.> #4: After a few more "I love yous" were exchanged - it takes much longer in a threesome - Carol went her way. A very happy Julia and I wandered our way. As we walked, Julia said, "There's so much I could tell you about last night, and this morning..." #3: " ... but it just boils down to Carol being an incredibly giving person. She feels that she cannot give enough. She's so happy making me happy that I usually have to insist that I want to make her happy sometimes too, if you know what I mean?" #4: Julia continued, "We had a fantastic time. We LOVE making love to each other. But that's not important..." #4: " ... What's far more important is that Carol is head over heels in love with you. She loves me, but her feelings for you are far stronger. She worships you, adores you, loves you, lusts after you, needs you, yearns for you, and whatever else I can't yet think of for that list. The best aspect is that she doesn't know you lust after her. She thinks you have been sexual with her ONLY to give her pleasure. That you don't get any pleasure yourself, but you force yourself to do unbrotherly things because you can see how much she loves the physical contact, and because that's how self-sacrificing you are." I was incredulous, "How can she POSSIBLY think that! I can barely hold myself back from ravishing her every time we're alone. I spent hours playing with her breasts, licking her pussy, drinking her juices, and I almost couldn't make myself stop. I kept expecting her to slap me for taking advantage of her, and I was stunned that she let me have such a good time, to do anything I wanted to her. What I did was ALL my own idea; she never asked for a thing. She's got that wrong, big time!" Julia said, "Yeah, she sure has. I know you lust after her even more than you do me - BEFORE you interrupt, that's already more than I can handle. Carol's got such an inferiority complex - especially when she compares herself to you because you're truly awesome - that she can't believe you could desire her. When she finds out that you want her as your wife, with all that implies, she is going to have the best moment of her life. It'll totally blow her away, PROVIDED she believes you. There's a problem getting her to believe you're serious rather than just being self-sacrificing to her again. That's what her first reaction will be. Luckily you already have the solution to that." "I do?" I sure hoped I did because I could easily imagine Carol thinking exactly as Julia had described. "Absolutely. You tell her that you want you and her to make babies together, and for her to be the mother of your children. Then you make love to her as best you can, which I know is awesome. The first time will be just between the two of you. I'll sit behind her, holding her head, stroking her brow and giving her small kisses. Long before you're finished, she will be yours forever. I am SO looking forward to tonight!" "That's BRILLIANT and perfect Julia. Carol's going to melt when I say that. I'm stunned at how wonderful you are..." We spent the next few minutes playing our usual Ping-Pong game, trying to give the other all the credit. ^ Lunchtime had a delightful little surprise for me. Two actually. I was sitting, eating my food (as I like to do at such times, and at other times too), when Julia and Carol stood up, moved between me and the rest of the school, stood side by side facing me, and simultaneously lifted the front of their short skirts. No one else could have seen anything from the rear as the backs of their skirts remained down, not that I was thinking about that at the time. But from the front it was a completely different story. When the skirts had started going up I knew I was about to get a stereo pussy flash. Having had several of these before, I was simply looking forward to it. But the little minxes took me by surprise. They had no panties, and no hair either! Truly naked pussies! Wow. It took me several seconds before I remembered that I had a mouth full of half-eaten food, that's how captivated I was! I shut my mouth, resumed chewing, and kept staring. Julia asked, "You like?" #1: Even before I answered Julia's question, she reached down with her spare hand and lightly caressed Carol's pussy. Carol swapped hands holding her skirt, then reached down and started playing with Julia's pussy. #1: After a few seconds of this, Julia laughed and, very sadly, let her skirt fall to cover her again. She sat beside me and Carol moved to do the same on the other side. I realized I had stopped eating again when I tried to talk and discovered that I had a mouthful of food, so I hurriedly chewed and swallowed, then said, "You two are SO HOT! That took me by completely by surprise. Wow. What a sight!" The both hugged an arm of mine each, and Julia said, "Good. I thought you'd like the bare look. I ordered Carol to do it last night and it looked so good on her I told her to shave me too, especially when I realized that it made it much easier for us to go down on each other. And for you too, when you want to do that to us." I felt Carol stiffen and grab my arm tighter at Julia's comment, so I turned to her and said, "Would you like me to taste your pussy, darling? Now that it's so wonderfully shaved I'm sure I can do a very thorough job of licking you." Carol half-moaned, half-said, "Please. Would you?" Her legs started opening, so I hurriedly said, "I think I'll do that sometime this afternoon or evening at Julia's house. That way I can put you and Julia side by side on the bed, naked, and I can go back and forth between the two of you, comparing the taste of your pussy juices. I'd like that." We all agreed that we'd like that. Julia and I knew much more was planned for this evening, but now Carol had something erotic to look forward to. Hopefully the anticipation would make this evening go even better for her. Carol said, "It feels strange to have the cold breeze blowing on it. I'm not used to having a breeze there." Julia couldn't resist, "You'll have plenty of practice getting used to Mark's and my hot breaths." "Yes PLEASE!" declared my previously modest, well-behaved sister. We brought things down to a more normal level. Julia said, "Andrew brought us to school this morning. We'll take the school's car home, going on to my place after dropping Donna off at yours." I corrected Julia, "Donna is going shopping with Mom this afternoon. Has probably already been picked up, in fact. I don't know why, but I'm guessing she won't be back at school this afternoon. Mom did say something about her missing the whole afternoon. So, unless Donna meets us at the car, we can go straight from school to your place." "Good, that means we can start quicker." Carol looked happy with that consequence too, although she didn't know what Julia and I had in mind. I spent most of the rest of the school day wishing it was over. ------- Part 4: Our Marriage ------- Chapter 47: The Proposal Thursday, April 14, 2005 (Continued) When the final bell rang, the three of us (Julia, Carol and I) wasted no time converging on the car's meeting spot. Donna never turned up, so when the car arrived a few minutes later we all piled into the backseat and set off for Julia's. Julia led us directly upstairs. At the top of the stairs I was surprised when she stopped. Julia said, "Mark, there's a change of clothes for you in the bathroom. Please have a quick shower and get changed. Come to the bedroom and knock on the door, but then go to the study to wait for us please. After we've showered and dressed I will come get you." #3: I wasn't going to argue with Julia, so I turned to follow her instructions. Carol must've quietly asked Julia something, or maybe she used that eyebrow trick, because I heard Julia say to Carol, "Because something very special is going to happen soon." My good clothes were hanging up in the bathroom. They'd been ironed after having been crushed in my bags. There were two handkerchiefs placed beside them, which made me chuckle. I quickly showered and dressed. I left my old clothes folded neatly in the bathroom and gave the "Mark knock" - two knocks, pause, three knocks - on Julia's door on my way to the study. I waited impatiently for a couple of minutes, but then figured that I might be waiting for quite a long time, especially with two females involved. Wanting to kill the time doing something mindless, I booted "the Andersons' computer" and played Minesweeper. In a surprisingly short time, maybe fifteen minutes, Julia came to fetch me. She was wearing an unusual outfit, a white mini-dress. Very satiny with lacy parts. Or maybe was it silky with lacy parts? I'm not much of an expert on female apparel and I'm not sure what the difference between satin and silk is. I did realize that it had been inspired by a wedding dress, but was much simpler. Also much, much shorter, and the blouse fabric was thin enough that Julia's nipples were clearly outlined and partly visible. All things considered, it was definitely my kind of wedding dress, although it wasn't recognizable as such to someone not thinking "wedding". Julia took my hand to lead me to her room. When I entered it I could see an identically dressed Carol, right down to the same style of white, medium-heel shoes. Although God knows why I was looking at the girls' shoes when their blouses were semi-transparent. #1: #2: #1: I wasn't the only one acting confused, Carol also looked very puzzled. I said to her, "You look beautiful, darling." "Thank you. Um, but I don't understand why we're dressed like this?" Before I could think what to say, Julia answered, "You're about to see something very special, my wonderful darling." Julia continued, "Mark, my Lord, would you please stand in the far corner." Julia pointed, and I walked to where she indicated. -- "Now, Carol darling, come over here," said Julia, leading Carol toward the opposite corner. Leaving Carol standing there, Julia walked over to the door and locked it. -- Julia walked back toward Carol, instructing, "Stand like this, facing the most wonderful man we will ever meet." Julia faced me, with one hand raised in the clichéd American Indian "How" pose. Carol faced me and copied Julia's stance, except with a confused look on her face. Julia walked over to stand next to me, then quietly said, "Do it." I gave Carol's palm a full, one-mind, TK-push, which I shut off as she reacted to it. An already confused Carol was now considerably more so. "What... , what did that? Something pushed my hand." Julia said, "It's all right, darling. Put both hands up now, slightly ahead of your face, so you can see them." Julia demonstrated the position, and Carol copied her. Julia instructed me, "Both at the same time please, Lord." This was certainly another of those occasions where I may be the boss, or apparently even the Lord, but I should do what I'm told. It's surprising how often they occur (or perhaps it's not surprising; you can decide). I gave both of Carol's hands the same push as last time. Carol exclaimed, "I was watching that time - nothing touched my hands! I saw nothing, but something pushed them. What's going on?" Julia said, "I know it's unsettling. I was scared too, the first time it happened to me. I have just two more examples to show you, then we'll explain everything to you. Okay, sweetie? Be brave." Sweetie would do anything we wanted, and all we'd done so far was puzzle her. It'd been painless and non-threatening, so she was fine. "Put your hands down by your side, look at our Lord, and stand very still." Carol apparently knew who "our Lord" was because she looked straight at me. Julia looked at me, and whispered, "Lightly press both her eyeballs when I say to. For heaven's sake, be careful." -- Turning to Carol, Julia said, "You have to stand very, very still, darling. No matter what happens, don't jerk. You'll be okay, I promise." While Julia had been cautioning Carol, I'd been thinking about the risk involved in TK'ing eyeballs. It seemed to me that there was no risk. I tried a quick experiment on the back of my hand. I did a light TK-push, and while I continued to push, I raised my hand, effectively pushing back. The TK was only pushing with about one pound of pressure, and my hand was rising with a great deal more than that. All that happened is that my TK-fingertip got pushed back. The most important result was that the feel of the force on the back of my hand never changed, so never exceeded one pound, even when I was raising my hand quickly. As the fingertip had no mass, it had no inertia, keeping its force constant. That meant Carol's eyeballs were safe, even if she jerked forward. Julia and Carol had seen me waving my hand while looking at it carefully, which must have made me look pretty silly but it was a small price to pay to be able to reassure them both. I said, "Actually, there's no risk at all, as I just found out by doing a little experiment on myself. So don't worry about it. And Carol, just stand facing me and relax, this'll be easy." Both girls smiled and relaxed. I started off by doing a light TK on one of my own eyeballs, just to find out what the minimum noticeable pressure was. When I had an idea of that, I looked at Carol, smiled at her, and very lightly pushed her two eyeballs for about half a second, then stopped. Carol said, "You pushed my eyes." It wasn't really a question, but I nodded anyway. "Wow, that was scary. I didn't see anything, and it was right on my eyes. You pushed me with something invisible. That's impossible!" When I'd tested my TK against my own eyeball, I'd closed my eyes, as you automatically do when you know something is heading toward them. Carol hadn't known to do that, so I'd pushed against her naked eyeballs. Feeling the pressure, but seeing nothing, must have been a very strange experience for her. She must have blinked and the TK-fingertip would have blocked her eyelids, making the experience even weirder. It's amazing she didn't scream. Julia said, "There's one more demonstration I want to show you. Come closer, darling." Julia moved toward Carol, and showed her where and how to stand. A couple of yards from the bed, facing it, with her feet at shoulder width, and her hands on her head. #3: "Come sit on the bed, Lord, so you can get a good view." Like a good Lord, I did as I was told. Carol was standing in front of me, with a stunned expression on her face. She had no idea what was going on, except that it was freaky and I was doing it. Julia moved around behind Carol so Carol couldn't see her, and caught my eye. Julia lifted her dress's hem with both hands, then used one of them to rub her panties, on top of her pussy. Julia nodded at Carol, but I'd already worked that out for myself. I smiled at Carol, and said, "You're going to enjoy this demonstration, my love." I used a pair of TK-fingers on either side to slowly lift her dress. Carol immediately felt what was happening, and looked down to see her dress rising. "Oh," she said, and smiled for the first time during the demonstration. Carol's recent experiences with sex must have taught her that it's a lot of fun. I kept lifting it until her panties were exposed. I noted, with pleasure, that they matched her outfit nicely. Then I recognized them as the pair Julia had told her to save for today, back when she'd given them to Carol at Monday's lunchtime. I had a wonderfully well-organized girlfriend. She was wonderful in other respects too. Julia had walked back to sit beside me, hugging my arm about the time that Carol's dress cleared her panties totally. I used my third mind to start rubbing between her legs. Carol immediately leaned forward to see what was happening, so I pulled the sides of her dress to flatten it against her tummy, clearing her view. Carol said, "Thank you." And then laughed, "Although I've got no idea what I'm thanking. I'd think ghosts, except that it's you that's doing it." I - specifically #4 because he'd begged for this job - rubbed Carol's pussy through her panties. Carol could see an indentation moving up and down her panties, and she said, "Oh my God! Look at that!" We already were. Carol looked at me again, and asked, "Is it really you who's doing this?" "Yes I am, and enjoying it too." "Oh my God." And she looked down again. I kept rubbing, and as had happened with Julia, Carol's panties started growing a wet patch. It showed up delightfully on the fabric of her panties. I rubbed a while longer, until Carol's face showed that she'd forgotten about being confused and was now 'purely' (that not being the most appropriate word) enjoying herself. Then I tried something that I hadn't shown Julia yet. #4 got relegated to holding the front of Carol's dress up. The two minds holding its sides let go and grasped the top of Carol's panties, pulling them down as quickly as they could. Before either girl knew something was happening, Carol's panties were below her knees. Both girls squealed, especially Carol. Carol called out, "Oh my God!" again. Apparently this was her version of a religious experience. Mine too. Julia grabbed me harder, and said, "I never knew you could do that!" I said. "Hang on, there's more to come. Move your legs a little closer together please, Carol." When she'd done so, I pulled her panties down to her ankles. "Lift one foot please ... Now the other. Thank you." Her panties were now on the floor in front of her feet. I floated them up toward my nose, intending to sniff them and make some complimentary comment. It didn't quite work out that way though. Panties floating through the air was just too bizarre. Julia shrieked and grabbed my arm even tighter. No matter how tight girls are already holding, they always seem to be able to tighten their grip when they're excited. After this demonstration I was going to have bruises. Carol just screamed, then fainted. I jumped forward to catch her but Julia's grip spun me around. By the time I got free of Julia, Carol was lying on the floor. I bent down and hoisted Carol up, then laid her on her back on the bed. She started coming around almost immediately, no doubt aided by Julia raining kisses all over her face. That's how I'd like to wake up. When she was sufficiently kissed, Carol asked, "Mark did all that?" "He certainly did." "But it's impossible." Julia offered, "Do you want to see the flying panties again?" Then she added, "I know I would." Carol's answer was just to giggle. I assumed that meant "Yes," so I floated them up again. If Carol wanted to faint again, she was much better positioned this time. ("Floating" probably creates the wrong image in your mind. They didn't rise ethereally off the floor, as if gravity didn't exist. I floated them by taking a grasp with two pinching fingertips and pushing those fingertips up with another pair. Consequently the panties hung vertically suspended from where I was holding them, and looked very much as they would if hung on a clothesline. The girls were still impressed though.) I moved them up and around the room a bit. The girls were both awestruck by the sight, so I sent the panties on a tour of the entire room, around all the corners, up and down, even having them do a couple of loops. While I was doing this, Julia said to me, "I didn't know you could fly things?" I answered her question, "I only worked out how yesterday. I didn't realize you two would find it so fascinating. It's just the same thing as me being able to touch you without touching you. I just touch something else, and lift it." Julia objected. "STOP saying 'just'! It's INCREDIBLE, mind-boggling, overwhelming. And you can even do it while you're talking to me." I was about to open my mouth to say, "It's easy", but Julia preempted me with, "I bet you're going to say 'It's easy'. Don't bother. NO ONE else in the world can do that! Saying 'it's easy' is absurd!" Choosing not to confirm the accuracy of Julia's prediction, I said nothing. Instead I floated Carol's panties to my nose, and made a long, loud sniffing sound. "What a lovely smell!" I declared. Both girls giggled, and I dropped the panties onto Carol's belly. She looked at them as if they were alien, then cautiously picked them up and inspected them. I don't know what she was looking for, but she found them to be perfectly ordinary, other than being damper and more aromatic than usual. I couldn't help thinking that I should have gotten Carol to turn around while she was still wearing them. They were a G-string, and I missed seeing her wearing them from all angles. Oh well, maybe later. In fact, CERTAINLY later. A Lord has to put his foot down on some issues, and this was one of them! I used my TK to gently caress Carol's cheek. She immediately moved her hand to her cheek, which blocked my line of sight, but it didn't matter. She asked, "You did that?" I nodded my reply. Julia, who had been thinking about this new development a bit more, said, "Can you imagine what the world would do if it discovered that you could do that?" For some stupid reason the first thought that crossed my mind was Adam's comment from a long time ago about me going on "Letterman or something". No doubt my bottled up "absurdity" was still trying to express itself. Julia visibly collected herself, and started taking command of the proceedings again. She started by asking, "Carol, are you fully recovered now? Not feeling faint or weak?" Carol said, "No. I'm too busy being amazed. This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen." Julia said, "Good. I want to get this conversation back on track. I had carefully planned what we were going to say and do, but then our Lord upset everything by amazing us all over again." Julia said all this smiling, and in case there was any doubt about her attitude, she leaned over and kissed my cheek. "I had planned on saying the next things while you were standing, Carol. While our Lord was rubbing your pussy through your panties and pinching our nipples through our tops, which is why they're so thin, but I think we need a chair for you now." Julia moved to get the seat of her vanity table. Inspired by Julia comment about nipples - which I always find very inspirational - and to pass the time while Julia was fetching her seat, I allocated one mind to each of Carol's nipples, they formed two fingers, and started lightly caressing her nipples through her top. Carol thought this was an excellent development. She stretched out on the bed and put her arms by her sides to make this as easy as possible for me. She watched with fascination as my TK-fingers caused indentations around her nipples. The third mind felt left out, and started massaging her breasts, with multiple fingertips. Carol reached out her hand tentatively, moving it toward one of her breasts. I saw what she was doing and I had no objections, so I let her proceed to touch my TK-fingertips with her real ones. I was using quite light pressures, so she easily pushed mine away. I let her 'play' with my TK-fingertips. Occasionally I would lose one, when her hand blocked my line of sight, and I explained this to her. She was quite experimental, even pinching one of my fingertips between two of hers, and once she had a firm grip, she squeezed. I felt it compress. They don't expand in the other direction, as squeezing a lump of any material object would, they just compress in the direction pushed. I don't know what Carol thought of that because Julia was ready for the next stage of her plan. Julia placed the seat as she asked Carol, "Have you been enjoying yourself?" "Oh yes. They're incredible. The strangest things I've ever seen, except I haven't seen them, haha. It somehow seems wrong that they play with my breasts. Miracles should do miraculous things, not play with my titties, haha. They're so weird." Julia asked, "Why do you keep saying 'they'? You know it's Mark doing it, don't you?" "I know. But he's not doing anything, he just sits there looking at me. He just smiles and talks while these things are rubbing themselves over me. I know Mark's doing it, but it's hard to get used to it." "Just so long as you know it's Mark. That's important. Sit here please." The seat was positioned facing where I was sitting on the bed, but about four feet away from it. Carol climbed off the bed and was on the way to the seat when I said, "Let me get a pillow for you, darling." I pulled the bed cover down with my real hand, enough to expose one of the pillows (which I now noticed numbered three across the width of the bed!). I used my TK to pick it up and float it across to the chair, putting it down for Carol to sit on. I was totally showing off but the girls loved it. When Carol was sitting, Julia kissed the top of her head, and said, "The best is yet to come, darling." While Julia was walking back to the bed, to sit beside me, I noticed that Carol's short dress was just short enough for me to think I might be able to get a glimpse of her bare pussy. I was looking carefully when Carol's legs suddenly widened, giving me a completely unobstructed view. She giggled and said, "You only have to ask, you know?" She was right of course, but I still wasn't used to that. I rewarded her attitude by TK-stroking her pussy with two minds, and her clit with the third. A good boss should reward his servants' good attitudes; that being a responsibility that I take very seriously. I could tell Carol thoroughly approved of her boss's new motivational technique. Julia sat beside me, fortunately without crossing between Carol and me so I never lost line of sight. When Julia saw Carol's wide-legged position and the expression on her face, Julia laughed, and said, "You're a very sexy girl, lover. I'm sorry to spoil your fun, but I need to talk about some serious things for a few minutes. Can you please put your delightful pussy away for a little while? I promise to make it happy later." I canceled my TK points while Carol sat up straight and closed her legs. Hopefully not for long. While I thought of it, we went 'off duty'. All of our minds should be able to participate fully in what was to follow. If we needed to TK, we could put one of us on duty in less than a second. With a more formal voice, Julia addressed Carol, "Our Lord's 'no-touching touching', which he calls 'TK', is incredible, isn't it?" Carol, "It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen or heard of. It's magic, but right here in front of us. It's unbelievable, but I believe it." "He does it entirely with his mind. He doesn't need any equipment, time to prepare, or anything else. He can do it whenever he wants. He can even hold a conversation while doing it, that's how incredible he is." Julia paused for a second. Seeing that Carol was nodding agreement, Julia continued, "His not needing equipment has some important consequences..." #2: " ... If Mark went through one of those metal detectors they have at airports, they wouldn't pick up anything. They could strip search him, or even X-ray him, and they wouldn't find anything unusual, would they?" Carol answered with a puzzled, "No." Like me, Carol had no idea where Julia was going with this. "Do you remember when he pressed your eyeballs?" "Oh, yes. That was very scary!" "Do you want me to ask him to do it again?" "No! I remember! I don't want a reminder, thank you." "Yes, I understand your answer; it is very scary. Now imagine he pressed someone else's eyeballs, just like he did yours, but he pressed far, far harder. What would happen?" "Eww, their eyes would burst. They'd be blinded and in agony. That'd be a terrible thing to do! I'm sure he'd never do that. Mark's a very gentle person, he'd never hurt anyone like that. He..." Julia held up her hand to stop Carol. "Carol, darling. I just wanted you to imagine what would happen. Of course Mark wouldn't do that. So stop worrying about that, that's not what I want to talk about." Carol stopped, so Julia resumed, "You've seen pictures of skulls, like on a pirate's flag. Behind the eyeballs there's a hole in the skull that goes straight back into the brain. Remember?" Carol nodded, not liking where this conversation seemed to be heading. "Now imagine Mark pushed right through someone's eyeballs, straight into their brain. He could kill them in an instant, or wreck their brains so badly they'd be incurably mentally damaged." Julia was surprisingly bloodthirsty and also wrong. Even if I my weak maximum force could burst an eyeball, which I wasn't totally sure of, my TK-fingertips wouldn't be able to force their way through all the muck to get into the brain before I'd lose sight of their location and they'd self-cancel. I was about to correct Julia when I realized I didn't know what she was trying to achieve with this point. I decided to wait and see, and to correct her afterward if it seemed best then. Carol gave a very reluctant nod. This conversation was a lot less fun than the nipple and pussy rubbing we'd stopped to have this talk. Julia said, "Remember he could press both your eyeballs at one time and he can do his TK as fast as he can think about it, so he could make anyone blind, turn them into a mental vegetable, or kill them. He could do any of those in an instant and just with a thought! He doesn't even need to be standing close, as he can do it from across a room." Julia paused as Carol shuddered. Carol's face was noticeably whiter than normal, and this talk of killing people was clearly making her very uncomfortable. I wasn't feeling too good myself, especially about the effect it was having on Carol. I looked at Julia, thinking to ask her to stop, or tone it down, or something. Julia saw my head's movement out of the corner of her eye, and said to me, "I've nearly finished, Lord. You'll understand why in a few seconds." This certainly wasn't my idea of a romantic wedding! But I could wait a few seconds for Julia, so I nodded. Julia turned back to Carol, and said, "Our Lord is the most dangerous man alive! He's the perfect assassin. He can kill ANYBODY, as long as he can see them. No metal detector will stop him, no strip searches or X-rays or anything. He's the perfect killer." Carol was clearly going to object to this, and strongly, but Julia firmly said, "NO! Don't argue with me! I am talking about what he COULD do. I do not need you to tell me he is gentle, I know he is. He would NEVER kill. Not normally anyway, not unless he found a man violently raping you. What would he do then?" Without thinking about it at all, in an icy voice I said, "I'd kill him." I didn't even mean to say it out loud, but I did. Carol heard me, and shuddered again. She was very unhappy with this conversation, and she wasn't the only one. I REALLY wanted to stop it. I turned to Julia, who could tell what I was thinking. She begged, "Please, darling. Give me just a few more seconds. It's been worse than I expected, but I had to make it gruesome for what comes next. Please? It's for the best, I promise." I reluctantly nodded. Julia better be right because I wasn't going to allow this to go on much longer. Julia progressed her point, whatever it was, "He's the perfect assassin. He would walk away afterward because he has no weapon on him and leaves no clues: no fingerprints, no forensics of any sort. The perfect assassin, agreed?" Carol nodded. "Since 9/11 our government has been paranoid over security, even insanely paranoid. But Mark could visit Washington and walk through all of their protections. I'm sure with a little effort he could get to see the President at a big charity event, a motorcade, or a public ceremony. There would be thousands of other people there too, but that wouldn't matter to Mark. Maybe he could even see the President and Vice-President at the same time. He would never get close, but he doesn't need to be close. From a distance he could instantly kill our President, and perhaps the Vice-President at the same time too, or perhaps it'd be even worse to turn them into mental vegetables." I chuckled, which made both girls quickly look at me. Dad cracks jokes about Bush being a mental vegetable because of his name being similar and his seeming so stupid, and in the surprise and tension of the moment, I'd reacted badly to Julia's comment. This wasn't the time to be mentioning that or chuckling either, so I said, "Sorry, I just had a stupid thought. Please forget I did that. Carry on, Julia." Julia said, "I know Mark would never do such a thing, but what he's shown you by flying your panties around, playing with your nipples and pressing your eyeballs, is that he has the ABILITY to do that. Our Lord is an incredible man in many ways, and some of his abilities are very dangerous and even lethal. You understand that, don't you?" "I think so. But why are you scaring me like this. I love him and don't want to know this stuff." "I'm telling you because I know you love him and he loves you. You'll understand why very soon, my darling. I am sorry to do this to you, but you will forgive me in a few seconds." Julia asked, "What would the CIA or Secret Service do to Mark if they knew he was the perfect assassin?" A confused Carol asked, "How... , how would they know that?" "Never mind how. Just what would they do if they knew for a fact that Mark can undetectably and unstoppably kill anyone, just by looking at them? Think about it seriously. It's a serious question." Carol thought about it. It didn't take her long, judging by when she shuddered again. Carol added, "They'd take him away." "Yes, they'd take him away. Either take him away or kill him. I don't think killing him is likely, as he's too valuable. They could lock him up and conduct experiments on him to learn how he does it. He'd be too dangerous to ever let go. What I think they'd most likely do is to force him to become an assassin working for our government, to kill people they didn't like. He'd know that they'd never let him go or stop using him, so he'd have to kill himself." #2: #3: #1: #4: Julia continued, "Don't think about those possibilities too much. We will all try very hard to make sure they never happen. The reason I've explained all of this to you is to make sure you REALLY appreciate how much Mark trusts you." "I know he does." "You said that too quickly. Stop and think for a moment. This isn't trusting someone with some money, or trusting them to pass on a message or to help you with your homework, or anything that we normally mean when we say 'trust'. Mark has just given you complete control over his life. If you EVER get angry with him, you can destroy him. One phone call from you to the authorities would start them investigating. Your comments and the other fascinating things about Mark, like his phenomenal IQ, would hook them. His life would be over. From this day on you have the power of life or death over Mark. His entire life is in your hands." "Oh no! He shouldn't have shown me! He CAN trust me - I'll NEVER tell because I love him so much - but he shouldn't have. He didn't have to show me. He should have kept it a secret from me. I don't want to know about it." Carol burst into tears and launched herself out of her chair and into Julia's arms. Being the well-organized guy that I am, I had a handkerchief in ... the bathroom! Damn, my first chance to do a 'hanky producing flourish', a la Prof, and I mess it up. (When I'd got undressed out of my school clothes to have the shower, I'd folded them up and thoughtlessly placed them on top of the handkerchiefs, there being not much counter space in the bathroom. After the shower I'd been too distracted to give the hankies any thought.) I tried opening my drawer using TK, but I couldn't pull hard enough. So I slid across the bed, got up and opened it the non-lazy way. I took out two hankies, one for my pocket and one for Carol. Trying to make light of the situation - which I thought Julia had made FAR too intense - I TK-floated a hanky into Carol's sight. I thought it looked silly and humorous, so should help. Carol saw it, and burst into a fresh round of more intense tears. Great! What do I do now? I wasn't sure whether to keep the hanky there because she needed it more than ever now, or to take it away because it was making things worse. Unfortunately making this decision required understanding a female, so I knew I was in trouble. While I was dithering, Julia grabbed it and used it to wipe Carol's eyes and cheeks. I decided to stick to the tried and true method for dealing with a crying female. I sat next to Carol, put my arm around her, and said, "There, there." Carol recovered after a minute or so. I'm sure it would've taken far longer without my "There, there's". I must do a scientific study of that one day. I have a feeling I'll be getting a large enough sample of crying females. Carol sniffled, "I'm scared. {Sniff}. I don't want to make a mistake and lose Mark." Julia said, "Yes, that's the scary thing about having power and responsibility. Mom often says recognizing that power is scary is a sign of adult maturity, so congratulations, you're growing up. -- "I agree it's scary having someone's life in your hands. Imagine what every new mother and father feels the first time they hold their tiny baby in their hands. One tiny accident and the baby could be lost. The fear you're experiencing is the same fear your parents had for you when you were a baby, but they got through it together. You're not alone, sweetie. You and I can help each other because Mark has trusted both of us with this secret." "{Sniff}. That's right, he told you too." "Yes. He trusts me that much too. So you're not alone. I will help you and you can help me." "Thank you. That makes me feel better." And she did look better. Carol sat up straighter and collected herself. Julia said, "Go and sit back in your chair, darling. The best is yet to come." #1: #4: When Carol was walking back to her chair, still clutching my hanky, Julia said, "If you're scared of having power and responsibility over one person's life, imagine how Mark must feel." Mark wasn't feeling particularly responsible. Not even a little bit. Not even about this marriage, presuming we finally got to proceed with that. Julia had everything planned out, even choreographed, all I had to do was follow along. Carol said, "What do you mean?" "He can kill people just by looking at them and thinking. Imagine how scared he must be of losing his temper. He has far more power and responsibility than you or I do." "You're right. I never thought of that." She wasn't the only one! The only time I'd thought about doing that - not killing, but eyeball poking - was to Biff#4. I never came close to losing my temper then, but now that Julia mentioned it, it was a bit scary. Good thing I almost never lose my temper, and on those rare occasions when I do, it's usually with myself. I was pretty sure I was safe from myself. I had been in danger of making myself blind before I met Julia, but not since. Julia kept shoveling it on. She was telling the truth as she knew it, but she was laying it on very thick, "Mark's only fifteen and he has the power of life or death over everyone he sees. That's too much responsibility for such a young man so we have to help him. Forget about your being scared and spend your life trying to help Mark. He needs you far more than you need him." "Yes, you're right again. I was thinking only of myself. I'll be his serving girl FOREVER! We can be his serving girls together. That'll be wonderful!" Julia gave a big smile, and said, "Not quite." "What, what do you mean? I want to be his serving girl. PLEASE?" Carol was getting visibly agitated. I got ready to try my first flourish. Julia reassured, "Don't worry, darling. Something good is about to happen, so smile." Carol didn't see anything to smile about, but she tried. Julia continued, "Our Lord decided to tell you about his ability - his TK - several days ago. I thought it was a wonderful idea because it means you can't be our serving girl. Before you get upset, I'll explain. Mark has put his entire life in your and my hands. There is only one type of person you trust that much, and it's not a serving girl." #2: "It's not?" "Can't you think who it is, darling?" "I can't think anymore, I'm sorry. There's just too much happening and I don't know what to think." Julia slid off the bed, and went down on one knee beside Carol, taking Carol's nearest hand in both of hers. Now I understood why Julia had put Carol in a chair a few feet away from the bed. And I knew my cue too. I dropped to my knee on Carol's other side. Julia gave me a smile, and I winked back at her. I took Carol's spare hand in both of mine. At that point I saw a way of improving the picture. I let go of Carol's hand with the hand that was closest to Julia, offering it to Julia, saying to her, "Take my hand, please love." Julia understood and was very pleased, judging by the big smile on her face. Never mind flying panties around the room, I had just achieved something considerably more impossible: I'd improved on one of Julia's plans! Once we formed a ring of hands, Julia took a breath to continue, but I got in first with, "My darling, Carol, the type of person to whom I would entrust my life is not a serving girl. Nor is it a sister or a girlfriend. The type of person required for that level of trust is far more than any of those." I paused to give Carol a few seconds. She knew something big was happening, but her brain hadn't caught up yet. Even our being down on our knees in front of her hadn't prompted her to see it as there were two of us and we were both 'invalid', one a girl and the other a brother. The TK demonstration and the very upsetting talk about killing had poor Carol so overwhelmed her brain had stopped thinking clearly. I gave her a couple of seconds to experience the moment, then believing the time was correct I said, "The type of person needed for that much trust, my darling Carol, is a wife." -- I raised her and Julia's hands a few inches, squeezed them, then said, "Carol and Julia, would you two consent to marry me and to be my wives?" Julia spoke. "Mark, my Love and my Lord, I will." -- Julia turned her face to Carol, and lifting her hand slightly, said, "Carol, would you be my wife, and marry Mark with me?" Carol must have believed she'd slipped into some weird alternate reality. Half the emotions in the dictionary flashed over her face: happiness, confusion, hope, doubt, and probably hysteria if we waited too long. I obviously had to explain, so I added, "We know the three of us can't marry legally. We wish we could but the law doesn't allow it. Even though we can't make it legal, in every other possible way Julia and I want the three of us to be married together." Carol said, "I love you two more than anything. I would love to be your wife, but it's not possible, and it wouldn't be fair to Mark." #4: #2: #4: #3: Julia answered, "When you say it's not possible, sweetie, you're slightly correct but mostly wrong. It's not LEGALLY possible, but in almost every other respect it is. You are learning to cook and do other household activities, so you will be our housewife. That will be your role in this marriage: our housewife and our serving girl. We will still be commanding you to do things for us, especially sexual things. You are far too sexy not to be taken advantage of whenever we want. Your role will be inside the home and my role will be outside it, to help our Lord in whatever way I can there. So we both have jobs to do for him." Carol was still highly confused, asking, "I don't understand why you want me as your wife. I will serve you anyway. I will cook your meals, and do anything else you want me to do, especially, umm..." Carol was looking at Julia at this point, so it seemed that Carol thought the "umm" applied just to Julia. "Sexually," Julia helpfully proffered. "Um, yes, sexually too. So I don't understand why Mark wants me to be his wife ... Oh! I'll keep his magic touching secret anyway. I'll NEVER tell ANYONE about that! He doesn't need to make me his wife because of that. I'll NEVER tell!" "He knows you won't. That's why he told you. He never would've told you if he didn't already trust you totally. He wants you as his wife for all the reasons any man wants any woman to be his wife. He loves you very, very much." Carol disagreed, "Umm, not really. He doesn't love me ... that way. The way a man normally loves his wife." #4: Julia corrected Carol, "Oh yes he does. He lusts after your body a GREAT deal." Carol disagreed, "I don't think so. When I first started cuddling in his lap in his room, I wore sexy clothes: a miniskirt and tight top, or my nightie with no bra, hoping he'd want me. But he just held me, he didn't try anything at all. He was a gentleman the whole time. And when I messed up the massage test by rubbing myself on his leg, and he tested me by doing all sorts of sexual things to me, he NEVER got hard. Never! And he never ordered me to touch him, even though I wanted to. I kept hoping he was enjoying himself, but he was just testing his sister. It was so wonderful that he cared for me enough to do that, but it made me so sad too. So I know he doesn't want me as a real wife." It really was rather funny. If Julia hadn't warned me earlier, I'd be having enormous difficulty not laughing my head off. It was time to fix her misunderstanding, and that was best to come from me. #3: #2: #3: #2: I said, "Carol, I am DESPERATE to love you sexually. The ONLY reason I didn't show it with you was that I was TERRIFIED you'd hate me for it. I didn't know you wanted me to want you, and I love you too much to have forced myself on you. Believe me! I want you enough to make ten 'real wives' out of you! I am hugely looking forward to making love to you for the rest of our lives." Carol's eyes opened wide, in excitement, and she breathed, "Really? How come you were never hard with me? I know boys always get hard." "You would NOT BELIEVE how difficult it was for me to hide that! If I hadn't been so terrified of upsetting you I never could've hidden it. The moment you left my room each time I IMMEDIATELY started jacking myself off. I was so desperate to have a cum it was physically painful. I am very, very glad that I never have to hide that again!" Julia added, "It's true Carol, my love. That's why I pushed your shoulder straps down your arms when we were in the hot tub a week ago. So Mark could enjoy seeing more of your breasts." "You wanted him to see more of me! But weren't you jealous? He's your boyfriend, how can you want him to want me?" "I'm not even slightly jealous of you, darling. There are many reasons, but I'll give you just three of them. You don't get jealous when Mark spends time goofing off with Donna because the three of you love each other. You enjoy seeing Mark and Donna happy together because you love them both. Same with me. I enjoy seeing you and Mark together because I love you both and it makes me happy to see you being happy. Jealousy is a greedy emotion, and I sincerely hope I never feel greedy about either of you. -- "When girls get jealous over their boyfriend, it's because they're in competition with the other girl. I'm not in competition with you. I want to marry you TOO! I want all three of us to live together. That was my second reason. My third one is that it'd be VERY stupid of me. If my jealousy forced Mark to choose between us, he'd choose you every time. Mark loves you much more than he loves me, so I'm very happy that YOU are sharing him with ME." I knew Julia was - amazingly! - not upset by the third reason she'd given, and Carol was about to argue, so I simply said, "Julia's right, Carol. I love you more than anyone else." A disbelieving Carol had to ask, "Even Julia! Julia's FANTASTIC! You can't love me more than her, I'm just a..." "You are not JUST anything. You are the girl I want to be my wife MORE than anyone else in the world! Julia and I are both telling you this, so not only are you outvoted, but I think I should get extra votes considering it's my feelings we're talking about. I want you to be my wife, and I VERY definitely want that to include as much sex and lovemaking as possible." I'd been kneeling on the floor this whole time, but not any longer. Carol threw herself out of her chair and onto me, bowling me over. A second later I was flat on the floor with a rapturous Carol on top of me screaming how much she loved me and wanted to be my wife. She kissed me during those infrequent occasions when she had to stop screaming to inhale. After several seconds Carol suddenly stopped in mid-sentence, wiggled her hips, then joyously yelled, "You're hard! It's true, you do want me!" Julia laughed. "It's true all right. There's quite a lot more to tell you yet, so please sit up so we can carry on." Carol sat up, but she didn't want to sit back in her chair. She sat beside me on the floor, so I could hold her in my arms. When we were comfortable, Julia continued, "I'll give you a very good example of how much Mark loves you. Mark came up to me a few days ago, looking very scared and worried. He had something to tell me and he was sure that I would get very angry with him. But even though he was afraid of my anger, this was something that was very important to him and he was going to tell me regardless of the risk. I'm sure that even if he thought he'd lose me, he still would've told me; it was that important to him. Can you guess what was so important to him that he'd risk losing me over it?" Carol shook her head. Julia said, "You should turn around and face Mark, so he can tell you himself. Or even better, please come and sit on my lap because I'd like to hold you when he tells you." Julia was sitting on the floor too, so Carol scooted over and turned around so she was sitting between Julia's legs, with Julia's arms around her. Carol looked at me expectantly. I said, "Carol, my love, as soon as we can make it happen after your education is finished, I would love for you and I to have babies together, and for you to..." I was going to say "be their mother", but I never got that far; I got hit by a second salvo of Carol-missile, knocking me on my back and smothering me again. Carol bombarded me with her rapturous, enthusiastic agreement. Carol's happiness was several times greater than the first time she'd bowled me over. She'd finally been convinced that this was real, and she was as overjoyed as it was possible for anyone to be, the real-world problems being temporarily forgotten. ------- Chapter 48: The Proposal Explained Thursday, April 14, 2005 (Continued) Carol was bawling all over me, using my face as her hanky, hugging me, kissing me, crying over me some more, thanking me, telling me how much she loved me, and generally having a great time expressing her happiness. Then Carol suddenly got a terrible expression on her face. She looked around in panic, saw Julia sitting on the bed, then leaped off me to start begging Julia for her forgiveness. A few semi-coherent sentences later, and it was possible to understand that Carol was feeling guilty that I wanted to have babies with her rather than Julia. When Julia understood, she soothed Carol, "You have nothing to apologize for. I think it's fantastic that he wants to have his babies with you. I'm not angry or envious. I'm only very happy. You and I are very different people so we won't be doing the same things. We'll both be his wives, but you'll have his babies and I'll find other ways to make him happy. That is what we live for more than anything else now, to make Mark happy because he is our Lord, and to make each other happy too. Everything is PERFECT! We love each other and we fit together wonderfully." Carol echoed that, "Life is WONDERFUL! I cannot believe how wonderful. Thank you so much, Julia. You have been incredibly good to me. You're amazing for treating me so generously." "There's no need to thank me, honey. I love Mark and you, and it is my pleasure to have the three of us together. We BELONG together! Do you see how perfectly we fit?" ^ [[Julia has three personality traits that featured heavily in these days: She doesn't hesitate to act. She enjoys managing and manipulating people to achieve her goals. Julia had pushed Carol's buttons to inflame Carol's desire for me, and she'd also fanned my desires for Carol. Not as intentionally or effectively as she had with Carol, but I'd provided more than enough of my own motivation once Julia had given me a push or two. Julia LOVED power. She was already very hooked on me when we first started dating, when about the only thing I had going for me was my being nice, athletic, and a studious genius. Not to mention the embarrassing, romantic fantasy 'revealed' during the Annette Neumeyer Incident of my unexpressed love for Julia having ruined me for all other girls. After discovering my infinite endurance and sexual ability, thanks mainly to go-softs, Julia's desire for me went into overdrive. After she learned about my TK, her desire went into HYPER-drive! She believed - as did her parents, which increased Julia's belief - that I'll become a very important, powerful man. Julia's self-appointed role as my "Chief Manager" meant that she'd have a very important, powerful life too. That had Julia's hormones dancing for joy. Julia's near-complete control of Carol meant that Julia's position in my life was considerably strengthened. That was only true if Julia didn't try to come between Carol and me, but that was never Julia's intention. If she'd thought of it, she would've instantly dismissed it as there were too many advantages for Julia in having Carol involved. Not only selfish advantages either, as Julia honestly appreciated the future need for me to have people I could totally trust around me. Especially after my TK revelation, Julia worried about my safety, as she'd so bloodthirstily described to Carol. Carol's being perfect in so many ways, on top of my pressing all of Julia's major buttons, resulted in Julia being as emotionally worked up about the future of our three-way marriage as Carol and I were. What with Julia being so excited, plus her power-kick from controlling Carol, and with having sex being new to Julia as well, it wasn't surprising that Julia's emotions expanded to include Carol so much. Plus Julia knew, including at a subconscious level, that she had to be involved with Carol and me at the same time or she risked being excluded from too much my life. Julia was claiming that she loved Carol, and that was already partially true. It'd be more accurate to say Julia loved what Carol meant for all of our futures, but that often overlaps with how people experience love, and it's also a good and fertile field for deeper feelings to grow from because it was "for all of us". Julia had very good reasons for bringing Carol and me together sexually, and then VERY strong reasons for making sure the result was a full threesome. Compared to those "very strong" threesome reasons, Julia's not being naturally sexually interested in girls was overwhelmed and brushed aside by all the other reasons, many of which were highly emotional. Julia was WILDLY excited about what was happening these days, including being sexually excited about me. Sexual excitement tends to expand in scope. Plus there was the issue that although I might have implied otherwise, Julia and her parents thought Carol and Donna might develop my abilities. Julia VERY much wanted to be right in the thick of that, and was more than eager to create the strongest possible ties to Carol.]] ^ Carol answered, "Umm, not really. Sorry, but this is all too new to me. I know I love Mark heaps, and I love you too, but I'm confused by all of this. I never dreamed that Mark would want to marry me and ... OH MY GOD! Mom's going to SCREAM! Dad's going to KILL Mark! Oh no! It's going to..." Before Carol could get herself even more into a panic, Julia commanded, "CAROL! QUIET!" To my surprise, Carol shut up immediately and totally. "Good girl. Let's sit on the bed. Mark, you come too please, it's more comfortable up there." Julia got us to sit facing her, with Carol happily between my legs leaning back against my chest. Julia said, "I need to do some explaining about how things are going to be arranged." Julia was the girl for that, all right. "First, our marriage won't a normal one, as I'm sure you've already worked out. We'll be Mark's wives. I'll be Wife#1 and you'll be Wife#2. Mark won't be our husband though. Society believes husbands and wives are equal but we don't believe we're equal to Mark. He's superhuman, so he's far superior to us and every other human being. You agree with that, don't you, Wife#2?" "Oh yes. Mark's incredible. Even before his impossible magic touching." "Good. I have decided that we'll call him our 'Lord'. I chose that name because in the olden days 'Lord' was a very high ranked person, along with Kings and Barons, and also because the Bible often refers to God as 'Lord', as in 'Our Lord in Heaven'. I want to use Lord to remind us that he is part-man, part-god. Of course he was born a human - from the same place you were, haha - but I want us to be reminded about how special he is. So we are his wives and he is above us as our Lord. That is how we will address him in private. Do you agree, Wife#2?" Wife#2 agreed very much, "I think that's PERFECT. He is my Lord in every way. I will be the best wife I can to my Lord, and to you too, Wife#1, {giggle}." "Exactly right. Good girl. I don't know how this'll work out in the future. I hope we can one day live together as we wish, maybe away from Corvallis so people won't know about our history. People will naturally assume that Mark and Carol Anderson were husband and wife. They'd be a little scandalized that I lived with you too, but I bet they'd mostly be envious of our happiness." Carol couldn't help agreeing, "Oh, that'd be wonderful. I hope we can do that!" "That'd be wonderful, but I doubt it'll be that simple. I think Mark will be very powerful and famous in the future, so his life will be under a great deal of scrutiny. Your and Mark's relationship might have to be kept behind closed doors only, but that future is too far away to worry about. For the present, I intend us to live as Lord and wives as much as we can. So we'll spend as much time as we can in this house because my parents are supporting our marriage. That..." "{Shriek!} Your parents know! Oh no! What's going to happen?" "Shush, Wife#2! My parents know AND APPROVE! They will let us live as Lord and wives here. Do you remember you asked me how my bed got bigger between last night and now, and I said I'd explain later?" Carol nodded, and Julia continued, "They bought us a bigger bed because they know the three of us are going to make love and sleep in it as often as we can. They even put three pillows on it, see the two here, and the one on your chair, where you pushed it clear across the room." I thought that was a good cue, so I recentered in order to TK the pillow back to its rightful place. Meanwhile Carol was asking, "They know we're all going to be have sex together?" Carol couldn't help feeling doubt, so she felt compelled to add on, "Mark and I ARE going to make love, aren't we?" "They know EVERYTHING. It's traditional, if not compulsory, for the bride and groom to make love on their wedding night. In our case, we will all make love together. Most importantly, you will give your virginity to your Lord and you will worship him with your body for the rest of your life." I would almost swear that Carol had a small orgasm at that. She certainly shivered with the thrill it gave her. She turned around and with a look of ecstasy on her face, she asked me, "Will you make love to me soon, My Lord?" I knew the answer to that! "Yes I will, and soon, my love. The first of many, many times. But Julia has more planned before then. Listen." Julia agreed, "Yes, there's more to discuss before we both have the pleasure of making love to you for the first time in our marriage." Carol had to ask, "How can your parents agree to me AND you in the same bed with Mark?" Carol was going around in circles somewhat, but I guess it was a lot to absorb. Julia answered patiently, "I have my parents very well trained, haha. They know everything about our sex-lives and they fully approve. They know the three of us will make love together as often as we can. Not just that the two of us will make love to Mark, but that the three of us will make love TOGETHER. They know that you and I made love last night and this morning, and they know..." "Eek! They know! Oh NO! What will..." "Shush, my love. They know AND APPROVE. Remember I said 'they approve'? I told them several days ago that you and I were going to become lovers. Same for you and Mark too. Everything is perfectly all right with my family." "I'll never be able to look them in the face again. I'll be too embarrassed to ever come here again." "Wife#2, NEVER, EVER be embarrassed about love! Of course we can't show our love in public, to protect ourselves, our families and mostly our Lord. We have to be careful then, not out of embarrassment, but out of caution for those black-hearted idiots that attack love. But in this family, EVERYBODY values love. When we're in this home, we are safe, and we WILL show our love. I won't have you scared of my loving you in my own home. At the first sign of you being ashamed of our love, I will order you to strip naked, to strip me naked, and we will 69 on the dining room table during the family's dinner. After that you will have no shame left. I am totally serious about this. Mark and I love you and we will show our love for you in this house, and you will show your love for us. You are ORDERED to express your love in the safety of this home. Do you understand, Wife#2?" "Yes, I will do as you say." "I am NOT asking you whether you will do as I say. Your obedience is taken for granted. All I need to know is that you understand. Do you understand my order?" "Yes, I understand. I'm sorry." "Good. Because if you understand, then you will ALWAYS obey my orders, won't you?" "Yes." "If I ordered you to strip naked, and walk around my house telling everyone in my family that you loved me and were going to have sex with me as often as I told you to, you would do that, wouldn't you?" "Yes." #2: Julia continued, "I love you, Wife#2. I will make decisions that are the best for you. Have I not just brought you and Mark together and made it possible for you to express your love for each other, even to your having his children in the future? Would you have been able to make that happen without me? Of course not. You would've wasted your wonderful life and love on an inferior and undeserving man. You OWE me your life and you will OBEY me in ALL things. Now come and give me a kiss and I will forgive you." Salvo #3 of Carol-missile launched itself across the bed. Using my stomach as a launch pad, unfortunately, but she never noticed that. When I had righted myself, Carol was desperately, and I was surprised to notice, passionately kissing Julia, and repeatedly protesting her apologies, love and obedience. Carol was on her hands and knees in front of Julia, and her ass was pointing straight at me. Julia looked over Carol's shoulder at me, catching my eye. Julia pulled on Carol's dress, which exposed Carol's ass to me. Julia mouthed "wet" at me a couple of times, until I got it and I looked between Carol's legs. Carol's juices were running down her leg. I'd seen Carol wet before, and this was right up there in terms of how aroused she could get. I got Julia's meaning: that Carol got off on her obedience. I don't know that I could ever be so bossy - it was so far away from my natural style that I'd be very uncomfortable with it - but I could see that it was something I should try to do, for Carol's pleasure. Julia loudly asked Carol, "Is your pussy wet, little girl?" I couldn't see Carol's face, but even her ass flushed! Carol said, "Yes, miss." #4: "Is it running down your legs AGAIN, you little trollop?" #1: "Yes, miss. I'm sorry, miss." "I suppose you are going to get your smelly pussy juices all over my brand new bedspread - on the very first day I have it - aren't you, you swampy slut?" I almost laughed out loud at that one. "Sorry, miss. I can't help it." "Of course you can't, you're such a leaky floozy. I'll give you two choices. Either I smack your bare bottom until you cum again to teach you a lesson, or you quickly spread your legs so your Lord can lick up your slimy juices before..." Carol's legs flew apart. " ... they make too much of a mess." It being necessary to avoid smelling up Julia's brand new bedspread on its very first day, I dived into action. There wasn't much conversation at the other end either. I didn't have an easy job of it, as Carol kept producing more. Fortunately I'm a very diligent worker and not one to complain about having to work overtime. I should remember to mention to Julia that if she doesn't want smelly pussy juice all over her brand new bedspread, then I suspect she should not talk with Carol the way she had. Yes, I definitely must remember to mention that to Julia. Not right now, of course, I was too busy. After I'd cleaned up all the juice I could find, I was forced to obtain any more directly from the source. I was perhaps a little over-enthusiastic because Carol started making more and more excited groans. Julia admonished her, "Why you little hussy, I do believe you're getting sexually aroused yet again. That's no way for a decent young lady to behave. You must be an indecent, immoral, little girl." "I can't, {groan}, can't help it, miss. {Groan}." "Of course you can't. You can't even control your own pussy no matter who's licking it, can you, you perverted little girl? I've a good mind to make you lick my pussy as punishment." Julia missed her chance though, as Julia's last statements drove Carol to scream her release. I suspect my suddenly fingering the outside of her asshole might have helped. I very nearly lost any need to get married. Carol was on her hands and knees, and as she exploded, her legs shot out straight behind her. I was on my knees too, and one of Carol's legs shot straight back between my two knees. I felt my manhood's hairs get brushed by a very fast moving foot. If I'd been sitting JUST a little bit lower something VERY tragic might have happened! It was something to remember for next time, as well as her response to my touching her asshole. In the few seconds it took for Carol to reconnect to the real world, I quietly said to Julia, "You're doing very well." She answered, "It's fun, isn't it?" I thought it was WAY too intense to be called "fun", but I nodded agreement anyway. When Carol was fully recovered, Julia said, "Go back and keep our man company." "Okay. I love you very much, Julia." "I know you do, my lovely little girl. I love you too, and we both love our Lord. Isn't life wonderful?" "This is the best day of my life! I love you two so much. I'm so glad you want me." Carol settled herself in my arms again. With her dress still hitched up around her waist, so from the waist down she was naked, the hussy! I placed one of my hands over her pussy and rubbed it very slowly and lightly while listening to Julia. Julia resumed her delightfully interrupted explanation of how our lives would be. To both of us, she said, "I have said my parents are accepting. They are, in the sense that we were talking about: my darling Carol's concerns about sex and loving. My parents have seen it all over the years and aren't fazed by our feelings, or our physical demonstrations of them. -- "Intellectually though, they're only mostly convinced. They're letting us do what we're doing now, to propose to Carol, but they've asked for Mark to demonstrate his TK before they allow us to hold a ceremony, give our vows and sleep together. All they know is that Mark has a very special ability that he's going to show them. They don't know what it is, and not even that it's called TK. I suggest that when you show them, Mark, that you don't touch anyone's body, and certainly not their eyeballs. I suggest you just float some objects around the room. That looks a lot less threatening. Do you agree?" I would show them whatever Julia thought would get us permission to proceed with our marriage. If that could be just a subset of my ability, then I was happy. Having to kill myself to avoid becoming the CIA's assassin was something I was happy to reduce the risk of. Julia continued, "Your parents are a problem I don't have the solution to. Carol turns eighteen in just over four years and can then legally do whatever she wants, even if your parents object. But I can't see us being able to keep our relationship secret that long. Sooner or later they're going to suspect, and then we'll have to find a way of making everything work the way we want. -- "Oh, Carol, I should mention this to you. Mark already knows that my parents are quite excited about the possibility of your having babies with him. They know that Mark is very, very special, and they wonder whether your babies with Mark might be special too. This is nothing to do with Mark's wanting you to have his babies, but it makes it much easier for the parents to agree to Mark and you having sex. You can forget I said that if you like, as it's not important and won't be an issue for many years. I just mentioned it because they might. All you need to know is that you love Mark and me, and will happily do whatever we want. Easy isn't it?" Carol agreed, "Yes. That IS all I want." "Good girl. Provided my parents like Mark's TK, which I'm sure they will, then you should both be able to stay here with me tonight. Mom didn't tell me how she arranged that, but she made me think it was going to happen that way. She wants my wedding night to be as it should be, with my wife and Lord all night. -- "Speaking of 'wedding', we are not, of course, legally wedded, and never will be unless the law changes dramatically..." Carol interrupted to ask Julia, "Why don't you marry Mark in a year or two when you're allowed to? I'm sure all the parents would agree to that. My parents think you're the bees' knees." I was interested in hearing Julia's answer. Our three-way marriage was so weird that maybe Julia and I might have to get married in the future, to make things look better for the public. Julia answered, "No, I won't do that. The most important reason is that Mark loves you the most so it's not right for me to marry him. If he marries anyone, it must be you. Maybe we can find a way to make that happen in the future, but that's something to be looked into later. The other reason I won't marry him is that it wouldn't be fair to any of his future wives." "Eek!" I'm not sure whether that was Carol's "Eek" or mine. Quite likely both of ours. I recovered the fastest, and exclaimed, "'Future wives'! Where did that idea come from? I don't want any more wives, I just want to marry you two!" "You are our Lord so you may do whatever you want. If you meet another girl that you want to marry, that's fine by Carol and me. If you don't meet another one, that's fine by us too. If you meet girl after girl, so you end up marrying twenty of us, that's fine too. Carol and I will be happy no matter how many girls you marry." "We will?" asked Carol, in considerable doubt about agreeing with Julia's claim. "Of course, Wife#2. Our purpose in life is to make Mark's life better. If he meets a girl he wants, and she would make his life better, then I will do my best to make sure she marries him, exactly as I did for you. I love you, but if Mark hadn't made it clear to me that he loved you and needed you in his life, then I never would've made this happen no matter how strong my feelings for you. My feelings are not important compared to Mark's. Our life is serving Mark. I take it very seriously and you must too. We are not here just to have fun, although we'll have an enormous amount of that. We also have a great responsibility. Mark's life is too important. I thought you understood that?" "I thought I did, but I never thought of him having more wives." "Let me give you an example. Maybe in five years or so, he might be incredibly famous so security will be a major problem. We don't know anything about security, so he'll need to employ a security expert. What better way to make her loyal to us than for us to marry her? That way she is protecting herself, her wives and her Lord, and she'll do the best possible job she can. We're not going to push her away if she can make our Lord safer. We'll help seduce her into our marriage." Julia probably could have worded the last part better because Carol's face fell, and she accused, "Is that what you did to me, seduced me into this marriage?" Julia wasn't standing for that, "SHAME on you, Carol! You know better than that! I love you, and I have showed you my love many times. I know you love me too. My whole idea of a multi-marriage came about because I wanted us to marry you. I could've arranged your being romantically in Mark's life in many other ways, but I did it this way because we ALL love each other. This is a beautiful thing we're doing, and your jealousy is wrong." "I'm not jealous. I never said that." "Yes you are. You're jealous of our future wives. You know you love me and that I love you. Your trouble isn't about you and me. We're wonderful together, as lovers of each other and as lovers of Mark. AREN'T WE?" "Um, yes, you're right. I do love you. I know that; you're wonderful." "You're jealous about his future wives, and that's wrong. I was his first girlfriend, so how would it have turned out if I'd been jealous of you so I'd deliberately blocked Mark and you getting together? I could've easily done that, couldn't I?" "Um, yes, you could've." "So if I was jealous I would've kept Mark all to myself, and I would've lost having the second most wonderful love in my life: you! I would've made my life far less happy, your life far less happy, and what's worse, Mark's life far less happy. The three of us being married is far better for all of us, including me, than me trying to keep Mark for myself, isn't it?" "Yes it is. You're right again. You've made my life incredible, and I'll try my best to make Mark's life better too, especially by having his babies. I REALLY want to do that! And I can see that you love us both. You're so much smarter than me, I can't understand all this as easily as you. I'm sorry, please forgive me?" "Of course I forgive you. You are my wife! You made a small mistake, but only because you haven't had time to think about this as much as I have. You didn't even know you were going to be a wife until a few minutes ago, so of course I forgive you. You've listened to me explain, and now you understand. No more problem." "No, no more problem. If Mark wants a Wife#3, I will help." Julia smiled, and said, "Actually, if he wants a Wife#3, that will be you." "I don't understand?" "Mark's wives will be numbered in the order we marry them, except for you. You'll always have the bottom number, so if we marry again, you'll become Wife#3." "Why?" "Because you're OUR serving girl. You serve Mark first, then you serve ALL his wives. Every wife will command you for whatever she wants, especially for sexual services. More than anything, you are our sexual servant. You are going to have a very busy sexual life, my little sweetie." I'd been very lightly playing with Carol pussy. Not trying to stimulate her because this conversation was too important to have her distracted, but just as a way of showing affection. I'd been doing it for so long and had become so engrossed in the conversation that I'd even forgotten that I was doing it, but its sudden increase in slipperiness caught my attention. I remembered three weeks ago when I'd said that, "Julia Williams knew how to push my buttons." Now I find that she SURE knows how to push Carol's buttons. The discussion about Wife Numbers had no purpose other than pushing Carol's wanting-to-be-a-sexual-serving-girl button. I wondered whether Julia had invented the whole Wife Number thing solely to give her a chance to push Carol's buttons. I wouldn't have been surprised because Julia certainly knows how to plan ahead. While I enjoyed playing with Carol's sudden wetness, Julia continued. "Whoever Mark chooses to join our marriage will have authority over you. You will be sexually commanded by the girls that Mark chooses, and you will do everything they say." Carol was definitely getting wetter, but she was also looking uncomfortable with the idea. Julia reassured her, "But think about this. Mark has hundreds of girls who want him already. Next school year that number will increase by hundreds more, not just because he'll be a senior, but because he'll probably be doing some courses at OSU so he'll be meeting many college girls. I'm sure many of them will fall in love with him too." Carol said, "Oh." Julia warned, "No jealousy! We want him to be able to pick from among the best possible girls. Plus there's no need for you to be jealous because you'll always be his sister, no matter how many girls he has. I don't believe he'll ever love any girl as much as he loves you, so you're doubly safe. Your jealousy is completely unnecessary and wrong. I have to train you better so you truly realize that Mark's being a superhuman mean that the normal rules don't apply to him. He can do ANYTHING he wants! We will help him, all right?" "Yes, I understand. And I agree. You're always right." "Good girl. Anyway, my point is that he can choose between hundreds of girls now, and that will soon become thousands of girls. Once he's famous outside of Corvallis, who knows how many girls he could choose from, maybe tens of thousands. So if he picks one, she's going to have to be a very exceptional girl, isn't she?" "Yes, that makes sense." "So I think it's extremely likely that both you and I will find her to be exceptional too. At the very least we'll respect her highly, but I expect that we'll probably fall in love with her too. Mark is a very sexy man and he creates a great deal of love and sexual excitement. I can't imagine that we wouldn't all fall into love, and fall into sex, together. Especially after she sees how sexy and caring you are." Carol came right back at that, with "And especially after she sees how beautiful and smart you are. Haha." Julia agreed, "Yes. Plus serving Mark and having sex with him will draw us all together. We are going to have wonderful lives aren't we, darling?" "Yes. That sounds incredible." "So much love, so much sex, so much pleasure and happiness. It'll be wonderful." "Yes, wonderful." #4: "So you can see your jealousy was silly, wasn't it?" "Yes, I'm sorry about that. I won't do it again." "Good girl. We want Mark to have the best possible girls, that way we get the best possible wives and lots of love for all of us. It'll be even better for you, once I tell every girl that they can command you to do anything sexual. You'll be having a great deal of sex." I could feel Carol's pussy react. To hell with rubbing her pussy gently! She was too stimulated to talk sensibly for a while anyway, and it was time to take care of her. I started rubbing her pussy lips directly with my fingers, especially inside her lips where I hadn't touched for a while. I was also thumbing her clit, and kissing all over her face. Julia leaned closer and whispered to Carol, "I REALLY hope our next wife likes using you in public. I would love to see her order you to wear tiny miniskirts and no panties, so when you rode up the escalators at the mall, anyone behind you could see your pussy. She'd order you to always stand with your legs apart so people had a clear view. You'd be forbidden to cross your legs when sitting, so anyone sitting in front of you could look right at your pussy. She'd make you to wear very tiny cut-off crop tops, so those gorgeous breasts of yours would be half exposed at all times, and if you bounced at all your nipples would flash in and out of view. That'd be so exciting wouldn't it?" I changed hands on her pussy, and brought the drenched one to her mouth, and made her clean it between her moans. Julia's whispers continued, "I'd like to see her order you to have sex in public. To open your legs wide apart and have you frig yourself, the way our Lord is doing to you now, with people watching you until you cum. If any of your superior wives were watching you, we could order you to get your head beneath our skirts and lick us to orgasm. Can you imagine what any spectators would think of that - of seeing you lick two, three or even more girls, one after the other in public. They'd think you were a complete slut, especially because when you were on your hands and knees your tiny skirt would be showing half your ass and all of your sopping wet pussy. What do you think of that?" It was just plain silly of Julia to ask that question. How could Carol possibly answer when she was far too busy producing louder and louder moans? I doubted Carol could create any sort of sensible sentence by now. Julia finished her off with, "But my favorite order to give you, which I like so much I think I might do it myself, is to order you to dress as a very young girl, as if you were maybe eight or nine years old. Pigtails in your hair, a little girl's school uniform, shoes and socks. Just your huge titties sticking out like you were some sort of tiny pre-teen slut. You wouldn't have a bra because 8-year old girls don't wear bras. You'd be holding Mark's hand as if he was walking you through a park. You'd be skipping along beside him, sucking a lollypop and singing a silly little girl's song. -- "Mark would walk you somewhere where there were lots of boys, near a skateboard ramp maybe, and when you were there you'd pretend to be naughty, so Mark would pick you up and put you over his knee, push your skirt up and pull your panties down, and give you lots of hard slaps all over your beautiful bottom. All the boys would see and would come running over to get a close look. By the time they got there your bottom would be nice and red, but Mark would keep smacking you for a while longer. When you were very, very red and crying, he would stop. I guess some of the boys might reach out and rub your bottom. You'd have lots and lots of boys playing with your bottom, and I bet you'd like that. The more naughty boys might push their fingers into your pussy because it would be very, very wet by now, wouldn't it?" Carol's was moaning loudly and rocking her body back and forth against my hand. Julia continued, "With so many boys having their hands on your bottom, not all of them will be able to play with your pussy. Some will start smacking your bottom, which will already be red and sore, so that will smart even more. But I hope some boys will do this, and if they don't I'll tell them to, some of the boys will stick their fingers up your asshole. I'll tell them to make their fingers go in and out, over and over again. The boys with their fingers in your pussy will do the same. In and out, in and out, of your asshole and pussy. All while other boys are smacking your ass over and over again too. -- "Then I'd grab hold of your pigtails and lift your head up high, and stick your face under my skirt and tell you to lick my pussy until I cum. With your hair pulled so painfully back like that, some of the boys will see that your huge titties are sticking out enough for them to get their hands on. By now they will be very excited, and they'll be pulling on your blouse and your buttons will be ripped off. Your naked tits will fall out into their hands and they'll grab your nipples hard, just they way you like it..." Carol suddenly screamed REALLY loudly, well into Julia's normal range, and by far the loudest I'd ever heard from her. Reminded by "grab your nipples hard, just they way you like it", I grabbed her clit, squeezed and pulled hard. She cut off her previous scream, sucked in another breath, and screamed in orgasm even louder, slamming her head backward and into my chest. Ouch! Thank goodness she wasn't sitting higher, or that could have broken my nose. Making love to your sister is DANGEROUS! I didn't dare trigger another reaction like the last, so I moved my hands up and hugged her tight, partly out of self-defense. Carol didn't scream again, and her ragged breathing slowly returned to normal. I relaxed my grip. When she got her breath back, Carol said, "I am marrying two very, very evil people." She laughed, then grimaced, and said, "Oh my! My stomach muscles are sore. You two are evil!" Her large smile implied she was just as evil. Carol looked at Julia and said, "You wouldn't really do those things to me, would you, especially not the last one?" "Maybe, if you are very, very good." "Don't you mean bad?" "I mean good. If you are very, very good I might do it for your reward." "Oh." And after a pause of several seconds. "You're right, that might be a reward, if we did it the right way." "I'm learning about you, my lover, and I want to bring you happiness." "It's exciting, but what if it's not safe? It could get..." Julia cut in, "If you're with Mark, then you're safe. Have you forgotten what he can do?" "Oh yeah, I'd forgotten. I couldn't stop thinking about all the boys playing with me. You're right, we'll be safe with our Lord. But I don't think I want to do that. It's too much." Julia said, "I'm not going to hurt my darling wife so you don't have to worry. Plus I think you're getting ahead of yourself, first you have to be 'very, very good', to earn it." "I will be very, very good." "I know you will. You always are." We sat in silence for a few minutes, just winding down. Then Carol said, "I don't know what you two want. I'd like to do special things for you too, but I don't know what would bring you happiness like Julia wants to bring me." Julia answered, "You're only just starting to get to know us intimately. That will take time, so don't worry about it now. You've already agreed to have our Lord's babies, which Mark wants very much. He told me that he wanted you to be the mother even though he was scared he'd lose me. We know because of Annette how much he loves me, so he must love you even more! And that's an incredible amount." "You're right. I hadn't thought of that. Wow. Mark, do you really love me that much?" #1: "I could truthfully just say 'Yes', and that'd be a perfectly good answer, but let me put it another way. In a week Julia has learned some very intimate things about you, that you didn't even know about yourself, yes?" Carol nodded. "So imagine how well she knows me by now! If she says I love you that much, then she knows what she's talking about." Carol laughed happily. I thought reinforcing the message would be a good idea, "Remember how you were jealous of our having more wives, but Julia quickly convinced you that it'd be better for all of us? Julia is very smart. You should always believe her if she says something." #1: #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: #1: #2: #4: #2: #4: Julia said, "I'm trying to remember if there's any more I have to describe about how our relationship will work. Carol, you know that if you marry us, you can never have a boyfriend or real husband. You're giving your life to Mark?" "Yes, I know that. I already decided to do that when I thought I was going to be just a servant to you two. Now I'm VERY happy to do that." "Do either of you have any questions about any part of this?" Neither of us could think of anything. Julia smiled, and said, "In that case, My Lord, could you fly the pink jewelry box from my dresser over here please." I recentered, and flew it into Julia's hands. Julia grabbed the box when it was close enough to her, and placed it on the bed in front of her. She opened it and pulled out three rings. "Send the box back please." Her Lord did the necessary fetching and carrying for her. It's harder putting something back as there's no one to grab it out of the air when it gets close enough, but I managed to bring the box into a rough landing in approximately the right place. When my attention was back, Julia opened her hand to reveal our wedding rings. Two of them were plain gold bands, not having a diamond or any other feature, except that they were an attractive red-gold color. No doubt the girls would have an incomprehensible word to describe the color, but I just thought of it as "red gold". The third ring differed only in being much wider, so it was more of a tube than a ring. Julia explained, "Rings are traditional in a marriage and I wanted us to have some. The ring shape represents 'forever', and I have chosen to use red gold because red represents blood and our bodies. We are offering Mark our bodies forever. Red gold is also not the usual color for engagement rings, so people shouldn't get suspicious when they see us wearing them. If asked, we can say they're our friendship rings. Our Lord's ring is the big one of course. My feeling is that it should be worn on the middle finger of your left hand, Mark. It's a 'superior' finger to the engagement finger, where Carol and I will wear ours. Our rings will be on the next and inferior finger to where yours will be, to represent that we will stand next to you, but are inferior to you. What do you think, Mark?" "I think you're amazing! It's brilliant and wonderful." Julia smiled at my approval. "My mother helped me plan what to get. I'd like to have gone fancier, but I think we're too young and too vulnerable to risk doing anything that might create suspicion, especially with your parents." "I can't think of any way to improve what you've done. Shall we put them on?" Julia suggested, "Now that I've seen your ability to fly things, can you fly them on to our fingers? I think that'd be a perfect symbol of your power. All of your wives should have their rings put on that way." Carol, who had been sitting quietly, jumped in, "I agree. Your flying power is awesome! That would be perfect." Julia said, "Please put your ring on first, Mark. Yours should be before ours." Julia opened her palm. By the way she'd worded her request, she clearly expected me to remove just my ring from it. I thought it would be cuter to TK all three rings in the air as a romantic group. They were light enough to be picked up by one mind each, so all three rings rose slowly up from her palm, with my making the small rings slowly orbit mine. The girls were stunned. Carol and Julia both exclaimed with great feeling, "Wow!" | "Oh my God!" I was surprised by the strong emotion shown in their reactions. The rotating ring thing was cute, but that's about all, I thought. I held the rings about our chest height, with the smaller rings cutely orbiting mine, while Julia whispered in awe, "You can move several things?" I nearly laughed, but swallowed it. Now I understood their reaction. They'd only ever seen me move one item at a time, but this little trick made them think I was three times more powerful than they'd previously thought. They'd felt multiple fingers on their bodies, they just hadn't understood what that meant. I answered Julia's question with a nod. I pointed my middle finger up, suddenly realized that it wasn't a polite gesture so I opened my hand so every finger was extended and splayed wide. I kept the two female rings circling where they were, and moved my ring onto my middle finger. As soon as my ring was partly on, I pushed it home with my other hand, and lowered both hands. The ring occupied most of the distance between the two knuckles and looked pretty good. It also fit perfectly, which surprised me. "It's a perfect fit! That's lucky." Julia disagreed. "It's not luck, I very carefully measured your finger." Of course she had! How stupid was I thinking something as important as getting our wedding rings to fit would be left to luck. "Well done. I never saw you do that." "I was sneaky because I didn't want to ruin the surprise." "You did it perfectly. Now shall we put your rings on?" Julia said, "I'd like to say a few words first, especially to Carol." -- Julia turned to Carol and said, "My darling, I know you've already said yes to us, but that was when we first asked you. Since then we've talked about what this marriage will include, such as more wives if Mark wishes. You should also think about the fact that our relationship is bound to cause us troubles. With your parents when they discover it, and with society should it become public knowledge. You may be attacked by people who will condemn you loudly and often. -- "Mark's power is so awesome, his intelligence so great, and everything else that he does superhumanly, that his life is certain to be extremely unusual. That might attract trouble to us, even more than the usual nuisances important people suffer. He might even be physically attacked. By marrying us you will be putting yourself in danger. You could even be killed by people who hate or fear Mark. We will love you, but others may hate you. Think about those risks when Mark asks you again to marry him." "I already know my answer. I won't let stupid and bad people keep me away from my loves. I want to marry you and Mark, I want to have his babies, and I want to serve him and all our wives. And I'd like to start soon please, it sounds like fun." #3: #2: #3: Julia said, "I also wish to marry Mark, in case there was any doubt over that. Mark, please agree to marry us by putting our rings on us." Julia extended her hand, with her fingers spread. Carol copied her. Not wanting to show favoritism, I started moving the still rotating rings down toward the two waiting fingers. I'd already noted that the rings weren't the same size, so I made sure the girls got the right ones, and slid them simultaneously onto their offered fingers. "With these rings, I thee wed." I didn't even know I knew those words, but they popped out. I wondered whether I should have said "thees", or maybe "yee" or "yees", but my thinking got overwhelmed by happy girls wanting to climb all over their Lord. There was lots of hugging, kissing and crying. Carol had lost the hanky she'd used before, not having a pocket in her wedding dress. Fortunately I still had one in my pocket, and the girls shared it. They needed to get used to sharing things anyway, my body being my preference for the item at the top of that list. There followed a considerable period of expressed feelings like, "I love you two", "I am so happy", "We are going to have wonderful lives", interspersed with many more kisses, not to mention tears from two-thirds of the spouses. When we had calmed down, Julia said, "My family should be waiting downstairs by now. The plan is that we go down, let them know that Carol has agreed to the marriage and that we want to proceed with it. The Boys will leave the room while Mark shows his TK to Mom and Dad. Then presuming they're convinced into consenting, we'll get The Boys and proceed with the ceremony. -- "It'll be a small repeat of Mark putting our rings on - in the non-magical way because The Boys will be there - and our offering to 'love, serve, protect and obey our Lord for the rest of our lives'. I want to do it in front of witnesses to make it more formal. It won't take long because I want us to get back up here so we can all make love for the first time together. Are you ready to go down?" "Absolutely," I agreed. It was more than fine with me. The last stage was the finest of course, but the ceremony was a good thing too. Not only would Julia and Carol like it, but the rest of Julia's family should see a ceremony to prove how serious we are. I'm sure Vanessa wanted something too, as this was hopefully the only marriage her sole daughter would ever have. Put that way, I suddenly felt sorry for Vanessa, especially when I remembered Prof's comment that she was an "over-the-top romantic" and so doubtless wanted a big wedding for Julia. Julia probably wanted one too. "Julia, darling, I just realized that you and your mother probably wanted you to have a very big wedding when you got married, didn't you? Because you're both romantics." "Yes, we did. We even talked about it a lot, planning a lot of the details. It was one of our favorite girl-talk subjects for when I married my Mr. Right. But we know that can't happen now. That part is sad, but that's just the way it has to be. I want to marry you and Carol, and that can't be done in public." -- "We'll head downstairs in minute. My parents want to see your special ability before the ceremony. Keep it as low key as you can, I think. Don't touch anyone, and only move one object. The three-ring circus - haha - is unnecessarily impressive. Which reminds me, when we go downstairs we'll give you our rings back. You put them on us again in front of my parents. Okay?" "Yes to everything you just said." We stood up and straightened our clothes. Carol announced, "I'm not going to put my panties back on. I don't want to waste time having to take them off again when we come back, haha." Julia hated being left out, so she lifted her dress hem until it was entirely above her waist, then gave me a spin, showing me that she was wearing a wonderful G-string! She looked superb! Julia paused halfway around, then completed the circle. When she was facing me again, she asked, "Can you pull my panties down with magic, please?" I answered by way of doing so. Julia lifted each of her feet in turn, and I floated her panties up to my nose. "Delightful," I announced. Carol asked, "Can you send them over for me to smell too please?" I thought that was another excellent development, so I did so. Carol then said, "I love the smell of Wife#1's pussy. I'm looking forward to tasting it again very soon too." Julia lowered her hem, Carol put the panties down, the girls took off their rings, giving them to me temporarily, and we headed downstairs. ------- Chapter 49: Obtaining Parental Consent Thursday, April 14, 2005 (Continued) Julia led us down the stairs and to the living room. She opened the door, stepped in, then stopped and wailed, "Oh no!" A moment later Carol and I saw the reason for Julia's reaction. My parents and Donna were in the room, along with all of the Williams family. It wasn't a situation we could bluff our way out of. The room was done up like a church, with white flowers all over the place and lit candles in stands, with two especially large stands of them in what was obviously the place the three of us would carry out the ceremony. The sofas and chairs were all arranged to focus on the ceremony area, and there was even hymn music playing softly. My girls were wearing matching wedding-type dresses, completing our self-incrimination. #4: I wasn't going to get out of this by saying, "Hi Mom, what a coincidence your being here too. Is it dinnertime yet or should I go back to my studying?" I was in MAJOR LEAGUE crap! Donna leaped to her feet and ran at me declaring, "This is so neat!" #1: The first clue I noticed was that Donna was wearing a very pretty dress, one I'd not seen before. Other than her field hockey uniform, Donna very rarely wears dresses, especially pretty ones, because they're feminine and slow her down. It has to be a special occasion for Mom to be willing to take on the battle of wills required to force Donna into a dress, but Donna was smiling from ear to ear now, confusing me. As Donna reached and threw her arms around me, she said, "Congratulations, Mark. I am so happy for you. And for Carol and Julia." After hugging me, she went to hug Carol, "You look so beautiful Carol. Wow, what a neat day." I looked up, at my parents. They weren't smiling - to put it mildly - but they didn't look like they were about to murder me either. Maybe I'd survive this. Prof spoke, "Mark, Carol; your parents know about your plans. We have convinced them to listen to our and your reasons, as they have several concerns." "No shit!" from Dad. Mom didn't even frown at him for swearing in front of the kids. That was NOT a good sign. Prof continued, "First of all, let's make sure we are all on the same page. Did you come here to carry out your ceremony? Do you all want to marry each other?" #3: Julia, who had moved back to take my arm on the other side from Carol, said, "Yes, we all do." Carol, in a voice trying very hard to be firm, said, "Yes. I want to marry Mark and Julia." Even though I knew I was committing suicide, I had to take my turn, "Yes, I do too. Sorry." Prof said, "Don't start apologizing, Mark. You do that too much. Your parents are not as against this as you probably think." #2: Then the thought occurred to me that they'd been sitting down here waiting for us, rather than storming up to Julia's bedroom and sledge-hammering the door open. Wow! That meant a lot. I didn't know what, but it had to be a lot. I now officially had no idea what was going through their heads. I took my life in my hands to ask, "Mom, can you explain what you think about this, please?" Mom answered, "We've known about this for a couple of days..." #4: " ... and have talked to Prof and Vanessa a great deal about it. They believe it's justifiable and they've convinced us to listen to your reasons. Their arguments are that the three of you are very happy and good together; and that your abilities are a strong reason not to abide by society's standard of acceptable behavior and law, both of which are extremely serious issues, especially if you get Carol pregnant. Prof tells us you have a secret ability that he believes will be overwhelmingly convincing. We want to see that before we discuss this further." #4: Julia accused, "Mom, why didn't you tell me they knew? You deliberately kept me in the dark!" Vanessa acknowledged, "Yes, I apologize for that but we had to see whether you truly wanted to do this. We wanted your honest, best decisions. If the three of you knew that Felicity and Steven knew, we feared it'd push you into making the wrong decision for the wrong reason. Either push you into doing it when you wouldn't have otherwise, out of stubbornness or rebellion; or more likely push you into not doing it despite your love, out of fear or a sense of responsibility. We thought this way was better because now we know - and importantly each of you know - your honest desires." Carol, who had been hugging my arm very hard, defiantly yelled at Mom, "I love Mark. I'm never going to give him up, no matter what you say! And I'm going to have his babies." That last statement did NOT help reassure Mom and Dad. Prof and Vanessa looked happy though. It's extremely unusual for Carol to go head to head with anyone, and even rarer that it be Mom. So Mom answered carefully, "We know you love Mark, that's another reason why we're prepared to think about this. We know the only way we can keep you two apart is to literally 'keep you apart'; to send one of you away. We don't want to do that. But neither do we think your continuing to have sex together is acceptable either, you're his 13-year old sister, for goodness sake!" #4: #3: I went through my list of symptoms, suppressing each of them. It quickly made us feel MUCH better, other than intellectually because we still thought we were in the crap. Carol proclaimed, "We haven't been having sex! I'm still a virgin and I can prove it!" Mom said, "Only because you're saving it for your so-called wedding night. You've done a great deal of sex play at home in the last few days. Don't try to deny it." #3: [[Mine had noticed the smell in my room, gotten suspicious, brushed my bed's covers to rub her hand through a puddle, and sampled it once she was out of sight. Mothers are damned hard to fool.]] Carol was wisely silent for a few seconds, then just repeated, "I love Mark and Julia." Mom won that round. Prof announced, "It's time for you to demonstrate your ability, Mark." Julia answered firmly, "Only to the parents. Everyone else out. It's too dangerous to Mark for unnecessary people to know." #4: Prof said, "You told us that before. The Boys and Donna will leave the room." The Boys got up, but Donna didn't want to miss out. She pleaded, "Mark, can I please stay and see it? Pretty please?" "I hate to say this to you, but 'No.' This isn't a game; it's deadly serious. This could get someone killed, so it's best that as few people as necessary know. It's not necessary for you, sorry." "Oh. That's scary." "Yes, it's scary. I'd much prefer not to show anyone, but I have to, to marry Julia and Carol. Please go with The Boys, sweetie." Donna, to her credit, didn't make a bigger fuss. Robert said, "Come on, Donna," and The Boys led Donna out of the living room. I closed the door behind them, checking that no one was listening to the door or watching through the crack (it's a double door), by looking through myself. My proximity sense didn't pick up anything through the door either, although I didn't know whether it worked through a closed door. I made a mental note to test that later, presuming I had a later. Reassured that no one was spying on us, I turned to face the jury. I had previously decided to show Prof and Vanessa by floating one of his handkerchiefs around the room, but the need to convince Mom and Dad made me decide to considerably upgrade the quality of the demonstration. The parents were standing in a semi-circle, facing us three, very much like a firing squad. There were several floral arrangements behind them at the far end of the room, so I TK-pulled two white roses out of a vase, then floated them toward the mothers. It'd been my intention to float them around to the front of each mother, and then to present one flower to each of them, but my girls reacted when they saw the roses float, and the parents soon figured out that the girls were looking behind them so they all turned around and saw the flowers floating toward them. Fortunately I foresaw a problem before it happened. To present the flower to the mothers, it would naturally be to their front, but that would put the flowers out of my line of sight, blocked by each mother's body. Having the flowers fall to the floor was not as impressive as I wanted to be, so I changed my intent and the flowers' direction. I raised them higher, flew them over the parents' heads, and arced them down into my fiancées' hands. Although I had to concentrate reasonably intently on the flowers, I did have a spare mind that informed the rest of us that the parents were gobsmacked. Having the flowers fly directly over their heads was a cool effect (the Williams' house was quite large and grand, including having a high ceiling in the living room). The parents still hadn't said anything by the time my girls got their flowers, so I followed up with, "Just in case any of you think there might have been hidden wires or who knows what other type of trick, Prof, do you have a handkerchief in your pocket?" "Can you imagine me coming to a wedding without several?" "Haha, good point. Obviously there are no wires around them, so can you pull one out please, and just hold it in the palm of your hand in front of you please." Prof did so. I allowed it to sit in his hand for a second, to build the tension a little, I then floated it up a few inches. There were intakes of breath from all the parents. "Prof, run your hands quickly around it, to check for wires." I specified "quickly" to minimize the risk of Prof's blocking my line of sight for more than half a second. I could catch the hanky once it'd fallen back into sight, but it'd be more impressive if it didn't fall, and I REALLY wanted to be impressive. Prof circled his hands and arms all around his hovering hanky. He could clearly see where I was pinching it as the rest of the hanky draped down from that point, and he particularly waved his hands back and forth above and around that point. I already had a grip on a lower edge, in case he blocked my line of sight for too long, but he didn't. He also moved his eyes right down to the pinch point, only an inch away from it, but he couldn't see anything, of course. I said, "To make the absence of wires even more convincing, I'll move it in ways that would tangle any wire." I floated the hanky up to one of the room's main lights. It wasn't quite a chandelier, but it had several arms. I passed the hanky around and through them several times, the fingertips only passing out of sight for moments. The parents were starting to make comments such as, "Incredible" | "Wow" | "Is that really you doing that, Mark?" I nodded, wondering what Vanessa - who'd asked the last question - thought the alternative might be, and wouldn't that still be equally impressive. I flew the hanky to be in front of Prof, and then said, "Yours, I believe." He took it, and examined it very suspiciously, but ended up finding nothing untoward, and put it away. I said, "Mom and Dad, just in case you think Prof was an accomplice of mine, why don't you each remove something from your pockets or purse. I especially recommend hundred-dollar bills, haha." Unfortunately neither took the hint, although they got the joke and Dad managed to squeeze out a small smile. Dad pulled out his car keys, Mom a tube of lipstick. "Hold them in your palm, and when you're ready, turn your hand over and let them drop." I'd figured that catching them in midair would look even better. It was easy to do as TK-fingertips can move as fast as my eyes can track. Dad, whether he intended to or not, set me a little challenge. He said to Mom, "3, 2, 1, drop!" Mom and Dad turned their hands over at the same time, but with each of my minds able to control an eyeball, and both objects still being within my stereoscopic field of view, it wasn't a problem. Dad's key ring had quite a few keys on it, and metal being heavy I'd already allocated two minds to catching that, with one mind to Mom's lipstick. I caught them as quickly as I could, before they built up much downward velocity. I raised them both so they were at about eye level, two or three feet in front of Mom and Dad. Noticing that the key ring itself was probably wide enough for the lipstick to pass through, I made sure I could hold the key ring up with one mind (yes), which gave me a spare mind. Then I aimed the lipstick at the ring and moved it in that direction. I passed the tube through the ring very slowly, 'handing off' to the spare mind when it was halfway through as there wasn't enough clearance for the lipstick's fingertips to pass through the ring with the tube. I thought the effect looked seamless and quite cool. Holding the lipstick stationary, I used two minds to move the key ring to above Dad's head, almost touching the ceiling and slightly in front of him. Everyone watched it. When it was in position, I said, "Catch, Dad," as I dropped them. Dad caught them easily. Just like Prof had done with his hanky, Dad examined his keys very suspiciously. After a few seconds I said, "If I might direct your attention to the magically floating lipstick." When they were all looking, I used all three minds to take it on a high speed tour of the far corners of the room, to emphasize my range and - in my opinion - my coolness. It was so light that I could zoom it around quite impressively, even zooming it down to 'strafe' the carpet in a clear area partway along the long length of the room, before raising it to the ceiling again, where I did most of the movements to ensure a clear line of sight. I also weaved it around the light fitting as I'd done with Prof's hankerchief. After a complete orbit I headed it back directly over the top of my parents, once more to the far end of the room. In passing, I noticed that Mom's handbag was at her feet and open, as she'd left it after extracting her lipstick. It was quite small and I had a little idea. I had to use three minds to slow the lipstick down, and once I had it returning toward the parents slowly, I left one mind on it and used two to try to lift the handbag. That was enough force to enable me to raise the bag a few inches up and behind Mom's legs. Then I floated it farther behind them. All the parents were facing the lipstick coming back from the far end of the room so none of them saw the handbag move. Once I had the bag three or four feet clear of my parents, I raised it to about waist height, and held it hovering there with one mind pulling each handle apart so it was open. The lipstick passed overhead of the parents, then started slowing so as to stop roughly above the handbag, whereupon I started lowering the lipstick. Vanessa was the farthermost from the handbag, and was able to spot it first. She just said, "Oh." The others saw the bag in turn, as the lipstick dropped toward it. I stopped the lipstick a few inches above the purse, saying, "I believe you dropped this, Mom," bobbling the lipstick up and down a couple of times. "Let me put it away for you." I dropped it into her handbag. I used all three minds to slowly move the purse toward her hand: two minds to hold it up, one to push. "This is yours too, I believe." Mom caught it when it was close, and even pulled it open and looked down suspiciously, perhaps not believing the lipstick was in there. I said, "I think that's a sufficient demonstration, don't you?" That broke the dam. MANY expressions of incredulity followed, from all four parents speaking on top of each other. My girls just stood beside me quietly, their flowers in one hand, an arm of mine in their other. I remembered my original idea, turned to Julia, and quietly told her to let her flower go. She did, and I floated it around in front on me so I could keep it in sight when I talked to Carol. I asked her to let her flower go too. I then sent one flower each to Mom and Vanessa. Now my girls could hold me with both of their hands, and more importantly, the parents were holding physical proof of my ability. The parents had fallen silent when the flowers had started moving, and once they were being held cautiously, the questions restarted. All four of them were asking questions at the same time. Julia let go my arm and stepped in front of me. She held up a hand and announced, "Mark will NOT answer your questions. You know enough to know that he's superhuman, which is what we agreed to show you so you would allow us to marry each other. You've seen your proof and now you're just being curious, which is too risky. Mark's life is at stake, and his security and safety takes priority over your curiosity. Now I want to get married, so please let's get on with it." #3: Prof and Vanessa went quiet, both clearly thinking. Mom and Dad neither quieted nor stopped to think. Dad's voice particularly dominated, "It was an impressive trick, but claiming lives are at stake is going too far and it doesn't change my mind about your misbehavior." Julia started responding when Prof overrode her, "Steven, Julia's correct. This is a great deal more serious than it seems. Julia has had longer to think about this than we have, so you should give her credit for understanding it better than we do yet. In my opinion, we've seen the proof we insisted on. Mark is truly exceptional, and I know several physicists who would cut off important parts of their anatomy to be allowed to study what Mark just did. Mark is, as Julia told us he was, superhuman. I agree with the wedding proceeding." Vanessa added, "I also agree it should proceed." Mom was sufficiently confused by Vanessa's and Prof's being convinced so quickly that she wasn't sure what to say. Unfortunately she wasn't convinced herself, only confused. Dad was a different story. "Flying flowers doesn't convince me of anything. Mark's my son and I can question him all I want, regardless of what Julia says." Uh oh, this was getting ugly, especially because Mom wasn't going to stand up to Dad on an issue she didn't understand. Prof said, "If I understand Julia correctly, she's refusing our asking questions because the more we know the greater the danger of one of us making a slip in public. Is that correct, Julia?" "Yes, that's the main reason, but also because we made a deal to DEMONSTRATE Mark's ability to you. We've done that, and now you're trying to change the deal by wanting to question Mark about it. That's not honest or safe for Mark, so I object." Prof replied, "I think the problem is that Steven and Felicity don't understand how scary Mark's demonstration was." #1: #4: Prof turned to Dad, "You're right that flying flowers aren't scary or dangerous in any way, but you saw Mark 'stealing' Felicity's handbag. What's to stop him from stealing handbags from women in public, or standing outside a jewelry store and making all their expensive diamonds fly out the door? He could even hide his tracks by unplugging security systems or covering cameras with bags, or by shorting out electrical systems by flying pieces of metal into the right places. -- "He could plant listening devices - bugs - in otherwise inaccessible places just by flying them there, even floating them into the pockets of his victims. He could plant bombs the same way, or fly poison into the drink or food of someone important. Or how about flying rocks into the engines of a plane as it was taking off? What do you think the government would do if they knew Mark could crash any plane using nothing more than his mind and whatever rocks were around? There are countless groups who would kill to get control of Mark. Every spy service and every criminal organization for a start, and doubtless others too. -- "If word of Mark's ability got out he'd be in great danger, as would your whole family. Even if the authorities got to you first, your rights would fly out the window faster than Mark could fly a tube of lipstick. The authorities couldn't let you be free again, not when you could be used to threaten Mark to work for terrorists, for example. Julia considerably understated the case when she said there were safety issues. This isn't just a cute way of delivering roses; this is an extremely impressive and scary ability. Are you getting the idea?" #2: #3: #1: #2: Prof's list had hit Mom and Dad hard. With a tremor of panic in her voice Mom asked, "What on Earth do we do?" Vanessa answered, "The short answer is, 'Nothing special.' The lives of your family are in your hands every time you drive them in your car. A second's inattention at the wrong time could end all your lives. Or you could give them food poisoning, or knock one of them off a ladder when they were cleaning your gutters, or many other accidents. Now there's an additional danger: that of your accidentally being overheard saying something that reveals Mark's superhuman ability. -- "What you do now is what you do for every other danger, you carefully try to minimize the risk. Think about the questions you wanted to ask Mark a few minutes ago. Do you REALLY have to ask those questions? Because the more you know, the more chance of your accidentally saying something dangerous. Julia understood that when she blocked your questions. She should've waited until you understood the implications of what you'd seen, but she was protecting her man so I won't fault her motives. Personally, I'm not going to ask Mark any questions. If anything, I wish I knew less, not more." Julia added, "That's why Mark needs loyal people around him. Loyalty is ABSOLUTELY essential because anyone close to Mark has his and your family's lives in their hands. Who could be more loyal than Carol and me?" "That's right!" declared Carol, tightening her grip on my arm. Vanessa agreed, "I can certainly confirm that Julia is fanatically loyal to Mark." "Damn right!" declared Julia, squeezing the last arm I had any circulation in. "Mark is a powerful man, and he'll be even more important and powerful in the future. He should not face that responsibility alone. Carol and I are going to look after him to the best of our abilities. They might not be as awesome as his abilities, but we make up for that by being very enthusiastic, don't we, darling?" Julia's last question had been aimed at Carol, Julia leaning around me to make sure Carol and everyone else saw it. Julia was making a point. Unnecessarily and unwisely I thought, but maybe her parents had a history of responding better to 'pokes' than my mom did. Dad spoke up quickly, "Vanessa, you can't really mean that we just drop it? That we don't ask any questions and treat Mark normally from now on?" "Julia has told us, and we've told you, that Mark doesn't know where his abilities came from. We believe a mutation is the most likely source of his uniqueness - his genius, athleticism and now his new ability." Turning to me, Vanessa asked, "That's got a name, hasn't it, Mark?" "Yes. I won't tell you the full name just in case someone says it in public. I call it 'TK', so you could've said, 'and now his TK.'" "Thanks. 'TK' it is." Turning back to face Dad, Vanessa asked, "What else do you want to know? How fast or far he can fly things, or how many he can fly? What use is your knowing that information? You can't give him advice on how he should use his ability because you have no experience with it. The only advice any of us can give him is to be extraordinarily cautious, but he knows that already. None of us had an inkling about his TK, so he's done an excellent job of keeping it secret so far..." #3: #1: " ... Mark has the power, so he has the responsibility. He has made everyone in this room responsible for keeping his secret, and that's more than enough responsibility for me. If you insist on asking him more questions, I'll leave the room because I don't want your family's lives to be my responsibility just to satisfy my curiosity. That would be irresponsible." Prof added, "I'd leave too. My scientific curiosity is yelling at me, but I agree with Vanessa that it'd be irresponsible for me to stay. It's none of my business. I can't say it's none of yours because you're his parents, but you're getting involved with something that's potentially life-threatening for your entire family so I strongly advise you to proceed with great caution." Vanessa said, "Mark, congratulations on being so gifted, and I hope you live up to the responsibility of having your gifts. I can see why Julia is so determined to spend her life with you. -- "Felicity and Steven, congratulations on being the parents of a superman. I hope YOU live up to the responsibility of YOUR position. Despite his genius, athleticism and TK, Mark is still a young boy with a great deal to learn about life before he will be an independent adult. It's hard enough being a normal parent, but you have several years of uniquely challenging parenting ahead of you. Prof and I would love and be honored to help, if you give us that opportunity. -- "And speaking of 'uniquely challenging parenting', what are you going to do about our children wanting to have their own wedding ceremony?" "Oh, dear," said Mom. Dad just looked out of his depth. Julia knew what they should do. She gave them the benefit of her very biased opinion, "Mark CANNOT be left to carry all his responsibilities without help. His burdens are too much for any one person. He needs someone he can trust totally, can open his heart to, who can share his burdens and whose shoulder he can cry on if he needs to. That's a wife. Because Mark's an overachiever, he's got two girls who want to be his wives together, and I see NOTHING wrong with that! His life is going to have far more than twice its fair share of burden, so he should have at least twice as much support. Carol and I are both eager to dedicate our lives to helping him. You'll never find two girls more dedicated, loyal and trustworthy for Mark than Carol and I. The wrong girl knowing Mark's secrets could cause the imprisonment or death of your entire family, so Carol is the PERFECT wife for Mark. -- "Then there's the most important issue of all: Mark and Carol having babies. Mark's IQ was average until his gift expressed itself, and there's a very good chance that if his babies inherit his gift they'll become world-leading geniuses too. In twenty or thirty years there could be half a dozen of the smartest people there have ever been working on world-shaking developments. Maybe curing cancer, solving global warming, ending religious intolerance, or who knows what they might do. With their superhuman intelligence, I bet whatever they do will change humanity forever. -- "Mark's becoming so nice started at the same time as his intelligence gain. I think it's part of his gift, which means his babies could all be superhumanly intelligent and nice. How fantastic would the world become if there were several people like that leading and helping humanity? THAT'S what you'd be robbing the world of if you forcibly separate Mark and Carol. -- "I haven't mentioned what would happen if Carol's and Mark's babies are even more gifted than Mark. I can't imagine what that'd be like. I can't imagine what an IQ of 200 means, let alone 300 or more. But if that happened, the results could be like hundreds of years of science all happening in a few years, by superhumanly NICE scientists! I think it'd be safe to say that they'd make life far better for everyone on the planet. I can't imagine how, but I'm sure that'd happen. Your preventing that would be greatly damaging the lives of billions of people." Carol tugged on my arm to get my attention. I turned to look. She had an open-mouthed look of wonder on her face, as she asked, "Our children could do that?" The poor girl had forgotten that Julia had told her it was only an excuse. I couldn't correct her now, so I might as well help Julia. I answered/bullshitted, "If my gifts are genetic, then what Julia described is definitely possible, even probable." "Wow!" Julia resumed, "It depends on whether your parents let you take on the role of Mark's wife, Carol." In the pause that followed that, I had a risky idea. I figured my parents had never been so bowled over by me before, or ever would be again, so this was the best chance I'd ever get to make something like this work. I said, "Actually Julia, it doesn't depend on my parents at all." That surprised everybody, especially the aforementioned parents. They'd been assuming that their kids having sex together was something they had a rather strong say in. I explained, "Not trying to achieve what Julia described would be a 'Crime Against Humanity'. As far as I'm concerned, we HAVE TO do it. Regardless of whether Mom and Dad bless it, when Carol turns eighteen our having children becomes obligatory. There are 6.5 billion people alive now, with a similar number born every twenty years. Our obligation to tens of billions of people comes a long way ahead of our concern over Mom's and Dad's discomfort. I don't intend any insult whatsoever to Mom and Dad, but our obligation to humanity comes first. What they're deciding today is not whether Carol and I have babies in the future, but only the nature of Carol's and my relationship over the next four years." #4: #1: Vanessa spoke forcefully, "Felicity, THINK before you react emotionally. You're the mother of a superhuman, so careful decisions are a very good idea. We discussed most of Julia's and Mark's points last night, and you tentatively agreed with them, subject to Mark proving that he was superhuman. There's no doubt about that now. He IS a superhuman: intellectually, physically, emotionally and now even magically." [[Mom and Dad's 'agreement' was more of a "giving us more rope to hang ourselves". Vanessa and Prof had argued well enough a couple of days ago to give my parents reason to pause rather than ripping straight into us, but they'd expected to veto our three-way wedding. There was just enough doubt over that, mostly because my parents respected Vanessa's and Prof's opinions, that Mom and Dad had kept quiet until now, and had even bought Donna a new dress, although that was mostly because Mom wanted to get Donna one anyway.]] -- "I know you understand the genetic possibilities, and nothing we've heard has changed those. We can see that Mark isn't taking advantage of Carol or vice versa, so there's no coercion to object to. The only objection I can think of is from the risk of their relationship being discovered, which makes it even more important that we permit it inside our homes, otherwise they'll act on their feelings where it's much riskier. -- "In his ham-fisted way Mark was right about what we're deciding now. By the time Carol graduates school Mark will be going to a prestigious university somewhere other than Corvallis. Julia will be with him and they'll have all the freedom they need to have Carol join them if they wish. The only chance of stopping that happening is to send Mark away now and hope Carol and him fall out of love in the next four years. You know how important Prof and I think it is to literally reproduce Mark's abilities, and that biologically the best chance of a reproduction is for Mark and Carol to have their own children. By the looks of them now, they believe it's emotionally the best option as well." Dad jumped in, "Carol's only thirteen, for goodness sake! That's far too young to be having sex, let alone planning to have babies." Vanessa countered, "I started PLANNING to have babies when I was younger than Carol. All girls start playing with dolls and imagining having babies when they're barely more than babies themselves. There's nothing wrong with 'planning', Steven. There's everything right about it. It's girls that don't plan their having babies that have the most trouble. Planning is good, so what you were trying to do was enlarge your argument unfairly. Your only valid concern is to her having sex at thirteen. Clearly her body is capable of sex, so I assume your objection is on emotional and legal grounds, correct?" "That's for sure!" ^ I'm going to stop quoting the conversation verbatim. There was a GREAT deal of it because Mom and Dad were VERY reluctant to give their consent. Vanessa did most of the talking for the "Goodies" as the issues were fundamentally emotional and she was better at addressing them than Prof. Prof contributed occasionally, while we three kept quiet as Vanessa requested - I'd 'helped' enough already. Mom took the front seat for the "Baddies". I watched and learned. Vanessa and Prof were VERY good at arguing logically. They eventually forced my parents to accept that there were only two choices: saying 'yes' to our pretend wedding and the consequent lifestyle, or sending me away. Simply forbidding us to misbehave wasn't given any chance of succeeding, and every one of the few other options was rejected too. It was definitely me that would have been sent away because if I stayed BOTH sisters had to be sent away, in case I got 'genetic' with Donna. That was something I had no interest in, and was even uncomfortable hearing it discussed. Fortunately it wasn't mentioned much. I was surprised to hear that if I got sent away, then Prof, Vanessa and Julia would move to wherever I went, Prof stating, "Mark is far too important to be left without support for his special abilities. That would almost be criminal, so we'd definitely go. The Boys can keep this house; Vanessa and I would follow Julia to be with Mark." I was impressed by their commitment because that'd obviously mean giving up their jobs as I doubted Mom and Dad would send me somewhere within an easy commute of Corvallis. Mom and Dad were uncomfortable and concerned about both options, to which Vanessa essentially said, "So what?" She was more polite than that, but that's what it boiled down to. "Yes, I agree you've got a tough decision as both options have problems. There's no perfect solution, but a decision has to be made so suck it up and pick the least imperfect option." Etc. Dad's objections to Carol's being too young for sex were part of this stage. Carol's being too young emotionally was largely negated by my clearly not trying to take advantage of her, and by my undoubted love for her already as my sister. An older boy might emotionally manipulate a younger girl for sex, or leave her distraught after he found someone better, but neither was the case here. No one mentioned the logical possibility that Carol might have been taking advantage of me for sex. The law was a problem, but apparently not as much as I thought. The parents unhelpfully saying things like, "As we discussed yesterday," so I didn't find out why they didn't treat it as the large obstacle I thought it was. Julia had showed me the law and Carol and me being convicted for first degree rape was terrifying, but I sure as shit wasn't going to raise that issue now. Neither of Dad's concerns - his objecting on emotional and legal grounds - were totally eliminated, leaving those issues still factors in the "So what?" situation. [[The parents were deliberately vague in their language because they didn't want us to know that brother/sister incest is virtually never prosecuted. It's not seen as a problem unless there's a large age difference. No one talks about it, including its being very rarely mentioned in any publication, from scientific studies of incest through to newspaper articles. Adult/child incest gets prosecuted and persecuted, but everyone pretends child/child incest doesn't exist. Which for siblings raised together, it almost never does, as humans have an instinctive aversion to romantically mating with someone they are raised with, related or not. Pre-adolescent sexual curiosity and games certainly happen very often, but a post-adolescent marriage level of commitment is very rare.]] FORCED to make the choice between "Send Mark away" or "Permit the marriage" - Vanessa and Prof didn't let my parents avoid the issue - Mom and Dad were EVENTUALLY forced to concede that the least imperfect option was to let us get married. I silently agreed it was "the least imperfect option", although I tended to think of it as "the most fantastic option". Naturally Mom and Dad wanted to delay the marriage. Prof asked, "What other information are you expecting to arrive that will change your decision?" After several similar questions chasing down their logic, Mom and Dad had to admit that they wanted to delay because they were uncomfortable. "Are you going to send Mark away for the duration of your delay, or trust they'll behave themselves while you're torturing them by making them wait?" Prof got them down to saying, "We'd like a few days to think about it." "Why? Over the last couple of days we've discussed it for hours. I don't believe there are any significant issues that we haven't gone over several times already. We've all been thinking about this a great deal and no one has raised a new issue today, so it seems to me that your wishing to delay your decision is motivated by your wanting to avoid your responsibility rather than for any good reason. Your avoiding your responsibility is not good for your children. A decision needs to be made, and it needs to be made now, regardless of your wishing to avoid it. It isn't going to go away while you delay. It's only going to get worse." After us kids twice having to go to the kitchen to make coffee and bring snacks to fuel the debate, Mom and Dad FINALLY agreed that we could have the wedding - I told you Vanessa and Prof were GOOD! And if you think Mom and Dad's final agreement was the end of the matter - as I did - then you'd be very much mistaken. We were sat down and lectured at for a considerable period of time. All the obvious stuff: "Look after your sister", "For God's sake be careful no one finds out", etc. For some reason it was mostly aimed at me, but to my delight Carol several times came to my defense, verbally leaping between me and Mom or Dad, standing up for us and facing down our accusers. It was very unlike her so I was very impressed by her newfound strength of character. By the way, during our first coffee-fetching trip I reminded Carol that our babies being superhuman was extremely unlikely, and that we were using it to convince the parents to allow us to get together. She was disappointed, but cheered up considerably when I pointed out that superhuman babies not being my motivation proved I loved her for herself. Prof and Vanessa piled on the pressure, and EVENTUALLY the miracle occurred: Mom and Dad capitulated, and we were told the marriage could proceed. ^ Julia sent me to fetch Donna and The Boys, telling me, "Walk slowly please, I've got something to tell the parents which will take about a minute." We'd gone at it for about three hours, so what was another minute? I walked slowly. [While I was out of the room, Julia warned the parents that the vows were unconventional, and told them not to interfere as it was OUR marriage and OUR vows; not theirs.] When everyone was gathered in the living room again, Vanessa apologized for the delay, "I'm sorry that took so long. It wasn't an easy decision for Felicity and Steven. However, they have given their consent so we'll start the ceremony now." The ceremony was further delayed by the resultant congratulations and other comments. After Donna hugged Carol and me, she said, "You must have done something AWESOME for Mom and Dad to agree?" We could all hear the question mark. Vanessa answered first, "Yes Donna, it was awesome. Mark is a very impressive young man. However, I wish I had NOT seen it! Andrew, Robert and Donna, I want you to know that it was NOT a good thing to know. I wish I'd left the room when you did because I'm very uncomfortable knowing it..." "I wish I had left too," added Prof. " ... I want the three of you NOT to be curious about it. Please don't try to find out what it was. Donna, I know you won't fully understand what I'm saying, so let me say that what Mark showed us was very scary, and it'll give me lots of bad dreams even years from now. You don't want to have nightmares or worry about Mark and Carol do you?" Donna answered, "No. Was Mark scary?" "No, Mark wasn't scary. He's too nice to be scary. Prof and I aren't scared OF Mark, we're scared FOR Mark. We think Mark's wonderful. That's why we're so happy he's marrying Carol and Julia. Prof and I wished we didn't know his secret, and if you found out you'd wish you didn't know either, so be a smart girl and forget there even was a demonstration. That goes for Andrew and Robert too, except for when I suggested they be smart girls." Donna giggled, and we moved on to the important stuff. ------- Chapter 50: The Ceremony Thursday, April 14, 2005 (Continued) Julia announced, "Everyone sit down please. Mark and Carol, please come to the front with me." While we were carrying out her instructions, Julia also quietly asked me to put my ring on. Julia got me to stand with my back to the rear wall, in the middle of a six-foot wide alcove created by the stands of flowers and burning candles. Julia placed two very small, silk (or satin?) pillows on the floor about two feet in front of me, and two feet to either side. Julia knelt behind the pillow to my right, so she was facing diagonally in toward me. She indicated that Carol should kneel behind the other pillow. The audience could see the girls in rear profile. As Carol was kneeling, Julia asked, "Mark, please put our rings on our pillows." Which I did manually, NOT using TK in front of Donna and The Boys. The dangers of the wrong people finding out about TK had been mentioned many times in the last few hours, so I was very wary about it now. Julia addressed the audience, "I'm going to shorten the ceremony because we've had a long, tiring conversation and the mood is less excited and celebratory than I'd anticipated." No one argued with her. After three hours of highly emotional discussion, the mood was certainly strained. Julia started reciting what I could tell was her mentally rehearsed speech, "Everyone here is aware that this is not a legal wedding, but other than its legality - which has very little power to keep people together anyway - this is in every other sense a wedding. We are offering Mark our vows and love, witnessed by our immediate families. In my heart this is greater than any wedding I ever dreamed of, not only because Mark is a greater man than I ever expected to marry, but because the degree of commitment I am making to him today is greater than I would've made in a traditional marriage. -- "Carol has very little idea of what is about to happen, she just knows that she wants to marry two people that she loves and who love her. She is leaping into this commitment blind as to its details, which speaks highly of her faith in her new spouses, and of her love for us. Carol has yet to hear the vows that she will be called upon to commit to. I will recite them shortly, and she may choose whether or not to make them to Mark. -- "Those of you who witnessed Mark's demonstration will have greater understanding of the import of these vows. To the others of you - Andrew, Robert and Donna - I'm sorry you won't understand the background to some of what you will hear shortly. You will understand the words though, and you will appreciate how important they are to us. -- "Although we are calling this a wedding and a marriage, there is no one that we are calling a 'husband'. Carol and I are offering ourselves as wives to our 'Lord': a man greater than we are. This is not an exchange of vows among equals. Carol and I are not the equal of our Lord. Consequently we will be making vows to Mark, and he will be accepting them or not, as he wishes. He will not be making vows to us. He is our Lord and may at all times do as he wishes. He is not to be bound by vows to us. -- "Carol and I will not be offering vows to each other. We are pledging ourselves, in our entirety, to Mark. If he accepts us both, then we will both consider ourselves his wives. That we love each other means we will consider ourselves wives to each other, but that is not the purpose or a requirement of this ceremony. At all times our relationship with and duty toward our Lord takes precedence over our relationships with our wife or wives. -- "The audience will not be asked, 'Does anyone here know of any reason why these people should not, etc.' You are not participants. This is a private commitment, from Carol and me to Mark. You are here as witnesses only because I would not deny you your seeing this. -- "If Mark would please hold up his left hand," I did so. "You will see that he's already wearing his ring. This ceremony does not include anyone putting a ring on Mark. He is a superior human and the Lord already. He will put a ring on each of us though, to indicate his acceptance of our vows. -- "You will observe that Mark's ring, and the rings in front of Carol and me, are of red gold. Rings, being a never-ending circle represent forever. We've chosen to use red gold to represent our blood and thus our life. We will be offering our life to our Lord forever, for him to use as he wishes. -- "I will now offer my vows to my Lord. After I have offered them, Mark may or may not accept them. If she chooses to, Carol will then offer the same vows, to which Mark will respond as he wishes. The ceremony will then be over. -- "Carol, darling, just watch what I am about to do and listen to my vows. You do not need to memorize anything because I'll prompt you when it's your turn. Just relax, listen and understand, okay?" A wide-eyed Carol nodded. There were a few more wide-eyes in the audience too, as this was not what they expected! With the exception of Vanessa, I noticed. She wasn't surprised, instead she seemed very happy and proud. Julia picked up her pillow carefully to ensure the ring remained balanced on it, then she swiveled around to face me, "Mark, my Lord, I offer you three lifelong Vows and a Gift: -- "First, I Vow to Serve. I offer my life in servitude to you. Your goals, needs and desires are forever paramount over mine. I will expend my life serving you to the best of my ability. -- "Second, I Vow to Obey. I will always obey your every order, voiced or anticipated, to the best of my ability. -- "Third, I Vow to Protect. I will protect you from all ill and harm, to the best of my ability. If the situation requires it, I will joyously sacrifice my life to protect yours. -- "Fourth, I offer you the Gift of my Love. Love cannot be vowed, as it may be denied and can be lost. Regardless, I offer it to you. -- "Lastly, in explanation to you all, especially to Carol. These vows are lifelong. I cannot and will not break them. They are the strongest I can make. I fully intend to die rather than break them. Mark may cancel them whenever he wishes, as that is his right as my Lord, but I may never do that myself. I am offering Mark all of my life, I am holding nothing back. All my worldly goods are his, everything that I am is his, and all my time is his - all to do with as he wishes. -- "Mark may also accept my Vows without my Gift. I will still be bound by my Vows even if he does not wish to accept my love. -- "The reason for my earlier statement that the audience may not object should be clear by now: no one's opinion takes precedence over that of the man I recognize as my Lord. -- "Having offered my Vows and Gift, I offer my ring to Mark." Julia raised the ring-bearing pillow with her right hand. Her left hand was palm up, with fingers spread, beside and level with the pillow. "If you wish to accept my Vows and my Gift, to become my Lord and Love, please take the ring and place it on my engagement finger. If you wish to accept my Vows but not my Gift, place the ring on my little finger; being yet farther away from the superior finger on which you wear your Lordship ring. If you do not wish to accept me at all, place my ring in my palm and command me to take it away." Julia fell silent, and waited. It was a pity I couldn't use TK to put the ring on as it was so appropriate that it cried out to be done, but the argument had convinced me to be very guarded about revealing it. I carefully picked up Julia's ring with my right hand, made sure I knew which finger was its destination as her hand was confusingly palm up, and slid it onto her engagement finger. As I did so, I used TK to stroke her right cheek, the one that was out of sight of the audience. As soon as it was clear that her ring was going onto her engagement finger, Julia visibly struggled to control her voice, to say, "Thank you, my Lord." The audience started speaking, but Julia very firmly announced, "Please do not interrupt. Carol is next." Julia shakily lowered her pillow to the floor, took a deep breath, and then looked up at Carol to ask, "Did you understand everything I said, Carol? Do you have any questions?" Carol answered with conviction, "I understand and I don't have any questions. It was beautiful and perfect. Thank you, Julia." I'd been focused on Julia and hadn't thought about Carol's willingness to take those vows. When we'd turned to Carol I'd had a few seconds to wonder about her reaction, but Carol was smiling happily, so everything seemed fine - although it was hard to describe those vows as just "fine"! Julia had outdone herself big time. Carol's answer removed the last of my doubts about what her feelings were. It also affected Mom the same way. Mom had to ask, "Are you sure, Carol? This sounds very serious." I could tell Julia was about to respond, and I feared it was not going to be very politic, so put my hand on her head to catch her attention, and said a quiet, "Shh." Carol said, "It doesn't SOUND serious, Mom; it IS serious. I'm even more sure about this than Julia is. This relationship is PERFECT for me." I saw that it was too, as it stressed subservience so strongly. Julia wasn't allowing further interruptions. "Carol, if you wish to offer yourself to Mark, pick up your pillow and turn to face him." Carol immediately did so. I glanced at Mom. She looked decidedly unhappy and I feared she was about to cause trouble. Mom started drawing breath to say something that I was sure I didn't want to hear, so I centered myself then TK-stroked the side of Mom's left cheek quite strongly. Not as a caress, but a message about my power. Mom quickly turned her head left, but there was nothing to see of course. I created several fingers, grasped her chin and lower cheek on both sides, to give a rough simulation of the feeling of a real hand grasping her chin, and I pushed her face around until it was pointing directly at me. I gave a slight frown, then I used a couple more fingertips to pinch Mom's lips quite forcefully together. Her eyes were WIDE open, but she kept her mouth shut. TK can be VERY useful! I canceled the fingertips holding her head, but kept the pinch on her lips going for a few more seconds before canceling those too. Julia had been saying, "Carol, repeat after me please." Julia repeated the Vows and Gift, with pauses for Carol to say them to me. Carol, in segments, recited the vows and what Julia had called "the Gift". Julia asked, "Carol, do you understand that your vows are for life and that you cannot withdraw them? Only Mark may do so. If he accepts your vows, you are bound to him for the rest of your life, whether or not he accepts the Gift of your love." Carol said, "I understand, and will never break my Vows or take back my Gift." Julia smiled and continued to instruct Carol, "Hold the pillow just with your right hand, and raise it slightly. Open your left hand and position it palm up next to the pillow. Repeat after me..." With Julia's prompts, Carol recited the offer of and instructions for how I could accept her ring. I did for Carol what I'd done for Julia: placing her ring on her engagement finger and TK-caressing her hidden cheek. Unlike Julia, Carol made no attempt whatsoever to control her sobs. She burst, and they poured out of her. Julia, obviously thinking they were a good idea now, rushed the couple of steps to sit beside Carol, took her in her arms, and they sobbed together. I was left standing there, wondering what to do. And wishing I had brought a LOT more hankies. I knelt in front of my wives and put my arms around them, "There, there." Moments later Prof arrived and, with two flourishes, produced a hanky for each girl. Things got more than a little chaotic after that. Vanessa was bawling already, and came over to join the girls so they could all bawl together. [I found out later that she'd helped write the vows. Knowing what to expect, she'd been able to enjoy the ceremony. When females enjoy weddings they cry because the wiring of their brains is weird.] Prof seemed reasonably comfortable. I guessed Julia might have talked to her parents about the content of the ceremony, so they weren't as surprised as they might have been. He came around to me and offered me his hand to shake. Figuring the three criers could comfort and/or encourage each other without me - being male I wasn't sure what they were doing - I stepped away and accepted his handshake. Prof said, "Congratulations, my boy. I guess I can call you 'Son' now, except not 'Son-In-Law' as the law doesn't know about this ceremony. Maybe you're my 'Son-Out-Law'? Haha." His joke was obviously one he'd thought of earlier, but rather than responding to that, I had to ask him, "I'm surprised how accepting you are of such a one-sided relationship?" "You've got a lot to learn about females, Mark, haha." He was deliberately jerking my chain, but knowing that didn't help me at all. I'm going to end up with that expression engraved on my tombstone, as it's obviously going to follow me to my grave. I wondered what I had to learn this time. Prof enjoyed a good chuckle at my expense, then he explained, "That ceremony didn't create a one-sided relationship between Julia and you, it only explicitly stated what she already thought of the existing relationship. I admit she's got some rather unusual thoughts on the matter, but I understand her thinking and don't see any reason to disagree with her. I also suspect the relationship won't be as one-sided as it might seem." #1: Then he added, "The ceremony was mostly for your and Carol's benefit, and as it turned out, for your parents as well." I didn't really understand, but I still managed to have the feeling he was right. "You should circulate, Mark. Go and talk with your family. I'll look after this lot, I've got plenty more handkerchiefs." Yep, he knew about females. I walked around the criers and headed to my family. Halfway there Donna rushed up and gave me a big hug. "That was INCREDIBLE. I've never heard of anything like that before! It was so beautiful. I'm so glad I was able to see it. And it's so great that you and Carol are going to be lovers, that's wonderful too. The three of you are going to have great times. Everything is wonderful." Donna was far more grown up than I expected. Two weeks ago I was afraid of saying the word "virginity" in front of her, but lately she's helped Carol and me be intimate physically, and now she's totally accepting of the whole ceremony, even seeming to understand the implications. I was going to compliment her, but was interrupted by The Boys joining us. Andrew said, "Well, I've never heard of anything like that before." Donna laughed, and said, "That's exactly what I just said. Your sister is very unusual." Andrew replied, "I never used to think she was, but after this - phew! This takes the cake." #1: #2: #1: #2: I agreed, "Yeah, Julia certainly is imaginative. She sure surprised me!" Robert declared, "Not nearly as much as all of you surprised us! Andrew and I had almost no idea. We knew it was going to be a three-way commitment, and we thought that was unusual enough, especially with your sister, but this caught us by surprise. I'm also astonished your parents didn't explode. You must have had a doozie of a demonstration and discussion. That's NOT a hint that I want to know anything about it. I'll take Mom's word as gospel on that. You should talk with your parents, they don't look so good." They didn't either. They were still sitting in their sofa, looking very mixed up, and some of the emotions in the mix didn't look like positive ones. I went to them and sat next to Dad, saying, "That ceremony was nothing like what I expected, so it had to be even stranger for you. How are you holding up?" Mom said, "We're shattered. Vanessa and Prof did a good job of forcing us to let the ceremony go ahead. It was a shocking idea, but it was damned hard to argue with them. They're very intelligent, logical, rational people - who talked us into accepting an insane relationship between their daughter and two of our children. Then that ceremony and what you did to my face overwhelmed me even more." "The ceremony blew me away too. I think Julia loves deliberately dropping dramatic bombshells in front of me. It might help you to know that Prof just finished telling me that the ceremony was only Julia verbalizing what she already thought, and that the type of relationship I have with Julia hasn't really changed. I'm pretty sure that's true with Carol too. Carol couldn't have put her feelings into vows like that, but she already felt that way. You heard Carol's response when you talked to her before she repeated her vows. So in some ways the ceremony didn't matter, although the girls would kill me if they heard me say that. -- "The face thing I half-apologize for. You looked like you were about to lose it. Carol was already committed to me, whether or not we had the ceremony, so your getting upset wouldn't have 'saved' her. I'm sure you wouldn't want the girls to be sitting down having a cup of coffee twenty years from now, remembering their wedding mostly because you had a meltdown in the middle of it?" I enjoyed using Mom's own words to help settle her. -- "I was intending to keep my being able to touch people secret, but it seemed like a good way to shock you into holding yourself together. You needed to be reminded of my power, Mom. I am VERY different from other people. Carol and Julia recognize that and they wish to live their lives accordingly. Vanessa and Prof obviously recognize it too. I know it's hard for you to look up to me like they do because you're so used to looking down on me as a child that needs raising, but you're going to have to get used to quite a few differences from now on." #1: #3: #1: Dad agreed, "BIG differences. Can you do to me what you did to your mother please?" "You want the face thing, or for me to confuse, bewilder and upset you?" Mom added, "Don't forget 'pressure me'. Everyone has put Steven and me under a great deal of pressure today. It didn't have to be done this way..." I was thinking about how to apologize to Mom without accepting too much of the blame, in case she used it against me in the future, when one of my minds had a much better idea. I interrupted with something I used to hear far too often until a year or so ago. I was a bit scared saying it to Mom, so I started by holding up two extended fingers. I interrupted Mom, "I've got two things to say to you. First, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself; you're never going to improve anything by wallowing in self-pity.'" -- Before Mom could get angry, I rushed on with, "Second, if you think you're pressured, HOW ON EARTH do you think I feel! You've only got three or four years more of being responsible for us. I'm looking down the barrel of a lifetime of being dangerously unique. There is NO ONE like me that I can talk with, no one who has experienced my problems, no one who can give me knowledgeable advice. Prof and Vanessa have got enormously high expectations for me to live up to, I could make a mistake that gets our whole family locked up for life, or God knows what else I could do wrong. You're complaining over your having to make a single decision to allow something joyful. You should try thinking about some of the pressures on me." That did the job nicely. In retrospect I could've gotten Mom into 'Mothering Mode' less dramatically, but it was a dramatic sort of day. While Mom was apologizing and sympathizing, I did the face thing on Dad. He couldn't help asking, "What else can you do?" "Tell you that this is NOT a topic for conversation or entertainment. Mom obviously told you what I did to her, so I showed you. Now I hope you never discuss it again because it's too dangerous. When Mom was telling you, did you both make DAMNED sure Andrew, Robert and Donna were well out of earshot? Because if one of them heard a single word they could suddenly bring it up in public." I was sure Mom and Dad had been far too overwhelmed by everything to give any thought to being careful. To rub it in, I repeated, "Well, did you make sure you couldn't be overheard before you talked about it?" Mom confessed, "Ahh, no. Sorry." "So BOTH of you talked about it without thinking about our life-or-death safety. It only takes one person to let a secret slip, so I'm less than impressed that both of you chatted away about it so soon after we discussed how scary it is. Funnily enough, I think I'll decline to tell you anything more about it." "I'm sorry, Mark," said Dad. "This is a lot to get used to." "No argument about that, but try harder please. There's a great deal at stake." Mom said, "To think that a few months ago my biggest worry was whether we could afford the college fees for both you and Carol. Compared to now, that worry was nothing!" Dad said, "The thing I can't get out of my head is how I'd behave if I had your ability. I remember you let that bully beat you up at school, even though it seems you could've easily beaten him. If I'd been in your shoes, I doubt I would've held myself back. You could even take out someone as heavily guarded as Bush, which I'd find damned tempting. It'd have to be Cheney too because I sure as hell wouldn't want him running the country..." Although Dad thinks Cheney already does run the country, judging by his frequently commenting, "If Cheney ever dies, Bush will become President." Dad has often declared his belief that Bush and Cheney have caused the biggest clusterfuck in America's history, "which will be costing us arms and legs for generations," so I wasn't surprised by his using them as an example. I could see that he meant every word about being tempted. " ... Your ability scares me as an adult. It scares me even more for you, son. You're smart; and judging from that bully, moral too; but having that ability is going to tempt you. Compared to how I feel about our so-called leaders, your boinking your sister is small potatoes. I can't believe I think that, but I do. It's obvious you're not trying to take advantage of her, so we'll cross our fingers and hope for the best on that. I liked it when Carol stood up to Fely in your defense too." Speaking of Carol, I wasn't sure what was traditional in Lordship vowing ceremonies, but I should probably talk with my new wives soon. I looked around, to see that everyone else was gathered in a circle by the ceremony area, all talking away happily. It seems the crying had been completed satisfactorily and the conversation was happily under way. It'd probably be best to let the families talk while they could, before we went upstairs. I asked Mom and Dad, "Are you two okay now?" Mom answered, "Not really. We understand that there are good reasons behind this, but it goes against many of my beliefs." "I suggest you go talk with Carol and Julia. Their joy should cheer you up." Mom said, "Good suggestion. Thanks." Thereby giving me an opportunity to check out the kitchen. That wasn't part of my reason for steering Mom and Dad toward Carol, I swear. I got as far as the dining room, and was starting to detect some very nice smells, when Andrew came the other way and said, "Time for some photographs. Back you go. The food will keep." #1: I'd missed my after-school snack, and it'd taken Vanessa and Prof HOURS to convince Mom to consent to this, so I was VERY hungry. But I could hardly claim they didn't need me for the photographs, so I had to turn around. Everyone thought taking photos was a great idea, other than the previously noted exception, but I put on a happy face. LOTS of photos were taken. Every possible combination of people had to be taken in every possible position. It was quite ridiculous. I was glad we'd have some commemorative photos, but by about the 800th shot I considered my need for a keepsake had been amply catered for. And speaking of "catered", have I mentioned that I was hungry? Andrew's pocket distressingly seemed to contain as many memory sticks as Prof's did handkerchiefs. His Lordship was going to have to pull rank on everybody soon. Hopefully enough of them would fall for it. I did have a little bit of fun. I borrowed the camera and took a couple of photos myself, mostly so I could see if I could create TK-fingertips when looking through a lens. I couldn't, even if I adjusted the lens to be as close to normal vision (no zooming) as I could make it. Creating TK-fingertips normally and then looking through the lens at their location caused them to cancel in half a second too, so through a lens was a definite no-no. I guessed the reason was probably to do with my not being able to judge the fingertips' location properly. Finally Andrew announced, "Sorry, that's the last memory stick full." I was sorry too, that it hadn't happened sooner. There was one tiny incident that proved that Carol and I weren't the only Andersons causing Mom problems. Robert was taking some photographs and he complimented the girls on their "attractive blouses", and I enjoyed the look on Mom's face when Donna responded by telling everyone, "When my tits get bigger, I'm going to wear tops like that too." The more Donna can distract Mom until the new situation is accepted, the better. The photography ending prompted Vanessa to say something wonderful, "Time for the wedding dinner! To the dining room everyone. Felicity, would you help me in the kitchen please?" She had a roast chicken - what a mom-in-law! Which reminded me to tell Prof, "I LOVE the way my mother-in-lawlessness cooks!" That got some chuckles. Speaking of getting things, I had a girl on each side of me, hand-feeding me pieces of gravy-soaked roast chicken, while my hands rubbed their bare legs. Life is GOOD, especially the roast chicken part! (I was VERY hungry.) I suddenly recalled that my girls weren't wearing panties. I couldn't believe how long I'd forgotten that! Having remembered, I decided to remind them. I picked a moment when everyone was distracted, then rubbed both girls' legs CONSIDERABLY higher than before. Both girls reacted shamelessly: their legs flew open, they stopped whatever else they were doing to suddenly turn to me to smile at or hug me. Carol even exclaimed, "Yes!" causing everyone to look at us. So much for my wanting to do this while everyone was distracted. As much as I wanted to rub both girls' pussies, doing it while everyone watched my upper-arms move back and forth was too embarrassing. I moved my hands rapidly back to their knees. "Aww," complained Julia. There were some toasts, lots of best wishes, and unfortunately LOTS of embarrassing jokes at my expense. No one else's; just mine. That's the way it always seems to happen. All the speakers considered themselves humorously inspired by my having two wives, so I had to suffer many jokes. Having two girlfriends wasn't just doubly embarrassing, I think it was at least four times as bad. I made a mental note to tell Julia not to find me any more wives. Nine times the embarrassment would not be worth it. Besides, I only had two hands. #4: #1: #2: There was very little sensible conversation, but there were plenty of nice comments, such as, "Would you like some more chicken, Lord?" Another example was Julia telling her parents, "Mom and Dad, you'll be interested to know that Carol is looking forward to having Mark's babies..." Carol interrupted with, "Oh yes! I can't wait. Three or four at least! Wouldn't that be neat?" Julia continued, "Not until my wife finishes school, but you can look forward to being 'grandparents-in-lawlessness', as Mark would say." After the clucky female comments, Mom asked, "But what about college, Carol? You've always wanted to go." Carol answered, "I'll go if Mark wants me to, but I'd rather look after my two loves and have babies. It's not like I'll need to go to college so I can get a job. Mark will easily earn enough for all of us." No one had an idea what my job would end up being, but several of them visibly tried to imagine it. I hoped none of them thought about jewelry store heists or handbag snatching. I also had good fun teasing Donna about her dress. "Donna, I'm shocked! All these years I thought I had a brother called Donna, and now that I've finally seen you in a pretty dress, I see I was wrong." I also used, "How long have you been a pretty girl?" That sort of thing. Donna called me "Silly", but she visibly enjoyed it. Mom had a couple of little announcements, both of which were extremely welcome. First she said, "It's a pity the three of you can't have a honeymoon, especially with the restrictions we have to put on you until the trial, but Vanessa and I agree that you can skip school tomorrow if you wish, so you can have a three-day weekend. Unless there's a test or something that you have to go in for." We all declared ourselves to be test free. I was even telling the truth, not that I would've said differently in any case. Mom also told me, "I've talked to a doctor about your cast coming off. It was supposed to be in another week and a half, and he thought it was too soon, but was agreeable if an X-ray looks good and we sign a release. I've tentatively scheduled that for tomorrow after dinner, that way it'll be off for your run on Saturday. Okay?" It was extremely okay. Not so much because of the run, as all my timing tests had been done with the cast on so I knew I could win, but because I was heartily sick of it being such a nuisance. Even when my family was leaving, people couldn't resist making embarrassing jokes. Dad asking Prof, "Do you think the soundproofing will be thick enough with the three of them?" Prof saying, "Maybe you're right. Perhaps we should limit the room to two people at a time?" Julia said, "We could stick half of Mark out of the window. The top half obviously because we've got plans for the useful half." I took the moral high ground by letting the jokes wash over me, and also because I'd run out of comebacks. After a few more such comments to me, and much more mushy comments to the girls, we FINALLY got to say goodbye to everyone and go upstairs. ------- Chapter 51: Carol's Deflowering; the Preliminaries Thursday, April 14, 2005 (Continued) Once the door was closed, Julia grabbed me and exclaiming, "I can't believe we got away with that! I thought your parents were going to ruin everything, but now it's even better. We can be open in front of BOTH families! That's WONDERFUL! We don't have to make up excuses for you two to come over here, and after the trial we don't even have to restrict ourselves to this room. That's going to make things even better. Yippee!" Carol joined us in our celebratory hug, and Julia said to her, "Remember all those times you complained to me that it wasn't fair you were Mark's sister. Now you've got the best of both worlds: he's your lover, or he will be VERY shortly," Julia kissed Carol to show her pleasure at that idea, "and you live in the same house as him. You can be intimate every day. I wish I could do that! Your parents are even okay with your having his babies later too. You've got everything you want. You're a lucky girl! I'm so pleased for you." Carol replied, "I can't believe how my life has changed. A month ago it was boring and now it's perfect. This is far, far better than my best dream. Thank you so much for such a perfect wedding, and for letting me join your relationship with Mark. And thank you, Mark, for having me." I thought that was a perfect opening to "have her." I could see Julia had a similar idea, except it turned out a little different from I'd expected. Instead of Julia and me ganging up on Carol, Julia made sure the two girls ganged up on me. It was terrible (yeah, right!). Julia commanded, "Down on your knees, Wife#2!" Carol immediately dropped. "You've not seen our Lord's cock properly yet, have you?" "No. I've wanted to, but he's never let me. Just that quick glimpse when he changed after we kissed before." #1: "Put your hand on the front of his pants, and rub." Carol complied with considerable enthusiasm. She's a lovely girl. Julia asked, "Doesn't that feel good?" "Yes," from Carol and me. Julia moved behind me, rubbed herself against my back, and put her arms around my waist for them to join with Carol's introduction to her Lord's very happy member. After a minute, "Undo his pants and take them off, darling." Darling did. I reached my hands behind me, and put them around Julia. Awkward, but I wanted them out of the way while Carol followed her instructions. Then I remembered than Julia was not wearing any underwear, so put my hands under her skirt and very much enjoyed rubbing her bare ass. Carol had undone my belt, lowered my zip, and pulled my pants down. Julia helped by pushing the rear of them down too. My pants fell to the floor, leaving my underwear on. That would need to be corrected. My shirttails were hanging over the area of mutual interest, so I started unbuttoning it from the top. I didn't want Carol to get off her knees to do it, as I quite liked her down there. Julia said, "Pull his underwear down too, sweetie." Carol took hold of the waistband on either hip, and pulled them down. Naturally they got hung up on my cock, an effect that was obscured by my shirt. Carol was puzzled by their stopping after she managed to get them down several inches. I thought it was rather cute that she was so sweet and innocent. Very soon she was only going to be sweet. I finished unbuttoning my shirt while the underwear hang-up happened, so I opened my shirt wide to give Carol a chance to figure out the problem by herself. It didn't take her long, as the problem was staring her right in the face. I commanded, "Put your hands behind your back, Carol." She did so, although I could see she hadn't expected that order. "Now pull my underwear down using only your mouth." #4's got a vivid imagination, and in this case a very agreeable one (we all presumed it was #4 who'd spoken). "Mmm, good idea," agreed Carol. #4: She raised herself on her knees and moved her head to my stomach. It was easy for her mouth to get a grip on my waistband just beside my cock, as there was quite a lot of air between my stomach and the band. She pulled it up a little, then out, and then - I'm happy to say - down. The top half of my cock abruptly swung into view. Carol hesitated, staring at it for several seconds and clearly wanting to investigate further. Unfortunately I'd told her to keep her hands behind her back and her mouth was holding my underwear. She eventually decided to keep pulling my underwear down, so she resumed lowering her head. I felt Julia pushing them down from the rear. It's nice that the girls help each other. Soon Carol had to walk her knees farther away so she could get her head down to my ankles. When my underwear were all the way down, Carol let them go, then struggled to kneel upright again. While she was doing that, Julia used a foot to push them all the way to my ankles. I wanted to step out of my pants and underwear, but I still had my shoes on and feared I might get tangled up. So I turned my head around toward Julia and asked her, "Please undo my shoes and take them off so I can step out of my pants." Julia bent to do that while Carol was now back on her knees staring at my cock. Which was staring right back at her (actually at the ceiling over her, but you get the idea). I - almost certainly #4 - said, "Keep your hands behind your back, Wife#2. You may do anything you want with your mouth though." Happily the "anything she wanted" was exactly what #4 (and numbers 1, 2 and 3) had in mind. Carol leaned forward and ran her tongue up the length of the underside of my cock. Wow, did that ever feel good! Carol must have enjoyed it too, as she did it again. She was EASILY my favorite sister. After a few more such licks she started trying to lick farther around my cock, rather than just the easily available underside. When she tried to get her head around to lick the sides, the pressure of her tongue causes my cock to bob around, making it harder for her to keep her tongue in contact. After a few seconds' frustration, she had an excellent idea. Carol tilted her head as far sideways as she could, and put her lips on either side of the base of my shaft. By pressing it against my stomach, Carol easily had most of the shaft held along her mouth. She held it firmly with her lips (good sisters shouldn't bite their brother there), swiping her tongue from side to side, taking it up and down my cock's underside a few times. It was very nice. Then it got even nicer when she slid her head up and down, rubbing the whole length of my cock along her mouth. Carol did it SLOWLY, several times, while using her tongue to good effect as well. It was slow, delightful and quite intense. #1: Carol was still sliding her mouth up and down my cock, when I became aware of Julia. I realized she'd been trying to get my attention for some time. My shoes were both undone and Julia had been waiting for me to lift a foot so she could slide them off. I must have been distracted. I couldn't think by what, because I couldn't think at all. I raised one foot as carefully as I could, to avoid moving my hips and making Carol stop. I'm a considerate guy. Julia removed that shoe, pushed the pants and underwear off that foot, then removed my sock. All with my keeping one foot in the air and my hips motionless. It's good to be graceful sometimes. In case you were in any doubt, this was one of those times. Julia then scooted around my back to the other foot, and we repeated the procedure there. After which I gave my full attention to Carol's ministrations. I presume Julia must have tidied up all my gear because it wasn't heaped on the floor next time I thought to look, which wasn't for ages. Julia returned and stood behind me again, rubbing her hands all over my chest, upper-thighs, ass, and everywhere else that would feel good except my cock. That she left entirely to Carol. I reached around behind me again, to put my hands under Julia's dress, only to discover she wasn't wearing it anymore. I was immediately aware that I could feel her naked breasts pressing into my naked back. I was amused I hadn't realized that before. Distracted again, I guess. Almost my entire attention was on my cock and Carol's mouth. It was exquisite, especially coming from my beautiful, historically innocent sister. On one of her downward movements to my base, Carol showed commendable initiative by lowering her head just a little more and starting to lick my ball sack. It felt fantastic too, especially in the area between the two balls, in line with the underside of my cock. I'd been previously unaware that my scrotum felt different there, but it's good to learn something new every day. Carol went back to my cock again, but I spread my legs a little wider in case she wanted to lick the interesting new area again. Her intentions lay in the other direction though. At the top of the next slow journey up my cock, Carol didn't reverse direction. Instead she moved her mouth even higher, and the head of my cock slipped entirely into her mouth. Oh no! She moved backward just a little to create room between my cock and stomach, straightened her head back to its usual vertical orientation, and then lowered her head onto my cock. Oh boy! I sucked in my breath while Carol sucked in something very different. Julia moved around my side in order to see what I'd reacted to. Seeing Carol's head going up and down, Julia quietly asked, "Is she good?" "She is very, VERY good. This is WONDERFUL. Carol is SUPERB at this!" She was too; I could already feel the faint stirrings of the start of my orgasm. I had two girls to satisfy tonight - a wonderful 'problem' to have - so I decided not to let myself go off now, so did a mini-go-soft to back it off a bit. I wasn't exaggerating much about Carol, she was doing very well. Part of it was because she was slow and careful, part of it was that she was on her knees and using only her mouth. Those restrictions should've reduced the quality of the experience because they limited her movements, but somehow they boosted my pleasure. Psychology is a strange thing. And speaking of strange psychology, her being my sister was a delightful piece of perversion. I made sure I complimented Carol repeatedly. Hopefully she'd want to do this again and again. Julia knelt beside Carol, suggesting to her, "Take your dress off. I'll keep our Lord's cock warm and wet for you." For me too! When Carol was naked and had resumed her position kneeling in front of me, Julia pulled off my cock to allow Carol back. I thought it was very nice that the girls were so good at sharing our favorite toy. I noticed that Julia also had her hands clasped behind her back. She awkwardly spread her legs wider and crouched to get her head as low as possible, then she started inserting it between my legs under Carols head. Having recently discovered how good it felt to have my nutsack licked, I quickly opened my legs wider to make it easier for Julia to get in. I soon had two, beautiful, naked girls licking and sucking my cock and balls. The frequency of mini-go-softs increased considerably. I could have stood there all night, but I became aware that Carol was getting a bit uncomfortable. Julia was even more hunched over, so I reluctantly decided to move us to the bed. After just one more minute, or maybe two. During the third minute, Julia moved her head even further under me, and licked behind my ballsack, halfway between by scrotum and asshole. I had to say, "Oh, that feels good, Julia. Do some more of that please?" I intended just for another minute or two, honest. You truly can't blame me, as I could hardly have discovered that licking that area felt so good by myself, could I? I could rub it with my TK though. I tried that the next time Julia was busy farther 'north'. It felt okay, but nowhere near as good as when Julia licked it. Not too many minutes later I suggested we move to the bed. I helped the two girls to their feet, while complimenting Carol effusively. She really is a lovely girl. The girls lay me on my back in the middle of the bed, positioned themselves on either side of me, then went straight back to where they'd been previously. For someone with - I believe - absolutely no prior experience with boys, Carol was taking to it like a duck to water. She was also watching Julia closely, ever the diligent student. Julia sidled her ass around so that it was closer to my head, and told Carol to do the same, "That way Mark can reach our bodies, rub our tits, play with our asses, and maybe stick fingers up our assholes." Carol giggled - something I particularly enjoyed, given where her mouth was at the time - then pulled back so she could ask, "Does he really do that? Isn't that dirty?" Julia - who had replaced Carol's mouth while Carol was talking - took her mouth off me to answer Carol (whereupon Carol replaced Julia's mouth on me. They're a damned good team!), "Yes, I think that's why he enjoys it. He's a pervert, and he's going to be even more of one shortly, when he starts making love to his sister." Carol and I both made "Mmm"-type sounds at that idea. I was already as hard as I could be, and was more than ready to make good use of it. Julia's comment sounded like a damned good idea to me, whether or not I'd be "damned" for doing it. It'd be worth it. I said, "I like the sound of that! I'd like to start by putting Carol in the middle, please, and having both of us working on her." Julia said, "Goody. I like 'working' on Carol, as you so romantically put it. Let's work her into a tizzy, repeatedly." Carol took my place in the middle, and Julia and I started 'working' on her. "Carol," I ordered, "put your hands behind your head and leave them there. You're forbidden to remove them." Carol complied. As there was no hurry, I started by caressing her torso and face with light kisses and touches with my hands. Julia followed suit. We trailed kisses up and down, always bypassing her breasts, but tantalizing her by getting closer, stalling there as if tempted, then moving away. Each time getting just a little closer or staying a little longer. We each had a hand trailing down her body, rubbing her upper-thighs, hips, stomach. Rubbing everywhere except where she most wanted to be rubbed. We probably spent ten minutes slowly increasing Carol's arousal before I made the first real sexual contact. I started kissing and licking around the base of her breasts, where the 'plains' first merged into the 'foothills' (leading up to the 'mountains'. Please excuse the silly metaphor, but when she's lying on her back Carol's breasts inspire such comparisons). By now Carol was very sensitive and her body was reacting strongly to new sensations. I also let my hand wander much closer to her pussy, so my fingers were sliding around the sensitive, uppermost areas of her thighs and alongside her bald pussy, just fractions of an inch away from her outer pussy lips. Julia copied everything I was doing, so Carol was getting it in stereo. Carol was starting to breathe heavily between her moans. Every minute or so she'd make a comment: "This is SO good with the two of you!", "Ohh, I'm tingling all over", "Wow, this has never happened to me before", "PLEASE touch me more, and harder." The latter comment I ignored, except to smile. After several more minutes, Carol wasn't interested in subtlety, she'd escalated her comments to, "I really, REALLY need you to fuck me, Mark. PLEASE! I REALLY need it NOW!" I replied, "We haven't even got close to sucking your nipples yet. Remember, we said we were going to do that. "I'm ready now! This is the right time right now." "You're going to have to be MUCH more patient. At this rate it's going to be ages before anything even touches your pussy, let alone goes inside it." "Arrgghh! You're torturing me. I've wanted you for DAYS. Please hurry." Julia replied, "Patience, our little sex-slave. You're giving us a lot of pleasure like this, so why should we ever stop? I think we can keep this up for hours! And we have tomorrow off school, so there's no hurry at all." "ARRGGHH!" It was cruel. Carol had been turned on by many things: the wedding ceremony's emphasis on my mastery and her subservience, her sucking my cock, all of us being naked, and what we were doing to her body now. Plus she knew she was going to lose her virginity soon. Although not soon enough, according to her pleadings. She was in need, and it was cruel to tease her. Not too cruel though, and it was a lot of fun, so we carried on at the same pace. The next time she begged me to make love to her, I said, "Judging by the volume of juices running out of your pussy you're getting very turned on. I wonder if we should go slower to give you a chance to calm down?" "Arrrggghhh!" #2: Despite Carol's limited vocabulary, she had other redeeming features, and I moved to a slightly higher elevation on the nearest redeeming feature, adding sucks and little nips with my teeth to my kisses and licks, working my way all around it, always staying well away from her nipple. From time to time Julia's and my faces would meet in the middle, and I made a point of kissing her as erotically as I could, making sure Carol could see our tongues playing with each other. I'd often make some little comment, such as, "Carol really is a delightful little sexual plaything isn't she?", "I can see that we're going to get lots of use out of her body. It's delightful to play with, isn't it?" Things like that. On one occasion I said to Julia, "Have you tasted this recently?" as I quickly wiped my hand right across Carol's pussy, collecting a good quantity of Carol's juices. I'd rubbed my hand across the entire length of her pussy, but I'd done it so quickly and with no warning, so it was over by the time Carol realized it was happening. Which left her even more frustrated, exactly as I'd intended. I held up my wet hand to Julia, and we took turns licking it and commenting, "Doesn't our little slave taste delicious?", "If we keep playing with her until breakfast, I think I'll just drink her instead of going downstairs." When my hand was clean I asked Julia, "Do you want me to get some more of Carol's pussy juice for you? She really is a very wet girl, I can easily get a lot, especially if I rub her pussy, or even put my fingers inside." Carol enthusiastically seconded my offer. "Please get some more. Rub my pussy. I want you to." Julia had no trouble finding a good answer, "Thank you for your offer, my Lord, but there really is no need. I'll go down there myself, and drink her directly from the source." Julia paused, and Carol said, "Yes, yes, yes. Do that!" Julia continued, "Just as soon as I've finished playing with her breast. Her breasts are beautiful aren't they? I could play with them for hours!" I agreed, "Now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind drinking her myself. But I drank so much at dinner so I'm not thirsty yet. Maybe later. And, yes, her breasts are gorgeous. I agree with you that we should just play up here for a while." "{Groan}." "Maybe after an hour or so we can swap sides, and start all over again?" "Arrgghh!" Julia and I continued our cruel, but fun, teasing. Carol soon got desperate enough to think of a new tack. She begged, "PLEASE can I take my hands down? I HAVE TO touch myself. I desperately need to. More than I EVER have before!" Julia answered, "Your Lord said it was forbidden. If he wanted you to frig yourself he would tell you to. We will give you release WHEN your Lord decides. Be a good girl, my wife." "I'm sorry, but it's SO hard!" "I know. We are deliberately making it hard for you. Testing your obedience gives us pleasure. We will test it many times from now on, especially sexually. It's important you learn to obey so we can take whatever pleasure we want from your body whenever we want. You are now our sexual toy, to be used however and whenever we want. In this bedroom or on the field at school." Carol was getting even more turned on by Julia's 'explanation', which was obviously Julia's intention. Julia was stimulating Carol's mind, which meant I should concentrate on her body, so I resumed my mouth and hand movements. Julia moved up to whisper in Carol's ear, leaving one hand to caress around Carol's breast. I couldn't hear what Julia was saying, but its effect on Carol soon became clear. After two or three minutes Carol's body reached an unsustainable level of arousal. It started twitching uncontrollably. I thought at first that she was trying to get her nipple in contact with my mouth, but soon realized it was outside of her control. I moved up to Carol's other ear and started whispering to her: "I love you, my wife", "I love my sister SO much", "We are going to have a wonderful life all together." Cute things like that. Then I overheard one of Julia's comments and saw Carol's reaction to it. I changed my comments to match: "What a wonderful slut you are going to be for us", "I'm going to fuck you in the ass soon", "We are both going to fuck you in public where other people will see you." The twitches grew into spasms, and Carol started calling out in between her groans, "I'm going to cum, I'm going to cum, oh, oh, it's going to be big, oh, it's coming, it's coming." Her volume and thrashings rose louder and louder. I'd never seen Carol so excited. In my few previous sessions with her - our 'cuddle sessions' at home - I'd always been cautious about getting her too excited in case her noise brought parental investigation. Caution was the last thing on my mind now, so Carol had been driven well past however excited I'd seen her before. "I'm cumming, I'm cumming, I'M CUMMING, ARRRRR!" Carol's arms had been behind her head, as instructed, but she used them to grab each of our heads in vise-like hugs, holding them tight against hers as she screamed her cum. It wasn't good for our eardrums, but I otherwise enjoyed seeing her have such a great climax. Her grip around our necks relaxed a few seconds later, and both Julia and I said "Phew." We laughed at each other's comment. Julia added, "That's the biggest one I've seen her have. Two-on-one is great, isn't it? Giving or receiving." "That's for sure. Thanks very much for making this possible, Julia." "My pleasure, especially soon, I hope." "That's right, you haven't had your turn yet. That's unfair, considering you made this whole thing happen." Julia disagreed with that idea, "NONE of this would have happened without you. She's your sister and I'm your girlfriend. The common word is 'your'. You're in the middle of this. You showed me you wanted Carol and I got her for you. For us, as it's happened. You have an unrealistically low opinion of yourself." Julia turned to Carol, who was listening to us, "Who is the most fabulous person on the planet?" Carol unhesitatingly said, "Mark, of course. And the most incredible, nicest, most intelligent, awesome, and lots more. I'm reliably informed he's the best lover too, but I'll have to get back to you on that one, {giggle}. Soon, I hope. So far so good though, that was an incredible orgasm. I've never had one that strong before. You two are DIRTY! I love it!" Julia said, "We've only just started. Are you ready for more?" It must have been a rhetorical question as Julia didn't wait for the answer. Instead she reached down and started moving Carol's legs apart. Carol spread her own legs, saying, "Oh, I thought it'd be someone else's turn now." While Julia was moving to put herself between Carol's legs, Julia explained, "No. There are too many virgins in this room, and we keep going until there are none left, even if that takes hours. {Slurp}." The "{Slurp}" was Julia licking one of Carol's upper-thighs. "You're a very wet little girl, yummy." Julia concentrated on her cleanup duties, leaving me to get back to Carol's breasts. I started licking around the base of the nearest, resuming just a little back from where I had left off. I used my hands and mouth to give both her breasts a lot of attention, but I still didn't touch a nipple. After about a minute Carol suddenly jerked and moaned. It wasn't due to anything I was doing, so I guessed Julia had licked up all the loose juice and was looking for more from the source. (You probably won't be surprised to know that I wasn't centered, so proximity couldn't tell us what Julia was doing. It was probably at too small a scale to be discernible in proximity anyway, even if one of my minds had volunteered to go on duty.) I kept on with my slow game, but Julia's actions were rapidly getting Carol very worked up again, and she was on a short fuse anyway. I realized it was time for me to accelerate my activities. I suddenly decided I didn't want to be patient anymore. I wanted to get my cock into her. So one more fairly quick cum for Carol this way, then her third would be the real thing. I ramped up my forcefulness, and soon was using both my hands to lift a breast, pull it taut and hold it so I could alternate kisses and tiny, painful nips around it. The two girls are very different in this respect. Julia doesn't like it rough, except for fast thrusts as she nears her orgasm. No way would Julia like receiving what I was doing to Carol now. Not that I could duplicate it exactly, as Julia's breasts were too small. But Carol loves it increasingly forceful and even painful as she gets closer to her cum. I'd played with her enough at home to know that the more turned on she is, the rougher she likes to be handled. This evening included making her orgasm, so I was going much further with her, finding that her liking of roughness increased too. I found it erotic, but scary at the same time. I know Carol gets a great deal of pleasure from it, and I enjoy giving her that pleasure, but sometimes I wince in discomfort at what I do to her. Julia was driving Carol up quickly, so I did my best to match my actions to Carol's rapidly rising level of arousal. I circled her nearest breast with both hands and squeezed it, so the top of the breast bulged from the top of my hands - the nipple demanding attention. I caught Carol's attention, and declared, "I'm NOT going to lick or suck your nipple. I'm going to BITE it. Hard! Get ready; this is going to hurt!" Carol's face was a mix of fear, anticipation and lust. She certainly didn't indicate that I should stop, so I opened my mouth and pulled back my lips so she could see my teeth. I held her eyes, and made repeated biting motions as I slowly lowered my mouth to her nipple, squeezing her breast even harder as my mouth got nearer. I could see that Carol was responding more to my actions than Julia's. Good! When my mouth was very close I opened wide enough to insert her nipple, and paused. Our eyes were still locked, and she knew that any instant my teeth were going to close. I made her wait two or three seconds, then as fast as I could I bit-and-released. It was a hard - but VERY quick - bite. It must have hurt, but it was over before she could even start to react. Carol gave a shriek, and while the echo was still dying, I lowered my mouth onto her nipple, sucking, licking, gnawing and biting gently. I pushed her breast down into her chest, to free up my hands, which reached across to her other breast, and I played with that simultaneously, especially pinching its nipple between two tightly squeezing fingers, and 'biting' it with the edges of two fingernails. I looked down, to see Julia attached directly over Carol's pussy, and working it energetically. I watched while one of Julia's hands let go of Carol's thigh and moved underneath her. In a couple of seconds it was obvious from Julia's arm movements, and Carol's reaction, that Julia had just stuck a finger up Carol's asshole, and was starting to ram it in and out. I looked back at Carol's face, and it was showing way more arousal than even just a few seconds ago. I removed my mouth from her nipple, and used one hand on each to keep the sensations going. Having learned the power of words on Carol from the previous time, I said, "You are OUR slut. We will use you and ABUSE you in every dirty, perverted, sexual way we want. I COMMAND you to enjoy it, you dirty little girl!" I was drawing my breath for my next mental assault, when Carol's orgasm started. She started reciting, "Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. FUCK." In ever-increasing volume. I started calling it with her, and pulling her nipple in sync too. I don't know if she even noticed, and only a few seconds later, "FUCK. FUCK. FFUUCCKK. FFUUUUUCCKKKK!" Prof's decision to soundproof this room had been a very good idea. Carol bucked. Julia nearly had her finger broken when Carol's hips shot into the air, but Julia quickly whipped that finger out and used the hand to hang on for dear life. Poor Julia weighs so little that I don't think she could hold Carol down at all - it was solely a matter of whether Julia could hang on until the ride stopped. I remembered the first time Julia had clamped me and bucked. I outweighed her by more than two-to-one, but she'd still frightened me then. Now Julia was on the receiving end from someone much bigger than her. I laughed, but I don't think anyone noticed. When Carol was at the end of a downstroke, Julia pulled her head out and leaped off the wild beast, rolling to safety. We watched while Carol's orgasm finished breaking over her. "She goes off well, doesn't she?" I observed. "I'll say. She's very noisy too." "Haha. Not compared to you, she's not." Julia was surprised, "I make more noise than that?" "Do you ever!" "Wow, that must be loud. No wonder I get teased so much. I'm really louder than Carol?" "Easily. I like to think it's proportional to your enjoyment, but I suspect it might be related to your lack of shame." "Haha. Maybe both." Carol was limp and quiet now, and I said to Julia, "Move to her other side. I want the two of us to cuddle her." A few seconds later we were holding her between us; cuddling, lightly caressing, stroking her hair, and that sort of thing. Julia passes out completely when she has a really big orgasm. Apparently, from what I could see this time, Carol is different. Carol was awake, but she wasn't tracking the conversation. Her body was awake, but half her mind had gone on a little vacation. We just held Carol, stroking her until she spoke a few seconds later, "I can't imagine a life with you two. It's too intense to imagine. You've said we're going to have lots of sex, but how could I survive much more of that!" There was a pause, then Carol suddenly exclaimed, "Oh." Julia asked, "What did you just think of?" Carol answered, "I was thinking that it was no wonder you wanted me to help you with Mark. I was about to say something like, 'We need a third wife.' But then I realized a third wife wouldn't spread out the excitement, she'd ADD to it. Three of you could work on me together. That gave me such a scare I said 'Oh.' I don't think I could survive that!" Julia laughed, "Married only a few hours and already you're imagining having sex with more wives. You've certainly changed your tune from your jealousy this afternoon." "Yeah, that's completely gone now. Maybe you've licked it away, haha. You were completely right, Julia: more is better for everyone. I just hope I build up some strength before Mark finds another wife." I remembered Julia's reactions to the girls that'd tried to flirt with me at school. I laughed at the memory, and when the girls looked at me, I explained, "Julia has been - I'll charitably say 'protective' - of me at school. Every time another girl tries to approach me, Julia goes straight into her 'Mad, Homicidal, Spitting-Cat Mode'. I've even had to pick Julia up and carry her away because I thought she was about to scratch another girl's eyes out. Do you remember that in the lunchroom, Julia?" "Of course. I've memorized ALL the girls who've approached you. I was watching out for them in case any of them tried again. For the first week or so I was very worried that you'd fall for their flirting, but I'm relaxed about it now, especially because of how automatic your dismissals are." "How do you mean automatic?" "When some slut approaches you, you just wave her off and keep walking. I don't think you even consciously notice some of them anymore. You notice the ones with big tits that are showing them off, and also the ones that get in your face because their nuisance level is higher, but I can see you don't care about any of them, so I've already stopped worrying about it. For a while I thought you'd drop me to play the field like most guys would, but after the first couple of days you haven't even looked tempted. That's a BIG relief, and another sign of how special you are." I chose not to worry about Julia's big-titted exception because she didn't seem upset about it. I knew I was guilty of that because I'd noticed me noticing them, so the less said the better. So I said, "Dad made it VERY clear to me how stupid that'd be, and Mom explained some of the emotions you and your mom would be having because of me, especially because of your giving me your virginity. Between the two of them I got a very clear idea of how much it'd hurt you if I even looked at any of those sluts, as you so delicately called them. It's been surprisingly easy to be a good boy, once I got over the shock of having any girl want to flirt with me. -- "My original point was that Carol's comment about a third wife is irrelevant, as I'm never going to get a chance to talk with any other girls. Not to mention I'm only fifteen - how many 15-year olds need more than two wives? Haha." Carol said, "Oh, oh. I know the answer to this one! Can I answer please?" Julia nodded. "Other boys don't have anything to do with you. You're our Lord, and you can do whatever you want." Julia smiled, "Very good answer, my wife. Our Lord can do whatever he wants, and we'll help him. If he wants another wife, we will help him get one." Carol answered immediately, "Yes. I remember how I was angry when you said you'd seduced me into this marriage. Now I'm looking forward to seducing another girl for Mark. That'd be very exciting." My cock went BOING! From semi-hard to rock-hard in an instant. The thought of Carol seducing another girl was, as Carol had said, "very exciting". VERY exciting! I hope I get to watch. Then a thought hit me. Stupidly my mouth voiced it, without bothering to check with the rest of my brain. I asked, "How come everyone always talks about more wives and not more husbands?" The answer started occurring to me even as my mouth was closing, but Julia answered it anyway, "Do you want another man in this marriage? Do you want to make love to a man?" I didn't have to think about the answer to that, "NO!" "So we only add wives. You can't stop thinking that we're all equal, can you? There is no equality in this marriage. You are the Lord. There won't be any other Lords. You're unique. We serve and obey you. Forget about finding husbands for us. It was for us because I'm sure you weren't wanting any for you! You are the only man we ever want." Julia didn't deem it necessary to check the last statement with Carol. "Okay. I did realize as soon as I finished asking the question that it was a silly one, so I am slowly learning to accept our situation. It's not something that I ever thought would happen, so it takes some getting used to. It's beyond my wildest dreams actually, so it's very hard to believe." "You are beyond Carol's and my wildest dreams, but here you are, naked in bed with us and married for life. So sometimes not only do dreams come true, but even 'beyond wildest dreams' do. But you're right about me keeping other girls away from you. I was too protective before. At first I was protective out of jealousy, then I was protective because I didn't know that you understood enough about what sort of girls were chasing you, but I see that you do understand. I was doubly stupid because Mom and Dad are always teaching us to value mistakes as a learning experience. I've been preventing you from learning, which is exactly the mistake Andrew told you off for. Remember the gun night?" Having my girlfriend tell her brother to shoot me if I didn't fuck her vigorously enough was quite memorable, so I nodded. Carol asked with concern, "Gun?" Julia answered, "I'll tell you later, sweetie. Don't worry, nothing bad happened or would've happened. I just got sex-crazy for Mark and I overreacted by saying some stupid things. I'll tell you all about it later." -- Julia returned to her main point, "Mark, you're right. I have been mistreating you. I think twenty hard smacks on my bare bottom are well deserved. If you agree, then I order Wife#2 to take my punishment for me." Wife#2 was quite surprised by this turn of events. I recognized it as just a tease, so I said, "Twenty five smacks, I think. I will make them quite hard too, but I'm not in the mood now so we'll do them tomorrow morning." Carol had to ask, "Umm, who are you going to smack?" "Who would you like me to smack?" "Um, I don't know. It just seemed weird the way Julia said it." I pretended to clarify the situation, "Julia has misbehaved, and should be punished. Smacks on a bare bottom are a good punishment. That makes sense doesn't it?" Carol had no trouble this far through the plan, "Yes." I couldn't help drawing it out though, "So I don't see a problem then." I knew Carol did, so I paused to let her speak. "But she said you should smack me. I don't understand that." I teased some more, "You don't? I thought she spoke very clearly. She wanted her punishment smacks to be made on your bottom." "I'm still confused. Who will you smack tomorrow?" "You, of course." "Why me? I'm not complaining or anything, I just don't understand." "Because Julia can order you to do absolutely anything she wants you to do. Certainly including your taking her punishment. That's why you are her servant: to do things she doesn't want to do. I imagine you'll always be getting her punishments. As well as your own of course." "Oh." Carol didn't know what to think about this bizarre turn of events. I'd heard Julia talk about smacking Carol before, and knew she'd done it at least once as part of their "Little Girl and Miss" playacting. Julia's mentioning it again obviously was because she knew it stimulated Carol. However, I didn't want to smack her tonight. I wanted to make love to her next. "Love", not fucking. We'd been pretty coarse with her the last two times we'd taken her to orgasm, and the next time was going to be her lovingly administered deflowering, or my name wasn't "Lord". I could still tease her though. I remembered Julia's lesson about using erotic imagery on Carol, so I said, "As our servant, if we wanted you to go downstairs now and get us a plate of snacks, you'd go wouldn't you?" "Of course. Do you want me to?" And she started getting up. I quickly stopped that. I had other plans for her in the next few minutes. "No, I don't want you to. In a few minutes I want to be making love to you." "Oh." Followed by a full-faced, ear-to-ear smile and a, "Goody." "But if either of us ordered you to, you'd go wouldn't you?" Nod. "Even dressed the way you are?" "But I'm ... Oh." A second later, "But Andrew and Robert are down there, Prof and everyone. They might see me." "You're right. They 'might see you' or 'might not'. To be sure, I could order you to make up a plate of snacks then walk around the house making sure you offered some to everyone before you came back up here. After all, we're all family now." Carol asked, "Would you really do that?" "Probably not. But mainly because if I was hungry, then I'd want you to bring the food straight back here. They can get their own snacks! But the point is, if Julia or I ordered you to, then you would do it, wouldn't you?" Carol paused for a second, looking uncomfortable. Then suddenly all the worry on her face disappeared and she laughed. After which she happily said, "Yes, of course. No problem. Thank you for making that clear." Now I was confused. I was just teasing her. If I'd made something clear, then it wasn't clear to me. But from my extensive past experience with females, I knew the standard response for situations like this: plead ignorance and ask for an explanation. In this case I could skip the first step. "Carol, explain what I have made clear." "I suddenly understood what it means to be your and Julia's servant. I don't have to think about whether I WANT to do something or not, I just have to do it. I was thinking about all the embarrassment, and getting worried about being seen, and then I worried about disappointing you by not wanting to do as you wanted me. I'd do it, but I was still worried about your seeing that I didn't want to do it. That reminded me of the vows I made in the ceremony. I immediately realized how stupid I was. In that wonderful ceremony I vowed to 'joyously sacrifice my life to protect yours.' And I would too, I'd die happy if I could save your life. And I vowed to obey your orders too. Compared to sacrificing my life for yours, what you asked for was nothing. -- "So I realized how silly I was worrying about embarrassment. You OWN my life; I am yours. If you give me an order, then I obey it. It's so simple I can't understand why I didn't understand it quicker. Julia has explained it to me before, but I never got it until just now. That's so neat! I can still enjoy myself if you give me an order I like, but if you give me one I don't like, I can completely ignore my feelings and just do it." -- I could see another thought hit her. "Oh, even better. I suddenly realize that even unpleasant orders will be fun. I'll be proud of doing them. That's so cool! Hey Julia, remember you telling me that Mark might want me to run naked around our block at home, and you said you'd come with me. I understand exactly what you meant now. You'd come with me to show your pride in being his. Wow. I never got that until now. It's so easy isn't it?" Julia said, "Well done, darling. You've got it. Welcome to our marriage, and welcome to the rest of your life. You have arrived." Accompanied by appropriate hugs and kisses. And a few inappropriate ones too. While they were doing this, I was thinking about the tease I had planned. Being naked around family wasn't erotic (present company excepted), so I had been intending to say something about having a barbeque for my soccer team where Carol served us naked. Or at least dressed extremely revealingly. I'd never make her do that for real, but I liked the tease. Unfortunately Carol's comments gave me a sinking feeling about the future of my teases. In desperation I said, "So if I invited my soccer team around for a barbeque, and commanded you to serve them all afternoon naked, you'd do it?" "Sure." A one-word death knell for teasing. Damn, I'd really liked teasing my girls. I was silent for a few seconds, mourning the passing of an enjoyable pastime, when Carol added, "I don't think you're serious, but if you told me to, sure I'd do it." Julia said, "Carol had a revelation a minute ago, and I've been thinking one out for myself too. I just realized I was wrong to keep girls away from you. I wasn't just wrong, I was ENTIRELY wrong. I'm going to make amends for that. You still need to smack Carol's ass tomorrow morning as I definitely deserve that, but I need to make amends too. In school I'm not only NOT going to chase girls away from you anymore, I'm going to chase girls TOWARD you, haha. I'll start introducing you to my girlfriends and other girls I know. Some of them are very nice people, and you might like some of them. You do that too, Carol, okay? Find girls Mark might like and give him a chance to get to know them." "Sure. That's easy. Lots of them are repeatedly asking me for chances to meet Mark. I'll let them come over to my house one or two at a time when Mark is there. I'll tell them they have only got one chance to make a good impression on him, so to dress as sexily as they can, and be as obedient to him as they can." #4: #2: "Julia, Carol, darlings; I'm confused. It sounds like you are going to parade other girls in front of me, and that can't be right! What am I missing?" Julia answered, "Nothing. You've got it right. If we know any girls you might like we'll introduce them to you. Not exactly a parade, but obviously you need to meet a lot more girls." #4: "Why do I need to meet more girls? You know that I'm EXTREMELY happy with the two that I've got. When I asked about more husbands or wives before, I was just questioning the logic behind why you kept mentioning wives. I don't want any more wives. I fully intend to live a long, happy life with just the two of you, thank you VERY much!" "Oh you silly man! There are many wonderful women out there: beautiful, talented, useful, loving women. I'm sure we'll find several more wives for you, and for us too. They'll make our lives even better. It'll be wonderful." -- After a few seconds Julia asked, "You look puzzled, Mark. Why?" #4: "I left 'puzzled' behind several sentences ago. Now I'm completely and totally lost. You say you're going to introduce me to lots of girls and I don't know why. What am I supposed to do with them? Do you want me to pick one as a wife? Or even more than one. That seems to be what you're saying, but that can't be right?" Julia clarified, "Oh no, nothing as immediate as that. Picking wives is a serious business and you should pick from the very best quality girls and women we can find. I doubt if any we'll introduce you to will be good enough for you. That's mostly why I've been keeping the sluts away from you recently, because they're not good enough for you. I'm sorry for that now. It was wrong of me so I hope you give Carol a very hard spanking tomorrow." "So why are you planning to introduce me to girls soon? What do I do with them?" Julia answered in a way designed to show just how silly I was, she asked Carol, "Carol, what can our Lord do with any or all of the girls we introduce to him?" Carol answered, "Whatever he wants! He's the Lord." "Exactly right. Good girl." Logically the next question should've been "Can I screw them?", but there was no way I was going to ask that, even though I didn't know what it was that I feared. It'd either be a slap or Julia saying "Well obviously, you silly man." Either way, I'd make a fool of myself. I was still trying to work out what I could safely ask, when Julia saw the need for more explanation, "Mark, you didn't mean to, but you pointed out that I was blocking your access to girls. That wasn't right of me. I was being selfish and I don't want to do that any longer. I live for you, not for me. You're going to have a life with enormous power and responsibility, so I was wrong to prevent you from having fun, from learning about people, and from possibly finding more wives for us. Not that I expect you to find more wives immediately, especially as it's going to take you a while to be able to be sexually interested in other girls after me. I was being particularly stupid expecting you to find the best wives when I was trying to keep you ignorant of other girls. You've got a lot to learn about girls and I was keeping you from learning that, which the more I think about it the worse I think I was being..." #2: " ... Your first ever date was only two weeks ago, for goodness sake. How could I be so stupid as to think you could find more good wives with so little experience! Carol was a special case, of course. So the three of us have to work to get you more experienced with girls. We'll try to advise you, but there's no substitute for experience. I know it wasn't your intention, but thank you for helping me realize I was acting against your best interests." Fearing for Julia's sanity I asked, "Carol, my darling wife, how would you feel if I dated some other girl. Even if I took her to bed?" "Would I be allowed to join in? That'd be so cool. Haha, I'm just teasing you. You should see the look on your face..." #4: " ... My answer would normally just be, 'You're the Lord and can do whatever you want, ' but I've been thinking more about the vows we took and listening to Julia. She's right about the quality of your future being better if you have more wives. Look how much better your life is with Julia. If you could have another wife or two as good as Julia, that'd be wonderful for you. -- "Julia is right that you won't make good decisions if you don't have much experience, so her advice is very good. It'll be fun too. It's strange, but I don't feel jealous or insecure at all. I'm very happy with my place in your life now. I know you love me very much, that I'll always be your sister, and as soon as we can we'll have babies. No one will be able to serve you as well as I can, now I understand that so well. I'm very happy. I admire Julia's courage though, she has to be more concerned about losing you to other girls than I am." Before I could ask, Julia answered me, "Of course I'm concerned. You're an awesome man and could replace me a thousand times over if you wanted to, so I know it's impossible for me to force you to stay with me. But thanks to Annette Neumeyer, I know you love me unbelievably much, which is very reassuring. To be doubly safe, I'm also going to make myself indispensable to you. I'm going to do my best to make you want to keep me, by making you as successful and happy as I can. -- "I was the first person in the world to recognize your importance, which means a GREAT deal to me. Every day I feel shock over that happening to such an ordinary person as me. I've always felt I'd meet a special 'Mr. Right', but I never expected he'd be as special as you. I hope we might be fated to be together, and that fate made you blurt out my name to Annette after all those months of your keeping your love hidden. -- "Plus I see SO much future ahead of you that my parents and I can help you with, so I can't believe that fate will take you away from us any time soon. Your capabilities are huge, your potential is huge, your future is huge, and I will do the best I can for you. I'm confident you will never have any reason to reduce your wonderful opinion of me." [[Julia had two types of reasons for her bizarre idea. First, she knew I was a complete wimp with people, which did NOT suit her vision of my future at all. Something had to be done! Getting me to practice on meaningless girls offered a way of teaching me to be more assertive. Julia did almost literally worship me, did want the best for me, and it did include my having fun. It's just that her idea of "best for me" was very much her definition of "best", including me being good at being bossy, because Julia thought being bossy was very important. While the first of her reasons wasn't intentionally selfish, the second reason was: Julia LOVED the idea of being in charge of all the girls that would swarm around me (Julia's worship of me meant that she was sure other girls would swarm). Notice that she'd repeated said that she or Carol (who Julia could control) would introduce other girls to me, not that I'd find them myself. In all her years of bossing people around, she had never been in control of something as sought after as Julia thought I'd be, giving her great power over all the other girls who'd want to get near me. That power, plus the fact that all the other girls would see that Julia already had me, appealed to her ego enormously. You shouldn't think too poorly of Julia, because it's not as if I was EVER going to object! Julia expected to enjoy the process, but not nearly as much as I was going to!]] #4: #2: #4: #2: #1: "Julia, you're awesome too. Your devotion to me is awesome. I know you're planning my future a lot better than I could. Not just planning, but carrying out the plans too. You're incredible. I can't imagine ever doing without you, so perhaps you're right that we're fated to be together. I'll enjoy meeting more girls - what teenage boy wouldn't! - but no matter what they're like, no one could come close to making me even think about not having you with me. And Carol, your place in my life simply CANNOT be changed. You will be in my life forever!" Even before we'd consummated this marriage, it seems we've decided that I'm going to have extra-marital affairs. Julia does like to plan ahead. ------- Chapter 52: Carol's Deflowering; the Act Itself Thursday, April 14, 2005 (Continued) By some sort of unspoken agreement, conversation was finished with now, and it was time to start the deflowering process. Carol had fully recovered from her last orgasm, so we spent some time doing loving, affectionate things to build the right mood. Lots of kissing, hugging, saying loving things back and forth, and caresses focused on Carol. When I felt it was time, I said, "Carol, my love, I'm going to make love to you now. I'm going to take your virginity and make you my woman in body as well as mind." Being outvoted and having to sometimes watch girly TV programs at home has taught me a few good lines. "Julia, would you please go to the top of the bed to hold Carol's head in your lap. Hold her and kiss her while we make love for the first time." My being the Lord meant Julia immediately moved to do what I'd said. It was also helpful that Julia had already told me it was what she wanted. Carol smiled widely, and spread her legs ever wider. I moved between them as Julia inserted her lap under Carol's head. I gently pulled Carol a few inches toward me to give Julia room at the head of the bed. When she was in position, Julia reached over and removed a rubber from the bedside table, opened the foil and passed it to me. "Here my Lord, you'll need this." "Thanks, I forgot. Too many things on my mind, I guess." Carol said wistfully, "Umm, I wouldn't mind if you forget sometimes." Julia and I both laughed. Julia commented, "You wouldn't mind accidentally getting pregnant, you mean. Several years ahead of schedule." "Yeah, that'd be okay." Julia laughed again, "I like your attitude, but not your impracticality. It's a good thing that Mom and I already gotten a duplicate of my prescription for the pill for you. When your next period starts you're going on them. Your mother can arrange your own supply after that. While I remember, you are ordered not to get 'accidentally' pregnant until our Lord wants you to, okay? If he forgets to use a condom you'll remind him, and you'll take your pill every day. This is an order, darling. As much as I want you to have our Lord's babies, it is too soon for that." "Okay. It's a pity though." One thing at a time, I thought, starting with Carol's virginity. I bent down and moved my face to her pussy. Bare pussies are such a turn-on, especially very aroused, wet, aromatic, puffy, bare pussies that I'm about to put my cock into. I wanted to make sure Carol was even more aroused before I did the deed (that was the excuse I gave myself), so I spent a few minutes gently playing around, trying to get her as wet as possible. She was already wet enough, but we were having fun. Julia kept Carol well hugged; kissing her face, whispering sweet nothings in her ear, lightly caressing her, etc. Both girls were very happy, and I felt as happy as both of them combined. For the first time I put one mind on duty so I could use TK as such an awesome, superhuman power should be used. I ran several TK-fingertips over Carol's body, especially her breasts and nipples. Carol's moans confirmed my opinion that this was an excellent use for TK, although she didn't react nearly as strongly as Julia does to it. No one gets off on power as much as Julia. Under our triple 'assault' (Julia, me, and my TK-fingertips) Carol was very ready for the main event. I moved forward on my knees until my sheathed cock was at her entrance. Julia told her, "Here it comes, the moment you've been praying for. Our Lord is about to take you. He's about to make love to you and claim you as his. You have his ring on your finger, and soon his cock will be in you. Are you ready for this?" I started rubbing my cockhead around Carol's pussy, over her lips and clit but not penetrating yet. Her hips had started off relaxed, but she started thrusting them up trying to capture my cock. "Please," Carol begged. "I'm REALLY ready. I want you to take me. Please make me yours. I want it SO much." There was absolutely no chance I'd be able to do Active Centering, as even if all four of my minds tried it we'd all be distracted almost immediately. None of my minds wanted to be Inactive, so we had to do without TK for the dénouement. I put my arms under Carol's legs to lift them in the air, and moved my hips so my cock was at her entrance. I recentered very briefly to use a small TK-push to angle it down until it was 'hooked' just inside Carol's pussy. Carol's hips were bucking to try to get me inside her, she was moaning and begging for it, so I was probably being redundant when I asked, "Are you ready, my love? I'm about to make you mine." "I'm ready, I'm ready, damn it. Do it already!" Virgins can be quite temperamental, but that problem was easily fixed. I said, "I love you," then thrust my hips forward. Carol's hymen resisted far more than I expected, so I had to push even harder. There was a bizarrely large proportion of my weight pressing down on my cock and her cherry, so much so that I started worrying about my cock buckling under the pressure. That had to be a VERY bad thing! I just started to panic about that when I felt Carol rip open, plunging me in. Carol screamed, "FUCK, SHIT, CHRIST! FUCK THAT HURTS!" Carol NEVER talks like that! There were no temperamental virgins left, but there was one very pissed off ex-virgin. It wasn't exactly the romantic lovemaking session I was hoping for. I knew enough not to move. Apparently #4's education of a couple of years ago had included how to behave when having sex with virgin girls. God knows why he thought that information would ever be useful, but amazingly it now was, although I was sure he hadn't forecast this exact situation. I settled in to wait, spreading my knees and getting a comfortable grip on her legs. "FUCK. DON'T MOVE, DAMMIT!" Julia reassured her, "Relax, darling. It'll pass." "It GODDAMN better pass!" I did my best to freeze totally immobile, not even speaking. I was willing to wait for as long as it took. Hopefully the nice, quiet, polite, loving Carol would eventually come back. In her own time though, no hurry. I wasn't brave enough to make any comment about that. Even Julia froze. There were tears rolling down Carol's cheeks, and Julia didn't dare lean forward to kiss them away. I hated seeing her so badly affected, and felt really sorry for her. It totally killed my erotic mood, so I became soft. When Carol felt it, she said, "Thank God!" Soon I was so soft and small that there was no point in staying in her. I said, "Shall I pull out and lower you to the bed?" "Yes please. Slowly." I did so, watching her wince. When Carol was flat on the bed, I made to move out from between her legs, to make it easier for her to get comfortable, but Julia said, "You might as well stay there Mark. You'll have to resume in a few minutes." The way I felt now, I was quite happy to wait a year or two. I looked doubtfully at Julia, who said, "It has to be completed." Julia got up though, to clean up Carol's blood with some tissues. Seeing blood completely and utterly destroyed my last few shreds of sexual atmosphere. I even felt a little light-headed, as if I was going to faint. I wondered where the blood went that was draining from my head, because it sure wasn't going to my cock. I was very uncomfortable with the idea of resuming shortly, but it was probably best not to argue about it in front of Carol so I waited some more. After a few minutes Carol's breathing settled down, her face and body relaxed. "Damn, that hurt. You never told me it was going to be that bad." Julia, who had returned to her previous position of cradling Carol's head in her lap, replied, "I'm sorry for you, but it looks like you had a tough one. It's different for different girls; you just had some bad luck. The good news is that you'll never have to do that again. Soon Mark will put it back into you and it'll start feeling good." Carol was firmly of the opinion, "Not soon it won't!" Julia and I decided to wait some more. We both lightly caressed Carol, offering soft reassurances and sweet kisses around Carol's face. After several more minutes Carol tried moving her legs from side to side a little, and said, "Okay, Mark, let's try again. SLOWLY and carefully please. And be ready to stop if I say so." I had a small, technical problem with trying again. Julia saw me looking down at it and she laughed. So far she was not helping at all. Julia laughed some more (excellent!) and leaned down to Carol and said, "Look, the poor little boy has gone all soft. Isn't that cute?" Carol laughed. This was most definitely not helping me get ready to "try again". Julia continued, "Do you think two, beautiful, sexy, naked, horny girls can think of any way of 'arousing' his interest?" Carol giggled while Julia carried on, "This'll be so easy it's hardly a challenge at all. Let's make it fun. Mark, close your eyes. We're going to get you ready just by voice alone." My mood had been so shattered that I would've doubted it was possible, but I've learned not to doubt Julia when she says she'll do something. I was very curious about how she'd do it, so I closed my eyes without further comment. Julia started her attempt, "Carol, I keep imagining how wonderful it is going to be for you to be living in the same house as our Lord. I wish I could do that, but never mind me for now. Imagine all the fun you two will be able to have. Because your job is to give our Lord pleasure, you'll be walking around the house in very skimpy clothes, constantly tempting him to take advantage of your availability. Any time he wants to he'll be able to run his hands all over your body..." Carol interrupted, "A few days ago he ordered me not to wear jeans at home, so he could test my sexual self-control whenever he wanted. I'm going to keep wearing short skirts and other clothes that he can easily put his hands, or even cock, inside. I want him to play with me ALL the time. I don't have ANY sexual self-control anymore. I am his plaything all the time now." "Exactly right. From now on it's only short skirts, no bras and no panties whenever you're around him. Hopefully he'll molest you morning, evening and night. Now that you're married your parents will expect him to have sex with you very often because they know what newlyweds are like, so Mark will be able to do anything at all he wants with you." Carol said, "Donna is cool too. She's already seen Mark lick my pussy, and she told me after that I looked like I was REALLY enjoying myself. I was too! Mark's VERY good down there. He's so good my juices are running again, just thinking about him licking my pussy again, especially bent over the sink at home." Julia asked, "Is that when he did it, when you were washing the dishes?" "Yes. I was minding my business, just doing housework, and he came up behind me and made me spread my legs. He stuck his face into my pussy and licked and sucked me. He didn't even care that Donna was home. I was his helpless plaything." "Good. Even better, as now he can do much more. Whenever you are doing the dishes now, I want you to stand with your legs well apart and tuck the back of your skirt into its waistband so your pussy is totally open and exposed, so he can walk up behind you whenever he wants. He can finger you, stick his face between your legs, or best of all, tell you to bend over so he can stick his cock into you, and fuck you from behind while you're washing. He can grab your gorgeous tits and fuck you like two dogs fuck. You'll be his bitch. After he's cum in you he can walk away, leaving all his cum and your juices to run down your legs, and because your skirt is tucked up, everyone will be able to see your slimy legs and pussy. If I'm there I'll love to stick my face between your legs when he's finished, and scoop up all his delicious cum and your delicious juices. -- "Open your eyes, Mark." #4: I open my eyes and looked at Julia. She nodded to my lap. I look down. Oh. Carol giggled, "Oh goody. I'm turned on now too. I want to be fucked now please. Can you do me doggy style, just like the story? I want to be your bitch, and I want Julia to lick me clean afterward. Please?" She did ask nicely. So nicely that I'd gotten even harder during her request. Julia said, "You get on your hands and knees and I'll slide under you. That way I can lick your pussy and Mark's cock while he's fucking you. Won't that be great?" I nearly had the opposite technical problem, I nearly came. Saved by a last second go-soft, phew. Carol rolled over and assumed the 'bitch' position, lifting one arm to let Julia scoot under her. As soon as Julia was in position, she didn't wait for me, but immediately started licking Carol. I had a momentary qualm about blood, but I adamantly blocked it from my mind. I didn't want to lose my mood from thinking about that stuff (shudder). I concentrated on the feelings the story had given me. After a few more licks from Julia, Carol started going, "woof, woof," which I was pretty sure was bitch-talk for "fuck me." I made sure the rubber was on properly, then knee-walked into position behind Carol. Julia stopped licking, and started giving Carol a progress report. "Here comes his cock. I've gotten hold of it now. I'm going to aim it at your deliciously wet pussy, and then he's going to slide it in. Get ready." Julia pulled my cock forward and placed the head into Carol. Carol immediately gave a "WOOF!" and wiggled her ass a little. I think Julia's story must have had even more effect on Carol than it did on me. I took hold of Carol's hips and slowly slid myself all the way into her. She was so wet I didn't need much pressure, but I still did it in a slow, controlled manner so I could quickly stop if she wanted me to. Her, "Oh yeah!" didn't sound like a request to stop, so I steadily entered her until I was all the way in. I paused to ask, "How does it feel, Carol?" Even before Carol answered Julia's hands came around Carol's waist from below, and Julia pulled herself up to allow her tongue to join in. It licked up my ballsack, then on to Carol's pussy, following around the outside of my cock and licking the entire length of one side of Carol's pussy. The considerable thrill of being inside my beautiful sister's pussy and having Julia licking both of us at the same time was a fantastic experience. It was almost enough to make me cum without further thrusting. Carol just moaned a couple of times. Whether in response to Julia's tongue or in answer to my question wasn't clear. I assumed it meant everything was great. Seeing how Julia was having to lift herself up to get good contact, and because I DEFINITELY wanted her to have good contact, I centered then TK'd a pillow from the top of the bed, up and over Carol, then dropped it beside me so I could manually slide it under Julia's shoulders. I repeated that with a second pillow. Carol watched the pillows fly with amazement. While I was positioning the pillows, Carol said, "It still stings, but there are so many other good feelings that the sting is outvoted. I want more sex please. I'm ready when you are. Gently please, but I want it." I was ready now, so as soon as Julia was settled I started sliding back and forth. Carol was immediately having a very good time. "Oh this is good. This is great. I'm sore but I don't care. Wow. Who'd have thought?" #4: I didn't really know what Carol had meant, and I couldn't be bothered thinking about it. I concentrated on the sensations I was giving and receiving. Carol lowered her mouth over Julia's pussy, returning the favor that Julia was giving Carol and me, even though the damned rubber deprived me of most of the benefit of Julia's tongue. Carol could only lick Julia for a few seconds, before she'd break off and start thrashing her head around, moaning and commenting again. There were so many brand new and intense sensations that Carol was repeatedly distracted. Every minute or so she'd remember Julia's pussy, but before long she'd get distracted again. After a few minutes Carol asked, "Can you go faster?" She'd asked in a tone that made it clear that she didn't know the answer. As I wasn't even going a quarter of my top speed, I answered by quickly ramping up my thrusting rate. "Oh my god, this is incredible! More, faster. Oh my god. Yes, yes. Faster. Oh my god! Oh Mark! Oh Julia! Oh my God!" It appeared that Carol quite enjoyed screwing. Her arms gave out and her face fell to the bedspread between Julia's legs. Carol's subsequent comments were highly muffled, but we continued to get the impression that she was having a great time. Carol was climbing to her orgasm very quickly. I was already using micro-go-softs to hold myself just short of my cum to ensure Carol got off before me. I wanted her first time to be all about her (call me a romantic). Keeping my micro-go-softs going, I sped my thrusts up even more. Carol tilted her head back and howled like a wolf baying at the moon. The unexpected bizarreness of it put me off my stroke for a second, but I had several very good reasons to recover quickly. I tightened my grip on her hips and went as fast as I could. Carol cut off her howl, and moments later screamed as she came. I kept pounding away, and she was still screaming when I blew my load a few seconds later. I wrapped my arms around her waist and we tipped to the side, to rest in a spoon hug. Rest was definitely a good idea as it'd been intense for both of us. It took me a little while to remember Julia. I raised my head to look for her. Julia had turned around and was hugging Carol face to face, giving her little kisses on her face every now and then. Carol's first comment came out as an unintelligible mumble. After which she rested for a bit more, then tried again. I nearly understood it that time. Third time lucky, "I love you both so much." Julia and I both said, "We love you too." Carol rested after the exertion of declaring her love. When I looked down on her, her eyes were closed and she had a blissful look on her face. I stroked her side and upper-arm. Julia kissed her and whispered sweet nothings. After a couple of minutes Carol opened her eyes, lifted her head and told us again, "I love you so much." "Yes, we know. We love you too." Carol hadn't finished, "And I love what you do to my body. Making love is very, very good, isn't it?" We sincerely agreed with her. Carol started straightening her legs, but immediately winced. "Ouch! It's very sore. It didn't feel sore a few minutes ago, but it sure does now. I think I need to keep my legs together for a while. What a pity! Haha." Julia said, "You'll be much better in a day or two." We lay silently for a while, then Carol asked, "Julia, how was it after your first time? I am VERY sore. I'm glad Mom said we can have tomorrow off school because I don't think I'd be going anyway." Julia said, "It hurt a lot too, but it's worse for you because your hymen was so tough. I could hardly walk after mine though. Thank goodness Mark carried me back to the restaurant." I had been remembering that night, and couldn't remember Julia being that badly hurt, so I asked her, "I remember that night - I'll NEVER forget it! - but I don't remember you being in so much pain. I did carry you back through the garden, but at the restaurant you walked in to order a taxi." "I was sore, even in some pain, but I didn't want you to see it. I wanted that night to be perfect for you. I didn't have to walk far so it wasn't too bad. It was probably good training for me. Remember how we had a lot of sex the next day, then the six hour endurance test I failed a couple of days later?" Carol said, "You had sex the next day? I won't be doing that! How could you have sex for six hours! I barely lasted six minutes." Julia laughed, and "I didn't last six hours. I lasted only two but I was too stupid to cry 'uncle' so Mark kept fucking me like I was a rag doll. I forced him to do it, and he did, over and over again. Don't worry, Carol. When you've healed you'll be able to make love for an hour or two easily. It's a wonderful experience. Your comment has given me a great idea though." "What?" "The incredible thing about that Monday wasn't that I lasted six hours, but that Mark did. Women can outlast men easily. Women can screw men into exhaustion, but Mark is a superman. The trial's in about a week and a half isn't it?" I nodded. Julia was asking about the first three Biffs' trial. It's going to be a combined one because so much of the evidence is in common, as is the victim (me), and the first three assaults all stemmed from Annette. They have their own lawyers, but the case was sufficiently open-and-shut that a few corners could be cut. Most people expect them to plea bargain before the trial anyway. I was hoping for that because the Bedroom Rules would likely be relaxed afterward. Julia continued, "Good. I hope Mark and I will be able to stop hiding that we are lovers after that. Remember how we decided to introduce more girls to Mark?" It was Carol's turn to nod, then Julia continued, "So after the trial I'm going to spread the very strong rumor that Mark is an absolutely awesome lover who can go nonstop for eight hours. We'll have girls panting for him." Carol giggled and said, "That's so funny. I wish I could also tell everyone how good he makes me feel." Julia said, "Yeah, it's a pity you'll never be able to talk publicly about your incest, but you can back my story up. You can say you've overheard us going at it for eight hours in your house, and how I come out wobbling and hanging on to the walls to stay upright, but smiling from ear-to-ear. You'll have lots of fun making up details. We'll try to provide you with plenty of inspiration, haha." Carol would have said more, but I jumped in with, "Hang on, you're exaggerating. How come you keep saying eight hours? You and I only did it for six hours." Julia said, "I think eight hours sounds more impressive but ten sounds too long because we don't want the girls to be scared of you. We could use any time and still be truthful, couldn't we? If I hadn't given up after six hours you could have kept going for as long as it took. Eight hours, ten hours, twenty four hours. You don't have a limit, do you?" "Um, probably not. I don't think so. I think it's the same as my running. I can just do it forever provided I get some food from time to time. Needing to sleep would eventually become an issue too, obviously." Julia said, "You've never mentioned being able to run forever before?" "I've said that I'm a good runner, right?" "Yeah..." "He is too," interrupt Carol. "Donna and I have been out running with him. He can run longer than I can ride my bike. I get tired before he does." I continued, "Like Carol just said, the reason I'm good is that I can run forever at or below a certain speed. The speed isn't high enough to win short races, but 5k and above I can run world-record times. It seems that below a certain level of exertion my body simply doesn't get tired. I don't know why or how; it just happens that way. No muscle fatigue, no cramps, no soreness the next day, and definitely no exhaustion." Julia exclaimed, "I already knew it, but you REALLY are a superman. I shouldn't be amazed or even surprised, but you still keep amazing me. That you can run forever is impossible and unbelievable, but I'm sure you can do it. The things you can do make no sense to me. How can genius intelligence, floating stuff through the air and running forever all be related? They're so different." I didn't have an explanation, so I shrugged silently. Julia turned back to Carol, and said, "You see what my life has been like recently? He keeps doing this to me: keeps showing me more and more impossible, way-out things. Just a few hours ago you floated Carol's panties into the air and I nearly fainted. I had no idea you could do that. You said you'd only just worked out how. Then you made our three rings dance in the air together, and I was stunned all over again. Now you say you can run forever, and you just casually mentioned it in conversation as if it was just an ordinary thing. Is there anything you can't do?" "I admit I can do some special things, but I'm no 'Superman'. I can't leap tall buildings, I'm not bulletproof, don't have X-ray vision..." #3: #4: " ... so I'm a very weak Superman." Julia disagreed, "You can do MANY things that no one else on the planet can do. Doing just ONE of them would make you incredible enough, but there seems to be no end to the new things you keep adding to the list. Just now you added that you're the best runner EVER! You can beat ANYONE in a long distance race. You could earn millions if you wanted to. Without doubt you're incredible." "But it's useless. What possible use is running forever? I don't want to do it for a job, so it's no use to me." Julia said, "You're right about running, but making love forever is VERY useful, haha. Running is mostly useless, and even as a way of making a lot of money it'd waste a lot of your time and you'd have to put up with all the time-wasting publicity rigmarole that comes with it. It's a pity you can't earn millions having sex because Carol and I would be very happy to help with that, haha." I did something unusual: I pointed out something Julia hadn't thought of, "If we need money there's a quicker way. I was half-intending to do it to get a college fund as a present for Carol, if it's needed. I can just go to a casino and make the roulette ball land wherever I want. I was thinking of having Prof place the bets as I'm too young, but you get the general idea." Julia interrupted excitedly, "That's fantastic! We'll do that. We need some money, a million or two, and that's how we'll get it." "Ah, honey, why do we need 'a million or two'? That seems excessive. The only thing I think I need is a few thousand for another second-hand car for me, once we both have our licenses." "We need a new house, of course. Big and with total privacy so both of our families can move into it and you'll be safe from anyone seeing something they shouldn't. That way the three of us will be able to sleep together every night, or any other girls you want to stay over some nights too. I've been trying to think how to achieve that for days and you knew the answer the whole time. It's so simple: you and Dad go down to Vegas, win a million or two, and we'll buy a new home." "I'm sure it won't be as simple as that. There are bound to be problems I haven't thought of." "Don't worry about it. Daddy and I will organize it all. He's very good at organizing things..." #2: " ... He'll love it as it's all about numbers, so it's right up his alley. You've shown him your TK already, so we're in business. Leave the organization to us. You don't mind if I ask him, do you? Please? Pretty please? I want to be able to sleep with you and Carol every night." #4: #3: #4: "Okay Julia, I guess it can't do any harm to look into it. And it would be good to be able to pay Prof back for the money he's spent on us already. Keep it quiet though, please. Initially just talk with Prof. If he doesn't like it, we'll drop it. And for goodness sake don't mention it to Mom or Dad because Mom is VERY anti-gambling. Okay?" "Of course, Lord." Julia is a very agreeable girl when I'm insisting on something she wants. Julia turned to Carol and said, "See what I mean? I wanted a ridiculous amount of money and our Lord can wander off with Dad for a day and get it for us. Isn't that just incredible?" Carol agreed, "I'll say! You kept telling me our life is going to be amazing, and it's starting already. Just the things that have happened today have been unbelievable. I can't imagine what our life is going to be like: Mark's incredible powers, wives all over the place, so much money, all the love, babies. I feel like jumping up and down for joy, except I'm too sore for that. All I can do is say, 'Wow.'" #1: Our next particularly enjoyable activity was my screwing Julia without a rubber on, as her pills had kicked in by now. It felt so much better than it had previously, which had been pretty damned good! I told Carol that she was definitely going on the pill asap. Cumming inside Julia was a buzz too, as was watching Carol try to lick it all out again. That inspired further activity. When Julia was next unoccupied, about half an hour later, she opened her bedside drawer and showed us two foils of pills. "We already thought of Carol going on the pill. One of these is mine, the other is for Carol." #4: Carol was sore enough that it hampered her movement and enjoyment even when she was pleasuring one of us, so after Julia's cum we settled down for some quality hugging. I wanted Carol to be in the middle, but they forced the Lord into that position. We chatted about inconsequential things: Did Carol want me to get a college fund for her? Carol said "Whatever you want, Lord," but it was obvious that she currently preferred the baby option. We wondered whether the two families would like to share one big house. We agreed to ask them, our votes being obvious. I wondered whether Carol would feel better in the hot tub. I was informed that chlorine on a very fresh tear would not "feel better." Ouch! The girls got me to play with our three rings in the air again. I could drop their rings through mine, so I had some fun with that, and with pulling the girls' nipples upward and dropping a ring on them. We enjoyed ourselves in lighthearted ways. #3: #1: #2: We were vaguely thinking about going downstairs to be social for a while, when there was a knock on the door. We dived under the covers, Julia warning Carol and me, "It's a soundproof door, so I have to yell loudly." Then she faced the door and yelled, "ENTER." Vanessa stuck her head in and said, "The Andersons are about to leave. Is it okay for us to come in and say goodbye?" We assented, so everyone followed Vanessa in. Both the moms led off with questions about how their respective daughters were. Carol got in the first answer with a very emphatic, "It hurt like a ... umm, it hurt a LOT, Mom. I'm very glad I never have to do that again." I could see that Mom, and especially Dad, weren't too comfortable with their 13-year old daughter talking about losing her virginity. Too bad. They'd have to get used to it, especially as I was pretty sure Carol didn't want it back. "But after that it was GREAT. It's the most amazing thing having two lovers. You wouldn't believe some of the things we can do together! It felt fantastic, especially Mark's... , um, especially Mark." I noticed Dad looking sheepish, but Mom just said, "Don't let your enthusiasm get outside the two families, dear. You ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT let anyone else know you have any lovers at all, let alone your brother. We could all get in serious trouble over this; very serious trouble. Go to jail, split up the family kind of serious. Child Protective Services would take you and Donna away and foster you out somewhere, probably in another town. You get the message, don't you?" "Yes, Mom. I know society thinks incest is bad. I know I have to keep my mouth shut. We were just talking about how after the trial Julia will be able to talk freer about her and Mark but I'll never be able to. That makes me sad, but Mark will just have to find some way to cheer me up!" Mom continued, "Good. You must never, ever get carried away and say anything about that side of your relationship. Nor be too affectionate in public either. We've laid down the law with Donna already, but please don't even tell your best friend. Tell no one, okay?" "I get it, Mom. Julia's my best friend and I'm pretty sure it's safe to tell her, but I get what you mean." "Same for you, Mark. Tell no one." "Yes, we know." Dad said, "The timing of your 'honeymoon' is lousy because of the trial. We're going to have to insist that from 3pm tomorrow until the end of the trial, you kids have to keep your hands off each other. We figure that if anyone hires a private eye to spy on you guys, during the weekend is the riskiest time because that's when they'll expect you to catch you out. So from when school lets out tomorrow until the trial is over, no more sex. Sorry, I know you'll hate that, but that's what it's got to be. Let's hope they plea bargain the whole thing away, and we can get back to normal again; although I don't think our normal is ever going to be normal again." #3: Carol moaned, "That's terrible. I'm too sore to enjoy myself for a couple of days, and then when I'll be ready and raring to go, we'll have to wait for the trial to be over. That could be two or three weeks from now. That's CRUEL. I don't mean you guys are cruel, Mom and Dad. I know you're right, but damn that sucks! -- "I bet we're not even allowed to suck each other, are we?" Dad gave a brief laugh, and said, "Sorry, no sucking either." Carol repeated her opinion of that, "Damn. We love sucking each other." Donna, who would've been much smarter to keep her presence unobtrusive, asked, "Do you like sucking Julia or Mark the most?" Donna got sent down to the kitchen to get us a snack out of the leftovers. Vanessa said, "The Andersons are having dinner here again tomorrow so we can talk more then. It'd be best if you don't go outside tomorrow, although I imagine you had no intention of it as you've only got until 3pm to get as much sex as you can. Felicity is taking Mark to the hospital after dinner to get his cast off, and from tomorrow night you'll all be back in your normal beds, until after the trial." Julia, who's no dummy, pointed out, "It's Mark that any investigator will be hoping to find dirt on, so will it be okay if Carol sleeps here some nights?" Mom and Dad looked at each other, then at the Prof and Vanessa. Parental ESP did its thing, and Mom announced the result. "Yes, that'd be okay sometimes. Maybe once or twice a week." Carol yelled, "Yippee! Sorry Mark, but yippee for me!" I felt good for the girls. You know how I felt for myself. The rest of the conversation was fairly uneventful. There was quite a lot of teasing. Of course, why wouldn't there be? Donna knocked on the door, which had been deliberately closed behind her. Before it was opened, Mom told us, "I know it's going to be virtually impossible, but please try not to corrupt Donna too much. It's probably too late already, but try." When the door was opened, Donna brought us a plate of snacks. She put it on the bedside table and said, "Here you are. I know you need to keep your strength up, haha." After a short while of other conversation, Donna knelt on the bed, leaned over Julia, and kissed me on the cheek. To my surprise just as the kiss was about to happen, she covertly licked the side of my cheek instead. I pulled my face away in shock, as Donna whispered, "Tasty." The last place I'd had my face had been between Julia's legs! I think Mom was right: it probably was too late not to corrupt Donna. I gave her a playful smack on the side as she was jumping off the bed. "You scamp!" Fortunately no one asked why. We chatted a little more, then as they all made their departures, Dad called out to me, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do." Mom remarked, "You've had your day. The torch has been passed to the next generation now." Dad agreed, "It certainly has. Have fun with your torch, Mark." #2: #3: #4: #1: The girls had a bite or two of the snack, leaving me all the rest. All was well with the Universe. After a little while Carol said, "I'm wiped out. My sleepover with Julia went late, and tonight has been overwhelming. Can I go to sleep please, my Lord? I LOVE saying that!" We assured her that it was fine with us. Before she did so, Carol said, "Thank you both so much. For an incredible day and for letting me join you. Thank you very, very much. I love you." Julia said, "We're very happy to have you. You're going to be a marvelous wife." Carol insisted, "I'm going to try really hard. I want to be the best. I'm going to be very, very obedient. I'll do anything either of you want. You can test me if you want." I opened my mouth, intending to say something like, "There's no need for that, we already know," when Julia beat me to it with, "We WILL test you; many, many times. We will make you do things you've never dreamed of, purely for our own pleasure. You're going to have some experiences that'll make you cream your panties, not that you'll be wearing them most of the time. Sweet dreams, darling. We love you." Carol whispered, "Thank you. Goodnight, my lovers." Carol rolled away from us and lay still. ------- Chapter 53: You Can't Have Too Much Consummation Thursday, April 14, 2005 (Continued) #4: #3: #1: #3: #1: #4: #1: I whispered in Julia's ear, "Don't fall asleep yet, I want to ask you something about Carol when she's asleep." Julia answered, "Certainly, my Lord. Can I suck your cock while we're waiting?" She immediately folded the covers back enough for her to get access, and dived down. She'd made a lucky guess about my answer. I lay back, gently rubbing one hand over Julia's ass while she quietly took liberties with part of my body. I resisted the considerable temptation to ramp things up, for the few minutes it took until Carol fell asleep. One of my minds thought to be curious about how a sleeping person would look in proximity, so he briefly mentioned it to us then went on Active Duty. We noticed that Carol's 'image' was significantly different now that she was asleep. I tapped Julia on the ass a couple of times to get her attention. When she looked back at me, I motioned for her to come back up. She smiled and moaned, "Aww," gave my cock a goodbye kiss, and reversed her facing. When we were cuddled closely, I quietly asked, "Why is Carol so determined to be obedient to us, even to the extent of serving all my teammates naked and going along with your teases about making her do other similar things?" Julia said, "Okay, this is easy. There are several reasons..." #3: " ... First, she's a very passive, naturally obedient girl. People vary in how dependent or independent they are. Carol is VERY dependent. She wants to be told what to do, as long as it comes from someone she respects, which includes both of us. Are you sure she's asleep?" I didn't bother to roll over to check (I was lying in the middle of the bed with my back to Carol), as Carol still 'showed' as asleep in my proximity sense. I just confidently said, "Yes, she is. I'll know if she wakes up." Julia looked at me seriously for a second, then said, "You can actually tell, can't you? Not just from her lack of movement or sounds. You have another ability?" I answered, "Not a new ability, just an aspect of an existing one. Remember when Sensei intended to punch me and I quickly moved out of the way?" Julia did, "I remember you talking about it. He never moved to punch you though." "No. He just intended to, but I could detect it. The intentions of a sleeping person seem to be different, which makes sense. I'll be able to tell if she wakes up." Julia asked, "By 'intentions', what do you mean? That sounds like reading my mind. Surely you can't read minds as well, although I wouldn't put even that past you?" "No, nothing like that. That's too preposterous even for me. BELIEVE me when I say that I haven't got a CLUE what you're thinking most of the time! Haha. I can detect intended physical movement because people project their movement in advance of making it. Sleeping people show up sort of differently, although it's hard for me to explain how. It's not magic. All good aikidoka - that's people who practice Aikido - can do it after a few years training. Like Sensei, for example. You could learn it too, if you wanted." Julia continued, "I can't pretend to understand what it is or how it works, but I don't want to train for years to find out. I know you didn't train for years though, only a few hours and your sensei said your ability was already exceptional even compared to experts. -- "But back to Carol because she's easy to understand compared to you. She wants to give control over her life to someone better than her. She has low self-esteem, low self-confidence, poor problem-solving abilities, and a desire to give control to someone else. She thinks both of us will make better decisions for her than she will for herself. She's right; she'll be a lot better off with us. She's not dumb, in fact she's smart, she just doesn't like to face problems. -- "Second. Umm, are you sure she's still asleep?" I nodded. "Okay. The second reason is that she's now finding that being in our control is a big turn-on for her. The stronger our control, the more it excites her. It comes out of the previous reason, but is separate." -- Julia looked over my shoulder to make sure Carol was asleep, then whispered the following to me. "I'm not sure how sexual it would have been for her normally because as soon as I discovered that you wanted her, and I realized how good it'd be to add her to our relationship, I've been doing everything I can to build her lust over being ordered to do sexual things. You've heard me stimulate her many times now. I've even heard you start to do it, although you are still too light-handed with her. If she was ordered to serve your teammates naked, her pussy would be dripping. She'd behave as a perfect waitress, if that's what you ordered her to do, but she'd be dripping. -- "Third, Carol thinks being obedient to us proves her love for us. It's an immature perspective; a phase common with girls about half Carol's age. Maybe playing with dolls brings it out because dolls are obedient in girls' imaginations. Anyway, Carol's still having that belief tells you something about how poorly she understands life, and how badly she'd probably do without us. I'll be obedient to you of course, but I know better ways to show my love for you than blind obedience. Better for you and better for me. That's because I know I have more value than as a servant. -- "One thing we need to think about for her is whether we enjoy her as she is, or push her to grow up. There's no hurry so the three of us can have some fun for a while, but do we want her to be dependent on us for the rest of her life, or do we want her to gain independence so she can look after herself? Mom's been quite clear to me that we have to make that decision sooner or later." [[Vanessa also knew what the decision damned well better be, but was holding back on expressing it to see what Julia and I chose.]] I was incredulous, "Your mom! You've discussed this with your mom?" "Sure. That's why I understand it so well: she explained it to me." "I agree the explanation was clear. It's not often I understand a female's explanation, but even I understood the three reasons. ALL three of them, which has got to be some sort of record for me. You're right about Carol being no good at solving problems, by the way. I've seen that all my life. She always goes running to Mom, Dad and lately even me. But I can't get over your talking to your mom about something so ... um, so sexual I guess. Even more than that, so personal." Julia explained. "Initially I didn't pay much attention to Carol. I talked to her and liked her, but I didn't put any effort into understanding her. When I saw how much you wanted her, I had to understand her to manipulate her, so I've talked to Mom several times. She's an expert on that stuff." "Huh? She's an expert on manipulating people? I've never seen any indication of that." "No, silly. She's an expert on the ethics of manipulating people." I guess I'd been pushing my luck by being so foolish as to think that I actually understood what was going on. Here I was thinking Vanessa was just a really good cook! "I didn't think there were any ethics in manipulating people. Isn't that a bad thing to do?" "I manipulated Carol into becoming our wife, and manipulated you into accepting her, and all our parents into permitting it, or even welcoming it in the case of my parents. Were those bad things to do? I don't think so! EVERYONE is better off, especially Carol. All interpersonal relationships, where one side wants the other side to do something, involve some degree of manipulation. Ideally it produces a win-win result, but often it doesn't. Negotiation, for example, is one of Mom's main areas of study." #1: If in doubt, ask: "Ah, honey, what does your mom teach at OSU?" "Ethics. She's an ethicist. I thought you knew that?" "Ah, no. I feel a bit stupid. Even worse, sexist. I never wondered what she did, sorry about that. Now I understand more about why you get advice from your mom." "No worries. I understand why you were confused. She's much more than just a great cook, you know?" Oops, guilty as charged. In my defense, "Hey, don't knock cooking. It's very important! Underfeeding your daughter's boyfriend - husband now - is very unethical as far as I'm concerned. But let's skip past my embarrassment. When you talked to your mom about Carol, what did she say? What does she think of the situation?" "It boils down to are we acting in Carol's best interests or in our own? Put simply, it can be okay to lie to people if it's for them, but you've got to be VERY careful if you also benefit because then you could be fooling yourself about your supposed altruism. Mom's going to spend a fair bit of time with Carol when Carol's over here to keep an eye on the results of my manipulations. If Mom thinks I'm short-changing Carol, I'll have some explaining to do." I asked, "So the three things you said about Carol - that she wants to be told what to do, she gets turned on by being controlled, and she wants to prove her love of us - your Mom told you about those?" "Yeah, sort of. I kept the sexual aspect quiet initially because I didn't want to tell Mom about my wanting to give Carol to you, but once I'd told her about the three of us wanting to get together, then I told her everything. She knows everything I know about Carol. She's not as thrilled about the second point - about some of my sexual plans for Carol - as I am, but she hasn't seen Carol's reaction to being controlled that way. I've said I'll take responsibility so she's waiting to see. If I get it wrong I'll have to make good somehow, regardless of how much effort it takes me." "The way you said you'll 'take responsibility' sounded special? I recall that phrase coming up over the gun incident." Julia confirmed, "Yeah, we take personal responsibility seriously in this family. Mom's influence again. You know Andrew refused to tell Mom and Dad about the gun. He said he'd 'take responsibility'. That's a key phrase in this house. If I mess-up with a gun again, Andrew will own up to getting his previous judgment wrong and he'll have to make good for the consequences as best he can. It wasn't fair to him as it was my frustration that caused it, so I told Mom and Dad about it a couple of days later, after I'd recovered from the six hour fuck-a-thon I forced you to do to me. I 'released him from the responsibility' of keeping it secret. That's another key phrase: 'releasing him from the responsibility'. Responsibility is something we are conscious of here. You follow all that, don't you?" "Yes. It makes sense. Your family is more deliberate than mine, and more advanced maturity-wise about responsibility, but not so different that I don't understand. My parents insist on it too, although more casually than yours." Julia continued, "I'm telling you about this in detail because it's important you know. Mom, Dad and I have talked about how you will handle your responsibilities in the future. You will most likely be a powerful person, and with power goes responsibility else you get corruption. They're opposite sides of the same coin. They're reassured that you are the least corrupted person they could imagine. You're so passive, self-effacing, apologetic, etc., that there isn't even a faint hint of corruption." "I think you're overstating my passivity, but I agree I am somewhat. It's good that they're not worried about me." Julia disagreed, "They worry all right. You're avoiding corruption by avoiding power, which equally avoids responsibility. That's not good. You need to grow into your power, but we're only kids so there's plenty of time yet. We're all looking forward to it. And, if I might speak personally, I'm looking forward to offering you lots and lots of chances for corruption. That'll be great fun!" "Surely you're joking? You can't mean that?" "Of course I mean it. Why wouldn't I? It'll be great fun and I want to be heavily involved." "Ahh, shouldn't I - shouldn't WE - try to avoid corruption? It's bad, surely. We should run away." "Haha. You can't run away from temptation; it finds you. When you're famous and powerful, temptations will come charging after you. They're an intrinsic, inseparable part of life. You have to learn to resist corruption; 'LEARN' being the operative word. Learn by doing and understanding. That's why my parents won't worry about you fucking other girls. I haven't talked to them about it yet, but when I do I'll say it's my idea and I'm arranging it. It'll be my 'responsibility'. I'm educating you on a temptation that's going to be chasing you your whole life. You need to understand it. Like I said, it'll be fun. We're going to have some great times out of this." #1: #4: #1: "I can see you and your parents are doing a fantastic job of planning for the future, but I don't understand yet. For example, how will introducing me to lots of girls help me avoid corruption? It seems to me that you're making it easier." "Lots of ways. I'm controlling the process, which will help reduce the chance of a screw-up, haha. The three of us will be open and communicative about what's going on, which will also help avoid anyone getting bad ideas. Not to mention we'll all have fun together. We'll find the best girls possible for you, of course, but they'll still be around your age and therefore unavoidably immature, so it won't take you long to see how pointless meaningless fucking is..." #4: " ... and when you learn that, you'll be whole lot safer from future temptations of that nature..." #4: " ... We might be really lucky and find another wife for you. That's unlikely but there's no harm in keeping our eyes open, at the same time as our legs, haha." I had to ask, "Julia, aren't you worried about me falling for some other girl and not wanting you anymore? Not that I would, of course, but aren't you worried anyway?" "Yes. If I put temptations in front of you, you can make a mistake. I can't stop you making mistakes - you even have to make some in order to learn - but I can try to minimize the risk by having lots of communication between us. That should help. You don't have to run around behind my back, you can screw them in front of me, or even on top of me. -- "If Carol or I see you getting screwed up then hopefully we'll be able to talk you around, but if you make a mistake, then you make one. I'm never going to be able to keep girls away from you. There's no chance of that at all; you're going to be powerful, rich, handsome, graceful, nice and legally single. They're going to swarm all over you. The best I can do is manage the process and hope you don't make a mistake. I'll also be trying very hard to make sure you know you'll never find anyone as good for you as me." I had to agree with that! "You can say that again - BIG TIME! I can't believe how good you are for me. I really hope I don't do something stupid, because I would have to be TOTALLY stupid to lose you." "You can't lose me. I am yours for life. I've told you that many times." "But what if I am so stupid as to want some other girl and don't want to see you again? I can't imagine that happening, but what if?" "Then I'll wait for you until you take me back." "Ahh. I'm embarrassed to ask this, but what if I never did?" "Then I'll die of old age alone, probably of a broken heart. That'd be very sad. You don't think I'm ever going to meet anyone else like you, do you? There isn't any such person. I'll wait my life away for you to come back. Before we get too depressed, let me remind you that there's no need to send me away. If you want another girl, we'll all seduce her into joining us. I'm happy to share you, as I'm already doing with Carol. I'm sure you're going to have more wives in the future. Maybe not for a few years, but I can imagine us as adults with several top-quality wives. I think that'd be an amazing way of living and I'm eagerly looking forward to it. -- "Don't get hung up on girls, they're just one temptation of many. In your TK demonstration, remember Dad mentioned you stealing diamonds from a jewelry store by floating them out. Did that tempt you?" "No. I thought it was silly, even if I could make it work. It never tempted me." "See, you resisted that temptation. Some people are very greedy for money. Or even greedy specifically for diamonds, although they normally tempt women the most. You simply weren't tempted. You have a perfect scheme for making lots of money from a casino but you haven't done anything about it because money isn't that important to you. What about killing the jocks that make you the angriest? You've never mentioned being tempted by that?" "No, I'm tempted about as much as I am for floating diamonds out of a jeweler's. It's definitely not my style. I'm not a murderer or a thief." "But you would murder someone who was raping Carol. You admitted that already. No doubt the casino would consider losing money to your ability to be theft even if there's no law against TK. I'm sure part of the reason you like the idea of getting money from a casino is because they're perceived as being immoral. Taking immorally earned money off people is different from robbing an ordinary person. Crimes are relative. When you have a lot of power, you will be tempted to commit crimes." "I even thought it was cool to take money off a casino. Of course I was never imagining a million or more, but the amount doesn't change anything especially as the Vegas casinos would barely notice a million or two from what little I understand about how rich those businesses are." Julia agreed, "Good, so we have the same opinion on that. Talking about crimes though, I didn't notice any reluctance on your part to commit a serious crime just a few hours ago: having sexual relations with your underage sister." "Haha. You're right again. A total absence of reluctance and quite a lot of enthusiasm. That crime was one I was happy to commit, and I look forward to doing so again." Julia suggested, "Why don't you wake her up and fuck her again then?" "No way! She's too sore. You heard how much it hurt her. How can you suggest that?" "As a little lesson. Remember corruption and temptation. I know you want to fuck her. If you woke her up now and ordered her to have sex with you, she'd do so gladly. She likes being controlled sexually. She'd be proud that you were using her even through her pain. Seriously, that's how she'd think. So why don't you wake her then?" "I'm not even tempted. The idea of her being in that much pain is a total turn-off for me. I couldn't fuck her even if you woke her and she wanted me to." "Why not fuck her in the ass then? I'm sure you want to do that. Remember you've only got until 3pm tomorrow so you'd better grab every chance you can." #4: "Sorry. No to that idea too, although I must admit to being tempted. I'd rather she slept and healed first. I want her to enjoy sex with me, not to feel pain. The first time the pain was inescapable, but I don't want to give her any unnecessary pain. That'd make me feel bad." Julia said, "You answered the way I thought you would. You'd happily commit a crime that society takes very seriously, sex with your 13-year old sister, but you wouldn't wake her up to fuck her out of concern for her healing and because you feel bad when you cause someone you love any pain. I think both your reasons are weak reasons." -- I was about to argue but Julia charged on, "Hold on! I'm not trying to argue you out of them. I'm just pointing out that they're minor reasons. What's important is that you didn't give its being a crime as a reason not to have sex with her. So crimes - whether underage sister-sex, theft or murder - are all subject to your judgment. You WILL commit the crime of underage sex if you want to, you WILL commit theft from a casino if you want to, and you will even commit murder if the guy was raping Carol. Your willingness to ignore the law if you think you've got justification is potentially scary in someone who might be very powerful one day. -- "Learning responsibility and how to avoid corruption is important. Mom and I talk about the romance of my being with you, but my parents and I talk even more about your potential and the responsibility inherent in it. So when you're talking to my parents and one of them uses the word 'responsibility', pay attention please. If you don't understand what they're saying, ask! Okay?" "Yes. That was a good lesson. Thank you." "Good. We've got some interesting times ahead of us - a LOT of interesting times - but not totally carefree. We have to be careful, thoughtful, and - I'm sure you're getting tired of hearing - responsible. But we can still have a huge amount of fun. I've got a high opinion of you, Mark. Not just because of your powers, but because of you as a person. You are kind, caring, thoughtful, and RELATIVELY moral, haha. For example, you listen to my lessons - my parents' lessons really as I'm just repeating them - and you learn from them. -- "Many boys with your powers and sex appeal would be running wild by now, but that's not the sort of guy you are. That's one reason why I'm not really worried about introducing more girls to you. I don't think you're the sort of person to get swept away by any of them. You're too mature already. Some guys would already be asking me: Which girls? When? How many at once? How often? Etc. But you've said barely a word about it, other than to express concern. I've also seen how easy it's been for you to discount the girls who've already been chasing you at school. You're just not that tempted." "I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm NOT tempted. I AM tempted! There are some gorgeous girls at school. You know you and Carol are my only experiences, but I would like to be able to try more. Dad and Mom scared the hell out of me about the risk of losing you if I paid any attention to other girls. I REALLY don't want to lose you! Every day with you makes me want you more and more. I don't know how you do it, but every day you impress me far more than you had previously, which was already as high as I thought it could be." Julia laughed, "That's EXACTLY how I feel about you. Every day you impress me more and more, which should be impossible to do, but you keep doing it. Today's revelations have been AMAZING: multiple floating things, running forever and even knowing when Carol is asleep. It never stops; you keep getting more and more impressive." "I'm just an ordinary boy with a few special abilities. You're the one who's the best person. Without you..." Apparently Julia strongly disagreed, "{RASPBERRY!} 'Ordinary boy'! Do you think for a moment that I'm going to believe that? Let's just agree that we're a good team. We belong together, okay?" "Sounds very good to me. Even though I'm getting the best end of the deal, haha." "Like heck you are! Did we finish talking about Carol? Did you want to know anything else about her?" "I think I've gotten the main points clear. She wants to be controlled, even in her daily decisions, and especially sexually. And we need to think about making her more self-reliant at some stage. Now that I think of it though, how good a mother would she be if she's not good at making decisions or solving problems?" Julia thought, "Yeah, that's an important issue. Kids cause a never-ending stream of problems, haha. We'll have to make sure she learns self-reliance before she's a mom. So the question about helping her grow becomes when, not if. Maybe you can help her by marrying a beautiful single mother, preferably a pediatrician or a maternity nurse. I'll keep my eyes open to see if I can find any." Julia smiled at me, in a way that conveyed she thought it was humorous, but not necessarily a joke. I felt like lightening the mood, so I deliberately asked a silly question, "You seem to assume that all we have to do is find one and she'll marry us. Isn't that very presumptuous?" "We'll all seduce her. I'll lead a seduction campaign. It'll be lots of fun. With you, Carol and me going for her, I don't think she'd hold out for long. -- "Hmm, I just thought that when you go to the casino, you should win some extra money, please. Relying on our meeting the right prospects for future wives is too chancy. We should be more thorough. We'll employ a company to find prospects for us, then we'll go meet them. We'll tell the company what we want: beautiful, doctor of pediatrics, single mother, age bracket, and whatever other criteria we think of. Then they'll search the country for us. Lack of money shouldn't be allowed to stop us getting the best choice. Make sure you get lots of it, okay?" "Ahh, if you say so. You're quite determined on this, aren't you? Somehow the word 'bloodthirsty' seems appropriate, although I'm not sure why." "Nothing but the best for you, Lord. I'm not joking about that! You'll need very good people around you. It'll be fantastic." Julia's last comment prompted me to ask, "You really do like having sex with girls, don't you?" "It's not as simple as that. When I said, 'It'll be fantastic, ' I was thinking about EVERYTHING, not just the sex. Finding the best possible girls or women for you, seducing them into our relationships - by which I mostly mean 'convincing them' rather than mere sexual seduction - and living with them afterward as a big happy family. -- "I don't think I'm strongly bisexual. Without you in my life I doubt I would've ever gone to bed with a girl. It's not so much the sex that appeals to me, as all the love centered on you. I very much enjoyed the sex I had with Carol last night, tonight, and I'll enjoy it with her when she has future sleepovers here, even without you, but it's all because of my life with you at its center. -- "Having said that, I think I might go through a phase of having some fun with some playthings from school. I think three of us could have a lot of fun playing around with some of the girls from school. I'm even getting quite horny thinking about it. Let me check something." Julia lifted the sheet, then announced, "Oh goody, you're horny too." Julia threw one of her legs over top of mine and started mounting me. I quickly said, "I've got two QUICK questions. Why do you call the schoolgirls 'playthings'? Isn't that a bit mean?" "We shouldn't treat them nastily. Some of them could become good friends or even a wife, but mostly they'll be playthings. They'll be trying to use you, suck up to your fame, get their jollies from the sex stories about you that I'm going to spread, etc. Don't worry, you'll soon see that they'll just be playthings. It'll be a good way to think of them, as we're intending just to have fun with them. They'll enjoy it too. Next question now - I'm in a hurry." She was so much in a hurry that she'd already started without me. She had my cock in her and was rocking back and forth. Not needing a rubber meant it only took a second for her to jump on top of me if we were both ready. It was GREAT not needing rubbers with Julia! "Okay, last question. I want to make doubly sure I don't have to worry about Carol being too obedient. She wouldn't actually do it if I accidentally told her to 'get lost', or 'jump off a cliff' would she?" "Haha. No need to worry about that. She hasn't turned her brain off. She's CHOOSING to obey you to show her love. It's a conscious choice and she knows what she's doing. She'd just ignore those comments as figures of speech. If she was in any doubt, she'd ask for clarification. I'm not sure what would happen if you INSISTED she jumped off a cliff. I suspect she'd make sure you really wanted her to, and then she might even do it. I wouldn't, but I wouldn't be surprised if she killed herself to prove her love for you." "THANK GOODNESS it won't happen by a misspoken accident then! But how come she might and you wouldn't? I thought you loved me too?" "ANOTHER silly question!" I've noticed that Julia tends to be less respectful when I frustrate her desires. It WAS a silly question, and it was CERTAINLY a very silly time to ask it. "Last one because I want to fuck! You already know I love you totally so you don't need proof, and how can I continue to make your life better if I'm dead? I serve you better by staying alive. Unless jumping off a cliff somehow saved your life, which is far-fetched but I'd do it in that case, of course." As soon as the last word was out of her mouth, Julia's hips went into full-on fucking mode. I got the hint to "shut up and fuck!" As hints go, it was the most enjoyable I'd ever been given. We were both raring to go - Julia was already 'going' - so I didn't waste any more time. I flipped her over and fucked her missionary style so I could go as fast as I wanted. And also because I wanted to flip Julia over. Sometimes I want to assert myself as the boss, and flipping her allowed me to do that without risking Julia arguing with me. A couple of minutes later, Julia's loud moans and cries woke Carol, who lay on her side to watch us. Seeing Carol awake prompted me to recenter briefly. She 'appeared' in proximity as she normally does when awake. That didn't definitely prove that how she'd looked last time was because she was asleep, but that was easily the most likely explanation. Julia was feeling very horny [[discussing her plans for my future tends to do that to her]], so it didn't take us very long to get her all the way to the "It's A Good Thing Prof Soundproofed This Room" stage. While Julia was having a little rest, Carol said, "Seeing my two lovers do it together is really hot. I can't get over being able to say 'my two lovers'. No one had touched me until a few days ago, and now I have the sexiest guy alive and a wonderful 16-year old girl as my lovers. That's so wonderful and so hot. I'm very, very horny." She looked down, and as my gaze followed hers she tossed the covers down, showing me her body, and her finger rubbing a very wet and raw looking, pussy. Another hint. I like the latest trend in hints. "Can you fuck me again, please Mark?" "I thought you'd still be sore?" "I am. Very sore. But I thought you could fuck my ass. Julia talks about that and I want to try it. Guys like it, don't they?" #4: "I only just cum in Julia so it'll take me a while to recover." "Then why can I see a bulge in the sheets?" Carol pointed. "Oh, I didn't realize I was hard already. I wonder how that happened, haha. You joked that I was sexy, but I've got very good proof that you're the sexiest Anderson." "{Raspberry}. Haha, I like doing those." #4: #1: "Rather than lying there abusing me, how about you reach into the drawer on your side to get a rubber and the lubricant please, Carol." Carol reached in and pulled them both out, which made me realize that she knew what lubricant is, which was more than I did when Julia first talked to me about it. I was surprised that sexually inexperienced Carol knew that, so I asked her, "I'm a little surprised you knew about lubricant. I didn't think to explain it until after you'd pulled it out, but you obviously didn't need the explanation. How come you knew what it was?" "All girls know what lubricant is." #1: #4: (Dad and I do Mom's car, and I don't think she has a clue it even needs it. When I mentioned it to her once she looked at me blankly.) I made a pile out of two pillows, Carol's and mine, as Julia's still had a restful Julia on top of it. Just for the fun of it, and to impress Carol, I used TK to move them while I was simultaneously putting lubricant on my rubber-encased cock. I had one eye on my cock and the other eye watching the pillows to retain my TK-points. The differently moving eyeballs thing made Carol laugh again. I got Carol to lay on the pillows, and I noticed that she moved gingerly. I asked, "Are you sure you're not too sore?" "Fucking sure! {Giggle}. It's fun talking so rudely." Things were going to get a hole lot ruder shortly (the misspelling seems appropriate). I had a good time slathering her asshole, repeating the same process I use with Julia: using TK to open her up, squirt some lubricant in, then use another TK-fingertip to push it farther in. My TK-fingertips are too weak, so I had to use my real fingertips to get Carol's asshole used to being opened widely, knowing we needed to widen it was one of the many useful facts that #4 provided. I was still early in that process when Julia woke up and felt the bed rhythmically moving. She looked over. With Carol's ass stuck high in the air and my finger pumping in and out of her asshole, it didn't take Julia long to work out what was about to happen. Julia slid over to be able to kiss Carol a few times. I took advantage of Carol's distraction to include a second finger. Julia said to Carol, "When you were sleeping I suggested to Mark that he wake you up and fuck your ass, but I think this is your idea?" "Yes. Why didn't he wake me? He likes ass fucks, doesn't he?" "He loves them. It's easy to tell that, just look back and see how hard his cock is." Carol turned to look, so I obligingly waved my cock at her. Carol giggled, turned back to Julia and said, "Good. How come he didn't wake me? He should have if he wanted to." Julia answered, talking as if I wasn't in the room but for my benefit in more ways than one, "We haven't got him properly trained yet. He's still way too cautious. He didn't want to disturb your rest." "That's just silly! I want him to fuck me whenever he wants. That's what my body is for now, for goodness sake." "I know that, you know that, but he doesn't know it yet. We'll just have to keep fucking him until he gets the idea." "{Giggle}. That's good, but if your screams hadn't woken me he would've missed out and that's not right. If you see him being silly like that again, please wake me up immediately. Just pinch me or something. I want him to fuck me. How can I be a good servant if he doesn't fuck me whenever he wants?" Julia commiserated, "I agree. He is inconsiderately making it difficult for you to do your job properly. He can be quite selfish sometimes. Imagine letting you sleep when you should have been serving him. He's a selfish, inconsiderate beast!" I thought Carol was giving her honest opinions - and what great opinions they were too! - but Julia's big smirk gave away that she was enjoying herself at my expense, yet again. I couldn't think of a way to get revenge, so I settled for, "Julia. I can think of a better use for your mouth than complaining about your Lord and master. Grab your pillow and use it to hold your head up so you can lick Carol's pussy while I fuck her ass. Okay?" #3: Nonetheless Julia gave a big smile while she got ready, saying, "Oh dear. If you insist then I guess I have to. You being the big, bad boss. Us poor, little, defenseless girls don't have any choice other than obeying. {Slurp}." Julia was starting without me again! Or - as I'm sure she'd say if I asked her - I was too slow again. I opened Carol's asshole with my TK, put my cock at the entrance, and slid it in just a little. Just as Julia had done when I'd screwed her ass, Carol tensed up. But she relaxed again almost immediately, in response to Julia's sideways swipes of her pussy. Carol was making appreciative groans and small hip movements, I guessed in sync with Julia's tongue. It made Carol's ass a lot less vise-like than Julia's had been. For a few seconds I held still to give her time to get used to me. Time which I enjoyed, as her hole's movements were pleasantly stimulating the head of my cock. I figured I'd waited long enough when Carol asked, "Why have you stopped? Is something wrong?" I pushed all the way forward. I paused again, probably totally unnecessarily, as Carol expressed nothing but happiness at this new situation, "Oh, I like that, Mark. It feels great in my ass, except it's not moving enough. Please fuck me, Mark." I nearly opened my mouth to ask about it being too tight, or her pussy too sore, or something, but then realized she'd already answered. It was time to get busy. I grabbed her hips firmly and tried to hold them still to make Julia's job easier, while I started sawing myself back and forth. I quickly built to a good, steady speed, and maintained it for a while so Julia could do her thing. Carol got into it, letting us both know that this was great fun. Or, as she put it, "Sex is fucking fantastic! {Giggle}." After a few minutes it was clear that Carol wasn't going to cum with the current level of stimulation, but I couldn't go any faster without bouncing Carol around too much for Julia. No choice though, so I started speeding up. Just as I thought, Carol's ass started bouncing up and down, more and more. It was being bounced up and down on the two pillows just below her waist, but one result was that it was also bouncing up and down on Julia's face. Whatever Julia was doing under there, Carol liked it. I was going faster and faster, and Carol was bouncing more and more, and calling out louder and louder. "This is so good. This is great, Ahh yes. Harder. Fuck me harder. I love it. I love you. Faster." Julia reached a hand from underneath, and tried to smack Carol's bottom, but didn't have a good angle. I moved Julia's hand away and smacked an ass cheek myself. Immediately after the smack Carol screamed, "Fuck YES, Again." I smacked her buttock again. "YES!" Julia moved her hand up to grab Carol's closest breast. Julia literally grabbed a handful of tit, and was pulling, pushing and mashing it around. I was surprised and concerned how much force Julia was using. Julia grabbed Carol's tit and pulled it so far sideways I was starting to get freaked out by it. Carol seemed to love it though. I knew she liked a bit of roughness when the sex got hot and heavy, but Julia was doing far more than I'd ever been willing to. Carol was yelling her approval so I couldn't complain. It was a pretty safe bet that Carol and Julia knew far more about female anatomy than I did, even about breasts, which I'd spent years diligently trying to get looks at. I forced myself to smack Carol harder, which she thanked me for - she didn't actually say "thank you", but the language she used conveyed that sentiment adequately. Half a dozen more smacks on that side produced increasingly incoherent screams from Carol. I changed hands and on my second smack to the new cheek she screamed her cum. Carol talks dirty when she's getting screwed, which I find a bit disconcerting as it's such a huge contrast to the gentle Carol I've always known and love, but it's still great to hear her final, "FFFUUUCKKK YES!" The spasms of her orgasm weren't enough to bring me off. I wasn't even close, as my cum with Julia had been too recent and this fuck had been a quick one. But Carol had had enough, so I pulled out and let her lay undisturbed. Julia had already extracted her head and pillow, so she and I talked. Julia smiled, and said, "She definitely liked it." "Yeah, although I don't know how anyone can get off on that much pain." "It's not painful. For the first few seconds it is, but once we're used to it, it feels nice." "Huh? At one stage you stretched Carol's tit halfway to the door. No way did that feel 'nice'!" "We're talking about different things. I meant she definitely liked being fucked in the ass. I thought she would." "Ohh." I wasn't sure whether to talk about the pain or the ass-fucking, but Julia seemed totally unconcerned about inflicting the pain on Carol (I couldn't write that Carol was unconcerned about it, as she'd been getting off on it too much to be "unconcerned"). So I asked Julia, "How could you tell that she'd like it?" #4 knew that a lot of girls didn't like their ass being fucked. God knows why he'd learned that, but he had. Knowing girls reacted differently, I was VERY curious about how you could tell in advance whether a girl would like it or not. Julia answered, "I didn't know about her body, but I was pretty sure her mind would love it. She loves being used by us, the more we use her the better for her. Giving you her ass is degrading sex and is being 'used' in an even more invasive way, so I thought she'd love it a lot. -- "Isn't that right, darling?" Julia had turned to Carol, putting her arm over Carol's shoulder. "Do you love Mark fucking your asshole because you're a dirty slut who loves doing every filthy, perverted thing we want? The dirtier it is the more you love it?" "Oh yes. I want to do everything for you both. Please make me do very dirty things. I will do everything, really I will. I don't care how perverted it is." Julia corrected her, "You DO care how perverted it is. You like doing perverted things, don't you?" Carol shuddered a little, then softly said, "Yes. You don't mind, do you?" "Not only don't we mind, we love it! We are going to use you in more and more degrading ways. You are going to be our personal slut, and you are going to do every dirty thing we want. Won't you?" "Yes I will. Everything." "Even if other people see you? Even if other people touch you?" Carol produced a much stronger shudder this time. "If you order me to." From her tone of voice it was obvious that was exactly what Carol was hoping would happen. Julia said, "Rest now, my little slut. I need to clean Mark." Julia used a tissue to remove my rubber, and tossed it in her trash. My cock was still hard, and Julia said, "Fuck me again, Mark, please. Our slut has gotten me so turned on I need to be screwed again." I was very happy with that idea, as Julia and Carol's conversation had turned me on too. I mounted Julia in the missionary position again. Julia called out, "Hey, slut. Get over here and suck my nipples." Slut was there even before the sentence was finished. Julia added, "And rub my clit while our Lord fucks my cunt." It was another 'go flat out' screw. I wanted to cum and went for it as fast as I could. When I was a few seconds away, I used continuous micro-go-softs to hold myself to short while until Julia was just about to cum. As I was feeling somewhat perverted myself, I made sure she was starting her orgasm before I pulled out and sprayed her belly. There wasn't much cum, but enough to do what followed. "Carol, put a pillow under Julia's head." Carol did so, of course. -- "Julia, did you know that I pulled out as I cum, and sprayed on your belly?" "No, I don't remember that. But I see it now." "Good. Carol, you slut, lick all my cum off Julia's belly. Then lick Julia's pussy clean." Carol exclaimed, "Oh, thank you!" then dived into her task ("dived" might be a slight exaggeration). I said, "I don't know why we use tissues to clean ourselves when we have our own slut who'll lick up anything we tell her to." Julia agreed, "Good thinking. Don't forget your cock though. Slut, after you've licked up all your Lord's cum, clean his cock with your mouth before you clean my pussy." "{Slurp}. Thank you so much. I love you two. {Slurp}" After we were clean - taking ten minutes to save maybe a penny's worth of tissues - and were cuddling under the covers again, I wondered if Carol was in much pain after her double virginity loss, "How are you feeling, love?" We have a little trouble calling each other "love" or "darling" if it's not part of an ongoing conversation because we have to get eye contact first so we know which of us is being talked to. I'm still managing to enjoy my threesome despite its complications though. "Very, very happy, thank you. Being your Wife#2 is the best thing that's ever happened to me." Not exactly what I'd intended. So I tried again, "Good. I love having you as my wife too. I'm very lucky to have two such wonderful wives..." #3: " ... But mainly I was wondering how your body is. Are you sore?" "I don't know. Probably, I guess, but I don't care. I'm just so happy. I love belonging to you and Julia. You're so good to me." #4: We chatted for a while, but the girls were both so tired that I soon suggested, "It's getting late and we've had an overwhelming evening. Shall we go to sleep? We can play all day tomorrow, until 3pm anyway." We rolled into a three-person spoon: me holding Julia, Carol holding me. Julia had a little idea, and she instructed, "Carol, rub our Lord's shoulders and back until he goes to sleep. Do it softly to soothe him, so he falls to sleep easily." I laughed sufficiently to make Julia roll onto her back so she could look at me. I explained, "I fall asleep very quickly so there's no need for a backrub, but thanks for the thought. It was a nice and kind idea, just not necessary." Julia disagreed, "It may not be necessary, but even a minute or two will be nice and will help you sleep." "Except that it takes me about one-tenth of a second to fall asleep. It's another little ability of mine. Carol won't even have time to move a finger before it's all over." "Really? Less than a second. Can we watch you? That won't put you off, or anything?" "No problem. A hurricane probably wouldn't put me off if I wanted to sleep through it. Which reminds me, it was thanks to you that I learned how to do this." "It was? How?" #4: "The night before our first date I was so excited I couldn't sleep. I tossed and turned for ages but my head was buzzing. Eventually I worked out a technique for getting to sleep. Now I can go to sleep instantly whenever I want. Shall I go to sleep now?" Both girls wanted to watch, so I lay on my back while they both faced me. Julia said, "Ready, set, go." On the "go", I told myself to sleep. ------- Chapter 54: Honeymoon Breakfast Friday, April 15, 2005 I woke at my usual time, to the sound of my two wives quietly talking. Julia was describing how she was learning to drive a car, which reminded me that I was allowed to try for my license when my cast was off, which would hopefully happen this evening. They were both pressed against my body, which was a nice way to wake up. I said, "Good morning, my beautiful wives." They declared the same back at me, with one important variation, then started raining kisses on me. It was definitely a nice way to wake up. When the kissing enthusiasm had abated somewhat, Julia asked me, "What would you like for breakfast, my Lord?" "Cereal would be fine. That's what I usually have at home." Julia said, "I think I'll have cereal too." Carol added, "Me too. A BIG bowl of it. I'm very hungry." While Carol was speaking, Julia resumed kissing me, so naturally Carol joined in. Julia winked at me and kept on with her kisses. I had no idea why the wink, but I knew what to do about the kisses so I concentrated on those, both Julia's and Carol's. I saw Carol attempt to kiss Julia, but Julia moved her lips away and used them to kiss me. Maybe thirty seconds later the same thing happened again. Julia seemed to be refusing to kiss Carol! After the third rejection I was sure, and was about to speak when Carol said, "Why won't you let me kiss you, Julia?" Julia said, "Didn't you hear our Lord say he'd like cereal for breakfast, and me saying the same?" Carol confirmed, "Sure. I'm hungry too. Can we have breakfast soon?" Rather than answering Carol's question, Julia went back to kissing me. Carol looked confused, then moved to kiss me. Halfway to my cheek, she changed her mind and moved to kiss Julia. Julia quickly moved her face away from Carol. Carol stopped, and cried, "What's wrong? Why won't you let me kiss you?" Julia finally explained, "I'd rather not kiss you at the moment because I'm unhappy with you. You shouldn't be here. You should be downstairs making the breakfasts we asked for, like a good servant would." Carol face collapsed, even before Julia's last phrase. "Oh NO! I'm so sorry," as she leaped out of bed. She took a couple of steps toward the door and then realized she was naked. The thought of what would've happened had she not realized amused me. Carol glanced quickly around the room. There were no clothes in sight because Vanessa had hung them up while everyone was in the room last night. Carol rushed to one of the closets. Julia yelled out, "STOP!" Carol froze. Julia continued, "As punishment for your mistake you will go and get our breakfasts naked. Have a good shower first so my family don't have to smell you. Don't wash your hair though because we don't want to get the bed wet if we decide to let you back into it. You know where the shower is, so go now!" [Which reminds me of a small, recurring problem we'd had last night. Carol's hair is very long, reaching almost to her waist. It looks beautiful but it's a bit of a nuisance in bed because it's often getting caught under someone when we're moving around. I'm delighted to say that we do a LOT of moving around. We certainly aren't going to give up 'moving around', and Carol's hair looks so beautiful it'd be a sin - a real one - to cut it, so this comment is pointless. I blame hunger. Moving on... ] Carol briefly looked back at the closet, then turned back to Julia and opened her mouth. For a second nothing happened, then Carol took a deep breath, turned, and marched naked out the door. Julia called out after her, "Make sure you wash thoroughly." As soon as the door was shut behind her, Julia burst out laughing. I didn't see any humor whatsoever in the situation, and was trying to decide what to say to Julia. I was still thinking about this when Julia leaped out of bed and hurried to get her robe on while telling me, "I sent her to have a shower so I'd have time to whip downstairs and get everyone prepared." Julia disappeared out the door, leaving me all alone. I was impressed. Julia had obviously pre-planned the whole thing because she'd asked for breakfast in a way that had set Carol up for failure. Sending Carol to have a shower was brilliant. Carol would experience all the fear of being exposed naked to other people, but without knowing that Julia had cleared everyone away. It was a clever little scheme. I was sure Carol would not forget this 'lesson', and we'd get our breakfasts promptly from now on. This was a very good thing, as I'm quite hungry in the mornings. It took Julia quite a long time to return, so long that I feared she'd be in danger of meeting Carol on the stairs, but judging by the big smile on Julia's face when she returned it'd all gone well. Julia hung up her robe then snuggled back into bed with me again. I expressed my admiration of her scheme, "What a clever little plan to ensure Carol won't forget our breakfasts again. It's very funny. When did you think of it?" "This morning soon after I woke up. It'll be interesting to hear what she says when she gets back. There should be some good laughs in it for us and a good experience for her." I was going to ask to have the "good experience for her" comment explained, but Julia said, "I'm horny and I want to be fucking you when she comes back. Please let me climb on top of you so I can pace myself until she arrives?" That sounded like more fun than what I'd intended to do, and Julia had used the magic word - "horny" - so I granted her request. She straddled me and my cock slid easily into her as Julia was surprisingly wet. Perhaps not so surprisingly when I thought about it. I think Julia gets turned on by her little schemes, especially those with any sexual connotation, although I have my suspicions that she could get off on schemes that had no such connotation, provided they had a large amount of management in them. Her brain is WAY different from mine! Julia was in no hurry, so we just rocked back and forth, playing with each other's nipples. I definitely got the best end of that deal because her nipples are a lot more fun to play with than mine. To kill time until Carol returned, I asked Julia, "Are you ready for your driving test?" "No, but there's no hurry for that. We should have a test drive with Dad sometime. We'll be prohibited from having sex in a few hours, so we can do some driving after that. You haven't tried driving our new car yet." We chatted about driving and other minor matters. I was starting to worry about my breakfast. It was taking a long time and I was hungry, especially because I was expecting it any second. Maybe Carol was too scared and was hiding in the bathroom. In which case, when would I get my breakfast? I was a little worried about Carol too. I asked Julia, "Do you think Carol's okay? She's taking a long time." Julia laughed and said, "I'm sure she's having a GREAT time. Don't worry about it." I really didn't think Carol would think the risk of being seen was "a great time", let alone "a GREAT time", but Julia wasn't worried about her so I was reassured. Julia understands Carol very well, so I took her word. Now I was worried about Carol's having a GREAT time delaying my breakfast. Something like twenty hungry minutes later the door started opening. Julia's rocking speed instantly increased, and she started crying out little obscene observations, "You are such a great fucker. I love the feel of your cock in me." The door swung open to reveal Carol bending over to pick up a large tray loaded with food. She picked it up very carefully as it looked heavy and perilous, and walked slowly through the doorway, kicking the door shut with her heel on the way past. She had a strange expression on her face. Embarrassment certainly as her face was red, but it also had a wild gleam. I suspect she might have gotten a thrill out of the danger of being seen naked. Maybe Julia's comment about her having a "GREAT time" was correct. Carol slowly moved toward the dressing table, no doubt to place the tray on it, but Julia - still rocking and moaning on my cock - called out, "Bring the tray here, Wife#2." -- Carol approached the bed and Julia said, "Stand holding it beside the bed. We'll be finished fucking soon." Then Julia ignored her and went back to calling out obscenities at me, one of which - "You haven't fucked me in the ass for a while, Lord. Do you want to fuck me there next?" - required a response from me. I wasn't sure what answer Julia wanted, so I gave a noncommittal, "Hmm, that might be a good idea." It wasn't so much that I didn't want to; it's just that I would have preferred to do it AFTER breakfast. Carol stood there quietly, looking down at the tray, in shame I assumed, although I wasn't sure whether it was at her failure to get our breakfast or at her nearly being seen naked. After a couple of minutes the weight of the heavily loaded tray was pressing on Carol, and she shifted her grip on it. Julia immediately asked, "Is the tray heavy?" Carol finally looked up, with a smile on her face, expecting Julia to make some kind, helpful comment. Instead Julia said, "Spread your legs wider then. I want to look at your open pussy when I'm fucking our Lord anyway, so spread your legs very wide." Carol said, "Oh," lost her smile, and looked back down at the tray. She carefully spread her legs. Julia, watching her, added, "Careful with that tray! If you drop it you'll have to clean up the mess AND go downstairs naked again to make our breakfasts all over." "Oh no." Carol held the tray very carefully. Julia asked, "Wife#2, why is your pussy so wet? I know it didn't get that wet so quickly just from watching us. Did our breakfast take so long because you stopped to frig yourself?" "Oh no, I wouldn't do that! It took so long because they made me do other things." #2: Julia spoke up, "I didn't ask you why you took so long. I asked you why your pussy is so wet?" A very bashful Carol reluctantly admitted, "Umm, I don't know." An angry Julia yelled, "You DO know! How dare you not tell the truth to us! Answer truthfully, RIGHT THIS INSTANT!" "I'm sorry. It's just so embarrassing. They all saw me, and made me do things, or made comments. It was terrible but I couldn't help getting excited. They kept talking about how wet I was, and pointing it out, and I just got wetter. Because I'm shaved they could see everything. It was so unfair. I thought I'd die." Julia, now in a happy tone of voice, said, "Good girl! Why don't you put that tray down on the vanity and come over here and tell us all about it." Carol carefully took the tray over to the vanity and placed it there. I could easily see the relief on her face when the considerable weight came off her arms. Julia instructed, "Sit cross-legged beside Mark's head, darling. I want us both to get a good look right up your very wet pussy." Carol blushed more, but still had the gleam in her eyes. She was enjoying it, obviously. I was looking forward to hearing her story, although I was getting quite concerned about what time breakfast would finally be served. I was pinned to the bed so there wasn't much I could do about it. Carol sat down where directed and opened her legs very wide. Julia leaned forward, scooped up a couple of fingers full of Carol's copious juices, and fed them to me. Hopefully as an appetizer for breakfast. Julia returned for more, alternating between feeding me and herself. Every scoop Julia made sure to rub her fingers firmly across Carol's swollen pussy lips, and we could see Carol react every time. Julia said, "Tell us what happened after you finished your shower." Carol started her story, "After the shower I had the idea of wrapping myself in a towel before I went down, but you had said that I had to make breakfast naked, so I didn't put on a towel." Carol was visibly proud that she'd obeyed Julia's order. Julia praise was effusive, "That's EXCELLENT, darling. You did it EXACTLY right. I am so pleased with you. What a wonderful girl you are! It is important to us both that you follow our orders accurately and intelligently. You knew what I wanted and you did it. You are perfect." Carol was very pleased, "Thank you so much. I'm very sorry I didn't get your breakfast when you first told me what you wanted, but I'll do better in the future. I want to be perfect for you." Julia encouraged, "You are doing very well. When you make mistakes we're very disappointed and have to punish you, but we can see that you are doing your best and you are getting better. Now keep telling us what happened." Carol resumed, "I went downstairs. I didn't see anyone or hear anything, so I thought I was safe, but when I walked into the kitchen your mother was standing there. I didn't mind too much because she's a woman. When she asked me why I was walking around the house naked, I told her I was getting our breakfasts. She insisted on knowing why I was naked, so I had to tell her you were punishing me. Then she wanted to know why you were punishing me, and I had to say I hadn't gotten your breakfasts fast enough. Then she wanted to know why it was me that had to get the breakfasts in the morning. She kept asking me question after question, and she forced me to tell her that I am your and Mark's servant. It's all right that I told her, isn't it?" "Of course. You don't have any secrets from my family. It's very important that you keep Mark's and my secrets - especially Mark's because they're life-and-death important - but you don't have any secrets of your own, and I'm not the least bit concerned about your being embarrassed by having to talk about your sexual peculiarities. You were correct to answer my mother. I'm happy that she knows you are our servant. Carry on." "After your mom knew I'd failed to be a good servant, she pulled a long, wooden spoon out of a drawer and told me that she used to smack your bottom with it when you were a naughty girl. She asked me whether I thought I should have my bare bottom spanked with it. I didn't know what to say. Then she asked me whether I'd been very naughty or only a little naughty. I said I thought only a little as this was only the first breakfast we'd had. I won't forget again, so I think the first time was only a little naughty. I told her that, and she put the spoon away and told me she'd only use it on my bottom if I was very naughty. I answered right, didn't I?" -- Julia just nodded, so Carol continued, "Then she asked me what we wanted for breakfast, and I told her. She asked if I knew where everything was. I didn't, so she pointed to where the bowls were and I got them out. But when I got three out she made me put one away and told me I was only making breakfast for you and Mark. She said that if you wanted me to have breakfast you should send me down with the dirty dishes after you've finished yours and I can make mine then. I thought that was okay, but then she told me not to worry if the neighbor's wife was in the kitchen when I returned, as she often pops over in the morning. I should just come in and wash the dishes and make my breakfast. You wouldn't send me down again, would you?" "Someone has to wash the dirty dishes after we finish. That's definitely a servant's job so surely you're not expecting Mark or me to do them, are you?" Julia said nothing after that, and there was a short silence, after which Carol said, "Okay. I'll do them. I just hope your neighbor won't be there. I don't even know her and it'd be too embarrassing even if it is another woman." Julia made it worse, "She might bring her husband. Sometimes he comes over too." "Oh no. How will we know whether he's here?" "That's easy. When you walk naked into the kitchen, if there's a strange man there, then that'll be him. He's a nice man, so if he's there give him a kiss on the cheek and tell him that 'Julia says hello'. Carry on with your story." Carol blushed more, collected herself and resumed, "Your mom pointed to where the cereal was. You have the same sort as we do, so that's lucky." Julia gave a little laugh, and I knew that it was exactly as lucky as the rings all fitting perfectly. "Your mom kept pointing to the next thing I needed, and slowly I made breakfast for the two of you. Cereal and drinks, just like Mark has at home. All the time your mom was asking me lots of questions, like did we have a good night, what did I think of your ceremony, which was the best part of it, what do I think of Mark, what I wanted to do in the future, and what did I use to want and why I have changed my mind. Lots and lots of questions like that, nonstop. She didn't even stop asking questions to tell me where the next thing I needed was, she just pointed and kept asking. It was very confusing. And she wouldn't let me just say 'yes' or 'no', I had to explain and give reasons. It made it hard for me to make breakfast quickly." Carol had to pause for a second because Julia bent forward and kissed her on the mouth, then Julia said, "You are pleasing me very much, my little darling. If it doesn't divulge one of Mark's or my secrets, you should always do your best to answer my mother's or father's questions. And I like the way your pussy keeps producing more and more juice. Are you thirsty after all that talking?" Carol nodded, so considerate Julia inserted three fingers into Carol's pussy and pumped them in and out several times, then scooped up as much juice as she could, raised her hand and poured it into Carol's mouth. After Carol had finished cleaning Julia's fingers, Julia commented to no one in particular, "Carol's pussy juice is so delicious. What amazes me is how much she makes. Carol must spend all day thinking about sex. Do you think about sex often, Carol?" Carol admitted, "Um, yes, I do. Not all day, but a lot. Especially the last few days. I can't stop thinking about it." "Good girl for being so honest and for being such a good little slut for us. We're glad you're so horny, aren't we, Mark?" "I'll say! I love it that you like sex so much, Carol." One thing was for damned sure, Carol wasn't the only one who was feeling horny now. Carol's story, Julia's teasing of Carol, and Julia's slow rocking on my cock, all had me very hard. Figuring the story was nearly over and wanting very much to cum, I started thrusting up into Julia. Julia felt me accelerating - she could hardly fail to - she looked at me and said, "You might want to pace yourself. There's a lot more yet, isn't there, Carol?" Carol got back to her story, "Yes. It gets worse now. I was just about to carry the breakfasts up, when your mom suddenly remembered that Mark's breakfast should have gone into a bigger bowl. She told me to get the bigger bowl out and make a new breakfast. I got it out and was about to tip one of the other bowls of cereal into it, thinking I'd just add a bit more on top, but Vanessa said it was time for Prof's breakfast so I should take one of the already made bowls to Prof in his study. I didn't want to because Prof is a man and I was naked, but your mom insisted so I had to." -- "I went as fast as I could, hoping The Boys wouldn't see me. His door was shut, so I knocked on it and he told me to come in. I didn't want to go in of course, so I just put my head around and held the bowl out in front. I tried to get him to come and get it, but he kept telling me to come in. Eventually I had to tell him that I was naked. I thought he might laugh, but that he'd come and get his bowl. Instead he said, 'Excellent. Come in then. You're beautiful and I'd like to see you naked.' I thought he was joking so I stayed hiding behind the door. Until he said, 'I am the master of this house. I order you to come in and stand in front of me.' So I had to go in. That's right, isn't it? It is his house, after all." I wasn't going to venture an answer. First because I'd gotten so horny I didn't trust my judgment, but mostly because I'd just realized that this was ALL planned. Julia hadn't gone downstairs while Carol was showering to get everyone to stay away from the kitchen; she'd gone down to set this up! What a fiend! Julia answered, "Of course you should obey him, unless Mark or I have given you a more important order. In this case we had ordered you to bring our breakfast but you were smart in realizing that our order was not urgent and we could wait while you did what Mom and Dad wanted." "Oh, I never thought about that. I wasn't really smart; I just did what everyone told me. It was very confusing because there was too much happening at once, all those questions from your mom that made me think hard about my answers, and I was very embarrassed and naked and everything. It was all a bit much for me. I hope I did all right?" "You did perfectly. So what happened when you went into Dad's study?" "I went in carrying his breakfast bowl. I was going to close the door but he said leave it open. I said, 'But what about if The Boys come past?' But your father said, 'Then they'll see you naked. It doesn't matter.' I thought it did matter but I couldn't argue with him. -- "He showed me where to put his bowl, then he told me to stand in the middle of the room. I did, and he just looked at me like he was waiting for something. After a little while he said, 'Is that how you normally stand?' I didn't know what he meant as I've never really thought about how I stand. He then told me to spread my legs farther apart, and to put my hands behind my neck with the elbows wide apart. I did that, and he got up and walked around me. -- "He walked very slowly and looked me up and down. It was very embarrassing. When he walked behind me I turned my head to keep looking at him, and he ordered me to just look straight ahead. He kept slowly walking around me, and eventually got all the way around. It must have taken him nearly a minute. It was just like I was a piece of meat or something. He just looked me up and down the whole time. He never said a word except to make me look straight ahead. -- "When he got around to the front of me he asked, 'Why are your nipples hard and your pussy aroused?' I didn't know what to say. Then he said, 'There's juice running down your legs now.' And there was. It had started while he was walking around me and I'd hoped he wouldn't notice it, but he did. I said, 'I'm sorry. I'll wipe it off as soon as you let me leave.' He said, 'I forbid you to wipe it off.' -- "Then he said something nice, he said that he was very happy to have me as his daughter-in-law, that I was a very nice person, and he hoped my marriage would be a very happy one. He told me to lean over a little, then he kissed me on the cheek and said to go back to Vanessa and give her the kiss, and to thank her for his breakfast. I was embarrassed but he made me feel welcomed and happy. Wasn't he nice?" Julia agreed, "Yes, he's a very nice man. Did you wipe your legs when you left his study?" "No. I thought about it, but he did say it was forbidden so I thought I'd better not. I just went back to the kitchen and Vanessa was still there, so I told her what Prof said to tell her, and I kissed her cheek. I started getting the cereal out again, to fill Mark's bigger bowl, when Vanessa told me that The Boys were in the Guys' Room, and for me to go and tell them that it was breakfast time. -- "It was as if she'd forgotten I was naked, as the way she'd said it sounded so normal. So I reminded her that I was naked, and all she said was, 'Yes I can see that. I don't mind and I'm sure they won't either. Go ahead.' So I had to go. When I got there I stayed outside the room, just sticking my head around the corner to pass the message on. -- "Then I ran back to the kitchen hoping I could quickly make Mark's cereal and leave before The Boys arrived, but Mark's bowl had disappeared. I ask Vanessa where it was and she asked me where I had left it. I quickly told her on the bench, and she said she must have tidied it up without thinking. I looked in the cupboard but I couldn't find it there. Vanessa suggested I try the other cupboards, and I looked through lots of them but it wasn't in any. -- "Then I heard The Boys coming, and your mom said that she'd probably put it in the dishwasher thinking it was dirty. I opened the dishwasher and it was at the back. I was just getting it out when Andrew said, 'How come there's a beautiful, naked ass sticking out of our dishwasher?' I didn't want to face him, but the way I was standing was even more embarrassing. He must have been able to see a LOT of me, so I had to stand up and turn around, but I covered myself with my hands so The Boys couldn't see me. -- "Robert asked me why I was naked so I said I was making Mark's breakfast. Vanessa told me that wasn't the full answer, and if Robert had taken the time to ask me a question the least I could do was to answer it properly. So I had to tell him I was being punished, and then your mom made me describe why. Your mom kept making me stand there and give more and more details to every one of their questions, when all I wanted to do was make your breakfast and get away. -- "After I'd answered enough questions your mom told me to make Mark's breakfast, and then I realized that I had to move my hands to make it, so The Boys saw even more. They asked me why I shaved my pussy. I tried to avoid answering but Vanessa insisted I told the truth, so I had to say, 'Julia told me to.' Then they wanted to know why, and I had to say, 'So we could flash Mark at school.' Then your mom made me admit that I found exposing myself at school very exciting. The Boys were nice though, they kept complimenting me on how beautiful I was. They said they hoped I'd keep being naughty so I'd be punished this way again. But I am NEVER going to be naughty again - it's FAR too embarrassing! -- "Eventually I finished making Mark's breakfast and Vanessa gave me a tray to carry it all on. I was just about to leave when she told The Boys, 'One of the disadvantages of a shaved pussy is that everyone can clearly see when you are aroused, like Carol is now.' Then she asked me why I was so aroused. I had to tell her it was because I was embarrassed. But she said that was the wrong answer, and told me to try again. I really wanted to get away but I couldn't think of a better answer. -- "She asked me, 'If a teacher embarrasses you at school by making fun of an answer you've given, does that get you aroused?' Of course the answer was no, but it made me realize that I have to be embarrassed about something sexy. She said that I was closer, but still not right. I didn't know, so she said, 'What if you were standing in the schoolyard and the wind suddenly blew your skirt up. Would that be exciting?' I said 'No, just embarrassing and annoying.' Your mom said, 'But what if Julia or Mark ordered you to raise your skirt?' I didn't even have to answer because she could see it in my face. Then she told me to take your breakfast up. She also said they'd all be in the study if we wanted any of them. -- "Phew, that's all of it. I was VERY glad to get away because it kept getting worse and worse. Even though your family were all very nice to me, it was very embarrassing. I'll never forget your breakfasts again, THAT'S FOR SURE!" Julia asked, "Did Mom want me to go to the study with them?" Carol answered, "No. Or she never said anything like that. Only that they'd be there if we wanted any of them." I suddenly realized that I wasn't as horny as I'd been before. I was still hard, but Carol's 'bad luck' at being caught in the kitchen was actually more serious than it'd first seemed, and that'd robbed it of its eroticism. Julia must have felt the same because she'd cooled off too. Julia asked Carol, "Do you want me to get off Mark so you can fuck him?" "YES, PLEASE. I need it really badly." I looked at Carol, and she sure did! She was VERY worked up. Both girls were rubbing Carol's pussy, and it was leaking even more juice than before. Julia suggested, "Get a condom out of your drawer, sweetie, then he's all yours." Carol had it ready in record time. Julia got off me, and Carol very quickly took her place. Julia tried to point out a couple of useful techniques for the girl, some different hip rhythms and how to roll her clit forward to stimulate it. I got the impression there were more lessons that Julia could've imparted, but Carol had started off only half-listening to Julia and had rapidly lost the ability to pay even that much attention. Within a couple of minutes Carol hips were slamming forward and back, and she was mauling her own breasts. Julia, being a Sex Trainer without a pupil, decided to take advantage of my unoccupied face. She had just straddle me, facing Carol, and I'd taken the first few licks, when Carol's movements and screams kicked into overdrive. I couldn't see anything except Julia's ass cheeks, but I didn't need sight to tell me how fast Carol was getting herself off on me. A few seconds later Carol screamed very loudly. After which she let herself fall sideways off me. It was over so fast I'd barely got back into the mood. Same for Julia apparently because she climbed off my face. We looked at each other and I said, "I don't know about you, but I'd really like my breakfast now." She laughed and said, "I was going to say the same thing. I don't think we were quite as turned on as our little servant." Somehow Julia's calling Carol "little" actually does seem appropriate, despite the total reversal of relative sizes. We got off the bed. The moment I stood up I noticed a LOT of Carol's juices running down my legs. Julia happily licked up most of it, then we walked over to our patiently waiting and traumatically prepared breakfasts. While there, I quietly asked Julia, "I understand that wasn't accidental, but what was it for? I originally thought you were just teasing her, but it seems bigger than that." Julia faced away from Carol, stood beside me and quietly explained, "It was so Mom could verify my claims about Carol. Mom had asked me to create an opportunity for that, and I thought of it just before you woke up. When I was downstairs we quickly got together and made a rough outline of a plan, but we mostly just left it to Mom to manage. I didn't know the details until Carol told us, but most of them were completely fake: we don't have neighbors that pop over in the morning, Dad doesn't eat breakfast in his study, The Boys don't play 8-ball in the mornings on weekdays. -- "It was so Mom could see for herself what Carol is like, and for Mom to get Carol off-balance so she'd give away a lot more information when answering Mom's questions. I bet Carol doesn't even remember most of the questions she answered, but Mom will. Mom will have learned a great deal. It'll be interesting to talk with her the next time I get a chance." I wasn't sure how I felt about that, and I expressed that to Julia, "It seems too calculating. Too cold-hearted and mean, or something. I like having fun with Carol, but that almost seems like conducting psychological experiments on her. Or have I got the wrong somehow?" Julia didn't really reassure me. "Mostly you've gotten it right. But there are two things you should realize. First, she enjoyed it. You saw how turned on she was, especially after repeating the whole story to us. Did you notice that we didn't actually ask for as much detail as she gave us? She WANTED to relive it. Also, I want to put her into embarrassing situations because she wants them so much. We can't do much in public as it could be dangerous or give her a bad reputation, but it's safe to do in this house. -- "The second thing to realize is the most important. Mom has said to me several times, especially recently, that we are playing for high stakes. We are committing sex crimes and our parents are taking a big risk for allowing this to happen, so it's only fair they can verify what we're doing. -- "Plus you and I have taken over Carol's life. You want her to have your babies rather than going to college, which is a MAJOR change to her life! We're using our power over her life, which means we're taking responsibility for her life. That's a big responsibility and I'm VERY happy to have Mom double-check my understanding of Carol. I don't want to make mistakes with her life. I feel much better with my family helping me. I'm sure my brothers will be eager to help as much as they can in the future too, especially after this latest 'job', haha." Sometimes I'm very proud of how clever I can be. Not only was I learning and getting reassurances about what had happened and why, but I'd gotten Julia to do nearly all the talking, leaving me free to eat my breakfast. She hadn't even touched hers while I had nearly finished mine. How's that for being clever! Julia, seeing that I accepted her explanation, pointed at her breakfast and said, "Mom probably intended this for Carol. I'm guessing mine is the one Carol took to Dad as he should've had his normal one already. I'll go downstairs to eat it and to talk with Mom just in case there's anything important I need to know. I shouldn't think so though as our darling behaved very much as I thought she would. Look after her, I'll be back soon." Julia gave me a nice kiss, then headed for the door. When Julia was halfway to the door, I suddenly realized that she was naked. Imagine not noticing that earlier! I quietly called out a reminder to her. She laughed and said, "Yes, I know. I'm going to tease my brothers. Thanks for thinking of me though." She headed out the door, confirming my previous opinion that the Williams family was definitely MUCH more open than mine! ------- Chapter 55: More About Carol Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) I had finished my breakfast, and there was a beautiful, naked girl lying on the bed. My priorities were clear. I went back to the bed and cuddled with Carol. She was happy just to lie quietly. When we were comfortable together Carol said, "Thank you for loving me so much, Mark." I had a momentary panic that she'd overheard some of my conversation with Julia, so I asked, "What did I do to deserve such a warm thank you?" "Most recently, letting me get myself off on top of you. I REALLY needed that! But mostly for being so good for me. Letting me love you and Julia, letting me serve you, caring for me and keeping me safe. There's so much you do for me, like what just happened downstairs. I LOVED it! It was fantastic and I owe it to you. -- "I owe Vanessa and the others too, but everything they're doing to make me happy they're really doing for you. I'm so thankful that their opinion of you is so high that they're willing to do so much for me. It can't have been easy for them to let me marry you and Julia the way we did because that means Julia will never marry you normally, which must break Vanessa's heart. They're giving up a lot for me, all because of you. You have made my life so full of happiness I want to burst. I love you my brother, my lover, my husband, my Lord. I will be with you for the rest of our lives." Carol burst into tears and sobbed into my chest. And me without a handkerchief again. On the other hand, what did a little more liquid on me matter, compared to what had already been smeared over me. It would probably make me cleaner. When she'd had a good cry, I said, "I love you too, you know?" "Yes, I know. Both you and Julia do. More than I deserve." -- I was obviously going to argue with that, but Carol didn't let me. She insisted, "Please! I know I'm right. You two do many things for me. I know both of you spent a long time planning how to get me to join you. Last night you made a comment about planning to win my college fund from a casino. You'd already thought about that and planned to do it, even though that was years away. You care about me enough to think that far ahead and plan to help me with something that you thought was important to me. Julia's taking me shopping tomorrow and we're going to spend a lot of money to make me happy, although we're going to get lots of sexy clothes to make you happy too. -- "Prof has several times said they'll get another computer for me if I want one. I just have to ask and it'll be done, even though Mom and Dad have objected. Julia even got off your cock because she could see that I wanted it the most. How's that for being generous! It goes on forever. But there's almost nothing I can do for you in return. I can give you my body but you make it feel so good I should owe you even more. I know love isn't about 'owing', but there's so little I can give you. I'm still too young to help you as much as I want to. Julia is only three years older than me, but I cannot imagine that I will ever be as good at helping you as she is. She's very clever, isn't she?" "She certainly is, and her whole family is very impressive. But I don't want you to grow up to be like Julia, whether in three years or thirty years. I already have Julia to do the Julia-type things. I want a Carol that does Carol-type things. There are things you can do for me that she can't, or that I don't want her to. The biggest is my wanting you to be the mother of my babies. I want them with you. That's a strong feeling in me. -- "My feelings for you are hard to put into words, but they're very strong. I know that if I had to choose to have only one of you two, I'd immediately choose you. I don't even know why, but I know my feelings are certain. The strength of my feelings for you proves that you MUST be giving me something. I don't know what that something is - 'just being Carol' maybe - but whatever it is, it's so strong it more than settles anything you think you owe me." Carol, teary eyed again, said, "Julia keeps telling me you love me more than her. She doesn't seem upset at all, which proves how special SHE is. You also say you prefer me. I have to believe you, but I don't understand why?" "I'm sorry that I can't explain why either. Something about your personality obviously, but that's a non-answer. I don't understand what, but that doesn't make it any less true. If you'll forgive the comparison, I don't understand why I like roast chicken so much, but I know I do. That I can't explain my preference doesn't make my reasons any weaker. I know how much I love you, and that's all I need to know. -- "Can I change the subject a bit, and ask about something you mentioned earlier?" "Of course, my Lord." "Haha. I get your little dig. I'm not a very bossy Lord, am I?" "No, but Julia and I will teach you to be. Before you woke up she told me that's one of the reasons we're going to get more girls for you to play with, so you'll learn to be more commanding. She says you are too passive with people you love, so maybe you'll learn faster with other people." "She's never mentioned that to me, but somehow I'm not surprised she has multiple reasons. I must admit that I'm looking forward to playing with a few extra girls myself. But what I wanted to ask you about is that you said that 'you loved what happened to you downstairs', and that 'it was fantastic'. I thought you found it terribly embarrassing?" "Yes to all of those emotions. That's why I appreciate you and Julia's putting me into embarrassing situations so much. Or at least threatening to. Being ordered into a sexually embarrassing situation is very exciting for me, as EVERYONE in this family now knows, after they all saw how wet my pussy was. Which just made it even wetter. It was WONDERFUL!" "I can't imagine how you can find embarrassment arousing." Carol's answer was an immediate, "I can't imagine how you can love me more than Julia." "Haha. Good answer. There are lots of things I don't understand about people, especially females. Do you understand it yourself?" Carol replied, "No, not really. It's got a lot to do with respecting you and Julia though. Julia understands it better than me, so ask her if you want to know." "Don't you want to know about it yourself?" "Not really. I don't need to. Julia does and you will, which is all that matters. I know the effect it has on me. I could hardly not notice how aroused I get when I follow Julia's or your orders. Especially your orders, although you don't order me around enough. I know that Julia could easily have asked me to make breakfast this morning, but she deliberately tricked me. I don't blame her for that; I thank her! It was wonderful. You don't need to understand why you like roast chicken do you? You like it anyway." "Very true." Carol said, "There's one important thing I want to tell you though. I began obeying Julia because I thought she was a wonderful person, and then I saw that she understood me and gave me what I wanted and needed. In a way that showed that she cared and was careful. I fell in love with her for those reasons. I began obeying you for the same reasons too, because you've been an exceptionally nice and caring person the last year or so, and because with Julia helping you, you were starting to know how to handle me. But I'm obeying you now for an even stronger reason: out of awe. -- "Julia is right that you're miraculous. When I obey Julia it's a game that we both know and enjoy, but obeying you is not a game. Julia had it right in our wedding vows: my needs are irrelevant compared to yours. If Julia told me to do something that I disagreed with, I'd question her about it and possibly refuse, but I won't do that with you. You are my Lord so I will obey you in all things. This is nothing to do with me getting sexual fun; this is about every part of my life, about ALL of my life. I am entirely yours. That's what my vows were all about and that's what I want for my life." "Wow. You've been doing some heavy thinking..." "It wasn't hard. I've been thinking about it for a few days and seeing you fly things through the air made me understand why Julia kept saying how important you are. 'My brother is superhuman.' That's a bizarre thing to say, but it's totally true. Serving you is the best way I could spend my life, although there's almost nothing I can do for you." I ignored her last sentiment, instead triple-checking something, "If I said, 'Get lost', or 'Go jump in the lake', or some other figure of speech like those, you wouldn't do it, would you?" "Not unless you wanted me to. Sometimes you're very silly, you know? Julia and I laughed about your going to sleep last night. Whoever heard of a superhero with the magical ability of falling asleep instantly?" I answered, "Whoever heard of a superhero who lets himself be teased mercilessly by two cheeky girls? Don't tell anyone please, or none of the other superheroes will let me play with them." -- As often happens with me, one of my other minds thought of another answer, so I added, "Anyway, I'll have you know that my falling asleep is completely consistent with my other super-abilities. Every superhero has a theme. Some are super-stretchy, others have fire abilities or are super-strong. I am super at everything to do with beds. I'm Super-BedMan!" "Haha. You certainly are. It's so good to know that I am dedicating my life to Super-BedMan. Now I feel very noble about my self-sacrifice." "It's a good thing I'm not Super-SnotMan, isn't it?" "Eww, gross! You'd be on your own if you were. Julia and I wouldn't have vowed to lay down our lives to save a big pile of snot. Yuck! You've ruined my dream of saving your life." "Why would you dream about that? I know Julia made it part of your vows but there are much more pleasant things to think about." Carol laughed. "I'd LOVE to sacrifice my life to save yours. I can't stop thinking about it since we talked about how dangerous your life could be yesterday." "Why ON EARTH would you be excited about that? That's insane. Sorry, but it is." "No it's not. It's the best thing that could ever happen to me. My life means nothing compared to how important your life is, but if I died saving your life, then my life has been worth yours. I would die the happiest person ever." Bizarrely, Carol REALLY meant it. She was sitting up with pride, looking me in the eyes while tears ran down her cheeks. She was proud of herself for being insane! #1: I couldn't think of anything helpful to say, so I just put my arms around her and held her. Carol put her cheek against mine and I could feel her tears running down. After a while, "Make love to me please, Mark." That was much better than saying, "There, there," but I'd noticed earlier that when she'd walked across the room she'd still been sore, and I'd not had a chance to talk about it yet. Now was a very appropriate time, so I asked her, "Are you not too sore?" "I am, but not too bad. If you go slow I should be fine, and I want to while we can because of the 3 o'clock deadline." I remembered my lesson from the "Gun Incident" about incorrectly imposing my judgment about other people's bodies on them, so I did exactly what Carol wanted: made slow, gentle, caring love with her. None of the usual rough stuff, just as much love as I could show her. We were only midway through when a smiling Julia came back. I felt embarrassed to do so, but I immediately asked her to wait for me downstairs. Thankfully she didn't say even one word, just turned around and left the room. Not just "the room", but "her room." When the door closed behind Julia, Carol said, "Thank you." "This is for us, and this is for you," as I kissed her again. I gave Carol my total attention. I was still new to her body and didn't know how to arouse it as well as I did Julia's, but I was determined to give her the best time I could. She was willing to give her life for me, so the least I could do was do my best to show her how much I appreciated her generous insanity. We finished about half an hour after Julia had left us, and I immediately felt guilty about leaving her downstairs. I moved Carol's breakfast to the closest bedside table, kissed her on the cheek, and told her I'd go check that Julia was okay. Carol gave a small laugh, and said, "Of course she's okay. She'll be pleased." I made a mental note not to have serious conversations with Carol soon after sex because she doesn't think very clearly then. I left her in the bed and put my robe on. Unlike some people in this house, I do NOT walk around naked! Then I went to find out how much apologizing I had to do to Julia. As it turned out, none. I found her cutting up some vegetables in the kitchen. I sheepishly approached her and started apologizing for rejecting her presence, but she spoke over top of me, "There's no need to apologize. I'm very happy with you." She obviously didn't understand what I was intending to apologize for, so I explained it to her. "I wanted to apologize for asking you to leave your own room; for not letting you join in with Carol and me." "Yes, I know. There's no need to. I was more than happy to leave. Thank you for telling me to." I suddenly recalled Carol's comment, so I asked, "Would it be accurate to say that you are pleased?" "Exactly right. Well done." For a second I was tempted to accept the praise by saying say nothing, but I did need to understand this stuff. The last thing I need is for the girls to get jealous of each other so the more I learn about it the better. So, "Ahh, it was Carol who said you'd be pleased. I don't understand why. Can you explain it to me, please?" "Of course, my Lord. It's quite simple..." #1: " ... You clearly gave me a command. You obviously wanted me to leave and you ordered me to, so I did. You don't give us nearly enough commands, so I was pleased that you're starting to." #1: I said, "Okay. I accept that you are happy to see me give more commands, but what about that particular command? Didn't it make you upset that I didn't want you to join in with Carol and me?" "Quite the opposite. You were doing something to make Carol happy that you thought would be best done alone, which was very sweet of you. Now you're down here begging me to forgive you for it. How could I possibly be upset? You've nothing to apologize for; you had a good reason and I trust your good intentions. Don't worry about it." "How do you know it was me wanting to make Carol happy? Maybe she was making me happy and I didn't want to share that." "Have you ever met you? If you had, you'd know that was absurd. You're not capable of that. That was just a typical male thing to say: logical but ridiculous." #3: I said, "You know me too well. Carol was very nice to me, and we got into a very loving mood where I tried my best to thank her for it. But I still feel guilty about not letting you join in with our sex. It seems selfish." Julia said, "You were giving her a personal gift. There's bound to be many occasions when you do things for us individually, so unless you want to spend half your life apologizing to the other one you'll have to realize that we're both very happy that you like giving so much. Carol and I are very different people so treating us identically won't work. Putting it in a more masculine way, it's not as if I expect to be with you every time you have sex with someone, nor you always with me when Carol and I are alone together. There's going to be a delightfully but ridiculously large amount of sex in our marriage, so we should learn to be tolerant about it, and certainly not possessive. I'm going to be spending some VERY high quality, one-on-one time with Carol very soon. Should I feel guilty about excluding you from that, or do you want to join us?" "That sounds great. What are we going to be doing?" "Spending ALL DAY clothes shopping. It'll be wonderful and you're welcome to join us." "Oops, you got me good that time! You've taught me a good lesson: NEVER apologize. It's too dangerous!" Julia said, "It wasn't a complete joke. Carol and I are going to be spending a lot of time together tomorrow. It'll be good fun and good for our relationship. Should I feel guilty that you're not going to be with us? Obviously not, because we'll be doing something that's best done with just the two of us. Same with what you were doing with her a few minutes ago. I love you for loving her." -- "Here's an idea, Mark. Rather than you apologizing all the time, why not just assume everything you do is fine. If you do somehow upset me, I'll tell you about it, and THEN you can apologize. How does that sound? It should save you a lot of time and worry." "That sounds like a typical male idea; which as you know, is not a compliment. I am honestly trying to be less apologetic, but I can't instantly change that much. I think I've improved, but I'd prefer to err on the side of being too apologetic than too little. I don't like people who think they're always right." Reassured that all was well relationship-wise, I turned to my other high-priority interest. "Why are you cutting up vegetables? Are you going to cook something for me?" Julia laughed, "I'm making some vegetable soup for OUR lunch. Not just for you. Have you noticed that when it comes to food you are very selfish, and you NEVER apologize for it." "People make food for me to eat, and I eat a lot of it. There's nothing to apologize for; that's the way the system should work. Having established that fact, please tell me about your mom's opinion of Carol?" "It went exactly as I thought, which is claiming too much credit for myself as most of my thinking came from Mom in the first place. Carol is as Mom and I thought. I'd told Mom about Carol's getting a sexual kick out of being embarrassed, but this morning's test wasn't just about sex. Mostly Mom used it to get Carol off balance so Carol would answer Mom's questions more honestly, especially about her willingness to hand over responsibility for her life to us." Julia looked around and said, "I'd better close the door." -- After doing so, Julia continued, "The most important part of Carol's personality is her overall subservience. She wants us to take responsibility for her, and we should because she's not good at making her own decisions and is too vulnerable. Her sexual thrill from being embarrassed isn't important, as whatever Carol likes we'll provide for her, just as you and I do for each other. Hers just happens to be embarrassment and some pain when she's very turned on. Mom and Dad say those two things are rolled up together psychologically and quite common. It's her general submissiveness that's extreme, even detrimentally so in terms of her ability to succeed at life. Mom and Dad are going to talk with your parents about her soon, probably tonight." #1: "Ahh, honey, should we be part of that conversation? I'm scared of it, but I want to be there if Carol's fate is being decided. I REALLY don't want to lose her, for lots of reasons, not just my being greedy." "You can't lose her; she's your wife. I know it wasn't a legal marriage, but no one doubts the strength of her commitment to you, or all three of us together. No one is going to attempt to break us up. That'd be too harsh. If your parents initially have that idea, my parents will soon put them right, but I doubt the conversation will go that way. Your mom must already have some idea of what Carol is like. It's probably better just to let the parents talk. Mom knows my views exactly, and my views are what's best for you so that's fine. It's really just a matter of letting your parents know that Carol belongs to us now. They heard her vows and know we're behaving that way now, so they know intellectually. They just need to know that it's a little more true than they currently understand." [[By the time Vanessa got to question Carol about her submissiveness this morning, Julia had already spent several highly emotional and effective days increasing Carol's reliance on Julia and me. Julia had done that mostly for my benefit, but she'd subconsciously known that her relationship with me would be much safer if she controlled Carol. If Julia had instead put the same effort into increasing Carol's self-reliance, Vanessa and Prof would have gotten a very different understanding of Carol.]] "Okay. As usual, you sound like you know what you're doing. I'll leave it to you." "Good attitude! No wonder I love you! Haha, just joking - remember that I want you to be more commanding. This will be easy, as my whole family is on my side." By now Julia had a pot on the stove. There were scraps and some mess, so I started cleaning up. Julia said, "Leave it for Carol." "I don't mind." "No, leave it all for Carol." "But she's resting upstairs and I'm standing right here. It makes more sense for me to do it." Julia corrected me, "Sorry, but the two of you have to learn that she is our servant. She wants to be so don't deprive her. Your breakfast dishes are still upstairs so let's go up and tell her to come down here and clean everything. I hope she still is resting, as waking her up to do them will be a better lesson for her." "Isn't that a bit cruel? I know you're not a cruel person, so I guess I'm really asking you to explain why you are so 'apparently' cruel about this?" Julia explained, "There are many reasons: The one you'll probably like the most is that there's very little she can contribute to our marriage because she is so young and unskilled, but being our servant is within her capabilities. She needs to contribute to feel worthwhile, so we'd be depriving her if we didn't let her clean up." "That's a good reason, except that she contributes a lot already. I know you like her body, for example. She contributes her body to our relationship, and it's a great body. We both get heaps of pleasure from her and her body." Julia disagreed, to my surprise, "Her body is almost worthless and she knows it." I was STUNNED by this totally unexpected piece of lunacy. I was about to object VERY strongly when Julia continued, "NOT for the reason you're thinking. Of course she has a lovely body, but it's nearly worthless because you can go out and get any number of beautiful bodies whenever you want. You're going to do be doing exactly that shortly. She knows it. Remember that we told her several times how many hundreds or even thousands of girls want you, in order to build up her opinion of your status?" #3: #1: "I remember you saying it." "She knows that offering you her body is not offering anything you can't get hundreds of anyway. She's in our marriage because you love her, and her real value is her giving and receiving of love, but she won't recognize or count that. Nor do you; it's a family failing that you both discount your emotional value. She needs to DO something, and being a servant suits her skills and personality. Okay?" "Yes. Okay as usual. By the way, what does 'building up our status' mean? I didn't understand that." "This is another piece of wisdom from Mom. Humans with high status are automatically perceived as sexy. It's one of our instincts. It doesn't matter how the status is gained, just having high status is enough, and the higher the status the sexier the person. By telling her that thousands of girls already want you, her idea of your status got elevated, automatically making her think you were sexier, which is what we wanted when we were seducing her." "I don't really understand. How does status create sexiness?" "I'll give you an example: football jocks are REALLY sexy, haha. I know you're about to throw up, but take it from me that half the girls at school would swoon if one of the football stars talked to her. You may think otherwise, but the fact that half the girls want them means that they ARE sexy. But why? If a girl saw them in ordinary clothes and didn't know they played, the guy wouldn't get looked at twice, let alone make her swoon. He's sexy ONLY because he's associated with a high status activity. If football didn't exist probably soccer players would be thought of as sex gods - which, by the way, you are." "I like the clever way you worked that compliment in, even though I don't appreciate your making me think of jocks as sexy. I still don't understand how having status makes someone suddenly sexy?" "No, neither do I. It's how humans are though. You've seen some of it already, with the girls that have been coming on to you lately, but wait until you're REALLY famous. Then you'll have millions of women hot for you." "Dad's talked to me about this. He was a high-school football star and he nearly got swept up in the fame. He told me the smartest thing he ever did was marrying Mom rather than one of the many others that chased him, because all of them would've been long gone by now, after he gave up football and went to work in a lawnmower factory. He had to chase Mom hard to get her. He's quite proud of that." Julia concluded, "If you want to understand status and sexiness more, ask your dad. It sounds like he understands it well. Shall we go upstairs now? The pot can simmer for a while." I'd been reminded of something I wanted to test, so before we rejoined Carol I got Julia to stand a couple of yards away from the other side of the closed kitchen door, then to slowly walk up to it, knock, then go back to her starting position to wait a random time before approaching it again. I stood on my side of the door and paid attention to my proximity sense. I quickly found out that I could sense Julia before she knocked (the knock was to confirm her presence). The sense worked through a door, which was good. I'm not sure what it was good for, but it was definitely better to have capabilities than not have them. As I'd expected, the door significantly reduced my proximity sensing range - as it did for the all classic senses to various degrees. I wanted to test whether the door distorted the spatial information I got from proximity so I improved the test by getting Julia not to knock, merely to walk up to the door without touching it, in case her intention to knock was helping me. Instead of her knocking, I knocked when I first sensed her, having asked her to call out how far away she was from the door each time. It turned out that the door roughly halved my range, from 3 to 1.5 feet. It didn't mess up my distance judgment though, as Julia seemed to be 1.5 feet away from me when I first detected her. I didn't have a lead-lined door to test it on, a la Superman, so that ended my little experiment. Upstairs we found Carol awake but resting. She'd eaten her breakfast but was still lying in bed. We both greeted her warmly, with lots of hugs and kisses. When that had died down, Julia said, "Carol, take the tray and dishes downstairs to wash and put away. There's more mess down there, so clean up everything, stir the pot for a minute, and then come back up here." An energized and happy Carol leaped out of bed taking her empty dish. Carol was picking it the tray when Julia called out, "Hang on, sweetie. Everyone else has gone so there's no point in your being naked." Carol blushed at the reminder of this morning's 'terrible' embarrassment. Julia got out of bed, opened one of her drawers and found something for Carol to wear. It was some sort of wrinkly looking colored top. It was tiny, half the size of Julia's torso. I couldn't see how Julia could fit it, so it was absurd to give it to Carol. To my amazement, Carol put her arms through it and pulled it over her head. It s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d like you wouldn't believe, at least by a factor of five. Even with its amazing expansiveness, it was still very small and tight on Carol, covering only the top half of her chest, and outlining it very well. Her belly and everything south was still completely bare. She somehow seemed even more naked now, and VERY sexy! Julia had climbed back into bed while Carol was putting it on. When she was settled, Julia said, "You look obscene. Go do your work now. Good girl." Carol looked down at her unclothed bottom half, blushed again, smiled, picked up the tray, and headed for the door. Because I'm a very observant guy and I happened to be looking in the general direction, I noticed that Carol put a great deal of extra wiggle into her ass. It was good to see her express her happiness. After Carol had left, Julia said, "I'd like to worship at the feet of my soccer playing sex god now please." She only got halfway to my feet before the worship started, but that was okay with me. Being a worshipful sort of girl, Julia and I were in the missionary position when Carol returned. I was happy to see that tight top looked EVEN better walking toward me than away, and she was carrying a plate of cookies and a glass of milk. All things considered, she's my perfect woman! Carol said, as she placed the food on the bedside table, "For Mark, in case he wants them later." Julia replied, "Very good, darling. Thinking how to serve our Lord is a very good thing to do. It's much better than just following orders. You're doing very well. It's going to be wonderful to have you in our marriage. Now take off that top and join us in bed." I yelled out, "No! Leave the top on." Both girls laughed at me. I didn't care. That top was hot! I remembered the position that Julia had briefly put herself in when Carol was riding me this morning. I'd found it extremely enjoyable, and I was already in the missionary position with Julia, so I got Carol to sit on Julia's face, facing me. Soon I was fucking Julia while kissing and fondling Carol. Somehow fucking one girl while kissing another felt morally wrong and depraved, so it was definitely something we were going to be doing a lot more of. In my book, sexual depravity was right up there with roast chicken (the two should definitely not to be combined though, especially if the chicken's still hot). We had a good time. To be more precise, Julia had four good times, Carol had three and I had two. While resting between "good times", my curiosity got the better of me and I asked Carol to take her top off. The top shrank down to a tiny size when not being worn. When I had it in my hand I pulled it taut and relaxed it a few times. I was amazed again at how much it stretched. I looked around the room for something to measure the stretch with. In my room at home there's a ruler on my study desk but I'd temporarily forgotten where I was. All the PINK quickly reminded me. Julia saw me looking around and then give up, and she asked, "What were you looking for, Mark?" "Oh, just a ruler. I was curious about how stretchy this is and wanted to measure it, but I guess they don't make pink rulers so there's no ruler here. It doesn't matter." Julia said, "Carol, go get Mark a ruler from our study." Carol quickly clambered out of bed while I was saying, "It doesn't matter. It was just an idle whim. Forget it." Carol stopped, until Julia said to her, "Go. I'll explain it to him." "Okay," agree Carol as she ran off. I knew what Julia was about to say. Something along the lines of, "Carol likes to follow orders", or "Carol needs to be useful to us." I saved time by saying, "Use her even for something as trivial as this? There's absolutely no benefit in my measuring this top you know. It was just idle curiosity." Julia's answer was predictable. I knew even before I'd started that I wasn't going to win this discussion, "Yes, even for something this trivial. For ANY and EVERY thing. It's excessive, but think of her purpose in life as serving you. If you don't get her to serve you, she has no purpose. Or a better way of saying it would be that it reduces her opinion of her worth to you. -- "Make sure you show your appreciation because that's what she's really looking for. So no taking her for granted, and no giving her obvious make-work because that'd devalue her contribution, but please use her as much as you can." "What's 'make-work'?" "Telling her to get a ruler, then immediately telling her to take it back, then immediately telling her to go get it again. Repeating an obviously pointless activity. That's devaluing..." Carol came running back in. She looks very good running naked. I was almost tempted to make her run back and forth across the room. By way of showing my appreciation for making Carol's play fetch for me, I made a bit of a production about determining the stretch coefficient, or whatever the correct term should be. A factor of just over four in each linear direction, as best I could tell with just the foot-long ruler. That doesn't sound like much, but it meant that the top could expand its volume by a factor of sixty four. I said "Wow, that's amazing," trying to make it seem more than totally unimportant. I doubt I succeeded. I tried to think of more ways to make this task seem important, but really it was just an empty whim. I put the ruler down on the nearest bedside table, and gave Carol the top back. "Put it back on please. I like how sexy you look in it." Carol looked pleased, and started doing so. Julia added, "And then take the ruler back to the study." Carol was just starting to put the top on, and the ruler was sitting on the table, so for fun I TK-floated it up and toward the door. When Carol was ready she looked for the ruler on the table, but Julia pointed to it floating across the room. I said, "It'll meet you at the door. Why should you have to carry it ALL the way?" Carol went to the door, and was a bit hesitant grabbing the rule. I said, "Don't worry, it can't hurt you or anything. Your ring didn't hurt you when I put it on did it?" Carol said, "No, but it seems strange to pick something out of midair." She did so though, and took it back to the study. I commented to Julia, really just talking out loud, "What a pity TK doesn't work around corners or I could have floated it back myself." Julia asked, "It doesn't?" "Unless it's very close to me I need a line of sight to it. If I floated it out the door and sent it around the corner, as soon as it was out of sight it'd fall to the floor. I have to see it to be able to hold it up." Julia said, "Oh. I didn't know that. I never even thought to ask. Obviously there must be constraints on what you can do, I just never thought about it. What other constraints are there?" "Well, each mmpff." (The "mmpff" was caused by one of the non-speaking minds slamming our mouth shut.) #1: #2: #1: #2: Our internal communication is faster than normal speech, and slowly getting faster week by week, but there was still a noticeable pause, so I said, " ... Sorry Julia, I had a thought about something else. What was I saying? Oh yeah. Each time I do a TK, I mentally imagine some invisible floating fingertips..." #1: #2: " ... They can grab things, and I can imagine them floating around, carrying whatever they're holding. I can only lift a total of about ten pounds, and the heavier the object the less acceleration I can give it, so it moves slower and changes direction slower. I spent some time experimenting with the physics of it and it's very scientifically consistent, which is a good trait in a scientifically impossible phenomenon, haha. -- "I was saying, it needs line of sight. I have to watch what I'm doing with at least one eye. If my sight gets blocked for more than half a second the fingertips disappear. Well not exactly 'disappear', as they're invisible already. They cancel and anything they're carrying drops. Have I explained that clearly enough?" Julia said, "Yes, I can imagine what you're saying. I've felt them on my body - especially playing with my nipples, which I like very much, thank you - and they do feel a lot like fingertips. Let me add something else though. You obviously started saying something and then realized you shouldn't tell me and you tried to cover it up. You didn't need to cover it up. Just say, 'Oops, I can't tell you that, ' and start again. I know you've got secrets and I'm fine with that. I haven't made any effort to dig any of your superhuman secrets out of you, have I?" I confirmed, "No, you haven't. I haven't thought about that for a while, but you're right. Thank you for that. I appreciate it." "You're welcome. Now that I think of it again, I don't want to know in case I become a danger to you. I can't see any benefit in my knowing, and I can see a possible danger to you if your enemies tried to question me about your abilities, so let's not talk about it anymore." Carol had returned during Julia's comment, but hearing we were having a serious conversation, she'd just silently snuggled alongside. I said, "Other than jocks and other asshole bullies, I don't have any enemies. Do you really think I might have future enemies who'd kidnap and torture you for information? That seems to be what you're implying." Julia said, "I take it seriously. It's not a problem now, but it will be if you are ever 'outed'. People won't know how to react to you, which means some of them will react badly. Some religious fanatics - and there's no shortage of those in this country - will think you're God and others will think you're the Devil. I'm not talking about my little joke that you're being our 'Sex God'; I'm talking about your being taken for THE God or THE Devil. Religious fanatics would be dangerous if they knew of your abilities, so the less I know the less I can give away. When I asked about the constraints on your TK, I wasn't trying to dig for any secrets. I was just making conversation about something that sounded interesting. I'm amazed at my attitude now, I was being blasé about a genuine miracle." "I never thought you were trying to dig out secrets, and what I told you was something you will see for yourself after I use that ability a few more times, so don't worry about it. You imply that you shouldn't know anything about my abilities, but the only way that could be the case is if I never use them around you, and that's not going to happen. I will keep the big secrets from you, if there are any, but the small stuff I enjoy sharing with you. I think I actually NEED to be able to share myself honestly with you and Carol, for the sake of my mental health." #3: #2: I continued, "How about we agree on this: I will tell you and show you what I feel comfortable with. You can ask me stuff if you want, and I might tell you or might not. Sound reasonable?" Julia said, "All you're saying is that you'll do whatever you want, which Carol and I will always agree to anyway. So, sure, that's fine with me." I asked, "What about you Carol? Are you worried about the danger?" Carol declared, "I'll kill anyone who threatens either of you, and I'll die to protect you, Lord." "Ahh, yes. You said that earlier. I was more asking whether you were worried?" Carol said, "Not really, but mostly because there's nothing I can do. I'll get a gun when I'm old enough. Until then all I can do is hit them with my book bag and scream. I remember Donna doing much better than that, when she picked up her bike and threw it at that reporter. Remember?" "Haha. Yes, that was funny, although seeing her so angry wasn't good. You know Mom and Dad aren't going to like the idea of you having a gun, even when you're old enough." "Not as much as I don't like the idea of someone killing either of you or our children." That was hard to argue with and the issue was years away, so I let it drop. Looking for a diversion, I TK-floated up a cookie and said to Carol, "That whole conversation started because while you were out of the room I mentioned to Julia that my TK only works when I can see what I am doing. I was saying that if I'd tried to return the ruler by floating it to the study, as soon as it got through the door and out of my sight, it would've fallen to the floor. Same with cookies, unfortunately. It'd be great if I could float them up from the kitchen whenever I wanted one, but I can't do that." "That's okay. I'll get them for you." Bless her. Julia said, "Speaking of food, who wants to eat me?" As it turned out, both of us. I made sure to consume the cookies and milk that Carol had brought up, to show my appreciation for her thoughtfulness. Julia had told me that doing so was important, so I had no choice in the matter. That I got to eat cookies was just a lucky consequence. I had some fun with the cookies, as TK meant we didn't have to stop having sex to eat them. When I wanted one, I just floated it over and from mouth to mouth, so we all got to nibble or bite, according to our individual preference. Carol's participation in our sex fun was interrupted a couple of times though, as it had been earlier in the morning, when she went down to the kitchen to check on and stir the soup. Julia didn't even have to remind her. Her caring for my lunch while having sex demonstrated a highly commendable attitude. During one such absence, Julia said, "Do you notice that I don't say 'please' when I give Carol an order? 'Please' would imply that refusal is an option. Not saying 'please' reinforces that it's an order, which also makes it easier for Carol to tell that it is. I always say 'thank you' - or 'good girl' if she's especially good - afterward as appreciation. You should get in the habit of that too. Although it's surprisingly hard to stop yourself from using please. "Okay. I'll try." When Julia decided it was lunchtime, she walked to the closets, saying, "I'll get our robes. After lunch I want to come straight back here for more sex, since we've only got until 3pm." Julia pulled out her and my robes and we put them on. Carol looked confused, so Julia said, "Sorry. I just meant robes for Mark and me. You will stay naked. I like looking at you naked." Carol said, "Thank you." I had said "Thank you" when I was handed my robe. Carol said "Thank you" for NOT being handed hers. Both of us meant what we said. It's weird how logical consistency doesn't seem to apply to girls. I automatically picked up the cookie plate and empty glass. Julia just stood there looking at me. Even Carol got the point before me and started laughing. Carol held out her hand and I realized what I was doing wrong. I passed her the dishes. Julia said, "Carol, you go first. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in my robe so tell me if you see that anyone has come home for lunch." What a load of crap. Julia had walked around naked this morning just to tease her brothers. She was obviously teasing Carol, which Carol visibly appreciated. Carol led the way, which was something I visually appreciated. ------- Chapter 56: Honeymoon Lunch Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) I quite like soup, provided there's plenty of it. There was a big pot, so no worries there. It was very tasty too. Even better than Mom makes, although I couldn't understand why. I'd seen Julia cut up the veggies and they'd looked ordinary to me. I said, "This is delicious soup. How come it's so tasty?" Julia said, "It's all in the stock." I was about to ask "Stock of what?" when Carol asked, "Yes, it's delicious. Can I get the recipe from your mom please? I want to learn how to cook food that Mark likes." I agreed wholeheartedly with Carol's attitude, but I knew she had her facts wrong. Vanessa had nothing to do with the soup, as I'd seen Julia cut up and put the pieces into the pot. I was about to correct Carol when Julia said, "Good girl, darling. Your attitude is superb. Mom will appreciate your asking. She made it especially for Mark's lunch so she'll be glad to hear that he liked it." I concentrated on eating my delicious soup. I must remember to thank Vanessa, apparently. While I was busy putting soup, rather than my foot, into my mouth, I remembered that I had never got around to testing the maximum range of my TK. The conversation upstairs about its constraints had spurred my memory of that. I needed a long line of sight, with lots of objects in it that I could try to touch to see if I got sensory feedback from them. This street was reasonably long, with lots of houses visible along it. And there were hills in the far distance I could see too. I said to Julia, "After lunch, can we go outside to the sidewalk for a minute or two? I want to try a TK experiment that I had forgotten about. Your question about its limitations reminded me of it. I've never tried TK over a long distance outside, and I want to see how far it can go. Out front is ideal for my experiment." Julia said, "Won't that risk people seeing things floating around?" "No. I'm not going to float anything, I'm just going to touch things at greater and greater distances to see how far away I can touch." Julia asked, "You can feel what you're touching with TK?" I nodded. "I never thought about that before, but if I had I would've assumed you couldn't. How can you feel anything when there aren't any nerves running back to your body? Not even invisible nerves because I've seen you fly stuff around furniture that would've gotten them tangled up. I'm right aren't I? No invisible wires?" "None, it's just the fingertips without any wires. I have no idea how I can feel what they're touching, but I can. It makes playing with your nipples and pussies a lot more fun for me." I immediately started TK-playing with Carol's oh-so-available nipples. I pulled them outward and from side to side, so Julia could clearly see what I was doing. Carol's moaning, "Oh yes," might've been a clue too. Julia laughed, and said to Carol, "See, isn't being naked a good idea when you have lunch with us?" Carol said, "Yes, it's very nice. But I'm worried about going out to the sidewalk. I will if you want me to, but I'm naked." I had noticed a pattern in Carol's comments at such times. She always points out that she's naked, but that she'll humiliate herself if we want her to. Both comments were unnecessary, especially her telling us that she was naked. Julia had only just commented on Carol's nakedness and I was rubbing her nipples, so I think it's safe to assume that we were both aware of that fact. This was how Carol increased her excitement. Her version of foreplay, I guess. Julia, who NEVER misses an opportunity to twist Carol's tail, her nipples already being twisted, said, "Do you need Carol to help in your experiment at all, Lord? Maybe to run after anything you float down the street, even if it goes a long way." I almost laughed at the preposterousness of that image, although Carol running naked down the street would be a very effective distraction so other people wouldn't notice something small floating in the air. I'd already told Julia that I didn't need to float anything, but if I did, I could jolly well float it back if I needed it again. Sending a naked Carol running down the street after it was excessive. A delightful image, but unfortunately excessive. Meanwhile Julia had a similar idea to my internal joke. She suggested, "If you do want to float something, but don't want anyone to notice it, I'm sure having Carol do a naked dance in the middle of the street would be a very good distraction. The more I think about it, the more useful having her with us seems to me, but it's up to you?" I looked at Carol, and couldn't decipher her expression. It certainly wasn't entirely negative. I do believe that she would probably do it if I said to, but we were only teasing her. I strung it out a bit longer by saying to Julia, "I think you and I should put our clothes on before we go out. Remember that Mom and Dad want to keep it quiet that we're having sex, and walking outside wearing matching robes at lunchtime is a bit of a give away. So let's go upstairs and get changed after we've finished lunch. Mom and Dad never said anything about keeping Carol hidden though, so I don't see any problem with her being naked. I'll think about her usefulness in the experiment while we're eating." I smiled to myself, and went back to eating and twiddling Carol's nipples with TK. Carol finished her soup before me because I was on my third helping, and she stood up to take her bowl to the sink. I (probably #4) suddenly said, "Sit back down, Carol." She did so. "Put the bowl down, spread your legs wide and masturbate." We were sitting on stools beside the kitchen buffet, and it was quickly apparent that they weren't good for leaning back on, or for holding legs apart. Julia spotted a good solution. "Sit on the buffet right in front of Mark, with your legs either side of his bowl." -- A moment later, Julia corrected herself, "No, not right in front of Mark because that's too visible from the outside. Sit on the far end of the counter and Mark can move his chair in front of you." I was willing to go to all the effort to relocate myself so I could stare straight into Carol's pussy while I had my soup. Within a few seconds I had Carol's pussy just inches away from my soup bowl, and Carol was excitedly frigging herself. Talk about an 'in your face' distraction. My soup intake slowed considerably. It didn't take long to see that this was an order that Carol was definitely enjoying fulfilling. Proof of her 'enjoyment' was soon visibly dripping off her. So there I was, inches away from a beautiful, bare, dripping pussy. With an empty spoon in my hand and an evil idea in my mind. I placed my spoon under her pussy and started sliding it up, keeping it firmly in contact with her body. Carol gave a shriek, and her hands flew away, giving me a clear run all the way up to her clit. When I hit that she groaned loudly. My spoon had collected an impressive amount of liquid, so I moved it over my bowl and tipped it over. We all watched as her juice flowed into my bowl. When the spoon was mostly empty, I returned it to her pussy and scooped again. I got a lot less this time, so I looked her in the eye and said, "Masturbate. I want more juice." One of Carol's hands made a beeline for her clit and the other for her breasts. She immediately began vigorously diddling herself, while never taking her eyes off the spoon. I moved it over the bowl and tipped it again. I looked at Carol, "Are you dripping wet yet?" As if I couldn't see for myself, my eyes being closer to her pussy than hers were. She wasn't yet, but she was getting wetter as I watched. She groaned, "Soon. Very soon." When I judged she was wet enough to provide enough juice to look good in the spoon, I repeated the collection process, this time actually pushing the spoon into her pussy. It couldn't go far without tipping sideways which would've defeated the ostensible purpose of the exercise, exciting Carol being the real purpose. The 'invasion' of the spoon into her pussy excited Carol even more, as did it bumping her clit again at the top of the scooping movement. I'd collected a useful quantity of juice again, and enjoyed tipping it into my bowl. I lowered the spoon into my bowl and stirred it well for a few seconds. I made a big production out of filling the spoon with soup and raising it to my lips. I paused - Carol's fingers didn't though - and took a careful sip. "Absolutely delicious! Even better than before. Try some, Julia," as I got another spoonful for her. Julia enthusiastically echoed my comments. I said, "Julia. Your mom needs to know about this. Tell her that her soup is even more delicious if it has three spoonfuls of Carol's pussy juice in it. I suggest you get her to write it in her recipe book so she doesn't forget, and so anyone else reading it will know too." I didn't know whether Vanessa had a recipe book or not. Our mom did, a sort of scrapbook really, with lots of loose pages of recipes she'd cut out of magazines or other people had written out for her, so that's what Carol would think of. Julia replied, "I'll tell her when she gets home and make sure she writes it in immediately. That way when she gives Carol the copy she asked for, it'll be included." While Julia was saying this I had refilled my spoon with soup and was now raising it toward Carol's mouth, as seemed only fair. I had it halfway to her mouth when Carol's orgasm hit her. She groaned loudly and her legs started closing, then stopped and quivered. I remembered that normally when Carol cums she squeezes her legs tightly together. I had a vision of the mess caused by hot soup being knocked all over me and Carol, although cleaning Carol would've been a lot of fun. I had one hand in midair holding a full spoon, but I started lowering it as fast as I could, and I put my other hand protectively on the bowl too. Carol had seen the problem and was fighting the urge to close her legs. They still slowly closed, and were twitching more and more. I could see the fight visibly reflected on her face. It was as if her orgasm had been 75% completed, then forcibly held just short of her final release. Her face was desperate and pained. I got both hands to the bowl, lifted it and leaned back. As soon as it was clear I started saying, "Close your legs", but never got past "Cl". Carol's legs slammed shut and her continual groan turned into a very satisfied, loud sigh. I held the bowl in one hand while I resumed eating with the other. I finished it quickly, faster than Carol recovered. The soup was delicious, even though I couldn't detect any flavor change as a result of my recent addition. Not that it mattered, as it'd never been the point of the exercise. Julia waited until Carol was starting to move again, then she said, "Look at the naked, lazy slut. Just sitting there enjoying herself sexually when there are dirty dishes to be washed and put away." The "naked, lazy slut" leaped to her feet and started collecting the dirty dishes, thereby disproving one of the three terms. The other two were still very much in evidence though, especially when Julia added, "She really is a big slut. Look at the size of the puddle she's left on our buffet counter." We all looked - as you do when someone points out puddles of pussy juice - and there was a very noticeable puddle, and a slime trail to where Carol had slid off the buffet. Carol blushed, looked down and smiled, then turned and picked up the kitchen cloth. Julia called out, "Stop! Surely you weren't going to wipe up pussy juice with our kitchen cloth! We use that cloth to wipe all our kitchen benches, including where we prepare food, so that would spread your juice all over our kitchen. The whole family would be eating your juice in their dinner tonight. Your family is coming over too, so you'd even be making Donna eat food flavored with your pussy. What a pervert you are!" A noticeably happy pervert, I could tell. Carol sheepishly asked, "I'm sorry. What should I wipe it up with?" Julia already knew the answer to that, "With your tongue, of course. It's far too delicious to waste." -- Julia paused to let Carol enjoy that image, then added, "We're going upstairs to put some clothes on now. When we come down I want this kitchen to be spotless and slimeless. Mark will let you know whether you have to come outside naked with us." Julia took my arm and we left Carol to her slime removing duties. On our way upstairs I said to Julia, "Do you know that Donna already knows what your pussy juice tastes like?" "She does?" "When the family came to say goodnight to us last night, remember that Donna climbed onto the side of the bed and kissed my cheek?" Julia nodded. "She faked us out. She didn't kiss my cheek, she licked it. I still had some of your juice on my face and she wanted a taste. She even whispered 'Tasty' to me right after." Julia said, "Haha. I'll have to upgrade my opinion of her; that was delightful. Right in front of all the parents too. I didn't know she was so sexually aware, she seems to be just a tomboy." "She's seen me do a few things with Carol, even saw me with my face between Carol's legs when I was eating her out in the kitchen, so I guess she's had a crash course recently. But let me add another thought that didn't occur to me until you mentioned Donna tasting Carol's juices in her dinner tonight. When Donna climbed up on the bed to lick my cheek, she had no idea whose juice she was getting. Isn't that kinky?" -- I had another thought, "I just remembered she was showing everyone her nubbins a few days ago. She was amazingly proud of them. She is growing up. It's hard to imagine her as anything other than a tomboy - that's what she's been her whole life - but she's just starting to become a woman." Julia laughed, "'Nubbins'! Where on Earth did you get that word? Haha." Fortunately Julia carried straight on, so I didn't have to answer. I DEFINITELY didn't want to admit that I'd EVER read any online porn. How embarrassing would that be! "I'm sure you know this anyway, but if you want her let me know so Carol and I can help you seduce her. It'd be easy with all of us working on her." Whoa! Back up the bus! "Ah, honey. I've never had a sexual thought about Donna in my whole life. I just told you that story because your comment in the kitchen reminded me." Julia said, "That's fine. Whatever you like. Carol and I will just help you if you want us to." "You really think Carol would help me seduce Donna? I couldn't ask her to do that - even if I wanted to, which I don't - it's too perverted. Surely?" Julia assured me, "She'd love to do it for you. Carol likes Donna very much. They're good sisters." "Exactly! Carol likes Donna, so she'll protect her little sister, not try to corrupt her." "You really are far too modest." -- I didn't think my modesty was going to change Carol's protecting her younger sister, but before I could object Julia added, "Carol thinks you are ... No, let me correct myself. Carol KNOWS you are the most incredible man on the planet. The nicest, most loving, and most awesome man EVER. In Carol's and my opinions Donna could never get a better man than you, so of course Carol would be thrilled if you wanted Donna. I'll prove it to you when we go back downstairs." "Eek." (I'm ashamed of that, but I really did go "Eek". Let's not make a big deal out of it, okay? Moving right along... ) I hurriedly added, "Please don't mention this to Carol. It's far too embarrassing." "Don't worry, I'll do it in a way that doesn't embarrass you." I kept worrying. I couldn't imagine how it could be done without embarrassing me, especially because it's CERTAINLY not like Julia to save me from embarrassment! She takes delight in doing the exact opposite as often as she can. #4: #3: #4: #3: #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #3: #4: We got to our room (really "her" room, but Julia deliberately calls it "our room" now and I've started accidentally copying her). Vanessa had hung up my hurriedly discarded good clothes last night, so I got them out again and redressed. I used a pair of underwear from the drawer Julia had allocated to me and even put a handkerchief in my pocket. We wouldn't be outside for long, so I didn't bother with socks and shoes, even though my drawer had several pairs of different colored socks that I had yet to touch. Julia had found a very thin, lightweight, short, summer dress. She put it on after she made sure that I was looking at her. I discovered that it's very sexy seeing a naked girl slip on a dress. Taking OFF a dress is sexy, so surely putting one on should be the reverse of sexy, but it still is. Don't ask me why. The dress looked very good on Julia, and she'd made sure that I knew she was naked underneath it. The dress flattered her body very nicely and I enjoyed looking at her. "This will be all right, won't it?" Julia asked me, as she rubbed her hands over her breasts then moved them lower to pull up the front of her dress to show me her naked pussy. Exactly why she had to show me her pussy in order for me to answer her question was not immediately obvious, but in case there was a good reason I carefully looked at her pussy. After giving the matter some thought, I declared, "That dress is perfect." "You don't think it shows my nipples too much, do you?" She helpfully turned sideways, and repeatedly tweaked her nipples. "Or maybe not enough?" "Haha. I think your nipples look perfectly fine in that dress. Shall we go?" "But what about my ass?" Julia turned away from me and lifted the back of her dress so I could see all of her ass. "Grrr. Now I understand why Vanessa keeps a wooden spoon handy. That ass is begging for a sound smacking..." I was going to say more, but Julia suddenly said, "Hey, we forgot to smack Carol's bottom this morning. We said last night that I had to be punished, and she was going to get it for me. I'd forgotten that. What was it for, I've forgotten?" "I've forgotten too. Stop showing me your ass, it's distracting me!" Julia laughed and did as I requested. I remembered last night's incident now. I said, "Now that I'm no longer distracted, I remember what it was about. We agreed to punish you with twenty five smacks on the bare bottom for keeping other girls away from me. Some nonsense about 'depriving me of learning experiences'. You ordered Carol to take your spanks for you." Julia agreed, "That's right! By the way, it's not nonsense that you need to learn about girls. We all need to learn to have fun with sex, so we don't get messed up about it later when you're more famous and the stakes are higher." Julia's comment didn't seem logical to me. I was about to object again when, #4: I understood the logic of THAT argument, so I made a small change to what I had been intending to say. I said, "Whatever you think best, darling." Considering what she was doing for me, it seemed only fair to call her "darling". Julia gave a small laugh. Not, I hoped, because she had any idea of my thoughts. She grabbed my arm and we headed downstairs. On the way down she said, "Leave Carol to me." I didn't know what that meant. I hope she didn't mean to leave Carol for long, because I'd been inspired by her masturbation and I wanted to act on my inspiration. However we were nearly at the kitchen so I said nothing. The kitchen was both spotless and slimeless. A happy Carol was standing waiting for us. When she saw Julia she smiled and said, "I like that dress on you. It looks sexy, especially your nipples. Can we get dresses like that for me tomorrow please?" I was about to add my strong encouragement to that, when Julia said, "Of course. That's what I already intend. Most of what we buy tomorrow will be to make you look sexy for Mark and me." "Goody." That was from Carol, but there were four quiet echoes of the same sentiment in my head. Julia made a production out of inspecting the kitchen, including some overly dramatic sniffs of the buffet counter. Julia declared, "Excellent. You have cleaned up very well. I can't smell you at all. You must have licked it up very thoroughly? "Yes I did. I licked it very clean. Thank you very much both of you. You're both very good to me. I love you so much." Julia said, "We love you too. And I must say that I am VERY impressed by how hard you're trying. Your attitude is exceptionally good." "Thank you. I want to make you happy." "Yes, I know you do, I love that about you. You're so good at it that it makes me wonder whether Donna would be good too." I reacted with surprise because I hadn't been expecting that comment. Carol was even more surprised, of course. Carol said, "Wh... , what do you mean, Donna?" Julia explained, "You're such a fantastic wife for Mark, and so good at serving him, that I can't help wondering whether Donna might be equally good. What do you think?" I was interested to hear that myself. Not because I lusted after Donna's body - because she didn't have one yet - but because I was genuinely intrigued by how Carol would answer. "Umm, I'm not sure. I've never thought about that before. Um, she's different from me, you know. I don't think she'll like embarrassment and serving the way I do." Julia replied, "We don't want another servant. You are perfect for that job already. You will ALWAYS be our best servant and the bottom wife. Remember, I told you about that before? If we marry her she'll be Wife#2, and you'll become Wife#3. You will serve her as well as Mark and me. You will have to follow all her orders, including licking her pussy whenever she wants." Carol blushed again. She does a lot of that thanks to Julia's teasing. Carol looked down, and twisted a foot for several seconds, before looking up and saying, "Umm, I think I can do that, but she might not want me to." Julia said, "Silly girl! Of course you'll do that. You'll do everything we want, ESPECIALLY every sexual thing. I wasn't asking whether you would or not because I know you'll do it if you're told to. Donna will be very often telling you to lick her pussy too." "How... , how do you know she will?" "First, because you are so beautiful, sexy and such a good pussy licker that she couldn't possibly not want you to. Second, I'll order her to make you do it every day." "Oh." "You've distracted the conversation by talking about your licking her pussy. You should know by now that you will lick the pussies of ALL our wives. Stop thinking about pussies all the time; you're such a slut! What I wanted to know was whether you thought Donna would be a good wife for Mark?" I could see Carol think about it for a few seconds, then stand up straighter and confidently say, "Yes, she would. She loves Mark very much. He treats her very well, gives her lots of his attention, treats her with respect, cares for her a lot. Plus she's very hot for him and would love..." "What!" I interrupted. "She's hot for me?" "Oh yes. She's only just started having those feelings, just the last few weeks, but you definitely make her all 'squickly', as she has fun calling it. You treat her wonderfully so how could she not love you? You're so handsome and your body is so fantastic and graceful, plus your playing sex games with me, and now marrying me, means she knows you're not worried about her being your sister. I'm pretty sure that's why she was so proud to show you her buds a couple of days ago. She wants you to know she's becoming a woman in the hope that you'll want to do something about it." #3: #2, #4: "How do you know all this about her? What she's thinking and feeling?" "She keeps asking me questions about you: What it's like being your girlfriend? What's it like sharing you with Julia? What's it like having sex with you and another girl? What's it like having sex with a girl? Donna has played around with other girls but never gone all the way so she's curious. She's quite open with me that you make her 'squickly' so it's not hard to work out what she's thinking about you. When we got home on Wednesday night she was excited that she'd shown you her breasts and that you'd seen that they're growing." "Hang on! How come you keep talking about her showing her breasts to me? She showed them to everyone - literally everyone! I was amazed as I've never seen her act anything like that before. I think Mom was amazed too." "It was only you that she was excited about showing them to, so I think that's all she wanted to do. I'd guess she showed everyone so she could get away with showing you. I'll ask her if you like?" "Ah, no. That won't be necessary, thanks." Carol said, "Okay. Or you could just ask to see her breasts. She'd like that." "Haha. Carol, I couldn't just ask to see her breasts. She'd punch my lights out then run to Mom and Dad. I'd be in so much trouble." "You're definitely wrong about that. Donna thought it was great that Mom joked about Donna giving people progress reports about them. In our room afterward she was dancing around laughing at that. She can show them again and then say, 'Mom said I could'. She said she hoped you'd ask to see them again. I really can't see her complaining to Mom afterward, can you?" I was forced to admit, "Umm, maybe not. I had no idea she felt that way." Carol said, "It's obvious that she'd feel that way as soon as she was old enough to have those feelings. How could anyone who knows you resist?" I was contemplating the absurdity of that statement, when Julia asked, "When Donna was asking you questions about being our lover, did you answer them?" "Sure. She asked me lots of questions and I answered as best I could. I'm VERY happy about being with you two, so it was great to be able to share it." Julia then asked, "You didn't think it might have been private just to us?" "That was the first thing I thought of, but you said I was allowed to talk about our relationship inside the two families. Donna and I are used to sharing stuff, including answering each other's questions, so I don't worry about my privacy when I talk with her. I told her not to tell other people, and Mom and Dad have already told her that too. I haven't done anything bad, have I?" Carol was looking concerned but Julia quickly reassured her, "No, you've done nothing bad. I'm sorry if I made you think you had. You've done very well. When I said not to talk 'outside the two families' I was really thinking of just the parents. I didn't think about Donna, and that's entirely my fault. You trust her don't you?" Carol nodded. "I don't see any problem. It will work out very well if Mark wants her. Because of you we know that she wants him. Although," Julia added sadly, "I am rather disappointed that we won't get to seduce her. I would've really enjoyed that." Carol laughed, and said, "Haha. No you certainly don't have to seduce her. I think she'd come running if Mark called her. You can still have fun with her if you want, the same as you did with me. You didn't have to seduce me, but you still tortured me for several days. You could do something similar with Donna, if you wanted?" Julia said, "I'll think about it and talk with Mark. Oops, there's no need to talk with Mark, look." Everyone looked down and saw the proof of my perversity. Julia put her hand on it, squeezed, and said, "Oh goody. We can play some more sex games. This is going to be so much fun." #2: <{Groan}.> #4: #3: #4: #2: I presented my decision, "Julia, Carol, this is what I want to do about Donna. I do like her, and as you can see - or you could see if Julia took her hand off it for a second - I find the idea of seducing her exciting too, but I don't want to take advantage of her then find I get bored with her, or something like that. I want to go VERY slow with her until I get some experience with other girls. If all I'm feeling for her is ordinary horniness, I'd rather find out using some other girl, or girls, than upset Donna." Julia said, "Aww, isn't he sweet? I must also congratulate you on including something in your decision that I'm very pleased about. Your decision to use other girls to learn about yourself. That's excellent! That's exactly what they're for." "Really? I thought using girls like that would be unethical. That your mother would object to for that reason, not to mention the usual reason?" Julia explained, "Only if we're more dishonest with the girls than they are with us. Not that I'm suggesting it, but if you approached a girl and told her 'I want to fuck you to see if that affects how much I desire my younger sister', and she agreed to do it, what would be unethical about that?" "You're right, nothing. I'm glad you told me that you weren't suggesting that because some of the things you do are so unbelievable I probably would've thought you were serious. I understand that honesty makes it okay, but what's with the 'more dishonest' thing you said." "Assuming you're famous already, let's say a trashy newspaper or magazine hires a gorgeous prostitute to seduce you so they can get a story about you. You boink her to find out if it changes your desire for Donna, but you don't tell her that. She sells the story of your boinking her to the newspaper and they publish it. You have used her because you didn't tell her why you were boinking her, but have you been unethical?" I thought about it a bit, and said, "I would've deceived her. She thought I was 'boinking her' - as you so romantically put it - because I liked her. So I was unethical." "I said 'boinking' because I've heard you use that word, but back to my point. You gave her exactly what she set out to get. She was hired to have sex with you and that was what she was trying to achieve. Remember that she could care less about your motives, and she certainly could care less about any harm she caused you, so how can you be worried if she unintentionally helps you achieve your motives. In fact, she'd hope you have some motives because maybe she could pretend to help you in order to trick you into bed." "Okay, you've convinced me that being dishonest can be ethical sometimes, but both of those are extreme examples. How would we ethically get a girl from school to boink me?" Julia answered, "There are lots of ways. We'll have heaps of fun inventing and playing different games with different girls. I'll remind you of a way I mentioned before: Carol and I - and probably Donna too, as you seem to like the idea of sex with younger girls - will spread the story around the girls in our grades that you're an awesomely fantastic lover. Some of them will line up to screw you. You won't have to say a word and won't have to lie to them. They'll be using you to get their kicks and satisfy their curiosity, and they won't care what your motives are. The only ethical thing you have to do is to screw them properly because doing a poor job would be dishonest. Other than that unlikely possibility, it's entirely ethical." "You're WEIRD, Julia! I can't believe this conversation, but I guess I kind of started it. Somehow I'm forced to admit to my wife that it'd be ethical for me to do a really good job of screwing other girls. I'm not sure how much fun it'd be though, as it sounds like you're setting me up as a fucking machine. And I'm somewhat shocked about the casual way you said you'd get Donna to obtain young girls for me to fuck. You said it so casually it was like you were offering me a piece of toast." Julia said, "Donna's twelve, isn't she?" Carol nodded. I was a bit slower as I had to think about it, but I nodded too. Julia continued, "You don't see any problem screwing Carol's 14-year old classmates, or my 16-year old ones. What difference does it make to screw some 12-year olds too? Some of them are going to be seeking you out and be lining up for you, so it's not as if you're going to be forcing them. They'll know what they're lining up for! If you want we can have a rule that only non-virgins are allowed," I looked relieved at that, until Julia added, "but lots of girls lose their hymens accidentally anyway, or through playing with themselves. Once the first few girls confirm how incredible you are at sex, I'm sure they'll all be busting their own cherries in order to get to you." "Oh." "And if you're willing to pop your own sisters' cherries, what difference do a few more make. What your problem really is, is that you think of Donna as the baby of the family, so she'll always seem young." "Yes, that's it." Julia added, "Even if you don't get Donna to spread the story, girls her age will hear it anyway, so including her in the plan makes no real difference. Except in one, wonderful, way I just thought of. Imagine how much we can tease Donna by making her spread these stories, and talk about how sexy you are, when all the time SHE wants you! She'll be wetting herself in frustration. It'll be delicious." Carol laughed, and said, "No wonder I felt so tortured before our wedding: you're evil! It's going to be such fun. As long as you do end up taking her cherry, and making love to her at least a few times after that. It'd be too cruel not to." I wouldn't want to be cruel, but, "Aren't we getting ahead of ourselves? We really have to wait until after the trial before we can play any of these games." Julia said, "That's mostly true, although we can start softening up Donna immediately." I asked, "Like how?" Julia, being the evil torturer Carol considers her to be, suggested, "When you're at home tonight you should walk into the girls' bedroom and tell Donna that you want to inspect her breasts. When she shows you make sure you touch them but act scientific. The mixed messages will excite and confuse her terribly. Tell her off for not coming to your room and showing you earlier, and that she must do so in the future." -- Julia turned to Carol, and asked, "Donna hasn't reached her menarche yet has she?" Carol said, "No, not yet." Julia turned back to me, and said, "Excellent. So you should ask her whether she's reached her menarche yet, and when she says, 'no', tell her that it's very important to you to know immediately when she does. Stress that it's important and you want to know immediately. Every time you inspect her breasts from now on, ask about her menarche. That'll really get her going." Julia and Carol started laughing. Carol gasped, "Oh the poor girl. I almost feel sorry for her." Then resumed laughing. After a few more seconds Julia saw that I wasn't laughing along with them, and when she had collected herself, said, "What's the matter? Do you think we're being too cruel?" I answered, "I've got no idea how cruel you are. What is a 'menarche' and why is it so important that I know immediately?" The girls started laughing again. Fortunately not for long. Just long enough to make me feel a fool. Julia said, "You poor guy. You've got a few things to learn about females yet, don't you?" #4: #3: Julia explained, "Menarche is a girl's first period; her first menstruation. When she's biologically a woman." "Oh." #3: Julia continued, "By asking Donna about her menarche, you'll be asking whether she's a woman yet, and letting her know that it's important to you. She'll get very excited about that." "Um, can she actually get 'excited'? You know, if she hasn't menarched yet?" The girls started laughing again. Excellent. Any faint hope I'd clung to about understanding females just got destroyed. Julia, after no more than fifteen or twenty seconds of laughing at me, said, "First, there's no such word as 'menarched'. Your sentence should've been, ' ... if she hasn't had her menarche yet.' -- "Second, yes, girls can get sexually excited before they reach their menarche. Several years before, I'm happy to say." Carol echoed, "I'll say!" #3: Julia said, "I'm sorry for laughing at you, Mark..." #3: " ... it's just that you've got so much to learn about females." #4: #3: #4: #3: #4: Julia said, "Do you understand why asking Donna about her menarche will push her buttons?" "Yes, I think so." "Good. If she asks you why you want to know, just say something like, 'It's too early to tell you yet.' That'll get to her even more. Of course she'll be plaguing Carol with questions, which is great for us as Carol will know Donna's state of mind. Carol will have to keep answering Donna's questions because it'd be suspicious to stop, but any questions involving Mark's intentions for Donna, Carol can just say, 'I don't know, he hasn't told me.' You'll be able to have lots of fun, Carol. You'll be able to say things like, 'Mark keeps asking me questions about you, Donna.' Donna will want to know what questions, so you can say 'Whether you have a boyfriend yet? Whether you masturbate? What you think of him? What you think of sex between girls, or sex with three or more people?' -- "Don't give her all the questions at once, just say 'Mark asked me a question about you today' and tell her one of the questions. You'll be able to keep her excited for weeks that way. Easily long enough to get to the end of the trial, when we can get her to help with some of the things we're going to do at school. You two are going to have so much fun with her. I DEFINITELY have to start spending time at your house. I want to tease her too, and to get to know her. I've hardly spent any time with her and that's no good if she might become one of Mark's lovers." [[Just in case it hasn't occurred to you, remember that Julia and her parents believe that my abilities are the result of a genetic mutation. Julia wanted to encourage me into seducing Donna.]] Teasing Donna did sound like fun, although what appealed to me the most was checking out her nubbins regularly. A thought occurred to me, "Will her menarche be soon now that her breasts have started growing? Because teasing her is probably going to make both of us very horny, so I wouldn't like it to last for more than two or three weeks." I got laughed at again. Maybe my girls should call me 'Court Jester' rather than 'Lord'. Julia managed to keep her laughter's duration down to only five seconds this time, so she was improving. She said, "About fifty two weeks, Mark. Her menarche will probably be about a year after the first signs of her sexual development, that being her very recent breast buds." #4: #3: #4: #3: <{Groan}.> "A year! That's going WAY slower than I wanted. Can't we speed it up a bit? More than a bit, preferably." Julia said, "We can't speed up her menarche. It sometimes takes one and a half or two years after breasts bud, but I'm guessing it'll be quicker in Donna's case because she's late to start and her body will probably hurry to catch up. You can speed up the game anytime you want, Lord. If you get impatient, just jump to the final stage. You're the Lord and that's your prerogative." "But she can't, can she? Not if she hasn't done that menarche thing." "She most certainly can. Just because she's not dropping eggs doesn't mean all the other equipment isn't ready." -- I must have looked a bit blank because Julia added, "If you get tired of the game and want her, just tell us. Carol and I will bring her to your bed, strip her, and help you make her a woman in the other recognized way." "Hang on Julia. That almost sounded like a description for rape. Surely you didn't mean that?" "Of course not. I was trying to conjure a sexy image. Not very well, sorry. I would hate to help you rape someone and would never suggest it myself, and do you really think I could hold Donna's legs down if she didn't want me to? She'd send me flying across the room even faster than your TK could." "Haha. You know my TK can't fly you across the room. It only works on weights up to ten pounds. You're light, but not that light! You've reassured me about your intentions for Donna, but you've also unnerved me too. You said you'd 'hate to help me rape someone'. That's weird language. Why didn't you just say you'd 'never help me rape someone'?" "Because I WOULD help you rape someone if you told me to. I'd hate doing it, but of course I would if you ordered me to. Didn't I make a vow yesterday to obey all your orders?" "But rape is a SERIOUS crime! And it's unethical as hell. We just spent ages talking about how we want to be ethical with girls." "Yes, it is a serious crime and 'unethical as hell'. I'm a very small and reasonably good looking girl, so being raped is something I worry about and will all my life. I'd HATE to help you do it to someone else, but I vowed to follow your orders, not just the legal and ethical ones. As much as I'd hate helping you, I'd hate to break my vow and disobey you even more. If I have to make a choice between breaking my vow, or a man-made law, I'll break the law." "Wow. You're scary." Julia disagreed. "No I'm not. I'm only an extension of your will. My helping you rape someone is exactly as scary as the chance of your wanting to rape someone in the first place, which is not scary at all. You'd NEVER rape anyone! You're a wimp. You're an incredible, awesome, wonderful wimp, but still a wimp. If you grabbed a girl to rape her, you'd spend all your time apologizing. You'd never get anything done." "That's not quite what I meant. I will agree that you're not a scary rapist's assistant, but I meant that your obedience is scary." "Good. That means you are starting to understand. I will obey virtually any command of yours. You need to get used to that, and when the time comes that you need to, use it." "Hang on, you said 'virtually any command'. That sounds like you're weaseling out of your vow?" "I won't kill you if you order me to. How can that be serving you? Remember the vows? Number one was to serve, number two was to obey. Number three to protect. They're in that sequence for a reason. An order that clearly does not serve you should not be obeyed. I wouldn't kill myself either, as that would mean I could no longer serve you, unless there was an extremely strong reason to do it, like saving your or Carol's life." "What? You'd kill yourself to save Carol's life? And I can't believe that I'm accepting that you'd do it to save mine, but why Carol's?" -- I quickly turned to Carol and said, "I'm sorry Carol, I don't mean any insult to you, I'm just trying to understand Julia's weird thinking." Carol said, "You have to FIX Julia's thinking. She's wrong. I would be very angry with her if she died to save me. That's very, very wrong. I should die to save her life, not the way she said." #2: I tried to summarize, "Let me get this right: Julia will die to save Carol's life. Carol will die to save Julia's. And both of you will die to save mine. Is that correct?" "Yes," x 2. "Julia, why would you die to save Carol?" "Because you love her the most. She is the most important person in your life. She makes you the happiest." "Carol, why would you die to save Julia?" "Because she is making your life wonderful. Mine too, but only because of you. You need her to achieve all the wonderful things you'll do in your life, but I can't do anything like that for you." "Sheesh! I don't suppose I can order you girls not to get yourselves killed, can I?" Julia said, "I know Carol believes what she said, and believes that she doesn't have much worth, but she is totally wrong. I can be replaced by any number of useful helpers, but Carol is unique. No one will EVER be able to replace your sister in your heart! Please order her not to sacrifice herself for me, or for anyone else except you. She is irreplaceable and must be protected for your sake." I knew Julia accepted that I loved Carol more than her, I knew Carol didn't have a high opinion of her own worth, and I knew how strong my feelings were for Carol. I also wanted Carol to know how I felt about her. So I turned to Carol and said, "Carol, I order you never to sacrifice your life for ANYONE except me." Carol's eyes were wide open in astonishment, and she stuttered out, "You... , you mean I-I-I'm more important to you than Julia?" I thought we'd established this point before in our bedroom conversation, but Carol was overreacting as if it was the first she'd heard of it. Needing reassurance, I thought. I nodded, "Yes. You are more important to me than ANYONE else." "Oh my god!" And the tears just erupted out of her face. She dived to hug me, and slumped at the same time, so she ended up hugging my knees fiercely. The "except me" part of my order had given me a brief worry. Then I figured that she'd reject the whole order if I left it off. Plus she'd actually prefer that I say "except me" as she'd earlier told me how she dreamed of exactly that. Plus I couldn't see this ever happening so putting it in didn't matter. I could faintly conceive that I might be in danger some day, but I couldn't imagine Carol would be able to sacrifice her life to save mine. That was over-dramatic silliness. Julia putting it in the vows made them seem far more impressive, but it had given the girls silly thoughts. I suddenly remembered that I did, for once in my life, have a hanky. I couldn't exactly produce it with a flourish, not with Carol holding my knees so tightly together that I could barely stand upright, but I pulled it out and passed it down to her. Carol sniffed out a, "Thank you." I remembered Julia, with a surge of guilt and worry, and looked at her. She was smiling proudly. She came over and gave me a strong hug, nearly pulling me over, but she held me up. Julia said, "I'm so proud of you." VERY hypothetically I'd just ordered Julia's death and she was thanking me! I would've been happy to stop this silly conversation, but Carol still had my knees locked together so I was stuck where I was. I might as well ask, so I did, "Why are you proud of me?" "Because you're learning to be a leader." #3: #4: #3: "I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you mean. Can you please explain it to me?" #3: #4: Julia said, "I'm too emotional to explain properly, so I'll bullet-point it. You recognized the benefits of making a decision rather than avoiding one, you identified your options, prioritized the considerations, made your decision, then confidently and competently implemented it. It was the right decision too, in my opinion. It was good leadership. Well done, darling." And then Julia started crying. #3: There was lots of sobbing. Mostly from Carol who was still very overcome, but also from Julia, who was whatever she was. I thought Carol's tears were a considerable overreaction, and I had NO idea why Julia was crying. About the only thing I knew was that her tears weren't for the obvious reason: that I'd just told her she was second best. So I had two crying girls and I didn't have two hankies. How stupid was I? I've got two girlfriends and you can guarantee that if one of them starts crying, then the other one will too. You'd think a genius with a 226 IQ would be able to figure out that if he needed one hanky, he'd need two. #3: #2: #4: #3: #4: #2: #4: #2: We TK-lifted the lid, but couldn't see any cookies. #4: #2 #4: #3: #4: "Excuse me girls, but I have to go to the toilet. All that soup at lunch, I'm sorry." They released me. #4: #2: After I got back from the toilet, the two girls were sitting on adjacent stools hugging each other. Upon seeing me they reached out to hug me. I was a bit reluctant, fearing I'd be trapped again, but it's hard to say no to them. You might want to remember that Julia was wearing a very thin summer dress with no underwear and Carol was naked. Let's see you refuse to be hugged by them. Carol said, "I can't understand how you love me so much?" She was looking for reassurance, but I knew I didn't have the words for her. All I could say was, "I only know that I do. I don't understand hardly anything that happens around here, so if that's all you don't understand you're doing far better than me. Some things just have to be taken on faith, including my love for you." -- Another of my minds added, "Looking for specific reasons sounds suspiciously like male thinking. I'd very much prefer you to remain as feminine as possible, darling. That's a VERY desirable trait in a wife." Carol said, "Can we do your experiment quickly, please Mark? I want to take you upstairs and thank you for loving me." Julia said, "Excellent idea. Carol, you wait for us in our room and we'll be back as soon as we can." Carol looked down at the floor, twisting her right foot a couple of times. I think she has deliberately added it to her act as a good way of showing embarrassed reluctance, "Do you want me to go outside with you, naked? I will if you say I have to." Julia said, "No game playing now, Carol. I'll explain why when we get back." Carol immediately looked up and said, "Okay then. Hurry back." And she turned and headed upstairs. I didn't know why Julia had called the game off, but it didn't really matter. Julia and I walked out to the sidewalk, and I started touching houses (or fences, trees, mailboxes, or whatever), at increasing distances down the street. At roughly a second per test location, it didn't take long to work my way down the street, giving Julia a brief commentary of what I was doing so she wouldn't get bored watching nothing. When I got a long way down the street I started suspecting that I was getting less feedback than normal, but it's actually quite hard to judge how much touch you're getting. I was still thinking about that when the fingertip canceled on me. I mentally created a new fingertip where I'd last touched something and touched it again. My TK worked fine. Maybe with reduced sensitivity, but mostly fine. I moved it farther away, and it canceled again. I tried creating a fingertip at the troublesome location, and it failed to create. There was no other feedback to tell me it was beyond my range; it just failed. I created one at the most-distant successful location, and just flew it away from me. It canceled at what seemed the usual distance. Just for the heck of it, I tried to create fingertips at some distant hills, and that failed too. I quickly tried a few very distant locations, but all failed. I came back just inside of what appeared to be my limit, and it worked. Okay, my limit was "that far". I wasn't sure how far "that far" was as I haven't had much experience at estimating distances. I thought of asking Mom to measure it on the car's odometer on the way to the hospital to get my cast off, but it'd probably be dark so I might miss the right spot. I told Julia which tree it was, and asked her to measure it for me sometime soon, using her bike or a car. We guessed it to be about two hundred yards away, pending a more accurate measurement. Just to make sure the limit applied when carrying something, I bent down and found a very small chip of stone. I picked it up with my real hand and stood up, then picked it out of my palm with TK, as it was small enough to be invisible beyond a few feet. I TK-floated it up several feet. It was small, so accelerating it was easy. I leveled it off, then accelerated it up to a moderate speed heading down the street toward the touch limit. Not too fast because I wanted to be able to judge where it canceled. As best I could tell, my TK cut out at about the same distance. For the heck of it I picked up another small chip, and just accelerated it down the street as fast as it could go. To my surprise, once the speed got very high I could feel the wind blasting against my TK-fingertips. I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd thought about it, but I'd been foolishly assuming that empty fingertips could go at infinite speed because they were massless. I'd always been able to move them at apparently infinite speed around a room, but probably my eyeballs couldn't move fast enough to experience enough wind resistance to matter when they were so close to me. Standing outside, my eyeballs could traverse across a vast distance very quickly, but the fingertips couldn't keep up. The chip-carrying package reached terminal velocity while still within my range, when wind resistance equaled the force I was using to push it with. It didn't take long to reach my range limit, where the fingertips canceled and the stone presumably dropped to the street (I'd have been very surprised if it hadn't). I tried to accelerate a single fingertip the length of the street as fast as I could, in case the wind resistance had all been caused by the stone, although it hadn't felt like that. A single fingertip had a much higher terminal velocity, but that was to be expected as there was only one fingertip this time, rather than the two required to hold the chip last time. Being half the size, it had half the wind resistance, so presumably double the top speed. [[I didn't know about the physics of wind resistance at this time, so the previous sentence is poor science.]] It encountered wind resistance and I could sense its speed being limited. I sequentially flew new fingertips off in a few random directions, including straight up. All of them seemed to cancel at about the same distance. The experiment was finished so it was time to rejoin Carol, "rejoin" being both literally true and a euphemism, which is an unusual combination. As soon as we were back in the bedroom, I told Julia, "I've been thinking about your earlier question to me, on the suitability of that dress. I've decided that - very pretty on you as it is - it is nonetheless completely unsuitable and should be removed immediately." She lifted her arms, expecting me to manually help her, but it was light dress and I had been thinking about TK recently, so that's what I used to remove it. Julia loves it when I use my TK on her, and it always makes her hot (meant euphemistically as opposed to literally). It's a very useful ability. Julia helped me undress in a more traditional manner. Once naked we jumped on the bed to either side of Carol. Julia explained, "I'm partly sorry for stopping your game a few minutes ago, Carol, but it was because I was so moved by Mark's showing you how much he loved you. It was beautiful and I don't want to play games at the moment. I just want to love you both for who you really are. That's okay isn't it?" I can't imagine she expected anything other than how we answered. We made love until 3pm, when we stopped. There was no one at home to enforce the limit, but none of us suggested going over. We must be good kids. Or drained kids. We showered and dressed. The girls even wore underwear. It was easier on us if the temptations were put away. I felt like crying, so I put three hankies in my pocket. We went downstairs, away from the temptation of the bed. The honeymoon was over. ------- Chapter 57: Is No Sister Safe? Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) Julia decided there was no time like the present, and rode her bike to my TK distance limit and back again, reporting that it was just under 0.1 of a mile away. Maybe 0.08 or 0.09, she guessed. I hadn't thought about the poor precision of her odometer, and a car's odo' wouldn't be any better either. Call it somewhere between four and five hundred feet. Not exactly good science, but it'd do as I had no need to measure the distance more accurately. The girls made us a snack and we sat on one of the living room sofas eating and chatting. Julia mused at one point, "Mark, remember that you didn't want Carol to bother getting the ruler from our study so you could measure my top?" I nodded. "You said it was an idle whim and not worth disturbing her, but it was your flying the ruler to the door and then explaining how TK worked that reminded you of the experiment you intended to do. The experiment taught you some facts about your ability that you didn't know before. So it was worth disturbing Carol, wasn't it? Especially as you might've discovered something important in that experiment." I conceded, "You're partly right. It wasn't so much Carol getting the ruler that got me to experiment, as my explaining how TK worked to you afterward. That suggests that I should explain my abilities to you more." Julia said, "Perhaps, but I don't want us to know more about them. They're yours and it seems best to keep them secret. I can add another point: you need spare time for experiments. By having Carol do things for you, like your chores at home, you'll have more time for thinking and experimenting. Carol should take over doing all your chores." Carol jumped in, and said, "Yes! I'll start doing that as soon as we get home. If Mom or Dad tell you to do something, just tell me. No, that's silly. I'll talk with Mom and Dad and get them to tell me in the first place. They already know I'm serving you, and that'll work a lot smoother." "Haha. I can't imagine Mom and Dad letting me out of my chores. Good luck on that!" Carol firmly expressed, "They'd better! I'll make sure of it. I am your SERVANT! It's exactly what I should be doing." Oh, she was serious. So I thought about it myself. No doubt HAVING to do chores was a pain, but it made me feel quite uncomfortable to allow Carol to do all of mine in addition to hers. It was definitely very unfair. "Umm, I think our parents give us chores in part to teach us responsibility. I should learn that." Julia snorted, which I've learned is an ominous and sure sign that I'm about to lose an argument. "Yeah, you're such an irresponsible boy, aren't you? Plus if your life lives up to its potential, I think you'll have PLENTY of opportunities to learn all about responsibility. That's a non-issue." In other words, Julia believed I'd lost that argument. I regrouped and tried again, "More often than not I won't have any experiments to do, so I might as well do my chores. Otherwise I'd just be sitting around feeling guilty for doing nothing while Carol is doing my work." Julia snorted again. It was going to be one of those discussions where I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning a single point. "First, leaders have to be rested and mentally alert for when decisions are needed, especially for when a crisis develops. Your rest is just as important as your experiments. -- "Second, get over the guilt. You'll employ people and leave them to do their jobs. That's how it works. If they're working when you're relaxing, so what! You will end up having heaps of people working for you. Are you going to feel guilty when a single one of them is working and you're not? You could even have people in different time zones, so when would you ever sleep? Feeling guilty is just plain silly." Oh dear, I'd progressed from "a non-issue", to "just plain silly". In desperation I tried, "Sometimes I like doing chores. Servicing the cars with Dad gives me some time with him, or washing the dishes with Carol or Donna gives me a chance to talk with them. That's nice. I wouldn't like to just sit in my room all the time." "Yes, I agree that's important, especially for you." #3: #1: #3: "Why especially for us?" Julia said, "No, not 'us', just you. You need to..." #3: " ... stay in touch with the common people. That's one of the problems with elevated leaders." "What are you talking about? 'Common people' and 'elevated leaders' is weird language! You've been using a lot of that recently, especially about leaders?" "That's because I've been doing a lot of reading about leadership in the last week, to help me plan and prepare for your future. With your abilities - by which I mean your IQ and niceness mostly, since your TK has to be kept hidden. Not unless you set yourself up as some miracle-performing, fund-raising, TV evangelist, and I PRAY that doesn't happen! Haha." -- Julia enjoyed her little joke for a second, then carried on, "Out in the real world you'll develop into something dramatic, but relatively normal. Whether you create another Microsoft - that's Robert's favorite example by the way, he'd REALLY like you to do that - or are a major research scientist, or a world-leading politician, or something else equally impressive, then you'll certainly have a large team of people working for you, so leadership is a critical skill. I'm learning about it so I can help you overcome your being FAR too passive and non-commanding. Later on we will employ experts to teach you these things, but for the first few years I'll be doing it." #1: #3: #1: #2: I asked, "You've obviously been doing a lot of studying about leadership. I've heard you mention it three or four times today, and you've been right in what you've said too. How come I never knew about this before? If you've been studying it for a week or so, I mean, how come you never mentioned 'leadership' before?" Julia answered, "We've been too busy discussing other things. How to seduce that gorgeous girl sitting on the other side of you, for example." Carol said, "I could've saved you a lot of time then. All Mark had to say was, 'I want you.' Haha. Oh, and also, 'Take your clothes off and lie on your back.' That would've been good too. Haha." Julia laughed, "Yes, we know, but where was the fun in that!..." #3: #2: #1: #2: Julia was still talking, " ... and today we've had all day to talk about other things, so it's come up a few times. I've told Mark many times in the past that he has to learn to be commanding. It's just that today I've been explaining myself more because we've had more time." I asked, "Why do I have to be a leader? You keep saying this over and over again, but I don't see why. I like just having the two of you. That's all I need to be happy." Julia rhetorically asked, "Isn't he sweet? Completely wrong, but sweet..." #2: Julia explained this particular instance of me being wrong. " ... Mom and Dad made this clear to me a week or so ago. Dad pointed out that in just over a year you'll almost certainly be leaving Corvallis. That'll be the public start of your career, in whatever direction you want to go. Mom pointed out that successful people are all leaders, and we all agreed that you were very deficient in that area, and that I'd study up and help you develop." #3: I said, "I've still got some questions. Two biggies being: WHY do I need to be a leader? You still haven't explained that. And if I do need to be a leader, why don't I do the study rather than you? That would seem to make much more sense." "Both are easy to answer. Mom said you need to be a leader because great achievements come from teams. One person cannot do much alone. Dad's favorite example is Einstein. Other than some very slow correspondence, he worked almost entirely alone when he developed his relativity theories, but that was in the years before 1916. That's so far ago it was almost the Dark Ages! Everything is far too complex these days so no one has worked like that for nearly a century. -- "Mom insists you have to build a team, and she loves my idea of the core being our multiple marriage. How big would Microsoft be if Bill Gates did all the work himself? No matter what direction you go, you will need lots of people to take care of all the time-wasting stuff or the jobs that are outside your expertise. Just like Carol's going to be doing your chores. If you invent something that is worth billions of dollars, are you going to do all the manufacturing, marketing, accounting, etc.? Of course not! You'll employ people and they'll be part of your team. The better you are at leading them, the more of your potential will be achieved, and Mom and Dad are very eager to have your potential achieved. They're very excited about that. Have I explained it well enough?" I said, "You've explained it pretty well, but I still can't see why I have to have a team and be a leader." "In that case I haven't explained it at all. Let me try another way. Think of anything really fantastic in today's world. Let's say the internet. What was the name of the person who invented that?" "Umm. I don't know of any name." "Exactly! If one person had been responsible for the internet, you'd be hearing his name every day. Maybe one guy had the initial idea, but he certainly didn't create it himself. Sometimes an individual can have a breakthrough idea, but it's usually on top of years of teamwork, and always requires more years of work from more teams of people to make it work. Can you name one single person who has INDIVIDUALLY achieved something incredible in the last several decades, without a large team helping them?" I tried. I thought about categories, like people who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but they all must have had a team to get their message out. Any sort of political process must need lots of people. What about scientific advances? The only person I could think of was Stephen Hawking (or Steven? However he spells his name, I can't remember). But I think he works in a team too. He even needs people to help him live: feed him, dress him, etc. And although his work is brilliant, from what I'd heard he hadn't actually discovered anything 'useful'. Knowledge of how the universe works is interesting, obviously, but hardly relevant. Not to mention the rather amusing mistake I knew he'd made, as he'd missed the W-Dimension. The category of "movie stars" popped into my mind, which was pathetic. They ACT heroic, but they aren't themselves. And even if they were, they have huge teams of people to make their movies. The 9/11 firemen-heroes came to mind, but what better example of a team could you think of? I was stumped. "Julia, I'm stumped. I can't think of anyone." Julia was not magnanimous in victory, she pressed her point even stronger. "Even if you could think of ONE example, it wouldn't disprove my point. One guy might get lucky, but that doesn't change the fact that teams are far more likely to achieve far greater success than individuals." I nodded, "Okay, I accept your point now. Everything is too complex these days for one guy to do it all." Julia said, "Yes, exactly. Sorry for pushing this so much, but it's stressing me out quite a lot. I hadn't really understood this before my parents pointed me in this direction, but leadership is critical. Bad leadership doesn't just prevent success, it can cause major disasters, whereas great leadership can create amazing results. -- "I get very excited about how much you could achieve, and very horrified about how bad things could get if we mess-up your life in some way. Getting it right is stressing me out. That's why I was so happy and relieved that you ordered Carol not to sacrifice herself for me. That showed that you are starting to become a good leader, and I now understand how important that is. Anyway, that's just me. I know I get carried away sometimes, and I'm a bit carried away about leadership these days." #2: I asked, "If you're so worried about me being a good leader, why are you studying it rather than me? Shouldn't I be doing the study?" Julia answered, "It's tempting. I'd like to be able to pass it over to you, but we don't think so. Not yet anyway. Mom and Dad say you're still a kid. They don't mean that in any derogatory sense, but you have to get out and do kid things, otherwise you'll grow up weird. Psychologically weird, I mean. Obviously you're weird in awesome ways already. It's better that I learn, and then give you lessons as good opportunities arise." I disagreed. "That doesn't sound right. First because you're a kid too. No disrespect intended either. Second, what you describe is inefficient: that you learn it all, and then pass extracts on to me. It'd take less total time and effort if I learned it directly." Julia disagreed with my disagreement, "Both your arguments have the same flaw: you're giving my time the same value as yours, which is obviously not true. My learning about leadership and passing on lessons to you does take more total time than if you learned it yourself, but it takes less of YOUR time. It's the same reason Carol will be doing your chores. It doesn't matter whether she'll be doing them faster or slower than you. Carol's and my job is to serve you. -- "If you had ten people working for you, but you could do their jobs twice as fast as they could, does that mean you should do all eleven jobs? How can one man do eleven jobs even if he's twice as fast? What if you had a hundred people? A thousand? Delegation is part of leadership, and you'll just have to get used to the fact that the person doing the job might be less efficient than you. The important thing is that it lets you get on with whatever you want to do, whether that's work or play. I was forced to admit, "I don't like the idea of your treating my life as more important than yours, but I know I've got no chance at all of convincing you otherwise so I'll not argue that point. By the criterion you're using, your method is better." Julia was magnanimous now, "Good. You're slowly learning. When your team gets even larger you will see that you have to let go and let them do their work in their way. How many people are in your team now, Mark?" "Two, obviously. You and Carol. And I can't believe how wonderful it is to have both of you. I'm so lucky." I hugged them both. "Don't try to divert the conversation into lovey-dovey stuff. Not quite yet anyway. Let's finish this, it's important. Two is wrong. Try again." "Ah. I'm pretty sure it's two. Donna hasn't joined yet, and I'm not even sure I want her to. I assume you want a whole number, like two. You don't want 2.1 for part of Donna, do you?" "Haha. No, I don't want to carve Donna up. A whole number is what I want. If someone is helping you, count them. Carol and I don't help you all the time, sometimes we do things for ourselves, but we still get counted as one each. I'll save you some time, and tell you that two is wrong, but while three is still wrong, it is better. Why three, Mark?" "Not Donna?" "No, not Donna. I'll give you a little clue: the three people are sitting on this sofa." "Oh, you mean me! I wasn't counting me. That's a bit mean of you. Obviously I know I'm part of the team, I just didn't bother to count me." "You are not 'part of the team', you are the REASON for the team. You're not just a member of it, you're the MOST IMPORTANT member of it. You should be counted before anyone else. You just demonstrated that you are still excessively self-effacing. -- "I know you understand that point, so moving on. Even three is not correct. How about my family? They help you a lot, spend a fair amount of time thinking about you, discussing you, doing things for you. Do you think you could have gotten the DMV to let you try for your license without Dad's help? Mom explains a lot to me, and even The Boys helped this morning by taking the time to look at Carol when she was naked. They enjoyed themselves of course, but they still were part of the team that was helping you." "I agree all of your family have been marvelous. Incredible really. You guys are planning my future and thinking about things that have never crossed my mind." Julia recited, "It is best to fix problems before they occur." It sounded like a catch phrase, something they said often. I had no trouble imagining it was the family motto, not with the effort they put into planning my future. I continued, "The Boys set up the study, for example, that will be great, when we FINALLY get around to using it, haha..." Julia interrupted me to explain why it hadn't been used, "It was only unveiled on Wednesday. I was NOT going to let it be used on our wedding or honeymoon days! Plus tomorrow is 'Shopping Day', which is far more important than study. Maybe we can start using it on Sunday." I carried on, "Anyway, the point I was going to ask about is that I accept The Boys are part-time members of my team, but you used the example of their looking at Carol this morning. Surely they did that for Carol's benefit, not mine. Shouldn't that make them part of Carol's team?" "Haha. If anyone else had asked me that question, I'd think they were trying to tease me, but you're serious, aren't you?" "Umm, yes. Is it another silly question?" "Yep. First, Carol doesn't have a team, other than your parents always being a team that help raise their children. I'm assuming that's the norm and I'm only talking about leadership issues beyond that. Carol isn't important enough yet. Sure sometimes people help her - she's a lovely person so of course people do - but that's just casual help. A team exists to achieve a sustainable goal of some sort. There is no short-term or long-term goal around Carol. When she starts producing your children we may well employ people to help her because then there'll be an important goal, but that's not yet. -- "Second, The Boys looked at Carol this morning for YOUR benefit, not hers. They enjoyed it - what guy wouldn't! Carol enjoyed the excitement it gave her, but enjoyment was not the reason for the exercise. The Boys did it to help Mom understand Carol..." I suddenly realized that Julia was giving away FAR too much information about Carol in front of her. Fortunately I was facing Julia with Carol behind me so I could wink heavily. That didn't stop her, so I rolled my eyes and frowned to attract Julia's attention to her mistake. All that happened was Julia laughed then said, "Don't worry about Carol hearing, Mark. Let me finish. The Boys helped Mom understand Carol so Mom and Dad could continue to help our three-way relationship, which exists because it's what you want. Thus it was all for your benefit. So The Boys were on your team then. -- "Your interruption wasn't necessary. Carol knows what we do to her. She may not know the exact reasons for everything we do, but that doesn't matter most of the time. I wasn't accidentally divulging something we have to keep secret from her. I prefer not to talk with her about it at the time because that'd reduce her enjoyment, but making sure you understand that The Boys helped you this morning is part of your learning about teams, and that's a lot more important than a little bit of game playing with Carol." I turned to Carol, and asked, "Did you know what was happening to you this morning?" Carol confidently said, "I knew I was having fun and getting very excited! Haha. I knew something else was going on. It was too well arranged to be accidental. People don't send a naked girl around the house to do things, especially not sending her to guys! Vanessa kept asking me lots of questions so there was definitely a reason. I don't know what it was and I don't care. It's not important to me." "It's not important to you why you were made to walk around the house naked? And letting all the guys see you?" "Nope! I trust Julia and her family. They're very nice people. No one touched me sexually this morning, Mark. Prof kissed my cheek, but only after saying things that prepared me and put me in the right mood for his little peck. That was a sign of parental affection and not sexual at all. He left his study door open so I'd feel safe with him, which was unnecessary but nice of him anyway. -- "Vanessa didn't send me into the room with The Boys, the way she made me do with Prof, because I might've found that too scary. Obviously she trusts her sons but she didn't want to scare me. Instead she made The Boys come to the kitchen where she was to help me feel safe. Donna felt completely safe and unconcerned in the tub with The Boys last time when she was topless. They're both gentlemen. How could they be anything else, in this house?" "Wow. I never thought of any of that." Carol said, "Nor did I at the time; I only thought of about it now. When I'm playing I go into a kind of Dumb Mode. I'm not really dumb, I just don't want to think about things that spoil my enjoyment. At some level I noticed the, which is why I was so comfortable doing them with the Williamses, but I refuse to consciously think about them. I loved that Julia and Vanessa did that for me, as they obviously put quite an effort into doing it well. It was very exciting and very safe, which was wonderful for me." #1: #3: #1: "I've got a lot to learn about females, don't I?" #2, #3: <{Groan}.> #3: Julia and Carol laughed, and Julia said, "You're learning. One advantage of your being so dreadfully modest is that you're always thinking you've made mistakes, so you're willing to listen and learn. It's much easier to teach you than an arrogant person, and you ARE learning." "I don't think I am. Maybe just a tiny bit, but it's a drop in the ocean. Everywhere I turn I see females doing things that I don't understand. It's going to take me years to learn enough for it to be noticeable." Julia said, "Good, that's what we're hoping. We're looking forward to spending years with you, aren't we, Carol?" "Too right! I want to be with Mark all my life." "But I keep making so many mistakes, and keep failing to understand almost anything. That must be a real pain for you two. Surely you want me to learn as quickly as possible, so I can stop being so bad to you." Both girls laughed again, for quite a long time. It wasn't a good sign. Julia turned to look square on at me, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, "Mark, you are already the most wonderfully nice, caring, considerate and loving guy imaginable. That's not counting ANY of your special abilities; that's just your personality. That's right, isn't it, Carol?" Carol hugged my back and placed her face over my shoulder, so our cheeks were pressing together. She said, "Totally. I fell head over heels in love with him even before I knew he had any special abilities. Other than his IQ improvement, but I didn't fall for him because of that. Smart guys have never appealed to me. I fell in love with him because of his personality. Donna's the same about him. Your parents too. Not out of love obviously, but they're helping him a lot." #1: "Carol, how come you don't like smart guys? And given that I'm doing so well at school, doesn't that contradict your liking me now? That doesn't seem logically consistent to me." They laughed again. Confirming that my being smart is only restricted to schoolwork. Carol eventually answered, "Smart guys are usually either socially nervous or arrogant about their intelligence. I like people I can honestly respect. A nervous guy doesn't respect himself and an arrogant guy doesn't respect anyone else, so neither deserve my respect..." #3: " ... You on the other hand, I respect so much I could burst. You're awesome in EVERYTHING you do, including earning respect. Not just for your schoolwork and special abilities either. Remember the trick I played on you to get you to compliment me in a way that showed you had watched and understood me. Remember I had written the answer on a piece of paper beforehand?" "Yeah, I remember." "You've got some incredible people skills. You notice and remember things about people better than anyone I know. Even tiny little things about what's important to them, what makes them tick, what makes them sad or happy, when they need cheering up, etc. You do it all the time. Look at you and Donna. Until a year or two ago you two had NOTHING in common, except your dislike of each other. Now she thinks you are Mr. Super Wonderful Nice, and you make her squickly, all because of your people skills. She's hardly seen any of your special abilities, so her feelings are all because of your personality." #3: #2: "Carol, Julia, just while I remember to mention it. Regardless of how much we do with Donna in the future, let's not tell her about my TK or anything else special. Maybe we'll decide to one day, but I mean not to tell her accidentally without thinking about it first." Julia said, "Sure. Fine by me. The fewer that know the better." Carol said, "I agree about not telling Donna more. It's too important to trust her with. She won't understand why it has to be kept secret." I said, "If I am so wonderfully good with people, why do you have to spend so much time training me to be better? I feel totally inadequate compared to you two. And with Mom too, when she points out female issues that I had no idea of." Julia said, "You're not nearly as bad as you think. We explain a lot of ways you could improve not because you're so wrong, but because we're trying to push you to learn much faster than normal guys. I'm sorry that we gave you the impression that you're inadequate in any way. That's TOTALLY not true. You are VERY, VERY adequate, isn't he, Carol?" "Oh YES! Very satisfactorily adequate, haha." "I'm pushing you to learn leadership to help make you more assertive. Ideally MUCH more assertive. We'll be pushing girls your way so you can learn more about how sex works. Not the physical act because you're already awesome at that, but how girls operate, the way they seduce guys, the tricks they try, etc. Once you know their tricks, you'll be in control and able to command them better. All these things are preparing you for your future. Because your future is going to be so important, we're pushing you more than other boys would be pushed. We love you and we want you to go a long way in life, so we're starting now. We - my family and I - think that's for the best, don't you?" I replied, "Well, actually, it's all a bit much at times. And it does make me feel inadequate. I like being a kid. I wouldn't mind going slow for a year or two." Julia said, "That isn't going to happen, Mark, sorry..." #2: " ... The world is going to start beating on your door next year, whether you're ready or not. So you'd better be ready, otherwise you'll be pushed in directions that aren't good for you." "I don't understand that?" "Next year you'll be doing 12th grade and OSU courses, yes?" "Yes. That's right. I'm quite looking forward to some of it because schoolwork is pretty boring most of the time." "That means you'll be completing about six years of education in half the time, while you've been acing the exams. That plus your documented IQ guarantees people will be scrambling to get their hands on you. You don't think they're all going to wait until the end of next year and send you a single sheet of paper listing all your options and wait for you to choose, do you?" "I don't know what you're talking about? What people will want to get their hands on me?" "Corporations, Government and Education. They'll be competing for you. They'll be climbing all over each other to be the one to recruit you, which means they'll be climbing all over you too if you aren't assertive enough to fight them off. They'll be coming at you from all directions. We know the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education are already very aware of you, and you can guarantee that your records have already been sold to others..." "Huh? They don't sell school records, surely?" "Not as policy, no, but the Boards employ people, and those people will have been approached by others and 'encouraged' to provide advance notice of any interesting students. This stuff just leaks out, even if not for money. Dad was able to find out things about your academic record just by asking around, back before we first dated. He expects trouble to start after the results of your end-of-year exams are released." "That's not too bad then, that gives us about fourteen months of peace and quiet. Couldn't we go slow on the 'Pushing Mark to Grow Up' project for six months or so, maybe nine?" Julia shook her head. "The 'end-of-year exams' at the end of THIS year, not next." "But that's only two months away!" "Yep! If you ace your 10th and 11th grade exams they're not going to wait. They'll want to get you signed up and committed long before your 12th grade finishes, in order to beat their competition to you. Before you ask it, 'No, you cannot deliberately do poorly in your exams.' What were you thinking!" I indignantly protested, "You can't tell me off for doing something I hadn't even done yet. That's not fair!" Julia, as she does from time to time, pointed out that she was right and I was wrong, "I bet you were thinking it, weren't you? I know how your mind works, in some respects anyway. Whenever you see a problem, your first reaction is to avoid it by running away rather than confronting and beating it. Doing badly in your exams could damage your life out of all proportion to the problem you avoided, as I'm sure you appreciate by now. And would've appreciated without me getting smart the way I did. I'm sorry about that." "That's okay. I know you have my best interests at heart. Even more than I do, as I had no idea of the recruiting stuff you described. Will it really be as bad as that?" "I don't really know. Dad fears it could get messy, especially if some of the more aggressive agencies of the US Government get involved. We prepare for the worst, in case that happens. If it turns out to be not as bad we've been lucky." "Ahh, what do you mean by 'aggressive agencies of the US Government'? That doesn't sound good." "You could talk with Dad to get his opinions first hand, but he says the NSA vacuums up mathematicians en masse, and that they're currently aggressively expanding and recruiting. The CIA wants smart people, especially if they knew about your people-observation skills. Who knows what else. It's not our area, other than Dad knows the mathematics industry is significantly affected by the number of mathematicians the NSA consumes." "I don't want to work for the Government. Especially not this one because Dad would disown me." (The Federal Government and several of its agencies become heavily involved in our lives later. Rather than referring to them all as Feds, I'll restrict "Feds" to FBI agents, will specify the parent agency for other agents, and will use "the Government" or "the Administration" to refer to the Federal Government. State governments had almost no part in my ascendancy.) "The government your dad's talking about will have changed by the time you start working, but I imagine your job would be the same regardless of what party is in power." I said, "Well, thanks for telling me all that. I had no idea. So what do we do about it? I mean, how do we prepare?" "Mom and Dad say 'by being very careful.' I know you won't understand because I didn't. Dad gave me an example. Dad's got an idea about your going to an overseas university. I'm guessing he'll recommend it when the time comes, although I haven't asked him his reasons yet. He said that the US Government may not want you to go overseas - depending on how badly they want you - so they could try to stop you. He said many countries won't let people reside who have drug convictions, so our government could entrap you into a drug conviction. If you go to a college party and a pretty girl offers you a joint, run away! That sort of being careful. According to Dad you won't have to worry about those sort of tricks until it's reasonably clear that you intend to go overseas, and then it depends on where you're thinking about going. Oxford or Cambridge would get a very different reaction than Beijing University." "This is scary shit!" "Dad's not worried about it now, he's just thinking ahead. In the meanwhile practice on other girls so sexy, joint-offering girls won't tempt you in a year's time. I believe you said you needed to learn more about girls?" "A WHOLE lot more!" Julia said, "I'm really getting ahead of myself. Let's wait and see what your exam results are like first, and do all the other things we want to do. The pressure for where you go next will take some time to ramp up anyway, so we'll see it happening. I'm sure you know not to sign any contracts that you're given, etc. Dad says he'll introduce you around OSU next year so you can start networking there, building up some good contacts and that sort of thing. Next school year just be a bit suspicious of people and watch them closely if they're doing something that could damage you." We sat in silence for a while. I was trying to recover from the intensity of it all. I had trouble believing it could be as bad as Julia said. Maybe she was using it as an excuse to keep pushing me? That seemed more likely than not. But on the other hand, I didn't doubt that she believed she was helping me, and I knew I needed to learn what she was teaching me sooner or later. I'd have preferred later, but sooner was doable and even necessary, if her perception of the 'threats' coming my way was realistic. Carol moved, and I realized that Julia and I had talked a great deal, with almost no involvement from Carol. I suddenly worried that she felt left out. I turned to look at her, and she looked worried. I asked, "Carol, are you okay? I'm sorry about leaving you out of our conversation for so long." Carol said, "I'm worried about you. What Julia talked about was very scary. I don't want you to be tricked into going to jail for drugs, or having other problems like that." I said, "That worry is a year away, and with the Williamses on the lookout for me I'm a lot less scared. What I'm worried about now is whether you feel excluded or not? I didn't talk with you for a long time." "I'm fine. Although if you made love to me again, I'd feel even better! Just kidding, I know we're not allowed to now. Sometimes you need to talk with Julia about stuff like that, and I can't help with it. It's great that Julia and her family can help you so much. Also, and I know this is selfish and I'm sorry, but you already showed me that you love me more than Julia, and that amazes me. I feel very good about that, sorry Julia." Julia laughed, and said, "Good. I'm glad you're happy about that. I'm happy for you too. You don't need to apologize because I already knew he felt that way. Also, Mark loves you more than ANYBODY, not just me, so I don't take it personally." Carol said, "Yes. I know you don't mind. You even told him to say it. I love you so much for that. You could have kept Mark for yourself, but instead you've been so happy to share him. That's incredible." "{Raspberry}," from Julia. "I couldn't have kept him to myself. Maybe for a few months I could have, but not much beyond that. He's too powerful, too sexy, too nice, and too several other things. Girls are going to be all over him soon, and are already starting to. I did the only sensible thing by sharing him with you. Which - I must say - is working out VERY well! I've lost nothing and gained a great deal. I'm very happy with how my relationship with Mark is working out." "Me too," said Carol. "Me too," said me. Carol giggled, "You can't be happy about your relationship with Mark. You'll go blind if you have too much 'relationship' with yourself, haha." "I might have to start doing that again because of the damned trial. You can still stay overnight here and do depraved, disgusting, delightful things with Julia. I'll have to do them to myself. Carol suggested, "Or Donna." "I don't want to go ANYWHERE near that far with Donna. I might dip my toe in the water, so to speak, but no more than that. That little bit of fun will get me even more excited, which will make waiting for the trial to finish even worse. I definitely predict some serious self-abuse in my near future. My pimples are going to get MUCH worse." Carol disagreed, "You don't have any pimples. You used to, but the last ones faded away recently." I hadn't realized that, but it didn't matter now. I said, "Exactly! That proves my case. When I started dating Julia my pimples went away. Now I'm going to be restarting my self-abuse, they'll come back." Carol laughed, but Julia said, "One small problem with your theory, your pimples were fading long before we started dating. EXACTLY when did you stop your previous self-abuse?" "Umm, two nights ago." The girls' laughter ended that discussion. Julia said, "Speaking of perverted activities, we still have one of them pending. Carol's punishment." I said, "Huh?" But then remembered the twenty five smacks from last night. Carol had forgotten though, and looked perplexed. Julia said, "Last night Mark said he would 'give you twenty five smacks tomorrow morning'. Remember? The smacks I deserve for keeping Mark away from other girls, that I ordered you to take for me." "Oh yes, I remember now. I'd forgotten all about that." Julia continued, "Yes, you had. What troubles me is that it's now the afternoon so Mark's intention to administer the smacks in the morning was not carried out. That's your fault, Carol." "My fault? How?" "We can't expect Mark to keep track of every little detail. His time is too valuable for that. You should keep track of how many smacks you are due, and remind him at a suitable time." "Okay. I'll definitely do that from now on." Julia agreed, "Good. I won't punish you for failing to remind him this time because you didn't know. If you forget again though, you will be smacked extra for it." "Yes, miss." #3: "We just have to settle what happens to the twenty five outstanding smacks. Unfortunately, when I start smacking my naughty little girl, I tend to get a little, shall we say, 'emotional'. I'd say you get that way too, but you're such a horny little slut that you probably feel that way all the time, don't you, little girl?" "Umm, yes. I'm sorry, miss, but I can't help getting 'emotional' when I'm with you or Mr. Mark. You both make me think naughty thoughts. I know good girls can control it, but I can't. I must be a very bad girl, miss, because I have lots of naughty thoughts and my, umm, my thingy, you know, it gets all puffy and wet and stuff." Carol, in particular, was camping it up. She was batting her eyes at me, trying to look all shy and nervous, wringing her hands together in her lap, any anything else she could think of to play up her act. Each time she twisted her hands, her skirt somehow got pulled higher and higher up her legs It was so funny I got an erection ("funny" might not be the right word). Carol gave a sharp, loud, inhalation of breath, and said, "Oh, Mr. Mark! Your, umm, your winkle is sticking up all by itself. Oh dear, now I feel even more squickly. What should I do, sir? I feel very strange." -- Carol lifted the front of her skirt and looked up her own skirt. "Oh, look at that, sir, my poor little panties are getting all wet. I don't understand how though. Maybe you should take them off me, sir, just so they don't get too messy. Because I think they might get very messy, sir. I feel very, very squickly." Carol started sucking a thumb, and mumbled around it. "My Mommy says I shouldn't let bad men touch me under my dress. But you're not a bad man are you, sir? Or if you are, I could take my dress off, and then you wouldn't be touching me under it, would you, sir? -- "Sir! Your winkle moved! I saw it move. Is it, like, alive or something? If it is, does it want a friend? Because I'd like to be its friend. I'm VERY friendly, and I'm sure it'd like me. Does it like to play games, sir? I do. Can I teach it how to play Hide 'N' Seek? Because I know a REALLY good place it could hide, where no one will EVER find it." I don't know how long Carol could have kept it up, but she was interrupted by Julia's cracking up, which set me off too. Carol joined in with our laughter. When we'd finished laughing Julia said, "Well done, darling. You're a wonderful little actress." "Thank you, miss. Unfortunately I'm seriously squickly now. I think I'll go to the bathroom for a while. Maybe for a long while." Carol got up, started sucking her thumb, and skipped out of the room. I was seriously tempted to do the same thing, although skipping might have been difficult in my current condition. Instead Julia said, "She's sweet, isn't she?" 'Sweet' wouldn't have been the adjective I would've chosen, but it was still true. "Yes, she is. Sweet and sexy. And smart too, come to that. That was an impressive impromptu performance. She was very quick to think up those lines. I couldn't have done it nearly so fast." "I doubt it was entirely impromptu. They were probably lines taken from fantasies she's spent years thinking about." "Oh." I thought a bit more, and added, "Seriously? That's her style of fantasy? It seems so... , comical, I guess." "One style, yes. I'm sure she has at least one other. Remember what she's doing right now, so it does get to her. Not just her either, it did make your 'winkle' stick up all by itself." "Haha. Yes it certainly did, but from novelty value as much as anything. I can't imagine finding that fantasy exciting for long. It's just too silly. But you said you were sure she had at least one other style, what do you think that is?" Julia asked, "Does she like pirate movies?" "Yes she does. I've seen her watching them for years. Why?" "Just to confirm my guess. She fantasizes about being raped." Julia saw the shock on my face. I felt my face go white, and it's got to be pretty extreme before you can feel that! Julia waved her hand in front of my face to get my attention, "Mark! It's not nearly as bad as you think. Relax. It's ONLY a fantasy; she doesn't want it for real. Remember that she's very aware of her safety during her play-acting. She's mentioned that to us more than once. It's even a fairly common female fantasy. You can ask Mom if you like." "NO THANKS! I am NOT going to ask your mother about rape fantasies." "Haha." "How can you laugh about that? Rape is terrible!" "Mark, it's a fantasy. It isn't real. Have you ever fantasized about something criminal?" -- While pausing for my answer, Julia had a thought and added, "How about fantasizing about killing a bully that was plaguing you? Not a sexual fantasy in this case - I HOPE not sexual! - but a fantasy nonetheless. Have you ever dreamed or wished you could kill a bully?" "Um, I must confess that I have. More than once. Even quite often at one stage. A few years ago. I'd never do it of course. I'm not..." "Relax, Mark. You don't need to reassure me that you wouldn't do it. The last bully that attacked me you took care of by letting him beat you up when you could have killed him as easy as thinking about it. I don't need your reassurances. Both you and Carol have had violent fantasies, and she's as unlikely to make hers happen as you are to make yours happen. They're fantasies, okay? Not real." "My killing someone certainly wouldn't be 'as easy as thinking about it, ' but ignoring that, I can't imagine how she could want to even dream about being raped. It turns my blood cold." "As I'm sure the idea of murdering someone turns her blood cold. Perhaps I shouldn't have told you, as I fear it might upset your relationship with Carol. It's quite common. A lot of girls have those fantasies. Depending on the girl, more or less often, but many of us do. Okay?" "Do you?" "Mark, I told you before that I am small and good looking, so an ideal victim for a rapist. I am very aware and very scared of being raped. Far too often in my life I've been physically frightened of it, such as when I'm in dark places or being hassled by large guys. It is something that intrudes into my life frequently. I HATE that it happens so often. So, 'Yes', I do fantasize about it." "Huh? I thought you were about to say 'No, of course not!' You mean, after all the long-winded winding me up about how terrible it is for you, even then you fantasize about it?" "Yes. Fear is a powerful aphrodisiac. I fear being raped, as does Carol, so we fantasize about it. I know Mom is afraid of being raped because she's mentioned it to me several times. I've never asked her about having fantasies about it, but I will and I'll let you know." "Ahh, I don't think I really want to know that about your mom." "Actually, I think it would be a good idea for you to know. About your mom too. It'd be a good part of your 'learning more about females' education. Leave it to me. I'll do it in a way that won't embarrass you." #3: I said, "I can see you've made up your mind and I know better than to argue with you at such times. THAT much I have learned about one woman. I trust you won't make me TOO uncomfortable." Julia responded with, "Do you want a snack?" Now there's a girl who knows how to cheer me up! ------- Chapter 58: Honeymoon Dinner Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) Carol had not returned by the time Julia and I had finished our snack. Julia said Carol would return when she wanted to. Carol eventually rejoined us about forty five minutes after she'd skipped out. I looked at my watch and said, "Good grief, how could you spend so long jilling yourself in the bathroom?" Carol indignantly defended herself, "What sort of sexual pervert do you think I am! I only spent five minutes in the bathroom. Honestly! Just because you've got a dirty mind it doesn't mean everyone else has!" "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply you were a pervert or anything like that. What did you spend all the rest of the time doing then?" "If you must know, I was in Julia's bedroom frigging myself with her vibrator, imagining I was playing Hide and Seek with your winkle!" The two girls laughed, and when I mentally climbed out of the trap, I joined in too. Carol said, "Haha. That was fun. You are very easy to set up for embarrassment, you know?" "Yes, I know. Believe me, I KNOW! It happens far too often. So what were you really doing then?" The girls immediately started laughing again. #2: After the most recent round of "Let's All Laugh At Mark", Julia said, "You really are sweet, Mark..." #3: " ... Naïve, but sweet. You've got no idea how sexy you are, do you?" #3: "I know exactly how sexy I am: totally not!" Carol laughed, but Julia stopped Carol, saying, "The trouble is that he actually believes it. You won't take our word for it, but we'll find a way to convince you." Carol said, "You are sexy, brother." "This from the girl who's a self-confessed sexual pervert, as you did spend forty five minutes frigging yourself like I accused you of. I only got the room wrong." "I was 'winkling' myself; it's a different thing entirely. Same end result though: a REALLY good time! Haha. Okay, I admit it, I'm a sexual pervert when it comes to thinking about my brother. I have no intention of ever stopping either!" "I'm glad to hear it." Then I thought of an interesting detail and had to check it, "Julia, do you really have a vibrator?" "Oh yes. I LOVE my vibrator. I don't know how I could survive the nights you aren't here without it. The next week or two especially, so I'd better get Mom to buy more batteries next time she does the shopping." Carol said, "I REALLY need to get one too. It's going to be terribly frustrating living in the same house as Mark without making love to him." Julia said, "We can get you one tomorrow. Now that I think of it, we should get you two because I saw how much you liked having your ass filled. That way you can have both going at the same time." "Wow, that's a great idea! Thank you, Julia. I never thought of doing that, you're so clever." Or perverted. On further thought: both. I must admit that the image of Carol doing herself with two vibrators was hot, even though I didn't exactly know what a vibrator looked like. I was eager to find out though, so I said, "I'd like to see that! Please buy two and let me watch you using them one night soon." Carol said, "Oh no. I couldn't do that." #1: "Why not, sweetie?" "It'd make me so horny I'd be unable to stop myself jumping on top of you, and we're not allowed to do that at home." Damn! And I realized it'd have the same effect on me too (jumping on top of HER, in my case). It would be torture to see her using them at home. Double Damn! Carol said, "I'll show you next time we're allowed to have sex here. Sorry." Yeah, me too. My dejected mood was improved somewhat when Julia suggested, "Why don't we buy another vibrator to give to Donna? She's going to need to burn off her sexual frustration soon." Carol laughed, and said, "Oh, that delicious. So sexual but no one else is involved." Julia laughed, and said, "Not quite no one else because Mark should give it to her. Nicely wrapped up like a real present, with a lovely card praising her for her developing maturity. I think that'd work very well indeed." So did the rest of us. Poor Donna was an innocent babe square in Julia's sights. Donna was doomed! A few minutes of idle chitchat later Julia asked, "What size pants and shirts do you wear, Mark? Carol and I will get you a few outfits tomorrow. Nothing much, just one or two casual changes for now." "I don't know. I hardly ever go shopping and always forget my size anyway. I just get the assistant to measure me." Julia rolled her eyes at Carol, and said, "Honestly! It's amazing they can dress themselves. You can see why I'm so glad our Lord has a servant now." -- Turning back to me, Julia commanded, "Loosen your belt so Carol can check your tag. Get his shirt size too." A minute later Carol had read both tags. I did up my belt and relaxed back in the sofa again. Both girls looked at me like I was stupid, which meant that I was. I asked, "What?" "You have to stand up, of course." "Of course I do. Would you mind telling my why though?" I said this while standing. I wasn't going to argue with Julia. "Now that we know the sizes of the clothes you're wearing, you have to stand so we can see exactly how badly they fit so we can estimate the correct sizes. That'll be good enough for getting you a couple of casual outfits. We'll take you out shopping some day soon, when you're not running. Very soon, because you're in dire need of some new clothes." "Hey, that's a bit over the top isn't it? A bit insulting even. This is my best outfit that I chose to get married in. I only bought it two or three months ago. I have been growing a bit recently, but even so!" "Look at the shirt: Its shoulders are too narrow, as you can see by the seams. The sleeves are too short, the chest is too tight, and the waist is too loose for that style. Turn around. Oh dear, the back is even worse. Carol, what sizes do you think he is?" The girls quickly agreed on my shirt and pants sizes. Julia said, "Don't pout, darling. We love you. It doesn't matter that we don't love your clothes. We can fix them easily. It'll be fun." Somehow I doubted the last part. I was thinking about going upstairs and changing into the other set of clothes I had there, just jeans and an old shirt that I'd worn to school yesterday. I hesitated because I feared having those criticized too. Thinking about those clothes made me think about the room they were in, and I had a panic attack. I quickly said, "No pink clothes for me, okay? No pink pants and no pink shirts." "Of course not. That'd be silly for casual clothes. Salmon might work though." #1: #2: "Ah, what have fish got to do with buying new clothes for me?" Julia patiently explained, "Not salmon the fish, salmon the color." #1: #2: #3: "Ah, darling. I've never heard of a color called salmon. What is it?" "It's a shade of pink, lighter than carnation." #3: #1: "Didn't we agree on no pink? You even said pink would be silly..." #1: <" ... for casual clothes", remember it's only silly for casual clothes.> #2: " ... so I think we shouldn't have any salmon either. Nor any trout." Carol laughed, "'Trout'! Haha. You're very funny, Mark." Julia said, "Are you sure? You'd look good in salmon. What do you think Carol?" Carol replied, "Yes, salmon would complement his coloring nicely." "Please! No pink, no salmon, no carnation, nothing even vaguely pink-like." "Sure. No problem. What about seashell?" #2: "What on Earth is seashell?" "It's a color, of course. A shade of white." #3: #2: #3: #2: "In what way is seashell a shade of white?" "It's mostly white, partly pink." "NO PINK!" "Formally it's not a pink; it's a shade of white." "NO PINK! No pink-pink, no white-pink, no pink-white, no green-pink, no blue-pink, no yellow-pink - ESPECIALLY no yellow-pink! No anything-pink or pink-anything. GOOD GRIEF! I just want no pink. How hard can it be to ask for 'No pink'?" Julia burst into laughter, closely followed by Carol. Julia thought it was so funny she even rolled off the sofa and onto to the floor, clutching her stomach. Carol wasn't much better. Julia, with tears in her eyes - because I damned well wasn't going to give her one of my hankies - barely managed to get out, "Haha. You haha are so haha easy to set up, Mark." When Julia was more collected and had wiped her own eyes, she said, "Sorry, but I just couldn't resist. Of course I knew what you meant when you said 'no pink'. I wouldn't buy you pink casual clothes anyway. But you're just so easy to wind up. Did you really think that I'd expect you to know what seashell was when you can't even tell the difference between cerise and vermilion?" #2: #1: #2: #3: Carol grabbed my arm. Pressing my upper-arm into her breasts always cheers me up, somehow. She said, "I love you Mark," cheering me up even further. "I'm sorry I went along with it, but it was very funny." "You went along with it? I thought she was fooling us both. When did you know she was teasing me?" Carol explained, "When Julia said salmon might work." "Hang on! That was RIGHT at the beginning. You knew way back then?" "Sure. Salmon would look terrible on you." #2: "Wait a minute, Carol! Didn't you later say salmon would 'complement my coloring'?" Carol confessed, "Yeah. Sorry about that. I was just going along with Julia's joke. Don't worry, I'd never buy you a salmon shirt. A vermilion shirt, on the other hand, would look great on you." I looked Carol hard in the eyes, suspiciously waiting to see if she cracked up or not. She held a straight face, so I was forced to conclude that I truly would look great in a vermilion shirt. Worth remembering, except for the following facts: Chance of me recognizing vermilion if it slapped me in the face? Zero. Chance of me walking into a store and asking for, "A vermilion shirt please"? Zero. I'd rather be slapped in the face with a wet fish. Preferably not salmon though, as it apparently doesn't complement my coloring. I was in a very suspicious frame of mind now, and realized Carol had been worryingly precise about one point. "Hang on. You said you'd never buy me a salmon shirt. Does that mean you'd buy me salmon pants?" Carol protested, "Of course not! That's ridiculous. I doubt anyone even makes salmon-colored pants. Who'd buy them?" I was too suspicious to be mollified by such a ridiculous sounding explanation. #2: #1: #3: #1: #2: #3: #2: #1: <{Groan}.> I put my hands up in the air and held them there. After a few seconds Julia asked, "What are you doing?" "I'm surrendering. I'm outnumbered, outmaneuvered and out of my depth. And I'm ashamed to admit it, out of options too. You girls win. Back when I married the two of you, I never realized that it meant that I could be picked on like this. I'd like to go get a cookie now, I badly need cheering up." Julia said, "We'll all go get you a cookie. We did tease you pretty good, didn't we?" "No you didn't. You teased me pretty BAD! I'll survive, but it was very unfair to pick on me using made up color names." "They weren't made up. They're real colors." "I have no doubt whatsoever that those names were made up by females. Man-hating, militant-feminist females! I'm sure it's a conspiracy. When I am King of the World my first royal decree will be that there are seven colors. No more, no less. As clearly illustrated by the rainbow. Now where's the King's cookie?" Five cookies later - three for me as I'd needed extra cheering up - we were sitting on the sofa again. Julia told me, "One thing you might want to think about is growing a thicker skin. When you're more famous many people will write and say bad things about you. That's what newspapers and magazines do to sell more copies. You don't want to get depressed because of that stuff. You'll need to learn how to ignore it." "You're probably right. I can easily imagine myself getting upset. I'm not used to people saying bad things about me." "Actually you are. Some people anyway. Do you take it personally and get all depressed when a bully says you're an asshole, or whatever they say?" "No. Good point. They're very insulting, but that's just to get a reaction. I couldn't tell you how many times I've been called gay, for example. I know I'm not gay because I don't know what color salmon is! It's a bit more serious with newspapers and magazines though, because other people read them and believe them." "Yes. But in terms of stopping yourself from taking it personally, just remember that magazines and newspapers are bullies." "That's a good analogy. How do you keep coming up with these lessons for me? I'm amazed at how smart you are. You're a very good teacher for me." Julia said, "Thank you very much. I appreciate your praise, even though I haven't been that smart. The things I've mentioned have been very easy to think of. I believe you're going to be rich, powerful, famous and successful, so whenever I see anything that talks about the problems facing rich, famous people, I ask myself how that problem could happen to you, and how to plan for it. I can sit in front of the TV for just an hour, and make a list of a dozen different problems that might apply to you. There's a huge amount of media coverage of famous people. That's almost all they talk about, with brief distractions for major disasters, so the media gives me a never-ending stream of ideas. Admittedly most of it is the same stuff repeated over and over again, but every now and again I'll come across a new worry. -- "The last little lesson I gave you was about handling negative publicity. Famous people and especially politicians are CONSTANTLY attacked. Their decisions are questioned, their honesty, their morals, etc. It's unstoppable so you'll have to learn to handle it. -- "Mostly I don't even have to have ideas about what we'll do in the future because famous people are already solving the same problems we'll need to solve. The idea of us all living in a mansion, for example, came from my seeing a star's house on TV. She had a huge house for all her staff - in our case for our families - BIG walls, great security systems, etc. That's what you'll need eventually. We can probably have a few years in a small mansion that's only half as bad as a star's house, but once you're properly famous, you'll be forced behind walls." "That's a good approach, Julia. I was getting a little freaked out by how smart you seemed, how brilliantly you were predicting the future, etc., but I see now that it really was quite simple. And you're right about there being no lack of examples. Rich, famous people are constantly on the news or in the papers." Julia said, "Yeah. It's actually worse than you think - at least I found it was - because you get used to tuning it out. When I sat down knowing that the man I love might have these problems, and I really paid attention and listened, it was very upsetting. Famous people have appalling troubles that they have to deal with. They get chased, set up, attacked, conned, lied about, defamed, and many other terrible things; by sexual stalkers, would-be kidnappers or murderers, paparazzi, autograph hunters, people wanting to do business deals, con men, etc. In your case maybe religious fanatics too. -- "I read an article just a few days ago about a rich man who has three full-time staff just to answer the mail from charities looking for donations. That's not counting the staff that open the mail and sort it into the various categories, that's JUST the staff that deal with that one category. Other categories of mail have their own staff too. Incredible! But there's no choice. If you get sent thousands of letters a week, you have to handle them somehow. -- "I used to think being famous would be cool, but now I'm having serious doubts. There must be benefits, I guess, but the problems seem far worse. Dad's idea of moving overseas to where people act more considerately is growing on me. I don't know where, but it's something to be aware of. Sorry, I've just realized I got carried away again. It's been depressing for me to listen to and read our media, and imagine my man being on the receiving end. But that level of problem is several years away yet, so I should shut up." "You take this 'getting me ready for the future' stuff seriously, don't you?" "My number one vow is to serve you. That's not as onerous as it sounds because I REALLY like serving you. I hope I'm overdoing my worrying about some of it, because it can't be as bad as it seems." I said, "Remember you're only sixteen and you're allowed to have fun. You said that about me, but it applies to you too." Julia smiled and said, "It's probably not as bad for me as I make it seem. It IS the role I volunteered for after all. I know I never said the words 'I volunteer' to you, but I chose to start planning things. I LIKE planning and managing, and I'm enjoying doing it for you. It's just that the responsibility weighs on me sometimes, but I like responsibility too so that's my own fault as well. It's nice that you let me enjoy myself teasing you from time to time though. That cheers me up. I loved the no-pink tease, that had me rolling on the floor." I had to point out a small error. I adopted a deliberately over-dramatic stern look. "Actually, Julia, I don't believe that I LET you tease me. I never noticed you asking for permission, let alone me granting it." Julia smiled, "Your time is FAR too valuable to waste with my unimportant little requests. So I just assume that, as your number one wife, you give me permission to do whatever I want. It works out better that way." "Better for you." "As it turns out, yes. But, being the wonderful guy you are, my being happy makes you happy. So I'm really teasing you to make you happy. Isn't that generous of me?" I partially agreed. "It's certainly something of you. I'm not sure generous is the right word." Julia kindly offered, "If you like, I could tease you again and at the end I could tell you whether I feel generous or not. That'd be a good test, wouldn't it?" "Given that we're married and what's yours is mine and vice versa, then I should tease you and see how I feel at the end. And given that teasing and tickling are basically quite similar, and tickling is quicker, it'd be more efficient if I started tickling you immediately. It even has the advantage of being an easily repeated scientific experiment; repeatability being an experimental virtue I'm generously willing to demonstrate to you several times." Julia was trying to find a more-or-less logical argument against that when the first of the family arrived. The Williamses all arrived in fairly short order. Lots of inquiries about our day, best wishes, and a few teases. I'd just been done over by experts, so these amateur jabs just washed over me. Vanessa said my parents would be bringing takeout food shortly. She asked the girls to make a fruit plate for dessert while she showered. I did some table setting. Just the usual domestic stuff. I was wearing my good clothes and feeling self-conscious about - apparently - how bad they looked on me. Damn, I used to like this outfit. Mom and Donna arrived a quarter of an hour later, with Dad arriving shortly after them. I looked at Donna in a new light (or perhaps with a new gleam, of the predatory variety). More greetings were exchanged, and more friendly inquiries were directed at the three of us. Donna rushed up to Carol, hugged her, and asked, "How was it?" Carol enthused, "Wonderful! They're both fantastic lovers. I had the best time." I quickly looked at Mom, expecting to see her make "shushing" sounds at Carol, but Mom seemed okay with it. Not exactly happy, but accepting. I guess it was pointless trying to keep that sort of comment away from Donna. Donna inquired further, "Why? What did they do?" I heard Mom say, "Shush Donna! Young ladies do not ask that sort of question." "Now that I've already asked it, is it okay for Carol to answer?" Mom's glare quickly scuttled that foolish hope of Donna's. Not long after that, Donna came to me, and I opened my arms for a hug that she quickly accepted. She snuggled in and said to me, "That was an amazing wedding. I've never heard of anything like that before." I replied, "Me neither. Julia has a very good imagination, and a sense of drama too I think." That wasn't what Donna wanted to talk about, "Will Carol and Julia really do anything you tell them to?" "Yes. Except I can't get them to stop teasing me. But yes to everything else." "So what sorts of things have you told them to do?" Mom was standing with her back to Donna and me, talking to Carol, and - I was sure - carefully catching every word I was saying. So I said, "Very important things. Like 'Can I have a cookie please?' or 'Is it time for lunch yet?' That sort of thing." "No, silly, that's not what I mean." "I know that's not what you mean, sweetie, but our mother has big ears and we don't want to shock her." Donna looked around in time to catch Mom giving me a smile over her shoulder. Mom turned back to Carol, and Donna quietly asked, "Can you tell me later?" I whispered back, "Maybe I'll even tell you to do the same things for me that I made them do?" Donna's eyes widened, and she smiled, "Really?" "Yes. How about right now: 'Can I have a cookie please?'" "Argh! You meanie." She punched me on the arm. Donna has a good punch, so "Ouch!" (although I probably deserved it). Which reminded me that she'd missed her Karate class in order to come to my wedding. "I just realized that you missed your Karate class to come to our wedding last night. I'm sorry you missed it, but I'm glad you came. It was good to have you there." "Really?" "Truly. I like you very much. Not having you there would've made it seem incomplete." Mom seemed to have lost interest in our conversation, as she was walking away toward Vanessa. I guess I'd proved myself to be discreet by now, and the talk of Karate classes seemed innocuous. It was time to take advantage of the opportunity. I continued with, "Besides, you looked very pretty in your new dress. I like looking at you when you are so pretty." Donna blushed (I double-checked that Mom wasn't looking), and she said, "Thank you. I wanted to look pretty. Mom and I had a big fight about it though." "Oh, why? I thought it was a very pretty dress." "Mom wanted me to get something all frilly. I wanted something much, um, sexier..." #1: #2: " ... We argued and I had to agree on something in the middle, and that's what I was wearing." I said, "Well I thought you looked very pretty in that dress. It was a good choice and I'm glad you didn't wear anything sexier." A disappointed Donna said, "Why not?" "Because then I would've been too distracted from my other girls, which wouldn't have been fair at their wedding, would it?" Apparently whether it would have been fair or not wasn't Donna's primary interest, "You really would've been distracted?" "I never saw the dress, but I think I would've been." I doubted I would've been at the time, but knowing our current plans for Donna I would be distracted now if she was wearing it, so it wasn't a complete fib. Donna smiled for a few seconds, enjoying that thought. Then she said, "But Carol and Julia were wearing VERY sexy clothes. I could see their, um, their bumps and everything." I had to smile, internally anyway; I tried to keep it from my face. I wasn't sure whether "bumps" were "breasts" or "nipples", but associating the word "bump" with Carol's breasts seemed very wrong. It'd be like calling Mt Everest a hill; far too disrespectful toward Mt Everest. And I had no idea what Donna meant by seeing their bumps "and everything." I think that was Donna just getting carried away. I nearly told Donna something like, "It'd be interesting to see you in one of their dresses," but figured that was going far too fast. I wanted to go slow with Donna, to give me time to see what effect other girls had on my desire for her. So instead I said, "I like looking at nice bumps," whatever they are "and I'm glad yours are starting to grow. I enjoyed seeing yours in the pool the other day." Donna immediately became very happy, "Really? You liked seeing mine?" "Yes I did. They were very nice." #3: #2: #3: #2: #1: <{Groan}. I'm starting to fear that #4's corruption has seeped into you guys.> #2: #1: #2: Donna moved closer to me, and whispered, "I could show you again, if you like?" I thought for a second about how to respond to that. I was definitely going to respond - it was such a superb opening - but I wanted to set our future on the right path. The only way I could imagine that adding several more girls to our relationship could be successful, even if just temporarily, was for them to do what Julia - and presumably me too - told them to do. I had trouble imagining Donna allowing me to boss her around, but it was worth trying that direction first. I responded with, "You WILL be showing them to me again. I will be keeping a close eye on their development." Donna was startled, but not at all unhappy with that announcement. A little disbelieving though, "You really want to?" I nodded, then thought to push the 'boss' thing some more, so added, "I wouldn't be instructing you to show them to me if I didn't." "Wow." And then, still disbelievingly, "Why?" Rather than complimenting her bumps further, or any similar response, I decided to bring this to a close. The seed had been planted, I wanted to go slowly, and I didn't want any parent to start wondering what we were talking about that had Donna looking so happy and interested. I remembered a piece of advice from Julia, so I said, "I don't want to discuss that yet." Donna always pushes her luck, so she immediately came back with, "Why not?" Time to nip that attitude in the bud (sorry about those). "Donna, I have been very impressed by your maturity recently. Especially your emotional maturity. You have been very helpful and supportive of Carol and me, have not giggled like a silly little girl or gone running to Mom and Dad. And for lots of other reasons too. You are becoming a fine young lady. However, after I told you that 'I do not want to discuss my reasons yet', your arguing for more information was not mature. In the future please do not argue with my decisions." #1: Donna's answer surprised me somewhat, especially because I was half-expecting her to punch me again, "Carol's told me that she and Julia like you being the boss of them. I think bossy boys are stupid, but I don't think you're stupid. I agree I was being a nuisance, so I'll try to be more mature from now on." While I was thinking about whether or not that had been a success, I noticed Vanessa strolling out of the kitchen holding a large red ring binder down by her far side. I had no idea what it meant, she just looked suspicious and that's why she'd caught my eye. She was holding it in a way to hide it behind her body, but while trying to look casual. Julia was with her part of the way, and smiling, so I figured it wasn't a problem, just something to ask about later. Vanessa disappeared into the back of the house. Donna hadn't punched me, so I decided to treat her statement as a success. I said, "Good. Thank you. I'll let you know when I next want to look at your body. I need to talk with Julia now, I'll see you later, sweetie." I kissed Donna on the cheek, and left her standing somewhat confused by the recent turn of events. I walked over to Julia and asked her, "What is your mom up to? I saw her sneak the red binder away." Julia quietly said, "Let's hope Carol didn't. Mom and I are setting her up for a little tease at dinner. Wait and see, you'll enjoy it more if you don't know." That's pretty much how my life has been ever since meeting Julia. I agreed, as usual. Mom approached me and said, "We're going to have a little conference after dinner to discuss some issues arising out of your rather weird approach to relationships." She was smiling when she said this, so I didn't worry. Just as well, because Mom is REALLY good at making me worry. Vanessa returned five minutes after she left, still carrying the folder. Julia had been talking to Carol, and Carol's back was to Vanessa. I suspected that was not a coincidence. Vanessa placed the binder on a shelf in the kitchen, then started pulling the food out of the oven, where it'd been put to warm up. The disposable containers had their contents transferred into much nicer serving dishes, and we were all told to go through to the dining room. During dinner, near the end of the main course, Julia suddenly said, "While I remember it, Mom, thanks for the soup for lunch today. It was delicious. Mark really liked it and had three bowls. I think Carol wants to learn how to make it for him." I looked at Carol, who gave a small blush, then she spoke up, "Yes I do. Can I have a copy of the recipe please, Vanessa?" Vanessa said, "Of course you can. It's in the red binder in the kitchen. Go and get it for me please, and bring it back here." Vanessa described the location of the binder I'd seen her smuggle out and back again. As suggested, Carol got up to fetch it. On Carol's return, she sat down and tried to pass the binder to Vanessa. Vanessa refused it, saying, "You can find it. They're in alphabetical order. It's right at the beginning of 'Carrots'." #2: #4: #2: Vanessa continued to Carol, "When you find it, pull it out of the binder and show it to your mom. She might be interested in reading it too." "Okay," agreed Carol happily. It only took a few seconds for Carol to find the beginning of "Carrots". She saw the page in question, blushed scarlet and froze. "Give it to your mom, dear," Vanessa reminded her. Carol, looking down at the page, said, "Umm." That's it, nothing else. She didn't move either. Vanessa helpfully suggested, "If you pull the lever up at the bottom, the rings will open and you can pull the page out easily." Carol looked down for another second or two, then looked at Julia, and said, "Really give it to my mom?" Julia said, "Sure. Maybe your mom will cook it for the whole family." "Oh." Carol looked even more worried now. Prof said, "I'd like to read it too please, after Felicity." Carol slowly released the lever, extracted the page, and passed it to Mom, blushing fiercely the whole time. Carol closed the binder, pulled it off the table, and hugged it tightly in her lap. Mom's initial reaction was shock, but she settled down, read a bit more, and laughed. She passed it to Prof, whose reaction was entirely amusement. The page started going around from person to person (skipping Donna, who objected, but Mom just said, "No, just eat your dinner."). As it made its way around the table, Carol just watched it, sitting in her chair, rhythmically squeezing the binder. Hang on a minute! "Rhythmically?" I looked closely. Yep, a corner of the binder was pressed into her you-know-what. She was doing it right at the dinner table - the shameless hussy! Julia was sitting between Carol and me, so I got Julia's attention and nodded toward Carol's you-know-what. Julia looked, and smiled back at me, quietly saying, "She's delightful, isn't she?" I just answered, "Very." The page and the laughter eventually got around to me. It was a single page, with a pictorial outer border of vegetables forming a frame. The center of the page having the recipe. It was headed: Carol's Pussy Flavored Vegetable Soup (serves 4-6, depending on how horny Carol is) Followed by what I guessed was the normal recipe (how was I to know!), except that the list of ingredients included: 3 tablespoons of Carol's pussy juice (fresh) per serving. There was a section at the bottom that read: Serving Instructions: Serve hot. Scoop the 3 tablespoons of Carol's pussy juice directly from Carol and pour into each bowl. Stir well. Carol should be naked at the time. Just like everyone before me, I laughed. I passed it to Julia, who laughingly read it too. When Julia had finished Vanessa said, "Give it to Carol." Julia did, and Carol sat there holding it, not sure what to do. Vanessa helpfully suggested, "Keep it, honey. You can start a recipe binder just like mine, for all the recipes you collect from your wedding day onward. You can keep this one right at the front, in pride of place." Blush. "Um, thank you." "You're welcome. Do you want me to print out any more copies, to give to your classmates maybe?" "Um, no. That's all right. Thank you." "It's no trouble. I can print as many as you want." "No. Um, it's all right. I don't need any copies, thank you. Please may I be excused to go to the bathroom please?" Vanessa maintained the pressure, "Certainly, honey. Do you want to take the binder?" Carol's immediate answer was "No." But then she realized the question meant Vanessa knew, and she blushed heavily again. She carefully put the binder on the table, and started hurrying from the room. Before anyone could react, Vanessa said, "Donna, would you like some chocolate ice cream?" "Yes, please." "Robert, please take Donna to the kitchen and see if you can find some. You might have to hunt for a while." Donna beat Robert out of the room, making it easy for Robert to close the door behind him. As soon as the door was closed Vanessa said, "This is an ideal opportunity to quickly explain to Felicity and Steven that Carol has a kink for getting-off on sexual embarrassment, as you just saw. Julia discovered it several days ago and discussed it with me. I confirmed it this morning with a little test we put Carol through, which Carol thoroughly enjoyed. It's completely safe and voluntary. Carol knows what's going on and actively cooperates. Because she's so obedient to Mark and Julia, they're ideally placed to be able to scratch her itch, within a loving, safe environment." We had a quick discussion about it. One point that came up was that Carol didn't get 'stuck' in her role. Julia mentioned that we'd started a little game this afternoon, but Julia had stopped it. Carol had instantly reverted to her normal character. Other things that came up included that Carol showed it more these days because she feels so safe with us, and it's a no-touch thing, although Julia added, "Maybe some spanking as well, she likes that too." We said we'd do it mostly within this house and involving just the two families for safety reasons. Mom and Dad were surprised, concerned and a little amused. Mom didn't have any idea that Carol was like this. Mom's only comment was that she'd thought Carol had a low sex-drive, as she'd never shown much interest in anything sexual. I nearly said, "But what about pirate movies?" but kept my mouth firmly shut. I did NOT want to go down that road! Instead I said, "I don't think she has a low sex-drive. I think she never found the right person, or persons, to push her buttons. Now she has." My parents were still a little skeptical. Mom pointed out, "The soup incident doesn't sound particularly sexual. Just like an ordinary newlywed game that everybody's done." #4: #2: #4: #3: #4: Julia said, "If we use the hot tub tonight, I can give you another example that'll convince you." Dad said, "Isn't twice in one day a bit much?" Several of us gave a small laugh at that, even Mom, I was pleased to see. Vanessa answered him, "I don't really want to know the answer to this, but how many times a day do you like to get sexually excited? Isn't twice better than once? Although I'm sure the kids are already at least at number twenty for the day." Andrew said, "Shall I let Robert know that he doesn't have to keep stalling Donna?" Mom nodded. Before he did so, Andrew added, "By the way, you should probably think about giving up on trying to protect Donna. She knows a lot more about sex than I'm guessing you think. I suggest having a talk with her about it, rather than both you and her pretending she doesn't know anything." Wow. That was telling Mom! Polite, but between the eyes. I couldn't really call Andrew a boy, but he's not really a man either. He's still at school, in one sense. But he didn't let that stop him politely telling my mom off. Mom took it with good grace. She reasonably asked, "What makes you think that?" "Robert and I have spent a fair bit of time with her, to keep her away from the adult conversations. We 'goof around', as she calls it, but she also asks us questions about adult relationships. About our girlfriends, past girlfriends, how we met, how we knew we wanted to be boy- and girl-friends, etc. She doesn't ask much about sex, more about relationships. She seems to have picked up a fair amount of knowledge about sex already. No doubt some of it's incorrect too, if it's the same incomplete set of playground facts I used to hear going around." Mom nodded, and Andrew continued. "What did you think that recipe contained that was so shocking that she had to be protected from it? I'm sure she knows what pussy juice is. So the only issue is whether the concept of drinking someone else's juice has ever been introduced to her. I'd guess the only doubt about that is how many years ago it was." I remembered Donna's licking my face, and decided this conversation didn't need that contribution, particularly given the 50% chance it was Carol's, and that's assuming only one girl's juice was on me. Mom said, "You might be right. In fact, I think you are. We were complacent about her sexual education, probably because Carol never seemed interested and Donna is so physically immature compared to Carol, but that's just an excuse." Vanessa added, "Thank you Andrew, that was very good of you." Mom echoed, "Yes, thank you, Andrew." "No problem. Just one of the responsibilities of a big brother-in-law. After this morning I realized there's going to be a lot of openness around here, and it doesn't help anyone to hide it from Donna. I'll go get her now." Mom looked at Dad and said, "Let's show Donna the recipe?" Dad joked, "Just as long as she doesn't try to make it! Haha." It turned out that Carol had taken it with her. I wonder why? She must have been quite sneaky about it because she wasn't openly carrying it when she left. Vanessa got up to print another copy, "After all, Felicity, Steven might want you to make your own version of it. It really is quite delicious." Something that I DEFINITELY did not want to think about! Dad turned to me, and asked, "What size spoon should I use, Mark?" It was totally unfair that only I blushed. Mom didn't look even the slightest bit upset. I guess because she - along with everyone else - was too busy laughing at me. I was holding the binder, as a result of our search for the missing recipe, and was flicking through it when I realized that "Carol's Pussy Flavored Vegetable Soup" would have been correctly alphabetized just before "Carrot". This family is VERY well organized! Donna and The Boys came back carrying a large plate of various cut up fruits, dessert bowls, spoons and a somewhat consumed ice cream container. The bowls were distributed and everyone helped themselves to ice cream and/or fruit. Donna took only two scoops of ice cream, then started walking back to her seat. Mom asked, "You're normally allowed three scoops, Donna, and always want more. Are you feeling sick that you only took one?" Donna said, "No, I'm fine. Just not very hungry is all." The explanation for which could be deduced from the chocolate ice cream already smeared around her mouth. "Are you sure? You might be sick. Maybe you should stay home rather than going to Mark's race tomorrow morning?" "NO! I'm fine! Really I am! I want to go to his race. It's important." Mom the Merciless continued to demonstrate that she was just as good a teaser as Julia, "I don't know. I've never seen you fail to take all three scoops before. You must be sick. I can't think of any other explanation." Donna had a hard choice to make: 'Fess up to getting into the ice cream already, or miss my race. She bashfully said, "Robert said I could have a little bit of ice cream in the kitchen, before we took it to you guys." Mom declared, "That's perfectly fine then." Donna immediately looked happy. "Just so long as you didn't have more than one scoop in the kitchen because that'd mean that bowl would still be within your three scoop limit." Donna didn't look quite so happy anymore. Vanessa returned now, and handed the page to Mom. Mom said, "I owe you an apology, Donna." That was the exact opposite of what Donna thought was about to happen. I could see her question herself about whether she'd heard that correctly. Mom continued, "I should not have stopped you from reading the recipe. I was treating you as too young. Here it is. You can read it while you're eating your, I'd guess, fifth or sixth scoop." Donna took the page, then looked suspiciously at Mom. "I can still go to Mark's race?" "Yes." Now Donna was truly happy. She bounded around to her seat. Mom added, "We should probably have some talks about sex soon too, when you're ready." "I'm ready now. It'll be much better to ask you than everyone else that I've been talking to." Mom looked at Andrew, and said, "Thanks, Andrew." "Why are you thanking Andrew?" "He told me that I should be more open about sex with you." Donna said, "Thanks Andrew." -- Then turned to Mom, "It's so unfair that both Andrew and Robert have already got girlfriends. I like them both." That was greeted with a moment of silence, then Donna added, "Relax Mom, I was teasing you. I know I need to be a few months older first." Mom's too smart to fall for the same trap twice, and just said, "At least." Donna read the recipe, and laughed just like everyone else. I was interested to note that Mom and Dad were watching her reaction particularly closely. When she'd read it she asked me, "So what did the soup taste like?" I waited for Mom to shush her, but she said nothing. Mom's a good mom. I said, "Out of everyone here, you're the only person who asked me that, so good for you. I'm sorry to say that I couldn't taste any difference. The soup had too much flavor of its own. Please don't tell Carol that because I like her to think that she tastes delicious, because she does." I looked at Mom when I said that because that was one of her first useful lessons to me about girls; "useful" as opposed to the general wishy-washy stuff Mom and Dad had given out previously. Donna said, "I'm sure she is delicious. You'll just have to get more next time." I think it was pretty safe to assume that Donna wasn't shocked. Mom was pleased at Donna's openness, and said, "Donna, how come you never asked me any questions about sex before? I always told you that you could if you wanted." "Oh PLEEZE! Every time there's anything more than kissing on TV you push me out of the room or change the channel. You told me to ask you questions, but you sure didn't want me to." Dad said, "We're busted." I had a brain spasm (that's my only explanation), I announced, "Hands up if you like the taste of pussy juice." I put my hand in the air, and every person in the room followed me. That included every female, in case you're confused what "every person in the room" means. Julia put up her other arm, saying, "This arm's for Carol. I know she does too." No one contested Julia's confidence in Carol's opinion. I was amazed that Mom's, Vanessa's and Donna's hands were all up. I REALLY wanted to ask some questions, but thought I'd better not. I just said, "Good. Let's be more open in the future." They all put their hands down. And THEN I realized that my polling question hadn't excluded their OWN juices - damn! It wasn't really the sort of thing I could ask everyone to do again. Damn again. The only person to make a comment about my poll was Mom, who looked at Donna to ask, "Really?" Donna just said, "Oh PLEEZE!" Dad laughed again, asking Mom, "How many times do you want to bust yourself, dear?" ------- Chapter 59: Carol's Dream of Dying for Her Lord Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) After the dishes were cleared away and loaded into the dishwasher (I hope our mansion will have one of those!) Mom said, "I'm taking Mark to get his cast removed later. I don't know how long that'll take so let's have our little meeting now, over coffee in the living room maybe?" Vanessa agreed and started making it. Carol returned looking happy, and Vanessa told her, "I've left your plate in the microwave, dear. In case you were hungry and wanted to finish it. You missed dessert, but it was only ice cream and fruit, both of which are in the fridge so help yourself." Mom said to Donna, "I'm sorry, but this meeting is private. Parents, Mark, Carol and Julia only. I have to exclude you and The Boys. It's not about sex generally, but about personal matters. I hope you won't take offense?" "Nah. That's cool. I'll hang out with The Boys." Robert said, "We don't have many DVDs that'll appeal to Donna. Why don't we take her out to buy half a dozen that she'd like and can watch whenever she's over here?" Donna thought that was an excellent idea. It's not often, if ever, that any of the Anderson kids gets granted carte blanche. I hoped that one day my family would have enough money to be so casual about spending it. We sat down for coffee and conversation, and I was informed that there weren't many items on the agenda. The parents wanted to discuss what to do about the possibility of Carol developing the same special abilities as me, especially as she was about the age I'd first started changing. By extension, that issue included Donna and any children I might have with a sister or two. The "flying stuff around" ability had particularly captured everyone's attention. The rest of my abilities, that they knew about, were human capabilities, but "flying stuff" was not. Mom asked, "What was the first sign that you were becoming more capable?" I replied, "When I started getting smarter," because "When I had another mind in my head" wouldn't have been a good answer, even if more accurate. Mom asked Carol, "Have you noticed yourself becoming smarter?" "No, and I don't want to either. Mark is the Lord. I want to serve him, not be equal to him, and I'd serve him anyway because he's so nice and loving." She was told to let them know if she got smarter though, and reluctantly agreed. The meeting wasn't as difficult as you might expect. There wasn't anything that I could say, so I essentially said nothing. That didn't leave them much to work with. Everyone knew that my abilities had come suddenly at the end of 2003, but they wanted to know about the cause, asking quite a few questions about it. Of course I told them that I had no clue. I was asked whether I'd knocked my head, fallen off my bike, or any other such traumatic event that might have initiated it. I told the truth for once, saying, "I can't remember any such incident." "You weren't electrocuted, drank any unusual chemicals, anything like that?" "No." I wasn't asked whether I'd rescued any aliens and been given a reality-altering device as payment, been mysteriously radiated by an exploding laboratory machine, or found any magical Egyptian artifacts, genie lamps or spell books. I guess those possibilities were just too implausible. [[Sorry, I just couldn't resist poking a little fun at the usual mechanisms of stories about people who gain special powers.]] The genetic possibility was the only one that had any credibility. This was the hypothesis I wanted to support as it justified my having Carol and - although I felt no real desire for her - Donna too, in the unlikely event that things worked out that way. Genetically speaking, if I had 'it' - whatever 'it' was - so might Carol and/or Donna. Or might not. Or maybe they had it as recessives. Our children might, or might not, have it, or even a double dose of it. You get the idea: every outcome was possible. Prof said, "If the mutation occurred in Mark, then the girls won't have it. But if the mutation occurred in Felicity or Steven, then any or all of the Anderson children might have it. It could be as simple as a 50/50 chance although that seems unlikely to me given the range of improvements Mark is expressing, or more complex if several genes are involved. The only thing we know for sure is that Mark has it. If he has children, and I hope he does, then there's a reasonable chance it'll pass on. It's worth noting that the mutation might be on the Y-chromosome, in which case only male children could inherit it. So please have several male children Mark, and that's not a joke!" We kicked that around some more, and everyone agreed that theoretically I should get Carol pregnant and have several male children with her. I got the impression that Prof, Vanessa and Carol would like that to happen sooner rather than later. Mom and Dad weren't so eager. Prof raised a couple of issues that I hadn't thought about. First the idea of having my genes examined to see if a reason for my abilities could be determined. It was hardly surprising that I hadn't thought of that. No one liked that idea because we'd have to tell the scientists far too much information about me to get them motivated to make the necessary effort. Maybe in a few decades gene mapping would be more routine, much easier and more thorough, but it wasn't a workable approach yet. Prof's second point was one that I agreed with: that it'd be a great pity if I got hit by a bus tomorrow. He suggested that they 'bank' samples of my body, especially sperm samples, for future use or study. Prof suggested doing the same for all five members of the Anderson family, as we didn't know who had the mutated gene(s). Prof already had details on two facilities that could take our samples (of course he did). "Two for redundancy," he said. Prof smiled when he pointed out that I wouldn't have any use for my sperm for the next week or two. His quip was almost amusing, but not quite. I had no trouble with agreeing to provide samples, "Especially if Carol and Julia are allowed to help collect them." I knew the samples would be worthless so I did feel a little guilty about my deception wasting money. Hopefully I'd be able to pay it back from my roulette winnings. There was some discussion about legal ownership and control of the samples. Prof was happy to pay the sample taking and storage costs, which raised the issue about whether he and Vanessa would have any control over them. Vanessa had plenty to say on the topic as it was a commonly discussed ethical issue, albeit with an unusual twist this time. Another consideration was whether the children would gain control when we turned eighteen. I attempted to defuse my part of that debate by saying, "I couldn't care less. If I'm alive I won't need the samples, if I'm dead you're welcome to them." Vanessa pointed out several flaws in my lack of thinking, but I still couldn't take any of her scenarios seriously, such as Julia and I breaking up acrimoniously, her using my sperm sample to get herself pregnant, and then hitting me up for support payments. Carol echoed my lack of concern, and we expected Donna to be even less concerned. Taking egg samples from the girls was agreed, and the word "menarche" was even mentioned. I was quite proud of myself for knowing what it meant. Silly really. I felt even sillier when I learned that everyone except me knew that Donna already had eggs in her body. That seemed wrong to me because she hadn't reached menarche yet. I wasn't going to ask for an explanation though. We resolved that the samples would all be controlled by Mom and Dad, then would pass to each child if both parents died, then to Prof and Vanessa if we all died, then to Julia and The Boys. Everyone agreed to update their wills appropriately. Carol and I agreed to get wills. Vanessa raised the issue of my having babies with Donna. Logically it was inescapably a good idea. Because it'd taken fourteen years for my abilities to manifest we couldn't just get Carol to pop out a baby, then say, "Yep, it's got the abilities. No need for your womb then, Donna." Conceivably (if you'll excuse the pun), Carol might not have the mutation but Donna might, including as a recessive. Possibly the only way to produce more people with my abilities could be babies from Donna and me. In the ensuing discussion, I dropped in a few comments: "I've never thought of Donna that way", "She's still a girl", "Yes I know I love one sister, but Donna is the baby of the family so I don't think of her that way." Mom asked, "Carol, what do you think of the idea of Donna and Mark having children?" Carol said, "I've never thought about it before. My first reaction is that Donna certainly loves Mark, but whether she loves him that way I don't know. If she does, and Mark wants to, then it sounds like an excellent idea. More little Marks running around sounds like fun. Or maybe they'd fly around." That created an image that resounded in everyone's mind! Mom enjoyed pulling Dad's leg with a comment about my kids making good livings as professional basketball players. I was impressed Carol had thought of flying babies. I guess her imagination was less constrained than mine, as I was VERY aware of my 10.5 pound restriction as EVERY TK action I took was a major exercise in weight management. [I later asked Carol how come she'd thought of floating children. She laughed and asked me, "Do you know how many times I've watched Peter Pan movies?"] When Mom got the floor again, she said to Carol, "When I asked you what you thought about it, I was actually meaning whether you'd get jealous if he and Donna had babies?" Carol, bless her, said, "Heavens no! He can have babies with whomever he wants; he's our Lord! With Donna would be very cool though. I'd like that. I'm EXTREMELY happy that he's going to give me babies, and maybe I'm a little overly proud that I'm his first choice, but that's all. I'd never be jealous. That's not serving him, that's serving me; even I know that!" Julia took Carol's hand and said, "VERY good girl!" Carol smiled happily, and told her, "Thanks, but it's obvious. I worked it out back when you first mentioned getting lots more girls for him." "WHAT!" from Mom. #4: As a result of Mom's abrupt exclamation, Carol turned to face Mom. Mom immediately expanded on her previous 'comment', "What's this about Mark getting lots more girls?" "Julia and I are going to be getting him some," answered Carol unhelpfully, in a normal tone of voice. Julia took a breath to speak, but I proximity sensed Carol surreptitiously giving Julia's hand a quick squeeze (they were sitting on my lap). Julia relaxed, saying nothing. After a moment's silence Mom tried again, "Why on Earth would you do that?" "So he can play with them, of course. What else would he do with lots of girls?" Carol was talking in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice, as if they were discussing the weather. That meant she was teasing Mom. I was impressed she'd gained that much self-confidence. Mom was a little confused, so she asked, "When you say 'play', exactly what do you mean?" Carol said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Mom. Didn't I explain myself very well?" Mom's body language made it clear that, no, Carol had not explained herself very well at all. -- So Carol did explain, "So he can screw them. One at a time, or in groups, with or without Julia or me. Whatever sexual activities he wants. It's all up to him." #4: The three other parents looked slightly amused. I had a feeling that Prof and Vanessa already knew, probably because Julia had bounced the idea of them first. Dad seemed pretty laid-back. I think he was enjoying watching Mom flounder. Mom didn't look overly pleased with this development. "I can't believe you let him talk you into agreeing to such a preposterous scheme. How can you allow..." "I didn't." "Pardon?" "I didn't let him talk me into this. It wasn't his idea. Julia and I decided on it, and we talked him into it..." #3: #4: #3: " ... We're going to get lots of our classmates ... No. That's not right, not just classmates. We'll be trying to get ALL the girls at school interested, so we can pick the most beautiful ones. Anyway, the idea is to introduce him to lots of beautiful girls for him to play with. We're pretty sure we can get dozens. In fact, I can think of a few girls who'd drop their panties for him right now if they had the opportunity." "And you're okay with this?" "Mom, it was half my idea. It's going to be so much fun and so good for Mark too." Mom snorted, "It certainly will be!" Carol pressed on, "So you can see why I am not the least bit jealous about Donna. It'd be great to keep making a family in the family, haha." Mom tried again, "I can certainly see that you're not the jealous type, but your idea is preposterous and completely unrealistic." Carol said, "I don't see why?" "You're not going to get dozens of girls to agree to have sex with him." Carol agreed, "You're right. Not dozens, but hundreds. Hundreds will want him. I imagine that he'll end up screwing only a few dozen though. Doing any more than that would be pointless. Maybe he'll stop after thirty or fifty or so, that's his choice." Mom turned to Julia, "Has my daughter gone insane? What do you think of all this?" Julia said, "It's pretty much as we agreed. Carol has described it well. The main problem I see is turning it off when he's had enough. Some girls won't get the message easily, especially if he keeps playing with a few favorites." #3: Mom started losing her cool. In fact, early indications were that her cool had already left the building. "This is nonsense! I can't believe you two little idiots..." #3: I yelled, "MOM!" When I had her attention, I said, "Sorry, but the girls were winding you up unnecessarily. They like winding people up, although their usual victim is me. They're very proud of me and they can't help making a big deal about it. I apologize for letting it go on so long." Mom relaxed, but still looked mad. She glared at Carol, and said, "How could you possibly have thought that was funny? I was sure you were..." I could see Carol about to tell Mom that it was for real, but I thought I'd better do it my way. "Mom! Let me explain a couple of things first, okay?" Mom glared at Carol, but nodded. "Carol made a mistake in twisting your tail on a topic that you didn't find funny, and I'm sure she'll apologize for that shortly," Carol responded, to apologize presumably, but I kept talking, "but only after I make sure you understand the real situation." Mom was looking much better, so I continued, "You're still thinking of me as the rather inept son you've known all my life, but I'm not that person anymore. I have abilities now. Remember this?" As I put my hand to my chin, and used it to pull my head around. Mom immediately got the reminder of when I'd magically done that to her at the wedding. "Julia believes that I'm going to be rich, famous or powerful in some way. Julia fears that women are going to pursue me, and perhaps entrap me. We know bad women chase successful men, yes?" Mom nodded. "Good. Julia believes that because of my inexperience I might make a stupid mistake over some woman when I'm older. Probably several stupid mistakes, knowing me. This is even more likely for me because I already have the only two girls I want, and have no intention of dating any more..." #2: <{Raspberry}.> " ... so I'll actually be very inexperienced at defending myself from womanly wiles. In addition, I'll only have one public girlfriend, Julia, and I'll be officially single, so lots of women will think I'm an easy target. I WILL be an easy target. So that's the problem Julia saw and I think she's right. Certainly I've heard you scornfully say several times how stupid men can be, like Clinton's episode with that girl who sucked him off. He lost the most important job in the world because he couldn't keep his pants zipped. I don't want to make a mistake like that, and Julia doesn't want me to either. That's reasonable, isn't it?" Mom said, "You're doing an excellent job of leading me by the nose. Are you trying to lead me to where I fear you are?" #2: I said, "Nearly there, Mom. When I'm older my life is going to be much more complex, and - quite frankly - dangerous. I don't want to make 'screw-ups', if you'll excuse the totally appropriate expression. I've got about one year before I'll probably move away from Corvallis, and out into the big, wide, SCARY world. Julia and Carol got together and worked out that a good way to protect me from future, high-stakes mistakes is for me to get some experience now, when the stakes are smaller. When I'm surrounded by both families, with lots of support, communication, help, etc. That's why the girls actually want me to date some other girls. I hasten to add that the three of us have already spent quite a long time today discussing how to play with them ethically. Julia's big on ethics, thanks to Vanessa." I give Vanessa a nod. I couldn't do any harm to stress ethics at a time like this. Julia took advantage of the pause, to jump in with, "If Mark's life had progressed normally he would've dated a variety of girls and women for several years, gaining experience, understanding and defenses, and eventually finding a nice young woman to marry and settle down with. But that's not what's happened with him. He married his first girlfriend thirteen days after his first date with her. I have never used any 'womanly wiles' on him. I didn't need to because I knew he totally loved me even before our first date, thanks to Annette Neumeyer. Neither has Carol. In fact, I don't think Carol has any wiles - she's such a darling! -- "So Mark has ZERO experience at defending himself from any female who sets her sights on him. As we get older Mark will encounter increasingly clever women who, as he gains fame and money, will chase him harder and sneakier. His understanding of 'womanly wiles' will be that of a 15-year old virgin. He'll be a sitting duck, which worries Carol and me greatly. We feel very insecure and at risk, so we suggested the obvious solution: because Mark missed out on experience BEFORE he got married, we're going to arrange for him to get some experience AFTER. It's the best solution for ALL of us: Mark, Carol and me." Mom was less angry, thank goodness, but she was still far from happy. I'm sure you don't want to read every word of what was said, so I'll save you from that by just writing that Mom continued to protest our stupidity and the conversation went around and around. Mom was no longer very angry with the tease - well, not TOO angry - but she couldn't accept the idea that it was okay for me to "Play around on Julia and Carol." I was being unfair to Carol, who Mom saw as the innocent in all this. Playing around is NOT how good people behave in a relationship. In Mom's book, it was WRONG, in capital letters, underlined, and flashing in red. We politely went around in circles for fifteen minutes. Then the politeness started dropping away and the anger started coming back. It was almost entirely Julia and me versus Mom. We started trying to talk very calmly and rationally, but all the logic in the world didn't matter because Mom KNEW we were wrong. She didn't want us to do it, it was a stupid and immature, unfair to Carol, would ruin our relationship, etc., etc. Dad was mostly silent, which is normal for him in such situations. Mom wears the pants in our family. He was called upon to comment a couple of times, but he was non-committal. Prof and Vanessa were silent. When they were pressed, Vanessa's answer was "You have to work this out for yourselves." Carol was quiet nearly all the time, as is also normal for her, both because she defers to everyone else and because she is the youngest and least experienced so she usually doesn't have anything useful to add. We were too busy to notice, but she got increasingly upset. After about thirty minutes of circling, when tempers were definitely fraying, Carol suddenly cried out, "Prof?" Prof answered, "Yes, dear?" With a face not far from tears, Carol begged, "Can I borrow your gun?" That got everyone's attention! "Why, dear?" asked Prof. "Because the only solution to this mess is for me to kill myself. I'd like to do that now, before it gets even worse." Mom started reacting to that, but Vanessa shocked everyone by yelling, "FELICITY! You're angry. Take a few breaths while I talk with Carol." Mom shut up; Vanessa has a great deal of 'presence' when she turns it on. -- Without waiting, Vanessa turned to Carol, "Why do you believe killing yourself is a solution?" Carol burst out in a rush, "Because Mom's holding Mark back from learning incredibly important stuff about females. Sex destroys people's careers if they can't control themselves, like Clinton. People still joke about him and that happened YEARS ago. I don't want Mark to be a failure and a joke because some woman screwed him up. His career could be the MOST important career anyone in the world has EVER had, and Mom is risking it to protect me. If I kill myself she can't protect me anymore." Carol's dam burst and her tears flooded out of her. I jumped up and pulled the first of my three hankies out of my pocket (this was clearly going to be at least a three-hanky alert). When I held it in front of her bowed head she looked up, saw it was me, and launched herself at me, sobbing even louder. I was holding her when Mom put her hand on Carol's shoulder. Carol looked up to see who it was, and when she saw it was Mom, Carol pulled sharply away and ran behind me, out of Mom's reach. Mom took a couple more steps to get around me, and Carol screamed at her, "GO AWAY! I HATE YOU!" Carol had NEVER said anything like this to Mom before. I know some teenage girls say things like that to their moms, maybe even many of them do, but Carol had never said anything remotely like it. On top of the killing herself comment, Mom was gutted! Vanessa appeared beside me and said, "Take Carol up to Julia's room. You did a very good thing, Carol. Mark is very lucky to have you. Well done, my dear." Vanessa kissed Carol on the cheek. I looked at Carol closely. She was looking a little braver, but she wanted to go upstairs so I held her close as we left the room. Julia got up to follow us, but Vanessa said, "Stay Julia, you can help me explain this to Felicity and Steven. Carol's fine with Mark. It's the best place for her." ------- Chapter 60: Are You Insane! Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) [[I will continue to write this from my viewpoint, as if I was still in the room as an observer. Julia subsequently described much of the conversation to me, and I also learned about it as part of my research for writing this autobiography.]] Mom was shattered by Carol's wanting to shoot herself. Vanessa got Mom to sit down, then sat beside her. Mom struggled for words, but Vanessa said, "Wait a bit. There's no hurry." Prof went and got a carafe of water and some glasses. Eventually Mom asked Vanessa, "What happened?" "You created a single-issue conflict where there wasn't a compromise solution. Either Mark was allowed to play with other girls, or he was not. You would not have agreed to his playing with half of them, for example. So Carol saw it as either a win-lose or lose-win. Then you refused to accept any settlement other than your winning, which meant Mark had to lose. When Carol, Julia and Mark would not let Mark lose, you got angry, especially at him as it was him that you blamed. Carol knows your relationship with Mark is very important to Mark's life, so your anger with him frightened her. Carol was also frightened that Mark might be the victim of bad women in the future. Carol doesn't handle conflict well, and she grabbed for the only solution she could think of. She found what she considered to be a good solution." Mom did not think so, "Killing herself was not a good solution. It was lunacy!" "It was a good solution given her life-skills and priorities. She did the best she could. Consider that Carol has almost no resources, so almost no ability to solve Mark's problems. She's not as smart or experienced as Julia and Mark. Carol saw that they weren't able to sway you, so she had no chance of doing so. She couldn't buy you off with her pocket money and she has no other resources. One of the measures of a 'good solution' is one that achieves the desired goal with the lowest cost. The only resource Carol has that could be used to solve this problem is her life. In her mind that's not a valuable resource. She doesn't think highly of herself, and she considers everyone else is much more valuable to Mark than she is, including you Felicity. Carol knew you were trying to protect her, and that if she didn't exist then you wouldn't have a reason to hold Mark back. It wouldn't work out that way, of course. Imagine the blame that would be leveled at Mark if Carol killed herself so he could play around, and I doubt Mark would recover from the guilt he'd feel. Carol couldn't see those consequences though. As far as she could see, removing herself solved the problem, thus making it appear a good solution. -- "Carol loves Mark 'unto death'. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be to love someone that much and not be able to help them in any important way? Love is about giving, but what can she give him? She compensates for that by giving Mark every ounce of her loyalty, so she can demonstrate her love for him. Her request for a gun was grandstanding to a degree, to prove to Mark how much she loves him. Having said that, I don't think it was a bluff. You should realize that Mark, Carol and Julia consider themselves married now, so their primary loyalties are to each other. We are used to seeing that happen when our children grow up, mature into adults, get married and move away; which is why you didn't recognize that it had happened with your still-living-at-home, 13-year old daughter. You were shocked when she showed that her priority was Mark over you. -- "She doesn't really hate you of course, it was just that you were acting against the best interests of her husband and she CORRECTLY got upset about it. If Steven's mother attacked him angrily for something that was not his fault, and she kept getting angrier and angrier for half an hour, you wouldn't hesitate to leap in to defend him, especially if what he was being blamed for was your idea. That's what Carol did, to the best of her ability. You've got a head-over-heels in love, worshipful, teenage girl who doesn't handle conflict well, and you threatened her superhumanly exceptional husband because they all want him to learn how to defend himself in the future. It's no wonder you made Carol desperate to find a solution." Vanessa then fell silent. Mom immediately disagreed with one part, "I didn't threaten Mark." "Yes, you did. You threatened his future by trying to keep him weak." Mom took a few seconds to think about it, then she said, "Your analysis was very impressive, Vanessa. I didn't see hardly any of it happening at the time, and even afterward would not have been able to present it like you did." Vanessa said, "It was easier for me than you think. Right from the start I knew you were wrong so it was easy to watch you and see what was happening. You spent all your time fighting to win your argument rather than looking, listening and thinking." Mom exclaimed, "Hang on there! What do you mean I was wrong? It's not right that Mark plays around with other girls." Vanessa said, "I don't want to restart the whole argument about that with you. I've sat through half an hour of it already, which is more than enough time wasted on such an obvious issue. I want to talk with you now about your shortcomings." Mom exclaimed, "MY shortcomings! This isn't about me, this is about Carol's meltdown and Mark's wanting to play around with other girls." Vanessa disagreed, "First, Carol didn't 'meltdown', she served Mark to the best of her ability. It's not her fault that her conflict resolution abilities are so stunted. Carol behaved commendably and I've already kissed her on the cheek and praised her. When you've thanked and praised her that issue will be finished with. -- "Second, you just accused Mark of wanting to play around, but of the three of them, Mark is the LEAST motivated to do that. Carol was willing to kill herself so he could play around - how motivated is that! - and it was Julia who was arguing with you most of the time. Mark was trying to be calm and conciliatory. So your statement describing what 'this is about' is wrong. You've failed to see that in the half an hour you were arguing, which makes that another shortcoming of yours. -- "Look at how your kids manage conflict. Mark has been a punching bag for bullies nearly all his life. If he hadn't developed extraordinary abilities they'd be punching him still. Carol sits silently until she can't stand the aggression anymore and then she wants to kill herself. The discussion wasn't even that bad. I've been in worse staff meetings where no one has found it necessary to kill themselves, sometimes to my regret. Mark and Carol are both terrible at handling conflict. -- "Donna's not so bad, from what little I know. Julia told me a story of Donna picking up her bike and throwing it at a reporter, while - I'll point out - her two older siblings were standing around uselessly. Probably Donna has learned what conflict resolution skills she has from her sports teams, which would explain her directness. Neither Carol nor Mark have played sports, except Mark only recently with soccer. When was the last time you and Steven had an argument in front of the kids?" Mom, indignantly, "Never! We would never do that. On the rare occasions we have an argument, we always do it quietly in our bedroom with the door closed." "Which is why your children don't know how to handle conflict: you've never shown them. Steven respects you so highly and you have such a strong personality that you have very little conflict at home, and what little you do have, you hide from them. So Mark and Carol are wimps." Dad spoke up, "I think you're right, Vanessa. I haven't been very..." Mom disagreed, "You're not a wimp! Vanessa is completely wrong about that. You are a strong man. I have seen you..." Vanessa burst out laughing, which was not what Mom expected. Mom stopped, and Vanessa explained. "Felicity, Steven FINALLY started saying something, after staying out of the argument for more than thirty minutes, and he got maybe half a dozen words out before you cut him off. He didn't fight you, he just sat back and let you carry on. Can you think of a more effective proof for my point? Steven does not stand up to YOU. I never said Steven was a wimp - you put those words in my mouth - I said your children are wimps, because Steven and you have not shown them how to handle conflict." -- Vanessa turned to Dad, "Steven, are you a wimp outside of home? Your job is supervising people isn't it? That must involve resolving conflicts." Dad said, "Yeah. I supervise plenty of people and have no trouble. No wimp trouble, that is. Every year or two the boss tries to promote me because I do my job so well, but there's too much paperwork and not enough people work at the next level so I always turn it down. That I might be a wimp has NEVER crossed my mind before. I'm not a wimp anywhere except when I'm with Felicity. She understands family matters a lot better than me so I let her decide things. Not man-stuff like servicing the car because then I know what I'm talking about, but raising the kids stuff, yeah, I leave that to Fely." Vanessa said, "All three of your kids are great kids. Mark, even ignoring all his special abilities, is a very nice boy. Carol's a real sweetie, and Donna's a hard case with a good heart. They're a good bunch of teenagers. A more LOVING family is almost impossible to imagine. You can be truly proud of how well your kids have turned out. I bet there've been lots of times when your heart has swelled with pride in them over the last year or so, am I correct?" Mom said, "Yes. Many times. But I've failed them..." "You have GOT to be joking! Your kids are wonderful." "I have failed. They're upstairs miserable because of our argument." Vanessa interrupted, "I promise you that they are feeling more happiness and joy than they believed possible." "Huh? That's insane! Carol threatened to kill herself ten minutes ago." Vanessa said, "Felicity, first she didn't 'threaten', she 'offered'. There's a BIG difference. A threat is made to force someone to do something they don't want to do. She didn't threaten anyone. She never said, 'You do what I want or I'll kill myself.' Instead she offered her life to Mark and you to make the conflict go away." Mom asked, "I don't understand that. How can she offer her life to Mark and me. That doesn't make any sense." "That's easy. Her existence was the apparent reason for Mark's maturity being held back. By taking herself out, Mark could move forward again, improving his life and removing a conflict between him and you. She was sacrificing her life to make his better. That's a gift, and is also something she vowed to do at her wedding." Mom said, "I can understand the logic of that, but it's completely out of proportion. In what way was she offering her life to me. I'd be losing a daughter. That's a loss, not a gift." Vanessa said, "I doubt that Carol was aware that she was offering you a gift as she doesn't understand her actions well enough, but there was an implicit gift. If you can't see it as such, consider that a threatening solution was for her to use the gun to kill you." "WHAT! Are you INSANE! She would NEVER..." Vanessa yelled, "STOP!" Mom did. Vanessa continued, "Felicity, you and I have got to have a serious talk about your use of the phrase 'Are you insane!' You are destroying useful dialogue by using it in the accusatory way you do. It's starting to annoy me, so please don't use it again. -- "You forced Carol into a corner and she panicked. Who knows what she would 'never do'. I would hope she would never kill herself, but it'd be a good idea not to force her into any more corners to find that out. I'm sure, in this case, that Carol never thought of shooting you, and if she had she would've rejected it because she thought killing herself was a much better option. That's what I meant about an implicit offer to you. Because she offered to kill herself, she is telling you that she loves and values you more than she loves and values herself. You should be proud that she loves you so much, but deeply concerned that she values herself so little." "Oh." "I said Mark and Carol would be joyful and happy now. Mark always spots when someone does something nice for him - provided he understands what happened - and he's very good at expressing his appreciation. He's overly effusive at such times. He's also extremely uncomfortable when his loved ones are unhappy and tries his hardest to cheer them up. Carol will be on the receiving end of his absolutely best efforts to make her happy. Carol glows under his praise so they'll both be very happy. A little concerned about you, but you don't matter much. They'll be too busy being wrapped up in each other. Do you know why you don't matter much, Felicity?" "No. But you're obviously going to tell me." "Yes I will, because there are three mistakes of yours and Steven's that have come to light tonight. First, that your children are wimps. Second, that you don't understand that they're married now. That's why you don't matter much. Mark and Carol are husband and wife. 'Lord and wife' in their terminology. They are no longer primarily your children; they are now primarily each other's spouse. Carol screamed that she hated you because you were hurting her man, so it's clear where her loyalty lies. When Mark and Carol have fully reassured each other than they are both okay, only then will they turn their thoughts to you. That's exactly how a husband and wife should behave. That's why I sent them from the room, so they could be together and heal each other. Do you understand that?" "I can see that. You explain it well." "Good. Now can you see how incredibly stupid you were all throughout that argument?" "Hey, that's not fair. I had lots of good points. Mark should not play around with other girls. That's insane. No one should do that in a relationship. In a MARRIAGE, as you just got to me acknowledge." "Felicity, do I have your permission to throw a glass of water over you the next time you use the word 'insane'?" "Huh? No, of course not." "I earlier asked you not to say 'insane' but you just did it again. I would REALLY like you not to use that word; it is important to me that you don't. So how should I motivate you not to use it? I thought maybe throwing water over you might wake you up. Do you have a better idea?" "I didn't realize it was so important to you. It's no big deal, and I don't see why you're so fixated on it. I'll just not say it, okay?" Vanessa agreed, "That would be good." Then she pointedly poured herself half a glass of water and put it right in front of her. Mom looked at the action most suspiciously. "We agreed 'no water', right?" Vanessa said, "It won't matter, as we also agreed that you won't use that word, right?" Mom gave a doubtful, "Okay." Vanessa said, "We were just discussing how incredibly stupid you were during the argument." "You are very abrupt sometimes." "Yes, it can be as good as a glass of water in the face." That did not cheer Mom up much. Mom asked, "Why was I stupid?" Vanessa explained, "The entire argument was about something that a husband and wife have got every right to decide for themselves. It was a matrimonial issue. You had no business sticking your nose into it. Your opinion wasn't even asked. When Carol mentioned 'more girls' you leaped onto the issue and never let up with your criticisms, and never stopped to think about the big picture. The kids had it all worked out. They knew what they were doing, why they were doing it, how, when, etc. You heard Mark say that they spent quite a long time discussing how to do it ethically. So, all things considered, I'd say they understood what they were doing a great deal better than most people understand most of the things they do." Mom wasn't going down without a good fight. "They may have thought they understood what they were doing, but they obviously didn't understand the consequences. Having affairs can ruin marriages." Vanessa turned to Julia and asked her, "Julia, list the possible consequences if the three of you proceed with your 'Playing Around' plan." Julia held up one finger. "Sure: -- "One: The one we want, Mark gains understanding of women and becomes better able to resist 'womanly wiles', as he so cutely put it. I would've said 'resist gold-digging slut bitches', but each to his own. -- "Two: That we would have a great deal of fun. We all love sex, so that would have been fun. The girls Mark had it with would have enjoyed it most of all, because Mark is VERY good at sex. -- "Three: We might meet some girls that we really liked and who could become friends of ours, possibly even future wives, although I doubt..." "WHAT! Are you..." Vanessa had picked up her glass. That stopped Mom cold. Vanessa said, "Felicity, do you want to express an opinion or ask a question? I will point out that this sounds like an internal matrimonial issue to me, and your opinion has not been requested. Feel free to ask questions if you like though. Questions are good because they lead to dialogue and increased understanding, unlike loud, accusatory expressions of the lack of sanity. So, Felicity, express an opinion or ask a question?" Vanessa pointedly changed her grip on her glass. Mom looked at it and Vanessa suspiciously, and said, "I think I'll ask a question. You can put that glass down." Vanessa did so. Mom turned to Julia and said, "Do you mean to tell me that you are considering having more wives?" Julia said, "Sure. Not only considering it, but planning for it. We've discussed it many times. Carol and I would be disappointed if we don't. Haha, I just realized that Carol would be EXTREMELY disappointed. Mark too, of course, as he gets to pick the wives, so they're bound to be girls or women he enjoys." "What! Oops. Umm, I mean, 'Mark chooses'! What about your and Carol's opinion?" "Mark's the Lord. Carol and I will go along with whatever he decides. You know this already because you heard our vows to obey him. Our marriage isn't a democracy; it's a meritocracy." Mom was incredulous, "I can't believe you two would go along with this. Mark's got you brainwashed. He's forcing you and my daughter into this." Vanessa's laughter stopped Mom. Mom looked at Vanessa. Vanessa explained, "Yeah, Mark is SUCH a forceful guy, isn't he? I'm sure he's a complete TYRANT in the relationship, forcing both the girls to do all sorts of horrible things they hate, haha. Listen to yourself, Felicity! Mark's a complete wimp. He wouldn't dream of forcing either girl to do anything they didn't want. If he THINKS that he MIGHT have POSSIBLY upset anyone, he spends the next two hours apologizing to the person and anything else that moves. Then the next day he'll do something nice to make up for it, and then start apologizing again. Get real! If it's part of their marriage then it's something the girls want. Julia, resume listing consequences." Julia said, "Okay. Where was I? First, Mark's learning. Our learning too, come to that - that's another consequence. Second, fun. Third, friendship and perhaps more wives, although I expect not. Unless we marry Donna if Mark has babies with her. Mom, to her credit, didn't say "What!" Instead she said, "{Groan}. I never thought about that." Julia said, "Why not? It was obvious. All of us knew we'd marry her if she has Mark's babies. We'd never have babies outside of a family structure. That's SO important! I'd be completely lost without my family. Thanks Mom and Dad!" Mom said, "I never thought about it. I guess I assumed that Steven and I would raise them." Vanessa said, "Why? They'd be Mark and Donna's children. Don't you think they'd want and have the right to raise their own children? Maybe with your help, when it was INVITED, as opposed be being forced on them." "{Groan}. I just never thought of these things." "But you said you were an adult and that you understood consequences better than the kids did. You used that to justify sticking your nose into their matrimonial business." Mom, "I haven't had time to think about these things." "You didn't take the time to think about the 'More Girls' issue either. You leaped straight in, staked out your ground and wouldn't budge an inch. Even though it was none of your business, all the kids were enthusiastic about the idea, and had obviously spent considerable time thinking about it, planning it, understanding it and its consequences." Mom said, "You're making me look stupid, but it still can't be right for Mark to play around. Everyone knows you shouldn't play around when you're in a relationship." Vanessa said, "So let me get this right: 'Everyone' says something shouldn't be done, so you're using that to guide what these three kids are doing. You're taking a rule from 'Everyone' and applying it in a totally unprecedented situation, to a multi-way marriage led by a superhuman man who could possibly become the most important person the world has ever seen. Even though all three kids clearly wanted to do things their way, and have the right to make their own decisions and their own mistakes, you thought the 'Everyone' rule was so important that you stuck to your guns so rigidly that Carol's only way to end the argument was to try to get a gun to kill herself." -- After a pause to let that sink in, Vanessa added, "Felicity, I KNOW you are not bound so rigidly by society's rules. You let your 13-year old daughter marry your son, have sex with him, and they plan to have babies together. You even calmly - or reasonably calmly once the surprise wore off - talked about Donna having his babies too. If I was to guess, I would say that your RIGID fixation on this particular 'everyone knows' rule is because you have projected onto Carol your fear that Steven might have an affair." Dad laughed, and said, "Haha. That's so silly..." He didn't get any further because Mom burst into tears. Prof produced a hanky. Dad was confused, until a few seconds later when Mom admitted that it was true. She had feared exactly that all of their marriage because of ... There followed a significant amount of conversation between Mom and Dad, which I'll skip as it has no real significance to my story at the moment and it's their personal business. You wouldn't stick your nose into someone's marriage when it's not invited, would you? Some time later Vanessa said, "Okay, two down, one to go. To summarize our progress thus far: The first problem that came to light tonight is that your children are wimps and they need to be strengthened. Second, Felicity's sticking her uninvited nose into their matrimonial business. There are side issues of Felicity's use of the 'insane' accusation that I'll address with her later, and the issue of Felicity's fear of Steven having an affair that they can work on themselves. Are we in agreement thus far?" -- Everyone was, so Vanessa continued, "I said there were three major mistakes being made that came to light tonight. So now we come to the third. This is an issue that we've discussed several times, but Felicity and Steven just haven't got it yet. I'll start by asking how do you value a life? It's a very basic ethical question. I don't mean monetarily, but comparatively. We like to say that 'all lives are created equal, ' and we believe in equality and all that nice, warm, fuzzy stuff, but sometimes you have to make either/or decisions. When people's houses catch fire, they often have to prioritize who they rush in to rescue. -- "Let me give you an example. Imagine Steven is out in the ocean in a small boat with three generations of his women: his mother, his wife (you Felicity) and a daughter (say Donna). A storm comes up and capsizes the boat. Steven's a strong enough swimmer to save only one of the three females and the other two will surely drown. Who should he save, Felicity?" Mom said, "Easy: Donna. I don't even like his mother much. Sorry, I couldn't resist that, but Donna in any event." Vanessa said, "Steven, who would you save in that situation?" Dad said, "Seriously? I have to choose between Fely and Donna? I'd rather not make that choice." "I need you to answer." Dad looked at Mom, and said, "Sorry, honey. Forgive me, but it'd have to be Donna. I'm not happy at being forced to say it in front of Fely either." Mom said, "If you'd tried to save me I would've kicked you in the balls! Of course you save Donna. There's nothing to forgive; you gave the right answer." Vanessa said, "If you ask Caucasian Americans, 90% save their daughter, and 10% their wife. The mothers are dead meat. Sorry for that term, but almost no one saves their mother. The same question asked in China gets responses of less than 1% of daughters saved, almost 20% of wives, and 80% of mothers." Mom shook her head, and asked, "How can they let their daughters die like that? Their daughters have got their whole lives ahead of them and are supposed to be protected from danger. That's what parents do for their children." Vanessa, "Chinese parents do that for their children too. They risk their lives running into burning buildings to save their children just like we do. Also their pets sometimes, but people are like that. -- "The capsizing boat exercise isn't about the parent saving him or herself in preference to a child, it was about which generation is worth the most. I imagine that a Chinese wife, floating beside her husband, would get as angry as you would if her husband tried to save her. She'd knee him in the balls then tell him to save his mother because those are their values. The usual reasons given for their choices are that the daughter is hardly ever saved because it is COMPARATIVELY - that word again - easy for a man to have another daughter. It is harder, but still doable, for him to get another wife. However, it is absolutely impossible for a man to get another mother. She is irreplaceable and valued accordingly." "Wow, that's interesting. Nice too, but if Steven saved his mother and let Donna drown I'd do more than knee him in the balls!" Vanessa continued, "Good, I see you understand what the example means. Now let's say all our two families are out in the boat together. We can include Steven's mother too, if you like. The boat capsizes again. Let's say that, somehow, everyone is knocked unconscious except Prof, who can hold up only one person. Who should he save?" Mom didn't need to think about it, "Obviously Julia. In our culture the children come first. You have three children, but girls and the youngest come first. Guys are supposed to protect girls and your boys would presumably agree that Julia should be saved." Vanessa said, "Let's say Steven is the only person conscious. Who should he save?" Mom said, "It's a bit harder in our case because we have two young girls. But I think probably the youngest, Donna. That's the way our culture normally works: save the youngest female." Vanessa said, "I notice that you thought Prof and Steven should save children within their own families. You didn't cross families." Mom confirmed, "No. No insult intended, but if you can't save everybody, you obviously concentrate on your own family. That's how our culture works too." Vanessa, "I agree that our culture teaches that your priorities are your family, young and female. Returning to the setup where both of our families are out in this badly constructed boat, it capsizes yet again, and Prof is the only conscious person. Felicity thinks he should save Julia. That's correct isn't it Felicity?" Mom nodded. Vanessa asks, "Julia, who would Prof save?" "Mark." Mom exclaimed, as she does in times like this, "What!" Vanessa said to Felicity, "Let me finish and we'll explain then. Julia who would I save if I was the only one conscious?" "Mark." "Who would you, Andrew or Robert save?" "Mark. Always Mark. If you guys don't, I'll knee you in the balls." Vanessa said, "If Steven is the only one awake, Julia, who should he save?" "Mark. Everyone in both families saves Mark first. If Mark is awake he saves Carol." Vanessa said, "Really? Carol? I would've thought you." Julia responded. "No, Carol. The three of us decided on this earlier. It's Mark, Carol, me." Prof said, "That's interesting. I'll tell The Boys just in case." Vanessa turned to Mom and Dad, and said, "Enough of the capsizing boat scenario. Let's talk reality. Everyone in my family recognizes that Mark is incredibly important. Then Carol because of her importance to Mark, then Julia because she is also important to Mark. In our society we like to think that people are equal. We tell ourselves that we SHOULD treat people as equal. Yet every day in America, in real-life emergencies, family members are saved ahead of strangers, children before adults, females before males. Equality is often impossible when choices are forced. -- "If the three kids are faced with a decision where they can't treat everyone as equal, then they will favor Mark ahead of Carol ahead of Julia. Likewise for Prof and me, and The Boys too if it ever matters to them. You understand that this sequence is something that we all agree with? It's not forced on us by some outside authority; it's what we think, believe and will use in our decision making." Mom said, "I know you've helped Mark a lot, and have opened up your home to us all because of him, but I don't really understand why it is so important to you that you emphasize it so much." Vanessa said, "Because once we all agree that Mark is the most important, it makes lots of subsequent decisions much easier. An hour ago you learned that the kids are planning for Mark to play around with lots of other girls. Now we've already agreed that it was an internal matrimonial issue into which you had no right to so forcefully insert your uninvited and un-thoughtful opinion. However we can now see that it is extremely easy to decide what should be done about it. Mark is the most important of the three, so ask what decision is best for him? Think of the pros and cons. I can think of several pros for Mark: Learning about females and also about himself, having fun, raising his self-esteem (which he badly needs), making his wives happy, maybe making some friends or even more wives. What are the cons for Mark? I can't think of any. As there are several pros and no cons, clearly the best decision is for Mark to play around. Simple, isn't it, Felicity?" Mom didn't think it should be that simple, "I don't agree. You've made the whole decision depend on Mark, and you've entirely left out the chance that it might bust up his relationship with Carol or Julia." Vanessa answered, "I agree that I've made the whole decision process depend on Mark's perspective. That's because of his being overwhelmingly more important than Carol or Julia, as we agreed only a couple of minutes ago. I DID include the chance it might bust up his relationship. That was included in the pro of 'Learning', as that's the main purpose of his playing around - to give him experience now with girls that can threaten his relationship before he has to face even more threatening mature women. I will admit that there is a con that his relationship with Carol and Julia might be permanently broken, but I think that's so unlikely that it's not worth including. Mark's a smart boy, so even if he was led astray initially, he'd soon work out that he was making a mistake." Mom was still not happy, "It's not right that Mark can play around. It's wrong..." Vanessa interrupted. "When people start talking about 'right' and 'wrong' it's usually a sign that they've run out of logical arguments and are just arguing their preconceptions. Fortunately, in this case we can intelligently examine whether it truly is 'right' or 'wrong'. Shall we do that?" Mom had to nod. Vanessa said, "Which of Mark's wedding vows would he be breaking if he played around with other girls?" "He didn't make any vows. That was entirely one-sided." "So let me get this right. He is not breaking any vow whatsoever. He's not breaking any promise or commitment or understanding that he made to, or that has been agreed between, the members of this marriage. Nor would he be breaking a criminal law and our kids were planning to make it happen ethically for the new girls. How then can it possibly be 'wrong' as you claim? It seems to me that you are taking the commitments exchanged in OTHER types of weddings and imposing them on Mark and his wives. They never agreed to that! It's completely and totally unfair of you to hold them to promises that they never agreed to make. In fact, I would call what you are doing morally wrong, but let's carry on. If Mark plays around with other girls, will Carol and Julia have broken any of their vows? Are they failing to serve, obey or protect him?" Mom grasped at a straw, "They're not protecting him. Some girl could get her claws into Mark." "No. We've discussed that plenty already. He has to learn now when he can make small mistakes and has both families around him to help him avoid those mistakes or quickly learn from them. That's the correct way of learning. The girls would not be breaking any vows. -- "Moving right along: if we STOP him playing around, has he broken any vows? No, because he made none. If we stop him have the girls broken any vows? To whatever partial degree they are responsible for his being stopped, then yes, they are breaking their vow to serve his needs ahead of their own - his need to learn, because he's a wimp. They are also breaking their vow to obey because Mark does want to play around, as indicated by his arguing for half an hour to be allowed to. Lastly, they're breaking their vow to protect him because he needs to be protected against future gold-diggers and other manipulators. -- "So letting Mark play around is entirely consistent with their wedding vows, and stopping him is entirely inconsistent with them. Clearly the morally correct outcome is for him to play around. I conclude that YOUR insisting on the girls breaking their wedding vows within a day of making them is morally indefensible. Mark's playing around is not 'wrong', as you have repeatedly but thoughtlessly claimed. -- "In some cultures if a wife is sick for an extended period, or is going away for a while, or is in some other way unable to have sex with her husband, she will arrange and pay for a prostitute to regularly service her husband. In those cultures, that is one of the duties of a good, MORAL wife. She will usually arrange for the prostitute to visit at a time of day when most of her neighbors will see the prostitute arrive and depart, so they'll see what a good wife she is for arranging for the welfare of her husband. -- "Morality, especially sexual morality, is not a universal truth. Our kids have chosen how they wish to commit to each other, and they have a VERY clear idea of their moral responsibilities toward each other. You have forcibly intruded your views into their matrimonial process and are imposing a morality on them that none of them agreed to. You are performing an act of violence on them and their relationship. So much so that Carol, who clearly loves you deeply, screamed that she hated you and wanted to kill herself." Prof said, "I'll add one thing, Felicity. If Mark had made a vow to the girls - which is logically impossible as it would conflict with their vow to serve his needs above their own - it would probably have been to do his best to make our daughters happy. Both girls have been very clear about which decision makes them the happiest. Why are you blocking their happiness?" Vanessa nodded toward Dad, saying, "I believe you have something to say, Steven. Go on, say it." Dad stood up, and said, "I've heard more than enough. I'm going upstairs to apologize to our children for not supporting them. It'd be a good idea if you came with me, Fely." Mom stood, saying, "Okay. I know when I'm beaten. I'm sorry for how much pain Carol felt. I'll let them do it." Vanessa said, "In which case, sit down again please. Seriously, sit down. Thank you. -- "Well done, Steven. You spoke well, and you need to do more of that in front of your children. -- "However, Felicity, you still haven't taken onboard the third major issue of how very important Mark is. Let me use another simple scenario. Let's say a scientist discovers a cure for cancer, but just before he can tell everyone what the cure is, he is kidnapped by terrorists who announce that they are going to kill him. We'll assume that everyone knows that his cure is a real cure and not a confidence trick or a mistake. The scientist is guarded by a large number of well-armed terrorists. The question is, 'How many lives are we willing to spend in order to rescue the scientist?' -- "Let's agree that the terrorists' lives don't count, which is a whole different ethical question. Let's also avoid thinking of the good-guy rescuers as soldiers or law enforcement officers because the ethics of using people who've signed up to be used violently complicates this scenario unhelpfully. Let's say that there is no time to get any soldiers to the area; that the terrorists can only be attacked by arming whatever civilians are in the area and attacking immediately. How many ordinary civilians are we willing to have die in order to rescue the scientist, so other ordinary people can be saved from cancer? Are we willing to sacrifice no one? Or will risk one person? Ten people? A hundred? A thousand? Or even more? What do you think, Felicity?" Mom said, "I don't have your background, but even I've heard the phrase 'the greatest good for the greatest number.' If he's really got a cancer cure then that could save a HUGE number of lives. We should be willing to suffer bad casualties to get him away, provided the terrorists don't kill him while the rescue is happening." Vanessa agreed, "For the sake of the exercise, we'll agree that the terrorists are somehow unable to kill him before their deadline. You said 'we should be willing to suffer bad casualties.' Let's be clear about our language, are we willing to kill many civilians in order to save this one man?" "I think so, yes." Vanessa said, "Okay. Now let's say the scientist hasn't got a cure for cancer, but a cure for another disease that kills only ten people per year. Does that change how many civilians we are willing to lose to get him?" "Yes, of course. It'd be foolish to lose 1,000 civilians for him, but 1,000 for the cancer cure would be worth it." "Okay. The second scientist's comparative value is a lot lower. Now let's say the prisoner is Mark. How many civilians is Mark's life worth?" "You're asking his mother this!" "Haha. Yes, I admit you're somewhat biased. But both scientists have mothers too, as do all the civilians who get killed on the rescue attempts. Let's make you pretend not to be a mother, but the person in charge of sending the civilians into battle. A man, to make it clear that he is not Mark's mother. As that person, you knew the value of Scientist#1, so you'd send in thousands of civilians. For Scientist#2, also knowing his value, you'd send in less than a thousand, maybe tens of civilians. For Mark, also knowing his value, how many civilians should an unbiased commander send in?" Mom said, "If I was truly unbiased, which obviously I'm not, but the answer would have to be 'none'. Otherwise you're just swapping a life for a life. But that's not your point, is it? You're saying I should send in more?" Vanessa concluded, "Prof is a professor of mathematics so he's good with numbers. Let's ask him how many people should be sent in to get Mark. Prof?" Prof answered, "Good intro', dear. Felicity, my honest answer, using all my mathematical skills, is 'All of them'. Haha. And then the commander should grab a gun and charge in too." Vanessa said, "I agree. And when the first town has nobody left, you send in everybody from the next town, for however many towns it takes. You don't even bother counting civilians because the count doesn't matter. And when you get to Scientist #1, you give him a gun and send him in too. That's how important Mark is." Prof said, "To be more accurate, that's how important Mark has the potential to become. He's not that important yet but he could be. We have no idea of what his future will be. Maybe he will cure cancer, or maybe his liking of science fiction will lead him to invent a rocket engine that lets mankind travel to the stars. Or maybe his influence of society will be more subtle, such as by inventing a machine that can infallibly tell whether an alleged criminal is innocent or guilty, or whether someone is telling the truth or not. There's no guessing what he might achieve, but if all goes well he will change the world." Vanessa tag-teamed with Prof, "That's why, when it came to deciding whether Mark should be allowed to play around or not, our only real criterion was Mark. If it's good for him, we support it. That doesn't mean spoil him since that would damage his potential. Our consideration is whether it is truly good for him. That's the same criterion we use for all our children, so no difference there. What we are saying is that Mark's needs come BEFORE EVERYONE else's, and certainly before YOUR need to protect Carol from his playing around; a protection that Carol didn't want but you kept trying to force on her." Vanessa let that sink in. It pretty much had by now, judging by Mom's guilty expression. Then Vanessa continued, "We - Prof and I - are already making our decisions this way. We are treating Mark's needs as more important than Julia's, for example. If we are willing to value your son's needs higher than our own daughter's, then it's about time you valued your own son correctly too. The equality we all say we believe in doesn't apply to Mark. He is truly more important. Your arguing against his needs, in favor of what you thought were Carol's needs, was simply wrong. Prof and I could see that within ten seconds of the argument's starting. -- "You HAVE TO understand this point, Felicity and Steven, because similar situations are going to come up again. Mark's abilities are so extreme, and our girls' chosen lifestyle and dedication to him are so unusual, that situations like this are sure to arise repeatedly. If you don't learn to think about them properly you are either going to cause a great deal of harm or alienate yourselves from their lives. -- "Before the wedding ceremony, when you were talking about sending Mark to another city, we told you that Prof, Julia and I would immediately follow him. Prof and I didn't need to discuss that option before telling you about it because we both know that's what we'd do. We understand how important your son is, and that his interests come before Prof's and mine. It's about time YOU realized that too. -- "I want you two to go upstairs and apologize to MARK. Not to Carol, as you intended, but to Mark. I want neither of you to say you're sorry to Carol. I know you think that's cruel - I can see the look on your face, Felicity! I know you'll find it almost impossible to do, but that is the best thing you can do for her." Julia exclaimed, "Wow, Mom! That's fantastic. That'll make her SO happy!" Vanessa smiled at Julia, and then asked, "Felicity, do you see what Julia sees? Do you know why it will make Carol happy if you apologize only to Mark?" Mom admitted, "No, but you've been right so far, so I guess you know what you're talking about. I find it bizarre though. I can't imagine walking into the room and apologizing to Mark but ignoring Carol. It feels very wrong and unfair." Vanessa said, "You don't have to ignore Carol. You can, for example, tell her that you've come to apologize to Mark. Just don't apologize to her. Don't rush into the room and hug her or do anything like that. You go to that room to apologize to Mark. You can acknowledge whoever else is in the room, and talk with them if you must, but your objective is to apologize to Mark. You behave as if Mark is the most important person in the room. Where have you heard that before? Get it? Mark IS the most important person in the room. Now do you understand why you only apologize to him?" Mom sighed, "No. I understand why you think I should apologize to him FIRST, but why can't I apologize to Carol after Mark? If he's the most important surely it's correct to do him first, then Carol second." Vanessa said, "I'm going to ask Julia to explain this to you so you can see that a 16-year old girl understands this better than you do. I promise you that your 13-year old daughter understands it too. You've got a serious perception problem, Felicity, if two young girls can see these things more clearly than you. I suggest that in the future you pay more attention to how Carol and Julia treat Mark. It'll help you understand their relationship. You'll be interacting with them daily, so you need to understand the situation better than you are now. -- "If you're confused about something you see, even if you disagree with something you see, don't accuse everyone of being 'insane'. Ask them what their reasons are, think about them, discuss them. Try very hard not to get into another thirty-minute argument against all three of them when they clearly understand what's going on better than you do. Explain it, please Julia." Julia explained, "Felicity, you just said, 'IF he's the most important'. The 'if' proves you haven't got it yet so you'd better take our advice or you'll be risking making another mess; possibly one that might upset Carol even worse. To explain why Felicity and Steven shouldn't apologize to Carol. Let's say that Carol is just angry at Felicity right now. That's a bit simple, but it'll do. Then: -- "Option 1 is: Don't apologize to either her or Mark. Result: Carol will remain angry. -- "Option 2: Apologize to BOTH her and Mark, including I hope, telling them clearly that you now agree that Mark should play around. Result: you will remove Carol's anger. She'll go back to normal. Normal is good as she loves her parents, so please do at least Option 2. -- "Best of all is Option 3: You walk into the room, acknowledge Carol, but directly start apologizing to Mark, including telling him he can play around. Carol will be confused for a few seconds, and then when understanding hits her, she'll be overjoyed. She'll be hugging you and kissing you and crying with happiness. You'll be demonstrating to her very clearly that you understand that Mark is the Lord. I want to stand in the doorway and watch. It'll be a beautiful thing to see." Mom said, "I still don't see it. How can not apologizing to her be good? I did upset her, so obviously I should apologize." Julia explained, "The easiest way to explain it is to imagine that Carol has NO desires for herself whatsoever, so her entire existence is focused on Mark. If you apologize to her, you're wasting oxygen. Your apology means nothing to her because she has no desires. You might as well be talking to a brick wall. She doesn't care whether you apologize to her or not; she only cares that you apologize to Mark. If you apologize to her you'll be demonstrating that you don't understand that Mark is her entire focus. She'll think you're dumb, and if you're dumb then the argument we had earlier will recur over and over again on different issues because you don't understand. But if you apologize to Mark ONLY, you'll be demonstrating that you DO understand that only Mark's desires matter. That means many future arguments aren't going to happen, which means that her Lord will have a wonderful life. That will make Carol unbelievably happy." Mom said, "She's seriously that committed to him? That sounds insane to - shit! Sorry I didn't mean to say that." Mom looked worryingly at Vanessa, expecting to need a towel shortly. Vanessa laughed, "Actually, Felicity, in that context I believe your use of the word was acceptable. Carol's degree of commitment to Mark could easily be described as, shall we say, 'unbalanced'. Some obvious reasons for it being appropriate are that Mark IS superhuman, that Carol doesn't have much to offer Mark other than her total loyalty, and that Mark is exceptionally nice, caring and loving toward Carol. I'll just have a drink of this water while you carry on, Felicity." Mom looked suspiciously at Vanessa holding the glass, but carried on, "Umm. I was wondering whether Carol was that committed. I guess she is, even though ignoring her own desires that much is very extreme." Vanessa said, "Carol just offered to kill herself to help Mark. I'd say she's proved that she's committed to him. Possibly to an unbalanced degree, or possibly not. I do know that she is gloriously happy to be married to Mark and Julia. Just in case she is unbalanced though, Felicity, it'd probably be a good idea not to scream accusations of insanity at her, Julia or Mark, don't you think?" "Um, yes. I will try not to do that. Okay, I can see, and even understand that Carol is that committed to Mark." Julia called out, "Me too." Vanessa called out, "Me too." Prof called out, "Me too." Vanessa explained, "We're not as committed to Mark as Carol is, in large part because we have other commitments we have to balance, but we are nonetheless still strongly committed to him. I'll give you two examples. Julia has been an excellent student thus far in her life, but we expect her grades might suffer because of the effort she's devoting to Mark. She's resigned from all her clubs and committees to free up a lot of her time, but if her grades suffer because she's too busy helping Mark, then we'll approve. We'd even encourage her. Mark's need for her is greater than her need for good grades. -- "Something else Prof in particular has been considering is having both our families sell up and move somewhere else. Perhaps to a state where the age of consent is lower, maybe Hawaii because the legal age is fourteen there. If Carol gets pregnant in a few months, Hawaii would be a good place for her to be; much better than Oregon with its minimum age of eighteen. We VERY much don't want Mark to be arrested for committing a serious crime, especially as sexual crimes have a odor that can ruin a man's entire career." Prof took over, "Another moving option is out of America entirely. I don't like what's happening here, and I particularly don't like the threat it poses to Mark's life or quality of life. Big brother is not playing nicely these days." Dad strongly agreed, "You can say that again! You can add some four-lettered swear words too, such as 'Bush'." Prof smiled, "If Mark's abilities become known, it'll be at a time when America has never had worse respect for an individual's rights, or - from what I can see - for the law either. He should be able to stand up and rely on the Government to support him and keep him safe, but the current reality is that the Government could be one of his biggest threats. My point is that we're willing to relocate our entire family if that is the best thing to do for Mark. We don't need to decide on that any time soon, but it's an example of our commitment to his future." Julia excitedly asked, "Can you guys go up and apologize to Mark now with option three. I want to see the look on Carol's face when she understands." Dad stood and said to Mom, "By the sounds of it option three is the right one. Shall we try that?" Mom rose and said, "Yes, we'll try that. We walk in, say we've come to apologize to Mark, do so, tell him he can play around - I can't believe I'm saying that - and we won't apologize to Carol. It's going to feel very uncomfortable but I'm willing to do it. If Carol does react as Julia predicts it'll be a good indication that you're right. I don't really doubt it, it just takes some getting used to." Julia said, "Great! Let's do it. If Carol doesn't get it, please just finish your talk with Mark and leave the room. Tell them to come back down when they're ready. It might take a while for Carol to understand." Vanessa said, "No it won't. If she hasn't got it by the time Felicity has finished apologizing to Mark, Felicity should then kiss her on the cheek and praise her for being a good wife and for serving her Lord so well. She'll get it then." Julia, "Will she ever! Apologize to Mark fast, so you can do that to her before she gets it. I want to see her when you say that!" Vanessa rose too, saying, "Felicity, we've only known your family for two weeks. We didn't have any preconceptions we needed to overcome so we could see Mark's significance immediately. You've had fifteen years of experience with him and that's a big weight of previous opinion to overcome. As long as you keep an open mind and are prepared to ask and understand, you'll do fine. We'll make some fresh coffee and check on Donna and The Boys. Why don't the three of you go upstairs and make good. We'll wait for your return." ------- Chapter 61: Mansion Plan Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) I'd taken the sobbing Carol up to 'our' room. She needed lots of reassurance and I had plenty for her. As much as she wanted. She blamed herself because she'd started it by letting slip the "lots more girls" comment and had then twisted Mom's tail about it. "Mom and Dad would've known all about it in a couple of weeks anyway. We were intending to get lots of girls into my life, so they'd be calling home, coming to it, and I might even be boinking them there..." #4: " ... It was better to get it out in the open sooner rather than later. Mom would have been even worse if she'd found out after we'd started, so you've actually done a good thing by bringing it up now." Carol had lots of other concerns, but they were even easier to counter. Having Vanessa, Prof and Julia on our side gave us a great deal of confidence. I insisted to Carol that they'd talk Mom around. Only Mom had been upset, and what chance did she have against everyone else? Vanessa was already taking charge when we left, so I didn't think it'd take long [I got that estimate wrong]. I reminded Carol that Mom was okay with our marriage, having babies, and possibly even adding Donna, so Mom wasn't too bad. She'd accepted such a huge amount already, and a few extra ordinary girls was no big deal [I got that wrong too.] I said things like, "No one can break up the three of us", "We all love you", "You're safe", "How soon do you want to start having babies?" The last one worked so well I didn't need to employ the big gun that I was holding in reserve: "There, there." We discussed the "Babies When" question for a while, as it distracted Carol wonderfully and I quite liked thinking about it myself. Her opinions, expressed at various times during the conversation, included: "Whenever you want my, Lord", "Now!" and, "I'm too young to be a good mother yet, but I'm going to learn as fast as I can." I knew she was feeling better when she suggested, "Maybe I should only ever tease you, darling." I wasn't feeling very charitable toward Mom, not after thirty minutes of her arguing so much that she'd upset Carol so badly, so I answered Carol's suggestion with, "I think we should share it around, honey. I'm not selfish. I'm even tempted to suggest we give Mom more than her fair share because I don't like how upset she made you, so some payback would be good." Mostly there was a great deal of cuddling, whispering of sweet nothings, and more than a few kisses. We kept them affectionate rather than allow them to become passionate. We weren't in the mood for quite a while, and even then the expectation of a knock on the door at any second was discouraging, especially as we were past the 3pm no-more-sex deadline. When Carol was nicely quieted down, I asked her, "You know how much I love you, don't you? That you're number one for me?" She smiled happily and said, "Yes, I know. I'm so lucky." I disagreed, "NO, I'm so lucky. That's why I love you so much. But my point is, who would I rather have with me: You, my number one love, or a whole bunch of strange girls I don't even know the names of?" Carol knew the answer - how could she not the way I'd loaded the question - but she had fun cautiously asking, "Me?" "Of course you! As you well know. For that reason, and for many other reasons, I am going to give you a serious order now. Are you paying attention? This is serious, not a joke." "I'm listening." "I order you to never even THINK about killing yourself again. And certainly to never, ever try to do it. I love you too much to ever lose you." Carol gave me a loving smile, "Mom got me very upset." "Yes, she did. Me too. But you will NEVER do that again. Will you obey my order?" "Of course, my Lord." After a small pause, "Unless I have to die to save your life. That's one of my vows so you can't take that away." Carol finished that sentence with a very firm look on her face. I wasn't going to take the vows to a lawyer to get a legal opinion, so I decided to let it slide. "Okay, I agree. But only if I am truly and seriously in immediate danger of being killed. Not just because you are worried that I won't learn enough for some problem that might come along in five or ten years." We cuddled for a while, to let the serious mood dissipate. After a minute or so, Carol said, "I'm not going to keep that promise if you're already dead. You're not my Lord if you've gone." It took me a second or two to pull the wording of the promise out of my memory, and then I realized what she was saying. "I don't want you to commit suicide if I'm gone, Carol." "That's too bad! If you've gone I don't want to live, and you won't be here to stop me." I didn't like the sound of that, but I found a loophole, "What if we have children? You can't leave them without a father or mother." Carol shuddered, then said, "No, you're right, I couldn't. I can't imagine how my life could be livable, but you're right." A few seconds later, "But I'll decide that at the time. If you've gone I can make my own decision." She wasn't asking my opinion. "Maybe Julia would look after the children." Oh dear! "Please stop being so macabre, darling. I was trying to cheer you up before, but now I'm depressed." "Would it help if I took my clothes off? I'd do that for you, you know? If you made me, 'specially if you showed me your winkle." "Haha. Very good. Yes, that would cheer me up a great deal. And then the trouble I'd have is stopping myself from getting even happier. So, you like my winkle, do you?" "Oh yes, Mr. Mark. I was telling my bestest friend Julia Williams about how warm and big and handsome it is, and she told me she wants to see it too. Would you let her see it? Pretty please, Mr. Mark? If we both promised to be bad little girls? You could even spank me if you like. I wouldn't mind, honest. Sometimes my friend Julia pulls my panties down and spanks me, but she keeps stopping to put her fingers up my, um, up my little places. You wouldn't do that, would you? Your fingers are so big I don't know if you could get even one in there. They're very small places, you know." "Damn you! Now I'm hard and horny." "Oh no. I'm a very bad little girl for doing that to poor, hard Mr. Mark. Do you think, maybe, that I should be spanked on my bare botty?" "You CERTAINLY should be! Just not now, unfortunately." "Maybe I should be a good little girl then?" "I think that you probably should. Before poor Mr. Mark has an accident." "Aren't good little girls given something to suck? A lollipop, or something. Do you have anything like that, Mr. Mark? I'm very good at sucking; really I am. My bestest friend Julia says that I am very good at sucking AND LICKING. You wouldn't believe what she makes me lick! She makes me do it for SO long. I'm only a little girl and sometimes I get very tired, so maybe you could help me? We could lick her together. Wouldn't that be super?" "Argh! I think I should kiss you, if only to shut you up." "That works for me! Yippee!" LOTS of kisses, many "I love yous" and other sweet whisperings, and about half an hour longer than I thought it'd take, there was finally a knock on the door. "Oh no," from a suddenly worried Carol, obviously not as reassured as I thought. I sat up in the bed, pulled her onto my lap, and loudly called out, "Enter." Mom and Dad came in, Mom leading. No anger and no yelling, so we were off to a good start. I gave Carol a squeeze. I looked at Carol, and she had a very frosty glare going in Mom's direction. I kissed her cheek but that didn't help at all. Carol's cheek was hard, unyielding, and I'd swear even cold. By the time I'd done that, Mom and Dad had arrived at the side of the bed nearest us. They remained standing, and Mom said, "I've come to apologize to you Mark..." "WE'VE come to apologize," from Dad, interrupting Mom. Mom resumed, "Yes, sorry. Mark, we've come to apologize for my sticking my nose into your matrimonial business, and trying to impose my values onto your relationship. I had no right to do that so forcefully and rigidly. I now realize that what you wanted to do is a good idea, Mark, and you should carry on with it. With our blessings and support. If you need any help, don't hesitate to ask for it, Mark." From Dad, "Mark, I wish to apologize to you for not supporting you during your argument with Fely. It was ridiculous that it went on so long and got so emotional. I will try to stick up for your rights better in the future, Mark, should you need my support. Even from Felicity, although I don't think she'll be giving you too much of a hard time in the future. Not over things that are your business anyway, Mark." #2: Carol had also noticed the same thing. I could see her look from Mom, to Dad, to me, back to Mom, etc. But no one was looking at her, let alone talking to her. #1: Mom said, "We approve of the direction you're taking your marriage, Mark, and how well you are managing it." Carol sat up straighter as a result of that. "Will you accept our apologies, Mark?" I felt like saying, "Mark will", but that seemed silly. Make that, "sillier". So I said, "Sure. Yes, I mean. Thanks very much." Dad said, "There's no need to thank us, Mark. We wronged you." #2: #1: Mom said, "Thank YOU, Mark, for accepting our apology. We'll go back downstairs in a second, and you should join us when you're ready, but before we go I'd just like to praise my daughter." Mom turned slightly, facing and looking at Carol for the first time. Mom continued, "Carol, I am very, very impressed by the depth of your love and commitment to your Lord. You are an exceptional wife, and you've upheld your vows to your Lord very well. I am proud of you." Dad corrected, "WE are proud of how well you serve your Lord." He was slightly better positioned, so he leaned forward and kissed Carol on the cheek. When Dad stood back, Mom leaned forward and kissed Carol too. By the time Mom was standing up, Carol had gotten the idea that something pretty fantastic had just happened. She didn't quite believe it, but only because it's her nature not to believe great things can happen to her. "Lord?" was all she incredulously asked Mom. "Lord!" confirmed Mom. Carol stated, "That's the first time you've called him Lord." Mom said, "It won't be the last." I was happy. I understood and accepted the BIG concession my parents had just made. Carol hadn't quite accepted it yet, so I sat still and waited. I let my attention wander a little bit, and noticed Julia grinning like an idiot in the doorway. (That's merely the expression; if she helped make this happen, she's a genius.) Carol asked, "You understand that he's our Lord?" Mom and Dad smiled and nodded. #3: Carol sat up rigid straight, stuck out her chest, and loudly insisted, "I AM HIS WIFE!" #3: #1: Mom laughed, and said, "You certainly are! A very good one too. We're proud of you." Carol further insisted, "I WANT to sleep with Mark EVERY night!" #3: Mom gave a small laugh, "You can try if you like, but his bed isn't big enough for comfort, and yours is no better." Carol stated, "Donna moves into Mark's room. Mark moves into my room, and we get one, big bed. VERY big. I want Julia to choose it." #1: Dad said, "Smart girl! Yes, we'll do that. We'll replace the two singles in your room as soon as Julia has the new bed delivered. Fely and I totally agree, but we insist that you and Donna share the bed until the trial is over. The very first night it's over Mark can move into your room." #2: #3: I'm sure Carol didn't believe her victory yet. She spotted a loophole or two, "And we can make love there whenever WE want! Including with Julia if she's staying over, because she WILL be staying over!" Carol wasn't asking questions; she was stating what she wanted to happen. But she was expecting to hear a "No." Mom destroyed the last of Carol's doubts, "You, Julia and any other girls your Lord invites. You'd better make sure Julia gets a BIG bed!" Carol got up to thank her parents. (That sentence is an understatement.) Julia came screaming in from the doorway. Carol screamed back. I'm sure there were several more people screaming. There had to be with the volume of noise my ears were reporting. It was good that the room was soundproofed and that there was a supply of fresh hankies in my drawer. We spent a while expressing joy and thankfulness. Mom and Dad sneaked in some apologies to Carol for not 'getting it' earlier, but none of us cared by now. I was highly, repeatedly and loudly appreciative to Carol for her idea of our sleeping together. That pleased her, which was only fair because she certainly pleased me! When things had quieted down - "things" meaning mostly Carol and Julia - Mom said, "Carol, sweetie, there are some practical issues with the new sleeping arrangements, mostly how to keep that you're sleeping with your brother secret. You'd better be very careful who goes back to your rooms. Donna will have to be careful who she takes to her new room too, because anyone who sees her room will be able to see from our doors that there's only one room left for Carol and Mark to sleep in. We'd better make sure that Donna's new room retains its masculine look so Mark can pretend it's his if he suddenly needs to. Likewise your room shouldn't have masculine stuff displayed in case someone needs to believe that two girls sleep there. Sleeping two girls in one bed is strange but acceptable. A brother and sister your ages sleeping together is not. We might have to plant some thick bushes immediately in front of your window, get blinds and look into soundproofing. It's important I give you what you want, but be aware that there are practical problems that we'll do our best to overcome for you." Carol said, "Yes. Thank you, Mom. I'll think about those things, but not right now. I'm a bit too frazzled to think clearly." Mom said, "I'll add one more issue. I have no idea how you expect to get away with sharing Mark with other casual girls. Surely if Mark, you and other girls are in bed together, they're going to realize that you and your brother have an unusual relationship. It only takes one of these girls to make one accidental or deliberate slip and we're in trouble. You need to think of all these things before you start doing anything." Carol said, "You're right again, Mom. I hadn't thought of these things. I just wanted to sleep with my loves every night. If we never had sex with any other girl there, that's fine with me. I just want Mark every night and Julia sometimes too. Julia can think about this stuff, that's her job. My job is simpler and more fun." Julia laughed, "I've already been thinking about it, sweetie. I think our families are ready for the mansion idea. In a big enough private house, with no close neighbors, we could easily set up the rooms in a practical manner. I haven't done anything about it yet, not even talked to Dad, but after watching your parents just now and seeing how much they get it and how hard they're trying, I think we should get moving on it soon. Do you agree, Mark?" "I think that could be a good idea." Mom asked, "Mansion idea?" Julia deferred to me, so I said, "Julia and I have discussed the idea of both families moving into a mansion. We call it 'mansion', but we just mean a house big enough for all of us, with privacy and plenty of rooms so we could live how we want much easier. We thought it'd be safer and more fun for everyone. A lot less worry. What do you think, Mom and Dad? Do you think we could share one big house with the Williamses?" Mom said, "I guess we could sell our house. I'm not particularly attached to it. Actually not at all, as it's low quality. It's hard to imagine the Vanessa and Prof will want to sell this house though. It's beautiful and they've got it so well set up for them." Julia, with her usual lack of respect for anyone who disagreed with one of her plans, said, "{Raspberry}." -- When she had everyone's attention, "My family would move to another country if it was good for Mark. Increased safety is good for Mark, so we'd certainly move to a different home in Corvallis. -- "The house we'd move into would be better than this one. Mark misled you when he downplayed the description of mansion as just a big house. Not intentionally I'm sure, it's just that he always thinks small. By 'mansion' I almost do mean mansion, or at least a very upmarket private home. It'll be the best quality mansion we can find that meets our needs for number of rooms, privacy, etc. Our need for time too because I want to do this quickly. If we find a mansion we like that's already on the market, we might be able to move in even before the trial is finished, so you guys wouldn't have the hassles of rearranging your house the way Carol wants. We just move into our new home already set up the way we all want, especially a really BIG bed for our Lord. That's the one piece of furniture that it's guaranteed to have!" Mom said, "I'm sorry Julia, but it isn't going to happen anything like that fast, or that way. It'll take several weeks for us just to get our house cleaned up and ready to put onto the market. Then however many months for it to sell and settle. Your house will probably sell faster than ours, I guess, depending on how well you price it to the market. Then we'll have to find another house big enough for all of us, and, quite frankly, it won't be better than this house. Our home is worth so little that finding a house big enough for all of us will mean that it will have to be a lower quality than this, otherwise we won't be able to afford it. Arranging financing will also be..." Julia interrupted, "Sorry to interrupt, but I'll save time if I jump in and say that buying a new mansion has nothing to do with selling the existing houses. Mark has an idea that will get us a million or two. Or three. I don't think the actual amount changes anything much. If his idea works - that's a big 'if' that I'll come back in a second - then we'll have cash. So don't worry about money. The question is whether you can happily share a house with my family?" -- There was a short pause, then Julia added, "I'll tell you what, why don't Mark and I go and ask Dad whether his idea is feasible. If it's not then the whole idea of buying a mansion is moot unless we can think of another idea. That'll save time. Let's go do that now." People tend not to disagree with Julia when she's in "Bossy Mode", so we went. Julia and I left Mom and Dad with Carol. We found everyone else in the Guys' Room. Donna was watching, I presume, one of her new DVDs on the big screen. Prof, Vanessa and The Boys were sitting around the bar, talking quietly. As we walked in, Vanessa said, "I see things went well." We agreed that they had. Julia added, "Dad, Mark and I want to check something different with you. Can we borrow you for a few minutes please, and go to your study?" That was fine with Prof, so I got to see what a nice study looks like. It looks very, very nice. Vanessa had one and a half walls for her shelves, desk, chair, etc. Prof ditto on the other side of the room. Their study was plush - very, very plush: Rich woods, a lovely rug and two facing sofas in the middle of the room, with a small table between them. Lovely pictures on the walls. Desks that were works of art to look at. It made my new study look bare and pathetic. Oh well. Julia quickly outlined the mansion idea without allowing the conversation to get detailed. Not much more than, "We buy a mansion for both families, for safety and private lifestyle reasons. So Mark, Carol and I can live together without anyone seeing us do it, or seeing any strange things happening. We all need to discuss whether we can live together happily but before we got into that, the question we want to ask you is whether it's feasible for Mark to make the money to buy the mansion by using his TK ability to win roulette in Vegas?" Prof's response was, "Hmm. I have nothing against the idea, and it would be useful to have access to large sums of cash, so I'm fine with it. Let's proceed on that assumption and we'll get Vanessa's opinion later." I said, "Our first problem is that I believe I'm too young to bet, so we need someone else old enough, say you. You bet, and as long as I can see the wheel and ball well enough I can use my TK - that's what I call the flying things around ability - to make the ball fall into the right hole, or slot, or whatever they're called." We quickly got into a discussion about my TK, and I gave him several demonstrations of the non-flying variety. Pushing a pen along the table, pushing his skin, lifting Julia's skirt briefly - she insisted on that. I think she enjoyed letting her dad know we had some fun with it. I described the fingertip TK-points, and how I could nudge, pinch and pick up with them. Trying to pick up a moving ball seemed impractical to me because the ball's subsequent movement would look very unnatural and suspicious. I suggested the idea that Prof would place bets on several adjacent numbers, and I'd try to nudge the ball into that area. It would probably be too hard for me to guarantee a particular number, without risking the ball's movement looking unnatural, but I might be able to get it within three or four to either side. Prof said, "I've never been into a casino but I've seen them often enough on TV or in movies to know how the game works. Let's google it quickly to see if anything leaps out that makes it look impractical." A few minutes later Prof said, "That looks straightforward enough. Betting on one number pays 35 to 1. Let's do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations to see how the numbers roughly work out. If I bet on one number, and all Mark did was to make sure the ball landed somewhere in my quarter of the wheel, then I'd have about one chance in nine of winning, assuming all the numbers in my quarter were equally likely. As you'll be aiming for my number, let's say our chance of winning was twice that, or about one in five. We expect to lose most of our bets - 4 times out of 5 in fact - so we don't want to bet all our money at one time, as we'd probably lose it. With an 80% chance of losing, there's about a 10% chance of losing 10 bets in a row, so a 1% chance of losing 20 in a row..." #2: #3: " ... A 10% chance of losing 10 bets in a row is too much risk. We don't want to go down to Vegas and lose all our money in the first 10 bets just because of bad luck. A 1% risk is probably playing too safe, but let's assume we use that. That means we need enough money to cover 20 bets, or to put it another way, we bet 1/20th of how much money we have. We could probably gather $30,000 or $40,000 fairly quickly. More if we wanted to mortgage the house, but let's avoid that if we can. 1/20th of $40,000 is $2,000. Let's play safe and say $1,000 per bet. That makes the calculations easier too." #2: "If we bet $1,000 a time, lose four times out of five, but win one time, then out of five bets we'll wager $5,000 and pull back $36,000, for a profit of $31,000. If we started with $30,000, then it takes us only 5 bets to double our money. If we wanted $3 million then we have to increase our money 100-fold, which is 6 or 7 doublings of our money, call if 7. At 5 bets per double, 7 doubles would take 35 bets. Based on what I've seen on TV, I'll guess there's about 2 minutes between bets, so that'd take 70 minutes. Just over an hour. So we should win the $3 million we want in about an hour. That works out well." #1: #2: I repeated that calculation to Prof, and asked him if he'd made a mistake. "No. I didn't explain well enough that as our profits build up, so will our bets. If we start with $30,000, then we should bet about $1,000. When that bet finally wins, say in 5 spins, we win about $30,000. Which, neatly as it turns out, doubles our money. Because we'd then have twice as much money, we can bet $2,000 per bet. The next win will win us twice as much as it did the previous time because we're betting twice as much, so we'd win $60,000, which doubles our money again. Our bets progress through $4,000, $8,000, etc., up to, let's see..." Prof did some quick calculations on his computer, then resumed, "$64,000, which when it wins nets us about $2.2 million. -- "Don't be concerned about those numbers. They're just to give me a feel for what sort of timeframe we're talking about. We won't necessarily be betting on a single number the way I described. Let's say we bet on three adjacent numbers. With one number we said a 1-in-5 chance of your getting the ball on it. With 3 side by side we'd get less than 3-in-5, say 2.5-in-5 or a 50% chance. We'd have to bet twice, on average to win, so we'd bet $6,000 to get back $36,000, exactly a $30,000 profit. So by betting on three numbers we'd double our money in two bets rather than five. So 7 doubles would take 14 bets, or about half an hour. I'm sure we could design an even faster way, but it all depends on the assumptions we are making about the odds of your hitting the number or numbers we've bet on. Maybe you can hit the right number every time, or maybe you can only get it somewhere within ten numbers to either side, giving us about a 5% chance of winning. We can't calculate an optimal betting strategy until we've tested how well you can hit the target area. -- "I was just doing a rough calculation to get a feel of how long it'd take. If my calculations had resulted in an answer of ten thousand hours, then we'd know that the idea was impractical unless we made some significant changes to it. Whether the answer is half an hour, one hour, or ten hours, we don't care - it's three million dollars! I'm prepared to play ALL day for that much if need be, haha. I'm reassured that the mathematics work out, and that it seems doable, subject only to your being able to hit our number often enough. We need to find you a roulette wheel to test yourself on. Let me think for a minute." -- A few seconds later, "I think we need to get you into one of the local Indian casinos to practice. You probably need to try a few different ways of nudging the ball to see which way works the best. Even if we don't bet, you can still pick random numbers and see how close to them you can hit. You should keep some statistics on how well you do so we can calculate an optimal betting method. We should practice with small bets too, to make sure that there are no unforeseen problems with the process. -- "All things considered, I think we need to get you ID for a 21-year old, which I think is the minimum age to get into a casino. You'll need a disguise to make you look that age too. You're tall enough to pass for an adult, so it should be doable. When we go to Vegas to do the job for real, I think it should still be me that does the big betting, as anyone who wins $3 million is going to get a great deal of scrutiny and I need to be legitimate. We'd hate for you to win the money and for the casino to discover that you've got a false ID and are under-age because they'd probably refuse to pay you. If I'm the big bettor you can hang around the table, placing some small bets of your own. That way you can get close enough to the wheel to do your TK trick, even if there's a crowd that'd stop you seeing the wheel from a distance. What do you think?" "Sounds superb. Where do I get a 21-year old's ID from though? That isn't exactly legal." Prof answered, "Andrew and Robert know some disreputable people, thanks to their many years of 8-ball gambling. Or it might be possible to use one of their existing IDs and just replace their picture with yours. They're ten years older than you, so you'd need a good disguise, but it'd mean the ID was otherwise legitimate. Do you mind if I ask them to get you a fake ID and whatever disguise material that'd be needed? I won't say why, or anything to do with TK." "That's fine with me. So the roulette thing is a goer then?" "It looks like it to me. Shall I ask Vanessa for her opinion of our using your ability to win some money this way? If she consents, which I guess she will, then the 'roulette thing will be a goer'. Which means your mansion plan will likely be a goer too." I asked, "You wouldn't mind sharing a house with my family?" "We'd make it work. I like the safety aspect. A big, secure house seems like a good idea. Let's go back to the others to ask Vanessa what she thinks." Back in the Guys' Room we found Vanessa and everyone else, including a very happy looking Carol. Even Mom looked happy. Prof asked Vanessa to join us for a few seconds. We adjourned to the far corner of the room, and Prof quietly explained the jointly occupied mansion idea to Vanessa, who agreed that the safety benefits made it an excellent idea. Then Prof asked her, "Ethically, or any other way, what do you think of our using Mark's 'flying things' ability to win the necessary money - 'take' the money really - by playing roulette in a Vegas casino? He'd be using his ability to make the roulette ball land on numbers that I'd be betting on." Vanessa said, "Haha. EXACTLY the same as I'd think if you used your ability to take money from drug dealers. Dealing drugs and running casinos are ethically identical; they both exploit a human weakness to sell an addictive 'product' that destroys lives. Take them for every dollar they've got." Prof said, "I didn't think you'd object, but I didn't expect you to be so enthusiastic either?" Vanessa explained, "I use casinos as an example in my business ethics courses. All businesses are based on a win-win proposition; the customer and supplier MUST both win. If you want a new pair of shoes, you can either make them yourself or buy them. To make them yourself would take a great deal of your time and effort, so it's cheaper for you to buy them from a store. The store buys them from manufacturers who specialize in making shoes very efficiently. The manufacturer can sell shoes to the store so cheaply that the store can on-sell them profitably, and still at a price cheap enough that you want to buy them. You win because you get shoes better and cheaper than you can make them yourself, and the store wins because they sell them for a profit. -- "If the stores tried to sell shoes at such a high price that you'd prefer to make your own, then they'd go out of business. Or if they sold them too cheaply, so they made a continual loss, then they'd go out of business. There's no such business, for example, where you can book someone to come to your house every morning to tie your shoestrings. They'd have to charge so much for that service that you'd prefer to do it yourself, which is what happens. But that's not the case for getting lawns mown as homeowners will pay for that service. ALL sustainable businesses are based on win-win propositions, otherwise they fail. There's a Nobel prize-winning economics study that shows win-win is required. -- "However, casinos don't offer a win-win proposition. They win ONLY if you lose, and vice versa. Thus they are not 'businesses'. They survive for only three reasons: they're deceptive externally by pretending to be a business to fool regulators and the public, they practice a great deal of in-house deception so their 'customers' are fooled into thinking that gambling isn't as expensive as it really is, and because a significant proportion of their customers get addicted into gambling irrationally." Prof responded, "I didn't know you were so anti-casino." Vanessa said, "There's a reason we've never gone to a casino all our married life." Prof said, "But millions of people do go to casinos and do have good times. Vegas is a huge tourism city. Doesn't that refute your argument?" Vanessa, "No, because those millions of people aren't the casinos' customers. They LOOK like customers, they walk through the casinos, sit down, play a few games, and generally behave like customers, but the casinos don't want them. Those players cost the casinos more money to service than they're worth. All the floor space, staff time, air conditioning, etc., required to service those players is money wasted, EXCEPT for one important fact: for every hundred players who wander through a casino, about 10% of them will at some stage get hooked on gambling. That 10% lose a large amount of money. So much so that casinos make billions in profits. -- "Think of it this way. Let's say the average adult American spends two days a year in casinos. If a law was passed that no American could play more than seven days per calendar year in casinos, that wouldn't affect the casual-player market at all, but it would DESTROY the casino business. Obviously then, casual players aren't their market. -- "There's been as much chance of my suggesting we go to a casino as my suggesting that we try cocaine. Both might be fun, and we might not get addicted, but we aren't going to be doing either of those! I've got absolutely no problem whatsoever with you taking money off them. Take as much as you can." #3: Prof said, "We need to get Mark a fake ID so he can get into casinos, which I was thinking of asking The Boys for. He'll need a disguise to age him too. I wondered about using one of the boy's real IDs but with Mark's picture on it. How do you feel about that crime?" Vanessa said, "If it's just for casino purposes, and provided you're very careful with it, then that's fine with me. The reason for the minimum age law doesn't apply to Mark anyway." I had to ask, "Why not?" Vanessa answered, "It's to protect youngsters from the evils of gambling. You don't need protecting because you're going to win. If anything, 'the Evils of Gambling' need protection from you. It'd be impossible for us to get the authorities to grant you an exemption, as with your driver license, so just go ahead and break the law. It's an ass when it comes to casinos anyway. Casinos and drug dealers both used to be illegal, but casinos bought their way into legality by offering State and Federal Governments huge sums of money to have laws passed legitimizing them. Those laws are corrupt. Not to mention that the money you win would be more useful to us. Get enough for two mansions as far as I'm concerned! Hmm, that's not a bad idea. Having a good amount of spare cash, a million or two, might be a good idea. Put it in a Swiss bank account in case we, especially Mark, ever needs it." Julia said, "Goody, let's get five million then. Heck, we might as well make it ten. We wouldn't want to go short, haha. This is so much fun. And I just realized, with $10 million we could buy a REALLY big bed! How soon can we do this?" Prof said, "Why don't I take The Boys to my study and ask them about IDs. I won't mention the scheme's details, just that Mark needs an over-21 ID. You and Vanessa talk with the Andersons about getting a mansion. I'd like to get this rolling too. -- "Some of it will be fun too. When I'm winning big in Vegas and looking like a genius because I keep picking winning numbers, I'm going to let slip that I'm a professor of mathematics. They'll think I've got a new method of beating roulette. I could look very serious and pretend to do complex calculations, mutter all sorts of mathematical terminology. Really play up the 'Mad Professor' role. It'll be great fun and it'll misdirect them away from Mark." Vanessa offered, "If you're going to be looking for a disguise to age Mark, why don't we try the Drama Department at OSU. Talk with The Boys first to see that a fake ID is doable - I'd be surprised if it wasn't - then you and I can ask around to see if we can find a contact in the Drama Department. Maybe the husband or wife of someone in one of our departments." I added, "You need to know that Mom is STRONGLY anti-gambling. If she hears one word of this, she'll jump up and down making a great deal of noise. How do you think about doing this but keeping the method a secret from Mom and Dad?" Prof answered, "There's a great deal to be said for the security of having your three-way marriage and any uses of your special ability behind a big wall, so I'm inclined to accept your roulette idea. Let's just investigate the feasibility of it for now." Prof led The Boys away, and Vanessa loudly said, "Let's go make some fresh coffee." They could have made coffee at the bar, but Vanessa herded everyone into the kitchen. Everyone except Donna, which I suspected was the real intention. In the kitchen Vanessa started the coffee, and Julia took charge of the conversation, announcing, "It looks like Mark's moneymaking scheme is feasible. Even better than I thought, according to Dad's quick calculations. It might take longer to get rolling though, as there's more preparation required than I imagined. We might have to 'put up with' our existing homes for a few more weeks, haha. The question for all the parents to decide is whether they're happy with us all sharing one large home. There's no hurry to decide that as I think Mark should go ahead and make the money if he can, regardless of whether we buy a mansion, because Mom pointed out that it'd probably be a good idea to have a million or two stashed somewhere for emergencies." Mom gasped, "A million or two! Are you insane!" Then the look on Mom's face changed, "Oh no! Sorry, I didn't mean to say that." Vanessa responded, "Tsk, tsk, Felicity. You really are going to have to watch how you speak. After this discussion, you and I are going to sit down and have a little chat of our own about this unfortunate habit of yours. Not to mention that you'd better start getting used to 'insane' things happening around Mark." I laughed, "Don't blame me. I had this idea just as a way of getting some money for Carol's college fund, and maybe some new running shoes for Donna. Maybe $50,000 or so. It's Julia that has jumped it up to the insane amount of $5 million or so. She's the one to blame. You'd better get used to insanity around JULIA, not me." Mom said, "FIVE million! I thought you said 'a million or two'?" Julia, not helping Mom see her as sane, said, "The million or two is just a stash for emergencies. If we want to buy a mansion that'll be another one or two million. That's just a guess as we need to do some research on that. Not just to buy it, but furnish it too. Including that it has to have a REALLY big bed, a large wall around the entire property and other very good security measures. If we can't find a house with all the features we want, we might need to add to it. Maybe even build a whole wing for Mark; that'd be cool. After all, it's going to be him that's getting the money for this, so it seems only fair that he has his own wing. So allowing a couple of mil' for all that is reasonable." Mom turned to me and asked, "EXACTLY how are you going to be making all this money? It doesn't sound legal to me." Before I could answer Vanessa said, "You don't NEED to know, Felicity. Think about it for a second. Mark can go and do something, and in a short time come back with several million dollars. We do not want outsiders to know that he can do that in case they try to force him to do it for them, so we want as few people as possible to know, even among us. If you think about some of the methods criminals could use to force Mark to do what they want, you'll see the need for great caution. Prof is asking The Boys for their help on one aspect, but he's not telling them anything about the scheme, merely their aspect. If we need your help on an aspect, that's all you'll know about. Mark asked Prof initially because the scheme is very mathematical. Prof checked with me because he thought it might have been unethical. I have no ethical concerns about it. -- "You can insist Mark tells you - as his parents you certainly have that right, and even that responsibility sometimes - but in this case Prof and I both approve of it. Nothing is going to happen for a few weeks so I suggest you take some time to think about whether it's essential that you know. I'll add that we'd better all get used to keeping secrets, because with Mark's abilities and activities they're likely to become common. His next project might be something you help him with but is kept secret from Prof and me. I'm sure we won't have any problem restraining our curiosity. -- "Prof and I think sharing a house is a good idea. It will make Mark's activities, including his sexual activities with Julia, Carol and maybe Donna, much easier to hide. A big house, out of sight and earshot of its neighbors, surrounded by a high wall, sounds like an excellent idea to us. -- "Another thought just occurred to me. If Mark develops new abilities, or if Carol or Donna develop some of his abilities, they might need to practice them regularly. A big, secure house is looking better and better." Mom said, "It's silly, but there are two issues that I can't get out of my mind. What's it going to be like with both of us in the kitchen? I don't want us to be tripping over each other and getting annoyed with each other. That would be a bad thing for our relationship. Too much closeness can be bad, even with friends. -- "The other thing I keep thinking of is REALLY silly, but you keep telling me off. The silly thing is that I know you're right. You are smarter than I am and you've helped my marriage and parenting by making Steven and me aware of things we were doing wrong, but it still feels uncomfortable." Vanessa suggested, "There are several solutions. Your kitchen worry could be solved by you and I alternating the cooking. I could cook one week, then you the next. We'd each have to cook for more people, but that doesn't increase the work by much. Week-on/week-off would decrease the total amount of work each of us did. I'd love to be able to take every second week off. Just think how relaxing that'd be! I could go soak in the hot tub, read a good book, and let you do all the work, haha. You could do the same when it's your week off. You'll be able to spend more quality time with Steven too, which I'm sure you'd both appreciate. -- "Another idea is to build a new wing, just like Julia suggested, but have it include a complete duplicate kitchen and dining room, so you'd have your kitchen and I'd have mine. I think that's excessive, but there's no reason we couldn't do it. It's only money after all, and that seems to be a non-issue with Mark on the job. Even more extreme than the new wing idea, is to build a whole new house right beside yours, to keep the two families more separate, maybe joining the two houses with a big family room in the middle, to be our shared area. We could certainly do that if we found living in the same house was too much of a strain. Money solves a lot of problems, Felicity, especially if you've got millions available, and can just tell Mark to go get some more if you want." Mom laughed, "Now I know I'm being silly, but I can't get the image of me sitting in a hot tub while you do all the cooking out of my mind. That sounds like a real luxury. Another concern is that you're a better cook than me, and I'll feel guilty cooking meals for your family which aren't as good as they're used to." Vanessa laughed, "If that's your biggest concern, you've got nothing to worry about. It wouldn't do my family any harm to eat a different style of cooking. It doesn't seem to have done your family any harm as they're all healthy and happy. But if you're worried about it, just hire a chef to work with and teach you during your weeks. After a few months you'll be more skilled than I am. I'd help you myself, but I'm going to be sitting in the hot tub with Prof, haha. -- "I don't think there are any problems we can't overcome, especially by throwing some easy money at them. While there are some important advantages in having a safer environment for Mark." Mom looked at Dad. Dad answered, "You expect me to turn down moving into a mansion and having a few million dollars floating around?" We heard Prof talking loudly, and coming into the kitchen with The Boys and Donna. Donna said, "I've watched nearly a whole movie and I'm bored. I want to do something." Mom turned back to Vanessa, and said, "Looks like the Andersons agree then. It'll be an interesting way of living. -- "I should take Mark to get his cast removed soon, as I don't know how long that'll take and I don't want him to have a late night before his big race." Donna seized on that, "Yes, that's right! Mark has to win tomorrow. You're going to win aren't you, Mark? I REALLY want you to." "Yes, sweetie. I'll make sure I win. It should be even easier without the cast on. Although I hope I'm not so used to its weight that without it all I can do is run in circles, haha." A very worried Donna said, "That's not going to happen is it? I want you to win the race. Maybe you should leave the cast on until after the race?" Mom laughed at her, "He's teasing you, honey. He'll run even better without it, which is one of the reasons I want to try to get it removed tonight, providing an X-ray shows it's ready to come off." Donna begrudgingly said, "Okay then, but only if you're sure. Can I come to the hospital with you? I'm bored here." "I'm sure you'd be even more bored in the hospital. We'll be sitting around waiting most of the time." Robert said, "Donna, how about you and I go bowling? How does that sound? Shall I call up to see if we can book a lane?" Donna exclaimed, "Yippee! I like bowling. That'd be great." -- Donna paused to look at him suspiciously for a second, then said, "Are you sure you have a girlfriend? Because if you don't, I'm available and Mom doesn't mind if I start learning more about sex." Mom exclaimed, "DONNA! I said you could ask me questions about it. I did NOT say you could start doing it! There's a BIG difference, girl!" "Hehe. You're so much fun, Mom. I know I can't have sex for WEEKS yet!" "Yeah, about a thousand weeks if I get my way, you scamp! Let Mark and me get on our way. I'll leave it to the rest of you decide what you want to do. If you want to tie Donna down so she can't get into any mischief, that'd be okay with me." Mom grabbed her purse and son, and off we went. ------- Chapter 62: Nubbins Inspection Friday, April 15, 2005 (Continued) On the way out to the car I had a thought, #3: #2: #3: #1: #3: In the car Mom asked me, "How come you asked Prof and Vanessa about your moneymaking plan before you asked your father or me?" "I didn't ask either of them, Mom. The only person I told was Julia. She dragged me downstairs to talk with Prof because it's a highly mathematical plan. In seconds he had worked out all sorts of stuff that I hadn't even considered. And then Prof asked Vanessa about it because there's an ethical angle. It wasn't my choice how it worked out; Julia just asked the people best able to help, and it wasn't you or Dad this time. There isn't a single thing that I think you or Dad could help me with about this idea as it doesn't involve stuff you're familiar with." I waited for a second, and Mom didn't comment, so I added, "Plus I think Vanessa is right about keeping some of my things secret. She had a VERY good point about how some people might react if they knew I could make a few million dollars quickly. She and Prof seem very concerned about security and what would happen if word got out, so I'm inclined to go along with them on the whole secrecy thing. I don't think we should talk about ANY of this stuff in public. We should get into the habit of being cautious. It'd probably be a good idea to not talk about it anywhere other than in the two homes, which might be one home soon." Mom sort of agreed. She couldn't really argue that it was a good idea for us to risk our lives by discussing something in public that we could discuss at home, if any discussion was necessary. I didn't want to talk with Mom or Dad about my abilities. I could too easily imagine them exposing me by accident, out of their misunderstanding some consequences of my abilities. I couldn't really imagine Prof or Vanessa making that mistake. If anything they seemed excessively cautious, which was something that I was willing to use to help me avoid awkward questions. Despite it being a Friday night, the hospital wasn't too busy. "Too early for the drunks," is what Mom said. We only had to wait half an hour. After my cast was cut off the nurse was confused, "Why isn't your arm wasted?" This confused me. I only had two arms and I didn't want to waste either of them. Mom leaned over and was surprised too. I soon learned that "wasted" meant shrinking muscles. I shrugged my shoulders, "I don't know. It's been covered by the cast the whole time so I don't know what's been going on." The nurse said, "I'll get a doctor," and she bustled off. We waited twenty minutes for the doctor, who looked at it for five seconds, looked at my file, then told the nurse, "It's hasn't been in a cast long enough to atrophy. Get it X-rayed and I'll look at it then." That was hardly worth waiting twenty minutes for. So we went to radiology and joined the line there. It didn't take long, what with it being too early for the drunks. After the X-ray we went back to our previous location, and waited some more. The same doctor eventually came back and examined the X-ray, then referred to my notes, then back to the X-ray. He pulled out the X-ray taken at the time of the assault and displayed the two of them side by side. One pictured showing an obvious break, the other showing a perfectly complete bone. "Puzzling," he said, "I can't see any sign of the healing. I'd almost suspect they'd X-rayed the wrong arm, but I can see it's the right one. Let's examine your arm." The doctor proceeded to poke and prod. Even with my limited medical experience, I already knew that doctors love to poke and prod. "Great muscle tone. Even better than mine." He made me arm wrestle with him. Not exactly like that, but he pulled my arm around and made me resist and pull back. "Have you been exercising it?" #4: I pulled my arm up and had a close look at its wrist. Even a REALLY close look didn't show any scar. For a comparison I pushed up my other sleeve, and compared the two of them. No scar on either. It looked like I was comparing muscle tone, so that was okay. I was answering the doctor's question at the same time, "No. I don't do any exercise. I'm a bookworm. The last week or so I've been using the sling less and less, and occasionally using the arm to lift things, but only because it felt healed and safe to do so. I've been using my other arm in preference, and only using this one when I needed two arms." The doctor said, "Well, I'm puzzled by how well healed it is, but there's no reason why you can't go. I'd say 'take care of it', but I'm almost hoping you break it again so we can regularly X-ray it while it's healing, but that's just my curiosity speaking. You're free to go." Mom said, "So it looks like your teacher was right, Mark?" The doctor looked at Mom, who started explaining. I'd have preferred her to keep quiet, but trying to shush her now would be making the doctor even more suspicious. Mom said, "His Aikido instructor said it'd heal faster because he has good ki, whatever that is." "What's Aikido?" Mom said, "It's a martial art. Mark's been studying it recently." "I can't see how it'd accelerate bone growth so much. What do you do at Aikido?" Mom said, "He's only been to one..." I interrupted, "Mom, I'd like to get out of here now. I'm hungry, so can we go home please?" I turned to the doctor, "We're free to go, right?" I stood up and started pulling down my shirt and otherwise getting ready to go. He nodded, and so I made sure we left quickly, in case his curiosity got the better of him. #4: I'd seen that Mom had realized that I'd cut her off, and why. While were walking away from the doctor she tried to apologize. I immediately cut her off, "NOT here! At the homes only." Let her stew in her juices for a while. It'd be good for her. This was EXACTLY what I'd been worrying about in the car on the way here: someone unintentionally saying too much to a wrong person. In front of the doctor I'd told her I wanted to go home, but that was just the easiest thing to say at the time. I was pleased that Mom drove to the Williams'. On the way back I remembered that I could go for my license now. I'd better do some last minute study. A practice session in Dad's car would be a good idea too. We rang the doorbell, heard the pitter-patter of footsteps to the door. Carol's head appeared from behind the door, with a flushed looking face. "Come in, come in," she urged. When the door was closed behind us we saw the reason for Carol's urgency. She was naked. It was amusing to see how far her blush spread. It was good to look at her for other reasons too. Mom asked, "Carol! You're naked." It's hard to fool my mom. Carol looked down shamefully and said, "Donna and Robert have gone bowling, Andrew has gone out with his girlfriend, and all the others are in the tub. Julia is making me serve them drinks, and to wait until you came home to let you in. It's been very embarrassing." In other words, Carol's been having a great time. I said, "Carol, walk ahead of us back to the tub room. I want to watch you walk." Carol blushed again, then led off. Mom chuckled, and quietly said to me, "Ahh, yes, I remember now. I had forgotten about Carol's 'kink'. I guess Julia is demonstrating it again." We walked toward the hot tub room in silence, then just before we got there Mom said to me, "I'm sorry I said too much to the doctor." I had also been thinking about it, and was ready for this. First I called ahead to Carol, "Carol, you go ahead. We'll be there shortly." I stopped, as did Mom. When Carol was out of sight I said, "Yes, you did. Imagine if he notes in my file that I seem to heal faster than other people and then in five years time someone in authority is suspicious about me and reads that file. He might decide that breaking a few of my bones and timing their healing would be an excellent way of testing to see whether I'm normal or not. That would be a very bad thing. Not only the pain, but I can't exactly control how fast I heal, can I? So that experiment would end up confirming that I aren't normal, then God knows what they'd do to me. -- "There was NO need for you to explain ANYTHING to the doctor. I'd say, 'Who the hell cares whether he understands or not, ' but the truth is that I care VERY much that he DOESN'T understand about me. The less he knows, the less chance there is of him getting curious. His job was to make sure my arm had healed. We could all see from the X-rays that it had, so it was time to leave. You even heard the doctor joke about me breaking more bones. That sent a shiver up my spine. That was EXACTLY the reason Vanessa suggested that the less anyone knows about my uniqueness, the less chance there is of someone accidentally saying too much. If I wasn't convinced before, I certainly am now. In the future I will refuse to answer some of your and Dad's questions about my uniqueness, regardless of your being my parents, if there is no need for you to know." So there! That should give me exactly what I want: the ability to refuse to answer any question I don't want to. I must remember to thank Vanessa for that. I almost felt like going back to thank the doctor for his joke about my breaking my arm again. But, on the other hand, there was a naked Carol in the next room. A difficult decision it was not. There wasn't much for Mom to say. Guilt is a great way to get someone to do what you want. I led off, and we resumed our walk to the hot tub room. When we entered, Dad and Prof were in the tub on one side, with Julia and Vanessa on the other. Carol was sitting outside the tub massaging Julia's shoulders. Upon her seeing us, Julia called out, "There are swimsuits hanging on the hooks," to which Julia pointed, and there was a suit for Mom and me. #3: In keeping with the 'getting Carol to do things' theme, I had an idea. I walked straight toward the door that led to the Guys' Room, calling behind me, "Carol, bring my swimsuit please and come help me get undressed." I'm SO helpless! Carol happily bounded across the room to grab my swimsuit off the peg. I walked into the Guys' Room and Carol followed immediately after. As soon as the door closed behind us I took her into my arms and kissed her. I also immediately put one hand onto her pussy and probed it with my fingers. "Why is your pussy so wet?" "Because Julia is being so nice to me." Good answer. I kissed and probed some more. My question had been answered but I like being thorough. We weren't supposed to be playing around too much until after the damned trial, so I had to stop myself. I stood back and said, "Start undressing me, please Carol." She started doing so, saying, "I LOVE to obey your orders, especially that one." She removed my sweater, folded it and placed it on a nearby seat. After she had similarly placed my shirt, she asked, "Can I look at your arm?" I have a policy of never saying "No" to beautiful, naked, wives (mine, I mean), so I said, "You can look at any part of me you like." Carol giggled, and said, "Goody, but just the arm for now." She reached out and gently - very gently - grabbed hold of my right arm. I said, "There's no need to be gentle. Other than its being white, it's as good as new. Treat it just like my other arm." She held it up horizontally across her front, then leaned forward and rubbed her breasts against it. I thought that was an excellent use for an arm. She was still being gentle, so after a few more rubs I put my arms around her and pulled her into a kiss. Mid-kiss I bent her over backward so my right arm was the one holding her up. I broke the kiss, and said, "See, strong enough to hold you up." We kissed some more, I stood her up, and we resumed the undressing part of my getting ready for the hot tub. Carol removed my pants, folded and placed them. Then she knelt down beside me and pulled down my shorts. Somehow my cock accidentally ended up in her mouth, and she had great trouble getting it out, even though she tried repeatedly. After only three or four minutes, she managed to remove it. I was very disappointed. Carol, still holding it firmly, said, "I think they'll suspect we've been misbehaving if you went back into the room with this lovely thing standing proud in your swimsuit. I think we should do something to make it go away, don't you?" I laughed, and said, "If I went back WITHOUT an erection, then they'd REALLY be suspicious!" Carol giggled. "Haha, you might be right." I said, "All this playing around is very hard for me, pun intended. I want to make love to you so much it hurts, which means it'd probably be a good idea for us to go back to the hot tub. Pass my swimsuit please, my sexy darling." "Aww." But she did it, right after kissing my cock goodbye. After I joined them all in the pool - Mom had somehow managed to beat me back even though I'd had twice as many people as normal involved in helping me undress - Carol said, "Mark, Mom, would you like something to drink?" I noticed that there were glasses already placed around the tub, so I ordered after Mom. Carol went back to the Guys' Room to fetch them. On her return, after the drinks had been handed over, Julia made her stand beside the tub. Julia turned to Mom and said, "You expressed some doubt whether Carol got off on being embarrassed. Shall I tell her to spread her legs and hold her pussy open for all of us to inspect?" I couldn't swear to it, but I thought I saw Carol's pussy throb (I happened to be looking at it at the time. Not an unlikely coincidence). I didn't even know they could throb. I'll have to look into that some more. Mom laughed, and said, "I don't think that's necessary. I'm convinced already." Carol laughed, looked Mom in the eyes and smiled, then said, "Aww." I don't know whether Carol intended it to be, but it was actually a very smart comment because it let us know that she was well aware that Julia was playing with her, and that it was with Carol's consent and enjoyment. Julia said, "Come join us in the pool please, wife. I want to cuddle with you." ^ My right arm became the topic of conversation, and I had to hold it up for inspection. Dad asked, "How come it doesn't look like a stick?" Mom opened her mouth to reply, then looked at me. I said, "It's okay within this group, Mom, especially if I'm holding the evidence up in the air." Mom smiled and said, "The doctor was surprised by that too. The X-ray showed no break and a perfectly fine bone. Not even the usual bulge around the healed break. It looks like Mark's Aikido teacher was right. I find it amazing that some people can train themselves to heal bones faster and keep their muscle tone the way Mark has, but that's what his teacher expected." I said, "It's mentioned in my Aikido books at home, Mom. I'll show you when we get back, although they don't say much." There were a few questions about it being sore at all, was it strong, that sort of thing. All easily answered. Dad was particularly impressed, saying, "Every other broken arm or leg that I've seen, which is quite a few, always come out of their casts looking very thin and weak." Julia said, "This reminds me of when Mark had to fight the last bully - remember the football player who wanted me to go on a date with him? Mark couldn't fight properly with the cast on his arm and I was very worried for him. I nearly yelled out to the bully that I would go on a date with him if he left Mark alone, but I was afraid that he'd rape me. How often have you feared being raped, Mom and Felicity? #4: #3: Vanessa said, "All too often, I'm sorry to say. Especially with a husband like Prof, unfortunately." #2: Prof said, "Yeah. We've talked about this a few times. Even in my prime it's unlikely I would've been able to protect her because of my size and leg. Or rather, 'lack of size and lack of leg', haha." #3: #4: I looked down at Prof's legs, but they were hidden under the bubbles. Prof saw me looking, and said to me, "You look puzzled, Mark. I guess Julia's never told you?" She'd never told me anything about Prof's legs, so I said, "No. I don't think so." Julia said, "It never came up." Prof leaned back and stuck his right leg up out of the water. Most of it anyway, as it ended in a stump just below the knee. Or since he was pointing his leg upward, maybe "just above the knee" would be better English. It's a confusing language, so you'll have to work out for yourself whether it was his lower- or upper-leg that was missing. "Gosh." I don't think I've ever said "gosh" before in my life, but this seemed like an appropriate time to start. "Seen enough?" "Umm, yes, thank you." Prof laughed as he dropped it back into the water. "I lost it in a car accident many years ago. Get Julia to tell you the story sometime." Julia said, "Mom tells the story FAR better than I do. She should tell it." Vanessa said, "I'd be happy to. Not now as I told it to Felicity and Steven not long ago and it'd be boring for them to sit through it twice." I asked a really intelligent question, "But I've seen you wear two shoes?" Prof said, "Yes. I have a prosthetic lower-leg and foot. I leave it wrapped in a towel in one of the cubbyholes when I take it off to have a soak in this tub, as the steam rusts the buckles too fast if I leave it uncovered." "Oh. You move well though. I've never seen you stumble or anything. I thought you had two legs." Somewhat inane, but the best I could do at the time. Prof said, "I've had years of practice and it's quite easy if the amputation is below the knee. Trouser legs disguise it perfectly so most people have no idea, just like you." I thought it best to say nothing now. Vanessa leaned over and kissed Prof's cheek. "My Hero." He kissed her back, "My Cheap Deal." Mom laughed, and said, "You didn't call her that last time." Prof said, "I like to vary it a bit." Mom, "But what does it mean? It's not exactly romantic, is it?" Julia recited, "Dad would've paid an arm and a leg to have Mom as his wife. It only cost him half a leg, so he got a cheap deal." Obviously Julia had heard the expression explained many times. Mom and Dad laughed. I did too, a little, although I wasn't exactly sure why. Mom said, "I was wrong. It IS romantic." Vanessa said, "Especially considering what it nearly cost him." I could see that Mom and Dad understood, but I was confused again. Julia said, "Wait till Mom tells you the story." Julia was wearing a swimsuit, but I also have a policy of doing what nearly naked, beautiful wives tell me, so I started waiting. Julia said, "We were talking about the fear of being raped. Mom said 'all too often'. What about you, Felicity?" Mom said, "Of course. 'All too often' for me too, even though Steven is a big guy. There have still been plenty of times that I've been alone and scared. Like every single time I'm parked in a dark parking lot or hear footsteps behind me at night and can't see where they're coming from, or plenty of other times. Unfortunately, at those times, wishing Steven was with me doesn't make him appear." I noticed both men had their arms around their wives. Neither looked shocked at the conversation, so it was something they were aware of. Julia said, "The reason I asked is because, since then, I've woken up a couple of times realizing that I was having a dream about being raped. I should have said 'nightmare', except that I was aroused. I'm confused by that. Is having such dreams normal?" Now the guys looked uncomfortable. And I'm including myself in the "guy" category, in case you're not following the story closely enough to have picked up on that nuance of my character. Vanessa said, "Yeah, I think it probably is normal. I can't say I've discussed it much, but I have experienced it, and I can work out the psychology of it quite easily. I think having those thoughts from time-to-time is natural. Not too often - that could be a sign of an imbalance - but sometimes is almost certainly normal. Felicity?" "Yes, same here. I've had them, and even enjoyed them, but I haven't enjoyed the fact that I enjoyed them. Sometimes I'll have a momentary flash which is exciting, but I'd much rather I didn't. Some women enjoy that fantasy more than others. I'm in the 'others' camp." Vanessa said, "Julia, you said you'd had them a couple of times. That's getting excessive in just one week. If you have another one let me know and we might have to get you some counseling." Julia said, "Don't worry about it, Mom. They were both the same night, one after the other, and I haven't had it since. I'm sure it was nothing." #4: Julia had a new topic all ready to go. She said, "I'd like to start researching what we're calling 'mansions' to get an idea of price and suitability. I'd like to visit a few, but no realtor is going to take a little girl like me around to look at million dollar homes. I can call up and make appointments and arrange all the details by pretending to be a secretary, but I'll need to go with either Mom or Felicity. We probably won't be ready to buy for a few weeks, but I'd like to get some initial impressions now in case we find out something that changes our plans. Also, some of the houses we look at might still be on the market when we've got the money so that'll save us time later. What do you two think of my making some appointments for Sunday afternoon. Can either of you take me with you then?" It turned out that both women were only too happy to go look at million dollar homes with Julia. Mom said, "We can tell the realtor that we're acting for the buyer, but that he's too busy himself at the moment. We just won't mention that he's too busy doing schoolwork, haha." Everyone chuckled at that. Prof said, "That raises an issue we haven't discussed. Whose name does the new house go in? I'll be Mark's front man when he earns the money, so the money will start off in my name. In some respects it'd be easier if I used that money to buy the new house in my and Vanessa's names. That way if the ownership of the new house is ever queried, we've got a simple money trail from me back to where the money came from. There'd be no sign of anything unusual going on. -- "If we put the house in Mark's name, which it should be, that might attract some very curious attention which we'd rather avoid. With large sums of money floating around it's a good idea to try and keep things simple but fair, so I suggest that when Vanessa and I buy the new house, at the same time we sell this house to Felicity and Steve for an amount that balances things well, even if that's just one dollar. They'll then have the two existing houses, which they can sell or rent out. We don't know how much the new house will cost, but presuming it's more than this one is worth, does this sound fair to everyone?" Mom said, "It sounds terribly excessive. Giving us this house is unreasonable." Vanessa said, "It's only fair. If anything, it's less than fair because Mark will really be the one earning all the money. Prof will just be fronting him." I said, "No, it's not fair to give me all the credit. My idea was to earn a few tens of thousands. It was Julia that added two zeroes to the target and who had the idea of buying a mansion in the first place, and it's Prof that's going to make it possible to carry out the idea. None of this would've happened without the Williamses." Prof said, "I can see that we will both want to give most of the money to each other, which is a lot better than the greed people usually demonstrate but we need to agree on something, and I think my idea is a good start. There will be, assuming all goes well, a great deal of spare cash floating around. A good chunk of it should be deposited into an off-shore bank - a Swiss bank for example - just in case we have to flee America in an emergency. We could always adjust who gets how much of that, in order to keep the shares fair, however we decide on what fair means. On the other hand, because it's emergency money we should make sure that any one of us can draw on it. If Mark earns us a great deal of extra money we can probably divide it into two piles, one for each family, so we couldn't touch each other's, but would still have enough for an emergency." I spoke up again, "You seem to be assuming that an equal split is fair, and that's by no means clear to me. Maybe a 75/25 split would be fair. I'd argue that the Williamses should get 75%, and you'd no doubt argue that the Andersons should. To my way of thinking all the money gets put into one big pile and we spend it however we need to. If we get low I'll just go and get some more. It's not as if it'll be hard, is it?" Mom laughed and said, "I've got no idea how hard it is. You've refused to tell me! Not that I'm fishing, but did I understand you correctly when you said you can just go get some more. You mean you can make millions of dollars whenever you want?" I looked at Prof, who said, "It looks that way to me. It should work over and over again so, yes, I think so." Dad said, "That's incredible. It's a good thing I enjoy my job or I'd find it hard to get out of bed in the morning." Mom said, "I never thought of that. We could sit in the hot tub and get manicures all day long if we wanted. What a weird life we could have. But let's get the money first, I won't believe it until then." Vanessa said, "I agree. Many times plans seem foolproof right up to the time they fail. My advice presuming we get the money is to buy the house and do the house swap as Prof suggested earlier. I'd suggest we open accounts overseas where we put $1 million in each family's name, which the other family can't touch but Mark can access both. It's for emergencies only, and no one touches it normally. I think that's a fair and sensible precaution. -- "The balance can be kept in a big pile - in one account we can all draw on - as Mark suggested, and we spend it on whatever we want. If Steven wants a new car, he just goes and buys one using that money. If the car goes in his name, no one cares. If Mark wants a new wing on the house, he gets it done and pays for it out of that money. I suggest we don't even keep track of who spends what, as long as it is for the two families. I wouldn't agree to one of us buying diamonds and hiding them, for example. That'd clearly be dishonest, but buying anything that's used should be fine. -- "When the pile gets low, Mark tops it up. If Mark gets a lot of money, either initially or on later forays, we might drop another million or two into the two offshore accounts, but otherwise I like the concept of one big pile for spending money. What we do with The Boys and Donna isn't quite so obvious. Maybe we give them $100,000 each just to keep them happy and provide them with some safety. Donna's money in a trust account maybe. Those amounts won't be significant anyway, so they don't really matter. What do you all think?" We all thought that was fine. In my case, surreal but fine. It was probably surreal for everyone. When it was clear we all agreed, I said, "You said one preposterous thing Vanessa. The idea of me deciding I needed a new wing and just getting it done on my own. That'd NEVER happen. Julia would kill me if I deprived her of the opportunity to do all that planning and managing." I thought of a question, "Julia. I understand why a realtor wouldn't take you seriously, but how come you only asked the moms about going with you? Either of the dads would've been equally credible. They're all adults, after all." All the women immediately started laughing at me, and the two dads quickly joined in. They were clearly laughing at me, but I had no idea why. After they'd all had a good chuckle at my expense, Dad said, "Let me describe the normal house-buying process to you. This is how it works. When it's time to buy a new house, the woman will visit half the houses in the state. Then she'll revisit her favorites at least once more, but more likely two or three more times. Those favorites will be analyzed every which way, at least 95% of the thoughts would never occur to a guy..." "At LEAST 95%," said Mom helpfully. " ... Yes. Let's just say 99% would never occur to us. She'll narrow her list down to her top five or so choices. She already knows which one they'll buy, but the next step is to invite the man to visit all five. During the visits he'll be repeatedly asked for his opinion, which women do just so they can laugh up their sleeves at us. After all the favorites have been viewed he'll be asked which one he wants to buy. When he picks the wrong one, which he always will, he'll be asked whether he considered a particular factor. Of course he hadn't, and that'll eliminate that house. If he's silly enough to ask why the house was in the shortlist in the first place, he'll never get an answer he can understand. He'll be invited to select another house. This will continue until he picks the right house, usually on his fourth or fifth guess. His woman will say that he's very clever and agree that he's made a good choice. Then they'll buy that house." Dad turned to Mom to ask, "Have I described the process well, dear?" Mom said, "I think you made the man seem too important, but otherwise not too bad, dear." Prof said, "If either Steven or I went and saw a house, even if we spent twelve hours studying it and considering every possible criteria we could think of, when we came back and reported to our wife, we'd be asked questions we'd failed to think of, and our opinions would be completely ignored. She'd go and visit it herself, and would form her own opinion, almost certainly completely different from ours. Women believe that men are useless at house choosing." Vanessa said, "Of course, in this case it's quite different." #3: #2: "Yes," agreed Mom. "This will be much more complicated. We have to evaluate every house in terms of being able to operate two families from within it. There's simply no point in even pretending that a man could have a useful opinion. Vanessa, Julia and I will find our new home and then we'll show it to you, just before we show you where to sign on the contract." Everyone started laughing again. It felt like only half of it was directed at me this time, the other half being at the generally absurdity of men thinking they could contribute to such an important decision. Carol came over and sat on my lap, hugged me, and tried to make me feel better, "They shouldn't laugh at you so much. It's not your fault you've got so much to learn about women." We all got out of the tub not long after that. It was quite eerie watching Prof climb out, hop over to his cubbyhole, unwrap his prosthetic and put it on. Everyone wandered off to get dressed. A naked Carol helped me dress, which I justified on the grounds that it was her that had undressed me in the first place. When I was dressed - which took an unsurprisingly long time - I told Carol to go get her clothes and to bring them back and dress in front of me. She was back in seconds because they'd been in one of the cubbyholes next door. I quite enjoyed her dressing for me, proving I have some rather weird perversions. I was surprised how clumsy Carol was, as she kept dropping her underwear and having to bend over to pick them up again. Eventually, sadly, Carol was dressed and we went in search of the others. We found Julia in the kitchen with a snack already prepared for me. "I thought getting Carol to help you dress might've made you hungry." It had certainly stimulated some appetites. The snack took care of one of them. After that we hung out with the parents for a little while. It wasn't long until Robert brought Donna back. Donna loudly reported that she'd had a great time. She made sure Mom was looking when she kissed Robert's cheek as a thank you. Mom didn't bite though. Mom declared it was time to head home, "Since Mark has an early start tomorrow morning." Donna exclaimed, "But I haven't had time for a swim in the tub. I wanted to show ... umm to swim for a while." Approximately nobody was fooled by her attempted recovery, and everyone else laughed at her. Mom said, "Too bad young lady, although I have my doubts about the 'lady' part of that sentence. It's time to go home." Donna agreed with surprisingly little argument, and soon we were on our way home. In the car Donna asked me again whether I was sure I was going to win. I wished I'd remembered to tease her by walking in circles on the way out to the car, but I'd missed my chance. So I just reassured her again. It was probably a good idea not to tease her as she seemed excessively concerned about my winning. I was sitting in the middle of the backseat, with a girl to either side. I whispered into Carol's ear, "Pretend to fall asleep quickly tonight. I'm going to come in and tease Donna. You might enjoy this." I knew I was going to. I hadn't been able to get it out of my mind since her complaining about not having time to "umm, swim" in the tub. ^ At home we went to our bedrooms quickly. Especially Carol who loudly declared, "I'm very sleepy. I think I'll fall asleep quickly tonight." I waited for about five minutes after the house had settled down, then I went and knocked very quietly on the girls' door. As soon as I had knocked I realized I didn't want Donna to call out in case it was heard by Mom and Dad, whose bedroom is next to my sisters', so I opened the door immediately. Why wait? Carol had no modesty in front of me, and Donna was shortly not going to have much left either. I got the door open without any call, and saw the dark room suddenly get lighter as someone had turned on their bedside light. I entered and looked at Donna and Carol. Donna was in bed, but sitting up slightly as it was her that had just turned the light on. Carol was lying in bed, facing Donna, but apparently asleep. Donna whispered, "You're too late. Carol's asleep." "I haven't come here to see Carol. I've come to see you." "Oh. What about? You're still going to win the race, aren't you?" I reassured her yet again, "Yes, the race is fine. Don't worry about that. I have come because I need to inspect your breasts. You haven't shown them to me recently." Not for two whole days! "Stand up and take your top off." I managed to bite off the "please" that almost automatically tried to follow. This was the first time I'd been anything like sexually aggressive with Donna. Her showing me her breasts in the tub was one thing, but this was a lot more. She couldn't quite believe it. "You want to see my breasts?" "Yes. Please hurry up, I don't have all night. I have a race I have to win tomorrow morning, in case you've forgotten." Donna was getting out of bed even before I'd finished the last sentence. She pulled off her top and dropped it on her bed, still looking at me as if she couldn't believe what I was doing. "Turn sideways to the light please, sweetie, so I can get a good look at them in profile." She did so. She was now facing Carol and I hoped Carol wouldn't open her eyes yet. I walked up to very close to Donna's side, and bent down so I could look across the flat of her chest to see how much the nubbins stood out. Her arms were slightly forward, stopping me get a perfect profile. I remembered what Prof had done to Carol, so I said, "Put your hands on your head, darling." The affectionate term would play with her mind even further. Donna's hands jumped to her head. "Move your elbows back. Good. Whenever I inspect your breasts in the future, this is the way I want you to stand after you take your top off. Okay?" "You want to inspect them again?" "Yes. I will be inspecting them regularly. Once or twice a week. This is a good way for you to stand as it makes them stick out more and gives me an easy look at them." "Why do you want to look at my breasts?" "I don't want to tell you yet. You haven't reached your menarche yet have you?" I'd had to pause to think how to phrase the key word, and nearly tripped over it, but I got it out correctly. "Umm. Not yet. Do you want me to?" "Just tell me when you have, okay? Tell me right away. I want to know. Now hold still while I have a good look." I crouched down. Now that Donna was no longer looking directly into my eyes, I gave Carol a quick glance. I could see a glimmer of light between her barely open eyelids. Good. She'll get a real buzz out of teasing Donna about this while pretending not to know anything about it. I looked across Donna's chest, and saw exactly what I'd seen two days ago, two little bumps. I said, "Hmm." I had no real idea why, I just had to say something. I reached out with my right hand and said, "What does this feel like?" as I lightly grabbed her nearest nipple between my fingertips. Judging by Donna's reaction, it felt pretty damned good! She sucked in her breath, then said "Ahh, good, I guess." There was a faint moan running through her speech, so "good" seemed accurate. I felt her up for about thirty seconds more, just rubbing my fingertips up and down the small, raised, hard ring that was under her nipple, and across the nipple itself. It was clear that it was starting to feel better than "good". I moved my hand to her other breast, and said, "And how does this one feel?" She was already in a good mood, and she had no hesitation telling me that it felt "Good too." Spoken with considerable more certainty than the first time. I played with that nipple for the same time. Then I reached up to her far shoulder and pulled her around to face me better. I reached out with both hands and started playing with both nipples at the same time, then I asked, "Does this feel better?" I could see the answer on her face even before I asked the question, but she replied, "Oh, yes. Very good." She even leaned forward a little, to increase the pressure of my contact. Over the thirty seconds that I played with them she got noticeably more aroused, and was starting to make groaning sounds in sync with my rubbings. I stopped and dropped my hands to my side, causing Donna to moan, "Aww." I replied, "Okay. Good. They're coming along nicely. They've got a lot of growing to do yet, but I definitely want to keep an eye on them. I want you to come to my room once or twice a week, take your top off and let me inspect them. Okay?" I thought I'd been quite clever specifying 'once or twice', because if she came twice or more then I'd know that she was happy to participate. I wanted to judge her happiness because I didn't want to be doing this if she didn't want me to. "Okay. What nights?" "I'll leave that up to you. If I'm asleep, wake me because your breasts are important." These days I find that even if I stay up very late for some reason or other, I always feel fresh and alert in the morning, so missing a bit of sleep isn't something that bothers me. Especially because telling Donna to wake me made it seem that something unusually important was at stake. "Really?" "Truly." I had a sudden thought, "Can you do anything to make them grow faster, like drinking lots of milk or something?" Donna giggled at me, trying to keep it quiet but finding my comment very amusing. I even saw Carol struggle to hold in a laugh. I guess I'd gotten that wrong. It had seemed logical to me, but obviously not. Donna giggled out a, "No." I figured it might be a good idea to give her a reason to talk with Carol, so I said, "You might want to ask Carol about that. Carol has beautiful breasts so maybe she knows something you don't." "Umm. I don't think so. I think she's just lucky. I don't really want breasts that large anyway." "Why not?" "They'd make it harder for me to do some of my sports. You wouldn't mind, would you?" I knew whether I minded or not was irrelevant, as they weren't going to grow to my specification. The answer was obvious, "I love Carol's breasts and I love Julia's even though hers are a completely different size. I'm sure I'll love yours no matter what size they are when they stop growing." -- I thought of a nice, warm, additional piece of bullshit, "I am not checking to see how big they are. That doesn't worry me, they'll be beautiful anyway. I'm checking to see how mature they are, how fully developed. I want to watch then grow so I will know when they start slowing down, because that will tell me you are nearly ready." "Ready for what?" "It's too soon to tell you." "Oh." "Anyway, the inspection's over. Thank you. You can go back to bed now. I hope you didn't mind my doing this?" Donna made not move to go back to bed. She turned to face me completely and said, "No, I didn't mind. I will come to your room like you asked. I wish I knew why you wanted me to, though?" "I can't tell you yet, I'm sorry." I wasn't sorry. I figured she'd get more enjoyment this way, even if it probably didn't seem that way to her. Actually, I figured we'd BOTH get more enjoyment this way. "Goodnight, sweetie." I kissed her on the cheek and turned to leave the room. I managed to turn halfway around before I was hugged. Donna declared, "I love you, you know? You're a wonderful brother." "I love you too, sweetie. If I didn't I wouldn't be interested in your body." Which was one of the few true things I'd said. As teenage males measure these things, Donna didn't have a body. Not yet anyway, maybe when she got her menarche. I wouldn't normally give girls who looked like her a second glance, let alone want to touch them. It was my emotions toward her that made teasing her this way fun. I gently pulled her hands away and resumed leaving the room. I'd only taken a couple of steps when I remembered the knock/"Enter" issue. I turned around again. Donna still hadn't moved. I said to her, "In the future, I won't knock on your door when I come in. I'll just open it and enter. Would you please tell Carol that, and also tell her not to lock the door anymore. Nor you either." "We don't lock it anyway, but I'll tell her what you said." I could see Carol's eyes wide open behind Donna so there wasn't any need, but I wanted Carol and Donna to talk with each other about this. Partly so Carol could tease Donna into an even more erotic mood, but mostly so Carol could find out if Donna was unhappy. "Thank you, sweetie. Goodnight." "Goodnight." Donna still hadn't moved by the time I closed the door behind me. Thank goodness for go-softs. The moment I was out of the girls' room I got hard. Not "as hard as nails" (one of the few expressions I didn't learn from Mom), but still hard. Teasing Donna had been sexy fun, and it doesn't take much of a sexual element to make me hard. As Mom had told me once, just the wind changing direction will do it to a boy my age. Donna not seeing me get hard would be another aspect of my teasing her, as it had been with Carol. On my way to bed I couldn't help thinking about how wonderful go-softs were. Of all my special abilities: TK, running forever, independent eyeballs, even my increased IQ (which wasn't really true or an ability); none of them had come close to being as important to me as go-softs. The Annette Neumeyer incident had turned my life around. I should have been completely humiliated by that, instead I'd triumphed because of go-softs. Julia was convinced I was special by our first two long sex sessions (I'm not counting the restaurant garden episode, as that was hardly a "session"), and I knew that without go-softs each of those sessions wouldn't have lasted six minutes, let alone six hours. Someone ought to invent a pill to stop guys blowing off, as they'd make a fortune! Never mind that Viagra pill which does the opposite. Those scientists must have forgotten what it was like to be a teenage boy, because there was a huge market for an anti-Viagra. Just enough dosage to hold a guy back from going off for long enough to give his girl a good time. I chuckled when I imagined teenage girls covertly dropping two or three tablets into their boyfriend's drinks. If the scientists were smart, they'd make them highly soluble. I was still chuckling to myself as I was about to order myself to sleep. I remembered my request that Donna wake me when it was Nubbins Inspection Time. I wondered whether I could be roused from my sleep when I had ordered myself to sleep until the morning. That was something I should get the girls to do the next time we were in bed together. It might be a very good idea to find that out before someone had to try to wake me because the house was on fire. ------- Chapter 63: The 10K Running Race Saturday, April 16, 2005 The family got up earlier than normal for us on a Saturday because the race was early and the competitors all had to gather well before to be told whatever it was we were going to be told. I didn't know anything about such things, but apparently there was more to it than just running fast when someone yelled "Ready, Set, Go!" Mom, Dad and I were sitting at the breakfast table when the girls marched in to give me my morning kisses. Donna cheated by breaking step, running ahead, throwing her arms around my neck and kissing my cheek several times. "I LOVE you, Mark. You are the BEST brother ever!" I didn't want to turn around to look at Donna while she was still kissing me because I could easily imagine that my cheek kisses would turn into mouth kisses, and that wouldn't be good in front of Mom and Dad. I kept looking straight ahead until Carol caught up and gave me my traditional morning cheek kiss. Mom's reaction to Donna's enthusiasm was, "You must be REALLY excited over Mark's maybe winning the race." I couldn't see her face clearly as it was too close to that eyeball, but I heard her say, "What? Umm, yes." She might as well have said, "No, I have an entirely different reason for kissing my brother so much this morning." Donna, for all her good points (#4: ) is not the sharpest pencil in the pack. #1: #4: #1: Mom and Dad accepted Donna's transparent cover-up. Carol stood, and said, "Sorry we're late coming to the table. I had a lot of trouble getting Donna out of bed this morning. I don't think she got much sleep last night. She must've been too excited." I laughed to myself. After this morning's greeting from her, there wasn't much doubt that Donna welcomed her brother's attention, but had there been any doubt, Carol's comment would've removed it. The trouble was that Mom and Dad had already been alerted by Donna that something was up. Carol probably hadn't realized that, otherwise she wouldn't have said what she had. I knew Mom and Dad weren't horrified over the idea thanks to the Williams' superb genetic theory, but I didn't want them to get the wrong idea, or even worse, the right idea, so I said, "It's a good thing I got plenty of sleep last night. I'd hate to upset Donna by losing today." Donna anxiously asked, "You're definitely going to win today aren't you? You did get enough sleep? You feel good?" I'm sure she would have carried on expressing her anxiousness, but I answered, "Relax, Donna. I'm sure I'll win. How hard can it be to run around a track a dozen times, or however many times it is?" Donna said, "It's a street race, not a track. That doesn't make a difference does it? Please tell me you'll still win? I've seen you running on the sidewalks and you run well. You'll win, won't you?" Around a track would've been a little easier for me because I could hold my optimal speed easily, whereas up and down hills complicated my pace setting. Just to play safe I asked her, "The course won't have lots of uphill and downhill parts will it?" Donna answered, "I don't know the course, but that'd be silly. It'll be reasonably flat. They normally choose routes with small undulations for long races because they make for faster times. That's okay, isn't it?" I had no idea why small undulations was better than flat [[it's because it varies the stresses on the muscles]], but I said, "It's perfect, Donna. Even hills would probably have been fine, but flat or undulations is perfect. It should be easy for me to win." Actually, it should be even easier than "easy", as at my optimal speed it seems to be effortless. The girls sat down and breakfast was resumed. Donna became worried about how much I was eating. I had to tell her to relax. The alternative was for me to eat less and that wasn't going to happen. Dad asked, "Donna, are you okay with the new room arrangements?" Donna wasn't so much "okay" as "confused". After a few seconds Dad said, "Hasn't anyone mentioned changing rooms to you?" "Changing rooms?" Mom said, "Carol has requested that you move into Mark's room so that Mark can move into yours. Carol wants the two small beds replaced by a double bed so she, Mark and sometimes Julia can sleep together at night. You'd have your own room - at long last - so I'm sure you'd like that." Donna declared to Carol, "You lucky devil! Umm." Donna looked around the table, then added, "How come no one told me this before?" Mom said, "It only came up last night and I guess there were so many other things on our minds we forgot. You were watching your DVD or bowling most of the evening, so you were busy too. But now that you know, what do you think?" Donna was thoughtful for a few seconds, then, "It's a good idea for Carol and Mark, and I've always wanted my own room, but I'm going to miss Carol. It'll be cool for them though. I'm happy for them. When do we swap?" Mom said, "We're not so sure. There are a couple of complications. Mark's having sex with anyone, even Julia, must be kept secret until after the trial. We were intending to replace the single beds with a double soon but to hold off swapping you and Mark over until the day the trial finishes, but there's another complication that we don't know how will pan out yet. I think we'll wait a few days to see how that's looking. One way or another, Mark and Carol will be sharing a room soon and you'll have your own. Maybe in a couple of weeks, or maybe a month or so. Is that okay with you?" It had better be okay with Donna or Carol was going to be VERY annoyed. I wouldn't be pleased either. Happily Donna said, "I think it's cool. Just make sure their new bed doesn't have squeaky springs, haha." Mom was surprised, and quickly asked, "How do you know about squeaky springs?" "Duh! Because I've seen a hundred jokes about them on TV." I think Mom wasn't too happy at being "Duh'ed". On the other hand, even Mom knew that "Duh" was a reasonable answer. Mom bit back her first response, then said, "You're right. Sometimes I forget about things like that. You should have been more polite though, just saying 'From TV' would have been better." "Come on Mom! You're so smart I hardly ever get to outsmart you. Let me have a bit of fun sometimes." Perhaps Donna was smarter than I gave her credit for. Mom accepted that excuse with good grace. Because I'd started breakfast so much earlier than the girls, I finished before them and began gathering up the dirty dishes to wash them. This was perfectly ordinary behavior, but Carol objected to it this time. She took a hurried mouthful of her breakfast, jumped up and intercepted me. With her mouth still chewing, she resorted to making hand motions to get me to stop. It took her a while to clear her mouth enough to tell me that my housework was now hers. Apparently I wasn't allowed to do it anymore. Imagine that, the LORD was not allowed to do something. Not for the last time, I was sure. We'd discussed this issue last night but I hadn't thought about it much. Certainly not enough to overcome a lifetime's of habit instilled by Mom. I don't have any problem doing the breakfast dishes or other little things like that. Especially breakfast as I'm up early and often have to wait for the girls to get ready so I might as well do something useful, but Carol wasn't allowing it. I told her, "Don't worry about it, Carol. Finish your own breakfast please. I don't mind doing them and I have nothing better to do." Carol was better prepared than I thought, "Your Aikido teacher gave you a whole lot of books last Wednesday. I haven't seen you touch them. Have you read them all?" "Um, no. I've read about half of them and they didn't look very useful to me. I think my situation is too different from what the authors expected." "But you haven't read all of them, have you? So maybe there's something useful in one of the remaining ones, and I know that now your cast is off you can go for your license. Don't you need to study the Driver Manual before that test? So you've got more important things to do than waste your time doing the dishes." It appeared that I did. I'm a magnanimous Lord, so I said, "Okay, you've convinced me this time. But please at least finish your own breakfast first." Mom said, "I'll make sure she does. Doing chores is good for your character, so your father and I won't let you out of all of them. Carol will sometimes have better things to do than your chores too, but Carol makes a good argument in this case so go do your studying." Carol declared, "I don't have ANYTHING better to do than serve Mark." Mom laughed, and said, "We'll see how long that attitude lasts. It can be boring doing chores. Doing yours and Marks will get old." Carol was firmly of the opinion that, "No it won't!" Everyone knew that arguing was going to be a waste of time so I wandered back to my room, leaving Carol to her breakfast and the dishes. I half expected to hear Donna say, "I'll help do Mark's chores," but she didn't. I guess she hadn't been corrupted by the "serve Mark" bug yet. Just the "be sexually perverted with Mark" bug. She's not totally dumb. Carol was right that I should read the Aikido books, if only so I could return them to Sensei on Thursday, so I sat at my desk, opened two of them and started skimming. Several minutes later Mom popped in for a chat. After listening to her for a minute or two, I realized that when Mom's polite verbiage was stripped away, she was warning me that she'll be keeping an eye on me to make sure I didn't take advantage of Carol. "How can I take advantage of her? I'm asking seriously. I can't take sexual advantage of her. I can't take advantage of her doing my chores because she's already determined to do them. It's too complicated to explain now but Carol needs to do things for me to make her feel good about herself, and about all she can do is chores so it'd be mean to deprive her of those. I'll make sure I'm appreciative though, and try and do things for her to show that." I could see that Mom wasn't interested in either of these issues. I was at a loss for what else to say, so I asked, "If you can think of another way I could accidentally take advantage of her, please give me a specific warning?" Mom vacillated, not answering the question. I was at a loss until, #4: I asked, "Can I guess that you're worried that I might show off to my teammates by getting Carol to be a naked waitress for them, or something like that?" Mom nodded, "Yes, that sort of thing. It's abusive and..." "Mom! Stop worrying. Have you ever seen me be boastful, let alone using my sister in that way. It's pointless your worrying about things that will never happen." #4: #2: Mom said, "Okay. Just remember that I'm watching! Also, Donna seems to be surprisingly affectionate to you this morning?" Mom's statement was actually a question, so I had to answer. "Yeah. I noticed that too. She obviously doesn't know me very well." "Oh, why do you say that?" Mom was no doubt expecting one of my usual self-depreciating remarks. "She spent so long kissing my cheek that I was getting worried that I'd never get back to my breakfast. Keeping me from my food is NO way to make me like her." My waiting breakfast had been a real concern of mine at the time Donna had been kissing my cheek. Mom laughed, and then said, "How do you feel about her interest? Other than its effect on your stomach, I mean." "How do you expect me to feel about a girl I love showing she loves me? I know it's not that simple because, just like you probably do, I suspect her type of love might be starting to change. She's been making quite a few sexy jokes recently, so it looks like that topic's on her mind. I guess I'll just wait and see. Maybe it's just a phase, or maybe she'll find a more suitable guy at school? She's still very young, or her body is anyway, so I think waiting and seeing is best." #2: #1: Mom said, "Okay. You seem to have a good attitude and she's obviously happy. Just remember that I've got my eye on you." "I hope you don't trip, Mom." "Huh?" "You're keeping an eye on me for Carol, and another eye on me for Donna. I'd be careful walking around if I was you, in case you trip." "Ha-ha, funny boy." Talking about eyes that way gave me an idea. I figured that giving Mom a reminder of my uniqueness wouldn't go amiss, as I liked the idea of her respecting my wishes more for the very likely case of my wanting to do something Mom might object to. I figured that was likely to happen sooner rather than later, especially with Donna being fun to play with. I said, "Talking about eyes reminds me of something. I don't think I've ever showed you this. See how there are two books open on my desk?" Mom nodded. I continued, "Sit on the bed, hold the books side by side on your lap, like this. Okay. Now watch my eyes." I had moved my chair so that I was facing Mom, and I started reading the two books. I used either hand to turn that side's page, and carried on reading. After a minute or so, which was four or five pages per book as their pictures made them quick to get through, I looked up at her eyes. She had a look on amazement on her face. Mom said, "You read both books at the same time?" I nodded, saying, "You can ask me questions about what was on the preceding pages if you want to test me." "I'll take your word for it. How on Earth did you learn to do that?" "I just discovered it one day. Most of the things I can do I discovered by accident. It's very useful when it comes to studying so much, that's for sure." Mom said, "I cannot imagine how you can do that. Not only moving your eyes separately, but how does your brain manage to think about and remember what you are reading?" I answered, "How does your brain think about and remember one book? You don't know the how of it and neither do I. I just know that I can do two. I showed you just to remind you that there are more than a few weird things about me. You probably don't have to keep an eye on me as much as with an ordinary boy. If I do play around with Carol or Donna, and even though I love them I accidentally do something I shouldn't, it's not going to be the end of the world. I'll do my best, which I think is pretty good, but if I make a mistake then I'll learn from it. The Williamses are very big on that." "I half agree with you. But the other half of me is still your mother and I'll jump in if I see something I don't like." I hit her with a low blow, "The way you did when Carol mentioned finding more girls for me to play with?" Mom's face turned white. Oops, I'd overdone it. I quickly apologized, "Sorry Mom. I shouldn't have said that. You obviously understand a lot better now than you did then. I apologize, that was an unfairly low blow." "Yeah, it was. Very low, but a powerful reminder that I have to think before I jump in. I'll try to remember that. Do you mind if I tell your father about your reading two books at once?" #4: "I can't imagine that I'd ever want you to keep secrets from Dad, or vice versa. I think you can safely assume that you can tell him anything you want about me, and he can to you too. It'd be tiresome for you and Dad to be checking every little thing with me all the time, although I very much appreciate that you did ask. If something ever comes up that has to be kept secret, I'll specifically request secrecy at the time, otherwise just share away." "Good answer. You're learning a thing or two. Okay, I'll leave you to your double reading." Five minutes later Julia called on my cellphone and we had a quick chat in which she wished me luck for my race. I quietly told her that I'd had some fun with Donna last night, as she'd suggested, and that it'd gone very well judging by Donna's happiness this morning. Julia laughed and said she was looking forward to hearing all the details. For herself, she was excited about her day with Carol. She told me to imagine how much fun they'd have shopping all day together. I imagined it, and told her I'd rather go to the dentist. We agreed to disagree. Ten minutes after that Donna stuck her head in the door, "You're definitely going to win, aren't you?" "Haha. Yes, Donna. Nothing has changed in the last quarter hour that'd make me lose. Can I change the subject?" "Sure." I was feeling very mellow toward her, as a result of my seeing her happiness at breakfast and Mom's implied speech about responsibility. The sexual fun I'd have with her will be fun, but it's not a big deal like it had been when Julia first got me to play around with Carol. I was in the mood to say, "I'm glad you love me, Donna." Donna wobbled a bit, blinked a couple of times, then responded with, "I'm glad you love me too." "Good. We understand each other then. I WILL run the best I can for you." "Um, thanks. Mom says we're about ready to go." Donna ran down the hall. I was ready so I followed her more sedately, to save my energy (haha). Carol kissed me good luck in the kitchen. She was staying here because Julia and Vanessa were picking her up just before the stores opened. The kiss was good luck in itself, being the sexiest she'd given me in front of our parents. Carol managed to pull me to one side, and whispered in my ear, "She's pretty much ready." Guessing she was referring to Donna, I replied, "I'm not." Carol's answer was, "Torturer," then she giggled to soften the accusation. In the car Donna held my arm. It appears that she's caught that bug too. I hoped she'd let go before the starter's pistol fired. ^ As soon as the car stopped Donna was out and running, talking to lots of different people she knew. I saw her frequently pointing me out to people. There was a bunch of stuff the other runners and I had to do: get our numbers - I was "58" - attach a little chip thing around our ankles, and listen to the course and safety briefing. We were told not to run into the path of any cars on the streets, which confirmed my opinion that most sports people, soccer players excluded, aren't very bright. Most of it was tedious. We had time to kill before the race started, so I wandered around trying to find Mom and Dad in the crowd. I was around the back still looking when I heard a girl yell out "Hey, handsome!" I looked toward the sound and saw a girl some distance away looking in my direction. She obviously wasn't calling to me so I went back to looking for Mom and Dad. "Hey, handsome!" was repeated even louder. I looked again, and she motioned for me to come over. I pointed at my chest, and she yelled, "Yes, 58." She was a fair distance away, which explained the "handsome" mistake, so I trotted over. When I got closer she called out, "Why didn't you come the first time I called?" I told her, "You called out 'Handsome'. How was I to know that was me? You should have called my number." "You were side-on so I couldn't see it. The race starts in ten minutes and all runners should be in the starting area, not wandering around back here." She was young but presumably still some sort of official since she was carrying a clipboard and wearing the colored bib (I think they call it) which indicated officialdom. "Oh. Sorry, I was looking for my parents." I took a few steps back toward the start line, then had to stop. The girl was in her early-20s, I guessed, and she was quite good looking so I doubted she needed to flirt with every guy who crossed her path. Not to mention that there were handsome, fit, young guys all over the place. Nearly all of whom looked a great deal more impressive than me. They had sleek tops and shorts, fancy shoes, and for all I know, special 'go faster' underwear. I had on an old T-shirt, my usual baggy shorts and old running shoes. Pasty, white legs, and an even pastier right arm completed my less-than-impressive look. At school I was used to girls coming on to me just because I'd been in the newspaper, but that didn't seem the case here, so out of curiosity I asked her, "Why did you call me handsome?" She laughed and said, "Gee, maybe because you're handsome. I like looking at handsome guys." I laughed back and told her, "I hope you find your glasses," as I wandered off. She jogged up beside me and said, "Are you really that modest or are you just blowing me off?" I said, "I choose the third option: I'm not that handsome." "Handsome, modest AND smart. Do you have any plans for tonight?" Now I was flustered. The girls at school I know to ignore even before they open their mouths, but this was different, including because Julia and Carol had said they were planning to line girls up to me to play with. That made quite a big difference. I said, "Ahh, I don't know yet." "Good," she said, as she was writing on the corner of a piece of paper on her clipboard. "My name's Cindy, give me a call this evening and we'll go out somewhere." "Um. I think I'll probably be out celebrating tonight. My girls haven't told me yet though." Cindy had ripped off the corner, and was holding it out to me when she paused and said, "Your girls?" What the heck! It's not as if this actually mattered. So, "My two favorite girls - my girlfriend and my eldest younger sister - will probably want to take me out celebrating tonight. They'd be here today but they've had a serious shopping day planned for a couple of weeks and apparently that's too important to postpone." "Haha. Celebrating what?" "Ahh." It was rather embarrassing to say it, but what the heck. I said, "My winning this race." Cindy said, "Maybe not so modest then, but you sound nice otherwise. Take my number and call me if you want. If you call me, are you going say 'it's number 58', or are you going to tell me your name?" I took the piece of paper and put it in my pocket, saying, "Sorry, rude of me, I'm Mark Anderson. I'll pass your number on to my girlfriend. She's in charge of my social life. See you after the race." I took off, jogging for the starting line as it was getting close to that time. I did manage to catch a glimpse of a bemused looking Cindy before she was left behind. The starting area was full of guys warming up and I joined in. There were well over two hundred runners, most of whom looked like serious athletes. In other words, not like me. The course was a 10k circuit of closed or semi-closed streets around the outskirts of town that ended near the starting area, inside a large park. I knew the streets and they were mostly flat with an occasional undulation, just as Donna had said. I couldn't imagine how they could give me any difficulty. The only problem I could think of was a strategic one. I'd been initially intending to position myself ahead of the otherwise best runner, and sit just ahead of him (by "sit" I mean "standing up and running") but that wasn't going to be possible in this race. There were too many entrants, all of whom would take off at different speeds, some probably faster than my optimal. Plus, because it wasn't a track race, most of them would be out of my sight most of the time. There was only one strategy I could use: run at my optimal pace the whole way, ignoring all the other runners. I didn't want to get a world record, merely to win, so I could ease off near the end if I had a good lead, but it'd have to be a very good lead because I didn't want to get passed in a sprint at the end. A couple of minutes before the start Donna fought her way through to the front of the spectators and called out, "PLEASE, PLEASE win." She looked VERY concerned so I gave her the most confident thumbs-up I could. I briefly saw my parents in the crowd too but they were immediately obscured again. Soon we had to line up for the start. There was quite a lot of jostling for a good starting position. As far as I could tell my only risk of losing - and terribly disappointing Donna - was my being tripped and injured, so I stood clear of the main throng. We had a big starting area, so it wasn't hard to find a clearer space on the side that would be the outside of the first corner. The actual start was less exciting than I imagined. The gun went off and we just started jogging. There wasn't the hectic burst I normally associate with race starts. I guess long races are different. I started cautiously to avoid being tripped, but I was probably overcautious because no one went down. The field spread out quickly, and there were short periods when I could run at my optimal rate, but I was usually running slower because the bunch was still too thick. As best I could, I sat at my optimal rate and ignored other runners, except to move sideways in order to pass them. Most runners - or what seemed like most as I couldn't see more than a fraction of the total at any one time - appeared to be very disciplined in pacing themselves. Not as disciplined as I was intending to be, as I was going to run the entire race at a totally constant speed once I had enough room. They and I were disciplined, but my rate was capable of completing 10k in two minutes under a world record, whereas their rates were much slower, so I did a LOT of passing. The world record was about 28 minutes. I figured I could run it in 26, maybe even very slightly faster without the cast on, although I didn't bother trying to increase my speed from my old optimal rate to see if a new optimal applied. I guessed most runners would run something like 32 to 35 minutes, which was about 20% to 25% slower than my optimal speed. I also guessed that most runners would start running slower than their overall average rate, so call it an average of me running 25% faster than most others, which is HUGELY faster, hence all the passing I was doing. After the first minute or so, when the chaotic start had settled down, no one was passing me. For the next several minutes I ran wide and fast, passing large numbers of my competitors. My pace was reduced below my optimal speed when the course zigzagged because my position on the outside of the field became the inside, and they all merged into me. Fortunately that didn't happen often as the course was a wide loop so most of the corners were on the same side. I was also delayed by the bunching up that occurred around corners when cars were using a still open outside lane. But after the race was a few minutes old I was generally able to sit at my optimal speed. By the time the race had been going for ten minutes I'd passed the vast majority of the field. I was passing fewer and fewer now, and some of them weren't too happy at being passed. I received a few derisory comments. They were clearly annoyed by the casual idiot who wasn't running 'properly', as was obvious by my going far too fast. My passing them was taken as an insult to the serious effort they were putting in. With Donna very much in mind I wasn't the least tempted to fool around with even the most offensive of them, even though it would've been easy to do as they were sweating, panting and clearly exerting themselves very strenuously, while I was just loping along smoothly enjoying myself. They didn't see me for long enough to see how easy this was for me. I enjoyed thinking about it though, as I maintained my constant lope. After about half the race the tone of the surprisingly large crowd became more enthusiastic. I never knew so many people were interested in pointless running; people need to get a life! I could still see runners ahead of me, but not many, and the crowd seemed to be still excited by the recent passing of the leaders. I was presumably catching up on them at a pleasingly rapid rate, since I was catching up to and passing everybody I could see ahead of me. I found the race somewhat boring, so I amused myself by doing some numbers. I worked out that I was probably running 10-15% faster than the guys ahead of me. A football field is about a hundred meters long - I have no idea why I knew that useless fact - so if another runner was a football field's length ahead of me, I'd catch him in about one kilometer. There were about four kilometers remaining, so I could catch anyone within four football fields' length of me. That's presuming they didn't speed up, unless I sped up 10% more than they did, which I was hoping I wouldn't have to. I could run faster if I was willing to fatigue myself, but I feared that my competitors would have greater endurance and higher sprinting speeds than me. The trouble was that I couldn't see four football fields ahead of me. The course turned too much and there were spectators and other obstructions blocking my sight around the corners. On the other hand, I couldn't run much faster, not with 4 km still to go. Donna had made such a big deal out of this that I definitely didn't want to let her down so I was getting worried. I increased my speed just a little, in case no longer carrying the cast made my optimal speed faster. I turned a corner and saw Cindy standing beside the next corner, talking to the official holding a little flag thing to point out the corner. I wanted to show off, so as I got close I called ahead, "Hi Cindy. How's it going?" Her eyesight was good enough to recognize me, "If it isn't Modest Mark. You're looking great! You're sixteenth." #3: That was GREAT to know! I could see twelve runners ahead of me, so there were four out of sight. Hopefully they wouldn't be too far ahead. The lead runner that I could see was about 150 meters ahead, so about 1.5 km to catch him, leaving me about 2.5 km to pass the remaining four. #1: Oops. I laughed to myself imagining how I would've hated this race if I hadn't corrected that mistake. I would've run my guts out trying to catch the remaining guy, not realizing that it was ME, haha. I overtook another guy shortly. Now there were fourteen ahead. I counted down each time I overtook someone, but after I'd moved up a couple more places the crowd started calling out my place for me. By the time I was about a kilometer past Cindy I was in sixth place, and very happy that I could see all five of the runners ahead of me. I might lose sight of them as they turned a corner, but that didn't matter as I knew where they were now. Most importantly, the leader was only about 100 meters ahead so it should take only another kilometer to pass him, leaving me two kilometers spare. I overtook the guy in fifth and he was not happy about being blown past so easily. He grunted and tried to match my speed. He hung on while we passed fourth, but he was forced to give it up soon after. He suddenly grunted and his speed dropped right off. I didn't bother to look back to see if he was still running or not. I was in fourth with three more to pass. I was comfortably expecting victory now. There were about 2.5 km to go, and the leader should be eating my dust in about half a km. I was running slightly faster than what I had previously thought was my optimal. Only very slightly faster, probably not even by 1%, and I was suspecting that just a little bit of fatigue was starting to accumulate, but it was very minor and the race would be over before it mattered. I was in a really good rhythm and happy to stay in it. I loped past the guy in third. He was not going down without a fight. He groaned when I overtook him, then picked up his speed and overtook me back. When he was ahead of me by several yards he slowed down again. I did what I'd done the whole race: just kept running at my rate. Number 3 (the guy in third) frequently looked over his shoulder and was dismayed that I was still coming on. He increased his speed to match mine, to stay ahead. I noticed that Number 2 was also looking back from time to time, doubtless noticing that we were eating into his lead quite rapidly. Number 2 picked up speed somewhat, halving our catch-up rate. (There are probably jargon terms that runners use for what I'm describing, but I haven't got a clue what they are.) We - me and the Number 3 guy just ahead of me - had halved our distance to Number 2 when I saw Mom, Dad and Donna beside the course ahead. Just for the fun of it, and perhaps because I enjoy being unModest Mark, I called out loudly, "Hi Mom. Hi Dad. Hi Donna. Lovely day isn't it? See you at the finish line, sweetie." I was tempted to start singing, but that would've been overdoing it. Donna urged me on REALLY excitedly, and as I passed the family she darted back from the curb and started running for the finish line. I hoped she'd be there to see me cross. Number 3 had not been pleased to hear my conversation. He was breathing very heavily now and his legs were starting to go on him. Just because I was so happy about making Donna so happy, I celebrated by calling out, "Hey, Number twenty four," (as I was "58", he was "24"), "It's about time I start my sprint to the finish. If you want to stay in third you're going to have to pick it up shortly. Just thought I'd let you know." I wondered whether I'd breached "Runners' Etiquette", or whatever. Maybe it's impolite to tease your opponents. I'd not seen anything in the registration papers or heard anything in the briefing which said that talk was not allowed, and I'd heard many other runners talking to each other or making comments at me as I passed them, so at worst I was just being rude. I didn't care about that as I was having too good a time anticipating Donna's happiness. Number 3 seemed inappreciative of my helpful comments though - lies really, as I had no intention of speeding up. He made an effort to speed up, which was just stupid because he lost his rhythm and he was too tired to react properly. His feet got messed up and he crashed to the ground. I easily ran around him, saying nothing. I thought it best not to. There were just under 2 kilometers to go now. Number 2 was twenty yards ahead and Number 1 only ten yards farther ahead, so thirty yards in total. That would have taken 0.3 kilometers at the old catch-up rate, but these guys had picked their speed up significantly so it'd probably take nearly a full kilometer. Number 2 was looking back quite often, Number 1 not at all. I figured that Number 1 could easily hear where Number 2 was, as Number 2 was making heaps of noise. I doubted Number 1 could hear me over the noise of the crowd though, as I was too far back and not panting loudly. I kept on with my incredibly complicated "Mark Anderson Sure Fire 10k Race Winning Strategy." Number 2 looked back and saw I was gaining steadily. He sped up, and within a couple of seconds so had Number 1. They hadn't sped up as much as they had last time and I was happy to see that I was still catching up to them. I guessed they might have halved my catch up rate though, so it might take me slightly more than a full kilometer to pass them. That was a bit worrisome because if they sped up again I might not be able to catch them unless I sped up too. I was now about ten yards behind Number 2 and I thought I'd better gain some information. After the next corner I ran a bit wider so I could get a look at their faces, especially Number 2's as I had a better angle on him. I was very pleased to see that he looked decidedly uncomfortable. Maybe it'd be more accurate to say he was "Markedly uncomfortable." He looked over his left shoulder, but I was to his right so he didn't see me. He panicked and whipped his head around to look over his right shoulder. In his tiredness he lost his rhythm and stumbled. He was slow to recover, and before he'd done so I was past him. Number 1 had obviously been alerted, either by the crowd's reaction to Number 2's faltering or to the sudden absence of Number 2's sounds. Number 1 looked around and spotted me about fifteen yards behind him, and wide to his right. I could see the surprise on his face. He gasped out, "Who. You?" Well, he had asked for it. "Hi. My name's Mark Anderson. Nice to meet you. Are we allowed to shake hands while we're running or should we wait until we finish? I'm not sure how these things work. You're quite a good runner but I hope you don't mind coming second because my little sister REALLY wants me to come first. She's very nice and I wouldn't want to let her down. Do you have a little sister?" He didn't seem interested in talking about his family. His couldn't have been as nice as mine then, snigger. He turned around and just ran, glancing my way occasionally. Runners aren't very social, are they? I continued to make ground on him, even though he was trying very hard to keep me back. I remembered the previous Number 2 and wondered whether he'd recovered from his small stumble and if he was catching up to me. I looked back and he was still running but was a significant distance behind us, and even from my brief glance I could see he was struggling and falling farther behind. He was no threat. The next corner was a right hander and I was already to Number 1's right. He closed in and went around the corner just five yards in front of me. It didn't take me long to move up to being on his heels, and then it was time to pass him. I pulled left and so did he. I pulled farther left and so did he. He was being MOST unhelpful, and after I'd told him how much I wanted to please my little sister! I pulled right and so did he. I noticed that the crowd was loving this, but I wasn't happy at all. I had no idea what the rules were in this case. In particular, if I ran into the back of him would I be disqualified? I was REALLY scared of making any physical contact, and had shied away from him every time he'd moved to block me. He was slowing me down and he was risking upsetting Donna a great deal, so I was getting pissed off. I was still thinking about the problem as we passed the 9 km mark, so only 1 kilometer to go. This was getting damned annoying. I studied him and could see that he was very tired. Although my steady pace was a world-record rate, I figured I was well behind a world record for this race. I'd begun behind the bunch and had started slow in order to cautiously get into the clear before speeding up. There'd been several times in the first third of the race when I'd been forced to slow down because the crowd of runners had bunched up around me. If I had started in a good position and had run clear the whole way, then no one would still be with me, but that hadn't happened. I checked my watch and figured that if we kept up the current rate then we'd finish a couple of minutes over of the world record. I wasn't sure, but that seemed a good time for a local race. The question that had me worried was whether this guy was good enough to run a race at WR+2 minutes? Other than by looking at him now, I had no idea who he was or what he was capable of. He hadn't even introduced himself; how rude was that! The finish was less than three minutes away and I had to decide whether to let him exhaust himself at this rate or to burn past him. I didn't think he could maintain this rate for long, but unfortunately three minutes isn't long. What decided me was that I was pissed off with him blocking me. I was fresh and he was heavily fatigued so I decided that I wasn't afraid of a sprinting race. It even seemed to me that the sooner I started sprinting the better, as there'd be less chance of his surviving it. It was time to make my move. I started panting louder and slapping my shoes on the ground harder, to let him know where I was. We were on the right side of the street. I noisily moved left enough to pass him, just as I had the previous three times. He moved to match. I moved noisily to the left again. As soon as he was committed to heading left again, I went silent, cut right, and ran as fast as I could around his right side. The crowd's reaction alerted him and he checked to his right first (damn!). He saw me and tried to react, but he simply had no bounce left in his legs. I was beside him well before he had a chance to block me, and I was moving a LOT faster than he was. He had no choice but to accelerate himself in an attempt to run me down. I'm not a pro runner, haven't trained for years, have no idea about correct race strategies, and don't even have any of their fancy gear. On the other hand, I was fresh and he had already run 9 km at a very good pace, with the last 1.5 km of it probably being at a considerably higher speed than he'd planned for. I was already going faster than him when he started accelerating, and he never got up to my speed, so I opened up a gap on him and it kept lengthening. Soon I was far enough ahead that I couldn't see him by looking sideways, only by looking backward over my shoulder. I kept to a good semi-sprinting pace and glanced back at him a few times to see if he could force me to run even faster, but he didn't even have what it took to match my speed. I ran another fifty yards then glanced back again. He was ten yards behind me. After another fifty yards, another glance showed him to be twenty yards behind. The next time I looked, he was forty yards behind. I saw him look back to see where the current Number 3 was, which was a LONG way back. I guess I must have stretched the field (I think that's the term). I could almost see Number 2 decide that second was all he was going to get today. He dropped his speed down to a slow jog. I dropped my speed way down too, to something like 20% below my optimal. My fatigue quickly cleared so if he'd made an attempt on me I could easily sprint again, probably all the way to the finish if I needed to. I kept a frequent eye on him but he didn't try anything, or ever seem capable of it. I loped through the finishing tape to great applause, which I pretty much ignored, and a rapturous Donna, which I very much enjoyed. ------- Chapter 64: Donna's Gift Saturday, April 16, 2005 (Continued) Amid the very noisy, backslapping throng, people kept mentioning how great my time was, but I didn't care. I'd originally thought of entering a race to confirm that I could run a world-record time. By the time the race arrived I already knew that I could, so I really only ran it because it was important to Donna. My time was, to me, a pointless piece of information. I knew that if I'd started at the front of the pack and had run at my optimal speed, I would've been several minutes faster than what I'd just achieved, so all my winning time really measured was how much the pack slowed me down, which was useless information to me. Very useless actually, as I had no intention of running in any more organized races. I was happy enough just from seeing how overjoyed Donna was. She was hugging me, kissing me - mostly on the cheeks, but sometimes quickly on the lips too, which was very cheeky of her - and telling everyone who cared to listen that I was her brother. She obviously recognized quite a few people around us because she singled out many of them for special mentions that I was her brother. They were her fellow club members, I guessed. When Number 2 wobbled his way across the line, I tried to congratulate him as I'm magnanimous in victory, but he shied away from me, accusing, "Fucking cheat." That certainly put a damper on my mood, and presumably the mood of the others that heard. I was pleased that Donna ignored his comment. Donna and I moved to the side to clear the finish area and the sore second-place getter, and we just chatted away. I heard the crowd roar louder than normal, and saw the third-place getter cross the line. He was a little too far away for me to congratulate him, and I was still thinking about walking back to do so when then second-place getter went to talk with him. I didn't want to talk with that asshole, so I turned my back on them and concentrated on hugging Donna. Mom and Dad fought their way through and we all got happy together for a while. I thought of getting my phone back from Dad and calling my girls, but the crowd's noise made that impossible. Texting would work but I preferred to wait until I could talk to them. After a few more minutes a number of race officials approached us. One tapped me on the shoulder and demanded that I come with them. The guy who made the demand was not at all polite or friendly. Nor were any of the other guys around us. The presumed head official - because he seemed to be in charge and he was the oldest official around - led off, and I was motioned to follow him. I shrugged and did so, with the family following along. I was taken into a tent that had been erected for the officials. My parents and Donna tried to follow inside but were blocked. When I saw that I immediately turned around and went back to my family. This did not please the various officials around us and they told me to get inside. "Not without my family I'm not. I've got no idea what this is about, but I'm not taking another step without my family." Mom and Dad started making a fuss, and one of the officials decided, "Let them in." We were escorted to the back of the tent and I was told to sit in a particular chair. Next thing I know someone is approaching me with a syringe. Whoa! Neither Mom, Dad nor I thought this was a welcome development, and we told them so. The head official said, "There have been credible allegations of cheating made against Mr. Anderson. As per the Registration, which he signed, we are permitted to obtain blood and urine samples, which we will be doing now." Mom demanded to see my Registration, which was quickly produced, and it did indeed grant them permission to do exactly as he'd said. It bore my name and signature too. They took their samples of my blood, and I adjourned behind a canvas flap to pee into small bottles while being watched doing so by a "Designated Peeing Watcher". I don't know what the job title really was, but I saw that he had to write his name and sign a form that recorded his doing so. The head official explained, "Several other runners have lodged official complaints that Mr. Anderson cheated. They particularly commented on his freshness, saying it was inconsistent with someone who had run a 10k race. Our officials at the finish line confirm that he did not appear to be fatigued when he crossed the line, so I have to say that the situation looks very dire for Mr. Anderson. We will check our race instrumentation and talk with our course monitors, and I expect that we will find that he did not run the entire race. In which case he will be disqualified and banned." Donna cried, "Oh no! What about my bets?" Perhaps not the smartest thing she could have said. Mom and Dad turned on her. Mom shrieked, "YOU DIDN'T! No wonder you were so eager for Mark to win. You are in SO much trouble when we get you home." "It's not like that, Mom." "We told you off for trying to bet just a week ago. I'm beside myself with anger. How dare you disobey us like that!" "It wasn't for me, Mom. Oh no! Now everything's ruined." "It certainly is. We'll talk about this - at length - when we get you home. You just sit there and shut up." Donna sat there and cried. Something didn't feel right about this. Donna's pleasure in my winning hadn't seemed mercenary. She seemed genuinely joyful. On the other hand, she'd pretty much convicted herself already. Dad asked the official, "What happens now?" He answered, "We've summoned the various course monitors. They'll be asked whether Mr. Anderson passed their stations. We'll check our electronic records and video cameras. It'll take a while, maybe as long as half an hour. If his tag passed every checkpoint, we'll have the time and will rewind each checkpoint's camera to that time, to check to see if it was him that was carrying the tag. We'll do that for every checkpoint, and several of our people are doing that now. The blood and urine samples will be sent off for analysis, which will take several days, but I don't expect they'll show anything." Mom demanded, "So why did you take them, then?" "Because we always take them when there are accusations of cheating. We'd be foolish not to. In this case it seems obvious that drugs aren't the issue. This looks like a blatant case of using a substitute runner. How you expected not to be caught when you crossed the finish line without even sweating, I've got no idea." Now I felt a lot better! I HAD run the whole course and that would presumably show up on all their equipment. I felt stupid for not thinking about my looking non-fatigued, but I still felt better. I said, "Mom, Dad. Don't worry about it. I'm not anymore. I did run through all the checkpoints, as they'll soon find out. And even if there's a computer glitch, or something, and they can't verify my race, I still couldn't care less. I don't care if my body's not sweating the same way other people's do causes them to not recognize me as the winner. The only reason I ran this race was to make Donna happy, and I couldn't care less for myself. They can disqualify me for all I care." Perhaps the reference to Donna wasn't smart, as Mom's lips tightened at that. Before Mom could answer Donna declared, "Oh no. You can't get disqualified. It's a serious problem. You can be banned for life and you'll never be able to run again." I laughed. "That's just silly, Donna. They can't stop me running. I can put on some shoes and run out the back door whenever I want. What are they going to do, post guards and the front and back of our house? Haha." The official said, "She means you can't run in recognized races. If you're banned for life you'll never be able to compete in organized events." I laughed even louder. He didn't look too pleased at that. I realized he obviously thought organized races were important as he'd hardly be the head official otherwise. I told him, "I'm not interested in racing. I ran once just to try myself out and I'd already decided not to run competitively again. You can ban me for life if you wish. It's a matter of complete indifference to me. I'd walk out if that's all that was involved, but I realize that my being declared a cheat would hurt Donna at her club so we'll sit and wait until my name's cleared." -- I tried to think of another topic. The only one that suggested itself to me was, "Mom, have we got any plans for tonight? I completely forgot about having a celebratory dinner and I was asked before the race what I was doing tonight. Has Julia discussed anything with you?" Mom clearly thought I was being a bit surreal, but she rose to the occasion, "She hasn't mentioned anything. I think she was too involved in her shopping with Carol. I know they were both very excited about that. Are you really this unconcerned?" "I really am. Let me check my understanding." I turned to the official who was babysitting us. "Am I right in thinking that even if you think I cheated, I won't get a jail time, or a criminal record, or a fine, or anything like that. All that will happen is that I'm banned from running in organized races?" He said, "Yes. Probably not just running though. If you took up another sport they'd find out about your banning and you'd at least be scrutinized carefully. Possibly dropped from any teams if they didn't want to bother with you." He said it as if it was a horrendous result. I turned to Mom, "See, Mom: totally unimportant. With everything that's going on in my life, do you think any of this crap matters?" The official in charge of "this crap" wasn't pleased, but Mom got my point and started laughing, as did Dad. Mom said, "You're right. For you this is meaningless. I just got scared by all the stuffy, self-important officialdom. It's just a bunch of sweaty guys running around in circles, so who the hell cares!" #1: Dad said, "I feel like standing up and walking out, but you're right that Donna's standing might suffer. Let's wait for a bit longer." Mom didn't like the references to Donna, but Donna wisely kept silent. An official came in and handed our guy a piece of paper. He read it, frowned, and put it in his pocket. Mom, Dad and I started chatting about family stuff. Just making lightweight conversation, as if none of this mattered to us. This visibly annoyed him so we kept it up. One thing Mom mentioned was that she'd gotten a text from Julia confirming that they'd be looking at houses tomorrow afternoon. Mom had nearly said "mansions", but erred on the side of discretion as there were too many people around us. I was wondering whether to call Julia when my cell started ringing. I'd given it to Dad to carry so he got it out of his pocket and gave it to me. "Sorry I didn't call you earlier, Julia. I did win the race..." The sounds of yahooing could be heard from my phone. I held it away from my ear until it had died down. " ... But there's a problem. Because I don't sweat normally they think I cheated..." The sounds of laughter could be heard from my phone. I held it away from my ear until it had died down. I particularly enjoyed the look on the official's face while this was happening. "We've got to sit through some small-minded crap while they check their computer records, videotapes and stuff. I even had to pee in a bottle while someone watched me. What a pain. We have to wait for them to clear me otherwise it might cause Donna trouble at her athletic club." I was about to start asking how she and Carol were enjoying themselves, when Donna interrupted, "Mark! Mark! Ask her to tell you what I said about your getting a car." I didn't have a clue what that meant, but I asked, "Julia, Donna wants you to tell me what she said about my getting a car. What's that about?" I listened, then Donna said, "Tell Mom and Dad." So I repeated what Julia had said to me, "Donna had asked Julia not to let the Williamses buy me a car yet, but Donna wouldn't say why, only not to do it until after this race." Donna said, "I bet all my money on Mark to win and I got REALLY good odds, so I can give him the money as a present to buy a car with. He's getting his license any day now and I wanted to give him really good present because of how much I love him. I didn't bet for me; I bet for Mark." Wasn't that sweet? And believable too as it fitted with how she'd behaved better than her wanting to win for her own benefit. I said, "Mom, I believe her." I think probably unnecessarily, because Mom seemed to believe her too. Mom said, "We'll still talk about this when we get you home, young lady. Don't think this gets you off the hook." The next event of note was Cindy coming in. When I saw her she waved and said, "Congratulations, Modest Mark. So you did win after all. So, can I come to your celebration this evening?" This caused me some embarrassment, but I covered it by introducing Cindy to Mom, Dad and Donna. I also mentioned my sister Carol and girlfriend Julia, reminding Cindy that they were out shopping. Mr. Official harrumphed. When Cindy looked at him, he said, "Your congratulations are very premature, Cindy. Mr. Anderson has been accused of cheating. We are waiting for the rest of the reports now." Cindy said, "These you mean? All of which say he personally ran through every checkpoint. I volunteered to bring them so I'd get a chance to make another pass at Mark." Not much shame to this girl. She added, "I was talking to Fred when Mark ran past Fred's checkpoint. Have you seen Mark run?" The official answered, "No. I was too busy in here during the race." Cindy said, "He's got the best running style I've ever seen. He flows across the ground like it's effortless. If you want to see a thing of beauty, take him outside and ask him to run for you. You'll enjoy it. I hope he chases after me." Nope, no shame at all. Donna laughed, which was very good to hear because she's totally one of my favorite sisters now. The official started reading through the results carefully. Cindy started leaving, and I said, "Hang on a minute please, Cindy." She stopped and I pulled out my phone and hit speed dial 1. "Hi Julia. It looks like the cheating allegation is falling apart and that we'll be out of here shortly. Yes, yes, but that's not why I'm calling right now. A pretty young woman hit on me earlier, and invited herself to our celebratory dinner. Are we having a celebratory dinner? -- "We are now, good. Her name's Cindy and I'll give her the phone in a second and you can arrange the details with her. Good. I'll talk with you about your shopping later. I'll put Cindy on now." I gave the phone to Cindy, saying, "Julia is my girlfriend. Take the phone outside and arrange the details with her. I find it's more fun when I'm surprised." Cindy took the phone, saying, "This should be interesting." She walked out, saying, "Hello Julia, I'm Cindy..." I stood, saying, "We've wasted enough time already. I could have run the whole race again in the time we've been sitting on our butts in here. I presume this is finished with now?" The official said, "We have to send the samples off. But as I said before, I doubt they'll show anything. The computer and videotape evidence exonerates you. We need to complete the paperwork, write an official report, reply to the complainants and to the accused - that's you. But that's just paperwork. You'll be recorded as the winner today and it's unlikely that'll be overturned. Prize-giving has been held up, but will go ahead as soon as you turn up." I said, "We're going home. I don't want to share a podium with the two sore losers - if my guess is correct - and this whole procedure has robbed me of any happiness I might've had. If there's any stuff you'd normally give me, let Cindy accept it on my behalf and she can pass it on tonight." I turned to Donna, "Donna, do you need to chase down your victims?" Donna laughed, "Haha. No. They're all from my club and I have all their phone numbers. I'll start calling them when I get home and get them to mail me their payments. They know I've got records." "We're outta here then." Donna grabbed my arm and hugged it on the way out. The official started giving the necessary orders to have my win recognized and whatever else he had to do. I didn't have any interest. Cindy saw us emerge and waved to get our attention. We headed over to her as she was ending her conversation. She handed the phone back, saying, "Julia says you have to get a camera phone so any other girls who pick you up can send their pictures to her so she can judge whether they're pretty enough. Your girlfriend's got an unusual attitude about you." "You've got no idea!" Donna, Mom and Dad all laughed their agreement. Cindy said, "I'm picking you up at 7 from your home, then driving us around to Julia's to collect Carol and Julia, then we're off to a restaurant." "Sounds good. Did Julia give you our addresses?" "Yeah." "We're not hanging around for the prize giving because the cheating allegation and sour-faced crap has ruined it for me. I told that guy," I pointed at him, "that if there are any certificates or medals or whatever that he should give them to you to pass on to me. Is that okay with you?" "No trouble. I'll be here for a while anyway. See you at 7 then?" "Looking forward to it. Thanks for your help today, Cindy. See you later." We wandered back to our car. I was glad the whole thing was over. While we were walking I started praising Donna for her clever scheme in getting me to do all the work for my own present. She insisted that she'd had to do lots of work too, mostly in acting like a little girl who was foolishly proud of her big brother, and then getting the best odds she could. Mom wasn't impressed and said she'd still have a serious talk with Donna at home. Dad said, "Cars are pretty expensive. How much did you bet?" Donna said, "I know they're expensive. I bet everything I have: $125. I got about 20-to-1 odds on most of my bets. I did lots of little bets and everybody thought it was cute that I was betting on my big brother. I've got it all written down here." Donna pulled a little notebook out, which had page after page of, usually, $5 bets. Donna continued, "I figure I've won $2,800 if nobody welches. It's such a pity I had to tell you already. I was planning to give it all to you when you got your license. That would've been so cool." It would have been an impressive gift. I was still flicking through her 'book' (in that sense she was a bookie). There was one $20 bet at 30-to-1. Donna saw me looking at it and said, "He's a pain. No one at the club likes him. He thought he could take advantage of me so I squeezed really good odds out of him. I made sure I got someone important to witness that bet." (Every bet had a second signature beneath it.) Mom was even less impressed. "You're FAR too good at this business, Donna." Mom started her preaching about doing bad things for good reasons, etc., etc. Just the usual mother stuff. I tuned it out. I just hugged Donna proudly, reminding myself not to tell Mom I was going to Vegas to gamble at roulette. Well, sort of gamble; just as Donna had sort of gambled. I remembered that Donna hadn't heard our conversation about buying a mansion, so she had no idea about how much money we should have shortly, fingers crossed. Her $2,800 will hopefully be insignificant after our Vegas jaunt, but I certainly wasn't going to mention that. When Mom paused for breath, I told Donna, "I thought what you did was VERY nice, but I suggest you give up betting now or Mom will kill you. That'd be such a pity," then I leaned closer and whispered, "now that your buds are growing." Donna's response was to try to tease me about my new "GIRLFRIEND," said with the tone little girls use when teasing. "Nah. I'm going out with Carol and Julia anyway. If Cindy wants to tag along that's fine. I'm too young for her and I don't have the spare time for another girlfriend anyway." Donna persisted, and even Dad joined in, trying to tease me about Cindy. But I laughed, "It's funny. Two or three weeks ago I would've been freaking out over Cindy's interest, but now I just don't care. I'll be nice to her and I hope we all have fun, but it wouldn't matter to me if she cancelled. I don't know whether Julia told her my age, but I don't think she'll waste much of her time on us once she learns it. She only chatted me up originally because she thought I was handsome, so I don't think that says too much about her being smart." Mom said, "She nicknamed you 'Modest Mark', so I'd say she was quite astute." "Astute, maybe. Clear sighted, not so much." Mom laughed, and said, "Look in the mirror some day. You're growing into quite a handsome guy." Before I could {raspberry}, Donna jumped in with, "You're handsome ALREADY. Just in the last few months you've gotten really good looking." I was about to {raspberry} that silly idea, when Mom said, "Yes. I've noticed that too." Even Dad chipped in with, "Even I've noticed, and I try not to notice how handsome guys are, haha." #4: I was thinking about what to do until Cindy came to pick us up, which reminded me about getting my license, so I asked, "Dad, can you give me a driving lesson some time today please? Just to let me drive your car for a while to get used to it again." I immediately realized the "again" wasn't very smart, but he never commented on it. I guessed because he thought I was referring to my parking lot test drive. "Sure. I can take you out after we drop the ladies off." That's what we did. Dad and I spent an hour or so with me getting reacquainted with his car. It wasn't COMPLETELY easy. Early on I had a few little awkward moments, but I invariably got them right on the second attempt. I was superbly physically coordinated, and with four minds on the job could easily keep track of several things happening at once. After an hour Dad said, "I can't imagine how you could fail a practical test. Let's swap seats and I'll take us back." Julia called me while we were driving back, mentioning that she was having lunch with her Mom and Carol. "Oh, is your mom shopping with you?" "No. She's just came to do a package run and we thought it was a good time to stop for lunch." "What's a 'package run'?" Julia explained patiently, as this was clearly something everyone should already know, "When Carol and I have too many bags to carry, we call Mom, she comes in and we load up her car with whatever we're carrying plus those we left at the last few stores, then she takes them home." "Wow! You two are doing some serious shopping." "No, not really. We're just scouting this morning. The serious shopping starts after lunch." I made a mental note to win an extra million from the casino. Julia continued, "The main reason I called is to find out about Cindy. What's she like? How did you meet her? What are your plans? Etc." I felt self-conscious talking about this beside Dad but there was no strong reason why not. "The easiest question to answer is about my plans, because I don't have any. I don't care what happens. Let's the three of us just enjoy ourselves and if Cindy joins in, that'll be fine. She invited herself along. She looks to be in her early-20s and she's quite pretty. Not as beautiful as you or Carol, but still reasonably pretty. Nice body too, not that I notice such things, haha. I guess she's probably a runner, as she was some sort of helper at the race today. As for, 'What's she like?' She's certainly not shy, that's for sure! I was walking around before the race and she told me to get back to the starting line, but she called me 'Handsome' because she couldn't see my number. We chatted briefly and she invited herself out with me tonight, and then asked again after I'd won." Julia asked, "So you don't mind me having some fun with her then?" Uh oh. "Um, just so long as you don't do anything to embarrass me." "When have I ever embarrassed you?" The date started in about seven hours, so it was doubtful I'd have time to fully answer that question! "If I answer that question you won't have time for any more shopping today." "Haha. Embarrassing their boyfriends is what girlfriends are for." "I KNOW that! That's one of the very few things I understand about females: 'Girlfriends cause embarrassment'. And I've got two of them. Oh woe is me!" "Haha. From what Carol's told me about Donna, you've got three any time you want." Remembering that Dad was beside me, I said, "Um, yes. I'm not sure about that though." Julia misunderstood my deliberately vague answer, "Carol's sure. Donna was playing with herself for ages after you left. Carol eventually fell asleep while Donna was still going. You had her going 'big time', as you like to say." "Yes. I know that side. It's the other side I'm not sure about." "Pardon? Oh, you mean 'you', but you can't talk easily now?" "You got it. Dad and I are heading home now after a driving lesson. It looks like I can handle the car okay. I'll read through the Driver Manual again when I get home. Probably I'll call the DMV guy on Monday and take the Knowledge and Practical tests asap." "Good. You can have my car then. It's already insured for you." Of course it was. I asked Julia, "Speaking about cars, did you hear what Donna got up to today?" "No." "She bet all her saved up pocket money on me to win. Got really good odds too, about 20-to-1 usually. She won about $2,800. She intended to give it all to me to buy a car with after I got my license. Just as a present for being a nice brother. That's pretty spectacular, isn't it?" "I'll say! That girl's got a big heart and plenty of gumption. So that's why she told me not to let my parents buy a car for you. What a nice girl." "Very. But she got busted when the race organizers looked like they'd be disqualifying me. Now she's in trouble with Mom, even though I think she's big time wonderful." Dad chipped in - I quickly held the phone toward him so Julia could hear what he was saying, "I admire her generosity and pluck too. It's worrying how much she knows about betting, but her heart's in the right place." When I got the phone back to my ear, I heard, " ... while I tell Mom and Carol." I then heard Julia repeat the story, with appropriate comments from Vanessa and Carol afterward. Then Julia came back on the line and said, "They like that story. We all agree she's a nice girl." "Yes indeed. Does my inviting Cindy along upset any of your plans for tonight?" "No. My plans got upset when we were told we weren't allowed to make love until after the trial. Remember how I said that when you had your cast removed I was going to buy Carol a similar dress to the one I wore on our first date, and the three of us were going to take you out on the town?" "Yes, I remember. Carol was very excited about getting a dress like that. That was way back before our marriage. Carol had no idea what going on a date with the two of us meant." #2: Julia said, "We have her dress now and it's VERY sexy! We'll wear them tonight to celebrate your getting your cast off and your win. The original intention - of having a really sexy night out to tease Carol - no longer applies, but it'll still be fun. It would've been much better without the sex restriction, but there's nothing we can do about that. Cindy sounds like a friendly girl so it should be a good night anyway. Not ending with several bangs unfortunately, but good fun and well deserved anyway. Hang on, Carol wants to talk with you." Carol just needed to gush: shopping was fantastic, her dress for tonight was "the sexiest thing I've EVER worn!" which wasn't actually saying much, but I kept that thought to myself so it didn't interfere with my anticipation of seeing her in the dress. Carol thought Donna's betting scheme and generosity were lovely, she congratulated me on my winning the race, said it was so funny that I'd found another girl even before the "School Plan" had started, etc. I was happy that Carol was so happy, and joked with her that, "I didn't find Cindy; she found me. I was a helpless victim, just like every guy is when a woman makes up her mind." Carol asked some questions about Cindy, most of which I'd answered to Julia but I happily repeated myself, enjoying Carol's mood. Julia suddenly came back on the line, and said, "Mom's had an idea about something. Can I talk with your dad please?" I passed the phone to Dad, who said, "Hello," and then listened for thirty seconds or so. He said, "You know, I think that's fine. Fine with me anyway. I'll check with Fely when we get home, but almost certainly that's okay." (Pause.) "No, I won't." Dad handed the phone back to me, and I asked Julia, "What was that about?" "It's better you don't know." "Oh, yet another one of those. Have you noticed that they happen to me a lot and never to you. Why is that?" I didn't really understand her answer. Something to do with the "natural order of things", and "innate female superiority". I wasn't convinced, but didn't protest too much. I've found that these "It's better if I don't know" things really are better if I don't know, which makes it hard for me to protest too loudly. We hung up shortly after that because, according to Julia, "We've only got four and half hours of shopping left, and I better not waste them talking to you." I knew that shopping generally took me - a mere male - about fifteen minutes. So much for "innate female superiority." After our call ended, Dad started chuckling, "You've got a very unusual girlfriend there." "Tell me something I don't already know! In what way this time?" "She told me not to tell you, but I'm going to enjoy telling Fely." Excellent. As usual I'd be the last to know, presuming I even notice. Thank goodness I was the Lord. How bad would it be otherwise? When we got home Mom asked about my drive, and Dad assured her that I'd pass. Dad added, "Let's go into the bedroom. I want to tell you about an idea of Julia's. Actually of Vanessa's I think, but Julia told me about it." Mom and Dad went into their room and Dad closed the door. A few minutes later they emerged, and Mom informed me that I had "an unusual girlfriend." Mom didn't look as amused about it as Dad did, making it even more pointless to ask about it. Mom said lunch would be ready in a few minutes, so I quickly finished the snack I'd just made for myself and went to chat with Donna. She was very happy to see me, and excitedly told me that she'd gotten hold of most of the people that owed her money while I'd been driving around, and they were going to mail it in. The guy who owed her $600 (ouch!) had apparently tried to weasel out of it, and Donna had been forced to get Mom on the phone. Donna took great delight in telling me that Mom had given him four days to drop the cash off or Mom was going to put a large ad in the paper showing a copy of the bet, his signature, and telling people not to trust him because he welches on paying a 12-year old girl after he talked her into betting four times more than the $5 she'd originally suggested. I laughed, having no trouble imagining Mom saying that, and following through if necessary. I was going to say a lot more to Donna - how proud I was of her, etc. - when the phone rang, and Mom called out, "It's another call for you Donna, and come to lunch anyway." When I arrived at the table, Mom said, "The phone's been very busy. Lots of calls from Donna's athletic friends, calls from her club wanting you to join, a bunch of calls from other athletics people, and several calls from press and running magazines wanting to interview you about today's events. I've kept all their messages. Do you want them?" "If the press call again tell them '{Raspberry}'. Haha. And I don't want to join any club. The only running I want to do is around a soccer field and goofing off with Donna. There's far too much crap with organized sports. Soccer's the only exception because we play just for fun. What a novel idea that is!" "What do you want me to do with the messages?" "Throw them away thanks. I'm VERY not interested." I started eating my lunch. I could see and hear Donna's conversation as the phone is nearby. She was basking in the reflected glory: "Yes, he's my brother", "No, he doesn't belong to a club", "The only training he does is playing soccer and running with me." There was more, but Mom started impatiently tapping her watch and Donna got the hint. I was reminded to contact my soccer team and find out what was happening because I can play now that I had my cast off. I'd do that right after lunch (it's a matter of priorities). ^ It turned out that there was a game this afternoon and I had to hurry to get to it on time. It was good to be back on the field, and it rapidly turned WAY 'gooder' than I'd expected. This was my first game since I'd discovered the effects of the Aikido centering, especially my proximity sense. I was so used to being centered now and in sensing people within a yard of me, that I'd not given it any thought before the game. Not even a minute into the game I had the ball and was faced with the problem of getting past a defender. Problem? What problem! When my proximity sense informed me that he was going to jig to my right in response to one of my moves, I quickly jigged to my left, and was clear of him as easy as that. By the time he realized he'd gone the wrong way, it was too late for him to catch me. That happened time after time during the game. It even worked when the defenders came at me from every possible direction because my proximity sense was 360 degrees, unlike sight. I could use that to turn my back on my opponents, keeping my body between them and the ball and still being aware of their every movement, even before they made them. From the start of this game, my getting past defenders was SPECTACULARLY easier than it'd ever been before! My already very high soccer skills were mostly due to my superb physical coordination and partly from my being able to mentally and visually keep track of more things than other players, but proximity took my game to a whole new level. It wasn't perfect. I still had trouble getting past multiple defenders, but that meant others on my team were unmarked so I just had to pass the ball to one of them. Another restriction was that it had only a three-foot range, measured from my center. That wasn't as much of a restriction as it seems because even if someone was as far as six feet away, if they had a strong intention of moving to within three feet of me - and if they didn't have then they couldn't get the ball off me - then I could detect that portion of their ki that was within three feet of my center, which often told me all I needed to know. My range restriction sometimes gave me a lot less warning than I would've liked, but it was still an ENORMOUS advantage to know my opponents' intentions before they acted on them. The word "intention" didn't need to be as conscious as it seems. Soccer is a fast-paced game so most of the time the players act or react by instinct rather than planning their actions consciously. Getting past a defender, for example, is something that neither he nor I usually have time to be deliberate about. Nonetheless, I could detect his subconsciously (or instinctual? or trained?) intended actions before they were physically committed to. So as soon as his mental processes - at whatever level of consciousness - decided what to do, I knew about it. As soon as I knew he was going to jig one way, I'd react by starting to jig to the other. The timing worked out well because the half a second or so it took me to react meant that he was by then committed to going the wrong way. My proximity sense worked just as well on their goalie too, something I got to test a LOT more often than usual. I was so good at getting past defenders that it was often better to treat the goalie as just another defender. So rather than shooting from several yards out, I'd dribble right up to him, around him, and then shoot into an empty goalmouth. Not that I had much opportunity to, as I played forward, but I was also an extremely good defender. If someone tried to dribble the ball around me, I could react to his moves before he started them, so I often intercepted the ball. It wasn't long before they completely stopped trying to run the ball past me, instead passing it out to the sides or kicking it over me. They couldn't do much to stop my team passing the ball to me though, short of marking me with a ridiculous number of defenders, which would've left them open to the rest of my team. My teammates were blown away by my new level of skill, which I used to "blow away" the opposition. Or "blow past them", or whatever term toots your trumpet. In effect, and to exaggerate only a little, if the ball was passed to me, then we got a goal. It didn't take my team long to learn to pass to me as much as possible. We got a very, very high score; into the double-digits, which is almost unheard of in soccer. Because I was thinking about my special abilities so much, early in the game I did something without thinking about it much: I applied a TK-push on the side of the ball as one of our opponents was heading for our goal. As a result he miss-kicked it, and the time it took him to recover the ball gave our defenders ample time to get back into position. He didn't score a goal, which he could well have done had I not interfered from half the field away. I felt guilty about it afterward as it seemed too much like cheating to me, so I later compensated for it by deliberately flubbing an attack of mine on their goal, not that it made ANY significant difference to the final result. I did briefly think about the ways I could use TK: tripping opponents by knocking their ankles at critical times - as I had with Biff#4 and a couple dozen jocks running to classes - pushing the ball away from its intended path on their long passes and the reverse for our passes, poking their goalie to distract him just as we were about to shoot for goal, keeping my high-speed dribbling runs more controlled, and several more. Soccer balls can be kicked with spin to curve in the air, so TK'ing them in flight could be done in an acceptable looking way, and the ground often has lumps which cause funny bounces, so TK'ing the ball on bounces would be practical too. TK would be an overwhelming advantage for my team, but it was clearly an active interference so I resolved not to use it again. On the other hand, my proximity sense was passive and seemed much more acceptable. I probably couldn't ignore it anyway as it was too much a part of how I moved now. I could uncenter but I felt awkward when I did that. I decided TK was a no-go for the soccer field, but my proximity sense was fine. I'd been in too much of a rush when I'd arrived so hadn't had time to socialize with my team before the game, but they SURE wanted to socialize with me afterward! Either that or just kiss my feet. I suggested that the other team's defenders weren't very good and that comment got totally booed down. My team rightly gave me all the credit for our utterly destroying our opponents. Our team's previous best player (me) was now an order of magnitude better - almost a literally accurate statement, if measured by the factor increase in the number of goals I scored - and my team was in a joyous mood. I hung around and the yahooing went on so long I eventually suggested that we go get a burger. I didn't have to pay, such was their happiness. There were lots of questions about my sudden increase in ability. "How?" was a very common one. All I could do was shrug and say, "I don't know. I guess having a few weeks off helped somehow. I've got no idea." I was asked whether I'd been to a soccer camp, or been watching lots of soccer videos, or something similar. I answered those questions truthfully. One player wondered out loud whether breaking my other arm would make me even better. I offered to break his! After the celebration had died down somewhat, I was several times asked what I'd been up to as far as non-soccer activities were concerned. The last time I'd played with the team was just before the Annette Neumeyer incident. Considering what had happened to me since then, I smiled to myself and decided to be very economical with the truth. I mentioned I had a girlfriend now, which several of them already knew. I neglected to mention that we were now in a three-way 'marriage' with one of my sisters. I did say that I might have my license in a few days. The team was of mixed ages and some already had their licenses and even cars, but several of them, especially the 15-year olds, thought that was pretty cool, were very envious of me, and wanted to know how it was possible. "It's who you know," was all I'd say. My large ring was noticed and commented on. It actually looked pretty good, and being such an obvious non-engagement/wedding ring, and its being on the wrong finger anyway, made it easy for me to just say, "A present from my girlfriend." After a while I made my excuses and headed home. Mom told me, "I've got quite a few more messages for you from running people." "Don't even bother writing them down, Mom. You're just wasting ink." ^ After a shower I had a problem: what clothes to wear to my celebration dinner? My best clothes had been ridiculed by Julia and Carol. Maybe not quite "ridiculed", but insulted enough to put me off wearing them again. I decided on what my second best outfit was and put that on. I wasn't very happy with it, but it was the best I could do. Then I remembered the "handsome" and "check in a mirror" comments I'd received recently. I don't have much reason to look at myself in mirrors normally, and when I do it I pay as little attention as possible (for my very occasional shaves, for example. Dad's always moaning about what a waste of time shaving is, and tells me to enjoy having to do it so infrequently). I've never been proud of how I look and have long since got out of the habit of actually 'seeing' my reflection. My closet door has a full-length mirror on the inside, so I opened the door and looked at myself. The first thing I noticed was that I had no pimples. Not even pockmarks. I'd had very bad pimples for two or three years. I remembered them diminishing recently, but hadn't noticed that they'd totally gone. I felt there was something else different about my face, but I couldn't put my finger on it. My nose looked the same, my eyes, my ears, etc., all looked the same; but somehow my face looked different. It took me quite a while to puzzle it out, but I eventually realized that my face was much more symmetrical than it used to be (left to right, not top to bottom; I would've quickly noticed that change). It seemed perfectly balanced. I remembered reading somewhere, years ago, that symmetrical faces are considered more beautiful ("handsome", in my case). Something to do with appearing healthy, or something. It was a long time ago so I didn't remember it well. I knew the Williamses had a digital camera so it'd presumably be easy to test my face's symmetry. I had the idea of stripping and studying my body in the mirror, even though it was definitely not the sort of thing I'd normally do. I removed my second-best clothes, and after checking my door was shut, my underwear too. The first thing I noticed was that I had a very noticeable waist. Or more accurately, about three-quarters of a waist, because it was so narrow. I hadn't noticed how extremely narrow it was when looking down from above previously, but it stood out - in a "shrinking in" sort of way - in the viewing angle the mirror provided. No wonder I'd had to nail extra holes in my belt. My waist was so narrow it almost looked feminine, which was a weird feeling. Fortunately I didn't have to move my eyes far to reassure myself of my masculinity. THAT part of me was not increasingly feminine, thank goodness! If anything it was slightly larger than the last time I'd looked at it in the mirror, but I was still growing into my full adult size so that was to be expected. Reassured that I wasn't turning into a female, I started a top-down examination of my body. I noticed three major changes: my shoulders were much broader than the last time I'd looked at my naked body in a mirror (God knows how long ago that'd been), I had very good muscle tone everywhere, and I had no blemishes at all. My shoulders puzzled me the most. In the mirror my shoulders' extra width was particularly noticeable because they contrasted so much with the narrowness of my waist. I knew that swimmers and rowers developed wide shoulders, but I did neither of those sports. I could swim, but hadn't done so since last summer and I definitely hadn't had shoulders like these back then. I had no idea why they were so wide. Turning pages of two grades worth of textbooks sure hadn't been the cause. I used to have a mole slightly to the rear of my right armpit but I couldn't find it now. Or was it my left armpit? I still couldn't find it. I couldn't find any skin discolorations or lumps. I knew I used to have a few, but they were all gone now. To my considerable surprise, I noticed that my appendix scar was a fraction of its normal obviousness. It was still there, but much thinner and more discreet than it had been. The previous scar had looked like someone had cut me open with a hacksaw, but now it looked like they'd used a very thin scalpel. The perpendicular ridges the sutures had left were totally gone now, making the scar look even cleaner. I'd had it for several years and it'd never changed so rapidly before. I was no longer the skinny beanpole I'd been for many years, I now had quite a good body. Slim, muscular - but not overly so - and generally, if I forced myself to ignore the fact that this was my body I was looking at in the mirror, quite attractive. I guess I had to admit that I was somewhat handsome now! That was going to take some getting used to. Once I'd accepted this implausible development, the obvious explanation for it was Aikido healing. It had apparently kept my right arm's muscles fully fit for the three weeks they were in the cast, so it must be responsible for 'healing' the rest of my body too. The change to my appendix scar was a particularly convincing proof that ki was VERY good at healing me. [And was even more convincing a couple of months later, when I couldn't find that scar at all.] The Aikido books I'd read didn't talk about healing much, and certainly had never mentioned the overall body changes it'd apparently caused on me. It was definitely something to ask Sensei about when I saw him next. He'd expected my arm to heal fast, so he understood the process. I redressed, happy to no longer be so self-consciously exposed. ^ I had some time to kill so I studied the Driver Manual again. I was pretty sure I had it down pat, but Prof had emphasized that it'd be a good idea for me to ace the test so I studied it again. We even uncentered ourselves so all four of us could read and remember it, increasing the chance that in the test one of us would remember the answer. We quizzed each other to help find any holes in our knowledge. Donna came in, shut my door, and climbed up on my lap. She grabbed my hands and hugged them around her, putting one of my hands on her nipple and rubbing it back and forth for me. Almost déjà vu for my experiences with Carol, except Donna was WAY more direct. I asked her, "You like me touching you?" "Yes, very much. I wish I were going with you tonight. Will there be lots of sex?" There truly isn't anything subtle about Donna. "Haha. I'm not going to have time to be properly social to all the girls as it is. Cindy is our guest so I'll have to spend most of my time talking to her, even though I haven't seen Julia or Carol all day. If you came I doubt I'd have much time to talk with you. And second, I'm sorry to say that there won't be lots of sex. We're not allowed to have ANY until after the trial." "So after the trial we're allowed sex?" "Ha-ha, Donna. I doubt very much whether the 'we' includes you. We could ask Mom, if you're not sure." "It'd probably be best not to ask Mom." "Yes, probably. You'll be eighteen in only six years, and won't need to ask permission then." I can be quite cruel at times. "I am NOT waiting six years! Carol's making love to you now and she's only thirteen months older than me. At MOST I'll wait that long, and hopefully a LOT less." #1: "Honey, Carol's body is obviously a lot more developed than yours. Her body was ready, yours is only just starting to become ready." #3: "I think I'm ready now, and I know a good way of finding out." She was a trier, but I knew how to fix that, "I know a good way too: we could ask Mom." "Argh. That's not what I meant. I want to do it with you now, and it's not fair that Carol can but I can't." "Tough cheese! Nothing is going to happen until we BOTH want it to, and I don't want to yet. I'm not ready for you." If I couldn't beat her, running away was my next choice. "It's about time I went out front to wait for Cindy." Donna and I went to the kitchen, where I had some of tonight's leftovers that Mom had left to keep me going until we got to the restaurant. Mom joined us to ask about tonight. To every question my answer was, "I don't know. Julia hasn't told me anything." It didn't take Mom long to give up. Her knowing Julia no doubt added plausibility to my excuse. ------- Chapter 65: The Best Dress I Have Ever Seen in My Life Saturday, April 16, 2005 (Continued) We saw Cindy's car arrive as close to 7pm as made no difference, making me suspect that Julia had been specific in her instructions. Cindy walked up the path carrying something fairly large and reflective, although I couldn't see much of it. I opened the door as she neared it, and she walked right in. The mystery of the object was quickly solved. It was my HUGE first place trophy. The damned thing was big enough to mount in the front yard with a fountain around it. Eagles could land on it when they wanted a drink. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but it was a LOT bigger than the little medal or few-inch high trophy I'd expected. I said, "Good grief. Where are we going to store that? If we put it in the garage we won't be able to get both cars in anymore. Oh, sorry. Hi Cindy. I didn't mean to be rude, but I wasn't expecting a slightly scaled down Statue of Liberty." "Haha. Most people put them on their mantle piece, or in a trophy case. Hello everyone, nice to see you again." My shock at being brought the Colossus of Rhodes passed, so we chatted normally. Re-introductions were made, and general chitchat ensued. Cindy's hair and makeup was done a whole lot better than it had been this morning. My opinion of her prettiness rose a couple of notches, not that I'm so shallow as to judge girls by their appearances, you understand. #4: #1: I wasn't really paying attention, but I heard Mom ask Cindy what was the plan for tonight. Cindy said, "Julia said something about going out to a very upmarket restaurant, and to make sure I got dressed up to the nines. I'm only a poor student, so I probably only got as far as an eight." Uh oh. Three girls plus me at a "very upmarket restaurant." This is going to cost a bundle. The trouble being that I don't have a bundle. Or even half a bundle. I excused myself for a second and shot back to my room to call the organizer. I quickly explained my concern to Julia. Julia laughed, "Don't worry, I've got it covered." Despite Julia's instruction to the contrary, I kept worrying. I told her of my consistent attitude. Julia said, "Mark, in a few weeks you're going to get millions for us. I think we can cover the cost of a few meals before then." "But we haven't got the money yet. Something could go wrong." "If it does then we'll think of something else. With your abilities there are probably dozens of ways of making money." I could certainly make a lot of money from the scrap metal value of the running trophies I could win. Reassured, I hung up and hurried back, as I'd suddenly remembered that Cindy had been in the process of taking her coat off to show what "dressed to the eights" looked like. I hustled down to the kitchen, but skidded to a halt when Cindy was in sight. She was posed, clearly waiting for my return. I had fully intended to make some excuse ("Sorry, I just remembered something important", or the like), but it's hard to talk and drool at the same time. Cindy was wearing a little, light-green dress - "little" being the main word. She's a fit, slim girl, and her muscular arms and shoulders were fully exposed as the dress just had a couple of thin pieces of green string holding it up. Medium-sized breasts, which - and I've got no idea how this thought entered my head - would probably be very exposed if she leaned forward. The dress was loose and the straps long, so surely the dress would gape forward. It was very worth keeping an eye open just in case she leaned forward, especially as I was pretty sure she was braless. Short skirt, very nice legs and high-heeled shoes completed her look, and a very nice look it was too. I hoped the restaurant was well heated because I sure didn't want her to keep her coat on. When a sufficient quantity of drool had accumulated on the floor, Cindy laughed, which brought me back to reality. "I take it you approve then?" "There's very little dress to approve of, so naturally I love it! You look very, very nice. That's much more flattering than the last outfit I saw you in." "Good. Julia told me I had considerable competition in the looks department and to pull out all the stops if I wanted to get your attention. I'm not sure why she told me that - her being your girlfriend and all - but you only live once so why not. I like dressing up anyway, and I'd hate to be underdressed compared to everyone else at the restaurant." "In that dress you're underdressed already. It's definitely a lovely dress. I think I know what Julia's wearing." I turned to Mom and said, "The black dress she wore on our first date. Do you remember that?" Mom nodded, "Of course." In a tone that meant, "What a silly question. I'm a woman and we don't forget important things like the clothes someone was wearing several weeks ago." "I think Julia is wearing that, and Carol's wearing a similar one from the same store." Mom asked, "If Carol's dressed up that nicely, would you ask Vanessa to take some photos please?" "Sure." Cindy asked me, struggling to raise the trophy, "Do you want to bring this to the restaurant?" "Good heavens no! Just drop it there and we'll find somewhere to store it later." Cindy said, "You really aren't going to display it?" "It's HUGE. Something maybe a tenth that size would probably be okay. We could put it on a shelf somewhere and it wouldn't be too obvious. But that thing's a monstrosity. It's just too big. Why do they make such big trophies in running?" Then I had a thought, #1: Cindy was looking puzzled. Donna said to her, "He doesn't know what he entered. A couple of weeks ago he asked me to enter him in a 10k or marathon, and this was the next 10k, so I entered him." Cindy said, "You really don't know what that race was?" "Sure I do. It was on the top of the registration papers. It was the 'Men's 10k something something of something.' Or was that the 'something of something something.' Something like that, anyway. I didn't really notice. Donna said it was the sort of race I wanted." "Do you know who you beat out of first place?" "A very sore loser, that's for sure! I've got no idea of his name and I don't want to. Surely coming second is still pretty good? Why'd he get so upset?" "Because he's used to coming first." "Coming second will do him good then. Shall we go, I'm getting hungry." Mom advised, "If I were you, I'd go. When Mark says he's hungry, he really means it." Cindy still look a bit confused, but Mom said to her, "Just drop the trophy there, Cindy. I'll get Steven to find somewhere for it in the garage. If you spend much time around Mark you'll get used to this." Cindy put it down and started putting her coat on. I remembered my previous lesson and leaped forward to help. I was wearing a "sports jacket" already. Why they call them that I'll never know. I can't think of a single sport you can comfortably play in one. But much about sports makes no sense, especially the size of their trophies. Actually, I'm not that dumb. Obviously the race wasn't just the local club's fun run. But whatever it was, I didn't care. Cindy started for the door, when Donna called out, "No, that's not right. You do it this way." Donna got me to hold out my arm and she took it the way Carol does when I walk her out to the school car. Cindy came back and replaced Donna on my arm. Donna said, "That's better," as I led Cindy outside. I thought it was better too, as it allowed my upper-arm to confirm that Cindy was braless. On the way to her car I told Cindy, "It's a new family tradition. About three weeks old, but we like it." We'd arrived at Cindy's car. Her comment about being a poor student was confirmed. Although I imagine she saved some money by only buying half dresses. I escorted her around to the driver's door and held it open for her after she'd unlocked it and got in. Damned coat! I would've gotten a spectacular look otherwise. I directed her to Julia's. On the way she asked me about my not having a car. I wasn't sure what Julia had said, if anything, about our ages, so I just said, "I'm getting one in a few days. I've just been biking around." (Corvallis is geographically small, with lots of students, and is very biker friendly, so this is plausible and not as insulting as it would be in other places.) Cindy asked me, "How many other races have you competed in?" So I got to use an old (probably ancient) line, "Besides today's you mean?" "Yes." "Hmm, let me see. Umm, 1, 2, 3 ... When I think of it, about zero, haha." "That was your first race?" "Yeah. My last one too. I didn't enjoy it much because there was too much crap. Why can't people run just for fun? Donna and I have been out a couple of mornings, and it's good just to jog along and chat. That I enjoy, but I don't like all the aggression that seems to come with organized sports." Cindy had an answer, "Because with organization comes support, publicity, competition, finance, motivation, verifiability, research and lots more besides." "I suppose so, but it doesn't suit me." "How did you motivate yourself through all your training then?" I was going to enjoy this little tweak, and I was quite happy to talk about any non-age related topic, even running, "It was easy. The first time was when I hadn't had time to catch up with Donna's life for a while, so we chatted, and that was nice. The second time my other sister Carol came on her bike, and the third time we canceled because it was raining." "Huh? Two training runs? Now I KNOW you're BS'ing me." ("BS" means "bullshit".) "No I'm not, but I understand why you'd think that. I seem to be somewhat naturally gifted when it comes to running. You commented on how good my style looked. No one taught me that, it just came by itself. I find long-distance running absurdly easy. I don't really understand why; it just is." #2: <"Effortless" is certainly "absurdly easy", and FOR SURE I don't understand why. "Moving in harmony with the Universe" doesn't add much understanding.> "Now I'm not sure whether to call you 'Modest Mark' or 'BS'ing Mark'." "Don't forget 'Handsome Mark'." "I don't think I will. I'm surprised Julia and your parents were so accepting of me, especially Julia. Isn't she worried that a handsome guy like you will stray? You must get lots of opportunities." Not yet I don't, but after the "School Plan" goes into operation I certainly will! Then I realized that I already have had lots of opportunities: all the girls that had been coming on to me at school. The "fame groupies", as Dad called them. I was so used to dismissing them that I'd forgotten that they were "opportunities", even if Mom and Dad had scared the shit out of me about hurting Julia and Vanessa. I was about to answer when Cindy added, "Are you sure Julia's not trying to get rid of you?" "I'm sure. She's busy planning for us to buy a house so we can live together. Julia, my mom and her mom are looking at some tomorrow afternoon, I believe. Let's just say that Julia and I are very secure in our relationship and not worried about anyone else upsetting it, even after Julia sees how good you look 'dressed up to the tens'. I disagree with your 'eight' comment, and nine isn't high enough either." "Thank you, kind sir. Buying a house is a big commitment so she must have faith in you. Aren't you young to be buying a house?" I was spared giving much of an answer to that because we'd arrived, Cindy didn't know Corvallis well and giving her the directions to Julia's had spread our conversation out a lot. I just said, "Yes, somewhat," and left it at that. I offered her my arm for the short walk to the front door. Cindy said, "What if Julia's parents see?" I answered, "They know already. Vanessa - that's Julia's mom - was with Julia at lunchtime when Julia was asking me for everything I knew about you, which wasn't much. They're fine with it, don't worry." Vanessa opened the front door for us, and I made the introductions. Vanessa was very welcoming and friendly, but Cindy clearly felt a little uncomfortable. Which was not helped when Vanessa said, "You'll be here at least half an hour Cindy, so give me your coat and I'll hang it up here." (There are several coat hooks behind the front door.) Cindy paused, shrugged, then started taking it off. I helped, for a variety of reasons. As the coat was coming off Vanessa got a clear look at Cindy, and said, "Beautiful dress, Cindy. Poor Mark isn't going to know where to look tonight. Or maybe that should that be 'Lucky Mark'. Anyway, Julia wants me to take Cindy up to her room, so the three girls can talk. Mark, why don't you wait in the Guys' Room and I'll join you shortly." If that's want Julia wanted, then that's what I'd do. I said to Vanessa, "So you're saying that the three girls are going to plot my doom between them, even before our date starts. I think 'Poor Mark' was the right description. Oh, while I remember, Mom asked me to ask you to take some pictures of the girls." "I'll get some as you're about to leave. I'll take Cindy up now." I said, "Cindy, when you're plotting my doom with the others, please ask them to be gentle. I'm young and have so much to live for." I hung my head and shuffled off as if to my doom, but expecting "delight" rather than "doom", knowing how Julia looks after me. I heard Cindy saying, "What a nice house" as she was led upstairs. Prof was in the Guys' Room, and he asked me if I wanted my "usual" (a glass of milk). I had a ginger ale instead because he had one of those handy. Once that was done, Prof said, "Julia tells us you're only a few days away from getting your license?" I nodded. "Yes. I can drive Dad's car fine. I think I've gotten the Driver Manual pretty well memorized now. It's really just a matter of coordinating between the guy whose name you gave me and Dad being free to take me to the DMV in his car. Probably sometime next week." "Good. Julia doesn't seem highly motivated to get her license so it's just as well you'll get yours quickly. While you're waiting for the girls to do whatever it is they do at such times, now is a good time to tell you about my missing leg. It happened about forty years ago. Vanessa and I had only been dating for a little while when we and another couple of friends decided to go away for a long weekend's skiing. We got up very early Friday morning, our friends picked us up and we set off. Vanessa and me in the back, them in the front. In those days seatbelts were around but weren't used much and none of us were wearing them. -- "We entered some heavy fog, not that Vanessa and I paid much attention because we were too busy talking to each other. This was our first weekend away together and we were in a very good mood. The police told me later that our driver had gone over the centerline and had been driving too fast for the conditions. Our car was hit a glancing blow and it spun several times. I was thrown out and the others stayed inside. I landed in some long grass so was relatively undamaged. The car that had hit ours was off the road on the other side from me, and our car was stationary parked sideways across the road, so it was blocking lanes in both directions. Its remaining headlight was pointing across the road so would be virtually invisible in the fog until the other traffic was on top of it. I could see headlights coming from both directions and couldn't think how to stop both streams of traffic before they hit our car. -- "I ran to it intending to get everyone out. When I got there the three of them were groggily moving but they were badly dazed and recovering too slowly. I tried to rouse them into action, but they didn't respond in time. Another car plowed into ours, sliding ours down the road and injuring me. I was able to get up, and could see that more vehicles were going to arrive very shortly. I managed to pull Vanessa out of the car and drag her to the side, but even before I got her off the road I heard the first of several more crashes. By the time I got her far enough from the road to be safe, I was unable to return because my leg had been too badly hurt. As you saw, it had to be amputated afterward. Our two friends were killed in the subsequent pile up, as were six other people. -- "Two morals from this story: First, drive safely. Our driver was not driving safely and as a result caused the death of a total of eight people including himself, and several people were badly injured. Second, wear seatbelts. Had we been wearing them we would have been able to exit our car almost immediately, and possibly been able to stop or slow the traffic in both directions, saving not only ourselves but several other people. I didn't emphasize those morals strongly enough. If you're the driver, then you do not start the car's engine until all the seatbelts are on, and you make sure they stay on until after the engine is stopped. If I ever see or hear of you in a car with the engine going and seatbelts not on, then you'll be persona non grata anywhere near vehicles and my family. Likewise if I hear of or see you driving dangerously. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that I've got a very low definition of what constitutes 'dangerously'." I answered, "Yes, sir. I haven't forgotten the last time you stressed car safety to me. I'll be a safe driver." "You'd better be. You strike me as a responsible teenager and certainly not a show-off, but you're still a teenager - a group not known for their self-control and attention spans. This won't be the last time you'll be reminded, just like our children. On a more pleasant note, I hear Donna has largely financed your car purchase already?" I answered, "Yes. She certainly has plenty of ingenuity and a good heart. I'm a bit worried what she'll think if I turn up with millions of dollars in a few weeks though, as that'll downgrade the value of her present enormously. Julia and I can easily share her car until then, when we can buy more reliable cars for each of us, so it doesn't make sense to go to all the trouble of buying a cheapo one now." Vanessa, who had come back in during Prof's story, said, "Reassure her that 'it's the thought that counts.' She should be old enough to understand that." "Yeah. That's what I figured too." Prof said, "I'll head back to my work. Oh, while I remember Mark, The Boys are going to ask around tonight about getting you a fake ID. We'll probably have some news for you tomorrow. I hope they're successful, as I'm looking forward to doing it. It should be fun, not to mention highly profitable." Vanessa added, "It's fun already for the women because we're going mansion viewing tomorrow. It's just as well you're getting your license too, Mark, as I think they're all out of town because of our criterion for being distant from our neighbors." Prof made his departure. After he was gone Vanessa said, "Now I'll fill in the small omissions from Prof's story. When he was initially thrown from the car, he was considerably more injured than he implied. Nonetheless he staggered back to our car, even though he was clearly heading into danger. He was trying to get my door open but was unable to because it had been jammed by the first impact, when the next car hit us the other side. His lower-leg was mashed when our car was pushed over it. He got up and hopped around to the other side of our car, managed to get that door open, and dragged me out. I was unconscious from the second impact and was a dead weight. Afterward everyone was incredulous that a little guy like him, with one leg that was completely unusable and doubtless incredibly painful, could have dragged me off the road. -- "Because of his heroism in saving me he nearly died himself, because when all the emergency services arrived no one knew about us. He'd pulled me behind a bush before passing out on top of me. We were only found because an observant EMT noticed the trail of blood Archie's leg had left. He followed it and found us, otherwise Archie would have died soon from blood loss. Also, if he'd left me in our car I would certainly had died, as our car was flipped onto its side and totally crushed in the subsequent pile up. He saved my life, at great risk to his own. -- "It took him a long time to recover from the guilt of not being able to save everybody. He lost his best friend, a guy he'd known all his life, because he chose to save me, a girl he'd only been dating for a few months. He had a great deal of trouble facing his friend's family, all of whom he knew well. His insistence - OUR insistence - is not just to prevent needless injuries and deaths, but to prevent repeats of the considerable guilt he experienced. He was my hero but he thought of himself as a failure. His guilt meant it took me several years to talk him into marrying me. Now you know why road safety is so important to us, and part of why Prof is so important to me. -- "But enough of that, on to more pleasant topics. The girls will be down shortly and your eyes are going to bug out when you see Carol's dress. Julia has been quite naughty. Carol is loving it." #4: #1: #4: #1: Vanessa said, "Watch a movie or play on the pool table. The girls shouldn't be long and I'll send them here when they come down." There wasn't time to get into a DVD, so I just goofed off, as Donna would say, playing 8-ball with my right side against my left. The best half-man should win. About ten minutes later the girls came in. Julia entered first wearing her First Date dress, then Cindy. And that was all. Damn! I must have had an amusing expression on my face because Julia laughed, then said, "I see Mom told you about Carol's dress?" I realized I had to be careful what I showed and said in front of Cindy, so I answered, "Yes. But only that you were very naughty about it. Just enough to make me curious. Where is she?" "She's waiting outside the door. We want to make sure she has your full attention when she comes in. I see she will." Julia called through the door, "Come in, darling." #1: #2: #1: #2: The internal conversation stopped there, as did all the rest of my thought processes, because Carol walked into the room. I had assumed that Carol was going to be wearing a dress something like Julia's because it came from the same store. I was WRONG! Julia's dress was classy and elegant. Carol's dress was classy and gloriously obscene. Yubba, yubba! I'll start describing it from the top down, following the direction my eyes took. Carol was completely topless, except for a thin, silver string that ran around the back of her neck then down over each of her breasts, widening as it descended. But - obscenely - not widening much until each strap was below its breast. Each breast had, at nipple level, a third of its width covered. The center portion over her nipples of course, but with a considerable amount of breast on either side of the strap exposed ("exposed" being the perfect word). When Carol turned into a sideways pose a few seconds later, the view was even more spectacular, as the straps were pushed out from her body. I've only described the top half of her dress, and already it was the best dress I HAVE EVER SEEN! As the straps widened going down, I could see that they were made of a black fabric underneath, with many thick silver threads on top. The silver threads widened with the straps, forming rays shooting down her dress. Two or three inches below waist level the straps widened and merged to form the skirt part of dress. It was predominately black, with the silver rays expanding as they descended all the way to the bottom of the ankle-length dress. It was a VERY different style of dress than Julia's. Carol was wearing black high-heeled shoes, with silver things on them. I can't say exactly where, as I didn't look at her shoes for long enough to remember. Her long hair was raised in a bun above her head, and she had a large silver necklace that trailed down into her cleavage, which wobbled DELIGHTFULLY every step she took. With her hair and high-heeled shoes she looked very tall, glamorous, and incredibly sexy. Yubba, yubba! "WOW! That dress is incredible! That's nothing like I imagined you were going to get. Just WOW! You're going to cause a riot tonight, Carol. And several heart attacks. I've never seen you look as incredibly sexy as you are now. Mom and Dad are going to ... Actually I'm not sure what they going to. But it's going to be fun to see, haha." #1: I was vaguely aware that Julia had started laughing at me, and Cindy had joined in too, but I wasn't paying them much attention. Julia said, "I take it that you like the dress then?" "Sorry. Could you repeat that please? I wasn't listening." More laughter, then Julia asked, "Do you know why I chose this dress?" "Because you wanted to win the Nobel Prize for Services to MAN-kind. And if they don't have such a prize, it's only because they haven't seen that dress yet." "Haha. Actually it was for the opposite reason: Services to one womankind. So I can do this." Julia had walked behind Carol, and now she slid a hand around Carol, under a strap directly over and cupping a breast, visibly rolling Carol's nipple between her thumb and forefinger. #4: #1: #4: <#3! Come off duty and have a... > #3: (You can tell how good we've gotten at ignoring reality when we're on duty.) Carol was very turned on. She melted into Julia's embrace. Julia's other arm came up to hold Carol around the waist, also under the straps. With a degree of panic I suddenly remembered Cindy. I looked at her, and she was accepting of what was happening. She didn't appear to be turned on, which I'd had a momentary hope about, but she wasn't upset or disgusted either, which I'd also had a momentary fear about. I was experiencing MANY momentary emotions, plus one emotion that was lasting a great deal longer than a moment. I double-checked Cindy's turned-on-edness after realizing that in her dress hard nipples would be easily visible. Nope. They were visible, but not prominent. What a pity. #2: #1: Julia said, "I bet you're regretting that Carol is your sister now?" "I'll never regret that, but I know what you mean. Boy oh boy do I know what you mean! If I was so unlucky that Carol wasn't my sister, then I'd be tempted all right. Which reminds me that my girlfriend - whom I haven't seen all day - has yet to greet her BOY-friend. I demand equal time! Although maybe without my nipple being tweaked please." Julia laughed again, "Your wish is my command, oh Lord." Julia released Carol, who wobbled on her feet, and elsewhere. Julia made sure Carol was steady before removing all support, then came into my arms. She gave me a big, open-mouthed, busy-tongued kiss. I even forgot about Carol for a few seconds. I also forgot about Cindy, and was surprised when Cindy commented, "I've never see a guy share his girlfriend with his sister before. That's gotta be weird?" I disengaged to answer, "It's wonderful. Look how happy Carol is." Cindy and Julia joined me in looking at Carol, who was visibly happy and proud to show it. I continued, "Julia's happy too. Who wouldn't be with a girlfriend as nice and sexy as Carol. And I'm happy seeing the two most important girls in my life so happy, so everyone wins." Julia said, "That's exactly right, except that I sometimes feel guilty for not being as available to Mark as I should be because I'm busy enjoying myself with his sister. I appreciate his attitude toward Carol's and my relationship so much that I'm not jealous about you coming along tonight, Cindy, or even bedding him if you want." #2: Julia added, "Mark, your playing around on the table reminds me of something. Cindy, do you know how to play 8-ball?" "A little, but I'm no good at it." Julia said, "My brothers grew up with this table and are very good at it. Mark had never played until they showed him how about a week and a half ago, and he beat the pants off them. Have a game with Cindy, Mark, to show her how good you are. Rack 'em up." I looked at Julia a bit doubtfully, and she quickly added, "Seriously, show her how physically gifted you are. I've been telling her upstairs that you're a physical superman, whether at running, making love and now that I think to mention it, 8-ball." #2: #4: Cindy said, "I'm not very good. Anyone could beat me." Julia answered, "It won't matter how good you are because no one can beat Mark. I'm assuming you know enough about the game to recognize an exceptional player when you see one?" "I guess so. Let's see." I racked the balls while Julia got a cue. She chalked it and passed it to Cindy, saying, "You break." As it happened, I was still down at the other end of the table when Cindy leaned forward to make her shot. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that her dress fell completely forward and the view was wonderful. Unfortunately she took her shot and stood up FAR too quickly. Damn! The table was also so long that I was standing farther away than I would've preferred. I needed to have Superman's "Telescopic Vision". I seem to remember from my childhood comic reading that he had something like that. Whatever it was called, it would have been very useful to me. It would be the perfect ability for a voyeur. When she stood up, Cindy winked at me and said, "Did you like the view?" I blushed and looked away. At the table would be a good place. She'd broken competently, and while watching it rather than having to face her I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to win this game, so I watched much more carefully. I hadn't noticed any balls going down, so I TK-encouraged a couple of balls to roll up the table a bit more than they would have, and I made sure the cue ball came to stop in a good place. Cindy stood, leaning on her cue. Julia told her, "You might as well give Mark your cue because you won't need it again." Cindy gave it to me, and I proceeded to clean the table. Julia racked the balls, and said, "Mark, you break." I cleaned the table again. During the games Cindy expressed considerable admiration for my ability. Julia said, "I don't think there's any point in another game is there?" I argued with that, "I disagree strongly! Cindy gets to break next and I like watching her, um, 'shots'." That earned me a few laughs, and Julia said, "I think you mispronounced that last word slightly, darling." Cindy laughed, as said, "You might get a free shot later if you're lucky. Are you right or left handed? You played shots on both sides." "Um, ambidextrous." Cindy turned to Julia, "I'm starting to believe what you said upstairs." I was curious about what had been said upstairs, so I asked Julia, "Oh?" Julia gave her usual answer, "It's better if you don't know." "Ahh, another one of those. They seem to happen very frequently these days." Julia said, "Just getting you trained. We've got a long life ahead of us but there's no reason not to start training you immediately." "The scary thing is that I think you're not joking." "That's because you're smart." "Oh. That's not very reassuring, you know?" "It's a good thing that I love you so much then, isn't it?" Julia said as she grabbed my arm and hugged it to her. "Yes, that is a good thing, for a variety of reasons." Julia said, "Before we go to the restaurant, there's one more thing to do. Take Mark upstairs and get him dressed in his new clothes." "Huh? What's wrong with the clothes I'm wearing?" Julia said, "Come on, honey, we don't have time to answer that question. Just come upstairs with us. Carol and I bought you some new clothes this afternoon. They're much better than what you're wearing now." (I'll give you a multi-choice pop quiz on how well you know me by now: Did I (a) stay and argue with Julia, or (b) go upstairs with her as she'd asked?) As we were all walking back upstairs, I had a thought so truly horrific that I stopped dead. The girls stopped and looked at me. I asked, "PLEASE tell me they're not pink? If they're pink I'm not taking another step." Julia laughed, "As if we'd be so cruel to someone we love so much. No pink, I promise." "Not salmon? Not whatever those other made up colors were? Nothing even vaguely pinkish?" "They're not pink, salmon, carnation or seashell. You're safe. Come and try them on." Carol added, "They're not trout either, haha." Cindy had been look on with amusement, but at 'trout' she looked at Carol and said, "Trout?" Carol said, "My brother doesn't know colors very well. We were teasing him about salmon complementing his coloring, and he insisted he didn't want salmon or trout." Cindy said, "But salmon would look terrible on him." Carol explained, "Yes, that's why it was a tease. But he didn't even know what color salmon was, and probably still doesn't. Imagine being so silly as thinking that 'trout' was a color, haha. Poor Mark has no idea! It was so funny." Julia said, "We'll tell you all about it over dinner. Let's get Mark dressed now." #1: Julia led off again, and I reluctantly followed her, sure that I was going to regret this. And I took exception to Carol's statement that it was silly to think that trout was a color. If salmon can be one, why on Earth can't trout? That was logical, wasn't it? My new pants, shirt and jacket were already laid out on the bed. They looked pretty good too. I'd tell you what colors they were, but I'd be wrong so why bother. Julia said, "Strip!" "Ahh, honey. Cindy's here." -- One of my minds added, "And Carol too." "Carol doesn't matter and I want Cindy to see your body." Carol had already bent over and had my shoes off, Julia had my jacket off and was working on my shirt buttons. It was very unfair, as Carol's movements were far too distracting for me to put up an effective defense. Cindy was looking on with what can only be described as "amused interest." Julia said, "You finish his shirt, Carol. I'll get his pants down. I like that job." Carol stood up and proceeded to unbutton my shirt, which caused lots of jiggles. Damned unfair distractions! Next thing I know I'm pushed back onto the bed so my pants could be pulled off. They were already around my knees and I couldn't recall them being pulled down off my hips. Damned unfair distractions. Within seconds I was left in my underwear and socks. Sitting on the bed, trying to be inconspicuous. Julia said, "Stand up and turn around slowly, so Cindy can have a good look." It was kind of hard to do that inconspicuously. It's also hard to refuse anything Julia 'requests', so I mentally bit the bullet, stood up and uncomfortably performed as requested. I didn't enjoyed it at all, but Cindy did. "Nice body, Mark. Very, very nice. To tell for sure you'll have to drop your shorts. Oh look, he even blushes cutely. I think I'll go back to calling you 'Modest Mark'. You really are very cute when you blush." #3: Julia said, "I've emptied your pockets, and all I've found is your wallet and house keys. Was that all? No handkerchiefs or anything else?" "Ahh, no, that's all." "Okay. We'll donate these clothes to charity. Get yourself a darker pair of socks out of your drawer. That'll give Cindy a better chance to see your body too." "{Sigh}." I walked around the bed to my drawer, and pulled out a pair of darker socks as well as three hankies because you never know. I took off the pair of socks I had on, and rolled them up and put them back in the drawer as they were newly on. They gave me an idea. As it seemed that Julia was trying to impress Cindy with my physical prowess, I asked Julia, "Have I ever shown you my juggling?" Julia and Carol both said, "No." I pulled out four light-colored and four dark-colored pairs of socks, turned to face the girls, uncentered myself and started juggling them. It's quite easy. I have to throw them quite high, but I have one eye pointing up, and one straight forward to include my hands, so the balls are always in my field of view. Then I have each mind follow two balls, numbers 1 & 5, 2 & 6, etc., and control the hands when appropriate. The other thing it requires is good physical coordination, which I'm superb at. That doesn't require conscious control, which is just as well because all my minds were busy. Rather it's subconscious, or maybe even lower. In any event, I'm extremely coordinated, that being one reason why my running style looks so good, I think. Juggling is a useless skill, but it does look good, especially the alternating colored balls orbiting in virtually exactly the same paths continuously, as one benefit of my physical coordination is being able to throw each pair with the same angle and force. The girls were VERY impressed. Carol said, "That's so cool. I've never seen you do that before. When did you learn to do that?" Julia snorted, and Carol looked at her. Julia said, "A normal person would have to learn and practice for goodness knows how long. I bet it took Mark five minutes to learn how to do that." I stopped juggling so I could spare the attention to talk. "Actually you're about right. I tried it about two months ago and found it quite easy." Cindy said, "Can you start juggling again please? I noticed something at the end that I want to check." For my answer, I started juggling again. Cindy walked closer to me, standing a yard in front of me. "I though so," she declared, "your eyes are pointing in different directions." I stopped juggling. That a second for the last ball to land, during which I briefly thought about showing her my eyeball trick. Several of my classmates had seen it. It'd been accidental, but that didn't matter. I couldn't see any harm in Cindy knowing about it. "Yep. I can move my eyeballs independently. It makes it easier to keep the socks in sight all the time." I swiveled my eyeballs around randomly while talking to her. Cindy paused for a second, and I could see a strain on her face. Her eyes looked up, then down again, then up, etc. After a few seconds, "How do you do that? I can't look up with only one eye." I shrugged. "I don't know, I just can. How do you move two fingers on the same hand so one points up and the other down? You don't have to think about it, you just do it. Same with my eyes, I just do it." "It's very impressive. YOU'RE very impressive. I'm going to have to starting calling you 'Modest Mark the Mystery Man'." "Believe me, I am not nearly as mysterious as every female I meet. I don't think I'll ever understand females. For instance, how come you undressed me in seconds, and I'm sure could dress me almost as fast, but it always takes Julia at least thirty minutes to get ready for a date? That's a mystery to me." I hadn't been on many dates with Julia, but I nearly always had to wait for her to descend from her room. Plus I knew from countless TV comedies that this was a common source of mystery, if not annoyance, so I played on it. Cindy looked at Julia, and I hope jokingly said, "Only thirty minutes! It's a mystery to me how you get ready so quickly too." That wasn't exactly my point. Julia said, "I start ages before, of course. Mark just has to wait for the last thirty minutes." "Hang on, that wasn't my point. I was asking why it doesn't take the one or two minutes it takes any guy?" Julia laughed happily, "Haha. Good one, Mark." Just as I thought, no answer. Julia turned to Cindy, "Have you seen enough of Mark's body? Shall we get him dressed now?" I'd forgotten I was virtually naked. I blushed again. Cindy, who was standing close to me, said, "He really is very cute, isn't he?" I thought it was a rhetorical question - certainly I wasn't going to answer it - but Julia and Carol both said, "Yes." Julia added, "He's a superb athlete at virtually every sport, but he's so self-effacing and modest. He's a real gem." Cindy said, "What other sports are you good at?" I answered, "The only one I play properly is soccer." I nearly added that I was on the school team, but I still didn't know what Julia had told Cindy about my age, which was becoming an increasing nuisance. I'd like to find that out soon. Instead I said, "I'm on a team that plays mainly for fun. We do well and we have good fun. It's a good bunch of guys. Other than that I just goof around with my littlest sister Donna. She's mad on sports, so we goof around a lot." Carol said, "He's the star of his soccer team. By far their best player. Dad says he could be a pro basketball player. You've seen how good a runner he is, and he's even better at marathons than 10ks. I don't know any other sports that he's tried. He hates football jocks so he won't play that, but I'm sure he'd be a star there as well, if he wanted to." Cindy picked up on the marathon reference, obviously running was an interest of hers, "What's your best marathon time?" "Ahh, actually I haven't run one yet." "Then how could Carol say you're better at marathons than 10ks?" Cindy looked at Carol who felt obligated to defend her opinion, "I've timed him on my bike, and he can run..." I could see this was heading toward something too revealing, so I interrupted Carol, "We've timed me running sub-marathon distances and extrapolated." "So how fast do you think you can run a marathon?" "I'd rather not say. Let's just say something similar to my 10k time, proportionately, okay?" "Do you think you'd win a marathon race against a field of the same caliber as you had today?" "I can answer that question very accurately: 'It ain't gonna happen.' I don't want to run any more organized races, and I especially don't want to win one. That's more trouble than it's worth, which is less than nothing as it just gives Dad the problem of working out where to store the scrap metal." "Can I come running with you one day? Just the two of us?" That was far better than another organized race. I knew she'd never be able to keep up with me, which meant I could stay at her pace and she'd not find out how special I was. "I suppose that'd be okay. I'd prefer to get to know you better though. I know almost nothing about you, mainly because Julia seems to have steered all this conversation to be about me. I've been standing here almost naked for several minutes, for goodness sake. I'd really like to get dressed now, if that's permitted?" Cindy laughed, "If you must. I've enjoyed looking at your body. I DID tell you when we first met that I like looking at handsome guys. I noticed you enjoyed looking at mine when I played my single shot at pool." "Um, yes, sorry about that." "Do you mean sorry you looked, or sorry that I knew you were looking?" "Ahh, I must confess to the latter." "Good. I wouldn't want to think that I'm losing my looks." "I think I can confidently confirm that you are not losing your looks. Your face is certainly very pretty, and from what I saw during your single, far too brief pool shot, the rest of you looked just as good." "Thank you, kind sir. Maybe if you play your cards right you'll get a longer look." Julia emphatically said, "NO!" Causing everyone to look at Julia in surprise. -- Julia added, "Cindy, can I have a quick word with you outside please? That'll give Mark a chance to get dressed." Cindy looked puzzled, but Julia started walking out of the room so Cindy followed. When the door was closed I quickly asked Carol, "Does Cindy know we go to school?" "She knows I do because I told her my age. Julia gave her age too, but no one has mentioned yours, or whether you're at school or college. Cindy has referred to me as your little sister a few times, so I guess she thinks there's a bigger age gap than there really is." "Thanks. It sounds like I have to keep making sure I don't mention school, which is a pain. By the way, that dress is INCREDIBLE! If Cindy wasn't with us tonight I'd be all over you. I am VERY envious of Julia's touching you. Your hair done up like that, your necklace and shoes - everything makes you look sensational. I almost hope Cindy goes home. No, that's not true, I DO hope Cindy goes home. I'd rather stay in this room with you and Julia." "As Cindy said, 'Thank you, kind sir.' Julia said she'd bought it so she could put her hand inside it, but that was just for Cindy's benefit. You know that we really bought it for you, don't you?" "I'm so blown away by it I'm not capable of wondering about your motives. I'm too busy being MIGHTY glad that you bought it. We have got to find more reasons for you to wear that dress when we go out. Or stay in. I think you should even wear it to breakfast every morning. It'd certainly get my day off to a happy start. Dad's too, probably. Provided he survives his heart attack when he sees you in it." "Yeah, I'm looking forward to showing them. I'm very proud of how good I look. I want them to see how I've grown up so they'll let me do more things with you and Julia. And thank you for saying you want Cindy to go home. I want her to as well, but we're not allowed to misbehave much. We'll have lots of days and nights together in the future, and it's probably better that we get used to other people." #4: The door opened a little, then stopped, and I heard Julia saying, "Let me know by 10 at the latest, okay?" Cindy answered, "I said I would." The door resumed opening. (#1: ) Julia came in, and said, "STILL not dressed. You haven't even put your socks on yet. I'm beginning to suspect you like being nearly naked around guests. Maybe we should strip you every time we have visitors?" "If they're as good looking as Cindy, maybe. But I don't want to go to the restaurant this way so I'll get dressed now." I started doing so, talking as I did. "I just got carried away talking to Carol. I haven't seen her all day so it was good to start catching up." Cindy said, "You get on very well with both your sisters, don't you?" "I certainly do. They're both very special people." "Julia's just finished pointing out to me some of the consequences of your being so special. It looks to me that you're the most special member of your family." #4: #2: #1: I answered, using Julia's theme, "Physically special maybe. Although looking at Carol in that dress, she looks very physically special too, to put it mildly. My sporting abilities to one side, non-physically everyone in my family gets along very well together. It's a very nice way to live. Can we spend the next while getting to know you please, Cindy? All I know is that you're pretty, like looking at handsome guys, and are a runner. Even that last bit is a guess." "Yes, I'm a runner. I'm in the same club as Donna. I've seen her around, although I don't think she recognized me. I run 5 and 10k distances, and Donna's more of a sprinter if I remember correctly." I wasn't totally sure, which was a bit embarrassing. I'd seen her bring home lots of prizes over the years, but most of those were in the days before I was nice to her. Thinking back over the last year or so, I seemed to recall short distance races was what she talked about mostly. I really should find out, but in the meanwhile I just nodded. Cindy continued, "Our being in different age groups means we don't mix much. What else? I'm doing my first year of an MS in Animal Science, majoring in dairy. My family is in Portland but I'm renting down here because the drive takes over an hour and I like having the freedom. It's easier to meet handsome guys like you this way, haha." I was dressed now, just threading the belt from my now charity-case pants into my new ones. Julia noticed. "Your belt's too long. I'll get you a shorter one next time. You look good, Mark. Those clothes suit you. What do you think, girls?" The other girls both thought I looked very good. Julia directed me to her mirrors. She had a setup that could be easily swung out to enable the person to see their front, back and a side, all at the same time - and it STILL takes her over half an hour to get ready! The setup is total overkill, but it's a girl's room so what can you expect. I had to admit that I looked very good. Considerably better than with what I'd had on a several minutes ago. I declared, "These are excellent clothes. The nicest I've ever worn, I think. Even I think I'm nearly handsome now." Julia said, "Girls, put your hand up if you think Mark is VERY handsome." Four hands shot up (Carol cheated). Cindy said, "That reminds me, why is your right arm so white?" "It was broken a few weeks ago. I had it in a cast until recently and it hasn't had a chance to tan up to my usual pale shade of white. Hey! There are shades of white, just like you girls said the other day. I knew that all along and never realized." Julia said, "As much as I'd like to tease you about that, we're running a bit late. I think we better make tracks to the restaurant." I thought that was an EXCELLENT idea, so I stopped admiring the look of my new clothes in all the mirrors. We were met at the door by a camera toting Vanessa, who complimented me on my new attire. "Julia and Carol picked it out for me. They're apparently much better at choosing my clothes than I am." Vanessa said, "Yes. Very few men have any color or style sense." "I'm in with the majority then. That makes me feel better." Julia said, "Mom, we're starting to run quite late. We might lose our reservation if we stop for photos." Vanessa's solution was to call the restaurant to postpone our reservation by thirty minutes, and then take the photos. I was happy with this because as much as I wanted food, I wanted pictures of Carol even more. The first time there was a pose of just Cindy and me, Cindy unhesitatingly put her arm around my waist. It felt nice and I enjoyed doing likewise to her. After that photograph, Julia got Cindy to hold me "properly", in the approved arm-grabbing manner. In group shots after that, when Cindy was beside me, she always held me in the proper manner. I was pleased at how she wasn't the least bit reluctant to touch me. That suited me nicely, as I wasn't the least bit reluctant at having her touch me either. I still felt self-conscious touching her, so I only mirrored her touches on me after she'd initiated each contact, although mirroring her holding my arm into her breasts didn't have quite the same effect. It took fifteen minutes to finish the photography, as Vanessa seemed to be bit OTT about getting lots of photographs. Cindy started putting on her coat and I helped her. Julia put one on too, which Carol helped her with. Carol didn't have one. I hoped we could get a park close to the restaurant because Carol was going to get very cold otherwise. Julia and Carol linked arms before we walked out, so I got the hint and offered my arm to Cindy, and escorted her to her car door. As Cindy was about to set off I said, "Cindy, I don't know how often you'll be driving us, but the family rules are that the engine doesn't get started until everyone has seatbelts on, and you drive carefully the whole time." "Sure." Julia said, "Dad's been talking to you." "Yes, not for the first time either." ------- Chapter 66: Short Date with Cindy Saturday, April 16, 2005 (Continued) We parked fairly close to the restaurant and walked down the sidewalk. I had Cindy properly attached to my left arm, Julia on my right arm, and Carol to her right. Carol got LOTS of looks and knew it. And loved it. She stood tall, in her already tall high-heeled shoes. I noticed that she was not totally comfortable walking in those shoes, but was managing surprisingly well (even though Carol was two people away from me, I could still see her quite easily because the person in the middle was Julia, who isn't exactly a difficult obstacle to see around or over). I commented on how well she was walking in high-heels, and Carol answered, "Lots of practice in Mom's shoes." I hadn't been aware that she'd done any practice. I guess girls have to learn somehow. High-heeled shoes must be almost impossible to walk in the first few times. We heard a piercing wolf-whistle from across the street, and I asked Julia loudly enough for the three girls to hear, "Am I really that handsome?" It earning me some chuckles, and a few comments about my attractiveness to other males that I'd rather not repeat, or have heard. We arrived at the restaurant without further incident, the girls handing over their coats. I kept mine on because my wallet was in the pocket, and I felt cold just looking at the girls. Cold and horny, actually. Lots of eyes followed us across the restaurant, with some of "us" being followed more than others, and ditto for some parts of some of "us". As we neared our table I heard, "Hey, Egg. You lucky devil, how are ya? As if I need to ask." It was one of the guys on my soccer team called Andrew, so I stopped. I introduced the girls to him, and him to the girls. I felt a bit self-conscious about how sexy Carol was looking, so I introduced her as just "Carol", leaving off the usual "My sister" tag. [During the rest of our conversation Andrew's eyes didn't know where to look, as all three girls were stunning. He unsurprisingly ended up looking mostly at Carol. I doubt he recognized her as my sister as he wasn't looking at her face much.] After I'd introduced Andrew to the girls, Andrew said, "Mom, Dad, this is Egg, otherwise known as Mark Anderson. The guy who single-handedly DESTROYED our opponents today. I've never seen anything like it. He was unstoppable. What a game!" -- To me he said, "You're celebrating your victory in style. THREE beautiful girls! Damn it, Egg, no wonder I have trouble getting dates. You've got half the best looking girls in town with you." "Gee, as soon as I stop smiling I'll start feeling sorry for you. I don't think it'll be anytime soon though, haha. If you'll excuse me, I'll take my dates to our table." My last comment was just to rub his complaint in. We sat down. I ended up between Julia and Cindy, which meant that I was looking straight across to Carol, who was a marvelous sight. Although, when I thought about it (as I did), seeing Carol side-on would've been even better (from a purely voyeuristic perspective, i.e., it would've been even better). When we were settled, Cindy asked, "Did you play a game of something today? Very well, from what I heard." "Yes, soccer. My first game since my cast came off. It was good to get back on the field. I'd missed it." "You looked fresh when you ran past me and I'd heard that you weren't tired after your run, but you really weren't tired, were you? I'd been assuming you just didn't look it, but you really weren't?" "No. Running isn't very tiring for me. My running style seems to make it easier for me, I guess." "You know they can study running styles in laboratories. Put little colored dots all over your body, especially your feet and legs. They have you run on a treadmill and video you, then feed it all into a computer. They might want to study your style if it's as good as it sounds." "THEY might want to, but I don't. I can't think of a good reason to waste the time, and don't want to be studied. I'd rather spend my time with beautiful girls. I've NEVER seen a lab smock look as good as any of the dresses you three are wearing. I think I'll pass on volunteering to be a lab rat, thank you." Cindy said, "The most serious runners go into the lab to improve their running styles, but that doesn't motivate you, does it?" "Not in the slightest. I fully intend never to run in another organized race, so improving my style is a total non-issue." "Okay. That kills that topic. Next topic: Why did that guy call you 'Egg'? Is that the team's nickname for you? What does it mean?" #2: #4: So I answered, "It's the entire school's nickname for me. It means..." "You still go to school?" "Sure. I'm a lot younger than you. Does that matter to you?" "How old are you?" Julia came in with, "He's studying 11th grade..." I interrupted, "I'm STUDYING 11th grade, but I'm in the 10th. I'm fifteen. Does that matter to you?" "Christ! I fancied a 15-year old!..." #2: " ... That's a shocker. There's a law against what I was thinking about doing with you. No wonder you're still living with your parents. When I chose this dress I didn't think I'd be meeting your parents again, or especially your girlfriend's parents. Now meeting them makes more sense, but how come none of the parents objected to me hitting on you? That makes even less sense considering how young you are. It's downright weird." I answered, "Our parents are cool about me dating other girls. There's a good reason for it but it's too complicated to go into now as it's a really long story. Not that your concern about the law matters as we weren't going to have sex tonight anyway." Julia interrupted. "You can if you want, with Cindy I mean. Not with, um, not with me. Just with Cindy is allowed." "No it's not. Not until after the trial." Julia explained, "Remember you were in your car with your dad, and I said my mom had an idea?" "Yes." "Mom's idea was that it IS okay for you to have sex with Cindy, if she's eighteen or over. Mom checked it with your dad, and later with your mom, who both agreed. If you had under-age sex the defense lawyers could use it against you, but not over-age sex. That doesn't make you guilty of anything, legally or morally, so there's no mud to throw at you. As far as everyone is concerned, you're free and clear. You can even spend the night with her in my room if you want. Carol and I will sleep elsewhere." Cindy said, "Hold up! There's too much bad-sounding stuff going on here that I don't understand. First I object to your comments about Mark being allowed to have sex with me, like it's JUST his choice. I'll have you know I choose who I sleep with..." Julia interrupted, "Which is EXACTLY what I've told you twice already today. When you first arrived and then outside my bedroom door. I told you that you had until 10pm to make up your mind whether you wanted to or not, otherwise Mark and I would enjoy the rest of our evening together. I never pressured you into it, never said you had to. I told you it was entirely your choice. I stressed that I would stand to the side and let you make up your own mind. However, I will apologize for not repeatedly emphasizing it to you during my explanation of Mom's idea to Mark. I'd figured you'd remember but obviously you didn't. So, yes, if Mark AND YOU want to sleep together tonight, then it's okay with everyone else, including my parents, as it was my mother's suggestion. If either of you doesn't want to, then it's a dead issue. Does that address your concern?" The waiter approached during Julia's little speech, and I waved him away. "You did tell me that, you're right. But what's all this about lawyers and a trial. Is Mark a criminal?" Julia and Carol both laughed at that. Carol said, "Mark wouldn't hurt a fly. He was in a cast because HE was beaten up. The guys that did it to him are on trial." "Then why is he not allowed to have sex with Julia? What the big deal about teenagers having sex?" I answered, "There's a stupid amount of noise about this case. Do you read the papers or watch the local TV news at all?" I'd asked the last part because I was a little surprised she hadn't recognized me by now, as there'd been a LOT of publicity. "Not much. Hardly at all. Nothing much happens that interests me." "If you had you might've heard about a high-school boy - me - who was sexually molested by a senior called Annette Neumeyer. When I turned her down, several of her jock boyfriends assaulted me. Allegedly. Three different assaults, one of which allegedly broke my alleged arm. And a fourth assault more recently, but that was only partially related. All the jocks, seven of them if I remember correctly, are going on trial in just over a week. All football players so it's gutted the school's football team." Cindy exclaimed, "I remember now! That was big news two or three weeks ago. I heard lots of people joking about it." "Yes. It was a big joke being assaulted several times and having my arm broken." "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I just meant to say that I did hear about it." "Okay. Because of the sexual background to the assaults and all the prurient media interest, the parents have decided that Julia and I have to be good little children until it's over. Officially we're not even supposed to tell anyone that we've ever had sex, but I guess Julia told you that we had." Julia said, "I did. I forgot we weren't supposed to. There were so many other things I was thinking about that I forgot. Please keep that quiet, Cindy?" "I don't want to talk about this with other people anyway. It's too embarrassing." Julia said, "Not in a few years it won't be." I thought I knew what Julia meant - that when I'm famous Cindy will be proud that she'd bedded me - but I didn't want to go down that path. I thought Julia had gone over the top trying to 'sell' me to Cindy. I appreciated her enthusiasm to get me bedded - such an attitude is not unwelcome in a girlfriend - but I was tired of the falseness, the exaggeration and the selling. I'd rather spend the evening honestly with Carol and Julia. So I waved it off, telling Cindy, "It doesn't matter, forget it." Cindy pushed back her chair, saying, "You're right, I'm going to forget this. Sorry, but there are too many things going on here that I don't understand and you're too young for me anyway. There are plenty of other guys so I don't need this. Thanks for the dinner invite, but I'm leaving. Bye." Cindy stood up and walked out. Julia looked quite upset, so I said, "Good. Let's get the menus and order. I'm hungry." Julia still looked upset, so I guess the thought of ordering food cheered me up more than her. She said, "How can you say 'Good'? She walked out. That's bad. You were supposed to sleep with her tonight. I messed everything up..." I had no doubt that Julia could have gone on for some time, which would've upset her unnecessarily and also upset me, and not only because it would've delayed our placing our food order. So I cut her off, "Julia, listen to me. I'm GLAD she's gone. For a whole bunch of reasons: There was too much 'selling' going on which I found totally unrelaxing. I'd rather concentrate on my two favorite girls, especially with both of you looking as good as you do now. I didn't know anything about her - she was just a random stranger who made a pass at me - and I would truly rather spend all evening talking to you two than be alone in a room with her. By the look of this restaurant, her leaving will save your parents a bundle of money too. All things considered, I'm relaxed, fine and happy about her leaving. -- "Remember that these girls are for learning experiences. I learned some things tonight, including that I don't like it when you hard-sell me, and I don't like trying to hide my age and watching every word I say. In the future we'll just be ourselves and if any other girls want in, then fine. For goodness sake, how hard is it to replace Cindy with some other girl? There are dozens at school who have already tried to get friendly with me. They're far better because they know who and what I am. Forget Cindy, she's unimportant. Learn the lesson and move on." I knew Julia believed that lots of other girls wanted me, but the truth is that their interest had significantly reduced recently because I hadn't been in the newspaper for quite a while, Julia had made it VERY clear that I was hers, and word had gotten around that I rejected everyone. -- I gave a brief chuckle, then added, "Another thought just struck me: remember how you said we might choose more wives based on how well they meet our future needs? How much use would Cindy be to us in the future? She's studying dairy. The only thing we could get out of a dairy farm is milk for when Carol has my babies. Look at Carol in her dress. Do you think we'll EVER be short of milk? Haha." Julia seemed half-reassured, which meant that food was now my number one priority. I looked up and saw a waiter looking at our table. I waved him over. He was a male, so he was at our table in two seconds. "Can we have three menus please?" He told Carol's chest, "Yes, sir." Then backed away from our table a lot slower than he'd arrived. While waiting for the menus, I turned to Julia, and said, "I appreciated your sales job on my behalf, but I wasn't comfortable with it. Sex is not that important. I'd rather just relax and be myself without trying to spin everything to make me look as good as possible, okay?" Julia paused, then said, "Yes, you're right. I'm sorry. I got carried away, didn't I?" "A bit much, for my tastes anyway. I don't like all the salesmanship. 'Modest Mark', remember? In the future let's do it simpler." "Sorry. Your wish is my command, as always. I was wrong, but I am very proud of you, you know. And I only told the truth." "I know you did, but sometimes you spun it pretty hard. When Cindy asked how old I was, you said I studied 11th grade. That was literally true but you did it deliberately to add two years to what she thought my age was. That was enough spin to be considered deceptive, and probably unethical, don't you think?" I knew that'd get to her, and it did. She hung her head, saying, "You're right. I was trying too hard. I won't do it anymore. Sorry." I told her, "Don't beat yourself up about it. It's not as if she mattered at all, did she? She pushed herself into our life, then took herself out a couple of hours later. It cost us nothing. I had some fun looking at her, and we all learned a few things. Personally I count that as a success." The menus had arrived, so I opened mine. I added, "Wow, look at the prices! Now I'm REALLY glad she left. I would've felt uncomfortable making your parents pay this much to feed her, just so I could have a bit of fun with her later." Carol said, "I'm hungry. Which means Mark must be even hungrier and that's not right. We shouldn't make him wait so long. Let's get something quickly for him." Julia said, "Good girl, sweetie. You're a good wife. Thank you." Carol looked very pleased, and Julia looked around for a waiter. Spotting one nearby, he was summoned. Julia told him, "Do you have a soup that you can bring a bowl of IMMEDIATELY? Not in five or ten minutes, but right now?" "I think so, yes. What flavor do you want?" "Whichever is your most filling. Please bring one bowl immediately, plus plenty of bread too. Thank you." When he was on his way to the kitchen, I said, "I am hungry, but that might've been a bit of an overreaction. I could've waited." Julia said, "By the time we order, and they deliver it, our appetizers will probably be half an hour away, and our mains maybe an hour. Would you have been comfortable waiting that long?" "Uh, no." "Good. Plus I like bossing people around. You might've noticed that." "Haha. I believe that I might have noticed something along those lines. So this would be one of those win-win deals then?" "Yes for you and me. Not so much for the waiter." "I don't know about that. I think he likes being called to this table." It only took him a couple of minutes, then our waiter was back with our urgent soup and bread order. He asked Carol's chest whether we needed anything else. We said we didn't. After he'd gone, I told Carol, "I love that dress on you. Not only does it create all sorts of wonderful feelings in me, but it guarantees we get extremely rapid service too. It's a very useful dress." I earned a couple of little chuckles for that, and then I remembered a previous thought of mine, "Carol, would you please move to sit in this chair." Indicating the one that Cindy had vacated. I thought it was interesting that Carol did so without any more than a "Sure." It was Julia that asked, "Why?" I answered, "Carol's dress looks even sexier when I see it partly side-on." I realized that Carol's new seat meant that she was now directly front-on for Julia, so improving my view had diminished Julia's. Too bad, as there have to be some benefits in being the Lord! I'd hoped I'd find one if I kept trying for long enough. Carol said, "Good. I'm glad I can do something to make you happy." "Happy is only part of it. Excited and horny too, not to mention extremely frustrated. My hand is aching to slide under your strap and feel your breast exactly the way Julia did in front of Cindy. I can't get that desire out of my head. I wish everyone in the restaurant would look the other way for a minute." Julia said, "Carol, lean over and pretend to look for something you dropped on the floor between you and Mark. There you go, Mark, reach down and play with her as much as you like." Having a smart girlfriend is great! I quickly looked around. Julia was right: we had a table on the side of the room so there was no one behind us, and the tablecloth hid us from everyone in the restaurant. Getting into the role I said, "Let me help you with that." Then I bent over and helped myself to Carol. I slid one hand over Carol's side, under the strap and onto her breast. Ahh, heaven! I wanted to feel as much as I could, so I tried to circle her breast with my hand, managing to get about halfway around, then I rubbed up and down. All the time trying to keep my hand in contact as much as possible. I wondered how many minutes we could stay down here? How quickly does soup get cold? Perhaps I could call out to Julia for her to order the mains for us, and she could let us know when the food arrived. Haha. Despite my internal jokes, I restricted myself to only thirty seconds or so. Very enjoyable seconds they were too. I reluctantly sat up, with Carol doing the same a second later. Julia asked, "Feel better?" "Yes," from both Carol and me. Julia laughed, adding, "I meant just Mark, but it's good to know you enjoyed it too, sweetie." Carol said, "I'll say. I wish he'd do things like that more often. Thank you for suggesting it, Julia." I quickly added, "Yes, thank you, Julia. I had a very good time." The soup was waiting for me, so I made it wait no longer. While buttering the first piece of bread I asked, "So, girls, how did your shopping go today?" I thought that was an excellent question because they both immediately started gushing back and forth about stuff that I had no comprehension of. I gave the occasional "Ah ha", "That's good", or the like, just to prove I was listening. Listening I was happy to do, as it didn't impede my food consumption. It was a very clever question indeed. Especially as it proved that I understood something about females: how to use their shopping weakness to my advantage. With the hunger edge taken off I turned my attention to my menu. The girls, having gushed enough about their clothes purchases, did likewise. We called our waiter over. Whoosh! He asked Carol's breasts what we wanted. We gave him our orders and the girls immediately resumed their gushing. I leaned back, nibbling on a piece of bread and just admired the views on either side of me. I tuned out their conversation because there are few things in life more boring than girls talking about clothes. Not only do most of their sentences contain words that I've no idea of the meaning of, but they've ALREADY seen each other buy the clothes, so what on Earth needs to be discussed? Pointless, meaningless and boring. Although, at the moment, nice to watch. The girls had no trouble at all talking until the appetizers arrived. The girls gave me samples of theirs, and they were all very tasty. After that course the girls asked about my race this morning. I spent a fair while telling them about the race itself, the cheating accusation crap, Donna's scheme, and Donna's forwardness before I left on this date. That occupied us right through our main course. I remembered to compliment them again on being so good at picking out my new clothes. Julia said, "We could have done better if you'd been with us. We should take you shopping some time soon. Not just to get you some better clothes, but you probably need to dress older to carry out your moneymaking plan too." I suspected that it wasn't "my plan" anymore, but I took her point. I agreed to do that "soon". We talked more about Donna's being up-front about wanting to have sex with me. I told them about her climbing onto my lap and rubbing my hand over her nipple. Also her strong preference not to wait thirteen months until she's Carol's age. Teasing Donna was going to be difficult when she just comes out and asks to be fucked, which is pretty much what she'd said, without being quite so coarse. Carol said, "I'll talk with her. She'll tell me more about what she's thinking. While I remember, we bought her a vibrator today. It might throw gas on the fire if you give it to her. Perhaps I should, or maybe Mom might be better. I'll take it home but won't give it to Donna until I've talked to her." I was debating whether to have a dessert when Andrew came over. Half to ogle the girls, and half to tell me that his parents would be coming to our next game to watch me play. He congratulated me on my superb game, and on my ability to celebrate our victory in style. Julia said, "We're actually celebrating his victory in a running race this morning and for getting his cast off. We don't know anything about his soccer game, what happened?" Andrew enthused, "He CREAMED the opposition. Made complete fools out of all of them. He got three times more goals than we've ever scored in a game before, not to mention setting up several others. He doesn't need a team, he could probably win games all by himself. Anyway, congratulations on whatever else you're celebrating. I'd better go, catch you at school, Egg." One last look at the girls and he left. Julia said, "Back when I first started going out with you, and was telling Dad how well you moved, he was curious about seeing you play. You had your broken arm then so weren't playing, but maybe I'll remind him. When and where is your next game?" "Ah, next Saturday, 2pm, at CV. It's just a friendly," (CV is Crescent Valley High School, the other large high school in Corvallis), "like we do from time to time, whenever the coaches have a common gap." Julia said, "That's easy then. I'll mention it to Dad and Mom." Carol said, "Good. I'll come too. Should I wear this dress and stand near your opponent's goalkeeper. That'd help, wouldn't it?" I laughed, "Their WHOLE team would stand around their goal. But I think we'd still score anyway. Maybe we should save that secret weapon until Donna's betting on a game." I'd been vaguely wondering about making my performance in the last game a never-repeated wonder by playing the rest of my games uncentered to turn off my proximity sense. That would make me feel uncomfortable because being centered feels 'smoother', but it might be a good idea. I was a bit worried about being so good at soccer that I attracted notoriety of some form, but now I was worried about letting down my spectators. After a small internal debate, I decided that I'd keep playing with proximity, but definitely without TK. That seemed like cheating and might be detected on film if someone carefully replayed a videotape of a game. I didn't really see any major problems with reacting to my proximity sense, as it just gave me good reactions or looked like good guesses. Having made my decision, I returned my attention to the dessert menu. I'd just ordered my dessert when Julia said, "How'd you like to sit in the hot tub and have Carol and me spoon-feed your dessert to you?" See that I liked that idea a lot, Julia concluded, "We'll do that then. I'll go pay the bill and ask them to bag it up. I'll order a taxi too." Carol said, "I'll get Mark's dessert. I think the waiter will be happy to do whatever I ask." I laughed, "I imagine he would. I'm pretty sure he's not blind. Thanks." We were soon on our way home. I only had to tell the taxi driver twice to keep his eyes on the road rather than the internal rear vision mirror he'd adjusted a few seconds after Carol got in the car. Guys are quite disgusting, aren't they? On that topic, I resisted taking Carol in my arms (well, "in my hands" really). It wasn't worth the risk that the taxi driver might know us as brother and sister. Resisting the temptation hurt though. ^ At the Williams', Julia suggested we go upstairs to get changed out of our good clothes and into our swimwear; except for Carol, as Julia reminded her of the house rule that Carol has to go naked in the hot tub. Julia went first to check in with her parents, seeing from beneath their bedroom door that their light was on. While Julia was doing that, Carol and I went into Julia's bedroom. As soon as we were in I had Carol stand still. I walked up behind her and slid my hands around her back and onto her breasts. She leaned back against my chest, turning her head around so we could kiss. Several minutes later Julia came in and the only parts of us that'd moved much were our lips and my hands. Julia laughed, "To think I was feeling guilty about making you wait for me while I talked to Mom. Silly me! Haha. -- "Anyway, Mom was pleased that you were truthful, Mark, even at the expense of missing out on some fun tonight, although I see you're having plenty of fun now. I told her we're going to have a soak and she said to make sure the drapes are well drawn, especially until after the trial." That room has glass doors to the outside, so it's not secure from surveillance if someone was obnoxious enough to sneak onto the property. -- Then Julia added, "But before that, I've been looking forward to doing this." Julia, who'd been standing in front of Carol, so she could look both of us in the face, reached forward for one of Carol's straps, moved it to the side, then bent down slightly to suck the now exposed nipple. We enjoyed ourselves for several minutes, especially Carol, judging by how much of her weight I had to hold up. Eventually we had to put our toys away. Well, not so much "away", as we started by undressing. Being surveilled obviously didn't worry Julia much because she declared that if going naked was good enough for Carol, then it was good enough for her. She also declared it was good enough for me too, so I removed my underwear, which I'd been planning to use as make-do swimwear. I remembered my idea of testing my ability to hold my breath, so I put my watch back on. It's not a good watch so I don't wear it in water, but I'd take it to the hot tub for timing purposes. We went to the hot tub room wearing only our robes, via the kitchen to get a couple of spoons. I enjoyed having my dessert fed to me by two beautiful, naked girls. It certainly added to the dining experience. After that gastronomically and visually delicious experience, I asked, "I want to try a little experiment with holding my breath underwater to find out how long I can do it for. I'll sit on the bottom in the middle of the tub. Would you lightly hold me down by putting a bit of weight on my shoulders. One of you please hold my watch and tap me on the shoulder when two minutes are up." I could have tested myself lying on my bed at home, but underwater seemed more fun. I vaguely recalled playing around with holding my breath a few years ago, and managing about two minutes forty five seconds, but I'd specified two minutes now because I wanted to start slow. The problem I had was not knowing how to extend my breath-holding time. I'd given it a bit of thought in odd moments since I'd first thought of testing it, but I hadn't come up with anything useful. I wanted my oxygen to last longer, and the first thought I'd had was to reduce my heart rate. I knew that I could deliberately alter my heart's speed, as I'd done that back on the life-changing, WONDERFUL day that I'd discovered go-softs, but I didn't think that would do the job. It wouldn't reduce my need for oxygen, merely reduce its delivery to other parts of my body. I didn't know what would happen if those parts got less oxygen than they needed, but deliberately under-supplying them for an extended period sounded scary. How much oxygen does a kidney need? A brain? What about flesh? My only idea was just to try to be as calm and relaxed as possible; to order my body to relax in much the same was as I ordered it to sleep, which reminded me to also test premature waking up, but that'd keep until I wasn't sitting in deep water. With a bit more explanation to the girls and a request that they be careful not to get my watch wet, I made my first test. I submerged and sat on the bottom with a small downward press from Julia. I relaxed myself and the time passed very easily and with no discomfort. Carol tapped me on the shoulder when the two minutes were up and I rose to take a welcome, but not overly so, breath of fresh air. After some time above water breathing normally to re-oxygenate myself, I tried again for three minutes. I did it, but was starting to feel considerable discomfort toward the end. It was a new personal best, but nothing dramatic. After a recovery period, I tried for four minutes. Tried but failed. I had to come up for air after three and a half minutes. It was less than a minute longer than a few years ago. So much for my thinking that I'd be able to last some superhuman period of time. That over with, we just cuddled and chatted. After we got back to Julia's room I tried the premature wake up experiment. I lay on the bed and ordered myself to sleep for half an hour. The girls had been told to wait five minutes then try to wake me up, but not to freak out if they couldn't. They woke me easily after the five minutes. That was good to know, in case of fire or whatever. We weren't really allowed to stay the night at Julia's, especially not both of us, so we reluctantly decided to go home. We called for another taxi and waited in the kitchen for it. Carol had dressed casually after our soak, in clothes she'd bought earlier today. A nice miniskirt and matching top. Very attractive, without being overtly sexual. She was taking her stunning dress home though, to show the rest of the family tomorrow. I was looking forward to seeing their reactions. At home we went to our own beds. When I'd done the sleep experiment at Julia's something else had occurred to me. I'd noticed that no matter what time I went to sleep at night or woke in the morning, I always seemed to wake feeling well rested. So I set my internal alarm for 5am, giving me about five hours sleep. For the few seconds I was awake I missed my girls, and then I slept. ------- Chapter 67: Mind-Games with Donna Sunday, April 17, 2005 I woke and checked my clock to confirm that it was 5am. I felt perfectly well rested, so I had a feeling I was going to get more hours per day. Cool. Now what to do with them? I didn't want to wake the family, so I had a quiet pre-breakfast snack. Then I returned to my room and finished reading the Aikido books, unfortunately without learning anything useful. Then I got into the Driver Manual, using different minds to quiz each other. That got boring because I couldn't find a question that another part of me didn't know the answer to. My boredom tempted me to go back to bed for a nap, but I wanted to try sleeping five hours per night for several days in a row to see if the lack of sleep caught up with me. Taking boredom naps would pretty much invalidate that experiment, so I resisted. When I finally heard someone in the kitchen, I went to join whoever it was; finding Mom, as expected. Mom asked, "How was your three-girls-at-once date?" "Only two-thirds that quantity." I briefly described Cindy's departure when she learned how young I was, leaving out the stuff about Julia pushing too hard. I concluded with, "I preferred to be alone with Carol and Julia anyway." Dad joined us and I remembered Carol's dress. I told them, "Wait until you see the new dress Carol wore last night. It's spectacular! She was turning heads all night." "That doesn't sound like Carol," opined Mom. "No. She's definitely gaining confidence, especially from all the support and encouragement Julia is giving her." That wasn't the only reason Carol had enjoyed wearing that dress, as she got sexual thrills out of showing so much of herself, but the reasons I'd given Mom sounded better and it was definitely true that Carol was coming out of her shell. Almost all the way out, last night. It was a nice looking day and Dad wanted to paint the fence. "It needs it anyway," he said, "but also to tidy up the place in case we're going to sell it soon." So that's how Dad and I spent our morning. Carol brought out a snack and drink mid-morning. When she handed me mine, she kissed me on the cheek and quietly complained, "I want to kiss my Lord far better than that, but the neighbors might see. I can't wait till we have a private place." Let me think: sleeping with Carol and Julia every night, doing whatever I wanted with them at any time, and living in a mansion. I replied, "Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too." Carol drew me away from the fence in case there was someone else on the other side, to tell me, "I had a good talk with Donna before she went to her game. From her point of view it's very simple: she wants you and you're obviously happy to have one sister, so another should be no problem. You're willing to date other girls such as Cindy, so being loyal to Julia and me isn't an issue. She sees no reason why you can't give her what she wants immediately. She's not going to be happy to be put off for long, and she wants you too much to react well to being teased. I think you have to either give her what she wants or put her off entirely. Teasing her is going to quickly drive her into doing something direct to get what she wants, and that'd probably cause trouble." The problem was that I didn't want to give her what she wanted. It had a small amount of emotional appeal from making her happy, but that's all it had. I simply couldn't imagine having sex with someone who looked more like a boy than a girl. There were plenty of other reasons to back off from that too: Donna was emotionally as well as physically young, nor did I want to open up my life to her the way I had with Carol. I didn't want to tell her my secrets the way I had with Carol and Julia because I could imagine Donna being childish in some way and divulging them. That childishness of hers put me off thinking of her romantically, and she wasn't even close to being thought of as wife material. So I had to cool her off in some way. I told Carol, "I think I'd better cool her off. I feel very safe with you and Julia, but I don't feel that way with Donna. I'll give it some thought." Carol said, "Give some thought about what to do with her vibrator too, please. I'd like to be able to use mine but I don't want to upset Donna." I had an idea and suggested it to Carol, "What say you and I talk with Mom about it, then maybe the three of us talk with Donna. That way it'll look really serious to Donna so she'll be more likely to abide by our decision and any rules or restrictions. She'll be tough to control otherwise. It'll make Mom happy too, especially after her feeling somewhat excluded from the moneymaking scheme." So that's what we did. Leaving Dad to the fence, Carol and I went inside to talk with Mom. I was surprised at my lack of reluctance. Talking to your mother about whether to start having sex with your 12-year old sister isn't your normal type of conversation, but it was surprisingly easy - so badly had the normal conventions been smashed already. To condense our conversation, I told Mom that as a result of Donna's flashing her budding breasts in the hot tub a few days ago and her recent affection toward me, I'd suspected that she wanted to get sexy with me. I'd tested the water a little bit with Donna, by doing a small sexual tease, to discover that Donna VERY much wanted sex with me and was asking for it in her usual, unsubtle, up-front manner. I thought she was a lovely girl, but I was concerned that she was still too young emotionally and physically. The trouble was that her developing in both those areas was going to take months if not a few years, but Donna's patience wouldn't last weeks. Mom asked some smart questions and made me explain that I wasn't strongly reluctant to have sex with Donna, or eager for it either. I could live with ramping up the sex slowly and perhaps getting to the full version in several months when she'd grown herself a feminine body. I wasn't concerned about myself but about her feelings, and I wanted to do whatever made her happiest. At the moment Donna thought that was full-on sex with me. I was particularly worried about her wanting the same sort of a romantic relationship with me as Carol had, as there was no way I could think of her as strongly as I did Carol, which might hurt Donna a great deal. There was a fair bit of talk about the genetic theory, all of which I knew was a wonderful excuse for Carol and me being together, but was otherwise irrelevant. I had to pretend to take it seriously though. I told Mom that what I'd like to see happen, is that Donna got put off until she was the same age as Carol was when we first had sex, which would make that thirteen months hence, and then we'd think about crossing that bridge. But if we decided earlier, we could act on it. If, for example, it somehow became important for me to have a baby with her quickly, or if her emotional development led me to give up on my negative reasons. Mom said she'd have a talk with Donna about it when she got home (Donna was at a friend's place). I bet that conversation would freak Donna out. I made a mental note to try to warn her first. Julia and Vanessa came over right after an early lunch in order to collect Mom to go mansion shopping. Julia took me to my room and gave me the news on the false ID front. "The Boys say it's easy to get you a good enough fake ID. It'll pass muster provided you don't try to give it to a cop or anyone who can run it. Mom's going to take some of the photos we already have of you to the Drama Department and get their advice on how to age you. We'll get you made up, photographed, and get the ID done, then Dad and you will do a trial run at one of the nearby Indian casinos. That'll probably be in about a week or two. Then down to Vegas as soon after that as you're ready." Cool! Millionairedom, here I come. But until then, back to fence painting. Donna got dropped off by one of her teammate's mom before our Mom got home, so I had a chance to warn her. She was not happy at the prospect. "It took the wind out of her sails", as Mom would say (who, as far as I know, has never been on a sailboat). I gave Donna a little talk, mentioning: "Sex is too important to play games with." I was feeling somewhat guilty about having played sex-games with her, so I was giving her the benefit of my newly acquired wisdom. "Mom and Dad knew about my wanting to sleep with Carol before she and I had sex on our wedding night, so they'll know before you too, sweetie." That I'd dismally failed to keep it secret from Mom and Dad wasn't worth mentioning. And my personal favorite, "I don't like keeping secrets from Mom and Dad." It's true, I don't LIKE to. I concluded with, "I'm very pleased we like each other as much as we do, Donna, so we'll take the next step and talk with Mom and Dad about it." It obviously hadn't been Donna's idea of the ideal next step, but I'd done an end-run around her (continuing the pedestrian metaphor theme), so there wasn't much she could do about it. No doubt she was expecting Mom to put her foot down. When the mansion shoppers returned they were in high spirits. They'd had a great afternoon sticking their noses into other people's homes and dreaming about living in such luxury. They gushed over how wonderful the houses were, especially Mom who was very excited about living in one. Our house is below average, so going to a mansion would be a HUGE improvement. After much gushing they announced that, "None were suitable, of course." If it was "of course", why go looking in the first place? How they could be so excited and happy from looking at unsuitable houses, as surely that meant they'd wasted their afternoon? Their attitudes didn't make any sense, but Dad's story about the inability of males to participate in house buying made me decide that it'd probably be best if I didn't point out their logical inconsistencies. I was worried about our finding a mansion to move into if the roulette plan worked, so I risked asking, "If none of them are suitable, what are we going to do? Does that mean we have to give up on the idea?" I got told, "Of course not." I wasn't brave enough to ask for an explanation, so I quit while I was behind. Donna overheard some of the mansion conversation and was confused. In answer to her questions, Mom explained that the Andersons and the Williamses were thinking of selling their existing homes and buying one mansion together, so the two families would be living together. Donna thought that was "really cool." Donna and Mom talked about it a bit more, and you could tell when Donna clicked to what the implications of "mansion" were. It was followed a fraction of a second later by Donna advising Mom that, "You should get one with a real basket ball court. And a big swimming pool. And a field for hockey and soccer too. Oh, and a horse! Definitely a horse. No! Several horses. And a stables. This is going to be SO COOL!" It would have been too, had reality conformed to Donna's new expectations. Unfortunately for her, Mom brought her down to Earth. It was a rough landing for a very disappointed Donna. Funny for the rest of us though. I made a mental note that Donna liked horses. I had no idea how much it cost to buy a horse, but I jokingly decided that another extra mil' from the casino would probably cover it. Just before dinner Carol got changed into her previous night's new dress, including putting her hair up, and the necklace and high-heeled shoes on. When she came into the room and gave a twirl, there were several "Wows!" Donna and Dad were especially impressed. Mom was more uncomfortable, and eventually said, "I'm not sure that's a very suitable dress for a 13-year old girl." I resisted the temptation to point out that it sure wasn't a suitable dress for a 13-year old boy. I've learned that Mom tends not to appreciate comments like that. Carol IMMEDIATELY retorted, indicating that she'd prepared for Mom's comment, "I never dressed like this when I was just a 13-year old girl, but now I'm also Mark's wife and this is a suitable dress for a newlywed and her husband. I bought it for him, but if you can convince him I shouldn't wear it again, then I won't." Mom still wanted to argue, but she wasn't silly enough to try to talk me out of Carol's wearing it. Instead she said, "It looks very expensive." Carol answered, "Then why did you spend the afternoon looking for a mansion to buy?" Mom rallied and tried, "I'm not sure you're safe in a dress like that. You could attract attention from the wrong element." "I was in a fancy restaurant with MARK! There was no 'wrong element' there, and even if there had been, Mark could've easily protected me." I would've too, if necessary. Just as well for the "wrong element's" eyeballs that they were elsewhere last night. Probably talking to Andrew or Robert about getting a false ID for me. I think Dad scored some serious brownie points when he asked, "Carol, would it be okay with you for your mother to borrow that dress one night, if I take her out somewhere nice?" Everyone thought that was an excellent idea, even Mom looked happy. She still protested however, "I couldn't possibly! I've had three kids. I haven't got the figure for that dress anymore." Dad did a great job of assuring her that she did. Mom was visibly pleased. I guessed she'd be borrowing it soon. [I guessed wrong. She never did, as it was far too racy for her. Dad had known Mom wouldn't wear it, but he was still smart enough to flatter her by suggesting it.] Mom's case against Carol wearing such a sexy dress was pretty much destroyed, so Mom gave up, opting to change target. "As we're all here, we should discuss Donna's wanting to have sex with Mark." Donna suddenly paled, looking sorry that the idea had ever crossed her mind. She clearly didn't want to discuss it; just do it. Mom was on much firmer ground for this conversation (that pedestrian metaphor's got legs). Carol and I being 'married' weakened much of Mom's normal parenting arguments against us having sex, but Donna had no such justification. The only practical factor that applied to Donna was that one day it might be a good idea for the human race if Donna and I had babies, if you subscribed to the favored genetic hypothesis for my abilities, which happily the parents did. That factor wasn't yet relevant because - as we're all very aware by now - Donna hadn't reached her menarche yet. Nor had she reached anyone else's menarche either, come to that. Mom asked Donna, "Why do you think we should allow a 12-year old girl to have sex with her brother? Remember that it's illegal." Donna's less-than-cogent arguments boiled down, after a few minutes of interrogation, to: she wanted to, and Carol was allowed. It wasn't exactly an overwhelmingly convincing argument. One of Mom's oft-heard responses for when one of us kids say "I want [something]," was for her to say, "And I want a million dollars," and then she'd give some homily about life not giving you everything you want. Mom started saying this but stopped when she realized she might have a million dollars soon. Mom tried again with, "Carol was allowed to have sex after she married Mark. I know it wasn't a real marriage as society judges them, but it was real to Carol, Mark and Julia. For the rest of her life Carol will never have a boyfriend, or go on dates, or any of those things because she's married to Mark now. In a few years she's going to have his babies and spend the next twenty years of her life raising them. Are you willing to do all that?" As it turned out, "No," to my relief. Mom literally pointed to Carol. "Look at Carol in that dress. Your body doesn't look like that yet, does it?" To be truthful, if Donna's body did look like that I'd be a damn sight more tempted. Donna's mental immaturity would be more easily overlooked, as I'd be much busier 'looking over' other parts of her. Mom's comment did remind me that in a few months (six, twelve?) Donna's body could look as good as Carol's. It wouldn't look the same as they have different body types (hardbody versus plush), but it might look as good. Mom and Carol both have better than average breasts so I hoped Donna would too. I started regretting the loss of my nubbin inspections. Normally when Donna is refused something she gets loudly annoyed, but not this time though. Donna must have known that what she wanted was far too inappropriate, as she caved in easily. The conversation ended quite soon, with Donna looking chastised ("chastised", and sadly expecting to be chaste for quite some time). After dinner Carol went back to her room to change. I followed her to 'help', by standing behind her, sliding my hands around her sides and fondling her breasts for several minutes. Carol's dress made that irresistible to me. I swear my hands 'wanted' to reach for Carol the way a magnet 'wants to' head for iron. It was a good position for neck nuzzling too, and for whispering sweet nothings into her ear, ESPECIALLY telling her how much I appreciated her buying this dress for me. Later that night, soon after Mom and Dad had gone to bed, I knocked lightly on the girls' door, then entered their room as Donna answered. The knocking was my habitual politeness. It wasn't until after I'd done it that I remembered telling them I wouldn't knock in future. Carol was asleep, presumably because we'd had a late night the previous night, but Donna was awake. I'd thought about how to treat Donna, either to be Donna's caring brother, or to command her as Julia kept asking me to do to my wives. I decided to go the wimp route, mainly because if Donna disliked the Lord act it might mess up our friendly home atmosphere, whereas being a nice, concerned brother couldn't do any harm. "Hi, sweetie. Are you free to talk for a little while?" "Sure." "Because we were talking about it at dinner, I thought I'd better come and ask you whether you want to continue with my inspections of your body? I enjoy them, and am hoping you still want to?" "Huh? You mean look at my tits?" I nodded. "I thought you didn't want to have sex with me. I wanted to, but you wouldn't." I corrected her, "I didn't want to YET. I don't think you're ready yet. But 'yet' means that I expect that we might one day. That's part of the reason to have the inspections, to see how ready your body is. The main reason really is just that it's good fun for both of us. It turns me on, and I hope turns you on too. Did you get excited the last time we did it?" I knew the answer to that as Carol had told me that Donna had frigged herself for ages afterward. I was hoping that my reminding her of the last time would get her in a sexy mood again. "I'll say! I've NEVER been so turned on. I couldn't sleep for ages." "Good. I like it that we turn each other on. Maybe one day we'll go all the way. Not yet, and probably not for a year or even longer, but we can play around until then. If you would enjoy it?" Donna had a good way of answering my question. With excitement in her voice she asked, "Can I play with you too?" Good old Donna ("young Donna", actually, but you know what I mean). If she wants something, she's not shy to ask for it. "Hmm. That's an interesting idea." Clearly Donna thought so too, judging by her very eager expression. I added, "I'm a bit worried that if we both start touching each other we might find it too hard to stop." #1: So I added more, "I'll tell you what. Sometimes - not usually, but sometimes - I will let you 'inspect' me. I will stand still and let you touch me, but I won't touch you those evenings. Just like when I'm inspecting you, you stand still and don't touch me. How does that sound?" "Can we do that tonight please? I really want to touch you." I just thought of a little tease, so I smiled at her, and said, "I'm surprised you're so eager. I don't have very exciting tits, you know?" Donna knew immediately that I was pulling her leg. "Haha. You can play with my tits when it's your turn, but I'm going straight for your cock. I can't wait to get my hands on it." Donna calls a spade a spade. Or, in this case, a cock. No little-girl terms such as "weenie", "thing" or the like. She knew what she wanted, and had no trouble telling me exactly what it was. I shook my head, saying, "Sorry Donna, but I have a special reason for wanting you to be on the receiving end tonight." "Aww. Okay, my turn tomorrow night then!" "Hold your horses," (another one of Mom's expressions, who as far as I know, has never held a horse. I didn't think they have many of them in England anyway). "First, we won't be doing this every night. Maybe once a week. Second, it's not going to be alternating turns. I will mostly be inspecting you. Occasionally I will let you inspect me, but not often." This was mostly selfishness. I would enjoy inspecting her more than her inspecting me because being on the receiving end would make me excited and frustrated. There were some practical reasons too: I wanted to be in control because I didn't trust her judgment, and I wanted to see how she handled the frustration of not getting what she wanted, as a way of measuring her emotional maturity. "That's not fair. We should have turns." "I'll give you a choice. We can do it my way, once per week with me inspecting you 80 to 90% of the time. Or we can alternate turns as you want, but I'll wait six months before I have each of my turns, which means your turns will be six months and one day apart. Which method do you want?" "Argh! You're being mean!" To both of our surprises, Carol spoke up, "Shame on you, Donna! Mark is offering you something you want and enjoy, but you're whining and complaining to force him into doing even more for you. He doesn't need to play with you at all. Julia and I would much rather he spent his time playing with us. He's willing to make time for you, but all you're doing is ruining his good feelings. He's lost the good, sexy mood he came in here with. Look at him, does he look happy?" Donna was positioned between Carol and me, and Donna had turned to face Carol to listen to her. Donna's turning around to look at me gave me time to adopt a somber looking expression. While Donna was looking at me, Carol was making 'go away' motions with the hand she had out of the covers, winking at me too. I got the hint, so I said, "I'm afraid Carol's right. Too much arguing has killed my mood. Such a pity. Oh well, it's getting late so I think I'll head off to bed. I'll see you for our run tomorrow morning. Goodnight girls." Donna and I had agreed over dinner to keep our Monday and Wednesday morning runs going, just as a way of spending some time together. As long as it wasn't raining, of course. Donna urged, "No, no, stay. It's okay. We can do it your way." Carol was still making small shooing motions, so I carried on being shooed. "It's no good, Donna. My mood has gone. Maybe I'll get it back in a few days. I had a late night last night and we've got an early start, so I probably shouldn't have come in here at all. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Goodnight, sweeties." I went back to my room, followed by Donna's protestations. I took Donna's vibrator out of my pocket and put it in a drawer, wondering what Mom would think if she found it. I'd taken it into the girls' room intending to get Donna to remove her panties, lay flat, and close her eyes. I was then going to turn it on, and run it from her belly button down to her clit, keep it there for a few seconds, and then tell her it was a present. That had been #4's idea, as he was the only one who knew how vibrators are actually used; the rest of us had assumed from its shape that it was used internally. Giving Donna her gift would have to wait until the next 'inspection'. I had no intention of going to bed yet as I wanted to continue the five hours of sleep per night experiment. I didn't feel tired so I was happy staying awake now rather than get up before 4am tomorrow morning. There was plenty of schoolwork I could review as I'd be taking two years' worth of exams in just a few weeks, so I sat down to do that. About fifteen minutes later there was a quiet knock on my door, and to my surprise Carol came in. I'd expected it to be Donna wanting to continue the argument. Carol shut the door behind her, then cuddled into my lap. She was wearing a long nightie, but was naked underneath it, so I had a good time. Carol said, "I had a good talk with Donna and she shouldn't argue with you again for a while. If she does, just pretend to lose the mood and walk away. She's just greedily wanting too much too fast. She'll have to learn. It's not as if she can complain to Mom or Dad, is it? Haha." "That's for sure. I can't imagine Mom insisting that it's fair to let her play with my cock if I play with her tits. I'm sure she can't imagine it either, after our dinnertime conversation. What did you tell her to make her stop arguing?" "That her greed and impatience have twice driven you away. Her wanting full sex immediately made you worried enough to go to Mom about it, and her insisting on playing with your cock made you leave tonight. I told her that it's good that she wants these things, but terrible that she argues with you about them. If she'd shut up and cooperated she'd be having a good time by now, and still get what she wants sooner or later. Probably sooner because you'd be happy with her. But if she argues even just once more you'll probably get so fed up with the whole idea you'll just decide she's too immature and forget about it entirely." "That's pretty good. I feel a bit guilty because I was being selfish with her, but I thought her playing with me would get me frustratingly aroused. What you said should work though, so thanks." "When we get to live in the new house you won't have to put up with being frustratingly aroused. You'll be able to have Julia and me whenever you want. Hopefully that'll be in only be a month or two, so maybe you can let her play with you then. I'd like that because if you get excited I'd be only too happy to take care of it for you." Carol was giving me a BIG smile by the end. I told her, "I think that sounds like an excellent plan. Not that I need anyone else to get me in the mood to desire you, but I know what you mean." "I'm SO looking forward to living in the new house with you and Julia. We are going to have SUCH a great time." I didn't have to answer verbally, as Carol was wiggling her butt on the demonstration of my agreement. Carol continued, "I also told Donna that her arguing with you was stupid even if she was definitely right and you definitely wrong. No one likes having their opinions argued with, and it was guaranteed to make you lose the mood. You already have Julia and me who'll do absolutely anything for you, regardless of whether we think it's fair or not. With girls like Cindy and all the other schoolgirls who're after you, you've got dozens of girls who will do whatever you want, so why should you have to be fair. You can get whatever you want from any number of girls, so Donna was really stupid to try to argue for fairness. I also told her she must cooperate totally with everything you say, and NEVER argue with you again over anything sexual. At most she can request something ONCE. Like she could say, 'Can I play with your cock, Mark?', but then she must totally do whatever you say. I laid it on thick and she got the message. She wanted to come and see you now but I said she'd annoyed you too much so I'd apologize for her. She's nervously waiting for me to come back and tell her she hasn't screwed up too badly, and that you still might want to play with her one day soon." "That's very impressive stuff. You've made it seem perfectly reasonable for me to be as selfish as I want, and that she should be happy at it. That's brilliant! Well done." "Thank you, but I can't take the credit. Most of it is very similar to what Julia told me. I just turned it around and used it on Donna. Julia is the smart one." I wasn't going to argue with that! "Plus I can see that Donna needs to be taught some patience and self-control. She's a nice girl but she's too quick to rush straight for what she wants. She'll learn, even though you'll probably have to walk out a few more times when she forgets. If you make her wait a few days each time she'll get the message. I expect she'll be very apologetic during your run." I expected that too. Donna obviously wanted to play around with me a lot, and the picture Carol had painted for Donna gave her no choice about how to act. She must "cooperate totally." I could work with that! Never mind that Donna was nervously waiting for Carol's return, now that Carol was on my lap I didn't want her to go. We cuddled, then kissed, then hands started moving, then we REALLY started kissing. Then my damned conscience kicked in, reminding me that we weren't allowed to have sex even in Julia's much more secure room, so sure as heck we should have stopped already. Damn! (Whether I meant "Damn rule!" or "Damn conscience!" I didn't know. Both sounded right). The extent of this room's security was to tack the drapes closed. Impressively secure it was not. I groaned and forced myself to stop. "Carol, I think we'd better stop, although God knows I don't want to. I'm definitely going to ask Prof if we can hurry up getting our new house. I'm worried about Donna too. If she's waiting nervously, shouldn't you go back and reassure her?" "No hurry. I'll say that it was very hard to convince you to try again with her. The longer she waits the better, although it probably has been long enough by now. But no hurry, I'll stay with you as long as you want." "Haha. I bet. Including all night if I want you to?" "Yes please. It'd be my pleasure. Lots and lots of pleasure," said Carol, wiggling on my erection, just in case my IQ had dropped by 220 points recently and I didn't know what she meant. An attitude like that had to be rewarded. To hell with the "damned rules and/or conscience!" So I slipped my hand up her nightie, between her legs, and kept going up. As soon as she knew what I was doing, Carol quickly turned sideways and opened her legs. "Good girl." My fingers found her hole, and my thumb her clit, and together they spent several minutes rewarding her for her attitude. I made sure my mouth was tightly sealed over hers as Carol's reward culminated. Fortunately Carol isn't nearly as loud as Julia. The reward didn't take long, as we were both already very turned on. We were even more turned on afterward. Carol grabbed the top of my sweat pants, making sure to include the top of my underwear in her grip, then pulled them over my very hard cock and down. For a second or two I intended to do the right thing and stop her. Then I thought "Fuck it! My turn for some fun," completely ignoring the fact that it'd thoroughly enjoyed getting Carol off. I lifted my ass off the chair. I was amused by Carol saying, "Good Lord." With my pants around my ankles, Carol lifted her nightie until she was holding the bunched up hem at waist height. It gave me a very clear view of her bald, very wet and engorged pussy. It was a beautiful sight. While I was looking at it Carol took a couple of steps so that she was standing hard against my chair, with her legs on either side of mine. Still holding up her nightie, which made me realize that my "fun" wasn't going to be the blowjob I'd expected. Carol wanted me in her. It took me a second or two to realize this, decide that it was more than fine by me, and then realize that my sitting back in the chair and its armrests made it almost impossible for her to achieve her goal. Carol had already worked out the solution. She moved away a couple of steps, turned around so her back was to me, then backed up, until she touched the chair again. With one hand holding her nightie, the other hand reached back between her legs for my cock. I slid forward in the chair, and into her grasp. I put my hands on waist, and helped her lower herself slowly onto my cock. The slowness was completely unnecessary - she was easily wet enough for her to drop straight onto me - but we both enjoyed the slow pace. Both of us sighed loudly at the sensations, then quietly laughed at each other's sighs. Carol leaned back against my chest, saying, "I need that. It's been FAR too long." It had been. It was Sunday night and the last time I'd been in her was Friday afternoon, so she was right that it'd been FAR too long. I put my arms around her, and she corrected my grip, putting one of my hands on her breast. So I corrected it even more, moving the misplaced hand under her nightie then sliding it up until it was on top of the same breast again, where it started making friends. We weren't in a good position for any thrusting, but Carol started squeezing my cock with her cunt, which was very nice (it had been FAR too long!). I was reminded of two things: First I moved my spare hand down to her pussy and started playing with it. Just lightly initially, as we were in no hurry (sorry Donna), and I expected her clit to still be sensitive after her very recent cum. I was certainly going to get her off again, as the feeling of her climaxing while I was in her would be very enjoyable. The second thing I remembered prompted me to ask Carol a question (the fact that it was the second I chose to act on will tell you what mood I was in). "Carol. I'm not wearing a rubber. The pills Julia gave you haven't had time to start working yet, have they?" "I'm not taking them yet. That starts with my next period, in about a week or so." "Um, doesn't that mean that you could get pregnant?" "Yes." Carol wasn't leaping off me in horror at the sudden realization of the risk; she was snuggling more. She wiggled and sighed, holding my hand harder against her breast. She was perfectly comfortable where she was. As was I. We sat there for a while, both enjoying the moment, with both my hands stroking her, and with her still squeezing my cock. After about a minute Carol added, "I need you in me Mark. I love you so much I have to have you. I just want to sit here for a while, then stand up and finish you by hand. Plus I like the idea of rubbing you off while you're covered with my juices. Is that okay with you?" "That sounds wonderful. Probably as close to perfect as we can do, unfortunately. You left one step out though, this." As I significantly increased the actions of my two hands, saying, "I'm going to bring you off again. I want to be in you when it happens. I apologize for being so greedy, but I love making you cum so much I'm going to selfishly do it again." "Mmm. Please be as selfish as often as you want. I'll just sit here and suffer. I must tell Julia off for not warning me how tough it was going to be marrying such a selfish Lord." I would've answered but I was too busy being selfish, including kissing her. I couldn't kiss Carol properly because she couldn't turn around far enough. She was 'pinned' in place by a big, throbbing 'pin'. Well, maybe average-sized, but I was still growing into my adult size so I'm just anticipating somewhat. Besides, writing "pinned in place by an average-but-still-growing throbbing pin" doesn't have the same panache. Because I was trying to do as much as I could to the side of Carol's head that I could reach, I started nuzzling her more accessible earlobe, and felt her immediately react to that. "Oh, that's nice." It must have been. I had my cock in her cunt, was diddling her clit and squeezing her breast, but she chose to tell me that she liked what I was doing to her earlobe. Females are weird. I was going to write, "females are put together weird", but that CERTAINLY isn't true, especially in Carol's case, as she's put together incredibly well. Some experimentation taught me that the only part of her ear that gave her strong feelings was her lobe. The rest of her ear was a little bit nice, but only a little. The lobe was GREAT though, judging by her body language and moans. Weird. Carol was getting fairly worked up now, what with the clit, nipple and earlobe(!) action. She was starting to thrash around and couldn't hold her head still, turning it left and right, making it harder for me to work on her earlobe. I think she did it thoughtlessly to reduce the stimulation she was under, but all she did was offer me the other ear. I was quite happy to go to work on that lobe. As soon as I licked it her breath sucked in, and she was suddenly a second or two away from her climax. Carol likes it a bit rough especially when she's very close to a climax, like now, so I squeezed her clit, her nipple, and I bit her earlobe. Wham! Her whole body stiffened, and she threw her head back, nearly ripping her earlobe off as I was still biting it. Luckily not hard so it pulled out from between my teeth. It must have hurt her, but I don't think she noticed. Or maybe it even helped. Carol took a BIG breath, which I instantly knew was going to be followed by a BIG scream. I had a feeling that my telling her "shush" wouldn't cut it, so I grabbed a handful of her nightie - it'd been pushed high on her chest - and I stuffed it into her mouth, holding it in with my hand. Better make that both hands. She SCREAMED into the nightie. Fortunately very little of that scream got through both the material and my hands. I can't believe I did so, but I actually thought, "Thank God she didn't come into my room naked." Imagine me being happy Carol wasn't naked! Maybe my IQ really had dropped 220 points recently. Carol totally slumped in my arms. For a second I worried that she might fall off, then I remembered that I had her "averagely pinned". #4: None of us had. We'd all been too busy with her earlobe, then muffling her scream. It probably would have been a REALLY good feeling too, given the magnitude of her orgasm. #4: We held her until she recovered, remembering to remove the gag, so she could breathe easily. I didn't want to make that mistake! Eventually she started stirring, very groggily and incoherently for the first couple of sentences. "Pardon?" "I said, 'That was a very, very good one.'" "It certainly was. I was very, very selfish that time." It took her a few seconds to think back all those minutes ago. "Oh yeah. Very, very, very WONDERFULLY selfish. Especially on my earlobe. Who'd have thought how good that was?" "Yes. Weird, eh?" "Weird and wonderful. I liked it." "Yes. I believe I noticed that." After this very complex conversation Carol needed to rest her brain for a while, so she fell silent, resting her head on my shoulder and cuddled into me again. After a full minute - her brain must have been very tired - she informed me, "Your cock's still hard." "I think that's something to do with its being inside the sexiest girl on the planet while she's in my arms and near naked." "Haha. That could be the reason, even though I'm not that sexy." "I think that orgasm must've fried your brain because you ABSOLUTELY are!" "Hmmm" (some sort of contented hum). "I feel so good because I know you mean it. I'm so lucky." "I've got the sexiest girl on the planet near naked in my arms and you think YOU are the lucky one! Your climax DEFINITELY fried your brain because it's obvious that I'm the luckiest person on the planet." Carol was too tired to joke around further, and she let the conversation lapse there. She rested a bit more, which was fine by me. I'd happily hold her in my arms for hours. After a couple of minutes she suddenly chuckled - a sensation an average-sized-but-growing part of my anatomy enjoyed - then she said, "I just had funny idea. I was just thinking that I'd rest a bit longer, then take care of this hard thing sticking into me. I was thinking about swallowing your cum, but my funny thought was to save it to carry back into my room. Donna will be waiting for me, and I'll let her see me slowly licking it off my hand. Probably she'll be innocent enough to ask what it is, and then I can tease her about it. I'll even make her drink some." "Really! That's bit kinky, isn't it?" "Yeah. Good eh? It'll be good for her training." "Haha. You've been spending too much time with Julia." "I haven't been spending ENOUGH time with Julia or with you, but I know what you mean. I really like the idea of taking Donna some of your cum. I can use it to teach her a lesson about not arguing with you. I'll tell her that if she'd just shut up and did whatever you wanted, like I do, then you're such a kind person you'd let her have her fun anyway. But now she's made you lose interest because she's made such a big deal about it and spoiled it for herself. Something like that anyway. I like it, can we do it now?" I couldn't think of any reason why we couldn't do it now. Not that I tried. "Yes, please." Carol sat up and put her feet on the floor and her hands on the chair's armrests. I thought she was going to stand up, but all she did was raise herself a few inches, then lower herself again, several times. It felt good, although not as good as real fucking. I couldn't help thinking that: (a) This was probably not a good way to carry my cum to Donna, and then (b) Pregnancy! "Umm, honey. Do you think you should be doing that?" "I'm just making sure that you're nice and wet." I cracked up, trying desperately to keep it quiet. "Ahh, darling, I'm sitting in a puddle. Do you have any idea how much juice has already come out of you?" "No. I can't tell sitting this way. Was it really that much?" "Yes, it really was. It was running down my groin. You certainly don't have to keep doing that to make me wet. I'm sure it's impossible for me to get any wetter." "So I should stop this sometime soon?" "Um, yes, soon. Soon-ish anyway." "Okay. I'll stop soon. Or soon after that. Just a few more. Hmm, it's nice, isn't it?" "Yes it is. Very." Conversation stopped but the squats didn't. After a few more I asked, "Is it soon yet?" "Not yet, but it will be soon." "Haha." "{Sigh}. Okay, I guess I really should stop. I don't want to though." "I agree." "{Sigh}," as Carol lifted herself entirely off and clear of my very wet cock. "{Sigh}," from me, in agreement with Carol. Carol turned around and faced me. She was happy but tired looking. I opened my legs to let her kneel between them, helpful guy that I am. She knelt, looking down at my cock as she did so. "It is VERY wet, isn't it?" "Very. The last one or two 'soons' were probably unnecessary." Then I thought of a little problem. "How are you going to catch my cum? It's been a while for me so I'm probably going to spurt quite a lot. You're not exactly going to be able to catch it with your hands upside-down, and my cock can't be pointed down very comfortably." #4: Before we could be enlightened about #4's idea, Carol started talking, "How about I take off my nightie and you just shoot it into my chest. I can scoop it up from there..." #4: #1: " ... You wouldn't mind if I jacked you off while I was naked, would you?" The cheeky grin on her face meant she already knew the answer to that question. "Ho hum, I guess that'd be okay. Or to put it another way, yippee!" In a second her nightie was off and thrown onto my bed, and her hands were sliding smoothly up and down my very slippery cock. Pussy juice is a great lubricant, hardly surprising really. I LOVED the feel of her hands on my cock. I loved it a lot. And I loved it quickly, WAY too quickly. Before she'd done half a dozen strokes I knew it was going to be over soon, with the real meaning of "soon", not the Carol version of that word. I immediately considered using micro-go-softs to hold myself at the brink. Carol was tired and Donna was nervously waiting, so I only did a few of them, adding no more than five minutes. I didn't have my watch on so it might have been ten minutes. Actually I did have my watch on but I didn't look at it. I'm pretty sure it was less than ten. It probably was, anyway. I was REALLY enjoying myself. Carol's jacking me made her breasts wobble delightfully, although they were obscured when she leaned forward to lick or suck me. So I was happy guy whether she was leaning forward or back. I think an ethicist would call that a win-win situation. Certainly I would. There was plenty of juice all over my cock, upper-thighs and balls, so there was no danger whatsoever of us running out. But for some reason every couple of minutes Carol would say, "Hmm, I think we need some more juice," and she'd shamelessly put several fingers into her pussy and thrust them a few times, then transfer the scooped up juices to my cock. It was completely unnecessary, totally overdone, and thoroughly appreciated, especially by #4 who seemed to be falling in love all over again. When I reluctantly decided to let it end (so sad!) I warned Carol, "I'm going to cum in a few more seconds." Carol then proved that her delightfully naughty ideas of catching my cum on her chest and resupplying her pussy juice were sourced from inspiration rather than knowledge. Acting on my warning she rapidly knee-walked very close to me, so her chest was about one inch away from the end of my cock, which she was aiming and still rubbing with one hand. She moved her other hand to cup it directly under my cock, presumably to catch any spurts that didn't have enough force to cover the inch gap. She obviously had no idea of what a male spurt was like. I would have laughed but I was too busy groaning. The way I felt she could have been standing in the doorway to my room, and I still could have hit her in the chest. This was going to be a good one. It'd been FAR too long, nearly two whole sexy-girls-filled days. Serious pressure had built up. "I'm gonna cum. I'm gonna CUM!" Blast, blast, spurt, spurt. Maybe a few more spurts, but I wasn't counting. I was too busy admiring the mess I was making on Carol's chest. She hadn't allowed for the velocity of my spurts, and had pointed my cock upward too much. She was too close for me to be able to hit her face, but I'd still decorated under her chin and her neck with my first blast. In her surprised reaction she'd failed to hold my cock steady, and now there was cum patches spread around over most of the top of her chest. She looked surprised, and this time I did start laughing. She looked down at the empty hand under my cock - fortunately not down enough to disturb the cum under her chin - and at her cum-splattered chest, saying, "Wow. I didn't expect that. It always seemed so neat and tidy when you filled a rubber, but that sure wasn't neat and tidy! Sexy though. Donna's going to love this, I'll make her lick some of it off me. Oh." (The "Oh" was Carol's reaction to my cock suddenly lurching, and hardening). She added, "Hmm, you like that idea, don't you?" "That's for sure! As the evidence in your hand proves. If you know nothing else about guys, know we LOVE the idea of two girls getting it on. Donna licking my cum off you is hot! You better go see her now, or it'll start to dip off you." Carol said, "It's not runny so it should stay where it is fine. You're nice and hard again, so I'm hoping I can get some more. That was fun!" "Haha. Yes it certainly was fun. The trouble is that cum doesn't stay as sticky like it is now. In a minute it'll start getting more like water, and it'll run off you. Unfortunately long before I'll be able to cum again. You better scoot back to Donna quickly." I scooped up the little bit of cum hanging off the end of my cock, and offered it to Carol's lips. I noticed that she immediately and happily licked my finger clean. Good girl. #4: All of us were so we couldn't argue with #4. It was usually best to ignore him anyway. I removed Carol's hand from my cock and stood up, pushing my chair back to make room. As she was getting up I reached over and picked up her nightie. I offered it back to her, even though she obviously couldn't put it on. Carol said, "My hands are messy, and I think it'd be more fun for Donna if I walk back naked. Keep it here and I'll get it tomorrow." #4 had a depraved idea, as he so often does. Watched by Carol he pointedly used the nightie to wipe Carol's pussy juice off our cock, groin and upper-thighs, then to soak up the puddle on the chair. Then he deeply smelled the nightie. "Delightful. I'll keep this on my pillow, so I can smell you all night and have very pleasant dreams." Carol looked a little shocked, but rallied and laughed. "I like having sex with you, Mark. You're very nice and a lot of fun. Disgusting, but in a very good way. Oh, I can feel it starting to run. I better go. Sweet dreams, my love. Goodnight." I leaned forward to give her a quick kiss, then she quickly and quietly left the room. I would love to be a fly on the wall to see what happened in the girls' room now. Unfortunately it was one of those times where I couldn't go in to see, as my presence would change their behavior totally. Oh well, I'd just have to get Carol to tell me about it later. I looked at my watch and it was still too early for bed. I didn't feel like hitting the books immediately as I was in such a good mood from Carol's visit, so I put my pants on and went to the kitchen to make a snack. While making it I wondered whether Carol might be pregnant now. Then I wondered which of the two possibilities I preferred. I was amused by my not being able to decide, even after allowing for Mom's explosion. If the casino plan worked money would cease to be a problem, and being a father with Carol would be surprisingly un-scary. I don't think I'd deliberately choose it, but if it happened by sort-of accident I wouldn't be unhappy. It was obvious Carol wouldn't be unhappy either. As I understood these things, which was poorly, we'd know in a couple of weeks, depending on if she got her period or not (that's how it works, isn't it?). After my snack, I went back to my room and studied until it was five hours before it was time to get up. ------- Chapter 68: Exercising with Donna Monday, April 18, 2005 I awoke feeling fully rested. Good, two nights of only five hours of sleep and no problems so far. A quick look outside let me see that it wasn't raining, so I put on my running gear and waited outside the girls' room. I half-expected Donna to sleep in, guessing that Carol might have kept her awake too long last night, but I heard movement and a couple of minutes later Donna emerged. She closed the door behind her, then whispered to me, "Carol's not coming with us. Last night she said she needed to catch up on her sleep." She'd had late nights almost every night for the last week, so I wasn't surprised. I nodded and turned to head out. Donna walked behind me, whispering, "I'm very sorry I argued with you last night." She stopped talking while we passed Mom and Dad's bedroom door, then resumed, "Carol told me off pretty good for being in such a hurry." I just listened as we walked outside and started stretching. I particularly enjoyed hearing, "I'll do whatever you say from now on." I would have been quite happy to end the conversation right there, as it couldn't get any better for me, but Donna needed reassurance and it wouldn't do any harm to reinforce the lessons. So while we started our jogging I spoke, "I like doing things with you: 'goofing off', as we call it. Playing basketball or other sports, running some mornings, and whatever else. All those things are fun and you're a nice girl to do them with. Sex can be fun too - it can be a HUGE amount of fun - but it's also a huge amount of serious. They couldn't send me to jail for playing basketball with you, but they sure could for having sex with you. They WOULD send me to jail if they knew, so we have to be very careful. You understand that, don't you?" -- Donna indicated that she understood what I was saying, so I continued, "There are several parts to being careful. I should be careful about whether you want to do things with me. I'm very happy you do because it tells me how much you like me, which is a very nice compliment." "I like you heaps and heaps. You're by far the nicest guy I know. I don't want to do sex stuff with anyone else, just you." I certainly couldn't echo her last sentiment, but I could mostly agree with the rest, "Thank you. I like you 'heaps and heaps' too, and I want to do some sex stuff with you as well, but Mom and Dad have given me some very strong lectures about being careful. They didn't scare the pants off me, they scared the pants ON, haha. -- "Mom and Dad are right because it could get us all into really bad trouble, so careful is the ONLY way to go. I wanted to just touch your breasts for a while, a few weeks or even months, to see whether you could control yourself. Not get impatient or boastful at school, or big-headed, or whatever else might have gone wrong. By taking small careful steps I'm making sure we both don't get in much trouble if anything goes wrong. If everything went well, we could do a little bit more, and slowly increase it as long as we were both comfortable." "I'd NEVER tell on you. You're a WONDERFUL brother." "Maybe not tell on me deliberately, but what about if we'd gone all the way, and then some girls at school teased you about being flat-chested." I assumed that happens to Donna from time-to-time, and I know how Donna reacts to being insultingly teased about anything. "Maybe you would get angry enough to defend yourself by bragging that you'd had sex with me. I don't really think you'd do that, but it's possible. That's why I want to go so slow, and that's why your impatience and arguing worries me so much, because it showed me that you don't have much self-control about sex." "Yeah, Carol explained that. I know I did the wrong thing. It's just that doing sex stuff with you would be neat fun. I got too selfish and I didn't think about the dangers, I guess." "What you did wasn't totally bad because it makes me feel good that you think so highly of me, but I'll make another point. When one person forces the other to do more sex than they want, that's what rape is. Obviously you weren't trying to do that to me, but you were doing a small version of it. Guys are told over and over that when a girl says 'No' it means 'No'. That goes both ways. If I say 'No' you should stop." "I'm really sorry, Mark. I had no idea how bad I was being. There have been lots of times I've had to tell boys to stop doing stuff and I hate it when they don't stop until I yell at them or hit them. I didn't realize I was doing that to you. I never thought about it. That was terrible of me." Donna was more upset than I wanted. I'd intended a little bit of upset to help reinforce my point, but I'd underestimated the effect. She needed some quick reassurance, "Don't worry about it. It was only a nuisance. That's why it's a good idea to go slow, so we can learn how to behave as we go. You've never had sex before so it's natural for you to make a few mistakes," I reassured, drawing on my seventeen days of experience. "Now that you know to respect my answer when I say no, I'm sure you won't repeat that mistake." "Oh no! I'll never make it again. Carol told me that I'd pissed you off twice and that if I did it again you'd probably never want to go near me again. Now that you've made me think about it the other way around, I can see that if a boy pushed me as hard as I pushed you, especially wanting to go all the way, I wouldn't want to ever talk with him again. So I'm very glad you still want to play around with me. I'll go as slow as you want, I promise." "Thanks, I appreciate it. I WILL go slow, and there'll probably be times that you get impatient. In fact, I hope you do because I want to see that you handle it properly, okay?" "I won't forget again. You and Carol have made me see how bad I was." "When I first started getting sexy with you, I was very worried about pushing you further than you wanted to go. I didn't want to scare you, didn't want to ruin our friendship, didn't want to make you feel unhappy - or even unsafe - in your own home, and lots of things like that. If you hadn't been happy with me, you could easily have felt all those bad things. And if YOU had kept pushing ME, you would've made me feel those bad things, which would've been terrible. Thank goodness you're smart enough to stop." I'd laid it on pretty thick, and by the look on Donna's face she' intended to NEVER make that mistake again. I knew she would, as she's an impulsive person. A quick reminder should quickly fix any future impatience though. I continued, "So you can imagine how very, very worried I was originally because I'd hate to do those bad things to you, but because you were so pushy and impatient I don't have to worry about having a bad effect on you. Now I know you want me to do EVERYTHING, so I can relax and enjoy myself a lot more from now on. What you did was wrong, but it had the good effect of giving me confidence. The first time I touched your nipples I really wanted to put my mouth over them to lick and suck them, but I was too scared of upsetting you, but now I know I can do that. You'd like me to, wouldn't you?" "That would be WONDERFUL! I'd LOVE you to do that. Please do it soon. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be pushy." "Relax, sweetie. You're allowed to ask me to do things to you, ESPECIALLY if I already said that I want to! It's great for me to know that I'm making you happy. Just don't try to get me to do stuff you already know I don't want to. If I say 'No", it means 'No', okay?" "I know that now. I can't believe how stupid I was before. I got so excited about what I wanted that I didn't think about you. If you'd treated me that way I would've gotten really angry at you. You were very patient and kind, as usual." Actually I was running out of patience by now. Donna willingness to let me play with her was arousing me and I wanted to suck her nipples. I said, "Donna, in the future I'm going to assume you will agree to anything I want. That way I won't have to go so slow. That's okay with you, isn't it?" #3: (#2 and #4, as #1 was on duty) < ... very carefully manipulate Donna. I think it's great that we're learning so much from watching Julia operate as we may need to use these sorts of techniques on other people in the future. But Donna almost certainly would've agreed to anything we asked anyway so it wasn't exactly a difficult test, and this is DONNA, our very nice sister. We shouldn't manipulate her into doing anything she wouldn't naturally want to do. If we manipulate her into doing something, but in a week, a month or even years later she came to regret it, she could get angry. Let's just do things we know she wants to do, and even then carefully, okay?> #4: #3: #4: Donna was still answering my last question, about my assuming she was agreeable to anything, "It's more than okay with me. I DO want to do everything with you. I get very excited thinking about it. Some nights I have trouble sleeping because I am thinking sexy things about you and me together. It's torture knowing that you and Carol do things. I nearly flipped out when she came back last night with your stuff all over her. You two are so lucky to be able to do things like that." "Which would you prefer to do Donna: keep doing our morning run, or go back to my room and letting me suck your nipples." Running rapidly back to our house I couldn't help laughing at Donna's effusive "Thank yous." In my room I got Donna to take her T-shirt off - ONLY her T-shirt - and to lay on my bed with her hands behind her head. "Keep them there. I'm going to touch you as much as I like, but you're not allowed to touch me." We had at least half an hour, so I took my time: kissing, licking and running my fingers over her chest several inches from her nipples, but slowly getting closer. Donna was very happy. I'd asked her not to talk, in case we were heard, but every now and then she'd make a quiet comment: a subdued moan, "Oh, that's so good", or "Thank you." It took me ten minutes before my first contact with a nipple, by which time she was VERY turned on. Her legs were opening and closing, then one crossed over-the-top of the other, and I could see their muscles stand out as she clenched and rubbed them to try to get some more stimulation. For five minutes or so, I slowly increased the frequency of my contacts with each nipple. Initially I'd give one of them a single lick, then kiss my way slowly toward the other. Later I'd suck one a few times before moving off. Or maybe twirl it between my fingertips - my REAL fingertips, as I wasn't going to show my TK to Donna. After another five minutes I was spending more time than not on her nipples, and I started touching both at the same time, occasionally sending one hand to roam over her torso, or up and down her legs. I didn't touch her groin. Whenever I ran a hand down to her legs, I did so by sliding it down the outside of her hips. If my hand went down about knee level I'd move it to the inside of her thigh, and slowly rub it upward, but I always moved outward just before reaching her shorts. Whether consciously or instinctively, whenever my hand was near her groin Donna would twist her hips to point them toward my hand, then thrust forward trying to make contact. I had a lot of fun letting her almost succeed, but moving my hand away at the last moment. It was sweet torture: "sweet" for me, "torture" for her. A couple of times she tried to move one of her hands - which should have been behind her neck - down toward her shorts. I immediately grabbed it and pushed it back to her head, growling at her. She complied, but groaned quietly in frustration. After her second attempt her groan was more heartfelt - 'something'-felt anyway, it might've been a different part of her anatomy - so I said, "If you're a good girl I'll give you a special present." "What?" "It's a surprise. Wait and see." I was thinking about the vibrator and looking forward to surprising her with it. I had already done everything I could think of to turn Donna on, and even #4 didn't have any more ideas, so I played with her for another few minutes, to our mutual enjoyment but her frustration too. Then it was time to introduce her to my surprise, so I said, "I'm going to pull your shorts and panties off now, sweetie. Okay?" Her single-word answer was a quiet but very ecstatic, "Yyeess!" She packed a lot of meaning into it, including that she was overjoyed at the idea of me having sex with her. I cautioned, "It's not going to be what you think it is. This is part of your surprise. Just wait and see." I moved down the bed to grasp her shorts and panties at both hips. She raised her hips and I pulled them down and off. I deliberately didn't look at her yet, suspecting that I'd get too distracted. Instead I carried her clothes up to her head, and laid them over her eyes, patting them down to block her vision, telling her, "Hold still, sweetie." I got the vibrator out of my drawer and knelt on the bed beside her hip looking at her. Her legs were open already - she was ever hopeful! - so I had a clear view. Donna had three or four long hairs growing from her pubes but was otherwise hairless. Carol and Julia keep themselves hairless these days too, so in that respect Donna's pussy looked similar to theirs, but quite different in other ways. Donna's lips were thinner, and the whole thing seemed to be oriented differently than with the older girls. I stopped my study. I looked up at her face to check it was still hidden by her shorts. It was, so I looked southward again. I placed the tip of the vibrator half an inch above her clit, then twisted its base to turn it on (I won't embarrass myself by telling you how long it took me to discover this yesterday. For quite a while I'd wondered why they were called "vibrators" when they didn't seem to no matter what I tried.) Donna was already very aroused, so I knew I could move it straight to her clit; #4's knowledge is sometimes useful. As soon as I had it vibrating I slid it down toward her clit. Donna immediately said, "Wow, you've got a vibrator. Oh!" (as it reached its destination). "OH!" (as it starting playing with its destination). I was unsure what to do with the thing, and even #4 had exhausted his meager knowledge, so I said, "Bring your hands down and hold it yourself, sweetie." Sweetie's hands flew down to grab it. They had no hesitation putting it to good use. I watched, learned and enjoyed. To help her have a good time, my hands reached out and grasped a nipple each, causing Donna to groan, "Oh God! This is fantastic!" I watched as she used the fingers of one hand to manipulate her clit in various ways, sometimes with the vibrator helping, other times with it tracing over her lips farther down. She particularly liked placing two fingers on either side of her clit so they extended down beside most of her pussy, pressing the fingers firmly into her skin, then repeatedly moving her hand up and down. The fingers didn't slide on the skin, instead they moved the skin with them, which must have created stretching tensions either above or below them, depending on which direction they were being moved. I couldn't imagine what that felt like, but Donna obviously liked it because she did it a lot, sometimes lightly touching her clit with the vibrator too. I'd not seen Carol or Julia make those motions, but I knew those two girls had their own distinct styles. As far as I knew all guys jacked off the same, and also as far as I knew, all girls jilled off differently. I only had a sample of three girls, so in the interests of scientific inquiry I should try to increase that sample size. I had a sample of two guys, thanks to #4's perverted activities of a couple of years ago, and that sample size wasn't going to increase at all. Scientific inquiry only goes so far, which is nowhere near far enough to get me interested in watching other guys jack off. I also noticed that Donna never inserted the vibrator into herself. The most she did was run it through her lips, which - I was interested to see - were lubricated as much as Carol's and Julia's become at such times. Scientific inquiry can be a lot of fun. I guessed Donna might not have inserted it because she still had her hymen. Donna had already been very turned on even before she got her hands on the vibrator. With her using it and with my attention on her nipples again, she was unmistakably heading straight for an orgasm. After about a minute of this activity her groans were coming constantly and her hips were starting to buck. I was wondering whether to start getting a little rough with her, the way Carol likes, when Donna beseeched me from under the shorts, "Please, please kiss me Mark? PLEASE? I REALLY want to kiss you." We'd hardly kissed at all as my feelings for her weren't romantic, but she was clearly in need and I was pretty sure I had to muffle her 'up-cumming' cry. If I was going to be romantic with my sister at any time, while she was frigging herself with a vibrator and I was playing with both her nipples seemed like a good time. It was obviously a good time for her too, so I pulled her shorts off her face and planted my lips onto hers. One of her arms wrapped around my head and pulled it hard down onto her, as she kissed me as hard as she could, her other hand going flat out between her legs. She must have REALLY liked my kiss because as soon as it started her groans' pitch and volume rose substantially. Ten seconds later her climax exploded in her. As usual with a female orgasm, it was very loud. Fortunately "very loud" straight down my throat, so it was highly muffled. Thank goodness, because it would have woken the whole house otherwise. Why are girls so loud? Carol can suppress her noise, but when she's behaving naturally she makes far more noise than me. Three out of three girls that I know about are way louder than me, although in the interests of scientific inquiry I really should increase that sample size. Donna wasn't nearly as loud as Julia - 747s aren't as loud as Julia - but she was still very loud. Unless I deliberately choose to yell it up, my usual sound is a quiet grunt. Females are definitely the noisiest half of humanity, in and out of the bedroom. I sure hoped the volume of noise is not related to the amount of pleasure, otherwise I'd feel VERY ripped-off. What a bummer that'd be! For me, I mean; obviously not for Julia. I stopped kissing, expecting Donna to flake out and let me go, but the reverse happened. Her other hand went around my shoulder and neck, and held me in a tight hug. As soon as Donna drew a new breath she started raining kisses all over my lips and the general area. After a few dozen kisses, she started alternating kisses with "Thank you SO much, Mark", "That was the greatest one I've EVER had", "I LOVE you SO much!" The last one made me feel a bit guilty, and I had to answer, "I love you too, Donna. You know it's not just because we do sexy things together don't you?" "Of course. The sex was so good BECAUSE we love each other." By the look on her face, what she'd really thought was, "Of course, Dummy." "That's okay then. Just so long as you know I'll love you just as much whether or not we do things like that." "You can say that if you like, but I love you MORE now! That was fantastic! Thanks very much. That was a LOT more fun than running, haha." I was still on my knees with my head pulled down to be near her face, which was a bit uncomfortable. So I stretched out to lay beside Donna, putting one arm under her neck to hug her with, and running the other hand lightly over her torso. Not sexual, just intended to be nice and soothing. We quietly chatted some more, Donna thanking me again and again. I assured her that, "It was my pleasure." She laughed, and insisted that it was "A HUGE amount of pleasure for me; that's for sure!" "I guess I can't argue with that. Let's say it was my pleasure TOO." Donna thanked me again. I was gaining the distinct impression that she was very thankful, which far from being tedious, made me happy that I had pleased her so much. In the repetitive conversation she thanked me for "using your vibrator on me." I corrected her, "YOUR vibrator, Donna. It's a present for you. I was just waiting for a good time to give it to you. That was a good time, wasn't it?" "That was a VERY good time!" "Yes, I could tell. My tonsils are still vibrating from your scream." I explained how come I had a vibrator, about Carol buying it, etc. I mentioned, "I want you to have it as a substitute for me. I really don't feel comfortable having intercourse with you yet and probably won't for quite a long time, maybe even a year or more." I wasn't sure whether any of that was logically correct. Would having a vibrator allow her to ease any sexual tensions I created, or would it just create more sexual tension? I thought giving it to her was the right thing to do, but given my less-than-extensive knowledge of pre-menarchial girls, it was 50/50 at best. Donna would enjoy it more though. Donna didn't answer me directly. Instead she said, "You've finished now, haven't you? It's nearly time I went back to my room?" "I think so, yes. No hurry, but soon." "I don't have any experience with boys, but I hear lots of other girls complaining about how selfish their boyfriends are. Not just their boyfriends, but all boys generally. But look at you! You've still got all your clothes on, you haven't made me touch you at all. If I'd tried, you would've stopped me. All you wanted to do was make me happy. You're just like a vibrator, you give pleasure without wanting anything back, haha. I'll name it, 'My Substitute Mark'. I can imagine asking Carol, 'Do you want to borrow My Substitute Mark? Haha." "You'd really share it with Carol? I don't think you need to because I think she bought herself one too, but I'm still surprised you'd share. Isn't it a bit personal?" "Cool, we've got two Substitute Marks. It's going to be fun when both of us are using them at the same time. Carol's made a big deal about sharing you, so I guess that means sharing Substitute Marks too, haha. Last night she let me lick some of your stuff off her. How personal was that!" My cock went {Boing!}. I'd only been half-hard most of the time with Donna, but the image Donna had just given me was an instant turn-on. I had to ask, "What did you think of the taste?" Donna answered frankly, as she normally does. "The taste was bearable. Not nice, but okay. What was GREAT though, was that it was YOUR stuff. That meant a lot to me. I know you won't let me touch you there yet, but when you do I definitely want to get more of it. I love you very much. Not really as a boyfriend because I know Julia and Carol are your wives and I'm just a girl, but you are very, very nice to me. You make me feel wonderful and I love you for that." Donna didn't deem it necessary to explain how love affected her desire to drink more stuff. "I can still hear Substitute Mark buzzing." I reached down the bed to pick it up from where Donna had dropped it. I turned it off and gave it to her. She looked at it critically for a moment, then asked, "Is Substitute Mark the same size as the real Mark?" "I think it's about the same size. Probably very close." "Good. I'm going to practice fucking it as best I can. I want to practice to be as good for you as I can for when you finally let me have you." I thought it was me that was going to be having her, but I've learned that females often get even quite simple things logically backward and it's not worth the effort of correcting them. Especially as, in this case, I thought of a problem she might encounter. "Aren't you going to find that difficult? I thought you still had your hymen?" "I still have it NOW. I'm not going to have it by breakfast time. It's going to be history one minute after I get in the shower with my new training aid." "Oh! Umm, don't girls like to save it for their first boyfriend? Isn't it supposed to be romantically special, or something?" Donna carefully explained the subtle nuances of her attitude toward romance, "Fuck that! I don't know how many times you'll let me screw you so I'm going to make them the best possible fucks I can. Poor Carol nearly had her wedding night ruined by hers and I'm sure not going to take that risk. I want us to have the best time we can." I like Donna. You always know where you stand with her. If somehow you don't, just ask her. She'll tell you. I was surprised about her belief that we might not fuck very often, so I asked, "How come you think we might not have many times together?" (I can't bring myself to be quite as direct as Donna.) "You said 'maybe a year or more' before we'll do it. People have been talking about you going away to college in just over a year. That doesn't leave much time, does it?" #1: "You're right. I never thought of that. Sorry. I guess I better try to make the year wait shorter then. That's confusing for me though because I don't really understand myself enough. Sometimes I think you're very sexy and I get hot thinking about you, but other times you're my little sister and I feel protective and cautious about you. My heart knows it loves you, but my body keeps changing its mind." Then I realized my last point was ambiguous, and I hurriedly added, "By 'my body changing its mind', I mean about physical love; about sex. Obviously I love you as my sister all the time." Donna understood, "Yeah, I got that. I was thinking that last night Carol explained very well how my impatience was ruining my chance of having you. Carol understands these things much better than I do, so I was thinking of asking Carol for more advice. Is that okay with you?" "Of course. Definitely. If you two can share my cum, you can certainly share some words about me, haha." "Thank you." Donna cuddled back into my arms. After a couple of minutes she added, "Carol and Julia are very lucky." I suspected I knew her thinking, but I asked, "Why?" "Because they're married to you. You're a very nice person." "Thank you, but personally I think I'm the lucky one. I'm SURE I'm the lucky one. Carol and Julia are both incredibly wonderful. I'm definitely the luckiest one, by far." "I knew you'd say that. That's why they're the lucky ones." #3: #4: #3: #1: #3: #1: It was impossible to argue with Donna's statement, for several reasons, so I said nothing. Donna rolled onto her side, to face away from me, then scooted back until we were spooning nicely, even though I had my clothes on. She took hold of my upper-arm and hugged it to her chest, putting my hand on one of her nipples. I just held it, and her, quietly. After a small pause she said, "This would be very nice if you had no clothes on. I'm not asking; I'm just saying. I've never done this before, but it feels very nice. I was just imagining how nice it'd feel if you were naked too." "Yes, it does feel nice. It's called 'spooning' because we fit together like two spoons, one nesting inside the other. I like holding Julia and Carol this way too, and you're right about it being better when both people are naked. Although sometimes the girl can be made uncomfortable by having something hard sticking her in the ass, haha." "Mmm. I'd like that. You could slide it into my cunny." Than a second later she added, "Oh, thank you." Because she'd felt my cock harden in response. "Your body does want me sometimes, doesn't it?" "Yes it does." "Good." We lay still again, apart from some gentle hand movements. It was unlike Donna to be so still. She must be happy being in my arms, which was nice. After another pleasant interlude, Donna said, "You know, if Mom opened the door now and saw us, I wouldn't care. I feel safe and comfortable. I like it. I'm surprised I'm not worried about Mom, but I'm really not. I don't feel naughty, I just feel loved. It's very nice. I understand why Carol wants to sleep with you every night." I was just thinking how nice and sentimental Donna can be, when she rubbed her ass against my crotch a couple of times, saying, "Of course I'd worry more if Mom came in while that hard lump was in my cunny. It'd be worth it though. I can't wait. I WILL wait, of course; but I still can't wait. Mmm, I'm getting horny thinking about it. I think I better take My Mark Substitute to the shower and fuck myself with it." So much for Donna's sentimentality. She turned over to face me, and moved to kiss me. Then she stopped and asked, "Can I kiss you? To thank you for a wonderful morning." "I've enjoyed it very much too. A kiss sounds like a good idea." As it turned out, it was an EXCELLENT idea because Donna was a very good kisser. It wasn't a sisterly kiss, but a full-on, put everything into it, tongue and all, kiss. She wasn't just enthusiastic, she was also GOOD. It was a very enjoyable kiss. It lasted a long time, and when she finally broke it I said, "Wow. You're a GREAT kisser. How did you learn so much about kissing?" "I've kissed some other girls quite a lot. Some of the girls in my teams like making out with other girls. It's fun sometimes." It was certainly fun now; I'd gotten hard thinking about it. Donna laughed, saying, "I like the look on your face. I'll go have a shower and think about making out with another girl while you watch us, until you get so horny you stick your cock in me. Then I'll shove the Mark Substitute in me, pretending it's you." She grabbed her clothes and the lucky Substitute, and headed out of my room, pausing to blow me a kiss from the doorway before she shut my door behind her. There was no doubt my body wanted her body at that moment. I quickly realized that my body wanted ANY body. I thought about sneaking over to visit Carol, wondering if I could get her to quietly relieve the pressure. I was sure I could, what with my being the Lord, which would be very useful at such times. The problem was whether we could get it done before Mom and Dad got up. I didn't want to get caught coming out of her room. It wouldn't be a disaster, but it would be trouble. I also felt guilty getting Carol to relieve the pressure Donna had caused. I knew Carol would be happy to, but I felt guilty and silly. I decided it wasn't worth it, I'd just jack-off in the shower as I had so many times before my first date with Julia. I was DEFINITELY going to call Prof tonight though, to see if we could hurry up the roulette scheme. Plus talk with Mom at breakfast about Carol's idea about swapping the bedrooms in this house around. I hadn't heard any mention of that for a while, so what was happening? I didn't want to meet Donna in the hallway or bathroom after her shower in case the resultant conversation was overheard by Mom or Dad, so I waited until I heard Donna return to her bedroom before I went to have my shower. I'd been looking forward to beating off, but once in the shower I had the stupid thought of looking for any bloody evidence of Donna's hymen busting. I couldn't see any, but the thought of it totally ruined my mood. I joined my parents at the breakfast table, and it wasn't long after I started eating when the girls marched in for their traditional morning kiss. The tradition is that they march around to stand on either side of me, then both kiss me on the cheeks simultaneously. I cooperate by keeping my face pointing straight ahead so they both have easy access to a cheek. This time was a little different. When it was time to kiss me Carol leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. A very nice kiss too, lasting maybe fifteen seconds. When Carol leaned back, Donna replaced her. All this in front of Mom and Dad, neither of whom said a word. I saw Mom do the eyebrow thing at Carol. Not at me, presumably because I don't speak Eyebrow, or perhaps Mom knew I'll never understand female motivations, or perhaps because Mom didn't trust me to give a straight answer. I hoped it wasn't the last reason because that'd make it much harder to misbehave in the future. Carol answered, "We decided we love him too much for just a kiss on the cheek." Sounded reasonable to me, and they were both very nice kissers. Dad laughed, and said, "If you decide you love him any more than now, you might need to say good morning to him in his room before you come out." What an excellent suggestion! It would have made it very easy to get rid of this morning's stiffness problem too. I was just about to express my whole-hearted agreement with Dad's suggestion, when Dad added, "But not until after the trial." Damned Biffs! I hope they throw the book at those jock bastards for making my sex-life so difficult. I was reminded of a thought that had briefly crossed my mind last night, while technically fucking Carol in breach of Mom and Dad's rulings about only doing that in Julia's bedroom, and not at all since the previous Friday at 3pm. I asked them, "Speaking of expressions of love, I'm a bit confused about something. You've said that we can't get very physical until after the trial is over, and I understand that we might be put under surveillance by the defense lawyers or newspapers. What I don't understand is how come we can still have so many discussions about sex. Sometimes we say stuff that'd be terrible if it got out." Mom answered, "Yes, that is a problem. I wasn't expecting nearly so many sex conversations, or for them to be so frank. It's a worry. We've done a few things. Your dad goes outside and checks the area quite often. We've also alerted all the neighbors that we expect snoops and for them to chase them off if they can or call our cellphones if anyone comes onto our property, even if they're pretending to be salesmen or utility repairmen. Mrs. Roberts especially promised to keep a good lookout, haha." (Mrs. Roberts lives opposite us, and makes it her business to know everything that's going on, whether or not it wants her to know. To be asked to be snoopy must've made her day.) -- "It's been very quiet. There haven't been any articles recently and we haven't heard from any lawyers either, which is surprising as I thought they would have wanted to interview you by now. No news is definitely good news as far as I'm concerned. If things start happening we might all have to shush up for a while, but so far so good, touch wood. Speaking of articles, there's story in this morning's paper about your race win. Do you want to read it?" "No." "Thought not. There's a nice picture of you so I'm going to put it in the family album. It does mention that your win was so surprising that there was an allegation of cheating against you, but an investigation cleared you, subject to your blood test coming back clean." I just shrugged, and even that was giving it more attention that it was worth. "I have a question on another topic. What's happening with Carol's request that we swap bedrooms around?" Dad answered (good for him, for speaking up more), "That's another confused issue for a while. You can't change rooms until after the trial, as we said before. We agreed to get a new bed installed, to be ready for you, but I think the idea of getting a new house for all of us kind of messed that up. It's not just a matter of a new bed for the room, as we have to disguise what'll be going on in there too. The trial could drag on, Prof and Vanessa said your moneymaking idea might not work, or maybe it'll work faster than we thought and we can move out sooner. Everything is confused so much we thought we'd just wait and see until the trial finishes. We can get the bed quickly if we want to, so you won't really be missing out." Happily Mom and Dad hadn't changed their minds, and it was only a matter of waiting. Damned jocks though! Carol said, "Waiting's hard. I want to be with him." Mom said, "Yeah, I understand. I sympathize with you, but we can't do much about it. Hopefully it'll all be over in a few weeks. You've got years ahead of you, so I think you can last a few weeks." Carol said, "Probably. We bought a couple of vibrators when we were shopping on Saturday, so they'll be some help." #1: Mom said, "Good idea. I should have suggested that myself." #1: #2: Mom continued, "Do you like using them?" #1: Carol answered, "I haven't tried it properly yet. Just played around a little when we put the batteries in. Which reminds me, can you please get some spare batteries? I'd hate to run out at an important time." Mom laughed, emphatically saying, "I can definitely empathize with you about that too. Sure. What size and how many?" Carol was answering when Donna said, "I've used mine twice now. I already know I'm going to use it a LOT, so please get plenty of spare batteries for me too." #1: Mom said, "Oh. I didn't know you had a vibrator too. I thought it was just Julia and Carol." Carol said, "Julia already had one. We bought two on Saturday, for Donna and me. It wouldn't be fair for me to use one in front of her and not let her have one too. I could have lent her mine, but this way we can both get off at the same time." #1: <{Groan}. They shouldn't be using them in front of each other at all. It's private!> I looked at Dad. He saw me looking, smiled at me and shrugged. We understood each other and nothing need be said. An attitude every female at the table should emulate, but obviously won't. Donna said, "I used mine to bust my hymen in the shower this morning. It was a lot less painful for me than it was for Carol." Unbelievably all three women started talking about how painful losing their hymens were, even MOM! I had to say, "If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go back to my room to hide under the bed until it's safe." Mom said, "But you haven't finished your breakfast. Don't you want to finish it first?" "No, I don't. I'll come back for it later. There's far too much should-be-private information flying about. Call me when it's safe to come back please." I fled for my room, pursued by three sets of laughter. Only Dad had the decency not to laugh. As I was closing my door, I heard Donna say, "I've named mine..." #1: <{Groan}.> Rather than hiding, I packed my schoolbag very slowly. After the minute that took, I opened the door to check, and all I heard was loud female laughter. That was a bad sign, so I shut the door. I waited a couple more minutes, then opened my door again, and listened to Mom saying, "If you don't mind sharing each other's, you should try using two at once. You can..." Nope, still not safe. I shut the door again. A couple of minutes later there was a knock on my door. I opened it and Carol came in carrying my half-eaten breakfast. She said, "I thought I should bring it to you as it looks like the conversation isn't going to end before the car comes. Mom's giving us some good advice and it's very funny. I'll go back in a second, but I want to quickly thank you for being so nice to Donna this morning. She's VERY happy." I was about to ask Carol what she knew about what Donna and I had done, but before I got the first word out Carol said, "Sorry. I'll talk with you about Donna later, but I don't want to miss anything Mom and Donna are saying." She thrust the bowl into my hands and ran back to the kitchen. #2: Carol's comment about the car reminded me about calling the guy from the DMV to arrange my test. I needed to talk with Dad about what time was good for him to take me there. I couldn't bring myself to go talk with Dad now. It can wait a day, so I'll ask him at dinner tonight, presuming it'll be safe to be around the table then. I pulled out the DMV letter and put it in my wallet to keep it handy, then sat down to finish my breakfast. Mom came in a few minutes later. She said, "We've finished so it's safe for you to come out now. I also wanted to thank you for whatever you did with Donna this morning. She's very happy and blossoming, so well done!" "Umm. Thanks. Don't you want to know what we did?" "I'm sure you don't want to tell me, but thanks for asking. In answer to your question, no, I don't want to know. I think I'll take a lesson from Vanessa's book and leave this one to you. I already know some things, and they're all good: Donna's very happy with you - even happier than normal, which is impressive in the first place. You haven't had sex with her yet because she was quite explicit about how she's using her Mark Substitute to get ready for the real thing and I got the impression she doesn't expect that for a long time - I like that part; please go slowly. And I know that if you mess up, you'll punish yourself worse than I could punish you. So all things considered, I think I'll just sit back and watch this time. So far you're doing very well. Keep up the good work!" Mom left the room. #4: #2: #4: #2: I had my chance to talk with Dad about the DMV, so I grabbed my empty bowl, headed for the kitchen, and asked him. Dad's answer was, "I'll check with my boss today and let you know tonight." The car hadn't arrived, so I sat down to eat some fruit out of the fruit bowl on the table. In seconds I had two girls sitting on my lap, one on each leg. They had fun taking turns hand-feeding me pieces of banana. As long as the food kept coming, they could joke around all they wanted, just as long as they didn't restart the masturbation discussion. Mom jokingly asked, "Where's Julia going to sit when the four of you are together." Donna immediately said, "Where I am, of course. I'm not his wife. Only a sister, which is pretty good." I put a few recent thoughts together, and asked, "Mom, with regard to my latest responsibility that you cleverly gave me a few minutes ago, Julia mentioned to me a few days ago that she'd like to spend more time over here than she has been, which is hardly at all. Julia wants to get to know Donna better, and I'd like that too as it'd help me make good decisions. Can I invite Julia for dinner tonight please?" Mom got my first message as I said it, and smiled at it. At the end of my request she said, "Sure. We certainly aren't doing our fair share of looking after you all. By all means invite her." "She'll be riding her bike to school now, so I'll wait to ask her at school, and text you her answer, okay?" Mom just nodded, as she walked to review the food she had pulled out for dinner. Mom swapped the meat for another out of the freezer. Carol said, "What a pity we don't have a big bed in my room, or Julia could stay the night with me." Mom and Dad, I was very happy to see, fully accepted Carol's statement for all that it meant. Mom said, "You're right. We forgot that angle. Maybe when we take her home tonight you could go with her and spend the night at her place. But how would you get to school in the morning? I wouldn't want to spring that on the Williamses in case they're too busy to take you to school by car. I'd need to talk with them first." I said, "I should have my full license in a couple of days. Two or three I guess, depending on Dad. And then I'll be able to drive Carol back and forth as much as she wants, or pick her up and take her to school, or whatever." Mom said, "I'll call Vanessa today and ask her what she thinks." The car came shortly after that, and off we went. ------- Chapter 69: The Track Coach Can Take a Running Jump Monday, April 18, 2005 (Continued) I was a little surprised that Donna sat in her usual front seat. I had half-expected her to sit in the back, as a semi-girlfriend sort of thing. Maybe she didn't think of it. Carol surprised me too. Partway to school she gave me a naked pussy flash, catching me by complete surprise. She dropped her skirt then laughed at the expression on my face. A couple of minutes later, when Carol also didn't expect it, I TK-pinched one of her nipples. Pinched, hung on, and pulled it. Carol was wearing the new casual outfit she had brought back from Julia's house: A short skirt, above the knee rather than below as she normally wears, and a matching top. The top was considerably tighter than her norm, and she was even wearing a thinner than normal bra because I could tell where her nipple was, making it easy to TK it. I liked her new look considerably (there's a surprise). Carol seemed to enjoy its advantages too, because while I was pinching her left nipple, her right one visibly hardened. I digress. The important thing was that my 'revenge' surprised her as much as her pussy flash had me. I enjoyed laughing back at her, and she knew exactly why. After the initial surprise, she enjoyed it too. I stopped it soon though, as we weren't far from school and I thought it'd be kinder if I let her two fairly obvious advertisements of 'enjoyment' soften a bit before she got to school. [An hour later it occurred to me that Carol might have enjoyed the embarrassment of having erect nipples at school, but then I thought she probably wouldn't as she wouldn't be doing it for Julia or me. Not understanding females, I wasn't sure of that, but I thought it most likely, otherwise she would've been wearing thinner bras to school for the last few years. That seemed logical, so I was very uncertain about it.] Donna hung around for a few seconds, until the car had gone. Then she said to me, "I will be thinking of you today. I've brought a very good reminder." She pulled Substitute Mark out of her pocket to show me. "Good grief. I hope that's not for 'Show and Tell', and that it doesn't go off accidentally in class." "Yeah, it's a pity it's a bit noisy, even on the lowest setting. I can still use it turned off though. I'm going to enjoy myself today." Obviously busting her cherry hadn't caused Donna much pain this morning, which I'd seen when she'd walked out to the car easily. "Have a good day then, sweetie. Try not to - cough, cough - 'think of me' too often, in case you get too tired to concentrate on your teachers." "I'll tell you at dinner how many times I 'thought of you', haha. See ya." Donna shot off toward her area of the school. Carol and I waited for Julia. I was about to ask her about Donna, when she beat me to it by saying, "You did very well with Donna this morning. She's very happy." "Yeah, happy and horny, but you're right. It wasn't just me though because you set her straight very well last night. This morning I just repeated much the same as you'd told her. I don't know whether she had time to tell you, but we only did half a run and spent the other half in my room. I played with her nipples and then gave her the vibrator. She used it to get off while I tweaked her nipples some more. The sex was pretty lightweight really, as I only touched her nipples. I don't think the sex was important; what worked best was what we told her." Carol said, "Donna told me most of that, but what had the biggest impact on her was that she tried to be so selfish last night, but you were so unselfish with her this morning. She said you gave her the best orgasm she's ever had without wanting anything for yourself. She was ashamed of herself and impressed by you." "I didn't really have a plan. It just worked out that way. And before you can compliment me, let me compliment you instead: you're looking VERY pretty today. I know you're doing it for me so thank you very much. I appreciate it very much." "Thank you. Nearly all of the clothes we bought on Saturday were to please you, so I'm glad the first two outfits make you happy." It took me a second to recall the other outfit, then I got it, "The dress you wore to dinner! That wasn't 'an outfit', that was Heaven on Earth! That didn't just make me happy, it TOTALLY blew me away. When you wear that dress my hands actually hurt if I don't let them slide under your straps. I can feel a physical pull like a magnet straining to reach for iron. It's amazing. With your hair up, the high-heeled shoes and necklace, and that dress - you looked SPECTACULAR. Sophisticated and very, very sexy. And every single guy we saw all night obviously had the same reaction. I thought the taxi driver was going to drive us into a tree because he wouldn't stop looking at you in the rear vision mirror." "I noticed the other guys, but there was only one guy who mattered to me." "You made him very happy, believe me. You're a wonderful girl. For reasons far beyond how beautiful and sexy you are. I'm so much looking forward to living with you as husband and wife." "Yeah me too. That's going to be fantastic. I pray your moneymaking idea works and that we can find a place that's got the privacy we want." "I'm going to call Prof tonight to see if I can speed it up. Let's change the subject to something less frustrating. You got me a good one in the car just now. I nearly swallowed my tongue when I gulped in surprise. It was well done, thanks. You're a delight." "I wanted to thank you for being so good to Donna." "In that case, I will be very, very good to Donna every day! Haha." "I'll just have to show you my pussy every day then, won't I?" I deliberately folded my arms, and said, "You don't have to show me, I can see for myself. You're still not wearing any panties, are you?" "No. They're in my bag still." "Look down then." Carol looked down, to see that I had already used TK to raise the front of her skirt. I hadn't raised it anywhere near high enough for me to see anything - there were far too many other kids around for that - but I had pulled it up enough for her to be reminded that I could do so. When she'd gotten the point of my demonstration, I said, "A short skirt like that could be above your waist in a second. Everyone would see everything." Carol hugged her bag to her chest and spread her feet apart, and waited. Yet another of my bluffs called. Neither Carol nor Julia come close to believing these threats of mine. That's the trouble of being known as a wimp. A very well-loved wimp, but a wimp nonetheless. I admitted, "You got me. I give up. You and Julia never fall for my bluffs." "You mean you're not going to do it?" "Um, no. I was only trying to scare you. Not really 'scare', of course, just for fun. But you called my bluff." "Aww, I thought you were going to." That reminded me. It had been a while since we'd played 'sexually embarrass Carol' games. I'd forgotten about them when I was raising her skirt. I realized that Carol hadn't adopted her 'helpless dumb girl' persona. So I asked her, "You're serious aren't you? Not playing one of those games you like?" "I just thought you were going to do it, so I cooperated with you." After a short pause, Carol added, "That's so COOL! I can't wait to tell Julia about that." I'm a bit slow at understanding females ("completely unable" being a form of "a bit slow"), so I did what I've found works well, and asked, "Why is it so cool?" Carol explained, "My unquestioning obedience. I didn't even think about questioning you, let alone disobeying. I just assumed you wanted to do it and I cooperated. I'm proud of myself. And proud of you for being so trustworthy." "My pulling up your skirt in public is hardly trustworthy of me!" "Haha. No, you're right. It's naughty, which I also like but that's a whole other issue. It's your PREVIOUS trustworthiness that earned my obedience. Think about Donna. She's going to be far more obedient to you now because you've earned her trust. She came into our room this morning completely naked and not at all concerned that she'd been naked with you. Can you imagine her being that trusting a month ago?" I thought about Donna's and my relationship a month ago. We liked each other very much, but I couldn't imagine her response to my telling her I was going to pull her panties down. It wouldn't have been the great delight she'd had this morning. I started shaking my head, when Carol suddenly laughed, and said, "Ha, ha. Never mind 'a month ago', I just thought about 'a year ago'. If you'd tried to strip her a year or two ago, Donna would have beaten you to a pulp, and then told on you to Mom and Dad." "Yeah. She would have killed me and then got me in serious trouble with Mom and Dad." Carol added, "Mom and Dad have changed too. If they'd seen Donna coming out of your room naked this morning, I don't think they would've hit the roof, but they would have a year ago." "You're right about that too. Mom knows I did something sexual with Donna this morning, but she pretty much gave me permission to carry on doing it." "So people are trusting you a lot. That's why I'm proud of you. So, are you going to pull my skirt up now?" "I can see what you think of that idea: your nipples are sticking out more." "I'm glad you look at them. I need to wear bras most of the time, but we bought some thinner ones so you can see my nipples easier." Not only see them, but the highly official Mark's-arm-holding technique felt better too. What else could I say, "Thank you VERY much. But, um, aren't you worried about other people seeing your nipples too?" "I know the boys in my class are going to go a little crazy when I start dressing like this, but Julia's given me some good put-down lines. If they don't work, I'll get your help like I did about a year ago. Remember?" "When I came to your class to tell Ed Miller to stop pestering you, right?" "Yeah. That worked wonderfully last year. If the boys get silly about my new look I'll try Julia's lines first, but if they're not enough can I ask for your help again please?" "Absolutely. Not only is that a small price to pay for seeing you look so good, but I'd even enjoy it. I like doing things for you." Carol smiled her appreciation, then said, "I'm not going to dress like a slut at school. Julia and I know you wouldn't like that..." I shook my head, to indicate, "No, I wouldn't." I don't even like it when the sluts dress like sluts. I better explain that in case you think I've got something against girls who show lots of flesh. I like their flesh FINE! The problem is that they've invariably got either an in-your-face aggressive attitude, or a stratospherically arrogant one. " ... Mostly I'll be wearing clothes like these. Showing enough to remind you that I am sexy and yours. That's all I need to do." "That sounds perfect to me. Don't hesitate if you need help with the boys though." One thing I knew for sure was that the boys in Carol's classes were going to make total fools of themselves. Carol's got a heavenly figure and now that she was actually showing its shape, the boys were going to get all gaga in the stupid way boys do. Carol added, "I did get some slut clothes too, for when it's just us. Let me know whenever you want me to wear them." A second later Carol laughed, and said, "I see I'm not the only one that has a problem with something that sticks out." I struggled to overcome my having gone all gaga. Having a hard-on when standing next to your sister wasn't a good look, so a go-soft was definitely required. Julia arrived while I was deflating myself. Julia said, "I had a flat tire at home. It took me a few minutes to repair it." Being the sexist I was soon made to feel, I asked, "Didn't one of The Boys offer to do it for you?" "No. I was taught how to repair my own punctures years ago. They helped me learn and do the first couple, but that was all. Mom and Dad said I have to be able to do things like that myself. It's not hard, you know, even for a poor, helpless little girlie." The last was said with a put-on humorous tone. Julia added, "I better make sure I learn how to change car tires too." Carol prompted me, "Ask Julia about dinner tonight." As instructed, I said, "Would you like to have dinner at our house tonight?" "Sure. That'd be good." Carol said. "Great. I gotta go now. See you at lunch, bye." Julia and I immediately headed off toward our first class too. On the way I told her that one of the reasons to invite her to dinner was so she could get to know Donna better, as she'd suggested a few days ago. I gave her a brief summary of my morning's activities with Donna and Mom's reaction to it. Julia was pleased. Everyone seemed pleased: Donna, Carol, Mom and Julia. I must be doing something right. I remembered to tell Julia that I wasn't going to show Donna my TK yet, just in case it came up in conversation while Donna was around. School has a weird schedule where every seventh schoolday has a different order of classes. It's mostly for elective classes that aren't important enough to have every week. Today was one of those odd days, but it started with a very ordinary class: English. During it, a student came in and passed a note to my teacher, who called out, "Mark Anderson, report to Mr. Millane in the gym." I didn't know a Mr. Millane, but this class was English so I was more than happy to report to anyone anywhere. I recognized Mr. Millane when I saw him, he's the school's track coach. I said, "I'm Mark Anderson. You sent for me?" "I heard about your 10k win. I want you to join our track team." "No thanks. That was a oncer. I'm not running any more organized races." ("Oncer" is a word I've picked up from Dad. Pronounced "once-er". It means "one-time event", which is what I should use, but don't. You can blame Dad if you want.) I turned to leave, but Mr. Millane stepped in front of me. "Please reconsider. It would be very good for you and the school." Reconsidering didn't take me very long at all. "Nope. I'm not running any more races. End of story. Bye." Apparently it wasn't the end of story because Mr. Millane moved to block me yet again. He launched into an impassioned speech about why I had to do as he requested. All sorts of crap reasons: I owed the school loyalty. This would be the same school whose lack of protection drove me to suicide. Track was important. How the world was a better place because Person A ran around a circle faster than Person B completely escaped me. How sports would teach me important life skills. The ONLY 'life skill' I'd noticed sport teaching anyone, including Mr. Millane, was how to be a bully. I talked over his tirade with, "No! I don't want to do any running. I want to go back to class now." He wasn't listening, and carried right on ignoring my objection. I started getting quite pissed off. I was about to get seriously angry in his face when, #1: It was fine with the rest of us, and we told him so. #1: #3: #1: We ended up agreeing on eight distinct refusals so far. #1: Mr. Millane was still talking more crap about sports being the most important activity in the world. Or something like that, as I wasn't really listening to him. My mouth, under #1's control, then spoke in a perfectly normal conversational tone, "I don't want to run." Mr. Millane wasn't listening to me either, as he didn't even slow down his impassioned rant. Excellent! Several seconds later I said, "I'd like to go back to class now." Again I deliberately used my normal, easily ignored tone, and again Mr. Millane ignored me. That not only suited #1's plan, but was probably fair as I was ignoring everything he was saying too. Over the next few minutes I got in several more refusals, most of which he ignored, although some spurred him to immediately change tack and try to convince me with another reason. He even tried to convince me that I could become famous. What a dipstick! I'd run a mile to AVOID becoming famous. Then I couldn't help laughing out loud at my accidental joke. My laughter caused him to pause, so I added another, "I'm not interested in running. I want to concentrate on getting good grades in my real subjects because exams are only a few weeks away now." #3: #1: #3: Before I could add another refusal, Mr. Millane said, "Track is important in this school. If your other teachers learn of your refusal to support your school, you might find your grades start going downhill." #1: #2: I told him, "You've convinced me that we need to talk with the Principal about this, so we can sort it out asap. The school year is nearly over so there's not much time. Let's go." Believing the merits of his many arguments had convinced me, Millane was willing to let me walk out the gym's door with him. I led the way briskly to the Principal's office. On the way he said, "We don't need to see the Principal. I can easily take care of the paperwork myself. There's not much." I answered with, "I'm in a special academic program which the Principal oversees. I need to talk with him." What it lacked in accuracy, it more than made up for by sounding good. Millane said other things on the way, but I treated them with the same respect I'd treated his previous comments. When we got to the Principal's office his secretary wouldn't let us in. "He's busy." I insisted. It's so cool that I can do that. The secretary knew who I was, of course. The assaults were only a few weeks ago and the school had started getting its act together in several ways. She was still reluctant because he wasn't just busy alone; he was having a meeting. I insisted some more. Did she really expect me to be sympathetic about some random meeting? No doubt one of hundreds, if not thousands, he has a year. My saying, "I'll call Mom then" as I pulled out my phone resolved the issue. Mom has been negotiating with the school over a financial settlement, so I'm sure the secretary didn't want to upset my mom, or upset the Principal by having my upset mom come down on him. The secretary went in to talk with the Principal, and his meeting suddenly ended. A couple of minutes later Mr. Millane and I were ushered in. I started by saying, "Mr. Millane, please explain what you want me to do." "Join the school's track team." "Now list all the reasons you used to try to convince me." I made him be as complete as possible, rather than letting him get away with just the two reasons he initially gave. I also made him explain each of the reasons, telling him to "repeat the same explanations you used with me." After I'd prompted him a few times about stuff he'd left out, he didn't need further assistance. He actually got excited about repeating it all again, the idiot. He even explained some reasons I'd failed to notice the first time, which unsurprisingly didn't change my mind. All of this took several minutes, and I was pleased that the Principal patiently sat through all of it. The only reason he would have done so was because he either respected or feared me. Both were good. When the dipstick had finished his list, I said, "You left one reason out, the last one you used to try to influence my decision." He looked blankly at me. He actually didn't know what I was referring to. A particularly stupid dipstick then, as he still had no idea that he'd talked himself right into the middle of a trap. I prompted, "Remember, you talked about what would happen to my grades in other subjects." He saw the trap now! "I don't think I mentioned anything about those." "Yes you did. It was the very last thing you said to me before I said we had to talk with the Principal. Don't you remember?" "No, I never said anything like that." "It's just as well that I have a SUPERB memory. That's one of the reasons my IQ tested out at 226." That got his attention big time! He obviously had no idea who I was, other than a fast runner, but he knew that an IQ of 226 was a FREAKILY high IQ. He looked at the Principal, who nodded confirmation. Then he just looked sick. Having established the credentials for my memory as best I could quickly, I said, "I deliberately memorized the exact words you used. You said, and I'm quoting you word-perfect now: 'Track is important in this school. If your other teachers learn of your refusal to support your school, you might find your grades start going downhill.' Now tell the Principal how many times I had refused to run for you?" "Eh?" "I'll answer for you, seeing as how you're apparently unable to count. By the time you found it necessary to threaten my grades, I had refused your request to run for the school twenty three times. Twenty three! I counted them. Now would you please explain to the Principal why you thought it was necessary to pull me out of my English class in order to make me listen to your ceaseless prattle and threats. English being my weakest subject and the one that I have to work at the hardest in order to keep my grade point average up." Not that I cared a monkey's fart about English or my GPA. I was pretty sure I was not going to be going down the usual career path that every other kid had to face. Dipstick apparently decided that offense was the best defense, and he started accusing me of making up all these accusations about me. I let him run on for a while. I probably couldn't have stopped him, but it was amusing to listen to him anyway. After he wound down somewhat, I said what my internal planning session had decided on, "I've got several points to make about your untruthful denials of my twenty three refusals: -- "First I made you describe to the Principal all the reasons you used to convince me to run for you. You listed every reason under the sun, and described them at length. Clearly I didn't agree to run or you wouldn't have needed to try so many reasons, at such length. -- "Second we can contact my English teacher and ask what time I was summoned out of class. What with the walking time required and the time now, it'll be obvious that I must have spent at least twenty minutes talking to you in the gym. -- "Third, ever since I won the race on Saturday I've been approached by a never-ending stream of people wanting me to run for them. I have consistently given the same answer: 'I won't run in any more organized races.' If I called my mother now and without prompting her in any way asked her how I would answer if I was asked to race for the school, she would repeat those exact same words. She's heard me say them over and over this weekend, as have all my family." -- I turned to face the Principal, "Shall I call my mom and ask her that question?" The Principal thought it was unnecessary. Although I'd exaggerated about all the people chasing me, I knew Mom would've confirmed my decision not to run again. I'd also been reasonably sure the Principal would have preferred not to call Mom if I offered him a choice on the matter. I continued, "Having established that you lied about my twenty three refusals, your saying you never threatened my grades is now not credible. On the contrary, your threat is entirely believable. I had been repeatedly refusing to agree to your demands and after you'd exhausted every reason under the sun to convince me, it's entirely believable that you'd revert to threats. Now tell the Principal how many times you physically prevented me from leaving the gym when I wanted to." He obviously wasn't going to do as I wanted, and he started making a fuss. I was pleased when the Principal shut him up. Politely, but effectively. I told the Principal the answer to my own question, "Three times I told him that I wanted to get back to my class and I moved to walk around him and out of the door. All three times he blocked me by interposing himself between me and the door. He was using physical intimidation to force me to stay where I was. I was pulled out of an important class and forced to endure a long-winded tirade on a subject that I hold in some contempt. I refused to do what he wanted twenty three times, and three times tried to leave but was physically prevented from doing so. Because of my repeated refusals I was then subject to a very serious threat against my grades. -- "I will mention that I am already enrolled in OSU and have their permission to audit and take any Mathematics courses I want. Free of charge, too. OSU have, at their own expense, provided me with a brand new home computer, high speed internet access, several expensive software packages and online access to all their course materials. The Dean of OSU has already spent a considerable amount of time smoothing my way to access his university. My girlfriend's father is a Professor and he has told me that if I get good grades this year then I will have universities and colleges from all over the world, large corporations and several Federal Government agencies pursuing me next year. All of that has been put at risk by this dipstick's not accepting my twenty three refusals to run around in circles for him." Ambush complete, I folded my hands and looked to the Principal to respond. He was starting to react already, "Okay, Mark. First we don't want to start using epithets, regardless of whether someone is a 'dipstick' or not." It was clear that the Principal had decided whose side he was on, and he was letting the dipstick know it wasn't him. That left me with only one worry, which I decided to leave to the Principal. I'd decided he wasn't such a bad guy. He'd handled this meeting very well so far, and he'd already started doing the right things in school as a result of my previous assaults. The Principal was still talking, but I interrupted him, "Sorry, sir. But I want to get back to class, and this has wasted enough of my time already. I'd like to leave this to you to fix, but I'd like to say a few things before I go. Is that okay?" I think he was more than happy at my leaving him, so he assented. I said, "I'm not worried about being made to run races for the school. Obviously no one can force me to run if I don't want to, and if they tried I'd just sit down and read a book. The only thing that Dipstick said that matters was his threat to damage my grades. That implies he either has access to my records, or can influence some of my teachers into downgrading me. Both are extremely serious concerns. I will call my mother shortly and explain that I was bullied by a teacher - because bullying is exactly what he was doing - and that my grades have been threatened. I am sure Mom will then call the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education to alert them to Dipstick's threats. You're going have to work with my mother and the Boards over how my grades for this year and next can be protected from his carrying out his threat or getting revenge on me. Clearly he's a liar, a bully and in a position of authority, so I'm seriously concerned about this. Mom may well have additional concerns and I'm sure she won't hesitate to call you if she feels it necessary." The Principal was sure of that too. I took my departure shortly after that, making sure the Principal saw me pulling out my cellphone as I left. I sent Mom a text message: "Julia coming for dinner. Call me if convenient re another bullying attempt, no hurry." I walked slowly back to my English classroom, figuring that if I walked slowly enough I might successfully miss the whole class and therefore get some benefit out of Dipstick's stupidity. Mom called back before I got to class, and I quickly filled her in. I reassured her that I wasn't really worried, believing that Dipstick had simply gotten carried away and was probably just blowing smoke with his threat. He obviously didn't know who I was and I had trouble imagining that any of my teachers would deliberately downgrade me on the Track coach's say so. I was sure the Principal would do his job fine. I told Mom that I'd done it mainly for two reasons: because Dipstick was seriously pissing me off and so deserved some major trouble as a consequence, and because I thought it'd help Mom squeeze a little more money out of the school. Mom's response was, "It'll help me squeeze a great deal more than 'a little', although you don't have any real proof so I guess it depends on how your Principal and the Boards handle it. You may not think it's worth worrying about, but in court this would be FAR more serious for the school than any of the football team's assaults, and they know it. I'll ring the Education Boards next and I'm looking forward to my next conversation with your Principal. He's going to be a VERY happy man when you finally graduate." "In my defense, school will be a better place by then too. What gets me is that Mr. Dipstick obviously had no regard for me as a person. He didn't care whether running races was good for my life, what my needs were, that exams are coming up soon, or anything like that. His only interest was that I could win races for his team, which I suspect boils down to just making him look good. I think they have so many thousands of kids come through here year after year, that people like Millane stop seeing us as people. We become just things he can use to get what he wants." "That's doubtless true. It happens in any profession that deals with lots of people. Doctors start referring to patients as "the broken arm in bed five", even though there's a real person with a name in that bed. It's probably even harder for teachers as they're dealing with thousands of kids and it'd be easy for some of them to decide that kids' opinions don't matter. Anyway, I don't have much time, and I need to call the two Boards to light fires there. Just before I go, did you know that I had almost settled with your school? We'd reached a figure I was happy with, but I was taking my time just to make them sweat a little. Your timing was perfect." "Glad to help. Can I ask what the amount was?" "Seems only reasonable, as it's your compensation. It was $25,000. Today's episode should increase that. I'll let you know." "Cool. Okay, bye Mom." Class had just finished and I was eager to tell Julia my new funny story. Julia came out talking to Linda, one of the other girls in our class. I was standing on the wall opposite the doorway, and Julia easily spotted me. She led Linda over to me and started making introductions. I interrupted, not to be rude to Julia, but I think it compliments the other person if you can show you already know their name, "I know Linda. The teacher calls on her often enough." Linda's a good student. Good at English anyway, she's not in any of my other classes so I don't know about her other subjects. Linda said, "I know your name too of course. Do you mind if I call you Egg? I think that's a fun name." I was amused by her "of course". Not so long ago no one knew who I was, and now I merited an "of course". I answered her question, "I don't mind being called Egg. I quite like it actually, although we should keep that quiet because I think you're not supposed to like your nicknames. The Secret Nickname Committee might change mine if they find out I like it." Julia said, "Linda's one of my best friends, although I haven't been a very good friend for the last two or three weeks, since you turned my life upside-down, darling." The "darling" wasn't giving anything away that wasn't obvious already, as Julia had moved her seat to be next to mine in all our common classes and was holding one of my forearms in her usual affectionate manner. (If Julia and I are anywhere near each other you can usually assume she's holding my arm to her chest; my forearm if we're standing, or upper-arm if we're sitting. Likewise with Carol, although Carol is tall enough to always hold my upper-arm.) I apologized, "Sorry. I didn't mean to intrude on your other friendships so much. You could have let me know not to take so much of your time." Julia corrected me (she does that, from time to time), "You didn't take; I gave. In case you haven't noticed, I like spending time with you." "I believe I have noticed something like that. It's very mutual." I was just about to say something to draw Linda into the conversation, when Julia asked, "Why did you get pulled out of class?" "Do you know a Mr. Millane, the track coach?" Neither girl did. Two smart girls then. I continued, "He heard about my win on Saturday and wanted me to join the school's track team. Wanted it enough to browbeat me for half an hour, and when that didn't work he tried to coerce me by threatening to sabotage my grades. I took him to the Principal's office and left the two of them sorting it out." Linda reacted before Julia. As soon as Linda had understood "threatening to sabotage my grades", she exclaimed, "Oh no! That's terrible. What are you going to do?" Julia just laughed, I thought at my story, rather than at Linda's concern. Linda was shocked by Julia's laughter, and said, "How can you laugh at that? Grades are important!" Julia said, "Sorry Linda. I know you must think I'm terrible. I laughed because I know Mark. He's so exceptional that unusual events happen around him. I'm already getting used to that, and it's been less than three weeks. I'm sure he's already fixed it. Is that right, Mark?" "Yeah, pretty much. The Principal is going to have a bad day running around fixing this mess, but his day isn't going to be nearly as bad as Dipstick's - that's my new nickname for Millane. I must remember to tell the Secret Nickname Committee, haha." "You're really not worried?" asked Linda. "No. I was mostly just annoyed. He was just a stupid, narrow-minded idiot. He didn't have a clue what was going on and pretty much confessed to everything in front of the Principal. My grades are safe. After this I could probably do no work at all for the rest of the year and none of my teachers would dare reduce my grade. That's not my style and I'm exaggerating, but I'm fine. I called Mom and we joked around about it too. It's not a problem." "My parents would freak. It'd be a major drama from now until the end of school." Julia said, "Mark's parents are also used to him. They've learned not to freak. You'll get used to him too, Linda." #1: <"Linda will get used to us." That must mean Julia is intending for Linda to spend time with us. Julia did say she wanted to push other girls our way, and it looks like it's starting already.> We looked at Linda's body with renewed interest because I know the way Julia thinks. Sorry. I just realized that was a silly thing for me to write. Julia is a female so I have no idea how she thinks. I'm not even sure that females actually think, as such, as the way they do things often have no discernable coherent sequence. Let's just say, "I looked at Linda's body with renewed interest" and leave it at that. Linda was just a good looking, healthy, teenage girl. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about her that I could see. My memory of her is that she dresses okay. Not fancy, certainly not revealingly, just ordinary, everyday school clothes. Jeans and some sort of comfortable blouse mostly. She wasn't in my girls' league for beauty, but she was fine. I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers; another expression of Mom's (who, I'm pretty sure, has neither offered crackers to a girl in bed, nor has kicked one out of bed for eating crackers anyone else had provided). I wouldn't kick her out of bed, but neither would I go out of my way to get her into it. She was a reasonably good looking teenage girl, so a month ago my brain would've had a spasm if she'd said "Hello" to me. These days I'm being spoiled and it's had a dramatic effect on my propensity to spasm. If Julia was trying to set me up with Linda - that was just a guess, but I gave it a good chance of being correct - then she was an unlikely first choice. Linda was in only one of my classes, English, which is my worst subject and I wouldn't have impressed her in any way. Especially as Linda was one of the best English students, being maybe second or third best in class. I can't remember ever seeing her around a soccer game, that being the only other thing I do that she might have seen and been impressed by. I gave up worrying about it. I would ask Julia at lunch. Linda asked Julia, "Why would you want a boyfriend who gets into so much trouble?" Julia laughed again. "Mark doesn't get in trouble the way you're thinking. Mark's a sweet gentleman - both 'gentleman' as one word and 'gentle man' as two words. He's not a troublemaker. He's just so unusual that people misjudge him and they make mistakes. Take Mr. WhatsHisName - Dipstick. It was Dipstick that behaved totally improperly. As I understand it he wanted Mark to run for the school, yes?" I nodded, saying, "Yes. His name's Millane, if you want to know." "Dipstick's better. Anyway, Mark didn't want to run for the school, so he refused as he's allowed to, as competing in running races isn't compulsory. But Dipstick stupidly misjudged Mark and tried a very bad thing to force Mark to run. Mark stood up for himself and now Dipstick's rightly in trouble. Mark did nothing wrong. Quite the opposite, as who knows how many other students Dipstick has coerced in that way." I told Julia, "So THAT'S why I have so much trouble: it's because 'people misjudge me'! I thought it was because I had used up my lifetime's supply of good luck getting you as my girlfriend. Anyway ladies, I've got to shoot off to my next class. Nice to meet you, Linda, see you in class next time. Bye, darling." Julia wanted a kiss, so I gave her a quick one, and shot off. In my second period class - happily Math, much more enjoyable - one of the guys came up to me and said, "I saw an article in the paper this morning that a guy called Mark Anderson won the 10k. Was that you?" I would have preferred to say "No", but I prefer not to lie unless I have to and can get away with it. Too many people had seen me win so I wasn't going to get away with it this time, so I begrudgingly admitted, "I'm afraid so." "Cool. Hey guys, it WAS Egg." I was saved from having to discuss it with the "guys" by the class starting. Unfortunately class eventually ended too. The "guys" gathered around me. Apparently being able to run along a street is an exciting topic of conversation (excuse my sarcasm, as I wasn't feeling very charitable about running or runners). The guys were all asking me questions so I held up a hand to stop them. When they'd stopped prattling I said, "Sorry guys, but I have no interest in running and even less in talking about it. I ran in one race because my little sister wanted me to, because sometimes you have to humor little sisters. I did it, I won, and it's caused me nothing but grief. Although it did make my sister happy so that part was okay. It's over with now and I'm going to pretend it never happened. My studies are a lot more important to me than running around in circles. I'm off to my next class now, bye." I'd always been under the impression that math appealed to intelligent people, but these guys persisted in asking me more questions. I was tempted to say, "What part of 'No' don't you understand?" because I think that's such a cool line. Too nasty though. They're Math students after all, so they deserve some respect. Instead I said, "Sorry guys. As far as I'm concerned I don't even know how to spell '10k'. Put it down to Egg being eccentric. Bye." And I walked out. On the way to my next class I realized that I could have used the, "What part of 'No' don't you understand?" line on Dipstick. Not in the gym, as there I'd been trying to clock up as many quiet refusals as I could, so I could honestly claim that number. But in the Principal's office would have been very satisfying. I could have easily worked it into my conversation too. Damn, I missed a perfect opportunity. ^ [As a small digression, for the rest of the day and the next few days I got plenty of practice at refusing to talk about the race. I mostly just claimed that it was too boring to bother discussing. "A bunch of guys running in a circle. How pointless and boring is that?" I'd yawn and walk away. On the third day, when I was very tired of the whole thing, a guy that I already detested wouldn't drop it when I refused to talk. I detested him because he was a type of bully. Not a fighting one, although he was large. His form of bullying was verbal as he completely dominated every conversation with his unwelcome and idiotic opinions. He also trashed everybody who expressed an opinion different from his, and almost everyone had opinions different from his. He repeatedly insisted to me that we should talk about my running because he was interested in running and I was very good at it. There were quite a few people in the area at the time, so I loudly said, "You think we should discuss something at length just because someone's very good at it?" He agreed, so I said (you should be aware that this guy has a big nose with gaping nostrils), "You must be the national champion of nose picking. Let's talk about that. How often do you pick your nose? By the look of it dozens of times a day. Which nostril tastes the best? I bet you can get two fingers at a time up those huge..." By this time all the loud laughter had driven him away. Which was a pity because with four minds I could have kept throwing all sorts of insulting sentences at him. He was forever after known as "Nose Picker". Whenever he made a nuisance of himself he was told, "Get lost, Nose Picker" or the like. It invariably drove him away so he must have been sensitive about his nose. I never managed to decide how I felt about what I'd done. I noticed that he learned to be less of a nuisance, including a great reduction in his verbal pummeling of other people, so a lot of people would have been happier because of that. I can't say I was proud of myself, but I didn't apologize to him either.] ^ Nothing else of any significance happened before lunch, so I met up with Julia as normal. I particularly like eating outside, which is possible most days in spring. Outside is a nice change from being in classrooms, and I prefer being with just Julia and Carol rather than jammed onto a lunchroom table with a whole bunch of other people. We can talk much easier, which is important because MANY of our discussion topics could not be risked in the lunchroom. Not to mention the pussy flashes, which aren't to be sneezed at. As something to think about during boring parts of classes, I'd been trying to figure out what Julia's plan for Linda was. Some of Julia's plans have been quite cunning and she often thinks a long way ahead, so I was intrigued. I'm very happy that Julia is so good at arranging things for me, but I like to have at least some idea of what's going on. The details I can happily leave to her, but I like to know in general. I had half-expected her to invite Linda to lunch, but she hadn't, making it easy for me to ask her, "Why did you introduce me to Linda?" "Because she's my good friend." "Yes, I got that. But why? I've been trying to figure out your plan, or even just the goal of your plan?" "No plan this time. Linda's a nice girl and I like her. She's been in my classes for several years and we get along well. Carol told me that you didn't socialize with girls much before you dated me so I'm going to introduce you to some of my girlfriends and hopefully we'll do some normal teenage things together. You'll learn more about girls in an easy way. Not much of a plan is it?" "No wonder I couldn't figure out your complicated plan. You tricked me by having a small, simple one! It's a good one though, so sign me up." "Linda's a studious girl, a bit like Carol in that respect. She's fairly inexperienced with guys and a virgin the last time we discussed that issue. I'm looking forward to being allowed to tell her about my losing mine. That'll make her blush. Her parents are religious. Nice enough but overly protective, and they tend to blow molehills into mountains. Linda's isn't that bad though. I think you'll like her, as she's kind, completely non-bitchy, and smart. She liked your 'using up your lifetime's good luck' line, by the way. That was sweet, and she likes sweet. I liked it too, thank you." We were kissing when Carol arrived a few seconds later. Maybe about sixty seconds later, because Julia and I were enjoying ourselves. Carol announced her arrival by saying, "That looks like fun. Can I have some kisses too please?" Unfortunately for Carol it is difficult for her to kiss either of us in public. We've got this little trick where she kisses the sides of our face in a way that looks like she's kissing our cheeks, but she does it close enough to include the corner of our mouth. It's the best we can do, and it has to be short, but at least it's lip to lip. We can even briefly touch tongues, but no more than a brief touch, unfortunately. Carol must have been in a good mood because as she kissed Julia's 'cheek', Carol reached down and briefly rubbed one of Julia's breasts. Julia said, "Mmm, hello lover." Similar greetings were echoed all around. Carol sat down and said, "Mark likes my outfit, but all my other clothes are at your house, apart from my [some polysyllabic Italian or French name that I didn't catch] dress, which might be too much to wear to school, haha." Carol saw that I wasn't following the conversation, so she turned to me and said, "That's the dress I wore to the restaurant." In that case it wasn't "too much to wear to school", it was WAY "too little". Although, in my opinion, it'd be a perfect school uniform. Unfortunately no one had asked me for my opinion on the school uniform. Maybe I should have brought it up when I was in the Principal's office this morning. Imagine how good school morale would be with a dress code like that! I was, of course, daydreaming. This is an automatic and uncontrollable male reaction to females talking about clothes. It's been scientifically proved that men can't help it. Historically speaking, men that listened to females talking about clothes rapidly got bored to death, immediately removing themselves from the gene pool. Only men who could completely tune out survived long enough to breed. Women's clothing stores have been around for hundreds of years, so by now almost all of mankind has this survival trait. I say "almost" because occasionally you'll meet a man who can happily talk about women's clothing, clothes shopping, and can probably even distinguish vermilion from all the other reds. As a rule, those 'men' (cough, cough) are poor breeders. I would have continued entertaining myself with my musings, except that I found something else considerably more entertaining to do. Carol was sitting on her ass, with her feet together and flat on the ground in front of her so her knees were raised, and she was using them to balance her lunch on. All this was perfectly normal looking. What caught my attention was my perfect view of her delightfully bare pussy. I must have given myself away because immediately Carol laughed at me and said, "I was starting to wonder whether you'd ever notice." Carol turned to Julia and explained. "I'm not wearing panties. Sitting this way gives Mark a very good view. As good as I can provide while still looking decent from a distance." Carol's back was to most of the rest of the school, but even from the side she would have looked decent. Showing a lot of leg, but decent. Only from the front and fairly close could anything be seen. And from that position, almost everything could be seen. It was delightful. Julia said "Very good girl." Julia was sitting next to Carol, and to my further delight Julia moved a little sideways, so there was no gap between them. Julia's far hand reached across and under Carol's raised leg, then rubbed up and down the length of Carol's pussy. Julia's head was still looking at me, and her hand was well hidden by the two bodies, so they still looked innocent. I had an idea, and instructed, "Carol, take your lunch off your knees and put it on the grass. Now slide your feet forward about six inches. A bit more. Perfect." Now I could see her nipples above her knees. I formed two pairs of TK-fingertips, and started playing with her nipples. I had a spare mind, so created one more fingertip, and used it to help Julia play with Carol's pussy. Carol quickly became very happy. She closed her eyes and started moaning. Between Julia and me we could easily keep an eye out to make sure no one got close to us, so there was no problem. Julia pushed Carol's legs apart a little, giving her access to Carol's clit, which is what she concentrated on. I used my TK on the bottom half of Carol's pussy, as that was the area I could see now that Julia's hand was covering the top half. There was no one close to us, and Julia took advantage of that by starting to talk dirty to Carol. Telling her, "Mark and I are going to frig you until you cum. We don't care if half the school walks over to look at your pussy while we're doing it. We're not going to stop no matter how many boys, girls and teachers are staring at your cunt. You started this, you slut, and it's going to keep going until our dirty little slut has her cum. Offering her pussy to us in the middle of school! What sort of total slut would do such a perverted thing? You're such a slut you've even closed your eyes not caring who could be walking toward us. For all you know another boy could be reaching out to put his hand on your pussy. His hand could be just inches away now and still the slut's legs are open and her pussy is dripping with her juices. His hand is only inches away now, and getting closer and closer. Any second he's going to touch the little slut's pussy. Here it comes - NOW!" Julia had taken a small risk, and moved her other hand down between Carol's legs. On the "NOW" Julia pushed the new hand's extended center finger straight up into Carol's pussy. I cooperated by squeezing her nipples hard. Carol's eyes flew open in shock at the touch of a new hand, and she climaxed moments later. It wasn't a very strong climax, but it certainly wasn't a little, silent one either. Carol's groan would have been unmistakable, had anyone been within several yards of us. The need for discretion meant Julia had to remove her hands and straightened up immediately, but no one could see what I was doing - TK-fingertips being invisible - so I kept doing it. I lightly caressed Carol's nipples and the outside of her pussy while she recovered from her orgasm. Carol returned to Earth a few seconds later. "Thank you both SO much. You are so good to me." I said, "Let that be a lesson to you, on the perils of being pantiless." "Haha. Yes. My poor, perilous, pantiless pussy. It's learned a lesson all right. Being pantiless is WONDERFUL." I correct, "You should have called it your 'poor, perilous, pantiless, PERFECT pussy'." Julia said, "I think you can add 'perfumed' to that list too. Carol smells wonderful. She's very wet and my fingers are covered in her juices." Then Julia started sucking them clean. While Julia's mouth was busy, I said, "When you arrived, Carol, I felt sorry for you being unable to kiss Julia and me properly. That sadness just got VERY well compensated for." "I'll say! I loved that. Thank you very much. You two are wonderful lovers." We spent a while sincerely telling each other how wonderful everyone was. Because I'm such a merciless Lord, I told Julia, "That was fun. Tomorrow's your turn, so wear something suitable." "If my Lord insists, and yippee!" That seemed to finish that conversation, so I changed the topic from the sublime to ridiculous, by telling Carol about Dipstick. Her initial concern was relieved by Mom, Julia and me all being fairly relaxed about it. Julia did say, "Since it might affect your education, do you mind if I tell Dad and Mom about it?" "No problem. It's certainly not a secret." Carol said, "I just remembered what I was saying when I sat down. You two distracted me wonderfully but I remember now. I was saying that nearly all my new clothes are at your house, Julia, so I need to bring some home in order to be able to wear them to school and around Mark. I was wondering about when you come to dinner tonight. Is it possible you can bring some of my clothes with you. I was thinking about my blue..." My self-protective male genes detected a life-threatening situation developing and immediately tuned my brain out. I concentrated on my lunch instead. I knew enough about females to know that the task of deciding which of Carol's outfits Julia should bring to our house tonight was a vastly complicated one. It probably needed four or five days to discuss and plan properly, there being so many critically important factors to consider. I didn't have a clue about what any of those factors were, I just knew there were bound to be many of them because why else would females spend so many hours talking about clothes. So after I finished my lunch, I just lay back and enjoyed the sunshine. I happened to lay my head in a good position for looking at Carol's pussy, almost by coincidence. I had no conscious knowledge of their words, but I could tell the girls were happy. I was looking at Carol's pussy, so obviously I was happy. So we were all having a nice lunchtime. Several minutes later, "Mark! Mark! Hello." "Huh? Oh sorry, Carol. I was daydreaming." "It must have been a great daydream then, because you've been staring at my pussy for the last fifteen minutes." "Umm, yeah. Sorry." Julia said, "What are you apologizing for? Carol WANTS you to look at her pussy; that's why she's showing it to you. I'm sure she's happy that you've been staring at it." I was sufficiently awake now to know that I'd been insufficiently Lord-like and entirely too Mark-like. Julia and Prof had already taught me that I shouldn't apologize for apologizing, so I said, "Yes, you're right. Carol's pussy is beautiful and I love looking at it. Thank you, Carol. Have you girls finished discussing clothes?" Carol said, "Of course not, but lunchtime's nearly over and I have to go back now." A quick kiss each, and a nice TK-grope, and Carol walked briskly away. I had a small, evil idea. I told Julia to look at Carol. When Carol was about twenty yards away I used TK to grasp the sides and rear of her skirt's hem, and I suddenly raised all three points. Carol immediately felt the movements, looking down as her hands flew down to save herself. Then she must have realized I was doing it because her hands stopped short. I'd never intended to expose her, as it was just teasing. My point being made I let go of her hem, and used a fingertip to lightly stroke her face as she was looking back at us now. I waved, and she replied by blowing me a kiss, then resuming her departure. With, I noticed, a pronounced swish to her ass. I happened to be still looking at her, admiring her "swish", when I saw a guy run up beside her, then walk alongside talking. Hardly surprising with her looking as fantastic as she did. Carol's walk didn't pause at all, and it took less than thirty seconds before he was dejectedly walking back to his booing friends. I'd expected Carol to turn back to look at us, to see if we'd seen the incident, but she just carried on walking. Julia said, "She's very beautiful, isn't she?" I emphatically agreed, "She certainly is! Beautiful, gorgeous, sexy. I'm very lucky." "WE'RE very lucky." "Yes. Exactly right. Anyway, did you see me raise her skirt?" Julia nodded. "This morning when we got out of the car and were waiting for you, I did the same thing to her. She wasn't wearing panties then either, as she'd flashed me in the car. I was trying to tease her by raising her skirt, but she realized it was me and cooperated. I joked that it was no fun for me as both you girls always call my bluffs. Carol said that she didn't think about me bluffing, that she'd cooperated just because I was doing something with her. She was quite proud of herself for her 'unquestioning obedience'. That was the phrase she used. She was looking forward to telling you about it, but you both started talking about clothes so I imagine she forgot." "She's a good girl. More accurately, she's YOUR good girl. You make her very happy. It's very nice to see." "She makes ME very happy too. Even without all the sexy stuff, which is fantastic, she's still very helpful. She puts a lot of effort into getting Donna thinking correctly. 'Correctly' for me, that is. She's great with Mom and Dad, does lots of little things for me like making sure I'm eating enough. I can easily imagine having a very nice life living with her." Julia said, "Can I send her a text message, so she can get it before class?" "Sure." Julia pecked away for a while, sent it, then showed me: "M talking about u ever since u left. He LOVES u v much. I v proud of u, incl ur 'un?ing obed' this am. Love u, J." I said, "Very nice. That should make her day, once she deciphers it." "That and her orgasm, haha. I'd say Carol is having a good day. Shall we head back?" ------- Chapter 70: Carol Decides to Become a Lesbian Monday, April 18, 2005 (Continued) In the afternoon I skipped one of the silly elective classes to sit in on one of my 11th grade classes. I was having some trouble understanding some of the current work and it would be quicker and easier to ask the teacher than work it out myself. That being what teachers are for, after all, as opposed to the Dipstick-type of self-serving 'teacher'. That got me thinking about the difference between Dipstick and Mr. Barrett, the middle-school Math teacher who had been so helpful to me when I first advanced a grade. Mr. Barrett had put time and effort into helping me for no reason other than to help me. There was absolutely no personal benefit in it for him. What a contrast with the sports coaches that intrude into my life. They all seem motivated by personal ego. I resolved to look up Mr. Barrett and give him some appreciation. [I hunted him down a couple of days later, telling him that it was my run-in with Dipstick that reminded me about how good some teachers can be. I thanked him for helping get me started on my accelerated education path. I also told him about OSU's Math Department's interest in me and a few related topics. He made the expected self-depreciating comments, "You would have done just as well without my help," etc., to which I replied with, "As it's turned out, you're probably right, but neither of us knew that at the time. You helped me before anyone else did, and it took some of your time and effort. Without your help it would have been harder and taken longer. I want you to know that I still appreciate your efforts and think you're a good example of what teachers should be like." He was pleased, which was my goal.] Back in the class, the teacher got into the area I was most interested in toward the end of the period, and most of my uncertainties were clarified. I was still writing down the important points as class ended. I wanted to get them down first, then ask a couple more questions, so I was hurrying in case the teacher left. A hand on my shoulder distracted me. I looked up and saw that it belonged to one of the prettier girls in the class. She said, "Hello, Mark. I was hoping you would come to one of my classes soon. I was watching the 10k and was amazed when I saw you win it. You're an incredible guy!" I was still writing my notes and keeping an eye on the teacher to make sure he wasn't about to leave the room. Fortunately another student had him pinned down and was talking to him. I could easily talk with the girl at the same time as I wrote since my multiple minds are perfectly suited for multi-tasking. I was extremely conscious that the girl still had her hand resting on my shoulder and that she was quite pretty. Those two facts combine very nicely (I think that's called "synergy"). Her being a pretty girl caused me to be more pleasant than normal when responding to a 10k comment. "Um, thank you." "It was incredibly impressive. I had no idea you were such a great runner too." I didn't know how to respond to any of those points: a) I didn't actually know how impressive winning the race was. b) As far as I was concerned I wasn't a runner at all, great or not. And c) I didn't know what her "too" was referring to. I avoided the problem of what to say by saying nothing. She looked around the room, then squatted down beside me, which slid her hand off my shoulder and down my arm, something I was still very conscious of. She quietly said, "Please can we have dinner together one night? Please?" My three minds, the fourth one being on duty, were of two minds. On the one hand I have a very low opinion of people who are interested in me just because I can do something like run fast. How does that make me a better person in any useful way? Especially in any way useful to a relationship. On the other hand were several aspects: she was a pretty 17-year old girl who was still touching me, she seemed excessively eager (I could work with that!), I knew Julia was planning on broadening my experiences with girls, and last but not least, I was horny. It'd been far too long since I'd had a good cum, and lunchtime had been very arousing. My whole life has been arousing recently - lunchtime today, Donna this morning, Carol last night, etc. - but with far fewer cums than I would've liked. The first issue, that she just seemed to be a fame groupie, was actually the biggest factor in my mind. Big enough that I didn't really care either way. I also wasn't impressed by her not even telling me her name yet. I decided to try something new for me, "I came to this class because I have some problems with the current material. I have to finish writing my notes and I want to talk with the teacher before he goes. I don't have time to talk with you now so would you please write your name, phone number and whatever else on the back of a photo of you and drop it into my locker?" I had remembered Julia's joke, delivered via Cindy, about my needing a camera on my cellphone so Julia could review my potential new girlfriends. Or in this case, more likely my new "plaything", to use the term Julia had insisted on. That was the main reason for my requesting a photo, to show it to Julia. This Miss WhatsHerName is a year ahead of Julia, so Julia probably wouldn't know her by name, whatever it is. I was curious to see how she'd respond, but I mostly expected her to be angry as it sounded as if I was judging her totally for her looks. It sounded this way in large part because I was. I figured that if she was chasing me just for my fame, then it was fair for me to return the favor by judging her on her looks. Her response confused me though, "What sort of photo do you want?" "Umm. I don't know. It doesn't matter much. Color would be better, I guess. Not too large, so you can get it through the slot." Miss WhatsHerName said, "I mean do you want one of me in a bikini, or something like that?" NO WAY could I ask for something like that! It'd make me seem like a low-life jerk. I hastened to reassure her, "No, no. Nothing like that. Any sort of photo is fine." I saw that the teacher had finished his conversation and was starting to pack up, no one else being in the room to delay him. I called out that I had a couple of quick questions for him. I didn't know if they'd be quick, but it sounded better to say they would be. Miss WhatsHerName rose, saying, "Thanks, I'll do that tomorrow." I wasn't sure what she was thanking me for, but I could live with the uncertainty. -- As she stood, she exclaimed, "You're still writing notes, and with your other hand! I've seen you do two subjects at the same time, but never like this. How can you do that?" I'd swapped hands because she'd arrived on my right, that being the hand I usually use purely out of habit from my pre-merge days. It'd been easier to swap my pen to my left hand and use my left eye to continue writing down the class's key points, while using my right eye to look at WhatsHerName while we talked. I simply said, "Sorry. No time to talk now." I bustled to the front, and started getting my outstanding questions answered. She waved as she left the room. ^ The rest of the school day was mostly uneventful. Several more guys asked me about the 10k race. None of them was as pretty as Miss WhatsHerName so I didn't ask for any photos of them in bikinis. Perhaps I should have because it would've been a very effective way of stopping them from blathering on about the race. It wasn't worth the risk though, in case any of them complied. I had a couple more girls act flagrantly friendly to me, but I'd decided I'd better talk with Julia before I let that activity expand any further. I was also aware that I couldn't do much about it until the trial was over. I turned them down, but not as abruptly as normal, telling them, "Ask me again in a week, I've got too many other things to think about at the moment." Not that I expected them to. They'd probably forget all about me before the week was up, when a jock did something awesomely impressive like running across a line painted on the ground carrying a bag of air, running from point A to point B and back again without getting lost, tying his shoestrings all by himself, or something else equally challenging. I met Carol at the usual place we wait for the car, and she hugged my arm while saying, "I've been thinking about something recently, and especially this afternoon. What do you think about me coming out of the closet as a lesbian?" Apparently I thought, "WHAT!" Carol laughed, "Haha. I enjoyed surprising you with that. I'm still serious, I think it'd make lots of things easier. We often get looks from people when I hold your arm like this. Most people will be assuming we're boyfriend and girlfriend, but anyone who knows we're brother and sister is going to be suspicious. I've already had a few people who've seen us ask me about how close we are. It'd be great if I could tell them I was a lesbian. They'd see I was too, if they saw me being affectionate with Julia. That's another of the reasons for my idea, so Julia and I can kiss and hold each other in public. -- "Another reason is that I've had several people be particularly friendly to me today because I'm dressed more sexily than usual. Nearly all of them have been guys, which just wastes my time. Only a few have been girls, but there'd be more girls if I was known as a lesbian. The last thing I was thinking of is for when you go to college. Julia and I will come with you, and it might be easier for us all to be together if we told everyone that you and I share Julia. That's the act we put on just for Cindy, but I think it will work well everywhere. What do you think?" "Gosh. You've said a lot, and I'm not sure where to start. Let's just go through your examples while I remember them. First was people seeing you hold me like this. If that's a problem we could easily avoid it by not doing it anymore. I don't want to, but surely that's easier than your pretending to be a lesbian. You are pretending, aren't you? That may sound like a silly question, but I easily get very confused by girls, especially on the things that I think are obvious." "Haha. Of course I am. There are only three people I want to have sex with: totally at the top of the list is you, then Julia, then any other wives we have, haha. Of course I'm not a lesbian. Whenever I think of having sex with you my pussy floods. That's a big clue, isn't it?" I laughed and nodded. Carol continued, "If I never made love to anyone else in my life except you I'd still be a very happy girl, but I'd also love it if you found more wives for us. I know you don't want any guys and I'm sure more girls or women is going to happen eventually, so I might as well be a lesbian officially." I confirmed, "You're right about my not wanting any more guys. I don't want to share my girls with other guys, and I especially don't want to share MY body with a guy. That turns me off entirely. More girls is probably going to happen though. I had several approach me today. The race win has suddenly made me more attractive." Carol said, "I had several people talk with me about it too. I also heard that you're refusing to talk about it." "Yeah. I'm surprised you heard about me though." "A lot of people know I'm your sister and talk with me about you. Plus I overhear lots of conversations about you anyway, whether or not they know I'm your sister." I tried to imagine what that'd be like, and found it weird. Unsurprisingly I said, "That must be weird? Overhearing people talk about me, I mean. I'd feel weird if I overheard people talk about you." Carol said, "It was strange at the beginning but I'm used to it now because it happens quite often. It can be a lot of fun." I HAD to ask! "What do they usually say about me?" "Couldn't resist, eh?" I sheepishly shrugged. "There are a couple of boys in my classes who're into soccer and they sometimes watch your games and talk about you afterward, but mostly I hear girls talking, usually about how hot you are, how you get them wet, what they'd like you to do to them, and that sort of thing. Do you want more details?" "No thank you. That was already explicit enough." I suddenly doubted her, and thought she was pulling my leg. I added, "Really? You're not just pulling my leg?" "Girls often talk very bluntly when there are no boys around, and often about you these days. You've got no idea how hot you are. When the trial is over, Julia and I are going to get you so laid! There's going to be a long line of girls begging for it. Even longer once Julia and I start encouraging them. Wait until we start packaging and advertising you! Just dressing you properly is going to leave girls fainting in your wake." That was just silly! Carol was obviously getting carried away. Way, way away, and then some! Carol could see my disbelief. She disagreed with it, "I'm serious. The fainting comment might be a little overdone, but not by that much. Lots of girls ask me about you, and their interest is obvious. I get asked whether you have a girlfriend, are you going to be breaking up with her soon, would you go out with them even if you have a girlfriend, do I think they have a chance with you, and lots of other questions like that. Not to mention them outright begging for an introduction to you. I'm going to suggest to Julia that we should start keep a list for when the trial is over. People probably watch what they say when you're around, but they seem to be less cautious when they talk with Donna and me. Donna will be getting it even worse now because so many of her friends are sports-mad. I bet she's had lots of her girlfriends ask about you today." "I hope it doesn't annoy her too much. Thank goodness that the fame will die down in a few days. Making Donna happy is the only reason left that makes me glad I ran the race. In every other way it's been a pain, such as the whole Dipstick thing. And I have no idea how girls can suddenly think I will be a better boyfriend because I can run fast. That's got nothing to do with running ability. If anything girls should want slow boyfriends so they can get away when he gets too grabby, haha." Carol said, "Are you serious about not knowing why girls want you more now?" "Sure. Being a good runner has got nothing to do with being a good boyfriend. Maybe 100,000 years ago when humans were running around chasing antelopes, or being chased by lions, or whatever, but not these days." Carol said, "Come on! You've seen nature documentaries. In every species the female finds the best male she can to breed with. The strongest, most colorful, best nest builder, best singing, best food gatherer, or whatever it is that's important to that species. It's all about instincts. Winning that race against the state champ proved you have exceptional genes. Your intelligence proves that again, and your handsomeness and physique proves it yet again. From these girls' point of view you are so close, you're ALMOST in reach. They see you every day and know you're walking around just yards away from them, so the deep parts of their brain are going to be screaming 'BREED WITH MARK, BREED WITH MARK!' If you'd heard even a fraction of the conversations about you that I have, you wouldn't have any doubts about other girls wanting you." "Oh. I hadn't thought about that." #2: #1: #2: Carol disagreed, "I'm sure you knew it. You're just too modest to acknowledge it even to yourself. You're a better runner, by a ridiculous amount, than any other boy in this school. You're easily the best runner in the whole state because you destroyed the previous champ. That means you have EXCEPTIONAL genes, Mark. You were hot even before this race, and now - for any girl that follows racing - you are a walking wet dream. That's why your popularity has jumped with girls." I guess I had to admit that Carol's explanation made sense. Except for one exaggeration, "I didn't beat him by very much, Carol. He was just behind me, so I'm not that spectacular." Carol look perplexed, and asked, "Who? The state champ you mean?" "Yeah, of course. You said I 'destroyed the previous state champ'. I didn't destroy him, he was just behind me." "Mark, the state champ was MILES behind you. He came in fourth." "Oh. Wait! You mean the other guys were..." Carol nodded. "Oh." After a moment or six to digest that news, I asked, "Then why did you use the state champ as a comparison? If he wasn't the best other guy there." "I didn't think about it; it just came out. Saying 'state champ' is easier than 'currently the third fastest in America.' Plus we were really talking about the girls at this school getting hold of a guy's genes. The state champ is sort of local so that's conceivable, excuse the pun, but local girls aren't going to get anyone beyond state level. Anyway, I thought you knew what I was talking about. Did you really not know who you beat?" "No. You're not the first person to ask me that either. I didn't care enough to find out. Still don't care actually. I just didn't realize how big the thing was that I don't care about." -- After a pause I had a sudden thought, "Hang on! If it was really that big there would have been a madhouse after I won it. A circus!" "Yes, that's right." "But I didn't see any circus." "The phone was ringing off the hook. Mom was taking message after message. Didn't you read them?" "Ahh, no. I told Mom to throw them away." Carol said, "You should talk with Mom then. I've only picked up bits and pieces from conversations I overheard. I wasn't even at home then. I was doing something far more important, remember?" I looked completely blank, so Carol supplied, "Shopping." "Haha. My mind was completely blank then. I was trying to do a memory retrieval keyed off 'important', and nothing was happening. Imagine my memory not filing 'Shopping' under 'Important'. Silly me, haha. But I get your point about you not knowing much about the race aftermath. I'll ask Mom when she gets home." I was silent for a while, mostly because I was trying to work out what we should talk about next. The conversation had wandered so much I'd lost track of all the different points I wanted to ask about. My cellphone went off then, and I answered it. Dad said, "I need to be quick. My boss is quite happy for me to take you to the DMV, just so long as it's not on Thursday or Friday. He wants some notice to make sure I can be covered, so when you get home call the DMV guy and make an appointment and text it to me, okay?" "I'll call him now. I've got his number with me." "It can wait till you get home. You're going straight home, aren't you?" "Yes. Just waiting for the car now." "Good. Call him from home, it's a cheaper call. Just text me when you get a time." "Okay, Dad. Thanks. Bye." I put my phone away, and Carol reattached herself to my arm. Which reminded me that we'd originally been discussing her "coming out", one of her reasons being the way she held my arm. So I said to her, "Sweetie, one of the reasons you gave for your 'coming out' as a lesbian was because of the way you hold my arm. Wouldn't it be easier just not to hold my arm?" "{Raspberry}. I LOVE holding your arm like this, and I know you do too. We both love it, so we're not going to let other people's prejudices stop us." "I think it's more than a prejudice. Brother-sister stuff is a law rather than a prejudice." "It's a law BECAUSE there's a prejudice. Our love is perfect and it's ridiculous for anyone to think otherwise. Anyway, there's nothing illegal about my holding your arm like this. I love it, so I'm going to keep doing it." "I'm sure not going to argue with you. I didn't realize you liked it so much though. I thought only I liked it that much." "I LOVE it! It feels perfect to me. It's asymmetric, which I REALLY like. You know what I mean? I attach myself to you, not you to me. It's not like holding hands, which is equal on both sides. This is me hanging on to my big, strong, superior lover. I get to hold your hard, muscular arm. Every time you move it I can feel your muscles flex, and that's a great feeling for me because of both the emotional thrill from being subservient and the physical thrill from feeling your physical strength. Plus I get to hold your arm hard against my breasts, and that's such a comforting, secure feeling, like being tightly hugged. It's the best way I know how to hold you which ISN'T illegal, haha." "That's a very good description, so good that I can imagine your feelings. Can I ask you something though? It seems a bit silly, but all this time I didn't think that you were aware that my arm was pressed into your breasts. I thought that was accidental, and you weren't aware of it. But obviously you were because you described the feeling it gives you." Carol looked confused and asked, "You really thought I hadn't noticed?" "Umm, no. No, you didn't notice, I mean. Or should that be 'Yes, I thought you didn't notice'? English is a stupid language. My answer should mean that I thought you were unaware." "I understand your answer. For your future reference you should assume that whenever a girl presses a piece of male anatomy tightly against her breasts, then she knows what she's doing. Okay?" Accompanied by Carol's laughter, I said, "Now I feel stupid. Obviously you would've known." Carol kept laughing, which made me feel even more supid. Then she made it even worse, "You've got a lot to learn about females, darling. We spend most of our lives carefully avoiding never-ending unwanted attempts to touch our breasts. We are very aware whenever a male gets close to them, and are totally aware when a male is touching. So of course I know when you're touching me there. I LOVE you touching my breasts, it's a wonderful feeling. I disliked having big breasts before, but when I fell in love with you that all changed. Now I'm happy that they're big because I know you love them so much." That took some of the sting out. I said, "Boy, do I feel stupid! All this time I thought I was getting free rubs. I'm going to miss that." Carol quickly reassured me, "You won't miss anything. I'm never going to stop holding you this way. Julia too, as she obviously likes it just as much as I do. Even Donna is taking it up." "Yes, I understand that, but you missed my point. I'm going to miss thinking that I was getting 'free rubs'." "But you're free to rub my breasts whenever you like." To prove her point she even rubbed my arm back and forth across her breast. I quickly looked around, but no one appeared to be looking. She soon stopped anyway, as this was certainly not the right place for that activity. I answered, "I love rubbing your breasts, as you know, but I also loved the idea of getting 'free rubs'. Do you know what I mean by 'free rub'?" "I thought it meant that you were free to rub them. Which you are, whenever you want." "Your answer seems logical, but it's not actually what it means. 'Free rub' is when I, or any other guy, gets a rub without the girl being aware of it." "But the girl is ALWAYS aware of it! Unless she's asleep, I guess. You can come into my room and rub me when I'm asleep, if you want. I'll start sleeping topless for you." "Umm, thank you, but that's not what I meant. It doesn't count if you're asleep. For a 'free rub' you have to be awake, but unaware that I'm doing it." Carol frowned and said, "I can't imagine how that's possible. But even if it were, are you saying that given the choice between a girl freely offering you her breasts and her love - giving them to you as a gift from her heart, or close by, haha - or your sneaking a quick, furtive, pretending-to-be-an-accident rub; then you'd prefer the second choice?" "Umm. Not exactly 'prefer', but there is a pleasure in it that I'm going to miss." "You're going to miss the idea that you thought I was unaware of your arm being in contact with my breast? I don't understand that. I love you doing anything, anywhere, anytime to my breasts, or any other part of me. I even love just offering my body to you. But a 'free rub' is somehow better? Surely that way you'd get less pleasure because you'd have to hold your arm still to avoid me becoming aware, and I get no pleasure at all because I'm supposed to be unaware. My pleasure goes from wonderful to zero, which would normally make me think you were being incredibly selfish, except that your pleasure goes from however much you could get doing whatever you wanted, down to whatever you'd get from just holding your arm still against me. That makes ABSOLUTELY no sense at all. Do other guys think the same as you about this, or is it only you that has these weird ideas?" "I'm sure I've never discussed this with anyone else, ever, but somehow I know that other guys feel the same. I even know that we call it a 'free rub', but I've no memory of how I learned that." Carol shook her head in dismay, saying, "I've always known that guys don't think properly, but that's got to be the most illogical thing I have EVER heard! I've got absolutely no idea how a one-sided furtive rub can - in ANY way - be better than loving, mutual gifts of pleasure. Guys are INCREDIBLY illogical!" Carol's final statement was completely and totally false. I'll demolish it, just as soon as I work out how. #2: #3: #4: #2: #4: #2: "Carol, you're right that 'a one-sided furtive rub is not better than loving, mutual gifts of pleasure.' But I'm going to miss THE IDEA that it was a free rub. It's the IDEA, not the actual physical action." Carol answered, "And that is more logical how?" "Umm..." #4: #2: "I wonder where the school's car is. Isn't it running late?" "Changing the subject isn't going to work. I'm still curious to hear your answer." #4: #2: #3: "Okay, I'll have to tell you the truth." I paused and looked all around me, to see if anyone could overhear me. Carol saw me doing this, and copied me. Assured that the coast was clear, I leaned in and quietly said, "Please don't tell anyone else this, okay, because we're trying to keep it a secret?" I looked around again, while Carol said, "Yes?" "It's because guys are pathetic. Don't tell anyone, okay?" "EVERY girl already knows that!" "In that case guys are pathetic AND in big trouble, haha. But all joking aside, I WILL miss the idea that I was getting a free rub. You're completely right that it's stupid. It's a male thing and I have no explanation for our stupid attitude. I suspect it's one of those inexplicable gender things like men getting a kick out of blowing things up and going to war, and women liking shopping and inventing ten names for the same color. I'd like to finish by telling you that I love you very, very much, and now I'll throw myself on the mercy of the court." "The court finds you guilty of being pathetic and illogical. In other words, of being a male. Your sentence is to make love to me as soon as you can please. The court loves you very much too." We both started laughing, me mostly in relief. Phew. Without thinking about it I'd taken Carol in my arms, and was giving her a very nice hug, when I realized that this was definitely not the right place to demonstrate that much affection. I quickly let go, and looked around. There weren't many kids around. I looked at my watch, and saw that the car was nearly fifteen minutes late. So was Donna. "Carol, what do you think has happened to the car and Donna?" Carol spotted Donna coming from a distance, accompanied by several other girls. They were running. Donna gave us a wave as soon as she saw that we'd seen her. When she and the other girls arrived, Donna exclaimed, "Thank goodness you're still here. Sorry I'm late. Too many people wanted to talk with me about your winning the race. I couldn't get away. These girls insisted on meeting you. Shall I introduce them or are they too much of a nuisance?" Donna's last statement was delivered with a growl, which amused me. We were still waiting for the car so I kind of had to agree to the introductions, even though I would've preferred to continue my discussion with Carol, the one about her lesbian plan, not about guys being pathetic. I realized that the Carol discussion was best delayed until tonight anyway. It was going to be a LONG discussion, judging by our taking fifteen minutes so far, just to half discuss the very first of her reasons. It'd also be best to have it with Julia, to save Carol from having to repeat the whole thing twice. I said, "Sure. We're still waiting for the car. He's running late for some reason." Donna started the introductions. Donna repeated much the same formula for each girl, "This is [name]. She's in [n]th grade. She runs [whatever distance]." (Not all of them were runners.) The girls were mostly from Donna's grade, the 6th, but two were from 7th and one from 8th. The latter had a 6th grade sister, as I discovered when they were introduced as a pair. Each girl nervously shook my hand, saying something like, "Very pleased to meet you," or, "{Giggle}." The fourth girl said, "Your girlfriend's very beautiful." She was looking at Carol, who was holding my left arm as she'd swapped sides when I started using the right to shake hands. I said, "I agree she's very beautiful, but she's not my girlfriend. This is Carol, Donna's and my sister." All the other girls suddenly looked significantly happier, which caused me some amusement. The sixth girl was a cutie, in a little-girl kind of way. She was quite bashful, and looked up at me quite endearingly when she said, "Wonderful to meet you, sir." I'm not used to being called "Sir". Without thinking about it, I just laughed and said, "Aren't you a cutie?" She blushed scarlet, and held my hand hard for a few seconds, while she recovered from the apparently overwhelming experience of having me call her a cutie. The next girl hopefully also said, "Wonderful to meet you, sir." I think she was quite disappointed in not being called a cutie back. The next, who was the 8th and last, tried it too, with the same lack of success. Girl #6 was beaming that she'd been the only one to earn such praise. When the last introduction was over I tried to think what to say. It was almost like public speaking, especially as they were ready to hang on my every word. Donna saved me by saying, "Most of them are members of my club and all of them want to congratulate you on your win." Which unleashed a chorus of "Congratulations", "You were so fantastic", "You run fantastically", etc., all over top of each other. As that ran down Donna said, "They all want your autograph. Is that okay?" I thought it was silly, but there was no reason why not, so, "Sure." Squeals of delight. Bags hit the ground and the girls all started digging out pens and folders, notebooks, or whatever. The quickest girl jumped in front of me and handed me her pen and book. I held them, suddenly unsure what to do. Is an autograph just my signature, or do I write my name, or write other stuff too? I didn't know the etiquette for autograph signing. Donna called out, "Tell Mark what you want him to write, including spelling your name if you want him to write it." The first thrill-seeker wanted, "To Maria Wylkyn, From Mark Anderson, April 18, 2005," and presumably my signature too. The next girl wanted the same, but with her name obviously. Then instead of "From Mark Anderson", she said she wanted, "With all my love, Mark Anderson". That earned her a growl from Donna, who declared that they were all going to get the same as Maria. That made it easier for me, and Donna soon taught them to say and spell their names to me when I was about to write them. When I finished the last, the second girl - the "with all my love" hopeful - darted forward and gave me a folded piece of paper. "Please read it later, Egg." I said, "If this is what I think it is, you should know that I already have a girlfriend." "Maybe you'll break up with her?" The other girls, who'd been annoyed by Miss Hopeful's getting in first, all looked hopeful themselves at that possibility. I didn't want to get into the whole, "I won't be breaking up with her, but she wants me to play around with other girls" thing. But neither did I want to simply say, "No way" as some of them were quite pretty, and their hero worship of me had a considerable appeal too. I settled for, "I'll tell you what. You're all nice looking girls." Some definitely more so than others, but there was no need to play favorites now. "So I'll think about it and let Donna know what I decide. Ask her in a couple of weeks." I stepped forward to give the unread note back. I said, "You keep this for now. You wouldn't want to have a headstart on the other girls, would you?" Stupid question, which she answered without hesitation, "Yes I would!" "Haha. I asked a stupid question, didn't I? I like your answer, so that'll be your headstart in a couple of weeks." Carol said, "Here comes our car, Mark." I said, "Sorry girls, but it's time for me to go. Nice meeting you." Miss Hopeful blurted out, "Can I kiss you?" The car was still several seconds away, so I had time for a little game. I said, "I only have time to kiss one of you, so I'm going to kiss the one of you that I think is the nicest and prettiest. Okay?" Eight very hopeful girls immediately tried to look as "nicest and prettiest" as possible. I didn't have time to spin it out, so I quickly inspected the girls, until I got to Donna, whose cheek I loudly smooched. That earned me several moans and laughs. They were disappointed but took it in good humor. "I have to go, girls. My father needs me to do something as soon as I get home and we're already running late. Bye." The car was parked for us now, and I opened the door for Carol while Donna ran around to her front seat. The other girls called out "Goodbye", "Thank you", and a few similar, until I heard a, "I love you." I don't know who started it, but most of the others immediately echoed it. Much to Mr. Moore's - the driver's - amusement. He asked with a chuckle, "Got yourself a little fan club, Mark?" "It looks a bit that way. First I knew of it though. They followed Donna to the pick-up point." "Sorry I'm late to meet you. The Principal summoned all the teachers to a compulsory meeting about you. It was supposed to be quick, but there's no such thing as a quick meeting when more than two people are involved. He told us about Millane's mess-up and warned us off repeating anything like it, or allowing anyone to influence the grades your teachers are giving you. It was quite a fun meeting. Did you really repeatedly refer to Millane as 'Dipstick'?" "Yes, I did. Millane's stupidity in trying to force me to run really got my goat. Then he doubly qualified for the nickname by stupidly hanging himself in the Principal's office. He opened his mouth and I kept feeding more and more of his foot into it, and he had no idea. 'Dipstick' seemed to fit him perfectly, although I don't actually know why that name means stupid." "I think because it's the simplest tool possible. You stick it in, pull it out, and look at it. It couldn't be simpler, which equates to being dumb or stupid." "That makes sense. I'm surprised my name for him came up in the meeting though. I'm sure Dipstick wouldn't volunteer it, and I'm surprised the Principal would do so." "The Boss had his whole day ruined and probably the next few too, all because of Millane, so he thoroughly enjoyed saying things like, "and then this teacher, that Mark Anderson called 'Dipstick', etc. He never called Millane 'Dipstick' himself, he just repeatedly said you did. We all knew his opinion though, including Dipstick. It was a much more amusing meeting than most I have to sit through. What Millane did was selfish and stupid, and I'm sorry for its affect on you, but he certainly entertained a lot of teachers a few minutes ago. I don't think you have to worry about your grades being affected. The Boss is going to double-check everything that goes in your file from now on. Not my place to tell you about all that, but just so you can stop worrying. Although from what I could tell from your fan club, you've got better things to do than worry, haha." "Except that now I have to worry about what to do about having a fan club full of giggly girls. But thanks for telling me about the meeting. I had a feeling the Principal would take care of the situation, and it certainly sounds like he did. I'm sorry I wasn't there, I would have enjoyed it." "Yeah, that probably would've made it more fun for us too. If you don't mind me asking, what puzzled me and plenty of others was Millane's claim that you're a world-class runner. Not just world-class schoolboy, but world-class open. I've never heard you talking about running or training so I was surprised. Apparently you easily won a national-level race on Saturday, but I never heard you talk about getting ready for that either. Are you really that good?" He'd been very plainspoken with me, so I thought I should answer him in just as friendly a way. "Yeah. I'm a naturally gifted runner, I guess you'd call it. Trouble is I find the whole thing rather pointless. Running around in circles doesn't achieve anything worthwhile, does it? Then there's all the aggressive competitiveness, organization crap, and everything else. Donna's in an athletics club and I like running with her for fun, but beyond that it's not worth the bother for me. I'm also on the soccer team, and I run around for that, but again we play just for fun." "You're an unusual boy. Not many guys would turn their back on being world class at something. I'd have to agree that your genius is more important than winning running races so I'm not going to argue with you about your choice. I'm not stupid enough to repeat Dipstick's mistake." "I didn't know you knew about my genius. You've never said anything. But when I think about that, what could you have said?" "Doesn't easily come up in normal conversation, I agree. I know you're 'Egg', and what the letters mean. I guess pretty much everybody knows by now. Remember that I was asked to drive you to keep you safe from being assaulted, and I was told that one of the reasons your safety was important was because of your genius. The Boss also mentioned it again in the meeting we just had. He's got the Boards breathing down his neck because of you, and he wanted us all to know that if we mess-up like Dipstick did, then the sky's going to fall on us." "I was kind of hoping that Dipstick would be in trouble because he bullied a student, not because the student just happened to be smart. Dipstick's behavior was wrong regardless." "We'll never know. The Boss used every reason he had to warn us not to repeat Millane's mistake, but how much trouble he would've been if he'd done the same to some other boy is anybody's guess. I'd like to think every kid would be equally protected, but that's not how the world works. For a start, the Boss wouldn't be having the big wigs breathing down his neck if the victim was just an ordinary boy." We were pulling up outside our home, so that was the end of that conversation. A very frank one for a teacher. Ryan Moore was an okay guy. As soon as we were out of the car Donna started apologizing to me, "Sorry about the girls, Mark. They wouldn't take 'No' for an answer. I got rid of most of them, but that lot wouldn't quit." I cut her short, "I've got to arrange my DMV appointment and let Dad know the time immediately. Dad's boss is waiting for the information. Let me do that now and I'll talk with you after, okay?" Donna was only too happy for me to get my license, as she had her heart set on helping me buy a car. The money for that had been flowing in, most of it being brought around personally. A lot of it on Saturday when I was fortunately away, but several visits on Sunday. Ostensibly to deliver their payments, but mostly to meet me. Apparently they'd all needed to be introduced to me, interrupting my fence painting and generally disturbing me. I'd cut each conversation off as short as my willingness to be rude would let me, which had gotten shorter for each successive visit. Mr. Roy Smith was the DMV guy's name. I got through to him easily on his direct line number and we set up a time for tomorrow afternoon. He confirmed that my cast was off, surprising me that he knew. I texted Dad: "I bike to DMV at 1:30 tomorrow to do rules test. Need you there at 2. Probly done by 3. I bike home, u back to work. Thanks." Julia sets me a good example about being organized. The girls were in their room, so after a diversion to get a snack from the kitchen, I went to their room to resume my conversation with Donna. They wanted to know about my license test, so I told them, "Tomorrow afternoon. I'll cut out of school early. If I pass, I'll have it by 3pm." Carol and Donna were excited for me, so I had to add, "Hang on, I haven't got it yet. I've still got to pass the tests." Both girls thought the idea of my failing at anything was very funny. In this case even I had to agree that I probably had it nailed because I had the entire Driver Manual memorized now, and I knew I was a very good driver practically. That topic finished with, Donna resumed her apologies for the girls. She was overdoing it and kept on overdoing it, apologizing over and over again. I was puzzled about why she wouldn't let me dismiss it as an issue, but it came clear when she said, "I wasn't trying to break up you and Julia, honest!" I remembered that Donna didn't know that I was allowed to play around. #4: #2: A few days ago we'd intended to tease Donna by using the "School Plan" to get her worked up, but teasing Donna seems to have gone off the rails recently so I just said, "Relax Donna. There's something you don't know. Julia and Carol WANT me to play around with other girls. That's the reason Cindy came out with us on Saturday night." Carol and I were in the same room, which meant she was holding my arm. At this point she must've remembered our end-of-school conversation because she started rubbing my arm back and forth across her breasts. There was no subtlety about it: Carol was deliberately groping herself using my arm. It was VERY distracting and I lost the thread of my conversation with Donna. My superb ability to multi-task is severely hampered when all my minds can't help themselves thinking about the same thing. Donna was distracted too, and didn't question my strange girlfriends' strange new attitude. That gave Carol the chance to say, "Isn't this better than a 'free rub'?" #1: I said, "Yes, thank you." "What's a 'free rub'?" asked Donna. Carol explained, at length, accurately and insultingly. Donna opinion was, "But that's just stupid! I know guys always try to cop feels, but why would sneaking something be better than being allowed to?" I explained the reason, "It's because males are pathetic, sweetie." "Everyone knows that! ALL the boys in my classes are USELESS! But even though they're selfish jerks, how can they still think that? They must know that being allowed to rub is better than pretending to get an accidental bump?" "Perhaps I didn't make myself sufficiently clear, sweetie. Guys are REALLY pathetic!" "And dumb!" "Yes, and dumb." "And stupid and idiotic." "I think we've established that. Shall I go back to my explaining how your introducing those girls isn't really a problem?" "Okay. 'Cause I was going to ask something else. Before Carol mentioned the idiot rub, I was going to ask what 'playing around' meant? You kept saying that Julia and Carol want you to play around." Carol answered, "Mark can do anything and everything: Go on dates, kiss them, have sex with them, and even invite them to be wives with Julia and me if he wants." "Wow! That's incredible." I wasn't going to argue with that! "I've never heard of girlfriends wanting their boyfriend to do that. Normally if the boy does that the girl will kill him and break up. You're not just girlfriends, you're wives! Why would you want Mark to do all that?" Carol explained, "Because Mark never had any dates before he met Julia so he's had almost no experience with girls. He's going to be rich and famous soon, and girls are going to be out to get him - like our friends are already starting to do - so he needs to learn how to handle females so they can't trick him and hurt him, Julia and me. Females can be very tricky, you know?" "Nah. It's boys that are very stupid." Carol laughed, "Haha. You're a smart girl." "You've just got to watch one for a few minutes. They're so pathetic when they think they're being cool around a girl. They make complete asses of themselves." #2: #4: Carol said, "Ignoring other boys - because they're easy to ignore - let's get back to Mark. Julia and I want him to learn about girls, and we want him to have a lot of fun doing it too. When the trial is over in a week or two, Julia and I are going to start getting girls for him to play with. You can get him some too, if you like. Not yet though, Julia wants to plan it better and the trial needs to be over. That's why Mark told your girlfriends to check back with you in a week or two." "I can get him hundreds of girls! Well, maybe not hundreds, but dozens. I have to fight them off already." Donna's face suddenly fell, "But I want him to keep playing with me. What if he gets too many girls and doesn't have time for me? Or for you and Julia? That'd be terrible." "We'll just have to be better than all the other girls then won't we? Plus we'll be living in the same house with him, and sleeping with him every night, so we'll have a huge advantage. Hopefully we'll have our new house soon and Julia will be sleeping with us too. I'm sure we'll be fine. Mark's very smart so it won't take him long to get bored with sex with random girls." #4: <{Raspberry}, {raspberry}, {raspberry}.> #2: #4: A downcast Donna asked, "But what about me? You and Julia will be sleeping with him but I'll be in a different room. He might not have time for me." Carol answered, "You can sleep with us some nights. We'll be getting a very big bed, easily big enough for you too." "WOW! That's fantastic! Thank you SO much." "You won't be able to sleep with us every night, Donna. A LOT less than every night. We'll try it and see how it works out. Remember that Mark, Julia and I are married, and married people need plenty of time alone together. So you must not get all whiny and beggy over this. It's a privilege that we'll OCCASIONAL offer you, okay?" "Yes. I understand. You're both wonderful to me." I wasn't sure about the "both" as it was Carol doing all of this, but I agreed that it was a good idea. I'd liked spooning with Donna this morning, and more of that would be pleasant. Not too often, but occasionally would be fine. Apart from the one, major, obvious problem. Carol had thought of it too. "You won't be allowed to stay in the bed if we start having sex. We'll have to kick you out then." "Aww. Okay, I understand." I could tell that from how disappointed she looked. Carol said, "Good girl. You'll have to go back to your room most times, but maybe sometimes Mark will let you sit in a chair in our room and watch us. You could play with your vibrator. You'd like that wouldn't you?" "Are you KIDDING! I'd LOVE it! Seeing Mark make love to you would be the most incredible thing to see EVER! I've never seen his body, and seeing him naked and doing you would be unbelievable. It'd be AWESOME!" Donna stopped speaking, the better to concentrate on imagining the sight she'd be seeing. Carol gave her a few seconds, then, "Don't get too thankful yet. You have to earn these privileges. Okay? No being whiny or beggy if we want to spend time alone without you, for example. Cooperating when we bring other girls here. Keeping our secrets. That one's HUGELY important. You have to be mature and helpful. Do you understand?" "Yes, yes. I'm already trying to be more mature." Carol said, "You're doing better than just trying, you're succeeding. I'm enormously appreciative that when Mark and I started doing things together you didn't go running to Mom and Dad. That might have ruined everything and my life is so fantastic now! Just keep being as wonderful as you've been recently, and doing what Mark, Julia and I tell you, and you'll eventually get more and more of what you want. PERHAPS even Mark making love to you when he's ready for that." #1: I was kissing Carol's cheek when Donna replied, "It was cool when you and Mark started playing around. You were both happy so I didn't want Mom and Dad to spoil it. You two are so wonderful to me I'll do whatever you want. If I do something wrong, just tell me and I'll stop. This sex stuff with you guys is REALLY exciting. I'm having such a good time!" Carol laughed, "Good. You deserve it for being so helpful. You'll be having even better times in the future. Julia's coming here for dinner tonight and we'll talk about how to manage all the girls that want Mark. We'll probably start keeping lists of the girls that ask us about him." "I can do that easily. It'll be fun. I'm sure there will be girls in my athletic club who would want to be on the list too. Girls that don't go to our school, I mean." "Good to know, but let's wait until we all talk with Julia later. Mark and I are going to his room for a while now. We'll leave you to play with your vibrator, or maybe do your homework?" I didn't know we were going to my room, but it sounded good to me. We left the room as Donna was laughing and pulling her vibrator out of her pocket. It hadn't been a hard choice for her. ------- Chapter 71: Why Females Take So Long to Get Dressed Monday, April 18, 2005 (Continued) In my room I started commending Carol for her great motivational techniques. I got about six words out before Carol rudely interrupted, with a rude demand, "Too much talking. Not enough fucking." She started stripping. I got the hint, and started doing the same myself. Carol said, "I've been horny too long. Last night having you in me was just a tease. All day today girls have been telling me how exciting you are. Not using those words, usually just asking about your availability and stuff like that, but I knew what they were thinking and I couldn't help thinking the same. At lunchtime you and Julia were so sexy with me, and then I had to watch all those little girls want you so much. I need you now. Do me quick and hard." Carol was lying on her back, with her legs open, so "Do me now" was implied too. I was naked so I climbed on the bed and knee walked into position. I asked, "Do you want me to use a rubber or go without?" "I don't care. Whatever you want." "Actually I'd like you to choose. It's a big decision, and I think it's your decision. I'll do whatever you want." "Wow. You'd really get me pregnant if I wanted you to?" I'd already thought about this, as a result of last night's fun, so I knew the answer. "If you wanted, yes. It's early, and I'd rather have some money first, but if you really wanted me to then I would." Carol said, "We're going to have SUCH a great life together! You're a fantastic guy, Mark." "I think so too. About our life together I mean." "Haha. Can't you agree that you're a fantastic guy? Let's vote on it when Julia arrives. Umm. Put a rubber on. I want to go all the way now, not like last night, and I have to admit I'm too young to be a good mother. I can't even cook your roast chicken dinner properly yet, {giggle}. I think I need to start taking housekeeping stuff more seriously because I want to be a mother soon. I'll talk with Mom and Vanessa about it. Later though. Now I want you." I got the rubber out of my wallet. We didn't have a lot of time before Mom or Dad could come home, so this wasn't going to be one of my multiple-position, multiple-cum sessions. This was going to be one, single fuck. With both of us cumming at the end. Best make it a good one then. I started firmly, thrusting into her hard, banging my hips into her pelvis. But I didn't rush. I stimulated her as much as I could with my hands and TK. I couldn't use my lips on her easily, but I could talk, so I aroused her verbally too. Carol responds very well to dirty talk, something I would NEVER have believed a month ago as she'd always seemed so uninterested and proper. You never can tell about females as they're VERY unpredictable. Anyway, long story short, I easily got her very aroused, and our sex became more and more physical. Building to an almost violent level, with the force of my thrusts slamming into her. In the last few seconds I was smashing into her with ever bit of force I had. I also TK'd a pillow on top of her face, and she made good use of it a few seconds later, screaming into it with all her might. I stopped my micro-go-softs and came with her. It felt GREAT! It'd been far too long. We collapsed, and relaxed for a while. Cuddling felt great too. After a while Carol chuckled, then said, "Have I convinced you that I'm not really a lesbian?" "Haha. Sorry, no. I think you'll have to try again." "{Groan}." I could tell Carol was joking. "Maybe tomorrow. My poor body needs time to recover. You are very good, you know? You gave me exactly what I needed." "It was easy, I just did exactly what I wanted." "I don't believe that for a second. If I'd asked you to make love to me slowly and tenderly, you would've done that and then said exactly the same thing afterward. And probably meant it both times too. You care so much I think you lose sight of what you want." "I want to make you happy. I love you very much." "{Sigh}, I know." Carol snuggled in tight, with her head on my chest. A few happy tears rolled onto me. We spent several minutes like this, then Carol quietly said, "Donna's got no idea how good love can be." Two thoughts crossed my mind (more than one thought at a time was a very common occurrence for me). I said them both, "Donna and I had a very nice spoon hug this morning: affectionate, quiet and sweet, so I think she's getting it. Not as deeply as you and me, but I can't imagine how anyone could. I had another thought too. What did I know about love when I was her age? I knew nothing at all. You didn't like me three years ago because I wasn't likable, let alone lovable. I think she'll do well, especially with your example and help." "I've only just started finding out for myself how wonderful it feels, but you're right that she'll learn. There's so much love around her how could she not? Anyway, I think we need to get up and get showered. Air out your room too. It smells like some girl got very lucky, haha." We got up and I was going to walk naked to the shower, but Carol stopped me, "Don't let Donna see you naked yet. I want that to be a big thing for her. We'll make a special occasion out of it." "Good idea. I was thinking earlier that you were very clever in how you motivated Donna to do what we want. I was very impressed." "Thank you, but it wasn't nearly that clever. Most of the ideas for what I said were her ideas in the first place. She's asked me several times what she has to do to get you to make love to her. I just added a bit about her not being whiny and beggy because she's never been patient. We've shared our room all our life, so I'm VERY aware of her lack of patience." "Well, it still sounded very clever." "Let me put it this way. She's been promising me several times a day that she'll do whatever we want in order to be able to sleep with you. I just told her that if she does what we want, she'll get to sleep with you. Do you really think I was clever?" "Put like that, no, but I bet it was your original idea for her to sleep with us some nights, and to sit in a chair watching us while we make love?" "You're half right. Sleeping with us some nights was her idea. She asked me about it shortly after she first heard about our swapping rooms. She made a big deal about how much she's going to miss me, and is going to be lonely in a room by herself, and can she please come and sleep in our big bed sometimes. I had fun teasing her that if she comes to sleep in the double bed, then you can sleep in her room to make space for her. That frustrated her plan entirely. It was funny listening to her insist that it would be okay if all three of us stayed in the one bed. She might be a little bit lonely for me, but it's you that she wants to sleep with." I had no trouble imagining that conversation. Donna's directness makes her easy to read. When she tries to be sneaky it stands out like a sore thumb. Which makes her very easy to tease too, although her lack of patience means you have to make it a short tease because she can blow up. Carol continued, "I'll take credit for the idea of her watching us from a chair. That was original and quite wicked. She's going to be getting-off to that image for a long time. When it happens it's going to drive her up the wall with frustration. Not being able to join in, I mean. It's going to make her scream, the poor girl. I'll feel sorry for her, while I'm putting on good show, haha." We opened the window, had our showers, and were sitting innocently in the living room well before Mom got home. I remembered a little question I wanted to ask Donna, "Sweetie, I just found out today how good some of the other runners in the race were. How could you expect me to win?" "Lots of reasons. I've seen how good you are at everything when we goof off now. Not just awesome, but freaky awesome. I saw how well you ran in our morning runs, so I asked you if you could win and you said you could." "You couldn't have been so sure I'd win just because I said so." Donna and Carol laughed at me. I asked, "What's so funny? I didn't even know who the other runners were until today, so I could've been wrong." Carol answered, "You NEVER boast! You don't even boast about things you CAN do. If you said you could win the race, then you could win it." Donna said, "Your not asking who the other runners were gave me more confidence. You're super-smart so I don't think you forgot there were other runners in the race, haha. They didn't matter, did they?" "Umm. I wouldn't say that exactly. The last guy was hard to beat." Donna disagreed, "{Raspberry}. The last guy was EASY to beat. You deliberately chose to beat him by just a little bit. You weren't winded when you crossed the line so you could've beaten him much better. My brother's a SUPERMAN!" Carol whole-heartedly agreed, "I'll say! Our brother is an absolutely incredible Superman." #3: #2: #3: Donna said, "I want to add something else. I've seen you get angry several times because of the 10k, and you almost NEVER get angry so you must've been REALLY pissed off! I figured out that you wouldn't have run it if I hadn't pushed you so much to win. You did it for me and not once have you complained about me pushing you, even though you should've. You're a wonderful, wonderful brother!" Donna threw herself at me for a hug, then almost immediately burst into tears. I reached into my pocket for a hanky. (Are you impressed? I remember to carry them now.) Before I could get to her, Donna fled from the room, still crying. I started following, but Carol said, "Stay here. There's nothing wrong, she just needs a few minutes. I'll go see her in a while. She's just not used to having so much love in her. Can't say I am yet either, but it gets easier." #2: #3: #2: #3: Carol said, "Don't worry. When girls fall in love we have to cry from time to time. It's good for us. She'll be fine, just make sure you carry plenty of hankies because I think Donna is starting to fall in love with you." "Umm, isn't she already in love with me? I don't mean to sound arrogant..." "{Raspberry}," from Carol, which I understood and thought best to ignore. " ... but she's said she loves me many times." "COMPLETELY different type of love. This one is BIG! It is for me and Julia, and I think Donna is just starting to appreciate how much bigger it might be for her too. She's changed quite a lot in the last few days." #4: Carol could see I was lost, so she said, "It's probably easiest for you if I just say that her love of you is changing from sisterly love into romantic love." "That I can understand! Thanks. That's much easier. I think I'm experiencing that transition toward her too, although mine is still mostly of the brotherly type. Sometimes I feel horny for her, or sometimes romantic, but most of the time I'm protective and brotherly. Probably still at least 90% brotherly. What stage do you think she's at now?" "Are you sure you want me to answer that?" #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #3: #3 asked Carol, "I'm thinking about whether I want you to answer or not. Can I ask whether - if I did ask you to answer - whether your answer would be a percentage? A number?" Carol said, "Of course not. That wouldn't explain anything. I'd have to..." I interrupted. "Stop right there thanks. Let me think for a second." #3: #4: #2: So I said, "We're going to take your advice and pass on it. Don't bother answering the question." "That'd be easier, thanks. Why did you say 'we'?" "Huh?" #3: Carol explained what we'd just worked out, "You said 'We are going to take your advice'. Why the 'we'? You should have said, 'I'm going to take your advice.'" #3: "The 'we' is the winners between the pros and cons. I try and think of all the pros and cons for each choice, then I imagine them like soldiers wrestling, trying to cancel each other out. The advantage is that sometimes a pro gets matched with a con I normally wouldn't associate together, and then I suddenly realize something interesting because of their collision. Like I might think of another pro or con that didn't occur to me before, or I might think of a whole different way of solving the problem. If I had paper and pencil I could just write down the list of pros and cons and join them all with lines and think about every pair, but just in my head I find it better to imagine them like soldiers. Because it's so visual it makes it easier and more fun for me. In my imagination, at the end, the winners yell out "We win!" I just let my imagination get a little carried away and said 'we'." #4: Carol said, "What a load of codswallop! If you don't want to tell me, just say 'you don't want to tell me.' Sheesh!" "Umm. Okay. I don't want to tell you." "Wasn't that much easier? I'd better go check on Donna now. I shouldn't be long." Carol walked away, shaking her head in bemusement. #4: #3: #4: #2: I heard a car come up our driveway, so I went out to see who it was: Vanessa. She was delivering Julia and a couple of suitcases full of Carol's new clothes for me to carry to the girls' room. I answered, "I'll just leave them outside in the hallway. Donna is having a little cry and Carol has gone in to check on her. Carol suggested I leave it to her." Vanessa said, "I'm glad things are going so well between the three of you. I'm going to enjoy watching you with all your girlfriends in the new house. I have some news about that, by the way, so let's go inside and talk about it." #2: #4: #3: Once we were in the house Julia told me, "I already know what Mom's going to say, so if you drop the bags in the hall, I'll take them in and praise Donna." "Sure, but, um, praise Donna for what?" "For maturing so well. I'm looking forward to getting to know her if she's so devoted to you already." #2: #3: I offered Vanessa a coffee. I was kind of hoping to get a chance to grab a snack, but she turned me down. Vanessa said, "I had a good chat with a couple of people in the drama department about makeup to age you. It's very easy and I have what we need here. I want to make you up, photograph you, then pass the photo on to Robert to get your ID done. Is that okay with you?" I wasn't sure about the makeup part, but getting the ID quick meant sleeping with all my girls sooner rather than later, and that was GREAT motivation. "Absolutely!" Vanessa said, "There are only three steps to it and they're very simple. I'll explain them so you can do them yourself after this. You should wash first and I see you just have, so that's good." #4: #2: Vanessa pulled a perfume bottle out of her purse. "This is a perfume bottle, but I've emptied out the perfume and replaced it with a type of alcohol. I spritz your face then alcohol evaporates, drying out and tightening your skin. The tightening creates very small wrinkles. The more you put on, the drier, rougher and more wrinkled you'll look, up to the limit of what this liquid can achieve, which isn't much. It'll add a few years, but that's all. It won't make you look like a wrinkled old grandfather, even if you soaked your head in a bucket of it. It wouldn't even make you look thirty, but it can add a few years. You already look to be in your late teens, so we don't need much of a change." Vanessa spritzed all over my face, even the back of my neck. She also did the back of one hand. I could feel the cold of it evaporating very quickly. "They never said anything about hands, but I figure that it should work in both places. Where you're going they'll be looking at your hands a lot, so I just did one so we can compare to see if they look different. I also did the back of your neck because you'll be hunched over a table, and people could be looking at you from behind. That should be long enough, let's look at your hands." I held them up side by side, and the sprayed one did look noticeably drier and more wrinkled. Older, presumably, although I can't say I've noticed what the back of hands look like. Vanessa was pleased, so I was too, especially with it being such an easy process. "Your skin slowly regains its moisture naturally so you'll need to spray yourself every couple of hours, although how often depends on your skin type and the environment you're in at the time. If you're going to be 'working' for more than about an hour I suggest you take the bottle with you and go to the bathroom every hour or so. Just make sure you allow enough time for it to dry completely before you leave the stall. A minute will be ample." -- Vanessa replaced the lid, and placed the bottle on the living room table. "The next item is a couple of small glue-on sideburns. Small ones, just to make the point that you can grow hair in a mature manner. Let me just hold them up against you. Yes, they match your hair color well enough. This is the glue, and I'll show you how to put them on. Normally you'd use more glue than this, but I only need a couple of drops to hold them on long enough for the photo." -- Vanessa attached them. "When you're at 'work', don't try to scratch or do anything else that might pull one off. The last item is makeup that makes a man look like he hasn't shaved for a few hours. 'Six o'clock shadow' is a phrase you might've heard. In this case it's about an 11am shadow. Just enough to give a viewer the impression that you're a man who shaved a few hours ago. I have two versions with slightly different colors so we can match it to your skin. I'll do a different one on each side, and then replace the one that doesn't look as good." Vanessa applied them, showing me what areas to apply it on. At the end she looked at me carefully, declared one the reject and put that in her bag. She wiped the rejected side of my face, and applied the better coloring to it. When she was finished, which took less than a minute, she got out a mirror and showed me how I looked. Which was twenty five, I thought. A lot older than I was used to, that was for sure. The whiskers-appearing makeup particularly weirded me out. Vanessa said, "The drama people said that because you're slim and your face is angular, you look considerably older than fifteen already. There's no sign of the baby fat that many 15-year olds still have remnants of. To my eyes you look 21. What do you think?" I said, "I'm impressed. I think I look even older, maybe twenty five? I've never seen myself with a whisker shadow like this and it looks weird. Weird and older, of course. It looks perfect for our purposes." "I agree. Let's take some photos." "Good idea, before the girls come out." "They won't. Julia will keep them busy. But let's get them done. Stand in front of that wall with you head in front of that clear space." Vanessa took several shots, and pronounced herself satisfied with them. She showed me how to remove everything, including how to use the solvent for the sideburns, then sent me to wash my face. I looked in the bathroom mirror carefully, and my face still looked a little strange because of the alcohol spritzing, as did the back of one hand. Back in the living room Vanessa had all my makeup equipment laid out, and told me to store it in my room somewhere. I did so and on my return she said, "We're going to get your new ID to match who you really are, same name, birth month and day, just six years earlier, making it November 9, 1983." I hadn't known that Vanessa knew my birthday, but she was a Williams so it was hardly surprising that she had it down pat. -- "If anyone asks you anything about your life, just tell them as much truth as you can, except you have to pad out the extra six years. I suggest a normal high-school education, leaving at eighteen, then three years of Math at OSU. Prof will take you to OSU before your big trip so you'll have some idea, although no one should ask for that level of detail. I think he just wants to take you anyway. -- "Julia can still be your girlfriend, five years younger than you - you cradle robber, haha. Prof is your girlfriend's father and a Professor at your college. You shouldn't have any trouble. Robert's been assured that the ID will pass any sort of visual inspection. Just don't give it to a policeman. That would be very bad! When I go home shortly I'm going to give Robert the photos and he'll deliver them to his contact tonight. We're told it'll take a few days. Prof wants you to come over one evening soon to plan your first test run to one of the nearby Indian casinos. Any questions or comments?" "Only, 'Wow.' I was thinking about calling Prof to see if we could hurry this along because I want to get into our new house asap, but you've taken the wind right out of my sails. I never thought we'd be going this fast. This is excellent. Even the disguise, if we can call it that, works really well. I'm very eager now." "Then my work here is done! You can go get the girls now if you like." "Umm, shouldn't you do it. Carol wanted me to stay out." "No. It'd be a good time for you to go now. I'll wait here." #2: #3: "I've been trying to work out how you and Julia knew what was happening in the girls' room. When you arrived and I told you Donna had been crying, you said you were glad things were going so well. I thought what I said should have created a bad impression, but you were happy. Then Julia said she'd praise Donna for maturing and being devoted to me, and just now you said it'd be a good time for me to go in. NONE of that makes any sense to me. How can the two of you possibly make accurate statements so confidently when you haven't received any information at all? It's freaky. My only guess is that all females secretly have ESP or telepathy or something!" "Haha. I'm afraid your guess isn't very good. The explanation is that we had PLENTY of information, nearly all of it from you. If you'd done something stupid or accidentally cruel, you would've had a total hangdog expression. You'd have been apologizing to us for upsetting Donna, even though we weren't here at the time. That's what you're like. You weren't apologizing, so it wasn't your fault. -- "Maybe Carol had upset Donna? That didn't seem likely because you said Carol was just checking on Donna. 'Checking', not 'apologizing'. -- "The only other bad possibility is that something happened outside the house, but you probably would've made some reference to it, like, "Donna's running coach died", or whatever the news was. -- "So nothing bad seems to have happened, which means Donna was crying over something good. Obviously involving you as Carol suggested that you stay out of the room for a while. The most likely good thing that could happen between you and Donna, that would lead to her crying, is that she's happy about falling in love with you. That's why I said I was glad things were going well, and why Julia was going to praise Donna for her developing enough maturity that love can cause her to cry. Young girls don't cry for that reason. So you see that it was quite simple." "I don't know what to say. Your logic is brilliant and perfectly accurate, but I can't believe that you worked all that out within one second of my first sentence finishing. It's particularly galling because your logic is flawless, darn it. I'm stunned and impressed by both you and Julia. You were both totally accurate, and totally confident about it, which makes it even more impressive. I feel like an inadequate fool now. I'll NEVER get as good with people as you two are. I thought I was pretty good, but I'm nowhere near your league." Vanessa said, "So I guess I shouldn't tell you that Julia and I knew this was going to happen about now, and we were waiting for it." "Huh? What was going to happen, Donna crying you mean?" "Donna falling in romantic love with you. The tears follow from that." "You knew Donna was going to fall in love with me?" "Yes. In the next day or two probably, depending on how much time you could spend with her." "Now I'm confused again. How can you know when someone's going to fall in love? I thought love is one of life's great mysteries?" "Ordinarily yes, but not in the case of Donna's feelings for you. Donna was already as totally in love with you as it's possible for a sister to be without it being romantic. She thought you were the best boy alive and she was overjoyed to have you as her brother. So as soon as you started doing anything sexual with her, her hormones were going to explode. She's just hit puberty and her body's awash in hormones she's got no experience with. With her love of you, some sex play with you, and the state of her body, she was on a very short fuse. Her already existing love of you would turn into romantic love almost as soon as your first kiss was over. Julia told me you were starting to get romantic with her, so it was only a matter of hours. When we arrived and Donna had been crying, Julia and I instantly knew exactly what had happened." "'Instantly'! You mean all that brilliant logic you told me was unnecessary?" "Completely and totally unnecessary. I made it all up only when you asked me to explain. I'm only sorry Julia wasn't here to witness it. She missed a good laugh." "I'm GLAD she wasn't here. She would have been merciless!" "It's true she would have laughed, but only because you deserved it. What's the lesson Mark? Because there is a lesson." "Ahh. I should have known you have a lesson for me. Hmm, DON'T TRUST FEMALES leaps to mind." Vanessa said, "Closer than you think. Turn it around a bit: 'Trust yourself.' You ARE good with people. Look how much the girls love you. That's not an accident. Your bullshit detector should have been going off when I was pulling your leg, and you should've called me on it. At the end of my con job you talked yourself into substantially downgrading your opinion of your people-skills. No single incident should be capable of doing that to you. Knowing you, I'm sure that no single incident could ever make you RAISE your opinion of yourself that much, so how come you let one lower your personal estimation so much? Not only do you have this propensity to downgrade yourself, but doing so at all was illogical. You've had thousands of experiences over the last couple of years of handling people with considerable skill, so putting weight on ONE negative example is very bad logic. That this example made your people-skills appear so pathetic, compared with what I was claiming I could do, should have made you realize I wasn't telling the truth." I said, "Put that way, your logic is inescapable. I know there's been heaps of times I have been good with people, but I forgot about those when you showed me up so badly." Vanessa answered, "You didn't 'forget' them. You CHOSE not to remember them. If there'd been a reason to raise your opinion of yourself enormously, you wouldn't have. You would have immediately thought of dozens of reasons not to increase it. You can remember other reasons, but you only try to do so in order to justify having a low opinion of yourself. If you could get rid of that negative bias, then your selective memory would correct itself." I nodded, not wanting to say anything, but forced to agree. Vanessa continued, "The reason for the lesson is that you're starting to do some serious things now. The casino scheme is BIG money and that much money is never a game. You'll have my husband with you and I want you to be capable of looking after him if that's needed. Most likely nothing bad will happen, but if it does your having a confident and accurate opinion of your abilities will help. Having a horribly low opinion of yourself and your abilities will NOT help. I want my husband back and Julia wants her love back, from the casino trip and from every other endeavor you're going to get involved in, and I'm sure there are going to be many of them. Got the lesson?" "I got it. Absorbing it will be harder though." "Awareness of your weaknesses is the first step to fixing them. I'll just keep hitting you over the head until you get it." "I imagine you will. You and your family are doing a huge amount for me. A tremendous amount. I appreciate it very much, even the tough parts like this. You're very good at it too." "Years of practice, but you'd be surprised how easy it is. Once you've had a little practice it's easy to turn almost any human activity into a lesson. At work I've got a file for the Adam, Eve and the Apple parable. You'd be stunned how many lessons people have created out of that one story, many of which are contradictory. Almost anything can be turned into a lesson about almost anything. When I made up all the false logic about Donna's crying I had no idea what the lesson was going to be. I didn't make up the lesson until just before I had to say it to you." I was amazed. "Really? You seemed to have it so brilliantly planned out." "I didn't have a single word of the lesson worked out in advance. I just started teasing you to kill a bit of time to let the girls have a few minutes and it turned into a lesson. That's how the best lessons are created: out of what happens at the time. They have relevance, immediacy and impact. If I told you the Adam and Eve parable and gave you a self-confidence lesson out of it, it wouldn't mean as much so it wouldn't be as good. -- "Remember that this is my job, Mark. I stand up in front of a room full of students and have to lead them in the direction I want the class to go. I have to think on my feet and make much of it up as I go. Spending a few months lecturing a class would teach you some useful skills, but I can't think of how to arrange that. When your going for a goal in soccer, do you plan out every step you'll take, or do you react to what happens?" I answered, "Both, but 90% react. There's too much happening too quickly to plan much." "Good answer and good reason. Your casino trip should be the reverse, almost entirely planned with very little need to react at the time. That's why you're going to do practice runs to a local casino, to get as many problems as possible ironed out first. Different tasks have different needs. We've digressed too much though. Your girls, especially Donna, will be happy to see you now. You should go see them." I had to ask about that, "That reminds me. Your leg pulling logic, which I now know to be fake anyway, never explained how you knew that I should go to the girls' room now. Now you've said it again, so I've got to ask. What's the non-leg-pulling explanation please?" Vanessa said, "Simple. Donna's just starting to fall into romantic love with you. It's very new and very powerful so she'll be feeling uncertainty, doubt and even fear sometimes. Your two wives have been in there praising her and making her welcome. She'll be feeling very good about her relationship with you and the other two girls by now. She'll be very happy and will want to share that with you." I nodded, and said, "You're right. Carol and Julia would be very good at making Donna happy, especially the two of them together." Vanessa added, "And if for some reason they couldn't do it the way I said, they've got an unbeatable secret weapon with them." I was clearly required to ask, so, "Secret weapon?" "Two suitcases full of brand new clothes that Donna has never seen before. I'm sure all three girls have been playing dress-up for some time, which means they've been naked most of the time. I can't understand why you're still talking to me." I heard Vanessa yell at my back, "I'll let myself out." ^ When I got to their door it was closed. I knocked on it and said, "Just me." There was the sound of sudden motions from within the room. Carol called out, "We're not dressed." I automatically stopped. Then I smiled to myself, opened the door and walked in, which caused a squeal from Donna. I quickly noticed (as you do) that no one was naked. Julia was wearing the clothes she'd arrived in, Carol had on a different skirt and just a bra on top, and Donna was holding something in front of her, appearing to just be wearing her panties behind it. The room looked like a tornado had hit it, as clothes were spread EVERYWHERE. I nearly had to say my punchline without an intro', but Donna came to the party, "We're not dressed!" "Yes, I heard Carol say that." My two girls weren't the least bit concerned, but Donna was flustered at being almost naked in public with a boy (I'm exaggerating the situation, but I imagine that was a part of how her brain categorized it, leading to her initial reaction to squeal and cover up). I paused for a second, then added, "OH! I understand now. 'We're not dressed' was supposed to keep me OUT! {Chuckle}. You've got a lot to learn about guys. To a guy that means, 'come in as quickly as possible'. Three beautiful, undressed girls - yummy." All the girls laughed, even Donna joined in at the end. Carol held out her hand to Donna, and said, "You don't need that, Donna. Mark can see you naked whenever he wants." Donna hesitated for a second, then suddenly handed her dress over to Carol, saying, "Of course. Sorry, I'm not used to that yet." She stood proudly, thrusting her chest out. All the "thrust" in the world wasn't going to achieve much in Donna's case, but you've got to admire her attitude. I also liked her saying "Sorry," because teenage girls should apologize for not going naked in front of me. Speaking of naked, Julia said, "Donna, would you like me to buy you some sexy panties so that you can wear them for Mark?" Donna was unsurprisingly wearing ordinary cotton panties. Donna was very happy at that idea. Which led to her telling me all the other things she was very happy with. Pretty much her entire life at the moment, especially me, Carol, Julia, "and everything." I wasn't sure what the last meant, other than Donna was very happy. After Donna wound down, which took a few minutes, I said, "I like how you've decorated the room. Were you going for the 'just been hit by a tornado' look?" Growing up with three females you pick up some decorating lingo. It's just one of my life's many burdens. Donna gushed, "Look at all these lovely clothes. Isn't Carol going to look fantastic? Look at that one." Pointing to a mixed heap of clothes lying on the bed. "And that one too. She's going to look great in that." As best I can recall, Donna has been forced into buying a dress maybe a dozen times in her entire life - always kicking, screaming and protesting, right from when Mom first mentioned the apparent need - but now she can point at a tornado wreck and pick out dresses that Carol will apparently look particularly good in. Carol even confirmed one of Donna's choices by saying, "Yes, that's one of my favorites. I made sure to ask Julia to bring that one here." Personally I was entirely happy with the way Carol was already dressed, in a nice short skirt and a thin bra, into which my upper-arm was pressed, creating a great feel and the sight of a very pleasing amount of extra cleavage. I would have sworn that Donna knew virtually nothing about clothes - running shoes, yes; pretty dresses, no - but she was confidently expressing her opinions, none of which the other girls disagreed with, and some they confirmed. It was impossible for her to have learned about clothes so quickly, so it was either secret classes or the three girls were in a conspiracy to make me feel inferior. For fun and because we had plenty of time, I said to Donna, "Sweetie, I'm curious about something. Pick the outfit you think is the best, and let's see how it looks." It was a perfectly straightforward request, so I should've known better. Donna asked, "For Carol, you mean?" "Yes." "For what occasion?" "Huh?" "For school, or the movies, or dinner, or what?" "Um, school is fine." "What's the weather like?" I tried to look out the window, which was silly because the drapes were tacked closed. Donna said, "I don't mean now. I mean on the day that were pretending she's getting dressed to go to school." "Oh. Um, same as today was, I guess." "What has she worn for the previous few days?" #1: I answered, "Let's just assume what she really did wear." Donna checked with Carol, reciting short, accurate descriptions for Carol's clothing at school today, plus Thursday back to Monday last week. All of which Carol confirmed. #2: "Is she trying to impress any boys?" Carol answered that one. "No, I have Mark now. I might be trying to impress other girls though. I think I'm going to announce that I'm a lesbian." -- Julia quickly looked at Carol, who added, "Just like we did with Cindy. I think it's a good idea to do that with everyone." Julia said, "Hmm. Yes, I think you're right. Good idea." Donna said, "Cool. That makes big difference then." Both Carol and Julia nodded at that. Donna added, "This time of year, correct?" "Yes." #2: #1: #2: Donna turned to Carol, "Are all your seats in good positions?" Carol answered, "I've got one major jerk who sits behind me in several classes. I'm thinking of getting Mark to kill him soon, so ignore him for now." #1: #2: Donna reached out and selected two dresses. "Either of these two then. What day of the week is it?" "Huh?" "Are we pretending it's Monday like it is now, or are we choosing a dress for Tuesday?" #2: #1: #2: "Um, let's say it's for tomorrow. That way Carol can really wear what you pick." I was proud of that little thought. Let's see if Carol will actually wear what Donna picks, rather than just agreeing to whatever Donna suggests. Donna said, "This one then," holding up one particular dress. I looked at Carol and asked, "Well? Is that the dress you would have chosen?" Carol answered, "Of course not. It's a good choice though. You did well, Donna." "Hang on. How can it be a good choice but not what you'd wear?" Carol explained, "It's a good choice because it matches well with what Donna thought about. She's got quite good judgment for a girl with so little experience. It's not what I would've chosen for tomorrow, but I'll wear it tomorrow just to show her that I mostly approve. Thanks, sweetie." Carol directed a smile at Donna, then resumed, "You have to remember that Donna's very young and isn't used to choosing dresses yet, so there are lots of things she forgot to think about." #2: #1: #2: "Carol, sweetie, what other things could you possibly have to consider?" "Heaps of things. Like my hair. Donna's got short hair and she isn't used to thinking about it, but I have to consider how I want to wear my hair each day, how I've worn it the last few days, when I last washed it, how different hair styles go with the potential outfits, etc. Then there are shoes. Donna forgot all about shoes. You can't forget about shoes, they're VERY important. Then there's my class schedule for the day. Donna doesn't know ANYTHING about my classes so it wouldn't be fair to fault her choice because of that." #2: #3: "I mostly get the hair and shoes things, but what possible difference can your class schedule make?" "Are you kidding? That's the single most important thing!" #2: <{Groan}.> I suggested, "You mean something like you understand Math better if you're wearing blue, for example?" "Haha. That's so funny! Good one, Mark." I said, "Yeah. I thought you'd like it. Thinking your clothes had anything to do with your subjects - how silly is that!" "I'll say." I pressed on, probably foolishly, "Um, so you can imagine how confused I am about you saying your class schedule was important." Carol exclaimed, "Oh, I get it now! You thought I was saying the class schedule was important because of the subjects?" "Well, yes. What other reason is there?" "Who the other people are in your classes! That's who you're dressing for, after all. That's what fashion IS!" "Huh? You mean you think about your classmates when you choose your clothes?" "Of course. You have to do that. It's mostly what it's all about." #3: "Honey, you say you 'think about your classmates, ' what sort of stuff do you think?" "There are a HUGE number of things you have to think about. Their status, their opinions of different styles, especially of what I might wear, trends in the way they dress, trends in the way everyone dresses, what they might be wearing today. Gosh, there's so much more. It's very complex." The scientist in me spotted a serious problem in one thing Carol had listed, "Hang on. Are you saying that one of the things that you think about when choosing what to wear is what your classmates might be wearing the same day?" "Absolutely." "But you haven't got any useful information about that. At best you can base your guess on what they were wearing yesterday, but that's old information. That's a logical mess. You'd get all sorts of 'what I thought she thought about what I thought' type of situations." "I'll say! It's a major problem." "It's insolvable is what it is. Why do you even try? You cannot possibly guess what ANY other girl is going to wear that day, let alone all of them." "You've got to! That's what fashion is. It's too important not to. Can you imagine what a disaster it'd be if I wore the same dress as another girl?" "Surely not? I've seen jokes about it on TV and they always make it look like some overreacted slapstick comedy, but surely it doesn't really matter. So what if both of you are wearing the same nice clothes. It's bound to happen some days." "They are NOT overreacting; it's a SUPER embarrassing disaster. Thank goodness the TV plot of having two identically dressed girls walk around a corner and bump into each other is virtually impossible - obviously everyone else wouldn't let that happen - but being in the same school is bad enough." "Huh? How could everyone else not let it happen? No one knows what anyone is going to wear that day?" "I mean they wouldn't let it happen ONCE you get to school. Lots of other girls will see you, and remember that someone else is wearing the same outfit, and they'll all run to warn you and the other girl. You'd both find out within minutes of the second girl arriving at school, LONG before you had a chance to meet each other." "Seriously? Other girls notice and remember what everyone else is wearing? And would go running to warn you both? That seems over the top." Carol looked puzzled, and said, "We have to notice what everyone else is wearing. That's how we know what's going on, fashion-wise. And of course other girls run to give warnings. I think that supersedes everything else. Even a girl that normally hated someone would warn her because she might need the same warning herself one day. Even hatred isn't as important as making sure you don't wear the same clothes. The warning has to be given as fast as possible too, to minimize the number of people who know about it." "But you just said all girls notice and remember each other's clothes, so sooner or later they're all going to notice that two girls are dressed the same. Even if those girls have been warned and avoid each other all day." "What? Oh, I get it, you misunderstand what a warning means. It doesn't mean the two girls avoid each other. It means one or both of them goes home to change. They both can't stay at school in the same clothes." "They can't?" "No way! That's unthinkable." "It is?" "Completely. It can't be done." "Accepting that for some reason having two girls in the same clothes can't be done, I have to ask who goes home? I get the impression that the two girls don't get together to discuss that?" "Heavens no! They can't be seen together. Not in the same room! No way!" "So how can they possibly decide who goes home then?" "It's very complex. It depends mostly on the statuses of the two girls, but also who has seen them, how many people have seen them, and things like that. Also sometimes both of them will have to go home to change. It's difficult to explain." #2: I said, "Being a girl is SO different from being a guy. I wouldn't have a clue what ANY guy in any of my classes wore to school yesterday. How do you keep track of all this stuff? The amount of information is incredible." "It's not so bad, and you learn ways of making it easier, so it's mostly fun." "How can you possibly make it easier? It's a logical nightmare and an overwhelming amount of information. The only solution to the whole mess would be to make every girl wear the same outfit every day, but you say that'd be a disaster." "That'd be okay if it was a compulsory uniform. Boring but okay. But in a non-uniformed school like ours, two girls wearing the same clothes is a disaster. Like I said before, there are tricks. If tomorrow I saw a girl wearing an outfit that I had in my closet, then when I came home I'd move that outfit from it's usual place in my closet to a 'danger place', depending on who the girl was." "What's a 'danger place'?" "That's what I just said: clothes that I've got, that another girl also wears to school. It depends, but at least three or four weeks after another girl wore one of them I might start to think about wearing mine again, but first I'd talk with her, tell her that I liked the outfit she wore four weeks ago, that I have a similar outfit, and that I might wear mine tomorrow. That way she'll know not to wear hers. If I do wear it, depending on the weather and other things, then she'll put hers into her danger area of her closet. So it's quite a simple system really." "It doesn't sound like a simple system to me. How can you remember which girl wore each of the danger area outfits so many weeks ago? You don't attach some sort of note to each of them, do you? Like date, who, where, that sort of thing." "No. That's too much work. We just remember. It's easy as it's only about a few pieces of clothing, half a dozen or a dozen at most. Hardly any. Keeping track of my own clothes is easy, it's keeping track of all the clothes that aren't mine that takes the most effort. That's why your 'attaching a note' idea wouldn't work, because I'm talking about all the thousands of outfits that I DON'T have. You'd spend forever writing notes and you've got nothing to attach them to anyway." "I don't understand. Why do you have to keep track of clothes you haven't got. That doesn't make any sense." "Of course I have to keep track of clothes I haven't got. That's what I have to think about when I buy new clothes. There are a HUGE number of things to think about when buying new clothes, but one of them is whether anyone else has ever worn the same or a similar outfit. It's risky to buy something that another girl in one of my classes sometimes wears. It'd be even worse if she had a poor fashion reputation, as that would sully my reputation by association when I wore a dress that she's been seen wearing. I also wouldn't buy any outfit that I'd seen two or more other girls wearing because trying to coordinate all of us would be too complex. So obviously I have to remember everything that everyone wears for the last few months, or else I'd never be able to buy new clothes." -- I was still struggling to imagine the mental effort required to do all that, when Carol thought to add, "Now you know why girls always wish that there were a LOT more clothing stores. All selling different clothes of course, to give us the choice we need. That'd really help reduce the risk of wearing the same outfits." "{Groan}. But women's clothing stores are already half the stores in town! It took you and Julia ALL Saturday to go shopping. If there were a lot more it'd take you a whole week to see them all." "I know! It'd be wonderful, wouldn't it?" "THANK GOD I'm a guy! I can't believe the effort you put into something as simple as choosing what clothes to wear. I just put on whatever comes to hand. I've got no idea whether other guys wear the same clothes as me, and couldn't care less." Julia spoke for the first time in a long time, "Lots of guys wear the same clothes as you, Mark." Carol agreed, "I'll say. So many guys have got the same jeans, same shirts, same jackets. It's terrible. They obviously all go to the same bulk chain that sells thousands of copies of the same clothes. It's just bizarre. I don't know how people can dress like that. We've got to do something for Mark. He could look awesome if he was dressed properly." Julia answered, "I'm already planning it, sweetie. Mark has to get new clothes for the job he's going to be doing with Dad, so we have to take him shopping Saturday. We'll also get him a large number of new outfits for school, for when the trial is over. He should dress so girls like looking at him, rather than as he does now." Carol exclaimed, "That's exactly right. I was telling him after school, when we were waiting for the car, that girls will faint if he's presented properly." I finally got a word in, "Hang on. What did Julia mean by my 'dressing so girls like looking at me, rather than as I do now'? I dress okay now. I think I..." "{Raspberry}." | "{Raspberry}." | "{Giggle}," from Donna. Julia patiently explained, "Mark, you dress like every other guy." "Exactly. So I'm fine." Julia resumed, "Except that nearly every guy has NO idea how to dress. Why on Earth do you all wear the same styles and colors when you've all got different body shapes, heights, hair and skin colors, etc.? It's a completely unmatched mess repeated a hundred times! Don't worry, Carol and I will take care of you." #1: Julia added, "Didn't the outfit we bought you for our date with Cindy look good?" Actually, it had. It looked very nice indeed. I'd been tempted to start wearing it to school as it was a very suitable outfit for school, but it was so nice I figured I should save it for special dates and the like. I nodded, and said, "Yes, it's very nice." Julia said, "It's okay, but that's all. Certainly not suitable for school or anything special, but don't worry, we'll get you some much better clothes on Saturday." I was thinking about throwing in the towel, when I remembered my old fear, "No pink, remember? Or anything like it." Julia said, "We'll see. You don't want to close off any options without seeing exactly what you're talking about." "No, that's EXACTLY where you're wrong. I DO want to close off that option. That's why I said it." "We'll see. We might not find any suitable pink clothes anyway, so why bother discussing it?" I could think of a very good reason to discuss it: to make sure they didn't buy anything pink! But I guess they can't force me to wear anything I don't want to. I'm twice times Julia's size, after all. I said, "You know I've got a soccer game on Saturday, at 2pm." Julia said, "I think that's fine. If we start as soon as the stores open we should finish in time. We're only shopping for one, there aren't many men's clothing stores in town, and half of them are high volume chain stores that we won't go into. We should finish by 2. We can always resume after your game. Or if we're really pushed for time you could skip out of your game at half-time." I was about to open my mouth and LOUDLY tell her that you DON'T skip out of games early, when I noticed Julia's expression and realized she was pulling my leg. Instead I laughed, "Haha. Good one. You really had me going there. We've spent so long talking about clothing that for a moment I seriously thought you considered clothes shopping more important that soccer." Julia said, "I was teasing you because I know YOU don't think shopping is that important. MY opinion might be quite different." Then she laughed again, and said, "I'm teasing you again, Mark. I know soccer's important to you. You're my Lord, and I want you to do things you enjoy. Soccer is a good thing for you. But I promise you'll end up thanking me for taking you shopping." At last something sensible and reassuring. I'd liked her soccer and Lord comment, and I even liked the shopping promise. I had trouble imagining how shopping could be anything other than tedious at best, but Julia sounded like she knew what she was talking about. She doesn't use the word "promise" lightly and I have to admit that she does know a bit more about shopping than I do. Julia added, "Not to mention that Carol and I are going to have a GREAT time! It's going to be SO much fun." "I'll say!" agreed Carol. I was not so reassured anymore. You'd think that I should be happy that my girls were going to have fun. But I couldn't help wondering what the cost would be? I was pretty sure I knew WHO would be paying the cost, it was just the form and magnitude of the cost that had me worried. We remembered the dress that Donna had picked out for Carol to wear to school tomorrow (unless any one of the 450 factors changed, forcing a re-evaluation). Carol put it on, and it looked great. For some reason it looked one heck of a lot better on Carol than when it had been lying on the bed. My initial reason for getting Donna to pick an outfit was to do a quick test of Donna's clothes-picking ability. I'd thought the whole thing might have taken a few seconds. Was I ever wrong! Now the idea of a test was blown out of the water because it was far too complex an issue for me to be able to judge anything about it. I was still trying to get my head around the magnitude of the task of getting dressed, when we heard Mom's yell that she'd come home. Julia and I wandered out to meet Mom, leaving the other two girls to get dressed. On the way to the kitchen I remembered that Julia had been quiet through nearly all of Carol's explanation of how to dress. It's not like Julia to be so quiet, so I said, "You were very quiet while Carol was describing her dress-choosing process. How come you were so silent? Do you have the same sort of system as Carol?" Julia answered, "I was quiet because I do things differently. There are some similarities of course, but enough differences that it was better just let Carol talk." #2: Julia continued, "She'll get better. She'll have to soon. She's only in middle school now and that's easy. Next year she's in high school and clothing issues are much more complex there. She's going to have to learn not to be so simplistic. 'Danger area' - ha! That's far too simplistic. She's going to have to develop much more sophisticated systems than that. Don't worry, I'll help her." #2: #1: Just as we walked into the kitchen, Julia said, "I like you, Mark. You're lots of fun. Hi Felicity, how are you?..." #1: #2: #3: #1: #3: #2: #1: ------- Chapter 72: More on Carol's Lesbianism Plan Monday, April 18, 2005 (Continued) Carol and Donna soon joined us. Immediately Mom said, "That's a nice dress, Carol." Which made Donna puff up with pride. That resulted in a female clothing conversation. I won't bother recording it here because it was a female clothing conversation. When it was finished, Carol said, "Mom, I'm not learning about household stuff fast enough. Cooking, raising babies, and all those sorts of things. Can you help me learn more please, like getting me to work on dinner tonight? Mom said, "Sure, sweetie. I'm happy to teach you, but you don't need to be in such a rush. You've only been married four days and you can't learn everything at once. You've got plenty of time." Carol disagreed, "Most girls know far more than I do when they get married." "That's true, but it's also true that most girls are a LOT older than thirteen when they get married. You've got years more time before you catch up to them." "Except that I want babies as soon as I can be a good mother. I REALLY want to have his babies, Mom. There's SO much I have to learn. I don't even know how to cook a whole roast chicken dinner properly yet." Mom smiled, "I don't think cooking a roast chicken has much to do with having babies. Of the two, I would MUCH rather spend the next few years showing you how to cook than how to raise babies. You know that you CAN'T have babies yet, don't you? There'd be all sorts of nasty legal problems. You have to wait until you're eighteen." "Unless Mark goes to a college in a state or country that has sixteen as the age of consent. Sixteen is a very common age around the world, it's just Oregon and a few other states that are stuck on eighteen." "You've been researching this?" "I think about it a LOT, Mom. I want his babies, probably starting in two years and nine months. You won't mind being a grandmother at thirty eight will you?" "You evil little girl. I'll 'grandmother' you! Get in here and peel these potatoes." "Yes, Granny." "Try that on your dad, he might appreciate it more than I do. If you're really that impatient, then I hope you're not TOO impatient. No accidents between now and when you're at least sixteen, please, honey. That would be bad." "My period should start in just over a week. I'll be going on the pill then. I do intend to take them properly because I know I'm not ready to be a mother yet." Mom said, "Yes, that's right: you're not ready. You also said your period 'should' start. I'm guessing that means you are playing dangerous games. Your impatience will hurt your baby's life if you're too young to raise him or her properly. You have to control yourself better, sweetie, no matter how good it feels now. You're not supposed to be having sex at all, but if you do for God's sake - and your baby's sake - use protection until you're old enough." "Umm, yes Mom. Sorry." "Good. You'll be a wonderful mother one day, but it's not yet. -- "And now for you, Mark! Don't think I've forgotten you. I'm even less impressed by your misbehavior. You are mostly to blame for this, and you better pull up your socks. Your father and I will be extremely unhappy if your stupidity lands us all in trouble in a few months." #1: #2: #1: #2: Long story short, I 'bent over and took it'. I'll skip the details. Carol and I promised to be good. Julia told Carol, "You can spend time with me, sweetie. I'll take your edge off as often as you want." Which did absolutely nothing for me. Mom must have seen my expression because she said, "For goodness sake, Mark, they'll give you blowjobs ten times a day if you want them to. Most guys would kill for the setup you've got, so stop feeling sorry for yourself." Mom's argument had some merit - perhaps more than "some" - so I decided to cheer up. Time to change the subject and I had a couple of little things to follow up on. "Okay, Mom. I guess I can survive on blowjobs for a week or two." Mom said, "Actually we didn't really want you to do even that. Remember the rule about no sex included no genital contact. I'd FAR rather you got blowjobs than got Carol pregnant, but if you can please try to survive on cold showers instead. Go for a run with Donna or something. On second thought, you'd better not take Donna, with the way she's been feeling about you recently. Everyone in this family needs more cold showers. Even I'm getting affected from the atmosphere around the house these days." It was DEFINITELY time to change the subject! "Okay, okay. Please, no more information. I was going to say that I'm booked in at the DMV tomorrow afternoon. I'll skip the last couple of classes and go to the DMV. Dad's meeting me there. All going well, I'll have my license about the time school lets out tomorrow." One of the amusing consequences of being an apparent genius is that I can tell Mom I'm skipping classes and it goes completely without comment. Everyone was pleased and congratulated me. Prematurely again, but I put up with their votes of confidence. Julia said, "Great. You can come over and pick up the car in the evening. I know Dad wants to talk with you about your business idea anyway. Dad will also make you take him for a drive before you're allowed to drive me. He's very protective that way. You'll get another safety lecture too. Make sure you don't start the car until everyone's seatbelt is on, as Dad's bound to try to trap you with that." Donna said, "I've got most of the money already. From that thing I did that I am never, ever going to do ever again." Donna was looking at Mom when she said that. "The guy who owes me $600 hasn't paid yet though." Mom said, "I'll call him after dinner. I gave him four days, which is until about 10am on Wednesday, but I'll give him a halfway reminder anyway." Donna continued, "So I should have all the money very soon. Can you not buy a car until then please. I'd really like to give all of it to you in one lump because that'll be more money than I've ever seen, and it'll be so cool to give it to you." Which was wonderfully unselfish of her. When I'd been her age, and a few other ages too, if I'd had more money than I'd ever seen before in my hand, I would've been very reluctant to part with it. Not only wasn't Donna reluctant, she was looking forward to it. I had an idea for what I wanted to do with that money and it wasn't to buy a car, so I said, "Donna, if it's okay with you I want to do something just a little different with that money. I think Julia and I can share her car quite easily. We'll start off doing that anyway, and see how it goes. Instead I want to use that money to buy a different form of transportation. Not a car, but something else. Is that okay with you?" "What do you want to buy?" I could see that Donna wasn't the only person interested in that question. "I want to keep it secret for now. Sorry about that, but I'm sure you'll be happy. It'll probably be a few weeks, maybe even a few months, but hopefully not too long. Please? I really want to do it my way" Donna didn't look happy at this development. Mom said, "Donna, if you give Mark a gift of money, it's up to him how he spends it. If he's found something he'd prefer more than a car then YOU should be happier because he's happier." Donna begrudgingly gave in, "I guess so. But waiting months is so long." All of us tried to cheer Donna up, but she wouldn't get any happier than indicated by her "I guess so." I felt bad because I'd screwed things up. Even if I bought a car now she wouldn't be as happy about it as she would have been without my opening my mouth. And I didn't want to buy a cheap car. I wanted to buy a good, reliable car with the casino money, and use this money to buy a horse for Donna once we had the new house because it should have a large enough property to hold a horse. After another couple of minutes of unsuccessfully trying to cheer Donna up, Julia whispered to me, "Change the subject." I had another subject I wanted to ask about, so I asked, "Carol. When we were talking in your room you mentioned something about a guy who sits behind you in class that you wanted me to kill." Carol and Mom were side by side preparing dinner, and it was Mom that first answered, "Oh?" I guess that'd gotten her attention. Hopefully it'd been dramatic enough to get Donna's attention too. Carol said, "Relax, Mom. Killing him would only be as a last resort. It's just a guy who keeps pulling my hair, bumping into me and that sort of thing. He just does it most days and it annoys me a lot. He won't stop." #2: Julia said, "I can help you with this. There's no need to kill the boy yet. For years every boy I've met has been larger than me so I've learned some very good verbal put-downs. The ones I told you when we were shopping aren't harsh enough for this guy, so I'll teach you some more. Don't worry, taking care of a 13-year old boy should be easy. I'll tell you them when we're in bed tonight. My mom said your mom called to ask about that. You're still coming over, aren't you?" I liked what Carol did next. She looked to me for permission. Me, not Mom. That was pretty cool. I, of course, looked to Mom, who said, "Sure. Nothing's changed since I talked to Vanessa. Steven or I will take you both whenever you want to leave." I suddenly remembered another topic, "Mom, I just found out today about the quality of my running race opponents. Was there a bit of a circus after the race? Because I didn't see much of one." Mom chuckled, "There certainly was. The phone was ringing off the hook. We actually left it off the hook most of Sunday, otherwise you wouldn't have gotten the fence painted. You went out with Steven for a driving lesson right after we got back from the race, remember?" "Yes." "That was a smart move for you two because I spent the next few hours mostly on the phone. Me and Donna anyway, as half the time it was her friends calling her to talk about it. Remember that I had a big stack of messages for you when you got back, and you told me to discard them?" I nodded "I'd guessed you wouldn't be interested, but after that I was able to make the phone conversations MUCH shorter. Your being a minor meant I could put my foot down heavily and they knew it. I was quite abusive to some of them when I warned them what would happen if they harassed you. I quite enjoyed myself, except for there being too much of it. They got the message that you weren't interested. Your no-show at the prize-giving helped with that too." -- Mom then added, "You know, I'm suddenly in the mood to call the guy that owes Donna the $600. I think I'll do that now. Hopefully I'll interrupt his dinner." Mom made the call, and we all got to hear it. We could easily tell that it was his wife that answered the phone. Mom soon found out that Mrs. Welcher had no idea about the $600 betting loss, and Mom quickly told her, making great emphasis about his trying to take advantage of a 12-year old girl by getting her to increase her bet fourfold. Mom got put on hold while there was a small family conference at the other end. After a couple of minutes the woman told Mom a few things, then they hung up. Mom said, "He's going to an ATM, then coming here. Who wants the pleasure of taking the money out of his hand?" I sure didn't. Fortunately Donna quickly volunteered, saying, "No one likes him. It'll be fun to look at his face when he hands it over. Can I make him count it?" Mom said, "Good thinking. You should never trust gamblers." Dad came home shortly after that, which made me happy because that meant I didn't have to stay around when the sore loser arrived. I'd been thinking that I should, as a "protect the womenfolk" thing. Dad's arrival gave me a chance to ask Carol and Julia to come to my room for a chat. I wanted to start the discussion about Carol's lesbian plan. It was probably going to be a long discussion and I wanted to get as much of it as possible done before they went to Julia's. Carol asked Mom, "Can I leave the rest of the dinner preparation to you please?" "I've managed for twenty years, so I should be fine." In my room I sat on my bed, and motioned for the girls to do likewise. Before I had a chance to say anything about the meeting's purpose Carol leaned forward and unzipped my pants. That was not what you expect to happen at a meeting to discuss the girl's coming out as a lesbian! I stopped Carol, and she said, "Aww, don't you want a blowjob?" I did now! Carol must have thought that's what the 'meeting' was for: me wanting a blowjob from my two girls as per Mom's suggestion. I was tempted, but the lesbian discussion was weighing on my mind and I wanted to address it. I was also very pleased that Mom hadn't warned, "No blowjobs!" when I asked took the girls to my bedroom, because surely Mom would have leaped to the same conclusion as Carol. Her silence was almost as good as giving us permission, even though it was against the no-sex rule. But the lesbian thing was worrying me, so I said, "Sorry. I appreciate your intention, but that's not why I wanted to have this discussion. We'll do that another time. We will DEFINITELY do that another time. I wanted to come in here to talk about your coming out as a lesbian." "Oh, okay. What do you want to say?" "Um. Actually I was expecting you to do most of the talking. We need to go through all the pros and cons." "We do? Why?" "Um, so we can decide what to do?" "I thought we'd just start telling people. Why? Do you think we need to announce it in some way?" "That's not what I mean. I mean we need to decide whether you should come out at all?" "Oh. I thought we already decided that. Julia said it was a good idea, and obviously I think it is because it was my idea. I thought you agreed with it too because you didn't object when we mentioned it in my room half an hour ago." I said, "Honey, I don't even know WHY you want to do it, let alone whether I think it's a good idea or not." "Oh. Sorry. I thought I explained that when we were waiting for the car. It'll make things easier. I can hold your arm affectionately if people know I'm a lesbian. If they don't know, we can soon tell them. Julia and I will be able to be affectionate in public, including holding hands and kissing on the lips, which I'm looking forward to being able to do. It'll stop so many boys wasting my time by their trying to pick me up, and will mean more girls will try instead. And my last reason was for the future, that when you go to a college your lesbian sister can live with you and your girlfriend without people getting too suspicious. There are probably other advantages, but those are the ones that I can think of. It seems like a good idea to me." I looked at Julia. Julia is very good at understanding lots of details about things like this, so I was sure she would have some good points. All Julia said was, "I still agree it's a good idea. Nothing's changed." "You don't want to discuss any of Carol's points in detail?" Julia said, "No, they all sound fine to me. I'm looking forward to being affectionate with Carol in public too. That will be nice. The Principal is going to have a fit though. The school tolerates some kissing, so it's an established precedent. They won't be able to object to our kissing because it illegal to discriminate against lesbians. If they suddenly started trying to stop kissing totally it'd obviously be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, not that lesbians have nuts, haha. Our parents certainly won't give the school permission to try to stop us. Quite the reverse, since our parents will defend us. Plus this whole thing involves you and your family, which the school is already in legal trouble with, so I think they'll tread very carefully." I didn't like the idea of another battle, and the Principal has been a good guy recently, so I suggested, "Maybe you girls shouldn't be very affectionate at school. Maybe we should keep it low key there?" Julia said, "School is where we should be the MOST affectionate. That's where most of Carol's reasons apply, and where we want as many people as possible to see it, and for them to be strongly convinced. Also, nearly all our time in public is at the school. If you excluded that, there'd be almost no other public time left. Carol HAS to be a lesbian at school, or the whole idea becomes ineffective and worthless. Don't worry about the Principal. He won't have a chance and he'll know it. We've got the rest of this year, and another whole year at this school. Getting the benefits from all of Carol's reasons for that long more than justifies a short-lived skirmish." So much for my concerns for the Principal. I still wasn't comfortable though. I was still struggling to find arguments against it when Julia said, "I don't understand why you are so hesitant. It seems like a very straightforward, good idea to me. It'll easily achieve all the objectives Carol listed, plus you think we're hot when were kissing each other so you should enjoy yourself." I tried, "I'm not sure it'll reduce the time Carol wastes with boys. Some guys will get turned on that she's a lesbian and will try to chase her." Julia answered, "That's probably true, guys being the illogical creatures they are." I started objecting, but Julia answered me before I had a chance to speak. "Come on, Mark! By your own admission MORE guys will chase Carol when they believe she's a lesbian, but being a lesbian means she doesn't want boys, so their actions are as illogical as it's possible to get!" -- Julia paused, to give me time to refute her, or perhaps to enjoy her victory, then she continued, "Carol will suffer some increased attention, but she can quickly stop that. If a guy makes a pass at Carol she just answers very loudly, 'You've got to be joking! You've got the reputation of being useless with girls. I've got a girlfriend who can pleasure me better with her little finger than all the stories say about you. Her little finger's probably bigger than your dick too.' By the time she's loudly announced a few put-downs like that, guys will be afraid to go near her." Just imagining her saying that killed every sexy feeling I had! Carol had a good laugh though, then said, "That's SO much better than what I was thinking of saying. I was just going to tell them I was a lesbian. Mine's totally lame next to yours. Yours is wicked!" Julia said, "Yeah. You're a lovely person but you're a bit too passive. I'll teach you some good techniques for putting guys down. Loudly ridiculing their penis is always a favorite. Start with a polite refusal, but be ready to ramp it up. Just make sure you shame them rather than anger them, and you do it very loudly if they don't get the message fast enough. I'll talk with you more about that tonight." Julia turned to me. "So, Mark, there might be a few hassles but it'll amount to little, and it'll save us more hassles in the long run. Saving the time guys waste is the least of Carol's points. Most guys are a minor nuisance that can be got rid of without even breaking stride. Don't worry about that point of Carol's. It's not important." I thought through Carol's points again: "She can hold my arm easier." Probably true, or she could hold Julia's instead. "Carol and Julia could be affectionate in public." Just try to stop them! I had no doubt Julia would overdo the PDAs. "Reduce boy pickups, increase girl pickups." The boys had been dealt with, but there was a problem with the girls. I asked, "Why do you want more girls to pick you up, Carol? I thought you were happy with Julia?" Both Carol and Julia laughed. That was never a good sign. Julia answered first, "They're not for her; they're for you." "But they'll be lesbians. That's the same amount of illogic as boys chasing Carol because she's a lesbian." "Some might be hard-core lesbians, but the majority will be bi." "But how could Carol tell? She could waste a lot of time of a girl who turns out to be a lesbian." Both Carol and Julia laughed. You know what that means by now. Julia said, "One possibility that might just work would be to ask, 'What do you think of my brother?' The girls whose legs shake and start panting are probably not hard-core lesbians." Carol said, "My idea was to ask, 'Would you like to meet my brother?' Any that knocked me over in their rush probably wouldn't be hard-core lesbians, haha." Julia said, "Very good, sweetie. I see we're on the same wavelength. Mark, it's easy. Imagine a girl approaches Carol and makes a pass of some sort. Asks Carol on any sort of date, to the movies or whatever. All Carol has to say is, 'I have to meet my brother first. Would you like to come and meet him?' Within ten seconds of the girl first making a pass at Carol, Carol will know whether she's lesbian or bi. I wouldn't be surprised if purely straight girls also make passes at Carol as a way of getting to meet you." Carol laughed at that, saying, "I think I might be a busy girl. My love-life is going to get very strange: straight, bi and lesbian girls, my brother and possibly even my sister in a year or so. What a strange life!" Julia said, "Yeah. You should probably give your vibrator to Donna. You're not going to need it and she's going to be desperate as a result of all the sex going on around her, the poor girl." Carol and Julia joked around a bit more, until I interrupted with possible problem. "I just thought of a problem. You're intending to ask the girls that make passes at Carol..." Julia interrupted with, "Me too." "Pardon?" Julia explained. "Girls will be making passes at Carol AND me. I hope they will at me. It'll be very bad for my ego if no one desires me. How would I live with the shame? I'd probably need LOTS of reassurance that I'm still sexually attractive, haha." "Why will girls be making passes at you? I thought the idea was for them to make passes at Carol." Julia explained, "We don't care who they make their pass at because they're all going to be passed onto you. It's not as if Carol and I will be in a competition or anything; not the way two macho boys probably would. We don't care, we're just serving you. So what was the problem you thought of?" "What if when Carol says, 'Do you want to meet my brother', or whatever she says, what happens if they don't know who her brother is?" Julia said, "I guess it's possible that they may not know of our relationship to you. That's trivially easy to fix though. Carol will just say, 'Do you want to meet my brother, Egg?' and I'll say, 'Do you want to meet my boyfriend, Egg?' That'll do it." "Hang on. I don't want anyone who'll make a pass at you, Julia. We've discussed this before. I don't want any guys; only girls." Julia said, "Sure. Obviously I'll tell the guys that I'm not interested. I'll get rid of the guys and only introduce you to the girls. Same as Carol will be doing." "Why will any girls be making passes at you?" "Because I'm good looking! Please tell me you at least think I'm pretty?" "Of course you are! You're beautiful..." Julia interrupted, "Ahh. I think I understand. Mark, I don't think you've realized something. When Carol declares that she's a lesbian, and starts kissing me in public, what will that make me?" "Huh? Oh! You'll be bi. I missed that. That was stupid of me." "You were just focused on Carol. When Carol comes out as a lesbian, I'll be coming out as a bi. We'll both get girls making passes at us, which we'll pass on to you. We'll both get some boys chasing us too, but we'll turn those down as we do now." "You get guys making passes at you? Even now that you're going out with me?" "Sure. It's a bit of a nuisance but no big deal. That's what guys do and we can't stop them trying." "It just took me by surprise because I haven't seen any guy try to hit on you since we started going out." Julia said, "It still happens. I guess not in the classes we share because I've made it VERY clear we're together. Always sitting next to you, holding your arm, and looking lovingly into your eyes." I laughed, "Don't worry about it. I know you're loyal to me. Boy oh boy do I know that! I saw that guy try to pick up Carol at lunch and it didn't worry me. Which is actually a bit surprising now that I think about it. I wasn't jealous or angry at all. That's a bit weird." Julia said, "How would you have felt if he'd put his arm around Carol's shoulder?" "That would've done it! Angry then for sure." "So I think your emotions knew the guy was meaningless." "Yeah. I had no hint of jealousy at all. I know you and Carol are both super-loyal. And I haven't forgotten that you're going to be bringing me girls, so it'd be completely illogical for me to get upset if a guy tries to hit on either of you. And, as we all know, guys are hardly ever illogical." Julia laughed, "Only about sex, which is what they're thinking of almost every waking moment, and probably most of their sleeping ones too." Carol added, "Don't forget that they're also completely illogical when it comes to clothes." It'd be best not get into that discussion, so I quickly moved on, "Before I got distracted by my stupidly not realizing that Julia would be coming out as a bisexual, I was going to ask about a problem. You said that any girls that make passes to either of you will be asked if they want to meet Egg. What happens if they don't know who Egg is? They're going to think you're weird because..." I stopped talking because both girls were chuckling. When I stopped Julia said, "Mark, half the school knows who Egg is." "What about the other half then?" "Within a couple of weeks of the trial ending, ALL the school will know. All of the high- and middle-schools anyway. I'm assuming you're not too interested in elementary-school girls." I exclaimed, "I think not!" Carol asked, "It's your choice, of course, but why are you so emphatic? 5th graders are only one year younger than Donna, and many of them are better developed. I had a girl in my 5th grade class who was a gorgeous blond with a figure many adult women would've loved to have. She's a fat cow now, but that's unrelated. Back then she was gorgeous. The girl you called 'cutie' this afternoon looked like a 5th grader..." Julia didn't know about any "cutie", so we had a digression to explain about Donna's little troop of girls who came to see us off. By the time that explanation was over with, I had worked out a few things for myself. I said, "I've had some thoughts about young girls: The purpose of me playing around is to learn more about females so I can protect myself better in the future. Playing with 10- or 11-year old girls doesn't teach me anything useful. Even though Donna's little group would be no good for teaching me anything useful, they still might be fun, and I'd regret not finding that out. Spending a whole day with all of them might be a bit much to take, but for an hour or so they'd probably be fun. I liked that they competed with each other, were hanging on my every word, and were so eager to please me. I imagine that if we met them one day and I complimented one of the girls for having a short miniskirt, then the next time we saw them every one of them would be wearing her shortest skirt. That sort of thing could be fun to play with. -- "I had some thoughts about Donna too. She's a nice girl, of course, and tries hard most of the time, but she's barely old enough for a relationship. In fact, she isn't old enough. I have to be too careful with how I treat her and too careful of what I say. She has bursts of immaturity, like over how I spend the money she's giving me. I want to use it to buy her a horse when we have a new house, but she's gone all petulant over my not buying a car now." There was a digression to discuss horses, which I'll skip, except to say that both my girls thought I was wonderful, and that Donna would love it for a year or two, when she'd probably develop other interests, which reduced my enthusiasm for the idea. Julia said, "I'm impressed that our propaganda about protecting you from womanly wiles has worked so well that you're claiming it's the reason for your playing around. It's less than half of the total reason. We also want you to learn to be more commanding which the younger girls would be ideal for, we want you to have plenty of fun for its own sake, and to learn not to take girls too seriously. If you want to play with Donna's friends, go ahead and play with them. I imagine that group will rapidly get larger too, when other girls learn the group is meeting with you, so you'll have plenty of them to play with. I agree with what you said about Donna, based on what I know about her so far. She's still a little too young, but she'll mature quickly, especially with our providing her with so much experience and examples. -- "But all of that doesn't matter. You don't need justifications and explanations, Mark. If you want to do something, do it. If you get tired of something, stop doing it. You're too passive so you should start taking what you want, especially when it's already being offered to you. You were depressed about not having sex for a few days and your mother had to remind you that you can get blowjobs whenever you want them. That's not the sort of thing mothers normally have to remind their teenage sons! Why didn't you remember that yourself?" I was struggling to think of a non-pathetic answer, but I couldn't. They were all pathetic. Julia said, "Never mind. I'm sure you know why. I'll point out something else: if you can get a blowjob, then why not an ass fuck? If you and Carol are going to break the no-sex rule, you might as well break it better than just a blowjob. Your mother shouldn't object too much as both activities keep Carol safe from pregnancy." Julia let me contemplate ass-fucking for a few seconds, then she carried on, "I can't understand how you can be horny and upset about it. Being depressed about something that is under your control is unnecessary and silly. -- "On the topic of Donna. You're not happy with Donna over her wanting you to buy a car now. That little mess is mostly your fault. You asked her, knowing she's a very impatient person, whether it was okay for you to wait several weeks or months before spending the money. When she said she didn't want you to wait, you essentially told her, 'Too bad, you have to.' You knew before you started that conversation what you wanted to use the money for, and roughly when, so why ask her whether she minded waiting? My question isn't rhetorical by the way. Why did you ask her whether she minded waiting?" "Um. I don't know. I didn't think about it." "I'll tell you why: You asked because you think asking is more polite. You like being polite and inoffensive." "Yes, being polite is good. It's the way I've been brought up and I think it's right. I'd much rather be polite than impolite." "So imagine it's early tomorrow morning, Carol and I are at my place and you're in this house. For some reason you want Donna to get out of bed an hour earlier than she normally would. Assuming you've already woken her up, would you then politely ask her to get out of bed?" "Of course. And apologize for waking her up too." "What if the house was on fire and you only had seconds to get her out of the room before the burning ceiling fell in. Would you apologize for waking her and ask her politely to get out of bed?" "No, of course not. It's an emergency." "So sometimes being polite is the right thing to do, and sometimes it's not. Let's say there wasn't an emergency. Instead of a fire there's a beautiful meteor shower that you know she'd love to see. If you are polite it'll take longer and she could miss the whole thing. But if you're impolite she'll see something she'll love. Would you be impolite?" "If she'll love it, then yes, I'd be impolite." "So it can be a good idea to be impolite if the person is happier as a result of it. It can also be a bad idea to be polite if they're unhappy as a result, as Donna would be if you woke her up to see the meteors but spent so long apologizing for waking her that she missed them. There was no point in politely offering Donna a choice over your timing for spending her gift, when you were going to reject the choice she was obviously going to make. That was equivalent to waking her for the meteors but wasting all the time being polite. The only thing you achieved was to annoy her, so you shouldn't have offered her a choice. You should have TOLD her what was going to happen, even though that seems less polite." I said, "I understand what you're saying, and I certainly understand that offering her a choice the way I did was stupid. I didn't think that through at the time, but I still don't know what I should've told her. I think that's partly why I asked her: because I didn't know what to say." Julia said, "I don't know either, but that's not the point. You shouldn't have approached this situation politely. You knew what result you wanted - buying her a horse in two to three months - so why give her a choice? That doesn't help you at all." "But I didn't know what to say. That's why I messed up." "That's NOT why you messed up. If you didn't know what to do you shouldn't have done anything. There wasn't any need to do anything, no one was pushing you for a decision or action. Donna was asking you NOT to buy a car yet because she didn't have all the money together. All you had to say was, 'Okay Donna, I won't do anything yet.' Then take the time to think about it yourself, or ask Carol or me for advice. You messed up because you floundered around being polite with no idea why. -- "Ahh! I just figured out what you should've done. You didn't need to DO anything! You just needed to gain time because when the time is up she'd have been happy with the horse. -- "You should've said nothing until she gave you the money. Then you should have thanked her for the gift, and told her that you know exactly what you want and that you are going to start looking for it. She would be extremely happy. In a few days you could tell her that you've ordered your gift, and that it's going to take three months to arrive. You could've made a big deal out of it having to be specially ordered and she would've been impressed that there was something you wanted to buy with her money that you'd wait three months for. She'd be very excited to find out what it was, and the three months would build anticipation and excitement in her, especially if you fed her the right lines from time to time. When you eventually said the gift was here, and introduced her to her horse, she would've been a very happy girl. You had a great opportunity to make Donna very happy and to build her excitement for several months, instead she's going to be unhappy all that time because you decided to be polite rather than effective. Do you agree with what I have been saying?" "I certainly do: I screwed up. Your plan would've worked far better." "I can't think of a way to make Donna properly happy now, and I'm disinclined to try. It might be a good lesson for you to have this problem hang around two or three months, that way you won't forget it. Remember that it was caused by your not being decisive. By your floundering around and being polite simply because you couldn't think of anything else to do. In a nutshell: you were weak. You should identify what you want, work out a way of getting it, and then get it. That's all there is to it. If you prefer to be polite when you get something, then by all means be polite, just so long as it is still a way of getting what you want. You were just pointlessly polite to Donna, without it getting anything for you. Got it?" "Yes, thank you. Your explanation is very good. You're much better at this stuff than I am. MUCH better! I'm too weak, whereas you're very impressive." Julia disagreed, "I'm not as impressive as you think. I was studying a leadership textbook immediately before I came here. All that stuff about politely waking Donna if there was a fire or a meteor shower, that's me paraphrasing about three pages of the book. It was talking about when a manager should, or should not, take the time to build a consensus with his staff for a decision, but it translated across to your situation with Donna easily. -- "Now that I think about it, I think these leadership books are so important for you that it doesn't make sense for me to read them and then try to pass the lessons on to you. I'm going to give you the books directly and ask you to study them yourself. You're exceptionally good at studying and I'm sure these would be well worth your time." I said, "If that's what you think then that's what we'll do. Give them to me whenever you want." After a pause to recover our wits, Julia said, "Where were we before we branched off into giving Mark his lesson?" I said, "We were talking about how to handle young girls, and that came from discussing you and Carol getting picked up by girls and passing them on to me." Julia said, "Right, I remember now. Before we restart, I should have mentioned a couple of issues to do with Carol and me sending girls to you. First, we don't want dozens of girls plaguing you as they'd eat up too much of your valuable time. We need a system so that they have to come through Carol or me to get to you. That's regardless of which of the three of us they make a pass at first. The second issue is that we need a rating system so we can pick the best girls from out of all the applicants." I remembered the idea I'd had for the girl to put her picture in my locker, and I quite proudly suggested it, "Julia, this afternoon at school, in one of my 11th grade classes, a girl came on to me. She was quite attractive but I didn't have time to talk with her, so I told her to put her details on the back of a photograph and slip it into my locker. Maybe we can do that for all the girls, that way it'll be easier for you to keep track of them." "I've already been thinking along those lines. We'll have to get the school to enlarge and secure the mailbox they have for you, rather than use your locker, but otherwise pretty much as you said." "Why change my mailbox?" "There are a number of reasons, but the main one is that the girls' packages won't fit through your locker's slots. The slot needs to be at least nine inches wide by half an inch high." "Um, what does 'packages' mean?" "We'll be asking each girl to provide us with a standardized package of information about her, so we can evaluate her. A manila folder with her name on the top, some 8" x 12" photographs: one a full-face shot, another a full-length body, and up to two additional photographs of her choosing. All the usual data fields: name, age, grade, phone number, address, ethnicity, height, weight, etc. Then stuff to help us get to know the girl, like her latest exam results, sexual experience and preferences, through to an optional free-form essay, no more than two pages, typed, double-spaced. Also areas for us to write our comments and scores, particularly if we know the girl already. All the sort of stuff you'd expect." I had a suspicion that I had to check on, "The full-length body shot. Would that be in a bikini by any chance?" Julia said, "Or nude or anything similar that displayed their bodies well. That's up to them. I was going to ask you what your opinion of pornography was? #4: "In what respect?" Julia said, "We want the applicants to have opportunities to express their personalities so we can judge them on more than just looks. I'm planning on saying that they can include up to two additional photographs of their choosing. How would you feel if a girl included a pornographic photograph of herself? If pornography turns you off we can warn the girls not to do it, otherwise I'm sure that quite a few of them will." #4: #1: I said, "I don't mind naked pictures, that's fine. Might be quite fun." Julia corrected me, "I'm not talking about nudes. I'm talking about pornographic pictures." "I thought that meant naked pictures. What are you talking about?" "Like a picture of a girl being fucked by her dog." "NO WAY! No girl could possibly think of doing anything like that!" #4: <{Chuckle}.> Julia said, "It happens. You might get extreme photographs like that from girls who are desperate to catch your attention. Most will probably just be downloads, but some might be real. I couldn't guess how many real ones you'll get, I don't mix with that crowd." "Thank goodness for that!" | #4: Julia asked, "So I'm guessing you don't want pornographic pictures then?" "No way. That's gross. I couldn't touch a girl that does that with a dog!" "Okay." #4: #2: #4: #1: #4: I said, "I've reconsidered that. I want the girls to be completely unrestrained. They can submit whatever they want. If a girl does those things, I want to know about it so I can burn her file and know to run for my life whenever I see her." Julia said, "Ahh. That's smart. I never thought of that." #4: There was a knock on the door, and Dad said, "Dinner's up, kids." We started getting off the bed. Trying hard to force the image of the dog from my imagination, I said, "Julia, will that whole 'Job Application' system work? I can't imagine many girls will bother going to all that trouble." "Initially you're correct. We'll package you up properly, then we'll handpick the first few girls, and after you've performed your bedroom magic on them, the advertising will fly. That'll get the ball rolling, and from there it'll be a chain reaction. Shall we have dinner now?" On the way to the kitchen Julia asked, "While I remember, how many sit-ups can you do in a row?" "I have no idea. Why?" "Just a little advertising idea I had. I'm hoping it'll be like your running, that you'll be able to go forever. Can you find out for me please?" "After dinner?" "That'd be good. You don't think I'd stand between you and your dinner, do you?" "Smart girl." ------- Chapter 73: Julia Plans to Offer Herself as a Sex-Prize to Every Boy at School Monday, April 18, 2005 (Continued) Dinner was very welcome as I had forgotten to have my usual post-school snack. I had just established a good rhythm when Carol told Mom and Dad, "Oh, by the way, tomorrow at school I'm going start telling people that I'm a lesbian and Julia is my bi lover. We'll start holding hands and kissing in public." #1: #4: #2: #4: It would be fair to say that Carol's announcement stimulated some lively discussion. I was pleasantly surprised that it was an adult discussion. I don't mean because of the subject matter; I mean that all us kids were treated maturely. Even Donna had her opinion asked for. Donna thought, "It's cool." (Okay, maybe the discussion wasn't entirely adult.) Naturally, my opinion was also requested, as it should be when one of a man's wives plans to come out as a lesbian. We let #4 do the honors, and he couldn't help showing off a little by saying, "Initially I was quite doubtful, even negative, but then I realized that I was being selfish. The girls are each deciding how they wish to present themselves to the world. This really isn't anyone's decision but theirs. The consequences will be almost entirely theirs alone, so the responsibilities and choices are too. I haven't been able to suggest any issues that they haven't already considered, so my role is over. I'll support them in their decision." Everyone around the table was very surprised. (Donna probably didn't understand most of what I'd said, but she knew I'd stopped eating to talk for a long time, which would've surprised her, thereby making this paragraph's opening sentence technically correct.) Julia was so proud she wanted to burst. She jumped into my lap and hugged me fiercely, loudly - for the first half of her sentence - proclaiming, "You're going to get SO lucky, umm, as soon as we're allowed. I had no idea you understood our decision that way. I didn't, but I should have because Mom has been teaching me for years. That you did is awesome. I can't wait to tell Mom what you said. She'll be very proud of you." #2: Mom and Dad had their discussion range curtailed. They - rightly in my new opinion - restricted their discussion to raising issues that the girls should consider. I also tried to find issues that were negative. All jokes aside, I would have preferred the girls not to do this. It seemed to be unnecessary and it might give them a bad reputation. I raised "bad reputations" as an issue, and it lasted about as long as I expected. Julia was asked what her parents thought, to which she answered, "They don't know yet, but they'll do exactly as Mark said and you guys are doing: they'll help us examine the issues and then they'll support our decision. That's what my family does. Sometimes helping us pick up the pieces afterward when we get it wrong, but that's life." Carol got in a good dig at Mom, saying with humor, "Mom won't let me have babies for at least two years, so I might as well be a lesbian." Julia called her parents, telling them about the new development to give them time to think about before the girls got there, 9pm was agreed for that. Carol was eager to publicly come out immediately, and it wasn't a very complex issue so Vanessa and Prof should have enough time to reach a conclusion tonight. Carol and Julia might be doing some heavy kissing at school tomorrow. Dinner got back to normal, and the other daily events got touched on: I told Dad about Mr. Millane, my DMV appointment was mentioned, Julia told my family that her father would get me to drive him around before I was allowed to drive anyone else. Before Julia could remind me - because she was clearly about to - I told her I wouldn't forget the "seatbelts before ignition" rule. After dinner I started helping with the dishes, but Carol chased me out, saying that, "I can't cook a roast chicken, but I can dry dishes. Didn't Julia want you to do something?" It took a couple of seconds, but I remembered the sit-ups. It was a bizarre request, but I did what I always do with Julia's bizarre requests. Julia said, "Before you start, we need to get the right clothes for you. Let's check out your room." I had no idea why doing sit-ups needed "the right clothes", but out of habit I complied with Julia's request. It turned out that "the right clothes" meant no shirt and the smallest pair of shorts I had, making it a "topless bizarre request". The no shirt requirement was easily taken care of. Julia expressed considerable dismay at my smallest pair of shorts. Apparently they were all terrible. New shorts got added to 'my' shopping list for Saturday. Julia unhesitatingly went through my underwear drawer. Having experienced exactly the same, totally unashamed invasions of my privacy when Carol and Mom were helping me prepare for my first date with Julia, I was not at all surprised. Embarrassed, but not surprised. "Ahh," said Julia, "these are good enough. Lose your pants and put these on." Clearly privacy was not high on the list of Julia's current mindset. I changed into my too-small, gray underwear. "On the floor and give me a few sit-ups." -- A few seconds later, "Excellent. Perfect in fact. Okay, stand up, thanks." I did so, unfortunately while Julia added, "Let's go to the living room." "Ahh, honey. I'm not really dressed to be walking around the house. This underwear isn't exactly modest." "Get used to it. You're going to be dressed this way in the middle of school in a couple of days." Walking through the house was surprisingly easy after that. Walking down the hallway Julia asked, "Do you have a metronome?" "What's a metronome?" "It's used to keep to a fixed beat when you play a piano." "It'll be next to the piano then." I couldn't resist that. And they think guys aren't logical! (The Anderson home isn't large enough to swing a cat in - another expression of Mom's that I doubt she's ever done - so the idea that we'd have a piano tucked in a corner somewhere is absurd.) When I walked into the kitchen on the way to the living room, eyebrows got raised. Mom exclaimed, "When on Earth did your body change so much?" "Julia runs me ragged and works me to the bone." "Like heck I do! He's looked like this all the time I've known him. You didn't know, Felicity?" "No indeed. How did you get so athletic looking, Mark?" "I haven't been doing an extraordinary amount of exercise. I think it might be a combination of soccer, a messed up adolescence that my body's just starting to get straightened out, and good genes from Dad." "I doubt it," stated Mom. "Your shoulders are too wide and your waist is definitely too narrow. That underwear certainly show your body off much better than the clothes you normally wear. Is there a reason you're walking around undressed?" Julia answered, "To show off his body. I'm getting him to do some sit-ups in the living room and I want to see how good he looks." "Me too," agreed Donna. And to my dismay, Mom also said, "Me too. Lead on." The females of the family abandoned the kitchen, leaving the dishes unwashed. They followed Julia and me into the living room. Dad whistled in surprised admiration when I walked into the room, and I had the same conversation with him, with him also not believing my explanation. I replied, "If it's not that, then it's something to do with my suddenly getting smarter and more coordinated." I'd been reasonably sure that was the case, but had preferred not to mention it. Everyone's disbelieving my innocuous explanation sort of forced me to tell them what I really thought. Julia was eager for me to get on with my sit-ups. She broke into my vaguely worded explanation to say, "Mark's going to do some sit-ups. Mark, if you would be so kind. I need a watch with a second hand, who has one of those?" My watch didn't, so I lay down while Dad handed his watch to Julia, who said, "I want to find the highest fixed rate that you can hold forever. Understand?" I answered, "Sure." Mom and Dad looked confused. They didn't know anything about any "forever". Donna wasn't looking confused though, she was too busy looking intently. Can you guess at what? Julia told me, "I'll let you find your own rate. When you think you've got a rate you can hold, let me know and I'll pretend to be a metronome." I had no idea what my sit-up ability was like, so I started at what felt like a slow rate. I'd done three when Donna volunteered to hold my ankles. After several more Julia said, "About eight seconds per sit-up. How's it feel?" "Fine, but I want to go for longer before I change my rate." After another minute Mom said, "Donna, try not to drool too much onto Mark's leg." She hadn't actually drooled yet, but some was hanging off her lip. Donna wiped it off. After a few more sit-ups, Julia said, "I'm not being biased when I say Mark's body is impressive, am I?" Everybody agreed that my body was VERY impressive. The sit-ups were showing it off very well, especially in the underwear I was wearing. Dad's comment was the one I took the most notice of, "I can't recall ever seeing a body like Mark's. Most of the athletes I've seen have been more bulked up, but for someone so slim his body looks superb. His waist is almost too narrow, and his muscle definition is impressive too." Julia said, "Is it just me, or is his waist hot?" All the females expressed the same opinion. Carol asked, "Mom, even you think his waist is hot?" Mom said, "If I ignore that he's my son, then the female parts of my brain are salivating, just like Donna. His waist is perversely sexy. It's so narrow that it looks like an hourglass-shaped woman's waist. It's feminine, but on a body that's obviously masculine, even with so little body hair. Mark's waist is a real bell-ringer." I had no interest whatsoever in Mom's bells. I strongly preferred to believe that she didn't have any, let alone that they could clang. I changed the subject, "I'm going to speed up quite a lot. This seems too easy." Donna said, "I can't see his waist very well from here, but I like what I'm looking at." I've previously mentioned that Donna is very direct. Now that we'd had a family discussion about her wanting to have sex with me, and it was an openly acknowledged fact, Donna's directness extended all the way to shamelessness. Julia agreed that part of me was very good too. Happily neither Mom nor Dad commented. Mom said, "I should get back to the dishes. I don't think Mark needs you to hold his ankles Donna, so you should come finish the drying." "Aww." Carol said, "I'll do them for you, Donna. You can stay here and perv at my husband. It's the closest you're going to get to it for quite a while and I'd hate to rob you of your fun." "Thanks," said Donna appreciatively, without stopping her perving. Mom and Carol wandered off, chuckling. Dad stayed and asked, "Seriously, how did you get your body into that condition, Mark? I haven't seen it since last summer, I guess, and I've never seen you working out. A bit of soccer and some goofing off with Donna is all." "I haven't been exercising. No more than you've seen anyway. Although being in bed with Julia is good exercise because she never gives me a moment's peace. For a little girl, she had BIG demands." "{Raspberry}," from Julia. I continued, "I have half a theory that I was going to talk with my sensei about on Thursday evening to see if he could confirm it. Remember Sensei predicting that my arm would heal faster that the doctors expected?" Dad nodded. "Faster healing is mentioned in Aikido books. I think aikidoka - that's the Japanese word for people who do Aikido - are naturally fitter somehow. Not because they work out, but because of the mental effects of ki. That's the mental energy that Aikido develops. The books that talk about Aikido healing all describe it as a mental activity. My hypothesis is that healing is similar to having good muscles, strong bones, and that sort of thing. That's why my body looks so good, because it's highly 'healed'. It's certainly not because I deserve it, as I spend most of my time doing schoolwork." Julia stated, "But you looked that good when I first saw you naked, and that was before you started Aikido." "Yes, but I think I discovered that aspect of Aikido before I went to the first class. Like Donna knew how to punch before she went to Karate." Dad thought about it for a few seconds, then said, "If it's an Aikido thing, every serious athlete would be doing it, but I've never heard of Aikido before. I wondered whether your muscles might be fake in some way - maybe they just look good - but I've seen you perform athletically and we've all heard about your bedroom performance, so that's not right either. It must be something to do with your being special, which is a pity because I'd join your Aikido club in an instant if one hour per week could make me look like you." Dad had taken a couple of steps to leave the room, when he stopped to ask, "Are you safe if I leave you here with Donna? Haha." Donna had the grace to look slightly ashamed, but she quickly recovered. Julia said, "I'll fight her off my man." Which was a ridiculous statement and Dad wandered off chuckling. I still wasn't feeling any fatigue, so I increased my rate again. Carol and Mom wandered back in again. Mom said, "Carol's done the dishes for you, Donna." Donna thoughtlessly mumbled, her mind clearly not on the conversation, "Umm, thanks." Mom added, "You should do all her dishes for a year." "Okay." We all laughed at that, which woke Donna up. It took Donna a second or two to recall the conversation, and then she quickly said, "No! That's not right. I thought you meant I should do them one night." Mom laughed, "You didn't think at all. You were too busy looking at your brother's package." "Yeah. He looks very good. He's got an awesome body." Mom agreed, "He certainly has, but why is Julia giving us this display?" Julia explained, "I had an idea a little while ago. It might take a week or two before the court case is over and we can misbehave like normal teenagers, but there's nothing to stop us from starting to advertise Mark before then. I was thinking about how to get other girls interested in Mark. He's got remarkable endurance at running and sex, so he's almost certainly got remarkable endurance at sit-ups too. If he does, and it's fast enough, then I think I'll arrange a lunchtime competition at school. Get lots of jocks and whoever else wants to join to strip down to their shorts and do sit-ups until only one person is left. The winner will get the prize. That'll be Mark of course, especially because I'll be setting a pace that will suit him. -- "If we have that competition, large numbers of girls will see Mark like this, as they've never seen him before, and will be much more interested in getting into his shorts. He looks a lot sexier and more impressive this way than he does in those terrible clothes he wears to school every day." Mom said, "It'd certainly create a lot of excited girls. Any girl seeing him looking like he does now is going to get seriously turned on. I don't really agree with your 'terrible clothes' comment though. He doesn't dress too badly." "His clothing is TOTALLY wrong! He's got no idea how to dress properly and it's a travesty to cover his body the way he does. We're going shopping on Saturday morning to get him some new outfits so he'll be ready for when the court case is over." Mom said, "That reminds me. I better call the police to find out what's happening with that. I was sure they'd want to interview everyone properly by now. I'll do that tomorrow. Is that how you're going to make Mark dress during the competition?" "Yes. He doesn't even have any normal shorts he looks good in. His whole closet is a bonfire waiting to happen. I was originally thinking that the guys could wear running shorts, but I've decided to change it so they all have to strip down to their underwear. If they refuse then they can't enter. That'll bring hundreds of girls to look." "It certainly will! How do you feel about that, Mark?" "EXACTLY as you'd expect! I'm not even comfortable dressed this way around my family. It's going to be horrendous at school. I don't like to go against Julia, but thank goodness there'll be plenty of other guys around." Julia said, "Not for long there won't, and not for most of the time. I'm sure most of them will drop out very quickly. There'll probably be only half a dozen guys that have any endurance. If the competition ends before lunchtime ends, then I intend to ask the audience whether we should keep you going for the rest of lunch. I'm sure they'll all scream yes. Just over lunchtime should be enough, but we should pick a day when the next class or two isn't very important to you. Math or Physics probably. That way if there's another guy who is very good, we can keep going until he drops out. What day would be good for you?" "Umm. Would you believe 'None'? I think schooling is very important and I shouldn't skip classes." I thought it was worth a try. "{Raspberry}. You're always skipping classes. Aren't you missing half the afternoon tomorrow to get your license? You could easily have done that after school." "I thought the DMV would be less busy then and I didn't want Dad to have to hang around too long as he has to take time off work. -- "I don't think I've got anything important scheduled for Thursday, six years from now." "Ha-ha. I'll give you one more chance, otherwise I'll pick a day. We need two or three days to advertise it properly, so pick a day after Thursday." "Next Monday, I guess. Are you sure this is a good idea?" "All my ideas are good ideas. You should know that by now." Julia was smirking, but unfortunately she was also right. -- She persisted, "I'd rather not do it on a Monday because people might forget about it over the weekend. We need plenty of guys to enter this, to make it a big event and get lots of girls interested. How's Tuesday for you? What do you have after lunch on Tuesday?" "English, which I'd rather miss than a Math or Physics class." "Tuesday it is then. I'll advertise it on Thursday, Friday and Monday. Tell all the jock coaches, spread the rumor, etc. Carol and Donna can help, but it'll mostly be a high-school event." Donna said, "That's going to be so cool! I can't wait to see that. Where are you going to do it, because I definitely want to watch?" "I was thinking on the sports field just outside the changing rooms. I want to be able to stand on a table with a megaphone and metronome to run things properly. I'll try to get one of the coaches to help. It should be a big event so we'd better be well prepared." Mom said, "It doesn't sound like a big event to me. You'll probably only get a handful of guys who want to enter. Why should they waste their lunchtime doing sit-ups? It doesn't sound like much fun, especially if you force them to strip to their shorts. You'll get a few showoffs, but not many." Julia said, "There will be a prize. I want to motivate LOTS of guys, so I'm going to be the prize. The winner gets me in his bed overnight, to do whatever he wants with." I totally lost my rhythm. Even Donna stopped looking at me, to look in shock at Julia. Mom and Carol both spoke at the same time. One said, "I don't think that's a good idea." | The other said, "Cool. I want to be a prize too." You can probably work out for yourself who said what. Julia laughed, "Mark will be the winner, Felicity. The whole point of this exercise is to make all the other girls realize that Mark will be awesome in bed. His coming second would probably still be okay in that respect, as at least the girls would have seen his body, but coming first is SO much better. I don't want to sleep with anyone else, so I'll only do this if we're sure Mark will win. -- "Carol, I'm sorry, but you can't be a prize. We only want one prize because Mark can't come both first and second at the same time." Carol said, "Make first prize a night with you AND me then. That'll definitely get the guys interested." "It CERTAINLY would! Thank you for wanting to help, but you're coming out as a lesbian tomorrow, remember? We want people to believe you're a lesbian, not bisexual, as they need to know that you cannot be interested in your brother. That was the main reason for your coming out. Plus when Mark wins, if you are part of the prize then people will put you and him together sexually in their minds. That is NOT an association we want them to make. Sorry, you can't join in." "Damn! That would have been so much fun." Mom said, "You're really willing to take that much risk?" "There's hardly any risk. You saw him out-run some of the best 10k runners in the country. What chance do high-school boys have against him? Plus I know what he's like in bed. He can go forever. I'm sure he will win if his sustainable rate is fast enough to burn off his competition." Mom nodded, and said, "You might be right. However, Mark's being sexually active has to be kept hidden until after the trial. You'll have to delay your stunt or at least delay the prize-giving." "I want to get the girls revved up ready for the trial's ending, so I'll delay the prize-giving. That's easy. It's even preferable because it gives me chances to discuss sex often." Mom didn't look too pleased at the idea, and I was curious about something, so I changed the conversation a little, "What have sit-ups got to do with sex? In bed I'm usually facing the other way, so push-ups would be better, wouldn't they?" Julia said, "No. Sit-ups test stomach muscles, and they're critical for sexual endurance." #4: Mom agreed with Julia, "Yes. Provided the guy doesn't cum too often so that he goes soft, then it's usually his stomach muscles that give out first in sustained sex." Julia said, "Exactly. Mark can go for hours in bed. Six hours one time with me. Remember the time I had to miss school?" Mom said, "You mean he was CONTINUOUS for six hours? I'd heard your session was six hours long and vigorous, but I didn't know it was continuous." "It was continuous all right. I was so stupid. I should have stopped at two hours, or even sooner. I won't make that mistake again." "He can really stay hard that long?" "He can do anything he wants." "Good grief! How many times did you orgasm?" "Dozens of times. Thirty, forty, fifty. I couldn't count. After the first dozen things got rather fuzzy." "I can imagine! Why on Earth didn't you tell Mark to stop?" "I was pig-headed and selfish. As a result Mark taught me a very good lesson. It wasn't a big deal, I just had to miss a couple of days of school. I even enjoyed the pain afterward, as it constantly reminded me how awesome Mark was." It was an opportune moment for me to change the topic; something I'd been eager to do for some time, "I'm feeling fatigue at this pace. How fast is it?" "Do a few more so I can time them." After a few more, Julia said, "About 2.5 or 3 seconds each." "Okay. I'll rest now until there's no fatigue, and restart slower than that." I lay back and rested. Donna kept holding my ankles. Maybe to stop anyone else taking over, or maybe because she thought the view was still just as good. Carol said, "Mark, do you want a drink or anything else?" "No thanks, sweetie. Except maybe some decent pants. That'd be a lot less embarrassing." Carol started heading for my room, even though I'd been joking. I didn't try to stop her though. Unfortunately Julia did, "Don't get them, Carol. Mark has to get used to looking like this. That's why I'm making him do it, not just for Donna's enjoyment." Carol stopped. She didn't even look at me for confirmation. I guess she knew who the real boss of our relationship was. Eventually we determined that about 4 seconds per sit-up seemed to be what I called optimal. It seemed to produce no fatigue. 3.5 seconds per sit-up did. Julia said, "Four seconds each means fifteen per minute. That'd be nine hundred for a full hour. That's an impressively large number. I doubt many guys could do more than a hundred. The competition should be easily over before lunchtime ends, and if not we'll just keep going, all afternoon if need be. I can't see anyone being able to clock up three thousand sit-ups without any rest breaks. Looks like we have a plan. Excellent. We'll do an hour-long test sometime before we start advertising it just to make sure, but it looks great. This will certainly get a lot of girls interested in him." Mom said, "It sure will! You're quite serious about getting him more girls? You're really going to follow through with it?" "Absolutely. It'll be a lot of fun. The only thing that worries me a little is disease. Mark will use condoms of course. If a girl becomes a favorite and starts to return frequently, we'll insist she gets tested. Mom suggested we arrange one specific doctor to do the tests for us and to email us with the results and photos of the girls so we'll know they didn't pull a switch on us. The girls will have to consent to that. Mom said that when the time comes she'll call around, pretending to be the leader of some sort of girls' group, to find a doctor who'll do what we want just from the girls' verbal consents." Typical of Julia. She'd planned ahead, thought of a problem, and had the solution ready before I'd had a clue about any of it. Julia added, "By the way, you can get dressed if you like, Mark. No one will object if you stay that way though." Donna protested, "I'll object if you get dressed." Like that was going to stop me! "Sorry, sweetie. I'm getting dressed right now. I would've thought you'd seen enough already." "Oh no, I haven't seen enough. I DEFINITELY want to see more." Too bad, I was already walking quickly to my room. "Great ass!" from Donna. "Yes, isn't it?" agreed Julia. I left the room, followed by several comments about my ass. Apparently I have "buns so tight I'd bounce off the walls." That was good to know. I'd not long returned - which was greeted by several "Boos" - when the phone rang and it was for me. It was my Sensei checking that I'd be coming on Thursday, including that I had no more surprise parties to attend. "No, no more engagements like that. My cast is off now because you were right that my arm had healed and there was no sign of any break on the X-ray." "Good. So you will start your training on Thursday?" "Yes. I'm looking forward to that. I finished the books you lent me so I'll bring them all back. I only skimmed through the parts that I thought you'd teach me better, like doing the actual techniques. I didn't find any part of the books useful unfortunately, so I guess I'll have to learn by doing. I do have some questions about the healing side of Aikido though." Sensei said, "It is called 'Kiatsu'. By all means we can talk about it, but I have another class starting shortly. Shall we talk about it after your class on Thursday?" That was fine with me. I didn't think Mom and Donna would mind waiting a few minutes, so I agreed. I was about to end the call when Sensei said, "If you can, please come to class a few minutes early as I will have a gi for you to change into." "Okay. Thanks. See you Thursday." We ended our call, and while I remembered to, I told Mom about talking to my sensei after my next class, so she and Donna might have to wait a few minutes. "I'll try and make it quick. I only really have one question anyway." "That'll be fine." I went to find the girls, and found them cleaning up after the tornado. Ostensibly anyway. In practice what had happened is that Carol had pulled out a lot of her existing clothes to make room for the new ones, which had resulted in Donna wanting to grab some of Carol's rejects. Discussion on the merits of various pieces of clothing followed, which pretty much meant progress stopped, and even went backward because Donna was pulling her clothes out to see if they matched Carol's rejects. I had a little question, while I remembered it, so I bravely faced the mortal risk of staying in the room while clothing discussions could occur. I asked, "Julia, how should I handle girls that come on to me now? There's the girl whose photo will be in my locker, presumably, plus whoever else." "With the other girls, just tell them you're too busy for two weeks and to check back with you after that. The photo girl, what's her name?" "I don't know." "Just grab her photo and we'll talk about it. At lunch if you have it by then, or when you come to my place for dinner. To get your car and talk with Dad about your business, remember?" "I remember. It's your car though, not mine." "It's your car. You're my Lord. What's mine is yours." I countered with, "And what's MINE is YOURS. So we're back to where we started." "Nope. You're getting confused with husbands and wives. You're my Lord, not my husband. There's no equality. What's mine is yours, and what's yours is yours. I'll transfer the car's ownership into your name if you argue." There's no point in arguing with Julia. Never mind all the emotional reasons, there's also the fact that I never win! I shrugged and said, "Okay, okay. I'm the Lord. I'll try to remember that. I wish I had when you ordered me to walk around the house nearly naked." "That was for your own benefit, as I'm sure you appreciate. Be a good boy or Carol and I might send all the ugly girls to you. Maybe even a few boys in wigs." "Haha. Consider me warned. I'll be a good boy, I promise." "Good. The car doesn't matter as we'll trade it soon anyway. Just as soon as you and Dad do your business." "Yes, I was thinking of..." Then I remembered (in the usual way, one of my minds reminded the speaking mind) that Donna was in the room, so going on about buying a more reliable car than I could otherwise afford was probably not a good idea. So after a small gap I continued with, "YOU getting a more reliable car." I was pointing across my chest at Donna, and saw that Julia got my warning. Julia said, "Sure. Brand new cars are normally reliable." "Umm. You want a brand new car?" "Absolutely. Something VERY impressive. If YOU'RE going to be driving me around, it has to be in a car that gives me the right status." Translation: Gives ME the right status. "{Sigh}. I don't want ugly dates, and certainly not wig-wearing boy dates, so I won't argue." "Of course not. After all it is my car, so how could you possibly argue? I'll make sure I put it in the right name too." "{Groan}. I'll go and do some homework then, until you girls have tidied up in here." "I'll be ten minutes or so." "Ha! As if you had ANY chance of sorting out this mess in ten minutes." I left the room, laughing at the absurdity of Julia's wishful thinking. I know almost nothing about females, but I knew THAT was not going to happen. I got out some schoolwork and set myself up for a long session. I'd barely started when there was a knock on my door. Julia entered. "Finished," she announced. It wasn't more than five minutes since I'd left the girls' room. I scoffed at that claimed accomplishment. She assured me that they had. I humorously demanded we go to the girls' room to check, and I led the way. There wasn't a single loose piece of clothing to be seen. The room was spick and span. I was looking at the proof, but I couldn't believe it. So much for my thinking that I knew ANYTHING about females. Carol and Donna were highly amused at me, and had no hesitation in displaying it. Julia was more sympathetic, saying things like, "There, there, Mark. It's not your fault that guys aren't as efficient as girls." And, "It's not really your fault that you don't understand girls, Mark. You're just as hopeless as every other guy so don't take it personally. I think guys' brains must all be wired wrong, after all, hanging up clothes in closet is hardly a complex task, is it?" And several more just like it. Carol and Donna found it highly amusing and joined in with a few 'commiserations' of their own. Shaking my head, I walked back to my room. Julia and the sounds of much laughter followed me. I was seriously confused. I couldn't imagine how three girls could possibly put that many new clothes away so quickly. Just the process of deciding which clothes were rejects should've taken them the best part of an hour. Back in my room, Julia asked me "How did your makeup session go with Mom?" "If we can call it a 'disguise session' rather than a 'makeup' one, then I'll tell you. Please let me win one argument today?" "Haha. Okay. Seeing as how we just made you look so silly. I've got no idea why you thought it'd take us more than ten minutes. There were three of us, so it didn't take long at all. 'Many hands make light work', you know?" I would normally have argued that three girls in one room make for no work at all and lots of talking, but what did I know about females? Julia added, "Plus you did look so good in those undies. Thanks for doing that for me, and for agreeing to do it at school. I know that can't have been easy for you." "I'm trying very hard not to think about having to do it at school. I wouldn't be surprised if I lose my bottle. Ah, do you know what 'lose my bottle' means? I think it's another one of Mom's expressions." "I got it from the context. It means to chicken out?" "Yes." "Why? What does losing a bottle have to do with courage?" "It's like all the rest of Mom's English expressions: it makes very little or no sense." "Okay. Please don't lose your bottle next Tuesday. Remember I'm the prize. I'll have to sleep with whoever wins and I'd much prefer that to be you." "Oh yeah! I'd forgotten that. Would you really do that, even if someone else won?" "I'd do it EVEN if you won, haha. But I know what you mean. Yes, I think I'd have to. Refusing would be a dishonest thing to do. I'd make sure he wore a condom and I'd only agree to normal sex. Nothing kinky and not with any of his friends as well. Thinking about it, I'd probably make him come to my bedroom so I'd be safer. It's only sex, and it's not like it'd actually mean anything. Not as much as my being shown up as a dishonorable liar in front of the whole school. You wouldn't mind, would you?" "You're right that it wouldn't mean anything. Except how far you're willing to go to help me. It's academic anyway, as I'm going to be the winner. There's no way I'm not going to enter if you're the prize. I'd compete na ... Ahh. Never mind." "What were you going to say?" "It doesn't matter." "It sounded like you were about to say that you'd compete naked if I was the prize." "Umm, actually, I was going to say I'd compete naked if I had to." "As interesting as that image is, why did you cut yourself off mid-word?" "I didn't want to give you the idea. I suddenly feared that if I mentioned it, you'd think of a way of doing it." "Haha. I thought of that idea ages ago, and rejected it. Never mind whether it'd be possible to do, which I doubt, the idea of a bunch of guys lined up naked isn't nearly as sexy as them wearing underwear. We want to tantalize and excite, so it's better to leave something to the imagination. A lot of guys don't understand that. Their idea of sexy is full-frontal and naked." #4: Julia continued, "Speaking of sexy, I've developed an uncontrollable urge to suck your cock. Seeing you doing those sit-ups must have done it. Can I please give you a blowjob? I'll let you tell me about your DISGUISE session while we start." She'd let me win the makeup/disguise argument, so it was her turn to win the next ten. Being the fair, moral person that I am, I agreed to let her give me a blowjob. I even helped by undoing my pants and grinning from ear to ear. Seeing me doing that, Julia said, "Goody. I'll enjoy this, and it'll also give Carol and Donna time to put her clothes away properly." "What?" "You don't think we could put them all away in five minutes do you? You made the serious mistake of laughing too loudly as you left the room so we had to twist your tail. We hurriedly stashed everything wherever we could then tricked you into coming back into the room. Your expression was priceless. By now your sisters have pulled all the clothes out again and are putting them away properly. It IS a complex matter where new clothes get put. There are many factors to consider. Shall I explain or do you want a blowjob, because there's not enough time for both?" Sometimes in life you're faced with difficult decisions. This wasn't one of those times. Julia happily stripped down to her G-string panties - "just in case you make a mess" - showed herself off with a twirl, then went to work. I'd somewhat lost my ardor during our conversation, but it returned big time. Teenage boy ardor is good that way. We both completely forgot about the disguise session. Or maybe just I did and Julia thought it was impolite to talk with her mouth full. Speaking of full mouths, when Julia got me to cum, none of my jism escaped her mouth, so her stripping had been completely unnecessary. I must forget to mention that next time I get a blowjob. After we'd finished, I'd thanked her effusively, and we were cuddling together, I remembered the disguise issue. I said, "Your mom's disguise worked really well. I was impressed by how quick and easy it was. It definitely makes me look like I'm in my early-20s. I've got all the gear in a bag in my bedside drawer. Vanessa took some pictures and told me that Robert will pass them on to the guy tonight. Apparently we'll get the ID back in 'a few days, ' whatever that means. I'm excited with how fast this is going as I can't wait until I can hold you in my arms like this while we go to sleep. Carol too, of course." "Yeah. Me too. I miss you so much every night. It sucks that I live in a different house. I don't see you nearly as much as I want to." That was true. If I feel like it during the evening I can simply pop into Carol and Donna's room, but most days Julia doesn't see me after school lets out. We chat on the phone most evenings, but that doesn't come close to being together. My recent blowjob being a VERY good example of that. Julia said, "I should get up shortly. Carol and I have to head back to my place soon so she can talk with Mom and Dad about her coming out plan." "{Sigh}. Yeah. Such a pity. While I remember, your mom made a fool out of me just before the disguise session. She taught me a lesson about having faith in my opinion of my abilities. She's very good at that sort of thing." "Tell me about it! I grew up - am still growing up - with her lessons. She's a great mom." "Yes she is. Hard on the ego though, but her roast chicken is a great compensation, haha." "How can anyone be hard on your ego? I don't think you have one! Wasn't Mom's lesson about how your ego should be stronger? How a guy with a body that looks as awesome as yours can be so reluctant to show it escapes me." #2: We chatted just a bit more, then it was time for Julia to get up and dressed. I was thinking about walking back into the girls' room and seeing the mess, when I remembered something, "Hang on a second. How come you originally said - before the tease started - that you'd come see me in ten minutes if you knew it was going to take much longer to get the clothes sorted out?" "Because I said 'I' - me in the singular - was going to come see you. I was just going to get all Carol's rejects out and put them in the suitcases for Mom to drop off at the usual charity we take our old clothes to. As soon as that was done I was going to come see you. I wanted to give you a blowjob before Carol and I left. I had to leave Carol to put her own clothes away. It's quite complex process and only she knows her closet systems." #4: #2: #4: We went through to the girls' room, which had extensively re-tornadoed. Julia asked, "We have to go soon, so are you ready yet, sweetie?" "Oh gosh! There's still so much to do." "You'll have to leave it until tomorrow. Just grab something for school tomorrow. Most of everything else you need is at my home already." "Okay. I'll wear the dress Donna picked out. I'll just leave all these," (indicating all the clothes spread across her bed) "where they are for now." Donna said, "Can I ask a favor?" We all looked at her, and she continued, "I'd like it if you put all the clothes away, even just temporarily, and then for Mark to sleep in your bed tonight. I'd like him to sleep in the same room with me. Please? I'm not going to do anything naughty, I just like the idea of him sleeping in your bed next to me." Carol said, "I think that's quite sweet. What do you think, Mark?" "I like it too. Also because I like the idea of sleeping in your bed. That feels VERY nice. Sort of personal and intimate, even though you won't be in it. One problem though, I won't be going to bed until after 2am and you'll be sound asleep by then, Donna." Julia asked, "Do you have a backlog of schoolwork due soon?" "No, nothing like that. I'm actually trying to find things to fill the time with. I'm doing an experiment. It appears I don't need as much sleep as I used to, so for the last few nights I've kept myself to five hours of sleep per night and not felt tired. If that stays the case for a few more days I'll drop down to four hours of sleep a night and try that for a week or so. Then reduce it again, until I find what I need. I'm just curious, is all." Julia gave me a hug and a kiss, then said, "You're an amazing guy. You keep finding new, weird things you can do." Donna said, "I'd still like you to. Just knowing you'll be in Carol's bed will make me feel good. It'd be even better if you woke me when you came in. I'll fall asleep again quickly, but it'll be very nice." I said, "Carol, I KNOW you can put these clothes away quickly because Julia told me of your nasty trick on me..." "Haha. The expression on your face was priceless. You were completely confused. It was very funny." "Yes. Thank you for reminding me. Anyway, I'm happy to sleep in your bed tonight, if you can put the clothes away, otherwise I'd be crushed by that pile. I think we also need to ask Mom and Dad." Noticing Donna's increasing smile slip at that news, I said to her, "I think they'll agree, sweetie. Everyone else is in favor of it, and I don't see any reason why not. No outsiders could object if they knew, as we could simply say we were keeping you safe when you were alone. Let's go ask them." It was okay with the parents, although Mom added a smiley comment, "Make sure you sleep in more than just the underwear you had on before. I don't think Donna is trustworthy with you wearing just those." I normally wear PJs and would certainly do so tonight, so that was easy to agree to. Carol and a happy Donna shot back to their room to tidy up. Mom held me back, and when they'd gone said, "You understand that Donna's request is because she's thinking of you romantically? Girlfriend romantic." "I understand. I agreed in large part because I like the idea of sleeping in Carol's bed. It makes me feel closer to Carol. In a silly way, but it still does. But Donna's wanting me to be in the same room is still cool. She's showing restraint, I think, which is something she needs to learn. I don't think she has any silly plan to try anything sexual. I won't let her if she does. I'd get upset with her if she tries that because she said she wouldn't and that'd mean she lied to me. I think it's okay and even quite nice." Mom agreed, "I think so too. Just as long as you're aware that she's starting to get romantic feelings for you." "Yeah. I also feel I need to make up for my ruining her good feelings over giving me her betting win. I REALLY could have handled that better. I'm kicking myself for it now." "Yes. What was that all about? Why don't you want to buy yourself a car?" I looked back into the kitchen, to make sure Donna wasn't anywhere close. I quietly said, "I do want a car, but I want to buy a good one after Prof and I do our thing to get the mansion money; our 'business' as Julia has started calling it. Rather than buying a cheap, unreliable one now, it makes sense to wait a few more weeks to buy a good one. I want to use Donna's money to..." I paused while I looked around again. The coast was still clear so I continued, "buy her a horse. After we're in the new house and have enough room for one. Donna got very excited at the thought of having one of those when she heard that we were moving to a mansion." "That's very nice of you. You're right that it makes no sense to buy a junkheap if you can get a much better one in a few weeks. You could have handled Donna much better though." "Tell me about it! You can kick me too if you like because I'm already kicking myself. The problem is what to do about it now. It'll probably be several weeks, even months, before I can buy her present and I don't want her to be unhappy over this all that time." "Do you want my advice?" It wasn't really a question; more Mom's way of saying "Here comes my advice, so listen up." But I chose to interpret it as a question, and I hurriedly answered it while Mom was drawing a breath. I stated, "Mom, I DON'T want your advice right now. I want to think about it for a day or two, to see if I can think of a solution myself. I'll come to you if I have trouble, okay?" Dad said, "That's a smart idea." Mom agreed. I asked, "It'll be a day or two until Donna gets all the money together, won't it? Did the $600 guy come and pay when I was talking in my room?" Mom said, "Oh, were you talking in your room? I thought you were getting a blowjob." "It occurred to me after I was in my room that you'd probably think that. Thanks for letting me, but we actually spent all the time talking. I was struggling with Carol's coming out idea, and I wasted all that valuable blowjob time thinking about it. I can't pretend to be too virtuous though, as Julia gave me one just a few minutes ago." Dad asked Mom, "Blowjob? Isn't that against the rules?" Mom said, "Yeah, but getting a blowjob, even from his sister, isn't that big a deal. I think we can live it down. I agreed to it because the kids' hormones were leading them onto thin ice. We haven't heard anything about the trial and I thought we would have by now. I'm going to call them tomorrow to find out what's happening, if anything. Also Mark was wandering around like he was terminally depressed. The shape his life is in there was no reason for that so I woke him up by reminding him about blowjobs. Imagine having to remind a teenage boy that he can get blowjobs on demand! You'd be laughed out of school if that story got out, Mark." Dad thought that was very funny. Even I did too, which was a first for a joke that was at my expense. Mom resumed, "The guy did drop the cash off. He wanted to drop it and run, but Donna made him come in and count it out on the kitchen table. He didn't enjoy that but he couldn't argue that it was a good idea. There are still a few more payments to come. They'll probably be in the next day or two's mail. I'm banking the money because it's too much to leave around the house. When it's all received Donna wants me to get it all out as cash because that'll look much better when she gives it to you. So I'd say you've easily got a couple of days. Don't worry too much about her depression about your putting your car purchase off. She bounces back fast and certainly didn't seem depressed over her idea of you sleeping in her room." I was mentally agreeing with that when Dad said, "I hope you find out what's happening with that trial, Fely. It's a major pain having to worry about it all the time." #4: The girls returned. Carol said, "We're ready to go. Can one of you give us a lift, please Mom or Dad?" Mom said, "I will." I said, "Can I come too? So I can cuddle in the backseat for a few minutes?" Everyone agreed that was a good idea, so we headed out. Vanessa's two suitcases were parked by the outside door. Carol asked me to carry one of them, explaining to Mom, "I had to clear out some space for my new clothes. Donna kept a few of my rejects, but most I've put into that suitcase for Vanessa to donate." Mom said, "I'd usually go through your rejects to check that I agree, but I think I'll just let it go this time. If you want to start having babies in a couple of years, I'm going to have to let you start making a lot of decisions by yourself, otherwise you won't be capable enough." Carol gave Mom a big hug and kiss, "Thank you SO much, Mom. I'm so happy and lucky!" "I'm not exactly agreeing, sweetie. Sixteen is still terribly young to be a mother, but I'll do what I can to help you mature faster than I would prefer. We'll still have a serious talk about this when you're sixteen. I'm sure I'll try very hard to talk you into delaying it further. Until you're twenty five would be about right." "Nine years after I want to start! By that time you'll be halfway to being a great grandmother Mom. Haha, how's that for revenge." "Horrible. That's definitely a low blow." "Sorry, but I like the idea of you being a grandmother. You're going to be such a cool granny. And Donna an aunt. I think those things sound so cool." "I'm sure it'll be enjoyable at the time. I just don't like to think about it, is all. Oh well, such is life." There was more girl talk like that during the ride. I was mostly silent, largely because the idea of being a father was looking more and more like a reality. I know it was probably two years off, and maybe more if Mom got her way, but it was being talked about with such certainty. It freaked me out a bit, but I still liked the idea of Carol and I having babies together. At the Williams' we all went in, me carrying the full suitcase. We didn't stay long, just enough time for Prof to ask whether I'd be coming tomorrow. I said, "Sure. I'll bike over after I finish at the DMV." Julia said, "That'll be about 3pm won't it?" "About then, yes, depending on how busy they are." Julia said, "Can you hold that thought for a few seconds, I just want to ask Mom something quietly." Julia took Vanessa out of the room for a few seconds, then they returned. Julia said, "Can I ask you a small favor please, Mark?" She obviously knew the answer to that because she plowed straight on. "Can you please ride to your home after the DMV. Someone will come and pick you up before dinner. Maybe Dad so he can test your driving skills on the way back. That way you can leave your bike at your place, rather than stranding it here when you take the car back to your place. That's not the only reason, but it helps." "If that's what you want, sure. I'll cooperate with your scheme, whatever it is." "You'll like it, I promise." "I always do." Mom and I returned home shortly after that. The rest of the night was uneventful. At Donna's bedtime she checked that I'd be coming in to sleep a yard or so away from "with her", and that I'd wake her when I came in. I confirmed that I would, and she went off to bed happily. I did some more driver license studying as everyone's certainty that I'd pass was making me worry about disappointing them. I studied it for a while, but it seemed pointless as I wasn't learning anything. I had the whole damned manual memorized by now, split up across various minds with a great deal of overlap. I occupied the rest of my time doing schoolwork. Having an additional four hours a night was allowing me to get a huge amount of extra schoolwork done. It was a bit boring, but useful. Trips to the kitchen every couple of hours relieved the boredom somewhat. When it was my bedtime I changed into my PJs and went through to the girls' room. I turned on Carol's bedside light and gently woke Donna. I was pleased to see she was properly dressed. I'd thought of her maybe being naked, but she was behaving herself. She woke quickly, and smiled happily. Saying, "Mmm. Hello, darling." "So I'm your darling now am I?" "Yes. I wanted to say it and it feels good. I won't say it again if you want?" "I don't think you should do it usually. How about just on special occasions?" "Thank you. And for waking me. Goodnight Mark." She snuggled into her pillow, preparing to go to sleep again. So no sign of any misbehavior. I kissed her on her cheek, and said, "Goodnight, sweetie." I got into Carol's bed, and just lay there savoring the emotional feelings it gave me. I felt really good. Her smell was all around me and the bed soon warmed up and made me feel comfortable. Donna fell asleep very quickly. She was just outside my proximity sense, but her breathing changed noticeably. I gave myself a few more minutes, then sent myself to sleep too. ------- Chapter 74: My “I Love My Sister Carol” Speech Tuesday, April 19, 2005 I woke at my usual time and noticed that Donna appeared to be still sleeping. I got up and stood by her bed. My proximity sense confirmed it, but as it nearly get-up time I bent down and kissed her cheek until she woke. A good start to the day for her, I thought. It only took half a dozen kisses before her eyes were fully open, and she said, "Good morning, darl... , Mark." "Good morning, darl, Donna." "{Giggle}." I offered, "I had a good night's sleep. Maybe we can do this on other nights that Carol's at Julia's?" "I was kind of hoping that. I like you being here." "I'll check with Mom, Dad and Carol, but I think everyone's okay with it." "I'm sure Carol won't object." "I'm pretty sure of that too. I'll go to my room to get changed now." I'd expect Donna to make some sort of comment along the lines of, "You can get changed here if you like," but she didn't, which pleased me. Having to push her away all the time, even verbally, gets tiresome pretty fast. #3: #2: #3: Donna did a one-girl marching formation in to breakfast, and kissed me on the mouth again. I guessed that was now a firmly established tradition. I said, "My wake-up kisses weren't enough for you? I thought you'd have had enough kisses already this morning?" "Not likely! Maybe you could give me some more and I'll tell you when to stop?" "Or maybe not. Don't you know it's my breakfast time!" Okay, so she wasn't totally mature all the time. I suspected I wasn't either. Mom got a phone call from Vanessa. They chatted away for a while. I couldn't tell much because it was mostly Mom saying, "Uhh ha. Uhh ha." the way adult women seem to do endlessly on phone calls. Mom then said, "Hang on, I'll check with Mark." Mom turned to me and asked, "Prof suggests he tells the Dean about the 'Dipstick Incident' and maybe get the Dean to call your Principal, just to put extra pressure on him. I'm sure he's getting plenty of pressure already, but a little more wouldn't do any harm. What do you think?" "I think the Principal already sounds like he's doing the right thing, judging from what our driver told us. Isn't it a bit mean, and a waste of Prof's and the Dean's time too?" Mom said, "Did you hear that Vanessa? Uhh ha. Uhh ha. Hang on." Mom turned to me, "Vanessa says 'Prof and the Dean can decide on their own priorities.' I don't think she means that as abruptly as it sounds. Can you think of a concrete reason not to make him aware that OSU's Dean is concerned about you? I don't think he knows that yet and it's fairly impressive." "I did mention the Dean's involvement when I was talking to the Principal and Dipstick, but it'd be a lot more impressive if the Dean personally called him. I just realized that Carol and Julia might get in trouble for being openly affectionate together at school - and I'm sure they're going to be VERY open about it, as that's the point of their plan - so it might be a good idea if the Principal has another reason to be scared of this family." "Good point. I didn't think about their being overt. Did you hear that Vanessa? Uhh ha. Uhh ha. Okay, bye." Mom said, "Carol's going to Julia's after school. The car will drop Donna off here, then take Carol on to Julia's. So don't worry if Carol's not home when you get here, Mark." Mom resumed her breakfast. After a few seconds I asked, "So what's going to happen about the Principal?" "Didn't you hear me talk with Vanessa? I agreed with her idea." "All I heard you say was, 'Uhh ha. Uhh ha. Okay, bye'. The 'okay' just sounded automatic, so I didn't hear any words that had meaning other than 'bye'." I half thought I knew the answer, and half wanted to pull Mom's leg a little, so that gave me a full reason for asking. "That's what the 'Uhh ha's meant. I was agreeing." "So they mean, 'I agree' then. I've often wondered that, because you use them millions of times." Mom scoffed at that. Dad cut her off by confirming, "Millions!" Mom said, "Really?" Dad and I nodded | Donna said, "Uhh ha." Mom laughed, and said, "I'll pay more attention in the future. Speaking of saying things without knowing, do you remember Vanessa telling me off for saying 'Are you insane'?" Dad and I nodded again. Mom continued, "She gave me a lecture about that later, when you were talking to Prof in his study, and also told me to ask my workmates whether I say it there. I told her that I was sure I didn't. I really couldn't imagine myself talking to them that way, but Vanessa insisted I ask them properly. It turns out that I say it often and they all hate it. It was probably hurting my career, so I told my boss I had just become aware of it and was trying to change. I also asked all the others to call me on it if I said it again. I owe Vanessa for that, as it was a bad habit for me to have gotten into. It's nice to have her help. She's pretty sharp, isn't she?" "I'll say. She and Prof are pretty good at pointing out my faults too. Good and merciless. Perfectly accurate too. When we're living in the same house they're REALLY going to keep me on my toes. Ouch." "They'll be good for you." "That's easy for you to say, you're not on the receiving end as often as I am. But I know you're right. I'm just going to be on my toes a lot. At least there'll be a readily available girl or two to cheer me up." Dad laughed, "It's hard to imagine how you could possibly need cheering up. I've never heard of a teenage boy with a better life than yours." "It has its moments." I occupied my minds by happily remembering some of those moments while I occupied my mouth with consuming the rest of my breakfast. When the car arrived I said a hurried, "Bye" to the folks. Dad called out that he'd see me at the DMV at 2. Maybe he thought I'd forgotten? Not likely! Donna sat next to me in the back. I had a sudden fear of her duplicating Carol pussy flash trick, but she behaved herself. In the car I asked the driver, "It's just the two of us this morning. On the way back it'll just be Carol and Donna, and Carol will be asking you to take her on to Julia's. That's the same place we've been before. That's okay, isn't it?" "Sure. No problem." I continued explaining, "I'm going to the DMV to hopefully get my license this afternoon, so fingers crossed this'll be the last day you have to drive us. My girlfriend Julia has her own car but no license yet, so I'll be using that to drive us to school from tomorrow on, assuming I pass. That'll make things easier for you, without having to worry about us every day." He said, "It hasn't been much trouble. A lot easier than I expected. You're very well behaved and I almost never have to wait for you. Having to drive you home has given me an excuse to miss quite a few after-school meetings, so I'm going to be sorry to lose that excuse. Oh well, all good things come to an end. Happy birthday anyway." "Huh? It's not my birthday." "Oh. I assumed it was your sixteenth. I knew you were fifteen and just assumed today was your birthday. Happy birthday for whenever it was." I let that go. There was no point in explaining why I could get a license at fifteen. After a few seconds pause, Mr. Moore continued, "You know that I'm the Drivers' Ed teacher, don't you? I know I've never taught you, but do you want a quick check-out sometime today? I can probably squeeze you in sometime, but I'll need to check my schedule when I get to school. Or at lunchtime, if you wish. I know I'm free then." "Yesterday we discussed me being a genius, but I never gave a thought to you being a Drivers' Ed teacher. So much for my so-called genius! I think I've got the test nailed, which might be 'famous last words'. If I fail this afternoon I'll take you up on that offer, thanks. Hopefully we can iron out whatever I did wrong and I can take the test again quickly. I'm looking forward to getting my license." "Most kids do. You won't be able to try again quickly though. You do know that they have a minimum wait of twenty eight days after a failure of the driving test?" "I didn't know that! So if I fail today, that's the quickest I can re-take it?" "Yep." #2: #3: #2: #4: I said, "In that case can I please take you up on your offer for a lunchtime practice? Maybe I could drive and you could ask me questions. Get a double workout at the same time." "That's fine by me. I'll meet you at the usual spot at the start of lunch. I don't usually talk with students much while they're driving as they're busy concentrating on driving, but we can play that by ear. It's mostly the driving we have to worry about because the 28-day wait applies only to that. If you fail the knowledge test you can try that again the next day." "Phew. So that's not so bad then. I still want to get the best session with you that I can." When we arrived at school Julia and Carol were waiting for us. Long before the car reached them, I noticed that Julia was wearing a VERY short skirt. I very happily remembered the reason too. Yesterday we'd frigged Carol off and I'd told Julia to dress appropriately for us to frig her today. She was dressed VERY appropriately for that, and very inappropriately for riding her bike, so I guess they'd gotten a car ride to school. But - dammit! - I'd just booked myself to do something else at lunchtime. As the car drew up, I saw that they were standing hand in hand, so it was starting already. School was going to be more interesting from now on. I got out, telling the driver that I'd see him at lunchtime. Donna got out, and told the girls, "You two look very sweet. See ya later." Moments later she was gone. I told the girls, "Sorry girls, I'm going to have to miss lunch with you today. I just found out that the DMV doesn't let people re-take a failed driving test for twenty eight days. I thought that if I messed up I could try again in a day or two, so now I'm worried. Our driver, Mr. Moore - who teaches Drivers' Ed - has offered to take me out at lunchtime. I can't pass up that chance. Very sorry Julia, especially with you dressing so wonderfully for our lunchtime frigging session. The good news is that if I pass my license you can dress like that again whenever you like, as I'll be driving you in every day." Julia chuckled, "I thought you were being casual about your test. Most kids freak out to some degree or other. I didn't realize you didn't know that." "I just read the road laws. I didn't read anything about anything else. Not too smart, I guess." "Not really your fault. Those sorts of things most people pick up because they're hanging around with other 16-years olds and doing the Drivers' Ed course. Have you got everything else you need: SSN, proof of address, parental consent, and money to pay the fees?" #1: #4: "{Gulp}. I didn't think about any of those things. Dad will be with me so I guess he can do the parental consent thing at the time and we should have enough money for the fees. I didn't get ready for this very well at all. I think I better call up the guy from the DMV and ask him what else I need. I'll call him now." I did, but he wasn't there yet. I was going to retry frequently until I caught him. Julia said, "You don't have to come and get me every day. That's out of your way before and after school. I can still bike easily." It's not often I get to do one of these - not nearly as often as I'm on the receiving end of them - so I enjoyed doing a, "{Raspberry}. The REASON I'm getting my license is so I can drive you. I WILL be driving you every day. Your Lord has spoken!" "A command! How wonderful. Your wife will humbly obey her Lord." "Somehow I doubt the humbly part, but I'll settle for any type of obeying. You look very good in that skirt. I think I'll have to order you to wear it again one day." "What? And completely bypass all the very careful thinking we have to do every morning. Carol just spent ages describing that to you and now you're going to arbitrarily pick something." "Oh yeah. Sorry. I'd forgotten about that." "Haha. I was pulling your leg. Whose opinion do you think matters more to me: yours or everyone else's?" "Umm, mine, I guess." "Yes, yours. Why do you think I'm wearing it today? Because you ordered me to wear something appropriate for my being frigged. I'm wearing it with pride, even though it'd normally be totally unsuitable for a Tuesday." "It would? Um, you should have said. We could have done the frigging thing on another day. We'll have to, because of my driving lesson." "I'm pulling your other leg, Mark. To even you up, haha. Of course there's nothing wrong with wearing this skirt on a Tuesday. 'Not on a Tuesday' - how silly is that? Haha." "Um, yeah, haha. I guess it was a bit silly of me to believe that." "No, of course. In fact Tuesday is an EXCELLENT day to wear it. A Monday would be terrible, of course." "Umm." I looked at Julia very closely, but she seemed sincere. Unbelievable, but sincere. "I'm running out of legs to pull, you know?" "You've got something else in the general area that I haven't pulled for HOURS." "{Giggle}," from Carol. "It's been even longer for me. Can I please help pull it this time." Julia chuckled some more, saying, "I don't think lesbians are supposed to be interested in that sort of thing." "I'm a sort of fluctuating lesbian. Depending on whether Mark's available or not." "It has been a long time since he let you give him a blowjob, isn't it?" Carol strongly agreed, "Far too long." So Julia suggested, "So just before you go to bed tonight, go to his bedroom and give him one. Unless he orders you not to, which I expect he won't." I also expected he won't. In fact, I knew he was getting hard from the anticipation already. I thought about that for a couple of pleasurable seconds, then Julia said, "We can take good advantage of your being away this lunchtime, Mark. I think Carol and I will have our lunch in the lunchroom today. There are always plenty of people in there, so that should work very well." "What should work well?" "Carol's coming out. We'll meet outside, then walk in holding hands. Kiss and cuddle a few times. Then maybe leave early and walk around the high school for a while, holding hands. That should get tongues wagging." Carol said, "I'd like to wag my tongue at you." "Good one. Now you're acting more like a lesbian." Julia pulled her close and kissed her lips. There was no one around us, so it must have been just for practice. Or maybe for real. After their kiss, Julia resumed talking with Carol, "We'll do that. You meet me outside the high-school lunchroom and we'll go in together. I'll take my panties off before that, and we'll try and find a seat facing some gossipy girls. You sneakily rub me a few times, and I'll make sure they see that I'm bare. It'll be hard for them NOT to see me, in this skirt. We can get a little carried away just before we walk out early, and they'll assume we're going somewhere to make-out. That'll work nicely." It certainly would! I'd like to see that myself. [Just to let you know what happened at lunchtime. It went even better than planned. Julia executed her plan brilliantly. Not only did the gossips notice, but pretty much EVERYBODY noticed. They got a standing ovation from all of the boys and a good proportion of the girls in the lunchroom. Twice a teacher had to tell them to cool it. When they left the lunchroom early as intended, nearly everyone saw them leave with Carol's hand firmly on Julia's ass, earning them loud cheers and whistles. They came WAY OUT!] The three of us walked into the school a little, Julia in the middle holding my arm with one of her hands, and Carol's hand with her other. Carol told me, "Julia taught me some good put-downs last night and we invented some new ones based on me being a lesbian. The guy I wanted you to kill is going to get a horrible surprise when he next tries anything, which is most days and probably even quicker with me dressed this way." Carol was wearing another outfit I thoroughly approved of, even more than I'd approved of yesterday's outfit. Today's dress wasn't immodestly sexy, but there was NO doubt that there was a great body under it. By Carol's previous standards, quite a large proportion of that great body wasn't actually "under" the outfit. I realized that if Carol continued to dress in her new clothes people would put her change of style down to her new lesbian relationship with Julia, which would reinforce that story nicely. I'm assuming other girls notice Carol's change of style, but that's something I had absolutely no doubt about now, after Carol's dissertation about female's attention to each other's clothing. I didn't bother to think about whether the guys would notice. Carol had to leave about then, so I didn't get to ask her about her put-downs. I took the opportunity to hit redial on my phone. Roy Smith, the DMV guy, was in this time. After introducing myself I asked, oh so casually, "Because my situation is a bit unusual I thought I'd better check with you about what I have to bring with me to our appointment. What forms and that sort of thing?" It turned out that all the paperwork was already done and sitting in front of him. Even the parental consent and payments. I just had to turn up and take the Knowledge and Driving Tests. The Williamses are good! It must've been Prof's doing mostly, I guess, as Julia hadn't known that it'd been done. After hanging up I told Julia, "All the details that I forgot have already been taken care of. By your dad, I'd guess, because my mom or dad never mentioned they were doing anything." "This would be a good example of an aspect of your being a leader. When you're older and doing more serious stuff than schoolwork, wouldn't it be great to have an assistant or two to do these sorts of things for you. You tell him or her that you want to do something, and they get it done so that all you have to do is turn up and do it. All the stupid little details are taken care of for you and you don't have to even think about them. Breeze in, breeze out. How does that sound?" "Very good. Especially - as you just saw - because I forget that there would be details. I wonder if Prof will want a job working for me in a few years, haha." I thought that idea was very funny, and was having a good laugh. Julia said, "He's definitely not the right sort of employee. I made a mistake before when I said 'him or her'. Obviously you'll employ a gorgeous 'her'. I don't think Dad really qualifies, haha." I'd been laughing because I thought Prof ridiculously overqualified to work for me. Julia was laughing because she thought he was totally unqualified. For a second I was going to argue with Julia that my employing a guy was just as good, but I stopped myself when I realized that it was years away, and I never win an argument with Julia, and I had no objection whatsoever to employing gorgeous female assistants, should I ever need any (maybe in my dreams). The morning was normal except for one strange event. As I've mentioned before, we were trying to strengthen our TK by pushing against walls or the ground almost every waking moment. This morning, during that VERY tedious practice, #4: #1: Previously we'd had no way of knowing who owned which fingertips, other than each mind knew its own (by keeping track of them from the moment they're created. If we lose track of them, they self-cancel). There'd previously been no way of telling them apart as they're visually invisible, and in proximity they all 'appear' identical, just like blips on a radar screen. The strange thing was that they still appeared indistinguishable in every sense we had, but we somehow knew who owned them. It would make multi-mind TK jobs much easier to coordinate so we were happy, but puzzled too. We discussed it for a few minutes but couldn't decide how we were obtaining this information. [[It was a nuisance not knowing who owned which fingertips, as we often want to suggest that one or more of them do something different. Knowing their owner wasn't the full solution, but it'd help considerably. Knowing that we were unhappy with the status quo, our subconsciouses - which is what creates and manages the fingertips - had started helpfully sharing that knowledge with each other, and passing it to our consciouses.]] I skipped out of my last pre-lunch class five minutes early so I had time to eat my lunch before meeting Mr. Moore. I was swallowing my last mouthful as he pulled up. He turned off the car and got out, saying to me, "Because your test is so soon I'm going to be a bit tougher on you than normal. I'm not going to give you any advice. I'll just sit back and wait for you to do things that need comment. If I think you can handle it, I'll ask you some of the Knowledge Test questions too. How does that sound?" "Like a good idea. Thanks." He tossed me the keys and walked around to the passenger side. Here we go. I was nervous already. After I got in the car I put the key in the ignition, but didn't turn it on. I put my seatbelt on, and asked him, "I haven't been in this car before. In the driver's seat, I mean. Do you mind if a take a minute to familiarize myself with the layout?" "I'd mind if you didn't." I looked around, adjusted my seat and the mirrors, made sure I knew where the indicator stalk was, and that sort of thing. I checked he had his seatbelt on, which he did, then I started the car and carefully began driving. I was a little bit erratic at the beginning, this being a car I'd never driven before, but it was only a matter of coordination so I adapted quickly. He briefly described a route, and away we slowly and carefully went. After a few minutes he started asking me questions interspersed with occasional routing instructions. His only negative comment was, "You're driving a little too slow. Try to stick just below the speed limit when the conditions allow it. If you go much slower than that you could cause other drivers to get impatient and they might pass you foolishly." Speeding up the few miles per hour required was no problem. That mistake corrected, I drove just under the speed limit. He directed us all around Corvallis, even through the center of town, which was busy and unnerving for the active one of my minds that hadn't driven before. We did all the usual three-point turns, parallel parking, hill starts and the like. When lunchtime was about two-thirds over he said, "There's no real point in continuing. You haven't got a single Knowledge question wrong and your driving is very smooth and as close the faultless as makes no difference. Any criticisms I made would be hair-splitting ones. If you do this well on your tests, you'll fly through. Not that I recommend trying to fly during the test, haha. Head back to school if you wish, or drive around some more if you want to." I knew the girls intended to wander around for the last part of lunchtime, so I'd probably be unable to find them before lunch was over. Plus I wouldn't mind more practice, if only for my nerves. I told him, "I'd rather keep driving, if that's not inconveniencing you too much?" "It's fine. Let's try the highway then; take the next left." We drove around some more, and then headed back to school in time for the end of lunch. He said, "You intend to drive your girlfriend's car to school when you get your license, don't you?" "Yes." "You need the school's permission to do that. I'd get that today if I was you because you'll probably have your license this afternoon. Go to the office and ask. They always say yes. It's mainly so they know who's driving to school and so you'll know that it's a privilege that they can revoke if you misbehave by breaching their rules." I pulled up in the usual spot, and got out, thanking him very much. "No problem, that's what I'm for. It certainly wasn't hard. I'm only sorry you'll pass and I'll have to start attending those after-school meetings again. Oh well. Good luck this afternoon. Can I give you my number and you call me tonight to let me know whether you passed or not, so I know whether to come to your house tomorrow morning?" "Oh. I never thought of that. I'll be texting Carol and Julia to let them know, hopefully to boast. I'm sure they'll tell you when you pick them up. How's that?" "That's even better. Good luck, bye." There was time for half a class with Julia before I'll have to duck out early to walk to the DMV, so I headed to my locker to get my bag and books for that class. When I was close, a guy I knew from some of my classes saw me and yelled out, running up to me. When he got to me he frantically whispered, "Egg, your girlfriend's a lezzie. Her and some gorgeous blond I've never seen before were making out in the lunchroom. Nearly caused a riot." Just as he was finishing another guy rushed up and told me much the same. Then another. Very soon a crowd of guys had gathered around me. The way Julia had described her plan, the idea was for her to let other girls know. Apparently it hadn't escaped the attention of the guys either, although why they were so excited about the pool of dateable girls dropping was a mystery to me - not! I had chosen not to answer yet, as there hadn't been much point with new guys continually arriving and the whole scene being so chaotic. There were now several excited discussions going on around me. I heard many, "Damn, I didn't see that", "Did she really?", "God, I wish I'd been there", and the like. Also several 'warnings' about my girlfriend being a lezzie, or some other equivalent nickname - the guys had lots of cool-sounding alternatives. There were also quite a few statements along the lines of, "Who was the other chick? She was HOT!" No one knew who the other 'chick' was. Chuckling to myself, I called for silence. When I had it I said, "Thank you all for your concerned warnings. It wasn't necessary as I've known for days. My girlfriend - Julia - isn't a lesbian, she's bisexual. I'm very sure of that. It's the other girl who is lesbian. That's Carol, my sister. My sister and girlfriend get it on together when I'm busy doing other things, like I was this lunchtime." Most of my last sentence was drowned out by the sudden excited uproar. I'd thought the prurient interest in the newspaper articles about the "Annette Incident" had been over the top. This was WAY over that (making it over the over the top). Normally I would have been very offended at the excited invasion into such a personal matter, but in this case the girls wanted the story to spread around school, so I smiled to myself and enjoyed fanning the flames. More like pouring gasoline on the flames, actually. Teenage boys are really quite pathetic. I answered their questions. They had some really stupid questions. One guy wanted my phone number. "Why?" "I want to call your sister. She's HOT!" "Dude, she's a LESBIAN! You do know what a lesbian is, don't you?" That got lots of the other guys laughing at him. I had no doubt they would have loved to call Carol too, as guys are very illogical at such times, which I swear are very infrequent. I continued, "She wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole. She thinks guys are gross. She's never had a boyfriend and never will." #2: Carol had actually gone on the occasional date over the last year or so. Nothing like real dates, just social things that specific boys had invited her to. Not only was she - and still is really - too young to date, but she didn't like any of those boys anyway. None of them had a clue about how to earn her respect and then push her buttons. No doubt their idea of a successful date was one in which they got a 'free rub'. How pathetic was that! The other question that often came up in various forms was about the three of us together, which I easily answered with, "She's my SISTER, for God's sake! The first time I accidentally saw them kissing sent shivers up my spine. I understand that you guys think it's hot, but I think it's the coldest thing possible. Right up there with walking in on your parents doing it." That made most of the guys shudder with horror. I added more fake-explanation, "Julia is mostly straight, so when the three of us are together Julia is my girlfriend. But when I'm not around other things happen which I completely refuse to think about. Thank God they keep it private from me." I did an 'involuntary shudder'. Having control of my muscles at that level is cool. Except for the go-soft ability, which is FAR beyond 'cool'. "You don't mind?" "Nope. I like Julia, of course. She's a wonderful girlfriend. I like Carol too, as a sister. I think it's cool that my girlfriend hit it off with my sister so well. Julia is still mostly straight so I'm not jealous. Carol's never fancied guys and she's only just discovered why. When she met Julia bells went off. I don't want to know about her bells, but I'm happy that she's happy. She'd been very confused and upset about that side of her life, and now she's a much happier person. My family are all very close, and we like to see each other happy. Even my parents are very happy that Carol is happy these days. It's great that she's finally discovered her direction in life." I'd made that speech because it was time to turn down the prurience level. I had to go to class and didn't want these guys running around with their cocks about to explode, especially if they ran into Carol or Julia (Julia most likely, as they were high-school guys). I had no trouble imagining them making complete nuisances of themselves, as is usually the case when guys' little head is in total control. I walked to my next class, trailing a number of the guys. I ignored the prurient comments they persisted in making. I sort-of found Julia outside her class. This is how we normally wait for each other, although in this case I only found her because I headed for the large block of excited boys, expecting her to be buried in the middle of them. I was noticed as I neared the throng, and soon people were falling silent, tapping their friends on the shoulder to warn them, etc. Silence descended as I got close, so I called out, "Boyfriend coming through. Let me in." They were falling back anyway, so my request was completely unnecessary. Fun though. Eventually the crowd parted enough that I could see Julia. She was standing with her back to the wall, and she did look a little cornered. I guess her scheme had worked better than she'd thought. I walked up to her and gave her a big kiss, then clearly said, "I hear you and Carol caused a stir in the lunchroom today?" "I think we got a bit carried away..." Julia would have said more, but that had set off the mostly male crowd again. I took the opportunity to bend close to her ear and say, "Leave this to me, I have a great little speech prepared." I didn't have it prepared, but my previous discussions had given me some ideas I could easily build on. Julia replied, "Good. I'm a little overwhelmed." #1: I stood up and turned around to face the circle of faces. I called out, "I will be making a little speech at the start of class, once everyone has arrived. So please shut up, back up, and give us some room until then." Of course they neither shut nor backed up. So I tried for another "up": I yelled out, "For God's sake you guys, grow up will you. What do you think you're achieving by crowding us up against a wall, other than proving how juvenile you are? I bet the other girls in class are laughing their heads off looking at all the excited little boys making fools of themselves." That last comment got their attention, and several of them immediately looked around. Of course there were girls arriving for class who were looking at this mess, especially after hearing my last yell. Suddenly every boy started pretending that he'd just been walking past and wasn't involved in this circus at all. They hurriedly separated, then oh-so-casually made their way into class. Julia said, "Phew. It's good to be able to breathe again. Thanks for that. Boys are pathetic aren't they? Wave a little bit of sex in front of them and they go crazy." "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I might incriminate myself." "Haha. Thanks anyway, and I quite like that you're a guy! Changing the subject, how was your driving lesson?" "Very good. He says I should pass. I'll have to leave part way through this class, but I'll make my speech first. Hopefully it'll take some of the pressure off you and make Carol's idea even better established." We killed a little time outside, talking quietly. Julia remembered to tell me that her mom had been very impressed with my comment about the girls having responsibility over their own decisions. Julia passed on a pat on the back for that. Several of the late arrivals to class looked at us pointedly. Not all of them, but the few that'd missed the salacious gossip would doubtless be informed very soon. We stayed outside until Teach arrived, and we followed her in. I held Julia's hand, rather than letting her hold my arm as usual. I wanted to make sure she'd stay next to me for what followed. I walked to my desk and dropped my gear. The room was already quiet when I asked the teacher, "Could I please take a few minutes to address the class?" One of the nice things about my position in school is that the teachers almost invariably say 'Yes' to anything I ask, this occasion being no exception. I turned to face most of the class, and still holding Julia's hand began my little speech: "I was busy outside of school during lunchtime, and returned to be mobbed by crowds of little children jabbering excitedly about my girlfriend and sister making out in the lunchroom." There were several mutters when I mentioned "sister", so I inserted, "Yes, the other girl was my sister Carol. She's in the 8th grade here." There were several more mutters, mostly from the guys about how hot my sister was. A couple guys even made their comments loud enough for the whole class to hear, to prove how cool they were, they thought. "Those are exactly the type of juvenile comments that I've been surrounded by since I got back. Julia too, by the look of the crowd of excitable little boys that were suffocating her when I arrived a few minutes ago. Let me give you a capsule history. I started dating Julia nearly three weeks ago. We got along exceptionally well right from the first date, and I am thoroughly enjoying having her as my girlfriend." Again a couple of male hecklers couldn't resist making stupid comments. I memorized them carefully because I'd just had a cute idea for how to make the hecklers end up looking way less than cool. -- "As Julia and I got along so well, she soon met my family. I have two sisters, the oldest is Carol who's thirteen, then Donna a year younger. For the past several years Carol has been depressed and unhappy girl. Not suicidal or anything near that bad, but still unhappy and withdrawn. My family is very close and all of us were concerned about her, and didn't know what we could do to help. We tried all we could think of, but nothing worked. Not even Carol knew that her depression stemmed from her sexual orientation. She'd had a few group dates with boys. Not many because she's so young, but a few. She found guys to be uninteresting, if not pathetic, because most of them just wanted to grope her tits." The girls in class nodded knowingly at that. "After being forced to endure the comments I've received this afternoon I agree with Carol's opinion about guys. -- "Anyway, because Julia and I were getting along so well, Julia and Carol had more and more time together. Our two families quite often have dinner at each other's place and that sort of thing. Carol started blossoming. From a withdrawn, unhappy girl she started becoming a smiling, happy, outgoing girl. The whole family was pleased, even though we had no idea why. Then, a few days ago, I walked into a room to find Carol and Julia kissing. I admit it was a heck of a shock, but we sat down and discussed it. Carol had just told Julia that she'd fallen in love with her. I could understand Carol's sentiment because I love Julia too." I put my arm around Julia's shoulders then, and hugged her to me. -- "Julia, being the wonderful person that she is, had helped my sister find her orientation and her direction in life. Julia says she has come to love Carol too, which is fantastic because now Carol's love is returned, which has completely turned Carol's life around. Now she walks on air and her joy is wonderful for us all to see. Julia, for the first time in her life, has realized that she must be bisexual. I understand that bisexuality is easier and more common for girls than guys. To my thinking that isn't a sexual thing, and certainly not a sexual thing the way these puerile little boys think. I think it's that girls are better at opening their hearts to give and receive love than guys are. Guys can't think past their cocks, the stupid fools! Julia opened her heart to my sister, and as far as I'm concerned has saved my sister's life. Not literally, but Julia has turned my sister's life around, filled her with joy, and given her a direction to live in. -- "To all the idiots who have asked me about my being jealous or upset, I answer that I love Julia more now than I ever have before. How could I not, after seeing how loving and giving she has been to someone in my family who was in so much need. -- "To the other idiots who have gone on endlessly about how hot this is, especially when they nearly wet themselves thinking about threesomes. It is NOT hot for me. Carol is my SISTER! I love her enormously, have hated to see her be withdrawn and unhappily the last few years, and am overjoyed to see her burst forth in happiness now, but there is NO WAY IN THE WORLD I would risk making her unhappy again by trying to touch her against her will, even if I felt the physical desire, which I don't. Here's a newsflash guys: Carol is a LESBIAN. That means not attracted to guys. Hello! I'm a guy. My sister is my sister, and that's how I love her. Any of you that read something sexual into that SERIOUSLY need to get counseling. -- "Other than the embarrassment it has caused me being the same gender as the idiots I've encountered this afternoon, I am otherwise proud that I am Carol's brother. Carol is bursting with such happiness and affection these days that it's great to share her jokes, smiles, hugs and - yes - sometimes even sisterly kisses. She is so full of joy that she can't help express it to those that she loves, and I am very happy to be included in that group. I am also very careful to make sure I stay in that group, which means I continue to treat her as my sister - who I love very much - rather than as a mindless, blow-up sex-doll like half the guys in this class seem to think all girls are. -- "To the other idiots who have already asked me for my phone number so they can call up to ask my 'hot sister' for a date. She's a LESBIAN, morons." Several of the girls laughed at that. "Look it up in a dictionary if you're not sure what it means. -- "I understand that Carol got carried away at lunchtime. Probably Julia did a little too, but I guess mostly Carol." Several heads nodded, as I knew they would because it'd been Julia's plan to have Carol touch her, simply as a result of Julia wearing a very short skirt today. "Carol's in love for the first time in her life and she's feeling enormous relief and gratitude about her life finally making sense, so it's hardly surprising that she got carried away. Some of Carol's feelings were expressed sexually. Personally I think Julia is hot, so I can understand Carol's lack of control, but there's no excuse for the stupid lack of control shown by the boys around here. -- "To those OTHER idiots - today has shown that there is no shortage of idiots in this class or school - who are still sexually fixated and who have asked me repeatedly how much it turns me on. Let me be quite clear that I can't leave the room fast enough when the two of them start getting affectionate." I also can't leave the room slow enough, or at all, but there was no need to mention those aspects. -- "I hope Carol finds another girl to fall in love with because I'd like my girlfriend back full-time. At the moment I'm making time for them to be alone together, which means I see less of Julia than I would like. But NOT FOR A MOMENT will I begrudge them their time together. They make each other happy and that's my greatest wish for people I love. Especially for Carol because she's had so little happiness for several years. For as long as they wish to have one, I will totally support Carol and Julia's relationship, including making sure they have all the time together they need. If their relationship lasts my whole life, then I will be happy at the joy that will have filled their lives. -- "I want to discuss the next few days. I don't want morons calling up my 13-year old lesbian sister to ask her for dates. I don't want Julia to be pressed against hallway walls and surrounded by so many guys she is visibly uncomfortable and has trouble breathing. When I approached you guys just before this class, you saw me coming, fell silent, backed away and warned your friends. From those guilty reactions you obviously knew your behavior was incorrect. For God's sake please grow up and accept Julia and Carol for the marvelous people they are. They don't exist purely for your sexual entertainment. They are real people with real emotions. In my opinion, better people than the idiots they've had leering all over them since lunchtime. -- "And what I don't want, more than anything else, is for my sister to get hassled badly over this. She's only thirteen, for goodness sake. She's also fragile, overwhelmed by new emotions, and truly happy for the first time in her life. She comes up from middle school to have lunch with Julia and me every day, for obvious reasons, so you might see her walking around. If I see or hear of anyone hassling her, I am going to get angrier than I have ever been. I will defend to the death her right to live her life as she wishes. Any asshole who..." "{Cough}, {cough}," from the teacher. I stopped, then reacted to her point. "Sorry. I was getting carried away there. Let's just say that I will defend my sister's rights and well-being to the best of my ability. Anyway, for those of you who AREN'T idiots, who have actually got a clue about what's important in life, please help me by stomping on any rumors and stupid talk you hear about Julia and Carol. Things like [I repeated back their exact words of the last couple of hecklers]." After so much loving stuff that I'd said, the hecklers' comments clashed glaringly. They shrank back in their chairs, which I took as a good proof that my speech had gone over as well as I thought it had. I finished with, "If you can't stomp on these comments yourself, tell me about them, and I'll do some serious stomping." The teacher interrupted, "Okay, Mark. I think you've made your point now. We could have done without the threats of physical violence, but otherwise a very good speech." #4: This was the biggest audience that I had ever spoken to, and to my surprise it was quite easy. With four minds suggesting things to say, I wasn't the least bit tongue-tied. The reverse actually as I had too much material to use and had gotten carried away. Once I'd gotten into the right mindset, I could've gone on for ages. All of me was proud of each other. Julia was proud of me too, and was crying. Oops, I'd been so focused on the speech that I hadn't noticed that. I hadn't expected it to go on for as long as it had, and I'd made her stand beside me the whole time. Her tears gave me an excellent chance to practice something though: I reached into my pocket and - with a flourish - produced a clean handkerchief. I REALLY hammed it up, to the extent of going down on one knee to offer it to her. It broke the mood nicely. I looked around the room, and saw several girls wiping their eyes too. Nearly all the girls in class, weepy or otherwise, were beaming at me. My speech, and - I liked to think - my flourish, had gone over big time. Julia was still visibly overcome, and the teacher asked, "Are you all right, Julia?" "{Sniff}, I will be soon. Can I have a minute outside with Mark please?" "Okay, but make it quick, we do have to a class to get on with." Julia led me from the room. On the way we passed one girl who I noticed was especially leaky, and I stopped for a second to say, "For those girls like Anna here who are a bit teary, sorry I don't have any more handkerchiefs, but thank you for understanding my feelings." I then resumed our walk out the door. Just as we reached it one of the girls called out, "You are going to get so lucky!" Without even turning around I said, "Already am." The moral high ground can be quite a lot of fun. I closed the door behind me. Julia pulled me to the side then launched the best kiss she was capable of at me. After which she exclaimed, "You were awesome. You bowled them over. You've totally made Carol's coming out idea work. No one in that class will dare cause us trouble now. Not only that but almost every girl in that class wants your babies. You've got them all! You were wonderful!" "Um, I agree that the speech should protect you and Carol, and establish Carol's idea well, but I don't agree with your comment about other girls wanting me. I just stood up and told them all that I was ultra-loyal to Carol as my sister and you as my girlfriend, whom I loved. I even said, 'Even to the end of my life.' I just told them all that no other girl has a chance with me." "Mark, I love you, but you don't understand girls, do you?" I very confidently answered, "Nope. Haven't got a clue. Not even on a good day. Luckily I've got you to explain those impenetrable mysteries to me." "We have to go back in soon, but I will later. Not only are most of the girls yours now, you've also created a very easy means to make it happen. You HAVE to give that speech in every class this afternoon. Come with me to all my classes and repeat it. Then go to your classes and repeat it in those if you can, if you think enough people know what happened to justify your doing so. We need to get as many people as possible to hear that speech while you've still got justification for making it." "I can't. I've got the DMV appointment shortly." "Darn! It's such a perfect speech. Let's hope I'm still being abused tomorrow, so you can make it a few times then." "I don't want to leave with your still being abused. I'm going to call up and postpone my appointment." Julia laughed, "Mark, at the end of this class I'll walk to my next one with several of the people who just heard your speech. If any new guys try to hassle me I think my new supporters will be very enthusiastic defenders, don't you?" "I guess so. I still feel like I'm abandoning you though." "Yes. I'll only have fifteen defenders rather than sixteen. Oh woe is me! How will I survive? Relax. I'm sure I can handle a few wolf-whistles. I hope I get hassled because I REALLY want you to be able to make your speech a few times tomorrow." "Isn't that a bit calculated? Won't other people thinks it's weird me doing that repeatedly?" "No. Just say that too many idiots are still hassling me and Carol. Who's to know how many are? You just need to say that you have to give the speech to protect me and Carol. Some of my classmates will hear it more than once, but that doesn't matter, I don't think, especially if you change it a bit each time so it seems from the heart rather than rehearsed. Tighten it up too, if you can. Can you do that?" "I guess so, but it seems too artificial. But if you say to do it, then I will. Will you be okay for the rest of the day? And do you think Carol might be having the same troubles?" "Carol should be fine. We did it in the high-school lunchroom so very few middle-school students will know about it. I'll send her a text message to ask her at the end of this class." "I have to go get my bag. I'll fib a bit and say I'm going to check on Carol. I'll text you how the DMV goes, and would you please tell the driver when he picks you up so he knows whether to pick us up in the future?" "Sure. Let's go back in now." We did so, Julia leading the way and immediately apologizing, "I'm sorry I disrupted the class so much. Sometimes I'm so proud of Mark I can't help breaking down. He's impressive, isn't he?" Pretty much every girl in the class instantly agreed. To my surprise quite a few guys did too. I guess there's hope for some of us after all. Anna touched my arm as I walked past, quietly saying, "Well done." I didn't have to reply to Anna, as Julia resumed her conversation with the class by saying, "It's hard to believe but Carol is even nicer. They're a wonderful family." I knew Julia had a reason for saying what she had about Carol. That's the way she works, especially as it was her last chance to get her message across. I couldn't figure it out though. Maybe she'd enlighten me some time. I grabbed my bag and told the teacher, "I'm sorry, but I'm going to check on Carol. There are too many kids in this school who are thoughtless, selfish, immature, cruel ... You know what I mean." I was halfway to the door, and I escaped without problem. ------- Chapter 75: The Examiner From Hell Tuesday, April 19, 2005 (Continued) I loaded my bag with what schoolwork I wanted to do tonight, then headed to the DMV. Corvallis being a small place, it didn't take long for me to jog there. It didn't seem to take any energy either, even with a backpack on. As a little experiment, I tried running at my optimal rate, and the extra weight did cause fatigue to build up, forcing me to reduce my pace significantly. Apparently there are some rational aspects to how I break the laws of physics and biochemistry. The DMV is a bit of a madhouse, but by asking around I found Roy Smith. I was taken through to his office in the back, confirming he was a big-wig, as I'd expected. After the introductions were completed he sat me down in his office, gave me a Knowledge Test form and told me to go for it while he did other paperwork. Multi-choice tests are wonderfully easy for my four minds to leapfrog through, so I knocked it off very quickly. Mr. Smith looked surprised at how quickly I'd completed it. I wasn't surprised at his surprise. I just said, "I think I prepared well." He quickly marked it, announcing, "All correct. Here's another one. Do this one too." #2: #1: So I started on it. He was watching me so I made sure I always paused before answering each question, to pretend to read it even though for most of them one or other of my eyeballs had already skipped ahead to read it and a mind had already worked out the answer. Toward the end of my test he got a phone call, and I heard him say, "Ask him to wait there." After he hung up he said, "Your father is waiting out front. We'll finish in here first." I completed the test then gave it to him. He suspiciously asked, "How can you answer the questions so fast?" I gave my prepared answer, "I can read very quickly and I'm highly intelligent so I don't have to think about the answers. You might've heard that it's my intelligence that's the reason I'm being allowed to try for my license early." He didn't respond to that, and just got on with marking my second test. He declared, with a decided lack of enthusiasm, "Also all correct." I breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm suspicious about the way you answered those tests." He picked up a copy of the Oregon Driver Manual, and started asking a series of verbal questions, which got increasingly difficult. He worked his way up to, "What's the stopping distance when braking a car from 55 mph?" There was a graphic in the Manual that showed these distances. I remembered the answer, so that was fine. I also remembered that immediately under the graphic's heading there was a note saying, "You will not be tested on distances in this table." I was tempted to quote that note as part of my answer, but I decided not to aggravate him further. So I just answered, "The Manual gives it as 275 feet on Dry, Clean, Level Asphalt." He'd asked me about twenty verbal questions, the stopping distance one being the last. After that he said, "We'll do your Driving Test now. Let's go meet your father. I grabbed my bag and followed him. Sweating, if not physically then certainly mentally. This guy was tough! I knew it certainly wasn't the DMV's standard way of testing applicants, and I'd had no idea they were allowed to be so vicious. He got me to locate Dad, and we went out to the parking lot. Mr. Smith (or as I had started thinking of him as, Mr. Mean-Bastard-Who-Wants-To-Fail-Me Smith), asked, "Is this the vehicle you'll be doing your test in?" Indicating Dad's car. I nodded. He walked around it, inspecting it carefully. I had no doubt he was looking for a reason to fail me because the vehicle was substandard in some way. When he got back around to us he seemed annoyed not to find anything wrong with it. He demanded, "Keys please," putting out his hand. Dad passed them to Mr. MBWWTFM Smith, who passed them to me, stating, "Your test starts now." #1: #2: We looked around the parking lot, just in case there was something to be wary of, but nothing seemed untoward. I moved toward the car, saying, "I'll just put my bag in the trunk." I'd just said it so he knew what I was doing, never expecting his response. He paused for a second, then said, "No. Give it to your father to hold until we get back." I rolled my eyes at Dad as I handed it over. I didn't dare say a word. Dad watched as I walked to the car, looked carefully around to make sure the coast was clear, then opened the door and got in. I was totally paranoid and didn't dare put the key in the ignition until everything was perfect. I adjusted the seats, mirrors, put on my seatbelt, etc., until everything seemed as perfect as I could make it. Mr. Smith had been busy filling out the top of his clipboard mounted form. I was ready and he was still writing. He hadn't put his seatbelt on. Given a choice between his having supreme confidence in my driving abilities, or he was hoping to fail me, I assumed the latter. I said, "I am ready to start the car but your seatbelt is not on. I will wait until you are ready." He stopped writing and put it on, then stated, "When you are ready proceed out of the driveway and turn left. Go straight until I tell you otherwise." So started the "Driving Test From Hell". I several times changed my opinion of Mr. Smith's middle names, always in a downward direction. He knew the worst possible place in town to do a three-point turn because it was narrow and had low bollards on the curbs that were just high enough to have damaged Dad's car had I misjudged their distance after they were obscured by the car's front or back when it got close to them. He knew the steepest hill to do a hill-start on, etc. The hill-start was particularly bastardish, so I'll describe it. He got me to park by the curb, then said, "Get out of the vehicle, move to the rear and wait for me there." How should you get out of a car? Are there rules for what sequence each step should be done it (e.g., take off the seatbelt before checking for other traffic, or vice versa). There was nothing in the Driver Manual about this. I thought through everything as carefully as I could, and did what I thought was right. Once I was standing behind the car, he got out and came back to me. "Give me your watch please?" I took it off and gave it to him. If he wanted it as a bribe he wasn't getting much, as it was a cheap thing. He checked for traffic then bent down and placed it on the ground immediately behind the left rear wheel. He saw that I was watching, and said, "We'll get back in the car now and you'll do a hill-start. Drive ten yards forward then stop." Bastard! Once in the car I had a problem: Did I simply drive forward ten yards then stop, or did I pull out with indicators flashing, drive five yards, then indicate that I was going to park and do so in another five yards? I wanted to ask him, but somehow I felt it was unlikely he'd be so helpful as to tell me, and would probably penalize me for asking. I found a loophole. After going through all the careful startup procedure again, I said, "I will do exactly as you requested, 'Drive forward ten yards and stop.' I won't pull out toward the center of the street, drive forward, then park in just ten yards, because you didn't tell me to do that." I immediately proceeded to do as he'd said. The fate of my watch didn't worry me much. It was a crap watch and I knew I could do a hill-start without the car rolling back, as that was just a matter of coordination. I was much more concerned about his attitude than this specific part of the test. At the ten yard mark, as best I could judge it, I stopped. That's all I did. He'd said to stop, so I stopped and awaited further instructions. I waited. He waited. I waited. "Go and get your watch." I carefully repeated my best idea of the correct "Getting Out Of The Car When A Bastard Of An Examiner Is Eager to Fail You" procedure. I retrieved my unbroken watch, moved to the sidewalk, put my watch on, and then cautiously got back into the car. While attaching my seatbelt I noticed that his was off, and I asked him to put it back on. Bastard! He told me where to drive to next, requiring a less traumatic hill-start for us to get going again. The test continued, and continued, and continued - seemingly without end. There was a clock on the dashboard and we reached the time when the school's driver would be picking up the girls. I picked a clear moment to say, "May I pull off the street and stop to ask you a question please? It's not about this test." "You may." Once I had parked extremely carefully, I said, "My school provides my sisters and me with a driver daily, to drive us back and forth to school. I had incorrectly told him that my test would be over by now, and that I would have texted my sister to let him know whether he had to come to our house tomorrow morning. He will be driving them home now. As this test will take longer, may I please text my sister and ask her to get his phone number so I can contact him later? I am asking this entirely for his consideration, not for myself in any way." I felt I was on thin ice, and was treading as carefully as I knew how. "You may." That was surprisingly considerate of the bastard. I created a quick message, adding "Do not call or text me back." As I sent it I realized that I'd been foolish to leave my cellphone on thus far, as I sure didn't want to answer any calls while I was on this test, so to play doubly safe I turned it off. The test resumed. At one point we were driving behind another car which was a little slow. Mr. Smith commanded, "Pass him." I almost did so, until I realized that the yellow lines in the middle of the road would suggest otherwise. I politely informed Mr. %#$@^# Smith of this fact. He started asking me more verbal Knowledge questions while we were driving. Also questions like, "Quick, list every driving hazard you can see now." How can you possibly get that right? Is a manhole cover twenty yards ahead of you a hazard or not? What about someone washing their car in their driveway that we'd just this second passed? Could the trees along the street suddenly fall onto it? Good grief! Fortunately with my four minds I could fire off potential hazards as fast as I could speak. "If in doubt, call it out" was my motto. He did things like tell me, "Take the next two right hand turns", the second of which was a one-way street going the wrong way, so I took the right hander after that. He sat there saying nothing the whole time. You get the idea. (I'll tell you anyway: he was a fucking bastard!) Just before 4pm he said, "Head back to the DMV." I knew where I was so navigated back there myself. I suddenly remembered Dad, and felt horribly guilty about all the time he was missing off work. Bastard! (Smith, obviously, not Dad.) When we pulled into the parking lot, Dad was outside looking for us. He looked very relieved to spot us. Imagine my relief when I finally got to park and turn the engine off! My legs were wobbly when I got out of the car. Smith said, "Follow me," as he led the way back inside the DMV. We walked past Dad, so I gave him his keys back and acted wiping sweat off my brow. I didn't dare tell Dad anything because I didn't want the bastard to hear me calling him a bastard. I asked Smith's back, "May my father come with us?" "Yes," he said without breaking step or looking back. Dad had heard, so he followed me following Smith. Smith led us back to his office again and sat us down. I didn't have a clue whether I'd passed or not. For all I knew Smith had decided to fail me before I walked in the front door. It sure felt that way to me. Without smiling he said, "You have passed your tests. I am under pressure to give you an unrestricted license but I would have refused to do so had you done ANYTHING wrong. Your written and verbal answers were 100% and your driving was passable, so I will issue it. I will also keep an eye on your record, and if there are any violations, I'll yank it. Got it?" "Yes sir. May my father go? He's late for getting back to work." "Yes. It's just form filling from here." Dad said, "I'll stay a few more minutes, just to make sure." It didn't take long to do the paperwork, mainly because Smith unashamedly jumped the necessary lines, such as to get my photograph. Apart from a few more threats, which were unnecessary - I think I'll be scared of Smith to my dying day - the only noteworthy point was when Smith explained, "There's no such thing as an unrestricted license as such in Oregon. For someone under eighteen years, it is indicated simply by the license's issuing date being at least a year earlier. For me to make your license unrestricted I either have to change your birthday so that you are over eighteen, which I won't be doing, or backdate the date of issue of your license, which is what I will do. I will backdate it one year and one day, so you can drive unrestricted immediately. Your license will have to be renewed one year earlier than it would otherwise, but that's a price you'll have to pay." [[Just as #3 and #4's previous dimension was unusual for letting 15-year olds get their license, I later learned that this dimension was unusual for not having a explicit indication of license being restricted or unrestricted. There are some strangely inexplicably random variations in some dimensions.]] There was no way I was going to argue with him. Also, I didn't know what having a license renewed meant as it hadn't been mentioned in the Driver Manual, but I wasn't going to ask him in case it gave him reason to fail me. Thank God it hadn't been one of his verbal questions! I was hoping to escape this place without saying another word. "If you are pulled over and have your license examined, the policeman will be suspicious of the dates and your trip might be delayed abnormally. There's nothing I can do about that, other than suggest that once you're eighteen you get a new license issued." I few minutes later I was walking through the doors of the DMV, clutching my HARD-earned license in my hands. Smith hadn't smiled once, not even when he handed it over and we thanked him. I vowed NEVER to see him again; not on my eighteenth birthday or any other day! As soon as the door closed behind us, I gave a huge sigh of relief, then told Dad, "That was the exam from HELL! That bastard tried his damnedest to fail me. He tried to trick me into turning the wrong way into a one-way street, to illegally pass across solid yellow lines. He even took my watch off and placed it just behind the rear wheel before making me do a hill-start. If I'd rolled back even one inch my watch would have been history. He peppered me with verbal questions, made me do two different Knowledge tests. Christ! What a bastard!" "You've got it now. If you were older this would be perfect time to have a whiskey, but that's a few years away even for you. I'll call work to see if they want me to bother coming back." I did similarly, turning on my cellphone. No messages, good. I dithered over whether to call Julia or Carol first. I realized they were together, but whose phone should I call? I chickened out and called their landline, figuring I might need to talk with Prof. Vanessa answered and I told her I had my license now but it'd been a very long, tough exam. I asked to talk with whichever girl was closest. Julia came to the phone. I repeated that I had it, and that I'd give her the gory details of the Examiner from Hell later to save me having to repeat it several times. I asked how her afternoon had been at school, abuse-wise. She answered, "It was great! There was a lot of it. I had several protectors so no trouble in that way, but there were heaps of catcalls and rude comments so you'll be able to repeat your speech tomorrow, hopefully several times. Isn't that great?" "Ahh, if you say so. I'd rather not, but if you think I should?" I asked hopeful of one answer but expecting the other. "Not only should you, you MUST. It's a fantastic speech. Carol and Mom were rolling on the floor. Well, Carol was. It's absolutely perfect." "Okay. How was Carol's afternoon?" "You can ask her yourself in a minute, but great. She had a fun day. Where are you now?" I had to put her on hold as Dad came back, "My boss said I might as well go home. He's okay, so don't worry about my being delayed. He knows you were getting a special license and he understands it was more time-consuming than normal. Do you want me to drop you at home or Julia's?" "Home, please." "Do you want to drive?" Dad could see how shattered I was, so he was joking. "Ha-ha! I need time to recover, and the last thing I need is for that bastard to see me make a tiny mistake and cancel my license." I got into the passenger's side and resumed my conversation with Julia, "I'm back, sorry about that. I'm just leaving the DMV." "I'll put Carol on quickly then, and you can call us later from home." My conversation with Carol was a virtual repeat of the one I'd had with Julia, except that she'd enjoyed her entire day, morning and afternoon. She'd gotten to use three of the put-downs Julia had her rehearse, including using one against her most hated foe. Apparently it'd been very effective, which probably meant that I didn't have to kill him, so that was good. Carol also had the phone number for our driver. "Thanks, sweetie. Can you give it to me now so I can call him when I get home?" Carol recited it. I was about to hang up when Carol delayed me by telling me how thrilled she was at my speech. Both at the depths of love I'd expressed, and at how the speech's dishonesty would make her coming out trick work better. I wasn't sure how she could praise the one speech for both of those reasons, but Carol had no problem doing so. She's a female, so logical consistency isn't one of her concerns. She wished that people in her classes would start verbally abusing her so I could come down and she could hear me make the speech first hand. Female logic at its finest: wishing to be verbally abused so I would go to her class to stop it. On that impressive note we ended the call. I very much enjoyed the emotional boost from leaving the DMV behind me. It felt like a large weight coming off me. It didn't take long to get home. I was already feeling much better but still fairly shattered. ("Fairly shattered" sounds as logical as "a little bit pregnant", but in sympathy for how I felt at the time, I'm too shattered to make the effort to get it right.) The news of my passing had already spread to the Anderson household, so Donna rushed out to congratulate me. After a few seconds she asked, "How come you're not excited?" "Because I'm shattered. Mentally and emotionally shattered. The examiner I had was a complete and utter bastard. He was mean, nasty, tricky, unsmiling, and he tried very, very hard to make me fail. He deliberately tried to get me to break the law, pass cars illegally, turn down a one-way street the wrong way, and that sort of thing. He made me do double the number of written tests I should have had to, asked me verbal questions when they don't normally. He even asked a question about something the Driver Manual specifically said wouldn't be examined. I was damned lucky that I'd memorized everything in the book. I had to be ULTRA careful EVERY second, and the whole time I had no idea whether I'd already failed or not. He didn't smile once. I don't think he knows how. It was like the worst teacher you've ever had, but ten times worse. Thank God it's over." Donna offered, "Would you like a massage? I'm good at those. I've heard people say they're good when they're stressed." That was a very appealing idea. "Seriously? A proper massage?" "I'm pretty good, people at the club say. We massage each other between races. Usually just the legs, but if we've got time we sometimes give each other bigger ones." I nearly opened my mouth to ask her, "Is this a trick to get me to strip?", but I was too tired to care and the idea of a massage was very appealing. Instead I said, "I'll bring my bedspread and lie down on the living room floor. How does that sound?" "Fine. I'm used to doing it on the grass so that'll be easier than normal. You should strip as much as you want. The more you take off the better the massage will be." "I thought you'd mention that at some stage. I might leave my shorts on, if you don't mind." "I mind, but that's still pretty good." I was thinking about stripping, when I realized I almost certainly needed a shower. I must have sweated from all the nervous tension. I told Donna I'd shower first then call her when I was ready after that. Which reminded me to call Julia again. Julia and I agreed that Prof would come collect me in what Julia pointedly called "YOUR car" at 6:15, and I'd drive him back to Julia's as part of his testing me. I groaned at the idea of another test but knew I had to do it. His test couldn't be anything other than a delight after Mr. Bastard Smith's. Julia said dinner would be about 6:45 so I might want a snack first. Suddenly I was very hungry. It must've been all the nervous energy I'd burned. I called Mr. Moore's home number next. I apologized for not letting him know earlier. Without thinking about it, my apology included the explanation that I'd had the Examiner from Hell and that the test went a lot longer than I expected. "Who did you have?" "A guy called Roy Smith." "Why would he be testing you?" I realized that our Drivers' Ed teacher was quite likely to know everyone at the local DMV. It didn't matter, so I said, "I didn't exactly get my license in an ordinary way. I'm not sixteen yet. I'm fifteen and a half." -- I suddenly remembered something, and exclaimed, "Damn! I just remembered that I forgot to get permission from the school to drive there. I got caught up in something else and got distracted." "I take it from that comment that you passed?" "Oh yes. I forgot to say that. Yes, I passed. I have my license now." "Take your car to school, but arrive a little early and go to the office. Tell them I said it was okay for your first day. You know where the students park, don't you?" "Yes." "Good. It's first come first served, so park wherever you want. So how does a 15-year old get a license?" "Ahh, sort of by knowing the right people. It's not really as bad as that sounds. The same reason we needed you as a driver was part of it. I also need to do some driving for other reasons, to OSU and things like that. There were enough people who had enough clout that wanted me to be able to drive that it was arranged. I guess Roy Smith didn't like that very much." "I don't know him so I couldn't comment. Anyway, congratulations. I'll be able to sleep in an extra five minutes tomorrow morning, so thanks for calling." We ended our call, and our relationship too I guess as I doubt I'd be doing Drivers Ed at school when I turned sixteen. I went to the fridge and made myself a fairly serious snack. I was working my way through it as I went to my room, left my snack there, then went to the bathroom and had a shower. That and the ongoing snack made me feel a lot better. Back in my room I put on a fresh pair of shorts, deliberately nowhere near as sexy as my sit-up pair, grabbed my bed spread and snack, took a couple more bites of it, then went in search of Donna. She was in her room, and she joined me in our walk to the living room. Dad was watching TV. I took the opportunity to ask him, "You're sure you won't get in trouble with your boss?" "It's fine, especially after I tell him some of the things your examiner made you do. He knows you're not sixteen yet and that I didn't have any way of hurrying it up. Remember the boss likes me, so I'd have to do a lot worse than being held up to upset him." I spread the bedspread on the floor out of Dad's line of sight to the TV and lay on it. Donna started on my feet, which left my other end free to keep snacking. It felt great, but I already knew I liked foot massages. Donna's style was very different from Carol's. Donna's was MUCH harder but it still felt good. I groaned a couple of times, which Donna giggled to. Dad said, "Good?" "It feels very nice. I was quite tense all during that exam so a shower then this feels great. Donna's got strong hands too; she really digs in." After a few minutes, when Donna was working on a leg, Dad got up, returning a minute later with a large towel and a bottle of baby oil. "Mark, spread the towel under you, then Donna can use this oil. I'll show you how much to use. Her hands will move much easier." I had to stir myself to spread the towel, but soon re-flopped. Dad showed Donna how to use the oil. It was a new concept to Donna as they just rubbed skin-to-skin at the club. We both enjoyed it better, so that was good. Donna did a good job of my legs, arms and back. She asked me to turn over, and when I did she said, "Aww. I was hoping you'd gotten hard. Sometimes guys at the club do." Dad asked, "And what do you do when that happens, Donna?" "Usually giggle and make fun of them. This is out on the field so there are people all around. I didn't really mean that it happened when I was massaging them. It could have been anyone and I just saw the guy roll over." "Okay." Dad hadn't questioned Donna's statement about wanting to see me hard. He'd saved me from having to answer it though, which was good. Donna worked her way up from my foot again. Her hands seemed to be spending a long time working on my upper-thighs. Then my upper-upper-thighs. Dad cleared his throat pointedly, causing Donna to say, "Rats!" Dad said, "You'll get more sooner if you prove you're trustworthy. That's a general rule in life, but it might work down there too." "Still 'Rats' though." But Donna did move to start working on my arms. Mom came home and congratulated me. I didn't know how she knew already, but moms have mysterious ways for finding out stuff about their kids. She added, "I got hold of someone in the DA's office this afternoon." (DA is district attorney.) "They think they might be able to get plea bargains on all the assailants so they're holding off doing any work. If the trial does go ahead they'll have to spend some time with all of you later in the week or this weekend. He said he'd let me know." Dad said, "So we don't really know anything." "Not really, no. Just wait and see, like before." We chatted a bit about my driving exam, Mom got me to confirm that Carol and I were having dinner with the Williamses, then went to the kitchen to start cooking dinner for her reduced family. That soon produced appetizing smells which invoked a belly rumble in me, to Dad and Donna's amusement. Donna finished off my arms and shoulders, then said, "Umm, I don't really know how to do your chest or belly. We hardly ever do them." "That's okay, sweetie. I feel very good already. You've got strong hands and give a deep massage. It feels good though. My muscles feel much looser and more relaxed." Dad said, "When you're ready to get up, Mark, use the towel to wipe the oil off you. Get Donna to help on the areas you can't reach. Rather than making Donna hang around, I immediately got up, and she wiped me down front and back. She did a good job, although she was a little clumsy as her forearm kept brushing against the front of my shorts. I was soft so she wasn't getting much of a thank you for the nice massage, but she seemed happy. I thanked her very much and went back to my room. I nearly put on the good clothes that Julia and Carol had bought for our last Saturday's date, but I figured that I might be better off wearing them to school as it seemed I had to make lots of speeches. I put on something else instead, and unpacked my bag to do some schoolwork. I noticed the Oregon Driver Manual on my desk and had considerable pleasure in taking it outside to throw in the trash. Just putting it in the small wastepaper basket beside my desk wasn't terminal enough; I wanted it GONE. On the way through the kitchen I passed Mom, Dad and Donna having dinner; that was another reason I was hiding in my room, to avoid the torture of having to watch them eat when I wasn't. Mom spotted what I was carrying outside and asked me where I was going with it. "I'm taking this outside to throw in the trash. I'm tempted to set fire to it and dance around it whooping for joy, but that might be going a bit far." "Don't you think you might need it again?" "I've memorized the damned thing forward and back. Let me show you this page." I flicked through until I found the graphic about stopping distances, showed it to them, as well as the notice that said, "You will not be tested on distances in this table." I said, "I WAS tested on this table. He asked me how far to brake from 55 mph." "That was mean." "Tell me about it! This book is going into the trash! I never want to see it or Mr. Bastard Smith, again." I wouldn't normally swear in front of Mom, but I figured she'd have enough sympathy for me to let me express myself this time. After I returned Dad said, "I guess if you do have any road code questions, you can always call up Mr. Smith. He seemed like a helpful guy." "{Groan}." The rest of the family laughed. I didn't have much time to kill until Prof arrived. ^ When Prof came in he congratulated me on my getting my license, commenting, "I understand you had a difficult time." "You have NO idea! The guy was trying as hard as he could to fail me, and was EVIL! Before that test I was fearing your testing me now, but after the DMV's test yours is going to be a cake walk." "Don't get overconfident. I've got high standards." "When have you ever seen me overconfident?" "Haha. Good point. I'm sure you take my meaning anyway." "Yes, Prof. I'm ready to go whenever you are." "Not so fast. Show me your license." "Oh. Here it is." I dug it out of my wallet, while Prof was saying, "Not that I disbelieve you, especially not with Steven standing beside you, but checking the details is a good habit to get in to. Your driving my daughter around is something that concerns me and checking your license only takes a few seconds." Those few seconds later, Prof asked, "Why is the Date of Issue a year ago?" Dad repeated Smith's explanation. Prof's only comment was, "Not a very good system then. Okay Mark, let's go for a drive. Pretend I'm your DMV examiner." "If it's all the same to you, I'm already trying hard to forget him. I'll just pretend you're Julia's ultra safety-conscious father." "That'll work too. Steven, here's a spare key to their car. We've got a spare one at home, one for Mark, and Julia has one on her ring already. Let's head off. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we get dinner." He knew how to motivate me! My family came out to see me drive off for the first time. As I approached the car I tried to get back into the mindset of being in an exam, as it wouldn't do to be careless, or I'd end up being carless. Prof pulled the "Forgot To Put His Seatbelt On" trap. I briefly told him about Smith's removing his seatbelt while I was recovering my watch after the hill-start test. Prof chuckled, "That was mean." "You have NO idea!" I pulled away, waved off by Mom, Dad and Donna It took me a few minutes to get used to the car, the first hill-start being a little clumsy, as was a few other minor things like that, but I was soon tootling along nicely ("tootling" being another one of Mom's expressions. I would never choose to say it deliberately, but it just toddles out by itself sometimes). Prof's test was quite a good one, for an amateur. I had no trouble, and he was relaxed about it. After about twenty minutes he said, "I was told to get you home at 6:45, so head that way now." On the way he said, "I emailed the Dean with a brief description of the trouble you had with the track coach at school. He replied that he would give your Principal a quick call. Probably has by now, I imagine." "Wouldn't he have told you what they discussed? I'd be curious to know." "There's no need for the Dean to tell me. The exact words used don't matter. It was simply the Dean telling your Principal, 'Look after Mark' and 'I've got my eye on you.' I'm sure your Principal will be counting down the days to your graduation. He'd also like to transfer you to another school, but he's probably more damned if he does than damned if he doesn't, to misuse that expression a little." "How do you mean? How could he transfer me?" "He can't really, that's why I said he's counting down the days. If he tried to kick you out for bad behavior then all the times he's failed to protect you would come to light. If not immediately, then in your later biographical works. He would become 'The Principal that foolishly transferred you out of his school.' His best course of action is just to wait you out. It's only one more year. I almost feel sorry for him, except that he doesn't have a very good reputation." "I think he's doing a better job now. Of looking after me, I mean. I can't comment on the rest of what he does. Mr. Moore, the Drivers' Ed teacher who has been driving us to and from school, told us that the Principal had called a meeting after Millane's silliness and had been very much on my side. The Principal sounds like he's turning into a good guy. I feel a bit sorry for him now." "With the amount of scrutiny he's under now, he's got no choice about how to act. The sources of that scrutiny want him to protect you, not Millane, so it's hardly surprising he sided with you against Millane. It doesn't indicate that he's a good guy at all, it just means he's smart enough to protect his own skin or is easy to push around. Either way, I wouldn't bother feeling too sorry for him. I'd have been more impressed by his character if he'd defended Millane. He would've been stupid to do so, but it would've indicated more character. Please remember to tell your mom that the Dean will have called your Principal. She can use that to tighten the screws a little." #3: #4: Prof said, "Park on the street out front. There are too many people coming and going from our place so you'd block the driveway if you make a habit of parking on it. You drive well, Mark. You passed the 'Prof Test', such as it was. If you keep driving so carefully I won't have any problems with you." I certainly didn't want him to have any problems with me! We headed inside, and I was greeted WONDERFULLY. First, both of my girls were dressed GREAT (I'm a 15-year old boy, so that equals "sexily"). Carol's top was very low-cut and revealed some of her best areas. I would've said, "yummy", but I was saving that for the second wonderful thing I was greeted by: the smell of a roast chicken dinner. Both girls rushed up and grabbed an arm each. I sometimes wonder how they decide who gets which arm. They never seem to collide or go for the same arm. It's probably that female ESP thing that I've noticed a few times. Much hugging and kissing ensued. It didn't take me long to comment on the smell of dinner. Carol very proudly proclaimed that she was cooking dinner tonight. Julia said, "She really is too. She's relegated Vanessa to supervision only, and I'm just a kitchen-hand," whatever that is. "Carol's trying to do everything herself. She's treating this like it's very important." I thundered, although I kept my voice down, "What do you mean LIKE it's important! How DARE you imply that roast chicken dinners aren't important! I've got a good mind to put you over my knees, except that both my arms appear to be restrained at the moment. But just you watch yourself, young lady." Julia laughed, and said, "Come and look at this." She pulled me toward the kitchen, so you can imagine my lack of reluctance. In the kitchen Julia picked up a page. I immediately recognized it as a recipe layout, similar to the "Carol's Pussy Flavored Vegetable Soup," but this one was headed up, "Chicken Roast for a Lord", subtitled, "Roast chicken, with all the trimmings and lots of gravy." Detailed instructions followed, but I didn't read them because I didn't want to spoil the wonder. I said, "So you've got two recipes now, Carol?" Carol blushed at the reminder of the first. Julia helped by saying, "Yes. We'll teach her how to make a nice dessert next, and then she'll be able to cook a three-course meal for us. I'm particularly looking forward to the soup." (For those of you who are interested in such things, I just discovered something useful. If a girl wearing a low-cut, loose top is hugging your arm to her chest, then when you slide that arm slowly sideways, it can take the top with it, which opens up the view even more. It can result in a quite spectacular sight. I just thought you might want to know.) "I'll take it off if you like?" said Carol. "Huh?" "If you want to see my breasts better, I'll take my top off. Bra too, if you want?" "Ahh. No, it's okay." Carol looked puzzled at my answer, so Julia explained, "I think it's the same as that ridiculous 'free rub' idea of his, only this time it's a 'free look'. Don't bother trying to understand it; it's too much a boy thing to make sense." Carol looked at me. I did my best too look mature although I suspect that I didn't fool them. Carol asked, "Do you want me to put on a top which shows more than this one, so you don't have to pull it sideways?" In all honesty, yes, I did. I was also extremely pleased that she had other tops that showed more than this one. What a lovely girl! Julia said, "Don't bother, he'll just want to pull that one sideways too." He may want to, but he felt too stupid to be caught doing it again. I decided that there was no merit at all in arguing with Julia. That's something I'm very cautious about doing even when I think I'm right, and that sure didn't apply now. I said, "Ahh, no, that's all right, Carol. You stay here and look after dinner. Isn't it about ready now?" (Notice the clever change of subject.) "Yes, but it can wait. I've got time to get changed." Now I was even more upset that I been caught getting a "free shot". Now it was holding up my dinner! A roast chicken dinner at that! I had no choice except to throw my weight around. In this case, to throw it all on the floor and beg for forgiveness. "I'm sorry girls. I'm a pathetic male. That's how we are. I love your top, Carol, and I loved sliding it sideways to get a free shot. Yes, I know you would take it off for me, or change it to an even better one, but none of that would change the fact that I'm a male and therefore pathetic. I beg for mercy. I also beg for dinner. I'm getting REALLY hungry. It's later than normal for dinner and I've had a TERRIBLE day." The sympathy card works every time. The girls suddenly changed their tack entirely, saying, "You poor thing," and those sorts of comments. They were music to my ears. It also meant food to my belly soon too. Yummy. My belly rumbled all by itself. Maybe I should have deliberately done that a couple of minutes ago. I was shooed out of the kitchen, "To let the women get on with it." They were unjustly blaming me for holding them up! Not that I stayed around to argue the point. I may be illogical about sex, but not about something as important as this dinner. Vanessa called out, "Tell the others that dinner will be in five minutes please, Mark. Prof's in his study, The Boys are in theirs." #3: None of us did, which meant we also didn't know where it was. I went to tell Prof about dinner first, then asked him, "Vanessa says The Boys are in their study. Where is that?" Prof chuckled, "That's another name for the Guys' Room. When The Boys were growing up they'd tell us they were going to study and we'd almost invariably find them playing pool. Many's the time Vanessa or I threatened to burn that table." "Haha. Okay." "If they're not there, they'll probably be in the library." "Huh? You have a library?" "Sure. That's where The Boys study. We don't like them having a study desk in their bedroom, so we use the library." "So if they're not playing pool in the study, they'll be studying in the library?" "You got it. Do you know where the library is?" "Until five seconds ago I didn't know you had one." "It didn't take you nearly this long to find out where Julia's bedroom is." I wasn't going to fall for a tease that weak, so "Nor the kitchen either. It's a matter of priorities." "I can understand that. We'd better not delay the food priority much longer." He gave me directions to the library, "but try the study first, haha." The Boys were in the study so I didn't get to see the library. They congratulated me on my license. I would have stayed to talk or asked to check out the library, but the five minutes were up and I didn't want to be late to dinner. I would even have preferred to be early but I'd missed that chance. It's all about priorities. ------- Chapter 76: Starting to Plan My Coming Out Tuesday, April 19, 2005 (Continued) Dinner was a great success. How could it not be? Carol was beaming with pride at having cooked it so successfully, and I lavished her with praise when my mouth wasn't full. Either situation made her happy, and me too. Carol said, "I think I can cook this by myself now, especially if I get Julia or Donna to help me." I wasn't going to criticize that comment at all. Carol's chicken cooking ability put her above petty concerns such as logic. I regaled them with stories of the Examiner from Hell. Carol regaled us stories about her lesbian put-downs. They hadn't been anything subtle or sophisticated. Carol's main mistake in handling obnoxious boys in the past had been to object too quietly. Julia had gotten her to turn the volume WAY up, ideally so not only could every kid in her class hear, but also the kids in the classrooms to either side. Carol said, "I gave him a chance to brush past me because I was SO looking forward doing this. He couldn't resist and when he did so I yelled out REALLY loudly, 'NO! I will not let you rub my breasts. Stop begging me to. No wonder I'm a lesbian, with boys as pathetic as you.' He turned bright red and cringed." #3: The rest of us assumed it was a pathetically rhetorical question. Carol continued, "He denied it and I yelled, 'How many times do I have to tell you I'm a lesbian? I wouldn't let you touch me even if I was straight. You're gross.' Or something like that. The whole class was laughing. Miss Rodriguez had to yell for everyone to be quiet and she demanded an explanation. Paul said he wasn't doing anything, just walking to his chair. I said, 'He's always rubbing himself up against me, pulling my hair, making rude suggestions and things like that. Ask any of the girls around here, I'm sure they've seen him do it lots of times all year.' Lots of girls said they had. He kept saying, 'I never said anything', but Miss Rodriguez didn't care. She made him swap seats with a girl on the far side of the room, so that he only had boys near him. My teacher told me that I should have spoken up earlier and I said, 'I was too shy. It was my girlfriend who told me I should speak up. She's sixteen, and very pretty and smart.'" Julia interrupted. "That was very clever, Carol. And thank you too." To the rest of us, Julia explained, "We rehearsed some things, but not for how Carol would respond to her teachers. Carol made that up on the spot." Carol said, "I didn't make it up. Every word is true. You are my girlfriend, you did tell me to speak up, and you are sixteen, very pretty and smart." Julia countered, "I won't argue with any of that, modesty not being my best virtue, but you were still smart picking out a truth that fitted your plan so well." "OUR plan. It was easy to mention you because I'm proud that you're my girlfriend. Speaking of you, lots of girls in my class want to meet you now. Girls in my other classes too because I talked about you other times too." Julia laughed, "That's funny because lots of girls in my classes want to meet you. I think we're going to be busy the next few lunchtimes. Why don't you come up to our lunch area tomorrow and I'll have some of my friends there, and the day after tomorrow Mark and I will come down to your area and you can have some of your friends with you. We might need to go back and forth a few times." Carol happily agreed with that idea. I suggested, "I don't think I should join you. This is a girl thing, so I should make myself scarce." Julia shook her head from side to side, "Mark, this is ALL for you. The idea is to introduce these girls to you, not to Carol or me. I'd bet that's what most of the girls want anyway." Carol said, "That's for sure. The girl who the teacher moved behind me asked whether Egg was my brother. When I said 'Yes', she said she'd like to be my friend. It was easy to tell what she wants." I asked, "How do you know she's not attracted to you and was just making conversation? You told the class you were a lesbian, and then she wants to be your friend, so she might want you rather than me." Julia laughed, saying, "Mark, you are far too logical. It doesn't work like that." #4: I expressed myself succinctly, "Huh?" "Girls are more complex than a simple yes/no choice in who they're attracted to. Or for anything else, come to that. There will be girls who are very attracted to females who would love to be with you, especially after they get to know you. And there'll be straight girls who could become attracted to Carol because they find out how lovely she is - ME, for example. Girls aren't black and white that way." #3: #2: #4: "I will bow to your infinite wisdom on this matter, Julia. Infinite when compared to how much I know about girls." After everyone had their little chuckle at my expense, Carol resumed, "That was the best fun I had making my announcement, especially because I was able to make it very loud so everyone heard. In my other classes I sometimes had to be quieter, but quite a few of my classmates know that I'm a lesbian now. In a few days everyone's going to know. -- "I didn't have ANYTHING like the problems that Julia did because of our lunchroom fun. I had one girl come up to me after lunch and tell me she'd been having lunch with her sister and had seen Julia and me. She asked if Julia was my girlfriend and I said, 'Yes. She's wonderful.' The girl just said, 'Cool' and walked off. I realized afterward that I should've said I was a lesbian as she might think I'm bi, but it was only one girl so it didn't really matter. Judging by no one else talking about my lunchtime fun she can't be a good gossip, so telling her wouldn't have helped us much anyway." Julia said, "Don't worry too much about spreading the news, sweetie. Just have fun with it. In a couple of days Mark and I will come down to your area. Between the gossip that will already have started and our kissing each other when I visit you, everyone in your classes will know in a few days." Vanessa mentioned my previous night's dinner table statement about the girls' coming out being "their responsibility." She congratulated me again for that. "I can't take much credit because it took me hours to think of it. For a long time I was against Carol's idea. Not strongly against it, but I still didn't like it. If I'd thought of the ethics of it earlier, I would've saved myself a lot of worry." Vanessa replied, "I'm guessing, therefore, that your concerns were out of your desire to protect the girls? From the difficulties that Julia had today, for example." "Yes. That was almost my entire concern. But I realized the girls had the right to choose, and that they had thought it through, so I relaxed. It has turned out to be a lot more trouble that I thought, though. I had to give that speech and will have to repeat it tomorrow, several times by the sounds of things. It would have been better if Julia didn't have to put up with that." Julia exclaimed, "Are you KIDDING! It was wonderful. Your speech, if it gets known widely enough, will make Carol's plan work far better than we thought it would. People are going to see the three of us together and think, 'Isn't that nice', rather than be suspicious of you and Carol." I agreed, "That's what I was intending by the speech, as well as reducing the amount of infantile hassling. You mentioned yesterday something about it giving you easy means to get more girls, or something like that. I couldn't see that because I thought I made it clear that I was ultra-loyal to you and Carol. You said you'd explain later and now seems a good time." Julia explained, "Your speech made lots of girls know what a wonderful person you are. An incredible person, really." Vanessa and Carol were nodding, so it was pointless me trying to argue with that. "The majority of them are so impressed that they'll respect your love and loyalty, so they won't try anything. They envy me like crazy, by the way. You should have seen the end of that class! The girls went CRAZY over how lucky I was to have you. Anyway, as of today, it'd damage your reputation badly if you allowed a girl to pick you up, so don't do anything like that for a while, which I know you wouldn't. When your court case is over I'll make it okay for other girls to have you. As a result of that speech they've got enormous desire for you but they don't have the opportunity. I'll open the door and invite them in. There'll be a stampede. It'll be such fun." I said, "While I remember to mention them, a couple of points. First, about the court case. Mom talked to the police today. They're hoping to get plea bargains, but nothing definite yet. In other words: no news. Second, picking up girls. Remember that girl was going to drop her photo into my locker. I'd forgotten about it, but there was nothing in my locker right after lunch. Maybe she forgot or got cold feet or something, but if she does put it in what should I do? Does the speech change anything?" Julia said, "She won't have forgotten; that's impossible. She might have gotten cold feet, or maybe she's getting a photo duplicated. If she talks with you again, tell her to ask you again in two weeks. If you get her photo show it to me and we'll decide then, depending on what she's written. Okay?" "Yes. That's fine. Apart from your saying 'that's impossible'. I forgot about her photo, so she could have too." "{Raspberry}." | "{Raspberry}." From both my girls. That's why I have two of them, so I can get stereo raspberries. Rather than getting into it, I said, "Let's drop it, she's not important." The girls agreed not to expand on their succinctly stated opinions. I returned to my main question, "Digressions about the court case and the forgetful photograph girl aside, what I'm most puzzled by is how you'll 'open the door' to let other girls be with me. Could you explain that please?" "I could, but it'd be more fun to just announce it at the time." "Would that be 'more fun' for you or for me?" "Definitely for me, haha. But doing it this way will make your reaction look more honest and convincing." "And it's just a coincidence that you'll enjoy it more?" "Heavens no, that's the main reason. I'll enjoy it so much, PLEASE?" Guys are pathetic: I caved. "Okay. At least you didn't pretend that it was important I not know." "I didn't need to as I knew you'd agree without it. You're SO good to me! Besides, I should save that reason for when it really matters." "{Sigh}. At least tell me that I'll enjoy it at the end." "Have you forgotten what we're doing? Getting you girls! If you can't enjoy yourself with a bunch of desperate-to-please, 16-year old girls then there's not much I can do to help you." "I'm willing to help," offered Andrew Robert said, "As if Sophia would let you do that." "Yeah. She's not QUITE as permissive as Julia, haha. To get back to reality, I'd like to invite Sophia around one night to meet Mark and Carol, but it'll have to be a night when we have normal conversations, and I've never seen that happen with you lot yet. God knows what she'd think if she heard half the stuff you talk about." Julia said, "I'm sure we could restrain ourselves enough to be normal for one night. Why don't you both invite both Sophia and Ashley around one night, preferably before the court case finishes because Mark's social life is going to get a little hectic after that." Andrew laughed, "By the way Julia talks, 'hectic' is going to be a considerable understatement. You must be incredibly secure in your relationship to be doing this, Julia?" Carol jumped in with a proud, "Me too!" Julia said, "Sweetie, there isn't a word to express how safe your relationship with Mark is. I guess you could say mine's on ice, but it's certainly not thin ice. Mile thick ice, I hope." I agreed, "Let's make it ten-mile thick, permafrost ice, before global warming." [[Which reminds me that I'd better give some thought to global warming. Humanity's going extinct wouldn't be ideal, even though it would be deserved.]] The phone rang then, and Vanessa said, "It's probably for you, Julia." Julia said, "I'll use the kitchen phone. Excuse me." Andrew asked, "So, Mark, what night should we make the dinner for you and Carol to meet our girlfriends?" "Umm. I don't know. You should ask Julia when she gets back." Vanessa said, "But I thought you were the 'Lord'. Doesn't that mean you get to be the boss?" "Well, theoretically, but I find it's best to leave these things to Julia. She's usually got so many schemes on the go that I never know what's really going on anyway." Vanessa said, "Go on, make a decision. If Julia has a plan she can change it. It'll do you good to start making some decisions." "Umm, okay. What do you think, Carol?" Vanessa laughed. "Haha. YOU make a decision, Mark." "Can't I decide to delegate? Julia tells me I should do that more." "Not nearly as often as I bet she tells you to be commanding or make decisions." "You might be right about that. Umm. Umm. I don't know where to start thinking about it. I've never planned a dinner party before." "So just imagine you're going to invite a bunch of your friends over. When would be a good night for that?" "Umm. It should be soon, before things get 'hectic' after the court case ends. I guess this Friday or Saturday. I guess Friday would be better in case people have more important plans for Saturday. Is that right?" Vanessa said, "Is what right?" "Friday. Is that a good night?" "It's a night. That's all we wanted. Friday night it is then. Can you ask your girlfriends, Andrew and Robert?" Both The Boys agreed they would, and that Friday was fine with them too. Vanessa said, "If either of the girls can't make it we'll reschedule, so ask them as soon as you can please." "We'll call them right after dinner." Vanessa said, "Relax, Mark. Friday night was a good choice. Your logic was correct." Phew. I celebrated with my fourth helping of chicken, which made Carol happy. She asked me yet again, "Is it really good?" "It's great. You're going to make some lucky guy a great wife one day. Wait! You already are. That must be me then, haha." Julia had re-entered the room and walked behind Carol. She put her hands on Carol's shoulders now, saying, "Make some lucky girl a great wife too. Which would be me." Andrew said, "That's the sort of comment you should try not to make in front of our girlfriends." Julia said, "Actually, I don't think my comment is bad. Obviously Mark's comment was, Carol being his sister, but Carol and I have already come out as being together." "I thought your coming out was just for school?" Julia corrected him, "It has to be everywhere. It'd be impossible to separate them and keep everyone consistent. We've come out all the way, not just in school." "You're right. I didn't think about it, but it obviously has to be everywhere. I picked a bad example for something you shouldn't say. But please don't tell our girlfriends that you're going to get Mark dozens of girls to play with. That wouldn't be good." I worried why Andrew thought it was bad, so I asked, "Why not?" "Because it'd make Sophia and Ashley worry about our family allowing guys to have lots of girlfriends. We don't need them to have jealousy worries. Jealousy can be very hard to dispel." "Umm. I guess so. I don't have any experience with jealousy." "That's right, rub it in!" I'd been waiting for a chance to check my Friday decision with Julia, but Vanessa beat me to the punch, "Mark decided to have dinner with boys' girlfriends this Friday." Julia said, "Okay." I, of course, checked, "Is that okay, honey?" "Sure. I'll have to jiggle a plan I was thinking about, but that's okay." I, also of course, offered, "We could do the dinner on another night, if that's better?" Vanessa said, "It's hard to get him to be decisive isn't it?" Julia agreed, "Yes. He'll get there one day, but he's not in a hurry. -- "Darling, I like it when you make decisions. Regardless what the decisions are, I'd like you to make more. If there's some terrible clash I'll let you know, but nearly always I'll be able to adapt. Friday is no problem. My plan for Friday was no more than a vague intention anyway." I knew Julia's plans were pretty damned good, so I wondered what an early stage 'vague intention' would be like, so I asked her, "What was your intention for Friday?" "Oh, nothing much. Your speech went over awesomely well with the girls in class. After the period ended they were all over me with questions about my relationships with you and Carol. There were more questions the rest of the afternoon too, if the girls could get through all the idiot boys. Several girls have called me since school let out too. A lot of them are interested in you, so I was thinking of arranging an activity for Friday evening that a group of girls could turn up at. Just make it a casual event, but somewhere where you could impress them somehow. Other than in a restaurant, where you could impress them with your eating, haha. The only idea I had was 8-ball, but I don't want to bring them all here at once, and public 8-ball places aren't good places for teenage girls to visit." Robert and Andrew laughed at that. "No, you don't want to be doing that on a Friday night." Julia said, "So I don't have any idea of where yet. You can see that having the dinner on Friday is no problem, as I haven't talked to anyone about the vague idea yet." "Okay. Have you really had several girls call, just because of my speech?" Julia, Carol and Vanessa all said something to confirm that. Julia's being, "Oh yes. Not necessarily JUST because of your speech as they've seen you in class all year, but your speech made a very large impact. I know you saw how many girls had tears in their eyes." "That doesn't mean much. Girls cry very easily." I got a few laughs for that, which hadn't been my intention. Prof said, "I heard you dramatically produced a handkerchief in class too. Well done for that." "Thanks. I enjoyed doing that. It was a perfect opportunity." Julia said, "Back to your 'girls cry very easily' comment. We cry when something gets to us emotionally. How many boys can tug on the heartstrings of a class full of girls? The only way most boys can make a girl cry is in anger or annoyance. That you got most of the girls in the room to cry by talking about love and commitment is a considerable accomplishment. Their opinions of you hit the roof. It is NOT easy to make girls cry that way. Andrew, Robert, how often do you make your girlfriends cry like that?" Between the two of them, once, several months ago. Julia continued, "Mark has made Carol and me cry many times. Happy tears, like the girls in the class today. Not because he got us angry or annoyed, and CERTAINLY not because we were sexually frustrated, haha." Carol agreed strongly, "That's for sure!" Julia concluded, "There are a lot of girls from that class who are very interested in you. If you repeat that speech a few more times tomorrow there'll be a heck of a lot more. That should work so well we won't have to do the sit-up competition." "In that case I'm DEFINITELY going to make that speech as often as I can tomorrow. I would MUCH rather stand up and saying loving things about you and Carol than strip down to too-small underwear and make a public exhibition of myself. That's for DAMNED sure! Sorry about the language." Vanessa said, "I believe we've survived worse. What's this stripping exhibition idea?" Julia answered, "Just an idea I had to get Mark to impress the girls. Tugging their heartstrings is a far better approach. I think we'll put the sit-ups competition on hold until we see how the speech approach works out. Judging by today's response, it'll work far better." That was a weight off my mind! Carol said, "Aww. Can't we do it anyway? Donna will be disappointed if we don't." I firmly said, "I would definitely rather not. It would be very embarrassing and I don't want to do it if it's unnecessary." Julia said, "I agree. It's on hold. I prefer not the run the risk, in case Mark got sick on the day, or something else like that happened..." #1: " ... We still need to do something to keep the girls coming along though. Nice speeches today and tomorrow are great, but how do we keep them excited until your trial ends. I was intending to have a fun night out with Linda some time soon too. Mom, you remember my friend Linda?" Vanessa did. "I introduced her to Mark formally a couple of days ago. They share English, but that's all and I don't think they've ever talked before." I indicated Julia had that right. "Now I've got so many girls interested in Mark I need to arrange a group event. Other than 8-ball I don't know of anything else you can usefully do in public. Running and soccer aren't suitable as you can't socialize with the girls at the same time. Do you have any ideas, Mark?" "I do have one, but I'm not sure about it. When you mentioned 8-ball you reminded me of when Robert took Donna bowling. I think I'd be pretty good at that. I'm not sure, but I think so." "How good?" "Umm. I think I could probably get 300." "What does that mean?" asked Julia. Robert answered, "It's the best possible score. EXTREMELY hard to get and very, very impressive." Julia asked, "Like playing a round of golf at par?" "More like nine under par." "Oh, that's VERY good. We'll do that. Oh, I just thought, will the other girls realize it's a good score? What if they know as much about bowling as I do?" Robert said, "They'll know it's impressive. The whole building will be going crazy." Julia checked, "There will be a big excited crowd, with the girls and Mark in the center of it?" Robert nodded. "That's perfect! The excitement will really get to them. Not to mention their seeing Mark do so well. We'll DEFINITELY do that. How do I arrange that, Robert? Do we just turn up, or do we have to arrive at a fixed time, or what?" Robert said, "You have to book lanes in advance. Some nights are busier than others. Sometimes you can walk in off the street and get a game, but it's best to book a few hours or even a day or two ahead. Especially if you want several lanes because you've got several players. Why don't you ask around at school tomorrow to get a feel for how many would want to play. You could do it on Thursday night, not Friday because of our dinner, or anytime on Saturday or Sunday." I said, "Not Thursday. I have Aikido then. I've got a soccer game at 2pm on Saturday too." Julia added, "Yes. And some serious shopping Saturday morning too." "I wouldn't mind postponing the clothes shopping a year or two." "Ha! NOT likely," disagreed Julia, while Carol just laughed at me. Robert said, "I suggest Sunday about noon then. Play for about an hour then you can all go somewhere to eat and socialize. Ask around at school and get an idea of the number that want to play. Spectators don't count and as many of them can come as want to. When you come home let me know and I'll help you do the bookings. I might come along myself because I've never seen a 300 game." Julia said, "You've never seen one?" Robert shook his head. "That's great. Mark will blow everyone away." I spoke up. "I've got two worries. I only THINK I can bowl 300. I have an idea about how I would do it, but I haven't tested my idea. I'd really like to test it first, before I'm in front of all these girls." I was about to go on with my second problem, when Julia went, "{Raspberry}. Mark. You're so modest that your thinking you might be able to do it is the same as anyone else's boasting after they've done it. I'm happy to arrange this as is." I was about to argue more, when Prof said, "Mark, how long would it take for you to check out whether your idea worked or not?" "Umm. I'd probably only have to bowl three or four balls. That should do it. Maybe a few more if I have trouble, but I shouldn't think so." Prof said, "That's what I thought. I think I know how you're going to do it." That got my attention, then I realized that Prof did know enough about TK to work it out for himself. "So I suggest that you and Robert have one game sometime tonight. Call up after dinner and see when the next free lane is. You could find out whether your idea works for certain and relieve your nervousness, all inside of thirty minutes or so. Julia, that's a better way. Always check the easily checked assumptions in any plan." "Yes, Dad. Sorry. I got carried away again." "Yes you did. One day your getting carried away is going to lead to a plan failing when it didn't need to. I hope it won't be an important one." "Yes. Sorry, Dad. I'll try to remember." "You should think about part of Mark's difficulty in being decisive is because you're overly pushy. He tried to speak up but you overrode him because you'd gotten excited. The first rule of planning is: 'If you've got time, use it.' There was no need to push Mark forward so fast in this case. As I understand it, you won't need to book the lanes on Sunday until Friday, so you've got several days' slack. I think helping Mark learn to be assertive is more important than this plan's affect on getting him girls, since it sounds like there are already enough girls interested. I think your priorities are backward. I suspect you mostly just want to show him off, which is more about your ego than his needs." Julia's face had been falling all the way through Prof's little lecture to her. At the end she overreacted, I thought, by sobbing, "Oh no! I've been a bad wife! {Sob}, {blubber}." A crying Julia jumped into my lap, begging for my forgiveness. I offered her a hanky, it being too hard to flourish with her sitting on me. Carol and I hugged her. When she calmed down a bit Prof said, "You hadn't actually DONE anything, Julia. We've just been talking about it for a few minutes. At most you cut Mark off once or twice. None of this deserves so much drama." "I don't want to be a bad wife!" "A good attitude, and had you behaved this way for several months then you'd have some apologizing to do, but I think we can call five minutes a tiny bump in the road rather than your being 'A Bad Wife'. Just remember to stay aware of your priorities, use time when you have it, check your assumptions, and please let Mark make a few decisions. Give him a day that's all his to plan, or give him a plan to see through to completion, or some exercise like that. He won't learn without doing it himself sometimes." "Yes Dad. I'll think about that. I am too pushy." "It's not your fault that Mark's too easily pushed. You've only known him for a few weeks and that trait of his precedes you by a long way, but you're not helping him as well as you could. Remember to think about your priorities. -- "To change the subject briefly. I need about thirty minutes of your time sometime tonight, Mark, to run over issues for our business. Let's schedule that after you find out what time your bowling lane is available. I suggest The Boys call their girlfriends now to confirm Friday's dinner, Robert calls the bowling alley to book the first available lane at least an hour from now, then we reconvene for dessert and coffees. Vanessa and I will get those, leaving Carol and Julia to kiss Mark often enough to bribe him into accepting Julia's apology, overly dramatic as it was." The various people headed off to carry out their appointed tasks. My job was to be the recipient of lots of kisses. I like the way Prof thinks. Vanessa picked up the remnants of the chicken. There wasn't much left, but I hated to see it go. Seeing my look, Vanessa laughed and said, "I'll package it up so you can take it home and snack on it tonight." I like the way Vanessa thinks too. I wasn't sure why Prof suggested that the girls kiss me. Surely Julia was the upset one, so Carol and I should have been kissing her to cheer her up. I assumed Prof knew what he was talking about and let them kiss me as much as they wanted, which turned out to be a great deal. They kissed each other too, so I guess it didn't matter what Prof had said. Andrew came back first, saying, "Friday's fine with Sophia. She was pleased to be invited. She was starting to worry because she noticed that I've been reluctant to invite her here for the last couple of weeks. I hadn't known she'd noticed that. I was being cautious because there were so many unusual discussions going on. If she resumes visiting with her usual frequency, we'll have to be more circumspect in our conversations in the future. -- "Julia, I'm going to use your and Carol's relationship as an excuse. Your falling in love with a brother and sister has disrupted the normal family routine for the last couple of weeks. It's a good partial truth and it's as much as I can tell her. You don't mind me telling her that in the next day or two, do you?" "Not at all. If I can help by kissing Mark and Carol even more than normal when Sophia's here, don't hesitate to ask, haha." Dessert and Robert arrived together. Fortunately I could eat and listen at the same time. Robert told me, "I've booked a lane in just over an hour from now. Just for one game, which should be plenty because you can bowl my balls too if you need to. Ashley confirms Friday. She's happy to be invited. Apparently she's been feeling a bit slighted." Andrew repeated his idea of an excuse, at the end of which Robert said, "Right, we blame Julia for being too sexually promiscuous and indiscriminate then." Julia didn't rise to the tease. "Be careful, I might set my sights on your girlfriends next." Andrew responded first, "{Groan}. To think we were worried about Mark. Now we have to worry about you as well. Friday's dinner is going to be a worrisome time, haha." I said, "Surely you weren't worried about me, were you? You should have said something." Andrew said, "If we had to say something then you wouldn't be the person we think you are. Of course you wouldn't do anything with our girlfriends, which is one reason we thought we'd better introduce them to you - so you know who they are! From the way Julia talks, most of the girls in Corvallis are going to be worshipping the ground you walk on soon, which makes us the only guys in town with safe girlfriends, haha." Julia was much cheered up. Whether it was all the kissing or her teasing her brothers, I wasn't sure. Probably both. When everyone was seated properly - Julia was of the opinion that this meant staying on my lap - dessert was served. The phone rang again. Julia went to answer it, then quickly returned to say, "It was yet another girl from the class Mark bowled over. I asked her to call back later." After a couple of minutes Carol looked at me and asked, "Should I make another roast chicken for Friday?" I was about to answer - and I'm sure you know what my answer would have been - when Vanessa said, "You can have too much of a good thing, Carol." I immediately canceled my previous high opinion of the way Vanessa thought. Unfortunately it was her house and dinner party so I couldn't disagree. I appreciated Carol for her suggestion though. Vanessa continued, "You'll have plenty of future opportunities to cook chicken for Mark. If there isn't an opportunity for awhile, I'll get you over here just to practice." Carol was very thankful and expressed it effusively. I spent the time wondering whether Vanessa's words meant I was going to be here at those times or not. If Carol was practicing her roast chicken cooking skills then I definitely wanted to help her by practicing my roast chicken eating skills. Dessert was quickly finished, as there wasn't much to discuss. Prof said, "I think I'll take Mark through to my study and have our little discussion. Thank you very much for such a nice dinner, especially Carol for a very nice main course." Carol smiled proudly as several people echoed Prof's sentiments, including my loud and enthusiastic endorsement. Prof continued, "I'm almost sorry to leave you with the dishes. Come on Mark." ^ As we were getting settled in his study I thought to say, "Thank you for pointing out to Julia that she's a bit bossy at times. I don't mean to complain about her, because she's wonderful in many, many ways, but she does tell me to do a lot of things." Prof opened his mouth as if to speak, but then he closed it again. He said nothing, and kept on saying nothing. Two or three seconds of silence passed while he just looked at me. That quickly got uncomfortable, so I said, "I'm really not complaining. I think she's WONDERFUL. So does Carol." Still no response from Prof. He just looked at me with his mouth shut. I even asked myself whether he had actually told Julia off for being too bossy to me. And I answered myself that he definitely had. So why hadn't he answered me? I said, "It's okay me thanking you for that, isn't it? I did appreciate it." Still no response, so I said, "I'm sorry she took it so hard though. She didn't need to cry because it was just a few minutes of conversation like you said." Prof still said nothing. I was getting quite concerned now, so I said, "Why aren't you talking, sir? Did I say something wrong?" Prof FINALLY spoke, "I was deliberately silent to make a point I hope you'll remember. When I didn't answer your first question you waited a little while and then you talked some more. Each time I didn't answer you started talking again. Repeatedly. Correct?" Uh oh. "Yes." "If someone had been listening to us, and told you off for talking so much, how would you feel?" "That it wouldn't have been fair. I only talked because you weren't. I wanted you to talk." "Yes you did. My silence made you talk. If anyone should be blamed for how much talking you did, it should be me for being so silent. So when you are silent about managing your own life and your relationships with Julia and Carol, your silence forces Julia to fill the gaps. She's waiting for you to make your own decisions, just like you were waiting for me to talk. She will stop making your decisions for you just as soon as you start making them for yourself. Blaming her for giving you too many orders is not fair on her because a significant proportion of the blame belongs on you. Do you see that it is your silence that is making Julia fill the gaps?" I knew he was 100% right. Julia has almost begged me to make decisions, and is very happy whenever I do, which is rarely. I even had a very recent example to think about: I'd been almost panicky at having to choose the night for the next dinner party without Julia there to - in all honesty - choose it for me. Prof said, "I can see by your face that you've grasped my point. We don't have long before you go bowling so I'll just say that I was still partly right to point Julia's mistakes out to her. She does get carried away and tonight's not the first time that we've mentioned it to her, but you are the main reason why she is bossy with you. If you had taken a greater role she would have taken a smaller one automatically and happily. In most marriages the wife would probably be reluctant to give up control she's got used to, but not in your relationship. You are her Lord, or will be when you learn how. She wants to pass the mantle of leadership on to you. It's about time you started taking it. -- "You're having trouble taking the initiative so I suggest you find something specific that's going on in your life and take command of it. Make it your project as a learning exercise. Hopefully you'll take on more and more projects, and eventually you'll be running your life the way you should. Quickly, I hope, because you're going to need to manage your life better when you go away to university. Choose your project before you go to sleep tonight. Anything going on in your life that requires decisions and actions from you, involves other people, and is something you'll enjoy. Got those points, or should I write them down?" "I got them, thank you." "Okay. On to roulette." Prof used his computer to display a video of a roulette table in action, telling me, "Ignore all the betting, that just looks like chaos to us because we don't know their procedures. It's obviously trivially easy in practice so ignore it for now. Concentrate on the ball and wheel..." "Sorry to interrupt, but why is the betting 'obviously trivially easy'? It DOES look like a complicated, chaotic mess." Prof answered, "Most gamblers are idiots. Gambling is often referred to as 'a tax on the stupid'; that's been mentioned several times in newspaper articles about opening Oregon to more casinos. Roulette is one of the stupidest games imaginable because there is NO skill involved whatsoever. With one very minor and ignorable exception, all the bets have exactly the same expectation, which means there are no good bets and no bad bets. It's a completely brain-dead activity, with a house margin of 2/38ths, which is about 5.3%. That doesn't sound like much, but if you place 30 bets per hour, you'll lose 160% of your average bet per hour, which DOES sound like a lot. Gambling attracts stupid people, and roulette has got to attract the stupidest end of that group, so how complicated can the betting be if these people can do it thirty times per hour?" "Good point." "By the way, thirty spins per hour looks to be about the right number. That's the rate I guessed last time we talked, not that it matters much." Prof went on to explain, using the video to illustrate his points, how the physical process worked: the wheel and ball are spun in opposite directions, how the ball eventually slows down enough to dip into the wheel itself, where it hits the many projections and gets bounced round a great deal, and eventually ends up in one of the little numbered slots. I could see that the ball bounced around a HUGE amount - much more than I expected - so it'd be very easy for me to flick it in any direction I wanted, several times if need be. But the trouble was where to flick it to? The target (the number we had bet on) was rotating all the time, making knowing where to flick the ball very much harder than it would have been had the target been stationary. After a little more thought, I decided that I was uniquely suited to solving this problem. Not only did I have TK, which was perfect for invisibly flicking roulette balls, but I could watch two objects - the ball and the target - at the same time with two independent minds and eyeballs. As well as the two eyeball-using minds, I had an extra mind to be centered so my TK worked, and another extra mind to collect feedback from the two watchers (e.g., , ) and to act on their information by flicking the ball in whichever direction seemed best. That added up to four minds, exactly the number I had! I also made a mental note to wear sunglasses because anyone looking at my eyeballs would get freaked out by their weird rotations. I could see that tracking the target slot at the beginning was going to be very hard, as the wheel was spinning so fast there was no way to read the numbers. But, usefully, the wheel had two bright green numbers, 0 and 00, and they were far easier to track. So if the target was four slots ahead of the 00, I'd just track the 00 and adjust slightly. The wheel slowed enough that the target became individually visible long before the ball stopped bouncing around, so that looked to be no problem. Just before the ball settled in its final pocket it did several small bounces or rolls, over several adjacent pockets. By then the ball and wheel were going much slower, and I could see that provided the target was anywhere near the ball, it should be quite easy to nudge or force it into the right slot. The only serious problem seemed to be in ensuring that all the major bouncing around ended with the ball within half a dozen slots of the target. The more I thought about it, getting Prof to replay the video several times, the more it looked to me like I should ignore the ball for a while. Let it bounce wherever it wanted. The bounces were so big and the wheel going so fast that getting it into the right area was going to be pointless as it'd immediately bounce away again. The best idea seemed to be to wait until the bounces were medium-sized, and to nudge the ball in whatever direction - forward or backward - was the shortest to the target area. From there, when the bounces and rolls were small, it should be easy to get it into the right pocket. "Should" being the several million dollar untested question. There were several things I didn't know yet, such as the weight of the ball, so I couldn't be definite, but I was reaonably hopeful. I now had what seemed to be a workable idea and just needed to test it. I leaned back and Prof said, "Seen enough of the video?" "I think so, yes thanks." "I've emailed you the URL. You can look at it as often as you want on your own computer." Not on the computer at home, over its dial up line. The computer upstairs would be fine though. That was good to know. Prof brought up a large still picture of the wheel itself, showing the pockets clearly. He commented, "Notice the numbers are shuffled, which might make things harder for you." I'd already had two ideas about the final stage of a spin. I could get the ball into the final pocket just by grabbing it, poking it in, and holding it there until the wheel was so slow there was no chance of it coming out. That would look unsuspicious if the ball was close to the target and the wheel was fairly slow already. My other idea was that I could stick a fingertip in all the pockets to either side of the target, but not the target itself, preventing the ball landing in them. If the wheel was going slow enough, which it would be when I wanted to do this, I could create twelve fingertips. That would block up a lot of adjacent pockets. I didn't know what doing this would look like, but I could practice on a table I was just walking past and not even betting on, so I wouldn't get any attention on me even if someone became suspicious. The shuffled numbering layout didn't matter to either of those approaches. I didn't know why the casinos didn't number the wheel sequentially, but I didn't care. Seeing my unconcern, Prof asked, "I've emailed that picture to you too. What do you think?" "I definitely have to have a practice session, but I think I've got some ideas of what to do. It won't be easy. Nothing like as easy as winning at 8-ball or bowling should be, but I think it's JUST within my capabilities. I also have a feeling that if I can do this at all, then I might be able to hit our target number every time. Not accidentally land to either side by one or two slots, but land on a single number." Prof liked the sound of that! "If you can do that, it makes our task FAR easier. That would be GREAT. I know your aging disguise worked well, and Robert has your ID under way. We were only told 'a few days', which is not helpful but I guess they know we can't complain to the Better Business Bureau. As soon as we get it, provided it looks reasonable, I'll call you and we can do a test run in a local casino. They're open every night so we can go whenever we want, just so long as Julia hasn't got you booked out for months with different girls. I'm joking, of course. Winning several million dollars is a little more important than a date with a girl you probably haven't even talked to before. -- "On that topic, Vanessa and I wondered about whether we should talk with you first about what is acceptable and not, what to look out for, what to expect, give you a heads-up on lessons to look for, etc. We decided to initially just let you loose and see what happens. We're going to let you use Julia's room whenever you want, and even request that you mostly do so. Not insist that you use it all the time, like we have the last few weeks, as after the trial you'll have much more freedom. In the backseat of your car is traditional, haha. -- "If you're active here most of the time we'll have an idea what's going on, will meet most of the girls, will be able to talk with you and Julia about what's happening, ask you questions and be better at answering questions you ask us. We're not trying to restrict you, but we want to keep an eye on your activities in case we see them going bad. Sex often makes people behave badly, and a large part of the reason for your doing this is to find that out for yourself. -- "I just remembered something important about roulette: we have to pay tax on any gambling winnings. There is no fairness about it: if you win you pay tax on your winnings, but if you lose you can't claim it off your taxes. It amazes me that anybody at all gambles! In an even-odds game with no house margin - like tossing a coin - because of tax all your losses are unaffected, but your wins are reduced by a third. That creates an average result that is well below breakeven. Add a house margin into that mix and gambling is even more irrational than I thought before. The tax is pure Government greed but we have to live with it. Fortunately we shouldn't be 'gambling', as such, so the irrationality of the process doesn't worry us. It does mean we have to win 50% more than I thought, to cover the tax. -- "From what I've heard, and we'll get better numbers before we do our Vegas trip, the top-of-the-market houses around Corvallis are about $1.5 million. We'll likely need some quite extensive renovations, security upgrades, furnishings, etc., so it would probably be best to say we need about $2 million, which would be $3 million before tax. That's just for the house. Ideally we want some spare cash too, so we'll be hoping to win at least four million. I'd feel more comfortable with five, to give us a decent reserve even after the expected spending spree. That's a big task for a 15-year old boy." I corrected him, "Fifteen and A HALF! Haha. Having to pay tax sucks though. If I followed your numbers, are we going to have to pay a couple of million in tax?" "Depending on how much we win, but yes. Uncle Sam says 'thank you very much' and takes $1.5 to $2 million from us." "Wow. That sucks big time. That's a HUGE chunk gone for no benefit at all. Just lost!" "I agree. I can't be too upset though. Assuming you can hit the exact number every time, we go down there with $50,000 say. To play safe we only bet $25,000 first time. It hits and we win. We've now got about $900,000. We bet $150,000, say. It hits, we win, and we've now got about $6 million. We go home. Total gambling time was four minutes. Even after paying tax we're left with about $4 million for four minutes work. It's an exceptionally good hourly rate, MUCH more than Math Professors normally earn, even good ones!" "WOW! That's incredible. And you could've won FAR more if you'd bet more. I'm stunned that it's possible to win so much money so quickly." Doubtless I would have raved for a lot longer, but Prof said, "That's why I'm rather hoping you can hit the exact number. It makes our job much quicker and easier. It's about time you went bowling. Have we finished here?" "Umm. Yes. Except to say 'Wow' once more." ------- Chapter 77: Less Than a Game of Bowling Tuesday, April 19, 2005 (Continued) Robert, Julia, Carol and I were going bowling, but not before Prof had a few words, "Have you driven at night before, Mark?" Not even in the dimension where #3 and #4 had got their license, as they hadn't had it long enough before merging away to be allowed to drive at night. "Not on roads, no. In a parking lot to show Dad I could drive, after dinner here a while ago. I don't expect any problems though." "Let's be safe anyway. Robert, you sit in the front next to Mark to keep an eye on him. Girls, you can make it easier for Mark by not distracting him. Which especially means no sex in a moving car. Sex is very distracting. That applies to all of your trips, not just tonight's. It'd obviously be stupid to have sex in a moving car." I had a feeling that it'd be a bad idea to try the Clinton Argument with Prof, so blowjobs on the way to school were off the agenda, damn. #1: None of my other minds thought blowjobs were important enough to start a topic of conversation that could lead to the destruction of human civilization across every w-dimension. Not even #4, somewhat to our surprise. Prof said, "Let me know how he does, Robert," and then we left, with me having no doubts that I'd better drive carefully. While driving, I thought about bowling - unlike some drivers I've seen, I can both think and drive at the same time. The last time I'd bowled had been several months before my first merge. In other words, when I'd been physically inept. Back then it wasn't too uncommon for me to bowl gutter balls, which I couldn't afford any of if I wanted to get the maximum score. Because I was so coordinated these days, I was sure I could learn to avoid the gutter, but "learn" was the operative word, so that was on this evening's agenda. With my coordination, if I bothered practicing much I'd probably be a very good bowler even without cheating with TK, so learning enough just to look good should be easy. Provided I could get the ball to hit the pins plausibly - close enough to the center and with good speed - the next issue was how to ensure all the pins fell over. Knocking them over one by one would look silly, but I should be able to starting from the front pin and knock them over working backward fast enough. I'd try different methods out when I got there. I suddenly thought of a worry, so I asked Robert, "If I bowl 300 I'm not going to be accused of cheating, hauled away for blood testing, have to pee in a cup and get the third degree the way I did after my running race, am I? Because I'd really hated that." "No. There'll be lots of noise and excitement as you get close to 300, and even more if you achieve it, but you're not part of a competition and there's no prize money at stake so no one's interested in pulling you down. You're only playing for fun. Unlike your running race, if you bowl 300 the most you might get a tiny notice mentioning it buried deep in the paper somewhere, but that's about it, apart from a lot of yelling at the time." "Phew. I can live with yelling." Robert asked, "You sound like you don't know much about bowling. How often do you play?" "My last game was about two years ago, I guess. Before then also about once every couple of years or so, although a bunch of us used to play it roughly once a month when I was about nine or ten." "That's no experience at all! What's your top score?" "I don't know. Probably about a hundred or so. I'm really not sure. It was a long time ago." "And you think you can bowl a 300 game! Are you ever cocky." There was some laughter from Julia in the backseat. After a few seconds she said, with a very put-on innocent voice, "I've got $10 bucks that's feeling lonely. I bet Cocky can do it. Care to match me, Robert?" Robert quickly got her point, "Bowling is a whole different game than 8-ball, sis." "Yeah. He's done bowling before. He'd never played 8-ball before in his life." "Way to rub it in! Okay, I'm willing to pay $10 to see a 300 game." I pointed out, "Sorry, but I'm not going to be trying for 300 now. In fact I guarantee I won't get it. I'm going to be playing around, getting a feel for it and that sort of thing. I just want to find out whether I can." Robert protested a little, "Once you think you've got it worked out, you could have a second game where you go for 300. You're not in any hurry to get home, are you?" "I guess I could do that." Julia asked, "From what you were saying at dinner, it won't take you long to find out if you're good enough. Just a few goes. Is that right?" "I think so. I won't know until I do it, but probably half a dozen balls, or maybe a few more." "Is that more or less than a full game?" Robert answered, "It's less. Each game is ten frames. Each frame is one or two balls, so ten to twenty in total. On the low end if Mark keeps making strikes." Julia said, "If he can prove to himself that he can bowl perfectly in less than a game, then I'd like to stop there. I want to be able to tell all the girls that he hasn't bowled a game for two years, which will be true if he's only bowled half of one. Also, if he bowled 300 tonight, wouldn't people remember him when he came back on Sunday?" "The staff certainly would. The customers would be different each time." "Then I don't want that to happen. I want the girls to know that he hasn't played a game for a long time. If we come here knowing he's so good it'll look like we were showing off. The more I think about him stopping short, the more I like it. We can tell the girls that Robert is taking me bowling, but that Mark will be along to watch. Then we can talk him into having a game that he gets 300 in. Hmm, no, that might look too fake. I'll think of something else, but it'd be best if he didn't get 300 a few days before." Robert said, "Okay. I'll leave that up to you. I can come to watch him on Sunday?" "Sure," agreed Julia. We soon arrived at the alley. It was a hard place to miss, as it's name was "Ten-Pin Bowling" and it had ten giant pins on its roof which flashed brightly at night. The guy who owned it was a strong believer in blatant advertising, so it frequently appeared on local billboards, in our newspaper, at sponsored sports events, etc. "Play Bowling at Ten-Pin Bowling" was his much-repeated, unimaginative slogan. Robert paid for a game for him and me. At our lane he didn't bother putting on his shoes, telling me to bowl for both of us. While I was swinging my first ball, I whacked it against my thigh, hurting and surprising myself. I dropped the ball, and it was in the gutter before it'd rolled five yards down the lane. Not exactly impressive. Robert asked, "Do you want some pointers on stance, Mark?" "Want and need. Thanks." Robert spent a couple of minutes coaching me, and I quickly picked it up. My next ball knocked down some pins. For the next few balls, I concentrated on getting them to go fast and accurate down the center of the lane. I'd achieved that by my fifth ball. I was now bowling well enough that I could start adding TK into the process, while learning to put some spin on the ball to curve it like good bowlers do, so Sunday's constant strikes will look more believable. For the sixth ball I tried to change its direction with TK, to see how that worked. Badly was how, which is what I'd expected. The balls are VERY heavy, moving rapidly, and rolling; a hard situation for my TK to work with. I decided not to bother trying to get better at TK-steering, especially as my bowling style was already good enough to get the ball to hit close to the center of the pins, and fast enough to make a strike look plausible. I hadn't had a strike yet, but Robert had commented that I would soon. On my seventh ball I concentrated on observing the fall of the pins. As it happened I got a strike, but that didn't really matter, other than making my supporters happy. What I was interested in observing was how rapidly the pins fell, because that's the speed I had to reproduce. The occasional late wobbler that fell would be okay, but not several wobblers that fell over one by one, every frame. That would be very suspicious. Knocking the pins down with their usual speed was important. I was standing there thinking about how to get good at this while conserving the number of attempts, so Julia could tell her classmates that I hadn't bowled a game in two years. The method I was thinking about was to have one mind allocated to the pins to the left of center, another mind to the pins to the right. They were to tip their pins over as fast as possible, with the third mind helping where it was needed the most, as would the mind that cleared its side the fastest. The two main questions I had were whether one mind had enough force to push a pin over, and whether we could push them all over fast enough, "all" theoretically being just those pins that the ball hadn't knocked down, although both causes of falling pins would be happening at the same time. For the first question I wanted clear proof that I could tip a pin over. Testing it while various pins were falling down around it wasn't a good test as it could be assisted by its being hit by the ball or other pins. I was thinking about simply tipping over one of my pins while I was still holding the ball in my hand. It'd look totally unnatural but it was otherwise a very good test. I was worrying whether this would cause me trouble when I realized I could do it to a pin in any one of the other lanes, so any suspicion would reflect onto someone else. I looked at the lanes to either side of me. I didn't have to wait long for one of my neighbors' games to have a ball go through the pins without knocking them all down. I tipped one of his standing pins over using one mind's TK force. Its late fall looked strange to the bowler, but he happily accepted it. The important thing was that it was easy for me. The pin presumably weighed more than one mind could push (3.5 pounds), but tipping it required a force only a fraction of the pin's weight. The pin's narrow base meant that not much tilt was required before it fell under its own weight. Continuing to abuse other lanes' pins, I waited until a guy in the lane on my other side was about to bowl. I watched until his ball reached his pins, then tried to push them all over as fast as possible. It was chaotic, fast and quite easy: "Chaotic" because often I'd be pushing on a pin only to have it get knocked over by the ball or another pin anyway. "Fast" because I had to change targets as fast as I could, which was virtually instantly. I don't even have physical reaction times to worry about, such as the time for the nerve impulses to go from my brain to my muscles. That means I can change targets incredibly quickly, far faster than someone shooting the pins down with a rifle could do, for example. "Easy" because so little force was required to tilt the pin, meaning I could accelerate the top of the pin very rapidly. A good bowl would often do most of the work for me anyway. The guy in the next lane was happy with his strike. I was even happier with it, as I'd given him a strike without anyone noticing anything weird about it. I couldn't definitely say how many pins I'd accounted for because some I'd started pushing were undoubtedly also knocked from below, but I thought I'd knocked over at least two pins that wouldn't have fallen without my effort. I waited until the lane to the other side of me bowled, and he also got a strike because of me. All this was happening while I was standing staring down the lane, as if deep in thought about my next delivery, which I guess was true, but not in the way an observer would think. I turned to my supporters, saying, "My last strike was just luck, but I think I've got it worked out now. Strikes from now on." My girls said, "Yay," or otherwise indicated faith in my prediction. Robert was more skeptical. My seven previous balls had only used two frames of my and Robert's game, so I had plenty of practice left. I made four strikes in a row, to increasing applause and happiness, even from Robert. That took what the scoreboard showed as a game between "M" and "R" to the end of the fourth frame. I said to Julia, "You can truly tell your friends that I haven't bowled a game in two years. If I bowl another frame then I've bowled two half-games which could be considered a game, I guess. There's no need for me to bowl any more though so we can go home now if you want. I presume you're allowed to leave a game uncompleted?" Robert laughed, saying, "Yes. You're allowed to leave. They don't have armed guards that force you to finish. You've only got five strikes, and one of those you said was an accident, so are you really sure you want to leave?" "Yep. I'm fine now. It's actually easier than I thought it'd be." Robert laughed at that. "Amazing. Your first ball nearly knocked you on your ass, and after eight frames of practice you declare yourself the perfect player. Are you really sure you can get twelve strikes in a row?" "Twelve? I thought there were only ten frames?" "There are, but if you get a strike on the last frame you bowl twice more balls to find out what the tenth frame's strike is worth. So twelve. Do you want to continue practicing now?" "No. There's no difference between twelve and ten in a row. It just surprised me. I can get strikes every time from now on, so it doesn't matter how many." "So you could bowl thirty six in a row?" Julia said, "I've got $10 that says he can." Robert wasn't going to fall for that! "Not this time, Julia. Besides, you don't need the money. Mark can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the pro bowling circuit. More than a million probably, with product endorsements. Please let your poor brother keep his $10." #1: #3: Robert canceled our game and we took our shoes back to the counter. While there Robert said, "Let's book some lanes for Sunday while we're here? We can always change our booking later." Julia agreed. Robert asked, "Do you think some of your friends will want to play?" "I guess so. I don't talk about bowling so I don't know. I'm guessing there'll be quite a few girls that come on Sunday, so we might as well book some lanes in case they want to. Book three, I guess, and we can put Mark in the middle one." So Robert booked three lanes for an hour starting at noon on Sunday. I drove carefully back to the Williams' house. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was Robert sitting beside me, I didn't request a celebratory blowjob. Julia and Carol spent the return trip telling me how incredible I was. I'd have preferred a blowjob. ^ Back at the Williams' home, Robert reported to his parents that I drove fine, that I played eight frames with my last five balls being strikes, and that I claimed to be able to bowl as many strikes as I wanted now. The way he said, "Mark claims..." indicated that he still didn't quite believe it, but he'd learn. Prof said, "Good. I'm almost tempted to come and watch you on Sunday but I think I'll give it a miss. I get more than enough of excitable teenage girls at work. Call me afterward if you can please, Julia, or just text. I'll be curious. -- "Mark, I'd like to spend some time with you taking you through your new computer system, particularly its access through to OSU. Also to discuss some of your educational options for the next academic year." I felt very guilty that I hadn't even turned the computer on for the week it'd been there, especially as I expected Prof to be fully aware of that, so I quickly agreed. Prof said, "Don't look so guilty. You got married last week and you've had very little chance to use it, especially as your getting back and forth between the two homes on a bike hasn't been convenient. I expect you'll use it a lot more now that your transportation is so much easier." I expected I would to. If only so Prof would see me doing it. Leaving the others to their own devices again, Prof and I went up to what I guess should be called, "The Anderson Study." Just "The Study" wasn't specific enough in this house, there being so many of them. Prof booted up the computer, and showed me what software packages it had, how to access the various parts of OSU and some miscellaneous things like backups, using the printer, etc. One of the software packages was a graphics package, which reminded me that I had noticed that my face seemed symmetrical. I said, something like, "Oh good," or some such. Prof queried my reaction, and I explained, "I have a little idea that my face is more symmetrical than it used to be, or than most people's are. I was thinking of taking a digital photograph of my face and a few others, and putting them into a package like this, and somehow checking the left-right symmetry. It's not important, just a random idea I had a few days ago." Prof said, "It's also easy to do. Let's do it now while The Boys and I are here." Prof got up and started walking out of the room. Following along behind him seemed best. We found everyone chatting in the living room. Prof got me to explain while he went to get the camera. It only took a few minutes to get photographs of everybody. The females wanted to be included too. I didn't recognize the significance of it at the time, but Prof was especially careful about getting a good shot of Carol, with her long hair held back from her face. Everyone wanted to come watch us work on them, but Prof said, "It'll take us a few minutes to set this up. Leave it to Mark and me and we'll call you when we're ready to show you the results." Back in the Anderson Study, we quickly decided that Prof would drive the computer as I'd never used this package before. Prof said, "I don't think we're trying to mathematically score the degree of symmetry. I think a simple strobing comparison is enough, don't you?" After finding out what a "strobing comparison" was, I agreed (alternately flash the near identical pictures in the same place, looking for how much movement there is between them. For example, how much the ears moved between the two shots). Prof quickly transferred the images to my hard drive. He then split each in half vertically, mirrored one half, then moved it on top of the other as two layers. Some careful positioning was required to get the two images as close to being perfectly arranged as possible, but it didn't take long. Prof did all of our faces, each in its own file. Then he wrote a little macro that strobed the layers. He got a bit fancy, having my face on one side of the screen, and his on the other, with both of them strobing. It was immediately obvious that my face was a great deal more symmetric than his. Prof said, "That's hardly surprising, as my face is a lot older than yours. Distortions creep in over the years. I think we're ready for the others now." Which I took as a hint to go get them. When everyone was gathered in the room, Prof said, "I'll leave Mark's face strobing all the time, and do each of ours on the right, starting with mine as you can see. What you're looking at is quickly alternating shots of our left and right sides, but with the left mirrored and placed over the right side." [[Prof wasn't as expert at software as I am now, so he wasn't aware that there was an easier way to do the test, with no cutting in half involved. Simply create another copy of the full image and mirror it. Lay it over top of the original in another layer, with a little care to get them lined up well. Strobe away.]] "Mark's facial layout is obviously much more symmetrical than mine, symmetry being an aspect of beauty. Let's say 'handsomeness' for the guys. By this test Mark is much more handsome than I am, a conclusion that will surprise no one, haha." I thought it impolite to laugh, but everyone else did. "Now to try the next oldest male, Andrew." Prof's face was replaced by Andrew's. Andrew's was more symmetric than we remembered Prof's as being, but still nothing like as much as mine, which hardly moved at all between strobes. Robert's had a similar degree of symmetry to Andrew's (they're fraternal twins; not identical). This got The Boys on to a discussion on which of them was the most handsome. Andrew wanted Prof to bring up both their faces at the same time so they could check. Prof said, "Symmetry is only one factor. Shape is important too. A guy with a perfectly symmetric pointy chin won't be judged as more handsome than a guy with a strong, square shaped chin, even if slightly asymmetric. Your competitiveness is pointless because the other factors will swamp any slight difference there is in your degrees of symmetry. The important point is that Mark's face is FAR more symmetric than any of the males. We're all from one family so we're not the best comparison, but I'm not aware that there's anything atypical about our faces. It appears that Mark's face is very unusual. Let's compare him to the women, all of whom are very beautiful." He's no dummy, is Prof. Vanessa said, "Lovely compliment, but shortly to be shattered by the mercilessness of a software package, I fear." Prof said, "Would you prefer me not to show your face, dear? We don't need to." Vanessa said, "Thank you, but show it. I hope I'm never too afraid to face reality, excuse the pun. I'm curious too." Robert's face was replaced by Vanessa's. As she feared, she was quite asymmetric. Prof said, "We make a good pair then, dear." "I've always thought so," agreed Vanessa. Prof said, "I imagine that age would turn even a beautifully symmetric face asymmetric over the years. Our bodies age in irregular ways. Moving to the next oldest female, Julia." Julia's face was the second most symmetric so far, after mine. She was much more symmetric than our memories of The Boys' faces. Prof joked, "Andrew, do you want me to compare your face to Julia's?" "No need. I will happy admit that my little sister is the beauty of the family. It's only Robert that I think is ugly." Which earned him a mock-punch to the arm. Prof said, "And the beautiful Carol is next." Carol's face was similarly symmetric to Julia's. Carol said, "I think Julia is the more beautiful of the two of us." Julia disagreed, "I think Carol has the worst eyesight of the two of us." Robert said, "I think Mark is the luckiest of all of us." Prof cleared Carol's image, just leaving mine. He said, "Mark's face is significantly more symmetric than anyone else's. Do you have any photographs of you from about two years ago, Mark? They need to be straight-on face shots." Carol said, "I'll ask Mom and help her look. I understand what you need. I'm sure his face is far more handsome now that it used to be a year or two ago." Prof said, "A fun little exercise, and another little piece of information about Mark's uniqueness. I'll make sure the images are saved and maybe we'll repeat the exercise in a year. It will be interesting to see how Mark and Carol have changed." #2: #3: #2: Prof said, "I was going to talk with Mark about some educational stuff, but there's no reason to do that here. Why don't we adjourn to the hot tub. I can see Mark likes that idea. Who else wants to join us?" Everyone was happy with that idea. Prof shut down the computer and we all headed off to our rooms to change. [A few days later, after checking with me first, Carol passed on a suitable earlier photograph of me to Prof. Prof and Vanessa had a scanner in their study, so it only took a few minutes before we were watching my two-year ago and current faces strobe. My younger face bounced around considerably, even more than Carol's when that was brought up for comparison purposes. Carol was right that I'd become more handsome - or at least symmetric - over the last couple of years.] Carol was not allowed to wear anything, not even a robe to and from the room. Julia put her little bikini on, the one that I'd completely failed to play with, and which had helped Julia realize how much I desired Carol. I reminded Julia of that, and she said, "Yes, I know. That's why I'm wearing it. It has wonderful associations for me too." Julia said, "Lead the way Carol, so Mark and I don't obscure anyone's view of you." Carol was naked, standing in the middle of the room, looking downward and embarrassed, but loving every second of her exposure and our conversation. The Boys were in the tub, with Vanessa and Prof walking in just behind us. Prof in shorts, letting me clearly see his prosthetic leg. I couldn't help looking at it, although I tried not to. Naturally Prof said, "You can look if you like, Mark. There's nothing shameful in it." Vanessa said, "To the contrary, it's a badge of courage." Prof just said, "Come over and have a good look. I'll show you how it works." It's hard to say "No" to Prof, so I walked over and looked. He was standing up, leaning against the cubbyholes, so I crouched beside him, and watched as he unbuckled and removed it. While I was doing this I heard Julia say, "Before you get into the pool, my naked sweetie, get everyone's drink order. Mark's first of course." I looked up and saw Julia getting into the tub. Andrew said, "Nice bikini, sis!" Robert added, "Yes, but not as nice as Carol's swimsuit though." That caused some laughter, much to Carol's pleasure. After which she asked, "What would you like to drink, Lord?" "Can I have a glass of milk please, naked sweetie?" Vanessa said, "You really like milk, don't you Mark?" "Yes. I sometimes feel like a pop drink, but I usually prefer milk." "You must REALLY be looking forward to getting Carol pregnant then?" My face turned red and I stammered, "Umm, I never thought of that." Actually I had but wouldn't admit it in polite company, giving this company the benefit of the doubt. Julia enthusiastically said, "Yummy, and I'm not even fond of milk. I already like Carol's taste though, so it'll be good to have a choice of where to drink her from." That was getting quite rude, in front of Prof and Vanessa too! It seemed to worry only me though, because that's how these things work. I turned to look at Prof. By now he was pulling his prosthetic away from the stump. He held himself upright by gripping a cubbyhole with one hand while handing me his leg and started explaining how it worked. It was a weird experience, but my squeamishness started fading as I got familiar with it. Prof took it back, wrapped it in a towel and placed it in one of the cubbyholes. "Seeing you're here, lend me your arm to help me get to the tub please?" "Ah, sure." He grabbed my arm with a hand, and used it to stabilize himself as he hopped to the tub. Quickly getting the hint I walked with him there. "Thanks," he said, "I'm getting old enough that I prefer to be cautious rather than hopping around." Carol had already taken everyone else's order and was walking around the house to get them. Most drinks were available in the Guys' Room next door but my milk required her to go to the kitchen, until she was pregnant anyway. #4: #2: Just before she got into the pool, Julia sent Carol to get the cordless phone from the Guys' Room, "In case another girl calls for Mark." Once that'd been fetched, Carol climbed into the pool. Just as she was climbing over the side, and her legs were spread, Prof said, "You are a VERY pretty girl, Carol." It was obvious what he was looking at. Carol froze in indecision for a brief second, which didn't do anything to preserve her modesty, then she resumed getting into the tub, saying "Umm, thank you." Vanessa laughed, saying, "I think it was his pleasure, sweetie. I'm surprised he didn't want to photograph it, to see how symmetric it was, haha." Prof said, "No need. I could easily see that it was very symmetric and beautiful on both sides." I knew the Williamses were being what would normally be terribly intrusive for Carol's benefit, but it seemed wrong to me, although Carol was enjoying it. It was being done for Carol and Carol was happy, and I was sure the Williamses knew a LOT more about what they should be doing than I did, so I was puzzled about my mistake in feeling that something was wrong. I was also worried that maybe it truly was wrong, in which case I needed to protect Carol. I gave it some serious thought. During the 'terrible ordeal' when Julia had ordered Carol to make our honeymoon breakfasts naked, one of Vanessa's questions had got Carol to admit that she enjoyed sexual embarrassment when it was caused by Julia or me. The key words were "sexual", "embarrassment" and "Julia or me". With those three criteria met, Carol would have a good time. What was happening now met those criteria because Julia had ordered Carol to be naked, but it still seemed wrong in some way. It took me a while, but I realized that this event differed from the previous ones in which we'd exercised Carol's kink because they'd also included humiliation whereas this had compliments instead. It was very weird to realize that I'd been comfortable triggering Carol's kink in humiliating ways, but I was uncomfortable about it being triggered by compliments. It's GOT to be better to receive compliments than humiliation, so those should be the other way around, but apparently - in my mind - weren't. Maybe I was the most perverse person here? It was one thing for Carol to be enjoying herself because compliments can be embarrassing, but it seemed much worse for me to be uncomfortable because I was embarrassed by compliments directed at Carol. Was I really so negative that I preferred humiliation to compliments even secondhand? I'd started this line of thinking because I'd worried that Carol might need help, and now it seemed that I was the one that needed it. I wasn't going to rush off to see a psychiatrist, but I would try much harder to stop being so negative, and I'd talk to Julia about these thoughts the next time we have a suitable occasion. [I did. Julia laughed at me for being so silly, and then told me off for being so negative. If thinking I was too negative was silly, how could she tell me off for being negative? Talk about injustice! Julia explained that I was being negative, but - foolishly - not the way I thought I was. Julia pointed out that she'd enjoyed using humiliation to press Carol's button, and that she [Julia] had used humiliation first and far more often than compliments. Julia didn't know why, but it must be a human instinct of some sort to prefer humiliation in such circumstances. Julia and I loved Carol and wouldn't dream of humiliating her outside of giving her fun with her kink, but we not only used it then, but we enjoyed using it, so humiliation obviously had a sexual aspect. Julia justified her calling me silly because I'd foolishly ignored seeing Julia humiliate Carol many times, and justified calling me negative not for preferring sexual humiliation over compliments (the reason I'd thought I was negative), but for jumping to the conclusion that it was only me who did so. I felt humiliated. Because it was an important discussion, involving both my struggling self-esteem issue and a potentially hurtful sexual practice if we got it wrong, Julia made us repeat the conversation with her mother. Vanessa confirmed that I'd been silly and negative exactly as Julia had accused, and she also mentioned that she and Prof had used compliments rather than humiliation because they were still trying to learn about the extent of Carol's kink. The conversation was another helpful lesson for me, even if an unpleasant one, and it did teach me that I could use compliments during our teases of Carol. Using compliments would be much nicer. Now that I understood the situation better, I could no longer understand why I'd ever had a problem with the Williams' sexual compliments to Carol.] [[The Williamses gave me lessons like this quite often. I will rarely recount them herein, not because I'm put off by how painful they were at the time (they were, but by now I'm proud of the Williamses for their help), but because they were so personal that I don't think you'd benefit from reading about them; they're certainly not fun to read. I will include just enough of these lessons to remind you that they happen, and to give some examples of my development.]] We settled into our seats, Julia on my lap with my arm around her waist, Carol snuggled in close under my other arm. I finally had no cast to worry about, yippee. The tub was large enough to accommodate all of us. There wasn't a lot of spare room, but clearly this family didn't have a lot of modesty barriers. Prof informally announced, "I was going to have a casual chat with Mark about what he's going to be doing educational speaking for the next year, to make sure we're on the same page." If we were on different pages, no doubt Prof's would be better. Prof asked, "What are your educational intentions for the rest of this year and next, Mark?" I could answer that easily, "Whatever you want them to be, sir. I'm not being facetious because you certainly know more about what's good for me in that area than I do. What do you recommend?" "I'm not going to argue too hard with your delegating a decision this time, but let's see if we can arrive at some decisions mutually. You've read the OSU material I gave you, or some of it, I believe?" "I've read or skimmed nearly all of it that seemed relevant to me. I was intending to go over it again and make better notes. There are so many choices and a lot of the course descriptions are very complex and hard to understand. I haven't got around to going through them thoroughly yet, mostly because it's too close to the end of the school year to achieve anything useful in the time remaining. I can't see myself joining one of the OSU courses this late in the year. Plus I need to do well in my school exams, although that's looking pretty easy." "You think you'll do well in your exams?" "Without wanting to seem boastful, I'm pretty sure I'll cream them, unless something goes horribly wrong somehow. I've done most of the work for both years already. All I need to do is keep up with any new material the teachers introduce, but that's easy. I've just started reviewing from the beginning of the year, and will easily have that completed in time. In fact I'm kind of looking for some additional reading material, as studying every night is getting boring, and I'm going to complete the review in about two weeks, I guess. I won't get 100% in every subject. Some of them, like English, are just too wishy-washy. But the hard subjects, like Math, I should cream." Vanessa asked, "It's not often I hear you speak so confidently?" "Well, the year's nearly over, so I know what I need to know, and I know that I already know it. Did you follow that? I'm confident in what I know, and there shouldn't be any surprises. I understand the material well and have an excellent memory. Any parts that I don't understand well enough I'll take care of in the next week or two, and I'll finish memorizing everything soon. The last few weeks of school are going to be quite boring." Prof suggested, with noticeable enthusiasm, "Why don't we find one or two first year Math courses and have you start them? It'd be great to have you passing undergrad courses when you're only fifteen." "Umm, I guess I could. I just assumed that it was far too late in the year to catch up." "You've missed most of the lectures this year but all the lecture notes are online. I'm sure the lecturers would make themselves available to you for one-on-one sessions. Say in a month's time you could sit down with one of them and go through whatever you need to from the first six months of his course, or wherever you're up to. That'd be far more time-efficient than sitting in on lectures. -- "I could get you permission to submit assignments, take tests, etc., even though they were originally due months ago. You could email them in from here. You'd have to agree not to cheat by getting the answers from the students who have already done them, but I think we can assume you'd agree to that. I'll be here to help you, and I'm sure I can tackle any question you're likely to come up with about a first year course. Having immediate access to a Math Professor has got to be a big help, I would hope. The more I think about it, the more I like it." Vanessa chuckled, "We can see that. Now we know where Julia inherited her 'getting carried away with something' gene from. Not that I'm disagreeing in any way; I think it'd be a good idea. There's no harm in trying it unless it impinges on Mark's schoolwork, which Mark should be careful not to let happen. That has to come first." Julia said, "I also want to get Mark to start studying some of my leadership and management textbooks. The process we're using now - having me study them and pass the lessons on to Mark as appropriate - just isn't working well. There's a large amount of good material in the books for him, it's taking too much of my time, is too slow, and I can't pass it on to Mark well enough. He can learn it faster and better if he does it directly. I'll keep learning it too because it's good stuff and I can help Mark learn it, but it's best if he does it directly." Vanessa joked, "That'll teach you to mention you've got free time, Mark - we'll load you up. Which does make me wonder about your free time. I thought that between Julia, Carol and your existing schoolwork, that you'd already be busy?" I said, "I'm bored with my current studying so I'm more than happy to have some interesting new things to work on, like some Math courses or the textbooks Julia wants me to read. I'm doing a lot of extra studying late at night because I've recently discovered that I can get by on five hours sleep per night. I've done that the last three nights and I don't feel any lack of energy or tiredness. I'll probably knock it down to four hours shortly, and see how that goes. After a few days of that, I'll try three hours. The trouble is that those extra hours are late at night, so not suitable for studying OSU material from here." There were a few miscellaneous comments from various people, such as Andrew joking, "That boy is weird. NOTHING about him works normally," but it was Vanessa that carried the conversation forward by saying, "Skipping the issue of when it's polite to study here, I'm more worried about your sleeping patterns. Sleep quantity and quality is important, and not getting enough can be damaging. Why do you think you need so little?" "For the last few weeks I was going to bed at erratic times and sometimes getting up early to go running with Donna. No matter how little sleep I got, I always seemed to wake up fully rested and full of energy, and never felt tired during the day, not even by the next bedtime. I eventually realized this and thought I might have been getting more sleep than I needed, so a few nights ago I cut it my sleep down to five hours a night. So far I haven't felt any tiredness. As far as I can tell I'm still getting more sleep than I need, so soon I'll start trying several days of four hours, to see how that goes, as I said before." "You're adjusting the amount of sleep you get by going to bed later, and you still feel fully rested when you wake every morning?" "Yes and yes." "I wouldn't be surprised if you need less sleep than normal people. Nothing about you would surprise me, plus there's quite a lot of variation among people anyway. Some need ten hours a night, most about eight, but some people survive happily on six hours or less. I've got a cousin who has averaged five hours per night for many years. You could easily be like him. What confuses me is your uncertainty over how much sleep you need. Why not go to bed at the usual time and if you wake up earlier than normal, however many hours that's been is how much sleep you need?" "I don't go to sleep and wake up like normal people either." Julia and Carol agreed, Carol chuckling while Julia said, "I'll say. He's weird." Andrew agreed. I continued my explanation to Vanessa, "When I want to go to sleep, I simply order my body to sleep until a certain time." Julia said, "Let's show them. They'll enjoy seeing it. Go to sleep for five minutes, but I'll wake you up anyway." "Okay. Don't let me fall underwater please?" Julia slid off my lap to sit on the other side of me from Carol. Julia held my arm in her two hands, and said, "Carol, hold his arm so he can't fall. Got him? Good. Watch his face everybody. Go to sleep, Mark." I ordered myself to sleep for five minutes. I woke to Andrew saying, "Five minutes on the button." Andrew's watch must be better than mine, as he'd left it on in the tub. Julia said, "Sorry. I said I'd wake you but five minutes wasn't long and I thought it'd be more interesting to wait it out. I would have woken you shortly if you'd used a different time. Is that okay?" "Sure, it doesn't matter to me." Julia said, "I'll fill you in on what we said while you were asleep. Everyone saw you nod off. I told them that you really were asleep and not just faking it. It's not as if you need to impress us, that's for sure. We figured out that your point about sleeping too long is because when you command your body to sleep until a certain time, then it does, even if that's more time than you need." I agreed, "Yes. That's what I figure too. I don't know what would happen if I commanded myself to sleep for some ridiculously long period: 24 hours, or even 24 days, or whatever. I guess I'd wake up when disturbed enough, which would probably include hunger or wanting to go to the toilet. I could experiment to test that, but I'd need the best part of 24 hours to do it properly. I don't know when I'll have a whole day spare that I'd want to waste on such a silly experiment. -- "Another thought that just occurred to me is what would happen if I ordered myself to sleep without specifying a wake up time. Would I sleep forever? I've always specified a time so far. I guess I'd wake at my usual time because I think that at some level my body knows that's what it should do, but that'd be an easy experiment to make one night. I could just ask Mom to check on me half an hour after I normally wake, and get her to wake me if I'm still asleep. Fortunately I can be woken normally, as it's not like an anaesthetic or a sleeping pill, thank goodness. I'm just taking conscious control of something that was subconscious in me before. -- "I only started doing this deliberately the night before my first date with Julia because I was too excited to sleep properly..." Julia had to interrupt me for some expressions of affection, making the others wait. I resumed, "Before that night I was still sleeping eight or nine hours without deliberate orders, even though I now think I didn't need it. I think my subconscious was only waking me at the normal time because that's what it thought I wanted to do. Which means that if I don't specify a waking time that's what would probably happen. Easy to test with someone's help." Vanessa suggested, "Rather than trying five hours for several days, then trying four, etc., wouldn't a better way of finding out how much sleep you needed be to order yourself to sleep, telling yourself to wake up when you'd had enough sleep, rather than at a specific time?" "That would be a MUCH quicker way of finding out, but I don't know whether I could do that or not. I know specifying time works - as you just saw - but I don't know about your idea. It's a good idea though, and well worth trying. I'll do it tonight and see what time I wake up." Vanessa said, "I'm fairly sure it'll work. Once you find out how long you need you can go to bed that much earlier or later. I suggest that tonight you go to bed at about 10pm. That gives your body plenty of time to choose between. If it needs six or seven hours, it can show you that. If it needs two hours, to be extreme, then you can just do your study from then until breakfast time." I liked Vanessa's idea. If it worked it'd let me find how much sleep I needed much more efficiently than my iterating idea, plus if I kept using her system, on those nights that I was especially tired, my body would automatically sleep however much longer it needed. I was puzzled about Vanessa's certainty, so I asked her, "Why are you so confident your idea will work? I hope it will because it's much better than mine; I just don't see how you can be so sure?" Vanessa said, "Because that's how bodies normally work. They wake up when they don't need to sleep anymore. You've got more control over your body than most people, but I think you're using more control than you need by specifying times. Just tell your body to do what it naturally would anyway." #2: #3: #4: "You might be right. I'll give it a try tonight." Vanessa added, "Bodies need differing amounts of sleep every day, depending on what they've done that day. I suggest that you might want to move your sleep to before you study rather than after. Go to bed at a normal hour, wake up whenever your body is happy to, and then study through to breakfast. That way your body always gets the sleep it wants. That should be the healthiest system." "I agree. I don't care whether I study before or after sleep, so that'll work well, thanks." "You're welcome. Two heads can be better than one sometimes." #2: <"Tell us about it!" Haha.> Vanessa continued, "That brings us back to the matter of your politeness." #3: Vanessa chuckled, "By the look on your face you've forgotten we were talking about you using your study during the night hours. You said it wasn't suitable to use late at night, presumably because you thought it was impolite for you to come and go at those hours." "I'm with you now, and that is what I meant." Vanessa said, "Even if it was impolite, I think we could easily put up with the 'terrible affront' in order to maximize the benefit to your education. We'll know about your coming and going, and we'll even be urging you to, so it can't be considered impolite, can it?" "Umm, I guess not. But I can't see how we could make it work in practice. The hours are unacceptable. If I go to bed in my home at 10pm, say, and need four hours, then I'd wake at 2am. Coming to your house at 2:15am night after night will soon make you very grumpy. You've just finished mentioning how important getting a good night's sleep is for me, and that applies to you too." The phone rang and Julia answered it. After the mutual greeting, Julia said, "Hang on a second, Katelin." Julia put the phone on hold and told us, "It's Katelin, a girl in my class that heard Mark's speech. I'll keep it short but listen in, Mark. You might enjoy this." The following quotes are all Julia's, from her half of the conversation: "Hello Katelin, sorry about that. I'm back now." "Yes, he is incredible all right. Unbelievably incredible. I've never meet a guy like him before." "I know, I know, I cried too. Did you see... ," they went into a ramble about who cried how much, who said what to whom afterward, what the second whom said the first whom said to someone else, etc. I'm sure you've heard these sorts of female conversations before. They go on ENDLESSLY! Fortunately Julia did remember her commitment to keep it short, so she cut it off after only a mere four or five minutes. Miraculously short, all things considered (where "all things" specifically meant the participants' gender). "Yes. I cried the most, that's for sure. I'm a very lucky girl. I have to pinch myself every day to make sure I'm not dreaming him. His speech was wonderful, wasn't it?" "Yes, I agree. Unfortunately I'm still getting lots of 'idiots', as my darling called them, hassling me. It's a huge pain. I'm going to ask him to come to my other classes and give that speech again. What do you think of that idea?" "I don't think I'll cry as much the second time, but you're welcome to if you want." "I agree. I'll definitely ask him to do it. Thanks for your advice. Tell you what, do you want to get together with us sometime?" "You do? Good. Some of my family are going bowling on Sunday at noon. I might invite a bunch of the girls from our class along. Play for an hour and then go somewhere for lunch. Mark hasn't had a game for years so it'd be fun for him to try it again. Would you like to come?" "You would, good. Do you want to bring your boyfriend, and do you want to play or just be a spectator?" "Not bringing him. I don't blame you. Did you hear the things he was saying to Mark before his wonderful speech?" "Yeah, I would've been embarrassed too." "Yes, yes, I am very lucky." "Why don't you join us for lunch tomorrow. Normally Mark, Carol and I have lunch out on one of the fields if it's fine. You could come sit with us, if you like? It'd give you a chance to meet Carol too, she's wonderful. She's Mark's sister, so that's hardly surprising." "Good. I'll talk with you in class tomorrow morning." "Yes, I'll tell him you're looking forward to hearing his speech again." "Yes, I will mention you by name. I'm sure he'll appreciate your comments, he's very good about things like that." "Yes, I couldn't agree more. Goodbye Katelin." After she'd hung up and put the phone down, Julia explained mostly to me, while being happy for everyone else to know, "I've had several conversations very much like that one since we got home from school, and I had many more at school too. All virtually the same, except for the bowling game and lunch invite because we just agreed on those. There wasn't much doubt about Katelin's interest, was there?" No one argued that point. "She's coming on Sunday, but not playing because she doesn't know how. She just wants to come, for some reason, haha." Vanessa said, "When you get something right, Mark, you get it very right. Well done on that speech. Successes like that should give you the confidence to do more." Carol suddenly exclaimed, "Oh. What am I going to wear to school tomorrow? I'm going to meet lots of your friends and I have no idea what to wear." Julia immediately lost all interest in her Lord's life and future, turning her attention to discuss this major, life-or-death issue. I heard, "What about the gray sweater with the..." when my brain shut off. ------- Chapter 78: Educational and Mansion Planning Tuesday, April 19, 2005 (Continued) "Mark!" "Sorry Prof, what was that?" Prof asked, "We set your study up for you to study in it, so why would we get grumpy at your doing so?" "Huh? Oh, that's right. If I woke you up at 2:15 every morning to let me in. Wouldn't you lock your frontdoor before you went to sleep?" "Of course, but you don't need to wake us. We'll give you a key and you can come and go as you please. You might as well have a key now, so I'll give you our spare as soon as we get out of the pool. You're family now, Mark." "Oh. I never thought of having a key and your letting me come and go as I please in your house. It seems such a big step." Vanessa asked, "A bigger step then letting you into our daughter whenever you please?" Julia butted in with, "I'm listening to your answer and you'd better not say that a pile of timber and concrete is more important than me, or I'll call Katelin back and tell her I've drastically reduced my opinion of you." "I wouldn't want you to have to break off the important conversation you're having with Carol, so I'll totally concede the point. Sometimes I talk complete nonsense, don't I?" "Yes, but you look good bare-chested so that makes up for it." Julia didn't waste any more time talking to me, immediately resuming her more important conversation with Carol. Vanessa said, "Talk with your parents about it, Mark. We suggest you sleep at your house until you wake up, then come over here to study OSU's courses or stay at your home to study your schoolwork, whatever is best for you. If you come here, you can have breakfast with us so you can chat with Prof if you need to. If you have a comprehension problem it shouldn't take long to clear it up. Prof should keep abreast of how you're going with that anyway, so a quick progress report each breakfast would be ideal. You'll need to keep some changes of clothes here is all, otherwise it's very simple." Julia said, "We're going clothes shopping Saturday. We'll make sure there's enough for both locations." Prof said, "Let me know if I need to build some more closets, haha." "Thanks, Daddy, I will. Probably not for Mark, but Carol and I could do with some more space. Haha, just kidding. We'll last for MONTHS yet." Prof said, "{Groan}. I think we better add some more money to our business target, Mark." "That's funny, I keep having exactly the same thought." Prof, more seriously, said, "Talk with your parents tonight if you can please, about doing a couple of Math courses at OSU and studying here at night. We really want to get that moving quickly." "Will do, Prof. How come you keep saying 'a couple of courses'? How did you arrive at that number? I thought one would be better?" "Let's try for two and cut back if it doesn't look like you'll be able to finish them in time. That'd be easier than starting with one and adding another one in a couple of weeks." "I'll read up on the first-year courses in the material you gave me, then talk with Mom and Dad about it." "Thanks. So that takes us to the end of the school year. What are your educational plans for over summer?" "{Groan}. You're merciless. I don't want to go to any summer school, that's for sure." "No, I don't think that's very likely. But why not do some more Math courses at OSU?" "But I thought it closes down over summer. Don't all the lecturers go on vacation, and things like that? I'm sure they won't want to come to work just to teach me." "I could teach you here. Teaching Math courses is kind of my job, you know?" "Of course, sorry. Maybe because I've never seen you at work, I don't have a mental image of you as a teacher." Andrew said, "I know what comes next." The Boys and their parents laughed. Julia was too busy. Before I could ask, Prof said, "Andrew is aware that I'm looking forward to showing you around OSU. Maybe showing you off a little too, I must confess. It will be good for you to see the place, get a feel for how it works, and most importantly, meet some of the staff that'll be helping you. It'd be best if you could take some time off school so you could have lunch with us too." "If you want me to visit OSU so much that your family all laugh about it, then I should agree. 'All of your family' except Julia, who's too deeply involved in the critical issue of what Carol should wear tomorrow." Julia pointed out, "It's a much more complex situation than normal. Everyone's going to be looking at her and first impressions are very important." "I'll never understand so please don't waste your breath when Carol needs you to use it to her benefit so much." "Haha. That was very diplomatically put." "Thank you. Let me talk with your father now. My education is almost as important as Carol's dress." "Now you're being silly." #1: I said, "Prof, I'll talk with my parents tonight and I imagine we'll agree to try to whiz through the two courses like you mentioned. I like math, so even if it's a lot of work it should be fun. I'll let you know their answer tonight if it's not too late, or else tomorrow morning. -- "Julia wants me to give my speech several times tomorrow. She seems to think that's important, and I want to stop her being hassled so much. I guess I could skip school for a while any day from Thursday on. Having the car and my license is great, so I can easily pop over to see you whenever is suitable for you." Prof replied, "Good. I look forward to hearing from you. Let's leave the discussion about your summer education aside until you've seen how you like the other two courses?" "Yes please. Let's definitely leave summer unplanned. One of the things I like most about summer is it doesn't contain any school. It seems wrong to even think about studying then." Julia looked up out of her huddle with Carol, telling everyone, "He's going to be busy this summer." #2: #3: #2: #3: Julia snuggled back into my lap, prompting me to facetiously say, "You've got her dress picked out already? That didn't take long." Julia answered, "Not yet. We just can't discuss it anymore while we're in the tub. When we get out we have to go upstairs and get Carol to try some of her new clothes on." #3: #4: Carol said, "I'm sorry, but I'm nervous about meeting Julia's friends." I could see that she truly was nervous. "Why? If anyone should be nervous it should be me, because aren't they all mainly coming to see me? That's what Julia says, and I couldn't care less, so why do you?" Carol stated, "YOU'VE got nothing to worry about! It's me that has to worry about what impression I make. They're all 16-year old girls and I'm only thirteen. I don't want to reflect badly on you or Julia." "That's IMPOSSIBLE, sweetie. There is NO chance of that happening." I spent a while reassuring Carol that she was beautiful and that I was sure everyone would love her no matter what she wore. We ended up agreeing that after she got out of the tub, she and Julia would go upstairs and she'd try on some of her new clothes so they could continue their discussion about the critical clothing choice. Vanessa said, "Just be yourself, honey. Everyone here loves you and that matters far more than a bunch of girls who just happen to be in Julia's classes. I wouldn't trust their judgments too much anyway as they spent nearly the whole year in a class with Mark and not one of them realized how wonderful he is, so how silly are they?" "{Giggle}. Pretty silly." Julia clarified, "Most of the girls will be there because they're so impressed with Mark, especially his speech about how much he loves you. They'll certainly be very nice to you. The last thing they want to do is make Mark not like them. As nervous as you might be about meeting them, they'll far more nervous about sitting with Mark. Most of them have never socialized with him before, which they must be kicking themselves for now." Carol agreed, "Yeah. I didn't think about that. I can't imagine how nervous I would be if I was having my first chance to socialize with Mark. {Giggle}. That thought cheers me up." Julia added, "Here's another thought, can you imagine how much trouble poor Katelin is having picking out her clothes? I bet she dresses VERY carefully tomorrow." -- Carol laughed, while Julia added, "It's not fair that Katelin's the only one who gets advance warning of their lunch with Mark tomorrow. I was going to invite them to lunch during class tomorrow, but now I think I'll call them tonight. That way they can ALL worry about their clothes. It'll be fun to see what they all wear tomorrow. They'll be dressing to impress Mark." Carol was looking less worried and the conversation drifted onto other matters, most of which were the Williams' internal family stuff: how Andrew's research was going, Vanessa talking about a problem one of her co-workers had, etc. I largely tuned out. I remembered that I had ignored Julia's bikini last time she'd worn it in this tub and wanted to make up for it this time. Unfortunately, it's socially awkward to grope your girlfriend in front of her family. Even counting her as my wife didn't help me feel any more confident about doing that only inches away from Vanessa. I did the best I could, rubbing my hands discreetly over some of her non-sexual areas, hugging her. Julia responded to my attention by snuggling in even more, and "Mmm'ing" me. I whispered, "I love this bikini. What a pity I can't grope you because your family is here." Julia said, in a normal, or even slightly louder, conversational voice, "That's easy: don't worry about that." She reached back, and in a second her bikini top was draped over the side of the tub. "No one minds if Mark gropes me, do they?" I didn't know whether I was hoping to be spared the embarrassment of having to do so publicly, or given permission to go ahead. As it turned out no one objected, so Julia grabbed my left hand and put it on her breast. Saying, "Use your other hand on Carol's breast. It's not fair she misses out." I was trying to deal with the embarrassment this caused me when Andrew said, "I'm not sure whether I should suggest Sophia brings her swimsuit on Friday. She normally does, but I'm not sure how she'd handle scenes like this." Julia said, "Mark won't sexually touch Carol in front of your girlfriends, of course. But if Carol's in the pool, she WILL be naked. That's a house rule." Carol gave a little shiver, while Robert answered, "I've got some friends who'd be very disappointed in me not inviting them around, if only they knew that, haha." Andrew said, "Carol's naked beauty is not my main concern. I'm more worried about how Mark's body puts us bookworms to shame. Even with a swimsuit on he looks very impressive. I saw how many helpings he had at dinner, which makes me wonder where it all went because it doesn't look like there's even room for a stomach in there, not to mention how his shoulders and muscles look. Robert and I are slugs by comparison." They didn't look bad at all. They weren't fitness freaks, but they obviously kept themselves in reasonable shape. Andrew continued, "I thank goodness that he doesn't strip down like Carol. If he's as impressive under his shorts as he is everywhere else, I'd really feel inferior." Julia said, "I don't really know whether he is or not, I haven't seen any other guys up close. How about you stand up, Mark, and..." "NO! I will not do that. I'm completely ordinary, and even that's more than everyone else needs to know." "Okay. I was just curious what everyone else thought." "I'm EXTREMELY UN-curious what anyone else thinks." "Okay. I know I'm not going to make any progress in that area. I'll change the subject then. Carol, is Mark touching your breast yet?" "No, he hasn't moved." "Just grab his hand and put it on. Sometimes he needs some help." Carol did as instructed. Andrew said, "That's another thing that worries me about inviting Sophia into the tub. You're surprisingly sexually aggressive, Julia, and I don't know how Sophia would handle seeing you behave that way." "I'm only having fun with my lovers, and I like that we can behave like this in front of my family. I think that's very healthy, but I can tone it down if you want." Vanessa said, "I also like that our children are relaxed around us and each other. Mark will get used to it, and Carol's motivations are good for her too. Andrew, ask Sophia whether she'd be uncomfortable. Give her some examples, like Julia kissing a naked Carol in the pool. Same with Ashley, Robert. If it appears either girl would be uncomfortable, reassure them that Julia will ease up. Making guests uncomfortable is unacceptable. Mark is family now, so he gets no such protection from us, haha." The conversation turned to other matters. Prof asked Vanessa whether she intended to go mansion shopping again this weekend. Vanessa answered, "No, we'll wait until closer to the time." Prof's question had reminded me about something that he'd mentioned during our roulette discussion, so I asked, "Prof. When we were talking in your study you said something about our new house needing expensive renovations. Like what?" Vanessa answered, which I should've expected. Imagine me being so silly as to direct my housing question to a male! Vanessa said, "The main issue is to do with bedrooms. We need one bedroom for you and your wives, two more for the two pairs of parents, three more for Donna and the two boys, which makes six in total. Plus we'd like to have three studies, two of which will probably need to be converted bedrooms. There are several large homes available with six or more bedrooms, but none of them have three master bedrooms, one for each of our three married couples, 'couple' being a triple in your case. I'm sure there are many suitable houses around the country, but not in Corvallis, as the local idea of what constitutes a mansion is quite modest. So we either have to get a house built from the ground up for us, or we have to extensively modify what's already there." [Those of you used to big-city prices might find the idea of mansion costing only $1.5 million silly. In a town like Corvallis prices are MUCH cheaper than big city prices, and it's even cheaper in neighboring towns as Corvallis is overpriced by county standards. The median Corvallis residential property is very close to $200,000, so $1.5 million is a sevenfold increase, which buys a substantially better house. Another way of comparing it is to ask what would a near-new house on twenty five acres of lush land (grass, trees, and even a small lake), be worth in New York City? That's easy to estimate because Central Park's land has been valued at $529 billion. It's 843 acres, 25 acres being 3% of that, so would be worth $16 billion. I'll ignore the construction cost of a house! In the area around Corvallis but within a very easy commute of it, a quality home on 25 acres costs somewhere between $1 and $2 million, including the house. As I said, it's MUCH cheaper!] Vanessa continued, "All the reasons we had for getting such a house, security being the main one, argue for our moving into the new place as soon as possible. Not waiting a year until a new one is built for us, or waiting many months for a major renovation job. We initially thought about moving into an existing house and getting workmen to add two master bedrooms either vertically as a new top story, or horizontally as a new wing. We thought we might be able to live there while the alterations were going on, but we decided that was too insecure. There'd be too many workmen walking around who might see something that would cause us trouble. -- "So what we've decided to do is buy a mansion that is suitable for all of us to live in, but ignoring you three. Ideally it'd already have two master bedrooms, or have a layout that we can easily create a second master bedroom out of by knocking out the walls between two existing bedrooms and a bathroom, then rebuilding them in a way that created a master bedroom. That'd be easy, and shouldn't take much more than a week. -- "For your accommodation we're thinking of buying another fairly small, single-level house somewhere - not the land, just the house - putting it on a truck and moving it to our new property, where we'd attach it to the mansion. We were thinking that if the mansion was on a hill, which most of them are, we could dig your house into the hill in front of the mansion so that the top of your house is level with the mansion's floor. That way none of the mansion's rooms would have their views blocked, just the back rooms of your house, which we'd try to make unimportant rooms. We could level the roof of your house and build an outdoor entertainment area on top of it: a barbeque area, outdoor hot tub, etc. That's our rough idea. When we get the money we'll employ a good architect to help us choose which mansion to buy, and to do all design work that follows. -- "We thought that'd give you plenty of privacy, as you and your friends could come and go easily, Carol could cook meals for you, and you could live as independently as you wanted. I imagine you three would sleep, study and privately entertain in your house, but spend most of the rest of the time upstairs in the original mansion with us; for meals, to be around the rest of the family, etc. It's the best of both worlds for you, which seems entirely reasonable as it's your money that's paying for it all." I was COMPLETELY blown away by the image that created! Flabbergasted! My flabber had never been more gasted. Julia's was well and truly gasted too. She was as excited as me, possibly even more so as she was squealing a lot more than I was. I was holding my squeals down to a sensible level, whereas she was showing no restraint at all. Carol was also thrilled, squeezing my arm hard and whispering (compared to Julia's volume), "I would LOVE to live like that. I could be your really truly wife in our own home. That's SO wonderful!" Carol was rapidly overcome and started crying in happiness. I took it in my stride. I'm getting used to girls crying whenever they're in the hot tub. It must be the bubbles. Julia demanded of her mom, "This is incredible. Why didn't you tell me this before?" "You never asked." "HA! You knew I'd LOVE to know this. You should've told me." "So you could have all the fun telling Mark and Carol the good news! I enjoyed myself more telling all three of you together. Look at how happy Carol is." Carol certainly was, and through her tears told everyone, "I can be his wife." Vanessa said, "You certainly can, my dear. We'll also make sure there's a room set aside for being the nursery next to your bedroom, for your babies." That finished Carol off, and for the next several minutes she was out of it. Scientifically I doubted it, but I almost thought the water level in the tub rose from the volume of her happy tears. When things had quieted down, by which I mainly mean Julia, Prof added, "So you can see why I was allowing a fair bit for renovations?" "No kidding! A whole separate house worth of renovations. That's incredible." "There are still many details to take care of. That plan isn't set in cement, if you'll excuse the expression. There are building permits to worry about, maybe it'd be quicker to build your place from scratch, or from a kitset frame, rather than so heavily modifying an existing house. The architect we employ could very easily suggest ideas that change things considerably, but now you know our general intention." I spent a few minutes basking in the pleasure of their general intention, while we discussed some peripheral issues, such as where to park the ridiculously large number of cars this combined family would have, eight including one for Julia. A problem suddenly occurred to me, "Where are we - the three of us - going to live until our house is ready? That will take several months, won't it?" Prof answered, "At least several weeks, yes, depending on how much renovation it needs. You'll stay in one of the master bedrooms in the mansion. If there's only one, you'll stay in that. If there are enough bedrooms in the house we'll all find a place to sleep, but if not we'll lease one or two fancy mobile homes, and park them immediately next to the mansion, and the overflow can sleep out there. I'm half-tempted to myself. It might be more comfortable than in a too-small bedroom in the house, and it'd certainly be more fun. I imagine that it'd even be quite romantic, having our own little nest like that." Vanessa hugged Prof to her, saying, "I agree. I think it'd be lovely for a few months over summer. I'm sure it'd be quite practical, as it'd only be for sleeping, and the occasional cuddling session." Prof's eyes twinkled, "Maybe not so occasional. I feel younger just thinking about it." Before Prof could feel too young, I said, "I'm not comfortable pushing you out of the house. The three of us could easily sleep in the mobile until our house is ready. That way you can set up your bedroom just once, and not be moved around again. That makes a lot more sense." "Normally I'd agree with you as we'd normally expect the youngsters to 'rough it', although how rough it'd be to live in a luxury mobile home parked a couple of yards away from a mansion is a moot point. The reason you'll be inside is that this move is all about your security. A mobile home is too exposed and vulnerable. People could sit outside our property with a long lens and photograph you and Carol going into it together, and they could pick up your sounds just by pointing a long-range microphone at any of the windows. It's not arguable, Mark. Your group has to be inside, and your room will be properly secured from surveillance, even better than we've done to Julia's room now. I am sure that many of the conversations you'll have in your room will be highly secret. -- "Out of our group, everybody else could be bumped into the mobile: Donna, The Boys, either set of parents. Maybe all the rest of us will take turns for a month or two each; that could be fun too. We'll sort that out between us, excluding you. It's not going to be a hardship so don't worry about it. As long as Vanessa and I have a good study set up in the house somewhere, we could operate perfectly well that way. If it really was a difficulty we could stay in this house and just let Julia live with you for those months, but I prefer the idea of us all being together, as I'm sure that'll be more interesting and fun." I couldn't argue with Prof. His reasoning was irrefutable (a popular sentence among mathematicians). I was quietly accepting my defeat when Vanessa said, "We're going to be living in a mansion, a house MUCH nicer than this one. We'll be in there all the time, except for sleeping and cuddling. It'll be a good, enjoyable life. I'm sure The Boys won't mind seeing Carol walking around naked more often either." They both laughed, with Andrew saying, "That decides it for me. I was thinking of staying in this house for a while, but seeing the beautiful Carol walking around naked clinches it: I'm moving in as soon as possible! Haha." During the chuckles that followed Carol jumped up and put her arm around Andrew's neck, giving him a kiss on the cheek. "Thank you for being so nice to me." She repeated the movement with Robert. "Thank you too, Robert." And even more effusively with Vanessa and Prof. What I found interesting was that Andrew had initially reacted with some panic, freezing and looking at Vanessa. Robert was more relaxed, Prof more still, and Vanessa totally so. It was only Vanessa that hugged Carol back. Carol settled next to me, where both Julia and I could easily hug her. Julia said, "Good thing Sophia and Ashley weren't here." Andrew said, "You can say that again! I'm pretty sure my being hugged by a beautiful naked girl wouldn't get her approval." After a few seconds, Julia said, "I think Carol and I better get out and go upstairs. We've still got to pick what she'll wear tomorrow." Carol quickly agreed, and both of them started getting out of the tub. I thought we'd convinced Carol that she didn't have to worry about meeting the girls, but apparently that didn't extend far enough to include not worrying about what she was going to wear. That signaled the break up of the party, with everyone else announcing they'd had long enough, so we all started getting out. I was thinking about helping Prof back to his prosthetic, when one of The Boys did it by unspoken agreement. It was obviously their standard operating procedure. Carol started collecting all the glasses, but I said, "I'll do that, sweetie, you go sort out your clothes for tomorrow." "But this is my job. I'm supposed to serve you." "You've got something to do that matters to you, and I've got time to kill, plus I want to talk with Vanessa about something anyway, so go ahead. Just this once will be fine." I kissed her, and patted her ass while pushing her out the door. She had nothing to slow her down, not even putting on a robe, so she was soon gone. Vanessa was waiting while Prof was getting himself put back together, so she had time to ask me, "You had a question?" I waited until the door was closed behind Carol and Julia. The Boys were still in the room, drying off, so I said, "Not a big deal, but I noticed that The Boys, even Prof, were quite stiff when Carol hugged them. I mean 'stiff' as in rigid or scared, not the usual male stiffness, haha. Especially Andrew. You were the only one who was comfortable. I was just wondering why that was? Andrew looked at you, so I guess you knew why?" Vanessa explained, "That's easy. Carol likes being naked in front of other people and we're happy to make her happy, but I made it a rule with the family males that there be 'no touching'. They have to look and talk in order to tease Carol the way she likes, but no touching. Probably not for the reason you first thought of. I'm not worried about Prof or The Boys taking liberties with Carol. I trust them totally and I've certainly known them long enough to be sure of my opinion, but Carol doesn't know them well yet and we don't want her to worry. The remarkable amount of trust she's showing them is nearly all based on Julia's and your faith in us, rather than her own faith. Carol will be hyper-aware of any touches when she's naked. I'm sure that she's already deduced that none of the guys will touch her when she's naked, so she'll be feeling safe and happy. Andrew's reaction was mostly out of surprise at her touching him." "I'll say," agreed Andrew. "She took me by surprise. I'm glad she's feeling happy and comfortable with us, but I'm not quite that comfortable yet. I'm very aware of the need to be careful with her, so her sudden hug gave me a quick scare." Vanessa said, "If you asked Carol how she felt about being naked with us, one of the first things she'd say is that she felt safe, especially because no one touches her. It's good that we can give her a safe environment to get those kicks of hers from." I said, "This family is so WONDERFUL to Carol and me. And you repeatedly surprise me with things you've been doing that I never suspected. Your ideas for the new home are incredible - especially for me! I'm STUNNED at how brilliant that plan is for me! But just now about Carol. I didn't know all you guys were having to be so careful around her. It's unfair that you can't relax and be yourselves in your own home, and that you have to be so conscious of your behavior that you won't accidentally touch her on the shoulder, or whatever. I'm sorry we're causing you so much trouble." Vanessa interrupted me, "Mark, surely you're not apologizing for giving these lechers are chance to ogle a beautiful naked girl, are you?" Robert said, "I, for one, would like you to bring more beautiful, naked girls into the house. I don't think there are nearly enough of them." Andrew added, "Not only do we get to look, but Mom and Julia have actually TOLD us to look. To even make a point of it. Gee, it's such a tough job making your family happy, haha. In all seriousness, Carol's a very nice girl and I've never heard a negative comment from her. It's very easy to do things to make her happy." Prof said, "I was going to say the same. She's a sweet girl and it does an old heart proud to see how happy she can be. I was glad to be here when Vanessa described your new home. Carol was as happy as I've ever seen anyone." "I was very, very happy myself, but Carol was WAY overjoyed. It was very good to see her like that." Vanessa said, "This is not my field so I'm just guessing, but I wouldn't be surprised if Carol slowly loses interest in her embarrassment kink. I think she's got so much love going on - giving and receiving - that she'll give it up. I think it stems from her having low self-esteem, or is a form a self-abuse because she doesn't value herself. If it's anything like that, then I can't see how it can survive with her living in so much love." "That's a nice image and I hope you're right. I like that her kink makes her happy, but I'm not really comfortable with it and it's a bit of a worry. And now I worry about my making her do something she no longer wants to do." "She'll let you know that she's not interested in doing it for her pleasure. She'll happily do it for your pleasure though, which she'll proudly tell you. Don't worry about it, as I'm sure you'll pick up on it at the time. I'll tell Julia my theory too, so she can watch out for it. It's only a theory, and for all I know Carol might go the other way and want more of it. Remember that you can always just ask her how she's enjoying her embarrassments. She'll tell you her thoughts." "That's true. I'd forgotten that. She's talked with me quite openly about it twice before. Even better, I'll ask her to tell me if her need for it changes." "That's a good idea. Shall we go get dressed now?" "Oh yes, sorry." "Somehow I knew you were going to apologize. And don't say 'sorry' again." So I shut my mouth. Then re-opened it to say, "Prof, I think I'll go have a look at those two courses online while I'm waiting for the girls, and I'll ask Mom and Dad as soon as I get home." We had a brief talk about which courses I should look at, which basically meant that Prof gave me his advice and I said I'd do it. After which he said, "Good. I'm looking forward to seeing how well you go with them, son. I guess I should try to get used to calling you 'son' now, especially if I give you a key for the house, which I'll get now while I remember." "Hmm. Maybe we should hold off on my joining your family. I understand there's a rule that the males in the family aren't allowed to touch Carol." I got some laughs for that. Prof said, "How about Vanessa modifies it to apply just to all males who are not Lords. The Boys haven't even got girlfriends who'll let them hug other naked girls so they can't be Lords, and I've had decades to get used to the fact that I'm not, so I think the new wording will work." Vanessa said to Prof, "You're not a Lord, you're a Hero. Lords are greater than normal humans. Heroes achieve their feats despite the limits of their humanity. I'm perfectly happy being the wife of a Hero, thank you. -- "The rule is less important now anyway, as Carol's obviously feeling very safe with you guys, which speaks well of you as it wouldn't have been her natural reaction. You don't have to sit on your hands whenever she is naked near you, just make sure that the first time you touch her is slow and deliberate so she can see it coming. She'll know the rule has been deliberately changed, but she should be comfortable with that. Anyway, shall we go get changed." I went upstairs. I was amused by the loudness - in my head anyway - of Vanessa's missing instruction. I had expected her to tell The Boys, "Make sure you don't touch Carol anywhere inappropriate," or something to that effect, but she'd said no such thing. It was obvious why not, but it was still surprising how loud the omission was. Maybe because my mom had spent years telling me not to do things that I obviously knew not to do. I knocked on the "He Showed Me" room's door, and then remembered that we had a secret knock. Trouble was if I did it now, it'd be confused by my first knock. I was still debating the way out of this dilemma when Julia called out, "Come in." Which was certainly one way out, so I did. The girls were decent, Carol wearing an outfit I hadn't seen before. Not sexy, but very pretty. Flattering too. I liked it and said so. Both girls were pleased, especially Carol. When I suggested that it'd be a good outfit to wear tomorrow, both girls scoffed at that. I had to wonder why Carol had bothered to put it on, but I wasn't stupid enough to ask. I said, "I've just come up to get changed. I'll go to our study and do a little online reading of the courses Prof wants me to do. Please come and get me when it's time to head home." I proceeded to get changed, with both girls standing there looking at me. That made me very self-conscious but they clearly weren't going to turn away. Not to save my dignity, as that was already a goner. Girls seem to take delight in destroying their boyfriend's dignity. When I was bending over Carol said, "He does have a nice ass, doesn't he?" Julia agreed, "He certainly does. I can't help wondering whether the front is equally impressive compared to other guys. Maybe we should go ahead with the sit-up competition so we get a chance to inspect lots of guys?" I knew they were teasing me (it's a safe guess, as it seems to be true about 80% of the time). So I said, "I think that's a great idea. Of course I'd have to stop after one sit-up so I could check them out too. I guess that means I wouldn't win the prize, but I'd still have Carol that night so I'd be all right." Julia laughed, "Ahh, yes. That is a weakness of that plan. I'll have to think of another way of finding out what lots of guys look like naked." "Let me know how you get on. While I'm thinking about embarrassing things, let me mention something to Carol." I was just about to say that we'd been talking about her kink, when I stopped to wonder whether I should. Then I figured that it was something that Carol was willing to talk about so I shouldn't treat it as anything shameful, so I said, "Remember I wanted to talk with Vanessa? I had a question related to Carol's kink about enjoying being embarrassed sexually. We got into a discussion about it and Vanessa suggested that because of the amount of love that Carol's receiving and giving now, that her interest in her kink might change. I would just like to ask you, Carol, to tell me if it does change, especially because I don't want to force you to do more than you want. Is that okay, sweetie?" "I'll tell you, my Lord. I don't feel any different about it now though, except maybe I like it more because I feel so safe here. Your family is very good to me, Julia." "I'm sure they enjoy being nice to you. You're very easy to like." "Thank you. Vanessa was right about the amount of love I feel. It's amazing! I never knew it was possible to feel like this. Sometimes I feel so good I can't hold it in." Carol paused for a couple of seconds, while she thought about that. We waited for her. "But I haven't noticed it change my kink, as you call it. The only thing I really want is to do more for you, Mark. I wish you would be my Lord more often. I also wish we could make love more often, but I know we have to wait for that court case. I HATE that court case! I can't wait for it to be over. We can sleep together every night after that. Won't that be wonderful?" "Sweetie, there isn't a single day where I don't think of that several times. I hate the trial even more than you, as it's stopping me sleeping with BOTH my girls." "It's not possible for you to hate it more than I do, but at least it'll be over in a week or two. I do wish you'd let me, or tell me, to do more things for you. Even little things like cleaning up the glasses just now..." #3: " ... I like that Julia makes me get everyone drinks whenever we are in the tub. Little things like that. I LOVED Vanessa's talking about my milk when I am pregnant. That was very exciting. Your mom's very clever, Julia." I was dressed now, and it was a good time for me to leave so I could rush downstairs to check on the glasses. I said my temporary goodbyes, and quickly went back to the hot tub. The glasses were gone, so I went to the kitchen. No one was there, so I gave it up. I went back upstairs to our study to read up on the two courses. Prof came up a little while later to check that I had located the information I was looking for, which I had. He also gave me the front door key and described their security system, telling me everything I needed to know to come and go at odd hours, or just to access the kitchen in the middle of the night, as downstairs was alarmed at night. -- Prof added, "The only problem I can think of with your coming and going at odd hours is if Julia doesn't get enough sleep. I don't think you'd wake her up, but I can easily imagine her setting her alarm to wake herself to check if you're in the study and then to talk with you if you were. I'm going to tell her that's a no-no as it'll burn her out. She can't keep up with you and it'd be foolish for her to try. I think she learned that from her six-hour sex marathon, which I'll remind her of. If she does come see you when she should be sleeping, please tell me. If she has a good reason I won't make an issue out of it, but I will if it's just for fun. Okay?" "Yes, I agree. By the way, I forgot to take away the glasses from around the tub. I went back they were all gone. Sorry about that." "Don't worry. We had a chuckle about how much must be on your mind. Your life's starting to get complicated, isn't it?" "I'll say. Good though, especially that house idea. That was incredible! Thanks VERY much for that. But you're right about things getting complicated. Trying to do two of your Math courses in two months is not going to help either!" "I think you'll find them easier than you expect. A little idea just occurred to me: If you're working here at night and you hit a snag, put a textbook against the hallway wall opposite my bedroom door. First thing in the morning when I get up, I'll check whether there's a book there or not. If there is, I'll bring it back to you and you can tell me what your problem is. That way we get it ironed out as soon as possible." "Good idea, thanks." "If your parents okay your doing this then you can start immediately, even later tonight or early tomorrow morning if you wish. Just start reading through the lectures, taking your own notes. I'll need to tell the lecturers that they've got a new student, but that won't be a problem. I'll go have my little talk with Julia about her sleeping through the night." Fifteen minutes later my girls joined me and told me they were finished. Carol was carrying two bags, indicating they'd even implemented their decisions. I was impressed by how quickly they'd managed that. I understood that they'd selected an outfit for Carol which met all the 250 normal daily criteria, plus the however-many extra criteria that applied under such special circumstances. I remembered that I'd decided to wear my best outfit tomorrow, a decision that'd taken half a second and involved one criterion: Is tomorrow a special day? Yes. So I'd better wear my best outfit then. Amount of thought given to what my male classmates would be wearing: Zero. If that value ever changed, I'd seek medical help. I'd already read enough about the two courses Prof had recommended to be able to talk with Mom and Dad about them. I'd read their descriptions, a good chunk of which I didn't understand because I didn't know the mathematical jargon they used, but that was to be expected. I'd also skimmed through the first couple of lectures in each course, and they were straightforward and easy to follow. I could talk with Mom and Dad about the courses, but it was my coming and going at such weird hours that I thought they might have problems with. I shut the computer down, and together we made our departure. On the way Prof made me activate and deactivate the alarms, explaining to me, "I'd rather correct any errors now than at some ungodly hour of the morning." I thanked everyone for a great night, apologized to Vanessa for forgetting the glasses. Vanessa said, "That reminds me, I have the leftover chicken in a little container. Do you want it?" Despite my being in shock that I'd forgotten about it, I was sufficiently lucid to answer, "Yes, please." I kissed Julia, then Carol and I got into 'my' Honda Civic. The first thing I did was tell Carol - who was still stowing her bags on the backseat - to put her seatbelt on when she was ready. "I know, Vanessa has already told me." I carefully drove Carol home. On the way she said, "Isn't it cool you've got a car?" "I'll say!" "It's late at night and no one can see us. You could pull over anywhere and kiss me as much as you want." I decided that was an excellent hint, and immediately acted on it. My first ever make-out session in a car! Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to kiss "as much as you want." We kissed for several minutes and then had to resume our journey, otherwise it'd be too late to have my educational discussion with Mom and Dad and call Prof to tell him the result. While driving the rest of the way home, Carol said, "I can't stop thinking about how wonderful it's going to be to live in our house the way Vanessa described." I was very much looking forward to it too, but not as much as Carol was, it seemed. Carol's mission in life was to be my housewife, but she didn't have a house to be a wife in. Living as children in our parents' house certainly didn't count. I told her, "I think I can imagine how much it means to you. You need a house to be my housewife in. To look after me in all the ways you want." "YES! Just like that. I want that SO much!" "Thank goodness we'll at least be able to sleep in the same bed for most of the wait thanks to your VERY smart idea of Donna and me swapping rooms. That will be very, very nice. Even better when we're in the new house and Julia will be with us every night too." "{Sigh}. Yes. Damn that court case. Even 'damn' to Mom's talk about our being sensible. Not damn Mom, just her telling us we have to be sensible. I SO much want to make love to you now. Not sex, I want love. {Sigh}." I didn't feel as strongly as Carol, but I could understand why she felt the way she did. There also wasn't anything I could do about it, as nothing as simple as going down on her would help. Distracting her might, so I said, "Julia will be calling up her classmates now, won't she? Inviting them to have lunch with the three of us tomorrow." "Yes. She said so again just before we left. I think she's going to enjoy doing it." "I was wondering how the girls will be able to decide what to wear? I'm guessing this will be a sufficiently unusual event that the normal reasoning won't apply. According to Julia the other girls will think sitting on a field near me is a big deal." "Oh yes, that's for sure. Some of my friends would be overjoyed if they could sit near you at lunch. They'd be very excited. If you and Julia come down on Thursday there'll be some very giddy girls. I'd better be careful not to tell too many." I'd meant to distract her by talking about Julia's friends' clothing dilemmas, but Carol had drifted into thinking about her friends. She was verbally listing the various girls she should or should not tell, only a small proportion of the names being friends of Carol's that I'd met before. Carol was sufficiently distracted though, so I kept quiet and just drove. We were home in a few minutes anyway. I parked the car in our drive, making a mental note to ask Dad about the etiquette of that. ------- Chapter 79: "Donna's Ducklings" Named Tuesday, April 19, 2005 (Continued) At home Carol went to put away her clothes for tomorrow and I caught up with Mom and Dad. They started asking general questions about the evening, but I focused on Prof's idea, "Because I want to call him back shortly, before it gets too late." That conversation went very much as I expected: Surprise at my needing so little sleep. I answered, "You know I'm weird, just accept it please. I'll make sure I get the sleep I need, however much that is." Surprise at the Williamses being willing to let me come and go at such odd hours. I said, "It's mainly 'come'. They've already given me their house-key and shown me how to use their alarm." Not being happy at letting a driver with so little experience drive at those hours. I countered with, "If the Examiner from Hell couldn't find a single fault, I'm sure I can drive safely for the few minutes it takes. And I don't need experience. You saw me drive Dad's car in the parking lot with no experience whatsoever. You know I didn't need any driving lessons to satisfy the Examiner from Hell. I'm weird, just accept it again please." Worrying about other drivers, especially the drunks. At those hours, that was an issue I was willing to accept as real. We agreed I wouldn't drive to the Williams' Saturday or Sunday mornings (late Friday or Saturday nights, if you prefer to think of it that way). I was happy to agree to that because it meant the rest of the week I could do as I wanted. Mom tried to call Vanessa, but the Williams' phone was engaged. I explained to Mom, "It's probably Julia inviting her classmates to lunch. She could be tying up the line for quite a while." So Mom called Vanessa's cellphone, and I left them to their discussion about my comings and goings. Carol and Donna were both hanging around, and so while Mom talked the issue to death with Vanessa, us kids and Dad just chatted. We talked about the evening, with me mentioning the highlight, "Carol cooked a VERY delicious roast chicken. I had four helpings." Dad and Donna had a few things to say about Carol's increasing wifely domestication, which Carol beamed with happiness about. Remembering that it was Donna's bowling game with Robert that had spurred that whole idea, I mentioned our plan for Sunday noon, "Julia, Robert, me, and a bunch of girls from Julia's classes will go bowling. Julia wants me to bowl 300 and impress everyone." Donna immediately BEGGED to come with us. At the same time Dad's reaction was to laugh at the idea that I could get 300. He obviously remembered some of my previous games. I chose to answer Dad first. "Dad, I CAN bowl 300. Prof suggested we go to the lane to find out whether I could, and I can. It's actually quite easy, if you can believe that." "You bowled 300 already tonight?" "No, I just bowled enough balls to know I can. If you like I'll bet you $10 that I can get 300 on Sunday." I'd rather thoughtlessly copied that line from Julia, when she'd used it to shut down Robert's doubtful comments. In our household the effect was a little different. From Mom in the adjoining kitchen, "I heard that, Mark! I'll be in to talk with you as soon as I'm off the phone. In front of Donna too!" #1: Dad, very quietly said, "I get your point, and you better not mention the previous $10 to your mother." Donna repeated her request to be allowed to come bowling with us. Dad, no doubt happy to change the subject, especially if Mom came in soon, said, "Mark's doing this to meet a bunch of 16-year old girls. I doubt he'll want you there, sweetie." I couldn't think of any reason not to allow her to come, and it seemed entirely fair to do so as it was her game that made me think of it. So I said, "Donna can come if she wants. It was her having a game with Robert that made me think of it. As I understand Julia's plan, it's just going to be a bunch of girls who'll be trying to flirt with me. If any of them have a problem with Donna, that's their problem, not mine. I'd rather have Donna there than any of them anyway." Carol had already claimed my lap, but Donna still gave me the best hug she could, exclaiming, "He's such a great brother. I'll LOVE to come see you bowl 300. It'll be incredible." Carol and Donna were giving me the kisses that I apparently deserved when Mom came in. "Sorry to break up the love-fest, but Prof wants you on the phone, Mark, to arrange your first visit." When I got to the phone, Prof told me, "Your mother has approved it. As I understand it you'll go to sleep at the usual household hour tonight, and wake up at an unknown time. Is that correct?" "Yes. I'll go to bed about 10 or 11 and tell myself to wake up when my body decides it's had enough rest. I don't know how that'll work. I might not sleep at all that way, or I might sleep until 7:30am which is when I'll ask Mom to wake me if I haven't already. I just don't know. But if Vanessa's right I should wake some time between. I think I need less than five hours, which if I'm right will mean I'll wake about 3am. If I wake at a useful time, I'll go to your place." "Good. I hope to see you in the morning then. Vanessa wanted me to ask whether you needed some snacks left in your study in case you get hungry during the night?" "That's VERY nice and thoughtful of her. Normally I do raid the fridge a couple of times during my late-night studying. This time, if I come, I'll just bring the chicken leftovers back and a few pieces of bread to make sandwiches. I'll look after myself tonight, but for other nights that would be great. Please thank her VERY much for me." I was VERY sincere. I joke about my eating, but it's a fact that I do need a lot of food and I do get hungry quicker than I used to. It can get very distracting and unpleasant if I don't eat often enough. "I will. Last point, remember to pick yourself a project before you go to sleep. Unless you've got one in mind already?" "Ahh, no. I haven't thought about it yet." "Something you'll enjoy, that involves other people, and will require several decisions. -- "Goodnight, Mark. No, hang on, Julia wants to talk with you. I'll see you tomorrow morning hopefully. Putting Julia on now, goodnight." Julia - who hadn't talked to me for SO LONG - had to tell me how excited all the girls she'd contacted so far were at having lunch with us tomorrow. When I had a brief window of opportunity, I mentioned that Donna was coming on Sunday, and knowing her she'd certainly want to play rather than be a spectator. Julia said, "Good. I'll add her to the list. All the girls I've talked to tonight want to come too. I've got more calls to make and it's getting late-ish, so I better hang up on you, darling." Some brief smoochy talk later, we hung up. I thought it was probably time to face the music, so I walked into the living room. Mom saw me enter and immediately said, "What was that I heard about you trying to bet ten dollars?" I managed to convince Mom that what I'd said was equivalent to asking Dad, "Do you want to bet that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning?" It wasn't meant as an invitation, but as a way of telling the other person that I was confident that I was right. Which led Mom to ask what we'd be talking about, so I told her I'd be bowling a 300 game on Sunday. Mom, like Dad, was initially doubtful. I debated whether to offer her a ten dollar bet, but decided that was like dousing myself with gasoline and then playing with fire, as Mom doesn't like smart-asses. So I just assured her that I was positive that it was "well within my Special Abilities." Mom got that, and accepted my assurance. Before Mom could return to her theme of betting I quickly asked, "Mom, Dad, while you're both here, I wondered about my parking Julia's car in our driveway. I think it'll be here most nights, Julia not having her license yet. Should I park it in the driveway where I might block you guys, or on the street?" "Use your judgment," was Dad's answer. He further suggested, "If you're going to be leaving in the wee smalls, you should back into the drive so you can get out quietly and without shining the headlights on anyone's windows." (Dad's saying "wee smalls" either meant in the early hours of the morning, or in my smallest pair of underwear. His mentioning the glare of my departure not shining on people's windows made me reasonably sure he was meaning the hour of the night.) That was a good enough idea that I immediately went out to rearrange the car. Donna wanted to come for a ride with me. Her first, even if it was only twenty feet or so. On the way out to the car I asked Donna, "Do you want to bowl or watch on Sunday?" I got an even fussier answer than I'd expected, "I want to play on your lane, of course." "I'll need to check that Julia hasn't already promised all those slots away. If not, sure." Turning the car around necessitated driving on the street, so the seatbelts went on before the engine did. Donna thought I was OTT, and I told her, "You should get into the habit with me. And with everyone else too, come to that." -- Donna didn't seem impressed so I added, "Prof lost his leg because people weren't wearing seat belts. Do you want to lose your leg?" That worked much better. Then Donna started telling me how wonderful I was to let her come bowling with me. I didn't see it as such a big deal. There was no reason why not, and a very good reason why: because she was so pleased about it. It was an easy decision. I was barely half listening to her because she was just praising me. She did say, "Wait until I tell my girlfriends how wonderful you are to let me come along. They'll be even more eager to meet you again." This immediately caught my attention for a couple of reasons, the first was, "Remember my being able to get 300 is a secret. No one should know I can do that in advance. You can say we're going bowling, and that I'm happy for you to come play with us, but please don't mention anything about 300 until after I've done it, then you can say I did, but not that we expected to, okay?" Donna assured me she understood. While I thought of it, I added, "And no betting on me! If Mom found out you'd be grounded. I'd be upset with you too. No betting, okay?" "I never thought of it, and still won't do it now you've given me the idea. Mom got REALLY annoyed at me for betting at your race." The second reason Donna had caught my attention was an idea for the project that Prof wanted me to exercise my non-existent leadership abilities on. Donna's little friends had been fun when they came to see us off at the car; "fun" being one of Prof's criteria. Involving people was another criterion, so that also got a tick. Involving "several decisions or actions" was the remaining criterion. I didn't have any specific goal in mind for those girls, but I was sure that whatever I did would involve many "decisions or actions". I had to decide what my goal was. After a bit more thought, I decided it was probably the 'journey' rather than the 'destination' that would be the most fun in this case. I imagined it'd be fun to play with their adoration and one-upping of each other to get my attention. I didn't want to actually do much with any of them; I just liked the fun of a group of them trying so hard to get me interested. "Can I ask you a favor, please Donna?" "Sure." After a brief pause she added, "OF COURSE you can. I'm not going to say no to you." "Thank you. I'm thinking of having some fun with those girls you introduced to me. Plus maybe some others of your friends if they want to join in too. If you get a group of them together, I can meet them from time to time. As a group; not one on one. I'd need you to manage them all. I certainly don't want to have a whole bunch of giggly girls calling me, or worse still, me having to call them. Would it be okay for you to do that for me? It might be a bit of a pain at times." Donna exclaimed, "Are you kidding! I'd love to do that. It'll be fun and make me very popular too. I'd be like a queen, with all the girls begging me for the chance to meet you." "Don't let this go to your head! Don't turn power-mad or anything. I'd hate to see you get arrogant and bossy, because you're such a nice girl the way you are now." "I won't. It'll be fun, but it's not going to last long. To the end of the school year, I guess, so just a few weeks." I hadn't thought about that, but it was true. Donna added, "Plus I'll be happy if I can see you enjoy yourself. I know Julia and Carol are going to get girls for you, and I think it's choice that I can too." "How do you know about Julia and Carol doing that?" "Please! It's hardly a secret. You all talk about it a lot. Carol calls Julia on her cellphone and talks in my room right next to me. You just told me Julia's inviting a whole lot of girls bowling on Sunday. The reason is obvious! Duh." "Okay, I asked a silly question. Your group of girls is different from Julia's and Carol's girls though. Julia and Carol want me to have sex with their girls, but with your girls I just like the fun of seeing how eager to please they are. I don't want to have sex with any of them." "You could if you want. Most of them haven't done it yet, but they'd love to do it with you. Maybe some might back out, but the rest would be jumping with joy." #4: "I don't want to, sweetie. Thanks for offering them to me though, haha. I just liked seeing the way they behaved in a group. I need to think of a way of meeting them as a group. I can come down to wherever it is that you have lunch some days. Not often, as I always have lunch with Julia and Carol and we've already got our lunches heavily booked. But I think I can come down sometimes. Maybe once every two or three weeks. How would that be?" "It'd be fantastic. It'd be great no matter where they meet you. They don't care; they just want to meet you. You tell me where and when and lots of them will come. Some would probably steal a car if they had to, haha." I was a bit worried about the idea of having dozens of pre-teen girls mobbing me somewhere, especially if I was trying to be cool in front of Julia's friends. "If you told them I was bowling, would they come to see me?" "If you wanted them to, sure. They'd love to come." "Actually, I meant if they just knew I would be there at a certain time. Would they come hoping to meet me?" "If they heard a rumor that you'd be somewhere at a certain time, outside of school, then maybe some would go. It'd have to be somewhere they could be just 'accidentally on purpose'. They don't bother you at school at lunchtime because they'd get in trouble walking around the high school looking for you, and they don't come here because I've put my foot down about that and told them I'd tell my mom who'd tell their moms, but quite a few might go to the bowling alley." I suggested, "Maybe you'd better not tell anyone about going bowling with me on Sunday. Afterward you can tell everyone, just not before. What do you think?" "Could I say that you've agreed to let me go bowling with you and a lot of other girls, but we don't have a time yet? That's okay, isn't it? I want to say you've got lots of girls after you." "Hmm. Yeah, I guess that's fine. I'm not worried if one or two of your classmates see me there, I just don't want fifty of them, or something silly like that. I just want Julia's girls there. I need to think of places where I can meet your group of girls." "What about at one of your soccer games? They can come and see you play, which will be good because you play so well. You could talk with them before and after the game. They'd be very happy, even if you only talked for a few minutes. They were very excited about meeting you at the car, and that was very short." I quickly had three thoughts about soccer, even before I got to speak the first thought. This was often the case. Having three minds not on duty meant I often got several suggestions. Most conversations we just let one of us run the body, including the mouth, and the other two normally just leave him to it. That's because most conversations were dull and routine: with the kids around school, answering a teacher's question, etc. But if the conversation interested us, all three would participate and suggest lots of ideas. Often we had to pick among several ideas what to say. The first of the three thoughts I told Donna, "I don't really want a bunch of 12-year old girls flirting with me in front of my teammates. It'd be a bit embarrassing, sorry. I don't mean to insult you." Donna interrupted an apology that I could've kept repeating in various forms for at least another two or three minutes. "Don't worry, I understand." The other two thoughts I had, which I didn't voice, were: I'm now MUCH better at soccer, thanks to my proximity sense. In fact, I'm awesome at it. So if the girls saw me they'd be blown away. And my third thought was that I shouldn't invite Donna's giggly girls to watch me play soccer, but should invite Julia's friends. I wouldn't be at all embarrassed by a large bunch of good looking, 16-year old girls flirting with me. I made a mental note to mention that idea to Julia. I said, "I can't think of anywhere else to meet your girls. That's about all I do outside of school. Running with you is about the only other thing, and that's not suitable. It might impress them, but it's too hard to talk, tease them, etc. I want to see them as a group, not strung out along the road." Donna said, "Most of the girls you met last time are members of my running club. You could easily meet them there and they could talk with you when they weren't running. I'm sure there'd be a huge number of twisted ankles all of a sudden, stopping them from running, haha. If I told them you were coming down to meet them again they'd be very excited. My WHOLE club would be very excited if you came down. You know nearly every big wig in the club called Mom after you won the race?" "I didn't know that exactly. I knew lots of people called Mom, but I wasn't interested in who. I don't want any of the crap I faced at the race. I like doing things for fun." Donna said, "There are lots and lots of girls at the club. Most of them are very fit too, and they're all different ages. I think you could have plenty of fun if you came sometime. You're very famous there. If you ran another 10k around one of the tracks while people tried to keep up, you'd be a big hit." Running an informal 10k actually sounded like a good idea, as it'd destroy any doubts people around the club had about my winning the big race by pulling a substitution cheat. I thought it quite likely that many people would still have that doubt, and I worried that my being thought a cheat might rebound on Donna, especially from the people she'd bet with. Fixing my reputation at her club was a good idea. I had a condition though, "I could come to your club, but there'd have to be no crap. I don't want people begging me to join it because I never will. I don't want to be pushed into entering any races, or do anything organized. That takes all the fun out of it. I wouldn't mind coming down if it was just social, and having a fun run around a track for half an hour to prove my win was legitimate would be easy and a good idea." Donna eagerly said, "I'll call them up and tell them you'll come if there's none of the crap you said." I interrupted with, "Actually, I think I might ask Mom to call them. I want them to take it seriously, and they might not believe you enough." "That's good. Mom's good at telling people off." Donna was particularly well aware of that, as it's her that gets told off the most. I asked, "What time does the club meet?" "They have different things on at different times over Saturday morning and afternoon. You just tell them what time you want to come, and they'll meet you." "Let me put it this way, what time will the group of your girls be there, and will there be older girls there at the same time?" "Haha, I forgot about that. About 10am would be a good time to go." "That sounds good. Let's go inside and I'll ask Mom to call the boss of the club and tell him the rules. It won't be this Saturday because I'm busy already, but the next one should be fine. Mom and Dad are probably wondering where we are, so let's go in." We'd been sitting in the parked car talking for several minutes, but they could see us out of the kitchen window so they hadn't needed to send a search party out. On the way in, Donna said, "We're not running tomorrow morning, are we? I heard you say you're going to Julia's in the middle of the night." "Oh, that's right. Tomorrow was supposed to be a running day. I forgot. Can we skip tomorrow please, and I'll try to make it up to you another day?" "{Raspberry}. You don't need to make it up. I want to thank YOU for letting me do the group thing. That'll be fun for me." Inside I told Mom about Donna's talking me into going to her athletic club the Saturday after next. I emphasized, "For SOCIAL reasons." I asked Mom, "Would you please call the boss of the Club and tell him I'll only come if I'm not hassled to join the club, enter any races, or any sort of organized crap. I'm just going down because Donna talked me into coming down to meet some of her friends. It's a SOCIAL visit. I'll run another 10k around their track in the same time as I did in the race, if they want, but I'll do it for fun. It's not a race, people can run alongside of me and chat while they can keep up, and that sort of thing. Okay?" Mom said, "Sure, I can do that. I have their numbers so I can call him now. I talked to him last Saturday and I know he'll be happy to have you come." "Make sure he knows that I'll get in my car and leave if someone asks me to join." "There'll be dozens of people there and some of them are bound to ask you that. I can tell him to do what he can to stop the club officers from pressuring you, but you've got to expect a few of the members to mention it. It's their club, so they obviously like being members. I think you can shrug off a few comments. It's not going to kill you to say 'Not interested' a few times." "That's okay, I guess. But make sure he understands that I don't like it though. See if you can give Donna the credit for getting me to visit, for what that's worth. She might as well get some credit for that." Donna was hanging on to my arm during this conversation, it being temporarily free of wives, and she squeezed it saying, "It doesn't matter, but isn't he nice?" Mom agreed, then went to look up the top big wig's phone number. I thought she'd be on the phone for a while, so while I remembered it and in case Julia wanted to know while she was still talking to a few of her girls, I texted her with, "I am VERY good at soccer now. U might want to invite some girls to watch me on Saturday 2pm at CV." A couple of minutes later my cellphone rang. It was Julia. She said, "Your landline was busy. What's this about your soccer?" I thought I'd already said everything in my text, but I repeated it verbally because females are very verbal creatures, "I am SERIOUSLY good at soccer now. Remember my teammate's comments in the restaurant on Saturday night?" "I remember, but you've always been good at soccer. I just assumed he meant you'd had a particularly good game." "I DID have a particularly good game. The point is that all my games from now on are going to be like that. I'm MUCH better at soccer than I used to be." I was about to describe how I learned more about my abilities while I had the cast on, when I suddenly realized I was talking on a phone. That our Government illegally records phone conversations had been a huge story in the media recently. Good grief! One more thing I had to worry about. So I simply said to Julia, "If you want to invite any of your girls to watch me play soccer, they will be very impressed, okay? I will get LOTS of goals." "Wow. Have you found another..." "Let's talk about it in person. It's complicated and I'd rather talk about it face to face." I didn't want to risk spelling it out any clearer in case the software the Government used to analyze conversations triggered off phrases such as "I don't want to talk about it on the phone". Julia obviously didn't get my hint, and started asking another question. I cut her off after a couple of words, saying, "Not tonight, darling. Don't make me get all Lordly." Which shut her up most effectively. I carried on with, "If anyone sees me play, they'll be impressed. I think your parents are coming to watch too, remember?" "Yes, but I didn't think they'd be getting as impressed as you're saying. Let's talk about it tomorrow morning." I agreed, "Okay. I just thought you might want to mention it to some girls tonight." "There's no need. I'm mentioning lunch tomorrow and bowling on Sunday, and that's enough to talk about. I've talked to nearly all of them already. We can mention your game to them during lunch tomorrow. Is there anything else, because I've got just two more girls to call and I can do it if I hurry?" Now that she asked I realized there was a little bit more. I said, "Just to let you know, that Saturday after next I'll probably visit Donna's running club. 10am for maybe an hour or so. Just a social visit to meet some of Donna's friends there." "Knowing your recent dislike of the running community, I guess these would be friends of the girl variety?" "You've got that right. It's to do with the project that Prof wanted me to do." "How does Donna's club tie in to that?" I'll skip quoting the next couple of minutes because they were pretty silly. Julia and I confused each other because she thought I was referring to the roulette project that I was doing with Prof. I eventually explained it was a NEW educational project for me: having fun with a group of Donna's young friends. Julia said, "Got it now. That's a good idea of Dad's to get you to do something specific. I kept asking you to do more, but you never do. Getting you to do something specific should work better. I'll thank Dad for that." "So you think my choice of project is okay?" "I wouldn't DARE argue you out of it even if I thought it wasn't, but it sounds like fun to me. Let me know if you want any help. No! Let me put that another way: TELL me if you want me to do something, as it's your project. I look forward to seeing how you do. So from 10am on the Saturday after next you'll be busy for a couple of hours. I'll remember that." "Good. Related to that is that I should have lunch with Donna in her area of the school some time. Apparently that'd be a big deal to her and her friends. Maybe once every two or three weeks the three of us could do that?" "Fine by me. Do you want Carol and me to come? That might cramp your style?" "I WANT you to come. I don't want to miss having a lunch with you and Carol. Donna's little group of girls can adapt to your and Carol's presence, or not, I don't care." "Good attitude! We've already scheduled the next two lunches: my classmates tomorrow, Carol's the next. You COULD visit Donna's Friday or next week, but I'd prefer Wednesday or after. That'd be best for me, but that's up to you, of course." I asked, "Why so many days away for Donna's group? You normally do things immediately." Julia explained, "If you do your speech again in several more classes tomorrow, then lots more girls will want to meet you. We can use Friday, Monday and Tuesday to catch up with most of them. I don't want them all coming at once because that'd be far too many to talk with. I'll make up a roster for each day but I need to know how many days I have. Can I book those three days for my girls please?" #1: #3: #1: #3: "Julia, you tell me how many days you want and Donna's group of little girls can wait. Take as much time as you need." "That makes it easy for me. Friday to Tuesday is enough for me. I'll try to leave Wednesday and Thursday free for you to visit Donna's group and Carol's group again if you want. While we're talking about all this scheduling, I've never seen you use a diary. How do you keep track of everything?" "Just remember it, I guess. Although it's getting more complicated these days, for some reason whose name starts with 'J'." "Ha! If you think I've complicated YOUR life, you should see what you've done to MINE! Not to mention my entire family's!" That was true. Rearranging Julia's bedroom and making our study was just the beginning of it. Now everyone is going to buy and move into a whole new house because of me! -- Before I could comment, Julia continued, "The reason I asked about your having a diary is mostly about soccer. I wondered whether you might have a clash between visiting Donna's club and your game that weekend? I'm not sure how often you play because you've had your cast on all the time I've been your girlfriend." Uh oh. I'd look stupid if Mom had to call up Donna's club and change my time. I told Julia, "Hang on. I've got the list in my bedroom. I'll go have a look." A few seconds later, "Got it. I've got an away game, but it's late Saturday, phew. We leave from school at 2pm, for about an hour's drive." "That could have been a clash. I'm going to get you a diary and you can start using that for everything we schedule. Clashes are a silly mistake we can easily avoid." "I don't really need a diary. I can easily memorize everything. It's just that I didn't bother to do it because I didn't see the risk of clashes. Now that I do I'll memorize my schedules." "I'm sure you could, but that's the wrong process. Your life is going to get increasingly complex and even if your memory is good enough, having your schedule locked up in your head makes it too hard for other people to know what's going on. If I want to book some of your time it's far easier if I can just grab your diary and look at it myself. If it's something I don't need to talk with you about, I can just write it straight into your diary myself. That'll make things much easier for both of us." "Umm, honey. Aren't diaries supposed to be private? I'd never look in your diary. That's a big no-no." "It's not that sort of diary. It's not a journal of your deepest, innermost thoughts. It's just an appointment book. Everyone at Mom and Dad's work has their diaries online. Mom or Dad frequently make appointments to see someone just by linking to the person's diary page and writing their appointment in. It's very easy. When you get more assistants you'll definitely have to do that, but let's get you started with just a little pocket diary and pencil. I'll get you one soon. Or better still, I'll ask someone else in my family to get you one from the stationery store at OSU. They're only a couple of bucks." "Umm. Okay on the paper diary, I guess. I don't mind you reading it, but I don't like the idea of other people, especially if it was online. What if I wanted to do something private?" "It's not online to EVERYONE, just those who are allowed to access it. Maybe only two or three people that you choose. If you want to do something private, just block off a chunk of time and label it 'Private'. That's what Mom and Dad do. They keep a pocket diary too, where they record their private appointments. I've seen them use that two-level system for years. I think it works well, but I'll ask them about it shortly just to make sure. Leave it to me, okay?" When Julia asks me to leave something to her, it's guaranteed to be a good idea to do so. I said, "I'll leave it to you, my love." There was nothing else to talk about, so Julia hurriedly hung up so she could call the last two girls on her list. I was sure she had a list, and I doubted it'd be in a simple alphabetical sequence either. I went back to the living room. After checking it wasn't a vital moment in a "Men running around chasing a ball" game, I announced, "Can I have all your attentions for a moment please." When I had them, I continued, "A small but maybe important point I want to remind you all of because I nearly forgot it myself just now. I was on the phone with Julia, and I was just about to talk about one of my special abilities, when I realized that doing so on the phone might not be smart. Equally so for talking about my relationship with Carol. Our Government records God knows how many millions or billions of private conversations. I guess they're using software to analyze them, but I've no idea what could trigger that software. I think we have to make sure we don't say anything that we couldn't say in public. -- "It's not just their automatic software that worries me either. What about if our wonderful Government saves all those conversations for years? Maybe in ten years I might be famous and some guy might be ordered to listen to all of my recorded conversations, possibly all of the conversations of my family too. It'd take him a few days, I guess, but he'd hear everything we said, and then we could be in big trouble. It's scary." Everyone agreed that it was scary, especially Mom and Dad. There was nothing we could do about it except be very careful. I told them that I'd remind Julia about it tomorrow, who'd share it with her family. As that covered everyone who be talking about my abilities and marriage, that should stop such talk. We discussed what was acceptable. I said, "I think the best rule is whether you could say it in public with other people listening. It's okay to say I passed my exams with high grades, or that I won a running race, or that I'm very good at soccer, or those sorts of thing, but don't mention stuff that the public don't know, like I can tell when people are sneaking up behind me or that I have special abilities or I'm having sex with my sister. Saying I'm good at soccer is fine, saying I have special abilities that have suddenly made my soccer better would not be fine. It's a pain but it has to be this way, I think." Dad asked, "Have you got even better at soccer?" "Yeah. I'm much better at it now. When I played last Saturday I found out that some of the things I learned about myself while I was out of the game really help my game. I'm a DEADLY striker now. Because of Aikido actually, which is due to Donna. Thank you AGAIN, Donna. Your finding Aikido for me keeps getting better and better." Donna was very pleased. While Donna was busy basking in that praise, Dad asked, "You were pretty good before, weren't you?" "Yeah, I was, but I'm FAR better now. Let me put some numbers on it. For the last few months, excluding the latest game, I averaged one or two goals per game. From now on I expect I'll probably get a dozen per game." Dad and Donna, who understood soccer better than Mom and Carol, immediately expressed their amazement. Dad explained to Mom, "Most soccer games end with none, one or two goals per side. Three or more is unusual. If Mark can get at least a dozen, that destroys the opposition. It's a complete massacre." I added, "I'm not totally sure that'll happen every game. My team has to get the ball to me. If the other team can stop that then I can't score, obviously. But stopping that would be pretty hard, especially as my team is reasonably good. Another problem would be if our opponents closely marked me with a ridiculous number of defenders. I'd have trouble getting through four markers, but they'd be leaving the rest of the field so open that my team would probably win by a landslide anyway." There was some more excited chat about my new revelation. One little thing that came up was my commenting, "I think Prof and Vanessa are going to come watch me on Saturday. We're playing at Crescent Valley at 2pm. You can come watch too, if you want." Dad, Carol and Donna immediately said they'd definitely be there. Mom did too, she was just slower to react as sport isn't really her thing. Even with her being English originally, she wasn't into soccer. Dad said, "So in the last hour you've told us you can bowl 300 games, and now we learn you can destroy your soccer opponents. Are there any more sports you can blow people away with?" "That's about it Dad. Running and 8-ball are the only other things I've tried, if 8-ball is a sport. I play basketball with Donna, which I guess I could be very good at but I'm not interested as it's too competitive and high-pressure. Who would've predicted a couple of years ago that I'd be so good at sports!" We chatted away for a while, on unimportant topics. At one stage Mom mentioned, "The Athletic Club president was very happy you'll be visiting them, although considerably less happy by the time I'd finished repeating all your requirements. He still wants you to come though. Do you want your father or me to come with you?" Considering that I was going there to play sexy mind-games with Donna's bunch of 12-year old girlfriends, I thought not. "No thanks. It's just a social thing. You don't need to be there to defend me because I'll just leave if they annoy me. If you've got nothing better to do, please go mansion shopping because I'm REALLY impatient for that to go forward as fast as possible." We discussed the new house, and I discovered that Mom and Dad hadn't known about the idea of an attached second house for me and my girls. They'd known the house would need some significant renovations to upgrade it to have three master bedrooms, but that was as much as they'd discussed with Vanessa and Prof. I repeated the security issues involved in having a big delay before we moved in, or in having workmen all over the place. I described the temporary mobile homes solution, and my detached house in more detail. Stressing Prof's point that, "It's Mark's money that is paying for it all." Carol was VERY emphatic about how much she wanted it. Donna thought it was a cool idea, and Dad said, "Gee. I wouldn't mind having a setup like that myself." Wanting to recruit an ally as fast as possible in case there was any chance of a future discussion about whether or not to let me have my own house, I quickly said, "Sure. We should have the money. Just tell the architect what you want." That made Dad's mouth fall open. Mom brought him down to Earth, "What do you need a whole other house for? You're not intending to have lots of teenage girls visit you, are you?" "Only if you're going to do like Julia and start supplying them. Somehow I can't see that happening, haha." Mom said, "We'll take that as a 'No', then. Seriously, what else would you want another building for? Everything we need will be in the main house." It turned out that Dad would quite like to have a really nice workshop, where he could tinker around with the lawnmower or whatever else, "And a Guys' Room would be nice too." Mom said, "Most houses at that end of the market contain a games room. The Williamses use theirs quite often so I'm sure they'd like a new house to have one. We can ask their thinking on that, to make sure. A workshop should be a simple matter, especially compared to Mark's having his own house. That's the thing I'm having trouble getting my head around. I wish Vanessa had talked to me about that before." Carol repeated, with GREAT firmness, "I WANT a house for me and Mark and Julia. I want to be his wife. I want somewhere that is OURS, where I can serve him properly." It wasn't so much her words, as the depth of emotion she put into them. The strength of her desire was palpable. Mom had to know that stopping us getting a detached house would hurt Carol very much indeed. Mom retreated to, "I'm not saying I'm against it. I just want to talk about it. It's too late to call now, but I'll talk with Vanessa tomorrow." ^ [For convenience I'll explain now that Vanessa apologized to Mom for the accidental surprise, "Prof and I only thought of it recently and meant to talk with you and Steven about it the next time the mansion came up in conversation." Vanessa's arguments in favor of their design summarize down to: "If your only real objection is the expense, then you quite literally have no say because it's his money and this is what he and the girls want. -- "He'll still be living with us, just in a much more extensive master bedroom suite than we envisaged before. -- "Most importantly, Mark has a HUGE need for privacy, as you well know. Quite possibly even the need to keep some of his things private from the two families. -- "We are moving FOR Mark, so Mark should be the focus of the design of the new house. -- "They're going to be moving away from Corvallis in probably just over a year, so they need to learn how to fend for themselves. It'll be an excellent learning experience for them." Mom had to accept it. It seemed over the top and 'wrong' for a 15-year old, but Vanessa's logic couldn't be faulted. Off the topic of my accommodation, Dad would be happy that the Guys' Room hadn't been forgotten, and a workshop for Dad was easily agreed on, "After all, Prof and I will be outfitting a very nice study for ourselves, so Steven should have his room too. What do you want Felicity?" Mom couldn't think of anything.] ^ Donna eagerly reminded us of her ideas for a swimming pool, basketball court and some horses. I was pleased to note the horses. Everyone else caught it too. Donna was reminded of what she was told the last time she recited her wish list. I remembered to ask Mom, "Please wake me at 7:30am if I'm asleep, although I hope to be at the Williams' by then. I'll have breakfast there, but come back here to pick up Carol and Donna for school." My request required some more explanation from me, especially my uncertainty about whether I'd be asleep or not, but it was acceptable after I agreed to call Mom at 7:30am if I was at the Williams', so she'd know that all was well. Otherwise I let my mind wander. I was thinking about how much easier it would be to play with Donna's group of little girls if I had my own house already. I mused on that for quite a while. Carol felt my erection and smiled at me. She didn't know why, but she always seems happy when I get an erection. It's good that what makes me happy also makes her happy. I got tired of thinking the phrase, "Donna's group of little girls". I knew it'd be even worse when I had to frequently refer to them in conversation, so I decided to invent a nickname for them. My first idea built on "giggly girls", to be, "The Gaggle of Giggly Girls", which was cute, but even harder to say than the original. "The Gaggle" or "The 3G's" would work as abbreviations, but weren't descriptive enough. "Donna's girls" was another idea, but that was plain boring. Gaggle being from geese, made me think of ducks. Donna's idea of being the queen reminded me of a boss duck and I recalled the image of a female duck being followed by a line of cute little ducklings. You never see a duckling by itself, they're always in a group of other ducklings, which is pretty much the case with girls that age too. I also had the image of them following Donna to the car pick-up point, and their being in the same club. I decided I liked, "Donna's Ducklings". Donna's group were little, cute, funny, interchangeable, hung around together, made cheerful but inconsequential noises, and were basically only good for having a little fun with. I chuckled to myself, which both girls noticed. I said, "I'll tell you tomorrow, just an amusing little thought. I think I'll have a shower now, to be quieter in the morning. Then I'll go to bed. Thank your for the lovely dinner, Carol. Goodnight all." Getting out of the room wasn't that easy, as both girls needed several kisses. These days Donna preferred more than a simple kiss on the cheek, three or four kisses on the lips was becoming her desired norm. I had to point out to her that she was not automatically entitled to the same level of attention as my wife, even though she and Carol were both sisters. It was hard for Donna to come up with a counter-argument to that. She wasn't misbehaving badly, but I had a feeling Carol was going to have a little talk with her in their room later about impatience. It'd be best to keep a tight rein on her, to use a horse metaphor that although she liked horses, I was sure she wouldn't welcome. After my shower I did some miscellaneous reading until 10pm, when I went to bed. I closed my eyes, mentally crossed my fingers, and told my body to sleep until it didn't need to anymore. ------- Chapter 80: Repeating My "I Love My Sister Carol" Speech Wednesday, April 20, 2005 It was dark when I woke. I eagerly looked at my bedroom clock/radio, to see "2:10am". So just over four hours of sleep then. Cool! I jumped out of bed, and decided that I felt fully rested and energetic. I dressed in my best, impress-the-girls-at-school, speech-making clothes, grabbed my schoolbag and the essential snack ingredients from the kitchen (it was important not to forget those). Seeing as how I was in the area, I snacked on something else I found in the fridge. Then I drove to the Williams'. Before my recent realization that I didn't need so much, I used to average about nine hours of sleep per night. Having an extra five waking hours, especially as they'd be undisturbed hours, should allow me to achieve a great deal more studying. I'd need it because I expect college level courses to be much harder than schoolwork. Facing college courses was daunting. The drive was uneventful. There were hardly any other cars on the street, none of which seemed to be under the control of a drunk intent on slamming his car into Julia's/mine. I arrived at the Williams' in short order, let myself in, reset the alarm, and headed up to my study. I could see a light from upstairs and soon found that they'd left the upstairs hallway light on for me. I was a good boy, walking straight past Julia's room. That didn't stop me wishing I was a bad boy though. The knowledge that Julia and I could be as noisy as we wanted in her soundproof bedroom was a temptation. But, as I said, I was a good boy. The first thing I noticed when I found and turned on the study light, was a plate of cookies and a bottle of water in the middle of my desk. I tested a cookie while I read the note propped up next to the plate: ^ To my wonderful, incredible, darling, Lord, I hope you are reading this because that will mean you are even more impressive and fantastic than I previously thought, and you know how much that was. It will also mean that we will spend most of the night close to each other. Not as close as I would like (don't you hate it when fathers are right?), but it's still very nice for me to go to sleep knowing that you might be near me. In his wisdom, my father has consented to my setting my alarm clock fifteen minutes earlier than normal, provided I go to bed that much earlier to compensate. I will do so, but expect to be too excited to sleep easily. That ability of yours would be welcome. When I awake I will immediately run to see if you are in the study. In my haste I might forget to put any clothes on ;) With that thought, I wish you a good night's studying. All my love, xxx Julia, Wife#1 PS. Under this note are the two leadership books I'd like you to read. Placed inside the front cover of each are my notes indicating which sections I think would be the most valuable to you, although I haven't read either book all the way through yet. If you get tired of math, try these for a while. It's a very different subject, and you might find the change restful. If you get very bored with studying, please come and ravish me. Just don't wake me, Dad wouldn't like that! PPS. Dad forgot to tell you that we don't have copies of the textbooks for your two Math courses yet, but he'll get them tomorrow. He's going to get you a diary too as he agrees that you should use one. PPPS. I love you. ^ I chuckled at Julia's finishing a love note with 'organize Mark' instructions. Also on my desk were two manila folders, already labeled with the two courses' names and numbers, a pad, and several different colored pens. I fired up the computer and started studying. I started with Algebra ("A" is before "C" in the simple, masculine way I make lists), and restarted from the beginning of that course's lectures, taking notes on the key points. I took quite thorough notes as I expected the material to start getting tough after the introductory lectures. I worked for about an hour, then stopped for a break. Using my newly acquired algebra skills, I calculated that I wasn't eating the cookies fast enough, so I took the necessary corrective measures. I'd enjoyed the work so far. It was actually quite simple, as it built up very logically. It hadn't gotten hard yet, but I expected it would soon. Alternating subjects hourly sounded like a reasonable approach, so I changed to Calculus, restarting that from the beginning of lecture #1. At the end of the second hour - ten minutes over, as I chose to finish at the end of a lecture rather than by the clock - I stopped for a picnic. I made myself a couple of chicken sandwiches, had a cookie or two and a drink. Last night I'd been urged to help myself to more food or drink from the kitchen if I wanted it, but I had enough here to last the night. Calculus had been a similar experience to Algebra, both easier than I'd expected for college courses. No doubt that'd change soon. I wasn't treating the leadership books as a subject for study tonight, so I alternated back to Algebra. At the end of my fourth period (two sessions on each course, with a few lectures being read per hourly session, so I was going faster than they'd been in real time) both courses were rolling along nicely. Calculus seemed a little slower than Algebra, but neither was hard. I'd covered what I thought took me well beyond anything that could be considered an "introduction", and the lectures not yet getting hard puzzled me. The time was about 6:45am and I wouldn't have time for another rotation, especially as I was expecting a naked Julia soon. I did a calculation of how long it'd take me to complete all the lectures at the current rate. Assuming four nights of study per week (Mom had prohibited two, leaving five as the maximum, and one was bound to be lost for some reason or other), and five hours per night, then both courses would be finished in nine weeks. That was close enough to how much time there was left before exams that I would have been happy if I hadn't been worried about the material getting harder soon. I didn't allow any time for schoolwork because I could do that during the normal hours of late-afternoon or early-evening. I decided to write Prof a note for when he got up and checked outside his door, as it seemed rude to be in his house without letting him know. I wrote: "I went to bed at 10:00pm. Woke at 2:10am, so just over 4 hours sleep needed. I feel good, and I think Vanessa's suggestion worked. Arrived here before 2:30. Have done about 4.25 hours of study, half each Algebra and Calculus. At current rate will finish both in nine weeks. No problems requiring your professorial input, surprisingly easy in fact, which puzzles me. Will read a leadership book until someone comes for me. I expect Julia soon." I took the note to the hallway outside his room and left it as instructed. I went back to the study and cracked open the leadership book that happened to be on top. I familiarized myself with its structure and made sure I could understand Julia's pointers to what she considered important. I was just settling in properly, thinking about the last cookie that I was saving for her, when the her in question opened the door and stuck her head in to see if I was here. Seeing that I was, a very happy, naked Julia came in and jumped onto my lap, kissing me repeatedly and making a big deal about my being here. She clearly didn't consider my reading leadership textbooks to be as important as making out, so I dropped it on my desk and used both hands to make her feel welcome. She was in a joyful rather than sexual mood, so I treated her accordingly. That Prof or Vanessa might walk through the door any second might've been a consideration. After Julia calmed down sufficiently, which took a surprisingly long time, she asked me some questions about how it went. I answered those readily, including my saying that, "The only problem I have is that the material seems too easy. Not trivial, but not as difficult as I expected either. I don't understand that. I thought passing college courses was supposed to be an accomplishment because they're HARD, but these two aren't yet. At the rate I did this morning, it'll take me nine weeks to finish the two courses. I wrote a note to that effect and put it outside your parents' room, so your father might come in soon." Julia said, "Good. Are you saving me this cookie?" "Yes. I thought you might want to break your fast, before you had breakfast, especially if you got up early. Thanks for your lovely note too. I was delighted to read it, and to see how well you prepared for my visit. You're a lovely wife#1." "Thank you my most deserving Lord. I am happy to serve. You can have the cookie, if you want. I'll wait for breakfast." "Okay, {munch}. Umm. {munch}, {swallow}. Shouldn't you put some clothes on in case your parents come?" "I'm more interested in taking your clothes off." Whereupon she started unbuttoning my shirt. I can, theoretically, accept that she doesn't mind her parents seeing her naked. Personally I'd find that very embarrassing, but if she's comfortable with it then good for her. However, her stripping me while being naked herself and making increasingly sexy noises was not something I could accept being seen doing by Prof or Vanessa. I was struggling to slow her down, when there was a knock on the door. Thank goodness they didn't open the door immediately. I was trying to decide whether to button up my shirt or grab my jacket off Carol's desk to cover Julia, when Julia called, "Come in. We're not doing anything yet, UNFORTUNATELY." By the time she'd finished saying that Prof and Vanessa were in the room, wearing PJs and robes, as a certain girl should have been. I was the only one that seemed to care though. Prof said, "Good morning, Mark. You're looking very flustered. Maybe you didn't get enough sleep last night?" Julia said, "He would've been looking a great deal more flustered if you'd taken five minutes longer, haha. Maybe I'll get up five minutes earlier tomorrow. No, better make that ten minutes earlier." Prof hadn't bothered putting on his prosthetic yet, and was using a crutch as a temporary leg. He saw me looking and said, "I don't bother putting it on until I've had my morning shower." After some more Mark teasing, Prof and I managed to have a sensible conversation. I expressed my puzzlement that college level courses didn't seem to be as hard as I expected. The explanation turned out to be that my expectation was wrong. Prof said, "Nothing magical happens to people's brains between being at high school and starting college. They have a summer vacation then carry on studying, just like between any two school years. That the studying occurs in a different set of buildings is irrelevant. There are some types of abstract logic that most teenage brains can't seem to process, but whether or not that limitation would apply to you doesn't matter as none of that logic exists in any undergraduate mathematics course. Maybe in other faculties like Philosophy, but not in Math. Show me what you've done so far?" I reached around his naked daughter, and used the mouse to show him, adding, "As I said in the note, I figure nine weeks at the current rate." "With what assumptions?" That's one of the things I like about mathematicians, they know that question is often more important than discussing the answer. I answered, "Four nights per week of five hours each, at the current rate of lectures per hour, which assumes the lectures don't get harder or easier." "The time should be fairly constant. That's how they're cut up, so they fit in a standard lecture period. Most of the time variation will be because of you, because you'll pick up some concepts faster or slower than others." "Okay. I've noticed Calculus is slightly slower than Algebra for me." Vanessa asked, "You're only allocating four nights per week to these courses, so what are you intending to use the other three nights per week for? Your schoolwork?" "Not schoolwork, no. I'm on top of that already and I think I can easily cover what that needs just in the usual after-school study hours. I was assuming schoolwork doesn't cut into these sessions, and I was assuming OSU's courses don't extend outside of these hours. Obviously I could do either whenever I wanted, but it was easier to assume a clear separation. I subtracted two nights because Mom won't let me drive late at night on the weekends in case of drunk drivers, and I subtracted another one just in case something happened, maybe a big assignment load at school or sickness or something, leaving the four nights I used." Vanessa said, "When Felicity told me she didn't want you driving Friday and Saturday late at night, I assumed you'd simply drive over earlier. Come here sometime during the day, spend it with Julia, and sleep with her until it was time for you to wake up and study." "D'oh! I'm an IDIOT! I never thought of that. You're right. I'll miss the first couple of weekends because of the court case, but after that is fine. I can't believe I didn't think of that." Vanessa said, "I'm sure that after the trial is finished you would've very quickly worked out that you could sleep here. That correction gives you six nights per week, rather than four." Prof said, "So six weeks to complete, rather than nine. Maybe 6.5 weeks if you miss a weekend or two because of the trial. But you could use that time to get well ahead in your schoolwork, and then do OSU study during the normal schoolwork hours, so we might as well call it six weeks regardless of the trial. The lecturers will give you some assignments to do. Part of their job is to make sure their students understand the material, so you'll lose some time doing those. Not much though because you can do them here and fax or email them in, and they'll return the marked work the same way. I'm almost tempted to try to add a third course, but I think that might be pushing it." Vanessa said, "Definitely pushing it too far, I think. Mark's doing thirty hours a week of additional study and he's going to need to take breaks. You could even call them sanity breaks. I wouldn't like to add thirty hours of studying to my week, even if I didn't need the sleep." Prof agreed, "Good point. We'll have to be careful of that. Unfortunately we don't have much slack to play with because the exam dates are unchangeable. OSU won't give you any leeway there, Mark, so you'll have to take the final exams the same time as the other students. I don't remember the exact dates for your courses, but sometime in the week from June 13 to 17, about eight weeks away. There's still the one night per week that you used as a reserve. You can study that night too, but at the increased risk of burnout. Did you miss not having the textbooks?" "I hardly gave them a thought." "I'll bring them home tonight. You'll need them for some of the assignments anyway. The course notes are meant to be self-contained, but you might find some material is covered better by the text than by the notes." "Thanks. I have a couple of thoughts. First, I kept expecting the material to get harder, so I was going slower than I needed to. I was trying to build a solid foundation, expecting to need it. If the work doesn't get harder I can speed up. I'd guess 20 to 25%. Second, I enjoy math, and I enjoyed myself in this session. Maybe having fun will help prevent burnout." Prof said, "That'd take you down to 4.5 to 5 weeks. Allowing half a week for assignments, which is probably excessive, give us 5 to 5.5 weeks. Provided you don't burn out, then that'll work. You'll have to be disciplined though. You can't make a habit of visiting some new girl's house and staying with her overnight. To get both courses done in time, you can't miss many nights. I wonder if it's better for you to study one course all the way through, then do the other, that way you're bound to be ready to take at least one exam. What do you think?" "I'd like to keep alternating courses the way I am now. I can keep an eye on my rate of progress and revert to one if there's a projected problem, but hopefully not." Vanessa said, "Good. That looks excellent to me. Julia, take note that there's not a lot of slack in this for Mark, so don't overload him with too much, especially frivolous sex. There are always more fish in the sea and there'll always be some waiting for him." "Yes, Mom. Isn't it great he'll be able to sleep here every Friday and Saturday? I'll have to reschedule the other boys that visit me those nights, but I'll do that for my main man, {giggle}." I said, "Talk about an empty threat." Prof said, "Some of us need to get changed, or in Julia's case, dressed. Mark, please keep us informed about your progress rate and whether you feel burned out or just fatigued or bored. It'd probably be a good idea to keep an eye on how much sleep you need too. Now you're into these courses, I definitely want to take you to OSU to introduce you to your teaching assistants, some of the faculty and others. Ideally not today, but very soon. Tomorrow would be perfect." I said, "Tomorrow is fine with me, except we've told Carol we'll have lunch in her area that day. You said before that you'd prefer me to visit OSU over lunchtime?" "Definitely, that's the one time most of the faculty will be free. I'll email them today that you are coming tomorrow for lunch, so any of them that want to meet you can reschedule any clashes they have. I'll show you around for about an hour before lunch, then we'll have lunch with the faculty, then back to school for you. You'll miss a couple of hours, or slightly more." "I'm not worried about missing classes, just about letting Carol down." Julia said, "Tell her on the way to school today that you have to go to OSU Thursday, so her lunch will be Friday. I don't think she's told anyone yet, or if she has she can tell them again. It's an easy change. I had something on Friday, but that can be pushed back too. OSU tomorrow, Carol Friday, my roster Monday to Wednesday, Donna Thursday. Okay?" "Yes. Fine by me. It's a deal, Prof, tomorrow it is." Prof said, "Excellent. I'll pick you up from school as finding your way around OSU the first time can be daunting. I'll show you where to park, where the Math building is, etc., so you'll have no trouble on later visits." Prof and Vanessa wandered off, very happily in Prof's case. Julia said, "Are you wearing the clothes you want to wear to school?" "Ahh, yes. I thought I'd better wear my best clothes for my speeches. That's all right, isn't it?" "That's fine. The problem is you were wearing them all night as well. We've GOT to get you some new clothes soon! If you've finished in here, let's go have a shower together." I couldn't finish fast enough. While I was getting undressed for the shower, I mentioned my telephone security fear to the conveniently close Julia, as she was helping me undress. She agreed it should be raised at breakfast. After our shower she made me sprinkle some girly smelling stuff on before redressing, so I smelled 'fresh'. I decided that shopping was the lesser of two evils, compared to smelling like a girl, so I hoped we went shopping soon. I'll have to remember to bring some more clothes when I come here tomorrow. I also remembered to call Mom at the right time to tell her, "Everything worked perfectly and I accomplished a lot of very useful studying. Prof and Vanessa are very pleased by my progress rate. I'll be there to pick up Carol and Donna at the usual time for the driver; it'll just a different driver this time." Mom was fine. Everyone was at breakfast when Julia announced, "Mark has a security issue he wants to raise." She passed the floor to me, and I repeated the comments I'd made to my family. The Williamses agreed to be careful with what they said over the phone or in emails. During the discussion, the thought of our car being bugged crossed my mind. I decided it'd probably pay to be cautious until after the damned trial. My make-out session with Carol last night probably shouldn't have happened, but it was too late to worry about that now, and it was only kissing. After the trial I was surely safe from any targeted snooping. To think otherwise was being overly paranoid. The Government's continuous massive phone and email bugging operations were a concern though. They insisted they were only doing it to international calls and emails, but no one in their right mind would trust what they said, especially because a few months ago they insisted they weren't snooping illegally at all. Prof asked, "While I remember, have you chosen a project for your leadership exercise?" "Umm, yes." "Relax, Mark. You don't have to tell me what it is if you feel bashful. Just try to make the decisions yourself, preferably not even asking Julia for advice. Okay?" "Yes, sir." I helped Julia make our bagged lunch, and we were soon on our way to my home to get my sisters. My first day driving to school! It felt good, even if the car wasn't really mine. ^ On the drive to my home, Julia said, "I'm so happy that your sleep and studying are so amazing. That's going to be a huge help to you in your life. I hope it doesn't get too boring or mentally tiring for you." "Based on the one night at your house, I enjoy doing the new Math courses. They weren't boring or tiring. The schoolwork reviewing that I've been doing at home is boring, but new math material is fun. I think I'll be fine so long as that remains the case, which it should. I'll let you know if I find I'm getting bored and we can try to think of a solution." "Good. I was thinking about your speeches today. It's likely I'll get some hassling before first class, so you can use that as a reason if you like, but I think all you really need to do is at the start of each class just stand up and ask the teacher for permission to speak, and then just give your speech. I don't think you need to worry much about having a pretext. If you appear upset over Carol and me being hassled, then people will assume we have been, which is very believable." "I'm sure you will be hassled, but I agree the speech doesn't need it. Later in the day when most of your grade should have heard it, it might be more difficult to have a natural reason to give it yet again." "Yeah, I was going to mention that point too. Before each speech you could ask for show of hands for who have already heard it. Just look at the girls because you can trust them to put their hands up if they've heard it, and it's only them we care about anyway. If more than about half already have, you can probably skip giving it in that class. We don't need 100% coverage. You'll probably only have to say it a couple of times in my classes, and maybe a couple of times in yours when they're different." "I agree with all of that. I probably won't ask for a show of hands in the first class though. From what you said about yesterday, the idiots will still be behaving like idiots." When we arrived at my place, I pulled up and got out in order to go inside to talk with the family, but the family came out to us. Carol was looking particularly nice, which reminded me that she was nervous about meeting Julia friends, so I said, "Carol, you're looking particularly lovely today. I like that dress on you." I'd liked every dress she'd bought with Julia so far, which was a compliment to both Julia's shopping ability and Carol's looks. Despite my knowing virtually nothing about females' clothing issues, Carol appreciated my reassurance. I held the door open, saying, "Ladies." Carol said, "Thank you, driver. You're more polite and much more handsome than our last driver. I think we'll get along well." "I think so too, ma'am." Mom had to ask more questions to make sure that I really was all right, "Did you have any problem during the late night drive?", "Do you feel tired?", "Here's your lunch?" The day turned into a great day because Vanessa had gotten Julia to make me a lunch too, so I now had two of them! Mom's questioning was going to get old if she did it every morning, as well as requiring me to call her every 7:30 too. I pointed out the delightful mistake with the doubled-up lunches, and politely suggested to mom that calling her at 7:30 every morning might disrupt her morning routines unnecessarily, so hopefully she'll soon feel comfortable with the Williams' ability to look after me in the mornings. We eventually made our escape, followed by Mom calling, "Drive carefully!" I appreciated Mom's making another lunch for me though. When we were rolling, Carol said, "I missed you at breakfast." With an echo from Donna. "It's not the same without you." I'd missed them too. We discussed that a bit, and decided that about half the time Julia and I would leave the Williams' home early to have breakfast at the Andersons'. When we'd finished discussing our morning breakfasting procedures, I announced, "Prof asked me to practice my decision-making by picking a project. It has to involve making decisions, obviously, and also other people and be something that I'd enjoy. I picked the group of girls that Donna introduced to me the other day, plus any others that Donna wants to add to that group. I've invented a nickname for them. From now on I'm going to call them 'Donna's Ducklings' because ducklings are cute little fluffy things that go around in a group and make sweet little sounds. Donna's Ducklings are just like that." All the girls thought that was a fun nickname. Donna was especially happy that I'd chosen to do something with her and her group, when I could have played with "older and more beautiful girls." I didn't tell her that I didn't want to 'play' with Julia's or Carol's friends, in case my doing so reflected badly on either of my wives, whereas Donna's Ducklings were so young that I didn't take them seriously. We chatted about other subjects until we got to school. I parked in the students' area and Donna took off at her usual pace. I told the remaining girls that I had to go to the office to get permission to bring the car to school. Julia said she'd come with me, and Carol said she'd go to her school. Carol gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then gave Julia a full-on, 15-second, mouth-to-mouth kiss. There weren't a lot of other students around, but those males that were lucky enough to see loudly expressed their approval in the time-honored fashion of loud cheers, wolf-whistles and catcalls. I'd forgotten about Carol's coming out, but it sure didn't take me long to get reminded! Once I got over the surprise of their kiss, I was confused about how to react. Look on with interest because it was so hot? Look away because it was so embarrassing? Or something else? I remembered my 'official stance', as per my speech. So I looked on benevolently, but not fixedly, making sure I stayed soft. When Carol ended her kiss I said, "I'd forgotten about your coming out. That was a good reminder though." Julia said, "I'll say. Carol's a very enthusiastic kisser." "I missed my morning kiss with Mark so I needed to make up. I better go to class. See you at lunch." Carol headed off in one direction, while Julia and I went toward the office. Carol was quickly intercepted by a couple of guys who wanted to talk with her about something or other. I was too far away to hear, but it must have been of no interest to Carol because she got rid of them quickly. To my relief because I'd been worried about them being too persistent, as guys have been known to be. Julia and I were going in the same general direction as several other people, and some of the males caught up to us. I didn't know any of them, so most were presumably seniors or maybe some 11th graders I hadn't met or remembered. They gushed the usual male comments: "That was HOT!" | "What was that all about?" | etc. I figured that we'd be meeting these people regularly as we parked near each other at the same time every day so I might as well explain properly. I also had a sudden thought that if the two girls kissed like that regularly, they were bound to be filmed by someone with a better cellphone than mine. I made a mental note to talk with Julia about that asap. I gave the guys around us a capsule explanation, "The other girl's my sister. She's a lesbian and has hit it off with my girlfriend. It's embarrassing but they're happy." I had to deal with all the usual questions, my usual answer being, "She's my SISTER!" And if the guy needed reinforcement, "You need to get counseling." No one was going into the office with us, so they peeled off. I had a chance to ask Julia, "Sooner or later some guy is going to film you two doing that. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are waiting with cameras poised tomorrow morning, just on the chance. It could end up going around the school, or even end up on the internet. How would you feel about that?" "Hmm. I'd rather they didn't, but it's impossible to stop them. We'd have to stop doing kissing to avoid it. I'll talk with Carol but I don't think she'll want to stop it. She came out so people could see us, so hiding it from them makes no sense. The video going around school would probably please her. Having it go on the internet so random perv's all over the world can see us would be annoying, but I imagine there are plenty of other videos of girls kissing on the internet, so ours shouldn't be a big deal. That's right, isn't it?" #4: #3: #4: #3: #4: #2: <"Blow off" to avoid "burn out" you mean?> #4: I answered Julia's interesting question with, "Umm, I guess so. We've only got dial-up at home so I don't really know. You're probably right though. I'll let you two decide what you want to do. 'Your responsibility', and all that." Julia said, "You'll be in the videos too, so make sure you're not ogling Carol. I'm sure that'll be Carol's only concern too. She believes you're the only important part of her life." I left it at that and we went into the office. The paperwork was simple, except that I didn't know the car's plate number. Luckily Julia did, and I memorized it to avoid looking like a dummy again the next time it came up. There wasn't any comment about not being allowed to drive it here today, I liked to think that was because the office ladies thought I was important. I figured I didn't need to inform the Principal that we no longer needed the school's car to drive us back and forth. Mr. Moore would tell him, unless Mr. Moore REALLY hated the after-school meetings, in which case there was even more reason for me to keep quiet. The office gave me a parking permit, which we went back to the car to install. We both had what we needed for our joint first class, so we headed to it. As we arrived outside the class we were treated to many of the predicted infantile comments, which we ignored. When some of the guys gathered around and became too annoying, even after being asked to stop, I took Julia for a little walk to kill time until the start of class. There was no point in our having to put up with their crap. While walking around I wondered how I would've reacted had I not merged and some other guy in my class had his sister and girlfriend hit it off. I probably would've been idiotic, but I wouldn't have been so annoyingly in their face about it, as that would've been far too aggressive for me. Not that my theoretically similar behavior was going to change my outspoken position today. We timed our return neatly and entered the classroom just before class was due to start. Similar to the class I'd had just after lunch yesterday, I asked Mrs. Osborne, the teacher, for permission to address the class. Permission was granted and I was able to repeat my speech. It was a different experience in some respects. I let Julia sit in her chair rather than stand by me and I changed the beginning quite a lot, mentioning that I was repeating a speech I'd had to make yesterday, and was doing so because of the ongoing troubles the girls were experiencing, "including those made a few minutes before class, when Julia and I were forced to leave and stay away until Mrs. Osborne arrived." We weren't really "forced' to leave, but by making it sound worse, it better justified my repeating the speech. The body of the speech was much the same, although I removed my threats of violence as they wouldn't have played well in a planned speech. Otherwise I repeated my story about Carol's coming out of her depression, falling in love with Julia, Julia's returning Carol's love, my supporting both of them. I gave the same list of "idiot" comments, made some very firm statements about the depth of my commitment to my sister's and Julia's relationship and happiness, and ended with asking for the class's help in stamping out any idiot rumors they overheard. The speech took about the same time as the first one. It was just as effective, although Julia cried a lot less. I gave her my handkerchief in a simple manner because I felt a flourish would have looked way too pretentious this time. I'm not sure why; it just seemed too contrived in a deliberate repeat of the speech. I was pleased to see that many of the other girls needed hankies too. After I'd finished, Mrs. Osborne made a couple of nice comments about my speech, and she also asked, "What sort of comments forced you and Julia away from the classroom before class?" I thought it was marvelous to be able to repeat the most vulgar comments because they contrasted HORRENDOUSLY with the very loving atmosphere that I'd created with my speech. I also thought it might be a good idea to identify the individuals who made them, as that'd embarrass them and others away from doing the same. There's good reason why embarrassment is one of the teachers' favorite control techniques. I enjoyed saying, "Michael demanded to know what it was like to fuck my sister. He asked me that several times. Dylan wanted to know whether the two girls' cunts tasted the same. Blake kept asking what it was like fucking two girls at once and told me to call him next time so he could join in." I was really enjoying watching each of the boys BLANCH as they were singled out. It hit them HARD. I had plenty of ammunition too, as the crowd that had gathered around us before class had gotten themselves quite worked up. "Dale kept complaining that it was unfair that I had two sluts and told me I should share them with him. Jordon kept telling Julia he had a big cock and she'd have a much better time with him..." Dana, one of the 'friendliest' girls in my grade, called out, "No she wouldn't. He's pathetic, trust me on that." Most of the class burst out laughing, Jordon being a notable exception. The guys that I'd already named weren't laughing either, nor were a few more guys who were clearly expecting to be named shortly, but the rest of the class were enjoying themselves. Mrs. Osborne asked me, "Are there any more, Mark?" I thought the interruption had ruined the great contrast I'd had going, and I'd made my point, so I decided to end it. I answered, "There were, but those guys were probably the most offensive." There were suddenly some very relieved looking guys in the room. She asked, "Julia, can you confirm Mark's quotes?" "I think so, yes. I was trying not to listen, but I heard most of that." Nia, one of the class's other girls said, "I can confirm it. Chris and I were standing nearby and we heard everything." Chris (Nia's long-time boyfriend, sitting next to her in class), backed Nia up, "Yes. Everything Egg said is true, and there was a lot more as well, including a lot of talk before Julia and Egg arrived." Several other girls backed up Chris, and even a couple of guys did so too. Mrs. Osborne demanded, "Right you five," by her angry tone of voice clearly meaning the culprits I'd quoted, "gather up your stuff. I'm taking you to see the Principal. You'll have to come too, Mark and Julia. Sorry, but you're going to have to repeat your quotes." The five guys started protesting and were quickly told to "Shut it! There's a room full of witnesses. Save your breath to try to convince the Principal that obscene sexual harassment and bullying is acceptable." I protested, "Umm. This has gone much further that I intended. I just wanted to embarrass them so they wouldn't do it again. Can't we just warn them not to do it again, or something?" "No, Mark. This school now has a zero tolerance policy on bullying. Zero! You've all been made well aware of that, including these five. Bullying and sexual harassment means this gets reported. There's another reason too." Turning to one of the five, Mrs. Osborne asked, "Michael, do you have any sisters?" I clearly reluctant Michael paused, before admitting, "Yes, Mrs. Osborne." She told the class, "The rest of the guys in this class might want to think about what Michael and his family will be going through over the next few weeks, while the authorities investigate whether any of his sisters have been molested by him, or are in danger of it." It didn't take Michael long to think about it. "Oh No! I never did anything, I swear! I would never..." "Save your breath, Michael. I'm legally required to report my suspicions and then it's out of my hands. I hope for your and your sisters' sakes that you're innocent of that, and guilty only of the terminal stupidity required to hassle the guy that brought zero tolerance to this school. Speaking of 'innocence', I saw by the looks on their faces that there were three or four more boys that were saved from being exampled only because of Dana's low opinion of Jordon. Those boys should start worrying now." Seeing that we were all ready to go, Mrs. Osborne appointed Nia to look after the class, told them what to work on, and ordered, "Lead off you five. You know where you're going." I had a feeling not much classwork would be done after we left. It didn't take long for the facts to be presented to the high-school's deputy principal (Mr. Morrison, the 2IC - second in command - for the high school), and the boys didn't contest them knowing that "there was a room full of witnesses," to quote a somewhat exaggerating Mrs. Osborne. Once the DP (deputy principal) understood the horror of the situation - judging by Mrs. Osborne's and his reactions - he called the Principal, telling him, "There's been another incident involving Mark Anderson," making it sound like it was all my fault. I'll admit I had a hand in getting Julia and Carol together, but I could hardly be blamed for the five guys getting so excited that they couldn't control themselves. ALL guys are like that! Carol and Julia's cafeteria exhibition emerged from the subsequent discussion. The P and DP were not pleased to hear about it, and the Principal ordered Julia to "cool her public displays of affection." He made no mention of the gender issue in his order. I mentally - and sarcastically - wished him good luck on getting Carol to cool her PDAs! He also asked us if there were any more boys we wish to complain about. Julia and I both insisted there weren't. The facts having been determined, Mrs. Osborne, Julia and I returned to our class, leaving the five guys to their fate. [After being read the riot act, the five testosterone victims were suspended for the rest of the day and the next, in accordance with the school's policy for a first offense. They were held in the office until they were picked up by a parent, who had their son's offense and the school's intolerance of it clearly explained to them. Mrs. Osborne's suspicions caused Michael a great deal more difficulty. His sole sister, 14-years old and also attending this school, stuck to her statement through several interviews that Michael's attention to her had started making her feel uncomfortable, but no more than that. Needless to say, Michael was warned off and, I imagine, treated with suspicion within his family thereafter. I have no idea whether my causing Mrs. Osborne's suspicion averted a tragedy or caused major family disruption merely to avert a minor irritant. I imagine many young girls are made "uncomfortable" by their brothers with nothing worse ever happening, so that feeling wasn't a significant indicator of what could've happened.] After we arrived back at class, and Mrs. Osborne settled everyone down, she said, "Let's try to get just a little of today's lesson done, shall we?" Nia interrupted, saying, "Mrs. Osborne, while you were away we talked about it, and the class has asked me to say a few words. May I please?" "Try to be brief please, Nia. We've lost most of the period as it is." Nia said, "I'll take a risk, and say that I think it would have been worth missing ALL of your class to hear Mark's speech. No insult intended - you know I like your class - but most of us agree that Mark's speech was the most wonderful thing we've heard in months, or even years." Many of the other girls called out their agreement. Nia continued, "The class would like me to thank you very much for your lovely and loving speech, Mark, and would like to apologize to you and Julia for standing by silently while the behavior of some of its members was reprehensible. We won't make that mistake again. On a more personal note," Nia stepped behind her boyfriend Chris's seat, and theatrically inserted an index finger into each of his ears, "give me a call if you ever need someone to have your babies." Several other girls laughingly made the same offer. One girl yelling out, "Nia was still talking for the class." "Not for me she wasn't," called one of the guys. The hilarity took a while to settle. Mrs. Osborne said, "I will add my congratulations for a very nice speech too. Mark's, I mean. Nia's speech lost points when she said she wouldn't mind missing all of my class. We've only got a few minutes left, so I'm going to summarize what I'd been intending to cover, and I'll assign you homework to cover it." "It was worth it," called out another girl. "I think we're all agreed on that by now, thank you," said Mrs. Osborne. "Please, ma'am, what's going to happen to us?" Asked one of the guys who owed his continued presence in the class to Jordon's lack of sexual prowess. The atmosphere of the class chilled and quieted immediately. Mrs. Osborne answered, "Ask me again after class," and immediately started into her much abbreviated lesson. She left the remaining guilty parties sweating for while, which was much less of a punishment than they could've got. Several times during the rest of the period I looked around the class. I'd not seen more than a few seconds of the result of my first speech, which Julia had made a BIG deal about when she'd commented on it to me, so I was curious about the outcome of this one. Many times I met girl's eyes, and they smiled at me. I also saw them smile at Julia many times. Not once did any girl make any sort of flirtatious, "I'm available" signal to me. Their "I'll have your babies" statements were clearly a strong form of praise rather than an offer of the prerequisite activity. Julia had used the same expression after my first speech to describe its effect on the girls in the class, and I had taken it fairly literally then. Now I realized that it was just something girls said at such times. My speech had inspired rather than aroused them. As soon as the class ended, Julia and I were swamped with girls. Julia receiving many variations on, "You're so lucky", "I wish I was you", "I'm so happy for you.", "Does Mark have a brother?", etc. The last comment was one Julia responded to. She said, "Sorry, no brother. Just two younger sisters, one of whom is already mine. I've got TWO of the family all to my own! I'm so lucky." That changed the subject to Carol, giving Julia an opportunity to repeat, "Carol's an absolute sweetie. She's even more giving and selfless than Mark, if you can believe that! His family loves each other very much and it's no wonder they're such wonderful people. I'll introduce Carol to any of you that want, but I might wait few days first, to let this mess die down." Several of the girls showed positive enthusiasm for meeting Carol. I didn't detect any sexual content at all, just pure, good-natured, supportive interest. I couldn't help contrasting it with how males would have responded. Julia had been outed as having a sexual relationship with another girl, and had then offered to introduce her partner, a lesbian, to the other girls. All these other girls were gathered around Julia, hugging her, patting her shoulders, and otherwise being very friendly, interested and supportive. If a male had just been outed as having a sexual affair with another guy, and had then offered to introduce his homosexual lover to the class's guys, he'd have been completely shunned in public then beaten up in private. Females live in a different world than us guys, and sometimes it's a far better world. Chris, hugging Nia, also came and shook my hand. "Good speech, man. You're normally quiet in class so that was a nice surprise. Though I still can't work out why Nia wants you to give her rabies, haha." He was theatrically banging the side of his head when he said "rabies", as if to fix his hearing. It was obvious he'd heard Nia's comment clearly, as she'd known he would with her ineffectual 'attempt' to block his ears. They both seemed relaxed and happy about it and with no jealousy, so they obviously had a good relationship. I was standing next to Julia, so I had a front row seat for all the feminine gushing directed at her by the girls around us. The ones talking to me (more accurately, "at me", as they mostly weren't waiting for answers) were also saying how lucky Julia was, and such like. After hearing "Julia is so lucky" for the umpteenth time, I loudly said, "Sorry girls, but everyone keeps saying 'Julia is so lucky'. I realize you're saying that because you liked my speech, but I never would've said what I did if I wasn't inspired by Julia and how loving she's been to Carol and me. It's Carol and me who are lucky to have Julia as our girlfriend, so you should ALL be telling me how lucky I am, and Julia should be listening with embarrassment the way I have been." The girls reacted to my heartfelt statement by immediately re-telling Julia how lucky she was. It wasn't exactly the result I'd been after. Julia agreed, "I know, I know. The amazing thing is that Mark really does believe what he just said. Isn't he wonderful?" All the girls agreed that I was wonderful, and that Julia was very lucky. I heard Julia say, "Can you believe that I'm the first girlfriend he's ever had? No other girls trained him for me; I got him this way. Isn't that incredible?" Apparently it was. One of the girls said, "I'm guessing that you're changing him in one way though." "How's that?" Asked Julia. "The clothes Mark's wearing now weren't picked by whoever normally buys his clothes, that's for sure!" There was far too much agreement from all the other girls around us. I was cheered up only by, when several of them denigrated my clothing sense, they ended with something like, "just like almost every other guy." It was clearly the Y-chromosome's fault, rather than mine. Julia, being my ever-loyal defender, said, "I know, I know. It's a crime. I'm taking him on a major shopping expedition on Saturday, and then we're going to have a big bonfire for his old clothes." Then someone said something that got Julia started talking about the Annette Neumeyer Incident. We didn't have time for a minute-by-minute recap of our entire relationship, since before it even started, so I said, "Sorry Julia, but we don't have time to discuss everything. We have to get to our next classes." I wasn't in the same class as Julia next period, so the idea was that I'd take her to her next class, repeat my speech. I'd modify it to avoid landing any more guys in trouble, as going back to the Principal's office again so soon would be VERY weird. Then I'd go to my class and repeat the speech there. Julia immediately agreed, and we quickly left this classroom. Several guys from the class had been hanging around, and they apologized to Julia and me on our way out. We didn't have time to talk with those guys properly, but I did the best I could to acknowledge and thank them. We had to hurry to our lockers to grab what we needed. In my locker was an envelope with note stapled to the outside of it. I had a quick look at the note, but saw it was more of a letter than a note, so it was too much to read now. I looked at the envelope, and the outside of it had, in large handwriting, "PLEASE read the note before opening." I dropped it into my bag as I didn't have time now. I realized that it was probably from Miss WhatsHerName, from my 11th grade class the previous Monday. If it was hers, then she hadn't forgotten after all. ------- Part 5: Accumulating Second-Tier Girlfriends ------- Chapter 81: Ava West's Letter Wednesday, April 20, 2005 (Continued) When Julia and I approached her classroom, running a little late, her teacher and the Principal were standing outside. The Principal wasn't often seen in the halls, so I suspected this was not a coincidence. He asked me, "Mr. Anderson, aren't you supposed to be in B12 now?" (Building B, room 12). "Um, yes sir. I'm just walking Julia to class to keep her safe." "That's what I'm doing here. Get to your class now, Mr. Morrison is waiting for you there." It was impossible to argue with a direct instruction like that. I wasn't going to be able to make a speech in her class this period. Just before I left I said to Julia, "See you after class." Mr. Morrison was, indeed, waiting for me outside of my class. I got my explanation in first, "I walked Julia to her class to keep her safe. Sorry I'm late." "Understandable. After you," indicating the door. It was closed as class was already in progress, so I opened it and we went in. I went to my seat and he to the front of the class. Mr. Morrison immediately addressed the class, starting with a description of the trouble Julia and I had suffered at the start of Mrs. Osborne's class. He recited, in censored terms, most of the comments the culprits had made, which earned him some sniggers from a few of the guys in class. I saw him mentally note who they were and smile to himself, which was opposite to the reaction I'd expect. He said that five of the culprits had been taken to the Principal's office and then he listed the agencies that had been called as a result. I was shocked, and the rest of the class was even more so. Not only the police, which I'd guessed might be involved in investigating Michael and his sister's family situation, but two child welfare organizations, plus the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education (no doubt only because I was involved, and maybe to get the jump on my mom, haha). Statements such as, "the police will be interviewing several people, and charges may be filed as a result," and, "both the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education have been informed of the names of all the culprits and will be following up with the families of all concerned," sure got the attention of the class. All five students have been suspended until Friday, by which time we will decide whether any expulsions are necessary. This school has a zero tolerance policy. Do you understand what 'Zero' means? You!" He said, pointing to one of the sniggerers that he'd noted before. "What does zero mean?" "Umm, 'None', sir." "So if you were to sexually harass another student by making one of the statements that I described earlier, how much tolerance would I show you?" "Ahh, none, sir." "Correct. And if you were to laugh, snigger or otherwise show approval for another student's committing a sexual harassment, how much tolerance would I show you?" Nervously, "None?" "Exactly. Meaning no tolerance whatsoever. What's your name?" Mr. Morrison pulled out a notebook and pen, and recorded the sniggerer's name. He pointed out each of the others, extracted and recorded their names. "The four of you are to tell your parents that I will be phoning them tonight to discuss your unacceptable attitude to sexual harassment. I will also be writing letters to your parents informing them that you have received your first formal warning for an unacceptable attitude to sexual harassment. If any of you are involved in another such incident, then you will have the book thrown at you. I am perfectly willing to suspend any student for two months, which will render you unable to take your exams, and you'll have to repeat the year. Got that?" The class definitely got that. "You four are particularly at risk of that because you've already received your first warning. If any of your names comes up again I will recommend to the Principal that you get suspended until after the exams. Got that?" Oh yes, they got it. "If you learn nothing else from school today, learn this: what you do in school can affect your entire life. There are several ex-students of this school who are about to go on trial for assault because they stupidly didn't believe assault was a crime just because the people involved were schoolchildren. That little piece of stupidity has ruined their entire lives. The police are already investigating as a result of the incident outside Mrs. Osborne's class, and if the DA decides that a crime has occurred then he will prosecute the offender or offenders. If any more such incidents occur in the school, and we think there's any chance at all that a crime might have been committed, then we will call the police. Because how much tolerance do we have? Come on! How much tolerance?" "Zero," several of the class recited. "For goodness sake, grow up, control your imaginations, and stop behaving like stupid little boys. If there's another incident like the last one involving Mark Anderson, his family, girlfriend, or anyone else remotely connected to him, then you will be risking everything you have, right up to your life in jail. Don't for a split second think we're exaggerating. We've already called the police today, as we will for any future incidents. WE WILL CALL THE POLICE! Have you got that?" Mr. Morrison left while various shell-shocked class members were still indicating that they got it. Wow! Talk about massive overkill. Even our teacher was stunned. It appeared I wasn't going to be making my speech in this class either! I would MUCH rather have made my speech than have the class listen to Mr. Morrison's rant. Mine was nearly all 'carrot', while Mr. Morrison's had been entirely 'stick'. Mine created loving feelings even among some of the guys, while his created fear. My speech, I had already seen, will lead to Julia, Carol and me having more friends; Mr. Morrison's speech will lead to people fearing me so much no one will come near me. After Prof's explaining the Principal's behavior over Dipstick, I guessed the only thing that mattered to the school was reducing the number of negative events. If they could get no student to ever talk with any other student, that'd make the school's record blemish free. No one was going to fire the Principal because he protected me so well that no one was willing to talk with me. I even thought, again because of Prof's comments, that maybe the Principal was deliberately trying to isolate me from friendships so I'd transfer at my own choice. If that was the case, it was very Machiavellian. [For those readers inexplicably unfamiliar with early sixteenth century Florentine political history, "Machiavellian" can be read as "sneaky".] Teach said, "I knew Mr. Morrison wanted to talk with the class, but I did not know what about. That took me by surprise as much as it did you. I guess our Principal has reached the end of his rope when it comes to incidents involving Mark..." #1: #4: #3: I stood up declaring, "I HATED that crap," to get the class on my side right away. "That was a truly appalling speech. I know I walked into the room with Mr. Morrison, but only because he was waiting outside for me. I hope some of you saw him there earlier because I do not want to be associated in any way at all with that hateful, fearful speech. What I find galling is that the school's response to the incident before Mrs. Osborne's class is to create fear rather than to build on the love that started it all." Not exactly a good bridge, but it let me start my speech. "If Mr. Morrison hadn't come in here just before, I was going to ask for you all to help me protect two girls I love. The five culprits Mr. Morrison referred to got overly excited because they heard about my girlfriend Julia and my sister Carol..." I proceeded to give my speech. I made no reference to 'stomping' on anyone, nor gave any examples of anything bad that anyone in this class had said. I was going to treat them ALL as my friends, to try to recover some of the goodwill Mr. Morrison undoubtedly lost me. I touched on all the good points. I still used the "idiot" examples, such as guys asking for my phone number so they could call to ask my 13-year old lesbian sister for a date. Those were humorous and attacked no one in this class, so they were safe to use. I should mention that there were a few students in this class who had already heard my speech, either the first one yesterday, or second one in Mrs. Osborne's class, but they were in the minority. I mentioned that a few of them had heard it before during this speech, to be up-front about having made it before. When I got to the end of my speech, the atmosphere in the class was far, far better. There were even a few wet eyes. I'd had a number of thoughts while I was making my speech. The speech was largely automatic by now and having several minds allowed additional thoughts to occur easily. After the end of the speech, I carried on with, "While I was telling you about my love for Julia and Carol, I had some more thoughts about Mr. Morrison's speech that will help remove the fear he created. First, he several times mentioned the police being called. The police were ONLY called because one of the guys who hassled me went on about having sex with a sister so many times that he made Mrs. Osborne suspicious that he wanted to have sex with HIS sister. When a teacher has reason to suspect something like that she's required by law to report it, and the police are required to investigate. I'm pretty sure the police are NOT investigating anything that was said to me. Mr. Morrison chose his words very carefully to give that impression, but he was deceiving you all to make you more fearful of me." One of the guys in this class who had also been in Mrs. Osborne's class said, "That's right! I was there. The police wouldn't waste their time investigating a bunch of boys going on about sex. There aren't enough cops in the country to investigate every time that happens." Quite a few of the class laughed at that, especially the guys, which was good to see because it'd been the guys who'd been the hardest hit by Mr. Morrison's speech and least helped by my "Loving Speech." "My second point is that, I did not complain to the Principal about those guys. It was Mrs. Osborne who took them there. I asked her not to do it, but just to warn them, but she insisted." The students who'd been there called out their confirmation of that. "Third, and this is addressed to all of you, but particularly at the four poor guys that Mr. Morrison singled out. If any of you come up to me and say "Boo!" I'm not going to go running to complain to Mr. Morrison. If you come up to me and ask for my sister's phone number, I'll just tell you to look 'lesbian' up in the dictionary. I'll even spell it for you if you're having trouble. If any of you make offensive comments three or four times and won't stop even if I repeatedly ask you to, then I'll REMIND you about Mr. Morrison. If you keep being offensive THEN I'll probably complain to him, but by then you've proved yourself so stupid you should be put out of your misery. In other words, I'm not your enemy. You can treat me like any other guy. You can even talk about sex with me if you want. Personally I find it a depressing topic because my girlfriend is off with my sister half the time, so I've only got half a girlfriend." One of the girls in the class quipped, "That's half more than most of these guys, haha." "Until three weeks ago that included me too." I paused for effect, then added, "I just had an idea. Some days Carol comes up from middle school to have lunch with Julia and me. I'll check our schedules and let you guys -girls included too - come and be introduced to her. We could line all the guys up like an orchestra, and I can stand out front like a conductor. On the count of three you can all yell out 'Can I have your phone number, Carol?' And she can yell back, 'I'm a lesbian, dummy, look it up in a dictionary, ' and then you can wander off and tell your friends that you 'Made a pass at a real live lesbian but she shot you down in flames.' No making passes at my girlfriend though, I don't want to drop down to a third share!" Another girl said, "I can't imagine that any guy could lure Julia away from you, Egg." "Yeah, but a couple of weeks ago I could even less imagine any girl could lure Julia away, and look how that worked out! My parents always told me to share with my sisters, but Carol's given that a whole new meaning." Mission accomplished. The class atmosphere was better than fine "I'll be your girlfriend, Egg!" "Me too!" "Me too! Pick me!" The teacher stood up and said, "I think now is a good point to bring that discussion to an end. An interesting but entirely unproductive class so far. We need to buckle down now." "I'm sorry, sir. Can I make three very quick statements please? Very quick." "Go for it, Mark." "One: Thank you ladies, but even half a Julia is a whole lot of wonderful for me. Two: Sir, I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell Mr. Morrison or the Principal about our talk after he left. I'd rather they not think they need to come back to reinforce their message of fear. I prefer my message of love." Teach agreed, "I didn't like Mr. Morrison's approach either. I'm prepared to do as you ask, but I will ask him privately why he was so aggressive. If he has a good reason I might have to reconsider." "Fair enough, thanks. My last point is can I be excused from class? I think the Principal probably made the same speech in Julia's class and she's probably quite upset. I'd like to go check on her." "You know you're allowed to come and go from class as you wish and I would like to get SOME teaching done." I hadn't unpacked my bag since I'd arrived with Mr. Morrison, so it took me only a moment to head for the door. During my exit, one of the guys yelled out in fun, "What's your sister's phone number, Egg?" The whole class laughingly yelled, "She's a lesbian, dummy," as the door closed behind me. I hadn't left to check on Julia, but on her whole class. If the Principal had done as I expected, I wanted to try to reproduce the feat I'd just accomplished in my class. The moment Julia's class saw me when I stuck my head in their door, it was obvious the Principal had delivered the same speech. It had affected everyone badly, Julia most of all. This wasn't one of my classes, obviously, and I didn't know the teacher. I wasn't going to be allowed to speak for more than a few seconds unless I could sell her [the teacher] on my continued presence, so I wasn't subtle, "Mr. Morrison just delivered the most appalling, over-the-top, fear-loaded speech that I've ever heard to my class. I see the Principal did the same here. I'd like to say a few words about love, if that's okay with you, ma'am." Ma'am was a ma'am, and therefore would like to hear about love (I hoped. Didn't all females?). If she said "No, go away", at least I had told the class that I disapproved of the speech. Linda, Julia's friend that I'd been introduced to a few days ago, asked me, "Are you going to make the speech that I've been hearing about, Egg?" I didn't really want to answer, in large part because it was quite a long speech, and I didn't want the teacher to suspect that my "say a few words" would take a fair while. I answered, "Part of it, yes." Linda said to the teacher, "I've heard people talking about it, ma'am. It's supposed to be a VERY good speech." There were several other students (female and male) who had already heard it, and they immediately spoke up, "It's a fantastic speech" | "I bawled my eyes out," (that from one of the females) | "Egg speaks very well." | "I want to hear it again." The teacher said, "Come in, Mark." She knew who I was, even if I didn't know her. "Make it quick please, we've lost a lot of time already." I didn't need to respond to that, so started my new speech while I was still walking to Julia's chair, "My apologies to those of you who've heard any of this before, and thank you for your support just now. To save time I will assume the Principal said much the same as Mr. Morrison did. If my speech doesn't make sense because they were different, someone correct me please. The Principal's speech was all about fear, mine is about love..." And so it started. As I'd told the teacher, I did go fast, but only because there wasn't much time left in the period. That I was going to use up nearly all her remaining class time wasn't something I was going to explain to the teacher in advance though. While I was standing behind Julia, holding her shoulders and describing her love for Carol, I could see that my speech was having a much stronger effect on this class than the same speech had achieved in my class. I couldn't put my finger on the reason why, but it was a very different dynamic, as clearly indicated by the number of girls who developed leaking eyes. I could've made a lighthearted moment out of performing a flourish to a crying Julia, but she already had my hanky from Mrs. Osborne's class. She soon had it in use too. She was mirrored by several other girls, and even ma'am was starting to touch the corners of her eyes too. I just did the nice parts of my original speech, again including the "idiot" parts as comic relief. At the end of it there was much blubbering. Linda was especially weepy, sobbing, "I'm so glad I got to hear that," and the inevitable, "You're so lucky, Julia." Teach was quite strongly affected too. I guess the softer subjects are taught by softer teachers. After a small pause I did my little demolition job on the Principal's speech, "Did he keep threatening to call the police? Yes? That's just because one guy's sister might be in trouble..." I explained why and called on some of the students who'd been in Mrs. Osborne's class to confirm my points, and they did, same as in my class. I finished the same way, with me telling the class that I'd invite them to share a lunchtime with us, ostensibly to meet Carol (in reality to show them that we're friendly and approachable, that we trusted them and they should trust us back, so there's no need to fear and shun us). I conjured up the image of a chorus of guys yelling, "Can I have your phone number, Carol?", and her yelling back "I'm a lesbian, dummy, look it up in a dictionary." I added a new joke, "I'm only suggesting all the guys do that because I believe that it's one of the lesbian rules that they have to shoot a certain number of guys down in flames. I'm just trying to arrange it so my newly outed sister gets a REALLY good start on achieving her quota." There'd been some other differences along the way. For example, the Principal hadn't tried to trick any sniggerers into sniggering, so the parts of Mr. Morrison's speech that attacked his sniggerers were missing from the Principal's. That affected my speech a little, but none of those differences made any real difference, if that makes sense. The final result was considerably more successful than at my class. Maybe having Julia with me and a teacher that got caught up in it helped. Amid the general hilarity and goodwill that broke out after I'd finished, there were some fun comments. The teacher told Julia, "Go on, give him a kiss, we all know you want to." Julia's lips were all over mine long before her teacher finished her sentence. I'd never been told to do that in class before (never mind that I'd had no one to do it with until three weeks ago). Julia's teacher was pretty cool, especially for a teacher as most of them have a vanishingly low level of cool, if any at all. I spent the rest of the 'lesson' sitting in Julia's chair, with her cuddled on my lap. One of the GIRLS in the class loudly asked, "Egg, can I," (with her "I" firmly stressed) "have your sister's phone number please? With Julia's approval, of course." Several people turned to her in surprise, and she answered, "No, I'm not a lesbian, but I'm not a dummy either. If Carol is as nice and loving as Egg, then I might consider taking it up. I'd like to meet her, with Julia's permission." Julia said, "You don't need my permission, I'm not possessive of Carol. Or Mark either, come to that." Several of the girls took GREAT notice of the tack-on. "You're not?" "No. I wouldn't try to prevent either of them doing what they wanted. They stay with me because of the strength of our relationships." "Oh." Those several girls gave up their sudden interests. They'd just heard my speech, and the strength of my relationship with Julia was in no doubt. Julia answered the original query, "You should ask Carol for her phone number directly. Like Mark said, we'll arrange a lunch with her sometime soon, maybe early next week, and you can ask her yourself. I'll make sure you sit near her and that you have a chance to talk together." "Thanks." "No problem. I'm sure she'll appreciate your interest, but she's just fallen in love for the first time so I wouldn't get your hopes up." In the brief silence that followed that, I had a chance to ask the teacher not to tell the Principal that I'd come to class and done what I had. I repeated my, "I don't want him to think he has to come back here and reinforce his threats." You could see everybody in the class draw back in reaction to that. The teacher said, "Not much chance of that. On second thought, maybe I should invite him back so you have to return to make another speech afterward, haha." After her little joke had run its course, the teacher said, "Oh my, is that the time? Time flies when you're having fun. In the thirty seconds we have left..." After the bell rang, all the girls gathered around us to tell Julia how lucky she was. I listened to that for the 200th through to the 250th times. I remembered the last time I'd tried to claim that I was the lucky one ("because Julia inspires me"), and it'd just made the girls redouble their same statements. Knowing that Julia wasn't going to get jealous of the likely replies I'd get, I loudly said, "I agree. Julia is VERY lucky. She's got a boyfriend AND a girlfriend. TWO friends. I've only got HALF a girlfriend. Half of a very small girlfriend, at that. And of all the girls in Corvallis that Julia could have chosen to get sexy with, she chooses the ONE girl I can't enjoy seeing her with: my sister! How TERRIBLY unlucky am I?" "You can get lucky with me, Egg!" "Me too! Whenever you want." Several girls echoed similar offers, although most weren't as overt as the quote immediately above. Julia's sitting on my lap probably had an inhibiting effect. Julia's friend Linda said, "I bet Egg's going to get lucky with Julia tonight." Julia said, "That's where you are totally wrong, Linda. Those are the times that I get lucky. Mark is very, VERY good." Uh oh, a maximum embarrassment conversation was about to happen. It was also not the sort of thing we should be talking about just before the trial. While several girls were pressing for detail, I whispered, "Careful, Julia. The trial, remember." Julia spoke up, "Ladies, I'm not one to 'kiss and tell', so I won't give you any details... ," #2: " ... but I will say this... ," #2: " ... you all know how incredible he is in the classroom. Let me say that there's another room that he's EVEN better in. None of you have got ANY IDEA of the incredible amount of lucky that I am! That's all I'm going to say on that matter. It's time we went to our next classes, so please make room for a very embarrassed boy and his girlfriend." Julia climbed off my lap and we started leaving the room. There were several comments, mostly of a ribald nature. I didn't enjoy any of them, but particularly disliked, "I see Egg got lucky in his closet when he got dressed this morning. Does that count as a room, haha?" Julia couldn't resist responding to that, unfortunately. "Luck wouldn't be seen dead in there. Nor 'Fashion' or 'Style' either. I'm taking him shopping properly on Saturday. You'll see a Mark that isn't a walking fashion disaster next week. You're going to be very surprised." I can't say I liked any of those comments of Julia's, but the last one was especially worrying. What I was wearing now fit me well, matched impressively, was nicely colored, and probably - for all I could tell - complemented my complexion. But there was nothing particularly "surprising" about it. It was just a better version of what I normally wore. Julia's saying "very surprised" threatened something quite different, which was worrying because I didn't want to wear anything surprisingly different. I couldn't think of what she might have in mind. I wear baggy pants, loose shirt and a jacket. The only real alternative is jeans and a T-shirt, which I was pretty sure wasn't what Julia had in mind. The only other thing I could think of was a football jersey, and while that would be very surprising indeed, it wasn't going to happen! I didn't doubt that Julia had something in mind though, so I was worried. We'd left the room, ignoring most of the chatting going on around us (I didn't want to respond to the girl who, I hoped jokingly, suggested the room I was so good in might be the bathroom. What was she thinking?). I was contemplating having to repeat my speeches in my and Julia's next classes, presuming the Principal and 2IC had covered the whole grade. I decided that I couldn't be bothered, figuring that enough students had heard the original speech, or had heard the fear-removing update. I said to Julia, "I'm not going to bother giving that speech again. I know it's a good one, but I feel stupid giving it in classes where most of the students have already heard a version of it and I'm worried about getting in trouble by wasting so much class time if I keep making it. I think the remaining people will hear about it through word of mouth anyway. I'm just going to tell my classes that those of them that haven't heard my speech should ask around. You should do nothing, just leave it to me, okay?" Julia agreed. She added, "By the way, well done on that 'half a girlfriend' thing. That was perfect." I like being perfect, but I also like to know how. I didn't have time to ask now so I saved it for later. In my next class it was easy to tell who had heard my speech and who hadn't. The first group greeted me in a VERY friendly manner. I particularly enjoyed that it included many girls. The other class members shrunk away and didn't want to be anywhere near me. They were confused by the warmth of the first group's welcomes. I waited until the start of class, then got permission from the teacher to address the class for a minute. I said, "The Principal and Mr. Morrison have been spreading a huge amount of fear about me. I strongly dislike their statements. I have discussed this in some of my classes, but won't do so now." "Aww," and a few similar comments from several of the students. "Sorry, but I don't want to waste any more class time. Will those who heard me give my 'Love Speech' JUST in the last period raise your hands and keep them up please. Only if you heard it last period. If you heard it before then please keep your hand down." I'd figured that people who liked me were far more likely than the fearing students to raise their hands on my request, so I worded my request that way around. I wanted just those that had heard the version that refuted the Fear speech, but I didn't want to say "refuted the Principal's speech" out loud, in case the teacher thought it worthwhile to report that to the Principal. A good proportion of hands went up, although less than half. I continued, "If the people who have their hand up can identify a couple of their friends from among those who have their hands down, and have a talk with them about it when you get a chance, I'd appreciate that very much. Those of you with your hands down, if you haven't had the situation explained to you in a day or two, please seek out someone who has their hand up. I think you'll be happier when you have." Several of the hands-up crowd made comments: "I'll say." | "I'll tell you after class, Brent." | "No one can tell it like you, Egg. Go on, give your speech again." I said, "Thanks for the time, Teach. Over to you." [I repeated the above process in each of my classes for the rest of the day. By the end of the day there had been a marked reduction in the number of my fellow students who were fearful of me. Word of mouth was working. By the end of the next day the fear speeches had been largely negated.] I sat down and opened my bag, ready to do some actual schoolwork for a change. I spotted Miss WhatsHerName's envelope and its attached note. I pulled them out with my book and folder, but paid attention to the teacher for a while first. I waited until I was comfortable with what the teacher was covering, and knew that I could follow it with a minimum of attention, then I did as the envelope requested by reading the handwritten note first. I flicked to the last page to find out what her name was: "Ava West". "Ava" was much easier to use than "Miss WhatsHerName". Ava's letter - as it was long enough to be deemed a letter rather than a note - read: "Dear Mark, I've never done anything like this before and I'm super nervous, so please forgive me if I make mistakes. I have handwritten this because my mother has told me that personal letters should be handwritten and flow naturally, not like a school assignment typed on a computer. This is a very personal letter, so here goes. I didn't know who you were at the start of the year, except as a 15-year old who was jumping through the grades. You don't often come to any of the classes we both have, but when you do you are always impressive. I can see you're following all the work even though I know you're doing two grades at once, which is a very strange way of doing school. I've heard our teachers make comments to you or about you often enough to know that you are doing very well in all our classes. When you come to my classes you nearly always ask questions and most of them are about tricky things that I'd not thought of. When the teacher explains you get the point far faster than I do, often before the teacher has finished explaining it. I watch you in class and I see you listening to the teacher but working on another subject at the same time. I can see that you are thinking about both of them at the same time, which I cannot understand how you do. I've tried it a few times and I can't do it. You can be asking the teacher smart questions about something, while still making notes out of another textbook! You must have an amazing brain. When I talked to you yesterday you amazed me even more. You were talking to me normally but still writing notes with your other hand. I worked out later that I had gotten in the way of your writing hand. I didn't mean to do that, sorry. But you just swapped hands and kept on writing! How can you do that? It seems so natural when you do it, but almost no one can do that. I shouldn't go on about this so much, but the more I see you in class, the more I am amazed by you. Just from what I've said so far, you must be nearly unique. I'm sure there must be hardly any people who can do those things, but you can do even more! I've watched some of your home soccer games since I became interested in you, and you were good at the beginning, but you've gotten better and better. I missed your last game, but I've been told that you played the best you ever have and that you won it single-handed. I'm very sorry I missed it, but I didn't know you had started playing again, and when I saw you win the 10k I never thought about you going to play soccer afterward. I cannot say how amazed I was to see you win that race. I run too, usually the mile, and I was enjoying the morning and the atmosphere of a big race. I was totally astonished when the man of my dreams ran around the corner and breezed past me like he was on a casual jog, only a lot faster. I could not believe my eyes! I mean that. I rubbed them and even got the person next to me to pinch me! I really did. But it was still you. I had no idea you ran at all, but you WON! I had to sit down after that, my knees were shaking so much. I have no idea how you could beat that field. I have a very high opinion of you, but that took my breath away. It was totally incredible and totally unexpected. I know you're very modest, which makes me like you even more, so I shouldn't talk so much about how wonderful you are. But I need to tell you why I feel so strongly about you. It is so unnecessary that it makes me laugh, but you've even gotten more and more handsome since I first saw you. At first I thought it was just me thinking you were more handsome because I was becoming more interested in you, but other girls in the class noticed too. The last month, everybody has noticed. I'm sorry this is so long, but there's so much I want to say to explain my feelings for you. I should mention something important. I know you are dating Julia Williams. That makes me like you more because she is a nice girl. It happened so suddenly though! For months you were the same, then one day you and Julia were suddenly totally together. I had no warning at all. Bang - and Julia had you. I should have done something sooner, but I am trying now even though I know it's too late. Julia Williams is a smart, pretty girl and is very devoted to you, so I have no real hope. It's just that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't tell you how I feel. I have seen several girls approach you and you always dismiss them very quickly, so I never expected you to allow me this chance. I still cannot believe I asked you for a date in class, but seeing you win the 10k and then seeing you in my class two days later made me act a little crazy. For me anyway, because I am not so forward normally. You asked me for a photograph and you were so cute when I suggested a bikini photograph. Any other guy would have leaped at the chance, but you were embarrassed. I suggested a bikini because I was hoping for the chance to get you interested in me, even though I didn't think that's what you had in mind. I've never seen you leer at a girl, and your going out with Julia proves you have a mature attitude. I know I won't get another chance like this to show my feelings to you, so I am going to do a brave thing and give you the photos that you will see in the envelope. I have never given anyone photos like this before. I want you to see how serious I am. I'm trusting you with these photos because I've never heard anyone say that you'd done a mean thing. I also want you to want me, and I think I heard somewhere that guys like pictures of naked girls, haha. Please believe that I am not normally forward like this. I am NEVER like this! Just for you. I will try not to make a nuisance of myself by chasing you. I know you are a very busy person and I don't think you would like anyone who chased you when you didn't want to be. So I will put this in your locker and wait for you to talk with me. I will be very nervous though. Please, please burn or destroy the photographs and this letter if you don't want them. I know I don't have to ask you not to show them to anyone else, because you are not that sort of guy. I should tell you some things about me, but I can't think of anything useful to tell you. There is nothing special about me. You are special in every way, but I'm not in any. I know I am good looking (and you have the photos to prove it :), but I know there are lots and lots of girls who are better looking than I am, including your girlfriend. I was going to write that I hoped Julia knew how lucky she is, but of course she does. I'm only an average student - not like you! To be honest, I'm not even average smart. My parents are smart and they make me study well. That's how I first became so interested in you, because my parents taught me how important being smart and being sensible are. I should say that my parents are smart but I am not because they aren't my birth parents. They adopted me when I was 3 and Mom was 38 because they found out that they could not have children. I am not saying that to get your sympathy because they are the most fantastically wonderful parents and I am very, very happy to have them. They say I'm a good girl, but they don't know about the photos that I given you! I don't have a boyfriend - I should have said that right at the beginning! I have had three boyfriends before. The last one was a college boy who I met through running. He broke up with me about four months ago because he wanted to date a girl he met in one of his classes. That didn't upset me much because I had become interested in you. Since then I haven't been on any real dates, just some group things or friendly, not-a-date dates. I like almost anything natural outdoors, like hiking in the woods, kayaking, swimming, rock climbing, etc. I had to put makeup on my legs for the photos to cover some bruises I got hiking. I hope you'll be too busy looking at other places in the photos to spot the bruises. I'm not sure what I will do after I graduate. My favorite idea is to be a wildlife park ranger, but I haven't made up my mind for sure yet. I don't know what else to tell you. Anything you want to know, you can ask me and I will tell you. As you will see when you open the envelope, I have no secrets from you! I know you are a far, far better man than I deserve, and if a miracle happens and I do have a chance with you, then I know I have to be honest with you, so you can ask me anything you want. I've put all my contact details below, so you can get hold of me any way you want. I will be happy even if you just email me questions. I will answer them as fast and as well as I can. I know you are kind to people, so please send me an email, or something, if you don't want someone as ordinary as me. That way I can start to be realistic. Love, Ava West (Followed by Ava's home and mobile phone numbers, home and email addresses). ^ I really shouldn't look at pictures of a naked girl in class - I suspect there's a school rule against it - but I couldn't resist. I made a three-sided, privacy shield by standing up two open textbooks, then opened the envelope, careful to keep its contents hidden. I had one eye looking around to see any trouble coming, and one eye looking down to see naked chic photographs, very much trusting in my special status to avoid any trouble. I quickly saw that they weren't bikini shots. There was no sign of a bikini or any other item of apparel. I think the term is "tasteful nudes" although #4 suggested <"Tasty nudes">, and it was difficult to argue with him as Ava did look tasty. Not "tasty" in the coarse, pussy-eating sense, but as in "pretty", "pleasing", and even somewhat "charming", as her photos leaned toward shyness rather than blatancy. All the photos were 6" x 4" prints, shot in an enclosed garden. Her home's backyard, I guessed. The first had her sitting on the grass, with most of her weight on her right ass cheek. Her legs were together, out to her left and angled behind her. She was tilted to the right, with her right hand supporting her weight on the grass, and her left hand resting casually on an ankle, so both arms were well clear of her torso. The anatomical details of her pussy were totally out of sight, the shot showing just the top of a neatly trimmed bush well above where her pussy was hidden. As she was topless, her chest was fully visible. The shot was taken from the front quarter (where the hour hand of a clock would be at 10:30), so it showed the profile of her breasts nicely. On a scale of A to whatever tits go up to, EE or something like that, her breasts were somewhat smaller than average: between Julia's and Carol's sizes. #4 suggested closer to B than C, and the rest of us weren't going to argue. Whether he knew what he was talking about was anybody's guess. The second shot was much easier to describe. It was a full-length shot of her standing straight on to the camera. Both of her hands were over her pubes, but otherwise all of her was visible, especially as her elbows were bent out to either side. It wasn't an artistic shot in any sense. It was a "here's all of me" shot, with the "all of me" excluding the single point of modesty, which was fine by me. I almost expected the next shot to be her in exactly the same pose but from the rear, to complete the "all of me" theme. Instead the third shot was another full-length shot, this time of her lying front-down on the grass roughly facing the camera. It was at about 10:30 again, and looking down on her. Ava was propping herself up on her elbows and smiling up at the camera, her legs bent slightly at the knees, lifting her feet off the grass. Her breasts were only partially displayed. Her ass was nicely visible, and visibly nice. The last shot was a close-up of her face and just the tops of her bare shoulders. She was a brunette, with straight, shoulder-length hair. She was well made-up and with small earnings. In this photograph I thought she was a very pretty girl, although I am prepared to accept that seeing pictures of her naked might have biased my evaluation upward. From the other photos I knew she was slim, fit-looking and with a nice figure. Any normal 15-year old boy would have been overjoyed. I noticed that her tan-lines, although very faint as summer was many months ago, indicated that her swimsuit was a modest one-piece. It gave some legitimacy to her claims that she didn't normally proposition guys in such a forward manner. That pleased me as sluts turn me off, unless they're being sluttish because I want them to because that's hot. I hadn't gotten either of my girls to do that yet, but it was still hot to briefly think about. I put the pictures and note back into the envelope and disassembled my shield, thinking about what I should do. If she'd sent me that letter and those photos a month ago, there was no doubt what I would have done: creamed my pants and had a nervous breakdown, probably in the middle of the class. Fortunately I've managed to acquire some self-control in that month. The photos, and what they promised - I don't think a girl would send a guy naked pictures of herself without being willing to get naked in person - certainly argued in favor of me proceeding in a direction I will call "toward consummation of a relationship." What that relationship could be covered a very wide range of possibilities, but it definitely should contain plenty of "consummation." The photos looked very nice. The letter confused things. Ava was certainly available; "ready, willing and able" came to mind. All very good traits in attractive, naked, 17-year old girls. Her being available unfortunately extended into her being vulnerable, which meant my conscience got into the act and informed the rest of me to behave responsibly (i.e., the opposite of fun). She'd given enough details about herself that I now saw her as a real person, which - pathetic as it undoubtedly is - I couldn't help thinking was an unfortunate fun-spoiler. Part of me would have preferred not to know her as a person. She still would've been one, of course, I would just have been able to ignore the fact. Like I said, pathetic. The FIRST thing I wanted to do was to show the package to Julia, to ask her advice. But the letter contained a request not to show it to anyone else. Actually the letter said "I know I don't have to ask you not to show them to anyone else", but that was a request as far as I was concerned; me not being a lawyer or a politician, and me knowing how Mom would respond if I tried to pull that justification on her. So the SECOND thing I wanted to do was ask Ava whether it was all right for me to show the package to Julia. The trouble was that I knew my next contact with Ava was going to be a very important one in terms of setting the direction for my relationship with her, so I should be very clear about that direction before I initiated that contact. So the THIRD thing I wanted to do was ask Julia, how I should ask Ava, whether it was all right for me to show the package to Julia. I had what I think is called a "moral dilemma". In this case, what is the most moral way for me to show photos of a naked girl to my wife, to maximize my chances of boinking said naked girl? Another option would be for me to ask Julia what to do about my receiving a letter from Ava that contained a request not to be shown to anyone else but which I wished to discuss with Julia? In other words, dump the whole moral dilemma onto Julia, letting her work out the most moral way for her to see photos of the naked girl I wanted to boink. I wasn't sure that I wanted to, or even should want to, have sex with Ava (see what having a conscience does). She seemed vulnerable, so taking advantage of her might lead to her being hurt. My uncertainties were due to two facts: (1) Ava is a female, a necessary characteristic in anyone I might want to have sex with, and (2) my having virtually no understanding of anything even remotely connected to females, let alone the females themselves. So my doing the right thing without getting advice would be a matter of blind luck, and therefore all too likely to lead to a mess. I decided to do the first thing I wanted to do: give the whole packet to Julia to read then ask for her advice, despite Ava's request to the contrary. It wasn't a hard decision. The spirit of Ava's request was for me not to embarrass her. Julia wouldn't do that, especially if I made a point of asking her not to. Ava was trusting to my discretion, and I totally trusted Julia. Far more than I trusted myself actually. I did have one small problem: when would Julia get a chance to read the letter and discuss it with me? Lunchtime was going to be busy with Carol and several of Julia's friends from the class that I first impressed with my "Loving Carol and Julia" speech. That wouldn't be a good time for Julia and me to discuss how I should go about boinking another girl. Ava's letter referred to our classroom discussion as having taken place "yesterday". It had happened on Monday, so the letter had been written Tuesday, I guessed at lunchtime, so it was probably delivered sometime yesterday afternoon. She probably didn't know that I was away from school all of yesterday afternoon getting my license, so she would've been thinking that I'd read it but wasn't answering. I felt sorry for her. I resolved to send her a noncommittal text after this class. Between classes I texted this to Ava: "Was away from school yesterday pm. Just now read your letter/photos. Need time. Am busy lunchtime. Probly? this evening." I had thought about adding things like, "Sorry", "Nice letter", "Pretty photos", or several other opinions, but decided not to. The less said, the less backpedaling I might need to do. I saved Ava's number in my phone, hoping Julia's advice would be some form of "Go for it!" including telling me how. I got back: "TYVM. Was worried. Better than expected, excited now. Yours Ava, xxx." I took me a little while to work out what "TYVM" meant, not being used to all these new acronyms and abbreviations. Replying to tell her not to get excited would only get her despondent, then trying to cheer up that despondency would only get her excited, etc. So I put my phone away. I was waiting outside Julia's classroom when the last class before lunch let out (it's very handy to be able to skip in and out of classes whenever I want). When she got to me, Julia said, "I've told the girls where to meet us, so we get a chance to talk on the way." "Good. I have something I want to talk about. My locker contained the photos and letter from the 11th grade girl I mentioned to you. Ava West is her name. I've read her letter and need your advice about what to do next." I passed over the package. "The letter and photos are in there. The photos are nudes so be careful no one else sees them." "Good girl. That's exactly the attitude we want! I don't recognize her name though. I hope I know her by sight because it'd be good to know her reputation." I joked, "You probably don't know her by the sights you'll see in there, otherwise she'd have a reputation that EVERYONE would know, haha. She's included a good face shot so you should recognize her if you know her at all." "Good. I'll look at it first chance I get. When do you want to discuss her?" "I was hoping by tonight. That's not essential, but she's very nervous and excited so I don't want to keep her waiting." Julia said dismissively, "Of course she's nervous and excited. You can't let that dictate your schedule or you'll never get anything useful done." "Umm, how can you say 'of course' she's nervous and excited? You haven't read her letter yet." "Mark, ALL the girls are nervous and excited to meet you. No, that's an exaggeration, as some girls are in good relationships already, or are lesbians - there's a lot of that going around at the moment, haha - or maybe something else turns them off, but it's certainly true that ALL the girls that want to meet you are nervous and excited to do so. Ava made a pass at you in class didn't she?" "Yes." "So she must be nervous and excited. I was very much so before my first date with you." "Me too with you, which means we should appreciate Ava's position more." Julia said, "The issue isn't Ava as an individual. The problem is that there will be a dozen more girls arriving to our lunch soon, and there'll be dozens more at our lunches next week, all of whom are nervous and excited to meet you socially. They'll swamp you if you let them. I suggest that the very first lesson you're learning from Carol and me encouraging you to get more girls, is that YOU have to set the schedule. Do you agree?" "You're right. I have to make them dance to my tune. It'd be chaos otherwise." Julia laughed for a few seconds. Then said, "Sorry, but I have trouble visualizing you making anyone dance to your tune. You'd ask one of them to do something, then you'd apologize to all the others for not asking them to do it. Then you'd apologize to the first one for leaving her out of all the previous apologies. Then you'd apologize all over again for taking so much of their time. There'd be a lot more apologizing by you than tune dancing by them. You need to think about that propensity of yours." "It's very hard not to apologize if I've kept someone waiting. I'm not sure I want to get in the habit of not apologizing for that, because that's rude. I know it could be chaos with a lot of girls but I don't want to be rude." Julia said, "We're coming at this the wrong way. I just realized that the best approach is to discuss expectations. You SHOULD apologize when you fail to satisfy someone's reasonable expectations, especially if you told them what to expect. But you should NOT apologize otherwise. Do you want an example?" "Yes, please." We had arrived at our lunch area, and there were half a dozen girls already there. They started walking toward us as we were getting nearer. Julia quietly told me, "Tell them to stay back where they were because you need to finish a private conversation with me." So I called out, "Sorry girls, but I need to finish a private conversation with Julia. Will you wait for us there please?" They agreed, moving back to the designated lunching spot. Julia said, "You need to practice giving orders without saying 'Sorry' in the front of them, but otherwise good. Let's walk sideways to avoid the late arrivals." We did that. Julia said, "You told Ava to put her photograph into your locker. Imagine you also told her that it would take you at least four weeks to reply to her. Let's say you got her photo three days ago. You wouldn't feel the need to apologize for not responding yet, would you?" "No. She's expecting to wait weeks." "But if you'd told her you'd reply within twelve hours and three days had gone past, you'd be falling all over yourself to apologize. It's the expectation - that you created - that makes all the difference. You DO have to apologize less because you do too much of it, but with girls like Ava you also have to be very careful not to create expectations that you can't meet, or can't meet without more effort than they're worth. You should be very careful about giving indications WHEN you will do something. That's a concrete expectation that people will hold you to." I had to laugh, "Haha. Exactly like my telling Ava that I would probably contact her this evening." Julia agreed, "That would be a good example. Did you actually do that?" "Yes. I sent her a text saying that I'd gotten her package, that I needed time, and that I'd probably reply this evening." Julia said, "You've caused two problems: She will expect you to reply tonight, and she now expects that when she drops something into your locker that you should contact her within a very few hours. Can you imagine if forty or fifty girls are dropping things into your locker all expecting answers within a few hours. How busy are you going to be answering and apologizing?" "It'd be chaos." "Chaos which would mess-up your ability to do anything else in your life. Your first contact with these girls is important in setting their expectations. You should have talked to me before contacting Ava the way you did." #1: Julia, seeing my expression, added, "Relax. Ava's only one girl, not fifty. Worst comes to the worst you could drop her or at least sit her down and correct her expectations. We'll talk about Ava tonight. Let's go have lunch with all these unusually well-dressed young ladies." "Ahh, is there anything in particular that I need to do or say?" "Not a thing. They're here because of your loving speech about Carol and me. They are curious to meet her, but most of them are here to try to become friends with you. They had no idea that you were so mature and loving. They probably didn't know that ANY guy could be that mature and loving. Just be yourself and everything will be fine." I failed to see how being myself would be a good idea, except that I was very good at being quiet so I'd do that. ------- Chapter 82: Lunch with the First Fourteen Wednesday, April 20, 2005 (Continued) Julia and I headed back toward the girls who were waiting for the honor of having lunch with me. They'd sat in the same classrooms with me almost an entire school year and I'd not noticed any of them feeling particularly honored. I should have made myself honorable by making girls cry years ago. Julia had already told me who she'd gracefully permitted to have lunch in my august presence, and I'd seen most of them during the morning. Seeing them all together now reinforced my impression that they were all unusually well dressed. I found it inexplicably strange that so many girls could dress up nicely just to impress me, as Julia insisted they were trying to do. It was a mystery that had no solution, so I distracted myself with some internal joking over the difficulty they must've had selecting their clothes this morning. How do you dress when you are ostensibly meeting a young lesbian girl, but in reality (apparently) you very much want her 15-year old brother to notice you? 15-year old boys generally notice only two things (left tits and right tits), but the whole meeting is in front of the boy's girlfriend, so unsubtle tit displays would not be a good idea. To make matters worse, you've got a dozen competitors and you've got no idea what they'll be wearing. I wouldn't be surprised if their phones had been running hot trying to find out what the others would be wearing, assuming they could trust each other to tell the truth. Imagine the politics of that! Such an interesting dynamic had resulted in a variety of approaches. No one was wearing the fairly standard school uniform of jeans and some sort of top. All these clothes were considerably classier and - in classy ways - sexier than was normal for school. None of them had gone for 'trashy' or 'slutty'. I guess that might've been too much of a declaration of war against all the other girls, or maybe I've got no idea what I'm talking about. Given that I'm talking about how girls think about their clothes, I know which of the previous possibilities is most likely. There were several noticeably short skirts, and several tops that were showing a pleasing amount of skin and breast, by school's standards. I was sure that a few top buttons had popped open sometime during the walk out here. A couple of girls had gone for tight, a couple for semi-transparent. It was enough to make the sole boy here very happy. Very puzzled about why these girls were trying to impress me, but happy that they were (which is probably an unnecessary statement, given my previous one about the girls "showing a pleasing amount of skin and breast"). As a small aside: There were fourteen girls here, excluding Julia. Fourteen "visitors", if you prefer. Eleven were from the class I'd given my first speech in. The other three were from other classes that Julia and I shared. I didn't know how the 'ringers' came to be here. Maybe they had some influence over Julia, or Julia over them, or some other mysterious feminine reason. Julia wasn't saying anything and I hadn't bothered asking. That all three were especially good looking might have been a factor in their being invited. It was certainly a factor in my not questioning their presence. The eleven non-ringers represented about half the girls from one class, so they weren't all A-list knockouts. That didn't worry me at all as they were all nice, friendly, 16-year old (more or less) girls, who had each made a special effort to look as attractive as they could for me. For me to write "I was happy" would be a considerable understatement, along with "I was puzzled". I was assuming that Julia understood girls better than I did. As I approached the group an idea for a tease occurred to me. When I got close enough I said, "Wow ladies. Look at how beautiful you all are today. And please excuse me if I offend anyone, but how SEXY you all are too." No one complained that I had offended them. They were too busy smiling at the "offense". I started briefly commenting on each of the girls individually, being deliberately but not excessively effusive. One at a time, from left to right, calling them by name and complimenting them on some sexy aspect of their dress. I always picked a sexy aspect, all the girls got roughly equal time, and I made sure that it seemed as fair and equal as possible. I never, for example, said anything similar to, "I liked A's dress more then B's". By the time I'd complimented the fourteenth sexy outfit, they'd each had my undivided attention for a few seconds and all of them were visibly happy, and I'll take a wild guess and venture that they were also honored. -- After complimenting the last girl's outfit, I carried straight on with, "I don't think I have ever been in a group of girls who have gone to such an effort to look as beautiful and sexy as this group has. Each of you is a sight for sore eyes and truly a pleasure to behold. Carol will be so happy that there are so many lesbians in our class who've dressed so sexily to meet her. I know boys aren't your inclination, which makes me sad. I'm sorry if I offended any of you by seeming to call you straight. I'd never do that because I do respect your choice of lifestyle as much as I respect my sister's. Certainly I will NEVER do anything as coarse as hitting on any you. I'll just sit over there," indicating a spot a few yards away, "to eat my lunch, so my maleness doesn't intrude on your gathering." The protests started about halfway through my drawn-out punchline, but they'd been weak denials because how loudly and emphatically could the girls be about their really being attracted to me when my girlfriend was standing right beside me? They did their best, but they stumbled over each other and were weak enough that I was able to finish my tease by raising my voice and dominating their spluttered protests. As soon as I finished and started turning my back to them - as if to go sit were I had indicated - the girls' protests started in earnest. They called: "Don't go", "I'm not a lesbian", "We like YOU too", etc. So I turned back and held up my hand, calling, "Girls, girls," until the volume of their protests dropped away enough for me to say, "There's no need for so much protesting and pretending. Relax, you're all COMPLETELY safe with me." Anything further that I might have said was swamped by the girls' even louder protests. They'd all leaped to their feet by now, and were looking as if they might physically stop me from walking away to my lunch spot. Julia had been holding my arm during my tease, and at this point she ruined it by bursting out in loud laughter, which I enjoyed joining in with. She had the pleasure of telling the girls, "You were all SO suckered! Haha. Of course Mark didn't think you're all lesbians. Never mind the improbability of more than half the girls in class being lesbians, just look at you. You're dressed to impress a BOY, you're hanging on every word Mark says, your eyes follow him wherever he moves. It doesn't take a genius to work out that you've all got the hots for him, and he IS a genius. It was so funny watching you all try to tell him that you really do like him while I was standing right beside him. I almost felt sorry for you, but it was too funny, haha." Some of the girls naturally rushed to reassure Julia, "We would never dream of thinking of your boyfriend that way. That's not..." Julia cut them off with an accusatory, "You better not be trying to tell me that my boyfriend isn't wonderful and sexy?" "Umm," and a significant pause while they thought about how to escape that. Julia laughed again. "Haha. You're too easy to tease. I don't mind that other girls want Mark. I'm PROUD of him for it. You're all rank amateurs compared to some of the other girls that have hit on him. Some of them have put naked photos of themselves and their phone numbers in his locker. Here comes Carol now. Remember that she's nervous about meeting so many high-school girls, so please make her feel comfortable." Carol was still some distance away. Julia pulled on my arm, saying, "Let's go meet her halfway." Julia seemed to assume that my arm was going with her, so the rest of me thought it might as well accompany her too. As soon as we were far enough away from the other girls, Julia said, "This is so much fun. I bet they're all blown away by that naked photos comment I left them with. I wonder how many of them are desperate enough to try it themselves, haha." I wasn't so much interested in how many would do that, but what the photos of the ones that did would look like. That was much more interesting to think about. We reached Carol. Julia and Carol unhesitatingly entered a hug and serious kiss, which once again gave me a delightful surprise. I just didn't expect that sort of behavior at school. I gave Carol a quick kiss on the cheek, which was sad. Julia told Carol, "They're so eager to please Mark that they'll fall all over themselves to be nice to you. I'll introduce you and then carry on talking about something else we've already started discussing, so you can just sit back and relax. Come on, sweetie." With Julia in the middle, holding both Carol's and my arms, we walked back to the others. Julia did the introduction of, "My girlfriend, Carol Anderson," then giving everyone else's first names to Carol. All the other girls were effusively pleased to meet Carol, complimenting her on her dress, beauty, hair, shoes, smile, etc. Basically everything they could think of to compliment. Julia told Carol, "Don't worry if you can't remember everyone's name." -- Then Julia announced, "Do any of you want to know the single most important way to make Mark happy?" Quite a few of them did, so Julia said, "Make sure he gets plenty to eat, often, and never, ever delay his eating when it's his meal time, which is what we're doing now. In other words, it's time to eat! Break out your lunches." Music to my ears! I sat down and commenced to do exactly that to my lunches. There were seventeen of us in total, so an awkwardly large number for an easy sitting arrangement. Julia and I sat side by side, somewhat leaning back on each other. Carol was in front of Julia, to the side away from me, so Carol could easily lean back on Julia. The other girls were in a staggered semi-circle facing us, roughly two layers deep. While everyone was getting their lunches out, Julia said, "I was serious about Mark's eating. He eats a huge amount, probably 50% more than you expect. If any of you are feeding him in the future, make sure you provide him with a LOT of food." One of the girls asked, "Why would any of us be feeding him? He's your boyfriend." "He sure is! But there could be a reason. Maybe you're having a picnic that I can't make it to. In which case I hope someone would feed my man! There could be several reasons why he might be somewhere with any of you without me to look after him. I just want to make sure you know to have plenty of food for him." One of the other girls said, "You're more trusting than I am. I wouldn't be happy letting my boyfriend go somewhere in the care of another girl, especially if I knew she wanted him, like you say most of us do for Mark." Julia laughed, saying, "You ALL want Mark. That's why you've come all the way out here to have lunch with us. I'm fine with it and I'll tell you why." At this time I remembered that I could deliberately rumble my belly. I thought Julia's lesson about feeding me was sufficiently important that it deserved reinforcement in case any of these girls might be in charge of feeding me in the future - the way Julia seemed to be implying - so I produced a loud, sustained rumble. While doing so I wondered about the girl with a boyfriend. Why was she having lunch with ME? Other than the honor of it, of course. After my rumble, the resulting laughter, and Julia's pointing out my need for food, Julia continued, "When I'm with Mark I often see girls flirt with him, give him their phone numbers, proposition him, etc. It happens very often. I got REALLY angry the first few times girls made passes at him, and nearly got into fights with the girls because of it. Can you imagine tiny me trying to scratch another girl's eyes out! Haha." Carol said, "I was with them once when that happened. Mark had to pick Julia up and carry her away. Julia WAS going to scratch the other girl's eyes out. Do you remember that, Julia, in the lunchroom?" Julia said, "I remember it all right. That was the first time Mark kissed me. I will NEVER forget that kiss. No girl should forget the first kiss from the man she will spend the rest of her life with." That produced several very girly agreements, but they quickly quieted down so they could listen to the rest of Julia's description of why she now didn't seem to mind that girls fancied me. Julia continued, "One day I realized that I can't stop girls being attracted to Mark. I can't even fault them for it, haha. The only issue is how Mark responds to them. You heard his speech. Mark UNDERSTANDS love and commitment. He REALLY understands! Not like some other boy trying to get into our panties by telling us he'll love us forever. You all heard Mark say he'll stand by Carol's and my relationship all his life, even though that'd mean he only gets half as much time with me. How many of you don't believe he meant what he said?" None, as it turned out. "Mark puts Carol's and my needs ahead of his own desires. How many boys would make a lifelong commitment like that?" Not many, according to the girls' lack of response. "Unlike virtually every other teenage boy, Mark thinks with his big head, not his cock." All the girls in the semi-circle facing me immediately looked at my cock. Fortunately Carol was facing away and couldn't react without going to so much effort that she'd realize that a sister shouldn't look, and would stop. There was nothing to see of course, especially as I wasn't aroused, but they all automatically looked. I just looked at Julia in surprise at her choice of language. Julia laughed, and several of the girls looked away guiltily. Julia said, "You don't have to feel guilty. I keep telling you that I don't mind and aren't jealous. Look at him all you want. Plenty of other girls do." Julia paused to let any that wanted to look at me, but the automatic reaction had run its course. -- "Remember Annette Neumeyer? She couldn't arouse Mark when she threw herself at him." The Annette Story was widely known - probably there wasn't anyone in school that didn't know it; plus most of Corvallis and the surrounding area knew too thanks to the many newspaper articles - so the girls all indicated to Julia that they remembered. "I could send him off to a picnic with any one of you, or with all of you, and I wouldn't even think about his misbehaving. I trust Mark TOTALLY. You could have your picnic at a nudist beach and all that would happen is that fourteen girls would get increasingly turned on and increasingly frustrated. Mark UNDERSTANDS love and commitment. His WHOLE body understands it! Mark would NEVER play around behind my back. He simply doesn't want to. That's why I'm not worried about girls coming on to him, giving him their phone numbers, putting naked photos in his locker, or anything else they could think to try. They're wasting their time. None of that matters at all." -- Julia looked at me to ask, "Mark, the girls that have put their naked photos in your locker, did you date or even just meet any of them after they gave you their photos?" "No, not to date or even meet." Julia made the point, "How many boys in this school could be so cool about receiving sexy photos like that? You know that those photos must've been sexy because no girl is going to give out nude photos of herself unless she knows that she's got a VERY good body. Do you all get why I trust Mark so totally?" The girls got Julia's point, along with the hook, line, sinker and bullshit it was attached to. It was attached to a LOT of bullshit because my ability to resist a pretty girl is exactly the same as any other teenage boy's. The girls thought they understood Julia, but I certainly didn't. I knew where she was hoping to go with this - getting me more girls - but I was VERY confused by her route since she seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. I wasn't going to argue with her though. Apart from anything else, I hadn't finished my two lunches yet. Julia paused, which gave the girls the opportunity to start gushing. I couldn't tell you the number of times I heard "You're so lucky." Too many times though. There were lots of other congratulatory noises too. Carol added a story, "One day after school, not long after Julia and Mark started going out, Mark was about to go to Julia's to make-out with her. He was REALLY eager to go, but I stopped him to ask about a little issue of mine. I got foolishly worked up about it and ended up crying. There really wasn't anything wrong; I just needed reassurance. Rather than getting impatient or angry at my silliness, Mark stayed with me for ages to cheer me up. He even offered to phone Julia to tell her he wouldn't be coming because he had to stay comfort his sister. Never mind Annette Neumeyer not turning him on, he offered to cancel making out with the girl he loves so he could reassure his sister. Mark KNOWS that sex is not as important as love, even love for a sister. Isn't he incredible?" They were very impressed and absolutely agreed that I was incredible, then they went on to tell Julia many more times that she was "so lucky." That should teach you something about how girls think: They thought Julia was "so lucky" to be my girlfriend because I'd offered to cancel a date with her. It was female logic at its finest. Amidst all the congratulatory comments, two stood out. The first was, "So when are you getting married?" Julia chose to answer that one, "I've been thinking about that. I think I need to make a decision about that soon. Give me a while longer to think about it, okay?" The questioner nodded. The second comment was directed at me, "Do girls really put naked photos of themselves in your locker, Egg?" I couldn't exactly agree with plural "girls", but I did say, "It's happened." "Real photos? Not fakes?" "I think they're real, yes." "What do you do when you get one?" Julia came in now, saying, "He doesn't show them around or boast about them, that's for sure. It'd be all over school if he did that. Mark respects people's privacy. Even I've never seen one. Mark, have you showed any of those photos to anyone?" "No. No one has seen any of them." Yet. Julia said, "Any other boy would have used them to jack off to, but I'm not going to insult Mark by even asking that." Supporting Julia's theme of me being a eunuch made my truthful comment easy, "I've NEVER even thought about doing that when looking at any of them. Please don't tell any of the guys that because they'd laugh me out of school, haha." (Whether my answer would have been truthful if I'd looked at them at any time other than the middle of a class, I'll leave for you to guess.) One of the girls declared, "After getting to know Mark better, I don't think I want to talk with the other guys anyway." Several other girls echoed her sentiment. I made a Mad Scientist Cackle, rubbing my hands together. When I had their attention, which didn't take long, I put on my Mad Scientist accent, "Exzzelent! My cunning plan iz vorking. Make all zee pretty girlz dislike boyz, zo more lezbianz for my darling zister. {Cackle}." After the laughter, one of the girls said, "Sorry Egg, but now we just want you more." A few of the girls confirmed that, so I said, "Ratz! Back to zee drawingboard zen." None of the girls argued with the assertion that they wanted me more, but a couple looked uncomfortably at Julia. Julia just laughed back at them, "If you don't want Mark then his cunning plan must've worked, because you've turned into lesbians." The girl who had made the "We want you more" comment, said, "I'm worried that I'm a lesbian. I think I should kiss a boy to check. Oh look, there's only one boy here," pointing at me, "I think I'll kiss him." She started getting to her feet, and I had no doubt where she would be putting her lips shortly. Goody, Julia's plan was working perfectly. Julia said, "Down girl! 'You can admire and you can desire, but more than that will incur my ire.'" #2: #3: "Damn. Can't blame a girl for trying," said the possible lesbian as she sat back down. Julia said, "I can blame you for not listening though. Mark wouldn't have kissed you back. Annette Neumeyer - in full-on slut mode - couldn't get Mark to kiss her back, so what chance do you think you or any other girl in school has?" -- Julia paused for an answer, but there was none, so she added, "If you walked up to and kissed almost any other boy in school, especially dressed the way you are now, he'd kiss you back - probably thinking all his Christmases have come at once - because boys all think with their little head. But not Mark. Try to kiss him if you want, but you'll just be another Annette Neumeyer." No girl in Corvallis wanted to be another Annette Neumeyer, so that killed that idea. It also killed any hope I had for understanding Julia's plan. To make sure the girls' idea and my struggle to understand were both truly dead, with the corpses rotting, Julia added, "Annette's attempt was back before Mark and I started dating. You heard from his speech what his feelings for me are now, so does anyone want to try forcing a kiss on him now?" I was beginning to suspect that Julia had changed the object of her plan to "Get Mark NO Sex." Julia seemed happy, but my cock wasn't, so apparently I DO think with it! Julia turned to Carol, "What do you and Donna think of having Mark for a brother?" Soon - after a little more prompting from Julia to get Carol over her initial shyness - Carol was in full flow about how wonderful I was. The superlatives and little stories were flying. Carol was enjoying herself, and her audience was even more impressed with me. Both were probably Julia's intent. Once Carol was established in the center of attention, Julia turned her attention to me, moving in for some quality snuggling time. Sweet kisses were traded back and forth for a few minutes. Then Julia asked me, "Mark, darling. I've been thinking. Would you mind terribly if we didn't get married?" Sharp intakes of breath from the girls nearest us. The other half said variations of, "What'd she say?" They were told, "Julia doesn't want to marry Mark." I was busy trying to work out what to say. I had NO idea! Julia's wink didn't provide any useful information. I was pretty sure she didn't want me to say, "Too late, we already are," but beyond that I was stuck. Julia said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, which wasn't hard as everyone was hanging on her next words. "Sorry. I didn't mean to blurt that out. It's just been on my mind a great deal the last few days. It's not that I don't WANT to marry Mark; it's that I don't think I SHOULD. Not yet, and possibly not for a long time." Julia paused. She hadn't done anything other than tantalize her audience, so they certainly didn't want to her stop her explanation where it was. One girl summed up their opinion, "Are you crazy? I'd kill for a guy like Egg." All the other girls agreed. This school's recently established reputation for violent assaults wasn't going to be helped by the fourteen promised homicides. Julia said, "I really shouldn't have started this here, but I might as well explain it. I don't think marriage would be fair for Mark. Over the last few days I've realized that my loving relationship with Carol is going to last a long time. Several years in all likelihood. That means I'll be spending much of my time away from Mark. I won't be sleeping in his bed, providing him with comfort, companionship, and - let's be honest - having sex with him as often as he deserves. You heard his speech. He'll joyfully live his entire life with only half a wife in order to ensure Carol's and my happiness. I don't think that's fair." It was quite funny to watch. They all thought Julia was stupid, and that she definitely needed to have her stupidity pointed out to her, but not a single one of them wanted to correct her. Instead they wanted to say, "You're right, you should break up with him," but they couldn't bring themselves to say that either. Carol and I kept silent. I didn't dare say a word because I could finally see Julia's strategy, and her opening the door to my bedroom was only seconds away. I prepared a look of surprise and made a strong mental note to hide my delight at the imminent offers. Julia paused for a few seconds, then looked at the girls, and pretended to realize, "Oh no. You've gotten the wrong idea. I've got no intention of leaving Mark. I'll NEVER leave him! I already know that I am his for the rest of my life. I need to explain myself better." All the girls clearly thought that Julia had to explain herself MUCH better! I'd quite like that too. "A couple of times Mark has joked with me about how unfair it is that the girl that I've started loving is his sister so he can't join in to have threesomes. He puts on a hangdog expression like he's really suffering, but he knows that Carol and I don't believe it for a second. He's VERY happy that I'm having a relationship with Carol because her happiness is more important to him than his own. You could tell that from his speech. I would never have developed a relationship with anyone else because I would've know that it wouldn't make Mark happy; his happiness being very important to me. As my relationship grew with Carol, so did Mark's happiness with it. Mark is my number one love and I would never hurt him by having a second love, but my having Carol doesn't hurt him; it makes him very happy. That makes sense, doesn't it?" They all agreed it did. The bullshit was already so deep they couldn't see daylight. Nor could I, but at least I could see the bullshit. I'd like to see the daylight though; Julia had me totally confused. "When Mark stands at the altar and makes his vow to be faithful, he truly will be. I have no doubt that from that moment on, until the end of his life, NOTHING will ever tempt him to break that vow. I'm saying that he won't even be TEMPTED. With other guys you'd pray they don't stray too often and you'd be constantly suspicious and fearful of it, but Mark won't even be tempted. That's the sort of guy he is." Several girls were nodding, clearly believing that to be the sort of guy I am. Julia was so good I almost believed it myself, if not for my mentally salivating about these pretty lambs being led so willingly up the well-manured garden path. It was also an extremely twisty and turny garden path which, if it did lead to my bedroom, did so in a way that I had no chance of predicting. Julia continued shoveling it, "So I'm starting to think that Mark and I shouldn't get married until my relationship with Carol ends. I think that sooner or later Carol will find someone else, although probably not for a few years. Carol, what do you think?" Carol gave the indicated answer, "I'm VERY happy with you, Julia. I don't want anyone else now. Maybe in the future, but not now. When we were talking about those naked pictures that girls were putting in Mark's locker, I almost joked that I wished girls would put naked pictures of themselves in MY locker," that got her a couple of chuckles, "but I didn't because the only girl I want is you." Julia said, "Ahh, isn't she lovely?" #3: Julia continued, "Mark, Carol and I have a very honest relationship, as you can see. None of us will try to stop Carol's and my relationship sooner than it should. That wouldn't be honest. Even a few years from now if Carol knew she was holding up my marriage to Mark, she wouldn't go out and pretend to fall in love with some other girl. It'd be deceitful, it'd dishonor Mark's sacrifice, and it'd be unfair to the other girl. That's not the way people in Mark's family behave." All the girls nodded, knowing that everyone in my family were saints. "It's totally unfair both before and after our marriage for Mark to promise not to play around with another girl when that's EXACTLY what I'm doing half the time now, and would continue doing after our marriage. So for the last few days I've been thinking that for however long Carol and I keep our relationship going Mark should be allowed to play around with other girls, and we should only marry each other when I can be faithful to him. For me to marry him sooner would be a lie and I'm VERY unhappy with that." I LOVED the irony of Julia claiming that she'd be unhappy with a lie. That might be true about a lie that didn't serve the best interests of her Lord, but if it served my interests then truth flew out the window. I even knew which window, in that I could finally see the direction Julia was going in. -- Julia ended it with, "So I'm thinking that for the next few months I'll let him date and have sex with other girls, because I'm away dating and having sex with Carol. That seems fair, doesn't it?" (Father Christmas to little girl: "If you've been a good girl I can give you all these wonderful presents. So have you been a good girl?") "YES!" They didn't all answer in one loud affirmative, but my writing "YES!" accurately reflects their thoughts, body language, and an increasing number of their verbal answers. Several of them couldn't believe their ears, couldn't believe Julia's stupidity, and their luck. I couldn't believe how strongly they overreacted. Julia sat there nodding repeatedly, and even once muttering to herself, "I think it IS fair." #3: #1: Julia let the excitement grow, and in another couple of seconds the first girl said, "Egg. PLEASE, I would LOVE to look after you when Julia is away. PLEASE let me. Any time, day or night, just call me. I'll give you my number." As she started scrambling for pen and paper. When that girl had first started Julia had smiled and nodded, which removed the last doubt of several of them. So the last half of the quick girl's comments were overlapped with several more offers. #3: #1: #3: Julia held up her hands and called, "Girls, girls." As they quieted down, "Thank you very much. It's very good of you to be so enthusiastic, but you haven't been listening." We all thought we had been listening. Very, very careful in fact. The girls because they couldn't believe their ears, and me because another appendage of mine had a vested interest. All of us were puzzled by Julia's latest comments. Julia explained, "I said I was happy that Mark could play around with other girls because that's what I do with Carol. That's obviously the fairest thing for him, and it means that when I go to the altar with him I won't feel guilty that I've deprived my man of what I should have been providing him, but that's ALL I said." They were still puzzled. I continued to keep them company. Julia continued teasing us, "I understand that you all think Mark is an incredible guy and that you all want to have sex with him. Both of those things are obvious, but I don't understand why you're all so excited?" The girls clearly didn't understand why Julia didn't understand why they were all so excited. I was in total agreement that I didn't understand either, although my confusion wasn't about why I was excited to have sex with myself. After a couple of seconds Julia 'realized' the answer, "Oh! I get it. You think that just because I said it was okay WITH ME for Mark to have sex, that he WOULD HAVE sex! You REALLY haven't been listening, have you?" #2: #3: #2: Julia indicated the girl who had tried to kiss me earlier, "What sort of kiss would you have gotten out of Mark when you tried to kiss him before?" She answered, "You said a bad one. He wouldn't have kissed me back." Julia said, "Exactly. None of you should need me to tell you that. You all know Mark well enough by now to know that if you tried to kiss him, it'd be a waste of time. So why are you trying to give him your phone numbers so he can call you for sex? If he won't even kiss you, what's the chance he'll have sex with you?" #1: <(a) 100%, and (b) I thought they were offering their phone numbers so we could date. I didn't actually hear a single one of them say anything about offering sex, and I'm VERY sure I would've noticed that! Julia keeps talking about sex even though no one else is, but she keeps finding reasons for us not having it. At this stage I don't know what the plot is, let alone which direction it's going in.> Julia paused to let that sink in, along with the accompanying sinking feelings and sinking hopes. Then she said, "Just because I think it's a good idea that he plays around, doesn't mean HE thinks it is. This is MARK we're talking about! He isn't an ordinary guy; he's very, very special. Let me tell you another story to help you understand. Last Saturday Mark won his national-level running race, and we were going out to celebrate. A girl called Cindy threw herself at Mark after the race. She was nice and gorgeous, so I agreed to let her join us at our celebration. Mark's got better things to do than fetch and carry girls, so we told her to drive herself to my house. -- "She arrived wearing an incredibly sexy dress. Far, far sexier and more glamorous than anything you're wearing now. She was still in my parents' house, with Carol and me right next to her, when she deliberately leaned forward so her dress almost fell completely off. She wasn't wearing a bra, and Mark had a clear view of everything she had. She was totally throwing herself at him. Mark, how old is Cindy?" "She didn't say her age, but she was doing the first year of an MS degree at OSU, so that'd make her about 23, I guess." "So he had a gorgeous, VERY intelligent, 23-year old woman, dressed in a very revealing, sexy dress, showing her body and throwing herself at Mark. Because it was a celebration for Mark's incredible win, I told him that I WANTED him to have sex with Cindy. Not just that I was LETTING him, but that I WANTED him to sleep with her overnight. Instead, even before halfway through our dinner, Mark decided that he didn't want a sex-filled night with a young woman he barely knew. He said he wanted to spend the evening concentrating on 'his two favorite girls': Carol and me. Mark sent Cindy away. He turned down a whole night of wild sex with Cindy so he could spend a couple of hours talking to his two favorite girls. Can ANY of you imagine ANY boy you know turning down a whole night of sex with a woman like Cindy, to talk with his sister and girlfriend, both of whom he sees every day anyway?" They couldn't imagine any such boy. Put that way, I was having trouble imagining me too. "I could tell you other stories, but you should understand by now. Mark does NOT think with his cock. Mark does what Mark's big head wants after he carefully thinks about it, so you can now see how incredibly unimportant it is that I said he can sleep with other girls? MARK will decide whether or not he sleeps with anyone, not me. The only thing that's happened this lunchtime is that I've made up my mind on what I think Mark should do. Now I have to convince Mark that he should do it. Mark's a GENIUS, as you know. Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is for me to convince Mark to change his mind about something?..." #2: " ... That's why I was puzzled for a few seconds when you all got so excited. I've gotten used to Mark and I forgot that you don't know him. None of you will get even a kiss from him unless I can convince his big head that he SHOULD do it. Throwing your phone numbers at Mark and expecting him to call you for sex SO isn't going to happen! It's so absurd that I want to laugh at you, but that'd be unfair because you had no way of knowing about Mark until now. Remember Cindy threw her whole BODY at him, and it was a very good body, and that didn't work, so your phone numbers are a complete waste of time. You understand that, don't you?" They nodded glumly, putting away their pens and papers. "Today I've decided to TRY to change Mark's mind. I've no idea how long that'll take or even whether I'll succeed. It's bound to take at least several days because Mark will never rush into something like this, the way any other boy would. Mark will THINK about this very deliberately and seriously, and at the end he might decide 'No' and that'll be the end of it." #3: "I don't know whether Mark will agree, I don't know when, I don't know what rules or restrictions he might put on his acceptance. Or maybe he'll end up convincing me that we should get married as soon as possible anyway." The girls were already looking dazed, and that rocked them even harder. "You never know what's going to happen with Mark." #2: Julia paused for a second, and repeated her last point, "Never knowing what's going to happen with Mark is VERY true. We've all gotten so used to boys behaving in certain ways - usually centered around their wanting sex - that we get into habits about how we should act toward them. Most of those habits are wrong when you're dealing with Mark. Like trying to kiss him and expecting him to respond. Annette Neumeyer had no idea how stupid she was trying to sexually humiliate Mark the way she did. She didn't just pick the worst guy in school to try that on, she probably picked the worst guy in America. I almost feel sorry for her bad luck. -- "If Mark was any other guy, I'd suggest you wear sexy clothes for the next few days to try to turn him on and push him into wanting to have sex with you, but that isn't going to work with Mark. He'll appreciate it - you heard from the way he teased you about your dressing up for Carol that he does like looking at pretty girls - but it won't affect his decision even the tiniest fraction. By all means be sexy around him, but it's probably even a better idea to be nice around him. Show him how nice you are, how enjoyable you are to be with, how happy he can be in your company, and that sort of thing. Remember that he sent Cindy away so he could have a NICE time with Carol and me." -- Julia looked at her watch, "We haven't got much time left because Mark and I have to talk with Carol about something else and Carol has to get back to middle school. I'll quickly mention sex because I can see all of you are thinking about that. I'm worried that nearly everything I've said to you about Mark and sex is about him turning it down. Let me tell you that two weeks ago my father spent a thousand dollars soundproofing my bedroom. Heavy, heavy soundproofing. Dad had to do it because no one in the house could sleep because Mark makes me scream and scream and scream. Whatever you imagine Mark is like at sex, let me tell you that he is FAR better! Trust me on that! -- "Most of you have only ever seen him in the classroom. You need to see him being athletic. You've got a soccer game on Saturday, don't you, Mark?" "Ah, yeah." "Where and when?" "Ah, Crescent Valley at 2pm." "You got that ladies: CV at 2pm on Saturday. Even if you don't understand soccer come watch. I promise that you won't regret it. We've got our bowling game on Sunday, but come on Saturday too if you can, so you can see what an athlete he is." I'd been carefully looking at the fourteen "visitors" during Julia's recent talk, trying to understand why on Earth they were interested in me (also because of "a pleasing amount of skin and breast"). More than half of them were visibly overwhelmed enough that they couldn't think properly. I empathized with them because Julia had my brain tangled up too, but one thing was clear: these girls were very interested in me. I couldn't work out whether their interest was just in dating me, or if it went as far as wanting to have sex with me the way Julia kept saying they did. None of them argued with her, or even looked offended, which was very confusing. They weren't the only people who were confused, as Julia's twists and turns had totally lost me. Her previously stated intention was for me to start having sex with more girls, but she wasn't letting them even kiss me. She was using a very confusing tactic, obviously one based on female logic. Julia said, "I think the three of us need to start walking Carol back to her school now." Julia started getting to her feet, so Carol and I did so to. One of the girls said, "Julia, you have my phone number. Please call me as soon as Mark makes his decision. I REALLY want to know." That prompted several others to say much the same thing. Julia said, "This may sound strange, but I'm not interested in whether you want to sleep with Mark or not. Please don't be insulted by what I'm about to say, but this isn't about what any of you want. This is about what Mark wants. I've been dating Mark for just three weeks and I'm constantly amazed by how many girls want him. If his big head decides that it's a good idea for him to have sex with other girls, then he can get those girls himself anytime he wants. He doesn't need to ask any of you. I have your phone numbers if he wants to contact you, but he certainly doesn't need them. -- "You only heard about this because of luck. This lunchtime just happened to be when I made up my mind about delaying my marriage and letting Mark play around while I'm in a sexual relationship with Carol. I could've made up my mind in class, after school, or some other time; but it happened to be now. Just because you've heard it, and you want Mark, that doesn't mean you'll get him. Even if Mark decides to play around, he might not pick any of you. He might want younger girls, or seniors, or college girls. It's Mark's choice who he plays around with. That's why I'm not bothering to make a list. He's got so much choice any one of you would have to be very lucky to be picked." You could see that the considerably majority of them didn't like that idea at all. One of the most enthusiastic said, "But I'll do ANYTHING. I mean it! I'll give him the best time. He should pick me, I'm very good in bed..." Julia laughed. "You're trying to lead him by his cock, Susan. That doesn't work on Mark. You can't think about what YOU want; you have to think about what Mark wants. Believe me, I've seen girl after girl try the usual tricks and fail. Cindy, for example. She went after what she wanted and she failed totally. You have to put yourself in Mark's hands, do whatever HE wants, and trust him to give you a good time. I know you don't understand and we don't have time to explain it now, but the smart ones among you should remember that. It's the most important thing I've said today." One of the girls who I knew was intelligent asked Julia to repeat it, which she did: "'You have to put yourself in Mark's hands, do whatever HE wants, and trust him to give you a good time.' It's almost the total opposite of how you normally manage a boy, especially trusting him so much. The smart ones here should think about that too. Being smart about this is an EXCELLENT suggestion. No one here can come close to Mark when it comes to intelligence, but you can still use what smarts you have to help bring yourself up to his quality of relationship. For sure none of you are going to get a second chance with Mark if the only thing you've got going for you is big tits and the ability to bounce up and down in bed. Mark will go read a book if that's all you can do." #1: Julia concluded, "We have to go shortly so I'll make some quick final points. This discussion is not a secret, but you shouldn't repeat it everywhere. Any girl whose talking causes Mark trouble isn't ever going spend any quality time with him, so don't talk with any teachers or boys about it. If you want to talk with other girls, then fine, especially if you think Mark would like her. Talking is pointless though, until Mark decides, and then only if he agrees with me that he should play around. -- "Second point: I know most of you are very eager to chase Mark, but I strongly suggest that you don't chase him. Being nice to him is a good idea, but begging him for sex is a big no-no. Remember Annette Neumeyer. Asking him if he's made his decision yet or any other type of nagging will also ruin your chances. Be as nice to him as you can, but don't crowd him. Don't crowd Carol or me either, as Mark won't like to see that. -- "Last point: Thank you for helping me make up my mind. I've been worrying about this for nearly a week and it's good to decide. It's also good to see that so many girls are willing to make him happy. I WILL try to convince Mark that he shouldn't be lonely when I'm away, and even if I fail, I'll be glad that I tried. Whether or not Mark ever picks any of you is nothing I have any control over, but I wish you good luck. I like all of you and would be happy for you if Mark picks one of you." Julia picked up her bag, casually telling them, "We should have lunch again some day." Carol and I gathered our gear too. Nearly all of the girls very much wanted to know when their next lunch with us would be. They REALLY wanted to stay in contact. Several of them urged that we have lunch again tomorrow. Julia looked at me and said, "Do you have anything planned for lunch tomorrow, Mark?" Most of the girls were looking very hopefully at me. I'd barely said a word all lunchtime, and now they were almost salivating to get their hands on me, and mostly because Julia had said I wasn't available. No wonder I'd been so useless at picking up girls before, because I'd been assuming that guys got dates by asking girls for dates. Obviously girls didn't think ANYTHING like that. I didn't have any idea how they did think, but it clearly wasn't in a short, straight line. I gave the answer that Julia certainly expected, "I'm busy tomorrow. I'm having lunch with some of the faculty at OSU." "Okay, what about..." Julia was interrupted by one of the girls, Lily, asking, "Why you have lunch OSU, Mark?" (Lily is Chinese, with poor English.) Julia said, "He's doing some courses there. What about Friday, Mark, can you have lunch with this group then?" From several of the girls, "You're doing courses at OSU? I never knew that." | "Two grades AND college courses!" | "How can you be doing college courses before you're even a senior?" Julia called, "Girls, girls. There's no point in getting so excited every time you learn something about Mark. I promise you he's INCREDIBLE at EVERYTHING he does. From being a wonderful brother, through to being a wonderful lover. He's a genius at everything, not just schoolwork. Back to picking a lunch day. You're busy tomorrow, how about Friday?" Carol had her answer ready, so Julia's squeezing her arm was redundant. Carol said, "We're having lunch with some of my friends on Friday. I've already told several of my friends about it this morning and they're very excited about having lunch with Egg. Some of them were so excited they were wetting themselves. For 13- and 14-year old girls, Mark is irresistible!" The knowledge of their additional competition visibly worried today's group of girls. Julia said, "So Friday's busy. I've already talked to people in some of my other classes, mostly the girls, about having lunches with us like today. Today was for the first class that heard Mark's speech, but several other classes have heard it now and those girls want every chance they can get to socialize with Mark. I was planning to have lunches on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for those girls; three days because there's so many of them. Most of you will get to come to one or more of those lunches, as you're in those classes too. They won't be about sex as much as today was, as today only happened by accident. I don't know when we'll be able to talk about sex so openly again, not that it really matters because there's no shortage of girls throwing themselves at Mark." -- Julia asked me, "You had something already planned for next Thursday's lunch, didn't you?" "Yes. That's when I'm having lunch with a group of Donna's friends." Julia turned to explain to the girls around us, "If you didn't already know, Donna is Mark's youngest sister. She's twelve, almost thirteen. She's got a group of girls Mark calls 'Donna's Ducklings' because they're such a cute group the way they run around after him. If you think girls Carol's age find Mark irresistible, you should see the girls who're a year younger. They're SO incredibly eager to please. They'll do ANYTHING he wants, and melt in pleasure if he even just smiles at them." For the first time in this lunchtime, Julia wasn't wildly exaggerating or outright lying, as the Ducklings were much as Julia had said. It was nice that Julia told the truth for once, to reassure me that she hadn't totally forgotten how. I'd cringed a little though, as I intended the term "Donna's Ducklings" to be a purely internal name; a convenient title that we could use among ourselves. It was a bit derogatory and embarrassing, but there was probably no harm in telling these girls. It wouldn't do for it to get more widely known though. I spent a second or two worrying whether any of these girls had a younger sister who might be in Donna's group. But there was nothing I could do about it now, and it was fairly unlikely. If there was such a sister, let's hope the older one never mentioned "Ducklings" to her. To the depressed girls around us, Julia added, "That takes us to Friday next week. I know Mark likes to have lunch with groups of college girls sometimes, so we should probably keep that day open for that." It is true that I like to have lunch with groups of college girls sometimes. I've never done it, but I'd definitely like to sometimes. "So that's the rest of this week and all of next week already booked. I don't think there's any point in looking at the week after that, as I guess Mark will have decided by then. If he decides 'No', lunching with us won't be such a big deal to you anymore because you'll never have a chance of dating him. Once he decides 'No', there's not a single thing any of you could do to tempt him into changing his mind. If he decides 'Yes' before the week after next, then he'll already be having sex with whoever he feels like. So there's no point in picking a day for our next lunch." In a very upbeat tone of voice, Julia finished with, "You can see how incredibly lucky you all are, can't you?" The girls had been getting more and more depressed as day after day was crossed off, with every day adding more and more competition. By the end of the litany all the girls' hopes had been crushed. They KNEW they couldn't compete. So Julia's upbeat statement that they were "incredibly lucky" somewhat confused them. Not me though, as I'd decided Julia's plan was so feminine that it was pointless my thinking about it. Not thinking meant no confusion. One of the girls, who looked like she was deciding whether to go take an overdose of sleeping pills now, or wait to hear Julia's explanation first, eventually decided to ask/complain, "We're not lucky. I've got no chance at all." "You're the luckiest girls of all! Those others hardly ever get a chance to talk with Mark. He doesn't even know most of them exist let alone their names, but he sees you EVERY school day. They're having to resort to putting naked pictures of themselves into his locker to get his attention. Others might only have a chance to say one sentence to him a month, but you see him every day. You can dress sexily - not too sexily, Mark likes classy rather than slutty - you can be nice to him, smile at him and be around him far more than girls from any other grade or from college. If he starts picking girls, the girls near him the most often must have the best chances. You might have a chance if you treat him in a way that pleases him while I'm trying to persuade him to find another girlfriend. -- "Carol is the luckiest girl, of course, in having Mark as her brother. I'm the next luckiest. I still can't believe how lucky I've been! I go to bed some nights and I can't sleep because I fear my life is just a dream. I cannot believe that Mark can be real, or is really my boyfriend. I sometimes get so scared that I have to go wake my mother to ask her if Mark is real. But after me, you're all the next luckiest girls. You have better chances of Mark picking you than any other girls do. Not high chances, but still better than anyone else's. Remember that there are only two months left in school. Next year Mark will be jumping ahead of us into 12th grade and doing a lot more college courses, so you'll hardly ever see him. I recommend you don't waste valuable days being depressed. You've made an excellent start this lunchtime by dressing so nicely and being so openly interested in him. I'm sure he enjoyed having so many pretty girls being open about their interest in him." I nodded several times, recognizing that it was time for some honesty. Julia continued, "So take advantage of your headstart. After all, NO other girls know about this yet. The next few days are a perfect opportunity for you to capture his interest." The girls' states of mind had improved considerably, especially right at the end. From their very obvious reactions at the very end, they HUGELY liked the idea of having an unfair advantage over every other girl. Julia declared, "We really have to run now, this has taken far longer than I intended. Thanks for a fun lunchtime, everyone." I quickly added, as Julia was already starting to drag me away, "Yes. Thank you. It was fun and you were dressed very prettily." I thought "fun" and "dressed prettily" were both safe things to say, as Julia had said both of them more than once. Playing safe was something that I definitely wanted to do, as I was totally lost about Julia's strategy. Carol said, "Nice to meet you all. I hope I see some of you staggering out of my brother's bedroom some mornings." Carol must've had a different way of looking at it than me. Several "Goodbye" type comments were yelled after us, but the girls were just operating on automatic. They were standing around, looking somewhat lost and bewildered. Looking at each other and wondering what to say. The end-of-lunch bell would rouse them eventually. Julia, Carol and I quickly strode off, leaving them to think about their somewhat unusual lunchtime conversation. ------- Chapter 83: The Biffs Plea Bargain Wednesday, April 20, 2005 (Continued) We strode away quickly, and even with that Julia had difficulty holding in her mirth long enough to get out of earshot. She held it for as long as possible, and then it boiled out of her. "Keep walking," she gasped, "they can still see us." We half-carried Julia another few tens of yards, and Julia said, "Let's sit here. I have to laugh." We sat, and I held Julia while she got a good laugh out of her system. Carol laughed along too, but in a much more controlled fashion. I was still too confused to be able to laugh. Soon Julia was able to say, "I REALLY enjoyed that! I LOVE working for you, Mark. I get to do the craziest things, and they're so much fun! Those poor girls. I was taking them up, then crashing them down, then taking them up and down again, over and over again. They were SO lost." "They weren't the only ones!" Julia continued, "The part that I like the best was that almost everything I said was true." #1: I pointed out, "But almost everything you said was UNTRUE. That's why I didn't say much, because I had no idea where you were going next. You weren't constrained by reality, that's for sure!" Julia laughed, "Haha Mark. Almost everything I said was TRUE. I understand you couldn't follow me, because I was deliberately zigzagging up and down so THEY couldn't follow me. I'm sorry that made it harder for you and Carol. -- "Carol, you did wonderfully, by the way. I loved your 'staggering out of Mark's bedroom' goodbye. That was a wonderful image to leave them with. Your comment about not wanting naked photos in your locker was also a wonderful addition. You were wonderful, thank you." Julia leaned forward and kissed Carol, who happily kissed her right back. We were much closer to a lot more people than where we normally have lunch, and lots of them noticed. My girls' kiss lasted about five wolf-whistles and eight catcalls. I patiently waited for Julia's explanation about how a conversation that was 95% lies could be deemed "almost everything I said was true." I had plenty of patience as I was enjoying watching them kiss. -- Julia carried on, "Since Mark's first speech I've been thinking about working on the girls like that, but I'd been planning on doing it in a day or two and in class. I had an idea about what I'd say at the start of class, to plant the seed and make people interested; and then what to say to everyone after the teacher left at the end of the class. But when they asked about our getting married, it was such a golden opportunity. I'd completely forgotten that people will expect us to do that because I don't think about our GETTING married anymore. Another thing I really like is that I totally destroyed every expectation they had. Remember we were talking about expectations earlier, Mark?" "Yes. And I can confirm that you did an excellent job of destroying everyone's expectations, especially mine." Julia explained to Carol, "Just before lunch Mark and I were talking about how he gives girls unrealistically high expectations. A girl left a letter and naked photos in his locker just before lunch, and he's already texted her back saying he'll answer her letter this evening. So now he has to, even if we would all rather do something else." Carol said, "So those are the photos you were talking about. I'd never heard about any before. He got them just before lunch?" Julia nodded. "Haha, that's so funny. You made it seem like his locker gets swamped with them. You're so good at this Julia." I interrupted, "That reminds me, you never answered my question about how you thought you mostly said the truth." Julia said, "We don't have time to discuss that at length, so let's do it this way, 'Everyone put up a hand if you think I mostly told the truth'." Julia and Carol quickly put their hands up. Julia said, "You're outvoted. It was mostly the truth." "Hang on. I'm the Lord. How come I can get outvoted?" "Darling, you ARE our Lord. We WILL do anything you tell us to. But as wonderful as you are, your orders can't change a fact. If you told us the world was flat, we wouldn't believe you. Same with my bamboozling those girls with mostly the truth. You can't order us to believe it was mostly lies. You can't change facts. Sorry." I also can't win an argument with Julia. I felt like grumbling to myself that being a Lord wasn't all that good, but even my usual pessimism couldn't make me blind to the fact it was actually working out rather well so far, although very confusingly today. Julia assumed I agreed with her and resumed, "Back to expectations. Those girls have none left. They don't know how long it'll take you to make the decision, and I'm sure they've got no idea whether you'll decide yes or no, which is just so funny! Imagine fourteen eager, good looking girls being so confused about whether a teenage boy wants them or not, haha. Imagine if Mark treats them normally for the next couple of days, which is mostly to ignore them, but to be polite when they do interact. They won't know what it means, and they won't even know whether to be happy or unhappy. Then on Monday he asks one of them how her weekend was. She'd be thrilled, even over something that takes Mark just a few seconds to do. The important thing is that Mark is free to do as much or as little as he wants. If he decides he wants lunch with them one day, they'll fall all over themselves to join him, which is far better than scheduling an appointment that constrains us, especially as we don't care if a few miss out. They can't be pushy with him at all. Just a single frown from Mark or me would have them running away. 'Managing expectations' is such a great concept. I'm definitely going to think more about that." "Um, on the topic of treating them, how do I do that? What sort of things should I do or say?" "The absolute bare minimum! That's why I tried so hard to destroy their expectations for your actions toward them. You saw that with your text message to the new girl. If you do something, not only does it take time to do it, but it creates the expectation that you'll keep doing it in every similar situation forever after. When you don't, you feel you have to apologize for it, which wastes more time and creates a whole new expectation you have to meet in the future. Do as little as possible! Ideally treat them as you normally do, and only say something extra once or twice a day. That's NOT once or twice per girl, that's once or twice in TOTAL, across ALL fourteen girls. Having to do one or two things per girl would be a disaster if you had a hundred girls chasing after you. If you can, try to accept anything any of them do for you as perfectly ordinary and expected. If one of them held a door open for you, for example, just say 'Thank you' in a perfectly normal tone of voice, like you're just being polite. If you made a big deal about thanking her, she'll expect big deals every time she does something for you, and that'd be a disaster with a hundred girls all trying to do things for you. In other words, play it cool. Very, very cool. Okay?" "I understand. Having to run around making sure fourteen more girlfriends are happy all the time would be impossible. That's hard enough with just two." "I know you don't really mean that. You make us happy very, very easily. A good way of thinking about these girls is that it's THEIR job to make YOU happy, not the other way around. You don't even need to say anything special if they do their job because it is their job. Only if they do something exceptionally good should you go out of your way to compliment them. Otherwise, when it's convenient for you, just drop the occasional LITTLE comment, just to string them along and keep them happy. Do it whenever you feel like, but not in response to any of their actions, that way they can't create an obligation for you out of knowing when you should do it." Julia paused, and I took a few seconds to admire her skill at this stuff, and to make sure that I had her instructions memorized. I'd been so lost during the lunchtime conversation that I needed to know what to do from now on, or there was too much chance I'd mess up whatever Julia's strategy was. Julia added, "I should say that my overall plan is not to try to get any more girls ready for you. When the court case is over you can pick two or three girls, maybe out of these fourteen or maybe others. That's up to you. Take them to bed and fuck the eyeballs out of their heads! Give them so much pleasure that they're incoherent. We'll make sure their experiences become widely known." "Ahh, I'm confused about the whole sex thing, not to mention TOTALLY confused about how what you did to them could be called "getting them ready." But sticking to sex, I don't understand how you can just say "Take them to bed," like it was automatic, or something. Guys are always trying to get sex from girls and failing miserably at least 99.9% of the time. I was listening carefully, and none of them said they wanted sex with me. You repeatedly assumed it, but none of them confirmed it. When the trial is over, you're going to have to do a lot more work on them before one of them wants to have sex with me. Shouldn't you..." I stopped because Julia and Carol shaking their heads and giving me looks like I was an idiot. Julia explained, "First you didn't recognize that nearly everything I said was the truth, and now you can't see how eager they are to jump your bones. You must've fallen asleep and dreamed a different conversation. As soon as the trial is over, you'll see them leaping for joy and into your bed." Carol agreed, "You've got them in the palm of Julia's hand, Mark. I have to go in a second, but I've REALLY enjoyed today. Thank you very much, Julia. It was great fun to see you bamboozle those poor girls. I was scared to meet them and now I laugh that I helped confuse them so much. Is lunch with my friends still on for Friday?" Julia and I both agreed. "Good, thanks. I'll see you at our car after school. I love you, Mark," I got a one-second kiss on the cheek, "I love you, Julia." Followed by a twenty-second kiss on the lips with tongue and passion. There's something wrong with this world that a guy's girlfriend can kiss his sister better than he can. When I'm Emperor of the World that's the second thing to change, right after ensuring that there are only seven colors, none of which will be salmon, although I am tempted to decree the existence of an eighth color called trout. After Carol left, I asked Julia, "Are they REALLY eager to have sex with me?" "Absolutely. Didn't you see how excited they were?" "Mostly they looked horribly confused. Their brief moments of excitement were only about dating me, weren't they?" "It was about doing everything with you. With more experience, you'll start to understand girls better." #3: #1: #2: #1: First class after lunch would be interesting because it'd have most of the fourteen girls in it (our school schedules classes so most classes are at the same time every day, except some days when they're not, just to confuse things). Julia and I had a little time, so took turns accompanying each other to our lockers, and then we headed to class, with me reciting to myself, "play it cool, play it cool". I had no idea what, if anything, would happen, but whatever did would be followed by me playing it cool. As we approached the room, we could see a few of the girls grouped together in the hallway. They saw us coming and all turned to face us. Julia raised her hand and called out, "Hi." I gave my action considerable thought, finally deciding to raise my hand and call out, "Hi." If in doubt - and about the only thing I wasn't in doubt about, was that I was in doubt - following Julia's lead would be a good choice. As we approached closer to the group, I gave some thought to what I would say when we arrived. I decided to go with "Hi," but without my raising my hand this time, because sometimes I like to live life close to the edge. But as it happened, about ten yards short of the waiting girls Julia stopped and pulled me beside her against the hallway wall, where we leaned casually. Oh-so-casually. Julia was closer to the girls, and had her back to them as she was half-facing me. Which meant I could see them over top of Julia's head. Julia looked up and quietly asked me, "They confused?" I looked at Julia, watching the other girls out of the top of my eye. "Yep, they're confused all right. They're starting to talk among themselves about what to do." "Good." In a normal voice Julia asked, "So how does your soccer team normally do against Crescent Valley?" I don't think Julia has ever asked me a soccer question before, and her sudden interest in the topic now was obviously feigned. I could have said, "About even," but that wasn't what Julia was looking for. Instead I launched into a long-winded monologue of an answer, providing all sorts of reasons for our relative performances. She looked up, giving me her entire attention, which I was CERTAIN was feigned. I was still providing a very fascinating answer when the girls edged into our two-person group, their nominated spokesgirl to the fore. Before any of them spoke, something they were not quick to do, Julia said, "Excuse me, Mark. Don't forget where you're up to because I want to hear the rest of that." Turning to the girls, Julia said, "Hi?" I didn't know "Hi" could be a question, but apparently it can be if Julia wants it to. The sacrificial spokesgirl unhappily asked Julia, "Umm, everyone wanted to know why you didn't join us? If you don't mind us asking, that is?" Julia smiled happily. "That's perfectly fine. I understand that none of you have ever been in this situation before, so asking about something you're not sure of is a very intelligent thing to do." The no-longer-sacrificial spokesgirl breathed a sigh of relief. Julia explained, "Mark and I love each other, so we spend a lot of time talking alone together. I'm sure if Mark was your boyfriend, you'd want a lot of time alone with him, wouldn't you?" "Y-Yes." "That's the main reason. We like talking together. We didn't mean to slight you at all, nothing like that. We both enjoyed lunch. You enjoyed lunch, didn't you, Mark?" "Yes. It was fun and all the girls were dressed very prettily." "I enjoyed it too. It was good to finally make a decision about that problem and stop worrying about it. I was also feeling guilty that I did so much talking that Mark didn't have a chance to say much. I'm sure you've all noticed that he's normally a fairly quiet guy." They indicated that they had noticed that. "I try to be a very good girlfriend, so I was just taking advantage of the few minutes Mark and I had alone to talk with him about things that are important to him, like soccer. I don't know whether you know it or not, but he's by far the best player on his team, and he takes the game very seriously." Actually I treat it like a game, i.e., for fun, but there was no need to point that out now. -- "Mark is an incredible guy and deserves the best possible girlfriend, so I try VERY hard to be as good as I possibly can for him. You've," Julia's arm waved to indicate she meant the collective group, not just the spokesgirl, "interrupted that now, but that's okay because you didn't know any better. I like ALL of you - or I wouldn't have invited you to lunch - so I'm happy to explain. -- "There are a HUGE number of girls who want Mark. You heard about the 6th grade 'Ducklings', there are also a large bunch of Carol's friends, and every high-school grade all the way to 12. There are at least fifteen girls in this class who like Mark a lot. You can work out for yourselves how many classes there are in our high school, and how many girls that means are interested in Mark. I make it hundreds of girls who're attracted to him, and who want to talk with him. That's not counting the girls from college, Mark's various sports, and other places. It's impossible for him to talk with all of them as much as they want, especially because he's so busy doing 10th and 11th grades, plus college courses, plus being his soccer team's best player, and other things. Not to mention that I want to talk with him alone most of the time." Who knows how many girls they thought were interested in me, but I could see them think that their odds of getting romantic with me - I was still confused about what that meant for these girls - were vanishingly small. Not that anyone in my family will admit to understanding anything about odds, not anywhere near Mom anyway. Julia continued, "Mark likes talking to pretty girls, and you are all particularly pretty today, but he can't do it all the time. If we want to talk with you we can very easily walk over to join you, or wave at you to come over to us. If you're walking past, call out "Hello" or even stop for a quick chat if there is something real that you want to discuss with us, but be aware that Mark's time is much more precious than most people's. Certainly more important than mine, Carol's and yours too. If you watch him carefully you'll learn to tell when he's busy. If he's happy to see you and talk with you, you'll learn to recognize it in his face. I had to learn that too. When I first started going out with Mark I thought my time was just as important as his. I even tried to make him run around after me because girls SHOULD make their guys run around after them, shouldn't they?" That produced the desired laughter from the girls. They all knew how to make guys jump through hoops; that was one thing I knew was damned well covered in those secret classes females sneaked off to. (Both "damned-well covered", and "damned well-covered". English can sometimes be efficient. You can tell how often by the length of my autobiography.) "I've totally given that up now. I NEVER, EVER try to make Mark run around after me. That would be wrong. Instead I run around after Mark, doing everything I can do to help him. Just like me, any of you that want to be Mark's girlfriend will also need to change your attitude in that way." A guy and his girlfriend, Jane, who were in this class, were walking past us in the hallway. Jane stopped to ask, "What's that about 'want to be Mark's girlfriend'?" Her boyfriend stopped, backed up, and for some reason seemed unhappy at her interest in this topic. Julia laughed, telling her, "Ask any of these girls sometime." She looked over the group, memorizing faces. Then she gave into her boyfriend's tugging. They walked into class, while the boyfriend seemed to be intently talking to her about something. I chuckled to myself. One of the girls around us, not the spokesgirl, asked, "What do you want us to tell Jane?" Julia said, "The quick answer is 'anything you want'. Or nothing, if that's what you want. It's up to you. Just so long as it doesn't cause trouble for Mark. Mark doesn't have time to talk with every girl who's interested in him. I don't have time for that either. So here's your very first chance to do something for Mark: you can answer Jane's questions for us. That's what a good girlfriend to Mark would do, just like I'm doing now, to save Mark the bother of having to explain the same stuff over and over again. This is what I do: find ways to help the man I love. It's not the normal way we treat guys, is it?" One of the girls asked, "Don't you find that demeaning? I don't mean to be negative, but you sound so old-fashioned, from way back before women's lib had even been thought of." Julia said, "I think that's a very good question. One of the best any of you have asked today. Women's lib is the way the world should work. Men and women DO have equal rights, and men should never be allowed to TAKE rights from women. Mark has never taken anything from me. What he did was EARN an amazing amount of my respect. So I treat him in the way I know he deserves. Remember he let me fall in love and continue to have a relationship with Carol. Not only is there nothing in it for him, he loses a lot of my time with him. He knows I would instantly stop that relationship if he asked me to, but I know that he never will. You heard his speech so you know that he never will. Does he sound like a Male Chauvinistic Pig, or a loving, giving man who deserves our voluntarily given respect and best efforts to be good for him? Unlike any of the other boys you know, Mark TRULY does deserve the best from you." You'll be glad to know that no one thought I was a Pig. One of them, Lily, asked, "Mark is best at school, best at soccer, best at bed and best his speech! Mark very special above ordinary boys?" Julia answered, "Lily, you've got NO IDEA! He's so far above ordinary boys that they're ants compared to him. I don't have time to discuss that now, but I know what I'm talking about. I would like to get back to my discussion with Mark now, so can you please leave us?" Julia was distracted for the first few minutes of class, clearly worrying about something else. But after those few minutes, she suddenly sat up and gave class her full attention. The attentions of girls who'd had lunch with us were initially all over the map, but since Julia and I didn't acknowledge any of their looks they settled down. They weren't being flirtatious, but I guessed they would have happily responded if I'd been, once I'd worked out how. I noticed that Jane, the girl with the concerned boyfriend, looked at me and "The Girls" several times. She knew something was up and was trying to put it together from the clues given out by everyone during class. What was the chance Jane hadn't noticed that all "The Girls" were particularly well dressed today? "Dressed to impress a boy," according to what Julia had said at the beginning of lunch. As soon as class ended Julia leaned over and told me, "I have a small problem that I want to talk with you about. Let's have a talk outside." If Julia had a "small problem", then I was in big trouble. We were still packing our bags when one of The Girls approached us. We were now standing and hoisting our bags. Seeing that, she asked, "Do you have time for another question?" Julia answered, "Sorry, no." "Oh." To her credit she backed away, although that was probably mostly from the surprise rather than the "respect for Mark" that Julia had instructed them to have. Julia and I headed out. We went outside and stood far enough away from the paths to have some privacy from people overhearing us. Julia said, "I didn't foresee the problem that those girls are going to be generating an ENDLESS series of questions. The more we tell them, the more questions they're going to have. As they get to know you better, they're EACH going to want to ask you and me even more questions. Not to mention asking questions about how this unusual new relationship has to work. They've never had a relationship like this before, and they're bound to have lots of questions about it, but if we tell them nothing then they won't know how we want them to behave, so they'll say or do things we don't want them to. It's a mess, and there are so many of them." I agreed that we had a small problem. Adding, "I thought you might have a solution because you seemed to make up your mind about something two or three minutes into the class?" "I made up my mind to stop worrying about it and to talk with you about it after class. Unlike SOME people, I have to concentrate in class." "Oh." Julia said, "I had a couple of thoughts before I decided to concentrate on the class: -- "First, if you didn't have ANY girlfriends in your classes, just in other classes, we could avoid most of this problem. They still wouldn't know how we want them to behave, but we wouldn't be around them much so they wouldn't have many chances to be disruptive. They wouldn't intrude into our lives unless we specifically invited them in. That creates the problem of what to do with the dozen girls in the class we just had. -- "Second, I liked the way I could tell Jane to talk with one of the other girls. That was a quick and easy way to handle Jane, and everyone else that asks in the future. Maybe we should have a management structure, like a girl in every grade who is your intermediary. All the other girls would be directed to her first. That's effectively what you're doing with Donna and Carol, although that's happened naturally as it's their friends that want to meet you, and because they're all in middle school so don't have their own access to you. The leadership books talk about management structures often, but I didn't pay any attention to that topic when I read them. I do know, though, that having a structure solves some problems but creates others, like how to train all the managers, then how do you make sure they all keep doing the right things." Julia's thoughts were much better than any thoughts I'd had, and the gap widened when Julia added, "Whatever we decide, it should probably be soon, before it's too hard to undo whatever we've done with the girls that came to lunch with us." So not only did we have a "small problem", but we should solve it fast. Julia didn't help by adding, "Ideally we don't want to annoy the girls from lunch, as that could create an unpleasant class atmosphere, and they're nice girls." So not only did we have a "small problem", but we should solve it fast AND in a friendly manner. "Umm, maybe we could ask them to keep the questions to a minimum?" "We could, but the trouble is that you're too fascinating and unusual, so there's a lot for them to learn." #1: #3: #1, #2: <{Raspberry}.> Julia continued, "It's obviously silly for you to stop being fascinating..." #1: #3: " ... One option would be to make you overwhelming. Make them all so in awe of you that they were scared of approaching you. Your TK would be perfect for that, but that's obviously silly because we don't want to show that to a whole bunch of girls that we don't know nearly well enough to trust so much." Flashing through all my minds were images of my family being held hostage to force me steal diamonds from jewelry stores or be an assassin for the Government, not necessarily our one. "I agree." Julia continued, "Sooner or later some of those girls could get angry with you because you're not giving them as much attention as they think they deserve. They could try to cause some sort of trouble, so you definitely shouldn't let them into any important secrets, like your TK or relationship with Carol. Remember: 'There's nothing worse than a woman scorned'." "You don't have to convince me. I DEFINITELY don't want my TK becoming well known. My relationship with Carol too, of course." I thought about it for a while, but the only ideas I had all involved telling the girls "to put a lid on it": rationing them to five minutes of questions per day, or questions only via a nominated spokesgirl, or similar. All variations on a restrictive theme. After a couple of minutes Julia said, "I can't think of a good solution. Either they all plague us with questions, or we get them annoyed by shutting them out. It'll get worse as the number of them grows too. Can you think of a solution?" I couldn't and told her so. I did think that my life would be easier if Julia left me out of decisions about my life. Julia said, "Oh well. We'll just have to stall them for the rest of the day then. Pity. You're coming to my home after school aren't you?" "I guess so. I haven't thought that far ahead yet. I guess I have to, don't I? To decide what to do about Ava." "Ahh, Ava. I'd forgotten about her. Yes, Ava too. I'm looking forward to reading her letter. That'll be interesting." "What about her photos? Aren't you interested in seeing those?" "I'm interested in seeing her face to see if I recognize her, but I know you're really asking about her body. I'm sure she's got a good body. She wouldn't have given you those photos if she didn't. Beyond that it doesn't really matter." I asked, incredulously, "You really don't care whether she's tall or short, blonde or brunette, well endowed or not, or any of that?" "No, not really." "Ahh, you do realize that she could become our lover, don't you?" "Sure. They're mostly for your fun, but I expect to be involved sometimes." "And you don't care what her body is like?" "Not really." #2: Julia, seeing my expression, added, "Haha. Sometimes you're such a typical male, Mark..." #3: " ... Sometimes you're incredibly mature and wonderful, and other times so typical. Once you've had enough girls you'll learn that their bodies don't really matter." #1: Julia laughed some more, then said, "I love you, Mark..." #3: " ... I'll see you after class." "Hang on. What are we going to do about all the questions from the girls." "Just stall them until tonight. Tell them you're busy, or answer some questions if you want, but mostly just put them off for the rest of the day." "But what'll we do tomorrow? The problem won't go away overnight." "We'll do whatever Mom suggests. If I can't think how to fix a problem I always ask Mom or Dad. Mom usually. That's what parents are for. That and providing soundproof bedrooms and VERY flexible clothing allowances, haha." "You're going to ask your mom? Seriously?" "Sure. That's what I always do when I'm stuck. I'm sure she'll know what to do." The amazing thing is that I was sure too, even though I had no idea why I possessed that certainty as I doubted Vanessa had never come across such a situation before! I even felt silly not thinking of asking her myself. If you can't ask the mother of your girlfriend the easiest way to manage fourteen more girls that you want to seduce, who can you ask? Which reminded me of something else, "At lunch you said you sometimes wake your mom to ask her whether I'm real. Was that true, or were you just feeding them a nice line?" "It was true. I told you most of what I said at lunch was true." Somehow that wasn't very convincing. "I accept that you're real now, but in the first week or two I did wake Mom several times. We'd have a good cry, and I'd go back to bed." I was stunned. Both at how weird females are, and especially at how weird females are. Julia pulled my head down for a very nice kiss. After which she said, "You're unbelievable, Mark, and some nights I couldn't believe you were real. I'm adapting though, even though you still perform one or two new miracles every day." "Huh? I don't think so. The last miracle I can think of was showing you TK, and that was a couple of weeks ago." Julia shook her head. For those of you not familiar with female body language, I'll translate: "You've just said something so much more foolish than normal that I can't find the words to describe it, but I will soon." Soon didn't take long; Julia found the words, "You told me late last night that you are now suddenly incredibly good at soccer. Much, much better than you were before, which was already very good. That sounds miraculous to me, unless you were exaggerating, and I've NEVER heard you exaggerate about yourself." "Umm, okay. But it's not really a new miracle. I'm just using something I've had for a while in a new way." "In an entirely new AND MIRACULOUS way. Every time Jesus laid on hands to cure someone, it was called a miracle, even though he was repeating the same thing every time. Yours is a NEW miracle. Then there's your speeches. Then there's your being able to bowl 300 after practicing for fifteen minutes." "Hang on. My speeches weren't a miracle. I was just talking. Anybody can talk. Most people do it too much." "Haha, I agree with that. I was referring to the CONTENT of your speeches rather than to your ability to make sounds with your mouth. Your speeches blew away class after class. Girls were crying all over the place. You even got some of the guys to grow up, and us girls have been unsuccessfully trying to find out how to do that for years. Centuries probably. It WAS a miracle that a 15-year old boy could do that. Then there was your getting your license yesterday, even though you'd almost never driven a car before and you had the 'Examiner from Hell'. That's four miracles I've learned about in just the last two days. Do you want me to go back further?" "Ahh, no. I'm sorry I asked about your waking your mom now." "Isn't it wonderful? She's so happy for me." I was sure my mom would also have been happy to be woken "several nights" to be asked whether Julia was real - NOT! If I'd done that, there would have been tears all right: mine. We had to run to get to our classes on time. I wondered if I could get the Principal to lengthen the gap between classes since I was having trouble fitting all the conversation I needed into just ten minutes. Of course he'd have to do it by shortening class time, as the alternative - delaying when we could go home - would instantly turn me into the most hated kid at school. Not exactly a good way to impress the panties off girls. My next class, which I didn't share with Julia, had a few of the lunch girls in it. Lily approached me as soon as the class ended. She nervously asked me, "I have idea for help you. Okay tell you?" Hard to say "Go away, I'm busy" to that, and she did look quite nervous. I was about to say, "Of course," but caught myself in time. I didn't want them to think that they could "of course" talk with me whenever they thought they had a good idea. It's hard work being a boss; you have to be on your toes the whole time. The perks can be good though. Presuming I ever get them. I struggled a little bit thinking what to say. "You may," was my Plan B, but that sounded far too formal. I ended up going with the good, old, "Okay." She said, "You miss this class sometimes. I take notes for you?" Not a bad idea at all (it wasn't English. God knows what Lily's Engrish notes would be like!). The teachers all give me, or leave in my mailbox at the office, their class notes. Those aren't ideal though, as teachers often digress during class, in response to a student's question, for example. Having the class notes would be good. I had to admire Lily's attitude too. "Good idea, Lily. Thanks." She smiled happily. I thought to add, "If you want to, you can take your notes to the office and use one of their photocopiers to copy them. Just make sure you tell them it's for Mark Anderson and they'll let you do it for free." "They will? I not think students can copy there." "If it's for me, they will. Don't try to do any for anyone else, or for yourself, but for me is fine." "Okay." "There's a mailbox with my name on it in the office too, so you can drop the notes in there, or give them to me next time I see you, whichever you want." She said, "I give to you." Of course she would; silly me. I remembered one of Julia's techniques, so I said, "Good girl." Then I remembered that Julia had also told me to only praise them if they'd done something exceptional. I couldn't un-say it, and I was saved from having to decide whether it was "exceptional" enough to deserve even more praise, by Lily's thanking me and walking away happily. Who'd have guessed that it was so easy to make girls happy. I made a mental note to tell Julia about Lily's offer. Julia would be pleased. And another mental note to ask the office ladies whether it was okay for other students to photocopy notes for me. I was pretty sure it would be because the teachers photocopied all their notes for me to put in my mailbox, and I knew the Principal was under pressure to keep me happy, but it'd be best to make sure. ^ At 2:45pm, on Wednesday, April 20, 2005, an event occurred that I'd been longing for. It started with my cellphone vibrating with an incoming text message. While still concentrating on the class, and concentrating on the other class's textbook that I had open, I extracted my cellphone so I could concentrate on that too. Sounds good, doesn't it? If I'd had three eyes it could have been entirely true. Luckily Teach was just talking, so that freed up an eyeball. The text message was from Mom and said: "Trial canceled. All accused plea bargained. Ask Carol if she wants us or J to find a big bed?" Sex! I can have sex wherever I want! Julia's home, my home. Anywhere, anytime! Yippee! "Mark! Mark!" Huh? Oh. I was standing in class, waving my cellphone around high over my head, with my latest "Yippee!" still echoing around the room. "Oh. Sorry. I just got some good news." The teacher said, "I think we got that. Anything you can share with the class, now that you have everyone's attention?" Not what I was celebrating about, that's for sure, but maybe the trial? Probably all the class knew about the assaults and know that there was a trial coming soon, but they wouldn't understand my overreaction to the plea bargains. So I just said, "Ahh, not really. Sorry. It's just a family matter." I sat down and concentrated on none of the previous items I'd been concentrating on. I wanted to go tell Julia and Carol, but I imagined their teachers would take a dim view of my entering and disrupting their classes to tell some news that would cause further disruption due to the girls' elation. School would let out soon, so I decided to wait. "Soon" took a hell of a long time. I sat in my seat, fidgeting, and not hearing a word the teacher was saying. Sleeping with Carol or Julia every night, and both of them sometimes, how FANTASTIC was that going to be! I even had to do some go-softs, and it'd been a while since any of those had been necessary in class. Fifteen minutes before the end of class I couldn't stand sitting (hehe, English is silly) any longer. I packed up and was outta there. I wanted to wait outside someone's classroom, either Carol's or Julia's. I dithered over that, while running to the office to clear my mailbox and ask the ladies about the photocopier, which got an, "Okay, as long as it's class notes for you and not too often." I decided to meet Julia, mostly because I already knew her schedule and where to meet her. I would've had to get the office ladies to look up Carol's schedule for me. Also because I worried somewhat about Carol's girlfriends all wanting to talk with me. I just wanted to get Julia, Carol and me back to Julia's bedroom as fast as possible, to begin celebrating. I ran to the hallway outside her classroom, and paced up and down impatiently. I texted Carol, "Good news. Meet at car FAST after class." The INSTANT the bell rang, I opened the door and rushed in to hurry Julia. She saw me coming and asked, "Good news?" as I was still approaching, so she must've seen the look of joy on my face. I already had my cellphone in hand, with Mom's text displayed. I silently put it in front of her eyes. She read it, then leaped to her feet yelling for joy. Nearly everyone was still in the room and they stopped to look at her, as she did a great job of making a complete fool out of herself. How embarrassing for her. She threw her arms around me, squealing and kissing me. Sometimes both at the same time. Then she yelled, "Come on, we've got to get out of here." As if I was the one holding her up! Actually I was, so I put her down. We were outta there in seconds. We arrived at the car only a few seconds before Carol. She came running up, calling ahead, "What's the good news?" I showed her Mom's text. Screams of happiness, which Julia joined in with just to keep Carol company. The girls did lots of jumping up and down, squealing, waving of hands in the air, and that sort of thing. I wondered if they knew how embarrassing they looked. An overjoyed Carol threw her arms around my neck and mashed her lips hard against mine. It took a few seconds for one of our minds to say, I tried to pull back, which was easier said than done too. As soon as I got some separation I warned, "We're in public." "I don't care. I finally get to sleep with you every night." I looked around in panic, as you do when your sister proudly declares your incest in public. Fortunately no one was close enough to hear. This is a noisy place when school lets out. I said, "We've got to get out of here!" The two girls instantly and enthusiastically agreed. I ran around to the driver's door while the two girls argued over who was going to sit in the front seat next to me. Each wanted the other to have the honor. Good grief! Who the hell cared? In minutes we'll be naked and all over each other. Why hold up the celebration to worry about who sat in what seat for a few minutes? I was around the car and in the process of sitting when Julia won. The girls piled in and Julia said, "Hurry up, we don't have much time." I thought we had the rest of our lives, but I wasn't going to go slow to prove the point! I was backing out of our parking lot when Carol exclaimed, "What about Donna!" Argh! And oops! I'd forgotten I had two sisters. So much for being Donna's favorite brother. I quickly re-parked in case Donna came and saw that we were about to leave without her. As soon as the car was parked again, I started muttering, "Come on Donna, come on." I got out and paced beside the car so I could wave her to run as soon as I saw her. She still didn't appear, so I walked several yards toward where she'd come from, so I could intercept her earlier. Donna's normally pretty quick, but today "pretty quick" equaled "took FAR too long". When she came into sight I frantically signaled to for her to hurry. She was jogging already, but I knew she could easily go twice as fast as that! "Come on, Donna!" "What's the hurry?" "I'll tell you in the car. Come on, run!" I ran back to the car and was starting it up while Donna was getting in. (No one tell Prof please.) I had my belt on already, and was pleased to see Julia get Donna to attach hers, Donna being too focused on trying to find out what the hurry was. Carol said, "The trial's canceled, so we can all have sex now. We've got to hurry so we can buy a bed before the stores shut." #1: Julia said, "No. Buying Mark some new clothes is more important!" What the hell! I checked with my ears, asking them to confirm what Julia had just said. They swore they'd heard her correctly, but it made no sense AT ALL. How can Julia POSSIBLY think of clothes shopping at a time like this! Carol said, "But we need to get a bed. I want to sleep with Mark VERY badly!" At least the second thing Carol had said made sense, unlike Julia's insane ramblings. Julia said, "They won't have time to deliver one today, and both of you can sleep with me the next few nights anyway." Carol said, "Oh, that's right! So why do we need to buy Mark new clothes?" #2: "Many reasons. Mainly because I can't stand the way Mark dresses. It's totally inappropriate for him to dress so badly. He's got an incredible body and he should be dressing to impress, not depress. People should be stunned when he walks past. We're allowed to start our plan to get him sleeping with other girls now, and the first step of that must be to get him to dress properly. We only need two outfits to last until Saturday, so it won't take long to get them. The stores close soon anyway. We've got ALL night together, and Mark can fuck us more than we can handle anyway, so can we PLEASE buy you some clothes on the way home? PLEEEZE DARLING? It won't take long, I PROMISE!" Julia was hanging on the back of my seat and damned near crying on my shoulder. I knew she took clothes shopping seriously, but FOR GOD'S SAKE! "It'll only be for an hour, then you can take us home and do ANYTHING you want to our bodies, over and over again." I wanted to start doing that NOW! Carol said, "It would be good to see him dress properly." #1: Julia said, "I already know the best store to go to. Park on SW 3rd Street, south of town, about where the stores run out, PLEEZE?" I had a choice between clothes shopping with Julia, or having pent-up, wild sex with two gorgeous girls who'd do anything I wanted, "over and over again". And Julia's pathetic begging made me cave. I agreed to go clothes shopping, demonstrating that I was even more pathetic than Julia. Sigh. I turned toward 3rd Street. Clothes shopping, for Chrissakes! A very excited and happy Julia thanked me repeatedly. I was glad someone was excited. It sure wasn't me anymore. Julia was gushing, "Thank you. Oh thank you. You're so wonderful to me. I'll make it up to you, promise." #2: Carol turned around to ask Julia, "Do you have anything in mind?" "I've got EVERYTHING in mind. I know EXACTLY the look to go for." "What? What?" Said an increasingly excited Carol, proving that insanity is contagious. Julia leaned forward to whisper the answer into Carol's ear. It took about thirty seconds, during which I could see Carol get even more excited and happy. And I got more worried. People whisper to avoid being overheard. Who did Julia not want to hear what she was intending to buy me? Me or Donna were the only two choices. I feared I knew the answer, hence my worry. Julia repeating the whispered description to Donna didn't exactly cheer me up either. It did remind me though, "Hang on, we'd better drop Donna home first." "No way! I want to see this," from Donna. | "We don't have TIME!" from Julia. | Carol just chuckled. It sounded like an evil chuckle to me, although maybe I was just paranoid. Carol asked, "What colors are you thinking of?" I assumed she wasn't talking to me. Why would she be? Just because we were shopping for MY clothes certainly wasn't a sufficient reason. I did recognize some of the colors Julia mentioned, but not many. I decided to honor Prof's cautions, and allocated all of my minds to driving carefully. Leaving none to listen. Or, to put it another way, I sulked. ------- Chapter 84: Shopping at "Raging Rocky's Rags" Wednesday, April 20, 2005 (Continued) I parked on the street roughly where Julia wanted. All the girls got out and I followed very reluctantly, still in disbelief that we were going shopping rather than to bed. With Donna walking impatiently behind us, and my least favorite wives holding an arm of mine each, Julia and Carol dragged me toward wherever it was we were going. No one had bothered to tell me. Why would they? We entered a men's clothing store that I'd never been in before. It was in a small building on the very fringe of the shopping area of town, and had a sign saying "Discreet Men's Clothing", so it wasn't the sort of place I'd normally go in. I much preferred the large, chain stores. Inside it looked even less like the normal places I shopped. Almost nothing like them, except that there were clothes on display, but they sure weren't displayed the same way as in the usual places. Rather than nice big piles or racks of each size and color, where you can easily locate what you want, this had single items "discreetly" displayed in various nooks and cubbyholes, on manikins that were in corners so you couldn't see them properly, and almost nothing was well lit. Don't ask me why a store - which is surely trying to sell its stock - displays it as discreetly as possible. Given the logic of its layout, I presumed it must be run by a woman. [I was half-right.] I started examining the first few items I came across. I don't know what I was examining them for, but that's what you do when you get dragged into a store by someone else. Julia grabbed my arm and pulled me farther in, "We don't have time for that." We had more than an hour until the store would close, but getting back to Julia's quicker than that was very fine by me. We were approached by the single other person in the store, presumably the owner or staff. That there were no other customers was hardly surprising, as the whole store barely had fifty pieces of clothing for sale. I wasn't impressed by the look of him either, as he was wearing clothes I wouldn't be seen dead in. "Hi. How can I help you?" Julia answered, "My boyfriend needs two outfits that'll have girls creaming their panties when he walks past." It went downhill from there. "I want tight, soft pants that really mold his ass and package to show them off. Tight on the thighs too. A shirt that shows off his shoulders and chest, just like the one you're wearing..." No wonder Julia had whispered in the car, it was horrifying! I would've run for the door, but there was a wife firmly holding each of my arms. Suddenly that previously enjoyed sensation had a malevolent intent. The assistant said, "Let's see what we've got to work with." Both girls let go and stood back. They kept looking at me. #1: Julia said, "Come on, Mark. We don't have much time." "Huh?" "Start stripping, please." "HUH! We're in the middle of a store! Anyone could come in. I'm not stripping here." "Just down to your shorts. I'm sure he's seen it all before." He (and I use that word loosely) said, "Always happy to see it again though." #3: By now Julia was removing my jacket and Carol was unbuttoning my shirt. Donna was in charge of providing the giggles. Julia told the ASSistant, "He's very modest, sorry." Why she had to apologize to him, for that virtue of mine, completely escaped me. I was of the opinion that if anyone should be apologized to, it should definitely be me! As my chest came into view the assistant's notice was suddenly captured, "Well look at you! Aren't you a hunk?" #1: <"Thank you. Coming from you that means so much." Argh!> As my shirt was forced from my body, he said, "What a bod; you're gorgeous!" He turned to Julia and said, "He's your boyfriend?" Julia nodded. "Damn. All the best ones are taken." All but the only male in the room thought that was funny. Donna was particularly enjoying herself. "Shoes and pants please, darling." Darling thought it was time to make a stand. "No way am I taking my pants of in public! Someone could come in at any time." Nancy - as I had decided to call 'him' - said, "I'll lock the door. We don't get many customers at this time on a Wednesday anyway." Imagine my surprise! While Nancy was going to do that, I whispered to Julia, "He's totally gay!" Julia explained, "I know. That's why we came here. This is his store." Nancy returned before I could even begin to untangle Julia's thought processes. Assuming she had any beyond, "Where can we take Mark to cause the maximum possible embarrassment." Nancy asked, "I've locked the door and flipped the sign. You should be comfortable now." #1: The girls had my shoestrings undone by now, and wanted me to lift my feet. I did so, but couldn't take the next step. I told Julia, "I'd be MUCH more comfortable using the dressing room to try on any pants you want me to." I turned to Nancy, asking, "You do have a dressing room, don't you?" "Naturally." #3: Julia said, "We don't have time for all that back and forth, Mark. We have to get TWO outfits and we've only got an hour. Besides, he has to measure you properly. I know you won't know your sizes, do you?" I WISH I could remember my size as I sure didn't want Nancy measuring me! I suggested to Julia, "You could measure me." "Don't be such a sissy." ME! The inaccurate targeting of that epithet left me speechless. Nancy said, "I'll get the tape." He was back in a second, far less than the hour I'd been hoping for. I surrendered to the inevitable, and raised my hands so he could measure my waist. If his hands didn't behave themselves, I'd ... I didn't know what I'd do. Probably slap his face. He measured my waist. His hands touched me, but no more than necessary. That was a relief. I could have done without the long, drawn out whistle though. Nancy expressed his admiration for my physique yet again, "Incredible. You must live in a gym. How come I've never seen you in any?" Julia answered before I could, "We have a gym at home." "I admire your dedication." Just what I needed, another thing about me for him to admire. Nancy continued, talking to Julia, "He needs custom-made clothes. That waist alone cries out for them. Stock shirts aren't going to flatter his shoulders and waist properly. We do custom-made clothes here, you know?" Julia said, "Yes, I know. That's one of the reasons we came here. Can you measure him properly now?" "I'll get my pad." Nancy got it, wrote down my waist measurement, then proceeded to measure my chest, shoulders, arm length, collar and even the length of my torso. When he had those all recorded he stood back, saying, "I need you to remove your pants." "Why?" Julia said, "So he can measure your inside leg." "What's that?" "Just how long your leg is. It won't take long." That sounded harmless, so I surrendered to more of that inevitable stuff, and removed my pants. There was one thing I knew I didn't have to worry about, I was damned sure my cock was going to be the softest and most inconspicuous it had EVER been! "Inside Leg" turned out to be an incredibly, misleadingly, innocuous phrase. Sure it SOUNDS harmless, but it is NOT! "{YELP!}," as I did my best to levitate vertically out of contact with his hand. I was again told, "Stop being a sissy." Fortunately that measurement was soon finished, and Nancy did behave himself; it'd just been the shock of it that caused my reaction. Maybe he'd behaved himself because he'd picked up on my subtle "I'm not comfortable" body language. Nancy returned the pad and tape to his counter, then came back to us. He said, "We really need to change his style of underwear. Those do nothing for him." #1: Julia asked, "What do you recommend?" Nancy checked, "You want him to impress, right?" "Definitely." "With what he's got on now his tackle just dangles down between his legs, which is pointless, haha. We sell a range of men's underwear which pulls forward and raises a little, so it creates a very proud outline." Julia said, "That sounds perfect." #2: Before I could comment further, even internally, about the degree of imperfection involved in my 'tackle' being proudly outlined, the situation worsened dramatically. Julia said, "Grab a pair please, we'll try them on now." #1: #2: #3: Nancy returned, smiling damned too much. "Here you are, handsome." #1: <{Groan}. What do we do now?> Donna knew what to do: giggle EVEN more. Julia said, "Get changed in the changing room, Mark." For a moment I thought , but I quickly corrected that! Nancy pointed to the changing room, and I made my escape, happy to be out of the center of attention for a while. Unfortunately the changing room didn't have a window that I could escape out of. Unfortunately again (there's a lot of "unfortunately" going on recently), the underwear made me look indecent. My cock really was pushed forward and made to stick out more. The underwear's front panel was thin and molded itself to the shape of my cock, making far too much anatomical detail obvious. Unfortunately I got the expected response when I called out, "It's no good. I'm changing back into my other pair." "Come out and show us." "NO WAY!" Julia had a different opinion. Donna particularly enjoyed watching closely as I did a slow twirl in the middle of the store. Everyone LOVED them. (When I write "Everyone", I'm referring only to the people whose opinions were considered. I wasn't in that group.) There was a mirror nearby so I got a look at myself. Good grief! They'd looked indecent from a top-down glance, but they looked positively obscene in a mirror. Correction: "I looked obscene." No wonder Donna was staring so intently. The three pieces of my anatomy were clearly outlined and visible. Not to mention lifted forward proudly. Groan. Nancy said, "He's got VERY nice ass too." Julia, Carol and Donna agreed. Julia said, "Stop studying yourself, Mark. You can do that at home. Come over here so we can discuss how to dress you." "'Quickly', would be very good. 'Completely' too please." I had my faithful, decent, comfortable, much-missed, old underwear bunched up in one hand. I walked to where my clothes were to put the underwear into a pants pocket. Nancy said, "You move very well too. Are you a dancer?" "No." I was saying as little as possible. I certainly didn't want to encourage him to ask me personal questions. "Have you ever thought about being a male model?" Donna giggled. She was have a GREAT time! Julia said, "He has a problem with modesty." #1: "Pity," said Nancy sadly. "Let me know if you change your mind. I know some people and you could earn a good living." I said, "No thanks." And then kicked myself for thanking him for embarrassing me again. Julia and Nancy started discussing clothes in more detail than I knew existed. How on Earth did Julia become an expert on MALE clothing? She knew even more than I did, which made no sense. Carol came over and hugged herself close into my arm, leaned on my shoulder and whispering to me, "You'll look very good, Mark. Thank you for doing this. You're making Julia and me very happy." I felt slightly less terrible after that, but it was very much a relative thing. Nancy noticed us, then asked Julia, "I thought he was your boyfriend?" Julia answered, "If you looked like that, how many girlfriends would you have?" "Haha. None, but I know what you mean. I don't know why he's modest. He's got nothing to be modest about." Julia agreed, "The two of us think so too." "Three," called out Donna. Nancy chuckled, then returned to his technical discussion with Julia. I stood there, effectively worse than naked. A couple of minutes went past, and I started getting even more uncomfortable, and that's coming after a considerable level of prior discomfort. "Can I put some clothes on while you're talking please? I don't like standing around like this." Nancy said, "I think we've got some ideas for you to start trying on." I didn't want to "start trying on ideas", I wanted to buy the two outfits we came in for, then go home. No one asked me though. Nancy started gathering the "ideas". It turns out that he had a great deal of stock in the back. Why he didn't display it all in the store so people could see it and buy it, I'll never know. I was passed a pair of pants and a shirt. I put them on eagerly, not only to be wearing something, but also because hopefully this would be my first outfit, and then we'd be halfway done. Nancy suggested, "With those he really should be wearing G-string underwear." Julia said, "Yes." I said, "Hell NO! I'm not wearing girls' underwear for nobody." Nancy laughed, "I was talking about MEN'S G-string underwear. We sell it here. I'll get you a pair." He headed in that direction, but I yelled out, "No way! Whether you stock it or not, I'm not wearing it. It's absurd. Guys don't wear G-strings!" "Sure they do. I'm wearing a pair now." #2: #3: I cannot stress too strongly, how strongly I stressed, "I DON'T!" "Pity, you've got such a nice tush." Fortunately he cut short his trip to the rack of cut short shorts. I quickly finished putting on my hopefully first outfit. The girls all said things like, "Wow", "Awesome", "That's so hot!" and a few more (they were taking turns and going around more than once). Carol spoke the most complete description, "Mark, you look wonderful. You look SO much better than you normally dress. It's almost impossible to believe you're the same guy." Julia called out, "Rocky! Come and have a look at Mark now." #1: #3: Nancy (I'm going to keep using "Nancy" as it suits him-ish FAR better) came in from the back, looked at me and whistled. I wished he'd stop that! He said, "Very, very nice. Go on, give us a twirl." I calmly, and with great dignity, deliberately turned in a slow circle. Carol said, "His cock looks great from the right angles." "Don't it just," agreed Nancy. Donna giggled. I didn't reply, trying desperately to hang on to my last, tiny shred of dignity. Several more compliments were made. Nancy came over and stuck his hand down my pants, which came as a considerable surprise! Fortunately I recognized the movement before I punched him out, as Mom has done it to me many times. Nancy hefted the waistband in and out a couple of times, saying, "It's almost impossible to get stock pants that will fit his waist. These are fairly stretchy, but they're still not coming in enough to form to his waist. (Yes, I was wearing stretchy pants; something I was rather hoping wouldn't be mentioned. Go on, have a good laugh.) Julia said, "Yes, I expected that. Mark and I will be shopping Saturday morning, so we'll come to discuss that with you then. You'll be here on Saturday, won't you?" "Sure will be. It's a date." #1: Nancy added, "Mark really needs to wear a belt with these pants. Do you want me to find a suitable one?" Julia said, "No need. We won't be taking them. Do you have a pair where the..." and they drifted off into technical issues again. #2: I was prompted to strip again, and was offered another pair of pants. Nancy pointed out, "These are linen," which was really good to know. #2: #3: #4: And so we entered the serious business of trying on outfit after outfit after outfit. I handled more pants than I have cumulatively owned in my entire life, with matching shirts, in a multitude of combinations. Eventually, although "Eternally" would be a better description, we reached the point where we only had fifteen minutes left before the stores closed, and there'd been absolutely no indication of any progress being make at all. Not a single shirt, belt, or anything else had been chosen, except for the underwear I was wearing, which I hardly considered "progress". Instead there were piles of clothes all over the place. I even felt a little sorry for Nancy, although not as sorry as I felt for myself. Not even close. I gave it another five minutes, then tapped my watch at Julia. Julia looked at hers, and said, "Oh my, look at the time. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun." #2: Nancy said, "There's no hurry. I can stay another hour or two. This is fun." Which confirmed my opinion of Nancy's lack of masculinity. It was also EXTREMELY unwelcome! I think Julia might have noticed the thunderous scowl on my face. She said, "I think Mark is running out of patience, so we'd better wrap it up." She'd gotten her tense wrong in the first half of her sentence, but the second half more than made up for it. Within a couple of minutes Julia and Carol had extracted a short list of possible choices. It was a very short list, compared to the number of clothes I'd tried on. I tried the very short list on again, and wonder-of-wonders, the final two outfits were decided on. #1: #3: <{Groan}.> The decision made, I started changing into my original clothes. Julia said, "Hang on, we just need to accessorize. Can you put that," indicating one of the chosen outfits, "back on please." #1: "What's accessorize and how long does it take?" Julia answered, "We need to choose belts, shoes and socks. We've only got time to look at the belts here now, but we'll look at the shoes and socks on Saturday. Yours existing ones will have to do until then, unfortunately. We also have to do something about that watch. Taking it off would be a good start." I couldn't really argue about the watch. Even I knew it was pretty bad, which probably means it was a great deal worse than that. There was no need to worry about the other things though. I told Julia, "I've got a belt. It's in my pants over there. And I've got plenty of socks at home." That hope was crushed. You'd have thought that the function of a belt - holding up pants - would've been perfectly well performed by the belt I already had. I'd never had any of my pants fall down accidentally, so I knew it worked fine. But apparently I was wrong. I had to try on each outfit again, and everyone else collectively chose the right belt for each. Yes, you read that right, TWO belts were required. Now I had THREE, which was clearly ridiculous. Fortunately the decisions didn't take long. I should describe the final outfits. The first outfit was embarrassingly tight and revealing, molding itself to the shape of my muscles and other parts. The second outfit was VERY embarrassingly tight, molding and revealing. The first pair of pants were "charcoal" and made of a material similar to - or perhaps the same as, for all I knew - the "linen" ones I mentioned earlier. It CLUNG everywhere that Julia wanted it to. Apparently my ass looked "irresistible" in it, which was good to know. I'm not being sarcastic because it truly was good to know: now I knew to stand with my back to walls as much as possible. The shirt was some sort of dark blue. They didn't call it that, of course, as that would've been understandable. It was thin, tight and "heavily tailored". I'd always thought tailors were the people who made clothes. Which, I guess, meant my shirt was either made by a fat tailor, which I doubted was the meaning, or was "heavily made", which was especially confusing as it was made of a very light material. On the other hand, it made as much sense as everything else here. The shirt didn't even have buttons all the way up; only about two-thirds of the way. It tightly hugged my waist, torso and chest, until it opened at the top to display a lot more of my chest than I'd ever unbutton a normal shirt to. It had very short, and tight sleeves, only about two inches long. It barely had a collar at all, even more abbreviated than the sleeves. I would have been embarrassed about displaying so much chest, but I knew most people wouldn't noticed, being too busy laughing at my clearly visible tackle. And that was the LEAST embarrassing of the two outfits. The second outfit was a pair of tight, dark pants. TIGHT! Stretchy material that had very little stretch left. And a tight, white, muscle T-shirt. Not really a T-shirt, as there were large parts of it missing. It wasn't even close to being long enough to reach the top of my pants, let alone tuck in, and instead of sleeves there were just huge armholes. The girls - including Nancy - thought I looked like a "real hunk". I thought I looked like a narcissistic, homosexual thug. I'd undressed YET again, and was making another desperate attempt to put on my original clothes, when Julia said, "Put this outfit on please," indicating the first, least overly embarrassing one, "I want to show Mom and Dad when we get home." I reached to comply as by now I was operating in 'obey automatically' mode, my spirit having been totally crushed. I suddenly realized something. "Julia, you said these outfits are to last me to the weekend. You want me to wear them to school, don't you? One tomorrow and the other on Friday." Nancy's ears picked up at that, "School?" I ignored him. Julia answered me, "Yes, that's right." I said, "I trust your judgment on these clothes. I WILL wear them to school even though I normally wouldn't be seen dead in these types of clothes. I'm doing this entirely on TRUST. You've got NO IDEA how much trust is required! But I have lunch with the OSU faculty tomorrow. Your dad's co-workers. How's he going to feel about taking me around with my tackle 'lifted and proudly outlined'? And the rest of the outfit is hardly conservative either." Julia said, "I'm sorry, Mark. This has been tough on you, hasn't it?" "We were well past 'tough' five minutes after we arrived. It's been going steadily and steeply downhill ever since." "At least you've still got your sense of humor. I DO have a fair idea of how much trust in me you'll need to wear those outfits to school. I know they're completely unlike the normal you, and you must feel uncomfortable in them. Carol, Donna, Rocky; what sort of impact will Mark make walking around school the next couple of days?" Everyone raved over the impact I was going to make. Nancy even said, "Where were the boys like you when I was at school?" #3: Everyone reassured me some more, "You'll be a huge hit, Mark" and similar attempts to make me feel good. I didn't "feel good". I MIGHT'VE felt SLIGHTLY less bad, but it was hard to tell. Nancy said, "I'm positive you'll be a hit at school, but if you're still uncomfortable in them on Saturday, bring them back and I'll let you swap them for more conservative clothes." That was pretty good of him. He did have some clothes here which were about halfway between these and decent clothes, and given how extreme these were, that was taking me a LONG way back toward comfort. That'd just leave the task of convincing Julia to allow a swap, something I realized that Nancy might've been aware of when he'd made his offer. Donna said, "I REALLY hope you don't take them back. I want you to come have lunch with my Ducklings dressed in one of those. They'll freak." #2: I just said, "We'll see how the next two days go." Julia added, "We'll be buying some more clothes on Saturday, Donna, so there'll be lots of choices. Maybe Mark will let you pick what he wears to your lunch." "That'd be SO choice!" Wearing things to lunch reminded me about my original question, "Julia, what about OSU tomorrow?" Julia suggested, "Why not ask Dad tonight? He'll give you a straight answer." #1: Nancy started packing up our purchases. He asked me if I wanted my old clothes put in the bag to carry, and I said, "Sure. Let me get my stuff out of my pockets first." I recovered my wallet, keys and hanky, leaving the old, comfortable underwear behind. I put my reclaimed items in my jacket pockets. Nancy had collected up the tags as he bagged each item, and he removed the tags from what I was wearing. He asked Julia, "How many pairs of underwear do you want?" "I'll probably get one or two dozen on Saturday, but let's just get three for now, the pair he's wearing and two more." Nancy and Julia went to get them, conferring about color, as if that mattered. I was concerned. I mentioned, "Julia, 'one or two DOZEN' is excessive. I've got plenty of pairs of underwear at home that are perfectly fine. I don't need another TWENTY pairs!" Julia answered me loudly and completely without shame, "I'll sort through them next time I'm at your place and we'll see then." #1: #3: #2: They returned with the additional two packets of underwear and added them to the bill. All the time we'd been here, I'd deliberately not looked at any prices because I knew it'd only hurt. Julia was paying anyway, which was a bad thing as it gave her too much control over the process. It left me just having to follow orders, all of which were highly embarrassing. I suddenly had a horrible thought and dashed back to the counter to examine the boxes of underwear. I looked at them very carefully, but couldn't see any writing that said: "G-string", "Thong" or "For Full-On Flaming Faggots Only", so I relaxed. I did see the prices though, and I cringed from those. The price of these three pairs would keep me in Kmart underwear for years. Decades probably. Julia, seeing my interest in the underwear, asked, "What are you looking for?" "Just making sure you're not trying to sneak a G-string pair in." "Relax. Even when I'm getting carried away, I know there are certain limits that you won't go over yet." #3: #2: #3: #1: #2: #1: #2: #1, #3: I turned my back on the cash register, and the robbery that was about to be committed there, and went to seek comfort in the arms of my sisters. I was going to say, "seek moral support", but morality obviously gets left at the door when you walk into a place like this. Carol and Donna comforted me for a while, mostly by telling me how hot I was, giving me plenty of hugs, and that sort of thing. I would have felt a great deal more comforted if they'd stopped running their hands over my body. Carol initially, but Donna wasn't the least bit reluctant to follow Carol's lead. They couldn't resist running their hands over my thin, body-hugging shirt. Then, when I wasn't ready for it, over my proudly presented pecker. "CAROL!" Carol laughed, saying, "I couldn't resist. It looks so good." I was still telling Carol off, while Julia and Nancy were laughing at us from where they were concluding their business, when Donna decided to reproduce Carol's tactile excursion. I was paying attention this time and caught her hand halfway to its destination. "Tut tut," I severely admonished her. Donna was predictably apologetic, "Please? Just once. Carol gets to have all the fun." "No. Not once, and especially not here." "At home then?" Asked an eager Donna, liberally interpreting what "No. Not once, and especially not here" meant. Nancy and Julia were walking toward us and Nancy noticed Donna's giveaway. He said, "Home? Sister, or sisters? Oh my! How POSITIVELY delightful!" I could see that Nancy had us pegged, and denying his suspicion wasn't going to do any good at all. "Umm..." "Don't worry about it," said Nancy dismissively. "I don't gossip. I'm glad I know, though. It's such a perfect end to the day, haha." He chuckled to himself as he put the bags down near me and reached for my jacket. I thought he was about to help me put it on, but he started folding it up, clearly about to put it into one of the bags. I said, "Ah, that's okay. I'll wear it." Nancy paused, looking surprised. Then he looked at Julia, who said, "You don't wear a jacket with that outfit. Not with the other outfit either." "But I always wear jackets to school. Every day." "No jackets with these outfits. Sorry, darling." "You mean I have to go to school wearing these outfits, and NO jacket?" Julia nodded. Carol said, "Oh no! You CAN'T wear jackets with these clothes." "But... , but all this time I thought I was going to be wearing a jacket over top." Julia asked, "Why would you think that? We never discussed jackets, or tried any on, or anything like that?" "I just assumed I'd wear one of mine. I've got several perfectly good jackets at home. I'd just choose one in the morning when I got dressed." Julia shivered at that thought, which was a pretty good indication that my assumption might not have been totally accurate. She said, "You CAN'T wear jackets with these clothes. PLEEZE, Mark! That'd ruin everything." I looked to the others for support. Stupid me! They were all clearly of the opinion that my perfectly good jackets would "ruin everything." Even Nancy, who'd never seen my jackets and was therefore in no position to judge. #1: "Ahh, honey. No one dresses like this at school. Without a jacket I'm going to look like a TOTAL fool. I'm going to get ridiculed horrendously." "No one dresses like that because no one can carry it off. With your body you can. You'll kill them." Everyone agreed that I'd "kill them." If that failed, I could always kill myself. If I timed it right, I might find a dimension with a sensible Julia. They pressured me some more, but I was damned well making a stand on this! I'd been imagining that my jackets would be protecting me by covering my torso and extending far enough south to hide my ass and even my tackle if I button the jacket closed. It was a horrible shock that I'd be walking around school defenseless and inviting enormous amounts of ridicule. I HATED the cruelty I'd received for years at school and these clothes were going to set it off again. Julia and the others could see how determined I was, and they weren't happy. After much consternation from all concerned, and much wheedling from the girls, we reached a compromise solution: I'd wear a new outfit to school - probably the day after tomorrow because I expected Prof to object to my wearing either of these outfits to OSU - and I'd carry a jacket draped over my bag. If the first few people who saw me in the parking lot laughed or reacted badly in any way, I'd put my jacket on and would wear it for the rest of my life. Julia wasn't happy, but tough shit for her! She could see my attitude and knew she wasn't going to push me any further. She conceded, "Okay, but please give the outfits a fair test before you cover up." "I'm pretty good at spotting people's reactions. I can see everyone here is in favor of these clothes, so I'll give them a try. They're CERTAINLY far beyond my better judgment, but I'm prepared to accept that all of you MIGHT have better judgment about clothes than me, although I've got very strong doubts about that now!" Nancy resumed putting my jacket in a bag, and I said, "Hang on. I'll wear it now." Carol suggested, "Don't wear it. Let's see how people on the street react. They don't know you so they're a safer test for you. I'll carry your jacket so you can get it back quickly if you need it." I'd rather be laughed at by people in the street than kids at school that I'd see every day, so I agreed to Carol's idea. She took possession of my jacket, passing me my wallet, keys and hanky. I started stuffing my wallet into one of the pockets, which was damned hard as it was so tight. The other pair of pants would be even worse for carrying stuff because it was even tighter - I'd earlier suggested that it was so tight as to be medically dangerous, but Julia had overruled that concern. While I was looking down, concentrating on working my wallet in, Julia said, "Mark. You can't put anything in the pockets." "I know, they're very tight. But I think I can get it in." Julia corrected me, "Sorry. I mean you SHOULD NOT put anything in the pockets. It ruins the shape." "Huh? But that's what pockets are for. Why else would they put pockets on pants, if not to put things in them?" "The style needs them." #2: #3: "{Groan}." I stood there, holding my gear, nonplussed about what to do with them. No jacket. Not allowed to use the thoughtfully provided pockets. No pockets on the shirt. "Ahh, how do I carry my stuff then?" Nancy said, "We sell a range of men's..." "NO! I will not carry a purse." "We don't call them purses. We..." "I don't care what YOU call them. It's what the thousand kids laughing at me will be calling it that worries me." Nancy admitted, "Okay. I admit that it might be too much for school." "Thank you. Now where do I carry this stuff?" Julia said, "At school you can carry your wallet and handkerchief in your schoolbag. Your keys can clip to a belt loop." "What about out of school? I'm not going to carry my schoolbag around everywhere. And I'm not really comfortable having my money off my person in case it gets lifted." Nancy said, "Most guys use a very thin billfold. A few notes, one credit card and their license. Keep it to the bare minimum. You can keep that in a pocket, just make sure you dress on the other side." Julia said, "We'll get you a thin billfold on Saturday. You can carry your wallet in your schoolbag for a couple of days, and just put the bigger notes loose into your pockets if you want to." That resolved, I started putting my gear away. I attached my keys to a belt loop, Julia unattached them and showed me the correct loop to use. Julia offered, "I'll carry your other stuff for now." I handed over my wallet but asked, "Can I keep my hanky? I want to be able to produce it in a flourish rather than search through my schoolbag." Nancy and Julia nodded at that, so I stuffed it into a pocket. Julia exclaimed, "Not that one." "Huh?" "Not that pocket, use the other side." "What possible difference does that make? A pocket is a pocket. They both do the same job." Julia explained, "It depends on what side you're dressed. You're currently dressed to the right, so you shouldn't use the right pocket. Use the left one." #1: #2: "Ahh, darling, I understood every word you said, but I don't have a clue what it meant. I'm dressed on BOTH sides. I'd look damned silly if I wasn't! Actually, 'damned SILLIER' would be more accurate." Julia and Carol laughed at me. For the first time since we'd arrived here, Donna didn't laugh at me, as she was as puzzled as me. Nancy helpfully explained about his favorite subject, "Dressing on the left or right refers to what side your cock is on. Yours is going to the right, so you're 'dressed to the right'." I looked down, and sure enough, he was right; not that I doubted he knew exactly where my cock was. Having established that it was pointing to the right, I had to ask the obvious next question, "What possible difference does it make which way I'm pointing? And I can't believe we are all standing around discussing that!" Nancy, ever the professional, explained, "If you load the pocket on the same side as you dress, it pulls the fabric away from your body, reducing the size of your bulge. Try it - put your hand in one side, then the other, and watch what happens." Everyone looked closely at my cock bulge while I did as Nancy suggested. This kept getting better. Nancy was right, of course. If anyone knew about cock bulges, it'd be him. Donna was happy with her newly acquired knowledge, and by the way she'd acquired it too, no doubt. I now knew that putting things in my pocket on the 'wrong' side diminished my cock bulge. Guess which pocket I was going to be using in the future? Not now of course, as everyone in the room was paying far too much attention to my bulge for me to get away with it. My handkerchief was currently in the wrong pocket, in all their opinions, so I either had to move the hanky or change which side I was 'dressed' on. I moved the hanky. It looked like we might FINALLY get out of here. Which made me realize that I was getting hungry as I'd completely missed my after-school snack. Which reminded me about dinner, then Mom, then, "Oops. We'd better call Mom. She might be panicking about none of us being at home yet." Carol said, "I texted her earlier, when you were busy with Julia and Rocky. I told her we're out shopping and we'd have dinner at Julia's. I texted Vanessa too. It's fine." That was a relief, especially that I was getting a dinner. I desperately needed food to cheer me up. The domestic comments reminded me about Donna's indiscretion in front of Nancy. "Thanks, sweetie. I'm glad someone's caring for me." I turned to Nancy and said, "Umm, about the sister thing. I know you said you don't gossip, but it's a BIG deal. NO ONE can know." I would've said more, but Nancy interrupted, "Don't worry. REALLY don't worry. Gays are the world's worst gossips so if I told even one story about what happens in here, the fact that I was telling stories about my clientele would be all over town in no time. In this town, I'd lose half my business if I wasn't discreet. You'd be surprised at some of the things I learn here, although you'll never hear them from me, haha. I always enjoy meeting someone kinkier than me though. It makes me think there's hope for this town yet." (Corvallis is a conservative town, despite the influence of the large number of students that attend OSU.) I guess we had to take him at his word. If you can't trust Raging Rocky, who can you trust? Donna was still going to get a good telling off later though. Happy in the knowledge that Nancy thought I was kinkier than him, we made our escape. Nancy accompanied us toward the door. Just before we exited he said, "When you're outside, try to look back into the store. You can't see in. We have to do that because we mainly make and sell custom-made clothes here, and some of them get wild. Your family arrangement is tame compared to some of the things I see in here - delightful but tame - so you've got nothing to worry about from me. Have a good evening, enjoy yourselves at school, and I'll see you on Saturday." Outside I tried to look back in, and he was right that there was no view. The door had pre-printed sign that read, "CLOSED for a Private Fitting. Please come back later. Knocks will be ignored, sorry." Free at last! We walked back to the car, with a girl on either arm, and with my bags being carried by my girls - as befitted a Lord of mighty dominance. Not that I was such a Lord, but their actions befitted one. I was more a "highly self-conscious Lord", waiting to see how any people we encountered reacted to the absurd clothes I was wearing. On the way back to the car, #4: #4's time to come off duty had been reached while we were still in Raging Rocky's, but he'd said he preferred to stay on duty. All of us would have happily replaced him, but none of us wanted to endure his jokes if he'd been rotated off so we'd agreed to let him stay on. [It's worth mentioning that all of us were getting a little better at following what was going on while we were on duty. Initially we'd had to concentrate hard to ignore everything external, but increasingly we could remain partially aware, just letting it 'wash over us'. We tried not to think about any of it, but there was a level of awareness of what was happening. It made it slightly easier to bring the on-duty mind up to date when he came off duty.] Julia said, "Isn't Rocky a dear?" All the girls agreed that he was. I mumbled. No way am I calling another guy - and especially not one like that - "a dear". "Don't you think so, Mark?" "Ahh, he was quite good." Then I added more assertively, "He was very reassuring after Donna's REALLY BAD slip! We could have been in SO MUCH TROUBLE because of her!" That should change the subject away from "dear Rocky". Before Donna's expected apology and begging for forgiveness, Julia said, "Wait until you meet his boyfriend on Saturday. Nigel's going to LOVE designing some clothes for you!" "I have to meet another one on Saturday!" I suddenly remembered that my Aikido sensei was called Nigel. Surely he wasn't Nancy's boyfriend? #4: I had to check, "My Aikido sensei's name is Nigel. You met him at your house. A small, old, English guy. Please tell me they're not the same guy?" "No. Rocky's Nigel is roughly the same age as Rocky." "How come you know so much about that place? It's hardly your sort of place." While I was waiting for her answer, I decided that it was probably a good idea to get out of the habit of thinking of him as Nancy. I'd probably let it slip sooner or later. It'd probably be best to start using "Rocky". "Andrew and Robert told me all about it when I asked them where I should take you shopping for some good clothes." "Umm. Don't Andrew and Robert have girlfriends? Not that there's anything wrong with their being that way, or anything. I just thought they were normal." "Haha. You really have had a sheltered upbringing, haven't you? The Boys are perfectly 'normal', as you called it. Lots of straight guys shop at Rocky's. He stocks a great range for guys, and Nigel is, I'm reliably informed, a whiz at designing and making custom clothes." We arrived at our car. I was sorry that we hadn't encountered anyone else between the store and the car, as I'd wanted to see their reactions to my attire and to use them to justify my wearing proper clothes to school. Unfortunately all the stores were closed by now and there was almost no foot traffic. Plenty of cars driving past, but they were going too fast to admire my ability to dress on the side opposite to the pocket my hanky was in, or all the other ridiculous aspects of these clothes. In the car the girls started discussing their favorite moments, i.e., those that embarrassed me the most, such as the way I'd yelped when Rocky measured my inside leg. I quickly stopped that, saying, "We should talk about Donna's blabbing about home. If Rocky tells anyone we could be in SERIOUS trouble. Or if Donna had said that in front of anyone other than Rocky. It was a TERRIBLE mistake to make." Donna apologized profusely, which was good, as it presumably meant she understood the size of the mistake. About the only thing I could say was, "If we're in public you must not get sexual with me in case someone seeing us already knows we're family. And if something sexy does happen - which it shouldn't - for goodness sake don't mention anything that means we are a family. Don't talk about our parents, home, or things like that." That lesson firmly stated, the girls resumed their discussion about their favorite moments. Their laughing about my "inside leg" being measured reminded me about custom-made clothes, and I interrupted with a very hopeful problem, "I'm still growing, Julia. Taller and whatnot. So custom-made stuff isn't a good idea. I'm guessing it'll be even more expensive, and not good value because I'll outgrow it too soon." Julia said, "Are you really growing that much? You mentioned you were still growing when the three of us were discussing it a few days ago, but I assumed your clothes didn't fit you mostly because they were a year or two old." Carol said from the back, "No. Mark's body has been changing shape quite a lot over the last month or two. Not just changing, but improving. He's taller and his shoulders are wider. I guess his waist is narrower too, but the last time I saw it clearly was last summer, and it wasn't anything like it is now back then." I said, "It's like I said about my muscles when you make me do sit-ups. I think it's an Aikido thing." Donna said, "WOW! You learned that at Aikido? That's incredible. Could I learn how to make my breasts grow faster?" I admired her goal, but, "Unfortunately not, sweetie. It takes Aikido people twenty or thirty years to learn enough to heal even a little faster. By then your breasts will probably be fully grown, haha. I just learned this faster and better than everyone else, because I do that sometimes." "Could you teach me?" "Good question! I think that's the first time anyone has ever asked me that. But I can't. It doesn't work that way." "Why not?" There were four more ears listening to this conversation, so a good answer would be useful. "Umm. Imagine you were asking me to teach you how I write my name in the snow by peeing. I couldn't teach you how to do that the way I do because you don't have a cock. It wouldn't matter how much you wanted to learn, or how much I wanted to teach you, it's just not possible. And that's a very, very simple example. What I do is far, far harder than that. Sorry, but even though I'd quite like to see you with bigger breasts, I can't teach you. We'll both have to wait." "Rats!" "It'll be fun for me to watch them grow though, sweetie. But - talking about growing - I was originally saying that custom-made clothes aren't suitable because I'll outgrow them." Julia decided, "We'll talk with Nigel about it on Saturday. If all goes to plan we'll have plenty of money in a few weeks, and then it won't matter whether you keep outgrowing them or not. I hope your waist doesn't get much narrower though, or you'll split into two, and then Carol and I would have to decide whether we wanted the top or bottom half, haha. Also, just imagine how much fun you could have getting Rocky to re-measure your inside leg every week." Which got the girls back to their "favorite moments" discussion. I concentrated on anything else; I didn't care what. Carol suddenly asked, "Oh Mark, what outfit are you going to wear to school on Friday?" "If I get the reception I expect at school tomorrow, I'll be back to wearing my proper clothes on Friday." Everyone else in the car disagreed and didn't hesitate to tell about it. Mostly they repeated some of the claims they'd made in the store, so I won't bother repeating their foolishness. I said, "Okay, ASSUMING the reaction isn't as bad as I'm sure it will be, then whichever one you want. I'm sure Prof won't let me wear either outfit to OSU, so they'll both be available for Friday." Julia said, "I think what you're wearing will be okay with Dad." I could tell Julia was unsure, which was interesting because it meant that she knew that these clothes were pushing the boundary of acceptable taste, and were possibly past that line. No normal person would wear clothes like these, and I'd never seen even an abnormal person in anything like them. Julia's doubt gave me an opportunity to argue with her, but it'd be better to wait until Prof had rejected them as that'd strengthen my position. I was wearing the more conservative of the two outfits - a VERY relative comparison - so Prof's rejecting it would be a rejection of both outfits. I gave a qualified response, "In the VERY unlikely case of Prof accepting what I'm wearing now, AND my not being horribly embarrassed at school tomorrow, then I'll wear the even more embarrassing outfit on Friday. To your lunch, Carol, if that's what you're thinking about." "It is. My friends are going to FREAK when they see you wearing that. Big time freak. No one has EVER seen you look like a super-hunk before. It's going to be awesome. I can't wait to see their faces. I'm going to change where we have lunch to somewhere where they can see you coming from so far away they won't know it's you. I want to see them slowly realize it's you. It'll be hilarious. They won't know who Julia is, and she'll look so small walking next to you. I'll tell them you're coming with your 16-year old girlfriend, and they'll be so confused when they see you and Julia from distance." Donna exclaimed, "I want to be there! PLEASE let me be there too?" Some negotiation ensued, mostly to ensure Donna didn't bring any of her friends, let word get out, or anything like that. Donna promised. After some discussion a new lunch spot was chosen, Julia and I were told when to arrive: a few minutes late to allow most of the girls to be there and looking around. We were even told which direction to come from, so we would be in sight from a long way away. Personally I didn't think it sounded like such a big deal, but if that's what Carol wanted, it was fine by me. Having done everything to max out my performance anxiety, the girls moved back to their previous topic; they still hadn't exhausted discussing all the ways I'd been embarrassed at Rocky's. ------- Chapter 85: Planning the Liaison Structure Wednesday, April 20, 2005 (Continued) Tuning out the girls recounting my many humiliations at Rocky's left me free to contemplate important matters. First dinner, then thinking about what we'd do afterward, how many times we'd do it, and in what positions. Important stuff. It'd been far too long since I'd had sex, and I badly needed to compensate for being in Rocky's company for so long. We'll have to take Donna home before we could start our celebration of the end of the trial-imposed sex-ban. Or maybe we could twist someone else's arm to return her. I wondered about the new bed for Carol's and my room (yippee!), so I interrupted whatever it was the girls were talking about to ask, "Julia, Carol, what's going to happen about a new bed for our place? I'm with Carol about wanting it as soon as possible." Julia answered, "I had an idea about that on the way to the store. I just need to check it with Mom first." #4: "Ahh, Julia. Don't you think your mom's getting involved in too many of our decisions? We should be able to sort out the bed by ourselves, surely?" #3: Julia answered, "I was going to ask Mom whether we could give you the bed that we took out of the spare room when we turned it into our study. It's not a huge bed, but three of us could sleep in it. We could get it delivered to your place tomorrow, with its bed linen so you could use it tomorrow night. Buying a new bed and everything else you need to go with it would cost quite a lot. A thousand or more, I guess. Something like that. I thought ours might be good enough for your place until we moved into a mansion, but I need to ask Mom before I can offer it to you." I felt more than a little foolish. "Sorry, Julia. Your idea's a good one. Especially as I'd hate to get Mom and Dad to spend a thousand dollars if we didn't have to, and if the roul ... and if the moneymaking scheme I have in mind doesn't work." "I'm not so worried about the money. If your current idea doesn't work, we'll find another one. As far as I can tell, you're the world's best at everything, so it shouldn't be hard to come up with another way to make money. Maybe not as quickly and easily, but I'm sure we could do it. I can't see Mom refusing, as the bed's only sitting in storage in the basement, so it might as well be used. The only real question is whether you and Carol want it, as it's probably a little smaller than what Carol had in mind." I looked at Carol. Carol looked at me. I said, "Our moving in together was your brilliant idea." "But you're the boss." "I don't want to disappoint you." Julia pointed out, "If you keep this up we'll all have moved into the mansion before you make up your mind. Mark, YOU are the boss, so make a decision!" "Umm. We'll take it then. If it's all right with Vanessa. And Mom and Dad, I guess. We can call them to ask if Vanessa says it's all right." "Good," declared Julia. "Is that all right with you, Carol?" I asked. "Argh!" From Julia. "Let me try this another way. Mark, what reason did Carol give for wanting a big bed in her room?" "She wanted me to move into her room with her." "Yes, but that doesn't require changing of beds at all. You and Donna could just swap beds." "I'm pretty sure Carol wouldn't have been happy with that! Me neither. I get your point: she wanted to be able to sleep with me. And with you too, I remember Carol saying she wanted a big bed for all three of us." "And did you not hear me say that the bed was big enough to sleep the three of us?" "Yes." "So it should have been a decision you could make in less than a second. Our bed meets Carol's requirements. You don't have any extra requirements of your own that I'm aware of, so the answer should have been a quick, 'Yes, thank you'. Simple wasn't it?" "Umm, basically yes, but what if Carol had new requirements I didn't know about. That was why I was asking her." "In that case you should have said, 'Carol, do you have any new requirements? No? Okay we'll take Vanessa's bed then.' All over in five seconds. Not to mention that Carol had ample time while you two were going back and forth to mention anything new she wanted to say. If she failed to mention something important then that was her fault, and she'd learn to speak up next time you're about to make a decision." "That's a good point. I never thought of that." "Let Carol make mistakes so she can learn. If you ask her everything twenty times, or talk every issue around and around for hours, then you'll hardly ever get anything done. If it's not important, or it's easily fixed, just jump in and do something. If it goes wrong, sort it out later. If our bed turns out to be too small for you, just send it back and go out and buy a bigger one, which is what you would've done anyway. Hardly a major disaster, is it?" "Umm, no. You make it look like I was pretty silly." Julia was not as bad as I expected, "You were silly. You had all the information you needed to make a quick, easy decision, but you muddled around. The reason you were silly was that you're always far too worried about making everyone happy, all the time. By the time you've got two hundred girls seeking your attention there'll be no way you can survive unless you learn to be much more decisive. You need to learn to decide and act a great deal faster than you do now." "I get your point. I know I don't want to do anything wrong that'll hurt anyone, especially Carol." "The way you avoid doing 'anything wrong' is to spend ages on every single decision. That's fine if you only have to make one decision a day, but it's going to be impossible later. Don't try to be perfect all the time because you don't have time for that. Yes you'll sometimes make mistakes, and sometimes Carol, I or you might be upset, but we'll forgive you, you'll learn and we'll move on. Okay?" "Okay. What you're saying is right, as usual. Thank goodness we're starting slow." "How do you mean?" "Just starting with those fourteen girls at lunch to get the bugs ironed out, and later going on to more girls. Like the two hundred you joked about earlier. More realistically maybe another dozen or so." Julia laughed, which was not a good sign. She said, "Mark, you'll have two hundred eager girls begging for your attention by the end of the day tomorrow." "Tomorrow! But when we talked after lunch about your little problem with how to manage them, I got the impression we had time to get ready?" "That was before we learned the trial was off. That changes everything! That's why we had to go shopping for you. There's already a huge number of girls who admire you for your handsomeness, intelligence and emotional maturity, especially after hearing your speech, or even just hearing about your speech. When you go to school in those clothes tomorrow, all the girls who already admire you for those reasons are going to see your body properly displayed for the first time. To quote Carol, 'they're going to freak'." "Big time," clarified Carol. "BIG TIME," agreed Julia. "Ahh, maybe I shouldn't dress like this for a while then? To give us a few weeks to get ready." "Tomorrow!" insisted Julia. "The best way for you to learn is to be thrown in the deep end. My verbal lessons aren't working well. You keep falling back into your normal passive ways. Having a few hundred girls chasing after you will keep you on your toes." "And back," added Carol, helpfully. "That's for sure. Which is a good point. You don't have time to handle all the mess that's going to happen. I'm going to make Ava your liaison in 11th grade, Donna for 6th grade, Carol for 7th and 8th. We'll deputize the first girls from the 9th and 12th grades that express interest in you, which leaves our main grade, the 10th. That's going to be the worst by far because they know you the best, have heard your speeches, etc. I'm going to deputize three of the girls we had lunch with today. They can have a third of the alphabet each. I'm going to put all the girls that want you into a holding pattern until we're ready. Then you can pick and choose whomever you want. You'll have to bed your liaisons to keep them happy, so tell me which three girls from lunch you want to bed over the next few days?" "Huh?" "Was I too subtle? Which three girls from lunch do you want to fuck?" "Ahh, I could see they liked me, but none of them are going to cold-heartedly leap into bed with me just because I pick them as 'liaisons', which I guess you mean as your deputies?" "Stick to the main subject. MOST of them will leap into your bed given half a chance. That's true of a much higher proportion of the girls at school than you think, and it's even more true for the fourteen that I picked to have lunch with you because that was one of the reasons I had for picking them. Those proportions are going to leap upward when they see you dressed properly tomorrow." #3: "Why ON EARTH would ANY of those girls agree to have sex with me! I still can't believe you and Carol want to, but at least you know me, for what that's worth. The others have barely talked to me all year." "They've seen you all year. They know you're a genius and they know you never behave immaturely. Your speech about loving Carol taught them that you're at least as emotionally advanced as you are intellectually advanced, and they'll be kicking themselves for being fooled by your silence over that. They've always known you're intellectually superior to any boy at school. They've just found out that you're emotionally superior, and your soccer and running abilities have proved that you're physically superior. The physical side is too indirect for most of them to appreciate yet, but that'll change when they see you in proper clothes. They've seen how wonderfully you treat me, plus Carol and I are going to be raving about what a fantastic brother and boyfriend you are..." Carol clarified, "I've been raving about Mark for months already. Donna too. That's why so many of our friends are eager to meet him." Julia continued, "Girls don't trust boys' claims about what great boyfriends they are, but they believe what the boys' girlfriend and sisters say about him. You've got the best brain, best heart, best body and best recommendations of any boy in school. Your quietness means the other girls will feel safe around you because you're never aggressive. Other than the girls who're already in strong relationships, there'd be very few girls who wouldn't leap at a chance to be your girlfriend, and the sexually active ones will happily include leaping into your bed." "I've NEVER seen anything like that, other than what Dad calls the fame groupies, but that's about their egos and not about me personally and has stopped now anyway. Maybe one or two sluts would go to bed with me willingly, but none of the other girls KNOW me." "They know everything they need to know about you, including that many other girls find you very attractive, which motivates all of them to go faster than they normally would. Part of the reason you never would've noticed how appealing you are is because you hid most of yourself until recently, and I bet also because you refuse to see it. You saw how quick the girls were to offer you sex at lunch, so why can't you believe they'll have the same attitude tomorrow morning?" "They DIDN'T offer me sex. A couple of them made broad offers to be 'very friendly', but they weren't explicit and could easily back out. The only person who actually talked about sex was you." "They were doing everything but leaning back and spreading their legs. Carol, were they hot for Mark, or not?" "Scorching! They'd be all over you if you gave them half a chance, Mark." "I can't see it. Guys are always trying to have sex with girls and girls are always refusing. It doesn't make sense to me that they'd leap for it now, especially not with me." "It's blindingly obvious to Carol and me why they would, but I can't be bothered bashing my head against a brick wall. You'll see for yourself over the next few days so I'm going to give up on trying to convince you about it. Back to my initial question: Which three girls from lunch do you want to take to bed?" "Wouldn't it be better to find out if any of them want to, and pick from that group?" "It's a safe assumption that all of them want to, especially when they see that most of the others want to. School doesn't last for enough hours to have this conversation with you there, so let's try to get it finalized sometime before breakfast." #2: "Just pick three girls?" "Yes." "Ahh, I need to talk with the girls first. To see what they think, and things like that." "No you don't. They all want to fuck you and that's the only important thing. Just pick three and I'll call them with the good news and to tell them about their new job as your liaison." Julia paused for a second, then added, "Actually I am being a bit premature. We should talk with Mom first, to see if she has a better idea." "Phew." "But I doubt she'll have any ideas that mean we don't need liaisons. Think about which three you want and tell me after dinner. Maybe pick a reserve, in case one gets cold feet, although that'll be unlikely after they see you tomorrow." The conversation ended because we were arriving at the Williams', which was just as well as I was more than a little shell-shocked. Donna asked, "Your new bed will be big enough for me, some nights, won't it?" I was still frazzled, so Julia answered, "It can sleep three comfortably, Donna. Which three is up to Mark." "Mark, I can still sleep with you some nights can't I? Please? You said I could before. Please?" Over the last few hours I'd become increasingly overwhelmed by the size and suddenness of the recent developments: Having to dress this way, which I was EXTREMELY uncomfortable about. I was embarrassed about walking in on Vanessa and Prof, so you can imagine how I felt about the idea of wearing these clothes to school! I HATED the idea of being ridiculed at school. The fourteen girls today and the hassle they were shaping up to be, and God knows how many more tomorrow. Ava. What to do about her, how and when. Having to pick three or four girls to fuck. No working up to it, but going from nothing to fucking in seconds, without my talking to them first to reassure myself that they really wanted to. My making a complete mess out of my recent conversation with Julia. I honestly hadn't seen that the girls wanted to have sex with me. I've hardly had any experience with discerning that signal from girls who're virtual strangers, and I'd annoyed Julia because of it. These pressures, and my annoyance at Donna going on about stuff we'd already discussed, made me snap a little. I told her, "No, not for a month because I'm very unhappy that you blabbed in front of Rocky." Donna cried out, "Oh no," then started bawling. I felt like a heel. We'd made her follow us around all afternoon rather than taking her home, and now I'd gone back on my previous agreement. So I corrected myself, "Okay, make that a week because you still need to be taught to be careful." This was my biggest concern about Donna: she seems too likely to blab something secret in a moment of thoughtlessness, unlike Carol and Julia, who're much more careful and dependable. Julia jumped onto my case again, "NO Mark! You have to make it a month. If you instantly cave in every time a girl cries at a decision of yours that she doesn't like, then you're going to be surrounded by hundreds of crying, whining, complaining girls trying to manipulate you into changing your decisions the way they want. Can you imagine how horrible that'd be?" I could, and QUICKLY told her I could imagine that. The image was horrific for me. I don't handle girls crying very well, especially not when they're crying at pain that I've caused them. Julia continued, "It's a standard girl tactic and I'm sure you're a total sucker for it, so you HAVE to stand firm. Which means Donna gets a month." "But I already told her a week." "You had no trouble changing a month into a week. Now have no trouble changing it back." I hesitated. Donna started crying louder than before. I'd parked the car by now, and we sat there while I summoned up the courage to tell Donna it was going to be a month. Ouch! Julia added, "Girls ARE going to try this on you, Mark. Not only do you have to show them it doesn't work, you also have to teach them - and every other girl - that trying to manipulate you gets them punished. If I was you I'd be telling Donna that if she doesn't stop crying in one minute, then you'll make it two months." Double ouch! -- Julia turned around to face Donna. "Listen to me, Donna. You're not being punished for blabbing to Rocky." #3: "{Sob}. I'm not? {Sniff}." Donna was rapidly cheering up, thinking her punishment was being rescinded. Julia said, "You might be punished for crying too much, if you don't stop quickly." Donna stopped quickly, and started smiling at Julia. Julia said, "You did many good things today. You were fun to shop with and I know you enjoyed seeing poor Mark have such a hard time in the store." "Yeah. It was very funny, {giggle}." "But you made three mistakes today." "I... , I did?" asked a suddenly worried Donna. "First, you blabbed in front of Rocky. That was a very bad thing to do. You have to be more careful. But that's not why you're being punished." "It's not?" "No. If Mark was going to punish you for that, he would have told you off and made up a punishment back in the store, or as soon as we were outside it. He didn't do that, so that's not why he's punishing you. He's really doing it for the other two reasons. Do you know what they are?" "N... , no." I was interested in hearing this myself, so I listened to Julia's explanation carefully, "You made both mistakes at the same time. You asked him three or four times whether it was still okay for you to sleep with him some nights. If he'd already agreed, why keep asking him? A smart person would have kept her mouth shut because all you were doing was giving him an extra chance to say no after he'd already said yes. Do you understand?" "I guess so, {sniff}." "You're not really being punished for that either. It was annoying of you, but Mark puts up with a lot of annoyances because he has almost no temper. What you're being punished for is your timing. Poor Mark's has had a very tough day. You saw how hard it was for him in that store. I know you did because you spent most of the time giggling at him. Then in the car we were talking about him having to handle lots of girls. Some guys would say 'yippee' and rub their hands together in glee, but Mark just got worried. That's what Mark does: he HATES making decisions or doing things that might possibly upset someone. He couldn't even decide whether to accept a free bed for a while, so how's he going to manage hundreds of girls chasing after him, asking him for dates, wanting his time, complaining and being unhappy about not getting his full attention, and all the other problems girls could cause him. His temper was nearly broken, and then you started bothering him over and over again about something he'd already agreed to, so he lost his temper and snapped at you. He made up a reason, but really he was punishing you for making him lose his temper. You're being punished for selfishly thinking only about what you want rather than thinking about what Mark needs." "But that's too much to think about. I just wanted to sleep with Mark because he looks so wonderful. I couldn't think about all that stuff. I'm not as clever as you. It's not fair! {sniff}." Julia offered, "I guess I have been unfair to you, haven't I? After all, you're only a little girl, aren't you?" "Yeah. I don't know any of that stuff yet. I'm still too young." "I thought you were a big girl now. Very mature and grown up." "No. I'm still young. It's not fair to punish me for not knowing so much." "But didn't you tell Mark that you were a big girl now, and it was okay for you to have sex with him?" "Umm." "You can't be both. Which are you, a big girl or little girl?" "Arr, {sniff}" "If you're a little girl, Mark won't punish you, but he won't have sex with you until you grow up, maybe in three or four years. But if you're a big girl then Mark will have sex with you sooner than that, but you have to take your punishment like a big girl should." Julia paused for a couple of seconds, to let Donna contemplate the rock and the hard place she was between, then she added, "Let's go inside. Mark must be hungry by now and I think we've spent long enough explaining these very simple things to Donna. She must be too little to understand properly." That decided Donna! "I'm NOT little; I'm BIG!" Julia got out of the car without saying another word. I will still thinking about a couple of the earlier words she'd said ("Mark" and "hungry") so I followed her example. Carol naturally did so too. Donna hesitated, then leaped out of the car too. We grabbed our bags and headed inside. I could tell that Julia was deliberately saying nothing, so I followed her lead. Donna was on tenterhooks, and she's not the most patient of people at the best of times, so even before we got to the front door she blurted out, "What's going to happen to me?" "If you are a big girl then your punishment is not to sleep with Mark for a month. You know that. That's what you agreed to by saying that you're a big girl. If you keep asking questions about things you know the answers to, or keep trying to wiggle out of your punishments, or keep crying every time you don't get what you want, then people are going to think that you're still a little girl." Donna didn't want people to think that! She carefully answered, "It's not going to be easy to wait a month." Julia said, "Bad things happen when you make mistakes, and you made three of them in a row today. I want you to think about them while we're having dinner, and then after dinner I will ask you to explain your three mistakes to me. If you explain them well enough, I'll ask Mark to reduce your punishment down to three weeks. How's that?" Donna thought that was a great reprieve, and thanked Julia very much. Which I thought was a great trick, considering it was Julia that had insisted her punishment be reset back to the original value of one month. Julia said, "Shall we go in?" I agreed, "Yes, please! I'm VERY hungry." Hoping to get the conversation onto something pleasant for a desperately needed change. Also hoping to get dinner too. Our going into the kitchen caused Vanessa to do a double-take when she saw me. "Wow. Who's your hot new boyfriend, Julia?" Julia was saying, "He scrubs up well, doesn't he?" "You can say that again." Vanessa was looking me up and down, and she rubbed it in my asking me, "What happened to 'Modest Mark'?" Cringing, I answered, "He's still here, now renamed to 'Mortified Mark'. I'm sorry to dress like this in your home. It's Julia's fault, she made me. I've got my old clothes in a bag if you want me to get changed?" Vanessa had a good laugh at that, while Julia said, "He's going to wear this outfit to school tomorrow, and to OSU for lunch with Dad's faculty. What do you think?" Vanessa replied, with me listening VERY carefully, hoping to get a sane, adult, non-hormone flooded opinion. She said, "I can't believe you're sorry you look like that, Mark. You've got NOTHING to be sorry about. Every other boy in school will be sorry though, haha. You should be proud of how you look. I've seen you in a swimsuit in the hot tub, but dressed like that is a whole different ballgame. Somewhat literally, by the look of your pants." -- Vanessa turned to Julia while I turned to red, "I see you went to Rocky's. They must have been drooling when they saw Mark?" "Nigel was away buying fabric today, but Rocky closed up and had a GREAT time getting Mark to try on half the stock in the store." "I can imagine. Nigel's not going to know what's hit him when he gets back, haha." #4: #2: Julia and Vanessa had a good laugh at that. Vanessa asked, "Was Mark like that the whole time?" #3: Julia answered, "Yeah. He had a terrible time. I thought he was going to make a run for it a couple of times. He's not homophobic exactly, but he sure is homo-uncomfortable." "Perhaps it was just as well that Nigel wasn't there..." #4: " ... Julia, you know that if Mark goes to school dressed like that tomorrow, there'll be no way to put the genie back into the bottle. There'll be lots of girls who'll be slammed in the vitals when they see him. They'll be head over heels in lust, and they'll try their hardest to win him from you. You won't be able to stop them by putting him back in his old clothes." "Yeah, I know. Carol and I have talked about this quite often. We, especially me, can't avoid this risk. All we can do is delay it, and not by much because his body will be seen over summer. The first time he goes to the Aquatic Center he'll have the girls mobbing him. We have to hope Mark is the sort of guy we think he is." I was the sort of guy who was uncomfortable hearing this type of conversation. Vanessa added, "Some of the girls might be very nice. They might suit Mark's tastes better than you do." "They'll never exceed my dedication to him." Vanessa said, "That's for sure!" In all of my minds, we echoed that sentiment. They also echoed the discomfort at hearing this type of conversation sentiment, so I suggested, "Ahh, I think I should leave this conversation to you. I'll take our gear upstairs." Vanessa had a VERY different opinion, and she glared at me while stating it, "My daughter is placing her ENTIRE emotional well-being on the line for you. The LEAST you can do is listen and learn to appreciate the risk she's taking!" "Yes, ma'am!" #2: Julia responded, "The more I get to know Mark, the safer I feel. Today we had lunch with fourteen girls who are very interested in him and dressed to impress. In the car ten minutes ago I asked him to pick three to take to bed, and he couldn't do it, and I bet he hasn't given it another thought since. He's just not sexually motivated the way most guys are. I'd think he was homosexual except that I saw his reaction to Rocky, haha. I'd think he was asexual except I've been on the receiving end of his VERY convincing attentions. I don't think I'll lose him because of sex. I don't think he'll go power-mad on me because he's still the most terribly reluctant decision-maker when it risks even the possibility of hurting someone's feelings. He twisted and turned rather than make a decision and risk hurting Carol's feelings when I suggested the Andersons take the bed we removed from our study. I should tell you the trial was canceled today. Everyone plea bargained, so Carol and Mark can share a bed at their house now." "Yes, Felicity told me. Congratulations, Mark. You must be very happy?" "Umm, I would've thought so, but it's not exactly working out the way I thought. I didn't expect to go shopping, and apparently we still have to make some phone calls to organize some girls for tomorrow for some sort of management structure, which Julia wants us to talk with you about. None of it is what I imagined we'd be doing." Vanessa chucked, "I can easily imagine what that was. That Julia is doing those things for you rather than dragging you off to bed should give you some idea of how committed she is to helping you." #4: Julia said, "I don't think he really gets that yet. He doesn't see himself as anything special. Just as an ordinary guy with a few special abilities." #3: Vanessa said, "So what's the schedule for tonight, Julia?" "Dinner, during which we can discuss two management issues I didn't expect: how to handle the fascination girls will have in Mark because they want to keep asking endless questions, and how to handle the explosion of interest that's going to happen because of Mark's new clothes. After dinner I'll start taking the first steps to implement the management structure we agree on, which will probably mean calling up a few girls and getting them to meet us fifteen minutes early tomorrow so we can give them their job descriptions. Mark also had a girl leave naked photos of herself and a letter in his locker and he promised to answer her tonight, so we have to deal with that too. She'll probably be more useful than I first thought, but I need to read her letter first. Mark wants to check with Dad that his clothes are suitable for his visit to OSU tomorrow..." "They're pushing it, but ask Prof as he's the one who'll be introducing Mark around." I would've preferred an outright rejection, but Prof should provide that shortly. "Is it okay to give the spare bed and its linen to the Andersons?" "Sure, that's a good idea. I'll call Felicity to see if she wants movers or whether Steven can borrow a suitable vehicle from his work." "Donna has to be taken home sometime." "I'll take her after dinner, with the linen." "I need five or ten minutes with Donna before she goes. Mark and Carol will spend the night here. I don't know about nights after that, as Mark's going to start having sex with other girls. He should have several booked by the end of school tomorrow. Exactly when and where he does them I'm not sure yet. Mostly here, but the actual scheduling is undecided yet." #4: #3: Vanessa said, "Don't forget to keep Friday evening free for dinner with Sophia and Ashley." We moved on to more important matters, such as washing up and setting the table for dinner, my job being to fetch the other menfolk. When I found Prof, I asked him, "Prof, Julia had a brain spasm while we were shopping, and she bought me this outfit. She wants me to wear it to school tomorrow, which will also mean to OSU. It's obviously not suitable, is it?" Unfortunately Prof didn't take the hint. He said, "You'll get some attention, and some of it will be negative, but the people who matter already know enough about you not to be swayed. I'll warn them in advance that it's all my daughter's doing. I'm looking forward to introducing you to the office ladies. They're going to become VERY helpful and cooperative for you in the future, haha." After he enjoyed his laugh, Prof added, "The textbooks and a diary are in your study." "Thanks. Do I owe you anything?" I started reaching for my wallet, until I realized I couldn't carry a wallet in these pants. Prof said, "Don't worry about it. Introducing you around tomorrow will be payment enough." #4: #2: "Uh. Okay. Dinner's being served. I'll just go tell The Boys." The Boys said a lot more, asking me what I thought of Rocky and Nigel, then laughing at my reaction. What I thought of wearing clothes like this, then laughing at my reaction. Was I looking forward to having lots of girls chasing after me, then laughing at my reaction. They had a good time, although they pointedly told me not to dress like this in front of their girlfriends on Friday. I answered, "You'll have to check with Julia, as I have to wear what she tells me. She's already making me wear another one of these outfits on Friday to school, and I don't know if I'll get a chance to change before dinner." Andrew said, "Don't just stand there, go and put it on. I'm sure everyone wants to see you in it." Then they laughed at my reaction. Unfortunately (you might be able to detect a small degree of sarcasm here) it was dinnertime, so I had to go eat rather than get changed to show off my even more embarrassing outfit. As soon as dinner was properly underway, Julia announced, "I need some suggestions on how we manage the large number of girls who'll be interested in Mark. I've got in mind a two-tiered management structure, with liaisons in between the masses of girls and me, but I'd like your opinions about whether that's the best idea, and how to run it. -- "We had lunch today with fourteen girls who're all eager to get to know Mark better. By the end of lunch they knew that Mark MIGHT play around with some of them, but it'd be done in a very different way from what they were used to because Mark would be in charge and they'd have to meet his needs, not the more usual vice versa or even equality. I also said he'd be thinking about whether he wanted to play around for several days because we thought the end of the trial would be several days away. I think you all know that it was plea bargained this afternoon?" Prof and The Boys confirmed they did. "The trouble is that after lunch they all wanted to keep asking Mark and me questions. Two types of questions: about Mark because they're fascinated with him, and how the new relationship would work. They had LOTS of questions and we ended up having to be quite abrupt about telling them to stay away. It's going to be FAR worse tomorrow when he wears that outfit to school. I had the idea of having liaisons, probably one girl in each grade who all the other girls have to go through, with three or four such liaisons in our grade because it will have the most girls who want to date Mark. The trial has ended much sooner than I expected, Mark's new clothes are going to be a HUGE hit, and I've seen from today's lunchtime how much time such girls will want to consume, so I'm not ready." I was first to comment, with a suggestion that was very obvious to me, "Why don't we delay things then? I can keep wearing my sensible clothes and we can spend a few weeks learning how to handle the initial fourteen girls before you ramp it up at a sensible pace." I mentally crossed my fingers. "We could do that, but it won't work well and I don't want to." Anticipating my less-than-thrilled acceptance of those answers, Julia explained, "The number of girls interested in you is going to rise rapidly when everyone sees that you're on the market and when the first few advertise how awesome you are, which is what I want them to do. The only way to keep the growth rate slow would be to be EXTREMELY discreet, adding one girl at a time, and carefully choosing the most discreet girls we can find. That's the exact opposite of what I want to do." Which was a pity because it sounded just about perfect to me. I asked, "Why do you want to go so fast?" "Because I've no idea what's going to happen in your life or when, so we have to prepare as quickly as possible." Julia recited, "Better to be prepared early, than not be prepared in time." It was probably their family motto, along with all the other similar expressions the Williamses have. "You're so unusual that we have no way of knowing when you'll need to know different things. It's only a couple of months to the end of the school year. If you get exceptionally good results and pass your OSU courses, who knows what offers might come your way. Or maybe the Chinese will send their sexiest spy to seduce you away, or who knows what. That's the problem: we just don't know! Even before then, maybe in two or three weeks, your business could work and you become a multimillionaire overnight. Who knows what problems that might cause you." "But isn't the money going to be in Prof's name? Why would it be a problem for me? Sorry Prof - that you'll have the problems - but surely that won't affect me." Prof said, "Maybe it won't be in my name. I haven't told anyone this yet, as I need to check it with an accountant, but I had an idea today that I think will get half the money legitimately into your name, possibly even more than half, if your school comes through in time. I'll let you know about that in the next day or two. In any event, we'll be making sure that as many people as possible believe the money is yours. That way you'll get as many of the problems as possible, and will learn how to handle them." #3: #4: #3: #4: #2: #4: I said, "I think I get that, Prof. You think I need to learn to handle the problems lots of money causes?" I could see that Donna was somewhat puzzled as we'd tried to keep money discussions away from her to avoid it diminishing her joy in making her gambling winnings gift to me. I wouldn't explain it to her now, and hoped I could be suitably vague if she asked. Julia added, "And also the problems girls cause, including the problems they cause when you've got lots of money. When word gets out that you're rich, the girls are going to get even more intent on snagging you. It's going to be funny, provided we've got good management systems in place, which is what I want to talk about now. -- "My initial idea is to have Ava - that's the naked photos girl I mentioned - as the liaison for her grade, which is the 11th. Donna for 6th grade, Carol for 7th and 8th. For the 9th and 12th grades we can appoint the first girls from those grades who approach us, or we can pick someone Mark already knows. 10th grade is going to be the busiest. I'm thinking of having three liaisons, which the bottom-rung girls report to based on their surnames. Then all the liaisons would report to me. Carol and Donna are special cases who can obviously talk directly to Mark. I can set that up, but I don't know what to do then. I was going to get all the liaisons to stall the girls beneath them, but the bottom-rung girls aren't going to want to be stalled. Everyone's going to be want to ask questions, spend time with him, etc. It's going to be a mess, and I don't know how to enforce order." Robert said, "I'm very glad we're not having this conversation on Friday in front of Ashley and Sophia. Seriously, are you sure you're not exaggerating the magnitude of the 'problem', sis? I know he's damned good looking, but maybe you're projecting your desire for Mark onto other girls?" Julia said, "I don't think so, but if you're right then all that'll happen is that I'll look silly for a few hours and then I'll scale back the management structure. If I'm right we'll find out equally quickly. I'd rather assume the problem is bigger than I expect and prepare accordingly, than get caught short." Robert chucked, "Fair enough. I can't help thinking of this though: 'There's no such things as problems, only opportunities.' Talk about a perfect example of that! Haha." Vanessa suggested, "The only leverage you've got over other girls is your controlling their access to Mark. That's the only thing they value that you have power over. That only applies if Mark backs you up, otherwise your authority is lost. Could you abide by that, Mark?" "Almost certainly, because I pretty much always do whatever Julia says anyway. My only doubt is because I haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Sorry about that, but I don't understand?" "I'll give you some examples. If Julia asks you not to sleep with a girl, or even not to talk with her, then you must back Julia up by doing what she requests. If Julia tells you the reverse, to talk or sleep with a girl, you should also do that. You've got more say than it seems because the girls only have to SEE that Julia has that power. You and Julia could privately agree on her actions earlier, and then in public Julia can reject or pick that girl as if it was Julia's choice. You can do many tricky things by private arrangement, just so long as in public you always back Julia up. Can you do that?" "Umm. I'm not used to thinking about girls that way." Vanessa said, "You think Julia is? None of us are. If Julia tells you NOT to talk or sleep with a girl, can you abide by that?" "That'd be easy. I don't talk or sleep with them now. Perhaps the occasional word, but no more than that. It's telling me TO sleep with them that has me flustered. I've barely said a word to any of the girls in our grade all year. To be suddenly pushed in front of them and told to have sex is VERY weird. I wouldn't know what to say, what to do, or anything. Oh! Julia better not tell me NOT to sleep with Carol!" Carol echoed my declaration, while the others chucked. Julia said, "I wouldn't be so stupid." Vanessa added, "Breaking the ice is a minor issue. The point of this exercise is for you to find yourself some favorites. Once a girl becomes one of your favorites, you'll manage her, not Julia. That's so you can get experience with how girls operate. Endless screwing would soon become tiresome, believe it or not." I chose to not believe it. "Most teenage boys would happily sleep with virtually anyone. Andrew and Robert certainly didn't show much judgment when they were teenagers." Both boys laughed and agreed. "Julia won't pick anyone too unsuitable for you, and there's nothing wrong with you occasionally vetoing her choice. It'd even be a good idea, as it shows that you're in charge, just so long as it's only occasional. A better way to do it might be to have a regular meeting every Monday, in which you pick the girls you'll sleep with that week, say three or four girls. During the week Julia can pick girls to come to the next meeting, maybe ten or twenty of them. When the next Monday rolls around, those ten or twenty girls turn up at the meeting, and you pick which three or four you want. Do you think you'll be able to pick three or four to sleep with out of those Julia has arranged for you that week?" I don't think they realized that it wasn't the physical act of having sex with girls that I found difficult to imagine (God NO!), it was the emotional and talking aspects. If Julia had ten or twenty girls lined up for me - assuming that was remotely possible - how the hell could I pick out a few of them? It'd be very insulting and hurtful for the rejects. Plus I don't believe that the girls who'd put themselves into such a group truly wanted to sleep with me. They'd probably been peer- or Julia-pressured into joining the group, and they'd feel very different about it later when they had to take off their clothes and climb into bed with me. I could EASILY imagine how upset they'd be if I tried to charge ahead when they didn't want me to, and God what I could say to help the situation. It was guaranteed to cause major upsets for both the rejected and picked girls, and me too. But how to tell Julia that her whole scheme was terrible? Vanessa started getting a little impatient at my hesitation, and was just about to say something when Julia suddenly hit her forehead with the palm of her hand and exclaimed, "Ahh! What an idiot I am. I'm VERY sorry, Mark! I can't believe I didn't realize why you've been so reluctant. I was too focused on what I want to achieve that I got carried away again. Please forgive me?" "Ahh, what for?" "For forgetting how wonderful your love for me is." "Umm, okay, I forgive you for that. But I still don't really know what you're talking about?" "I totally failed to realize that you must be worried about being able to perform with other girls. How could I forget that you loved me so much you couldn't get hard for Annette! Of course Carol is a special case! I shouldn't have bulldozed you into trying to have sex with girls that you can't love the way you love Carol and me. That was terribly thoughtless and insensitive of me. I'll make sure I apologize REALLY well when we get upstairs later, but while everyone else is here let's try to rework my plan. -- "I had intended that after Mark had taken the Liaisons to bed and worked his magic on them, they'd be highly motivated to do whatever we want in exchange for some more bed-time with Mark, and they'd also be wonderful advertisers of Mark's prowess to attract more girls, but now I realize that's no good for Mark. I have to think of new ways to achieve those goals." #4: #2: #3: I ventured, "Ahh, Julia. I've been thinking about that, and I think the situation is more complicated than you think." It involves lots of girls, so it has to be very complicated. Saying it was gave me an excuse to ramble. "I feel very secure in our love now, and I didn't have any trouble motivating myself with Carol, so I think I might be okay with the physical side. If I have trouble, I'll just close my eyes and imagine the girl is you or Carol. It won't be nearly as good, but I don't want to disappoint you or make it much harder for you to carry out your Liaison plan. What I'm mostly worried about is the emotional aspects for the girls. If I pick some girls out of your lineup, that'll mean all the others will feel rejected, and I..." "Stop trying to avoid the risk of slighting anybody, Mark," admonished Julia. "You can't achieve that except by hiding in the corner and doing nothing. As soon as you start doing ANYTHING, people are going to react differently, and some might not be pleased. That's what life is! If you become the most important person in the world, you'll have demoted the second most important person and everyone else beneath him. You can't let consequences like that hold you back any longer. Ignoring that issue, are you saying we can go ahead with my original idea for how to motivate the Liaisons?" #3: "But what if a girl I picked was only in the group because of peer pressure. She's going to be very upset when she has to..." "It's NOT a problem. Of course they'll be putting themselves forward because of peer pressure and because of my tricks too, but none of that matters. They'll be highly enthusiastic to jump into bed with you before you pick them, and much more so after they've been picked." "I can't see that." "You'll see it when it happens. Stop worrying about something that isn't going to happen. What I want to know is whether you'll be able to get hard when you're with another girl. Will you be able to do that?" These family dinners are excellent; I get to make a fool of myself in front of lots of people. "Ahh, if I know she's happy and wants to be in bed with me, then I think I should be able to make myself able to do that, even if I have to close my eyes sometimes." Vanessa said, "Good. Moving forward then. You both have to back up your Liaisons. When they say yes or no, it has to stick. Especially don't let girls do end-runs around their Liaisons. That's going to be tricky because you won't know all the individual girls by sight. You'll have to think of a way of easily communicating back and forth with your Liaisons. I suggest you only choose girls for Liaison who have cellphones with a camera, so if they're sending you a girl, they can notify you by sending you a picture of her first. When girls find out that the only way they can get to Mark is via their Liaison, who has to send a photo first, they'll start taking the process seriously. -- "The last major issue is 'paying' your Liaisons. The coin they want is Mark. Mark will have to spend more time with the Liaisons than most other girls, both as a group and individually. You'll probably need to have weekly Liaison Group Meetings. In the Guys' Room for business then the hot tub for relaxation afterward would work well. You should pick one Liaison per week to go upstairs and be personally rewarded by Mark. There aren't enough weeks left in this year, but if you kept this going next year you could institute a points system so the Liaison's would compete for the most points, and winner gets to bed Mark. They could earn points every time he picks a girl that they passed up the chain, that way they've got an incentive to learn Mark's tastes and to help make him happy. -- "Why don't you choose your Liaisons tonight, meet them tomorrow morning before school, tell them the structure, and for them to take names and numbers for all the girls in their grade that are interested, but to tell those girls to wait. Meanwhile Mark beds the Liaisons to 'welcome them to the team'. In a day or two you'll have an idea how many bottom-tier girls are interested, and you can make more detailed plans. It'll take him a few days to get through all the Liaisons, as he has to do a good job on each of them." Donna exclaimed, "Yippee! That's going to be so neat. I can't wait! Can I go first, please?" Vanessa said, "I'm sorry Donna, I forgot that you were one of the Liaisons. I don't think Mark's ready to have sex with you yet, are you Mark?" Poor Donna. And poor me having to answer this. "'Fraid not, sweetie. It's too early. Sorry. One day we will, but not yet." "But Julia said I could be a Liaison, and they get to do it with you." Vanessa said, "You also heard me say that the ONLY time Liaison girls will get to talk with Mark is once a week in a meeting here, with all the other Liaisons present too. If you insist on being a Liaison then you have to abide by ALL the Liaison rules, not just those you like. Which means Mark will completely ignore you outside those weekly meetings. No talking, no touching, no smiles, no driving you to and from school, or any socializing outside of school. All you'll do with him is a meeting for one hour a week with several other girls present, where you won't get any special attention because you're insisting that you be treated like an ordinary Liaison. So, are you insisting that Mark will no longer be your brother and friend, so you can be an ordinary Liaison and 'do it' with him?" Donna twisted and turned. If I'd been a gambler, I would have bet on her being sensible, but it wasn't a sure thing. Eventually, she begrudgingly conceded, "I guess." Which wasn't a logical answer to Vanessa's questions, but we all understood Donna's meaning. Vanessa said, "Do you want to know a secret?" What female doesn't want to know a secret? "Yes!" declared an ever-hopeful Donna. "If you'd sat in your seat quietly, eating your dinner, listening to us talk, and maybe adding a good idea if you had one, Mark would have been impressed by how sensible and mature you were. He would have thought that you were growing up, and he'd have let you have sex with him sooner. Instead, every time you try to trick him, make a scene, or cry, you make Mark think you're still too young, so you're making it take even longer." Donna didn't like that secret very much, was feeling sorry for herself, and was heading toward having a cry about the injustice of it all. Vanessa added, "Donna, you're old enough to know I'm right, and you're old enough to know that if you cry, then you're telling Mark that you're still too young. If I were you I would sit up straight, apologize to everyone for holding up our discussion, and let us get back to our talk." Donna wanted to give vent to her feeling that everything was unfair, but she knew that wouldn't go over well. "{Sniff}. Being a big girl SUCKS!" That earned her a few laughs. Vanessa replied, "Yes, Donna, it often does suck. You're right. But sometimes big girls get to sleep with big boys, and that helps a LOT! I know a certain big boy who is very much looking forward to your becoming a big girl." Donna looked at me eagerly, "Really? You're looking forward to it?" "Of course, sweetie." I certainly wasn't going to deny it, although her childishness often causes me to lose all my enthusiasm for it. "That's why everyone is trying so hard to help you understand how to be a big girl, so we can do it sooner." ("Sooner" being a word that created no fixed expectation, as per Julia's lesson.) We resumed our discussion. Fortunately Julia didn't insist on my picking the Liaisons right now. Instead Julia decided, "I'm going to call the fourteen lunch girls to a meeting thirty minutes before school starts to explain the Liaison job and ask for volunteers for you to choose from, Mark. You'll see how eager they are. Then right after that we'll have our Inaugural Liaison Meeting, so they'll be on the job immediately, ready to handle the reaction to your dressing properly. Donna, we'll be picking you up forty minutes earlier than normal tomorrow morning. FORTY, got that?" Donna nodded. Still to Donna, Julia stressed, "We CANNOT be late for this meeting, or else all our Liaisons will think they can be late in the future and that'd be a huge nuisance. If you're not ready we'll leave without you and you can bike to school, okay?" "I'll be ready. I can get up early. I've never kept Mark waiting for our runs." I confirmed, "That's true. Donna's always on time. She's very good about that." Which made Donna smile. She enjoyed that she could get something right. The dinner table discussion agreed that during the day any girl who approached Julia and me would be asked what her grade was. If there was a Liaison already, she'd be so directed, with no fooling around. If there wasn't a Liaison, Julia would collect names, numbers and grades during the day, and choose someone to cover the uncovered grades by the end of the day. Robert joked about my reluctance to take more girls to bed, which caused Julia to bashfully ask, "Are you REALLY sure you'll be able to get hard?" Wonderful! I explained, "I THINK I'll be okay with that. I'm more worried about the preliminaries to it. I can't imagine myself cold-heartedly picking a girl. I want to talk with her first to find out what she's thinking and feeling, but I can't imagine how to have that conversation either. It's very foreign and uncomfortable for me." Julia explained, "You'll be picking from the girls who want to be Liaisons, and they'll know that job will involve sleeping with you. Getting close to you is what will be motivating them. You just have to pick the three girls you most want to sleep with out of the several who'll want to sleep with you. The final choice will be entirely yours. If none of them appeal to you, tell me who you particularly want out of any of the girls at school, and I'll do my best to get her for you?" "Ahh, I'm even less comfortable with picking someone else outside the fourteen. At least with them I've seen that they have some degree of interest in me personally." My reason was true, but I'd thought of much more than just that. There were many beautiful girls at school that I would've been overjoyed about being in bed with, but I didn't want to embarrass Julia by making her unsuccessfully proposition girls on my behalf. It would be better to pick girls out of those that volunteered, although I couldn't imagine there'd be many of those. Julia wasn't going to be offering them some sort of long-term, romantic boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with me. She was going to be talking about in-your-face, full-on sex. To borrow one of Mom's expressions, surely Julia had to be insane. I knew quite a few of the girls were impressed by my "I Love My Sister Carol" speech, but that was warm, mushy stuff, and MILES away from volunteering to let me fuck them. Plus my dressing like a homosexual wasn't going to help nearly as much as Julia thought. I knew it showed off my body, and I knew my body had improved a great deal, but girls don't leap into bed with a guy just because he's got a good body. There are some very athletic guys at school, and they can't go up to a girl they've never talked to before and pick her to have sex with. If that was the case, every boy would be exercising like crazy. Julia said, "So we're still using my first idea. I'll get them to come early, and those that want to sleep with you will be offered the possibility of being a Liaison, from which you'll pick three of them. Or if you like, I'll pick them and you can veto any of them if you want." "I couldn't do that in front of them! That'd be terribly insulting and I'd..." "We'd arrange a signal so they'd never know. Let's just play it by ear tomorrow. After you see how enthusiastic they are, I'm sure you'll find it easier than you're imagining now." Vanessa and Julia started talking about the management structure, but I wasn't really listening. There'd been too much hard stuff this afternoon, and I couldn't keep up. I was thinking through each of the fourteen lunch girls in turn, trying to imagine whether I wanted to pick her or not. Some of them I had quite literally not spoken a single word to all year, until our lunch a few hours ago. Even then the only real speaking I'd done was my tease at the beginning, because once Julia had launched into her plan, she'd left me confused and behind. To go from having no relationship whatsoever, with not even a single word exchanged, to, "I pick you to have sex with," was difficult to grasp. Virtually all of my experience with girls was that if I looked like I might be even thinking about talking to them, they'd start ridiculing me. It was a very weird situation, and it was extremely easy to imagine it turning into a great deal of upset and hurt. In thinking about the fourteen girls, I remembered the good idea Lily had suggested to me (copying her notes for me for classes I missed). I told Julia about it, and her response was, "Good. That makes her Liaison #1 for our grade. We only need two more. I can use Lily as an example to the other girls too, so that works out very well." "Umm, you mean you just chose Lily as one of the Liaisons?" Julia nodded, adding, "She chose herself, by being smart. She IS a smart girl and pretty, so a good choice." "Umm, so does that mean I have to sleep with her soon?" "You don't HAVE TO, if you prefer any of the others. But a few minutes ago you didn't have any preferences. Do you now?" "Ahh no. That's not it exactly. Lily's fine. I just didn't expect to be thinking about a specific girl so soon." "Mark, there will be six Liaisons from high school for you to take to bed. I want all of them to have had their world rocked by you before Monday. That's why I'll only pick Liaisons who'll sleep with you, so that after you've rocked their world they'll do ANYTHING we want to get more of your loving. I want the Liaisons to be thoroughly onboard before they start passing new girls up, and the bottom-tier girls aren't going to be held back for long, hence my Monday target. That gives you four days to totally rock six girls, which you can do easily. You'll even have time for some shopping and a soccer game, haha." "And bowling," added Donna. "I can't wait to see you bowl a 300 game Mark." "And bowling," echoed Julia. "So Lily's back to being Liaison #1?" I nodded. "Good. She'll be the first one to come here then. No, on second thought I think I'll make her the second. She's good enough to stay overnight and that'll be a good lesson to the others. You'll do one of the other girls before dinner tomorrow, and Lily can come in the evening." After some more thought, now that the decision had been made, I was quite looking forward to Lily. She's Chinese, and therefore has exotic appeal going for her. In fact, she's quite Chinese, as you can tell the moment she starts talking. She isn't a 'banana' the way most of the few Chinese people I've met are. ("Banana" means "yellow on the outside, white on the inside", i.e., has been in America so long that they have our culture.) I was pretty sure Lily was born elsewhere because she's more Chinese than American in her speech and behavior. Robert said, "We should start a pool for how many different girls Mark beds before the school year ends." There were several jokes about that, estimations of numbers, and talks about bets. During which I noticed Donna thinking. I could almost see the cogs turning in her head. I was ready for her when Donna said, "Robert, put me down for..." "{GROWL}." Donna looked at me in surprise. I said to Robert, "If Donna gives you any money, please give it to me. I'll give it to Mom and explain where it came from." Donna asked another unnecessary question, "No betting?" "VERY no betting. It's stupid. In fact I'm seriously tempted to call Mom right now and tell her about this." Prof's saying that gambling wins were taxed had really opened my eyes. I knew next to nothing about gambling, but I easily understood that the mathematics of an even-odds game, with tax, rendered the whole idea stupid. What little I did know about gambling included that there was ALWAYS a house margin - so gambling was VERY stupid. Prof's talking about gamblers as idiots and Vanessa's talking about casinos as equivalent to drug dealers had been very convincing too. Donna was FAR too eager to bet, so I was going to jump on whenever she backslid. Donna hurriedly assured me that there was no need for me to call Mom. Which reminded me that I did need to call Mom, just to check in, but that was a separate issue. I realized I'd also made a small gaff, "Robert, I didn't mean to tread on your toes about betting. Sorry about that." Robert said, "No worries. Mom and Dad didn't let us bet until we were 21 years old, so Donna is far too young for betting." He turned to Donna, ask her, "Did you know that if you try to bet in a casino when you're under 21, you are breaking the law? The police can arrest you and take you to jail." "Really?" "Yes," assured Robert. "Betting when you're too young is very bad. You should wait until you're at least 21, like Andrew and I had to. Okay?" Donna agreed. I remembered something about The Boys earning a lot of money playing 8-ball, and I had the impression it'd started long before they were 21, but I appreciated Robert's lies. None of the rest of the conversation is worth recording here. It lasted for several more minutes, concluding with Vanessa suggesting, "Sleeping with Mark isn't the only reward you can offer. Many activities can be rewards, such as having lunch with him, seeing him on evenings or weekends, going to the movies, etc. Look for activities several girls can do with him, such as lunches at school, because they don't use up any extra time. You could have three days for lunches to meet a dozen girls each time, and two days for your own lunches, where you can keep your relationships going properly. Make sure you keep enough time for yourselves out of all this." ------- Chapter 86: Preparing Ava; Part One Wednesday, April 20, 2005 (Continued) When our meal ended, Vanessa said, "Donna, do you want to do the dishes with me so I can tell you some things that will help you convince Mark that you're growing into a mature young woman?" Helping with the dishes, something Donna often does anyway, was an inconsequential cost for such useful advice. She eagerly agreed. Vanessa added, "You three go and make your phone calls." Carol said, "I'll help with the dishes too. Julia doesn't need my help to manage ANYTHING." Helping with the dishes didn't much help either. In this house it meant loading the dishwasher and pushing a button. Julia said, "If Mom's going to talk with Donna, I should have a quick word to Mom first about Donna's three mistakes in the car. Did you think about those during dinner, Donna?" "Are you kidding! What you guys were talking about was far too interesting. I tried to at the beginning, but I got distracted. I think I remember them though." I ignored the parenting stuff. Prof was still in the room and I wanted to ask him something, "Any news about the thing we were waiting 'a few days' for?" "Not yet. I didn't expect any yet. You're going to be studying here again tonight?" "Yes. I think the plan is that Carol and I stay with Julia tonight to celebrate the trial's cancellation. I REALLY hope we get to celebrate it. It's four hours since I heard the news and I've barely had a kiss yet. To think I've been saving up for days and I'm still having to wait!" Prof understood, "To paraphrase Donna's wisdom, sometimes being a big boy SUCKS!" I chuckled in agreement. He asked, "I noticed your surprising lack of enthusiasm for bedding girls. You didn't spend too long with Rocky today did you?" It took me a moment to realize his meaning, "Haha. Definitely not! Not the way you mean, because I DID spend too long with Rocky, but that's nothing to do with my lack of enthusiasm for bedding girls. I just find it hard to agree to that. Those girls are virtually strangers, and I'm not really comfortable with Julia pushing them into my bed. Her bed actually, but you know what I mean." Prof said, "My understanding is that they're coming running for a chance to get close to you. At the most Julia's choosing who to hold the door open for. Everything that happens after that is their choice. I cannot imagine you or Julia 'pushing' anyone into that situation. That'd be coercive." "Julia did say she was tricking them." Julia hadn't gone upstairs yet, as she was still talking to her mother about Donna. She must have had half an ear tuned to my conversation because she immediately explained, "I'm tricking them into realizing how wonderful you are. It's quicker to do it that way, especially because your modesty is making it difficult. I am NOT tricking them into your bed. Once they know how amazing you are, they can make their own decisions about whether or not to accept an invitation to have sex with you. I only want the girls who're eager because I want them to be excited about telling everyone about it afterward." "Umm, sorry then. I shouldn't have used 'pushing'. I misspoke." "No you didn't," disagreed Prof. "You spoke what you were thinking. What you did was mis-think. These girls ALL know what they're doing, and Julia won't be misleading them. If they walk into your bedroom - run more like - they'll know exactly why. You are foolish to reduce your enthusiasm and enjoyment by imagining that they are being 'pushed'. Don't worry about it though. By the time you've had a few of them, you'll see what's happening. You're only making that mistake because of your inexperience with girls, something Julia will soon cure you of." -- "I must be getting old - I nearly commented that you shouldn't 'celebrate' too late tonight in case it made you miss some of your algebra and calculus time. Imagine thinking that you'd prefer algebra and calculus to having sex with Julia and Carol! Vanessa often teases me for liking mathematics so much, so she's going to chuckle over that." Prof wandered off, which let Julia start to reassure me and apologize for not remembering how difficult it would be for me to get hard. I accepted her apologies, and then said, "I need to call Mom, just to check in." I didn't appreciate Mom asking, "I'm surprised you're calling. Have you worn Julia and Carol out already?" My explaining, "We haven't even started on that because we had to go shopping," resulted in me being laughed at. My description of what the shopping experience was like got me laughed at even more. Mom said, "I'm looking forward to seeing you in those clothes." Of course she was, if only so she could laugh at me EVEN more. "I'm wearing one of the outfits to school tomorrow, and possibly the other on Friday although that's doubtful, so you'll see at least one of them in the morning. Carol and I will be staying here tonight, and by the sounds of it I'll probably be here tomorrow night too, I think, but you'll see me in them when I pick up Donna. By the way, we have to get to school early tomorrow, so we'll be around to pick up Donna about forty minutes early." Mom suggested, "Come forty five minutes early, so you'll have time to show me your new outfit." No doubt so she and Dad could start the day with a five-minute laugh each. When I'd finished talking to Mom, I passed the phone over to Vanessa. She'd heard me talking to Mom, and had asked for the next turn. I walked away quickly, but not fast enough to escape the sound of Vanessa saying, "Wait until you see him, haha." The laughter was starting already, excellent! My early morning studying had come up during my talk with Mom, which had prompted me to worry about the snacks I would need to get me through it (maybe not "need", but I didn't want hunger to distract me from the serious business of algebra and calculus. That and I liked cookies). I was going to grab some for myself, but felt a bit self-conscious about conducting a serious raid without permission, as I'd need sandwiches as well as cookies and a drink. Vanessa was on the phone, so I went in search of Julia, to get her permission. While I had been busy amusing Mom, Julia had gestured to me that she was going upstairs, and I quickly found her and Carol in 'our' bedroom, sitting side by side on the bed, leaning close together so both could read Ava's letter, with Carol still holding Ava's pictures face up in her hands. I hesitantly said, "Umm, Ava kind of wanted her photos and letter to be kept private." The girls looked up at me, and Julia said, "Don't worry, we won't show them to anyone." How to say this diplomatically? "Umm, I wasn't really expecting you to show them to Carol. I kind of had to let you see them, to get your advice, but I was hoping to keep them as private as possible. Sorry Carol, but I was thinking that just Julia would be able to give me all the advice I needed." Julia started smiling with anticipation. I suddenly got the urge to back slowly and carefully out of the room. And, for some reason, to climb a tree. Julia smiled sweetly and said, "Carol's not looking at them so she can give you advice. She's doing so out of curiosity." #3: #4: I've noticed that the more Julia enjoys herself in these circumstances, the less I do. This gives me considerable incentive to diminish her enjoyment. I lay myself on the floor, curling into the fetal position with my hands over my head. Carol giggled, and Julia laughingly asked, "What are you doing, Mark?" "I know you're about to point out how stupid I am. I don't know why I am, but I know finding out is going to hurt, so I'm getting ready. Okay, I'm ready now. What did I say wrong?" Carol giggled some more, and Julia said, "Aww. You're no fun." #1: "I'm not getting up just so you can have more fun at my expense. Just tell me why I was wrong?" Julia assured me she would do so without further teasing, and that I could get off the floor and come sit beside her. With some trepidation I did so. Julia explained, "I appreciate that you were concerned about Ava. That's what you always do: worry too much about what the other person is thinking or feeling, or even just might think or feel. You need to remember some things. First, Carol and I are your WIVES, so the three of us owe our first loyalties to each other, not to people like Ava, who you've barely ever talked to. That's just silly. -- "Second, if we start keeping secrets from each other, especially sexual secrets, then our marriage is in trouble. -- "Third, Carol isn't as involved in this part of your life as I am, so she could feel left out. So I'm making sure to include her so she feels secure and not threatened. -- "Fourth, we need to know what you're doing so we can help you in various ways. Perhaps to see lessons you should be learning, or perhaps in some practical manner. Maybe Carol or I know Ava already and know that a lot of her letter is lies, or maybe we just get the feeling that she's dishonest from reading it. That's not the case - she seems like an honest girl - but if it was, wouldn't you like to be warned?" #1: #4: "You're absolutely right, Julia. I'm sorry. I'm especially sorry to you, Carol, for me being so 'silly' - as Julia kindly pointed out - as to think it was good idea to exclude you. I was worse than silly and I'll try to never make that mistake again." Julia said, "It's easy. If you ever think about keeping something secret from either of us, make sure you tell us right away, because those are the most important things to share. Not the special secret stuff that goes on in your head though. It's a good idea to keep that stuff secret." #3: <"What goes on in our head"! That's a bit too accurate for my liking. I wonder how much she knows?> #4: "Uhh, thanks." Carol said, "I didn't really feel threatened, or anything like that." Even I knew the answer to that one, "BUT you might've, especially if I'd carried on keeping secrets from you. Julia was totally right." Julia added, "But I haven't even told you the main reason to include Carol yet. MORE important than all the others put together." If it wasn't for the smile already breaking out on her face, I would have been worried. "Okay, give it to me. I can see you're busting to." "Aww, I can't even tease you about that either. This hasn't been nearly as much fun as I thought it would be." "You've already had more than enough fun at my expense at Rocky's!" "That's ALMOST true, haha. Okay, the main reason to share with Carol is so she and I can gossip together about all your girls. We're going to have SO MUCH FUN doing that! I feel sorry for everyone in boring 'one-wife, one-husband' marriages. It is SO much more fun for us when there are two wives." In all honesty it wasn't too bad for me either. Two Julias would have been have been too many (probably about 1.2 Julias too many, although I'll never voice that thought). But Julia and Carol are a very nice balance. I said, "Okay. I'll leave you to your letter reading and gossiping. I certainly don't want to hear that!" Julia said, "You came up here for a reason though, didn't you?" "Yes, but that doesn't matter. Vanessa will be off the phone now, so I'll ask her. It was just about my making a snack for when I study tomorrow morning." Presuming we didn't disappoint Prof by celebrating all night. It'd be best not do that, if only because Julia will need her wits about her tomorrow when she starts implementing her management structure plan. Carol firmly declared, "Making your snacks is MY job if I'm here, not yours! That's one of my main jobs. Almost as important as sex and gossip, haha." #4: #3: Carol asked me what and how much I wanted, then happily set off to make it for me. Julia assured me she'd set up a better system to ensure my snacks every night, without my having to worry about it. I had no doubt she would too. Having two wives is pretty cool sometimes, and we hadn't even started celebrating yet! Julia put Ava's letter down, telling me, "I'll finish it with Carol. I'll start calling the lunchtime girls now." I wanted to ask her what she thought, especially of the photos, but Julia was already punching buttons on her phone. Her first call was to Lily, and Julia's side of it went like this: "Lily, Julia here. I have to make this quick. Mark's having a shower and he's going to ravish me when he comes out." "Yes, I am lucky." Thinking Julia was hinting that I should go have a shower, I stood to do so, but she waved me to sit back down. Julia continued her conversation with Lily, "I'm calling a meeting of all the girls who were at lunch today to discuss some Mark business. Can you meet us thirty minutes before school starts tomorrow morning?" "Good girl." Julia then described exactly where and when. The middle of the student parking area was apparently too public as Julia specified a significantly quieter location. "Make VERY sure you're not late, Lily. It's very important you're there on time. Not even a minute late." "Good. Last question, does your cellphone have a camera on it?" "Of course it does, silly me, haha. Okay Lily, I've got to call the others. Sweet dreams, goodnight." Turning to me Julia said, "Good. Lily says she'll definitely be there on time. She's got her own car, so that should be easy. She's a good first choice for Liaison: smart and with the right attitude toward you. It's sexy her being Chinese too, isn't it?" "Umm. I guess so." "Don't even pretend that you haven't already been thinking about that!" Julia laughed some more. It'd been at least ten minutes since someone had laughed at me, so by today's standard, it was long overdue. Then Julia added, "I think you'll have a good time with her tomorrow night because she seems so interested in you." "If she stays here the night, where will you be? I'm kind of hoping you will be able to stay with us, and I thought Lily would like that too." "Why do you think Lily would like a threesome with us? That's what you're saying, isn't it?" I explained my logic, which was probably about the point where I started going wrong, "Yes. At lunch I thought she was bisexual. Nearly all of the fourteen girls seemed to be. I later guessed that was part of the reason you chose to invite them." "What made you think they were bisexual?" #1: "Umm, I just thought so because they seemed happy with you and Carol. They saw you kiss each other first, and then Carol sat in front of you and you often hugged her or caressed her face, or whatever, and none of them seemed uncomfortable. Mostly they seemed happy." "And you thought that meant they were bisexual?" #4: "Yes, but obviously I was wrong. I knew girls were more tolerant than guys about same-sex relationships, but I assumed their being happy to see you and Carol kiss meant that they were that way inclined." "You were wrong. I can't understand how guys can get so angry about two guys who're happy together, but thank goodness girls aren't like that. We're much nicer, especially when we can see that there are loving emotions between the couple. You can't judge a girl's bisexuality by her failing to show discomfort or even if she shows happiness. I've got no idea about the lunchtime girls' bisexual inclinations. Until recently I had no inclinations of my own, so you should know it's not an on/off situation with girls." "Okay. I'm very ignorant about all this stuff." "You'll be learning quickly. I'll be creating a bisexual atmosphere around you, so there'll be plenty of that going on. It's just that I've got more important things to worry about now than whether or not each of those fourteen girls is consciously bi. I think most of them will happily do whatever it takes to get you, especially after they've had you once. It doesn't matter if any of them kicks up a fuss later - when the bisexual sex starts happening - because they can be easily replaced." #4: #1: So I said, "Thank you, both for the tolerant explanation and your being so happy to have so much exciting sex around me. I think I'll definitely enjoy that, largely because you'll be with me. It'll make it MUCH easier for me to get hard! But I'm surprised at how interested you seem. Other than with Carol, you've never shown so much interest in girls?" "I'm not particularly, although my experiences with Carol have expanded what I thought were my interests. I'm including myself mostly because I don't want to be excluded from important things that will be happening in your life, or from your bed. I'm going to encourage the girls you'll be going to bed with to be bi, so I can be with my man too. I don't want to lose ANY of my time with you, if I can avoid it, haha." "But you shouldn't have to do something so intimate just to be with me. I shouldn't make you..." "HONESTLY Mark! How can you possibly think you're MAKING me do this? I'm making you do it! You wouldn't have taken the first step if I hadn't been pushing you. I want this to happen. If I have to spend some time in bed with you and another girl, then that's a price I'm willing to enjoy paying! I LOVE sex with you Mark. Love, LOVE, LOVE! I'm sure that if I like the other girl even a little, then I'll enjoy having sex with both of you. I've discovered that about myself, but I don't think that's a big discovery for most girls. I'll especially love it because I'll be seeing how much pleasure it brings you once you've managed to get sufficiently used to having sex with girls that aren't Carol or me. So there IS going to be lots of girl-on-girl action happening around you. Stop walking on your tiptoes and apologizing just because something could conceivable be a problem, especially when it so obviously isn't. I'm enjoying myself! Got it?" "Yes Julia. I'm sorry I..." "Argh! We don't have all night for you to apologize for everything under the sun. And before you apologize for that, I'm just going to keep on talking. We need Liaisons as fast as possible if my belief about your popularity is correct. So I won't make that any harder by pushing the bisexuality issue now. I'll let them enjoy some one-on-one time with you. Starting next week that'll change. So, in answer to your original question about Lily, I'll spend the night with Carol at your home in her new, big bed. Perhaps I'll practice on Carol for when you and I can have Lily together. I'm interested in Lily myself because I'm impressed by her so quickly understanding that you're special and wanting to help you. That lights my fuse as much as anything else about her." Having disappointed Julia with my wimpishness yet again, and strongly resisting the impulse to apologize for it, I forced myself to find something else to use to keep the conversation going. Thinking about what Lily looked like naked made me recall Julia's comment about her phone having a camera (you can work out for yourself how those two topics are connected). It spurred me to ask, "I understand why you asked about her cellphone having a camera, but why were you silly to do so?" "She reminded me that her parents go back and forth to Hong Kong frequently, especially her father. She has a new phone every few months, and they're always fantastic. We really have talked for too long. This is eating into our celebration time, and I still need to call the others." "Okay. So..." I managed to bite off all of the rest of the apology. "I'll shut up and let you make your calls." Because I had nothing better to do, I picked up Ava's photos and re-examined them. Not an unpleasant way to pass the time. I also enjoyed re-reading her letter. There's something enjoyable about such a pretty girl throwing herself at me so totally, so the letter cheered me up. I also listened to Julia's next couple of conversations (I'm good at doing two things at once, as long as one of them isn't toughening up), and I noticed something curious. Julia's calls went like this: "Hi [whomever], Julia here. I have to make this quick because I have to call fourteen of you. I'm calling a meeting of all the girls who were at lunch today, to discuss some Mark business. Can you meet us at [the specified exact place and time] tomorrow morning?" "Good. See you there. Goodnight." The second conversation was identical, except it ended, "Well, do your best. Goodnight." There was no stressing of how important it was to be there on time, questions about their phones, or any of the stuff that Julia had said to Lily. The conversation was the absolute bare minimum, and never used other than a normal tone of voice. I listened to the third non-Lily conversation, and it was identical to the other two, other than the different name. After that'd finished, I asked, "How come these calls are all so much less emphatic than Lily's? I know we've already chosen her, but I don't understand why that changes her treatment so much. Surely you want all fourteen girls to be there on time? Because you've got the Liaison meeting fifteen minutes later, and then school, so you don't have time to wait for anyone." Julia explained, "I have NO intention of waiting for anyone. The meeting will start EXACTLY on time. I want some of the other thirteen to be late so they'll miss out. That's why I'm deliberately not stressing its importance. They'll lose their chance to be chosen, and they'll be really pissed off. It'll be a strong lesson to all of them, one that the Liaison's will also pass onto the girls under them. The only girl it's important is there on time is Lily, or else we'd look inconsistent picking her." "Wow. Isn't that rather cruel? Half an hour early is quite a lot earlier, and some girls could easily miss out." "I don't care, and YOU don't care either. You've not shown any preference for or against any of them, despite my asking you more than once. As long as at least two of them turn up - which I'm SURE will happen - then you can pick two. We don't care who they are, but we do care that they know to be on their toes the whole time. It'll work well." I felt sorry for any girl that was late. I realize that could be interpreted as my being arrogant, but that's not the way I meant it. "Julia the Merciless" would be on their case! Julia added, "Mom and Dad are frequently complaining about the amount of time they waste because people are late to meetings. I've heard that a thousand times, and I hate it when people are late to meetings I'm involved in. We're going to make promptness crystal clear to our Liaisons right from the start. Why don't you go have a quick shower, Mark? The rest of the calls will be the same. Carol and I will discuss Ava with you when you come back." Rocky's locking me in his store and measuring my inside leg had made me sweat, so I went to have a shower. I finished my shower and dressed in just my robe, with the hope that I'd not need it for long. Then I returned to our bedroom. Carol and Julia were discussing Ava when I walked in. Julia broke off to tell me, "Mom and Dad have taken Donna back home. They're going to stay there for a while to socialize with your parents. Mom suggested that for your early morning snack she can either make a little extra dinner the night before and leave it in the fridge on a plate that you can heat up in the microwave - you do know how to use a microwave, don't you?" "Sure." That and the can opener were the two kitchen appliances I knew how to use. "Good. She can't leave it in the study because that wouldn't be healthy. Or she suggested that when you get up, you make yourself an early, extra breakfast of your usual cereal and fruit. Either is fine with her, so it's up to you?" I hesitated. Not for long though, because Julia said, "Let me repeat myself, EITHER is fine with Mom. It is up to YOU! Don't think about ANYTHING else other than what you want, okay?" "Umm, the cereal I guess." It'd be less work for Vanessa too. "Good. I'll tell her later. There's already food in your room for tomorrow morning, but cereal from then on. I'll leave some cookies in the room each night so you won't have to interrupt your studies once they start. Dad's already asked Andrew to get some little lights for our hallways to make it easier for you to walk between the study and kitchen. Andrew will get those on Saturday." [Vanessa improved on Julia's cookies idea. A couple of jars of different cookies were soon permanently installed in my study. They mysteriously refilled themselves every few days. Life can be tough, but not around here.] Julia asked, "Shall we talk about Ava?" I told her, "I'm looking forward to it." Not so much the talking about Ava part, but what that would lead to me doing with her (I'm assuming you're not worried about my erectile dysfunction). Julia led off, "I recognize her from her pictures. I've seen her around school but I don't know anything useful about her. She's the last thing holding us up before we can begin celebrating so I'm CERTAINLY not going to waste time calling around to find out about her now! I'll ask around about her when we get to school. So let's try to take care of the Ava issue quickly. To start with, what do you think of her Mark? Does she turn you on?" "In the interests of speed: Yes." "Do you want her as a Liaison, with all that implies?" "Yes." Julia said, "Good. We have to find out whether she wants that job, so we'll invite her to the second of the two meetings tomorrow morning. She doesn't know anything about your being 'allowed' to play around, unlike the girls from lunch, so we need to tell her that. We want her to be a Liaison because her grade is probably going to be the second most popular high-school grade for you. I also like her as a choice because she values intelligence even though she's not smart herself. It appears that she's been interested in you for a few months, which reinforces her valuing intelligence, because intelligence was mostly what you were known for back then. She said nice things about me so I immediately trust her judgment, haha. More than anything else though, is that she's begging. Begging is good - I can definitely work with that. All the Liaisons have to report to me, so the first thing we need to do is to make her aware that I know all about her letter and photos. That's a rule for ALL the girls. I don't want any of them to think they can get around me. I suggest you call her now to ask her permission to show her letter and photos to me. If she agrees tell her 'you'll call her back in ten minutes after Julia has read the letter and we've discussed it'. If she balks give me the phone and I'll explain it to her. Okay?" "Umm, yeah, that's okay with me." Julia picked up her bedside phone, dialed the number from the bottom of the letter, and handed me the phone. It was a bit quick for me as I hadn't worked out what to say. Something that wasn't helped when Ava answered the phone instantly. (When I quote a phone conversation I usually quote just the half that I can hear. This conversation starts with me talking to Ava so I could hear both sides, but that lasted such a short time that I've stuck to one-sided quotes.) "Umm. Hello Ava. It's Mark here." "Yes, I said I would. Um, I've been reading your letter, of course, and I want to show it to Julia. Is that okay with you?" "No, no. It's all right. It's nothing bad. I promise." "No, nothing like that. Julia is a nice girl. She won't behave like that." "No, I don't hate you. Really I don't. I'm not trying to embarrass you." I rolled my eyes at Julia, who put out her hand. I gladly gave her the phone. (Told you I didn't last long.) Julia said, "Julia here, Ava. Tomorrow at school Mark is picking a second girlfriend. Do you want to be his girlfriend?" "Yes, you heard me correctly, Mark WILL be choosing another girl tomorrow, and it could be you. It's his choice, but I'm helping him. He had lunch with fourteen of my girlfriends today and he's thinking of choosing one of them tomorrow. Your letter came at a perfect time, but he wants to talk with me about your letter, and he needs your permission for that." "I'll tell you why later; it's not important now. Mark is asking you for your permission to be included in the list of possible girlfriends that we are considering. Will you give it?" "Let me put it this way. Mark is asking you to trust his judgment. If you DON'T trust his judgment, then you have NO chance of being his lover. Mark will return your letter to you, and you'll never have another chance at him ever again. But I can see that Mark likes your letter, so if you DO trust his judgment, then you have a good chance of being his lover. You might even be in his bed making love to him sometime in the next two or three nights; as early as that. So, Ava, do you trust Mark's judgment: yes or no?" Ava must have trusted my judgment, which is more than I do, because Julia said, "Good. Mark has already read your letter at least twice that I know of so he's DEFINITELY interested in you. What's going to happen is that I'll hang up to read your letter, then Mark and I will discuss you. That won't take very long because Mark already knows what he thinks, and unlike you, I trust his judgment immediately without making a big fuss about it." "No, Ava. I am NOT interested in your excuses. There are many dozens of girls who have told Mark that they will do ANYTHING he wants. Absolutely ANYTHING. None of the girls who've left letters in his locker have said no to his showing them to me. You're the very first to make a fuss about that." "Why would you think you're the first? Haven't you seen how many girls are interested in him?" "So you know what I mean then. But out of ALL the letters that have been put in his locker, yours is easily the one that he liked the best." "Yes, it's true. That's why I am so interested in reading it. Mark obviously likes you, so I want to like you too." "Thank you, you're sweet. Let me explain something. Did you know that I am Mark's girlfriend AND his sister's girlfriend?" "Good. It's true. I started as Mark's girlfriend, but then I met his VERY nice sister Carol, and now I spend half my time with her. Earlier today I convinced Mark that it's not fair to him if I can have a relationship with another girl but he can't, so we're going to find him some other girls. Hopefully he'll find one or two he likes as much as I like Carol. I feel guilty that he's been missing out for the last couple of weeks, so he and I are going to do this very quickly. Are you able to be his girlfriend quickly if he chooses you?" "Good. I'll hang up in a second so I can read your letter. While you're waiting I suggest you think about all the other girls who do whatever Mark wants. There are lots of girls who call out 'Yes' even before he's finished telling them what to do, including me. Mark is such an incredible genius, so wonderful and I respect him so much, that I do anything he wants. If you want to be his lover, then I suggest you think very hard about whether you'll trust his judgment about EVERYTHING. He's so much smarter than I am that I let him be my boss because that makes the best sense. I don't know you, so I don't know how smart you are. Maybe you're as smart as Mark?" "You're not! Then why on Earth did you argue with him about showing me your letter? You should have known that someone who is such a huge genius like Mark would have good reasons. I've been spending ALL day helping him find new girlfriends, so I HAVE TO see your letter, so I can tell him whether I think you'll try harder than all the other girls who want to be his girlfriend." "I'm sorry Ava, but I am NOT sure you will. I'm worried that you don't respect his judgment enough." "You do? Mark is starting to look impatient and I ALWAYS do what he wants, preferably even before he asks, so I'll hang up now. You spend the time thinking about whether you'll do what he wants in the future, so you can be his lover. Mark will call you back in ten minutes. Goodnight." Julia hung up and I said, "Damn! I wish I could do that. You are SO much better at that than me." Carol echoed my sentiment. Julia laughed at me, "That's because you don't even try. You spend all your time and energy trying to make the other person feel better, or worrying how to avoid making them feel bad in the first place. You completely forget about what YOU want. When I was talking to Ava, the ONLY thing I was thinking about was how to manipulate her into agreeing to what I wanted her to do, which was very easy because she's so desperate for you." "Umm. I don't really like the idea of manipulating people. I'm not comfortable with doing that to them." Julia said, "There's one MAJOR thing you're not thinking about, Mark." I tried to ask her using the eyebrow thing, but I don't think she noticed. Luckily she carried on anyway, "Ava's at home now, very excited and very happy. I bet she can't sit still. She'll be pacing backing and forth, looking at the clock and cursing that it's moving so slowly. She'll also be scared, nervous and cursing herself for arguing over giving you permission to let me see the letter. She'll REALLY be kicking herself for that. But mostly she'll be excited and happy because she knows that you're going to pick a new girlfriend very soon. She has a FAR better chance of being picked than she thought she had fifteen minutes ago. You can easily imagine her feeling like that right now, can't you?" "Oh yes. I'm sure that's exactly what she's doing and feeling." Carol said, "I know EXACTLY how she's feeling. I was just the same before you surprised me with our marriage. The days before that were so exciting and happy for me, but so scary too." Julia laughed, "Yes. Sorry about that, sweetie. I know we teased you a lot, but we needed to see how much you wanted to be with Mark. With me too, but mostly with Mark." Carol said, "I'll forgive you, IF you make love to me SOON! It's taking a long time and I'm getting very eager." Julia answered, "It's not going to take much longer. I'll call Ava back in about fifteen minutes. I know I said Mark will call her back in ten, but obviously we won't do it that way. Mark doesn't know how to talk with her properly yet, and even if he did, it'd be better if I called her so she learns that she's not important, and that I'm in charge of her." Carol said, "But after that, PLEASE can we go to bed. I REALLY want to." Julia said, "You and me both. It's a pity Mark wasted so much time after school." I opened my mouth to strongly object, but realized Julia was jerking my chain. I used my open mouth to, "{Growl}." Julia said, "We should have a quick shower to kill the time before we call Ava back, but I'll quickly finish the conversation I was having with Mark first. Mark, remember we agreed that because of my manipulations, Ava will be pacing around in circles at home, mostly excited and happy?" "I remember, yes." "If I had left you to talk to her yourself - without any manipulations - how would she be feeling now? Excited and happy, or would you have made her more and more upset and embarrassed, the way you were doing when I took over?" "Umm. You're almost certainly right. Maybe I could've rescued the conversation, but there's a big chance I would've caused her to burst out crying and hang up on me. She was heading that way before you took over." "I'll tell you a couple of things quickly. It is FINE to manipulate someone when you're manipulating them into something they're asking for in the first place. Why bother arguing with her, trying to make her feel good, reassuring her, etc., when all you needed to do was ask her whether she wanted to be your girlfriend. That was EXACTLY what she wanted, so that INSTANTLY cheered her up. All I did was dangle the bait she wanted, because we all wanted roughly the same thing. It was the easiest possible manipulation. -- "Second, lots of people are going to try to manipulate you. Males and females. You'd better start learning about it so you recognize it when it's being done to you. There's no better way of learning about something than doing it yourself, and these girls are perfect opportunities for you to practice on. -- "Lastly, I think that sometime during your conversation with Ava, she would have become so upset that you would have panicked and tried to cheer her up by offering to be her boyfriend. She would have been very happy, but you would have felt trapped and not in control. In a week or two you would hate it, and you would have had to break up with her, making her FAR more unhappy than she would've felt from just a bad phone call." Bingo! That's almost certainly what would have happened. It's scary how well Julia knows me, and it's even scarier how pathetic I can be. I KNOW I am, it's just hard to stop it at the time. Julia added, "AS SOON as you know a girl even slightly, even from so little as Ava's letter, you can't help but try to cheer her up if you imagine that they are, or might be, upset about something you're doing, or might do. If you're not VERY careful, in a week or two - once you start getting to know several girls - you're going to start agreeing to be boyfriend to ALL of them individually. It'd be a big mess and you'd cause a great deal of unnecessary bad feelings and hurt. Try not to do that, okay?" I agreed to try not to do that. Especially as I feared that Julia was right. We all went and had a shower. It was a squeeze getting us all in, so we had a good time. It certainly lifted the mood after Julia's gloomy forecast. It was nearly twenty minutes after the end of the first phone call with Ava that Julia called her back. Carol and I were both listening carefully. "Hello Ava, Julia here." "Oh dear! Maybe I was wrong about you after all. I should have tried harder to get Mark to pick one of the other girls." "Why? Because I said 'Julia here', and then you immediately started complaining about our not calling you back earlier." "It's not me you need to apologize to; it's Mark. He's not here now because he's in the shower. We got held up because another girl who wants to have sex with us was on the phone, so he's only just managed to get into the shower. When you talk with him tomorrow you should apologize to him for complaining when I called you back. Mark specially asked me to call you back because he was worried about the other girl making you wait so long. He's a very caring, considerate guy, so he was worried about you. He's not going to be pleased when I tell him that I called you back and you immediately complained." "No, I WILL tell him. I owe ALL my loyalty to Mark. I look after him, not after you. If you make a mistake then it's your problem, not mine. You're just lucky that he's quite interested in you. He'll be disappointed when I tell him, but I'm sure he'll still be interested in getting to know you better. Let me give you some advice though, you had better be very careful not to complain or disagree with him again. Or even just to me, because I tell him everything. Okay?" "I really can't stress that enough. You have a good chance of getting much closer to him, but if you disagree again I wouldn't be surprised if he chooses one of the other girls instead." "Good girl. By the way, I liked your letter. No wonder Mark was so interested in you. You wrote a very good letter and I was impressed. Thank you for saying nice things about me too. That made me happy of course, but more importantly, it made Mark happy that you praised someone that he cared for." "Thank you. I don't think I've seen a letter from any other girl that was as good as yours. I'll tell you something that will make you happy. Some of the girls that are chasing Mark are very smart girls, and they could easily write very smart, funny, and complimentary letters. Anyone else would think their letters were better than yours, but your letter was almost perfect for Mark. Your letter made you look like almost exactly the sort of girl that interests him the most." "Yes, yes, that's true. That's why he's so interested in you. Your personality seems almost perfect for what he's looking for. You respect intelligence, which is excellent because Mark and I both think intelligence is very important. You're fit and healthy which is ABSOLUTELY essential. I'll tell you why in a few minutes. Mark's fit and healthy, of course, you've seen him play soccer and run the 10k, so you know how incredible he is." "Yes, yes. Incredible. I know. Mark can do many, many incredible things. There are many wonderful things you don't know about him yet. Do you know he's doing courses at OSU?" "Yes really. He's doing 10th and 11th grades at the same time, after skipping a grade last year, AND he's doing college courses too. He's going to OSU tomorrow to have lunch with most of the faculty of the Mathematics department." "Yes, that's right. He's having lunch with the lecturers and professors. They think Mark's incredible. OSU gave him a brand new computer and lots of software a little while ago so he can study better, and they don't charge him for any of his courses either. They're giving him everything for free because they are so honored to have him go there. Isn't that incredible?" "Yes. He's a HUGE genius, but he's more than that. Do you know that he has his driver's license?" "He IS fifteen. If you're lucky enough to spend time with him, ask him to show you his license one day, because you'll see that the issue date is more than a year ago." "Truly. I've seen it. He had to take a very, very special and incredibly difficult driving test. I know you think he's amazing, because your letter says that, but he is far more incredible than you know. Mark is certainly the most fantastic guy you will EVER meet in your entire life, and he's interested in yo. Isn't that so wonderful for you? So you'd better try your ABSOLUTE hardest to make him happy." "Yes, yes. I'm sure you will. I'm about to ask you a personal question now. Any other girl I would've just asked, without saying that I was going to, but because I liked your letter so much I've warned you first. When I ask you this question, Ava, you MUST NOT complain about me being too personal. You MUST answer right away. If you make a fuss the way you did about my reading your letter, then I WILL tell Mark. It's not a hard question, so don't worry too much. Are you ready?" "Good. In your letter you said you've had three boyfriends, but you didn't say how many guys you've had sex with. Mark wants to know how many?" "You don't have to worry about what he'll think. Let me give you some advice: ALWAYS tell the complete truth to Mark. He's a genius and he'll quickly figure you out if you're lying, and then he'll break up with you and you'll lose him forever. I always tell him the truth because I know he sees straight through other people's lies. That's one of the reasons I've been such good girlfriend to him, because I give him my total honesty. My other piece of advice is not to try to understand what Mark will think about things. He's so incredible that I often have NO idea how he thinks. He's too hard to understand, so I usually don't even try. If he asks me a question, I just answer it with the truth right away. It's not the usual way us girls treat boys, but it's the only way to treat Mark. Any other way and he'd realize you were dishonest and he'd break up with you." "Yes. Your letter sounded very honest. But I notice that you still haven't answered Mark's question." "Six. Good. And in the future try to answer my and his questions much faster. I didn't mind that last delay because you were trying to understand, but it would be better for you if you got into the habit of answering immediately. How many girls had you had sex with?" "No, not just kissed. Get-naked-and-all-over-each-other sex?" "None. Okay. I was telling you that your letter sounded almost perfect FOR Mark. Sorry, what was that?" "You're worried that six is too high? Mark didn't tell me why he wanted to know how many, but I can guess, if you want me to?" "Okay. I'll tell you my guess. Mark might be thinking differently because his mind is often too hard for me to understand, but my guess is that Mark will be happy that you've had six lovers. Hopefully seven very soon, if Mark likes you when he meets you. I think he wants you to be sexually experienced. Six or seven sounds like a good number to me. I'm guessing you like sex?" "Good. So does he. I'll tell you something in confidence, okay?" "Mark is very, VERY good at sex. INCREDIBLY good!" "No, I'm not joking or exaggerating. Mark is incredible at EVERYTHING he does. You saw him win the 10k. He beat some of the very best runners in America..." "Yes, exactly. Well he's even better at sex. I promise you he is not only better than any guy you've already had, he's better than any guy you've ever met!" "Why can't you believe it? He's a better runner than any guy you've ever met, so why can't he be a better lover too? Take it from me, he definitely is, and I KNOW what I'm talking about, okay? If you're lucky enough to get him to pick you, and he takes you to bed, then you'll never forget it for the rest of your life. Anyway, enough about that. I was telling you why he liked your letter so much. It seemed to have an almost perfect combination of respect for his intelligence, humor, honesty, willingness to be a good girlfriend for him, even patience. In your letter you said you'll wait for him to answer. Patience is important because so many girls are chasing him that they sometimes slow him down from doing what he wants, like calling back tonight. Although now that I think about it, you weren't very patient then, so maybe we didn't read your letter properly." "You will be patient from now on? That's good. In fact, it's essential. You can't imagine how busy he is doing 10th and 11th grades plus college courses, not to mention the time he spends running, playing soccer and everything else he does. The last thing he needs is some girl complaining because she had to wait a few minutes more than she expected." "Good. I certainly hope you never make that mistake again. Which reminds me about one aspect of your letter that I VERY much liked. I loved that you already understood that Mark is so much more important than you are. You and I agree on that, because I also think he's more important than ANYBODY, including you, me and everybody else. I'm sure that most of the girls chasing him now are going to forget that, and one day soon they're going to demand that he treats them as equals, or even better than equals. He'll just laugh and walk away from them. Some silly little girl trying to trick him into running around after her - the way girls normally do with guys - just isn't going to work against Mark. Your letter showed that you already think he is much more important than you. If you keep that attitude you could become a very good girlfriend for Mark." "Good girl. I like you, Ava. I think we could become good friends." "Thank you very much. I should stop telling you how wonderful I think Mark is, and tell you the real reason I called you. Have you ever seen Mark naked?" "No, I didn't think so. Maybe one day soon, if you're lucky. The reason I asked that is because Mark has the most incredible physique you've ever seen. I mean absolutely incredible! I know some people who want him to be a male model. He could make a fortune doing that." "Yes. I'm serious. His body is far, far better than you think. He deliberately wears shapeless clothes to hide how great his body is." "Yes, I agree. The thing is that now that I've talked him into playing around with other girls. Oh, I should have told you that before. Mark's playing around with other girls wasn't his idea. I had to talk him into it. I felt so guilty because I fell in love with his sister and he got left with only half a girlfriend. He didn't want any other girlfriend, saying that he was happy just to have half of me. I offered to break up with Carol - that's his sister - but Carol's happiness is very important to Mark so he said he'd rather live the rest of his life with only half a girlfriend than make his sister unhappy. Isn't that incredible? How many guys would be so giving and loving?" "Yes, that's for sure. Most teenage boys fight with their sisters, not love them so unselfishly. Everyone in Mark's family is incredibly wonderful. That's partly why I fell in love with Carol. You'll meet her tomorrow, at the thing that I'm taking far too long to tell you about. Anyway, because I managed to talk Mark into trying to find another girlfriend or two, I've also convinced him to dress in clothes that make him look as good as possible, rather than making him look like a sack." "Yes. I don't know how he could do it either, but that's what he did. Anyway, he's not going to be doing that from now on. We went shopping this afternoon and from now on he's going to be wearing clothes that are going to make girls faint when they see him." "No, I can guarantee that there will be girls who faint tomorrow." "You'll see for yourself tomorrow morning so let's not debate it now. I expect many more girls will start chasing him, and that'll waste a lot of his time. Mark's time is very important because of all the things he does already, and because of how important he's going to be in the future. Are you aware that he's going to be very important in the future?" "No. Oh. Well let me quickly say that Mark is going to be one of the most important people in America in a few years. I told you how OSU is throwing gifts at him already. They're doing that because they know in the future, when books are written about Mark, that their being so helpful to him will be worth millions of dollars of good publicity for them." "Yes, absolutely. Look at him. He's a world class athlete, he's a huge genius, he's absolutely gorgeous to look at - wait until you see him in good clothes tomorrow - and he's also a wonderfully caring, loving, sensitive guy. Can you imagine ANYTHING that he couldn't be world famous for? My father thinks Mark could be even more important than Albert Einstein." "Yes. THE Einstein. Everyone in the world knows about Einstein, and in a few years everyone in the world could know about Mark. That's not just my opinion, as a girlfriend, that's my FATHER'S opinion, and my father is a full Professor so he knows what he's talking about. You already know Mark is a world-class runner. Did you know he was holding himself back in that 10k? He could have run it considerably faster but he didn't want to show off so he held himself back." "Truly! Would I lie to you? He's also been holding himself back at soccer. The game last Saturday he started playing properly, and I read your letter that you know how well he did in that. Are you going to his next game?" "Of course you are. Good girl. Well, make sure you don't miss it because you'll see him play without holding back, and you'll see how truly amazing he is as an athlete. He's going to be a very, very famous person in the future, and they'll be many books written about him, and YOU might be mentioned in them! Wouldn't that be amazing?" "It would depend on your convincing him that you'd be a good girlfriend for him. I really hope you can do that, because I'm starting to like you." "Aren't you sweet! Thank you. That's why I'm trying so hard to help you. Believe me, I don't spend ANYTHING like this long talking to all the other girls that call him." "Hang on Ava. Mark's come in, so I'll put you on hold for a little while." Julia lowered the phone and told us, "I just need a little pause to collect my wits before I start talking about Liaisons. Give me a few seconds to think about it please." As far as I was concerned Julia could take as long as she wanted. There was no point in me saying anything, and certainly not to give her advice. ------- Chapter 87: Preparing Ava; Part Two Wednesday, April 20, 2005 (Continued) After a minute's thought, Julia said, "Okay, I know what points I want to make. I'll finish her off now." Julia took her phone off hold. "I'm back, sweetie. Sorry about that. Mark finished his shower and he popped in to see how I'm getting along with you, so I gave him my initial impressions." "Of course they're good, or I wouldn't have spent so long talking to you. Do you know that he's waiting to make love to me. That's what we're going to start as soon as I hang up with you." "No, no. There's no need for you to hang up. When Mark saw me talking to you he smiled. He's happy. He wants you to understand all of this stuff. I told you he's not the same as any other boy. Rather than being impatient over having sex with me, he is happy that I am helping you understand. How many boys would be like that?" "I'll say! Believe me, after Mark, you'll never want to go near another boy again. Getting back to what I was talking about just before Mark came in. I was talking to you about how many other girls are interested in Mark and what a pain it is. That's why I'm calling a special meeting tomorrow morning that I want to invite you to. Can you come to school fifteen minutes early tomorrow?" "Good girl. I just realized that I was a bit silly. It's for Mark, so I'm sure if I'd said can you come to school four HOURS early, you still would have come, wouldn't you?" "That's good to know. Mark and I will both be very happy with you if you're always so cooperative. I want you to come to [Julia described exactly where and when the meeting was to be]. I want you to come at EXACTLY that time. So I suggest you arrive early and sit in your car in the parking lot until about two minutes before, and then walk to the meeting place. Don't come early because there will be another meeting already going on that you'd disrupt. I don't want Mark to see you causing trouble by not arriving at exactly the right time. Okay?" "Good girl. The meeting you'll be coming to is what we're calling the first Liaison meeting. Because Mark is so important to me, and to you too I hope?" "Excellent. Well because of his importance, I'm worried about too many girls at school suddenly deciding they're in love with him, and chasing him so much that it wastes his valuable time. To protect him from that, we're going to have Liaisons for each grade. Do you know what 'Liaison' means?" "Yes, that's close enough. We could have called them 'Blocker' too, but that'd annoy the ordinary girls. The idea is that there will be one Liaison per grade, but three for 10th grade because Mark's so popular among all his classmates. That's six high-school Liaison girls in total. The job of the Liaisons will be to try to control the girls in their grades who want to talk with Mark. To act as blockers really. I'll describe that job to you better tomorrow, so don't worry about it for now. The most important thing for you to know is that Mark specifically wants YOU to be the Liaison for your grade. He's going to be so busy until the end of the year that he won't have time to talk with you unless you are a Liaison. So I hope you'll agree to do that to help Mark?" "Good girl. That's exactly the right answer. I'm the same. I'll do anything he wants me to. I don't even care what it is; if he asks me, then I'll do it." "Excellent. We don't know who the other Liaisons will be yet, as you're the first one Mark has picked. Isn't that wonderful for you?" "Yes. I keep telling you that Mark liked your letter. You definitely have a chance to get very close to him. As long as you don't make any more mistakes, but I'll help you as much as I can with that because I'm starting to like you so much." "You don't have to thank me. I like you because I like the way you look up to Mark and treat him as being so important. You and I think the same, so it's very easy to like you, haha. In your letter you said you're not very smart, but you understand what I'm telling you FAR better than a lot of other girls. Lots of them try to get bossy with Mark, or keep him waiting, or argue with him. Can you imagine any girl being so stupid?" "I know. They're really foolish, because they'll never get another chance. One mistake too many, and - bang - they're gone. I don't think you'll make another mistake though, because I think you're quite smart about people." "Haha. Thank you, but it's actually quite easy for me. I've seen girl after girl after girl try to catch Mark and fail, so I know what they do wrong, and I make sure I never do that!" "Yes, I WILL help you. I'll help you because I like you, but mostly because Mark likes you. Whatever Mark wants, that's what I try to do for him. If he didn't like you, then it wouldn't matter how much I did, because my opinion isn't as important as his. Lucky for you, we both like you. I've already told you the two most important things that you should NEVER forget. Do you want me to repeat them?" "Okay. Number one: Mark is the most important person you will ever meet in your entire life. Actually he's the most important person ANYONE at our school will ever meet. He is VERY important. Important people are already taking great notice of Mark. Did you know that the Dean of OSU - that's the number one boss of OSU, the most important man there - calls up the Principal of our school to make sure that things are going well for Mark? OSU has TENS OF THOUSANDS of students doing advanced degrees and probably has thousands of staff, but the most important man at OSU already knows how important Mark is and makes the time to ensure that Mark is being looked after properly even before he graduates from school. Isn't that incredible?" "Mark's driving license is another example. It's against the LAW to have a license at fourteen. Can you imagine how important the people had to be to force the DMV to give him a license?" "Yes. Absolutely incredible. Totally. Several times in the first two weeks that I was going out with Mark I couldn't get to sleep at night because I was scared Mark was a dream. I couldn't believe he was in my life. I certainly couldn't believe that he could like an ordinary girl like me. I kept waking my mom and asking her whether Mark was real." "Yes, exactly like that. You and I are just ordinary girls, and there are plenty of girls around like us, but for some reason Mark likes us. That's why I try my ABSOLUTE hardest to make him happy. There's NO WAY in the world that I deserve to be his girlfriend, but he lets me, so I devote myself to thanking him for my being so lucky." "That's one of the things I liked from your letter. I think you do understand how amazing he is. And if you think he's amazing now, wait until you have sex with him. It'll blow your mind like nothing you have ever experienced before." "Haha. Wait and see for yourself, if he lets you. It'll be the best night you've ever had, that's for sure. Anyway, I was saying there were two important things that you should never forget. You remember number one?" "Yes. Good girl. He's more important than anyone you'll ever meet. That includes more important than me and you too. The second important thing you should never forget is kind of obvious because of the first, but it's better to make sure you know it. If Mark asks you to do something, you should IMMEDIATELY say 'Yes' and jump to do it. Don't even think about saying 'No'. If Mark asks for something, you do it. It's very simple. -- "Many boys would go crazy if they had a girl who would do anything they wanted, but you've met Mark: he's very gentle and loving. In all the time I've been his girlfriend he's NEVER asked me to do anything I didn't want to. I LOVE doing anything for Mark. Hopefully you will too. I'd feel a lot better about my being away with Carol - which Mark wants me to keep doing - if I knew there was a good girl like you looking after Mark." "I hope he chooses you too. If you remember those two important things you have a good chance. You must ALWAYS remember them. Let's say one day Mark asks you to do something for him. If you accidentally told him that you couldn't because you had an assignment due soon, then you would have failed BOTH number one AND number two. You must never do that. If he asks you to do anything, you must ALWAYS say 'Yes'. Have you got that?" "Good girl. Also, if I ask you to do something, please immediately say 'yes' too. Nearly everything I do, I do to help Mark. So if I'm asking you for something, it's for him. I think you know me well enough by now to understand that?" "Excellent. You ARE smart. I think you were too modest in your letter." "What's that? You're NOT modest, because of the photos. Haha. Good joke, Ava. You've got a good sense of humor too. I like that. Actually Mark hardly even looked at your photos. A very brief glance at the most." "Because he's a genius. He knows that bodies aren't important. It's all about personality, attitude, honesty, etc. He looked at the picture of your face, I guess because he was trying to get a feel for your personality, but the nudes didn't register with him much." "I'm serious. Remember that Annette Neumeyer tried her best to make him hard. She couldn't do it when she was dressed like a total slut and was rubbing herself all over his body, including over his groin. He didn't get hard then, so he's not going to get hard from looking at pictures." "No, it was a VERY good idea that you included them." "I've confused you? Sorry about that. It was a very good idea because it showed that you were open and honest. Not keeping anything secret from him." "Yes, EXACTLY like you said in your letter. He likes you because you seem to be exactly the sort of girl that he's looking for. You're extremely lucky because there've been countless girls who've already failed. It seems that you're lucky enough to have almost the perfect personality for him. I'm amazed at how lucky you are." "Yes. It is unbelievable. That's exactly right. Mind you, you've still got to be very careful and try your hardest. You can't afford to make any more mistakes so close to getting him. What's that?" "Oh no, he's not here. This is girl-talk, haha. He left before we started talking again. He has an enormous amount of work to do, so if he has some time he does some study. We're in my parents' house now, and a couple of weeks ago they pulled our spare bedroom apart to build a study for him, so he can have his own room to study in while he's here." "Absolutely. My parents are like everyone else that gets to know Mark. They recognize how important he is, and they do everything they can to help him. I promise you that no matter how wonderful and important you think Mark is, you are wrong, because he's EVEN more wonderful and important than you think." "That's correct. It's not just me who thinks Mark is important, there are many adults who know he is. Remember the Dean at OSU calls our Principal, Mark's driver's license, my parents building him a study, and other things like that. I'll tell you another funny story, my parents also spent a lot of money soundproofing my bedroom. Mark was giving me so many orgasms, and making me scream so loud and so often, that no one in the house could sleep. My screaming was keeping them awake all night long. They couldn't tell me to be quiet because when Mark is doing me there is no way I can control myself, and it went on for hours, so it was terrible for them. They had to get carpenters in to soundproof my room, so now I can scream for hours and no one hears me." "What's that? Hours. Oh yes. Mark can make love for hours." "I don't know how long. I always have to beg him to stop long before he has to." "Haha. Wait and see. Remember I said at the beginning of our talk that your being physically fit was very important, and that I'd explain why later? Mark's ability at sex is the reason. If you're fit then you'll last longer before you have to ask him to stop." "Yes. I am 100% totally telling the truth. Mark will make love to you for as long as you want, and eventually you'll have to ask him to stop." "Haha. I'll tell you some more about this at the end of our talk, but can I change the subject off how divine he is at sex. Remember I was saying that it was good you put nude photos of you in your letter?" "Good. Yes, so he could see you were open and honest. Also because, once he meets you, and starts to like you, THEN he'll like to look at them again. I know him well enough now. He doesn't know you well enough yet so your body means nothing to him, but once he starts liking you, then your body will start turning him on. Then I'll give him your photos again, and he'll look at them happily." "Yes, that's right. He's just like a female that way. In many ways he's far better than other guys because he understands females so well. He makes jokes about never understanding us, but that's just because he's funny. Remember that he's a genius. While I remember to mention it, another reason he just flicked through your photos is because there are some girls chasing him who have the sexiest bodies you could possibly imagine. Luckily for you and me he's not like other boys because he understands that personality is the most important aspect. Most of those sexy girls have had so many boys chasing them that they've become stuck up, and they have no clue about how to treat a boy who's more important than them. They can't stop being arrogant, so Mark tells them to stop bothering him and go away. That's another reason you're so good, because you're not arrogant." "Believe me, once you spend a few days around Mark, any arrogance you might've had will disappear. I want to tell you again how important your personality is. Mark can have many girls who're better looking than you and me, but all they're good for is bouncing up and down on his cock. You will NEVER keep Mark as your boyfriend if all you can offer him is sex, because he can get that from hundreds of girls. The ONLY way you can keep Mark is the same way I keep him: by having a personality as close as possible to what he is looking for. THAT'S how you can become his girlfriend, and I think you've got an EXCELLENT chance, provided you keep trying hard." "I want you to be too, and I'll do everything I can to help. I'll have to go soon, Ava, because Mark is waiting for me. He can be wonderfully patient, but obviously I don't want to push my luck with him. In fact I'd NEVER keep him waiting at all, except that I know he's happy that I'm helping you." "Yes, yes. But I need to tell you one more thing. It's a bit of bad news for you, actually, but I should tell you so you know about it." "I don't know how bad. You'll have to judge that for yourself. I need to explain it, okay?" "Good. As you know, Mark and I are lovers, and Carol and I are lovers too. Carol is his sister, if you'd forgotten. Carol's a lesbian, but she didn't know that until recently. She was very depressed in her life because she couldn't understand why she felt dead about things other girls were raving about, like boys. And she wasn't feeling things for girls because no girls were developing that sort of relationship with her, so nothing had a chance to blossom. I don't know how it happened with me, because I always thought I was straight, but somehow wonderful chemistry started happening between Carol and me. Soon Carol and I were in love. This has been GREAT for Carol, because all of a sudden she understands herself and her life, and she's happy for the first time in years." "Yes, yes, it's a wonderful story. It's a VERY wonderful story. Mark is very, very happy to see his sister - that he truly loves - change from being depressed into a laughing, happy, in love person. You'll meet Carol tomorrow morning because she's coming to the meeting. I won't bother explaining why, you'll learn that tomorrow. Anyway, you'll see how beautiful she is, and you'll start finding out how nice she is on the inside as well as the outside. But - and this is an important 'but' - now imagine the situation from Mark's point of view. First, he's incredible in bed and can always make love longer than I can. That's GREAT for me, but not so great for him because I have to ask him to stop when he still wants to keep going. Then Carol and I got together, so Mark is getting evenb less sex now. It must be incredibly frustrating for him, but he never complains." "No, not once. He's happy for his sister." "I know. It's incredible all right. He's a saint. Oops, are saints allowed to be incredibly sexy fucking machines? Haha. Anyway, he's down to half a girlfriend who is not able to give him anywhere near as much sex as he would like. Then to make matters worse, his girlfriend is having sex with another girl. We all know how horny that makes guys! Every guy on the planet drools when they think about that, but I picked his SISTER to fall in love with! If I'd fallen for ANY other girl, I would have introduced her to Mark. Mark is such a nice guy, not to mention genius, handsome and a hunk, so it probably wouldn't have taken more than an hour before my girlfriend was begging to go to bed with him. Then the three of us would have had an incredible time in bed together. Mark can easily satisfy two girls, so he would've gone from having only half a girlfriend, to having two lovers at the same time. And not just two lovers, but the two girls would be making love to each other as well, which is exactly the type of threesome that guys go totally gaga over. I felt SO SORRY for him not getting anywhere near enough sex AND being tortured by threesomes being so close, but not possible because Carol is his sister." "No. He wouldn't even think about touching her against her wishes. He's a surprisingly moral person. In fact, for a guy he's astonishingly moral. With all this sexual frustration, and with his knowing that I am making love to his sister so often, not once has he even joked about touching Carol. He totally respects her, including her lesbianism. If you get to know him you'll see for yourself that being unloving is impossible for him. Until a couple of days ago Mark refused to play around with other girls. He was TOTALLY faithful to me. I think your letter even said something about him being very abrupt with the other girls who tried to throw themselves at him, so you know what I'm talking about, don't you?" "You did see that. Good. Mark was totally faithful to me, even though I wasn't to him. Again, how many guys would behave like that?" "You got that right! Anyway, just a couple of days ago I started working to convince Mark that he should find an extra girl that he likes. That happened to be exactly the day that you talked to him. Your timing was PERFECT!" "I can't believe how lucky you are either. It's a dream come true for you, that's for sure. Mark might end up as the most important man in America, or even the entire world, and you happened to ask him on exactly the right day, and your letter captured almost exactly the right personality for him. I cannot even begin to describe how lucky you are. There are no words for it." "Shush, shush, Ava. There are a couple more things you need to listen to yet. Because Mark is important to me, I want him to find the best possible girl he can. One that has exactly the right personality for him, will look after him well and do what he wants, that has a good body, and many other considerations like that. I know he hardly ever notices bodies, but once he likes the girl, he'll be happier if she has a nice body, and I want him to be happy. So my plan was to introduce him to LOTS of girls. -- "Remember I said fourteen girls had lunch with him today. They dressed up very beautifully and sexy for him, and tried hard to make him like them, laughing at all his jokes and the usual things we do. There was one girl he liked a little bit, but none of them very much. But what was important is that he's starting to look for another girlfriend. I thought it might take weeks or months until he found a girl that suits him, and I was doing everything I could do to help. I've talked him into dressing to look good rather than hide how fantastic his body is under sacks, and other things like that. I'm astonished that you came out of nowhere, Ava! You just suddenly turn up as if by magic, and from what I know about you already, you seem almost perfect for him. Isn't that amazing?" "I know. God must really love you to give you this chance. But there's a problem Ava, maybe a serious problem, so you have to keep listening. I strongly want Mark to get the right sort of girl, because he deserves it. He's been unbelievably wonderful to me and Carol, so he deserves the best possible girl we can find for him. You'd agree with that, wouldn't you?" "Yes. Obviously he does. The problem is that he's so AWESOME at sex. He can go for hour after hour and I can't keep up. No matter how hard I try, I can't last as long as him. I tried for six hours one night, and at the end I was a complete and total wreck. I had to miss two days of school because I couldn't walk after he'd fucked me so many times. But Mark wasn't tired. He didn't miss any school, or have even a single sore muscle. Isn't that amazing? I bet you CAN'T WAIT to have sex with him, to find out what he's like?" "Haha. Yes, really six hours. I timed it. And that was just ONE night, he could do that EVERY night if he wanted to. That's why my parents had to get soundproofing; I would scream for hours! So now you understand why his perfect extra girlfriend has to be fit! She has to be VERY fit, haha." "Yes. I know you're fit." "Even VERY fit. That's good. In fact, that's even better than good, it's GREAT. But, NO girl can keep up with Mark, Ava. I can't keep up with him, and I'm sure you can't keep up with him either. He can beat EVERY man in America at a 10k race, and he can beat EVERY girl in America in bed. Do you want me to put you on my mother or father so they can confirm to you how many hours I screamed for?" "Seriously, I would if you wanted confirmation. My parents aren't shy and they're EXTREMELY proud of me for being Mark's girlfriend. Remember they built a study for him, soundproofed my room, and many other things I haven't mentioned. My parents are very happy to help Mark. Just like everybody else that learns to appreciate how important he is. If I told them you were important to Mark, they would do everything they could. Do you want them to confirm that Mark is as good in bed as I say?" "You'll take my word. Good girl. Where was I? Oh, I remember now. No ONE girl can give Mark as much sex as he wants. But TWO girls AT THE SAME TIME could give him a lot more sex, and - for a guy - a type of sex that guys really like. That's the one serious thing that your personality hasn't got Ava. I want to find Mark a bisexual girl, so the three of us can have enormous amounts of wild sex together. The trouble is that you've never had sex with another girl. It's a huge pity for me, because I'm really starting to like you, and I know Mark likes you too. I think Mark and I have to keep looking for a girl just like you, but who's also bisexual. Do you know any girls like that?" "What's that? You think you're bisexual? Do you mean you'd be perfectly happy to have sex with Mark and me at the same time?" "Gosh, now I feel stupid. I should've asked you whether you were bisexual right at the beginning, rather than how many girls you'd had sex with. All this time I've been worrying about that but I didn't need to. Phew, that's a relief. In fact, that's wonderful, because we're going to call some girl to come over tonight and have a threesome with us for several hours of wild sex. This would be Mark's first threesome, and he's very excited about it, so he's going to be totally unstoppable tonight. Me and the other girl are going to be screaming our heads off for hours. We're going to have such a fantastic time. Do you want me to ask Mark if he wants to you and me all night, instead of one of the other girls we were thinking of?" "That's wonderful! I think he'll be very pleased to hear that. I'll put you on hold in a second so I can go ask him. Just before I go, if I give you my address, can you get here yourself? You have your own car?" "Good. The reason I say that is I know Mark wants to make love to just me for a while, then ask the other girl to come to us and join in. He's a very emotional guy, and even if he can get a threesome whenever he wants, he's already told me that he'll often want me alone, or the other girl alone. That's because he values people as individuals and in building relationships with them. You wouldn't mind making love to him alone sometimes, would you? Just for a few hours at a time, especially when I'm away with Carol?" "Haha. I loved that emphatic answer! I realized I'd asked a silly question right after I finished it. I start getting silly when I get close to having sex with Mark because I'm too busy thinking about how good he is in bed, rather than concentrating on what I'm supposed to be doing. Wow! I just opened my robe and looked at my pussy, and it's sopping wet already. I can't believe how wet I am, and Mark's not even in the same room yet. I must be so wet because I'm thinking of you and him together. How about you? Are you wet knowing you're just an hour or two away from having the most intelligent, athletic, loving and important man you'll ever meet, give you the best sex you've ever had?" "Yeah. I'll say. I feel sorry for you having to wait an hour or two. Oh, I forgot that I've got to ask Mark yet. I'm starting to ramble again. I'll put you on hold while I go ask. Hang on please, darling." Julia pressed a button on her phone, then asked us, "I got a bit carried away, but how was that?" Carol and I had long since stuffed as much pillow as we could into our mouths to stifle our laughter. I'd thought the whole thing was hilarious. There'd been a few times I'd winced at how much praise Julia was directing at me, but I'd mostly been able to ignore them as being part of her snow job. Carol didn't have any reason to hold back, so she'd had a great time laughing wildly into her pillow, and often kicking her feet up and down on the bedspread. Carol answered first, "That was awesome. My belly hurts because I was laughing so much about how brilliantly you're leading her along." Julia gave a mock bow, "Thank you my loyal audience. It's surprisingly easy. 90% of the time I'm ignoring what she's saying and just moving through the things I want to say, which is simply to build Mark up and string her along. She wants to go to where I'm taking her, so it's not hard. Especially with Ava; she's nice but she's not bright." The sudden thought of Ava's hearing us concerned me, and I pointed to the phone frantically. Julia checked it, then said, "It's fine." Seeing I was still not reassured, Julia put it under the bedclothes, and covered it with Carol's and my well-chewed pillows. Julia then asked me, "What did you think, Mark?" "So many things. Hilarious, especially your comments about my genius meaning that I understood females..." That spurred a lengthy discussion about everyone's favorite parts. Julia particularly enjoyed her references to my deliberately wearing clothes that looked like a sack; Carol liked the stuff that talked about her. Not that she was vain (quite the opposite), she just got a kick out of being used as such a wonderful justification for me being allowed a lot more sex. We discussed several of our favorite lines, then I said, "I feel a bit sorry for her though. She's a nice girl and you're stringing her along so much. It seems unfair." Julia answered, "EVERY girl you meet will have a personality, a life, reasons, hopes, dreams, etc. Just because you've learned more about Ava than the fourteen girls from lunch, for example, doesn't make Ava more deserving of special treatment. You're giving her what she wants: a relationship with you and a shot at the grand prize, which is to convince you to marry her so she'll have you all to herself. Her desire for that is totally selfish because she's not giving any thought to what's best for you. If she's an unusual girl, who doesn't want marriage, then playing around with you is still giving her exactly what she wants. We're not really lying to her. We're not telling her that you will marry her, or that you'll leave me and she'll be your only girlfriend. If she doesn't like the truth, she can walk away at any time. If she buys in, then that's by her choice not because we've forced her. Even if we were deceiving her unfairly, I'd do it anyway because your needs are more important to me than hers - by a LONG way! For her and the other girls who'll get close to you, we'll try to keep them happy, try to break up with them in good ways, etc. They might feel some anger immediately after the breakup, but I'm sure that years from now most of them will be extremely proud that they had a relationship with you." I couldn't argue with any of that, and had very little motivation to do so. We chatted a bit more, and one of the things that Julia pointed out was, "Next year I'll be in the 11th grade, but you'll be a senior with Ava. Finding and training girls who'll be in your classes then is something we want to do because that'll make next year easier and more enjoyable for you." That sounded like a good idea to me. After nearly ten minutes of talking, Julia said, "It's about time I took her off hold." "Hi darling, it's Julia here again, are you still there?" "Haha. I guess you did know that. Especially as I'm the only girl who calls you darling. Haha. Your letter had some funny parts in it too. I'm going to enjoy getting to know you better." "Thank you very much. We'll BOTH enjoy it. Let me tell you what happened. I talked to Mark, and he was VERY interested in what I thought about you. Normally he doesn't waste even a single second on most girls, but he talked to me for MINUTES about you, so he's definitely interested in you." "Yes, yes. I'm so happy for you too. I remember the night before my first date with Mark, and I was giddy with excitement." "Yes, just like you. Because you and I talked so well on the phone before, and you listened and understood what I was saying so well, I've come to like you a lot. Because he's such a genius, Mark could easily see that I like you, and he's very happy about that. I think he's already starting to believe that you'll be a very good girlfriend and lover for him and me." "I'm sure you will do your best Ava. You HAVE to do your best, because there are so many other girls who want him just as much as you do, maybe even more." "Okay. Haha, I'll take your word that no one could want him more than you. Shall I tell you what Mark decided?" "You know that Mark's a genius. He asked me very smart questions about you. After a few minutes, he asked me whether you were bisexual, because he knows that I'm trying to look for bisexual girls. I said you were, because that's what you told me. He asked me whether I was TOTALLY sure. When he asked me like that I had to stop and think, because if Mark asks me something twice, then that always means that he understands something better than I do. I knew that I really want you to be bisexual because I think you'll join in with Mark and me perfectly, plus you'll also be great for him when I'm away with Carol, but Mark made me think very carefully, and I had to tell him that you've never had sex with another girl. Mark nodded his head at that, and said that he thought so." "No, no. This is NOT as bad as you think. Really Ava, listen to me, okay. First, you DEFINITELY should not have told me that you'd had female lovers if you hadn't. Mark would have seen straight through that lie the very first time you were in bed with him and me. That would've made him IMMEDIATELY kick you out and you'd NEVER have another chance. You must ALWAYS tell us the truth; that's very important. Not only because he deserves the best from you and me, which includes the truth, but also because he'll find out anyway. -- "I'm fairly sure he already knew you were not bisexual. That's why he asked me twice. He's seen you in class most of the year and I think he had already detected that you weren't bi. He's very good at detecting things like that. In fact, he's very good at detecting everything, because he's such a genius. Remember in your letter you said he was talking to you AND writing down notes?" "Yes. Mark can do TWO things at the same time. So even when he's paying attention to the teacher in class, he is also watching the students. I think he knows more about you than you think he does, so lying to him is impossible. If you try, you'll just lose him. When he told me that he didn't think you were bisexual I was SO disappointed. I thought he was certain to lose interest in you." "Shush. It's all right." From Ava's point of view, it obviously wasn't all right. Even Carol and I could easily hear Ava's sobs. It took a minute or so until Ava was calmed enough to listen again. "You haven't given me a chance to tell you the WONDERFUL news yet. Mark knew right back even before the first time I talked to you that you weren't bisexual, but that when I asked you, you would say you were. You had me fooled, but I'm SURE that you never had Mark fooled. He's far too smart for that. When he got me to admit that I doubted you were bi, he told me that he was sure you weren't, but that you could learn to be. Isn't that amazing? How could he possibly know that?" "You don't have to tell me you can learn. If Mark tells me he's sure about something, then I believe it already. Even if you told me you could NOT learn, I'd STILL believe Mark rather than you. He's so smart that I'm sure he'd be right rather than you. He reminded me that two weeks ago I would've sworn I was straight, and yet now I am very happily bisexual with Carol. He thinks the same will happen to you. Sometimes he scares me with how smart he is. He understands people so well, especially girls." "No, no. None of that matters, Ava. Mark has already decided what's going to happen. I'll tell you shortly what he's decided, but the most important thing is that he wants to make sure that you are comfortable and happy in your relationship with us. Which MUST mean that he hopes you'll be involved with us for a long time. You are very, very close to being Mark's girlfriend! Isn't that incredibly fantastic for you?" "You are SO close, darling. I'm almost as excited as you are. Here's what Mark has decided. Are you listening carefully? You should always listen carefully when you're hearing what Mark has decided." "Good girl. Mark is very busy, as you know, and he doesn't have the time to do everything himself. He's told me to find out whether you can be bisexual or not as fast as possible, and then to let him know." "Yes. I'm sure you can be, but Mark has asked me to make SURE. When he gives me an instruction I ALWAYS do exactly what he says. The good news for you, is that when he asked me to do this 'as fast as possible', he explained that he wants you to be ready to sleep with him and me on Friday night." "Yes, that's right, just two nights away. Mark wants you to become his lover in just two nights from now. That's so wonderful for you." "No, you won't be coming here tonight. Mark KNOWS you've never had a bisexual experience and he doesn't want to force you to do anything tonight you'd be uncomfortable with, that's why he asked me to help you. Hang on darling, Mark's just come in. I'll put you on hold." Julia turned to us, saying, "She's very eager but also a bit dumb, so I'm just going to tell her what to do and not give her any choice. I'll tell you two what I intend for her, and you tell me whether you agree. In short, I want her to be our plaything. She's not smart enough to be much use otherwise, but she is pretty, desperately eager to please, and easy to order around, which I find quite exciting. So I intend to push her into full-on sex with all of us, so we'll all be able to boss her around as much as we want. I know Mark will like that, but what do you think, Carol? Do you want Ava to follow your orders and do anything you want, especially sexually?" Carol said, "I DO like that. I'm getting turned on a little by listening to you playing with her on the phone and I'd like to do that with her too, but she's in 11th grade and I'm not even fourteen yet. She won't take orders from me." Julia answered, "I'm fairly sure I can make it so she will, if you want me to. I know that when we got married I said that other wives will be able to order you around, if that's still the way you get your kicks at that time, but Ava isn't going to become one of our wives so you can easily be her boss if you want." Carol said, "I'll be able to make her do things for me in public, won't I?" "Haha. Not extreme things, but light stuff, I think so." "In that case: I want." I spoke up, "Umm. I'm not sure we should be treating her that way. Ava's a nice girl who..." Julia said, "Not once has Ava asked me what you want. All her thinking is how to achieve her own selfish desires. She's got an image of you coming into HER life and making HER happy the way SHE wants. That's all she's thinking about. So we're doing exactly the same to her as she's planning to do to you; we're just doing it better. Second, you NEED to learn how to be bossy. Ava is a perfect girl to practice on, and you'll see Carol and me be bossy to her - which is the main reason I want her to be subservient to all of us. Maybe you'll finally learn to be more commanding that way." "Umm. Okay then." Julia reconnected to Ava, saying, "Sorry about that, Ava. Mark popped in. He's not happy about how long I'm having to spend with you. I think he's worried that you're not interested enough, if I have to spend so long explaining everything to you." "Yes, I know you're super interested, but this is taking too long. Listen carefully, this is what is going to happen. I am spending tomorrow evening and night with Carol, which I often do. Mark wants me to make sure you're bisexual before Friday, so you have to come to Carol's place tomorrow night. Sometime after dinner tomorrow I'll call you and tell you to come over. Bring a change of clothes and overnight stuff, because you'll be staying the night, so we can give you as much training as possible." "What's that? You don't know Carol. That doesn't matter, because I know her very well. She is perfect for you; trust me on this. You DO trust me, don't you? Because if you don't, I'll hang up and tell Mark that we need to find another girl because Ava doesn't trust me." "Of course you do. Look at how much trouble I'm going to for you! You'll see Carol tomorrow morning at the meeting, and I'll introduce you then. When you arrive at the meeting, Ava, I want you to give me a very passionate kiss, and when I introduce you to Carol, I want you to give her a passionate kiss too. Mark will see you, and will see that you can be bisexual." "Yes, Carol too. Ava, listen to me. Mark puts Carol's happiness ahead of his own. I told you already that he was willing to have only half a girlfriend for the rest of his life, so Carol would be happy. That's the sort of guy Mark is. If Mark sees that you make Carol happy, by kissing her and by sleeping with her overnight and giving her good sex, then he'll not only know you are bisexual, but he'll also love you for being so wonderful to his sister. He'll CERTAINLY want you to become our lover on Friday night. Do you understand how important Carol is to Mark, and why my plan of getting you and Carol together will totally convince Mark that you are the perfect girl for us?" "Yes, I know you never thought of that. You need to realize that I'm much smarter than you, and if I have a suggestion for you, then there are good reasons for it. Sometime tomorrow night you and I are going to have to have a serious talk about your not trusting me. Both Carol and I know Mark FAR better than you do, and it makes no sense for us to have to explain everything to you all the time. You KNOW we are trying to help you, so why did you kick up such a fuss?" "Okay. I'll accept your apology this time, but we're still going to talk about this tomorrow night. Make very sure you kiss me and Carol passionately tomorrow morning in front of Mark. Don't try to kiss Mark yourself though. You're not his girlfriend yet, and he wouldn't like it if you tried. If he wants to kiss you, he will, but it's not your place to force yourself on him. Okay?" "Good girl. At the meeting you'll obviously say 'Yes' to everything he asks. During school hours none of us will get much chance to talk together, but I'll call you after school. Your parents will let you sleepover at Carol's?" "Good. I'll give you the phone number and address when I call you, so you can give it to your parents if that's what you normally do when you don't spend the night at home. They can call Carol's parents, which are Mark's parents, if they want. They'll be fine with another girl staying overnight. Mark won't be there, so there'll be no boys to worry about." "Of course he won't be. He doesn't go anywhere near his sister when she's having sex. Stop interrupting with silly questions. Make sure you remember that if you CONVINCE Carol and me tomorrow night that you'll be a good bisexual lover, then you'll be sleeping with Mark and me Friday night. You do want to be Mark's girlfriend, don't you? Because if you don't there's a long line of other girls that will do ANYTHING AT ALL to have him? I hope you'll do ANYTHING too, otherwise he'll pick one of the other girls?" "You will. Good. So sleeping with two good looking girls will be easy for you, especially as you want to become bisexual. Just before I hang up, I want to say that I am sure Mark is going to make you very happy, and that you're going to make Mark very happy too. Spend the rest of the evening thinking about how wonderful it is going to be for you to be Mark's girlfriend and lover. Sweet dreams, darling. I've got to go, bye." ^ Before we could talk, Julia held up her hand to keep us quiet, saying, "I'd better call your parents to confirm that our spare bed will be ready by tomorrow night." Julia called my home number by speed dial. "Hi, it's Julia here. I need to check something with you, please. Carol, me and another girl called Ava that you haven't met before would like to christen the new bed in Carol's bedroom tomorrow night. We're hoping to sleep together. Is that okay with you, and will the bed be ready by then?" I winced. "Yes. Carol and I will be making sure she's properly bisexual before Mark and I sleep with her at my place Friday night." What do you call a wince when it's about twenty times worse? "Recoiled in horror" came to mind. My family is NOT open about sex stuff, and I waited for Mom's reaction (I could faintly hear that it'd unfortunately been Mom that'd answered the phone). Mom talked for several seconds, in a normal tone of voice, as best I could faintly make out. Julia said, "Good, good," a couple of times. Then, "Ava and I will come over after dinner. Or better still, all of us except Ava will have dinner at your place, because you won't have seen much of Mark and Carol for a while. Ava will join us after dinner. Is that okay with you? Great. Thanks, bye." Turning to us, Julia said, "Your father will borrow a truck from work, bringing your two single beds here for storage because you don't have room for them at your place, and take the big bed back. That'll all be done right after dinner, so it'll be ready before Ava arrives at about 7:30 or 8. My plan is that tomorrow after school Mark beds one of the 10th grade Liaisons here before dinner while I'll do schoolwork in the study. Then she goes home and Mark and I go to have dinner at your home. After dinner Mark returns here, and Lily arrives to spend the night with Mark, leaving Carol and me to play with Ava. Is that fine with everyone?" Carol immediately said, "That sounds GREAT! I'm looking forward to it. We're going to have lots of sex in the future, aren't we?" Julia said, "As much as you could possibly want. I had one idea when I was talking with Ava that I'm particularly proud of. I'm getting her to kiss you and me at the meeting tomorrow mainly so all the other girls see. I'll casually mention that Ava's bisexual, and that bisexual girls will get more time with Mark because they can join in when I'm there too. I expect a wave of sudden bisexual tendencies to sweep through the school, especially after word gets out about how awesome Mark is in bed." I said, "Actually, that raises something that's been worrying me. You keep telling all these girls how good I am, but what if I'm not really very good. Won't they be..." I was going to say "disappointed", but I never got the chance because Julia's laughter cut me off. Carol was more succinct: "{Raspberry}." I opened my mouth to protest, but never got a chance for that either, Julia saying, "You've got unlimited stamina, a cock that never cums unless you want it to so it stays hard for as long as you want, you quickly learn how a girl's body responds best, and most importantly you always consider the girl's pleasure more important than your own. You'll TOTALLY blow them away." Carol added, "What she said, with bells on." "Ahh. Okay. If you insist." That earned me another "{Raspberry}" from Carol. I pressed on, "Another worry I have is what do I say to the girls that come here tomorrow: Lily in the evening and whoever before dinner. I still can't believe that I don't even know who the first girl will be." Julia said, "She'll be whoever you pick tomorrow morning. One of the other two Liaisons." "Yeah, I got that. It just seems so ... weird, I guess. Uncomfortable. I can't think of what I can say to her, because I don't even know who she'll be yet. Even Lily, what do I say to her? I don't have a clue what to do." Julia said, "I'll be here when the first girl arrives, so I'll take care of that. Once you're having sex I'll leave you to it. I NEED to catch up on my schoolwork anyway, so that works out perfect." "Phew. But what about Lily? You'll be at my house with Carol. What on Earth do I say when she arrives?" Julia explained, "Listen carefully, because it's quite tricky. Are you ready?" I gave her my full attention and nodded. Julia continued, "When Lily arrives, you take her by the hand and lead her up to the bedroom. When you get there, lead her inside, shut the door, take off your clothes, and lie on the bed. Sooner or later - probably sooner - Lily will climb on top of your cock. After that it gets somewhat technical so maybe I should get some instructions for you off the internet. There must be some stuff about sex on there somewhere." Carol was loudly enjoying laughing at my expense. Julia just sat there, smiling smugly. "You're saying I don't need to say anything." "I'm saying you MUST NOT say anything. Lily and the other girls will be psyched up for getting fucked. They won't want to talk, and they'll be disappointed if you waste time doing so. Knowing you, you'll get yourself all worked up about being caring and concerned for them, and you'll talk yourself into a complete tangle which would frustrate everybody. Just keep your mouth closed and fuck them. After you've done a few girls you'll settle down and it won't be a problem, but for the first few it'd be best if the last thing you said to them was, 'Come in.' Understand?" "Umm, yes. And you're right." "You'll be fine. And I'll show you how with the first girl. Is there any more business, or can we start having sex now please?" We gave Julia's question the amount of careful consideration it deserved. Ten minutes later the phone rang, which we ignored. Thirty seconds later Vanessa knocked on the door, calling out, "It's for Julia." "{Groan}." Julia picked up, "Hello?" A few seconds later, "Yes, I know the phone was busy. I can't talk with you now. I've just started having sex with Mark and I'm totally turned on and horny. Ask me tomorrow. Goodnight." Julia got up and walked to the door, opened it and stuck her head out to yell, "MOM, WE'RE HAVING SEX NOW. NO MORE CALLS PLEASE. THEY CAN TALK WITH ME TOMORROW AT SCHOOL." I don't know why she addressed her yell to her mom, because the whole family would've heard it no matter what rooms they were in. We did our best to recapture the mood. Quite successfully, as it turned out. There were quite a few more phone calls, eight or ten, I guess. I wasn't really counting. I don't know how many were for Julia, probably most of them because most evenings here don't have as many calls as that. I won't describe the sex, other than to say that the three of us had a VERY good time. Our wedding night had been six nights ago, and we were LONG overdue for some more sex and loving. Later - much later - when we were settling down to sleep, I suggested I swap position with one of the girls, reminding them that I would be getting up to study in a few hours. The girls insisted I sleep in the middle. "But I'll wake someone when I get out. It makes more sense for me to sleep on the outside." Both girls were firmly of the opinion that it made no sense at all for me to sleep on the outside. Julia insisted, "You're the Lord, so you sleep in the middle. Just give whichever one of us you wake a kiss to apologize. Me would be good." "Me would be better," suggested Carol. Apparently all the awesome powers and responsibilities that went with being a Lord didn't include choosing where in the bed I sleep. "{Sigh}. Okay. I'll try to alternate which of you I wake in the mornings. I'll start with Julia tonight, only because she happens to be on the side that I'd normally get out of." "Good," from Julia. | "Aww," from Carol. "Sheesh! It's hard work keeping both my girls happy. I'll give you an extra kiss now Carol. And snuggle with my arms around you while you fall asleep." "Good," from Carol. | "Aww," from Julia. "Sheesh!" from me. I did the best thing I could think of: I went to sleep. ------- Chapter 88: Picking Liaisons Thursday, April 21, 2005 I woke in the dark with both girls holding me. Looking at the clock showed that I'd had about the same amount of sleep as the previous night, just over four hours. I'd woken at 2:10am yesterday, but it was nearly 4am now as our 'celebration' had started unbelievably later than it should have, which had been ten minutes after school finished, and that's including time to drop Donna off at home. I extracted myself, trying not to touch Julia as I crab-walked over her. I failed, she woke, and I kissed her to apologize even though it'd been on her insistence that I slept in the middle. She just mumbled, "Mmm. I love you," then rolled over and went back to sleep. Travel time to the study was much less than it had been yesterday, and I studied faster as I was less worried about the material suddenly getting harder. The textbooks were occasionally helpful too, as any point that I didn't quickly comprehend from the lecture notes, I could get a different view on from the textbook. The somewhat improved speed didn't make up for the late start and early finish, because we had to get to school early, so I fell well short of yesterday's achievement. I was satisfied though, especially as I could easily see that a full morning's study would cover a very useful amount of material. I should be able to keep on, or even get ahead of, Prof's schedule. In one respect this morning's study was better than yesterday's, because TWO naked girls came in to inform me that it was over. It was too early for Prof to get up, so I had no concerns installing one of them on each knee, where we spent a few minutes cuddling and doing other things that should be done to naked girls. Until Julia declared that we had to get moving, "We don't want to be late to our first meeting. It'd set a terrible precedent." If I'd been given the choice of keeping my fingers where they were or setting a terrible meeting precedent, I probably would've chosen differently than Julia. I've never been worried about precedents before, and it seemed like a very bad precedent to start doing so now. I managed a brief overlap with Prof in the kitchen, just before we left, and informed him of my morning's progress (poor) and rate (very good). I was still discussing the implications of these two variables on my overall schedule, when Julia grabbed my hand and dragged me out to the car. That precedent thing was still weighing on her mind, I guess. Prof yelled at my receding back, to remind me about his picking me up before lunch. I waved an acknowledgement over my back. I was, of course, dressed in the second most embarrassing outfit I possessed. I was properly 'dressed' too - Julia had made me remove my wallet and put it in my schoolbag. My handkerchief was the sole occupant of any pocket, and it was on the side that made my cock look the best because I'd deliberately tried to put the larger wallet on the modest side, so Julia had pronounced herself happy with my look. Especially that part of my look that she was looking at. There was no hope of an unobtrusive visit to the Anderson home. Slowing down to let Donna jump in wasn't going to happen. I had to park and walk inside. There were many twirls, much laughter and considerable embarrassment. There had almost been one good point among the many, many bad ones. Mom and Dad had teased Julia and Carol about their plans for Ava to spend the night. I would have enjoyed that, except that Julia was quite matter of fact about it. Carol took her lead from Julia, and only blushed a little when she said she was looking forward to it too. Not having much success teasing the girls, Mom and Dad had turned their attentions back to me. Excellent! Fortunately Julia insisted that we had to leave quickly, "Because we have to get to an important meeting on time." We had plenty of spare time, but I chose not to argue in favor of staying longer with my family. Mom's final comment, of too many, was, "I wouldn't want to be a teacher in any of your classes today." We arrived at the meeting place ten minutes early, as it would've been a terrible precedent to be late. I was very self-conscious when I got out of the car, even with no one else being in sight this early. I carried my jacket - the longest one I owned - ready to put it on as soon as the first person to see me started laughing. There were already two girls waiting, one of whom was Lily, which earned them both praise from Julia. Julia had time to praise them because they were both speechless at the sight of me. That didn't last long, unfortunately. I'll downplay their reactions by just writing, "They went gaga INSANE over me." More girls kept arriving, which continually renewed the embarrassing, gaga-insane mayhem. Julia helped a lot, by standing back and giving them free access to me. They went seriously over the top. I got FAR more praise for how I looked in these clothes than I'd received all year for being a genius. It indicated that girls have a very screwed up sense of priorities. I can't say I was surprised, as I'd received a hint or two recently that girls were irrationally over-focused on clothes. I was forced to do several things I didn't want to: blush, twirl, and admit that it appeared my new clothes were going to be a hit with the girls at school. It seemed that Julia had known what she was doing when she dressed me like this. Talk about a TERRIBLE precedent! Julia had been looking at her watch quite frequently, and stood there staring at it for several seconds as the meeting's start time approached, clearly intending to make her point about the importance of promptness. It would've worked well if any of the girls had been looking at her rather than me. At the designated time, Julia LOUDLY (she had to) declared, "I call this meeting to order. Everyone be quiet and stand back so I can see all of you." They did so. I counted breasts and divided by two, and only ten of the fourteen girls had arrived on time. "Everyone, this is Donna, Mark's youngest sister. I won't inflict all your names on her at once as there are too many to remember. Right, this meeting is to choose which three of the ten of you get picked for a position we're calling Liaison. You all see how good Mark looks when he dresses properly. QUIET! We're also going to be making public around school that Mark is looking for an additional girlfriend or two, to make up for my absences, just like we discussed at lunch yesterday." -- More noise broke out, and Julia shouted it down again, "Yes, you heard me. QUIET! I thought it'd take days for me to convince Mark but he saw my reasoning very quickly. That's what happens when you deal with a genius. I'm still not used to that. Anyway, when the news gets out, especially when girls see him looking like this, we expect him to be swamped." MORE noise broke out. During which one of the missing girls arrived. She announced her arrived by calling out, "Sorry I'm late, what's all the noise about? Oh My God! Egg! Oh My God." Julia yelled out, "Shut up everyone. I don't have time for hysterics." Everyone shut up as they were getting used to reacting to Julia's orders, except for the late arrival who took advantage of the sudden silence to repeat, "What's going on?" Julia said, severely, "I don't have time to start again. Stand over there." Indicating a spot slightly to the side of everyone else. The girl looked puzzled, but moved to comply while asking me about my new clothes. Julia amended her instruction to, "Stand QUIETLY over there, while we get on with the meeting." Julia turned her attention back to the on-time girls. "Donna will be Mark's Liaison for the 6th grade, Carol for the 7th and 8th grades, no one has been picked for the 9th yet, three of you for the 10th grade, Ava West for the 11th - she's scheduled to arrive in twelve minutes - and no one picked yet for the 12th grade. So there will be six Liaisons from high school, and Mark's two sisters to cover middle school. The job of the Liaisons is to take the names, numbers and grades of all the girls who want to meet and date Mark, and to keep them away from wasting his time when they're not on dates. Mark and I will INSIST that we won't deal with anyone who doesn't go through her Liaison. In a few days, once we've gotten an idea of the number of girls who want Mark, we'll start the process of managing them all. I won't bother explaining that now, but all communications will go up and down through the Liaisons. So the structure will be all the ordinary girls at the bottom, who do NOT get to talk with Mark directly, but only through their Liaison. The six high-school Liaisons plus Donna and Carol will get all their information and instructions from me, and I get mine from Mark. As I said, Mark will pick three of you for the 10th grade Liaison job. In return for helping Mark, the three chosen Liaisons will get to spend more time with Mark than other girls and will be Mark's lovers." The turmoil forced Julia to pause. It's inexplicable, but my new clothes had caused major malfunctions in all the girls' brains. They'd seriously flipped out just from seeing me dress like a homosexual, and they'd gotten themselves into a complete tizzy over me. They weren't calming down either. From the moment they'd seen me, they'd been in some sort of frenzied gaga ecstasy of my clothes and me. When Julia said three of them would become my lovers, they lost their last tiny shreds of self-control. It was pathetic, but in a REALLY good way! I no longer feared that they didn't want to have sex with me. Now I only feared for my safety if they got any more excited. Julia eventually got them to subside down to a lower level of frantic, so she could resume, "Yes, you heard right. Three of you, plus the other three high-school Liaisons, will become Mark's lovers. Over the next few days, from tonight to Sunday night, Mark will take the six lucky girls to his bed and make love to them for as long as they want. For the rest of the school year, and quite likely beyond, there will be weekly Liaison meetings at my house, where the best Liaison for that week will be rewarded by making love with Mark again. Plus you'll have increased contact with him at other times. Are there any questions?" You probably won't be surprised to learn that there were. Most of which Julia either answered very quickly, or put them off with, "This meeting finishes in eight minutes. Then Ava should arrive and I'll spend the next fifteen minutes describing the duties and benefits of being Liaison in more detail. By then you'll know enough to be able to choose whether you want to be in the group that Mark will pick the three Liaisons from." Subsequent repetitions of that being much shorter. One answer Julia did give was, "Mark is looking for the best possible extra girlfriend or two, for when I'm with Carol. He will be choosing from among ALL the girls at school as that's the best way for him to find what he's looking for, but if you're chosen as Liaison, then you will have a much better chance than any other girl of being picked as his long-term girlfriend because you'll have far more contact with him." Another answer, "No. I'm not jealous. You see what Mark looks like, you know how intelligent he is at school, how fantastic at running and soccer he is, and from his speech what a wonderful person he is. I'd drive myself crazy trying to block every girl from hitting on him, and there's no way I could succeed. Plus I WANT him to do this, as I'm guilty of being only half a girlfriend for him, and his happiness is important to me. Also, Mark will probably deliberately choose at least one girlfriend who is bisexual, as he knows that I would very much enjoy having sex with him and another girl, and he'll do that to make me happy." I could see that the last reason made an impact on several of the girls. One of them, fortunately not Lily, snorted, "I'll bet making YOU happy won't be what he'll be thinking about!" Julia responded, with a stern tone, "Mark and I have been dating for nearly a month. In that time I've seen countless girls throw themselves at him. Literally dozens of them, some of them beautiful and most of them offering sex. Mark has been totally faithful the whole time. He waves them away without even looking at them. He even said that he'd be happy to have only half a girlfriend for the rest of his life because he wanted his sister to be happy. I didn't become bisexual because Mark pushed me into it; I did it for MY OWN selfish reasons. Mark has SUFFERED because of it! I STRONGLY resent your insinuation that Mark is selfish. It's Mark's choice, of course, but I hope he doesn't choose you as one of his Liaisons, because I don't think you deserve to be one of his lovers." "I was just joking! I didn't mean it like that. I REALLY want to be his lover." Julia gave her shoulders an exaggerated shrug, saying, "It's not my choice." "Mark, PLEASE let me your lover. I REALLY..." Julia interrupted, "We don't have time. Do any of the rest of you have any essential questions, or wish to insult the nicest man any of you will ever meet?" None of them wished to insult that man, or me either. They were too scared to risk it by asking another question, so Julia talked over the girl who was still pleading to say, "We are just about ready for Mark to choose his three Liaison-Lovers. Before we do that though, Lily, if you want one of the three places, it is automatically yours. Do you want to be one of Mark's Liaison-Lovers?" "Oh, yes. Thank you. I very happy be with Mark..." Julia interrupted, "Are you able to come to my house about 7:30 or so tonight, so you can spend the whole night making love to and sleeping with Mark?" "Yes." "Go and give your lover a kiss." Chinese girls can move REALLY fast! Lily carried out Julia's instruction very thoroughly, although she'd obviously missed Julia's use of the singular, maybe because English wasn't her first language. Julia addressed the girls, "Yesterday, at lunch, I suggested that you should be nice and helpful to Mark. After lunch Lily approached him and offered that when Mark missed a class that they shared, that she'd make good notes and photocopy them for him. She was the ONLY one of you to offer something useful like that, and her thoughtfulness, intelligence and kindness toward Mark is being rewarded by automatically making her the first Liaison for our grade." There was an instant cacophony of all the other girls yelling out offers to do the same thing in their classes. Julia yelled, "QUIET! Lily is not being rewarded for taking notes. She's being rewarded for thinking of Mark and having the idea. It's too late for any of you to try and use the same idea. It's time to choose the last two Liaison-Lovers. I want you all to form a line, shoulder to shoulder facing me." Julia indicated an imaginary line with her hand, and the girls started lining up along it. When the latecomer moved to join the line, Julia told her, "Not you." "What? Why not?" "You didn't arrive until after the meeting started, so you were too late." "But only by a minute. Not even that." "It doesn't matter, late is late." "But I got here as fast as I could. My mom wouldn't bring me any earlier. It's not my fault." Julia asked, "Why didn't you order a taxi to bring you ten minutes earlier?" "Huh? A taxi? My mom always brings me to school." "So you should have either got her to bring you earlier or caught a taxi. You had choices. You could have arrived on time if you'd wanted to." "But... , but I didn't know I had to. I didn't know I could be Mark's girlfriend. You didn't say anything like that on the phone." Julia said, "I told all of you exactly the same thing: that I wanted to 'discuss some Mark business.' Everyone else here arrived on time and you could've if you'd wanted. Some of them were even several minutes early, which is a good sign." "But you never said how important it was." "I told you at lunch yesterday that Mark was a very important person, and I told you this meeting was to discuss Mark's business. It wasn't my fault that you couldn't work out for yourself that those two statements automatically made this an important meeting. You were willing to make us all, including Mark, wait for you because you didn't think Mark was important enough. Well, we're all sorry for you, but all the rest of us think Mark is more important than the few dollars a taxi would've cost you." Personally I don't think ANY of the other girls were "sorry", as one less girl improved their odds of being chosen. I'd bet they were thankful that several girls hadn't turned up at all, and were cursing that more hadn't slept in. Lily, who was cradled under the arm of mine that Julia had vacated, had stiffened at the moment that told me that she recognized that she'd been told something different from the other girls. She wisely kept her mouth shut, which nudged my opinion of her upward. Julia said, "I am deliberately being mean because I want all you to understand that Mark has many dozens of girls who'll run around doing things for him. Why should he have to settle for a girl who can't get to meetings on time? If ANY of you EVER fall short of what's required of you, you can be replaced in an instant. In fact, you WILL be replaced. I could easily have asked every single girl in our grade whether they wanted to be Mark's Liaison-Lovers, and we would have been swamped in volunteers. Instead I only asked the fourteen of you who came to lunch yesterday, because I thought you understood. Evidently some understood better than others." -- Julia turned to the latecomer, "If any of the three 10th grade Liaisons who're picked today later decide to resign from the job, or get fired for not doing it well enough, then you'll be eligible to be picked as their replacement, so hang around and listen so if you're picked later you'll know what the job is. That applies to all of you. Immediately after this meeting I'm going to explain the Liaison job in more detail. I encourage ALL of you to stay and listen to that, in case you get a chance to be picked later." Turning back to the others, I noticed they included the still-hopeful girl who'd insulted me. I'd honor Julia's request not to pick her, although my being accused of looking forward to threesomes was hardly an inaccurate accusation. Julia looked at her watch, saying, "EXACTLY on time. That's Ava West. I asked her to arrive neither early nor late, and she's exactly on time." Julia called out loudly, "Ava, please wait there for a minute. This meeting was delayed by a latecomer who wanted to argue." Ava stopped as requested and Julia added, "Thank you, darling." We turned back to the group of girls, ignoring the very forlorn latecomer standing out to the side. Julia instructed, "If you don't want to be on of Mark's Liaison-Lovers, stay where you are. If you DO want to be one, step forward." They all stepped forward. "The job will probably require that you have a camera on your cellphone. So step forward if you have one already or can get one if I ask you to." A couple of the girls stepped forward before Julia had finished, presumably having cameras in their phones. Three more stepped forward confidently after Julia finished. The others took a second or two to think about it, but within a couple of seconds all had stepped forward. If any of them weren't being strictly honest, I didn't really care. I'd boink them in the next day or two, then have to boink their replacement if they failed to get such a phone. I thought I could live with that. Last I heard from Julia, she wasn't sure we'd need such phones anyway. Julia turned to me, saying, "Choose your two Liaisons." So Julia didn't seem to care either. But then she quickly added, "Hang on. Think about your choice, Mark, but wait until Ava comes over." Julia then called out, "Come on, Ava. Thanks for waiting for us, and thanks for being exactly on time." Julia was reinforcing a lesson that I very much doubted needed any more reinforcement. Ava strode up happily, and very prettily too, I noticed. She was looking good (it's amazing how much attention you pay to a girl when you know you're going to be having sex with her soon). She was wearing a lightweight summer dress. The weather wasn't really warm enough for it, but I forgave her. She was wearing underwear that was clearly visible through her thin dress, and both pieces were heading toward being ineffectively small. For her sake, although not that of the guys in her classes, I hoped she had something warmer in her car to put on top. Given the reactions my clothes had got from every one of the girls, I could probably lend Ava my jacket if she didn't have anything of her own. On the topic of girl's clothing, I had been pleased to note that every girl here had dressed nicely, as I judged it. Some of them may not have realized how important this meeting was because of Julia's deliberately downplayed phone conversations, but none of them had forgotten to dress to interest me. Drawing on my extensive knowledge of female apparel, I could tell that they'd dressed to impress a guy, mainly because there was significantly less 'apparel' than was the norm for school. Ava walked determinedly right up to Julia, bent down and 'planted one on her'. There were a few small inhalations of surprise from the other girls, but nothing else. I couldn't tell much more about their reaction because there was no way I was going to look away from Ava and Julia. My dedication was rewarded because I witnessed Julia smoothly sliding her left hand (the one all of us could see) up from Ava's waist to her breast, cupping and lightly caressing it. Julia's slide gave Ava some warning, but she still stiffened only a little, then quickly relaxed. Or more likely, forced herself to relax. She also redoubled her kissing effort, which was a good sign, as was Ava's moan when Julia lightly pinched and rolled Ava's nipple. Julia broke off the kiss after not-nearly-long-enough. A slightly flustered but happy Ava stood upright and immediately looked at me. Naturally I gave her a BIG smile, sincerely wanting to encourage such behavior. Carol was standing next to Julia, and spoke now, "Hi Ava. I'm Carol Anderson; Mark's sister. You're very sexy. You make me hot." Apparently Carol was choosing not to play hard-to-get. Ava smiled, and asked, "Can I kiss you too, please?" I guess Ava was too nervous to do it cold, even after Carol's saying she was hot. Carol soon removed any doubt, "Yes please," as she raised her arms to put them around Ava. Ava stepped straight into them, and a second later the girls were kissing. Julia moved behind Carol, and ran both hands around Carol to cup both of Carol's breasts. It was EXTREMELY hot, for about half a second, until, #1: I'd quickly looked away, cursing the cruel injustice of it all. I looked at the other girls, and they were all looking at Ava's welcoming party. EVERYBODY was looking at it, except me. Oh the injustice! Carol moaned loudly. #2: I looked at Lily, who was still nestled under my left arm. I thought it'd be good for my cover to give an 'involuntary shiver', so I did. That got Lily's attention, and she looked up at me. I was looking at Lily, a direction which was more away from the groaning threesome than toward it. I asked her, "Tell me when it's safe for me to turn around please?" Lily laughed, obviously immediately buying my BS. So far Lily was working out perfectly. To kill more time, I added, "I wish Carol would warn me before she does things like that." Lily and some of the potential Liaisons who'd heard, laughed. I looked over to them, and saw that most of them were looking at me. Usefully, four of them were still looking intently at the threesome. Unfortunately including the "Insult Girl", but that still left three girls as prime candidates for being bisexual. I'd recently come to appreciate the advantages offered by a girl being bisexual, so those three girls immediately got a large pile of bonus points. Lily said, "I distract you." She took one of my hands, and put it on one of her breasts. NOW Lily was working out perfectly! [[This is VERY atypical behavior for a Chinese girl in public. Even kissing in public is frowned on. You'll discover later that Lily's actions were highly motivated now, and even more so in a few days.]] I leaned down and started kissing Lily. If kissing was good enough for my two spouses, it was certainly good enough for their Lord. I didn't forget to caress Lily's breast lightly. Lily's distraction was very effective, because it took some throat clearing from Julia to get my attention back to reality. "When you've quite finished, Mark, haha. It's time to choose your other two Liaisons." I looked up and around at Julia. Ava was standing in the middle, with Carol and Julia to either side, the three girls having their arms around each other and facing me while they awaited my decision. There'd been ten girls ready at the start of the meeting, ignoring the latecomer. Lily was already chosen, and the Insult Girl disqualified, leaving eight girls from which I had to choose two. I'd been aware that I was going to be choosing lovers, and I'd been looking at them carefully most of the meeting, except when distracted, but the three possible bisexual girls had upset my previous choices. I turned to the candidates, to think about my decision in light of the new information. It must have happened during the couple of seconds that I'd been looking at Ava and her new friends, because when I looked at the group of possible Liaisons again, I immediately noticed - because guys specially train themselves to notice such things - that Susan, one of the big-breasted girls, had experienced a significant 'clothing malfunction'. In the seconds we were distracted by Julia's last comments, several of Susan's blouse's buttons had leaped through their holes and were straining to get as far away from the offending buttonhole as possible. Said holes were also straining to get as far away from their buttons as possible. There was a lot of "straining" going on. Quite a lot of "heaving" too; who'd have thought that Susan was such a heavy breather. You had to admire her initiative, and while you're in the area, you can admire the considerable amount of cleavage she's showing too. I think it's quite likely that my expression indicated that I had a sudden source of interest. A fraction of a second later most of the other girls had followed the direction of my - let's be honest - ogle, and there were several hisses. That Susan was smiling proudly probably didn't engender confidence in her opponents either. While the view was admirable, you may be surprised to know that she'd turned me off picking her as a Liaison. I hate arrogant, self-satisfied girls almost as much as I hate guys who're the same. The girls can so easily become Queen Bitches, like Annette Neumeyer had been. I looked away, very glad to have done so because of what came next: One of the other blouse-wearing girls was busy creating her own button malfunctions as fast as she could. A third girl, seeing what was happening, looked down in dismay at her top. It was a sort of tight, somewhat cut-off, T-shirt thing. It wasn't a T-shirt, as it was made out of much nicer material, but whatever it was, it didn't have any buttons. She looked around. The second unbuttoner was working from the top down, and was already at her bellybutton level. It appeared she wasn't going to stop. A couple of other girls were starting to untuck their blouses too. Another girl was rolling up the waistband of her already short skirt. The sort-of-T-shirt girl apparently thought , and whipped it off. In a second she was standing in skirt and bra only, holding her top at her side. She looked around proudly. The other girls saw what she'd done and start copying it. Susan, finding herself rapidly passed in the "Get Mark's Attention Race", quickly undid her two remaining buttons, removed her blouse, dropped it onto the ground, and then immediately dropped her bra on top of it. If you're still admiring her initiative, you're crazy. After that, things REALLY started happening: clothing started falling to the ground all over the place. One poor girl had a one-piece dress. Not even buttoned. She had no choice, she must have thought, and she removed the whole thing, leaving her in bra and panties only. The girls in skirts weren't going to let her get away with looking so sexy unchallenged! I've often wondered why it takes girls so long to get ready to go out. Take it from me, it's NOT because it takes them long to get undressed. These girls proved that they can do that VERY quickly, even allowing time for them to look around to size up the opposition. I was tortured by not having more eyeballs, because I just couldn't follow every girl. I frantically tried to see as much of the action as I could, but there were so many of them and they were so fast that I missed most of it. The first girl to get down to only having her panties left, stopped there. As did the next, and the next. They looked around worriedly, but that seemed to be as far as they were going to go. A couple of girls had their thumbs in their waistbands ready, but they paused to look around, and seemed happy not to have to go that far. As more and more girls reached that limit and stopped, the particularly quick strippers started relaxing, and turned to face me proudly. I admired the WONDERFUL view: a bunch of good looking teenage girls standing topless in their very sexy panties. There was a wide variety of colors and styles of panty, and nothing but gorgeous tits and bodies. They all looked FANTASTIC! (In the earlier chapter about our lunch with these girls, I wrote "The eleven non-ringers represented about half the girls from one class, so they weren't all A-list knockouts." That might seem inconsistent with my describing them as "FANTASTIC" now. Let me remind you that they're almost NAKED, and in frantic competition to demonstrate their eagerness to have sex with me. I don't know about you, but that's my definition of "FANTASTIC!") Lily had, a few seconds ago in this sort of negative "arms race" - although "arms" weren't a body part anyone was thinking about - moved to step away from me and her hands had gone to the zip on the back of her dress. I'd gently pulled her back into my hug, telling her, "No need. You've already been chosen." She'd snuggled back in. I assumed she was relieved, but I hadn't wasted the time to look at her to confirm that. In case you're confused by my bizarre behavior, I'll explain that I'd stopped her stripping because I already couldn't keep up with everything else that was happening, I'd see her naked when she slept with me tonight, and she would have stood in front of me, blocking my view of all the other girls. Insult Girl must have been a late starter in the undressing race (I can't say I noticed the late starters, as I'd been too busy watching the early starters). Whatever the reason, she and the only other still busy girl reached the panties-only state at about the same time. Looking up, and seeing all the other girls had stopped, she saw her opportunity to recapture the ground she'd lost because of her insult. She quickly pushed her panties down, and stood to face me, naked as the day she was born but quite a lot prettier. She faced me square on, spread her legs a little, put her hands on her hips and stuck out her chest. She looked at me proudly, secure in the knowledge that she'd shown all the other girls up, by showing me her down. Her taking the ultimate step had not gone unnoticed. It didn't go uncopied either. A couple of girls didn't hesitate before they dropped theirs too. Seeing them start, a couple of others got into act. Seeing them, everybody else did too. Five seconds later, I was staring at nine naked girls. I was pretty sure that this was the best start to a school day that I'd EVER had! It was also a very convincing demonstration that the girls were thinking of me sexually. They'd gotten swept along by that fantastic peer pressure effect, but there was no doubt that the girls were hot for me. Provided I could overcome my penile dysfunction - which I was pretty sure I could - then my near future was going to have some VERY good times! As the last of the panties were hitting the grass, Ava asked, "Do you want me to strip too?" I heard Julia say, "No thank you. I admire you for offering though. Mark, you'd better choose FAST!" Julia was right, even though I'd have much rather study all my choices very slowly and thoroughly. We were in an area hidden from where people arriving at school would see, but as more people arrived the risk increased, especially as we were visible from a couple of the classrooms. Those rooms would be opening soon, and it wouldn't take long for people in them to notice nine naked girls. Once they got over their shock it wouldn't be something they'd fail to mention to their nearby friends, who'd loudly mention it to theirs. News would spread and trouble would follow. It'd also take the girls some time to get dressed, so it'd be best if I didn't wait until they were seen. I quickly located the three girls who I thought might be bisexual, or at least not put off by the exhibition they'd carefully watched. I quickly judged the best looking of the three of them, and recalled her name (Laila). Then I looked over all the other girls. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that I quite like breasts. And if you like breasts, as I do, it's generally true that the more breast there is, the better. I located the girls with the biggest breasts (actually, I already knew where they were. Guys are clever that way). Susan, as well as another almost as well-stacked girl, now appeared to me to be overly stacked. Not to put too fine a point on it, but their points drooped, which I found decidedly unappealing. They'd have been better advised to remain partially dressed, but peer pressure is truly a wonderful thing. The girl with the next largest rack looked much more appealing, as her breasts were large and upright. Yummy. Dakota it was then. I called out, "Laila and Dakota." There were approximately two "Yippees", and seven "Oh no's". There was also a single "Get dressed QUICKLY!" (That wasn't from me, in case you're wondering. It was Julia's fault). I was amused to see Susan looking down at her breasts with a look of confusion on her face. I could almost see her ask herself, "Why didn't they work?" Julia walked up to me, and said, "That was unexpected. Fun though! Thank goodness we didn't hold this meeting at lunchtime." That earned her a few laughs, from those of us that weren't frantically getting dressed as fast as possible. I noticed that Ava and Carol were holding hands. I did a deliberate double-take, then stared for a second. When I knew they'd both noticed my attention, I looked up to Carol and asked her, "Sweetie, do you like Ava?" Carol enthused, "I think she's HOT. I'm hoping to have lots and lots of sex with her." Carol gave me a discreet wink. I said, "Gee, that's fantastic! I'll be extremely happy if you liked her, Carol." -- Looking at Ava I said, "I didn't think you were very bisexual, Ava?" Ava hurriedly assured me, "Oh I AM! Especially for Carol. She's so beautiful, with such a fantastic figure. And she's a really good kisser. And she makes me hot. And..." I could see Ava struggling to dredge up compliments about my sister, whose happiness - Ava knew - is so important to me. I interrupted with, "Carol, if you get a chance to spend any time with Ava, please let me know what you think of her. There are many aspects of her personality that attract me, but I'm worried about two things. I didn't think she was very bi, but she appears very attracted to you, so that's excellent. I was also worried about her following instructions. Julia's told me that several times Ava has kicked up a fuss about something that we knew was the right thing to do. Please tell me if Ava ever makes a fuss over even a simple request." Carol's, "I will," was drowned out by Ava's, "I'll NEVER make that mistake again, Mark. I've learned my lesson about that. Julia has been wonderful at explaining all that to me and I understand everything now. I'll do whatever you or Julia want." As if it was some sort of secret, I frowned at Ava, and rolled me eyes toward Carol. It took her a while to puzzle it out, then Ava suddenly said, "Oh AND Carol too. I will ALWAYS do what Carol says. Carol is very important." The only reason Ava thought Carol was important, was because Julia had told her that her chances of becoming my girlfriend would be greatly helped if Carol liked her. Otherwise Carol wouldn't be important to Ava at all. They'd just met, so where could the importance have come from? But I didn't mind Ava being so transparent. What a pity all girls weren't equally easy to understand. (Yeah, I know I'm being totally unrealistic.) I was about to answer Ava, when she suddenly added, "Oh, and Julia is hot too. I meant to say before - when I was saying how I was bisexual for Carol - that Julia is very hot too. I hope I can have lots of sex with her too. And with her and you. And with you. I love sex. I really do." "That's great. I'm VERY pleased to hear that. My first instincts about you were very good, but then you got me worried when you wouldn't let me show Julia your letter and other things like that." "I've learned my lesson. I promise. I'll be perfect from now on." Carol cut off Ava's repetition before I did, by saying, "I really enjoyed how Julia was standing behind me before and rubbing my breasts. Would you do that for me, just for a while please, Ava darling?" Ava darling couldn't comply fast enough. Smiling proudly at me as soon as she had her hands on Carol's breasts. I said, "I'm glad you're in good hands, Carol, haha, but this is a bit too sexual for me to look at my sister doing so I'll leave you to it. I'm glad you're happy with Ava though." Ava requested, "Sir, can I please say two things very quickly?" Being called "Sir" by a girl two years older than me was an unusual experience. Her rubbing my sister's breasts at the time didn't make it any less bizarre. Having the perfect excuse to keep Ava brief, something I feared she might easily not be, I said, "Okay, but quickly please. I don't feel comfortable seeing my sister like this." This was a true statement, as my discomfort was caused by my "pull forward and uplift" underwear being too tight for my expanding cock. Yet another go-soft was required. Ava said, "I'd like to apologize for not letting you show my letter to Julia, and for complaining a little bit when Julia took longer to call me back than I was expecting. I'm very sorry and I won't do things like that again, sir." "Thank you. Apologies happily accepted." I thought that was the "two things" she wanted to mention, and I started turning away. Ava quickly added, "And let me say that I've NEVER seen any guy look as good as you do. You look better than any movie star or rock star I've EVER seen. My panties are dripping wet, and I'll do ANYTHING you want if I can be your girlfriend. ANYTHING at all, just ask me?" She spoke with a heck of a lot more emphatic conviction than when she'd been telling me how hot she found Carol and Julia. Julia had been talking to Donna and my three 10th grade Liaisons: Lily, Laila and Dakota. All the girls were dressed now and there'd been no hue and cry, so we seemed to have gotten away with it. All the poor unfortunate girls who'd missed out on the honor of being my Liaison were still gathered around and had been listening to Julia explain the Liaison duties in more detail. Julia called out to me, "Mark, I need Carol and Ava as soon as you've finished with them please." Now was a good time, so we walked the few yards required, Carol letting Ava end her breast-holding service. While we were forming the new circle of the Liaisons around Julia and me, one of the missing girls came running around the corner, calling, "I'm SO sorry I'm late. I couldn't get a ride any earlier. What did I miss?" I yelled back, "Nothing much." Even the rejected girls laughed at that. The girl looked at me for the first time and said, "Fuck! Look at..." Her speech was cut off by her feet tangling up and she pitched face-first into the ground. For a moment I was worried about her because it'd been a spectacular crash, but she BOUNCED straight back up again, saying, "Egg. You're GORGEOUS! I've never seen..." Julia yelled, "QUIET! You're late and you are disrupting my meeting. I don't have time for this! Be quiet. You can catch up after we've finished. Now..." Julia resumed explaining their duties to the Liaisons. The latest latecomer was somewhat offended, but curious, especially about me. She rushed up to one of the rejected girls, who were standing in circle around the core group. The latecomer started asking something, but was immediately shushed by two or three of the nearby girls. They didn't want to miss a word, and they sure didn't want Julia to get mad again. Julia's explanation continued, considerably confusing the latest arrival, but her next attempt to ask a neighbor a question was instantly shut down. Another girl arrived a minute later, yelling out as she drew near. Julia growled, "Some one shut her up please?" Julia was probably overdoing her reaction, but it was undoubtedly a good lesson to all the girls already here. They could see that if they arrived late to any future meeting, then they'd have a very pissed off Julia to deal with. None of the girls wanted to go and intercept the new arrival, but eventually one did. Julia was already plowing on. There were a few aspects of Julia's talk which were different from, or in addition to, what we'd discussed last night and earlier this morning: The 10th grade alphabetic assignments were in the order I picked the girls: Lily got girls with surnames starting with A-G, Laila got H-N, and Dakota got O-Z. [When Julia had been sitting on my lap in our study this morning, she'd quickly googled "popular American surnames", had found a table of them, and had divided the alphabet into three ranges which contained an equal proportion of people. Julia is VERY methodical.] The Liaisons were told that their relationships with Mark, including it being sexual, would soon become public knowledge. They were strongly encouraged to answer other girls' questions about what it was like to have sex with Mark. All the Liaisons would meet at lunch at the same place we'd eaten yesterday to swap notes about what was happening. Julia reminded them that I'd be at OSU. Julia talked more about their duties, including things their job would include arranging groups of girls to meet Mark, and eventually some of the better ones to date him. When talking about other girls, Julia several times mentioned that bisexual girls would be preferred. The last point led to a little bi-play by-play. Julia's repeated mentioning "bisexual preferred" didn't go unnoticed by the girls, and the main implication was quickly grasped. On the third such comment, Laila declared, "Just like me! I'm bi." [I later learned that she was even more into girls than guys, so Laila certainly had good justification for her claim.] Some of the other girls called out that they were too. I didn't look, because I didn't want to miss Lily's and Dakota's comments. The next comment I heard was Ava's, "Me too. Seeing all you girls naked got me so hot!" I wondered how long Ava had been waiting for a chance to use that invention. I chuckled at the thought of what the most recent latecomers would've made of it. Dakota looked around, then suggested, "Me too." Not very convincingly, but I'm sure Julia would give her plenty of opportunities to prove it. Lily seemed unaffected by the peer pressure, and was contentedly leaning against my left side. She obviously wasn't going to add her voice, so I asked, "Lily, what about you?" She looked up into my eyes and said, "I do anything you want." She was proving a better choice all the time, for her intelligence as much as any other reason. Well, okay, for the other reasons too. The last of the fourteen girls arrived, and was quickly intercepted by one of the others without requiring Julia's instruction, as Julia was saying, "The only remaining issue is which of Laila or Dakota to come to my place right after school and spend as long as they want making love to Mark? Are you both able to come right after school?" Both could. Dakota asked, "If we have a choice, I'd like to stay overnight, like Lily will be doing. I should be able to trick my parents into that." Julia said, "That reminds me. My parents are cool with all of this and will actually help. Mark's parents too. If you want to tell your parents that you're having a sleepover at my place, no problem. They can call my parents, who'll back us up totally. Remember, I told you at lunch that my parents soundproofed my room for sex. That's where we'll have most of our sex." After that, the newcomers REALLY wanted to know what was going on. The other girls shushed them up, with some promises to tell them later. A couple of on-time girls asked Julia, "How come your parents are like that?" Julia said, "It's too complicated to waste time explaining now. Dakota, in answer to your question about choosing to have Mark overnight, Lily's got tonight. Tomorrow night will be me, and if she continues doing so well, Ava as well to make it a threesome. Saturday and Sunday aren't booked yet but anything could happen on those nights. You'd be taking a risk pinning your hopes on either of those. I recommend you choose either this afternoon after school, or tomorrow afternoon after school. I promise you that Mark will fuck you over and over again until you beg him to stop, so it doesn't matter when you do it. You'll get all the sex your body can handle either way." Dakota said, "My body can handle a LOT!" I stated, actually with some confidence as this morning had given me a lot of that, "I have a preference: I want Laila this afternoon, Dakota tomorrow." My reason was that I knew Julia would be at her home this afternoon, so it was a good time to have the bisexual Laila there, Dakota's claim to that wonderful status not being believed. Julia said, "That's decided then. I'll give the Liaisons my address later. Dakota's comment reminds me to ask whether any of the Liaisons are virgins?" Donna put her hand up and said, "Me, dammit!" Fortunately she was smart enough not to look at me, and I played safe by not looking at her either. While the girls laughed at Donna's comment, I could see Carol think about something, then ask, "Do vibrators count?" Which added to the laughter, and which I thought was a good answer as it provided an explanation for her lack of a hymen, if some girl happened to be in the area and notice its absence. Julia clarified, "Are any of Mark's NON-sisters Liaisons still virgins? There's no problem if you are; I just want to know. If you are, you won't be for long. No one? Okay then, let's get to class." [I later asked Julia why she'd wanted to know about the girls' virginity statuses because it seemed irrelevant to me, especially as our plans for bedding the Liaisons had already been made without caring about that status. Julia had wanted to know been she'd anticipated updating her mother about the events of this meeting. The stripping competition, although wonderful, indicated that the girls had felt a lot of peer pressure. Julia had wanted to confirm that all the Liaisons were non-virgins as that meant they'd known what they were competing for, reducing Vanessa's likely concern about what had happened.] Our bags were piled nearby, so we could grab them and head to class easily. Ava had to go back to her car, and she called out a quick goodbye. I yelled to her over the noise of all the other girls' excited talk - especially that of the intensely curious, answer-demanding, latecomers - "Ava, I may not see you again today, so thank you for making Carol so happy." "My pleasure, {giggle}." We were soon too far apart to communicate, and Ava turned to hurry back to her car. Through her thin dress I could see she was wearing panties which were cut halfway to being G-strings. Presumably there's a name for panties with that cut, but I have no idea what it is, and my not knowing didn't in any way diminish my enjoyment of them. That part of Ava looked fantastic hurrying away. Julia was saying, "I will NOT answer you. You were late. Talk with Laila, she's your Liaison." Julia raised her voice to be loud enough for everyone in our little throng to hear. "All the girls here who are not Liaisons, remember Lily A-G, Laila H-N, and Dakota O-Z based on your surname. Mark and I will NOT answer questions from non-Liaisons - that's their job." Until we got to class Julia was deaf to all non-Liaisons, and I followed her lead. Carol had recaptured my right arm, and Julia had dropped back to walk with me. Lily was currently occupying my left arm, in the more traditional manner, my hand being over her shoulders. When Julia dropped back I automatically took my arm off Lily. Lily looked up at me wondering why I'd released her. I explained, "Julia wants to hold this arm. Julia and Carol get first dibs on any of my arms." Lily moved sideways to make room for Julia. I was impressed how readily she did that. No complaint, no apology, just immediate acceptance. Lily simply positioned herself outside of Julia. Donna had already run off and Carol left us very shortly thereafter. Carol's spot to my right was immediately occupied by the Insult Girl. She didn't grab my arm, but she did 'bend my ear', "Mark. I'm SO SORRY that you thought I might have been insulting you. That wasn't..." I knew what Julia wanted me to say. Loud enough for many of them to hear, "I will NOT discuss my relationship issues with non-Liaison girls. Sorry, but it'd be chaos to allow dozens of girls to talk with me about that. You have to talk with your Liaison only." Her mouth open and closed a couple of times, but there wasn't anything helpful she could say. So she shut it a final time and vacated her spot. Dakota was nearby, so I waved her in. With my right arm on her shoulder, and her arm around my waist, we headed to class as she raved about my new clothes, a theme that all the nearby girls excitedly joined in with. I'd felt a little guilty ejecting Lily from my left arm, only to shortly thereafter offer my right to Dakota, so I looked to Lily to see if I needed to apologize. Lily was walking alongside Julia, thanking her for the opportunity to be with Mark. Thanking Julia was a very smart strategy. Most of the girls around us weren't in Julia's and my first class, so they separated. ------- Chapter 89: Homosexual Clothes Make Girls Faint Thursday, April 21, 2005 (Continued) We were cutting getting to class a little fine, so Julia, Lily, a couple of the Liaison rejects and I went straight into the classroom as soon as we arrived. I was thinking about other things (recalling the wonderful stripping race, if you must know), and I automatically paused to let the girls traveling with me enter the room first, then I entered after them. Classrooms are always very noisy places just before class starts. There's lots of catching up, joking around, etc. I walked into the cacophonous room and the reaction immediately started. People fell silent, maybe with a gasp or exclamation first, but then silence. It quickly spread across the room. Everyone who noticed me, stared. The people that hadn't noticed yet were rapidly being nudged, or were turning to check out the unnatural silence. My unnatural clothes kept them speechless and the speechlessness only took a few seconds to spread throughout the room. I had been enjoying my thoughts so much it took me a second or two to consciously notice the reaction and recall that I was dressed in a somewhat unexpected manner. I wear my schoolbag like a backpack to free up my arms for any spouse that wants to hang on, so the class had an unobstructed view of my "magnificence" (one of their words, as you'll read very shortly). Pat (short for Patricia), one of the class's prettiest girls and who happened to be standing near me, exhaled, "Egg! You're magnificent!" Pat forgot to inhale after her comment. Instead - while most of the girls in the class were echoing Pat's opinion - Pat's legs visibly started wobbling and she started crumpling. I like catching beautiful girls, so I quickly leaped to her and caught her about halfway down. I lifted her up and supported her weight while I waited for her legs to stop flopping around. Eventually they worked out what they were for and started doing their job. I'd turned so most of the class were now behind me, which allowed some of them (just girls initially, fortunately) to make such comments as, "Egg's a HUNK!", "Oh my god! Look at his ass", or "How can a guy have a waist like that? I'd kill for that waist." Some whistles, plus some even ruder comments, as you'd expect from tomorrow's leaders and the cream of the country's education system. There'd even been a few comments made by guys, but thankfully, they were mostly keeping quiet. Pat was grasping one of my arms with both her hands. As her strength returned, her grip relaxed, but did not release and she still had a fair bit of weight on my arm. When she seemed capable of standing unaided, I asked, "Are you okay now?" Pat looked deeply into my eyes to breathe, "Yes, thank you, Egg." It was time for me to leave her, to make my way to my seat, but first I had to say, "Umm, you need to let my arm go." Pat looked down at her hands, staring at them in puzzlement for a couple of seconds. Normally I wear a jacket, whereas this shirt was very short sleeved, so this could have been the first time Pat had seen my arm. She seemed fascinated by it. She was certainly unable to let it go. Her eyes moved up my arm. My whole body is very well muscled - totally undeserved, probably from the ki healing thing - and my arm muscles where working to support Pat's weight. She relaxed one hand and used it to rub up my arm, whispering, "You're stunning. Can you help me to my desk, please?" Pat sits in the front row so it was a short trip. I took a good grip on her and turned to help her to her desk. One of the girls near me said, "Oh. Look at his, umm." Everyone knew what she'd meant. There wasn't anything I could usefully do. I could step behind Pat, but what about the rest of the day, and every other day that Julia would want me to dress similarly. Best to ignore it. Especially now that the whole class had looked at my "umm" anyway. I got Pat to her chair and sat her down. Pat said, "I can't believe how superb you look, Egg." Julia, who was sitting in her chair, called out, "If you think Mark looks good now, you should see him naked." Every single girl in the class immediately visualized that. Almost without exception all their eyes dropped to my "umm". So did the eyes of a few of the guys, making me even more uncomfortable. I prayed they were motivated by macho competitiveness. Hopefully really, really macho. Julia added, addressing Lily who was sitting a few desks away, "Lily, when you come to school tomorrow morning, tell Pat and the other girls what Mark looks like naked, okay?" I was glad Julia had specified "girls". Lily said, "Okay." I was back in my seat, head down and searching through my schoolbag at my feet for whatever it was that'd take me the longest possible time to find. Whereupon I intended to lose it and start all over again. One of the girls called out, "What's going on?" Julia started answering, "Mark's looking for another girlfriend because I'm busy with Carol half the time..." Julia continued with her fake explanation. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the excited reactions of damned near every girl in the class. They thronged around Julia, some around Lily, and some around me. Hiding under the desk (a.k.a. searching diligently through my bag) wasn't working for me, so I took the couple of steps necessary to try to hide behind Julia. It was insane how much noise there was, and how little of it was even semi-intelligent. I was the same guy I'd been all year, but I turn up dressed as a homosexual and half the class - fortunately the female half - gets wildly interested in me. After a minute of chaos during which Julia had loudly finished her explanation and ignored the shouted questions, the teacher called for order. And then called for order again, louder. The class's girls would MUCH rather discuss this latest development than listen to a boring, old teacher, so they ignored him. He called out yet again, "GIRLS. SIT DOWN. What's got into you?" One of them yelled back, "I know what I want to get into me." That helped restore correct classroom behavior not at all. Eventually the teacher got all the girls seated. Seating them didn't stop the problems though, as they kept turning to look at me, trying to talk with Julia or Lily, pass notes, and things like that. The teacher noticed that half the class were paying no attention whatsoever to the lesson, instead aiming it at Julia and me. It didn't take very long at all for the root source of the disruption to be identified. "Ahh, Mr. Anderson. I see you've changed your style of dress." "Isn't he DIVINE?" opined one of the girls. (Mom uses some strange words, including "opined". It means "to express an opinion", making it a conveniently short word. For some reason I like the sound of it, although I'd never be silly enough to use it out loud at school.) "You should see him when he's standing. Stand up and give us a twirl, Mark," begged another girl. "YEAH!" agreed every girl in the room. Not being a girl, a fact that would have been proudly demonstrated by the way my clothing molded to me if I'd stood, I stayed seated. It took the teacher a little while to settle the girls down to a workable level again. Class started, but all during the lesson there were problems. Not from me though. I was on my absolute best behavior to avoid giving the teacher any excuse to blame me. I was dressed well within the school's dress code so had nothing to fear if I behaved myself. Despite my good behavior, the teacher wasn't having a good period. About fifteen minutes in, for example, one of the girls raised her hand, saying, "I desperately need to go to the ladies room. I'm DESPERATE!" Which triggered much laughter, and many, "Me too's", with various levels of desperation declared, some of which were shockingly frank. I was EXTREMELY relieved that none of the guys felt a similar need. For the rest of the lesson, a high proportion of the class's girls needed to go "Take care of business", as one of them called it, or to "Relieve myself" as another did. On her way out, one of the girls stood in the doorway, stared at me for a few seconds, then sighed loudly and closed the door behind her. It took the teacher a fair while to quell the laughter. Even the boys had laughed. Everyone except the teacher was having a great time. Another distraction occurred mid-class when Julia suddenly burst out laughing. I looked and saw that the guy sitting on the other side of her had been leaning toward her, but was now rapidly moving back to his normal stance and turning red. The teacher took a dim view of being so loudly interrupted and demanded an explanation, which was probably a tactical error. Julia said, "I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself. Eric just asked me for a date. Why on Earth would I go out with Eric when I've got Mark, who's an absolute god in bed?" The class's females laughed, but were also desperately trying to work out what on Earth was going on. Most of the guys just laughed, no doubt thankful that Eric had been the first to try his luck with my self-confessed sexually active and - they'd hoped - ex-girlfriend. The teacher was less than impressed by Julia's answer, especially her inflammatory last phrase. Julia kept a low profile for the rest of the class. Toward the end of an exasperating and very unproductive lesson, the teacher declared, "I hope you're not going to be dressed like that tomorrow, Mark." Julia answered for me, "I'll make sure he dresses better." Teach smiled happily, while all the girls moaned and complained. Julia firmly repeated much louder, "MUCH BETTER." Most of them got it, and when one girl said, "Wow," the rest of them understood Julia's point. Julia's statement also reinforced that she wasn't exactly fighting to hold me back. Quite the opposite. Any girl that wanted a piece of me not only had an open target - that's how it felt to me - but one that Julia was pushing out into the firing range. The instant the bell rang we were mobbed: "What's going on?", "Why's Egg dressed like that?", "Why's Lily seeing him naked?", "Is Mark your boyfriend or not?" And more; much, much more. Julia held up her hands and called for silence. Then called for Lily, who managed to worm her way in through the crowd. Julia pointed to my lap (I was still sitting, as that was less embarrassing) and suggested to Lily that she, "Take a seat." Lily took the hint and the seat. I put my arms around her and hugged her close, to help Julia make her point, and also because I enjoyed it. Covering myself up was a nice bonus too. Julia called for Pat, who also worked her way through to the inner ring. While we were waiting for her, Julia whispered to me, "Do you want Pat?" Pat was definitely one of the best looking 16-year old girls at school. Right up there with Julia but with much larger breasts, and she's a nice girl too. My decision was easy; I nodded enthusiastically. It was unbelievable what affect dressing like a homosexual had. It made girls EASY! The anxiety I'd had on the way to school and when I'd first got out of the car was swept away by now. When Pat arrived, Julia said, "Pat, you were strongly affected by Mark's new look, you're beautiful and a nice person. Mark's already agreed, so if you want to, you can spend tonight at my house with Mark and Lily. It's up to you?" Apparently it wasn't up to Lily. Lily stirred on my lap, and was now giving the conversation her complete attention rather than cuddling with me, but she voiced no objection. Pat seemed confused and unsure about what to say. Julia expanded, "If you want, tell your folks you're having a sleepover at my house. Come at about 8 and spend the night. He'll give you the best sex you've EVER had." -- Turning to me, Julia said, "Mark, can you drive Pat to school tomorrow morning?" (Julia already knew that Lily has her own car.) "Sure." I thought it was the least I could do. "Good. Don't bother coming to get the rest of us from your home because we'll get a lift from Ava." Pat, who was struggling to comprehend Julia's plan, said, "Huh? I thought you were having a sleepover at your place?" Julia explained, "You, Lily and Mark will, although I recommend you waste as little time as possible sleeping. I'm spending the night at Mark's house with his sister Carol and Ava West, a junior." (To remind those readers who need it, in most dimensions' Americas, students in school grades 9 through 12 are more often called: freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors respectively. I usually substitute in the grade numbers herein, even when quoting someone's speech. I apologize for the slight inaccuracy that introduces into my autobiography, but it's worth it for the additional clarity.) Pat said, "But, ah, I've got a boyfriend. I don't understand why you're doing this." Julia answered, "The short answer is Mark's an absolutely awesome lover, who I can't satisfy no matter how hard I try, and it's even worse now that I spend half my time with Carol. So Mark and I are looking for another girlfriend or two for him, to share him with me. You have a opportunity to have better sex tonight than you will EVER have in your life, and to start your relationship with Mark." "With Lily there?" "Yes, with Lily. A threesome. No one's forcing you; it's entirely your choice." "Umm, I've never done anything like that before. I have to think about it." Julia, who never forces anyone, said, "You already know Mark's reputation, and now look at what a hunk he is. Do you really think other girls are going to give you time to think about whether you want to becomes friends with him?" Which prompted several of those other girls to urgently offer to take Pat's place. Many of the girls also made comments or asked questions: "Is he really that good?", "Why would you share him?", "Is his sister as hot as him?" Julia and I both took note of which girl asked that question, as she was our sort of girl! It was Savannah, a tall, attractive, Black girl. Doubly noteworthy because there are very few Blacks in Corvallis. Unfortunately Savannah was very aware how attractive she was, which was a turn-off, although her question compensated by being a major turn-on. There were even more questions flying, but Julia held up her hands until she had silence. Julia said, "I'm NOT going to answer detailed questions. You can ask your Liaisons sometime later. They are..." Julia went on to give a quick description of what Liaisons were and how they had to be used. In a brief silence, another girl held out a piece of paper to Julia, saying, "That's my number. If Pat does a no-show, call me and I'll be there with bells on. Nothing else, just bells, haha." Several other girls started trying to give Julia their phone numbers, but Julia yelled over them, "NO! This chaos is exactly why all these things go through your Liaison. I will NOT take anyone's phone numbers. I offered tonight to Pat - and Pat ONLY - as a one-time offer, so all of you could see that this is real. We're ONLY waiting for Pat to say yes or no, not declaring Mark to be open for all comers. Pat, what do you want to do?" "Um, I want to, but I have some questions." Julia invited, "Ask them provided they're quick." "How can we hide this from your parents, especially if you go to his place. What about his parents too?" Several of other girls muttered in response to this serious problem, then they listened carefully as Julia answered, "My parents are WAY cool. They grew up in the 60s and we've all heard what the 60s were like, haha. Some nights I sleep with Mark, and some nights with his sister Carol. That doesn't worry my folks at all; they welcome Carol and Mark equally. Dad even had some carpenters fit soundproofing in my room's walls because I was having so much loud sex. Mark's parents are fine too, as you can tell from my having my own three-girl threesome there tonight. Any more questions, Pat?" "Just a comment, really. I'll do it, but..." The rest of her comment was drowned out by the other girls' moans. Apparently they'd held out hope that Pat would decide not to and they be able to fill the empty slot, in order to have me fill their empty slot. Pat doubled her volume, and continued, "But my parents won't let me ride in a car with an unlicensed driver, and I wouldn't anyway, so I'll ride my bike to your house." Julia said, "Unless you choose to stop having sex early, which I doubt you could, then I recommend against trying to ride a bike in the morning. Both you and Lily will probably have trouble even walking in the morning." Several of the crowd laughed at Julia's wild exaggeration. Julia didn't bother trying to explain, instead she carried on with, "It doesn't matter anyway, as Mark has his full license so he can drive you to school. Lily too, if she'd rather ride in with Mark." Pat said, "But isn't he only fifteen?" "He is. He's fifteen and a half." Turning to me, Julia ordered, "Get your license out and give it to Pat for her to see." I reached for my wallet. I had a moment of panic when I couldn't find it in my pants pockets, then realized that it was in my bag. I leaned down to get it out, careful not to dislodge Lily. I extracted my license and passed it to Pat. Several of the nearby girls craned their necks to look at it. Julia asked, "What's Mark's birthday?" Pat answered, "November 9, 1989." Julia said, "1989 to 2005 is sixteen years. In November he'll turn sixteen, so he's just over fifteen and a half, right?" Several girls nodded. Julia added, "What's the Date of Issue on his license?" "April 18, 2004. Just over one year ago. Unrestricted all right. It must be a fake." Julia said, "Pat, do you really think I'd be involved in anything like that?" I laughed to myself, remembering that the Williamses were actively getting a fake ID for me. Julia added, "If it was a fake, don't you think they'd have backdated his birthday a few years!" Several of the girls laughed at that, and one of them asked, "How did a 14-year old get a license?" "He's Egg. He can do things that'll surprise you, as Pat and Lily will find out tonight. Pat, get one of your parents to drive you over with a change of clothes and whatever else you need at about 8. My parents will meet you at the door. It'll look totally on the up and up." Pat said, "Okay. I'll do it! Oh boy, I've never done anything like this before." #4: We left to go to our next class, forcing our way out of the room. We managed to get a quiet word with Lily between the two classes. Julia said, "Come to my place at 7:30, Lily. You deserve at least a little one-on-one time with Mark. Thank you for not making a fuss about having to share with Pat. I promise you'll still get just as much sex as you want." Lily's answer was, "I do what you want. I know you boss." Julia chuckled, "Good. You're smarter than the other girls we've dealt with so far. I also appreciate your cooperativeness and 'flexibility'. You should never underestimate Mark's role in this though. HE is the boss, even though you can't see how." "I cooperate. You ask, I do. I remember what you say at lunch." "I said a lot at lunch. What are you referring to?" Lily quoted, "You said, 'Put in Mark's hand and trust.' In your hand too, yes?" Julia was pleased, "Very good! I think you're the only one who has remembered that. Yes, both our hands." ^ [Later when Julia and I were alone (this is somewhat out of chronological sequence, but it meaningfully fits here), Julia said to me, "I want Lily and Pat to arrive at school tomorrow utterly shagged. Able to walk, but only just. Don't be rough because they're bound to be asked about that and I want them to deny it. Also make sure you stop when they ask you to, of course, but if they don't clearly ask you to stop, keep giving it to them. Wake them about 5:30 tomorrow morning and give them another hour or two of nonstop sex. When the two of them limp into class, well fucked and smiling, your reputation will be made." I wasn't sure what to say, so took the easy way out, "Okay." "I want them to advertise how good you are, and even if Pat's reluctant, I'm sure Lily will advertise it widely if we ask her to. She's very intelligently cooperative. It'll be great having someone so easy to work with. She's so much quicker and easier than Ava." "But won't that get Pat in trouble with her boyfriend?" "Do I work for you, for Pat, or for her boyfriend?" "Ahh, me." "Having Pat and Lily rave about how good you are at sex will help you start relationships with many girls, and that's good for you. Pat's accepting our invitation to have sex with you clearly indicates she doesn't care much about her boyfriend, so why should you? You don't even know who he is, do you?" "Ahh, no. I'll take my question back, and quickly change the topic back to Lily. I'm also impressed by how quickly Lily's fitted in with us. I think she's trying to figure us out, whereas all the other girls spend most of the time thinking about what they want. Except for Ava. Ava's so confused and desperate that she's just doing what she's told. Carol was certainly having fun with that this morning, haha. I probably won't see Ava myself today, unless I make a special effort. I was thinking of popping in to one of her classes just to congratulate her for doing so well at the meeting. What do you think?" "Sounds good to me. The more classrooms of girls that see you dressed like this, the better, and if you do something such as kiss her, then after you leave she'll have lots of her classmates asking her what was going on. She'll be very proud of that. While I remember, you're going to start going through a LOT of condoms from this afternoon on. I suggest you buy some when Dad brings you back from OSU, because over the next couple of days you're not going to have time for shopping before or after school." "Good idea." I'm sure the father of my girlfriend wouldn't mind stopping to let me buy huge numbers of rubbers to use with girls that his daughter was sending to her home for me to have sex with.] ^ The delay at the end of the first period's class nearly made me late to the beginning of my second class, so I rushed in and sat down. Again I was shocked and embarrassed by the magnitude of the reaction. One girl, for example, had been sitting on her desk talking to a friend and facing away from me. Reacting to the sudden silence and gasps, she spun around to look for the cause. She saw me, and was so distracted that she lost control of her spin. She spun off her desk and fell to the floor, knocking over her desk and chair, making a considerable clatter. I didn't save her because she was too far away. She wasn't good looking either, but that had nothing to do with anything, so I don't know why I mentioned it. Normally someone falling off their desk would've been laughed at big time, but her accident was ignored because most of the class were still gobsmacked by me, apart from those who'd shared my earlier class. There was the usual exclamations and praises, which I'll skip repeating. Among them all, one guy asked, "How come you're dressed like that, Egg?" I probably heard him clearly because his voice was the sole male one at the time. I surprised myself by answering ["surprising myself" isn't that unusual, as it simply means that the mind who spoke said something the rest of us didn't expect. It's rarely important enough to make an issue out of, but I thought I'd mention it so you get a better idea of what my life is like]. I said, "I'm looking for another girlfriend. My existing girlfriend, Julia, spends so much time with my sister that she's convinced me to find a second girlfriend. She says it'll be easier if I dress like this." Quite a large proportion of the class, of both genders, agreed that my dressing like this could improve my chances of finding a girl who might be interested in me. They were more succinct, but you get the idea. One girl disagreed strongly, "To hell with girlfriend, I want your babies. What are you doing tonight?" She never found out what I was doing because her boyfriend voiced his strong objection to her proposal. Her answer to his objection was, "Are you crazy! Look at him. If you looked like that I'd have your children too. And if you were as nice as him and got his grades ... Oh God, that body and a genius too!" I was sitting in my seat by now, and I noticed that the board already had the Liaison names with their alphabetic ranges of surnames written on it. Presumably left over from the previous class, so Laila's or Dakota's doing. I was amused and pleased. Class was about to start so I pointed to the note and called out, "If anyone wants to know more, DON'T ask me. We've set up a Liaison system. Talk with whichever girl on that list corresponds to your surname. She'll answer your questions." None of the three Liaisons were in this class unfortunately, but these girls would track them down. One of the girls asked, which an incredulous tone, "You've set up a committee to handle finding you a girlfriend?" "Umm, close to that. Your Liaison will explain it." Shaking her head, she commented, "I can't decide whether that's 'Eccentric', 'Genius', or just bizarre." Class started before I could explain that it was actually both, in that it was "Julia". Much more of the same continued all morning, including major disruptions in class, but none of it is worth describing in detail. ------- Prof picked me up on time (of course, him being a Williams), and we headed off to OSU. While I remembered to do so, I told him Julia's comment about my needing quite a few condoms. Prof said, "We can buy them cheap at OSU. How many do you want?" Good question. I figured that I mostly needed a new rubber each time I cum, which won't be very often as mini-go-softs allow me to spread them out. Plus I'll need to throw away the last one at the end of a session whether I cum or not. An average of two rubbers per session may not be enough, but three would probably be too many. Then there'll be about three sessions per day (pre-breakfast, afternoon and possibly two in the evenings, but three was probably a high-ish average already), so it'll be getting up to nearly 10 condoms per day. Call it 50 per week, especially as they're not needed with Julia, nor soon with Carol when her pills kick in. I don't want to have to go back and forth to OSU frequently just to buy rubbers, so I'll get a month's supply, which works out to be nearly 220. I answered, "If they come in boxes of a dozen, then twenty boxes should last a while." Prof agreed, "Yes, it should." My statement of how many I needed hadn't been intended as humorous (mathematics can be a lot of fun but it's rarely humorous), but I realized the humor of my statement when I heard Prof's dry agreement. I said, "I blame your daughter. She's taking this sex campaign - or whatever you want to call it - seriously. She's already booked me for one girl right after school this afternoon, then two more after dinner. They'll be staying overnight, presuming that's okay with you and Vanessa. Julia wants me to also give them a pre-breakfast session tomorrow. She's got another girl booked tomorrow after school, then Julia and another girl for overnight Friday. Just the next two days will be using the best part of two dozen rubbers. She's loading me up with girls, so far mostly just the Liaison girls we picked this morning." Remembering the fun we'd had, and quite happy to think about it again, I added, "Let me tell you what happened at the meeting when we chose which girls we wanted for Liaisons." I described the 'negative arms race' ("negative" because normally soldiers 'gear up' for a battle). I hammed it up a bit, and Prof thought it was so funny he pulled over so he could concentrate on the story. At the end he said, "What a pity I can't repeat that story in the faculty lounge, or at the dinner party on Friday. You have to tell The Boys at some stage. They'll get a laugh out of it." Prof restarted the car, and we completed the short journey to OSU Some of the things Prof showed me during the tour don't need much explanation here, such as where to park, how to use the library, where the Mathematics Department, many eating places and bathrooms were, and other stuff like that. Useful to know, but not interesting in themselves. However, there are a few incidents worth mentioning. Prof said, "Neither of your courses are being lectured now, but your algebra lecturer - Robert Smith, actually a PhD candidate and a teaching assistant - is teaching a different first year course and I'll take you in so you can see what a lecture looks like." It looked like a class at school, only much, much bigger, with a sloping floor and a hell of a lot more students. Goodness knows how anything gets done. The lecturer - or TA, or whatever he should be called - saw us and called out a greeting to Prof. The room was large enough that "called out" seems more accurate than "said". Prof called back, "I'm showing Mark around before lunch." "Bring him down, bring him down," waved the lecturer. Sure, make what looked like two or three hundred students wait because of me. The lecturer WAS waiting though, which meant the students necessarily were too. Prof urged me down, so down I went, with Prof following behind. The lecturer told the class, "Some of you may recognize Professor Williams. He's the older of the two. If any of you manage to pass this course and go further in Math, then you might have Prof. Williams at some stage. The younger of the two, the young man that most of you girls are paying so much attention to, is Mark Anderson. That's Mark with a 'k', Anderson, 's-o-n'." "Can you spell his phone number please?" asked one of the girls, which resulted in considerable laughter. By then I was at the front of the class, and wishing not to be. The lecturer said, "If you remember nothing else from today's lecture - the probability of which I won't comment on - remember that this is the day you met Mark Anderson." "Why?" ask several of the students. It's weird being in the front of so many people because it's very hard to know where to look. You can't just look at someone's face, like you do in a normal conversation, because that means there are hundreds of faces you're not looking at, which seems rude. I found my eyes wandering around the room rapidly, too nervous to hold still anywhere. It wasn't a comfortable experience, and considerably worsened by my being the subject of conversation and being so self-conscious about the clothes I was wearing. I knew Prof was really a professor, and that he could be referred to as "Professor Williams", as he had been only a minute ago. So assuming the same structure applies to lecturers, Lecturer Smith motioned to Prof to answer the students' question. Prof said, "How would you feel if you'd gone to college with Einstein?" "Old," answered one student. Lecturer Smith said, "Ah, yes, Mr. Richards. Most people say age brings wisdom, but in your case just 'old' would be a sufficient answer." Prof added, "You'd be very old, as Special Relativity was published exactly one hundred years ago. There's also the problem that Einstein was never an undergraduate in college, but ignoring those issues, Mark Anderson may well be this century's Einstein. Remember his name, and in a few years you might look back and remember this day." Several questions were called out, in various ways asking the lecturer to explain. There were also highly intelligent, college-level quips such as "Yeah, the Einstein of Hunk!" It was bad enough to be down the front of the class, but it was even worse when a number of the class starting taking photos of me. I was happy about one minor detail though. I'd taken my wallet out of my bag when I'd left Prof's car, and had worked it into one of my pockets. I figured I was safe because Julia was miles away, and I didn't think Prof would notice that I wasn't 'dressed' correctly. Lecturer Smith asked me, "Do you have any questions about any of the material you've reviewed so far?" Sure, make the entire class wait while I ask questions about an entirely different subject. I didn't though, and even if I did, Prof would have already answered them. "No thanks. The lecture notes and textbook are easy to follow so far." I tried to think of a something useful to say, ideally humorous and modest, but drew a blank with all three minds. The best I could come up with was, "Prof, can we get out of here?" Prof nodded, saying to the lecturer, "Mark's a bit daunted. We'll leave you to it. See you at lunch, Robert." The lecturer shook my hand, saying, "An honor to meet you, Mark. We'll talk more at lunch." On the way out, I heard Lecturer Smith explain, "Most of you are doing Calculus and Algebra. Mark started studying both those courses yesterday, and is working through the year's online lecture notes for them, so you'll see him at the..." Thankfully the door closing behind me cut off the rest of this description of me. It also silenced some of the ribald comments from the girls I'd passed walking out. I recalled Prof's comment about college students being much the same as high-school students, just a year older and at a different venue. His comment was backed up by their behavior, which didn't seem any more mature than that of the latter grades at school. Already in our walking around OSU I'd had people stare at me several times, especially girls, and had even received a few comments, so the esteem in which I'd previously held college students had been significantly eroded. Prof next took me to meet the office ladies, warning me, "These ladies run the Math Department, so it's a good idea to keep them happy." There were some glassed off counters, obviously to serve people who need whatever it is that the office ladies do, but Prof took me around a corner and up the hallway to the door into the ladies' area. He asked me to wait just outside while he talked to them. He slid through the door, leaving it just a little open. I heard him say, "Ladies, do you remember Mark Anderson, the 15-year old math prodigy? He's started studying a couple of courses and I'm showing him around campus. I thought I'd bring him in here to introduce him to the most important people in the department." "Now, Prof, you know students aren't allowed back here," said one of the ladies. "Okay," said Prof. Then calling out to me, "Mark, just stand in the doorway and wave to the ladies." I did as he said, waving and saying, "Hello ladies." "Oh, look at you! Come in, Mark, come in." The words came from the large, 40-ish-year old woman who was walking toward Prof. "But Maureen," said Prof, "what about the 'No Students Allowed' rule?" "Girls," called Maureen, turning to address the room, "is there any rule that gorgeous stud muffins aren't allowed in here?" The ladies (there were several of them, covering the age spectrum from the 20s to the 60s), had been generally busy with whatever it is they do in here, and some hadn't bothered looking up to my "Hello", but they all looked up to Maureen's "gorgeous stud muffins" comment. One of them answered, "I think we're required to check out all the stud muffins." The ladies all got up and started heading toward us. Whatever they do in here is apparently easily interrupted. Maureen stood beside Prof and they put their arms around each other in an easy friendship. Maureen said to Prof, although looking at me, "Aren't you a nice man. Look at what you've brought us. I always wondered what professors were good for, and now I know! You bring us lovely treats." Maureen gave Prof a squeeze, adding, "You're rapidly becoming my favorite Professor." I'd come to a stop now, facing Prof and Maureen. Prof did the introductions, adding, "Maureen is the queen bee of this particular hive. Anything I need done, like getting you that big pile of material on OSU and our courses, processing your enrollments, getting the textbooks for you, Maureen or one of her ladies does it for us." Maureen said, "That's right. The division of labor in this place is that we produce all the work, and the professors produce all the hot air. Which reminds me, I've got Mark's hunting permit on my desk. I'll get it in a second. -- "It's nice to meet you, Mark. I've never seen a student's costs allocated to marketing before, but now I understand why. If they used your picture in our advertising, female admissions would go WAY UP, haha." I started thanking her for doing the things for me that Prof had listed, although I was rather confused that they included a hunting permit. Before I could ask what I'd be hunting, Maureen dismissed my thank you speech with, "Don't worry about that. Let me introduce you to all the other hardworking girls here. You can tell how hard they work from the way they're standing around leering at you." Maureen introduced me to all her 'girls', even the 60-year old one. Acting on Prof's advice, I made a special effort to memorize all their names: I uncentered and allocated each lady to one of my four minds, which made each mind's task easily doable, as there were seven ladies in total, so only two names each. At the end Maureen told me, "If you need help with anything, just come in and ask. We'll be happy to help you, won't we, girls?" The girls agreed. Prof asked, "But what about the 'No Students' rule?" "Doesn't apply to walking marketing programs," laughed Maureen. There was some more joking around, during which Maureen briefly left us to fetch my hunting permit. It turned out to be a parking permit for the area where Prof had parked. Apparently I was being elevated to faculty status, or more accurately, Julia's car was. Prof warned me, hopefully as a joke, "Guard that with your life. You'd be amazed by how emotional the discussions can become over who gets those." After some more joking around, mostly between Prof and Maureen, she said, "Unlike professors, we don't get paid to stand around talking all day." That started the goodbyes. Without thinking about it, I kissed her on the cheek, which caused her to, "{Giggle}. You're just like Prof, getting a poor woman's hopes up but never following through." After a little more joking around, we left. Prof commenting when we were out of earshot, "It'll be easy to get things done for you in the future." I knew that my reception had been entirely due to my looks. Less good looking students, less embarrassingly dressed, would've been given far less of a welcome. More likely than not, they'd have been kicked out because of the rule. It seemed wrong to be so advantaged just because of my looks, but how did that differ from the lecturers being willing to help me because of my mathematics ability. I'm sure there were deep social or philosophical issues in there somewhere, but it was lunchtime and I was hungry. Lunch in the faculty dining room was pleasant. Judging by the number of people in it, the room was shared by a lot of departments, or maybe all of them. It was really just another cafeteria, with somewhat better food and a much better decor. There weren't any other kids here, but no one took exception to me. They didn't even appear curious. Prof led me toward where the Math people were grouped together. When they saw me coming, they showed a considerable amount of curiosity. I worried that more of it was because of my clothes than brain. I was introduced to far too many people to remember. I again met Robert Smith, my algebra lecturer, and Jay Bolton, my calculus lecturer. Vanessa was at the table and had saved two seats next to her for Prof and me, and we did a little seat rearranging so my lecturers could sit near me. There were some jokes about my clothes, fortunately Prof deflected most of the blame for them onto Julia, and then we went to get our food; that part was good. Once we were settled down to lunch, normal conversation started. I didn't have anything important to say to my lecturers. I told them where I was up to in their lectures. Both were impressed that I'd covered so much in only two days. I mentioned that I would have gotten more done, except I had kept expecting the material to get hard so I'd been cautious. Prof explained to the table how I revered the quality of undergraduate courses, and several of the staff laughed at that apparently silly idea. I was asked whether I understood the material so far, which I said I did. They each asked me a couple of questions as a very short oral quiz, which I had no trouble answering. Prof raised the topic of quizzes, asking them, "Mark does his study in the early morning, way too early for me to get up and supervise his taking quizzes. Can we put him on the honor system for doing them?" We agreed to do that. They'd email the quizzes to Prof, who'd print them out and put each in an envelope, marked with the lecture number after which I should do them. After I'd completed the quizzes, Prof would fax them back to the appropriate lecturer. The Head of the Math Department came in, and Prof stood to introduce us. Obviously an important guy, so I stood and greeted him. I didn't kiss him on the cheek though, as that was only for important office ladies. He didn't stay, saying, "I just came to welcome Mark to OSU." He said a few words of welcome, including, "I look forward to seeing how you do in your courses." He left after that. There were several reasons why it was a good idea for me to get good grades here, including - I was increasingly aware - that if I failed to do so it would reflect poorly on Prof. I'd mention this to Julia at some stage, just to make sure she didn't overload me with too many girls (and I can't believe I just had that thought!). Lunch was otherwise unnoteworthy. Nice though, as I was hungry. I got teased for that too. After lunch Prof said, "Let's go to Student Health to get you those condoms, then it's back to school." Getting them was slightly amusing, but mostly for Prof. Twenty dozen condoms was apparently an unusually large order, and the girl that served me had a good time joking at my expense, especially after I told her that they weren't for a frat house, but for my personal use. She also asked, "I don't remember you being in here before?" "Ahh, no. This is my first time." "Thought so." She started flirting with me, then when there was little time left, she asked, "So how many of these can I get you to use on me?" She was pretty enough, but I wasn't that interested. She was at least five years older than me, and probably wouldn't appreciate learning my age (which, apart from other considerations, made her proposition illegal). I also didn't need the inconvenience of trying to spend time with a girl who didn't know my background. All the girls Julia was arranging for me wouldn't need all sorts of explanations. Julia had even told me NOT to talk with the first few, that's how little explanation was needed. I was also conscious of the need not to lose too much study time, and judging by what had happened at school this morning, I had a feeling I was going to be losing a lot. So I pointed to Prof and said, "The guy chuckling at me is my girlfriend's father." "Just my luck," she complained. Happily Prof didn't inform her that none of the twenty dozen rubbers would be used with my girlfriend. I got a little revenge on Prof for chuckling at me. I didn't have enough money on me, and asked him to make up the difference. He happily did so, fake-grumbling about the things a father had to do to keep his little girl happy. I was distressed at how much a month's supply of rubbers cost! Maybe I should've responded to the salesgirl, to get her to buy them for me at the staff discounted rate. After that we headed back to school. ------- I put the rubbers in the trunk of Julia's car, then wandered into school. It wasn't worth going to class, so I killed a little time in the library, then waited outside the room that Julia would be in this period, to tell her how my lunch had gone and see how her day was going. The bell rang, and the first students came through the door, and saw me. They stopped in the doorway, blocking it and causing a temporary traffic jam. The people coming from behind pushed, which got things moving again. As they walked past most of the girls said "Hello, Egg" (or "Mark"), and for some of them, their steps faltered and they looked as if they wanted to stay and talk with me more, but they all decided to keep walking. I was amused to see some of them glancing back into the classroom to see if Julia was looking. The level of female attention was WAY higher than normal, my clothes and my "looking for another girlfriend or two" being the obvious explanation. The behavior of the guys walking past was different from normal too. About half ignored me, a quarter were friendlier than normal, and the last quarter were unfriendlier: glaring at me or pointedly ignoring me (I could somehow tell the difference between deliberate and casual ignoring). Julia didn't come out. When the flow through the doorway thinned sufficiently, I entered the room to find her. Julia had been held up by a couple of girls asking questions about the Liaison process. Seeing me, Julia told them, "You can find out the answers at the after-school talk, or at lunch tomorrow. Mark is dating the Liaison girls for the next few nights, before he dates anyone else, so you won't miss out by waiting. I want to talk with Mark now." Julia left them and came over to greet me. Our next class was together so we wandered toward it, keeping our conversation brief as we didn't have much time. Julia told me, "There are LOTS of girls interested in knowing about being your girlfriend. Lily, Laila, Dakota and I have been swamped by people wanting to know more. At lunch we decided that Lily would stay after school for fifteen minutes to address all the girls who want to listen. One big lecture, rather than having to say the same thing repeatedly to individuals. We'll do the same thing at lunchtime tomorrow. Tomorrow night she's going to set up a page for us on the web somewhere, maybe on MySpace or something similar, and we'll use that for most of our future announcements to the masses. -- "One thing we didn't expect was that several guys have been asking about what's going on. Most out of simple curiosity, but some of them seem unhappy, I guess because their girlfriends are taking an interest in you. That's something they need to sort out with their girlfriends. We're not targeting any specific girls, so those guys can't blame us for their girlfriends' wandering eyes. How was your lunch?" "Fine. I met my lecturers and both are very willing to be helpful if I need them to be, which I don't so far. It was interesting to visit, and I now know my way around OSU enough to go by myself if I need to, but so far the online lecture notes are ideal for me. I can work through their lecture notes online much faster than the real-time rate, which is hardly surprising as there have to be over two hundred students in a class." We chatted a bit more about OSU, but of no significance. I changed the subject as we neared our next class, telling Julia, "I'll skip out of class a couple of minutes before the end in order to catch Ava at the end of her class." We arrived at the next class, and the other students reacted to me much as at the end of the previous class: many of the girls called "Hello" or otherwise greeted me, but no more than that. Julia and the Liaison girls must have done a good job of warning off the many girls who were obviously interested in me. A few more of the guys were friendlier than normal, and a few were unfriendlier. A couple of the guys came over to talk. If they'd been girls Julia or I would have told them to talk with their Liaison, but the threat used to keep the girls in line ("Mark will ONLY talk with and date girls who come through a Liaison. Girls who persist in trying to shortcut that will be permanently banned from dating Mark"), didn't have a lot of leverage on guys. The guys wanted to know, "How long are you going to dress like this, Egg?" Julia answered, "Probably until he graduates." #1: One of them said, "We were hoping things would return to normal after you found another girlfriend." I said, "I think things will settle down soon, once people get used to seeing me dressed like this." They hoped so, and chatted a bit more about it until class started. I slipped out a couple of minutes before the end of class, and made my way to where I knew Ava would be, in one of the classes I was officially attending but seldom going to. ------- Chapter 90: First Time with a Liaison Thursday, April 21, 2005 (Continued) I arrived outside Ava's classroom as the bell rang, and it didn't take more than a couple of seconds before students were coming out. Many of the 11th grade students hadn't seen me in my new clothes, so seeing me standing outside their room caused some disruption. Mostly among the females, confirming my opinion that females are easier to disrupt. Lots of comments about how great I was looking, some along the likes of, "I'd heard you were dressed hot today, but I'm stunned." One girl said, "I heard you were looking for a new girlfriend, Egg," which caught the attention of several of the other girls. A couple confirmed they'd heard the same thing, and suddenly several girls were very interested. I'd been looking for Ava, and it was lucky that I was taller than the girls around me because Ava was one of the last girls out, walking out in close company with one of the guys from the class, who was talking to her intently. Hardly surprising, as Ava was dressed particularly attractively. She had a sweater on, but a short, semi-transparent skirt showing sexily cut panties is not the sort of thing guys fail to notice. Upon seeing me, Ava instantly forgot about the guy talking to her, making a beeline for me. I thought I'd be nice to her by showing her closeness to me in front of most of the girls in the class, so I demanded of the small crowd around me, "Please let Ava through," while making appropriate parting motions with my hands. The girls parted as requested, and Ava came through the small crowd to me. I held my right hand up and out to my side, and Ava VERY happily snuggled underneath it. I'd not really talked to her before, apart from her very brief pickup attempt and my even briefer phone call with her, so this was WAY more affection than I'd shown her before, and she was delighted. The guy she'd been talking to didn't look pleased about being left in her dust as she ran to me. He looked at all the girls gathered around us, frowned, and walked off. One of the girls said, "Aww. Ava's your new girlfriend already." I was going to tell Ava to explain what a Liaison was, but figured I should probably do it myself, Ava not being so bright. I spoke up loudly to give a little speech, "Possibly, that's not decided yet. I am STILL looking for one or two additional girlfriends to get to know much better. What Ava is now is my Liaison for 11th grade. Julia thought there'd be too many girls interested in me for me to talk with them all without disrupting all the extra study I do, so we created Liaisons for each grade. If any of you want to find out more about possibly being my girlfriend, then you should talk with Ava about it." I had been intending to briefly describe the role of the Liaisons and how other girls should work with our system, and then pull Ava away so I could praise her for behaving so well at the pre-school meeting (more fondly remembered in my head as "The Mass Strip Session"). For some reason, thinking about that session put me in a horny mood. Ava and I were backed up against the hallway wall and were closely surrounded by about a dozen girls, so no one would be able to see what I had just thought of doing. Rather than cutting the conversation short, I allowed them to ask questions of us. I took my hand off Ava's shoulder and put it around her waist, squeezing it a couple of times. None of the girls around us paid any attention to the movement. Meanwhile I was answering a question by telling them, "I'm particularly interested in having a girlfriend in your grade because next year we'll be seniors together. I don't know how often I'll be coming to school, but it'd be great to have a girlfriend in my classes when I do." Predictably, one girl asked, "Why wouldn't you come to school?" I could feel Ava start to answer, but then hold back and look at me. I guessed she wasn't sure whether she was allowed to tell people about my college courses. It wasn't a secret, as nothing Ava knew was a secret, and probably never would be. I told her, "You can answer if you wish." Ava said, "Because he's ALREADY doing college courses. I didn't even know that until just recently, but Mark's doing 10th AND 11th grades, AND college courses! I guess that if he can do that this year, then next year he'll do 12th grade and LOTS of college courses. So he'll be at college most of the time." Ava turned to me to ask, "Is, oh. Is that right?" Her verbal stagger was caused by my sliding my hand from her waist down to her ass. I hadn't been shy about it; I'd slid it quickly and firmly, and was now blatantly rubbing her ass. I'd caught her by surprise, but it only took her a moment to react. She leaned into me, whispering quietly but VERY enthusiastically, "Thank you very, very much." Meanwhile her ass was pressing back to make stronger contact against my hand. I didn't know why she was thanking me, but it seemed to make her happy. Mostly I'd been intending to make me happy, but I had no objection to her enjoying herself. I said to the crowd, "Ava's right. I'll be doing a lot more college courses next year. I don't know how many yet, so I'm not sure how much time I'll spend here." While the little crowd around us expressed amazement at that, I leaned down to whisper in Ava's ear, "I'm VERY pleased with how great you were in the meeting before school. Especially with Carol." Leaning down to whisper to her lowered my right shoulder, allowing that hand to slide down her left leg until it reached her leg's bare flesh just below her short skirt. Ava reacted by quietly uttering a "Yes!" More a moan than speech, and definitely a good sign. As I straightened up, I kept that hand's fingers in contact with the flesh of her leg, so my hand slid up her leg, bunching her skirt on my wrist as I raised it. By the time I was upright, my hand was in contact with the flesh of her ass, which the cut of her panties left mostly and delightfully bare. Anyone standing behind us would have had a clear view of half of Ava's ass, but we were safely standing with our backs to a wall. No one could see what I was doing. Ava's grip around my waist tightened, and she leaned harder against me too. We were both happy. Isn't that nice? #4: #3: I rubbed my hand freely over her ass, sometimes over the bare flesh, sometimes over her wonderfully inadequate panties. Meanwhile I was facing the crowd, answering their questions, and appearing totally innocent. After about thirty seconds, I slid my hand sideways under the thin vertical band of her panties, reaching so my fingers were lying inside her ass crack. Ava was obviously happy with this development. Somewhat inexplicably too, I must admit. I couldn't understand why a girl I'd barely ever spoken to would take such delight in having her bare ass groped by me. I made a mental note to think about it some other time, because I was too busy rubbing and squeezing now. Ava was mostly silent, obviously focusing on my hand more than the conversation, so for another couple of minutes I answered all the usual questions: "Wasn't Julia jealous?", "Why not?", "What sort of girl was I looking for?" To that question I decided it would've been undiplomatic to say "One with big tits," so I answered with, "I have no predetermined criteria. Any of you might be wonderful for me." When I had a small pause, I announced, "Hang on a second, I just need to check something with Ava." I bent down to whisper to her, purely so I could get my hand lower. I'd gotten a little bored just playing with her ass, with the honey pot being so close but just out of my reach. Bending down allowed my fingers to slide all the way down her butt crack, over her asshole, and toward my goal - her pussy. My hand was blocked by her legs being too close together, but as soon as Ava realized my hand was being impeded, she spread her legs and I was able to slide my fingers over her pussy. It was already moist. I pulled my hand back a bit, then easily slid my longest finger into her. I needed to say something as a cover for what my hand was doing, so I whispered, "I saw through all your attempts to trick me this morning, but I am very pleased that you are trying so hard. And I'm thrilled that you're successfully making Carol so happy with you." Ava was just chanting, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," in time with my finger rhythm. The other girls were talking among themselves, and making enough noise to cover our conversation, but I thought I'd better not keep them waiting too long. Having satisfied my curiosity, I stood upright again, which sadly just left me only able to rub her ass cheeks. I told the girls around us, "I understand that right after school today one of the Liaisons, Lily Cheng, will be addressing girls who want to know more about this. That's right, isn't it Ava?" Ava confirmed it was, giving details about exactly where Lily would be. I resumed, "If you've got more questions, and I definitely hope some of you do, then that meeting should answer a lot of them. If you can't get to that meeting there's going to be another one at lunchtime tomorrow. I'm not sure where." Ava jumped in with, "Same place as Lily's one." "Good. Normally if you have any questions, ask Ava, but those meetings will tell you all the basics. I want to talk with Ava for a few minutes alone, so if you'll excuse us ladies." I removed my hand from under her skirt and I nudged Ava down the corridor, repeating to the others, "Excuse us ladies, make way." The 'ladies' wanted to know if my "I definitely hope some of you do" implied I had some favorites, and if so, who? I didn't go to 11th grade classes very often, averaging maybe one a week, so I didn't know any of these girls hardly at all. I had some ideas about who were the nicest and least nice, and I certainly knew who were the prettiest, but I didn't want to apply any criteria now. I'd made my comment mostly to encourage them all to join the Liaison process, so I just said, "I don't know you well enough to give a definite opinion, so I don't want to say anything that might discourage someone who might have a good relationship with me. Once the Liaison process is up and going properly, we'll get to know each other better, and that'll be the time to start thinking about preferences. Now, if you'd excuse Ava and me please." We made our escape, leaving the girls to their discussion about the interesting development of someone else being able to become my girlfriend. I doubted it'd be much of a conversation, because I doubted many 11th grade girls would be interested in me. They hardly knew me. I suspected some of them didn't even know my name. Their interest just now was probably because of the way I was dressed, and once the first few girls had gathered around me, the others had probably done so out of curiosity. Ava's considerable interest in me was an obvious exception to my belief about the general 11th grade attitude. I was somewhat curious about how she'd come to like me so much. Her letter implied it wasn't just because of my 10k victory, which is what I'd thought when she'd first talked to me in class, but her reason didn't matter much. What mattered the most was that Ava was so obviously very attractive putty in our - mine, Carol's and Julia's - hands. I certainly wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when the horse was so happy to have my hand down her sexy panties (that metaphor didn't work out quite the way I wanted). Walking down the hallway, and then outside for some privacy, Ava said, "Thank you SO MUCH for touching me, it made me SO happy that I almost made a fool of myself. Especially 'cause I was worried you'd be upset about Conrad talking to me." #3: Ava being a female (I'd checked), I naturally didn't understand her logic, so I asked, "Why are you so thankful, and why would I be upset about Conrad talking to you?" "Julia told me you weren't interested in my pictures, and that you wouldn't be interested in my body until you liked me. I never expected you to like me so quickly, so it was a wonderful surprise." Remembering that Ava was supposed to think I was superhumanly smart - as I'd have to be to understand females as well as Julia had told Ava I did - I said, "I understand your thinking now. I didn't know Julia had told you that. Julia knows me well, and was right. The reason I like you so much more now is because of how wonderful you were this morning. You did everything perfectly, from arriving exactly on time, making Carol happy, offering to strip to match the other girls, trying so hard to be bisexual, and many other things. Your personality is what most attracts me to you, and you demonstrated WONDERFUL attitudes this morning. I especially pleased about how Carol responded to you. I really want Carol to be happy, so the more she likes you, the happier I'll be." "Thanks. I'll try very, very hard. She's a beautiful girl, and I liked touching her and kissing her. She's very sexy and makes me hot for her." Ava was laying it on thick, but that was fine with me regardless of it being unbelievable. I decided to return the favor, "I'll be VERY interested to hear what Carol tells me tomorrow about how good tonight works out for the three of you. Please, PLEASE make sure you never make Carol unhappy. That'd be a terrible thing because she's vulnerable at the moment and I'd have to put my sister's feelings before mine when it came to keeping you as a girlfriend. If you make her unhappy, I'll have to break up with you, and I don't think I want to do that because you're being so wonderful." "You're so nice for caring for your sister so much. I'll do my very best for her AND you. I'll be just like Julia: being with you AND Carol." Somehow I couldn't see Ava being "just like Julia", but she was welcome to try. We were far enough away from the girls we'd left, so I stuck my wet fingers into my mouth, and noisily lick them, "Mmm, tasty!" Ava giggled, "You like how I taste?" I hadn't met a pussy yet that I didn't like the taste of, so I could honestly say, "I do. Hopefully tomorrow night I'll get to drink a lot more of you, straight from the source." Rather than get into a conversation about that, I changed the topic to, "Remember my question about Conrad? Why would I be upset about his talking to you?" Ava answered, "I thought you might not want me talking to another boy. That you might be jealous and want to keep me for your own." I hadn't given it a thought. My only emotional reaction had been amusement at Conrad's understandable interest, and how he'd been left in her dust when Ava rushed to me. Now that Ava had made me think about it, I still wasn't jealous. It hardly seemed fair for me to be jealous given how many girls I was going to be playing around with soon, many of which Ava would know about, and even be helping arrange for me. My only worry about answering her jealousy point was not in knowing the truth about how I felt, but in whether I should answer truthfully. Maybe Julia would advise me otherwise. I decided to give myself plenty of room for maneuver, "I don't have any jealousy about you, Ava. You're not my girlfriend yet, so it wouldn't be fair for me to be that way. If I feel that way in the future, I'll mention it to you. Until then, don't worry about it." I made a mental note to ask Julia whether I was jealous about Ava talking to other boys. "On that topic, I was also very pleased with you this morning when you didn't react badly when Julia talked about me sleeping with other girls. I was worried that you might get upset. Maybe you'd be jealous of me?" I could see that Ava didn't know how to say what she was thinking. Suspecting that she was going to be less than truthful, I said, "Simply tell the truth, Ava. Don't worry about what I'll think, because I'll think even worse if you're not totally honest with me." Ava deflated somewhat, then said, "I was shocked, but Julia had already told me that you were having sex with others. She said you had a threesome last night?" Ava had turned her statement into a question, so I just nodded. Of course I wasn't going to say it was with Carol, but nodding was fine. She continued, "But I didn't know about your Liaison idea, and that you'd be sleeping with six of us, and even more girls after that. That shocked me. I was unhappy until I realized that Julia and Carol want you to do that, especially Julia, and she must have good reasons because she's so smart. You even more, because you're a genius. I don't understand it, but I know arguing is stupid because you can have almost any girl you want. I'm just an ordinary girl and I'm very scared about having so much competition, but at least I have a chance. -- "I WILL try my hardest. Already I have been far luckier than I deserve by being picked to be a Liaison for you, and somehow you and Julia seem to REALLY like me. Carol too. I don't understand how you can all like me so much, but I will do everything I can think of to make you like me more. I truly want you pick me, even if you have to try all the other girls first." We didn't have much time left before the next class started. I can be late to classes but Ava can't, so I decided to end the conversation quickly. Ava believed my trying all the other girls was a temporary thing, presumably to be followed by my settling into a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with one of them, and obviously she was hoping that'd be her. I didn't think Julia saw it that way, and I was pretty sure #4 didn't either. There was no merit in raising that issue with Ava now, or possibly ever, so I simply said, "Good girl, Ava. You may not understand all the reasons, but you've made the right decision. Arguing about this would certainly annoy Julia, Carol and me. That'd be a terrible pity, as you're starting to have a wonderful relationship with all of us. We've got to go to our classes now. I just wanted to thank you for being so wonderful this morning. Keep up your wonderful attitudes, and I'm sure good things will happen to you. I've got to go, bye." I decided not to kiss her. Fingering her cunt was fine, but certain things have to be built up to slowly, so I just waved as I started jogging away. The rest of the school day was uneventful, except I suddenly had an idea that made me kick myself. I was laying out some of my 11th grade work on my desk so I could study it during class, when I had the thought, #1: Then I kicked myself because, of course, I COULD study them at the same time. So much for my supposedly being a genius! If I uncentered, two minds could work on each, doubling my current speed. There wasn't much spare time in Prof's schedule, and I'd been starting to worry about all the imminent sex cutting into my study time so much that it threatened the schedule, so realizing that I could double my studying speed was wonderful. It'd improve all my future college studies and give me more time for sex - ideas don't come much better than that! The lecture notes often have graphical stuff in them, mostly formulas, which would probably lose too much readability if I shrunk the fonts enough to fit both subjects onto the screen at the same time. Nor would keeping the same font size and two half-sized windows work well, as I need to see the context of what I'm reading. What I'll do is print one of the courses out so I can study one online and the other from paper. If I print a lecture or two out before I go to bed, they'll be ready for me when I started studying, and as I finish each lecture during the study session, I can start a new one printing. Excellent! Now I don't have to worry about lots of sex causing me to let Prof down. He'd made a couple of comments about my needing to keep my priorities straight, so I'll tell him about my new scheme asap, so he can stop worrying about me having sex with so many girls. When school let out, Julia and I didn't hang around. We left Lily to address however many bottom-tier girls turned up for her mass explanation, while we headed straight to the car. We didn't have time to waste, because Laila's 'payment' for being my Liaison was somewhat tight for time, as Aikido started at 5:45. Fortunately Carol and Donna arrived at the car quickly. I took them home, ran in to grab some clothes to train in and the Aikido books I needed to return to Sensei, then Julia and I headed to her place. Laila was waiting outside, as it'd been quicker for her to bike directly here than we'd managed with our side trip. She was looking nervous, so Julia told her, "You're not going to have that look on your face in a few minutes, that's for sure." That didn't noticeably help, but I couldn't think of anything better to say either (what do you say at a time like this?). Julia took Laila's hand and led her into the house and upstairs, chatting all the while about how the other girls at school had reacted during the day. Once in the bedroom, while I was putting my stuff down and the bag of rubbers into a drawer in the bedside table, Laila nervously said, "I'd better call Mom to say I'll be late." Julia pointed to her bedside phone, and Laila went to use it. I suspected that Laila was trying to stall, and apparently so did Julia as she told me, "Strip Mark. Let Laila see how fantastic your body is. That should rekindle her enthusiasm." Julia helped herself to the distressingly few buttons that this shirt had, so I started with my belt and fly. While talking to her mom, Laila watched my unveiling with interest, but also with some trepidation. My shirt came off first, then my shoes and socks. My pants and underwear came down together, and Julia took them away, leaving me standing naked in the center of the room. "Wow!" exclaimed Laila. Followed by, "I've got to go, Mom. Julia just showed me something amazing." Laila put down the phone. Julia, returning from taking care of my clothes, said, "I bet you didn't expect Mark to look like that, did you? Especially before he started wearing good clothes today." Laila exclaimed, "I didn't think ANYBODY looked like that! He's INCREDIBLE." Julia cut off any more gushing with, "Mark, what time do you have to finish with Laila?" "Umm, I've got Aikido at 5:45, and need to get there before then to talk with Sensei about something, and I'll need to shower before I go too, so we'll have to stop no later than 5:15." Julia said, "Laila, you don't have much time. If I was you, I'd be stripping already." Laila didn't move, so Julia added, "Mark, kiss Laila then undress her." I was reluctant to kiss a girl who wasn't showing enthusiasm for it, but I was even more reluctant to argue with Julia, especially as I remembered Julia's instruction not to start some long-winded, attempt at reassurance. I could too easily imagine that conversation lasting until 5:15, and ending worse than it started. So, without talking, I did what I was told. I walked up to Laila, put my arms around her, and bent to kiss her. She turned her head away, asking me, "Let me just touch you first, please?" That seemed like a perfectly reasonable and enjoyable request, so I removed my arms from around her and stood straight. Julia didn't say anything, so I just stood patiently. Laila put her hands on my chest, and started rubbing them across my body. From my chest, down to my belly, one hand to either side of my waist. Then she took a couple of steps to be most of the way behind me. Her hands slid around while she walked, so one was now on my back and one on my belly. Her back hand slid down to my back side, and started squeezing my butt. I was pleased that Laila was starting to get sexual. So was my cock, an opinion it expressed by getting hard. I also found it rather amusing that just a few hours ago I'd been groping Ava's ass. Karma, I guess. Julia, who was standing nearby watching us, said, "Mark's got a gorgeous ass, hasn't he?" "ALL of him is gorgeous. I've never seen a body this good before, never mind touch one." Laila had been looking at Julia, and when she looked back at me, she'd moved enough to notice my proudly protruding penis's profile. "Mmm," said Laila, and her forward hand slid down to take me in its grip, rubbing me lightly. I said, "Mmm" too. Julia contributed something more intelligent to the conversation, "Laila, Mark is a very, very good lover. You're going to regret wasting this time soon. I suggest you strip and lie on the bed, and let Mark show you what he can do." Laila had an excellent way of saving time, she knelt in front of me and enveloped my cock with her mouth while she used her hands to unbutton her clothes, undo her shoes, etc. All too soon she stood, stepped out of her shoes, and quickly dropped her clothes onto the floor. In seconds she was naked, grabbing my cock, and pulling it and the rest of me toward the bed. She lay on the bed, on her back, and I climbed on at her feet. We didn't have time for much subtlety, so I moved straight to her pussy. She wasn't wet enough yet, so I put my mouth and fingers to work to stimulate her, paying three total attentions to her responses, to learn them as fast as possible. Julia moved to the bedside table, removed a couple of rubbers, and put them loose on the top of the table. "Ready for quick use. I'll be in the study, Mark. Have fun you two." Julia started toward the door. My mouth was otherwise occupied, and Laila beat me to the question. She asked Julia, "I thought you were going to join in, after your talk this morning about wanting threesomes?" Julia answered, "Another day I'd love to. You've got a lovely body, Laila, and you've been very helpful for Mark and me today, but I want you to have Mark only. I want you to know that everything that's about to happen to you is because of Mark and Mark alone. That way you can honestly tell other girls how good he is." "I don't normally talk about sex. Do you want me to?" "Absolutely. Part of a Liaison's job is to encourage other girls to be interested in Mark, which includes telling them how good he is in bed. He can't boast himself because for some reason girls don't believe a guy's telling them how good he at sex, haha. I'll leave you to it. Maybe I'll stick my head in at 5, and perhaps join in for a little play at the end. See you later." I'd only been lightly caressing Laila's pussy lips while the girls were talking. With Julia's departure I returned to learning about arousing Laila. I haven't seen many pussies, but so far they've all been very different. Not only to look at, but in how their look changes as they become aroused, and especially in what arouses them. They're fascinating, delicious, and a great deal of fun too. We had about 1.5 hours - not long enough for a fuckathon, but long enough to justify spending part of it learning my way around her buttons, starting with the best one. My main goal wasn't to arouse her, although that was a natural consequence of 'playing around down there'. I'd try something, see how she reacted to it, try something else, she how that affected her, and so on. Her level of arousal climbed and lowered repeatedly, but trended upward. After five minutes of this she asked with a puzzled tone of voice, "What are you doing?" "Learning your body's reactions, and enjoying myself while I'm in the area. I can see you're enjoying it too, so just lie back and relax." "You're not doing what people normally do." It was a statement rather than a question, and I was busy, so I didn't answer. Female bodies are strange things. The exact same movements by me, such as sliding the tip of my tongue up one of her lips and down the other, can have completely different effects when the girl is barely aroused, half-aroused, very aroused, just before her climax, or soon after it. And all of those responses can be different from girl to girl too. It's a silly system, but I'm actually happy that it's so messed up because I figure that it gives me a considerable advantage over other guys. Most of them wouldn't be able to learn their way around their lover's body as well as I can, which would make my performance stand out as better. [[I had five sources of competitive advantage, a term I learned from my business degree, but that's later: (1) Having three active minds concentrating on observing the girls' responses. (2) My proximity sense gave me some information. Not much at this point in my autobiography, but enough that I could move gracefully with the girl. (3) I was a wimp. The girls' pleasure was considerably more important to me than my own, so I devoted all my time to making her happy. (4) Effectively infinite endurance, somehow. (5) Go-softs, without which none of the previous reasons would've mattered, as the sex wouldn't last more than a couple of minutes. Every one of those five factors was a considerable help. Infinite endurance and go-softs have obvious advantages, but even the least seeming advantage - my being graceful - was surprisingly effective: I avoid the clumsiness of two bodies trying to synchronize their various changing positions and movements; my gracefulness was impressive in itself; and it also implied that I'd had a considerable amount of prior sexual experience from many other girls, instinctively raising the current girl's estimation of my desirability.]] After ten minutes, by which time Laila was very aroused and very happy, I knee-walked around her legs and up beside her, to be near her tits. I kept one hand on her pussy, doing things that I'd learned she liked. I aroused her more, then lightened my touch so she drifted down pleasantly, then did something else to arouse her, repeatedly. I used my mouth and other hand to learn my way around her breasts. By now she was very sensitive, so even just licking under the base of her breasts made her gasp. It was five minutes before I touched a nipple for the first time, which drew the first significant sexual moan out of her. I played around for a few minutes, seesawing between giving her breasts more stimulation than her pussy, then pussy more than breasts. While I was up near this end of the bed, I grabbed a condom and carried it with me ready to put it on quickly later, as I knee-walked back down to my original position. I wanted to play around with her pussy some more. I kept one hand on a breast or nipple most of the time, using my mouth and one hand on her pussy. I wished I could also use TK on her, but that would be very stupid as she might notice the impossibility of it despite her distraction: her head was starting to whip from side to side, her hips make small thrusts up and down. She was groaning, as much in frustration as excitement. I licked and diddled her until she was getting very close, then I held her there, extracting many more groans from her. She'd been grasping the bedspread in her hands, pulling and pushing on it in her arousal, but she couldn't stand me just holding her level, so she moved her hands to frig herself. I captured both her forearms with my hands, and pinned them to the bed to either side of her waist. I put most of my weight down on her arms as I moved myself up over her body, so that I was now slightly too far north to enter her. I lowered my hips between her legs, until the base of my cock came in contact with her clit. She strained to move her hips up the bed, to line my cock up with her hole, but I had her extended arms firmly pressed into the mattress, and she couldn't slide up the bed at all. She changed tactics, trying to bring herself off by rubbing her clit against my cock. I let her for a few seconds, then I twisted a little so my hip was holding her upper-thigh down, preventing her from thrusting against me properly. Then I allowed a few more seconds of clit contact, even thrusting with my hips a few times to rub my cock against her, an action that quickly got her excited, until I stopped it. Meanwhile, at the other end, I'd lowered my mouth toward hers, but when Laila tried to kiss me, I'd avoided her mouth, and instead kissed her nose, then her forehead, ears, cheeks, etc. Everywhere except her lips. Her pussy was being frustrated, and her mouth's lips too. I managed to capture her ear lobe, and very quickly found out that, as turned on as she was, the ear lobe suck had a great effect. It'd be an exaggeration to say she reacted as if struck by lightning, but it was something like a watered down version of that. She jolted, and whipped her head around to the other side, thereby offering me her other lobe. I didn't hesitate to go for it. She was so turned on that her ear lobes were too sensitive, so she instantly pulled her head away, then tried to keep me away from her lobes by pushing her head back into the pillow while looking directly up. I quickly kissed her lips, pulling away before her response, which was to raise her head, chasing my lips. I darted my head to the side, and licked up the side of her neck, and onto her ear lobe again. With all the clit stimulation and frustration that was going on as well, poor Laila was getting very, very wound up, and I was having a great time. Unfortunately time was also passing as we'd used up nearly thirty minutes by now, so I started frustrating her verbally too (Julia had shown me, on Carol, how effective the right words at the right time can be). "Do you want me to fuck you?" Did she ever! She was very, very definite about it. I said, "We've still got HEAPS of time. I think I'll arouse you more first." I started rubbing her clit with the underside of my cock again. I let her groan at my torture for a few seconds, then I shut her up with a full-on, passionate kiss. I gave her just long enough to get into it properly, and then I pulled my head and my hips off her. The sudden absences took her by surprise, and then she screamed, "ARGH! FUCK ME!" She'd asked so nicely that I decided to grant her polite request, after just a little more teasing. I leaned down and whispered, "You didn't say please. Now we have to start all over again. Yummy, more pussy licking." I slowly sat back on my heels, moving my head down the centerline of her body, kissing it as I went. Clearly heading for her pussy. She started thrashing her body from side to side, trying to escape my grip, which she had zero chance of accomplishing. "BASTARD! Fuck Me! Please Fuck Me. PLEASE." My mouth reached her clit. I gently sucked it into my mouth, lightly licking and rubbing my lips along it (Laila didn't like forceful contact, wanting more and more gentleness as she got sensitive and aroused, the direct opposite of Carol). This shut her up for a couple of seconds. I moved farther south, to her fully open pussy. She was totally turned on, and very, very ready. I licked up one side of her pussy, then said, "You're so wet that licking all this up could take a while." I licked the other side, while she GROANED, then begged, "Please, PLEASE. I NEED to cum. I REALLY need to." I'd quite enjoyed having her arms pinned for so long, and didn't want to release them yet, but I needed a hand to put the damned rubber on. So I picked up both her forearms and moved them until her wrists crossed under her breasts. I moved one hand to firmly hold her wrists. I looked around for the rubber, and it was on the wrong side of me. I used TK to slide it across the bedspread out of Laila's sight, until I could reach it with my free hand. I opened it with my teeth, and put it on one-handed. I'm very dexterous, and I used a little TK to hold the rubber in place while my real hand adjusted its grip. Laila had seen me put the rubber on, and was impatiently demanding that I hurry up. Time for another lesson/tease then. When the rubber was properly on, I used my free hand to lift Laila's closest leg up over my shoulder, and moved my hips so my cock was at the entrance to her pussy, using a little TK to adjust the angle of my cock so it lined up perfectly. It's a useful little trick I'd used many times with Julia, but not nearly often enough with Carol yet. I very, VERY slowly inched my cock into her. After not even an inch, I stopped, and said, "Who's the boss of our relationship?" "Huh?" asked a confused Laila. "Several times you demanded that I hurry up. Surely you didn't mean to make demands of me?" As soon as I heard it, my question seemed too stupid to bother pursuing. So I ignored it, choosing instead to start fucking her. That was probably the better choice! I pushed my cock the rest of the way into her. It was a very good distraction. For the next forty five minutes I made a serious effort to extract the greatest number of orgasms that I could from her. I didn't cum myself, and barely slowed down when she came, which she did several times. I flipped her over, or changed positions in other ways, after each of her orgasms, but that was the only respite she got. Unlike Julia, who passed out for up to a minute after a particularly good fuck, Laila stayed alert. The better to appreciate my performance, I thought. Sometimes her clit got too sensitive and I had to be careful to avoid it for a while. Other times her pussy needed a break from being pounded, so I went down on her. I had tried touching around her asshole early on, but had quickly seen that it turned her off, so her pussy got quite a workout. It was only forty five minutes, so I figured she'd cope. The first couple of fucks she'd encouraged me with "Harder", or "Faster", but after I learned her preferences in those respects (not hard, but very fast at the end was best for her), she mostly just groaned, calling out, "Oh My God!" or the like. After a time of very fast thrusts, I could feel some fatigue build up in my stomach muscles, but it quickly dissipated after Laila's cum when I moved her into a different position and restarted slower. After the forty five minutes, at 5pm, Julia stuck her head in the door. We were, of course, fucking, but I waved Julia to come in anyway. Laila was fully aware. Heavily blissed, but not out of it like Julia, and Carol to a lesser extent, can get. She saw Julia approaching and exclaimed, "I have never, ever, been fucked like this before. He's a machine. He never needs to rest, he just goes and goes and I just cum and cum. He's incredible." Julia laughed, and said, "You don't have to tell me. I was on the receiving end of six nonstop hours one night." Julia looked at me to ask, "By the sounds of it, you didn't have any problems getting hard?" Laila just groaned while I diplomatically answered, "Ahh, I was a little slow getting started, but I think I shouldn't have a problem from now on. It was just a matter of finding the right mindset." It's true that I was a "little slow getting started", very, very little. What Laila would have said to that was cut off by Julia leaning over to kiss her passionately. I'd long since released Laila's hands, and Laila threw them around Julia, holding her in tight and moaning. Laila had been panting before the kiss, and was now moaning while her hips were thrusting, so she was visibly close to an orgasm. Julia reached out with one hand, and located one of Laila's tits with it, pinching the nipple and rolling it, to help Laila's orgasm. At such times Laila's nipples get increasingly sensitive and need to be touched lightly. Julia was too rough for Laila; not badly so, but not ideal, so I pushed Julia's hand up and away with TK then showed her with one of my real hands how Laila liked it: no pinching, just running one finger gently over and around the nipple, keeping in contact the whole time. Julia took over on that nipple, so I moved my hand to the other one. The girls' kiss was still going, with lots of moaning from Laila, so I accelerated my thrusts, using my other hand to gently stroke along the top of her clit. In less than another minute Laila groaned her climax into Julia's kiss (Laila is a groaner, which is SO much easier on my ears than a screamer like Julia). As soon as she'd finished, I flipped her over, placing her belly on the pile of two pillows we'd already used a couple of times. This time I made sure that the pillows were placed under her chest, rather than hips, to give Julia plenty of room to get her head under. I also moved Laila and me to the far side of the bed so Julia had room to lie on it comfortably. This only took a few seconds to do, and once Laila was in position I inserted myself into her and motioned for Julia to slide her head in underneath. This is one of my favorite threesome positions, as I love having a tongue licking my cock and whoever-I'm-fucking's pussy. Whether from the third person coming in sideways like this, or from a girl-on-girl 69, both work great. Laila had her head down, and didn't see Julia getting into position. She felt Julia's head sliding into position under her though, and started saying, "Oh God. Two of you. This is the most awesome sex ever!" Julia's tongue convinced Laila to revert to groans. Together we gave her two more orgasms, and were working on the third, when Julia said, "This should be the last one. Cum on this one if you want to, Mark." I had about three hours until I had to get it up for Lily, so a cum now was definitely a good idea. Three hours was easily long enough, and I was definitely looking forward to Lily, so I'd have no trouble getting hard for her. Julia did her best to make Laila's last one a good one. Kissing her repeatedly, whispering sweet nothings to her. Things like, "The next time we fuck, it's going to be a full-on threesome, all of us naked and fucking each other. I want to sit on your face and kiss Mark while he's fucking you." Laila responded VERY positively to Julia's suggestions. "God YES! Anytime you want. Call me and I'll come running. I LOVE this!" With alternating depraved whispers and kisses from Julia, and me performing my usual activity at the other end, it didn't take us long to get Laila to her last orgasm. I stopped the ever-wonderful go-softs at the last second, and had myself a VERY enjoyable and well-earned cum. It's not exactly a habit, because it's something I have to do consciously, but I like to make a reasonable amount of noise when I cum now. I know I greatly enjoy it when girls make noise, and they seem to enjoy it when I do. After her cum, Julia snuggled in on one side of Laila. I removed my rubber and cleaned myself with tissues, then snuggled in on the other side of our victim du jour, or more accurate "du hour", considering how many girls I'll be bedding today. We let her relax and rest by restricting ourselves to just some light kisses and caresses to keep the mood sexy. Laila said, "That wasn't just the best sex I've ever had, I think it was the best fun of any sort I've ever had. You're incredible Mark. I can't believe you could fuck me nonstop for an hour. Not only the fitness required, but holding yourself back from cumming until you wanted to. You're unbelievably awesome." I didn't know what to say. "Aw, shucks" seemed a little trite, so I said nothing. Better to be modest. Julia said, "His night is only just starting. In half an hour he's got a martial arts class, then a quick dinner at his house, then back here to screw Lily and Pat. What just blew you away was only a light warm-up for Mark. Look at him, he's not the least bit tired." Laila sat up a little to look at me properly. I was lying down, so I don't know how my tiredness could be easily determined. Laila looked at me, then asked, "You're really not tired?" "No. Happy though, I enjoyed that. It was fun to give you a good time, even though it was a bit rushed." Laila allowed herself to collapse back on the bed. "Good grief. He was rushed!" Silence persisted for a few seconds, then Laila added, "Julia's coming back into the room a few minutes ago reminded me that I'd forgotten all about her. Mark alone was by far the best sex I'd ever had, even though I normally prefer sex with girls. I'm lying here now trying to imagine how good it's going to be to have sex with the two of you together in the future. My life just got hugely better! I'll do whatever you two want me to do, just so long as I can keep coming to your bed. Thank you both for letting me in on this." I said, "You're welcome." | Julia was more focused, "Keep cooperating with Mark and me, and you'll get what you want." "I couldn't possibly be more motivated than I am now!" Julia said, "You realize that this afternoon Mark was pleasuring you. Future sessions won't be so focused on your pleasure. There'll be more give and take." "Sure, I know that. I've had enough sex in my life to understand how that works. I'm not expecting future sessions to be like our last one, except that I know Mark will be incredible." Julia asked, "You sound very experienced. More than I expected. Can you tell us about that, if it's okay with you?" "I can answer without details. I got involved in girl-on-girl sex several years ago, and have had a lot of it since then. I've never considered myself a lesbian, but the two or three boys I've tried - before today - were always disappointing. Today TOTALLY changed my mind about how good guys can be! I'd like to tell my main girlfriend about today. Maybe she'll want to join in, perhaps we could do a foursome some time. Is that okay?" "We don't mind you telling another girl, because that's what we want you to do. But whoever she is, she doesn't have automatic access to our bed. The Liaison girls get a sample over the next few days, then earn more sessions by doing their job well. Unless Mark simply decides he wants someone, as that supersedes everything else, of course. I'm going to put a type of 'Application Form' on our web page when Lily gets it up, that other girls will have to fill out, with name, age, pictures, etc. Your girlfriend is perfectly welcome to submit one, just like every other girl. Mark decides what happens after that. There's a lot of interest though, Lily texted me that about fifty girls stayed to listen to her after school." "Good. Thanks. One little problem is that she's never seen Mark. She doesn't go to our school. Can I bring her along to Mark's soccer game, or to the bowling on Sunday?" "Sure. The soccer game's wide open for anyone who wants to come. The bowling venue is more restricted for space, so don't invite lots of extra girls along to that, but one more would be no trouble." I said, "I really need to get up and showered now. I'd love a snack too please, Julia. Can you make one for me please?" "Delighted to. Sorry that I didn't think to get one for you before, but I'll do that now. Laila, can you have a quick shower right after Mark, because we have to get out of here soon?" "Okay. I might be walking a bit gingerly, but I'll manage." A nice snack was waiting for me when I got back from the shower. I gave Laila my robe and directions to the bathroom, then got busy with my snack. I finished it, got dressed in my tracksuit, happy to be able to wear decent clothes for the first time today. I carried the empty plate downstairs. Julia was talking to Vanessa in the kitchen, helping with dinner preparation chores for the rest of the family. After a bit of joking around about my creating another satisfied customer, I asked, "Is Prof home yet?" "Not yet," said Vanessa. "Okay. Remember how we were discussing how long it'd take me to get through all the lecture notes for the two courses?" "Yes." "It was doable, but without much spare time. Today I realized that I can double my speed. Probably just less than double, say 1.9 times faster. Would you please tell Prof that, in case he's worried about it being tight." Vanessa was naturally curious about how I could do a little thing like doubling my studying speed. I didn't advertise my ability to multi-task, but it wasn't exactly a secret either. Julia and Carol knew, as did Mom and probably Dad, and several people at school had noticed me working that way, so I told Vanessa, "For more than a year I've been able to read two things at the same time. Two books, two sets of lecture notes, or whatever. That's a very large part of the reason why I've been able to do twice as much work at school. For some stupid reason I never realized that it'd work equally well on college courses. I'll just study them both at the same time, which pretty much doubles my speed." "If you've been doing it for more than a year, then I'm sure you know what you're talking about, but that seems unbelievable to me. How can you read from two different books at the same time? I can understand alternating between books, but that doesn't increase your rate. If you can read two sources simultaneously, are you actually LEARNING both sets of material, or just memorizing them with a photographic memory?" I was about to answer, but Julia was all ready with a demonstration. She said, "Watch his eyeballs, Mom." Julia held up the index fingers of both hands, gave me a second to focus one eye on each, then moved them around in different ways, even deliberately crossing them for a second or two. Vanessa started laughing, saying, "That looks very strange." I answered, "Yeah, that's what everyone says when they see it. Not many have, because I prefer to keep my abilities quiet, but enough have noticed it." Julia said, "Mark uses one eye and hand for each book, the hands to turn the pages when that eye needs it. Isn't that cool?" Vanessa agreed, "VERY cool. Very useful too. I wish I could do that. Do you actually understand both sources you read from, Mark? If you hit something complex in both sources at the same time, can you think them through?" "Yes. If you held up two pages, I could read them both at the same time, then answer questions about both of them. I know it seems weird that I can think about two things at once, but everybody does that to some degree. Like when you're driving your car. You can be thinking about something else as well as how to drive. I'm better at it than other people, because I can have two conscious streams of thought going simultaneously, but it's just an improvement of a normal human ability." I'd tried to present it that way because I wanted to deflect them away from thinking of me as having two conscious minds (four, actually, but I wasn't going to mention that, not unless I grew two more eyeballs). Vanessa shook her head, saying, "I'm impressed and intrigued. I have to try that myself, even though I know I'll fail. Prof will be happy to hear that you'll cover the material faster. He should be home soon but you're leaving shortly, aren't you?" "Almost immediately," said Julia, adding, "Mark, can I come to your Aikido class to watch please? I'm very curious to see it, and it'll save you having to come back here to pick me up before going on to your place for dinner." I had no trouble agreeing to that, "Sure. Spectators are welcome. You might find it a bit boring after a while though. It can be repetitive to watch." "I'll bring some schoolwork with me, just in case." That agreed on, we went back upstairs to hurry Laila up. By unspoken agreement, Julia and I didn't want to leave random girls in the house. Laila was just getting out of the shower, and we both enjoyed making a couple of ribald compliments to her. "Please don't make me laugh. My belly muscles are a little sore. I had the idea in the shower that I should text Lily and Pat something to encourage them to come tonight, just in case either of them is having second thoughts because I know I was nervous. What do you think?" Julia - while handing Laila a towel to keep her getting ready - said, "Good idea and a very good attitude. Something encouraging but not too explicit would be best." Laila suggested, "How about, 'I've just had a fantastic time with Mark. You'll love it. Call me if you need encouragement.'?" "Sounds great." Laila said, "I've got Lily's number but not Pat's. Can I get that from you please?" That was agreed and accomplished when we were back in the bedroom. Julia kept Laila moving, and as soon as she was dressed we headed downstairs again. Julia said, "I'll introduce you to my mom because you'll be coming here regularly once the Liaison meetings have started, probably every Sunday after this one." Andrew was talking to Vanessa in the kitchen, so Julia introduced them both, telling Vanessa, "Laila is one of the 10th grade Liaisons. She's the first of them to get 'The Mark Treatment' in bed." Vanessa politely inquired, "How did you enjoy him?" Laila looked uncomfortable at being asked that. I supported her by looking uncomfortable too. Andrew suggested, "Mark can't be very good if you can't find anything nice to say." Julia laughed, "Maybe Laila can't talk because Mark screwed her brains out. Back when she could talk she said it was the best sex she'd ever had. They only had an hour and a half, but Mark rocked her world." Laila still didn't want to talk about it, so after a pause, Julia added, "Maybe she's changed her mind and doesn't want to have any more sex with Mark. In which case we'll have to find a new Liaison. There were several disappointed girls at the meeting this morning so I'm sure we can find a replacement." Laila said, "Ahh, no. That's not necessary. Umm." Vanessa said, "Excuse my daughter, she loves to tease. Of course you're shy talking to us about having sex with Julia's boyfriend. You can relax, Laila, we know Mark's going to be having sex with many girls from now on." "Mark, AND ME," corrected Julia. "I want in on a lot of it. Laila's perfect for that, because she's mostly into girls. While I remember, Mom, I'm going to Mark's Aikido class with him, then on to his place for dinner. I'll be staying overnight with Carol and a girl called Ava that you haven't met yet, provided the big bed will be set up by then?" Vanessa answered, "Steven's supposed to come over right after dinner, so you might have to wait for a little while, but it shouldn't be long. The bed linen's already there, so you can make the bed, and then mess it up again, as fast as you want." "Great. Mark's going to drop me off at his place and then come back here for the night. There are two girls coming here later: Lily first at about 7:30, then Pat at 8. Lily's got her own car, but Pat will probably get one of her parents to drive her over, ostensibly for a sleepover with me so could you answer the door, please Mom? Then just send Pat up to my room, because Mark and Lily should already be hot-and-heavy by then." "Okay. They're both staying the night?" "Yes. Lily was Mark's first pick as a Liaison because she's very helpful, so her reward is a full night and morning of sex with Mark. Pat was added on a whim, really. She's not a Liaison, but is nice and very pretty, and Mark likes her. Lily and Pat are both in our first period class, and I want the whole class to see them stagger in tomorrow morning, so they'll all know how awesome Mark is at sex." "You're enjoying yourself with this, aren't you?" "Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Much more than I expected. I think it's a lot more fun than Laila expected too." Mostly Laila had been finding it confusing. She'd been listening to Vanessa and Julia talk about me sleeping with multiple girls, in ordinary tones of voices. I'll take a guess and say this probably isn't how they discuss sex in her family. Laila chose not to respond to Julia's last comment, instead she asked Vanessa, "You really don't mind other girls sleeping with your daughter's boyfriend? In your own home and even when she's not going to be here tonight?" Vanessa answered, "No one in this family minds. We know and approve. Mark is Julia's boyfriend, so if she approves of this then we have no right to prevent it. Even if she is wrong it'll be a learning experience for her, but as it happens we understand why Julia is doing it and we agree with her reasons. I'll grant you that it's very unusual, but in this case it's right. That's why we help, as do Mark's parents. The only person here who doesn't seem to be having fun is Mark, standing there without the trace of a smile on his face. You'd think he should be the happiest, but he's too self-conscious." Before I could defend myself, Laila said, "I claim the position as 'Happiest Person'. Mark spent an hour and a half making sure of that. He's incredible. I see what you mean about Mark, though. Julia told us all that she had to talk Mark into this, which didn't seem believable at the time she said it but I'm convinced now. Julia is obviously the one who's pushing the idea." (Could I claim that I'd seemed uncomfortable the whole time as part of a cunning plan to back Julia up?) Julia said, "Having introduced Laila and shown her that my family is amazingly cool about all this, we have to leave or Mark might be late." Goodbyes were quickly exchanged, and we headed outside. Laila was walking carefully, and I nearly stopped to ask her whether she'd be okay, but I resisted the urge. She wasn't in too bad a shape and we didn't have time to help her anyway, as Sensei had asked me to come a little early as he had a gi for me. I was actually quite proud of myself for not getting myself in a little tangle by offering help I couldn't provide, as it proved that I was toughening up in the sensible way that Julia was urging me to. It was a nice improvement over the mess I'd made out of asking Donna is she minded my not buying a car immediately. ------- Chapter 91: First Time Training at Aikido Thursday, April 21, 2005 (Continued) As soon as we walked into the dojo, Sensei spotted me and quickly came over, greeting, "Good to see you, Mark." "Thank you. Sensei Nigel, this is my girlfriend Julia. You met before, when you came around to her home to test my ki a week ago." "I remember. Nice to meet you again, Julia. I have a gi for you, Mark, so get dressed first." Sensei relieved me of the books I was returning, gave me a gi, and told me to ask other students in the dressing room how to put it on and how to tie the white belt that came with it. By the time I'd done that, it was time for the class to start. Sensei opened it as normal (based on my one other experience), including the warm-ups. When the lesson itself was about to start, Sensei introduced another aikidoka, Ray Croft, saying that Ray would be taking the class while he [Sensei] gave a one-on-one lesson on the other side of the mat. The new teacher was a young guy, in his late-20s I'd guess, but he was wearing a black belt and the black over-pants that the books called "hakama". Only Sensei was also wearing a hakama, so they were apparently a sign of rank. Certainly the black belts were; the students mostly having white belts like me, or yellow ones. It turned out that I was the "private tuition" he was referring to. Sensei summoned me over to the far corner of the mats, and the two of us started training there. The first technique Sensei showed me was an immobilization hold called "Ikkyo". Apparently it means "First technique" in Japanese, indicating that Aikido had been invented by a male. I had several major advantages in learning this stuff: Having so many consciouses and subconsciouses, I was superbly physically coordinated. Even my reaction times seemed better. I could observe and see much more than other people. For me to miss noticing something (e.g., the way Sensei angled his feet to make a movement more balanced), it had to be missed by all three observing minds, which was a LOT less likely than for other people. Not just by a factor of three either, e.g., if 1 mind had a 1-in-4 chance of missing something, then 3 minds had a 1-in-64 chance (that's simplistic, but it'll give you the idea). Perhaps most importantly, I could sense Sensei's ki with my proximity sense. The last point needs some explanation. When Sensei showed me a technique, which he usually did by using me as his opponent so I would know what it felt like, he was necessarily always within my proximity sense range. So not only could I see (with my eyes) him holding my arm, but I could also sense (with proximity) how he was intending to move my arm. This was a HUGE advantage, because it was not something that was visible to any other sense. If you think, "Surely all I had to do was wait to see where my arm moved to, and that was where he intended it," let me tell you that I was definitely NOT as easy as that. Where my arm ended up was a combination of several factors: the length of its bones, how its joints bent, how my body was balanced, how I was moving at the time, and others. In mathematical terms, the resultant arm position is the sum of a number of vectors, the direction Sensei was pushing being just one of them. I was able to directly and exactly sense what direction he pushed in to achieve the desired result, so I did the same when it was my turn to try the technique. Anyone else would have had to learn that through trial, error, and verbal instructions from their teacher. For a constantly and rapidly changing series of moves, those aren't good sources of information. Not only could I sense his ki when he was using the technique on me, but I could sense it when I was trying to copy what he'd just showed me. Let's say I had him bent over forward at the waist with his arm extended horizontally out to his side and in my grasp, as is the case at one point of Ikkyo. The technique requires me to move his arm in a certain way in order to unbalance him. Being a teacher, Sensei would be visualizing the way I should move his arm, which meant his ki would be extending in that direction. All I had to do was move his arm in the direction he was visualizing. It was like doing an exam where useful portions of the correct answers are given immediately after every question. There was still plenty for me to think about and carefully copy, as the technique had many physical components which were not controlled by Sensei's ki, and my proximity sense wasn't good with small movements such as small shifts of balance. But the combination of all my advantages meant I learned the technique EXTREMELY quickly and well, astonishing Sensei. After a few repetitions of Ikkyo, Sensei moved us on to Nikyo ("Second technique"). I was even quicker learning this because it had some commonality with Ikkyo, and I was starting to understand what Aikido involved. I was learning what to look for, how to move, etc. We spent about ten minutes on Nikyo, and a similar amount of time on the third and fourth techniques too (if you know how to count in Japanese, their names will be obvious). We'd trained for about forty five minutes by now, not counting the warm-up time. Sensei said, "We do not have time for another technique. Are you able to stay for few minutes after I dismiss the class?" "Yes. I want to as I have a question I want to ask you." "You are not the only one with questions! If you would rejoin the class, I will give my closing homily now." Sensei returned to the main class and brought their practice to an end. His closing homily was philosophical, about the peaceful nature of Aikido, including not injuring your opponent. I'd certainly seen that in our training. Some of the holds were extremely painful, just for the instant it took to get the attacker to respond in the desired way, but the pain stopped equally quickly and without injury. After the homily and the class being dismissed, Sensei called Ray Croft over and introduced us. Ray bowed to me and I back to him, that Japanese etiquette was used in the dojo instead of handshakes. It was much quicker when welcoming or taking leave of a whole class of students. Sensei said to me, "Mark, I would like you to perform the four techniques with Ray. Is that acceptable to you?" "Sure. I can't stay very long though as my family is holding dinner for Julia and me." We moved toward the center of the mats, and Ray did the 'attack' that Ikkyo is a defense for: he grabbed one of my wrists. I did the technique, and then said, "That wasn't very good. I was thrown off by Ray being quite a lot taller than you, Sensei. Can I try it again please, a little slower?" I let Ray up (Ikkyo pins the opponent to the ground), and we did it again. This time I was aware of the height problem and did my best to adjust the technique for it. Sensei said, "We are not trying to train you now, so we will not try to refine your movements. Go on to the others." Ray and I did the other three techniques I'd learned, with me making what height adjustments seemed best. Each technique takes less than thirty seconds, so this didn't take long. At the end, Sensei said to Ray, "Thank you, Ray." Sensei bowed to Ray, who bowed back, then left. Turning back to me, Sensei said, "Shall we sit with your girlfriend while we discuss your question and my thoughts?" That was fine with me, especially as I felt somewhat guilty for ignoring Julia for the last hour. We walked over to her and sat on seats to either side of her. I put my arm around her, telling her, "Sensei and I have a couple of things to discuss. We won't be much longer, promise." "No problem. I've enjoyed myself." Sensei said, "We should start with your question, Mark." I didn't know why we "should", or maybe Sensei just talked like that. In any event I said, "You were right about my broken arm being healed already. The cast was removed last Friday, and there was no sign of the break in the X-ray. I understand that your prediction was based on aikidoka healing faster than other people. What puzzled me, and puzzled the doctor and nurse at the hospital, was how well my arm was healed. There wasn't even the little extra build up on bone I understand there normally is around a recently healed break. I wondered whether that might be part of Aikido healing?" "Let me have a good look at your arms." An easy and thorough way of doing that was to take off my gi's top, leaving me in just a T-shirt. I did so, then held out my two arms side by side toward him. Sensei said, "I can tell which of the two was broken, but only because one of them is whiter. The muscle tones appear identical. May I?" he asked, as he extended his hand to feel my forearm. Considering we'd been hauling each other around by our arms for the last hour, "Sure." He compared the feel of the muscles on both forearms, and got me to identify precisely where the break had been so he could feel that particularly thoroughly, then said, "I believe kiatsu," he faced Julia, clarifying, "that is the proper name for what Mark referred to as 'Aikido healing'. I believe kiatsu can hasten the healing of broken bones. Also sprains, cramps, torn muscles and similar injuries. There are people who claim it can help with everything from hay fever through to cancer, but I believe they are being overly hopeful, as people often are over matters of healing. More generally, aikidoka appear to be healthier than the norm, but whether that is due to the physical exercise, the removal of stress through the calmness that Aikido teaches, or from ki, I cannot say. I have never heard of kiatsu accelerating bone growth as quickly as seems to have happened with Mark though, so I have no explanation." "What about bone growth, not in the healing sense but actual growth, like growing taller?" "No. I have never heard of that. If anyone else had asked me that I would have been confident in my refusal, but I presume you have a reason for asking?" "Yes. I am growing taller. I also have a much better physique than I deserve because I don't exercise much. I thought that it might be due to ki or kiatsu. I was hoping you'd have heard of this happening to aikidoka?" "What do you mean by 'better physique'?" "I'm much fitter and more muscular than I deserve to be. I'm mostly a bookworm, but my body looks like an athlete's." "I have not heard of anything along those lines. I presume that bone growth would be the same process as bone repair, as would muscle growth and muscle repair, so what you are suggesting would seem plausible in direction, but not degree. Your ki is very strong, and you have demonstrated remarkable expertise in some Aikido techniques, but physical transformations of the nature you are asking about are far beyond what I can credit as possible." "Oh. Okay, that's my question taken care of. What did you want to talk about?" Sensei answered, "Your Aikido training. As fast as you learn, it makes no sense for you to be in a class as that would slow you down considerably. I suggest you and I do one-on-one training most of the time, plus an extra session every few weeks when you would come to a more advanced class to practice what you have learnt with other people. Does that appeal to you?" "That sounds wonderful. I'd love to do that." "Good. So as not to interfere with the classes I teach, I would like to change your training time. I already have your cellphone number, so may I text you with a list of possible times, and you can let me know which is most convenient for you?" "That's fine with me, but we can do it easier. I don't have any other regular appointments other than school, so you can pick whatever day and time suits you." "I will do both then: send you a list of possible times with my preference emphasized, and you may choose as you wish." Julia asked Sensei, "Is there any reason why a class lasts only one hour? Wouldn't it be more efficient to have two or three hour sessions?" I was a bit embarrassed at that question, feeling that we were taking too much of Sensei's time, but he didn't hesitate to say, "Longer would be better. This dojo is not used Monday evenings, so shall we meet here at 6pm on Mondays, to train for as long as we both wish to continue?" "I like it, but isn't that imposing too much on you? For just one student?" "Not at all. Quite the reverse as your abilities fascinate me and I am looking forward to training you. It will be very interesting to see how far and fast you can progress." Money is always an issue in the Anderson household, especially the lack of it and the consequent need to be careful. I was still thinking about how to raise this issue, when Julia raised another serious concern, "Mark has an unusual metabolism and needs to eat more often than most people. If you have long sessions he'll get hungry. Can he bring a snack and eat it when he needs to?" #1: Sensei's answer was, "There will just be the two of us here so you may stop for a break whenever you want to, Mark. Aikido can be tiring as there is a considerable amount of bending and twisting involved, which your body will not be used to yet. An important aspect of Aikido is its philosophy, so I can talk with you about that while you are resting or eating." I expected Julia to tell Sensei that I wouldn't need rests, but she didn't. Which left me to fearfully ask, "What do you charge for private tuition like this?" Sensei waved it away, "I am fascinated by your potential. The enjoyment I will derive from teaching you will be payment enough." I was not comfortable with the idea of paying nothing. On the other hand, paying any sort of reasonable fee was also a source of discomfort for me. The usual fee was $40 per month, which was effectively $10 per hour. If we did three hours per Monday, that'd be $30 per week, which was getting a bit beyond what I could afford to pay out week after week. It was even worse than that, because the $10 per hour was multiplied by there being 20-odd people in a class, so his time was effectively worth more than $200 per hour. Private tuition should be considerably more than $10 per hour, but I couldn't sustain a payment of even $60 per week. The "Instant Multimillionaire Through Roulette" scheme would be wonderful, but I couldn't volunteer now to pay Sensei what his time was worth in case the scheme didn't work for some reason. I offered/asked, "I don't think it's fair that I pay nothing, but I can't afford to pay what I think it's worth either. I might have some money coming my way in a month or two, so can I accept your free offer until then, and reopen the payment discussion if that happens?" "That is perfectly fine by me. See you Monday next week at 6pm?" "Yes, please. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks very much." It was time to go, as the room was starting to fill with the people for the next class. I went back to the changing room, got changed, folded up the gi, and approached Sensei again. When I had his attention, I asked him, "Where do you want me to leave the gi?" He looked confused for a moment, then said, "It is yours, Mark. A gift. Take it home and wear it to class from now on." "Oh. Thanks for that. See you Monday then." I headed back to Julia, carrying my new clothes that - I will point out - no one had needed to measure my inside leg for. Julia stood at my approach, asking, "Happy?" "Very. That was a great training session, and having several more hours every week of one-on-one training is going to be fantastic for me." Julia gave me back my watch and ring (jewelry gets removed while training), and we headed out. She said, "It was very impressive to compare you to the other students. Nigel would show you something I know you'd never done before, and you'd gracefully copy his movements, flowing through it. The other students would bumble around, stop and start, correct each other, and almost trip over their own feet. The difference was amazing." I had watched them on my previous visit, two weeks ago, and Julia was right. Aikido, when done properly, has a very graceful, flowing style. That's how I naturally move these days, a similarity that Donna had spotted when she saw the videotape. Aikido and I naturally suit each other, although I'm not sure dying twice to get this way could really be called "natural". I relayed the first half of those thoughts to Julia, adding another thought at the end, "I was a little surprised that you suggested classes longer than an hour. Won't that eat into the time I have available for your other schemes?" "Sure, but you've several times mentioned that Aikido is EXTREMELY important to you. If I understand you correctly, you even believe that the superb health of your body is Aikido related?" I nodded. "So Aikido is FAR more important to you than a few hours of playing around with some girl. I like my little schemes - they're fun and I'm enjoying myself with them - but they're all about what's best for you. Aikido is clearly more important than sex. -- "To get to your classes at 6, you're going to need some sort of dinner before you normally have it. I'm going to tell Carol that from now on she's responsible for your dinner every Monday. I'm even going to make her do the shopping for it. She'll have to cook it for you and make your snack too, even if you're at my house. I'll tell her over dinner shortly." That idea was somewhat of a shock, but it was a good one. I knew Carol would like it. Fortunately I'm not fussy about the quality of my food, just the quantity and frequency, so I wasn't too worried about slight mishaps along the way. ^ Something interesting happened throughout the Aikido lesson that I've saved the mention of until the end: I gained a lot more information about how much ki people had when centered. I'd proximity sensed hundreds of people by now, mostly other kids at school, but also teachers, people at the DMV, etc. For all of them, small, casual movements projected differing amounts of ki, but no matter how intensely people focus on major movements, they all have the same maximum amount of ki. I knew from the testing session at the Williams' that Sensei's ki increased from the base level that every human seems to have to three times that amount when he was centered. In the course of this evening's training session most of the students had come within my proximity range at some time as the mats had been fairly full and there's a lot of movement and swapping of partners. Nearly all of them had no discernible increase in ki over the base level. Perhaps because they weren't centered. I'd gotten close enough to a couple of the better students, as indicated by their having colored belts, to sense that they sometimes projected slightly more ki than the usual maximum, but it was a barely noticeable increase. The most interesting was Ray Croft. I'd been hoping to get near him all session, but never had a chance, so I was very pleased when Sensei called him over to train with me. I quickly found out that his ki was about 50% more than the base level. I now had several data points for how being centered affected the maximum amount of ki a person could project: untrained students had the human norm +0%, slightly trained students had about +1%, a young black belt aikidoka had +50%, and Sensei had +200%. I was an aberration, having 10 to 20 times as much ki as the normal human base level. It seemed clear that the more training an aikidoka had, the more ki they projected when centered. I was the least trained student there, so presumably centering didn't change my output. Annoyingly, I couldn't confirm that because my proximity sense stopped working if I uncentered myself. Assuming it was the case, then I should be able to increase my already huge amount of ki with more training. Given that my ability to learn some of this stuff seems to be exceptional, maybe I could increase my ki by factors far larger than other Aikidoka. On the other hand, maybe I was already projecting the absolute human maximum so more training wouldn't increase it at all. In other words, it was impossible to logically deduce my situation. I knew from the Aikido books and from Sensei's frequent comments about it, that ki was incredibly important to Aikido. That was something which I agreed with totally, as ki seemed involved with my TK, my body reshaping itself superbly, and my running forever (the energy had to come from somewhere, so presumably it was ki). Ki was so important that the uncertainty over my situation was best ignored. I resolved to spend some time every day deliberately practicing trying to project as much ki as I could. Hopefully I'd sense an increase over time, although it might be slow since it'd taken Sensei thirty years to triple his ki. I was already spending a lot of time each day trying to strengthen my TK by having unoccupied minds push against the ground or walls, so now we had two things to practice as often as possible. ^ [[The amount of ki someone naturally projects is dependent on how much their UNCONSCIOUS mind can tap from the Universe. That's the same for non-aikidoka as it is for a new Aikido student, or for any uncentered highly experienced aikidoka, even Sensei. Deliberately practicing projecting ki increases the amount of ki a centered person can CONSCIOUSLY tap. When I started practicing projecting ki, from this point in my autobiography forward, the amount I could project increased FAR quicker than anyone else's had when they'd trained, for several reasons: My being centered all the time helped a great deal. It was an essential prerequisite that was always being met, so the following points applied every waking hour rather than for only the few minutes a day that other aikidoka managed. I even had more waking hours than anyone else, for an additional advantage. I could sense how much ki I was projecting. It's much easier to get better at something when you can see the results. Learning, at the physiological level, includes laying down new neural connections. My body, which includes my brain, was very good at adapting itself. Last, and by far the greatest help, was that I had a VERY good idea: whichever of my minds was on duty was tasked with deliberately projecting ki ALL the time. Not only did that give us twenty hours of practice per day, but it even helped the mind on duty ignore everything else because it had one constant thing to focus on, like meditating on a candle flame or mantra. In contrast to the last point above, our TK-strengthening exercises had to be done with an active mind as our environment was changing too frequently, but ki projection could be done by the on-duty mind as it could be practiced as a constant stream straight up through my head. There's nothing freaky or worrisome about that energy going through my head, as people project ki from their heads every time they move them. And when you're in a crowd, there's ki being projected ALL over the place. It's obviously not a harmful radiation. In fact, it seems to be beneficial, as indicated by my body being extraordinarily fit and healthy. Twenty hours of practice per day was FAR more than other students could put in, as the slipperiness of staying centered meant they'd be lucky to achieve twenty minutes of that per day, most of which they probably wouldn't spend consciously projecting ki. Because this is about consciously tapping ki, each of my minds had to learn separately, so they were getting five hours of practice per day. However, there were some synergistic benefits from my minds not being totally independent - they did share the same brain after all - so it was equivalent to somewhat more than five hours per day. My minds became less independent in more subtle ways in the future, but that's a topic for later. All the factors helping me develop my ki combined to give me an improvement rate about ten times faster than Sensei had managed. Rather than his taking thirty years to triple his projected ki, I began improving mine at a rate that would triple my ki in three years. +200% in 36 months is the equivalent of +5% per month (it was a linear growth, not compound). As I had sixteen times as much ki as a one-minded human, I was adding a whole human's worth of ki every five weeks (had all else remained unchanged, which it did for a while, but not for long).]] ------- My family had dinner waiting for Julia and me, so our arrival meant we could all sit down to it. They hadn't seen much of me recently and Mom asked, "So what have you been up to recently, Mark?" I remember the past, when most days could be described as "The same old, same old." That sure didn't apply to my life these days! JUST today I'd: Dressed like a flaming homosexual, and it'd produced great reactions ("great" in both meanings, although this morning's teachers disagreed with one of them). Chosen three Liaisons, during which several girls had stripped naked for me at school. Started advertising around school that I wanted "another girlfriend or two," which had produced great interest ("great" still in both senses of the word). Visited OSU. On which topic, I'd calculated that I could cover a whole year's material for two courses in just under a month. Boinked Laila. That was NOT good dinnertime conversation. Had a superb Aikido session, with the promise of even better ones in the future. Found out that Carol was going to be my housewife for one dinner per week from now on. Was going back to Julia's bedroom after dinner to have a threesome with two sexy girls: Pat, a very attractive and well-endowed Cauc-asian; and Lily, a reasonably attractive Chinese-Asian, both of whom I'd barely ever talked to. This was even more in the "Not Good Dinnertime Conversation" category. Aikido and Carol were the two topics that most affected the family, so I chose to start with those. I answered Mom by saying, "So much! Let me start with Aikido. Sensei gave me a one-on-one session tonight, while another guy taught the rest of the class. Apparently I did well..." "{Raspberry}. Mark did NOT 'apparently do well.' He blew his sensei's socks off! I went to watch, and the difference between Mark and the other students was phenomenal. Carry on with your story, Mark." "Married for just one week, and already I'm being corrected - sheesh!" -- After the chuckles and a non-apologetic kiss from Julia, which prompted my other wife to give me one too, I continued, "The result is that Sensei and I have changed my training times. From now on I go on Monday nights, from 6pm until whenever we want to stop, probably around 9-ish, I guess. They'll be private lessons, with just me and him. He's very eager to train me, which is great because I'm very eager for him to do so. He's a very nice guy, and just from the single hour that I had this evening, I've learned that Aikido has some very impressive techniques." There was a fair bit of resultant discussion. Payment for three hours of private lessons per week was mentioned early. I said, "He was happy to do without payment because he's so eager to train me. I don't feel comfortable with that, but I'm sure I can't afford a fair price either. We agreed with no payment for a while, until I see whether my moneymaking idea works. If it does I'll make sure to pay him properly." When the Aikido conversation was dying down (including after I'd praised Donna again for finding it), Julia dropped her bombshell on Carol by saying, "Carol, for Mark to start Aikido at 6pm, he'll have to have his dinner earlier than either Felicity or my mom can have it ready, depending on which house he's in at the time. If he trains more than a couple of hours, he'll need to have a snack to keep him going because he can't eat a full dinner before he starts. So from this coming Monday on, you're totally responsible for Mark's Monday dinners and snacks, to help you train for being our housewife. You'll be doing the necessary grocery shopping, doing the cooking in whatever house Mark is in, and making him a snack to take. Can you handle that?" The look on Carol's face was excited, determined and fearful; but mostly fearful. Carol asked, "EVERY Monday?" "Yes, for as long as he goes to Aikido at that time." Donna helpfully suggested, "You can make your soup," which just flustered Carol even more. Mom spoke up, "I'll help you, and you'll do fine. You already do half the preparation for me if I'm late getting home. It's easier than you think. In fact, after a while it gets boringly routine." "Okay," said Carol, "I'll try. I want to be able to do this." That being agreed to, I started talking about how well my college studying was going. After just a minute on that topic Julia said, "That's good, but you've got to tell your parents about the Liaison-picking meeting this morning. That was the funniest thing I've seen for ages. You haven't told them already, have you, Carol or Donna?" They hadn't, so apparently I had to. I'd already practiced with Prof, so I made a good job out of it. All three girls added their own amusing additions, and the story kept us in laughs for most of dinner. At the end of the story Julia talked about how well the Liaisons are working out, especially Lily. Julia finished with, "They were helpful before, but they're going to become a whole lot more so after they've been screwed by Mark. You should have heard Laila after her session. Mark gave her by far the best sex she'd ever had, and she's now only too happy to do whatever we want. It's hard to imagine how Lily could be any more helpful and cooperative, but if that's possible, she will be after Mark does her and Pat tonight. Ava's already hooked and determined to be as cooperative as she can. -- "Word hasn't got around the 9th and 12th grades yet, so we don't have any Liaisons for them. I don't care about the seniors, but it'd be good to get the freshman girls chasing after Mark. That shouldn't be hard, as those girls were in Mark's classes last year so they know him." My having sex with other girls was embarrassing, so I'd been rather hoping that it wouldn't come up in our dinnertime conversation. Silly me. While Julia had been proudly describing how fantastic her boyfriend was at screwing other girls, Mom had been rolling her eyeballs toward Donna, meaning, "Not in front of the children." Julia had carried on, only now reacting to Mom by adding, "It's going to be ALL over school how awesome Mark is in bed, Felicity. There are going to be girls begging Donna and Carol for help in getting sex from Mark..." "Already are," boasted Wife#2 proudly. "It's so funny. They act SO silly!" said Donna. Julia continued, " ... So there's no point in trying to keep it quiet." Mom asked Julia, "You REALLY don't mind?" I quickly injected, "Mom, that question should have been directed at Carol just as much as at Julia." "Ahh, yes. Sorry. That takes some getting used to," apologized Mom. Julia said, "You answer the question, Carol. Do you mind that our man is so awesome at sex that girls all over school are dripping wet and hot for him?" Mom tried again, "That wasn't the question I had in mind. Do you - Julia AND CAROL - really not mind that Mark has sex with other girls?" Mom hadn't seen any humor Julia's version of the question, although Dad and the girls had chuckled. I hadn't, because I was worried about upsetting Mom. Despite the good results that came out of the big fight between Carol and Mom at the Williams' place, Mom clearly wasn't happy with the idea of me sleeping around, and she'd just learned that it was no longer an idea but a full-on activity. Mom knew her trying to stop it was indefensible and would fail because everyone else would disagree with her, but she was clearly against it. Julia's being so blatant wasn't a good idea. Carol answered, "No." That's all she said; no justification, no reasons. Carol resumed eating her dinner. It left Mom hanging, with nothing to criticize. Everyone except Mom enjoyed Mom's frustration. Even Dad thought it was funny. Mom just couldn't resist filling the silence. After a few seconds she opened her mouth. Even before the first word emerged, Dad firmly cut her off, "Drop it, Fely. Unless you're praising her - which I doubt - then it sounds like you're trying to talk her into minding, which is just causing trouble. They're happy doing what they're doing, so let them do it." "But it just seems so WRONG!" stated Mom. "It would be very wrong for us, but maybe it isn't for them," said Dad. "If they screw-up, they screw-up. It's not the end of the world, and it's not our business either." Mom gave up, sinking back in her chair. #2: #4: To change the subject, although only a little, Julia had said something that concerned me significantly. She'd said that she didn't really care about the 12th grade's involvement with the Liaison system. Those girls are the highest status and most desired girls at school. If I had to pick a grade to boink my way through, I would've instantly chosen the 12th. So hearing that Julia didn't care about them was, to put it mildly, not ideal. I said, "Thanks Dad. To get back to something Julia said. Julia, why aren't you interested in finding a Liaison for the senior girls? I think most guys think those girls are the most desirable." I knew I was rubbing Mom's face in it somewhat, but I didn't expect any problem after Dad's intervention. Julia answered, "They are, just like senior guys are the most desirable guys for schoolgirls who haven't already found the love of their life." Wasn't that sweet? I would have told her so, except that I didn't want to interrupt her explanation. "Unfortunately they're almost useless for our purposes..." #4: " ... because they're all disappearing in two months. Even those that go on to OSU will be spread across all the degrees and very few of them will be in any of your lectures. We want girls who'll be around long enough for them to try their tricks to get their hooks into you." Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that. The expression on my face must have given me away, because Julia added, "Haha. You'd forgotten that's what this was all for, hadn't you?" Not waiting for the obvious answer, Julia continued, "The reasons we're doing this are for you to learn about the tricks females can use, that sex for the sake of sex is no big deal, and to be more commanding. Fun is a wonderful side benefit, but it's not the justification. We couldn't have talked all the parents into this if it was just about fun." Ahh, yes. I remember now. Julia WAS happy to do this for my fun. The ostensible justifications that she'd played up to our parents were doubtless true, but they were also excuses for what we wanted to do anyway, as her last couple of sentences had clearly been intended to remind me. "I've got it now, Julia. My little head had been doing the thinking for me. Sorry about that." I made a mental note to ask Julia later what the real reason was for her not caring about seniors. Julia said, "Tell it to relax. It'll need all its energy for Lily and Pat soon." Julia can be very subtle at times, I imagine. The reminder about time was a good one, as Lily was due to arrive at the Williams' soon. Dad had mentioned earlier that he wanted me to help him load the single beds onto the truck he'd borrowed, so I quickly finished my dinner. [I later asked Julia what the real reason was why she didn't care about 12th grade girls, and it was exactly the same reason she'd given at dinner. I could have as much sex as I wanted from the other grades, and those girls also had the advantage of staying around long enough for me to learn other things from them, so it made sense to concentrate on them. If seniors threw themselves at me, I could catch them if I wanted, but it didn't make sense for us to put effort into managing them, especially as Julia was already worried about being overworked by all the girls in the other grades. It was a totally sensible and rather disappointing answer.] As I was about to leave to go meet Lily, Julia reminded me, "Don't forget to wear the right clothes to school tomorrow." Carol quickly agreed, "Yes! Tomorrow is lunch with girls from my classes. I definitely want you to wear the other outfit from Rocky's." "{Groan}. I will. I'm resigned to it already." After several kisses and some tongue-in-cheek instructions: Julia telling me to, "TRY to enjoy yourself", my telling her, "Please don't turn Ava into a total lesbian", and our agreeing we'd be too busy to exchange late night phone calls, Dad and I loaded the single beds onto his borrowed truck and we left in convoy. At the Williams', Andrew, Robert, Dad and I made short work of putting the single beds into storage in their basement (the stairs to which were hidden behind - looking in from the front door - the stairs that went upstairs). The basement was quite small, but it made a great storage room. The Boys already had the big bed ready by the front door, so it took the five of us only seconds to load the truck. If Lily was on time, and I expected her to be, she'd be here in five minutes, so I left it to The Boys to follow Dad in one of their cars, to help unload at our home. That gave me just enough time to boot up my computer and start printing the next two Algebra lectures. I left the printer doing its thing while I went downstairs in anticipation of Lily's arrival. ------- Chapter 92: Lily and Pat's First Time; Part One Thursday, April 21, 2005 (Continued) Lily drove up exactly on time. I met her at the front door, and commented on her punctuality. Lily said, "Julia say very important." "I thought you'd be on time. Julia and I are both impressed by your attitude to what we're doing." "I know you special man." #2: Rather than foolishly prolong the conversation, I brought Lily inside. I knew Julia wanted the girls to be aware that her parents were cool about all the sex, so I told Lily, "I'll introduce you to Julia's parents if they're handy. Let's check the kitchen before we go upstairs." Lily followed me to the kitchen, and we found Vanessa there. I've learned that Julia keeps her mother well informed of our plans, so I wouldn't be surprised if she'd been nearby deliberately. I introduced Lily and Vanessa, adding, "Lily is the first 10th grade Liaison we picked and so far easily the best. No doubt she'll be a regular visitor to the weekly meetings Julia wants to have." The usual comments were passed back and forth. In departing I wanted to say something to emphasize that we'd be having sex, but I have trouble being as obvious as Julia. I can't do "blatant" nearly as well as her, but that's balanced by her not being able to do "wimpy" nearly as well as me. I managed to say, "When Pat arrives, can you please send her to our bedroom. Lily and I will already be naked, so I won't be able to answer the door." "You wouldn't hear the doorbell through the soundproofing anyway. I presume you don't mind if she walks in on you while you're going at it?" "I think that'd be an excellent way to break the ice. We'll go upstairs now and get started. Thanks, Vanessa." Lily, with no sign of amazement at the level of parental permissiveness, said, "Nice meeting you, Vanessa." I took Lily's hand and led her upstairs. I was tempted to question Lily about her lack of surprise, but figured that the less talking I did, the better. As we entered the bedroom, Lily asked, "What does sign mean?" ("The 'He Showed Me' Room") "Julia put it up to commemorate something that happened between her and me. It's meaningful to her, so she can explain it much better than me. Ask her sometime. I'm sure she'll be happy to explain." Lily was carrying a small bag and a dress on a hanger, which I took from her and hung up in my end of the closets, as my section had more spare room than Julia's or Carol's. When I turned to face Lily, she was standing still, looking at me. It was time to start the sex, and I was very uncertain how to start. I didn't feel romantic toward Lily, so a seductive, smoochy, slow undressing of each other didn't seem appropriate. I had a feeling that Ava would love that, but Lily didn't seem emotionally involved. As best I could read her motives - admittedly a very small amount - for her interest in me, they somehow seemed more intellectual than emotional. With considerable trepidation, and in the absence of any other idea of what to do, I simply said, "Take your clothes off, Lily." Without saying a word, Lily immediately started doing so. I should've tried that on girls years ago. Feeling self-conscious about doing so, I quickly stripped too, and was naked before Lily. That was a tactical error, because she stopped to admire me. "Laila said you sexy body." Lily came over to me, to have a good look. I just knew that I was going to have to do another twirl shortly. While I was waiting for that, I asked her, "Did you talk with Laila when she sent you her text message? Because I thought that was her offering reassurance, and I can't imagine you needing reassurance?" "I was VERY curious. Laila VERY excited. Now I see. You beautiful. Could be model." I couldn't help a brief, "{Snort}" at that. When Lily looked at me inquiringly, I explained, "The last person to tell me that was a guy who was a flaming queer." "Ahh! Time important because you busy study, exercise, girl- and boyfriends." I had been about to correct her thinking about my spending time on exercise, when that issue got BLOWN away by her saying "boyfriends". I nearly said "Eek!" but managed to swallow it at the last moment. I protested, "I do NOT have boyfriends! It was a guy who worked in a clothing store. I'm completely and totally normal that way! I've never had a thought like that in my life, and hope I never do." "Okay. Not matter." I corrected her, "It DOES matter! NO boyfriends! I ONLY want girls, including you if you'll finish taking your clothes off." Lily said, "Okay," then resumed undressing herself. I enjoyed watching her, because that's EXACTLY the sort of guy I am! I was soon seeing my first naked Chinese girl. I looked at her carefully, as you do at such times. Her face was, of course, quite different from what I was used to. I had no idea whether Chinese guys would think she was pretty or not, but I enjoyed the look of her, so that was fine. Her body wasn't any different from what you could see on an American girl, other than Lily's slightly different skin color. She was short, with smaller than average breasts, but neither of those two attributes were unusual in Caucasians. She had black, untrimmed pussy hair, which I was sure were also quite common among American girls - Julia for example, before she started shaving it all off. Lily's skin color was the only difference, and that was a minor variation. I hadn't thought about what I expected, but now I knew the reality was 'just' a nice looking 16-year old girl's naked body. "You like?" Lily asked me in concern. I reassured her. "Oh yes. You have a very nice body." Lily took my hand and pulled me to the bed. I wasn't really in the mood for sex now because of the boyfriend comment. Lily could easily see that for herself, which was perhaps why she'd asked if her body met with my approval. I had, unfortunately, lost the mood so completely that it took Lily well over a minute to get me back into it. Lying on your back while a pretty, naked, Chinese girl straddles your chest - enthusiastically masturbating her pussy and tits just inches in front of your face - turns out to be quite a good aphrodisiac. Better tasting than oysters too, as I found out when I grabbed her hips and pulled her forward a few inches. She'd broken the ice very well, raising my opinion of her even further, and from then on everything went fine. I didn't bother with a slow start, the way I had with Laila. Pat was going to arrive in about fifteen minutes and I wanted Lily and me to be going at it when Pat walked in. Lily didn't seem to have any objections at all, so that's what we were doing when there was a faint knock on the door. Right on time, allowing a couple of minutes for her to get up here. I hadn't had enough time to impress Lily with my never-ending endurance, nor had I done any more than barely start to learn her body's responses, but we were still having fun. Certainly too much fun to get up and answer the door. I warned Lily, "I have to yell loud because the room's soundproofed." Then I yelled, "COME IN, PAT." #2: The door opened and Pat's head looked in. I'm not sure what she was looking for, but she saw me slowly thrusting in and out of Lily in the missionary position. Those missionaries sure knew what they were doing when they invented their position, because it's my favorite. I can see all of the girl's body, which is something I quite enjoy! I can see her face to better judge her reactions, I can reach her clit and breasts. With Carol and Julia I can also TK those parts, to everyone's enjoyment. I can even lean forward to kiss the girl, or the girl next to her if we're having a threesome. Moving her legs around creates different feelings for her and me, and when she's tired I can do all the work, which is what usually happens in my lovemaking sessions. I must remember to send the Pope an email to thank his organization for their position on sex. Lily called to Pat, "Come in, Pat. Look Mark's body. Look his ass. Open, close, open, close. Very sexy, yes?" I sincerely hoped Lily meant "clenching and unclenching", and even that was still something I was uncomfortable thinking about. I outright flatly refused to think about "open, close". Pat entered the room, carrying a small bag and a dress on a coat hanger, just as Lily had been. That's when the conversation took a lurch into the surreal. Lily said, "Pretty dress. I like you in that one. What belt you bring?" Pat answered, "The wide, yellow one, with the scalloped edges." I'd never seen her wear a belt with seafood stapled to it, but what do I know? I know I'm being silly. Clearly if "salmon" can be color, then "scallop" can be too. There are probably lots of colors named after marine life. I remembered Julia had mentioned "seashell", so it's obviously a common theme. Now that I think of it, I've also heard of "lobster red", yet another name for red, because the world needs more of those. "You wear same shoes?" About this time I realized that I was giving my attention to a conversation about female clothing, rather than to fucking the pussy my cock was already in. There was something SERIOUSLY wrong with my priorities, but that was easily fixed. I chose the activity I thought I'd enjoy the most and concentrated on doing that. I tried REALLY hard not to, but I still caught fragments of their conversation. Apparently Lily had a similar dress, but she thought Pat's dress looked better on Pat than Lily's dress looked on Lily; there was stuff about belts, then I heard, "in the third closet." Females are weird (take as much time as you need to recover from the shock of learning that before you carry on reading). Lily and I were totally naked and actively screwing on top of the bed, so not covered by any bedding, but that was completely ignored so the girls could talk about their clothes. Pat opened the closet to hang her clothes up, which meant she saw Lily's clothes. Naturally Pat had to make a comment about it. #4: Whatever Pat had said, Lily responded to with, "That old thing!" I certainly didn't want to encourage their conversation (and I was damned sure I didn't want Lily to again think of me as being queer), but even I nearly laughed at Lily's last comment. I have to make a very embarrassing confession now. All year I'd noticed Lily's clothing. She wears clothes that are consistently and considerably better quality than those of other girls. Not in the sense that a 15-year old boy would judge "better" (I told you this was embarrassing), but better in that they were obviously far better made, with much more effort and quality than every other girl wore. I'd several times overheard her respond to another girls' compliments by saying that she gets them from Hong Kong. She almost never repeats an outfit, so I shudder to think how large her closet must be, or what she spends on clothes. So her, "That old thing!" comment was amusing, both in its total inaccuracy and it's perfect cliché-ness. But I refused to respond to it, for the reason already given. Pat succumbed to her irresistible genetic urge, and pulled Lily's dress out to have a better look at it. During the conversation that resulted from Pat's checking out of Lily's outfit, I was tempted to go check that the lecture notes had printed properly. I didn't think either of them would notice if I stopped doing what I was doing and left the room for a while. I was wondering how to get the girls off their favorite topic and onto mine without sounding petulant, when Lily ran her hands up my sides, saying, "Feel muscles, Pat. Very sexy body. I want watch him do you." Pat cautiously advanced toward us. I wasn't pleased by her caution, but at least she was coming toward us and not talking about clothes. Lily encouraged Pat some more, then Pat finally put her hands on my back and started feeling my body. I canceled my plan to check on my lecture notes. I thought about the threesome that was just about to happen, which made me realize that Lily hadn't made any move to hide her body from Pat's view, nor to draw attention to it. She'd either talked about clothes or my body, which was probably a smart move as Pat's response to our invitation had showed she'd been concerned about there being three of us here. Lily asked, "His butt feel good?" #4: Pat slid her hand down to that part of my anatomy, then said, "He's got an AMAZING body, and such a CUTE ass!" I don't particularly enjoy conversations about any part of my body, and I'm most uncomfortable with talk about my ass, so naturally that was the part that the girls spent the next couple of minutes discussing. I was embarrassed enough that I should have gone soft, but having one girl rub her hands over my ass while I was fucking another girl was sexy enough to save me from going soft at a very inopportune time. Pat's hands started wandering more enthusiastically over my body, and she started making even more appreciative comments. Lily (I guessed) judged the moment right to say, "Me close. Mark finish me then your turn. You undress now." Pat hesitated, but only briefly, then said, "Okay." She wasn't exactly enthusiastic, but it'd still result in another naked girl - and easily the better looking of the two - so I wasn't going to complain. In fact, I was going to watch. Turning to me, Lily said, "Faster please." I'd been looking forward to watching Pat undress, but sometimes in life you have to make choices. I chose to ignore Pat to concentrate on bringing Lily off as fast as possible. I'd been slowly moving in and out of her since Pat had arrived, mainly because I feared that if I stopped the atmosphere of the room might end up being too self-conscious to restart easily. I had the feeling that probably wouldn't have worried Lily, but it would've worried Pat and me. I was especially worried about me, because I could too easily imagine me getting involved in another of my well-intentioned but counterproductive discussions. I also feared going soft if I stopped. To cut a long story short, Lily had been constantly stimulated, and she didn't appear to have been embarrassed into losing the mood, so as soon as I picked up the speed she responded with her own increase arousal. As Lily was getting very close, I felt Pat put her hands on my back. Pat had unfortunately been out of my sight while she'd got undressed, and I'd thought it too impolite to look behind me at another girl while getting Lily off, but it was good to feel Pat's return. Her hands rode up and down on my back, as I rode up and down in Lily. I expected Lily's orgasm to be quiet, because aren't all Chinese girls demur, so I was surprised when she was suddenly loud and vocal. Maybe it was intended as encouragement for Pat. If so, then good for Lily! I was impressed by her helpfulness; in addition to her nakedness and sexual willingness, which are also very good things. I kept my cock fully inside Lily during her climax as I like the feeling of a girl's contractions on my cock when she cums. I have recently discovered that I also love kissing one girl while I'm inside another. I regretted that Pat was still standing behind us now, but I hoped to get several chances to enjoy my little kink very soon. When the best of Lily's thrashings had finished, I turned carefully to avoid dislodging my cock, and I looked at Pat. She was ALMOST naked, just wearing some very pretty panties. Not that I spent much time looking at her panties, because Pat has LOVELY breasts! When I looked at her face, I could see Pat was self-consciously waiting for my opinion, and it was very easy to give, "Pat, you're gorgeous! I've always noticed how pretty you are at school," (did I mention she had lovely breasts?), "but you're even better now. Of course I'm a boy, and we tend to have a thing about preferring beautiful girls to be naked, but I can honestly say that I think you're gorgeous. You're a very beautiful girl, dressed and undressed." "My ass is too big. Especially after seeing yours." "Well turn around and let me have a look. Come on, give me a twirl." It was so nice to ask someone else for one of those, rather than having to do them myself. And if you're going to ask anyone else, a virtually naked, beautiful, 16-year old girl is a VERY good choice. She gave me one, which I thoroughly enjoyed all 360 degrees of. I announced, "Personally I disagree with your silliness about your ass's size. Do you have any G-string panties?" "I have a couple of thongs." I thought they were the same thing, but you know how much I know about female apparel. I chose not to go down that road, even though it was a very interesting one. Instead I just said, "I'm just one guy, and I don't know much about female bodies, so I suggest you wear your smallest panties to school tomorrow. Seeing as how you're concerned about the size of your ass, we'll get you to hold your skirt up around your waist at the front of each class to get as many opinions as possible. That way you'll find out for certain whether your ass is too big or not. That'd be good to know, wouldn't it?" Despite the obvious scientific merit of my proposal, Pat chose to treat it as a joke and just laughed. I said, "If you did, I'm pretty sure you'd learn that most guys think your ass is MIGHTY fine. Are you sure you don't want the reassurance? After all, it'd be no different from wearing a thong bikini bottom." "I don't have THOSE!" I'd simply been teasing her when I mentioned it, but her statement immediately made me wish that she did have one. And while I was at it, I wished every other girl I knew had one too. I REALLY like the idea of going somewhere (anywhere!) with a bunch of my girls all wearing thong bikinis. Or G-string bikinis, I'm not fussy. I nearly said something like, "All my girls will need to have one of those in summer," but I figured I'd better not scare Pat off now. There'd be plenty of time to corrupt her later. I changed the subject somewhat, conscious that complimenting Pat's body too much might not be kind to Lily, whose body I hadn't made a big deal about. I said, "Pat. Of all the individual pieces of clothing you could have kept on, your panties are the most inconvenient. The whole point of your being here tonight is rendered somewhat impossible by your wearing them. I need to put this thing," pointing to where my cock disappeared into Lily," into exactly the place that your panties are covering." She hesitated, which gave me an opportunity to exercise one of my little kinks. My cock still being in Lily, I reached my hand around Pat's waist, and pulled her into a kiss. That was easier for her to respond to. She leaned on the side of the bed, and into my kiss. After a couple of very enjoyable seconds, I made it even better by moving my hips slowly back and forward. It just feels so WRONG to be kissing one girl while fucking another. It's GREAT! Lily liked it too, and started moaning quietly. Pat heard, and looked down, then asked, "You're still hard?" Lily answered, "{Giggle}. Hard and big. You keep panties on. I look after Mark, okay?" My right hand was around Pat's waist, and I couldn't think of any reason not to reduce the number of panty-wearing girls in the room. I slid my hand under her panties' waistband and onto an ass cheek. Between kisses I said, "Hmm, nice ass!" Now that I thought about it, that was an anatomical difference between Lily and American girls: Lily had a smaller butt than normal for a girl her size. I remember noticing that most Chinese girls have small butts. Not fat Chinese girls obviously, although I guess that even fat Chinese girls would have smaller butts than equally fat American girls. That seemed to be a racial difference. Hardly an important one, especially as Pat's comment about her ass being too big was silly. Besides, with how fantastic Pat's breasts are, why would anyone care about her ass? I rubbed my hand ALL over Pat's perfectly desirable ass, which somehow resulted in her panties getting pushed downward. It wasn't easy to do, but I managed that with only one hand (my left hand was too far away, and keeping my cock in Lily prevented me from turning enough to reach Pat with both hands). Pat got the idea after a little while, and did the decent thing by pushing her own panties down and stepping out of them. It hadn't escaped my notice that Pat has VERY nice breasts, so my hand wandered northward. Soon I was fucking in and out of Lily, and kissing Pat while caressing her breasts. Life can be good! Lily thought so too, and was expressing it more and more enthusiastically. That might have been my fault, as my hips had started getting quite vigorous. I was in a good mood, and my hips were reacting appropriately. I could see that it wasn't going to take me long to get Lily off again. Two cums in quick succession should keep her quiet for a while, so I could then spend time getting to know Pat, in the biblical sense, i.e., leading to the missionary position. Twisting my upper-body to kiss Pat was preventing me moving as easily as I wanted, so I broke off the kiss and turned to face Lily better. I put my right hand around Pat's left thigh, and then slid it up to her pussy. Pat stiffened a bit, clearly not being completely comfortable with that level of intimacy yet. There was no point in beating about the bush, so I started rubbing her. Her legs were too close together for my liking, so I said, "Put your left foot up on the bed behind me, Pat." That would totally open her to me. She hesitated briefly, and then complied. Being the sort of gentleman that I am, I took immediately advantage. Pat was only slightly damp, so slightly that some parts of her pussy were still dry. I caressed it lightly, to slowly and gently get her comfortable and aroused. Both of Pat's hands were simply resting on my near shoulder, so she certainly wasn't being swept away yet. Lily was getting higher and higher, and would only take another couple of minutes to reach her peak. I could easily split my three attentions between the two girls, but only being able to use one hand on Pat was hampering my efforts to stimulate her properly. So I said, "Pat, sweetie. Go around and lie on the other side of the bed next to Lily, and when I've made her cum we'll let her rest while I give you my full attention, as you deserve." "All right." I let her go, and she walked around the bed. Now I could concentrate on Lily. I used my left arm and hand to hold her legs in the air, and my right hand went around her leg and onto her clit. I started frigging her as I rapidly accelerated my thrusting rhythm. Pat lay down on the other edge of the bed, with - I was disappointed to notice - a wide gap between the two girls. Lily, who was getting very turned on now, reached out with her right hand and grasped Pat's left arm, squeezing it tight in the passion of the moment. Pat looked at Lily's hand in surprise, clearly wondering what to do about it. Pat was disappointingly uncomfortable with girl-on-girl contact in such a sexual setting. While Pat was thinking about that, I kept accelerating my thrusts. Pat's eyes moved from Lily's hand, to Lily's face, then body, then up to me. Then kept moving around. Pat wasn't appalled, or revolted, or anything else too negative, but she was clearly uncomfortable. She would have preferred to look away, but it was rather hard to ignore Lily, as Lily was making a LOT of noise, including many very explicit statements of how good I was, how I was making her feel, what a great cock I had, etc. I made Lily cum as quickly as I could, and kept thrusting through her orgasm, to wring every ounce of sensation out of it for her. Hopefully she'd rest for a while, giving me a good chance to work on Pat, who clearly needed it. After Lily went quiet, I started slowly pulling my cock out. Whether she was being helpful or really meant it, Lily groaned, "Please. I need rest." Pat watched me pull out from Lily, then commented on the obvious, "You're STILL hard?" "Yes. I'm hoping to make use of that fact with you later, when you're in the mood. That's the second time you've asked me that. Why do you keep asking?" "I've only been with one guy before and he can't stay hard like you do. He keeps shooting off too early. It's very frustrating. Do you take Viagra or something?" "No to Viagra or anything else like that. Staying hard is easy. I'm in bed with two beautiful girls - that'll do it every time! It's not staying hard that's the issue, it's avoiding cumming. I've got very strong willpower, is all. I want to make sure you and Lily are satisfied and happy before I let myself cum." Pat chuckled, saying, "I think Lily is satisfied." Lily confirmed that fact with a, "{Giggle}." I was still kneeling below Lily, although I had moved her legs to the outside of me to make her more comfortable. I knee-walked into the gap between the two girls. Lily's hand was still holding Pat's arm, but lightly. When I touched it to start peeling the fingers off, Lily remembered it. She said, "Sorry," and pulled it away herself. I lay in the gap, on my right side, facing Pat. I had noticed Pat's use of the present tense when she was talking about her boyfriend, and I remembered her mentioning that she had a boyfriend back when Julia had first 'offered' her the chance to have sex with me. It was probably best not to say anything about that though. I didn't see the need to say anything about anything else either, so I snuggled closer to Pat, putting my right arm under her neck so I could hug her properly. She cooperated by lifting her head, which was good to see. I put my left hand on her belly, slowly rubbing it around. I intended for it to eventually end up on her breasts (I like breasts, and hers more than most), but there was no hurry. I nuzzled into her head, and started kissing her neck and the side of her face. She lay there, smiling slightly, and letting me nuzzle away. After thirty seconds or so, Pat said, "I'm going to enjoy this, aren't I?" "I'll try to make sure you do." Then I realized that I could do much better (in other words, another mind took over). I added, "You WILL enjoy it, Pat. Very much, if you decide you want to. I'm physically a very good lover, but you have to like me enough to join in, which you haven't done yet." I raised my volume and looked over my shoulder somewhat, threatening, "Maybe I should give Lily another go while you're thinking about it." Lily issued a, "{Groan}," which had been roughly what I'd expected she do. Pat said, "No. I've already decided. I'm here because you're a nice guy. I AM going to enjoy this." Pat rolled over to face me, and started kissing me. Lily said, "Thank goodness." While Pat chuckled, I said, "I'd been looking forward to seeing Lily naked, to see what differences there were with Chinese girls. I didn't see any other than skin color, and even that's not so different. But apparently Chinese girls just don't have the endurance of good quality American girls. Two orgasms and she's groaning like she's run a marathon. Or maybe I'm being unfair to other Chinese girls, and it's just that Lily is lazy?" Lily responded, "You bad man! I get you later, after I rest." "Take your time. I'm pretty sure I can find something enjoyable to do while I'm waiting for you." Which was the last thing I said for quite a while. As I had plenty of time, I used a lot of it to build Pat up. Some enjoyable minutes spent kissing her, then I rolled on top of her, and kissed my way down her body. Her breasts are nice (I know I've already mentioned that, but they're VERY nice), so I spent several minutes slowly building up the stimulation on them, culminating with some mutually enjoyable nipple nibbling. Then I drifted farther south. I like 'south' as it's so much more responsive and interesting than north-west and north-east. Not so interesting to look at from a distance, but a LOT better face-to-'face'. I spent a LONG time down there, more than half an hour spent getting to know Pat's body's preferences very well. I had a hope that Pat would be more than a one-night stand (although why it's called that when very little "standing" occurs puzzles me). Lily had long since rolled onto her side, and was unashamedly enjoying watching us, while lightly rubbing herself. Which I was unashamedly enjoying watching, when I wasn't busy looking elsewhere. After about twenty minutes of my attending to Pat's pussy, Lily had asked me, "Please do me same later. You very good." Pat answered before me, "Oh yes. Very, very good. It keeps getting better and better. It's going to be awesome." I was happy to comply, "I'd like that. Let me give Pat enough cums to tire her out first, then I'll do the same to you." Now that Lily wanted my attention again, I went faster with Pat. I was very pleased to see that just before Pat's cum, Lily offered her hand to Pat, who grabbed it with one of her own and held on hard. I gave Pat her first orgasm of the night with my mouth and fingers. I'd taken so long to build her up that it was a very good one for her. Even while Pat was still writhing, I wanted to move up on the bed and slide my cock into her pussy, but I had a problem with not knowing what the etiquette was for doing this while still wearing the same rubber I'd used with Lily. Would Pat get upset because it was gay to have Lily's dried out juices inserted into her, or could there be health issues? I kind of wanted to ask, but it would have disrupted the mood too much. Stopping to get a new rubber would be even worse. Even the closest thing I had to an in-house sex expert, #4, had no idea (he was more of a wannabe expert than a real one). I slowly moved up the bed, holding my cock pointed at Pat's pussy so Lily could see what I was about to do. She had time to speak up, but didn't, so in it went. Pat's only responses were moans, as I lifted her legs so that I could operate without stimulating her now too-sensitive clit, and started fucking her. Lily, seeing that I was holding Pat's hips in the air, grabbed a pillow and pushed it under Pat. I admired Lily's helpfulness yet again. I started fast, and got faster, as Pat was still very aroused. It'd probably taken me forty minutes to create her first orgasm, but it didn't take four minutes for her second one. I retained my hold on her legs while she was cumming. As soon as she had stopped thrashing, I lifted her higher and asked Lily, "Another pillow please." I flipped Pat over, lifted her briefly to make a stack of two pillows, then mounted her doggy style. I held myself in her, without movement, until she was fully aware again. Then I started SLOW, taking several seconds to pull out, then slowly slide back in again. After three or four cycles, Pat's amazed voice squeaked, "Again!" "And again and again, for as many as you can handle. Lily wimped out after only two. How many can you handle?" I didn't wait for her answer, instead reaching around under her for her pussy. I knew what she liked at this level of arousal, so I slowly and lightly brushed my fingertips back and forth over the very tip of her clit. All she said was "Oh," which I hoped wasn't an answer to how many she could handle. One good thing about the doggy position (and there are many), is that the girls asshole is readily available for whatever it is that I want to do to it. I put my other hand's index finger on the small of her back, in the center, and slowly slid it down into the crack of her ass, and kept sliding it. Pat could certainly feel it, ass cracks being very sensitive, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to extrapolate where my finger was going to be in a few seconds. Pat said, "No one's ever touched me there." I was also fucking in and out of her cunt and diddling her clit, but I knew what "there" she was talking about. I paused that finger and said (drawing on my extensive anal experience with three whole girls' holes: Julia, Carol and Laila), "Most girls are shocked, but like it. A minority are shocked and refuse to let me near it. I will be guided by your reaction." "You're the expert at sex, so I'll let you do what you think is best." Today was the April 21, and my first date with Julia had been on April Fools' Day, so I'd been a non-virgin for one day short of three weeks. Now probably wasn't a good time to point out that inconvenient fact, so I just said, "Good decision." (In the sense that it was good for me.) I resumed sliding my finger down her crack, while continuing to perform my other actions on her body. My finger got closer and closer, and I could tell that it was my finger that Pat's entire attention was on. Rather than touching her rosebud with my finger, I lifted it, used the other fingers of that hand to push her cheeks apart, and poised that finger just out of the way, using TK to touch her instead. It was an easy way to avoid having to stop to wash my finger if Pat didn't let me go any further. Pat said, "Oh, that feels strange." After a few seconds of light TK-pushing, which was all I could do with TK, I decided that her only comment being "that feels strange" meant I had a green light. I said, "I'm going to put a rubber on my finger." Pat surely knew what was going to happen after that, but she didn't overrule the sex expert. I asked, "Lily, would you please pass me a rubber from the drawer?" A smart guy would have gotten more out after using up the last of the ones that Julia had gotten out for me and Laila. An even smarter guy would've even had a few packets scattered around the bottom of the bed to avoid such delays, but I'd done neither. Not for the first time either, although when I'm with Carol these days, I use TK to float the rubbers to me. Lily had to stretch over top of Pat to reach the drawer on the other side of the bed. When Lily opened the drawer, she exclaimed, "Wow. You ready for LOTS of sex!" Pat raised her head off the bedspread and looked too, then giggled. I defended myself, "Blame Julia, she's the one that talked me into doing this, and into having Liaisons find more girls for me." Lily pulled one out, even taking it out of the foil for me. I extended my finger, and Lily fitted it for me. It was loose, but it'd do the job well enough. I turned my attention back to arousing Pat properly. I resumed the good, old fashioned, doggy position fuck, and kept that up for a couple of minutes. I had also resumed playing with her clit with one hand, and using the 'gloved' hand just to hold her hip so I could fuck her well. When I judged that she was properly aroused again, I slid that finger from her hip to the top of her ass crack, then down the crack to her hole, where I immediately started some minor pushes, just flexing it rather than penetrating. Pat's moans seemed happy ones, so I increased the pressure until my finger popped through her ring. I slid it in as far as it would go, while sill fucking her. I wasn't intending to fuck her in the ass tonight. We had so much sex ahead of us that I didn't want to make her sore and spoil her enjoyment of it. Doing it tomorrow morning wasn't a good idea either because it might make her day of walking around school unpleasant. So all I intended to do was introduce her to it and see how she responded. I believed she'd be back for more, especially now that she'd seen my ass "open, close, open, close." Who could resist me after seeing that? So I just fucked Pat to another orgasm normally, except that I kept my finger in her ass, moving it in and out. It was hard to maintain the same rhythm as my hips, but it didn't seem to matter so I didn't worry about it. She seemed to like it, although very few words were exchanged. She didn't take long to cum, and I like to think my finger had a hand in that. I'd noticed that when Lily had lain down again, after getting the rubber for my finger, she'd lain in the center of the bed, much closer to the action. I hoped part of her interest was in Pat, because her action had given me an idea. I disposed of my finger-rubber, then climbed back on the bed. I hooked my arm under Pat's hips, lifted her, then rotated her as I lowered her back down. She was now on her left side, facing Lily, who was already on her right side facing us. There was about a foot between the girls. I knee-walked up from below Pat, my knees pushing her left thigh (the lower one) forward out of my way, until its knee was touching Lily's upper-thigh. I raised Pat's right leg and put it on my shoulder. I now had easy access to her pussy, which the pillows under her helped raised to a convenient height. I did what any red-blooded American boy would do under the circumstances: I put my cock in it. After her three orgasms, Pat was pretty wiped out (she sure hadn't built up any endurance screwing with her current boyfriend, haha). When I inserted my cock, Pat groaned. I didn't want her to ask me to stop because I wanted to fuck her while she and Lily were staring into each other's eyes, so I didn't ask her whether she wanted me to continue; I just quickly did so. She'd have to find the energy and will to speak up if she wanted me to stop. In the absence of any instruction to the contrary, I started fucking her again. This sexual position was another good one because I could diddle her pussy easier than either doggy (which requires too much reaching), or missionary (which is constrained by wrists not being flexible enough). So I enjoyed myself diddling and fucking her. I remembered Julia's talking dirty have a great effect on Carol, so I said, "Lily, if you can, scoot closer to Pat and talk dirty to her." Lily smiled happily and said, "I try," then scooted closer. Lily rested her right hand on Pat's head, stroking her hair. Lily's left hand she placed on Pat's hip. Pat was, of course, naked, so that meant it was a good amount of flesh-to-flesh contact. That pleased me, and I smiled at Lily when she looked at me right after doing it. Lily had been told Julia and I favored bisexual girls, and was presumably behaving with that in mind. Lily placed her head on the same pillow Pat's was on, so their noses were virtually touching. I was pleased to see that Pat didn't react negatively to the touches or the face-to-face position. Lily started whispering to Pat. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but over the next fifteen minutes I several times saw Pat react well to it. Pat must have been getting tired, because it took me fifteen minutes to bring her to her next orgasm, even with the help provided by Lily's dirty talk. Pat enjoyed it, but her enjoyment wasn't energetic. Mostly she lay still and moaned. I was very pleased to see that about thirty seconds before her cum, Pat pulled Lily's head into a hug. It wasn't a sexual contact, as only their cheeks and shoulders were in contact. Below that their bodies were angled away from each other. It was good to watch though, especially Lily's hand rubbing up and down Pat's back. After Pat's cum, I lifted her again, rotated her another quarter turn in the same direction as last time, and lay her down on her back. I spread her legs wide, and started licking up the copious juices from her upper-thighs and around her pussy. I was taking my time, taking small licks, stopping to kiss her thighs, and running the very tip of my tongue along her skin to maximize the sensory experience for her. After a few seconds of this, Pat mouth managed to stumble through, "Wh... , what you do... , doing?" "There's a lot of your delicious juices down here. I'm going to lick them up. Your pussy's been pounded a bit recently, so I'm going to give it a rest while I bring you off with my tongue. After that we'll go back to normal fucking." I resumed licking her juices up. She groaned out, "I can't. Please no more. I need a rest." "That's fine, Pat. Lily's been waiting very patiently, so I'll give her my attention now. You rest and let me know when you want some more." Pat told me, "{Groan}. Ask me next year." She tried to laugh at her little joke, but quickly stopped, saying, "{Groan}. Oh, that hurts. Please don't make me laugh." She'd made herself laugh, but I didn't think she was up to a discussion about it. I said, "Let me pull the pillows from under you so you can rest more comfortably." Also so I can use them with Lily, but I used the reason I thought would appeal to her the most. I lifted her again and extracted the pillows. Pat sighed heavily when I put her on the bed. She just lay there, not moving a muscle. She'd lasted about one and a quarter hours. Not very impressive really. Julia had lasted considerably longer in both of her long sessions, although she'd been highly motivated to do so, especially for the second session. ------- Chapter 93: Lily and Pat's First Time; Part Two Thursday, April 21, 2005 (Continued) As promised, I turned my attention to Lily. "Thanks for waiting, Lily. I think we've safely got half an hour of uninterrupted time, so I'll be able to do a good job of going down on you." From Pat (it was nice to know she was still awake enough to participate verbally), "Not half an HOUR. Half a YEAR! {Groan}." Lily said, "I'm scared. You go too long." She did look scared, or at least concerned. "Lily, I stop the INSTANT any girl tells me to. You saw me stop when Pat asked. You never need to be scared of me, honest." She looked happier, but was still hesitating, so I added, "I'm hoping you and Pat will both become regular lovers of mine, so I definitely don't want to scare you off when we've only just started. Besides, I'm really looking forward to going down on you. I want to find out whether Chinese pussies taste different than American pussies. How cruel would you be to let me get so close, then keep me away from such important knowledge?" "That IS important. I taste Julia and tell you if taste same me, haha." So it's teasing time is it! I've been trained by experts (not so much "trained" as "victimized", but you get the idea), so Lily will have to do a lot better than that. I had a naughty idea. Pat was still lying on her back, and had been only partially licked clean. I swiveled toward her and said, "Excuse me, Pat" immediately before I ran my forefinger across her upper-thigh. I had a sample of Pat's juices before she knew what was happening. It wasn't much of a sample, but that didn't matter - this was fun, not science. I turned back to Lily, and said, "Here, taste Pat." I half, or even more than half, expected a protest from Pat. One of my minds even suggested that Lily had said "taste Julia" because she cleverly hadn't wanted to worry Pat by using her name, even though Pat was a far more convenient source for Lily's suggested taste test. I heard Pat inhale sharply, but no protest followed. I held my finger up, and Lily took hold of it and moved it to her mouth. I turned to look at Pat. Pat's eyes were wide open, watching Lily. I felt Lily's mouth envelop my finger, then, "Mmm, nice." Pat said, "I've got a feeling that if I hang around with you guys, I'll end up doing some things I've never done before." Fortunately Pat was smiling, so I could see the prospect was one that she was okay with. Not necessarily raring to get started on immediately, but "okay with" was fine with me. I do like corrupting girls. Corrupting myself is fun too. I answered, "Yes, I've got a feeling you're going to be enjoying yourself. But there's one new activity of yours that I'm particularly going to enjoy. I'm going to punish you for lying so badly to me." I was smiling, so Pat wasn't offended, but she was puzzled, "I haven't lied to you. I've been quite open." "Yes, you have been, which I appreciate. But you still told me one big lie, and I'm going to punish you in a few months, by taking you and several of my other girls to a beach." "I don't understand?" "All the girls, including you, will have to wear thong bikinis. Especially you, so everyone can admire your lie about having a big ass." Pat's response was horrendously unfair, unprovoked, uncalled for, and TOTALLY unappreciated. She said, "I'll wear one if you do." Lily laughed at me, "Haha. Your face so funny." "I'm afraid my tease backfired horribly. Suddenly summer is a lot less appealing. I think I'd better concentrate on the here and now, before I lose the mood entirely. If I remember correctly I was just about to lick someone's pussy for half an hour or so. Now whose pussy was it?" I reached over to Pat's legs, and pushed them apart. "Yours, I think. Get ready for a very thorough pussy licking." Pat protested, "No, no, not me. It was Lily. I need to rest." "Even if it was Lily, I still think I should spend a VERY long time THANKING you for your suggestion that I wear a thong. You DESERVE some very energetic, vigorous and prolonged thanking." "{Groan}. You've thanked me enough already. I really think you should thank Lily for laughing at you." "That's true. She did laugh, didn't she?" "Yes, and she's been lazy too, so she deserves lots of thanking." "Plus there's my scientific interest in comparative racial pussy tastes. We shouldn't underestimate how important that is. That decides it then! Lily, get ready for some rigorous, scientific pussy licking." Lily had been ready for some time, so all she said was, "Good." Lily had been watching me screw Pat repeatedly, and was in the mood to get things moving rapidly, so I REALLY enjoyed going slowly. There was no hurry, as it'd take a while for Pat to get back in action, and it was a lot of fun to frustrate Lily. Going slowly meant I got to understand her body better, and it also meant that I could make her eventual orgasm much better than it would have been otherwise. That's another of the differences between males and females: female orgasms are much more variable in their pleasure, depending on the girl's emotional state (and you know how erratic that is!), and how much time is spent building the orgasm. Toward the end, when Lily was getting particularly vocal - especially in demanding that I go faster and harder, which I enjoyed ignoring - and Pat was presumably feeling more rested, Pat moved closer and rolled onto her side to watch us. Pat asked Lily, "Is it okay for me to watch?" Lily answered, "Is good. Better if you touch me." "I don't think I'm ready for that, but I like watching you and Mark. He's very good." "TOO SLOW!" Pat and I laughed. After which I returned to my slow, enjoyable (for me), pussy licking. Pat just watched. I was hoping she'd sit up and get a good view of what I was doing, but she was content to watch from a horizontal, face-to-face position. As I had done with Pat, my pussy licking slowly lifted Lily to increasing levels of arousal. Erratically, as that was more fun as well as an inescapable result of finding what worked and didn't work on her. As Lily got more aroused she expressed it, explicitly and loudly. The quiet, demure stereotype for Chinese girls was being well and truly shattered. I enjoyed it, as it's always great to receive positive feedback that I'm doing something so well, but Pat thought it was a bit much, as she sometimes winced after a particularly loud yells from Lily. After one such wince, to a particularly loud expletive from Lily, I said, "Pat. This room is VERY well soundproofed. No one can hear anything we say or do, no matter how loud Lily is. And wait until you hear Julia let loose: she's REALLY loud! So don't worry about what Lily does or says. In this room you can safely do whatever you want. Let loose and have fun." I meant the last half to apply to more than just volume, but I didn't push it any further. The seed had been planted, in fertile ground judging by some of Pat's comments. She was just inexperienced and cautious about some of the things I wanted her to do, rather than opposed to them. I was taking it slow with Lily, even slower than I had with Pat, because I was enjoying myself. Eventually all good things must cum to an end. Just before that end, a very agitated and highly aroused Lily grabbed one on Pat's hands, and pressed it to one of her [Lily's] breasts. Lily screamed, "SQUEEZE! SQUEEZE!" I couldn't help with that because I was far too busy holding Lily's hips down. Plus I didn't want to help as it was MUCH more fun watching Pat hesitate, and then do it. Lily grabbed two handfuls of bedspread, planted her feet flat on the bed, then pushed her hips as high in the air as she could. Never mind that half of my weight was trying to hold her down, she took me for a ride. When she reached the top of her arch, Lily's orgasm hit her. Loudly. Very, very loudly. Being such a sex expert, I'd long since - probably two whole weeks ago - learned not to have my head between a girl's thighs when she goes off. But I was tempted to shove it back in, if only to have her thighs muffle the scream. All loud things eventually come to an end too, in this case when Lily ran out of breath. Her second cry was merely loud. The volume of her third was low enough that the room could be considered habitable. Her cries turned into pants, and after a while she said, "BEST I EVER have! SO good! Scream good, Pat good, Mark VERY good. Eee YA! I BURST!" Pat laughed, "I think you DID explode." "Feel like..." What she thought it felt like was cut off by my picking her up around her hips and flipped her over. Lily started asking me, "What you..." I interrupted her, "Enough foreplay! {Growl}. I'm horny and need to fuck." My cock sliding into her pussy reinforced my words very effectively, I thought. I couldn't see Lily's expression, but Pat could, and said, "Haha. You should see the expression on YOUR face now, Lily. You were teasing Mark about his expression before. He's good at revenge, haha." Most of my body had been lying immobile for more than half an hour and I was feeling vigorous, so I decided to give Lily a quick, hard workout. I grabbed her hips and screwed her flat out right from the start. My cock was ramming into her and I was pulling her whole body back onto me, with every thrust. I hammed it up a bit, while I was hammering it up more than a bit, "You've been getting far too cheeky, Lily, so it's about time I put you in your place." She hadn't been too cheeky, but she was having trouble catching her breath, so I didn't expect her to argue. She didn't even last five minutes before she had another "Eee YA!"-level orgasm. For my next trick, I did a mirror image of what I'd done with Pat earlier. I rolled Lily onto her side so she was facing Pat, moved her lower leg forward, put her upper leg on my shoulder, and my cock into her. Lily was, although conscious, I thought unaware of what was happening. I quietly said to Pat, "It'd be nice if Lily came around to find you lightly stroking her breasts with your two hands. If that's acceptable to you?" I thought it would be, as Pat had shown nothing worse than a slight initial hesitation the previous time she'd touched Lily's breast. Even when Lily's orgasm had hit her back then, Pat had not let go immediately. In addition, I could see that Pat was getting increasingly turned on by all the sex she was watching, she'd largely recovered as a result of her nearly forty five minutes of rest, and I liked to think that she was learning that good things happened when she did what I wanted. My intent was to give Lily one more seriously good fuck, then to have Pat next. To continue to alternate between the girls and - for however long they could keep awake - to ramp up the girl-on-girl contact. Pat smiled at my suggestion, and reached out with both of her hands to place them on Lily's conveniently handy breasts. Pat did some very light stroking. I guess there was no need to tell one girl how to treat another girl's breasts in this circumstance. I'd been slowly and gently moving my cock forward and back inside of Lily, taking several seconds per cycle, just passing time gently until she was aware. I was enjoying watching Pat's expressions as she was playing with Lily. Her initial interest was for the idea of it. She'd never been in this situation before, and didn't know what it'd be like. I watched as her curiosity was replaced with enjoyment, and she started stroking Lily much less tentatively. Pat's strokes became much more confident, with much more of each hand in contact rather than just her fingertips, and with more firmness and a wider range of movements. I was also glancing at the side of Lily's face that I could see. Eventually I noticed Lily breaking out into a smile, and her eye was focused on Pat's face. Lily announced her return by saying, "This very fun sex." Pat answered, "I knew NOTHING. I can't begin to describe this." "{Sigh}. Pat, I too scared to look. Mark isn't do me AGAIN!" "Haha. I'd think you'd be feeling him. It's HARD to mistake that feeling." Lily turned her head to look at me, "{Groan}. You want MORE?" I answered, "Oh yes. I'm looking forward to this one. When I went down on you, that was just foreplay. The fuck we just finished was only a quickie, just to take the edge off. This is going to be a real one. A nice, long, slow, pleasurable screw. Pat's going to help too, so we'll all have a great time." "ALL 'good time'. Too much 'good time'. VERY tiring." She seemed okay to me, so I said, "Pat and I will make this one nice and gentle. Then we'll give you a rest, while Pat and I have some more fun together." Pat answered first, "Yippee. I'm rested now. I'm very excited and can't wait to do more." One of the good things about this position (and there are several), is that I can get very deep into the girl. I figured that enough time had been wasted talking, so I pushed myself ALL the way into Lily. She immediately felt the difference, saying, "Oh, good." I sped up my thrusts somewhat, and made sure to make them all as deep as possible. Lily agreed with that development, "Is VERY good." To get as deep as possible I had to hold her upper leg in the right position, but I could do that with my right hand, leaving my left hand to play with her pussy. Being completely ambidextrous is very useful at such times. With my activities and Pat's caresses, Lily was definitely enjoying herself. She praised both of us, to make sure we knew it. I took it fairly slow, as I'd told them it would be. Lily's body decided otherwise though. It was rising much faster than I'd intended because she was getting turned on by both me and Pat. Seeing that I was going too slow, I sped up, which further increased the rate at which Lily was getting stimulated. So much for my "nice, slow" intent. Adaptability is important at such times (it's actually VERY important), so I changed my intent so that it was now to give Lily a nice, fast screw. The screw was progressing very nicely when Pat said, "Please touch my breasts, please Lily." Pat had said "please" twice, so Lily complied REALLY quickly. Or maybe because she wanted to. Pat does, after all, have very nice breasts. Pat immediately sighed, saying, "Oh! That's so nice. Why did I wait so long?" Lily and I treated that as a rhetorical question. As any intelligent person knows, there was no sensible reason for her to wait AT ALL, never mind for so long. In my humble, if slightly perverted, opinion, the two girls should have been doing this and more right from the beginning. I'm a sex expert, so I know what I'm talking about. Pat was enjoying this new development, as was Lily, and you already know my opinion. Consequently Lily's arousal - which had already been rising quickly - was now rising even faster. All three of us liked the new development, so you can see that it makes complete sense that girls behave this way. I was increasingly rapidly doing my thing, down at my end of Lily. At the top end, the girls were playing with each other's breasts, and I was enjoying myself watching them enjoy themselves. Lily got past the rhythmic moaning stage, and into the repetitive, "Soon, soon... ," stage. In the last few seconds Lily threw her hands around Pat's head and pulled her into a scorcher of a kiss. Pat had only just started responding when Lily climaxed, screaming into Pat's mouth. For about half a scream, and then she passed out. Bless her; the poor girl was tired. I picked Lily up enough to extract the pillows from under her waist, so I could lay her flat. Doing that kept me busy for a few seconds, and when I'd finished and turned to look at Pat, I could see she was very upset. She just finished struggling to extract her head from Lily's arms, and then called to me, "Something's wrong with Lily. We need to get help!" I knew nothing was wrong. Lily had just passed out and she'd come around in her own time. I'd seen Julia do the same thing several times, and Lily's proximity reading had changed in the same way Julia's changes, which is also the same way sleeping peoples do (I'd been within range of Julia, Carol and Donna when they were sleeping). A sleeping person's proximity 'image' is slightly different from when they're awake. Sort of 'fuzzier', although that's not very accurate. I hadn't tested it, but I was sure a dead body would be ki-less, so Lily wasn't dead, merely temporarily passed out. I reached forward to adjust the position of Lily's arms to somewhere more comfortable, while saying, "RELAX Pat! Lily is perfectly fine. She's just passed out. I've seen it MANY times. It happens when sex is too good for a girl's body to handle. She'll come around all by herself in a few minutes. She's fine, I promise." A much calmer and no longer trapped, Pat asked, "Are you sure?" "I've seen it many times. She's just sleeping it off. She was just too excited and had too much pleasure. She was probably getting tired too. Her body wasn't used to it, so it went to sleep. I always think it's rather cute." "She's just fainted?" "That's it exactly." "I've never heard of a guy doing that to a girl before. That's amazing." "I don't think it's that big a deal. Julia often passes out after a particularly good orgasm, so I think some girls do it easier than others. Lily too, presumably." Pat said doubtfully, "I've never heard of it. I think it's more to do with you than the girl." "Except in this case it was because of YOU. I've screwed Lily several times tonight and she's never passed out. But this was the first time you'd been involved." "{Raspberry}..." #1: " ... I'm sure my letting her kiss me did NOT make her pass out. I was too surprised to react, so it can't have been caused by me being such a good kisser. Or maybe it was my deadly nipples that knocked her out. All these years I've been fighting off boys who were trying to grope me, but maybe all I needed to do was let them. They'd fall asleep, and I could walk away safely. Haha. I think I'll stick to my theory that it might have something to do with how good YOU are." In the middle of Pat's talking, my proximity sense reading of Lily changed. She had woken, and was forcing herself stationary and breathing quieter (I got the last aspect with my other senses, as breathing doesn't show up in proximity). I listened to Pat, while Lily continued to hold herself motionless and quiet. I suspected she was eavesdropping on us. I suggested to Pat, "How about we agree it was a combined effort, because Lily was excited by you too. I noticed you were enjoying yourself as well. Girl-on-girl is a lot more fun than you thought, isn't it?" I half-listened to her (actually, one-third listened, if you don't count the mind on duty, which I usually don't), while Pat answered, "SEX is a LOT more fun than I thought..." Pat went on about girl-on-girl being great, especially when already so turned on, etc. I listened to enough to confirm that she was happy. I spent most of my effort trying to think of a good way of teasing Lily. The opportunity she was giving me was too good to pass up. The trouble was that I couldn't think of anything very funny. I did have one good idea, but it required her to be talking to me at the time, so wasn't usable now. One problem was that Lily was facing Pat, and might have her bottom eye open just enough to see Pat react if I mimed a warning that Lily was awake. I decided to do the following. Cutting Pat off from her gushing praise of sex (she was preaching to the choir anyway, if you'll excuse the inappropriate metaphor), I said, "Pat, sorry to interrupt, but I just thought of something I want to do while Lily's asleep. Can you please look in the bedside table behind you to see if Julia's giant dildo is in there?" Pat was a little surprised, but turned over to look. She opened the drawer, then said, "I can't see anything like that." "Believe me, if it was in there, you'd know it. It's HUGE. It must be in the other drawer. I'll get it." I was sitting on my heels between the girls' hips, facing Pat mostly as I'd been talking to her. Now I edged backward off the bed, then walked around it behind Lily. I bent down to pick one of my shoes off the floor as I passed it, but kept walking to the drawer. I opened the drawer to make that noise, for Lily's sake. At the same time I held up the shoe so Pat could see it. She looked puzzled, but I winked at her. I then said, "Ahh, here it is. Isn't it a monster?" Waving the shoe, and making rapid nods at Pat, who got it after a second or so. Pat said, "Wow, it's huge." There was just a hint of an uncertain question mark at the end of her sentence, but I ignored it. I walked around behind Lily again, saying, "It's far too big to be able to stick into Lily's asshole while she's awake, but I might be able to force it in while she's asleep and so relaxed." As close together in time as possible, I lifted her top leg, put the toe of my shoe against her asshole, and started pushing it. The front of my shoe is a GREAT DEAL wider than Lily's rosebud, something that Lily would have noticed pretty damned quickly. Lily's hips jerked forward, both her hands flew to cover her asshole, and she rolled onto her back. Feeling safe, she looked back at me. I was kneeling on the side of the bed, proudly holding my shoe at the appropriate height, with a big smile on my face. Lily looked confused. Pat was laughing at Lily's reaction while I said, "Roll back over, Lily. I want to see if I can get both shoes into your asshole." Then I started laughing too. I dropped my shoe on the floor and climbed onto the bed properly, still laughing. With a concerned look on her face, Lily asked, "You joking?" "THIS time. Who knows what might happen next time you pretend to be asleep. I don't know whether you were doing it to eavesdrop or because you were being lazy AGAIN, but in either case a kick up the ass would be very appropriate, haha." "You knew I awake?" "Sure. You woke up when Pat was talking about using her nipples to put groping boys to sleep." "Yes. I very quiet. How you know?" Pat also asked, "Yeah, how could you tell? You weren't even looking at her; you were looking at me. If anyone should've noticed, it should've been me because I was facing her the most." I wasn't going to tell the truth, of course, so I said, "I've had enough experience with girls passing out. Plus I've spent some time getting to know Lily's body. I knew pretty well how long she'd be out. By the time a few extra seconds had gone past, I knew she must have been faking. I just thought of a funny way to tease her for it." Lily said, "Funny for you. Scare me! Julia not have big thing for that, does she?" "Why would she need a big dildo when she can borrow my shoes?" "You tricky man! Haha." "I'm not the one who was pretending to be asleep. Anyway, how come you did that?" "I awake and Pat talking. I comfortable and need rest. Last hour VERY tired making." Which was a great intro to the teasing idea I'd rejected while she was faking it. I said, "I'm sorry, but I have some bad news about the last hour." A puzzled Lily asked, "What?" Even Pat was looking on in confusion. "Remember we started it with me licking you?" "Yes." "I got carried away, and completely forgot to think about comparing the taste of Chinese and American pussies. Now we're going to have to repeat the ENTIRE hour all over again. Are you ready?" I pulled her legs open, and repeatedly licked my lips as I lowered my head toward her pussy. Lily's hands, which she was sitting on, rapidly whipped around to protect her pussy. To be doubly safe she rolled onto her front. I said, "Great! Asshole time! Where's my shoe?" Lily rolled over again, groaning, and saying, "You TRICKY! I need rest." "You moved very quickly when my shoe touched you. I think you must be good for another three or four times yet." "{Groan}. I not selfish. Pat next. Pat next and next and next. I need rest. I NEED rest!" Pat had been chuckling along with this by-play, but stopped chuckling long enough to say, "Yes, please. I would like some more now. You've both made me very horny." Lily asked, "I make you horny?" "EVERYTHING is making me horny. I've never had a night ANYTHING like this before - it's AMAZING! Yes, you did make me horny. I got very excited when you were rubbing my breasts. It was so intense having you rub me while Mark was pounding into you, and I could see him and see your face as you had your orgasm." "Good. I never make girl horny before." Pat said, "This is a night of firsts, isn't it?" Lily agreed, "Yes for you and me. Not for Mark." Mark, not for the first time, thought there had been enough talking. It was time for some grunting. I'd previously decided that I wanted to have Pat ride me. I don't get to use this position much because - for some reason - most of my lovers are too tired to do it properly. Pat had said that she was rested, so it was a good time to do it, especially because it was with Pat rather than Lily. One of the good things about the girl-on-top position (and there are several), is that her breasts are wonderfully displayed and readily accessible. Missionary position flattens them and doggy position hides them and makes them difficult to reach when I'm doing much thrusting. With a girl who has breasts as nice as Pat's, girl-on-top is a great position. Lily was occupying too much bed, so I said, "Excuse me Lily," while I pushed her toward the edge of the bed. I then lay on my back, and suavely invited, "Climb on, Pat. Time for you to fuck me." Pat said, "I've never done it this way. What do I do?" My respect for her boyfriend, whoever he is, plummeted. While I was instructing her how to mount up, I couldn't help wonder what Pat was going to tell her boyfriend the next time she saw him. I almost felt sorry for the poor guy; almost. I chose not to discuss hum, as there were better things to talk about now, such as, "You can raise and lower yourself vertically, which if you're feeling very energetic is best done if you're squatting rather than kneeling. I can help you do that by holding your hands or waist, but it's hard on your thigh muscles so most girls don't do it for long. It's fun for a short while, normally when you're just starting in this position. The most common movement is to have nearly all your weight resting on me and to move yourself rapidly forward and back, as that stimulates your clit well. That's the best way for you to get yourself to an orgasm in this position, particularly if you lean forward to increase the pressure or tension on your clit. You can also move your hips in horizontal circles, which can be fun as it gives unusual sensations, but it's not very intense. Another way is for you to hold yourself a few inches above me, and let me do all the thrusting. That's a good position too, and I can hold you up to make it easier for you. You can also lean backward to get my cock to press against the top of the inside of your pussy for a different sensation. Why don't we try them all for a few minutes each, so you can see for yourself?" I didn't suggest her turning around and doing it facing my feet, as that'd be a terrible visual waste. Pat thought my last idea sounded like a good one, and so it proved to be, as we both enjoyed ourselves. We spent most of the next twenty minutes in the usual forward-and-back motion, which was fine with me because it feels very nice, and I got to play with her lovely breasts. Pat discovered that she could lean down and kiss me, and she did a lot of that. She was starting to fall for the old Mark charm. You know what I mean: where she slides around on my cock while I lay on my back and say nothing. That's me at my most charming. While she was sitting on me, moving around however she wished, Pat suddenly remembered something. She asked, "Lily, do you normally pass out during sex?" Lily was resting and watching, but did have the energy to answer. "That first time. I not know until wake up. Mark VERY strong man." Pat said, "I thought so. Mark claimed that girls fainting from sex is common, and that you were probably the fainting type." "Because Mark, not me." "Yeah, that's what I thought." Lily added, "You help. You make me more exciting." I hadn't participated in the discussion because one of the good things about the girl-on-top position (and there are many) is that if the girl leans forward enough, then it is very easy to suck on her nipples. Especially if she has nice, large breasts. Thus I had two better things to do. It turned out that Pat had overestimated how rested she was. Not long after I picked up the pace, by holding her hips and pushing/pulling her back and forward vigorously, she started groaning in soreness while she was moaning in pleasure. I lifted her a few inches above me, some of her weight supported by her legs, and began finishing her off by thrusting rapidly up from below. We were heading for Pat's climax when I thought to worry about my own. I asked, "Lily, I think this will be Pat's last cum tonight; she's about done in. Do you want another one after I've finished her off?" Lily said, "Sorry. Too much. No more please." "Okay. You have to respect your limits. We'll fit in a few more before breakfast anyway." "{Groan}," from Pat | "Eh?" from Lily. I explained. "I'll be waking you at 6am for some more. You'll be rested after a good night's sleep." "MORE in morning?" It'd been Lily who asked that question, because I was going so fast under Pat now that she was having trouble catching her breath. Julia had told me to do so, to ensure that the girls arrived at our first class REALLY well fucked. Julia is always telling me to do things, and that instruction is definitely one of her better ones. I answered Lily, "Absolutely! You're both great girls to have sex with, so I'm looking forward to it. Especially because tonight hasn't lasted very long." I said all that to hopefully make it hard for them to refuse me. Pat was a bit of a rag doll now, so wasn't capable of refusing or agreeing to anything much. Lily was thinking about it. I didn't want her to do that, because instant acceptance was much better. I added, "You'll feel better after a good night's sleep. I have a feeling you'll sleep very soundly tonight." Lily just shook her head. In disagreement with something, or perhaps in disbelief. I didn't bother asking. I was on the home stretch with Pat, and I wanted to enjoy my cum. I figured I'd earned it! As Pat's orgasm got close, her inability to talk turned into a very vociferous ability to yell. I was very happy too. Pat's got a very nice body, and it was a lot of fun to look up at it while it was bouncing around so much. After our mutual orgasm, I lowered Pat to the bed, toward its center so I could easily get up. I removed my rubber and wrapped it in a couple of tissues as usual. I wiped most of the pussy juice off me, then used a few more tissues to gently clean Pat. Lily cleaned herself a bit too, although she'd pretty much dried off already. Once all the tissues were disposed of, I asked, "Do either of you need to go to the bathroom before we go to sleep?" Neither wanted to enough to suffer through having to walk there. I told them where it was, "In case you wake up during the night. Also, if you do wake up, and I'm not in bed, don't worry about it. I'll just be doing some studying. If you need me for anything, I'll be in my study." I told them how to get to that room too. Lily asked, disbelievingly, "You study before wake us at 6 for sex?" I nodded. It wasn't quite 11pm yet, so I'd be waking just before 3am if the usual duration applied. 3am to 6am gave me three hours of study, obviously. Now that I could go at double speed - I was still kicking myself for not thinking of that earlier - I'd get quite a lot more done than I had the previous nights. In preparation, I got the three robes out of the closet (Julia had bought Carol a matching one on their shopping trip). Mostly to get mine out so I didn't have to hunt for it at 3am, and also in case the girls needed a trip to the bathroom or wanted one in the morning. Pat had been lying motionless, watching me fetch them. Her eyeballs were about the only part of her that was moving; the poor girl had overdone it. She said, "You're not tired or sore?" "No, I'm very fit. It was only about three hours. An hour and a half each. That's really not very much." Pat opined, "Yes it was! You pounded my body into exhaustion." Lily agreed, "Yeah." Changing the subject, I said, "Let's get you two under the covers." Easier said than done, especially for Pat. I lifted her off the bed, while Lily pulled down the covers on the side opposite her, rolled over to that side, then pulled them down on her original side. I carried Pat around to that side, saying, "For a girl with a supposedly big ass, you don't weigh very much." Helped by the ten pounds of TK force I had pushing upward on the underside of my arms. She laughed, then cut it off, moaned, and called me a meanie for making her laugh. I turned on a bedside light, then turned off the room's main lights. I tried to get Pat to move into the middle of the bed, so I could sleep on the side. Neither girl would allow that, Pat stating, "Julia told us that you have to sleep in the middle." I was momentarily curious about what reason Julia had given Pat and Lily. It would've been, "Because Mark's the Lord," but I realized that whatever it had been, it'd be embarrassing to hear now, so I just accepted it. I had to step over Pat and then slither down under the covers. It was hard to do gracefully, even for me. After I'd stretched enough to turn the light off, and had lain back down again, both girls moved in closer to me to cuddle. I lay on my back, with an arm around each of them. Pat was the first to speak. She kissed me on the cheek, then said, "I want to thank you very, very much for tonight, Mark. It was exciting, exhilarating and exhausting, haha. It was also a revelation. I've learned things, done things, and had my eyes opened so much. You've changed the way I think about sex and relationships. They're very important parts of life so I owe you a great deal, and I won't forget it." #4: #1: Before I could respond, Lily immediately followed Pat with, "I learn Mark VERY SPECIAL man. Very, very special." I said, "I thank you, but I think you've overstated it. We all enjoyed some good sex, but it's hardly a life-altering experience." Lily started answering, but Pat overrode her, insisting, "Let me answer this, please Lily. I was thinking about this earlier, back when I could still think. Mark, you could have taken any two girls to bed tonight and done the same things. This has not been a profound experience for you. But Lily and I couldn't have had this with any other guy. Julia's right that you are unique and special. This HAS been a profound night for us. We haven't changed your view of life, but you have changed ours. Mine anyway, I shouldn't speak for Lily." Lily said, "I same." Pat answered, "I don't have anything more to say. I'm too tired and want to sleep now." Lily agreed, "I same again, haha." I said, "Goodnight, my two beautiful lovers." I waited for a couple of seconds. No one said anything and they were both showing no intent to move in my proximity sense. #1: #4: #3: #4: #1: #3: On that profound decision, we ordered ourselves to sleep. ------- Chapter 94: Lily and Pat in the Morning Friday, April 22, 2005 When I woke both girls were still cuddling me. The bedside clock showed just before 3am, so it was time for me to get up. The worst thing about threesomes - because it's the ONLY bad thing about them - is trying to get out of bed from the middle position. It'd be trivially easy for either of the girls to get out, but from my position in the middle it's a real nuisance. I can only imagine how 'bad' a fivesome would be. I decided to clamber over Lily, as she was the smaller obstacle, had been the least tired, and was a Liaison so had 'duties', apparently including being clambered over. [One evening, a few from now, I joked around with Julia and Carol about how I could get out of bed from the middle without clambering over one of the girls. We rejected my idea of a trapdoor that somehow dropped me through the mattress so I could crawl out from under the bed, or some sort of pneumatic rope and pulley system attached to the ceiling which could lift me up and over the girls. Julia rejected my less drastic idea of our sleeping with our heads where our feet would normally be, so I could crawl out straight over my pillow and onto the floor. Julia had pointed out that our pillows would annoyingly fall off the end of the bed during the night, and she didn't want the bedside tables to either be in the middle of the room or remain where they were, which would be inconveniently at our feet. I would have to keep clambering. Much later, I found several very cool ways to get out from the middle, the first - admittedly not as good as later techniques - only a few weeks from now.] Both girls still had an arm over me, as they'd had when we went to sleep, so I picked each arm up and moved it out of the way, then I gracelessly - because there is no graceful way - climbed out over top of Lily. She muttered something and rolled over, but didn't wake up. Once I was standing beside the bed, I was tempted to push Lily closer to Pat and put their arms around each other. No doubt they would sleep better that way, now that they were unconsciously used to hugging someone. I enjoyed thinking about my being so considerate, but decided against acting on the idea. I'd be having sex with them again in three hours anyway, and I suspected there'd be a decent amount of girl-on-girl contact then. I put my robe on, and then went to do my studying via the kitchen, because I was hungry. The printer had done its thing successfully, so I'd be immediately able to study very productively, two minds reading the lecture notes off the screen, and the other two reading the printed notes. Prof would be very please. I'd had over a year of practice doing this with schoolwork, so I knew the system worked very well. [[The previous sentence is what I thought at the time, and it is literally true, but some problems with the "Divide and Conquer" system did emerge in a few days. I'll explain my use of the technique a little more fully so when it does go wrong, you won't think I've been deceptive or inconsistent. We didn't actually use the "Divide and Conquer" approach to study discrete subjects at school because we wanted all our minds to be able to 'carry their weight' by contributing to assignments and exam questions. Keeping all of my minds up to date with every subject wasn't difficult: We rotated which of my minds was on duty for each class to minimize our knowledge gaps for each subject, we did a small amount of revision most evenings to spot and fill any gaps, and classwork was slow enough that all my active minds could keep up reasonably well just by tuning into the class occasionally, even if some of us were working on something else in the class (remember that we can 'talk' internally, so if a mind was doing homework for some other subject and only half-comprehended something from the current teacher had just said, he could immediately ask the other minds to clarify the material). The mind that was on centering duty for each class was the most disadvantaged when it came to understanding what was taught that period because although he'd heard and seen it, we'd trained ourselves not to think about anything when on duty. Despite the thoughtlessness, even the on-duty mind had absorbed enough of the material that subsequent revision of it was quickly able to fill in any understanding gaps. In short, we didn't Divide and Conquer entire school subjects for an entire year, but did almost constantly divide up short-term tasks, so we knew the technique worked very well. It was because we employed that technique so constantly for almost everything we did during the day that we didn't make the effort to think about how we were using it for the college courses. Had we done so, we would have realized that there were a couple of fundamental differences in that situation which would later cause us trouble, one of which was our powering linearly through all the lectures as fast as we could.]] Dividing my minds this way is particularly suitable with a good subject such as Math. It wouldn't matter if half as many minds know how to do something because in math, if you know something, then you KNOW it. Knowing it four times wouldn't make me do any better in exams. The only downside for not knowing something with all four minds is I might have a little trouble leapfrogging questions in a quiz or exam if too many of the questions on a page require the same minds. That's pretty rare and I can always flick ahead a page, so I'm not too worried about it. Certainly not enough to justify halving my studying speed. I'd started printing this morning's third lecture as soon as I'd arrived in the study, but I discovered that the printer was very fast compared to our one at home, so the printing time for a lecture was considerably less than the time it took me to read one. I changed to printing lecture n+1 just before I began studying lecture n (I'm in the mood to express myself algebraically). I could've printed all the lectures out in one long print run so I wouldn't have to bother with the repetitive little breaks, but I quite liked having several little breaks - I called them "cookie breaks". During my morning's work, I hit a problem in calculus. The course assumed some knowledge that I didn't have, so it was probably a 12th grade topic. It wasn't explained in the college textbook either, presumably because it also assumed the knowledge. I was meant to leave Prof a textbook 'flag' outside his bedroom to ask him to come and help me when he got up, but I was going to be boinking Lily and Pat at that time. Calculus is fun, but it can't quite compete with having threesome sex. Besides, Julia had told me I had to boink the girls again before breakfast, so I had no choice. For a few seconds I was stumped about what to do, then I thought to google the problem area. This isn't something I do much of at home because I study in my bedroom, and if I do make the effort of going to our PC, our dial-up is painfully slow and we're restricted on how long we're allowed to stay online. It turned out that there's lots of mathematical stuff available online, and I quickly found the solution to my block. Isn't the internet cool? Sex AND math are both readily available; it can't get much better than that! The only other noteworthy point is that I achieved an excellent rate of "lectures per hour". It looked like it'd only take me about a month to get all the posted lectures done, depending on how much time I 'lost' to sex. During that month the live class would have a few more lectures, increasing my target slightly, but it'd only take me one or two more nights to knock the new ones off. If I finished the two courses in a month, then the last month before exams (they were two months away) would be boring because I wouldn't have enough to do. I wondered whether there'd be any merit in starting a third course. I'd talk with Prof about it over breakfast. I studied until a natural stopping point, at about 6:10. I figured a few extra minutes of sleep for the girls wouldn't cost me anything, as I didn't think they'd have enough stamina to last through to breakfast time anyway. Back in the bedroom, I removed my robe and enjoyed the sight of the two girls cuddling in their sleep. Some time since I'd left, Pat had moved into the middle of the bed, and both girls now had their hands on each other (I'd lifted the covers to check). I had to walk around to Lily's side of the bed to grab some rubbers out of that bedside drawer, it being 'my' side when just Julia and I sleep here. I grabbed several packets and carried them around the other side of the bed, putting them in Julia's drawer so there'd be some within easy reach in the future. I put one on too, as I was already hard in anticipation of what was shortly to follow. I chose to snuggle in behind Pat, for a number of reasons. That it was side of the bed with the most room was a good reason, but I also wanted to wake Pat first so she'd discover that she and Lily were cuddling. If she was embarrassed about that, it was better done while Lily was still asleep, but if it pleased her, then it was best to let her see it. Lily was so cooperative I didn't have to worry about - what Julia would call - "manipulating" her, whereas I did need to "encourage" Pat to get into girl-on-girl sex. Pat was sleeping on her side facing Lily, so I could spoon with her very nicely. If, after I started kissing and fondling her, she got wet enough for my hard cock to slide into her, then so much the better. That was, in fact, my plan. One of the advantages of this position (and there are many) is that it's initially very romantic, as everyone seems to love spooning, and then - once the right mood has arrived - it also permits very sexual contact. It also makes it very easy to caress the girl's breasts - another good reason for me to get into the bed behind Pat - so it's a good position, and one I was soon in. I inserted my cock through Pat's upper-thighs, laying it alongside and against her pussy so I could stimulate that with small hip movements later. My top hand gently caressed one of her breasts, and my other hand stroked her hair. I lightly kissed and licked her neck and shoulder until she awoke. As soon as she started waking, I gave her a welcoming squeeze, saying, "Good morning, beautiful." She wasn't in a hurry to wake the rest of the way up, feeling warm and comfortable, and perhaps still somewhat tired. But after a few seconds, Pat said, "Mmm. I'm still here. This is nice." "I think so. It's also nice to see you and Lily so comfortably holding each other." I had recentered, and could just discern Pat's attention move to her hand and to Lily's hand on her hip. Pat said, "It IS comfortable. I didn't know I was doing it, but I feel good about it. Not as good as I feel in your arms, but still good. You're on the other side of me, so did you get up in the night?" "Yes, I did some studying, like I said I would." "Oh. Lily and I thought you might be too tired, because you fell asleep so quickly last night." "I always," for the last three weeks anyway, "fall asleep instantly. It doesn't matter whether I'm tired or not. I would've explained that to you last night, but I thought both of you were too tired to talk anymore." "Yeah, you tired us out pretty good. Lily tried to say something to you but you were already asleep. We joked about tiring you out, then we fell asleep." "I hope you're rested now, because I'm feeling very 'romantic'." Pat wiggled her hips then said, "Yes. I can feel your romance sticking between my legs." She wiggled her hips again, which I chose to interpret as body language for, "Go for it, Big Boy." My top hand was on her breast, which I thought was a perfectly good place for it. My lower hand was stroking her hair, which was a silly waste of a hand, so I pulled it back to push under her waist. I bent my elbow around so my hand was on her pussy, and so both my arms could hold her tightly to me when we get more vigorous. Pat put her left foot flat on the mattress, and bent that knee upward so that leg's thigh was now well separated from her lower leg's thigh, giving me very good access to her pussy. We initially couldn't kiss easily, but with her twisting her upper-body and head, and with my leaning over her somewhat, we were able to kiss well. (It really is a very good sexual position, being one of my favorites.) I threw most of the covers down the bed so I could see what was happening. If Lily got cold, and woke up, then that'd save me from having to make enough noise to wake her. Because - for sure - she was going to be woken very soon. I wanted Lily to join in, especially as Pat's body was facing her making girl-on-girl action very easy (it's a VERY good position). I was caressing Pat's breasts and pussy, eager to get through the foreplay preamble quickly. I could see that Pat's hands were under-employed, so I told her, "Play with Lily's breasts. She'll wake up soon, and she'll enjoy doing so with you touching her." (I hoped.) Pat moved to do so, which was very easy because the girls were an ideal distance apart. She asked at the same time, "Are you sure?" Was Pat asking whether I was sure Lily would be waking up soon, or whether I was sure she would like to wake with Pat touching her breasts? Lily WAS going to wake soon. I'd start hitting her with a pillow if necessary. Whether she'd like the breast contact I was less sure of, but I was sure she wouldn't complain about it, so I said, "Absolutely." It took an unsurprisingly short time for my hand to feel that Pat was getting wet. I hoped part of the reason was her emerging bisexuality. Only my hand could feel her moisture unfortunately, because of the damned rubber. Making love to Julia is SO much better, including because no rubber was needed. Carol would be starting her pills in about a week, and I was eagerly looking forward to going rubberless with her too. I wished there was a way to do without rubbers, but unwanted pregnancies and various horrible diseases are pretty effective inducements to be sensible. And pretty good things NOT to think about at times like this, so why am I? I slid the hand I had on Pat's pussy a little deeper between her legs, and used its fingers to angle my cock straight at her pussy. I moved my hips forward, until my cock was just entering her. "Oh yes!" Pat exclaimed, answering my unvoiced concern about whether I was going to fast. I slid all the way into her and Pat repeated herself even louder. My head was lying on the pillow directly behind Pat's as I nuzzled her neck, but I was close enough to Lily to proximity sense her waking up. To repeat the little tease of last night, I said, "Good morning, Lily." Pat looked at Lily, who only then opened her eyes. Pat said, "You did it again!" Although Pat was looking at Lily, the "you" was obviously me. Lily smiled, then looked down at her breasts, seeing Pat's hands on them. Looking back at Pat, Lily said, "GOOD morning, {giggle}. Why your hands stop, Pat?" Pat started moving them again, saying, "Mark surprised me. He knew you'd woken up again. How do you do that, Mark?" "I notice things." Which is true, I'd just failed to specify which sense I notice them with. "I thought I'd greet her this time, as I was too busy to go get my shoe." I gave Pat a couple of particularly hard thrusts, to remind her of what we were doing. It's not good for my ego when the girl forgets that I'm boinking her! Lily had been happily positive about Pat's touching her, so I invited her to participate in something I've done a couple of times with my two wives. I said, "Lily, lean forward and give us a three-way kiss." I kissed Pat on the corner of her mouth, while Lily moved forward to take me up on my invitation. Pat's head shrank back a little, but I considered it mostly from surprise. I kept my mouth in contact with hers, and in a couple of seconds Lily's lips met ours. Three-way kisses are silly as you can't get a real kiss out of them. They are fun occasionally though, and - more usefully this time - a good way to break the ice. We played around with it for a few seconds, then I gave Lily a serious one-on-one kiss, then I pulled back, and left it to the two girls. Lily looked at me, then Pat, then me again. I smiled and nodded toward Pat. Lily looked back at Pat, then moved forward to kiss her. Pat accepted it, and within a few seconds both the girls had entered into the spirit of the occasion. I closely watched the serious kissing that the girls had going. My cock lurched, which reminded me of this morning's agenda. I didn't have a lot of time to play around, so pulled my head back, grasped both of Pat's hips, and went for it. Lily's kisses and caresses of Pat's breasts were VERY helpful, and Pat's climax only took a few minutes. As soon as Pat had cum, I leaped over her, pushed Lily onto her back, hoisted her legs over my shoulders, and started hammering her. Pat recovered from her climax a few seconds after I'd started on Lily. Pat was still on her side and close to us, so I put my right hand around Pat's shoulders and pulled her closer and downward. Pat rotated as much as slid, as intended, so her head ended up lower than Lily's. I told Pat, "Suck on Lily's nipples." Pat's eyes opened wide at that. Lily exclaimed, "Yes! Please, Pat." Pat's mouth didn't have far to go, but she closed the distance slowly. If she was slow because she thought either of us would object, then she was very wrong. As with the kissing, once things got going and Lily was making appreciative noises, Pat became more enthusiastic, which made Lily even more appreciative, which... (you get the idea, including that I was getting quite appreciative myself). Neither girl had done these sorts of things before. Lily didn't hesitate to do anything I wanted, but Pat found each new escalation scary, and had to be gently pushed into it. As much as I like obedient girls - which is a LOT - I found Pat's slowly crumbling reluctance much sexier and more exciting than Lily's immediate obedience. Don't ask me why. Clearly there has to be an explanation, the only other alternative being that guys are illogical, but I'm too busy to work it out now. Both girls were enjoying themselves, especially Lily. Very soon Lily was well on her way to her climax. Near the end she grabbed Pat, and pulled her up so they could kiss while Lily came. Immediately after that, I pushed Pat onto her back, and repeated the same position I'd just finished with Lily. Pat said, "Oh." She can't be very smart if she was surprised. She should've known me well enough by now to expect this. I said, "And now Lily can return the favor, by sucking your beautiful breasts, Pat." Lily took the hint and started doing so. Soon Lily was using her mouth on one breast and her hands on both. Pat was having another good time. After about ten minutes of this, when Pat's body was starting to twitch and she was moaning more than talking, Lily took her mouth off Pat's breast, started sliding her right hand down Pat's body, and told Pat, "I touch you down there." "Ohhhhh," groaned Pat. Lily's hand reached its destination, and Pat's hips rose to help reinforce her contact with Lily's hand. Lily started stroking Pat pussy. I reached down and corrected Lily's finger positions, and moved her hand a few times for her, to show her what Pat liked best at this stage of her arousal. Pat moaned, "Yes. Like that. Just like that." I let go of Lily's hand and she continued unassisted, to Pat's verbal encouragement. Lily put her mouth back on Pat's nearest breast, and that was how we all were when Pat's climax hit her a couple of minutes later. I placed Pat's legs back on the mattress to either side of me, then reach across and put a hand around each of Lily's hips. I lifted her, and pulled her hips back toward me, laying her down so her body was on top of Pat's. After a little adjustment, Lily was perfectly lined up, lying face down on and face to face with Pat. Actually more like face to neck because I'd lined up their hips and Lily was shorter than Pat. I had already spread Lily's legs to the outside of Pat's so it was very easy for me to slide my cock into Lily's pussy. I was holding Lily's hips up, to take most of her weight off Pat, so I had all the control I needed to start giving Lily another good 'seeing to'. Pat joined in, leaning forward enough to start kissing Lily. I lowered Lily so the girls' clits came into contact with each other, my thrusts into Lily causing her to rub back and forth on Pat. Their moans and cries of "God yes!" telling me what they thought about that. I didn't have such a good angle into Lily anymore, but sliding my knees back farther improved that, and soon I was thrusting at a more downward angle into Lily. The angle, making Lily and Pat even happier. They were repeatedly informing me of that fact, when they weren't too busy kissing. Fortunately, for my ego's sake, Lily came first, otherwise I'd have been questioning how effective my cock-work was. Lily came first, and she came MOST. She REALLY let loose. The girls were getting each other very excited (I like to think I was helping too), so each of their orgasms was getting more and more impressive. This one blew Lily's fuses, and part way through her screaming, she suddenly decided to have a little nap. When Lily collapsed on Pat, I pulled out. Pat moaned at the cessation of activity. I ignored her moan, knowing that she'd be back in action in a few seconds. Then Pat noticed that Lily was totally limp. Pat said, "Has Lily passed out again?" "Yep. She denied it last night, but I think she must be the fainting type." Pat and I joked around about that while I picked Lily up and turned her around so I could put her on the bed, on her back and with her head toward one of the bottom corners, so her body was diagonally across the bed. Lily was still out of it, but Pat was excited and fully aware, although getting tired. I could see her trying to puzzle out what was going to happen next. I'd been faithfully alternating orgasms between the girls, so it was Pat's turn now but I'd taken quite a lot of time to arrange Lily. I walked back around the bed to Pat's side, climbed on and walked on my hands and knees over to her. I kissed her a couple of times, then asked, "Having a good time?" The poor girl visibly struggled for words. Her mouth opened, and for a second nothing came out. She eventually decided on, "God yes! Last night was the best sex I've EVER had, and this morning's is EVEN better! When Lily and you are both doing me, it's AMAZING! I can't BELIEVE how..." She'd had trouble starting her answer, but once started, I thought she'd never stop. I jumped in with, "We've got time for one more cum for each of you, so I want to make it the best I can." Actually we had more time than that, because we'd been very quick this morning, largely because the girls were turning each other on so much. I only wanted one more each mostly because I thought the girls needed some quality hugging and chatting time, to finish on a good emotional note. The physical side of things had been a great success, and I was going to build on it. I'd seen enough romantic shows on TV - the penalty of living in a family with so many females in it - that I knew females like that sort of stuff. I wouldn't normally talk to girls about emotional stuff, because I'd be certain to mess everything up, but I actually felt quite confident about my little plan. I had a good idea what sort of thing to say, and I could keep the focus very narrow and on a subject I felt comfortable talking about. But for now, on with the sex! I explained to Pat how I wanted her to move. When she finally grasped what I was suggesting, she was shocked. "I've NEVER done ANYTHING like that before. I don't think..." Before she got all negative on me, I asked her, "How many other things have you done in the last twelve hours that you'd NEVER done before?" Her mental wheels spun, going nowhere, so I helped her out, "Have you ever rubbed another girl's breasts before?" "No." "How about had another girl rub yours?" "No." "Have you ever kissed a girl passionately before? Or sucked her nipples? Or had her suck yours? Or had her rub your pussy while a guy was screwing you? Or rubbed clitties with another girl while she was being fucked? Have you done ANY of those things?" "No. Nothing like any of those." "A minute ago you were saying that this morning's sex was even better than last night's. Ask yourself how that's possible when I'm doing the same stuff I was doing last night? The difference now is that I've been encouraging you and Lily to have sex with each other at the same time as I am. Last night you were having sex only half the time because you were waiting to have turns with me. This morning you're having sex ALL the time with TWO people, so it's FOUR times better than last night. Trust me on this. I know a thing or two about good sex, don't I?" "I'll say! But I don't know what to do. I've never done that before ... Oops, I said that already, didn't I?" "I've watched you have sex with Lily so far this morning, and you've got a good touch. You're careful, and you try to give her pleasure. You're not like some guy who grabs and squeezes without regard for the girl. You're a good lover, and so far Lily has thoroughly enjoyed everything you've done, so this will be no different. Trust me, okay?" "I do trust you. I've never met anyone who knows as much about this stuff as you do." It truly is amazing what you can learn in three weeks, when you've got my advantages: four minds, near infinite endurance (I still don't understand how that can be possible), go-soft commands, superb physical coordination, and even enough strength to pick up and hold girls. Forgoing further conversation, I started pulling Pat into the right position. She chose to cooperate with the person that she trusted so much: a horny, 15-year old boy. I hoped her degree of trust didn't extend to everyone in that demographic. Lily was already well positioned, so it only took a few seconds to get Pat on her hands and knees above Lily, facing in the opposite direction. I kissed Pat on the lips, saying, "I'm going to slowly fuck you until Lily joins us, which shouldn't be long. You can do whatever you want at this end, but I suggest some simple rubs and licks. Listen to Lily, she'll tell you what she likes. You can ask her now, if you like, because she just woke up." Pat said, "You can't POSSIBLY tell that by looking at her legs!" Lily had a different subject on the tip of her tongue, "Mmm. Pretty view." The next sound I heard was that of Lily licking Pat's pussy. It was VERY closely followed by Pat saying, "OH!" For what I wanted to do next - which was to 'do' Pat - I was at the wrong end. I started walking around the bed, leaving Pat to puzzle out how I could possibly know when Lily was awake. I didn't think she'd figure it out, partly because Lily's actions were HIGHLY distracting. I grabbed a pillow and folded it under Lily's head, then slid myself into Pat. I started slowly and didn't speed up, mostly because I was REALLY enjoying Lily's licking of my ball sack. I've recently formed the impression that Lily is a VERY nice girl. Lily also licked the base of my cock, and around Pat's pussy, which Pat verbally appreciated very much. One of the things I thought about was that when I'd grabbed the pillow for Lily, I'd almost starting using TK to fetch it. I use TK a lot with Julia and/or Carol. We all enjoy it. Not just for touching, such as rubbing the girls' nipples when my hands are elsewhere, but also for fetching things like pillows or another rubber. Julia especially gets quite a thrill out of seeing my power in action. There'd been three or four times since Lily had arrived yesterday that I'd nearly used TK. I hadn't been in as much danger of revealing it by flying something as you might think. First, using TK is a VERY conscious action. A hundred times more complicated than picking something up with a hand (I'll wildly estimate). Second, even if I had STARTED using TK to move a pillow (say), the pillow would have barely moved before I realized that I shouldn't be doing it and canceled the fingertips. If I made a mistake with TK, it was much more likely to be in touching one of the girls, such as squeezing a nipple. Perhaps this was another reason to favor group sex - as if it needed additional reasons! - as it made it easier to excuse touches in funny places provided the recipient wasn't looking at the invisible touch at the time. Threesomes also made it easier to keep the girls 'blissed out' so they might not notice, or be able to think about, impossible touches. My mind was just wandering, while I was enjoying myself slowly screwing Pat during her 69 with Lily. When I paid more attention, I could hear Pat making lots of appreciative noises, which I always enjoy hearing. After another couple of minutes of my nice, slow pace, Pat said, "Faster please, Mark." I realized that Pat had been making a lot of verbal noise, fairly continuously, and therefore probably not doing a lot of pussy licking. It was a terrible waste of a good 69 position, and it inspired me to have an evil idea, "Oh, Pat. Did I forget to tell you the rule before we started?" It seem as if I'd 'forgotten' to mention it, since I'd only just invented it. "What rule?" Pat asked. "I won't let you cum until AFTER you've licked Lily to her orgasm." "What?" | "Good!" I added, "That's why I've been going so slowly: I was using Lily's arousal to set my pace, so I was effectively waiting for you. I didn't realize you didn't know the polite etiquette for the threesome 69 position. It's only fair and polite that the girl who's getting the cock gets the other girl off first." A possible problem occurred to me, so I clarified, "By 'gets off', I mean getting the other girl to orgasm, not climbing off her. After you get Lily off, I'll get you off, and then the two of you will turn over and we'll do it the other way around, with me fucking Lily. That way she'll have to get you off first. It's a very fair system." "Oh, I didn't know..." #2: " ... I don't know what to do?" "Just try doing anything and Lily will let you know what works for her, or what doesn't. Lily definitely wants to help you, because this is for her pleasure. I suggest you start with pushing her legs apart, and licking the tip of your tongue up and down the skin to the outside of her outer lips, including just below where they join on the opposite end as the clit. She likes that as a way of warming up." "I do?" asked Lily. I said, "Try it Pat, and let's see if Lily likes it." A few seconds later Lily exclaimed, "Oh, I DO like. How you know, Mark?" "I've spent some very enjoyable time down there. I noticed a few things." As Pat got Lily more aroused, I'd occasionally tell her what to try next. I was showing off; successfully as it turned out, because both girls were very impressed. Especially because I was giving my suggestions 'blind', as I certainly couldn't see what I was suggesting Pat to do. It was quite easy though, as I could judge Lily's arousal by looking at her face and listening to her noises. I increased Pat's arousal at the same rate as Pat increased Lily's, although I kept Pat a little behind. I wanted Pat to get Lily off, then for me to be able to finish Pat off almost immediately after, so they were close to cumming together. If I didn't judge it well, there'd be too much chance that Pat would lose focus near her climax and fail to get Lily off at all. My plan worked perfectly, aided by both girls having lost most of their inhibitions by now and finding it very easy to become more and more aroused. We didn't talk much, mostly me giving occasional suggestions to Pat, but I could tell that Pat was thrilled at being so successful at arousing Lily. Pat's fear of failure was soon replaced by pride in doing so well. She was well and truly corrupted. After their near simultaneous orgasms, and a little rest, Pat couldn't stop talking about how much she enjoyed getting Lily off. My fucking Pat so expertly didn't get a mention, which actually pleased me. All possible jokes about my ego aside, it made me think very well of Pat. She was overjoyed at GIVING Lily that much pleasure. That attitude is hugely important in a lover. Perhaps (I'm only speculating now, so I could easily be wrong), even more important than lovely, large breasts. Fortunately Pat had both those aspects working for her. When the girls were ready, we rebuilt the position with Lily on top this time (it's easier for me to penetrate the girl on top). Neither girl showed any reluctance. I didn't expect any from Lily, but Pat had rarely shown no reluctance, so her enthusiasm was good to see. According to the several-minutes old "Official Threesome 69 Etiquette", Lily had to get Pat off first. From our conversation last night I knew that Lily was equally inexperienced as Pat with girl-on-girl sex, but Lily had a completely different attitude and she dived right in. I hoped that Lily would ask me for suggestions for how best to stimulate Pat's pussy, so I could show off about how well I knew a second girl. That wasn't so I could take an ego trip, but because Julia wanted both girls to advertise how good I was. But Lily never asked. She never needed to. Whatever she was doing to Pat it was met with rapidly increasing expressions of approval. I managed to live with the knowledge that I wasn't essential for everyone else's good time, and instead I concentrated on giving Lily a good fuck. This would be my last one this morning, so I wanted it to be a good one for all concerned, including for me. I also concentrated on Pat's having a good time - I like being able to concentrate on multiple things, especially when they all involve sex with naked girls. I really enjoyed listening to Pat. I was proud of her for extending her boundaries so far in just a few hours. I guess she'd extended them exactly the same distance as Lily had, as they'd started from and ended at the same places, but Pat's journey had been the more difficult so my hat was off to her. Of the two girls, Lily is the most useful, but I like Pat more. Plus Pat has REALLY nice tits. Our three cums were virtually simultaneous. Our little stack collapsed onto the bed, as we all lay down for a rest. Strictly speaking I didn't need to rest, but I like cuddling naked girls so I was happy to join in. After a couple of silent minutes - the girls awake but quiet (they're VERY unusual girls) - I did some cleaning up. That taken care of, I climbed back between the girls again and pulled the covers over us. It was just after 7am, so there was time for some cuddling and talk. We didn't have long - showers were DEFINITELY needed, and breakfast too, of course - so I started with the bullshit shoveling, "While you're both quiet I want to say a few things. We have to shower soon and don't have much time, so I'll make like a teacher and sort of lecture you because it'll be faster. I want to talk about a few ways that you two particularly impressed me: -- "You both adapted very well to bisexuality. That's not really a comment about a sexual act. Rather it's about your trusting me and each other, about your feeling safe, your willingness to try risky new experiences, and your openness. You didn't just 'adapt', because by the end you were enthusiastic participants. There were even a few moments when I thought that neither of you would notice if I left the room, haha. That's not a complaint, but a compliment about how great it was to see you get so involved with each other. I'm VERY pleased that you both got so into it. As you now know, it's a LOT more fun for everyone. Much better than waiting for your turn, like we did last night. -- "I mentioned trust already, but I want to emphasize it. You both trusted me. Lily particularly, which is no criticism of Pat, because Lily was selected from a group of girls who were already putting themselves forward to me. Whereas Pat was picked by Julia on little more than a whim, so it wouldn't be fair to directly compare your attitudes. It was great that you both trusted me and deferred to my opinions and expertise. I know what I'm doing, about sex and a surprising range of other things, such as knowing when someone is sleeping or not, haha. Anyway, it was great that you both trusted me. -- "There are characteristics of each of your personalities that I think deserve special mention. Lily's obedience was an outstanding characteristic. Lily, you're obedient to Julia and me all the time, and we both value that highly. Me especially, because I'm so busy. I told you I did some study before waking you this morning. It sounded too boastful to describe it before, but I think it'll help make my point now. I got up at 3am, and studied from 3 to 6:15. I got exactly four hours sleep last night, while you two got over seven hours. I have too much I need to do to waste time sleeping, even after several hours of wonderful sex. -- "Pat, your personally impressed me in two ways. The first was over your being so happy at getting Lily to climax during the first 69, showing that you unselfishly like to give pleasure. There's no better trait in a lover, or in a person generally, than to be a good giver. The second trait of yours that I liked was that you were continually able to overcome your fears. Both of you were obedient, but in very different ways. Lily decided several days ago to be obedient and now simply does whatever Julia and I ask. You came here last night with no prior relationship, Pat. Every time you were pushed into doing yet another new thing for the first time, it was always a source of fear for you, but you always overcame that fear. You impressed me with that. -- "Last, I might suggest one problem you have. I think your eyesight can't be very good if you think your cute ass is too big." Lily and Pat had been making the occasional acknowledging noise during my speech, so I knew they were following along. My little joke at the end (it's always good to lighten the mood at the end of such a speech) caught them by surprise, then earned me a few laughs. God knows why, but Pat needed more reassurance, "You really think it's okay?" "It's so much better than 'okay', that I become erect when I think about fucking it." "Oh! I've never done anything like that before." Lily and I both laughed at that. After a couple of seconds even Pat joined in. I asked, "Have you done ANYTHING with us that you HAVE done before?" "Not many things, no. I can't believe what you two got me to do, and I can't believe how much I enjoyed everything. 'Enjoyed' isn't nearly strong enough; I've NEVER had sex as good as we had here! I didn't even know it was possible to have sex this good. My boyfriend's history, that's for sure! Which raises an important question." I'd guessed it might. It'd been one of the reasons why I'd allowed time to talk. During our wild sex this morning, Pat had become increasingly affectionate toward me. Mostly verbally as we'd been too busy to exchange affectionate actions, but it was clearly something that was growing in her, so it was best to get it addressed. Pat had paused, probably afraid to ask the question. I said, "I don't know when I'll be able to date you again, Pat. There are lots of girls who want to date me, most of whom I don't know well, so I have to spend time with each of them to get to know them a little. Eventually I'll be able to say who my favorites are and spend my time with just them, to get to know them even better and to reduce the number as fast as I can." I suddenly remembered Julia's lesson to me about not creating expectations that pressured me. I kicked myself a little for not remembering it earlier, because I could easily have dug myself into trouble already. Happily I hadn't, and what I needed to add fit easily into the theme I'd already started. I continued straight on with, "But I've only just started. Literally just started, you're the first non-Liaison girl that I've slept with, so I have no one to compare you with yet. That's why I gave my little speech a few minutes ago, I wanted you to know what I thought of you, which is highly. But whether you'll become my favorites I simply unable to tell yet. -- "Let me back up a little, because I didn't word that well. I made two mistakes." My two non-speaking minds had suggested corrections. "First, I certainly won't be sleeping with all the other girls who want to date me. What a HUGE waste of time that'd be! And probably unenjoyable most of the time too. Julia and I are going to be doing other things to reduce the number of girls as quickly as possible. Like the bowling thing on Sunday. Do you know about that, Pat?" "Yes. Julia invited me already. She's invited LOTS of girls." "Exactly. The idea is that I can meet them socially in a large group. Just by seeing how they behave socially, I might be able to cross half of them off any possible dating list. Julia's got other ideas too. I even heard her talking about some sort of essay contest, which sounded weird to me. But the important thing is we want to get the list down to as few girls as possible, as quickly as possible. I certainly don't want to sleep with a whole lot of girls whose company I end up not enjoying." #4: #3: #4: I continued, "The other mistake I made with my wording was in giving you the impression that you were the same as any other girl I might date. That's not true. I've seen you in class all year. I know you well enough to know that I like you. I wouldn't have slept with you otherwise." #4: #3: #4: "I said earlier that Julia selected you on 'little more than a whim.' That was poorly worded too. Julia didn't intend to choose anyone else for tonight. It was supposed to be only Lily. So adding a second girl was a whim, but it was not a whim that the second girl was you. Julia knew I liked you, and she double-checked that with me before she asked you if you wanted to come here. I'm certainly more attracted to you than many other girls. Especially now that I've seen the many ways in which you were good last night and this morning; the things that I talked about before. I expect you'll probably be one of my favorites, who I'll want to spend a lot more time with and get to know better. I just don't know WHEN I'll be able to decide who the few other favorites are. It depends how long it takes me to get to know the other girls well enough to find out they aren't compatible with me. Have I explained that well enough?" "You're saying you like me, but I have to be patient while you get to know lots of other girls, to see which of them you like the most, possibly even more than me." That was what I was saying, I just didn't like the way she summarized it. I was still thinking about how to re-word the truth so it sounded better, when Pat added, "If any guy other than you said that, I'd ... Actually, I don't know what I'd do, but whatever it was, it wouldn't be pretty and it'd be the end of any chance he had of a relationship with me. Hmm..." Pat was thinking. I thought the smartest thing to do was to say nothing. After a few seconds Pat said, "What you said about getting to know other girls, picking your favorites, etc., that's Julia's idea, rather than yours, isn't it?" Most things I do are Julia's idea, right down to the clothes I wear (groan!). On the other hand, I did like the idea of more girls (yippee!), and Julia was doing it because she knew I wanted it. So I wasn't sure how to answer Pat's question. I'm not a genius, but sometimes I can still be smart. I asked, "What makes you think that?" "It's simple. I was thinking that if any other guy said what you said, I'd accuse the asshole of thinking he was God's gift to women. But you've always been modest to the point of invisibility, even though you've got many reasons to be proud. You would never speak that way, even though you probably are God's gift to women in every way that I can think of, including that you don't think you are. You wouldn't say that, but Julia would. I've seen how Julia worships you and heard her talking about you, so I think you must have told me her words, not your own, because all of this is clearly her idea. I should talk to her about it. Is that okay with you?" Actually, I preferred it! Talking to a girl about stuff like this is very much like walking in a minefield. On the other hand, Julia would hate it if every "bottom tier" girl got my permission to talk with her; that's what Liaisons are for. I decided to give Pat permission, but to drastically reword my after-sex speech to avoid this mess with other girls in the future. "Okay, but I have some restrictions. First, don't do so until I've had a chance to tell Julia what happened last night and this morning. I don't want her to be answering personal questions in the dark, as that'd be unfair to her. I'll give you the nod after I've told Julia, and you can talk with her any time after that. Second, the whole point of Liaisons is so they can serve as intermediaries between most of the girls and Julia. Julia would not be pleased if I gave too many girls permission to shortcut their Liaisons and go directly to her. Julia has a very low threshold of what she considers 'too many girls.' You should have seen the way she treated latecomers at the first Liaison meeting, right Lily?" Lily agreed, "Yes. Julia was VERY strong. Important to make Julia happy about Mark things." Not exactly what I was expecting Lily to say, but usable. I took over, "You need to keep your discussions with Julia as brief as possible, ideally to one very short chat. Julia is being very efficient over this, even viciously efficient, but she has to be. She's doing several other things for me too, and her time is under pressure." "Got it. In that case my answer is, 'Yes, I will wait'." I'd lost track of the conversation; fear to a girly emotional meltdown will do that to you. I said, "Huh?" Pat answered, "You asked me to wait until you'd decided who your favorite girls were, and then to compete with them for your ongoing favor. My answer is that I agree to your request to wait. If my talk with Julia changes my mind, I might change my answer, but I don't think so. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think I don't even need to talk with Julia. She's only going to confirm my opinion, so I cancel my request to talk with her. I'll just wait for you. Would it encourage you to see me sooner if I offered to let you have me in the ass?" #4: #3: "Thank you for dangling that delectable although rather small bait in front of me, but this really isn't about sex. And if it was, sex with Julia is unbeatable anyway because of the feelings I have for her. Unless and until I develop feelings as strong for someone else, sex would never let me find a second girlfriend." I'd heard crap like that used in girly movies. #4: Pat sighed, "I was afraid you'd say that." "I'm impressed by how smart you are about this. And even though you don't want to question Julia anymore, I'll still be telling her about our time together because she'll want to know how her 'whim' worked out. I'll be telling her nice things about you, partly because I've had a good time, but mainly because I've learned several good things about you. As an additional point, if I suddenly find myself in the mood for taking a lovely piece of ass, yours will be the first one I think of. That should prove to you EXACTLY how highly emotionally developed and mature I am." I enjoyed their laughter. The were laughing at the truth, which I found particularly ironic. After it had died down, I said, "Lily. You've not had a chance to talk. Is there anything you want to discuss?" Lily answered, "I want to say I am VERY happy. You VERY good sex and very nice too. You VERY special man! I very glad Pat here. Not so I get rest, because Mark gentle even if just one. I enjoy sex with Pat too. More sex and better sex. Was VERY good visit. -- "Pat, Julia want us tell class how good Mark. How many times did you?..." Lily made an explosion sound and hand movements, then giggled. Pat answered, "My ex-boyfriend normally gives me zero, but I'm sure there were more than that! Haha. I wasn't counting, or even thinking sometimes. I guess four this morning, and more last night." Lily suggested, "We say, 'Maybe ten, but too good, hard count.' Okay?" "Sounds about right. Are you really going to tell the class that?" "Julia say tell; I tell." Pat said, "That reminds me of something. Can I change my Liaison to Lily please? With my surname, it should be Laila, but after Lily and I have shared what we just did, I'd prefer Lily." #3: I weasled, "For the moment let's agree that it's Lily. That's okay with you Lily?" "You say yes; I say yes. You boss." While I was admiring that, I finished my answer, "Okay, it's Lily. HOWEVER, I know Julia has plans for how the Liaisons will operate that she hasn't had a chance to talk with me about, so swapping you might cause problems. I'll check it with Julia. And for goodness sake, keep it quiet. If every other girl thinks she can swap Liaisons, it's going to turn into a mess." I was not happy with myself. Pat had scored two concessions off me: permission to question Julia directly, and now the change in assigned Liaison. If every girl I bedded extracted two concessions, Julia would be having stern words with me. Probably short ones. I'd better have a talk with her about which areas we could be flexible about, and which not. I suggested, with some enthusiasm, "Let's go have a shower then." Showering with one or more girls is fun, especially when there are breasts to be washed, which is happily often the case with girls. It's particularly enjoyable with girls like Carol, and now Pat, because large breasts clearly need a considerable amount of washing. ------- Chapter 95: Prof's Degree Bombshell Friday, April 22, 2005 (Continued) On the way to the shower, Pat asked, "How come Julia has three robes in her closet?" For a panic-filled second I thought Carol's and my incest had been caught through circumstantial evidence, but then I realized we were safe. Phew. I answered, "This one's mine, and you two are wearing Julia's and Carol's. Julia's is the short one, of course." "Oh, does Carol sleep here sometimes too?" There'd been a comment that I'd nearly made earlier, but had decided it wasn't worth the bother. I thought I'd trot it out now to change the subject. "Sure. Even more often than I do I think, although I've never bothered keeping track. Carol needed a lot more support at the beginning of her relationship with Julia, so she was here quite often. Can I change the subject, please Pat?" I didn't wait for consent, instead carrying straight on with, "Your question reminded me about your boyfriend. You said he'd soon be your ex-boyfriend. I feel a bit guilty about that because I don't know when I'll be able to spend time with you again. You don't have to get rid of him. I'm not asking you to, and I don't mind if you have a boyfriend, because there's no commitment between us yet." Pat answered, "I've lost interest in him. After you - not just your lovemaking, but everything about you - my boyfriend seems pathetic. He didn't seem all that great even before last night, and I've lost interest in him now. Me and my ass will wait for you." "Haha. Thanks for the little reminder." We were in the bathroom now, even though two out of the three of us had insisted on walking quite slowly. We shucked the robes and proceeded to have a very enjoyable shower. Four breasts needed a considerable amount of washing, and Pat clearly expected me to make an issue out of her ass, so I did. Both girls took flagrant liberties with my body too, which was also a lot of fun. I had to cut it short unfortunately. I wanted to talk with Prof over breakfast - both of those issues being important ("talk with Prof" and "breakfast") - and I was also worried about The Boys being locked out of the bathroom for too long. The number of toothbrushes and the shaving gear indicating that they didn't have their own bathroom somewhere else in the house that I hadn't seen yet. I hurried the girls back to the bedroom, at their slow, cautious pace. It was time to get dressed, and I had a dilemma. On the one hand, I definitely had to keep my back to the girls while I put on my "pull forward and lift" underwear, then quickly follow them with pants, before the embarrassing absurdity of my underwear was noticed. But on the other hand, I wanted to watch the girls get dressed, because that's sexy. I chose to minimize my embarrassment. Notice that I wrote "minimize". From what would have been horrific, down to merely horrible. I was particularly appalled by the cut-off shirt. There was an embarrassingly large amount of my midriff exposed. I felt like, and no doubt looked like, a total fool. Either that or a homosexual male prostitute. I was hoping for "total fool". I'd laid my clothes out in a corner of the room away from the girls, keeping the underwear hidden. They didn't look suspicious when off, but why take the risk that the design was recognized. The girls were chatting away happily about clothes somewhere behind me, when I shucked my robe, extracted and pulled on the underwear, and followed them immediately with the pants, which I noticed already had the 'correct' belt in the hoops. I put my socks and shoes on next, because I'd rather go entirely without a shirt than wear this blatantly egotistical one. Eventually I had no choice, as I knew I'd be in big trouble with Julia if I wore some other shirt instead of it, so I put it on then turned to face the ridicule. Pat and Lily were talking about clothes, so were deeply engrossed and probably wouldn't have noticed a bomb going off next to them. They'd have noticed a girl walking past with a mismatched sweater, but anything less important, such as an exploding bomb, would've gone unobserved. I stood there facing them, for several seconds, feeling like an idiot, because: I was dressed like an idiot, and I was standing still, facing them and not moving, which made me feel like an idiot. The sooner they noticed I was dressed like an idiot, the sooner I could stop feel like an idiot for standing there waiting for them to notice that I was an idiot. Eventually Lily noticed. Her talk stopped mid-word and her mouth fell open. Pat noticed the sudden stop in their interesting conversation about clothes, so she turned to look at whatever Lily was looking at. I like Pat, and her words about my coming on like I was 'God's gift to women' were ringing in my memory as an imminent source of embarrassment, so as she turned I said, "I'm sorry for these clothes. Julia's making me wear them." The girls didn't laugh, probably because they'd stopped breathing in shock. Eventually they remembered that air is really useful stuff, and started inhaling it again. The next five minutes were very embarrassing, which is what I'd expected, but it was in ways I'd not expected. The girls were gobsmacked. When they recovered from that, they were effusive in their declarations that I was the sexiest thing they'd ever seen. Apparently I get sexier when my naked body is covered, "covered" referring mainly to my pants, as the shirt covered very little. Pat and Lily, especially Pat, and especially Lily too, were rocked by my clothes. During the ensuing gushing, Brad Pitt was told to eat his heart out, the two girls repeatedly told each other that they'd never seen anyone look this hot (I presume they meant guys, because I'd seen plenty of girls looking hotter than me, i.e., most girls). The Brad Pitt comment was especially stupid (all their comments were stupid, but that one especially). After the symmetric photos exercise I'm forced to admit that I have become less unattractive - even somewhat handsome - but Brad Pitt was safe from any competition from me. The girls' comments were wrong, doubtless because their brains were running off hormones rather than logic. One issue that came up was Pat asking, "You're wearing those clothes to school?" I was frazzled enough that I nearly said, "No, I dress this way just for breakfast," but I caught myself in time. Instead I said, "Unfortunately yes." "We're going to walk into the school, next to you, dressed like that?" "I'd rather you walked immediately ahead of me so I could hide behind you, but I'm afraid so, yes." "And into our class like that?" Having established that I was going to walk into school dressed like this, I thought it was fairly unlikely that I'd stop somewhere mid-school to get changed, before walking into our class. I answered accordingly, "Yes." "Wow. They're going to FLIP! Can I hold your hand when you walk in?" That was one question I was happy answering, "Of course you can, Pat. I like you." "Wow. He likes me!" I'd just spent several hours making love to her while I was naked (in case you'd missed that nuance), and now Pat was getting all weak-kneed about holding my hand when I was half dressed. Clothes do funny things to female's brains. Lily suddenly remembered her cellphone had a camera. So my new look was recorded for posterity. From several angles. With and without Pat and/or Lily. Then they realized that if they positioned me in front of a mirror properly, they could get photos that captured multiple angles in the one shot, so the whole process restarted with that important addition. I eventually said, "I'm sorry girls, but I have to cut this short because I need to talk with Julia's father about my college courses." I was lying, because I wasn't the tiniest bit sorry. The girls were only half-dressed, something I hadn't been in the mood to notice. They quickly threw on whatever they needed to throw, and then I led them downstairs. They didn't like stairs very much, wincing as they descended and being very happy when they reached the bottom. I'll spare you the description of the ruckus my clothes caused at the breakfast table. You'd be the only person spared, because the Williamses certainly didn't spare me. I introduced the girls, "Lily, who's one of the Liaisons, so she'll be coming here regularly when the weekly meetings get going. And Pat, who's the first of the," I had a momentary pause, while I rejected "bottom-tier girls", and "ordinary girls", before I settled on, "non-Liaison girls that I've dated." The word "date" needed some work too. The girls were welcomed, and places were already set for us, so we settled in quickly. Or I settled in quickly; they were a significantly slower. Vanessa chuckled at them, saying, "I see Mark did a thorough job on you two?" Pat concentrated on getting to her seat. Leaving Lily to answer, "Yes. Very good job. Please no one say funny things." Talking to Prof was important, but loading up my plate came first. Something that Pat and Lily both commented on. Andrew jokingly inquired, "What can you possibly do that burns off so much energy?" Both girls blushed slightly and started chuckling before they cut it off to groan. I asked, "Prof, did Vanessa pass on my message about my doubled studying speed?" "Yes. That's great news." "Except that I should've realized it before I started the first day, but never mind that now. Last night's rate, extrapolated, gives me a catch-up date for both courses of about 3.5 weeks from now. Then I'll be waiting for each individual lecture from the last month, which will be very slow and boring. So I was wondering about picking up another course in the last month. My current rate is two weeks per course, so one more in the last month should be easy. I was a bit worried about quiz turnaround times, if I do the whole course that fast. What do you think?" As soon as I'd finished saying that, I realized there was a flaw in my logic. The speed I'd quoted assumed double-speed studying. If I started the third course after finishing the other two I'd have to study from two parts of it at the same time in order to get the speed I wanted. So I added, "I should have said that the extra course has to be one where it doesn't build on itself all year. It has to have independent blocks of material." [You're probably aware of this already, but the process that actually occurred when I spotted the problem, was that one mind was controlling our mouth, telling Prof the previous paragraph. Meanwhile another mind spotted the problem, and thought of the solution, by which time the first spoken paragraph was nearly finished. So the second mind waited until the mouth had stopped, then took it over to add the second paragraph to Prof. It's weird, cool, and very useful, but does make my conversations jump around a bit, even when I try to invent good links between the points.] Prof asked me a few questions, mainly to make sure he understood my "independent blocks of material" point. Then he added, "The quiz turnarounds shouldn't be a problem. There aren't that many over a year, and the lecturers will prioritize marking and returning yours. You're doing Differential Calculus now, and there are two more calculus courses required at that level: Integral Calculus and Infinite Series and Sequences. You could do either. Why don't we wait until you've done a quiz from each of your current courses, just to make sure all's going well, and then we'll enroll you. We might was well do it earlier, so you can start doing some of the work if you want a change. Where are you up to with the current courses?" I told him. "Good. You'll hit the quizzes soon. I'll put them in your study this evening. I'll tell your lecturers that I'll probably be faxing them your answers Saturday morning at about 8, and I'll ask them to grade them and send them back as soon as possible on Saturday. I'm looking forward to seeing how you do on them." "Yeah, me too. I'm pretty sure I'm on top of it all, but it'd be nice to get that confirmed." I was amused to have noticed that Pat and Lily were somewhat wide-eyed. With no explanations provided to them, much of what Prof and I had said would have been confusing. My amusement at their confusion disappeared following Prof's next statement, "If you can maintain two weeks per course, you'll be able to complete your undergraduate degree next year." "Huh! The WHOLE degree!" I MUST have misheard him. "Yes, that should be doable. You could possibly do all the reading just during your early morning study hours. That'd be quite a push, but you'll only be doing one grade at school next year so you'll have plenty of spare time during the day and early evening. Completing the degree shouldn't be difficult for you. You'll have to go to OSU quite often, which will be a nuisance, but it shouldn't be too bad. We'll be able to get a couple of your requirements waived too. For example, did you know that you have to do three credits of fitness courses to get your BS in Mathematics? I'm sure that Pat and Lily will happily attest to your level of fitness, won't you girls?" ("BS" is Bachelor of Science. Mathematicians never bullshit.) Pat wasn't prepared to answer, but Lily said, "Yes. Mark is VERY fit." Prof chuckled, "Perhaps more credibly, winning your 10k event should count as course credit, I would think. Or you could just turn up wearing that shirt. Haha. -- "In a few more days we should be able to see whether you're fast enough to finish your first degree before you graduate high school. It'll require a lot of work at OSU's end, because we're not set up for students to complete courses in one to two weeks. We could use all the lecture notes from this year, but extra exams are going to have to be written just for you, and some of the lecturers are going to have to temporarily drop everything else in order to keep up with your needs. Fortunately, I think the Dean will back you, and everyone else will do what he tells them. I'll wait until I see your quiz results, but next week I should drop this bombshell in the Dean's lap. It's going to take a significant amount of planning and preparation to make it flow smoothly for you, so advance warning is essential." None of my minds had a coherent thought between them. I'd previously thought (although "thought" is an overly ambitious word in this context) that I'd do two courses this year, "a few more" next year, so that when I went to college the following year, I'd have somewhat less work to do. I hadn't thought about it in any more detail than that. I hadn't even wondered whether I'd save a whole year off my college education. Having the WHOLE degree knocked off before I finished high school was WAY beyond what I'd imagined. Prof added, "It'd probably be a good idea for you to start your online studying this summer. No fixed schedule for that, but even a couple of months of your early morning studying at you new rate will give you a great headstart. It's not as if you're going to be doing anything else at four in the morning, is it?" "Ahh, I guess not. I don't know. This is all too much of a surprise." "Yes. I was quite surprised when I realized the implications of your new rate too. Between that and a much lighter workload at school than you're used to, you should be able to do it easily. You won't be doing any 12th grade Math courses either, so that'll free up even more of your time." "Why won't I be doing them?" "You'll get credit for the college courses, freeing up from going to any of those classes, doing their homework, etc. It'll save some more of your time." "But I like Math! It's my favorite subject." "You'll be doing an ENTIRE degree's worth of Math in one year. I don't think you're going to miss your 12th grade class, which would probably bore you anyway." "Oh yeah. This is taking some time to get used to." "I can understand that. I think I'll slightly change something I said about your quizzes. If you do well in those, then I'll drop this bombshell at work next week. In which case I'd better be very sure. I think I'll get up early tomorrow morning, about 5:30 or so, and bring the quizzes into you, to supervise your taking them. A lot of people are going to have to do a lot of extra work to get ready for your next year, so they'll feel better about it if I supervise your work more closely. Unfortunately a good chunk of the work preparing for your next year will need to be done before we get your results for the final exams at the end of this year, so we can't wait for those. -- "Also, you would've read in the material Maureen got for you that about a third of your degree has to be picked from the smorgasbord of "Baccalaureate Core Courses". They range from public speaking, to physical sciences, to cultural and societal topics. They're intended to make graduates well-rounded individuals and they're required. They're independent of every other course, so you can do them in real-time during the year. You've got that information at your home, yes?" "Ahh, yeah. I've only very lightly skimmed them, because there are hundreds of them and I only need to do a few. I was mostly reading up on the Math courses." Vanessa said, "There's another Core course that we might be able to get credited for you: "Human Sexuality". I believe you probably understand that material well already, haha." Pat declared, "Mark should be the teacher! It'd be a VERY popular subject." Vanessa added, "There are a couple of Core courses that I'd suggest could be very useful for your future, Mark, on Ethics and Power. That's not power like electricity; it's power in the personal sense, like your power over Julia. They don't go into any depth, but they'll give you something to think about. There are several courses in my department that I'd like you to do, but it's too early for those. We'll make them part of one of your later degrees." "Huh? There are going to be more of them?" Prof said, "Absolutely. If you progress in Math you'll do a master's and a doctorate. I don't know that you'll want to go that far in such a pure field. Vanessa's got some strong opinions about your needs in her area of expertise, and I'm inclined to agree that those are probably more important than pure math, but please don't let my Department Head know I said that! Haha. -- "Julia's convinced you're going to need to manage a large organization, so she's pro-business studies. Not for money reasons, but for some of the skills you'd learn at that college. But don't worry about all that now. It won't start becoming an issue for another six months or so, and we'll all help you choose a university and design a course for you. You'll be able to dictate your own terms so we'll get you something good, even if it's a diverse pastiche that'll confuse everyone else. I see you're not eating, so you must be addled, haha. We don't need to decide anything now, so get back to your breakfast." As tempting as breakfast was (and you know it truly was!), I couldn't return to it yet. I said, "I don't know that I can do ANY of what you've talked about, let alone so much of it. I've just done a little bit of a couple of college courses so far. I think you're extrapolating way too far. A large number of people doing a whole bunch of extra work for me is a SERIOUS worry!" I was expecting some reassurance, hopefully REALLY effective reassurance, so was surprised when Prof said, "We know you might not be able to do it. We've all seen early geniuses who hit a plateau and stall. It's an especially common phenomenon in Mathematics. We - by which I mean OSU - will do as much as we can for you next year. If you hit a biological limit, then such is life. There's no fault associated with failing because you can't exceed your limits. However, WE would be at fault if we held you back." Vanessa said, "Prof will give the Dean the most accurate information he can about your achievements and potential, and then leave it to the Dean to make his decision. That's the Dean's job. It's his decision whether or not to allocate his staff and resources to make it possible for you to complete your BS next year. Your responsibility is just to do the best you can. If you do your best - which I'm sure you will - then neither you nor anyone else will be blamed for anything other than not supporting you properly." All of that made sense and sounded good, but my problem was that I knew I truly had an IQ of only 105. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, I was going to hit material that was too hard for my four averagely smart minds. I had no way of explaining this without getting into territory that I wanted NO ONE to have any idea of. The trouble was that short of refusing to do what Prof and Vanessa wanted, I couldn't think of any other way to slow them down. It boiled down to the following issues: It seemed impossible to stop these plans. I DID want to go to college anyway. I hadn't a couple of years ago, but did now. Prof and Vanessa seemed happy to accept the risk that I might hit a personal limit (there was no "might" about it, I WOULD hit my limit, sooner rather than later). Because of my double-speed studying and needing only four hours of sleep per night, I could do far more studying than other students. I didn't mind being loaded up with much more work than normal, especially as each mind would only be doing half of it so it wasn't all that bad. Because I enjoy math, each mind only doing half the studying was actually somewhat disappointing. I'd work on it, as everyone wanted, until I hit my IQ limit. Apparently not in this year's courses, because I'd done enough already to see that they were fairly straightforward, but surely the second or third year's courses would be too hard for me. I'll worry about crossing that bridge when I hit that brick wall (obviously I'm not an engineering genius). I nodded, to whoever needed a nod from me, saying, "Okay. I've thought it through, and we'll go ahead as you described. I think you're overly optimistic about me not having a limit that'll kick in as the material gets harder, but I'll do the best I can. Presuming the Dean agrees, I guess." Prof said, "I don't think you have such a limit, Mark. I've seen several geniuses plateau over the years and they were all one-trick wonders. There was only one particular thing they were genius at, and they were usually average or below average in other areas. You're virtually a genius at everything, from Mathematics through to sex, and most mathematicians will tell you that there's normally a negative correlation between those, haha. -- "Second, I sure the Dean will go ahead with your one-year degree. I'm going to make an appointment to spring it on him personally, rather than in an email, because I want to see his face. He's going to wet himself when he hears what I think you can do. He might want to double-check me, maybe get your current lecturers to set you a test or verbally quiz you, but I don't think that'll be a problem, will it?" "I shouldn't think so. The courses I'm doing seem quite straightforward so far." "Good. I'm going to ask your lecturers to sit beside their fax machines tomorrow morning, and to get your grades back to me as soon as they can. They won't know why yet - I'll save that bombshell for the Dean - but I'll do my best to make sure they do." I'd better do a good job on those quizzes then! Not that I wouldn't have tried anyway. One good thing about math (and there are many, despite its not overlapping with sex), is that when you know the material, you know you know it. I suddenly had a thought, "Does Julia know about any of this? My doing a whole degree next year, I mean." Vanessa said, "She knows enough about your ability and about degrees that she could work it out for herself, but I don't think she's put it together yet. With three girls in Carol's bed overnight, I doubt she spent much time thinking about academia, haha. We thought you might enjoy springing it on her." "Never mind the Dean, Julia will wet herself! She enjoys ambushing me, so my getting one over on her will be good fun. She deserves it, for making me dress like this." -- I just remembered a small issue, and mentioned it to Prof. "Julia and Ava are staying with me tonight, here. Ava is the 11th grade Liaison. I'd normally give her a, um, workout in the morning, but the quizzes are obviously more important. I'll let Julia know there won't be any hanky-panky in the morning, not until after the quizzes are done, anyway." Prof acknowledged my statement. He certainly wasn't going to disagree with me that those quizzes were important, even more so than sex! Vanessa turned to the girls, "Lily, Pat; don't spoil Mark's surprise with Julia. More generally and more importantly, you should NOT talk about things you overhear in this house. It's up to Mark to decide how much of his life other people know. I strongly suggest that both of you realize that when it comes to retaining Mark's and Julia's friendships, that discretion and trustworthiness are worth a great deal more than sex appeal, or whatever else you think you've got going for you. If you're smart you'll keep your mouths shut about his business. Got it?" Lily answered, "I do what Mark and Julia say. More now, because Mark so special." Lily had proved herself cooperative already, but she'd given her answer extra emphasis, making it even more convincing. Vanessa prompted, "Pat?" "Mostly I don't understand. I was impressed when I thought Mark was doing even one college course, but doing a whole degree in one year while he's still at high school isn't possible, I would've thought. Except that both of you think he can do it, and you work at OSU, don't you?" Prof nodded, so Pat continued, "I think I'll just go to school and say that Mark is awesome in bed and not mention anything else. I'm not comfortable with anything else. This has been the weirdest breakfast conversation I've ever listened to." Robert said, "Actually it's less weird than normal. I've got to head off. Does anybody need a lift?" No one, by which Robert had meant Pat or Lily, did, so he left us. That started the general exodus. I was hurriedly finishing my breakfast when the phone rang for me. Vanessa joked around with Julia briefly about how I was dressed and the two well-screwed girls that were sitting next to me, then passed me the handset so I could talk with Julia between mouthfuls. After some brief lovey-dovey stuff, telling each other we missed each other and that sort of thing, Julia asked, "So it went well with Lily and Pat?" "Yes. Both girls were VERY good and we all had a lot of fun, especially this morning when they both discovered that they like bisexuality and threesomes. The only criticism I've got," I said this knowing both girls were listening intently. Both were pretending not to, but their pretence was transparent, "is that both of them begged off after ONLY three hours last night. I think we need to make all the girls who want to date me run a marathon first, and pick my dates from those who can finish within a decent time. I'm sure Lily and Pat would train hard for that." #4: Lily and Pat were not reacting enthusiastically to my suggestion. Julia laughingly suggested, "You could always take more than two girls to bed." "Sure, I could take more girls to bed, but sometimes a guy just likes to have some quality time with one of his favorites. Pat's trying to tempt me into another date with her by offering me her ass. What would happen if I got excited over that idea - because she does have a very nice ass - and couldn't hold myself back from wanting four or five hours of full-on sex with her. I'd have to do that on a Friday night so she could stay in bed recovering before school on Monday. Knowing she was in bed all weekend, I probably couldn't resist slipping upstairs a few times a day, just for some quick, two or three hour sessions with her. I fear she'd never get rested enough to walk again. Maybe all my dates should provide their own wheelchairs?" Both Pat and Lily laughed and groaned at that. Julia just laughed. I asked, "How did Ava work out?" "Ava has very good potential - even excellent potential - but she needs to work on her obedience. She knows that we understand things a lot better than her, and that we know what's best for her and you, but sometimes she still hesitates before doing what we tell her she should." I could hear Ava's urgent promises to be more obedient in the background, while Julia continued, "It's quite annoying when Carol or I ask her to do something which is obviously a good idea, but she doesn't understand and hesitates to act. Luckily she's stopped asking for explanations all the time - because that was a TERRIBLE waste of time and effort - but she still hesitates. Every time she hesitates she's sending Carol and me a message that she doesn't trust us, so she's making it much harder for us to develop a good relationship with her, or to think she'll be good enough for you." More background promises from Ava, never to hesitate again, etc. -- "Ava's slowly getting better at sex with girls, although she needs more practice. Carol must really like her, because Carol's offered to spend a lot of time helping Ava get better. I've told Carol that I'm not so worried about how good Ava is at sex, because I know she will get better at that with practice, but I'm more worried about Ava being obedient enough. I've asked Carol to give Ava lots of orders. Anything and everything that Carol can think of, even if it doesn't make much sense. You and I don't have time to train Ava properly, so we're very lucky that Carol is willing to do this for us. Carol is an extremely helpful girl. I wish Ava was so helpful." I could hear Ava declaring that she'd be 'super-helpful'. I'd seen her naked photos, so this was good! -- "I know you have VERY little time available for Ava, but it'd be a very big favor for her if you asked her to do as many things as you can think of. I want her to get into the habit of jumping to do everything immediately. Even silly little things like asking her to tie your shoestrings for you, carry your schoolbag, or other minutiae. Once she's proved to us that she trusts us and that she will do the important things we ask her to do, then we can stop asking her to do these little training jobs. But for now we have to train her to be more obedient. I'm sorry to put you to all this bother for just one girl, when you've got so many other girls who'll already do everything you want immediately, but Ava is quite sweet. She's also very fit, so you could probably fuck her for three hours or so before her body gave out and she wasn't any good for you after that." "You're enjoying yourself, aren't you?" "Yes, that's exactly the right word, Ava does have plenty of 'potential'. She's not nearly as smart as me, and of course no one is as genius as you, but I think she's learned never to argue with us again. She is a nice girl, and she is trying VERY hard. I have to admire how hard she tries, even though you've got plenty of other girls who easily do whatever you want." "Haha, I see. So is she going to be coming here tonight?" "Definitely. That would be great. But I should mention that Carol and I still aren't sure whether Ava is good enough to spend any time with you yet. We're not sure about tonight. We're going to see how Ava continues to work out for the rest of today, although we don't have much time we can spend with her. Carol and I are going to have a serious talk together after school about Ava, and we'll call her after that to let her know whether we think she's good enough at sex and obedience to spend time with you tonight. -- "I'm most worried about whether Ava is bisexual enough. She spent a lot of time last night and this morning trying to show us that she is, but the trouble is that you're so much better at understanding girls than I am. I'm worried that if Ava, me and you are together tonight, and Ava goes down on me the way she's been practicing, then even though I think she's getting quite good at it, you might look at her and see right through her. You might think she's funny, or embarrassing, or silly, which could ruin your mood. I'm trying to do the best I can, but it would be easier to train one of your other girls. Ava's lucky you like her so much already, otherwise I would've given up. -- "I've spent too long talking about her again. Let me talk about more important subjects. Are you driving Lily and Pat to school in your car, or is Lily driving herself separately?" "I'll ask, hang on. But before I do that, I have to mention that Prof has got some study-type work for me to do tomorrow morning, so I probably won't have time for any sex in the morning, just tonight. I'll tell you the details later. Can you adjust your plans accordingly please?" "Sure." "Good. I'll find out about the girls here, hang on." I found out the answer, then relayed it to Julia, "Lily will follow us in her car. Lily and Pat both want to walk into our first period class with me. Holding my hands, apparently. For some bizarre reason they don't think the way I'm dressed now screams 'egotistical homosexual idiot'. I must have boinked them too much last night because they've obviously suffered brain damage. But if they want to be seen near me, that's their problem, I guess." I remembered that Julia wanted to know that I'd boinked them impressively, so I added, "Or maybe they just want to hold my hand because they're having trouble walking. They're walking very funny this morning. You'd think they'd overexerted themselves recently, but I know that all they did was mostly lie around in bed, plus have just a little bit of sex with me and each other. They're nice girls, but they're weaklings." Julia said, "Good. I'm glad to hear you screwed both girls so well they can't walk properly. I'll make sure I'm in class before you, because I want to see the reception you get. That'll be so funny. Pat and Lily know to advertise how good you were last night?" "Yes, especially Lily. She's onto that." "Good for her. Make sure Pat backs her up. I'll hang up now. I want to be in class early and I need to tell Carol that you'll be very busy tomorrow morning, and may not need any extra girls overnight at all." I was about to correct her misunderstanding, when I realized she was jerking Ava's chain again. I finished with, "Say 'hello' to my family for me, please, and I love you, Julia." I probably don't say that often enough, as it always pleases her a great deal. We'd both had sex with two girls overnight, but for some reason I suspected that Julia was more in need of reassurance about our relationship than I was. The rest of the stuff we needed to do before we left was quickly finished, except for the girls putting their makeup on; that took a while. Personally I thought they could have painted stupid pictures all over their faces and no one would have noticed them if they were walking next to me. They gave their families quick calls. During Lily's call, Pat said to me, "I know you were joking about choosing girls who can run a marathon and our being weaklings, but compared to you we are. You must find that very frustrating at times?" I'm thrilled that I get any sex at all, so in truth the answer should've been, "God no!" I didn't give that answer, as I like Pat and I saw an opportunity to fertilize one of Julia's themes. Instead I said, "Yes and no, Pat." (It's always a good idea to leave your options open when talking with girls because they usually react in unexpected ways). "It's true that physically I could have far more sex than I did last night, or any other night. I would like to have more, of course, because I like sex. You wouldn't believe a 15-year old boy saying otherwise! But I've had enough by now to learn that quality is more important than quantity. I'd rather sex with just Julia than with any ten other girls, because of the emotions Julia and I have for each other. Julia has convinced me that we should include one or two more girls in our relationship. My physical stamina being one of the reasons, but there are others, including that Julia enjoys being bisexual. -- "Nights like last night, when Julia and I slept apart, I want to have as infrequently as possible, ideally not at all after we're old enough and have found one or two more girls that we are both compatible with. It'd put too many girls off if we told them right at the beginning that bisexuality was required, but the reality is that the girl or two that joins us will probably have to be bisexual. We know that many girls can happily adopt that lifestyle. Julia was unquestionably straight three weeks ago, for example. You've seen for yourself that it's actually the best approach and so much better than being rigidly straight. The most important consideration is that it's not really about sex, it's about emotions. Sex is fun, but it's just the icebreaker. Julia and I both want to love whoever joins us." At this point, with both Lily and Pat avidly listening, I realized that I'd wandered much further than I intended. Pat had just asked me whether I get physically frustrated, and I'd gone well beyond her question. What I'd said wasn't the message we wanted all the girls at school to hear, as it was too serious, intense and permanent sounding. So I changed my tack. I gave myself a little shake then said, "Sorry about that. I got really maudlin and carried away there. I guess I was missing Julia MUCH more than I thought, because I told you all the most schmaltzy things Julia and I have ever discussed. All of what I said is a true to some degree, but not yet. Julia and I are sixteen and fifteen, so we've got two and a half years before were allowed to live permanently together. Until then we both want to have some fun and experiences. We're very happy with each other, but we both know that we need to do more than focus totally on each other at such young ages. I was missing Julia and I guess there's been a lot happening around me recently, such as the huge changes in Carol's life when she fell in love with Julia. That started less than two weeks ago, so it's still a very important emotional issue for me. Pat, when you asked me whether I get frustrated about exhausting my lovers, I should have just said, 'Damn right! Bring me more beautiful lovers! Haha." They laughed, but they both still looked thoughtful, so I added, "Everything I said was true, but I didn't balance it well or get the timing right, but it's probably good that you heard it, as it'll help you understand me. And Julia too, come to that. To use you as an example, Pat. We joked around about your offering your ass to me. Maybe one evening I'll feel like a piece of lovely ass, and I'll call you and ask you to come over and give it to me. Or maybe I might be feeling schmaltzy again and I'll call to ask you to come over just because I'd like to spend some time with you. Maybe we'd have sex then, or maybe not. Me being a boy, probably we would, but sex wouldn't really be the reason I asked you over. It would be because I liked you, and I hoped you'd come because you liked me. Back before we had our showers, we talked about my finding my favorites. My favorites would be girls that I felt I could call up for EITHER reason, for their ass or simply because I liked them and wanted to spend some time with them. I feel myself getting overly maudlin again. We need to get moving girls, or we'll be late." I thought that'd muddied the waters sufficiently. They'd be able to tell the bottom tier girls great things about me physically, as well as some nice emotional stuff, without the emotional stuff coming across as threatening the way my first explanation had. I could see that Pat had something to say, but she held it back. It came out almost as soon as we were in 'my' car. I had the impression she'd been saving it until we were alone, Lily following us in her own car, a considerably nicer one than Julia's and mine. Pat released what she'd been holding back, saying, "Mark, when I asked about your being frustrated from girls not lasting long enough, I was asking because if you did, I was going to offer to start exercising to get fitter for you. What you said, when you got 'all schmaltzy', was not what I expected, but it was very lovely." I could see Pat steel herself, then say, "Mark. I like you very, very much. Much more than I've ever liked any other boy. I want you to know that if you call me up and ask me to come to you - for either of those two reasons, or for any other reason - then I will try to come. I want to be your favorite, Mark. I want to offer my body to you, and my heart." Pat would have carried on, getting far more schmaltzy than I had, but I'd suspect this might coming and had some thoughts prepared. I also didn't really want a crying girl in the car (it'd be almost impossible to extract my hanky out of the TIGHT pockets of these pants while sitting down). I interrupted her with, "I know, Pat. Thank you for telling me your thoughts, but I knew already." With considerable surprise, Pat exclaimed, "You did!" "Yes, that's why my schmaltzy talk always used you rather than Lily as my example. I was telling you that I knew you felt that way." The reason I didn't use Lily's name was because Lily doesn't interest me emotionally. Lily's helpfulness is great, but that's about all. It doesn't make me want her. I don't dislike her, and I could happily boink her (I'm a teenage boy), but she wasn't high on the list of girls I would call to come over to spend time with me. So I hadn't used Lily has an example, using Pat partly by process of elimination, but mostly because Pat is nice. A bit naive, but likable. She was significantly better looking than Lily, with a much better figure and a weaker personality; that latter point being an aspect of Pat that I recognized did attract me, but I prefer not to think about why. I continued, "I know I can call you up. You didn't have to keep your offer bottled up inside you ever since my schmaltzy talk and let it burst out of you as soon as we had some privacy." "You knew that too!" Pat's repeated surprise demonstrated her naiveté, or at least, inexperience. It hadn't been hard to notice. It was pretty obvious that I was the first guy she had much feeling for, and she couldn't hide it. I remembered some of the tricks that Julia had used on Ava, so I said, "Of course I noticed it. I'm extraordinarily good at noticing things. From Lily waking up, to your falling in love with me." "{Gasp}. I wasn't going to say that. I didn't want to scare you off." "That's not the true reason you didn't tell me that you loved me. Let me state something VERY explicitly now: Telling me, or telling Julia, things which aren't true will absolutely prevent you from being one of my friends, let alone a girlfriend. Neither Julia nor I can abide dishonesty, and there are plenty of other girls we can get to know. It doesn't matter how nice your ass is, or any other part of you, dishonesty is killer - so don't do it! Do you want to try again to explain why you didn't tell me you loved me?" "I'm very, very sorry Mark. I'll never..." "I don't need your apologies and promises. You made a mistake, you got caught and warned. Learn the lesson and move on. If you are totally honest in our future conversations then I will be happy. If you are not then we will be over. You're a fairly smart girl and I know you can do better than this, so just answer my question." There was a pause, then Pat exclaimed, "I don't KNOW! I don't want to lie, but I don't know." I was about to make some guesses, so I watched Pat carefully with one eye, the other watching the street and calling the first one back whenever it needed to judge distances or speeds accurately. I was mainly working off Pat's comment of, 'I want to offer my body to you, and my heart.' Not just the words, but her body language too had told me that she hadn't actually offered them; she'd merely said that she wanted to offer them. She was holding them back, wanting me to commit first. Probably because of insecurity, I thought, especially as she was so unconfident in telling me how she felt. Insecurity seemed the best guess. I started by spreading some bullshit, "The real reason you didn't tell me you loved me, was because you wanted me to profess love first. You were holding your commitment back, waiting for me to commit first." She was nodding; subtly, but enough that I could see I was on target. "You're insecure in your relationships with guys, not that you've ever had a good relationship with a guy." She'd only had one lover, who was her current boyfriend, who she'd several times said derogatory things about and had easily decided to break up with. She'd also said that she had never been so eager for a guy as she was with me, after spending only four or five hours awake with me, a couple of which I'd spent not talking to her as I was too busy making love to another girl. So I was reasonably sure she hadn't had a successful history with guys. -- "You've never committed yourself to a guy. You may have said so to them, but you've never made the emotionally leap. I don't know why a girl as attractive as you has yet to connect to a guy. Whether it's because you don't trust yourself, or you don't trust them, I can't tell yet." I could tell now, as the timing of her reaction had just given it away. I remembered that she'd been quite smart about the ways that girls thought, so she must have a blind spot of some sort with guys. "Now that I think about it, I do know which. You trust yourself, but you don't trust guys. It's not because some boyfriend took advantage of you in the past, so it's something else. You've been hurt by male untrustworthiness in some other way, but I'm not going to think that through any further as that's getting into areas which are none of my business." Another reason not to go down that road was because I'd hit a dead end. I could have taken stabs at it, e.g., guessed things like her mother and father had split up and she blamed her father, but I didn't want to bother, and I didn't want to know. All I was trying to do was fool her into thinking that I was MUCH smarter than her, that being the same tactic Julia was using on Ava. I wasn't that much smarter than Pat, but she was so inexperienced that she given out a couple of big clues, and the rest I could ham up to hopefully make myself look impressive. -- "I'm not going to worry about those issues because they're YOUR issues. There are trustworthy guys in this world, so you're wrong to distrust all guys." I'd painted myself into a bit of a corner now, because I was NOT particularly trustworthy. I was looking for girls to play with. They knew that, but I don't think they actually comprehended what it meant. If they did, they surely wouldn't let themselves fall in love with me! I could partially protect myself from future allegations from her, and - more importantly - from thinking badly of myself, by emphasizing that I was going to be dating multiple girls. I'll do that soon, but first... "So that is why you didn't tell me that you loved me. Because you are insecure in your relationships with guys because you don't trust them. Do you want me to give you some advice?" Pat was looking very unhappy, which was NOT how Julia wanted her to look when she walked into our first period classroom. I'd gone too far, and now needed to do some repair work. Giving her hope would be a good idea. I decided "{Sniff}" meant "Yes", so I said, "Julia likes you, Lily likes you, I like you. Many people think you're a nice person. I enjoyed your company last night and this morning, as you know from the little lecture I gave before our shower. I hope to enjoy your company again in the future too. You were the very first non-Liaison girl that I spent any time with, and I chose to make it very personal, intimate time. I did that because I've gotten to know you over the last several months at school, and I've liked what I've seen of your personality. And, as you now know, I'm EXTREMELY good at noticing things about people. I would like you to try to become one of my favorites, because I think you have a real shot at that. IF you think having a serious relationship with me is something you want. You say you love me, but do you really?" "Oh God, yes! But how can you want me? You know me so well, and you know I'm no good." "Actually Pat, I DO know you very well, and I know that you are good. That you don't trust guys doesn't make you a bad person, especially because there are heaps of guys who shouldn't be trusted, especially not by big-breasted girls; which I'm sure I don't have to explain to you. I KNOW you can learn this Pat. Last night and this morning you did several scary things that I asked you to do because you trusted me. I even complimented you for your trust in me. Remember my little speech just before our shower?" "Yes." "Good girl. You are a good person, Pat. I'm going to walk into our classroom in a few minutes holding your hand, and I'll kiss you in front of the whole class because I KNOW you're a good person. I would never do that to someone I thought was bad, so I must think you are good. Do you want me to kiss you in front of the whole class?" "Yes please! I'd really like that." "Good. Because I like kissing you. Plus I like that we're lovers now. Remember that I kept using your name when I was schmaltzy. That was deliberate because when I get schmaltzy, I like to think of you. I LIKE you, Pat, so please don't give up. I want you to try to be one of my favorites. I think we'd both be very happy if that happened, wouldn't we?" "Oh yes." We were driving into the school's driveway now, so it was time to try for a happy note. "If you become my favorite, PLEASE don't make me wear embarrassing clothes like these. The whole class is going to laugh their heads off when we walk in." "Are you KIDDING! You're a dream. They're going to blah, blah, blah..." All the usual gushing. Pat was happy, which meant Julia wouldn't kill me for messing up her plan. If there's one thing I've learned about girls (which is about the right number), it's that the best way to distract them is by mentioning clothes. It works every time. I parked, and Lily drove into the spot beside mine. I'd much prefer not to, but I got out of 'my' car. Now I was in public, dressed like a complete dork. At this point of my autobiography, I'd like to skip over all the "dork" aspects of the next several weeks of my life. I'd "like to", but unfortunately I had to live them and they did have some important effects, so I'm going to have the dubious enjoyment of writing about them. Try to feel some sympathy for me. I'd parked the car and was in the process of getting out of it, when there was a loud groan from Pat. During the ride she'd forgotten that her body's muscles were sore. She'd opened the car door and had swung her legs out in the normal way, during which she'd discovered that swinging her legs had not been a good idea. I called, "Hang on, I'll come around and help." I athletically ran around the car, perhaps bouncing somewhat more than strictly necessary. I held the door open for her and helped pull her out and upright, while she was saying, "God, you're an impressive bastard, aren't you?" That had been exactly the effect I'd been going for, but it was probably best not to agree out loud. I reached into the backseat and extracted our two bags. I knew the Pat and Lily wanted to hold my hands going into class, so I wouldn't be able to carry the invalid's bag for her, so I put it on the ground by her feet while I put my own backpack on. Lily joined us, and we headed for class. Me in the middle holding their hands, with their outside hands carrying their bags. We were cutting it fine for getting to class on time, but the girls preferred to walk slowly and carefully. I mentioned, "Pat, if we don't get to class before the teacher, I might not be able to kiss you in class the way I said I would." "I'm going as fast as I can, {groan}. You can kiss me after class instead, or as well!" There weren't many students around, and most of them were hurrying to class. The few that saw us gave us some strange looks, because it's not every day you see an obvious homosexual holding two funny-walking girls' hands. A couple of our classmates arrived at our classroom door at the same time as us, and they stopped in shock. Pat and Lily stopped too, happy to rest their bodies. It would be better not to respond to these classmates' comments, but to continue our limping progress into the classroom - I kept telling myself that it'll be like pulling a Band-Aid off": best to get the pain over with as quickly as possible - so I restarted the girls by pulling them toward the door. ------- Chapter 96: School Before Lunch Friday, April 22, 2005 (Continued) We walked into the room. Several guys saw me and immediately laughed, as I'd expected. As I dared hope but not really believed, many of the girls expressed their admiration by saying "Wow!", licking their lips, or making similar reactions. I was still very uncomfortable, but it could've been worse: the girls could've laughed and the guys could've licked their lips. The laughing guys eased off when they saw how most of the girls were reacting. I looked for and located a smiling Julia. For a moment I wished she was much bigger, so I could go hide behind her. Our teacher hadn't arrived yet, which I now regretted as it meant no one had any restraint on their reactions. I should've walked slower. Julia stood up and started coming toward me, while I escorted Pat to her seat near the front of the class. It didn't take long to get her there, even with her - I noticed - exaggerated limping. Pat dropped her bag near her desk, then swung around and pulled me into a scorcher of a kiss, her previously-bag-carrying hand going on to the naked small of my back - having no trouble finding it as there was about a foot of shirt missing. Her hand roamed up and down my back. Pat pulled her other hand out of my grasp, and used it to start groping my ass, all the while rubbing her body against mine. Fortunately it was not possible for me to feel any more embarrassed. My face being so red, a go-soft wasn't required. There was all the catcalling, whistling and stupidly immature male comments you'd expect (I've often claimed that my gender is logical, but I've never claimed that we're mature). I ignored all of that and decided to concentrate on Pat's kiss instead. Lily was still standing beside me, but she released my hand so I was able to put both of them around Pat to give her the attention she wanted. Pat kept her kiss fairly short. As passionate as she could possibly make it, but not long. She pulled her mouth away, and loudly declared, "Thank you VERY much for the most AMAZING night of my life! I never knew sex like that was possible. If you EVER want me again, let me know and I'll come running. My body is yours whenever you want it, just as soon as it has recovered, haha." #3: #4: #2: #4: Pat turned to speak to Lily, sparing me from the task of working out how to respond to her OTT flattery, "Lily, thank YOU very, very much too. I know last night was supposed to be yours alone, and you could easily have told Julia that you didn't want to share it. I'll never forget the favor you did me by letting me join you and Mark." -- Pat turned to Julia, who had just arrived beside me, "Julia, how can you POSSIBLY survive night after night of sex like that? Lily and I can barely walk!" Julia answered, "Now you know..." The guys were just starting to get excited about Pat's statements implying that she, Lily and I had enjoyed a wild threesome last night, when the teacher walked in, adding to the guys' frustrations. Julia stopped talking, it probably being a good idea not to let the teacher "know" whatever it was that Julia had been about to say. On the way to my chair I whispered to Lily, "I'll kiss you after this class." I'd been feeling guilty that Pat was getting all my attention. "Okay." Julia, Lily and I were behaving quietly, but the rest of the class was still far too excited. It didn't take long for Teach to notice my new attire. Two mornings in a row I'd caused considerable class disruption, and today was even worse than yesterday, both because my clothing was worse (it met every definition of "worse" that I could think of), and because of the effect of Pat's comments on the class. Teach was not impressed, "Mr. Anderson, I never realized what a troublemaker you are." "I haven't said a word!" "You don't have to say a word, dressed - or undressed - the way you are." "Julia likes me to dress like this." Another of the girls yelled out, "I LOVE it!" Nearly all of the other girls loudly and explicitly expressed their approval too. It was one of those classes. Julia 'apologized' to the teacher, "I'm sorry class is disrupted by Mark's being so incredibly sexy." Which produced the easily predicted results, thereby proving that Julia can't have been particularly sorry. -- When the teacher managed to get the class to settle down, Julia added, "Everyone will get used to it in a few more days." Another girl asked, "Mark's going to keep dressing like this?" "While we're looking for more lovers, yes." Which produced the same predictable results, although the teacher was even more annoyed this time. He settled the class down yet again. Julia wisely decided to say no more, and the rest of the period was erratically productive from the teacher's point of view. Only "erratically" because various disruptions continued to occur, even without Julia's unsubtle encouragement. For example, other girls tried to pass notes to Pat, Lily, Julia or me. I refused to see any headed my way, as I was already in enough trouble with Teach. On another occasion, Teach stridently told one girl, "STOP THAT!" She'd been sitting out of my sight, but there was little doubt what she'd been doing, especially as a few seconds later she asked to go to the bathroom " ... to finish off." Bathroom breaks were a common request from the class's girls, although I suspected it was mostly because they wanted to gossip there. The end-of-period bell eventually rang. All the girls sitting near Julia and me had already been edging closer, and they were like racehorses out of the gate (whatever those things are called that racehorses run out of at the start of a race). An extremely short race in this case, as the girls were only a few feet from us. They still took winning seriously though. Actually they all cheated, because they were yelling their questions even before they arrived. They'd spent all period thinking about the situation, and they had questions - lots of loud and often very explicit questions. Even before our teacher had left the room, and he couldn't get out fast enough. Julia climbed on her chair and cried for order, which I thought was ironic considering how often she given the same problem to Teach. "We don't have much time between classes, so listen up. You know we're looking for another girlfriend or two for Mark. Mark slept with Laila yesterday afternoon. Any of you can talk with her about what she thought of it when you see her. Last night Mark slept with Pat and Lily at my house, as you heard us arrange yesterday. I slept at his house, with his sister Carol and junior called Ava West. Lily, Pat, are you there?" Lily and Pat were located and allowed to squeeze through to Julia and me. I owed Lily a kiss, so I pulled her onto my lap and delivered it. One of the girls around us (about two-thirds of the girls in class were curious or frantic enough to hang around), asked, "How can you let your boyfriend kiss another girl, Julia?" Julia answered, "The same way he let's me kiss other girls. I started it first and he didn't get angry, so why should I?" "I bet he didn't!" yelled one of the throng. Julia yelled back, "It was his sister. 'She's a lesbian, dummy'." [I was quite proud that the "She's a lesbian, dummy," phrase was being heard increasingly often around school whenever someone did something particularly stupid. Usually, but not always, for a boy-girl thing, as Julia had just used it (God knows plenty of stupid things happen in that arena). It was being used with humor, which meant those speeches of mine had been well received and remembered positively.] Julia continued, "I'm away half the time that I should be available for Mark so it's fair enough that he spends time with other girls. Last, he's FAR too much of a man for me. He's too much for me intellectually, sexually, even emotionally - you all heard his loving speech about Carol. He overwhelms me. He overwhelmed Lily and Pat last night, didn't he?" Lily stood on a chair and said a whole bunch of really nice things about how good I was in bed. Her language was awkward, but her meaning was clear, including that I'd given her and Pat ten orgasms each, which blew the audience away ("What! EACH?") Pat climbed another chair and said, "Lily hasn't come close to saying how good Mark is. He's a nonstop sex machine who rocked both our worlds until we couldn't take any more. I have no doubt that he could've given us thirty or forty orgasms if we'd be fit enough to handle them. But more important than the quantity of his lovemaking, is the QUALITY. That was indescribable. Whatever you're thinking, you're wrong - he's better. -- "I can't believe I'm saying this, but even ignoring his lovemaking, Mark is an incredible guy. I made a complete fool of myself in his car on the way to school, and he treated me with kindness and compassion. I won't say any more about him, because I'll get far too schmaltzy {giggle}. Sorry, that's an in-joke between Mark and me. I understand why Julia is willing to share Mark, because he IS too much for any one girl, and no girl is good enough to deserve him. I know I'm not anywhere good enough, but I'm going to try to improve and hope I'm lucky enough to spend some more time with Mark. I'm going to sit down now, before I cry." She did look like it. Pat sat back down on my leg (Lily and Pat were still sharing my body), and buried her face in my shoulder. She wasn't crying, but it'd be best to leave her alone for a while. Julia, still standing on her chair, announced, "If any of you want the best sex you'll ever have in your life, or want to get to know Mark romantically, then you know what to do: express your interest to your Liaison! Not to Mark or me, because we don't have time for that. Over this weekend Lily will be putting up a website for Mark, which will contain more information and will start the process of Mark's choosing which of you he'd like to get to know better. We'll announce the web address at school next week. -- "If any of you are interested in seeing him in action athletically, Mark's got a soccer game at 2pm tomorrow at Crescent Valley High School. Most of you only know him from class, so you have no idea what he's like athletically. Even if you don't know much about soccer, come look at him play tomorrow. You'll be sorry if you don't. As you can tell from the clothes he's wearing now, and from Lily's and Pat's comments, he's as exceptional athletically as he is intellectually. Those of you whose surnames starting with N to Z, Dakota will be sleeping with Mark after school today, so you can ask her what she thought of it after that, or ask Lily, Laila or Pat. I'm sure they'll be happy to give you as many details as you want." If they wanted to stay on Julia's good side they would. "Mark and I are leaving now. I suggest the rest of you let Pat and Lily start walking to their next classes, as they're only able to walk slowly. It'd be nice if some of you carried their bags too." Julia stood down from her chair, which was my cue to induce Pat and Lily to stand. That took a few seconds. Their spirits were willing but their flesh was weak. It was very nice flesh, but definitely weak. I was sorry to leave Pat behind me. She was sore and her emotions had been getting quite a work-over recently. She'd admitted she loved me, but knew she wasn't good enough for me. That's pretty heavy stuff. I DID leave her behind, of course. I knew I had to toughen up. I was just sorry about it. Julia is good at forcing her way through crowds of girls. Which, given her size, is somewhat surprising. She more than compensates for her lack of size with an excess of fierce determination. She has the determination of a line backer. Or is it line blocker? Or tackler? Something like that. Whatever those football guys who run into the other team's football guys are called. Julia had to pointedly recite, "Ask your Liaison" a few times, then we were clear. I was happy to see that some of the other girls were helping Lily and Pat. As Julia and I left the room, I heard one of them ask either Lily or Pat, "You were exaggerating about the TWENTY orgasms, right?" As soon as we were out of the room, into the hallway, Julia said to me, "Carol sends her sisterly love. She also says, 'Thank you very much for her new sex toy'." "Huh?" I would have got it eventually, but Julia answered my grunt, "Ava. Carol likes playing with Ava. As I said on the phone, Carol has helpfully volunteered to train Ava to be obedient. Which I expect will require Ava to perform some very amusing public displays of - shall we say 'affection' - toward Carol." "Haha. Yes, I got that from our call. I'm glad Carol's so happy. So what're your plans for Ava tonight?" "We'll invite her around, specifying a time after the dinner party has finished. She's ... hmm, let's wait until after our next class to discuss this. It's too graphic for a hallway." "Okay." We didn't have any spare time, so we went to our next classes. The usual hysteria happened over my clothes. I'll skip describing it yet again. I don't know about you, but for me it got tired very fast. These girls had had all year to get to know me and hadn't made any effort to do so, but as soon as I turn up in a shirt that is far too short to tuck in, they go all gaga. I was very unimpressed, and it made it impossible for me to take their reactions seriously. Or them seriously either, come to that. After the second period, Julia and I met up again and went outside for a little privacy. Julia wanted me to describe my evening first, so I said, "I've got a few things to mention: -- "First, everything worked out good at my end, as you heard Pat and Lily say in our first class. We had good sex, and they both ended up doing some bi stuff. Lily automatically did whatever I wanted. Pat was more fearful and needed a little pushing, but she got into it at the end. She'll probably backslide now all the excitement is over, but it'd be easy to push her back into it. -- "In the car ride here she said she loved me but she knows she's not good enough for me. I caught her in a tiny lie, and found out that she has an issue trusting guys. She's never been emotionally involved with a guy before, and she's got no idea how to keep those feelings off her face. I enjoyed her more than Lily, who seems too deliberate. For some weird reason, Pat's reluctance is more exciting than Lily's obedience. I remembered your lesson about not creating expectations, so Pat has no expectation of me doing anything at any time. She has considerable hope, but that's all. I certainly wouldn't mind spending more time with her. Her body is great and she's very pretty. She's a bit naïve though, which in some girls could be fun, but with her seems a little annoying. I can't put my finger on why, but I don't think it matters much for now. She'll keep for a while. -- "Second. Pat asked me for a couple of exemptions from the normal rules for 'bottom-tier girls' - we've got to invent a less insulting name for them! I gave Pat and Lily a little speech this morning, right after we'd finished having sex. I was trying to set up the right attitudes in their heads. Pat's mostly, as Lily's attitude seems to be irrelevant if she's 100% cooperative. I didn't word it well, and Pat figured out that the Liaison system and the get-more-girls-for-Mark ideas were yours. She wanted to talk directly to you about it. Obviously she couldn't talk with her Liaison because Pat knows as much about me as Laila. Probably more, actually. I gave her permission to talk with you, with some heavy warnings about being brief. Later she decided she didn't need to, so she canceled her request. I realized that the fault was mostly mine, because my speech didn't go the way I'd intended. I'll work out a better speech, so that problem shouldn't repeat. But just in case it does, what are your thoughts about what I should say if a bottom-tier girl asks me for permission to talk with you directly?" Julia said, "I don't like it! It's a bad idea because it means I have to spend time answering individual girl's questions. They never ask just one. Whatever answer I give just prompts more questions. It's also a precedent, because other girls might see they can go around their Liaison, and because that girl - Pat, in this example - will know she can go around her Liaison in the future. Once it starts happening, it'll snowball. If a girl requests that of you in the future, ask yourself whether it's truly important AND urgent. NOT whether the girl thinks it is, because they all will, but whether YOU think it is. If it's not, and she wants me to answer a question, tell her to put it in writing and give it to her Liaison, who'll pass it on to me. In due course I'll answer, probably two or three weeks so they can't bombard me. Most of these girls aren't going to get another date with you in less than three weeks anyway, so they can wait for an answer. Okay?" "Yes, and a good idea. The other request Pat had was to change her Liaison to Lily, because they shared me and each other so intimately. I agreed, but said it might interfere with some of your plans so my agreement needed to be confirmed by you. What do you think?" "Again, generally, not ideal, but not so bad this time since it doesn't increase our workload. The reason for the swap - that a girl and another Liaison had a threesome with you - won't come up often. It won't upset any of the ideas I've got for Liaisons, so we'll let it go this time. We'll warn her to keep it quiet though." "I already have. Good. That finishes up my girl-related news. I was saving the best news for last. Your dad dropped a bombshell at breakfast this morning. Which, while I remember, Pat and Lily heard, but Vanessa told them to keep quiet about. Do you know what your dad said?" I was reluctant to just come out and say it. I wanted to build it up, and/or (preferably "and") tease Julia about it, but I couldn't think of any way to do any of that, hence my go-nowhere last question. "No, what?" Nope, I still had no smart idea about how to tease her (sometimes I wish I truly was a genius). So I just said it. "Prof says that at my new study rate - splitting the work in two the way I am now - I should be able to complete an ENTIRE college degree next year. I'd graduate high school AND college at the same time." Before I could even start on my doubts and worries, Julia exploded in excited celebration. She didn't quite do cartwheels, but she certainly squealed, leaped up and down, launched herself at me so he could rain kisses all over my face, jumped off me so she could yahoo and leap up and down some more, throw herself at me again, etc. She was very, VERY excited (two "verys" isn't enough, but you get the idea). On one of the rare occasions when she stopped to catch a breath, I managed to inject, "Why are you so excessively excited?" "I am NOT excessive! It's the first time that my opinion of your ability has been confirmed in an important way. Your playing soccer so well, winning the 10k race, or being a great lover; those are impressive, but they don't really matter. Your TK is awesome, but it has to be kept secret. But if Dad says you can complete an entire degree next year, then that confirms my opinion of you and my belief about how our life is going to be. You're going to be HUGELY important, and achieve phenomenal things in whatever direction you choose to go. I don't know what you'll be doing yet, but you're obviously going to have a huge impact. It's FANTASTIC to hear that Dad thinks that!" When she'd said "our life", that'd gotten to me. Julia has made me the center of her life. Not just given me a lot of her time, but made me EVERYTHING to her. At times, probably a lot of times, she must have worried about that. Her whole life was at stake so no wonder she was happy to get some serious confirmation. Which made me feel absolutely terrible! Sure Prof said that at the current rate I could complete the degree, but he was working on the assumption that I had an IQ of 226, not four IQs of 105. Any idiot can pass school because they spoon feed it to us - jocks pass, so ordinary idiots find it quite easy. Judging from the two courses I'm doing now, the first year of college is straightforward but I'm sure that the third and fourth year courses are going to be damned tough, and probably impossible for me. Julia was leaping with excitement and I felt terrible that it wasn't going to happen that way. I should have put my warnings and worries in before I told her what Prof had said, not that she'd have believed me. I needed to bring her back to reality, so I said, "Julia, just because your father says I can do it if I maintain my current rate, doesn't mean that I WILL be able to do it." "Of course it does." #1: "No, seriously! I have doubts that I can do third and fourth year courses at all, let alone at the rate Prof is assuming. You should know me well enough by now to know that I'm not that smart." This was something I'd been worrying about. Julia has spent enough time with me, and has seen me make more than enough stupid mistakes, to have learned that I'm not really a genius. I'd never mentioned this to her before, and had been surprised she'd never raised it until I realized she probably didn't want to, considering how important I was to her. I was somewhat worried about bringing it up now, but it had to be done because it should be a considerable help in proving my point in this serious topic. "{Raspberry}." #1: #4: #2: The delightful tones of her raspberry dying away, Julia continued, "I've got complete faith in you. You'll do it easily." "It's your faith that I'm worried about. It's misplaced." We discussed this around and around some more, before Julia said, "Just do it, and we'll see how you go. We don't need to decide anything now. No one's going to blame you if you try your best." Her approach was obviously the smart thing to do, thereby proving that Julia was the brightest one of the two of us, and also proving that I was right about not being smart enough for advanced college courses. She added, "I know I'm right. You'll complete it fine. I'm SO excited." She started kissing me again. Maybe neither of us is terribly smart. To say the least, that conversation hadn't exactly convinced me to start celebrating, so I grabbed the first chance I had to change the subject, "Didn't we come out here so you could tell me your plan for Ava tonight?" "Okay, we'll talk about Ava. She's coming along very nicely, and there are many good things about her. Including - thank God! - that I don't have to explain every single little thing to her the way I did at the beginning. She's also a very good lover. She's very enthusiastic about sex. She's had sex with six guys before, but many times with those six so she's had a lot of practice. She's always screwed them into submission because she's extremely fit and enthusiastic. She's got an overblown ego about her ability to bring any guy to his knees, which is an unacceptable way for her to think about you. About ANYTHING to do with you, but particularly about sex because that's a large part of why we have her. She's not much good for anything else, but it turns out that she's particularly good at sex." "Okay. I'm glad to hear she's so into sex, as I quite enjoy it myself. I'd thought it was something she'd end up doing a lot of for us. Perhaps for Carol mostly, because I'd have more choice, but ideally for any of us whenever we wanted." I internally debated including, " ... and I'm still adapting to being able to get hard with other girls," or something along those lines, but I decided that it'd probably be best to say as little as possible about that issue. Julia seemed to have no problem with me having no problem, so I shouldn't risk making a problem out of it. "Good, we're on the same page. Carol loves having her as her toy. That's more psychological than physical, but we don't care what Carol's motivation is. I enjoyed Ava too, although I don't think she'll be my favorite. I don't have strong feelings for any girl other than Carol. I'm enjoying learning so much about sex though, and in doing all of this for you. I REALLY enjoy making all of this happen. I think I'm a bit of a control freak sometimes." I carefully checked to see if my fingernails needed cutting. Julia laughed, then, "Okay, moving right along. If Ava's allowed to keep thinking that she's better at sex than you, then she'll end up being harder to manage the way we want, which is about sex. I didn't try hard to find out, but I think her other boyfriends were so eager to have sex with her that they gave her too much power, so she's used to being in charge. At the moment she's trying hard to please us, but she's likely to revert to being bossy after a while unless you shatter her view of her superiority. Not that it matters, but I have some doubts about the explanation she gave us about her breaking up with her previous boyfriend: that he found someone in one of his college classes. It's not going to be relevant to our relationships with her, so I can't be bothered making an issue out of it. -- "Ava's currently of the opinion that she's better at sex than you. She believes you're probably better than other guys, but still not better than her. She tries to keep it hidden, but if you don't win her respect then she'll likely get less and less subtle about showing her sense of superiority. Obviously I know that you're better than her, but I want her to find that out in a way that absolutely DESTROYS her ego about it. That her ego is so big about it is wonderful, because destroying it will leave her totally lost. We'll be able to remake her our way very easily. I like the idea of that, so I've been giving some thought to the best way of doing it." "Can I interrupt with a question?" "Sure, ask away. Oops, maybe not. We'd better get to class." I must remember to talk the Principal about the length of the gaps between classes. Conversations have got just long enough to get interesting - in this case, to the stage of destroying a very pretty 17-year old girl's ego and then remaking her as our sex toy - and then we run out of time. This is no way to run an institution with lots of pretty girls in it! In case you're wondering, my question to Julia - when I get a chance to ask it - is going to be, "How in hell does she know ANYTHING about destroying people's egos and remaking them how she wants?" I don't share all my classes with Julia, but I'm pretty sure this isn't part of the curriculum of any of her subjects. She does Social Studies, for example. I'm pretty sure ego destruction is not consider something that should be taught about social interactions. Not in the 10th grade, anyway. I'll skip ahead to my next conversation with Julia. I'm only skipping over the usual girly jabbering, plus - because I was apparently so sexily dressed today - some unusual girly jabbering. I'll tell you about it later, if I can be bothered (girls can be quite silly). When I had Julia separated from others enough, I asked, "Remember I had a question I wanted to ask you?" She looked blank. "It was, how on Earth do you know about destroying people's egos and remaking them how you want?" "Oh that. That's easy. It's one of the basic psychological torturing techniques." #1: #2: "Ahh, darling, speaking as your concerned boyfriend - one who spends a lot of time in your company, in a soundproofed room with a lock on the door - I'm a little curious and concerned, I should definitely emphasize 'concerned', about your knowing 'basic psychological torturing techniques'. Please tell me that you don't know any ADVANCED psychological torturing techniques, and how it is that you know ANY such techniques at all? I'll just stand over here, out of your reach, while you answer." "Haha. Very good, Mark. I only know three: attack fears, destroy pride, give and remove hope. Mom made me watch a documentary on what we do to our prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and gave me a small book from OSU's library to read on the subject. She said I should know how easy it is to bend people's minds, because the world is full of people who try to do that to others, and - even worse - is full of people whose minds have already been bent. She said I should be able to recognize the techniques and effects. I never expected the knowledge to be so useful though. The techniques work extremely well. I'm impressed by how well, which is a sad comment about people's minds, unfortunately." "Okay. You haven't exactly reassured me here. You use these techniques?" "Sure. You've seen me use them several times. They're purely psychological so they can usually be done just by talking. My favorite, because it's so much fun to use, is the last one: giving and removing hope. Remember the lunch we had on Wednesday with the fourteen girls?" I nodded. "All during that lunch I was giving and removing their hopes for being your girlfriend. You remember that don't you?" "I remember it well. I want to say that it was very funny, except that you're telling me it was a torture technique?" "Yes. Straight out of the book. Lock up a prisoner, give him long enough to feel hopeless, give him hope and then remove it, repeatedly. After several cycles human minds become too scared to hope, but we have a psychological need to hope so it's a very uncomfortable situation for the prisoner. Then he encounters someone playing the 'Good Cop' routine; someone who pretends to befriend the prisoner. The prisoner is desperate for hope, but has learned that he can't trust his own judgment about what to pin his hopes on, so he takes advice from the Good Cop. The guards arrange for the first couple of little hopes to come true, and then the prisoner is psychologically helpless and is soon swallowing everything the Good Cop says. In the right conditions: where the prisoner's life is at stake; where he's under the complete control of the guards; and with no contact with anyone else, especially with no one else who would be able to provide him with any hope; then it takes about two weeks before the prisoner is highly dependent on the Good Cop. After three weeks the prisoner literally doesn't know what to think unless told by the Good Cop, and asks him what to do for every single decision. -- "That's what I did during that lunch. A much weaker version obviously, but I gave and removed hope so many times that by the end of lunch they were asking me what they should hope for, and what they should do to get it. I wanted them to think I was on their side - that I was the Good Cop - so all the hope ups and downs had to be 'accidental'. I didn't take them away maliciously, I just pointed out things they hadn't thought of, as if I was their friend helping them. They didn't realize that I was working for you, rather for them. -- "Look how well it worked - we had lunch with them on Wednesday, and on Thursday morning they all stripped naked in front of you on school grounds. Largely because all the hope ups and downs made them depend on me for instructions on what to do. Building you up and competition were also very important, but they ended up acting irrationally, and that's one of the signs of someone who has been tortured this way: they're no longer thinking for themselves when deciding what to do, but taking their cues from the Good Cop, even if those cues make them do things that are bad for them. You look very confused?" "I'll say! What you're describing sounds terrible, yet I know that I had trouble not laughing my head off during Wednesday's lunch and during the crazy strip. I AM confused. I don't know whether to congratulate you, tell you off, or run away and hide somewhere safe!" "I also 'tortured' Carol before we married her. I'm sure she'd even use that word to describe those days. Maybe we could've done it in an easier way for her, maybe just asked her several days before if she wanted to marry us, but I think she'd say she preferred what happened. It was torture for her at the time, but it made the wedding so much better for her that it was worth it. It was a good thing. With Ava we're going to destroy her egotism about her sexual superiority as thoroughly as we can. She's lost past boyfriends because of it, she'll lose you because of it, and probably future boyfriends too. She's better off having it destroyed. Remaking her as our willing toy is harder to justify, but she can walk away any time she wants if she's not enjoying herself. As can every other girl. None of them are being forced to do what we want, and I'm sure all of them have their own agendas and are trying to trick us, especially you, into giving them what they want. How many of the girls that we've dealt with so far have told you right at the start what they want and tried to agree a fair exchange of value for it?" "None. That'd seem silly. That's not the way relationships happen." "No. Humans nearly always try to use each other, rather than work with each other. You, me and Carol will do everything we can for each other. We know you're the Lord, so theoretically we should be doing everything for you, but there's nothing you wouldn't do for us if we needed it. Compare our relationship with how Lily behaves. She'll do everything we want, and has repeatedly told us that, even though she doesn't know what we want yet. That means she's willing to pay whatever it takes to get what she wants. Only she's never told us what that is. She's never even hinted at it to me. What about last night to you?" I shook my head. "Exactly. If she's willing to pay such a high price, she must be after something she values very highly. The three of us talk about what we all want. Lily has kept her goal secret. Put that way, Lily's a worry, isn't she?" "Yeah." "Or maybe we're misreading her. In some ways she seems American, but I know her parents are still very Chinese. A lot of Lily's attitudes, behaviors, etc., will come from her parents. Look at how much my parents affect me, or your parents affect you. Maybe she's just inscrutable, like Asians are supposed to be. Forgetting Lily and thinking about the other girls: Most of them, like Pat for example, will quickly declare their love for you, and will soon show you that they'd love to marry you, in an attempt to get you all to themselves. They never think about what's best for you, and they don't even think about what's best for them; they just assume getting you into a traditional marriage is the obvious next step. They're stupid. Even the smart ones are stupid if they fail to think about what's best for them and you. But worse, as far as I'm concerned, is they're being selfish. They're intending to make their life better without caring about whether that makes your life as good as it could be. If they're willing to screw you - in both senses of the word - then I'm willing to use their motivation to turn things around on them. They can always walk away if they don't want to pay the price of playing their own game. -- "That's my hard-nosed approach. Maybe we could meet a girl who we genuinely like, and who becomes our friend or more. That's a different situation entirely. That's why I always listen very carefully to your opinions on the girls, especially how much you like them. How do you feel about the torture issue now?" "Still somewhat confused. I don't want to say I approve, because torture sounds wrong. In the days leading up to our marriage, when I was teasing Carol, I even thought that I was 'torturing' her. I had good motives - to make the wedding better for her - but I did use that precise word when I was thinking about what I was doing to her. I think I have to agree you should carry on doing what you're doing. I feel I should take some time to think about the issue, but I've also got the feeling that I'll never get around to it, or if I did, I'll not have any more clue than I have now. "So ignoring that issue, what're we going to do with Ava then?" "I'm not sure exactly. She can't come over until after the dinner party has wound down. 9:30 or 10, I'd guess. We'll probably call her about 7, telling her to come at 10. I'd like you and her to be alone so you can concentrate on her. I had plenty of her last night, so I won't miss her but I will miss you. I'll talk about that later. We'll tell her you're alone because you're tired and not particularly horny, so you only want a little bit of sex, but I want her to experience the BEST sex she's ever had. Keep on doing her over and over again. Don't take a simple 'no' for an answer. Eventually take a loud 'NO', but only when she's not going to be able to walk for a day, preferably two. -- "In the morning we'll tease her again in some way or other. It shouldn't be hard as she'll be very tired, sore, and in shock, and she's not smart to start with. I'd like you to come and get me after you've worn her out, and bring me back to your bed, and have sex with me there so she sees that she couldn't satisfy you. It'd be good if she woke in the morning to your making love to me. -- "I'm going to be tired tonight, because Carol, Ava and I were busy until very late last night. You and I have a very important shopping day tomorrow, so I'll need my sleep. I'm going to get Andrew or Robert to bring up one of your single mattresses from the basement and put it on the floor in our study. I'll sleep there while you're crushing Ava's ego. Wake me when Ava finally collapses and I'll come sleep with you in our bed. That's my current thinking. I'm sure we can improvise somewhat, as it's a simple concept. All you have to do is completely humiliate her sexual stamina. I know you can do that." I knew I could too, "go-softs" had HUGELY improved my life. My athletic stamina presumably helped too, as apparently guys can get tired muscles from sex, although I've never experienced more than a few seconds of that so I don't know how important my not getting tired is. I knew young guys going off too early was a HUGE problem, as I'd heard hundreds of jokes about that in movies and on TV, and a few around school too. Not to mention Pat's recent comments about her ex-boyfriend. #1: I said, "Sounds good to me, except that I'm worried about the timing of it all. If Ava doesn't arrive until 10pm, and I give her three hours worth say, then I sleep for four hours, that takes us to 5am. You want you and me to have more sex in the morning, to make sure Ava sees she wasn't good enough. That might take us to 6am. Prof wants me to take two quizzes tomorrow morning and I'm not even up to them yet, so that'll take a few hours. I'm not sure how long, maybe three or four, so that could take us to 10am. Then there's time for showers, breakfast, some chatting. That's bound to take us to 11 or later. It doesn't fit, so I think we'll have to cancel the shopping." It was worth a try. "Yeah, right! Like that's going to happen. You desperately need new clothes and it can't be delayed any further." Of course it couldn't. Julia's tone of voice clearly indicating that the fate of the entire world hinged on my getting new clothes. Julia continued, "Ava has to be crushed in one overnight session. It doesn't work if we spread it out over several days. We can delay your college studies a little. That's fine as your new double-speed study rate means you're speeding through the work. We've only run over time by a couple of hours, so just do a couple less than you intended. That means you won't miss any of your soccer game because we haven't finished shopping yet." Julia saw my reaction to that, and started laughing before I could tell her what I thought of THAT! She said, "Relax Mark. I was pulling your leg. Remember that my parents are coming to watch you, and goodness knows how many girls because I've heavily promoted it. Several dozen girls probably. Not Ava though, I just realized. Haha. She's going to be too tired and sore. She's going to miss another one of your games. It'll be useful to be able to tease her about that, but never mind that now. Everything fits if you study for a couple hours less. Okay?" "Unfortunately, not okay. Your father wants me to take the quizzes tomorrow morning. He's going to tell my lecturers to sit by their fax machines tomorrow morning so they can mark them and get the results back to Prof quickly. He's probably already told them because he was quite excited about this. I HAVE to do the quizzes tomorrow morning. The other thing I haven't mentioned to you yet is that I'll probably do a third course this year, if I can get through the first two fast enough. Two hours isn't important in the grand scheme of things, but we shouldn't start thinking that sex - or dare I say it - clothes shopping, is more important than studying. I don't think your dad would be very impressed if he had to reschedule the lecturers because we wanted more boinking or shopping time." I'd been tempted to end by just referring to "shopping time", but that would've been playing with fire. "A third course this year?" "Yes. My study rate is fast enough that I'll have time for a third. I suggested it to your father at breakfast, before he hit me with his bombshell for next year. Doing one more this year will mean one less next year, the workload for which is seriously worrying me. I realized a couple of hours ago that the last couple of years, I've done two year's of work in each school year. But now Prof wants me to do four years of college courses, plus 12th grade, all in one year. FIVE years' work in one year, with most of them being college courses! Anyone else and I'd think he'd made a mistake in his calculations. That's a serious workload. If I can do an extra course this year, that'd help. Next year is going to be VERY busy. I doubt I'll have any time at all for clothes shopping." "Don't worry about shopping. By then you'll be rich enough that the stores can come to you. We'll probably be seeing a lot of Nigel and Rocky at our home, so they can keep you clothed properly..." #1: Julia continued, " ... but I get your point. Okay, we need to think of a way of making sure you don't lose the two hours of study time. I'll think about it. I'm sure I'll think of something that means you'll still make your soccer game on time." "{Growl}." "Haha." I wasn't worried whether Julia would find a solution. You might say I was even hopeful she wouldn't, as it was obviously our shopping time that was going to be reduced if she couldn't. But if anyone could think of a way to arrange x+2 hours' worth of stuff to do into just x hours, so her precious shopping time was kept safe, then it'd be Julia. [She later told me how to create the two extra hours, as I'd been fearfully confident that she would. Julia found two extra one hour blocks. The first hour was after I finish boinking Dakota this afternoon, at about 5 or 5:30, when I should go straight into the study. Julia would take care of any post-coital chatting that was required. Just as I'd realized that immediately post-boink was an excellent time to teach the girls some good attitudes, Julia had realized that it was also a good time for some psychological torturing techniques. Julia would also make sure Dakota got showered, got home, and all that stuff. The second hour that Julia 'found', was by playing a cute little trick on Ava tomorrow morning. I'll save the description of it until the chronology of this story gets to the right time. It's somewhat amusing, although I doubt Ava will see it that way. ------- In order for Julia and me to bring ourselves up to date, and plan tonight and tomorrow morning, we had to have several disjointed conversations. To help you, dear Reader, I presented them sequentially. If you've gotten this far in my autobiography, you probably need all the help you can get. I skipped past a few other things that happened this morning, so I'll briefly mention some of them now. ^ I met up with Laila mid-morning. She was effusive about how wonderful I'd been yesterday, thanking me all over again. She'd spent some time on the phone with Hannah (who I learned was Laila's girlfriend) yesterday evening, singing my praises. Hannah was going to come to my soccer match and Laila wanted to make sure that she'd be able to introduce us. I was sure that wouldn't be a problem, as there's always plenty of fooling around after a game. Sometimes during a game too, especially because the next game is a "friendly" so it doesn't count for anything in the league we play in. ^ Several times during the morning I was sexually assaulted. I should probably explain that more. I'd be going about my business - walking through the doorways was particularly problematic - when a hand would suddenly rub my body, usually on my bare back or belly because this damned shirt didn't tuck in properly, or my ass because it was apparently irresistibly cute. I proximity sensed the hands coming, and sometimes managed to avoid them, but they were often too quick or the doorways too crowded for me to escape. My proximity sense let me know who the culprits were, even though the majority of the attacks were surreptitious. I call them "attacks" deliberately, because they were often carried out by unattractive girls. Their pawing at me was TOTALLY unacceptable! Lots of girls, sometimes girls that had previously seemed to be perfectly well-behaved, good girls, yielded to the temptation. I was appalled that so many of them could think that getting Free Shots was acceptable behavior. Where were their morals! The girls who weren't the least bit surreptitious weren't any better. They were SHAMELESS, often exclaiming - so everyone could hear - things like, "Oh my god, feel his muscles." Just what I needed: the other girls to be given an invitation! Or they'd ask me to lift my shirt, "So I can get a good look at your chest." Good grief! Several retorts crossed my minds: "Lift up your blouse so I can get a good look at YOUR chest!", "Why don't I drop my pants so you can grope my ass properly?", etc. None of which I dared utter, unfortunately. I was being bullied all over again. By a much nicer smelling group of perpetrators, but it was still much the same thing. I couldn't complain to a teacher or the Principal because they'd just tell me to dress properly. I tried to complain to Julia, but she only laughed and exclaimed, "Great!", which was not the least bit helpful. Another problem I had was that I couldn't bite the assailants' heads off (metaphorically, as too high a proportion of them I wouldn't want to touch with my mouth anyway). I knew Julia wanted girls to chase me, so my making an angry scene whenever I was groped would give me a bad reputation and go against Julia's wishes. I even briefly thought of making a speech to each class as I had about Carol's coming out, asking them to stop groping me, but standing up asking not to be touched, while wearing clothes like these, would make me look stupid. It was too hard to come across as noble with the latest topic, the way I had with my "Loving Carol" speeches. I certainly couldn't appeal for moral behavior when I was dressed like a male prostitute. My being groped persisted all day, some girls even came back for second helpings, taking "shameless" to new heights! I'd never had this problem back when I used to dress properly. When we were shopping tomorrow I'd see if I could talk Julia into finding a jacket for this outfit. Or maybe a shirt that was the right size. Both would be good, but I wasn't hopeful about either. ^ One good thing that happened - in comparison to being groped by ugly girls, shudder - was that several girls propositioned me. I automatically refused the first one because I was flustered at the time, but after that one I remembered about the Liaison system. Thereafter I responded better, asking their grade first. Those that were in 10th or 11th were told to talk with their Liaison. ALL the 10th grade girls knew that already, but some still tried their luck, usually immediately after they'd broken the ice by rubbing their hand over my bare skin. I was abrupt with all the 10th graders, as they knew better. I wasn't sure what to do with 9th and 12th graders, as Julia had mentioned a few of possibilities without telling me precisely which one she wanted us to do. I knew we were going to pick one each to be Liaison for their grades, but I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to pick one myself, send them to Julia, get their names and numbers in writing, or what. I knew they could be put off until next week, so I didn't worry about it much; I asked them their names and made sure to mentally note the ones that I thought might be good Liaisons. That wasn't based solely on beauty and figure for the 9th graders as I'd been in classes with many of them last year, and I even knew a little about the reputations of some of the few senior girls that wanted to talk to me. I told girls from those two grades, "I'm interested. Write your name, number and grade on a piece of paper for me please?" I did something I could imagine Julia doing: those girls that did NOT write their grade were not considered for Liaison because if they couldn't follow such a simple instruction they'd be certain to piss Julia off at some stage. Those girls that did, and otherwise appeared suitable, I later wrote "PL" on their piece of paper, to denote "Possible Liaison". I'd give all the papers to Julia later, to do with whatever she decided. Early on in that process, I'd had a chance to ask Julia whether I was doing the right thing. She'd shrugged, saying, "As good as any," so I was definitely getting better at making my own decisions. Julia added, "I'll do the same thing: getting their names, numbers and grades. Sometime next week I'll get the 'PL' girls together and you can choose which two you want." That'd work well, especially my picking them, as I'd been a bit afraid that Julia would choose them over the phone, and one or both of them might end up being girls I didn't want to spend time with. I also had a momentary flash of another group of girls stripping, but knew that wouldn't happen as none of the new ones knew me well enough to be that motivated, or had been softened up with some lunchtime psychological torture. I did see one small problem though. I asked, "How will you know which of the girls that approach you are girls that I'd give 'PL' ratings too? I don't mind if you invite all the girls to the meeting where I pick them, but I'm curious because the way you described it implied you'd have some 'PL' girls too." Julia answered, "I'm intending to do the same as you are, write on their paper whether they are 'PL' possibilities or not. That saves me having to call up so many girls for the meeting. It's pointless to spend time inviting girls who have no chance of being picked." "But how will you know which girls are 'PL' or not? You don't have the same tastes as me." "I'll just pick the good looking ones with big tits. That's about right, isn't it?" It was close enough not to be worth arguing about. I would have liked to argue, because it was somewhat insulting, but arguing risked changing the criteria. I had to sleep with two of these girls, so I said nothing. ^ There is one more point 'worth' mentioning. I'd rather not, but I kind of have to, which is why it's last. Mid-morning a guy approached me, asking, "Egg, did you get your new clothes from Rocky's?" "Umm, yes." "They're darlings, aren't they?" I instantly lost all interest in the conversation and SUDDENLY remembered that I had to be ANYWHERE else. Three times this day something like that happened. One of them was even worse (I'll leave THAT to your imagination!). I stridently complained to Julia, who responded, "It's hardly surprising. Look at the way you're dressed." Like it'd been my choice! "EXACTLY! I'm dressed totally wrong. No one dresses like this!" "Some guys do, especially some of the jocks. Some guys wear cut-off shirts and tight pants. None of them have got bodies as good as yours, but they do dress similarly." Putting me in with jocks was NOT going to win her any points. "It's not really a problem, just tell the guys that come on to you that you're straight. Word will get around in a while. You can't blame them for trying, not with you looking so hot." I had several thoughts on that matter: Julia's belief that "It's not really a problem" was 100% WRONG! It CERTAINLY was a problem! I wasn't going to tell the guys that came on to me ANYTHING! I didn't want to talk with THEM! "Word will get around in a WHILE". How long is a "while"? If it's longer than five seconds, I'm not happy. With regard to whether I could "blame them for trying," I damned well COULD! And even if I couldn't, I damned well still would. I think Julia might have detected my feelings on the matter, because she added, "You'll get used to it, Mark." I would NEVER "get used to it". I very DEFINITELY didn't want the 'opportunity' to get used to it. That's precisely what I was complaining about! Julia regrouped and tried again, "How do you think I feel when guys I don't like come on to me?" "That's COMPLETELY different. You've got to expect that sometimes. It's what happens. I know it's a nuisance, but you just brush it off, the same as when girls I don't like come on to me." "You say I've 'got to expect that sometimes.' Sorry to tell you, but 'you've got to expect that sometimes' with guys coming on to you too. That's the way the world works. It won't happen that often, but it will happen. You can't stop it, just like you can't stop girls you dislike wanting you either." "But the way I'm dressed is making it WAY worse. It didn't used to be a problem when I dressed decently." "It also wouldn't be a problem if you locked yourself in your bedroom and never came out. That'd keep you even safer. Deliberately dressing ugly the way you used to would reduce the problem, but it'd reduce many good things too. It'd cause a MAJOR reduction in how many girls would be interested in you. It'd reduce how much attention you got from everybody, and a lot of that attention can be helpful to you. People will go out of their way to help good looking people. It's the way the world works." I knew that, of course. I'd many times seen beautiful girls act as if the world owed them instantly attentive service. I'd laughed about Carol's dress giving us wonderful service in the restaurant on our abbreviated date with Cindy. I remembered Maureen's (the Math Department's office lady) being so eager to be helpful to me too. Damn. I hate it when Julia wins arguments like this. Julia continued, "It takes you ten seconds to wave off some guy you don't like. Are you going to give up all the hours of wonderfully enjoyable benefits you get from dressing like this, to save you ten seconds every now and then?" Damn again. "I don't like it. I wish they wouldn't do it." "There are many people in this world who do things I wish they wouldn't. I'm sure our parents have even longer lists. You can't stop people from doing things you don't like. You can only choose how you react to it." "Maybe if I'm very good at science I'll be able to invent a cure, and then I WILL be able to stop them doing it." So there! "A cure for homosexuality?" "Damn right!" "I think you're off to a bad start. I doubt treating it as a disease is going to be a productive approach. Also, I hope you don't, because I'd miss not wanting to make love to Carol. Especially Carol and you at the same time, that's very special." "Not girls, just guys. There's nothing wrong with girls being together. In fact, that works extremely well." "So you're going to 'cure' males but not cure females. And you don't see that as somewhat inconsistent?" "It's completely consistent WITH MY FEELINGS! Male homos make me uncomfortable, girl homos are great. Yes, I know I'm being stupid - I'm venting. I hate guys hitting on me, and I'm not too fond of losing arguments with you either, especially when you're right." "Haha. And you say guys are logical!" "We ARE logical. Nearly all the time. Just not about homos is all." "Exactly!" "Huh? No, that wasn't what I meant. Damn, I can't even have a good vent without making a fool of myself." "Never mind, darling. You'll get used to it in time. Maybe we should invite Rocky and Nigel over for dinner one night? They could bring some of their friends. We could have a party in the hot tub." "Now you're being DELIBERATELY cruel. I've got a good mind too..." "Yes please!" "You don't know what I was about to say." "I bet it was very heterosexual." "That's a safe bet, EVERYTHING I do is heterosexual." "Lucky for me I'm a girl then, isn't it?" After that it got silly. Or perhaps it'd been silly for a while. I'd had my vent, and I felt SLIGHTLY less bad now. I couldn't feel good, as that'd require there to be no homo guys. Or, if there had to be some, none that came near me. Maybe Corvallis could be a "Normal Guys Only" zone. Better make it all of Oregon, just in case I wanted to go to a beach one day (Corvallis is about fifty miles inland, so going to a beach requires leaving town). We hardly ever go to a beach as we're a little too far north for that, but better safe than sorry. ------- Chapter 97: Lunch with Carol's Friends Friday, April 22, 2005 (Continued) Immediately after the lunch bell finished ringing, I got a text message from Carol reminding me of where, when and how I was to approach her group. Unnecessary, but I guess being away from us all morning makes her feel isolated. Next year will be better, because she'll be a high-school student then. Except that I'll be trying to do four years of college in one year, and God knows how that's going to work out. I'd better dress as sexy as possible for the next few weeks, because I don't think I'm going to have time for any sex next year. I sent Carol an acknowledgment "I'm sorry I missed witnessing you in action last night. I won't miss this lunchtime." Not that funny, but I didn't want to be too explicit over the phone. Carol wanted Julia and me to turn up a few minutes late, most of which we would use to walk that far. I collected Julia at our lockers. I remembered something about Carol wanting me to arrive empty handed so my shape looked good. Silly, but you have to humor sisters and wives, especially when they come in the same package. I dumped my bag in my locker, just carrying my lunch when we slowly made our way to the designated location. Even before we'd crossed into the middle school, I was empty-handed as per Carol's request. Full-bellied, but empty-handed. It hadn't been possible to walk all that way carrying my lunch, and I was expecting to have to do a lot of talking to Carol's friends so it was best for me to eat quickly. We approached Carol's group from an unused, unpopulated direction, as much as either of those descriptions apply during lunchtime. Julia spotted Carol before I did, because she knew what clothes Carol and Donna were wearing (girls remember those sorts of things). Carol's group were out to the side on one of the fields, and there were about two dozen of them, most looking in the wrong direction. Julia and I were walking holding hands (not Julia's usual style), with her walking a little farther away from me than would be normal, "So your silhouette is clear." Julia even had me keep my other arm a little away from my body, "So the girls get the full impact of your waist's shape." I'd naturally asked, "Isn't this going over the top in a silly way?" "It's what Carol wants. First impressions count and none of these girls have seen you dress even the tiniest bit sexy before." Julia's first sentence would have motivated me enough, but she couldn't resist the less-than-subtle dig at my previous, and greatly missed, clothing style. Granted my previous style wasn't as sexy as what I was wearing now, but it'd never given me cold drafts in places no self-respecting guy should experience drafts. I overreacted to Julia's overemphasis on my previous lack of sexiness. I sarcastically offered, "Maybe I should strip so they can see all of my 'silhouette'." "Yes, but not yet. We'll do it halfway through lunch, to help build the mood." #3: #4: #1: #4: #3: #4: #3: Julia added, "I was thinking about this during class this morning. It'd be nice for Carol if we can make this go as well as possible. I had some ideas. First, do you know how to play 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'?" "Yes. It's a silly game though." "That doesn't matter. We'll probably be playing it soon. I'm going to blindfold you, but pay attention to my fingers on your back. One finger means you should do Rock, two fingers Paper, three fingers Scissors. In the order of the name of the game: Rock, Paper, Scissors. Okay?" "Sure, but what are you..." "Don't worry about it. It'll make sense at the time and I don't have time to explain now. Also, early on when we're talking to the girls, pick out the one that you'd like to make-out with the most. Not Carol or Donna, as this will be in front of all of them. Pull my ear just before you say her name, so I know who she is. Okay?" "Okay. You like doing these things to me, don't you? Especially if I've got no idea what's about to happen?" "It's great fun, including for you because I know you enjoy it more if you don't know." "That's sometimes true, but I've noticed that YOU always enjoy it far more if I don't know." "Just one of the many reasons we're so compatible, haha." I couldn't think of a comeback, so we walked in silence; Julia no doubt believing she'd won the exchange again. In another couple of seconds Julia asked, "Have you got a condom on you?" "SURELY you can't be planning to..." "We don't have time. Answer quickly." "I need to check my wallet." "Do so quickly please." I quickly checked my wallet, finding I didn't have a wallet. "I am not allowed to carry my wallet because it's a fashion-crime. It's in my locker. I don't think there's a rubber in it anyway. I remember using the last one on Carol and not replacing it because I'd put all the other rubbers I had in your drawer back when we could only have sex in your room." "We'll get you a billfold for your pants tomorrow. You should start carrying condoms again. Carry several in your wallet AND billfold. You're going to need quite a few from now on." This was an EXTREMELY interesting conversational development. Unfortunately Carol's girls had finally spotted us. They'd been sitting in a semi-circle facing the wrong way. Carol knew which direction we'd be coming from, but she was playing along with the others. Carol and Donna were sitting at the back, and could see some of the girls look around, and notice us from a distance. We were too far away for identification initially, but as we got closer more and more girls kept looking at us. They were confused because we didn't look like what they expected. They expected me and my high-school girlfriend, but walking toward them was a jock and a presumably middle-school girlfriend or maybe little sister, based on Julia's lack of size. Eventually we were close enough to be identified - that's what happens when you keep walking closer, even when you wish you weren't because you REALLY want to know why you should start carrying lots of rubbers. I couldn't hear the girls as the wind was blowing the wrong way, but the sudden pandemonium and finger pointing was a bit of a giveaway that they'd spotted us. The next minute was quite funny. We'd gotten quite close, probably because Julia and I had been looking at each other rather than at Carol's group, so we'd seemed disconnected from them. We were close enough that some of the girls remained sitting, some stood, and some of the more enthusiastic stood and started running toward us. Why they were running I have no idea, but enthusiasm makes girls act strange. Some girls running caused the other girls to rise, look at Carol, back at us, and generally be confused about what to do. Most started running to greet us. Once the early starters had halved the distance, they started getting good looks at me and were more than impressed. One girl's legs got totally confused about what they should be doing and she fell over. Another girl stopped in shock, only to have another girl run into her, and they both went down. One girl got close enough for a good look, and her speed quickly diminished down to stationary, when she developed a need to sit down. It was just as well, as her legs looked decidedly wobbly. The girls who could remain vertical stopped about five feet away from us, forming a rough circle around us as we kept walking toward Carol and Donna, who'd elected to stand up and wait for us. None of the girls could approach within five feet of us, such was my awesomeness. (I'd showered this morning, so it must've been my awesomeness.) We arrived at the place where the two girls had gone down together. The girl who had stopped, and been run in to, was still on the ground. She hadn't tried to get up yet, seeming perfectly happy to sit on the nice, solid ground while staring at me. I extended my spare hand to her, asking, "Would you like a hand up?" She looked at my hand like she was considerably puzzled about what it was. By the look on her face she appeared to be thinking, "I know I should recognize that, but I can't quite work it out." I don't think her brain was really working at all. I moved my hand a bit closer, to prompt her, and she tentatively extended one of her hands. I saved time by grasping it and pulling her to her feet. I had to pull hard because she wasn't helping. Once on her feet I had to use both hands to hold her up until she remembered what legs are meant to be used for. Meanwhile, the girls around us had made all sorts of "Wow," sharp inhalations, or similar noises. Summarized by one girl saying, "Look at his muscles!" For those of you who've forgotten the description of this shirt, let me repeat it: It's easiest for me to describe where it ISN'T, as it's more of a non-shirt than a shirt. It's tight, with no sleeves or much else. Its sleeve holes occupy almost all of each of my sides plus extending wider to expose some of my front and back, which didn't leave much of my torso that COULD be covered by any material. What material there could be, was cut short, missing my belt by several inches. And even the neck hole was excessively large. I doubt the shirt covered a quarter of what a normal sleeveless shirt would have. So when the girl said, "Look at his muscles," it wasn't exactly hard for them to do. If she'd said, "Look at his shirt", that would have been harder. The girl I'd raised seemed firm on her feet, and all the other girls between us and Carol were up, so I recaptured Julia's hand and we walked to greet Carol and Donna. Leaving the girl I'd raised to her feet standing still, looking at her hand intently. I was sure she'd eventually work out what it was. When we arrived at Carol, I gave her a good hug and a kiss on the cheek. She whispered, "This is going so well." If she thinks it's going well now, just wait until I - apparently - strip. Donna stepped up, so I gave her the same greeting. I turned away from Donna to find Carol and Julia in a very passionate kiss. It looked HOT, until I remembered that I wasn't supposed to react that way in public. I looked around the other girls. Many of them looked like stunned mullet (it's an expression of Mom's. To the best of my knowledge Mom has never experimented on mullet to find out what a stunned one looks like, but perhaps beating up fish is a popular English pastime. Maybe it's the first step in making kippers for breakfast). The kiss stopped after a few seconds, and Carol looked around at her friends, then said, "What? I told you that my brother's girlfriend and I are lovers. You all knew that." Knowing that in advance, and seeing their tongues duel for several seconds, have different emotional effects. They certainly affect me differently, so I did another go-soft. Donna was giggling to herself too, so all the Andersons were having a good time. Carol announced, "If you all sit down so Mark can see you easily, I'll tell him your names." Oh dear, twenty or so names was going to be a bit hard to remember. I uncentered. About five girls per mind. Doable, I guess, although we might need to stay uncentered. When we called #2 off duty and explained why we'd summoned him, he said, #2: #3: Carol got all the girls seated, which was a bit of a struggle, mostly because they all wanted to sit near me, but didn't know where that would be yet, so there were some interesting games going on, all of which took time. I stood in front of the sitting girls while Carol stood beside me and introduced everyone, just giving their first names. Apart from #2, who'd already picked which girls he'd learn, the rest of us alternated (#1, #3, #4, #1, #3, etc.), that way each mind had time to look at and memorize his girls. It was quite funny, as most of the girls spent most of their time staring at one of several places: shy girls stared at the ground, averagely confident girls stared up my shirt, and bold girls stared halfway between the other two groups, at that part of me that was at their eye level. More and more girls were overcoming their shyness during the introduction process. As I walked around to see the girls I was being introduced to, I sometimes deliberately stood very close to a girl, ostensibly to get the best view of the girls behind her. I stood so my pulled-forward-and-lifted-up cock was inches away from the girl's face. I did this three times, and all three girls got considerably flustered by it. I, of course, never noticed. In total there were eighteen new girls (so a total of 21 with Carol, Donna and Julia included), only three of whom I'd met before: two were friends of Carol and one I'd met because she was in Carol's class and I'd helped at a class event of theirs several months ago. I'd remembered her because she was gorgeous. Speaking of which, I was very pleased to see that all of the girls were good looking or better. For a 15-year old boy, even an average looking 14-year old girl is a thing of beauty - or at least a thing of desire - but all these girls were above average, some of them a long way above it. I was going to do my best to charm this group. Collectively, they were considerably better looking than the group of fourteen girls that Julia had invited to lunch. [As Carol explained it to me later, she had drawn from the pool of every 7th and 8th grade class, giving her twice the number of candidates as we had in 10th grade. But the main reason these girls were so much more attractive was that in 10th grade, and increasingly so in the 11th and 12th grades also, there were quite a few girls who considered me beneath them, especially the most beautiful girls. Quite a few of the high school's A-list beauties wouldn't deign to have anything to do with me beyond the occasional sneer, whereas almost without exception, the middle-school beauties would come running if they had a chance of meeting me.] I hadn't picked the girl Julia had asked me to choose yet. I'd wait to see how they behaved for a little while first, but I already had a shortlist because standing above the girls and looking down on them made it obvious which of the girls had the nicest breasts, and who were dressed to show them off the best. Those were my shortlist because guys are very straightforward creatures. They'd all dressed nicely. Nicer than I remember girls dressing when I was at middle school. Not as "nicely" as the sluttier high-schools girls dressed, but similar to how Carol did these days or even better than that. That means the eighteen girls here were dressed in ways I thoroughly approved of, because Carol's clothes were chosen to please me. All things considered - which I carefully did - I was very happy with Carol's friends' attitude. A few of them looked particularly good (the shortlist), and I made sure to compliment them on it. I was aware that I'll probably be having lunch down here again, so it was a good idea to reinforce the behaviors that I wanted to see repeated. The wearing of low-cut or gaping tops was one of those behaviors. I'll let you know what the other behaviors are when I think of them. After all the introductions were done, I did a quick check with my other selves to make sure I had all the names down pat. We thought we did, so I said, "Let me check that I have all of your names correct. First, the three pretty girls whose clothes I particularly like:" I called each of their names, pointing to them in turn. They smiled very happily. "And the rest of you are," as I pointed and recited the remaining fifteen names. I got it perfect, which surprised and pleased me. All the last fifteen girls were pleased, but you could see they would have been more pleased to be among the first three. Rubbing my hands together and cackling was probably not a cool look, so I just smiled happily as I finished reciting their names. Hopefully there'd be a great deal of visible breast the next time I came down here. That'd be only fair, considering the amount of my breast that was visible though my mock-shirt's holes. Carol said, "Wow, I don't think I could have done that the first time I met so many new people, but Mark's always doing genius things like that. Let's sit down and have lunch." All the girls sat UP, eager to see where I'd sit DOWN. Carol indicated a spot, and there I sat. I was next to Carol, until Julia said, "Mark, could you move over a little please, so I can fit between you and Carol." I had no idea why that was important as there was room to my other side, or to Carol's other side, but I was sure Julia had a reason. I scooted sideways a little, making a couple of the girls a little happier because I'd moved closer to them, and another couple of girls sadder. Carol said, "Let's all eat our lunch first, to get it out of the way before we talk." Girls started opening bags, etc. Carol asked me, "Mark, where's your lunch?" "I ate it already. I thought I should, so I could talk freely to your friends for most of the time I was here." That was pretty much the last thing I said for most of the lunchtime, because Julia chose this moment to ask, "Do you pretty girls want to hear some stories about Egg?" That got a resounding "YES!" from many directions. Julia said (and I wished she hadn't), "Let me tell you what happened when Mark bought the clothes he's wearing now. Carol and Donna were with us, so they can add some comments too." When human beings have two X-chromosomes, it creates a severe short-circuit in their brains, which gives rise to what can only be described as insanity whenever anyone mentions clothes shopping. Even more so when they're looking at a boy wearing 25% of a shirt. I have to admit that a discussion about clothes shopping was a very good place to start, as it made all the girls insanely happy, plus it could get Carol and Donna involved, so no doubt there'd be lots of fun and laughter from all the XX-chromosome carrying human beings here. It turned out to be even worse than I feared for the XY-chromosome carrier though. For example, Julia had my inside leg measuring "{Yelp}" pitch perfect. Her music training, I guess (Julia does one music class and was somewhat into it before I entered her life. She has to finish the class and take the exam, but it's just one of several things that she's effectively given up to spend more time with or thinking about me). All the girls thought Julia's yelp was very funny, and she had to repeat it a few times. In the course of the discussion Julia managed to casually let drop no fewer than six flattering references to my cock, such as "his beautiful cock". Rocky's (dis)orientation was made clear, and his interest in my body stated far too explicitly. Much was made of Rocky's statement that "Mark could be a world-famous male model." Which wasn't how I remembered Rocky saying it, but Julia never lets factual accuracy stand in the way of making girls hot for my body. I had some sympathy with her goal, so I chose not to correct her. I was also hoping that the less I said, the quicker the story would be over. Besides, I was busy. I'd moved myself a little so I could see some of Carol, and I'd been VERY lightly caressing Carol's nearest nipple with TK. She was wearing a thin dress and bra and I'd been missing her. Carol had a very happy, slightly spaced-out look on her face. Julia said, "When Mark drove us home from Rocky's ... Oh, did you girls know that Mark has his license. He's only fifteen, but he's got an unrestricted license now. He's left it in his locker so we can't show it to you, but it has an issue date more than a year ago. He was the same age as most of you are." (Because Carol jumped a grade a few years ago most of these girls would be a year older than her, so fourteen going on fifteen.) "Can you imagine your getting your license now? Of course you can't, because it's illegal. Mark had to get extraordinary permission from some very important people before he could get his, and none of you could ever do that. One of the reasons he needed it was because he has to drive back and forth to OSU for all the college courses he does. Oh, you didn't know he's doing college courses too. Yes, he's doing several..." You get the idea. Julia was segueing from boast to boast at superhuman speed. She was in full-on "Talk Mark Up" mode. She didn't have much time, and she wasn't wasting any of it. I tried to tune out most of it, preferring to concentrate on what I was doing to Carol's nipple. Julia's mention of soccer caught my attention. My game tomorrow was mentioned, and they were all invited to come watch. Another sentence that caught my attention was, "That's why so many girls want to fuck him." It caught the attention of the poor, innocent, 14-year old girls too. Julia and I were both pleased by the interested reactions that caused. I smiled to myself, while Julia reacted differently, saying, "Oh yes. Mark is SO good at sex that girls are falling all over themselves to get into his bed. He screwed three girls yesterday: Laila just after school, then Lily and Pat both slept with him all night. They're all 10th grade girls. Lily is Chinese, so some of you might've noticed her around. Pat is very beautiful, with a wonderful figure. And Laila's mostly a lesbian, but she was desperately eager to go to bed with Mark because she's heard how good he is. -- "He's taking Dakota to bed right after school today, and sleeping with Ava and me tonight. Ava is the 11th grade girl that Carol and I slept with last night, while Mark was busy with Lily and Pat. Ava is very good at sex, very experienced and enthusiastic. She's a wonderful lover. Carol, why don't you bring Ava down here sometime next week, to have lunch with any of the girls here who want to meet her. If any of you girls are bisexual you might want to make sure you come to that lunch, because Ava is a great kisser, and I'm sure she'll wear a low-cut top and short skirt if Carol asks her to, so you'll be able to caress her breasts or her pussy if you want to. That's if any of you want to make-out with a very pretty 11th grade girl while she's telling you all how good Mark is in bed?" Mostly what they wanted to do was get their brains checked for malfunctions. Surely they hadn't heard what they just heard! Even mullet never look this stunned (I'm guessing about that). Julia chuckled, adding, "Sorry. I forgot that you aren't used to sex yet. But I've started, so I might as well carry on. If you want to ask Ava about Mark then she'll answer every question you've got. She's very honest, so she'll give you every little detail. What Mark's cock looks like, how many orgasms he gave her, how good he is at licking her pussy, what his favorite positions are, what's the best way for any of you girls to suck his cock, and any other details you want to know. -- "Mark is an incredible athlete - just look at his body." Julia's hand waved to indicate where I was sitting, in case any of them failed to remember who the only guy here was. "I don't know why Mark bought such a ridiculous shirt. He might as well not wear one at all. It's a nice day, so you might as well take it off, Mark." All eighteen girls visibly agreed. In fact, all twenty one. This is a perfect example of female logic. If, as Julia had said, "He might as well not wear one at all," then what difference would it make taking it off? Yet my taking it off was obviously a very highly wished for action. I went with the majority opinion. Julia whispered in my ear, while kissing me a little, "I need that name soon. You'd better whisper it to me." The process of taking my shirt off was a wonderful distraction. None of the girls were looking at my eyes, so I could easily review the girls I'd had on my short list. I picked one. I didn't care much, so I chose the one with the nicest tits. I returned Julia's kiss, whispering "Gia" to her. Julia whispered back, "I don't remember who she is. What's she wearing?" "Far too much" wouldn't have been helpful. So I said, "Denim miniskirt, tight green top." Julia nodded. I was happy that she indicated she understood who I meant, as I wasn't sure that Julia would recognize what "green" looked like. To the crowd, Julia said, "I just had an idea. Why don't we make a wall of people's bodies, to block everyone else's view, and one lucky girl can make-out with Mark for five minutes, then she can tell you afterward what it was like. Apart from Carol and Donna, are there any girls here who DON'T want to make-out with Mark for five minutes?" Julia gave them one and a half seconds to speak up, and when none did (after Julia's sexual descriptions, most of them were probably too stunned to know their name) Julia announced, "I don't blame you. Mark's a great kisser, and look at that body." They did. No one questioned its greatness. "We're going to play Rock, Paper, Scissors. I'll blindfold Mark then all of you will hold a hand over your head with either rock, paper or scissors. Then without knowing what any of you are doing, Mark will hold up his hand as one of those. Those of you that he defeats have to get up and move to the side. Carol, Donna and I will look out for anyone changing their choice. Anyone cheating will be disqualified from this AND all future visits, because Mark will come down here from time to time to give you more chances to win a make-out session with him. We'll keep playing rounds until just one lucky girl is left, and she'll get five minutes with Mark while the rest of us form a wall to protect them from view. Do any of you not know how to play Rock, Papers, Scissors?" Four of them didn't. Julia said, "Carol, please just show them the three shapes. They can guess randomly because we don't have time for a better explanation. They should learn before Mark comes down here again. I'll get Mark ready." Carol explained the game to the four. To everyone in fact, as Carol just addressed the group. Meanwhile Julia was blindfolding me with my own shirt (it made a far more effective blindfold than shirt). She also got me to turn around to face away from the girls. Carol had finished. Julia said, "Anyone that doesn't understand the game, just choose any shape each time. This is a purely luck game because that's the fairest way. I've even turned Mark around so he definitely can't see any of you, so this is totally fair." As I've said before, Julia doesn't let fairness or facts get in the way of my getting the girl I want. "Okay everyone, choose a shape and put your hand up over your head." I don't actually know what happened since I truly was blindfolded. It took the best part of a minute to get everyone ready. Julia, who had her hand on my shoulder, said, "Soon, but not yet, Mark will put up his hand with his shape. Carol, Donna and I will watch carefully for cheats. I strongly suggest none of you cheat or you'll NEVER get to even talk with Mark in the future. Okay Mark, choose your shape and raise your hand." During her recent talk, Julia had been pressing TWO fingers into the top of my chest, which made that Paper. I held up a flat palm, which was greeted with some groans and several yippees. Julia announced, "I see five Stones. Please stand up and move over there." Eighteen minus five equals thirteen to go. The remaining rounds were much faster as the girls knew what to do now. Thirteen quickly dropped to seven, then to five, then three, then one. When I removed my blindfold and looked, the winner was a girl called Gia. What were the odds of that! I'd previously scoffed at Julia's, Carol's and Donna's excessive claims (I'd thought) about how many girls were interested in me, and the degree of their interest. Then the mass strip event had convinced me that an unbelievably large number of girls (i.e. more than none) truly had self-deluded themselves into a ridiculous - but wonderful - frenzy over me. All but a couple of these girls had never said a word to me before, but now they were desperately wanting to throw themselves at me, and were terribly disappointed that Gia had beaten them to that opportunity. Girls' thought processes are undeniably warped, but this time they'd warped themselves into a FANTASTIC mistake. I was REALLY looking forward to the fun and games I'd be having from now on, for as long as the mass insanity lasted. Julia asked, "Your name is Gia, isn't it?" Gia nodded. "Come here, you lucky girl." Gia advanced hesitantly, still overcome by the shock of her win. Julia asked, "Do you think Mark looks better with his shirt on, or off?" "Umm, off?" "Off it is then. Mark, leave your shirt off when you kiss Gia please. All you others: bad luck, but remember we'll be coming down here again so you'll have other fair chances. Come over here and form a wall. Good girls. Come on, a bit faster please." While Julia was herding them, I approached Gia and put my arm around her shoulder. "I'm glad you won, Gia." I enjoyed telling the truth. "You are?" "Yes. You're one of the most beautiful girls here." That was also true, the two truths not being a coincidence. I pulled her into a hug, and she seemed to be recovering. Her hand moved up in front of me, until it was in front of my belly. She asked me, "Can I touch you?" "Of course. You played so well you won." Julia had the wall reasonably well arranged. She said, "Carol and Donna, you in particular look out for any trouble please. I'm sure you don't want to look at your brother making out anyway. All you others, feel free to watch Mark and Gia as much as you want." The other girls were all facing us, which made them useless as lookouts anyway. "Mark, you and Gia sit down here, and start immediately. Gia, you do whatever you want, and Mark won't do any more to you than you do to him. If you want him to do less, just tell him. He's very gentle so he won't pressure you at all. Your five minutes start now." A few seconds later, Julia added, "Kiss her Mark, to get her started." I did so, and after a second she started kissing me back. After a couple more seconds, she REALLY started kissing me. Soon she had a hand rubbing up and down my chest. I wasn't sure how to mirror this, as per Julia instruction. My chest was naked, and Gia's - VERY sadly - wasn't. Gia's chest also had a considerably larger amount of tit than mine did. I gave myself the benefit of my doubt, and moved one of my hands from her waist, slowly up and over the front of her top, until I was rubbing the outside of her breasts. Gia started moaning and rubbing my chest harder and faster. Which, as I optimistically understood mirrors, meant I should do what I was already doing, but with my hand inside her top ("optimistically" is the key word in that sentence). I moved my hand down to under the bottom hem of her top (she also had a bare midriff, although with only a couple of vertical inches exposed). As soon as my fingers tried to squeeze under her top, she immediately sucked her belly in as far as it'd go, to create more room for me. It was easy to get my hand in, and her top was quite stretchy, so I had no trouble moving my hand up to her breasts. They were nice, large breasts (as I wrote before, Gia is one of the most beautiful girls here). By her increasingly passionate kisses and moans, she thoroughly approved of my actions, which made two of us. After thirty seconds or so of this (although I wasn't going to pull my hand out to look at my watch), I was getting annoyed that I couldn't get into her bra easily. I decided to make this easier. I used both my hands to pull up the bottom hem of her top, until I had her top entirely above her breasts. The spectators made various comments about that, demonstrating amazement, envy and excitement. It was simple for me to slide a hand into a cup, and to play with her nipple. Gia had largely stopped any of her actions on me now. Her attention was totally focused on what I was doing to her. She was loving it and was seriously excited. Who'd have thought that having a tit groped could excite a girl so much, but it sure did for Gia. Julia announced, "Two minutes left." Gia was breathing hard and had a vacant look on her face. She was obviously so turned on that I thought that I might be able to bring her off, which would have been great for a variety of reasons. I decided to go for it. I had a momentary thought to put my hand up her miniskirt, which was very easy the way she was sitting. In fact it was hard to stop myself from doing so. Julia had been fairly explicit about my not doing more to Gia than she was doing to me. I'd been liberal in my interpretation, but frigging her pussy to an orgasm was a little to hard to justify as any sort of mirroring of what she was doing, which was mostly hugging my neck tightly, moaning, and watching me play with her breast. "Gia, sweetie, may I undo your bra and suck your nipples with my mouth?" I'd specified, "with my mouth" in case she was as inexperienced as I thought. "Yes. Yes. Yes." That was excessive as she only had two nipples, but I took it as a "Yes" so I quickly unsnapped her bra. There are times being dexterous is truly wonderful. The old Mark would still have been fumbling when time ran out two minutes from now. I pulled the cups up, holding them flat to her upper-chest so she had a clear view of what I was about to do. That tied up one hand, but the other was free to roam, and I used it on both her breasts. I lowered my head to the breast I could most easily reach, and started licking the tip of my tongue around its underside. I don't know why, but the underside of breasts is the most sensitive non-nipple area. I didn't have time for more than a few seconds of foreplay, but even a few seconds is better than none. Gia enjoyed the foreplay so much, and was getting so much more excited from it, that I ended up using about forty five seconds on it. Then I let the tip of my tongue run over one nipple. She HISSED, and her back bent like a bow, trying to shove her nipple into my mouth. I licked around it a couple of times, to torture her (it's a useful thing, is torture) then took it into my mouth gently, while my other hand gently grasped the other nipple. Julia called, "One minute." Gia wasn't doing anything, but somehow still managed to convey that she REALLY wanted to hurry. Not to put too fine a point on it (because I already had two fine points, and any more would have been plain greedy), I hurried. Far faster than I would have preferred, but Gia responded wonderfully. In this context, that means "quickly and a lot." I was interested in getting as much response out of her as I could, and happily she was one big hair-trigger. Every touch got her more and more aroused. It was looking likely to be easily the fastest orgasm I'd ever achieved (I'm excluding many of my own from the pre go-soft days, because some of them shot off while my hand was still reaching for my cock. Not to mention my first ever cum with Julia, which I'm doing my best to forget. But I'm digressing). With about thirty seconds to go, I was squeezing and biting harder than I really wanted to, except that Gia obviously wanted it. She was into that rhythmic moaning pattern that I so enjoy, and I was timing my movements slightly faster than her rhythm, making her go faster and faster. We had about fifteen seconds to go, and I thought we had a good chance of making it. I was also praying that Julia would give us an extension if Gia needed it, as it would have been horribly cruel to stop a couple of seconds short. However, as I say, I was building her as fast as I could, and had about fifteen seconds of time left. Suddenly Gia sucked in a huge lung full of air. She'd taken me by surprise by jumping ahead of me. I blame either her inexperience, or my inexperience with 14-year old girls. Both inexperiences needed a considerable amount of remedying, preferably at the same time (Gia has WONDERFUL tits). It probably wouldn't be the best thing to have a 14-year old girl scream her orgasm at school as loudly as it seemed this one was about to. I moved my mouth to hers as fast as I could, clamping mine completely over hers. Figuring she didn't need to watch her own nipples anymore to get aroused, I stopped holding her bra flat, and used both hands to grab, squeeze, pull and twist her nipples. That was probably unnecessary, but I'm an artiste. That and I like playing with nipples. Gia went off BIG TIME, screaming into my mouth. I think it's rude to clamp a girl's mouth with my hand. That seems wrong somehow, and certainly not romantic. Muffling her by a kiss is far more appropriate. Besides, it's more fun to have her yell into my mouth. It's an unusual sensation, feeling her yell inside my own chest. After Gia ran out of breath, I looked up and around for Julia. I was distracted by seeing the reactions of all the other girls. Gia's second yell ALMOST caught me by surprise. Another very hasty kiss was required. I really should get some more practice with big-titted, orgasmic, 14-year old girls. When I was sure she was yelled out, I decided the first order of business was to put her back together. I'm not stupid enough to try to hook up a bra from the front. I'd NEVER practiced that move, and I knew I'd make a fool of myself attempting it, so I looked up for the nearest girl, called her by name, and asked her to do up Gia's bra. While she was doing that, I looked around. Some of the other girls were cheering, others were speechless, some were excited themselves; a couple very much so. There was a variety of emotions, but none were negative (I'm assuming envy is a positive emotion in this context). I'd been a hit. Gia's bra now done up, I pulled her top down, helped by the girl behind Gia who'd just done up her bra. I made sure Gia's top was perfect: no wrinkles, the hem wasn't bunched up, etc. I was being solicitous, under the assumption that girls would like that from a boy after he's chewed on one of their nipples. Meanwhile Gia was hugging me fiercely. I couldn't see her face, as it was tightly clamped against mine, but I could feel that her breathing was settling. I had to feel this, as the level of noise had risen considerable, as the spectators had lost all constraint in expressing their opinions. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see a smiling Julia. She said, "Well done." Which I got through lip reading as much as hearing. Julia's touch on my shoulder broke everyone else's restraint, and in seconds we were surrounded - two or three layers deep - by excited girls; "excited" meaning both aroused and delighted, with both emotions causing noise. I heard snatches of all the usual gushing girls produce at such times. I mentally agreed that it was amazing, that Gia was so lucky, and that I was hot. Speaking of which, where was my shirt? For a few seconds I thought I was going to be spending the rest of the day topless. I was happy at that thought, as it was preferable to that shirt. Then I sadly saw that Julia had it in her hand. I held out my hand for it, and Julia gave it to me. Putting it on was problematic though, as Gia was attached to my neck. It was stretchy and more hole than shirt so maybe I could have put it on over both of us, but I don't think 14-year old girls are part of the male dress code. She has to be removed from my neck. I held my shirt under one forearm to avoid its being trampled, then used my hands to try to pry Gia loose. She didn't want to let go and resisted, but I'm considerably stronger than her. There can't have been much of our lunchtime left, and I didn't want Julia to be late back to class. Plus I suspected that there would be some more talking before we left. Julia decided it was time to take charge, and started calling for quiet. The other girls had gushed enough, so they settled down fairly readily. Julia also got them to move back a little to give us room. I tried to get Gia to stand, and she said, "I don't want you to go. I love you." #3: #1: Most of the girls had heard Gia's declaration, and by the look on their faces were torn between, "Isn't that sweet" and, "Lucky bitch, I wish that was me." Julia said, "Come on, Gia, your time is up. Return to the other girls. Mark and I have to head back to our school shortly." "No!" as Gia threw her arms around me again. She was a braver girl than me, to say "No" to Julia. To my surprise, Julia didn't immediately eviscerate Gia. Instead Julia smiled then addressed all the other girls. "Every girl that spends time with Mark falls for him. He's a genius, is handsome, athletic, kind, funny, and he's a wonderful lover, as we just saw Gia discover. Many, many girls want to be one of his girlfriends, and maybe one day his wife. Shall I tell you what sort of girl has the best chance of being his girlfriend, in case some of you want to be one?" Several of them expressed considerable and enthusiastic curiosity about this topic. I thought they were wonderful girls. Clearly not very discriminating in their taste, but that only added to their wonderfulness. Julia explained, "Remember that Mark has not just dozens, but hundreds of girls who like him very much, so he can choose whatever sort of girl he wants. He likes good looking girls, and all of you are, so any of you could be his girlfriend for that reason. He tends to like girls with good figures, but he's smarter and more mature than other guys. You can tell by looking at me that Mark doesn't let breast size control his thinking." #4: #3: "You saw which girls Mark liked the clothing of. So more important than figure, is how you show it off. Next time we have one of these lunches, you should all make sure you're wearing clothes that Mark likes. Maybe with buttons or a zip at the front, so you can walk around school normally, but REALLY catch Mark's eye at lunch. A miniskirt is good, and a top that is easy for Mark to get into, in case you're lucky enough to win the next Rock, Paper, Scissors game. -- "But I was talking about what sort of girl Mark likes. We don't have time for more, so I'll just say that looking at Gia, she had a good chance of becoming Mark's girlfriend. She's good looking, has a good figure, is dressed nicely, she obviously loved getting sexy with Mark, which Mark really enjoys too. But there are probably a hundred girls in school, including some of you standing here, who are at least as good as Gia. With so many girls to choose from, how does Mark decide which ones to get to know better?" Good question, judging by the focused attention of her audience. "It's simple. He looks for the girls who aren't selfish. Look at Gia. She made Mark do all the sex stuff. Not once did she try to give Mark pleasure. He had to spend all the five minutes making her happy and giving her an orgasm. He got NOTHING. Now she's sitting in his lap refusing to get up, saying, 'I love you', 'I don't want to go', 'I don't want you to go.' Everything Gia says is about 'I, I, I.' Gia has had her five minutes of fun, but her selfishness has proved that she'd be a terrible girlfriend. Mark, stand up, and drop Gia on the ground if you need to." "NO!" cried Gia. But, as it turned out, "Yes." There was nothing Gia could do to stop me. At best she hung on for a few seconds longer than if she'd just let go. I hope she enjoyed those seconds, because they're probably the last she'll ever have with me. I dropped a sobbing Gia on the grass, then walked over the Julia. Julia continued her lesson, "Gia's mistake was that not once did she think about what Mark wanted. A smart girl would've made that her top priority. With hundreds of girls to choose from, Mark is going to choose girls that are good at making him happy. That's TOTALLY obvious. I'll repeat it for you: 'Mark is going to choose girls that are good at making him happy'. Just like you'd choose the boy who'd make you happy, which is obviously Mark. Mark is the BEST man any of you will EVER meet. Look at him, he's gorgeous." Oops, I'd dropped my shirt. It was still lying on the ground next to Gia. I didn't want to walk near her again, so I stood there topless. -- "In just a few years he's going to be famous. Not just in Corvallis or Oregon, but famous all over the WORLD! Look at his body now. A poster of him looking like he does now could soon be hanging on millions of girls' bedroom walls." Appealing to 14-year old girls' desires to be near a famous pin-up boy - Julia was bringing out the big guns! [Her prediction turned out to be dismayingly accurate, but that's a long way ahead.] "You all have the chance to be one of the first girlfriends of a man who is going to be world famous, and if you try REALLY hard, to be more than his girlfriend. Gia had the best chance of all, but she didn't bother to make Mark happy, and when he asked her to do something - to let go - she repeatedly told him 'No'. With hundreds of girls who want to be his girlfriends, why would Mark want to waste any time with a girl who didn't care whether he was happy and kept saying 'No' to him?" -- Julia let them think about that for a couple of seconds, then she turned to Carol, "Carol, NEVER invite Gia to any more of these lunches. Mark is too important to waste his time on girls like her. Find some other girl to take her place who WILL try to make him happy, and who will ALWAYS say 'Yes' to him. There are plenty of girls like that, aren't there?" Carol didn't have ANY trouble following that lead, "Heavens yes! When you walk back to your school, let me escort you through where I know most of the older girls sit. They'll see Mark and just DIE! After that most of the girls in our grade would kill to have a chance at Mark. I'm sure none of them would ever say 'No' to him." Julia continued, "Good idea, sweetie. I know you could invite dozens of girls if you wanted, but try to keep the number small. Other than Gia, the others have been very helpful and cooperative, so it'd be fair to invite them again. I think they've got the message about how to treat Mark properly." There was a chorus of agreements. "Good. Okay Carol, find another girl, or a few more girls, to replace Gia at future meetings. Not too many though. We'd better get going now, especially if you want us to walk a roundabout way back." All this had been talked through over Gia's continual crying, which now rose in volume. She lay sobbing while we started gathering up our gear. I didn't have any, but I managed to sidle up to near Gia and quickly whip down to recover my shirt. I wasn't comfortable getting near her, in case I made her feel even worse. She'd gone from euphorically happy, to desolate, all within a few minutes. Julia's building me up even higher with the other girls hadn't helped Gia either. By the time I had my shirt on all the girls were ready to walk away except for Gia, who hadn't moved other than to sob loudly. None of the others were going near her. I would've thought that some of them were her friends, but so much for friendship! A few minutes ago they'd all been wishing they were her, and now they wouldn't even look at her. It was cold of them, and I felt very sorry for her, but I couldn't give her any comfort. I understood Julia's reasoning, and I'd probably benefit from it in the future, but right now I was feeling very sorry for Gia, and not impressed that none of the other girls went to her aid. I would think better of any girl who did that, and I'd also feel a LOT better if Gia stopped crying. Some of the other girls had been asking Julia when the next lunch would be. They were hoping for tomorrow! It was a Saturday, but I got the strong impression that they'd still rush to school to be near me. Julia looked at me, and asked, "When do you want to come down here again?" Quite frankly, Gia's crying was making me regret coming here the first time. I showed a considerable lack of enthusiasm. I wanted to say "Never," but I didn't want to upset Carol, which meant some sort of compromise, say a week or two. I was still thinking this through when Julia said, "Yes, I agree. NONE of these girls are very good, are they?" I had no idea what Julia was talking about, but I'd been well trained by now so I replied, "Sadly, no." This was an unpleasant surprise to all the non-sobbing girls. Julia answered their surprise, "I'm also not impressed with any of you. I told you several minutes ago that Mark likes looking at girls with buttons or zips undone on their tops, and NOT ONE of you undid a single button to make him happy." Several girls immediately moved to do so. Julia yelled, "STOP! There's absolutely no point in doing that now..." #3: " ... We don't have time, and if any of you had done that originally you would've shown that you were THINKING about how to make Mark happy. Just mindlessly doing what you're told to do doesn't show that you'd be a good girlfriend..." #3: " ... A GOOD girlfriend is one that anticipates ways to make her man happy. None of you have done that today. None of you even undid one button. Yesterday a dozen 10th grade girls arranged to meet Mark before school, in a private corner, and they all stripped totally naked so Mark could see them and choose which ones he wanted." That image drew many "{Gasp's}" from the girls. Even Gia's sobs momentarily stopped in shock. I sometimes love Julia's wording. A group of 10th grade girls DID arrange to meet, Julia being the 10th grade girl who did all the arranging. And while her wording had been literally true, it also made it seem as if they'd intended to strip, which wasn't true at all. Julia was very entertaining and impressive. Julia continued, "I keep telling you that there are hundreds of girls who will do whatever Mark wants. None of those girls would dream of saying 'No' to him, and they're trying as hard as they can to make him happy. Because he loves Carol so much, Mark came down to have lunch with you, as a favor to her. He gave up having lunch with any number of high-school girls who would have undone their buttons to make him happy. Usually none of the girls Mark is having lunch with are even wearing panties, they take them off before they join him. And they make sure he sees them, and they let him play with any of their bare pussies that he wants." One of the girls looked all around her, particularly back toward the rest of the kids having their lunch. Deciding it was safe enough she reached under her skirt. Julia had unfortunately spotted the movement and called her name, telling her to stop. Adding, "There's no point. Do it next time we come, if we come, but it's too late now. As I was saying, Mark gave up having a very sexy lunch - with very cooperative, friendly, happy girls - in order to come down here and have lunch with his sister and her friends. How many of you have got brothers who'd give up playing with 16-year old girls' pussies in order to have lunch with his sister?" None of them did. Put like that, I was amazed my sisters had such a brother. What was he thinking! -- "Mark's a caring, loving, kind man. Those are the most important things about him. Despite what he gave up to come down here, despite Gia's selfishly making Mark spend all his time giving HER pleasure rather than her giving him any, despite her repeatedly telling him 'No', and despite none of the rest of you being nice to him, Mark has not made a single complaint. You'll never meet a kinder, gentler man. All of you can see what he's like, and you can easily see how uncomfortable he is with Gia's crying and unhappiness, but not one of you has tried to make Mark happier by looking after Gia. You are ALL thoughtless and selfish. I'm SURE that all of you would have made exactly the same mistakes that Gia made. -- "The four of us are going to walk off now. I want you ALL to stay and help Gia, because she behaved no worse than any of you would've. Mark and I MIGHT come down here for lunch another day, or we might not. I'll talk with Mark about it after he cheers up. If we do decide to come, Carol will tell you. I STRONGLY suggest that any of you who are interested in Mark have a VERY HARD think about what it means to be a good girlfriend to a guy as exceptional as he is. You'll NEVER meet a man as fantastic as Mark again, not in your whole life, and just sitting on your ass with your brains turned off isn't going to get you anywhere at all." Julia took a couple of steps away, then added, "I was going to say, 'Nice to meet you', but mostly I was disappointed." Julia resumed walking, quickly followed by Carol, Donna and me. The eighteen remaining girls were left standing and confused. I saw some of them hesitantly move toward Gia. Some even took a couple of steps after us, but I turned to face Julia, caught up with her, and walked on. None of the girls intruded. They were probably too scared of Julia, which meant they'd finally started using their brains. We walked away rapidly, wanting to get some distance for privacy. It was Donna who spoke first, "Wow, you SURE told them! Are you going to do the same to my friends next week?" (For those of you who haven't started using a diary to keep track of my bookings, next Thursday is Donna's Duckling's turn to have us come to lunch.) Julia answered, "If they need it, yes, but you can tell them what happened at this lunch so they shouldn't make the same mistakes." "I can do that. That'd be fun. Can I tell them EVERYTHING?" "Nothing was secret, so sure, but it sounds like you've got something specific in mind?" "About the Rock Paper Scissors game. That'll get them very excited, knowing one of them will making out with Egg. There's going to be a LOT of RPS practicing going on the next few days! I was also thinking about what you said about girls taking their panties off when they have lunch with Mark. I'd LOVE to tell them that. Do girls really do that?" Julia said, "Many times EVERY single girl Mark is having lunch with has no panties on. That's just when he's having lunch with Carol and me though." "What, just you two?" "Yes. Mark hardly ever has lunch with anyone else. Just with us two." "Haha. You're SO tricky. That's so funny. I like it! Can I trick my Ducklings the same way?" "Only if you'd think Mark would like to look at lots of girls' naked pussies?" Somehow Donna didn't even have to think about it, she immediately started laughing, "Haha. This is going to be SO much fun." I thought so too. Donna asked, "Is Mark going to wear the same clothes on Thursday?" #1: Julia said, "Oh no. He can't come back to middle school wearing the same clothes. We're going shopping for him tomorrow morning, before his soccer game. We have more time, so we'll able to find something better for him." What a relief! For about one second, until I realized that my understanding of the word "better" might not be the same as Julia's. Then I relaxed. You might be surprised by that, but it was because it truly wasn't possible for clothes that were within the school's dress code to be any worse than what I was wearing now. Donna said, "Rats! I can't come with you. I've got running tomorrow morning. Shopping was such a lot of fun last time!" No it wasn't, but it wasn't worth the argument. Julia asked, "Carol, that lunch was tougher than I had planned. Are you okay with the way it happened?" Carol said, "Everything up to the end was what I expected you to do, but the ending was hard. I understand why, so I'm not arguing, but I feel very sorry for Gia. She's a nice girl. She's one of my favorites out of the girls that were there, so that was very hard for me to see." "Sorry about that. It wouldn't have happened if she hadn't refused to let go of Mark after her five minutes were up. I know I was VERY hard on her, but it's the best way to teach everybody else. Even Donna's friends are going to hear about it. You also saw me be hard on the girls who were late to the Liaison picking meeting. If I keep doing that, girls will learn to be on their best behavior. If I don't do it, they'll take advantage and waste a lot of our and Mark's time. Did you know that Dad thinks Mark can finish his undergraduate degree next year?" Julia had to explain what that meant, but when Carol and Donna understood, they were amazed. I'd even go so far as to say that Carol was flabbergasted. Not so much with Donna, as she was still too young to have developed much of a flabber to gast, what with her not having reached her menarche yet. Plus she didn't understand college much. Julia got the conversation back on course, "Mark's time is very important. We have to start the right way now, so everyone will behave properly this year and next." I just realized that Julia and Carol weren't the perfect girlfriends for me. My elementary school education had taken 100% of the usual time, my middle school had taken about 75% of normal (2.33 years out of 3), high school will take 67% of the usual time (2.67 years out of 4), and my college degree will take 0% of the usual time (I'd graduate college even before leaving school). In another couple of years, I'll be going so fast that I'll be going back in time. I wanted to make that joke, but neither Carol nor Julia would find it the least bit funny because it was too science fictiony. It's hard finding the perfect girlfriend. I could cheer myself up by continuing to look for more girlfriends though, as that's fun! It would also be good if I had the time to read sci-fi again - it'd been too long. If I wasn't careful, I'd be in danger of not getting my own jokes, which would be a very sad day. Although not getting some of #4's would be a mercy. I'd left the girls to their chatting while I'd been amusing myself with my own thoughts. When I picked up the girls' conversation again, Julia was telling Carol, "You can't let Gia back into the lunch group. It'd also be better for her if she didn't come to the soccer game tomorrow, since Mark won't let her get close. We have to stand firm on that. The best you can do is reassure her. Tell her that when she's grown up and married to a normal man, she'll be able to boast to him and their children that she knew the famous Mark Anderson. You can joke about how proud she can be that he sucked her breast and gave her an orgasm, which is more than almost every other 8th grader is going to get from Mark, so she's actually one of the lucky ones. She'll get over it quickly. It's not as if it was real love, just the emotional overload at the time. In a few days she'll be fine." That ended the Gia conversation. I was sad with how it'd worked out because she'd had very nice tits (past tense, as they were gone from my life now. Both of them, unfortunately). ------- Chapter 98: Dakota's Session Friday, April 22, 2005 (Continued) With Carol and Julia correctly attached to my arms, we paraded through the middle school, to give as many young girls as possible the benefit of seeing me in my new sartorial splendor. We - mostly me, I must admit - attracted considerable attention, and we accumulated quite a group of followers, both male and female. We often encountered girls Carol or Donna knew, and the appropriate sister would make the introductions, explaining, "Mark and Julia had lunch with us, and they're going back now." There was an excess of other jabbering too, as the crowd were nearly as gaga as the lunch group had been. I won't bother quoting what they were saying, as it was all too predictable. We kept walking, as we had very little spare time, even though the girls we walked past would MUCH rather we stopped to talk. From what I could see, a large number of them wanted to spend the rest of their life basking in the magnificence of my presence, and that's not much of an exaggeration. Easily enough girls saw us to inflame the rumor mill about my new look, so my sisters were going to be busy for the next few days. When we reached the dividing line between the middle and high schools, we stopped so Julia could more fully explain the Liaison system to the female members of the throng. She insisted that Donna and Carol would know when we'd next come to middle school for lunch, that they were the contact point for all questions about me, and admonished the girls to behave themselves or else. Just the usual stuff we had to tell girls who were overcome by the look of my clothes. Then it was time for the goodbyes. Donna yelled, as she accelerated away, "Bye. I can't wait to start telling my Ducklings about that lunch." Carol called after her, "Be kind about Gia please!" Donna waved what looked like an acknowledgment. Carol made a more sedate farewell, involving considerably more kissing, unfortunately my share was tiny. Carol said, "It was a tough lunchtime, but I can already imagine that the next one is going to be a LOT of fun. Let me know when you want to have that. I'll go see if I can cheer up Gia now. Bye, my loves." We went through the gateway on the boundary between the two schools and walked toward our lockers. That forced the majority of the middle-school kids to stop following us. Some of the more adventurous or smitten ones persisted, requiring Julia to warn them off. That gave me time to memorize the prettier ones, as they might be fun to play with regardless whether they were pretty and adventurous, or pretty and smitten. I could work with both types. There'd been a question on my mind for most of lunchtime, and walking alone with Julia now gave me a chance to ask it, "Why did you ask me whether I had a rubber?" "I was thinking of setting it up so you had sex with the winner of the RPS match." That would have been fun, especially because Gia had been VERY good looking. I thought Julia's comment was worth following up on. I casually inquired, "That would have been fun. So how come we didn't do it?" "When I started talking with them, I was reminded how easily they were overloaded with sexual imagery, and that would have been too much for them. It would only have been five minutes, and probably with a virgin, so you wouldn't have gotten much pleasure out of it." "Couldn't we have made it a 'Non-Virgins Only' competition?" All eighteen girls had been eminently fuckable, so I wouldn't have minded who won. Surely, out of eighteen girls, there'd have to be at least one non-virgin? I know Corvallis is a conservative town, but eighteen out of eighteen being virgins would've been horrendously bad luck. "Sure, but that wouldn't help with their being so easily overloaded by sex. You don't want them running back to their mommy or the Principal. Remember these girls almost never see you. Their desire for you is mostly because you're famous and the stories Carol and Donna have spread about you. I was used to dealing with 10th graders and had forgotten how easily spooked these girls would be. Don't worry, you'll have your evil way with them the time after next." "Huh? 'Time after next'. We're going backward faster than we're going forward. What's wrong with the next time?" "You'll get better quality fucks if we take one more lunch to prepare them. It's more about quality than quantity." The two essential elements that Julia was failing to grasp was that there's no such thing as a low-quality fuck, and that guys get a huge buzz out of being successful with as many girls as possible - whoever invented sex REALLY knew what he was doing! Fucking is GREAT! Especially with ANY of the beautiful, highly enthusiastic girls we'd just had lunch with! The sole negative aspect was Julia's previous point about virgins, but waiting one more lunch wasn't going to change that issue, and surely I could start with the non-virgins? I was trying to think of a diplomatic way of telling Julia that she was ENTIRELY WRONG! It doesn't happen often, so I wasn't sure how to point it out. Julia added, "We should get them to ask you for sex. They're all less likely to go running to mommy if they asked for it. I'd rather we went too slow than too fast, because too fast could get us in trouble. A high-school male going down to middle school to screw 8th graders during lunchtimes isn't something you want any adult learning about." That argument had some merit. "Okay, you're right about that. I guess I got overly excited at the idea. They were all very pretty." "I don't think you're going to be lacking for sex. Not with the Liaison system starting to work. Already you can ask Carol, me, Lily, Laila, Ava and Pat to jump into your bed any time you want. Dakota will join that list in a few hours. If you wanted you could add Donna any time, as she'd be thrilled to be invited into your bed. You'll pick up even more prospects after your soccer match and bowling. Which reminds me, I haven't tried to plan anything for after those two events. They're mainly to increase your attractiveness, rather than get you immediately bedded. Have you thought about what you want to do after those games?" "No, I haven't thought about it at all. There's been too much else going on." "Think about it and let me know. It's always better to plan these things than to improvise at the time." Somehow I wasn't surprised that Julia thought that. I considered it during my next class (English, not a subject that needs much thinking about as it's easy to make up and write any old twaddle). When I caught up to Julia in the next between-classes break, I told her, "I know what I want to do on Saturday after soccer. I want to go home! I haven't been home for too long. I haven't talked to Mom or Dad. I haven't slept in Carol's and my new bed, and I miss Carol very much too. I want to spend some time with my family, and then sleep with my two wives in my bed. And go for a run with Donna Sunday morning too. And if that means missing a morning's study at your house, then too bad!" "Aww, aren't you sweet? That'll be the plan then. There'll be some chatting to all the girls after your game, but let's say that from dinnertime onward you'll be at your home and we won't let anything get in the way of that. How does that sound?" "Perfect!" "You said you wanted to sleep with your two wives. Did you mean to include me, or would you prefer just your family?" "Definitely you. This isn't about sex anymore. This is about being with the people that I love, and that definitely includes you." Brownie points through the roof! I don't know what I'd use them for though, as Julia does everything I want anyway. Or would do, if I had a chance to want something before she anticipated it. I immediately got some very nice hugs and kisses though. ^ The rest of the school day was fine, apart from the aforementioned homosexual guys coming on to me. That was VERY NOT fine. An increased number of girls came onto me too (which WAS fine). Several of them saying they'd looked for me at lunchtime. I just said, "I had my lunch elsewhere." The last thing I wanted was high-school students looking for me around middle school when I was FINALLY getting to boink any of Carol's group. I either directed them to their Liaisons, or collected their names, numbers and grades, also as aforementioned (useful word, that one. It's nice to have learned some useful English from Mom). Lily and Pat were walking around less uncomfortably, but were no doubt thankful that a lot of time at school was spent sitting down. Not that they were perfectly comfortable sitting, but it was much better than walking. When the two of them were together, as their schedules permitted, they were openly friendly and affectionate. The "affectionate" aspect caught several people's attention. I overheard one guy asking them about it (for some reason, it was mostly guys that noticed their affection. We must also be more observant. Or perhaps not, because he hadn't noticed me in the room). Pat answered him, in a voice that was just a little louder than normal (good girl!), "Sure. Lily and I slept with Egg last night. Didn't you know about that? I thought everyone did. He was awesome!" Pat had observantly spotted me in the room and she knew on what side her bread was buttered. "But, um, how come you and Lily are so friendly? How come you're not competing with each other? I don't mean to be nosey or anything; I'm just curious. I thought Julia was his girlfriend. How many girlfriends does he want?" "I don't know. You should ask him." Lily pointed behind "not nosey but curious" guy, who turned to see me. He couldn't have been that curious, because he was too embarrassed to hang around to ask. I don't think my prepared answer ("Lots!") would have been helpful anyway. I encountered Dakota several times during the day, as she was in some of my classes. She was very excited about our planned session this afternoon, because of how good she'd heard I was. She was also somewhat scared, because of how good she'd heard I was. Lily, Laila, Pat and Julia had all told her stories, and she was quite worked up. I was looking forward to Dakota's session because she has an especially good figure. Even better than Pat's, although Pat's face was significantly more beautiful. If I put that mathematically: Dakota's face wasn't as good as Pat's, but BOTH her breasts were better, which gave the match to Dakota. Dakota was worried though, and asked me to go easy on her. I reassured her, "Of course I will, Dakota. I like you," (see my previous comment about the quality of her breasts). "The other girls should have told you that I'm not a bully." "Oh, I know you're not a bully. I couldn't imagine you being like that. But Lily and Pat are sore. They say 'good sore', but it still looks very sore. I don't want to be sore afterward." "We don't have long. Unfortunately, because I like you. I've got a very busy evening this evening and some important quizzes tomorrow morning." That confused Dakota as we tend not to have school quizzes on Saturday mornings! Seeing her puzzlement, I added, "For some of my college courses." "Ahh. You are busy, aren't you?" "Not nearly as busy as I'm going to be next year! But don't worry about that. You and I don't have long for our session and we can ALWAYS finish early if you want me to. I'd never go longer than you're comfortable with. I wouldn't do that anyway, but I'd like it if you wanted to come back for more some day" (see my previous comment about the quality of her breasts). Dakota said, "The other girls said you were a gentleman. They also said you were a nonstop fucking machine. That sounds contradictory." "I'll make sure the gentleman is in charge of the machine, AND that you've got control of the 'Off' switch. Okay?" "Thanks. I'm excited but scared too." "I can understand that. These clothes would scare anybody. I look like a homosexual thug." I was using my ultimate weapon to distract her. "Are you kidding! Those clothes are HOT! You don't look like a thug at all, not with that cute little ass." Which I took as confirmation that I looked like a homosexual. Our conversation had already sunk to a low level (it was about my ass), so I'll stop recording it further. The plan was for Dakota to ride her bike to Julia's, while I drove via my home. Pretty much a repeat of what we'd done with Laila, even to me having to pop into home to grab some clothes to wear to the dinner party for The Boys' girlfriends, as my current clothes were unfit for polite social company. Fine for homosexual company, but not for polite company. When school finished, the four of us - Julia, Carol, Donna and me - quickly gathered at our car, and headed home. I didn't want to keep Dakota waiting (see my previous comment about the quality of her breasts). As soon as we were rolling, Julia said, "Our lovely man says that he doesn't want to play around with any girls after his soccer game. He wants to spend quality time with all his loved ones because he misses us all so much. So after a little inescapable socializing we'll go back to the Anderson house. We'll have dinner at your place and stay the night in the new bed. Donna, that'll just be his wives, in case your hopes got up, but you get to go running with Mark Sunday morning if you want to. How does that sound?" They thought that sounded wonderful. Carol said, "That sounds wonderful." (See, I told you) "I miss him very much, especially after what he was doing to my nipples at lunchtime." I chuckled at that, because it'd been fun. Donna asked, "What did he do?" Oops. Donna didn't know about TK, and I didn't want her to. Carol had possibly forgotten that so I didn't want to risk waiting to hear what she said. I couldn't go "{Cough, cough}" to put Carol off because Donna would know she was being kept in the dark about something. I wanted to use TK to keep Carol quiet, ideally by pinching her lips together. By bad luck Carol was sitting behind the driver's seat, so I couldn't see her, and therefore couldn't see where to TK. But I could see her in the car's internal rear view mirror. Moving sideways just a little gave me a clear view of Carol's face in the mirror, and I tried to create TK-points, but the creation process failed. I'd never tried doing it via a mirror before, and I didn't have time to experiment now, as Carol was about to answer Donna's question. The street looked safe for a second - there were cars all around us but they were moving smoothly - so I turned all the way around in my seat, hoping that Prof or Vanessa were not anywhere within sight of me. As soon as I saw Carol, I clamped her lips shut, then immediately turned back to look at the street. I REALLY like looking at the street when I am driving! My turning away from Carol had killed my TK-points, but I hoped the brief contact gave Carol enough of a hint. I said, with what I hoped was just the right amount of concern, "Oh no! Was my staring at you that obvious? I loved the thin top and bra you were wearing, but I REALLY hope none of the other girls saw me staring at you?" At lunch I'd been careful NOT to stare at her. I'd kept her in my field of view but I had rarely looked directly at her - just enough to be natural, like when she was talking - so we had no problem in that respect, only now about Donna's question. Carol's no dummy (she's smarter than I am), and she got my hint. "Umm, he was making them hard. I haven't been with him for far too long, and they got hard every time Mark looked at me. I don't think anyone else noticed, but I sure did, and it made me miss him a lot. Did you notice my nipples, Donna?" "No, but I was mostly looking at the other girls. No one seemed to notice anything. I think they were all FAR too busy looking at Mark's nipples, haha." That caused plenty of laughter, and relief for me. I think I'll have a talk with Carol and Julia, to get them never to sit directly behind me in case I need to do that again. Donna can have that seat permanently. If Carol had been in any other seat, pinching her lips would have been far easier and safer. Julia resumed, "Carol and Donna, you'll be home Saturday evening, won't you?" "Yeah," from Donna | "I will DEFINITELY be home now, but would've been anyway," from Carol. "Can you also please check with your parents tonight, to make sure they haven't got any plans to go out?" Carol said, "Will do. Do Mom and Dad know about your finishing college next year, Mark?" I'd have preferred not to tell them because I knew I'd hit a brick wall and fail to finish, but Mom would obviously find out about Prof's expectation from Vanessa. I wasn't looking forward to seeing Mom's and Dad's enthusiasm, knowing I was going to be letting them down, but I couldn't see an escape anywhere. I'd do what Julia said, and just go forward and cross that bridge so I could hit the wall (she doesn't talk like that, but you know what I mean). "No, they don't. That's one of the reasons I need to catch up with them." There was something else that was worrying me. Prof said people from overseas colleges and big companies would start chasing after me next year. How would my failing to finish a degree affect that? I wanted to hear those offers because I might find something that suited my rather peculiar abilities. Mixed up in that was some worries I had about buying our mansion. I want us to have a mansion and live together very much, but if I get chased even harder because I'd started college courses, might that mean I leave Corvallis sooner? Maybe immediately after I finish 12th grade in June. That wouldn't give much time to live in the mansion, especially in the attached house for me and my girls. I wasn't comfortable with how uncertain my future was getting. Making it worse was that no one was taking my failing college seriously, so I didn't think I'd get good advice about what would happen if that eventuality occurred. I'd been worrying about it, on and off, all day. Not seriously heavy worries, because no decision was required yet, but it hardly made me enthusiastic to tell Mom and Dad about my "finishing college next year," to quote Carol. Julia changed the subject, "Carol, do you want to come clothes shopping with Mark and me tomorrow morning?" #2: Carol answered, "Thanks for asking, but I think I'll leave it to you. It'd be great fun..." I expressed my opinion, "{Raspberry}." Yippee! I got to use one. That hardly ever happens. It felt good too, even though they ignored it. " ... but I'm getting behind on my schoolwork. That NEVER used to happen, but my life has changed SO MUCH! I won't be able to do any schoolwork from about 1:30 tomorrow, because of Mark's soccer game and being together afterward. Sunday we've got bowling at noon and lunch after. I think I should catch up while I can." ^ [As it turned out, Carol's schoolwork catch-up plan failed. This afternoon and tonight she received many phone calls from girls in her grade wanting to talk about how incredible her brother was, and asking how they could get to meet him. On Saturday morning Carol received more of the same, plus a visit from a very distraught and sleepless Gia. Gia had gone home right after her nipple-sucking, so Carol hadn't had a chance to cheer her up at school. That probably wouldn't have been doable anyway, as the time between classes is too short for good conversation. The first Carol saw of Gia was when she turned up on Saturday to beg me for another chance. I wasn't there, and Carol refused to say where I was or give out my cellphone number, so Gia spent far too long begging Carol for my forgiveness. All of this occurred when I was either at the Williams' house or shopping. I was even GLAD to have been shopping, when I learned I'd missed Gia. Sorry for Carol, but glad for me.] ^ At my place I ran in, grabbed a decent set of clothes, grabbed an indecent kiss from Carol (it'd been far too long), and ran back out to the car, eager to get a lot more indecency. I was eagerly looking forward to my first session with Dakota, more than I had for any of the other girls I'd had recently. Yesterday I'd increased my 'score' from two to five - it'd been a GREAT day - but I'd been a bit nervous about the girls yesterday, whereas today I was an experienced old hand at this quick boinking business. Plus it's worth mentioning that Dakota has REALLY nice tits. Dakota was waiting for us outside Julia's front door, and the two girls started chatting away. My wife and very-soon-to-be lover chatted happily, glad to see each other. Life is bizarre. It fell to me to unlock the front door and disable the alarm. Dakota noticed, and with surprise asked me, "You've got your own key and know the alarm code to Julia's house?" "Yeah." "My parents would NEVER let me give a boyfriend a key and the codes. They'd hit the roof if I suggested it." Dakota asked Julia, "If your parents know you and Mark are that serious, how come they don't mind him having sex with other girls? That doesn't make any sense." I was comfortable answering, "It was Julia's father who gave me the key and code. For a reason that really doesn't have much to do with my relationship with Julia or sex, regardless of who it's with. I come and go at funny times to study my college courses here because Julia's dad supervises my work. I'm doing Math courses and he's a Professor of Mathematics at OSU. It was easier for me to have my own key so I can come and go easily." "They must really trust you, to let you into their home whenever you want." Amusingly, our plan was that in a few months they'd be going in and out of MY home, if you consider my winning the money to pay for it made the mansion mine. Legally I couldn't care less how it was going to be organized. I tend to leave organizational stuff up to the Williamses. For two reasons: (1) They are ALL really good at it, and (2) I'm not. "You know, we could stand here and discuss that, or we could go upstairs to bed. Can you guess which option I prefer?" And to think that I'd been worried about how to greet Laila and Lily yesterday. I was getting 'cool' real fast. Or perhaps 'horny' might be more accurate? Yeah, probably. Dakota didn't bother to guess, she just laughed and blamed Julia, "It wasn't my fault. Julia who was talking to me." "Yeah. She's always making it hard for me to screw other girls. She's a real nuisance. Come in, girls." I waved them in hornily (it's the same as "waved them in eagerly," but with an erection). On the way upstairs, Julia said, "I'll be in our study. Have fun, Mark. I don't have to wish for Dakota to have fun because I know EXACTLY what she's going to be receiving. It's going to be fun, all right!" Julia left us at the doorway into her bedroom. Dakota stopped and asked me, "What does the sign mean?" "It means, 'Run into the room, take your clothes off, and lie on your back.' You'd better do what it says right away, because it means business!" Thinking about the previous "Cool or Horny" question, I can confirm that "Horny" was the right answer. Dakota didn't run, but there wasn't far to go so I was prepared to accept her merely walking in. I quickly hung up the change of clothes I'd brought, and turned to face Dakota. I'd used up all my cool by now, so I went with honesty. "I've been looking forward to seeing you naked, Dakota." "Not as much as I've been looking to seeing you, especially after the stories I've been hearing all day." "I'll show you mine if you show me yours?" Was that cool or stupid? I couldn't make up my mind, and I was too horny to care. As I was in a hurry, the obvious next step would be for me to speed the Dakota-stripping process by starting to undress her myself, since she hadn't yet started. I walked up to her and tried to figure out how her outfit came off. I couldn't see how. I looked again because I was very motivated, but still couldn't see how. I walked around her. Nothing - no buttons, zips, or levers labeled "Open in an Emergency". Good grief! I have never, in my whole life, had a moment's hesitation in knowing how to remove any item of male clothing (always my own, I hasten to point out). Men have shirts with buttons up the front, or if there are no buttons, then simply lift the item up over the head. That's it! It doesn't take long to work out which procedure to use for any specific male top. Men's pants are even easier. You undo the fly and push them down. Unless I'm wearing shorts, in which case you can often skip the "undo the fly" step, and the rest of the procedure is unaffected. It's not rocket science, because it SHOULDN'T be rocket science. Clothing needs to be removed often, which makes removal one of its functional requirements. So why make it apparently impossible? I was stumped, and Dakota was just smiling, looking at me. I said, "Change of plan. I undress me; you undress you." I didn't wait around. I pulled my shirt over my head, hearing her say, "Wow!" I threw my shirt on the bed; the wastepaper can being by Julia's vanity and too far away. Dakota stepped closer and put her hands on my naked chest. Which would be nice in the fullness of time, but I wanted to put MY hands on HER naked chest, and we were still no closer to that. She started telling me how amazing my body was. #4: #2: #4: #3: I sat on the bed and start to carry out my hopeful plan. Dakota took the couple of step required maintain her position beside me, and continue to explore my torso with her hands. "You've got fantastic muscles, and I can't get over how narrow your waist is. How do you get it so narrow?" I was, in fact, quite happy to talk about my exercise program, as the entire conversation would be over before it started. In a logical world it would have been anyway, but I could easily imagine me saying "I don't exercise", and then her asking "But how come yaddah, yaddah, time-wasting-yaddah." Several possible answers crossed my mind: "I exercise by beating girls who don't strip fast enough", "By climbing the walls in frustration", and several others which were even less useful. I was forced to resort to a tactic which rarely works on girls. As a measure of how desperate I was, I used logic: "Dakota, I am very horny for you, and can't do anything about it while you are still fully dressed. Would you please strip for me?" "I'm a bit reluctant. Not scared exactly, but..." Dakota's explanation tailed off. I had a feeling that my saying, "Don't worry, I'm enthusiastic enough for both of us" wouldn't work. Why did this have to happen with the girl with the best tits? Which gave me an idea, "But you had no trouble taking off all your clothes yesterday morning, when I chose you to be one of the Liaisons?" "That was different." Which wasn't exactly a very helpful explanation. I was internally debating calling in the big guns (going to get Julia), when Dakota giggled, and added, "That was very funny, wasn't it?" VERY! But I answered, "Yes. How good you looked then was one of the reasons I picked you as my Liaison. Also because of how confident you seemed." The last point being a complete fabrication that I just made up and tacked onto the end. I was getting desperate. (If you think I was looking at all those naked girls yesterday, and noticing their "confidence", then you don't know me at all.) "You like my breasts, don't you?" #4: #3: So I asked, "Umm, what makes you say that?" "You've been looking at them since yesterday afternoon. You never used to do that." #4: #3: #4: <{Groan}.> I grabbed the joined-together holes that pretends to be my shirt, and started searching through it to work out how to put it back on (that's actually quite difficult. In a normal T-shirt you stick your head in the big hole and push it out of the middle small hole. Identifying the correct holes is considerably more difficult with this shirt). I was also thinking that Julia would probably insist we find a replacement Liaison, because I was pretty sure Julia wanted all the Liaisons to have been boinked by me. Having deduced how to put the shirt on, I did so. During which Dakota said, "What are you doing?" When my head emerged from the top big hole (I'd put it in the bottom big hole, but it could easily have emerged out of the left big hole or the right big hole), I said, "I don't really like to walk around topless. Shall we go and have a talk with Julia about how the Liaison thing needs to be reorganized now?" "But I thought you wanted to have sex with me?" #4: "You don't want to and I've been a bit of a pig lately. It's best we forget about it." Certainly I was going to do my best to forget about it. Doubtless unsuccessfully. Damn, she had REALLY nice tits! "We can if you want? I want to now." "Huh?" "Yes. I'm feeling much better now. You're very nice." #4: #2: | #3: Dakota asked me, "Shouldn't we get undressed?" Words failed me! Which was just as well, because the ones I'd have been likely to say were probably best not said. "Are you sure?" #4: #2: #4: #3: Fortunately Dakota said, "Yes, I'm sure. I'm looking forward to seeing your body." Again several responses came to mind, most of which wouldn't have been a good idea to use. I just said, "Okay then. Let's do it." I started taking my shirt off again, thinking I'd never had a shirt that came off and on so many times in one day. As my head cleared the bottom large hole again, I caught sight of Dakota. She was standing beside where I was sitting on the bed, so seeing her was not difficult. What caught my attention was that the top part of her dress had completely fallen down from her torso, and was now hanging inside out, down from the dress's waistband. Her hands were in the waistband, just about to push it down. Two thoughts crossed my minds: They were still in their bra, but Dakota was standing right next to me and bending forward, so they were right at my eye level - if two such large objects could be said to be at the same level as my MUCH smaller eyeballs. In short, I had a much anticipated and VERY good view. The remaining thought that crossed one of our minds was, #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #3: #2: #4: It was a particularly nice dress. No doubt chosen specially because of some combination of Dakota's new status as a Liaison, her 'date' with me now, and the other 250 criteria girls use to choose their clothes in the morning. How she balanced those I didn't care. I just knew it was a nice dress, and that her body looked very, very good beside it. I admired (make that "ADMIRED") Dakota's body, while she folded up her dress and laid it carefully on Julia's vanity table. I'd long since noticed that even in the supposed heat of passion, girls will carefully fold or hang up their clothes. I don't know about guys generally (and have no intention of finding out), but for me in specific, I'm quite happy throwing my clothes over my shoulder as I'm leaping for the bed. I don't care where or how they land. I don't even care IF they land. There are more important things to think about. But not for girls; they love clothes more than they love lovemaking. Sometimes I think their priorities are very messed up, and the rest of the time I'm asleep. Then came the moment I'd been waiting for, Dakota reached back and unclasped her bra. Ahhhh, bliss! Moments like this make life worth living. Or to choose a more accurate cliché, moments like this were worth dying for. Then Dakota bent forward to slide her panties down, which did WONDERFUL things to the shape and movement of her breasts. She placed her underwear neatly on her pile of clothes, then turned to me. Which was great, because then she was facing me, and I could see all of her very clearly. All the front of her anyway, but that was the area I was most interested in. She looked at me, and said, "Gosh it's hard to get you to take your clothes off. I thought you wanted to have sex? We can't do it with your pants on, you know?" Smart-ass! I had a good mind to put her over my lap and spank her, but you can't have sex that way. Well, not the way I wanted to have sex: in positions where I could clearly see her breasts. I stood to remove my pants, figuring that'd be a good next move. I didn't take my eyes off her, and I said, "I was arrested by your beauty." By which I meant the "the beauty of your tits", but shortening it seemed better, and not only because I was saving my breath for my later exertions. Soon I was naked, and she stood there and admired me. While I stood there and admired her. Which, although admirable, wasn't getting anyone fucked. I couldn't even reach her tits from this far apart. We'd wasted a lot of the short time we had, so I decided it was time to put the pedal to the metal. Because I wanted to go fast, Dakota wanted to go slow (that's the way females are). But at least there was at least some "go" happening, so I was happy. Dakota wanted nice, slow lovemaking. Which - once I'd adapted my mindset - was fine by me. She wasn't going to be limping around school tomorrow as testament to my sexual prowess, but (a) enough girls had probably done that already, and (b), there was no school tomorrow anyway. It turned out that Dakota was almost certainly a virgin. She didn't have a hymen, but she did have a lot of uncertainty, hesitancy and ignorance. I didn't make an issue of it, even though Julia had specifically asked about virginity and Dakota had let us believe she was experienced. But NO WAY was I going to say ANYTHING to jeopardize having sex with this gorgeously big-titted creature. Now was DEFINITELY not the time to make a fuss about anything at all. Afterward would be fine, by which time the problem will have been solved. I just went a lot slower than I normally would've, and more carefully explained what worked on me, or didn't work (which happened a few times). Who'd have thought that a girl with such lovely tits would have had so little experience? That's so unnatural it's almost perverse. After her second cum, when I started moving into her third, Dakota said "Please, can we stop now? I've had a great time but I'm worried about being too sore. I'm not used to it." She certainly wasn't used to it, as virgins rarely are. I kind of wished I'd known earlier that she wanted to stop after two, as I hadn't had a cum yet. This didn't worry me too much though, because I was in a fairly mellow mood with her. Plus I'd more than make up for it with some very enthusiastic Ava-fucking, starting in five hours or so. We were already under the covers as she'd felt too exposed making love on top of the bed, so it was a simple matter to roll over and pull her into a cuddle. Quite nice too, especially as I could lay on my side facing her and lightly caress two particular areas of her torso. "{Giggle}. You like my breasts, don't you?" I'd had my hands or mouth in contact with them almost continuously for the last hour, so it was probably a little late to deny it. "Yes indeed. They are VERY nice. At the meeting, when I picked you as Liaison, I noticed that there were two girls with bigger breasts than yours, but yours were MUCH better looking than theirs. Yours are the perfect combination of size and shape. They're truly beautiful. I'm glad you, and these wonderful things, are my Liaisons." The last sentence was clearly nonsense. Talking about her breasts as a disconnected coincidence, rather than the entire reason for her being picked as a Liaison, was a weak attempt to stop me seeming so immature over having concentrated on her delightfully, wonderfully, large breasts so much. Breasts are a subject I tend to get too enthusiastic about, as you might've noticed. Dakota said, "Good. I'm glad." If she was glad that I liked her breasts, then we had the basis of a VERY successful relationship. I said nothing, figuring that she probably knew my opinion of her breasts already. After a pause, she said quietly, "I'll be better next time." I knew what she meant, but for fun I exclaimed in a deliberately AMAZED voice, "Your breasts are going to be EVEN BETTER! WOW!" "{Giggle}. No, silly. Haha. I'll be better at making love. You know what I meant." "Yes and no, Dakota. You're learning more about how to give me pleasure and how to ask for it yourself, but we'll never be having your first time again, and that was an honor for me. I know a girl as beautiful as you would have had many previous opportunities, and that you chose me was very special." I'd called her beautiful, which is not strictly true - she's pretty, but not beautiful - but I knew that she still would have had many previous opportunities. For exactly the same reason as I called her beautiful: the opportunities came from boys, and I know what boys look for in girls. "Oh, you knew it was my first?" "Yes, Dakota. I worked that out a LONG time ago." "You didn't mind about that, or that I didn't tell you?" With deliberate amusement in my voice, "I minded SO MUCH that I'm going to make you do the WHOLE thing all over again to make it up to me. That'll teach you to deceive me!" I'm obviously not very good at threats, because Dakota snuggled in closer, saying, "I'd like that very much." A couple of seconds later, she eagerly asked, "When?" That was a bit of a problem. I fully understood what a nuisance meeting expectations could be, not setting them being one of Julia's most easily absorbed lessons. My social calendar had never been heavily booked before, or even lightly booked, but now I had to be very careful about making time commitments. I certainly couldn't specify a date and time to Dakota, because I had no idea what was going to happen next week, except that I knew it was bound to get chaotic as the Liaison system got into operation. Also, as much as I had TRULY enjoyed having sex with Dakota, I'd also truly enjoyed it with Laila, Lily and Pat. No doubt I'd enjoy it with Ava tonight too, as I'd seen pictures of her naked and Julia had several times said that Ava was very good at sex. I could leave Carol and Julia off the list of girls I'd enjoy sex with because they were on a WHOLE separate list of their own! ALL of those girls were great to have in bed, and I had no doubt the new girls - whoever they'd be - would be too. So when I'd get around to Dakota again was extremely uncertain. It was well into the "God Knows" category, but it'd probably be best if I didn't use that as an answer. Plus Julia wanted to reward the best Liaison each week with a session with me. I had worried earlier that I wouldn't want to, but so far the Liaisons were three out of three for happy repeatability. The point was that Julia probably wouldn't want me boinking any of them too often, as that would devalue the inducement she was using to motivate them. I knew Julia wouldn't object if I told her I wanted to give any of the Liaisons an extra boink or boinks, but it might make her job harder, which was something I definitely didn't want to do. All things considered, I answered, "I don't know, Dakota. The next several days are going to be very messy for me. I don't know when I'll have a chance." "I knew it! I knew I was no good! You don't want me anymore!" She rolled over to face away from me and started sobbing heavily. #3: I put my hand on her shoulder to start reassuring her (I had no idea what to say, so I was going to try "There, there"), but as soon as my hand touched her, Dakota hissed at me and jerked her shoulder away from my touch. Then sobbed even louder. #1: It's hard to talk with someone when they're facing the wrong way and sobbing loudly. Plus there wasn't much I could say anyway. There was no way I could spend any more time with her tonight. We were nearly out of time already. Tomorrow night I wanted and NEEDED to spend with my family. Sunday might be possible, but I had a strong feeling that something was bound to happen sometime over the weekend that required me to boink someone else. There were apparently going to be dozens of girls at the soccer match, and a couple dozen at bowling. Both events designed to make me more irresistible (soccer and bowling weren't exactly "designed" for that purpose, but inviting the girls to watch me was). Something was BOUND to happen. Knowing Julia, something that she WANTED to happen, that furthered her plans usefully. Not being able to do whatever it was that Julia wanted me to because I had to boink Dakota again wouldn't go over well with Julia. Julia had said that Lily was working on a website for me over the weekend. I had no idea what was going to appear on that - I seem to have "no idea" about quite a few things to do with me - but knowing Julia, it wouldn't be something innocuous. Nor could I couldn't commit to giving Dakota another date next week, because I also had no idea about Julia's plans for next week. The thought crossed my mind that I could give Dakota a date early next week, then blow her off at that time, but that's not the way I work. I tried my best. I reached out for her again, then thought better of that and awkwardly pulled my hand back. I said, "Dakota, I'm VERY sorry, but I am TRULY too busy. I REALLY don't know when I can see you again." "I KNEW it! I gave you my first time, and you just took advantage of me. Mommy was right that guys are LIARS. {Sob, sob... }." That was SO unfair! I didn't know it was her first time until we were into it. I didn't take advantage of her, as she'd put herself forward at the Liaison meeting, fully aware of what that entailed. And how could I be a liar when I'd NEVER even hinted at a second date? Nonetheless, it certainly wasn't her fault that I couldn't give her a specific date for our next session. The onus was on me, I felt like a heel, and I HATE making girls so upset that they cry. In an ideal world, I could explain all of that to Dakota and she'd understand and feel better. Not in this world though, only in my imaginary ideal one. In this world she'd just cry louder. Of that I had no doubt. Females don't respond well to logic; emotionally upset females respond REALLY badly to it! The problem was working out what she WOULD respond positively to. I'd seen guys in TV programs slap hysterical girls' faces to calm them down, but I had a feeling that wouldn't work here. And no way was I brave enough to try it, even if I thought it might work. I couldn't even give her a hanky. Not easily anyway, as my pants were somewhere on the floor - I wasn't sure where - and my clothes drawer was on her side of the bed and too far away to reach from the bed anyway. Even if it'd been closer, as Dakota didn't even want me to touch her shoulder, she wouldn't appreciate my laying my entire body across her to reach for a hanky. I decided she could wipe her eyes on the sheet. She was crying so much that I hoped it was only her eyes that were running, as I had to sleep in this bed later tonight. None of my minds could think of anything helpful to say, short of promising her a specific date soon, which would probably just get Julia annoyed at me. Even though Dakota was the immediate problem, the risk of annoying Julia carried more weight with me. The only thing I could think of was to ask Julia whether I had a gap sometime soon. Julia knew Julia's plans a LOT better than I did, which was hardly at all. I'd have to leave Dakota crying while I went to talk with Julia. I hated the idea of leaving her in so much upset so long, but that was the best I could do. I got up and walked around to my closet to get my robe on. Dakota's sobs quieted for a couple of seconds, then she asked me, "Where are you going?" "To talk with Julia about this." "Oh." Dakota was still pondering that - happily without the sobs - when the bedroom door opened and Julia walked in. I was surprised because she hadn't knocked. On the other hand, it is her bedroom. Then I realized that Julia had probably chosen not to knock, to make a point to Dakota. In which case, Julia would probably repeat it for my future sessions with other girls. Regardless of how Julia had arrived, I was VERY glad to see her! She'd know how to make Dakota feel better. Julia's MUCH better than I am at things like that, as it involves understanding a female. Julia had very quickly seen that something was amiss. She asked us, "Why is Dakota crying?" Dakota just said, "{Sniff}." So I provided the explanation, "We'd finished, and everything was good. This was Dakota's first time having sex. She didn't have a, um, hymen or anything, but it was still her first time. We were cuddling after, she said she'd be better next time, and asked me when that'd be. I said I was pretty busy and I didn't know when, and she just burst into tears. I've tried to cheer her up, but can't. She's VERY upset, and I don't know what to do. Please help!" Julia, somewhat to my surprise, starting laughing. What's worse, it was at ME! "Haha. You should see the look on your face, Mark. You look so guilty and sad. Forget about her. Dad's got some good news for you, to do with your business idea. He wants to talk with you before the others arrive and we get too busy. Can you talk with him now please, then have a shower and start on the studying you need to do. We're getting a little short of time." I was certainly interested in ANY progress on the business idea front, but Julia's "Forget about her" was not exactly reassuring. If she'd said, "I'll cheer Dakota up," that I could've happily accepted. But "Forgetting about her" didn't sound too good. I wanted to know what Julia was going to do, ideally how she was going to make everything okay with Dakota, but I already had a sinking feeling it wasn't going to work out that way. I asked Julia, "I DO want to talk with Prof about that, but what are you going to do about Dakota?" "Nothing. I need to have a shower now and I've just come in to pick out a change of clothes. Then I need to start helping Mom. I don't have time to worry about Dakota." Julia walked to and opened her closets, then started sliding clothes back and forth. I'd stood still for a few seconds. I noticed the room was virtually silent: there was no sobbing. I looked at Dakota, and she looked both upset and fearful. Julia's answer of "Nothing" had apparently sounded equally ominous to Dakota. I couldn't leave the room. I wished I could, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, as I'm not that cold-hearted. I asked Julia, "You're going for a shower, I'm going to talk with Prof. What's going to happen to Dakota?" "She can stay or go, as she wishes. It doesn't much matter to me. If she's still here when my brothers get home, I'll ask them to pick her up, carry her outside, and dump her on the lawn. I hope they remember to bring her clothes or she's going to have a chilly ride home." Julia noticed that I wasn't very comfortable with her method of cheering Dakota up, so she explained further, "We told Dakota back at the lunch on Wednesday that you were extraordinarily busy. We gave them several examples of the extra things you do, like two grades, college, soccer, etc. We told them the same thing again at the meeting when we picked the Liaisons. They've all heard it several times. She asked for a second date and you said you were busy. You ARE busy and she knows it. She's just trying to pressure you into making time for her because she's greedy and has no regard for your time or needs. In addition, she misled us about her virginity. I specifically asked about that. Twice, if I recall. That makes her a greedy, inconsiderate liar who can't accept reality. She's fired as your Liaison. Pat BADLY wants that job so I'll get my cellphone from our study and call Pat to tell her the good news. Dakota, get up, get dressed and get out, or my brothers will throw you out." Evidently Julia wasn't as good at this cheering up thing as I thought she'd be, because she just made Dakota's crying FAR worse. Julia ignored her though, and went back to casually sorting through her closet. It was a good thing that choosing clothes was a visual process, because you couldn't hear anything over Dakota's bawling. Julia looked around a couple of seconds later, and saw me still standing there. She made shooing motions with her hands. I shooed. I understood what Julia had done and why, and didn't really disagree with it. But, by God, it was brutal! I decided that, from now on, whenever I have my pick of several girls, I'm going to pick the ugliest ones. That way, after Julia has brutally eliminated most of them, I'll be left with good looking replacements. I'd lost Gia and Dakota in the space of a few hours, both of whom had REALLY nice tits. As I headed downstairs, I wondered to myself what would happen in the room after I left. Would Julia completely ignore Dakota or talk with her. Both would be bad. #1: #2: #3: ------- Chapter 99: Prof Plans for Me to Become a Quadmillionaire Friday, April 22, 2005 (Continued) It was easier for me to check the kitchen for Prof than check his study, because the stairs arrive at the ground floor near the kitchen. Plus I should greet Vanessa anyway. The fact that I was overdue for a snack had not escaped my notice either. Also, I like kitchens. So I had lots of good reasons. I stuck my head in, and somewhat to my surprise, Prof was in there. As part of the mutual greetings Vanessa asked, "How's your day been, Mark?" "Very interesting so far." Vanessa said, "Good. You can tell us about it over dinner." "Umm, maybe not. It probably wouldn't be suitable dinner conversation in front of The Boys' girls." The two interesting things I'd been thinking of were the Gia and Dakota incidents. Probably best not to mention those, or all the girls who'd tried to pick me up today, and ESPECIALLY NOT the guys who'd tried to pick me up either (shudder). Which pretty much left me with nothing to talk about. Apparently it'd been a slow day, other than all the sex. Soon Prof said, "I've got a piece of interesting news about your business idea. Can you spare five or ten minutes from the girl you have upstairs?" "Easily, Julia just fired her from being a Liaison. Your daughter is merciless! I don't mean that as a criticism, because I understand why and agree, but she's still scary. I'm VERY glad she's on my side, that's for sure." Vanessa said, "You are her side. Did you learn a good lesson from the girl, or did she just not work out?" "I learned a lesson. The girl, Dakota, wanted a second date quickly and tried to manipulate me into it by crying. Largely put on, I suspect now. I totally fell for it, but when Julia came into the room, Julia saw through it in no time at all. Dakota did know I was busy so she was being selfish, and we'd caught her in another little lie too, so Julia fired her. If she doesn't leave under her own steam, Julia's threatened her with having The Boys carry her outside naked and dropping her on your front lawn. I imagine the fear of that will have her moving shortly." Vanessa chuckled, adding, "So you won't fall for the crying trick again?" "Umm, perhaps. Let's say I'll be more doubtful in the future. Dakota's crying seemed genuine, which worries me. The only reason I suspect it was fake was because it stopped so quickly when Julia started talking. Julia saw through her because of the facts of the situation, not because of her crying seeming false." Vanessa said, "You won't be able to tell fake crying from real crying because they'll nearly always be real. Females can make the emotion at the base of their upset real, even if it's a pretend emotion. It's a consequence of our ability to empathize with other people. In her case, Dakota was empathizing with a version of herself that deserved another date with you and was being hurt by your not giving her one. Think of it as acting, where the actor intellectually knows she's acting, but truly does feel the emotion. For future reference, if a girl is crying at you because she wants you to do something that's better for her than you're prepared to do, then you should assume that she's probably manipulating you. That'll be true more often than not. I don't blame you for being fooled this time, but you should have seen through the facts if Julia could do so quickly. Were you very uncomfortable when she was crying?" "I'll say! I HATED it." "Yes. That's one of the reasons it works so well, guys stop thinking when a female cries. The 'Protective Instinct' kicks in. Guys feel an instinctual compulsion to make everything better." "EXACTLY! That's exactly how I felt." "That's how every guy feels, and every woman knows that. It's one of our best weapons. Dakota was foolish to use it around Julia though." "Julia was in our study originally and only came into the bedroom after Dakota had been crying for a while. Maybe Dakota had forgotten about Julia, or maybe Dakota thought she'd be able to manipulate me before Julia got back, which would've been silly because I'd have to tell Julia I had another date with Dakota, which would've opened it all up. I don't think Dakota was very smart." "Just as well she's fired then." I was more comfortable with the Williamses now, so I confessed, "Yes and no. She had REALLY nice breasts." I was a bit embarrassed saying it, but the two of them laughed away happily. Prof chipped in with, "Maybe I should hang around in case The Boys need any help carrying her out, haha." Vanessa playfully slapped his shoulder, "Down boy! Why don't you take Mark to our study for your conversation. I should go upstairs and check on Dakota." I spoke up, "Umm, can I grab a snack of something please. I'm quite hungry. Also, why do you need to check on Dakota? I didn't think she mattered anymore? Certainly Julia wasn't worried about cheering Dakota up. Julia was merciless." Vanessa said, "There's plenty of snack makings in the fridge, or cookies. You don't need to ask, help yourself anytime. I'm not worried about Dakota because I'm sure Julia is doing whatever's appropriate. Julia got a good sense of values." I wasn't as sure of that, as Julia's brutality seemed excessive to me. In fact, it seemed excessive even compared to what I thought would have been excessive, if that makes sense. Vanessa continued, "I just want to make sure we don't have an angry, vengeful teenager running amok upstairs, wrecking the place." Oh dear! I'd never thought of that. I felt bad bringing that risk into the Williams' house. And I thought of something else too, "I'd better come up with you. Julia did say she was going to have a shower, so Dakota will be alone." "Don't worry about it, Mark. I doubt Julia left her alone, and the sight of you would probably make matters worse. I'm sure I can handle a single teenager. I get enough practice with roomfuls of them at work. She's not a 200lb weightlifter, is she?" "Haha. No. I don't think you need worry about that. Are you sure? I don't feel comfortable leaving you alone with her." "I feel comfortable. Make yourself a snack and go chat with Prof. I know you're in the kitchen for the next few minutes, so I'll call out if I have any problem. There's some lemon cake in that can over there." That was a dirty trick, as I really like lemon cake. Lemon anything actually. Vanessa headed upstairs. I let her go alone, as it was her call and I didn't expect Dakota to be violent. Plus there was lemon cake down here. Prof said, "I'll get you a piece of cake; you check the fridge." It was a good division of labor, after I'd said, "Make it a big piece please." He talked while we made my snack, "About the business. We can talk generalities out here, but we'll save the details for when we get into my study. In general, I had an idea a few days ago about how to get a significant proportion of the money into your name. We want it in your name for a variety of reasons, mainly because that'd be fairer and so you'll learn all the lessons that result from being rich. Ideally all the money would be in your name, but because of where we earn it, it has to go into my name initially. I don't know whether you're aware or not, but if all the money is put in my name, and then I give it to you, then we have to pay Gift Tax on it, so it'd be taxed twice: when we first earn it, then when I give it to you. That's true even if I give it to you one second after I get it. The IRS takes about a third each time, so for every $100 gross, I have to send them $33, keeping $67. Then when I give that $67 to you, I have to send the IRS another third, call it $22, leaving you with $45. We'd end up with 45% of what we started with. In America, all gifts worth more than a few thousand are taxable. Great system, isn't it?" "I don't understand tax, but to me that sounds unfair and wrong." "Let's not worry about the morality; it's the law. As you get older, you'll see that laws can be immoral. They're written by humans, with all the vested interests, greed, biases, errors, lack of imagination, etc., that entails. Anyway, the problem that I'd been thinking about was how to get as much of the money as possible into your hands without the double taxation. I had an idea that I checked with my accountant. He confirmed that it's perfectly workable." I had a plate nicely loaded now, so we walked toward Prof's study. I'd been listening carefully, in case Vanessa needed help, but had heard nothing. Just as we were leaving the kitchen I heard footsteps on the stairs, so I ducked back to look. Vanessa was coming down alone, saw me and said, "Everything's fine." That's all I needed to know, so Prof and I resumed our little journey. In his study he continued. "I didn't give my accountant the details, but he said he didn't need them. It is perfectly fine for us to establish a business and create a foundation document that determines its profit split. We'd have no trouble with the IRS saying that even 75% of the profit goes to the inventor of the business's core idea, which is you. We're going to make your intellectual property - which is a fancy name for "idea" - worth 60% of the profit, for a reason I'll come to soon." The reason didn't matter to me. I remembered that Prof said we'd try to win enough so that after taxes we'd have $5 million. 60% of $5 million was a number that I was EXTREMELY happy to have in my bank account. Prof continued. "The remaining 40% will be split 20% in each of two categories: financing and labor. The financial contributors will share in 20% of the profits in proportion to their investment. The workers - that's mainly you and me - will share in the last 20% in proportion to our time input, which we'll call equal." I said, "I'm not sure I followed that. Do you mean I get EVEN more than 60%?" "Yes, because I haven't explained everything yet. I'll do that shortly. Be aware that this is all an accounting fiction. We're doing this only to keep the IRS, banks and other officialdom happy. Let me finish explaining using our example, and you'll understand better at the end. Okay?" "Please." "For every $100 of profit, you get allocated $60 for the value of what I'll call, 'The Idea'. We don't need to tell the IRS what the idea is, merely that there is one. In reality it's because you've got your TK ability, but we won't be telling the IRS about that! Then there's $20 of profit to allocate according to labor input. Let's assume you and I are going 50/50 on that, as we're both going to Vegas, so you get another $10, as do Vanessa and I collectively. Lastly there is another $20 to allocate to the financiers. If Vanessa and I put up all the money, as we originally discussed, then we'd get all $20, so the final split would be 70 to you, 30 to us. However, it appears that Vanessa and I aren't going to be putting up all the money, as your mother says you'll be settling with your school early next week. Felicity says the amount will be $45,000." "Wow. That's wonderful! Carrying that cast around was a pain, but nowhere near a $45,000 pain. Awesome!" "Your Mom won't accept the deal until she's talked to you about it, but she says she knows you'll approve." "I'll say. More than approve!" "That'll release the school for all liability over all the past assaults on you and the incident of the teacher threatening your grades. The slate is wiped clean. The $45,000 will be paid directly to you, not to your parents, so it'll be in your name. I talked to Felicity about what I'm talking to you about now, and she's making the payment being in your name part of the deal with the school. They don't care who they pay, just so long as they get lots of signatures on the release. What we're going to do is Vanessa and I are going to put in $50,000, you'll put in $45,000 and your parents another $5,000, making $100,000 in total. So you get the $60 per $100 credit for your 'idea', $10 for your half of the labor, plus 45% of the financiers $20, which is another $9. The final totals are $79 per $100 of profit for you, 5% of 20% for your parents, which is $1, and the balance of $20 for Vanessa and me. To put real number on that, if we win $7.5 million at roulette, lose a third in tax, we net $5 million. You get 79% of that, which is a fraction under $4 million; your parents get 1%, which is $50,000; Vanessa and I get 20%, which is $1 million." "Wow. Those are amazing numbers!" "Especially yours. You'll be a 'quadmillionaire'. But, as I mentioned earlier, it's mostly an accounting fiction. Let me explain the rest. Our goal is to have two $1 million dollar emergency funds. A million may sound like a fortune to you," He was right about that! "but it's really not that much. If some emergency comes up and you have to flee the country and keep a low profile for several years, you'd be surprised how fast that could be used up. We'll have two $1 million funds, one for each of our families, except that you'll be able to access both of them. That way if an emergency happens it's likely that you and anyone you're with will be able to fend for yourselves. Those will be spread across two or three overseas banks who can wire the funds to you wherever you are. We'll also make sure we stash some cash in a few locations too, enough to keep you going for a few days or to get you overseas, until you can tap one of the emergency accounts. -- "The reason we made your idea worth 60% was to leave Vanessa and me with 20%, and therefore a $1 million share. That's our emergency fund. Your parents are tipping in their $5,000 just to even up the financing. They feel better about their family carrying the same risk of losing as Vanessa and me. Legally, because you're a minor, all your winnings are controllable by your parents anyway, so they can set up their $1 million emergency fund using what is theoretically your money. That'll leave $3 million of winnings, mostly for the mansion, its renovations and furnishings, which will be in your name. That'll probably end up costing something like $2 million, but that's only a very rough guess. I'm sure there will be a spending spree as well. There's bound to be, with so many women involved, haha. Hopefully we'll be able to hold back a $100,000 or so for the emergency cash stashes, some at home, some in safety deposit boxes in two or three places. Maybe some even buried in the woods somewhere, just in case something really crazy happens and you can't go anywhere near any people. So the almost $4 million that you'll theoretically have in your name will be spread around: $1 million overseas, roughly $2 million spent on the house including all the renovations and furnishings, some cash stashes and some spending. I know Julia intends for you to get a new car, for example. -- "That's a slightly simplified breakdown, as I think we should give The Boys, Julia and Carol a very small credit for their labor. Again it's really an accounting fiction, but when the money comes in we only want to pay tax on it once. This is especially important for Carol and Julia, as neither of them is your legal wife so they don't have legal, tax-free access to your money. If you give them much more than $10,000 per year, you'll have to pay gift tax on it. If we record in the business's documentation that Carol and Julia did some work for the business, then they can get a share of the profit. -- "I said earlier that you and I will not quite be 50/50 on time. My share needs to stay at 50% else we can't afford our overseas fund, so we have to reduce your share of the time. Every 1% of the time allocation is worth 1% of 20% of $5 million, or $10,000, so if you wanted to put $100,000 in each of Julia and Carol's names, for example, then you'd have to give them 10% of the labor each, so the time share would be 50/30/10/10. I don't imagine you'd want to give Donna more than $10,000 per year, so there'd be no need to involve her in this, but Vanessa and I would like The Boys to get something in their names. They've spent time helping you, but their time isn't so valuable as to be worth more than a few hundred dollars, but we'd like something more substantial than that. That's all up to you, of course. -- "That's the structure described. There are a few side issues I'll mention. One consequence is that neither family needs to sell their existing houses. Vanessa and I would probably keep this house, and either rent it out or let Andrew and/or Robert live here if they want to stay in the area, if they get jobs here. I think we'd be wise to keep this house just in case there's a personality clash among the two families. With so many people under one roof, even if it's a very big roof, that could happen. Vanessa and I are both unusually focused people, and our style may clash with that of your parents. No faults on either side, just different ways of doing things. Another issue which may have occurred to you, is why go to all this bother to minimize taxes, when we can just win more money?" I agreed, "That HAD occurred to me. This is a LOT more complicated than I thought." "We should have a meeting about it, you and your two wives, Felicity and Steven, Vanessa and me. It wouldn't take us long to agree on the splits. Then we pass it over to the accountant and lawyer, and they take care of it. Similarly when the tax returns need to be done. As far as our time is concerned, it takes an hour or two, and a small amount of money for professional services. If we didn't worry about any of this, and paid gift tax on the winnings, we'd have to win about $11 million, rather than $7.5 million. I know we want to think of this as 'free money', but there's rarely such a thing. I'd much rather we spent an hour or two deciding about this and getting professionals to set it up properly, than having to win an extra $3.5 million. Something could go wrong during that extra winning which ruins the whole plan. Why take the risk just to save an hour or two's talking?" "No argument from me. I think having to lose ANY of this to the Government sucks, so I'm perfectly happy spending an hour or two to halve the amount they get." "I'm still amazed that gambling wins are taxed. If someone spent all year gambling as their job, like a professional poker player, I could understand it, but not casual gamblers like we'd appear to be. Moving on though. Another thing I'm assuming is that this is a one-time deal. I expect that we could repeat this a few more times, but sooner or later the casinos are going to decide they don't like giving us millions of dollars of their money, and they'll stop accepting our wagers. I know there are plenty of casinos around America, or the world, but I don't want to have to do this again if we can do it properly the first time." "Fine by me. Now that this is getting closer, it's getting scarier. I'm more than happy to minimize as much as we can." "Good. Any questions?" "Yes, but can I hold them back for now? I have a couple, but I know I'll have some more once I've stopped freaking out about the size of it. I'm also worried about failing to finish all the material the two quizzes include by tomorrow morning. I'd like to get back upstairs, make sure the Dakota situation is under control, and get some more studying done. If that's okay with you?" "I can't imagine any of my other students would want to study hard after they learned they were going to get their hands on $4 million soon, but I'm not going to criticize your diligence, haha." I took my empty plate back to kitchen, to find Vanessa and - to my surprise - Julia, busy doing important dinner preparation things. I expected Julia to be upstairs still arguing with Dakota. "Julia, how's Dakota? Where's Dakota? What happened with her?" "Long gone, of course. Why are you so worked up about it? She's upset, but that's her problem, not ours." "She's gone already? I thought there'd be a big scene and you'd still be arguing with her." "Why would we allow her to stay here and argue with us? We've got better things to do, like making your dinner for you." That's my girl! She knows me well. "I'm just surprised you could get her to leave so quickly." "The threat of my brothers dropping her naked on the lawn got her out of bed and dressed quick enough. There was no way she could stay because it's not her house. After Mom told her to leave, she left. We didn't even need to threaten to call the cops or her parents. The ONLY problem was that she wanted to argue about still being a Liaison, but that was easy too. She left ten or fifteen minutes ago. By the way, Pat is VERY happy with her new job. I thought afterward that I should have asked you who you wanted. I'm sorry about that. Do you want someone else other than Pat?" "Heavens no! I couldn't do that to Pat. Oops, I just realized how egotistical that was. Like being my Liaison is such a big deal..." Julia interrupted, "It IS a big deal! That's why Pat was jumping up and down in happiness. It's a great result. I'll make sure all the Liaisons know what happened, so they should be on their best behavior for a while now. Did you have a good talk with Dad?" "Fantastic. Did he tell you what it was about?" "Just the outline. The details don't matter to me. He gave me a brief description of the structure and told me how much money doing the right initial setup would save us, and that was amazing." "I'll say. I'm going to have some questions about it, but I'm still getting used to the idea. Probably I'll have another talk with him tomorrow morning after the quizzes. I wanted to check up on you and Dakota, then get to my studying. Can I ask you something more about Dakota that's puzzling me?" "Sure." "You said she wanted to argue, but that you got rid of her quickly. How did you win the argument so quickly? I'm sure you did, because I know how good you are at things like that, but I know I'd still be upstairs arguing if it'd been left to me." "The short answer is that I didn't win the argument. I didn't win because I didn't argue. Why should I argue with her? There was nothing I wanted from her, so what would I have been arguing about? I didn't have to argue over whether she was still a Liaison or not because that's entirely our choice. She has no right to be your Liaison, and no control over our firing her. The only thing I wanted her to do was leave, and arguing would have slowed that down, so I didn't argue. All I did was calm her down and get her out of here so I could do more important things, and almost everything is more important than some silly girl. Some STUPID girl, actually. She knew how busy you are, knew you were doing two grades, doing college courses, 'doing' the other Liaisons, haha. She was just greedy and stupid about it, and now she's gone. No loss. It worked out well really, because she'll be a good example to the other Liaisons, and Mom said she had a good talk with you about what you could learn from it." "Yeah. It was a good talk. But from the Dakota incident I mostly learned not to get on your bad side. Ouch, if that ever happens to me. You're scary!" "Haha. Thank you. But I can't scare you." "You ALREADY scare me, so I know for a fact that you can." "Not so. I only attacked Dakota because she tried to improve HER life at the expense of YOURS. You can't do that to yourself, so it won't happen." "I bet I COULD do that to myself. I bet I could have a stupid idea that really harmed my life, but I thought was a good idea. I'd screw-up, then you'd yell at me, and I'd deserve it. I'm quite sure I could EASILY screw-up like that. That's why I'm scared of you. So there! I've decided that I've won this argument already, so I'm going to go have a shower and then study. Quickly, before I find out that I'm wrong again. Thanks for the lemon cake, Vanessa." I kissed a smiling Julia on the cheek then ran away. I heard Vanessa tell Julia, deliberately loud enough for me to hear, "He's getting smarter." Not smart enough to make any practical difference. Just enough to suspect that life would be less worrisome if I was dumber. I quickly showered, then somewhat nervously entered the bedroom. There was no sign of Dakota, of course, but I still felt some silly relief. While I was putting on some real clothes, #2: #4: #2: #4: #3: #4: #2: #4: The conversation carried on at that elevated moral level until I had dressed and gone to our study. I was surprised to see a single bed made up on the floor. Just the mattress, sheets and blankets. Either one of The Boys had come home already, or Prof had done it, presumably with Julia helping. In either case, they'd carried the mattress up two flights of stairs then made the bed, all while I was fucking around. It really wasn't fair how much the Williamses were doing for me. I didn't think Prof's profit split was fair either, but I'd mull over that one for a while and talk with Prof about it tomorrow morning. There was a note in front of my computer, telling me what lectures I had to finish up to before taking the two quizzes. It was doable, if I didn't fool around. I started the next Algebra lecture printing, while I sat down to my 'two subjects at a time' studying. I'd gotten a small but useful amount done when Julia knocked and then entered the room. I don't know why she bothered knocking. What could I possibly be doing in here that I needed privacy for, when she wouldn't knock before entering when I was fucking another girl in her bed? While I remembered, I asked her, "Your knock on this door reminded me that you didn't knock before you entered the bedroom when I was with Dakota. I guessed at the time that was intended to be a lesson to Dakota, or any other girl I was with. Is that right?" "Yes. It'll teach them they have to be very sneaky, which you'll learn quite a lot from." "What? I thought the idea was to teach them that there were no secrets between you and me? So they wouldn't try to do anything?" "No, not at all. The lack of privacy won't change their desires, only their opportunities. They will still want to seduce you away from me, regardless of how much privacy they get. The lack of privacy will just make it harder for them because they'll fear my walking into the middle of a conversation. Most of them will initially say that they're happy with a nice, open sharing threesome, but as soon as they can they'll start digging away at getting some private time with you, then some control over you. My walking in will make it harder for them. If it's harder they're more likely to make a mistake. I DEFINITELY want them to make mistakes! Not only so I don't lose you, but also so you can spot what they're up to and learn from it." "The learning from their mistakes part I understand, but surely you're not worried about losing me? There's NO chance of that!" "Of course there's a chance. I'm throwing beautiful girls at you, and they very much want to catch you. It's a risk. I think a lower risk than if I don't do what I'm doing, but still a risk." "I can't POSSIBLY imagine any girl convincing me to leave you. It's just not conceivable! The VERY most that I could imagine is another girl JOINING us, but no more than that, and I know you're okay with that." Julia shot my argument down, "That's the problem: you can't imagine it. You've had almost zero experience with being manipulated by girls, so your imagination is operating in the dark. Dakota would've gotten another date out of you by using the oldest trick in the book, even though she was using it very stupidly. Some of the girls you'll meet in a few years will be vastly better at tricking guys than a rank amateur like Dakota. That's why you're starting now, and also why I'm pushing them at you. Because I'm involved I can see what's happening, like I just saw through Dakota. If I was holding on to you in the traditional boyfriend-girlfriend manner, a few months from now girls would notice how hot you are, especially when you went without a shirt in summer. Your physique is totally different than it was last summer..." #1: #2: #1: " ... Girls seeing you in summer are going to drool over you. You've already seen that in the last couple of days. In a few months, in this scenario, girls would start hitting on you. It'd all be behind my back and I'm sure you'd try hard to be a good boy, but you'd crumble. I doubt it'd even take long, as you would never have had any girl other than me and you wouldn't be able to help yourself. Especially with the lucky girl who discovered that crying at you turned you into a total marshmallow. Then you'd get all guilty on me, be afraid to face me, the other girl would encourage you not to face me. She would've gotten you to break up with me, which you would've done believing you weren't good enough for me. Doing what I'm doing now is a risk, but not doing it would be a certainty. You are far too attractive to girls, and you're far too much of a pushover. This way is far better." "Wow. I had no idea you'd thought about that stuff in so much detail." Julia interrupted, "Here's a newsflash, Mark: You are important to me. VERY, VERY important. There's nothing more important. Center of my life. My reason for living. I'd lay down my life for you. That level of important. They're good motivators for my thinking about the risks of losing you." "Umm, yeah. Sorry, I was stupid in not realizing that." "No problem. It's my issue, not yours. It's only an imaginary issue anyway, entirely in my head because you've never given me any reason to feel jealousy, only pride! I'll tell you something great that has reduced my fears substantially. The key difference is Carol. I know you will NEVER leave Carol! A girl might be manipulate you while you're so inexperienced and vulnerable, but if that girl tries to get rid of me, Carol is going to kick up a hell of a fuss and not let you leave me. The only way I think I can lose you is if the new girl seduces you AND Carol away from me, and that's so unlikely I can ignore it. I only thought of that yesterday when I realized how involved Carol is with the whole Liaison process, meeting your other girls, coming to your soccer game, to bowling, etc. How involved she is in your entire life now. It's an enormous benefit to me. I'll make sure I tell her about it when we're in bed tomorrow night. It'll be very nice to tell her how important she is to me because she's removed so much fear from my life." "I'll bring the hankies. You and Carol are going to need several each." "You've got that right! I'll tell you something else that keeps on amazing me: this plural marriage. I saw how attracted you were to Carol and brought her in for you. You loved her and I loved you, so I did it to make you happy, but the more time I spend with Carol, the more I like her. It's impossible not to like her. The phrase that keeps running through my mind is, 'What's not to like'. Everything about her is lovely. She's not strong, and certainly not independent, but I like that too because she's so honest and giving. To my surprise, her value to me keeps on increasing. Initially just to make you happy, then sexual value, then friendship and fun, then help with my various plans, and now I've realized that she's of enormous value to my security with you - and you know how important you are in my life! That's another totally unanticipated, very valuable benefit. This marriage keeps producing more and more benefits, not just for me, but for all of us. Even apparently silly things like Carol having Ava as a toy. Carol's having a great deal of fun with that, and I think it'll end up being very good for Carol's development. Give her a lot of self-confidence and teach her some useful skills, and I'm not talking about sexual skills, haha. Our marriage is incredible and I think it's going to get better. Even just between the three of us, it'll get better. God knows what adding another girl could do, but it's becoming very easy to believe that the right new girl will enrich it even further, although it's hard to imagine how it could get any better. I'm rambling, but you understand what I'm raving about, don't you?" "Yes I do, and it's beautiful. I'd like you to tell my WHOLE family that, rather than just Carol in bed. After dinner, in the living room. I worry that my family aren't connected enough to what's happening in my life, because Mom doesn't really approve of it and so much of it happens in your house. Can you do that for me, please? It's much better coming from you, than from me." "I'll be happy to. You'll need a LOT of handkerchiefs, haha. I'm looking forward to it now. It'll be a nice thing to do with your family. Changing the subject, I came up to say that everyone is here now, and would you please come down soon." "Good. I'm hungry. Can I finish what I'm doing to a good stopping point?" "Sure. It's not a formal dinner. Sophia and Ashley have been here many times. They all know you're studying so won't be upset if you don't turn up immediately. You can't turn up immediately anyway, as I've already been talking too long for that. So why don't I shut up, to let you study." ------- Chapter 100: I Get Told Off for Not Having a Bigger One Friday, April 22, 2005 (Continued) Julia waited while I turned to my studies to finish them off at a good point. I was in the middle of learning something new in Calculus, and if I stopped now I'd have to start the next session with a review before I could complete the concept. It's much better to stop once the concept is comprehended. As a result of my working through two courses now I would rarely get two perfect stopping points at the same time, so I was just hoping not to be in something tricky for either subject. I finished the on-screen Calculus section at a time when Algebra was cruising along with lightweight stuff, so I just drew a line across the page beneath it then started tidying up: putting my notes away, shutting down the computer, etc. The printed lecture notes had to be handled carefully since there are several piles: notes of lectures I have finished (kept handy because I might need to refer back to them), notes from the current lecture that I've already read, notes from the current lecture that I haven't read yet, and the printed out lecture that I haven't gotten to yet. When I finished putting everything away, according to my system, Julia - who'd been watching me quietly - asked, "Am I correct in thinking that you studied one course from the screen and the other from paper?" Julia already knew I could read from two sources at the same time, so I had no problem answering, "Yes, that's right." "Why do you do it that way? I understand you want to read them both at the same time, but why not print them both out if that's better, or have two windows open at once if that's better? It's not because one course is better from a printout and the other better from the screen, is it, because that seems unlikely to me?" "No, not that. I don't care which is on paper. It's just that the lecture notes contain lots of equations and other graphical stuff, and if I create two windows, whether side by side or one above the other, then I can't read them as well. If I keep the fonts the same size there's so little information displayed in each window that my learning rate suffers because I can't see the context and have to scroll up and down all the time. But if I reduce the fonts so I can see as much text as now, the graphics become too squashed to read easily. What I'm doing now works best." "If working from printouts is so good, why not print them both out?" "No, I prefer the screen. Being able to search for things saves a lot of time, or sometimes I copy/paste different bits into a new document so I can play around with them. Sometimes there are linked documents too, like spreadsheets that I can change the values of. I can't do any of that on paper." "So you are saying that you're using an inferior process - printouts - because your computer screen is not big enough?" "Yeah, but it's not a big deal. This is fine. In fact it's great. It's miles better than our system at home. Having fast internet is fantastic. There's a huge amount of math stuff online that I can google and pull up to help when I hit a snag. I'm very happy." "That's not what I'm talking about. If you had a better system, your studying would improve. The only question now is what works best for you. What's your PERFECT study system for you, Mark? You designed how you wanted the shelves over your desk, now design the computer." "This system IS very good..." "{Growl}. You know I'm right about this. Money is NO object, especially as it's OSU's money. We'll tell them what we want. The worst that can happen is they say 'No', and you stay with what you've got anyway. Asking for more risks nothing." "Umm. Part of the trouble is that I'm not experienced with computers. Our home one barely does one thing at a time. I guess a larger screen would be good. In fact, it would be very good, as I'd be able to see more of the context at one time. That's often quite important. I DO spend a lot of time scrolling back and forward as the material often extends for several screens. A taller screen would be really good. VERY good even." "But if you want to do two courses at the same time, then you'll need either a much wider screen, or two screens, won't you?" "I've never used a computer with two screens so I don't know how that works. I've seen them briefly on TV or in movies, but never for long enough to understand what they'd be like to use. I can imagine how a bigger screen would work, and that'd be good. To get two courses displayed nicely it'd have to be a HUGE screen, because it'd pretty much need to be twice as wide, as the formula pictures are already a little difficult to read. I don't think a screen only 50% wider, for example, would allow two courses side by side. Twice as wide, and ideally MUCH taller, is a HUGE screen. I don't know whether they make them that big, but if they did, I'm sure they'd cost a fortune." "It's not our money. From what you've said, height is very useful, so what about putting one screen above another, to make the result much taller?" "I don't know. I've never used a computer with two screens. I don't know how it would work. Maybe you can't get one document on more than one screen at a time, which would kill that idea." Julia said, "I don't know either. We'll ask everyone at dinner to see if anyone knows. If that doesn't work we can visit a computer store tomorrow so you can see for yourself. It'd be eating into our shopping time, but getting you studying properly is important." Now I was REALLY flabbergasted! "Do you mean there's something MORE important than clothes shopping? I'm shocked!" "I bet you love to hear me admit that. Yes, your studying IS more important than clothes shopping. Especially as I can already tell that the lack of a tall screen is slowing you down. You said you google other sites to help you, and that there were linked spreadsheets too. It'd be better to have them in windows that didn't obscure your lecture notes wouldn't it?" "Yeah. That'd be good, but I don't do that very often, so it's not a big deal at all. Seriously. I spend less than 5% of my time with an extra window open over top of my lecture notes, and it's easy to swap back and forth, so the efficiency loss is quite small. Fixing that problem would have very little effect on me." "Okay. Anything else then? A better printer: faster or bigger or anything?" "No, the printer is fine. Especially because if I had a bigger screen I'd hardly ever use the printer. I don't write many notes, just very summary level stuff, which I like to do it by hand because I'm used to it and I think it helps me remember. Let me think about my perfect system for a few seconds." I tried to visualize myself using a "perfect system", with an imaginary HUGE screen on it (REALLY huge, money is no object in my imagination). After a couple of seconds I told Julia, "What would be VERY good would be two mice. I do a great deal of scrolling up and down, so it'd be great to have a mouse for each course, one in each hand, so they can scroll up or down as their eye wants. Using one mouse for two documents would be a REAL pain, especially if I was scrolling both documents at the same time, which would be very common if my screen was large enough for both courses side by side." "Sounds easy. What about two keyboards?" "Nah. I don't use the keyboard much, so it's very unlikely I'd want to use both of them at the same time. It wouldn't be worth the extra clutter on my desk." "Is your internet connection fast enough?" "It's great! Everything is almost instant, so there's no point in trying to make it faster. I can't think of anything else. It's really just a matter of a screen which is double width and MUCH taller, and two mice. A system like that would be a big improvement." "Can you guess how much faster you could study that way?" "I think I'd be faster for two reasons. More efficient, which is what we've been talking about, but I'd also get faster because I'd be able to concentrate better. It sometimes takes me thirty seconds or a minute to find something in the printout because I have to look back several pages. The time isn't that much, but it disrupts my concentration. Being able to see much more of the document at one time would also help a lot. The online lecture note system doesn't suit working on a small screen, rather than a big blackboard in a classroom, where you can see everything at once. I'm guessing, but I'd probably say about 20% faster." "TWENTY!" "About that, I guess. Is that okay?" I could tell by the shocked look on Julia's face and her shrill screaming tone of voice, that it probably wasn't. I'm very good at spotting body language clues like that. "I was expecting maybe FIVE percent, and was already mentally rehearsing your reprimand. TWENTY! Jesus Christ, Mark! You're about to start a degree that'll take you ten months. With a better computer system you'll save two months of effort. Two months OF YOUR LIFE wasted just because you didn't ask for a bigger screen and a second mouse. Even worse, if you end up doing four or five degrees, which is what I expect, especially in the time you can do them, a better computer system will have saved you an ENTIRE YEAR of your life. I know you won't do all the degrees here, using this system, but you'll take your attitude everywhere. What could you achieve in your life with that extra year? I want to kick you in the ass until it's black and blue. Wait till Dad and Mom hear this. Let's go tell them. Come on!" I didn't want to. By the look on Julia's face, I wanted to stay up here hiding under the desk. Julia grabbed my arm and dragged it downstairs. I followed it, having no choice. For some reason an image came to mind of a naughty schoolboy (me), being dragged by the ear by a big, mean, nasty teacher (Julia). On the way downstairs I recalled Prof telling me, more than once, not to hesitate to speak up if anything would help. Earplugs would help. Maybe a book down the back of my pants to protect my ass from all the kicking it was about to get. I was dragged into the kitchen first. Vanessa and two 20-something-year old girls (Sophia and Ashley presumably) were in there. I was NOT introduced. Julia immediately said, "Mom, can you spare five minutes right now, so I can tell you and Dad what this moron was doing?" "Yes." "Where's Dad?" "In the living room." "Right. Let's go!" Julia dragged me to the living room. I heard Vanessa say, "Can you keep an eye on the pot, please Sophia?" "Sure." I was quickly dragged to the living room. Prof and The Boys were there, with Vanessa somewhere behind us. Julia immediately started, "YOU," (pointing to me), "SIT!" (pointing to a chair). I'd rather hide behind the chair than sit on it, but I did as Julia instructed. -- To her dad, Julia moaned, "You'll never guess what this moron was doing in the study." Julia's voice was plenty loud enough for Vanessa to hear, no matter where she was in transit. Even Sophia in the kitchen (whichever of the two girls she was) would be able to hear. Vanessa arrived after a couple more sentences. I'm sure she missed nothing. "He was printing out half the lecture notes and going through them on paper. I thought it was strange, and when I squeezed it out of him, he admitted it wasn't as efficient as having the right computer system would be. The current computer screen isn't big enough to display all the stuff he wants, so he prints half of it. But there are linked spreadsheets, search functions and other things that are lost when they're printed to dumb paper. He gave me a percentage figure for how much faster he could study, but I'm not going to tell you what he said. Instead I'm going to teach Mark a lesson by asking you what the MINIMUM improvement he could achieve that would justify him asking to have his computer system improved. Like, would you get angry if he didn't ask for an upgrade if he could work 1% faster? Or 10%? Or 100%? What's the MINIMUM number that would piss you off if he didn't tell you about it? Mom? Dad?" I knew I was in trouble when they quickly agreed that 5% would be annoying, and worked down from there. "Three or four. Probably four," was the mutually agreed upon answer. "TWENTY!" shrilled Julia. She launched into a rant. I'll skip reproducing it here, because some of it was unintelligible and all of it was unpleasant. Even the unintelligible parts were unpleasant, if only from her tone of voice. She was surprisingly worked up about it. After a minute she had to draw another breath, so I jumped in with, "I'm VERY sorry, Julia. I KNOW I was at fault. I see that now." Julia tried to restart, but Vanessa cut her off. "Julia, you've made your point now. Stop. We all know he made a mistake, including Mark. Now we fix it and learn from it." Julia cried, "Good grief! Doesn't he realize how valuable his time is going to be!?" Vanessa answered, "No, he doesn't. Which means you're being somewhat unfair for criticizing his not considering it. Plus Mark's time is not valuable YET! You're getting ahead of yourself, which is not fair either." From Prof, "He's only had three study sessions so far, so it hasn't mattered. You caught it early, Julia, which is great. Well done on getting suspicious about it and investigating, but you're overreacting." Vanessa's and Prof's defense cheered me up, until Prof added, "It's ironic that you're referring to Mark as a 'moron' given that we're discussing his computer system's inability to keep up with him. But I agree that his using such an inefficient process was foolish, but it was Mark's FIRST such mistake, Julia. The first mistake is a freebie. If he does it again you can yell at him all you want, and I'll help. Now let's discuss what needs to be done to correct the situation." Julia answered, "He needs a MUCH bigger screen. At least twice as wide so he can fit two courses side by side, and as tall as possible. Tall is especially important. He has to keep scrolling up and down because the material he needs to read covers several screens. In a classroom you can see the whole board, but on a computer screen you get just a small section, which makes it hard to see the meaning. The more he can see at one time the less time he'll spend scrolling, and the quicker he'll understand what he's reading. He needs the biggest screen possible." "That makes sense," said Prof. "I thought that if we can't get one screen which is big enough, then two screens side by side might be a good idea, so there'd be one for each course. Possibly even more screens on top of the others too, to get as much height as possible. Mark's never used a computer with two screens on it and none of ours have two screens, so I'm taking him to a computer store tomorrow so he can try it out, even if I have to pay them to set up a system for him to trial. Mark needs to decide for himself what works, because his studying process is so strange. He also needs two mouses, or two mice, or however you say that." Robert and Andrew were, unsurprisingly, the most computer knowledgeable people in the room. "Two mouses" caught their attention. Robert asked, "Why does he need two mouses?" I answered, "I have the lecture notes of two courses open at the same time, and I want a mouse for each, one in each of my hands. That way I can scroll up and down with either hand. That'd work very well for me." That wasn't the best description I could have given, because I was trying to keep quiet about my being able to read both screens at the same time. Andrew and Robert didn't need to know that. Andrew said, "I've never heard of a computer with more than one mouse. All the computers I've ever set up have only got one socket on the back to plug one mouse into." Robert added, "I've also never heard of it, but I know you can get USB mice, so plugging more in would be easy. I think the trouble might be Windows not handling it. I'll google it now, if you like? It'll only take a few minutes." Julia liked, "Yes please, Robert. Please look up BIG screens too. Anything up to the size of the boards lecturers write on." Prof laughed, "Haha. You're getting WAY too carried away there, Julia." "Why? If the lecturers write on them then it makes sense to reproduce that for Mark." "Except that we'd have to knock out the walls of your study to fit even one of those boards. The lecturers write BIG on those boards so people sitting way at the back can read them. Mark sits a few inches in front of his screen and all the font sizes are scaled down. The correct way to think about it is to ask how much bigger the new screen has to be compared to what he has now. Would twice as wide and twice as high be good enough, for example?" Julia didn't hesitate to answer that, "It'd be the BARE minimum. Twice as wide allows two courses side by side, but Mark's already told me that the graphics are a little hard to read at the current size, so even wider would be better. Something like three times wider would be good. Plus height is even more important - three or four times taller would be good." Robert said, "Okay, I'll go research that. I know Mark's current screen is 1280 by 1024, so I'll scale that as you've said Julia. Back in a few." "Thanks, Robert," called out Julia, happy to see progress being made. #3: #1: #4: #1: #4: #1: #3: <"Screwed the pooch"! You sure didn't get that one from Mom.> #1: As Robert was leaving the room, Prof started chuckling. Julia asked him, "What?" Prof answered, "I can't believe Mark was printing lectures out so he could read them. That's such a crude solution." The ever-helpful Vanessa said, "It certainly was, but by the look on his face he won't make that mistake again. Do you understand what mistake you made, Mark?" Now I was on safe ground. I'd long since figured this out, back when Julia was dragging me downstairs by my metaphorical ear. "Yes. It was incorrect of me not to bring an inefficiency to your attention. Prof, especially, had several times told me to let him know if there was anything more he could do to help with my study set up." "Not really, no. You SHOULD have done that, but that's not the root cause of your mistake. Try again." Goodbye safe ground! It'd felt good for the one second I thought I was standing on it. "Umm, I was wasting my time? Not valuing it highly enough, I mean?" "True, but not the core mistake. Try again." #1: No one else had a clue, so I was forced to say, "Sorry, I'm stumped." Vanessa said, "Consider OSU. They value you as a potential marketing tool. If you turn out to be as extraordinary as it seems you will, especially if you can graduate with a BS next year, then OSU will advertise that they helped you. They will benefit from that for as long as you're famous, which could span decades. I don't know the value they put on you, but it certainly isn't a small number. We can all see that they value you, because the Dean has gotten involved in looking after you - and believe me, he's FAR too busy to care about individual students. Plus OSU provided your computer in the first place, are letting you take courses for free, etc. There's plenty of proof that they value you. If you'd bothered to think about it economically, you would have known that a 20% efficiency improvement easily justified upgrading the computer. I don't know what that'll cost, but there's no doubt OSU will pay for it happily. -- "But you never thought about the economics of it, or any other facet of it. You simply assumed you were valueless and made do as best you could with the current system, rather than bother ANYBODY. You didn't bother Julia, even though she lives to help you. You didn't bother Prof, even though he'd several times told you to let him know if your study could be improved, and he's shown great interest and enthusiasm with your studying progress. Nor did you bother OSU. I know you don't know who to contact there, but even if you did, you wouldn't have asked them about it. In a nutshell, Mark, you were weak and passive, as we've seen several times with you. Luckily Julia caught it early, and good for her for that, but let's consider what might have happened if she hadn't caught it. Your value to OSU is dependent on your doing very well academically. By studying 20% faster you'll achieve some combination of being less likely to fail any courses, getting higher grades, and/or finishing faster; ALL of which increase your value to OSU. By being too weak to mention the problems with your computer system you were diminishing your value to OSU, and therefore letting them down. You were letting Prof down because he's your advocate at OSU, and because he's emotionally invested in your academic achievements. You were letting Julia down because she lives for your success. You were letting yourself and your family down too, of course, by wasting your time and limiting your achievements. Your refusal to think you have any value is stopping you from achieving as much as you could, and is causing you to let down and disappoint EVERYBODY." I was GUTTED. Tears were not far away (seriously). Andrew said, "I'd better go keep Sophia and Ashley company. Is there anything you need done in the kitchen, Mom?" "No thanks. Sorry Andrew. Tell them I won't be much longer." Vanessa continued to me, "We don't know what would've happened in the future. Maybe after a couple more study sessions you would have gotten annoyed with the inefficiency and complained about it to someone." I didn't think so, because I'd been patting myself on the back for the double-rate system working so well. Prof added, "No one can fault how hard you work, Mark. While the rest of us are sleeping, you're doing four or five hours of studying per night. Your double-rate process effectively doubles that because you are doing twice as much reading, thinking and memorizing, which IS twice as much work! So you do an extra eight or ten hours per night, or fifty hours per week. And those are just the EXTRA study hours you do while we're sleeping. You study during normal hours too. I've got many students who wouldn't do five or six hours of study per week, let alone the seventy or eighty you average. We DEFINITELY cannot fault your effort; it's extraordinary. But working hard is no substitute for working smart, unless you're planning to be a ditch digger." Not that I'd correct him, but Prof's calculations were wrong. Each mind only works the real-time number of hours. To put it another way, tiredness or boredom doesn't accumulate across minds (not that math is boring. I'm referring to my other subjects at school). Unfortunately pleasure doesn't accumulate across minds either, but such is life. Only my life, in this case. Vanessa resume, "One day your passivity IS going to let people down, Mark. This time Julia caught it early. Next time no one may catch it, and harm may be done as a result. I know you're young, but responsibility is coming to you early. Responsibility to do your best in return for the help OSU is providing you, for example. I know you CAN work smart - if anyone can, you can - but you refuse to even try if it requires you to push yourself forward at all. I have to get back to the kitchen or I'll fail one of MY responsibilities, haha. It beats me how you could have such a weak ego, with everything you've got going for you, but if anyone can strengthen it, Julia can. More girls and lots of money should help too. In my experience both of those create people with excessively large egos. Give him a cuddle Julia, he's having a bad day." Vanessa left the room, while Julia - who had mostly been pacing around - decided that cuddling me was a good idea. She climbed into my lap, put her arms around me, and snuggled in very nicely (she's very good at it), saying, "Sorry. I got too angry, didn't I?" "That's what happens when people are let down." I knew that end of it. It was not letting them down in the first place that I had trouble with. "You hardly ever let me down, darling. What you've been doing with all the girls is incredible. You're completely bowling them over. I can't think of any way you could possibly do that any better at that. I just got angry when I saw how much of your time you were wasting. I didn't think about all of the stuff that Mom said, just that you were wasting your time over something that's so trivially easy to fix. A bigger screen and another mouse, for goodness sake! It doesn't get much easier than that!" Robert walked back into the room. Seeing that he had our attention, he said, "Not quite, Julia. Two mice IS tricky; even impossible. There are plenty of big panels around, and we can easily attach several of them to his computer, but the two mice aspect isn't going to happen." "Why?" demanded a stubborn Julia. "I was surprised too. It's not really because of a computer problem, either hardware or software, but because of logical issues. I found one good document that discussed many ways in which two mice could be used, what you'd need to do, what the problem would be, etc., and it mentioned one point which I thought was particularly relevant to Mark's needs. Mark, when you're scrolling up and down the lecture notes, do you mostly use the mouse's scroll wheel, click on the scroll bars, or hit the PageUp/PageDown keys?" "Almost always the scroll wheel. Whoever designed the scroll bars was silly, because to scroll up and down you have to move the mouse pointer back and forth between the little arrows at the top and bottom of the scroll bar. They're so far apart and such small targets that doing so takes FAR too much concentration and time, and I have to take my eyes off what they're reading. If I have to scroll a long way, I drag the little box that moves inside the scroll bar - whatever that's called - but otherwise, and over 90% of the time, I use the wheel." "You obviously want the scroll wheel for the mouse in your left hand to scroll the document on the left side of your screen, and the right mouse's wheel the document on the right. Correct?" "Absolutely. Doing them the other way around would be silly. I could do it, but there's no advantage in it, and it'd take some time to get used to." "There's the problem," said Robert. "The Windows operating system is designed to have windows opened anywhere all over the screen. It's up to the user where you place your windows, how many you have, etc. Right?" We all nodded. Even I knew that. -- "So if you're on a computer, with lots of windows open, and you roll your mouse's scroll wheel, which of all your many windows does the scrolling happen in? It's not the window that's under the mouse pointer, because there could be several windows under it, or none. It's whichever window is active; whichever window is on top of all the others. You understand 'active window', Mark?" "Yes, thanks." [[Actually, in about 10% of the dimensions that have the Windows operating system - and damn near every dimension does - the mouse's scroll wheel will scroll an inactive window if the pointer is over it. Windows is an inconsistent system.]] "The Windows operating system has only one window active at a time, and that's the one that scrolls. So even if you could connect two mice, and you had two lecture note documents open, only one of them could be active at a time. No matter which of the two mice you scrolled with, only the active document would move. If you want to scroll your left document you'd have to click on it first, to make it active before you scrolled it. Ditto with the right document. And there's no way of being able to scroll them both at the same time, simply because Windows only allows one active window at a time. Plugging in more mice doesn't change that fundamental truth." "That's just SILLY!" declared Julia. "Why can't you have more than one? Computers are supposed to be smart. By now someone must have thought of a way of having two or more active at one time." Robert chuckled, "Yes, you'd think so. It seems so easy. But answer this: if you had two or more active windows at one time, when you type on the keyboard, which window does the typing appear in? Or does it go into all of them? Imagine the mess that could make of your work. It just doesn't work, Julia. Computers are designed to be used by one person, with one keyboard and one mouse. While computers can do many things simultaneously, they're designed assuming the human is only doing one thing at a time. If the user wants to do a second thing, he has to change which window is active." "What about if you have two screens plugged into your computer. Can you have an active window on each screen?" "No. The same problem exists. The COMPUTER can only have one active window. That's the one the keyboard input goes to, that's the one the scroll wheel effects. What you're asking for is a computer that's capable of being used by two people at the same time, and they're not designed for that. People don't want to work on the same computer at the same time, having to sit next to each other, sharing a screen, sharing a keyboard, banging their elbows against each other. Even married couples would come to blows over that, haha. Everybody has their own computer, so naturally the designers expect only one user. Mark will just have to go from window to window like everybody else. It's not as if he can do two things at once anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Everyone else manages." I could see it coming. Julia was frustrated because she doesn't like reality to get in the way of what's good for me, and she was determined to make this work. I'd told her that scrolling both documents independently and possibly at the same time was useful to me, so she was going to make it happen. In her frustration, she didn't care that Robert wasn't supposed to know that I can read from two sources at the same time. Obviously, she trusted him, and it wasn't a big enough secret for me to cut her off, so I let it happen. Julia blazed, "He can! That's the whole point! He needs a computer system that can do two things at once or it slows him down. Good grief! How hard can it be to be able to scroll two documents at the same time? That's a stupidly simple thing to do!" Robert said, "I don't understand this two things at once business." I interrupted his struggle to find the right question. "Robert, look at my eyes." It's not the sort of thing I normally ask guys to do, but when he did, I moved my two eyes around independently for a few seconds, saying, "I can read two books simultaneously, or two computer documents, or whatever. That's partly why I'm so quick at school, because I study two subjects at the same time. And that's why I want two mice, and to be able to scroll the two documents up and down independently, as each document's eye needs." After the usual exclamations of amazement and subsequent questions and answers, Robert concluded, "Amazing as Mark is, that doesn't change the fact that computers are designed to take input from only one person at a time. Mark's left and right sides operating independently makes his interaction with the computer indistinguishable from two people operating it, and they can't handle that." Prof had been sitting quietly this whole time, and he now suggested, "It seems to me that the best solution is two computers. Put them side by side, one document open on each, one mouse per computer, etc. If Mark interacts like two people, treat him as two people by giving him two computers. Would that work, Mark?" It'd obviously be stupid to have two computers for one person, but I kept that opinion to myself, knowing full well how it would be received. I visualized how I would work on two computers. It wouldn't be quite the same as having both documents open on one big screen, or as two side-by-side screens on one computer, as each mouse would be 'restricted' just to its screen. But I couldn't think of any problem as a result of not being able to 'cross' mouses. There'd be two keyboards too, but that was a non-issue. Powering up and shutting down would be a little more troublesome, but it was only a few seconds each time. Surely the Williamses wouldn't tell me off for wasting a few seconds per day? The only issue I could think of was cost, and I now knew better than to raise that. #4: <10 seconds 'wasted' per day to move to the second computer and tell it to shutdown, would be about 3600 seconds per year, or 60 minutes. An hour. That's quite a long time. We'd better mention it in case we get in trouble again.> #3: #1: #3: After thinking it through, I said, "I think two computers will do everything I want. From what I can imagine, they'll do it really well. My only negative thoughts are that it'll be a tiny nuisance to turn them both on and off every day, and I can't believe you want to get an ENTIRE second computer just because we can't get a second $10 mouse to work on the first computer, or whatever it is that mouses cost." There were some chuckles over my last comment. Prof then suggested, "If powering the computers on and off bothers you, leave them on. There's nothing wrong with that, is there Robert?" "No, no problem. Just hit a key or move the mouse to wake them up." If ten seconds shutting down per day was one hour per year, then saving about two minutes per day watching power-ups would be twelve hours per year. I wouldn't be using the computer every day, so call it six hours saved. What could I do with an extra six hours? I could have a very nice lovemaking session. I don't have enough time for those as it is. So, given a choice between watching 180 power-ups or having six hours of sex, I think I'll be leaving the computers on from now on. #4: As Mom would say, jolly good. Everything resolved. I felt better now. Hungry, but better. I wonder how far away dinner is? Julia said. "Okay, that's the second mouse issue resolved. Tell us about big screens please, Robert." I said, "We don't need to worry about that, Julia. The second computer will come with a screen, and I have one course's lectures open on each screen. I just thought that if I leave the computers on, I don't even have to exit the browser. I can leave them as is. That's cool. Oh, except that Carol might want to use my computer sometime. It was supposed to be for both of us." Julia said, "First, the idea of you and Carol sharing that computer was WAY back before you started doing ANY college work. There's no way we're going to let Carol's work interfere with yours now that yours has become so much greater and more important. She can use one of your computers if you're not in the room, but if you are she can use mine. If that doesn't work out, we'll get another computer for her, right Dad?" "If necessary, but I don't think Carol's used the study much, has she Julia?" Julia answered, "Barely. You're right. Let's forget about that for now. But the main thing I wanted to say to Mark is that we still need to talk about computer screens. Just because the new computer will come with a screen is NOT good enough. His current screen is not big enough. I want both computers to have BIG screens. Didn't you say tall was important, Mark?" "Ahh, yeah." "Good. Robert, what's the tallest screen we can get?" "That'd be the Dell 30-inch. Actually all screens are wider than they are tall, but you can rotate most of them ninety degrees so they become taller. For what Mark wants to use it for, that's the way to set it up." Julia said, "Good. Thirty inches sounds perfect. Wait! You do mean thirty inches tall don't you, after it's been rotated ninety degrees?" "Actually, no. Thirty inches is the diagonal size, from corner to corner. When it's rotated it'll be 1600 by 2560, compared to Mark's existing 1280 by 1024, so it'll be a little wider than his existing screen, and about two and half times taller." #1: "That it's a little bit wider sounds perfect. But only two and half times taller doesn't seem like very much. Can't you get a taller one?" "That's it. There are physically bigger screens, but they display even less information, which is not what you want. The only way to get taller is to put another screen above this one. Before you say you want that, think about this. The two screens would probably be over four feet tall. Imagine sitting at a desk and having to look up four feet to read the top of your screen. Mark would get neck and eye strain. The pictures I saw of the Dell make it look like an awesome screen, so I'm pretty sure one of these on each computer will keep Mark happy." "Can we add more later if we want to?" "Sure. If you want to, that's easy." "Good. Have you got that, Daddy?" Robert said, "I know what you need. I'll make a list. There are a couple of things to be careful of, like getting a good enough graphics card. I'll need to check what's in Mark's current machine to see if it can drive the new screen. He might prefer a left-handed mouse with the new computer too." Prof said, "If you could do that, I'd appreciate it, Robert. The sooner Mark's system is improved, the better." "I'll do it tonight. I'm also worried about the layout of the study furniture. We designed it for Mark having only one computer with a normal-sized screen, and I don't think two computers with two screens this big will fit the small desk we have his computer on now. We need to be careful how we set them up because these screens are heavy and very expensive. I'll think about that when I'm checking his existing graphics card." I had to. I really didn't want to know, but I had to. "Umm, Robert, how expensive is 'very expensive'?" Julia jumped in, "What does it matter, it's not your money? You just need a system that works well." Prof said, "Julia, I think Robert SHOULD tell Mark. Hopefully they'll be very expensive so Mark will learn something about his value. And it's not as if he can stop us getting them, if he disagrees on the cost, is it?" "Haha. No. You wouldn't go on strike in protest, would you, darling?" I rarely refuse whatever she wants when she calls me "Darling". Or "Honey", "Mark", "Hey you", or "Whatshisname". "I don't have enough courage to try that. You might withhold sex." "{Raspberry}." I didn't mind that one. It was probably the first one I'd effectively asked for. Robert said, "The panels are about $1,500 each. They need grunty graphics cards, but I didn't bother looking up the prices for those." #4: #1: #4: #1: #3: #1: Prof said, "Well, Mark. Any comments?" "Your daughter just cost OSU a LOT of money!" "No she didn't. Julia just increased your value to OSU by a couple of orders of magnitude more than the direct cost." "I'm sorry. I don't understand?" Prof explained, "The new hardware costs OSU virtually nothing, a few thousands as a one-time cost. Your value to their marketing program will almost certainly be at least a few tens of thousands PER YEAR, maybe a hundred thousand or more per year, depending on how famous you become. By enabling you to go 20% faster, your value to OSU has probably increased by a hundred times more than the new hardware will cost, because you'll finish your degree faster, better, safer and more importantly, you'll finish it more impressively, increasing your value to OSU, as Vanessa said before. -- "As a little bonus, they had to buy you a second computer because Microsoft doesn't allow a second $10 mouse to be plugged in, as per your joke. OSU's marketing people will LOVE that. It's a humorous, catchy story, and they'll milk it for all it's worth. People love humor that makes Microsoft look silly. I'll repeat your joke to the Dean when I tell him about your doing an entire degree next year. He'll love it. Not only for its marketing use, but because he sometimes meets with educationalists from Seattle, and that'll give him a chance to twist their tails." (Microsoft is headquartered in Seattle, just 250 miles north of Corvallis.) -- "I won't tell them that you can read from two screens at a time. I'll just say that you're ambidextrous and could work much faster with two mice, but dumb Microsoft held you back until OSU came to the party and bought you a whole second computer. The Dean's going to be a very happy man when he hears what Julia did." Prof let me think about that for a second, then he added, "You don't need a third computer do you?" "Haha, no. That'd be silly. Wait a minute! Are you being serious or was that a joke?" "It was both. I understand the way you work well enough to imagine that two computers is your limit, but I thought I'd ask anyway." "Umm. In that case, no, I can't use a third computer. I've only got two eyes and two hands." Julia said, "Is the computer system situation is fully resolved now? Everybody's happy with what we're getting, and it just needs to be installed?" Prof looked inquiringly at me. I answered, "I am." Prof said, "I'd be very surprised if there was anything other than celebration at OSU's end. They provided his first computer on the faint hope that it might help prepare Mark for starting a few college courses next year. Now that he's started a couple much earlier than they expected, and assuming he does well on his quizzes tomorrow morning, then they're going to wet themselves when I tell them what he's achieving already and intends to do next year. It is FAR better than what they were hoping for." Julia declared, "Good. That means Mark and I don't have to waste any time tomorrow going to some stupid computer store. We can spend all the time buying clothes." Julia laughed at the expression on my face. Prof said, "Vanessa's probably been holding dinner for us, so we'd better go to the dining room." As we were leaving the living room, I remembered that I was going to be meeting Sophia and Ashley. I wanted to make sure I knew who was who, so I whispered to Julia, "Don't forget to introduce me to the girls, please." She gave me a look like I was a dummy, and said, "Of course." It wasn't worth pointing point out to Julia that she'd failed to do exactly that once already, as doing so would hold up dinner even longer, and that would've been rude. ------- Chapter 101: Ava's Fitness Test Friday, April 22, 2005 (Continued) Julia did introduce me to Sophia and Ashley. They were nice girls (and not much more needs to be said about them as they don't feature significantly in my autobiography, being my girlfriend's brothers' girlfriends, so three removed from me). Dinner was waiting on us. We were quickly seated and it was served. I tried to apologize for holding it up by blaming Julia in a lighthearted way. Ashley said, "We heard her calling you a moron. Sophia and I have the same problem. Boyfriends can be fine for days on end, and sometimes even for a whole week, and then they go and do something that leaves us shaking our heads in amazement." Then they saw how much food I put on my big plate, and they shook their heads in amazement. I explained, "I'm trying to put on weight so it's harder for Julia to drag me around the house." Julia added, "He does a lot of sports, plus he's got a very busy day of shopping tomorrow." That was generally the tone of the conversation. Normally our conversations are strange these days, so we tried to create strange conversation so it'd appear normal to Sophia and Ashley. Although it did take a lurch in the normal direction when Sophia asked me, "When will we meet Carol?" I was a bit flustered, trying to work out why they'd want to meet Carol, and how they even knew she existed. Andrew, seeing my confusion, came to the rescue, "Remember we said we'd tell Sophia and Ashley that Julia was also Carol's girlfriend. We talked about it when we were in the hot tub last time." Ahh! I remembered now. The Boys had also been worried about Julia's sexual aggressiveness and if Carol would be naked in the hot tub, which reminded me that Carol was supposed to be here tonight. I'd forgotten all about it, and she wasn't here, so I was confused again. I said, "I remember now. I had forgotten, sorry. What's worse is that I'd forgotten that Carol was supposed to be here tonight, wasn't she, Julia?" Julia said, "That was the original plan, but Carol and I changed it last night when I was with her. Sorry that I forgot to tell you. She was hoping for a quiet, catch-up evening at home and an early night. I talked to her a while ago and she's fine. She mentioned that her Liaison Club has been VERY busy. She thought that was funny." Julia turned to our guests, and said, "That's a girls' social group at Carol's school. Carol might come over for an hour or so later. You'll meet her then." Almost none of the rest of the conversation was about me, which was perfect as far as I was concerned. Most of the time they talked about stuff relevant to the four of them (The Boys and their girls). My managing to eat all the food that I'd piled on my plate was joked about, which put me off getting seconds. I'd have to sneak some more food later. While the table was being cleared after dinner, I had a chance to grab Julia for a private chat, "Julia, I've been worrying about the quizzes your dad's going to give me tomorrow morning. I still have to cover some more material, which I'm pretty sure I can do, especially if we do that running trick with Ava tomorrow morning. But those quizzes are REALLY important, especially with the expensive new hardware possibly coming. I've never heard of anyone spending that much on a computer before, and it's scary. I'd like to spend some more time studying, so I can review some of my earlier work before doing the quizzes. An extra couple of hours would be much appreciated. I was wondering whether I could duck out of the rest of the dinner party to study? They're happily chatting among themselves so they shouldn't miss me. What do you think? That's not too rude, is it?" "That sounds fine to me, let's check with Mom shall we?" We went to the kitchen. There were several people there, still cleaning up after dinner. Julia whispered in her Mom's ear for about three seconds (WAY shorter than I'd taken to explain the situation). Vanessa smiled and said, "Sure." Julia came back to me, then called out to the room, "Sophia, Ashley, Others. Mark's got a couple of quizzes tomorrow morning that he doesn't feel comfortable about, so he's going to duck upstairs to do some studying. I'll see him settled then come back and join you. See you in a few minutes." "Nice to meet yous" were exchanged, and I was outta there. That was easy. We went up to my study. While I was getting ready (powering up the computer, pulling out my notes, etc.) Julia said, "I'll call up Ava in a couple of minutes. What time do you want her to come over?" "As late as possible. No, that's not right. It doesn't matter, because it just slides when I'll get up to study. Whenever suits you." "I'll tell her 9:45 promptly then. I'll meet her and bring her into our bedroom. You keep studying and I'll come fetch you once she's here. Then you do what we discussed before and I'll come and sleep in here. It'd probably be best not to wake me when you come in to study in the morning. Is there anything else?" "That's all fine. I'd appreciate it if you could smuggle a snack up here at some stage. I didn't get any seconds." "Why not?" "The girls were joking about how much I ate, and I didn't want to grab even more in front of them." Julia shook her head in that way that means I've been stupid again. She said, "I've a good mind NOT to bring you any food, to teach you a lesson. There was no reason you couldn't have had seconds AND thirds, Mark. Even in those shapeless clothes they can see you're not fat. There's nothing to be ashamed of in eating a large amount if that's what your body needs. If you were a pig who stuffed himself and got fatter, then shame would be appropriate, but nothing could be further from the truth. I will go and get some food for you, but I'm going to make a BIG production out of it: filling up your LARGE plate, and loudly making sure they all know it's for you. That way, for the rest of ALL the meals you'll be having with them, you'll be able to eat the amount you want. Sheesh! I do wish you'd toughen up." Julia left, without giving me a goodbye kiss. Today wasn't one of my better days. I turned to the computer, and while #1 remembered, we checked his hypothesis using Calculator: a^2 + b^2 = c^2, so 16.00^2 + 25.60^2 = 911.36. That to the power of 0.5 was 30.19, which Dell obviously just called their "30-inch" screen. Which confirmed that those numbers were the size of the screen in hundredths of an inch. Excellent. It was great to get at least one thing right today. Thus cheered, although a little sad that most other people were so uncomfortable with numbers that they had to drop the decimal point, I started studying. I still have new material to work through until I reach the point in each course that Prof identified as where I should stop. Any study time after that I'll use for reviewing. Julia came back about thirty minutes later, carrying my big plate covered in a small mountain of food and a large glass of milk. The plate contained enough for seconds, thirds, and a good proportion of fourths. Julia informed me, "Ashley and Sophia are AMAZED by how much food you eat! -- "I talked to Ava briefly and all's well there. I told her you'd had a busy day and a lot of sex already, so you wouldn't be up to your usual standard. I told her to bring her running clothes in case you feel like having a run in the morning. She laughed but said she would. I talked to Carol as well. She's good, and isn't going to come over tonight. You're too busy and she is too. She's had many girls call her since she got home. Girls who were at lunch or who saw you walking around school. She's having a great time telling so many tall tales about you. Someone's been a bad influence on that girl, haha. It's a good thing Carol's got a cellphone, because she'd be MILES over the limit you're allowed on your landline. She talked to Ava earlier. Ava's excited about seeing you tonight, but we knew that anyway. Carol asked Ava to 'please give you a good time, because you are such a nice brother.' Ava boasted that she'd give you all the good time you could handle. 'Pride goeth before a fall, ' haha. -- "My last comment is about a little point you may not remember. Do you remember me mentioning at lunch that Carol could take Ava down to meet her girlfriends, and let them play with Ava's body while asking sex questions about you?" "I think I can remember something like that, yes." "Good. Carol said that some of the girls asked her about that. Half a dozen or so. Carol has told Ava that she's going to be played with by several girls at school next week as part of her bi training and testing. Ava's quite mixed up about that. Carol managed to make it sound quite sexy, but it's not Ava's normal scene, so she doesn't really know how to react. She'll do it, of course, especially after she gets a taste of you tonight, but she's confused about the direction her life has suddenly gone in. I told Carol that I'll text her when Ava goes home tomorrow morning, and for her to call Ava about fifteen minutes later. Ava should have just got home and hopefully will be exhausted but won't have fallen asleep yet. Carol will tell Ava to come over for sex, which will be the last thing Ava will want. She'll have to explain that you're too much of a man for her, which will be good for her to have to admit, and Carol won't let her forget it afterward either. -- "Carol sends you her love, and asked you to give Ava a kiss for her, but you can choose where. Also that all your family will be home for Saturday dinner and afterward. That's about it." I managed to get several kisses this time, then Julia said, "I'd better leave you to your studying." After about fifteen more minutes of study, there was a knock on my door. When it didn't immediately open, I called, "Open." Robert came in. "I thought I should check on what graphics card you've got in your computer. OSU should have it in their records but I'd rather double-check so there won't be a slipup. Is now convenient?" Not really, as it was obviously going to take a fair while to shut everything down, disconnect all the cables from the computer, and open up the case to find out; and then to reverse the entire procedure. But it had to be done sooner or later, so it might as well be now. At least it'd give me some uninterrupted snacking time. "Okay. Give me a second to note where I'm up to." "No need. Just let me have the mouse for a few seconds." I took my hand off the mouse, partly out of surprise. True to his word, three or four seconds later Robert said, "Thought so. Thanks." The software knew what hardware it had! I'd never thought of that. That seemed almost intelligent. He closed the window, stood back, and asked, "Have you given any thought to where to place the new hardware?" "Ahh, no. I haven't." We discussed that for a few minutes. When I'd first designed what I wanted here, especially the positioning of the shelves, I'd been thinking mostly of doing schoolwork, which is not how it's turned out. Studying college courses was currently almost entirely screen based. The easiest setup was to install both computers under my desk with the panels mounted side by side on the wall I faced, rather than have the systems on the mini-desk between my and Carol's desks. On my much larger desk, with the keyboards in front of the screens, there was still plenty of desk space for my note taking, and having the mouses out to either side. All we needed to do was move a couple of shelves, which Robert said was very easy. They were 80% empty anyway, although they'd be filled next year - I shudder at the thought of how many textbooks I'm going to have to read next year. Setting up my new system, if OSU agreed to buy it, looked to be very easy, which made Robert happy. Before he left, Robert asked, "Please tell me that you're not so focused on studying that you sleep in here rather than with Julia?" He pointed to the mattress made up in the far corner of the room. There was no secret about the other girls, so I said, "The reverse this time. Julia will be sleeping there. A girl called Ava, one of my Liaisons, is coming over at about 10. I'm going to give her a hard workout, then leave her in the main bed while I come back here to carry on studying. Julia needs to catch up on her sleep, and she slept with Ava last night anyway, so Julia is going to camp in here so she can sleep through the whole thing." Robert shook his head. "Your sex-life is too bizarre. But then, so are you. When I came in you were reading the monitor and those notes," pointing to the printed out lecture notes in front of me, "at the same time, weren't you?" "Sure. That's how I work. That's how I USED to work, until Julia caught me and dragged me downstairs. Two monitors and two mouses will be great though, especially if they're big screens." "They're big all right. I'm not brave enough to get on Julia's bad side by not spending enough of OSU's money. Can I watch you study for a minute or two, before I go? I find the concept amazing." "Sure, although it's not exactly thrilling to watch. By the way, as you know about that ability of mine, you might as well tell Andrew. I'll give him a demonstration sometime, over breakfast or whatever, just so long as there aren't any non-family witnesses, as I'd prefer to keep it low key. Please don't discuss it with anyone else." "Okay. I'll have to think of a fun way to tell Andrew. It's too good not to twist his tail about it somehow." I chuckled about that, wondering if some money might be changing hands shortly. I turned to my studying. A couple of minutes later Robert slipped out of the room. About forty five minutes later, about 9:30, there was another knock on the door. This time Prof came in, shut the door behind him, and wordlessly handed me my license. I was confused for a second, because I thought it was in my wallet in Julia's bedroom. But then I noticed that I looked a little older in the picture and the pieces fell into place. I looked at it much more carefully. "Wow. It's good. Can I get my real one from Julia's room and put them side by side?" "That'll be good. I'll come with you." On the way I asked him, "When did you get it?" "Not in the hallway, Mark." Oops. I shut up until we were in Julia's room with the door closed. "Sorry about the hallway question." "No problem. I'm sure you knew better. We have to be cautious because there are so many people coming and going these days." I looked at my watch, then said, "Yeah. There's another one coming in ten or fifteen minutes: Ava, one of the Liaisons. We shouldn't stay in this room long. Let's look at the two of them." Side by side they were virtually identical, the main difference being my birth year. "This is a VERY good fake. Not that I know much about fakes, but I'd heard that most of them were pretty crappy. This one sure isn't." I offered the two cards to Prof, who refused them saying, "I've already done the same thing, comparing it to mine." Then he pulled the fake out of my hand, "If you don't mind - and even if you do - I'll keep the fake well hidden in this house. It's not the sort of thing you want to accidentally give a cop if you're pulled over one day. In answer to your question about quality: with fakes, like so much else in life, you get what you pay for. With so much money at stake we didn't want to scrimp. It was surprisingly cheap though, which is a little worrying." I didn't want to know the price. Every time I turn around, money is being spent on me. -- "Tomorrow night will be a good night to go. I imagine it'll be the casino's busiest night, which hopefully means all the staff will be busy and less likely to notice anything we do. I hope you haven't got anything you can't cancel tomorrow night?" "Umm, actually I do." There was the beginning of a frown on Prof's face so I hurriedly added, "A family thing. I've been spending so much time away from my family that I'm getting homesick. I've already asked everyone to be home on Saturday evening and they've all agreed. Mom and Dad don't know about our plans for my doing a whole degree next year, Mom hasn't had a chance to tell me about the school's $45,000 deal. We're not seeing enough of each other." "That's a good reason. Relax Mark, I don't mind. How about Sunday evening then?" "That's good with me. I am VERY eager to move this forward. I can't wait until we're all in the mansion. That's going to be AWESOME! And think of how much more efficient it'll be, as I won't miss evenings because I'm homesick, haha. Which reminds me, because I'm staying with my family on Saturday night, I probably won't be able to study the next morning, because Mom doesn't want me to drive those hours on weekend mornings." "I think we can miss a day, especially if you'll be 20% faster when your new hardware arrives. Why don't you take your mother for a drive sometime, so she can see how good you are? Maybe she'll relax that restriction." "Umm. I never thought of that. That's a good idea. Thanks." "No problem. Drive her somewhere busy, such as through the center of town. Back to Sunday. The casino we're going to is nearly an hour's drive away. It's small, so nothing like the Vegas casinos you would've seen on TV. According to their website they've got only four roulette tables, so we're going to have to be careful, but that would've been the case anyway. I don't want us to do much talking about our research or plan in the casino itself, in case we're overheard, but we should be able to discuss the details during the car ride. It comes down to you, though: how your ability works out, different things you want to try, etc. Have you reviewed the movie and picture that I emailed you?" I hadn't thought to check my email. My family all got email addresses when we got dial-up, but I virtually never use it as our home computer is too slow and its online time too restricted. Now that I'm getting some real, non-spam emails I must get into the habit of checking it regularly. So the truthful answer to Prof's questions was a big, fat "No." Prof already had the casino picked out, knew how many roulette tables they had, and who knows what else, but I'd done nothing. Except repeatedly tell myself how desperately eager I was to make this happen. Just not eager enough, apparently, to actually DO anything useful about it. Sheesh! Fortunately I had a small escape window, "I haven't looked at them again, but in your study I worked out pretty much what I want to do. Then it'll be a matter of learning from experience at the time. I'll look at them when I get back in the study, but I don't expect to have any more ideas." "Okay. I'll let you get back to your study then." It'd only be for about five minutes, until Ava arrived. Prof left, carrying my fake ID and the empty plate with him. It was probably a good idea not to leave a six-year backdated ID with a 15-year old boy. Who knows what mischief I could get into, if I could find time after all the sex I was doing. I made a mental note to put my "Disguise Kit" in my car the next time I was at home. I'd feel foolish if we tried to set off on our journey and I'd forgotten to apply it. I spent the next few minutes looking at the video and close-up picture of the wheel. No brilliant ideas struck me. Nothing unusual about that, as - not being brilliant - brilliant ideas don't strike me very often. I was also conscious that I hadn't gotten around to thinking about Prof's profit split structure. I wanted to discuss that with him sometime soon, especially as things seemed to be progressing nicely. In fact, the speed of the next stage was entirely up to me. The sooner I learned how to get that little ball into the right slot, or close enough to it that the odds were distorted sufficiently for us to bet them profitably, the sooner we could take a little trip down to Vegas. With $100,000 in our pocket, good grief! Julia came in. The first thing I noticed was that she was carrying a nightie. I don't think I'd ever seen her in a nightie, not that I remembered anyway. I 'only' remember seeing her in the nude, there being nothing "only" about that! I asked, "You've got a nightie?" "Sure. Several of them." Of course she did. They were clothing, and we all know how much Julia likes buying clothing. "I brought it with me in case the bed was cold tonight. When I got it out I told Ava that I was sleeping in another room because you'd screwed me too much recently." The sad fact was that I hadn't screwed her for far too long. There had to be a good reason for that, but I couldn't think of it. I said, "Unfortunately that's VERY not true. Sorry about that. Please remind me to do something about that tomorrow night." "If I have to remind you, I'll be very disappointed. We should have some more opportunities over the next few days, as it'll take a while for the Liaison process to start feeding new girls through. Then we'll try to keep it reasonably balanced." I couldn't argue with that, mainly because I had no real idea about how the Liaison process was going to work. Julia continued, "I can't believe I'm saying this, but it'd be a good idea for me to have some nights off. I couldn't keep up with my schoolwork or sleep if I had you available all the time. Carol thinks the same applies to her, so your having some random girls a few nights a week is probably a good idea all around." I couldn't argue with that either! Couldn't argue, wouldn't argue, refused to argue. Mainly because I was too busy anticipating it. I've recently discovered that I quite like having sex with other girls. I did stay focused on the current conversation enough to say, "Did Prof mention that he and I are probably going to try our business idea out on Sunday? You know we have my ID, don't you?" "I know. Robert had to go pick it up. Ashley's date with Robert has been very stop/start tonight, but the rest of us kept her company." I HAD been interrupting Robert a lot tonight: the computer discussion, him checking out my study, and now going to get my ID. I must have looked guilty, because Julia added, "Don't worry, he promised to make it up to her tonight. I think she'll be happy enough." Remember me telling you that "brilliant ideas don't tend to strike me very often"? That's not true with stupid thoughts, I have those very often. I ask, "Oh, is Ashley allowed to stay overnight?" I immediately realized my stupidity, just not immediately enough to stop making a fool of myself. What was the chance that Prof and Vanessa allowed their 16-year old daughter sleep with her partner overnight, but not their 26-year old son? D'oh! In my defense I'm not used to ANYONE staying overnight for sex as it doesn't happen in our house; other than Mom and Dad, of course, but I CERTAINLY don't count them! I immediately added, "Cancel that! Very stupid question. Ava's here, is she?" "Sure is. Lying naked in bed waiting for you. She brought her running gear too. I don't know whether Ava will overlap with Ashley and Sophia in the morning. We'll try to get Ava out of here before the others get out of bed. If they do meet I don't mind telling them that we had a threesome. I dropped some very vague hints about that earlier, just in case. I think The Boys are being overly protective about that. Ashley and Sophia aren't blushing virgins. We'll try to avoid it because there's no benefit in rubbing it in their face, but it's nothing to worry about as far as I'm concerned." "I'd better go say 'Hello' to Ava then." "Haha. If you want to waste your time talking, then by all means. You go work your Mark Magic on her. I've already said goodnight to everyone, so I'm going to bed too, just not the same one, unfortunately." I opened my mouth, but Julia said, "No. Tomorrow night is fine." I shut my mouth. I didn't bother tidying up my study area because the less I put away now, the less noise I'd make getting back to work later. Also because I was quite eager to start working my "Mark Magic" on Ava. I kissed Julia. She WAS tired, and I could easily smell that she'd been in the hot tub, which induces additional sleepiness, so it was just a short kiss. I said, "Goodnight, darling." I left the room, rubbing my hands together in glee at being able to do some 'Magic' on a new girl. I saw no good reason to knock, so I simply opened the door and entered the bedroom, deliberately walking as if I was tired. Ava was sitting up in bed, the sheet pulled up to just below her bare shoulders. Goody, as bare shoulders imply naked. (As a general rule, finding a naked teenage girl in your bed merits a "Goody.") The only time I'd seen her naked was in her photos, and she'd looked very nice in those. Which gave me a little idea. I walked to my closet and started undressing while saying, "Hi Ava. Very nice to see you. Julia and Carol have been telling me how hard you're trying and that I should let you spend the night even though they're not totally sure about your obedience and bisexuality yet, but I'm sorry that you've caught me on a night when I'm very tired. Are you sure you want to do it tonight?" By now my shirt had been removed and hung up (I'd only worn it to dinner, so it was easily good for another day without a wash), I'd bent over and removed my shoes and socks, which somehow required a surprisingly large about of muscle flexing, and was in the process of pushing down my pants. Ava had been watching me avidly the whole time, especially after my shirt came off (I'm not sure someone can be "especially avid", but if they can, she was). "Oh YES!" she exclaimed. "You look VERY good." I hung up my pants, and still in my underwear to frustrate her obvious desire to see more, I implemented the little idea I'd had on entering the room. I turned to her and said, "Ava, get up and let me have a look at you. I've got no idea what your body looks like. Julia and Carol have seen you, but I don't know what you look like yet." I was proud of myself for not saying "please". That was VERY hard for me, especially right at the end. It almost hurt to force myself to leave it off. My plan got delayed for a minute while Ava raved about my body. There's been so much of that recently I'm sure you don't need me to quote it yet again. Eventually I was able to repeat my request that she get out of bed to show me her body, ending again with, "I STILL don't know what you look like." Ava moved to obey while saying, "Yes you do. I gave you my photographs." I frowned, as if trying to remember, and wondered out loud, "Were you one of the girls who did that?" As she was indeed one of the girls who did that, Ava said, "Yes. Don't you remember? I put some naked photos of me in the envelope." "Ahh, yes. Now I remember. I didn't really look at them. Except I liked the one of your face; that was nice. You had done your makeup nicely, and you had nice earrings in too. I remember thinking how pretty you are." My combined knowledge on makeup and earrings could be written on the back of a postage stamp using a thick felt-tip pen, but she didn't know that. "You really don't remember my body?" "Why? Was there something especially memorable about it?" Ava was REALLY at a loss how to answer that. Her mouth opened and closed a few times. Comically and ineffectually. I added, "I remember thinking that it looked fine, but I've forgotten why now. Please get up and let me have a look." Damn, a "please" had slipped out. With a confused look on her face, Ava started getting out of bed. (I was going to joke that she was the sort of girl who'd often have confused looks on her face, but she really isn't that dumb. Julia had put her into such an unusual situation that the poor girl didn't know what was going on. From that uncertain base, it was only a very short step to make her confused.) I enjoyed watching her get out of bed (I can imagine your lack of surprise at reading that). She has a nice body. Slim, athletic, and definitely desirable. I could feel the "desirable" aspect starting to have an effect already, but I sent it the first of many go-softs because I didn't want to show any desire yet. Because I DID remember her body, and distinctly remembered that her photos were tasteful, and only showed the hair at the top of her pussy, I immediately noticed that there was NO hair down there at all. I pretended not to notice that change. She stood proudly, and turned around doing a few little poses for me. I said, "I think I do remember now. I have a good memory, but I didn't bother giving the photos any attention. Bodies don't mean much without the personality of the person." That last statement was crap of course. Bodies are completely separate from personalities, and it's wonderful when a girl has a great body, regardless of her personality. I'd only used the line because I remembered Julia saying something to that effect when she was talking to Ava on the phone, and because I knew it to be the type of unreal nonsense that girls eat up. God knows why. I was expecting Ava to comment on her lack of pussy hair, because Ava isn't the sort of girl who can restrain herself easily. Sure enough, after a few seconds she said, "Did you notice that I shaved." It was quite easy to make a joke out of it by looking up at her head. She saw where I was looking, and said, "No, down here," as she pointed with both hands at her pussy. "Oh. Of course, sorry. Guys shave on their faces, so that's what I thought of. I must be even more tired than I thought to mistake you for a guy, haha." I looked at it for a second, or even less, then looked back at her face, saying, "You have quite a nice body. You look fit too, which is good." "What do you think of my shaving? I've never done it totally bare before, but Julia said you and Carol liked it that way." I bashfully looked down at the floor, then collected myself and looked up again. "Umm. I find it a bit hard to think about Carol doing things like that with you. I know she does, but I'd rather you not mention it too often. Just so long as you make her happy is all I want to know." "Oh, I'm sorry! I forgot. I won't do it again, I promise!" "Don't worry about it. It's not a big deal. I know she does it, and I know I should get used to it. Save your promises for things that really matter. And while I remember to mention it, your pussy looks quite nice. Thank you for doing little things to please me. I like it very much that you have such a good attitude. That's one of the things I like the most about you: your very good attitude toward trying hard to make Carol and me happy." I'd deliberately downplayed her pussy - in fact, her whole body - because I wanted her to think that her body had no leverage over me. I was effectively telling her a watered down version of, "{Yawn}, another body. {Sigh}." I'd only looked at it briefly, spending most of the time after that looking her in the eyes. I could see she was confused about my lack of interest in her body. I doubted the other boys she'd showed it to reacted this way. I said, "We should get to bed because I'm tired. I might only manage two or three hours tonight, Ava. And I have a busy day tomorrow, sorry." She was already confused by my apparent lack of interest in her body (I'd like to claim it was my consummate acting ability, but I couldn't have acted indifferent even just a week ago. My recent sexual experiences made all the difference). My telling her that I'd manage "only two or three hours" was not a male norm either, further confused her. I knew - and I'm sure she knew - that when males were tired they barely managed two or three minutes. I'd heard enough jokes about that to know it was common, but quite frankly, I don't understand it. If you've got a girl you desire, why not enjoy yourself? And you can't possibly have had enough enjoyment after two or three minutes. I don't think there is such a thing as "enough enjoyment", but if there is, it's for damned sure not reached within three minutes - ESPECIALLY when it comes to sex! So normal male behavior doesn't make any sense to me. I've only been having sex for three weeks though, so maybe there are reasons that I'll learn about later. I knew she'd decide that I meant I'd try to stay AWAKE for two to three hours, and she'd expect the sex to be intermittent during that time. I wanted to tell her "two to three hours" now, so that when I did keep going for that length of time, she'd learn that I spoke the truth about sex. That way she'd be easier to manage in the future. Plus even more usefully tonight, I knew that "two to three hours" was a little longer than was good for her. I could see us going for something like one and a half or two hours, and then she'd want to stop. I'd remind her that I wouldn't last much longer, then she'd force herself to keep going. By the end of three hours, which is when I'd stop, she'd be EXTREMELY tired. When I woke her four hours later to resume having sex, her body would be tired, sore and fucked out so much she wouldn't want to be fucked in anymore. That was the basic plan anyway. I'd find out whether she was fit enough to derail it. I turned around somewhat and stripped off my shorts. I walked to the linen hamper, to drop them in and to give her a good look at my body. There was a sharp inhalation of breath behind me, then, "Your body is incredible! I've never seen a guy look like you." I was returning from the hamper now, so she was getting a full-frontal view. I was very, very self-conscious, but pretending not to be. I'd been doing go-softs, but deliberately only about 90% effective so my cock was a little bit extended (yes, I am aware that I was effectively lying about my cock's size when soft, but there's an awful amount of body honesty going on otherwise). I wanted to appear totally unturned on, to let her know that her body hadn't done a thing for me. After several more of her over-the-top expressions of amazement at my naked physique, I replied, "Thank you. Yours is nice too." She'd noticed that I was soft. She'd noticed several times because she kept double-checking. I arrived back at the bed and pulled the covers open for her to get in. She'd been riveted to the spot, staring at my body, and getting more aroused. Instead of getting in, Ava asked, "Don't you want me?" I HAD just asked her to get into bed, which would normally have answered that question, but her worry obviously stemmed from another source. I continued my tease, "What do you mean? I'm holding the covers, waiting for you to get into bed." "But you haven't tried to kiss me, or touch me, and, umm, you're soft." "You surely don't expect me to get hard just because I'm looking at a naked girl do you? Your body is nice but it's just a body. Bodies don't mean much, do they?" I couldn't have written, "She'd had an orgasm at the sight of my body," but she'd certainly been strongly affected by it. It was therefore a little difficult for her to agree that bodies don't mean much. -- While she was thinking about that, I added, "You haven't even tried to turn me on yet. You haven't touched me, or kissed me, or done anything, so nothing has happened to get me excited." That a naked girl had to do something to turn-on a guy was obviously a concept she hadn't encountered before, and she was having some trouble believing it. The evidence was right in front of her though, just dangling there. I gave up waiting for her, and got into bed by myself, lying on my back and sliding over to make room for her. I said, "If you want to have sex, come to bed. You can get me started by sucking my cock." She DID want to have sex. That was obvious. If I'd been hard, I was sure we'd be going for it already. But her confusion left her unsure what to do. She needed a little nudge to get her moving, so I said, "Maybe I should tell Julia that you're not very good at sex if you don't even know how to suck a guy's cock?" Since she considered herself to be very good at sex, my little nudge had the desired result: she leaped into bed, leading with her open mouth. Within moments she was doing her best to arouse me. Her best turned out to be good enough to get me aroused, after I slowly reduced the go-softs. Her worst would have been good enough too, such is the effect of good looking, naked, 17-year old girls sucking on my cock. She was the first such girl to do so, but I was confident in my expectation that others would be similarly successful. Ava was very happy when my cock started responding. I was happy too, and not just for the obvious reason. I'd also successfully proved that she couldn't lead me around by flashing her body at me. It was the obvious reason that I was particularly happy about though, because I'd quickly noticed, as you do, that she was BY FAR the best cock-sucker I'd ever had - BY FAR! On one hand, that doesn't mean much given the pathetically low number of girls who've sucked my cock, both of them - Julia and Carol - being virgins until they'd succumbed to my charms (more or less). The other girls I'd bedded had all been on the receiving end of my attentions and hadn't had the 'opportunity' to demonstrate their expertise in this particular skill. On the other hand, Ava was REALLY good! I could tell that she and I were going to become VERY good friends. Sex is so much better when you see past the body, and learn to appreciate more than just the girl's beauty, such as her being fantastically good at sucking cock! Unfortunately, and I mean that most sincerely, her sucking my cock wasn't what this night was about. Another night would DEFINITELY be about that, but not tonight. As was usual when I initiated a new lover, I needed to give her the best quality and quantity of sex she'd ever had. Especially so with Ava because I not only had to break her in, but to break her ego too. After which I turn her over to Julia, for whatever torturous procedure was next. So I said, "You're quite good at that, Ava. I think I might ask you to show Julia how to do it so well." To hell with any concern I had about undermining Julia's authority, Julia WAS going to learn this! "You've got me nicely warmed up now, and Julia was right that I like naked pussies, so let me have a look at yours." I pulled her up so I could go down and then go down. I started my usual learning about this important area of her body. I find it rather ironic that the start of my having any sex-life at all was when I teased Annette Neumeyer with a lie about Julia Williams knowing how to press my buttons. Now I was becoming exceptionally good at learning how to press girls' buttons, and it had dramatically increased how often my buttons got pressed, polished, licked, rode, and everything else that can be done to a guy's buttons. One thing I soon learned about Ava, was that she didn't hesitate a moment to give plenty of feedback. I was immediately informed about what she liked, what she didn't like, what she wanted more of, and how she wanted it. There was no beating about the bush, especially because there was no bush. If Ava liked it, she expressed it verbally and bodily. It made my learning easier and a lot more fun (and it was already a LOT of fun). I really enjoyed seeing and hearing how much pleasure I was giving her. I didn't do everything she said - I probably didn't do even a quarter of what she said - because I had my own goals. Our main difference was that she wanted me to go much faster than I wanted to go. I suspect because she was used to the speed normal guys normally went. I liked slower, because building a girl's arousal slower results in it being a bigger one when it finally explodes. I particularly wanted her first one to be a big one, as the first one is the one she'll best remember. Another difference between Ava's and my approaches to what I should be doing to her pussy, is that she knew what she liked and I didn't. I could do what she said, which would be fine, but I'd never discover any new techniques that way (new to her). She'd be impressed if I found new things that worked on her, and impressing her was a large part of what I was trying to do. So I spent a long while down there, and did a lot more than she expected. Nearly all of which she enjoyed because if anything didn't work, I quickly stopped doing it. She was impressed by my dedication and technique. I was impressed by her enthusiasm and openness. I did find some new things too, which I thought I would, as I had a long list of things to try that worked on other girls. It was easy to know when I showed her something new, as she'd say something like, "Ohh, that's nice. What's that? Do more of that." About the time I would normally start winding her all the way up, I decided to try something I hadn't done before, rather than her first orgasm being oral and fingers, this time I decided to make it more traditionally. I got her to a high level and kept her hovering there with just one hand, freeing the rest of me to kiss my way up to her breasts and mouth. I grabbed a box of rubbers out of the bedside cupboard while up there, then headed back south again. She was starting to praise me ("This is nice", "You're good at this", etc.). She had no idea what was going to be happening once her orgasms started. While mouthing her, I used my two hands to extract and fit a rubber. When I moved back up her body, I rolled her onto her side with her right leg over my shoulder. As soon as my hips were far enough up her body, I slid my cock into her. In this position I could easily frig her with my right hand, while my left hand could roam up and down her body. It could reach her breasts with a bit of stretching, or rub her ass, or just rub her back or side. Last but not least, in this position I could fuck her. Ava was so turned on that I could bring her off whenever I wanted, but I started fucking her slowly, spending a couple of minutes moving my hips back and forth just enough to let her know that I was in her (perhaps literally unnecessary, but you get the idea). My hips were moving so slowly that I had to use my fingers to keep her interest level up. Ava was calling out enthusiastic instructions for me to go faster, alternating with comments such as, "Wow. This is fantastic." I took the view that if it was so fantastic, why finish it quickly by going fast. So I increased my speed slowly. After a thoroughly and mutually enjoyable several minutes, the inevitable was clearly going to happen soon. It is always much better to sprint across the finish line, so I 'went for it', accelerating my hips to their maximum speed. That's very fast, presumably because my 'cute little ass' doesn't have much mass, therefore not much inertia, so all the changes of direction are easier. I frigged her while I was pounding away, and it only took a few seconds before she was screaming her release. I held myself in her while she was cumming, which required considerable strength as her hips were all over the place. When she went limp, I rolled onto my back, making sure to stay in her while I pulled her on top of me. We lay there until she recovered enough to say, "That was a great fuck, thanks very much. Julia was right, you ARE very good." I was very amused that her tone of voice indicated she thought we'd finished. She even snuggled into my chest. How lazy was that! "Don't stop! I didn't cum yet because you climaxed too quickly. I'm still hard, can't you feel it?" I was certainly hoping she could feel it, otherwise it was going to be MY ego that was going to be destroyed. "Oh yeah, I can. That was a very long fuck. You really didn't cum?" If she thought that was a long fuck, wait until it'd being going for another two and a half hours. "No. You came too quickly. But I'm very turned on now, so can you get me off by riding me please?" The damned "pleases" are hard to stop. Ava would have preferred to rest a while longer, but I'd said I was very turned on and we were in the ideal position for her to ride me (not by accident), so like a trouper she raised her knees and started the action. She was VERY good at it. Ava REALLY got into it, and was doing truly wonderful things to me. I had to admire her expertise and enthusiasm. From this position I could admire pretty much everything about Ava. Ava could feel that I was hard, and after our last fuck she knew that I must be very close to cumming, so she 'went for it'. I was giving her my sincere encouragement, egging her on (as she was on Egg). Unfortunately for her, in this position she was forced to expend a great deal of energy, and she started getting tired. After fifteen minutes she was groaning, panting, using her arms to support her weight, and changing from one technique to another more often because her muscle groups had reached the limits of their endurance. (Did I write "Unfortunately" at the start of that paragraph? How silly of me. What I should've written was, "Exactly according to my dastardly plan, {snigger}.") An inescapable consequence of her trying to arouse me was that she was getting aroused herself, helped by my fingers. After several minutes of her wonderfully trying to get me off, she realized that her orgasm was sneaking up on her. She'd been making comments to encourage me, but she suddenly changed tack, and said, "Fuck. I'm going to cum soon." "Go FASTER! I'm getting very close now." I grabbed her hips and encouraged her go faster (how dastardly!). I admired the incredible blessing that was my go-soft ability. Or, in this case, MANY DOZENS of mini-go-softs. "FASTER Ava! Faster!" The poor girl actually thought she had a chance to get me off, and she accelerated, taking my word that my cum might arrive before hers. Unfortunately, snigger, it did not. Imagine my surprise! That won't take you long, so when you've finished you can imagine Ava's surprise. I didn't even give her time to catch her breath after her orgasm. I flipped us over for a quick, vigorous religious experience in the missionary position. It took her a while to catch her breath, something that wasn't helped by my still pounding into her. She managed to get out an incredulous, "You're still hard?" I answered, "I don't mind that you go off so fast. There's nothing wrong with your not having much experience." Ava was somewhat confused over that, because she'd been under the impression that she was quite experienced. As I learned later, her parents had several times told her off for her eagerness to accumulate it. She did her best, but unsurprisingly came before I did yet again. I was forced to try the doggy position next. Ava was enjoying herself very much. More than she ever had before. She told me that several times; very emphatically too, so I believed her. When she had a chance to catch her breath, usually mid-way through each arousal cycle, she actively participated in the fucking. She really was a trouper. A very, very surprised and happy trouper. Also a very fit trouper; I was genuinely impressed. But no amount of fitness was enough to enable her to keep up with a guy who can apparently go forever. Eventually - and it took over an hour of very active fucking - her surprise started turning into worry, and her enthusiastic willingness to participate turned into bravely trying to keep up. Ava groaned, "I've never, {groan}, had sex like, oh, this before." "Yeah. I could tell you've gotten lazy. You must've been spending time with some pretty unfit guys." I had the impression that she valued athleticism, both in herself and in guys, so chances were that more than one of her boyfriends had come from her running club. My calling her past lovers "lazy" probably contradicted her previous opinions of them. She couldn't really argue, because by now they certainly seemed lazy compared to me. During the next position, Ava asked, "I need to have a rest." "Yes, I'm getting a little tired too. We'll stop soon." By "soon" I was thinking of an hour or two. Ava would have preferred a second or two, but would hope that I meant a minute or two. Several minutes later Ava managed to find the energy and breath to express the opinion, "I don't think I can keep doing this." "Haha. Good one, Ava! It's a good thing I know you're fit because you told Julia that several times." I increased my speed a lot and made sure my thrusts pounded into her torso, making it more difficult for her to catch her wind. While she was struggling for breath, I asked her, "While you were over at Julia's last night, did she describe to you how the Liaison system is going to work? I have been too busy having sex with her today and we haven't had much time to talk. I was wondering how they're intending to use the website that Lily is setting up. What do you know about the website and how we're going to use it to find more girls to fuck? And isn't Lily useful? I'm quite impressed by her. She's very helpful and obedient, which is excellent in a Liaison because it makes Julia's job so much easier. Julia's wonderful too, isn't she? I'm very lucky to have her as my girlfriend. Anyway, what are your answers to all those questions?" "{Pant}." "What was that?" "I... , I need to rest. Before I. Can answer," suggested a hopeful Ava. "Don't worry about it then. We'll talk when we've finished. I'm just starting to get into the swing of it now and don't want to stop and then have to restart all over again." Her next cum was getting close so she wasn't able to talk for a while. About fifteen minutes later Ava managed to say, "I need to stop." "Definitely. I did say I was tired and I'd only be able to go for two or three hours. We're getting close to two hours now. I might have finished already if you didn't keep going off so often. You have orgasms very easily, don't you. Why is that?" Ava was unable to provide me with an explanation. She did call upon God to help her, but apparently the room's soundproofing was very effective. In the absence of a divine intervention, she was at my mercy. Which was unfortunate for her, because I wasn't showing any mercy. A few minutes later, she croaked, "Please stop!" She was getting desperate now, so I had to use the big guns, "Now you're just being lazy! Listen to the way I'm talking. I'm not out of breath at all, and I'm the one doing all the work. You're just lying there! Even Julia can last longer than this, and she's not an athlete like you." Julia CAN last longer; she just can't walk afterward. I kept going, waiting for Ava to speak again. I had to wait a few more minutes, and just when she was about to, I spoke over her with, "Wait a minute! I just had a thought. I know you told Julia that you're fit. You insisted on it. But Julia told me that if she caught you making another bad mistake, like all the fuss you kicked up when I wanted to show your letter to her, then she'd ask me to break up with you. You weren't fibbing about being fit were you? Please tell me that you are fit, because I quite like you, and I'd hate for Julia to ask me to break up with you." "{Groan}." I almost expected Ava to tell me that she was NOT fit, in order to make all of this stop. But she'd had lots of orgasms, and it WAS great sex, it just didn't have any rest stops between each "great". She was getting seriously tired. I knew that tiredness was not going to be the main problem. In the morning she would discover that her muscles were very, very sore. I had been doing everything I could to make them worse too, such as pushing her legs out sideways, or up in the air nearly as far as they would go. Really STRETCHING those muscles, while I was pounding into her. In the morning they'd tell her what they thought of her foolishness. After her next cum I rolled her over and entered her missionary style, with my hands on the underside of her upper-thighs, pushing them toward her shoulders (stretch those thighs, baby). I kept my thrusts very slow, letting her catch her breath. I didn't want her to run out of breath so much that she had to stop early, before I'd done as much to her as I could. When she was breathing better I commented, "I guess you must be a smoker, Ava?" "{Pant}. Why?" "You seem to have breathing difficulties. I would have thought that as a runner you'd have good lungs, but it occurred to me that you probably smoke. That's not healthy you know? Oh, I just thought that maybe you're asthmatic? If you have medical problems, please tell me, because I don't have to have sex with you. We can be friends who just talk with each other, if you're not capable of having sex. There are plenty of other girls who're only too willing, so you don't have to put yourself out just to please me. Some of them are very fit too, so I can have good sessions with them." "I don't {pant} smoke. No asthma. I CAN have sex, {groan}. I LIKE sex. I'm just, {pant}, not used. To so much, {moan}. Of it. You never stop." "Sure I do. I said 'two or three' hours remember? I'm going to rest after that. So you ARE fit? I don't have to tell Julia that you were fibbing to her. It must be that you're just out of condition for sex. Has it been too long since you had any?" "Yes, that's it!" "Okay. I WAS going to stop soon, but now we'll go for longer to work on your condition." Ava didn't thank me, probably because my sudden increase in speed robbed her of her breath. We eventually got close to the three-hour mark. Ava's body was starting to give out on her. My tricks had cut off all her verbal requests, one after the other, and she'd finally run out of energy. I was quite pleased, because it demonstrated that her ability to stand up for herself against me was low. This was a good trait in a girl Julia wanted to be our sex toy! Although it was hard to be sure, because Ava's will power - or "won't power" - would've been badly disrupted by her having so many orgasms. Early indications were that she'd be a great sex toy, especially as she'd been very good at sex, back when she'd had any energy. #4: We agree that none of us knew, but that it was hot and we liked it. [Being interested, I asked my wives later. I was disappointed to learn that Carol had picked up the term from Julia. I was amused by my disappointment. You'd think that it shouldn't matter which of my wives knew the term first, but I would've much preferred it to have been innocent Carol. That's probably a clue that there's something weird about my personality, but I suspect that you know that already.] I said to Ava, "If you don't mind, I think I'll just have one more cum, and then stop. It is nearly three hours and as I told you, I am tired this evening. Is that okay with you? We can work on your conditioning some other time." I hadn't had ANY cums yet, but wanting to have "one more cum" than zero was still an accurate statement. I said it simply because it made me seem more normal, and Ava certainly had no idea how many I'd had as she'd been unable to notice what was happening during most of her orgasms, and for increasingly longer periods after each of them. Ava wasn't in a condition to argue with me about anything, and she SURE didn't want to argue about stopping. Her body gave a big sigh when it realized the ordeal was nearly over. Shortly after that she fell asleep on me, so I didn't get even one cum. Damn! I'd been looking forward to it. I wasn't going to use her body while she was unconscious, and even waking her up seemed too cruel to me. So I just did a go-soft. I went to the bathroom for a quick drink and pee, then back to bed and to sleep. While I had enjoyed it, I had hoped that Ava wouldn't last three hours because it ate into my studying time. I was worried about the amount of reviewing I'd have time for before doing the quizzes, so I decided to cheat a little by setting my head to wake me at 4am, which would give me three hours sleep. It'd been an idea I'd accidentally failed to mention to Julia when it looked like we might miss some shopping time. ------- Chapter 102: Ava Has a Tough Morning Saturday, April 23, 2005 I woke up at 4am as expected, and felt fine. It didn't look like Ava had moved all night, so she was conveniently still on her back. I reached over to turn on one of the bedside lamps, put a rubber on, then pushed the covers down, spread Ava's legs, and moved so I was between them. I went down on her, to get her as aroused as I could, and even to get her off if it went that long. Her being asleep didn't change most of her body's reactions, which I knew well by now, so she did start getting excited in her sleep. Not for long though. She struggled awake before she came, which disappointed me, although I'd have been surprised if she hadn't. "Wh... , what are you doing?" With a bright, cheerful voice, I beamed, "GOOD MORNING, BEAUTIFUL! How are you this lovely morning?" I had no idea whether it was a lovely morning or not, but made a mental note that I should check later. She wasn't awake enough to know how she was yet, but it didn't take her too many more licks before she realized that she was very sore. Having her legs spread so wide probably wasn't helping any. Once she realized how her body felt, she made a, "{GROAN}." Her pussy was lubricated enough because I'd made sure to slobber a lot, so I moved up, as if to kiss her. As I was moving up I used TK to angle my cock correctly, and I guided it straight into her pussy, then I started having sex with her. This came as quite a surprise to Ava. She wasn't fully awake, was still VERY tired (the poor girl had only had three hours sleep, after all), and was very sore. Her hips twitched upward as if to have sex, ONCE, then they let her brain damned well know that they did NOT want to play this game. "{GROAN}. Wh... , what time is it?" "Four. So we've plenty of time before breakfast. We can make up for the time I lost us last night. Sorry I was so tired." That wasn't how she remembered it! She tried to move her legs into a more comfortable position, but they didn't want to move even more than they didn't want to be where they were. Next she tried to sit up, but her stomach muscles immediately screamed at her not to be so fucking stupid. She collapsed back on the bed, groaning again. I got in a few more thrusts, before she said, "Mark! I can't. I'm sorry, but I can't." "Can't what?" Still thrusting away. "I can't do sex..." "Don't worry, I'll do all the work until you wake up properly. Then we can roll over because I liked the position where you're on top. You're very good at that one." "No! No! Please stop." Ava dug her hands into the mattress to try to push herself away from the fucking monster. Unfortunately that motion required that her stomach muscles tense up. They asked her, once again, to please stop doing that. She collapsed again, and I took mercy on her, by pausing at the bottom of my stroke. I innocently asked, "What's the matter?" "I can't. I'm very sore." "From what?" She looked at me with a stunned look of her face, then shrilly answered, "From all the SEX!" "Oh. Did you have sex with a lot of people yesterday too?" It was fun playing with her head, and the looks on her face were also very amusing. One of the reasons I like Ava is that she's so easy to read. Also because she's VERY good at sex. "No. Well yes; with Carol and Julia in the morning. But I meant I'm sore from you." "But we hardly had much sex at all. Not even three hours, and the beginning was just warming up. Not even two and half hours of real sex. You can't possibly be sore from such a small amount." To confirm my being sure that she couldn't really be sore, I restarted my pushups. I got about half of one done, before Ava yelled, "I AM SORE! I really am. Please stop." I sank back into her again, then said, "Truly. Even from such a little amount?" "You don't understand. You kept going and going and going. You never stopped. For HOURS! I've never had sex like that before." "But it wasn't for long, not even two and a half hours. How are you going to manage a normal session, if you're sore after just two hours?" She REALLY didn't want to ask. Fascinated horror was visible on her face. But "fascinated" won; she HAD to ask, "How long is a normal session?" "Five or six hours usually. Longer on the weekend of course, when we've got more time. I LIKE sex and you said before that you like it too, so we could easily have weekend days where we spend most of the day in bed fucking. That'd be good, wouldn't it?" I flexed my hips a little, in case she'd forgotten what fucking was. "FIVE OR SIX HOURS! Without stopping! Like last night? Five or six hours like last night?" "Of course without stopping. Well maybe for lunch, but why would you stop if you're having a good time? The whole point is to have sex, so why lie around NOT having sex? That's just stupid! I'm starting to think you don't really like sex, because you seem to be looking for any excuse to stop having it?" "No, no. I DO like sex. I'm just not used to so much of it." "That's no problem. You'll soon get used it if you're with me." I started my pushups again. "STOP! Stop. Please stop. I can't. I'm too sore." "I'm not the least bit sore, so you can't be very sore. I'm sure that once you start moving you'll loosen up and everything will be fine." I started another pushup, and BARELY moved before Ava yelled, "NO! I am VERY sore. Very, very sore. Too sore for sex." "I don't understand. How did that happen?" "{Groan}. From YOU! You did it to me last night." "But that was just for two hours. Are you really that sore from just two hours sex?" "YES. I am! Please no more." "Wow. You're not very good at sex, are you?" I saw her bristle at that, even get angry. Her lips even started forming the beginning of her protest, but then she realized what my hips would start doing if she said something like that. She visibly struggled for an ego-saving answer, eventually arriving at, "I AM good, but I'm out of condition." "I would have thought that all the running you did would have kept you in condition?" "No. Sex is different from running." I wasn't going to argue with her about that because sex IS different from running. If they were the same, life would either be a WHOLE lot more fun or not worth living. "But I woke up at 4, intending to have about four hours of sex before breakfast." With a hopeful tone of voice, I asked, "Are you sure you can't do just four hours?" "{Groan}. No, I really can't." "How about two hours then? You did more than that last night, so two hours should be easy for you." "No. I can't. I can't do ANY sex. I'm too sore." "Not even ONE hour? One hour is NOTHING. I'll be REALLY quick, I promise." "{Groan}. I can't do ANY! NONE. I'm too sore." "From just from two hours of sex last night! That's terrible, you must be miles out of condition. I wasn't even very good last night, because I was so tired." Ava had nothing to say to that. I continued with, "So when you told Julia that you were fit, you were talking about your running muscles. It's just your sex muscles that are out of condition. You weren't lying to Julia; you were just talking about different muscles, right?" "Yeah. I just can't do any more sex now." "Okay." I climbed off the bed, went to Julia's vanity table and picked up Ava's running clothes off it. I carried them back to the bed and dropped them beside her, happily announcing, "I was going to wait until after sex, but let's go for a run now instead. I've got lots of energy I need to burn off. We've got at least three hours, which is easily enough time to do a long run. It'd be nice to be able to get to know you better while we're running." For some reason Ava hadn't moved, so I pushed her legs sideways, swiveling her around until her legs were hanging over the side of the bed. I pretended not to notice the shock and groans this caused her, saying, "Come on, lazy bones! I know you're a good runner, so we'll just do twenty five or thirty miles before breakfast. It'll be easy for you." Ava was still trying to recover from the pain of my moving her so unexpectedly. I ignored her, and went to my dresser, removed a pair of underwear and put them on after throwing my rubber into the trash. It looked like I wouldn't need it. I pretended to notice that Ava hadn't moved, telling her, "Boy! Are you ever lazy this morning. I thought you'd be eager to get out and running." I started running on the spot, just to rub it in. She was looking at my near naked body bouncing up and down very athletically, but - for some reason - she was showing somewhat less arousal than she'd shown when she saw me undress last night. She was a worried girl. She knew she'd painted herself into a corner by saying that her running muscles were fit, and she didn't want to admit she'd lied about that. Julia had warned her about honesty, and I'd reminded her about Julia's warning this morning. She was between a rock and a hard place, with muscles that refused to move. "What's the matter? Why aren't you getting dressed for our run?" Her brain was incapable of finding a solution. She was very sore, very tired, and very out of ideas. "Do you need some more sleep?" "YES! I do! I didn't get enough sleep last night." "Okay. Just because I like you, I'll go wake Julia to have sex with her until 5:30. She's very nice to me and is happy to have sex whenever I want. I'm horny this morning because I thought I was going to have some more sex with you. But as you're not very good at sex, I'll go and have some with Julia." I could see Ava want to argue with me again, but her brain worked well enough to see the danger in responding to that. I continued, "I'll come back here at EXACTLY 5:30. I want you to be completely dressed in your running clothes and ready to run out the door. That way we can get two hours of running before breakfast, which would be good as I'd like to spend some time talking to you, so we can get to know each other better. I'll see you at 5:30 EXACTLY. You'll be ready, won't you?" She knew she wouldn't be. She MIGHT be capable of dressing despite the pain that'd cause her, but there was no possibility of her running for two minutes, let alone two hours. After her hesitation I said, "Ava, last night I said I would have sex with you for two to three hours, and I did. When I say I'm going to do something, I do it. This morning you said your running muscles were fine, but somehow you can't run now. I'm giving you an extra one and a half hours of sleep and then we'll go running. If you tell me now that you'll be ready to go running at 5:30 but you're not, then I'll be VERY angry. I don't like people who lie, which Julia has already warned you about. So I'll ask you ONE more time, will you be ready to go running with me for two hours at 5:30? If you tell me 'Yes', and then don't do it, I will never see you again. So I suggest you answer 'No' unless you're positive that you can run for two hours with me." She wasn't positive that she could, so she hung her head, and quietly confessed, "No." Silent tears started rolling down her cheek. I said, "In that case, let's get you back into bed, so you can sleep." I gently picked up her legs and swung them back into bed, then pulled the covers up over her. I knelt on the floor beside her as she wouldn't have enjoyed the jostling caused by my sitting on the bed, because I'm nothing if not considerate. I wiped her cheek with my hand and said, "I'm not going to break up with you." I have a new rule in my life: Never break up with anyone who can suck my cock so wonderfully. "You've done some good things with me since you came here last night, and you've done some silly things. We'll talk about them later, but I am NOT going to break up with you. I'll go find Julia now because I want some sex, and after that I'll have a run. You have a good sleep now. I won't disturb you again until 7:30 at the earliest, so you can have a nice, long sleep in." I stood, kissed both her cheeks, and then finished dressing in my running gear, except I was carrying my shoes and socks as it would seem weird to put those on before going to have sex. I turned off the bedside light, and said, "Sweet dreams, sweetie," as I groped my way to the door. In truth, I was going to study, but telling her what I had was a lot more physically impressive, and it was her belief in her physical superiority that Julia wanted to crush. On the way to the study I congratulated myself for how well it'd worked. I'd been worried about Ava's fitness preventing her muscles from getting sore, which is why I'd punished them so much last night, but they were certainly very sore this morning. Probably her fitness level meant she'd bounce back quickly (maybe not exactly "bounce", but you know what I mean), but that didn't matter now. In the study I turned on a spotlight above my desk, leaving the room's main lights off. I looked over at Julia, and saw that she was wearing a black mask over her eyes. The type of mask that I knew some people wore on planes to help them sleep. It was very early and I didn't know how lightproof her mask was, so I left the room's main lights off. I put my socks on because my feet were cold, then I studied quietly while Julia slept on undisturbed. I couldn't help imagining what 'my' new computer hardware would look like, and how great it'd be to use it. Every time I hit a part of a lecture that needed a lot of scrolling, I thought about my - hopefully - new system again. What a pity I hadn't thought to ask for it before Julia caught me out. Prof had originally suggested that he get up at 5:30 to bring the quizzes in. When we'd later worked out the timings of what we wanted to do this morning, we'd changed that to 6:30 being the start time of the first quiz. They were both fairly small jobs (quizzes, rather than exams). Each was allowed forty five minutes, totaling 1.5 hours, thus giving an 8am finish, and giving us time for a shower and breakfast before shopping. We didn't know how long it'd take to get Ava on her way, but if the worst happened she could just stay in bed for a while, as Prof and Vanessa were going to be home until the soccer game. A 4am wakeup to the 6:30 quiz start gave me 2.5 hours, so just over two hours of studying because of the time spent forcing Ava to admit defeat. I quickly finished Algebra up to the point Prof had specified, and that pair of minds (#1 and #2) joked with #3 and #4 about who the smartest Marks were. Calculus still had a fair bit to go, which wasn't ideal as it was also the course that I most wanted to review, but that's the way the cookie crumbles (thinking that did nothing to help my concentration). Unfortunately, we could only use the two minds that had finished Algebra to review the first part of Calculus, up to the point when we'd realized we could go double-speed, because they hadn't learned any of the Calculus past that point. We had to wait on #3 and #4 to be able to review any of the Calculus past that point. Immediately after that we realized we couldn't use #1 and #2 to review Calculus at all, because they didn't have any printouts of the first few Calculus lectures to read. We didn't want to print them out now because the noise would disturb Julia, and we couldn't divide the screen in half without slowing down #3 and #4, who were already worryingly slow. What a pity we didn't have a better computer system! So #1 and #2 started reviewing the Algebra printouts we did have, which missed several of the early ones because we hadn't started printing them out until we split our focus. Even when #3 and #4 finished studying up to where the quiz would be, they'd still need the screen to review their material, so we had no way to review the early Algebra lectures without risking waking Julia. The next time someone calls us a genius we're going to blow them a very big raspberry. If that wasn't bad enough, a few minutes later one of us had another horrible thought, #1: #2: #1: #1 and #2 got bored with their reviewing, as they were learning nothing new. #2: Short of quickly growing a third eyeball, we could only agree it was a pity. Although we also agreed that some boredom was probably better than the trouble having a third eyeball would cause us. We had to cut short the humorous scenarios we were creating for each other because we had more serious work to do. #3 and #4 finished the last Calculus lecture just before six. The damned thing had a couple of tricky parts in it, which was the last thing I needed now. I immediately started reviewing Calculus as fast as possible. For about two minutes, when an alarm clock went off, scaring the hell out of me. I'd been very careful to stay as quiet as possible, that the sudden alarm nearly made me wet myself. It was coming from Julia's direction, and it only took her a few seconds to raise her blindfold, and declare, "Good. You're here." I said, "Everything went well with Ava, who should be asleep still, and I hate to be rude, but I've only just this second finished the last Calculus lecture, and started reviewing. My time estimates were a bit off, unfortunately. I REALLY want to review as much as I can for the next thirty minutes. Can I rudely ignore you please? And can I start printing stuff out as well, if you don't mind the noise?" "If you make it up triple for ignoring me now, it's a deal, haha." Greedy girl, demanding triple. What happened to double? I fired up the printer for the early Algebra and Calculus lectures, and got back to my reviewing (two minds did each of those simultaneously). Julia got up, gave me a very quick kiss, and wandered off for a shower. Prof came in at 6:25, carrying the dreaded, important quizzes. "Good morning, Mark." After the usual exchange, "Are you ready to take the quizzes?" "Sort of. I've finished the lectures and I've reviewed Algebra pretty thoroughly, and all seems fine there. But I haven't done as much Calculus review as I want. I think everything will be okay, because I think I do understand the material, but I'd like some more Calculus time. I was wondering if we could do the Algebra quiz first. I usually finish quizzes faster than most people, so maybe that'd give me some extra reviewing time before Calculus. Would that be allowed?" "No problem. The other students had several days between their last lecture and the quiz, so giving you a few extra minutes is perfectly fine. Would you prefer to put this off for another day? It's not the sort of thing you can start doing, then decide it's too hard and come back and try it again later. It's a one-attempt deal." "I'm confident with Algebra, so let's do that one now, and I'll see how I feel after that." That's what we did, Prof making a production about turning off my computer screen and putting all my lecture notes and printouts away. He placed the quiz face down on my desk, got me to get my pad and pens ready, then meticulously timed the start of it. A very quick read of the quiz showed that the questions were in chronological order, so we separated the pages so #3 and #4 could work on the early ones, while #1 and #2 worked on the later ones which only they knew the answers to. When #3 and #4 hit the end of the material they knew, they supervised, looking for stupid mistakes. #1 and #2 split to have one eyeball each, and leapfrogged through the rest of the questions. It turned out to be a doddle. That might be a word that only Mom and a few other people know, so I'll explain that it was a cakewalk (I hope that helps). We finished writing all the answers (using pens in both hands) in about twenty minutes. I double-checked the answers fruitlessly for another ten minutes, which was probably excessive for a double-check, but I was determined to do well. [When writing with both hands the paper tended to drift around without the second hand holding it, so I had long since learned to pin the top of each page with a book, or write on full pads so the mass of attached paper holds the top pages steady, or more recently, to use TK to hold the paper.] I declared, "finished" after thirty minutes. I put the pens down and leaned back in my chair. Prof said, "That was a very strange sight. It's one thing to hear that you can simultaneously read two computer screens and can use two mice, but watching you write the answers to two different complex questions at the same time is MOST impressive. Do you do that at school?" "No. I often do two things at once, like reading a book and writing notes about what the teacher is talking about, but I definitely don't write with both hands. I keep only one pen on my desk to stop me doing that accidentally. I figured there was no harm in doing it here though." "I enjoyed seeing it. I can tell Vanessa, I assume?" "Sure. I assume you two are equal. No secrets between you. I finished fifteen minutes early, and might do the same for Calculus, so can I review that for about twenty minutes now please?" "Go for it." I turned my screen back on, and went for it. Once the twenty minutes were up, and I'd turned the screen off again, Prof asked, "Do you want to do the test or delay it?" "What I'd LOVE to do, is to review for three or four hours to use up nearly all of my shopping time, but that'll only be delaying the inevitable AND annoying Julia. I didn't find any problems during the review so I think I'm probably okay. Let's try it." It was the same procedure, producing much the same outcome. Calculus is, for me, harder than Algebra, so answering the questions took me a few minutes longer. I also double-checked more slowly, using up the full time allowance. Prof gathered up my answers and wandered off to his study to fax them through. I shut the computer down, tidied up, put on my running shoes to pretend with Ava later that I'd been running, then went in search of Julia or breakfast. I started the search in kitchen, in case she was there. She wasn't, but the breakfast makings were, so that was fine. Julia came in five minutes later, saying, "I thought I'd find you in here when the time was up. How did it go?" "Good, I think. In fact, I'll be so bold as to say great. Your dad should have faxed them through already. He enjoyed seeing me write the answers to two questions at the same time using both hands. Freaked him a little, I think, but I wanted every time advantage I could get." "It's good to remind him how special you are. I'm looking forward to out how well you did, but I bet Dad is even more so. Tell me what happened with Ava while I get my breakfast. We don't want to lose valuable shopping time." She used the word "we" incorrectly, but I told her about Ava anyway. My description didn't take long as my sessions with Ava had pretty much gone to plan. I reminded Julia that Ava thought I'd woken up Julia for some sex this morning, and had been out for a run. I ended with, "I know what to say to her when we go wake her up, and then I'll leave her to your tender, torturous mercies while I have a shower." Prof came in as we were washing our dishes, he said, "I thought you'd be in here, Mark. I've faxed them. They'll call me with the results before they fax them through, so I should know in about ten minutes." That surprised me. I'd been expecting several hours. I'd even had the brief thought yesterday that I hoped Prof could tell me when he came to my soccer game. I showed my surprise and Prof started explaining, but I figured it out for myself, "It's okay. I realize I was just used to school taking a day or more to tell us. Of course it doesn't take long to mark a single test if the marker is poised for it. Far less time than it took me to do it." Julia said, "Mark and I have to talk with Ava, Dad, and we don't want to waste valuable shopping time. We'll go talk with her now. If Mark's results are good, can you come into our room and tell us please? It'd do Ava good to hear what Mark's accomplished this morning, and it'd be good for her to have you walk into the room. Don't knock, just walk in. If Mark did well, that is. If he didn't, I don't want Ava to hear that." "Sure. See you in a few minutes." It was about 8:30 when we went to wake Ava. On the way upstairs Julia instructed me on how to sit on the bed. I noticed she deliberately left the bedroom door an inch short of closed behind us after we'd entered her room. I shook Ava, calling, "WAKE UP, Ava. It's 8:30. Come on, sleepyhead." "{Groan}. What time is it?" "8:30. Come on, sit up, we want to talk with you." Ava would have preferred to listen to our talk without moving a single one of her muscles, but Julia insisted that Ava sit up. Ava struggled and groaned, but eventually succeeded. She pulled up the sheet to modestly cover her chest, but it got pulled down and pinned when Julia and I sat on the bed to either side of Ava. Ava started covering herself with her arms, and then realized she was being silly, both of us being her lovers. She relaxed about that, which was the only thing she would relax about. Her body was still very sore, and she knew she was about to be talked to about something not good. I started, "Ava. This morning you turned me down for sex and a run. It took a long, time-wasting conversation before I discovered you didn't want to do either because your body was too sore, because it wasn't able to keep up with me in sex. That was the reason, wasn't it?" She didn't want to admit that. So I prompted her, "Ava, before I let you go back to sleep again, you said you were too sore because of the sex you'd had with me last night. You've already admitted that's what made you sore, so why can't you admit it again now? I hardly think it's likely that there was some other reason for you being so sore that you'd forgotten about, was there?" Julia said, "Hurry up, Ava. We've got a busy morning planned and Mark has to have a shower after his run. We don't have time for your being afraid to admit the obvious truth. Are you too sore because Mark's body was too powerful for you?" I was admiring that phrase, while Ava admitted, "Umm. I guess so. He wouldn't stop, Julia. He just kept going and going. He never, ever stopped." Julia interrupted, "Ava! I've made love to him many times, including this morning because you were too weak. I know EXACTLY what he's like. I told you several times when we were with Carol how athletic he is in bed." "But I had NO IDEA! I've never had a guy who could do what Mark did last night." "Shut up Ava! You're wasting time. I KNOW what Mark is like, so there's no need to keep telling me. It's not my fault that you didn't listen when I told you the night before last. Now be quiet and listen to Mark." We heard the house phone ring, but ignored it. It was picked up immediately anyway. Presumably lecturer #1 of 2 reporting in. I said, "What annoys me is that when I woke you this morning, you KNEW that your body was wrecked. Why didn't you immediately say, 'Mark, I am sorry, but I am very, very sore. I can't have sex, I can't run, I can't even walk. Your lovemaking last night was more than I could handle. Please forgive me for being so weak, and please let me go back to sleep so I can rest and heal faster.' Instead you wasted fifteen minutes trying to fool me into thinking that you were fitter, stronger and healthier than you really are. Why did you waste fifteen of my minutes, Ava? I'm a very busy person, and don't have time to waste on people who talk such nonsense?" Ava prevaricated - a big word, but it didn't need her to use any muscles, so she could do it. After that she hemmed and hawed, but only cautiously, especially with the hawing because that was job-related to how she got sore in the first place. Julia said, "You've already deliberately tried to mislead Mark this morning, and you've been warned about what will happen if you are dishonest, so I STRONGLY suggest that you IMMEDIATELY answer Mark." Ava swallowed, then forced herself to say, "I didn't want him to know I was sore." Julia demanded, "Why not?" Ava paused. Julia stressed, "IMMEDIATELY!" grabbing hold of Ava's hand and squeezing it in emphasis. Still Ava paused. Just briefly, but I didn't want to drag this out very long and the pause was more than enough time for me to butt in with, "I know EXACTLY why." Julia turned to me, and said, "Why?" Ava just looked unhappy. The phone rang once again, presumably lecturer #2 of 2. "Because Ava is vain about her body. She thinks it's something special when really it's not. Last night, when I first saw her naked, she couldn't believe I didn't get hard just from LOOKING at her. Why would I care about seeing one more naked girl? It's weird. Girls complain all the time about guys seeing them as sex objects, but when Ava stripped naked she was unhappy when I didn't treat her as a sex object. After that, when we were starting to have sex, Ava seemed to be overly proud of how athletic she was. I got the impression she thought she was stronger at sex than me, which puzzled me because I knew you'd told her that I can outlast several girls. Even if Ava was twice as fit as other girls, it wouldn't matter because I'm ten times fitter at least. And this morning when I woke her up, all Ava had to do was admit that her body wasn't as good at sex as mine is, which is something I knew already, as no girl's body is. If she'd admitted it right away I would've been perfectly happy, because she'd simply be telling me something I already knew. Instead Ava tried hard to fool me because she was too vain to admit that her body is nothing special at sex. It's just a body." I was going to say more, but the timing worked out well for Prof's walking in now. It wasn't good timing from Ava's point of view though. She squeaked, and tried to pull the sheet up. She got one hand to it, but Julia was firmly holding Ava's other hand. Ava pulled it free from Julia's grip, got both hands onto the sheet, and tried to pull it up. Unfortunately both Julia and I were sitting on it. After two or three hard and completely unsuccessful tugs, Ava gave up and used her hands to cover herself, then realized she could slide down in the bed, and did that too. Sore muscles temporarily forgotten while this strange man was looking at her (Ava hadn't met Prof before). Prof's news being considerably more important than Ava, Julia and I turned to him. He had a big smile on his face, which I hoped was from my results rather than from seeing Ava's breasts, although I'd understand the latter because she does have a very nice body. If I hadn't discovered go-softs, I'd be instantly hard from looking at her. Prof's presence in the room was a good sign, his big smile an even better sign, and the need for any signs at all was ended when he said, "100% both times. Congratulations, Mark." He shook my hand vigorously, while Julia clambered over poor Ava to hug me fiercely. We celebrated together. I wasn't so worked up, but Prof and Julia were VERY happy. Julia was overjoyed! I wasn't looking at Ava, but she must have been puzzled about what was going on, especially at the intensity of our happiness. Of course our celebration was totally excessive for two such minor tests, because we weren't really celebrating those. We, especially Julia, were celebrating what the two results promised for the future. As far as Julia was concerned, I just passed my BS in one year. I was happy that she and Prof were happy, and I was also happy that my computer system was even more likely to be upgraded now. After a few minutes, when things had calmed down, Prof said to Ava. "Hello young lady. We haven't met. I'm Prof, Julia's father. How do you do?" Prof extended his hand, and Ava carefully snaked her hand up, and out of the covers, to shake his. Julia said, "For goodness sake Ava, sit up and shake Dad's hand properly." "I can't. I don't have any clothes on." "{Sigh}. We KNOW that Ava, but no one cares! Good grief! What's this big deal you have about your body? That's what Mark was just saying. For goodness sake, sit up and say hello to my dad properly. He's already seen your breasts, so who cares if he sees them again. I'm sure he's got better things to worry about than some little girl's breasts." Thereby telling Prof how to react. Not that he probably needed it, as I couldn't imagine Prof making a big deal about them anyway. I hope that when I get that old that I'm not as indifferent to beauty as he seems to be. -- Julia waited, and nothing happened, so she said to me, "Mark, would you please ORDER Ava to sit up. We already know she's not as honest as we want, and if she doesn't sit up then we'll know she's not obedient either. Which will mean that she's not suitable as a Liaison or as one of your lovers or girlfriend. We'll have to find another 11th grade Liaison." I said, "Ava, I order you to sit up and shake Prof's hand properly, without trying to cover your chest. Come on, Ava, sit up. I like you, and don't want to lose you if I don't have to." Julia said, "I agree. Poor Carol would be heartbroken too, because she couldn't be your friend anymore if Mark doesn't trust you." Ava was unhappy with either outcome, and doing nothing wasn't advancing our case at all. I added, "Julia, I don't know whether you know, but Ava has shaved her pussy. Why don't we grab the bedclothes, and pull them off the bed entirely, so Prof can clearly see ALL of her?" We never found out "why don't we," because Ava 'popped' up. It's amazing how sore muscles can disappear in times of emergency. She extended one hand to Prof. I said, "Lower your other arm like I ordered you, Ava. You're still being disobedient." She reluctantly lowered that arm, exposing herself to Prof. He ignored her breasts, took her hand, and shook it. "Nice to meet you properly, Ava. My real name isn't Prof, but that's what I prefer to be called. Julia has mentioned you to Vanessa - that's Julia's mom - and me several times. Julia made several nice comments about you and gave us the impression that you were proving to be very helpful, but maybe I got that wrong? You didn't seem to be very sensible just then. Never mind - I'm sure you'll either learn to do what they want, or they'll replace you. Come downstairs when you're ready if you want some breakfast. Bye." Prof let her hand go, then looked at Julia, "Anything else?" "No thanks Dad, that was great. Fantastic news about Mark's results, isn't it?" "It certainly is. I think I'll call the Dean and see if I can go tell him today about the new situation, the plan for next year, and the new hardware request. I'm sure he'll enjoy the Microsoft joke too. I'll give him a little longer, in case he had a late night. Congratulations again, Mark. Your lecturers asked me to pass on their congratulations too. Oops, I'd better go tell Vanessa. I forgot about her, haha. See you later. Nice to meet you, Ava. I hope your behavior improves. Bye." Prof left the room. I watched him go, thanking God for mathematics being a proper subject, where it's possible to get 100%. You can't do that English. Even worse, marking English is SUBJECTIVE! If the marker doesn't LIKE your essay, or he/she is in a bad mood, or whatever, then you can get a low mark. It was a ridiculous way to run a subject. But, as I said, thank God mathematicians are smarter than that. While I was at it, thank God the first year of college was pretty much as easy as high school. I'd achieved 100% in school Math quizzes/tests before, even occasionally way back before my first merge, but getting them in college quizzes was a relief. Ava slid down in the bed, presumably in case someone else came in, then asked, "What was that about?" Julia answered, "Mark had two VERY important tests this morning, for two of his college courses. You heard Dad say he's going to call and go see the Dean about what Mark has done. The Dean is the number one boss at OSU. They were very, very important tests, and Mark got 100% in BOTH of them. That is so FANTASTIC!" Julia had oversold it, but it sure sounded great and Ava would never know the difference. I was also amused that "quizzes" got upgraded to "tests". I don't know if there's a formal difference, but "tests" sounded better. Ava was confused (funny how that seems to happen to her around us), asking, "But when did he do them. It's only 8:30. I thought he had sex with you and went for a run. How could he do two important tests too?" Julia shook her head. Fortunately not at me, this time. Next time it would be, but this time I was happy to watch Ava get it, "Ava, Ava. How many times have I told you that Mark is a very busy and very important person? I've told you that over and over again, haven't I?" "Umm, yes." "Mark came to where I was sleeping this morning, did what he wanted to do with me, and then sat his two tests, that Dad - who's a full professor at OSU - got up early to administer. Mark went and did whatever running he wanted while Dad faxed Mark's test papers directly to the two markers at their homes. They'd been instructed to sit by their fax machines this morning. They immediately marked his papers and sent the results back to Dad. On a Saturday morning, I might add, which is normally their day off. -- "Mark is a very, very important person, and you WASTED fifteen minutes of his incredibly valuable time bullshitting him about your being fitter than him in bed, when you knew you weren't. Can you imagine what a DISASTER it would've been if you'd delayed him even longer, or got him angry so his concentration was badly affected, or did something else to cause him to make mistakes? I can't believe how selfish and inconsiderate you were! You KNOW Mark is far, far more important than you, but you wasted fifteen whole minutes of his valuable time because of your nonsense. There were several important people all around Corvallis - far more important than you and me - waiting for Mark's papers and results, and you jerk him around for FIFTEEN WHOLE MINUTES! Good grief! I'm getting so angry at how much damage you nearly caused." Julia looked it too; she's a VERY good actor. Even I was amazed at my losing "fifteen whole minutes" to Ava's "jerking me around." I would've happily spent thirty minutes fucking her this morning, the "important people all around Corvallis" notwithstanding, but there was no need to mention that now. Ava was protesting, "I didn't know! How could I know?" Julia appeared, and sounded, very worked up, vehemently stating, "It was none of your goddamn business! Mark's OSU studies are NOTHING to do with you! Surely you're not demanding that Mark keeps you informed of everything he does every day, just so you can decide when's the best time for you to jerk him around! You're just a little schoolgirl who's so vain about her body that she can't even say she's not as good at sex as Mark, when it's obvious to everyone that you wouldn't be. You've seen Mark naked, so you can't POSSIBLY think that your body is better than his! We've told you over and over again that Mark is IMPORTANT. How hard can that be for you to understand? There are hundreds of people all over Corvallis and at the university who know that, and who run around to do whatever they can to help Mark. And all the time you think your vanity is more important than ALL of these people, and more important than Mark. Jesus Christ!" I was starting to get worried now. Maybe Julia wasn't acting at all. -- "You even KEPT wasting Mark's time. He had to tell you over and over again to sit up and shake my dad's hand properly, all because you were so worried about flashing your precious little titties. I'll tell you a true story. A week or so ago Mark and I were between classes in a hallway at school and I misheard something he said. What I thought he said was that he wanted me to strip, so I IMMEDIATELY started taking off my clothes. It didn't matter to me that there were people around me. I thought Mark had said 'strip', so I started stripping. Unlike you, I didn't argue with him, didn't make him order me over and over. I just started stripping. Mark had kept walking, and by the time he turned around, I had my blouse off and was about to remove my bra. There were boys running up the hallway to see me and you can imagine what the people around me thought, but none of that mattered to me. In another second I would've be bare-chested, and just after that I would've been naked; except Mark told me to stop and to put my blouse back on. -- "We worked out later that I'd misheard him, but I'm GLAD I did, because I showed him how obedient I am. I'll strip in the middle of school if he wants me to, but you wouldn't even show your titties to an old man who'd already seen them without making a big scene out of it and requiring Mark to repeat his order several times." -- Julia took a deep breath, then let it out. Then said, "I'm glad I told you that story, as it gave me a chance to settle down. I was getting far too angry. Ava, you obviously don't understand how important Mark is, do you?" Ava had been SLAMMED by Julia's tirade. (Me too. I'd made a mental note to run for the hills the next time Julia shook her head at me). Ava had also recovered somewhat during Julia's story, and when asked about knowing my importance, Ava knew the answer to that. "YES! I do NOW! I can see that Mark is super-important!" Julia said, "Mark! Look at the time! We don't have any more time to waste on Ava; we've GOT to go. Quickly RUN and have the fastest shower you can. I'll get your clothes out and bring them to you. Move, Mark." Julia was pushing me, so apparently she was serious. I got off the bed and walked toward the door. "Faster, Mark." Yes. The five seconds I could gain by running to the shower, rather than walking, could be much better used for shopping. I ran, rather than argue with Julia. Ava was frantically asking Julia, "What about me?" I looked around, hoping to learn that myself. Ava was a REALLY good cock sucker, and very good at sex generally: very enthusiastic, vocal and physically skilled. Plus I REALLY did not want to lose YET ANOTHER girl. I'd had the thought that Julia had concocted a bizarrely complex plan to keep me faithful to her by having me form a relationship with EVERY other girl in Corvallis, and then break up with them in ways that convinced me that I couldn't try them again. There were a LOT of girls in Corvallis, but at the current rate it wouldn't take long for me to have none left. The only thing I learned when I turned to look back, was that I was surprising uncaring about the fact that Julia was already sorting through the underwear in my drawer. Funny how you can even get used to that gross invasion of privacy and decency. Then I was outside the room, standing outside the door that I'd deliberately failed to close, a trick I'd recently learned from Julia. I heard Julia's answer to Ava, "I don't have time to talk with you. I have to get things ready for Mark. Mark is far more important than you, in case you've forgotten. Rather than lying around in bed demanding to be the center of everyone's attention, a good girlfriend would be leaping out of bed and offering to help." I heard Ava say, "But." But that's all. Then I heard her prove what a good girlfriend she was, by leaping out of bed. I didn't so much hear the leap, as track the moving location of the groans. They seemed to move quite rapidly, so I was impressed. Ava asked, "What can I do to help? I want to help." "Hold out your hands and I'll give you the clothes to take through to Mark, so he can get dressed after his shower." "Thank you so much." I guess I'd better go have a shower then. I ran, to make up for lost time. I realized that I definitely needed a shower, as I was covered with Ava's dried juices. Prof had learned even more about Ava's biology than she was aware. I had the fastest shower possible, consistent with making sure I wouldn't smell like pussy juice while I was walking all around town today. #4: #1: #4: #2: #1: My internal joking around was interrupted by Ava coming into the bathroom and telling me, "Mark, I've brought your clothes. Julia says I have to help dry you then get you dressed as quickly as possible. I'll wait here." I didn't pause my rapid washing, because Julia was apparently in a tearing hurry and I REALLY feared getting on her bad side at the moment. I was terrified of that! As best as I could tell through the shower walls, Ava seemed to be naked. I rather liked the idea of a naked handmaiden waiting to rub me dry when I emerged from my shower. It was a pity Julia hadn't told her to come into the shower to help wash me, but Julia knows me entirely too well, as that would've had a negative effect on my showering speed. I finished quickly, as I was eager to see if Ava was naked. Which made me realize that Julia knew me very well indeed. When I got out of the shower, a lovely, naked Ava told me, "Julia said to hurry. Here's a towel. You do your front, I'll do your back." Personally I thought that was the wrong way around, but Julia had said to hurry. I nodded, and started drying my poor, lonely, unsatisfied front. Ava started on my back, begging, "I'm SO sorry I wasted your precious time this morning. I know not knowing about your tests isn't an excuse, and I know you didn't have to tell me I was wasting your time - boy oh boy did Julia tell me off for trying that excuse! I just didn't understand how important and busy you are. I'm not used to someone your age being so important. Julia had told me before that you were, but I hadn't seen it. I've SEEN it now; I REALLY have! I can see that you're really important and amazing. Please don't break up with me! I'll be a very, very good girlfriend from now on, I PROMISE. I'll to ANYTHING you want. Do you want me to strip at school? I will if you want." When Julia had been telling Ava her "naked in school" story before, I'd thought about all the prospective Liaisons stripping for me (I like thinking about that, and will do so at the slightest reminder). Ava's offer gave me a good opportunity to return to the theme I'd originally planned, before Prof had come in and taken the conversation off in another direction. Not to mention that I was getting tired of Ava's begging. I said, "Good grief, Ava. Why are you so hung up on thinking your body is important? You keep going on and on about it, like it's a big deal or something. If I didn't get hard looking at you last night, knowing we were about to have sex, why would you think that your stripping at school mattered to me? If I want to see a girl naked at school there are plenty of other girls I can ask: Julia obviously, all the Liaison girls who stripped for me at the meeting a couple of mornings ago. Probably lots of others, but I've never bothered thinking about it, so I don't know. It's just not important to me. Wait a minute; didn't you offer to strip at the Liaison meeting too? And didn't Julia tell you not to?" "Yes I did. I wanted to show you that I was just as good as the other girls." "At the meeting Julia told you not to strip because Julia knows me well. She knew I didn't care about your body. I didn't care about the other girls' bodies either. I didn't ask them to strip; they did that themselves. If you want to show me how good you are for me, then there are FAR better ways of showing me than taking your clothes off, like being immediately obedient rather than wasting my time, being COMPLETELY honest rather than trying to fool me about stuff which is nonsense. And also by being nice to Carol; that's VERY important to me. Also being nice to Donna too, come to that." I'd just remembered that Donna has mentioned a few times before that she'd played around with other girls, and I'd had the sudden thought that maybe she might want to play around with Ava too. I didn't know, but there was no harm in mentioning Donna now. Maybe it'd be useful later. -- I remembered something else, and immediately mentioned it, "I remember that when I asked you for permission to show your letter to Julia, that you kicked up a big fuss and wasted a lot of my time." I could tell that "wasted a lot of my time" was going to become a very useful motivational tool with Ava. "Look how much time and effort Julia has spent on you. HOURS of her time trying to help you become a good girlfriend for me. Without Julia I would've long since broken up with you. I remember you apologizing for being difficult about my showing Julia your letter. You said you'd learned your lesson and you wouldn't make the mistake of causing a fuss again, yet that's EXACTLY what you did this morning. You made a fuss over your body being fit when it obviously isn't anywhere near as good at sex as my body, and you even made a silly fuss about wanting to hide your titties from Julia's dad, like they were some big deal, or something. -- "When Julia and I ask you to do something, we KNOW what we're talking about. When I asked you show your letter to Julia, I knew Julia would be very, very helpful to you - exactly as she has already proved to be. This morning you wasted fifteen minutes of my time when I had two very important tests to go to. One of the things about your letter that I liked very much was that you were honest about not being smart, but since then you've repeatedly wasted our time. Why do you keep arguing with us about anything, when it's obvious that you should just do whatever it is that we've asked you to because we know what's going on so much better than you? I remember your letter very well. I liked the girl who wrote that letter, because she was honest, open and tried to think of how to make me happy. Unfortunately the Ava I've met since then seems to think she is much better than me at making decisions, that her time is more important than mine, that she knows more about how I should run my life than I do myself. I'm looking for a girlfriend who is polite, helpful, caring, honest and obedient. Instead you're mostly an argumentative time-waster." We'd finished drying me by now, and I was getting dressed, unfortunately in the clothes that I'd worn to school on Thursday; the second most embarrassing outfit I owned. It had been bad enough walking around school and OSU dressed like this, but soon I had to walk around town too. Unfortunately, Julia was in such a hurry and in such a bad mood that I didn't dare argue with her about them. Ava spent the time I was dressing promising everything she could think of. I tuned out and thought about more interesting things, like being able to get girls to strip for me at school. That was SERIOUSLY hot! When I had dressed, I started leaving. I naturally paid more attention, and caught the end of Ava's ramblings. Gosh, she could go on and on! Ava was saying something that sounded like she was trying to suggest my dropping her would be unfair to Carol. She was probably dredging up every reason or excuse she could think of. Good thing I hadn't been listening. Ava concluded with, "Will that be okay?" "I'm not sure. I'll have to think about it some more and talk with Julia." I started walking back to our bedroom. Ava tried to walk with me, but had no hope of matching my speed, not when she was so sore. The poor girl should be resting in bed, not walking naked around the house. She was clearly uncomfortable about being naked, and had checked the hallway before leaving the bathroom, but I was sure she knew not to make a fuss about it. I hoped Sophia or Ashley weren't up and about. I quickly outpaced Ava, and she called out, "Please slow down." As an automatic reaction to such a request I did stop to wait, but then I realized I should not. I started striding away, calling back "No. See if you can work out why." Julia had gotten changed and was ready for me. As soon as I walked in the room, she told me, "I've got your wallet in my purse. Here are your keys and a handkerchief. Are you ready to go?" Apart from my having a naked, maybe ex-lover hobbling up and down the hallways of this house, "Yes." "Where's Ava?" Ava's entering the room provided the answer. "There you are! Mark and I are going now. You should get dressed and leave as soon as you can. I'm going to think about you for a while. You obviously don't deserve to be Mark's girlfriend, but for some reason he seems to like you." I added, "I USED to like her. The Ava in her letter was wonderful, but this Ava is wasting a lot of my time. Even though she knew we were in a hurry, she asked me to walk slower in the hallway because she couldn't keep up." I'd just spent longer describing it than walking slower would've cost me, but that wasn't a factor. I would've happily taken a thousand times longer to make the point; that I was losing "valuable shopping time" had not escaped me. Ava started saying something, but Julia cut her off with, "I've heard enough of your excuses. I will be thinking about you. I'll talk with Mark and I'll talk with Carol. Obviously you need a LOT more training, but I'm not sure whether you're worth all the work. I know Mark is far too important to have time to train you himself, and I have to spend most of my time looking after him, like a good girlfriend should, rather vainly claiming she's better than him in some way. That means Carol will have to spend EVEN more time training you, and I don't know whether she wants to spend that much time on you." "I'm sure she will. Carol really likes me!" "Carol likes you mostly because Mark does. If Mark dropped you, Carol would too, especially as she wouldn't want Mark to keep seeing you as that'd keep bringing back bad memories for him. Carol loves Mark very much - far more than she cares for you - so I wouldn't get too hopeful about Carol if I was you." We could see Ava rapidly become no longer hopeful about Carol protecting her. I thought about suggesting that Donna could help with Ava's training, but having a flighty 12-year old girl boss 17-year old Ava around seemed ridiculous. Somehow it wasn't nearly so silly that Carol did, even though Carol was only one year older. I'd mention Donna's possible involvement to Julia privately later. Julia continued, "I've got some ideas about how to train you better, but the main issue is whether anyone can be bothered spending any more time on you." "I WILL be better. I PROMISE! I'll do ANYTHING." "Shush, Ava! Every other girl promised to do anything too, so that doesn't make you any better than ANYONE else. This is our decision now. I'll send you a text message when we've decided. Get dressed and wait in here until one of my parents comes to get you, okay?" "Yes, {sniff}." Julia led us out of the room, shutting the door behind us. Knowing it was soundproof, I asked, "I hope we're not going to break up with Ava, are we?" "Do you really want to keep her? There are plenty of other girls, you know?" #3: #4: I told Julia, "I know there are other girls, but Ava is REALLY good at sex. She's a great deal of fun in bed, and would be even better if we were having a normal session, rather than me trying to wear her out as much as possible." Julia asked innocently, "Is she even better than me?" Uh oh! All my minds frantically tried to find a diplomatic answer, and found nothing. It looked like I would have to lie my cute little ass off. Julia laughed, quite a lot, "Haha. You're so easy, Mark. I was a virgin three weeks ago. Do you really think I don't know Ava's better at sex than me? She's had six lovers over what sounded like several years, so a LOT of practice. She LOVES practicing that, haha. Don't forget I spent a night with her too. She wasn't really into it, although she tried hard to be, but I can easily imagine that she'd be a lot of fun with a guy she wanted. I was just teasing you, so relax. And relax about Ava, you're not going to lose her. Have you ever seen me spend more than five seconds on a girl once she's no good for you?" That was true! Even five seconds would be a generous amount of time for Julia to spend on such a girl. Phew, Ava was safe. My cock and I celebrated quietly. ------- Chapter 103: I Have a Tough Morning Shopping Saturday, April 23, 2005 (Continued) Julia needed to tell her parents that we had to leave Ava behind so we could rush out to do our very important shopping (I thought of it differently), so Julia steered us to her parents' bedroom. They weren't there, so we headed downstairs. Meanwhile, Julia was explaining, "I was just setting her up for some attitude adjustment. Ava will be good if she can be trained the way I want. Of all the girls we know so far, whether you've 'initiated' them or not, she's the only one I can imagine living with us in our house at the mansion." "At the mansion! We don't even have the money yet, and you're already thinking about populating it. With Ava? Really? I've never thought about anyone other than the three of us, and your including Ava surprises me?" "I haven't included her yet. I meant that I imagine that she COULD work out that well. We need to get to know her a lot better yet, but Carol and I spent a long time talking to her at your place and she is VERY dedicated to you. You may not have talked to her enough to see that yet, but she is VERY hooked on you, and she has been for many weeks. That's the most important attitude a person can have. If I can get her to obey us without making a nuisance of herself by having to understand everything before she acts, if she proves trustworthy, and if several other requirements are met, then why not? It'd be fun to have her available whenever any of us want, and she can do things for us: shopping, housework, errands, etc. Why should any of us bother with any of that? The immediate difficulty is getting her to stop being annoying. Her lack of smarts is useful, but sometimes a pain. Maybe she's so independent and self-willed because she's an only-child. I hope she can learn to change for us." We arrived in the kitchen to find the whole family and The Boys' girlfriends there. They all congratulated me for my two 100% results. I hadn't known that Sophia and Ashley were aware that I was doing any college courses, but their congratulations told me that they did. Julia pulled her father away to quickly - valuable shopping time was being lost - tell him that Ava was in our room, and to be careful that Ashley and Sophia didn't see Ava leave, especially considering the way she'd be walking. Then we called out quick "Goodbyes," and left. In the car Julia called Carol. There were a few topics Julia wanted to quickly discuss: My two 100% results and what they meant for the future. I did some wincing. Updating Carol about Ava. Asking Carol to keep out of contact for a couple of days, while Ava stewed. If Ava called her, Carol was just to say "I'll wait to hear what Mark decides before I see you again," and to wish Ava good luck. I relayed through Julia a request that Carol bring my soccer gear to the soccer grounds before the game, "Because we'll be too busy shopping to come get it." (I did my best to keep my tone polite.) After that call was over, Julia told me, "What happened with Ava this morning was different than I'd planned. Dad's news and a few other things changed it around, but I think it worked better, especially Dad's news. That really impressed her." "Especially after how much you inflated its importance. That was brilliant." "{Raspberry}." We were pulling up at our first stop, so urgent shopping matters bumped every other topic of conversations. The first stop was Rocky's, so the rest of the day could only get better. I got to meet Nigel. I'll just say that I felt a LOT more comfortable with Rocky, and leave that to your imagination. Shudder. There's a great deal about that visit that I don't want to think about again, but I'll mention a few. ^ Rocky said, "As you're wearing one, I guess the two outfits were a success at school?" Julia praised the outfits, and graphically described how they'd been received. She went over the top about how wonderful they were, but that's Julia's nature. We'd only been in the place a couple of minutes when Nigel said, "I'd LOVE to design some darling little outfits for Markie." Julia said, "He's still growing so we'll hold off on doing much of that until he stops." "He couldn't be growing any cuter." Julia said, "I want a couple of very sexy outfits for Mark." Rocky said, "I've got the perfect pants out back, I'll get them for you." Rocky was back a few seconds later, holding up a pair of what I will call "pants", although that's even less accurate than calling yesterday's rag a "shirt". The 'pants' had VERY important parts missing. I said, "Haha. Guys must look REALLY stupid with their underwear exposed like that." "You don't wear underwear with these." That means... , OH MY GOD! They were indecent! Really, truly INDECENT. Get arrested, go to jail, indecent. Julia laughed, and said, "Sorry. I meant for wearing in public. To impress the girls at school. Although those pants would impress them, all right, haha. Maybe Mark will buy that outfit for me, for my birthday." #1: Nigel asked, "Why not try them on now, Markie?" Markie told him why not. In no uncertain terms, loudly and twice! I wanted there to be NO doubt! Rocky and Nigel fussed around - no one can "fuss" like Nigel - looking for something for me to be embarrassed in that wasn't a federal offense. After seeing those pants I was tempted to believe that nothing could ever embarrass me again, but I knew something would, that it was bound to be in this store, and that Julia would buy it for me to wear. ^ As a special treat (I swear that's what she said), Julia bought me a pair of pants that I couldn't wear underwear with. Fortunately they were NOTHING like as bad as the previous pair, or I would have mutinied. These had two- or three-inch gaps on the outside of each leg, which were held together by criss-crossing leather cords. The bad news was that the gaps ran ALL the way up the outside of each leg, from the cuff to the waistband, so my hips were exposed, hence no underwear. Julia said, "They're probably a bit too much for school," I didn't correct her (they were actually a quite a lot too little for school), "but you can wear them on special occasions." Like the next time I attended a dinner party on the moon. I kicked up a surprising (to me) lack of fuss. I must've still been in shock over the previous pair of pants. ^ Do you remember how I felt secure knowing that it was not possible for there to be a shirt more embarrassing than the cut-off, cut-out, curse of a shirt that I'd had to wear yesterday? It turned out that I was mistaken. Rocky suggested, "What about a mesh shirt?" Julia said, "GOOD idea!" I didn't know what Rocky was talking about, but I didn't like the enthusiastic sound of Julia's agreement. I should have worried more. Rocky held up a fishing net that had been shaped into a travesty of a shirt. It was 99% holes and 1% strands of whatever the fabric was, arranged in a diamond pattern with the strands about a quarter of an inch apart. It was completely and utterly absurd. Julia said, "I'll take two, in white and black." "Hang on a minute! I can't wear those. I'd look ridiculous. I'd be the laughing stock of school. I'd rather go topless than wear one of those things." "It's a rule that you have to wear a shirt to school. One of these would be PERFECT for when you have lunch with Donna's friends on Thursday." "You want me to be the laughing stock of the entire high AND middle schools!" Julia turned to Rocky to ask, "Do you have them in pink?" I talked Julia into buying only the white and black ones. The strands of the black one had thin, shiny threads inside them. Wasn't that nice? The shininess distracted from my nipples, so I preferred it to the white, which accentuated them (Nigel had pointed that out). ^ Did you know they make see-through shirts for guys? They do. Isn't that good to know? (Hint: the answer's got two letters.) Julia picked out several of them, one of which was vermilion. ^ Rocky never once mentioned my missing sisters, which was a bit of discretion I appreciated. I found out that most of Rocky's business didn't come from local Corvallis residents, but from mail-order and people coming to Rocky's from many of the neighboring cities. Apparently Nigel had a considerable reputation, which was no surprise at all. ------- We spent two hours in Rocky's before I could make my escape. Fortunately the rest of our shopping was merely tedious, as clothes shopping should be, as opposed to terrifying and traumatizing. Especially the latter, as I couldn't get rid of the image of a guy wearing those first no-underwear 'pants'. We got me some nice, sensible clothes. "Not many, because you're still growing." Where was that logic when I needed it, at Rocky's? Julia also bought me a couple of VERY nice outfits, "So you can look wealthy when you go to casinos. They'll be suspicious if you look poor and are betting so much." It's very easy to make yourself look wealthy, you just spend all your wealth on one outfit. Julia did it twice. That's just my way of saying they were REALLY expensive. Julia's shopping process is completely different from anyone's in my family. We're on one side of profligate; she's on the other side, vanishing in the distance. I considered all the hours I'd worked in my summer job the last three summers, and how many minutes the total accumulated sum would have lasted in Julia's hands. Being with a girl on a shopping spree is a scary experience. One I hoped never to repeat. I already knew it was a foolish hope, no matter how strong I hoped it, because Julia was already planning on a BIG shopping spree for when I stop growing and are rich (which I suspect will only be a temporary condition). I was starting to get very concerned about how much this was all costing. What she was spending today plus last Saturday's shopping with Carol had to add up to a ridiculous amount. Poor Prof and Vanessa. They may not have been poor a week and half ago, but they must be by now. [I found out later, in a conversation about the roulette scheme, that Prof and Vanessa were fairly well off. Not rich, but they'd inherited a very useful amount of money many years ago. They'd made the serious mistake of letting their daughter into a teenager, but other than that, they'd looked after their money well.] Julia gave me a break in the middle of all our clothes shopping. She told me she'd make an 11 o'clock appointment for me at a hairdressers. "I won't need a haircut for a few more weeks yet." After my haircut we had lunch. I couldn't believe: How long it takes to get a haircut in one of those fancy places, and That I'd managed to get my way with anything during this excursion. She'd actually agreed when I begged, "PLEASE can we stop for lunch?" After a hurried lunch, one of us dragged the other back to clothes shopping. The relatively unimportant clothes were left to last (I say "relatively", because they were still clothes, and therefore VERY important): just some casual shirts and pants, and even a pair of jeans. For the price of my new jeans I could've bought at least five pairs from my usual store. I got a billfold, and Julia suggested a watch because mine was so ugly. I said, "It'll only be a few weeks, maybe only two or three, until we earn the big money from my business idea. Wouldn't it make sense to wait until then, and buy a good one?" My current watch did annoy me, so I did want a good watch, maybe even a very good one. Once we'd earned millions I'd be perfectly happy to spend as much as two hundred dollars on a very good one, so buying a reasonable one now was silly. Apparently my current watch was so ugly that waiting a few weeks was not something that Julia could bear, so I got a cheap, but much better looking, new watch. My old watch was immediately removed and my new one put on. I caught Julia about to throw my old one in a trash can, but I rescued it for a spare. On the topic of time, I was getting worried over the lack of it, as I like to have a LITTLE time with my teammates and coach before a game. They like to discuss the opposing team, strategy and other things they consider more important than shopping. Julia said, "I suppose we've got enough to last you for a while. We can always come back another day." That was close enough to an agreement to stop that I kept my mouth shut. We headed back to the car. We drove to our opponent's school, parked and locked the car up very carefully, as I'd HATE to have to repeat all that shopping if my new clothes were stolen. I found Dad's car and all of my family waiting by it. I didn't have much time, so I asked them to keep a look out while I got changed in their car. Donna kept a look in, thus all directions were covered. Then we headed off to the field and to find my teammates. When we rounded the last of the school buildings, and should've been able to see the field, we couldn't because of all the girls in the way. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but the difference from what the spectator numbers 'should' have been was immediately apparent. This was only a friendly game because both teams had the weekend off from our normal game schedule, so there should've been very few spectators: some of the immediate family for some of the players, a few friends, the coach, and if we were lucky, a water boy. And that's about it. Sadly not even the cheerleaders since this was only a "friendly". But today, as well as the expected spectators, there were LOTS of nubile young girls (as young girls go, nubile ones are my personal favorites). Mom said, "There are a lot of girls here." Julia and Carol laughed. We were almost immediately spotted, with many of the lovely nubiles greeting us as we got close enough to them. My names (usually "Egg", but sometimes my real name) were called out, with plenty of "Julia's" and a few "Carol's". Most of the girls had come because they were interested in me. Merely "interested", not madly in love or anything extreme like that, so we weren't mobbed. It was a friendly, orderly scene. Thank goodness, because 40-odd disorderly girls would be scary. Most of them merely called and waved a greeting, content to wait and see what happened. Several approached us though, when they had some reason. Laila, for example, who introduced me to her girlfriend Hannah. I had to be abrupt with them all, telling them, "I'll talk after the game, because I have to talk with my teammates now. Sorry." My teammates were gathered on the field, all but the one of them who's nearly always the last to arrive every game. They were amused, bemused - and I'd like to write "ceemused" but will have to use "happy" - by the appearance of so many girls. They knew the girls had come to see me - "They kept asking us where you were" - but that didn't stop my teammates admiring the many pretty girls. Eye candy is still eye candy, even if it's looking for another guy. I explained, "Julia and Carol have been spreading the word about how well I played last week, and telling their friends to come see me. I'm sorry there's so many of them. I'll get Julia and Carol to stop inviting other girls along. The last thing we need is a bunch of girls distracting us from playing well." I like teasing my teammates. As expected, my teammates strongly disagreed with my suggestion. One of them suggested, "He was right to apologize, because they've ALL come to see him. Don't you know that teammates should share equally?" Another of them (Fred), "I'll be fine, as there are bound to be a few girls who are happy with the team's second best player." Fred was about our tenth best player, in a team of eleven (plus a couple of reserves), so he got booed down. The coach said, "If we've finished dividing up the spoils of victory, let's discuss strategy. First question: Mark, will you be playing as well as you did last week, or was that a fluke?" "It would be terrible if any of the girls had to lower their standards down to Fred's level, so I think I'll play like last week." My proximity sense was still working, as it always does these days because I've become almost perfect at keeping center, so I had no worries about that. So Coach's preferred strategy was, "Pass the ball to Mark." Then he discussed our Plan B, in case I had an off day. Our last player arrived, apologized again, was reprimanded again, and coach carried on talking. I saw Vanessa, Prof and Robert join my family five minutes before the whistle blew, so I had every reason to play well. I knew I would. The only way this game wasn't going to go the same way as the last one was if I chose to turn my proximity sense off by uncentering. With everyone important in my life here, not to mention lots of nubile girls too - which I will mention, because they're nubile - that wasn't going to happen. While I remember to mention it, most of my Liaisons were here too, including the newly appointed Pat. Ava was notably absent though, and I didn't expect her. She had both physical and emotional reasons to stay away. The whistle blew for the start of the game. Two minutes later I got my first goal. That was a feat that I accomplished a total of fourteen times during the game. I looked AWESOME. I dodged and weaved past the defenders time and time again. I was near perfect at zigging whenever they zagged, and zagging whenever they zigged. I was unstoppable. Maybe not all the time, but the difference between my getting a goal 90% of the time I got the ball, or 100%, was not nearly enough to save the game for CV. Final score 20 to 2. The other six goals we got were because CV had put too many defenders on me, leaving easy goals for my teammates. That is a truly absurd score in soccer. Even 10 to 2 is absurd. We got 20 goals because it was a "friendly" (so to speak). By halftime their team morale was very poor. They started the second half with a bit of extra effort, but after I got two more quick goals, most of them stopped caring and they played out the game with no heart. They were already beaten, had no chance of clawing it back, and there was nothing at stake; not even their pride because that was long gone. They stopped putting any effort into it. It wasn't a good game for the spectators either, because the second half was so halfhearted. Even my team stopped playing their best, which is mostly how CV's second goal happened. I was the only one who played properly the whole game, trying to keep the game's energy levels up. Being watched by so many nubile girls might've had an influence too. The only good things that could be said about the game were: The first quarter of an hour had been truly exciting watching, as everyone had played hard. The drama of watching CV try their best to fight off my assaults was an exciting element. The rest of the first half was moderately enjoyable soccer. The weather was reasonable, so the second half wasn't too unpleasant to wait through. Everybody knew that I'd DESTROYED the opposing team. Before the game ended I decided that it might be a good idea for me to sit out friendly games in the future. I'd mention that to our coach, so he could tell their coach, or else they may never want another friendly game with us. When the final whistle blew the crowd was, for the most part, not excited. They congratulated me and were obviously impressed, but I'd been so much better than my opponents that most of the spectators didn't know what to make of it. It was like an adult soccer player playing to the best of his ability on a field of seven-year olds. How could you get excited about his performance? This wasn't quite the same as that, because I appeared equivalent to all the other players (in our baggy shirts, I did look like the others), but I was so obviously in an entirely different league that ordinary excitement seemed misplaced. I went to stand with my family, and most of my team followed me. My team were excited because we'd lost hard games against CV before, so winning one was enjoyable for them. My family and the Williamses were excited, because my demonstration confirmed their opinions of my special nature, which had implications in other, more important, areas. [They were also somewhat worried, and seeing me in such impressive action prompted a later conversation about the risk of public displays of such a high degree of athleticism. The four parents were obviously much more worried about my showing my TK publicly than my athleticism, but they suggested that even the physical side of my abilities needed to be displayed with some caution. Nothing bad was expected from my being a great soccer player, but they advised against running marathons in sub-world record times, or bowling multiple 300-point games.] There were also a few spectators who understood soccer enough to appreciate what they'd witnessed, and they sought me out too. One such was CV's coach, who was unstinting in his praise, expressing total amazement at my improvement since the last time he'd seen me play. He then left, to go talk with his team. As a result of there being a group of people around me who were genuinely happy, the atmosphere was raised around us. Girls who joined our group had their spirits lifted too. I didn't worry about anyone else. At worst they'd be awed and confused. With any luck they'd ask Julia for her advice, and if they were pretty girls, they'd soon be in my bed. I'd met nearly all the girls who'd come to see me play, either from my 10th grade classes, or from lunch with Carol's friends. I was able to greet them all by name, which especially pleased Carol's friends. My remembering all their names surprised me too. I'd partly used the colors of their clothes at that lunch, and they'd changed clothes since then, but I still managed to get them all right. I had to temporarily uncenter to get a couple of them, but I did get them all. After some conversation that's not worth reporting, Laila did a good thing. Not intentionally, but it worked out well. Laila brought Hannah back to meet me again, and we got to chatting a bit. Hannah was a friend of Laila's four-year older sister, which made Hannah about twenty. Laila quietly aked Julia and me (Julia being attached to my arm), "Is it okay to talk about sex stuff now?" I looked around: my girlfriend, her parents and one brother, my parents and younger sisters, assorted other girls and teammates. No problem that I could see. "Sure. No problem, say whatever you want." Julia had already agreed. Laila said to Julia, in a normal tone of voice, "I told Hannah that Mark is as good at sex as he is at soccer, and she'd like to find out for herself. She's not at school, so I wasn't sure whether the Liaison system applied or not?" It's a funny thing about human nature: mention the word "sex" in a crowd, and EVERYONE notices. Any other word and no one even hears it. The noise level of the conversations around me dropped dramatically, as people listened in. Julia said, "He's better at sex. Soccer is competitive and the other team got depressed and gave up. I haven't thought about what to do with girls from outside of school. Mark will be getting to know some of those, but I haven't bothered thinking about it yet. If Hannah just wants to have a screw, that's probably easier to arrange, but I need to think about that. I'll get back to you later. Let's say you're her Liaison for now, okay?" All the Liaisons had been told to be very open about how good I was at sex - even to advertise it - and that our families were cool with it. Laila also knew first-hand that Julia's family was accepting of these things, so she knew she was on safe ground. Most of the listening girls and all of my teammates weren't aware that our attitudes were so open, and were shocked to various degrees. They were expecting an explosion. Laila answered Julia, "Okay. That's what I expected. I told Hannah how many orgasms Mark gave me on Thursday and she was very envious." "I'll say," confirmed Hannah. "No guy has given me anywhere near that many. Most guys think they're Mr. Wonderful if they can get me to cum once." Julia declared, "I'm so lucky having Mark. He can always give me as many as I want." Pat, who was hovering nearby, agreed vehemently, "God yes! Mark's awesome. I've never heard of anyone having as good a time as Lily and I did Thursday night." Pat had obviously been waiting for the chance to do so, and she continued right on with, "Thank you very much for letting me be a Liaison, Mark. I'll do a really good job, and I won't be greedy like Dakota was." I was saying, "You're welcome," when Julia quietly told me, "Kiss her." That was obviously a MUCH better way of showing appreciation, as it was both for my benefit and for the benefit of all the girls watching, so I did so. Pat cooperated enthusiastically. A few seconds into it I heard Julia laugh, then say, "Don't look like you expect me to complain. It was me who suggested to Pat that she sleep with Mark in the first place, so I'm hardly going to object to them kissing." Pat finished our kiss as Julia finished talking to the watching girls. Pat turned to Julia and said, "That's true. I owe it all to you Julia. Can I thank you too?" Julia agreed, and my teammates couldn't believe what happened next. Pat's recent discovery of the joys of bisexuality and her knowing that Julia was an active participant in it, had motivated Pat's choice of method to expression appreciation. "Christ, Egg! You lucky bastard. You score even better off the field than on it." Julia, with a few supporting comments from me, spent the next few minutes explaining to the nearby crowd that there was going to be a great deal of sex going on around me while I looked for a new girlfriend or two to compensate for Julia spending so much time with Carol. Julia affectionately introduced Carol to everyone, as some of them didn't know who she was. The explanation was made in front of both sets of parents. It was one thing for some of these girls to be told at lunch that our parents were cool with it, but it was FAR more convincing for them to see it voiced in front of all the parents involved. The conversation lasted until nearly 4 o'clock (in soccer, each half is forty five minutes. With the half-time break and sometimes a little injury time, a game lasts SLIGHTLY more than one and a half hours. Compared to football's incessantly boring stop-go-stop nature, soccer is nonstop). Prof said, "I've got to drop the family home, then head off for a fun conversation with the Dean. So we'll make our departure now. Impressive game, Mark." In the middle of the goodbyes Julia said, "We should head off too, Mark. We've got to unload the car, and decide which half of it goes in my house or in yours. That'll take a while." Groan. I'd thought the whole shopping thing was behind me. Hoping to diminish the pain I said, "Why don't we just dump them all at your place, as there's no room in my closet at home?" "We OBVIOUSLY have to take some of them to your place, otherwise you'd have nothing to wear when you go to school from your home." OBVIOUSLY I would have something to wear: the clothes that I've already got at home. For some reason Julia was assuming they didn't exist any longer. I feared I knew the reason for that, but I was too scared to ask. Carol wanted to come with us, to see ALL my clothes at Julia's place. I pointed out, "You'll see them all eventually anyway, when I wear them." Carol and Julia looked at me like I was either simple-minded or male (it was difficult to discern which of those two they were blaming me for). It'd probably be best if I said nothing. It was clearly going to take quite a long time to sort through my clothes at Julia's place (groan), and I'd hate to delay dinner, so we had to leave too. That broke up the party. Julia made me kiss all the Liaisons, but only them, "Because we've got more important things to do." I've got a girlfriend that thinks sorting through already purchased clothes is more important than my kissing beautiful, nubile girls. There's something seriously wrong with my life. In the car Julia said, "I'll send a text message to Ava, to encourage her." Julia sent: "Soccer 20-2 bc Mark deadly. Carol strongly insists u can be good girl. Mark n I still undecided about u." Carol was telling us about Gia's begging for forgiveness this morning, when Julia's phone received a reply from Ava, "Sorry I miss game, 2 sore. Congrats to Mark. I can be VERY good girl, promise. Pls 1 more try?" Julia didn't reply, and the conversation with Carol about Gia resumed. Then Carol's phone got a message from Ava, "Tyvm for help w Mark. U wonderful. I love u, xxx." Julia and Carol had a good laugh. I was puzzled, so Julia explained, "Ava has never said she loves Carol before. It's excessive as a thank you. She's trying to motivate Carol to help her even more." Julia dictated an answer for Carol to send, "Up 2 Mark now. I said u good bc u obey me so well. Why u not obey Mark so well? Mark v important & good man." Carol had just finished telling us how upset Gia was, and Julia was starting to suggest what to do about it, when Carol's phone received another message from Ava, "I make mistake. Never again. I know M important now. Pls tell M I will obey perfect now." Carol's answer (straight from Julia's mouth to text) was, "I NOT tell M. He 2 busy 4 me talk same topic AGAIN. I 2 smart n caring 2 waste his time. Good luck 2 u." Julia suggested to Carol what to do about Gia, which Carol did by calling Gia. The core point of the conversations was Carol saying, "Gia, I told you how many girls called me last night, and you saw how many girls called me while you were at my house earlier. We just had Mark's soccer game and he was INCREDIBLE, and even more girls from our grade saw him. They ALL keep asking me lots and lots of questions, especially about sex with him. I CAN'T talk about that because he's my BROTHER! So I'm going to do something which is going to make you one of the most popular girls at school. You want to be popular, don't you?" -- Apparently Gia did, as Carol continued in an excited voice, "I'm going to tell them ALL to talk with you. You'll have heaps and heaps of excited girls wanting to talk with you. If you cry you'll ruin everything, but if you're happy and excited, they'll have a great time talking to you, and they'll envy you like CRAZY. You're the ONLY girl in middle school that he's touched, and he gave you an ORGASM! You're the luckiest girl in middle school. You're going to be SO popular." With a little bit of repetition, Gia got excited about the idea. Carol ended the call as we parked outside the Williams'. Julia commented, "Ava's not too bad. She's never sent a message or called Mark's phone, and only once to me, in reply to my message. She must want to desperately, but holds herself back. That's smart of her." I said, "I don't think she's got my phone's number. We were too busy to worry about that sort of stuff." "Didn't you send her a text message after you got her letter?" "Oh yeah, I did. She will have it." "If I was you, Mark, I'd be very careful who you text or call from your phone, because if your number becomes well known, you'll have thousands of girls calling you." Julia always exaggerates about my attractiveness, but - unbelievably even a few days ago - I now accepted that there could be two or three dozen girls calling me, so Julia's point was a good one. Carol added, "It's already happening on our home line, over the last couple of days. Donna and I are already having to be firm about that. I suggest that when you're at home, you let someone else answer the phone, otherwise they'll never stop calling." If there's one thing girls do too much of, it'd be clothes shopping. But if there are two things, the second would be wasting endless time on the telephone, so I'd act on my wives' advice. Julia, Carol and I took the first load of bags upstairs to Julia's room. Once there the girls started pulling them open, leaving me to go back and forth for the remaining bags and boxes. That's how these things work: they have to do all the work of deciding what to buy, and I have to do all the fetching, carrying and twirling. Carol got excited about my new clothes. Julia got re-excited. I got outta there, heading to the kitchen for a morale-lifting snack. I've been having trouble with my hearing lately, and didn't hear their, "Can you just try this one on?" as I walked out the doorway. Maybe it was the soundproofing's fault. Or perhaps it might have been my lack of faith in my two girls' ability to count to one accurately. They'd completely messed up how many wives there were in a marriage, so what was the chance they'd stop after playing one round of "Dress-Up Mark"? After my snack, I hid in our study. I even studied, making productive use of my time, which was more than the girls were doing. I'd heard Julia tell Ava several times that I'm VERY busy, so it must be true. Certainly too busy to play dress-up. After working for a while, I remembered that I had to generate some questions for Prof about the roulette profit split discussion we'd had. I fired up Word and created the following document: QUESTIONS/COMMENTS: Casino gives you one check for the amount or lots of checks to each of us? If one check, won't that mean you have to pay gift tax when split up the way you discussed? If lots of checks, wouldn't that be unusual for gamblers, so suspicious, and they'll know all our names? With $100,000 as starting money, how will we do the betting? We originally thought we'd start with $50,000. Both emergency accounts accessible by me, shows great trust. Williams effectively getting nothing, as their $1m intended to sit unused, hopefully for many years. Not acceptable. The Boys, and everyone else, should get paid for the RISK of all this (who knows how all this might affect their lives). Money now. So need to win more, with extra going to The Boys, Prof & Vanessa, Mom & Dad. Adjust the % splits to make this happen. Happy with that as a list of points to discuss, I saved the document in case I thought of something to add to it later, printed it out, pocketed it, and went back to my studying. At about 5:30pm (good grief!) Julia stuck her head in the door, "Ahh, here you are!" I wisely said nothing. "Can you finish up fairly quickly? We shouldn't keep your family waiting." I wisely said more nothing, choosing to nod instead. Fearing that I might be in trouble for hiding, I immediately started tidying up. "Dad called Mom, and she's already gone to join him for dinner at the Dean's. Dad asked me to tell you three things. First, that the Dean is very happy so you'll get your new hardware as soon it can be delivered. He's amused at how much you need because you couldn't plug in a second $5 mouse." Apparently the price of mouses has dropped. -- "Second, Dad and you have to sit down soon to work out what courses you want to do next year. You don't have to choose the whole year now, just the first few months' worth, so OSU can prepare them for you. Dad says you are to read up on the courses in the first two years of the degree. -- "Third, a photographer will be contacting you in the next few days. On the expectation that you'll become famous, OSU want some photos of you to hold in reserve for their Wall of Fame, for future publicity material, advertising, and various things like that. The photographer will call your cell outside of school hours. PLEASE make sure you don't just let him turn up and start taking your photographs. You need to let me pick out several changes of clothes for you to be photographed in. You'll need a variety of different types of shots depending on what they're used for in future. I wish I'd known about that before we went shopping, but thank goodness you've got a few decent choices now." Julia could easily see what I thought of this development, so she added, "Dad said to tell you that's the price you have to pay for everything that OSU is doing for you. You and your parents have to sign a release too." I really didn't want to, but Prof clearly needed me to agree, so I had to say, "Okay." Julia changed the subject, "It's a pity you were working in here. We could've used your advice on what clothes stayed here, or went to your place." I decided to keep my thoughts to myself, but for posterity, they were: It wasn't a pity that I was in here; it was my deliberate intention. However, it was a pity that I HAD to be in here. There'd been absolutely no chance that my advice would've been listened to. Julia tells me what to wear anyway. I sometimes - quite often actually - wonder how girls' brains evolved so weirdly that Julia could have said what she did with total sincerity. We went back to the bedroom where I was loaded up again. The girls had cunningly condensed all the clothing into fewer packages and bags, so I was able to carry them all in one trip. It was a big load, but I managed. That left the girls' hands free to carry Julia's little overnight bag, and to gesticulate with while they talked about some of their favorites among my new outfits. When I'd put all my wonderful new clothes into the trunk, and we were heading home, I said, "Thank goodness that's all over with. What an expensive way to waste time!" Julia agreed (with my first sentence only, obviously), "Yes. It's great to finally have some good clothes for you. You can relax for three or four weeks now." It was another one of those situations when you know you really don't want to ask, but you can't help yourself. I made one attempt to cling on to a last straw of sanity by asking, "You meant three or four YEARS, didn't you?" "Haha. Not unless there aren't going to be any seasons from now on. Summer's coming, and you're going to need a WHOLE lot of new clothes for that. That's even more important." "{Groan}." #1: #3: #4: #3: #4: #3: At home, Julia and Carol happily told my family that I had some wonderful new clothes. Mom and Donna both wanted to see them. The girls started opening the bags. Within seconds it was, "Try this on, Mark." "{Groan}." "Oh! And this too! This is great." "I am VERY hungry. I was hoping for dinner soon." Mom answered, "Dinner's ready. We can have it whenever you want." "Now would be the PERFECT time." "I'll dish up." I said, "I'll dump these in my room." I grabbed everything and took them to my room, hoping that "out of sight, out of mind" might work after dinner. In my room I was confused for a couple of seconds. Things had moved. The bed was about a foot away from where it normally was, my study desk had moved, and the shelves above it had all the wrong books. Ahhh! I confirmed my delightful hope by looking in the closet. Yep: Donna's clothes. Wow. I REALLY was sharing a room with Carol now. I picked up my packages and took them to my NEW room. One big bed - cool! I dumped everything on the floor next to the double-width closet I was now sharing with Carol (I opened it to make sure), and headed toward dinner. I said, "I LOVE my new room! It's going to be so fantastic. And thanks to whoever it was who had transferred my stuff from my old room" Dad said, "Fely and I did it. It didn't take long. You don't have much stuff." Meanwhile, I was giving Carol a big hug, but stopped when everyone started laughing at Donna for doing something that I hadn't seen. Donna said, "I bet you ... Oops. Umm. Did you go into the wrong room?" "Haha. I sure did. Took me a few seconds to work it out too." "I go into the wrong room EVERY DAMNED TIME! It's driving me up the wall." I thought to tease Donna with, "The wall in which room?", but Donna doesn't like jokes like that. They're too abstruse for her. Plus I thought I might have the same trouble, so I should be sympathetic. "I'm sure I'll have the same trouble. All my life I've been going down the hall and turning left before the end. I'm bound to keep doing that." (Now that I think of it, my humor's too abstruse for most people - the recent joke about redundantly getting a second never-ending credit card being an obvious example. I probably should have warned you about my humor earlier. Oh well, better late than never.) Donna said, "Maybe you'll even get into the wrong bed one night." "But then I might hug and kiss the WRONG girl! That'd be a terrible mistake. How embarrassing for you. I'll try very, very hard not to scare you like that." Donna's answer to that was, "Maybe I'll keep coming into the wrong room and get into the wrong bed." "Don't you think that its being a double bed and not in the same place as your single bed used to be might clue you in?" "Nah. I'm pretty dumb about things like that, especially when I'm tired, and ESPECIALLY when I'm horny." That earned her several laughs. Mom added, "Let me tell you that Donna's horny a LOT! I have to keep buying her new batteries. Not the way I ever imagined keeping track of my daughter's development. It's funny how things work out sometimes." I was sure that Mom would MUCH rather buy batteries for "Practice Mark" than have the real thing take care of Donna's needs. Although that was unstated, things certainly do work out funnily. Conversations like this one, for example, sure weren't our normal dinnertime conversation even just a few weeks ago. Dad said, "By the look of the interest of all the girls at your soccer game you're not going to be short of sleeping companions?" Conversations like this one too! "It appears not. Julia and Carol are doing a great job of ensuring that." "{Raspberry}," from Carol. I asked, "What'd I say now? I was telling the complete truth." Carol answered, "Except that it's YOU that's doing the great job. You don't think Julia and I could get that many girls interested in some other guy, do you?" "I KNOW I couldn't get that many by myself. Or any, for that matter. So, as I was saying - before I was so RUDELY interrupted - it appears that there will be plenty. But we can't bring them here. That'd give the whole me and Carol thing away by what's in our bedroom. And we'd also be too noisy for too long. So in this house I'll only sleep with Carol, and with Julia if she comes. And I know Donna hasn't forgotten my offering it before, so I'll invite Donna sometimes too. That's 'SLEEP' with you Donna. No battery-saving activities!" "Yippee! Can I bring Practice Mark with me?" "No, you can't. We're not having ANY sex. Cuddling at the most, okay?" "If you insist. Practice Mark isn't an 'it'; he's a he. Can't you tell from his having a willy. That's ALL he's got! He's just one, big, vibrating willy, haha." "Thank you, Donna. That was probably more explanation that I needed." "I can get him all the way up now. No problem at all. It's easy and fun. I'll show you after dinner. I'm ready whenever you are!" Mom rolled her eyes, and said, "Whatever happened to good old fashioned romance? In my day..." "I don't want romance! I just want Mark to..." "Yes, THANK YOU, Donna! We know what you want. You haven't been subtle about it. This is not appropriate dinnertime conversation, so change the topic please." Dad took that ball and ran with it, "Mark, I was wondering what you're going to do about soccer? I'm stunned at how good you are. If you're that good in all your games, it's pointless for your opponents to even turn up. Aren't you going to get bored playing so far beneath your level?" "Yeah. I've REALLY enjoyed soccer, but being so good is a problem. I will be that good from now on, because I'm using something I learned from Aikido. I think I'll talk with Coach about sitting out of any more friendlies, but I'm pretty sure my team would be upset if I dropped out of the real games. I could easily stop using the Aikido technique, but the team wouldn't appreciate losing games knowing that I could've gotten us the win. Plus why should they try their best when I'm not? It'd ruin the whole thing, I think. This year's league is nearly over, so I'll finish it, but I'm not sure about next year. Maybe I won't play next year. I think I just have to wait and see how I feel when school restarts. I'll miss it if I give it up though." Julia said, "Why not play with a much better team next year? That'd be better for you wouldn't it?" "If their opponents were good enough to be challenging, I guess. AND if the team had a good atmosphere, because that's what I most enjoy about soccer. I don't really know about any other teams that I could play in. I'm not really into soccer itself, just my little team. God knows I don't read the sports pages of the paper! Are there any other good teams in Corvallis?" Dad answered (I should have known that he'd know), "Sure, the OSU Beavers is the best team in Corvallis. They're about average in a pretty tough conference, but they seem to be an improving team. I expect they'll be reasonably good next season." Julia suggested, "Maybe you should watch one of their games Mark, to see what you think of them. When's the next game?" Dad said, "The season's over. It runs August to November. Your high-school soccer is just part of a PE program that several schools run all school year. It's not done very well." "Oh. I thought it was good. We have great fun and get plenty of exercise?" "Which is all you really care about, I know. The problem is that the league your team plays in is a very casual one. They don't participate in any of the professional development programs and your games aren't accredited. They're just fun. That's always been fine for you, but it's unfair to the other students who might have wanted to pursue soccer further had they been brought along properly. Unfortunately the only men's sports your school puts any real effort into are football and basketball." "I didn't know any of that." "You don't exactly hang around with athletic types. The Beavers is a well run team, with all the professionalism and competitiveness you wouldn't like, so I don't think they'll suit you." Julia said, "Soccer's important to Mark, so I'll research them when I get home tomorrow." I asked, "How will you research them from home? Won't we need to go to OSU and talk with the coach? Do they even have a coach, if they only play for four months a year?" Dad laughed, "They'll have SEVERAL coaches, Mark: a head coach and some assistant coaches. And the season is about three and half months long." "That's just silly! They must be bored out of their skulls for eight months of the year. Why not play for the whole year? 'School year', 'college year', or whatever they call it." "Haha. You really don't pay much attention to sports, do you?" "Happily no. And the more I learn about how silly sports are, the happier I am with that decision." Julia said, "I'll research the Beavers online, Mark. I need to get home fairly early tomorrow to see what Lily's done. She'll have something set up by tonight." "That's good about Lily, but I'd be very surprised if you find anything about the Beavers online. They're just a sports team. At most there's probably only contact information on one of OSU's pages. Which, now that I think about it, is all we really need anyway. We can call one of the coaches. He certainly won't have anything better to do, what with his next game being four whole months away." [The next day Julia showed me the Beaver's website. It turned out to be VERY extensive, which amazed me! Until I realized that setting it up must be what the coaches do for the 8.5 months per year they have nothing else to do. Which just goes to prove the superiority of soccer coaches over football coaches. Football coaches are presumably ex-football players, so they wouldn't even be able to spell "web", let alone create a website.] With mixed emotions I said, "Speaking of college and next year... ," and went on to talk about Prof's plan for my completing my BS next year. I tried to restrain their excitement, but I wasn't very successful. Julia wasn't helping either. No one believed that I might not be able to do it. They'd say something like, "I'm sure you'll do your best Mark, and if they're too hard to do in one year, then you'll complete it the next year. That's still VERY impressive." And then they'd all get excited together again. At one stage Mom asked, "The whole degree in one year. What will that cost?" "I don't think very much. Prof has already told me that my Math courses will be free. That's about two-thirds of the degree. And he said I might be able to get a few of the other courses waived, so it shouldn't be much." Julia said, "I'd be very surprised if they charged Mark anything. They didn't hesitate to throw another $5,000 at his computer system, and that'd be more than his non-Math fees would be, so I don't think they'll be worried about it. Mark's business idea is progressing nicely too, so hopefully cost won't matter much to you either soon." I said, "Hang on, Julia; you're getting ahead of yourself about the business idea. I don't know whether I can do it yet." Dad said, "Never mind that for a second. Back up to the $5,000. Did you mean that OSU is spending ANOTHER $5,000 on Mark's computer?" "Yeah. They're upgrading his current computer and installing a second one." "I thought we agreed that you wouldn't get a second computer without discussing it with us?" I could see Julia retrieve the memory, then she said, "Ahh, I got you now. That discussion was about a second computer for CAROL. This is a second computer for MARK. Mark needs two computers for himself, because one by itself isn't capable of doing everything he needs." Unsurprisingly this confused everyone in my family. Fortunately they're used to being confused about me. "Mom, Dad. I was making do inefficiently with one computer and Julia caught me. She hit the roof and dragged me downstairs to explain to Prof and Vanessa what I was doing. They hit the roof. Then they told me off in no uncertain terms. Then they ripped me a new one, kicked me in the ass, and sent me to bed with no dessert. It was not pretty. Good luck on trying to get them to change their minds." Julia laughed, "Haha. For once Mark isn't exaggerating much. He NEEDS two computers, and OSU has already agreed to provide the second one. It costs us nothing and it'll greatly help his studying. It's a non-issue. Next topic?" -- No one argued for half a second, so Julia carried on, "You were right, Mark, that I was assuming your business idea will work. I think it will, but we'll find out tomorrow won't we? It's not as if anyone is going out on a spending spree on the expectation of that money, so it doesn't matter." We'd spent a ton of money this morning, but I knew Julia saw that as a 'necessity'. I said, "Okay. We'll PROBABLY find out tomorrow. I might hit problems which take a few days to think through and retry, but I think tomorrow will be successful." Mom asked, "If it is, what's the next step?" "To starting planning doing it for real. We have to make some decisions about stuff, maybe doing some legal set up too. I'm not sure about that side, Prof's doing all of it. As far as my side of it is concerned, once I know it'll work out, we can do it for real almost right away. The timing is mostly up to Prof. If the test tomorrow is successful, then I hope we can do it for real next weekend, but I'm only guessing." Mom said, "You mean this time next weekend the whole thing could be over, and the money could be ours?" "I HOPE so. Let's see if tomorrow works. If it does, then on the way back I'll talk with Prof about the timing, and let you know." Donna asked, "What's the business? Everyone keeps saying nothing. You're very mysterious and I'm very curious." There was some laughter, which was not what Donna wanted to hear. Mom said, "Donna, the ONLY people who know are Prof, Vanessa, Mark and Julia. Not even your dad and I know. If you find out, please tell me, because I'm very curious too." "But you were talking about it. I thought you must know?" "Steven and I only know they're doing something. We know about the money we have to put into it, something about what happens to the money if it works, and that's about it." "Now I'm REALLY curious! How come you won't tell us what it is, Mark?" I thought of, and discarded, several ways to answer Donna. They were either short and cruel ("short" was good, but "cruel" wasn't), or were far too long-winded and still might have ended up being unsatisfactory to Donna. Julia answered first, "Donna, do you think your mother and father are sensible, mature people?" "Of course." "I'm sure they're curious too - your mom even said she is - but they're not asking Mark about it. They KNOW it's a secret, and that Mark would tell them if he thought he could. Now, remember that Mark said he'd have sex with you when he thought you were sensible and mature enough?" Donna could remember that, all right, but she didn't like the way this conversation was going. "If you copy your mom and dad, and don't ask questions about it, Mark will think you're more mature. If you ask questions about it, he will think you're not mature." Donna hated that argument. You could see that she REALLY wanted to complain that it wasn't fair, but she knew that'd make her sound immature, which wasn't fair either. Mom said, "Sometimes you have to trust people, Donna. Steven and I are trusting the four of them. We have to give Prof a LOT of money to do this, and we're trusting him with our money. We're also trusting them when they say that it's better if as few people as possible know. Trust is very important. Much more important than your or our curiosity." Donna begrudgingly agreed, "I guess." It might've been more important, but it wasn't nearly as much fun. Donna didn't like it, and I can't say I did either. Not telling Mom and Dad what I was doing wasn't a decision I was proud of. The main reason for not telling them was that Mom would certainly hit the roof, yell a lot, then forbid it. I was extremely eager for us to live in a mansion, and I very much didn't want Mom stopping that, so the best thing was not to tell her, even at the cost of my not being proud of it. Donna's acquiescence was good enough for us, and we moved on. I'd been tempted to mention the school's $45,000, but Mom and Dad hadn't mentioned it, so I kept quiet. Carol said, "I have a question about something else. Where are you going to have dinner on Monday, Mark? Because I need to cook it for you. Mom and I bought the ingredients this morning, so I'm ready, I just need to know where." "I'll probably have dinner at the Williams' tomorrow, because Prof and I are doing our business thing, but for the days after that I don't have any plans. Julia, any preferences?" "No. I don't have any plans for after that." Julia must be ill. I should take her to doctor. "Seriously? YOU have NO plans? I don't think I've ever heard you say something like that before. Are you feeling well?" "Haha. I don't have any plans that involve DINNERS." "Ahh. Now the world has returned to normal. In that case, let's make it here then, Carol. Okay?" "Thanks, that's easiest." Mom said, "For me too. We'll increase the quantities, and you can do the whole family's dinner Carol." "I... , I'll try." "You'll do fine. I'll supervise. Hopefully I'll soon be able to take Monday nights off from cooking and leave it to you. Except I guess I'll have to start taking turns doing the dishes on Mondays, haha." (We have a well-adhered-to family rule that the dishes are done by people who did not do the cooking. I'm pretty sure Mom invented that rule.) By now we'd finished dinner and were about to clear the table and wash the dishes. Mom said, "There are a couple of private things I need to talk with Mark about. Let's talk about them in your room, Mark." We left the girls to the dishes and Mom followed me down the hallway, watching me walk into the wrong room. I told her, "This is going to take some getting used to." I tried again, and got it right this time. Mom started, "Donna collected the last of her betting profits this morning. On Monday I'll get the money I'm holding for her out of my account and give it to her in the evening. I guess she'll give it to you as soon as she can, either before or after Aikido. You need to decide what you're going to say to her." Despite intending to, I hadn't gotten around to thinking about it. My immediate thought was to come clean with her, by telling her I was going to use the money to buy her a horse when we got our new place. By Monday we'd know a lot more about whether my TK would do the roulette job, so I should be able to say that with some assurance. I told Mom what I thought of doing, and she agreed it was good enough, adding, "Donna has lost a lot of her enthusiasm for this little project of hers, but knowing a horse is coming should revive her spirits. I imagine that'll make you her favorite brother again." It wasn't as bad as that, as indicated by our recent conversation about Practice Mark, but Mom's comment did have some merit. -- Mom continued, "The other topic was the settlement offer from the school. Prof's mentioned it to you, hasn't he?" "Yeah. It's fantastic. It was worth getting beat up for that much. I wish we'd gotten paid that each time a bully beat me up over the years." "Unfortunately you didn't have any importance back then, not like now. Now the Principal has the consequences of your importance coming at him from all directions. If I had any sympathy for him, which I don't, then I'd feel sorry for all the pressure he's under just because you're so unusual. As it is, he deserves everything that's happened to him, and a fair bit more. Anyway, I take it that you're happy with the settlement amount, don't want to hold out for more, or change anything?" "I think it's wonderful. If you're happy, I'm definitely happy. Prof said it'll be in my name, which is freaky. He's explained why, and it sounded sensible, but I'd normally be much happier with it going under your name." "It doesn't make any real difference as far as the family is concerned. As a minor we have legal access to your money if it mattered, and I expect that your business idea will either lose it entirely, or turn it into the millions you're aiming for. In either case no one's going to care about the $45,000, which is a strange thing to say, but true. By the way, Carol and Donna don't know much about the school negotiation. They know it's been happening, but that's about all. Partly not to make Donna depressed about her much smaller gambling win, but mainly to keep it quiet until after you've tried whatever it is you're trying. If your idea fails it'd be better they didn't realize what it cost." "You seem to think my idea might lose all the money. You keep mentioning that." "Of course. Get-rich-quick schemes are nearly always boom or bust, and usually bust. We don't expect you and Prof to come back with a small profit or loss. Not that your dad and I have any experience in get-rich-quick schemes, but that's not how they usually go." "You're probably right about our not coming back with a small profit or loss. It's probably going to be a lot or nothing." "Yeah. I'd expect a failure because such schemes always seem to fail, but it's hard to believe that Prof and Vanessa don't have good reasons for backing it. They originally intended to fund it entirely themselves and are still putting in just as much as they originally intended, so they obviously have a lot of faith in you and your idea. We just feel very uncomfortable not knowing what's going on, but Prof's made it clear what happens if we make a fuss about that." That sounded ominous, and I hadn't heard of any such threats. "What?" "They fund it entirely themselves and still give us the same amount of money if it succeeds. It's pretty hard to argue with them when they put it that way. -- "Let me point something that you don't seem to have understood. Your dad and I are putting in just $5,000 of our money. It is YOU that are putting in the bulk of the Anderson half. If your scheme loses, it'll be your loss. The $45,000 would normally get put into your account and be there when you later needed it, for buying a house in the traditional manner, for example. If your idea fails, it'll be you that suffers. Are you confident enough in your idea to be okay with that?" "Yes, as much as I know about the situation so far. It's possible that tomorrow we'll find out that the whole idea is impossible, in which case it'll get scrubbed and we'll all try to think of another way of making a lot of money. Julia has several times told me she's sure I can make heaps one way or another, and she's probably right. I could certainly make a lot of money as an athlete - running, soccer or whatever - although that'd be far slower and a pain in the ass. I'd HATE dealing with all the other jocks, the TV interviews and all that crap. But it's doable if we need to. So I'm pretty comfortable with what we're doing, and not too worried about it failing." "Okay. I'll give your school our decision on Monday. Our lawyer has to okay the contract they'll give us, but that should be quick, and then we all have to sign it. Then we get the check." "We have a lawyer? That's the first I've heard of that." "We've managed to avoid them most of my life, but we needed one this time. The school wouldn't have taken my threats seriously without his being involved, and the settlement has a bit extra to cover his fee, so no reason why not. That's my discussion finished. Shall we go back to the living room?" In the living room we just gathered around and chatted. Catching up on bits and pieces. We got onto the topic of Donna's Karate classes. Donna was having a great time in them and was telling us how much fun it was. From what I could tell, mostly because she could hit people. Mom suggested, "Go get the karate book you've got to show Mark, Donna." "Okay." Zoom. (Donna zooms when she's excited, and whooshes most of the rest of the time.) As soon as she was out of the room, which didn't take long, Mom said, "Shush. Listen." A second later a loud, "DAMMIT!" echoed from down the hallway, followed by the sound of a door being slammed. It was clearly the door's fault, for leading into the wrong room. We chuckled, and did so again when Donna returned and announced, "I got it wrong AGAIN! I really think Carol should have the single room and I should sleep with Mark. That'd be MUCH better." "Not even a good try, sweetie. Show us your book." And so the evening went. Over the course of it there were several phone calls. Carol answered them, and most of them were her friends - or at least in the grades Carol was liaison for - wanting to talk with me, in which case Carol just said, "He's busy," and spent a minute or so talking to the poor, besotted girl herself. Sometimes the caller was a friend of Donna's, in which case Donna took over to do the besotted girl talking. [[In the interest of autobiographical accuracy, I must confess that although I joked with myself at the time about the callers being besotted, they weren't. Most of them hadn't even talked to me, let alone become sotted. There was a great deal of complimentary gossip about me though, and that had sparked the girls' curiosity. Popularity being contagious, and the gossip including that I was looking for a girlfriend, quite a few of the girls were doing what the gossip suggested: contacting Carol or Donna.]] There were a lot of those calls, with Carol and Donna having to get very insistent at times. They disrupted the comfy atmosphere I'd expected, as did Mom and Dad worrying somewhat about the "business idea", so Julia never felt it appropriate to mention her little speech about how the three-way marriage kept producing unexpected benefits. I whispered to her to save it for bed talk. Just as well, as I hadn't remembered to carry extra hankies. There was other stuff like Prof calling me up to report on the Dean's happiness. We also agreed that I'd have dinner at their house tomorrow, and we'd head off to do our experiment after that. Vanessa was intending to come too. I wasn't sure why, but thought it'd be better to discuss it face to face. I had no objection; it just seemed a waste of her time. As it got later, my thoughts turned to the catching up we could be doing in the other room. Carol was witting on my lap (it was her turn. The girls have a system. I don't know what it is; I just hug whoever sits on me, whether it's one or both of them on a leg each). Carol could tell what I was thinking. She announced, "It's getting a little late and I think Mark wants to try out his new room, so we should call it an early night." I agreed, "Yes, I want to try out the new bed to make sure it works properly." Julia said, "We won't be going to bed for AGES yet, Mark." Seeing my confusion, Julia added, "Carol hasn't seen you in many of your new clothes yet. You're going to be busy for HOURS!" Then she burst out laughing at me, claiming, "Isn't it great having a guy who's so easy to tease?" I'm pretty sure she meant "great" for the two of them. "{Growl}." "Honestly, Mark, I just don't understand how you can't like trying on new clothes. It's SO much fun!" "Yeah," agreed Carol, "especially when you're so good looking. You looked fantastic in the two new outfits from last week. I can't wait to see you in some more good clothes. I'm sure Julia bought you some REALLY good ones today." "I did!" exclaimed Julia. "You should see him in the... ," Julia started going on about some of the pieces she'd bought. Carol got excited, forgetting that she was sitting on my excitement, which was rapidly becoming easily forgettable, such is the awesome destructive power of talking about new clothes: it can destroy even a teenage boy's horniness. I was tempted to ask Donna whether she wanted to have sex with me, just to get a dig in at my two wives, but that would have been too mean on Donna. Instead I asked, "Dad, you might know the answer to this. All the girls around here have vibrators. Is there anything equivalent for a boy to use when his women won't stop talking about clothes?" At least that got the girls to shut up. Julia even had the decency to look a little abashed. Dad said, "The best I've come up with are earplugs. Just remember to nod and say, 'That's nice, dear, ' or, 'You don't say, ' every thirty seconds or so. You've got to vary it a bit or they get suspicious. With two wives, you're definitely going to need a very good pair." Mom was beating up Dad, while Julia and Carol were apologizing to me for their getting carried away. Carol said, "I think you should take us to bed and spank us for being naughty." That worked for me, and for Mark Junior, which made it unanimous. We went to bed. I got the right room this time, but I'd been walking down the hallway thinking about the big bed, so that was hardly surprising. In the room neither girl mentioned the new clothes, which amazed me. Hopefully they realized that I'd reached my limit on that topic. The girls did something with clothes much more to my liking, they took theirs off. I am happy to report that the new bed worked very well, it was my brain that let us down. I did Julia first, as she tends to be more than a little noisy, so it's best to 'get her out of the way' - to put it very romantically - before the rest of the suburb are trying to get to sleep. Carol sitting on Julia's face is a pretty good muffle too. It was Carol's turn next. Unfortunately that required a rubber, which shit-for-brains me didn't have. Nor did the girls. I was fucked (me, not Carol). I was also EXTREMELY apologetic to Carol. I NOW had a very clear memory of Julia telling me to load up my wallet and billfold with condoms; I just hadn't remembered it at a useful time, like when I was standing next to bedside drawer that contained over two hundred rubbers just begging to be used. Neither Carol nor I were in the mood to screw without one. Neither of us even mentioned the possibility. Carol said that she could do without sex, or orally would be fine. But, as fun as all those activities are, they weren't acceptable to me. I really wanted to screw her properly. It'd been FAR too long and this was our new bed! I wanted to celebrate. I thought of asking Dad if he had any. He might get in BIG trouble with Mom if he did, but I thought the chance of him having any was so unlikely it wasn't worth asking. The only other alternative required getting up and going for a drive to a store, but the girls weren't happy with that idea. Nor was I, to tell the truth. I used every part of my body that I could to make Carol happy, except the one 'little' (in the grand scheme of things) bit that I most wanted to use. I insisted Carol was sleeping with me at Julia's tomorrow night, so I could make good, over and over again, for as long as she wanted. After we'd finished and were relaxing, Julia told Carol her little speech about how our three-way marriage keeps creating unexpected benefits, particularly that Julia feels much securer in her relationship with me because Carol will keep it safe. Julia said it very well and emphasized the enormous emotional benefit Carol was providing her. There were many expressions of love, appreciation and happiness. The hankies got a serious workout. We all said quite a lot to each other, just before falling asleep, about how much our marriage meant to each of us. Especially about how much each of us benefited from the others, in all six directions (each of us benefiting from the other two). Any one of us could choose any one of those six and describe why it was working. It was a superb marriage. I tried to put Carol into the middle when we were about to go to sleep, in compensation for my thoughtlessness preventing me showing physical appreciation earlier and because Julia and Carol were feeling very huggy because of Julia's nice sentiments, but I was informed "The middle is the Lord's place. You are the central reason all of us have a relationship, so you go in the center." It was hard to argue with Euclidean logic like that. Just as I was about to fall asleep, I thought about not having to get up early for study. I'd gotten an hour too little sleep last night, so would presumably sleep longer tonight, but I'd still be waking earlier than other people, and wondered what to do with myself. Then I remembered that I'd intended to ask Donna to have a run with me in the morning, but I'd forgotten. It was too late to ask her now. I'd messed up with BOTH of my sisters - idiot! Sometimes - quite frequently - I wished I really was a genius. I decided to sleep as long as my body wanted, as per Vanessa's idea, and to see what time I woke, and worry what to do then. I went to sleep while I was still kicking myself. ------- Part 6: The Incredibly Important Discovery of Blobs ------- Chapter 104: Let There Be Light Sunday, April 24, 2005 We'd gone to sleep about 11:30, and I woke at 4 o'clock, so about four and half hours sleep. My first problem was figuring out what to do for three or so hours. Get a snack obviously, but what to do after that? Schoolwork, I decided. My basic study plan had been to do my college work in the wee small hours and school stuff in the afternoons. Unfortunately (with tongue firmly in cheek, and elsewhere) Julia had recently been 'making' me have sex every afternoon. Doing two grades at once means a lot of material that needs to be worked through. I do most of it during class because I can split my attention so easily, but some of it needs to be done at home. I had a few days' worth of accumulated work now, so I decided to carry it down to the living room to work on it there. The next problem was the total absence of light; it was PITCH black in here. So dark I couldn't tell whether my eyes were open or not. There was no light at all coming in through the window because Mom or Dad had sealed the drapes for security reasons, as we didn't want any neighborhood Peeping Tom seeing Carol and me in the same bedroom. Even if we weren't having sex, just our being in the same bed would be bad enough. If there were any Peepers in the neighborhood, it was very easy to imagine them trying to catch a glimpse of Carol, so they posed a significant danger. On the wall above where the two single beds used to be are two small lights, with light switches just under them. We'd had them on last night, but I hadn't paid enough attention to the switches' locations relative to the bed to be able to easily find them now. I didn't want to get up in the dark either, for several reasons: there was stuff scattered around the floor, I was in a room I was not used to navigating in the dark, and I needed light to find my 11th grade notes. I always center myself the moment I wake, so I knew from proximity that the girls were asleep, and I didn't want to wake them with my stumbling around. Nor did I want to break my neck stumbling over a bag of clothes. My total lack of genius causing me to forget the rubbers for Carol last night meant I was going to let her sleep undisturbed, so I thought about climbing out of the bed over Julia. The trouble was that she was on my left, which took me away from the door, making it even harder and more perilous (there was quite a lot of stuff on the floor) for me to find my way. I decided to make the necessary effort to try to find a light switch for one of the small 'bedside' lights (actually they're above the bed, rather than beside it, but you get the idea). I knew the switches were immediately below the lights, so I tried to visualize where the lights had been relative to my being in the middle of the bed last night. I closed my eyes to help me visualize, which amused me since it was pitch black. At the same time the visualization recalled the memory of where the light was coming from last night, I felt a mental twitch very similar to the feeling I get when I create a TK-point. I opened my eyes in surprise, and there was light! I momentarily thought the bedside light had come on, but I could see the real light a few inches away from a little floating blob of light. The new blob MUST be my creation! I was sure it was, because I could sense it in my mind, the same way I can sense where my TK-fingertips are. WOW! In the same way as I could tell which one of my minds 'owned' TK-fingertips, I could tell that #2 owned the blob. It was about the same size as the real lightbulb, but floating a few inches out from the wall, unconnected to anything. In terms of my being on target for knowing where the real light was, I wasn't very good. My light ball was ten inches to the side of the real light, a little too far away from the wall, and too low by about two feet, the latter deviation probably because I'd visualized where it was when I'd been on my hands and knees on the bed, rather than lying flat as I was now. Appalling inaccuracy aside, this was otherwise AWESOME! #4: #2: Moving the blob of light was as easy as TK-fingertips. When they aren't carrying anything, TK-fingertips can move as fast as my eyeballs can track, and I quickly found out that so could this, so the light was probably massless. Which I guess made some sort of sense because photons are massless (sort of, but that statement is accurate enough in this situation). It was reasonable of me to think that I was moving photons around rather than an emitting device - which would have mass - because the blob of light was transparent and I could see the wall through it. It seemed to be made of NOTHING except glowing air, so I appeared to be creating light out of nothing, similar to how I create physical force out of nothing with my TK, and I can run without using any of my own energy, so therefore must be obtaining energy out of nothing. "Out of nothing" was presumably from ki in some way, but God knows how, because I sure as heck didn't. I had a thought that the size of the blob being the same as the real lightbulb was the result of my visualization, and I knew my TK-fingertips could change size, so I tried increasing the size of this. I was immediately successful. Surprisingly, its output didn't increase with its size. The blob's maximum diameter was about six feet. Next I shrunk it to find its minimum size, if any. I was again surprised when, once the blob was very small, making it yet smaller did reduce its output. It got smaller and dimmer until it was barely visible. It might have been possible to get it smaller yet, but I wasn't quite ready to risk it 'going out' on me. For the lack of a better default size, I returned it to the original size, which also returned it to its original output level. Then I tried to make it brighter without changing its size, which was immediately successful. I cranked up the brightness until I worried about waking the girls. I moved the blob down to the end of the bed and held the sheet up so it was between their faces and the blob, blocking the light from shining directly on their eyes. I resumed turning up the blob's output. It maxed out at what seemed to me to be the equivalent of a couple dozen bedside lightbulbs' worth. I made it larger and then tried to make it yet brighter, but the output didn't change. While still at its maximum output, I shrunk it. This time it started dimming while it was considerably larger than the last time it'd dimmed. The above brightness comparisons were hard to measure because eyes adapt to brighter lights by narrowing their pupils to equalize the light input to the eyes, but they do it slowly enough that I thought the above description to be reasonably accurate. As best I could judge, the blobs had quite a decent maximum output level, except that very small blobs - below half an inch in diameter - had their maximum reduced, presumably because they (or I?) couldn't output the full amount inside a tiny volume because it would've required too high an energy density. I tried changing the shape. A six-foot glowing blob, if narrowed, would make an AWESOME ghost! Unfortunately I had very little shape control, about as little as I could change the shape of TK-fingertips. All I could do was 'stretch' the sphere so the longest axis was about 25% longer than the shortest. I could also 'square' the whole thing a little, but it was still as close to spherical as made no real difference. I tried repeating these shape changes with a few different starting sizes and brightnesses, but the results were the same, so no luck with that. I remembered the feeling of the first creation, and tried again. And then there were two! Piece of cake. Some more playing around led me to judge that each of my minds could create a total output of light, whether it was one or more blobs didn't matter, just the brightness. Different blobs could be different sizes, as could TK-fingertips. There was a maximum number of blobs, the same number as for my TK-fingertips, four per mind. One mind has to be centered, so twelve in total. Canceling a light blob was almost identical to canceling a fingertip, simply a relaxing of the concentration required to keep it active. Now that I was confident of being able to create them, I did a test I'd delayed: I dimmed a blob all the way down to zero output. It was totally invisible, but still existed because I could proximity sense it. I turned it up, and that worked fine. [By the way, usually a few times a day we would practice remaining centered but letting the mind that was on duty participate (what we called "Active Centering"), rather than ignoring everything ("Inactive Centering"). We were getting better at holding active center for longer, depending on the amount of distraction going on at the time, but the improvement was slow. With Active Centering we could create a maximum of sixteen blobs - we briefly tested that now.] The blobs radiated light in all directions equally, and I couldn't get that to change. I suddenly remembered that lightbulbs also produce heat, so maybe these blobs do too. I canceled all but one blob, which I moved near my outstretched hand. I couldn't feel any heat. I VERY cautiously moved my hand slowly toward contact, not feeling heat at any stage. Just before I made contact, I had the smart idea of poking it with a TK-fingertip instead, in case it 'ate' whatever touched it. I had no problem creating a TK-fingertip, nor in moving it into contact. In fact, right through contact, with the fingertip never feeling anything. Nor was there any visual or audible change. I moved the fingertip around, into and through the blob, but there was no interaction. I canceled the TK-fingertip and went back to using my own. My real fingertip felt absolutely nothing new as it made contact. I moved my finger even farther into the blob, still feeling nothing. As far as my finger could tell, the light blob wasn't there. All that was happening was that my finger was well lit, just like being next to a lightbulb but without any heat. The blobs appeared to be pure light. I moved my hand into the blob, and there was no sensation at all. I held my hand stationary, and moved the blob completely through it. My hand might as well not have been there. I made the blob about an eighth of an inch in diameter. I moved it through my hand, and saw my skin start to glow as it was about to come out. THAT was freaky! In my experimentation soon after I'd discovered TK-fingertips, I'd learned they couldn't operate in areas that I couldn't see, but light blobs seemed different. There were obvious similarities between blobs and TK-fingertips, but they were certainly different in being able to pass through my body! I had a feeling fingertips and light blobs were somehow different manifestations of the same thing, differing only in what form of energy they were: mechanical force versus light. Rather than moving a blob through my hand, I tried creating one inside my hand, close enough to the surface for it to shine through. It was easy. I'd pretty much confirmed that blobs were ONLY light. Certainly no physical presence, as the apparently massless TK-fingertips had. Can I have twelve fingertips AND twelve light blobs, or twelve in total? In less time than it took you to read that question, I found the answer was: twelve in total. That was more evidence that they're related in some way. They both appeared in my proximity sense, so they were presumably ki related too, whatever ki is. If I can create light energy, can I create heat energy? I closed my eyes and visualized a GENTLE heat-radiating blob in front of my very outstretched hand, ready to be rapidly pulled back should the heat be too hot. I imagined what a candle would feel like from a couple of inches away. I imagined the source as a sphere, as that seemed most likely to be correct. I felt something happen mentally, and felt a tiny amount of warmth. It was as easy to create as a TK-fingertip or light blob. In fact, it was almost identical to creating a light blob, but it was a LOT harder to experiment with as it was invisible. I had to create a light blob to check the heat blob's lack of visibility, which confirmed that it didn't have any. Then I carefully moved my hand around to check that the size and location of the heat blob in my proximity sense correlated with reality. I tried moving the heat blob. That was as easy as expected. No way was I going to pass this one through my hand though! I created a second one, and felt the heat radiate onto my hand from two directions. I canceled one of them. I can't accidentally leave a heat blob 'lying around', as they all take a little concentration to maintain, but I'd much rather play safe with heat by canceling them when not immediately needed. I tried slowly increasing the heat output. It didn't increase by much before it reached its maximum, which was something that I almost felt good about. Intellectually speaking, the greater the range of my ability the better, but not being able to accidentally burn down the house was emotionally appealing. Then I wondered how hot it'd be closer to the source. I floated the heat blob toward my hand. I accidentally did it FAR too fast for my hand's liking - yikes! I didn't burn myself, but I gave myself a fright before I canceled the blob. Too late I realized that the heat hitting my hand would rise on an inverse square function; in other words, QUICKLY. I recreated a maximum output heat blob and tried again, moving my hand cautiously closer. It started getting uncomfortably hot, but only when I was pretty close. Imagining how hot it would have been if I'd brought it into contact, I decided that it probably wouldn't set fire to paper. That experiment could wait for a somewhat safer setup than lying in bed with two sleeping girls. [[Incandescent bulbs (the traditional household lightbulb) are about 5% efficient, i.e., 5% of the power input is converted to light, with 95% going to heat (which is hardly ideal in a LIGHT bulb!). My light output maxed out at 20 to 30 bulbs' worth of light. So my heat max was about 1 to 1.5 times as much heat as a single bulb produced, that being the same amount of energy. I was using the bedside light as my standard, so a blob's heat output was probably less than that emitted by one normal-sized lightbulb. It was puny, but so was TK.]] There was only one more thing I wanted to try with heat, which was to try to create a blob that was both a light blob AND a heat blob. What came into existence was a light blob that did not radiate any heat at all. I tried again with the light output very dim, and the heat output quite high. I just got a dim light blob. When I adjust a tunable parameter (e.g., the size of a blob) I simply visualized it changing in the desired direction. To be incorrectly anthropomorphic, I don't just tell a blob "get bigger", because it doesn't know how much bigger to get. I have to instruct it more specifically. It's very easy, requiring neither intense concentration nor much imagination. As easy as thinking, "Double in diameter," although thinking precisely that wouldn't work because I have to imagine my proximity 'image' of the blob changing. Usually I visualize these changes occurring as a rapid transition, such as the blob growing from the original to the target size in whatever time period I visualize it occurring in, probably less than half a second. As I got more comfortable with blobs, I stopped using these transitions, instead just imagining the final size (or other parameter) that I wanted. As far as I could tell, the blob would change instantly from the 'before' to the 'after' configuration, regardless of what tunable parameter was changing (e.g., size, brightness, heat). All of which is a long-winded way of saying that if I visualize changes to a blob's or fingertip's tunable parameter, then it happens. Why reality does what any of my minds visualizes, in these specific ways, I have NO IDEA, but it does. [[I know now, and it will become apparent later.]] I remembered from Physics that heat and light are the same thing, with heat (I think just radiant heat) simply being light of a different frequency, called infrared light. Heat is on the non-visible side of red, so I tried visualizing the light from a light blob transitioning from the yellow they all get created at (much the same color as the wall light in this room), toward red. The blob immediately got redder. Cool (actually, it was scientifically more accurate to say "Warmer"). I quickly tried other colors: green, blue, orange. The blob matched me. I visualized white, and it ignored me ("Bad Blob!"). I wasn't surprised though, as it appeared that blobs can only radiate a single frequency and white light is a combination of frequencies. Red, green and blue is what we mostly use to create white light, although other combinations work too. I went back to red, then tried shifting it toward the infrared. I couldn't "visualize" that, as infrared is invisible, but that was a non-problem because I've used the word "visualize" here when I could have equally used "imagine" or "intend". Anyway, I INTENDED the light blob to shift redward and to keep going, and I soon felt some warmth coming from it. That was enough for me, so I canceled it. I knew infrared was next to red, but I also knew there were other frequencies somewhere around that I wanted NOTHING to do with, such as microwave, X-rays, and Gamma rays. NO THANKS! I could hurt my hand with heat, so I VERY MUCH didn't want bombard my body with that much microwave or X-ray radiation. I knew almost nothing about that stuff; just enough to be afraid of it. Presumably I could even create TV Blobs, by radiating on a frequency used for TV. They'd just be a fixed frequency (not an actual program, so my own Playboy Channel wasn't possible, unfortunately. Although probably fortunately, if #4 was in charge of a 'broadcast'). I didn't know nearly enough about how TV was broadcast to know what effect having a single frequency blob transmitting near a TV antenna would do to its reception. I wasn't going to experiment either, because I was afraid of radiating strange frequencies. I had answered my question about why I couldn't create a combined light and heat blob. The blobs took requests, but only performed one frequency at a time, thank you. #4: No one else wondered that, so #4 just laughed. I created three light blobs: red, green and blue, and slid them together. Hey presto! White light. It had a slight bluish tinge, presumably because I didn't have the frequencies correct, but I turned down the brightness of the blue light a little, and the white improved in purity. After a little playing around, I had what seemed a very good white, so I separated the three blobs and tried to memorize their look. I canceled them, recreated them, and merged them again. A nice white light resulted, good. I canceled them again, then tried creating all three at the same location. I can't do that with fingertips, but it was just as easy as usual with light blobs. It looked like I'd created a white light blob. I should be able to create a combined light and heat blob. I tried it, and it worked fine. That'd be a good way to mark where a heat blob was, in case I used heat blobs in the future when Julia and Carol were moving around the room. #4: #2: #4: #3: #4: We called #1 off duty, and #2 went on, as we took #1 through what we'd learned. [The mind that's on duty tries to ignore everything that's going on, but he does have some idea because it's not as if we block the sensory input to our brain. (Because of the improved control we have over our body, we might be able to block the senses, but they feed into our brain which we share, so we thought it'd leave all of our minds blind, deaf, etc. We were good enough at retaining center that we didn't need to experiment with blinding ourself.) The on-duty mind could be accurately described as "non-thinking". Things would happen to our body and the other three minds, but the mind on duty would stay as unthinking as possible. It's very hard but we get a LOT of practice, and we rotate about every hour so it's not too bad. So #1 had sort of seen what we were doing, but in such a way that he ignored it at the time. Having seen it once, it was reasonably quick and easy to take him through the highlights. One reason the duty mind can maintain center without getting distracted is because he knows he'll be brought up to date soon.] Once #1 was up to date, #3: First we checked the baseline. We closed our eyes and created a TK-point a few inches in front of our face. We didn't even have to open our eyes, not that there was anything to see even if there had been any light; TK-fingertips being invisible. Then we repeated the experiment, but with the TK-point being created five feet in front of our face. That also worked. It shouldn't have, according to our prior experiences, but it had. We made doubly sure we weren't deluding ourself by creating a light blob to witness our using the TK-fingertip to nudge something across the room. Next we tried creating a new TK-point outside of our proximity range, and inside the closet. That failed. Our ability to create TK-points outside our proximity range had improved somewhat, but not totally. We did some more experimentation with fingertips, and confirmed that the line of sight restriction was now less restrictive, both within and beyond my proximity range. Beyond my proximity range I used to have an almost total line-of-sight restriction (not quite totally, because inside the front hem of a skirt was doable). Previously, virtually any location I couldn't see was deadly for TK-fingertips, but now that was much less the case. If I had a very good idea where the out-of-sight location was, then I could create a fingertip there or move a fingertip through that area without it canceling on me. But I still couldn't achieve my dream of sending some fingertips to the kitchen to get me a cookie. Within my proximity range, the previously partial line-of-sight restriction seemed to have gone away entirely. I could create or send fingertips anywhere within my proximity range and they wouldn't cancel. Under the bedclothes and under the bed both worked, whereas they wouldn't have before. As far as I could determine now, fingertips continued to exist anywhere at all within my proximity range, except the usual restriction that they couldn't overlap with matter. I decided the improvement was because I'd gotten better at using my proximity sense, which I guess wasn't surprising given that I use it twenty hours a day. That explanation also explains the improvement beyond my three-foot proximity range, because ki-effects - which now included light blobs - do appear in that sense beyond three feet. I didn't know how I could sense things beyond that sense's range, but I could. My proximity sense is like a 3D radar screen, with a 500-foot range, that being the maximum distance I can sense and use my ki-effects. From the center of the screen, for three feet in all directions from my center, my proximity sense picks up all ki, whether from me or from someone else. Beyond three feet I can only sense my own special ki-effects (TK-points and now blobs, but not my body's own ki). It's as if those special ki-effects radiate so much of their own ki that they appear on my screen, despite my own internal radar station not having enough transmission power to pick up anything beyond three feet. [[The 3D radar screen is a good metaphor to describe what I sense, but it explains the range issue poorly because the reality is the other way around. Proximity picks up my and other people's ki when they are near me because that ki is being radiated. The far effects - a remote TK-fingertip for example - radiate no ki at all. Far effects are detectable because they don't transmit anything through normal space. They send their messages directly to my brain, a process that includes the effect of their telling my proximity sense, "Yoo hoo, I'm over here."]] #4: #2: #2: #3: #2: Even though I was eager to demonstrate my new ability to my wives, I decided to wait, in part because I did have a heap of studying to do. So now I had to climb out of bed. I was tempted to light my way with a dim blob, as it'd be easier on Julia's eyes if my clambering woke her. I could put it down at floor level, out of her direct sight, and she'd probably be too tired to notice something funny was going on. "Probably" was the key word though. I didn't want to risk it. To see whether I could, I created some TK-fingertips in the dark, then ran them along the wall until I felt the light switch. I had a good idea where it was now, but it was still a good test. I turned it on, then crab-climbed over top of Julia. Both girls were still asleep (all my experimentation had been totally silent, and I'd shielded the girls' eyes reasonably well during the brief periods when the room had got fairly bright. Julia roused a little, mumbled, rolled over and hugged my arm mid-crab, which was inconvenient. I managed to stand on the floor and disentangle her hands from my arm. I started dressing. It'd be cold in the living room, and my heat blobs were far too weak to warm my whole body. #2: #4: Princess was literally a spoiled little bitch, one of the neighborhood dogs. A yappy, nuisance of a poodle. #2: #3: #2: #4: #2: #4: That seemed a good place to stop the conversation, until our next encounter with Princess. I picked up everything I needed, and carefully picked my way through the shopping debris on the floor, heading out the bedroom door. I paused there to use TK to flick the light switch off. A very useful thing, TK is. With its being easier to use now, I'll be able to use it more effectively during anal sex. I could find my way down the dark hallway easily. I had a brief thought of using a dim blob, but anyone looking in - unlikely as that was - would've been amazed as blobs look nothing like a flashlight. It wasn't worth the risk. Fortunately I knew my way to the kitchen. There I dropped my stuff and manually switched on the lights. Checking the fridge was the first priority, as there's always good stuff in there. While transferring the good stuff into me, I noticed a roll of paper towels. After a few more bites, I ripped of a small amount of paper and stuck it onto the end of a fork. I created a small, warm heat blob in the middle of the sink and ramped up the heat, ready to cancel it if it caused any problems. It did not, and soon the blob was at its maximum heat output. It wasn't anywhere near hot enough to have any effect on the metal of the sink, but I played safe by not delaying. I moved the fork until the paper contacted the blob. I expected the paper to instantly burst into flame, but it didn't. It browned very slightly, but that was all. I moved my free hand closer to the blob to feel the heat for myself to make sure it was working properly as I had no direct feedback from the blob about how hot it was, which was a nuisance. My hand quickly let me know that the blob was working fine. #2: #4: #3: #2: (Our house has a thermostat that heats up the house to 55 degrees, if necessary. We'd much prefer at least 60 degrees, but that costs quite a lot more.) #4: #3: [It took several days before I had a chance to experiment on Princess. I covered her with a poodle-sized heat blob and slowly ramped up the output. She didn't seem to notice, being too busy running around yapping at me. A max output heat blob was hot to my hand when it was small and the hand was very close (a small blob radiates the same amount of total heat as a big one, but my hand can get much closer to the total volume, so intercepts a much larger proportion of the output). A Mark-sized blob would be barely warmer than ambient, but a poodle-sized one should have been noticeably warm. I guess yapping took priority. Encouraged by Princess's brain not exploding, or other bad effects, I moved my hand into a large heat blob. It felt warm, and that was the only result. I couldn't see any point in experimenting further - there was no point in sticking my head in one, for example - so I left it at that.] I studied until 7am, when I went back to wake my two girls, to give them a little surprise. I needed to wake the girls and talk with them before I showed them anything new, so I turned on the room's main lights. I'd turn them off again before my demonstration, as the light blobs would be so much more impressive in the dark. The two girls were cuddling in their sleep, which I paused to admire for a few seconds, thereby proving that this neighborhood does have at least one Peeping Tom. I shook them awake, finishing off the job with some kisses for each. I sat on the end of the bed facing them. After the usual morning pleasantries, I said, "I've got something pretty cool to show you. I've discovered a new ability. Probably an aspect of my TK, although I haven't worked out how, and certainly don't understand it." #4: I changed tack, "Remember when I showed each of you my TK?" They did. Julia adding, "You magically lifted my skirt and rubbed my pussy. You don't think I'd forget that do you?" "Me neither," added Carol. #4: "Well this is like that. It's a bit freaky, so don't scream or anything, okay? I don't want alarm the whole house. All this is TOTALLY under my control, just like TK is under my control, okay?" I had their interest now. "Sit up in bed so you'll get a good view. I'm going to turn the light off in a few seconds, which will make it very dark in here. Then after a few seconds you'll see it. Don't scream, okay?" I waited until they were ready, then I flicked the light switch off with my TK. The girls had seen that sort of trick many times, so it's no big deal, although it's great for a lazy guy like me. I moved my hands so they were cupped in front of me, as if I was holding a soccer ball. In fantasy novels this is often how the magician creates a fire ball, and it seemed a good idea to copy it, mainly so the girls could see that I was apparently holding it, and therefore in control. I created a totally dim (zero light output), white blob (which means red, green and blue overlaid blobs), where the center of the soccer ball would be, but only an inch in diameter. I slowly increased the three brightnesses until the girls gasped, "Wow! You're doing that?" from Julia. | "Oh my!" from Carol. I made it a little brighter, to make sure they could see it clearly. "Keep your eyes on it." Silly really, as it was the only source of light in the room and it wasn't bright enough yet to illuminate much beyond my hands, so there really wasn't anything else for them to look at. Plus they were staring at it in wonder anyway. I ramped up the brightness steadily and quite rapidly, so in about five seconds I could see them clearly. They were wide-eyed and open-mouthed. It was now about half as bright as a good-sized lightbulb. They looked fine, so I increased it to be as bright as the main light of this room would be. "I'm going to make it larger now." I waited a second, then expanded it. When it was soccer ball-sized, I stopped its growth, asking. "Pretty cool, huh?" "Oh my God Yes! You're incredible," stated Carol. Julia was about to add her opinion, but I got in first with, "Wait. There's more." I floated the blob up to my left, stopping it just over my head height, a few feet to the side and a little ahead of me. The girls' eyes tracked it like they were glued to it. When it stopped they looked back at me. I held up two fingers, "Here comes the second one." I put my hands back into their fake creation position, and created a second blob (actually numbers 4, 5 and 6 superimposed). I created it instantly, to look exactly as the first blob now looked. No slow growth for this one. Both girls gasped at the suddenness of it. I floated it up to the other side of me. I decided to not make any more. I wanted to keep one mind totally free to concentrate on the girls. One mind was on duty, and the other two minds were controlling their white blobs. I could've done more, but it was going to get a little complicated and I hadn't practiced this. I started the blobs orbiting around my head, still above it so they didn't obscure my sight of the girls. It was so impressive that every single one of my wives was rendered speechless. I moved the blobs back to either side of me, then split each of them into the three colors: red blobs went slightly down and toward me, blue blobs up, green blobs down and away from me. I moved them just far enough that they weren't touching. "Wow, PRETTY!" exclaimed Carol. The girls had handled the experience well, but that hadn't stopped me being worried about scaring them, so showing the colors right from the start would've been better, as "pretty" things are too busy being pretty to be scary. (Sure there are dangerous multicolored animals, but you shouldn't bring reality into it when you're thinking about how girls' brains work.) I said, "You know how I can create TK-fingertips anywhere I want and move them around? Well it's the same with these. I'll put them back together because that makes white light which is easier to see with, and then I'll cancel the first one." I did that, and then floated the remaining blob down to between my hands again. I was apparently holding it, so I said, "There's no need for me to hold them. I just thought that looked cool." I took my hands away and the blob stayed there. "I can even do this," I said, as I waved my hand straight through the blob. The girls almost screamed. I'd thought about how to show them that the light blobs were harmless, and I'd wondered about making more of a cautious demonstration but thought that might just build the tension and scare them, so I'd decided to do it so fast that it'd be over with before they knew what had happened. I don't think they appreciated my logic. Both girls got a serious scare and opened their mouths to scream, before their eyes told them that I'd removed my hand and was standing calmly, smiling at them. Before they could start telling me off, I got in with, "It's just light. Literally nothing else except light. And not even very bright light. It's completely harmless, and PRETTY." I canceled the existing blob, then made a succession of small multi-colored blobs which I flew around the room. I used all seven colors, and just let each mind have fun with them, but playing safe by keeping all the blobs well away from the girls. It was also fun making the blobs overlap with each other, as that produced some interesting colors too. I thought of some fun games, so I held my left and right pants' pockets open, and had each of the blobs fly around the room in a follow-the-leader formation, diving into the left pocket, then invisibly through my hips and out the right pocket. The girls clapped. My next idea was skywriting. Twelve blobs weren't enough to do a whole message, but it was enough for one letter at a time. I said, "Read the letters." For the letter "I", I popped three small, yellow blobs into existence across the top, six as the vertical bar, and three across the bottom. I displayed it for a second then canceled them. I wanted to do a heart, but worried that it might not be recognizable as six blobs per side didn't give much definition to the shape, so I spelled it out one letter after another "L - O - V - E - U." I was going to put "2" on the end, but they both clapped so much after the "U" that it ruined the moment for that. They were happy without it. I had to flick the room's light on for my next trick, so they could see me blow them a kiss. From the blow twelve little red blobs blew off my hand toward them. I made them spiral around rather than fly directly toward the girls in case that was too scary. I had them grow in size somewhat too, and then disappear about halfway to the girls so they wouldn't get worried about being touched. Then I coughed a couple of times, saying, "I think I've got a frog in my mouth." Then coughed out a bright green blob, which fell to the floor. I said, "Ribbit," but I don't think they were fooled. I made the 'frog' hop across the room, growing bigger the whole time, until it was about three feet tall, then I said, "Don't worry about the big, scary frog ladies. My trusty six-shooter will save you." I drew my trusty index finger, cocked my thumb, aimed carefully, said "Bang", and shot a small red blob out of the end of my finger. "Bang, bang" as two more slow bullets made their way to the "big scary frog." When the first 'bullet' hit it, I made the green blob take off up into the air and zigzagging across the room, getting smaller as it went, while I made the long, drawn out raspberry sound that a balloon makes when it's released without being tied shut. I made the bullets chase it, and they finally caught it when it was about a quarter of its originally size and high up in the center of the room. The tricky bullets attacked from two sides at once, and the poor frog/balloon had no chance. It went, "Ahhhhrrr," (well, I did, but the girls appreciated it), and it spiraled down to the floor, in agony, where it disappeared. I thought of making twelve yellow blobs and have them spin over my head as a halo. I thought it'd be a reasonably effective looking halo, but I decided against it. I feared it might remind the girls that if other people saw this stuff, then all sorts of bad things could happen. God knows what would happen if I walked into a church during a Sunday service with a halo revolving over my head! Or walked up to the White House and asked to talk with Bush (I thought it unlikely that the Secret Service had a plan for what to do in that circumstance). Or walked into the Vatican and told the Pope, "You really should allow the use of condoms." Maybe I'd add, "I buy them twenty dozen at a time to use on all the girls my wives make me have sex with, so there's no reason the Church shouldn't encourage their use." Amusing myself with fantasies that, realistically, would get me locked up forever, wasn't what I should be doing. Both girls seemed not only over their fears, but having a great time. There was lots of laughter and clapping, which had to be a good sign. I asked, "Who wants to touch one?" That sobered them pretty damned fast, but it didn't take Julia long. She quickly declared, "I will!" Carol was still hesitating, and Julia turned to her, saying, "Mark is not going to hurt us." That reason convinced Carol, who held her hand out, ready. Julia copied Carol. I hammed it up, pretending to pop two red blobs out of my heart. I floated them across the room slowly, expanding them to about a foot in diameter, saying, "I'll stop them when they get close to you, and you can poke them when you're ready." Both girls looked determined as their blobs approached. Carol cheated by quickly jabbing into and out of hers before it'd stopped at its destination. Her arm didn't fall off, or any of the other things she seemed to fear. In fact, she felt nothing, so with much more curiosity she probed it again. Julia had been watching her, and Carol said to Julia, "Nothing. I can't feel a thing." Carol put her hand into the blob, and waved it around inside it. "I still can't feel a thing." Julia put her hand into her one. She might've been trusting, but she still managed to look relieved when nothing happened. The girls played around for about a minute, before they got bored. I said, "It's just light. That's all. Entertaining, but not much use for anything. We won't need lights in the bedroom anymore, so I guess that'll save a few dollars of electricity a year." The girls started asking questions, but I said, "Hang on. There are still two more things I want to show you. Questions after that, so I can cuddle in bed while we talk. I'm going to make a bright, little blob - I call them "blobs", by the way - then pass it through my hand. I'll need to sit near you for this." I moved closer, to sit on the bed, I created a very small, bright white blob, then flicked the room's light off. I held my hand open and level, and flew the blob under my hand, then up into it. As the blob got closer to the surface of my skin, we could start to see the light shining through my skin, with the bone shadows clearly visible. "Eww, yuck," said Carol. Julia agreed. I said, "Our flesh and skin is a little translucent, if the light is bright and close to the surface. Just for the fun of it, I want to try something." I moved the blob out of my hand, and enlarged it to about half the size of my head. I moved it to be immediately behind my head. "I'm going to move it into my head and forward. As I move the blob forward enough it'll start shining through. I can't see what I look like, so tell me when to stop." I moved the blob into my head, and I was very happy not to feel anything. I knew I wouldn't, but still felt happy to have that confirmed. Before it got dark the girls didn't look happy, but it was now too dark for me to smile at them. #1: #3: #1: #4: Soon, as I continued moving the blob forward, the girls gasped. I started saying, "Tell me when to stop it," but didn't get very far because opening my mouth let out a lot more light. I could see both girls' faces, and they looked freaked, so I moved the blob up out of my head, to illuminate the room. "Scary?" I asked. "Horrible." | "Disgusting." "Excellent. Just the look I was going for. I'm hoping that, come Halloween, I can REALLY clean up on the Trick or Treat circuit." They weren't over their horror and disgust (respectively), but I did get some chuckles. "I know my face is symmetric, but my head's not a perfect sphere so I should do that with several different small blobs: two for the eyes, one for the mouth, maybe two for the nostrils. I could even use colors, so the eyes could be red, the nostrils green, the mouth orange. I'll need to practice that in the mirror to get it right. Cool, eh?" Girls are sissies. After they expressed their sissy opinions, I said, "I've got one more thing I'm going to show you that I can do with the blobs. It's not dangerous, but it could hurt you a little, so we need to be a little more careful. Hold a hand up each, palm out." Which they did. "I don't know how much you know about physics, but visible light is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Right next to the color red is infrared, which is heat. What I am going to do is create a blob that gives out some heat. Not much, just enough to feel warm." I kept a white blob to the side to illuminate the room, and created two superimposed blobs in front of the girls, one a dark red light blob, the other a slightly warm heat blob. "Tell me when you feel some warmth." I dialed up the output, until both girls reported feeling it. "I call that a 'Heat Blob', because it's a blob that gives out heat. Imaginative, eh? The blobs we had fun with earlier I call 'Light Blobs', because they give out light that we can see. You can tell I'm a genius. What you're looking at looks like one blob, but it's actually two blobs in the same place: a heat blob that's invisible because it's radiating heat rather than light, and a dark red light blob, which I use to show where a heat blob is. -- "I can make heat blobs have different temperatures, just like I can make light blobs brighter or dimmer. The hottest I can make is similar to a candle, so it's fairly pathetic. But to warn you, if you see a light blob that dark red color, it means there's a heat blob in the same place and you shouldn't stick your hand into it or you might get a nasty surprise before you snatch it back. Can you remember that color? I call it 'dark red' but I'm only a male, so what do I know." Both girls assured me that they could easily remember that color. Apparently Julia had a dress in a very similar shade, which no doubt had an entirely different name for its color, but just so long as the girls were happy. I decided not to mention setting fire to paper, or microwaves and X-rays, instead saying, "That ends this morning's demonstration of pretty blobs. Your lecturer will take questions once he's naked, in bed, and getting some good quality cuddles from his very impressed audience." My audience was certainly impressed, and welcomed me with open arms. Both Julia and Carol raved over this new ability. One of Julia's comments can serve as a summary of all they said, "Of all the amazing abilities you've shown me, that's got to be the most impressive. It is unbelievable, impossible, magic, blah, blah..." (you get the idea). I settled in between them, saying, "I agreed it LOOKS impressive, but I haven't thought of a real use yet. I can use a white or bright yellow colored blob instead of the room's light when I wake up in the morning, which is SLIGHTLY more convenient, but hardly a big deal. And the only use I can think of for heat blobs is to keep our feet warm on a cold day. I know light blobs are safe, but I'm not totally sure about heat blobs yet, so I'm going to experiment on Princess." Julia didn't know what I meant by that, but Carol's sudden laughter showed that she did. I explained to Julia, "Princess is an annoying nuisance of a yapping poodle a few doors down the street. Everyone hates it. I'm almost hoping my experiments fail, but all that's likely to happen is that I make the little bitch feel comfortably warm." After they laughed I said, "If either of you can think of a good use for blobs, please let me know. Apart from getting a job as a professional magician, I can't think of anything." We discussed it for a bit, and I described the ability and its constraints more accurately, but no one had a good idea. I said that the "feet warming" joke might be usable over the whole body, but unless one of us was dying of hypothermia it wasn't worth much, merely saving us getting up and putting on something warmer. The girls seemed very comfortable with my ability, so I had a slight change of mind, telling them, "I don't know, but blobs might be able to radiate energy at frequencies other than visible light and infrared. But some of those waves aren't healthy so I don't want to go there. I don't have any way of working with such radiation, as I can't see it, feel it, measure it, or anything." Neither girl knew much about science, so I explained what "radiate energy at frequencies" meant, and that I was talking about stuff such as microwaves and X-rays. They knew enough about those to be happy with my decision not to experiment with them. I wouldn't know how to 'dial in' a blob to those frequencies anyway. Visible light and heat I could imagine, and I could probably find ultraviolet, but I have no idea about every other frequency. The girls got over their excitement about the wonderful looking, but boringly useless blobs, and we started talking about other things. Their conversation turned to the more important topic of sorting out my side of the closet so my new clothes could fit, which clearly meant that it was time for my breakfast. They had some good reasons why I had to stay and help them sort out my clothes, but their reasons weren't as compelling as breakfast. They weren't even as compelling as going to the dentist. "As much as I would NOT like to stay here and sort out my clothes, I'm going to get breakfast. Are there any wives here who love their Lord more than clothes?" I like to think that their difficulty in answering that question was a tease. Eventually they agreed to accompany me to breakfast. As we were dressing, I said, "Don't mention the blobs to anyone, please. They're of no real use and could easily freak people out." [I was half right.] Breakfast passed without problem, after which I left the girls to sort out my closet while I did another few hours of catching up on my schoolwork. I'd done enough by about 10:30, so I called it quits. I had a shower, Julia and Carol VERY carefully selected which of my outfits to wear to best impress the girls who'd be watching me bowl, and we set off for the Williams' home. Donna came along, eager to see a 300 game. At the Williams' we had a little time to kill, so Prof and I went to his study so I could ask my list of questions about the roulette profit split. I asked, "Presuming we win in Vegas, are you going to get the casino to give you one check, made out to you, or lots of checks to cover all of our shares? Because both seem to have problems. One check will cause us to pay gift tax when we split it, and lots of checks will look suspicious because a gambler wouldn't normally do that, would he?" Prof answered, "One check, or more likely one wire transfer. There won't be any gift tax because I'm earning it on behalf of the business. It's acceptable practice for someone to gain income, or incur expenses, in their personal name on behalf of a business. The IRS doesn't have any problem with that. I immediately hand the money over to the business, and it distributes it. I covered that with our accountant, and he says there's no problem." "Okay. With $100,000 as our starting money, rather than the $50,000 we discussed before, how will we do the betting?" "That depends on how good you are at getting the ball into the number we want. If you can only get it somewhere within six pockets or so, then we have to go a lot slower and more carefully. If you can get the right pocket every time, then we can reach our goal in just two bets whether we start with $100,000 or $50,000. The extra money isn't necessary, but it has a number of advantages: it gives our desired profit split more justification; it makes things appear fairer between the two sets of parents, which is always a good idea when money is involved; and it gives us some flexibility if we have to alter our plan if Vegas is different than we expect, say because we have to lose some bets to look more believable. I haven't worried much about this yet as it depends so much on how accurately you can place the ball. Hopefully we'll find that out tonight." "Okay. Looking at the video and still picture you emailed me, I think there's a reasonable chance I'll be able to get the specific number. If not, I should be able to get close to it, maybe one or two to either side." "We'll know more after tonight, so we'll discuss it then." "Okay. I have three more questions, but they're all about the same issue. Which is that I don't think it's fair that no one gets any money out of this except me. The two $1 million emergency funds will hopefully sit untouched for years, so they're no use to either family. Maybe in ten or twenty years we might decide we don't need them and you can start spending your fund, but that's ages away, and until then you're getting nothing, which is unfair. You're risking a LOT of your money, and who knows how knowing me might affect your future. It might all be good news, or there might be trouble. Some of the things you and Vanessa talked about when I revealed my TK to you and my parents were SCARY! There's a real risk, so you should be paid for that. Same for my mom and dad and The Boys too. So I think we should win more, so you can all get reasonable payments. I keep joking to myself about winning an extra mil' or two to pay for Julia's shopping and the like, but I really do think we should win more. Which reminds me that I'd very much like to repay you for all the money your daughter has been spending on Carol and me. Earning extra money should be possible, shouldn't it?" I'd been nervous bringing this issue up. I think because this topic was going to end up putting a monetary value on everybody, and that wasn't a comfortable thing to do. I waited for Prof's answer with some concern. Prof said, "We have a very flexible 'business' here, so we can arrange all sorts of possibilities. What it comes down to is that any money anybody gets effectively comes out of your share. If you win an extra million, then as far as we're concerned, it's your million because it's your ability that's making all this possible. If you want to win some more and give it away, I doubt any of the recipients are going to object, but you're under no obligation to do so." "I think I am. You're risking your $50,000, for example. That's a big risk that you should get something back for it." Prof chuckled, which confused me because it wasn't a joke. He explained, "Vanessa and I joke that your uniqueness has already saved us that $50,000, so if we come back from Vegas with any money at all we'll be ahead." I had no idea how I could have SAVED them $50,000. Every time I turn around they seem to be spending more money on me. Prof explained, "Vanessa and Julia spent years planning Julia's wedding for when she finally met her Mr. Right. I heard enough about it to know that it was going to be very, very expensive. So your three-way ceremony saved me a GREAT DEAL of money, haha." I chuckled along with him, then answered, "I don't doubt that's true, but it's still your money that you're risking, and none of this would happen without so much help from your family, getting such a good ID for example. I'm MORE than happy to earn a bit more and pay it out to the four parents and Andrew and Robert. So when you work out how we do this, please build that in." "That'll be my pleasure, thank you." I didn't bother arguing over the inappropriateness of his thanking me, so that ended our little chat. It took me a few minutes to find Julia and Carol. I eventually met them coming out of our study. They'd been checking out the website that Lily had set up for me. I was interested in seeing it, but Julia said, "We don't want to be late. I'll show you when we get back." I was amused that it was "my" website, but I didn't know its address, had never seen its content, and hadn't even discussed what it'd be used for. ------- Chapter 105: Bowling Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) I drove Donna, Julia and Carol to the bowling alley, arriving about five minutes before noon. Robert followed us in his car, curious to see me play. There was a good turnout of pretty girls waiting for us at the alley: The three 10th grade Liaisons: Lily, Pat, and Laila (with her girlfriend Hannah, and sister Gabriella whom I hadn't met before). Katelin, Linda (Julia's good friend) and Savannah (the attractive Black girl who'd caught my attention with her question, "Is his sister as hot as him?") A goodly number of the girls who'd been in the original fourteen from whom the Liaisons had been picked. And several other classmates of ours. [In total about twenty five girls turned up, most already there when we arrived, but some joined us over the next several minutes. They must not have been exposed to Julia's punctuality training yet.] Julia went to get our shoes while I introduced Carol, Donna and Robert to all the girls. All of whom were definitely - if you'll excuse the arrogance - Mark-worthy. Julia had done a good job choosing whom to invite. All of these girls were well over my minimum standard, although I must admit to not being fussy. The only noteworthy introduction was Carol to Savannah. After the exchange of names I said, "I was looking forward to introducing you two. A few days ago Savannah asked Julia and me whether you were as hot as me. I'll be interested in seeing how well you two get on today. I hope you'll hit it off." Carol was wearing a denim miniskirt and a cut-off top. Neither was very short, but she looked mighty good to me. Carol dresses very nicely every day now, in the clothes Julia bought her, so every day it's a treat for me to see her. I don't know what Savannah looked for in a 'hot' girl, but it was hard to believe she wouldn't find it in Carol. Savannah was less sexily dressed, in tight jeans and a tight yellow T-shirt. She's tall and slim, so the jeans looked very good on her. But more importantly - because I have what would previously have been unbelievably high expectations for what can happen in my life - it was easy to see that she'd also look good with nothing on. While describing how people are dressed, I might as well admit that I'm dressed very embarrassingly. Did you expect otherwise? Fortunately Julia saves my most embarrassing outfits for school, where most people know I'm not gay. For walking around town, Julia lets me dress only half as bad. She was nearly always hanging off my arm, so that stopped many of the nasty anti-gay comments I could've got. [Those that I did get occasionally in the future, Julia had fun responding to. For her, it was yet another advantage from dressing me the way she did.] Savannah said to me, "I'm surprised you remembered that. That was days ago and plenty of other people were yelling questions at you." I remembered it because it made me horny, which I can't publicly admit to getting when my sister is involved. Knowing that everyone listening to us now had heard my "I Love Carol" speeches (except for Robert, Carol and Donna, who knew already), I said, "It caught my attention because I like to hear things that might make Carol happy. She's only just come out, and anything that brings her happiness, and ESPECIALLY that supports her lifestyle choice, is great with me." Savannah said, "Carol, why don't we spend some time talking today, and see how we get on?" Carol answered, "I'd like that." We carried on with the rest of the introductions. At the end of which Julia stood up on a chair and announced, "I want to run a little competition. I'm going to pass around a pen and paper. All the girls here who want to can write down their name and their guess for what score Mark will get. The girl who guesses the closest gets to ask Mark for a favor. Only a short duration favor though; no asking Mark to marry you because that'd disappoint me too much, haha. To be fair, I should tell you that Mark hasn't played a game for a few years, and he wasn't very good back then, getting about 100. But - and it's a BIG but - since then he's become incredibly athletic. Many of you saw him play soccer yesterday and know that he made everyone else on the field look silly. So it's anybody's guess what score he'll get. Sorry, no entries from Liaison girls because you've got better access to Mark already, and no sisters because Mark does anything for you already." Donna called out, "No he doesn't!" I was about to tell her to cool it when Donna added, "He won't do all my homework no matter how hard I ask. I could get A's in every subject and it'd be REALLY easy for him. What a mean brother!" Donna occasionally asks for help if she's stuck, but that's all. She was just pulling my leg. She got a few laughs from the crowd, including from me, and a wink to tell her I got her inside joke. Julia pulled a small notebook and a pen out of her pocket and passed it around, telling the first girl, "Rip off your guess and I'll collect them in a couple of minutes. Pass that on." Robert said to me, "I might as well have a game while I'm here." Julia already knew that, so the center of the three lanes was for Robert, Donna, Julia and me. The rest of the girls sorted themselves out for who was playing in their lanes. A couple of them had come with their families, so after making their guess about my score and giving their slips to Julia, they went back to their groups. I noticed that Savannah was playing, but Carol (who wasn't) had chosen to sit in my lane, so I moved to sit next to Carol and quietly asked her, "What do you think of Savannah?" Carol responded quietly too, "I guess you're asking whether I'm attracted to her?" I nodded, and Carol continued, "She's pretty enough to attract me. What's she like as a person?" "I've hardly ever talked to her, but she seems nice enough in class. She's outgoing, maybe a little too much for my liking, but not badly. Buckets of self-confidence and she's aware of how good looking she is, but that's hardly surprising. Average student intellectually, and into sports quite a lot, I think. That's about all I know about her." I'd downplayed one aspect, as Savannah is VERY aware of how good looking she is and tends to look down her nose at less attractive girls, which is nearly every girl in Savannah's over-inflated opinion. She naturally treats boys with contempt because of how they chase after her. I didn't think my downplaying that to Carol would cause any problems, and the thought of Savannah and Carol getting it on together was HOT. Even hotter if I could somehow get involved. It was worth a little downplaying to get things moving in that direction. "Thanks. I'll make sure we talk and we'll see how that goes." "What do you think of me introducing you to girls? Do you like it or don't like it? I should've asked you first." I didn't want to say it, in case we were overheard, but I really meant " ... because you're not really a lesbian." "No harm in introducing me. I've only had good experiences so far, but that's only with Julia and Ava. No need to tell you how well Julia has worked out for me, and Ava's fun to play with. I LOVE the way my life is working out, Mark. Mainly because of the three of us of course, but the other parts are good too. I like that we can have fun while still feeling secure with each other. That's very nice." "Good for you. And I DEFINITELY agree with your last point. I LOVE that I can do that too!" For me it was far beyond "very nice". I obviously got a lot more out of it than either girl, who weren't into sex with other girls (other than each other) as much as I was. Julia probably got the least out of it. She liked it somewhat, but I was pretty sure she enjoyed the power of making it happen more than she liked the actual itself. Other than with Carol, and Julia's feelings for Carol are still climbing. Meanwhile Julia had collected all the slips of paper and put them in her pocket, and Robert had set up our lane's scoreboard-computer-thingy (whatever it's called). Donna was first up, then Julia, then Robert, then me. I understood the "girls first" principle, but was surprised that he'd put himself before me. I didn't mind at all, it just seemed strange. It was one of those social things you hate to ask about in case you make the other person feel bad, so I kept my curiosity to myself. [Julia had told him to put me last to build the tension before my turns.] I won't bother giving a ball-by-ball breakdown. Throughout the game Donna was pretty good, Julia poor and Robert very good (in my opinion, which probably overstates his ability). After they'd had their first bowl it was my turn (fairly obviously). I was quite nervous, especially as all the girls around halted their games to watch. If I fluffed this then the 300 score would immediately become impossible to reach. And if I was going to fluff any bowls, it'd most likely be this one. I knew I could knock over all the pins with my TK even if I bowled a gutter ball, but clearly that wasn't practical. Ideally I wanted my ball to strike pin number 1 (the forward most of the triangle of pins). Pins 2 or 3 (either side and just behind pin 1) would be acceptable as the first point of contact of the ball, but not ideal. Any farther to either side would make all ten pins falling over look odd. I was very careful to get my stance correct and to release cleanly, to avoid a major screw-up. All I was going for was a nice, slow bowl down the center of the lane. I released it, and was ready to try TK'ing the ball back toward the center of the lane if it erred to the side, even though the ball's weight and rolling would make that difficult. Fortunately that wasn't necessary, as it was on target the whole way down. Unlike 'cool' bowlers who can walked back to their seat immediately after releasing their ball, I have to stay looking at it, ready to start TK'ing at the moment of impact. Unsurprisingly (to you), my fairly slow ball knocked down a surprisingly (to everyone else) large number of pins. Ten of them, to be exact. Cheers and claps from my audience. One ball down, eleven to go. I had been the only person among our group's twelve players to get a strike first up, so I got plenty of claps. Being the center of attention for a bunch of pretty girls - for a reason other than wearing clothes that embarrassingly flaunted my body - was nice. Our group totaled about thirty people (the twenty five invited girls plus my core group), and virtually all of us knew each other, so there was plenty of noise after each person's turn. A latecomer arrived to join us. To my surprise, Julia didn't make a fuss about it. I guess because she'd never made an issue about their being on time today. Soon it was my second turn. Equally unsurprisingly (to you), but more surprisingly (to most of my spectators), my second ball was another strike. Maybe helped by my bowling faster and more confidently. Or maybe not. I heard a couple of girls exclaim, "Wow, two in a row!" If they were getting excited after two, heaven help them by the end of the game. The scoreboard-computer-thingy showed no score for me yet because a strike in frame 1 is scored depending on what I get on my next two balls. If I keep bowling strikes, the frame 1 score wouldn't be known until after I'd bowled my third frame. I overheard some of the spectators explaining that to other spectators. I was reasonably sure I understood the scoring system, but it was nice to get a confirmation of that. No one else had two strikes. Savannah had a spare in her first frame and a strike in her second, which was pretty impressive. Robert had two spares. Scattered among the rest of the players were one more strike and spare, which I thought was a pretty high standard. There was a hush for my third ball. I bowled it more confidently, even putting a little spin on it so it curved more impressively. The hush turned into loud cheers when it unsurprisingly/surprisingly turned out to be a strike. While the cheering was going on I was very pleased to note that no one was the least bit suspicious of the way my pins were falling. Even though I was TK'ing them from the front to the back, their falls didn't look too regular as the ball was causing all sorts of mayhem at the same time, randomizing the process nicely. The latecomer girl, presumably after some other girl had told her about the Guess Mark's Score Sweepstake, tried to enter. Julia told her, "It was only open to girls who were here on time. You should've been here on time anyway, but in this case it wouldn't be fair to the other girls because you've already seen Mark's first three scores." That point was inarguable, and equally successful on the two other girls that showed up a bit later too. After my fourth strike the atmosphere started changing a bit, especially among the girls who knew the game well. Rather than fun yahooing at my good luck, they started suspecting something interesting was developing. There was some quiet excitement and anticipation mixed up with the loud yahooing. It was early yet, but they were getting an inkling. My fifth strike created a lot more "Wows!" I now had 90 points for my third frame score. The next highest third frame score, across all twelve players, was Robert, who'd bowled: spare, spare, strike, 9, spare, which totaled 57. Savannah had spare, strike, 9, 8, strike, for 48 points. So I was significantly ahead. I was questioned, "WHEN was the last time you played?" "I honestly haven't had a game in more than two years! You saw how cautious my first bowl was." I said, hoping some of the audience remembered. Strike number six took my fourth frame score to 120, even further ahead of Robert's and Savannah's scores. Six out of what should be twelve balls bowled, so I was halfway there. It would be easy. My nervousness over my first ball was long gone and I had no fear that my well-coordinated body would fail to keep sending the balls down the center at a very nice speed. I could probably even get quite a few strikes without TK, but I'd leave that experiment for another day. I noticed that the girls we knew who'd been playing with their families had abandoned their games, as they were now among the audience I had around me. I noticed a few strangers starting to pay attention to my lane too. Everything ramped up during frames seven, eight and especially nine. Everyone - now meaning not just my group, but by frame nine damned near the whole bowling alley - were watching avidly. Julia would come and sit on my lap when we were waiting for Donna's or Robert's bowls. She was smiling from ear to ear, and was whispering things like, "This is going perfectly", "Look at the audience. They're getting really worked up", and, "You're impressing the panties off the girls." That was my favorite comment. #2: Carol was sitting beside me, which let Donna claim my lap while Julia was bowling, which I didn't mind. I hadn't bothered to mention to Julia or Carol how I was able to unfailingly bowl strikes, but either they guessed it for themselves or they just assumed that I was capable of anything, because they were just as happy and excited as everyone else. Robert had been told that I'd get 300, so he should've been unsurprised when it was happening, although his behaving that way would've been a false note. Happily, he was behaving very much like an excited schoolgirl, so that was good. The leader in the excitement stakes was Donna. She didn't know about my TK so she was blown away by how incredible I was. She was a very excited, young girl. She wasn't so much sitting on my lap, as bouncing up and down with glee on it. Otherwise I was surrounded by excited girls. Life can be good sometimes. Julia made sure the Liaisons got preferred positions so they could stand close to me while I was sitting between my turns. Beyond the Liaisons were all the other girls, and a rapidly increasing number of the alley's other patrons. There was a hush all around me while I bowled my tenth ball. It was another strike and there were LOUD cheers from half the alley. No one else in my lane had bowled a strike or spare in their last frame, which meant their games were over. To finish my game I had two more balls immediately, to find out what my tenth frame score would be. Both of our other lanes, to my left and right, had a two or three balls to go, as they'd been slowed down watching me. I invited them, "Go ahead and finish your games before I bowl my last two balls, otherwise you'll probably not get a chance to finish because of all the chaos that'll happen soon." "Are you sure?" asked one of the bowlers. "Sure. I don't mind sitting here cuddling Julia." The girls turned to finish their games, and a couple of strangers yelled out for me to bowl right away, "While I was still in the groove," or similar. I ignored them, as "grooves" didn't have anything to do with my playing style. In fact, I was trying to avoid them (the gutters on either side). One of the opinionated advice givers repeated his advice, louder. Almost certainly a jock, as he thought yelling the same thing louder was a smart idea. I was sitting down so had no hope of seeing him through the throng, and had no interest in standing to see him. I yelled back, "Whoever it is that keeps yelling at me: I'm trying to be polite to the young ladies who're my guests here today. If anyone puts me off my game, it'll be your rudeness." I heard about thirty people making shushing sounds back in the throng somewhere, and that yeller was not heard from again. While the adjacent lanes were finishing their games I joked around with Julia, whispering to her, "I just visualize the pins as pretty girls, and I try to knock them onto their backs with their legs in the air. I find that VERY motivating!" "I think it's working for real. You've got twenty pins to go, with almost exactly twenty girls ready to lie on their backs for you, if you don't count the girls you've already seduced into that position." "I'm not sure having you push them into my bed can really be considered 'seduced'. As I recall, you told to me say as little as possible, preferably nothing, when Lily & co. arrived at your house. That doesn't sound very seductive to me." "That's because you already seduced them with your wonderful clothing sense, haha." Using heavy sarcasm on me was a low blow! Our adjacent lanes finished. Savannah won in her lane, but they'd all become distracted so they'd stopped caring much. The entire alley was quiet, waiting for me to finish my game. It'd probably be best for me not to sit here talking to Julia then. Julia let me up. By now I had the process down cold, so I quickly and easily bowled two more strikes. Pandemonium broke out, closely followed by chaos, while bedlam elbowed its way into the room too. I was quickly surrounded by a couple of dozen of VERY excited girls, all of whom wanted to hug and kiss me, so I was having a very good time. Then complete strangers started appearing in front of me. They had, and more of them were starting to, rudely push their way through the comparatively small schoolgirls in order to congratulate me. People can be very unimpressive at times. Julia was hanging onto my arm grimly, and was starting to get jostled. She must have seen the look on my face, because she yelled, "Just ride it out. It's fine." I wanted to lose my cool, but my causing a loud, angry scene probably wouldn't go over well with anyone. Robert was close and tall enough that I could catch his eye and get him to come to me. When he arrived I got him to help me shelter Julia. I'd lost sight of Carol and Donna, although I occasionally caught glimpses of various other of our girls. I suffered through the excitement, which only lasted a few minutes before relative quiet and sensibility returned. It hadn't been too bad. In hindsight I'd just gotten pissed off by seeing the girls pushed aside like that. Not to mention that I'd been quite enjoying myself kissing them, and that moment had been lost now, damn it! As the crowd thinned, the girls started reforming around me again. Much better! Especially when I could see that Carol and Donna were fine. Carol looked a bit disheveled, but Donna was simply grinning from ear to ear. Knowing Donna, she probably enjoyed the chaos. Any guys who tried to push her too much would probably get a hard elbow in the ribs, adding even more to Donna's enjoyment. I was also approached by a bowling alley employee holding a camera. He said, "A photo for our 300 Wall of Fame," as he started raising the camera. He wasn't asking a question. I answered him anyway, with a loud, "NO. No photo." He stopped, looked surprised, and asked, "Are you sure? Most people want to have their photo displayed." #2: "No. Go away." I wasn't in a good mood, not without some more kissing anyway. He shrugged and left, which created more room for girls so it was definitely an improvement. I'd much-more-than-half expected Julia to override me, to insist that I had my photo taken so it could be displayed to add to my fame, but she'd said nothing. Just when you're sure you don't understand girls, something comes along to prove you don't understand girls. I noticed that the two girls who'd come with their families were standing in a large, combined group nearby. Seeing me look at them, they advanced toward me, leading their families. I got the girls standing near me to open up, to make room for them. The two girls were visibly proud to be able to introduce me to their families, and we did the polite "Nice to meet you" routine. One of the mothers said, "So you're the young man that we've been hearing so much about?" Which has always struck me as a particularly stupid question. First, how on Earth am I supposed to know? I wasn't there at the times she'd heard whatever it was that she'd heard, so I wouldn't know who it was about. Second, what do you say in answer to that question? "Yes, ma'am" or "No, ma'am" aren't good answers. Shrugging is even worse. Why ask a question which is impossible to answer? My ego couldn't help but be flattered though. And amused, because I'd certainly never mentioned her daughter to anyone in my family. I was sure of that, as I virtually never mention ANY classmates to my family. One of my minds actually came up with a good answer, I said, "I'm not sure, ma'am. Anna is so attractive that I'm sure many of the guys at school have been trying to gain her interest. She could've been talking about any one of them." The adults laughed at that, Anna's father said, "Smooth Mark, very smooth." Anna looked very happy at my compliment. They chatted with me a bit, asking me a few questions about my bowling expertise. I couldn't really say "Just lucky, I guess," because that sounded too implausible and weak. Instead I repeated what seemed to be our standard line, "I haven't had a game in over two years and I wasn't very good then, but in the last couple of years my physical dexterity has improved. Good genes, I guess, as my father was a very good athlete at school." #4: #2: The other father said, "I can see you train hard too." He could see that because the semi-clothes I was partly wearing, "To show your figure to good effect," to quote Julia. I never knew I had a figure, but these days it's talked about regularly. The father continued, "What position do you play?" "Striker or center forward; it's the same thing." He looked confused, and I guessed the reason, so I added, "I play soccer." "Ahh! Why don't you play football? By the look of you, you'd be..." Laci, his daughter, grabbed his arm, urging, "Dad! Mark doesn't like footballers. Please drop it." I was impressed that she knew that about me. I'd been wearing a cast until about a week and a half ago, and there'd been all the articles in the paper three to four weeks ago, but none of those were obvious reminders right now. Nonetheless, Laci was quick to act. "Why? There's nothing wrong with football. It's a lot better game than soccer." "DAD!" beseeched a very embarrassed Laci. With his being so slow on the uptake about his daughters embarrassment, his poor grammar (not my strong point, but I'll add it to my list of his defects anyway), his uncalled for rudeness toward my sport, and his stupidity in thinking that football was superior to soccer, it was obvious that he'd played football himself. I didn't care about him, but Laci was pretty, so I said, "Don't worry about it, Laci. Thanks for trying to deflect the topic though, I appreciate that." -- I didn't want to bowl another game, as getting two 300-point games in a row would be too freaky (the parents had also warned me not to), and not getting 300 on a second game would be a let down. Now was a good time to call it quits for the bowling. Besides, it was about lunchtime. So I changed the topic away from the relative merits of football and soccer, by saying, "I think I've had enough bowling for another couple of years and I've worked up a hunger. Laci and Anna, would you like to join the rest of us for lunch somewhere?" Turning to Julia I asked, "Where are we having lunch?" Julia named the pizza joint just up the street from here. Before I could say more, both girls were pleading for parental permission to join us. In Laci's case, pointedly with just her mother, who asked, "How will you get home afterward?" Julia responded first, "I'll be inviting whoever wants to come back to my home after pizza. Just for three or four hours. It'd be good if Laci and Anna could come. There'll be plenty of people at home, so someone will be able to give them a lift afterward." Some of the other girls volunteered to be taxi, which took care of that issue, and the parents agreed. Some of the other girls started asking about the details of visiting Julia's house, but Julia announced, "Mark says he's hungry and I think he's earned his lunch. I'll tell you while we're waiting for the pizzas to arrive. Let's get out of here." They wisely agreed with Julia, which is always a good idea. Katelin called out, "Julia, who won the Guess Mark's Score competition?" There was a lot of interest in the answer. Julia said, "I'll look through your entries during lunch. To make the revelation exciting, please don't reveal your guesses to each other. I did say we were going to have lunch afterward, so I hope everyone's able to come, aren't they?" They all were coming, so we quickly packed up and headed out. The pizza joint was close enough that we walked there. Julia on one of my arms, Carol on the other, with a whole bunch of happy, excited girls around me. Especially Donna; she was still gushing about how wonderful I was. Robert suggested to Julia that he might head home. Julia urged him to stay, bribing him with an offer of a free pizza, "At least until we find out which girls want to come back to our place and see who needs lifts." I got the impression that being trapped in a room with a couple dozen excited schoolgirls didn't appeal to Robert much. Strange, because I was quite looking forward to it, plus there was PIZZA! He agreed, whether to help his sister or for the pizza, I couldn't tell. During the walk Savannah said, "Carol, you hold Mark's arm like he's your boyfriend, just like Julia does. How come?" This was one of the reasons Carol had come out as a lesbian, so it was a question I knew she would have prepared for. Several other girls were clearly interested in the conversation, so I guess they'd noted Carol's and my affection but had lacked the confidence to ask about it. Carol answered, with increasing enthusiasm, "Having Mark as my brother is FAR better than having him as my boyfriend, especially because I don't want a boyfriend at all, haha. But even if I was straight, I'd still prefer to be his sister. Girlfriends will come and go from his life, especially girls that aren't good enough for him, which I don't think I would be. So I'm VERY lucky that I'm his sister, because that means I'll NEVER leave his life. Mark and I are going to love each other for all of our lives, and nothing can ever change that, and that feels very, very good to me. You're all impressed by his bowling 300, or his being by far the best soccer player yesterday, or those sorts of things. Those mean nothing to me. I love Mark because of how wonderful he is as a person, not because he's good with balls, haha. See, told you I was a lesbian. -- "I guess most of you heard his speech protecting me when I came out as a lesbian, so you do have an idea about how loving, generous, unselfish and so many other things he is. However nice you think Mark is, I promise you that he is far, far better than you imagine. I live with him every day, so I KNOW that! Mark's the most wonderful guy that I can possibly imagine. Even if I was straight, I think I'd still have to turn lez, because no other guy is ever going to measure up to him in my eyes. Or in my heart, come to that. -- "I hold his arm, Savannah, because I want to get as close to him as I possibly can. I wish I could climb into his skin, and put my heart alongside his. I know that sounds corny, but that's how I feel. But the best I can do is hold Mark's arm against my heart. I used to hold hands with him like people normally do, but that didn't feel as good as what I'm doing now, so this is what I do. It feels good to me, and I can't think of anything better." Savannah said, "Wow. That was a LOT more answer than I expected. I..." Savannah would have said more, but she was interrupted by Donna. At the start of Carol's answer Donna had been ahead of us, doing cartwheels (as she often does when she's excited, and either outdoors, or indoors when Mom can't see her), but we'd caught up with Donna, and she'd heard what we were talking about. She'd listened to the rest of Carol's answer, and got her chance to add her opinion by interrupting Savannah. Donna said, "I'll say. All Carol had to say was that Mark is very, very nice to both of us, and is the best brother in the world - EVER!" Savannah, "I feel silly now, but I'll ask anyway. I was mainly asking about the way you hold his arm, because often his upper-arm is rubbing against one of your breasts. If my brother did that to me, I'd kick him in the nuts. Don't you mind?" I had a brief moment of worry, trying to think of a good answer to that in case Carol couldn't. I was also thanking my luck that I was sufficiently used to being held this way that I didn't react to the breast contact. Carol started answering, "No, I..." Julia laughed, and Carol let herself be interrupted by it. After a few seconds, Julia said, "There are so many reasons you're wrong that I don't know where to start." I was relieved to hear that, as I hadn't thought of a single good reason. Not being able to think past the naughty reason hadn't helped. Julia listed the reasons, "First, Mark's not doing it to her; Carol's the one that holds his arm. I've never bothered asking before, but I bet Mark never asks Carol to do it. It was all your idea, wasn't it Carol?" Carol answered truthfully, although I'm sure she would've lied to follow Julia's hint had it been necessary, "Totally. I saw you holding his arm like this, so I tried it and found that I liked it a lot. Mark never suggested it, and has never asked me to do it. He lets me do it because he knows I like it. It probably made him uncomfortable the first few times, but he never showed that to me. I think he's used to it now though." Before Julia could carry on with her list of reasons, I quickly jumped in with, "Not only am I used to it, but if you're around and not attached to my arm, then I don't feel right. I feel incomplete, like there's something missing." Julia continued, "Second, Mark would NEVER take advantage of Carol sexually. He'd have a massive guilt trip if he had an incorrect thought like that. He'd want to wash his brain out with soap. He's very gentle and considerate, even inside his own head. -- "Third, let me demonstrate something to you, Savannah. Lily, would you come stand in front of me please." Lily was only a few steps away, so that didn't take long. Julia was holding my left forearm, and she raised it a little, saying to Lily, "Take Mark's hand and place it on your breast." Lily was surprised, but recovered quickly. She smiled, took my hand, then paused to ask Julia, "Inside or outside?" as she pulled the hem of her T-shirt open Julia answered, "Your choice would seem fair." During that little exchange I did a quick look around. We'd just reached our destination, but had stopped several yards away from the entrance in order to finish this conversation. With the twenty five girls circled around us, Lily and I were reasonably sheltered from strangers' sight, although it'd be better if no one came out of the restaurant while this was happening. I hoped Julia didn't have any more sexually explicit plans up her sleeve. Lily held the bottom of her T-shirt open with one hand, and used the other raise my hand inside of it. Because I'm a considerate sort of guy, I spared her the trouble of trying to manage my whole arm by moving my own hand to her breast. Caressing it in a way to make it obvious where my hand was. And also, as a secondary benefit, to enjoy myself. I gave the audience a quick glance. I saw a variety of reactions. Quite a few of them were surprised, which was hardly surprising. Some were shocked, and some were looking around in panic. A few were amused or interested. Julia let it go on for only a few seconds before saying, "I think my point's been made, so you'd better stop now, Mark." I removed my hand. "Savannah, Lily has several times told Mark and me that she'll do whatever we want, so I knew she'd agree to it. The point of my demonstration is that Mark knew it too. If he wanted a breast to play with, he knew Lily would happily provide hers. We shouldn't do this anymore in their parking lot, but Pat and Laila would also allow Mark to play with their breasts, if he wanted to, wouldn't you Pat and Laila?" Both girls agreed, no doubt helped by Julia's having just said they wouldn't have to actually do it. I don't know whether they would really have allowed me to grope them. On one hand we were in a public area, but on the other hand they knew better than to refuse Julia's 'requests'. I'd had sex with them, of course, but this was different than in the privacy of a bedroom. Julia continued, "Mark would have to be stupid to prefer a surreptitious rub with his upper-arm, when he can get all the full-on, voluntary breast fondling he wants, just by asking any one of several girls, including me obviously. And if there's one thing we all know, it's that he's very, very not stupid." While the girls were digesting that, Julia added, "I just thought of another, much better answer. I should have said this right at beginning. You know that girls can always tell when they're being groped. I'm sure that some of you have got brothers who've tried to get feels, 'by accident'?" Several girls laughed. Apparently that's a common occurrence. One added, "Not to mention 'on purpose', as well." There were several agreements with that too. Julia concluded, "If Mark had been groping Carol in any way at all, Carol would've known. She would have been doubly pissed off about it because she's a lesbian. You all heard Carol take Savannah's question and launch into a speech about her love of Mark. Those weren't the feelings of a girl who has been groped. They ARE the feelings of a girl who truly loves and trusts her brother. All of you should think about the quality of people Mark and Carol must both be to have built such a deep, beautiful relationship." It was a lovely "Aw, shucks" moment, which we all enjoyed silently. Even Carol got a bit misty eyed, and hugged my arm tighter into her chest. Which was great for me, because I got a real good feel of her breast. Carol smiled, then winked, at me (a girl can always tell when she's being groped). After a couple of seconds, Lily said, "You wrong Julia." That shocked everyone, especially Julia! Lily continued, "You said that answer better. I think touch me MUCH better!" Amidst the laughter, Julia yelled out, "Let's go get some pizzas!" ------- Chapter 106: Food of the God, Pizza! Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) We trouped into the pizzeria, picked an area, and pushed some tables together so we could be one big group. Julia had chosen this place not only because it was near the bowling alley, but because it was LARGE and informal. It was the sort of place that allowed you to do things like push tables around and make lots of noise. They served pizzas on plastic plates; that's the sort of place it was. I was pointed to a seat in the middle of one side of our combined-table. Carol sat to my right, while Julia took a seat one removed from my left. Julia pointed Lily to the empty seat between us, telling her, "Cooperation will be rewarded." The other two Liaisons were pointed next to Carol, Robert sat next to Julia, and everyone else was free to choose where they wanted. Donna had seated herself before anyone else, more interested in the menu than seating politics. I agreed with her that the menu was excellent reading. It was a large, noisy place, with loud music and several other groups, although it was only about a quarter full at this time of day. We'd be able to talk fairly indiscreetly without anyone else hearing us, should the conversation go that way, AFTER the ordering had been done. Once the orders were placed, Julia stood and yelled to the whole table, "Now to find out who's the clever girl who won the sweepstake. Who'll be able to ask Mark to do ANYTHING she wants, as long as it doesn't go beyond what I'll accept, and I'll accept A LOT! If the winner DOESN'T ask Mark for what girls normally stop their boyfriends' doing, then the winner's crazy." While our crowd was yelling ribald comments at Julia, she made a production out of discovering the winner. Initially pulling two slips out of her right pocket, reading out the names of the two girls but not their guesses, then saying, "The closest girl is... [one of the two names]." Julia then put the losing slip into her left pocket, and extracted a replacement slip from her right. "The new girl is [whoever], and the closest girl is... [one of the two names]." This process repeated slip by slip. The only interruption occurred early on, when the two girls involved in that round told the table what their guesses were. Immediately some of the remaining girls moaned. Julia announced, "It'd be best not to tell anyone your guesses until after it's all over. That way the excitement lasts longer, especially for the poor girls whose guesses were less than yours." The two girls understood and apologized, and Julia responded, "No problem. It's understandable in the excitement of the moment." Katelin's name came up about halfway through the process, and survived challenge after challenge. Some of the challengers must have guessed low, because they obviously knew they had no chance, but some of the others reacted as if they thought they'd had a good shot at ending Katelin's run. I was amused and flattered by so many girls being so eager to win. I was more pleased over that than I would be over any specific girl winning, whether it was Katelin or anyone else. Julia had handpicked which girls to invite today, and every one of them was - how to put this delicately? - very fuckable. I wouldn't kick any of them out of bed for eating cookies, not even if it was my last cookie. Katelin's guess eliminated yet another girl, and Julia fished around for the next slip, pulled it out, then said, "I think this is the last, let me check my pocket carefully." A pause while Julia did that. "There are no more. This is the final comparison." Donna yelled out, "What about mine? I guessed 300, and I want Mark to do my homework for the rest of the year." During the laughter, I thought to myself that Donna was doing very well today. I should find some way to reward her, and I knew that wouldn't be hard (both meanings apply). Thinking the word "reward" also reminded me that Lily was sitting next to me for her reward, and I realized that I should personally do something to thank her for letting me grope her tits in front of everyone. I'd do it when Julia's drama was over. Julia read out the name of the last challenger, who looked brave, but not hopeful. "And the winner is ... Katelin!" While Katelin was jumping up and down with glee, several of the other girls yelled out, "What did you guess?" | "What did she guess?" (depending on whether they yelled at Katelin or Julia). Katelin answered, "280." Julia handed the slip over to one of the inquirers, and it started rotating around the table, just to prove that Julia hadn't fixed THIS competition, unlike the RPS game with Carol's girls. Many of the girls expressed amazement that Katelin had guessed so high. She answered, "I think Mark is fantastic. He's fantastic at everything else, so he should be fantastic at bowling too. I was just scared that someone had guessed 300. I'm SO HAPPY now. I know what I want too. Can I whisper it to you Julia, to make sure it's okay?" Julia called back, "Sure. Come around and tell me." Katelin got up and as she was walking around, Julia called out, "You're not allowed to ask to have his babies." That earned Julia some laughs. A few of the girls joked by saying things like, "Drat! That's what I wanted," but I could tell they were joking, thank goodness. While I was waiting for Julia to rule on Katelin's intended prize, I suddenly remembered that Prof had wanted a call or text message letting him know whether I'd gotten 300 or not. I'd remind Julia the first chance I got. Katelin whispered to Julia, who whispered back, and they went back and forth a few more times, then arrived at a decision. Julia called out to me, deliberately loudly so most of our table could hear, "Mark, Katelin would like to come over to my place after dinner, and stay with you overnight, on Tuesday night. Is that okay with you?" Most of the girls caught it. Some didn't, and I gave them time to find out from their neighbors. Then I answered, "Apart from one possible clash, that sounds great." It did too, as Katelin was attractive and very interested in me. I explained the possible problem, "I'm a little worried that what I'm doing with your father tonight might need some more work on Tuesday night, like if we need another trial run that evening." "You'll know that by the end of tonight though, won't you?" "Probably. I should have a very good idea then whether Tuesday night will be needed or not." "That's good enough." Turning to Katelin, Julia said, "That should work fine. Plan on it happening and I'll let you know if a problem comes up and we have to move it to Wednesday night, but it probably won't." "Tuesday night?" asked Katelin, more out of disbelief at how lucky she was than anything else. I had disbelief at her disbelief, but I also know that I don't understand girls, so I wondered whether those canceled out. #3: Julia answered Katelin, "It looks like you're going to have a VERY good time in a couple of days, yes." "Yippee! That's so NEAT! Thank you SO MUCH, Julia." Katelin gave Julia a hug, which - I was disappointed to see - was just an ordinary, happiness hug. Pity. Julia said, "Go and give Mark a thank you kiss, then back to your seat." Katelin thought the first half of that was an excellent idea, so she repeated it three times. While I was busy helping Katelin carry out Julia's suggestion repeatedly, I could hear Carol tell the group, "I just had a little thought. Remember Annette Neumeyer? She made a fool out of herself when she rubbed her tits all over Mark, trying to get him to react." Katelin's head blocked my view of most of the girls, but I was pretty sure they didn't need a reminder about who Annette Neumeyer was, and what she'd done. Seeing they remembered, Carol continued, "Mark didn't react, because for him that wasn't sexy. Same when I'm holding him. Mark is FAR more mature than the normal boys we meet. I absolutely hate it that so many of the boys at school try to rub against me, or can't stop staring at my chest, but I don't have any of those problems with Mark. For him it's not sexy unless it's got the right emotions behind it. Unless it's a sharing, consensual, giving, and things like that. He's very impressive." Carol leaned over and kissed my cheek, to thank me for being so impressively mature. I could see that the other girls had swallowed Carol's lies completely. We've become very dishonest since meeting Julia. It's a lot of fun. Knowing the girls would take it as a joke, I said, "Gee. You mean all those years I didn't ogle you because I was afraid you'd tell on me to Mom and Dad were wasted? Damn!" They laughed, obviously because the thought of me ogling Carol was so ridiculous. When she got a chance, Julia said, "I know it sounds weird, but I'm trying to get Mark to behave MORE like ordinary boys. I'll explain what I mean. We all know that you're all here to get to know Mark better, because you're all attracted to him." I saw some of the girls look uncomfortable at that, perhaps even start to object, but Julia responded to their body language, "We saw how happy Katelin was to win her night with Mark and how much the rest of you wanted to win the competition. Also, many of you have boyfriends, but not a single one of you turned up with him. What an amazing coincidence! Haha. I'm sure there were lots of imaginative excuses flying around town recently, so each of you could come here unaccompanied." It looked like Julia was starting a long speech, so I took advantage of the opportunity to put my left hand on Lily's bare leg, just above her knee and just below her skirt's hem. I leaned over and whispered to her, "I remember Julia saying outside that you should be rewarded for your cooperation. I'm wondering how you'd like me to reward you?" I slid my hand up her leg an inch or so, to give her a hint. Lily answered, "You boss." Her attitude is wonderful. A pity her tits aren't bigger, but it's very hard to find the perfect girlfriend. I told her, "This is meant to be YOUR reward. I'm sure you know what I've got in mind," as my hand slid a little higher as a further hint, "but you can ask for something else if you wish." Lily answered, "What you doing." Lily opened her legs wide. She's a VERY helpful girl. There was certainly no point in asking her if she was sure, so I quickly slid my hand all the way up. Lily shifted her weight from side to side, so she could hitch each side of her skirt higher, to make things easier for me. Of all the girls that I've bedded, Lily was probably the worst choice for me to do this with as I'd rushed learning my way around her pussy. That'd happened because Pat had been due to arrive soon after Lily, and I'd wanted to be more active with Lily during the small amount of one-on-one time we had. Nonetheless, I thought I knew enough about her to be up for the job. I started, intending to give her the best time I could, hopefully including an orgasm. Meanwhile Julia had continued speaking, "Mark knows why you're here. I told him days ago that I was inviting you so he could socialize with you, get to know you, and find which of you he liked the best. You know that I want him to have another girlfriend or two. The trouble - and it's hard to call it 'trouble' with a straight face - is that there are literally hundreds of girls interested in Mark. He can't get to know hundreds of girls one at a time because that'd take far too much time, so he has to start by socializing in groups. When Mark and I next get a chance to be alone, I'll discuss each of you with him to find out what he thought of you. Hopefully we'll be able to decide on the top six or so, that I'll invite to future events like this. That'll eliminate most of you and save Mark's valuable time." I could see that this struck the girls forcibly - they'd had no idea that this was going to be cut-throat. Julia's very good at motivating girls to throw themselves at me, bless her. -- "You've seen from class that Mark doesn't socialize much. You also saw him while he was bowling. Between each of his turns he was perfectly happy sitting with either Donna or me on his lap, chatting with us or Carol. Any other guy would have been strutting around, boasting and flirting with all of you, especially knowing that you'd come there to see him. Obviously Mark's exceptionally good at relationships - look at how much his sisters and I love him - but he's too modest. He wouldn't even let the bowling alley guy put his photo on the wall, even though he totally deserved to have his accomplishments known. There are so many things about him that he could truthfully boast about, but he won't. He could also flirt with any of you, but he won't, because that's not his style. -- "Those of you who dressed in a way that a boy would like are smart, because if he doesn't talk with any of you enough to get to know you, then his opinion is going to be colored by how good he thinks you look. He's not immature about that, that'd be a guy choosing a nasty girl over a nice girl because the nasty one had a bigger chest. Mark's going to have to choose which of you he likes the most when he doesn't know who the nice and nasty ones are. I don't mean 'nasty' in your cases, because I didn't invite anyone like that. But he can't tell between the NICE and NICER girls, so short skirts and revealing tops will be the tie breakers. He IS mature, but even mature guys will choose a sexy girl over an unsexy girl if there's no reason not to, just as all of you are very aware of how good Mark looks, both his handsomeness and his physique. I said I want him to behave more like other guys, because he needs to..." "{Moan}," interrupted Lily. What Lily and I were up to had been completely hidden by the long, plastic tablecloth (tableplastic?). Lily's moan drew the attention of everyone who could see her, and our arm positions confirmed their suspicions. Lily had both of her hands under the table, one to hold her dress and the tablecloth up out of the way, and the other holding the crotch of her panties to one side. I had turned to face Lily, so I could bring my right hand around to use on her. My left hand was playing with her clit and other exterior areas, while my right hand's fingers were thrusting in and out. Lily had managed to stifle a few previous expressions of her rising sense of enjoyment, but this one had escaped her. There was no point in attempting to deny what we were doing, and I saw no reason to stop either, so I kept trying to get her off as quickly as possible. If you'll excuse a slight digression at such a critical time. I have to say that I was puzzled about what Lily's reason(s) were for being so cooperative with Julia and me. She didn't seem to be in love with me, or have any of the usual emotional motivations. I couldn't imagine Lily behaving like Gia when she'd refused to stop hugging me, or like Ava when she'd been egotistical. Lily seemed to have reached an extremely quick, intellectual, non-emotional decision to cooperate fully with us. I was tempted to inquire into it, but didn't want to risk spoiling her wonderful helpfulness. Thus I'd been very interested to find out how quickly Lily would 'juice up' when I started playing with her. To my surprise Lily got wet very quickly, which presumably meant she had strong emotions for me. I was pleased, but even more puzzled than before. Other than its effect on my curiosity, her responsiveness also meant that Lily had been quick to arouse and wasn't going to take much longer to finish off. Lily and I were instantly the center of attention for our table. When I responded by speeding up rather than stopping, Lily groaned again, differently than before. When her groaning breath ran out, she inhaled, then started another moan; just like the first one, although early indications were that it was going to be even louder. I was thrusting in and out very rapidly now, while my left forefinger was vibrating on her clit. Julia, sitting next to Lily, grabbed Lily's head and pulled it into a lip-locking, moan-smothering kiss. One and a half highly muffled moans later, amidst the loud cheering of the guys on the nearest occupied table (presumably at the girl-on-girl kissing), Lily's orgasm hit her. Her whole body stiffened, pulling Julia straight up out of her chair, and nearly backward over it. Julia's lips hung on bravely, until Lily went limp, nearly pushing Julia over by the sudden change in direction. Lily slumped on Julia, who sat down to support Lily's weight. My fingers had done their job, so I pulled them out and away. I held up the wettest to my mouth, and licked it, then complained to the table, "The things a guy has to do, to get a drink in this joint!" I resumed licking all my fingers clean while a few of the girls laughed. The rest were busy getting over their shock (I'm presuming this doesn't usually happen when they have pizzas). Julia laughed too, while she was sitting with her right arm around Lily's shoulder, holding her comfortably while she recovered. Hannah, who was sitting several seats to my right, leaned forward to ask me, "You like the taste, Mark?" Knowing she was Laila's sexual girlfriend I gave a smart answer, "I love it! Do you?" "Love it. It's much tastier than from guys. What do you think?" #3: "I think you just got me. I'll defer to your greater experience on that subject." After the chuckles at my expense, Hannah came out with another good one, inquiring innocently, "Julia, before you were interrupted, weren't you were telling us something about Mark not being very good at flirting?" Julia and I both got the irony right away and started laughing. Some of the girls took a second or so before they joined in. Including Donna, who wouldn't recognize irony if it hit her in the face, although that wouldn't stop her from hitting it straight back. I said, "Hannah, you're very skillful with your mouth." I could see her thinking about that. She eventually said, "There are SO many responses! How about: You appear to be very skillful with your fingers, so maybe we should get together to practice our skills on each other?" I like her intelligence, her humor, and that when I'd complimented her mouth, rather than accepting it egotistically she'd come back with a compliment about me. She was also very straightforward about wanting sex with me, which is an attitude that should always be encouraged in pretty, 20-year old girls. For all those reasons, and more (she had nice tits), I answered, "I would like that. I'm busy through to Tuesday, and I'd like to keep Wednesday for Julia. How does Thursday or Friday night suit you?" "Let's make it Friday, so we can play around on Saturday morning too." Donna spoke up, "Remember you're going to my club Saturday morning, Mark." "That wasn't early though, was it? 10am, if I remember correctly?" "That's right, 10." "No problem. We'll finish well before then. I'll come and get you at 9:45, okay?" "That's good. It'll be a LOT of fun. The Ducklings are very excited." #2: Hannah asked, "Who're the Ducklings?" Donna answered eagerly, before I thought of an acceptable response, "Some of my girlfriends who're all in love with Mark. They're very funny." #1: #3: "Umm. I'm going to Donna's athletic club on Saturday morning, mostly to do a run to put Donna in good with some of the people there. But Donna's got a group of her girlfriends there, who get all giggly around me. We call them the Ducklings, as a nickname." Hannah answered, "Cute name. We can change to Thursday night, if you have to do some running for Donna on Saturday morning?" I'd been trying to work out what the socially acceptable etiquette was for inviting Hannah's lover, Laila, to join us. Should I ask Laila if she wanted to join us? But what if Hannah didn't want a threesome? It would be very embarrassing for Hannah to try to ask Laila not to come. If I asked Hannah to invite Laila, that might seem that I was arrogantly assuming Laila's decision. If Hannah said 'Yes' but Laila wanted 'No', or vice versa, then unhappiness could result. I wondered whether I should just settle for Hannah, but I REALLY like threesomes, especially if the two girls are into each other, as Hannah and Laila surely would be. I decided to go for broke, the main reason being that if I did get broke there were plenty of other girls around to fill the gap. So I said, "Nah, Friday night is good with me. I'd also enjoy our playing around on Saturday morning. Laila too, if the two of you would like to make it a threesome?" Laila enthusiastically answered, "Yes please! I was hoping you'd ask me." Hannah said, "TWO of us! You're full of yourself. Julia, I thought you said Mark was modest?" Julia answered, "Mark's got the least to be modest about of any man any of you will ever meet, but he's still totally unassuming." Julia turned to the table, and raised her voice, "Girls, you've all been in Mark's classes all this year. Have any of you heard Mark make a single boast?" All the other girls were intent on this conversation, and they immediately answered with many head shakes, "Nos" and "Nevers". That I hardly ever talk in class didn't invalidate Julia's point. Probably strengthened it, in fact. Hannah got in before Julia's follow up with, "If you've got to do some running in the morning, we'd better go easy on you." I was pleased by the laughter that greeted Hannah's comment. Julia stood to pull her notebook and pen out of her pocket, and passed it down the table, saying, "Hannah. Please write, 'I offered to go easy on Mark' on a page. Then rip it out and stick it on your mirror at home. When you limp home on Saturday morning, read it. You'll have a good laugh at yourself." Hannah asked, "He's that good?" Julia answered, "Pat, you were in a threesome with Mark and Lily. Can he handle Hannah and Laila?" This was amusing timing for that question, because the waiter had just arrived behind Julia with the first few of our pizzas, and it made his day. He stopped, no doubt hoping that the conversation would carry on. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't inconspicuous, standing a few feet behind Julia holding several plates full of pizzas. Two-thirds of us had already spotted him, and Julia soon turned. He was a young lad and still in shock, judging by Julia's having to motion him back into motion. He pleased my emotions by starting to put the plates on the table. Fortunately for the waiter Pat answered, "With both hands tied behind his back. Which would be a pity, because Mark is VERY skillful with his fingers. Isn't he Lily?" "Yes! Finger, mouth, cock. I go {explosion sound} many times." By the look on the waiter's face, he was halfway to exploding too. I'd MUCH rather he brought me my pizza. Pat added, "Lily and I both had as much as we could possibly handle, and then we had to ask him to please stop. HE will go easy on YOU, not the other way around." Laila said, "I believe them, Hannah. My session with Mark was only for a couple of hours, but he was nonstop the whole time and not tired at the end. Lily and Pat stayed overnight, and all the next day they were walking uncomfortably, and Mark was fresh as a daisy. He outlasted them. I've been dreaming about having a multi-way overnight party with Mark ever since." Hannah asked, "Mark, could you handle three or more girls?" "Sure. I don't want to sound boastful," which got me a small raspberry from Julia, "but I'm not really the limiting factor. I'm so fit that I can perform nonstop for several hours. But I've only got one set of, umm, let's say equipment, so I can only do one girl at a time. It wouldn't be a problem for me to rotate sequentially through any number of girls, but it would be boring for the girls who were waiting unless they were bisexual and wanted to make it one big, friendly, tangle. In other words, the limiting factor isn't me; it's the attitude of the girls involved." Julia said, "Excuse me, Mark." She turned to the waiter, who having dropped off those plates that he'd brought (a fraction of our total order), was now standing beside our table listening. "If you don't RUN back and forth with the rest of our order, I'm going to complain to your boss." He stood there, saying, "Ahh..." "RUN!" Commanded Julia. He ran. Damned good idea too, as my order hadn't arrived yet. I turned back to the table, and Laila asked me, "Whose place on Friday night? My place is fine, and Hannah has her own place so we could also use that." "I MUCH prefer Julia's place. It's soundproof so we can make as much noise as we want. That's important if we go on for hours, which would be bad news for anyone else if we use another place. It's got a king-size bed too. Unless there's a strong reason otherwise, I'd like it to be at Julia's?" That was agreed. Soundproof was great, but my other main reason was so that I could get up in the wee small hours and do some college study. I didn't list that though, as it sounded too nerdish, and possibly might have insulted the girls. I have a VERY strong moral belief that I should not risk insulting girls who've just agreed to have a wild threesome with me. The waiter arrived with the next armload of plates. I couldn't see Julia's face, but I was sure she was glaring at him. About half the table had plates now and were sharing with each other, but my order STILL hadn't arrived. I glared at the waiter too. He left quickly, as there wasn't any salacious conversation for him to listen to, and no one in their right mind wants to face Julia when she's glaring. I had a chance to mention, "Julia, I think I remember your father asking us to text or call him with how I did at bowling. Do you remember that?" "Yes. Robert did it already. Dad sends his congratulations." Carol and Pat were sharing one of the most recently delivered plates, and Carol offered me a slice. I really do love my sister. Everyone was chewing on some food now, with a lot of sharing going on. The waiter turned up with a couple more plates, for Robert and me. After he'd put them down, he said to Julia, "That's everything now." Julia said, "Good. Run along so we can have a PRIVATE conversation." There's something seriously wrong with the principle of "girls first". Walking through doorways is fine, but not when there are 20-odd females, only 2 guys, and it's about FOOD. Fortunately there hadn't been many plates for the waiter to bring to the girls, because - for some weird reason - the girls had pretty much all shared a pizza between two of them. SHARING PIZZA! Sometimes I don't understand girls ("sometimes" being about 99.95% of the time. Or maybe a little more). For a while we all concentrated on our food. There were many small conversations around the table, pieces being swapped around the place, the waiter running back and forth for drinks orders, stuff like that. Including Julia yelling across to Katelin, telling her, "Eat up Katelin. You need to build your energy for Tuesday night." Some of the girls were declaring they were full now, and were passing their leftovers to me. They'd shared a plate, and STILL had leftovers! Of PIZZA! It worked out very well for me though, as one pizza really wasn't big enough for a Mark-sized meal. As the meal came to an end, Julia got everyone's attention. Then said, "I've got three things to say. The first won't take long because it's just finishing off what I was saying before the food arrived, and before Lily's lack of self-control so eloquently interrupted me, haha." Several of the girls started chuckling, as they got Julia's reference. Lily looked down, then remembered her job and declared, "Mark VERY good!" When the chuckles eased, Julia resumed, "Hannah joked about Mark not being good at flirting, but the truth is that he's not. He's already been with Lily, so there wasn't any flirting involved. Lily will already do whatever he wants. You saw that in the parking lot before we came in." Actually, they'd seen Lily do what JULIA wanted. I was sure Lily appreciated the importance of that distinction, but the others didn't see it. "I was saying before that so far today Mark's spent virtually no time talking to most of you, so the main way he's got to judge which of you he likes the most is visually. Personally I've got nothing against him choosing girls for their sexiness, because I'm totally aware of how very sexy I find Carol," that caused Carol to blush nicely. "but Mark might miss out on finding a girl whose personality he likes. So I'm asking you to help us, which will also help you. Please try to help Mark get better at socializing with girls by approaching him, talking to him briefly, and being generally friendly. Don't all immediately swamp him, but when you get a chance to chat, do so. If you meet him in a hallway at school, stop to talk for a few seconds. He's too modest to push himself forward, so you need to break the ice yourself. Once the ice is broken, Mark's fine; just ask Lily!" -- After the laughs Julia added, "On that topic, I'll point out that what Mark did for Lily was all about HER pleasure. He's surrounded by girls, many of whom will do virtually anything a guy could want - just look at Katelin's enthusiasm at winning the Score Guessing Game - and Mark's only action is to give Lily a lot of pleasure. That's the sort of guy he is." The reason I'd given Lily pleasure was to thank her for being so cooperative outside. Julia was giving me credit for a non-selfish act, when really all I'd done was follow her lead about rewarding Lily. It was typical of Julia to misuse reality to suit her goals. To sound noble, I said, "It wasn't that one-sided, because Lily tastes very, very good." Several of the girls looked pleased by me. I'd praised an attribute of Lily's, but it made me seem better in their eyes. I was amused that my prediction of their responses had been right. #2: Julia continued, "I'm asking you all to break the ice with Mark when you can. Don't swamp him or scare him off. He's also extremely busy, so if you can see that he's too busy to talk with you, don't bother him. If you do these things well, then he's much more likely to want to spend time with you in the future. Be aware that Mark's always been too modest to flirt, so he's bound to have some trouble getting used to it. He may speak poorly, or do other things we'd normally consider silly, and even laugh at the guy for. Obviously Mark's not a silly person - very much the opposite of that - so YOU'D be silly not to cut him some slack. In other words, be kind to him. Do you all understand that?" It wasn't difficult, and they all appeared to have grasped it. I wondered whether Julia actually believed that I was unused to flirting because I'd "always been too modest"? As opposed to the real reason - until about a year ago I'd been an awkward, uncoordinated, pimply, unattractive (if not worse), socially inept, beanpole of a wimpish punching bag. Attempting to flirt, on those rare occasions when I'd been self-deluded about a girl and desperate enough to try, had only added pain and humiliation to my life. Fortunately it'd been in an earlier grade, so these girls knew next to nothing about my history. "By all means, those of you that are hot for Mark, keep dressing sexy like Linda has. That can't do ANY harm at all, haha. If Mark and I choose only five or six girls for him to see again after today, then Linda will be on that list, and most of the rest of you, who've NOT demonstrated ANY interest in making Mark happy, won't." Linda was wearing a very low-cut top, so I'd been terribly disappointed (by her not being one of the bowlers, haha). Judging from what I'd seen of Linda at school - too little - it wasn't normal for her to dress so revealingly, but she was one of Julia's best friends and I didn't have any trouble imagining that Julia had given Linda some 'advice'. -- "I've heard many of you talking about the way Mark dresses these days. Pat fainted when she first saw him dressed to show off his body, and I know many of the rest of you cream yourselves at the sight of him. Yet almost none of you returned the favor. Not to mention that you've got DOZENS of competitors for Mark's attention. You need to realize you're in an INTENSE competition, and wise up, which leads me to the second of the three topics I want to cover." [Julia later told me that she'd been annoyed at how normally many of the girls had dressed today. Few of them had attempted to look sexy for me ("Because I know how much you like looking at sexily dressed girls." Bless her!). Julia had been dropping repeated hints in her speeches today, about the importance of their looking sexy, but she thought that the girls weren't picking up on it, so she'd been forced to be a LOT less subtle, and had said what I've quoted just above. During this later conversation, I'd asked Julia, "Did you ask Linda to dress sexily for bowling?" With indignation Julia protested, "Of course not! I never said the word 'sexy' or 'sexily' at ANY time during my conversation with her. I just told her to wear that top, haha."] Savannah put up her hand, and said, "Julia. Can we have a restroom break before you continue please?" Several girls showed approval at that suggestion, so Julia consented and some of them left the table. While that was happening, and I was looking around for any more stray pieces of pizza that needed tidying up, I proximity sensed someone walking up behind me. I turned to see Laila, Hannah and Gabriella. Laila smiled at me, then said, "Hannah and Baby have to go in about fifteen minutes to help a friend of theirs move apartments. They may not get a chance to talk with you, so can we grab you for a quick talk now, away from the table?" "Baby" confused me momentarily, until I realized that it was Gabriella's nickname. Cute, even if it seemed weird for 16-year old Laila to be calling her physically larger 20-year old sister "Baby." Maybe their parents had started it when Baby was a baby. "Sure." Especially as there was no pizza within easy reach. I stood up and we moved a few feet away. There was a lot of ambient noise in this place, so our voices wouldn't carry far. Laila asked, "On Friday, do you mind if Baby joins us?" #1: #3: #1, #2: #4 was alerted and brought up to date with the latest development. We'd been right about his appreciating the situation's subtle nuances. Meanwhile, #2: I answered, "I'm surprised. I did hear you correctly, didn't I?" Laila said, "If you were surprised, then you heard correctly, haha." I resisted all the "yippee"-type of things I could say. Instead I played it cool by saying, "I don't have any emotional problems with OTHER people's sisters, but there is one possible issue. Julia knows who gets into my bed, and her parents know who gets into their home, so I have to tell a few people this is happening. I'm not telling them BECAUSE you're sisters, but that's something I expect they'll quickly work out for themselves. I'd be surprised if anyone raised an objection, but you need to be aware that a few people are going to know. I definitely respect that you want to keep this quiet, but you have to trust my judgment and discretion about whom I talk with about it." I couldn't wait to tell Carol too, but I hadn't included her in my list as there was no acceptable reason for doing so. "Thanks. Our parents know we've been doing it occasionally for years, so it's not TERRIBLY important, but we like to keep it quiet. I know you're not boastful, so we trust your discretion, especially after your careful answer. Julia seems to be the one that's boastful on your behalf though. Can she keep it quiet?" "Absolutely! I can 100% guarantee that. You may have the impression that Julia shoots off her mouth a lot, but the reality is that she's actually very careful about what she says." #4: "We don't mind her knowing, but we're a little worried about her boasting about how many girls you can handle in one night and using us as an example." "Julia talks me up, but she does it very deliberately. She's a very organized person and I don't have any doubt that she mentally rehearsed nearly everything she's said recently. I'm 100% sure she won't divulge your secret." "Okay. My last question is because of when I was with you, Julia came in at the end and helped finish me off. I was REALLY hyped up, and I raved about having future threesomes with you and Julia. I'm still very happy to do that, but Baby and Hannah don't know Julia well enough yet. This is embarrassing to ask, but would it be okay if it was just the four of us for now. Would Julia let us, without getting jealous and angry?" "Umm. In some ways that's a complex question, but not in ways you'll think of. First, Julia certainly won't get jealous. And her 'letting us' is not really an issue either. If I say I want to do something, then she always lets me." I could see that point hadn't been believed, so I repeated it. "Seriously! Julia will ALWAYS let me do what I insist on, and I don't even need to insist hard. We have an unusual relationship - as if you couldn't tell! - and there's heaps of internal relationship stuff that you've got no idea about. Even if Julia knows that what I want to do is wrong, she'll let me do it. AFTER I've done whatever I wanted, if it was stupid, she'll DEFINITELY point out my mistake, but that's after. So if I tell her it's just the four of us, without her, then she won't try to stop it happening that way. -- "The ONLY worry I have is about a control issue. Julia needs to be in control of the process of me looking for a new girlfriend out of all the girls who're interested. The line of communication is from me, through her, to the Liaisons, then to the non-Liaison girls. What you're asking is possibly cutting around Julia, and that might ruffle her feathers. It wouldn't be a sex issue, but a control one. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what her reaction will be. Sometimes Julia thinks about things in ways that surprise me..." #3: " ... so I always tell Julia what I'm up to." This was a point I knew Julia wanted other girls to be fully aware of. It was analogous to her walking into the bedroom without knocking when I'm mid-session with a girl. "So I'll simply ask her what she thinks about it. If she gets upset, it'll be a smaller upset if it's now rather than during the act. Why don't I call her over and we can ask her now?" I could see that Hannah and Baby were uncomfortable with that idea, and even Laila was a little. I knew that I was going to ask Julia about this, so the only real question was whether to do it now in front of these delightfully decadent girls or in private. It seemed to me that if Julia did get upset, then it'd be best for these three to see it, so they'd know exactly what the problem was. I'd much rather Julia explained it to them than I have to do it, because it might be an incomprehensible girly issue (sorry about the redundancy). Or if Julia didn't get upset, then it'd be good for them to see how permissive Julia is. The only reason I had to not ask Julia right now was to spare their feelings. Ordinarily that would've been something to concern me, but NOT when it risked upsetting Julia's feelings. I had no doubt which was the most important side of that equation, EVEN considering how much I wanted to do this foursome. I assured, "TRUST me on this, okay. I know Julia far better than you do. I'll get her now." Before they could object, I took the few steps necessary to tap Julia on the shoulder. I didn't really care whether their trust in me was lived up to or not. If Julia hit the roof, then mistrust wouldn't matter. When Julia turned around, I asked, "Something's come up, can I borrow you for a little while please?" Julia quickly agreed and we rejoined Laila's group. I said, "Julia, about the threesome planned for Friday night. Baby - that's Gabriella's cute nickname - wants to join in too, making it a foursome. I told them I didn't have any reluctance when it came to OTHER people's sisters, so that issue is fine. I also promised them that you wouldn't tell anyone else about their sister thing. I know that I have to tell a few other people, and they trust my discretion on that, but I don't want you to discuss it with anyone who doesn't already know, okay?" Julia immediately said to them, "I PROMISE I will keep your 'sister thing' - as Mark so cautiously put it - TOTALLY secret. I won't mention a word of it to anyone who doesn't already know." They seemed pleased by Julia's immediate and emphatic response. I continued, "I knew that wouldn't be a problem. Another thing they're concerned about, is that they want the foursome to be JUST a foursome. Without you, in other words, because Hannah and Baby don't know you well enough. Laila's embarrassed about that, because at the end of my last session with her she was very eager for a threesome with you and me. She's still eager for that threesome, but not to overlap it with this foursome." Laila looked worried and about to speak. I don't know what else she could have said, because I had defined the situation well, I thought. I never found out, because Julia jumped in, saying, "Give me a few seconds to think about it, Laila." Julia turned partly away from us, and looked at the ceiling, obviously in thought. Which pretty much prevented Laila from adding anything more. A few seconds later Julia turned back. Laila and I had both been worried, but Julia had a smile on her face. She told us, "I've got no objections. It's good as far as I'm concerned, and I look forward to Mark telling me afterward how much he enjoyed it. I've got some quick comments though: -- "First, don't be worried about asking me questions. You're not going to get in trouble for asking. That especially applies to Laila when she's doing Liaison 'work', which this is. Worst that'll happen is that I'll tell you 'No', and why. -- "Second, I'm not personally insulted about being excluded. Just as Hannah and Baby don't know me, I don't know them. But be aware that Mark's sessions can last a long time and sometimes something comes up that I need to talk with him about. If I'm staying with Carol at his house, I'll call his cellphone; and if I'm still at my home, I'll just walk in to talk with him face to face. So even though I'm not involved, it's possible that you might see me for a few minutes if I need to talk with Mark. You've got nothing to worry about, as I don't get jealous seeing him in action with other girls and I'll leave you to it as soon as my conversation with Mark has finished." -- "Third, and definitely most importantly, VERY well done Laila! Not only am I not upset, I am very happy. Do you remember that I said there'd be a 'Best Liaison of the Week' competition every week, with a prize each Sunday of a session with Mark?" Laila nodded, adding, "I think I remember you saying something about it. You didn't say much though." "I'll explain it some more. From next Sunday we're going to have regular Liaison Meetings at my house, with all the Liaisons, Mark and me. They'll be to discuss the week's events, what the non-Liaison girls are saying, ideas and suggestions, etc. It shouldn't take long. After that meeting Mark will choose the Liaison that pleased him the most the previous week. Then Mark and that girl will go to my bedroom and she'll get well 'thanked', haha. -- "Next Sunday I imagine that you'll have an extremely good chance of winning that prize, especially as your foursome will only have finished the previous morning. That's assuming no other Liaison does something even better, which would be difficult, and that you don't mess-up in some way. You understand all that, don't you?" "Umm, sure. It sounds simple. So I'm going to be with Mark Friday night, Saturday morning and probably Sunday too? That's going to be a great week! I hope my body can handle all that." "I know the feeling! My body's not being able to keep up with him night after night is one reason I'm not jealous about sharing him. You'll have some help though, the three of you on Friday and Saturday, and it'll be you and me on Sunday. That's not up to us, of course." #2: #4: Laila had the same confusion as me, "Umm, it's not? I don't really understand. Who's it up to?" "Mark, of course. Isn't that obvious?" #1: "Umm, no, not really. Wouldn't a Liaison pick her own prize?" Julia looked puzzled for a second, then said, "Ahh, I understand your mistake now. You lost sight of the big picture. That's easy to do. I'll explain why it's obviously Mark's choice. It's all to do with why you're a Liaison in the first place. When I get back to the table I already plan to say this in more detail, but let's just agree that Mark is an incredible guy, that a huge number of girls would love to have him as their boyfriend. That's obvious, just from looking around right now, because two dozen of the nicest and prettiest 10th grade girls are here today for a chance at that. In the next few months Mark's going to meet many more girls, he'll choose the ones he likes the most, say the top quarter, and spend more time with them. He'll keep narrowing the field, and getting to know the remaining girls better and better. Eventually he'll be able to decide on one or two girlfriends, and those will become his full-time girls, with me as a part-timer because I'm with Carol half the time. I'm sure you understand that process, as it's a simple one. -- "Now think about Katelin. She won the competition and gets to spend ONE night with Mark. Chances are that after that night Mark won't have time to talk with her for weeks, possibly even months, because there are going to be too many other girls lining up for their turn with him. Katelin can only count on ONE chance to make Mark like her. You know how good and giving he is at sex. Within a few minutes poor Katelin is going to be unable to think clearly, and she's going to spend the night having nonstop orgasms. You know what a session with Mark is like." Laila VERY happily agreed, "I'LL SAY! It was AWESOME!" "I doubt very much that you did ANYTHING with Mark on your first session that differentiates you from any other girl. In particular, did you do ANYTHING that was all about HIS pleasure, rather than yours?" Laila had to admit, "No, not the way you said. We both had a great time. He enjoyed himself." "Sure he did. But I guarantee that you enjoyed yourself FAR more than you ever have with a guy before. Yes?" "Yes. Absolutely. That was the best sex of my life, and I'm not insulting Baby or Hannah, because I've already raved over it with them. That's why they're here today." "Do you think YOU gave Mark the best sex he's EVER had? What about after he's had sex with a hundred other girls, or two hundred, or three? Will he remember how good you were? Will he remember Katelin, or anyone else?" "Ahh, no. He won't remember me. That's not a happy thought." "Welcome to my world! Do you think he's keeping me as his girlfriend because I'm better than anyone else at bouncing up and down on his cock? If you do, you're very wrong. I'm his girlfriend because I put his pleasure ahead of mine, the result of which is that I get FAR more pleasure from Mark than ANY other girl. Short-term thinking will ruin any chance you have at being Mark's lifelong girlfriend. I presume you're smart enough to want that. So when you win the Best Liaison prize, by all means YOU tell Mark what YOU want, then Mark will give it to you. He'll give it to you very, very well. You'll love it, but you will also have given away an extremely valuable opportunity to ask Mark what HE wants, to differentiate yourself from every other girl. When you ask him what he wants on Sunday, I'm assuming he'll ask for a threesome with you and me, because he loves me. That you'd let him do that will earn you big points with him. Now do you understand why YOU should allow it to be Mark's choice what he does with the Liaisons?" Laila did, that's how good Julia's fancy footwork was! "I'll say! I NEVER thought of ANY of that before. Now I understand you a lot better, Julia." Julia said, "There's a lot more you don't know yet, but I don't have time to explain it now. What I want you to do sometime in the next few days, is explain everything I just told you to the other Liaisons. You don't have to explain it to Carol or Donna though, since they already know what unselfish love is." After a very short pause, Julia added, "I bet your first emotional reaction was that you didn't want the other Liaisons to know. Don't bother commenting on that, but I suggest you think about it. If you remain selfish, then sooner or later you'll try to put your desires ahead of Mark's, like Dakota did, and then we'll fire you. I could call out now and have twenty volunteers to fill your position. You are very, very easily replaced, Laila. Don't forget that, especially as you've already ignored Mark's desires in favor of your own once this lunchtime." Laila looked puzzled, but not confident enough to ask what Julia meant. I saw the moment Laila decide to say nothing, as her mouth suddenly pressed closed. So Julia asked, "Do you know what I'm talking about?" Laila admitted, "Umm, no?" "Your other selfish action was not wanting me to participate in your foursome on Friday. You were worried how I would react to being excluded, but despite that worry you stuck to your request, because it was what you, Hannah and Gabriella wanted. You considered how EVERY SINGLE PERSON involved in that event would feel EXCEPT Mark. As far as I'm concerned - but obviously not you - Mark is the ONLY important person. I bet you never asked Mark whether he wanted me involved on Friday, because if you had he would've chosen to include me. His pleasure never crossed your mind. You're USING HIM as nothing more than a giant vibrator, to get as much pleasure for yourself and your friends as you can. Can you imagine what I think of you, Laila?" #1: The look of despair on Laila's face indicated that she knew she'd fucked up. Laila started stammering something, probably an apology, but Julia cut her off, "Then why did I say you'd almost certainly win the Liaison of the Week prize?" #1: #4: #2: #1: #2, #3, #4: It was obvious that Laila was exactly as confused as I was, which was totally. She said, "I don't know, Julia. I'm sorry." Julia said, "I'm not going to tell you as it's time you learned these things for yourself. It took me about four days after my first date with Mark to realize the sort of relationship I had to have with him. Coincidentally, this is the fourth day after you had sex with Mark. Plus I've spent hours talking to you individually or with Liaisons generally, so it shouldn't have taken you this long. I'll give you until 10pm on Tuesday night to send me an email with your answer as to why you'd probably win Liaison of the Week. If I don't receive a good email I'll fire you and offer your job to Katelin. She was smart enough to have the best guess, so she's probably smart enough to be a good Liaison. She'll be in the middle of a sex session with Mark, so I'm quite sure she'll leap at the opportunity. Feel free to talk with whoever you want about this. Your sister, the other Liaisons, other girls. Dakota might be able to give you some insight, considering that you're in the same position she was..." #4: " ... but don't talk with Mark, Carol, Donna or me about it. None of the four of us would benefit from that discussion. I'm not angry with you, Laila. You're just facing a test. All the Liaisons will face several tests. You're in an extremely privileged and sought after position, so you have to prove that you're up to it. Ava's crying at home now because she's in even worse trouble than you are. I've told you before, Mark's going to be one of the most important men on the planet. If you think you can stay as close to him as you are now without busting your gut to make yourself as worthy as possible, then you're very much mistaken. I have one more speech to make to everyone here, which I need to do now. I know you're feeling upset, but you should listen to this. You too, Hannah." "Me?" asked a surprised Hannah. "Yes. You've quietly listened to this conversation even though I know you've got very little idea of where I'm coming from. I think you'll find the next few minutes interesting. Let's get back to our seats now." Julia, holding my arm, tugged me into motion. #4: #1: ------- Chapter 107: Chloe in the Parking Lot Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Julia got everyone's attention, then, "Sorry that took so long. Laila dug herself into a hole then tried to get out by digging it deeper. She's going to be fired as Liaison unless she finds her way out by Tuesday night." There were expressions of shock from all around the table (well not from Robert or Donna, but you get the idea). Laila didn't look shocked, being too busy looking unhappy. #3: #4: #3: #4: All four minds, both eyeballs, and my head turned to face this interesting new development. The development's owner saw our attention, smiled at us, and stuck out her chest to show it off. Savannah was wearing tight jeans and a tight, bright yellow T-shirt. She'd definitely been wearing a bra last time I'd looked at her, when she'd asked to go to the bathroom... #4: #2: #4: <(a) I'm hardly likely to EVER forget that meeting. If I ever lose interest in remembering that, someone please shoot me. (b) Savannah had her arms crossed when we were walking back to the table after Julia demolished Laila. I bet she kept her uncovered state covered by her arms until we were looking. See how the other girls have noticed where we're looking and aren't pleased. Savannah stole a march on them.> #1: #3: #1: #3: #4: #2: #1, #3, #4: "Excuse me, Julia." When Julia paused, I continued. "Savannah. Let me be the first to congratulate you..." #3: " ... You're right that I do like looking at sexy girls, and you are sexier that way, so thank you for that. I'm especially impressed that you were smart enough to do it, and acted so quickly. You're more on the ball than many of the other girls here..." #3: #2: " ... And most importantly, you were REALLY listening to Julia. Laila's just had a nasty shock, in large part because she was too self-centered and didn't bother listening to Julia carefully enough over the last few days. Ava's also having a tough time for the same reason, which is why Ava's not here now. If Julia ever says, 'I suggest' then all of you should strain your ears to catch every word, and then do it, because Julia will notice if you don't. So VERY well done for recognizing that, Savannah." This was FAR better recognition than Savannah had hoped for, so she stuck out her chest in pride. She was already sticking out her chest to show it off, so the result of this double-up was very enjoyable. Several of the other girls started adjusting their clothing in ways clearly intended to be delightful. #2: #4: #1: #2: Julia called out, "Stop! THIS isn't the place for that behavior. Half of you will remember what happened last time. Do you want to do that again in the middle of a restaurant?..." #4: #1: " ... You'll get ample opportunity to do that at my place after lunch." All the girls stopped improving their clothes. I could see that half of them - those that hadn't been to the Liaison Picking Meeting - didn't understand Julia's reference, but they knew to stop. The all-important momentum had been tragically lost. Happily a few of the already undone buttons were left that way, but - sadly - no one had had time to improve their look as much as Savannah had. Oh well. I consoled myself with the belief that next time we had a social outing like this, the girls would be a LOT better (i.e., less) dressed. #4: #1: Julia said, "Well done, Savannah and the rest of you who started copying her. I know only half of you know what happened last time something like that started. I'll tell that story later, as it's very funny. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Laila. I think I'll skip what I was going to say about her predicament. Let's wait until Tuesday night for that. -- "What I want to talk about now is Mark's Intellectual, Physical and Emotional aspects. I'll start with Intellectual, because that's mostly the cause of all that follows. You should know that last school year Mark was skipped from the 8th to the 9th grade. This year he's doing 10th and 11th grades at the same time, and a few college courses too." There was some surprise at that, so Julia added, "Yes. For those of you that didn't know, Mark has already started his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at OSU. That's one of the reasons he has his driving license, so he can drive to college when he needs to." There were some more expressions of surprise, so Julia yet again added, "Haha. You don't know much about Mark, do you? Show them your license please, Mark." I was already starting to reach for it, knowing how this goes. I pulled out my billfold (there's no room for an ordinary wallet in these pants), extracted my license and passed it to Julia, who announced, "I'll pass it around. Look at the issue date and Mark's birthday." She passed it to Robert, who smiled and passed it straight on. A few seconds later a girl's surprise exclamation interrupted Julia restarting of her speech. Julia said, "I'd better explain now, or I'll get interrupted several times. Mark's age is fifteen and a half. His license's date of issue is over a year ago. Do any of you know anyone who got their license at fourteen and a half?" None of them did, not even me. I could see Donna looking puzzled, trying to work out what Julia was getting at. I believe Donna got it, then clamped her mouth shut. I let go the breath I'd been saving to use to distract her with the question I had prepared. -- "It's illegal to get a license younger than sixteen in Oregon. You can go online and check, as I have. There are no exemptions or special cases listed. But Mark has an entirely legal license. It was issued by a very pissed off big boss at the DMV, when someone several levels above him forced him to do it. I've told some of you before that Mark's going to be important. Well, he's ALREADY important enough to get the DMV forced into legally issuing him what should have been an illegal license." [My license went around the table, and arrived back several minutes later.] -- "I mentioned college. Mark is doing some college courses. A few of you have met my father. He's a professor at OSU, and is quite old and well spoken. He says OSU is 'wetting their pants' over Mark. That's not how my father normally talks!" (Actually it's one of the Williams family's favorite expressions.) "OSU is not charging Mark for any course fees, textbooks, etc. Mark doesn't have a scholarship. He doesn't need one, because OSU is so honored to have Mark study there that it has refused to charge him. Have any of you ever heard of anything like that?" None of them had. -- "OSU has given Mark a new computer. It turned out to not be powerful enough to keep up with the amount of work that he does on it, so they're upgrading it in the next few days. My brother Robert helped with that. Robert, how much do you think Mark's entire computer system will cost after it's upgraded?" I noticed the clever way Julia said "computer system" to disguise it just being two computers. Robert thought for a second, then said, "Hardware and software combined, probably eleven or twelve thousand dollars." "What!" That was from me. I'd been expecting FAR less. Quite a few of the girls had been surprised too. Robert explained, "Yeah. There'll be about eight grand of hardware, and three or four of software. Virtually every software package that OSU could imagine you might find useful next year is going to be installed. That's valuing the software at OSU's educational prices, by the way. It would cost a few thousand more at retail. Dad mentioned to me this morning that your upgrade should arrive Tuesday afternoon. The Dean's arranged an OSU technician to bring all the new equipment and install it then, as that'll be the best for you. I'll be coming home to let him in and to make sure he does it right." Julia said, "Thanks Robert. You heard him, girls. At retail OSU are giving Mark what sounds like $15,000 worth of computer stuff. You heard Robert mention the Dean too. The Dean is the number one boss at OSU. Like our Principal at school, only ENORMOUSLY more important, being in charge of tens of thousands of students and many hundreds of staff. Dad told the Dean last night that Mark wanted a better computer, and you heard Robert say that the Dean has it arranged already. On the WEEKEND! The Dean is the man in charge of all of OSU, and he's running around on the weekend to get things done for Mark. Does that begin to give you girls some idea of how important Mark is?" They looked stunned. I had no difficulty imagining their thoughts: "$15,000 wasted on computer! Think of the clothes I could buy with that!" Julia continued her lecture, "I imagine that most of you intend to go to college after you graduate high school." Julia has a belief that smart girls are better for me, so most of these girls are smart. I didn't object to her bias, as smart girls can have big tits too. Plus, to be honest, smart girls have the advantage of not doing stupid things so often, clothes shopping excepted. "Mark's doing courses toward a BS in Math, which is four years hard work. Right?" #3: #4: Such overwhelming logic, not to mention Julia being damned hard to stop, meant we sat there quietly while Julia watched a few girls nod, then she said, "At Mark's current rate of progress through his OSU courses, he's going to finish his ENTIRE four year degree BEFORE he graduates high school next year." #3: #4: #3: #2: #3: Quite a few of the girls were struggling to accept the latest piece of Mark advertising. It was hard for them, as they were probably still dreaming of all the clothes they could buy with $15,000. So Julia repeated herself, "At the end of the next school year Mark will have done from 8th grade to 12th, plus four years of college, which totals nine years of education, in just three years - last year, this year, and next. Nine years in three. Have any of you ever heard of any one even close to being as intelligent as Mark?" None of them had. -- "I imagine that smartest guy any of you have ever heard of, is Einstein. Right?" That they could agree with. Several nodded their heads. -- "My dad's a bit of a buff on Einstein, so I've picked up a few things about him. Einstein's long dead, did you know that?" Most of them seemed surprised, judging by their body language. -- "Yeah, I was surprised to learn that too. We hear Einstein's name so often, that we assume he's still alive. He died in 1955, 33 years before we were born. He's most famous for relativity. It's something to do with the speed of light and E equals MC squared, whatever that means. I don't understand why, but we all know that Einstein's work was very important. The relativity that he's famous for he published in 1905, exactly one hundred years ago. That's ANCIENT! I'm amazed that he's so famous all over the world a hundred years after he made his biggest discovery. The point I want to make is that Einstein is the most famous scientist the world has ever had, and Mark's IQ is almost THE SAME!" #3: #2: Julia gave them a second to contemplate my intelligence, then she continued, "When you get a chance, go online and read up on Einstein's high-school and college years, and compare them to Mark's going from 8th grade through to finishing his bachelor's in three years. Mark is currently doing BETTER than Einstein. Look at Mark. You're looking at someone who could easily be more famous than Einstein. For many hundreds of years almost everyone on the planet might know who Mark Anderson is, and there could be hundreds of books written about him, and countless TV shows." Julia waited, and the silence extended. The girls were gobsmacked (that's a highly technical term us world-famous geniuses use). There was a piece of pizza on a plate near Donna, and: I felt like a snack. The tension needed relieving. I felt like a snack. (Hey, it's PIZZA!) I said, "Donna, can you pass me that piece of pizza please? I'm too smart to let delicious pizza go to waste." My asking for another slice reminded them of the many earlier jokes about my appetite, and it broke the tension well. As the chuckles broke out, Julia smiled at me proudly. So I got her praise AND a slice of pizza. Life is good! Julia said, "Mark's injected some humor well, but remember what I said. You all knew that Mark's a genius, but none of you understood how much of a genius he is. You're sitting in a casual restaurant sharing pizza with someone who could be talked about all over the world for hundreds of years. Isn't that amazing?" I was about to make a joke, but Carol got in first. "I don't think you're correct, Julia. You said we're 'sharing pizza with Mark'. I didn't notice Mark sharing any pizza. He eats every piece he can get his hands on." There was much undeserved laughter (well, okay, it WAS deserved). Julia said, "You should never forget what you've just learned about Mark. Try to understand how important it makes him. And now I'm going to tell you to temporarily forget it, while I change the topic away from Mark's intellectual to his physical aspect. The most obvious physical thing about Mark, that you've drooled over, is how good Mark looks in the clothes he wears these days. How any guy could look like him and be modest about it escapes me, but Mark is far more comfortable wearing those shapeless bags he called clothes. I think all the girls at school owe me some mighty big thank yous for my providing them with such wonderful eye candy." Julia was interrupted by some mighty big thank yous, and several lower-toned comments too. -- "Laila, Lily, Pat and I are the only ones here who've seen Mark naked. In my opinion, Mark has the most awesome body that I've ever seen, and I'm including all the VERY hunky guys I've seen in glossy magazine ads, on billboards, in movies, and EVERYWHERE else. What do you think Laila, Lily and Pat?" What they thought was embarrassing. Then it was graphic, detailed and even more embarrassing. They had no shame, but I sure did. After far too long, Julia cut them off, "Haha. Okay, thanks. I think everyone's got the idea by now. By the way, after we finish here you're all invited back to my place. We'll just play some 8-ball, watch a movie, soak in the hot tub, relax and chat. Mark, Carol and I like the hot tub, so if you come to my place you'll see Mark, Carol and me when we're naked, although I'm sure you'll..." Katelin was the first to react, "Mark will be NAKED?" A few of the other girls were interested in confirming that they'd heard that correctly too. "Sure. We don't usually bother wearing anything when we use the hot tub. None of you have to get naked if you don't want to. Just do whatever you want. That's why it's called 'relaxing'." #4: #3: #3: #2, #4: "When are we going back to your place Julia?" asked any one of the girls, the others listening avidly. "When I've finished this discussion. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that I'd be naked. I had no idea that so many of you couldn't wait to see me naked." Julia earned herself several chuckles, and an eager follow-up question from one of the girls, "Why can't we continue this discussion at your place? Around the hot tub." Julia said, "Because some of you might not be free to come to my place. If only a few have to miss out, the rest can fill them in tomorrow, but I want most of you to hear what I'm saying. How many can come to my place for a couple of hours?" Bedlam broke out. Broke back in, then broke out again, because it could make more noise that way. Most of the girls were immediately and joyously able to loudly inform Julia that they were absolutely able to come to her house, preferably right now, and could they have directions please. There were also several impassioned, "Can I get a lift? I REALLY need a lift. PLEASE!" A few of the other girls were saying things like, "Argh! I have to call Mom. I'll call her now. PLEASE don't go without me." All of these occurring at the same time. Most of the girls were out of their seats, trying to get directions, giving directions, begging for rides, paying the bill, collecting money, etc. Bedlam in all directions. There's nothing quite like a couple of dozen overly excited schoolgirls for making bedlam. I got up to get ready to leave. The Giant Vibrator Threesome approached me. Hannah started, "Baby and I have to go. Our friend is depending on us and we can't let her down. I think I'm too scared to stay around Julia anyway, after the way she ripped into Laila." Laila was looking decidedly unhappy. She had until Tuesday to pull out of her funk and attempt to save herself. Which gave her a LOT more time than Dakota got. I rejected "Tough shit," as a possible answer, as the sister foursome would be damned hot! Instead I said, "Julia wasn't intense in the bowling alley. She is now because some thoughtless, self-centered girls didn't realize that I'm as important as Julia thinks I am. Regardless of whether you agree with Julia's opinion, you were inarguably ignoring both my and Julia's pleasure in pursuit of your own. You may live your own lives that way if you wish, but it goes directly against how we want our Liaisons to act. Our Liaisons are supposed to be acting FOR us, not USING us. You said Julia is scary. I'm surprised how GENTLE Julia was to Laila. I was with Dakota when Julia gave her the chop. Dakota didn't even get two seconds, let alone two days to think about it and come back with an email for a second chance. I was also with Ava when she screwed up, and again Julia was far more severe on Ava than she was with Laila. Julia didn't hand Laila's job over to Katelin on the spot not because of any reluctance, but because Julia must see sufficient merit in Laila to make it worth giving her a chance. If I was you, Laila, I'd rise to the occasion and do your best to provide Julia with what she wants." Laila moaned, "But I don't know how! I know what we did wrong, and I agree with Julia that I was only thinking about my friends. I could EASILY write an email describing how wrong I was for doing that, but I can't think why I'd win Best Liaison of the Week." "Don't ask me. Literally, as Julia told you not to. My advice is for you to decide whether or not you want to try. If you want to give up, go and tell Julia now that you resign, as that'd be the decent thing to do. If you DO want to try, then get started working out the answer. You could hang around to try to soak up more information, talk with the other Liaisons, and Julia specifically mentioned discussing it with Hannah. Julia must've had a reason for that. So I suggest you and Hannah get together to see if you can solve your problem. Or work out why Julia mentioned Hannah, as maybe there's a clue in that." Hannah said, "Baby and I have to go help our friend, so I can't help Laila this afternoon." I saw a good answer to that, so I shrugged, and said, "Your choice, your action, your consequences, your responsibility." Hannah helpfully asked, "What do you mean?" "I'll use you as my example, Hannah. It's your choice whether to help your friend or Laila. You can't do both, so you have to choose. Your choice leads to whatever action you take, obviously. Your action will have consequences. If you don't help your friend that will affect her, and your friendship with her. On the other hand, without your help Laila may not be able to produce a good email by Tuesday night and she'll lose her extra access to me. No one knows what the consequences will be, but you'll be partly responsible for them." Hannah started repeating stuff about her obligation to her friend when I proximity sensed Julia walking up behind me and reaching for my left arm with her right hand. I thought it might be interesting to do, so I moved my left arm out slightly to make it easier for Julia to grasp it, I moved my right hand across my front toward my left arm, and looked straight at Hannah while I said, "I'm just finishing, Julia." Julia's hands arrived on my arm, and my right hand folded over Julia's. Hannah got my point, and also got that I wanted her to get it because I'd made a point of staring straight at her while I talked to Julia, which isn't a natural action. Hannah turned, obviously checking for mirrors or some other clue. There was no obvious explanation, so Hannah asked me, "How did you know Julia was coming up behind you?" "Ask some other giant vibrator. I don't have the time or inclination to explain." Hannah didn't like that, so I did. I turned to Julia, "Sorry about that. Judging by everyone's getting up and walking out, I guess we're leaving?" "Yes, we're ready to go. Only Chloe can't come to my place because her parents insist she comes home from here. She's not very happy with her parents. One of the others offered to send her some photographs of you, but I suggested that might not be acceptable to you." If the natural order of the Universe had been adhered to, by which I mean the girls rather than me would be getting naked at Julia's, then the loss of Chloe would be a disaster of epic proportions, because that's how big her tits are. They should be officially made the Eighth and Ninth Natural Wonders of the World. Because Julia is a girl and therefore thinks weirdly, Chloe's departure just meant one less girl to perv at me, so I rather than weeping with anguish I just said, "You know me well. Let's go." Laila beseeched, "What about us?" Julia answered, "I invited everyone to my home, and you're part of everyone. You know where I live, and it's your choice whether you come or not." We took another step, then Hannah blurted out a question, "Are you really as smart as Einstein?" Julia started answering, but I wanted to so I patted her hand, saying, "Let me." Turning to Hannah I said, "Whether I will achieve more or less than Einstein is an unknowable future. I'm only fifteen so almost anything could happen. I will say that my last IQ test at school produced a score that compares well with Einstein's. Also, thank you for asking me whether my girlfriend is a liar. The three of you need to decide which way you're going to jump, before you push even more of your feet into your mouths. When you decide which way, try to jump as far as possible. Little jumps aren't going to cut it. See you later, or not, as you choose." As I was turning to leave, I could proximity sense Hannah intending to grab my arm, but she quickly canceled her own intention. Moments later replacing it with walking after us, and then I was out of range. She never walked after us though. The poor girl was confused about what to do, which amused me. When we were sufficient out of earshot from them, I said to Julia, "They're confused. They started off saying they were scared of you, but I think they're mostly just confused. I told them..." Julia interrupted me, "No need to tell me. I heard enough to understand your attitude to them, which I'm VERY proud of you for. Very well done!" "I can't have been that clever, because I couldn't make up my mind about what to do. I was fairly angry with them, but you treated them so much gentler than you did Dakota, so I didn't know what the best thing to do was." Julia said, "You showed them that you didn't care about them, which was perfect. Pretty girls aren't used to being treated like that. They didn't think about your pleasure in their foursome because they're too used to assuming guys will do whatever they want. Now the table's turned and they're confused, which is wonderful." "Confused is wonderful?" Julia confirmed. "Oh yes. Confusion is the best possible thing for nearly all of your girls. When any of them are sufficiently confused, then Dear Aunt Julia will help them by explaining what they need to do - said the spider to the fly, haha. With the exception of Lily, who I don't understand, none of the others have got the right attitude, and will never get it until their world view is shaken up and rearranged to have you in the center, rather than them. Lots of confusion helps, as does fear, hope, greed and lust. Changing the subject, you need to work on your mixed metaphors." "Huh? I do?" "You told Laila and co. that they'd put their feet in their mouths, then you told them to jump. You should've said "hop". No wonder they're confused about what to do, haha." #3: We got outside and joined the big group of girls waiting for us. Carol attached herself to me, and we headed back to where our cars and bikes were. Chloe came near and said, "Mom says I HAVE to come home. We've got relatives coming and they want me there. I can see my stupid relatives any time, and it's not fair that I can't come with you. I'm the only one with parents that mean." Julia cut in before Chloe could get her tantrum into top gear, "I'll make sure that I invite you to the next event, Chloe. Some of the others might not be invited, but you will be. Okay?" I was relieved to hear that, because of the Natural Wonders. Big-titted girls have recently had a zero survival rate in their encounters with Julia, so this was a piece of good news. Chloe is quiet too, adding another good attribute, making three in total so far. Actually more like five, because her tits are twice the size of anyone else's. Chloe was much happier. All the other girls were much sadder. One of them asked worriedly, "Some of us might not be invited again?" Julia said, "Absolutely. There are at least another two dozen 10th grade girls who haven't had their turn to meet Mark socially yet, plus there are all the 11th grade girls that Ava has been talking to, and I know Carol has been swarmed by 8th grade girls who are desperate to meet Mark." Carol confirmed, "I'll say! I've had something like forty or fifty phone calls since school let out on Friday. I leave my phone on vibrate now because it rings so often." Carol 'forgot' to mention that I'd had lunch with her friends on Friday, and had really stirred things up by getting Gia off, so naturally there'd been lots of calls. I also noted that Carol had said forty or fifty "calls", not "girls", and I bet a lot of those calls were from Gia, plus several more repeats from other desperate girls. Julia is a good teacher. Julia continued, "A lot of you are so used to having guys chase around after you that you've become unconsciously arrogant and self-centered toward guys. Laila, for example, just did exactly that to Mark, and that's why she's in danger of being fired. I won't stand for ANY girl treating Mark that way! Carol's 14-year old girlfriends look up to Mark so desperately that their attitude is automatically far better than most of yours. There are also many younger girls wanting Mark too, right down to Donna's 12-year old Ducklings. Not to mention all the 9th grade girls who know Mark because they were in his classes last year, plus the increasing number of senior girls who're starting to offer themselves to him. And I haven't even started talking about all the college girls that want him!" High-school girls must live in fear of college girls, judging by several of the girls around us sucking in their breath with dismay, or moaning, "Oh no, college girls!" It was quite funny. Julia responded, "Sure. You all know Mark's extremely successful at college. The entire faculty, right up to the Dean, are 'wetting their pants' over Mark. Don't you think the students pick up on that? There are girls at college, you know?" Most of these high-school girls groaned, or words to the same effect. "I've never been to college with Mark, so I don't know much about what goes on there. Mark, do the lecturers make a big deal about you at college?" Julia had truthfully never been there with me all the once I'd gone, but I'd told her about it so she knew how I'd answer, "God, yes! It's horribly embarrassing. I get called right to the front of the room, and they have REALLY big rooms, with hundreds of students in them. They all get told my name, and the lecturer raves over me. They take photos of me, and girls call out some very rude things. College girls have no shame! I even had one of them make a pass at me by putting some condoms in my hand and ask me to use some of them on her. How incredible is that!" #4: Julia said, "Really? You didn't tell me about that." "I was too embarrassed at the time. I'll tell you more about it later, because I'm sure you'll get a laugh out of it." Julia would too, when I told her the truth. To the crowd, I explained, "Things like that happen EVERY time I go to college!" Julia followed up with, "You see what I mean? Mark has so many girls wanting to get to know him, so why should he spend time with girls who don't try? Most of you haven't done ANYTHING today to show Mark that you're worth inviting back. He'd be better off socializing with fresh girls rather than re-inviting most of you, because maybe they'll be smarter. Some of you will definitely be invited back again: Linda will, because she showed she was smart enough to make Mark happy right from the start. Savannah because she was smart enough to listen carefully to me and to quickly act on what she heard. Chloe will be invited back. Not because she has to leave early. That'd be a silly reason because then every girl would pretend to have to leave early in order to get a second invite. Chloe will be invited back for a specific reason. Do any of you know what it is?" #4: #3: None of the girls knew the reason, not even Chloe. I didn't know either. Julia asked, "Who thinks it's because her tits are the biggest ones here today?" #4: #3: <{Raspberry}.> None of the girls were rude enough to agree to that. Seeing them all not react, I couldn't resist it. I put up my hand. Hopefully it might help to get the girls to resume their unbuttoning once we got to Julia's. Chloe wouldn't like it, so I did it in a tentative manner, obviously intending it to be a joke. It must have worked, because I got several laughs. Julia said, "Mark is absolutely right." That surprised everybody. "It's not the only reason, but it is a reason. Mark likes tits. How many 15-year old boys DON'T like tits! Mark's also very truthful - he put up his hand in answer to my question even though he knows how sensitive Chloe is. Being truthful is very important to Mark. He's very mature, and he doesn't let his liking breasts lead him into bad decisions or stupid actions, the way other boys do. You've all seen that he NEVER ogles girls in class. I'm his main girlfriend so far, and it's not because of the size of my tits, THAT'S FOR SURE!" Julia patted her chest, pretending to look for and not find any tits. She got lots of laughs. [There are two reasons I've not ogled girls in this year's class: I'm too scared to because I'm a wimp, and I've come to understand how much it annoys many of them, especially Chloe.] Laila & co. joined us now. Julia and I ignored them. We didn't do anything negative; we just didn't respond to them in any way. Our attitude was that we were busy. Julia continued speaking, "Mark has enjoyed looking at Linda's chest today. Obviously not as much as he enjoyed the pizza though, haha." After they all had a good laugh at me, Julia resumed, "Regardless of how pretty he finds Linda, Mark will decide who he likes based on their personality, attitudes, and the other good reasons. But Linda dressed smartly, because she's telling Mark that she wants to make him happy. That's a VERY good attitude in a potential girlfriend. -- "The main reason Chloe is one of our favorites is because she has an even better attitude. When Mark finished eating his pizza, he was still hungry and he looked around for more. Chloe had been keeping an eye on Mark, and she immediately offered him one of her last two pieces. Chloe was still eating, so that piece wasn't a leftover. She ended up finishing her half pizza, and I later noticed her looking around the table a few times. She was still a little hungry, and would've been even hungrier at the time she gave her piece to Mark. That's EXACTLY the unhesitating, thoughtful generosity that Mark deserves. Chloe is DEFINITELY going to be invited back. So good for Chloe!" "But," protested one of the girls, "I didn't know how important food was to Mark." "Nor did Chloe at the time. The only thing Chloe knew was that she cared for Mark. I watched her face carefully after she did it, and there was no sign of any arrogant self-satisfaction. She was happy to have helped Mark. I loved her for that!" Chloe's face was showing even more happiness now. Another girl called out, "I shared my pizza with Mark too." Some other girls echoed this point. "Yes, several of you did. Nearly always after you'd already eaten your fill so it doesn't count NEARLY as much. You could hardly NOT hand over food that was only going to be thrown away otherwise, could you? Just because I've only listed Linda, Savannah and Chloe so far doesn't mean all the rest of you won't be invited next time. They were EXAMPLES of how to get invited again, not the complete list. Mark and I haven't decided whether to thin the numbers yet. It's quite possible we might invite ALL of you back ONE more time. So few of you have woken up to the fact that you have to try that it seems silly to tell you that you've lost a race when you didn't even know it'd started." We'd arrived at the bowling alley's parking lot, and it was time for us all to go to our respective vehicles. Julia anticipated my concern, by telling me, "Everything's arranged. You just have to drive Carol, Donna and me." Julia called out, "Okay everybody. See you at my place in a few minutes." Most of them headed for their bikes, a few to cars, usually singly, indicating they'd got their license in the last few months. A few extra girls got into Robert's car. Chloe voicelessly waved to Julia and me, as she turned to head for her bike. Clearly I had to do something to acknowledge the importance of her contribution to my well-being. Which, I'm ashamed to say, I hadn't noticed at the time. Perhaps I'd been overly focused on the pizza, if it's possible to do that "overly". Plus there are at least two other reasons why I should be nice to Chloe. I called back, "Chloe, if you want, I'd like to kiss you goodbye." "Oh, yes! Umm, I guess so." Chloe's response was quiet, as Chloe's a very quiet girl. It was also initially enthusiastic, but then lost all its steam. I didn't understand why, but it did seem to be an agreement. Chloe had turned to face me, but didn't approach, so I started walking toward her. Julia quickly told me, "Stop. She should come to you." I'd stopped immediately when Julia had said the first word, and as soon as Julia had finished talking to me, Julia called out, "Run here, Chloe. Come on girl, we have to go soon." Chloe hesitated for a couple of seconds, then hurried toward me. Chloe is a lot of fun to watch when she's jogging. She was wearing a high-necked top (she ALWAYS does), but there was a very enjoyable plenitude of movement under it. As she got closer Julia said, "If Mark calls you should always come quickly, Chloe." Chloe nodded. At least, I THINK she nodded. So much of her was already going up and down, in a rich variety of rhythms, that my ability to judge the relative movements of her head was severely compromised. Plus I wasn't looking at it. Chloe slowed down and stopped about four feet away from me and looked at my shoes. It wasn't an easy kissing distance or head position. Julia asked, "What's the matter, Chloe?" Chloe looked up at Julia (as short as Julia is, not much "up" was required), and answered with, "Can I ask a question first, please?" "If it's quick. We have to get home for the others." "Umm, Mark." started Chloe, looking at my shoes again, "Do you really like big girls, the way Julia said? With big, you know?" I knew all right, and I could certainly answer her question VERY quickly! Halfway through my inhalation Julia pinched the forearm of mine that she was holding. Not a gentle pinch either. I looked at Julia, and she looked at me sternly. The pinch meant my predictable answer wasn't a good idea, but I couldn't believe that she wanted me to answer "No." Because, first, she'd not long since told everyone that I did like tits, so I couldn't get away with lying now. Second, I couldn't bring myself to badmouth tits. That'd be against my religion and all that I hold sacred, or would hold, if Chloe gave me half a chance. I decided on my answer, "Chloe, your question was, 'Do I like girls with big breasts?' Is that correct?" Chloe nodded. She was otherwise stationary, so the nod was easy to discern. "Julia spent a lot of time over lunch telling all of you that I'm unusual and better than other guys. But you were perceptive enough to already know that, weren't you?" I was taking a gamble here, based entirely on Julia's description of how Chloe had been keeping her eye on me, and her immediately offering me her pizza when she saw I was still hungry. I thought it was a pretty safe gamble. "Oh yes. You're much better." "Thank you. I have some good news and some bad news when it comes to me being different than other guys. I'll start with the bad news. First I'll talk about something I know you understand: clothes shopping. Personally I think girls are CRAZY spending so much time buying new clothes. If I have to spend more than an hour PER YEAR buying new clothes, then it's been a BAD year for me. You always dress nicely, so I'm sure you spend a LOT longer than one hour per year clothes shopping, yes?" Actually she didn't dress "nicely" as I thought of it, but she'd think she did. Chloe ALWAYS covers her chest FULLY. For the first few weeks of the school year seeing Chloe for the first time every day - to see what she was wearing that day - had been a succession of disappointments. After those weeks, it was obvious that she was never going to wear a style a guy would appreciate. Everything she owned was permanently buttoned to the neck. Not that she owned that much, as she repeated her clothes quite often (I had checked repeatedly). It was a safe bet that she thought she dressed nicely though, especially because she was otherwise very prim and proper, always clean and tidy, etc. "{Giggle}. Yes, a LOT more than that." Good, she was starting to talk more. "Julia is just as bad. To my way of thinking, just as crazy. I've seen enough comedy shows from around the world to know that girls everywhere are the same. As far as I can tell, all you girls have got some sort of terrible genetic malfunction that turns you all into crazy clothes shoppers. I'll never understand it as long as I live. I'd laugh at girls for being so silly, except that I know that boys have got a terrible genetic malfunction too. For a different crazy reason boys all over the world love breasts." Chloe, who had started looking at me and smiling while I was talking about clothes, suddenly turned cold. -- "Remember I said I had good news and bad news? Well the bad news is that I've got that same genetic problem. I do like breasts, just like every other boy. The good news is that I am smart enough to KNOW that breasts aren't important. I chose Julia as my girlfriend because she's a truly incredible person. Every day I'm blown away by how fantastic she is. She joked just a few minutes ago about having very small breasts. I can TRULY HONESTLY say that the size of Julia's chest didn't have the tiniest fraction of influence on my wanting her as my girlfriend." I'd been too busy being ecstatic over lucking into having any type of girlfriend. "Nor has it affected my opinion of her at any time of our relationship, and it never will, for the rest of our lives together. I love Julia for WHO she is. None of her physical attributes - chest, height, hair color, or anything - affect that in any way." I had the feeling that Chloe would fall for the romantic approach, and that seemed to be working. On Julia and Carol too, so three birds and six tits with one stone. -- "Let me use an opposite example. I presume you know that Dakota was fired as a Liaison?" Chloe nodded. "Dakota didn't last very long at all. Julia and I got rid of her very smartly because she was so selfish. As I remember, Dakota has a big chest too - about the same size as yours - but that didn't save..." "Hers are smaller." " ... Sorry, what was that, Chloe?" Chloe repeated, "Hers are smaller than mine. Quite a lot smaller." Chloe's tone of voice was not proud, but envious, which tells you all you need to know about Chloe's attitude to her breasts. "I'll take your word for that, but it doesn't matter to me. I just remember that Dakota's, like yours, are bigger than average. The point I was making was that I fired Dakota without a second's thought about her chest. She was selfishly trying to force me into behaving the way she wanted, and her trickery and selfishness made both Julia and me angry so we fired her. It was as simple as that. The size of Dakota's chest didn't affect my opinion. -- "I have to be quick, so I'll give you one more example. Carol often holds my upper-arm against her chest, because she likes to feel my arm against her heart. Carol also has big breasts like you, but the size of her breasts doesn't affect my opinion of her. She's my sister and I love her for who she is. None of my relationships with those three girls - Julia, Dakota and Carol - have in any way been affected by their breasts. -- "When you ask me 'Do I like girls with big breasts?', I consider that as two totally distinct questions: 'Do I like girls?' and 'Do I like breasts?' Girls are girls, and have to be valued for the good or bad that is in them. Breasts are breasts, which because I'm a boy, I think are all good. Julia has lovely breasts, Dakota has lovely breasts, Carol has lovely breasts. But Julia's, Dakota's and Carol's breasts do NOT affect how I treat those three people. You can easily see that's the case, because you know how I treat those three people." Chloe nodded. -- "Making a relationship depend on breasts would be as stupid as using any other body part, like ... I don't know ... ears." After a short pause, I said a loud, "DAMN!", making Chloe and Julia jump. "Sorry. I've been trying REALLY hard not to mention ears to you. I've got a thing about sexy ears. I REALLY have! I get quite seriously turned on by sexy ears. I LOVE to lick earlobes, around behind the ears, and the neck just under them too. I find all those places irresistibly sexy. I have to warn you that I find your ears to be VERY SEXY. You're standing so close to me that I can see your ears clearly. All the time I've been talking I've been trying extremely hard not to get distracted by your ears." "{Giggle}. Really? My ears?" "Heavens yes! If you and I ever become good friends, Chloe - which I hope we will - then I'm not going to be able to hold myself back from spending a lot of time sucking and licking your ears. If you see me staring at your ears, I hope you'll forgive me, because they truly are two of the nicest ears I've ever seen. You're SO lucky to have ears like that. You've got FANTASTIC ears. Argh! I can't resist them anymore. Chloe, please, PLEASE be my girlfriend? I HAVE TO be able to suck on your ears EVERY DAY!" "What! You're crazy." Chloe looked around in mild panic. She even took a step back. I leaned back on the car to look less threatening, and said, "Relax Chloe. That was a joke. I was just showing you how stupid it'd be to base a relationship on ears. Pretty dumb, eh?" "What? You were joking?" "Totally. Made myself look like a complete fool, didn't I? Imagine basing a relationship on EARS! How stupid would that be?" It took her a second to believe it, and then she burst into a very good laugh. All the other girls joined in too, although Chloe's laugh was much more fun to look at, when it was safe to do so. After several seconds of laughter, Chloe calmed down, got her breath, and then said, "You had me totally convinced." "Good. I enjoyed myself, but I'm sorry I gave you a few seconds of panic though. Sorry about that." "That's okay. It was worth it. I had a very good laugh too. {Chuckle}. I can't believe you had me convinced my ears are sexy. I'm so gullible sometimes." "Your ears ARE sexy. I was serious about that." "What? You said you were joking? I thought you were just using them to make a point about my, you know?" "Two things, Chloe. PLEASE listen carefully. Number one, you DO have sexy ears. Cross my heart and hope to die, I honestly do find your ears sexy. Number two, I was joking about having a RELATIONSHIP that was in any way influenced by your ears. I would never ask you to be my girlfriend because of your ears. That'd be stupid. The point I want to make is that I am drawing a very clear line between those two statements. Your ears are sexy, and my relationship with you will be based on what I think of you as a person, not what I think of your ears. Do you understand me?" After a brief pause, "Yes." "Do you know that there are at least two other parts of your body I find sexy too? Can you guess what they are?" She knew what we were really discussing, and she didn't appreciate my finding them sexy. Her body posture, which had been relaxing, suddenly tightened up. She hunched her shoulders forward to try to minimize her chest size. Her arms moved fractionally toward covering herself, although she aborted that movement. She could hardly go through life holding her arms over her chest, although I'm sure she often wished she could. I casually said, "What's that?" as I bent over to look at the ground. After a second's inspection, I dropped to my hands and knees and studied the ground near Chloe's feet. "What?" she said, stepping back so she could get a better look at the ground near her feet that I was appearing to stare at. I looked up at her and said, "Step over here, Chloe," indicating for her to move to a spot a couple of feet away from where she was now. I looked at her ankles as she moved. -- When she'd reached the spot, I said without looking up at her, "Now move over to here," indicating a spot near where she had started. She moved. -- "Now over here." She moved, but asked, "What are you looking at?" "Hang on Chloe. Just move over here." After a pause, she did so. -- "Great. Now over here." She didn't budge. "What on Earth are you doing?" I looked up at her, saying, "I was looking at your ankles. You've got VERY sexy ankles, especially when you're walking." "What!" My girls - Julia, Carol and Donna - had all been leaving this to me, but Donna was unable to restrain a brief laugh at this. She obviously clued Chloe in. Chloe said, "You can't be serious! Can you?" I ignored her, and just moaned loud enough for her to hear, "Aww. Now she's stopped walking." I got to my feet, and said, "Thanks. That was great. One thing puzzles me. When I said I found two other parts of your body sexy, you hunched your shoulders and started moving your arms to cover your chest. Why would you think I was attracted to your tits when you've got such incredibly sexy ankles?" I saw Julia tap her watch at me, and she was right. I'd been aware that this was taking too long, but I'd wanted to get Chloe to relax her phobia around me. Chloe was struggling to find an answer, but I had to end the game, so I said, "Chloe. I'm sorry, but Julia and I HAVE to leave any second. We have to go look after our guests. Let me quickly say a few things. First, I have enjoyed your company and hope we can spend some more time talking another day. Second, I do not find your ankles sexy. I was teasing you about that and also hoping to use them to teach you something, but I ran out of time. Third, I DO find your ears sexy, but that won't affect our relationship. -- "Fourth, I DO find your breasts sexy, but that won't affect our relationship either. Please think about that; it's important. I am NOT like ordinary boys. I think Dakota's breasts are sexy, but that doesn't affect my NOT having a relationship with her. I think your breasts are sexy, and that doesn't affect our relationship either. We will have a relationship when we like each other enough to start one, not because of your ears, breasts or ankles. -- "I like you, and would like to spend more time with you, but I know you've learned to mistrust guys. I understand why, but the fact is that we cannot have a relationship unless we trust each other. So you have to decide whether you can trust me or not. I'm not going to lie to you by pretending to be someone I am not. I am NOT going to pretend that I don't want to lick your ears, and I am NOT going to pretend that I don't like looking at your breasts. I've been trying a far too long-winded way of teaching you that regardless of what other guys are like, for me relationships are with people, not with their bodies. I probably acted like a madman, but I have very little experience at trying to convince a beautiful young woman that it's safe for her to be proud of her beauty with me. Sorry about that." Julia said, "I've got some things to say to Chloe too." And then Julia launched into her version of how to motivate Chloe. "Mark's got two dozen good looking girls at home who're very eager for his company, and with whom he'll have a lot of fun. You don't know it Chloe, but half those girls stripped themselves totally naked in front of Mark at school several days ago." Chloe gasped. "Yes, at school! They were perfectly happy to show Mark everything they had. I'm sure they'll be even happier to do so in the privacy of my home's hot tub, especially as this time Mark will be naked. Most of the girls will strip. Mark knows that'll happen, BUT he chose to spend ALL THIS TIME talking to you." #4: #3: Julia's rant was just getting some momentum going, "You can be proud of yourself for making Mark like you enough for him to be willing to spend so much time with you. Time which you FUCKING WASTED every single second of! You did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to make Mark like you more. Instead you had him crawling around your feet on his hands and knees acting like a madman and racking his brains trying to think of ways of talking to you without hurting YOUR feelings. All about YOUR selfish feelings. You didn't once give a single thought to his feelings, especially about how to make him happy. You had more one-on-one time with Mark today than ANY of the other girls, and you are very, very unlikely to get this much of Mark's undivided attention EVER again, and you WASTED it. All because you're hung up on having big tits. -- "You know that Mark's the most intelligent human being on the planet and you wouldn't credit him with enough intelligence to realize that tits aren't the best way to judge people. How fucking stupid are you? Not to mention that there's nothing special about your tits anyway. There are dozens of girls at college with bigger tits than yours. College girls are falling all over themselves to get hold of Mark, because - unlike you - they're smart enough to know how important having a smart boyfriend or husband is. OF COURSE he knows that tits are just tits. He's a fucking genius! Mark knows that tits are for FUN! Not for choosing girlfriends, not for serious, life-affecting decisions, but for FUN. When we FINALLY get to my home he's going to be surrounded with naked tits and pussies all afternoon, and when the afternoon's over, he's going to thank them for a fun afternoon. And that's it! Everyone has some FUN. Big fucking deal. -- "You saw Lily let Mark play with her tits in the parking lot before lunch, and Laila and Pat said they'd let him too. Linda and Savannah also seemed pretty eager, and I'm sure plenty of others were too. But he never touched anyone's tit all day, except for when I asked him to touch Lily's. He likes tits, but he's FAR too much of a gentleman to take advantage of even willing girls. You saw all of that for yourself, but you're so distrustful that you couldn't recognize a man worthy of ALL your trust, even when he was right in front of you. -- "You were angry at your parents because they stopped you coming to my house to see what Mark looked like naked. How is it that you think it's perfectly okay for you to ogle Mark's body, but if he'd asked to see your tits you would have screamed bloody murder at him? Your head is fucked up. -- "Go home and think about how abysmally stupid you were. Bawl your eyes out for a while, then try to think about something other than your precious titties for a while. Tomorrow, at school, don't bother trying to talk with Mark because you've wasted more than enough of his time already. But I will try to find some time to talk with you, and you can try to convince me that you're worth a second chance. If you try hard enough you WILL get a second chance, but you're going to have to stop being so stupid in thinking that Mark is ANYTHING like any other guy you've ever met, or will ever meet, in your ENTIRE, pathetic, little life. And for God's sake, stop being so fixated on your precious tits. YOU are the one who is letting them influence - and DESTROY - the most important relationship chance of your life: a relationship with Mark." -- Turning to me, ignoring the bawling Chloe, Julia said, "Get in the car, Mark. Let's go. We've wasted too much time of this worthless idiot already." I didn't want Julia yelling at me, so I did EXACTLY as I was told. I got in the car, checked everyone put their seatbelts on, started the car, and started driving toward Julia's home and all the naked titties waiting for me there. As the car rolled past the unmoving Chloe, Julia leaned out the window and yelled at her, "Go home, you stupid cow." ------- Chapter 108: Donna Gets Her Hands on Part Of Me Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Julia wound up her window then said to me, "With a bit of training she'll make a great girlfriend for you." I bet you expect me to be confused? I wasn't the least bit confused. I've seen Julia operate often enough by now to confidently expect to be completely and totally lost, so it was going exactly as I expected. I would've been confused if it hadn't been. -- Julia said, "I've got heaps to say before we get home. There'll be two purposes for all our future 'Get To Know Dates', which is any activity with Mark and lots of girls that he doesn't know very well, like today. -- "Purpose One: For us to get to know the girls a lot better. I know them, but not in dating situations. We're looking for girls that Mark likes, and who'll suit the way we want to live, such as being bisexual or at least bi-tolerant. They should also be okay with nudism, be sexy, helpful, funny, etc. Girls we'll enjoy having around, especially for Mark's enjoyment. -- "Purpose Two: to create an atmosphere which is friendly, relaxed, and as sexy as possible without coercion. The better we do that today, the easier it'll be to build on it in the future. I was annoyed by how unsexy most of the girls dressed today, for example. Hopefully they'll do a LOT better the next time we meet. I'll explain more about that later. -- "There'll be other groups we'll have 'Get To Know Dates' with, such as with Carol's and Donna's friends. Normally such groups will have their numbers thinned ruthlessly, but this group I want to thin much slower because these are going to be my pool of replacement Liaisons for the 10th grade. I didn't realize how quickly we'd be going through Liaisons, so I'm going to train this group on how important Mark is so I don't have to keep training individual girls. -- "Mark, I want you to socialize this afternoon please. I'll make sure it's easy for you, but you can help by deliberately spending time with each of them, and by trying to remember what you thought about each girl so we can compare notes later. -- "Notice that having fun and having sex are NOT included as purposes. That's because these 'Get To Know Dates' are mostly about - funnily enough - getting to know the girls and their getting to know us. Spending the whole time in a bedroom having sex would restrict that. Once any group of girls has been thinned down to a few girls, we can worry a lot less about getting to know them, and can start enjoying them more. -- "Fun and sex aren't Purposes, but I expect there'll be some of each. This time perhaps quite a lot of sex, because we'll have privacy. Our next 'Get To Know Date' might be entirely in public, so there'd be no sex then. I'm going to limit the sex for the first hour or so today, but allow more later. To start with I want lots of things to be happening: play some DVDs, some music, dancing, 8-ball, the hot tub, and lots of moving from one to the other. I have several ideas for events. None of us should do any one thing for long, but should circulate. Even if you're in the hot tub with a sexy girl sitting on your lap, Mark, don't spend too long in one place, okay?" I answered, "Sacrifice today for more pleasure in the future?" "Exactly right. I'll also be getting Mom to walk through, and maybe Dad and The Boys, depending on how things go. They'll behave as if naked bodies are an everyday occurrence. What I don't want is for all the girls to sit in a corner and talk about school, or clothes. That'd be pointless." The idea of all the girls sitting around discussing clothes when they could be frolicking naked in the hot tub with me was, in my opinion, not so much "pointless" as a DISASTER. -- "When we get home, I want you to head to the hot tub room, undress there, and climb in. Don't run to do it, but don't fool around for more than a few minutes. It doesn't matter whether any of the others are naked, in the pool, in the room, or anything. Just do what I've said, okay?" "It doesn't sound complicated, just embarrassing." "Yes, but they'd feel the same if we wanted them to strip first, so if you break the ice then it'll be easier for them to follow. When you come in, avoid any distractions and strip. Once you're in the pool, you can fool around a little - in fact, please do - just no heavy sex please, not for the first hour or so, okay?" That was a restriction that had wonderful implications, so I said, "Absolutely!" "Carol and Donna go upstairs to my room, strip, and put on robes. Wait ten minutes then walk to the hot tub room, take off your robes and get into the tub. Act like you've gone naked in front of Mark every day of your life. Donna, this is going to be strange for you. You've never seen Mark naked before, have you?" "No, but I'm REALLY looking forward to it. Am I really going to see him naked soon?" "Yes, both of you will be naked. The trouble is that you have to pretend it's totally unimportant and uninteresting. You have to act like you've seen him naked a million times before. You have to act the way you and Carol do when you're naked together. Can you do that?" I could easily imagine Donna having trouble with that. She's an impulsive sort of girl, and she'd be having some pretty strong impulses upon seeing me naked for the first time. So I suggested, "I think Donna might have trouble with the initial shock. How about when we arrive I go upstairs with Donna and Carol. I strip up there to let Donna have a good look and get used to me, and then I get redressed, go downstairs, and do what you asked me?" Julia said, "Yes, that's better. So Carol and Donna, after Mark leaves the room, wait ten minutes before you go to the hot tub, okay?" "Sure." | "YIPPEE!" I said, "Haha. I'm happy to see you so happy, Donna. The reason you'll be seeing me naked is because you've been EXTREMELY good today. You've not let slip any secrets, or said anything troublesome at all. There were lots of times you could've when the girls were talking about my body or sex, but you never did, so I'm happy to reward you for that. I had already decided to let you sleep with Carol and me soon. Not sex, you understand, but lots of nice cuddling. That'll probably be tomorrow night, but we'll wait and see about that. That's provided you keep behaving so well, of course, so please do." Donna said, "Thanks SO much! I've been trying VERY hard. I keep asking myself, 'What would Carol say?' I've asked myself that a zillion times already today. Vanessa also told me, 'Young ladies often just sit without speaking for a long time, ' so I've done that too." "Good for you," praised Julia. "Keep it up. Mark, please keep your cock soft right from the beginning. For quite a long time, probably thirty minutes or more. Bodies don't turn you on, only consensual, sharing sex - like you told me you did with Ava; that was a good idea. I'm going to demonstrate your softness to all the other girls, and it'd be bad news if you weren't, especially as Carol and Donna will be with you at the time." #1: #3: #4: "I'll try." "Good. You guys go upstairs and I'll start off by organizing the girls: telling them they can walk back and forth, be naked or not as they wish. Mom's got plenty of drinks and snacks for us in the Guys' Room, and lots of towels. When any of you have had enough time in the tub you can get out and get dressed if you want, or wear a towel, or walk around naked, depending on what seems best considering what the others are doing. If no one else is naked after a while then you shouldn't walk around naked because I don't want the others to feel they're unsafe or pressured. It might work out that the Guys' Room becomes a room for the girls who don't want to strip, and the hot tub room becomes an anything-goes room. In which case we'd always dress when leaving the hot tub room. I want everyone to be comfortable, but within that, I also want to encourage as much nakedness and sex-play as possible, okay?" We thought that was okay. -- I was just about to ask about sex when Julia beat me to it, "Sex is very likely to occur, unless they're more uptight than I expect. When you're upstairs, Mark, please load up your pockets with condoms. Just don't show them until they're needed, in case it scares anyone. To start with keep the sex light. Just play around. With your sisters nearby you'll have a good excuse to keep it low key. Donna, when the sex gets heavy, one of us will tell you to leave..." "Aww! Why can't I stay? I like sex. And after seeing Mark naked, I'm REALLY going to want some!" Julia said, "I'm not kicking you out to be mean. I'd like it if you were able to stay, but it's too dangerous. What would happen if a girl got you really close to an orgasm, and Mark walked past with his cock dangling in front of your face? Could you ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY promise that you wouldn't - not even for a fraction of a second - look at his cock in a way that these more experienced girls would recognize as lust? All it takes is for one of these girls to have a nasty suspicion, and then get annoyed that Mark won't marry her, so she gets revenge by making an anonymous phone call to the police. That could happen very easily. Girls can get very nasty if they don't get what they want. You know that could EASILY happen, don't you?" "Umm, yes. I never thought of that." "No you didn't. It was wrong of you to argue with me before you spent ANY time thinking about it. The best I could do for you is to get you and Mark both naked in the hot tub together, and I can only do that by having my mom walk in and out a couple of times so everyone can see that it's done with adult supervision and approval. That way if one girl later calls the police, my mother can go down to the police station and say that she was supervising us. Do you understand how much trouble and effort we're going to, Donna?" "I'm sorry. I'll be good." "You're normally a VERY good girl, but arguing with me about anything to do with sex was very silly. Your day will come, and it won't be with a whole bunch of girls you've never met before. It'll be loving and caring from within your own family. You think about that, while I send Chloe a text." Julia pulled out her phone, saying, "It's about time I told her what to think. Give me a minute." We chatted among ourselves. To be more precise, Carol and Donna teased me about my crawling around Chloe on my hands and knees. Before sending it, Julia showed me her message, "M calmed me now. Sorry. I get angry u mistreat M so badly. Why u so crazy think your beauty > M's? U shld think about M being so kind, gentle, fond of u, even tho 20 naked girls waiting for him, & think how u can convince genius u not always so selfish?" "Any comments?" Julia asked me. "Umm. 'Thank you'? I don't really understand what you're doing, so I can't comment." Julia pulled the phone back and sent the text, telling me, "We need to spend several minutes talking about Chloe before school tomorrow. She'll probably be eating out of your hand in a few days, but I need to tell you what to do. We don't have time now, so let's do it after you come back from your business test with Dad, okay?" Having Chloe eating out of my hand might lead to even sexier activities, so I said, "Abso-very-lutely." Julia laughed, "I thought you'd be happy with that prospect. She'll probably be yours by Tuesday or Wednesday, although it might take as much as a week or two, depending on which attitude she takes. I'll know when I talk with her tomorrow." Julia also passed her phone to Carol, so she could read the text to Chloe. Carol looked at it cursorily, then passed it back. Donna said, "Can I see please? It was so funny to watch before." Julia firmly declared, "No." "But..." After a pause, Donna gave up. Julia resumed the main topic of conversation, "Back to our party. Eventually I hope lots of them will want sex, but there are a few things to remember. A good brother would not have sex in front of his sisters, so you'll have to play it cool if Carol or Donna are nearby. I don't mind if some girl is sitting quietly on your cock in the hot tub, but no visible sexual acts please. The same goes for you, Carol. Don't have sex with anyone in front of Mark please. A good sister wouldn't do that." "I don't think I want to anyway, but okay." "Our party will be in the two rooms, the hot tub room and the Guys' Room. The Purposes mean we have to socialize, so going off to one of the bedrooms is not ideal. We've only got about three hours for this, which Mark could easily spend in a bedroom with just one girl, which would be great for the girl but useless for our Purposes, so try to stay in the two rooms please. That's less important for you Carol, so if you want to go to a bedroom for a while, feel free." Carol shrugged, and said, "The three of us are sleeping together tonight, aren't we?" Julia said, "That's my intention. Mom will take Donna home and we'll stay overnight. Is that all right with you, Mark?" "Perfect." Carol said, "I thought so. In that case I think it'll be the most useful if I spend most of my time in whichever room Mark's NOT in, so I can hear what those girls are saying. I know we'll start in the hot tub together, but generally I'll try to be in the other room. I don't know any of these girls anyway, so sex with them doesn't interest me." I'd been very impressed with Carol's thinking, until she got to the last point. Two dozen attractive, naked and probably sexually excited girls, and Carol can't imagine how incredibly horny this afternoon is going to make her! Julia was impressed though, saying, "Very good, sweetie. You're a great wife! Mark, when it gets that far, use condoms please. There are a lot of girls involved and we don't know where any of them have been. I also strongly suggest that the girl-on-girl sex not be hardcore either. Kissing, licking and fingering is fine, but I wouldn't go much further than that, okay?" Donna asked, "What else is there?" "Good question, Donna, but I don't have time to answer it now. We'll do that another day. Mark, when things start heating up you'll probably need to wear a condom in the hot tub, because I imagine you'll have different girls hoping on and off you. You put condoms on OUT of the water, NOT in the water. Just stand up, put one on, and sit down again. Okay?" "Umm, I'm kind of curious how you know that?" "I asked The Boys. They've had to do it often enough." "Oh. Now I'm sorry I asked. I hope the water's been changed?" "Imagine how the rest of the family is going to feel about the water after THIS party! I have a couple of points to make about incest. First, I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of the girls try to get Mark to have sex near a sister, or even WITH a sister. Obviously we won't allow that. If any of these girls try to push you in that direction, don't give them an inch. You ALL behave as you are totally okay with being nude near each other, but you're NOT okay with having sex near each other. Nudism and sex are TOTALLY different things. We don't want to show ANY sexual attraction inside of your family yet." #4: #3: #1: #4: "The second incest point is that ALMOST CERTAINLY someone's going to warn Carol or Donna about being naked with her brother. They're ALL going to think it, because even families - which should be a bedrock of trust - are constantly publicized as needing suspicion and distrust, so one of them is BOUND to mention it. Probably to you, Donna because you're younger, so listen carefully to what I'm saying, okay?" Donna confirmed, "I'm listening." We all were. "I don't mind if a girl asks you whether you're worried about being naked with Mark, or asks whether your parents mind, or something not badly judgmental like that. You can give her a great big, happy 'No way!' But if a girl says something like, 'Does Mark ever touch you where he shouldn't?', or anything nasty sounding like that, then just walk away. Don't argue with her; just leave. That's especially important for you Donna, because I can imagine you getting angry and fighting her. I normally wouldn't mind too much, but it'd ruin this party. So don't argue with her please. I'll hurt the girl a lot more with my words than your punches could, okay?" "I don't argue ALL the time, you know? I can easily do that." "Good for you. In that case, I'd be even more impressed if after the girl says the first bad thing, if you could ask her, 'What do you mean?' If you can pretend you don't understand, you can trick her into saying something even worse, because that's what I want to happen. But NOT if you're going to get angry, okay? I don't want you to get angry." "You and me are tricking her?" "Exactly right." "I can do that EASILY. That's just like teasing someone. That's good fun." #1: Julia said, "It won't feel like teasing Donna, because it won't be about having fun. The girl would have said something bad, so it won't feel funny at all." "Can I punch her AFTER you've said your words, Julia?" "Good attitude! Let's wait and see. If I want you to punch her, I'll let you know. -- "Anyway, after she's said something bad enough, just get up and go find Mark. If there's a girl on his lap already, which there probably will be, say something like, 'Mark, I don't feel good. Can I have a cuddle please.' Mark will quickly get rid of the girl and you can climb onboard. You give him a good hug and cuddle. Mark will ask you what's wrong, and you say, 'I don't like [whatever the girl's name is], because she said, ' and then you tell Mark everything the girl said. I want the other girls around you to hear what the bad girl said, so please talk as loud as you normally do. Don't act shy and embarrassed about what the bad girl said; just upset. -- "If I'm not sitting next to Mark already, then Mark will say something like, 'We'd better talk with Julia, ' and he'll come and tell me what happened. When you get to me Mark will do most of the talking, and all you'll have to do is repeat to me what the girl said, again in a clear voice. After that I'll take over and do all the talking. Is everybody okay with that? Carol, do you understand that it could be you rather than Donna?" Everyone confirmed they understood. Julia explained, "If it doesn't happen, then fine, but it probably will and I hope it does. We either have to face this issue, or never have Carol or Donna on these dates, which is unfair. The sooner this issue comes up, the sooner we can get the message out about how trusting and loving your family is, and what happens to girls who raise bad questions. -- "Everyone clear that nudism is fine, that you all trust each other totally, and like being together as very good friends, but there's absolutely NOTHING sexual between you, not even a sexy look. You can't look at Mark's cock because lots of girls would notice if you did that. You treat each other just like Carol and Donna do when they're getting undressed at the same time; it's got absolutely nothing to do with sex, even if you're naked, okay?" It was okay. Julia said, "Good. I think it should go very well. Donna, you've been very good today and you didn't argue at all when I said you couldn't read the text message I sent Chloe, so I've changed my mind about that. You can read it, here it is." Julia passed it over, and Donna read it with considerable interest. Then Donna said, "I don't get it. This is the same as you told her in the parking lot." "No. There are some important differences. Can't you work out why I had to send that message?" Donna read it again, then answered, "No. It's the same." "I don't have time to explain, but this might help you realize that I know a GREAT deal more about sex than you do, so you shouldn't argue with me about it in the future." #1: #3: #4: I said, "I'm glad you're working on Chloe, Julia. It's a HUGE pity she's not going to be part of the hot tub party. I'd LOVE to see her tits today. I'm impatient, I guess." Carol and Julia both laughed, which surprised me a little, because what I'd said wasn't that funny. My second clue was that after she stopped laughing, Julia started shaking her head, which is NEVER a good sign. "Mark, if Chloe had come this afternoon, there'd be no way in the world she'd show you her tits. She would've remained fully clothed. Most of this group will strip for you, but some won't, and Chloe definitely wouldn't have. She's EXTREMELY modest. Even in the girls' showers she's modest, although not so badly there. I included lack of modesty as one of my factors when choosing which girls to have in this group because you want girls who want sex, so Chloe's modesty counted against her. She had other things going for her though, so she was included." -- I was debating whether it was okay to make one of those all-too-common, puerile, teenage boy jokes, but Julia could see me thinking about it, so she answered for me, "Yes, her tits were a big reason. I am doing this for you, after all. She's also much less afraid of you than she is of other boys, and she's a very caring person. Exactly the sort of person I can easily imagine giving away her food to someone who was hungry. Plus I can use her modesty to manipulate the others. Which reminds me, be aware that for this and every other 'Get To Know' group, I'm going to tell the girls that it's COMPLETELY up to them whether they get naked or not. I'll say there'll be no pressure, and we won't hold it against them even the slightest amount. Of course we WILL hold it against them, but they won't know that. We have to thin the numbers, although not so much for this group. Girls who are too modest, and who hide from you rather than pleasing you will be eliminated. Remember that our main purpose is to get to know these girls, NOT just to see their tits." "Okay. I'll try to remember that. This is VERY exciting for me, you know?" "That's why I'm doing it for you." "Thank you VERY, VERY much, Julia." We spent several seconds gushing at each other, Carol quickly joined in too. After that had been expressed, I said, "It's probably just as well that Chloe didn't come this afternoon then, because her discomfort would've been a negative influence and she might even have made a bad scene. I'd be upset if she was eliminated, because all the big-breasted girls like Gia and Dakota seem to be disappearing. I know that's only coincidence, but it's still upsetting. Thank goodness you saw her pass me her pizza, because that's made a huge difference to Chloe's standing. Food and tits are both very important to me, haha." "It's not a coincidence that big-breasted girls are being eliminated so quickly..." #4: #1: #4: #3: " ... I think they're so used to their breasts giving them power over guys that they've become too selfish and inconsiderate. Dakota probably expected you to give her what she wanted, in part, because she's got nice breasts. It's natural for those girls to learn that guys are pushovers." #4: #3: #1: #3: Julia continued, "And my seeing Chloe pass you her pizza wasn't luck the way you think it was. I was carefully watching four girls, waiting to see them do something I approved of. I wanted reasons to promote their advancement, and also to use as examples to the others. If Chloe hadn't done that, then sooner or later I would have seen her do something else that I could twist into a positive that I could use." I checked, "You were stacking the deck? Just watching a few girls?" "Yep. I would have made up some plausible sounding lies if I'd had to, but I didn't need to in Chloe's case. Or Savannah's either, because she was one of the four too. You beat me to it, Mark, but I would've spotted her having removed her bra shortly. By the way, I was amazed at how quickly you noticed her nipples after we got back to the table. I never realized your powers of observation were so acute that you could see two such small things from across such a large table when there are so many other distractions going on. I really am very impressed by the attention to detail you have." I jerked Julia's chain right back, "Just as I'm amazed at how you can walk into a men's clothing store and in five seconds flat locate the single most embarrassing outfit for me to try on. Your powers of observation are even more acute than mine." "I should describe my shop searching methods to you, but we don't have enough time now. I'll save it for a special treat for you." "I'll let you know when. Can I just double-check my understanding about something: you are stacking the deck with the girls in this group? Some are favored? Some you'll even tell lies about in order to promote? And, obviously, others are being disadvantaged. Knowing you, you might have put some girls in the group because you know they'll screw-up and then you can deliberately eliminate them and use them as an example. Essentially, I'm just checking that this whole thing is as unfair as it seems?" Julia answered, "I'm PREPARED to be as unfair as I need to, to get it to work the way I want. I've got no compunction about that at all. I'm serving you, not serving them." Julia turned to face Donna, saying, "Donna, some of the things you hear us talking about, like my cheating, you obviously can't tell anyone else. You understand that don't you?" Donna said, "I think so. I mean, I KNOW I can't tell them stuff. I said 'I think so' because I don't really know what you're talking about. Don't worry about me, I won't tell them." Julia continued, "Thanks. You and I should have a talk about your Ducklings. About whether there are any that might be especially good, or especially bad, for Mark. Talk with me later about that, okay?" "Okay." Julia resumed, "Anyway, I'll mostly be fair with this group. There are so many of them that they'll provide me with enough positive and negative examples. They'll do and say whatever they want, and at the end of the day you'll like them, or dislike them, on their own merits. That's fair. When I think someone might be good for you, I might give her a little help, like my telling Linda to wear that top today. All I'm really doing is pointing her in the right direction. It's still up to her to get your interest. Gia was an example of someone I was too hard on, because I wanted her as an example of behavior the girls should not do. I was too tough, which wasn't fair, but she gave me the opportunity so I used it. If she'd done something good, then I would have played that up instead, so it was her choice. By the way, Linda has disappointed me today. She wore the top I suggested, but she's done nothing else. I'm going to try to motivate her one more time, after that she can sink or swim on her own. Does that answer your question, Mark?" "Yeah. Pretty much as I expected. I'm glad you're on my side, that's for sure!" "'Glad' doesn't come close to describing how happy I am that you LET me be on your side. You are my life." "Aw, shucks." Before I could gush at her some more, Julia added, "I forgot to answer your question about putting in girls to be eliminated. I haven't done that. I thought about it, but it's obvious that they'll eliminate themselves fast enough. I'm quite horrified at how stupid they are. They've seen you all year, and I've hit them over the head time and again with how special you are, but they just can't see it. Like Chloe in the parking lot or Laila not thinking about what you'd want in the foursome or fivesome. They're nearly all completely thoughtless about you. They're assuming that all you want is sex and that'll they can control you through it. It's almost impossible to wake them up..." #4: #3: " ... Lily and Ava seem to be the ONLY two so far. That's why I'm so glad you're doing your test run with Dad tonight. I PRAY you have a successful night. You've got no idea how hard it's been for me to bite my tongue about that." It was true that I had no idea about that, because I didn't have a clue what Julia was talking about. I knew it wasn't quite what it sounded like, in that she wasn't biting her tongue about telling people about roulette, and certainly not about my using TK at roulette. She wouldn't want to talk about those things. As the expression goes: "If in doubt," - a frequent event whenever girls are involved - "ask!" "I had no idea you were biting your tongue. To be frank, I've never noticed you having any trouble using your tongue, haha. What do you mean about my test run tonight and girls? They're TOTALLY independent activities." Julia threw up her hands in frustration, crying, "Arrgghh! You've got NO IDEA how frustrating it's been with all these stupid girls." She was right, I still had no idea. "I've tried pointing out how intelligent you are, and they all nod their heads and say they understand. I've pointed out your looks and physique, and they all say, 'yummy', then continue to act as self-centered as before. I try to show them how loving and caring you are, and they all say you're wonderful. They see you winning running races, or bowling 300, or playing soccer incredibly well, BUT NONE OF THEM - Lily and Ava excepted - wake up to their having to make ANY EFFORT AT ALL! The best I can get them to do, if I hit them in the face with it, is to get sexy with you. Dozens and dozens of girls I've talked to, and with only one and a half exceptions, the best they can do is to occasionally take off their clothes. That's INCREDIBLY frustrating! It drives me up the FUCKING WALL! I'm totally stunned and horrified at how self-centered and stupid they all are!" Personally I thought getting girls to take their clothes off was pretty much the pinnacle of success. I was EXTREMELY happy whenever it happened, and was greatly excited about seeing a lot more of it very soon. But apparently Julia had other goals. God knows what though, because her explanation had explained nothing. I told her, "I agree. It's appalling. Today's young people really are very shallow, aren't they?" "Huh?" I had confused Julia, which was only fair. "What are you talking about, Julia? What does my trip with your father got to do with girls?" "MONEY! If tonight works then we know you'll be rich very soon. In ALL the conversations I've had with girls about you, I've never once said that you'll be rich, because it's never been immediate and certain enough to be mentioned. If I'd told them you'll be rich, they'd ask me how, and I'd have no useful answer. If tonight is successful, it'll change all of that. As soon as girls know you're rich they'll be racking their tiny little self-centered brains trying to think of ways of getting their claws into you. It's the ONLY damned thing that I know that'll motivate them into actually DOING SOMETHING. It's truly pathetic that the only way they've got to value people is so single-dimensional. Your gentleness doesn't even register with them, nor any of your many other wonderful aspects. Sure they'll come along and watch you bowl, or jump in a hot tub with you, but they won't actually THINK, or put any EFFORT into it. The only thing that's going to wake them up is your being rich, which is not about who you are, it's just a stupid consequence of that. Even when you're rich and they're running around chasing hard for your money, hardly any of them are going to see who you are. Almost every single one of them is fucking pathetic!" -- Julia paused, took a deep breath, then said, "Sorry about that. It's incredibly frustrating for me that no one else seems to get you. Lily and maybe Ava seem to be the only ones who have a clue, and I'm not entirely sure about either of them. It is very, very annoying. Sorry I exploded, but it's been bugging me for ages." I said, "You and Carol value me for who I am, so I've married the right two girls. If NOTHING else if my life ever goes well, then I'll still have an incredibly wonderful life, thanks to the two of you. Everything else is trivially unimportant compared to that, and not worth your level of frustration, Julia. You've forgotten what's important." "Ohh, Mark." Julia started throwing herself into my arms. That would be somewhat inconvenient while I was driving, not to mention highly dangerous and God help us if Prof saw us, especially as we were nearing his home. But fortunately Julia's seatbelt stopped her, then made her aware of where she was. She sat there, frustrated about how to express her feelings (just what she didn't need: more frustration). Carol grabbed her from behind, and they expressed their feelings in the way that females do at such times. It took me a several seconds of driving with my ass raised two feet above my seat, but I managed to extract a hanky from my overly tight pants. I returned my ass to its normal driving position, and passed the hanky to the girls. We drew up outside Julia's home about a minute later. The girls had both had a brief but good cry, and were pulling themselves together now. Julia said, "You've come a long way, Mark." I had a feeling she didn't mean from the bowling alley. "A couple of weeks ago you would have self-depreciated yourself all the way through that conversation, which would've achieved nothing - probably would've made me even more frustrated - and you wouldn't have known how to remove all my frustration so wonderfully. It really is amazing how fast you learn." "I have a very, very good teacher. And that's not empty flattery; that's the honest truth. You, and your parents too, have been giving me some pretty amazing lessons. I'll still screw-up, of course, but I'm getting it right more than I used to, which was virtually never." Carol said, "It wasn't anything like 'virtually never'. You've been a wonderful brother for more than a year." "Yeah. You're cool," agreed Donna. "Thank you, but we'd better get inside. Julia, you were clearly putting too much emotion into pushing these girls around. Please relax and enjoy yourself more. Even if none of them react the way you want, I've still got you and Carol. That's pretty damned good in my book." "You've got me too," pointed out Donna. I didn't respond fast enough for Donna's liking, so she added, "I value you for who you are too." "So you do. I apologize for leaving you out." As we were getting out of the car, I told Julia, "Julia, I was effectively saying that you need to work less hard on these girls. Right?" "Yeah, I'm more relaxed now. They don't matter. It was their inability to see your value that frustrated me. It's their loss, but unfortunately it's your loss too. I want you to have a good time with them all, and they're not giving it too you." "In that case, it's obvious what you have to do. Concentrate your effort where it matters the most." She took the bait. "What do you mean?" "On the girls with the biggest tits." All the girls who valued me for who I am laughed. As soon as it slowed down, I added sternly, "I'm SERIOUS! I've only got ONE plaything with large breasts: Pat, and hers aren't even all that large. ONE big-titted plaything! That's a travesty!" I earned a few more laughs, then Carol added, "What about me? I'm big-titted." "I know. My arm is pressed into one as we speak, which is ABSOLUTELY something I notice. You're not a 'plaything' though, you're a wife." "I want to be both." "Haha." The rest of my response was interrupted by Vanessa's intercepting us to say, "I've installed them in the Guys' Room." "Thanks Mom. Sorry we're late. I've got a few little things to ask you, then I'll go talk with them. Mark, you can go upstairs with the girls and do your thing with Donna. Don't forget to grab some condoms before you come down. Carol and Donna ten minutes later, okay?" Donna thought it was VERY okay, and led the way at a run. As Carol and I walked away, I heard Julia asking her mom "Please find some excuse to walk in a couple of times, without knocking and not making any sort of issue out of whatever sex is happening..." At the same time I was also talking to Carol (normally, when YOU are talking to one person, it's hard for you to listen to other conversations. That's a mental restriction, not an audio one, and it doesn't apply to me). I said, quietly because there were others in the house, "You understand that 'plaything' is a girl I don't care about. That I'm really just using to have a good time with. I could never treat you that way." Carol, taking my quiet talk as a clue to be discreet herself, very quietly answered, "Sure. I was mostly joking. I like the thought for tonight though, haha. Also, Mark, I've NEVER seen you treat a girl badly. I'm sure you're extremely considerate even to your playthings, and I saw how much effort you were putting into being considerate to Chloe. Being your plaything would be a good position for any girl, if it wasn't for the scary risk of having Julia rip their head off for not worshipping you hard enough." "Come on you two!" said a naked Donna, from the doorway into Julia's room. I couldn't decide whether to laugh or warn her that someone might see her. Then I realized that the second thought was silly. "We're coming. Don't lose your cool, because it appears to be the only thing you've got left, haha." We'd arrived by now, and entered the room, shutting the door behind us. I said thoughtfully, "Now what was it that Julia wanted me to do in here? I've forgotten. Oh yeah, get some rubbers then go to the hot tub room. Ouch." Donna's method of reminding me was very direct. I'd proximity sensed her punch coming, so my "ouch" was mostly theatrical. And also because she hits hard. Figuring that all the girls downstairs wouldn't be attracted to a guy who was covered in bruises, I decided to gracefully accede to Donna's eloquently expressed reminder. I started stripping. As soon as skin started appearing, with my shirt coming off first, Donna started walking around me, trying to see every side at once. Even when I was undoing and removing my shoes and socks, Donna was pacing. I thought it unlikely that the sight of me removing my socks was that sexy even without a shirt on, but Donna seemed very happy. "Faster!" (Make that, "very happy and impatient.") I slid my pants down, leaving my underwear on. When I'd been helping Julia test out her idea for my winning the sit-up competition, I'd been more brazenly displayed than I was now, but Donna was already far more excited. I threw my pants on the bed, then hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my underwear. Donna was kneeling in prime viewing position, and holding her breath. I looked at Carol, who had been standing nearby, watching us. Carol smiled and nodded. I made Donna's day. "Wow!" I find it hard to imagine how it could possibly be worth a "Wow!" but Donna seemed to think it was. I was not hard. The embarrassment of the situation and worrying about Donna had almost entirely dissipated the eroticism involved. Donna's being naked didn't help as she'd entirely forgotten about it so was moving about naturally and very unseductively, not that she had much to be seductive with. I kicked my underwear away, and stood with my legs apart and my hands on my hips. "Have a good look, Donna." That was probably the most unnecessary sentence I have ever uttered. For a girl who'd been calling out "Faster!" only a minute ago, Donna was suddenly in no hurry at all. She studied all the interesting parts REALLY thoroughly, from many angles and positions. To my surprise, I probably felt the most embarrassed by how long she spent staring at my ass. After about five minutes, toward the end of which I was starting to indicate some impatience, Donna kneeled in front of me, took a good long look, and then looked up at me, asking, "Can I touch?" Clearly she'd saved her question to the end, knowing exactly what was going to happen now. "Haha. Good try, Donna. I'm sure you know the answer to that." Donna didn't even protest as I relaxed out of my 'presentation' stance and turned to reach for my clothes to re-dress. Carol said, "Your choice, of course Mark, but I think it might be a good idea to let her touch you." (A few paragraphs above, where I wrote, "I made Donna's day", cancel that, Carol just did). "Donna has been VERY good today so far, and I think that if she touches you now, she'll find it much easier to behave herself downstairs." "YES! That's right! It'll be MUCH easier for me downstairs." Carol added, "Plus you DO have a very nice cock." Which was hardly a convincing point, since neither of them had ever seen any other one. Donna tentatively reached her hand out toward that part of me that seemed of most interest to her. She looked up at me, seeking permission to finish the movement. #1: #2: "Donna. Don't touch yet. I have some points to make. Put your hand down and look at me - my face, I mean - and listen." When she had complied, I said, "I will let you, but..." "THANK YOU SO MUCH! I love you." "Haha. I love you too, sweetie. Here are the rules: My giving you permission to do this now does NOT give you the right to do it ANY other time. When we sleep together I will wear underwear, and if I catch your hand anywhere near me you'll not sleep with me again until you're at least thirty. I don't even want to hear you ask for another touch. Got it?" "Yes. I'll be good. I LIKE being good with you guys, because you let me do REALLY good things." "Okay. Second rule: no blabbing to ANYONE. You can't run around school telling all your girlfriends you touched my cock, or even touched A cock, in case they demand to know whose." "Of course not. I knew that already! I'm not stupid." "I'm just making sure. Umm, you've never touched a cock before, have you?" "Never wanted to; they've always looked so stupid. Yours is beautiful though, and I REALLY want to touch yours. Oh, wait a minute: I kneed one of the guys in the balls when he kept waving it at me. Does that count as touching? I touched it with my knee but I can't remember feeling anything. He sure did though, haha." #1: #2: #4: "Umm, Donna. Does Mom know that a guy exposed himself to you?" "Sure. Mom's had talks with Carol and me about guys showing us their cocks. I won't tell Mom about this though. This is different, because I WANT you to show me. Don't worry about my telling Mom. Carol won't either, will you Carol?" Carol said, "I'll do whatever my Lord wants. But I think Mark was talking about something different." I said, "Yeah. I wasn't worried about you telling Mom about this. I was thinking that you SHOULD tell Mom about the other times. I'm glad you have. I was worried about you." "Thanks, but it's just been a nuisance. Mom's warned us about it before. We tell her when it happens." #2: <"When it happens." This is an ongoing problem for both of them. Is anyone else ashamed we're a male?> #4: "Okay, you can touch me. You know to be gentle don't you, especially of my balls?" "I kind of know. I've heard lots of talk about it, but I've never done it. I'll be careful, okay?" "Careful would be good. Okay Donna, you may SLOWLY touch." I had a thought, and TK-locked the bedroom door. The last thing we need is one of the other girls to come looking for us! Carol heard the sound and realized what I'd done. Donna's concentration was elsewhere. Carol said, "Please don't damage that Donna. I want it to be working perfectly later tonight." "Lots of the girls downstairs would be mad at me too, {giggle}." Donna's fingers made contact with the head of my cock, and she started feeling her way around it. Initially there wasn't enough room for both of her hands, but it felt nice so the lack of room problem didn't last long. Donna said, "Wow, you like it!" Donna was stating a fact, not asking a question, so she obviously knew how these things worked. I briefly contemplated a go-soft, but I couldn't think of a single reason why I should, and Donna's happiness argued against it. I'm the sort of guy who's very conscious of his sisters' happiness. Once I'd relaxed some more, Donna's feeling me up felt VERY nice. I was very surprised at how good she made me feel. She was being gentle, caring (by several times asking me, "Does this feel good?"), and acting on what I told her. For a girl with no experience, her attitude turned this into a very nice time. For both of us, judging by her happy comments. She got a great thrill out of my getting fully erect, happily saying, "They really do get hard, wow." I didn't make any attempt to get her to jack me. This was ALL about Donna's sense of wonder, and some nice love between us, so jacking me off would've been wrong. This wasn't at all how I imagined Donna's first success at getting her hands on me would be. This was LOVELY. Donna asked, "Why is the end getting wet?" Carol fielded that ball, "You know how your pussy gets wet when you get turned on?" "Does it EVER!" Perhaps more information than I wanted to know. Or - I was beginning to wonder - perhaps not. "Mark's cock is making lubrication too. One day, when he puts his cock into your pussy, your lubrication and his lubrication will make it slide in and out very easy. It feels much, much better than a vibrator." "Mark's cock just jumped and got even harder. He wants to fuck me. That's AMAZING. I never knew that." #1: #4: Carol said, "He doesn't want to fuck you Donna. He wants to make love to you. That's why we all want you to grow up and learn as fast as possible, so he can make love to you." "Wow." #2: Donna asked Carol, "Why doesn't he then? I want him to, and he wants to. I REALLY want him to a LOT!" Carol said, "Because you're not ready yet, honey. Your body and brain both need to grow a little more. We've talked about what puberty does to you with Mom, so you know what I mean. Until then it would be bad for you. Even though Mark's cock wants to, he would never do anything that's bad for you, because he loves you so much." Looking up at me, Donna asked, "Do you really love me, Mark?" "You know I do, sweetie. We love each other." Donna looked down for a few seconds, not even moving her hands either; just hanging on. Then she looked up, "I love you, Mark." "I love you too, Donna." Donna took a deep breath, let it out, and said, "I am VERY happy!" Before I had time to respond, she added, "Can I touch your balls please? I know I have to be VERY gentle." #4: "Yes, sweetie. Be gentle. It won't be for long either, because we should finish soon." I wasn't looking forward to this. Having my balls played with is not sexually stimulating for me. My cock: ABSOLUTELY YES! Just behind my ball sack, on the skin between my legs: that's nice too. But my ball sack and all that it contains: nope! It doesn't do a thing for me. Whether it's the lack of the right sort of sensory nerves, or too much nervous nerves, I don't know. Whether other guys like it, I don't WANT to know. For Donna's educational purposes, I agreed. Donna started by running her fingertips over my ball sack, but soon she tried to get a clear understanding of what was inside the sacks, by feeling everything fully. She was VERY gentle, as she'd promised, but soon the way she was holding me was making me nervous. Each ball was totally surrounded by the fingers of each of her hands, while her fingertips felt around the base of my ball sack, or between the balls, to learn what else was down here. Intellectually I trusted her, but my body couldn't help being nervous of being so vulnerable. I reflexively raised myself slightly on my tiptoes. Donna asked, "Am I hurting you?" "Not at all, sweetie. You are VERY gentle. But this part of me is so sensitive I can't help feeling nervous. It's not your fault at all, just my nerves." "I think I'll stop then. I don't want to hurt you." She slowly and gently let go, and returned her fingers to my cock. "Your cock isn't hard anymore. You didn't like me playing with your balls, did you?" "Not really, sweetie. That's certainly not your fault though. You wouldn't feel sexy if someone rubbed your nose. Some parts are sexier than others; just not my balls. On the other hand, I DEFINITELY like the way you played with my cock. You did that VERY well." "{Giggle}, I saw that! I LOVED doing that to you. It's SO COOL that you like me touching you. I'll touch you whenever you want, you know? Just ask me." Carol gave her a laugh, "Good try, but that's one of the jobs of being his wife that Julia and I like the most, and wives come before sisters." "Maybe one day I could be one of his wives too?" Carol answered, "Maybe one day, but you've got a LOT of growing and learning to do before we can even think about that." "I know, {sigh}. Julia made me look pretty stupid in the car. Because I was stupid, I mean." I said, "It's just a matter of growing up. I'm sorry, but we've already taken much longer than Julia expected. I'm getting worried about making her wait so long. We have to stop very soon." "{Sigh}." Donna rubbed me a little more, then asked, "Can I kiss Real Mark goodbye?" Carol answered on Real Mark's behalf, "Just for a second or two, and just on the tip." That was quite a lot different than the answer I was going to give, but I had a feeling I wasn't running this anyway. Donna's goodbye kiss of the tip included some tongue action, just to get a taste. I'd expected it, and it was fine with me. After her kiss, Donna stood and said, "Thank you very, very much, Mark. That was far, far better than I expected." I responded, "I was going to say exactly the same thing. You were very gentle and caring, so I liked your touch very much." "{Sigh}. I wish I could do it more often." Carol said, "If you continue to be such a good girl you'll get other times in the future. Not often, but sometimes." "When I'm a good girl with Mom, she buys me an ice cream. I like this MUCH better. THANK YOU, Mark." Donna threw her arms around my neck, and gave me a fierce hug. I put my arms around her waist, and hugged her back. In just a few seconds she let go, so I did too. Donna took a small step back, looked down, and said, "I could feel your cock pressed into my stomach." "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to..." "No. I LIKED it." My apology had been stupid. Or, at best, automatic. Donna would obviously like it touching her. Donna moved forward again, putting her arms loosely around my waist, just hugging me loosely. I wasn't sure what she was up to, so I just rested my hands on her shoulders. Donna was looking down, and moving her body just a little, I guessed to feel my cock's movement against her stomach, although the contact wasn't a firm one. Donna looked at Carol, saying, "My vagina is only and inch or two in front of Mark's cock. If I could raise myself, then lower myself, we could stand just like this but his cock would be inside me. We could be hugging, and no one else could tell, but Mark would be inside me. It's SO close! Wow. Ohh! I need to sit down." We were standing beside the bed, so Donna quickly turned and sat. "I nearly had an orgasm and I wasn't even touching myself. Isn't that incredible. Boy! I wish I had Practice Mark here. Carol, can I frig myself please? I REALLY need to." Carol laughed, "I think that's an excellent idea. It has been an intense time for you. Go for it. Oh, you already are." Turning to me, Carol said, "Now's probably a good time for you to get dressed." I did so as quickly as I could, doing a go-soft at the same time. Donna reached her goal before I was dressed. Watching me move around and dress seemed to have excited her even more. Donna didn't help matters by immediately starting on her second one. I averted my eyes and finished dressing. Carol offered me several packets of condoms. I put half in each pocket, giving her my billfold to leave up here, to make room in these ridiculous pockets. Fully dressed, it was safe to approach Donna. I gave her a kiss on the top of her head. Donna said, "Thank you SO much, Mark. That was the BEST time." "Still is, by the look of it. I'll see you downstairs, but PLEASE don't come down looking like you've just had sex. That would be VERY bad. Take as long as you need to calm down. You're going to need a shower too, because you produce a lot of juice." As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I shouldn't have uttered them. Donna said, "Would..." "No. If my guess of what you were about to say is correct, the answer is no." Donna giggled. I was starting to fear that I was going to be in trouble with Julia. I'd be ten minutes late (so about twenty minutes in total), and Carol and Donna's arrivals were going to be very problematic. At best they'd be late, if not very late and one by one to allow Donna extra time to calm down, clean up and pull herself together. I wanted to stay and make sure Donna was perfectly innocent looking before she came down, but my staying would make matters worse (or from Donna's perspective, better). I didn't dare keep Julia waiting any longer either. I made my escape from one naked girl, heading for twenty more. Hopefully from the frying pan into the fire via the hot tub. ------- Chapter 109: Hot Tub Party; a Tit in Each Hand Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) I entered the hot tub room with a non-specific apology loaded up and ready to speak, but there was no one in the room. I could hear loud music and laughter coming from the Guys' Room, so that's presumably where everyone was. Julia's instructions had been for me to strip and get into the hot tub. She'd even said to do so even if there was no one in the room. But I was ten minutes later than she expected, so did that change anything? Also, should I stick my head through the door and announce my arrival? And if so, before or after I stripped? I wouldn't normally have worry so much, but I feared Julia might be upset at my delay, and get even more so when Carol and Donna didn't turn up for however long it took inexperienced Donna to get control of herself. Perhaps only Carol would come down soon if Donna needed longer to get herself looking innocent and decent. That fear upped the stakes on my decision. I decided to do literally what Julia had told me to do. That way the worst that could happen would be that I'd be accused of being late and stupid for not letting her know I was here. If I did something else, and it was the wrong thing, then I'd be guilty of being late, stupid AND disobedient. I stripped, took the packets of rubbers out of my pockets and put them into the cubbyhole behind my clothes. Then I got into the tub. Just as I my ass hit the seat I flashed to the image of Andrew or Robert having sex with his girlfriend in this tub. I looked at the water suspiciously, but couldn't see anything untoward: no used rubbers floating in it, for example. I REALLY wish Julia hadn't mentioned that about The Boys. I momentarily worried that Carol and Donna would arrive while no one else was here. That wouldn't fit Julia's plan, would it? But then I realized that Julia was bound to spot that I was here long before Carol got Donna calmed down enough to leave the bedroom. A minute or so later I suddenly remembered the bubbles. Maybe if I turned the jets on Julia might hear them? Nope, not over the noise coming from the other room. I turned them on anyway, as they'd hide my nakedness, making me feel much more comfortable. Since none of the girls were naked in the tub already, I feared they might have already discussed their getting naked and had rejected it, so it'd be best if I played safe by hiding under bubbles. What a pity TK doesn't work out of sight to the extent I'd need to be able to tap Julia's shoulder from here. I couldn't tell from here where Julia was, including where her shoulders were, so my invisible fingertips would have to blindly feel their way around the room, finding girls, and then feeling them up to find out if they were Julia, which would certainly increase the noise level coming from that room. It was a stupid thought, but I was nervous and not sure how to kill time. While I was trying to think of something sensible to think about, I remembered blobs, and I wondered whether blobs worked underwater. Not that I had any need for the knowledge, I just wondered. [Underwater blobbing turned out to be surprisingly useful, but that's not for quite a while yet.] I turned off the jets so I could see what I was doing, then tried creating a dim light blob in the water between my knees. It created no worries at all. I canceled it and was happy for a second, until I remembered refraction. The air/water boundary bends our sight, so where I see my knees isn't physically where they are. So the blob should've been created in the wrong place. Except maybe it was created in a place with the same refraction error as my knees, but refraction made them both appear to be in their right places. Or maybe my proximity sense and/or sense of the locations of my own body parts had influenced the experiment? I had only just started thinking this problem through (I was sure a real genius would have comprehended the situation immediately) when I heard Julia's voice say, "Ah good, you're here." I looked up to see Julia in the open doorway between the two rooms. I said, "I'm sorry I took so long. We got talking and it took a lot longer than..." "Don't worry about it." That was a relief. I only had to worry about my sisters' arrival times now. Julia continued, "I used the time to finish..." Some of the other girls had walked up behind Julia, and one of them turned around and yelled, "Mark's in the pool." The group that I could see started walking into the room, with Julia walking in front of them, continuing to talk with me. More and more girls followed. Unfortunately, and I mean this with utmost sincerity, they were all fully dressed. " ... my little talk about your Intellectual, Physical and Emotional aspects. They say they've got a better idea of your value now." One of the girls walking close behind Julia turned and yelled back, "MARK'S NAKED, and you can see EVERYTHING!" #4: It's a good thing Julia had stepped to the side, because she would have been killed if she stood in the way of the twenty four insane girls stampeding for the best viewing spots around the hot tub. One of the girls asked, "Please move your hand, Mark." ALL the other girls thought that was an excellent suggestion, judging by the number and volume of the echoes it received. I moved my hand. Just not the one they wanted, and my action wasn't considered to be at all humorous. "No! Move your LEFT hand." | "We want to see all of you." | "Stand up so we can see you better." | And several more indecent requests, none of which I liked or complied with. I was surprised that some of these girls hadn't been crushed in the stampede and their bodies pushed into the pool to float lifelessly face down. I waited for a few seconds, hoping this would happen so I could use their bodies for cover, but I had no such luck. After several more requests, I heard Julia's voice from somewhere over the back, "You might as well stand up and give them a good look, Mark. You won't get any peace until they've seen enough." "Yeah, stand up," x 24. Probably x 25, knowing Julia. Surrendering to the inevitable (which is whatever Julia tells me to do), I stood, removing my hand as I did, as that was inevitable too. Intellectually, I've now accepted that my body is pretty damned good. But there's a big difference between being that acceptance, and being the center of attention of twenty-odd sex-crazed, shameless, teenaged perverts. Who make comments. And demand that I "twirl". I hate twirling. Especially as I knew what was going to happen. I surrendered to more of that inevitable stuff, and twirled. As dreaded: "Wow, look at his ass." All the girls who weren't already looking at my ass must have been too busy looking at the flying pigs. "Turn around again." "{Sigh}." I turned. "Flex your muscles." I flexed. "Bend over." #2: I did NOT bend over! The 'fun and games' had been going strong for a couple of minutes (going on months), when I heard a strong, "Excuse me." The side of the crowd parted a little, and a naked Pat and Lily quickly stepped up onto the raised platform around the tub, then into the tub. Wordlessly they flanked me, then pulled me down so we were all sitting. They put their arms around me and started kissing me. #1: #2: #4: The last mass stripping that I'd seen (also the only other one I'd ever seen), had been a stop-go event as each girl checked out whether she needed to take more off. This was all "go": clothes were FLYING off. All the girls were standing in a fairly tight group, as the hot tub is built into a corner of the room, so they were pressed in fairly tight against about half the circumference of the tub, and were lined three or so girls deep around it. They went from all leaning forward in a tight group to look into the tub, to all wanting to strip as fast as possible. It was a total mess. I couldn't see well, especially as I had two girls who were eager to get as many kisses from me as they could before the number of competitors jumped drastically. but I did catch glimpses of the circus, heard thuds and grunts as a couple of the girls were pushed over, heard the ouches as girl A's elbow dug into girl B's whatever. I imagine an elbow into the whatever is very painful, especially at the speed they were moving. I'd previously learned that when girls get undressed, each item is very carefully hung up or folded and placed away; because - as we all know - clothes are very important to girls. Apparently not the clothes girls wear when they go bowling. I had trouble seeing the girls through the storm of clothes flying through the air. They landed all over the place: in the tub, on the floor, on top of other girls (who were extremely annoyed at the delay caused by having to pick the item up and throw it away). Clothes ended up everywhere except in the cubbyholes that'd been built for them. The first of the strippers cheated. She had both hands behind her back to undo her bra, and still had her panties on, when she tipped headfirst into the tub. Whether it was some sort of deliberate kamikaze-like dive, or she was pushed, I don't know, but I quickly grabbed her before major harm could be done. I pulled her head above water and opened my mouth to inquire how her day was going, but my mouth was swamped by the splash from the next girl leaping into the tub. After that things got a bit chaotic. More and more girls piled into the tub and headed straight for me. I rapidly had to change my concerns away from protecting the girls, to protecting myself! I sat down and pulled Lily and Pat in front of me, using them as human shields (a very recent addition to the job function of Liaisons). They fended off the man-eating marine life for me, laughing to themselves. I'm glad someone thought this was funny! Far, far later than should've been the case, I heard Julia starting to yell for order, interspersed with her laughter. "GIRLS! GIRLS! Haha. Girls, calm yourselves. Haha. This is very funny, but the tub's not big enough to hold all of you. There are too many in it already, so there's no point the rest of you trying. We'll be here for another three hours so you've got plenty of time." Most of the movement had stopped. The comparative silence was welcome, as was the cessation of girls trying to pull my arms, head and another important appendage from my body. They hadn't actually gotten hold of that important little piece of me (at the moment it was very little, in terror), but I had no trouble imagining the consequences if they did. Julia called, "I see that nearly all of you have at least partially stripped. I thought most of you were more modest than that, so you might start feeling uncomfortable. I talked about this a few minutes ago, but I'll repeat it again. Don't let peer pressure - or what looked like temporary madness - cause you to do something that you'll be unhappy about tomorrow. Make your individual decisions on how much, or how little, you wish to wear. If you feel uncomfortable, and IF you can find your clothes in this mess, put whatever you want back on. Mark likes sexy girls, and he definitely likes naked, sexy girls, but you should do what YOU like." A couple of the shyer (i.e., soon to be eliminated) girls started searching for their clothes. -- "Can [Julia named two of the girls] tidy up the clothes please. Fold them up and put each person's in a cubbyhole. Panties and bras just pile up somewhere unless you know which cubbyhole they go in. All the clothes which have been dirtied or got wet, put in a pile over there and I'll get Mom to run them through the washer and dryer for us. Also, in the future, would NONE of you EVER ask to borrow any of my clothes again; you are all VERY irresponsible! Haha." Even I laughed at that. The first time I'd laughed for a while. -- "Thank you all very much for letting me watch one of the funniest things I've EVER seen. It was hysterical, especially the look on Mark's face. The poor boy was sure he was going to get drowned under a pile of naked, hysterical girls. What a way for a boy to go! He'd be more famous than Einstein just for that alone! Haha." More laughter from the girls. #1: #4: Julia was still in management mode: "Laila and Hannah, I'm glad to see you've entered into the spirit of the afternoon." Both of them were naked in the tub with me. "I sincerely hope you have fun today, but don't forget the email is still due Tuesday night. I mention that because you might want to talk with some of the other girls, or Liaisons, to help you work out the answer." Most of them had no idea what that was about, but that didn't matter. -- "There are too many of you in the tub. I'm sure the girls who're already close to Mark don't want to get out, but most of the unlucky others should get out and wait until later. There are plenty of towels. If you don't want to get dressed, you can walk around naked, or wear a towel, or just your panties; that's up to you. We're very casual here, so do whatever you want. Let's keep tub soaks to a fifteen-minute rotation all this afternoon please, so you all get a turn. Mark can stay as long as he wants, of course. Most of the girls will want him to stay in there all day, but he'll have to get out sometimes or he'll cook. We'll do our best to make sure he circulates so you'll all get a chance to socialize with him, including the girls who prefer not to be naked. -- "You might want to think about how smart Pat and Lily were. They completely outsmarted you. They were the only two of you to use their BRAINS. There are twenty four of you here, plus hundreds of girls in the rest of Corvallis, who want to be Mark's girlfriend. The girl who succeeds will be one who uses her brain." #2: #1, #4: #2: "Okay girls, let's get moving. Most of us should hang out in the other room as it's much more comfortable. Mark will be wandering back and forth between both rooms later. Can I leave you girls in the tub to choose who's staying in it and who's getting out?" Lily stood up and called out to Julia, "I give my seat to someone." This was a valuable concession as Lily's seat was right next to me and I still had arm on her shoulder. I could see that Julia was surprised, but she seemed to quickly work it out. Having worked it out, Julia then asked Lily, "I'm surprised, why?" Strictly speaking Julia HAD been surprised; she wasn't now though. Lily answered, "He see me before. He not see others," Lily waved her hand to indicate everyone else. "Better for him I go." Julia looked like she wanted to give Lily a medal, although pinning it on would have been problematic. Julia said, "VERY good, Lily. I hope all you learn from that, especially you, Laila. That sort of thinking is EXACTLY why Lily was the first Liaison Mark chose! Well done. I'm sure that after that unselfish example, reducing the number of you in the tub will go smoothly. I'll be tidying up in the other room. Those of you who don't stay in the tub should come on through." Julia left. I'm not sure why she couldn't stay in this room, but I was sure she had her reasons. Unfortunately she'd never got close enough to me for me to whisper that Carol maybe, and Donna certainly, would be late. I hadn't wanted to yell the information to her in case it sounded too prearranged. I also wanted to explain that the two girls might end up coming separately, depending on Carol's attitude to waiting long enough for Donna to finish and calm down. I needed a conversation, but didn't get a chance for one. I guess Julia would be back before the ten minutes were up, to be ready for when she expected Carol and Donna, so I'd try to talk with her then. Two distressing things started happening. The first was that nearly all the girls in the tub started getting out, and the undecideds seemed to think joining the majority was a good idea. It was NOT a good idea! Naked girls moving AWAY from me is BAD! I grabbed Pat, saying, "Sit beside me again, please Pat." "But you've seen me before." "And I'd like to see you again." I whispered to her, "If someone doesn't show that it's okay to stay, everyone will leave." #4: #2: I added, "Laila, why don't you and Hannah stay too?" Laila had definitely been in the process of leaving, and was surprised to be stopped. "Are you sure? You've seen me before and we're not in your favorites at the moment. I thought we should get out." "I'm sure. Tuesday night is the time to resolve the other issue. Until then we should all try to enjoy ourselves. Plus I'm going to be circulating around anyway, so we'll spend time together. All you're really offering to do is change the order, which doesn't matter. Lily's offer was important because it served as a very good lesson, but your repeating it adds nothing, so stay. -- "I'd like about six girls to stay: you, Hannah and Pat make three, so any three of you remaining girls." I indicated the several girls that were still standing in the tub, or had recently departed it. The tub holds eight to ten comfortably, so seven of us, plus Carol and Donna when they eventually arrive. That would be after the first fifteen-minute rotation, and possibly after the second, but setting the number of girls now should persist until then. One of the other girls (Tania) asked, "Can I stay?" "Let me think about that. You're pretty, you're naked, and I'm a teenage boy. Gee, I don't know. I wish I was a smarter genius so I could work out the answer to that REALLY HARD question. Why don't you have a seat while I think about it. It might take me about fifteen minutes, but I'll try my best." I didn't want to have to try to invent jokes for two more girls' individual requests, so I said, "Anna and Victoria, how about you two stay? Unless you'd prefer to leave? It's up to you." Both girls were happy to stay, especially Anna, who seemed thrilled. Naked girls SHOULD be thrilled to be given the chance to let me perv at them; I just had trouble believing that any of them were. The rest of the girls proceeded to join the others in the room who were starting to get redressed, which was ALL of them. That being the second of the two distressing things I mentioned earlier, the word "distressing" being somewhat of an understatement. I REALLY wanted to ask them not to, but damned Julia (only half kidding) had made a big deal about their making up their own minds. I wondered if I could convince them that getting dressed was following peer pressure, and at least half of them should remain naked to prove there was no peer pressure either way. #4: #1: #4: #2: #1: #2: Anna was asking me, "Do you really think I'm attractive?" I looked away from Lily, to Anna. Anna was pretty, but I had the feeling she was referring to something specific and I was puzzled about what it was. She saw my confusion and explained, "At the bowling alley you told my mom that you didn't know what boy I'd been talking to my family about because I was so attractive that it could have been a lot of them. That was a very sweet thing to say. I've only been talking about you though. I'm not interested in any other boy. I think you're WONDERFUL! I ONLY talk about you. Recently I mean. Ages ago I used to talk about other boys, but they're no good compared to you. You're wonderful. -- "You don't mind that I used to talk about other boys do you? I haven't talked about any of them for weeks! Especially not in the last week. When you told the class how much you loved Carol I cried so much. That was the nicest thing I've EVER heard. I couldn't believe how loving you were. Well, I could believe it, of course, because I've seen you be so nice to people before, and you're NEVER nasty to anyone. You're not like other boys who're always trying to throw their weight around, as if that made them important rather than obnoxious. Not like you. You NEVER try to push people around. You're very gentle. -- "Even better than that, you're very, very loving. I've never seen a boy be as loving as you were toward Carol. And I see how good you and Julia are together. I can't understand how she can choose to not be with you all the time. Even if she loves Carol, how can she not love you the most. Oh! I didn't mean to insult Carol. I'm sure Carol's lovely. You love her so she must be a wonderful girl. I just meant that YOU are so wonderful. I think Julia's lovely too, but I don't understand..." #1: #4: #2: I firmly declared, "Yes." " ... why Julia would let ... Huh? Sorry. What did you say?" "Yes." Anna had completely lost the plot. Her mental wheels spun, getting nowhere, for a second or so. I clarified, "Yes, I really think you're attractive." "Oh. Oh NO! I talked too much. I'm SO SORRY. I didn't mean to..." "Anna?" "Umm. Sorry. Yes?" "You DID talk a lot, but most of it was about how important you thought being loving was. That you value being loving so highly makes you an unusually nice girl. Now you know that I think two things about you: that you are very attractive AND unusually nice." "Oh wow. Really? Oh I get it! You just cheered me up. You're very, very good at that. What you said was perfect! I've noticed that..." "Anna! I should have said that there are FOUR things I know about you: Number one, you are very attractive. Number two, you are unusually nice. Number three, you like me very much. Number four..." "Oh yeah! I think you're WONDERFUL. I like you better than that! You're the most loving boy that..." "Anna! Number FOUR." I paused to make sure she was listening. When her silence indicated that she was, I hurriedly resumed because I didn't expect her silence to last long, "Number four, you're not very good at noticing when a guy wants to kiss you." Kissing her was my objective for three reasons: I would enjoy kissing her (which would bring me pleasure). It would bring her within my grasp, so I could get my hands on her body (which would bring me pleasure). It would stop her talking (which would bring me even more pleasure). "YOU want to kiss ME!" I could probably have gotten away with answering, "Yes. Incredible isn't it?", but that was too arrogant, even for me (haha). Instead I said, "I would, yes. If you would like to?" "Oh yes! Umm, how?" Anna was looking at the other girls around me (Pat and Victoria on one side; Laila, Hannah and Tania on the other). It would have been difficult for her to lean over and kiss me. Fortunately I had long worked out the solution to that problem (see the second of the three reasons above). Pat started offering her seat, but I overrode her idea with my own, "Climb onto my lap, Anna." The water's buoyancy meant it was very easy to float Anna onto my lap. I was stretched out a little rather than sitting upright, and I made sure to stretch out even more so my body was virtually a flat slope. I was placing her so her back would be lying on my front, as front-to-front seemed to be getting too sexy too quickly, so should be avoided as per Julia's "go slow" instruction. Anna's back would tend to slide down my body's slope unless I held her well. I had offered her a seat on my lap, then I'd made sure I had no lap, so my hands would need to perform all sorts of movements and grips in order to hold her against me, maximizing the second of the three "which would bring me pleasure" reasons above. Apparently I'm an evil genius. While these maneuvers were taking place, #4: The rest of us had been vaguely aware of this, because some of the earlier dressers had waved, "See you later," or some such comment at us, as they'd walked away from the tub area toward the Guys' Room. I'd waved at them or said something short back, but I hadn't given them any attention as I'd been concentrating on the girls in the tub. If a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, then six naked birds in the hot tub are worth any number of dressed girls who're walking away from it. The best response we could come up with was: Considering most of the girls were already dressed and in the other room with Julia, this wasn't exactly brilliantly innovative lateral thinking. More the accepting reality type of thinking. Oh well. Girls are nothing if not inconsistent, as their frantic stripping and then complete redressing very effectively demonstrated. Maybe in ten minutes they'd all have a sudden urge to strip again. You never can tell with girls. You think you can, but they do the opposite more often than not (and I'm FULLY aware that if they do the opposite "more often than not", that you SHOULD be able to logically take that into consideration, but for some reason that doesn't seem to work. I think it's a corollary of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that applies at the macroscopic, feminine level). I returned my attention to Anna. She came to rest, slightly diagonally across my body so my lips could access hers. As my lips descended onto hers, my arms were folding around her, perfectly positioned to lay across her breasts at the time when my kiss had just started, so when she'd be the most distracted. By the time the kiss had been going for a while, her body should've got accustomed to the pressure of my arms across her breasts, and she'd find it too much trouble to object to their presence there. {Evil Genius Cackle}. For the first time since I'd arrived in the hot tub room, I felt my cock start to stir. Abject embarrassment followed by abject terror tends to reduce my libido a notch or fifty, but being moments away from getting some very nice gropes had an extremely reviving effect. I had already parted my legs a little, so my recently much admired tackle had fallen through. I issued a go-soft and prepared for the need to issue a lot more. Anna was going to be fun! Just as our lips contacted, and moments before my arms would've make a nice soft landing, Anna's entire body rotated 180 degrees centered on her lips. Her arms reached around my torso and hugged her chest to mine. Her lips plastered themselves against mine, while she did her best to suck my tongue out of my mouth. And my Evil Genius-directed arms and hands got pathetically disappointing gropes of her naked back. It was a nice kiss, I guess. More than a little over-enthusiastic on her side, but at least it stopped her talking. My eyes had been looking forward to looking down at Anna's upwardly pointing breasts. But backs are pointlessly boring. Yawn. Oh well. The best laid plans of mice, men and Marks. My lips were firmly anchored, but my eyes could wander. There were plenty of interesting things to look at. There were two of them on Pat, just inches away from me, for example. I watched the last girl - other than the towel-wrapped Lily who was still drying herself - finish dressing and head toward the other room. I looked elsewhere, but my attention returned to Lily when a few seconds later she, now naked, approached the side of the hot tub, "You want drink, snack from other room, Mark?" I disengaged my lips, hoped they still worked after the vacuuming they'd received, and said, "A drink and a snack both sound great, thanks Lily. Whatever's easiest would be great." The door from the hallway opened, and robe-clad Carol and Donna entered, about ten minutes after my arrival rather than the considerably longer I'd expected. I looked at Donna, fearful that she'd look like she'd just had sex. Apparently I don't know as much about girls as I thought I did (and you know how little that is), because they both looked bright, breezy and as if they'd never had a sexual feeling in their lives. I waved, in case they hadn't seen me buried under Anna. Although - I was extremely ego-gratified to note - all they had to do to find me was look in the middle of the only group of girls in the room. I wondered what the correct thing to do was, without Julia being here to manage us. Should they go to talk with Julia first? Still wearing the robes or naked? Or should I send Lily to tell Julia they were here? Donna threw off her robe and headed for the tub, closely followed by Carol. I guessed I might've been indecisive too long. Or maybe it was Donna being her usual very fast self. I couldn't make up my mind. I looked at the girls around me. They were all surprised, except for Anna, who'd seen nothing because her face was nested into my neck, humming. The others all showed surprise initially, then uncertainty, looking at each other and me for cues for how to act. It amused me that the girls sitting on both sides of me saw the one eyeball they could see looking straight back at them. My face was pointed straight ahead, with the eyes hard left and hard right, so looking in nearly opposite directions ("nearly", because the hot tub is circular). I deliberately didn't look at my sisters when they climbed in, as the whole climbing-over-the-edge-thing can be more than a little graphic, especially as my sisters both have no hair down there. After Carol had settled, I took advantage of Lily's being rooted to the spot, and said, "Lily's about to get some drinks and snacks from the other room. Do you want anything?" Donna enthusiastically ordered a coke. Carol said, "No thanks, I'm not thirsty." #4: #1: <{Groan}. How of Earth do you think of this stuff? Why can't Carol just be not thirsty?> #4: #1: Carol was telling me, "Sorry we were slow getting down here. We got talking to Mom on the phone." I had no idea whether that was true or not, but it explained their absence to the other girls, so that was fine. Julia hadn't given me any specific instructions for what to do now, just that I was generally to behave as if naked sisters were an everyday event with no sexual overtones, undertones, and - I felt safe in assuming - besidetones either. To avoid being confused by all the tones, I'd treat Carol and Donna normally, as if they were wearing boring swimsuits. Normally I'd give the girls a hug - not just "normally", but "always" - then they'd snuggle up next to me or on my knees. That would be difficult as I was surrounded by other girls. Getting my sisters to sit on either side of me meant moving five other girls, whereas getting them onto my knees only required moving Anna, who I was getting somewhat tired of anyway. I couldn't sit up to create a lap for my sisters because Anna's back didn't bend that way. That wouldn't have been a problem if she stayed in the breast-groping orientation I'd wanted, but it was no use crying over unfelt-up milk. I said, "Anna, sweetie, my sisters have come and I always spend a little time cuddling with them. Can you take a seat please, so they can sit on my knees?" I was pulling her arms from around my torso, so she didn't really have much choice. She was reluctant, but I was an apologetic unstoppable force. When Anna vacated the entire length of my torso, I was able to sit up properly, and I opened my legs wide so the two girls could sit on one thigh each, facing inward, with my putting an arm around each of their waists to hold them steady. Carol put her right arm (she was on my left leg) around my shoulder, but didn't pull herself against my chest the way she normally would. Donna mirrored Carol. It was good to see her taking her cues from Carol. One interesting effect of this position was that both girls were fairly high in the water, so their toplessness was glaringly obvious to all the observers, and delightfully obvious in my case, although I had to make sure I didn't pay the four of them any attention. I nearly said, "How's Mom?" but then realized that there might not have been a real phone call to Mom, so best not to pressure Carol. I was trying to think of an alternative, when Carol asked, "What did we miss?" That one I could work with! I started with, "I came down here, and there was no one in the room, so I got into the tub. I was having a nice, relaxing, peaceful soak. Minding my own business and calmly enjoying myself, when Julia spotted that I was in here. Julia led a horde of insane, sex-crazed, wild perverts into the room. Before I could make a break for the door, they'd all mobbed the tub, cutting me off from any escape. Julia made me stand up and display myself, like some sort of circus animal. All the girls were yelling out instructions, getting me to twirl this way and that way, flex my muscles. One girl even wanted me to BEND OVER! What on Earth was she thinking of? Don't tell me! I don't want to know. -- "Julia was no help at all! In fact she was the ringleader for my humiliation. Sometimes I think she gets entirely too much pleasure out of my embarrassment. Julia's right that I need another girlfriend, because I need someone to hide behind whenever Julia pulls a stunt like that. I thought we were just going bowling, and then having some pizza. Pizza is good! But I realize now that pizza was just the condemned man's last meal, because after embarrassing me near-to-death, the girls had worked themselves into such a frenzy - just from the sight of one, skinny, little boy - that they turned into a mob of homicidal maniacs! They tried to grab my arms and legs, my head, and other parts they had NO BUSINESS grabbing, and they tried to rip me apart. They were throwing their clothes off so they could leap into the tub to physically attack me. There were clothes flying in all directions, girls diving into the pool, grabbing at me, trying to drown me under the weight of dozens of writhing bodies. Some of those bodies weighed a LOT too! They'd eaten FAR too much pizza, the gluttons!" I continued on this theme, detailing the various - highly exaggerated - assaults of individual girls, and how I'd been reduced to a quivering wreck, cowering behind Lily and Pat, " ... the only two girls who'd had any scrap of human decency and consideration." I was hamming it up wonderfully, with exaggerated hand movements and silly voices, getting lots of laughs for my efforts. Lily started leaving about halfway through the above, I hoped to finally get my snack. I interrupted my portrayal to request, "Lily, would you please let Julia know that Carol and Donna are in the tub with us now? In case she's wondering where they are. Thanks." I didn't understand the details of Julia's plan - something that happens with roughly 100% of her plans - so I didn't know whether she'd leave us in here alone, or bring one or more girls through. I suspected the latter, so I kept the story going, throwing in all the outrageous details my three minds could think of. That's surprisingly easy, even more than three times easier, because only one mind gets bogged down on the immediate needs of talking. The other two have the time to think of a theme, or just a small idea, then take over the mouth and run with it for a while, and we give each other ideas too. My sisters obviously knew that I was trying to be humorous, and they supported me by laughing, and particularly in Carol's case, by feeding me a couple of lines and trying to raise the atmosphere. I hammed it up even further, adding funny faces to my act. Even Anna was laughing, having recovered from her unhappiness at being moved off me, sheesh! I'd been keeping an eye on the door through to the other room, and when it opened I pretended not to notice Julia was coming through, with quite a few girls with her. I kept my story going as Julia advanced into the room. Carol was the sister whose breasts were pointing at the newcomers, and Carol's breasts aren't exactly inconspicuous, even from across a room. There were quite a few surprised expressions at seeing Carol's breasts sitting on her brother's leg. Quite a few of the girls had their steps falter, but nothing untoward occurred. When Julia was about halfway across the room, with about a dozen girls spread out behind her, I pretended to see her for the first time, and shrieked, "Oh no! They've come back to finish me off! Hide me girls!" I pulled the Carol and Donna together and hid myself behind them. I stuck my left arm out, pointing it toward the door into the hallway (it's in the opposite side of the room to the Guys' Room). I put on a very fake, falsetto girl's voice, squealing, "I saw a boy go that way! He had a REALLY nice tush. Hi, my name's Margaret." I bent my wrist down, in the camp, limp-wristed, gay way. Then declared still in my girly voice, "Oh no! I've broken a nail!" The girls in the tub had a great time laughing at my antics. Hopefully I was showing the newcomers that we were having nice, wholesome, non-incestuous fun. Amid the laughter from the tub, Julia said, "Haha. Good one, Mark." I girly-shrieked, "That's her! That's the ring-leader. She's the worst one of the lot!" That got me a few more laughs. -- I'd made my point now, so I came out of hiding. Holding Carol and Donna in place, I opened my legs and looked between the girls at Julia. In my normal voice, "Hi, darling. Carol asked what they'd missed, so I was giving them an entirely accurate description of the homicidal attacks on my person." Anna told Julia, "{Giggle}. He's very funny." Julia said, "We had fun too. I was telling them all about our parking lot conversation with Chloe." #2: #1: Several of the other girls started smiling and became more animated. One of them asked, "Did you really crawl around on your hands and knees, admiring her ankles?" I waited, hoping that Julia would help indicate what I should say. All Julia did was start to undress, so I had to wing it, "Ahh, umm. I'm afraid so. I got a bit carried away, and made a bit of a fool of myself." "Yeah, we know. Julia told us ALL about it, haha. It was VERY funny; we were all in stitches. You're so wonderful." #4: We eventually came up with a good response, "Umm, thank you." Anna excitedly asked, "What did Mark do? Why was he wonderful?" Julia motioned one of the girls to tell the story, and Anna was given her answer, with me listening in avidly. The indicated girl started, "You know how Chloe hates her breasts?" "Sure," said Anna. #4: "Remember that just before we left the pizza restaurant, there was some talk about Mark liking breasts?" Anna nodded. Good, I wanted ALL the girls to remember that I liked breasts. More of them needed to dress like Linda and Savannah. "Well you can imagine how Chloe felt about that! But she was also praised because she gave Mark some of her pizza, so her feelings were all over the place. In the parking lot Mark felt sorry for her being the only one having to go home, so he offered to give her a kiss goodbye. Chloe started going on about breasts, which had nothing to do with anything. Mark just wanted to give her a quick kiss then come here. No way did he and Julia want to be slow getting home, because they should've been here before us. But when Chloe got all emotional Mark tried VERY hard to show her that he respected her as a person and that her tits were irrelevant. -- "Julia told us what he said, and it'd take me too long to tell you now - besides, I couldn't do it nearly as funnily as Julia - but he pretended that her ears were sexy, and pretended to treat them like breasts, to show how silly that'd be. I haven't explained it well, but it was very clever. Then Mark got down on his hands and knees and started repeating the same thing all over again about her ankles. He didn't worry at all about making a fool of himself. All he was worried about was trying to make Chloe understand how to have healthy self-image about herself. He would have done it too, eventually, but it was taking far too much time and Julia lost her temper at how much time and effort Mark was putting into helping Chloe, but which Chloe didn't appreciate at all. Chloe was treating Mark like any other boy when it's obvious he'd never grope anyone. He won't even touch the breasts of girls who want him to. He was trying REALLY hard to help her as a person, but she refused to see past her insecurities. Chloe was so into herself that Julia lost her temper." Julia was stepping into the tub by now, and I wanted to contrast my behavior with Julia to that of my sisters, so I didn't take my eyes off Julia. I was pretty sure that the girls in the tub recognized my different attitude to Julia's body. Julia said, "Carol and Donna. Have you had enough time with your brother yet? I'll wait if you want more lap time." Carol stood, saying, "We've been here for ages, all during Marks convincingly accurate story. He's all yours." Donna leaped to her feet too, and headed for a spare bit of seat. Carol bent to kiss me on the cheek first. That was okay, because it's how we behave at school. Carol moved off to join Donna. Julia, bless her (and I truly mean that, for what she achieves shortly), sat on my lap, grabbed one of my hands, pulled it over her shoulder and onto one of her breasts. She announced, "You see what I have to do to get him to touch me? Mark is such a gentleman he wouldn't dream of imposing himself on anyone. I don't know how many times I've told him that I want him to hold my breasts, but he simply won't do it. He's too caring and too scared of upsetting any girl by doing it inappropriately. After weeks of my unsuccessfully battling to get Mark to touch me, I got SO ANGRY at Chloe for her treating him over and over again as some tit-groping pervert. The absurdity of her abusing Mark that way drove me wild. Mark likes breasts - he likes them a LOT, like all guys do - but he wouldn't dream of acting on his desire." -- Julia looked around, and asked, "I don't know how many times I've told him that sometimes a girl likes to have her breasts held nicely. Mark has a nice touch too, so it truly does feel good to be held by him. I've been pushing him really hard to loosen up and touch girls who will obviously let him. He keeps telling me that he'll try to do it, but I've never seen him. Has he tried to touch any girl's breasts in here yet, or has he been his usual I-wouldn't-dream-of-touching-you-in-a-million-years self?" Julia looked around, and everyone shook their head. -- Julia exclaimed, "You see what I mean! He's in a hot tub with six naked girls, all of whom want him. He really likes breasts, but he's done nothing about it. Any other guy would have been all over all of you by now. Pat, he hasn't even touched yours?" Pat said, "No. I've been sitting beside him the whole time, and he hasn't touched me anywhere." Julia said, "Good grief, Mark. Pat is your LOVER. You don't need to be shy about touching her. I'm sure she's eager for you to touch her again, aren't you Pat?" "God yes! I'd LOVE to go back to bed with him, but I'm getting depressed about that if he won't even touch me when I'm sitting next to him. When I got in here I thought we'd be getting sexy - isn't that what people do in hot tubs? - but he hasn't moved a muscle. If I didn't know better, I'd think he was gay." I was shocked to hear that accusation! Julia laughed, because she felt my reaction, then she said, "Pat, did you see how I got Mark to touch my breast?" "You grabbed his hand and put it on." "So what are you waiting for?" "I can just grab his hand?" "He MIGHT object, but I know he thinks you've got lovely breasts so I'd be very surprised." Pat followed Julia's instructions, and found the whole process was surprisingly successful. I was very, very happy. Tits in both hands, from two different girls at that. Can life get any better? Julia said, "Comfortable Mark?" "Yes thank you. Actually VERY comfortable, Pat has nice breasts." "Are you happy, Pat?" "Much better, thank you Julia. Mark has a nice touch, not like the guys who just grab and squeeze. All I had to do was put his hand there? I wish I'd known that before." Julia laughed, "Yeah. Me too! I wasted weeks waiting for him to touch me until I finally realized that he never would. Needless to say, that required EMERGENCY action! Let me say a couple of things. All of you here, if you want Mark to touch you, you have to help him. Grabbing his hand and moving it to your breast is a VERY effective way of helping him, but be very aware that he may not want to. It's one thing if he wants to and is being cautious of your feelings, but it's an entirely different thing if he doesn't want to. Obviously you don't want to force him. Can you believe that I'm actually saying that here is a guy who will seriously sometimes NOT want a girl to put his hand on her breast! If that doesn't convince you that Mark's unique, nothing will, haha. -- "So be very considerate for his feelings. Mark is NOT like other guys, and he hates to offend people. He's the sort of guy who would NOT REMOVE his hand from you if he thought doing that would hurt your feelings. So please respect his sensitivity and his caring for you, by caring for him. If you want him to touch you, don't just grab his hand like you own it, and you can do whatever you want with it, because it's not yours. If you treat Mark that way, you'd be forcing him to participate in sex that he doesn't want, which isn't a nice thing to do to anyone. If you want Mark to touch you, be gentle and caring, and give him every opportunity to refuse. Look him in the eye, ask him if he wants to even before you take his hand. If he doesn't object, then take his hand and move it. If he pulls away then obviously don't try to force him back. Nor do you argue with him. In short, you treat him with all the respect and empathy that you wish to be treated with yourself. You all understand what I'm saying, don't you?" Lots of nods and quiet "Yeses." "Good. Now imagine the parking lot with Chloe. Every time Mark's hand crossed in front on her, she shied away from it, assuming he was going to lunge for a grope of her tit. Every time his eyes moved over her chest, say because he'd been looking in her eyes, then needed to look at his watch to check the time, then back at her eyes. Every time his eyes did that, I could see the nasty suspicions, if not even momentary hatred, in her eyes, because Chloe mistook every single one of those eye movements. When he was talking to her and he mentioned breasts - which he had to, because SHE raised the topic - she reacted negatively every time. She'd draw away for an instant, as if he was going to rape her. You all know Chloe, and you've seen how she tries to talk with guys sometimes, but the moment any guy reacts to her breasts, she cringes and then considers him an asshole. She's paranoid about guys, thinking that they all want to grab her tits. -- "Every time she reacted like that to Mark, she was hurting him. He knew he would never dream of touching her in an unwelcome way. He won't even touch girls who want him too, because he's too worried about upsetting them. A blind man could see how much Chloe didn't want to be touched, so it is inconceivable that Mark would try to touch her. I'm sure all of you can see that. Yet Chloe was insulting Mark over and over again, by reacting as if he was about to rape her breasts. And how did Mark react to all these insults? He got down on his hands and knees and made a fool of himself while he was racking his brain for ANY way he could think of to help her understand him. Chloe's right about most guys, but she's DEAD WRONG about Mark. Every time she insulted him, and he took it and tried even harder to help her, it hurt me terribly. Unlike Mark, I don't have the patience of a saint, so I lost my temper very badly. I'm sure that if I hadn't, Mark would still be in that parking lot now, trying his best to convince Chloe that he valued her entirely as a person. -- "He was trying to get her to see that she could trust him. You know he was already trustworthy, but he wanted Chloe to know that too. If he could get her to trust just ONE guy, then the crack would open and she'd learn that she can trust others. Her whole life would change and become far happier if she could learn that. Mark was prepared to take as long as necessary, and would still be in that parking lot now if I'd kept my temper. He knew that what he was trying to do with Chloe was important for her whole quality of life, whereas all he'd be doing here was having fun with a couple dozen beautiful girls, many of whom will happily get naked or have sex with him. Any other guy would've left Chloe in his dust and got a speeding ticket getting here, but not Mark though." I could tell Julia was pretty much finished her speech, and she'd certainly achieved her purpose, judging by the damp eyes all around the room. It was time to change the mood then. I said, "Julia, unfortunately you're wrong about almost EVERYTHING you said. I helped Chloe because she had two things that I love very much, and she gave one of them to me to put in my mouth. Yummy, I LOVE pizza!" Ahh, life is good when you get one right. Julia and I are a good team. She builds them up with all sorts of good sounding bullshit, and then I crack a self-depreciating joke about myself, and the girls we're talking to (we don't do this with boys, obviously) are VERY impressed. It's amazingly easy and effective. Julia turned away from the girls to face me, then threw her arms around me, crying. Which I thought might've been overacting, but it was fine by me. I put my arms around her - yes, even the one from Pat. I could always put it back later. Or better still, Pat could put it back later. [I found out later that Julia's tears weren't really acting. She'd gotten involved in her story about my altruism with Chloe, but mainly she was very proud of me for how well I'd done in the tub with my sisters before she'd arrived, with my joke just now, and how well I was doing the whole day. Personally, I thought her trick of getting girls to ask nicely if I would please grope their tits beat my performance hands down.] When things had settled down enough, Julia said, "I wish Chloe had been here to listen to all of that. Mainly because it would have been wonderful for her, and would probably have changed her life. But, I must admit, I'd also love to see HER on her hands and knees begging for Mark's forgiveness. I think that'd be VERY appropriate, haha." One of the girls said, "I was going to call her." "Me too," echoed several other girls. Chloe was going to have a very unexpected evening. If the girls bought Julia's story - and it certainly seemed that they did - then Chloe was going to be hit over and over again with a powerful message. "Oh!" said an apparently surprised Julia. "That's a good idea. You should do that. Chloe's a very caring girl, and it's nice that she's got so many friends that'll help her." "You should call her, Julia," suggested one of the throng. "You'd tell it much better than we would." "I know what you're saying and I thank you, but I don't think I'd be better than any of you. You understand Mark well enough now. If a few of you call Chloe, or visit her even, then you'll do a better job than I would. I still feel anger about her insulting Mark, because she was so totally in the wrong. I can't be dispassionate about her insults to my man when he was so innocent and trying so hard to help her. When my temper's cooled, I'll give her my apologies, but I think she'll need to apologize to Mark first. I think it'd be best for her if as many of you as possible visited and called her after we finish here. -- "I want to change the subject, if you don't mind, and talk about Mark's sisters: Carol and Donna." Everyone was a little surprised, but there were no objections. "I guess the first most of you knew about Mark having a sister was his speech about how much he loved his sister Carol, and the trouble that was being caused by her coming out as a lesbian and as my girlfriend. I know a lot of you were stunned by Mark's depth and purity of feeling for Carol. Am I right?" Oh yes, Julia was right, all right. They'd been well and truly stunned, and they told her so. One of them even told Julia, "You're so lucky," because she apparently hadn't been told that enough yet. "Remember how much love he showed for Carol. You'll have to take my word that his love for Donna is just as strong. Now I'm going to drop 'love', and talk about 'like'. Mark took his 12- and 13-year old sisters with him when he was going out on a date with twenty five sexy girls, ALL of whom fancied him, several of them so much that they'd make love to him the instant he asked." "Oh yes," said Anna. Then "Oh no," when she realized she'd spoken out loud. Several of the girls laughed, and Anna looked horrified, mortified, and as if she wished she was dead. Julia slid off my lap and stepped over to Anna. Julia lifted Anna's chin, and told her, "I was going to give you my seat when I'd finished talking, but I think now is a much better time." Anna didn't move, managing only to make some incoherent noises. Julia said, "Go and sit in the lap of the man you love, Anna." "You... , you know?" "Of course. Go sit in his lap." Julia pulled Anna to her feet, and pushed her the one step to me. I caught her, turned her around, and pulled her on to my lap, putting my arms around her to hold her while she decided whether to cry or not; it was a near thing. Julia told the group, "I don't think any of you should laugh at anyone who falls in love with Mark. Anna's not falling in love with an equal, the way every other male-female couple roughly is. Anna's falling in love with a man who is already far greater than she will ever be. She is overwhelmed, and rightly so. As you'd be if you open your heart to Mark. I know that Anna's slip was funny, and that you weren't intending to be cruel, but she's very vulnerable now. She needs our support and encouragement, not laughter, okay?" "Sorry Anna," from a few of the laughers. Julia added, "The OTHER thing Anna needs, is for Mark to put one of his hands on her breast. Isn't that right, Anna?" "Oh yes please. I'd LOVE that." I wouldn't mind it myself, so we were both happy. Julia continued, "And if Pat doesn't want Mark to hold her breast again, maybe she should give up her seat to someone who does." Pat very quickly acted on her decision not to give up her seat, adding, "Sorry, I forgot. I was too busy listening," I didn't bother wasting breath with an excuse, I just groped Pat as well. "The only way I could make it any easier for the two would be to Super-Glue Mark's hand to your breast, haha. Before Anna's lovely slip, I was talking about Mark's bringing 12- and 13-year old Donna and Carol on his date today, remember?" Nods all around. ------- Chapter 110: Hot Tub Party; Democracy in Action Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Vanessa walked in from the hallway door. The girls were surprised by her sudden appearance. Most of them were fully dressed and had no reason to react beyond surprise, but a few did. Anna frantically pushed my hand off her breast. Pat stiffened, hesitated, then looked at me. By way of answer, I resumed stroking her breast (I'd stopped in surprise too). Pat relaxed, trusting me to know how to act. She'd also met Vanessa before and knew of her permissive attitude, which helped a great deal. There were a few naked girls around: the others in the tub, and Lily sitting on the tiny deck the hot tub was built into. After the initial surprise, seeing that it was just one woman, they all relaxed. Julia, Carol, Donna and I didn't bat an eye. My hand had paused, but only Pat noticed that. #1: #2: #1: I was facing Vanessa, so was quickly able to greet her. Carol and Donna had to turn around first, and they greeted Vanessa as usual. Vanessa asked, "How's your day going?" She asked everyone, but Donna got in first, "AWESOME! Mark bowled 300. Did you know that? The alley went wild. I've never seen anybody get close to that before. It was awesome to see. Then we had pizza, which was great except Mark ate most of it, haha. Then we came here. So far there's just been LOTS of talk. I've never heard so much talk." Vanessa and several others chuckled, then Vanessa asked, "Julia, is there anything you need?" "Yes please, Mom. But first, everyone, this is my mom, Vanessa. There are too many of us to introduce to you, Mom, but I will introduce you to Anna. Anna is the girl sitting on Mark's lap. You might see a lot more of her from now on because she just told us that she's fallen in love with Mark." That was a terrible surprise for Anna, especially as Julia had just told some of the girls off for laughing at her. Anna would MUCH rather be laughed at by a few girls than have this happen. Julia's victims are rarely offered a choice though, hehe. Vanessa responded, "Congratulations, Anna. I hope it works out very well for you. I know Mark is a good boyfriend because I've seen him with Julia often enough, so you'll have a successful relationship if you can put the necessary thought and effort into it. Good luck with that." Anna was too busy wishing she was anywhere else, or perhaps dead, to answer. Julia responded instead, "Thanks, Mom. See that pile of clothes there, could you please put it through the washer and dryer? The girls had a crazy stripping frenzy, and several pieces of clothing got dirtied." "No problem," as Vanessa moved to gather up the pile. "If everyone undressed before, why is nearly everybody dressed again? That's not how I remember my teenage parties going. Do you do things backward these days?" "The got all modest after the first mad scramble. I think they shocked themselves at the beginning and have overcompensated. Don't worry, I'm sure your confidence in teenagers will be restored. They'll loosen up once all the fucking starts. There'll be lots of naked girls running around then. Plus Mark, although he won't be doing much 'running', haha." The phrase, "once all the fucking starts" was apparently not one that most of these girls were used to hearing in conversations between mothers and daughters. There were many shocked, disbelieving girls. Somehow neither Julia nor Vanessa heard all the gasps. Vanessa said, "Do you need any more condoms, tissues, towels, or anything else?" "I think we've got everything thanks, Mom. Mark, you've got some condoms somewhere haven't you?" I forced myself to answer with assurance, "Sure. There are a couple of packets in my cubbyhole, the top left one. Twenty four should be more than enough because we don't have much time, especially with all the talking this crowd does. Donna was right about that." Vanessa said, "Just sing out if you want anything. We're in our study. Donna, when it's time for you to go, I'll probably be in my study, okay?" "Okay. It's starting to get boring anyway. Julia's talking about Carol and me now, so I want to hear that, and then I think I'll play some 8-ball, if I can find someone to beat, haha." "Okay. Have fun girls. I probably don't need to tell Mark to have a good time do I? I'll bring these back," hefting the load of washing, "when they're done. Nice meeting you, Anna. You're a nice, quiet girl. After Julia, that'll be a welcome contrast for Mark, haha. Bye for now." Vanessa walked out the door, and Julia said, "Where was I? Oh yes, Donna and Carol. I was talking about Mark's bringing his 12- and 13-year old sisters on his date, remember?" Julia likes to tease people, which is usually very unfortunate for me, but my not being the victim would make this time much more enjoyable. One of the girls ventured, "Ahh, Julia. Your mom's very relaxed about sex." Another girl said, "Forget that! What's with her attitude to Mark and Anna? That's WEIRD!" Julia explained (Julia is good at explaining things), "Because back when I first realized that Mark needed another girlfriend, I talked to Mom about it, especially about why. Then I talked to Dad, my brothers, Mark's parents and sisters, and last - but DEFINITELY not least - Mark himself, haha. Everyone agreed that my idea was unusual, but also the right thing to do because of Mark's uniqueness. It seems weird, but he's so unusual that sometimes we have to do unusual things, like putting his hand on your breast. Look at Anna. She removed Mark's hand when Mom came in, but Mom's gone now and Mark hasn't put it back. ANNA has to put it back, and the silly girl hasn't done so yet." The silly girl giggled as she fixed that oversight. "How unusual is it for us to have to help a boy do that! Haha. -- "Everybody in both families approves and is helping Mark and me. You heard Mom wish Anna good luck. Mom likes Mark very much, and she truly does hope he finds another very successful relationship, like he has half-time with me. Mom's wishing Anna good luck seems weird, but my parents understand that many of the usual ways of doing things don't apply to Mark, like how he got his license so early. I keep telling you how unusual Mark is, over and over again, but you haven't got it yet. -- "If nothing else convinces you, maybe the way you see my parents behave toward Mark might wake you up. My parents are very intelligent people, and you'd normally expect them to protect their little daughter, so if they're okay with Anna loving Mark and his having sex with other girls, then you have to know that something unique is going on. Today isn't just a bunch of girls having a fun day and there happens to be one boy here as well. This day is ALL ABOUT Mark, to help you realize how important he is. I can't understand why you're so self-absorbed that none of you can see that." "I do!" declared Lily. "I knew before, and now Mark even better." "Yes," agreed Julia, "I should have said, 'none of you except Lily.' It's awkward to keep saying that, so I got lazy and left her off. Sorry about that, Lily. I don't know whether you get it as well as I do, but you're MILES better than anyone else." Lily looked very please with herself, which I'm starting to think might be a bit of a problem with her. If there's one thing I've learned from Julia, is that we have to pop the over-inflated bubbles that are the egos of most pretty girls. We want girls to look up to me, and certainly not to think THEY are superior. The further they have to look up, the better. I didn't want to do anything drastic, but a little dig wouldn't do any harm, plus I had an important ulterior motive. I said, "Don't look to self-satisfied, Lily. You offered to get a snack for me and a drink for Donna a while ago, but you failed to deliver." Lily leaped to her feet, "So sorry! I get now." She rushed through to the Guys' Room. In her wake, I commented in a normal tone of voice, "I couldn't get them myself, my hands are full." As usual, Julia got it fractionally first, but it didn't take long for the rest of them to catch on. Lily rushed back with a bowl of nibbles, a drink for me and a coke for Donna. I was soon faced with the dilemma of which hand to use to eat and drink with: the Pat's breast hand, or the Anna's breast hand. Anna's breasts were average, so Pat's won out in that respect, but Anna's emotions were far more vulnerable. Alternating hands seemed best. I decided to start with the Pat's breast hand (previously known as "my right hand", but now promoted). I reached into the bowl, and Anna said, "I'll get those for you, Mark." Anna squirmed around on my lap, to reach the bowl, then returned to her normal position. She was now sitting on my lap holding the bowl in front of her. She said, "Tell me when you want a bite, and I'll hold one up to your mouth." I remarked, "I'm sitting in a hot tub, playing with the breasts of two beautiful girls, and being hand fed. This is turning into a very good day. Heck, it's turning into a very good LIFE. Haha." After some joking around from the girls, Julia was able to restart her oft-interrupted talk, "I want to resume my point about Mark's bringing Carol and Donna on this date - remember?" She got plenty of confirmations. "Previously I talked about Mark's LOVE of his sisters, but now I want to talk about LIKE. You can see from today that Mark LIKES his sisters. In the bowling alley every time I got off his lap, Donna jumped on, and Carol was sitting next to him. If you remember what he behaved like back then, he was perfectly content hanging out with his sisters. He was enjoying being with them, and they with him. He could have been strutting around, flirting or boasting with other girls. I'm sure you can easily imagine how any other boy's ego would be blown out of all proportion by being the center of attention of twenty-odd pretty girls while he was bowling 300. But not Mark, he was perfectly happy visiting with his sisters. When I came into this room last time, Mark was in the spa pool with six naked girls who fancied him, plus his two sisters. Who did he have on his lap, and was spending a lot of time and effort entertaining? His sisters. Mark REALLY LIKES his sisters, and they him. -- "It's not that he's scared of girls. He's extremely cautious and considerate, but he's not the least bit scared. In the parking lot with Chloe, for example, Chloe's body language and attitude was insulting to Mark. But he didn't run away and hide behind his sisters. He knew Chloe's mental health was important, so he stood his ground and did his best. Actually, he didn't 'stand his ground' the whole time. Sometimes he was on his hands and knees on his ground, haha. Which better demonstrates that he wasn't shy, because he didn't worry at all about making a fool of himself for her. A shy person couldn't have done that. -- "I could go on for HOURS with examples that I've seen for how well the three of them get on together, but I'll spare you. If you spend time with Mark in the future, you'll see lots of examples for yourself, because if you see Mark, then you'll often see Carol and Donna too. They LOVE each other, and they LIKE each other. If any of you girls can get into Mark's heart even half as much as Carol and Donna are, then you'll have a wonderful life, and be the envy of millions of other girls, like I was saying in the other room." The girls were all nodding along, and some were even starting to look increasingly moist-eyed. -- "When I was planning today there was only one thing that worried me much, how you would react to Mark and his sisters being naked together." Donna looked down at herself in surprise. Julia caught it and laughed, "Haha, Donna had forgotten. Anyway, what I worried about was that one or two of you would be screwed up mentally with a sick fixation on incest, and be unable to see the incredible love and liking they have for each other. I'm far less worried about that now, because I think that all of you can clearly see that these three have a fantastic relationship." When Julia had said, "you would be screwed up mentally with a sick fixation on incest," it had rocked a lot of the girls. The contrast with the previous loving tone was a slap in the face. I was curious why she'd chosen to talk like that, but no doubt she had a reason. -- "Because of all the stupid, pointless trouble that could result if one of you has the wrong idea about these three, I'll take the time to say a few things. First, obviously my mother saw them naked just now and didn't bat an eyelid." That scored a few points with the girls. -- "Second, you can SEE the girls have no fear of being touched by Mark. They sit on his knee with no sign of nervousness. If anything, it can be hard to get them off when it's my turn, haha. You KNOW how reluctant Mark is to sexually touch a girl, even a willing one. I've spent weeks trying to get Mark to do that to me, and I've been forced to grab his hand like Anna and Pat have had to do. Obviously you all know that Chloe was completely and totally safe from Mark even thinking about touching her inappropriately." The girls were nodding, forcing me to reconsider my previous belief that Julia had invited smarter than average girls. "It's IMPOSSIBLE to imagine Mark touching either sister inappropriately! The thought would NEVER cross his mind in the first place, but he'd rather cut off his hand than use it to touch a sister that way. He's caring, sensitive, gentle ... I'd better stop that list, because I'll get too carried away and emotional. I'll just say that it's IMPOSSIBLE. -- "Third, which I'll mention just because I like talking about Mark's cock, haha. Have any of you ... Oops, I was just about to ask you whether any of you had noticed his cock today. What a STUPID question that was! Haha. I should ask if there are any of you that have NOT noticed his cock, haha." I'll say they had! They'd been 'checking me out' from the moment they'd first seen me. Sometimes they'd get so wrapped up in something Julia was talking about that they'd forget for a while, but my body had been on the receiving end of MANY glances from the girls (sisters excepted), especially my cock. The frequency of such looks had certainly been a never-ending series of reminders to make sure I kept the go-softs going. [I soon thought of a little trick to eliminate the need to remember to do so many go-softs. I'll describe it later.] Julia asked, "Anna. You can feel Mark's cock under you. Is it hard?" "No, NOTHING the WHOLE time! Sometimes a twitch, but I think that's just the water moving it around. I'm NAKED on his lap and he can play with me as much as he wants, but nothing. I don't know much about boys, but I don't think he's interested in me! It's so UNFAIR! I love him so much and..." Anna's voice had started breaking, and would soon become a wail. Julia jumped in, "Anna! Stop getting yourself into a tizzy and listen to me. Everything you're thinking is completely irrelevant! Take a breath and listen, okay?" -- Anna collected herself, and Julia resumed, "When I asked you whether Mark was hard, I was expecting you to just say 'No'. You gave me WAY too much information, haha. You didn't need to get so worked up. You made one BIG mistake: you judged Mark based on what you know about ordinary guys. Mark is NOT an ordinary guy! I believe I've mentioned that once or twice already. You will NEVER meet anyone like Mark, OR his cock! Lily, Pat and Laila can all confirm that Mark's a fantastic lover, can't you girls?" They did so, very enthusiastically. -- "I've had more experience with Mark and his cock than all of you put together, and he still blows me away in bed. I can feel myself juicing up already, just thinking about it..." #1: A few of the girls looked down at Julia, including Savannah, I was VERY happy to notice. Julia looked VERY wet (she was sitting in the tub, haha). It was impossible to tell whether she was 'wet' in the more interesting sense. It was very good to see their reactions though. " ... So I think we can agree that Mark's cock works fine. You're right, Anna, that any other boy would be hard now - or more likely have blown off already - but not Mark. When Mark's big head is ready for sex you'll know all about it, but until then you're safe, even though you don't want to be safe, haha. Remember Annette Neumeyer?" #2: #3: #1: #3: #1: #3: The girls indicated that they remembered Annette Neumeyer. "Mark's big head wasn't the least bit interested in her. Any other boy would've been putty in Annette's hands, but not Mark. NOT until his big head decides. Actually that's not quite the case. When he and I are just casually playing around he often gets erect, because he knows that I won't get offended or feel pressured. It's the same thing as his touching your breasts. He has to feel absolutely, totally confident that the girl won't be offended before he'll get erect, touch your breasts, or any other sexual activities. He CANNOT get erect, unless he knows that the girl wants him to. Even if a girl is asking, he errs on the side of caution. In the early days with me, he was sometimes so 'cautious' I wanted to SCREAM! I was so horny I was panting, and he'd keep asking me if I was sure. I'm sure you can imagine how frustrating that was! Fortunately, as he's become comfortable with me and knows he's not in any way imposing, he's not so frustratingly cautious anymore. -- "Mark doesn't know you very well yet, Anna. He WILL be cautious with you, and it WILL frustrate the hell out of you. Remember Chloe in the parking lot again. Can you understand how WRONG she was! It's impossible for ANYONE to be more wrong than Chloe was about Mark. That's why I completely lost my temper and ended up calling her a stupid cow. It was unfair of me, but you can imagine how incredibly angry I was at the injustice of her nonstop implied insults and accusations." Imagining that was almost making me angry enough to lose my temper too. The stupid cow! How dare she! Snigger. -- Julia paused to let the girls think about it, then continued, "Mark's not erect now, Anna, because he doesn't know deep down inside of himself that you would be comfortable with him being erect. He wouldn't even be touching your breast if you hadn't put his hand there. Every time his hand gets removed for some reason, like when my mom came in, YOU had to put his hand back. If it was Chloe sitting on his lap now, rather than you, Mark would be EXTREMELY unlikely to touch her breasts at all, because he knows how many issues she has over those. Even if she was begging him too, I doubt he would. If she begged him over and over again, and finally convinced him, then he might do it, but he'd be looking at her very, very carefully for the first sign of any discomfort. If he thought he saw a flicker of discomfort, he'd yank his hand away so fast it'd be a blur. He'd be MORTIFIED at making her uncomfortable. Have you all got a clear understanding of how cautious and unwilling to impose himself on any girl Mark is? Take a second to get a strong feeling for how safe and trustworthy Mark is for ANY girl." Pause. "Have you all got that feeling?" They all nodded. "Now imagine him forcing himself on one of his sisters." Every girl shuddered. And a boy too. "Yes. It's impossible. I said before that Mark would rather cut off his hand than do anything like that. It would've been more accurate to say he'd rather cut out his heart, because doing something like that would feel worse to Mark than having his heart cut out. The wonderful thing is that I'm not exaggerating. Mark really does feel that strongly for his sisters. That much love is very wonderful. -- "Now here's my problem. Mark is going to be meeting many, many girls. Quite a few of them are going to fall in love with him, like Anna says she has. Some of those girls, the stupid ones, are going to be so desperate to marry Mark that they'll try to blackmail him into it if they feel it's the only way. They might threaten to accuse him of molesting his sisters. Or maybe some girl that Mark drops might get so upset that she lashes out to get revenge, and accuses him of that. Because Mark is so close to his sisters, such a threat would seem plausible to anybody who didn't know them well enough to know that it's impossible. I've used incest as the most likely threat because his two naked sisters are right under my nose, and also because I can't think of anything nastier. I guess someone might accuse him of cheating on a school exam, but somehow that doesn't worry me so much, haha. My family and his family are totally fine with all of us using the hot tub in the nude. It's natural and okay by all of us, but some desperate or hate-filled girl might use it as a basis for an allegation. -- "I'm not worried about Mark's being found innocent. That'd be easily achieved because we could find a thousand witnesses for how well they get on together, and it wouldn't take any psychologist very long with them to be willing to swear in court that the three of them love each other wonderfully. I'm only worried about Mark having to put up with all the crap that goes with such allegations. We've all heard stories about how ugly that can be. -- "Some of you may have noticed that I'm not very jealous about Mark, haha. I don't mind if any of you, or all of you at once, fuck Mark from one side of Corvallis to the other. But I must have a very misplaced sense of jealousy, because I take PROTECTING Mark very seriously. NOTHING gets me angrier than threats to Mark. You heard about how upset I got at Chloe, and that was just from her body language's insults and accusations. Imagine what I'd be like if she'd threatened him in some way! Actually you probably shouldn't try to imagine that, because it wouldn't be pretty. I want to warn you not to threaten Mark. I don't see that as much of a problem, because you're all smart and are getting to know him well enough that I can't see any of you being that silly. -- "More importantly, I want to ask you to be careful of what you say to people. There's no need for you to mention that Mark's naked sisters were sitting on his knee while he was naked, for example. It's true, but it's also a lie because you know that it'd be giving the wrong impression. You all saw how it was in reality. There were several other people in the tub, and every one of you were laughing and having a great time. Mark can be a great entertainer. I'll talk about this a little more soon, but for now, I'll just ask you to be careful. -- "Most importantly, I want all of you to be on the lookout for anyone who might be threatening Mark. Whether it's a jilted ex-girlfriend hell-bent on getting revenge, or more football jocks wanting to go to jail by attacking him, or anything else. If you hear anything threatening to Mark, I want to know about it IMMEDIATELY, okay? I'm not jealous of Mark, but I am VERY protective of him. But please don't call me up if you hear some boy complain that Mark's got too many girlfriends. I don't want thousands of phone calls over little grumbles. I'm talking about THREATS of some sort, okay? -- "I'm sure you've all got that, so I'm going to change the subject and tell you something funny I thought of while I was talking. When I first started going out with Mark, I was very jealous and angry whenever a girl made a pass at him, which happened often. Now I laugh at myself for worrying about his faithfulness. Look at Mark's hands." Everyone looked at my hands. The one on Pat was dangling loosely, hanging a couple of inches in front of the center of Pat's chest, between her breasts. I was just holding Anna around her waist. I'd gotten distracted listening to Julia. To be fair, so had everyone else. Also, I HAD been having a very good time playing with them both, but even playing with breasts can get a little bit boring and be easily distracted from after long enough. (It's TRUE! I know it seems UNBELIEVABLE, but it is true). #1: #2: Julia said, "In the early days of my dating him, if Mark had chosen to be unfaithful to me, it'd still take him several YEARS to get as far as actually do the dirty deed. Haha." The girls laughed, to my embarrassment. Julia added, "It's a wonder how he got so good at sex, because he doesn't seem to have any interest." Victoria asked, "Is he really that good at sex? He doesn't seem to care." Which started a FAR more detailed and embarrassing discussion. I quickly decided to flee, "Excuse me ladies - although I don't know how I can call you 'ladies' after hearing some of those comments - I'm going to get out of the tub as I'm overheating. I'll go play some 8-ball with Donna..." "Goody. Thanks." "No problem. I'm happy to get out of here before that conversation gets any more personal. I've enjoyed myself in the tub. I wonder if I can get one installed in a classroom at school, so I could sit in my tub in class, feeling two naked girls' breasts. One girl would be hand-feeding me like Anna has been, and the other would be writing my notes for me. School would be a LOT more enjoyable, that's for sure!" I got some laughter, and a whole heap of accusations for being a male sexist pig. "Only a boy could think of that!", "Yeah, great for all the other boys in class watching too", "While you're at it, why not a couple of naked girls standing to either side, fanning you, to keep you cool?" Etc. Julia said, "This is an example of my knowing Mark better than all of you. You've all responded to the sexy part of his idea, but I bet the most exciting part of that fantasy for Mark is his being hand-fed." They all had no trouble laughing at me for that. I started getting out, but Anna wasn't happy over that development. Julia leaped on the issue quickly; she'd probably been waiting for it, as it was easily predicted, "Anna, do you know the fastest way possible to be dropped as Mark's girlfriend? Dropped so bad that he won't even talk with you again?" Anna didn't want to ask, but it was one of those no-choice situations, especially as Julia would have told her anyway. "How?" "By being selfish." Anna perked up at that, happily declaring, "But I'm NOT selfish. Honestly. At home Mom and Dad often compliment me on being unselfish." "You've spent more time on Mark's lap than ANY other girl here, including me. The rest of us would love to spend time cuddling with him, but you're still trying to hog him. Second, Mark is hot and overheating, so making him stay in longer for your pleasure is cruelly selfish. Third, he wants to entertain Donna. You heard Donna tell my mom that she was getting bored of all the talk and wanted to play a game. Since then we've done a lot more talking, so Donna must be VERY bored, but she sat quietly and didn't interrupt the whole time. Mark is being considerate to his sister, and you've all seen how important his sisters are to him. Mark is a very, very good brother. That's three ways you're being selfish. Do I need to give you any more?" "No. I'm sorry. I didn't realize." "We all understand that you're horny for him and that you want more of his physical attention, but it's not going to happen today. Mark doesn't have those feeling for you yet. He's not like other boys; he won't leap at anything in a skirt. Or, in your case, NOT in a skirt, haha. You've got to build his interest in you, and you've only just started doing that - although sitting on his lap and hand-feeding him was a VERY good start. Get off Mark's lap, Anna, because you're STILL stopping him spending time with his sister." I helped her, by picking her up and placing her on another seat. I was a gentle dumping, and I did kiss the top of her head before I got out. Julia was still educating Anna, "It's a mistake to assume that all you have to do is tell Mark you love him, and then he'll do everything you want. Would you do whatever a boy wanted just because he said he loved you on the first date? I don't think so! No matter how much you want it, you have to make Mark want it too, or it'll never happen. That's why my mom warned you that relationships need effort. My advice is to ask your mom how to earn the love of a good man, and how to build a good relationship. Have you got a mother you can talk with about things like that?" "Yes, {sniff}." "That's what I think you should do. You might want to leave out that Mark was naked in a hot tub with twenty four other naked girls, as that might confuse your mom, haha. Just talk with her about what it takes to build a good relationship. If she asks you for details about who the boy is, because she'll obviously know you've got one in mind, just tell her it's too soon yet, because it IS too soon. You have only just started, Anna." Turning to me, Julia said, "Are you intending to get dressed, Mark?" I'd just finished drying myself, and was now stepping into my underwear, so I had little trouble saying, "Yes." "Should Mark get dressed, girls?" canvassed Julia. "NO!" x every non-sister. #1: #2: #3: Julia said, "Sorry girls. I've just realized that I was being unfair to Mark. Why should he go naked outside of the tub when everyone but Lily is dressed. We'll have a new vote. Girls, put your hand up if you favor stripping. If the majority votes to strip, then Mark AND the girls that voted that way will get naked. Girls that don't want to strip don't have to, but they can't vote for Mark to either, as that's unfair. There are twenty four of you plus me, so..." Carol asked, "Can I be included in the vote please?" #3: #2: Julia asked, "Why?" "Not for the same reason as the rest of you, that's for sure, haha. I don't care about Mark's body, or he about mine, but I want to vote for stripping because Mark will enjoy himself more if there are naked girls. I know he'll be embarrassed to start with, but he'll get used to it, and it'll be good for him to learn to be less self-conscious." Julia agreed, "Good reasons, darling. I approve." #3: #2: #3: Donna said, "Me too please! I want to vote too." There was no doubt which way her vote was going. "Okay, sweetie. You're in too. Are we all ready to vote?" There were a couple of questions from girls who hadn't followed well, and an explanation of how the already naked girls in the tub would be handled (which was obvious), and then Julia called. "All the girls who're in favor of Mark staying naked, raise your hand please." Julia's hand went up while she was still speaking. My ever-loyal sisters raised their hands. All the other girls in the tub did so too, clearly not the least bit worried about their being naked around me. Anna wasn't smiling, but she knew what she wanted. That was nine votes already. Lily's made ten. There were seventeen girls who were dressed, maybe missing an item if Vanessa was washing it. The votes of a few of them, such as Savannah, were never in doubt: their hands shot up. There were several girls who had obviously decided that they weren't going to strip. Their hands didn't budge. For a second I had the hope that I might be able to get dressed, as playing 8-ball naked was VERY unappealing. But it was soon apparent that the voyeurs would carry the day. There were several girls who were indecisive. Their hands would go up, they'd look around, put them down, look around, worry, change their vote again, etc. My first thought was that they preferred to vote 'No' to retain their modesty, but they'd vote 'Yes' if their vote was needed to ensure the majority required to enforce my stripping. But I rejected that idea when it was clear they were changing their votes without having done a count. Julia showed she understood when she said, "Some of you aren't sure. Don't let peer pressure influence you, because you'll probably regret your action tomorrow. This is about what YOU want, consistent with your modesty and what you want Mark to think of you." Julia's last point seemed not to have occurred to several of the girls. Some of the previous certain hands vacillated, and the indecisive girls firmly decided to be even more indecisive. Julia gave them another ten seconds, then said, "I'm going to call out some names. Listen for your name." Then she recited several of their names. It was quickly clear that she was identifying the modest girls (what #4, if he wasn't on duty now, would have called the "rejects"). At the end of the list Julia said, "All of those girls go and stand by the exercise bike please." One of the rejects said, "I've changed my mind, Julia. I'll get undressed." She put her hand up, to prove the point. Julia answered, "I'm sure you would, but you're risking regretting it tomorrow, Emily. I think you'll feel relieved if you go stand with the other girls by the bike. There are nine modest girls." With a fake-outraged voice, Julia continued, "What a TERRIBLE comment on today's values that so many of you are willing to strip just so you can ogle one, single boy. I'm appalled." Hannah pointed out, "You're also naked yourself." "Very true. I learned weeks ago that VERY good things happen when Mark and I are naked together. Do they ever! A second girl at the same time works very well too, as Lily and Pat have told you. Probably twenty four other girls at the same time is beyond even Mark's powers though, haha." I volunteered. Rubbing my hands together with glee, and putting a lecherous look on my face, "I'm willing to try, if all you victims ... sorry! 'all you GIRLS', are willing to come within reach of my clutches." I got some good chuckles from that. Anna, who was still sitting in the tub (where I'd dumped/gently placed her, after lifting her off my lap), quickly stood and said, "I will." She even started getting out of the tub, in case I started without her. #3: Julia said, "Anna, Mark was joking. I'm sure you want your first time with him to be special, not one of a whole bunch of other girls." "Oh yeah. {Giggle}. I got too hopeful. I want to, a LOT. I've never felt like this before. He's very nice and very sexy isn't he? And I'm sorry I spent so long on his lap. I didn't mean to be selfish; it's just that I love Mark so much..." We only had a few hours left, so Julia had to cut her off. "Come and sit next to me and I'll tell you a story while all the other girls are getting undressed." In a louder voice, Julia called out, "Don't stand too close to Mark when you strip girls, or you might accidentally rub against his body." I was lucky to survive. Especially because the girls quickly developed an EXTREMELY liberal idea of what "accidentally rub" permitted. Their fully deliberate rubs were a lot less gentle and more hurried than Donna's had been in the bedroom upstairs, although often similarly located. MAX go-softs were required. Donna had climbed out of the pool with me so we could play 8-ball together, and had dried and dressed herself faster than me. She'd still been standing next to me when Julia started the democratic process, and was still beside me when Julia made her comment/invitation to rub me. Donna was pushed away from me by the 'Charge of the Crazy Girls'. I would've been concerned or upset at their inconsiderate treatment of my sister, if not for her highly amused laughter. I yelled at her, "Save me, Donna! I'm being shamelessly manhandled ... GIRLhandled. MADgirlhandled." "Haha." No rescue from that quarter then. I was trapped against the cubbyholes, surrounded by girls who were thoroughly enjoying themselves, laughing and joking with considerably more hilarity than I thought the situation merited. Unfortunately they were doing far less undressing than the situation merited - nay, required! I called out, "Donna. Go get a game of 8-ball ready. I'll try to join you there. If I haven't arrived in thirty minutes, call for the paramedics!" I struggled weakly - very weakly - but eventually managed to extricate myself from the rapacious mob. They tried to follow me, but Julia pointed out, "Girls, the deal was you stripped, and you're standing beside the cubbyholes right now, so get to it!" I looked back, to make sure, and was happy to see them start to comply. Make that, "very, VERY happy." As I walked past the modest group, they didn't look too happy. They'd missed out on all the fun of groping me. Tough cheese! I would suggest that there was a moral in there for them, but it was more likely to be an immoral. [While I was out of the room (which I get to shortly), some of these girls told Julia that they were on their periods and were wearing pads so couldn't strip. Julia whispered this to me later, which - once the shivers stopped going up my spine - I insincerely thanked her for telling me. She said she'd told me so I wouldn't assume that the girls she'd named were the boring spoilsports they appeared to be, which was a good point. I thanked her for that.] I could see Donna racking up a game as I was crossing into the Guys' Room. I could also hear Julia say from behind me, "Don't be sad sacks, girls. If any of you want to strip now you can, or you can stay dressed. It's completely up to you. No one's going to think any worse of you either way..." #1: " ... Why don't you go watch Mark play Donna. He's going to look very, very funny leaning over the table when he's naked." Judging by the sudden laughter, a large number of them thought so too. ------- Chapter 111: Hot Tub Party; 8-Ball Demonstration Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Donna is competitive and has to see people trying hard to beat her for her to enjoy playing games with them, so whenever we goof off these days, I always handicap myself. I enjoy it more that way too. We negotiate, and something renegotiate, the handicaps with the various games we play, or maybe we just make up a new game heavily slanted in her favor to make it a challenge. With 8-ball, I wouldn't use any TK (Donna doesn't know about that anyway), and I told her that I'd never play direct shots but would always use a cushion or an extra ball somewhere in the shot, and Donna could have two shots in a row unless she fouled. I didn't tell her, but I also decided to play this game right-handed only. Not so much to help Donna, but because I expected to have some fun with that later. More and more spectators drifted in, initially the clothed ones, but later more of the girls I tended to prefer. They watched and noticed the strange way Donna and I were playing, unless they were totally ignorant about the game. I was asked about it, and told them, "It's my handicap, so we've got a fair game." Donna exclaimed, "Mark's the BEST at EVERYTHING. No one can EVER beat him." Donna's childish loyalty earned her several condescending laughs, which she VERY much did not appreciate! Donna face hardened, and she turned to face the girls. I hurriedly rushed to her side and hugged her, "Let it go, Donna. I'll show them later, after we've finished our games." Julia was certain to insist on that anyway. I kissed Donna on the top of the head, "Make your shot, sweetie." Sweetie, not exactly living up to her name, firmly told all the girls, "You're all STUPID!" Then she turned back to the game. Trying to clear the air, I said, "It'd be a REALLY good idea not to insult me in front of my sister when she's holding a big stick. You might regret that, haha." "We didn't insult you." "Some of you laughed condescendingly at Donna's praise of me. That IS an insult to me, and to Donna, although she didn't care about that. You don't have a leg to stand on, so let it go." They let it go. A couple of the girls immediately said "Sorry Mark." One said, "Sorry Donna," which pleased me a whole lot more. All the other girls caught on, and the apologies flew for a few seconds. Girls continued to drift in, and a couple of minutes later one of them asked, "Why are they playing so strangely?" The early arrivals leaped to explain, before Donna could get involved. The spectators were THOROUGHLY enjoying the game. Seeing me bend, stretch, twist, etc., gave them a perverted thrill. For example, sooner or later (and it was unfortunately sooner, especially as I was playing only right-handed) I had a difficult shot. I started laying myself across the table the way you sometimes have to in this game. The rules require that one foot has to be on the floor, and that can result in shots with widely spread legs when the other one has to be on the table. Several girls walked to a better position straight behind me and started making impolitely detailed anatomically comments. I froze, wondering which of the two options - proceeding with this shot, or getting off the table to play a modest duff shot - would make me look the least like a complete dick. It wasn't an easy decision, but my dignity was pretty much ruined already, so I played the shot. I missed and got several appreciative claps. Then there was the time I had to lay myself on the edge of the table to make a shot, then adjust my position because the edge dug into somewhere I didn't want any digging to occur in, I got several laughing offers to hold my "sensitive bits out of the way." The girls were having a great time. Girls don't seem to have any shame at the best of times, and a room full of them concentrating on pulling the leg - or thereabouts - of a single naked boy, was about as far as I could get from the "best of times". Julia wandered in and stood beside me while I was waiting for Donna to take her turn. I had just started talking to Julia when I proximity sensed Hannah walk up behind me. I could tell she was trying to 'hide' by the way she was tiptoeing and 'curled in on herself.' [Proximity operates over 360 degrees. More accurately, it's almost certainly a three-foot radius sphere, although I haven't tested that thoroughly. As long as I'm centered, it's functioning. It's not like sight, in that it only detects intentions (even in dogs and cats, you might be amused to know. Both with very much less ki than humans, and that of cats barely detectable). But like sight, I don't have any problem processing the input. Now that I'm much more used to it, I don't get swamped by all the input. Your seeing a hundred people is no "harder" than seeing one. If they're further away, or in front of each other, you might miss some details, but it's not "harder" to process. Neither proximity nor sight takes any noticeable effort to use. If someone walks to within three feet of me, then I not only CAN - but I DO - proximity sense them, just like I would see them visually if they walked in front of me. So sensing Hannah was automatic and effortless. Once she was in range, it was easy to sense that she was "hiding", because she was trying to think herself 'small'. Ironically, it was her desire to be inconspicuous that gave her away).] Remembering our little game at the pizzeria, I kept looking straight ahead, and said loudly, "Are we still playing that game, Hannah?" "Argh! How do you do that?" "There are ways." An innocuous answer, I thought, especially in making it a plural. I knew only one way to do it: kill myself twice, center myself, and have a previous experience of someone in my proximity sense so I knew what they 'looked' like. But for all I know, there might also be other ways. "No. Seriously. How do you do that?" "Seriously, I'm not going to tell you. It amuses me to frustrate you. Call it my revenge for trying to use me as a giant vibrator. It's not my fault if you can't work it out for yourself." "But there's no glass that'd reflect on me the way we're standing, and I just got out of the tub so I smell the same as everyone else that's been in it, especially you." That last point was quite clever, especially if she'd been aware of it when she'd chosen to time her 'sneak attack' now. I was a little impressed, but that was NOT going to induce me into telling her how I'd done it! I didn't want her to become fixated on discovering how it worked, as that could become a nuisance, so I said, "I'll play this game no more than TWO more times with you Hannah, just to frustrate you further. After that I won't say anything when you try it, so you'll never know whether I knew or not. You may think you're smart, but as Julia insists, you're not as smart as I am." The last point had nothing to do with anything, except that it made my 'trick' sound more natural. She does seem to consider herself smart, so taking her down a peg or two might be a good idea. It was my turn to shoot, so I resumed the game. Several minutes later one of the girls said, "Hey! Donna voted for stripping, so she has to strip too." Donna was still dressed. She'd gotten dressed before the voting occurred, and then got distracted by the "Charge of the Crazy Girls", being pushed away by them, and my suggesting that she went to set up an 8-ball game. Donna said, "Oh yeah. I forgot." She put her stick down, and moved to unbutton her top. I said, "Hang on, Donna." Turning to the girl who'd spotted the discrepancy, I said, "My sisters NEVER 'have to strip'. Second, Julia made the girls who voted that way strip to be fair to me, because if they were getting the pleasure of seeing me, it'd be fair if I got the pleasure of seeing them. That reason doesn't apply between my sisters and me, because there's no sexual interest between us. Third, you heard my sisters' logic, twisted as it was. They voted that way because they thought it would be fun and good for me. In other words, for MY benefit rather than THEIRS, so they have no need to 'pay' for their vote." "Oh yeah. Sorry Mark. I didn't think about it before I spoke." "And I overreacted to your comment. I'm sorry for that. I know it wasn't meant in any bad way. I'm just overprotective of my sisters, I guess. I'll take my arguments back, because they weren't called for. Sorry." I could happily take them back, as they'd had their effect now, reinforcing Julia's themes of no sexual interest in our family (somewhat erroneous!), and my being a protective brother (which was much more accurate). Donna said, "I better take off my clothes then." "Why?" I asked in surprise. "Because my reason was different than Carol's. I just thought you'd look REALLY silly playing 8-ball with no clothes on. And you do! It's great fun watching you, haha." Loudly, over the laughter and - I'm sorry to say - enthusiastic agreement, I yelled, "You SCAMP! Get those clothes off, you little devil." Donna, laughing as she did so, threw them off, and into a pile on the floor. When she was finished, and turned back to the game, Julia said, "Put your clothes into a cubbyhole, Donna. We'll wait for you." "Oh yeah. Sorry." While Donna was running to comply, Julia said, "Mark's comments reminded me. I should have said earlier that if any of you naked girls feel uncomfortable, you can get dressed again. Don't feel honor bound because of your vote. That was just a game. You can ALWAYS dress or undress in this house, in whichever way makes you feel happiest, or that you think will give you the best chance of attracting Mark. It's completely up to you." It truly was up to them. Julia was just letting them know that'd they'd be dishonorable and stupid to do it. Julia should probably have mentioned it ten minutes or so ago, before they'd become used to being naked around me. Snigger. One of the clothed girls asked, "Can I get HALF undressed, Julia?" "STUPID ME! Of course you can! Sorry. I completely forgot about that. I tend to be an all-or-nothing sort of girl! Haha. Any of you can wear as much or as little as you like. That's entirely up to how you feel about yourself and Mark. If there's some part of your body that you think Mark shouldn't look at, then by ALL MEANS keep it covered. No problem at all." I was interested to watch the girls. Most of the naked girls were totally happy with their decision. A few of the nudies dithered a little. I guessed tempted to go put on some panties, or whatever. None of them did though. A couple of the clothed girls immediately headed back toward the cubbyholes, then a couple more followed them, then all of them left. They trickled back, about half wearing panties only, the others in panties and bras. There wasn't a dress, blouse, pair of shorts or jeans anywhere to be seen. My sort of party! It's hard to believe, but Julia seemed even happier than me, presumably because her machinations were working so well. I should also mention, in case any of you aren't aware of it (in which case I feel VERY sorry for you), but Julia must have been VERY happy, because I sure was: girls look DAMNED GOOD in panties. In some ways, even better than not wearing panties, although nude will ALWAYS be my preference, as a matter of a deeply held personal conviction. After the third game, which Donna won, giving her the 'match' 2 to 1, Donna said, "Can you play someone else properly now Mark. I want to see them eat their words." Donna hadn't forgotten or forgiven their insults. Julia, who I am sure had been waiting for this opportunity, immediately said, "We don't have time for all of you to play him. Who's the best player here?" Most of the girls had no skill at all, but a handful had played enough to require a discussion among them. Alexis was chosen. I wanted to break first. It wasn't a big deal, but it was slightly better. The usual mechanism of tossing a coin wasn't available at the moment. I didn't have one on me, and I was pretty sure none of the others did either. For fun I looked straight at them, and said, "Who's got a coin?" A lot of them reacted, then looked up to see me smiling at them. Gotcha! I got a few chuckles too. There were no balls on one end of the table, so I put the cue ball there and said, "Alexis, no coin, so you hit that ball hard sideways across the table. Provided it rebounds at least four times, then when it finally stops, if it's closer to that wall I'll break first, the opposite side you break first. That sounds fair, as you're doing the shot. Okay?" Alexis couldn't argue with that. She made a hard but very deliberate stroke. It rolled to a stop where I won the break, probably because Alexis had failed to take my TK into account (hehe). Donna called out, "Beat the pants off her, Mark!" Alexis was naked, so Donna scored some laughs. On my break, an 'under' dropped. Within a very short period of time, so had every other under, then the black. Alexis never got a shot. On the next game she broke, but no balls dropped. It was difficult to achieve as balls were rolling in all directions, but I managed. One use of TK was a bit obvious if you were looking for it, but I thought the risk was slight. Alexis' failure to sink a ball wasn't essential - not even close to it - but it'd make this more impressive. It was my turn, and I sunk all the unders again, then the black. It was my break again, so she stood by helplessly during that game too. I turned to her, and said, "How many more games do you want to play?" She responded, "I HAVEN'T played a game yet! Can I try one more?" "Sure. I can do this all day. It's not hard." She gave me a look, halfway between 'dirty' and 'disbelieving'. (I might be wrong about that, as there aren't many suitable words between those two.) On her break she managed to sink a ball. More precisely, I did not manage to prevent her sinking one. Unfortunately, snigger, the cue ball had stopped in a difficult location for her. She did her best, but unfortunately again (snigger again) she failed to sink another ball. I was my turn, so I sunk all the overs. "Rack 'em Donna." Donna was my helper, all the more to enjoy my victory. It was much easier to ensure a ball fell during a break than to stop one, so I had no trouble ensuring that I potted one off my break. I finished that game too, in my usual nonstop style. There had been, of course, lots of comments from the spectators. Mostly along the lines of "Wow!" Julia and Carol just stood there, arm in arm, smiling ear to ear. After game five, Alexis complained, "I'm never going to win a game, am I?" "Not unless you can clear the table off your break. Otherwise the game's over as soon as you give me a shot. To be totally honest, I can't absolutely guarantee that, because you might leave me in an impossible position, but you'd be surprised how unlikely that is. The short answer is that you're correct about never winning a game." "But even professional players can't pot every ball like that. Not game after game they can't. It's not possible." I called, "Rack 'em Donna!" "{Giggle}. I told you they were STUPID." With a light tone, I told her, "Play nicely, Donna." I'd deliberately played right-handed the whole time, saving my ambidexterity for a good opportunity, such as now. I said, "Your break, Alexis. To make it fair, I'll play entirely left-handed from now on, okay?" That revived her interest in the game. Alexis said, "That sounds fair." How little she knew! She broke, but had the misfortune of not sinking a ball. I cleared the table. "Rack 'em Donna!" I cleared the table. "Rack 'em Donna!" "Ahh, I think I'll give up now." "Are you sure? I can do this all day." "You could make a FORTUNE as professional player. Why aren't you doing that? Do they have an age limit, or something?" "Yeah, Mark," inquired Julia innocently, "why aren't you doing that?" My TK would be a LOT less obvious in camera replays in this game than it would be with bowling. Even without TK, I could probably be very good at this game, but NO WAY was I going to take this up professionally, presuming there wasn't "an age limit or something." The truthful answer was that it'd bore me to tears, and I'd HATE all the time I'd have to spend traveling away from home. Plus there were far quicker and easier ways to make far more money, such as roulette, hopefully. I knew from Julia's frustrated tirade in the car that she didn't want to talk about me being rich yet, so I just said two-thirds of the truth: "It'd bore me to tears and I'd hate all the time I'd have to spend traveling away from home. I like being with my family, and Julia is quite nice too." She poked her tongue out at me. I TK-squeezed one of her nipples. Julia jumped in shock, then laughed heartily. The other girls were surprised. Carol was surprised too, and standing where I could see her clearly, so I demonstrated how I'd surprised Julia by lightly caressing her breast then squeezing one of hers. Carol got it, and laughed too. When Julia recovered, she explained/dismissed her over-reaction by waving her hand and saying, "Sorry, private joke." Alexis had been waiting impatiently, and she now told me, "I don't think you understand. You could make a FORTUNE! Millions of dollars! I don't know how much the top players make, but it's got to be HUGE, with all the endorsements and everything. And you'd be FAMOUS!" Alexis was quite worked up. Who'd have thought ANYBODY could get worked up over 8-ball! Famous: phooey. Not that I wanted to be famous - VERY much the reverse, thank you very much - but at 8-ball! Talk about useless! Julia said, "Alexis, why should Mark bother being rich and famous at 8-ball when he can be rich and famous at bowling?" "Huh?" said a confused Alexis, not quite able to switch lanes that fast. "Mark is good enough to bowl perfect games, so I'm sure he could be rich and famous at that too." Brenda, one of better bowlers asked, "Julia, you can't possibly mean Mark can bowl perfect games EVERY TIME? That's IMPOSSIBLE." Julia turned to me, to ask, "Mark, can you bowl a perfect game every time?" I had to be careful here, because this was one of the issues that the parents didn't want me to do because it was too freaky and attention getting. Talking about it was a lot safer than doing it though, especially as it's not completely unknown for guys to exaggerate how good they are when talking to pretty girls and sex is in the offing. "I've only played the one game since becoming more athletic, but bowling strikes was very easy for me, so I think there's a good chance I could get a very large number of perfect games in a row. It's even easier than winning at 8-ball." Brenda opened her mouth, paused, then said, "But that's IMPOSSIBLE! No one could do that. The best ANYBODY has ever done is three perfect games in a row. Saying you can get a large number of them is RIDICULOUS!" "Yes. Amazing, isn't he," agreed Julia. "Huh? No, Julia. I mean it's NOT POSSIBLE." Brenda was getting somewhat agitated, but then she suddenly relaxed, and said, "Ahh! I just remembered you don't know much about bowling. You must've got the wrong idea somehow. Take it from me, no one can do that." Julia responded, "Mark knows about bowling. Mark can you bowl perfect games every time?" I didn't know much about bowling, other than how to cheat highly effectively. Having just bowled a perfect game I should have some authority, so I said, "Maybe not EVERY time, but certainly quite a few of them in a row. Like I said before, it's considerably easier than cleaning up at 8-ball." Brenda opened her mouth to argue again. Donna yelled, "He CAN. I keep telling you that you're STUPID." I was proud of her loyalty, considering she didn't know a thing about my TK. I was a little less impressed with her tact, but you can't have everything. Donna didn't do her credibility any good when she added, "He can do ANYTHING!" It was nice of her though. Carol said, "If Mark says he can do it, then he can do it. He's not exactly a braggart, is he? You saw him do it once, why can't you believe he can carry on doing it?" Julia said, "This argument isn't worth all the bother of going back to the alley and having Mark bowl more perfect games just for you Brenda, so you'll just have to take our word for it." Brenda said, "Let's drop it, Julia? I don't want to cause any trouble." Julia doesn't like not winning arguments, and she also doesn't like girls not understanding my brilliance, so I didn't think it likely that Julia would drop it. This was a worry, because I feared Julia would explode in some way. I'd gotten an idea, based on Brenda's rant about three perfect games in a row being the record. I said, "Brenda, let me put this mathematically." Which was my favorite way. "I need a number to start with, for how likely it is for someone to bowl ONE perfect game. If a really good player went to the alley tomorrow and bowled one game, what's his chance of getting a perfect game? One in a thousand, one in a million, one in ten? Just a very rough guess that you'll be comfortable working with." "Umm. If you just want a rough number, then one in a hundred, I guess. If he was a VERY good bowler." "Okay, so the chance of bowling two perfect games in a row is one in ten thousand, and three in a row is one in a million, right?" Mathematics wasn't her forte and she struggled a bit, lowering my opinion of her, but she eventually said, "Yes." No doubt mostly because several other girls were already agreeing. "And the reason you say getting many more than three in a row has never been done is because the odds get worse and worse. Bowling three perfect games in a row is one in a million, six in a row is one in ten to the twelfth, which is a trillion, nine in a row is one in a ten to the eighteenth, which is a quintillion." Brenda was lost. The wheels weren't even going around. "Umm. I don't know. I'm not very good with numbers." #1: I'd been intending to use a very simple piece of mathematics. That when her 1/100th probability was reduced, then the compounded probabilities for 3, 6, 9 or whatever number of consecutive perfect games, dropped dramatically faster. And when the probability of a perfect game got to 1 (which I can do), then any number of consecutive games was possible. But this approach wasn't going to succeed with her. "Let me try another way then, Brenda. Let's say I'm great at school. Even a bit of a genius. Can you imagine that?" Most of the girls chuckled at that. Brenda's mind was still recovering from the horror of having to think about numbers, so it took her a little bit longer to get the wheels moving. Happily for her there were no numbers in my new approach. When she was ready, I continued, "Let's say this cunning genius, who - by the way - has a very nice, calm, even-tempered girlfriend," who responded by hugging my arm and giggling, "invents a new bowling ball. It's a very, very clever bowling ball, containing a really clever computer, a video camera so it can see, a motor to move itself, and two robot arms that it can tuck inside the ball, but can also stick out and wave around when it needs to. This is just the sort of bowling ball you'd see in a silly cartoon. Let's call it 'Barry', 'Barry the Bowling Ball'. Can you imagine Barry?" Quite a few girls giggled. Brenda was smiling, which was more than she could do when I talked about numbers, so a cartoon was definitely a better approach to use with her. -- "Good. Now Barry's mission in life is to knock over pins. Barry HATES pins, and he LOVES to knock them ALL over. Sad to say, but Barry is a bit of a bully. So he should be called 'Barry the Bully Bowling Ball'. So, after I've designed and built Barry, I take him down to the bowling alley and I toss him onto a lane. Barry opens his eye, and down the far end he sees those pins that he hates so much. He thinks to himself, 'Right, I'm going to get you, you DAMNED PINS!' He turns on his motor, and he drives himself straight down the center of the lane. He's got an eye, so he can easily see where the center is. When he gets down to the end where the pins are, he sticks out his arms - which are very long - and he smacks every pin in the head, knocking them all down. He's having great fun now, because he's down there among all the pins, rolling back and forth, smashing into them, knocking them back and forth. -- "He'd happily spend hours doing that, because he REALLY HATES pins, but that machine thingy that bowling alleys have, comes down from above and sweeps all the pins and poor Barry. I don't really know what happens back there, but it ends up with Barry being put into that thing that rolls the balls back down to our end of the lane. Now Barry's no dummy - he knows that after he gets sent down to the bowlers' end, then the bowler will pick him up and roll him down the lane again, so he gets to beat up EVEN MORE PINS! This makes Barry very, very happy, because he LOVES beating up pins. And that's what happens. The cunning genius inventor..." "With the beautiful girlfriend," prompted Julia. "With the TWENTY FIVE beautiful girlfriends, one of whom isn't very modest, picks up Barry, and tosses him onto the lane again. Barry sees all those pins standing up and looking smug, just begging for a good bashing! So he motors straight down there and knocks them all down, like they jolly well deserve. He's still smashing them all around the place when that arm-sweeping-thing comes down again. Barry thinks, 'Yippee, I get to knock over ten more smart alec pins soon.' And the whole process repeats. -- "Barry is a very enthusiastic bully and very good at it, so he ALWAYS gets all ten pins. So each time the genius with the twenty five beautiful girlfriends and two wonderful sisters tosses Barry onto the lane, Barry always gets a strike. He NEVER fails. I'm sure you can see that after twelve tosses, Barry's owner's got a score of 300. Now the next game starts, but Barry doesn't care anything about games; he just hates PINS. So on the thirteenth repetition, Barry just thinks, 'Yippee, ten more stuck-up pins to knock down', and motors down there to deal to them. Same on the fourteenth repetition, and all the way to the twenty fourth repetition. Barry's owner, me, now has two perfect games in a row. A few minutes later Barry's had the pleasure of knocking down 120 more pins, and I've now got three perfect games. Barry's having a GREAT day! He's a computer, so he doesn't get tired, and doesn't need to rest. So how many perfect games in a row could I get?" -- Everyone was too wrapped up in the story to respond, so I said, "Brenda! How many perfect games could I get, if I had a bowling ball like Barry?" "Huh? What?" "If Barry really existed, and I took him to the bowling alley, how many perfect games in a row could I get?" "But Barry's a cartoon!" Sheesh! "Work with me PLEASE, Brenda. Pretend I really, truly had built a bowling ball like Barry, who got a strike EVERY SINGLE TIME he was bowled, how many perfect games could I get in a row?" "If he was real?" "Yes, real AND could get a strike EVERY SINGLE TIME. How many perfect games in a row?" "Umm. As many as he wanted. As many as YOU wanted. Do you mean he's real? Have you really built a ball like that?" #1: "Let's ignore Barry for the moment. You agree that if I can get a strike every time, then I can get as many perfect score games in a row as I want?" "Sure, that's obvious. Does Barry really hate pins?" #2: "Brenda, there's no such thing as Barry. He doesn't exist; I made him up. You saw me at the bowling alley, I bowled with one of their balls." "But you said..." "I MADE HIM UP, Brenda. You were having trouble with mathematics so I used a cartoon. Mathematics is a logical, left brain activity. People who aren't strong in their left brain are usually strong in their right brain, so I used a cartoon image to see if that worked better with you. You must be VERY strong in your right brain, because that cartoon image worked very, very well, haha. Do you understand that Barry never existed? I invented the IDEA of Barry just a few seconds ago, to help you understand?" "But why?" asked a confused Brenda, saddened by the passing of Barry. "To make you understand that if I can bowl a strike every single time, then I can get as many perfect games in a row as I can be bothered playing. You do understand that, don't you?" "Sure, that's obvious. But how can you get a strike every time without Barry?" "I'm going to explain that easily, but I'll start by asking you to imagine a different game than bowling. You've seen games of basketball, haven't you?" "Sure. I like watching basketball." "That's good. That will make this even easier then." It wouldn't really, but I wanted to encourage her to think it would, to keep her spirits up. "Imagine that somewhere in the world there was a guy born who grew to be FIFTEEN feet tall. Obviously a freak, but let's pretend such a guy did exist. Now imagine how good he would be at basketball. He'd be awesome, wouldn't he?" "I'll say! He'd totally dominate the court, and shooting baskets would be so easy it'd be silly." Which gave me an idea, so I added, "That's a good point. Let's pretend this guy was fifteen feet tall, and his arms were each FIFTY feet long. That's FIFTY feet EACH, so one hundred feet of total reach. This guy, let's call him 'Basketball Bob', could stand in the middle of the court, with one hand at either goal. Whenever his opponents shot for a goal, that hand could snatch the ball before it got into the hoop. Then he could throw the ball up over his head to his other hand, which would drop the ball into his team's goal. He could do that over and over again, all game and every game. Bob wouldn't even need a team because he could win every game all by himself. The opposing team might as well stay at home, because there'd be no point in playing against Bob. Of course Bob doesn't exist, I just made him up a few seconds ago, but if he existed, he would be the world's best basketball player, wouldn't he Brenda?" "I'll say. But I don't understand why we're talking about Bob?" "For one simple reason, so I can get you to agree that in some sports certain physical attributes, like how tall someone is, or how long their arms are, or other things, can make a difference to how easy that sport is to them." "You mean like big guys make better tacklers?" Oh goody, a football girl. It's a good thing she's pretty and naked, but she's starting to tip the balance too far the wrong way. "I think I understand what tacklers do, so I'll agree. Also like boxers want long arms to hit the other guy first; or swimmers would like to have great big paddle-hands and -feet, with webbed toes too; and wrestlers probably want to be double jointed so they can get out of holds; and Sumo wrestlers want to be HUGELY fat, from what I've seen on TV. All I'm saying is that in some sports, some physical attributes make that sport easier. Do you agree with that Brenda?" "Sure, that's obvious. Everybody knows that." #1: "Yes they do. I started with that one because it's so obvious. The next one is just a little bit harder, but not much. Let's forget about the body now, and think about the mind. I'll stay with basketball, because you like it..." #3: " ... And we're going to make it women's basketball this time. Imagine a girl who looks like anyone else on the team, let's call her Betty. Just a perfectly average player in her body, but Betty's mind is very, very unusual. I'll make up some stuff. Let's say her mind can think ten times faster than anyone else, so she can easily keep track of everything that's happening on the court; and that when Betty shoots for a goal, she can tell EXACTLY how far away the hoop is, and she knows EXACTLY how hard to throw the ball so it lands in the hoop EVERY time. 100% shooting accuracy! Maybe Betty's smart enough to know what the opposition are probably going to do, so she can get LOTS of intercepts by moving herself to the right place at the right time. All these things are in Betty's mind, but they make the game FAR easier for her. Brenda, can you see that the right sort of MENTAL abilities can make sports FAR easier?" "Yes. I see that. It's not as obvious as physical, but I still agree." "Good. Do you remember Basketball Bob? The guy who was fifteen feet tall with arms fifty feet long?" "Sure. Barry the Bully Bowling Ball was funnier though." #1: I pressed on, "Let's stick to Bob please. Imagine Basketball Bob, who's fifteen feet tall with 50-foot arms; and Betty, who's the girl with the incredible basketball brain, meet and fall in love. They have a baby boy who grows to the same size as Bob and has the same brains as Betty. So the best possible physical attributes AND the best possible mental abilities. When that baby grows up, he's going to be able to know what his opponents are likely to do, he'll be able to reach one of his hands to intercept almost every pass the other team makes, no matter where on the court they are. So they'll never, ever get close to scoring a goal, unless they try a long-shot, and obviously this kid can grab that out of the air easily. His brain is so good he could shoot with his hand anywhere on the court, if he wanted to, or just reach over and drop it into the hoop. This kid is going to find basketball very, very easy to win, isn't he? I mean absolutely, ridiculously easy?" I could see by the looks starting to appear on a few of the smarter girls' faces that some of them were already starting to get it, including Julia and Carol, but they'd had a BIG headstart. Not Brenda yet though, who - to be fair - probably wasn't as dumb as she seemed. She'd gotten off to a bad start with my using numbers on her, plus she'd been distracted by an overly suggestible imagination and being in the hot seat. I started my run for the home plate, "Obviously I'm not fifteen feet tall with 50-foot arms, but I'm like that kid. I have a body and a brain that finds many sports ridiculously easy. All you girls, take a moment to forget all the made up stuff I talked about. Forget about Barry, Bob, Betty and their kid. What my story boils down to, is me saying that I have physical attributes and mental abilities that make many sports ridiculously easy for me. Brenda, you've already agreed that the right physical and mental characteristics can make sports easy. I'm telling you that I have LOTS of those advantages. Remember that dirty trick I used on Alexis when I offered to play 8-ball left-handed, and then I was just as good left-handed as I was right-handed?" Everyone remembered that, as there'd been a great deal of surprise and amazement at it. -- "I'm totally ambidextrous, because that's extremely useful in sports." It was far too simplistic to say "because" like that, but it'll do for this conversation. "Remember when my right arm was in a cast until recently. I wrote all my notes at school with my left hand. No problem for me." In a perfectly ordinary tone of voice I said, "I don't know whether any of you girls noticed my body. Did any of you bother to look at me after I stripped?" I waited, and there was a brief silence, before the giggles started. "Some of you did, good. For the rest of you - for the nice, well-brought up young ladies who wouldn't dream of looking at a young gentleman when he's not properly attired - I'll save you the discomfort of making you look by telling you that my body is very well muscled and otherwise very athletic. Modesty prevents me being more detailed." Unfortunately it didn't stop them: "Tell us about your ass!" | "I want to hear about your cock." | "Go on, give us a twirl." | "Show us your muscles!" | "Give us a pose." "Ladies, ladies. D'oh - stupid me! - there are NO ladies here. I should have said, 'Harlots, harlots', some decorum please." The easiest way to distract them was simply to do what I'd intended next. I reached over to the table, picked up four overs and four unders, uncentered and started juggling. That distracted them very nicely. I wanted to talk, which I preferred to do when NOT having to concentrate on eight heavy balls. Getting distracted and having one of them kill me by hitting me on the top of the head would be a terrible waste of a good speech. I juggled for thirty seconds, then stopped and returned the balls to the table. I got some claps. I thought of saying "Thank you, harlots," but I didn't want to get them started on that again. Instead I said, "Some of you might have noticed that I'm VERY physically coordinated. You know I'm graceful as you've seen me moving for months, and it is my nickname's middle word. You all saw how good I was at 8-ball so you know that sport is easy for me. Nearly all of you saw me play soccer yesterday, so know that sport is easy for me too. Most of you have probably heard about me winning the 10k running race a week ago, so I'm also very good at running. That's why my ass is so cute, all that running, haha. You saw me juggling just now and my bowling strike after strike. Many athletic activities are ridiculously easy for me. -- "Brenda, I'm finally ready to talk about bowling again. We agreed that if I could get strikes every time, then I could get any number of perfect games. You questioned my ability to get strikes. I can't PROVE I can get strikes every time, and I can't introduce you to Barry, sorry, but I hope that by now that you - and all the rest of you - can see that bowling, like many other sports, is ridiculously easy for me. It truly is very, very easy. I KNOW I can get strike after strike. I could probably get hundreds of them in a row, if I could be bothered. Brenda, if I set up a bowling lane which had just ONE pin on it, and that pin was only five feet away from where you released the ball, I am sure you could get a strike - which means knocking down that ONE pin - very easily, couldn't you?" Brenda answered, "Knocking down one pin five feet away?" I nodded, "Exactly. That'd be easy, wouldn't it?" "Yes." "For me, a strike is about as hard as your hitting one pin five feet in front of you. Remember when you asked me why I wasn't a professional player and I said I would miss my family too much because of all the traveling, and that I would be bored to tears. I WOULD be bored to tears. How would you like to spend day after day, all year long, knocking down one pin five feet in front of you, over and over again?" "Wow!" Which I assumed meant she was convinced. For a bit of comic relief - always a good way to end, although I didn't have a good one worked out as I'd been too busy making sure Brenda followed my path - I said, "And I promise you Brenda, that if I ever invent a Barry, you'll be the very first person I introduce him to. But DON'T wear a white dress, in case he thinks you're a pin." There were some chuckles at that. Julia asked loudly, "How many of you doubt he'd STILL be in the parking lot talking to Chloe?" Julia's comic relief worked much better than mine. There was much more laughter, and the somewhat intense mood was very well broken. There was a whole bunch of excited or awed (depending on the girl) questions. Nearly all of which I couldn't answer. Such as, "What abilities have you got that make bowling so easy?" I could talk about very good coordination and good eyesight (I've never needed glasses. Thank goodness, or the years of being a victim to bullies would have cost Mom a fortune in new glasses), but that was about it. Hardly very convincing. I had to be vague, "You'd be surprised how important having very precise and accurate physical coordination is to bowling. It's very much the same as 8-ball, and you saw how good I was at that." One day I should try bowling a few games without cheating. It'd be interesting to see how good I was. "What other sports are you good at?" "I don't play many. I goof around with some basketball with Donna." Donna grabbed her chance. In a hard, loud voice, "I told you all before that Mark is the best at every sport, and that no one can beat him, and you ALL laughed at me. You were all WRONG and I was RIGHT! SO THERE!" That disrupted the mood, and the girls weren't sure how to respond to Donna. I'm sure they didn't want to risk offending her again either. I said, "Come here, sweetie." As I invited her into a hug. While she was being let through I told her, "To be fair to them, you have known me twelve years longer. Most of them have barely talked to me before. I'll tell you what, if any of them are still rude to me after another twelve years, you can hit them with a pool stick then, okay?" "Can I practice on any that are rude today?" Julia answered, "I don't think any of them will be rude to Mark from now on." There were agreeing noises from several girls. That was a good answer and a nice image too. I thought Julia had finished, and was surprised when she continued with, "So of course you can practice hitting any of them that are. They'd certainly deserve it." I wasn't the only surprised one, most of the others being both surprised and worried. Those standing near Donna edged back. I instructed, "Donna, these girls are all pretty, so please don't hit them in the face, okay? I wished we had MORE pretty girls at our school, not less." Julia had started this theme, and I was enjoying seeing the girls respect Donna, if only out of fear. I knew Donna would like it too, a lot more than I did. She doesn't get in too many fights - just the usual number of childhood scraps mostly because the other person frustrated her in some way - so I wasn't worried about Donna lashing out now. I reassured the girls, "Relax girls, Donna hasn't killed anyone for weeks and she's promised to try to cut down on how often she does that." Julia said, "Mark, let's get back to talking about other sports because I'm curious about that myself. What sports have you played?" "I'm very good at basketball. Donna and I play a lot of one-on-one at home." "Not so much lately," complained Donna. "I'm sorry, sweetie, but I'm getting busier these days, and the next school year's going to be even worse. That's just part of growing up. At least we had some fun at bowling today." "Yeah, that was AWESOME. I can't wait to tell the Ducklings about that tomorrow. They're already wetting themselves thinking about you." I could see the thought occur to her, "And NONE of them would EVER be rude to you!" "I'm sure none of these girls will now either." I resumed my answer to Julia, "Other than one-on-one basketball, I haven't tried anything much. The only sports I do much of is soccer, and the occasional run with Donna." Donna drew breath, and I thought she was about to complain about not much running either. I didn't want her to come across as being too negative, so I put my finger across her lips. She gave it up. We gradually got the level of animation up, as the girls started suggesting various sports, and I said how good at them I thought I'd be: Golf? Asked by Julia. "Pretty good, but nothing special." Only my base athleticism would apply, I thought. I couldn't think of any special advantages. In several respects, bowling and golf have very similar skills - the person can take his time, they require a precise, well-coordinated action, a ball is sent to its destination, etc. But the long ranges and very fast moving, very small ball would prevent my special abilities helping with my drives, although I'd be an extremely good putter. Boxing? My immediate emotional response was "No way!", but I realized how incredible proximity would be, both for my avoiding my opponent's blows, and for knowing when he was going to open himself up so I could punch him. Plus TK would be very nasty too, because I could TK-tap his stomach, and when he lowered his guard, I could punch his face. I figured my muscled body could take a lot of punishment, and my wide shoulders and strength could deliver a lot of punishment back. With a bit of training I could be very, very good in my weight class. Best of all, TV replays wouldn't look too bad, unlike bowling. I answered, "I would never do boxing, but I'd be deadly. World champion level after some training, I would think." That floored several of them (haha). I was asked, "Really?" They seemed overly impressed, even excited, so I squelched it, "I will NEVER try boxing. Not even TRY it. I don't like fighting. Move on to another sport please." Football? I should've known. "The trouble with football is that there are too many football players involved. If you could get rid of all of them, I might try it, otherwise I'm not even going to think about it." Volleyball? "Court volleyball I'd be very good, but not great. Beach volleyball I'd be TERRIBLE at!" I added the last as a joke, sure someone would ask. A concerned looking Julia did, "Why?" I answered, "Every time a girl like Chloe walked past in a bikini I'd be going, 'Wow! Look at the tits on her!' I'd be totally distracted and hopeless!" It's great when telling the truth makes people laugh. After a couple more sports, someone asked the "How'd you get SO good at sports?" I'd expected it sooner or later. "I don't have a good answer. It's not training, obviously, because some sports I could start doing very well immediately, such as bowling or 8-ball. All I can suggest is that puberty has been kind to me, which is a pretty pathetic answer. When I hit puberty I initially became skinny and uncoordinated, but most of the way through things started clicking. My father was a very good athlete. Captain of the high-school football team and that sort of thing. We won't hold that against him, especially as football was a lot less competitive and aggressive way back then. That was like twenty years ago. He wasn't as athletic as I am now, but he was still very good, so I got some very good genes. The only answer I can give is good genes and some good luck." "So why don't you pick a sport you're the best at and become a world-famous millionaire at that? That'd be WAY cool!" Pretty much every girl enthusiastically agreed that it'd be "way cool". No boys did though! "That's a horrible image to me. First - and it's EASILY a good enough reason all by its own - I HATE the idea of being famous and having to put up with all the crap that goes with it. I'd run the other way to avoid that! Second, any sport requires lots of traveling, which I also very much don't want. I want to stay around my family. I'm also very busy with school and college." There was another reason ("There are easier ways of making money"), but I didn't know what Julia planned to do about that, so I kept quiet. The girls didn't buy into my "Fame is bad" belief, and made derogatory noises when I'd advanced that reason. My wanting to stay with my family was very nice though. Julia said, "Anyway, if we wanted money I'm sure Mark could get it easier than being a professional athlete." This was an idea that clearly was of some interest to the girls, but they were confused: "But sports is the only way for young people to earn a lot of money, unless he becomes a movie star. He's gorgeous enough for that. Are you going to become a star, Mark?" Another girl answered, "He doesn't want to be famous or leave home, so he can't be a star." With sports and movies eliminated, the girls were at a loss for how I could make money. That didn't stop them suggesting a few indecent possibilities, but the less said about them the better. They shouldn't have been mentioned in the first place. Julia helped them understand (she's good that way), "Sure, Mark could be the best bowler in the world, best 8-ball player, best runner, probably the best soccer player based on what we saw yesterday. Best boxer too, if he changed his mind about that sport. Mark's easily the world's best in many sports, doubtless including many we haven't thought of yet. He's the world's best overall athlete, so OBVIOUSLY he could make millions from sports. BUT he's also as smart as Einstein. Have you forgotten that?" Yep, they'd forgotten that: "Oh my God!" | "Wow!" | "That's right! That's incredible." | "All in the one guy!" Some of the girls looked SERIOUSLY impressed. Julia and I were doing a much better job of brainwashing the girls this time. After the initial reactions had died down Julia said, "If Mark wanted some money, I imagine he'd get it using his intelligence rather than his athleticism. It's FAR easier making money using your head than using your body." It was over too fast for me to see it in all of them, but I noticed some of the girls had dollar signs spinning in their eyes. Unfortunately including Hannah (pity, I'd had hopes for her). I noticed a few seemed unaffected (Lily and Anna, for example). Most were impressed, but didn't seem to see it as an opportunity for themselves. Probably because they didn't think they had a chance of getting close enough to me, rather than their not being interested in money. Buying clothes requires money, so there was very little chance they weren't interested in money. Julia innocently informed me, "You don't know this, Mark, but for a few days I've been vaguely thinking about your buying a new home." #2: "Oh?" "Just a thought. If you had your own home your sisters could come and go whenever they wanted, girlfriends could visit and even stay overnight easier. You could build a REALLY good study for yourself, because I know how important studying is for you. You'd definitely need to get a MUCH bigger hot tub too, so you could get twenty five girls in there at once, haha. A very big bed too, obviously, for when you're having sex with five or six girls. You'd need to have a special bedroom built for that." I could see the last point rocked the girls quite a lot. Donna seemed ready to speak, maybe to say, "Get a horse," or maybe, "But we've been planning a mansion for a week" I gave her a cautionary squeeze, just in case. She subsided, deciding to say nothing more than a quiet chuckle. Julia suggested to me, "Why don't we think about it overnight? Tomorrow we can talk about whether the advantages of having your own home are strong enough to make it worth the bother of your getting the money for it." Because we were teasing the girls, I thought I'd ham it up a bit more. I waved my arm in a dismissive manner, saying, "I wouldn't worry about the bother of making money. There are plenty of ways of making money and I'm sure I could think of something pretty easy. I'm more worried about all the bother of finding a house, getting it renovated the way I wanted, all the hassle of furnishing it, moving all my stuff. That's a LOT of bother!" (Moving all my stuff wouldn't be. That probably took less than ten minutes to move from my original to Carol's room). One girl yelled out her volunteering, "I'll help you decorate. I'm REALLY good at that. I LOVE decorating!" Moments later I had approximately two dozen volunteers for every feminine task associated with a new house that they could think of. And I was amazed at the number of female related tasks that are involved! I never would've, for example, thought of having to buy new pots and pans, but one of the girl's fathers owned a store that sold pots, pans and lots of other kitchenware, and she was extremely excited to be able to offer her father's store to us. Which gave me an idea. I said, "Hey, I just thought of something brilliant. If I get my own home, and we're renovating it, I could get one of those wide, low, brick oven things that they cook pizzas in. My own pizza cooking thing inside my own home - brilliant!" There was some good laughter at that. One of the girls told me, "They're called pizza ovens." "Huh?" "The oven to cook pizzas in, is called a pizza oven." That name was so unexpectedly obvious it momentarily confused me. How was it possible that women called a kitchen appliance with such a logical, sensible, obvious name? It took me a couple of seconds, but then I remembered that the cooks in all the traditional pizza places I'd been to had been guys. It was a GUY who invented that name! End of confusion. A worried girl said, "I don't think my father sells pizza ovens." Brightening up, she added, "I'll ask him though! He might know some way of getting one." Julia laughed, "Don't get carried away. I've ONLY JUST mentioned the idea to Mark. He may not want a new home, EVEN if it had a pizza oven in it! Mark will think about it. After all, it will be his home. Mark and I will discuss it some time in the next few days, and I'll let you know what we decide." I was quite sure she would. One of the girls ventured, "I'm not sure if Mark would be allowed to buy a house. I've never heard of a 15-year old owning one." Julia snorted a half-laugh, half-raspberry. The girl looked a little offended. Just a little, because she wasn't stupid enough to do more than that to Julia. Julia pointed out, "We're talking about MARK! I doubt owning a house at fifteen is illegal, but even if it was, so what? It's MARK! You don't get it yet, do you?" More than one of them didn't get Julia's point. -- "His driver's license, just for ONE example. I KNOW him having a license is illegal, but he got that. How hard would it be for him to get permission to buy a house that just sits there not threatening anyone's safety? If Mark decides to buy a house, then he'll think of a way to get the money. If it's illegal for him to own one, he'll get an exemption somehow. Don't ask me how, but he will. If the world record for the highest number of consecutive perfect bowling games is three, and Mark wants to bowl a dozen of them in a row, he will. If he wants to invent something that makes him as famous as Einstein, he will. I wouldn't be surprised if he fell head over heels in love with TWO girls, that he wouldn't find a way to marry them both at the same time. That's the sort of guy he is. Normal rules do NOT apply to Mark! Mark can do WHATEVER HE WANTS!" Carol was extremely happy at Julia's last comment. Donna giggled and started speaking. I squeezed her, but she continued, "You tell them, Julia. Make the silly girls get it." "Of course," added Julia, "what he mostly wants is pizza, haha. But between meals, he can do whatever else he wants. You need to understand how special he is. All of you need to seriously think about that." After a brief pause, "I see you all nodding, like you agree with me already." Oh yes, they knew I was special all right. There was a chorus of agreement. ------- Chapter 112: Hot Tub Party; Things Get Sexy Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Julia pointed out, "If you think you all understand how uniquely special Mark is, let me tell you that your understanding means NOTHING unless you change your behavior. If you continue to treat him like an ordinary boy, then you've learned nothing. Emily, why are you wearing a bra?" "Huh?" Emily was taken by surprise, not ready to be singled out. "Why are you wearing a bra? Is it because you don't feel comfortable exposing yourself?" "Yes. That's right." Julia continued, "But I've seen your breasts dozens of times. So have most of the other girls here. You're not worried about showing your breasts to the girls are you? Only to Mark?" Emily didn't want to admit it, but after a couple more exchanges, Julia dragged it out of her. After Emily's shameful confession, Julia said, "Emily's reluctance would be perfectly natural with any other boy. I for one wouldn't be showing myself like this to any other guys, and I'm sure most of you - if not all of you - wouldn't either. But Mark's different. Is he EVER different! He's spent the last ten minutes holding his sister in his arms because she got a little upset earlier. Sure he looks at our bodies - I'd be quite upset with him if he didn't! - but he's a GIVER not a TAKER. He gives caring, comfort and help, whether to someone as close to him as a sister, or to Chloe, who he's probably barely said two words to all year. I'm sure that none of the girls who are naked or topless now feel as if Mark has been taking advantage of them. Most of them are probably WISHING that he would take advantage, haha." Several of them strongly agreed with that. That was VERY nice to know! I was having a good day from that point of view. EXCEPT no goddamned sex yet, argh! I did make mental notes of which girls had been the strongest agreers though, for possible future action. -- "When I see you wearing that bra, Emily, I see a girl who doesn't understand Mark, and is perhaps not a very giving person. Donna would probably just think you were being silly." Donna giggled and started confirming Julia's guess. I squeezed Donna, telling her, "I think you've made that point often enough today. Let it go. Try to think of nice things to say about the girls who do treat me the way you like." I'd been hoping Donna would remember my advice the next time she wanted to make a negative comment, so she took me by surprise when she immediately said, "Some of them have got wonderful bodies. I wish I looked like them." I didn't want to get bogged down with Donna's self-esteem issues, especially because I knew why she wanted to be more mature, so I exclaimed, "They HAVE!" I hammed up a very pointedly staring around all the girls bodies, fairly quickly, then said, "Oh my God! There ARE some sexy, naked girls here." I turned to face Donna, and waved my forefinger in front of her face in a scolding manner, telling her off, "How many times have I told you, young lady! Whenever you see a sexy, naked, beautiful girl, you HAVE TO tell me about it RIGHT AWAY! You know I'm no good at spotting them for myself. Good grief! You've wasted an hour that I could have spent ogling them." I was going to say, "When we get home I'm going to put you over my knee and spank you," but that might have sexual connotations, especially with us both being naked at the moment, so I changed it, saying, "When we get home I'm going to tell Mom and Dad on you. Wait till they hear that you didn't point out ANY sexy, naked girls to me. You're going to be in SO much trouble." Donna, having been successfully distracted from her own body, giggled along quite happily. Julia suddenly spoke up, "Emily, stop taking off your bra." Emily said, "Ahh, I thought I should. I thought you wanted me to?" Julia said, "Definitely not. I wasn't trying to force you into removing it. I don't care about your bra, I was just using it as an example. The issue isn't whether or not you're wearing a bra, it's whether you understand how special Mark is. One day, when you finally understand Mark, MANY of your behaviors will change. Not just bra wearing, but your entire approach to your relationship with Mark, just as the way I treat him is totally different than how I ever thought I'd treat a boyfriend. Once you understand Mark, you'll understand my behavior. I'd even prefer that Emily or any of you who are still wearing something, NOT take anything off, at least for half an hour or more. I don't want you to regret anything tomorrow or feel that I pressured you. That is ENTIRELY your choice, as I've said many times already. Mark's got plenty of naked girls to look at already, so one or two more won't make any difference." Figuring that Julia was more or less finished with this issue, I said, in a mock-reprimanding voice, "Julia! That's just SILLY talk! Everyone knows that the more sexy, naked girls there are, the better! There's no such thing as too many. That'd be like saying, 'No thanks, I've had enough pizza.' It's just WRONG! Not that I'm trying to pressure you, Emily, or any of the other girls who aren't naked. I'd NEVER pressure YOU. What I'm doing is telling Julia off. Clearly Julia should have invited FIFTY girls here today. That way I'd have TWICE as many sexy naked girls to look at. What on Earth were you thinking Julia, to ONLY invite twenty five girls? I'm VERY WORRIED about your attitude, young lady! Only twenty five girls for me! Good grief, don't you realize how special I am?" Amid the laughter, one girl teased, "But you just told Donna that you weren't even looking, so what difference does how many make? Haha." I knew Julia was quite happy, and even preferred for me to admit that I liked sexy girls. If nothing else, because that made it a lot easier for her to provide them. Julia had talked about my liking breasts just as we were finishing lunch, for example. I just had to make DAMNED SURE that I didn't act like a typical teenage boy about it. I had to pretend to be mature, which was a real pain sometimes, like when there were twenty-odd bodies that I definitely wanted to ogle, and had great trouble stopping myself from doing so. Fortunately, when I've determined that I HAVE to do something, I'm not easily distracted. Normally one or other of the minds won't forget to behave, or will remember quickly if I start going awry. So from the girls' perspectives, my eyeballs seem well behaved. Thank goodness none of them had a clue about what some of my thoughts had been! Not only didn't they have a clue, they actually had the opposite idea: that I was a gentleman - ha! I confessed, "Umm. I might have been stretching the truth a little with Donna. Maybe quite a lot more than a little. In all honesty, I have very much enjoyed seeing so many good looking bodies. Emily, and the other girls who're in underwear, if you think I don't find you sexy, then you're very, very wrong. You're walking around in your little lacy things, and I think you look HOT! You'd start a riot if you came to school looking like that, so I'm CERTAINLY not complaining about how you look. I am HIGHLY appreciative of it. I'm a VERY happy teenage boy! Thank you all, every single one of you, for the trust you are showing me and the pleasure you are bringing me. And if any of you see me drooling, please just wipe it up quietly, so the others don't find out what sort of boy I really am." "We KNOW what sort of boy you are. If you were drooling, it was because you were thinking about pizza, haha." #2: Julia said, "Let me summarize. Mark's got four things going for him. One, he's the world's best overall athlete, and could be the world's best player in several sports if he wanted to be. Two, he's an Einstein-level genius. Three, he's wonderfully nice. Given numbers one and two, it's amazing he's not an arrogant asshole..." #3: #1: #3: " ... You all heard how much time and effort Mark put into talking Brenda into realizing that he could bowl perfect games. I don't know how many of you spotted that he didn't do that because he wants to impress you with his bowling ability. If that was important to him he could easily have stayed in the alley and bowled two, three or even a world-record number of perfect games. He spent so long talking to Brenda to stop me losing my temper. I was about to blow my stack at her for not realizing how incredible Mark is, and Mark didn't want me to do that. It would've upset our afternoon and I would have been very embarrassed about it later. Mark spent that much time and effort just to save us from a temporary upset. How long would he spend on Chloe's far more important self-esteem issues?" #1: #2: Julia summarized her previous summary (she does tend to get carried away once she starts), "Number one, incredible athlete. Number two, incredible genius. Number three, incredibly nice, caring and loving. And number four is: incredible ass." Julia caught them all by surprise, but they quickly shouted their agreement. Loudly and enthusiastically, throwing in many ribald comments. After it'd gone on for long enough, I held up my arms for some silence. When I finally got some, I said, "Julia never told me how she decided who to invite today." That caught their attention. "When I first saw you all I decided it was because how good looking all of you are. That's obvious just from looking around." Many of them did look around, so I milked it a bit longer (for some reason I was thinking of milking things). "You're all beautiful. Except when you get reminded of it, you're otherwise unselfconscious, natural beauties. It's a visual pleasure being in the same room as so much beauty. But as beautiful as you all are, I've just realized that your beauty wasn't Julia's criterion for inviting you today." -- That puzzled them. Julia was just smiling happily, knowing me well enough by now to know a joke was coming. "When Julia was summarizing, she said I was an incredible athlete, and you all nodded your agreement. She said I was an incredible genius and you nodded." Some of them started getting it, so I had to rush on. "Incredibly nice, you nodded. Incredible ass, and you whooped it up BIG TIME! Julia invited you because you've all got DIRTY minds!" They reveled in it! I particularly liked the response of the girl who yelled back, "Someone's got to have; you sure don't!" Lots of the girls yelled or laughed their agreement with that. Maybe Julia's criterion had been "Easily fooled", because they didn't know me worth a damn. Julia looked extremely pleased that they'd fallen for that lie so well. I was therefore a little surprised when Julia called back, "You're all totally wrong. Mark DOES have a dirty mind." -- They quieted down quickly, so Julia could explain this interesting new development, "He LOVES that you're all naked or down to your underwear. This is a dream come true for him. But - and this is a HUGE but - he's also an EXTREMELY cautious, caring gentleman. Mark, is your cock hard? Come out from behind Donna please." My cock wasn't hard, but only because of about five thousand go-softs. We'd been having to do them so continuously that we'd gotten the centered mind to try maintaining center and maintaining the feeling of being soft, and we'd found that worked well. It meant stopping practicing projecting ki, but that didn't matter for a few hours. I stepped to one side so twenty five girls, even Carol and Donna, could look at my soft cock. It's one of the prices I have to pay for working with Julia. Julia said, "A room full of beautiful naked girls, and Mark is soft. That's how much of a gentleman he is, right down to not even feeling the desire. How many guys do you know who are that much of a gentleman?" None, apparently. -- "Just while we're on the topic: Mark has been hugging his naked sister to his naked body for the last ten to fifteen minutes, with her ass pressed against his cock, and he's a soft as a wet noodle. I'm sure none of you were still thinking about that issue, but if you were, there's the proof." #3: #1: They all looked at the proof again, including Donna, who giggled. I got a little worried about her getting cocky and putting her foot in it, so I said in a mock-serious tone (hoping she'd understand that even the mock was mock, and that I was serious), "Mind yourself, young lady. I brought a spare sister here today, just in case you act up." "{Giggle}. I just think it's funny that I never noticed. Really, I didn't." Phew, that was innocent, and I understood her message. "I'm VERY happy to hear that! That was Julia's point about me and my sisters." "I know THAT. It's just funny is all. Any other boy did that to me, I'd rip it off and throw it away, but I didn't even notice with you." #2: Vanessa walked in, again without a warning knock. She said, "Hello everyone." There was the usual surprise, sudden modest movements, which quickly settled down. This time one of the modest urges was mine. I was totally exposed, but I knew Julia's theme so I stood there, naked, in front of my girlfriend's mother. This would be another one of the prices I have to pay for working with Julia. I sure didn't expect this one though. After the greetings, Vanessa said, "The clothes have been washed and dried. I've put them in one of the cubbyholes, Julia. How's it going?" "Thanks very much, Mom. We're going great, RIGHT GIRLS?" The girls all enthusiastically agreed. A few seconds into their agreements, one of the girls said, "Mark's incredible." Which soon got picked up on by all the other girls, and they all started yelling their comments. They were yelling stuff I had no interest in, so I spent the time looking closely at Lily. She'd been puzzling me since the end of my Barry the Bully speech to Brenda. For quite a long time thereafter Lily's expression had been one of self-satisfied elation. Like she'd achieved some huge victory. This puzzled me because she hadn't done anything. Maybe Julia could've felt that way, because Julia had set this up, but for Lily it didn't make sense. Her expression had gradually subsided, but she still looked somewhat self-satisfied and proud. I couldn't think of a reason for it. I let her see me looking at her, and her reaction was immediately a great deal of happiness that she was perfectly happy to show me. Certainly not the reaction of anyone up to anything surreptitious. I decided I didn't understand females. I glanced around the room, trying to find things to look at. For some reason I felt uncomfortable looking Vanessa in the eyes. I saw the snacks, and almost went to grab some. All that talk about pizza must've made me hungry. But I realized walking to get them would've drawn attention on to me, so I stood still. I'd wait until Vanessa left. I noticed Savannah and Carol were standing next to each other. They had been for some time, but I just remembered my hope of Carol having sex with Savannah. I wouldn't be able to see it, but it'd still be fun to think about. They weren't holding hands or anything like that, which was a pity, but at least they were standing together. I took a moment or ten to admire Savannah's body. It wasn't as sexy as Carol's, but it was very nice in other ways. She was slightly taller than Carol, but seemed much more so because she was so slim and toned. Black skinned, with very short pussy hair and slightly smaller than average-sized breasts. If she wanted to eat crackers in my bed, I'd fetch them for her. What else could I look at? There was some sort of MTV video playing on the big screen, with the sound turned down low, which caught my attention, so I watched that for a while. I listened to the talk, and nothing of any consequence was said, and then Vanessa made to depart. I turned around to say goodbye (least I could do). It came out as, "See you later, Vanessa." "I see you too, Mark. Now I know what Julia sees in you." Vanessa left, while the girls discussed the pretty shade of red I was. Emily said, "Julia, I'd like to take off my bra. I feel comfortable about that now. Is that okay with you?" "You know the answer to that. It's entirely your choice. I don't even want you to think you need to ask me. Just do whatever you want." "Okay, thanks." Don't ask me why, because it makes no logical sense, but I felt a rush of arousal at the image of Emily taking off her bra for me. All the tits already exposed in the room, and I get aroused over two more! Weird. The continual go-softs prevented any physical sign of my interest, but I still felt it. There wasn't anything noteworthy about Emily's breasts either, they were of average size, which was perfectly fine by me. In my experience (recently VERY much increased), there's no such thing as unattractive breasts, from Donna's up to Chloe's. Obviously Chloe's are magnificent, but all girls' tits are good. Certainly all the ones here were VERY good! Emily, without having yet made any attempt to remove her bra, started heading out of the room. I realized she was going to take it off by the cubbyholes. Because I'm a pervert, I said, "Emily," she stopped, "ONLY if you are comfortable doing so, but I'd appreciate watching while you took it off. You can certainly do it in the other room if you prefer, but I'd enjoy watching you do it here." Emily dithered briefly, then she said, "I guess I'd be silly to mind. You're going to see me when I come back anyway. Okay then." She started reaching behind her, looking a little nervous but doing it anyway. Julia said, "Emily. Stop for a moment..." #2: " ... It's good that you agreed, but think about this. Your breasts are the first ones that Mark has shown any interest in all day, and this is the first time he's taken the initiative with any girl. Rather than your having an 'I suppose so' attitude, you should be PROUD to undress in front of Mark, and he would enjoy it a lot more that way too. The reason you are undressing is to make Mark happy, so why not do the best job of it you can?" After a moment, Emily wondered aloud, "I am the first, aren't I." Not really a question, just her working it out for herself. Then I saw her stand straighter with pride when she knew she was. "I AM the first!" she declared. With pride she faced me square on, reached behind her with both hands, wiggled her chest from side to side a few times to build my interest. It did, without affecting my cock visibly though. Then Emily undid her bra and lowered it in a slowly revealing way. It was a very enjoyable mini-striptease. When she was fully exposed to me, after a couple of more wiggles to show them off well, I said, "Thank you VERY much, Emily. They're lovely breasts, and were well worth waiting to see. And especially thank you for your attitude, that's marvelous." "{Giggle}. Thank you, Mark. I'm glad you like them. They're nothing special, they're just..." That attitude had to be squashed. "Emily! They ARE special! ALL breasts are WONDERFUL." I'd overdone the pizza jokes today, so I went straight on with, "Second, and by FAR the most importantly, you happily presented them to me as a GIFT. A gift that I very much appreciated because, as Julia said, I truly do have a dirty mind, haha. How could a dirty-minded boy NOT have just had a wonderful time? Thank you very much for your very special gift." In retrospect, it was probably too elevated. Sooner or later we've GOT TO lower the tone of this afternoon. Preferably soon and by a LOT! Nonetheless, Emily was EXTREMELY happy, as any girl who's honored enough to be allowed to remove her bra to show me her tits should be. Emily gushed, "Thank you so much. You're SO NICE. Thank you so much too, Julia. That was so much better than how I would've done it. I feel great." Julia suggested, "Why don't you walk up to Mark then, and let him feel your breasts for a few seconds." #2: "Oh," said a startled Emily. "It's up to you, Emily. You know for a fact that Mark will never impose himself on you. It's your decision whether you like him well enough. Obviously you TRUST him well enough, because all of us can see that no one is more trustworthy than Mark. So the only questions are: how much do you like him, and do you want to show him that you like him." Logically speaking, there were other ways she could show her liking me, but giving me her breasts to play with was a sufficiently enjoyable method that I didn't feel inclined to speak up. Savannah said, "If Mark doesn't want to play with Emily's, he can play with mine ANY TIME he wants!" Carol turned around to talk with Savannah, and I REALLY wanted to hear what they said, but it was drowned out by all the other damned girls clamoring to tell me I could play with their breasts too. [I asked Carol later. Disappointingly she was just thanking Savannah for being nice to me.] To my surprise, I wasn't instantly swamped by a rush of girls running up to stick their breasts into my hands. They were only offering verbally, which was confusingly well behaved of them, as any idea I'd had that these were proper young ladies had long since been destroyed. The insane "Strip then Attack Mark in the Hot Tub" incident at the beginning had convinced me of the dangers of a mob mind, especially a female mob. That they were still standing back was probably a testament to their respect for Julia or fear of Donna, behind whom I was standing again. You may think I'm complaining, but you didn't see how voracious they were when they mobbed me in the tub, and later when they re-stripped and felt me up. I was prepared to dive under the pool table if they charged. By the way, I was behind Donna, but self-consciously far enough behind her that my cock and her ass weren't touching. Several minutes ago Donna had tried to quietly back her ass into contact, but I'd turned my hold of her into a forceful holding away, strong enough that she knew I was on to her game. She'd behaved since. When the noise level dropped, Julia said, "While Emily's making up her mind, I'm going to promote myself to the head of the line and get Mark to start by rubbing my breasts." Julia took the couple of steps required. Amid the delightful clamoring of the other girls, Emily loudly announced, "I've made up my mind. I'd LOVE to let Mark touch me." It was obvious that peer pressure had worked its magic on her. It had only partially worked back when Emily had first got undressed, but she'd received a GREAT deal of positive reinforcement and approval since then, plus some sweet personal attention from yours truly. Julia said, "Strangely enough, Emily, I don't want to hear your answer until Mark has finished with me, haha." I was looking forward to feeling Julia's breasts, but she pulled my head down into a scorcher of a kiss instead. That was nice too. After some very enjoyable kissing, Julia pulled my head into a hug, saying loud enough for the girls to hear, "What an amazing day this has been." Under the noise of all the girls agreeing with that, Julia quickly whispered to me, "Get hard from now on. Unless sisters are involved. Use your judgment." #1: #3: #4: We were rock hard before you've read this sentence. [A bit of background information. Back when we'd first discovered centering, we'd rotated the on-duty time purely by the clock, an hour at a time. That was still our default process, but if there was something interesting going on (this party would qualify), then we'd learned to be fairer, by trying to ensure that each mind had an equal amount of fun. We'd also discussed decentering as an option, but we had a belief that getting REALLY good at centering might be something that would be very important in our life, even more important than each mind missing out on a quarter of the sex. We were getting better at centering too, as indicated by the success of our experiment of getting the on-duty mind to do the go-softs. That mind was able to do them without losing center, and more reliably than an active mind because those minds were too easily distracted by whatever they were actively doing, especially because it was the events that required go-softs that were the most distracting.] It was not difficult for Julia to feel the result of her request. In fact, I got hard so quickly I was surprised it didn't injure her. I was sure she'd at least have a bruise where it stabbed her. #1: "Feel my breasts please, Mark," Julia breathed out as she pulled me into another kiss. I happily proved my obedience again. After our kiss, Julia lowered her hands to around my waist, and while still holding me tight against her body, turned the top of her torso and her head around to face Emily, saying, "Emily, it's your turn to kiss Mark while he plays with your breasts... ," #2: " ... but you might want to reconsider." "No. I definitely want to, OH!" Julia had just stepped to the side, revealing the recent change to my physiology. Emily said something else, but I couldn't hear it over the din (make that "over the DIN!"). I had no hope of lip reading what Emily had said, not that I can do that anyway, because her head was tilted downward, as was every other female's head in the room. I could hear plenty of the other comments though. You'll be glad to know that lots of the girls thought I had a "NICE COCK, Mark!" Also heard were: "Wow, I want some of that." There were several enthusiastic agreements with that, including my agreement with their agreements. "He CAN get hard!" I did NOT appreciate that there'd EVER been any doubt! "You're beautiful, Mark." That was just silly - it's a COCK! And don't even start me on the gender of "beautiful". It was quite embarrassing. On the other hand, two dozen good looking, naked, turned-on girls is a LOT MORE than quite arousing, so there wasn't a chance of me softening even a fraction. Especially as I strongly suspected that this latest extension of my anatomy was going to get a workout soon. I had no idea who with, but by now I didn't care, especially because I also hadn't cared earlier. Just so long as it involved ME! I was horny! In fact, I'd shot past horny well over an hour ago. A girl asked, "Julia. I know you said no photos and we had to put our phones over there," indicating a pile of phones on the bar, "but I'd LOVE to take a photo of Mark now. Can I please?" [The bar was far enough away from the rest of us to not annoy us when the girls had their phone conversations. I couldn't believe how often girls have to talk with someone! It hadn't been "a constant stream", but it certainly wasn't uncommon for one or even two of the girls to be on the phone rather than being brainwashed. I was surprised Julia hadn't insisted they turn their phones off, but I guess even Julia has limits on what she can achieve.] Every other girl who had a camera on her phone had the same interest in suspending the party while she pursued her photographic hobby. Every other girl who did NOT have a camera urgently requested that they be sent copies from all the girls that did. Julia eventually got them to quiet down, to tell them, "Mark would NEVER allow that. He is FAR too modest." There were many disagreements with that. For some reason they couldn't believe that, standing the way I was, I could have any modesty at all. Julia let them speak for a few seconds, then insisted, "Have any of you EVER heard Mark boast? You've seen him in class all year and he's never once shown off, either his intellect or physically. He didn't even want his photo on the wall at the bowling alley, let alone what you're asking for now. He doesn't want to be world famous at any sport, even though we all know he could be world famous in a dozen different sports AT THE SAME TIME if he wanted. Can you imagine how the world's media would GO MAD over a guy who could be number one in a dozen different sports at the same time and look as handsome as he does, but Mark doesn't want that. He hates the idea of it! -- "Mark doesn't have an ego like other boys. The ONLY reason he is here at all today, is because I asked him to. I had to talk really hard to convince him to date other girls in the first place. Standing there naked - as impressive as he certainly is - is the LAST thing Mark wants to do. He is ONLY doing it as a favor to me..." #3: #2: " ... Remember that he's been soft all the time here. One of the reasons for that is that he's not comfortable exposing himself. Mark IS aroused now, as we can all enjoyably see, but that doesn't mean he has no modesty. He's only aroused because he's starting to relax and because a girl he loves kissed him. In case you couldn't tell - Mark REALLY likes me kissing him. That's VERY good for MY ego, haha. I've probably overdone my answer. I could have just said, 'No', and left it at that. But it's important that you gain some understanding of Mark. Those of you who are nice enough to Mark for him to start liking you, MAY - if you're lucky - get to spend more time with him, in preference to all the other girls he could spend time with. Those few lucky girls have to understand how he thinks so you can make him happy. If you don't, he'll prefer the company of other girls." They'd forgotten it was a competition that they could lose, so that scared them - which had probably been Julia's intention. Most of them looked around, eyeing up the competition, all of which were well worth eyeing up. I enjoy doing that myself. Julia finished, "So the answer is, 'No, Mark would never allow it.' I don't even have to ask him, because I know him well enough." "Damn right," I said, just in case there was any doubt about whether I wanted photos of me naked in circulation. Julia turned around and looked very carefully at my cock for a couple of seconds, then declared in a loud voice, "I think it might have gone ever so slightly soft. I'd better warm him up again." Julia threw her arms around my neck again, and I had to do the whole kissing, breast rubbing thing again. Sheesh! We had several seconds of that, accompanied by the other girls yelling lascivious comments. Then I was shocked by Julia's next action: she removed one hand from around my neck, moved it way down, and wrapped it around something nearly the same thickness (that might be a small exaggeration. Either that or a big one). She even moved her body to the side so all the girls can get a clear look at what she was doing. The girls loudly approved of that, their comments turning whatever the exceptionally dirty version of "lascivious" is. While she was rubbing me, again under cover of all the noise, Julia whispered to me, "Make sure you're fucking someone in here at exactly 4:15." (Which was the best part of an hour away). #1: #2: #3: After several seconds of Julia's rubbing, I had to start doing mini-go-softs to avoid shooting off. This was turning into a VERY good day. Julia eventually finished, stepped back, and said, "There. I think I've got him hard again." Which was greeted with catcalls, laughter, and other intelligent conversation. "Emily, you're next." "Oh. I don't think I can do that." "I didn't mean to give you the impression you had to do what I did. That's not the case at all. This is about your kissing Mark and his touching your breasts. You can even do less than that if you want, you can just shake his hand." Which was greeted with boos, laughter, and more intelligent conversation. "Oh yeah. Umm, I think I'd like to kiss him. Is that okay?" Julia answered, "I'm sure it's very okay. You were the first girl he took special interest in, after all." Emily liked being reminded of that! "Remember, if you want him to touch your breasts you either have to move his hands yourself or ask him to. Mark isn't the sort of guy to initiate such an intimate contact with a girl unless he's positive she'd welcome it." "I'd like to. Because he liked my breasts." It's true, I did like her breasts! "Don't tell me," said Julia, "tell Mark." "Oh yeah, haha. Mark, will you play with my breasts please?" I almost said something facetious, but managed to hold myself back. Instead, "It would give me considerable pleasure, Emily. You have lovely breasts." She did too. All the girls did, that's part of the magical wonder of breasts. Emily advanced toward me, and soon spotted a problem that she didn't know what to do about it. She hesitated, uncertain. Julia helpfully suggested a solution, "For goodness sake girl, it's just going to fold flat against your stomach AND you're wearing panties. I don't think your life's going to be ruined by feeling his beautiful cock against your stomach. Most of these girls would love that. Either jump in to kiss him, or go to the back of the line." She hesitated for a moment, then jumped in. A good choice, I thought. We had a very nice kiss. She had her arms around my neck, as Julia had originally done. I had one around the back of her neck, to hold her and rub up and down little, because that seemed nicer and more romantic than having both my hands on her tits. That tragic loss to romance meant my other hand had to work double-time, but it did its best. All of me did my best to give us both a good time. Emily certainly seemed happy enough, and after a several seconds even started moving her hips around to better feel my cock. While Emily and I were thus engaged, Laila and Hannah grabbed Julia's attention. I'd noticed Laila and Hannah suddenly start whispering to each other back when the question about taking my photo was first raised, and Laila had subsequently made a phone call - I'd watched carefully to make sure the call wasn't a disguise for her snapping my picture. After her impassioned call (I had a feeling she was calling her sister, which made me chuckle to myself) Laila and Hannah had wandered around to stand near Julia. This was the first opportunity they had to talk with Julia. I could easily hear Laila ask, "Julia, Hannah and I got so swept up in everything that we were learning about Mark, that we totally forgot about Baby. That's Gabriella, my sister. I've already called her to let her know that her being here is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than moving Tyler's gear. She should be here in about twenty minutes or so. That's okay, isn't it?" Julia answered in a loud, clear voice, "That's two strikes Laila. One more and you're out." Laila had clearly been asking just out of courtesy, and had assumed consent would be automatic. She was completely thrown by Julia highly negative metaphorical answer. "Huh? Pardon? You mean Baby can't come?" "Of course not. I'm very disappointed in you for asking. Do I need to explain why?" "Uh, yes. Please?" "You want to invite Gabriella because it's important to her that she hears all this. Her meeting the most incredible man in the world is far more important to her than moving some boxes around, correct?" "Yes. FAR more important. Umm, I should have called her earlier. I know that. But I got so swept up in everything you were saying. We both did." Julia proceeded, "I agree that it was incredibly important to Gabriella that she be here today. It's incredibly important to all of you that you are here today. This could well be the single most important day of your lives. But - and this may surprise you Laila - I don't give a shit about Gabriella." That did surprise Laila, Hannah, and every other girl too. Not me though, as I'd already worked out where this was going. That doesn't make me smarter than the girls, just more experienced with how Julia works. -- "I owe my loyalty to Mark; not to your sister. Can you give me one single reason THAT'S GOOD FOR MARK why Gabriella should be allowed to arrive late, disrupt our party, need explanations about everything we've done already, not understand the context of many of our future conversations, and generally be nothing more than a disruptive nuisance?" -- Julia let them stew on that for a second, then added, just in case it helped them in any way, "One thing's for sure, Mark's not short of girls today. Adding one more would be pointless. And if, for some reason he did want more, I could get on the phone and call any number of girls to come, none of which have already turned him down once today." "But, but she HAD TO. She'd promised to help Tyler move." "Gabriella CHOSE to keep her promise to Tyler. If the President had personally called Gabriella a couple of hours ago and begged her to meet him, and told her he'd pay her a million dollars to do so, would she have turned him down? I don't think so. Gabriella CHOSE to turn Mark down because she didn't think Mark was important enough. That was HER mistake. In my opinion Mark's going to be FAR more important than any President we've EVER had. Mark's importance is going to be worldwide, and he'll probably be a respected household name hundreds of years from now, like Einstein. -- "Plus, quite frankly, I don't give a shit what Gabriella's reason was. Even if her reason was incredibly important to her, it doesn't matter to me. The only question I care about is the one you haven't answered yet: Is there a single reason that is good for Mark for her to be allowed to come and disrupt us?" Emily and I finished our kissing now. Everyone's attention was on Laila's dismemberment, so I just turned Emily around and got her to lay back against my chest, while I played with her breasts some more. Emily was very happy after our kissing. Apparently I'd kissed away a lot of her fears and hesitations. Or maybe I'd fondled them away? Emily snuggled into my arms and sighed very happily when I played with her. She wiggled her butt against me too. I was tempted to move a hand in a panty-ward direction, but remembered Julia's painting of me as a saint. I suspected that saints shouldn't even ask for permission to do such a thing, dammit - being a saint goes somewhat against my character. All four of my characters actually. After a few more seconds, Julia added, "I'd be perfectly happy to let her join us if there was a good reason. I seriously would. I WANT to do things that are good for Mark, so I hope you think of a reason. Well?" Laila and Hannah looked at each other, saw no hope, and so Laila said to Julia, "We can't think of a reason. We were doing it for Baby's benefit." "Which is a repeat of your previous mistake, making two strikes. In fact I shouldn't say that, because all you others might think you're allowed two free mistakes. That's VERY much not the case. Dakota was fired on her first mistake. Ava's on extremely thin ice after making her first mistake. There have been a couple of other girls you don't know anything about who've also been dropped after one mistake. One of Carol's friends, for example, got too clingy with Mark. The ONLY reason I haven't fired you on the spot Laila, is because I'm in an extremely good mood about how well this afternoon is going. I'm ecstatic that so many of you are starting to comprehend Mark's importance. Plus Mark just gave me a couple of very good kisses, and they always leave me feeling VERY good. I've wasted enough time talking to you about the same mistake. Go stand away from me for a while, before you ruin my mood. Call Gabriella and cancel your inviting her to my home. You know my attitude to people being late: you saw it at the meeting where we picked the Liaisons." "I didn't think it would apply this time." "I doubt you thought at all." Laila hung her head, and they went to give Gabriella the bad news. I chuckled to myself, until I realized that this was not a good development in my hope to get into bed with two bisexual sisters. Julia announced, "I'll tell you all something that was a horrible shock to me at the time. When I first started dating Mark I thought we were equal. We're all brought up to believe in equality. For the next several days Mark was 'rocking my world'. I don't mean that just sexually, although he was certainly doing that! Mark is very modest and shy. No one before me had gotten to know him well, so no one had discovered what I discovered: behind his completely modest, non-egotistical, covered-in-baggy-clothes exterior, was a TRULY INCREDIBLE person. I was shocked, confused, elated, and also depressed because I didn't think I was good enough for him. My world was turned upside-down and shaken. Then I realized what I had to do: I had to devote my life to Mark. From the moment I made that decision my life has been INDESCRIBABLY JOYOUS. -- "One of the things I had trouble with initially, was that I was a very unimportant person compared to Mark. I believed in equality but I had fallen in love with a guy that I was a LONG way short of being equal to. That was difficult to come to terms with, but after a considerable personal struggle I was able to accept and embrace it. Some of you might be able to do that too, although I am sure most of you won't. Laila and Hannah are obviously failing so far. If you want proof of the difference between him and you, think about this: I could send half of you home right now. Mark would be sad for a few seconds, and then he'd carry on in exactly the same way. His life wouldn't be changed in any way whatsoever. Any one of you, or any twelve of you, could disappear and it wouldn't matter one tiny bit to Mark's life. On the other hand, none of you will EVER meet anyone as fantastic as Mark ever again. Not in any of your ENTIRE lives. The effects on your lives of being near Mark are incalculable. You might be written of in dozens of history books, you might even be the person who gives him an idea for his most famous invention. You might become his full-time girlfriend or perhaps even his wife, because Mark IS looking for another girlfriend or two. Someone is going to be chosen for that. One thing's for sure, if you mess up your chance with Mark, the way several girls already have or are currently doing, then you will bitterly regret it for the rest of your life as he goes on to become more and more famous, but Mark won't give you a second thought. -- "Maybe, just maybe, one of you might actually comprehend that as well as I do. If not, then it's not a problem because I can get twenty five new girls here every day, day after day. As could Carol and Donna, and Mark could for himself with college girls. Mark and I are giving you all a CHANCE to prove yourselves. Whether you succeed or fail is totally up to you. You've all got an equal chance and it's fair. I've got no idea why Mark singled out Emily, for example. No insult intended to Emily, but she's not the smartest girl here, nor the prettiest, nor does she have the biggest tits, nor anything else that I can think of. As far as I can tell, Emily is more or less about average in this group, yet she's the one who's currently being held by Mark. If that doesn't convince you that every girl has a fair chance, then nothing will. So your success or failure is up to you. I'm busting a gut trying to get you to understand. If you fail to, it's not from my lack of effort, but from yours. Think about that seriously, especially over the next couple of days. -- "I'll jump sideways for a minute, and mention something that seems amusing, but is true. I need help! I can't keep up with Mark. Arranging all of you to meet Mark, trying to make you understand, trying to think about what Mark might need or want in the future such as his own home, keeping my parents informed about what Mark's doing and what he needs so they can see ways to help him. All these things and many others are keeping me very busy. Mark gets a HUGE amount of stuff done in one day, and it's a REAL struggle for me to keep up with him. One of the reasons this party is unfortunately so short - and it is unfortunate, because Mark would LOVE to spend more time with beautiful, naked girls - is because right after dinner Mark and my father are doing some work on yet another project that none of you know anything about. It's an important project, and there's a great deal that needs to be done for it. It's yet more work for me. Chloe is another example. One of my jobs is to try to tidy up all the loose ends around Mark. He has too many things to do for him to be able to take care of everything himself. Now that he's made some effort on Chloe, and invested some of his caring into her, it'll bug him if he doesn't finish the job. That's especially true because he wasn't ready to give up when I dragged him away. That was my fault because I lost my temper, partly because I'm overworked trying to keep up with Mark..." #2: #3: " ... I said earlier that one or two of the Corvallis girls might become Mark's girlfriend, and maybe even wife, but many more girls than that can benefit hugely from knowing Mark. He needs assistants who MUST know him VERY well, because he's so unusual. I'm one, Carol helps a lot, and Donna is starting to become helpful too, but he's going to need more and more of them, and far faster than you think. Remember he graduates college next year, and he's already working on non-academic projects with Dad. Mark might end up with ten or twenty girls who are his assistants. Many Corvallis girls might find that they spend the rest of their lives working for, and possibly living with, Mark. That will be an AWESOME life, because Mark's life is going to be INCREDIBLE..." #3: " ... There will be important people from all over the world coming to see Mark. World-famous scientists, kings and queens, rock and movie stars. Mark is going to need a large team of helpers, and those helpers are going to have AWESOME lives. Mark will have his own private jets, we'll be flying all over the world, dining in the world's best restaurants with incredible people. Flying in our own jets to Paris, Rome and Milan to buy our clothes. Can you imagine that sort of life?" They certainly had no trouble imagining flying in private jet to Paris or Rome to buy clothes! I could tell that because half of them looked close to having orgasms at the thought of it. God knows why they thought that'd be part of the job of an assistant, but they swallowed it hook, line and sinker. #1: #3: #1: "So I'm very much on the lookout for HELPFUL girls. That's one reason why I was so pleased that so many of you were happy to visit Chloe, to tell her about today and to convince her that she can trust Mark. If any of you could help convince her of that, it'd reduce my workload, make Mark happier, be good for Chloe, and it'd make us think good things about you too." Julia paused, and the silence was very quickly filled by the clamor of girls telling Julia how helpful they were going to be. And to tell me too. Then to remind Julia, in case she'd forgotten that they'd already told her. Clearly they were overdoing it, but Julia had mentioned private jets to Paris and Rome to buy clothes, so it was understandable. #2: Julia said, "Emily, I think Mark might have lost the mood a little. Shall I warm him up again, or do you want to?" "{Giggle}. You've already done so much for us today, Julia. So let me do this for you. It's the least I can do. {Giggle}." "Thank you. See, all of you, I told you I needed more girls who were willing to help me, haha." Savannah volunteered, "I'll help you kiss Mark all you want, and a lot more too. He won't lose the mood when he's with me - I can guarantee that! Haha." #3: #2: #3: #2: #3: Julia said, "Can I leave you girls alone with Mark, kissing and breast fondling for a while? I have to get something. You're not going to trample him are you? Can you sort an order out for yourselves, how about alphabetical on surnames? That way it might be my turn by the time I get back, haha." They agreed they could do that, although some of the later girls didn't look too happy at having to wait so long. Julia said, "I'm going to get the equipment I need for another game, like the Guess Mark's Bowling Score Game. This is for who's going to fuck Mark soon. I presume at least two of you want to, otherwise I don't need to invent a game?" Some of the girls clearly didn't want to fuck me ("their loss", hehe), such as Emily, who'd only just got used to my cock touching her stomach. There were still several girls wearing panties, so none of them seemed likely to agree. None of that really mattered because there were plenty of girls who had long since decided that a fuck with Mark would be a very welcome party game. They let Julia and me know, and they weren't the least bit shy about it! Julia laughed, "I thought not, haha. Okay, I'll just go get the stuff from Dad's study. I need to talk with him too, so I'll be gone for five or ten minutes. I know I'm the life of the party, but try your best to enjoy yourselves while I'm away, haha." Julia started walking out of the room. Nearly all the girls quickly looked around at each other, confirming that someone had to say something. One of them did, "Ahh, Julia. You don't have any clothes on, haha." "I'll be fine. I'm fairly sure there's only family at home, and I'm only going down the hall a few yards." That wasn't the answer they expected. "Umm, you don't mind that your father sees you naked?" "He's my father, for goodness sake! I'm not going to get dressed so I can walk ten yards, then have to undress again when I come back. That's just silly! I could care less whether my father sees me, and neither could he. Same with my mother and two big brothers. I'll be back in a few." Julia walked out, before I could remind her of the two robes. No one else mentioned them either, I think because the girls were still hung up one the "two big brothers" issue. ------- Chapter 113: Hot Tub Party; Line Up for Gropes Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Carol volunteered, "Even I've walked around this house naked. All of Julia's family have seen me like this. They were all very nice about it and I felt totally safe. They're very nice people." "Especially Robert. He can see me naked whenever he wants, haha." That was from Donna, in case you're wondering. I didn't know whether Donna's comment was literally true, or whether Donna had said it just for fun. It didn't matter either way, as I had complete confidence in Robert's ability to manage Donna; he was a Williams after all. I couldn't resist something that'd crossed my mind not long after I'd been introduced to The Boys. I explained to the girls, "Julia has twin brothers, Andrew and Robert. Andrew is 26." I paused. Wait for it ... Ahh, here it comes. "How old is Robert?" I'd had my money on Brenda, but it was Laci that'd asked. That made sense too, as her father obviously wasn't very smart (he was the father I met in the bowling ally who preferred football to soccer). Unfortunately, having achieved my goal, I now felt like a heel because I had to explain it to her. I did my best, "I have to apologize to you, Laci. I love mathematics, and I have a somewhat peculiar sense of humor. I've been waiting to do that ever since I met her brothers. Her TWIN brothers, Laci. If one twin is 26, how old is the other twin?" "Oh," as she realized the other one would be 26. And "Oh," again, as she realized she'd just made a fool of herself. It'd been because of my trap, which made me feel bad. I tried to cheer her up. "As I said, I AM sorry. Blame my silly sense of humor. I've wanted to do that for WEEKS, and today just happened to be the first chance I got. I'm sorry, but it wasn't aimed at you. Now that it's out of my system, I'm going to forget all about it. Can I make it up to you by giving you some extra kisses, ahead of all the other girls, even before we start the alphabetical list? That's if you still think I'm sexy enough to kiss? Or maybe I should crawl around on my hands and knees, like I did with Chloe, begging your forgiveness?" "{Giggle}. No, that's okay." "Do you want your extra kisses, ahead of your normal turn?" Laci looked to the other girls for guidance. I jumped in with, "Don't look to them Laci. They know I was unfair to you, and none of them will object to my trying to make it up to you. Anyway, I get to choose who I kiss. They're my lips, after all." #1: "You don't mind?" Laci asked me. I'm not sure what she thought I was minding, but as I said before, she's the daughter of a football-favoring father and a woman that chose to marry him. I felt doubly sorry for Laci. "I don't know about you Laci, but I'm scared of Julia. If she comes back and we haven't done ANY kissing, I'm going to be in trouble. I don't think even Donna could save me from Julia. If YOU want to kiss me, come here, otherwise who's the girl at the head of the line?" The girls all laughed at me. It took me a few seconds to work out why. The answer to my question would be Laci Abbot. Sometimes I think God does these things to me deliberately, just to make my life difficult. "Boy! I made a fool out of myself with that, didn't I? I've sat with you in class all year, and I forgot that you always get called first." In a mock-reprimanding voice, "How DARE you trick me into looking foolish! Just for that I DEMAND extra kisses. Come here, girl." I stepped over and grabbed her, dragging her into my embrace. I was pretty sure she'd be fine with it, and her "{Giggle}" certainly didn't give me cause for concern. Laci happily embraced me back, and we started kissing. I had made two serious tactical mistakes: The first was that I'd forgotten to ask about my touching her breasts. As soon as the kissing started I remembered (damn!, as she has especially nice breasts). The second error was brought to my attention a few seconds later, and it was considerably more important. In order to grab Laci I had stepped into the middle of the girls, many of whom had no shame, no morals, dirty minds, and - I soon discovered - wandering hands; lots and lots of wandering hands, which had a powerful penchant for my posterior. I did my best to ignore the hands. I failed totally, but still managed to give Laci a nice, drawn out, enjoyable kiss. When I thought it'd gone of sufficiently long - Laci seemed to have no time limit of her own - I ended it and stood back, which was my third tactical mistake. "GIRLS!" As I leaped forward again, to hide against Laci. "Have you no shame!" "It's in the other room, with my clothes." | "Not when it comes to that thing." | And other less than ladylike answers. "Let me try this approach. I can't have 40-odd hands grabbing at me down there. There's some delicate equipment involved and I expect to need it soon. I don't know who the lucky girl will be, but I'm pretty sure she'll want that part of me to be working in tip-top order. Can you PLEASE not go for me there. SERIOUSLY! I feel enough fear that I'd go soft, and then you'll have to wait for Julia to come back to warm me up again." Moans and grumbles, but acceptance. I cautiously stepped back from Laci, prepared to glare dangerously at any backsliding, forward-grabbing, miscreants. Proximity showed none, so I relaxed a bit more. I still had a problem with my first tactical error; how could I remind the girls to ask me to touch their breasts. I HATED the idea of missing out on that, but Julia had set this up in a way that made it difficult for me to raise the subject. I guess I could say something like, "Girls, I'm not suggesting this for my own pleasure you understand, but I want to remind you that you have to ask me to touch your breasts," but that would be pretty pathetic. I stalled for time, to give my minds time to work on it. One mind said. "Thank you, Laci. That was very nice. So nice that I think we should temporarily change your surname to Zimmerman, to give you another turn after all the other girls. I did say I'd give you an extra turn, so how does that sound?" One of my minds thought of an idea. I created several TK-fingertips and made a large, flat surface with them by making them as wide as possible and putting them side by side. I tried to create what would feel like a hand. I used one TK-point to rub Carol's cheek for a moment to alert her, and then I used the TK-hand on one of Carol's breasts, just lightly, because I didn't want any of the other girls to see Carol's breast moving about and being squeezed for no visible reason. Carol didn't get my message immediately, so I carried on doing TK-caressing her while I said, "Okay girls. Who's my next helpless victim, to be KISSED?" The girls were from different classes, so it took them a while to determine the correct alphabetic sequence. While they were doing that, Carol suddenly understood my message. She called out, "Don't forget to tell Mark whether you want him to touch your breasts. He'd NEVER ask that for HIMSELF." Smiling directly at me as she said the last. It's good having a smart sister, so I showed my appreciate by giving her nipples a little tweak. Laci moaned, "Oh no. I forgot. Darn!" I said back, "You're upset! Imagine how I feel! 'Darn' doesn't come close. You've got very nice breasts." She did too, that's why I'd been kicking myself for missing out. "Haha. Don't worry, I'll remember next time." I decided this was EASILY an important enough issue that I needed to keep my future options open, so I don't get caught like this again. So I said, "And if you don't, I WILL! To hell with Julia's silly idea that I'm a gentleman. Breasts are too important to miss out on!" They all happily agreed that I should be able to help myself. Pat said, "You weren't so gung-ho in the tub, Mark. You must be relaxing and getting into the mood, like Julia said." I looked down at my erect cock while I said, "You know, I think you might be right." We started on the list of alphabetic girls, the first after Laci being a Miss Allen. I gave her about thirty seconds. This was considerably less than she wanted. Me too, although it did mean my ass, back, legs, etc., got groped a lot less by the spectators. After her little grumble, I pointed, "Twenty four of you times two or three minutes each is hour, which would bore everybody who has to wait, and would also waste far too much time when we could be doing more entertaining things. We have to make the kisses short, sorry." The next girl on the list was a Miss Bean. "No it's not," corrected Carol. I'm 'Anderson', so I'm next." #2: "Ahh, Carol, sweetie. This isn't exactly a brother-sister sort of thing." "I know THAT. I just want a hug. You haven't hugged me for AGES." "Aww," said many of the girls. "Hey, me too!" declared Donna. Never one to miss an opportunity, even though she'd had LOTS of hugs from me recently. She added, just in case I'd forgotten, "I'm an Anderson too!" I suppressed my facetious comments, instead saying, "Ahh, Carol, there's a small problem," as I pointed down at myself. I think Carol had thought it through, judging by her saying, "Everyone knows I didn't cause that. It was like that before I said I wanted a hug so no one's going to think you're a pervert. If they do, I'll sic Donna onto them! I know that when I give you a hug it's going to be touching me. I care about that exactly as much as you care about my breasts touching you when I hold your arm against my heart." #1: Fun enough that she earned a gentle nipple tweak for that. I got a smile in appreciation of my appreciation. Carol turned to the group, "Can any of you think of a reason why every one of you can get a hug and a kiss, and his sisters - who love him more than any of you - can't get just a hug?" Not only couldn't they think of one, they didn't even try. Instead, "Go for it" | "Give them a hug, Mark" | Anna had a partial objection though, "You don't love him more than I do!" Carol answered, "Anna, yes I do. Not that it's a competition, but I do." "Me too!" declared Donna. "But... ," from Anna. "Hush," and similar instructions from most of the girls around Anna. The facts of life were explained to Anna, such as Carol and I having lived together all our lives. In reality, only the last seventeen months really counted, and then I had to start from a negative position, but none of the visiting girls knew that. Plus what those seventeen months lacked in quantity, they more than made up with quality. A great deal of quality. Before I had time to make any more of an issue out of my cock, Carol gave me a hug. A second or two later I proximity sensed the surrounding girls' hands stretch out toward me. Without even think about it, I broke the hug with Carol, and firmly announced, "I do NOT want ANYONE to touch me while I am hugging Carol, or Donna either. That makes me VERY uncomfortable." I was amused (?), impressed (?) (I couldn't put my finger even close to the right emotion), that my dislike of having their hands on me during my hug with Carol had been totally honest, and at the same time it perfectly fitted the should-be-non-sexual nature of our hug. For good measure, and after some thought, I added, "Surely you can see that?" They honestly could, now that I had pointed it out. "Sorry, I didn't think." | "Of course you're right, sorry." I said, "I'm sorry too. I probably overreacted. It just felt very wrong and made me very uncomfortable. Sorry about that." "Don't go soft, Mark," called one of the girls. Who was immediately hushed by most of the others. Carol lightened my mood, by saying, "Do we have to start the hug all over from the beginning again? Oh no, how terrible!" She stepped up to me, and started hugging me again. Amusingly proximity showed all the nearby girls shrinking back. Even if they didn't physically move, their mental imagery was of them shrinking back. Carol ignored my cock of course (rotating her hips would have been a VERY BAD thing). We hugged for a few seconds. Then she just kissed me on the cheek, telling me in a normal voice, "I'm having a good time. It's good to see so many girls start to understand how wonderful you are." "Thank you for your help. I'll try to find a good, brotherly way of thanking you." "My room needs cleaning." "Haha. Time's up Smarty Pants." I gave her ass a very light smack, then said, "Oops, no pants. I'll have to start calling you 'Smarty No Pants', haha." Carol gave a good answer: "Mom calls me 'Smarty Pants' a lot too. She'll laugh when I tell her my new name." I can't remember Mom ever calling Carol that. This was a total lie, for the benefit of the listeners. Carol truly was a Smarty of either form, although I preferred the longer of the two names. We separated, and I suddenly felt a little bashful that my cock had been sticking into her stomach. I should be a lot bashful, so I went with it, saying, "Umm, sorry that my, umm..." "{Raspberry}. Honestly Mark, you've got a one-track mind. NOT the usual track, but being a gentleman the WHOLE time. Sometimes I think you're a gentleman too often." Turning to the girls, "What do you all think?" They thought so too. There was a range of expressions of their opinion, from praising me for it to, "I wish he'd come over here and be a non-gentleman all over me." Donna exclaimed, "My turn!" I hope she was referring to her hug, rather than my being a non-gentleman all over her. I had been intending to tell Donna that I really wasn't comfortable with her hugging against my cock (it'd was still hard as I'd decided a go-soft was more of a nuisance than a necessity). I was going to suggest that I sit on one of the seats, with my cock tucked down between my legs before she climbed into my lap, but Donna just launched herself at me, pretty much rendering my intentions moot unless I made a larger deal out of them than they deserved. Never mind. It didn't matter. "{Giggle}. Your thingy feels funny." Laughter from the audience. I was stumped about what to say, so I went with, "Thank God I've only got two sisters!" "I agree," affirmed one of the girls, "or I'd have to wait even LONGER for my turn." She went down in my opinion. Up slightly for her sense of humor, down a lot more for using "I" and "my" rather than "we" and "our". "I liked scaring your girlfriends before. They deserved it." It really doesn't pay to get on Donna's bad side. They weren't my girlfriends, but that was a bit of a minefield so I ignored that issue. I ignored her aggression too, hoping it'd eventually go away. Donna added, "I'll have to go home soon, won't I?" "I'm afraid so, sweetie. You've been VERY good though." Except when she mentioned my thingy a few seconds ago, but I wasn't going to remind her about that. Then I worried about her asking about her reward (sleeping with me, probably tomorrow night). Happily her mind was on other things. She asked, "Maybe we can go bowling again. That was a LOT of fun!" Everyone wanted to see that again. Except me. I looked at the girls when I said, "I don't think so, sweetie. By now they've probably found the string I pulled whenever I wanted all the pins to fall down." The girls that immediately laughed went up several notches in my opinion. For two reasons: for having faith in me and being intelligent enough to know how silly that was. Those that looked at me wondering whether it might be true went down in my opinion. Inventing ways of measuring these girls was fun. Not as much fun as getting them to take off all their clothes so I could visually measure the quality of their bodies, but still fun. Donna's a little below average in the IQ stakes, but she makes up for that by being loyal - "ultra-loyal", would be more accurate. She laughed immediately too, then said, "You don't want to bowl again?" No harm in reinforcing one of Julia's themes, so I said, "Maybe if Julia wants to impress another group of twenty five girls that way. But I probably wouldn't bother doing it on my own." "Can I come if you do?" I was amused that none of these girls added their request, although several of them shifted uncomfortably. "Of course you can, sweetie. That's one of the two advantages of being my sister." Carol was quicker than Donna at fielding that one. "What's the other advantage?" "Never having to worry about how to dispose of leftover pizza." It been long enough since the last pizza joke. After the chuckles finished, I said, "I think you've probably had your thirty seconds by now, sweetie." "I know. It's just that I have to go home soon and I'm going to miss you." An 'aw, shucks' moment, until Donna added, "{Giggle}, but I don't think you're going to miss me. You're going to be BUSY!" "I'm afraid so Donna. There's no rest for the wicked." On that little bit of humor (the girls enjoyed the irony of me calling myself "wicked"; I enjoyed the irony of their irony), Donna and I separated. To be safe, I turned her around before she could look down at my cock, in case the sight inspired her to say anything about my thingy that I might regret. When Donna moved away, I saw many deliberate looks, and heard more than a few, "Phew, he's still hard," and other such expressions of relief. There was no hint of any accusation, just comments of relief. I'd known the issue of me being up would come up, so I'd prepared what to say: "I knew you'd be disappointed if I wasn't, so I cheated. I was sure you wouldn't mind." One of them was bound to ask. And... "How can you cheat at that?" I moved out both hands in front of me, as if squeezing a couple of tits. I put on a sappy grin, and said, "I just visualized Chloe. That girl's got fantastic ankles." That last word caught them flatfooted, but they soon reacted. -- I gave them a few seconds for it, then added, "Honestly girls, you've all got VERY dirty minds! How could you POSSIBLY imagine that I'd be interested in Chloe's breasts? I'm a GENTLEMAN. Speaking of breasts, which of you is next in the alphabet to be kissed and have her breasts mauled by me?" We got back to working our way through the list. Considering we'd only completed two non-sister so far and one of them was going to have another turn at the end, I had much more 'work' to do. But I'm nothing if not a dedicated mauler of girls' breasts (a truer fact you'll never find in this autobiography), so I girded my loins and got back to business. The first (counting from now) girl didn't make any reference to her breasts. So I said, "Cough, cough. Excuse me, ma'am, but this gentleman would like to ask the lady if she might like to give him permission to tactilely appreciate the wonder of her physical charms." "Huh?" One of the other girls translated, "Do you want Mark to feel your tits, Tianna? Haha." "Oh yeah. I forgot. I'm not used to having to ask boys to do that." Apparently she wasn't the only one who'd not got into the habit of asking boys to feel her tits. Girls are clearly not being raised properly these days. I had a smart idea (and if you're ever going to have a smart idea, having one that maximizes the amount of breast fondling you do is a DAMNED good place to have one). I said, "From the volume of ribald comments I've heard recently, I'm guessing that most of you would like us to share as much contact as physical possible. To save me having to ask each of you in turn whether you want me to caress your breasts, I suggest that the minority who do NOT want me to touch them there, put their hands up now." Hopefully very few of them would have the strength of character required to raise their hands. Four spoilsports spoiled my sport. In accordance with Julia's strategy, I said, "Remember, it's entirely up to you. And you're entirely allowed to change your mind, just make sure you tell me. I will happily touch all of you except the four who have their hands up. I'm perfectly fine with all of that, and hope you all are too." They all seemed happy. I added, "I'm a little bit puzzled about what to do with you, Jennifer. You didn't put your hand up so you seem to want me to feel your breasts, but you've still got your bra on?" "Oh yeah. I forgot. {Giggle}. I'll take it off." "What is it with all this forgetfulness? Are you all distracted by something? I see that most of you seem to spend all your time staring at something around here." I pretended to look for whatever it was they were looking at. I searched around the immediate area, at about my waist level, but was completely unable to find anything. Eventually I said, "I can't see anything I haven't seen a million times before." "Lucky you!" I almost started saying something mushy like, "Yes I am. Not because of that little thing, but because of my two sisters, the twenty four other girls in this room, plus Julia, of course." But that was a stupid thing to say because it'd lead to an entirely unnecessary and excessive delay of the kissing/fondling process, so I cut it off. Instead I restarted with the girl who was waiting for me. The surrounding girls were MUCH slower off the mark, to get their hands on the Mark, this time. It must've taken them all of five seconds to remember to grope me. The next girl started normally, but after a couple of seconds she started intending to move her hand down to my cock - the move that Julia had showed them. She dithered about it, while I dithered about whether to allow it. I dithered a lot less than she did: it took her all of ten seconds before she committed to making the move, by which time I'd easily decided that there was no reason not to enjoy letting her. Her move did not go unnoticed or uncommented on; especially not uncommented on. It was frequently, loudly and humorously not uncommented upon. And in the case of the girls who'd already had their turn, it did not go unregretted. It was clearly going to be an oft-repeated maneuver. That'd been my hope when I'd let her. I gave her a little longer, to reward her for breaking the ice, and to reward myself for letting her. The next girl advanced with one of her hands at groin level, and it made contact with my cock before any other parts of our bodies touched. So much for this being a kissing session. The next girl was modest, but she put everything she could into the kiss. Pity, because NO WAY does a kiss compare to breast and cock fondles. Get real! Julia walked in during that one, carrying several small pieces of paper and an assortment of pens and pencils. She put them down and watched while I finished the current girl. I looked to Julia, who waved, saying, "Carry on. I'll wait until you're finished." The next two girls were 'normal', i.e., they were naked, wanted their breasts played with, and they fondled my cock while we kissed. "Normal" was pretty damned good! Savannah Glass was next. I was looking forward to getting my hands on her. As she approached she said, "I've changed my mind about wanting you to play with my breasts." This was both a considerable surprise and disappointment to me. She saw my expression, and very much enjoyed seeing it; which annoyed me as it feed her feeling of superiority. She declared, "I want you to use one hand on my breasts, and one hand in my pussy. I hear you're very good with pussies." I didn't know what to say to that demand. I knew what I THOUGHT about it, I just didn't know whether to do it. I looked at Julia, to find out. Julia said, "Savannah asked you to, so she wants it. If you want to, go for it." Green light. My only concern was, "I can't really be good with a pussy in only thirty seconds. That's nowhere near long enough." Savannah had an easy answer, "Feel free to take as long as you need." Julia squelched that, "Good try, Savannah, but that'd drag this out forever. We've only got about an hour left, maybe a little more. I've seen Mark spend that long just getting one pussy warmed up." Given the positive response that got, maybe Julia should have led with that when she was trying so hard to impress the girls earlier. "If any of you are ever lucky enough to have several hours with Mark, in a twosome or threesome, then you'll get much more attention, but with this number of girls, thirty seconds only." I'd been waiting for Julia to question why we were still so early in the alphabet. She'd seen enough girls by now to know we were doing them alphabetically, and have noticed that we were only just up to "Glass", but she seems to have decided it didn't matter. Savannah, "Okay. It was worth a try. Thirty seconds worth please, Mark. Make it a good thirty." Julia jumped on that, "Savannah! That's not fair, and you know it. What's worse, your statement was ENTIRELY about YOUR pleasure. I'm very unimpressed." #1: Savannah immediately answered, "You're right. I'm sorry, Julia. I'm sorry, Mark. I just got carried away." I had a smart idea (and if you're going to have a smart idea, having it to save the ass of a good looking, bisexual, sexy, Black girl is a damned good place). Before Julia could send Savannah home, I quickly jumped in with, "Go to the back of the line, Savannah, while I think about what to do about you." Julia was surprised for a very short time, then said to me, "Well done, Mark. You're learning." I wondered whether she'd spotted that I was mostly getting in before she could fire Savannah's lovely ass. I was handling JULIA more than Savannah. The 'processing' (such a sterile sounding word for what was such a thoroughly enjoyable experience) restarted and proceeded routinely. Several girls asked for their pussy to be played with, and I happily complied. Other girls had requests that were less sexual, as previously described. After a girl who I knew didn't want her breasts played with was finished, Julia asked a question, "Why didn't you play with her breasts, Mark?" "We established which girls didn't want to have that done before we started, so we wouldn't have to worry about a girl forgetting to tell me." "Good idea." Coming from Julia, that was high praise. Four girls before the end of the line (the recently renamed Laci Zimmerman), I said, "Savannah, I will take you now." I'd called her before the end of the line, hoping it'd show her that I was a forgiving person, and that I was in charge. Neither was a strong message, but there was no reason not to make them. While she was walking toward me, I informed her, "I will do the best job I can of making your breasts feel nice, but breasts only. I won't be touching your pussy." (Sometimes the responsibility of being a boss can be a source of disappointment. Something I'm extrapolating from my extremely limited bossing experience.) Because I needed to reinforce her lack of power I added, "Take it or leave it?" I was hoping like hell that she'd take it. Savannah said, "I'll happily take it, thank you. The girls all say you're very nice with your hands." I 'processed' her, and it did feel a bit like processing. Her superior attitude had eliminated some of the happy anticipation I'd had. Nonetheless I did my best, then moved on to the next girl. After what would have normally been the last girl, if it hadn't been for Laci having two turns, Julia said, "Right. What I've got in mind..." "Sorry to interrupt, Julia, I've got one more to do: Laci." Laci leaped forward, happy not to have been forgotten. There wasn't going to be any forgetting happening this time, as Laci was already humorously holding her breasts up and forward to offer them to me. The motion was similar to what my underwear did to my sexual equipment, but much more appreciated in this case. Laci's being at the end confused Julia, especially because Laci didn't look like someone who'd been sent to the back of the line, as she'd been happy the whole time since Julia's return and was clearly happy now. Julia asked, "Why is Laci at the end?" Laci answered, "Because my name's Laci Zimmerman." That was NOT a good way to talk with Julia. By all means tease Julia - she certainly deserves it often enough - but NOT about an organizational issue. Explain the situation FIRST, and then joke about it. Plus Julia is, I am VERY sure, putting a great deal of thought, attention, effort, etc., into this meeting, so she'll be somewhat stressed. NOT a good time at all! I hurriedly explained, "Laci gets two turns. She had her first turn at the beginning, then we joked about changing her name to Zimmerman so she could get her second turn at the end. All this happened before you came back, so you had no way of knowing." -- I was going to add something easy, like "The reason doesn't matter." In fact, I even preferred to do this, to spare Laci the embarrassment of having her mistake explained again. But I remembered that Julia had said that we want all the girls to believe that Julia and I completely share our information, so I said, "I had a moment of weakness just as we were starting this, and I teased Laci. I was unnecessarily cruel and felt bad about it. I'll tell you all about it later, rather than making Laci hear it again. My way of apologizing to Laci was to give her two turns." Julia was quite surprised, asking me, "You were cruel? That seems hard to believe." Laci said, "Bah, it was nothing. I walked right into it. Mark said you had twin brothers and said one of them was 26, and I was stupid enough to ask how old the other one was. I don't mind at all, especially if I get two turns. I forgot to ask him to feel my breasts the first time, but not this time!" Laci held up her breasts and offered them to me again, giggling. I was starting to like this girl. Julia had been chuckling through most of Laci's chatter. When Laci finished, Julia said, "That old trick! That's been done a million times. Mark's embarrassed about being cruel that way?" I nodded. Julia hammed it up, "Oh you BULLY! I hope I NEVER get on your bad side. How would I survive the agony of ALL THAT CRUELTY? Haha. I've done that trick many times myself, Mark. Probably everybody who gets to introduce twins has done it. It's irresistible. For that Laci gets two turns? You're a softie. Go on, give it to her. It's hard to deny a girl who's holding up her breasts like that and smiling so much." #1: #2: #3: #2: For fun and to progress this meeting in the direction I thought Julia wanted it to go, I whispered something to Laci before we started. She exclaimed, "Really. I can ask that?" Which gave away a chunk of the surprise value, but it was still worth doing. I nodded. Then I asked out loud, "Are you ready to start, Laci?" "Yes please. I would like you to play with my breasts, AND SUCK THEM! {Giggle}." None of the other girls had thought of this (as you could tell by their sudden exclamations of surprise, closely followed by exclamations of chagrin). Surprising them was my little revenge for their lack of imagination. Also my reward to Laci for being so positive and - shall we say, "giving" - with her breasts. I might have taken more than thirty seconds too. That'll teach 'em! During the minute or so that I was playing with Laci, the other girls were grumbling among themselves about not knowing that they could ask for sucking. Julia ignored them, and I was busy. When I'd finished giving a happy Laci a thank you kiss, the girls thought I was free and started grumbling about their missing out on my oral ministrations. Julia talked right over the top of them, saying, "The next activity is another guessing game like the Mark's Bowling Score. The winner gets to have sex with Mark on the leather sofa over there." Pointing to the largest of the sofa's, over by the big screen TV at the far end of the room. One of the possible winners asked, "Ahh, will everyone else be in the other room?" Julia answered, "In the hot tub, playing 8-ball, watching Mark, or anywhere else in these two rooms. Personally I'm going to have another soak in the hot tub because trying to educate all you girls is stressing me out, but that's just me. There will be no privacy, if that's what you're asking, but no one's compelling you to enter the competition or watch the result. You can hide in the hot tub room if you're scared of seeing people having a good time. -- "There'll be two prizes, second prize is fifteen minutes with Mark, first prize is thirty minutes with him. If there's a tie we'll split the times if we can, or toss a coin, but that's up to me at the time. So who wants to enter? No Liaisons, sorry." I was very interested in seeing who wanted to enter. Sooner or later Julia would ask me which of these girls I preferred to see again, and the ones who wanted to fuck me would have a million bonus points. That list was: Hannah, Linda, Savannah, Anna, Laci, Victoria, Alexis, Brenda, and three others I'd barely talked to during this 'party', so they must've been motivated by something other than my sparkling repartee with them. Eleven entrants in total. I was pleasantly surprised at how high the number was, as in I only 'needed' two for the competition, but the extra nine were GREAT for my ego (the one that Julia says I haven't got). I wasn't the least bit surprised by Hannah or Savannah. Linda's including herself was quite a shock though, because she seems so studious and quiet. Apparently more forward than I thought, to have sex in semi-public. Anna was in love with me, so who knows what was going through her head, if anything. Alexis is a tough, rough girl. She always dresses in black - although not at the moment - and it's easy to imagine her on the back of a big motorcycle. I assume she has loose morals, but have no evidence of it (not that I can claim to be highly moral myself, considering the 'prizes' on offer). Does Alexis having tattoos count as evidence of her having loose morals? Brenda was the girl with the vivid, suggestible imagination, which probably influenced this decision. The others I had no particular opinion about. I couldn't be bothered thinking who I preferred for first and second, as it was outside my control anyway. Julia went on to explain the rules to the entrants, starting with getting the eleven girls lined up around the pool table, one piece of paper each, on which they wrote their name. Then Julia said, "I'm going to ask you a question about how long something took Mark to do. The answer will be a NUMBER followed by one of these words: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years. As an example - JUST an example, not the real question - if I asked how long Mark's arm was in a cast after the football players' assaults, one of you might write '3 weeks', someone else might write '21 days'. Both would be equal, and very close to being correct. Does anybody not understand?" There was some meaningless conversation, more out of nervousness than anything else. Julia just had to repeat herself until the questioners calmed down. Once they were calmed, Julia continued, "From the moment I finish asking the question, you have ONLY three seconds to write your answer. Then I'll call "Pens down!" As soon as I've finished saying "down", anyone with pens still in their hand will be disqualified. I'm a stickler for time, so be warned. If you wait until after I say "down" before you drop your pen, you WILL be disqualified. Also, any answer which is just a number, like "42", will be disqualified. You have to say 42 what: seconds, weeks, or whatever. At least the first letter or two, so there's no ambiguity. Everybody ready to go?" I suddenly wondered whether Julia might have told Linda the correct answer in advance. I'd soon get a very strong clue. [I later asked Julia why she gave them such a ridiculously short time. She'd wanted their first thoughts, as that'd better reveal the girls who had absorbed Julia's lessons about how special I was. She's quite cunning, is Julia.] Julia announced, "The question is: From never having done the activity before, to the level of skill you saw Mark demonstrate today, how long did it take Mark to learn how to play 8-ball?" Three seconds later, "Pens down!" Unfortunately for Anna (I was happy though, as I was a little worried about her mental state), she was disqualified for not putting down her pen in time. Not even close. She'd been totally indecisive and unable to write anything. She was quite upset, but some of the chickens comforted her. Julia did a repeat of the excitement building process she'd used with the previous game, except with three slips at a time now, keeping the best two out of the three, then adding a new third and repeating, until there were only two names left. None of us knew the values of the losing guesses, as Julia kept them quiet and firmly under her control. Julia eventually announced, "First place goes to Hannah who guessed '0 seconds'. Second place to Alexis who guessed '1 day'. The correct answer is twenty minutes." You've got to be impressed by someone who can guess how long it took me to go from a neophyte to something like the world's best 8-ball player, and get it wrong by only twenty minutes! Zero seconds was a smart guess. Had Hannah been listening? Laila sure hadn't, given that she was in danger of being fired. I was also impressed by Alexis. She'd been the one I'd played, and had "beaten the pants off". As an experienced player, she knew first hand how long it takes to get good at the game. I don't actually know this myself, but I'm sure it's a big number. I imagine years or even decades are required to reach the level of skill I'd displayed. Her "one day" guess was a ballsy one. I was impressed with any girl who recognizes how truly impressive I am! Haha. The audience were, of course, primarily impressed with me. "Twenty minutes!" was a common exclamation, accompanied by various predictable comments. Julia said, "What's going to happen now is that Mark will deliver the prizes to the two lucky winners. That'll take forty five minutes. After that Mark will sit in the tub, and any of you who want to can come and sit on his cock for a few minutes, and bounce up and down a bit, just to get a taste for what it feels like to have Mark's cock inside you." Most of the girls thought they'd misunderstood/misheard Julia. I was very surprised myself, but I had no trouble believing what I'd heard. The other girls asked - nay demanded - that Julia repeat herself. Anna, still sobbing after her messing up the competition, stopped sobbing, holding her breath while Julia repeated herself. After Julia had, Anna went straight into glee meltdown mode, sobs completely forgotten. One of the other girls double-checked their reading of the situation, "We can fuck him?" "That's the plan. He'll have about twenty to thirty minutes, so how long you'll each get depends on how many of you there are. Something like one and half to two minutes each, I guess. Not long. Less if we spend time talking now." That ended the conversation! As I was pushed toward the sofa by several very helpful girls - Julia had mentioned earlier that she needed more helpers - I heard Julia yell, "I'll bring the condoms and towels. Wait for them!" Hannah and Alexis made their way eagerly to the sofa too. None of their four feet were cold. We were very quickly at the sofa, but had to wait for Julia. All the girls pushing me hadn't sped up the overall process one iota. They'd showed delightful and highly commendable enthusiasm though, so I was happy. While waiting for Julia, a sheepish looking Donna turned up, "I guess I'd better go?" Carol arrived right after and said, "I think you'll get a few more minutes yet, Donna. Mark, if you're going to be entertaining vigorously for an hour or so, would you like a snack before you start?" Now that she mentioned it, I certainly would! "Thank you, sweetie, that'd be great." Groans from several of the other girls, who saw their 1.5 to 2 minutes getting further eroded. A dozen girls LEAPED to fetch me everything edible in the room. Within seconds I was surrounded by girls holding bowls for me. NEVER has a snack been provided so quickly. It's a great pity life wasn't always like this. Carol never took a single step to carry out her offer. Both Carol and I thought that was quite funny. Donna was sad though. Carol said, "Donna, if Mark sits on the sofa, you can cuddle in his lap until he's finished his snack." We did that. Julia arrived with a handful of towels and one of the packets of rubbers. "When you're ready, Mark, we'll spread a few towels on the sofa. They're not strictly necessary, but it makes cleaning up afterward easier. Don't worry too much if they drift around inconveniently. Hannah, you won first price - with your most impressive guess, I must say - so you get to choose whether you want to go first or second?" "I was wondering if you'd let me choose. Definitely second. I'll enjoy watching Mark and Alexis first. That'll get me turned on even more, thank you." One of the overly willing, impatient, helpers (no doubt worried about time), raised an issue that'd been worrying me. She said, "Mark's been soft for over ten minutes. What'll we do when Donna gets up?" Julia said, "No worries. I'll kiss him." #2: #4: #3: I'd had several quick mouthfuls urged onto me when the snacking first started, and a drink had been fetched and half-consumed. Now every time I reached out my hand, most of my spectators visibly begrudged the time it would take me to eat its contents. It was almost enough to put me off my snack, and that's not easy to do! Action needed to be taken, in case my snack enjoyment was further eroded. I addressed them, "You may all be a year older than me, but you're considerably less mature if you think an extra fifteen seconds fucking each of you compares with cuddling with my sister. If you're going to begrudge every mouthful I take, I've got a good mind to eat more and slower, just to teach you a lesson. Either get yourselves under control, or put the bowl down and leave the room." It wasn't exactly a rigorously logically argument, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. It was sufficient to shame them all into apologizing and behaving better. It made Donna happy too. Donna returned to her usual thesis, "They're silly." In a slightly weary voice, I answered, "They can't really help it, Donna, they're just girls." Donna had been - if not physically, then at least mentally - nodding along with me. When I finished she said, "Yeah... ," then she realized what she'd agreed to. "Hey, you tricked me!" "It was easy, you're just a girl." Donna and I had a good tussle for a couple of minutes, partly verbal, partly physical. When she was sufficiently happy, I said, "Okay, champ. I don't need my bodyguard anymore. I'm going to beat them all up with my big stick. You head home and I'll call you after dinner, okay?" "You will?" "Sure. Before Prof and I go and do our work. Let's get up so Julia can spread the towels. I'll walk you to the hallway." "Your stick isn't all that big, you know." "Ha! You're in no position to talk, you don't even have one! I walked her to the door. "Make sure you thank Vanessa or whoever takes you home, okay?" "Sure. Have a good time, {giggle}." "I'll do my best. Thanks for being so well behaved today. We'll talk later, bye." I shut the door behind her, and moved back to the den of iniquity. I'd thought of another way of telling the impatient throng off, and it was too good not to use, so when I walked back into the Guys' Room and had all their attention again (given what they were all waiting for me to do, I was the center of attention pretty damned fast), I said, "Honestly, sometimes I think girls have no idea about what's truly important in life!" They apologized profusely for their rushing my quality time with Donna. I didn't bother mentioning that I'd mostly been thinking about their rushing my snack. ------- Chapter 114: Hot Tub Party; Two Identical Fucks Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) I'd painted myself into a little corner by claiming the moral high ground. What I was about to start doing could hardly be done from that position, so I needed to get off it. I'd worked out what to say next ("Let's fuck!" What it lacked in subtlety, it made up for by lacking in subtlety). Unfortunately, just as I was about to leap off the moral high ground, I realized that I'd lost the mood, and all the scrutiny I was under now was definitely not helping the situation as it truly did make me very uncomfortable. I feared that even a kiss from Julia wasn't going to get me into the right mood, and having a bunch of girls staring at me with annoyance over the delay certainly wasn't going to help my mood either. I stopped indecisively near the sofa. Julia walked up, and stood in front of me. "Are you ready for your kiss?" "Umm. I guess so." I leaned down to kiss Julia. Julia bent DOWN to kiss me! This surprised everybody, including me, although my surprise IMMEDIATELY turned into delight, especially after her kiss progressed. Many of the girls were genuinely shocked. Don't they teach girls ANYTHING useful at the secret classes they go to? I mean, why on Earth would they waste valuable class time on imaginary shades of color, when they could be teaching THIS? If any of you are detecting an improvement in my mood, you'd be on the button! In a surprisingly short amount of time, I declared, "Right! Let's Fuck!" I was raring to go now, but suddenly realized that Alexis might not be. My telling them all off might've created a roadblock. Julia had revved me up very effectively, but I didn't imagine anyone had done the same to Alexis (certainly not EXACTLY the same, that was for sure!). I had a total of only fifteen minutes, and it was up to me to get her motor running (guys use automotive metaphors when we've got to put the pedal to the metal and burn rubber. Not the rubber I'd be wearing shortly though; I CERTAINLY didn't want to burn that. Ouch!). Believing and hoping that Alexis was a 'rough and ready' sort of girl, I called ahead, "Alexis. On your back and spread those legs. I'm going to be diving in headfirst, and there's no time to waste." Julia hasn't yet had a chance to teach me much about seduction. Alexis seemed happy. She jumped into an appropriate position, giggling. Always a good sign, although extremely difficult to work into an automotive metaphor. She wasn't wet, so I got straight down to business, trying to quickly find something that worked well on her, and to ride it as far as it would take her. I was kneeling on the floor beside the sofa, and could see Julia remove a rubber from its foil, clearly intending to put it on me. She thinks she needs helpers, but where are we going to find staff with that much dedication to their job? Which gave me an idea: Anna needed a dose of reality, and I thought of a good way of giving it to her. Making sure I had both hands and their fingers well placed to keep stimulating Alexis when I removed my mouth. (Important tip guys: Girls' bodies are less forgiving of discontinuities in stimulation than guys' bodies are. In other words, they lose physical arousal faster when the stimulation stops. So, minimize those gaps guys, ESPECIALLY when pressed for time.) "ANNA, where are you, girl?" I got a perverse thrill out of bossing her around. It had to be "perverse" because all my normal sources of thrills were very well catered for by all the naked girls around me, and the fun I was already having with Alexis' body. "Here." I didn't bother looking toward her voice, as I was too busy keeping an eye on what my fingers were doing. "Run over here and kneel on my left. Quickly, girl." When my tongue wasn't busy yelling at Anna, I used it to help my fingers. Alexis had been wet previously; there was evidence of that once I looked closely enough, and I certainly was close enough now. She was still damp inside, where the air hadn't dried her out. I could easily get her wet enough to fuck, just by licking the outside of her pussy lips a couple of times, but I wanted to build her arousal too. It wasn't going to take long, so I had to get Anna to hurry. Plus I wanted to yell at her to do this anyway, because I enjoyed it. It's that "perverse" thing again. Anna alighted beside me, and had no idea where to look. But she had a few ideas of where to definitely not look, so she busied herself not looking at any of them. I didn't give her much time. "Suck my cock a couple of times to get it wet, grab the rubber from Julia and put it on me. HURRY! I need to get fucking in a minute!" I didn't need to have my cock sucked to have a rubber put on. I'd thrown it in for fun; mine mostly. Anna had been one of the girls who'd been shocked when Julia had done it to me. She was going to be learning about it first hand a WHOLE LOT faster than she expected! My mouth was back on Alexis, as Julia would have no trouble knowing what to do from now. Anna did, saying, "I don't know what to do. I've never done..." Julia supplied the necessary information, "You open your mouth, stick it over his cock, and lick. It's not rocket science." No it's not, although it can cause blast offs. Not when the girl is completely out of her depth though. Anna repeated, "I don't know how..." Julia called, "Someone grab both her ankles and pull them around forty five degrees toward the bar, then pull her back about eighteen inches." There was nothing interesting on TV, so everyone had been gathered around closely, watching us. Three girls bent down to comply with Julia's instructions, and in seconds Anna was repositioned. Julia was on her knees on the other side of me from Anna. She reached between the sofa and my body, took hold of Anna's wrists, and pulled then a long way toward Julia, which unbalanced Anna forward. Anna was now on her hands and knees, with her head within range. Julia commanded, "Open your mouth." "I've never..." "And now you're going to. Open you mouth and do NOT speak!" Proximity isn't fine enough to discern open or closed mouths, but it was certainly capable of detecting Julia put her hand on the back of Anna's head. I was waiting for the push, but Julia said, "I will guide your head. Relax your arms and bend toward Mark's cock." "But I've never..." Julia lifted her head and called, "Can any of you girls do this instead of Anna?" LOTS of them said they could. Savannah had been one of the girls who'd towed Anna into position, and she was still standing right behind her. Julia said, "Savannah, pull Anna out and do it yourself." Anna said, "No it's, oof." As Savannah picked Anna up around the waist and pulled her back. Savannah is athletic, and Anna was history. Savannah had the whole job done in seconds, although she wasted a couple giving my cock an entirely unnecessary kiss. Anna may "never have", but Savannah sure had; many times, judging by her unhesitating skill. I'd expected Anna to perform MUCH faster (how hard can it be? Although, NEVER ask me to do it!). When Anna balked, I'd expected Julia to force her, but that much force would have been wrong. This way was better. Alexis had been able to see virtually all the Anna/Savannah by-play, as she was lying along the sofa and I was coming in square, over her hip. Alexis' head was to my left, lying on the armrest at the far end of the sofa, so with a grandstand view of where Anna had been (also to my left). Alexis had enjoyed the by-play, and had laughed at it several times. There'd not been any sympathy from tough Alexis for prissy Anna. But Alexis wasn't here for the laughs. I had just over ten minutes left, which wasn't long enough for two orgasms. I decided to go flat out to start with, to make enough progress to make sure I could give her one, but then to time it for the end of the fifteen minutes. I stood up, grabbed Alexis' ankles, and with no subtlety whatsoever, pulled her down the sofa until her ass was just over the end of the armrest. She moaned, "Oh yeah", as she was being manhandled. I stood at the end of the sofa, put her ankles up by my ears, one arm holding both legs against my chest, the other hand for frigging her. Within almost no time, I was fucking her flat out. I can thrust faster standing vertically than any other position. With my muscle tone, this is very, very fast. I didn't even care about picking up fatigue, as I intended to go this fast only long enough to make sure she would orgasm, and then I'd slow down and cruise home at the fifteen minute mark. The speed of my thrusts, especially my going at full speed as soon as she was wet enough, took every girl by surprise (except Anna, she was too busy sobbing). It especially took Alexis by surprise. She held her breath in shock for a few seconds, then released it in a drawn out exclamation of astonishment, "FUCK!" I fucked and frigged her flat out. Alexis loved it. She was grunting, groaning, swearing and having a great time. Which was rapidly getting greater. She loved "hard and fast", especially "hard". I suddenly remembered Carol, and looked around quickly. Two dozen spectators, but no Carol. Julia worked out what I was thinking, and nodded toward the hot tub room. I'd go check on her between the two girls. The only discordant note was Anna's sobbing. Fortunately, about three minutes into the high-speed run, Anna started calming down. Alexis urged, "Fuck. Someone slap the stupid bitch. Make her cry again." I almost laughed. I certainly didn't share's Alexis' kink, but I had found Anna's sobbing annoying and almost felt like slapping her for it myself. As tempting as it was, it would've been counterproductive and I'd never slap a girl, more's the pity sometimes. Alexis got her desired end result anyway. Anna didn't like being so unsympathetically called a "stupid bitch", and she started crying all over again. That annoyed me, but Alexis succinctly expressed her happiness. Oh well, we weren't here for my pleasure. #4: #2: #4: #3: I'd begun to slacken off, especially on the finger work. I immediately changed that, now only concerned with bringing Alexis off as fast as I could without TK. She didn't really need that, as she was already mauling her own tits, one of which had a nipple ring. Seeing her pull that freaked me out more than a little, but not enough to put me off my strokes. At my suddenly increased speed, Alexis said, "FUCK!" Which made her a rough, coarse and repetitively redundant girl. I fucked her as hard and fast and I could, frigging her clit almost viciously, and even squeezing her legs against my chest far tighter than I needed to just to demonstrate my strength to her. In two or three more minutes she started screaming the foulest obscenities you're ever likely to hear in a gathering of young schoolgirls. As Julia had mentioned a while ago, I sincerely hoped there were no non-family visitors in the house. I made a mental note to ask Prof about soundproofing this room too. Maybe the hot tub room too, while he's at it. Alexis went off BIG TIME. As soon as it hit her, I pulled out, lifted her hips and flipped them over. Her head and upper-torso didn't flip properly, but that was fine by me. Even good - the more discomfort, the better. I yanked her toward me a few inches, so her legs dangled over the end of the sofa, plugged myself in, and starting fucking her flat out again. She hadn't even finished her first orgasm, so it took her a few seconds to realize that the world had turned over and what was happening to her again. "Jesus {groan} fucking Christ {groan}." I was holding her up by both hips, when I thought of a better idea. I let go, so her hips dropped onto the armrest. Her upper-thighs hanging over the end of the sofa should hold her firmly in position, freeing up my hands. Her height dropped a bit, which was a little annoying. I had to adjust my angle and bend my knees a little, but not enough to cause too much difficulty. As soon as the new position was arranged, I moved back into top gear again. My thrusts knocked the sofa across the floor, which was a real pain, as it pulled me out of Alexis and I had to stop thrusting properly to walk closer to her again. I grabbed her hips again, while yelling to the goggle-eyed spectators, "Some of you sit on sofa." Only Julia moved to comply. There were several girls between her and the sofa, so it'd take her several seconds to get there. And, for goodness sake, Julia sitting of the sofa was going to be as effective as throwing another pillow on it. I yelled directly at the girls standing beside the unused end of the sofa, "SIT ON THE SOFA, BITCHES!" It didn't matter whether they collapsed in shock, or did so out of obedience, the 'bitches' sat. I let go of Alexis' hips, and there was now enough weight on the sofa to stop it getting away from me. With two spare hands I was now able to start spanking her butt. There were shocked gasps from many of the audience. I looked up and could see that many of them had never seen this happen before either (the curriculum of those secret classes is in SERIOUS need of revision). Alexis LOVED it, which is all that mattered. I knew Alexis and Julia would do any repairing 'education' that was required afterward. Anna was silent, wide-eyed in astonishment and shock. Apparently my violently assaulting and fucking another girl hadn't been what she expected when she fell in love with me. I kept slapping hard and thrusting harder. Alexis was getting more and more excited again, and it seemed pretty likely we'd get another one completed in time, or maybe slightly after. It'd be too cruel to stop thirty seconds short, surely, even for Julia? Alexis was groaning loudly into the seat of the sofa (she'd twisted her own torso around, so she was lying flat). I had an idea, and was able to reach forward enough to grab hold of Alexis' hair. I pulled it, arching her back and lifting her head well clear of the sofa. I had to pull that much so I could stand upright enough to do my main job properly. I commanded, "Slap her face!" No one moved, unsurprisingly. So insisted, "SLAP HER FACE, BITCHES!" With a VERY strained voice, because of how much I was arching her back, Alex groaned/yelled "SLAP ME, BITCHES!" Brenda slapped her hard enough to, perhaps, dislodge a loose hair. Both Alexis and I said, "HARDER." Brenda, cautiously, started complying with Alexis' repeating instruction of "HARDER." I didn't have a very good angle with my loose hand for ass slapping, but I had a good enough one ram my thumb up her asshole. Alexis' repetitive, one-word instruction to Brenda was interrupted with her saying, "Oh GOD! Motherfucking Asshole Fuck Fuck Fuck." Pause for breath, "Harder, Bitch! {Groan}." I squeezed her asshole between my thumb on the inside, and the rest of my hand on the outside. Holding her firmly in place (somewhat like a bowling ball grip; appropriately, considering how this date started), I concentrated on fucking as HARD as I could. Slamming into her was more important than speed this time. Brenda wasn't doing her job properly, so I told her, "Slap both sides, Brenda." Otherwise it was straightforward, plain, HARD fucking. All the way until Alexis started trying to scream her orgasm. She was having trouble breathing, so I let go her hair. Her torso fell forward, and she started producing another loud and very vocabulary rich expression of her pleasure. I'd had an idea during the run for home which I put into action as soon as Alexis' orgasm was well under way - about thirty seconds before the Julia's time limit, I was happy to note. I pulled out both appendages, folding my dirty thumb into that palm to avoid touching anything else until I'd had a chance to wash it (that aspect of playing with assholes is a nuisance). As much as I would have liked to go wash my hands now, I had to carry out my idea first. So with thumb folded, I walked around to the front of the sofa. That only took a couple of steps and Alexis was still climaxing. I reached forward with both hands (one hand and one fist), and rolled Alexis toward me and off the front of the sofa, causing her to fall to the floor. I looked like I was being rough, but I was watching her head very carefully, ready to protect it with a hand or foot if necessary, but it wasn't. As soon as Alexis had fallen on the floor, I turned myself around and sat on the newly vacated area of sofa. I'd momentarily thought about using her as a footrest, but rejected that. The sex was over, and therefore so was my apparent mistreatment of her. I just sat, with my feet on the floor. Alexis was lying on her side, between the sofa and my feet. I looked up to find Julia, and innocently asked her, "Would you please get my drink for me, sweetie? I'm a little thirsty." Julia was having some trouble holding the laugher in, but she managed, "Of course, darling. Would you like some nuts with that?" "I would be delighted. Thank you, sweetie." "You're most welcome." I couldn't say, "You could hear a pin drop", but only because of the groans coming from under my legs and the background music. Otherwise there was shocked silence from all the other girls. Some of them started recovering quickly. Others, such as Anna, didn't appear to be recovering at all. Anna looked like she'd need a week. One of the quick recovery girls exclaimed, "My God! Where did THAT come from?" Which got things started, and several other girls started commenting. "Who are you, and what did you do with Mark?" | "Was that sex or violence?" | "Poor Alexis, is she okay?" | And other, almost entirely ignorant, comments. Savannah said, "Wow, that was great!" Several of the girls looked at her in shock. So she added, "What? It WAS great! Wait till you hear what Alex says." "{Groan}." Julia returned, holding out a drink and bowl of nuts to me. I only had one usable hand so I took the drink. Seeing my dilemma, Julia put the bowl of nuts on my lap (near the other nuts). Seeing my rubber, Julia said, "Hasn't Anna taken your condom off YET? That girl's USELESS! Wouldn't put it on, hasn't taken it off. I don't think she's any good for you." I didn't think Anna could even say what day of the week it was, so there was no chance of her being with it enough to start cleaning up my cock. "I think you're right. She's going to need a LOT more training." Which is what I thought Julia wanted me to say. "It's FAR too much bother. I don't have the time and why go to all the trouble? There are plenty of other girls. It's not like she's really in love with you; she's just got a schoolgirl crush. She'll never be able to keep up with you. It's your decision, of course, but my advice is that after this afternoon you drop her and not waste any more time on her." "You're right." She was, 100%. Anna was only just now starting to realize something had happened. "What? What did you just say? What did they just say?" No one wanted to tell her, and Julia was getting some tissues, so it was left to me. I filled my mouth with nuts instead, which is what Anna should have done originally. Julia returned and was removing my rubber while I finished off my drink. I said, "I'll go wash my hands and check on Carol." "Okay, darling." Hannah didn't look to be in ANY hurry to start her session, so I probably had time. There was a small room with just a toilet and sink off the Guys' Room, so I used that first. Coming out, and crossing this room again, I heard Julia explaining to Anna that she [Anna, not Julia] didn't love me. Anna couldn't decide whether she did love me or not; whether she wanted to love me or not; or whether she should run home before the horrible man got his hands on her. She was a very confused young girl, so would be putty in Julia's hands. Alexis was starting to talk with the other girls. Apparently she'd quite enjoyed herself, and she was very emphatically telling them that. I headed through to check on Carol, patting myself on the back metaphorically as I went. Carol was on the rowing machine, not working hard, but good on her. As I got closer, Carol said, "I could hear most of that, the loud noises anyway. It was very funny. It was a pity Donna wasn't here because she would have LOVED you calling them all 'bitches'. I'll tell her that next chance I get." I was about to caution Carol about being too detailed about the background reasons, but then decided I could leave that to Carol. I just hoped she wouldn't. Carol added, "They're pretty, but I don't think they're very smart. Now I understand why Julia got so irate in the car on the way here. I bet she must be frustrated now." I didn't understand that, as things seemed to be going very well. The girls had been blown away by our explanation about how special I was, and as best I could tell something like three-quarters or even more of them wanted a minute or two on my cock in the tub. That had to be a GREAT sign. #2: #3: #4: #2: #3: I asked, "You're not too bored out here, are you? It's a pity that you have to miss out on this stuff." "I'm okay. I thought of going upstairs to do some study, which I probably should do, but I like listening in to what's going on. I'm learning quite a lot. Julia and I will be studying tonight when you're away with Prof." I didn't know what Carol could learn out here, but she seemed happy and that's all that mattered. "Okay, sweetie. I better go back to them." I gave her a kiss, just on the cheek in case any of the other girls walked in. Carol whispered, "I love you," which I echoed back to her. I blew her a kiss and went back to see the rest of them. As I walked within earshot I heard Alexis tell them, "I've never had sex in front of so many people before." Which immediately made me wonder what sort of pervert has sex in front of other people. #3: #2: The girls were sitting around the entertainment area, sitting on all the sofas, several of them on the floor, and Alexis was telling them how much she enjoyed herself, how fantastic I'd been, how much she'd loved being fucked so incredibly forcefully. When I got about halfway across the room, Linda called out to me, "Egg, where did that come from? I've never seen or heard of you acting like that." Julia answered, "Mark ALWAYS acts like that." I noticed that this was NOT taken as good news by Hannah. It puzzled me a little too, because I hardly ever ask bitches to slap my fuckee's face. Alexis said, "Thanks VERY much, Mark. That was a GREAT fuck. I didn't think fifteen minutes was going to be long enough for anything much, especially after stupid Miss Stuck Up here," indicating Anna, "pissed around so much, but that was fucking fantastic. Anytime you've got a spare fifteen minutes, let me know. Hell, a spare ten minutes would be enough. Julia must be a shit load tougher than she looks to be able to sleep with you overnight and still walk." Hannah had been thinking the matter through, and jumped in with, "I don't want my turn now. Who came third, Julia?" Julia said, "I can't remember. Pat, Lily and Laila, do any of you Liaisons want Hannah's turn?" There was a disturbing lack of enthusiasm at her offer. "Yes," from Lily, although it wasn't enthusiastic. | "Umm, yes," from Pat, "if Mark acts like his last time with me?" Laila had waited, and she now said, "I'm the same as Pat." Julia ignored Pat's question, and said to Lily, "Lucky you, Lily. It looks like he's yours." Julia turned to everyone sitting on the designated fucking sofa, saying, "Everyone off please, to make room for Mark and Lily." They got up, the towels were re-spread, and a somewhat fearful but ever-obedient Lily joined me on the sofa. All the girls watched avidly. Lily was, to understate her state, not aroused. I had some work to do, but I knew my way around her body so I happily started the process. I wasn't totally happy because I'd have preferred a new girl for the novelty value and to increase my count. But there's no such thing as a bad fuck, so I was still happy. I kissed and cuddled with her for a few seconds, before whispering quietly to just her, "I'll be the same as I was my first time with you." That good news caused Lily to relax a great deal. After that it was easy. I started even gentler than my last time with her, but soon we were both happily having a great time. Julia turned up with another rubber, sucked my cock a couple of times, and put it on for me. When Savannah became aware of what Julia was doing, Savannah almost protested, but then relaxed and let it go. Julia said, "Does anyone want to come have a soak in the hot tub with me?" Most of them didn't even seem to hear the question. A few verbal answers, "No thanks." | "I want to watch this." | "Later." Julia shrugged, and wandered off by herself. The girls waited patiently for the violence to start. Then they started waiting impatiently. Then one of them asked, "Umm, Egg. How come you're so gentle this time? Not that I want you to be so rough, I'm just curious." I said, "Hang on a minute, girls. Lily, we've only got about twenty minutes left. Do you want me to stop so I can waste your time answering the girls' questions? Because you know girls: once they start asking questions they'll never stop." Lily answered with surprisingly good English, "Fuck no!" I kept going, ignoring the other girls, not even telling them I wasn't going to answer. They understood my pointed ignoring of them, and subsided into silence. I didn't have much time as it was nearly 4:15, the time Julia had given me. So I got part of myself into Lily, and started fucking her properly. I couldn't hear anything happen at precisely 4:15, as Lily and I were making too much noise and there was some music playing. About thirty seconds later Prof walked in from the hot tub room. The sofa we were on faced away from where Prof was coming from, so Lily couldn't see anything. I'd been kneeling on the end of the sofa doing a missionary, so I was high enough to see over its back (which was not a coincidence). I was expecting something, so I was the first to see him. It took a surprisingly long time for all the other girls to notice though. I guess they must have been looking elsewhere, and Prof is so short he's easily overlooked, haha. When he stepped around the near end of the pool table, he was noticed. "EEK! A man!" This was not good news to the twenty four virtually naked girls (only one girl was still wearing bra and panties, five more in panties only). Julia was watching from the far end of the room, and she called out, "That's not a man, that's my father, haha." Long before Julia finished her logically flawed explanation there were girls ducking for cover: leaping behind their sofas or chairs, covering themselves with sofa cushions, trying to hide behind each other. There was so many of them that it was chaos. It was very funny to watch. Lily was struggling to see the source of the - to me - hilarious overreaction. One of the reasons I enjoyed watching the girls was to take my mind off Prof watching me. I'd stood naked in front of Vanessa, but this was worse, even with Prof being a man (I was ignoring Julia's opinion). It was clearly a plan of Julia's, and she had been to talk with Prof earlier, so I had to carry on. To Lily's struggles, I told her, "Relax Lily, it's just Julia's father." Lily wasn't sure that this was sufficient reason to relax, but she wasn't in a position to do much about it, especially as my body was still doing its thing to Lily's. Julia called, "Mark, Dad wants to ask you something about tonight." "Fine." It wasn't really, but what else could I say? Prof was advancing toward me, so he clearly didn't want me to stop and go to him. Prof came around the end of our sofa, and stood beside Lily's head so he could look at my face while he talked to me. I was giving my best impression of someone to whom this happened every day of the week. Lily was covering her breasts with her arms, but was otherwise pinned down. Prof looked down, and said, "Hello, young lady." "Ahh, hello." "Sorry to intrude on your recreation. I won't be long. Mark, a few days ago Vanessa gave you some equipment that we need to use tonight. Do you have it with you, or does Vanessa need to fetch it from your place?" I worked out that Prof was referring to the disguise kit. "It's in the trunk of my car. Julia's car, I mean." Despite my best efforts at appearing nonchalant, I was more than a little flustered. "Shall I get it for you, as you appear to be occupied?" "Ahh. I can get it afterward, Prof." "Okay. I've also got all the paperwork and the funding ready so you don't have to worry about that." The paperwork presumably being my fake ID. "Funding" was something that hadn't occurred to me. A trip to a casino was OBVIOUSLY going to need money, but equally obviously I hadn't bothered turning my brain on to think about it. I felt stupid, mainly because I'd been stupid. I'd follow Prof's instruction "not to worry about it," just like I had been so far. "Ahh, thanks, Prof. I'm glad one of us is on the ball." "Haha." #3: #4: Julia had arrived, and was standing beside Prof, totally unconcerned that she was naked. Prof asked her, "Vanessa asked me to ask you whether the number of people for dinner has changed?" "No, it won't change. Thanks, Dad." "I'll let you get back to your game of Hide 'N' Seek. I don't think your friends are very good at it, as most of them seem to be behind that sofa over there." Prof indicated the other sofa the same size as the one I was on. There were about a dozen heads peeking over the top, a dozen being rather too many girls to be hiding behind a single sofa. Prof added, "I'll go check for you." Prof turned and leaned forward, as if he was walking, although he didn't even take a step. PANIC broke out behind that sofa. The girls had all been crouching, which is not the most stable of positions. They recoiled in horror at the thought of a man seeing their bodies. I couldn't see them, but I could hear the sounds of bodies hitting the floor as they lost balance or got pushed over. Thuds, grunts and curses were heard. One girl, fearing Prof was going to walk around the right end of the sofa, made her dash to freedom out the left. Seeing that she was the only one naked in the middle of the room (Julia excepted), with everyone looking at her, including the unmoving Prof, she stopped. Another girl, following the clever idea of the first, had made a similar dash, keeping her eyes on Prof. The sudden halt of the first girl caused a collision, and both girls fell in a tangle. They were in a clear area and were highly (and to my mind, delightfully) exposed. They frantically climbed over each other as they scrambled on their hands and knees back behind the sofa. More thuds, grunts and curses indicated that they collided with at least one other girl, who'd probably tipped sideways into some others. Prof just chuckled, and said, "In my day we used to try to be much quieter when we played that game. I can't remember playing it with no clothes on either, but I'm getting old so maybe my memory's faulty, haha. Sorry to interrupt. I'll see you at dinner, bye." Prof left the room, and I said to Lily, "Well done on not being a sissy like all the other girls, Lily." Not that she could have run away, not with her feet in the air the way they were. From behind the sofa, "Is it safe to come out?" Julia answered, "It was ALWAYS safe. Why were you all so surprised to see Dad? This is his home, and he does walk around in it. It's not like any of us were doing anything that needs privacy. Mark, you can get back to fucking Lily now." "Oh yeah. Sorry Lily, I was distracted by listening to Julia." "Ahh, okay." Julia said, "I think Dad's visit damaged Lily's mood Mark, so take an extra five or ten minutes with her if you need it. I'll extend the finishing time a little, so the quick fucks in the tub don't get reduced." #4: One of the other girls asked, "Ahh, Julia. Why didn't your dad get upset seeing Mark making love to Lily? I though he was going to kill Mark. Or Lily, or someone. It's very strange." Julia helpfully answered, "Why would Dad get upset? He can see the towels." "Huh? Towels? What've towels got to do with anything?" "Dad wouldn't get upset because he can see they're using towels to keep the sofa clean. Other people have to sit on this sofa, you know?" "FORGET the sofa! What about Mark and Lily having sex. Why didn't your dad go ape?" "Do you want me to forget the towels too?" "Argh! Stop teasing us! Yes, forget the sofa AND the towels. What about Mark and Lily HAVING SEX?" "Oh, that's EASY! It was MARK. There's nothing special about Lily, as far as my parents know. Sorry Lily, no offense intended. It could've been any girl, or several girls, and it wouldn't have made any difference. It was all because of Mark. If one of my brothers was in here one day, having sex with his girlfriend, then that'd be fine. Providing they were using towels, of course, because other people have to sit on these sofas. But if my brother was screwing some other girl, my parents would rip into him for cheating on his girlfriend. They'd give him a VERY hard time over that, because my parents are very moral people. But they'd never do that to Mark, of course." "What? Because Mark's not theirs, you mean?" "Oh no! Definitely not for that reason. If my parents caught one of my brother's girlfriends having sex with someone else here, EVEN if they were using towels, my parents wouldn't hesitate to rip into her either. Good morals is good morals, regardless of whether the people are your children or not." "I don't understand. Why wouldn't they rip into Mark?" Julia said, "We're distracting Mark and Lily, which is not fair to them. I can either give you the long answer if you follow me to the hot tub, or the short answer now. Which do you want?" "The short answer. Definitely the short answer please." "Dad didn't object to Mark having sex with other girls because it was MARK. I've told you all this time and again, NORMAL RULES DO NOT APPLY TO MARK. Mark could screw girls all over this house and my parents would let him, provided he used towels. Mom and Dad have given Mark the front door key and the alarm codes so he can come and go whenever he wants. That's got nothing to do with me, I don't need to be with him because I obviously have my own key. It's entirely for his personal use. My brothers are 26 - BOTH of them, Laci - and NONE of their girlfriends have EVER been given a key to this house. But Dad offered a 15-year old boy a key after his dating me for less than three weeks. My parents KNOW the rules don't apply to Mark. I was going to say, 'All of you should think about that, ' but unfortunately I think Donna's right; you're too silly. I'm going to go have a soak. If you stay here to watch Mark and Lily, don't distract them with any more conversation or I'll cancel the hot tub fucking afterward. Everyone is welcome to join Carol and me in the tub." Julia walked out on the silly girls. They clearly wanted to ask Julia some more questions, but not enough to follow after her, or enough to speak up and risk the cancellation of the hot tub fucking (phew). I quickly got proof that at least one of them truly was silly. A few seconds after Julia walked through the doorway, one of them said, "It's safe to talk. She won't be able to hear us now." I was tempted to say nothing, but even if all the other girls were as silly as Tania, there was nothing I could imagine them saying that I wanted to hear, so I said, "HELLO! I'M still here. If I hear ONE more word out of any of you, I'm going to tell Julia on you, and she'll probably cancel the hot tub fucking." I'd be begging her not to though. "Then whoever spoke will have twenty pissed off girls at her throat. So not ONE more word. If you have to speak, leave the room first." They kept silent for about five minutes, which I guess was probably a world record for a group of twenty three schoolgirls (not twenty four as I didn't count Lily). One girl opened her mouth and got half a word out before the other girls all hushed her. I ignored them. It was too much to hope that they could keep silent for another twenty minutes. I know next to nothing about girls, but I knew that much. I just hoped they'd keep it unobtrusive. I concentrated on doing a good job on Lily. Soon Lily was telling me, usually non-verbally, what a GREAT job I was doing. It wasn't difficult as I knew several things she liked having done to her body. It was something that definitely didn't go unnoticed by our audience, and then uncommented upon (sigh). I was seriously tempted to take Lily upstairs to have some uninterrupted sex. If Julia had been in the room I would have asked her about it, but it wasn't worth disrupting our sex yet again to go find out, especially as I expected Julia to say "No." Julia wanted all these girls to be impressed, so that's what I tried to do. The end result was that Lily had some sex that she thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated. The other girls were wowed, so that was good too. I still didn't get to cum, knowing I'd need to stay hard for the immediately following hot tub shenanigans. The second it was clear I'd finished, every question that the audience had been holding back came gushing out. I ignored the largely incomprehensible babble while I made a deliberate production out of arranging the towels, sitting carefully, leaning forward in an attentive manner, then saying, "Let's take your questions one by one. Put your hands up and I'll choose a person." Most of them had hands in the air, which they seemed to think gave them license to also yell out their questions at the same time. I leaned back in the sofa, folded my arms, and patiently waited for quiet. During which there was a small additional distraction. To set the scene: Lily and I were cuddling on our sofa, and the rest of the girls were scattered around in front of us. It turned out that not quite all of them were in front of us, as I proximity sensed Hannah crawl on her hands and knees to the back of the sofa I was on. I said, "Hello back there, Hannah. One more to go." "Argh!" Hannah protested as she stood up. "You couldn't POSSIBLY know I was there. Even if there'd been a mirror, I was hidden beneath the sofa's back. I was quiet as a mouse too. There is NO WAY!" "You've convinced me. I take it back, I couldn't have known it was you. Still only one more try though. Mainly because this game is getting boring. You're not very good at it." "I want to know how you can do that!" she demanded. "And I want a million dollars." That's one of Mom's many expressions that I thoughtlessly recited. It's means wanting the impossible. Given the roulette scheme's possibility, I couldn't resist adding, "And I think I've got more chance of getting it than you have of outsmarting me, haha." It took a little longer for quiet to descend. I leaned forward and resumed the Q&A (Question and Answer) session, "Put your hand in the air, and I'll choose a girl. That girl will then ask her question in a clear voice, so we can all hear it. I will answer it as clearly as I can. Take your time, because we're in no hurry. I've had plenty of sex now and don't care that this is using up our hot tub fucking time. Right, Victoria. What is your question?" "Umm." Pulling her hand down, Victoria said, "I don't have question." Every other hand came down. I said, "Any more questions? No one? I must say I'm surprised. I thought you had lots of questions." I leaned back on the sofa, saying, "No problem. I'll give you a minute or two to think of them." First one, then the others, leaped to their feet. The eager-for-sex girls beseeched, "We don't have any questions. Let's go to the tub. Come on, come on!" I had a quick worry: it was very easy to imagine too many of them running into the other room and leaping into the tub without regard to its capacity. Carol and Julia were probably already in it, and it wouldn't hold as many people as were showing eagerness to fuck me. In other words, I imagined a repeat of the chaos that had started this 'date', but with Julia and Carol under it all, which was a scary image. I yelled, "STOP!" That worked. I carefully leaned farther back into the sofa to make sure I did not look like I was about to get up, as that might start the stampede. I held up my hands and called for quiet, not for the first time today. I remembered the alphabetic order the girls had been in back at the kissing/breast fondling game. I said, "Put up your hand when I say your name. Laci Abbot..." I called six names, skipping Lily Chen, then I continued, "You six, and ONLY you six, will get into the hot tub first, but stay to listen to the rest of what I say. You can put your hands down now. Okay, quite frankly, a dozen or more girls trying to leap into the tub at the same time is scarily unsafe. The first six alphabetically will get in when we WALK - not run, but walk - there. After I've joined them in the tub, they will sit on my lap in alphabetical order. As I finish each girl she will get off me, and out of the tub, and the next dry girl will get in. Julia is in charge of the time. Most importantly, I will not have chaos like we had at the beginning, because Julia is so small and could very easily get hurt, so NO chaos, madness or running. Do you all understand how we're doing this?" They did, and were eager to get started. Before then, I explained, "Lily, I left you out of the list, but you're free to join in whenever you want. Do you want me to help you up, or carry your through to the other room?" "I'm okay. I want little rest, then I walk." "Okay. Will some of the later girls please collect up the towels first and bring them with you when you come? Okay, the rest of us let's WALK to the tub." I stood up and walked into the other room. Julia and Carol were in the tub, Julia sitting on Carol's lap, and they were kissing. This surprised everyone, including me. We'd all forgotten about that. I recovered fastest. I resumed my walk to the tub, intending to climb in. I was still wearing the same condom I'd used on Lily, so there was no reason for me to waste time. My movement got the rest of the girls moving too. #1: As I was walking closer and getting in, I told my two girls, "I had great fears of two dozen crazy girls all leaping into the tub and burying you under them. Like how they almost killed me earlier today. I must be much better at organizing than you are, Julia, because I've got these girls organized to have only six of them in the tub at a time, and to rotate across my cock in strict alphabetical order." "Good. Carol and I can go back to our kissing. I wanted to ask Lily how she enjoyed herself. Where's is she?" I started answering, "She's resting. She'll..." (I had been about to say, " ... join us soon", but got totally interrupted.) The rest of my sentence was drowned out by the floodgates opening (i.e., all the other girls' mouths). Lots of comments like, "She's great." | "She'll be here shortly." | "She and Mark had lovely sex." | "Mark wasn't rough at all." | "How come Mark wasn't rough? You said he always acts the same as he did with Alexis." Hannah very definitely wanted to know the answer to the last listed question. She stated, "I gave up my turn to Lily because you said Mark was always rough. But he wasn't rough at all, and I would have enjoyed sex like that. I'm unhappy that you lied to me like that, Julia." #3: #2: #4: Julia said, "I'm quite happy to answer your questions, but all this is using up the remaining time. Why don't you start trying Mark out, and I'll talk while that's going on?" The girls couldn't think of any reason not to do exactly that, and the first six started getting into the tub. Julia said, "Mark, your new watch has a second hand and is waterproof, right?" "Ahh, yes." "Is it in the cubbyhole with your clothes?" "Yes. I took it off out of habit." "No problem. Savannah, would you please look in Mark's cubbyhole for his watch please." Julia directed her to the right one, and Savannah started searching. I suddenly thought of something that I'd arrogantly (imagine that!) failed to consider. "Hang on girls. When I counted off the first six alphabetically, I didn't consider that some of you might not want to get into the hot tub. I didn't mean to imply that I expected all of you to have sex with me, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I'm sure there must be some girls here who're saving themselves for their Mr. Right. I'm right about that, aren't I?" There were some silly comments (good for the ego though), such as me being, "Mr. Fucking Fantastic" (from Alexis), and other similar, although more ladylike, comments from many of the others. But there were some girls who did not want to do IT. All the panty wearers, and a few others. Seven of them, in total. #4: #2: #2 and #3 stopped to think about it, but #4 already knew the answer. #4: One of the six girls already in the tub (Eileen, fourth in the list), hesitantly said, "Umm. I'm not sure. I didn't want to bring it up and make a fuss." Julia announced, "You should have. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: we are NOT forcing you to do anything you don't want to, ESPECIALLY not to have sex! You can ALWAYS say no, especially about that. I don't want any of you to think that there's any pressure on you, not even peer pressure, so let's do this: When you get onto Mark's lap, Mark will let each of you put his cock into you, by your holding it when you sit down. If you don't want to have sex, but don't want the other girls to know, just hold Mark's cock so it goes up between your two stomachs. No one else will be able to see. You can even bounce up and down and make noises to fool everybody. Only you and Mark will know, and Mark will pretend along with you to keep it secret. I'm perfectly happy, and I'm sure Mark is too, if all you do during your turn is sit in his lap and cuddle..." #4: " ... This is NOT about sex, this is about having a little piece of quality one-on-one time with Mark..." #4: #3: " ... Those of you still wearing underwear can get into the tub with it on, if you like, although that'll mean it'll be wet when you go home shortly. Or you can take it off. Personally I think it's totally obvious that you're safe with Mark, and I doubt the sight of yet one more pussy is going to turn him into a mad, unstoppable sex monster. Even if he did, we've got him badly outnumbered so I'm sure we could hold him down, especially now that Donna's no longer here to beat us up for him, haha. But, as I said, it's totally up to you." The bra and panty wearer (whose name was Princess - what were her parents thinking?) asked, "Can we have our 'quality time' with Mark outside of the pool?" That sounded reasonable to me, so - because that is how these things work - Julia said, "No. With so many girls Mark can't cater to special requests, otherwise everything turns to chaos. It's also a lot less comfortable for him to have girls climbing on and off him without the support of the water. But, more than anything else, if you're not willing to get wet, then you can't be very interested in Mark, so why should he bother wasting time with you." "Umm, it's not that I'm worried about getting wet. It's just that I'm not comfortable being naked. You said you wouldn't force us to do anything we're not comfortable with." Julia answered, "Nor will I. No one is forcing you to get naked. You can choose to get into the tub with your underwear on, or you can choose not to hug Mark at all, both of which preserve your modesty. It's your choice. All we're doing is not allowing you to dictate your own terms. I'm not trying to be mean, but with twenty four of you here, allowing each of you to define how you each want to do everything would be unworkable. That's the situation, Princess." "But you shouldn't penalize me for being modest. Being modest is GOOD. Too many girls aren't modest. It's not fair that..." "I am not penalizing you; YOU are. You are putting your modesty ahead of getting close to Mark. I've wasted far too much time on this discussion already. I'm sure everyone else knows that they have to throw their modesty away when they're with Mark, so let's get on with the Hot Tub Quality Time." I could easily see the "Throw Modesty Away" point hitting home with nearly all the girls. That was good. Two of the modest girls dropped their panties, which pleased me considerably. I enjoy logic, and found the logic of Julia's argument about them throwing away their modesty to be very convincing. I looked (as you do, at such times), and was puzzled by their both having strings hanging down from their pussies. #2: #4: #3: #4: #3: #2: #4: Savannah had long since located the watch, and now passed it to Julia. Julia passed it on to Carol, saying, "Can I ask you to do me a favor please? Would you do the timing, as I'll be talking too much? It'll mean that you're in the tub while Mark is having sex, but there won't be anything to see, so you shouldn't get too uncomfortable. You can do that, can't you?" "I think so. I'll try and see how it goes. I can always get out if it causes me trouble." "Brave girl, thank you. Each girl will get a minute and a half. We'll start when the second hand's at the 12 to make it easy for you. All you need to do is call out 'Next girl' every ninety seconds. Don't worry about what's happening, just call out 'Next girl' every ninety seconds, okay?" "Sure, that's easy." To the crowd, Julia said, "I know you've got some questions and I've also got some things to say. We'll talk while Mark's entertaining each of you. Everyone should hang around even if it's not their turn so they can hear. Unless ANYONE wants to go home?" Said Julia, pointedly staring at Princess Modest Cock Grabber (she'd been "hands on" during the kiss and breast fondle game earlier), who just hung her head. Laci was the first, and Julia made her hover near me, until Carol was ready to say, "Go." While Laci was hovering, I quickly and quietly asked Julia about the tampon wearing girls being in the water with us. Julia answered, "It's okay, Mark. Don't worry about it." I ignored her advice and kept worrying about it. Seeing my expression, Julia added, "TRULY Mark. It's okay. Nothing bad is going to happen. Relax." I partially relaxed. "Go." From Carol. ------- Chapter 115: Hot Tub Party; 90-Second Notches Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Laci had no hesitation going for the main prize, inserting it in her, and expressing her happiness at achieving it. #4: I won't bother describing the 90-second fucks. A couple of details get mentioned below, but that's about all. Not that I didn't enjoy them, because I SURE did, but they were obviously all very similar, especially as the water made it very hard to get any sort of rapid movement going; a problem I hadn't foreseen as being as significant as it was. Julia said, "I know one of your questions is about my statement that Mark always acted the same. The one Hannah called me a liar about..." #3: #4: We got our feet well planted and our hands under Laci's armpits, ready to quickly lift her off and leap out of the tub after Julia. " ... Mark DOES always act the same. You've heard Mark described as a fantastic lover by several girls. That wouldn't be possible unless he was smart enough - which he obviously is - to give each girl exactly what she wanted. He always considers and acts on each girl's individual desires and needs. You've seen Mark all day, and he's been considerate to everyone all day. Apart from Hannah, you've all seen him at school all year, and he's always considerate. He only had fifteen minutes to please Alexis, so he gave her what she wanted." "Fuckin' A!" agreed Alexis. "When he had sex with Lily he did the same as he ALWAYS does - which is what I said before - he considered her needs and gave her what she wanted. Just as he would have done with Hannah, had she not given up her turn." "But," protested Hannah, "I didn't know that! When you said he always acts the same, I thought you meant he was always violent. I hate violent sex. That's a large part of why I prefer sex with girls." That surprised quite a few of the other girls, who hadn't known about the nature of Hannah's relationship with Laila (or Baby, snigger). Julia answered, "You've had hours in Mark's company and I'm sure Laila has told you stories about what he's like at school and what other girls think of him, particularly his lovemaking. Laila told us before that she'd regaled you with stories about Mark's sexual prowess. Despite all that, you leaped to a conclusion that was obviously wrong. I'm not responsible for the quality of your thinking, Hannah, and I've got lots of better things to do than run around pointing your mistakes out to you. I was tempted to, because I'd been so impressed by your guess of zero seconds, but there are plenty of other girls for Mark. Whether it was you, Lily, or anyone else didn't matter to Mark, so it didn't matter to me." "But, but you KNEW I'd made a mistake. You probably deliberately said it the way you did to fool me. That's not fair!" "Of course I said it deliberately, knowing it'd fool some of you. It WAS fair, because I didn't aim my comment at you, I aimed it - fairly - at everyone. I wanted to see how many of you trusted Mark. As it turned out every single one of you recoiled from Mark except for Alexis, but she had good reason not to, haha. Lily was the smartest of all of you, so she got the reward. That's how life works. Mark can't keep dating twenty four of you at a time. Soon Mark and I are going to sit down and decide which of you he will continue to invest his time in, and which he won't. Whether you trust him is a VERY significant factor." "But that's not fair," protested one girl, "we didn't know we were being tested." "Next girl!" announced Carol. Everyone looked at Laci, who'd been enjoying herself and did not want to stop. She stayed on my cock, trying to get a couple more wriggles out of the experience. Julia looked back at the girl who'd complained about no knowing they were being tested and answered, "That's a foolish thing to say. Whenever you're on a first date with a boy, you carefully watch his every word and move. If he says or does anything wrong - especially if he puts a hand wrong - it immediately gets counted against him. You all know that you deliberately test boys to see how they'll react. I just did the same thing you all do, on Mark's behalf. It's even more important for him, because there are an unmanageably large number of you..." #3: #4: #2: " ... Are there any more questions?" "Yes," declared Alexis immediately. "When can I get another fuck from Mark? Now's good for me, haha." "It's entirely up to Mark, of course..." #4: " ... But I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. Every girl he fucks wants more, and there are dozens or even hundreds waiting for their first time. It could be weeks, months or never. It all depends on how much he enjoyed you compared to all the other girls. Or maybe it'll depend on his mood. For all I know, in a few days he might tell me that he's in the mood for another session with you. I've got your number, so I'd call you and tell you to get your butt over here pronto, so Mark can slap it some more, haha. Don't hold your breath, but if he or I call, drop everything and come running. That applies to all of you, of course, not just Alexis." One of the other girls said, "You mean Mark or you can call us and we have to come running, so he can fuck us? Get real! That's NEVER going to happen!" Julia said, "It might never happen with you. It's ENTIRELY your choice. I keep saying that phrase over and over again. If Mark or I call you, you don't HAVE TO come. OF COURSE you don't have to! We'd be stupid if we thought that. If you want to say 'No thanks, I'm busy," then that's no problem at all. We'll just cross you off our list and Mark will call some other girl. Nothing could be easier." The girl whose turn it was on my cock, who had been waiting increasingly impatiently, finally said, "Ahh, excuse me, but Laci hasn't got off yet, and it's supposed to be my turn." Julia helpfully answered, "Yes. I'm surprised you haven't done anything about it." "ME! But I thought you would." "I'm too busy answering questions, and you already know I don't care who he fucks. If you want to let Laci have your turn that's your business." "MY TURN!" "Sure. You heard me ask Carol to call 'Next girl' every ninety seconds. When's the next girl's turn start Carol?" "About ten seconds," supplied Carol. "THAT'S NOT FAIR! I want my turn!" "I agree," said Julia, "Laci has been very selfish. She knows we have a limited time and she's hogging it all to herself." Laci was starting to look a little worried. Perhaps this hadn't been such a good idea after all? Julia is an evil character. "GET OFF LACI!" screeched Girl#2. "Next girl!" declared Carol. "GET OFF LACI!" repeated Girl#2, even more urgently. Julia said, "It's too late. Laci used up all your time. Who's the next girl?" "Me!" As Girl#3 got to her feet. "I WANT MY TURN!" said Girl#2. Which I thought was an unnecessary statement, as I was pretty sure all of us already knew that. "It's MY turn!" insisted Girl#3. Another unnecessary statement. Laci was looking back and forth between #2 and #3, nervously, but not getting off either. "But I haven't had my turn!" said #2. #2: "But it's MY turn now," said #3. "Get off him, Laci!" "Yeah, get off Laci," commanded #2. Laci didn't move nearly fast enough for either girl - by about 110 seconds, I figured. Both of them grabbed hold of her and heaved her off. Poor Laci made a frantic effort to hang on, but a girl sitting in a hot tub hasn't got a snowball's chance of remaining seated when two irate girls - with their feet well planted and with plenty of grip and leverage - decide that her time is well and truly up. Laci was jerked off me and flung across the tub. Fortunately the water provided plenty of cushioning, as did the girls numbered 4, 5 and 6. #4: "One minute left, {giggle}," announced a very helpful Carol. Not only did I have a front row seat, I WAS the seat! Girl#2 had been more encumbered by Laci, so #3 got to try to put herself onto me first. Unfortunately for her, moving in water is so slow that she hadn't accomplished this before #2 was able to reach over and pull her off. Giving #2 about four seconds to try to get herself onto me. Nowhere near long enough, and #3 pulled her away. It was clearly impossible for either of them to get onto me before the other girl pulled her off. The standing girl had too much advantage. It only took them one more complete cycle before they realized this themselves. Girl#3 appealed to higher authority. "Julia, whose turn is it?" "Yours." "Thirty five seconds left," announced Carol. "It's MY turn," insisted both #3 and #2. Then #3 made another attempt to sit on me. Girl#2 cried, "ARGH!" She turned on Laci, cowering on the other side of the pool. "BITCH! I've lost my turn because of you!" Girl#3 achieved her goal, "AT LAST!" "Twenty five seconds left." "Argh!" moaned #3, as she tried to get the best value she could out of her paltry turn. #4: #2: Laci pleaded, "I didn't know. I'm sorry. I just thought I'd get some extra time. It was so nice." #3: Julia said, "The girls who have had their turns, or missed their turns, have to get out of the tub. There's not enough room for everyone in here. Once you've got out, get dressed, because this date will end right after the last girl finishes." Laci couldn't get out fast enough, which was unusually obedient of her. She clearly didn't want to stay and face #2's wrath, and kept looking over her shoulder at #2, expecting the worst. Rather than getting out, Girl#2 again screeched, "Argh!" in frustration. She paused trying to think of a solution, but couldn't, and then accepted the inevitable and started moving to get out. Eileen, who would be Girl#4, said, "Umm, I can't decide whether to do IT, or just cuddle. But I think I'd rather give up my turn to Tianna." (Girl#2). "Is that okay, Julia?" "Of course it is, sweetie. That's very nice of you." Tianna quickly turned to Julia, and excitedly checked, "I can have a turn?" "Eileen's giving you her turn." "THANK YOU, Eileen. Thanks VERY much. I REALLY want to do this!" "Yes, I could tell, {giggle}. A LOT more than I do. I like Mark, but I don't think I'm ready to do THAT yet." "Next girl!" Tianna came over to me as fast as possible, saying to Girl#3, "Get off. It's MY turn now!" "But I've only had thirty seconds," pleaded Girl#3. "Can't we share?" "You didn't want to share with me when I was ahead of you." Tianna ended the discussion by pulling Girl#3 off me, and replacing one pussy with another. #4: #2: Girl#3 left the pool, not very happy about having to do so. Laci got a dirty look. Eileen asked Julia, "I guess I have to leave the pool too, don't I?" "I'm afraid so, sweetie. That's how it has to work." "{Sigh}. I'm sorry, Mark. I want to cuddle with you, at least." I disengaged my lips from Tianna's, figuring she'd have to be cruel not to allow me to cheer Eileen up for a few seconds. "I'm sorry too, Eileen. I hope there'll be other opportunities in the future." I glanced at Julia, to find out whether I'd have other opportunities in the future. Julia smiled, so I said, "I'll try to make our next time extra special for you." "{Sigh}. Thanks. You're very nice. I wish ... Oh well." Eileen got out of the pool, gave Laci a dirty look, saying, "I lost my turn because of you." Three girls were pissed off at Laci. Probably four, assuming Julia was too. I hope the extra few seconds on my cock had been worth it. Laci pleaded again, "I didn't know. It was only a few seconds. Julia could easily have let everyone have their full turns after me." Julia wasn't going to let that stand, "I've tried very, very hard to make EVERYTHING to do with all of you having a chance to be Mark's girlfriend as fair as possible. I believe in fairness! Some of you have tried to accuse me of being unfair today, and I'm sure many more girls will try to accuse me of the same thing in the weeks and months to come, until Mark makes his choices. So I do my absolute best to be TOTALLY fair. You did NOT have just a "few extra seconds", Laci, you had very close to an extra two minutes. If it wasn't for your being pulled off, who knows how long you would have wanted. I have no trouble imagining five minutes, or ten minutes, but let's just assume just the extra two minutes. I have to be fair, which means if you get an extra two minutes, so must every other girl. Which works out to be an extra three-quarters of an hour. You could've easily worked that out for yourself, if you'd thought about it. -- "There is NO WAY Mark can afford to spend an extra three-quarters of an hour here. I've already told you that he's working on a very important project with my father tonight, which is far more important than all of you put together. My father's already working on it, in case some of you didn't notice him come in to talk with Mark about the essential equipment that Mark's got in his car. Mark should be helping my father already, instead of sitting in a hot tub playing with all of you. Mark's trying to be as fair as he can to everybody. I'm trying to be fair. You knew everything I just said Laci, but you still refused to get off. -- "You know Mark and I are fair. Mark's going to treat Chloe with exactly as much consideration - remember how considerate he is? - as any other girl. He's not going to give her special attention because she's got big tits, and he's not going to give you extra time just because you went first. Especially in this case, where any extra time he spends here means he spends less time working with my father on their project. Mark will treat Chloe, you, and every other girl, with the consideration that your personalities deserve. How much consideration do you think your personality deserves, Laci?" I don't think Laci could find a number low enough, because she didn't answer. Maybe the answer was written on the floor, because she was studying it. To help Laci work out the answer, by giving her another example to work with, Julia added, "And how much consideration is Mark - and me too - going to give Eileen for her personality?" Eileen perked up immediately, asking happily, "Me?" Julia answered, "If you were Mark, who would you rather have as a girlfriend: a selfish, inconsiderate girl; or a generous, caring girl?" "Wow." And because Eileen wasn't a dumb girl, she added, "He should pick ME!" "So far it's looking that way, Eileen. Your act was the nicest one I've seen today. There were some other ones, like Chloe giving Mark a piece of her pizza. Savannah was great with her removing her bra at lunch - I know Mark liked that - and she was helpful replacing Anna to put Mark's condom on too. There were a few other kind acts today, but distressingly few. It's early so don't get too excited, Eileen. I know a lot of you have volunteered to help convince Chloe how trustworthy Mark is, for example, and your doing that well will make it much easier for Mark and me to teach Chloe that she CAN trust some guys, starting with Mark. I'll make sure I ask Chloe on Monday to tell us who spent how long with her, and who was the most helpfully convincing, that way we'll be able to FAIRLY appreciate each of your efforts." #3: "It's not over for you yet, Laci. You've still got hope. Mark and I haven't yet decided to drop anyone from this group, so until then there are opportunities for you all to shine. You can give up, if you're a quitter, but I think the chance of having a fantastic life with Mark, flying all over the world, meeting incredible people, buying fantastic clothes, and everything else you'll do, is well worth a few weeks of effort. But that's up to you, of course." Laci asked, "I can STILL be picked?" "Anyone can still be picked. Not after they've been fully dropped, like Dakota, but no one has been dropped from this group yet. So try your hardest, and who knows how wonderful your life could become." Laci started immediately, "I am VERY sorry, Julia and Mark, that I was so stupid and selfish. I won't do it again, I PROMISE!" I was about to say "You're welcome," but Julia beat me to it with, "It's pointless apologizing to us, as it wasn't us that you wronged, it was the girls whose turns you selfishly disrupted, or in Eileen's case, lost. You need to make up with them, and I somehow doubt that a simple apology will count for much. I'll leave you to work that out among yourselves." (Carol had been doing her timekeeping duties, and continued to do so, but I've stopped bothering to record the disruptions here. I let you know #4's total for our final Fuck Count later.) Julia said, "Are there any more questions from anyone, before I get on to the topics I want to talk about?" "Yes," said one so far unnamed girl (unnamed for a little reason that will be made clear shortly). "You told Alexis a while ago that when Mark calls up for sex, we have to come running or we get crossed off the list. It's not right that he can just call up and demand we come to him and go to bed with him. That's not how people should behave. It's WRONG!" This was the girl who'd argued the same point back when Alexis asked about having more sex with Mark. Julia said, "So you think it's wrong that one person can dictate another person's actions, especially about sex?" "It's VERY wrong! It's immoral." "Then stop doing it!" commanded Julia "What? I'M not doing it, MARK and you are." "Yes you are! If Mark or I call a girl, then it's entirely up to her whether or not she says no. Mark and I aren't going to beg her, force her, or apply any coercion. We'll just hang up. We're not forcing anybody, just like we haven't been forcing anybody all day. How many times do I have to keep saying that? Of course there are consequences, because any girl that says no to Mark will be letting him know that she doesn't like him very much, but that's ENTIRELY her choice and her right. Neither Mark nor I will ever DEMAND a girl has sex with him. -- "We were talking about Hannah just a few minutes ago. Hannah was very annoyed that I didn't explain to her that she was wrong in thinking Mark was a violent lover. I've told you all that Mark and I won't coerce any of you into anything. If I had tried to convince Hannah she was wrong, then that could've been interpreted as me trying to coerce her. Of course I knew she was wrong, but that's what everyone always thinks when they argue with someone. You all saw what I did with Hannah; as soon as she expressed reluctance, I let someone else have the choice. So don't you DARE try to suggest that we are forcing or demanding anybody do anything, because that's completely untrue, and you all know it. We're not even trying to persuade you, so we're obviously not doing anything stronger." Several of them were nodding. -- "YOU can say no if Mark or I call you, just like every other girl can. You know that. So why do you keep telling everybody that you think it's wrong that they've got a choice whether they say yes or no? To me it's obvious that you don't believe people should have a choice about who they have sex with. YOU are trying to CONVINCE them to always say no. That makes you guilty of EXACTLY the same crime that you are falsely accusing us of." "That's not fair. You've twisted my words around. I..." "I have NOT twisted your words. You said it was not right that Mark could call up and ask a girl for sex. There's nothing immoral about that at all. Mark can call up anybody and ask them for a million dollars, if he wants. They are, of course, perfectly entitled to say yes or no, as they wish. That's their choice. There's nothing immoral about it. It'd be a stupid waste of time, but not immoral. Anybody can ASK anybody anything. Just so long as it IS a question and no coercion is applied, then it's moral." "But there is coercion. You said that if the girl says no you'll cross her off the list. That's blackmail!" "Wrong again! If Mark called you up and asked for a million dollars, and you said no. Then the next day he called again, and asked the same question, you'd start getting annoyed. If he repeated it day after day you'd get very annoyed. Your annoyance would be justified because he'd be wasting your time. By far the most moral thing he can do is call the girl, and if she says no, never call her again. Of course, if she said yes, then obviously it'd be fine to call her again some other day, because she's shown she wants such calls. To make your accusation even sillier, you're objecting that saying no to sex removes you from the list of girls that Mark THINKS wants to have sex with him, because those are obviously the girls that he's calling. Isn't it obvious that if you just said 'No, I don't want to have sex with Mark', then that means that Mark should no longer think you want sex with him? It can't be any simpler than that!" "But it might just be that the girl doesn't want sex THEN. Why should she be crossed off from the list totally? That's not fair!" "What? You want Mark to call the same girl day after day at random times even though she keeps saying no? Make up your mind!" Several of the other girls laughed at that. "We just agreed that the most moral action was to call just the once. More often than that could even be considered coercive, and we'll NEVER do that. What we will do, is cross the girl off the list. That is the ONLY moral thing to do." "But I might want sex later. I may not want it exactly at the time Mark called. It may not be convenient. But maybe I want it later, maybe after I get to know him better. It's not fair that I'd be crossed off the list because I didn't come running the second Mark demanded it. That's not how relationships work." "First, you used the word 'demanded' again. I'm going it ignore it though, because all of us knows that accusation is wrong. We will NEVER demand! -- "Second: 'Not how relationships work'. How much experience have you had in knowing how relationships work with a guy who is the best overall athlete in the world and could easily be number one in a dozen or more sports, AND who is also a genius of Einstein's level, AND is also incredibly muscled and good looking, AND is also incredibly nice? How many relationships with such people have you studied? The answer is obviously zero because there's never been a guy like Mark before. If dozens or hundreds of girls want such a relationship with Mark, who are you to say it shouldn't be done that way? The only relationship of Mark's that you have half a say in is your own. So stop telling other girls how to manage their relationships with Mark. That is their choice, and you are morally wrong to impose your values on them. -- "Third, if a girl is crossed off the list, I've not said a single word that implies SHE can't call up Mark or me, and ask to be put back on the list, or to call him up and ask for sex. If it's moral for Mark to call the girl, it's certainly equally moral for the girl to call Mark." I could see virtually every girl's eyes light up at that news, which was actually a worry because some of these girls were voracious. I'd seen how some of these girls get when they're excited, and it's truly scary. -- "Of course," Julia continued, "Mark is EXTREMELY busy. He's completing his bachelor's next year, for goodness sake! Not to mention the dozens and dozens of other girls he's got available to screw. So it is almost impossible to imagine that he'll be free for some random sex at precisely the moment that you call. His time is booked up DAYS in advance! Almost certainly - you might as well say certainly - Mark will say no. As we discussed before, the girl can NEVER call a second time, because that's immoral and coercive. If that happened more than a few times, Mark would have to call the girls parents and complain that the girl was sexually harassing him. -- "It's quite obvious that BY FAR the most moral process is for Mark to call the girls when he's available for sex, and for them to tell him yes or no, as they're FREE to choose. Then for Mark to NEVER again call girls who say no, which he ensures by crossing her off the list of girls he thinks want sex with him. If she later decides that she does want sex with Mark, she can call to ask for sex, but the chance of her being told yes is virtually zero and she'd never get another chance. Or she can call and ask to have her name added to the list. But Mark's list will soon contain the names of hundreds of girls who'll come running whenever he wants, so I can't imagine why he'd bother putting such an erratic girl back on it. To me that girl sounds like too much of a nuisance to bother with. He'd put her back on the list, but on the bottom of it. -- "Anyway, what I just described is CLEARLY the most moral way of doing it. If you don't agree, feel free to say no if Mark ever calls you. Just don't try to force your values upon other people. That's immoral, and it's hypocritical as you just tried to accuse us of exactly that." [A few hours later I PRAISED Julia for the above. She told me that she'd worked out most of this 'logic' (hehe) some days earlier, and had been waiting for the chance to use it. Julia had appeared to be outraged, but had actually been close to wetting herself with laughter. The girl - who I deliberately left nameless in this document, to show my contempt for anyone who knee-jerk argued self-centered morality without bothering to think about the circumstances - was not invited to any future Mark-centered functions. Julia didn't drop her now because Julia wanted Chloe pushed into my web with a very clear message from the maximum number of girls, and without any negative incidents being part of the story she'd hear.] "But... , but you're saying Mark can call a girl whenever he wants, and demand... , and tell... , and ASK her to come immediately. That's not right!" There was sufficient laughter from the other girls that Julia didn't need to bother arguing it further. Julia couldn't resist adding, "You haven't understood much about Mark. First, the sex that any girl has with Mark is the best sex of her life, isn't that right Lily, Laila, Pat, Alexis?" Agreements from all of them, including an emphatic, "Fuck yes!" from Alexis. Julia continued, "My opinion is the same, as I'm sure you all knew." I was VERY sure I was the best guy Julia had EVER had sex with, haha. "Feel free to disagree with me girls, but if Mark called up any of us and offered sex, we'd come running. I know I would. How about the rest of you?" The consensus was, "Fuck yes." Julia continued, "You all saw how incredibly reluctant Mark was to even hold a breast unless his invitation was explicitly and strongly given. You've got to grab his hand and shove it against your own breast, otherwise he'll sit there twiddling his thumbs for hours, rather than risk upsetting you by his being too forward. What's the chance of him calling up and - haha, DEMANDING sex?" Lots of the girls laughed at that. "So why did we spend all this time arguing about it?" asked the nameless girl. "Because I'm trying to train Mark to be more assertive. Hopefully one day he will start calling girls. But I know Mark, and I'm sure he'll only ever call girls who've made their ENTHUSIASTIC willingness perfectly clear, like Alexis, for example." "Fuck yes. Anytime, anywhere, any position." "Mark's list is only going to have girls on it that he's VERY sure about because they're BEGGING him to call them. Girls who are not so full of themselves that they think they're superior to Mark. Mark is so much superior to ALL of us that our insisting he subsume his desires to our pride is ridiculous. I've told you that the normal rules don't apply to Mark. You've seen that even my parents, the DMV, OSU and several important people already know that. One of the rules that doesn't apply, is that the girl is in control of dishing out the sex. With Mark, it is Mark that's in control of that. He is SO MUCH in control that to even dream that you have the faintest hint of power over him is truly absurd. Your only power, is the power to say no, and you only get to use that once." "Ahh, Julia," asked a new girl, "what if we're having our period?" "Sorry, I should have made that clear. By all means tell Mark you've got your period if you have. I strongly caution you against lying about it though. You all need to listen to this VERY CAREFULLY. You should never, EVER lie to Mark. First, he hates lies. Both Mark and I are extremely truthful and moral people, so if you get caught in a lie, you won't get a second chance. Second, he's an incredible genius, and his ability to catch you telling lies is far greater than you can imagine. Hannah, do you know how he can tell when you're sneaking up on him?" "No, dammit! And I WANT to know! It bugs the hell out of me. Do you know how?" "I am not going to tell you. I will NEVER go against Mark's wishes, and he clearly doesn't want you to know how. My point is that we all lie to boys about when our periods are, but you'd be extremely stupid to take a relationship-ending risk like lying to Mark, when you've got no way of knowing how much, and how, he understands things. So, provided you're truthful, periods are a perfectly acceptable excuse. Just like they are for the girls who have them now. Other GOOD reasons are perfectly acceptable too. Remember that Mark can simply call up another girl, so it's not like your availability matters to him. If one of your immediate family was seriously sick in the hospital, for example, that'd be perfectly acceptable. He's not exactly a tyrant, is he? -- "I meant Mark will cross you off his list if you honestly don't want sex, or you tell lies to cover up the fact that you can't be bothered with it right now. You either say yes or no, or you have a very good, truthful reason, which includes periods. Those are your three options. Lying is simply stupid, so I won't even count it, although I'm sure plenty of you will try to lie to Mark at some stage. That'll be the end of you. We need to reduce the numbers of you anyway, so I won't be sorry to see any liars go." -- "Enough of that topic, I've got a few more I want to discuss and time is running out. The first is titled, 'What Happens Here, Stays Here.' That's not a sacrosanct rule, as I've already asked you to help me with Chloe, but I urge you all to be extremely cautious who you tell what to. Telling virtually no one would be best. If in doubt, keep it to yourself. I'm suggesting this for your benefit rather than Mark's or mine. You've seen that my parents support what we're doing here. Mom even asked if we needed any more condoms and Dad came in while Mark was inside Lily, so I think it's clear my parents are cool with it. Same with Mark's parents, so you can't get Mark or me into any trouble. Most of you are in VERY different situations. Most of your parents would have a fit if they knew a fraction of what happened here today. Just look at what you've been doing the last few minutes, or are still lined up to do. Yes, I see panicky looks on your faces. That's why I suggest you keep your mouths shut, except when you talk with Chloe; but please not around her kitchen table where her parents will hear, haha. -- "Also, most of you have got boyfriends, who I'm sure you don't want to find out about this either. I don't know who half of your boyfriends are, but I know that Mark is MILES above their league, and you know it too. Clearly you should all try your hardest to win the position as Mark's girlfriend, but you'd be smart not to let your boyfriends find out. If you want to break up with your boyfriend anyway, then break up by all means, but don't tell him about this. The other girls would very much appreciate NO boy finding out what goes on here, because if just one of them finds out, then they'll all find out. You know what boys are like..." #2: #3: #4: " ... I'm not talking about Mark, obviously. None of you have ever heard him boast and I doubt you ever will. He won't say a word of this to anyone. That's not how he behaves. I see some of you aren't convinced. Let me put it this way, who is Mark more likely to boast about, his being with you, or his being with college girls? Have any of you heard him boast one single word about any of the college girls he's had sex with? No, of course you haven't. Mark does NOT boast. If ANY story about today or our future dates gets out, it came from one of you, not from Mark. -- "I suggest you be careful of what you say in public. Don't stand around your locker discussing all the sex you participated in here, for example. Mark and I won't get in trouble, but you might, so you'd be well advised not to talk about this unless you're positive you're safe. Any questions?" The only comment of any consequence was Pat proudly announcing that she'd broken up with her boyfriend yesterday, so she could concentrate on being a good Liaison. Julia commended her, so I felt it safe to do so too. A small incident occurred, which happened slightly earlier than this point, but I'll mention it now to keep things tidy. Anna's turn as the next 90-second fuckee came around. I knew Julia had talked to Anna while I was visiting Carol after my fifteen-minute session with Alexis. Anna seemed okay thereafter, but I wasn't really looking forward to my ninety seconds with her in case she flipped out. She approached me, with a very determined look on her face. "Hello Anna." "Hi." So far, so good. The problem showed up when she raised herself well above my cock, and dropped herself onto it. Because of the water, the speed of her drop was very much reduced, the significance of which became apparent when my cock didn't penetrate, hitting a barrier. It didn't take a rocket scientist to work out what that was. Anna groaned in frustration while she raised herself to try again. As much as I wanted to claim one more scalp, I even more didn't want to sit in a pool of bloody water to achieve it. It would have taken her several seconds to raise high, then sink back down again, so I had no trouble at all intercepting her second attempt. I put my hands around her hips and said, "Hold it there, Anna." Not trusting her, I did the holding. "You're a virgin, aren't you?" A question that caught Julia's attention, because I'd asked it loud enough to make sure it did. Julia stopped her conversation to listen. I asked again, "Anna?" "Argh. Yes. This is my last chance. I want to lose it now." I decided not to laugh, settling for a sober, "This is NOT your last chance. You'll have plenty of chances with other boys." "NO. With you! This is my last chance with you! Julia explained that I am too inexperienced to be a good girlfriend for you, because I'm too scared of the things you do a lot of, like sex. I know she's right and I'm not trying to change her mind, but I want to lose my virginity with you." "Thank you for the compliment, but while we're all sitting in a hot tub is NOT a good place. I think the scientific term is 'icky'. We don't want your blood in the water." "It won't be much." I had no idea whether she knew that for a fact, or it was pure fantasy, or somewhere in between, but I didn't care. "It will be SOME, Anna. None of us want ANY in the water. I don't like blood; it freaks me out. We will NOT be doing that in the tub." "Outside then. On the sofa, like Alexis and Lily." I had a suspicion that Vanessa wouldn't appreciate bloodstains on her sofa. Especially not blood from 'there'. "I don't think so, Anna. I think it's best that you leave here today the way you arrived." Which was obviously what Julia was waiting to hear. I doubted Julia would have stopped me if I really wanted to fuck Anna, but this was clearly the best choice. A sad choice, but the best. Julia led Anna away from me. Fortunately Anna seemed resigned to her fate, as she didn't put up a fuss. Julia's next major topic of conversation started, "Before I went to get the pens and paper for our guessing game, I distinctly remember saying I was leaving you to do some kissing, and if the girl wanted, having Mark feel her breasts. But when I watched you after I came back, most of you were grabbing Mark's cock and some of you were asking for Mark to finger your pussy. Did Mark ask you to grab his cock?" Reluctance to look Julia in the eyes overtook every girl. "It's a simple question. Katelin, you grabbed Mark's cock. Did he ask you to do that, or did you decide you wanted to do that all by yourself?" "Umm, other girls were doing it." "Don't make me work my way up through the alphabet asking each of you in turn. Just tell me Katelin, did Mark give permission for you to do that?" "Umm. He didn't say 'No'." "Which presumably means that someone grabbed him first, and he didn't object, so the rest of you kept doing it?" Various mumbled agreements, until the girl who'd first done it said, "I saw you do it to Mark before you left!" "Sure, but I often go to Mark's home at night and sleep with him. Do you all think you can do that too? In case you haven't noticed, I'm ALREADY Mark's girlfriend. Naturally that means Mark and I do things that non-girlfriends - like all of you - don't do. When I left I specifically said 'kissing and breast fondling, ' so you all knew what was permissible. Don't worry about me being angry, because I'm not. I'm just trying to understand what happened while I was away. It looked like most of you decided to grope Mark. Am I correct?" Julia managed to drag their agreement out of them. They were fearful of the consequences, while I was just curious about where Julia was going with this. Her next question was, "Let me ask about getting Mark to feel your pussy. I was there where Savannah asked for it, and judging by everyone's reaction, it was obvious that she was the first girl to ask. Is that correct Savannah?" "It seemed like a good idea. I'd heard he was good." "He IS good. I can definitely confirm that. It WAS a good idea and I'll offer my congratulations for being smart enough to ask. Notice I said 'ASK'. There's nothing wrong with asking. Mark can always say no, which he did to Savannah, although for a different reason. I've absolutely no problem with asking Mark to do something sexual. What I'm puzzled about is that I didn't hear a single girl ask MARK what he wanted. All I heard was a whole lot of girls TELLING Mark what THEY wanted. Why did none of you ask Mark what he wanted to do, or wanted you to do? Why was it all about YOUR desires, and not about HIS desires?" Unsurprisingly, none of them had an answer for that. "Come on. Surely out of twenty four girls, at least one of you thought to ask Mark what he'd like? I know none of the girls I watched did, but SURELY at least one of you did?" Julia knew damned well that none of them had. As soon as one girl had done it, the rest would've had to copy her, and Julia would've seen the result when she arrived. "I'm forced to conclude that not a single one of you considered Mark's pleasure, because your ONLY concern was your own sexual gratification. Is that right?" -- A few silent seconds later, Julia had to repeat, "Is that right? Unless someone speaks up within five seconds, I'll take it that I'm right. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay, let me summarize. In a room of nearly thirty people in total, virtually all of you thought it was acceptable, even fun, to sexually grope Mark, with no regard to his pleasure, only your own sexual gratification. Does anyone disagree with my summary?" "I didn't grope him!" declared Tianna. "Why not? Don't you like Mark's cock?" The reason was discovered: it was the girl after Tianna who thought of doing it, so Tianna missed out. "Are there any SENSIBLE disagreements with my summary?" There were none. "Okay. I've got that now. Mark and I are very moral people, and I just wanted to know what was morally acceptable to all of you. I noticed that even the girls that didn't participate fully had no objection to it, so it was clearly morally acceptable to them too. That's fine, I'm glad I know." We all knew that there was a reason well beyond intellectual curiosity that Julia wanted to know. It was only a matter of waiting until one of the girls asked. Sure enough, one of them weakened, "Ahh, Julia. Why do you want to know?" "I just wanted to make sure that my understanding was correct, and it was. Clearly if all of you thought it was morally acceptable for you to sexually grope Mark in a room full of other people, for your own pleasure, and without regard to his, then it must be okay for him to do the same thing to you. Turn about is fair, obviously." This confused them and me. I was fucking my way through most of them, so groping seemed like small potatoes. "I wish he would!" was the oft-repeated majority opinion. Julia answered, "And he will. Not today, as we don't have enough time left, but over the next week or two, sure." "Huh?" was the next oft-repeated majority opinion. "Are we going to have another get together here?" "No. I'm talking about his doing it at school. Between classes probably, in the hallways, at lunch, whenever he wants." "What!" was the very often repeated majority opinion. "If it's okay for you to sexually molest Mark, without asking for permission and in a room full of people, then it's fair for him to do so too. We don't have time today, so he'll start doing it from tomorrow. By the way, I'm aware that not all of you actively participated. You were all silent, so you can't pretend to be virtuous; 'shy' is probably your entire defense. However, I'll exclude the non-participants from this, so when I say 'all', I'm only talking about the participants. I know who most of them are and Mark can give me the rest of their names later tonight." "That's fine by me," agreed Alexis. "Anywhere, anytime, any position. I'm game. Mark can sexually molest me as much as wants." The others weren't so game. Even Lily was very hesitant, although she eventually conceded, "If Mark wants, okay." Julia said, "You're not listening. I am not ASKING for your permission. You've all already given your permission by doing it to Mark. I'm TELLING you that it's going to happen. You're all pretty girls, so I'm sure Mark will enjoy groping you. Guys like that sort of thing, from what I've been able to learn about guys. I've certainly seen most of them pretend innocence while they get a rub or a grope from some girl or other. It's nice that Mark won't have to pretend, that he can just walk up to any of you and do it." "But we did it HERE. It's completely different in SCHOOL!" "I don't think so. I can't think of a meaningful difference. Not one that changes the morality of the act." "But we could get in trouble. Mark could get in BIG trouble. Very BIG trouble." "He'd never get in serious trouble unless the girl complained, and none of you would do that because you've already given him permission by doing it to him. There are nearly thirty witnesses here that you groped him first. Without your complaint, and with your permission, the worst he could get would be a reprimand. There's no way in the world that our Principal would reprimand Mark. You've seen Mark wander into and out of classes whenever he wants, and there are lots of other special privileges he gets that most of you don't know about." I could think of a couple: the mailbox and photocopying at the office. That was close enough to "lots" for me to keep quiet. "Mark won't even get a reprimand and he'll protect the girl too, so there's no problem. He wouldn't do it in front of a teacher anyway, so it's never going to be an issue." "But the other kids might see!" "I'm sure quite a few of them will. But that didn't stop any of you here. There were 20-odd people watching each of you molest Mark, so you can hardly claim lack of privacy as a difference. Next try!" "But here we all EXPECTED sex. At school the other kids don't expect it." "That makes NO difference to the morality. The act is between Mark and each of you. The other kids aren't participants. Next try!" "But today's been by consent. You said you'd never force us to do anything." "You're right that today's been consensual. EVERY SINGLE ACTIVITY Mark and I have done with all of you today has been by invitation, with many repeated offers to allow you to back out. The guessing game, for example, only half of you entered, and that was perfectly fine with Mark and me. HOWEVER, when you groped Mark's cock, NONE of you asked his permission first. What you did to Mark was non-consensual, proving to Mark and me that you morally approve of non-consensual actions. I'm positive that all of you demand control over who touches YOUR bodies intimately, but that didn't stop you trampling all over that incredibly important right when it came to Mark's body. Next try!" "Mark enjoyed it! He was smiling. Guys like their cocks played with. They're always begging us to do exactly that. It's pathetic really, but they do!" "Mark's enjoyment wasn't on any of your minds. Not a single one of you asked Mark how he liked his cock stroked, and you spent nearly all of your time staring at his cock rather than looking at his face for his reactions, so you couldn't tell if he enjoyed it or not. Mark is so unusual that it's not easy to judge his feelings, especially because he's so considerate and polite that he might have acted as if he was happy to avoid giving offense by refusing you. It's bizarre that he wouldn't want to give offense when HE was the one being molested, but with Mark that's believable. Anyway, if Mark gropes you, you'll probably enjoy it too, so everything is still equal, fair and moral. That's certainly not a moral reason against his groping you. Next try!" "It sort of was consensual. Mark could have easily objected, but he said nothing. We took that as approval." "Mark and I have been bending over backward to give you every opportunity to back out of every single activity. We ask over and over again to make sure all the participants feel happy, and that the non-participants don't feel pressured or bad about their decision. We even suggested that some of the girls who sit on Mark's lap can pretend to put his cock inside them, so peer pressure won't force any of you to do anything you truly don't want to. We do everything we possibly can to make it easy and comfortable for you to say no. We never charged ahead with doing something sexual where the only way for you to stop it was to speak up. How much effort did any of you put into making it easy for Mark to refuse? I bet the answer is 'None whatsoever'. You did not ask him, and Mark did not give permission. Next try!" "Haha," laughed one of the girls, "I've just remembered that Mark wouldn't even touch a breast unless the girl INSISTED. There's no way he's going to grope us. You're just scaring us. I agree we were wrong, and I'm sorry for that. I promise I won't do that again." The others were busy laughing, expressing relief, and promising they'd learned their lesson too. Julia hushed them, then, "You're absolutely right that Mark wouldn't dream of initiating such a contact himself. Zero chance of that happening. HOWEVER, if I tell him to grope any of you, he'll do it. Mark listens to me. Next try!" "Would you REALLY tell Mark to molest us?" I noticed that no one tried to argue that I listen to and obey Julia. Julia said, "I can't think of any reason why not. You deserve it for the way you mistreated him. I can't believe that not a single one of you asked Mark what he would enjoy! You were all entirely focused on your own pleasure. You definitely deserve to be on the receiving end. I think that is PERFECTLY moral and highly APPROPRIATE, considering the way you mistreated Mark." "{Gulp}," was the oft-repeated majority opinion. Julia's threat was entirely believable and widely believed. "None of you have come up with an even vaguely plausible reason not to, so this IS going to happen. Mark and I will discuss it and work out the details between us. There are some rules, for example, a thirty-second time limit. That's the time you had, so Mark will take the same. You went for his genitals, so obviously he can go for yours..." "{Gulp}," was the majority opinion being oft-repeated again. " ... He may decide that he'd prefer to grope some of your breasts, because he's rather partial to breasts. Are there any of you here that object to having your breasts groped, and insist that he only grope your genitals? None? You can if you want, because no one groped Mark's breasts, haha. No one is going to insist on genitals? Okay. By the same logic, he might prefer to play with some of your asses. Do any of you insist on genitals rather than ass?" "Can I ask for all three places please?" requested Alexis. "Haha, I like your attitude, Alexis. I think we can take it that you HAVE asked. Now the ball's in Mark's court, so to speak. You'll have to wait and see. We WILL do this, and you WILL cooperate. However, unlike most of you, Mark and I are very moral people, so I'll offer you an out. Any of you who actively participated in groping Mark's cock may tell me that you don't want to be groped at school. If you tell me that, there will be two consequences: you won't be groped, and you'll never be invited on another date with Mark. Mark is looking for a girlfriend or two, and for several assistants. Because they'll share Mark's life closely, neither of those positions are open to any girl who can't take moral responsibility for her actions. If any of you immorally refuse to be groped, then it would be a complete waste of our time to have you involved in any future dates. So do any of you think the chance of a lifetime with Mark is not worth thirty seconds of having Mark do to you what you did to him?" None of them did, especially not Alexis. Julia added, "Any of you who turn cowardly before you receive your deserved punishment, can tell Mark or me that you want to cancel your permission. Obviously that's the same thing as your giving up on having a life with Mark. Don't even think about begging to be allowed to keep trying for that. You've seen today how moral Mark and I are. What you girls did to Mark was WRONG. You sexually molested him for your own pleasure, with no thought of his consent or pleasure. -- "Okay. You all witnessed that no girl objected. If any of you complains about her paltry little thirty seconds, there are two dozen witnesses that you consented to it in advance. I don't know when Mark will do the gropes. Maybe all of you will be done in a few days, or maybe he'll spread it out to the end of the school year or even longer. That's Mark's choice. Knowing Mark, though, he'll do his best to make sure you enjoy it." Several of the girls believed I was so altruistic that they nodded at that. Julia appeared to have finished, so for some comic relief because they were all looking somewhat worried, I held up my two hands in front on me, looked from one to the other, and back again, then theatrically moaned, "Oh the injustice of it all!" Enough of them looked at me in curiosity, that I explained, "So many girls to grope, but ONLY TWO HANDS! Life is SO UNFAIR!" It helped a little. All I had to do now is find out why on Earth Julia wanted me to molest girls at school. I had no doubt that her stated reason was a load of BS. Carol called, "Time's up!" and there were no more girls left to 'service'. The final count worked out as follows: Lily had joined in, so there were twenty four potential 90-second fuckees. Lily, Pat, Laila and Alexis all took their turns, but they weren't new 'notches on my bedpost' so their 90-second screws weren't counted. Julia didn't even have a turn, so she wasn't counted either. She was busy and probably not in the mood, what with the stress from managing all these silly, selfish, immoral girls. Of the twenty potential new conquests that could've participated, five chose not to get into the tub. Three of them were obviously wearing pads in their panties - something I refused to think about - and two simply didn't want to. Of the fifteen that got wet, you already know that Eileen gave up her turn, and that Anna remained a virgin, leaving thirteen potential new conquests. Two of those were wearing tampons, so we were down to eleven. Of those eleven, three quite openly told me they were virgins and were happy just to play around in other ways for their ninety seconds. Three other virgins had been secretive, whispering their status to me and pretending to insert my cock. All six of the virgins insisted that they thought I was wonderful, which didn't cheer #4 up at all. I thought of checking the truthfulness of their claimed status by fingering them to see if they had a hymen, but it wouldn't have helped as a refusal was still a refusal. I 'scored' with the remaining five. Just FIVE, out of a possible twenty! Oh the injustice of it all! Life is SO UNFAIR! That took my total from eight (including Alexis) to thirteen. The day, overall, had almost doubled my total. Which, I guess, sounds impressive, but I'd hoped for CONSIDERABLY more. Someone needs to do something about periods and virginities, because they're a source of great disappointment. I couldn't figure out how eleven non-Liaisons could enter the "How Long Mark Took To Learn To Play 8-Ball" guessing game we'd played earlier, but far fewer girls want to fuck in comparative privacy in the hot tub. That made no sense at all. I'll even go so far as to say it was illogical. How could evolution have thrown up brains that operate like that? Surely being so inconsistent must be a NON-survival trait! I had a total of nine 90-second fucks (as Lily, Pat, Laila and Alexis count in that total), so it wasn't as boring as it seems. Plus there was plenty of kissing and fondling, and that was good too. But JUST five new notches - good grief! #4: #3: #4: #3: #2: ------- Chapter 116: Hot Tub Party; Two New Abilities Discovered Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Many of the later girls had not bothered to get dressed yet, and Julia pushed them to do so quickly. They needed pushing, or it would have taken hours to get them out the door. If you think girls take a long time to get dressed, wait until you see them doing it when they're TRYING to stall! Fortunately Julia was on the case, and she doesn't stand for much fooling around at the best of times. There were some delays though: we were asked, "This was fun. When can we do it again?" Julia answered, "I don't know yet, as it depends on too many other things. How well you all behave with Chloe and over the next few days is important. So is the behavior of the other girls Mark will be meeting. If they act less selfishly than you, which seems likely, then Mark will probably prefer to have more of his repeat dates with them than you. Carol's girlfriends would be MUCH better, because they'll fall all over themselves trying to please Mark. Not like nearly all of you." #2: The girls pressed Julia for more information about the next time. Especially a couple of the girls who'd been on their period. It was very unfair they'd missed out, "Especially," one of them said, "because I was going to guess 'zero days'." All Julia would say to that was, "There's some merit in what you're saying, HOWEVER, your periods did not stop you trying to please Mark. They only stopped Mark pleasing you. I didn't notice any of you putting any effort into pleasing him, so why should I put any effort into arranging another date for you, just so you have another chance to get Mark to pleasure you?" "We understand that now. We won't make that mistake again. We just got carried away with how fantastic his body is." "In that case let's make the next date on the Saturday four weeks from now." "But, but. Umm. Julia, that means I'll be on my next period again. Can't we make..." "What does that matter? You just said that next date you'll concentrate on pleasing Mark. What's with the pathetic look on your face? Forget it, I'm just teasing you. I've got no idea when the next date will be. We've got far too many other things to think about and do before we worry about that. I'm not going to go out of my way to cater to those of you who feel you missed out for one reason or another, whether it was a period, family obligations, or any other reason. Mark and I will choose another date and let you know. You can come, or not, as you wish. We cannot possibly cater to the individual schedules and other needs of so many of you." As Julia was ushering them out the door, she said, "I REALLY hope some of you wake up and start trying harder. Many of you are my friends, and I'd love to be able to fly a plane load of us to Paris and Rome for a serious shopping trip." That was almost the very last thought Julia left them with. I doubted that was an accident. If there was one thing she knew, it was how to motivate girls. The last process was seeing everyone on their way. Happily, many of them proudly stated they'd visit or call Chloe " ... to help you." There were several attempts at long, drawn out hugs and kisses with me, but Julia kept them extremely short. Most of the girls had their own transport, predominately bikes, and they were soon on their way. Some had arranged pick ups to come when they called, and they were all calling. Julia told them to wait outside, because, "Mark and I have to get busy to catch up on the time we spent on this date." A few girls had transport difficulties though. I offered, "No problem. I've got to get stuff out of my car for Prof, so I might as well drive you home as well." I was already in the process of getting it. "Certainly not!" declared Julia. I looked at her in confusion. Corvallis is a small place, nearly all the small city fitting inside a two mile by two mile square, so car trips are very quick and easy. Julia explained, "If you do that, from this day on EVERY girl that comes to this house will 'unfortunately' have no transport arranged to get home. You'll have to drive them all, just so they can spend a few more minutes with you." Several girls were noticeably disappointed that Julia had seen through their little plan. "They've all got money, so they can spend a few dollars on a taxi if they don't want to walk. You've got far more important things to do with your time than be taken advantage of as taxi driver by dozens of girls." I could think of one "more important thing" I wanted to do right away: take Carol upstairs for a quickie. I was desperate for a cum! I declared, "Damn right! How dare they try to take advantage of my good nature like that. They can walk home if they have to." It turned out that all of them were able to make non-walking, non-taxi, arrangements. Mostly the other girls, who had lifts coming, offering to take them too. Girls can be damned tricky. Fortunately I had a particularly tricky one of them on my side. Carrying my bag of "secret equipment" - which had been my answer to one of the waiting girls who'd asked - Julia and I headed inside. #1: [I think it's obvious, but just to make sure you're aware of it, when the on-duty mind is relieved, the two other minds immediately bring him up to date. So #1 knew how many girls we'd had in the tub, who they were, who the virgins were, and other important information]. #3: #1: #4: Inside, with the door closed behind her, Julia said, "Christ, what a bunch of fools. I don't understand how so many of them can be so self-centered." #1: #4: #1: I told her, "If you don't understand them, then I haven't got a snowball's chance. I had a reasonably good time so I'm not upset, but I am a little disappointed. I thought we had them eating out of our hand after we'd finished the long sports talk. I thought we'd convinced them so thoroughly that we'd overdone it, and that'd be no good." "How do you mean, 'overdone it'? How is that even possible with what we're trying to do?" I explained my logic (my first mistake, applying logic to girls). "If we completely convince all the girls of how special I am, they'll all end up as super-obedient as Lily. Sure I'll get lots of sex, but I'd also like to learn about female tricks. I'm starting to appreciate that females are a LOT trickier than I thought, and I think I need to start learning about some of those tricks. But if we convince them all so well, I won't learn ANYTHING about female tricks. Don't we need some girls, even most of the girls, to be only partially convinced?" "Haha, Mark. You really don't know much about girls do you?..." #3: " ... Convincing them how special you are won't make them obedient in the way you're thinking. Even Lily is not obedient that way. No matter how convinced they are, they'll NEVER forget what they want. They're not going to give up their own desires in order to serve yours. Carol and I are exceptions, and it's possible we MIGHT find another exception one day, but don't hold your breath for that! Lily isn't one; she's just playing a long game. She wants something, and she'll maneuver to get it. When she gave up her seat next to you in the tub, she had no need to announce it so loudly, but she wanted to show off. Likewise when she walked into the Guys' Room naked after all the other girls had dressed. Lily was more interested in showing off to me that she was still naked, than in getting your snacks, which she forgot. Her obedience is great and very useful, but there's no reason not to believe she's as selfish as all the others. She's just less short-sighted about acting on it. I fully expect you'll see her try to pull a trick or two yet. The more convinced girls are about you, the harder they'll try to trick you. You can ALWAYS rely on people's self-interest." "Oh. I didn't think about it that way." By now we were back in the 'party' rooms and had joined in with helping Carol with the cleaning up. Julia said, "Mark, rather than your helping us clean, is there anything you need to do with Dad or anything else more important?" "I'm pretty sure I don't need to do anything with your dad. I've done all the thinking I can do until I actually try it, plus we'll have plenty of time to talk in the car on the way there. In truth, and I mean this VERY sincerely, the only thing I want to do is get upstairs and have some REAL sex, where I actually get to cum! I REALLY want to cum!" After the laughter, and the "Oh you poor boy!" jokes, Julia said, "You seriously haven't cum today?" "No, and it's not natural!" "Why didn't you? You had plenty of time to do so with Alexis and Lily?" "I had to stay hard for all of them, otherwise there would've been some very unimpressed girls. We need to change the way we do these dates so they end with a long fuck, like the one I had with Lily, so I can cum at the end. Those 90-second fucks were impossible from that point of view, especially sitting in the tub." "But I've noticed recently that you can get hard or soft whenever you want. Why not just have a cum whenever you want, then get hard again?" "It doesn't work that way. When a guy cums he's always soft for a while afterward. If I'd cum at the end of Lily, I might not have been any good..." #4: (We were soft now, as the goodbye process had hardly been erotic. My need for a cum was psychological more than anything, but that sure didn't make it any less wanted.) #3: #4: #1: #4: #3: #1: #4: #1: I cut off the sentence I was in the middle of saying, and started again, "Umm, you might be right. I've never tried before..." #4: " ... I always got hard naturally before. Let me take my pants off to try. Just to make sure..." "Yes please," from both my very interested wives. I dropped my pants and shorts. I didn't need to hold up my shirt, as it was a tight T-shirt that didn't reach that far. #4: #1, #3: #4: #1, #3: "Hehe, look at that!" from Carol. We were all already looking. All smiling too. #1: Julia said, "I thought so. But I thought you were already doing it deliberately. Is this really the first time you've deliberately got hard like this?" "Umm, yeah. It was always perfectly natural before, just from what was happening, or by having dirty thoughts - which I am NOT going to describe to you, haha. They're private! Although I must admit that they all involve you two." "Aww, aren't you sweet." "You haven't let me finish. ' ... involve you two', lots of feathers, plenty of flavored yogurt - ideally cherry - and some wind-up racing cars." #3: #1: "Haha. I was right to tell the girls that you have a dirty mind! So if you can get hard whenever you want can you also..." #3: " ... cum whenever you want?" "Umm, I don't know. Let me..." "{Giggle}," x 2 Carol added, "Now we've got some more cleaning up to do. I'll go get a towel, {giggle}." #4: #3: #1: < We can cum on demand. That's quite amazing, isn't it? I wonder how many times in a row we could do it? That one happened too fast to be fun, but obviously we could do it slower and more pleasurably.> #4: #3: #1: Julia called out, "Carol! Come and look at this. It's going to be so funny." #1: "What is?" asked Carol, hurrying back with a towel. "This. You watch this. Okay Mark, get hard!" #3: "Come on, Mark. I know you can do this. You did it just a minute ago." #4: #1: #4: <{Sigh}.> I did a "Go-hard". "{Giggle}," x 2 #3: Julia said, "Come on, Mark. You know what I want. You were staying soft for the first hour, so you don't need to be embarrassed over it. It's not unmanly to get soft. We'll still love you, haha." I did a "Go-soft". "{Giggle}," x 2. [And many more of them followed in the next couple of minutes too.] "Now get hard." "Now go soft." "Now get hard." "Now go soft." "Wow," said Julia, "talk about the PERFECT boyfriend, haha. You REALLY are my Mr. Right, haha." #1: #4: "Spread the towel, Carol. Let's make him cum again." #4: <{Sigh}.> #3: #1: #4: <{Sigh}.> Carol asked, "Can I catch it in my mouth instead?" "Good thinking. Hey! Look at Mark. I didn't ask you to get hard yet, Mark. Getting ahead of yourself, aren't you? Haha." #3: Carol positioned her mouth appropriately, and, as expected Julia politely requested, "Cum, Mark, {giggle}." "Yummy," said Carol, after swallowing. "Stay hard, stay hard. My turn." Julia positioned her mouth at the end of Old Faithful and said, "Cum please." Followed a couple of seconds later by, "Aww, that wasn't much." #4: While Julia had trouble talking because of her mouthful (that may be a slight exaggeration), I did a maxi-go-soft, and pulled up my pants. "The circus is closing for the season." "Aww. That was such a lot of fun..." Carol agreed, "Yeah. That was cool. Can I take you to 'Show N Tell' please, Mark? Haha." "{Giggle}," from my other tormentor. #4: #1: #4: #1: #3: "Look," said Carol, pointing to my cum on the carpet, "I think Mark loves the carpet more than us. Haha." #1: "Thanks Mark," said Julia. "I needed cheering up after watching all those short-sighted, selfish idiots." #4: "You are very, very impressive. You know that, don't you, Mark?" "Yes. I could tell how impressive I was from all the laughter and giggles." "We'll finish cleaning up, check in with Mom and Dad, then take you upstairs and make you feel better." "Ahh, that last point probably isn't going to happen. Not if you mean it the way I think you mean it." "We'll see." I don't know much about females, but I know enough to know that those two words really mean, "You're totally wrong, and I'll show you exactly how and why later." Which she did. In bed, Julia got me to go hard again - which caused them both to giggle again - and then I proceeded to give Julia and Carol a quick orgasm each. I felt better even without bothering to have an orgasm of my own. I was so cummed out that it wasn't worth bothering with a weak, pathetic one. I liked to give my girls a good time, and they deserved it for today. I only had a few 'minor' (maximum sarcasm) worries left. When would Julia see the implications of my go-soft ability on the Annette Neumeyer Incident? Would she realize that my being soft then wasn't because I loved Julia so much that I was ruined for other girls, as I'd allowed her to believe? And would I, and our relationship, survive the explosion if she did put it all together? We didn't have any time for post-coital conversation before dinner, so we had very quick showers and headed downstairs for hard-earned dinners. Or, in my case, "hard, soft, hard, soft, hard-earned dinner." ------- Chapter 117: Hot Tub Party; Pipeline Idea Suggested Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Dinner conversation was very lively, as we entertained the Williams family with incidents from the date. Prof, for example, had us in stitches with the recount of his visit to our room. He'd been tall enough to see over the back of the sofa that the dozen girls had been hiding behind, so was able to see the chaos that had erupted there. It made for some very funny recounting. There were a couple of serious topics. The first was very brief. Prof asked me, "Mark, do you have any idea how long you'll need tonight? I know that's an awkward question because you don't know how successful you'll be, or what unforeseen problems might emerge, but I'm only asking so I have a better idea of what time we should leave and what time we'll probably be back. It's not critical, so just take a guess." Prof had said that roulette takes two minutes per go, so thirty per hour. I could fairly easily imagine that I might need about that number of trials, to test different ways of doing it. Issues like whether it was better to fill all the adjacent pockets with fingertips to stop the ball entering them, or whether it was better to let it enter the wrong pockets naturally and then flick it out, or perhaps to lift it out. Presuming my ability worked usefully, I should be able to find out how in about thirty tests. Then I might need quite a few more tests to see how well it performed. For example, if the best I could do was to get within plus/minus three pockets of the target, then I should play at least another thirty times to get some statistics for how often I hit each pocket as it was unlikely to be a flat distribution. "I'd guess two to three hours should be sufficient. If it took longer than three then I've either hit a serious problem or we're gathering statistics for a wide spread of results, if you know what I mean?" Prof nodded that he did. "Taking less than two is also possible, because it might be very easy, or maybe we quickly find out that it's virtually impossible. But I'd guess two to three hours is most likely." "Let's leave at 7 then. Is that okay with you?" "Sure." It wouldn't leave us much time after dinner, but it would be AFTER dinner, which was the important thing. The other serious topic was introduced by Julia, "I'm not succeeding well enough at getting the other girls to treat Mark properly. I tell them incredible, amazing things, and they nod and act all excited, and then carry on behaving like short-sighted, selfish, silly girls. They revert to their normal behavior if I'm not standing over them, managing the whole thing and essentially forcing or tricking them into behaving the way I want. They can't comprehend that their needs are less important than Mark's, so selfishness rules the day. I could work with them if they realized they actually had to do something rather than sitting on their asses waiting for the world to give them everything they want. -- "Lily's the only one that sees beyond the short term, and she saw the long term virtually immediately. I'm sure she's got her own agenda, because she asks me many questions about Mark's abilities - I mean like his IQ, college studies and other things she knows about - but not many questions about Mark as a person. She's obviously got something in mind, but I'm reluctant to tackle her about her motivation in case it creates a confrontation. I don't want to lose her, because she's the only one of them who's significantly useful to me. She's saved me many hours of work, whereas every other girl has drained my time to some degree or other. My problem is how to get the others to see beyond the short term. -- "The first times I talked to them about Mark, a few days ago, I stressed the most important amazing thing about him, which is his intellectual abilities, but it seemed to go right past them. Even the smart girls couldn't see how important that is. Today I stressed his physical and sporting abilities, and they got far more excited about that, the idiots! They don't seem to understand that a lifetime of intellectual accomplishment is far more valuable than five years or so of whatever sports Mark chooses. How can entertainment be the only thing they comprehend and get excited about? -- "The other thing I could do is emphasize money, but that's a weak point until Mark is rich, then they'll be all over him because I know they understand what 'rich' could mean to them. But nearly all of them will still be short-term thinkers, which means they'll still be nothing more than nuisances. -- "What was particularly annoying about today, is that I picked these girls because I thought most of them would be good replacement Liaisons. Instead they all acted like idiots. I wanted to fire Laila today, but I don't have a good replacement for her. I could pick a replacement more or less at random, but that's not good enough. The ONLY girls here today who were slightly cooperative, were doing so because they wanted sex with Mark. If that's what most interests them about him, they're not likely to become smart, successful Liaisons. They'll be fun for him to play with, but there's no shortage of that type of girl. I want SMART girls, who can be USEFUL. Lying on their backs and waving their legs in the air seems to be about the only things these girls are capable of, Lily excepted. I had an image of our having a large bunch of girls, all eager to be useful and impress Mark. We could choose the most useful to be Liaisons, hopefully all as useful as Lily, and all able to do different things so I could use each of their skills as needed, just like Lily helped with Mark's website. Remind me to show that to you, Mark. -- "I know it'll take time and effort to train up Liaisons, but it's obvious that it's hardly worth bothering with most of the current ones, and it's obvious that anyone I replace them with isn't going to be worth bothering with either. Laila, for example, is almost certainly going to be fired this Tuesday night. She's got a little menage-a-trois going with her sister and another girl. Laila's loyalty is totally to her group. A win-win is fine, but Laila's only interested in making sure her group gets a win, and she's completely blind to Mark's side. It doesn't even occur to her to think about it. I would have fired her already, but I've got no one sensible to replace her with." I interrupted, "Umm. First, I'd like to see my website. I don't know ANYTHING about it, and I am kind of curious, seeing as how it's about me." "I'll show you after dinner. It won't take long as it's very simple." "Thanks. Second, I thought you were intending to pick Katelin. She was smart enough to pick 280 for my score, and she seems enthusiastic about me." "I will pick Katelin, but not because she's smart. Picking 280 on the information she had available was probably stupid rather than smart. What she's got going for her is her enthusiasm for you. The two guessing games I ran today were just my way of finding out which of the girls were the most extremely pro-Mark. If I can't find sensible, long-term thinking girls, at least I can find girls who're blindly enthusiastic about you. They'll be highly motivated and easier to control, like Ava is. But it's hardly an ideal approach." "Oh." "Another thing that worries me is that I expect all the good work we've done today impressing these girls, will unravel over the next few days. I can get them excited if I work on them for several hours, but as soon as it's over they start to 'forget'. They're so short-term thinking that unless it's right in front of them, they don't react to it. They also seem to believe there's safety in a group. If a large group of them are acting in a certain way, no one questions it. They all go along with the majority, rather than trying to deviate in any way. The silly thing is, that according to the scenario they think they're in, they're supposed to be competing with each other so the larger the group the worse off they are. -- "I never expected this level of short-sighted, selfish stupidity, and I don't know what to do about it. I've known most of these girls for years, and I know most of them are better than average students, but they've all turned into simpletons just at the time I want them to behave as smart as they possibly can. You know Linda Hogan, Mom. I think she'd be good for Mark, as her skills and attitude complement his nicely, but unless I stand behind her and push, she does nothing. She barely said a word to Mark all day. I don't understand why none of these girls are grasping ANYTHING that I am telling them, Lily excepted. I would have gone insane with frustration today, if it hadn't been for something Mark said in the car between the pizzeria and here." Vanessa raised her eyebrow in the way mothers do. Julia answered, "I had a mini-frustration explosion in the car. Mark said that if nothing else ever went well in his life, having Carol and me was more than enough to make him a very happy man, and I shouldn't get so frustrated about trying to add more. It was lovely, and it saved my temper here today, but as lovely as it is, it's not practical long term. Mark's being able to finish his BS next year has shown us that things are going to happen a lot faster than we'd thought, which means less preparation time. Plus Mark does need to learn about girls and women, and he's going to need a large support team, especially as the amount of work he is capable of burning through these days is so much higher than I previously thought. Mark's lovely statement made me realize that THESE girls are not important, and I shouldn't get so wound up about them, but I need to do a LOT better at understanding and managing girls and women for the long term. Any advice you've got will be GREATLY appreciated." Vanessa said, "I've got some opinions or thoughts you might think about further. But first, Mark, thanks for defusing Julia's explosion. Julia often does get too wound up about her projects and she doesn't handle frustration well, so it's good that you've learned a way to make it easier for her. Ironically, Julia, it's YOUR lack of long-term thinking that leads to that. As you said yourself, these particular girls didn't matter much, so you were getting too focused on the short term, and its frustrations affected you too much. -- "Moving on to your particular issue, I think the problem is fundamentally rooted in two things. First that what you're asking them to do is romantically relate to a boy. I know you've successfully had some of these girls involved in other projects before, Linda certainly, but this time the project is a boy. The second aspect is their age. Sixteen-year old girls have not yet developed many ways in which they can successfully relate to boys. You present them with Mark and tell them how wonderful he is, and about the only way they know how to respond to that, is - to borrow your description - 'to lie on their back and wave their legs in the air'. For the most part 16-year old girls have nothing else to offer, which has never been much of a problem, because 16-year old boys don't want anything else, haha. -- "They don't have many technical skills. Lily's setting up a website is an exception. You're an exception too obviously, but you know that already. That's the way we chose to raise you and you've risen to the challenge. You say they're smarter than average, and I'm sure they are when it comes to schoolwork and in their interactions with other girls, because their ability to have meaningful relationships with girls is far greater than their ability to have meaningful relationships with boys." [Actually, Lily wasn't doing the website. One of her father's staff was, with Lilly acting - appropriately - as the liaison between Julia and the programmer. I didn't know that yet but Julia did. She didn't speak up because it wasn't worth making an issue about.] -- "Some of them will have brothers, friends who are boys, maybe part-time jobs where they work with boys, etc., so they're not as one-dimensional as I'm painting, but you're presenting Mark as boyfriend material, and they all know that the way to treat boyfriends is to make the boy run around trying to please them, and if he does that well enough, let him get closer to scoring. Their short-term thinking is programmed into them because boys are supposed to 'Pursue and Persist' while the girls use 'Attract and Resist' to test the boys' interest and commitment. Boys show they're interested by chasing girls, by investing their time and energy in an ongoing pursuit of a chosen girl. Presuming the girl's interested in him, then instinctively she wants him to put so much effort into pursuing her that he's got none left to pursue anyone else, thereby proving his commitment to her. -- "Girls' instinctively short-term memories force the boys to keep the pursuit highly active. If a normal boy fancied a normal girl, but he took a couple of weeks off from trying to impress her, when he next approached her virtually all the relationship ground he'd gained previously would've been lost. She'd never treat another girl that way, if they met casually two weeks apart, but romance-seeking boys she will. That's the human courtship ritual. A two-week gap in effort implies a gap in commitment, and that's a deal-breaker for a girl instinctively looking for a lifelong commitment. You're fighting against instincts, Julia, and my money's not on you in that battle. You need to change your approach sufficiently, so the situation your friends find themselves in no longer meshes with their normal courtship instincts. Mark's being rich will certainly trigger other instincts; greed being the obviously highly motivating one. For the most part that'll result in short-term thinking and actions too, although some women are smart enough to take the long view; sometimes investing several years in an attempt to lure a rich man to the altar. Whether ordinary 16-year old girls are capable of sustaining a long-term campaign is doubtful. -- "My other general comment is not to worry so much about this problem. The only things Mark is likely to learn from these girls are their short-term tricks, like Dakota's crying that we talked about on Friday. Did I detect that Anna - that was the name of the girl lying on Mark's chest when I came in, wasn't it?" Julia confirmed the name. "Did I detect that Anna had a schoolgirl crush on Mark?" "Yes. She was emotionally young, inexperienced and naïve. I let her down a small amount today, and I'll let her down the rest of the way Monday or Tuesday." Vanessa said, "Thought so. The look of rapturous worship on her face is a somewhat of a giveaway, haha. That's another short-term effect Mark should experience and learn how to handle WITHOUT his passing it on to you! No doubt it'll make him feel uncomfortable, which is exactly what he needs to experience, so he learns that sometimes toughening up is the right thing to do. By the time he's handled a few of those, and maybe mishandled a couple too, he'll have absorbed that lesson. -- "I think you have been trying to achieve too much with the material that 16-year old girls offer you. With young women from college you'd have done much better, and even more so with young professional women, but not with school-aged girls. I suggest you do two things. Scale down the number of girls you're attempting to handle at one time. You should scale them down in a smart way, eliminating the girls who're the least satisfactory and retaining the best ones. If you do that in a process where the girls know a significant number of them are going to be cut regularly, you might see some interesting behaviors emerge. If you manage it properly you can probably have three or four groups in a pipeline. Do you know what I mean by that?" "Not really, no." Me neither. The idea of girls in a pipeline created a very peculiar image. "You don't have enough time left in this school year to do it fully, but it might be usable over summer, and it certainly will be next school year. Start with a large group of girls, something like you had today. Call it 30. Have a date or two with them over a two-week period, and then eliminate half of them. Start a completely different group of 30. Now you've got one group of 30, and another of 15. At the end of two more weeks of a date or two for each group, halve each group and start another new group of 30. Now you've got groups of 30, 15, and 7. -- "At the end of another two weeks you've got four groups feeding through, two weeks apart, hence the pipeline image. Or if you prefer, you can think of it as a funnel. The smallest group is now 2 or 3 girls. You can either inject them back in a starting group to seed their behavior, or you can keep the few individuals as some sort of final group that you spend most of your time with. You can have the new girls that arrive every two weeks replace the few you'll get rid of on a case-by-case basis, as you get to know them better. That'll include the girls that you catch trying to manipulate Mark, like Dakota did. -- "With about four groups in the pipeline, and assuming you'd need two dates with each group before you did a cut, that means eight dates. So a two week cycle is probably the minimum because there are other activities you want to do. Time alone with each other and schoolwork being two good examples. I'd suggest at least three, maybe even four weeks between intakes, which makes the rest of this school year only two cycles long. There's no reason you can't keep socializing beyond the end of school, of course. Do you understand the concept?" "Yes. It sounds very good. Thanks very much." "There are lots of details that need working on. For example, getting the next group of thirty girls ready to start. You could hand that job entirely over to your Liaisons and give them points for each of their girls that survive each cut, with more and more points for the later cuts. That way the Liaisons will be motivated to choose good girls, give them good advice, answer their questions, etc. Obviously the Liaison points give the Liaison girls various privileges that they'd value. You could even auction off various 'prizes', so they set the values for you. -- "You should have each pipeline group completely arrange every date, rather than your running around doing it all, and cleaning up after. You'd tell them the day, start time and end time, and standard rules - which you'll need to develop before you start this, like how many girls are allowed how much time with Mark, what they're allowed to do, and such like. The group then has to arrange everything. You arrive, have the date, and you leave. Make sure they know that if they mess-up preparing a date that you'll randomly eliminate half of them immediately. That should be a good enough inducement. Get them used to running around after you, not the other way around. You might get them to pick up the tab too, as that'll help reinforce that they have to do everything and that this is not a normal boy-chasing-girl situation. If each group has two dates in a cycle, then one of them could be here, one elsewhere, at their choosing. I'm sure you can think that through. -- "You might want to eliminate the allocation of which girls go with which Liaisons. Let the Liaisons get girls from wherever they want: from different grades, outside of school, or wherever. It's their job, and the more ambitious ones will do it better, so why constrain them. You also need a review process to pick which thirty girls are in each intake. You might restrict each Liaison to only submitting ten girls to each intake. That way they'll pick their best ten, rather than submit an unmanageably large number. With six Liaisons you'll have sixty girls. Get your database system going, have you or Mark review the sixty, and pick the thirty that get accepted into the intake. The Liaisons would get minor points for that too. Girls who failed that cut can be resubmitted any number of times, if their Liaison wants to keep putting them forward. It's no extra work for you, so who cares. -- "You might want to let SOME girls who get eliminated in the pipeline - depending on why they were eliminated - have ONE more try through the system. It's likely they'll be much smarter the second time, which would serve as a good example to the other girls in their new groups. Obviously that wouldn't apply to girls who were cut because they behaved too badly. You don't have to make the groups thirty strong either. No reason you can't start with twenty or ten, or any other number. You need to think that through yourself, and consider what Mark's going to be doing over summer." I said, "As far as I know, I'm not doing anything much. If tonight's trip proves successful, I won't need my vacation job. My only other planned activity is studying for next year's college courses. That's right, isn't it Prof?" "Yes. My feeling is that it'd be good to start you at a fairly busy level at the beginning of summer, until we've got enough progress that we can extrapolate it for the whole year, with the intent of your graduating college and high school at the same time. We can then adjust your workload to suit your productivity. It'll have to be online study as the lecturers will be on vacation, but that's no problem because I can fulfill their role for all the undergraduate courses. If I'm a little rusty at something, it wouldn't take me long to get back up to speed, so you could just do something else for a few hours. One large advantage we've got is flexibility, so we can juggle your days, times and courses around. That'll make dating easier for you, just so long as that's not too many nights a week." "That sounds good, Prof, except I'm a little worried what 'start you at a fairly busy level at the beginning of summer' means. That could be scary. Can you put some numbers on that? If anyone can, you can, haha." "I'm not going to dictate to you, Mark. That's not my place. I will SUGGEST the following. That you do the nights the way you do now. It seems to me that you've got nothing else worth doing at those times anyway. As for during the day, if you'd normally have worked two days a week in your vacation job, then doing two days of study per week makes you no worse off. Better really, because if one of them turns into a nice day, you can decide to play and make up the time some other day. You're a diligent boy - despite my daughter's best efforts to lead you in temptation - so I'm not worried. Ideally I'd like to start reasonably fast, but I'll leave that up to you. You understand what we're trying to achieve as well as I do. Maybe if you enjoy yourself, you might want to do more. How's that for hopeful? Haha." The wee small hours were freebies as far as I was concerned. Provided I didn't get bored and had plenty of food to keep me going, I was perfectly happy to study during them. A couple of days a week wasn't onerous. I can't recall ever telling him how many days I worked in my vacation job, but he'd got accurate information from someone about that. I'd rather study math than work in a warehouse anyway. I could always go for a run for half an hour or so if I needed to blow the cobwebs away. #4: "Sounds good to me, Prof." Vanessa had been waiting for my answer, and resumed her ideas, "So Julia, Mark will be around and flexibly available. If you had groups of girls in your pipeline, they can arrange some summer activities for you. It sounds like you might have a fun summer. A few minutes ago I said I had two suggestions, scaling down the number of girls by using the pipeline system being the main one. The other suggestion comes at it from the other angle: how about Mark doing some traditional dating with individual girls? That way all their normal instincts will kick in, so Mark will experience them. You'll need to modify the process in some ways, but it should still let girls' normal instincts kick in. Normally, for example, girls rather frown on their suitor going out with other girls. That's not going to fly in Mark's case, so you'll have to find girls that can tolerate that initially. As much as possible Mark should be the one picking the girls, managing them, etc. You need to know what's going on, but keeping informed is not the same as managing the process for him. Your existing Liaisons are the obvious first candidates for one-on-one dates, but it doesn't need to be them, or just them. -- "HOWEVER - and it's a big however - girls aren't the only ones with instincts; guys have them too. If Mark starts one-on-one dating with another girl, some of his instincts are going to come to the fore. There are dangers in that, so the three of you need to think about that carefully. There's no hurry to act on that suggestion, so take your time. The other obvious source of one-on-one date material are the girls who survive to the end of the pipeline process, which gives you several weeks to think about how to treat them." Julia said, "Funny you should mention that Mom, because I've half-started it with one girl already today. Not for the reasons you said, because I never thought of those, but it's still heading the same place you suggested." Julia looked at me and said, "Chloe." "Oh. Really?" "Only half-started. She might not be suitable, but I should have a better idea about that in a day or two." -- Turning back to her mom, Julia said, "You haven't seen her because Chloe couldn't come here after lunch. She's got huge breasts - which is something that didn't escaped Mark's notice, haha - but she's also got a major negative issue about them. So much so that they've ruined every chance she's had for a relationship with a boy, because as soon as he looks at her tits, which is literally impossible for a boy not to do, she believes that he's only after her for them. She's got no confidence in herself, and a one-dimensional character when it comes to boys, so she'll be extremely easy to manipulate. At lunch she did a nice thing for Mark, and just after lunch he did a nice thing for her, so the ice has been broken. I've already started the process of convincing her that Mark is trustworthy, and in a couple of days she should be eating out of his hand. I was setting it up so it was HIS hand she was eating from, not mine or ours. -- "It's straight out of your negotiation textbooks, Mom: a single-issue negotiation. She won't have read the books so she won't have a clue what's happening. She doesn't have any relationship experience with boys because none of her relationships last more than a few hours of face time, she doesn't have any confidence, and she's a big-hearted girl, like Carol, so I can't imagine anyone safer for Mark to start with. That's presuming we can get over the hurdle of her tits, haha." "She's like me?" asked Carol. "In many ways, yes. Weaker, unfortunately for her. There are important differences, but the best aspects of Chloe's personality are similar to the best aspects of yours. It'll be interesting to see what sort of person she'll blossom into when Mark and I finish working on her. I think she might become a very good person, which is why I'm trying so hard to make it happen. I think this project will be a large win-win. A life-altering win for her, and two very wobbly wins for Mark, haha." Vanessa said, "Sounds like you've got it all mapped out already." "It's very easy, Mom. Chloe's crying out for this. It needs a boy to do it, and Mark's the perfect boy because Chloe likes Mark a lot already." "Huh? How can she like me? We've barely spoken all year." "That's largely why. Boys hang around her like flies, trying to talk with her while staring at her chest. She loathes that, but you don't do it, or stare at her from a distance. You ALWAYS try to be inoffensive to people - that's your GREATEST defining characteristic! I'm sure you know the way to offend Chloe is to look at her breasts, so you don't. I can't say that I've noticed in particular, but I've no doubt that if you met her head-on in a doorway, you'd be a total gentleman toward her, whereas virtually every other guy would deliberately rub up against her as they crossed. I've seen countless occasions where boys have deliberately timed their arrival at a doorway to coincide with Chloe's, so they can try to rub her, although she always holds her bag to her chest going through doorways." Back before my first merge, sixteen months ago, I'd done the doorway trick several times. Maybe not making the effort to time my arrival, or not very often, but I certainly used to take full advantage of any lucky doorway encounters. That used to be pretty much my sole source of sexual contact with girls. My first merge, and its resultant increase in my ability to notice people's reactions, led me to stop doing those sorts of things. Fortunately my early stupid behaviors had not been in the same grade as Chloe, so my reputation with her was spotless. "Oh. Umm, I'm confused about what you're doing with Chloe. Is she 'eating out of my hand' like you said, or 'blossoming' like you also said? Because they don't sound like the same thing." "Getting her to eat out of your hand will make her blossom. Which I know makes no sense to you now. I'll explain after you get back, because we don't have time now. I have to tell you so you'll know how to talk with her tomorrow. Don't worry, it's very easy. She's a one-dimensional character when it comes to boys, so you'll easily understand what I mean, and what you need to do..." #4: " ... Just as your defining characteristic is that you're so inoffensive, hers is her very low self-esteem because of her large breasts. So all you have to do is prove you're not interested in her breasts, then show interest in her personally. You know most of what I'll be telling you, so all I need to do is tell you how to do it." #4: Vanessa said, "It sounds interesting..." "I'll tell you about it tonight, Mom, after Mark and Dad go. There are also a few other things I'd like to bring you up to date about. Nothing major, but a chat would be nice. I like all your pipeline ideas. All of them sound great. I'm definitely going to think about that, and almost certainly do it." Vanessa said, "You haven't responded to one of my points: the fear that Mark's instincts toward forming relationships - pair-bonding - might damage your relationship with him?" "Sorry, I didn't mean to not respond. I hardly care about that anymore because I recently realized that Carol is protecting me. Carol loves me, and Mark loves Carol. For a new girl to dislodge me, she'll have to convince Mark and Carol to get rid of me, which I can't imagine Carol ever agreeing with because she doesn't have the pair-bonding instincts that might trip Mark up. I CAN imagine a girl turning up who is better for Mark than I am..." "{Raspberry}." I love it when I get a chance for one of those. Smiling at me, Julia continued, " ... but if that was the case, we'd ask her to join our relationship. Our marriage will increase, rather than decrease, if we meet the right girl..." #1: <"If we meet the right girl". Shouldn't that be, "if Mark meets the right girl"? Isn't that our Lordly prerogative?> #2: #1: Julia was still talking, " ... I only worked that out a couple of days ago. It makes me feel MUCH safer introducing girls to Mark. It also gives me a whole new reason to appreciate Carol. A selfish one admittedly, as she's protecting me." Carol blew, "{Raspberry}..." #1: " ... I wouldn't be in this marriage if it wasn't for you, OR have the wonderful amount of love that's in my life now. I owe you EVERYTHING. You can't possibly be too selfish with me. So {raspberry} again; so there! Haha." Vanessa said, "We're so used to thinking about marriage being one male and one female, so that if another female comes onto the scene it leads to a conflict. Ditto with a second male, although I can't imagine you or Carol meeting another guy you feel more for than Mark." Julia agreed, "That's for sure! I don't think there are many guys of Mark's quality floating around unattached." Julia turned to me, and asked, "Mark, can I mention what we discovered after the girls left?" "Ahh. I'd really rather not. That's VERY personal." "Aww, come on. How can you worry about being personal with my parents after what they've seen of you today? I'll be very vague. It'll be all right, I promise." I did what I normally do when Julia begs me for something. Julia turned back to her Mom, to say, "We discovered another little trick Mark can do. As Mark said, it's 'personal', so I'll just say it makes him an even BETTER lover than he was before, and you know what we already thought of that! Now Carol and I have yet another reason to believe we'll never find a better guy than Mark, haha. I think it's safe to assume Mark's got nothing to worry about from other guys. I'd almost like to see some other guy try; it'd be hilarious." Vanessa said, "Maybe Prof and I should carefully time when we walk into your next group date so we can catch a demonstration of this curious new trick. Anyway, I was saying that people tend to think marriages are exclusive, but yours can grow, which does create safety and comfort for the members. Other girls won't think that way though, so they'll still try to gain Mark exclusively for themselves, but I know you're fully aware of that. If Mark is truly unsnatchable, but many of them still try to snatch him, then you should all see some good examples of female behavior. It'll be interesting to see how often they're able to fool Mark, and how fast he learns to handle them." Julia and Carol chuckled their agreement. I said, "Umm, didn't you just agree that I was 'unsnatchable'. Which I'm positive I am too. Doesn't that mean they won't be able to fool me?" Vanessa said, "You were fooled by Dakota's tears, weren't you?" "Ohh, yeah. That could easily happen." "Some of these girls are bound to get you running around in circles for them. Hopefully they'll fail getting you to leave Carol and Julia, but they'll succeed at many smaller manipulations, and possibly at some larger ones." Julia said, "They succeeded just recently. Some of them said they had no way of getting home, and Mark volunteered to drive them. They were very disappointed when I stopped him, but none of them had trouble finding another way home. Mark didn't see the consequences of his being helpful. He's an easy target for the 'Poor, Helpless Girl' routine. He's so helpful they can easily take advantage of him." Vanessa asked me, "Mark, do you know what mistake you made when you agreed to drive the girls home?" #1: "Umm, I didn't foresee that they'd do it deliberately in the future, so I'd end up being a very busy taxi driver." "Can you generalize what you did wrong?" #4: I said, "No I can't. I've got no idea. I'm not even sure what the question means?" "You were giving them something they wanted, in this case more time with you, for a particular behavior, in this case saying they had no way of getting home. After Julia had spent several hours getting them excited about you, the idea of having more time with you - especially in a much smaller group - would've been very desirable to them. If you reward people for a behavior, it will encourage them to repeat it, and encourage others to emulate it. I've seen that you're good at recognizing good behaviors and rewarding them, but you need to be on the lookout for behaviors that you don't want to encourage, and make sure you don't reward them." "I think I already understood that, although I'm sure not as well as you. I think my main mistake in the ride home case, was not realizing that they wanted to have more time with me. I just thought they wanted a lift home. It was easy for me, so I volunteered. How were they even to know that it'd be me that volunteered?" Vanessa said, "I didn't watch them leave, but I'd bet the girls that said they had no transport didn't mention it until AFTER all the girls who had cars had already left. If getting a ride was their real objective, wouldn't they have mentioned it sooner?" #4: "You're right. I was stupid not to think of that. And if I hadn't volunteered, they would probably have asked me next. Girls are very tricky, and I'm very easily tricked." "You're just not used to people trying to take advantage of you, so you're not used to questioning people's motives. You're going to have to learn to do that whenever you're asked to do something for someone, or when you feel like volunteering to help them. It's going to happen more often in your life, so you'll need to wise up about that. Just wait until you've got a lot of money! There'll be people coming at you from all directions, all with hard luck stories and all in desperate need of your money. Most of them will be just like the girls without transport: they'll be fooling you with convincing sounding stories. You need to become aware that you're starting to have value. You'll get better at recognizing when you're being taken advantage of, but we all fall for it sometimes. -- "Changing the subject, what about your gaining understanding of males? All our discussions and planned activities are to do with females, but males are going to cause you trouble too. So how do you intend to smarten up about them?" Julia said, "There's almost nothing I can do about that, Mom. I can't control groups of guys, I don't even know what they talk about when they're alone. From what I've overheard from Andrew, Robert and their friends, guys only seem to talk about completely stupid things, like cars, sports and loose girls. I've got no idea whether guys even have tricks that they use among themselves, so I've got even less idea what to do about it." Carol shook her head, and said, "Don't ask me. I know even less than Julia." #1: Vanessa agreed, "There's not much you can do, I recognize that. Although many of the lessons Mark will learn from girls will apply to people in general, regardless of gender. When it comes to guys, Mark's going to have to help himself more. Maybe Andrew and Robert could've been useful if Mark was attending OSU, but by the time he is, The Boys won't be, and Mark will probably go to another university anyway. Steven will be a help though, on guy issues. Mark, you do need to be on the lookout for masculine issues." "Umm. I'd keep a diligent lookout, if it wasn't for one problem: I don't know what I'm looking for! I'd think there weren't any masculine issues, except you obviously know there are, so I'm just going to ask 'What are they?' I'm almost ashamed to have to ask a female that, haha." Vanessa enlightened me. "Let's take male sporting bonding and camaraderie. A few weeks from now, when it's known that you have millions of dollars, one of your teammates approaches you, and very sorrowfully tells you that his mother is desperately ill and needs a $4,000 test to find out what the problem is, and begs you to help her before she dies. You've got nothing to do with his mother, and certainly aren't responsible for her medical situation, but he's presented it as your deciding between his mother's life or death, and he's drawing on his sporting friendship with you. I'll assume you give him the $4,000; after all, it's not much out of your millions and you can easily get more if you need it. He has, after all, been a good teammate and friend of yours. -- "He comes back to you a couple of weeks later, and tells you that his mother's tests worked wonderfully, and they know exactly what's wrong with her now, and she urgently needs a $6,000 operation. If you pay for that, a couple of weeks later there'll be a complication of some sort that'll need a $10,000 remedy. And then a relapse that requires an emergency $15,000 operation to save her. And then the only effective drugs to keep her stable cost $20,000. Then they'll discover her disease has spread, and another $30,000 is urgently needed. It'll rise and rise forever, until you refuse to pay any more. -- "Spot the pattern? A small initial cost, within the value of your friendship, which then progressively escalates. At any point you've already spent enough on his mother that withholding the extra would seem foolish. If a comparative stranger approached you, you wouldn't give him anything, but by drawing on your sporting connection - which many guys put a lot of importance on - your teammate can extract a great deal more money from you, and escalate it to extremely significant amounts." "You're saying the whole thing's a trick, right from the beginning?" "It's a common con." "I can't believe ANY of my teammates would EVER think of anything like that. That's disgusting. It's..." "Sure, but their parents could. Imagine a family that's terribly in debt, gambling debt say, and about to lose their home. The parents could easily push their son into using his friendship with you to trick money out of you. After all, he owes his family more loyalty than you." "Oh." "To simplify considerably, let's say his mother really was sick, and everything he said was true. Except that he knew the total cost to save her would be $50,000. Rather than asking you for $50,000 up-front, which he'd have to expect you to refuse, he'd start at a lower sum and work his way up by installments. The point is that he'd be using his teammate camaraderie with you. -- "Let's take another example. There'll be end-of-year parties when school lets out and many summer activities during the break. How would you feel if you got lots of invitations from guys to their parties, their social outings such as trips to a beach, or to any other guy-arranged event?" "Umm, flattered I guess. Other than with my soccer teammates I don't tend to hang out with guys much. It would probably be fun to do some guy things sometimes." "How would you feel if you found out that the only reason you were invited to a party or beach was so they could spread the rumor that you would be there, so a large number of girls turned up hoping to see you. That way the other guys could hit on all the spare girls." "Oh." "Another issue that will arise is status. Many guys are instinctively very status conscious because that's an important part of human mating rituals, so there's a great deal of masculine jostling for position on the status ladder. With guys, that 'jostling' is often literally that: a physical tussle. As your status rises, more guys are going to think that the best way they can gain status is by being the guy who brings you down. To a guy's instincts, if you've got a hundred girls who want you, and he beats you up, then the hundred girls should want the victor. Illogical I know, but that's how guy's instincts work." Julia snorted, "Ha! I pity the poor guy that tries to take on Mark. Mark will..." "Mark will what? Do what he did to the last bully: pretend to film him and then allow himself to be beaten up? That would get that guy expelled but Mark's passivity would only encourage every other guy who wants to gain status. At this time of year guys will be very interested - and in some cases increasingly desperate - in getting a girl lined up for them to date over summer. Mark's usual passive defense is the worst possible response in this case. Even beating the attacker up isn't a good defense, as that was a risk the attacker was willing to take and he won't have lost anything - he merely failed to acquire Mark's status. Mark has to humiliate the attacker in a way that does as much damage as possible to the attacker's existing status, so future potential attackers will think it's not worth the risk. -- "One way you can help with that, Julia especially rather than Carol since it'll mostly be a high-school problem, is after Mark defeats such an attack, you get as many girls as you can to publicly humiliate the failed attacker. If other girls see your girls humiliate the guy, they'll join in. Keep it going for days before Mark makes a formal complaint. Make it so every time the attacker walks into a classroom, all the girls laugh at him. Tease him mercilessly in every way you can think of. If he's got a girlfriend, for example, get her to break up with him. Re-enact mocking parodies of the fight so everyone can laugh at them. Hold a competition for the best jokes about the incident and publish the results at school. If possible, get the incident on camera and spread it around. We could probably get an article about it in the local paper, especially if we can provide them with a humiliating photo to use. Get T-shirts printed up for girls to wear to school, labeled with something funny and derogatory about the attacker. You want it so that no girl would be seen dead within ten feet of this guy, and for every guy to know that's the risk he's taking by taking on Mark." #1: Carol looked more worried than anything else, but Julia was excited, and she exalted, "This is going to be SO MUCH FUN! I'm going to enjoy this. I can get girls in his classes to loudly ask the teacher to change seats to be farther away from him 'Because he's violent and stupid, so I don't feel safe.' The teachers will have to allow that, and the girls can all joke afterward about not wanting to be within ten feet of him. -- "Oh! I just had an even better idea. I can get lots of girls to encourage GUYS to laugh at the idiot too. As soon as any other guy says something nasty about the idiot, my girls will laugh at the joke, tell the joker that he's so funny, touch his arm, etc. Guys fall for that stuff so easily! We'll soon have EVERYONE mocking Mark's attacker. This is going to be GREAT. We're going to DESTROY him! I can't wait to sit down and plan other things we can do. Mark, we have to upgrade your phone to a camera phone, so you can give it to a spectator to record it all. There's a good chance you'll be able to do that, because I've seen how nimble you are at avoiding attacks." #2: #4: #2: Julia continued, "I HOPE it's a 10th grade boy who first does this. There are so many 10th grade girls who'll cooperate with me that I'll be able to make the idiot wish he'd never been born." #1: "It probably will be," answered Vanessa, "because those are the guys who have Mark's successes rubbed in their faces the most, and who have the easiest access to him." "Ahh, honey and Vanessa. Don't you think you're intending to punish him far more than one failed attempt to beat me is worth?" "No." | "No." Vanessa explained, "It's not about him; it's about all the guys who'll follow him. Your accomplishments aren't going to stop after the first attempted beating, so guys will continue to be jealous of your successes and envious of your status. Some of them are going to act on it physically. Do you honestly prefer to suffer ten attacks, and send ten more guys to prison with criminal records, over publicly humiliating one guy? It might even be a 20-to-1 ratio, if we can do a good enough job of humiliating the first guy. But, as good as it is to prevent nineteen guys from getting criminal records, the real motivation is to save you from nineteen unnecessary attacks. You're simply too valuable to allow nineteen such risks. Any of these guys might get a lucky blow in, maybe pick up a desk and smash it over your head, for example. Your head is too valuable to risk in unnecessary assaults. I know we have your sperm samples, but I'm confident that you'd rather we not have to use them because you've suffered irreparable brain damage." ^ [Prof had arranged for every Anderson to have body samples stored in two locations for possible future research, especially samples from me, and most especially my sperm. I 'accidentally' forgot to record that embarrassing incident in this document (oh well, too late now). But as Vanessa just mentioned it, I can't resist saying that if I'd known about "Go-cums" then, I could have 'impressed' the nurse tremendously, by filling the specimen cup before she'd had time to leave the room. How to look like a great lover! Haha. I should mention one other little point (literally "little"), related to 'impressing nurses'. Dad got phone calls from both labs after our visit. When he discovered the medical nature of the subject he put them on to Mom, who's quite well educated in that field. The labs were extraordinarily impressed by my sperm. They said they'd never seen sperm as healthy as in my sample. Sperm go through a lifecycle - they're created, mature, then die - so every ejaculation always contains some immature, dying and dead sperm. Even among mature sperm, there are also significant numbers of confused, lazy and defective individuals. They swim in circles, hardly swim at all, have two tails, misshapen heads, and other such problems. Depending on the age of the donor, healthy men produce 25% to 85% useless sperm; guys my age being in the lower third of that range. Apparently less than 5% of my mature sperm were defective, which they'd never seen before. Mom fed them some bullshit about me being a fitness and dietary fanatic. Both labs asked for permission to do a study on me, and to write it up for a medical journal. Mom - very aware of my desire to stay low key - firmly refused and reminded them of the confidentiality clauses in their contracts. After hanging up, she teased me about it. It's another example of my body working superbly, even at a microscopic level. I'd asked Mom about my having to worry about being more likely to get a girl pregnant. She'd answered, "You should worry about that, but no more so than any other guy. Men shoot millions of sperm each time. That you shoot 20% more good ones isn't going to change things much. If one of your extra 'little boys' could get to the goal, then so could many of the original amount. It only takes one, so a few more makes no real difference." [[Some of Mom's medical knowledge and logic was incorrect, although not as incorrect as her logic.]] Mom then went into "Mother Mode", checking that I used condoms when I should, etc. I'll spare you all of that.] ^ Vanessa was saying, "The risk of such an injury is low, but the potential loss to the world if it does happen is so large that being kind to your future assailants is the least of my concerns. I don't think you realize how much jealousy you're going to cause, Mark, especially once you're rich. A lot of the guys at your school are going to get angry at your success. We have to provide them with the largest possible disincentive to act on their anger." "If it's going to cause so much trouble, why publicize my having money then? Why not keep the money in someone else's name?" "Mainly because school is a MUCH safer environment than the real world, so it's an ideal place for you to learn. It's not just money that could cause you trouble, as your success in other areas will also generate jealousy. You're not going to hold yourself back socially, academically and athletically just because of some short-tempered guys. You can't go through life avoiding problems. You have to learn to face them and overcome them. There must have been some incidents already of guys not being happy at the level of female attention you're getting?" "Yes, they're starting. I know they're going to get worse next week too. I've got a speech roughly worked out to use on guys who seem too unhappy. It should defuse things." Julia thought otherwise, "Haha. Good luck with that! You'll persuade the reasonable guys, but it's the unreasonable ones that we're worried about, and I can't see them hanging around to listen to a speech. I know you give good speeches, but you're not going to get a chance to." It WILL be a good speech. I hadn't worked out the details yet, but I had the basic concept well developed. I had thought of it as being an "extremely reasonable" speech; one which should convince the guys out of believing that my successes were unfair. But as Julia had just pointed out, it was the unreasonable guys that I had to worry about the most. That was a small flaw in my plan. #1: "{Sigh}. I've been out-argued again, haven't I?" "If you want to avoid making people jealous, you could always not have any money, fail all your exams, never get another soccer goal, give up sex with every girl except me, and go back to wearing your old clothes." "Can I choose just one of those?" "No! Speaking of which, we'd better get you upstairs and changed into more appropriate clothes." I guessed that meant the next guy to attack me was committing social suicide. ------- Chapter 118: Trial Run at the Spirit Mountain Casino Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) Julia and Carol chased me upstairs to get changed for Prof's and my trial casino trip, but I asked to divert to our study to see my website first. I learned that my website's address was www.EggsSearch.com.hk. [[Don't bother trying it, as the need for it disappeared long before I wrote this.]] Julia explained, "Lily hosted it through her father's business in Hong Kong. We could have gotten an American 'dot com' address, or done it on one of the social network sites, but I like having it so disconnected and apparently unrelated to America. It has to be available to the girls that want to use it, but I'd prefer the whole world doesn't know about it, or can't connect it to us. Any girl too stupid to find it because she's hung up on 'dot com', we don't want." The first screen was almost totally blank, having just two fields: a heading of "Eggs Search" and a place to enter a password. Julia explained, "The password is what 'EGG' stands for, all lower case and without commas or spaces. We'll publicize that at school. The password isn't meant to be highly secure; it's just to keep complete strangers out." Once in, the next screen was almost as simple. Three column headings: "Date", "To who", "Description". There were three entries under the headings, all dated "Always" and addressed to "Everyone". The descriptions were: "Our purpose", "Current List of Liaisons" and "Application Form". Julia explained, "I'll get Lily to fix her grammar later. She's shown me how to add new entries to the list, and how to edit or remove existing entries. The list of entries can be as long as we want, as it'll automatically create scroll bars when it gets more than a certain number of lines." Julia clicked on the first entry. Carol and I gathered close to the screen to read what "Our purpose" was: "We are searching for one or two new girlfriends for Egg because his girlfriend is only available half the time for him." Julia commented, "I'll edit it tonight while you're away, to add the idea I had today about making assistants a subject of our search too. I'll have to edit it even more if Mom's pipeline idea is implemented. I'm supposed to be the only person able to maintain the list, although Lily can if she wants because she told me how to get into it. The idea is that we get all the girls at school to keep an eye on it, and we use it to broadcast information to them. It's deliberately a one-way system, so anything girls want to communicate back has to come through their Liaisons. Mom's pipeline idea might change that, but we can redesign the site as we go if we need to. That's about it. Simple, and I hope useful. What do you think?" Carol replied, "I like it. Donna and I can tell the middle school girls too?" "Yes, it's for everyone who's interested in dating Mark." I said, "I didn't have any real idea of what the site was for, but now that I see it, I understand. It's essentially the same as a notice board, isn't it? Where you can control what's displayed." "Yes, exactly right. If we adopt the pipeline idea, I just need to type up a description and replace the outdated document with the new one. From then on, everyone will read the new one. I'll be telling everyone to check the site frequently." "It'll save you heaps of time. I've never dreamed of having my own website, but if I had, I wouldn't have imagined this. I see it fits your needs very well, so all I can say is, 'Well done.' I like it. My only request is to see the 'Application Form'. What's that?" Julia navigated to it, and it was her database idea. Instructions to fill in all the fields, then print out the result, attach any pictures, and pass the hardcopy back through their Liaisons. I was amused that including a full-length bikini shot was advised. Julia said, "We'll never refer to you by name, always by 'Egg'. We'll also never talk about underage sex or anything else that might get us in trouble. The Liaisons will be sometimes emailing me text documents they want put on, for the girls under them to read, and I'll check them first to make sure they're anonymous and safe. I can put a password on each document. So let's say we use Mom's pipeline idea and we have Intake1, Intake2, etc. Each intake can have a password that I'll put on all their documents, so only they can read them. That reduces the risk of other girls crashing the dates." "What about girls who don't have easy access to a computer, or don't check often enough?" "Then they miss out. Who cares? There are plenty of others who do have easy access. One thing I know I'm NOT going to do, is cater to the problems of individual girls. That'd be a disaster." "Yeah, I got that impression already! I'm starting to appreciate how troublesome that could be, after those girls said they didn't have a way of getting home. I like your mom's idea of the pipeline, because rapidly getting rid of girls who cause trouble should quickly teach the others to be even less troublesome, even though I'm still struggling with the idea that any girls at all want to chase me." "Other than your being a genius, wonderfully caring, hunk of manhood, you mean?" "Ahh, thank you for that, but as delightful as it is to have girls desperately eager to have sex with me, you have to admit it's damned stupid of them, because most of them have barely said a dozen words to me all year." "That WAS stupid of them. We don't have time to get into that again, because we have to get you changed for tonight." #3: #1: We headed to the bedroom, me still feeling weird about having an 'official' website devoted entirely to me. Julia had purchased a couple of outfits that made me look rich and stupid (to spend so much on clothes), so therefore a casino's ideal customer. There was a knock on the door while I was getting dressed. Being only semi-decent, I hesitated, but then realized that there was no one left in this family who I cared about seeing me naked anyway. I called out "Enter," and Vanessa came in. She asked, "Mark, do you need any help applying the disguise?" "I'd like you to watch while I do it, to make sure I get it right. Also, I've been wondering about the sideburns. We don't really want Andrew or Robert to see me wearing them, do we?" "Not that it'd cause trouble, but the less explanation required the better. We'll put them on here, and I'll check that the coast is clear before you slip through to the garage. Prof will meet you there. On the way back, take them off in the car before you arrive." I put the disguise on, which was easy, although the experienced females couldn't resist teaching me how to properly brush makeup on. I couldn't wait to never make use that knowledge again, outside of this project. Carol and Julia spent a minute wishing me good luck, and kissing me several times in case that helped somehow. Then I was smuggled down to the garage. Prof joined me almost immediately. I jumped in his car, buckled up, and we were off on our little, but very important, adventure. On the drive to the casino, Prof informed me, "We're going to a place called Spirit Mountain Casino. It's about an hour's drive north. I've got a few topics to discuss. First and most important, we do NOT want to get arrested tonight!" "ARRESTED! Could we get arrested? I didn't think that there'd be any laws against TK?" "I find it hard to imagine there would be, but if some very funny things happen around us, we could be arrested on suspicion of cheating. We'd hopefully make bail and the prosecution would be difficult because of insufficient evidence, but we still don't want that drama. Especially as your ID is illegal and that would very quickly be discovered." "You've got my ID, haven't you?" Prof handed it over, adding, "I suggest you take out your real ID and leave it in the glove compartment. You don't want to accidentally hand over the wrong one when we're checked at the door." "Ahh, I've never actually had to hand over an ID before. Is it safe? I mean, I won't be arrested then and there, will I?" "No. They'll just have a private security guard who'll eyeball it. They can't run it, the way a policeman can. If he asks for ID, just casually hand it over, let him look at it, and he'll hand it back. We should have practiced that somewhere. It's been so many years since I've thought about that. You know your ID is visually identical to a real one, so there's nothing to be worried about, right? The only way you can give yourself away is to be nervous. Can you act well enough not to look nervous?" "Yes. That's very easy. Don't worry about that at all." "Are you sure? If you've never done this before, I'd expect you to be quite nervous. You're not exactly a hardened criminal, are you? Haha." "Honestly, it's not a problem. I've got a way of suppressing all the symptoms of nervousness which works very well. I might have been caught by surprise if you hadn't described the process, but I know what to do now. I'll be fine." I finished changing IDs, making sure I kept the right one, while Prof resumed, "Okay. Back to not being arrested. We want to avoid doing anything that will bring suspicion on us. I'd much rather take this slow and easy than rush and get arrested. We can come back to the casino night after night if we need to, so there's no hurry. Okay? I'm relying on you for this." "I got it: 'Slow and easy.' I'd much rather not get arrested too." "So no impossible ball movements please. Don't have it rolling uphill unnaturally. Especially don't have it hovering in midair, the way you did during your demonstration on your wedding night. I don't know much about casinos, but I know they have lots of security cameras. Video evidence of a hovering roulette ball is not the sort of thing they're going to dismiss as a momentary figment of their imagination." "I'll be very careful, I swear." "Please do. I gave serious thought to having Vanessa or one of The Boys follow in another car, to keep an eye on us from across the casino and to call a lawyer if anything went wrong, but we figured it wasn't useful enough to put them to the bother and risk their getting caught up in it if anything does go wrong. Caution the WHOLE time tonight, okay?" "Yes, sir." #1: #2: "Good. Another way to avoid being arrested for cheating is to lose rather than win. Ideally I'd like us to lose every single bet we place tonight. I realize we might win some by accident, but I want you to always try to get the ball in a slot well away from any number that we're betting on. We'll have to do some betting to have an excuse to hang around the roulette table so long, but we'll say we're just beginners - which is certainly true - and we'll watch and bet cautiously. Remember those people on the video I showed you? You could see their hands dropping bets all over the table, like mad people. We'll be much less active than that. -- "Another thing we need to do is avoid arousing their suspicion by the ball landing on a strange sequence of numbers. I know you're not so silly as to do this, but don't aim for the same number every time. Likewise don't always choose red numbers, or odd numbers. One good way to pick a random number is to look at the second hand on your watch. Go for whatever number it's pointing at, 24 seconds past means 24, obviously. If it's on any number more than 38, just subtract 30, as that's easy. So 50 seconds would mean aim for 20. Unless that's what I bet on, in which case, use the minute hand, or add them together." "I got that, Prof." "Good. When we arrive I intend to just watch for a while. If people ask why we're not playing, we can say we don't know how, which is substantially true. If we're not allowed to stand and watch, we'll walk around and watch. I want us both to get a feel for how the game works before we attempt any funny business. Remember that we're in no hurry. As much as possible we'll stick to the truth. You're my daughter's boyfriend, and we've come to the casino to see how to play roulette. Okay?" "Very okay. I'll find it easy not to know what's going on, considering I don't have a clue." "In Vegas we'll probably pretend not to know each other, because I expect that winning several million would cause some commotion among the senior management of the place and it'd be best if you don't get swept up in that, especially as your ID is illegal. But tonight I think it's best for us to be together. It's a small place and for all I know everyone is a regular, so our arriving at the same time will stand out. Plus we'll probably need to talk. On the subject of talking, either one of us can tell the other 'I want some fresh air, ' then we can go outside to talk. Anything we don't want to risk being overheard should be said outside in the car. So far, so good?" "Yes indeed." "Good. We should return to the car every hour or so, to re-spray you with the alcohol to wrinkle you up again. I'll keep an eye on you, and let you know if I think you need it. -- "When we're playing, I'll do the most betting, mainly because you should be concentrating on your job. I don't care who has to bet, as I want us to lose anyway. It might also be a rule of the place that you have to bet in order to stay by the table, so then you'll have to. When we're ready to start playing, I'll buy us both some chips, and you can play with yours, or keep them in your pocket, or whatever seems appropriate. Just don't go crazy, as I've only brought five thousand dollars. I'm guessing that it should be ample, if we go slow." #1: #4: #1: "I will try REALLY hard not to lose your $5,000 too quickly. Do you really think it might cost that much? That's a LOT of money!" "If it costs less, I'm not going to complain. Remember that I've never been into a casino before, or even talked to other people about them much. They've always seemed like such an obviously stupid idea that I've always ignored the topic. I don't know what it might cost, so I brought more than I guess we should need because it'd be a nuisance to run out prematurely. -- "Moving on to what we're trying to achieve tonight. In Vegas, when I win, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the casino bosses are reluctant to hand over the millions. One of the few things I've heard about casinos is that they're not in the business of giving away money. I presume they'll check as carefully as they can that everything was kosher before they pay, so the ball's movement has to look natural. So natural is MORE IMPORTANT than accurate. That's critical because an unnatural movement could forfeit our winnings and get us into legal trouble. If there's a choice between your getting the exact number 100% of the time but looking slightly unnatural, or spreading the result somewhere over half the wheel in a natural looking way, we'll choose the second option. We can design a betting scheme that works with that, and still reach our goal. 'Natural is MORE IMPORTANT than accurate, ' okay?" "Got it." "So tonight, what we're hoping to achieve is the most accurate result you can achieve while ALWAYS LOOKING PERFECTLY NATURAL. I suggest you spend the first however long you need just watching the ball, so you get a feel for what natural looks like. If you need to try different ideas, to find out how far you can push the accuracy with each, always start with the minimum effect and slowly build up. I don't know enough about your ability to be able to give more detailed advice, but I'd prefer if you didn't find out what the limit of the accuracy was by going OVER what looks acceptable. If you can get the ball within two pockets either way, for example, and you think that getting it within one pocket might look unnatural, then don't even try. Within two is fine for us. If you're ever in any doubt about what to do, either don't do it or tell me you want some fresh air, and we can go outside to discuss it. Okay?" "Yes. That's what I was intending already." "Good. Once you've arrived at a method for your ability, you'll probably need to run some tests to measure its accuracy. For example, if you can get within two pockets of the target, it'd be good to know roughly what the probability of each pocket was. We need that information to design our betting scheme. It doesn't have to be highly accurate, but an approximation would be good. When the time comes for you to do some testing, that might be a good time for some fresh air, so you can tell me where you're at and what you're testing. I might have some ideas about that, and I might be able to help you remember the results as they build up. Okay?" "Need some fresh air before I start my statistics gathering. Got it." "It would be very important, for example, to know whether you can hit the target number 100% of the time, or only 80%. If you only tested your method for half a dozen turns, they might all hit perfectly. But we'd look pretty silly if we went to Vegas, bet all our money on one number, and you hit the number next to it. I'd never bet like that, and have already decided never to bet more than half of our remaining money on a single turn, just in case something like that happens. So with $100,000, I'd bet no more than $50,000 the first time, and if that lost, $25,000 the next, etc. That's assuming you think you can achieve 100% accuracy, which would be fantastic. Likely your accuracy will be less, and I'll have to reduce my bets in proportion. -- "The next issue is practice. I much prefer you to practice here rather than at Vegas. In Vegas the bosses might do a lot of asking around between my win and their paying me, so the less playing around you've done down there, the better. You'll be at the Vegas table before me, specifically so you can confirm that whatever you do still works on their wheels, but the less of that the better. Which means that once you've found a good method, whether it's tonight or some other night, then you practice it enough to be confident that you can do it for real almost immediately upon arrival in the casino in Vegas. It may be that you get enough practice during your statistics gathering, or maybe not. I'll have to leave that up to you, as it's more than a little difficult for me to see how well invisible things are working, haha. -- "The last issue on my agenda is obvious, but still worth mentioning: leaving. As soon as you want to leave, tell me you want to leave. The sooner the better as far as I'm concerned, consistent with achieving our goals for tonight. If you hit a brick wall and can't get any further, just say you want to leave. If you later think of a solution, we can always go back. If you get as far as you want to, and know you can't do any better tonight, then tell me you want to leave. I'll also call it a night if I think it's getting too late or if I think people are starting to get suspicious about us for any reason. I'll be on the lookout for that. Better to run away, try to figure out what we did wrong, and then try again at another casino. So if I say it's time we left, and I look determined, then we scuttle out of there posthaste. If I'm suggesting we leave because it's late, and I'm getting tired, but you're only a few minutes away from achieving success, then tell me you'd like a few more minutes. Is that all clear?" "Yes. Phew! You put a LOT more thought into this than I did. I didn't think of hardly any of that, and I haven't thought of anything you didn't cover. I would have turned up tonight with no thought of what to do. I didn't even think about bringing money, which was amazingly stupid, considering where we're going." "Don't worry about it, Mark. The preparation was my job. Your job is CONSIDERABLY more impressive and important than mine. I'm nowhere close to pulling my weight on this one." Prof is a cautious driver, so the trip took us slightly longer than the estimate given by his car's navigation system. My ID was checked on entry into the casino part of the building, but my suppressing all the symptoms of nervousness made it very easy for me to look relaxed and natural. I thought Prof appeared more nervous than I imagined I did. We had no problem, my ID was handed back, and we strolled in. Prof appeared quite relieved. He'd obviously been worried about that, or perhaps about me. Two things were quickly apparent when we walked into the casino: slot machines are REALLY popular, and Prof and I were WAY overdressed. We eventually made our way past all the slot machines, and arrived at the real games. Our standard of dress immediately caught everybody's attention. My outfit alone probably cost more than all the other patrons' clothes combined. It was just as well we hadn't been pretending not to know each other. So the first lesson we learned for Vegas was to research dress standards, because there we did want to appear to be strangers. We ignored the other players who stared us up and down. One of the casino staff came rushing over to introduce himself. He was primarily talking to Prof and I didn't catch his name as there were too many distracting new experiences. He was a "Pit Something". It must be an important job, judging by his attitude. Although it appeared not to pay well, judging by his clothes (I've learned far more than I ever wanted to know about clothes, from listening to Julia critique the many clothes I've tried on when shopping with her). Prof told him our first names - giving me a momentary panic that we'd not discussed whether or not to use false names, but then I remembered that my ID was in my real name. Prof was still talking to the Pit Something, giving the spiel about me being his daughter's boyfriend, that it was our first time in a casino, and we were interested in learning how to play roulette. He eagerly escorted us to a roulette table, and started explaining how to play the game. Prof interrupted, "I think I understand the game itself because I read up on it on the internet before we came. What we don't know anything about is things like where we buy chips from, what different colored chips are worth, and such like." He launched into a description of 'color chips' and 'cash chips', which almost immediately confused me. Prof too. Gamblers must be a GREAT deal more intelligent than Prof and I had thought, if they could understand what a Professor of Mathematics and an Einstein-level genius could not. Either that or it wasn't a very good explanation. The Pit Something waved a waitress over and offered us a drink on the house. Prof ordered a glass of white wine and I ordered a glass of milk. Apparently my order doesn't occur very often in casinos. Prof explained, "He's in training." Which was true, as I was training how to win millions of dollars at roulette. Prof ended up having to painstakingly extract the information we wanted out of the guy. Apparently, on roulette tables, you can use color chips or cash chips, but they prefer you use color chips because many players can bet on the same number. Cash chips are the same across the casino, so there's no way of telling who put down what chip, but color chips are many different colors and each person has his or her own color. You can choose what value your chips are worth when you buy them, which contradicted what little I knew about chips, but that piece of information came straight from the Pit Something, so I wasn't going to argue. The Pit guy showed us how the values were indicated for the stacks of color chips, and we could see that most of the people playing at the moment were playing with chips worth $1 each. At two minutes per turn, Prof's $5,000 was going to last a LONG time! Except, for some reason, everyone wasn't just placing one bet per turn, they were placing chips ALL OVER the betting area of the table. I'd swear that some of them bet on more than half the possible numbers, not to mention some of the other bets like red, black, high, low, etc. I'd seen the same behavior on the internet video, but it had only shown the part of the betting area closest to the wheel and I'd assumed it wasn't representative. Apparently it was. Pit guy asked, "What value do you want for your chips, sir?" Prof said, "I don't understand the game well enough yet. I'd like to get more information before I answer that. Why are people betting so many times?" I listened to the explanation carefully. It was such a common behavior that there had to be a good reason why they all did so much of it. It turned out that I was wrong, because the reason wasn't "good"; it was actually so silly that I massively reduced my opinion of gamblers' intelligence again. It boiled down to "losing slowly is boring." He didn't use those words, but that's what he meant. If you bet on half the numbers, for example, then half the time you win. Isn't that exciting! Taken to its logical conclusion, people should bet on all the numbers, that way they'd always win something, just not as much as they'd had to bet to cover the table. If you take that to it's logical conclusion, you'd stay at home! The thing that worried me, and I think was worrying Prof too, was that this "cover half the table with bets" betting style didn't suit what we wanted to do in Vegas. We didn't particularly want to cover the table here either, because we wanted to lose our bets. If we covered half the table, we were bound to win sometimes, which could fuel their suspicion that we were cheating if that thought occurred to them. There were some more explanations: about how to buy chips, don't take them away from the table you bought them on, how to place bets, minimum and maximum bets on the inside and outside... "Hang on. Would you explain that maximum bet restriction again please?" asked Prof. He was more than pleased to discuss the maximum bets. We were NOT pleased by what he said though. Never mind all his stuff about the difference between inside and outside, and how the 2-to-1 maximum was twice the 1-to-1 maximum, and other crap. The only piece of information we cared about was the limit for betting on a single number: "On this table the straight-up maximum is $10." "Is that all! What if I wanted to bet $50?" "No problem! You can bet $10 on five different numbers." #3: You didn't have to have an Einsteinian level of genius to spot the teensy weensy problem with that! I reduced my opinion of gamblers' intelligence further. Also, while I was at it, that of Pit Somethings too. #2: Prof asked, "You said, 'on this table the maximum was $10.' Do you have tables with higher maximums?" "YES, sir!" said the very happy Pit Something. "On Friday and Saturday nights, that table over there has a $25 maximum." #2: "Do you know what the limits are in Las Vegas?" "Do you mean at the Strip casinos?" #4: "Whichever casinos have the highest limits." "That's the big Strip casinos. I don't keep current with what's going on down there, and they can vary from casino to casino, but I'd think $100 would be a high limit for regular tables. Maybe a little more in some places." We didn't need "a little more," we needed a SHIT LOAD more. Assuming I could get 100% accuracy - which I was hopeful of being able to do - Prof was talking about our first bet being $50,000. Our second bet would be even higher. A "little more" than $100 wasn't going to cut it. Prof asked, "You said 'for regular tables'. What does that mean?" "Tables open to Joe Public; that anyone can walk in off the street and play. VIPs can negotiate special arrangements with their hosts. If that's what you're after, you'll have to talk with a casino about what they can do for you. If there's nothing else, I should get back to my station." He seemed to have lost interest in us, and Prof let him go. "Shall we get some fresh air, Mark?" "Good idea." Sitting in the car, Prof said, "That's disappointing, isn't it?" "I was going to put it a bit stronger than that." "I never thought there'd be a limit on how much we could bet. I assumed casinos would welcome every dollar they could get, as the odds are in their favor. The only research I did was to read up on the rules, and I assumed the rest as it seemed simple and obvious. I spent most of my time worrying about our end of it, the profit split and that side of things. As it stands now, if roulette maximums are as low as it sounds, this scheme looks like a non-starter. There'd be no point in our taking the risk of your doing any experimentation inside tonight, and we should go home. The question is whether the limits are that low in Vegas. Maybe he didn't know what he was talking about, or maybe VIPs can get the limits we want and we can become a VIP, however that's done. I think our first step should be to call Vanessa and ask her to google 'roulette maximum bets'. We'll wait here for her to call back. Maybe we'll learn enough to decide, or maybe we'll need to call some casinos and ask them, but I'd rather not talk with any of the Vegas casinos yet, not unless we have to. What do you think?" "I can't think of anything better. Wait! Is it safe to call Vanessa? What if the damned Government record the conversation?" "Vanessa and I bought a couple of disposable phones yesterday and we'll talk carefully." "I'm MIGHTY glad I've got you doing this!" Prof called Vanessa, and after a quick reassurance that nothing bad had happened, he explained the problem, using innocent sounding language, and asked Vanessa to research it. Prof hung up and told me, "Vanessa's doing it right now. We'll sit and wait. What are your impressions based on what you've seen so far." We spent some time cheering ourselves up with jokes about how casinos weren't the sophisticated, exciting places we'd both thought they were. The levels of sartorial elegance and intelligence demonstrated by the other players deserved particular comment. "Did you see anything which would affect your TK ability?" "I can't say I looked much, because there were so many other new things going on. But from what I did notice, everything seemed fine. One thought that occurred to me earlier was that some casinos might have little cages on the pockets, so the first pocket the ball hits is the one it's trapped in. That would have made it very much harder for me. But this place seems to be happy to have the ball bounce around just like in that video, which works very well for me because that's what I need to make it do." We kept trying to cheer each other up, and I kept trying not to think about how disappointed Julia and Carol would be. Vanessa called back about twenty minutes after Prof had called her. The result of her research, translated out of the innocent language she used for much of it, was that there was some bad news and some good news. There were two pieces of bad news: (1) $100, or so, was about the maximum straight-up bet for regular patrons in most of the big Vegas casinos. (2) Vanessa couldn't find any information about what the maximums would be for VIPs. There were also two pieces of good news: (1) To be considered a VIP by a casino was very easy: you just had to bring lots of money to gamble with. The more money you brought, the more "VI" your "P" was, and the more the casino was willing to do for you, especially with quality hotel rooms, meals, show tickets and other stuff we had zero interest in. (2) Most importantly, there was a casino that was famous for taking extremely high bets. [Vanessa didn't name it over the phone, but we found out when we got home that it was called Binion's Horseshoe Casino.] [[I am aware that in many of my readers' dimensions Binion's Horseshoe Casino was closed for financial troubles in 2004, was bought by Harrah's and reopened, but has not returned to its former glory. In the dimension that this is occurring in that didn't happen, as the local Ted Binion is a better judge of women than the most other dimensions' Ted Binions. In this dimension Ted was not killed, and - being alive - was better able to manage the casino, avoiding the 2004 financial crisis.]] Vanessa recited a story to Prof of a guy who visited that establishment a few times. Each visit was to place a single bet of a few hundred thousand dollars on red or black. He won the first few times, then lost a million dollar bet, and killed himself a few months later. The key point was the casino had a policy of allowing people to place virtually any wager they wanted. Their rule was, "Your maximum bet is your first bet," meaning that you could walk in, bet apparently any amount you wanted, and either leave or carry on playing for as long as you want. The only maximum bet restriction if you kept playing was that you couldn't place any bets higher than your first bet. Prof said, "That could be made to work for us. If you were 100% accurate, we'd bet $50,000 the first time, which wins $1.75 million. Then we'd leave, and come back when they'll accept a $200,000 bet, which would win $7 million. Those numbers aren't fixed; I'm just illustrating the idea. Vanessa's story doesn't say how long they make gamblers wait before coming back. That guy's visits were months apart, but maybe weeks, days or even hours would be sufficient. -- "If you're less than 100% accurate, we might need to do more playing at a particular limit, until we've accumulated a good win, then we leave for a while, coming back again later and doing it all over again with higher bets. I presume you know that we can't win turn after turn without them getting suspicious?" "Yes, I worked that out. With the maximum bets this place has, we'd have to win an absurd number of bets in a row to get what we wanted. With a 1-in-38 chance of each win, winning even five bets in a row is so unlikely as to be unbelievable." "That's right. The way I figure it, if you're 100% accurate then the best thing for me to do is to win two bets in a row, leave, and never return. If you want to do it again, you'd need to get someone else to front you. 1-in-38 squared is 1-in-less-than-1,500, which is very unlikely but not impossible to believe. If your accuracy is less than 100%, say you can only get within three to either side of the target, then we'd have to bet much less each time, and play much longer to win what we need. We'd need to have a significant proportion of losing bets to avoid their suspicion, which would extend our playing time even further. Between the casino Vanessa found, and with VIPs possibly having useful limits, I think we should go back inside to put your ability to the test. What do you think?" I was lost for words about what I thought. I just said, "Yes please." We applied some more of the wrinkling spray, gave it a little time to dry, and then headed back inside. My ID was checked by the same security guard who'd checked it last time, just in case I'd gotten younger in the last forty five minutes. I was starting to get the impression that intelligence was a rare phenomenon in casinos. The Pit Something guy saw us, and approached with much less bustle than he had the first time. "I thought you'd left?" Prof said, "We thought about it, but we're here now so we might as well learn how to play the game. Don't worry about us. We'll watch for a while, then join in when we're ready." That was fine with him. He said, "Good luck," as he left us, without offering me another free glass of milk. Considering the average patron's intelligence level, good luck was the only hope they had. This casino had four roulette tables, but only two of them were being used now. We found a spot between them, where we could observe fairly well, and simply stood there watching. There was no problem with our staring at the wheel as the ball was finishing its bouncing around, because everyone else around the table was staring at it too. Seeing two tables in operation meant I could quickly get a feel for what "natural" looked like. That's not as silly as it seems, because the ball bounced differently depending on how fast the wheel was rotating, and its movements weren't like playing around with a ball at home. At the start of a turn, the ball spends a long time (thirty seconds or so), rotating too fast to come down from the top lip of the wheel. When it slows enough, it drops down and starts hitting the projections built into the wheel, which are obviously there to make it bounce around unpredictably. Because, I feel safe in guessing, casinos prefer people not to be able to predict where the ball is going to end, haha. It'll only be when this extreme bouncing around has nearly finished that I'll start doing anything. There are two reasons for that. First, because most of the time the wheel is spinning too fast for me to see where the target pocket is. Second, even if I could get the ball near the target, or even into the target, it's still bouncing so much that it would just bounce wildly away again. What I was intending to do was wait until the bouncing had reduced enough so that some of the wheel was becoming very unlikely for the ball reach, then I'd flick the ball to roughly near where the target was. As the ball and wheel got slower and slower, I'd keep it roughly within its bouncing range of my target, flicking it back if it went the wrong way. By "flicking", I mean waiting until the ball would normally bounce off something - a very common occurrence - and momentarily TK-pushing it in the desired direction. At the very end - getting the ball into the target pocket - I'd have to experiment between tiny flicks, carrying it, or blocking the nearby pockets that I didn't want it to fall into. When the ball did manage to fall into the desired pocket, I'd simply hold it in, provided the wheel was moving slowly enough to make that look realistic. The ball and wheel are rotating in different directions initially, but by the time I start flicking the ball it'll be going the same direction as the wheel (on average, as it does bounce forward and back). When I first started flicking, I'll have to be carefully to aim it ahead of my target as the wheel will be rotating faster than the ball (again, on average). Aiming ahead means the target slot would catch up to the ball. As the ball slows relative to the wheel, the amount of leading will reduce, until the ball is pacing the wheel. Then it'll be a matter of making sure that the ball is near enough to our target to drop into it. Prof made some infrequent comments about the game, stuff that we should have been interested in, if our story to the Pit Something had been entirely true. During one such little conversation I said, "I'll start trying things a little now." "Careful," he whispered back, gripping my arm. "Sure. No problem." I didn't bother to think about a target number yet. I just wanted to start by getting a feel for the flicks. On one of the tables we were watching, the wheel and ball had slowed enough that this would be about the time where I would start acting, if I'd been ready for doing it for real. I waited until the ball was hitting a projection, and I gave it a hard, momentary, TK-push. The ball FLEW out of the wheel and into the crowd of players, getting a major reaction as players ducked or tried unsuccessfully to catch it. Prof grabbed my arm so hard it HURT. There was considerable laughter from the crowd, as some of them scrambled to retrieve the ball. My immediate reaction had been to look at the security guard across the room, expecting him to come running over to arrest me. When I recovered enough to realize that was silly because they couldn't tell the culprit was me, I looked at the other staff around the table. None of them seemed worried. The staff guy who puts the ball into the wheel - that I thought of as the "ball boy" - seemed puzzled, and said something to another of the staff standing next to him, which I couldn't hear over the laughter. That guy just shrugged. Shrugging was GOOD! The staff declared to all the players that the bets were void, and none of the players looked like they cared. Several seconds later, a customer handed the ball to the ball boy, who got a new turn started. Within thirty seconds everything was back to normal, and there was no sign that anyone was worried. Prof leaned forward to ask one of our neighbors, "I'm new to casinos. Does that happen often?" "Not often, but sometimes. Mostly with new dealers. I've never seen it happen so late though, normally only when the ball is first put in." Somewhere or other I'd heard a story about people putting magnets on roulette wheels, which surely meant that the balls had to be metallic and therefore heavy? Things must've changed since the days of that story. When Prof returned to my side, I carefully chose my language to sound innocuous, then commented to him, "That ball must be very light. I thought it'd be heavy, like a ball-bearing, but apparently not." "Apparently," said Prof, squeezing my arm again, hard enough to remind me of something I no longer needed to be reminded of: "CAUTION!" The next time a ball was stationary in a pocket, while all the highly skilled players who'd bet on that number were being paid, I used a tiny TK force to push the ball out of the pocket, but so lightly that it wouldn't actually move. I SLOWLY increased my push, until I felt the ball wobble. The amount of force required was far less than I had previously imagined. In other words, the ball was far lighter than I'd thought, by a factor of ten or twenty, I guessed. Apart from the scare we'd got, this was EXTREMELY good news, as my TK works a lot better on light objects than heavy ones. This almost certainly meant that at the very end of the bouncing around, presuming the ball was near the target pocket (if it wasn't, I'd flick it closer), I could just grab hold of it and moved it to the pocket, in a way that would look like a natural roll. I could even make it wobble a little at the entrance, and bounce against the base of the pocket when it seemed to roll in. With a light ball, lots of things were possible that weren't with a heavy one. I leaned over to Prof, to say, "This is very, very good." "Really?" "Oh yes. Very!" I returned to my CAUTIOUS experimentation. Prof eventually bought a hundred dollars of chips at only $1 each, causing a little disappointment for one of the more senior staff around the table. Prof played, while I kept doing my thing. What I thought of as the "end-game" - when the wheel and ball are very slow, so the ball's about to settle into a pocket - was when I needed to get the ball from hovering near the target pocket, to actually and firmly inside it, and to hold it there in case the wheel wasn't quite slow enough for the ball to stay there naturally. Even being CAUTIOUS!, I quickly discovered that I could do what I needed to do at the end-game very easily, 100% accurately, AND realistically. The only unrealistic aspect was that I was carrying the ball as I put it in the pocket, so it didn't rotate, but no one could see that because the ball was a uniform color. I even had some fun making it look like the ball was going to end up in the neighboring pocket from my current target, only to have it bounce off the base of that pocket, wobble on the dividing wall, then tip slowly into the true target. In Vegas it'd look suspicious if the ball made a beeline for the target every time, so learning how to make it appear indecisive would be a good idea. The "early-game" I ignored. This was when the ball was still spinning up against the top lip, and when it had started bouncing, but the wheel was still going far too fast for me to see the target number. There was no point in trying to get the ball near the target as they were moving so rapidly that they'd immediately separate again. The "mid-game" turned out to be the only tricky part. In this phase I had to take a ball that was bouncing fairly wildly, and have it stay in the general vicinity of the differently rotating target slot; with the phrase "general vicinity" meaning ahead of the target by differing amounts, depending on the speed of the wheel; the width of the "vicinity" getting tighter as the wheel slowed down. I had a lot of things to try. For example, in some circumstances it was better to just block the ball from bouncing in the undesired direction rather than flick it the other way. I had two big advantages. First, there was so much bouncing going on mid-game that it would've been difficult to do anything that would be suspicious, with the obvious exception of flicking the ball when it was clear of every obstruction. Inexplicable changes of direction would be BAD! Second, if one of my flicks didn't work well, or the ball bounced away again, then I just kept on flicking until I was happy. The casinos had built the wheel in a way that deliberately created highly erratic bounces, so I could pretty much do whatever I wanted, within reason. The main thing I had to be careful of was to flick the ball ONLY at a time when a change of direction was believable, in other words, when it was hitting something. That did require considerable care and some practice to get the timings right. Fortunately my TK-fingertips react and move at the speed of thought, rather than waiting to get messages down long nerve pathways, and then have to wait until the right muscles to contract, and then have to overcome the inertia of a sizable lump of meat and bone. TK is QUICK! Learning that was the only real problem I had, because I'd started my first few flicks a few fractions of a second too soon, expecting longer reaction times. The end-game was so easy that I barely bothered to practice it at all. I was only the mid-game that took me a fair while to work on. I had two tables to practice on, and the mid-game was sufficiently chaotic that I didn't need to be especially careful with anything other than my flicks' timing, so it only took me about forty five minutes to reach the point where I was sure I could achieve 100%. The lightness of the ball meant it was considerably easier than I'd expected. The casino should've used thirty or forty pound balls. They'd render my TK virtually ineffective. Balls this light were a gift. I said to Prof, "I feel like some fresh air." "Okay." We had a little trouble leaving the table, as they didn't want Prof to walk away with the chips, so after they were converted to cash chips - which, for some reason, they seemed perfectly happy for us to walk away with - we headed outside. In his car I said, "100%, and it's so easy that I could do 150% if you wanted me to." "Haha. That IS good news. Am I correct that it's time for some statistic gathering?" "Yes. I could go home happily now, as I'm that confident - like I was after my little bowling trial that you sent me on - but I'm sure you'd prefer some more testing with something as important as this." "I certainly would. One of the things that frustrated me in there was that I didn't know what you were doing, or even if you were doing anything at all. Other than your looking happy, I didn't know how it was going. An idea I had when we were in there, is that we'd choose some numbers now, your birthday numbers would be good, so you'd be sure to remember them, and when we go back inside you try to hit them one after the other. That way I can see for myself how accurate you are. How does that sound?" "No problem. My birthday is November 9, 1989." "So aim for: 11, 9, 19, 8, 9. If I see you get those numbers in a row, I'll be VERY happy. We'll go back inside, and you can practice for a while, for as long as you want. Whenever you're ready, let me know that you're starting that sequence, and I'll watch carefully, okay?" "Sure. I could start it immediately, if you like?" "There's no need to push it. If you're that sure, just take a couple of spins to settle down, then squeeze my arm. Do those five numbers, then carry on to do about another fifteen random numbers. I'd like about twenty or so successful tests, so we know that 100% is at least 95%." "No problem." "After the tests, presuming there's no sign of suspicion, I'd also like you to play for a while, because you haven't done that yet and you'll probably need to in Vegas. I'll give you $100 and I want you to buy your own chips, do the betting, and go through whatever the procedure is at the end when we want to leave, so you know how those things are done. It doesn't need to be for long, fifteen or twenty minutes should be ample." "Good idea. Do you want me to do my TK-thing at the same time? All bets have to be down and finished with before the ball gets to the stage when I need to do anything, so I'll have no trouble betting and TK'ing the same game." "There's no reason why not, as it increases our sample a little, or you can start playing earlier so we can leave quicker. That's up to you. Just make sure you lose every time." A re-spray of alcohol and a short wait, and then we headed back in. The same security guard checked my ID yet again. For a moment I was glad that it was such a good fake, but then I wondered about his ability to discern a fake anyway. I also wondered about his ability to tie his own shoestrings. Prof changed his cash chips back to color chips again, and he started playing. As I had before, I used my watch's second hand to pick a couple of random numbers, and got two for two on my pre-test tests. I squeezed Prof's arm, and proceeded to successfully work through my birthday. Prof looked at the wheel EXTREMELY carefully during those turns, so I made sure that a couple of the end-games were 'fun', with the ball seeming to teeter between the target and a neighbor, enter the target, roll out again, bounce again, roll back into the target again (you get the idea). After all my birthday numbers I did a couple more successfully, then decided to buy some $1 chips and play myself. I had a hundred chips, and was going to lose, so I spread seven or eight of them around the table, betting on my 'lucky numbers'. I soon decided that I needed to get some new lucky numbers, because my old ones always lost, haha. After my third such loss a rather pretty girl, dressed in a considerably 'nicer' style than anyone else I'd seen in here, squeezed up to the table, next to me. There wasn't much room, so her breasts rubbed against me. "Excuse me," she said. "No problem." "I haven't seen you in here before?" "No. My first time." "My name's Candy?" "Ahh, I'm Mark." "How long are you here for, Mark?" as she put her hand on my arm, and looked me in the eyes, chewing her gum most unattractively; not that there's an attractive way. #4: #1: "Another ten minutes only." "Oh. Would you like to go somewhere, for some fun with me?" #1: "Ahh, no thanks. I'm here with my girlfriend's father and we're leaving in ten minutes." I indicated Prof, who was smiling with amusement. He nodded at her. "He can come too. I'll give you a discount for two." #1, #2: #4: "Ahh, no. Definitely not. Sorry." "So just you then?" #4: "No. I already said we're leaving in ten minutes." "I can be quicker than that." #1: "Please go away." "{Chew}. Your loss." She pranced off (can cows prance?). Prof laughed at me, and innocently offered, "We can stay longer, if you'd like? I'm sure Julia wouldn't mind, haha. I think Candy must have been attracted by your casual indifference to losing dollar after dollar, haha." "Thanks for the help!" "All part of life's rich tapestry, Mark." We returned to our very exciting game of roulette, until I'd lost the rest of 'my' chips. I told Prof I'd run out, and he smiled, and said, "In that case, you'd better stay with me while I do whatever it is we have to do when we leave." Oops. I'd forgotten that. It turned out to be easy. Convert Prof's remaining color chips to cash chips, then, "Take them to the Cage." Which, unsurprisingly, led to Prof asking, "What and where is a Cage?" "The 'Cashier', over there." We headed over there, passing the Pit Something, who called, "See you later." Somehow I doubted it. At the "Cage", Prof handed over his chips, received a few dollars back, and we left. I walked out the door, happy at not being arrested. ------- Chapter 119: End of an Eventful Day Sunday, April 24, 2005 (Continued) As soon as we were sitting in the car Prof said, "You were 100% on the tests?" "Yes. It's actually quite easy, provided I concentrate for the thirty seconds or so that it takes." "A couple of the tests I watched seemed close to failing?" "I thought you might think that. I was sort of showing off, sort of teasing you, and also practicing for real. We don't want the ball to make a beeline for the number we've bet on, and I thought close calls like that look more believable. There was never any possibility of those two falling into the wrong pocket. Imagine you had been holding the ball between four of your fingers, and deliberately wobbling it on the edge of the barrier. You've got such a good grip on it that it's not going to fall anywhere unless you want it to. That's what it's like for me." "How does the wheel rotating at the same time affect things? That must make it harder, mustn't it?" "Hardly at all during the end-game, surprisingly. 'End-game' is what I call the last few seconds before the ball settles in a pocket. It'd be easier if the wheel was stationary, but its rotating slowly makes less difference than you'd think. If you were using a real hand to do what I do, you'd have trouble rotating your arms and wrists all the way around four or five times. Wrists can barely turn 180 degrees, let alone 1800 degrees! Plus there's a lot of inertia involved in moving your arm around in a circle, and it would be hard keeping it precisely in time with the wheel. But I don't have either of those problems. I can move my TK-points as fast as I want as they have no mass of their own, and I don't have to use any force to get the ball to move with the wheel, as the wheel does all of that for me, thanks to good old Newton. All I need to do is apply a little bit of force to alter the relative position of the ball compared with the wheel, such as to tip it into the pocket I want. At those speeds there's virtually no centrifugal force or inertia, so they're non-issues too. The end-game is EASY. I spent nearly all my time working out how to manage the middle-game; that's when the ball's bouncing around." "In that case, I'll call Vanessa and tell her the good news." Of course without yet starting the car; this was Prof! The conversation was short, "Mark has it nailed 100%. We're leaving now. I'll tell you more when we get home." Vanessa spoke briefly, then they hung up and we set off. On the way back Prof said, "Vanessa did some more online research after our previous conversation, but didn't find out anything else of use. I thought about it while we were playing. It occurred to me that a small casino like that one wouldn't want someone to walk in and bet $50,000 on a single number, because that could bankrupt them, so they need some sort of maximum to protect themselves. But a $10 maximum seems bizarrely cautious. And $100 in the huge Las Vegas casinos seems even less comprehensible." Before I could answer, my phone rang. Julia, of course, with Carol beside her. I interrupted her very early, telling her, "This is NOT the time and place for a phone conversation. I'll talk with you when I get home." Then I hung up. Actually the time and place was fine, it was the subject that was the problem, but I didn't want to sound like I had a secret that couldn't be mentioned over the phone, because I had a secret that couldn't be mentioned over the phone. Without doubt Vanessa had told Julia about our success, and Julia's excitement made her call me just so she could hear about it again, but I couldn't take the risk of her saying something dangerous. Females have to 'share' emotions rather than simply accepting a fact, but in this case she could sit on her excitement for an hour. On the drive home Prof's comments seemed overly optimistic about our overall project, which implied that my accomplishment was far more important than the maximum bet problem. To me they both seemed equally important because we were dead if we couldn't do either of them. I queried Prof on this, and he said, "There's only one of you, so your success was the most critical. There are probably thousands of casinos, so we have a much better chance of finding one that'll do what we want. Or maybe we'll think of another approach. Having so many casinos to choose from, or try different approaches with, gives us lots of choices." That was hard to argue with. The rest of the drive home we wound down with inconsequential matters, Prof teasing me about Candy, both of us joking about some of the other players we'd seen doing silly things (plenty of material there), and joking about how silly roulette was (nothing but good material there). As we neared home Prof reminded me about the sideburns and to swap my licenses. I was glad I wasn't doing this by myself because I'd forgotten about those. I suggested that he might as well keep my disguise with the fake license, as I'd never need one without the other, which he agreed with. We were greeted as conquering heroes. The females' attitude seemed more than a little premature to me, but evidently not to them. I took advantage of their exuberance to ask for a snack, which was enthusiastically gathered. The Boys were there too, so we kept the conversation innocuous until they excused themselves after a few minutes. Our conversation became much more explicit, with Julia and Carol immediately wanting to know ALL the details. In the course of that discussion it was obvious that they were totally confident that millions of dollars were just about to fall into our hands. I had to ask, "Didn't Vanessa tell you that we have a real problem with the maximum bet?" Vanessa had, but Julia didn't care about that, "That's not important! Dad will find a way around that. The important thing is that you're so fantastic!" There was more gushing from the girls, more self-effacing from me, more gushing from the girls. That's another way females are. Prof and Vanessa said they'd work on trying to find a solution to the maximum bet problem. Prof said he'd also do some more general research, in case we tripped over other problems. In the course of the conversation, Carol and Julia learned that $45,000 was coming to me from the school in a few days, which was a nice surprise for them. I asked them to keep Donna in the dark about it though, so her car money gift to me wasn't devalued. Prof said, "Mark, once your money comes through, and we find a solution to the maximum bet problem, are you happy to go to Vegas and do this for real? Can you think of any problems? Do you need any more practice?" "Doing it for real is a terrifying prospect, but I know I can do it if the game is the same in Vegas. The weight of the ball is important, so I want to have some practice down there before you play for real. There could be other differences too, so I definitely need to check the place out before you play. Clothing was also an issue. We should research that, and probably dress quite differently from each other if we want to appear to be strangers. But those are my only two issues. In some ways I wish we could win the money in nice slow steps so it wouldn't be so nerve-racking, but I understand that two quick wins and getting outta there is safer." "Good. That's what we'll aim for then." #1: <{Gulp}.> Not long after that we ended the discussion and headed upstairs to bed. As I was leaving the room, I heard Vanessa say to Prof, "How much energy do you have left, or do I have to remind you about the teenage girls you saw naked this afternoon?" I shut my ears and walked faster. One reason to walk faster was that my girls were in the same mood as Vanessa, which was much more enjoyable for me to think about. The conquering hero was required to perform two more heroic deeds, which I finished to everyone's satisfaction. Afterward I suddenly remembered something, "Hey, Carol. I need to make up for my failure to have rubbers with me last night. We should go again." With my go-hard ability, this wasn't a problem; and probably wouldn't have been anyway. Carol said, "You may want sex twenty times a day, but twice is fine for me. I feel good, and I know Julia wants to talk with you so I'll save it for another day. Is that okay?" I was already worried about the time. I only need four hours per night, but the girls need double that and it was already too late for that, so I agreed by saying, "I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on paying interest. 50% per day sounds about right. With luck I'll never clear the debt." After the small chuckle that weak joke didn't particularly deserve, Julia said, "I'd forgotten about the girls in the tub. Who did the deed properly and who faked it?" I could remember Julia saying that knowledge was entirely between the girl and me, which amused me as I told her. Adding the news that three girls had excused it by quietly claiming that they were virgins. Julia was interested in all the information, but we didn't waste time discussing it. We did discuss something very interesting though: Chloe. Julia said, "I'm lining up your reward for you. A very apologetic Chloe called while you were working. It seems that she's been on the receiving end of a never-ending stream of very helpful girls telling her the incredible things they'd learned about you, especially that you're far too emotionally mature to care about her breasts and that she should trust you totally. I, of course, apologized to her for my loss of temper, and she said that the girls had already explained all about that, and that it was totally her fault. It went as I thought it would, especially because she's so happy to have a boy like her for who she is. That boy being as nice and handsome as you is beyond her hopes. All you need to do now is prove that her tits don't motivate you at all, and that's easy. -- "You were on the right track in your parking lot discussion with Chloe, in trying to make her believe that her breasts weren't important to you. Your direction was correct, but you were FAR too cautious in pursuing it. You care too much about not inflicting even the slightest amount of emotional upset, which causes you to be ridiculously gentle, costing you far too much time and effort. Sometimes a slap on the face can be better, and it's a great deal quicker. That's effectively what I did, taking a fraction of the time you'd taken. Getting others to do the rest of the work for me saved me even more time. Because Chloe needs to learn to trust guys from a guy, we'll have to double-team her, so we get the best of your approach and mine. This is what we're going to do with her over the next day or two..." Julia went on to discuss her plan, what she was going to do, and what my role would later be. It was quite easy, and made even easier by Julia doing most of the work (I'll omit the details of her plan, because you'll read about it soon). After the conversation about Chloe finished, Julia said, "I also talked to Ava not long after you left. I've told her you've decided that she's going to be kept on as a Liaison this time, even though she nearly caused so much harm to your test results, etc. She's going to come over Tuesday evening, for her punishment. I'm especially eager to get Ava very well trained. Not just because Carol enjoys playing with her..." "{Giggle}. She IS fun. I'm looking forward to having her come down to have lunch with me and a group of my girls, the way you suggested." "I thought you might. Ava should have a better attitude after Tuesday night, so I suggest you make have her come down Thursday or Friday. The main reasons I'm especially eager to train her is that I think she's very trainable, and because next year she'll be in Mark's grade, so will be very useful. -- "She's going to be punished for her attitude toward you, Mark. Specifically her pretending that she was fitter than she was, and delaying you because of her egotistical refusal to accept that you're much fitter and a much better lover than she'll ever be. She's coming over Tuesday soon after dinner, and she'll strip and lie face down on the bed in the study. You're going to thrash her with a belt. Her adoptive parents have never once smacked her, so a sound thrashing will have a big impact on her. It'll teach her that thinking she's even capable of equaling you is an error, and she'll vividly remember it for a very long time. When she makes mistakes in the future, which she's sure to, a small reminder of the pain and humiliation will quickly serve to correct her latest error." "Umm, what do you mean by thrashing her? You mentioned a belt?" "Yes. Thrash her with a belt. She'll be face down and naked, and you hit her, hard and repeatedly, from the top of her legs, mostly on her ass, and up her back." "Umm, that sounds VERY painful. The flat of a belt stings." "Correct. I want her to feel a lot of pain. She'll be sleeping the night in that bed, because she'll be too sore to move." "I am REALLY not comfortable with that!" "I know, that's one reason why I chose this punishment. I want her to see how upset you are. That'll be a good lesson for her too." "But I DON'T want to do it at all! I know some people find that sort of thing sexy, but not me. I know I slapped Alexis' ass cheeks, but that was because it was good sex for her, not because I enjoyed doing so. And this sounds very, very unsexy." "It IS unsexy. This is pure punishment; not sex. Let me put it this way. If on Tuesday evening you tell her, 'Bad girl, ' and lightly smack her on the palm once, how much disincentive is that going to give her for the future? More importantly, what lesson does that teach about her and your comparative importance? An extremely painful thrashing will drive home the lesson that she did a very, very bad thing, and will help convince her that you are far more important than her, which is exactly what we want her to think. We are making the punishment fit the magnitude of the crime we wish her to perceive. She knows this is happening and she's agreed to it. She knows she's unlikely to be able to drive home afterward, and she's bringing a change of clothes for school on Wednesday." "You're talking about REALLY hurting her. About ME really hurting her. I've never done anything like that, and I don't want to." "Let's separate the two issues: one is your sensibilities, and the other is whether it's a good idea or not. Your sensibilities we can protect by getting one of The Boys to do it instead of you. As long as they could check that Ava was consenting, and I assured them it was a good idea, then they'd do it. So let's skip who's doing it for now, and discuss the merits of the idea. Do you have any reasons for believing it is not a good idea?" I floundered around, advancing several pathetic excuses. They were all shot down with, "It's ONLY pain. In a few hours she'll be running around as right as rain. You doubtless did longer-lasting damage to her body when you fucked her so vigorously on Friday night. One of the reasons I chose this punishment is because it is so physically temporary, AND because it should serve as a long-term lesson for her. It's very good 'value for money', as it were. Can you think of a better way of punishing her for her misbehavior and reinforcing her position beneath you? Or would you rather not punish her at all, and let her continue to believe that it's okay to try to take advantage of you whenever she can? Alternatively you can drop her entirely, and not waste any more time on her?" "Umm..." You know how this ended. I caved. Ava would be thrashed. By me, as Julia convinced me that it was far more effective coming from me than one of The Boys. "Laila is my next topic," said Julia. "There are only two reasons I haven't yet fired her: the lack of a good replacement, and a long-term idea I have about Carol. The first you already know about. The second is because I hope that when we have a solid group of loyal girls around us, then they can be tricked into believing it is their idea that you and Carol get together physically. I'd make them push you and Carol hard and long - no puns intended - for you two to become lovers, so that as you very slowly crumble, they'd think it's all their doing. At the end of which Carol would be able to join in with all our activities, rather than being excluded whenever we get sexual in a group. Because it was their idea, they should be a lot more supportive of it and much more likely to keep it secret. I'd make sure that every one of them had to personally do things to make it happen, so all of them would think that some of the responsibility was theirs. I'm sure I'd have no trouble arranging that, but it would be great to have Laila and Gabriella as part of our core group as a constant example to all the other girls, and as an obvious source for the idea of you and Carol. The problem is that Laila and her girlfriends aren't giving you any loyalty whatsoever so it's unlikely they'll be suitable for our group. Plus they're not essential and I'm getting worried about whether we'll ever reveal your incest because we'd need to trust the girls a great deal, and so far the Liaisons haven't inspired me with trust. All things considered, Laila's on thin ice. As much as I know it'd thrill you to see the two sisters together, at the moment they're just using you. If she doesn't send me a good email by Tuesday night, I'll fire her and give the job to Katelin." I'd been curious since Julia had mentioned Laila's winning Liaison of the Week, so I asked, "What answer are you looking for in the email, that'd be good enough for her to win Liaison of the Week?" "It's nothing clever. There are two reasons: Part of her job is to give you fun, and I know you'd very much enjoy the kinky sex she's arranging for you. Second, it's because she's demonstrated how loyal she can be, although to her clique rather than to you. If she could transfer that loyalty to you, she'd be great. I don't think she'll guess either reason. Obviously her sole motivation was that her girls would enjoy sex with you, and I doubt the word 'loyalty' has crossed her mind, even about her own group. I don't want to wait for her to eventually get it. We've only got a couple of months until the school year is over, and it'd be great to have a group of useful Liaisons by then, or preferably even earlier. Unfortunately, I think Mom's right: it's too hard for them to break the habit of relating to boys primarily through sex, using it as bait and occasionally as a reward. They might understand that other ways exist, but they can't break the habit of thinking that way. Especially, as Mom told us tonight, I'm not helping by deliberately creating a sexy atmosphere. -- "Chloe's going to get seduced in a non-sexy way, but that exact method won't work with anyone else. Other girls will be much harder to convince to trust you, as no one's as vulnerable as Chloe; she's almost begging to be fooled. Apart from a few easy pickings that we might find, like Chloe, I think I need to scale back my idea of what I could achieve for you. Getting you sex is easy, but surrounding you with a group of useful, loyal girls, with the attitude I want them to have, seems to be beyond either their abilities or beyond mine. The more I think about it, the more I like Mom's idea of making the Liaisons and girls do ALL the work, and our just enjoying the fruits of their efforts. What do you think, Mark?" "Umm, I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're asking me?" "Do you mind that instead of having lots of loyal girls around you, who'll do anything you want, we just have a handful - Carol and me, maybe one or more of Ava, Lily and Chloe if they prove themselves, and maybe a few others if we're lucky enough to find any, and all the rest of the girls you just use for sex without caring what they think?" "Is that a trick question? Because I don't see a downside anywhere." "Haha. Okay, that's what we'll do. Something like Mom's pipeline. I'll text Lily now, telling her to keep the website quiet until I make the necessary changes, probably while you're at Aikido tomorrow night." Julia didn't have anything else to talk about, but I had a few questions for her after she'd finished sending the text. I asked, "I was surprised at how much effort you put into making it clear to the girls that every sexual thing, from partial stripping through to sex, was ENTIRELY their choice. I know it worked out well, and it was very funny hearing you say how moral you and I were, but I still thought you were mollycoddling them." Julia explained, "It was just to make it less likely that any of them would complain, because we don't want that hassle. Pushing them too hard could lead to complaints, so I didn't. Even if those that chose to participate later regret their actions, they're less likely to complain because they know there were nearly thirty witnesses that it was all extremely voluntary. Any girl that complained would be laughed at by all the others, and they all know that." "Okay. I thought it was something like that, but I can never tell with you so I wanted to check. I'm also puzzled about your getting most of them to agree that I can grope them at school? That's amusing, but it's not my style, especially as I was able to grope them as much as I wanted earlier." "I set them up for it, by groping you myself then leaving the room. I thought they'd take advantage of my idea, and they didn't let me down. I did it for a number of small reasons: I thought it might help them think about things from your point of view, I thought you might enjoy groping them at school, and I thought it might be useful in some way, such as in seducing Chloe or other girls, or - I just thought - maybe if you need to prove something to a guy. You might be in a conversation with someone, and a good way to prove your point is to call one of the cock-groping girls over to grope for a while. I know you're not likely to want to do it to be boastful, but it might be useful if the right circumstances arise. In a day or two, pick a class where you've got several such girls, and grope one of them. They'll all get to hear about it, so they all know it can happen to them. Then you can wait until you have a good purpose, or just do it for fun. It's up to you." "Oh. I don't think I could really do that with other people in the class watching. It'd be too embarrassing for the girl, and we could get in trouble." I lost that argument too - strange how that keeps happening. I particularly didn't like, but couldn't counter, "They won't respect you properly until you start doing it." "Umm, I'll try." "Don't worry, I'll make it easy for you." I think Julia probably meant, " ... hard for you not to." "Ahh, thanks. My last comment is silly in hindsight, but about halfway through the date, after what we'd talked about after the 8-ball games, I thought you'd hugely oversold me. You'd said so many fantastic things about me, I thought they were well and truly hooked. I thought you were crazy for making such a huge deal out of me, but by the end of the date it was as if you hadn't said nearly enough. The respect and even awe they'd been looking at me with was nearly all gone. I don't understand how girls can be so impressed, yet be so wrapped up in themselves. That's what's frustrating you, isn't it?" "I'll say! I don't understand how they can be so stupidly self-centered either. I think Mom's on the right track with her explanations. The girls were hugely impressed by you, and I'm sure still are, but being impressed isn't enough to get them to change their normal behavior. They don't even want to show you how much they respect you, because pretty girls learn it's best to show only minimal interest in the guy they want because that keeps the guy trying hard. They're each greedily hoping to have you all to themselves, but they're waiting for YOU to chase THEM, because that's what guys are supposed to do. Pretty girls are VERY used to guys chasing them. They're programmed to believe that being chased and making guys jump through hoops - like giving them a ride home - is how it should be done. I'm either going to have to restrict myself to ugly girls, or find some way to shake up the pretty girls. Do you have any preferences?" I thought about it for a little while (a very, very little while. Whiles don't come any littler), and gave her my response, "Any more jokes like that and I'm going to revise my opinion of violent spankings, and practice them on you!" "Haha. You still haven't said your preference, but if it's okay with you I'll stay with the pretty girls because I can't be bothered starting afresh. Let me know if you'd prefer otherwise, haha. I'll do something like Mom's ever-diminishing pipeline idea, and I'll make it VERY clear that the criterion for being kicked out of the group is failure to actively please you. They'll get the idea after an elimination or two. By then you should be rich too, so they'll very much want to avoid elimination. They're all familiar with the idea of girls chasing after rich guys so they won't have any trouble knowing what to do. Hopefully some good ones will come out of the end of the pipeline. I was previously trying to keep as many girls as possible 'alive', but I think Mom's right. Better to have just 5 or 10% of them, on their best behavior, than 90% of them behaving poorly." "I certainly agree that it's not worth the stress it was causing you to try to get them all to behave the way you want. There are hundreds of girls at our high school, plus more at Carol's grade. If I said 200 were pretty enough, and 5% survived the pipeline, that's 10 girls. As much as my ego likes the idea of having hundreds of girlfriends, it's ridiculous in practice. Ten of the very best, plus you two, the Liaisons, and Chloe, is still far more than I can make time for. Eliminate girls without mercy, Julia. Any girl that gives you any grief at all, just send her packing. I think you're trying way too hard at the moment, and you should ease off a LOT. I am more than happy with you and Carol." We exchanged some mushy, romantic stuff, the way you do when you're trying to cheer up your two wives when they're stressing out over getting you an unnecessarily large number of perfect girlfriends. Then Julia added a couple of final points, "I'm going to hold off sorting out the Liaisons for the 9th and 12th grades until I've thought through the pipeline idea properly, and got the website ready for it. That's okay with you, isn't it?" "Absolutely. In fact, I couldn't care less. There are some girls in the 9th grade that I know and like, from when we were in the 8th grade together, but not enough to make it worthwhile to do anything about them. As soon as you're ready is fine." "Good. The other thing I think I'll do is mention to the girls we saw today that you're reasonably interested in buying your own home, and you're going to think about how to make the money for it. Is that okay with you?" "Sure. Couldn't care less, again." "Good. They'll believe they were there at the beginning of the idea, and it'll blow them away when you suddenly become rich. The three of us first discussed it on our wedding day, ten days ago, but they'll be a lot more powerfully affected if they thought it started right in front of them." Somewhat after midnight we called it a night. I flicked the lights off and we went to sleep. ------- Chapter 120: First Mass Lunch Monday, April 25, 2005 I woke after the usual four and a bit hours. I didn't have to turn on any of the room lights to get out of bed, as a dim yellow blob did the job perfectly. I climbed over Carol and went to do some studying via the kitchen. The hallway's main lights were off now. Instead there were those small lights that plug into an outlet to provide a little illumination at floor level. That was useful, as I didn't want to use light blobs walking around the house. The risk wasn't worth the few pennies of electricity it'd save. After "pre-breakfast" (or "first breakfast", or whatever I should call it), I went to my study and immediately noticed that the single mattress now had its base under it, probably brought up from the storage room some time yesterday. It was quite nicely set up, as there was a good space for it by the wall we weren't using. There was even a little bedside table and lamp. In the experimentation I'd done when I'd first discovered light blobs, I'd briefly and unsuccessfully tried to get them to radiate light in less than the full sphere. While walking out of Julia's bedroom a few minutes ago, I'd worried about the light shinning in the girls' eyes, and had wondered whether I could get the blob to act more like a flashlight pointing ahead of me, and away from the girls. Hopefully I'll be sleeping with both of my wives for many years, and from what the Williamses have said, I'll be doing many degrees, so getting up in the wee smalls countless times. It'd be a good idea to reduce the chance of my light waking up the girls. In the privacy of the study I made a serious effort of trying to achieve a flashlight effect. After several minutes, I'd completely failed and had ran out of ideas to try. Light blobs radiated evenly in every direction, and there was nothing I could do to change that. Studying beckoned, so I fired up my comparatively cheap computer system and got to work. Monday and Wednesday mornings are supposed to be "quality Donna time", when we go for our morning runs and chats. I'd more than make up for missing this morning's by allowing her to sleep with Carol and me tonight, but I still missed it. Driving back and forth seemed excessive, so I just hoped it wouldn't be long until we all lived in the same house, for a variety of reasons. I studied until a couple of naked girls walked into the room. I tend to find that quite distracting, so that was the end of this morning's studying. We swung by home to pick up Donna on the way to school, and during the drive I made sure to thank her effusively for behaving so well yesterday. She caught me flatfooted when she started asking for explicit details about what we'd done after she'd left. I floundered around trying to find some good middle ground between giving her the details she wanted, and giving her no details at all. Julia saved the day by reminding Donna that a young lady wouldn't ask questions like that. School was just more school. Same old same old, except for me wearing yet another highly embarrassing outfit: Julia had insisted on my wearing one of the transparent shirts. Sigh. It earned me more compliments. Apparently tomorrow's leaders didn't think a genius IQ noteworthy, but my showing my nipples deserved dozens of compliments. Throughout the day I also gathered considerably more girls' names, phone numbers and grades, leading me to believe that I must have exceptionally attractive nipples. In the car on the way to school we'd talked briefly about Chloe, and true to what Julia had said, as soon as we arrived at school Julia immediately located Chloe and had a quiet talk with her. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but knew it was Julia telling Chloe that she only had one chance to make a good apology to me, and she'd better think very hard about getting it right. Julia offered to help, which really meant to trick Chloe into doing what we wanted. I would help by not approaching Chloe until she was ready. At the beginning of the first few classes, as I encountered each of the girls from yesterday's hot tub party, they greeted me in VERY friendly fashions. There were lots of hugs, kisses on the cheek, and references to having a great time. Most of them also told me how hard they'd worked on Chloe for me and Julia. I answered, "Thanks, but it's really Chloe you're doing it for, as she's the one with the problem, not Julia or me. Chloe and Julia have been talking, so Julia will find out from Chloe who helped her the most." Actually, the girls were doing it partly for themselves, hence their need to tell me all about their efforts, but that didn't need to be pointed out. The girls' very friendly greetings didn't go unobserved by the other guys in the classes. Girl after girl affectionately thanking one guy for a great time yesterday is, to put it mildly, more than a little noticeable. A lot of the girls were calling me "Champ" too. A new nickname, it seemed. Presumably a reference to my sporting prowess, which I guess they'd decided on at Chloe's house. Personally I preferred "Egg", but no one asked me. A lot of the guys were frowning at the amount of female attention I was getting. Alexis' version of "good morning, Mark" temporarily stopped their frowns though. She pulled up the entire front of her T-shirt to chin level, and offered her bra-covered breasts to me, saying, "Hi Stud. You wanna grope me now?" This happened before the teacher and all of the class had arrived, but still about a dozen people got a clear look, half of whom were bug-eyed guys. I was more than a bit flustered because I'm not used to girls doing these sorts of things to me. I'd like to be, but I'm not yet. I wasn't sure what to say. "Take ya time, stud. I got nuthin' better to do." She stood there, offering her chest and smiling at me, without a care in the world. The guys who could see her did as much intense "seeing" as they could. Guys behind her were rapidly correcting that unfortunate accident of geography, pushing desks out of their way in their urgency to run around to her front. Alexis didn't care, so I acted cool about it too. In other words, I managed to suppress my first reaction. I noticed she had a very pretty bra on. Doubtless not a coincidence, but it did contrast somewhat with her image. One of the guys helpfully volunteered, "I'll grope you." Alexis laughed, "In your dreams, BOY. These are for a MAN!" The "boy" Alexis answered back to was a year older than the "man", but that didn't seem to matter to Alexis. As well as being a man, I was also a chicken, so I said, "Put them away, spanky. Thanks for the offer though." Alexis pulled her shirt down, "Haha. No problem. Whenever you want, they're yours. And all the rest, stud." She was wearing black jeans, so all the rest went undisplayed, no doubt to the regret of all the boys in the class. A minute later Emily sidled up to me and whispered, "We decided that Julia was just teasing us about the groping. She was, wasn't she?" I answered, "No she wasn't. She considers it richly deserved." Emily started sidling away again, looking very nervous. I spotted an unforeseen problem: all those girls were going to be scared to be anywhere near me. I said, "Relax Emily. You're in no danger. I will decide on the girl in the morning, even before I come to school, and I haven't done so today so you don't have to worry about being near me. Either I've already decided, in which case I'll find the girl and carry it out, or you're perfectly safe. If I can, I'll even give the girl advance notice the previous day, so she can wear appropriate clothes. I can't promise that, but I'll try. Please spread the word that none of you have to be nervous around me, as it doesn't increase your risk." One of my minds added, "In fact, I'll probably choose girls who're avoiding me, because they'll be trying to avoid responsibility for their actions. Your coming to ask me was a smart thing for you to do, because it tells me you're taking the issue more seriously than the others. You should spread that around too." "Thanks, Egg. We were very nervous about this, and they're not going to be happy that it's for real." "They can always opt out, and take the consequences of that. In all seriousness, I doubt I will do it to many of you because embarrassing people isn't my style. I can't promise, because it depends on how many of you treat me coldly or try to avoid me. All of you were inconsiderate to me, but I think you'll all get that message without me having to embarrass everyone." "Phew, thanks. I'll start telling the others." I let Emily get a few steps away, then said, "Emily!" She turned, and I said, "On the other hand, you're very pretty and grope-able" (Emily was pretty, but not exceptionally, but that only added to my joke). I suddenly started acting like some sort of 'Frankenstein's Groping Monster'. I stretch my arms out in front of me, opening and closing my hands, lurching and limping slowly toward her, saying "Very pretty. {Cackle}. Must grope. {Cackle}." There was a moment of fear on her face, and then she realized I was joking. She laughed and easily ran out of reach. I dropped my act and returned to my desk. I got some funny looks from other people, so I told them, "I need a new line. That one never seems to work." I made a mental note to tell Julia about the girls' fears [and subsequently did]. Dakota later approached Julia and me, and maturely apologized for her behavior Friday afternoon (the crying trick, to coerce me into another date with her). I was impressed with her apology - especially as I remembered how upset she'd been when Julia fired her - so after she'd gone I asked Julia about reinstating her, perhaps as Laila's replacement. Julia snorted. #3: Then she explained, "She took her shot at manipulating you, against your needs and desires, for her own selfish gain, and she lost. She doesn't have any right to be your Liaison, she has no leverage over us, and there's no reason to believe she'd be any better at the job than Katelin or anyone else. Even less, because that apology could easily have been yet another trick to try to get us to take her back. We don't need a Liaison who's going to treat you trickily. Not to mention that taking her back would make it much harder for us to control all the other girls. She lost, end of story. Her life goes back to how it was a few days ago, and we move forward with some other Liaison." So that was the end of those wonderful breasts. Mid-morning Julia asked me, "What do you want to do at lunchtime?" I gave her the only answer I could think of, "Eat, but you probably already knew that. What do you mean?" "After your Loving Carol speeches last week, most of the girls who heard it want to get to know you much better. You had lunch with the first bunch last Wednesday, OSU on Thursday and Carol's friends on Friday. I was intending to have lunches with the rest of the girls today, tomorrow and Wednesday, but I haven't got around to doing much about arranging them. I mentioned having lunches to quite a few of the girls last week, and they're asking about it now. Shall we go ahead and do it?" "Fine by me, but how about you put a lot less effort into selling me than you normally do? They're not worth your getting stressed out over." #1: #2: Before one of my morning classes started, Lily and Pat approached me, and Pat said, "We'd like to ask you a question. Is that okay?" "Sure," I answered with curiosity. "For us to do this, we need you to stand in the corner and face the room." Lily indicated the nearest corner. I complied, and the two of them stood side by side between me and the rest of the class. Pat said, "You suggested I ask the whole class this, but I can't do that. I can ask you though. Are our asses too big?" Both girls turned to face away from me, bent partly forward and lifted the backs of their skirts, giving me two delightfully bare asses to look at. I noticed both girls were wearing G-string panties, but there was so little fabric that they did almost nothing to detract from my enjoyment, both visually and at the humor of the situation. Times like this I am VERY glad I have eyeballs that can look at two things at once! "Well, what do you think? Are they too big? Haha." "I'm carefully studying the situation. You wouldn't want to rush me into giving an inaccurate answer to such an important question, would you?" I wasn't rushing - in fact, I was willing to take a considerable amount of time - but some of the guys in the class were rushing very urgently. They were desperately eager to see if what they thought was happening, truly was happening. Lily and Pat weren't going to give them a free shot, so just as the fastest guy was getting around the side of them, they straightened up and pulled the backs of their skirts down. "Aww," complained one of the very disappointed guys. Who then tried for some vicarious pleasure. He excitedly asked me, "What did you see?" Talking to the girls, I answered, "Two very delightful sights. Or maybe that should be four, I'm not sure how to count those. Perfectly sized too, although I should occasionally check that they remain that way, haha. Thank you, Pat and Lily. I enjoyed that." "You're welcome. We enjoyed it too. It's fun to surprise you." "Not NEARLY as much fun as it was for me!" "I like surprises too," said one of the guys. He was ignored. That probably didn't surprise him, which I was fairly sure meant he didn't like it. I pulled the girls into a three-way hug, as they clearly needed to be thanked. #3: #1: #3: One of the unfortunate guys was in the process of bending over, trying to look up Pat's skirt. I had to do a double-take, as I couldn't believe my eyes the first time. "Get up, Owen! Good grief. You can't go around trying to look up girls skirts like that!" "I just wanted to see what they were wearing. It's not fair; you saw." "They SHOWED me!" | From Pat, "Get lost, creep!" "Argh. I just wanted to know." Lily and Pat told him where to go. Lily knew the English for that. The last pre-lunch event worthy of note was Laila. She didn't look like a girl who'd solved the puzzle about why she would win Liaison of the Week. Which probably meant that, come Sunday, she wouldn't be in the running. Julia hadn't previously arranged the Monday to Wednesday lunches properly (apparently there are limits to what she can achieve), so she'd spread the word this morning that we'd be having "open" lunches for the next three days, that any and every girl could attend. The only restriction would be that the ground nearest to me would be for girls who hadn't sat near me at a lunch recently, to give everyone a fair chance to chat with me. (Obviously neither Julia nor Carol had to comply with that rule or many others, and in Carol's case, not with a law either.) It was a nice lunch, as lunches usually are when I'm surrounded by forty girls who are all interested in me. They weren't all pretty, but they were all 16-year old girls who were interested in me, which counts for a LOT. Chloe was one of the many that turned up, but she sat in the haphazard equivalent of about the third row and didn't speak to me. Julia told me that she'd invited Chloe along ostensibly so she could get to know me better, but really so Chloe could see that I didn't need to chase her, and her seeing me being so popular with other girls would make Chloe upgrade her opinion of my desirability. Carol arrived while we were still getting settled. Forty-odd girls can take a lot of settling, especially when many of them want to sit as near to me as they can. When Julia introduced Carol to everyone, there was a sudden, dramatic surge of interest. This was "The Carol", of my "Loving Carol" speech's fame. That speech - I soon had reinforced to me - was the main reason many of the girls were here, to get to know the guy who was capable of standing up in class and talking like that. Meeting the inspiration for my speech was another special event for the audience. They'd all seen me plenty of times, and many of them had never seen Carol before, so the girls' interest immediately focused on Carol. My role was to sit beside her and look platonically loving, while she told them all how wonderful it was to live with such an incredible brother. I tried to add "detachedly modest" to my "platonically loving" look. They were hard to combine with eating, but I did my best. If Carol had had low self-esteem problems - which, until about a month ago, she had (the last month had been very good for her) - then the reception she got this lunchtime should have cured them. She came in for a LOT of praise. In fact, she got a LOT just for the way she was dressed, in one of Julia's flattering purchases. Julia had chosen them all to please me, with a 100% success rate so far, therefore they were all sexy. None overtly so, with the special case exception of the dress Carol had worn on our date with Cindy. Julia had explained to me the "look" she was going for with Carol, but much of that explanation was in girl-speak so it went right past me. I had caught "not overtly sexy", which was perfectly fine with me, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with covertly sexy. Carol's clothes came in for a great deal of praise from the other girls. The last sentence is what physically happened, but I need to translate it from Girlish into English for my male readers. When girls praise another girl's clothes, they are actually praising the girl far more than her clothes. Somehow, through a process I don't understand, when a girl buys clothes, and they are the 'right' clothes (don't ask me how that's determined!), then all the other girls are consequently very impressed by her and she becomes more praiseworthy. The other girls truly seem to believe that she is a 'better' girl for having made that purchase. This, of course, makes no sense, as clearly illustrated by the following example: I have no idea whether loose- or tight-legged jeans are in fashion for guys now. If I went out and bought a pair of jeans - not that Julia would let me do something so important without her - and I got the fashion right or wrong, then either outcome obviously in NO WAY changes who I am as a person. And it would never occur to any guy that it would - except Rocky and his better(?) half. In English, rather than Girlish, the sentence that I'm explaining - the last one of the paragraph above - means that all the other girls thought Carol was wonderful, and were telling her so. Carol, being a girl, understands Girlish, so she was very happy. Her old worry that she'd find 16-year old girls intimidating was pretty well dead now. Ignoring female fashion psychology for the moment - and a considerable number of extra moments to play safe - I'll mention another aspect of female psychology. It was an unquestioned assumption by ALL of the girls that the reason I was such a wonderful guy was obviously that Carol had trained me correctly. There was simply no other possible explanation. I'm not joking! This is what ALL of the girls around me believed, and even stated several times! No boy could get as nice as I'd been in class without female guidance, and it had only taken a few seconds of their listening to Carol to convince all the girls that Carol had obviously been that influence. None of the girls doubted that I was wonderful, but Carol was clearly the reason. She came in for a great deal of praise for making me so wonderful. Carol handed all the attention very well, thereby convincing them that they were right. It was kind of impossible for me to insist that I'd made myself so wonderful, so I had to sit quietly while Carol got all the credit. Girls are strange. I did find it quite funny that so many girls could be so blindly gender-biased. Ignoring that, I genuinely enjoyed many of their "my brother is worse than your brother" stories. Some of those were truly appalling and impossible not to laugh at, even if I felt like a traitor to my gender. [I later had a chance to whisper to Julia, "Why were all the girls so interested in Carol? Far more than on the fourteen-girl date we had last week, and more than on the bowling date." Julia explained, "There's been a LOT of talk about Carol since then." That didn't make much sense to me, especially because bowling had only been yesterday afternoon. Not to mention that all the girls had been concentrating on Chloe after they'd left Julia's place so hadn't had much chance to talk about Carol. When I don't understand girls, which happens from time to time, I ask Julia to explain. Apparently the key facts were that Carol's behavior yesterday had impressed the other girls, she was 'more real' now (I made a mental note to confirm that by checking Carol VERY carefully the next time we had enough privacy), and that Julia had let it be known that Carol would be here today, so the girls had come expecting to meet her. I'm sure that there were nuances I'd missed (probably the size of barns), but that's the best understanding I could get, as poor as it was.] Word of my 300 score at bowling had long since got out, so there was talk about that. I was asked, "Can you really bowl as many 300 games as you want?" I said, "I can probably bowl several of them in a row. How many is mostly a matter of luck. Maybe one day I'll go back and try again." This was more modest than how I'd answered the same question in the Guys' Room yesterday. Modesty seemed more appropriate in this group. Julia thought otherwise, giving me - as she too often does - a, "{Raspberry}." Adding, for the benefit of the crowd - the raspberry had apparently been just for my benefit - "He's being too modest. He's much better at bowling than he will admit. Just like he needs only one turn to win at 8-ball, can win running races, and beat an opposing soccer team single-handed." (Actually you don't use your hands in soccer, that's why soccer is called "football" in more sensible countries, but I let that one go rather than risk getting another raspberry from Julia. Amusingly, it did remind me that American jocks stupidly and incorrectly call their game "football", even though their ball is nearly always handled, it isn't even ball-shaped, and the game mostly requires the players to crash into each other whether or not any of them has the ball. I guess they call it football because a meaningless name like "soccer" would confuse so many of the jocks they'd be unable to get enough of them to form a team. Julia boasting of my sporting prowess drew lots of "ooh's" and "ahh's" from the gathered girls, and many comments to the effect that, "Wow, you could make a fortune!" Julia laughed, then said, "Better he finishes his schooling first. What would a 15-year old boy need a fortune for anyway?" Most of them had no trouble excitedly suggesting several good uses for a fortune, clothes shopping being on the top of most of their lists. Their idea of "good" was clearly from their perspective rather than mine. That the guy who earned and rightfully owned the fortune might have a different perspective didn't occur to them. Eventually one of yesterday's girls responded to Julia's cue properly - as I guessed Julia's intent - when she asked, "What about a house? Yesterday you said Mark might buy a house." "Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Mark and I talked a little about it last night. He's interested, mainly because of the pizza oven I think, haha." I could see that Chloe sat up and smiled at the pizza reference, which was a good sign about her positive interest in me. "When he gets some time Mark's going to look into how to make the money for it. It won't be through anything as silly as bowling though, as that sort of thing would take far too long and disrupt his education. I don't know when he'll get around to it, as he's extremely busy working on his college degree." I was surprised at how many girls weren't surprised to hear I was working on a college degree, but several hadn't heard about it, and they somehow managed to drag out of Julia that I was finishing my Bachelor in Mathematics next year. You shouldn't be surprised by the other girls being able to extract information like that out of Julia so easily. Girls are generally very nosey, so they learn how to be skillful interrogators. I was amused that my bowling 300 had obviously been fairly widely broadcast by yesterday's girls, but my finishing a college degree had apparently not been mentioned nearly as much. Just not impressive enough, I guess. At one time I was requested to show my juggling skills. Several of the girls had apples, oranges and the like, and they passed them forward. I rejected bananas as being too awkward. I juggled only four, because their having different sizes worried me a little, and because food should be treated with respect. One of the audience said, "Four's not hard. I can do four too. I'll show you." She started trying to obtain the necessary fruit. Julia wasn't going to stand for anyone challenging my superiority! Before the girl could show us that she was as good as me at anything, Julia said, "Mark's only warming up. He can do a LOT more than four." Turning to me, Julia demanded, "Do more, Mark." I've never tried a number of items that wasn't divisible by my number of minds, and didn't want to start experimenting now, not with Julia's vicarious ego at risk in front of so many spectators. I called for four more pieces, and they were located (most girls seem to only eat a single piece of fruit for lunch. I'm glad I'm not a girl!). I arranged the eight pieces in size order, and juggled them in the sequence of pieces # 1, 3, 5, 7, 2, 4, 6, 8; so each mind's fruit were similarly sized. It was easy. Julia challenged Miss Thinks-She's-As-Good-As-Mark to try to equal that. She declined, saying, "Wow. Eight is HARD! I could never do that many. I can't even do five." Julia let her live. I returned the fruit to its rightful owners, somewhat regretfully, as I fancied eating some of it. Their needs were greater than mine. For me it was just a little snack, to fill a corner. For them it was their ENTIRE lunch, the poor things. We'd made our way to our lunch spot in little groups, but we walked back to class at the end of lunch as one large group, except for Carol, who'd had to leave a couple of minutes earlier. Several of the guys we passed were surprised to see one guy surrounded by so many girls, including with Julia and Pat on an arm each. Most of the guys were fine, some even called out amusing comments, but some of the 10th grade guys scowled in displeasure. It appeared that I was going to have trouble sooner or later. As we all started dividing up for classes, Chloe asked to speak to Julia. I excused myself and left them to it. They talked for a few minutes, and ended up having to run to make it to class on time. When she could, Julia told me that it seemed that nothing was going to happen with Chloe today, as they hadn't had enough time to talk, but Chloe was going to come over to Julia's after dinner, to talk some more. The afternoon was generally similar to the morning. Fewer friendly girls thanking me for a great time yesterday, compensated for by more girls thanking me for allowing them to have lunch with me. For a couple of minutes before one class, Pat sat on my lap, making sure I saw that she flipped her skirt up first, so her bare ass was on me. My cock instantly got hard, showing my appreciation. Pat wiggled on it, to show HER appreciation for my appreciation. When she got up, a very quick go-soft was required, before I was laughed at. The cock-groping girls had been a little nervous after word first got around that Julia was serious that the "Revenge Gropings" would happen, but they'd relaxed almost entirely by the end of the day. One of my male classmates commented to me, "I don't think it's fair that so many girls are chasing after you." I didn't have time to give the whole speech I'd pretty much worked out, and it's the sort of speech that only works if the listeners hear all of it, so I just said, "First, I think it's FAIR that people be able to choose for themselves what they want to do. If several girls want to chase me, that's their fair choice. Second, if they were all chasing you, I doubt very much that you'd be sending them all away because you wouldn't want to be 'unfair' to all the other guys. Get real." To get to the next class on time I had to leave him pondering those thoughts. I doubted he'd ponder them enough, unfortunately. He looked like the "sore loser" type. I also ran into Ava late in the day. I was uncertain what to say, but she had no problem. She immediately launched into a heartfelt apology for her behavior on Saturday morning, calling herself "stupid" several times, sometimes adding, "especially because my muscles were sore all day Saturday." She also added, "Did you really bowl 300 on Sunday?" "Where did you hear that?" "Julia sent me a text message. You really did?" "Yeah. There were nearly thirty of the 10th grade girls there, including all the other Liaisons. If you ask around you'll find plenty of people who saw it." "Oh, I BELIEVE you! I'd never not believe something you or Julia told me was true. I just can't believe how incredible you are. I DO believe, and I CAN'T believe, if you know what I mean. You run fantastically, you bowl fantastically, you are super-fantastic at sex, AND you're a genius as well. I can't believe how stupid I was to try to pretend I was as good as you at anything. I won't do it again, I promise. I've learned my lesson." Which gave me an opening into what I most wanted to ask about. "Ava, your punishment on Tuesday night is REALLY going to hurt. You know that, don't you?" "Yeah. I hit myself with a belt last night, to see what it felt like, and it hurt like hell! I know Tuesday is going to be terrible. You won't mind if I cry, will you?" I DID mind. I'd much rather nothing happened that caused her to cry. Instead I said, "Are you sure you want to allow me to hurt you like that?" "I know it's going to be the worst pain I've ever felt, but I deserve it. Julia has explained why you're going to be doing it to me, and she's right. Julia is a very smart girl. Much smarter than me." It felt weird to say it, as it wasn't my usual style at all, but I thought it was a good idea to say, "Yes she is. We're both much smarter than you." That lesson reinforced, I was still not happy with having to hurt her so much. I remembered Julia's plan that Ava live with us in our mansion, so I said to her, "Ava, honey, if you keep on doing what Julia and I want, good things will happen in your life. Things you've got no idea about now, and that you can't imagine, but they'll be good. But you have to do what we want." "I will. I've learned my lesson now. I know you are super-fantastic at everything. I'll do what you want. What Julia and Carol want too, because they're important to you." I'd forgotten Carol, but it was good that Ava hadn't. Especially if Ava was going to live with us, because then she'll need to be obedient to all three of us. "Good girl. I'll see you on Tuesday night, if not before." I gave her a very nice kiss before we went in our separate ways, trying very hard not to think about thrashing her. As we were about to drive home, immediately after she was in the car, an excited Donna wanted confirmation that she'd be sleeping with Carol and me tonight. I answered, "Sure, sweetie. I'm looking forward to it." Not so much for myself, because I was somewhat nervous about it, but Donna was so happy at the prospect that I felt good for her. I headed to Julia's place first, to drop her off before the rest of us went to our home. Carol would be nervously cooking dinner for me there, before I went to Aikido. Julia gave me a nice kiss goodbye, and asked me to call her when I got back from Aikido so she could tell me what she'd discussed with Chloe. At home Carol and I both went to the kitchen. She wanted to make sure all the ingredients were still there for dinner; I wanted to reduce the supply of other ingredients, by way of getting myself a snack. After that we went to OUR bedroom (so cool!). Carol said, "When we were moving all your stuff in here, Mom and Dad told me to be careful about our privacy, and I was told to pass it on. Mainly to close the drapes if we do anything that a brother wouldn't normally do with his sister." "Okay. I'll remember that." The drapes were now pinned to the walls on the outside and had Velcro patches down the middle, so they could be closed very securely. After they were well closed, we did some things a brother wouldn't normally do with his sister. Just for five or ten minutes. Very nice it was too. After which Carol started some of her schoolwork, and I finished getting out of my silly school clothes and into some casual, nipple-obscuring ones. After changing, I carefully read through the descriptions for the first two years of OSU's Math courses. Knowing I had to start choosing them very soon was a marvelous inducement. No amount of inducement helped me understand them any better though. Some of the terms I'd already learned from my first two courses appeared, which gave me SLIGHTLY more insight than I'd had last time I'd looked through these. It was obvious that when it came to choosing which courses I was going to take, especially in the third and fourth years where most of the choices were, I was going to have to rely virtually totally on Prof. Not only didn't I understand the descriptions, but I also had no idea how useful any of the courses would be in my future. Fortunately there was actually very little choice in the first two years, but even "very little" was too much for me. I'd leave it to Prof. I also read up on what OSU called their "Baccalaureate Core Courses", the roughly one-third of the degree that I had to do in more general topics. Most of them were of way less than no interest to me: Poetry (no way!), Native American Literature, Bible Studies, Geography, Law, Politics - sheesh! Fortunately there were some interesting courses, mostly science oriented, of course. I turned to my schoolwork. Carol and I studied away quietly together. At 4:00 Sensei called, to confirm we were on for tonight. "Definitely. I'm looking forward to it." Back to the books until Carol said, "It's time for me to start making your dinner." I closed my books and stood up, saying, "I'll help you." "No way! This is MY job. No Lords allowed." She meant it too. My telling her, "But I'd like to help," got me nowhere, except back to my schoolwork. I heard Mom come home, so I went to meet her, but mainly to check that all was well with my dinner and that Carol was not stressing out or anything like that. Mom was checking on Carol's progress, and they both seemed perfectly happy, so I was too. I was shooed back to my room. Carol had made enough dinner for everyone. The plan had been that the family would have theirs at the normal time, while I'd have half of mine now and half later, to keep me from getting too hungry and from training on a full stomach. But Carol asked me, "Would it be okay for me to come and watch you tonight please? I've not seen Aikido and it's important to you, so I'd like to understand it more." Donna immediately said, "Me too, please? I found it for you, and I haven't seen it. I want to see you do things." Mom got her worry in first, "Would the teacher be okay with spectators at your training, Mark?" "I'm sure that'd be no problem. The dojo's normally full of people, and he had no problem at all with Julia being there last time. I'm only worried that I'll be training for three hours, so Carol and Donna might get very bored." Especially Donna, but that didn't need saying. That was easily resolved. They'd take some schoolwork, and if they got too bored, they could call Mom or Dad to come get them. Which meant they also needed dinner now, so it was easier for the whole family to have an early dinner. It was a good dinner, something I complimented a happy Carol for at least half a dozen times. During dinner I brought my parents up to date with some of my latest happenings. Bowling 300 particularly impressed Dad. Celebrating afterward with a couple dozen naked girls also impressed Dad. Both of these Mom and Dad had heard from Donna, when Vanessa had brought Donna home last night, but it was still good to tell them myself. I also mentioned that, "Prof and I did some work on the moneymaking idea last night. We overcame probably the biggest hurdle, but discovered a new problem that we hadn't foreseen. If we can't find a solution we'll be stuck and the whole idea might have to be dropped, but Prof is working on it and seems hopeful. I've got no idea when he'll find a solution though - maybe tomorrow, maybe a month, or maybe never. I don't know." There wasn't much more I could say without giving the game away. Mom asked, "Is there anything we can do to help?" I said, "I don't think so." Then I thought of a better answer, so I added, "The ball's in Prof's court now. If he thinks of something you can help with, I'm sure he won't hesitate to ask." Immediately after dinner Donna made a little production of making me wait at the table while she went into Mom's bedroom with Mom, and returned with a handful of cash: $2,800 to be exact. Donna said, "I got the money from the last people on Sunday. Mom had been keeping some of it safe for me, and now here it all is. $2,800. It's a lot of money, isn't it?" Donna handed it over, smiling proudly. I had no trouble saying, "I have never had so much money in my hand before. $2,800! Wow." Before I could say anything else, Donna eagerly asked, "When are you going to buy a car?" Rather than mess around (again!), and perhaps mess it up (again), I immediately said, "I've decided to buy a horse instead." "A horse! You want a horse?" asked a VERY surprised Donna. I suddenly realized that Donna probably didn't know that I'd remembered her comment about wanting a horse. She had only mentioned it twice in my hearing, and never to me personally. So I decided to tease her a little. "Sure. Julia and I share her car very easily, so I don't think I need another car. What I REALLY want, once we get our big house with plenty of land, is to have a horse I can ride around. That'd be fun, wouldn't it?" "That'd be AWESOME. I LOVE horses!" "You do? It must run in the family then. I'm glad you won so much money, because horses take a lot of looking after, exercising them, taking them for rides regularly, grooming them, and all those sorts of things. With this much money I'll easily be able to afford to hire someone to look after it for me." "I'LL DO IT! I'll look after it for you! Please let me?" "You pay for it AND look after it for me too. That hardly seems fair." "It's fair! I WANT to. I'd LOVE to look after your horse." "Well, if you're so eager, maybe you can help me choose which horse to buy?" She had to know more than I did about buying horses, because I knew next to nothing. Even though I knew so little about horses, I was reasonably sure that $2,800 would be more than enough, because horses give birth to themselves and then only need grass and water to live, so they'd be quite cheap to buy and keep. But even if I was somehow wrong and they cost more than $2,800, it wouldn't matter because we'd only buy a horse if we got a mansion, which would mean we could afford whatever a horse would cost. "I'd LOVE to help you choose. What sort of horse do you want?" I was pretty sure they had four legs, so a four-legged one would be good, but beyond that I had no idea. "Umm, how about we wait until we've got our new house so we can see what sort of land we've got, and we can decide then. We have to wait until we get the new house, as we have no room here. I'll keep your money in my account until then." "Okay. I hope we get the new house soon though." I agreed with that, for reasons that had nothing to do with horses, although the main reasons did total four legs. I said, "As you're going to be looking after it so much, and choosing it, it'd make sense that you get to name it too." "Wow. That's..." Donna stopped saying whatever it was she was going to say, and looked at me suspiciously. "You're buying it for me, aren't you?" The cat was out of the bag. "Yes. Because I'll enjoy that very much." An excited, "Wow." But after brief pause, a more subdued, "But the money is for you. You're meant to buy something for yourself." "I can't think of anything that'd make me happier than using it to buy you a horse." "Wow." After a second. "Can Mark really do that, Mom? Is it okay?" Mom answered, "IF we get a much bigger new house, with plenty of land the way we want, then he certainly can." That made it official, so Donna rushed to me, and rained kisses, hugs and thank yous on me. When Donna had calmed down enough, which took quite a while, Mom cautioned her about it depending on the new house, "It's very uncertain if we'll get it, and even if we do, it might takes months, maybe even a year or more. We don't know yet." Donna announced, "I REALLY hope we get it real soon!" Carol and I certainly agreed with that. Mom's and Dad's faces showed a lot less enthusiasm. Not negativity, just not much enthusiasm. Hopefully only because it was so unreal to them, as they weren't involved at all. Donna declared, "You're the best-est brother," squeezing me as hard as she could. Eventually we finished dinner, and it was time to get ready for Aikido. I changed into my gi, the girls gathered their schoolwork, plus a fiction book in Donna's case. When I returned to the kitchen Mom handed me a veritable picnic, "Enough for you and your teacher, if he wants something too, and a little extra for the girls." ------- Chapter 121: Sleeping with Donna Monday, April 25, 2005 Sensei didn't mind my sisters being there, and we got on with having a fantastic one-on-one training session. Sensei started by making sure I remembered the techniques he'd shown me last time, by my using them to defend against his practice attacks. You've got to like an activity where you get to throw your teacher to the floor and pin him there. It was a pity we couldn't do that to some of the teachers at school, especially the dipstick ones. I easily remembered all the previous lesson's techniques. I have a VERY good memory. Not only because I have four of them (three in use at one time), but each memory is also better than I remember it being a year or so ago, unless I'm mis-remembering that, haha. Before we could move onto the next new techniques, which were several different ways of throwing an opponent, Sensei first had to teach me how to roll properly. That was easy to do so he was soon able to use the momentum of my attack to throw me what seemed like several yards through the air. It was lot of fun, as he'd shown me how to land in a type of forward roll and to quickly stand up at the end. The closest thing to personally flying I was ever likely to do. Donna thought it was cool too. My learning rate was as good as it'd been in our last training session. There were five "projection" techniques, their word for techniques in which the opponent is "projected" away, i.e., thrown. We took a snack break after my finishing those - although aikidoka never "finish" learning - eating it in a little kitchenette they had as there was a strict rule against food near the mats. During the break both Donna and Carol said they were impressed. Donna's actually words were, "It's really cool the way you go flying all over the place." Carol said, "You seem to be learning very quickly." Sensei said, "Yes, you are learning to an extremely high standard very quickly, Mark. Other students can learn the basic movements of a technique not much slower than you, but their first attempts are very clumsy. It takes several years of practice for their techniques to improve to the level that you are achieving in a few minutes. You have an advantage in having such a highly developed sense of ki, but the quality and speed of your learning are still inexplicable to me." I couldn't make it explicable to him, not without divulging to many details about myself, such as that I could read his intentions so clearly. He'd tested my ability to sense ki by intending to punch me and seeing me dodge it, but he'd never once made a comment to me during our training along the lines of, "Can you feel my ki for this movement?" I don't know why he hadn't, because the two uses of what I called "my proximity sense" seemed identical to me. I wasn't willing to volunteer much more than I already had, as the more training I did with him, the more sure I was that my proximity sense was considerably more useful than what other aikidoka used to detect incoming punches, or to walk around the mats avoiding students. I simply said, "I don't understand it either. It's like trying to explain color to a blind person. I can't identify why others can't learn as fast as me." We finished our quick snack and headed back to the mats. We spent the last period doing some miscellaneous techniques, such as how to deal with someone who puts their arm around your neck from behind, or who sticks a gun or knife in your back, and several others. Sensei finished with some interesting philosophy, and we ended almost exactly at 9 o'clock. Sensei and I were both very pleased, and already looking forward to our next session. Almost his last comment was, "Are you not fatigued, Mark?" "No. It was fun. I'm sorry we have to stop." "You must be very fit, because that was an intensive session. Normally students get several rests while they sit through demonstrations, but you and I almost never paused. You might find you are sore tomorrow, as nearly all of the movements we made tonight would have been movements your body is not accustomed to." "I shouldn't think so Sensei. I've exerted myself harder than this before, and not had sore muscles. I'll tell you next week." We called it a night, I thanked him very much, and he assured me, "I enjoyed it very much. I have never trained anyone like you. It is very interesting and rewarding." Carol and Donna had kept themselves amused, by either watching me or doing their homework. In the car on the way home they assured me that they were glad they'd come. Donna was especially voluble, talking about how much Aikido differed from Karate. From her comments, such as, "When do you learn to hit things?" (To which my answer was, "Never. That's not part of Aikido"), we were clearly each doing the martial art that best suited us. At home I called Julia and let her know that Carol's cooking dinner had been a complete success, and that I was eagerly waiting for Carol to re-heat the last installment as we spoke. I also told her that Carol and Donna had watched my wonderful three-hour Aikido session. After my little pieces of news had been discussed, Julia said, "Chloe did come over after dinner, like a fly into the spider's web, haha. I had Mom primed to tell Chloe when they were introduced, 'Oh, so YOU'RE the girl Mark likes so much! I'm looking forward to finding out why.' Chloe thinks every boy likes her just because of her breasts, so she immediately noticed Mom's belief that you had a reason different from the obvious. As soon as we got to my room Chloe asked me about what Mom had said. I told her your staying in the parking lot rather than playing with two dozen naked girls obviously demonstrated you liked her and were far too mature to be influenced by bodies. Chloe knows all about the 'playing' you did, and that you had sex with half the girls. She's very impressed that you chose to keep talking to her. She complimented you for your maturity, haha. She doesn't know you well enough to know the real reason you stayed..." #1: We feared it wouldn't be complimentary, and more to do with our immaturity than the reverse, so we decided that "ignorance was bliss" and let Julia continue uninterrupted. " ... I made a BIG deal about how caring and unselfish you were in the parking lot, and how her suspicions and implicit accusations were an appalling way for her to treat you. I laid it on thick, and she ended up feeling miserable about her behavior. I also told her that my mom is very smart, and knows that you're far too mature and intelligent to consider breasts important. I'm a superb example of that, because mine are so small. I teased her with things like, 'How on Earth could you believe that any boy who has me as his girlfriend thinks breast size is important?' I gave her a hard time about her being the only person among the three of us thinking about her breasts, and that it was HER fixation on her breasts that caused her to mistreat you so badly, and HER that messed up her relationship with you. She's so used to thinking that guys mess up their relationships with her because of her breasts, that for me to accuse her of the same thing shocked her. She had to accept it, because of all the seemingly altruistic effort you expended trying to convince her that they weren't important to you, and because you've never made a nuisance of yourself to her. I was going to hammer that point over and over, because that's the key we're going to use to flip her, but she accepted it without much hammering being required. -- "Then we mostly talked about generalities, things like how with you it's all about who she is as a person not as a body, why I wasn't jealous of other girls, how I thought that she was a very nice caring girl, how I hoped she'd be able to convince you that she'd be a good girlfriend for you, what a very special guy you are, etc. I had no trouble convincing her how special you are, as the girls had told her about your sporting prowess. Your finishing your undergraduate degree next year had also been mentioned to her, plus she saw you bowl 300 so she's seen how athletically incredible you are. To start with, I couldn't tell whether she genuinely likes you, or it's just that she's very lonely for any guy to like her for herself. It doesn't really matter either way, but I now think it's probably the latter, as she doesn't seem to know you very well. Even though she's totally paranoid about her breasts, she quickly accepted that they don't matter to you, so she obviously doesn't know you at all! Haha. -- "Even though EVERY guy is either obvious about his interest in her breasts, or he tries to pretend he doesn't notice them but invariably slips up soon, she's still willing to give up her suspicion about your being motivated by them. Of course you'd slip up quickly too, which is why we're doing what I've suggested." (I could tell you what Julia suggested, but - as Julia often says - "You'll enjoy it more if you don't know about it in advance.") Julia gave me many more details, presumably because she had enjoyed herself so much. The details weren't necessary, as it was obvious that Chloe was hooked. There were a couple of slightly troublesome issues, the first being Chloe's low opinion of herself. Julia spent most of the time reassuring Chloe that I did truly like her. "More than any of the twenty four girls who were here yesterday." Also, "You're a very caring person, Chloe, similar to Mark's sister Carol, who you saw at lunch. The girls who were here yesterday would have told you how much he loves his sister, and you heard his speeches about that a week ago. He values Carol enormously, and you're similar to Carol, so I think he sees a great deal of value in you." The second problem came about after Julia talked up how wonderful I was and how much I already liked Chloe. Chloe started questioning why I was intending to date any other girls if I liked her [Chloe] so much. She didn't think my dating other girls was needed any longer, now that she and I liked each other. It was a wonderful sign. Wrong of course, but wonderful anyway. Julia blamed everyone except me, saying something like, "I'm insisting that Mark has to have the best possible girlfriend, and he's such an incredible person that he deserves the best, but finding such a girl isn't easy. Mark's not the sort of guy to judge a girl by her looks, so he has to spend some time with every girl who's interested in him, and there are MANY of them. He's getting it over with as quickly as he can, especially by doing multiple-girl dates like yesterday, but he's only just started and it's going to take a while to do it properly. As you know - because he's never flirted with you - he's not a playboy type of guy. He's been concentrating on his studies and mostly ignoring girls for years, so he has to start from scratch. You've got a big lead over the twenty four girls that he kept waiting while he tried to help you, but I wont let him concentrate on just you. He and I both know that it wouldn't be fair to him, because even though Mark likes you a lot, so far you've only used your one-on-one time with him to be highly distrustful and accusatory. From that we know that you have trust issues. Successful relationships are built on trust, so your problem is very serious. I appreciate you want Mark for your boyfriend, but so far all you've done is show Mark that he shouldn't want you as his girlfriend. -- "Because Mark likes you so much, and because I trust his judgment, I'll help you the best I can - you can ask me any question you want, bounce ideas off me, and ask me for whatever else that might help you - but it's eventually going to be up to you. Unless you can prove to Mark how much you trust him, and that you can be a good girlfriend for him, he'd be foolish to spend any more time with you. Mark is VERY smart; easily smart enough to like you despite your nastiness to him yesterday. He knows your problems aren't the real you - that deep down you really are a lovely, loving person - but you still have to prove to him that you can open up and share the real Chloe with him. To show him that you can openly trust and love him the way someone as wonderful as Mark deserves." After much more girly talk, Chloe eventually decided how she was going to prove to me that she trusted I wasn't interested in her for her breasts. This had happened after some more subtle 'help' (snigger) from Julia. Julia steered Chloe right into having the idea that Julia planned for her to have. Chloe said she'd do it tomorrow, in the gap just before the last class of the day, "So if it doesn't work, I don't have to face him for the rest of the day." (Chloe and I don't share the last class tomorrow.) Julia promised to make all the arrangements, and also promised, "Of course I won't tell Mark. This is private between you and him." Because Chloe had had the 'idea' of doing exactly what Julia and I had already planned for, we didn't need to discuss what to do next. So Julia finished the topic with, "She's very eager to find a guy who values her for herself, and is amazed that it's someone that she thinks so highly of. I'll get a nice feeling from lifting her long-running depression, and you'll get a nice feeling too, haha." Julia knows exactly how my mind works, regardless of her not knowing how many of them I've got. With those two very pleasant images in mind, I told Julia, "Excellent work with Chloe. You're right that I'm looking forward to your plan succeeding, for both selfish and altruistic reasons. I'll come study tomorrow morning, so I'll see you when you wake up." "Okay, darling. Have a nice night with Donna and Carol. Love you. Goodnight." "I love you too. Goodnight." It was getting easier and easier for me to say that, for reasons that had nothing to do with Chloe. Carol had the rest of my dinner ready - such good service - and then sat on my lap to supervise my eating it. Mom had recently installed some "ready-made drapes" in the kitchen to make Carol's and my cuddling safer. We chatted with Mom and Dad during my meal. The four of us initially talked about Aikido, but soon Mom moved the conversation on to what was obviously her idea of the main topic: she seemed to have developed a bee in her bonnet about how our three-way marriage was working out with my playing around with all the extra girls. I told Mom that I thought it was working out fantastically, but for some reason Mom seemed to assume my opinion was somehow biased. Mom was mostly worried about how Carol and Julia were managing with my "playing around", which was said with tone of voice that would have been used for "cheating". Carol wasn't going to take Mom's accusations sitting down! If anything, she was even more enthusiastic than I was, although I couldn't imagine how that could be possible. Carol firmly disagreed with Mom, making a big deal about how she and Julia were strongly in favor of my playing around, and how they supported each other so weren't under any threat. I expanded on one of Vanessa's previous comments, "Vanessa pointed something out to us recently. In a traditional marriage a second girl must be in a 'winner takes all' competition with the wife, but because our marriage is open there is no such competition. Any girl could enough to threaten Julia and Carol can simply join in. There's no possessiveness, jealousy, fear, and the like. Adding Carol to my relationship with Julia made everything better for all of us, and we expect adding another girl should do that again, so no one is worried about that happening. We're looking forward to it, although we have no one in mind yet. We're all starting to understand that a multi-way marriage is a lot safer. Julia, especially, now feels far less worried about being pushed out than she used to be. Amusingly it's the second girl, Carol, that's made the first girl feel so secure, the opposite of what would happen in one of those silly two-way marriages, haha. You're the only person worried about this, Mom." Carol confirmed, "Julia and I are very happy. We're having a fantastic time. We not only don't mind Mark playing around; we think it's good for him and fun for all of us. Julia's main worry is how to get as many girls as possible for Mark to play with." Mom talked it around a bit more, while I finished my dinner, but it was hard for her to argue with our logic and happiness. She couldn't pull the "mother knows best" routine, because mother knew nothing about multiple-way open marriages, but she did try to claim that she knew more about people in general, but I shot her down with my prepared answer, "Vanessa and Prof understand people even better than you do, and they're in favor of and actively help our three-way marriage and the playing around that I do." Mom couldn't think of any other good points to put forward, so the discussion ended with Mom not being happy with the result. She wasn't angry, just unhappy, but I worried about it. Her attitude to my sex-life was fluctuating for reasons I didn't understand - moms tend to be females, so there was little chance of my understanding my mom's feelings. I couldn't see how she could win in an argument over how we ran our marriage, but I didn't want her to be unhappy about it. If she got worse, I'd have to talk with Vanessa about it. After dinner I would've liked to take Carol to bed to thank her for my dinner properly, but it was late and Donna wanted to get to bed for the unusual combination of her being both tired and eager. So the three of us called it a night, and headed for the same bed. I'd been worried about how to handle Donna being in our bed. On one hand I wanted to give her a good time to thank her for being so mature recently and for her $2,800 gift, but I didn't want to treat her too maturely. There was no possibility of "Practice Mark" being retired any time soon! Donna had a not unreasonable expectation that if she behaved herself then the amount of sex she had with me would slowly ramp up. That made it very important to never give her too much sex, because she wouldn't take kindly to the next session going backward. I also feared doing too much as I don't exactly have a lot of experience slowing girls down. Fortunately I'd already told Donna that I'd be wearing underwear, and that they were a "no-go zone" for her hands. As long as I kept her out of my underwear, nothing much could go wrong. I was first into bed, waiting for the girls to come back from the bathroom. They entered the bedroom together, in their nighties, but not for long. They pulled them off, and wearing nothing but smiles, climbed into bed on either side of me. I wanted to keep things decent, so I mentioned my going to study at Julia's in the early morning to remind them about important things like good behavior, seriousness, maturity and the like. In response Donna said, "I'm so excited I'm sopping wet. You can feel if you like?" So much for Plan A. Too subtle, I guess. I tried Plan B. "Haha. No thanks, Donna. I think that's more than we should be doing for a fair while yet. Tonight's about friendly affection, not sex. I'm not going to be doing things like that, and remember that I told you that you have to keep your hands away from my underwear too." As soon as I'd said all that, I realized it was full of negatives, which wasn't a very friendly way to talk with anyone. Donna answered, "I remember. I don't mind you touching me though." "In that case, sweetie, I think I'd like to very closely check out your breasts." Judging by the way she instantly threw the bed covers down the bed, and the way she stuck out her chest, that seemed to get Donna's approval. (I'm getting better at understanding girls.) After careful and mutually enjoyable tactile and visual scrutiny I said, "They even seem to be a little bit bigger than the last time I looked. I didn't expect that in such a short time." I wasn't completely sure they were bigger, but I thought so. One thing I was sure about though, was that my saying so would make Donna happy, which it certainly did. It also led her to ask me, "If they're growing quickly, does that mean I'm going to end up with big breasts?" I didn't have a clue whether that was the case or not, but was impressed by how much faith Donna had in my expertise (ha!). I hesitated, and Carol filled the gap, "You can't tell from the speed, because it also depends on how long they keep growing. But like we told you before, Mom and I have quite large breasts, so you probably will too." "Yeah, but you've been saying 'probably', and I thought we might be able to tell already." We got into a, quite frankly, somewhat boring conversation about what size breasts Donna wanted, especially as we'd had a very similar conversation not long ago. She wanted to be sexy, but she also wanted to remain competitive at sports. I guess it must be a scary thing for a girl, as girls are so easily and often judged by their breasts and they have no control over them. I had the obvious answer readily available, "Donna, I think both my wives have sexy breasts. Yours will be sexy no matter what size they are, because you're a sexy girl." Donna thought that was wonderful, but she had a valid point when she added, "I'm sure you like looking at girls with big tits though, just like every other guy. I'm much slimmer than Mom and Carol, and didn't start maturing until much later than they did, so I might end up with small tits. It's nice you say that Julia's are sexy, but I know that small tits really aren't." Good grief! Why worry about something that hasn't happened yet, may not happen, and you've got no control over anyway. And it's not like Donna to behave so depressingly self-conscious. I didn't know why she was behaving this way, but I had an idea what to do about it. My idea was already in my mind, as I'd been resisting acting on it for several minutes. Telling myself I was doing it to reassure Donna, I leaned over and starting sucking on one of her nipples. Donna enthusiastically agreed with that development, "Wow, that's great. Ohh, that feels wonderful." I sucked and licked her for a while, then gave her some kisses before swapping to the other nubbin. I kept it up for several minutes, and ended up kissing Donna far more than I ever had before. Donna thoroughly approved, making several statements like, "This is SO much better than playing with myself," and "Sex is REALLY good fun." If Donna thought having her nubbins sucked was such good fun, she's going to be blown away when she finally gets full-on sex with someone. Carol suddenly pushed the covers down even farther, and said to Donna, "Look how hard Mark's cock is. He obviously thinks you're sexy, even with your breasts as tiny as they are now. You don't have to worry about needing to be bigger to attract him." Donna looked down, admired my bulge, giggled happily, then tried to reach for it. I intercepted her hand, saying, "Tsk, tsk, Donna. You know I told you that my underwear are a no-go zone." Fortunately, Donna's being another of Mom's children meant she didn't react to "tsk, tsk" the way anyone else would have. It's no wonder I used to get beaten up so often at school with language like that. I was lying on my side facing Donna, with Carol spooned up behind me with her hand around my waist. It was therefore very quick and easy for Carol to pull the front of my underwear out and down, and to say, "Remember Donna, you mustn't touch his underwear, {giggle}." I was still holding Donna's nearest hand, but she was moving her other toward her goal, while eagerly asking me, "Can I really?" Outnumbered, I said, "Umm. I had intended that we not get very sexy tonight. Just cuddle and be friendly." Carol countered with, "I know you can go to sleep instantly Mark, but Donna and I are so turned on we're going to have a sleepless night unless we can get some release. You should make love to me, while Donna watches and plays with herself. We can go to sleep after we've all had a good orgasm." So much for my intention to keep sex out of tonight. I understood Donna and me being aroused, but Carol had just been snuggling up behind me and chatting a bit. So I asked her, "Carol, how come you're so turned on?" "I've been looking forward to your making love to me. I like having sex in front of other people: our threesomes with Julia, or when Ava was here. I'm excited about doing it in front of Donna because it's so kinky, haha." I certainly agreed that it was kinky, but Carol's first comment confused me. "You've been looking forward to our having sex? I thought the idea was just to have a friendly night together." "What a waste that would be!" Donna giggled her agreement with that sentiment. Carol continued, "I want to, and Donna's so excited to be in bed with you that it'd be cruel to just cuddle. You won't be taking advantage of her, because she's only going to be watching. Mom and Dad may not exactly be encouraging us, but they're aware of roughly what we do and they're not stopping us. The only reason not to do it would be if you feared Donna would let slip something to an outsider, but I can't imagine that she could possibly 'accidentally' mention something like this. She's been very mature recently, so let's do this. Plus, did I mention that I REALLY want to?" "I was getting that idea, yes." I had neither reason nor motivation to argue with Carol, so I added, "Okay, we'll do what you want." "Yippee!" from Donna. Donna was only going to be watching, which made my lack of visible enthusiasm look poor, so I added, "Yippee from me too." I discarded my underwear while Carol got out a rubber. She commented, "Just a few more days until I go onto the pill. Yippee for that too." "You can say that again. That'll be great." When Carol handed me the rubber, I held it out to Donna, and asked her, "Do you want me to teach you how to put a rubber on?" I asked her because I thought we both might enjoy her holding my cock while she put it on, plus it seemed like a good thing to teach her. Maybe the knowledge might prove useful to her one day, plus I take my responsibility as big brother seriously, including teaching one sister how to put a rubber on me so I don't get the other sister pregnant yet. Donna enthusiastically agreed, proving that education can be a lot of fun. It's a pity my school doesn't make its teaching as enjoyable. I figured Carol and I should have sex with me on top, because I wanted Donna to have the impression that I was the boss, although that'd require her to forget that my plan for tonight had been for a sexless cuddling session. The missionary position would be good, so I put Carol on her back and rolled on top of her. Once I was there, I couldn't resist going down on her. Donna put her head right next to mine to watch closely, which particularly aroused Carol. After a couple of minutes I had a naughty idea. I turned my head and kissed Donna on the lips, giving her a taste of Carol. A couple of minutes later I offered another kiss to Donna, who responded by kissing and licking Carol's juices off my face. This was deliberate depravity, and we all seemed to enjoy it. As far as I knew Carol and Donna had never done anything sexy together. Probably they were doing so now only because they were both so turned on and because I was the intermediary. Whether they'd do anything together in the future was something I was going to leave ENTIRELY up to them to decide. I wasn't going to push it at all because I was a GOOD brother! I didn't even think about their being together. Instead I very enjoyably thought about me watching Donna with one or more of her Ducklings. Preferably with "more" of them. Which reminded me that lunch with the Ducklings was in just three days but I hadn't done any planning at all for it. I didn't want to have sex with any of them myself. Instead I wanted to watch them as a group, get them all sexually aroused, and see them try to impress me. I definitely needed to think about how to push them in that direction. They were my Prof-assigned project, so I had to work this out for myself. I shouldn't think about that now though, so I returned my attention back to what I was doing with Carol. I spent several more minutes having fun between Carol's legs (I can't believe I ever thought this was "Eww"), occasionally sharing her juices with Donna. I'd had the impression that Carol had intended for us all to have just one orgasm with Donna's being self-administered, and then to go to sleep. My "no sex" intention had been ignored, so I ignored Carol's intention too. I thought it'd be more fun, and more impressive for Donna, if I gave Carol an oral orgasm before the main event. So I carried on in that direction. Donna asked, "Will you do that to me one day?" I was busy, but I took a moment to say, "One day. Maybe on your birthday." After a pause, Donna politely pointed out, "But that's MONTHS away." Donna's birthday was August 1st, which was just over three months away. I thought that was a suitable time period for her to prove her maturity in. Carol, although she was having trouble talking, managed to say, "Don't worry, Donna. It'll happen before then." Apparently three months wasn't a suitable time. "Good. What about my sucking him? I want to do that too." You know your authority is not being taken seriously when one sister asks the other when she can suck your dick. You'd think the person the dick is attached to should be the one asked, but apparently not. Before Carol could catch her breath to answer, I got in first with, "All of that depends on how well you behave. If you're mature and trustworthy," I had an idea, so quickly added, "and helpful - like with the Ducklings - then more will happen. Especially trustworthy - that's VERY important, because Mom and Dad would be in big trouble with the authorities if what we do became known. Not asking too many questions when I'm trying to give Carol a good time would also be good, haha." Donna showed she got the hint by keeping quiet, and I got back to the job at hand, regretting that I hadn't included "obedient" in the list of things Donna had to be. The idea of an obedient girl is quite sexy, but - on the other hand - I've never taken advantage of Julia's and Carol's willingness to be obedient. The trouble is that they always seem to know what to do better than I do. Oh well, on with the job at hand. A couple of minutes later I looked over at her, and noticed another reason why Donna was not talking: she was more interested in watching us and playing with herself. Good, for all sorts of reasons. I moved my head slightly to the right, and tried to mostly use my right hand, so Donna's view was as unobstructed as possible. There was no talking after that, just all of us enjoying Carol getting more and more aroused. Carol's moans naturally became louder and louder, and her final cry must have been heard through the wall by Mom and Dad. I moved up to cuddle with Carol for a while, on the side away from Donna just in case Mom or Dad came in to check on us. Better to be seen cuddling, than what I would normally be doing next. Donna - lightly rubbing herself to keep her arousal going - said, "Wow, that looked neat. Mark seems very good at that?" Carol answered, "He sure is! I didn't have any comparison until recently, but now I've had Julia and Ava several times, and he's easily better than both of them." "I am?" I asked without thinking, from incredulous, pessimistic surprise. "Haha, you sure are. You should know that already. Haven't all the girls you've done that to been very happy? The ones I've heard talking about it can't wait to do it again." Donna declared, "I can't wait to do it the FIRST time!" Carol said, "Speaking of doing things, how come you're just cuddling me, Mark?" "Ahh, I'm worried about Mom or Dad coming in to check on the noise we were making. It'd be a bit embarrassing to be seen going at it." "I don't think they'll come in. They didn't when Julia and Ava were here, and we made plenty of noise then, especially Julia. Even if they did, I'm sure they'd knock first to give us time to get decent. And have I mentioned recently that I REALLY want to do it? Haha." I was quite eager too, and I was sufficiently reassured I wouldn't be caught mid-stroke, so I 'saddled up', so to speak. Everything went as expected, Carol and I having a great time, and Donna very excited to be right beside us while we were having it. I even got a little carried away, by kissing Donna or sucking on her nubbins while still thrusting in and out of Carol. For some reason I find it very depraved to be fucking one girl while kissing another (or sucking her nubbins; my depravity isn't fussy), so I can't resist doing it whenever I get the chance. I definitely couldn't resist sucking on one of Donna's nubbins while making love to Carol, because that was VERY depraved! Donna certainly enjoyed being included that way too. It became obvious that while Donna was very interested in me sexually, she wasn't interested in Carol that way. Donna's comments to me such as, "I can't wait until you fuck me," and, "That is so much better than Practice Mark," were pretty good indications of her feelings for me. While the comments Donna made to Carol were more along the lines of, "Gee, your breasts bounce around a LOT! Does that hurt?" and other inquiries to help Donna understand what it felt like to be under me. That was where Donna was looking forward to being. I value my sisters for reasons far beyond their sexuality, so instead of being disappointed by the loss of hot sister-sex, my main reaction to learning about Donna's focus was that it made me relax. Obviously not to relax physically as I was far too busy for that, but emotionally. There was already too much sex going on around Donna in my opinion, and I thought it was good that there was no sexual tension between Donna and Carol, because Donna needs some normality around her. It also meant that Donna could easily talk with Carol if she had any concerns about all the sexual stuff that she was being exposed to, Carol not being part of the problem. By her prior admissions, Donna wasn't shy about fooling around with other girls, which offered very interesting possibilities for me and the Ducklings, but it felt safer that she was mainly into guys. I was also pretty sure she was into guys plural, rather than just me, because she'd made comments like, "I wonder how Mark compares to other guys." Even I could discern the motivations behind that. Carol had answered that, "Far better. You can ask Ava next time you see her, as she's had quite a few guys. Just make sure you don't let her know why you're interested." There a surprisingly large amount of talk during our sex. Donna was very interested and didn't hesitate to ask every question the moment it occurred to her, and Carol had no compunction about answering in as much detail as she could. Only one person was embarrassed at all, and you can probably guess who that was. I don't understand how females can talk so shamelessly, but that's just one of a long list of things that I don't understand about females. Other than the embarrassing conversation, the only unusual event was Carol asking me, "At the end Mark, please pull your condom off and spurt on my belly. I want Donna to lick it off." "YEAH!" agreed Donna. "That'd be SO cool! I'd love to taste that again." With my newly discovered "go-spurt" ability I could do this whenever I wanted, but immediately after Carol started cumming would be a very good time. I happily agreed by saying, "Your wish is my command." "Goody," said Donna. Because we'd been talking so much, one of my minds wasn't totally focused on having sex. Donna's "Goody" comment made him think of something stupidly funny. He shared it, and I laughed at the thought. Both girls asked me what I was laughing at, so I told them, "One of Donna's favorite ice cream flavors is 'Goody Goody Gum Drops'. She's obviously growing up, because now she wants to lick 'Goody Goody CUM Drops'! Haha." The girls let me know that they also thought it was stupidly funny, especially the "stupidly" part. Rather than being teased, I distracted Carol by suddenly thrusting with extra vigor, which quickly caught Donna's attention too, although not as quickly as it caught Carol's. We'd been having sex for quite a while by now, and this sudden speed up caused Carol to quickly reach the beginnings of her orgasm. I thrust faster and faster, matched by Donna's fingers on herself, as she'd been told to get herself off at the same time as we did. I had to laugh to myself. I'd thoughtlessly assumed Donna would be clumsy and inexperienced at playing with herself, but I soon found out that wasn't the case at all. She knew exactly what to do, and thoroughly enjoyed doing it. My image of her as the baby of the family was taking some serious damage from watching her do herself so proficiently. It only took a couple of minutes until I had to choose which girl to kiss, in order to muffle the sounds of their climaxes. The decision was made for me by Donna's climax causing her to roll out of my reach, so I leaned forward and kissed Carol just as she started cumming. I held the kiss, and kept my cock in her, while Carol was thrashing around. I love being inside a girl when she cums, because her cunt muscle's spasms feel great. (It was only a few paragraphs above where I said how much I love fucking one girl while kissing another. Sex is a WHOLE bunch of fun!). When Carol's thrashing diminished, I pulled out, pull my rubber off, and spurted over her belly. Donna had recovered already, and was lying on her side facing us. She reached out a finger to scoop some of my cum up, but I stopped her by saying, "Carol's still too far out of it to notice what you're doing. Wait a few seconds so she can enjoy watching you doing it." "Can she really not notice me? Her eyes are open." Carol answered for me, "Yeah, cumming totally distracts me for a second or two. A really big one can take me even longer to recover from. Julia's the worst. When Mark gives her a good one she passes out for a minute or more. From what I know, most girls are like me and Ava, just being overwhelmed for a few seconds. Anyway, that's not important for now. You should lick up Mark's cum before it turns all runny." Donna smiled, and reached out her finger again. Carol interrupted her action by saying, "Try licking it directly with your tongue, so you get the taste stronger than you would from using your fingers. It's got quite a strong taste, and it takes a bit of getting used to." "Okay." Carol pointed at the largest puddle, so Donna leaned over and licked most of it up. Donna's face screwed up a little as Carol asked, "What do you think?" "It's okay. Knowing it's Mark's makes a big difference. I'd probably complain if Mom cooked something that tasted like this, but it's okay from Mark." "Haha, good comment. You'll get more used to it after a couple more times. It may be quite a while before Mark thinks you're ready for going all the way, so you'll probably end up doing a lot of sucking each other off. Mark's very good at it, so you should try your best too." Carol started cleaning up her own belly one finger swipe at a time. I could see Donna was uncertain what she thought about Carol's prediction, which made two of us. After a few seconds Carol added, "Don't bother thinking too much about it, Donna. Mark's got heaps of girls to choose between and you're going to have to take your turn with the rest of us. Just be satisfied with whatever happens whenever it does. Meanwhile help me clean up this mess, so I don't have to bother going to get a towel." Carol scooped up each drop, and Donna licked what Carol couldn't get. While they were doing that it occurred to me that Donna had tasted Carol and me, but we hadn't tasted her. For some reason - probably something to do with my being perverted - I wanted to taste her. I also liked the idea of Donna obediently accepting whatever I wanted, so when the girls had Carol clean I said, "Donna. Lie on your back and open your legs." She immediately broke out in a great big smile. There wasn't any doubt what she incorrectly thought was going to happen and how much she welcomed it. I briefly considered not saying anything, as some sort of lesson for her, but I didn't want Carol to worry. So I said, "It's not for what you think, Donna. That's never going to happen without some serious discussions first." I deliberately didn't say why I wanted her in that position. I was pleased both by Donna's looking disappointed, and especially by her doing what I wanted without further questioning. When she was spread, I slowly reached out my hand, with two fingers extended. Donna's eyes were riveted on my hand, and she watched avidly as my fingers got closer and closer, and finally made contact with her body, just below her pussy. I paused for a second, then ran them upward, collecting her still plentiful juices. I wasn't trying to turn her on, but she loved the contact, saying a delighted "Ohh" as my fingers moved up, followed a second later by "Aww" when my hand broke contact with her. My hands moving toward my mouth got her riveted attention. She watched with bated breath as it arrived, and I drank its contents. I thought about teasing her, but she seemed so intent on my opinion that it probably would've been cruel. There was never any possibility of my saying anything other than, "Delicious!", especially to Donna, and that's exactly what I did say. "Really?" she checked. "Absolutely. I'm looking forward to drinking much more of that in the future. For years and years, hopefully." With a happy smile, Donna offered, "I'm still wet, so you can get more right now." I could, and I could also offer some to Carol. That was even "fair", as Donna had tasted Carol via me as intermediary. Instead I decided not to, because I didn't want to pressure the girls at all. I said, "Some other time, sweetie. It's time to cuddle and go to sleep, not to get you excited again." I had intended to carry on reassuring her, but one of my minds suggested, #1: Carol added, "Yeah, I'm tired. Goodnight." Carol stretched out and pulled the covers up over her. I thought that was a good idea, so I said, "Goodnight, darlings," and out of habit I TK-flicked the light switch off. It only took an instant to do, and it wasn't until after the room had plunged into darkness that I remembered that Donna wasn't supposed to know about that ability yet. Oops. She could hardly fail to notice that the room was pitch black, but would she realize that no one had gotten out of bed to make it happen? It was such an everyday event (or "everynight event"), that maybe she wouldn't notice that something weird had happened. "Oh," said Donna. "The bulb just blew. That saved me getting up." Donna was closest to the switch, so presumably expected to be the one to get up to turn it off. I couldn't think of a good reason to correct her, so I said nothing. We cuddled into a three-way spoon, with me in the middle facing Donna. I hugged her, careful not to put my hands on her breasts, the way I normally do with Carol or Julia when I spoon with them. Donna said, "{Giggle}, I can feel your cock." I answered, "Of course you can, in this position. But we're not having any sex now so it doesn't count. Please act maturely or I'll have to go to all the bother of getting up and putting my underwear back on again." Donna apologized, "Sorry. I'm just not used to it. I'll be more mature." Being approximately the same level of maturity as Donna, I had to do a go-soft. Just before I ordered myself to sleep, it suddenly occurred to me that Donna probably didn't know I could do it so fast. I said, "Donna, I'm about to go to sleep. I do it instantly, in less than a second, so don't be surprised. Is there anything you need to say to me first?" "Umm. Thank you for letting me, umm, 'play' with you and Carol? And for letting me sleep with you." "Haha. I didn't mean you HAD to say something. I just didn't want you to be surprised with how fast I fall asleep. But in answer, 'You're welcome.' You were a good girl and I'm sure we'll do it again. Thank you also for your gift of the money. I know I'm going to use it to buy you a horse, but you didn't know that, so you were very generous." I gave Donna a kiss on the neck. Donna and Carol exchanged a couple more pleasantries with me and each other, and I finished with, "Remember that I'm going studying in the morning. I'll see you when I pick you up after breakfast. And don't worry about the lightbulb, I'll fix that when I get up." That earned me a little laugh from Carol, then I went to sleep. ------- Chapter 122: Planning Plenty of Pretty Pussies Tuesday, April 26, 2005 Both girls were sound asleep when I woke. I had a problem that I wished I had far more often: deciding which of the girls I'd slept with to clamber over. I easily picked Carol as I could use a light blob with her, and I didn't want to wake Donna in case she tried to get sexy again, as it'd only end up disappointing her. [[I'm amused by my recalled thought processes from this time. I had been strongly determined that there would be no sex when we went to bed, and look what happened then. If I woke Donna now, and especially if Donna woke Carol, pretty much anything could've happened. My personality was weak. I'd like to say my weakness was "where loved ones were concerned," but it wasn't as discriminating as that.]] I created a dim, yellow light blob and clambered over Carol, momentarily waking her. I left quickly so Carol could get back to sleep properly. When I got to my study at the Williams', there was a note from Julia, "I've updated EggsSearch.co.hk with Mom's diminishing pipeline idea, but late in the job I decided I'm going to hold off using it for a while. I'll tell you why when I wake up. There's no hurry, but take a look some time and we'll talk about it. Love, Julia." Checking it out was the first thing I did after the computer had finished booting. There were now four entries listed: "1. Our purpose", "2. How you get to be Egg's girlfriend", "3. Current list of Liaisons", "4. Application form". Numbers 1, 3 and 4 appeared the same as I remembered from last time. Document 2 was brand new. It described Vanessa's pipeline idea, pretty much how Vanessa had first described it to us, although in more detail. There was nothing in it that I thought needed changing, or which explained why Julia was postponing using it. I didn't waste time trying to guess her thinking - good luck on that! It would be easier to wait until she told me in a few hours. I resumed my studying, which went pretty much as usual. The sole exception was that I encountered a problem that I couldn't find an easy solution to. It didn't appear to be critical, so I just left a textbook as a flag outside Prof's bedroom and carried on. When the pajama-clad Prof arrived, I explained the problem to him, and he explained the solution. It wasn't difficult, but the solution required new material that hadn't been included in the lecture. Prof scrolled back through the online notes, then said, "Either the lecture notes are incomplete, or the original lecture was incomplete. The latter would be especially bad if one of those problems was in the final exam. I'll send your lecturer an email about it and get him to fix it." [Jumping ahead a couple of days, it turned out that the lecturer had digressed verbally in the previous lecture and had failed to update his notes, so the method wasn't explained. In his next lecture, the one I'd just read, he'd digressed down the same path, adding a related problem which he did remember to put into that lecture's notes. As a result of Prof's query, he updated the previous lecture's online notes then emailed me his apologies and the new material. I also got me some emails offering me cheap Viagra, which amused me.] Prof also asked, "How's the work going otherwise?" "On schedule. Ahead of schedule actually. I'm still understanding the material fine, so all's well with that too. Changing the subject somewhat, yesterday I spent some time re-reading the paper descriptions for the first couple of years' courses, in preparation for having to choose which of them I want to take in which order. Quite frankly I can't make intelligent choices because I understand very little of what the descriptions say, and I don't know which courses will be useful to me in the future. I think you're going to have to make my choices for me. Is that okay?" "It's fine. I realize it's hard for you to pick them so far ahead and without your having absorbed any of the career knowledge you'd have by the time you were attending OSU normally. It'll be easy to plan the first couple of years' courses for you. There are no electives in the first year, and I'll simply put you down for the most common choices in the second. If you later need to have finished one of the others, it'll only take you a few weeks to zip through it, because they're no harder than what you're doing now. I'll get back to you with the list, after I confirm there'll be no problems with any of them on OSU's end. The BCC - that's the Baccalaureate Core Course - electives are a very different matter. You should be able to understand their descriptions easily, there are far more choices, and I know Vanessa wants to discuss your choices with you. We'll mention it to her at breakfast. By the way, I understand that if the hardware supplier keeps their promise, you'll have your new computer system installed this afternoon." "Cool. I'm looking forward to working on the new setup." I was going to say more, about how quickly it was happening, but Julia walked in. I was somewhat relieved that she was wearing a nightie this morning. She and Prof may not feel embarrassed when she's naked, but I do. "Morning, darling and Daddy." We wished her "Good Morning" while she walked the rest of the way in, and climbed up on my lap. Prof said, "I think we've finished here, haven't we, Mark?" "Yes thanks, Prof." "Okay. I'll just mention one more thing before I go. Vanessa and I are working on the maximum bet problem. We've confirmed that the normal limits are impracticably far below what we want. We want betting limits more than a thousand times higher than normal, so it's an extraordinary situation and we'll need to obtain a great deal of cooperation from our target casino, so we're learning about the culture of the industry, especially about high stakes VIP players and Binion's Casino - which seems to be the only casino that promotes itself as taking such large bets, if their management okays them. Once we know enough about how the industry works, we'll be able to look for ways to convince a casino's management to agree to the betting limits we want." "Damn! I was REALLY hoping we could get the money and the new house soon, but what you and Vanessa are doing sounds very hard and like it'll take a long time." Prof interrupted my sadness with, "No. It's neither hard nor time consuming - mainly because Vanessa's good at this sort of thing. We should have it finished by Thursday or Friday." "Wow! Really? That's stunning. I thought this was a huge problem, or even an impossible one. That's FANTASTIC!" "Judging by your excitement, I haven't explained myself clearly enough. Vanessa and I are currently doing RESEARCH. I'm saying that our research is quicker and easier than you thought, and should be finished by the weekend. We won't know what the solution is until the research is finished, so we won't know how long implementing the solution will take. If it needs another fake ID, for example, that'll take at least a week. Or if a fake ID isn't good enough, we might need to wait until you're legally allowed to gamble, several years from now. I see by the look on your face that you understand what I'm saying. I'm simply giving you a progress report on the research, which is going very well, mainly because Vanessa is much more imaginative than I am. At the end of the research we'll start the next stage of the project: choosing and implementing a solution. We'll give you progress reports through that stage too. The last stage should be going down to Vegas and winning the money." "Yeah. I got all that now. I'm not used to thinking about large projects, with stages having their own progress reports. Most of what I do just has one step. I do it, and it's all over." Julia said, "Actually the project is even bigger than what Dad said, because the goal of the project is not just to win at roulette, but to buy our mansion. Our roulette work is just a part of the mansion project. After you win the money, we still have to find the right place, get an architect to design the changes we want, get the renovations built, furnish it and move in." I said, "It's not often you're wrong Julia, but you are this time. Prof was describing the project to me. My dad very carefully explained how this works for males. Presuming we get the money from roulette, then Prof and I will be completely finished as soon as we come back from Vegas. Being males we're not allowed to be involved in mansion choosing or decorating, so we hand over the money, sit down, put our feet up, and say the occasionally 'Yes dear', or 'Whatever you think is best, darling'. Your project may be much bigger, but the male part of it isn't." I got some laughs for that, and a comment about how well-trained I was already. Then Prof left us, saying, "See you at breakfast." Julia and I hadn't seen each other since I'd taken her home after school yesterday, so we had some catching up to do, during which she suddenly decided that she preferred to be naked after all. Prof had gone, so that was perfectly acceptable with me. After much very enjoyable kissing and fondling, Julia asked me, "How did it go with Donna in your bed last night?" "Good. Even very good, although not as I planned." I described what had happened in reasonable amount of detail. Because it was amusing, I mentioned my TK'ing the light switch mistake, and Donna's assuming it was the bulb blowing at the perfect time. Julia asked me, "Have you thought about showing your TK to her?" "I have, but I'm scared to. I can too easily imagine her having an argument with some other kid, and saying something like, 'My brother's amazing! He can make things fly through the air with his mind, so there!' That sort of childish thing. There's no chance of you or Carol doing something like that, but I fear Donna might because she's so competitive, impulsive and impatient. I don't think she could walk away from someone badmouthing me." Julia let the matter drop, changing the subject to ask me, "Is your studying going all right? I guess you had a problem if Dad was in here?" "Studying is going fine. I had one little comprehension problem I couldn't solve, but Prof thinks the lecturer left something out of the notes. It was no big deal, I just skipped over it and carried on until Prof came and explained it. I'm ahead of schedule for the two courses. I'll be even faster with the new computer setup. That should be arriving this afternoon, according to Prof. If that's anything like as good as I think it'll be then I'll definitely be able to complete a third course this year. I'll do one morning's study with the new computer setup to check its effect on my rate, then I'll talk with Prof about the third course." I picked up the note Julia had left me, waved it a little, and said, "I looked at your website. Everything seems fine to me. I couldn't think of a single correction or omission, so for what my opinion is worth, you've done a very good job. I'm puzzled why you're not going to start using it immediately? Not that I'm necessarily greedy for more girls; it's just that I'm intellectually puzzled. Also, more girls would be good, haha." Julia explained, "Mom was right that I shouldn't be trying to get every girl wanting you. That was silly of me. I've got too much pride, I guess. All the work I needed to do to get them all hooked on you and treating you the right way was stressing me out. Under the new scheme the idea is that they sink or swim by themselves. But while I was typing up the description of the new process, I worried that not enough girls will be sufficiently motivated to enter such a clearly competitive race, or if they do enter, they'll just sit on the butt because they're too used to guys chasing them. One partial answer would be to have another document on the website about how incredible you are, as a way of motivating the girls. Things like your being on schedule to graduate a BS in Math next year, six years ahead of what normal people achieve, your 10k running race win, and things like that. We could keep adding to it, as you did new things, like bowling 300. But I'm not going to do that, as I don't want to say anything on the website that clearly identifies you, in case it comes back to haunt you when you start getting involved in politics..." That was so preposterous and surprising that I couldn't help myself. "{Snort!}. Sorry, but that's NEVER going to happen. Not only do I have no interest in politics, I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. I've been brought up hearing how bad politicians are, and everything I've seen for myself seems to confirm that. One of Dad's favorite jokes is that 'poly' means 'many', and ticks are blood-sucking insects, so 'politics' is 'many blood-sucking insects'. He'd never forgive me if I got involved in politics." "You may find that politics gets involved with you. If you're as successful as I expect you to be, then you might have to deal with politicians whether you want to or not. I'm playing safe by not identifying you on the website, so I can't include a list of your accomplishments, which makes me worry about how to motivate the girls to try hard enough. I decided to wait a few days to see what happens about the money. Every girl understands how important money is and your becoming a millionaire will become widely known in no time at all. Even the girls who aren't purely motivated by greed will appreciate the importance of your being rich. You don't mind holding back on launching the website do you?" "Heavens no! That's only about getting me new girls." (I'm not crazy! Keep reading.) "There are heaps of girls around me already, plus I imagine Chloe will be two major additions very soon. We can certainly wait until your parents finish their research before deciding what to do. If they find a solution that we accomplish quickly, the website might only be held up for a few days. If the results of your parents' research are bad, we can discuss what to do next on the weekend. Waiting a few days is irrelevant." I pride myself on being considerate. Julia can take it easy for a few days by only throwing a few new girls at me. Just so long as she doesn't make a habit of slacking off like that! "Good. I thought you'd be okay with it. Shall we go get showered and changed?" "Give me a minute or two to finish tidily please." Julia had slept alone and missed me, so we fooled around in the shower together. We were a bit late getting down to breakfast, so I had to cover my breakfast topics quickly. "Vanessa, Prof's going to choose my Mathematics elective courses for me, because I don't know enough to be able to choose them myself. He suggested I talk with you about which BCC electives I should do. What do you think?" "How about I print out a list of all the BCC courses at work today, and put ticks alongside the courses I'd like you to think about? With two ticks alongside the courses that I'm particularly eager for you to do, such as 'Ethics and Power'. You can make your choices from there." "That sounds good, thanks." Not only good, but quicker and less dictatorial than I'd expected. I continued, "Prof, I'm almost certain I can finish a third Math course this year. I was thinking of doing one morning's study with the new computer system, to check how fast I can get through the material with it, but that's really not necessary as even my current rate is fast enough. What do you think about me starting another one?" "After your test results and the improvement the second computer should provide, maybe another two! Before you get worried, let me explain. Let's assume you do them in sequence and that you complete the first of those two courses, being your third course overall, as that's what you just asked for. We're only talking about your fourth course being a possible problem. The most important consideration is that you can't take the exam and pass the course unless you enroll in it, but enrolling doesn't have any downside. You don't have to take the exam if you choose not to and enrolling doesn't cost you anything, so there's no reason not to enroll. Theoretically I could enroll you in every single undergraduate course we offer, and just let you work on whichever ones you want. That'd be silly, but it illustrates my point. There's certainly no reason why I can't enroll you in two more courses, on the reasonable chance that you can be ready to take the fourth exam. It doesn't matter too much if you don't get all the work done by exam time. Even if you only manage to read 75% of the lectures, you could still take the exam. Judging by your 100% test results, you'd get 75% of the questions right and still pass. So if you think it's possible that you'll be able to read most of the fourth course's lectures, then it's easily worth giving it a shot." #1: < I never thought of not having to read all the lectures. That's a good point.> #4: #1: Prof was still talking, "I'm going to suggest you do the two new courses in sequence, with the most useful one first. If you don't have time to read enough of the lectures to take the exam, you'd do it next year as normal. Or if you do get enough of it read, then you can take the exam and finish off the reading after the exam, so there wouldn't be any gaps in your knowledge when you do later courses. -- "My last point is that as wonderful as your two 100% test results were, you don't need to be that studious. If you sped up your reading of the lecture notes, you might get the occasional exam question wrong, but you'd cover significantly more material. I'd recommend that, because I think speed is probably more important than 100% comprehension this year, as long as your comprehension doesn't suffer too much. Have I convinced you to try for four courses?" I answered, "I think so, especially as you say there's no reason not to try for them. I hadn't thought about not reading all the lectures but still taking the exam. That makes it more doable. While you were talking I wondered about only reading 80% of all four courses' lectures, which would be 3.2 courses' worth of reading, which I could certainly fit in. But that's not a good idea if some of the courses are more important than others, is it?" "Not really, no. Theoretically you could read 80% of each course, take the exams, and finish reading them over summer. The important courses are only important because they're prerequisites for later courses, and filling in the gaps over summer would take care of that. But I don't like the risk of your doing poorly in too many exams. I'd much rather you read 100% of three courses, and whatever you can of the fourth. If that happened to be only 20%, then simply don't take that exam until the following year. -- "No one's going to fault you for not being able to pack the fourth course into such a short time, but they would fault you if all of your exam results were disappointing, especially if some of them were fails. There's also a complicating factor to do with prerequisites. The third course I'm going to enroll you in is Calculus 252. You're doing Calculus 251 now, which is the prerequisite for 252. Strictly speaking you shouldn't start 252 until you've finished 251, but you're far enough through and doing well enough to be able to do it, but it makes doing 251 properly important. Reading only 80% of 251 would impact on 252. If you then read only 80% of 252 the gaps in your knowledge could compound badly." "Okay, Prof. I won't cut corners that way. I was nervous about skipping lectures anyway, so I'm happy not to deliberately do it. But you also suggested I speed up. Isn't that much the same as skipping lectures, in that I might end up getting poor results in all four exams?" "I don't think so. Not reading lectures will have a roughly linear effect on your grades, but reading faster might have no effect at all, especially if you chose to speed up in areas you think unlikely to be in the final exam. Even if you only 80% comprehended something tested in the exam, you could probably work out the remaining 20% while you were answering the question. I saw how fast you did those tests, so you'd probably have time to do that. You have to judge your speed for yourself, but the two 100% tests are a good indication that you can go faster." "I'll try. I'm hoping to do as many courses as I can this year because it means fewer next year. I'm terrified of the courses I'll be doing at the end of next year, so the more time I've got to work on them, the better. You say I can finish the degree next year, but I have serious doubts about my ability to understand the advanced courses." "No one else doubts you can, Mark. Even the 300 and 400 level courses are still only undergraduate courses, so effectively just more schoolwork. If you do the work, you'll pass. They're the best part of a year away, so let's not worry about them now. I'll ask Maureen to enroll you in the two new courses today, and I'll bring the textbooks home with me. Do Calculus 252 first, because that's the most important one." "Okay." I was okaying Prof's telling me to do Calc 252 first, not his telling me not to worry about the advanced courses. I was definitely going to keep worrying about those. Having finished talking, I put my head down and concentrated on breakfast. We picked up my sisters, then headed to school. As soon as we'd left my place, Carol told me, "Mom made a few comments at breakfast about the sex sounds we made last night. She's not angry, but she's finding it a bit hard to get used to all the sex she knows is going on, especially with Donna getting involved. I told her truthfully what had happened last night, especially that Donna had mostly been a spectator, but Mom was still uncomfortable about it. I think she wants to protect us, but no one else wants her to, especially not Donna and me. Even Dad was supportive of us." Donna happily informed me, "Dad said I could have sex with you Mark. Isn't that great?" Carol and I both laughed. Carol corrected, "Dad said he was 'okay with it'. I'm sure he'd be even more okay with your NOT doing it, Donna. He just said that it's obvious Donna is willing, and..." "VERY willing!" " ... and that you're not trying to take advantage of her..." "No, dammit! I wish you would." " ... Which are the same comments that Donna made at the breakfast table, leaving no one in doubt about her opinion. Dad said that if anything happened, it'd be for good reasons and that he wasn't too concerned about having children that got along so well together. Donna decided that meant Dad was giving her permission to have her way with you." Donna clarified, "I want to have LOTS of different ways with you: me on top, me underneath, the way we were lying last night when I could feel your cock. If it was hard it could go right into me, and that'd be great to try. I also want to try..." I left Donna listing all the things she wanted to try. It was a surprisingly long list, so I suspected she'd been giving it considerable thought. She didn't need any comment from me, not even that none of those things were going to happen until I decided, as she already knew that. Instead I thought about Mom. Mom had been much more accepting back when the marriage had taken place, but lately she's been unhappy with the situation. Not unhappy enough to put her foot down about any part of it, but unhappy nonetheless. The situation wasn't likely to change in a way that would make her happier either. Quite the reverse, as there'll be even more girls for me, and more sex for both Carol and slowly for Donna. I didn't want to change the situation to make Mom happy, so I had to do something about her view of it, as Mom being continually unhappy was bad for lots of reasons, not the least of which was that I simply didn't want her to be unhappy, especially not about anything I was responsible for. The question was how to change Mom's attitude? Demonstrating TK to her had worked the first couple of times, but doing it again wasn't going to help. It occurred to me that she probably felt left out of everything that was going on. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything I could get her to participate in. What I thought would work - based on what little I knew about females - would be to get her heavily involved in decorating the mansion. Surely all females would love doing that? The obvious problem being that we didn't yet have a mansion to decorate, and I didn't know how long it'd take to get one. It took me a while, but I eventually zeroed in on the 'fact' that Carol and I were together because my abilities were 'probably' (cough, cough) genetic. That rationale applied equally to Donna, giving us an excuse for Donna's increasing sexual involvement. I decided that I had to emphasize how important to the human race my having children with my sisters might be. In other words, and in the absence of a better idea, I had to add some more lies to that fake theory. I gave it more thought, thinking of several things to do and say. I resolved to use them on Mom at the very first opportunity. Which would be when? Tomorrow night, as Julia already has this evening booked for me to thrash Ava and sleep with Katelin overnight. I COULDN'T believe that neither of those two planned events had crossed any of my minds this morning. It was still early in the day, but I was stunned that I'd forgotten both of them. I preferred not to think about Ava's thrashing, but to fail to eagerly anticipate sex with Katelin was a worry. Fortunately I knew I was still sane, because I was still eagerly anticipating the fruition of Julia's plan for Chloe. Having thought it through and having decided what I wanted to do to cheer Mom up, and when, I turned to my secretary to inform her of the change to my availability, "Julia, I've been thinking about Mom and Dad. Especially about Mom being unhappy with some of the sexual aspects of what we're doing. I think I need to have a serious talk with them about it. I'm busy this evening with Ava and Katelin, but there's nothing booked for tomorrow as far as I know, so I'll do it then. I'll have dinner at my house and talk with them afterward. It might take as long as an hour, so I don't think I'll be available for any of the usual things you arrange for me. Is that okay with you?" Julia answered, "It's good." I had a small surge of negative feelings in reaction to that answer: why was it good that I couldn't do anything with Julia tomorrow evening? I managed to suppress the feeling, but still had to ask, "Why is it good?" "Because you've obviously been thinking the problem through for the last few minutes, have made a plan, and are going to act on it. That's exactly the way I want you to learn to behave. So it's VERY good." So much for the stupid reasons that had crossed my mind. Now I felt ashamed of myself for thinking them. I looked at Julia, and saw that she was looking at me. I suspected she understood the mistake I'd made, but she said nothing about it. Instead, a couple of seconds later, she asked me, "Do you want Carol or Donna there, or should they come to my place?" So much for my believing I'd thought it all through, as I hadn't considered including the girls in the conversation. Now that I thought about it, there were some good reasons to do so. There was no reason not to include Carol, so she was in. She wasn't necessary, but she'd help, so she was definitely in. Donna was more of a problem. Actually more like three problems, as I intended to briefly mention my TK again, to demonstrate light blobs in a specific way, and to talk about my having babies with the girls. I had no intention whatsoever of having babies with Donna, but that wasn't going to stop me talking to Mom and Dad as if humanity's future might depend on it happening. I didn't want Donna to hear that, as it could be a real pain either way. If she wanted babies, she'd be disappointed that I didn't act on it and might start nagging me. If she didn't want them, she'd be unhappy that I said we might have to for the sake of humanity. If I explained to her that our babies wouldn't be special, that might get back to Mom and Dad years before I was ready to let them know that, well after Carol was 18. It would definitely be best to leave Donna out of it. The conversation with Mom and Dad was going to be about Donna as much as Carol, but luckily I hadn't mentioned that in the car, with Donna in the seat behind me. I said, "Definitely Carol should be with me, as the conversation with Mom and Dad will be about Carol's role as my wife. It's a matrimonial matter, so not relevant to Donna." I half-expected Donna to butt in with a comment. She didn't, so I was surprisingly able to carry on talking. "Thanks for your offer, but there's no need for Donna to go to your place. She can watch TV at ours, while we talk in one of the other rooms." This time Donna did comment, asking, "Can I listen please?" Donna's including "please" didn't alter what I'd already decided to say, "Mom and Dad don't invite you to listen in when they're discussing their marriage, do they?" I didn't wait for an answer. "Same with us. We already share a lot with you - remember last night! - but emotional discussions are even more private than sex and far more boring for a spectator. You'll just have to be happy with little things like being lucky enough to be allowed to put rubbers on your brother's cock, haha." That distracted her nicely. She started laughing, then telling jokes about what would happen if any normal brother tried to get his sister to do that, or if I'd asked her to do it a year ago. That amused her for all of the short time it took us to get to school. As we were parking, I remembered another distraction I could use on her, "Donna, about Thursday's lunch with you and your Ducklings. I've been thinking about the Ducklings. What I'd like to do is get them feeling sexy, turned on, that sort of thing. I don't really want to do anything with them personally, but I don't want them to know that. The trouble is that I don't have any clue how girls that age think about boys, especially not about older boys like me. So I need lots of help from you. One idea I had was that you can pick what clothes I wear to school that day, something you think the Ducklings will like." "Really?" I nodded. It was a safe invitation, because Donna couldn't embarrass me any more than Julia did every day. "Cool. I'll go through your closet when I get home. You've got some clothes at Julia's place too, don't you?" "Yes, about half there, half at home. Tomorrow after school I'll be dropping Julia off at her house first, before going to our home. We could stop for a few minutes so you could check out my closet there. We'll have to take anything you choose home because your lunch is the next day." "Neat, thanks. I'm sure the Ducklings would prefer you to be naked, but I'm pretty sure you won't let me choose that, haha." I changed my mind; Donna COULD embarrass me more than Julia! "Will you take your shirt off at lunch, the way you did at Carol's lunch?" "Sure, if you want me to. That's my point: you know better than me what will excite your girls. What I want you to do between now and then, is to think of a list of things I can do, or that you and I can do together, to get your Ducklings excited during the lunch." I mentally congratulated myself for inventing a way of keeping Donna happily distracted from thinking about her being excluded from tomorrow evening's conversation, while - at the same time - getting her to work on my problem of how to get the Ducklings excited enough to achieve my voyeuristic, lecherous intentions. Maybe I am a genius after all? Donna said, "There's no need to worry about that. They're already wetting themselves thinking about it, and they're going to be dripping wet at lunch. Haha, I just realized that you'll see that for yourself, haha." Donna saw my confusion, and explained, "They'll all be wearing short skirts and no panties at lunch, because they want to show you their pussies. That's why I laughed, when I realized that you really will see them dripping." "Huh? Show me their pussies? How did they decide to do that?" "You guys said I could tell them everything that happened at your lunch with Carol's friends. So I told them Julia's story that when you have lunch with high-school girls, they often take their panties off and let you play with their pussies. Julia was very tricky, because you used to have lunch with only Carol and her, but I just copied what Julia said so the Ducklings don't know that. They all think you're very sexy and they're determined to copy the high-school girls. They've also all been practicing Rock, Paper, Scissors. All the Ducklings want to win a turn with you like Gia did at Carol's lunch." I hadn't anticipated Donna going so far, in the cause of getting the Ducklings to go so far. Even though I very much doubted they'd all be in short skirts and no panties, as a lot of them were sure to get cold feet on the day (cold somewhere else too, if they actually did it), Donna's obvious relish at her job of misleading the Ducklings would create much of the sex-charged atmosphere I was hoping for. I should hopefully be able to build it up even more at the lunch. So much for my giving Donna something else to think about, as the job was probably done well enough already. The best I could do was, "Well done, Donna. You've done a much better job than I expected, and sooner than I expected too. If you can think of anything I can do to help, like wear the clothes you pick or take my shirt off, let me know, okay? Short of my going to school naked, I mean." "Okay. I'll think about it. I haven't done anything to make Saturday sexy for you. When you come to my running club, I mean. Do you want me to do anything about that?" I could only guess about how the club operated, but I doubted there was much privacy with so many people there, so it wouldn't be worth hanging around long. Judging by the number of phone calls Mom had gotten after the race, the club's bosses would probably want to talk with me too much, and I wanted to spend half an hour repeating my 10k run, so I said, "No thanks. I don't think I'll be there long, and much of that will be doing a 10k run to prove I didn't need to use a substitute runner in the real race." It was a good thing I didn't need to train for that, because I'd been too busy to do any of that. Julia asked, "Mark, you haven't said anything about what you want Carol and me to do at that lunch. Not even whether you want us to be there. The Ducklings are your project, so I don't want to push anything myself, but I could wear a short skirt and no panties too, and let the girls see me. What do you think?" I loved the idea! Not only would it be good for revving up the Ducklings, it'd also be good for revving me up. I was just about to answer, when Carol said, "What about me? Do you want me to flash my pussy too?" Of course I WANTED her to, but was it a good idea? Fortunately #4 is a very clever guy and he suggested, #4: With the benefit of #4's wisdom, I answered, "Definitely. Not just flash either. I want you and Julia to get sexy with each other. Nothing too dangerous for school, but especially if you could rub each other's pussies and let the Ducklings see you doing it, that'd be great. I'd get a big kick out of seeing a group of them be all adoring toward me, and really sexually turned on too. They're too young for me to do anything sexual with them, and there are probably too many of them, but it'd be cool to see them get worked up together. Donna, how many of them are there, by the way?" Donna answered, "Twenty. About the same as Carol had at her lunch. I can increase or decrease it if you want? I just copied what Carol did." I hadn't thought about how many there'd be, but I was surprised at the number. I guess I expected less because so few had come to see me off from the car pick-up point the first time. More than twenty could become chaotic, and reducing the number could be cruel, so I said, "Twenty's fine." #4: Donna said, "Good. Except you're wrong about them being too young for you to do sex stuff with. They really want to do it with you, and most of them are more developed than me - and I can take Practice Mark no trouble at all - so you could easily have sex with lots of them if you wanted?" Good grief! Donna's offering them to me as if it's easy. I didn't know who any of these girls were - not their names, not even what they looked like - and I doubted if more than one or two of them had ever met me before. #4: "Donna, I don't know ANY of these girls, and they don't know me! How can they possibly want sex with me when they've never met me? How can they even intend to come to lunch with no panties on when they don't know me? That doesn't make any sense." Donna just laughed. Carol and Julia quickly joined in too. Excellent. Donna eventually stopped laughing, and explained, "Sure it does. You're famous, so they don't need to know you to get excited. They've seen or heard about how sexy you look, know how smart you are, and stuff like that. Some of them have got older brothers or sisters who talk about you. You've been in the papers for rejecting a very sexy senior, which REALLY impressed them with how cool you are! Plus I've told them LOTS of stories about you! About how nice you are to me and Carol, how popular you are with other girls, how good you are at sex, that you bowled 300 on Sunday, about the REALLY sexy party you had after that. None of them had EVER heard of anything like that before, except for movie stars, which is kind of how they think of you. It's easy to get them excited about you because they already think you're awesome. They keep asking me about you and I talk about you heaps and heaps, just copying the things I hear Julia telling other girls about you. They're very excited already." #1: Carol added, "Same for me. Less, because I spend my lunchtimes with you and Julia now, but between classes lots of girls talk with me about you. Too many of them also call me, but I mostly ignore those calls and I tell them off for it later. You're famous, Mark, including for being exceptionally nice, which is a big deal with girls. The girls in my classes ask me every day when you'll be coming down for another lunch with them. They're very eager." #2: #1: Julia said, "It's too early for Mark to have another lunch with your girls, Carol. We want them to regret their not trying hard enough to please him last time. You could tell them that, and that Mark's having lunch with large numbers of high-school girls these days. Don't say he's having sexy lunches now though, because some of your girls might have sisters in 10th grade. "We need to get to class. We can continue these discussions some other time if we need to." We exchanged goodbyes then headed off to our respective classes. Just after our first class ended I got a text message from Carol. "I had idea: Ava at Donna's lunch? Can do more things in front of Ducklings." We certainly could! With just Donna, Carol and Julia, there were a lot of my sisters, making my being innocent a little tricky. Sitting Julia between Carol and me - as I obviously would - still risked our looking like an active threesome if Carol and I played with Julia, even if not at the same time. With Ava included, I could have Julia sit beside me, then Ava beside her, then Carol. That way Carol and I were far enough apart that we couldn't overlap in someone's lap, and there could be lots of playing between any two neighbors up and down that line. Halfway through lunch Julia and Ava could swap positions, to mix things up even more. I liked the idea, but I couldn't quickly think of how to convince Ava that this was acceptable behavior. Julia and Carol would cooperate without hesitation, but I had to have a plausible reason for asking Ava to participate. I replied to Carol: "Thanks, good idea. I'm thinking about it. Will talk with Ava tonight." As soon as she saw me, early in the school day, Chloe approached me and said, "Good morning, Mark." Hardly an unusual statement, but it took me a little while to work out how to respond. Chloe had never gone out of her way to talk with me before, or probably any other boy, and this encounter wasn't in Julia's plan. My current role in the plan was to pretend to be not interested in Chloe, and especially to pretend not to be interested in her breasts. The idea was that I had already spent some one-on-one time with her, and although I did personally like her, she'd behaved too badly for me to devote any more time to her. Instead I'd be, according to Julia's scenario, getting to know all the other girls who wanted to date me. Chloe had eliminated herself, and I had moved on. It was therefore up to Chloe to do something dramatic to return my attention to her, which was planned for just before the last class today. After due consideration, I said, "Hi, Chloe." Making DAMNED sure to ONLY look her in the small round things rather than the big round things. Getting that wrong would've ruined Julia's plan. Mom has an expression (actually, she has hundreds), "Good things come to those who wait." I knew Chloe's "very, very good things" would come to me soon, but I HAD to wait, and most definitely not look at them in eager anticipation. Chloe said, "I want to apologize for the way I treated you on Sunday." Damn, she's not following the plan! I couldn't accept her apology because Chloe might then decide that she didn't need to carry out 'her' - she erroneously thought - dramatic idea this afternoon. I couldn't pretend not to understand what she was referring to, as that'd make me look stupid, and would only delay it a few seconds. I had to deflect her apology while also making myself appear more mature and knowledgeable about relationships. Julia had done a very thorough job of explaining what was going on with Chloe, so it was amazingly easy for me to handle any little issues that arose. So with eyes strictly horizontal, I simply said, "I understand that your breasts give you emotional problems Chloe." It was an incomplete answer, as it neither accepted nor rejected her apology. All I did was agree that she had problems, and by implication still had the need to do something about them. Hopefully the excellent idea that Julia had planted with her. I didn't want to risk any further conversation, especially because it was extremely hard not to glance at her breasts when I said that word. Chloe was obviously working out how to answer my unusual comment, but I pretended not to notice and made my escape by turning and walking away quickly. Most of the day was of no particular consequence. Katelin was very excited and chased me down to confirm we were still on for tonight. I assured her that I was excited about it too; which I was, when I remembered to think about it. She asked me to confirm it again just after lunch, and yet again just before the last class started. I have no problem with a pretty girl being so eager to get into bed with me, so I was happy to enthusiastically repeat my confirmation. I saw that the "Revenge Grope" girls were nervous of me. I must remember to do something about reassuring those immoral girls, because they're my favorite type. Julia was very busy, as usual. In this case mostly in arranging what needed to be done for Chloe to be able to carry out what she thought was her own idea. Julia had to talk with several girls to achieve that, but I ignored them as I wasn't meant to know anything about it. Laila also talked to Julia, and Julia told me afterward that unless Laila had a brainwave, she was going to fail to meet the email deadline. That'd mean the end of Laila as Liaison, and sadly, also the demise of the decadently debauched date on Friday night. Lunchtime was similar to yesterday's. Much the same girls, although a few extra came this time. Different girls got to sit near me, for what that was worth. Those whose turn it was all made the effort of moving forward to claim their position, so it must have been worth something. I was interested to note that Chloe came again, and was considerably more talkative this time, even talking directly to me a couple of times. Julia and I were both pleased by that. Ava also came and sat next to Julia. They often talked, but so quietly I didn't catch much of it. What fragments I did hear (" ... and these are just some of the 10th grade girls who...", "You'll be fine", etc.) were all fairly uninteresting, if I understood them at all. There was a lot less delight in meeting Carol than there had been yesterday, for the obvious reason that nearly all of the girls had met her now. She was still singled out for special attention though, and she had to stand up, do a twirl, and her clothes were praised all over again. If you remember how to translate that little bit of Girlish into English, you'll know what that means. There was also less boasting about me, as the audience had heard most of it yesterday. Julia did manage to mention, "Mark's enrolling in two more college courses today." They looked at me in some amazement. Among their comments, one of them asked, "How can you enroll when you're sitting right here? Don't you have to go to OSU?" I waved my hand as if the whole college thing was trivial, and said, "I have an arrangement with the college. I just tell them what I want to do and their staff arranges everything for me." That being Prof, helped by Maureen. "It's easier than having to do all the boring paperwork myself." The girls were suitably impressed, including Julia, as she couldn't have said it more misleadingly herself. I added, "I do have to go to OSU sometimes," every time I need a bulk supply of rubbers, "but I'd much rather stay here and have lunch with so many pretty girls." Schmaltzy, tongue-in-cheek flattery, but acceptable nonetheless. Speaking of "so many pretty girls," another new development was the opposite of that, as four of my male classmates were watching us from a distance. They were too far away to intrude on us, and they couldn't come closer without it being rudely obvious that they were being nosey, as we were sitting well away from any possible reason they could have for being in our area. There was nothing special for them to see - unlike what was going to happen at Donna's lunch! - and they couldn't hear anything from their distance either, so they weren't troubling us. Most of the girls probably didn't even notice them. I did though, because I was used to sitting here and I'd never seen them hanging out in this area any other lunchtime. It was just another little sign that some of the guys might be getting themselves worked up over so many girls hanging around me. I wasn't going to give up any girls and I had no fear for myself, but I still hoped nothing happened because I thought Vanessa's and Julia's bloodthirsty strategy was too nasty. It was up to the guys though: if they leave me alone, I'll leave them alone, if only so I can devote more time to girls. I got a call from Mom, saying that she'd be coming to the school soon to do the contract signing with the Principal. "Your Principal wants to do it in his office. Make a little ceremony out of it, shake hands, etc. A waste of time really, but there's no real reason why not, especially as he'll be handing over the check at the end of it. So expect to be pulled out of class next period, okay?" You could even pull me out of Math for $45,000, so I said, "Absolutely." Mom added, "I don't imagine you would be otherwise, but please be nice to the Principal and whoever else is there. The idea is to have a happy, fresh start." "Sure, I understand that. While I've got you on the phone, are you and Dad going to be home tomorrow night after dinner?" "We've got no plans, so I think so. Why?" "I want to have a discussion about a family issue. Not urgent enough to cancel what Julia's got planned for tonight, but I'm free tomorrow so I'm checking whether you are too, before Julia books me up. I'll be at the Williams' tonight, but I'll spend tomorrow evening at home." We agreed on tomorrow evening after dinner, and then ended the call. I rejoined the lunch group. Just before we had to head back to class, Julia gave me a BIG kiss. I thought probably because she was in a kissing mood, after the passion of Carol's goodbye kiss a minute earlier. Julia then passed me on to Ava, who was even more passionate. By the time Ava had finished our long kiss, Pat was ready for what she decided was her turn. I still saw no reason to object. After Pat came Lily, a somewhat hesitant Laila, then an extremely unhesitant Alexis, who during the kiss removed one of my hands from around her neck and placed it on her breast. I didn't want to disappoint her, so I felt her up. And spanked her ass when she finished and turned to walk away. To my surprise a brand new girl came forward for the next kiss. By "brand new" I mean she hadn't appeared herein before, although she'd been in some of my classes all year. I have no moral objection to kissing pretty girls, but I did have a practical one: a line was starting to form and it was almost time to head to class. I hesitated to start, and Julia spoke up, "Sorry Angelina, kissing Mark is just for his lovers. Even Katelin will have to wait until tomorrow." (Katelin was third in the line.) "Aww," said Katelin. Julia laughed, "Haha, Katelin. I have no sympathy for you. You're going to have all night with him!" Some of the girls didn't know about Katelin's imminent - what I like to think of as - good fortune. One of them asked incredulously, "You're sleeping with Egg tonight, Katey?" "Oh yes. I can't wait." That caused a buzz of conversation from several of the girls, including the original questioner, who said, "How come you didn't tell me..." They started girly-talk about being friends, she should have been told, and stuff like that. I tuned out. While that buzz was going on, Savannah promoted herself from about fifth in line to number one, stepping forward and saying, "I qualify." She reached out her arms, wanting to start our kiss. Julia quickly interrupted, "No you don't, Savannah. Not even close. Sure you had his cock inside you for a few seconds, but that doesn't make you one of Mark's lovers. I'm sure Mark doesn't count you as one..." #3: " ... That was all about the girls' pleasures, not his. The girls got to choose whether to fuck him or not. He didn't get to choose you. Anything that one-sided doesn't make you lovers. Not to mention how quick it was. You'll know when Mark becomes your lover because you'll have a huge smile on your face and will be walking funny." Julia's comments added a whole new layer of buzz. Apparently a lot of the girls had no idea what Julia was talking about, but it sounded interesting. It was hard to imagine how they couldn't know about it. I know there'd been a great deal of talk about Sunday's date/party, but apparently that particular activity hadn't been widely discussed. Weird! If I'd been the sort of guy to talk with other guys about my exploits, the number of fucks I'd had would've been right at the top of the list. It was almost enough to make me think girls have weird priorities. The girls who had firsthand experience quickly agreed (although "hand" was the incorrect appendage). Pat, Lily and Alexis were especially expressive, colorfully so in Alexis' case. She always dressed in black, but she has a colorful vocabulary. Julia continued, "We don't have time to talk about it now, so we'll put it off until tomorrow's lunch. If any of you missed out on hearing all the details about what happened on Sunday you can ask about it then. You can also ask Katelin how her night with Mark went." We still had the walk back to classrooms, so there was time for more excited conversation. Katelin had a group of girls around her, talking about her imminent date with me. Now that I think about it, "date" seems an inappropriate word. I could lay naked on Julia's bed waiting for Katelin to arrive. She comes to Julia's place, comes upstairs, we fuck, then go to sleep. In the morning we do some more fucking, then my girlfriend's mother feeds Katelin some breakfast. That's it. Can that be called a "date"? While I was amusing myself thinking about that definition, I also listened to Julia talking to other girls yet again about her lack of jealousy. Girls seem to have a hard time accepting that Julia isn't jealous. I overheard Julia say, "I don't know who had sex with Mark in the hot tub on Sunday. I noticed a couple but I wasn't paying much attention because it was just sex. I didn't think to ask Mark about it afterward either. I doubt he remembers very well anyway, because he prefers to spend at least three or four hours making love to a girl properly. A quick in and out isn't any fun for him." Girls who'd been there were telling other girls more details about what happened on Sunday, particularly why Savannah could try to claim she was one of my lovers. They all seemed to have acquired the idea that I was a highly moral and mature guy, so it was very amusing how much they misunderstood me (a comment that doesn't apply to Julia, just as reality doesn't apply to her when she's boasting about me). It was all I could do not to laugh. I'd probably have the same trouble at tomorrow's lunch too. ------- Chapter 123: Chloe's Topless Proof of Trust Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) Soon after the next class started I was called to the Principal's office. That earned me the usual "You're in trouble" taunts as I left my class, but I knew it was the school buying its way out of trouble with Mom. As Mom had said it would be, it was mostly a waste of time. The Principal and a woman from the Corvallis Board of Education were there for their side. Mom, me and our lawyer on our side. I'd never met him before, but he apparently thought I was shortly going to be rich enough to merit his giving me his business card. There were handshakes all around, smiling all around, and polite chit-chat. Then we did the signing, exchanged more smiles, more handshakes, more saying nice things, the check was passed to me (I enjoyed that part), more nice words, then we left after more handshakes. Fortunately there were no real speeches, and the boringly predictable things that were said were brief. Outside our lawyer shook our hands, said some nice words, and left to, as he put it, "Go back to my office and send them my bill." Which made me wonder something. I asked Mom, "Don't lawyers get a cut of checks like ours?" "Only if they were retained on a contingency basis. He was employed on an hourly rate, and part of the deal was that your school picks up his tab. Legally he bills us, and we pass it on to the school, and they pass his payment back through us, but in practice they're going to deal directly. As far as we're concerned it's all over with now." I'd already asked Mom to bank the $2,800 from Donna. Theoretically it would've been safe for me to carry in my wallet, if it'd been converted to $100 notes so it fit, because it was literally impossible for anyone to pick-pocket me as my proximity sense would detect the thief even thinking about doing it. Violent robbery wasn't a major worry for me either, as I could burst the robber's eyeballs in a fraction of a second. The main problem with putting $2,800 in my wallet was that I couldn't fit my wallet in my pants. Almost all the pants Julia had bought for me were too tight. I left my wallet at home these days, just taking my billfold. That had four or five bills in it, my license, and a rubber because Julia had told me to carry condoms. Although - now I think about it - she never got around to explaining why. Even with that meager load I could barely force the billfold into some of my pants' pockets. When I'd given Mom Donna's $2,800, Mom had said she'd bank it when we got the check from the school. So I now gave Mom the check, after a last look. "Pay Mark Anderson the sum of forty five thousand dollars only" had a nice ring to it. It was also - BY FAR - the largest deposit I had EVER put into my bank account. Mom said, "I'll bank this and Donna's gift on the way back to work. You'll have almost $50,000 in your account; you're a wealthy young man now." "Not really, as I'm not really going to spend any of it. But it does look good, I'll agree with that." Just after Mom left I thought of a joke I could have said about the speed at which my wife#1 can spend wealth on clothes, but I was way too late. I walked back to class happily, theoretically wealthy, even if all the money was already allocated. ^ In my penultimate class, just before it started, Julia said to me, "Mark, at the end of this class I've got to run, but can you please WALK to C4, and meet me outside the girls' bathroom there?" (C4 was a room in classroom block C. That block was only one level and used for the science labs. It was relatively quiet when there were no science classes on.) Pretending to have no idea, I said, "Sure. That sounds mysterious though. What's it for?" "You'll see." "Okay." Some of the girls around us had been to the spa party on Sunday and were listening carefully. I pretended not to notice that either. I'd been doing a lot of pretending today, with quite a lot more to come shortly. At the end of class Julia was off like a shot, very quickly followed by several other girls. I slowly packed up and ambled toward C4. When I got to the girls' bathroom, there were several of the spa party veterans hanging around outside. As I approached I looked at them with apparent confusion, and asked, "I was supposed to meet Julia here. Have any of you seen her?" "She's in the bathroom. She told us to tell you to go in." She'd also told them not to mention Chloe, for a reason that'll be apparent soon. "What! Go into a girls' bathroom? I couldn't do that. There might be someone in there!" "It's safe. Julia wants you go in. We're going to stand out here to stop anyone else from going in." I looked at them suspiciously for a moment, then dropped the look, saying, "I guess it's okay, because Julia did ask me to come here, but I'm still worried about embarrassing some poor girl by walking in on her." I knew Julia and Chloe were waiting for me inside the bathroom, so I was talking complete twaddle. I was doing it to show I had no clue about what was going on, in a way that made me look good, by pretending to be selflessly worried about embarrassing a girl, rather than worried about getting myself in trouble. I opened the door a crack, and called, "Julia, are you really in there?" "Yes. Come in." Without moving, I called back, "Are you sure it's safe. I don't want to scare anyone?" "It's safe, come in." "Okay, but we can't keep meeting like this." That earned me several laughs. I slid in. Julia was standing alone in the center of the room. One of the cubicles had its door closed, which was according to the plan. Chloe would be hiding in it, waiting to make her entrance after Julia's introduction. I asked, "This is weird, Julia. What's going on?" "I'm helping Chloe with something..." I interrupted, "Good. Chloe's a lovely person." Chloe thought she was hiding in the cubicle so Julia could introduce her properly. In reality it was so she could 'catch me' making that apparently spontaneously honest statement. It was an HONEST statement, because Chloe is a nice person, unless you're a boy looking at her breasts (in other words, unless you're a boy), but it couldn't possibly be less spontaneous. Julia and I had carefully chosen every word. It was gender-neutral to de-emphasize sex, and was entirely about her personality rather than her body ("lovely" could refer to physical beauty when it preceded "girl", but didn't when it preceded "person"). The chosen statement was nice, but not over-the-top-nice. I hadn't said, "extraordinarily lovely", for example. We wanted it to be believable and for it to motivate Chloe to push herself forward, not to think she'd won the race already. We'd also discussed whether I should say, "Poor Chloe's a lovely person." Or even add a second sentence, such as, "I hope she finds a nice guy soon, because she deserves someone good." But we'd decided on a minimalist approach. If Chloe was convinced of our sincerity then we could add whatever else we wanted in normal conversation later. Julia pretended embarrassment (but she winked at me). "Umm. Actually Chloe's in one of the cubicles now. She would've heard you say that." "Oh! Ahh, I guess I'm not worried about her hearing my opinion of her, but I shouldn't be in here if she's going to the toilet. I'll wait outside." "She's not going to the toilet. She's just waiting to talk with you." "She can talk with me any time, without meeting inside a girls' bathroom. I'm confused. What's going on?" "I'm sorry," said a very insincere looking Julia. "I'm not doing this very well. Chloe wants to apologize to you for the distrustful way she treated you in the parking lot on Sunday. She wants to prove to you that she trusts you." "We could have discussed this at lunch. She was only sitting a few yards away." Julia giggled, then said, "Not the way Chloe wants to do it, she couldn't, haha." After a brief, theatrical pause, Julia continued, "I can see that you're confused. I think you'll understand better when Chloe comes out." Julia's face adopted a more serious look. I was having to keep my expression consistent with my act because I was facing the cubicle and Chloe could have popped her head over the top in an instant. Julia turned to face the cubicle, and she called, "Come out, Chloe!" This was the part I was looking forward to, provided she didn't chicken out now. I mentally crossed my fingers, and started the go-softs early, just to be safe. Chloe's feet appeared on the floor, I could hear her standing up, and the cubicle door swung open. YES! A topless Chloe walked out into the room, her arms locked determinedly to her sides, and her breasts gloriously naked and displayed. They were WONDERFUL! Even larger than I'd imagined, and I'd spent quite some time imagining them, especially once I'd heard Julia's plan. What was most wonderful about them was that they didn't droop, not even a little! Chloe's huge tits pointed upward! THANK YOU GOD! I'd been very worried about this point. Or, more accurately, about where her points pointed. Like all teenage boys I've seen pictures of girls with big hooters, and I don't like that so many of their tits point down. In my opinion they don't look attractive, and on this topic no one else's opinion matters a damn. I was a VERY happy guy. I was somewhat of a silly happy guy, as I just realized that I could've asked Julia what Chloe's tits looked like as they shared the same gym classes. I'd never thought to do that, worrying in silence instead. Now I had to be happy in silence. The happy was already well taken care of, as even with the horrible impressions left by her bra, her tits still looked WONDERFUL! The silence part was going to require considerable self-control. I had to very carefully control myself now. I was allowed to look at her body once, but not for too long, and then my eyes had to move to Chloe's face - never to return to where they most wanted to go. Yelling "Yippee!" and dancing for joy wasn't allowed either. I forced my eyes up. I read a variety of expressions on Chloe's face: determination (her jaw was clenched and she was looking me straight in the eye), pride (head held high, shoulders back), nervousness (biting her lower lip), and others. I was very pleased to see that most of her emotions were positive ones. That implied she had a very good opinion of me. I was also very pleased to note that she had her hair pinned behind her ears (that was important). It was one of the weaknesses of our plan that Julia wouldn't have been able to fix if Chloe had covered her ears while she was in the cubicle. We had a Plan B for that, but it wasn't nearly as good as Plan A. Happily Plan A was a goer. Looking Chloe in the eyes, I said, "I think I can guess why you didn't want to do this at lunch, but I don't know what you are doing. You have EXCEPTIONALLY nice breasts Chloe..." Oops. I was supposed to say "very nice breasts". "EXCEPTIONALLY" was way too much emphasis. It was true, but too emphatic. Fortunately it wasn't a disaster, as the plan called for my being maturely open and honest about her breasts. It was too late to do anything about it now anyway, so I just carried on with my lines, " ... and thank you for showing them to me, but I'm sure that's not what this meeting is for. Would someone explain what's going on please?" Just before I finished talking I looked away from Chloe and at Julia, making it easier for Julia to answer before Chloe. We didn't have a lot of time (the Principal doesn't realize how important it is to have a useful amount of time between classes), so we wanted Julia to steer the conversation, rather than let Chloe flounder around for too long. Julia answered, "Chloe realizes that she should trust you - that she DOES trust you - and she thought this would dramatically prove that to you." I said, "It's certainly dramatic, I'll give you that, but I'm not sure what it proves. Chloe," I looked back at her eyes, "maybe you should explain this in your own words." Chloe was much less tense now. A long way short of relaxed, but visibly better. Good, my attitude was affecting her as Julia and I had expected. She answered, "Like Julia said. I was wrong to be so distrustful of you on Sunday. Out of habit, I treated you the way I have to treat every other boy. I did it without thinking about you as an individual. I've thought about you since Sunday and I realize that you're much better than other boys. So I'm showing you that I understand that now, that I trust you, and the way I behaved toward you on Sunday won't ever happen again. I know you're meeting other girls so you can find which one you like, and that you have to quickly stop wasting your time on the unsuitable ones. I know my attitude on Sunday made me seem unsuitable, but my attitude toward you is completely different now. I like you very much and I know you like me, especially because I just overheard you tell Julia that you though I was a 'lovely person', haha..." Chloe's little laugh, her more casual stance, starting to give hand gestures, etc., all showed that she was almost relaxed. It was an impressive change of attitude for her, because normally she's extraordinarily uptight in any situation where a boy and her breasts are in the same room. For her to be topless and relaxed while talking to me was great. Unfortunately for her, a lot of it was because she was believing her own argument and thought I did too, but that wasn't Julia's plan for this encounter. On the topic of her argument, I wasn't impressed by how poorly expressed it was, not that its quality had ANY effect on my motivation to achieve our dual goals (for once that's not an innuendo. Julia and I each had a goal for Chloe). Even I could've presented Chloe's argument better than she had, just from how well Julia had explained Chloe to me. Obviously Julia hadn't given Chloe any help composing her request. Presumably because Julia hadn't thought it worth the effort, since I was going to reject Chloe shortly. On Julia's very first telling me of her plan, I thought that this would be the point where I'd accept Chloe's apology and we'd all live happily ever, especially me. Instead, Julia had told me that I'd be completely rejecting Chloe. That had horrified me when I heard it. She'd be right in front of me, offering her semi-naked self to me, so it made no sense for me to zoom directly away from the goal I was very eager to get my hands on! But Julia convinced me it was for the best, as she does from time to time. Although Chloe's inability to articulate her thinking disappointed me, I didn't really care. I figured she had never thought about a relationship with a guy in the way she was trying to describe now, so I cut her plenty of slack. Chloe wouldn't need to get any better at thinking about this type of relationship because it wasn't going to happen. Not even close! Julia and I were going to dramatically change her viewpoint over the next few days. Chloe was still talking, " ... So because we both know that we already like each other, and because I'm proving that I trust you about my breasts more than any other boy, I hope you'll agree that we should spend a lot more time together, so we can get to know each other even better than we do now. I think we'll be very good together, don't you agree?" Chloe had moved right past relaxed, into confident. Although she would be okay with me looking at her breasts now, probably even proud of herself for letting me, the plan still called for me not to. Instead I had to make sure she saw that I never looked, so she'd remember it later. Talk about having to make a sacrifice! It was time to start the rejection. I didn't answer her question; instead I followed Julia's plan. I replied, "I've got several opinions to express, about different aspects of what's happened here so far. Let me start with the thing that I'm the most impressed about, okay?" With great confidence Chloe happily said, "Sure." Everything seemed to be going extremely well for Chloe, as far as she could tell, especially because of the boost given by her 'accidentally' overhearing my "Chloe's a lovely person" comment. All the other girls and Julia telling her how my parking lot effort proved I valued her more than twenty five naked girls was also very encouraging for her. She was, I was sure, also proud of herself for being topless with me, proud of me for reacting so maturely about it, and then proud of herself again for correctly judging that I was the right person to show her breasts to. Unfortunately, as she was about to find out, pride and confidence go before her fall. "Out of everything you've said and done in here, the thing I'm most impressed by is that I can see your ears." I stopped, to let her work out how to react to that. It took her several seconds to work out that she didn't know how to react. With a puzzled look on her face, and the beginning of a realization that all was not going as well as she thought, Chloe asked, "My ears? I don't understand?" I explained, as scripted by Julia, "You almost never wear your hair like that. It's always forward, covering your ears. This morning and at lunch your ears were covered, and now they're not. I told you on Sunday that I've got a thing about pretty ears, and that I think your ears are very pretty. You've obviously deliberately tucked you hair behind your ears so I can see them during this talk. Physically that's a small thing, but it's a big indication about your personality. It tells me that you're thoughtful, attentive, caring, willing to please, and many more things..." I was pleased to see the first of Chloe's panicky looks at Julia, who gave no reaction whatsoever. I had to keep praising Chloe over her attitude to her ears for as long as it took. It would have been a major strain on my creativity except that Julia and I had prepared for it. It was still good to see Chloe look at Julia though, as that hinted that this may not last much longer. " ... I particularly like that you didn't even mention it. That means that you're not boastful, which is great because I don't like boastful people. You just let me quietly enjoy myself and that's an attitude that I very much admire. As you know there are many girls chasing me, but most of them are too strident about it. That shows they lack confidence in themselves. But not you; you are quietly confident. I can easily imagine you offering the right man your entire self - your mind, body and soul - the way you offered your ears to me just now. Quietly, confidently and with complete trust in the man who is the recipient of your gift..." Ahh, good. I could see by the increasing look of dismay on Chloe's face - rapidly increasing dismay during my last point - that she wouldn't take much longer. Julia isn't giving her any indication what to do, but it should be over soon. I started an improvisation off the last point, as it seemed to have hit home. " ... It is the small things that best show people's personalities for what they really are. Your generosity with showing me your ears may seem a small thing to you, but I'm sure it indicates..." Chloe had finally had enough. She had been hanging her head, and by now it was aimed very much at her feet. She looked up briefly to beg, "Please stop, Mark." I was very happy to stop, as it was a VERY stupid topic to have to pour out so much bullshit about. Chloe told her feet, "I didn't put my hair back. Julia did it just before you came in. She said you liked my ears, and gave me two pins out of her hair to hold mine back. None of those nice things you said about me are true." As per the script, I said, with a very upbeat, happy tone of voice, "Boy oh boy! I made a complete fool of myself there didn't I? What a dummy I am. Oh well, just as well it doesn't matter at all to me." I waited for Chloe to question why "it" didn't matter. The "it" was deliberately ambiguous - as "it" could refer to my making a fool of myself or her ears - making it more likely that Chloe would ask a question. If she doesn't, Julia will. After a brief delay, Chloe asked, "It doesn't?" "Not at all. Julia already knows, values and loves me for who I am, so I couldn't care less about making a fool of myself in front of her. Love means that I SHOULD be fully myself and fully open whenever I'm with her. That's far more important to my life than any momentary embarrassment I might cause myself. Once you truly understand that, it stops being embarrassing anyway. As you can see, I'm not the least bit embarrassed. I'm just amused and happy that Julia saw me be so open and giving. I also couldn't care less that I made a fool of myself in front of you. In my life I am going to meet countless people. They'll come and they'll go, and their opinions of me matters not the tiniest fraction compared to those of the people I care about. If you leave my life, my embarrassment won't have mattered. If you stay in my life, it'll be because we come to care for each other, and then my embarrassment won't have mattered either. Remember when my sister Carol came out as a lesbian and was terribly hassled because of it? You heard me give a speech in some classes asking people to please stop being cruel to her, and asking them to be kind. You've seen me in classes all year, and I've never given a speech before. But for Carol I jumped up and gave a highly emotional speech. I fully expected to make a complete fool of myself because I have zero experience at public speaking, but I didn't care, because I love Carol. The core point is that when you love someone - the way I do Julia and Carol - then it's truly liberating. Not only do you discover how totally unimportant the opinions of people temporary to your life are, but love gives you the strength to open up and blossom from within yourself. It's obvious that you've never found the right guy to love yet, Chloe, but when you do, it will change your life totally. It's incredibly liberating and strengthening." I could see that the speech had pushed Chloe's buttons nicely, as predicted, as Julia knows what sort of person Chloe is. It probably would've worked on most girls anyway, as they love hearing about love. Even I knew this, after seeing Mom and my sisters watch far too many schmaltzy movies. We were short of time, so I had to press on. "Chloe, my rambling about your ears wasted a lot of time, so I have to be quicker now. I originally said that my seeing your ears was the most impressive thing. That's gone now, but I will quickly mention two things. First, that you demonstrated your honesty. You 'fessed up. I noticed that Julia didn't make you confess, it was entirely your choice, so good for you. Honesty is very important to me." By the way, we had several minor reasons for Julia keeping a blank face when Chloe looked at her in panic during my ear-praising nonsense, but the main two were that there was no reason not to, and it made Julia seem more on Chloe's side. Hopefully that would encourage Chloe to go to Julia for advice in the future, especially over the next few days. That's Julia's usual trick, and it works extremely well. -- "Second, the hair pinning idea not being yours doesn't make all the nice things I said about you untrue. They might still be true, but for other reasons. I said you were "thoughtful, attentive, caring, and willing to please." I still think all of those things are true. I also said I could imagine you quietly and confidently offering your entire self to the right man. I can still imagine you doing that." All of those are how I want her to think about herself, how she probably wants to think about herself, and especially how I want her to behave toward me in the near future. I was - admittedly weakly - programming her behavior. -- "I will very briefly mention I was impressed by your confidence and determination. I know it must have been extremely hard for you to appear topless in front of a boy." She nodded at that. "I was also pleased at how amazingly quickly you relaxed when you were talking to me. You came out of the cubicle stiff as a board, with your arms clamped to your side to stop them flying up to cover your breasts, but in a very short time you were relaxed and laughing. I see by your happy look that you think I'm complimenting you. Think about this, Chloe: you wouldn't have relaxed in the presence of any other boy, but I could've gotten most girls to relax. Do you get my point? I'm complimenting myself more than you, but I will acknowledge that there is some good chemistry between us. It needed good chemistry for you to go from terribly uptight to laughing so quickly, especially with your being topless the whole time. Let me ask you a question: how many times have I looked at your breasts since I first saw that you were topless?" Chloe had no hesitation in answering, "None. You've not looked at them a single time. Even when we talked about breasts you didn't look down, and guys ALWAYS look at them then." "I'll explain why I asked you that question later, instead I'll talk about something else now. As you know, I've found out some nice things about you today. You also overheard that I think you are a lovely person, so you know I like you, and I've just said that I believe that there's some good chemistry between us. You wanted me to come here so you could ask me to spend more time with you, to give us a second chance at a relationship. I've been thinking about that carefully, and it seems to me that nothing much has changed today, there is still one major problem which is overwhelming every good thing about you. You may think that the problem is your breasts, but that's incorrect. They're actually very nice breasts and I would never consider them to be a problem. Nor is the problem whether you trust me. I don't want to sound arrogant, but I know I'm trustworthy, and by now you know that too. Your belief that most guys can't stop thinking about your breasts is correct, so you're right to distrust most guys. In me, you've finally found a guy that you can trust, but the overwhelming problem is that now your breasts have become such a huge part of the way you think about relationships with guys that you can't see past them anymore. In the parking lot on Sunday, your being constantly distrustful and accusatory showed me that you were unable to stop thinking about your breasts. Today your entire strategy was to be topless. You didn't even have a speech properly prepared because you thought that the sight of your breasts would convince me all by themselves. -- "You are also making bad decisions because of them. On Sunday I told you that I would never choose to have a relationship with a girl because of her breasts, yet today you thought the way to get a second chance of a relationship with me was to show me your breasts. You chose to try the single thing I'd already told you wouldn't work. That was a bad decision. Even worse, let's pretend that I was convinced today to do what you want, and we started dating. Sooner or later, probably sooner knowing your mistrustfulness, it would occur to you that I only started dating you after you offered me your breasts. You would instantly fear I was the same as every other boy and only interested in you because of your figure. In other words, your way of trying to restart our relationship would have also destroyed your trust in me, thereby ruining our relationship. It was a fatally flawed strategy and an extremely bad decision. -- "I asked you a minute ago how many times I'd looked at your naked breasts, and you instantly said 'None'. Not only did you instantly know the answer, but you'd clearly been intently observing my eyes, studying the way I looked at, or did not look at, your breasts. If I asked Julia how often I'd looked at her breasts, she wouldn't have a clue. No doubt she hopes that I look occasionally, because she likes that her body arouses me, but she'd rather devote her energies to being a good girlfriend than obsessively tracking my looks at her breasts. If I asked you how many times I'd looked at your ears, you wouldn't have a clue. You don't think your ears are important. To you, your breasts are the most important part of your body. You're obsessed about them. -- "Chloe, I definitely like you. You overheard that I think you're a lovely person. I'm happy you overhead me say that, because you deserve to be complimented for being such a lovely person. Even though you're a lovely person, you would be a bad girlfriend because of your obsession. You think every relationship problem, and every relationship solution, involves your breasts. There's no point in our trying to have a relationship, because your breasts would destroy it within a few days. Thank you for wanting to try again with me. Coming from someone as nice as you, that's a considerable compliment to me, but I think I'd better leave you now." I turned to Julia, and said, "Julia, I'd really appreciate it if you would stay and look after Chloe. Is that okay with you?" "Of course. I wouldn't have left her anyway, she's a lovely girl." I quickly left, easily catching all the eavesdroppers at the outside door. I simply said, "Thanks for your help." I walked rapidly to my last class. Julia and I hadn't needed to plan what would happen next. Julia had simply described to me what she intended to do. Julia has been in Chloe's classes for years, and had several times seen someone hurting Chloe emotionally. Chloe's reaction was always to cringe. If the hurting continued, Chloe withdrew; either by physically leaving the area, or if that wasn't practical, by mentally tuning out so she became extremely quiet and passive. That's how she reacted when I was laying out my rejection of her. That's why there'd been no argument: Chloe doesn't argue against hurt, she cringes from it. Chloe's passivity meant we could easily plan to leave Julia with her after I left. I had to leave because my remaining would make it far harder for Chloe to recover. Julia was going to sit with her and coax her out of her withdrawal. It shouldn't take long as the plan called for me not to be cruel, and Julia was seen as a friend. Julia would get Chloe talking, and get her to admit her obsession as the essential first step in breaking it. Then Julia would "happy her up," as Julia had put it. That's why we'd included so many compliments, to make it easier for Julia to cheer her up by reminding her about them. Early on in the 'happy her up' stage Julia was to suddenly get very excited and congratulatory, telling Chloe that she'd virtually had me wrapped up as her boyfriend already, that she could easily overcome her obsession, that everything was looking great for her. When Chloe was sufficiently convinced, Julia would push her in the direction of the next thing she had to do. ^ [As I was driving her home, and in her room after we arrived, Julia gave me a lot of the details of what had actually happened.] To start with, immediately after I'd left a couple of the door-minding, eaves-dropping girls stuck their heads in. They were desperately eager to go "all girly" and gush about what they'd heard. Julia had FIRMLY told them all before this started to keep their noses out of it, and the look on Julia's face when they entered the bathroom reinforced that message. They did need to rush off to their last classes, so they just asked whether Chloe was okay, and whether they could go. Julia said "Yes" to both, sending them on their way. No doubt they'd interrogate Julia at the very next opportunity, and no doubt Julia would treat it as an opportunity to use those girls to further her plan for Chloe. Julia and Chloe talked all period, so it's too long to quote completely. I'll paraphrase Julia's side, as Chloe effectively just said a succession of yeses because Julia was verbally leading Chloe by the nose. It wasn't hard to get Chloe to agree that her idea of showing her breasts to Mark, and her being so aware of whether Mark looked at them or not, was proof of her obsessing over her own breasts. Whereupon Julia told Chloe, "Mark REALLY likes you. Not just a little bit, but very much. He mentioned it over and over, and you can tell that he really wants to date you. The great news is that the ONLY reason he had for not dating you is your obsession. That's great, because I figure your obsession is already at least 75% cured. You can easily get rid of the last 25% and then start dating Mark." Chloe couldn't see how she could be 75% cured, so Julia explained, "I've seen obsessed people on TV, and they're obsessed ALL the time. You're not like that. You're only obsessed when you're dealing with boys; not with girls, and I'm sure not with old men, baby boys, etc. Only with boys that you think want to date you. That means what turns your obsession on or off is inside of you, and it depends on what you think about the person you are with, so it's under YOUR control! That's incredibly important. -- "Even better, you just spent several minutes standing right in front of Mark when you were topless, and you were very relaxed. You even laughed a little. If someone had told me a week ago that Chloe would be standing topless and relaxed next to a teenage boy, I would've sworn it was impossible, but I just saw you do it. Not only were you topless and relaxed, but Mark told you several times that he likes you and he talked about dating you. You hate it when boys talk about dating you because you're sure they just want to get their hands on your breasts, but you didn't feel that way when Mark talked. Mark even complimented your breasts briefly, which is the worst thing in the world any boy can say to you, but when Mark said it you didn't freak out at all. Mark said ALL the things that normally set off your obsession, but it didn't go off and you stayed relaxed. -- "There are two very important things we can learn from that. First, how you reacted to Mark means your obsession is flexible and subject to your opinion of the person, even with dateable boys, so yours is a controllable obsession, and you can get better at controlling it. I bet you've never tried to before, because it's never mattered until now. Every guy you've met HAS been after your breasts, so it didn't matter that you thought they were. Now it matters a great deal, and you've already started learning how to manage your compulsion. You've only had two meetings with Mark: last Sunday and just now, and already you can be topless and relaxed around him. I bet that after a couple more meetings with him you'll be relaxed all the time. You are improving incredibly rapidly, Chloe. -- "The second important thing is a question: WHY are you improving now? You've met hundreds of boys at this school, and there's not been a single one of them that you could have relaxed topless with. Mark's the only one. So why did your obsession suddenly start improving so quickly with Mark? To me it's obvious: the real Chloe - the subconscious, instinctive, emotional Chloe - already trusts Mark. Your conscious mind still needs some work, but I'm sure just to overcome your habit. You've gotten so used to mentally linking dateable boys with their chasing your breasts that your conscious mind is stuck in a rut. We need to break that habit, but it's just a habit, not the real you. The real you trusts Mark. I think you've FINALLY found a guy you can trust, and the real you knows it. -- "I have one more thought on how you've reacted to Mark. I saw you standing topless in front of him while he discussed dating you and occasionally complimented your breasts, and you were relaxed. I've known you for years, and I literally do not believe you could learn to trust any boy that fast. I have a hope, a very big hope, that you are NOT learning to trust Mark, but to love him. It's too early to tell yet, especially because your conscious mind is fairly confused when it comes to boys, but that's what I'm praying for." That rattled Chloe. -- "I have a theory that we'll soon find out whether you love him or just trust him. If you trust him you'll feel relaxed and comfortable when you are with him, but if you love him then after a few more meetings you'll start feeling very, very horny for him. That'll be your subconscious expressing its feelings for Mark through your body. Your conscious mind might take weeks to accept what's happened, but your subconscious mind won't. I'm going to cross my fingers for that." [Julia laughingly told me that a fully developed, 16-year old girl's first real crush is certain to explode into lust, and as inexperienced as Chloe is, she'll interpret it as proof of love, especially with Julia encouraging that conclusion.] Julia also had to take some time to reassure Chloe that she [Julia] would be absolutely thrilled if Chloe fell in love with Mark. "You know I want Mark to have another girlfriend, and naturally I want her to love him. Of all the girls I know, you'd be a fantastic girlfriend for Mark, because you're so giving and caring. -- "Mark did NOT say anything like, 'don't waste any more of my time', or 'I gave you a second chance, but I'm not going to give you a third chance.' I've heard him be extremely abrupt to girls he didn't like, but he wasn't like that with you. He left the door open for you. In fact, I think he even invited you to try again. He repeatedly stressed how much he liked you, and that your only problem was your obsession. He even said how impressed he was by how relaxed you were with him, so he knows you can get on top of it. -- "I think there are two things you have to do. The first one I'll call 'Eliminate the Negatives'. You need to eliminate all the negative behaviors that come from your obsession, such as taking minutes to relax, or constantly keeping track of whether guys' eyes are looking at your breasts or not. Especially when you're with Mark! It should be relatively easy with Mark, because you KNOW you can trust him. This obviously doesn't mean you suddenly let guys play with your breasts. Not being obsessive means being normal. If a normal girl wouldn't let a guy do something, then you shouldn't either. -- "The second thing you have to do is 'Create the Positive'. You need to find ways to make Mark like you. This is easier because you don't need to be doing them all the time. You could do something helpful, give him a gift, or any of the things you would normally do for a good friend. In your case, definitely nothing to do with breasts, because that'd look like part of your obsession. One of the things I do for him is to help him form relationships with girls who might develop into very special friends - that's what I'm doing with you now - but that's a bit advanced for you right now. I'm reluctant to suggest anything specific, because it'd be far better if whatever you do is obviously your own idea. -- "Mark wants you to try again, I want you to try again, and I think you MUST try again. You'll never meet a guy as perfect for you as Mark is, especially for trustworthiness, which is such an important issue for you. There are only about seven weeks left in school, and for half of those he's going to be studying hard because he's got nearly triple the number of exams that you and I have. Very soon it's going to be extremely hard for you to get any time with him, so I strongly suggest you act quickly. You've got about twenty days to get him interested in dating you, if you take two days to think about it, you'll be down to eighteen days. You'll never get that time back." Julia had to jolly Chloe along; to reassure her that she really did have a chance with me. "Mark knows you're falling in love with him, because you'd never be topless in front of a boy unless that was true, and he didn't tell you not to try again. He kept saying how much he likes you. He WANTS you to try again, so OF COURSE you've got a chance. The only question is whether you've got the courage. I watched how brave you were with him just before, and it's obvious that you do. You've also got a secret weapon: ME! I think you'd be wonderful for Mark, so I'm going to work very hard to help you. I know I didn't realize your idea of going topless wouldn't work - I'm not used to thinking about the problems of big breasts, haha - but for your making Mark happy I can definitely help. -- "There are two things about Mark that you should never forget: The first is that he's very caring. He never ogled you all year because he knew you didn't like it. I'm sure you've never seen Mark be cruel to anyone. He simply doesn't do it. He would NEVER let a girl who was starting to fall in love with him keep trying if there was no chance - that'd be too cruel! You've still got a long way to go yet, and we don't know how compatible your personalities are, but Mark's made sure that you know that he likes you a great deal, so it's CERTAINLY worth your trying. -- "The second thing to remember about Mark is that he's superhumanly smart. By the end of next year he's going to have finished his first college degree and be six years ahead of normal people. You saw how incredibly fast he was at working out that if he accepted your offer today then it would destroy your trust in him weeks or months from now. You and I had days to think about what you were doing, and neither of us thought that far ahead, but Mark did it in SECONDS! I'm sure he understands what's going on between you and him far better than you and I do. You still have to do your best, to prove that you can be a good girlfriend and that Mark will enjoy your company, but if anything happens with Mark that you don't understand - or even if you think you do understand but don't like - I'd advise you to remember that Mark is so much smarter than anybody else that he could have reasons far beyond any that we could think of. Just do your best, and trust him totally. -- "OH Chloe! I've just had a WONDERFUL idea! Talking about how caring and smart Mark is made me think of it. Remember that I said you had to do two types of things: 'Eliminate the Negatives' and 'Create the Positives'. I think you'll do well on the positives because you're a very giving girl, but you might have real trouble getting rid of your negative issues. You're extremely conscious about boys and your breasts, so it could be very difficult for you. My wonderful idea is that you ask MARK to help you get rid of your self-consciousness! He's so caring and smart that I'm sure he'll be able to help cure you far faster than you could do it yourself, AND you'll be spending time with him too! Isn't that amazingly clever?" Chloe agreed it was, just like she'd agreed with everything else Julia had led her through. "It's even better than I first thought, because if you make a mistake - like today was - it won't kill your relationship chances with Mark. Instead he'll probably try even harder. It's FANTASTIC! You definitely have to do some positive things for him, so he can see you're trying and not just free-riding off his efforts. He doesn't like people who are takers, so you need to show him that you're a giver, but as soon as you've done that a couple of times you could ask him to help you. Mark's so caring he'd agree to help you even if you wanted to be someone else's girlfriend. Remember he's so smart that you may not understand everything he does, but you know he's totally trustworthy, so just accept it. Mark is going to help us get you ready for Mark; isn't that funny?" Chloe agreed, yet again. They spent some time discussing what Chloe could do for me that was positive. Julia and I had already made a little list that Julia could suggest, but Julia preferred to let Chloe try herself, in part because Julia wanted to know whether Chloe was capable of being a good girlfriend. In Julia's opinion, that took more than big tits. Despite Julia having told her that time was critically short, it really wasn't, as what was the chance of me losing interest in a girl with tits that beautiful? The end of this school year certainly wouldn't be the end of my interest in her. Chloe couldn't immediately think of anything positive to do for me, but Julia had given her several examples of what other people had done for me recently, such as Donna's fetching me when she was watching her martial arts video "Because they move like you", so Chloe easily understood the concept. She promised to try very hard to think of things to do. Julia had covered all the points she wanted, by which time Chloe was sufficiently deluded. For example, we didn't think Chloe was as obsessed as we'd made her think she was. A lot of our apparent proof of how bad her obsession was, was based on her trying to use her breasts to start a relationship with me, but she'd been subtly steered into that by Julia. Without that incident the reality was simply that Chloe was far too conscious and protective of her breasts. Destructively so, but Julia was sure Chloe wasn't so bad that we couldn't fix her. Chloe was also deluded about how knowledgeable I was about people. What little I knew about girls, especially about Chloe, was because Julia had explained it to me. With the "Mark's so smart you may not understand him" excuse, I could probably get away with all sorts of stupidities, provided I looked confident and mysterious, and then ran to Julia for help! Chloe had already dressed, mid-conversation after Julia had cheered her up enough for her to get moving again, but it was too late to make it worthwhile catching the last few minutes of class, so they passed the time until the final bell by chatting about how wonderful I was, which was just Julia encouraging Chloe even more. Julia had to do some more talking about how she wasn't jealous, really wanted Mark to find someone wonderful, hoped it was Chloe, and that sort of stuff. Chloe wanted to believe it, so it wasn't difficult for Julia. Chloe was also worried about her never having had a real boyfriend before, but Julia assured her, "Mark's well aware of that, and that you may not know how to behave with a boyfriend. He'll make allowances for it. It really doesn't matter much, as he's interested in your personality, and that's nothing to do with experience." Chloe confessed that she was worrying about both her relationship and physical inexperience, the latter of which was an EXTREMELY good sign! Even the former was good, as it'd make it easier for us to manage her. To which Julia reassured, "In that case, Mark's the PERFECT guy for you! He treats every girl exactly how she needs. Did you hear how rough he was with Alexis when he fucked her?" Chloe confirmed she'd heard, and looked increasingly worried, because she'd forgotten about that. Julia said, "He didn't make love to her; he FUCKED her! And you've seen Alexis talk with Mark several times in the last couple of days. She's all over him, offering herself to him every chance she gets. She LOVED it, as it was the best sex of her life. Same with me, Chloe. I was a virgin my first time with Mark, and I'm tiny, but he was incredibly gentle and patient with me. He was perfect with Alexis; he was perfect with me. You've heard Pat, Lily and a couple of others talk about their experiences too. All of them say he was perfect. He'll be perfect with you too, especially because he likes you so much. He will treat you in exactly the way you need. You've got NOTHING to worry about. Remember how much you trust Mark? So you can give him your heart, AND YOUR BODY, and have no fears at all. He'll look after you perfectly. When Mark decides it's time, I promise he'll do it perfectly. It's not even your decision; it's Mark's, so you don't need to even think about it. You can totally forget about it, and leave the decision up to him. Do you understand why the timing over your giving your virginity to Mark is his decision?" Chloe didn't, and was surprised to hear that Julia thought it was! "There are small reasons such as his being more experienced and knowledgeable than you, but the two main reasons are first that he knows you and your needs better than you do. He's a GENIUS, Chloe! I'm sure that over the next few days Mark will prove to you that he understands you better than you do. I've seen him do that before, and because he knows you are a very sensitive girl, and even insecure too, I'm sure he'll be very careful and thoughtful with you. He's never cruel, and a lot of that is because he is so caring and careful. The second reason is that he'll make the decision entirely based on you: on your needs, comfort level, security, readiness, etc. That's the sort of guy he is. Did the other girls tell you how reluctant he was to touch the breasts of the girls sitting next to him in the hot tub on Sunday? Good. Mark's extremely cautious about taking advantage of a girl until he's absolutely convinced she wants him to AND it's the right thing to do. You walked out of that cubicle topless, clearly wanting Mark to look at you, but after the first glance he didn't look at your breasts again. YOU may have thought you were ready and wanted him to look, but within a couple of seconds he had worked out that you were not ready. He controlled himself totally, not looking even once. He CERTAINLY won't decide to take you to bed until he knows it's the right time. Just like with his looking at your breasts, he'll know that far better than you do." Chloe was impressed and convinced (i.e., deluded). I'd expect her being so convinced to be only temporary so she'd get cold feel later, but Julia had already given me a rough idea what we were going to do over the next few days. We hadn't bothered planning it yet, but I knew the gist. Chloe would be impressed and could well end up permanently believing I knew best; that being a wonderful delusion for a girl with breasts like hers to have! (To be fair to myself, Julia and I had an altruistic reason too.) Julia finished with, "What amazes me is how incredibly smart he is. He looked at your breasts when you first came out, but NEVER again. Not even a brief glance. That means it took Mark only one or two seconds to understand what was going on and why he shouldn't look at you. He likes breasts; I know that because he loves playing with mine. He even joked once about how sorry he was that Dakota had to be fired because she had such nice breasts. He still fired her, of course, because he'd never let his judgment be affected by something as silly as breasts, but he was sorry to see them go, haha. -- "The point is that he was certainly deliberately and very consciously not looking at your breasts. He wanted to, but he did not, because he recognized that it was not right. You and I didn't think of that, and we had DAYS. Mark had it all figured out in one or two seconds. That's how smart he is, and how well he understands you. When it's time for you to give your virginity to him, he will know. I've learned that most of the time he lets people do their own thing, make their own decisions and their own mistakes. He can't run everybody's lives, even if he knows what they should do better than them. But when it comes to your virginity, and other things to do with sex between the two of you, I am sure he'll be very thoughtful, careful and deliberate about what you should do and when. You can trust his judgment about everything to do with your relationship with him. Stop worrying about it yourself, because Mark will look after you FAR better than you can." ------- Chapter 124: a Divine Being Gets a New Computer System Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) By the time Julia had brought me up to date about Chloe, we'd dropped my sisters home, driven to Julia's, had a snack, and were in her room. We'd been talking the whole time, as Chloe was a subject that I was VERY interested in. Then I remembered that my computer system (using the word "my" loosely) might already be upgraded. We shot around to the study, but sadly nothing had changed. We went back to Julia's room, and she started telling me what to do next with Chloe and why, in case I had to improvise. I didn't write "we planned what to do with Chloe," because it mainly consisted of Julia telling me what to do. I didn't need any advice about the general theme, as it was pretty simple and I understood the psychology of it well enough. Mostly Julia was talking about specific things we'd be doing soon. One of Julia's ideas, for example, had Carol coming to one of the classes that I shared with Chloe, and deliberately displaying her tits - nipples and all! (Eat your heart out Janet Jackson, Carol's are far better!) Julia needed to tell me what verbal points Carol and I had to make with Chloe. Julia told me about this while she had Carol on the phone, so it only needed to be described once. Carol had to wear appropriate clothes to school for the next few days, to be able to do it whenever I thought Chloe was ready. Hopefully soon, as I was impatient for Chloe to progress as fast as possible, although Julia told me it probably wouldn't be for at least three or four days, and could be longer. Damn! [[I'm writing this autobiography by reliving my thoughts, typing them up as I go, although I'm not "typing", as such. I'll retain topical comments such as references to Janet Jackson's closet malfunction. It was old news by the time this was written, but it accurately reflects my thinking at the time.]] We were discussing another idea fifteen minutes later when Robert knocked on our door to tell us one of the university's computer technicians was installing the new system. We hadn't heard them arrive because of the soundproofing. I had to go see that! It was exciting for about thirty seconds, and then it got boring. Certainly not as interesting as planning our seduction of Chloe. Or, perhaps, "tricking of Chloe" would be more accurate as it was Julia at her tricky best. She'd obviously put a lot of thought into it, and I understood that a significant part of her motivation was that we'd be helping Chloe. The way it'll unfold, Chloe will get most of her benefit before I get any of mine, so if it fell apart for some reason we wouldn't have taken advantage of her. Julia hadn't tried to make it happen in that order; it was just a nice accident. Watching the computer guy put together the brackets for the two screens had gotten old, especially as all the new stuff was still in its boxes or wrapping, so I asked him and Robert, "Do you need me? Julia and I were discussing something important in her room." Robert said, "You need to check it all works before we leave, and it'd be a good idea for you to pop back in ten minutes or so, just to make sure we're putting everything where you want, but otherwise we don't need you." The computer guy - Logan; we'd been introduced - said, "I've already installed a lot of software packages on the new computer, a lot more than your first system has. That software isn't going to be installed on the other one, so the machines will be a little different. Do you want the new one on the left or right when we set it up?" I was about to say, "It doesn't matter," when I realized there was a small reason. "Put the one with the most software on the right, thanks." That was the side of Carol's desk, so if she wanted to use any of the packages she could easily roll her chair over, and I could move to the left and use just the old computer for a while. Julia and I went back to our bedroom, and resumed our planning. It didn't take long to finish discussing Chloe as her situation was really quite simple. That made it an opportune time for me to check up on the progress. I popped back into the study to check all was well, which it was. The only thing to watch happening was Logan's ass while he crawled around under my desk plugging in cables, which got old REAL fast. I said, "It looks great," (the setup, not Logan's ass). "Come get me when you're ready to test it?" Robert and the ass agreed, so I popped out again. Back in the bedroom, I told Julia what I was intending with Mom and why. She thought it was good, but pointed out that if I showed my light blobs to my parents then I better show them to hers, because our parents compare notes about us so often. I had no problem at all showing Prof and Vanessa my light blobs, but I was surprised at Julia's saying they talked so much. "Do they really talk a lot? I haven't noticed much." "Because they don't do it when any of us are around. Not that it's a secret or anything. They just do it when it's convenient for them, and if we're around they're usually busy with us. I know about it because I spend so much time asking Mom for advice about many of the things that we do, and she often mentions her talks with your mom. Like I've told you before, many of the clever things I do for you, I can only do because Mom has given me the idea or helped me plan them. I'm not nearly as smart at this stuff as you probably think I am. Mom says she's always known I was going to be some sort of manager, because I've been bossing my playmates around since I was a toddler. She's encouraged me to learn more about it, but I still get a great deal of help from her. -- "Anyway, back to our parents conversations. Our moms talk the most, of course. Every day I would imagine, because there's a lot going on. More often if something new happens, or either of them thinks of a reason for another call. There IS a lot going on, and mothers need to keep a very close eye on their kids. Most of it happens here, and two of your mom's kids are involved, so your mom needs to talk with mine a lot. You should assume that anything any one parent knows, all four of them will very quickly know. Mine would keep a secret for you if it was necessary, but you'd have to convince them they should, like with the roulette scheme. Speaking of keeping secrets, I suggest that when you show your blobs to your parents, tell them you'll show mine in the next couple of days, but ask yours to keep them secret because it'll be more fun for my parents if they don't know about it in advance." #1: "Sure to everything you just said. I'll show my parents, ask them to keep it quiet, then show yours the next time I'm over here. And you'll have a hard job convincing me that you're not as smart with people as I think you are. I've seen you act on the spur of the moment, and you're extremely good at it. So you haven't burst any of my illusions about you, because they're not illusions. But speaking of something that is an illusion, I need to take some time to work on the halo thing, to find the best way of doing that before my light blob demonstration." I moved to one of the many mirrors in Julia's room (its being a girl's room, it was excessively equipped with mirrors), and thought about how to create the most realistic halo. Given that halos are myth, trying for a "realistic" one is a stretch, but the look I wanted was what is painted in those religious artworks: a ring of bright light above my head. Because I wanted "bright", I'd use the maximum amount of light, and it'd have to be yellow as white is too awkward to create. The tricky part was my wanting it to be a circular ring, because blobs are spheres rather than rings. I thought of two ways of creating a ring effect: either the maximum number of small blobs circling extremely rapidly, ideally so fast as to smear into a solid looking shape; or a large, bright blob with a slightly smaller very dark, ideally black, blob inside it, 'eating' the lighter colored blob's light. The second idea was almost certainly nonsense, but then the whole light blob concept was seemingly impossible anyway, so it was worth a few seconds to try the second idea just in case yet another seemingly impossible thing happened. If it worked it'd be a very simple and easy solution, because I could create a ring by having one head-sized yellow blob, with two black blobs mostly inside the yellow blob, but one above and one below the yellow blob's center. With the correct sizes and positions, all the yellow would be canceled out except for a single ring. It'd have a slightly weird cross-section, but it'd be acceptable for my purposes. The image of that idea had occurred to me quickly, almost immediately followed by the thought that it wasn't likely to work, but it was worth a try. First of all I tried creating a black blob. That didn't work as there isn't an electromagnetic frequency for black. I could make a red blob and then make it vanishingly dim, but that just left the ambient light, exactly as if there was no blob there at all. I tried creating a largish yellow blob, and then a dark-red one (which was as close to black as I could get) inside it. It didn't cancel any of the yellow at all, it just added dark-red to the full amount of yellow. I tried again using dark blue rather than red. And then I tried a third time using dark red and dark blue at the same time. Nothing worked. There is no such thing as black light, unfortunately for this purpose. I spent a while trying to create two yellow blobs that were somehow "out of phase" with each other, so their light canceled, but had no success with that either. I gave up. I returned to the idea I'd had for a halo back when I'd first discovered light blobs: many rapidly spinning, small, yellow blobs. For my parents I wanted to create the halo in an instant, so that meant creating all twelve blobs and have them rapidly spinning right from the get go. I started developing that in easy steps, first creating twelve small, yellow blobs. I moved them into position, then adjusted their diameters and spacing to change the diameter of the ring they formed, also adjusting their vertical distance above my head so they looked as 'realistic' as possible. Stationary, the twelve blobs didn't look great, although they did at least suggest a halo, but if I could make them move so fast that they blurred into a solid looking circle of light, that'd be wonderful (literally). First the good news. Normally I can't see what's happening above my head, and looking up wouldn't help as I should have the halo tilt backward to stay 'above' the top of my skull. Not seeing the halo would normally make coordinating its visual effect very difficult, but my proximity sense gave me all the information I needed. The bad news was that it took an awful lot of concentration to move all twelve blobs rapidly, especially as they had to remain roughly equidistant from each other and not deviate from the ring. The equidistance requirement wasn't too important, because when the blobs were moving fast enough they were a blur anyway. What was harder was keeping on the track. If my head moved a little we had to change the position of the halo, the result was very ragged as individual minds adjusted their blobs differently, until they settled into their new, consensus position. It'd be a REAL mess if my head was frequently moving, the way it does in a relaxed setting. We tried for a few seconds, hoping it'd get easier with practice, or a more efficient way of managing them all would occur to us, but without luck. The best we could do was to take an intense amount of concentration to produce a ragged result. What we could achieve looked impressive if we kept our head very still, but it was only doable for a short time without its deficiencies becoming too apparent. We canceled them, and stopped to try to think of another way. #1 was clearly not focusing on the job, because, #1: #4: #1: #4: That got everyone's attention! #2: #1: Almost immediately afterward #2 and #4 (#3 being on duty) confirmed that the image of Carol's breasts was very nice. #4: #1 sent the image of Prof's study, of which we were envious and had a good mental picture. Both the other minds got it. We 'fetched' #3, as this was more important than being centered. We told him what had happened, we all tried it, and we could all do it. It also worked with sounds and smells, the latter test being something #1, #2 and #3 did not thank #4 for, given the example he'd chosen. #4: We tried private sendings, i.e., #4 sent an image only to #3, keeping #1 and #2 in the dark. We knew this worked for our internal 'verbal' communication, although we rarely use it except to keep whatever mind is on duty out of the loop, to make it easier for him to retain concentration. We quickly confirmed that it worked with the new forms of communication too. #1: <#2 and I tried some of this stuff right after our first merge and we couldn't do it. And you would have thought we would have noticed it long before now if it came with the second merge. I think we must be getting better somehow. It can't be "with practice" because we never practiced that, but something seems to be improving.> We all agreed that was the only likely explanation. #3: We all agreed with that too. ^ [It was two weeks since we'd first weighed our TK ability. In that time we'd been pushing against walls or the ground so often that we should've noticeably affected the Earth's rotation by now (joking, although it's theoretically possible, to a tiny degree). We hadn't consciously noticed that our TK ability was any stronger, but the science lab's scales would be a far better way of determining that. The next chance we got at school we re-weighed our TK force. It was fractionally higher, our maximum force was now 14.2 pounds, up from 14.1. Hardly impressive, but at least it was improving. Hopefully by a compounding factor of 1.007 per two weeks - rather than just +0.1 pounds - because after several years' compound growth would eventually produce a very large force: 20 pounds after 2 years, 35 pounds after 5 years, 88 pounds after 10 years, 221 pounds after 15 years. I was very much looking forward to year 13 or 14, provided compound growth applied. If it was a simple growth, then 15 years would produce only 54 pounds, and my dream wouldn't get off the ground. We resolved to continue to practice strengthening our TK as much as we possibly could. We were practicing two ki skills: the mind that was on duty was practicing consciously projecting ki, and the active minds were consciously creating TK-fingertips and pushing with them as much as possible. The first exercise was no problem at all. It was even good, as it was meditative for the on-duty mind. The second exercise was an EXTREMELY tedious, time-consuming, repetitive, boring exercise, but we couldn't think of any other way to make our TK stronger.] ^ We got back to the job at hand: how to create a plausible looking halo. We tried moving all twelve blobs closer together, until they touched, making the ring they formed much smaller. That looked fairly silly stationary. We tried moving it only moderately fast. It looked a little better, but nowhere near good enough and it still required a lot of concentration. We tried having just one blob, moving as fast as the mind could make it go. We were hopeful for this approach because it eliminated most of the problems caused by moving our head. We knew we could move blobs incredibly quickly, so this should work. Unfortunately it didn't. Moving the blob, per se, wasn't the problem; it was doing the necessary thinking about where to move it to. We could streak a blob across the room so blinding fast that it looked like a blur (we did that, for fun and to double-check we were right about that [[we were actually wrong because light blobs don't really "move" as such, but it didn't matter because they look like they do]]). Moving them across the room was so quick because almost no thinking was required. A halo required constant thought about where the blob was to go, especially if my head moved, because then thinking about the blob's course took so much time that it either slowed it to a non-blurring speed or sent it flying away from my head, both looking silly. We were stumped again. After some more thought we tried to see if we could flatten a blob any more than we could when we first discovered them, which was to make the long axis about 25% longer than the short, i.e., increase one by 11% and decrease the other by 11%. If we were lucky we would have somehow got better at it, and could now make a wide variety of shapes, perhaps including something more useful. As it turned out, we had no luck at all, as it was still about a 25% ratio. We crossed our fingers and tried to create a blob shaped exactly how I wanted it: as a halo. Nope, it didn't happen. Stumped yet again. Another alternative was to use somewhat larger blobs moved closer together so that they nearly touched, giving far more yellow around the 'ring' than blank space. It created a solid-ish impression. I couldn't rotate them fast enough to look like a ring while moving my body moved naturally, which I wanted to do with Mom and Dad, but at a slow rotation they still looked impressive; even 'regal', somehow. Not exactly like a halo, but recognizable as a kind of one. If I walked into the Vatican with that going on, I'd be sure to get some serious attention. A slow rotation reduced the head-tilting problem too. We decided to have one mind in charge, so that when the head tilted, its job was to adjust the orbit of its four blobs, which were one after the other, not alternated like we do with juggling. The trailing blobs owned by other minds would just follow the leader. That would distort the ring a lot if I rapidly moved my head through a large angle, but I had no intention of doing that. I just wanted to be able to move my head naturally, to avoid looking stiff and unnatural. I said, "Julia. What do you think of this look? I don't think I can make it any more halo-like. If I told my parents I was walking into the Vatican like this, they'd get the halo connection wouldn't they?" "Absolutely. Even without mentioning the Vatican they'd make the connection. It's not the usual halo look, but there aren't many alternative explanations for lights floating around the top of your head! Mentioning the Vatican will make their knowing what it's meant to be a cinch." "Good, thanks. I just need to practice creating it instantly now." I had to remember the size, positions, frequency and brightness of each ball. We assumed #3, who was currently on duty, would be put back on duty just before the demonstration. Someone had to be, and there was no reason to bother changing it around. So the currently active minds memorized their data. Only the positions were different for each blob. Frequency and brightness were especially easy: the frequency was the same as we used when we got up every morning, and brightness was "max". We practiced creating all twelve and immediately making them rotate. The first couple of attempts were ragged, because each mind had different rotation speeds, but the third attempt was close, and the fourth apparently flawless. I practiced one more time looking away from the mirror, which I didn't really need, but sight is a hard habit to break. It seemed fine, so I canceled them all then asked Julia to watch. I did it again, and she declared, "It'll knock their socks off." I got her to keep watching while I moved my head a bit, then I tried walking slowly forward. "It's fine. Honestly, they're going to be blown away. They're not going to be checking for accuracy. You'd better make sure they're sitting down when you do that!" Good point. I'd also been talking to Julia while walking, and I was pleased that I could do that and still keep the halo going properly. The concentration required was a major commitment. I had seriously considered using only eight blobs to free one mind up for conversation, but eight would have been a significant reduction in quality. I canceled the blobs, happy to stop the mental effort required. I had another topic to discuss with Julia: the revenge gropings, but Julia got in first with, "I've been thinking about the problem with your mother. I think we need to build up the genetic theory. So far we haven't done a single thing consistent with thinking that Carol or Donna might develop the same abilities that you have, the genius IQ and sporting skills especially, as your TK didn't develop until later and I'd rather not discuss that much anyway. We shouldn't have forgotten to do things to confirm we believed the genetic theory! Not only would it keep reminding your mom why you and Carol are having sex together - Donna too, to a lesser extent - but it'll show her that you think genetics is the real reason. If we do nothing then the parents are eventually going to realize that we don't believe it's genes, and that could mess things up very badly, especially as your parents aren't going to react well to being deceived about your justification for having sex with their 13-year old daughter." "Ouch! Yeah, put like that it'd be a real good idea to keep that theory alive. How do you suggest?" "Exactly how old were you when it started happening to you, to the nearest month?" "Umm, November 2003, so I was fourteen and a week or two." "Carol will be that age in three months. We should definitely be expecting her to show some abilities, especially because girls mature faster than boys. Girls that age are a year or so ahead of boys, so she could be overdue. You skipped forward a grade in January 2004 didn't you? Just one or two months after whatever it was happened?" #4: #1: #4: I confirmed when I'd skipped 8th grade, "Yes, that's right, about one and a half months after." "Which doesn't compensate for girls being about a year ahead of boys. All the parents are probably expecting Carol to change any day now, so we definitely need to show them that we're taking this seriously right now. What I want are a couple of things that Carol can do frequently - say once a week - to test herself for your abilities. One mental test, one physical test. I was thinking about having her do an IQ test every week, but we don't want them to be difficult or time consuming. You know which of your skills your parents learned about first, so we should choose quick and easy tests that match their knowledge, but not so 'quick and easy' that they don't notice Carol doing them. They have to be noticeable, as that's the whole point. Do you have any ideas what the tests should be?" #1: #2: We thought through our discoveries in chronological order, dismissing most of them but suggesting a few. Julia and I decided Carol's tests would be juggling and reading two books at the same time. They weren't perfectly acceptable according to Julia's criteria, but Julia fixed that by changing her criteria. I wasn't going to point out that I only got really good at both those skills when I got to four minds, but I did say, "I don't think my parents have actually ever seen me juggling since I got good at it. Mom has seen me read two books, but only a couple of weeks ago though." "That doesn't matter. They're both believably consistent with your superb physical and mental skills, and you can juggle for your parents any time you like. The important thing is that Carol can frequently walk around your home trying to juggle, to show your parents that she takes testing herself seriously. It's such an unusual activity that every time they see it they'll be reminded what it's for. We should get her to walk around doing it tonight, and when she's asked about it, say, 'Oh this. I've been doing this as a way of testing to see whether I've got Mark's gene and it's turned on yet. Mark said it was one of the first things he discovered about his physical skills, so it's a good test for me. He also suggested seeing if my mind can follow two books at the same time, which I've tried but can't do either. I'm going to keep trying though because Mark and Julia have explained how important it is to find out as soon as possible, so we can all plan what to do about it.' -- "If she talks like that it'll show your parents that we're serious and have the whole thing under control already. Carol can also occasionally ask your mom or dad to look at her eyeballs while they move two fingertips around on either side of her head. That'll also remind them about the genetic theory." Julia called Carol, and started relaying it all to her. Not long into that conversation Robert knocked, "The computers are set up, Mark. Can you please come and test them out, to make sure they'll do what you want?" I raced him back to the study! I was excited. I wasn't sure why, but that didn't matter, I just wanted to see the new set up going. When I got to the study, I was stunned - literally stunned - my footsteps faltered and I stood there with my mouth open. I managed to use it to say, "Wow!" The side-by-side 30" screens looked incredibly impressive. Robert and Logan (the computer guy) laughed good-naturedly. Robert agreed, "Yeah, they're impressive all right. I'm as envious as hell, of your computer setup AND your sex-life, haha." Logan looked at Robert with curiosity. Robert answered the unspoken question, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you, even though you can see what he looks like." (I was still in my school clothes, and you know what that means.) Logan said, "Can you do whatever it is that you do that needs this setup, so I can see that everything works the way you want?" That I could; I was even looking forward to it. I didn't want him to see my eyeballs moving independently, but he would be standing far enough behind me that I was safe from that, and I didn't need to do it anyway. All I needed to do was fire up two lectures and scroll up and down in them. The old computer had the link saved as a bookmark in the browser, but I had to manually type it into the new computer's browser. Logan saw me doing that, and offered, "I've got a little program at work that copies clipboards across a network. Do you want me to send it to you so you don't have to retype like that?" "You mean I can copy on one computer, and paste the stuff on the other?" "Yeah, except you have to hit a key between the copy and the paste to tell the software to transfer the clipboard, and to where. I'll have to talk you through setting it up, because it's only a little hack program that I threw together myself. You need to tell it the names of all the computers on the network, install it on each machine and put it in the Startup folder. Then I'll have to tell you how to use it. It's very simple so it won't take long." About halfway through that list I lost interest. It may not take him long, but it sounded like it would me. Retyping the occasional web address, or whatever, wasn't worth the bother of getting all technical. I waited for him to finish, then said, "I don't need it, thanks. I'll hardly ever need to use it, especially now that I've saved the new address." I created my first bookmark on the new machine. It wouldn't be the only one, as every course had it's own address, but having one in there now meant that every new course was only a couple of clicks away, easily avoiding the fearful-sounding technical stuff he'd said. I opened a different lecture on each screen, and was amazed at how much more I could read. I could see the physical size of the screens, of course, so knew how big they were, but having the lectures themselves displayed was making it more real for me. I grabbed a mouse in each hand, and scrolled up and down them, occasionally pausing to enjoy looking at all the text. I remembered Robert said that the screens were two and half times taller than my old one, and that made a HUGE difference. It sounds silly, but two and half times taller seemed more like four times better. I wondered if I'd underestimated the improvement I'd get in my studying speed. I played around for a couple of minutes, then leaned back and said to Logan, "They're perfect, thanks. Even better than I imagined. I'm definitely going to enjoy working this way." Logan looked puzzled, "That's it? That's all you do, have two lectures open and read them at the same time?" I didn't want to say too much about the eyeball thing, but I could say, "Yeah. I work quite strangely, and I need to go back and forth between them, and scroll them up and down independently, sometimes even at the same time." "Okay, I'll accept that. I can't say I understand it, but if that's what you want then that's fine. But why did you need two computers? Why not just have two panels running off one computer? It'd be cheaper and easier for you too, because there'd only be one computer to manage." "Umm. I thought you couldn't plug two mouses into one computer? I want to be able to scroll both lectures at the same time, so one mouse for each, right?" "Two mice on one computer wouldn't work, but scrolling two documents independently is trivially easy. Use the mouse for one document and the keyboard for the other." I was a bit lost now, and didn't know how to answer. Robert had been following though, and he responded with what I remembered was the key point, "I realize PageUp and PageDown work, for example, but only in the active window, which will be the same window as the mouse controls. Mark needs to have the two windows both scrolling at the same time, but only one of them can be active." "Sure, under the operating system, but it'd be very easy to write a bit of code that used the keyboard to control the inactive window, or maybe the keyboard always had the left window and the mouse always had the right. Something like that. You'd have a hotkey to toggle that software between on or off so you could easily do normal things. It could also automatically inactivate itself when there was only one lecture open, or if one of them was minimized. I'd have to learn more about how you work to be able to write something that worked seamlessly, but it probably wouldn't take me more than an hour." I guiltily said, "Oh. Umm, what do we do now then?" Oh boy. I didn't feel too good anymore, OSU had spent a great deal of unnecessary money on me. Logan waved dismissively, "Don't worry about it. I was just making conversation really. I was just surprised what you wanted was so simple." "Umm, don't you want to take one of the computers back? They're worth quite a lot of money." "Pffft! It'd only save one box, as you'd still need both panels and graphics cards. No one cares about one box! It's not worth the bother of changing everything around now that it's installed. It's ESPECIALLY not worth the pain in the ass it'd be to transfer the software packages and their licenses. Just remember the software utility idea if you want to work on even more lectures at the same time. It'd be more fun just to add new panels to what's already here. Setting up a whole new system, installing the software, etc., is boring because I do so much of that already. I'd much prefer to write the program for you. That's a hobby of mine, and more challenging." I understood almost nothing about how or why my abilities worked, but what little I did know (or at least suspect) was that the independent eyeball thing was because of increased physical coordination. As I was pretty damned confident that I was never going to be growing any more eyeballs, I told him, "It's a big relief that you're not upset about the expense, and you don't have to worry about my wanting any more screens. I'm sure that's NEVER going to happen! This is as much as I'll ever need. I am very happy with it. Thanks very much, Logan." "Good. In that case I'll be going. Here's my card if you need to contact me for any reason. All your new manuals are on the shelf with the earlier ones." Logan indicated the shelves above what had been Carol's and my computer desk, and I saw there were now a lot more boxes and books on it. "If there's nothing else, I'll leave you to it?" Julia came in just after Robert walked out with Logan, and I had the pleasure of pointing out my new system to her, in case she'd missed noticing that half my wall was now occupied by two gigantic screens (that's an exaggeration, but it seemed that way). Julia was VERY impressed. I was amused by her saying, "This looks very impressive. I'll have to show it to your girls from now on." I sheepishly confessed that OSU hadn't had to buy a second computer. When I explained what Logan had said, Julia seemed unconcerned. When I mentioned that Logan wasn't either, Julia lost all interest, saying, "I look forward to watching you working on it when I get up tomorrow morning. Ava will be amazed too, because she'll be on that bed." I'd forgotten about that. My good mood was killed by what I had to inflict on Ava soon. -- Julia carried straight on, "Carol tells me that she's terrible at juggling, so she'll have no trouble convincing your parents that your genes haven't expressed themselves in her yet, haha. She'll be juggling badly as she walks to dinner tonight, so that'll get that message across. It's very easy to motivate her when being your wife is at stake, haha." Julia was chuckling away. I suspect her good mood was due to all the plotting that she'd been doing recently. I finally got a chance to bring up the topic I'd been saving, I said, "I've been meaning to talk with you about the revenge gropings. I think that if we're serious about doing those, then we should do one soon, or if we aren't going to do any, can we let all the girls know that we're not going to. They're all scared of me. Not highly scared, but enough to be worrying. We should get the issue taken care of rather than left hanging over their heads the way it is. Or maybe 'over their genitals' would be more appropriate. What do you think?" I wasn't overly concerned about the issue because the 'victims' were only nervous rather than terrified, but I didn't feel comfortable whenever any of them looked at me worriedly, so if we weren't going to do it - which would be my preference - then I wanted them to know so they could relax. Julia said, "Before we discuss that, there are a few issues about the genetic theory we should clear up first: What do you want to tell your sisters - either or both of them - about the chance of their getting the same abilities as you? Do you want Donna to start doing the genetic tests that Carol is? And do you want to tell Donna about your maybe having babies with her? As I understand it, she doesn't know about that possibility yet, right? Some of those questions you can easily put off answering, but the reason I mention them is that if you've got them doing juggling and eyeball tests, then they might get excited about the chance. On the other hand, if you tell them there's no chance, they might accidentally let your parents find that out, even just by indirect means." We tossed it around for a while, and agreed the following: I'd get both girls to do the 'genetic tests', with Donna doing them less often if she wanted, because she was still so much younger than I'd been. I'd even ask Mom to periodically do the two-fingered eyeball test on both girls, to keep Mom thinking about it. We'd tell the girls that they MIGHT develop the same abilities. We couldn't provide any facts or reasons, but we'd try to give them the impression that the chance was so low - say 5 or 10% - so they shouldn't get too excited about it. A chance in that area was high enough to justify my having babies with the girls, given that my babies could immeasurably improve the future of the human race. That would justify some illicit boinking even if the chance was well below 1%. We would tell Donna now that, "One day, YEARS from now, it MIGHT be very important for you to have babies with me. If that happens, we can think about your joining my marriage, or use artificially insemination, or maybe other options. There's no need to decide for several years yet, so don't bother thinking about it or getting excited." Hopefully that'd keep Donna from charging off in a troublesome or upsetting direction. I would also privately tell Mom and Dad that I felt it was critically important that every child I had be brought up in a loving family environment. That was what I wanted anyway, but we would stress its critical importance given how powerful the children might be, especially as they could theoretically be even more powerful than me. Someone with that much power had to be raised well, otherwise who knows how much evil could be done. Because of that, I was totally against artificial insemination. I had to be there as the father, because only I understood my abilities, and I wanted the real mother to be a real mother right from the conception. It was a lot of crap, but I was very determined to justify my continuing to love and make love to Carol. Those decisions didn't take us long to work out, but even though it was a fairly short discussion, it did throw up one thought neither of us had realized before: would the genetic theory motivate Mom and Dad into having more babies? Stupidly, neither Julia nor I had thought of that freaky possibility before, but it was a safe bet that at least one of the four parents had thought of it, which meant they all knew of it by now. For all we knew, Mom and Dad might already be trying. Possibly Mom might already be pregnant, which was a very weird thought, especially as it would've been for a totally spurious reason: Mom would have gotten pregnant because I wanted to have sex with Carol! The problem was that we didn't know what to do about this idea. Should we mention it to the parents or not? In the unlikely event that they hadn't thought of it already, we'd be giving them the idea. Mom was 35 this year, which Julia insisted wasn't too old to have a child, although the idea of Mom having a new baby thirteen years after Donna seemed bizarre to me. It'd certainly stop Donna being thought of as the baby of the family! If the roulette idea worked, it'd guarantee Mom and Dad could afford another child. Mom and Dad had struggled during my childhood, so I was very conscious that raising kids cost quite a lot of money. Happily, even if roulette didn't work, I was sure I could eventually find something else that did. It might be slower and not worth as many millions, but it didn't take millions to bring up a child, not unless they grow into teenage girls who've got no self-control when it comes to clothes shopping. Because of the possibility that the genetic trait might be on the Y-chromosome, Mom and Dad should try to have at least one more son, so goodness knows how many new siblings I might end up with! Julia and I decided not to mention this idea to anyone. We'd say nothing, at least until we had the roulette money, and then we'd think about it again, and probably again decide to keep quiet. We'd do no more than keep our eyes and ears open, to see if we could find out whether they were aware of the idea, not that we could do anything about it, because all the justifications for my having babies with Carol applied equally to them. The only ways to stop them would be to tell them it wasn't genetic (no way!), or to prove that the mutation was in me only, which would be extremely difficult to prove. The mutation-in-me hypothesis was our best guess of what the parents were thinking. If Carol or Donna developed my abilities, that'd prove the mutation was in either Mom or Dad, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if Prof and Vanessa started begging Mom and Dad to pop out some more kids. Hopefully the parents were waiting to see if that happened first, which - if they were that conscious of the possibility - made it even more important for us to show them that we took the genetic hypothesis seriously by testing Carol and Donna periodically, because the parents sure as heck would be hyper-conscious of that issue! I had just re-raised the revenge gropings issue again when Prof came in. Naturally I had to demonstrate the new system to him, and tell him how pleased I was with it. I also had to confess the extra box mistake. Prof wasn't fussed about it either, saying, "Robert's already told me about it. It would've been better if we'd gotten it right at the beginning, but the amount is trivial and it's not worth all the paperwork and the technician's time to sort it out. Don't worry, especially because it wasn't your mistake but Robert's. He's not worried, so neither should you be." I was rapidly taking Prof's advice not to worry. Certainly no one else was. Feeling better about it, I joked, "It's worth remembering Logan's software suggestion though, in case I wake up one morning with more eyeballs." Prof chuckled at that. Prof had been carrying some textbooks, which he put down now, saying, "These are for your two new courses. All the details you need to know are on a page Maureen has put inside the front cover of each book. All the lectures are online, just like the others, so you can start whenever you want. I'd suggest having a quick look at each to make sure there's no obvious problem, then put them to one side until you've finished the first two. Then do Calc 252 first, and after that the Physics course." (One of the first year's core Math courses is a Physics course. Don't ask me why. Physics is my second favorite topic, so I don't mind.) "Great. Thanks. Umm, remember that I have to be able to divide the lectures into independent chunks, so I can study twice as fast. How can I..." "Already done. I got the lecturers to indicate that. It's on the information sheet in the front of each book." Prof opened the cover of the top book, and there it clearly was - blocks of lecture numbers that were independent/dependent. A few seconds perusal showed me that they weren't perfectly separated for what I wanted (there was too much interdependence for that), but enough to see that I should be able to work on two screens most of the time. If I hit a dependency problem my blocked pair of minds could always do the other course for a while, or jump to a whole new block, until the other pair caught up to the knowledge that I needed. "This looks like it'll tell me exactly what I need, thanks." "Why you needed that information is one of the few things about your abilities that I understand, so it was easy for me to describe to your lecturers what I needed from them. I didn't tell them exactly why, just something to do with the way you allocate your study time, which is true. Simultaneous time, in this case. Any more questions? No, okay. Dinner's in about five minutes. See you then." After Prof left, I said, "Things happen fast around here, don't they. To think that I had year after year at my home where everything seemed boringly the same. Now things are happening all over the place. You Williamses are amazing. Don't you ever get tired, and want to take a year or two off? Haha." Julia laughed, "Don't blame us! This is ALL because of you. I'm sure that it'd be..." Julia paused for a second, then resumed, "I was going to say 'it'd be the same if you were at your house all the time, ' but I realized that's not true. What's different here is that my family has skills and connections in the areas you need now, and Mom and Dad are used to working in teams. They're working on your team now, and getting things done for you. So more is getting done far faster than you're used to. This is a perfect example of what I've been telling you about why you'll need to be a good leader in the future. You need to have a team of people working for you, so you can get as much done as possible. You would have wasted hours - probably days - if you'd had to do all your own enrollments, textbook buying, getting the lecturers to divide up independent chunks the way you wanted, etc. With a team, you tell Dad, Dad tells his secretary, and it's all done by people who know the systems. It takes them a fraction of the time it would've taken you, and it takes you no time at all. Remember this the next time you need to remember why you need to learn to become a leader." "Yeah, you got me on that. It's a good example. I've got that lesson now. Speaking of leadership, I am reading through the leadership books you gave me when I get chances. They're written in fairly clear English, but a lot of it is foreign to my normal way of thinking. I'm understanding some of it, but there's a big difference between understanding something and putting it into practice, especially because most of their examples are business ones." "The more you understand, the more likely it is you'll recognize a situation you can use something. I think gaining confidence to manage people is your biggest problem to overcome, and you're making great strides with that. It's amazing how fast you've adapted to participating in conversations." "Changing the subject slightly, not that it's important, but there's one thing that's not happening fast. I'd like to know what's happening about the revenge gropings? I feel uncomfortable because those girls are uncomfortable about me. What are we going to do about them, because the status quo isn't ideal?" Julia said, "Walk me back to the bedroom and we'll take care of it." "Okay, I'll just shut the computers down." "Why? Just leave them on. Didn't Robert say that was okay?" Julia was walking out, so apparently that issue was resolved. It felt weird to me though. I was brought up to be very frugal with anything that cost money, two computers' worth of electricity in this case. Julia was out of sight by now, so I hurried after her. In the bedroom Julia picked up her cellphone, looked up a number, and dialed it. "Hi Savannah, Julia here. I've only got a minute because dinner's on the table. I'm calling to let you know that Mark will be groping you tomorrow. He decided that just a few seconds ago. Unless you want to opt out, make sure you're wearing something that's easy for him to get his hand into. Jeans would be a bad idea, as he'd have to unbutton them and pull them down to get at you, and that'd be even more embarrassing for you. Do you have any questions?" "Whenever Mark wants. Just sometime during the day." "However he wants: tits, pussy, ass. Any one of them or all three of them. That's up to him. You had..." "What's that? Sure, all three. You used both your hands on him, so he can use both of his on you. You had no hesitation grabbing his genitals so it's fair that he can grab whatever he wants of yours. The way I think about it, tits and asses are less embarrassing to you than his playing with your pussy, so if he spends any time on those then you're gaining. You had no hesitation, compunction or politeness about going for his body in any way you wanted with your hands, so he'll treat you the same way." "Yes, it quite likely will be embarrassing. That seems fair. I'd take it like a man if I was you, haha. If you try to hide or delay it, he'll probably make it far more embarrassing for you than he normally would. You can opt out, of course, just by sending me a text message saying so, or even by telling Mark verbally at the time. Unlike you, Mark and I are very concerned about treating people fairly. If you do opt out you'll never be invited out with Mark ever again, because we don't like people who avoid taking responsibility for their actions. That'd be a big pity, because all three of us think you're very sexy, especially Mark. But if you want to give up your chance of having a fantastic life with him to save yourself a few seconds of embarrassment, then that's your choice." "Mark, Carol and I. Sure, we all think you're sexy. Mark thinks you're very sexy." "I'm not at all surprised he hasn't done anything about it. I haven't discussed it with him, but I'm sure I can guess the reason. It's because Mark is so incredibly un-arrogant. He could be arrogant about his sporting prowess, for example. He could lord it all around school because he beat national-level competitors in that 10k race. There were national magazines who wanted to do pictorial stories about him, but he turned them down. He could be arrogant about his genius. He's going to be six years ahead of normal people by the time he graduates next year. Until I started telling people, none of you had any idea he was even doing any college courses, let alone only a year away from completing his first degree, that's how un-arrogant he was about it. One day I must show you the computer system OSU has given Mark, it's incredibly impressive. Lastly, don't forget how arrogant he could be about his sexual prowess. You've heard every lucky girl he's bedded gush over how incredible he is, and you saw him give Alexis and Lily exactly what they wanted on Sunday, especially Alexis, haha. Alexis has been unashamedly wanting another session with him ever since. Can you imagine how arrogant any other teenage guy would be if they were as good at sex as Mark is? They'd be insufferable! Mark has more to be arrogant about than any person you'll ever meet in your entire life, but he shows no arrogance whatsoever. So, obviously, he doesn't like arrogance. -- "I'm fairly sure he hasn't shown any interest in doing any more with you because he thinks you're a little full of yourself, especially about your sexiness. You're tall and sexy, and you know it. You come across as believing boys should chase after you - which many of them do, of course - just not Mark, because it turns him off. Mark much prefers totally open and honest people, like Alexis. She's not as pretty as you, and much rougher, but she doesn't have an ounce of arrogance. She's totally up-front and honest about wanting more good times with Mark. She wants him, so she tells him that. She couldn't make it any simpler. You should think about that, because Alexis' attitude is fully honest, and Mark values that a lot. He certainly values it far more than physical beauty, especially because he can find any number of girls much better looking than you, especially at college, but finding un-arrogant, open, honest girls is far harder. -- "You're used to thinking you have power over boys because of your sexiness. But you have zero power over Mark. And your small but constant arrogance about it is having a negative effect on him. By the way, I'm sure the main reason Mark chose to grope you first was because he thinks it'll be good for you to be brought down a peg or two. Just like he was willing to spend a lot of time helping Chloe, he's probably trying to help you. He's not being cruel, because he's never cruel. You've seen him in class all year, and I'm sure you've never seen him be mean to anyone. He's choosing you first because he honestly thinks you need it. -- "Anyway, my dinner will be getting cold. I suggest you think about what sort of boyfriends you want in your life, Savannah: those that can't see past your sexiness and are willing to belittle themselves to please you; or real men who value honesty and similar virtues. I've got to go now. See you tomorrow, bye." Julia hung up. "Right, that was easy. Let's go have dinner." "Ahh, was that really easy? It sounded like you put a great deal of effort into it." "Nah, none at all. EVERY girl should have her ego reduced and be subservient to you, because you're better than all of them and it'd be chaos if they started getting you to run around after them. I give that speech to every girl who gets near you: Ava, Chloe and even Carol, who certainly didn't need it. All I do is customize it a little each time, which is easy. The only clever thing I did in that speech was use Alexis as an example of someone you prefer to Savannah. Savannah looks down her nose at Alexis, so I tweaked that nose nicely, haha." It was true that Savannah thought she was superior to Alexis. Most girls thought they were superior to Alexis, and - truth be told - probably were. Savannah shows it more than most, though. But as Julia pointed out, when it comes to being honest about what they want, most girls probably aren't superior to Alexis. Alexis didn't wrap all sorts of ego or power bullshit around sex, the way virtually every other girl does, especially the good looking ones. I made a mental note to show Alexis some appreciation, as I'm firmly of the opinion that if girls want sex, they should be thanked for making it obvious and easy. "Ahh, I am hungry, but I haven't got a clue how I should grope Savannah. How should I do it, where, when? Important things like that." "I'll tell you during dinner." #1: ------- Part 7: Our Growing Relationships with Ava and Others ------- Chapter 125: Planning for Ava's Thrashing Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) Fortunately it was just the immediate family at dinner. As we walked in, the last to arrive, Robert said, "Couldn't stop playing with your new toy, huh?" I hadn't had a chance to play with it at all, and was worried about my answer seeming unappreciative of the work Robert had done getting it for me. I was thinking about how best to politely answer his question when Julia beat me to it, "Mark hasn't had time to use it yet. We've been busy discussing how he's going to be sexually and publicly groping a dozen girls at school." As she knew she would be, Julia was asked to explain. She described the "revenge gropings" at reasonable length to her family, their reactions making it clear that Vanessa already knew about them. Andrew asked, "Why do you want to do them? I can't see a purpose." Julia answered, "I had no strong purpose in mind. It just seemed to me that they're a lesson to the girls that they shouldn't take liberties with Mark, whether sexual or in any other way, and they should be thoughtfully respectful of him. Most guys would love to have their cocks rubbed like that, so I'm making Mark seem more mature and exceptional by making an issue out of it. I thought it might be useful in some as yet unknown ways. It's extremely flexible, so we can do whatever we want with it. We could explain our letting the whole thing drop, or we could do a few small gropes in very quiet corners that no one else got to see, or maybe only seen by girls who were at the party, or we could do it more publicly. All of those could be done in ways I could spin to make Mark look good. -- "We're doing it at lunch tomorrow to a girl called Savannah. She's tall, beautiful and quite full of herself. She's also a very sexual girl and is hot for Mark. She's especially hot for Mark and Carol together, which she won't see happen for months at least, but if we ever open that up we can use the pressure from girls like Savannah as the excuse for how it happened. We'll be having lunch with something like forty girls tomorrow, mostly from our grade but there'll be some 11th grade girls coming too." That was news to me, but things being news to me isn't news to me anymore, so I said nothing. -- "We're already intending to talk about Sunday's party at lunch tomorrow anyway, and now I'll add an explanation of how most of the girls took immoral liberties with Mark, not a single one of them asking his permission even though Mark and I repeatedly asked every single girl whether or not they wanted to participate in every single activity we started. Then I'll get Savannah to stand up and offer herself to be groped. I'll make sure it's very clear that it's of her own freewill, so no one can complain about it afterward. Whether Savannah submits herself to it or opts out, either way I can make Mark look good." Julia had already explained opting out to her family. It was the very first thing she mentioned once the "revenge gropings" concept was clear. There was a little more discussion on the topic, but of no particular consequence. Mainly warnings about things that Julia was well aware of and had the solutions for already. Not to grope a girl in private, for example, unless there were several witnesses to her prior consent, so she couldn't complain about it afterward. I relaxed somewhat when the topic came to an end, as it was an extremely weird topic, and no one in this family had the least hesitation in mentioning anatomical details, using words I was not used to hearing at the dinner table. Julia said, "There was one thing that happened today that I'm particularly proud of." Whereupon she launched into the story of Chloe's toplessness in the girls' bathroom, and what that whole thing was all about. That was a much longer conversation, especially as Julia explained at length how we were doing it to help Chloe. She didn't forget to mention, "She's got the most incredibly large breasts. I understand some guys like that, haha." Julia was mostly looking at her brothers when she said that, and they happily indicated that preference applied to them. To my surprise Julia added, "Your birthdays are in three months, but you wouldn't mind if I gave you an early present by parading a naked Chloe in front of you, would you? She really has a spectacular pair." Both boys laughed, while I tried to get over the shock. Only seconds earlier Julia had been saying very nice things about improving the quality of Chloe's life, so the sudden lurch into parading Chloe around as a sex object, which she'd HATE, shocked me. Andrew said, "I think that's the least you can do for us, considering how many naked girls you let Dad see on Sunday, haha." "Believe me," insisted Julia, "seeing one Chloe is easily the equivalent of a room full of ordinary girls. On the other hand, I'll probably show her to Dad too, so he'll still be ahead of you." "That's not fair," mock-complained Robert. "It's not his birthday for ages." "Dad's getting so old I don't want to wait that long. Maybe by then he won't appreciate such sights." There was much resultant teasing of Prof, ably led by Vanessa and thoroughly enjoyed by Prof, who gave back as good as he got. It's hard for me to get used to this family's conversation and jokes. I thought Prof was too old to risk poking fun at his age, the way I sometimes did to my dad, but none of the Williamses hesitated to tease Prof. Or anyone else come to that, especially me. I had a more pressing concern though. As soon as everyone calmed down, I said, "Ahh, Julia. Surely you can't be serious about parading Chloe around naked so your family can see her. You're joking about that, right? It sure doesn't sound like the sort of thing you'd normally do." "I did it for Carol." "But that was for Carol's sexual excitement and so your mom could learn about her. Neither of those apply to Chloe, do they? She's not turned on the same way, is she?" Julia said, "I've got no idea what turns Chloe on. She's so inexperienced and repressed I doubt she's got much idea either. She's obviously heterosexual, but that's about all I can tell. I AM going to parade her around. I hadn't thought about it until just before I mentioned it, but it's obviously a good idea. It'll be good for her. That's the only reason I'd do it, as I'm sure everyone here understood." The whole family nodded, smiled, or otherwise indicated they'd understood that. I said, "Oh. Sorry. I didn't think of that. I should have. But, umm, how will it help her?" "She needs to find out that you aren't the only boy she can trust. We don't want her recovery to be totally dependent on you, in case you and Chloe don't last long together. It'd be good for her not to fall back in to her old behavior when you break up with her." Vanessa added, "You also don't want Chloe to be with Mark because she's helplessly dependent on him and unable to be happy anywhere else. She won't be in your life more than a few months so creating a dependency would be a very bad thing to do. I'd be upset with you if you didn't do everything you could to free her from those chains as quickly as possible. If doing so risks giving my poor old husband a heart attack, then that's a risk we're just going to have to take." Which started the teasing all over again, some of which was hard for me to take, like Prof's, "I don't think you have to worry about my health. Didn't you comment on my vigor on Sunday night, after my seeing those naked girls? I'm more worried about wearing you out, dear. You'd better get advance notice from Julia, so you can rest up before Chloe gets my heart pumping. If she's as sexy as Julia says, you'll need all the rest you can get." Prof and Vanessa are OLD! - and they look it too - so jokes about their having sex is ... Well, you know what it is. I'd rather not think about it, that's for sure. Fortunately it wasn't so bad as to spoil my appetite, so I concentrated very hard on taking care of that, while the others kept joking around, unfortunately on the same theme. I was happy when a change of subject occurred to me. As soon as I could decently pretend I thought they'd finished, I interrupted with, "Prof, Mom settled with the school today, so our side of the money is okay now." "Yes, thanks. Your mom told us about it earlier. She's very happy to have that finished with." "Yeah, me too." #1: It wasn't a particularly good subject, but I was happy to grab at anything, "Julia, I was impressed by how well using the girls' bathroom worked out. No one tried to get in, and several girls must have tried. The girls outside did a very good job." Julia said, "They sure did. Especially as I'm sure they had their ears pressed up against the door the whole time, which must have made other girls curious." Oh yeah, I never thought of that. Now I was puzzled how they managed to keep the curious away. Julia continued, "I can tell you a funny story about using a bathroom for that meeting, if you like?" It was unlikely to involve sex between old people, so, "Sure. Please do tell. I like your funny stories." "I had the idea of your using a girls' bathroom for privacy after we had the first big lunch. That was Wednesday last week, if I remember correctly. The lunch with the fourteen girls that we chose the Liaisons from the next morning. Yeah, it was definitely last Wednesday, because remember when we went to have lunch with Carol's girls on Thursday I told you to start carrying condoms?" "Yes. I DO remember that. I've occasionally been wondering why, because you've never explained it. I carry one in my billfold now, by the way. You said to carry several, but it's hard enough as it is to get my billfold into the pockets of the impractical pants you make me wear. I could carry a lot more of them if you let me wear more practical pants." Julia cruelly riposted, "If you wore the pants you used to, you wouldn't need to carry any condoms at all." #3: #1: #4: #1: #4: #3: #4: #1: #4: #3: #1: Julia was still talking. I'd missed a bit - thinking about Chloe's fun bags will do that - but not too much, as my internal conversations had sped up over the months. " ... was thinking of your using the girls' bathrooms as a place to have lots of sex in..." #4: #1: " ... There were enough girls willing to help that we could get enough to block strangers. We've been too busy to use that idea for sex, but I remembered it when I needed somewhere private for Chloe. One of the reasons I haven't done anything about your having sex in a bathroom is because it's hardly a romantic location, to put it mildly. Probably the only girl who wouldn't mind would be Alexis, because you could incorporate it into your rough role-playing. -- "I had a better idea than a bathroom anyway, which was to get the Principal to allocate you your own room somewhere in the school. There must be a room somewhere which could be made available for you. We could give him some excuses about how you needed it for all your studies, college courses, etc. Get some extra Math books from college and spread them around. It wouldn't be hard to make it look like you worked hard in it. You'd install a comfortable sofa, and have your own key, and you could use it to play with as many girls as you want." I loved it! And I told her so, "That's BRILLIANT Julia. SO much better than in a bathroom! I think we have a good chance of being able to twist the Principal's arm enough for that..." Julia cut me off, "Don't get too excited. It's not a very good idea. It's not nearly secure enough. Far too many people have keys to the rooms in school, and it's most likely that if the Principal gave you a room, it would be in the office block. You'd not be able to have girls walk in and out of your room in the office building, especially how some of them would look when they walked out. It wouldn't work, but don't worry, because I had a better idea." "Goody!" "The problem was controlling access and being in a non-discreet location, so I thought that when you got all your money, we could give the Principal the same 'Mark needs a study' cover story, but this time to justify your parking a small mobile home somewhere on school grounds. You'd be the only one with a key, and it'd be somewhere out of sight of the administration. There are quite a few places where it could be parked so we could use it discreetly, especially if the door was facing away from any schoolrooms." "THAT idea I like! What a pity we don't have the money yet." "Don't get excited. It's not a very good idea either. It wouldn't be nearly soundproof enough, for one thing. I'm sure people would try to eavesdrop, like all the door guards did with Chloe. It'd be far too accessible, so they could listen in, and could create trouble if they recorded the sounds on their phone. But don't worry, I had a better idea." "Oh. Okay, what?" "This is a little slower and still needs you to have money. We give the Principal the same line, and you pay to have your own study built for you. It'd be built on school grounds over summer, and it would be exclusively yours all next year. The deal would be that you'd donate it to the school after you left, so the Principal would probably be overjoyed at that. You could build it soundproof, and even make it a two-level building, with the bedroom - not that we'd call it that - on the top floor. You could have a good security system installed so no one could sneak up on you. You could have outside video cameras, a door at the base of the stairwell that only you could open once you'd gone upstairs, and other measures like that." "THAT is brilliant! THIS time I like the idea a lot. It'd be expensive, but not too much as it'd just be a small building. The money should be replaceable anyway. We could get something really perfect for what we want. We could have a little kitchen, TV, fridge, a good computer. Even a pull-out sofa. Wow! How cool." Julia helpfully suggested, "Don't get excited. It's not a very good idea either. Haha, I like the look on your face. This is fun." #1: Julia explained, "I realized there were still several problems. There's bound to be all sorts of horrible paperwork involved in around constructing a building on school grounds. The red tape would probably take months to organize, even before construction could start. Plus the school would have to have keys and would be responsible for what went on inside it, a responsibility they'd doubtless take seriously. We couldn't get it built in time, and even then we wouldn't be nearly as free to use it as you'd think. But don't worry, I had a better idea, haha." "{Groan}. You're enjoying this, aren't you?" "I told you it was a funny story." "Funny for you, rather than me, I'm starting to suspect." "Oh," said Julia innocently, "did I forget to mention that, haha. But don't worry, because there's only one more idea. Do you want to hear it?" "I'm thinking of becoming a monk, because having a sex-life isn't worth all the teasing I get! Are you sure there's only one more idea?" "I may think of a better one tomorrow, in which case I'll be sure to tell you, haha. But here's my current best idea: when you get your money, buy one of the houses next to the school. You could even put a gate between your place and the school so you and other people could get back and forth easily. It's not on school grounds, so it's none of their business and you'd avoid all the school bureaucracy. They might be concerned about what goes on inside it, but I guess the Principal would be happy just to keep his eyes shut until you graduate. If you needed to, you could even tell him that you'd think about donating it to the school after you graduate, provided the school was cooperative with your needs. That should keep his eyes shut. Ideally, though, you'd simply sell the house afterward, so it wouldn't end up costing you much." "Is it safe for me to like that idea, or are you going to ambush me again?" "Haha, it's safe. I'll even tell you that I like it, if that makes it easier for you." "In that case, I like it too. We'd have a free hand to do whatever we wanted to the place, it wouldn't take long to get ready once we'd bought it, so it would well be available all next school year, if the money comes through in time. We could build a high wall all around it, and have a strong gate that only you, Carol and I controlled. I like it." Andrew exclaimed, "SURELY you're just winding us up, aren't you? You wouldn't really go to all the trouble and expense of buying a house just to have sex? It's not as if Mark's not getting plenty of that already." #4: #1: #3: Julia answered Andrew, "Of course it's not for sex. That'd be silly..." "IT..." I shut up! I had started exclaiming, "IT'S NOT!" but there's an expression about shutting up to avoid removing all doubt that you're a fool. Now would be an excellent time to follow its advice. #4: #1: " ... Sure there'll be plenty of sex... ," #1, #3, #4: " ... but the raison d'être is to provide a private location where Mark can do things like what we did with Chloe today. Things which are intense social interactions. The sort of activities that Mark can learn the most from. With such a place Mark will have a far more interesting and educational year than he would without it, especially because the other school kids will know that Mark bought the house. A display of casual wealth like that will get their attention and lead to all sorts of educational experiences. Not all pleasant, as there's bound to be envy and other negative reactions, but they'll be part of its educational value." #4: Vanessa said, "Interesting idea. It gives Mark a great degree of freedom for a 16-year old, which means a great deal of responsibility too. There could be a medical emergency, there'd be pressure on him to allow it to be used for wild parties, what about if a girl ran away from home and wanted to live there but pleaded for secrecy because she was being abused? It definitely has some merits. We'll give it some thought. There's no hurry, obviously." Julia agreed, "No, none at all. We can't act until we have the money, and maybe I'll have yet another idea tomorrow. The sequence that I teased Mark with is the sequence that I went through, and there's no guarantee that it's finished. I only mentioned it now because Mark talked about how well the bathroom worked out for his meeting with Chloe. Obviously having a neighboring house would have been far better than talking in a bathroom. Much more pleasant and relaxed, easier to organize, and far fewer eavesdroppers for starters." Everyone agreed that almost anything would be better than a bathroom. Julia said, "I've got a last quick point before we finish. Two girls are coming here tonight. A girl called Katelin will be here about 8:30. She's the girl who guessed closest to Mark's bowling score and wanted a night with Mark as her prize. She may have shown highly optimistic judgment on her bowling score guess, but I have to admire her choice of prize. I might be biased though, haha. Mark's just going to screw her in his usual way. Less usual is Ava. Ava's coming at 7:30. We're going to strip her, lie her on the spare bed in our study, and Mark's going to thrash her with a belt." Vanessa and Prof didn't react, but The Boys were certainly surprised. "Yeah, I know," said Julia to her brother's reactions. "It's unusual, and it's especially difficult for Mark because he's a very caring wimp, so he might chicken out. That's where either of you come in. If Mark chickens out and it doesn't get done properly, it'll ruin the significance of the event. I'd like to be able to come and get one of you to finish thrashing her?" Very sensibly, both Boys showed every intention of never volunteering. Vanessa told them, "I've talked to Julia about this. Julia says this is mainly Ava's way of showing she's committed to Mark. It's also because she's messed up a few times, and she thinks she needs to do this to wipe the slate clean. I'd prefer to find another way, but from what Julia tells me, this has a lot of significance for Ava. In her mind it's got a good chance of having the desired effect. I'll have a good talk with her when she arrives, and I'll call it off if I feel that's best, but I guess it'll go ahead. I can't imagine Julia planning to do this unless she's sure it's a good idea, and it is only pain after all, so it'll fade quickly. If it does go ahead, it's most likely that I'll be controlling the severity and duration. Julia is right that stopping partway is a poor result. It'd be best if Mark saw it through to the end. This is Ava's commitment to him, and he'd be devaluing it considerably if he chickened out. That'd be a selfish action..." #1: " ... If he does chicken out, I'll want one of you to finish the job. It'd be better to do that than leave it part-done. Not as good as Mark doing it himself, but still better. I doubt he will leave though, knowing that one of you two will step in. Is that agreed then?" -- The Boys didn't argue, so Vanessa carried right on. "Ava is trying hard. She's not smart, but she is trying, and there's a lot to be said for that. I could easily talk her out of this simply by pointing out that what she's offering to Mark - her showing him that she's willing to suffer considerable pain for him - is not something that he values. Quite the reverse in fact. I could tell her that she should go away and find something that Mark wants and offer that to him instead. The problem is that she may not find anything which has as much significance to her, and this is essentially her own lesson rather than a gift to Mark. Without my having a good alternative for her, I don't want to destroy her faith in this choice. -- "After this is over, I want all of you to be a careful how you to talk with Ava about this. If it comes up, simply praise her for it and say Mark values the strength of her commitment. It'd be sad for her to do this and later have a careless word eliminate its value for her. One last point: this is a one-time event because we won't allow her to do anything like this again. I'm sure I don't need to explain why. I'll make sure she understands that. Does anyone have any questions or comments?" The only comment I wanted to make was, "I don't want to do this," but that wasn't going to go over well so I said nothing, just like everyone else. It wasn't exactly the sort of conversation where everyone can't wait to participate. Fortunately dinner was virtually over with. Upstairs, back in her room, Julia said, "When I was listening to Mom I was trying to think of ways to make you more positive about what we're doing with Ava. Like pointing out that it'd only take a few minutes, compared with a benefit that could last for a long time. But then I realized that I'm not seeing this situation the same way you are. It seems much worse to you because you don't see the goodness in it." My surprised snort of derision at such a stupid statement was taken as agreement. Julia continued, "I don't have the language to explain it well, but from Ava's point of view - which is how it should be valued - she is doing a very generous, giving thing. If someone wrote you a very emotional letter, you wouldn't value the letter or the friend by the quality of the paper. It's the message the words create which is what's important. A wonderful message on cheap paper is of far greater value than a terrible message on high quality paper. You agree with that, don't you?" I recognized this situation, and knew exactly how this was going to go. Julia was going to ask me a series of questions which had very simple, obvious, inarguable answers; at the end of which I'd have agreed to a statement which was the direct opposite of what I believed. Julia had done this to me more than once, and - sigh - was about to do it again. I couldn't stop her without being stupidly petulant. To make matter worse, in the past she'd been proved to be correct. I was reluctant to start the process by answering her question, especially as I could see that this was a particularly short garden path that she was leading me down. It was obvious, so I got what little satisfaction I could by not following her step-by-step script (I WAS feeling petulant). I said, "You're going to tell me that her pain is just the paper, and the message is something beautiful?" "Exactly right. You're very smart." Ahh, flattery too. "Why do we want Ava in our group at all? What's her use?" That wasn't the question I expected! So much for me being "very smart." I answered, "Umm, I'm not sure. I wasn't expecting that question." "Think about it. I know you were very interested in Ava after reading her letter, so what was it about her letter that made you want her?" The first answer that popped into my head was, "The quality of the paper," but that was asking for trouble so I had to think about it properly. Thinking through the letter I said, "I remember that I was impressed by her having liked me for a long time, and that seemed to be an honest statement rather than pure flattery because she talked reasonably knowledgeably about my soccer games. She also thought intelligence was important although she wasn't smart herself. And she was extremely eager to be with me, even begging to be." Julia agreed, "Yes, that's what I remember too. Let me add an item to the list that wasn't from her letter: she's a great lover. She's a great deal of fun in bed, and we both know that, don't we?" "Yes, that's for sure. I'd forgotten to think about that, but it's certainly true. She's extremely good in bed. After you and Carol, easily the best I've had so far." "Thank you for that. I'll suggest one more item that I want you to agree to: Carol very much enjoys Ava. Both as a lover - the same way you and I enjoy her - and as an obedient sexual plaything. Carol very much enjoys Ava, and wants her back in our circle. Do you agree?" "Yes. Again I'd forgotten to think about that, even though Carol sent me a text about Ava earlier today." "Oh, what was that about?" "Carol had the idea that Ava should come to Donna's lunch, because that way we can all do a lot more sex stuff in front of the Ducklings without the risk of Carol and me overlapping when we touch you. With Carol and me at either end of the line there would be two people between us, and there wouldn't be any hint of incest." "That's an excellent idea, and good proof that Carol misses Ava and wants her back. It's also a good example of Ava being useful to us. I'm surprised you didn't tell me that Ava would be coming." "I don't know whether she will. I think the idea is excellent, and I texted Carol that it was, but that I had to think about it. There are a couple of big problems: I want to see what happens with Ava tonight first - Ava's very much up in the air until that's done. And it's going to be very hard to think of a justification for a 17-year old girl helping us get very sexy with a bunch of 12-year olds. From what Donna was saying, her lunch will be so sexy that Ava is probably going to be shocked. I don't know if I can find a reason to make her think it is okay for us to do those things, so it might be better if Ava doesn't come." Julia said, "That explanation makes it easier for me to convince you that the Ava situation is working out wonderfully." #1: Julia continued, "Let me summarize: First, from her letter Ava has looked up to you - even worshipped you - for months. She is begging to be yours, and is aware that she's not your equal. Second, from our experiences with her, all three of us think Ava is an exceptionally enjoyable lover, and want her. Especially Carol, who clearly misses her. Is that a fair summary?" "Of the good points, yes. It'd be totally accurate if you added that she's not very smart and is occasionally disobedient." "I'll agree she's not smart, but I disagree that she's disobedient." "But we're punishing her for it soon!" "That's largely the fault of my impatience," Julia confessed. "I sent her away Saturday morning not because she was disobedient, but because we had to take too long to explain why she should do every little thing we wanted her to do. She understood the tasks, but needed painstaking explanations to perform them. For example, it was painful getting her approval for my reading her letter. She's getting 'punished', as you called it, because of my impatience as much as any other reason. She did mess you around Saturday morning about running, but I deliberately set that up for her, knowing that she would. Labeling her 'disobedient' is unfair. At worst she was 'difficult to motivate'. -- "I deliberately manipulated her into having a mini-crisis with us, because I wanted to create a way of making her leap into action unquestionably in the future. Or at least, less questionably. I didn't expect her to offer - even insist on - what we'll be doing tonight. That was entirely her own idea. From our perspective, especially since it is mostly my fault, it's massively excessive. But from her perspective I think it is a stunningly impressive example of her feelings for you. It is also EXACTLY what we want. That may surprise you, but I'm referring to the message rather than the paper. The message is PERFECT. We want - even demand - subservient girls. Remember my phone call with Savannah just before dinner. Most of that was about reducing her ego. We don't have to do that with Ava anymore. The punishment part of tonight is just the paper. The message Ava is giving you tonight, in a way that is emotionally very powerful for her, is that she is crawling on her belly before you, offering herself to you. Mom called it her 'commitment', and Mom was much better at understanding than I realized because I didn't understand that until just now. -- "I have to tell you that I've only just worked all this out. I've had a feeling that this was a good thing, but I never thought it through so well. I explained the situation to Mom, and Mom agreed it was good, but Mom never explained to me why she thought it was good. Probably she thought I understood, but now I realize that I didn't. It was your absence of any good feeling about this made me try to explain it to you, and as a result gain much better understanding of it myself. Mom was right to call it Ava's commitment. Tonight is Ava showing the biggest commitment to you she can think of. She can't offer you her virginity because that's long gone. She can't offer herself to you in marriage because you're so far above her that she would be gaining far more than you, which is the wrong way around. The best idea she could think of is being thrashed. She's got very gentle parents who've never smacked her, so this is frightening for her. -- "Speaking of parents, there's probably undertones of her accepting that you are the parent and she is the child. That's why Mom made such a big deal that it has to be you that thrashes her, not Andrew or Robert. They could do it, and it would be better than nothing as she'd be showing she can take pain for you, but it's nowhere near as good as your doing it. It'd be like a wedding ceremony where the groom didn't turn up but the bride still said her vows to his stand-in. Her act would be meaningful, but nowhere near as effective as if he was there and they exchanged vows personally. -- "I'm starting to ramble, but you get the idea. Of course she's not marrying you, but she is showing you that she is very serious and committed. No one would take as much pain as she's insisting on without intending for it to be a long-term commitment. I'm very excited about this, because this is EXACTLY what I was hoping to eventually achieve with her! Remember that I was already hoping she could live with us in our mansion. The behavior she's promising tonight is exactly what I was dreaming of, only far earlier than I'd realized. Isn't it fantastic?" I had been unenthusiastically convinced by Julia's argument as it had unfolded, so for the last minute or so she'd mostly been excitedly talking to herself rather than to me, and she hadn't noticed that I was ready to tell her I was convinced I had to do it. Julia had finally paused. While I had the chance I said, "I'm convinced Julia. I was convinced a minute ago, but you were on such a roll I didn't want to interrupt. I agree..." Julia interrupted, "Do you see that you don't need to give Ava a reason at all for coming to the Ducklings lunch. You just tell her to, and tell her what you want her to do? She committing herself to you in a way that proves she thinks you're the boss. You and I won't need to keep giving her justifications for anything. I'm sure she'll ask sometimes, but we'll just need to remind her that we're her boss." "Now that you mention it, I see that. And I also get that Ava will be very useful to us in a lot of other situations, like in the tit flashing plan with Carol and Chloe. Let's get Ava to come at the same time as Carol. Don't give Ava any script or instructions beyond the phone call Chloe will hear. Ava doesn't need to say anything, but if she does, so much the better. When she hears Carol and me talking, she's sure to jump in with the right sort of comments, and they'll come across as being totally sincere because they will be. What do you think?" Julia smiled widely. "I love it! We'll have to tell Ava to wear the right sort of top, but she'll just think you want her sexually, which is an extremely believable assumption, haha. Let's wait until after Ava is thrashed to tell Carol, just to make sure. She can also pass on to Donna that Ava will be coming to her lunch." "Agreed. Back when you mentioned marriage, you gave me an idea. Given that Ava is seemingly - if your logic is correct, and I think it is - making a commitment to me, I think we could invent a little ceremony for her. Something very small, but to make it more powerful for her. Not a wedding of course. Something consistent with what she thinks is happening. I also want to do that so we can use it to check our logic. If we make the ceremony mention the things we think she is doing and accepting, and she looks puzzled and says, 'What the hell are you talking about?', then we'll know we've made a mistake. We should also tell your mom what we're doing. We haven't got much time, so why don't we go to your mom right now, and get her to help us work out the ceremony? That way we'll be saving time and checking to see if she agrees with our logic." Julia had grabbed my arm and was dragging me out the door while the last words were still exiting my mouth. Halfway to the staircase Julia had to stop to kiss me passionately for a few seconds, before grabbing my arm and hurrying me forward again. It would be fair to say that Julia was happy and excited. We found Vanessa with Prof in their study, both of them reading casino-oriented material on their respective computers, which was nice to see. Julia gushed her read on the Ava situation to her Mom; casino research being lower priority than Ava, for the moment. When Julia had finished explaining our read on the situation, Vanessa said, "Your opinion of the strength of her commitment is significantly stronger than I thought, but along the same lines as my conclusion. You could be right, or you could be guilty of wishful thinking. You do seem very excited about your theory, Julia?" "I am. We don't have time to get into why I'm so excited now, but I think it's extremely promising for the future." "You shouldn't forget that even if Ava has strong intentions now, teenagers aren't known for their steadfastness, so we don't know how long she'll last. Another issue is that you won't have a good understanding of Ava's commitment to Mark until you understand her motivations for it. It's one thing to know what is happening, but it's even more important to understand why. It can sometimes take quite a while to find out what motivates people, but you should try to. Even though you're obviously excited about her commitment, the why of it might not be acceptable to you, so your relationship with her could fall apart." "That's a good point. I have to admit that I don't know why. As far as I can tell, Ava was chronologically the first girl to be attracted to Mark. She seems to have fallen for him a few months ago, way back when he used to wear his old clothes! I don't know how she was able to spot him so early, especially because she doesn't strike me as being amazingly discerning. But shelving that issue for now, Mark had the idea of having a little ceremony for her. Nothing like our three-way wedding. He suggested a ceremony consistent with what Ava thinks she's doing, and he also suggested we explicitly state what we think she's offering, that way her reaction will serve as a double-check that we're interpreting her offer correctly." "Good ideas, especially checking your logic. That you and I agree on what's happening, even if not the degree of it, is not a good confirmation because you're my only source of information. If you made a mistake in what you observed, it will throw both of us off. I don't think you need much of a ceremony, but a small one would be good, especially if it's entirely centered on Mark and emphasizes her position under him. I suggest that rather than your stating what you think she's offering, you get her to tell you what it is. That's a much better proof of your logic than her going along with what you say, and it'll be more significant to her too. -- "It would be good to do the ceremony as soon as she arrives, because succeed or fail it'll change the content of the talk I'll have with her. I was expecting to need to have at least a phone conversation with her parents, and that may not be necessary or even a good idea now. I still need to be very sure that Ava's accepting her punishment voluntarily and isn't likely to regret it soon afterward. What you are doing is technically an assault, so we need to be careful. We can even make her ask for the assault as part of the ceremony, so it's clear to everyone that it's her request." The females had only just gotten down to deciding the details when Julia's phone rang, and it was Ava wanting to know if it was okay for her to come over now. Julia answered, "Yes it is, Ava. Mark is very much looking forward to this." I certainly wouldn't have worded it like that, but at least I wasn't dreading it the way I had been. Ava must have said something like, "He is?", because Julia next said, "Remember, Mark's a genius. He understands what you're doing and why. Mark and I were only just talking about you, and I believe I'm starting to understand what tonight means to you. We'll talk more when you get here, okay? See you at 7:30. Sharp, as usual, because you're very good about things like that." Seconds after Julia hung up, her phone rang again. This time it was Katelin, telling Julia she was ready, and could she come over now? "Sorry, no. Mark and I are very busy on other things. It's a hectic night. I can't let you come early. Please come no earlier than 8:30. No insult to you, and you'll get used to this if you spend much time with Mark, but I have to go now. Bye." Knowing Ava would be on time, and that time was only a few minutes away, we quickly threw together a ceremony. I doubt if any female, anywhere, ever, has planned a commitment ceremony so quickly. At one stage Vanessa said, "Mark, you will have to repeatedly belt Ava hard enough to cause her a considerable amount of pain. Are you capable of that?" "Yes. I accept that I have to. I tried to think of a way out of it by claiming I was such a genius that I could accept her commitment without her needing to follow through on the thrashing, but I know that doesn't work well enough. I have to do it, but I'm going to try very hard not to think about it, and the sooner you announce it's finished the happier I'll be. I've got one major problem though: I don't have any idea how hard to swing the belt, and I'm scared shitless - sorry - of doing it too hard. I need to find the right level by working up from soft as I watch her reactions. So my idea is that I'm going to tell her that I'm going to start softly and get harder until I think it's as hard as it can be without damaging her body, and that I don't want to damage her body because it's now committed to serving me. Does something like that sound okay?" "It's fine. You'll have some guidance from what she will have already said, so modify it as you see fit." I couldn't resist suggesting, "Or maybe I could practice on Julia now? Sometimes she's very bossy." Julia immediately jumped away from me, declaring, "Not damned likely, haha." We agreed on signals that Vanessa - who would be supervising - would use to indicate harder, softer or stop. We wanted her guidance to be silent, so Ava would think I was in charge. Personally I was MUCH happier that Vanessa would be the boss. We agreed that the target area was buttocks to the base of the shoulder blades, as we didn't know if bruises would develop tomorrow, and we didn't want anyone to see any if they did. We didn't have a duration, number of hits, or any other limit pre-determined. We would stop when Vanessa decided Ava had had enough. None of us had any experience at this, so it was entirely a "steering by the seat of where Ava's pants would normally be" situation. #4: #3: We were mercifully spared learning more about what #4 knew of porn by Julia suggesting some dialogue we could use, and discussing that kept us going until the doorbell rang at 7:30. ------- Chapter 126: The Ava Plan Goes Perfectly Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) Julia went alone to let Ava in and to take her up to our bedroom. Julia needed to say a few things to Ava, mostly to let her know how the 'event' was going to unfold. Almost none of the following was scripted in advance. Julia knew the sequence of what we were intending to do, but how to tell Ava was made up by Julia as she went. In her room, Julia said, "Mark understands that you're here to offer to serve him better than you have so far. Is that correct, Ava?" "Yes. I'm hoping that Mark will..." "Stop, Ava. You are offering yourself to Mark, so you have to explain it to him, not to me. All I need to know is that you're willing to make a commitment to him. That's correct isn't it?" "Yes. That's exactly what I want him to understand. I thought if I..." "Ava, Mark understands all that already. He already understands EVERYTHING about what you want to do tonight. Remember that he's miles smarter than ordinary people, including you and me. Tonight isn't about making him understand anything; it's about your understanding yourself better, and then your actually making your commitment to Mark. You'll understand this better when I explain how we're going to do this tonight. Shortly I'll show you where Mark's study is. That's where the bed is that you'll be thrashed on, and where you'll spend the night. Tonight is separate from sex, so Mark wants you to sleep separate from him. You'll be too sore to be any good in bed for him anyway. After I show you where his study is, I'll bring you back here, and I'll leave you alone for ten minutes to prepare. I'll explain what that means shortly. After ten minutes I'll return with Mark and my mother. While my mother and I are watching, you will strip naked, kneel in front of Mark, and explain your commitment to him." Ava interrupted with a shocked question, "Naked? In front of your mother?" "Yes. Nakedness is a symbol of your honesty, openness and giving everything you have. My mother because you are making a commitment to Mark, and that's done in front of witnesses. Mom and I are your witnesses. A marriage ceremony is when two people exchange commitments in front of witnesses. This is similar, except that it's just in one direction: you're committing to him, but he's not committing to you. Although, by accepting your commitment, Mark is also taking responsibility for you, and that is..." "YES! That's what..." Exclaimed an incredulous Ava. Who paused, then added, "Wow. I never thought that would happen tonight. Is Mark really going to look after me?" Julia wasn't sure how to respond to that unexpected question. She ducked the issue for the moment, "I don't know Mark's deep thinking on that. He's so smart it can be very hard for me to understand his thinking. I do know that he understands that accepting your commitment puts a responsibility on him. I guess how much responsibility depends on how much commitment you make, which is what I was talking about. In front of Mom and me, you will describe and offer your commitment to Mark. That's what your ten minutes of preparation time is for: for you to get your thoughts and notes together. You've been thinking about this for a few days, so you should have a good idea already. It doesn't need to be perfect, just honest. Mark will listen to what you're offering, and will tell you which parts of it he accepts." We hadn't discussed the last point, Julia had added it because she was more aware of the responsibility aspect, and wanted an escape loophole for me if one was needed. The addition alarmed Ava, "What? He might not agree? Oh, I never thought of that." Ava was visibly upset, and Julia hastened to reassure, "Listen carefully. Mark knows you're coming here tonight to make a commitment to him, and he's a very kind person. He wouldn't let you come if he was going to reject you outright, but it's certain that he'll think of things that you haven't, and he takes his responsibilities seriously." Julia paused to let Ava grasp that point, then carried on, "I can put it even better than that: Mark is better at making decisions than you are, so let him! He wants you to describe your commitment to him so he can see that you understand it, but then HE will decide. That's the way it's going to be from now on. That's even how you want it to be, isn't it?" "Yes, but I was scared when you said he might not accept me. I understand better now, sorry." "I don't think he'll reject you. I can't promise that because it's his decision, but I think it's unlikely. At most I think he might point out a problem you didn't think of with some part of what you said. Let's not worry about that now, because it might not happen. -- "We'll grab a pen and paper when we're in the study, so during your ten minutes of preparation time you can write some notes for yourself, to help you work out what to say. When you explain your commitment to Mark, no one is expecting anything fancy or professional, so don't worry about that. Mark just wants to give you an opportunity to express yourself. After you've told Mark what commitment you want to make, and after Mark's talked about it as much as he wants, then Mark and I will leave you and go to the study. My mom is going to stay, and she is going to talk with you about what you're doing, both the commitment and the thrashing. My mom is a very wise woman, and we are all young, so we..." Ava stridently proclaimed, "MY mother is very wise too! My mom is amazing..." "Ava! This isn't a competition between mothers. I'd be perfectly happy if your mother is twice as wise as mine. That's not the issue. Mark and I are young and we need my mother to consent to this. You want Mark to thrash you with a belt. That's an assault and the police wouldn't like it. It's happening in my parents' house, so they have to approve." "Oh. Okay, sorry. It's just that I love my mom so much." "Which is great. I'm very glad to hear it. But now that you've mentioned her, how come I've never heard you mention her opinion when we've talked about tonight. Have you talked to her about this?" "Ahh, no. I didn't know how to. It's too hard to explain any of it to them. Even explaining Mark to them is too hard." "Your parents don't even know about Mark?" "No. I don't know how to tell them. He's too young and I can't be his real girlfriend because I'm not good enough for him and because you are. I'm afraid I would disappoint them terribly if I tried to explain him to them. NOT because he's no good! I don't mean that; Mark's INCREDIBLE! I mean because I think I'd mess up telling them. It's a very difficult thing to explain, especially with you and all the other girls around Mark. I have to tell them something soon, but I don't know what." Julia reassured, "Don't worry about not being good enough for Mark, because no one is. We want him to have excellent girls around him, but that's much more to do with their attitude, commitment and effort; and I think you might be an exceptionally good girl at all of those. You are certainly far better than nearly every other girl Mark has met. I understand you're worried about how to tell your parents, but the main thing to realize is that it's simply not your problem anymore. Or it won't be shortly." "It won't?" "No, of course not. In the future, everything to do with your relationship with Mark will be decided by Mark. He's such a genius that he'll know exactly how best to tell your parents." That relieved Ava considerably. [I was not aware of the contents of this conversation at this time, because Julia's statement would have made me extremely nervous. Fortunately she didn't mean it literally; she was assuming she'd manage the situation, through me if necessary. Unfortunately Ava's parental situation was a great deal worse than I would have feared, as you'll soon read.] Julia continued, "You can't go running to Mark for every little decision - he and I would both get angry with your wasting his time that way - but if you have a major problem, especially if it involves Mark, then you don't have to worry about it in the future. Just ask Mark. Or better still, ask me first. I'm a lot smarter than you, so I may know the answer myself, or I might know what Mark would do. I know him better than you do, so I can often guess what he'll do. It's important to remember that you and I both want to do as much as we can to make Mark's life better, so we will often sort things out together, rather than bother Mark with them. I'll help you and you'll help me. Mark has already told me that tonight is almost certainly going to work out very well - I told you how incredibly smart he is - so I'm already planning several things you can help me with: -- "I want you to start bringing the 11th grade girls who are interested in Mark to our lunches. Starting with tomorrow's lunch. There won't be a group lunch on Thursday, but probably will be again on Friday. It's time for the 11th grade girls to start getting to know Mark socially. -- "I want your help with something Mark is doing to help another girl. That will probably happen in the next few days. -- "On Thursday, Mark, you, Carol and I are having lunch with a bunch of Donna's girlfriends, down in middle school. It's going to be a very sexy lunch, and we want your help to sex the mood up. -- "I'll tell you more details about all of those later, but you can tell you're going to be very busy with us! I can't wait until you and I are working together properly. You'll help me with things I need to do for Mark, and I'll help you with things like deciding how to tell your parents. And I haven't even mentioned how eager Mark, Carol and I are to get you into our beds again. We all love having sex with you." "Really! Gee, thanks. I like sex with all of you. Really, I do! But I didn't think I was very good with Mark. I made a fool of myself trying to pretend to be as good as him." "Of course you're not as good as Mark! No one is. But compared to the other girls Mark's had, you're one of the best. Just in case you get big headed, remember sex isn't that important to Mark. He likes it and has fun with it, but you have to be a good girl in many other ways for Mark to want to keep you. He hardly looked at your naked photos, remember. You've seen how hard I work for Mark, and you have to work just as hard. Any stupid girl who thinks she's going to keep Mark just because she's good in bed isn't going to last five minutes with him. Mark hates that attitude. -- "Just while I'm talking about all the things you can immediately do to help Mark and me, if Mark doesn't hit you as hard as you want tonight, I don't want you getting all selfish and complaining about it. We don't want you to be too sore to go to school tomorrow. We've got heaps of things for you to do, starting with getting the 11th grade girls coming to tomorrow's lunch. How hard YOU want to be hit is all about YOUR wants, and we don't have time for that selfishness. I don't know how hard he'll hit you - that's entirely up to him - but however hard he does it, you'll be thankful for. Okay? No complaints?" "Oh NO! This is working out super-fantastic. It's far, far better than I imagined. I've loved EVERYTHING you've said. I've got no complaints at all. No way!" "Good. I've probably said too much, so I better speed up. After my mom has talked to you, she'll leave you in here and come talk with us in the study. I don't know exactly what'll happen then, as it depends on what Mom thinks. She might disagree with something, or maybe she'll agree with your committing to Mark but not that you should be thrashed. Maybe we'll all need to come back to the bedroom to talk some more, or maybe we won't. If it goes to plan then what'll happen is that Mom will come back and tell you that Mark accepts your commitment, and that Mom agrees to carry on with the plan. If Mom tells you that, she'll immediately go back to the study. -- "Then it'll be your choice. You can get dressed and go home, or you can pick up the belt that we will leave here for you, and carry it to the study. We want you to carry the belt to prove that being thrashed is your deliberate choice. In the study you will lie on the bed, and Mark will thrash you as hard and for as long as he wants. It's his choice because he's the boss and he understands this far better than you do. If you want to, you can get up and leave, just like the bride can refuse to let the groom put the ring on, but that obviously means the commitment is broken. You can leave any time you want today, we'll leave..." "Oh NO! I'll never leave. I don't want to EVER leave Mark, especially not now." "Good girl, but I need to finish saying this. We'll leave your clothes and car keys in this room. The front door will be unlocked so you can walk out whenever you want. You don't even need to run. If you get up, we will stand back and let you go. We won't say a single word to stop you. We're doing this because legally speaking, anything else would be stupid, and also because the easier we make it for you to leave, then the more meaningful your commitment to stay is. If we tied you to the bed your being thrashed would mean nothing, because you had no choice. Tonight we will make it as easy as we can for you to leave. We'll hold the doors open for you, even carry you out if you want us to. Do you understand that?" "Oh yes. I can't believe how incredible this is. I just expected Mark to thrash me and for me to beg his forgiveness and promise I'd to better in the future, but this is incredible. This IS like a wedding! It's wonderful! I feel so lucky. Thank you SO MUCH, Julia. This is beyond the wildest dreams of what I wanted. Well, not quite. Originally I wanted to marry Mark, but I know that's stupid now. Oh! Don't worry about me ever trying to take Mark away from you. I'll never try to do that. You're so much better for Mark than me..." Julia interrupted, "Ava, I will NEVER be marrying Mark. NEVER! I'm not good enough either. Before I started dating Mark I was a very romantic girl, with dreams of a huge white wedding with all the trimmings. Just look at my room! You can see how girly I am, haha. Just like you, since I fell in love with Mark I've realized that my life isn't going to happen the way I dreamed either. For both of us, our lives have been turned upside-down because of Mark. We're sisters in that way. I'm sure the same thing is also going to happen to other girls. Mark is too much of a man for us. I have no idea where his life is going to go - that's unimaginable - but I know that my role is to follow wherever he leads. That's your role too, if you want it." "Wow." Ava was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, "I just thought I deserved to be punished and I wanted to show Mark that I knew I should behave better in the future, but then you said about the half-wedding we're going to have, and that blew me away. Especially Mark being responsible for me. That's EXACTLY what I was most looking for, but I gave up having ANYONE look after me so I could be with Mark." The expression on Ava's face crumbled, "You've just made me realize that things are even more different than I thought. I didn't understand ANY of this, Julia! This is all far too much for me. I don't think I can do it. I'm not smart enough..." Julia interrupted, "Ava! What's the single most important rule about ANYTHING to do with your relationship with Mark?" "Huh? Umm. Is it, 'I should do what he says'? Or maybe, 'Don't waste his time'?" "Both very good rules. Well done! You're right that both of those are very important. I didn't ask my question very well though, because what I meant was: 'Mark decides.' You're worried that you're not smart enough for Mark. So the obvious thing to do would be to ask Mark whether you are or not. I'm sure he's the best person to judge how smart he needs you to be for him. You might have to worry about what clothes to wear in the morning, or whether your car needs fixing, or a whole bunch of other things, but you NEVER have to worry about anything to do with you and Mark. If the answer's not obvious to you, just ask Mark! Or better still, ask me first: 'So you don't waste his time, ' haha. You know that rule already. You should ask me whether you're smart enough for Mark, because I definitely know the answer to that question. Go on, ask me!" "You want me to ask you if I'm smart enough for Mark?" "Yes." "Umm. Am I smart enough for Mark?" "Yes." Julia stopped, saying nothing else. After a couple of seconds Ava said, "That's it? Just 'Yes'?" "The answer IS 'yes, ' so what more can I say? Yes means yes, it doesn't need any more information. Do you want me to explain WHY the answer is yes?" "Yes please?" "Okay. Mark knows why you're coming here tonight. He knows how smart you are, he knows what his own life is like, and he knows what sorts of things we want you to do, so he knows EVERYTHING already. If he didn't think you were smart enough, or nice enough, or honest enough, or lots of other things, then he wouldn't have let you come. He wouldn't waste his, my, and my mother's time on you if he didn't know you were good enough in every way you need to be. Even more important to him than wasting his time, is that he wouldn't want to be so cruel as to give you false hope. Mark is never cruel like that. Plus he would NEVER, EVER thrash you with a belt unless he was very, very sure you were good enough for him. Mark would cut off his hand rather than hurt someone like that without an EXTREMELY good reason, in this case because you want to prove your commitment to him. Speaking for myself, I'm absolutely positive you're smart as well as nice and honest enough. But even if I wasn't sure, I'd still be sure you were because Mark let you come here tonight. That's a good enough reason for me, and it should be a good enough reason for you. Is that okay, Ava?" "Yes. Thank you. You're right, Mark wouldn't hit me unless he wanted me." "Good. Just to be very thorough, I'll prove it even more, because I want you to never worry about this again. Remember that I already gave you a quick list of several things Mark and I want your help with? The first was to tell all the 11th grade girls who are interested in Mark to come to where we have lunch tomorrow, and probably Friday too. I'm sure you're smart enough to do that, aren't you?" "Of course, that's easy. Most of them ask me about Mark all the time anyway, because I'm their Liaison. I've been hoping to have something happen soon." "The second job I said was to help a girl. I didn't say how, but I will now. What you have to do is wear a low-cut top, walk into one of Mark's classes, and let some boys ogle you. Do you think you can do that?" "Let them look at my tits? That's all?" "Yes. That's all you need to do. Stand around for a couple of minutes and let them look at your tits. Can you do that?" "I usually have trouble stopping them, {giggle}. I can do that no trouble, haha." "The last job was to have a sexy lunch with a lot of Donna's friends, and with Mark, Carol and me. You'll need to do some kissing. You do know how to kiss, don't you?" "{Giggle}. Yeah. I like kissing." "All of the girls will be wearing short skirts and will have taken their panties off. Are you smart enough to take your panties off?" "{Giggle}. Mom says that sometimes I'm not smart enough to keep them on, haha. That's partly why they want me to find a good man soon." "You've found the best! The last part of the Donna's Ducklings job is maybe getting quite sexy. We might be rubbing each other's pussies, kissing, rubbing breasts, and those sorts of things. Are you smart enough to do all those things? You do know how to find those places don't you? Breasts are right up here, on the chest; pussies are between a girl's legs. You're smart enough to remember that and find them, aren't you?" "I think so. I've been practicing how to be bisexual with you and Carol, so I'm pretty sure I can find them, haha." Julia concluded, "That's it, Ava. That's all the things that we need your help with in the next few days. I left out your being our lover again, because I don't have to ask whether you can do that! We know how good you are, and we're excited about having you back. All the things we want your help with are extremely easy for you, and you're easily smart enough to do them. Now do you see how totally unnecessary all your worry about being smart enough was? You ARE smart enough!" "Yes, thank you. But I worry about other things. All those things will be very easy, but what if Mark asked me to do something much harder?" "That's true. Mark is doing some very advanced Math courses at college. Next year he's going to finish his degree so there'll be some incredibly hard Math courses. I'm sure there will be stuff in those courses that even he won't instantly understand, and that he'll have to think hard about. If he has trouble with those, should he ask for your help?" "I hope not! There's NO WAY I could help him. I'm not even good at 11th grade Math, and he's a GENIUS. There's no way!" "That's right. Me neither. That's why he won't ask us. He asks me to do things for him that he knows I can do. He'll ask you to do things for him that you can do. He'd be stupid to ask you to do something that you couldn't do - and he's definitely not stupid - is he, Ava?" "Oh no. I get it. He won't ask me. Can I still do enough things for him?" "Yes. He wouldn't have let you come here tonight otherwise. Mark will let you commit yourself to him because he knows that you ARE good enough for him in every way that matters. You don't have to worry about ANY of that. The only thing you have to do is try your best. Mark knows that any particular thing you're not good enough at now, you'll try hard to get better at, just like you are with being bisexual. Seriously Ava - and this is important - if this goes the way you want, Mark will be in charge of large parts of your life, and you MUST leave those decisions to him. He is better at them than you are. Okay?" "Okay, Julia. It's just that I didn't understand that so much was going to be happening tonight, and that it meant so much." "Yes, I was going to mention that next too. It took me weeks to understand some things about Mark, and I frightened you by talking about them too soon with you. I got too excited about how wonderful you are, and I said so much I made you think you weren't smart. It wasn't fair of me to do that to you, so I apologize for my impatience. You're not dumb if you don't understand something in one minute that took me one month to learn. In fact, I'm impressed that you understood it so well, so you're smarter about some things than you think. You have my and Mark's word that you are good for Mark, including smart enough. So no more worrying after today, okay?" "Okay Julia. I trust you." "Good girl. I'm glad I did tell you some of that frightening stuff though, Ava, such as tonight being something like a wedding. Tonight is a major commitment for you, and it could change your entire life, so you must understand what you're getting into. You understand that this is big, don't you?" "Yes I do. It's so much bigger and more wonderful than I knew before. I'm very happy. Mom and Dad will be very happy too, when I figure out how to tell them." "No Ava; when MARK figures out how to tell them." "Oh yeah, sorry. {Giggle}. That's hard to remember." "Yes, but you do need to remember it. I was exaggerating though, because if you can think of a good way of telling them, then by all means tell them yourself. You should only ask for my help, and then Mark's help, if you can't solve problems like that for yourself. But if you can't, don't worry about it; just ask us, okay?" "Yes. 'Mark is the boss.' I understand that, I just have trouble remembering it sometimes. It's a big change for me." "Yes, I understand that, sweetie. I'll make sure you get plenty of practice to help you learn it. You're like my little sister, so I need to help you. We said tonight is like a marriage, but I want to tell you some ways that's it's definitely not like a marriage, okay?" "Sure. {Giggle}, I'm not going to be wearing a wedding dress for one thing. Or any other clothes, haha." "Yeah, you're going to be delightfully naked. I'll tell you the most important difference: in a normal wedding everyone says that the bride and groom are equal partners in their relationship. That's definitely not true..." "Oh no! I understand that. That's the ONE thing I am very, very sure I understand. Mark is incredibly wonderful, and I'm just a nobody." "HEY! No one's allowed to call my little sister a nobody! You STOP that! Haha. Seriously, Mark's got the choice of dozens and dozens of girls already, and if he waits just a little while longer, lots more college girls will know about him, and he'll have the choice of THOUSANDS of girls. But he wants you to be a very important person in his life. You'll have thousands of girls envying you. You are definitely NOT a nobody. Remember that Mark's a genius, so if he thinks you're special, then you're special, and that's that!" "You're very nice to me, Julia. Especially tonight. I like that you call me your little sister. That's very sweet. Funny too, because you're so little. It's very nice of you." "You're welcome. I like thinking of myself as your big sister. Somehow that feels very appropriate. I hope you don't object to sex between family members though, because I like having sex with you?" "Haha. You're funny. You know I'll have sex with you whenever you want. I'm glad I'm bisexual now." "Good girl. I know I'm being nicer to you tonight. I'm a little embarrassed about how hard I treated you recently. Mark is the most important part of my life, and I get short-tempered when people waste his time, and I lost my temper with you too much. I'm sorry about that." "No, you were right. I'm very silly sometimes. I'm really not very smart. I'm VERY happy that I'm smart enough for Mark, but I know I'm not smart." "There's a big difference between being silly and not being smart. I agree you're not smart, and you're very honest about that, even putting it in your letter. But you can learn not to be silly, and that's important. Mark and I would get annoyed if you're silly. I will try to hold my temper though. -- "I was saying why I was so nice to you tonight. The other two reasons were because I didn't realize what a high opinion Mark had of you. He's hard to understand sometimes, and I got that wrong. The last reason is because I am very impressed by the amount of commitment you're going to make tonight. To me that counts for a HUGE amount. I worship Mark, and I'm very impressed that you are willing to worship him too. Nearly every other girl is so full of herself that she can't do that. I'm incredibly pleased with you, Ava. I PRAY that you can keep to your commitment, not backslide, not be silly. I'm taking too much time, so I need to go faster, sorry. -- "I need to tell you other differences from a normal wedding. You know Mark and you aren't equal, which is good. Because Mark is so important you understand why you have to do what he says. To obey him. I think I told you about the time I was walking in a school corridor with Mark and I misheard him. I thought he'd asked me to strip, so I immediately started stripping. It didn't worry me that it was in the middle of school. I thought Mark told me to, so I did. When he saw what I was doing, he told me to put my blouse back on, and we laughed about it. But the important thing is that I was instantly obedient, and you have to be like that too." "I will. I really will. Tonight is amazing for me. It's the most important night of my life. -- "Haha. I just remembered all those other girls who stripped for Mark. That morning when you were choosing the Liaisons. That was very funny. If you want me to strip at school to prove I'm obedient, I'll happily do it. I want you and Mark to see how good I'll be from now on." "Mark and I will be getting you to do things for us, so we'll soon see. Remember the list of things I've already mentioned, and that's just over the next few days. There'll be many, many times you'll be able to prove that you understand Mark is more important than you, because that's what you'll be doing every time you obey him. I'm not so much worried about your obeying, but I am worried about your asking 'Why?' all the time. The very first time I talked to you, which was to ask approval to read your letter to Mark, you asked me 'Why?'. A few minutes ago, when I said 'Yes' to your asking whether you were smart enough for Mark, you didn't just accept my answer. You were very uncomfortable and unhappy until I had explained why. Every time you ask 'Why?' you're telling the person that you don't trust their judgment. I didn't mind explaining your being smart enough a few minutes ago because this is a very important night for you and you need to understand everything you can, but after tonight you simply CANNOT keep hesitating to do what you've been asked. Mark and I don't have the time to explain everything to you, and it's very insulting that we have to keep doing it. After tonight you have to stop doing that, Ava. You have to obey immediately. -- "When I thought Mark asked me to strip in the school corridor, I didn't stop to ask, 'Why?' I was almost certain it must be a mistake, but that didn't matter. I would much rather strip naked and have the whole school laugh at me than disappoint Mark. If I was driving a car, and he said, 'Turn left', but he really meant 'Turn right', and going left would cause an accident, then I'd double-check of course. I'd be stupid to blindly obey something as important as that. But for stripping at school, that would have been harmless and funny. I've got great parents, and they would've laughed if it'd happened, so I wouldn't have been in any real trouble. When Mark or I tell you to do something, then you must immediately do it. If you don't understand WHAT it is, then definitely ask questions until you do, and then jump to it, okay?" "Yes, Julia. I will try very hard. I know you're right that I do that a lot. I do it whenever anybody asks me to do anything, but I understand you and Mark are different. I'll try my absolute hardest. It is very, very important to me that Mark doesn't break up with me, so I'll do everything I can to avoid making any mistakes. I'm really scared that I could accidentally say, 'Why?' It's so easy to say it without thinking." Quickly, before Ava could get as blubbery as her face threatened, Julia said, "Mark and I know habits are hard to break. It's actually a lot better than you think. We don't mind you accidentally saying 'Why?', because we'll just tell you 'We are not going to tell you why.' When you hear us say that you'll realize your mistake. Provided you jump up and immediately start doing whatever it is that we asked you, then there'll be no problem at all. -- "What is insulting and wastes time is when you demand an explanation. I've seen you be asked or told something, and you just don't believe it, like when I said 'Yes' to you being smart enough. That's what you MUST stop. You don't need to judge Mark's decisions. That's VERY important, because he's so intelligent sometimes there will be no way in the world for you to understand why he is doing something. Even something that looks very simple may be cleverer than you think. If Mark or I say 'We are not going to tell you why, ' then I suggest you be very, very careful about what you do next, because if you argue with us, that's almost the same thing as saying you want to break up with Mark. Do you understand that?" "Oh yes. If you or Mark say that, then I'll instantly obey. I NEVER want Mark to break up with me, so I'll do it immediately, even if I think you're CRAZY!" "Haha. Good girl. I like your attitude very much. I was pleased that when I mentioned the three things I wanted you to do soon, you didn't ask me 'Why?' about any of them, so that pleased me a lot. Another way this isn't a marriage is that it is far easier to end. You can end it whenever you want, just by walking away." "Oh no! I'll NEVER do that." "Good. I hope you never do. It can be ended in other ways, by disobeying us, for example." "I'll NEVER..." "Haha. Yes, I know Ava. You are very wonderful tonight. I didn't think you would, I just mentioned it as an example. You could also end our relationship by being bad in other ways. For example, stealing our money, lying..." "Oh no! I would NEVER..." "I'm not saying you would. I'm just letting you know the rules before you commit yourself. If I didn't let you know the rules I wouldn't be being fair to you. I'll give you another example that MIGHT cause you temptation. In a few years, probably not very many, Mark will be famous. Possibly even internationally famous..." "Really? Cool!" "In some ways, yes, but in other ways it'll be a big nuisance. When Mark is famous, the main girls in his life will be famous too. When I said earlier that thousands of girls will envy you, I wasn't just saying something nice to sound good. I really mean it. When Mark is famous, you'll be famous, so thousands or maybe millions of girls will wish they were you." "Wow! I never thought of that. Cool! Oops, not cool?" "Haha. You'll find out for yourself. Let's not debate it now. But if we are so well known, then the media will be interested in us. Quite likely you'll be invited to be a guest on Oprah. What do you think of that?" "Co ... Umm. I don't know." "I should have asked, 'Would you go on Oprah?' Or the other shows that ask you, and dozens of them are sure to." "Umm. I don't know. I'm a bit confused by all this now." "That's fine. I don't know the answer either. If I'm asked to go on a show, I can't tell you now whether or not I'd go on. But I can tell you EXACTLY how I would decide. I know that already. Do you want to know the answer?" "Yes please. I like Oprah. She has some very good shows." "Yes she does. The decision for whether to go on the show is quite easy. Just ask yourself, 'Would it be good for Mark?' It doesn't matter whether you'd enjoy it or not. It doesn't matter whether you'd love your friends to see you on the show or not. NONE of that matters. The ONLY question is, 'Would it be good for Mark?' Do you understand why?" "It's because he's the boss, isn't it? And because he's more important than us?" "Exactly right. Good girl. You should remember that although your commitment to Mark will bring many marvelous experiences, it will also sometimes cause you trouble or major disappointments. You may be eager as anything to go on Oprah, but if it's not good for Mark, then you don't go. End of story. Oprah never would have been interested in you without your being with Mark in the first place, but that would be hard to remember at the time and won't make the disappointment any less. -- "My main point is you said you'd never steal our money or lie, and I believe you. You seem like an extremely honest person, as your letter showed. We know you're honest, but no one knows how you'll react to fame. Not even you know that yet. What might happen, when Mark gets famous and the rest of us do because we're with him, is that the fame goes to your head and you start behaving badly. People can go very strange when they get famous, and they often get very arrogant. Can you imagine how bad it would be if you started getting arrogant with Mark?" "Ohh! That'd be TERRIBLE! It'd be a disaster." "Yes. It would very quickly be the end of your relationship with him, and with me and Carol too of course. That's another way to end it. If you ever do things which are bad for Mark, then it's all over. Whether that's lying to him, or telling people stuff about him that he wouldn't want you telling. You mustn't do anything that causes him problems. I'm talking about things you deliberately do, like stealing or going on Oprah without caring whether it was good for Mark. You MUST think about Mark first. That's a BIG commitment, Ava. It's bigger and harder than a real marriage, and it is FAR, FAR MORE IMPORTANT, because you can damage Mark's life if you get it wrong." "Wow. It IS! Julia, I don't know that I can do that. I'd hate to let Mark down, and..." "Ava, the answer is 'Yes'." "Huh? What do you mean?" "The answer is 'Yes.' You CAN be good for Mark, otherwise he wouldn't have let you come tonight." "Wow. That really is true. Wow. This is AMAZING!" "I'll say! But just because Mark knows you CAN, doesn't mean you WILL. You'll still have to try hard. Sometimes you'll probably have to try very, very hard. As hard as you've ever done anything. Mark's life is going to be so strange that things will happen to you that you've never faced before, or even heard about. It won't be easy, and you may fail. Many girls have wanted to catch Mark. Some, like Dakota, lasted a few hours. Some, like Laila - if she gets fired tonight, which seems likely - will have lasted a week. They hardly bothered trying at all, so I know you'll do much better than them, but their examples show you how important trying hard is. You have to do your best. Dakota and Laila both failed to think of Mark first. Dakota was selfish for herself. Laila wanted to use Mark to give her friends pleasure, without caring whether Mark wanted to or not. You must ALWAYS be aware of what's good for Mark. I've told all the girls that, but I think you really are getting it, aren't you?" "Oh, yes! It's easy. Mark is super-super-important, but I'm only just a little bit above a nobody, haha." "If you prove that you can treat Mark properly, then you'll be a LONG way above a nobody. I've told dozens of girls how they should treat Mark, and they all say 'Yes, yes, ' then do nothing. Most of them even wait for Mark to chase after them, which is stupid. My best friend, before I met Mark, is like that. Obviously I like her, so I've tried to encourage her, but she doesn't do anything. In her case, she doesn't have enough gumption. She's not arrogant; she just doesn't have enough initiative. She would never think of writing Mark a letter and putting it in his locker. There are many things in life more important than being smart, so you shouldn't keep putting yourself down." "Being smart IS very important, Julia. My mother and father have taught me that. I don't want to argue with you, but they've convinced me it's very important to making good decisions and having a good life." "They're right, Ava. Being smart is important to those things. I didn't express myself as well as I could. You are not intelligent at school, but you are very wise about Mark. What is the right word to use: intelligence, wisdom, smartness? I have told girls more intelligent than you how important Mark is, and they haven't understood at all. Shouldn't that make them dumber than you? I will simply say that I think you are very WISE. Wiser than nearly every other girl I know. For that reason alone you should not put yourself down. Let me change the subject back to something we were discussing just a little while ago: many things about our lives are going to be hard. Some girls find it hard not to get jealous. Have you noticed that I'm not very jealous?" "Haha. You're not jealous AT ALL! You're the opposite of jealous; you're not happy unless you're getting Mark to sleep with more girls. You're a very strange girl, Julia. Very nice to me, but very strange." "That's a very 'strange' compliment, haha. Actually I'm not a strange girl at all. Two months ago I wanted to meet Mr. Right, have a great big wedding, settle down and live happily ever after. I wanted a management career as well, but it's normal for women to have careers these days. I was a VERY normal girl, except a bit shorter and bossier than most. Then I met Mark. To start with, that didn't change me at all. I simply thought Mark was my Mr. Right and everything I wanted would happen with him. A few days later I started understanding Mark's importance, and then my whole world started changing. I'm still the same girl, but now my life is devoted to Mark. If I had married a normal Mr. Right, and I caught him sleeping with someone else, I would have hit the roof. I would have been very jealous and there would have been a terrible scene. I'm not jealous with Mark for several reasons: -- "Jealousy is an emotion people feel to protect THEMSELVES. Protecting myself isn't my goal anymore; it's helping Mark. My being jealous wouldn't be good for Mark. Getting angry, yelling at him, having terrible scenes, etc., none of those are good for him, so I don't allow myself to be jealous anymore. I was extremely jealous my first week with Mark, but once I understood his importance, I stopped being jealous. You'll be surprised to hear that it's actually very easy. It's no problem for me now. -- "More girls is truly beneficial for Mark. Dakota tried the oldest trick in the book to make Mark do what she wanted: she cried. Mark had never had a girl do that to him before, so he totally fell for it. He's such a caring guy that he was a complete patsy for it. If I hadn't pushed Dakota at him, he never would've learned to be suspicious of crying girls, and that's a very good lesson for him to learn. He learns a great deal from watching girls and having them try their tricks on him. That's going to be important in the future when he's important and rich..." "He's going to be rich too?" "Sure, one day, if he wants to be. He could earn a fortune in sports, but he doesn't want to do that because it'd waste too much of his time, and you know that wasting his time is a big no-no. He's a genius, so I'm sure he'll think of a way if he needs money one day. Chances are he will, so chances are he'll be rich. I'm taking too long, so I'll carry on. -- "Another reason I'm not jealous is because I want Mark to have fun with girls because it's good for him to have fun. He works very hard with all his studies and other things he does, so he deserves fun. So for learning and for fun, more girls is good for him. I've made a commitment to do my best to make Mark's life better, so I could never stop him having more girls, because they're good for him. I have no jealousy because I take my commitment to him VERY seriously. -- "I'm also not jealous because people are jealous of possessions. People talk about 'MY wife', or 'MY boyfriend'. Mark isn't 'MY' possession. He's so far above me - above you too - that it'd be silly to think I possessed him in any way. -- "Another strong reason I'm not jealous is because I've learned that more girls is not only good for Mark, it's also good for me. That was a huge surprise to me, when I learned it, but it's totally true. I want more girls! Not only for Mark, but for me. I'm not talking about sex, although that's a lot of fun, I'm talking about all the support and help we can give each other. If something new happens in Mark's life that I don't know how to handle, it's great that I've got other girls who are very close to Mark that I can talk with. Let me explain it from your point of view. If you became Mark's ONLY girlfriend tonight, could you do all the things for him that he needs, that I do for him now?" "I hardly know what you do, Julia. I know you're REALLY busy. You always seem to be running around organizing things and talking flat out. Even though I don't really know, I'm sure I couldn't do what you do. You're much smarter than me, and much better at getting people to do things." "Thank you for saying so. My point is, if you were Mark's only girlfriend, then all the things that I do wouldn't get done, and Mark's life would suffer. I do a LOT of really important things for Mark, and if I didn't do them his life would be damaged a great deal. I'm heavily involved in his college work, in managing his sex-life, in identifying what skills he needs in the future and making sure plans are put in place to develop those. My family does a great deal to help him too, and I serve as the focal point between Mark and my family. I do all those things and more, but I can't do everything he needs. I can't even come close to doing everything he needs. Fortunately Carol helps a lot, which is great, and I'm really looking forward to having your help too, like with those three little jobs I mentioned earlier. There will be many more jobs like those. I'm very good at management things - being bossy mostly - but there's so much I have to do for Mark that I don't have time to do day-to-day things like cooking, washing his clothes, fetching and carrying whatever he needs, and tasks like those. It would be a TERRIBLE waste of his time if Mark had to do those things. At the moment my mom and his mom do nearly all of those things, but sooner or later he's going to want to buy his own house, and who'll do them then? I'm already far too busy, and I'm sure he's going to make me even busier." Ava exclaimed, "I could do them! Me! I could! I've got a car, so I can do all the fetching and carrying. I don't mind housework. I'm an only child, so I've always done lots of housework. This is so great! I was starting to get very worried when you were talking about all the clever stuff you do for Mark, because I was starting to worry that I couldn't do ANYTHING for him. I can't do clever things, Julia, but I can EASILY do housework things! Or other dumb things like that. Please let me! Please? I REALLY need to do this." "Relax, Ava. I'm SURE we can give you what you want. The only important consideration is what's good for Mark. We'll divide up the work between us so that Mark gets the best results. You say you're good at housework, which I'm not. I'm good at management, which you aren't. So it's obvious what we have to do. I am PERFECTLY happy to let you do that, sweetie. I appreciate that you volunteered so quickly and enthusiastically." "When Julia? When do you think we can get a house with Mark? Renting is fine, we don't need to buy one." "Whoa girl! We've got to get through tonight first. You haven't actually given your commitment to Mark yet, and already you're picking out what design you want on the dinnerware. First things first, okay?" "Oh yeah. Of course. Sorry. Do you think before the end of the year? 2005, I mean, not the school year. It's very important to me." "Sweetie, you're going too fast. Plus I've taken FAR too long to talk with you already. We have to keep to the plan for tonight. I've still got a few more points to make, so I have to keep going. I was talking about jealousy. I'm not jealous, and I don't want you to be jealous. If you become a long-term part of Mark's life you'll probably see many girls..." "I have no jealousy with Mark now. He's never been my boyfriend; he's always been yours. You don't have to convince me. Even if I start feeling jealousy in the future, I know Mark and you could replace me in a second. Also, Mark's the boss and you're the next boss, and you both want him to play around, so it's going to happen. The ONLY thing I'm worried about is that you and Mark want me." "That certainly makes you very easy to get along with, which is perfect for everyone. Thank you for that. My next point is about how your relationship with us might end. Remember I gave you several examples about how it could end. I want to make sure that you understand that you can end it whenever you want, and so can Mark. He's a very kind guy, and he's not going to..." "Julia. I KNOW that! OF COURSE Mark can end it." "Good. Another important point is that not only Mark and I will be your 'boss', as you call it, but Carol too. Mark trusts Carol enormously and she does lots..." "That's fine, Julia. EVERYTHING is fine. I agree to everything." "You really should let me describe the relationship you are committing yourself to. It's wonderful that you're so cooperative, but there might be some parts that you have trouble with." "I don't care. I want to get to the part where I offer my commitment to Mark and he accepts it. I know everything I need: Mark is going to accept my commitment and be responsible for me. That is the best thing that could ever happen to me, except Mark marrying me, and I'm not even going to hope for that. I TRUST you and Mark. That you want to tell me every rule and example you can think of tells me how good you are. I don't need any more; I really don't. Everything that you've said is better than I dreamed, and then EVEN better, and then EVEN MORE better. I CAN'T WAIT. PLEASE can you go and get Mark so I can give myself to him?" "Umm. I think I need to talk with Mark for a few minutes. To explain what's happened. I didn't expect you to be so, um, enthusiastic and impatient, I guess. They're expecting us to go through the steps of the ceremony we planned ... Umm, do you still want Mark to hit you with the belt?" "The ONLY thing I want, is to have him agree to look after me. I'll do ANYTHING to make that happen. I don't care about the thrashing or ANYTHING else. I just want him to agree to look after me." "His looking after you doesn't mean giving you money or anything like that. Mark doesn't have any money now..." "I don't care about money. I want him to help me live my life. Tell me what to do, help me make decisions, care for me, and those sorts of things. I'm only seventeen and I'm not smart. I need someone to look after me. Not for always maybe, but for several years until I'm old enough and smart enough to be okay by myself. Mark and you would be FANTASTIC. You're both so incredible; even you, Julia. I want my mother and father to see that I will have a wonderful life, with wonderful people. They're hoping for 'with a wonderful man', but it's going to be with wonderful people now because of you. I feel so happy I could cry. PLEASE can we do this?" Then Ava proved that she was so happy that she could, indeed, cry. Julia said, loud enough to be heard, "I'll go talk with Mom and Mark. I'll probably be a few minutes, so don't worry, okay Ava?" "{Sob}, {sob}, okay, {sob}." ------- Chapter 127: The Best Laid Plans of Mice, Mark and Julia Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) Prof, Vanessa and I were waiting where Julia had left us, in Prof and Vanessa's study. We did a LOT of catching up while waiting so long for Julia to return. Our first topic was of particular interest to me: the roulette scheme, including how they were intending to do their research. Their plan - actually it was Vanessa's plan, Prof happily giving her the credit for being more imaginative than him - was: To research the industry enough so they could talk sensibly about it (done). Research a particularly widely known, high-selling, spy-story author (done). Identify some knowledgeable Vegas people (done). Cheat! (due to start tomorrow.) Phone the people identified in the step immediately above, pretending to be the widely known author from two steps above, or his research assistant. They would say they were researching his next book (making it a TRULY "fictional" book). It would have a section in which someone wants to place some extremely large bets in Vegas, far over the normal betting limits. They hoped at least a few of the local experts would give their expert advice on how it could be done, in return for - if their idea was used - their name in the credits of the book and being sent an autographed copy when it was finally released. I hoped the 'advisors' don't hold their breaths waiting for it to arrive! The advice would only take a few minutes and shouldn't involve anything considered secret, so no greater payment should be expected, nor any contact beyond a phone call. Prof and Vanessa had created a fictional situation well enough removed from our own that when their 'advisors' heard about our real Vegas trip, it wouldn't sound familiar. Prof and Vanessa were going to use the prepaid disposable cellphones to avoid any phone records tying the calls back to them. Not that being discovered would be bad, as researching in this way was hardly a serious crime. And - if confronted after we'd come back from Vegas with a huge haul - they'd simply say, "That's how we found out how to be allowed to place large, legal, honest wagers. So what?" Even if our target casino afterward connected our haul to the research deception, it didn't tell them anything bad; they'd already have Prof's name in order to pay him. Prof wasn't going to use a false name in case the casino checked him out MUCH more carefully after the win but before the payment, and used his fake name as an excuse not to pay him. Even if we won in court, it'd be years after I'd left Corvallis and we would have missed out on living in a mansion in the interim. Having exhausted that topic, and Julia not having arrived back after finishing her preliminary briefing of Ava, we discussed a succession of other topics: Carol, my parents, my sex-life - as distinct from my love-life, which we also discussed - my school and college studies, and even Aikido, which wasn't something they'd had much to do with. I was tempted to drop into conversation that, "Carol and Donna hadn't shown any sign of my ability yet," but I thought I should check with Julia about this first, as we hadn't actually discussed how to deal with this with her parents. Prof and Vanessa are great talkers and very interested in me, but I was almost ready to show them light blobs ahead of schedule as a way of passing the time. So much time had passed that we were starting to get concerned, both about how Julia was getting on, and about our maybe not finishing with Ava before Katelin arrived. As more time passed, it became certain that we'd have to park Katelin in the hot tub or on a sofa to watch a DVD until we'd finished with Ava. Eventually Julia returned. She explained her long absence, "It didn't go as I expected; it went FAR better! Ava's is far more determined to commit to Mark than any of us thought, and she's willing to do anything to make it happen. The phrase, 'I'd give my right arm for... ' would almost be literally true right now. She doesn't care about the ceremony, the thrashing, or anything else. She just wants to see Mark so she can commit to him and he can agree to look after her." -- We all reacted to the last phrase, and before any of us could speak, Julia continued, "Yeah, I realize we never agreed on that last part. I'll tell you what happened. She arrived expecting the least possible significance from tonight. She'd be thrashed, in part as punishment for past errors, in part to show Mark she was serious. Then she'd promise Mark she could do better if he'd let her try again. I started talking, and as soon as she understood there was going to be a ceremony, she was thrilled. She LOVED the idea of the ceremony, and that we were taking her so seriously. -- "When I got to the part about her offering her commitment to Mark, she was shocked when I told her that she'd be kneeling naked in front of Mark with Mom and me as witnesses. I gave the 'witnesses as for a marriage' excuse for Mom being there, as we agreed before. Of course I explained it wasn't a real marriage because the commitment was only one way. Mom and Dad have told me countless times that 'with power comes responsibility, ' so because she was giving Mark power over her, I said that, 'she'd be committing herself to Mark, and Mark would be accepting responsibility for her.' Ava suddenly got even more excited when she heard that Mark was going to 'look after her' - those were her words. Alarm bells went off in my head, so I created an escape clause by telling her that she'd be offering her commitment to Mark, but it was up to Mark how much of her commitment he accepted. I said there might be some back-and-forth discussion about that, especially after she'd talked to Mom, so we do have room to negotiate if we need to. That worried her, but she had to accept it, and it seemed to calm her down. -- "Then I started going through all the points we'd agreed on. I had to flesh them out, which took a while, but she couldn't have responded better. She never looked like she'd ever say no to anything we wanted. The further through I got with her, the more and more excited and eager she was at being Mark's. The only hiccup was her feelings of worthlessness, so a couple of times I had to stop to reassure her that she'd be useful. Otherwise there was absolutely no doubt of her increasing eagerness to throw herself at Mark. Toward the end I was talking about her not being jealous of other girls, and saying it was good to have more girls in the relationship because we could each do different types of tasks to help Mark. I added a bit that we hadn't planned, but it's been vaguely in my mind for a while, for her role in Mark's wing of the mansion. For about thirty seconds I played up all the stuff I do for Mark, making it sound very complicated and difficult, then I said that I was very worried about what would happen when Mark finally moved out of home, and there wasn't a mother to do all the housework stuff for him: cooking, cleaning, fetching and carrying, etc. She leaped on that and was BEGGING me to be allowed to do Mark's housework. I was hoping to sort of trick her into it, but she leaped at it. She would've cried if I'd refused her! -- "I agreed she'd be the housekeeper at the time, and then she wanted to set up house immediately with Mark. She's not trying to grab Mark for herself; she made that amply clear. She just can't wait to housekeep for him. She wants us to rent a house so she can be the housekeeper. She said it was important to her that we did it before the end of 2005, which didn't make sense to me. I would've thought after she graduated in mid-2006 would be the far more natural choice. I was already well behind schedule, so didn't want to get into a never-ending house planning discussion, especially because our financial situation is so uncertain. I put her off, and got back to the other points I wanted to cover. -- "All through our talk she repeatedly said things like, 'I will do whatever Mark and you tell me.' In her mind Mark and I are both her bosses, and she looks up to, respects and wants to obey us. Especially Mark, of course. If she looked up to Mark any further, she'd fall over backward, haha. She never volunteered Carol's name as a boss though, not once. It's clear she doesn't think of Carol that way. So I was quite worried about telling her that we wanted Carol to be in charge of her too. I was mentally prepared to have to fight my way through a list of reasons why Carol had to be in charge, but as soon as I mentioned Carol's name, and before I gave any reason at all, Ava immediately agreed. She didn't care about reasons anymore. I tried to get through the rest of the points, but she wouldn't let me. She cut me off, and said she doesn't want to hear any more. She just wanted to commit to Mark, so he can look after her. -- "I was worried about money, in case she wanted Mark looking after her financially. I mentioned it, and she immediately dismissed it in a convincing way, so I don't believe that's motivating her. I did say Mark would probably be rich one day, but well after she'd already shown me that she was eager to commit to him. As far as I can tell, she's incredibly motivated to have someone help her make life decisions. I think she must have a terribly low opinion of her ability to get through life. That's what it seems like. She said she'd like us to give her advice for several years at least, until she's older and smarter. -- "The ceremony idea, and my talking her through all the pros and cons, convinced her that we really care about her, and that we're trustworthy, and that's all she needed. On top of the strong feelings she already had for Mark, she's now convinced she can totally trust us. She's throwing herself at us, and promising us everything we wanted with a great deal more enthusiasm and less judgment than I was hoping for. I've overachieved every single objective I had. I'd congratulate myself, except I don't understand why she's so incredibly willing and eager. She was SO eager that I'm worried. The only guess I've got, is that her parents have told her she has to move out soon. Maybe not a specific date, but soon. By the end of 2005, it seems. I think they might've put very hard expectations on her to shape up and start living life properly. Maybe she's been sleeping with some real losers so far, or something like that. She certainly loves her parents, so there's no ill will there. -- "I left her in the bedroom, waiting for our return. She's crying in happiness because, 'All her dreams have come true.' She's extremely happy at the idea of living with Mark and me. She's even looking forward to introducing 'the wonderful people she's with' to her parents. And she said it in a way which meant they'd know she was committed to both of us. She worried about how to tell her parents, and was very reassured when I said Mark would sort that out for her. I'd help with that, of course. -- "Quite frankly, Mark, you could move Carol into that house and sleep with her as husband and wife, and Ava wouldn't bat an eyelid, such is her devotion to your wishes. You can do ANYTHING. You can ESPECIALLY do anything if it's in return for looking after her. I'm just concerned that I don't understand exactly what that means and why. That's about it, I think. What do you think we should do?" Vanessa said, "You told Ava that she and I would be having a private chat as part of the ceremony?" "Yes. The whole thrashing and ceremony plan we had before is mostly irrelevant now, especially the thrashing part, I'm happy to say. She's just begging to be allowed to offer herself to Mark, and for him to accept her. Oh, while I remember it. I did emphasize that the relationship could be ended at any time by her or Mark. She was adamant that she'd never leave him, and that she'd try her absolute hardest to make him not get rid of her, but she totally accepted that he had the right to stop the relationship whenever he wanted. She thought I was silly trying to explain that, because it was so obvious that he could. So she's not under the misapprehension that she's getting something permanent. That also means that if we do this, it's not like Mark will be making a lifelong commitment. So we can try it, then back out later if it doesn't work out for any reason, which is a huge relief." "Okay. Thanks Julia. I think I'll go have a talk with her. It'd probably be best if it's just the two of us. In the state she's in, I'm sure it won't take long. Unless anyone has a better idea?" No one did, Prof being particularly emphatic, "This one's right up your alley, honey. I'll go put the kettle on." They walked out together, each to perform their self-appointed task. Julia told me some more details after her parents had left, small things of no great significance: "Ava was fun to talk with. We joked around, laughed. It was enjoyable until she got so eager that she only had one thing on her mind. When she feels confident she's good company. I can imagine her being nice to live with, especially if she feels that she's valued. What's with girls being so insecure about their value? Chloe's the same, and Linda seems to think it's not even worth trying." "There's no problem with her cooperating with the sexy lunch with Donna's friends. I described it early on as an example of her usefulness and she was perfectly fine with it, and that was early, even before she got excited." "I went on at length about her annoying need to have everything explained. We hadn't planned that, but it bugs me and she did it again. She promised to try her hardest not to do it again, but she's worried about accidentally asking 'Why?'. I told her we'll say 'I'm not going to tell you why.' When she hears us say those words, she'll know we're serious, and that if she doesn't leap into action she's being disobedient. I can't imagine that she'll disobey us, not with the amount of eagerness she's showing now." -- Julia gave me several other excerpts, as they occurred to her, then summarized, "I can't think of a single way Ava's attitude could be any better. In some ways it's a pity she's not smarter, but then she wouldn't want to do all the housekeeping jobs. She even called them 'dumb jobs'. She wants to do the dumb jobs for us. We'll need someone to do those, especially when Carol's a mother. Plus Ava will be very useful when you're both seniors, and she's obviously going to be useful immediately on things like Donna's lunch, being a Liaison, Carol's tit flash for Chloe, and many other of our plans." I'd forgotten about Carol being a mother. Not "forgotten" per se, as it wasn't the sort of thing I could ever forget, but I hadn't included it in any of my thinking. I said, "Carol's being a mom is YEARS away, Julia. Sure it'll be great for her to have Ava's help, but Carol's not even fourteen yet. Legally in Oregon, motherhood is over four years away. Maybe we could go somewhere more permissive, but we've got no idea whether Ava would want to move with us. And even if we did, the limit is still likely to be sixteen, so still more than two years away. Not to mention that I can't imagine Mom and Dad allowing Carol to get pregnant before she's eighteen. They'll have a MAJOR problem with it happening before Carol graduates." Julia said, "We're only talking hypothetically, so it's not worth an argument, but I'll mention a few things for you to think about: Carol wants it sooner rather than later, things around you happen a LOT faster than with normal people, the law also said you couldn't get your driver license and looked what happened with that, and I'm fairly sure Ava would follow you wherever you went." [Actually, the law does permit underage licenses in extenuating circumstances, but the authorities keep it very quiet and Julia had no interest in finding out about it.] -- "That last point makes me think. Ava was talking about your looking after her for 'at least several years', and she seemed to want longer, so if she's thought that through at all then she'll expect to move away from Corvallis. I'll ask her about that, as it'll be good to know. Most of the other girls I'd leave behind without regret, but Ava could be different. -- "In case you're worried about it, I'm also aware that getting Ava to do the housework for you is usurping the role we planned for Carol, as that was meant to be her area of serving you. I've thought about that, and I'm not worried. Carol has become more secure in her relationship with us, and knows we value her, so she's less needy about having to prove her worth. I'm sure that by the time the mansion is ready, Carol won't care about Ava's doing the housework. When I talked to Ava about it, all I was hoping to do was plant the seed, or maybe to get her general acceptance. I was then going to drop the issue and not mention it again until it was time to move into the mansion. Instead Ava's busting a gut to start the job, and she's certain to mention it to Carol. I'll need to be a little careful when I talk with Carol later, but I'm sure she's secure enough already. It's obvious that our marriage is more based on love than anything else, and certainly not on housework! Haha." I hadn't been worried, because I hadn't thought of the issue. I don't think of Carol as my housekeeper, so hadn't been concerned about Julia pushing Ava into toe-treading territory. Housekeeping is such a small issue anyway, as there's not that much that needs to be done: dinner and the dishes, obviously, plus washing some clothes from time-to-time, but that's about it. What there is to do, Mom does, with the new exception of my Monday dinners. It was good that Carol was cooking those, as it gave me ample opportunity to praise her and build her self-confidence. Carol's concern about her ability to cook for me when we had our own house, especially when we moved away from Corvallis, was mostly a self-confidence issue. I'd seen that Mom could always make the dinners quickly and easily, so they were obviously no big deal. I'd even been left with instructions a few times, about what to do and when, and there wasn't much to it. Rather than worry about Carol's toes, Julia's comment about my getting my driver license early had caused me to daydream. I'd been amusing myself thinking about the "getting Carol pregnant" version of Roy Smith and the DMV exam. What sort of exam would I have to take to be allowed to impregnate my sister before she was eighteen? And how could the examiner make the practical test even more difficult for me? (By making me put my watch under her rear? By testing my knowledge of stopping distances? Telling me to go the wrong way up a one-way passage?). Would I get another card that I could pass around to impress a room full of girls? Would I be able to get an unrestricted license so I could operate during the hours of darkness and carry non-family passengers? I was thinking of sharing these profound thoughts with Julia, when Julia said, "Oh damn! I just realized that if Ava works out well - if we accept her commitment - then it'd be highly appropriate to sleep with her tonight, and it'd be poor of us not to. I booked Katelin tonight because I assumed Ava would be too sore to move. I've got all the lunchtime girls primed to talk about Katelin tomorrow too. Let's wait until we hear what Mom says, and then try to think of something." Julia ran out of things to say. She jumped onto my lap and snuggled in, saying, "Mom will sort everything out. Mom's very clever and good with people." I wasn't going to argue with that, both because it was true, and also because I wouldn't want to annoy a woman who presumably knew even more about psychological torture techniques than Julia did. Not to mention that she cooked a very nice roast chicken. -- Julia must be psychic, because she added, "Oh. I forgot to ask Ava how good she was at cooking. Food's important to you, so we definitely need to get you an extremely good cook." "That's VERY nice of you, but we don't really, not in the way you mean. Frequency and quantity is important to me, but not how fancy it is. I don't need an 'extremely good cook', just an extremely generous one. My mom's cooking is fine. Your mom's cooking is even better. I'm sure Carol's cooking will be just as good once she's gotten a bit more self-confidence. Even if Ava's got no clue, she can still help by peeling things and cutting stuff up. Carol will easily be able to do the rest." Julia gave me a funny look, in the sense of "funny" that means "you haven't got a clue what you're talking about." I changed the subject to something that'd been vaguely puzzling me, "How come you're so much more excited about having an obedient Ava than you are about having an obedient Lily? Granted that Ava's more fun in bed, but Lily's more useful, like with the website. There's got to be something I'm missing, because I don't think you consider being good in bed is so important?" "No, my valuing Ava so far above Lily has got almost nothing to do with how good she is in bed. It's because Ava's a pig, and Lily's a chicken. I bet you don't understand that, do you?" "Ahh. I understand what calling someone a pig or chicken means, but it doesn't make sense here. Ava's slim, not fat; and Lily's not cowardly, she's quite forward." "I used pig and chicken with different meanings. It's an expression Mom and Dad have used about their colleagues for years. In a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the pig is COMMITTED because it gave its life to feed you, while the chicken is just INVOLVED because it only contributed an egg. The chicken can walk away whenever it wants, the pig can't. Ava is closing her eyes and leaping, trusting us to catch her and keep her. She's fully committed. She assures me she'll never choose to leave. Whereas it seems to me that Lily is making choices about whether to cooperate with us or not. I get the feeling that Lily could simply decide to walk away one day. I prefer Ava over Lily so much, because I trust Ava a lot more than I trust Lily, even though I know both girls about the same. -- "I don't recommend showing your TK, blobs or incest to Ava yet, but I can imagine that you will one day, especially if we want Ava to move in with us, but I can't imagine your ever showing any of them to Lily, not unless something dramatic happened to increase our trust of her. By the way, I planted a seed with Ava about incest. I called her my 'little sister' and then made a joke about family members having sex together. She didn't throw up her hands in horror or make any other negative reaction. I wouldn't expect her to, as it was only a joke and we're not real sisters, but it was a small indication. I'll keep mentioning sisters and sex. It'll give me a better read on her attitude to it, and one day it'll cause a conversation on the topic. I'd better remember to tell Carol why she'll hear me call Ava 'sister' a lot, so she won't get jealous. If all goes well with the money, our moving into the mansion might only be a few months away and it'd probably be cruel not to let Ava come with us right from the beginning." We paused to hug. Vanessa was taking longer than I expected. I have a high opinion of Vanessa's ability in this sort of stuff (and cooking), and she'd said it wouldn't take long, so I'd expected her back already. My mind wandered, mostly into daydreams about the mansion. That led to me regret that we hadn't gotten the money YET! How long was it going to drag on! I remembered a comment of Julia's, so I said, "You said just before that 'things happen fast around me.' I want the roulette money a LOT. I'm really desperate for it, but it's taking AGES!" "I feel the same way, but it's only been a couple of weeks so far. Mom and Dad think they'll find a solution by the end of the week, presuming one exists. There's a good chance the solution will be quick to put into action, so you might have the money in about a week and a half. That's what I think is most likely. So, in total, less than four weeks. Isn't that considerably faster than most people can earn five million? Things DO happen rapidly around you, haha." "REALLY? In a week and a half! Is that what you really think will happen?" "Sure. I wouldn't mislead you over that. It depends on the two things I said: That Mom and Dad can find a solution - they said they most likely can and I'm certainly not going to disagree with them about something they're working so hard on - and that the solution can be put into use quickly, which I guess it probably will be able to." "How can you possibly guess that? You don't even know what the solution is!" "True. But it's all about gambling, which is just moving money around and talking. Both of those are quick. It's not likely the solution is going to require you to do something time-consuming first. The most likely solution will probably just need some paperwork to be done, so it backs up whatever you need backed up, to get the casino to cooperate. Paperwork is normally doable in a few days. Then you just have to win! That's important too, haha. You told me you would, and I'm not going to argue with you about something you say you can do. So that's what I think. I haven't bothered talking about it because we'll know more soon anyway." Prof had recently returned, bearing a tray containing a teapot and several cups, interjecting at the time to tell us, "You'll probably want to take this upstairs when Vanessa calls you. Crying females appreciate cups of tea." He'd poured a cup for himself, although he didn't fit that category. I repeated Julia's comments about the roulette timeframe, asking his opinion. Prof said, "I can't fault Julia's logic. We could have bad luck, but she's probably right. Don't get your hopes up yet, because even if we find a solution and employ it, we could still hit an unforeseen problem. As Julia said, we'll know more soon. Very soon, actually. If enough of the people we talk with tomorrow are helpful, if what they say sounds plausible, and especially if several of them give us the same advice, then that'll be a very significant early result. I'm expecting people will be helpful, because we aren't asking for anything that's secret, and most people would love to have their name in the credits for a famous author's bestseller. I'm sure most of them know the answers we want, so we should learn everything we need quickly. By the end of the week almost certainly, and quite possibly by the end of tomorrow." "Wow. That'd be fantastic!" "Don't get too hopeful. For all we know everyone in Vegas is so money-hungry they won't give us the time of day without an up-front payment. A single issue effect like that could apply to everyone we have on our list, and could block us. Tomorrow we MIGHT have good news, or maybe bad news, or maybe none. Isn't that helpful? Haha." At 8:15, just a quarter hour before Katelin was due, a glum looking Vanessa returned. Vanessa told us, "This is considerably more serious than you thought, Julia, so listen carefully. It took me much longer than I expected because Ava didn't want to tell me why she was so determined to have you two look after her. She was VERY reluctant, which made it even more important that I find out. She wasn't in a position to refuse me, as I knew she desperately wants Mark to accept her, but I still had to do a lot of arm twisting. When she finally started telling me what was going on, it quickly became clear that the two of you have put yourselves into a situation that requires a serious decision. So I spent longer to make sure I found out everything you need to know. Here's the situation, and it's not good, so prepare yourselves. -- "Five months ago her father was diagnosed with cancer. With treatment he's got a 50/50 chance of lasting to Ava's graduation, but not long after that. There is no real hope of his beating it." Vanessa gave us a second, then added, "Two weeks later her mother was diagnosed with another, even more virulent form of cancer. She almost certainly won't last to graduation; with treatment she might last a year from now, but probably not." Vanessa said nothing for a while, letting us come to grips with it. I did it by saying "Shit!" repeatedly. Julia sobbed. It took a while. "Her mother was also an only child, her father had one older brother who died several years ago, also from cancer. Her sole aunt - her father's brother's wife - is in her mid-60s and living in a retirement community in Florida. She has two cousins, both in their early-30s. They're both out of state and she's never been close to either of them. Some family friends, of course, but no one she loves. When her parents die, she'll be very alone. -- "The news isn't entirely tragic. She's not going to struggle financially. She'll be fairly well off, although that's no consolation. The house will become hers. She says it's a nice one, and almost mortgage free. Her parents have reasonably good life insurance. Nothing spectacular, but reasonable for their having only one child. Plus, they'll leave her what sounds like some moderate investments and money in the bank. They seem to have been reasonably successful accountants who've lived a quiet life, doting most of it on their only child. -- "I dug into the money situation, and I've explained it to you, because this could've been about money. I'm no longer worried about her seeing either of you as a meal-ticket. One reason she was reluctant to open up to me initially was that her parents have cautioned her not to tell anyone about their health, in part to avoid a gold-digger going after their daughter. She described herself as 'too gullible', and said that they're all worried about that. She's certainly not money-hungry, because she wants you two to live in her house with her after her parents die. That's why she mentioned that renting was okay to you, Julia. She knew it'd only be temporary, because she'll soon have a nice home available. I'm surprised you didn't pick up on the amount of emotion she must've been feeling when she was talking about that?" "Ahh, sorry Mom. I didn't see it at all. I was probably too excited about being so successful with her, or too busy thinking about what to say next. I feel ashamed about that now. It must've been hurting her a great deal to talk about that. I'm surprised she could talk at all. I can't imagine how bad this must be for her." "She's had several months to get used to it and neither of her parents are visibly sick yet. She was also feeling some very good emotions about you and Mark, which I'll return to later. There's a lot more to come, so I'll press on. Incidentally, she reassured me that you two could have the master bedroom, and she'd stay in her current room. She doesn't want me to think that she's getting between my daughter and Mark. She places herself very much under the two of you, which confirms what you thought, Julia. You're good at seeing what it pleases you to see." Julia hung her head. -- "Because you're all school kids, she's expecting to pick up the tab for everything: rent in the temporary house, and then the running costs when you move into her home. She's expecting to carry you both financially, until, 'whenever Mark wants to get rich, like Julia said.' She's not thinking about money though. She never asked when Mark would get rich, how he would, or how much he'd earn. The only thing she wants is to have your support, and - more than anything - to have her parents see that she's going to be well looked after, so they can die in peace. That's very important to her, as you can imagine. -- "She freely admits to not being smart. She says her parents don't have a high opinion of her life-skills either. I don't know her well enough to tell how true that is, but judging by her attitude to you two, it probably is true. If you asked for it, I think she'd put her house into your names, so she's either extremely good judge of your characters, or more likely is dangerously trusting. Regardless of what you decide to do with her, I'm going to make sure her parents are aware that there are ways to prevent things like that happening until she's much older, twenty five say. I would've been sure that between two accountants they'd know about trusts, but Ava looked blank when I mentioned them. -- "In recent years she's had a number of boyfriends, none with any meaning beyond fun, which is not unreasonable for a teenage girl. When her parents were diagnosed they sat her down and had a talk with her about finding someone good as fast as she could, ideally so they could see her safely married before they passed away. If not married, then well on the way to that. More than anything, they put a lot of weight on her finding someone 'good'. They worry about her being so young and lacking in life-skills. -- "Being methodical people, they sat down and drew up lists of what she should look for, where to look, etc. They're not impressed by her friends from the running club, as her prior experiences have mostly been with guys from there, and they've all been predominately physical relationships. They give her a lot of latitude, even spoil her, but that's not the sort of relationship they want her in now. School is the only other place where she spends much time. From what she was saying, her parents value intelligence highly. They suggested to her that she identify the smart guys at school and study them. They were very systematic, listing several things she should look for. They preferred a senior, for example. He'd be young, but still a year closer to being an adult than a boy from her own grade. Social ability measures like the number of friends, the number of social interactions, maturity in various ways, etc. Also academic ability, sports ability, and other measures. The details don't matter. -- "In the course of doing this 'research', Ava discovered Mark. In short, she increasingly fell for him, but was also greatly confused by him. I'll skip most of the details she gave me. Two examples were first that Mark was ridiculously young for someone to guide her life in the important years following her parents' deaths, but he was doing 11th grade and her parents had deemed 11th graders acceptable. Mark also even seemed more mature than most of the guys in her classes and he's certainly more intelligent than them, so she had some confusing results to think about. Second example: She also couldn't understand why you didn't have any real friends, Mark. You'd skipped a grade so lost contact with your old friends, but you weren't looking to make new ones or keeping up with the old ones at lunchtimes. For that reason you appeared to be socially inept, except that she could see that you were the opposite of that. You weren't outgoing, but you had no trouble talking to people, and people seemed to like talking to you. You were frequently kind and considerate too, which is no small thing in a teenage boy. So Ava went around in circles, getting nowhere except more and more interested in you. None of the other guys she studied captured her interest the way you did, but you didn't make sense, and she didn't know how to explain you to her parents, so she said nothing. -- "She was very impressed when you stood up to that Annette girl. You know the one I'm talking about?" I nodded. "But Julia was all over you from the moment you returned to school, stalling Ava. She showed her parents a long newspaper article about you, telling them that she liked the boy it was about. They read it, and made favorable comments about you, which encouraged her interest in you. Her parents were also starting to express concern about the time that was passing. -- "Then you won the 10k race. Apparently she's quite heavily into running, and that 'blew her away.' Your genius is more important according to the criteria her parents have given her, but winning that race out of the blue stunned her. She decided it was make-or-break time: she had to make a try for you, and when she failed, she would move on to someone else regardless of her fascination with you. She said she asked you out, 'and nothing has been normal ever since.' You and Julia did your tricks on her, and turned her life upside-down. None of which she could tell her parents. -- "Julia also launched 'The New Mark' onto the school: new clothes, new behaviors, lots of girls, lots of sex. That's blown Ava away even more. Those measures that her parents told her to use to find a good man, that you used to do poorly on, Mark, like the number of friends, have been turned upside-down too. Ava told me that she now realizes that the reason you didn't have many friends was that school kids were too far below you. She's seen you spend just a few hours with a girl and then that girl worships the ground you walk on, and she's seen how popular you are with so many girls. She was particularly impressed by the love between you and your sisters. You can imagine how sensitive she is to that, and how much she wishes she had sisters now! -- "Mark tops the scale on virtually every measure her parents gave her, so subjectively and objectively Mark destroys all the possible opposition; not that he has any, because Ava isn't looking at anyone else now. Every time she turns around Mark is doing something new and incredible, like everything she heard about Sunday's activities: bowling 300 with no practice, only needing one turn to finish 8-ball games, yet being such an incredible cautious gentleman with twenty five crazy, naked girls, and then - to quote her - 'fucking the crap out of Alexis' Ava thought that was very funny. -- "It's critically important you two understand the depth of her feelings, but I'm sure I don't need to go on any further. Ava worships Mark, and knows Mark is the best guy anyone will ever meet. She repeatedly called him a 'superman'. She came here tonight having decided two things: from now on all she was going to do is try to be in a relationship with you two, and to totally give up on even thinking about finding a boy for herself the way her parents want. She decided those things believing that she was never going to be able to explain any of this to her parents, and that she would be disappointing them. She knew she was right to come, because she knows how incredible Mark is, and she was willing to pay the price of letting her parents die disappointed with her. If nothing else does, that should tell you how much she feels for Mark. -- "With all the pain that's causing her, the urgency and pressure that's on her, and with her whole life being in a serious mess that she's got no ability to control; the first thing that Julia told her tonight was that 'Mark understands EVERYTHING'. Then you proved it to her by telling her that there would be a ceremony in which Mark would commit to support and care for her. You even threw in a bonus for her, because she trusted you totally when you said that Mark can explain all of this to her parents. If I was given to understatement, I'd say she thought tonight was working out very well for her! -- "She's yours, Julia, just the way you wanted. All you have to do is support her through both of her parents' ugly, agonizing, cancer deaths, and for several years thereafter. Or if you don't want to do that, having convinced her that she will never meet anyone as good as Mark ever again, and having encouraged her to devote her mind, heart and soul to Mark, you can break up with her and send her home. The choice is yours. She's upstairs now, waiting for Mark to go up so she can make her commitment to him." There was stunned silence for several seconds. I tried to think of what to say, if you can call the unproductive, incoherent, panicky circles my minds were racing in, "thinking". Nothing worth saying emerged. Particularly not worth saying were my thoughts about whether my ki-healing would be strong enough to cure Ava's parents. For a moment I had a wild hope it would be, and then I realized I was being stupid. My ki is about five times stronger than Sensei's. If it was possible for me to cure cancers as deadly as Ava's parents had, then people like Sensei would be curing damn near every other type of disease, especially if a few of them got together to help one person. Teams of Aikidoka could make millions of dollars curing rich people, there'd be huge stories about it, and Aikido would be far better known than it was. Sensei had even discounted kiatsu being able to help cancer, and if he didn't think his ki could help, mine wasn't going to be able to cure two people's virulent cancers. I made a mental note to research kiatsu more though, just in case. Prof asked Vanessa, "As bad as that?" "Probably worse. She's a gullible girl, and vulnerable too." More silence. In my case, also more unproductive mental panic. Julia appeared to be thinking intensely. Prof and Vanessa just seemed to be doing nothing other than waiting for Julia to speak, which confused me. And I was feeling incredibly uncomfortable from not knowing what was going on, and what the fuck we were going to do with this disaster. After a couple more seconds, I shifted my position, but Julia didn't respond so I weakly cleared my throat. That didn't work either, so I said, "Ahh, Julia. What are we going to do?" Vanessa said, "Don't worry about it, Mark. This is Julia's responsibility." I looked at Prof, who just nodded. I looked at Julia. Julia didn't nod; she just said, "Yeah, this is all my doing." I was about to say something. I'm not sure what, but it was doubtless going to be useless. Prof beat me to it though, "Let Julia think it through, Mark. We've warned her several times not to get carried away or it'd cause problems. Now it has, and now she has to work out how best to take responsibility for her actions. When she's ready we'll listen to what she says, and we'll discuss it, but it's important that she does the best she can first." Prof and Vanessa seemed quite relaxed, which was bizarre. And enviable. As instructed, I sat in silence. I did, at last, manage to start thinking a little coherently. I could clearly think of the disasters both alternatives represented. I had no problem at all thinking of many, many things we should not have done. After another minute, Julia spoke. "I can't think of any way of supporting her without Mark being substantially involved. Can any of you?" I shook my head. Prof and Vanessa indicated they couldn't either. Probably they couldn't a hell of a lot better than I couldn't, because I was totally lost. Julia turned to me and said, "Mark, I owe you a huge apology. I made commitments in your name without knowing what I was committing you to. That was incredibly stupid of me, and I apologize profusely for that." Vanessa said, "Mark's struggling to follow Julia, so give him some examples. And, 'Good girl, ' by the way. So far you're on the right track." Julia said to me, "I promised her you'd explain everything to her parents, even though I didn't know anything about her relationship with her parents, and I knew you couldn't do it yourself. I also told her that you'd look after her in return for her commitment. You didn't know I was saying that, and I committed you to something that'll take several years, and a couple of them are going to be very unpleasant. At the most I should have said that I would commit to support her and that I hadn't talked to you about it so I couldn't indicate either way what you'd think." I was starting to get my head around the current topic. I still had no idea what to do about Ava, but I was starting to understand Julia's apology. I said, "Julia, when you told us what you'd said to Ava, I didn't object to anything. I'm sure I wouldn't have objected had I been standing right beside you at the time. As far as I'm concerned you speak for me. God knows you've done it so many times that have worked out wonderfully for me. You've brought me many good things that I could NEVER have brought myself, especially Carol, for goodness sake! I can't say I understand what we're going to do with Ava, but I'm still going to stand beside you. When I know you're doing things for me, I can't just take the good and run away to leave you with the bad. That'd be silly. Well not 'silly', but you know what I mean. It'd certainly be wrong. I think I heard somewhere that we're supposed to take the responsibilities for our actions, so I think I'll do that." "Good boy," praised Vanessa. Julia hugged my arm fiercely, saying, "Thank you. I did a very bad thing, you know. Several bad things." I had the answer ready for that, as I'd been wishing I'd made a bigger deal in my last speech about how good getting Carol for me was, so I said, "I'll let you know when all your bad things add up to the good you did getting me Carol. You're nowhere near there yet." Vanessa asked, "Mark, do you understand the consequences of your decision? What is going to happen now?" "Umm. I'm standing next to Julia. Whatever we do, we do together. Oh, I just realized that drags Carol into this too. She never agreed to that. Didn't I just do the same bad thing Julia did?" Vanessa answered, "Not really. Ava is so focused on you that she won't notice whether Carol is there or not. So Carol can join in to help you if she wants, or leave if it all gets too much for her. Knowing Carol though, I think she'll be a good help." Julia exclaimed, "That's right! I never thought of that. I LIKE our marriage! It really works well." Vanessa said, "I agree it has merits. Especially once one of you learns not to make too many thoughtless commitments. Let me back up a little. Mark, you said 'Whatever we do, we do together.' Do you understand what it is that you are about to do?" "Umm. I thought Julia had just apologized to me, and now we are about to work out what to do about Ava. That's right, isn't it?" Julia said, "No. There isn't any choice about what to do about Ava. We have to go upstairs and do the commitment ceremony she's waiting for." "We do? Wow. I didn't see that. That means helping her when her parents die, and all that?" "Yes it does." "That's BIG! That's going to last for years! That's not playing around with girls, the way we normally do. This is serious, and it's going to be VERY painful?" "Yes it is. But we're not doing it alone, Mark. Mom and Dad will help. Carol will help. I'm sure your parents will too." "They will?" I looked at Prof and Vanessa. Prof said, "Of course. Parents support their children. There's another reason too. Vanessa and I knew Julia was getting carried away in many ways about her life with you, and we decided that we'd warned her enough and we had to let her make mistakes so she'd learn. We could have reined her in, but we chose not to, so we have to take some responsibility for that decision too. We weren't expecting something quite so long-lasting and important, but such is life. It's not all bad, as she sounds like a nice girl. It'll be good to help her." Vanessa said, "Yes, that was my next point. We'll go upstairs shortly, but before we do I want to give you some positive things to think about: -- "I talked to Ava while she was very emotional, so I'm sure that what I saw was real. I feel confident in saying she's fundamentally a very nice girl. Managing her will be easy because of her respect and worship for you. If you tell her to do something, she will. You've got no idea how many parents of teenagers wish they had that power, haha. -- "Financially she can easily pay her own way, and she's a fit, healthy, happy 17-year old. It's not like she's a baby that needs constant attention. Her next birthday will make her a legal adult. The amount of effort she'll need from you will be minimal. You'll be able to leave Ava alone for days, if you wish. Not when her parents' situation is at its worst, but for most of the time you'll have her you will. -- "Julia valued Ava for various reasons and purposes. You got your wish Julia, in spades! So you're getting even more value now, as she's so committed to you. -- "I won't go on. My feeling is that this'll work out well. It'll be good for you, you'll have fun, you'll be proud of yourselves, and many years from now you'll sit back and be happy that Julia made the mistake she did. It appears that a good thing is happening, even if for the wrong reasons. That's not a good way to go through life, Julia, so you need to think about your mistakes, but I believe you'll end up celebrating this mistake. Ava will take some of your time and cause you some difficult emotions, but I believe she'll pay you back more than she takes. You can go upstairs to meet her with smiles on your faces and happy hearts. -- "Katelin is due in one minute, and from what I've heard I imagine she won't be late, so I suggest you go upstairs immediately and tell Ava it's all going to happen. I'll greet Katelin and get her settled in front of a DVD, then everyone else will come upstairs. I'd like the whole family, including The Boys, to witness her give herself to Mark. I suggest her kneeling to Mark is still a good idea, but nude is probably not. I know there is symbolism in it other than sex, but there's also symbolism in allowing her to retain her clothes..." {Ding, Dong}. (From the doorbell, not Vanessa.) "You two head upstairs, and we'll come up when we can. The Boys are lurking in the hallway outside your room, Julia, in case Ava tried to leave or anything we wouldn't want at this stage, so when you see them please send them down. Prof, can you tell them what's going on? Just so they have some appreciation of what they'll be witnessing. The rest we'll fill in later. I'll let Katelin in." ------- Chapter 128: Ava's Commitment Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) Julia and I shot up to Julia's room, the teapot completely forgotten. Ava was sitting on the bed, with a face containing several emotions. A dominant one was worry, and I didn't want her to worry for a second longer than she had to, so I said what I'd thought of on the way up, "We're going to do this even better than Julia said before, Ava. Not only are Julia and I going to support you, but all of Julia's family want to be here to witness it, and to show you that they'll provide you with support too. We don't want you to be naked, so you'll be doing it just as you are now." We hadn't discussed that on the way up, but I was using my Lordly prerogative. It wasn't often that I'd be using it to keep clothes on a girl, but this was definitely one such event. Worry was no longer a dominant emotion on Ava's face. "REALLY?" squealed Ava. "Absolutely. I'm looking forward to it." I figured this was one of those situations like not saying "Eww" when you went down on a girl. There are times you have to show enthusiasm, whether you feel it or not. In this case, "not": I had zero expectation that this would work out as well as pussy licking had. I was actually terrified of being around Ava when her parents were dying and for the following months, as I hate to see people in pain and I expect I'll be totally useless at helping her handle it. I had time for my thoughts to ramble because Ava was all over me, expressing her joy and love. This was the first time she'd seen me since she'd arrived this evening, and my absence must have been bothering her greatly. She was showering me with appreciative kisses and expressions of joy and love. I was happy to hug and kiss her back, and to say nice things, but I couldn't say "I love you" back to her. It's a hell of a weird phrase, as it felt wrong to say it and it felt wrong to NOT say it. How is that logically possible? (It involved a girl.) After expressing her joyous appreciation of me for a minute or so, Ava pulled Julia into a three-way hug and started expressing appreciation to her too. Julia got several "thank yous" and even some "I love yous", but not so emotionally as mine had been and still were. We let Ava express herself while she slowly unwound. It was fair to say that tonight was a VERY big deal for her. Eventually the excitement and relief had wound down, and she started talking in sentences more than two or three words long. Among her other sentences, she said, "I was so worried. It was taking so long and I..." I replied automatically, "Sorry about that, Ava. That was my fault." I'd gotten about 80% of the way through that before I realized what I was saying. It was my absence that Ava was talking about, and it seemed automatically obvious for me to apologize for it. God knows I was feeling sorry for all sorts of other reasons, so I had to apologize for something, and this was simply the first opportunity. There was nothing bad about the subject, or the words per se, but at the 80% mark I realized I was contradicting the "Mark knows everything" theme we'd had before. Then I realized that our (I will say "our", Julia's AND my) arrogance had gotten us in into this mess, so I did finish the sentence as intended. -- I was thinking about the messy, accidental consequences of my not being all-knowing, as I was advertised to be, and decided to add, "I didn't know your parents were sick." I wanted to use it to explain why I'd been absent for so long - which I was truly sorry for because I could easily imagine how much it must've worried Ava - and to give us a reason for why the ceremony was going to change. I also realized that it was a little dig at her for not telling me about their sicknesses earlier. Which made me wonder how different this mess would've been if she'd mentioned her parents sicknesses to us a day or two ago. How could she think I "knew everything" if she didn't tell me this! I could create colored light blobs, not read minds! I had to cut that train off thought off, because I could feel myself getting angry. Let's hope Vanessa is right about this mess turning out well, because I was scared me shitless. It was going to be horrific for her, and I had absolutely no experience comforting people, not even for minutes, let alone for months or years. I wanted to run away, but couldn't, and that could very easily make me angry at Ava. It wasn't fair to blame her for my being in this position now. Apart from anything else, her parents had told her not to tell anyone. This was Julia's and my doing, simply because we'd been too greedy and had opened our mouths too wide (I considered the "we" was justified, even though only Julia had talked). I'd been thinking too long, so I quickly added, "When I found out your parents were sick, that made me realize that your commitment to me was even larger than I'd thought it was. We had to discuss how to make our response larger." I wasn't sure where I was going with this thought, and while I was sort of rambling, looking for a final point to make, one of my minds reminded me, #1: #3: I said, "Ava, sweetie. We're no longer going to do our previous plan of me thrashing you with a belt, so you're not going to be lying prostrate on a bed unable to move. But we previously invited another girl here tonight thinking you would be out of action. Julia knows Katelin much better than I do, so what do you think we should do, Julia?" Julia said, "It's up to you, but this is what I think: Katelin's been waiting since Sunday to collect on the prize that you agreed to, she likes you a lot and she's very excited, so it'd be cruel to disappoint her. You should spend an hour or two making sure she's very happy. Ava and I will talk in your study while you're doing that. Ava understands that you're going to have lots of girls coming and going, and that's perfectly fine with her, just like it's perfectly fine with me. Ava's going to be spending more time with you than almost any other girl, because you're accepting her commitment, so she's not going to miss out in the long run. I'm sure there will be some nights she'll be begging you to let her have some rest. Right Ava?" "{Giggle}. I wish I had begged for a rest the LAST time. Mark, I will do anything you want tonight. Or any night. Or day too, haha. Just tell me. Don't worry about me tonight. Just do as much as you want with Katelin. I'm very happy already." Julia hugged Ava, saying, "Isn't she wonderful?" Then continued, "Mark, just have sex with Katelin as much as you want, then come and get us from the study. We'll push Katelin to one edge of the bed and the three of us will use the rest of it. Ava might not be in the mood for sex, or she might want to celebrate her pseudo-wedding wildly. We'll let Ava choose depending on how she feels at that time. Katelin can do whatever she wants: join in, lie there with her eyes open or closed, or go hide in the study. That's her choice, although she won't be able to monopolize you because most of your attention should be on Ava. You promised to sleep with Katelin overnight, so when you've finished with us, we'll go get her from the study if she went there. Then we sleep - the bed's big enough for the four of us. In the morning, after your studying, you can have sex with whoever you want. It'd be nice to give Katelin a pleasant 'Good Morning', so she can go to school with a smile on her face, but that's up to you. I'm sure Ava and I would like to go to school smiling too." #2: We all agreed it was a good plan, especially because Ava looked happy. Her happiness had to come first because this was a very important evening for her. With Ava so happy, the boinking sounded good. It'd also make Katelin's stories to the lunchtime crowd tomorrow rather interesting. Ava particularly enjoyed cracking a couple of jokes about the surprises Katelin was going to get tonight. Julia added to Ava, "Imagine how she's going to talk about it at lunch tomorrow." I wasn't surprised Julia had thought of that. Julia's comment set Ava's laughter off again. Ava was in a very good mood so laughed easily. After a couple of silly suggestions about what Katelin might say, Ava asked, "Will I really spend a lot more time with Mark than other girls, the way you said, Julia?" Julia said, "Yes, you will. That's a consequence of Mark's accepting your commitment. I hope you're not asking because you want to compete with the other girls?" "Oh no! I didn't mean that! I just meant that I'd be spending so much time with Mark. I can't believe how lucky I am." After a small pause. "Mark could spend his time with a LOT of girls, if he wanted, couldn't he?" "Of course," nodded Julia. "I'm sure he will too." "Yeah, but he's going to spend a lot of time with me. That's amazing." Another little pause, then, "But why would he want to be with me when he can be with so many other girls? Some of them..." "Ava," interrupted Julia. "That's a 'Why' question. You are questioning one of Mark's decisions." "Oh no! I'm sorry. I never meant to..." "That's okay," interrupted Julia again. "You haven't made your commitment yet, and no one's angry about it. I'm just pointing it out to you, to help you get better at stopping them in the future. I can tell you the answer if you want? It's a very easy answer." "Why? Oh no! - I said 'why' again." "Haha. Relax Ava. I asked you to. You don't have to be afraid of doing anything Mark and I ask you to do. The reason Mark's going to accept your commitment, and agree to spend a lot more time with you than normal, is because he thinks you're a lovely person and he likes you very much. It's pretty simple, isn't it?" "Really? You like me, Mark?" I answered, "Ava, sweetie. You wouldn't be here if I didn't like you. In fact, you wouldn't even be here if all I did was like you. You're here because I like you VERY MUCH." That set off another round of hugging, sweet statements to each other, and the like. Julia was the first to say something substantial, "Ava, yes you'll spend much more time with Mark than other girls will, but you still have to be very careful not to waste his time, get in the way of what he wants to do and cause problems for him, and all the other things we talked about." Ava tried to protest, but Julia kept on going, "I know, I know. But there are a couple of points I have to make. First - and I'm sure you know this already - while you can, you should spend as much time as possible with your parents." Julia wasn't going to stop Ava's response this time, "Oh YES! They're both SO WONDERFUL. I'm going to..." Seeing the predictable path Ava was on, Julia jumped in, "Ava, tonight's a night for HAPPINESS, not for SORROW. My point is that Mark and I don't expect you to spend a lot of time with us like a normal girlfriend would. You should spend most of your time with your parents. We will BOTH be available for you when you need us though. If you're having a tough time, especially in a few months, and you need us, then we'll be there for you. Another thing that will happen is that all three of us - you, me and Mark - will be spending quite a lot of time with your parents." "You will?" "Sure. That's very important. They have to see that you are very happy with us." The rest of the Williams family came in. It'd taken them longer than expected, but maybe Katelin had needed some reassurance, or something. Julia motioned them that she wanted to finish this off first, then she continued to Ava, "They have to get to know us well enough that they trust us to look after you when they've gone. And we need to talk with them about what their dreams and desires for you are, how they want you to be brought up, any advice they can give us about you, and many other parental issues. Mark and I will be taking over from them, so we need to know what they want us to do." "Wow. I never thought of all that..." #1: #3: (my four minds) " ... You're taking this seriously, aren't you?" continued Ava. Julia answered, "Ava, darling, I spent a lot of time tell you how seriously important Mark is, and how serious and total your commitment to him has to be. You are offering yourself to us that seriously, so we cannot be less serious back." Tonight was a night for happiness, according to what Julia had told Ava, although I was still trying to come to terms with the scary size of what we'd committed ourselves to. With females, happiness often comes with tears, starting right now. Fortunately Prof and I both had hankies immediately available. Vanessa said, "Well-spoken Julia. Ava, you can be very proud of yourself." "{Sniff}. I can?" "Your parents wanted you to find someone to care for you after they've gone. Not only have you found someone, you've found TWO someones. They'll both be exceptionally good at looking after you, better than anyone your parents expected you to find. Your mother and father are going to be very surprised initially, but they're going to become extraordinarily proud of you." While Ava was reacting to that, Vanessa and Julia quickly exchanged a couple of funny faces with each other. I was trying to decipher them when Julia told her Mom, "Ava knows all about Katelin, and all his other girlfriends." With a little bit of extra emphasis, Julia added, "That he met at school." It took me a while, but I figured that was a hint that Ava didn't know that Carol was one of my "other girlfriends". -- Julia continued in a normal voice, "The plan is that we'll have the ceremony, which will be very quick. Ava and I will have some great girly talks in the study while Mark pounds Katelin into submission. Then he'll come get us, and we'll come back here and Mark, Ava and I will celebrate her commitment. Then we'll all sleep here. It's entirely appropriate that Ava waits for Mark to finish with Katelin first, as she has to learn that whatever Mark wants to do goes first, whether it's having sex with another girl, his studies, or anything else." "Oh, I already know THAT! That's EASY!" Robert and Andrew exchanged a look, and shook their heads in amazement. Vanessa said, "Good girl. I had a slightly different plan in mind though, Julia. I was thinking that after the ceremony, Prof and me, you and Ava should go over to the Andersons, introduce Ava to them, and talk about the situation." Julia agreed, "That's an excellent idea, Mom! Actually they've already met Ava when Ava and I spent the night there with Carol a few nights ago, but they need to be told what's happened and doing that in person would be best." Before Ava could work out how to react, Vanessa said, "Good, that's agreed then. You'll probably be away an hour or so. Prof and I will go in a separate car, because we want to stay longer and discuss our plans for the dinner party for Ava's parents." Julia said, "That's great. Thanks, Mom." | Ava asked, "Dinner party?" Vanessa answered, "Yes, Ava. There's going to be quite a large group of us for your parents to meet, so a dinner party would be the best way to introduce your parents to everyone. It'd be much nicer to do it in a friendly way like that." "Well, yeah. I just didn't realize so much was going to be happening so quickly." "The sooner your parents meet and get to know us, the better. We want you and them to stop worrying about your future as soon as possible." "Wow." The pause that followed gave me the gap I'd been waiting for. I jumped in with, "What happens to Katelin when we all go to my place?" Vanessa said, "You don't have to come, Mark. We won't be away long, and Julia and I can explain our side of it perfectly well. Ava can explain about her parents and their cancers too." "Umm..." from Ava. Vanessa said, "Ava, when we have our dinner party, the main topic we'll talk about is going to be how to support you after your parents are gone." "Oh. It's just that..." "Yes, I know, they asked you not to tell anyone. Mark and Julia aren't after your money, Ava. No matter what house you live in, they will pay their full share. Probably more than their full share, to be sure they're not costing you anything. They won't take a dollar from you. ALL of that money is yours. Prof and I insist on that, not that we need to with Mark and Julia. So the reason your parents gave you for keeping it quiet no longer applies. Plus I'm sure they always expected you to eventually tell the guy you found and his family. It just happened now rather than later. -- "Back to Mark. Mark, you don't have to come. If you had nothing else to do, then I'd expect you to come, but you've got Katelin waiting downstairs. You shouldn't keep a girl waiting too long when she's come over to have sex with you; it's impolite! Haha." Julia joked, "I'm SURE you read that in an etiquette book somewhere, haha." During the laughter, I questioned, "But SURELY I have to speak to my parents. We're all taking on a long-term commitment with Ava. It's just WRONG that I'm not there..." "Actually, Mark," interrupted Vanessa, "as unusual as it seems, it is okay that you won't be there. It's strange, but it's not wrong. God knows there are plenty of other strange things going on, so what's one more!" Prof added, "You've made a commitment to Katelin, and you should keep your commitments, especially in front of Ava because you want her to know that you take commitments seriously. Plus the rest of us can fully explain everything to your parents, so we don't need your help with that." #1: Vanessa continued, "That's all settled then. Before the ceremony, I should be polite and make sure Ava knows the names of everyone here." Turning to Ava, Vanessa said, "Ava, we are the Williamses, and I am Vanessa. We call this old gentleman Prof, but his real name is Archibald." With a twinkle in her eye, Vanessa added, "That's a shameful family secret, so if you tell anyone you'll be in BIG trouble, haha." Prof extended his hand, and said, "It is a pleasure to meet you, Ava, and to be able to help Mark and Julia support you." Ava took his hand, then said, "Thank you, umm ... What do I call you?" Vanessa said, "The last time Julia called him Archibald, she was 10-years old, and he tickled her until she wet herself. Do you want to take that risk?" Ava did not. "Haha. I think I should call him Prof. Thank you, Prof." Prof answered, "Wise decision, Ava." Vanessa said, "I don't believe you've ever meet these two troublemakers. This is Robert, and this is Andrew. These are your two new brothers." Ava exclaimed, "Brothers! Really..." Andrew said, "Gee, is that right? Ava is just the sort of girl I like, and I was thinking of asking her out on a date." I was shocked! I never expected either of The Boys to do something like that. Andrew knew Ava was one of my lovers too, so he was poaching on my territory! Admittedly I had a lot of territory, but still! And what about Sophia? I thought they were in a serious relationship. Julia was surprised, but didn't react nearly as much as Ava, who stepped back, looked at me guiltily, looked back at Andrew, and then said, "Oh no. I could never do..." Ava's speech trailed off. Vanessa, who one of my minds had noticed hadn't been surprised at all, said, "Do you mean 'you could never date another boy, ' Ava?" Ava, looking at me happily, saying, "No. I'm Mark's now. I'll never date anyone else." Vanessa said, "I think you've got the wrong idea, Ava. Mark may disagree with me... ," #1: " ... but my understanding was that you were about to commit to obeying Mark, and he was taking responsibility for supporting you. Included in what Mark and Julia were agreeing to, is that they will help you develop your life-skills. To help you and support you until you're smarter about life and better able to look after yourself. I remember you telling me that was exactly what you wanted them to do for you. To effectively become your parents after your own pass away. You did ask for that, didn't you?" "Umm, yes, but..." "No 'buts' Ava. From today on, Mark and Julia are going to start behaving toward you in ways that parents would. They're going to worry about your future, about your behavior, and especially about your misbehaviors. They'll even tell you off if you fool around too much in school - and they'll be there to keep an eye on you! Boy, are you going to have to be careful, haha. They're also going to be your lovers and your friends, but the role they going to take most seriously is that of parent. You are asking them to help and support you, so that's what they're going to do. The sex is a side benefit, and even the friendship is a side benefit. They will mostly concentrate on helping you grow. -- "I'm sure that your real parents, if they'd stayed healthy, wouldn't want you to live at home for the rest of your life and to never date any boys ever again. Parents want their children to experience the world, to meet people, learn about them, have fun, etc. That's what being a good parent includes. I am sure that Mark and Julia will do exactly the same for you. You probably won't date anyone else for a year or two, because you should concentrate on spending time with your mother and father. But when the time comes, and with Mark and Julia's approval, it will eventually be time for you to be open to dating again. Then, when a boy asks you for a date, you can say yes if you want. -- "This is very important, Ava, so listen carefully. You are NOT marrying Mark and Julia. You have asked them for their help and support, and they will do their very best to give it to you. They will try to help you grow, and you must also try to help yourself. You cannot refuse to grow up. Nor can you live your entire life attached to just Mark and Julia. You have to learn how to get out into the world and fend for yourself. Most likely you will never meet any man like Mark, but Mark is not yours. You will eventually reach a point in your life when you should have someone of your own; to be married to, to have children and build a life with. That's what good parents want to see their children do. Mark and Julia will always be your friends, and possibly they might also always be your lovers if you marry a man who can understand and accept that, but they won't always be the center of your life. They're not agreeing to that. They're agreeing to help make you stronger, which specifically requires that you not depend on them forever. Do you understand that, Ava?" "Yes, I think I do. What we're doing tonight is much more complicated than I thought. I didn't understand ANY of this. I'm not very..." Julia said, "Ava, sweetie, NO ONE understood all of this. None of us have ever done this before. We're doing our best, and making it up as we go." Ava asked, "But what about Mark. You understand all of this, don't you, Mark?" #1: "I'm very smart, Ava, but being smart doesn't help me when I don't know things. I didn't know your parents were sick, and that changed EVERYTHING. I'm doing my best, like everyone else." "Oh." Ava stopped to think about the consequences of that. Julia said, "Mark's incredible, Ava. He's even more incredible than you know - because you've only known him a little while - but he's only human, and humans have limitations." Ava was looking worried, so Julia went into 'sales mode', "But think about all the incredible things you know he is. He IS a genius; you've seen how he does two grades at once. He's an incredible runner and incredible lover. He's also kind and caring, so the perfect guy for you to ask for help and support. Your parents are going to be very impressed with him and very proud of you. You can be PROUD of yourself! You now have the best man in the world looking after you. I hope your parents will be happy with that, because it's going to be very, very hard for you to improve on the best! Haha." Ava was looking happy again. Vanessa resumed, "So you understand that this is not a marriage. Mark and Julia will be helping your help yourself to grow up as successfully as possible, with everything that includes, such as dating at the appropriate time?" "I understand, um, Vanessa. Thank you." "Good girl. I'll tell you an image that I find quite funny to think about. Imagine a couple of years from now, when the three of you are living together with Mark and Julia in their role as your parents. A boy asks you out. You tell him he has to come home to meet your 'parents' first, haha. Imagine how surprised he's going to be when he gets sat down in front of Mark and Julia! And then imagine the grilling they're going to give him. They're both so smart that the poor boy - even if he's older than them! - is going to be in big trouble if he has bad intentions for you. Haha. I know you're too old to be treated that way, but I still find it very funny to think about." The rest of us chuckled a little, but I suspected that image was humorous mostly for Vanessa. Or maybe it was just intended to distract Ava. Don't ask me; I was barely keeping up with this conversation, let alone understanding its nuances. Julia said, "Ava, there's one more important reason why you may want to start dating again. Mark is a very caring, very giving guy, but he's known you for less than a week. As much as he likes you, he does not love you." "Oh." "It's not as bad as that. He obviously likes you a HUGE amount, because he's promising to spend so much of his time with you over many years. That's HUGE, Ava! There's no other girl in school, apart from his sisters and me, that he'd do that for. That makes you very, very special. It's always possible that he might fall in love with you. You can never tell what's going to happen in the future, so who knows? But tonight, the best Mark and I can do is to promise to help and support you. We can't promise to fall in love with you, because we don't have any control over that. That's why, in two or three years, you might want to start looking for a man who will love you." "Oh. Umm. Maybe I should..." Vanessa said, "Ava, sweetie, when your parents get very sick, you want to have Mark and Julia with you, don't you?" "Yes." "Then that's who you'll have." Julia said, "We WANT to be with you then, Ava. Not just then, also before and after. You're forgetting one very important thing." "{Sniff}. What?" "You're going to be WORKING for us! I've already got several things for you to do - that I've already told you about - and there are going to be a whole heap of more jobs for you. You're going to be running around in circles trying to keep up with all the things we want you to do. Mark is a very busy guy, so you're going to be busy too. Not to mention all the sex we are going to use you for! There are THREE of us: Mark, Carol and me. All three of us want to get plenty of you! Believe me, YOU are not taking advantage of US. We're getting the best side of this deal. You're going to be doing so many useful, fun things for us, that I'm going to be embarrassed about how little we do for you. Looking after you through your parents' sicknesses and helping you get better at life, is the LEAST we can do for you. You are going to be so useful to us, and so much fun, that I refuse to let you get away. I WANT you to be with us, so no more trying to get away from all our work, okay?" "You talk a lot of nonsense, Julia. You're just making it sound good." Julia said, "Let me tell you something my mom said to us downstairs, just before we came up here to talk with you. Mom said that Mark and I would one day, many years from now, look back on today and be very thankful that Ava joined our lives. We are NOT going to let you go now. You love Mark and you should be with him for the next few years at least, and we truly want you to be with us. That's the end of that topic, okay?" "{Sniff}. You're very nice, Julia. You're all very nice." Vanessa said, "You're very nice too, Ava. Wipe your eyes, take a deep breath, then I'll carry on." After Ava had carried out her instructions, Vanessa continued, "This differs from a marriage in another way. In a marriage the husband and wife should not have any secrets from each other. With you and Mark, it's perfectly okay for him to have secrets from you, but not the other way around. He's the boss; you are not." "Sure. Mark's the boss all right! I don't want to know any of his secrets, and I don't think I have any. Not any important ones, just silly things." "I'll say a little more though, Ava, just to make sure you understand. If Mark chooses to tell you some things, or chooses not to, you can't complain about it. He's the boss, so he decides, okay?" "Sure. That's easy." "Let's say you caught a glimpse of something really interesting which made you very curious. If you ask Mark what it was and he says it's a secret, then that's the end of it. No asking him again, no asking Julia, no snooping. Mark says it's a secret, so it stays a secret. You do nothing and say nothing. Okay?" "That's fine. I don't care about any secret stuff. I just want the relationship with Mark and Julia that we talked about before." "That's very smart of you. I'll remind you that until recently you did have one secret: your parents' sickness. If you'd already been committed to Mark, you would've had to tell him about that." "But, but my parents told me not to tell." Her face fell. "I am NOT saying Mark's more important than your parents. You parents are very, very special people to you, and I'll never try to make them seem less important to you than they are." That revived Ava's spirits. "Your parents told you to tell nobody, but they didn't know Mark. If your parents had known Mark, they would've wanted you to tell him, so telling him was really the best thing to do. If Prof and I got sick we might tell our children not to tell anyone, but we'd definitely want them to tell Mark. Mark is special. You know that. When you parents get to know Mark, especially when they see how much support he and Julia are giving you, they'll be glad he knows." "Oh yeah. That makes sense." "Remember that your parents told you why you had to keep it secret: so guys wouldn't sweet-talk you for a few months to get your money. You know Mark's not that sort of guy, especially because if he wanted money he could go professional bowling, or professional soccer, or professional 8-ball, or professional running, or professional who knows what else. Just remember that Mark can keep secrets from you Ava, but not you from him. -- "Where was I in the introductions? Oh yes, I was just introducing Andrew who wondered about asking you for a date." Andrew said, "If you don't mind, Ava, I'd like to take that back. I've been thinking about it, and I've decided that I would far rather have you as a sister than anything else. Can we please be brother and sister from now on, instead of all that silly dating stuff?" Ava looked at me. I said, "Andrew's asking you, so it's your choice." Ava looked back at him, "Okay. Brother and sister. {Giggle}. I've never had a brother before." "Well you've got one now. I won't be like Julia and Mark, who are also your lovers and will be partially your parents. I'll just be your big brother. If some boy at school pulls your pigtails, you come tell me, and I'll go beat him up, okay?" "{Giggle}. I don't wear pigtails anymore." "Okay. How about if you have car troubles, you can call me and I'll help get them fixed." "Really? That happens sometimes, you know?" "That's what big brothers are for. We'll all give you our cellphone numbers, and you can call any of us if you need anything." "Wow, I never thought of any of you doing things like that EITHER! This is amazing. Thank you all so much." Andrew leaned down, and stage-whispered to her, "That's okay. I think you'll be a MUCH nicer sister than Julia. Sometimes she's VERY bossy!" Ava laughed and giggled at that, then agreed, "Yeah. She can be REAL bossy! I got in trouble with her a couple of times - before - and she was scary. But she's very, very nice." "That sounds like Julia: bossy and very, very nice. That's exactly how I've thought of her since she was old enough to talk." Vanessa resumed the introductions, "Ava, this is Robert." Robert put out his hand, saying, "Very pleased to meet you, Ava. I have no hesitation in saying that I am happy to have you as a sister immediately. The sooner the better. Shall I tell you my reason?" Ava can't have been too dumb, because she very cautiously said, "Okay?" "My car is very dirty." Ava didn't see the connection, and she had company. Robert let it draw out, but before anyone could speak he said, "Oh, I forgot you've not had any brothers before. Do you know the Big Brother Rules?" "Ahh, no?" "Oh. Okay, I'll explain. One of the Rules, number twenty three I think, is that younger sisters have to wash their big brother's car when it's dirty. Mine is dirty, like I said, so the sooner you're my sister, the sooner you can wash it." Ava looked surprised (which was hardly surprising), but also looked like she might agree. Julia saved her from it though, "Don't listen to him, Ava. There's no such thing as Big Brother Rules, let alone a car-washing rule number twenty three. He's a ratbag who's teasing you. I should've warned you about this. Having brothers can be good SOMETIMES, but not often! Mostly they're a real pain! I'd tell you to run away and hide from this family, but I need all the help I can get. Haha. The Boys are just teasing you. It's their way of welcoming you into the family." "Oh. That's very nice of them." Julia humorously exclaimed, "You can't tell them that! You'll only encourage them! You've got to tell them they're 'real pains', or 'ratbags', otherwise they get all big-headed and impossible. You and I are going to have to have some serious discussions about how to manage brothers. I'd better make this the very first new life-skill that I teach you, or you might spoil my brothers and undo all the hard work I've done over the years. Fortunately we've got some more sisters that can help us. Carol and Donna have their brother wrapped around their little fingers. I'll get them to help teach you 'Brother Management', haha." "More sisters? Carol and Donna too?" "Yes, you're going to have more brothers and sisters than you know what to do with. Seriously for a moment, Ava. We know we're not really your brothers or sisters, but it's our way of telling you that we'll all do what we can to help and support you, especially when your parents get sicker. You can treat my brothers as if they were your brothers, and you can treat Carol and Donna as your sisters. Carol's a bit different because she'll also sometimes be your boss, just like me. You remember that's one of the rules, don't you?" "Ahh, yeah. I remember now. That's fine with me, she's a nice girl." "You don't know Carol very well yet, but you'll find that she's even nicer than you think. She's actually a very important part of what goes on around here, as you'll come to see. Carol also treats this family as her own, and my brothers as her brothers. If she had a car, and it broke down, I'm sure she would call Andrew if she needed to. We're not sure what use Robert is - we're still trying to find a use for him - but if we find one I'm sure he'll do it for all three sisters: me, Carol and you." "I'm pretty good at opening jar lids," suggested Robert. "There you go!" declared Julia. "I knew he had to be good for something. If you have a particularly tight jar lid, then Robert's the brother you call for help. All of us here, including Robert, will also be pretty good if you're having a rough time about something and need someone to talk with. Or if you're finding it too difficult to drive yourself to the hospital safely, then one of us will help you. Or even simple things like your needing someone to help you with your homework next week. You wouldn't believe it to look at them, but Andrew and Robert are actually moderately intelligent. If you catch them at the right time, they can sometimes be smart for several minutes in a row." "{Giggle}. You tease your brothers a lot." "You forget that they're only boys, so most of the time they're not smart enough to notice." "Haha." Then, "Mark's a boy and he's VERY smart." "I know. He's WONDERFUL to tease! You and I are going to have a GREAT time teasing him. Are you ready to make your commitment now?" #1: #3: "Really?" asked Ava. "We're really doing it now?" Julia answered, "Unless you have any more questions?" "I don't have any questions; it's just that I can't believe it. Mark and you are really going to look after me? Through everything?" I spoke up as well, so that Julia and I both said, "Yes we are." "Wow." Pause. "I don't know what to do. What do I do?" Vanessa said, "I have a suggestion, unless you have something already planned, Julia?" "I don't have anything specific. There's been too much going on for me to think about it properly." I had the same problem, but I didn't bother telling them as I figured they knew already. Vanessa said, "I suggest something very simple, so Ava can carry the memory of it with her forever." "Oh yes!" agreed Ava. Vanessa said, "Ava, kneel in front of Mark, and take each of his hands in yours." Which we did. "What's your surname, Ava?" "West." "Okay. Say after me, 'I, Ava West, '" "I, Ava West," "'Offer Mark Anderson, '" "Offer Mark Anderson," "'Control over everything that is me, '" "Control over everything that is me," "'But never over any of my wealth.'" Ava looked at Vanessa and started objecting, but Vanessa insisted, "Say it, Ava. Mark won't let you leave it out." Ava looked at me, so I said, "Say it, Ava." Ava stumbled over it, but Vanessa re-prompted, and Ava got it the second time. Vanessa looked at me, and asked, "Do you accept Ava's offer, Mark?" It seemed appropriate to solemnly say, "I do." Looking at me still, Vanessa said, "Repeat after me Mark, 'I Mark Anderson, '" Julia interrupted, "I want in on this, Mom." "Of course. Stand beside Mark and take hold of one Ava's hands... , yes, that's it. Now both of you repeat after me, 'I, and-say-your-name, '" "I, Mark Anderson," | "I, Julia Williams," "Promise to the best of my ability," (we repeated it). "To help and support Ava West,"... "Through her parents' illnesses,"... "and to grow into a mature, capable, happy adult." Looking at Ava, Vanessa said, "Ava, do you accept Mark's and Julia's promises?" "Oh yes! I do!" ------- Chapter 129: Vanessa's Comments to Ava Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) Vanessa said, "Take a seat on the bed you three, because I'd like to make some brief comments to all of you, but mostly to Ava." We did so, Julia putting Ava in the middle so we could put our arms around her. "This exchange is based on the honor system. It requires trust, and without trust it is nothing. The three of you should strive to earn and retain the trusts of the others. The future is uncertain. Events may occur which make it extremely difficult for one or more of you to uphold your commitment. If that happens, honor requires that you do your best to abide by the spirit of the commitments. Your promises to each other are simple, and you don't need lawyers to tell you what you can or cannot do. Use your best judgment and your best intentions. -- "Lastly, and this is addressed to Ava only. Ava?" "Yes?" "You have committed everything that is you to Mark. Your body, your thoughts, your heart, even your hopes for the future. That would make Mark the ONLY purpose of your life. But to achieve what he has promised, Mark has to let you have back most of what you gave him. You would never grow into a happy adult if, for example, Mark did not let you have your own hopes for the future. You gave your life to Mark, and he has let you have most of it back, but Mark still has control over it, Ava. That's very important. He'll let you have your body most of the time, but if he wants it, it's his. If Mark told you to walk across the room and slap me in the face, you would." Ava recoiled from that idea. "Yes you would, Ava. If Mark ASKED you if you wanted to do it, you could tell him 'No.' But if he ORDERED you to, then you shouldn't even think about it. You should get up and do it. Mark has decided, and he's ordering his second body - which is you - to do what he wants. His own body's hand wouldn't refuse or argue with him, and you won't refuse or argue with him either. Do you understand that's how strong the commitment you've made is, Ava?" "Yes." Pause. "I have to do everything he says." "If Mark clearly orders it, yes. You have made a commitment. We all heard you, and everyone in this room takes commitments very seriously. If you break your commitment, we'd be extremely disappointed in you. We want to like you, but we'd like you a lot less if you broke your word. That includes Mark liking you a lot less. You don't want that, do you?" "Oh no. I want Mark to love ... LIKE me a lot." "It's perfectly all right for you to want Mark to love you. You love him, and we all know you want him to love you back. You should never hesitate to express your true feelings with any of us." "Okay." "Good girl. You'll get used to our openness. Back to Mark. Most of the time you'll treat each other normally. You'll tease him the way Julia does. You'll joke around, even argue lightheartedly. You'll be allowed to tell him you're busy or not in the mood when he asks you to do things. I'm sure you'll mostly do what he asks, because you'll want to, but that'll still be from your choice. But if he orders you, then you don't have any choice. The decision has been made and you have to do it. I know you understand that, but I'll give you an example. Have you ever spent time with a boy after your parents ordered you not to see him again?" Ava hung her head, and quietly confessed, "Yes. I wish I hadn't now." "I'm sure you'll be a very good daughter from now on, but my point is that if Mark orders you not to see a boy, then you'll absolutely obey him. You won't even think about disobeying him, no matter how wonderful you think the boy is. You will obey all of Mark's orders, even more than you obeyed your parents' orders. Do you know why Mark's orders are even stronger than those of your parents? I'll tell you right away that it's not because your parents are less important than Mark." "Umm. No?" "It's because you never gave your parents a commitment like you just gave Mark. You're old enough to make very adult decisions now, and you deliberately decided to give everything you have to Mark. You will obey Mark more than your parents because of the importance of that commitment. It's far, far more important than a marriage vow." "Wow. I never realized that." "It doesn't matter whether your realized it before or not. It's a done deal now, so you can't change it. That's two lessons about being an adult: you often can't take things back, and you have to take responsibility for your actions. Your commitment has been made, so all you can do is keep it or break it. I'm sure you'd be appalled if Mark and Julia tried to take back their promises to you. We'd ALL be appalled, and they'd be in a great deal of trouble with Prof and me. They can't take theirs back, and you can't take yours back. I'm sure you've seen Julia argue with Mark several times? Sometimes even push him around?" "Yes. A lot. Julia does nearly all the talking." "Mark lets her do that. In fact, he wants Julia to do that." "He does! Why? I'd NEVER talk with Mark the way Julia does sometimes!" "The reasons don't..." Julia interrupted. "Sorry Mom. Ava, that was a 'why' question. You were questioning one of Mark's decisions." "Oh, I was too. I'm very sorry, I didn't mean to..." Julia interrupted again, "Don't worry about it. The important thing is to completely drop it now. Carry on Mom, as if nothing had happened." Vanessa said, "Okay. I was saying Mark wants Julia to express her opinions, even if they disagree with his. That's one of the things Mark gave Julia back. Do you understand what I mean by that?" "No." "When Julia made her commitment to Mark, almost the same as the one you just made, he gave her back that part of herself." Ava looked at Julia in amazement, "You've done this too?" Julia could only nod because Vanessa kept speaking, "You don't think you're the only girl smart enough to want to make such a commitment to Mark, do you?" "I'm not smart." "Yes you are. You just gave your life to Mark. That was very smart." "Oh. Wow. Oh." Julia said, "We're sisters in more ways than you thought, Ava. Mark controls both of our lives." "Wow. This is AMAZING! I never thought of that EITHER, {giggle}. I don't think I thought of hardly ANYTHING, haha." Julia said, "Here's another surprise for you: There will be more sisters in the future too. More girls who commit themselves entirely to Mark." "More?" questioned Ava, frowning at the thought. Julia wasn't going to accept that frown. "Yes. Probably several more. I see you're not happy at that idea. How would you have liked it if I'd been unhappy at your joining me? Would you have liked it if I'd frowned and tried to keep Mark all to myself? Instead I opened my arms and welcomed you. I'm not selfish, and I know you're not either. You'd better not be, because you don't have any choice. I had no choice about your joining, and we both have no choice about any more girls. The decision is entirely Mark's. He's the boss, remember? -- "I AM glad you've joined me Ava. We will have fun together, I'm looking forward to helping you with your parents, and I'm looking forward to having your help when I am doing things for Mark. I'm also looking forward to having your help when I'm teasing my brothers and Mark, but that's just for our personal pleasure, haha. But our enjoyment is not the issue. If Mark decides to let another girl commit to him, then I'm not going to tell him he can't do it. Are you going to tell Mark he can't do something, Ava?" "He REALLY is the boss, isn't he? The big boss. Not just of me, like I thought, but even more than me?" "That's a good way of putting it, sweetie. Mark is the 'Big Boss', and he's going to get bigger too. Not because he eats so much, haha, but because more girls will come. I even think that there'll be one more girl quite soon. I don't think she'll be as committed as you and me; I think she'll just give her love to Mark, and Mark will accept it. Lots of girls say they love Mark, especially after they sleep with him, and he normally doesn't do anything about it, but I think he'll accept the new girl's. Even though she won't be as committed to Mark as we are, we will still accept her with open arms and do everything we can to make her happy. Even if we don't like her - which I'm sure won't be the case - but even if we don't, we will still try very, very hard to make her happy. Do you know why?" "No. I don't even know who she is!" "That doesn't matter. We will make her happy, whoever she is, because our real job is to make MARK happy. He wouldn't like it if she wasn't welcomed, so we will welcome her. I am welcoming you because Mark wants me to. The fact that I am VERY happy to have you join me is GREAT, but I'd welcome you anyway. My opinion doesn't matter once Mark decides something, just like your opinion doesn't matter. If Mark ordered either of us to go and slap my mom, we would do it, regardless of our opinions. If Mark lets another girl join him in some way - whether the same way as us, or a different way - then we do it, regardless of our opinions. Mark is the Big Boss about EVERYTHING to do with our lives." "I never thought of that EITHER! I just thought I was giving myself to Mark and you." "Yeah, I had the same surprise when I realized my life wasn't going to be just me and Mark together like a normal marriage. It's turned out surprisingly wonderful. You like that I'm your sister, don't you? That I'm going to help you when your parents get sicker, and help you become confident about living your own life successfully?" "Oh yes! That's going to be super-fantastic for me. I know you're going to be a HUGE help. I can't imagine how bad it would be without you. I'd be..." "Sorry to interrupt, but my point is that if you had Mark to yourself, like a normal couple, then I wouldn't be around to help you. Having me as an extra sister for you, makes your life a LOT better than it would be without me. Same for me. With you as an extra sister, you can help me, and that will make my life better. Having more sisters is GREAT! You frowned when I first mentioned it, but when Mark tells me he might add another girl, I say, 'Yippee!' More sisters means more girls who'll be able to help you when you need it, and it means more chances for you to do wonderful things to help them. There will be a LOT more love going around. I hope we end up with several girls, because that's going to be such an incredibly loving way to live our lives. Can you imagine living in a lovely house with several very loving friends." "That's AMAZING! There could be LOTS of us. {Giggle}, Mark's going to be VERY busy!" "Yeah, just as well he's so fit." "I'll say! Oh, I just thought that we won't all fit in my parents' house; it's not big enough for too many people." "Don't worry about that, there are many solutions. An easy one would be just to add a new room on one side - a new bedroom for Mark. A very big, new bedroom." "Haha. It'll have to be VERY big. With a GREAT, BIG bed. Boy, there's going to be a LOT of sex!" By the look of the smile on Ava's face, this was a very welcome development. "There certainly is!" Julia then suggested, "If there are lots and lots of girls, we could even buy the house next door and convert it into a HUGE dormitory. More sisters is good, but I hope Mark doesn't add that many too quickly. It'd take some getting used to." "Umm, Julia. I don't think I'll have enough money to buy the house next door." "We already said your money is your own. It's totally excluded from your commitment to Mark." "I know that, but I'm the only one who'll have any. If you want to build a new room or buy the neighbors, someone has to pay for it." "Sweetie, that's very generous of you, but we won't be touching your money. If we need money, we'll just ask Mark for it. He's the man of the house, and that's what men of the house are for. He can't just lie around all day having sex with all the girls; he's got to earn his keep! Haha." "But it'll be YEARS before he earns enough money to do what we've been saying." I knew a good way of answering Ava's concern, so I said, "Ava, how many years of practice does it normally take to be able to bowl 300 games? How much time training to win 10k races? Some things I can do VERY quickly. I'm sure that if we need some money, I should be able to get it. We don't want to touch your money, and we'll be fine without it." "But you're still at school. And next year too. Even if you get a job right after graduation it's going to take..." Prof interrupted, "Ava, as I understand things Mark is the boss. Correct?" "Sure. Definitely! The Big Boss, with lots of girls, haha. Oh, I just realized we're talking about all that in front of your family. My parents would've hit the roof by now!" Prof said, "It's fine with us, Ava. Julia never gave us a choice and we're used to it now, haha. My point about Mark being the boss is that it's the boss's job to make plans like where you live, how to pay for it, etc. It's Mark's responsibility, and he's already said he won't be using any of your money, so that's the end of that small part of it. Stop worrying about it, stop talking about it, stop thinking about it. Leave it to Mark." Ava looked frustrated. We could all see her wondering if she could ask just 'one more question'. Julia said, "Drop it, Ava. One of the consequences of having a boss is that sometimes he makes a decision while you still want to talk about it. You have to learn to accept his word. Mark has said it will be fine, and I'm sure it will be. Talking about it further just wastes his time and annoys him. That's far worse than simply not satisfying your curiosity about something which isn't even your responsibility. Got it?" "Oh. Okay, I guess. It's hard to get used to." "Don't look so depressed, sweetie. Mark and I are going to know you for years, and you've only just started learning about how to be with him, so don't worry. Think of it this way: I know you appreciate how intelligent Mark is, right?" "I'll say. He's a genius!" "He certainly is. Because he's so intelligent, he'll often make decisions far faster than we can. That's obvious. We certainly can't make him explain all his decisions to us, at our much slower, dumber thinking speeds - that'd add up to wasting YEARS of his life - so we simply have to learn to accept his decisions immediately." "That makes sense. I knew anyway, but it's hard. I'll try to do that." "I'll help you, sweetie. Every sister has to help every new sister." Vanessa said, "I had a SMALL point I was going to make, before Julia hijacked the conversation. Julia made good points but I'll get back to my topic now. I said that Julia had made a similar commitment to Mark, and that Mark had given back her bossiness and argumentativeness. Mark's allowing Julia to behave that way because Julia is good at being bossy. Julia is good at managing people so she can help Mark by doing that for him. Just because Julia can argue with Mark, that doesn't mean you can, Ava. You'd be out of line and in trouble if you talked to Mark the way I know Julia does sometimes." "Oh, I'd NEVER do that!" "I'll tell you something that Mark's given back to you that he hasn't given back to Julia: your heart. Mark still controls Julia's heart, and probably always will. I doubt whether she'll ever fall in love with anyone else, but you're free to." "Ahh, that's because Mark doesn't really want my heart. I'm not as good as Julia." "That's not true Ava. Mark DOES want your heart. Mark has already accepted your love, and is letting you love him. I've seen him reject girls' love before. There was a girl here on Sunday clinging to Mark in the hot tub. What was her name, Julia?" "Anna." "Yes, that's right, Anna. She declared her love for Mark, but Mark didn't accept it. He has accepted yours, just like he's accepted Julia's. The difference is that he's given you back control of your heart. You can love Mark for as long as you want, and when you find another man, your love can go to him if you wish. That's under your control, not Mark's. But Julia's heart is not under her control. Mark and Julia know that the best thing for you is for you to have control of whom you love. -- "So there are at least two ways in which you two are different: Julia's bossiness, and your being able to choose who you love. There will be other differences, and any future girls will have other differences too. But there's one thing all of you girls should have in common: when Mark orders you to do something, you obey. I originally mentioned Julia's argumentativeness because I wanted to say that, as argumentative as Julia can be, if Mark told her he insisted on something, then Julia would instantly shut up and accept it. You must do the same thing, Ava. We've already told you that you must obey Mark. I don't want you to believe that just because Julia appears to be not very obedient, you don't have to be. Even though you may not see it, if Mark ordered Julia to do something, she would." "I know that! Julia told me a funny story about her ... umm." Ava turned to Julia, to ask, "Can I mention, you know?" Julia said, "I don't know?" "Umm, stripping." "Oh. You mean when I started stripping at school?" Ava nodded, and Julia summarized her story to her parents, "I told Ava that I'd misheard a comment Mark had made while we were walking in a corridor at school. I thought he'd told me to strip, so I started doing it. Ava knows I'm obedient to Mark." #3: #1: #2: Vanessa said, "I've spent too long building the foundations then. I'll just give you the bottom line Ava: You must be obedient to Mark because there are things going on in his life that you know nothing about. They're very important and very unusual, so there's no way you could understand them. I have no idea how critical it might be the future, but it's entirely possible that people's lives could be dependent on your being immediately and totally obedient to Mark. That's actually a real possibility. When Mark orders you to do something, you MUST obey. Your, my daughter's, and Mark's life might depend on it." #3: #2: Ava said, "Really? Their lives? Wow." After a moments thought. "I WILL be very obedient, Vanessa. I've already promised that." "So if Mark ordered you to fuck everyone on his soccer team, you'd do it?" "Huh? Ahh..." "Wrong answer, Ava!" "But you didn't give me time to think. I'm..." "Wrong answer again! When Mark gives you an order, you don't need to think. You IMMEDIATELY say 'Yes Mark!' The ONLY reason to ask questions would be if you didn't understand what he wanted you to do. I'll assume you know how to fuck, so the only possible answer was an immediate, 'Yes Mark'." "Wow." Ava looked at me, and asked, "You wouldn't really order me to do that, would you?" Vanessa answered for me, "I doubt it." Ava looked very relieved at that, until Vanessa added, "On the other hand, it would be a very good way of his testing that you really were loyal and obedient. Not to mention that all the guys on the team ARE his friends, so it would be a very good way for him to become popular with them." "Oh." "Maybe he could motivate his team to play better by giving you to the best player at the end of every match. The second best really, after him. More seriously, imagine if Mark wanted a guy to do an important favor for him, but that guy was reluctant. Then you walked past and Mark saw that the guy fancied you. Mark could offer you to the guy in return for the favor. Not only could he do that, I even hope that he does, or something like it." A dazed, shocked Ava asked, "Really?" "Mark needs to learn to give orders, to make good use of his resources - which include you - and even to make decisions which he finds difficult. It's only sex! In fifteen or thirty minutes it'll all the over and you can be very happy with yourself." "Happy? How could I be happy?" "Because you would've helped Mark. That should be VERY important to you now. Mark should be more important to you than you are. Your discomfort doesn't matter compared to being useful to Mark." "Wow. I never thought of that EITHER! I wasn't thinking about sex stuff at all when I was thinking about being obedient to Mark." #2: #3: Vanessa said, "I want Mark to practice being commanding with my daughter. I am DISAPPOINTED that he is not. Of course I didn't want him to give Julia to his soccer team, but a much milder version of that wouldn't have upset me much. I understand that you've had several lovers before, and I see your attitude to sex is positive, so I don't see why you couldn't be useful to Mark in this way. After all, you did give him control of your body, so it's his choice to decide how to use it in ways that are useful for him." I'd been occasionally glancing at The Boys during Vanessa's long discussion with us. They obviously had almost no clue about how far away from normality their parents' thinking had gone. By their reactions they obviously hadn't known Vanessa hoped for a mild version of my giving their little sister to a soccer team! The Boys were deliberately saying nothing, but it looked like Vanessa and Prof were going to be asked more than a few questions at the very first private opportunity. Ava said, "I just never thought of doing those sorts of things for Mark. I was more thinking of things like doing his shopping for him. Normal things like that. Having sex with other guys is a BIG surprise! Umm, I guess I could though. Wait!, that's the wrong answer." Ava took a breath then proudly quoted Vanessa: "Yes Mark!" In a more normal tone, "Wow. I never thought I'd be agreeing to that. Umm, they'd wear rubbers, wouldn't they? I'm on the pill of course, but I still hope they'd wear rubbers?" #1: #3: Vanessa adopted a more upbeat tone, saying, "There is no 'they', Ava. We're just talking hypothetically... , just talking about a made up example. I was deliberately trying to scare you because I want you to understand how big your commitment is, but reality won't be like that. I was very impressed by your 'Yes Mark!' That was wonderful. Mark and Julia are both very caring people, especially Mark, who cares too much. You can trust them both to care for and be nice to you. You'll have a joyful, wonderful time with them. They'll make you very happy, so you're a very lucky girl." Ava recovered enough to look liked she believed it. I helped a little in my own, silly way, by giving Ava an extra hard hug and whispering, "I think Julia and I are the lucky girls." Ava giggled at that. Vanessa raised her voice and adopted a solemn tone, making sure we took note of the following, "For better or worse, the three of you have got exactly what you wanted. Ava, what you wanted, and what you have done, is to put your life into Mark's and Julia's care. That will sometimes make you very happy and it will sometimes piss you off, just like it does with your real parents. You've chosen very good people, so I'm sure it'll work out even better than you expect. Julia you now have someone you can rely on to help you serve Mark in any way you want. I hope you make good use of her, and I deliberately intend both meanings of 'good'. -- "Last, but not least, Mark. Without your unique circumstances, I wouldn't have participated in - or allowed - any of this. The ordinary commitments of friendship would have been sufficient between the three of you. You are the root cause of tonight's activities - even though you weren't the, let me say, 'primary agitator' - so most of the responsibility for this is on you. Make sure this works well, and that everyone benefits. -- "You need to learn to be more assertive and to practice giving orders; including deciding what orders to give and in taking responsibility for them afterward. You're currently letting life wash over and push you in whatever directions it wants. By which, I really mean PEOPLE are too often pushing you in whatever directions THEY want. Making decisions for yourself, standing up for yourself, and giving orders to others, is how you get your life going in the direction that you - rather than others - want. For whatever reason, you won't command Julia, so Julia has 'washed' you into this direction. Hopefully you'll command Ava now. If not, then you've got an issue which will cause large problems in the near future. -- "Now that the three of you are much more partners in your relationship, rather than people to be 'managed' - Julia! - I suggest you sit down and have a session where each of you identifies what you particularly want out of this relationship, and what you're able to put into it. You will be able to help, and be helped, better after that discussion. -- "Julia, you made several mistakes getting to this point. 'Getting carried away' was just one of them. I want to discuss those with you some time in the next couple of days. Preferably before you make a bad mistake to match tonight's good mistake. Produce a list of all the errors you can identify, and we'll go through them together." "Yes, Mom." "I've said my piece. Does anyone have anything they want to add? Any comments or questions?" Not me! Vanessa can scare the hell out of me when she gets going, so I was going to keep my head down and try to hide. The Boys were saving their questions. Prof was smiling happily (God knows how he could do that!), and Julia was looking chastised. Ava, when no one else spoke, hesitantly advanced, "Umm, I didn't really understand most of what you just said. Sorry." "That's perfectly okay, sweetie. It was addressed to your two lovers, and they understood it. You and I spent a long time talking before that, and you participated very well then. You've done exceptionally well tonight, especially considering how difficult and strange it must have been for you." "I'll say! This has been the weirdest night of my life! We NEVER talk like this at home." Vanessa smiled innocently, and inquired, "Doesn't your mother ever tell you to have sex with a soccer team?" "Haha. Not likely! She would have blown her stack if she'd heard you talk like that." "Not the football team either?" "Haha. No, no teams. She thinks I have sex with too many guys already. She wants me to settle down, but I'm going to be getting a LOT more sex from now on, aren't I?" Julia answered, "Only with Mark, Carol and me to start with Ava. Don't worry about the soccer team story Mom told you; that was to scare you into understanding how big your commitment is. Any more lovers will probably be girls. There will be plenty of them around, like Katelin later tonight, and you'll be here as often as you want, so you'll have lots of chances." "So when Mom asks me if I'm having sex with my new boyfriend, can you explain all that to her please, Julia, haha. She told me it was time to stop sleeping around and to settle down. She's going to be shocked! Thank goodness we don't have to mention Carol and any others; it's going to be hard enough to explain that there are three of us." Julia asked, "I understand the others are casual and can be left out, but why would we not need to explain Carol?" "Umm. I LIKE Carol, and all that, but I was kind of thinking we'd just have to tell Mom and Dad about the three of us. I REALLY hope we'll rent a house, so they can see us together." "Ava, sweetie, I love Carol and she loves me. If I live in a house with Mark, then Carol will come too. There will be four of us, at least." "At least?" Now Ava was worried. "Yes. I'm sorry Ava, but I forgot to mention that what I called 'sisters' - girls that join with Mark similar to the way you and I have - that includes Carol already. We might not have any more 'sisters', but if we do, some of them might prefer to live with us. I know Carol will, for certain. There might not be any more new ones, but Carol is already included. Almost certainly everyone in the house will be lovers together. They'll need to be lovers, because we'll all be sharing Mark and sleeping in his bed. It'd be very awkward if two of the girls wouldn't touch each other, or if one girl wouldn't touch any other girl." I waited for Ava to comment on the OBVIOUS! - that "everyone will be lovers together" logically included Carol and me - but Ava didn't seem to catch it. Along with her not thinking of sex when talking about her obeying me, she wasn't doing well at spotting the obvious. She just said, "Oh. That might make things very hard to explain. Especially if even more girls join us. Mark, do you think there'll be any more girls?" "I can't say, sweetie. I may not have met them yet. There might be, there might not be." "Oh dear. Mom and Dad could come visiting unexpectedly too. They could easily catch us all having sex together. Oh dear." Vanessa said, "I have a suggestion, Ava. Two suggestions actually." "Oh, what?" "First, don't worry about it now. It hasn't happened yet. It could be months and months away." "Oh yes. That's right. Thank you." "Second, I would very much prefer your parents to see the truth. To see it and to value it for all the love there will be for you. I want them to see how much caring and support there will be between you and everyone else: Mark, Julia, Carol, and any more loving 'sisters'. Wouldn't it be wonderful for your parents to see all the love around you?" "Oh yes! But they'll NEVER understand what we've been talking about! Never! They're old; they're in their 50s!" The older people in the room laughed, from The Boys up. Vanessa asked, "How old do you think Prof and I are, sweetie?" "Oh. I forgot. {Giggle}." "So even old fuddy-duddies can accept lifestyles like you will have. You'd be surprised how many things are acceptable if they're for love. Rather than worry about how to hide it from your parents, why don't we think about how to show them how wonderful it will be for you? That would be a better approach, wouldn't it?" "Oh yes. But how?" Vanessa suggested, "Don't you worry about that. There are two whole families - this one and Mark's - who would love to show your parents how wonderful their children are, and how well you'll be loved and supported. You leave it to us. You concentrate on starting your new relationship with Mark and Julia, and on getting to know Carol better. Leave telling your parents to the rest of us." #2: "Wow. Can you really do that?" "I think so. We'll have to be careful, but I'm sure we'll make a very good start tomorrow night." "Tomorrow night?" "I would like to have them over for dinner as soon as possible. Tomorrow night would be good. I assume none of you have got anything more important planned?" I didn't even have anything less important, so I said, "I'm free." Which was echoed by nearly everyone. Andrew asked, "Do you want Robert and me there?" "Yes please. The more support we show, the better." "In that case count me in." Which Robert echoed. Julia suddenly said, "I just realized it may not be a problem at all! I'm embarrassed to say that it took me too long to remember that Ava isn't really bisexual, so..." "I AM bisexual! You've seen me, with you and Carol." "Sweetie, my mom told me to be more open and honest with you from now on, and she's right. I made a big deal about your having to be bisexual for you to get Mark, and you've been trying very hard to be ever since, but Mark and I know that you're not really. It's perfectly all right for you to admit it now, because you won't lose us over it. We've swapped commitments now, and they don't depend on what sort of sex you prefer. I mentioned it because if you drop the bisexuality, that'd make Mark your only lover, which would be MUCH easier for you to explain to your parents. Although, now that I think about it, it's still got a major problem because Mark will still have other lovers, such as me! But at least you'd only have Mark." Ava thought about it for a few seconds, then asked, "You'll still be in the house, won't you?" "Yes. Me, Carol, and maybe more. There will still be at least four of us living there. The only change is that your only lover would be Mark." "Mark would still be making love to you and Carol and any other girls? Well, not Carol, but you know what I mean?" "Sure. Yes he would be. We can't ask everyone except you to give up sex with Mark for a year, especially not in our own home. Maybe we could do it for a week, but not for a whole year! Haha." "My parents might come over some morning, and catch Mark having sex with someone who wasn't me?" "Yes they could." Vanessa said, "They probably wouldn't even need to do that, sweetie. Your parents are going to be studying Mark VERY closely. The very first thing they are going to suspect is that he's not faithful, especially if he's living in a house with other teenage girls. I wouldn't be surprised if they hired a private investigator to check Mark out. I would if I were them, because they don't have the time to wait to get to know him. So I think it's almost certain they'll quickly find out." "They'd HATE Mark! That's far worse than thinking I'm bisexual. What we were going to tell them before - that we are all lovers together - that's better than Julia's idea." Julia said, "It wasn't really an idea, Ava. I was saying what the truth was, and saying that it might be better for you." "It's not better; it's worse!" "I agree it probably is. What do you want to do then? You don't have to pretend to be bisexual anymore, so you can choose." "I didn't really mind being bisexual, you know?" "Yes, I know you didn't. If you'd minded it, I would have stopped making you pretend. I could see you even enjoyed yourself, but it's obvious that it's Mark that you're most interested in." "Oh yes! {Giggle}, I am VERY 'interested' in Mark. I really enjoy being 'interested' so many times in one night, haha. Can I keep pretending to be bisexual please? For the next couple of years?" Vanessa said, "We would prefer to show your parents the truth. We don't want you to live a lie either, especially as your parents might discover that. Don't forget that they'll also be studying you very closely too, not just Mark." #1: #2: Ava said, "I'm not sure what to do." Vanessa said, "Let's start with finding out what the truth is. I think that is an EXCELLENT starting point, haha. As I see it, there are only a few questions that need to be answered: Do you want to be Julia's lover? Do you want to be Carol's lover? Do you want to be any other girls' lover? And how does having multiple partners at one time affect your previous answers?" "Umm, what does the last one mean exactly?" "For example, you might be fine with having Julia as your lover, and having Carol as your lover, but not both at the same time. Or maybe you're happy to be with them both at the same time, but don't want to be their lovers individually." "Oh I don't mind that. If you're going to have sex, you might as well have a lot of it! Haha. But, umm..." "Yes, sweetie." "Nothing." "Let me guess," said Vanessa. "You were going to say that sometimes you'd like to make love to Mark alone. Just you and him. Yes?" "I'm sorry." "Sweetie, EVERY woman feels that way about the man she loves. That's natural..." #3: #2: #3: " ... Every man sometimes feels the same too..." #2: #1: #2: #1: (We usually refer to ourselves - by which I mean the four-minded Mark Anderson - collectively as "we", "us", "our", "ourself" or "ourselves", etc., in our internal conversations, but when discussing ourself in a group of other people, Julia and Carol included in this case, "we" and "us" becomes ambiguous. We did experiment with trying to refer to ourself as "Mark", but that felt so awkward we abandoned it. Fortunately we nearly always knew what we meant. Because you won't be as similar to us as we are to each other, you will probably be confused by the ambiguities more often. Sorry about that, but English doesn't really offer a practical alternative.) #2: #3: #2: #1: Vanessa was still talking, " ... It doesn't mean you're being greedy. It's a real need. You're not greedy if you eat food, you're only greedy if you eat yours and then too much of someone else's too. So it depends on how often you want to sleep alone with Mark? There will the other girls around, and you will all need to be VERY careful about that, because bad feelings could easily develop. I can't emphasize that strongly enough, because that's one of the major threats to your multi-girl relationship." Ava puzzled it for a second or two, then said, "I don't know how often. It depends." "Yes it does, but that you say that reassures me that you have the right attitude. I'm going to assume this isn't a problem, because I already know you're not a selfish girl. I can even imagine that you'd give away your turn too often. Does that sound like you, sweetie?" "{Giggle}. Yeah. I guess so. I don't need him all to myself every night, just sometimes, when I feel like it, or need it." "Exactly right. Good girl." I'd been thinking about Vanessa's statement that sharing private bedtime with me was going to be hugely important. I knew she was right. Both my girls (I'd better get out of the habit of thinking "both", as there are three of them now) had mentioned how much they sometimes liked sleeping alone with me. There'd been nights when the emotions had suited three much more than two, and there'd been nights when we had no preference either way. The latter was most of the nights, but without doubt two was sometimes a very good idea. Even a "real need", as Vanessa had said. For the sake of completeness, I also thought about there having even been times during our threesome nights in which the girls had gotten more into emotionally loving each other than me. That was PERFECTLY okay with me. In fact, I thought it was wonderful for reasons beyond the obvious sexual one. There'd also been times when the girls slept together while I slept elsewhere. I could easily imagine that, in a very good three-way relationship, sometimes the girls would need to be alone together, so I made a mental note not to behave like a spoiled brat if I was left alone because they wanted time together. But overall I was clearly the 'limited resource', so to speak. I said, "Vanessa. I've been thinking about your comment that sharing private bedtime with me was very important, and that being unfair would be a major threat. Obviously we need to make up a schedule, where we allocate some nights to each girl, and some to 'group nights', I guess you'd call them. It'd depend on how many girls..." I stopped talking at that point, because the expressions on all their faces had quickly made it obvious that stopping my talk would be an excellent idea. With very little hope of saving myself, I added, "Or maybe not. What do you think?" Julia turned to Ava, and said, "Ava, if I EVER again tell you that Mark understands everything, just remember this moment, okay?" Ava giggled in obvious agreement. Julia added, "To be fair, he's hardly ever as bad as that. He normally does fairly well, but he's got a massive genetic disadvantage in being a male. They think they can apply logic to everything..." #1: " ... I always cheer myself up by thinking how incredibly wonderful he'd be if he was female, but then I thank God that he's actually a male. Just like you, I'd much rather make love to him as a male than as a female." "Really? I thought you were totally bisexual?" "No. I love Carol and enjoy sex with her a great deal, but mostly because of my feelings for her. Sex with other girls is fine, even fun sometimes, but I'd much rather be with Mark. Mark AND another girl, that's good for me too. So is being with Carol and another girl. I like both of those, provided I'm just after fun. But if I want loving, Mark being a guy is exactly the way I want it." Ava declared, "That's just like me! Not with Carol, of course, more, umm." Vanessa suggested, "More with Julia." "Yeah, with Julia. Boy! You're REALLY good at guessing what I'm thinking. Julia said you were very wise." Vanessa laughed. "Haha. Thank you, sweetie, but all evening you've been showing us how much you respect and need Julia's approval, and - as far as I know - Julia is the ONLY other girl you've slept with. Guessing what you meant couldn't have been easier!" "Oh yeah. Haha. I guess it was easy." Ava turned to Julia to ask, "You don't mind that I like you that way?" Julia answered, "Why would I mind if someone nice liked me a great deal?" "Umm. I mean physically. You said you enjoyed sex with Carol mostly, so you may not want sex with me?" Julia said, "I am happy to have sex with you, sweetie. I've already told you my plan for tonight, that when Mark's finished with Katelin... , Oh gosh, Katelin's STILL waiting! We'd better hurry up!" Vanessa said, "Yes, but this is more important. Carry on, Julia." "Okay. Ava, my plan was for Mark to finish with Katelin then you and I gang up on him, remember?" "{Giggle}. I think it might take more than two of us to gang up on him." "I agree, even after Katelin. I'll save time and just say that I've always known that all us 'sisters' will be lovers, and I'm HAPPY to have sex with you. It's not as wonderful for me as with Mark or Carol, but it's still fun and you can be my third favorite. I hope that's okay with you?" "I'd be very happy to be your third, Julia. I could never be above Mark, and I know you think Carol is wonderful. I should get to know Carol better, shouldn't I?" "You DEFINITELY should. It'll happen anyway, because she's very often with Mark and me. You already know that I think she's a fantastic person, but let me predict that, of all of us, it'll be Carol that comforts you the most when your parents pass on." "Really? But I hardly know her?" "You hardly knew me a week ago! Carol is very giving and doesn't take at all. You've got a long time to get to know her, so you'll find out for yourself. We'll tell her about your parents illnesses when we go to her place - soon, I hope - so she'll be sympathetic right from the beginning." Vanessa said, "Carol and the Andersons already know about Ava's parents. We're going over there to talk about it." #1: #2: #3: Ava said, "Didn't you say I had to tell them?" "I don't think I said those exact words, but if I gave you that impression, I'm sorry. I meant that you'll do some talking. Tell the Andersons what the situation is in your own words, give them an idea what sort of people you and your parents are. Don't worry about it, Ava. Julia, Prof and I will be with you, and the Andersons are very nice people. They can't be too bad, if they've brought up a son like Mark, can they?" #3: #2: #3: #2: Ava giggled, which was interpreted as agreement. Vanessa said, "I'll point out that Ava just solved what to tell her parents about her sexuality. She wants sex with Julia. So Mark, Julia and Ava are a threesome, with Carol only partially overlapping." #2: Julia exclaimed, "Oh! That reminds me. When I said just before that 'Carol doesn't take at all, ' I was forgetting her wanting to order Ava around for sex games. Carol will be your boss, Ava, as we told you before you committed, but I'll let her know that sex with you is off the agenda now. She'll be far too busy being sympathetic to be disappointed anyway." Ava asked with concern, "'Sex with me is off the agenda.' What does that mean?" "Sex between you and Carol. Carol was intending to have quite a lot of sex with you. Public games and sometimes normal sex like we had with her last week." "Off the agenda because I'm not really bisexual?" "Yes. Don't worry about it. Carol will be disappointed, but she's far too nice a person to play her games with someone who doesn't want them, especially knowing about your parents. You can forget it was ever mentioned." "I'm still not sure what you're talking about. 'Public games' and 'sex games'. Are they like what you and Carol did to me when you were picking all the Liaisons, and Mark did to me in the hallway afterward?" Julia asked, "What did Mark do to you in the hallway?" Normally a boy would be extremely nervous now, but I wasn't, for two reasons: 1) Julia and her family are VERY permissive. 2) I couldn't remember what Ava was talking about. "He put his hand up my skirt and into my panties and felt me up. We were in a crowd so it was quite exciting. And he, um, had long fingers, haha." #2: Julia isn't like most girlfriends; you can probably imagine what a typical girlfriend would say after my described actions! Instead Julia said, "You were excited by it?" "Yes, very much." "Good girl!" #3: Julia added, "What were you referring to from the Liaison meeting? As I recall, there were quite a lot of unusual things that happened at that meeting, haha." #2: "There was quite a lot of breast rubbing between you, Carol and me." I remembered that too, fondly. That'd started the moment Julia introduced Ava to Carol. It'd been a total setup by Julia, to save any 'pussyfooting' (excuse the pun) around the bisexuality issue, plunging Ava straight into it. It'd been damned hard to look away, but I'd had to, Carol being my sister. "And you enjoyed that too?" "Umm, yeah. Especially doing it in front of Mark. The others too, but very especially Mark." "It didn't matter that we were girls?" "No." "What about that one of the girls was Mark's sister? Did you like doing sexy things with Mark's sister in front of him?" I held my breath, crossed my fingers, and touched wood. "Yes." #2: Then Ava almost immediately added, "And with you, Julia." #1: I couldn't help myself. I HAD to ask, "Did you prefer doing it with Julia or Carol?" "Hmm. I don't really know. I didn't know either Julia or Carol then. I just liked that we were doing it in front of you. I DID know you then! I was very excited that you liked my letter and that you and Julia had given me so much hope on the phone the previous night." All three minds were busy trying to work out my next cunning question. It wasn't easy balancing how to circle closer to the key question, without creating too much suspicion at the same time. Happily Vanessa saved us a lot of time. She asked, "Most people think sex between a brother and sister is very bad and they get angry about it. Other people don't care. You're talking about Mark looking at you while you were doing something sexy with his sister, so I guess Mark and Julia are wondering whether you think it's bad or don't care?" "I don't care. I've never had a brother or sister, so how would I know?" Vanessa said, "I guess it'd depend on whether you liked your brother or not?" "I guess. I hope I'd like him, but I've always noticed that most of the girls at school complain about theirs." I held my breath, crossed my fingers... (you know the drill). The next question was going to clinch it! I could almost taste the words - "If you liked your brother would you..." I wasn't sure how Vanessa would finish it, but the beginning was obvious. Vanessa said, "Julia, Ava asked you whether Mark feeling her up in the hallway and you three rubbing breasts while Mark watched was what you meant by 'sex games'. Was it?" #1: #3: #2: #1: #3: My attention was recaptured by Julia's answering, "Yes. That's what I meant; that sort of thing." Ava had been getting a bit morose during the talk about her non-existent sibling, and didn't really respond to Julia's answer. Julia prompted, "Ava, why did you want to know about 'sex games'?" Ava's attention returned, but she'd forgotten the thread of the conversation. It took a couple of reminders before Julia mentioned "off the agenda", and Ava recognized that. Ava said, "Oh yeah. I remember now. You said 'sex with me was off the agenda'. I didn't like the sound of that. I like sex, and I liked doing the things we talked about." Julia checked, "You liked Mark feeling you up in the hallway." "Mostly I liked him feeling me up in the panties, haha." Julia said, "Haha, I guess I asked for that. I shouldn't even have mentioned it, because we're not talking about taking sex with Mark of the agenda, just with Carol. You can still have all the sex games you want with Mark." "Good. I wish he'd do more." "Me too," agreed Julia. "We'll probably have quite a few sex games on Thursday, with twenty or so of Donna's girlfriends. That could get very sexy." "Good. Ahh, Julia, do we have to keep talking about sex? I'm getting very horny, and I'm already VERY excited about being with you and Mark from now on. But I have to wait for him to finish with Katelin first. That'll be HOURS!" "I'll speed up, sweetie. I'm confused, because I thought you weren't into girls." "I'm not into girls. Not really." "But you were excited when Carol, you and I were all rubbing each others breasts in front of Mark?" "Yes." "What about when Carol, you and I slept together. Did you really enjoy that, or were you just pretending?" "I enjoyed it. That was the sexiest day of my whole life, and then the two of you made me do a LOT of sex!" Julia couldn't place the day (nor could I, come to that), so she asked, "It was a sexy day? What happened that day?" Ava almost cried in exasperation, "It was the SAME day that we've been talking about! When we all rubbed breasts in front of Mark, AND Mark felt me up, AND the first time Mark wore sexy clothes to school, AND I knew I had a very good chance of being Mark's girlfriend, AND you told me I was having sex with you and Carol later. I hadn't slept well the night before because I was..." Ava had been getting visibly aroused, as she'd warned, and her listing the events of that day was making the situation rapidly worse. She broke off what she'd been saying, to beg, "Julia PLEASE!" Julia said, "I'm still confused, sweetie. I'm trying..." Ava turned away from Julia, to me (on the other side of her), and urgently asked me, "I can ask for favors, right?" I said, "Of course, sweetie." Even before I'd finished Ava had leaned forward and was whispering imploringly into my ear. It didn't take her long to explain, even without the name. Everyone quietly waited for Ava to finish whispering. When she did, and leaned back, I couldn't resist. There was absolutely no possibility whatsoever of my resisting. I was vaguely aware that maybe I should think about resisting, but I didn't care; it was too good. I said, "You have my permission, Ava." Ava immediately turned to face Andrew, who was sitting on Julia's dressing table across the room. Ava pointed at him and said, "You. I've forgotten your name, but you asked me for a date. Can we go straight to your room now please? Just for a little while. I'm SUPER-horny and Mark says it's okay?" Very unfortunately Ava blocked my view of Julia. I'd tried leaning forward or back to get a good angle on Julia's face, but she was sitting too close to Ava. I had to settle for watching poor Andrew's shock when the comprehension hit him, and his embarrassment when the whole family rose to the occasion to tease him, saying things like: "Mark says it's okay, so?" "It normally takes you months to get lucky. Keeping your mouth shut works MUCH better for you." "It's an emergency, so I'm sure Sophia won't mind." "I'm disappointed in you, son, getting a boy half your age to provide the girls for you." Andrew tried to defend himself. To Robert he said, "Ava had her pick, and picked the best!" Robert countered, "She's desperate; she picked the easiest!" There was more, and it would have been great to let it keep going, but Ava very soon become concerned that she'd done something wrong. Vanessa noticed it, then announced, "Let's clear the room so Mark and Ava have some privacy. I think we can spare them a few minutes." Vanessa started shooing her family out. Ava asked me, "Is everything okay?" Rather than worry her anymore, I said, "Do you want a quickie?" One of my minds added, "With me." #3: ------- Chapter 130: Katelin's Prize is Delivered Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) Julia hung around long enough to say, "I think I should leave you to it for this one. Besides, I need to keep an eye on Andrew to stop him trying to sneak back in, haha," which Julia said loud enough for Andrew to hear. "I'll talk with Katelin too. Just send Ava down when you've finished, and I'll send Katelin up. Be quick, as we're running late." The last instruction was silly, as by now Ava had pushed me onto my back, undone my pants, pulled them and my shorts down, straddled me, pulled her panties to the side, and had slid herself down onto me. My cock had been waving in the air before Prof's back was out of sight through the doorway, so I don't know how much quicker Julia wanted me to be. Technically I hadn't actually done anything more than allowed myself to be pushed flat, but I'd done it REALLY quickly. Ava must have assumed Julia's "be quick" instruction applied to her too, because she didn't just sit around. One hand held her panties to the side, and the other frigged her clit, while she rocked and rolled all over my rod. Two minutes of lying motionless on my back later, Ava had her orgasm, and I congratulated myself for yet another satisfied customer. I really was getting very good at this sex stuff. After a few seconds Ava asked, "Can we do it again?" I wasn't sure there was much "we" involved, but my opinion was still, "Sure, sweetie. If you're fairly quick. By the way, you don't have to muffle your voice when you cum. This room's soundproof, so you can scream as loud as you want." Ava just nodded, as she was bent forward to look at her pussy and my cock, while she raised and lowered herself on me. She was less frenetic this time, so I finally did something to help, reaching up and caressing her breasts through her dress. "Oh yes!" My doing so reminded me of the breast rubbing sex game, and there was certainly no reason not to talk with her about it, especially as it certainly hadn't reduced her arousal last time! I was very curious to untangle several things: whether or not Ava was bisexual, whether Carol could play games with her (which I was very eager to happen, provided both girls did), and more about her attitude about incest. I asked, "Would you like it if Julia was behind you, rubbing your breasts?" "Oh yes. I like you rubbing them too. That's wonderful." It was also not where I wanted to be going with this conversation. "Good. I'm very happy that you like sex with me. I REALLY like it with you. But what..." "You like sex with me?" I nearly said she was my third favorite, as Julia had done, but feared that she'd ask me for the names of numbers one and two. It was way too early for that! Instead I said, "Ava, you are one of the very best. You're GREAT at sex!" "Goody. I'm glad you like me. But I'm not as good as you; you're SUPER!" "I'd MUCH RATHER have sex with you than with myself." Ava giggled at that. I congratulated myself because when a girl is impaled on your cock is an EXCELLENT time to make her giggle, especially because it's already an excellent time even before she giggles. -- I got back to my thread. Having established that Ava would like Julia rubbing her, I needed to check it applied to other girls rather than just Julia, "Would you like it if Carol was behind you, rubbing your breasts?" "I'd rather have you do it." I don't know whether you've noticed this or not, but sometimes it's not easy talking to girls. I tried again, "I mean do you think having Carol rubbing you is sexy?" I was also curious to see whether Ava would comment on the incestuousness of the situation, but suspected she wouldn't. "It would be now. I'm very turned on." I haven't been describing it, but there was plenty more of the rocking and rolling going on. We were having a great time! "What about any other girl? Would you like other girls to be rubbing your breasts and pinching your nipples. Maybe a different girl on each side. Maybe even their leaning down and sucking your naked nipples." I had extended the question, beyond the first specific image because I could see the answer: Ava thought it was an excellent idea. To make absolutely sure that Ava didn't have Julia in her imagination, I picked a couple of names that Ava would know, and said, "How would you like it if I got Lily and Pat to suck on your nipples? They would, if I asked them to." "Oh yes! I'd LOVE that! I wish they were here now." Her hips sped up considerably, provided an excellent confirmation. I was starting to have the first inklings of a suspicion that Ava might, just possibly, be a little bit bisexual. So why had she denied it? "So you are into girls?" Ava shook her head, although that could have had a different cause since she was getting very aroused by now. She managed to answer, "No." I was stumped for a second, or five. One of my minds grasped at a straw, "What about if Andrew and Robert - Julia's two brothers - were sucking on your breasts now?" "OH GOD YES!" I didn't try to think of any more questions. Ava wasn't going to be answering any more until she'd finished. I wouldn't be waiting long. #2: #3: #2: #1: #2: #1: #3: #2: #1: #3: #1: #2: #1: #2: #3: #1: #3: #1: #2: #1: #2: #1: #3: #1: I said, "One day, very soon Ava, I'm going to fuck you in front of other people at school." #2: #3: We waited until Ava finished, largely because we couldn't hear ourselves think. She was deliberately celebrating loudly, which I thought was such a good idea that I joined right in. I'd recently decided that life is VERY good. Ava collapsed on top of me, and I waited until she caught her breath, as she'd been moving very vigorously for a while there. I asked, "Feeling better now, sweetie?" "Very. Thank you. You're very good." I had to chuckle to that. She'd done 99% of the work. All I'd done was lay on my back and reach up to squeeze her breasts. I was pretty sure most guys could do that successfully. After my chuckle, I said, "Nice of you to say so, but I didn't do anything. I just provided the cock and you did the rest." "You talked dirty at just the right times. Thinking about Julia's brothers sucking on my tits while I was riding you was REALLY hot. And just before the end you made me think of lots of people watching us fucking. That was super-hot too. I hope we can do those things for real! They're SO sexy!" #2: "Ahh, honey. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we can do one of those things. The bad news, sorry, is that we won't be doing the other. There will only ever be one boy at a time." #3: I added, "On the topic of other guys, sweetie, would you mind if I gave you an order not to have sex with any other guys? Even if you wanted to." #1: Ava answered, "Sure. No problem." "You understand that it's an ORDER. You absolutely cannot do it, even if you're very horny." "Sure. When I get horny I'll just come looking for you or Julia. Or Carol too, I guess. If I'm horny, it'll probably be because I'm with you anyway." #1: #2: "You say 'Sure' very quickly, but I saw how quick you were to proposition Andrew, so I'm a little worried you might get that horny again and proposition some other guy." "Tonight has been VERY special, Mark. Very, very special! You've promised I can be with you - and Julia too - for YEARS! As your lover, friend, and {giggle} your 'daughter' too. So I was super-super-happy. With all the sex talk, I got super-horny too. I wanted you very, very badly, but Julia had said I had to wait until you'd finished with Katelin. I thought about asking Julia to help me, but I wanted a guy that I could pretend was you. Besides Julia was talking so much. I like Julia a LOT, but sometimes she talks too much." I gave a small, careful nod. That seemed best. "Besides, everyone had told me that I could ask my new brothers for favors, and everyone's so open and easy-going about sex, so I thought it'd be okay to ask. It was okay, wasn't it? He got a LOT of teasing." #1: "It was more than okay, sweetie, it was wonderful. Julia's family love teasing each other; it's one of the ways they show their love. It's not cruel. You saw how they were all laughing. Even Andrew laughed after he got over the shock. It was also wonderful because it showed everyone how strong your need was. That's why they left the room so quickly, so we could have some quick sex to make you feel better. You DID tell Julia you were horny, and she did keep on talking, so it's not your fault. Especially because I am so incredibly sexy." I meant the last comment as a joke, to lift the mood, but Ava simply agreed, "I'll say!" -- We paused for a couple of seconds, then Ava added, "I won't have sex with any other guys, Mark. I don't want to. I haven't had sex for months; not since Mom was diagnosed. Not until the last few days with you and Julia and Carol. I just want to be with you and Julia now. I love you very, very much. And Julia too, sort of. That's very different." Ava was struggling to explain, but there was no point, so I said, "I'm sure it is different. It could hardly be the same, could it?" "Haha. No, I guess not." I held her for a while as she seemed thoughtful and sentimental. After a few seconds I said, "I ordered you not to have sex with another guy, but you are still free to like them, or love them. Remember that you have control over your heart. If you find another guy that you feel that way about, please..." "{Raspberry}..." #1: #2: " ... Mark. I LOVE you. My heart's not moving. I'm NEVER going to meet anyone as amazing as you." I started opening my mouth, but, #3: I closed my mouth. Then used it just to say, "Thank you." We shared another moment for mutual, silent hugs. Ava asked, "Is Carol really as nice as Julia says?" "Ava, sweetie. I love Carol very, very much. I think she's the most wonderful person I've ever met." I thought that might be a very good thing to establish so strongly. Any sexual stuff that we tell Ava could be introduced as part of Carol's and my wonderful love, rather than something tawdry. Love provided a wonderful justification for sticking my cock into her. "Even more than you love Julia?" "Yes. Julia knows that. Julia loves Carol too, remember." "Wow. That's beautiful. Carol's very lucky." "I'M very lucky." "Oh yeah. {Giggle}. You're BOTH very lucky. Julia too, to be involved with both of you." "Yes. It works very well. There's a lot of love." "Wow." Ava thought about it briefly, then added, "I'm looking forward to getting to know Carol better. Apart from having sex with her, I mean." For at least two reasons, I said, "Good." Ava had a little think, then said, "Carol's very beautiful." "Yes, she is." I had been tempted to ask about Ava's attitude to having sex with Carol, but I could see that this conversation was going in an even better direction: Carol and me having sex. Ava continued her list, "And she's got a wonderful figure." "Yes she has." "The sort of figure guys go for." "Yes." I was adopting a massively understated style of answering. #2: #1: #2: #3: "And she must love you incredibly too." "She does, but why must she?" In the flat tone of voice that people use for stating an inarguable fact ("the world is round", or "fish live in water") Ava explained, "Because you're you." "Oh yeah." I nearly said, "Oh yeah, I forgot," but cut it off for being too silly. I added, "Thanks." If Ava knew how many of me I was, she'd be very surprised. Breath held, fingers crossed, wood touched. "{Sigh}." #1: #2: Ava added, with REAL feeling, "It's SO sad." #2: #3: I asked, "What's so sad, sweetie?" Ava morosely answered, "That you and Carol love each other SO MUCH, but you can NEVER make love to each other. I think that's very, very sad." #3: #2: #1: #3: #2: "Sweetie. I'm curious about why you think we never could?" Continuing her very sad tone of voice, Ava quoted a line often heard around school these days, "Because she's a lesbian, dummy." I couldn't help a chuckle escaping me. I cut it off as quickly as I could, but she'd noticed. Ava looked up, into my eyes, and incredulously asked, "It's funny?" I could hardly deny it, since I'd just laughed. The best I could quickly come up with was, "Yes. I'm sorry, but I'd forgotten all about that. You caught me by surprise." I thought it was a good idea to add, "I thought you were going to tell me it was because society is against brothers and sisters having sex." "Oh pffft. Society can go jump off a cliff if it thinks you and Carol shouldn't make love. Society would never know what goes on in your bedroom anyway. I just think it's very sad that Carol's a lesbian. I don't understand why you laughed though. Don't you think it's sad?" #1: "I have a VERY good relationship with Carol, sweetie. It brings us both a great deal of happiness, so it's hard to feel sad when I think of Carol. Pretty much impossible, actually, because she makes me feel very good. I don't spend any time thinking about her being a lesbian, but I do worry about people thinking about incest because Carol and I are quite affectionate in public. You just surprised me, and I laughed at how stupid I was to forget the obvious. -- "Changing the subject a little, I was also surprised you knew the, 'She's a lesbian, dummy' line. I thought that was just a 10th grade thing?" "Oh no, you and Carol are famous for that. Everyone's heard about your sticking up for her so wonderfully. Maybe not the boys, but all the girls know. I've been asked about you many times, because people know I know you. Wow! - I just realized. What do I say about you and me now? It's very complicated." It certainly was, but it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with the truth. That required Ava's going public with her parents' illnesses. That needed her parents' permission, which would be too hard to seek before the dinner party. I said, "I suggest you say what you've been saying already, until we have dinner with your parents. If, after that dinner, your parents consent to your telling people of their illness, then I think you can tell everyone the complete truth about everything. We'd definitely want to check that with Julia and Vanessa, but that's what I think." "Wow. That's very unusual - telling everyone that you're going to be my father, lover and friend. And Julia too, except 'mother'. That's going to amaze people." Linking "father" and "lover" is also going to do something a lot worse than "amaze" them. We definitely need a better way of describing our new relationship than that, and quickly, before Ava got into the habit of "father, lover and friend". It already rolled off her tongue too easily. The best thing to do was for both of us to go downstairs. The Williamses and Ava had to get over to my family soon as that was already running very late, I needed to quickly tell Julia my thoughts about Ava's sexual orientation, her "very, very sad" attitude to Carol and my being together, and the "father/lover" problem. Plus the less urgent "What Ava tells everyone" issue. I said, "It'd probably be a very good idea not to talk of me as your 'father' and 'lover'. I'm already worried about people thinking dirty thoughts about Carol and me, and that wouldn't help. But just say nothing about it to anyone for a while. I think we need to get downstairs, sweetie. Let's move." It didn't take Ava long, she just stood up. Usually, at this stage, I take off my rubber and clean myself, so my not finding a rubber was a bit of a shock. I hadn't cum as they'd been so quick, so it wasn't TOO bad. It was too late for anything other than asking Julia what she thought about it, and being prepared to duck if she objected badly. There were some other issues I hadn't finished with: I would have liked to hear more about Carol and my being famous around school. Not for ego reasons; just to understand. (Okay, maybe some ego too). I never got to finding out whether Ava wanted to play sex games with Carol or not. It was in a "Maybe, maybe not" category. I was curious why Ava had never had any prior experience with girls. Julia had established that 'failure' very early on in her dealings with Ava. Not specific to Ava, but I'd never found out what was wrong with my "private sleeping with Mark schedule" idea. I wasn't so stupid as to suggest it again, but I was still curious. With something as important as Vanessa had said this problem was, we definitely needed to make sure we had a very good prevention or solution in place. We went downstairs via the upstairs bathroom, as Ava had said, "I don't want your parents' first impression of me to be my smell, haha." During the walk Ava said, "Aww, we never finished our discussion. I wanted to find out why you, me and Julia's two brothers can't have sex all together. That'd be GREAT!" I chuckled at my failure to leave that off my list of unresolved issues. I added: Convince Ava never bring up sex with multiple males again. From the bottom of the stairs we could hear voices from the kitchen, so I led the way, all of half a dozen steps. The "away party" (Vanessa, Prof and Julia) were there, as well as Katelin. I immediately felt guilty for walking in with Ava, having kept one girl waiting far too long for her promised boink because I was boinking another girl (actually she'd boinked me, but my guilt didn't care). I started gushing VERY non-specific apologies to Katelin for keeping her waiting so long. Katelin waved my apologies away, saying, "Don't worry Mark. Everyone's already apologized to me. Everything's been explained." I doubted very much that "everything" had been explained. I was curious to know what Katelin thought "everything" was, but I wasn't going to risk asking. Katelin wasn't angry, so I left that miracle alone. Julia introduced Katelin and Ava. I hadn't realized they hadn't met, remembering too late that Ava hadn't been at the bowling date/party. Katelin said, "I saw you at lunch today. Nice to meet you, Ava. You're very lucky." Julia immediately explained, "Katelin knows that Ava's just become a long-term girlfriend for Mark and me." Ava agreed, "I AM so lucky. Tonight's been the most amazing night of my life." "I wish I was Mark's girlfriend," wished Katelin. #2: ^ I'll digress to discuss an internal issue, to give you a better idea of how my multiple minds functioned. #2 was the only one paying much attention to what was going on. We'd just done the changeover, so #3 was busy bringing #4 up to date and #1 was now on duty. #4 had been on duty beyond the usual time because there'd been too much important stuff going on. Swapping who's on duty takes only an instant, but we want all our active minds able to participate fully in "important stuff". Losing one knowledgeable mind in exchange for a non-current mind would reduce our ability to participate intelligently. There'd been a LOT of talk while #4 was on duty, and talk (as opposed to action) requires the most effort to catch up on, so it was going to take a while to bring #4 up to speed. It's quicker than you could describe it verbally, but it still takes a while. Action is much quicker because the on-duty mind still experiences everything that happens, he just doesn't think about it. Not thinking about actions still creates enough of a memory to help with the catching up process. Because words aren't memorized well without conscious effort - it's like staring at a page without reading it - they're lost, making the catching up process longer. Actions are also even easier to communicate now that we can send images to each other - that increasingly becomes a major part of our internal 'conversations'. We'd previously discussed our centering options several times: Remain centered virtually all the time (we do this). Remain centered except for important times (discussed below). Remain uncentered, becoming centered only when it was needed to use an ability. This was so obviously a bad choice that we didn't need to discuss it. There was something very, very important involved in being centered, so we were going to practice it. The middle option was somewhat tempting. It would be good to have all four minds able to participate in important events, and not have to repeatedly bring one of them up to date afterward. There were some problems though. One major problem is that there are a lot of "important times", as so much keeps happening to us. The definition of what qualifies as an "important time" is problematic, as every situation is different. Stopping the bar creeping downward over time would be another problem, as it was too easy to imagine our wanting to spending more and more of the interesting times uncentered. Then there's the problem that sometimes we didn't know something was important until we were well into it, which is often a terrible time to be distracted by having to bring the previously on-duty mind up to date. Almost invariably, being centered isn't important, as we don't need to be able to immediately create TK-fingertips, blobs, or to proximity sense. If a need arises, it takes less than half a second to center ourself. The extra 'grace' we feel when centered is of no practical use either. But despite those points, we want to remain centered as much as we can so we can practice three things: Remaining centered. Both to avoid losing center in an emergency, and if we get really good at it, me might be able to make Active Centering work all the time, so we won't need to have any minds on duty. That would be wonderful. We believe we're getting better at this, although it's a subjective judgment. Sometime in the future (six months? two years?) we expect to be able to remain centered AND participate with all four minds unless the event is EXTREMELY distracting. Those events might take several years to learn to ignore. Ironically, it's especially important to practice during "important times", as those are the ones that are most likely to distract us. We figure losing some hours of our individual perceptions of life now, by remaining centered during important events, is worth the sacrifice as it'll pay us back for decades after we've got good enough to rely on active centering. Keep pushing walls and the ground with TK to make it stronger. This has already improved by 0.1 pounds, proving that we are making some gains. Keep practicing projecting ki to make that stronger too. This is immeasurable using anything in our Physics lab, or anywhere else probably, although I've got a mental note to ask Sensei about measuring ki one day. I can 'see' it though, so hopefully I'll detect that it's got stronger after the change is large enough. There's a last reason for why keeping one mind on duty at all times is workable: we trust each other. None of us can argue that he has any better judgment than the others, we all have identical (and mediocre) IQs, almost identical experiences, etc. The differences that do exist between us - presumably because of differences in the dimensions we came from - are so subtle that by the time we'd worked out that one mind might be slightly better at a particular task, that task was probably long since over. The only major exception was only two of our minds having previous driving experience, but we're eliminating that deficiency rapidly. ^ It sounded like Ava and Katelin might spend some time gushing at each other, so I seized the opportunity, saying, "Julia, I need a quick private talk with you please?" I took us to another room and closed the door. I quickly went through my list: "Ava asked me what she can say in school about her relationship with us. I said to say nothing until the dinner party, then if her parents consent on their illnesses being known, let her tell the truth." Julia answered, "Of course. Next! Sorry, but we're in a hurry." "I learned some things about Ava's sexuality. She's heterosexual, NOT bi, but she's also VERY sexual. When she's aroused she enjoys another girl. A boy would be better, but a girl is fine. She personally likes you enough that you're fine at any time. I suspect that she'll come to like Carol enough for that to happen too. She also seems to be into public exhibition sex games too. My advice - my REQUEST - is not to close any doors between Carol and Ava. I expect she'll do everything you, Carol and I want, and maybe even add a few more activities of her own because she's so sexual. She really wants a foursome with me, her and your brothers, for example." "Haha." "You may laugh, but I haven't had the time to tell her 'Hell no!' properly yet." "I'll take care of it, don't worry." "Thanks. She's also completely unconcerned about me and Carol. What goes on in my bedroom is none of society's business, as far as she's concerned. She is also very, very sad - even almost tearfully sad - that Carol and I, who love each other so much, can't make love because Carol's a lesbian." "I think Ava might be seeing a slowly, backsliding lesbian soon. I even think how fast Carol will backslide will be set by having to make it look believable, rather than our worrying about Ava's attitude. That's great news. We still have to know that she's trustworthy. That's very important. Here's another issue: do you want to show her your TK and light blobs?" "I forgot all about that decision. I've got so used to keeping them secret I didn't even think about it. I certainly don't want to tell her now, not until I've seen that she's trustworthy first." Julia pointed out the obvious, "The only way to find out if someone is trustworthy, is to trust them with something, and see if they do the right thing. Then trust them with more and more secrets. That's assuming they aren't already known as being a terrible gossip or known liar. Those don't apply to Ava as far as I know. You're in some of her classes: have you ever seen any behave any of those ways?" "I didn't even know her name until she wrote her letter. I've never considered myself an 11th grader, never socialized with them, never thought about them unless they get my attention in some way. Ava never did, especially as she's fairly well behaved in class. I've not noticed gossip or lying, but I wouldn't expect that I would've." "So we have to test her. You've got three big secrets that I know about: Carol, blobs, TK. Choose the least important and let her know about it. If all goes well, tell her the next, etc. What do you think?" "I think I'm scared of showing ANY of those things to her as a test. They're not tests; they're the real thing. They are secret secrets!" "You need a smaller secret then. I didn't know you had any. All your secrets seem to be real humdingers. You know your secrets better than me, so can you think of one?" I could go to sleep instantly, but that was hardly tempting enough to be a test. I thought about how my proximity sense let me avoid punches or detecting people behind me, even through a door if we were both very close to it, but that didn't seem like the sort of thing Ava would get excited about. I was just about to give up because we were pressed for time, when one of my minds came up with the perfect suggestion. It can be VERY useful to have three minds working on one problem, as the illusion it gives of me being more intelligent actually pays off sometimes. "I've got the PERFECT test! I can run a marathon in less than a world-record time. Quite a lot less. Ava would get very, very excited about that. I'll make up an excuse for her to pace me - by bike or car - and I'll run it at my best speed. That'll really freak her out. Then we wait to see if anyone mentions marathons to me over the next few weeks." "Great idea! Do that. The sooner you do it, the sooner you'll be able to sleep with her and Carol at the same time, AND the sooner she'll be able to visit your home casually. At the moment you can't let her into any bedroom, especially if she opened a closet..." #2: " ... I'll keep her too busy to check out the bedrooms tonight, but I can't rely on doing that in the future. The only choice is for you and Donna to swap rooms again, move all your clothes, etc." "No way! I want to keep sleeping with Carol!" "So Ava can't visit your home. That means you can only meet her here. No, that's not right. You can obviously 'meet' her anywhere that's not your home. You can go to the movies, or wherever, but you can have sex with her only here." I remembered, "And school. I told her I'd have sex with her at school soon. She wants it." "Fine. I'll set it up." "Huh? How?" "In a girls' bathroom. That's what I originally intended them for, remember?" "Yes. I remember your teasing me with that sequence very well, thank you. I forgot to mention that I sort of promised her sex at school with people watching. I think my exact words were, 'One day, very soon, I'm going to fuck you in front of other people at school.' I got a bit carried away, didn't I?" "Haha. I think so. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one whose mouth gets them in trouble for that reason." I ignored Julia's later comment. Vanessa would amply address that issue, I was sure. I simply said, "She was close to cumming and I wanted to say something graphic enough to see if it excited her." "Did it?" "I'll say! She literally 'got off on it'; she came almost immediately. It was a great experiment, but unrealistic unfortunately. She enjoyed being felt up in the hallway though, so I'll scale back to that level of sex-game." "Oh, thank you for using that phrase. That makes my idea even better." "Huh?" "I was just going to set it up so you can do what you promised Ava, which was your sex-game with her. But that phrase reminded me of Carol. I'll get Carol to order Ava to do it step by step, without Ava knowing what's going on. That way Ava will get what you said, and it'll be a sex-game with Carol that Ava will love, especially judging by her reaction when you said it to her. That'll make it far easier for Carol to have even more sex-games with Ava after that. Carol will probably only have to verbally remind Ava about this time to get her turned on enough to want to do more games. It'll work out great. I just need to work out how to do it." "Huh? The way you were just talking, I thought you already had a plan? I was VERY impressed that you seemed to have one." "No, no plan, just some ideas. I thought of doing her in front of the Ducklings on Thursday, because you told her you'd do it 'very soon', but I rejected that. They're your project, so I shouldn't intrude." "But that'd be so cool! I can't imagine how we could get away with it, but it'd definitely be amazing. The Ducklings would be blown away." "They're your project. You have to decide what to do with them, and how to do it. I think we'll do it in front of Carol's friends, that way Carol has a reason to be in charge. We can set it up so Carol seems to be in charge of the whole thing, so it'll be perfectly natural for her to be ordering Ava around. By the way, have you ordered Ava to take Carol and my orders yet?" "Ahh, no. She knows that anyway, we told her before the ceremony." "It'd be much better if you explicitly ordered her to. It'd make it far more real." #3: #2: #3: #4: #2: #3: #4: #2: #3: "Julia, I'll do the marathon run with Ava immediately after I drop you and my sisters home after school tomorrow. It'll probably take about three hours, what with the driving time needed too. We should finish that just before the dinner party, although it'll be cutting it close. I'm going to order her not to tell her parents. She'll be desperately eager to impress them about me, so that'll bust her gut. If she can hold out telling them, she probably won't tell anyone." "That sounds very good, especially with the temptation to tell her parents. If she passes that test, she'll have gone a long way toward proving herself." "I agree. In case I forget, can you also tell Ava sometime tonight. She'll have to follow me in her car after school, and then I'll leave my car at either house and have her drive me to where I want to do the run." "Okay. Was there anything else?" "Ahh. Just one more thing. I'm a bit reluctant to bring it up, but I have to say that I forgot to put a rubber on before Ava and I did it." I prepared to duck. #4: Julia said, "Haha. That's right, she was very quick. I watched her climb on you and I didn't think of it either. She's on the pill and I doubt you came, not with Katelin next, right?" "Ahh, right." "So it's only STDs to worry about. I'll talk with her about it those on the way to your place. She did say her last sex was months ago, so I imagine there's no problem, but I'll check. You just need to tell her not to sleep with anyone other than us." [STDs are Sexually Transmitted Diseases.] "Ahh, I already have." "Good. As long as she's clean now, there's no problem. I remember she was condom conscious during Mom's hypothetical soccer team story, so I'm sure she's fine. It'd be a good idea for us all to get regular checks though, given how much sex we are having with so many different girls, especially you." I protested, "But I always use a rubber!" "Always?" "{Gulp}. That was the first time I've got it wrong." #4: #3: "Even if you always wear them, condoms aren't 100% reliable at preventing disease. We'll get checked every three months to be safe, and I'll get some literature on the common diseases so you'll recognize the symptoms and can seek treatment faster." This conversation had gone seriously downhill since we'd stopped talking about fucking Ava in front of the Ducklings. So far down that it'd gotten seriously icky and I didn't want to continue it anymore. "Ahh, how can you talk so casually about stuff like that? I'd really rather we dropped it." "It's part of life. You have to be responsible. Girls have to be careful about it - for things like thrush or yeast - and there's no reason you can't look after yourself too. You should, as it'd probably be you that experiences the symptoms first." #3: #2: #4: "Do you mean yeast like they put in beer?" "Yes, it's much the same. We don't have any time, Mark. You can ask me about medical stuff later. Is there anything else?" #2: #4: #3: #4: #3: #4: We went back to the kitchen. On the way #3 had an idea. I told Julia, "Don't tell Ava anything about why I want her services right after school tomorrow. Just tell her I need her. Also, it might be a good idea for her to have her clothes for the dinner party in her car because she may not have time to go home for them. We'll probably come straight here after my run, okay?" "Sure." There wasn't time for more. I was also disappointed that Julia had never asked me how much faster than the world record I could run a marathon. It was impressively faster. I remember figuring that it'd be about fifteen minutes under the 2 hour, 5 minute record, not allowing for speeding up at the end, at the expense of some tiredness. The Anderson-visiting party set off almost immediately, leaving me with Katelin. I was trying to think of a diplomatic way of mentioning that we should go upstairs, when Katelin said, "Can we please go straight to bed, Mark? Ava and Julia's mom have been winding me up with stories about how good you are in bed, and I don't want to wait anymore." #3: <"And VANESSA"! Now I'm glad we were stuck talking icky stuff with Julia. Listening to Vanessa would have been very embarrassing.> #2: I couldn't think of a reason not to agree to Katelin's request - admittedly I didn't try hard - so we went upstairs. When we got down to it, I found my heart wasn't into it. So I parked my heart to the side and let my body do its thing. I knew Julia wanted Katelin to spread some good stories tomorrow. Between go-hards (which I didn't need as I wasn't that FAR out of it - don't be silly!), mini-go-softs (very useful for keeping me constantly rock hard for as long as the girl wanted), my physical stamina, my by now considerable technical knowledge of female sexual anatomy (non-medical), and my attention to button-pushing detail; Katelin had a very, very good time. "The best of my life!" she happily enthused many times. One advantage of go-hards was that I could let myself cum whenever Katelin did, without fearing I'd be unable to get hard later. It wasn't until I was putting on my third rubber that I realized I would be going though a LOT of rubbers. Rubbers are expensive in the quantities I use them, even at the old rate when I restricted how many cums I had. Cumming is fun (I suspect you already know that), and I knew I'd be getting all the cums I wanted later, when Julia and Ava got back, so I made the third rubber last a LOT longer. Katelin helped me discover a little trick I'd been unconsciously doing for - I was sure - a few weeks. She complimented me on it, which made me realize that I moved with her. If she changed her position, I 'saw' it coming with proximity and moved along with her. That meant the number and duration of the awkward pauses to adjusted/readjusted our positions were much reduced. She was particularly impressed by those occasions when there was no pause at all, because we could transition in one movement, together and simultaneously. Our boinking 'flowed' much more gracefully than she was used to, and she was impressed by it. She seemed a little OTT about it, until she explained that she was into dance, so had some appreciation for movement, particularly coordinated movement. Katelin was pretty - Julia wouldn't have invited her on Sunday's date otherwise - but mostly I was thinking about what was happening at my home. After Katelin's first three orgasms I didn't need to give her much attention. She was so turned on and blown away that she wasn't noticing much of anything, so I mostly operated on automatic (#4 volunteered to be "automatic"). #4 fucked her repeatedly, while the other two minds mostly 'chatted' internally about recent events, implications thereof, plans resulting from, etc. #3, for example, had a bit of fun planned for Ava and the marathon, which is why he'd asked Julia not to tell Ava what I needed her for after school tomorrow. He shared his plan with us, and we all got a little chuckle out of it. Katelin had come over at 8:30 precisely, but we'd kept her waiting about forty five minutes. Vanessa and Prof (in their car), Julia and Ava (in Ava's car) would have gotten to my place about 9:30. Vanessa had said that she expected the girls would get back here in "an hour or so". I took that to mean about 10:45. I wanted Katelin to be well taken care of by the time the girls arrived back, so I could concentrate on them rather than Katelin, so I aimed to exhaust Katelin at about 10:45. As it turned out, the discussion at my home took longer than Vanessa had expected, which I would've expected it to, except that it was Vanessa's expectation I was contemplating overriding. Julia and Ava arrived about 11:15, half an hour late. That extra thirty minutes took its toll on poor Katelin's body. Katelin was on her last legs - and particularly nice legs they are too - and was incredulous at the enthusiasm I showed when Julia and Ava stripped off and jumped onto the bed with me. Ava was HIGHLY enthusiastic, and I was eager myself, so she and I were going at it hammer and tong before the last of her clothes had reached the floor. We never got around to asking Katelin what she wanted to do threesome/foursome-wise. Ava, Julia and I just leaped into sex, leaving Katelin on the side of the bed, looking on in disbelief. We didn't touch her, being too busy touching each other. Then she fell asleep. #1: We had to decide that it didn't, unfortunately. I had previously thought that when Ava got back from what I assume would be an emotional discussion with my parents, she might be in a mellow mood and prefer some gentle loving, or perhaps no loving at all, just cuddles and talk. Nope, she wanted lots of fucking, so that's what we did. We kept our threesome - or foursome if you'll allow me to count a sleeping girl - going until 1:30am. It was a very happy fucking session. We didn't talk much, other than "stick it in here" and the like, so at 1:30 we finally settled down to some cuddling and talking. Katelin was asleep the whole time; something that I kept a proximity awareness of, as some of our talk went well beyond what she should hear. ------- Chapter 131: Ava's Loose Threads Tuesday, April 26, 2005 (Continued) The meeting at the Anderson's had gone very much as expected, in that my two families would do the decent thing and give Ava buckets of support. Everything about it was pretty obvious, so I won't bother describing it further. Most of what follows are threads left dangling when Ava & Co. went to meet my parents. I'll present the threads a little out of chronological sequence, following threads rather than chronology, for the sake of clarity. ^ When Ava and Julia returned and we had started our sex session, Julia said it was fine for me not to use a condom with Ava. I was supremely uninterested in having another medical discussion, and - at that exact moment - had FAR more interesting things to do, so I said nothing beyond "Yippee." And then another "YIPPEE" when I realized that it meant as many cums as I wanted, without having to worry about the expense of rubbers. In our post-sex talk, Julia and Ava gave me more details for their no-rubber permission, not that I cared much about the logic behind their decision. Ava was certain to be STD free - I didn't ask whether she was worried about magpies - because Ava's mom had been making Ava get STD checks periodically, and had insisted on a complete medical checkup soon after she [Ava's mom] was diagnosed with cancer. Ava hadn't had sex since. During the conversation, Julia said to Ava, "Thank goodness you're adopted." This surprised me, and I was even more surprised when Ava agreed. Julia explained to me that having two parents and sole uncle die of cancer in their 50s would have had scary implications for their biological children, if they'd had any. ^ Ava told me, "You don't have to worry about me wanting to have other guys at the same time, Mark. Julia explained the three reasons." #4: #1: Ava had a strange look on her face, so I looked at Julia. Julia had no trouble keeping a straight face. In fact, she looked quite innocent. Uh oh. I knew what was required of me, so I asked, "What are the three reasons, sweetie?" I was asking Ava. I suspect Julia put her up to whatever this was, so Julia was temporarily off my "Sweetie" list. Ava's face got even more strained, and she said, "It's complicated so I might mess it up, but I'll try. Number one: you want all the girls to know that you're the boss, and if you're the only guy that's much easier." I was impressed. That was a good reason not to have any more guys. It was a completely unnecessary reason - because there weren't going to be any more guys anyway - but it was still a good one. "Number two: guys get into all sorts of competitiveness, like boasting, fighting and stupid stuff like that. What did you call them, Julia?" "Status games." "Yeah, thanks. 'Boasting, fighting and status games.' She said it would mess up the loving, open ... Um, what's that word, Julia?" Julia supplied, "Culture." " ... culture that you want." Looking at Julia, Ava asked, "Isn't culture what foreigners have?" Julia said, "It means how people behave together, so every group of people have a culture, even Americans. Just think of it as 'the atmosphere between people.' Mark wants our house to have a loving, open atmosphere between all of us." Ava looked back at me, "Yes. Just like that. Lots of loving and open. Especially open legs, haha. You don't want any macho games messing that up, do you?" "No, I truly don't. Both of those reasons are good reasons." I wondered what the third was going to be. It had to be good, with this set up. "Yeah. Julia's very smart. The last reason is that girls are naturally givers and boys are naturally takers. So it's easier to find giving, loving girls than boys. There are some boys like that, but they're too hard to find. Julia said that if there was another boy now, he might prefer some of us girls the most, then not want to share them with you. Have I explained that properly, Julia?" Julia said, "You've explained it perfectly, sweetie." Ava looked relieved. I thought the last reason overlapped with number two ("macho status games") a lot, and I wasn't too thrilled with the "guys are takers, girls givers" assumption either. Julia, perhaps seeing my expression, saw the need to explain, "As a general rule, guys approach life competitively. That's how they get ahead in their lives. Females are more cooperative. We don't try to 'get ahead' because we've evolved to be the nurturers, which cannot be a competitive activity. Those are very general statements, of course. There are many exceptions either way." "Oh yeah," said Ava, "I forgot that bit." #3: #1: #4: Ava said, "I'm looking forward to when there are more guys. That'll be neat!" "Huh?" Ava answered, "Huh?" When we'd untangled that confusion (Ava had been surprised by my being surprised, because surely I knew what was going on), Ava explained, "Julia said there'd be more guys in the future, but probably not for several years. So I have to give up asking you about them and just get used to you being the only one for a long time. That's okay. I don't mind you being the only guy; I think you're WONDERFUL!" My happiness at being considered "WONDERFUL" was somewhat diminished by what Ava had said Julia had said. I looked at Julia inquiringly. Or perhaps that should be, "in shocked dismay." Probably some of both, although definitely more of one than the other. Julia answered my dismayingly shocked inquiry with, "You don't know enough mature guys yet, but you'll meet them as you get older. There's no reason you can't get on with guys as well as you do with girls, and you'll certainly need to deal with them in your adult life. All girls know that male squeamishness at male intimacy is just more of that silly macho stuff that Ava mentioned. There is, after all, no LOGICAL reason against two men being very good friends, is there?" #4: Julia, seeing the look on my face, "Remember you're the undisputed boss, darling. Nothing like that will happen until you want it to. I'm just making a prediction about the future. Do you know what your life is going to be like when you are twenty, or forty, or sixty?" I knew what next year was going to be mostly like: an awful lot of probably too hard college study, but after that I had ABSOLUTELY no idea. According to Prof I might even be in another country, but God knows which one. What my life would be like when I'm twenty, forty and sixty were complete unknowns. [[My life turned out to be utterly different than every guess I could've made!]] Julia finished with, "It'll ONLY happen, if YOU want it to, so you don't have anything to worry about." #1: #4: #1: #4: ^ After that Julia said, "Mark, have you ordered Ava to follow Carol and my orders yet?" I hadn't, but that was quickly fixed, "Ava. I order you to follow Carol's and Julia's orders as if they were my orders, okay?" "Not so fast," said Julia. "Ava, Mark's orders are the most important, then Carol's, then mine. That means if I order you to do one thing, and Mark orders you to do something else, then you do what Mark says, okay?" "Okay. Mark's the number one boss, then you and then Carol." "No, Carol then me. Carol is more important to Mark than me." "Really? More important to Mark?" "Yes." "Wow." After a short pause Ava looked at me, and said, "What a pity you can't sleep with her." I didn't want to lie if I didn't need to, so I said, "Not really. I've been told she snores a lot." After we'd finished joking around with that, Julia added, "I think Ava understands, so try giving the order again Mark." I carefully worded my order, "Ava, I order you to obey Carol's orders as secondary to mine, then Julia's orders as tertiary to mine. Okay?" "Okay. But what does 'tertiary' mean?" Julia answered, "It means 'third'. Mark's orders are first, Carol's second, mine third." "Thanks, okay. I got that. I still can't believe Carol's more important than you, Julia. You're AMAZING! Carol's even better?" Julia answered, "It's not a matter of 'better'. It's that Carol is more important to Mark. He needs her in his life more than he needs me." Ava asked, "You don't mind?" "Why would I mind that Mark has someone in his life that brings him so much love and joy? I want him to be happy, and no one makes him happier than Carol." "Wow, that's beautiful! I'm going to make sure I spend a LOT more time with Carol!" "Good decision. Let me tell you a few things about orders. We won't be giving you orders often, so chances are you won't have the problem of two of us giving you orders at the same time. If we do accidentally do that, tell us, and let us decide which order is the most important to do first, okay?" "Okay. That's easy. What sort of orders are you going to give me though? I've been wondering about that." "They might be simple orders, like getting me a glass of water, or they might be more interesting ones like ordering you to help me do something useful for Mark, like helping me with Donna's Ducklings. They might even be very, very important orders. If four men with guns broke into the house now, I might order you to help me attack them, to give Mark time to get away." "But they could SHOOT us!" "While they'd be busy shooting us, they'd not be shooting Mark, so he might have time to get away." #4: "Wow. You'd do that?" Julia stressed, "WE would do that. Without hesitation." "Wow. You must REALLY love Mark. Ahh, but aren't guys supposed to save girls?" "Who do you think is more important, you or Mark?" "Mark, of course." "There's your answer. I would sacrifice my life to save Mark's without hesitation. So would Carol. But we'd be extremely angry with him if he did the same for either of us. We expect you to treat Mark the same way." "Wow. You guys are scary! I know you're just scaring me, like your mom did, but it's still very scary." "When did Mom scare you?" "With making me have sex with the soccer team. I would MUCH rather have sex with the soccer team than attack men with guns, that's for sure!" "Unfortunately, men with guns is more likely than sex with the soccer team. Mark is very, very incredible, and incredible people can make other people jealous or angry, so he could be attacked. That's why I'm telling you now. One of your jobs - a VERY important job - is to keep Mark safe. If you hear some jocks planning to ambush Mark and beat him up, warn him. If men with guns break into the house, do whatever you can to protect Mark, including immediately following any orders you're given. You can imagine how important those orders could be!" "You're not just scaring me? That could happen?" "It COULD happen, yes, but we don't think it WILL. If we thought that, we wouldn't have let you join us and we'd be running away and hiding somewhere safe. But it COULD happen." Ava asked, unbelievingly, "And you STILL want to be his girlfriend?" "Absolutely. I love him and he's very important. Besides, I'd want to be there to do everything I could to protect him. Don't worry about it, Ava. It's true that it could happen, but it won't even be a risk for years yet. I just want you to realize how important following orders could be." "Super-important!" "Yes. Even super-super-important." "{Giggle}. I don't think my parents would want me to have a dangerous boyfriend though." "You don't even have to start worrying about it for years yet, Ava. By then you could be married and have your own family, and not be close to Mark and me at all." "Oh no! I always want to be close to you. Just not close to bad men with guns!" #1: #4: #1: #4: #3: #4: #3: (Corvallis is just south of Salem, Oregon. The Salem Witch Trials occurred in Salem, Massachusetts - a different place entirely - but the name similarity makes the witch trials something we're slightly more aware of. It's a tiny corner of our culture, proving that it isn't just for foreigners.) #4: #3: #1: #4: #1: #4: Julia was saying, "Never mind super-super-important orders. Let me talk with you about super-super-silly orders. We will sometimes give you orders that you think are silly, that you won't understand why we want you to do them." "You will?" "Yes. I'm going to deliberately give you orders like that sometimes, so you get used to it." "Why? I can ask 'Why?' now, can't I?" "Sure. Asking why wastes our time, especially Mark's time, when you ask us to explain our decisions or orders, but this is a discussion where I want you to understand what I'm talking about, so asking is the right thing to do. -- "The reason Mark and I are going to order you to do silly things is so that you get used to doing them. One day Mark might have something very important for you to do, and he'll order you to do it, but if you stop to ask 'Why?' it might cause that very important thing to fail. So we're going to give you lots of practice, so you get out of the habit of wanting to know why." "Okay. I think I understand that," agreed Ava. I made a mental note to follow Julia's hint. "Good girl. Now, let's say I wanted a glass of water from the kitchen." Ava answered, "Okay, I'll go get it for you," and Ava started getting out of bed. Julia quickly said, "It was just an example, Ava. I'm not thirsty, but thank you very much. IF I wanted a glass of water, I could order you to go get it, yes?" #1: "Of course. You just saw me try to get it, haha." "Now imagine you brought me the glass, but even though I hadn't taken a single sip, I said, 'I order you to take it back downstairs, empty it, dry the glass, put it away, then come back to bed.' You'd do that, wouldn't you?" "I guess. Sure." "Now imagine you do that, come back to bed, and immediately after you put your head on the pillow, I order you to go to the kitchen and get me a glass of water. Then when you fetched it up here, I ordered you to take it back to the kitchen and put it away again. Then, when you got back to bed, I ordered you to get me another glass of water. Imagine I did that over and over again, not ever taking a single sip. You're going to get very annoyed, aren't you?" Ava checked, "I'm going up and down for a glass of water, for nothing?" "Yes. You'd get annoyed, wouldn't you?" "I'll say!" Before Ava could say more about what she'd say, Julia said, "NO you wouldn't!" "I wouldn't? Why wouldn't I?" "If I'd ASKED you to do those things, then it'd be fine for you to get angry. But if I ORDERED you, you're not allowed to get angry. Orders are different. Your opinion doesn't matter. Mark and I are not going to give your orders without doing so very deliberately. If we give you an order, it is for a reason that we have thought about and decided on. We are not going to say 'I order you to... ' by accident. It is going to be very deliberate. Do you understand that?" "Yes. It'll be deliberate." "Yes, it'll have a deliberate reason. If I order you to go up and down, getting and returning glasses of water, then I will have a reason. You may not know what my reason is, but I don't care whether you know or not. If I am giving you orders, your job is to obey them, not try to work out what my reasons are. We've talked about that before: when you're given an order, don't worry about why, just do it. I'm sure you remember us telling you that?" "Oh yes. I just didn't think about doing the same order over and over again. That seems silly." "Remember I said we will give you silly orders." "Oh yeah. Umm. I didn't mean 'silly' exactly. Umm, it seems mean." "Yes. I agree it does seem mean, but remember that I'm deliberately ordering you to do it. I know you trust me a lot, and I presume you don't think I'm a mean person, do you?" "Oh no. You're a lovely person. Although a lot of the stuff we've been talking about today has been very strange and scary, but I don't think it's been mean." "I agree it's been VERY strange. I'm very impressed how much of this talk you've managed to accept." "It's because Mark is so incredible, and because even your mom knows that. Moms don't treat their daughters' boyfriends ANYTHING like your mom does. My mom sure never treated any of my boyfriends like yours does, haha. I think I should listen very carefully to what you and your mom tell me, shouldn't I?" "That's far smarter than most girls would be. I'm VERY impressed." Which made Ava very proud. Julia added, "I don't know how much time Mark and your mother will have to get to know each other, but I hope that your mom will become like my mom about him. I think she will start to realize how incredible he is too. I hope she'll become enormously proud of you for being Mark's girlfriend." -- Ava needed a small pause while she wiped her eyes. When she was ready, Julia resumed, "Much of our talk has been strange and scary, but we're saying these things because they're important. If I am deliberately giving you orders that seem mean, like going up and down with glasses of water, but I'm not a mean person, then there must be a reason, mustn't there?" "I guess." "I'll give you some possible reasons. The first reason is that I might be testing your loyalty and obedience. I might be deliberately giving you orders that make you go back and forth to see how long it takes you to get angry with me. You should NEVER get angry about orders, so if you got angry after three or four trips, I'd know that you are very poor at keeping your commitments, so probably Mark and I wouldn't try very hard to look after you." "Oh NO! I will NEVER do that!" "Sweetie, if I hadn't told you this story, but had really ordered you to go up and down with the glasses of water, you would have gotten angry. That's why I'm telling you this story, so you don't get angry in the future. I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for you to keep your commitment by explaining everything to you as well as I can first, before you actually have to start doing things." "Oh. I would've, wouldn't I?" "I think so, but now you know that any time we give you orders, we might be testing to see how good you are at keeping your commitment. You should remember that any order we give you might be a test. If you're ever tempted to complain about an order, or refuse it, think about what it means to our opinion of your commitment. I'll remind you of that from time to time. -- "Here's another reason that I could be giving you an order that seems mean: I could be in a really SHITTY mood! That happens to me, just like it does to everyone else. I'll try not to take it out of you, but it's bound to happen sometimes. Sorry, and I'll try very hard not to be mean, but if it happens you'll just have to suffer, because you're not allowed to argue with orders. Just do what I tell you and hope I get happy again soon. When I do, I'll try to do something nice to apologize to you. Maybe I'll give you one of my turns to have sex with Mark. How would that be?" "SUPER!" "Haha. Now you're probably hoping I get in bad moods all the time, so you can have all my sex turns with Mark, haha. There are other reasons we could give you orders that seem silly or mean, but I won't bother going through them all. Just accept that a lot of the time you won't understand why you have to do something. Sometimes the orders will seem stupid or mean. Sometimes - I'm sure most of the time - you'll enjoy doing what we order you to do. But the most important thing is that you obey every order as best you can." "I WILL! I'll try my VERY hardest. Honest I will! But I'm worried about, um, about making a mistake. I'm not very smart, and sometimes..." "Ava, sweetie. You're a lot smarter than you think you are. You may not be smart at some school stuff..." "I'm not. I don't know how Mark can be so good at Math, because I think it's a REALLY hard subject!" "Luckily we don't need you to be good at Math; we've got Mark and my father for that. You are smart in other ways which are much better for us. You're the smartest high-school girl I know at recognizing how special Mark is. There are dozens of girls who are in Mark's classes every day, but they don't understand Mark nearly as well as you do. Mark hardly ever goes to your classes, yet you understood his importance a long time ago. That makes you very smart indeed. Smart about Mark, which is the most important way to be smart." "Wow. Thank you very much." After a moments thought, "But, um, it was mostly just because my parents made me look at boys differently. If they hadn't told me to, I never would have gotten interested in Mark." "Your parents just told you what to look for. It is you that did the looking, and you understood what you saw. That makes you very smart. I have no doubt about that. When we start giving you orders, don't worry about making a few mistakes to start with. That's why Mark and I are going to be making you do extra orders, to train you. It always takes time to learn something new, and I can see you're going to be trying very hard, so Mark and I will be very happy with you." That was a good point to end that particular conversation. It was amazing how much Ava had accepted. ^ I asked Ava how come she'd never had sex with girls before (I diplomatically left off the end of the sentence, " ... before Julia pushed you into it?"). This had been puzzling me, because Ava's obviously got a - shall we say - "healthy" sex drive. And, judging by what we'd been doing a few minutes previous, no reluctance about having sex with girls. Ava answered, "Most of the time I've had a boyfriend. There were a few times I got super-horny and wanted someone quick, but it's never hard to find a boy to have sex with. They're very easy to pickup, you know?" I believe I knew that. ^ Not a "loose thread" per se, but it happened right after the above, and was funny, so I'm including it. Plus without the following explanation you'd get confused by references to "NP" throughout the rest of my autobiography. Julia whispered something to me, and I agreed, so Julia said, "Ava, when we're about to go to sleep we always get Mark to turn the lights off." "Ahh, okay." Ava didn't understand why Julia thought it necessary to tell her that, but she had no reason to object. Shortly after that it was time for me to turn the lights off, so I put my hands on Ava's body just to prove to her that I wasn't using my hands in any way (well, not "just" to demonstrate that, as I carefully chose where to put them), then I used TK to flick the light switch off. In the dark, Ava exclaimed, "Huh? How did you do that?" Julia said, "He's incredible, isn't he?" "Yes, but how did he do it? He didn't even move, and his hands are on my tits." I had a wonderful idea (it involved nipples, therefore it was wonderful). I created a TK-point and felt around in the dark using that recently discovered capability until I had found the bedside light switch. I poised the TK-fingertip on it, but did not trigger it yet. While I was doing that I was saying, "That's because of your magic nipples, Ava." "What?" "Your magic nipples. Surely you knew you had magic nipples?" "{Giggle}. There's no such thing as magic nipples!" "Sure there is. Your right nipple turns lights on, and your left nipple turns them off." I squeezed her right nipple, and sure enough the bedside light turned on. Somewhat to Ava's surprise, but not to anyone else's. I squeezed the left nipple and the light turned off. I squeezed the right, and it turned back on. I paused, to give Ava time to react. "Julia's doing it!" Julia said, "Ava, I promise I have nothing to do with it. I could leave the room and it'd make no difference. I'm too lazy to do it now, but I promise it's not me." "Okay." I liked Ava's instant acceptance. "Hmm. Mark's doing it with his feet, somehow?" "My feet are nowhere near the lights, but if I move my feet up and hold them against your body. You can even hold them with your hands if you like. Got a good grip? Good. You ready? 'Lights Off!'" I squeezed her left nipple, and because it's a magical nipple, the lights went off. A couple of seconds later I squeezed her right nipple, and it worked its magic too. Ava exclaimed, "You didn't move your hands OR your feet! How do you do that?" "I DID move my hand; I squeezed your magic nipples. I can't believe you didn't know you had magic nipples." "I DON'T have magic nipples, {giggle}. You're just teasing me." There was enough illumination from the bedside light for me to see the room's main light switch just inside the door. Unlike my house, here there is also a switch controlling the main lights above the headboard, but it would be easier to use the switch across the room, and it fitted what I wanted better. I said, "See the light switch by the door Ava." I nodded/pointed with my head, my hands being occupied. A hesitant, "Yeah." "If you listen carefully, you'll hear the switch turn on. It's all the way across the room, so there's no way Julia or I could make it turn on from here. I have to warn you though, it's a long way across the room, so I'm going to have to squeeze your nipple harder than before. It shouldn't be too bad though. Are you listening carefully, and ready?" "Ready." I squeezed harder than before, but not too much so, and the light switch flicked on. "Wow!" After a moment, "But I can't have magic nipples. That's ridiculous! There's no such thing." "Not only is there such a thing, I'm pretty sure there are TWO such things. Let me check. One. Two. Yep, that's right." I'd given the left and right nipples quick squeezes, and the bedside light went off and on again. "That was the bedside light this time!" "Sure, they were only quick squeezes." "I can't believe I've got magic nipples. You've GOT to be teasing me somehow." "Your nipples are good, but it's your pussy that I'm the most impressed by." "Why? What can it do?" "Make my cock VERY happy." "Oh you! {Giggle}." Julia giggled at that one too, and Julia isn't much of a giggler, so I gave myself a pat on the back for that. Or I would later, when my hands were free. Ava said, "I've squeezed my nipples lots of times, and the lights have never gone on or off." I really shouldn't keep this going much longer, as Ava already has too much of an "I'm not smart" thing going on. So I started ending it; slowly though, because it was fun. I said, "No, they wouldn't. It only happens when I squeeze them." "Just you?" "Yes. I should have said that they're magic - but very, very fussy - nipples. They only work when an incredibly sexy guy squeezes them. Nipples like sexy guys, you know. Were any of your other lovers as incredible as me?" "Haha. No, of course not. Now I'm SURE you're teasing me!" "Why? If I was a magic nipple, I'd only work when an incredible guy squeezed me." "Haha. Haha. You're very funny, Mark." "Thank you, darling. I'm glad I can make you happy." From Julia behind me, "Me too." I said, "It's very late, so we should go to sleep. I'll get the lights." I gave Ava's left nipple a quick squeeze and the bedside light went off. Ava giggled, so I said, "I can't turn off the main lights while you're giggling so much, Ava. Your breasts are wobbling around too much." Which just made her giggle more. When she finally settled down, I said, "You've moved around too much. You need to roll onto your back a bit more, so I can point your nipple at the light switch." "I do NOT! {Giggle}." I squeezed it hard, without bothering to point it, and the light went off, as they do. I straightened myself out of the ball I was in, extracting my feet from Ava's grip, and snuggled into her. Julia snuggled up behind me. In the dark Ava said, "That was you the whole time?" "Yep." "You didn't need to squeeze my nipples?" "I didn't NEED to, but I enjoyed it. We did warn you before that there was a lot of teasing in this home. Every time Julia teases me I think there's too much." "No one's ever teased me like that before. That was fun. Um, I get the feeling you're not going to tell me how you did that?" Both Julia and I said, "Good girl" at the same time. Julia added, "That was very smart of you, sweetie. Mark might tell you one day, or he might never tell you. That's his choice. My advice is to accept that your life with Mark is going to have things in it that you won't understand, but to trust us and not worry about them. Just relax and go to sleep." "Okay. I was already feeling like that anyway. Mostly I'm just feeling very happy. Thank you both very, very much." We both thanked her too. She disbelievingly asked, "What for {giggle}?" Julia said, "For being so accepting and obedient." | Mine was trite but perhaps better, "For being you." We did some kissing then. Julia thought of an addition, "You can't tell anyone either, Ava. It's a secret." "I can't tell anyone I've got magic nipples?" Julia started answering, but Ava's giggles gave her little joke away. Julia stopped. Ava said, "Yeah, I know Julia. Your mother wouldn't have said what she did unless Mark was very special. Girls can rave about their boyfriends, but mothers don't talk like yours did." "Good girl," x 2. I gave Ava the usual warning that I fall asleep very quickly, and then I did so. ^ For comprehension's sake, I'm jumping ahead in time for the next three topics. Then I'll revert back to the correct time. In the morning, when we had some privacy, Ava quietly said to me, "After you fell asleep, I worked out that you showed me my 'magic nipples' {giggle} for a reason, didn't you?" "Yes, as a message. Last evening all of us were telling you over and over that there are things about me that you wouldn't understand. You accepted it, but it was better to show you one. I'm sure Julia will talk to you some more about it, but there are things about me that you TRULY will not understand. In other words, there are things that your 'Why' question simply can't help you, no matter how long you spent trying to understand. Knowing that should make it easier for you to do some of the things we ask of you." It would also make her even more believing of whatever we told her, if that was possible. Later in the day, during class, I was amusing myself by reminiscing about the magic nipples tease when I remembered a little source of discomfort I'd had for a while: I don't really like calling my TK ability "TK", because that's what it is! Anyone who overheard us mention that I had a TK ability could work out that it stood for telekinesis, which instantly gave them far too much possibly dangerous knowledge about me. I'd vaguely thought about using a different name, but nothing had suggested itself to me before. I decided to change the name now. I didn't like "Magic Nipples" because I wanted to avoid any association between me and magic. Plus saying "MN" is a little difficult as it doesn't roll off the tongue easily. I gave it a couple of seconds' thought, and decided on, "Nipple Power", or "NP" for short. Anyone hiding in the bushes to eavesdrop on our conversation, who hears that I've got Nipple Power, is probably going to give themselves away by laughing out loud. It's also completely innocuous and misleading, as my nipples, in fact, have very little power. It'd also be a nice, little compliment to Ava. I can't express why that's true, but it somehow is. On the next opportunities, I informed Julia, Carol, Prof and Vanessa that TK was to be hereafter referred to as NP, and why. They all liked the reason, not just for its safety and amusement value, but that I'd given Ava a tantalizing glimpse which she was reacting well to, by accepting it rather than bugging us about it. I also told Ava about the new "Nipple Power" name, and the bare minimum I needed to say in order for her to appreciate that our fun had been commemorated. I didn't even tell her the old initials. Mom and Dad knew about TK, but they could well have forgotten the name by now, as the initials probably meant nothing to them. I didn't inform them of the change, but will use "NP" with them in future discussions, if any. ^ The following is as reported to me by Julia on the way to school the next day. [[I much later researched it using my own methods, so it's reproduced here in detail.]] Ava and Carol had gotten along famously during the discussion at my home. Ava had been sold on Carol from the earlier praises of her [Carol] at the Williams', and Carol had been very caring right from the moment Ava arrived at the Anderson's, as they'd been snuggled comfortably together on the sofa all during that talk, Julia on Ava's other side. In Ava's car, on the way back, Julia had said, "We didn't have a chance tonight, sweetie, but I need to let Carol know fairly soon about taking sex with you 'off the agenda', as we called it. I saw you..." "No need. Please leave it on the agenda. She's a VERY nice girl, isn't she?" "She certainly is." "And she's beautiful and good at having sex with girls." "She is, and we practice every chance we get. We haven't been practicing long, but we're very enthusiastic, haha." "You've been practicing longer than me! On the agenda, please." "That's wonderful. That does make everything very much easier between all of us. Now everyone can love everyone." "Especially Mark loving Carol." "Yes. And Carol loving Mark. Both ways." "Good, I'm glad. What about Mark and Donna? Donna seems like a nice girl too." "Donna IS nice. She's still mostly a little girl - a bit of a tomboy - but she's starting to become a young woman. She and Mark do love each other, but not as deeply as Mark and Carol do. That is very, very deep. I know you're going to say something about how sad it is that Carol is a lesbian, and I agree with you." "{Giggle}. Yeah. It'd be perfect if she liked boys too." "People can't choose their orientation. Whatever happens, happens. When you talked about putting sex with Carol back on the agenda, you didn't mention 'sex-games'. Do you want them on or off the agenda?" "I'm confused about that. I know what sex in bed is like, and I like that a LOT, but I don't know what could happen in the sex-games with Carol, so I don't know whether I'd like it or not." Julia helpfully suggested, "How about we leave it on the agenda, but it'll be voluntary and cooperative. I'll let Carol know not to order you to do things, that way if she tells you to do something you don't like, you can tell her you don't want to do it. But if you like it, you can carry on all you want. How does that sound?" "Super!" "Good. I'll let her know tomorrow morning. If she ORDERS you to do something sexy, you can't refuse that, you know?" "Yeah. I can't refuse orders. I know about orders by now!" Julia checked, "Orders from Mark, Carol or me. You know you CAN refuse orders from other people?" "{Giggle}. Yeah. I'd hate to have to obey orders from everyone. That'd be terrible." "It certainly would!" After a pause, Ava said, "Mark's going to fuck me at school. In front of other people. That's a 'sex-game' too, isn't it?" "Doing it in front of other people certainly is. Are you looking forward to that?" "I always look forward to have sex with Mark, but I know what you mean. Yeah, it makes me hot. It's very sexy. Do you think it'll be in front of the soccer team?" "That's one idea. Do you like the sound of that?" "I'll say!" "Mark mostly hangs around with girls, so it could be in front of girls. Would that be as good as in front of the soccer team?" Ava thought for a second, then, "I think we should do both, and then I'll let you know, haha." "Good girl." After a minute of other conversation, Julia suddenly thought to ask, "Aren't you worried about your reputation if you have sex in front of lots of other people?" "Oh, I never thought of that. I wouldn't want Mom and Dad to hear anything bad about me. That's important..." "Yes, very," agreed Julia. " ... Umm, I'm not much worried about what other people think, but I am about Mom and Dad. You and Mark are the most important, and Mark's the one who's going to be doing it to me so I don't think he'll be upset about my new reputation, haha. I've only got one more year of school, and I won't want another boyfriend then..." "I wouldn't think so, no." " ... I wouldn't want lots of girls being mean to me for being a slut, or lots of boys hitting on me. That'd be a real pain." "People will clearly see that you're Mark's and mine only. You might have some trouble from the stories, but it shouldn't be bad or last long." "People will see I'm yours too?" "We'll be holding hands a lot, kissing when we greet, sitting together at lunch, just like I do with Carol. When Carol's with us, it'll be the three of us kissing each other, sitting and holding each other. I think people will notice, don't you?" "{Giggle}. I just never thought about that part of it." "I didn't think about it until just now either. Carol and I came out only a week ago, but it feels natural and I didn't think about behaving any different with you. We could hide our relationship at school, but there are going to be plenty of girls from school seeing us together outside of it. I don't want us to have to try to hide our relationship whenever there's anyone else around, because that's going to happen a lot. I think it's best to show our feelings everywhere, don't you? They're good feelings." "Yeah, very good. I'm very proud that you want to have a relationship with me. We're going to tell Mom and Dad about us tomorrow, aren't we?" "My mom's got plans for your parents, but I haven't had a chance to ask her what she intends to say to them yet. I don't think she'll talk about you and Mark as if you could have a normal relationship. She has to talk about me. Mom might not mention Carol in our first meeting with your parents, in case your having three lovers might be too much for them to absorb in one go, especially as two of them are brother and sister." "{Giggle}. Yeah, the four of us together would be a BIG shock. They want me to stop having so much sex and to settle down. They won't expect me to settle down and have even MORE sex, haha. Especially with girls! What a pity they'd worry about Mark and Carol being together." "That is a pity, but we'll do our best to teach them what we can. Your parents will see that Carol will be in your life a lot from now on, especially next school year, so they'll see that you're special friends with her. Better we tell them in a good way first, so they don't spend any time getting suspicious and worried about it." ^ I remembered to ask Julia what was wrong with my schedule idea for ensuring an equitable allocation private bedtime with me, as per Vanessa's concern. Julia laughed at being reminded of it, then she said started, "First," (which was a bad sign), "the needs girls have for private times with you are moods. You can't schedule moods! When do you expect to be happy next, for example." Julia was making a point, rather than asking a question, but I knew the answer, "When I manage to forget about the disaster I know this conversation is going to be." "Haha. True. But it'll be an educational disaster, so I'll carry on anyway." #1: "You can't schedule moods, okay?" I nodded. "Nor are the moods on some sort of regular cycle. There's nothing regular about them at all. When each of Ava's parents get very sick, and when they die, she'll need to spend a great deal of time with you. She might need to be in your bed every night for weeks. For loving, not sex, obviously. At other times, she might not need private time for weeks." "Okay. I understand that." "Good. While I remember it, when things get that bad with her parents, and she needs your comfort, please don't go to sleep instantly. That's very abrupt and unsettling for the girl. Ava will need to be held and comforted every night; NOT unsettled! You might need to hold her for an hour or more if she can't sleep. So no 'Instant Sleeps', okay?" "Okay, I understand. Does my instantly going to sleep unsettle you too?" "Sure. Before you volunteer not to do it, the answer is a definite 'NO!' Every five minutes you stay awake means five minutes less study time when you wake up. When it's time to sleep, good on you for doing it so quickly. Plus I'm getting used to it, so don't worry about it." "Okay. It's hard to argue with your logic." "Female logic is always hard to argue with." That was true, and something that male logic and self-preservation required to me to respond to with nothing more than a nod. -- Julia continued, "So it can't be scheduled and is inconsistent for each girl. It's also inconsistent across girls. Donna and I eat different amounts, for example. Donna needs more food because she's much more physically active and larger than me. Girls have differing emotional needs too. Some girls will naturally need to sleep with you more often than others, regardless of any special reasons at the time. In summary: it's unpredictable, highly erratic, and variable across the girls. So there's no way it can be scheduled." I certainly agreed that my original idea of a fixed schedule was - shall we charitably say - simplistic. "But your mom said it was very important we be fair over this. That it could wreck everything. Maybe we could have some sort of extremely flexible booking system, where the girls could swap their nights..." "Mark, stop! This cannot be solved with male logic. Leave it to the females to manage, okay?" "But how? It seems unsolvable." "Scheduling in advance who sleeps with you IS unsolvable. Deciding who sleeps with you at the time is not. Provided we girls remain aware of the issue, and are careful, we'll know when one of us needs you, and who needs you the most. We'll send that girl in. Your job is just to welcome her appropriately. You'll be fine." "I just lie back and wait for one of you to come? I don't have any part of choosing who comes?" "Not on the nights when one of us needs you, probably not. There might be a few obvious times, like the nights Ava's parents die, when you'll know without our telling you that she'll need one-on-one time with you. But there's NO WAY any guy - not even you - is ever going to be able to judge the emotional states of several females and choose who, if anyone, most needs private time with him. Leave that to the females; we are MUCH better at things like that." I was NOT going to argue with that. But I did have a question, "Are you sure it won't be the disaster your mom said it could be?" "Mom said it was a 'threat'. If we keep a careful eye on it that threat will never amount to anything. I'm sure we can keep it well below the disaster level, Mark." I wasn't going to argue with a female about the emotional needs of females - it's hard enough to win an argument with a female about anything, let alone that - so my logical scheduling idea was dead and buried. ^ [Focus returns back to the previous night.] We finished talking about 2:30am. I mentioned to Julia, "That means a 6:30 start to my studying time, but that's even later than I should start having sex with you all again, assuming the usual 'impress a new girl' routine still applies to Katelin. What do you want me to do in the morning?" "There's not much point in your starting to study at 6:30 because you'll barely get started before you have to stop. There's no urgency to your studying, is there?" "No. There are no tests or anything like that. Just the same old studying." "I want Katelin to be woken up by our having sex. I imagine she won't wake up before 6:30, so you wake then and wake Ava and me. We'll start having sex and I'll try my best to scream loud enough to wake her up." Ava and I laughed at that. Julia - even without trying - already screams loud enough to wake the dead. I pointed out, "You two won't get enough sleep though. Four hours is not much." "We'll be fine. We'll make sure we have an early night tomorrow night." I realized we were taking up a lot of Ava's time. Even after school tomorrow she wouldn't have a chance to chat with her Mom, as she'd be pacing my marathon. The next time she'd get to talk with her folks would be at the dinner party. I said, "I just realized that we're keeping Ava away from her parents a lot. All tonight, and she'll be busy until the dinner party tomorrow. And it's WAY too late to call them for a chat now. We need to be more careful about that." Julia said, "Ava called them from your place, to get their confirmation for the dinner party tomorrow night. Starting at 7:30, by the way, to give you and Ava time to get home." Ava giggled, "Was Mom EVER curious! I told her I'd found my man, and that there'd be a dozen people at the dinner party, but that's all I told her. She was BURSTING to know more. It was so funny. Julia told me what to say, and poor Mom was stuck." "What'd Julia tell you to say?" "'That she'd enjoy it more at the time if she didn't know in advance.' That frustrated Mom terribly." "I imagine it did." Julia said, "Haha..." #2: #4: #2: #4: Julia was saying, " ... Ava put Mom on, to discuss the details. Mom told Katie - that's Ava's mom; Katie and Carson West - told her that everyone knew about their cancers, and that the dinner was a 'get to know' as well as starting the process of making sure Ava got the support and help she needed in the future. Even mom had to duck Katie's questions." Ava said, "I'll need to call Mom sometime tomorrow, to reassure her that everything is wonderful. Thank goodness you guys will explain all this tomorrow. I wouldn't know how I'd do it." Me neither. Thank goodness for Vanessa. We went to sleep not long after that. I spared a thought for my brand new, extraordinarily expensive, fantastic new computer system. Sitting there, powered up and unused for at least another day. So much for a 20% studying speed improvement. ------- Chapter 132: Katelin has a Good Morning Wednesday, April 27, 2005 Katelin couldn't believe her eyes when she awoke. "YOU'RE STILL GOING!" We stopped so we could laugh at that mistake, and then we resumed. Julia freed up her mouth, wiped it, and replied, "Mark woke up horny a few minutes ago. Now that I think about it, he wakes up horny EVERY morning, haha. It's GREAT sleeping with him! You get wonderful sex at night AND in the morning. How did you enjoy yourself with Mark last night, Katelin?" "God! He was AWESOME! That was the best sex of my life, and the most too. We did it over and over. I thought he'd never stop. He DOES never stop! Look at him going now!" Ava encouraged me, "{Giggle}. Go faster, Mark. {Grunt}. Yeah, like that. Oh, that's so good." Julia said, "He does stop, Katelin: when the girls want him to. We finally had to stop last night, when Ava and I were worn out." "He wore BOTH of you out last night! After me?" "Sure. He wore us out quickly, as we went at it full-on because we were both so horny. I guess we finished about 1:30." "But that's ... more than four hours. Mark was going nonstop for more than four hours!" "Yeah, I told you he wore us out quickly." Julia can be delightfully abstruse at times. "But he was NONSTOP! With me anyway, and what I saw of you. And now too. He doesn't stop AT ALL! Not even for a few minutes rest afterward. After EACH afterward! {Giggle}. I can't believe I'm talking to you while you're doing that!" "It's good, isn't it? And if I move my legs like this ... then Mark can reach my clit with his other hand. Oh, thank you, darling." "No. Haha. I meant talking to you while you're all having sex. This is weird!" "You saw Mark with Alexis and Lily on Sunday, and the girls that wanted to sit on his cock in the tub." "That was different. Don't ask me to explain it, but this is much stranger." Katelin was still under the covers, holding them up to her chin. Julia said, "Please don't think I'm being rude, but I want to stop talking so I can concentrate on being rude, haha. You can do whatever you want: lie there and watch, go have a shower, or join in if you want. It's up to you." "I COULDN'T! I've never had sex with a girl before. I don't want to. It's too weird for me already." "You heard how moral Mark and I were on Sunday. We're not pressuring you. If you want sex with Mark, just ask him. 'Take a number, ' haha. When he's ready for you, you and him can go for it. One thing's for sure, Ava and I would be happy to take a break for a few minutes." Ava exclaimed, "NOT right now!" Katelin giggled, while Julia said to Ava, "No, we'll let Mark get you off first. No more talking, Katelin, I want to make love; it's too good to pass up. If you want any, speak up. I wouldn't wait too long though, we have to get ready for school soon." We got back to business, Julia and I keeping an eye on Katelin sometimes, when our views weren't obscured by having something in the way, like a pussy. Ava was too focused on having fun with the two of us to care about Katelin, who she didn't even know. Katelin SLOWLY relaxed. She rarely looked at Ava or Julia, but she enjoyed looking at me. After fifteen minutes, Katelin discovered that she didn't need two hands to hold the covers under her chin. I rolled over so she was within my proximity range, then laughed quietly to myself when I sensed the confirmation of my guess. A couple of minutes later both of her hands were down there and Katelin was starting to breath heavily. A couple of minutes later she had to try hard to stifle her cry. That amused me, as the three of us were making FAR more noise. Not long after that Katelin hesitantly asked, "Julia, can I have a turn please?" Julia was very busy, and took a couple of seconds before she could say, "{Grunt}. You tell her, Mark." "Of course you can, Katelin. When Ava and I have finished bringing Julia off, I'll do you next." "Thanks. I don't want anyone else to touch me; just you." "They won't." "And I don't want to touch them." "Then don't." It would've been a silly conversation if it'd been about anything else, but I knew people get weird about sex, so I didn't judge her harshly. "What do I have to do?" "For a start, you'll need to get a rubber for me. There are some in the drawer behind you. It'll also make it quite a lot easier if you come out from under the covers." "I knew that. I'm feeling shy though." "I suspect you're the only one. We've all seen you naked, and you've got a very nice body, so you've got nothing to worry about." "Ava hasn't." "SHE DOES TOO! What a thing to say!" I was shocked. "I meant she hasn't seen me naked." "Oops, sorry." Part of the reason I'd taken the wrong meaning was because of the reason I gave now, "Katelin, Ava HAS seen you naked. Last night when she and Julia came into the bedroom." Katelin had been so well fucked by then that it hadn't registered. That was so good for my ego that I excused her mistake. All that talk distracted from the main activity, so I got Katelin to shut up until we finished with Julia. I always like to see if I can give Julia a good enough one to make her go unconscious afterward. It gives me something to strive for. Julia had been very emotional and horny last night, but she wasn't nearly so much this morning, so I wasn't having much success at making her pass out now. That didn't stop me trying though. After having fun but failing to help Julia catch up on her sleep deficit, I turned to Katelin. She bashfully emerged from the covers. She was already holding the packet, so I asked her to put the rubber on me. She took the rubber out of the foil, and was moving to put it on me, but she recoiled when she saw how wet my cock was. "Ahh. It's very messy." Ava said, "Silly girl." Julia said, "Play nice, Ava. Not everyone is as comfortable with sex as you are." Ava could neither argue nor agree with Julia's statement, as her mouth was full by now. A short but delightful time later, Ava said to Katelin, "There, nice and clean for you." I couldn't resist a gentle dig, so I said, "Katelin, you should thank people who do you a favor." "Ahh, thank you." I added, "And Mom has always told me to be specific when you're thanking someone. You should include what you're thanking them for." It's true that Mom has often said that to me. I hardly ever do it, as it seems too formal, but what the heck. "Ahh, thank you for, umm..." Katelin was shy, so I offered my help, "sucking Mark's cock clean for me." Katelin hesitated over that, and I thought I'd pulled her leg enough, so I let myself laugh. Katelin stopped trying to carry out my etiquette advice to accuse, "You're teasing me?" "Sure, and enjoying myself doing so. I didn't know you were so prudish, Katelin. You certainly weren't last night. I had the impression you'd had lots of sex, so you must have seem messy cocks before?" "Sure, but it was always my mess. I've never done anything weird before, only normal sex." Julia chipped in with, "There's NOTHING normal about sex with Mark! Katelin, you're holding things up and we don't have much time before we have to shower and go down for breakfast. Mark, lie on your back, Katelin put that thing on him and jump on." We did as Julia had instructed. That's what usually happens when Julia issues instructions. As soon as Katelin was happily riding me, Julia jumped on my face, facing Katelin. Even though I couldn't see anything (well, I could see 'something', but nothing beyond that), I had no trouble imagining the view that Katelin was getting. I could tell with proximity that Ava was kneeling beside my shoulder, and was moving between kissing Julia's lips, nearest breast, or her other lips. I particularly enjoyed when Ava and I were both working on Julia's pussy, as our tongues played with each other's, and we could kiss while still in contact with Julia. A question may have occurred to some readers: given that I'd just fucked Julia, and was now going down on her ("going up" in this case), was I tasting my own cum? Julia has long since made sure I didn't have a problem with it, by deliberately giving me the right attitude. I had naturally been embarrassed and reluctant when this problem first arose after Julia no longer needed rubbers, but Julia had given me no choice. After a dozen or so "no choices", it wasn't an issue anymore. Also, I ration my cums or they become pathetic, so there's often nothing of mine to taste anyway. After a particularly long session I'm often so drained that there's almost nothing to taste of myself. That's especially true if I haven't recharged after the previous session, which I hadn't after last night's four-hour fun. Meanwhile, at the other end of my body, Katelin was doing her thing. Delightfully rhythmically too, probably helped by her dancing experience. There wasn't much I could do to help at the moment, so I just lay still and enjoyed myself. These were our positions for a few minutes, and thoroughly enjoyable positions and minutes they were too, but eventually Julia climbed off me, then moved to be able to whisper, "I want you to give her a VERY vigorous fuck, then immediately the same to Ava." Instructions like that I'm happy to receive from Julia. Katelin had gotten herself nicely worked up, and it was a perfectly good time to get "vigorous" with her. I lifted her off me, flipped her onto her back beside me, and enthusiastically followed Julia's instructions. Not that Katelin cared by now, but Julia was going down on Ava on the bed beside us. Katelin was not paying much attention to anything beyond my thrusts and the effects they were having on her. Soon Katelin was not paying ANY attention beyond the hammering she was receiving. Katelin was getting increasingly noisy, the idea of stifling this one didn't even occur to her. She was groaning, invoking God (it's funny how many girls do that at this time), declaring her love for me (funny how many do that too). Julia had wanted me to be vigorous, so I was doing my best jackhammer impression, and doing it HARD. Katelin was being SLAMMED. God got invoked a LOT! Personally I'd prefer Him to come at some other time, as I'm busy now. Julia was alternating licking Ava and talking dirty to her. Julia is MUCH better at verbal stimulation than me, and I enjoyed listening to her, although not as much as Ava did. "Look at Mark fuck the living daylights out of Katelin", "He's going to pound you just like that next", "He's going to be your lover for years. You're going to have YEARS of the best sex you can imagine." Sweet things, like that. Katelin seemed to be polytheistic judging by the number of gods she called on, and deeply in love with me judging by how often and vehemently she declared it. She was a very verbal girl, including several words she'd better not let her mother hear her say. Katelin was having a great time, climaxing as strongly as any she'd had last night. Julia had been goading Ava, "You're next", "He's nearly finished", "You're going to get SO fucked", "Listen to Katelin go!" As Katelin was exploding, Ava started calling something. I couldn't hear it for a few seconds, then I heard, "Leave the rubber on." That was puzzling, but fine. It's not as much fun more me, but I'd had a reasonable amount of fun recently. The puzzle was solved when Ava added, "I want it in the ass. Fuck me in the ass." I pulled out of the collapsed Katelin, while Ava struggled to roll over and offer me the recent subject of conversation. As I was moving sideways, I said, "So you want it in the ass, do you?" Silly question really, but it seemed appropriate at the time. "God yes, I'm REALLY horny!" #2: #4: I was worried about Julia's "vigorous" instruction, but Julia seemed completely unconcerned (judging by her sliding scoops of Ava's pussy juices to where they could be of more use). I certainly didn't need to lubricate my cock, as it was covered in Katelin's juices, which gave me the idea of helping Julia by tapping another source. Katelin was pretty much out of it, for a few more seconds anyway, so I quickly scooped up as much as in could, opened up the outside of Ava's asshole with NP ("Nipple Power", the ability previously known as "TK"), and poured some juices above the hole, so they'd run in. Out of concern, so I knew how careful to be, I asked, "You've done this before, Ava?" "When I'm really horny." I took that as a "Yes." Or possibly, "Half my waking hours." Either was fine. She hadn't done it for a while though, so it took some effort from both of us. Julia was underneath, licking Ava's pussy and enjoying watching whatever she could see of my activities from that angle. It was therefore up to me to locate more lubrication. Katelin was the obvious source, but was much more aware now and had just started staring at what I was doing, mostly in disbelief. I thought about it for a couple of seconds, couldn't think of a logical reason why not, and it would make a good story for lunchtime, so I reached over and scooped up another load of Katelin's juices, and moved them to just above my cock. "Hey!" called Katelin. "That's..." she struggled for the right description, finally settling on, "not right!" "It's perfect. Pussy juice is very slippery. That's what it's for." "But it's MY pussy," she paused, clearly regretting saying a word as rude as "pussy", finishing weakly by appending, "juice." "Oh. Were you saving it for something?" I asked, innocently. "No, of course not. But it was MINE! I don't want to be involved in any weird stuff. I told you that!" "You're not involved. I was the only one that touched you, which is what you said you wanted." "But it was MY juice!" I believed that fact was both never contested and already well accepted, and therefore not worthy of further debate. But on the topic, I stated, "And VERY nice pussy juice it is too. You taste delicious!" "But you're using it to... , in her ass!" #3: #2: #3: #4: #3: I was still working my way into Ava; I hadn't slackened on that at all. Ava was alternating between groans at my efforts, and giggles at Katelin. Julia was politer, listening without the giggles. I needed some more juice, so without much hope I reached for it. Katelin very quickly leaped sideways, declaring, "No way!" I chuckled, unconcerned because I knew there were tubes of lubrication in one of the bedside drawers. Julia said, "Katelin, I heard you yell out several times that you loved Mark. Is that true?" I liked where this was obviously going. Katelin was distracted by other issues, "Oh yes. Mark's incredible!" Then, "Umm, you don't mind that I love him?" "Of course not. I'm thrilled that Ava loves him, and I want to find girls who will. I have no jealousy whatsoever. You have no jealousy either, do you Ava?" "No. I just want to get fucked." At the moment that was mostly what was on her mind. She'd already admitted to being "really horny". Julia said, "Katelin, you can love Mark all you want. Be my guest and go for it. Which you already do, don't you? You love Mark?" "Yes, but I don't like this weird stuff." Julia ignored that, "If you truly loved Mark, you'd let him use your pussy juice as lubricant to fuck another girl's asshole." All three of my minds enjoyed the logic of the moment. We were even tempted to interrupt #1 to tell him, but resisted, knowing we'd enjoy doing so later. I couldn't see Julia's face at all, but I was sure she enjoyed it too. Ava's giggles left her opinion in no doubt. Katelin's opinion was quickly expressed, "That's stupid! That's..." Julia interrupted, "Is it, Katelin? I suggest you think about that, because it's not nearly as obvious as you think. Personally, Mark's welcome to use my juices for anything he wants. That's what we'll do now, as we don't have time to talk more." Julia started extracting herself from under Ava while still talking, "Don't worry about it, Katelin. Remember how moral Mark and I were on Sunday. We INSIST that you can choose what's okay and not okay for you. We're not going to give you a hard time, pressure you, judge you, or anything. You are WELCOME to your own beliefs. After Mark's finished with Ava, how about you and him go have a shower together, and he can make love to you again in the shower. Would you like that?" "You don't mind?" "Not at all. We often make love in the shower." "No. I mean about my juices. You don't mind that I didn't like it?" "The ONLY thing I would have minded, would have been your feeling pressured into doing something you didn't want to do. If you feel comfortable, then I'm happy. Don't let one tiny incident upset you. Mark simply didn't expect you to react that way, so it was an honest mistake. You've had hours and hours of very, very good sex, right?" Katelin cheered up at those memories. "I'll say. He's awesome in bed!" "I suggest you lie there, thinking about those memories then, while Mark finishes with Ava. Then you and Mark can go have a delightful shower together." Julia passed me a tube of lubricant, which Katelin immediately recognized, exclaiming, "You had lubricant the whole time?" #2: Julia said, "Sure. We use it from time to time. Sometimes Mark or the girl feels like an ass fuck. We do have a huge amount of sex, you know?" Katelin had recently learned that. "But why didn't you use it before? Rather than my... , than me." "We normally use each other's juices. It's just friendlier that way. That's why Mark made an honest mistake with you." Julia was being dishonest, because we always use the lube. Ass-fucking needs a LOT of lubrication! "Oh. I didn't..." "Don't bother explaining and apologizing all over again. Everyone else has forgotten about it already. We'd much rather get on with having good sex. What would you rather be doing: talk about it some more, or be in the shower with Mark?" Obviously she still wanted to talk about it, but couldn't say so. (I'm not feeling charitable enough to write, " ... she was too smart to say so.") I was in Ava now, so I had better things to do. Julia kissed and cuddled with Ava, at one stage whispering something that made Ava giggle a lot. [I later learned that Julia had told Ava, "You're MUCH smarter than Katelin!"] I noticed Julia playing with Ava's nipples, so I asked her, "Don't squeeze them too hard, Julia; I need the lights on to see what I'm doing." Ava found it especially funny. I'm always impressed by people who can laugh at themselves as it's something I'm not good at, being too quick to take personal jokes hurtfully. Katelin was trying hard to understand why the three of us were chuckling, but she couldn't see the humor in it. She wasn't ever likely to have the opportunity to find out about NP, as Julia's "We will not judge you" was bullshit; Katelin wasn't likely to be invited back. We didn't have much time left, so I stopped joking around and got down to business. One of the best things about threesomes (and there are several best things about them!) is that when two people concentrate on one, that one has a VERY good time, especially when she's "super-horny" to start with. Ava is a very enthusiastic lover, in my experience truly in third place behind only Carol and Julia. Ignoring the emotional attachment I have to those two girls, Ava would be the girl I'd most like to be in bed with. She's FUN! She enjoys herself, and broadcasts her enjoyment. I'd been a bit bummed out (excuse the pun) by the miss-step over using Katelin's pussy juice. I thought it'd caused our session to fall flat, until Ava's happiness helped revive it. It was almost a pity that Ava finished so soon, as Katelin had improved enough to be on the verge of smiling. Julia suggested, "To give Katelin the best possible time, Ava and I will have first shower. You two lovers can have one more sweet time here, then another sweet time in the shower." Julia had squeezed my arm on each "sweet", so I nodded, saying, "That sounds lovely. I'd like some one on one time with Katelin, because she's a very nice girl." Julia nodded, saying, "Come on, sexy," pulling on Ava's arm. "Let's leave the two love-birds to it." Ava got up, and the two girls headed for the door. When they got close Ava said, "Do we need to cover up?" "It doesn't matter if we see anyone; you're family now." "Cool!" and resumed walking out the room. Julia called back, "We'll be quick, Mark." Personally I hoped they didn't meet anyone; the girls were a MESS! So was the bedspread, but that seemed to clean itself by magic (i.e., probably magic courtesy of Vanessa). I turned to Katelin, crying, "Alone at LAST! I thought those two would NEVER get enough! They're insatiable." Katelin giggled. In my best imitation of "sweet" I asked, "How would you like to pass the time, sweetie? Julia says they won't be long, but we've probably got fifteen minutes. Can I make love to you again?" "You want MORE? You've been..." "I want more with YOU! I haven't had much time with you this morning." "Even after I was so selfish before?" Which I assumed was a reference to her refusal to share her pussy juices, which reminded me I'd better replace the current rubber with a fresh one. I got up to do that, while I continued to be "sweet" by saying, "I have no memory of you being selfish. I've got lots of wonderful memories of you, but nothing like that." "You know! When I wouldn't let you use my juice." "Sorry. My mind is a blank. I can't remember a thing." "When you wanted to use my juice rather than the commercial lubricant. Using mine would have been friendlier." "Nope, can't remember a thing." I was 'dressed' ready for action now. Cooperatively, Katelin finally got it. "Oh, I get it. You're very sweet." Exactly what I'd been going for. Julia would be proud. I didn't really want to talk with her for the next fifteen minutes, so I moved straight into making love. In other words, I made sex, but "sweetly", as per Julia's request. That was no hardship at all, because Katelin is: A pretty girl, even among the group Julia invited to the bowling and hot tub party. Has a slightly slim figure, which means a good one as far as I'm concerned. Your basic, non-overweight teenage girl's body looks damned good naked. She's very limber, which had been interesting last night. And she has no prudishness about "normal" sex. Which is good, because I quite enjoy it too. So I had a good time. I was even somewhat disappointed that it didn't take very long. She was easily aroused; I guessed either from the virile, masculine dominance I conveyed by ass-fucking Ava, or perhaps from my being so sweet now. It was impossible to tell which, but I had a sad suspicion. We were cuddling afterward, because Julia had told me to be sweet. Katelin asked, "I don't understand how you can be so wonderful and incredible?" "I don't really know how to respond to that, sweetie. It's not exactly an easy question to answer, is it?" "Umm. I guess not. It's what I wonder though. How can you be so nice to me now, after I was so rude to you?" "I have no idea what you're referring to." "You're not even going to talk about it?" "It never happened, and I'll never mention it." "Thanks." "You're welcome, sweetie. You're also worth it." I'm not even sure what that meant, but I had to use a bigger shovel to say it. Whatever it meant, it kept her quiet for a while, but all good things come to an end. "How can you be so good at sex? You're not going to say you don't know what I'm talking about, are you?" "No, this time I will say that I've noticed that myself." "I've had some boyfriends before, just for normal sex..." "That's the best sort, sweetie." "It is?" "Absolutely. Otherwise some other kind of sex would be normal." #3: I added, "Sorry, sweetie. I have a..." I almost said "perverse sense of humor," but figured she didn't need the reminder. I changed it to, " ... PECULIAR sense of humor. You're absolutely right that normal sex is the best. By far. I like it very much." I like to say something that's true from time to time. "You were saying about your boyfriends?" "Yeah. None of them have been anywhere near as good as you in bed. They were all bumbling fools compared to you. You're incredible! You..." Before she got too wound up, I said, "I am very, very fit, Katelin. VERY! I don't know whether you've looked, but my body is quite good." "{Giggle}. If you looked up 'quite good' in the dictionary, your body will NOT be the picture!" "Maybe under 'yucky' then?" "More likely under 'yummy', haha. Hey! You're not on drugs, are you?" "What! Where on Earth did you get that idea?" "You're so incredible! It seems so far above what other guys are like it must be drugs." #3: "I don't take ANY drugs. I haven't even had a headache for months. Lots of months, now that I think about it. I can't remember the last time I had anything even vaguely close to a drug. So no drugs." "But how can you go for hour after hour nonstop. You don't even need to take breathers. Doesn't Speed do that?" ("Speed", I'm vaguely aware, is an illegal drug. And that's about everything that I know about it.) "I have no idea, sweetie. The sum total of what I know about drugs is: 'Drugs are bad.' I've always thought that way, but right now I am PERFECTLY happy with my body and my brain, and I really don't want to mess either up, thank you very much." "Are you sure?" asked an obviously doubtful Katelin. It wasn't an appropriate time for a facetious comment, so "I'm positive. I'm a genius, Katelin. I'm not going to fuck up my head with drugs. I've got too much use for it. The stoners at school don't exactly excel academically, athletically, or inspire anyone else to copy them, do they?" "Oh, okay." said an unconvinced Katelin. Fortunately a reasonable answer finally occurred to me. "You've seen all the ads for Viagra on TV, magazines, newspaper and the like, right?" "Sure. Not to mention all the spam. Why do they send ME ads for Viagra?" I ignored the distraction, continuing with my point, "The drug company must spend a FORTUNE advertising Viagra, right?" "I guess." "And the only thing Viagra does is make guys harder for longer. That's right, isn't it?" "Yes. Dad uses it, and that's what it does." I was sure he'd appreciate her telling me that. "Now imagine there really was a drug that made men into lovers as good as I am. Can you imagine the publicity that would get? It'd be HUGE! EVERYONE would have heard of it. Viagra wouldn't exist because it's pathetic compared to what I can do." "Yeah, you're right." The obvious 'proof' occurred to me. "Katelin, you saw me boink three girls into submission last night. Well, you didn't actually see it, because you fell asleep first, but you know it happened, right?" "Sure. They said so. Pat and Lily also said you wore them out." "Imagine if this amazing sex drug really existed. The drug company would make a FORTUNE selling it, because every guy in America would want it. Every guy in the WORLD would want it. Every man could fuck at least three females into exhaustion every night of the week, and every morning, and every afternoon too. In a few weeks, every female would be a limping, tired, sore wreck. Can you imagine what a disaster that would be? Who would COOK ALL THE DINNERS!" "{Giggle}. Yeah. Or change the sheets, because guys can't do that either, haha. They'd get REALLY disgusting. Okay, I'm convinced there's no such drug, although that's pretty obvious, now that I think about it." "It is?" "Sure. There's the way you move. I've never heard of a drug doing anything like that. You're not just "graceful", like your nickname says, you're also fantastic at moving with me. I'll do something, and you move right along with me at the same time. You don't know what I'm going to do or when, but you move right with me. It's uncanny. You'd be INCREDIBLE at dance!" "I would be, you're right about that. I'm somewhat of a martial arts expert. That's what taught me to move so well." #4: <"Expert"? We've had two lessons.> #3: #4: #3: #4: Katelin said, "Ahh. That explains it. What martial art do you do?" #3: #4: "I'm surprised you know anything about martial arts?" "My brothers all do them and I do dance. Our family likes doing physical things. Even Dad does judo sometimes, but he's usually too busy." "Oh. I see. How many brothers do you have?" "Four." #4: "You LUCKY girl!" "What do mean?" "I'm always telling my sisters how lucky they are to have me as a brother. You've got FOUR brothers! How lucky are you!" "{Giggle}. They're PAINS! I'd much rather have a sister. I'd trade ALL my brothers for a single sister. Most of the time I'd trade ALL my brothers for a hamster! Haha." #4: "Oh no. Not a hamster. If you get a choice, definitely trade them in for a sister or two." "Why?" "So far every girl that I've met from your family is lovely to be with. If you have sisters who are anywhere near as nice as you, I'd definitely want to get to know them." "Thank you, but there's NO WAY I'd introduce you to my sisters. One of them might be prettier than me." "That's EXTREMELY unlikely. In fact, you're talking silly! You'd obviously be the prettiest sister." I thought she was also 'pretty well stalled'. Not much chance she'd remember the original, "What martial art?" question. However, I was starting to get a little worried that I'd been too sweet with her. I don't mind that she cries out, "I love you" when I'm giving her a jolly good fucking (most girls do), but I didn't want her following me around school like a love-struck calf. It was time to introduce a bit of reality. I said, "Besides, I could very easily make sure you had to introduce me to your sisters." "How?" With a serious expression and tone, "I'd go to your parents. If they're anything like my parents, they would have told their daughters a thousand times to share their possessions. I'd tell them that one sister is hogging me, and ask them to make sure I was shared." -- I gave her just long enough to realize what I'd meant, and then said, "I have several points. First, you were trying to 'keep' me to yourself, but I am not a possession. Second, if you loved your sisters, you would introduce me to them. You don't compete within your family. That'd be a terrible thing." -- Then I thought of the blindingly obvious point that I'd stumbled my way to. The key issue now was why had Julia wanted me to be sweet to Katelin. I thought it was so Katelin would tell good stories and say nice things about me at lunch tomorrow. I was going to assume that was the case. If it was simply that Julia wanted Katelin to be happy, then this might not turn out well. I threw out the silly points I was going to make (I hadn't worked them out yet, but there was going to be something about me wanting multiple girlfriends, and having them all from one family would be very convenient). Instead I was going to wake Katelin up to the reality that I wasn't going to be her normal-style boyfriend. I said, "If I'd kept Julia to myself rather than sharing her with Carol, I would have tragically reduced the quality of my sister's life. Julia has been enormously important to Carol, and I thank God I introduced them." I knew Katelin knew all that. She'd heard my "Love Carol" speech more than once. In fact, she'd gushed about it over the phone to Julia while I listened in. Plus she'd met Carol on the bowling/hot tub day, and seen her at the lunches. Katelin knew exactly what I meant. "Oh no. That's not what I meant..." "Sweetie, I know we were talking hypothetically - trading brothers for sisters is obviously silly - but you still showed some of your real personality. I like you; I really do. You know I do, because I could have easily gone to have a shower with either Ava or Julia, but I was happy to stay here and spend quality time with you. I am very happy to have..." "You're breaking up with me, aren't you?" The tears were all lined up, ready to start the deluge as soon as they got the word from me. Which was something I could really have done without. After some quick thinking on how best to word this (getting it wrong would be very wet), I said, "My sisters are incredibly important to me, and I love them both very much, as you know. You also know that they love me just as much. I bet you don't know that eighteen months ago we hated each other. Maybe not hated, but very strongly disliked. Did you know that?" #3: #1: #4: "No." "It's true, I was a horrible brother. Now, just eighteen months later, look at the difference. Think about the wonderful transformation that has taken place in just eighteen months! There's a lot of love under the surface in a family. Sometimes it can be buried, but it's there all the time. Once it's nurtured, it blossoms and becomes wonderful. I went from a horrible brother to, I'm repeatedly assured, 'The best brother EVER!' in just eighteen months. You're a LOT nicer than I was back then, so it should be much easier for you. Do you know what I am talking about, when I say it should be much easier?" "No, not really." "How many times a week do you tell your brothers you love them?" Her head had been starting to rise slowly, during my conversation, now it dropped again. "And how many times per week do they tell you that they love you?" "None. None of us do. Almost never." "How many times do you think my sisters and I tell each other?" "Heaps." "Yep, heaps. Not just tell; we show it too. Pretty much every chance we get. How many times do you think my sisters wish they could trade me in for a hamster?" "{Weak chuckle}. None." It hadn't been a good laugh, but it was a sign that she wasn't going to get all blubbery on me. "No, none. Or if they do, it'd have to be a very, very special hamster." "{Chuckle}." "I'm not going to break up with you, Katelin. You want me as your boyfriend, and I am interested in you." "REALLY?" "Of course. Would I be talking to you like this if I wasn't?" #3: #4: #1: "I guess not," she guessed. Not a particularly good guess, but I wasn't going to tell her that. "Breaking up with you would be a terrible waste..." #4: " ... There's a reason Julia invited you to bowling on Sunday. Julia chose each girl carefully, fully aware of the sort of girls I like. So it'd be a big waste to break up with you now. That'd be a negative thing to do. I want to do something positive. You are already a very nice person, but you'd be an even nicer one if you had a family life similar to mine. If you want me as your boyfriend, you're going to have to prove you deserve it. You have to create love between your brothers and you. You are far nicer than when I started doing the same thing with my sisters, so it should take you much less than eighteen months." "I don't understand?" "I'm not breaking up with you, but I am making our getting more serious depend on your creating a loving relationship with your brothers." "What! But how? They're horrible nearly ALL the time!" "I have some experience being a brother, all right, so I know what I'm talking about. It's very complicated, but it goes like this: 'Boys are pathetic!' Can you remember that?" "{Giggle}. I knew THAT already!" "And the thing we're the most pathetic at, out of all the many things we're pathetic at, is risking opening ourselves. Guys will posture, bullshit, fight, lie, be mean, and all sorts of other macho status game crap, to avoid showing real emotion. Guys are scared to do that. Deep down inside guys are lonely for good emotions, but they're too scared to open up and ask for them. So it's up to you to show them that they can love you. I can give you three pieces of advice. Are you listening?" "Yes." "First, never ever say something mean to them, or about them, ever again. I know from personal experience that negativity is far more deadly than you will be aware. So no hamster trade-in jokes; no saying, 'They're a pain'; or any of that. Not even the tiniest of hurtful comments. Every time you talk like that, you bury the love they want to show deeper, and you damage your ability to love them too. -- "Second, talk with your parents about wanting to dramatically improve your relationships with your brothers. Dramatically! Let you parents know that your goal is to have your brothers and you telling each other how much you love each other daily within six months. You've seen me and my sisters, so you know how we behave toward each other. Get your parents advice and get their help. Make a big deal about it, and keep discussing it week after week. -- "Third, talk with your brothers about it. One on one to start with, because a group of boys won't be able to help themselves doing their usual macho bullshit in front of you. Not initially. -- "You're not going to see love immediately, but you should see the negativity reduce quickly and positive behaviors start. Trust me that there's a lot of love waiting to come out; it just needs to see that it's safe and will be welcomed. When you think you are ready for me to see your success, invite me over to have dinner with your family, and I'll see how you all behave together. You won't be nervous; because by then you'll be as proud as punch and dying to show your family off to me. -- "I'll give you two offers. If you want me to, my sisters and I will come over to talk with your family about how wonderful it is to go from disliking your siblings to loving them. You might need that visit a week from now, a month from now, or several months from now, but I hope you'll never need it. I want you to impress me, Katelin, and I think you can. Julia wants me to have the very best girlfriend I can find, and if you can do this without my help, I'll be very impressed. Don't be foolish about it though; if you need help, ask." #1: #3: "My second offer, if you need it, is a different approach. Do you remember that I'm very good at a martial art?" "Yeah?" "Well, if your brothers don't buck up their ideas, let me know, and I'll go around to your house and beat them up until they promise to be nice to you." "Haha." #3: #4: #1: #4: #1: #4: #1: #3: #1: After some more internal dialogue, we added, "Katelin, The first step along this process is the most important, and it's your proving to your brothers that they can trust you not to hurt them emotionally. They may behave like macho gorilla's, but - believe me - guys can be hurt emotionally very easily. I'm sure you've heard countless times that loving relationships are built on trust. That definitely applies to brothers too. You're going to have to prove trust before they will start opening up to you. So ABSOLUTELY no hurtful comments. Not even if you say them as jokes. At the beginning your brothers will be looking for reasons to distrust you, so don't give them any reasons at all. Okay?" "Are you sure you're a boy?" I was so focused on the Dr. Phil stuff that it took an amusing length of time for me to get it. I had a good laugh, then, "You wait until I get you in the shower, young lady. You'll find out for yourself." As so often happens with me, another mind had another answer prepared, so it had its turn too, "And I better put those relationship suggestions in writing, because you've obviously got a very poor memory. To think that all that effort I put into impressing you with my manliness last night and this morning has been wasted, simply because you've forgotten I'm a male." We cuddled, and Katelin needed reassurance. "You really want me to do that? It's not a little thing you're talking about. It's going to cause a lot of... , umm, it's not going to be easy. My family doesn't talk like you do about love, openness, trust, and those things. My family are all macho gorillas." "Nor did I eighteen months ago. Not at all, not even a little bit. If one of my sisters had tried to talk like that, I would have ridiculed her, and probably punched her too, I'm ashamed to say." "Then how can I do it? They'll ridicule me, I just know it!" "So don't start talking about love. Just start by getting rid of your negatives. Tell them you don't want to behave negatively toward them anymore because it makes you uncomfortable and it's unfair to them. You're going to do your best to stop, and want them to point it out if you make a mistake out of a bad habit. It won't be easy. The best things never are. I'm sure they'll tease you from time to time, and you'll want to make nasty comments back at them, but you can't. You might have to hold back a lot of stuff that you'd be perfectly justified in saying to them, because of the horrible things they're doing to you at the time. But remember the big picture: Living in a family where your brothers and you get on as well as my family does, and impressing me. I've liked having sex with you, but I'm not going to choose a serious girlfriend on her sexual ability. I'm going to base my decision on her ability to commit to love." "'Commit to love'! OH!" After a thoughtful pause, Katelin said, "You're DEEP! I have NEVER had a boyfriend who thinks so far ahead, or so emotionally. Mostly they just want to get into my panties. You're a whole different... , Oh! I just realized; you're NOT breaking up with me! You're testing me in the most incredible way I've EVER heard of. Not just testing me, but helping me too. Completely and totally unselfishly. I'm blown away!" #3: #1: #4: #3: #4: #1: There was silence. I was patting myself on the back (#1's back, but it comes to much the same thing), while trying to decide whether the pats were for our brilliance or our luck. I could see that Katelin was busy struggling to come to grips with the magnitude of my magnificence. She got enough of a grip on the magnificence to start telling me about it, "I thought you were incredible before, but you are so far above what I thought you were, my head's still spinning..." #1: We spent the next several minutes lying cuddled on the bed. Katelin randomly skittered between: gushing about me, pausing to bask in the wonder that was me, being stunned at the wonder that was me, and delighting at being in my arms. I spent the time worrying. #1: #3: I told her, "Katelin, I think I should meet your family some time soon. I have said a lot about them without knowing much about them..." "You don't know ANYTHING about them!" I had to laugh to myself about that as I'd almost said exactly that, but at the last second had changed "anything" to "much" as I needed her to have some faith that I knew what I was talking about. I reacted by saying - and crossing my fingers that it was true - "I know you. Any boys from the same family that produced you can't be too bad. You may think they are, they may even behave as if they are, but it's just that male, macho bullshit stuff. Underneath they'll be decent people. I'm busy today after school, but can I pop around tomorrow after school? Just for a few minutes." "The oldest two brothers work, so they won't be home until dinnertime. Same with Mom and Dad, of course. Didn't you say you wanted to meet the whole family?" I had, I'd just stupidly forgotten it. #3: "Yes. You're right, sorry. I got distracted. Can I come over just before dinner? Just for a few minutes." "You can come FOR dinner. That would be fantastic. I'd love that." #4: "No, not for dinner, Katelin. Maybe one day, but it's far too early to be behaving like we're boyfriend and girlfriend, but..." "Apart from having sex, you mean?" "Haha, yes. You got me on that one." "I'll have sex with you anytime you want. I'd LOVE to. Even if you weren't so incredible at it, I'd still want to. You're an amazing guy." "Thank you, sweetie. Let's not worry about that now. What I'm talking about is more important than sex." "Are you sure you're a boy? Haha." "Very good. You are long-overdue for a reminder about that. Something must be delaying Julia and Ava. I just want to pop around to your home for a few minutes, to have some idea of what they're like so I'll be able to put faces to names when you talk with me about them in the future." "I can talk with you about all this?" "Of course. It's a test, so I'm not going to do the work for you, but it's also more important than just being a test. If you need advice you can talk with me in school. Constructively, I mean; I don't want to listen to a long-winded moan about how horrible all your brothers are." "I wouldn't do that. Can I check with my family tonight that they'll all be there before dinner tomorrow night, and call you." A phone call from a girl to discuss my meeting her family, in the middle of my meet-the-family dinner with Ava's parents, wouldn't be a good idea. So, "I've got some very important things I'm doing tonight, and I won't be able to take your call. Telling me at school tomorrow is fine." #3: #1: Which made me think of something, so I added, "Katelin, let me meet your family first, before you start doing anything about changing your relationships with your brothers, okay? Just in case I want to give you some more specific advice first." "Okay. I'm scared to start, so I'd be happy if you could put it off as long as you can." She wasn't joking either. "Just remember how wonderful my family is to live with, and imagine yours being as good." #4: #1: #4: We were silent - Katelin was between gushings - when the overdue Ava and Julia returned. Julia said, "Sorry we're..." Katelin rode right over the top of Julia's explanation. In a loud, shrill, excited voice, Katelin exclaimed, "YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT MARK JUST DID!" The look on Julia's face was not one of total confidence in her man. "What?" Julia asked, with suspicion and worry. Katelin didn't notice though. "He ... He ... What did you do Mark? I can't think of a way of expressing it." "I..." "He's INCREDIBLE! He blew me away! My mind's still spinning..." #1: I interrupted loudly. I had to be loud, to have any chance of stopping Katelin, "Everything is fine, Julia. I told Katelin that she was a very, very sweet girl, and the next thing I wanted her to do for our relationship is pass a test I've set her. It'll take her several months..." "Mark wants me to make my brothers love me, which is incredible..." "Actually, Katelin, you won't be MAKING your brothers love you. You and them - together and cooperatively - will be building love between you. There's no MAKE anywhere in it." "Oh yes, I knew THAT! It's just that they're real pains and it'll be..." "KATELIN! Stop insulting them. I'm sure they think you're a pain too. Right now, even I'd swap you for a hamster, especially if it was a quiet one. Let me explain this to Julia and Ava. They are my girlfriends and have a right to know." Not to mention that I needed to stop Julia worrying so much. "Sorry. I'm just very excited." "Try to behave like a very excited, quiet hamster, okay?" "{Giggle}, okay." I started explaining it again, emphasizing that I thought Katelin was very sweet as that was the theme Julia wanted me to convey, and that nothing would happen in my relationship with Katelin for several months yet. Hopefully that'd reassure Julia that there was no urgent problem. Eventually I filled in enough of the details for Julia to grasp the essence of it, and her face cleared immediately. Julia said, "That's quite impressive Mark. You're a very lucky girl, Katelin, to have Mark so interested in you." "You don't have to tell me THAT! I'm still amazed by it all. Scared about how I'll do it, because my brothers are..." Katelin bit off what she'd been about to say. I asked innocently, "What are your brothers, Katelin?" "They're, um. Nothing. It doesn't matter." "I hope Carol and Donna never describe me as 'nothing'." "That's not what I meant. You know that's not what I meant." "Nonetheless, I bet my sisters would never describe me as 'nothing'. I hope you can see that some of the reason you and your brothers don't get on is because of your unthinking put-downs." Julia interrupted, "Katelin, are any of your brothers at our school?" "Yes, two of them." "At lunch today, when all the girls are talking to you about how your night was with Mark, it'd probably be best not to tell anyone about Mark's test. If word got back to your brothers, they might not appreciate it. They wouldn't trust your intentions, so you'd never succeed. Just talk about how incredibly nice Mark is, and about the sex." A worried looking Katelin asked, "You want me to talk about the sex?" "Sure. You've heard the other girls talk about it, and everyone's expecting you to. I'm sorry to cut this short, but you two need to get cracking and have your shower. We're running late. That's partly Andrew's fault too, because he was in the shower when we arrived. Ava and I couldn't resist teasing him for a while." I had to chuckle to myself. All three of them would have been naked; something poor, teased Andrew would have been acutely aware of. Ava went well beyond my internal chuckle; she laughed outright. "Haha. It was a LOT of fun. Andrew didn't know what to do. It's SO much fun having brothers now." Katelin puzzled, "What do you mean, 'having brothers now'?" "Last night Julia's family sort of adopted me. Not for real; not legally or anything like that. Just for... , fun, I guess. To be nice to me. Her brothers said I should treat them as my brothers, and that's a LOT of fun, haha." "You can have my brothers if you want ... Oops." I said, "Yeah. You're starting to see that much of the problem is you. Remember all this started because you wouldn't share me with your sisters? You are nice, but you could be nicer. When I said this was a test of your ability to commit to love, it's also intended to help you become a nicer person. To make you aware that you are often, unconsciously, not as nice as you think you are. It's not the real you, it's just bad habits, but your life would be better if they were fixed." Katelin looked at me seriously for a couple of seconds, then said, "I was foolish thinking I could be your girlfriend, wasn't I? I'm nowhere near good enough for you." "I would have said it differently: 'You're not ready YET.' There's a lot of good in you, more than enough to make me want to help you." #4: #1: #4: #1: #4: #3: #4: Julia said, "You two need to move it to the shower. You can talk there, but talk quickly because we're getting late. We're losing a lot of our breakfast eating time." That last bit motivated me, as Julia doubtless intended it to. I half-dragged, half-carried a giggling Katelin out the door and into the shower; Katelin's giggles coming from her knowing my attitude to food. We didn't fool around in the shower. No more than was necessary to clean each other. Katelin said, "That reminds me, if you need my juice again, to help you... , you know, then I'll let you use it." "I know you will, sweetie." That was pure Julia. ------- Chapter 133: I Couldn't Even Eat the Pizza Wednesday, April 27, 2005 (Continued) When Katelin and I got back to the bedroom after our shower, my clothes for today were already laid out on the bed, right down to the socks and underwear. Julia decides what I'm wearing every day, so there was nothing unusual in that. I don't even cringe too much at the thought of her going into my underwear drawer anymore. Katelin had a set of clothes hanging in one of the closets, so we were soon dressing ourselves, during which Katelin remarked, "Julia must be an amazing girl. I never realized that before." I wasn't paying much attention, and asked, "How do you mean?" "To be good enough to be your girlfriend. I've known her for quite a while, and I knew she was an unusual girl, but I never realized how special she must be." I had no hesitation agreeing with Katelin. Julia was certainly a lot more special than I was. All I had were some freaky mental powers that I got through blind luck: the astronomically unlikely possibility of getting déjà vu just as I was dying. I agreed, "Yes, she is special." Katelin and I were the last to arrive at the breakfast table, which I took to mean that we had to make up for lost time. I immediately proceeded to do that. I was hungry! ^ Every now and then I'm reminded of how little I understand my abilities. I had used a LOT of energy last night, plus some more this morning. I had been actively having sex for hours, and I mean ACTIVELY! as well as HOURS! Yet I wasn't as hungry as I should have been. I was hungry, no doubt, but by the usual morning amount, not by enough to replenish the calories I'd burned through. Food intake doesn't correlate with energy expended. When I run within my optimal rate, I don't get short of breath. From my Biology classes I knew that oxygen is required by the process that delivers energy to the muscles. From what I remembered, sugars are delivered to the muscles, 'burned' with oxygen, which releases the energy the muscles need. I might have that wrong, but it's something like that. In any event, I know oxygen is necessary. So how come I don't seem to need much oxygen? I don't get fatigued much either, not unless I'm exercising particularly hard. Part of fatigue is lactic acid (I remember that name), a waste product of muscle action. Why don't I get lactic acid buildup and need to rest while it dissipates? Whatever happens in me is very weird. GREAT for sex though! [[The above paragraphs have a few scientific errors, but they're minor enough to leave as I thought at the time.]] ^ Julia had introduced or re-introduced Katelin to everyone, and general breakfast time conversation was occurring. I was eating. This may make me sound anti-social or even a pig, but the truth is that the amount of food I eat does take me longer to consume than everyone else takes to eat theirs. If I stop eating to talk, then it results in my breakfast taking even longer, which delays clearing the table and leaving to go to school. To avoid taking longer at all my meals, I talk less and eat faster. Plus I'm often hungry! I particularly didn't want to be late today, because I wanted to touch base with Mom and Dad at home this morning, when I stopped to collect my sisters. It seemed to be a good idea, as my actions had resulted in their having to spend the next few years helping look after Ava. In a pause in the conversation, Prof asked, "So Mark, how was the new computer system?" Oops. I'd made a mental note last night, just before going to sleep, to be the first person to mention my failure to use it. I'd been busy eating and had forgotten my note. Prof's having raised it seemed even more embarrassing. Fortunately I had a mouthful of food, so Julia answered for me, "I'm sorry, Dad, but we kept him busy for far too long. Last night was a very special night for Ava." "I'LL SAY..." started Katelin's interruption, her voice trailing off in puzzlement when Julia ended with "for Ava." Julia said, "There were things happening last night that you don't know about, Katelin. Remember we couldn't let you come early because I said we were very busy, and we kept you waiting even after you arrived on time. Ava was sort-of adopted by my and Mark's family last night. That's why she referred to Andrew as her brother just before." "Adopted by TWO families?" Which had to be even more puzzling. "Not really adopted. Ava's nearly an adult, so adoption isn't the right word, but she's become special to us in a way it wouldn't be appropriate to explain now." "She's pregnant?" "Haha," from several people. Julia added, "No, nothing like that. Until Ava is willing to talk about it at school we'd appreciate your not talking about her 'adoption', please." -- Turning back to her dad, Julia said, "We kept Mark up far too late last night, so he didn't have time for any studying at all this morning. I'm sure we'll have a much earlier night tonight, so Mark will do better tomorrow morning." Vanessa said, "That's fine. Wild, rampant, four-way sex is a good way to welcome someone into the family. Not how we did it in my day, but times change, haha." Julia protested with mock-indignation, "Mom! What sort of girl do you think I am! We only had wild, rampant, THREE-way sex. Katelin fell asleep, haha." When the resulting joking around ended, Andrew said, "I've got a concern. Ava, I want to make sure that you're not worried about my 'dating' comment last night." Ava said, "I'm not worried at all." "I've got a long-term girlfriend, and I'm no threat to you. It's important that you know our relationship will be like that of a real brother and sister." "That'd be wonderful. I've never had a brother, so it'll be great to have you two. Already it's fun. I enjoyed teasing you in the bathroom with Julia." By the look of Andrews face, Ava had enjoyed it more than he had, but he settled for concluding with, "Just so long as you feel completely comfortable with me, and in this house. That's the most important thing." Ava alerted me by squeezing my thigh, as she was saying, "Oh. You want me to be comfortable TOO! That's even better. Thank you very much, Andrew. That's the best of both worlds: brother AND comfortable." Ava got up and walked around to Andrew, gave him a good hug and kiss on the cheek, then wormed her way between him and the table so she could sit on his lap, still with her arms around his neck. "You're SO wonderful," Ava declared. "Umm. I'm confused. Robert's your brother too, but you didn't thank him like this?" "But Robert never said he wanted me to be comfortable. You said that, so you're my favorite brother." Ava looked around, saying, "Umm, it's okay that I have a favorite, isn't it?" I suspected Ava was having fun, so I quickly played along, "Sure it is. Go with your feelings." "Great. Thanks." Ava turned to look back at Andrew, saying, "Whenever I feel uncomfortable, I'll come to straight to you. I feel uncomfortable a lot, so it'll be super-convenient having you as my brother. Can I have your cellphone number please, like you said last night. I'd like to be able to call you whenever I get uncomfortable." "Ahh, Ava, what are you talking about?" "When I get uncomfortable! Sometimes I get terribly horny, and it makes me uncomfortable. But you're going to make me comfortable again. That's why you're my favorite brother now!" Ava gave him a kiss, but his heart wasn't in it, so she changed to just hugging him cheek to cheek. While the rest of us laughed out loud. As soon as I could, before someone else spoke to ruin my opportunity, I adopted a stern voice and said, "Ava! Andrew's got a girlfriend and Sophia is a very nice girl." I could see Andrew relaxing; excellent. -- "Sophia stays here overnight some nights, so she could easily be with him. It'd be VERY rude to knock on his door and ask him to leave her just because you're uncomfortable. So if Sophia is here, make sure you politely ask both of them whether they'd like a threesome with you." Ava called out, "Neat!" while Andrew's face blanched in panic. But only for a second or two, then he suddenly relaxed, "Oh! You're winding me up. Very good. Thank God for that. You had me going there." I would've liked to milk it just a little bit longer. I even knew roughly what to say, something about "Ava's having threesomes far more often than not, so it's perfectly natural for her to jump into bed with you and Sophia," but I worried about making Andrew too uncomfortable - in the usual sense - with Ava in the future. Instead I simply said, "Well done, Ava! That was very funny, especially because it wasn't at my expense, for a change." Ava got off Andrew, gave him another hug and kiss on the cheek. Then said to Julia, "You're right Julia. It's a LOT of fun teasing brothers. Thanks for letting me use yours." "You're welcome, sweetie. That's what they're for. You've got seventeen years of teasing to catch up on, so go for it, haha." As Ava was walking around the table, I noticed that Robert was particularly enjoying Andrew's victimization, and that wasn't fair! So I said, "Ava, it's good that Andrew's your favorite, because I know another girl that Robert's been very nice to. She got him dead in her sights, and when she decides it's time, he's going to be VERY busy fending her off." Robert had to ask, "Who?" "Donna." Robert had been nice to Donna - taking her to bowling one day, and doing a couple of other little things - and Donna had teased him about her wanting him sexually, the memory of which immediately returned to him. To make it worse for him, I said, "Donna's obviously going to be sexually active VERY soon, and she's very up-front - if not downright aggressive - about it. She's got her own vibrator and makes no bones about talking to the family about how much she uses it. Every second meal she's asking Mom to buy her more batteries. And your name has come up more than once, Robert." Robert, no longer laughing at Andrew, asked, "Really?" "No, but you were laughing at Andrew so much I thought it wasn't fair that only one of you got teased." I turned to Ava, sitting next to me by now, and said, "It IS fun teasing brothers, isn't it? Even someone else's. We should do this more often." I went back to my meal, merely listening to the resultant laughter, follow-on teases, and other banter. Normality returned, and the conversation moved on to other matters. Soon the topic was the dinner party for Ava's parents tonight. At one point I had to say, "I'm going to be busy right after school. I'll drop Julia home first, but then Ava and I are taking off. We'll back sometime around 6:30 or 7:00." Ava said, "That's right! Julia mentioned that last night. What are we doing?" "I spend far too much time lying around in bed, so I want to go for a good run to get some exercise." Katelin made the mistake of accepting such a normal sounding sentence as face value. This was fine, until she realized that my version of "lying around in bed" entailed an impossible amount of exercise. When the realization struck her, she gasped in surprise. It wasn't a good idea while eating milky cereal. The resultant spray further delayed breakfast, and embarrassed Katelin considerable. She apologized several times. Robert reassured her, perhaps not very effectively, "When I was a boy, I would have LOVED to be able to shoot milk that far out of my nostrils. That was VERY impressive. I can see why Mark likes you." I hadn't originally intended it, but I had the opportunity to, so I said, "Katelin, why did you react like that. I HAVE been spending too much time in bed, and I DO need the exercise." "Haha." "No, I'm serious. Did you see me out of breath or tired last night or this morning? Even a little bit?" "Ahh, no." "So it wasn't real exercise then, was it. What I did with you three didn't come close to pushing my limits." "But you were REALLY going for it sometimes. You were..." I didn't really want Katelin to be too specific about what I was doing, not while we were trying to eat breakfast, so I interrupted, "I did get SOME exercise last night. Obviously, because I was moving my muscles, but it wasn't a good workout, so I'll go for a run. I've been thinking of running a marathon, so I think I'll do that." Katelin said, "Wow," at the concept of anyone needing exercise after what she'd seen me do. Ava was excited about my mentioning running a marathon, and she immediately asked for the most important piece of information, "When do you want to run it?" [I didn't know this at the time, but runners LOVE talking about marathons. It's probably even more exciting to them than talking about shopping is to girls; which is both frightening and should give you a good idea how interested Ava was in my comment. She was greatly looking forward to helping me train for it. Her, "When do you want to run it?" meaning "How many months do we have to work on a REALLY fun training program together?" It takes extensive training and preparation to be ready for a marathon, and therefore provide runners with countless hours of enjoyable running and talking about running.] "After school today." "No, I meant when do you want to run your marathon? There's one in Corvallis in September, but there are plenty going on in other clubs in nearby cities, so we could find one happening almost whenever you want." "After school today. I don't want to train, Ava; I just want to run one. We'll do it after school and you'll follow me in your car, time me, give me water, and whatever else needs to be done. Is there anything else? I don't know much about marathons." "But you can't..." "Ava, I didn't train for the 10k. Not at all. And I did pretty well in that, didn't I?" She was lost for words, so I just carried on, "We've got about three hours before the dinner party, so I'll go for a run. Three hours is long enough to run a marathon, isn't it?" "But Mark, 26 miles is a LONG way. It's a LOT longer than a 10k run. The effects on your body are much worse. It can be very unhealthy to try to run one when you're not ready. People can get seriously sick, even die, if it goes wrong." Ava was genuinely concerned and sounded knowledgeable, so I probably shouldn't have approached it in this way. I was VERY sure I wouldn't have any troubles. Maybe not 100% sure, because Ava was scaring me, but even if I had some troubles, I was sure they'd be minor. I didn't want Ava to be worried sick all day, so I said, "Let's do it this way. From time to time you can drive ahead, get out of your car, and run alongside me for a few yards to see how I am. If you think I'm having trouble, I'll let you call it off. You'll have your cellphone if something really bad happens, but I'll make sure I never push myself that far. I'm just doing this for exercise, not for glory. And I don't want to be so tired that I can't talk with your parents properly. Remember that I'm a pretty smart person, sweetie, so I won't do anything stupid." #1: #2: #1: #2: #4: I said, "You're probably right Ava. Cancel the marathon idea. I'll just do some jogging." Ava was considerably relieved. She really had been worried about me. The rest of the breakfast conversation was relatively normal, especially by our recent standards. Katelin was very thankful to everyone she could think of thanking, especially Julia, who she now treated with some reverence. [Later, in the car, I explained to Julia that it was for her being "good enough to be my girlfriend," and - after I'd teased her enough - what the background to that meant.] Katelin's parents had dropped her and her bike off last night, so Katelin could make her own way to school, as could Ava because she had her own car. Katelin was very reluctant to end the date. I got a slightly teary "Goodbye," despite the fact that'd I'd be seeing her again in less than thirty minutes. I wanted to talk with Mom and Dad - or, more accurately, listen to whatever they had to say to me about Julia and me landing them with helping look after a soon-to-be orphan - so Katelin had very little chance of holding me back for long. Julia and I had an interesting talk in the car, much of which has already been described or referred to in the "Ava's Loose Threads" chapter above, so I won't mention it again. I did suddenly remember to ask Julia, "Oh, did you get an acceptable email from Laila?" "I forgot to check. I'll ask her at school. Would Katelin be a good Liaison do you think?" I wasn't enthusiastic about the idea because I wasn't all that attracted to Katelin. I didn't dislike her, but her "normal sex only" fixation even about something as simple as a threesome diminished my interest in her, because I'm VERY interested in SOME forms of un-normal sex! I said, "I honestly don't know. She seemed stupid about some things, but I think that was largely her being self-centered, which my 'love your brothers' thing kind of blew away..." Julia chuckled at that, and we diverted into a little discussion about how unsafe Julia now realized it was for her to tell me to be "sweet" to a girl, and then leave the room. "I'll have to teach you that 'sweet' has limits. It does NOT include turning her world upside-down, okay? Haha." "Back to the Liaison question. I don't think she'll be as self-centered in the future, unless she backslides back into it. But I'm not sure she'd want the job, because I effectively told her she had no chance of being my girlfriend for months." "She'd leap at it, don't worry about that. She worships the ground you walk on and would do anything to be around you." "Isn't she far too prudish for the job though? She only wants 'normal' sex. She doesn't like even being around any other sort. Although, in fairness, in the shower she told me I could use her juices if I wanted to lubricate a girl's 'you know'. She volunteered her juice, but couldn't name the location I'd be using it." "If Laila admits she didn't send anything, I'll fire her, but I think we can do without a replacement for a few days. I'll tell Laila to refer any girls who want to talk with her to me. We're seeing most of the girls at the lunches anyway, and can disseminate information there. I might hold off on the pipeline idea until I've had a chance to talk with mom about the things I did wrong with Ava." I tried to talk about that. I didn't really want to, but I was concerned about Julia being in trouble, or feeling down about having made mistakes, or something. But Julia interrupted me with, "I don't want to talk about it until I've had a good think. I haven't had a moment to myself since Ava's ceremony, so it's way too early. Today won't be much better. Give me another day or two." When we got to my place, we went inside to talk about Ava. Carol said more than anyone, all of it supportive. Donna was happy too, including because, "She's a GOOD runner." I'd half-expected Mom and Dad to try to talk me out of it, for some reason or other, but they made no such attempt. Mom was far more concerned with checking that I understood the emotional cost this was going to have. I had no trouble realizing that losing two parents, and having no one else left, would be horrendous for Ava. Julia's comment about Ava probably needing to sleep with me night after night when each of her parents died had also made a strong impact. Dad talked more about practical things, for example, that it was expected that I'd be moving out of Corvallis after I graduated in just over a year, and that might be the time when Ava most needed Julia's and my support. I remembered Vanessa saying that Mrs. West probably wouldn't last that long, and Mr. West had a 50/50 chance of doing so. I knew that those timeframes were only guesses, but it was probably unlikely they'd still be around by the time the graduation summer had finished (obviously I wouldn't want to go anywhere until I'd enjoyed the summer after graduation). At one stage the word "convenient" crossed my mind, but I very quickly quashed that appalling thought. I told Dad, "We'll just have to wait and see." As we were leaving, I had to ask Mom, "How come you haven't tried to talk me out of it?" "Ava seems to be a nice girl, and it's a very nice thing you're doing for her. It'll be a valuable experience for you. Hard at times, but valuable. I'm proud of you." We didn't have time for more, but that was pretty good. It wasn't until we were driving away that I realized how proud I was of everyone else too. I could immediately tell Julia, Carol and Donna that I was proud of them, so I did. I wanted to tell Mom and Dad too, but might not see them until everyone was at the dinner party. I decided to send them text messages. It's the modern way. On the way to school, I somewhat worriedly told my sisters about my offer to Katelin, for the three of us to visit her family and help her with her brothers, if she asked us to. To my surprise both girls quickly and easily agreed, "Sure." | "No problem." Personally I was hoping it'd never happen, but the girls took it in their stride. That was nice of them. Julia had a conversation with Laila early in the school day. Laila had not sent an email, so Julia said, "Regretfully that means you can no longer be a Liaison. Sorry about that, Laila; you had very good potential." Laila tried for a second chance, but Julia was predictably firm. At the end Laila asked for what the email should have said. Julia answered, "There were two reasons. The first was that you are a very loyal person. Unfortunately, that loyalty is fixed on your sister and your lover, so it's at Mark's expense as you were willing to use him to give your clique a good time. But, nonetheless, you proved yourself capable of considerable loyalty, which is a trait that is very high on my search list. It's a great pity you couldn't have transferred it to Mark, but that was your choice. The second reason I'm not going to tell you. There's information in it that's too private." (It was that I would've enjoyed the kinky sex with two sisters, which Julia didn't want to talk about with someone who might feel bitter and revengeful about having been fired.) -- "Thanks for everything that you did for us since last Thursday, but it was only a few days and you can go back to normal with your little group. Almost everything I learned about you was a good thing, so I hope there are no hard feelings between us. There shouldn't be, because I think you're a better person than I used to think you were. It's just that loyalty to Mark is my paramount consideration. I'd appreciate it if you send to me any girls that come to you as Liaison." There was a little more remonstrating from Laila, but it was pointless. One of Laila's last statements was, "I'm going to regret my mistake, aren't I?" "I imagine you'll be kicking yourself for years, whenever you learn of Mark's accomplishments. On the other hand, there are so many girls around him that each has only a very small chance. You got as far as being Liaison and had some unique experiences, so you can enjoy the memories." I saw Alexis before the class began, which reminded me of my little mental note to thank her for being so open and honest, so I yelled out to her, "HEY YOU!" She turned, as did quite a few others. I pointed at her, then at the floor in front of me, "Get your butt over here!" Alexis bounced over, smiling happily. I don't know if girls going for the grunge, tough-girl look should bounce, but her image is her concern. As soon as she was in reach, I grabbed the top of her jeans just above the fly, and supporting her weight I kicked her feet apart. I slapped my other hand over her pussy and started rubbing it through her jeans (a symbolic action from my side, given the toughness of jeans, but hopefully it provided her with some pleasure). My jeans-holding hand pulled her hard forward into my body, and into a kiss. That action took barely a moment, and Alexis fully participated in the kiss. She didn't seem the slightest bit fazed by my treatment of her, making me wonder whether she was used to it. I wouldn't have been surprised. I'm fairly strong these days, so for fun I slid my pussy rubbing hand farther between her legs, then lifted her entirely off her feet and into the air, pushing her sideways and dropping her butt first onto the desk beside me, surprising the guy sitting at it. To make doing that act easier, I'd created three NP-fingertips under the hand between her legs, and max pushed up against the back of my hand. That provided 10.5 pounds of lift without any physical effort from me. Other than inertia, which was a minor issue, it effectively reduced her weight by 10.5 pounds, making it more likely I'd be able to perform the action without making a fool of myself. As she thumped onto the desk, I let go with both hands, and casually wished her, "Good morning, Alexis. How are you today?" "{Giggle}..." #1: #2: " ... Great!" I looked around the class, then said, "That's how I pickup girls. It works pretty well, doesn't it?" I ignored their responses. Lots of laughter and stupid comments, the latter mostly from guys, because that's what guys do. Turning back to Alexis, I said, "I decided yesterday that I liked your openness and thought I should show my appreciation. How was that?" "Hot. How much more openness do ya want from me?" She opened her legs as far as they went. Black jeans completely ruined the visual, but the symbolism was understood by everybody. I was out of material, and wasn't used to these types of conversations. The best I could come up with was, "I'll let you know." "You got my number. Any time, stud." Actually I didn't have her number, but my #1 wife did, and that was just as good. I'd been looking for Chloe, and was happy that when she saw me, she gave me a good smile. I gave her a smile and waved back, but didn't attempt to approach her. She had to come to me, much like a fly to a spider. Later Julia told me, "I've talked to Chloe. Don't hurry to lunch after the last morning class. When the bell rings, pack up your gear then amble to your locker. If she still hasn't caught up to you, amble to our usual meeting spot. I've already told Lily." "Great! What's going to happen?" "You'll enjoy it more if you don't know. Haha, good expression, Mark. The real reason is so you'll have the right look of surprise. My first reason is still true though, if your surprise fools her you'll certainly get a great deal of enjoyment later." "Rats! That phrase of yours is ENTIRELY too useful." "Ava thinks so too, she had to use it on her mother an hour ago." "She called her Mom, right?" Julia nodded, "Sure. She had to clear the air before the dinner." That explanation didn't explain anything to me. Quite the reverse. "What air wasn't clear?" "Mostly about Ava telling us about her parents' illnesses. But she also had to rev up her mother, so her parents would arrive in a more friendly, positive mood." "Oh." Can't say I really understood that too well either. I gave it up as not worth pursuing, instead asking, "Did the call go well?" "Katie - Ava's mom - is still bursting with curiosity, and is frustrated not to have any details beyond your first name, but otherwise everything is good. Ava insisted that she's very, very happy, and that's what mothers are most concerned about. I didn't have time to talk with Ava for long, but we'll talk a lot longer during your run. Are you still intending to run a marathon, or did you change your mind at breakfast?" "I'll run it. I just downplayed it so Ava and Katelin don't go around telling half the school today. That'd make it too hard to know if she blabbed afterward, other than in front of us at dinner." "I thought it might be something like that. I was thinking about your physical safety. It'd be safer to do your run on secondary roads than the main highway. There are some straight roads with good visibility over by..." We discussed a good place for my run, choosing a road that had open fields on one side so I could run beside the road if cars came, and there were very few houses on the other side so little chance of anyone getting curious and timing me. It was probably about five or six miles long so I'd run back and forth until I'd reached twenty six miles. Julia also told me that Ava had been very busy running around her grade to spread the word to as many of the girls as possible about their lunch invite. Apparently there was quite a lot of 11th grade interest in me. I saw Savannah before lunch, which is when Julia had indicated the revenge groping was to occur. She appeared to be dressed "appropriately", as best I could judge. A skirt that ended not far above the knees, and a fairly open-necked blouse. To assure her I wasn't going to grope her immediately, I put my hands in my pocket as I approached her. Or I tried to, only managing to get my fingertips in by the time I reached her. "It's not time for it yet, Savannah. This is the first time I've seen you today, so I want to check that you haven't decided to opt out?" "I don't want to do that, but I don't want to do the other either." "You appear to have followed Julia's, um, suggestion, that you dress appropriately today. Was that your intention?" "Yeah, but I knew I could always back out later." "That's true, you can back out whenever you want. My honest advice is to let it happen though. I believe it's the best decision for you. Remember that I don't want to do this, so that's my honest belief." "Don't do it then." "But I don't want to NOT do it even more. With everything that Julia and I have going on, we have to draw a very firm line on behaving morally." I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but knew I could make up some BS if I needed Savannah asked me about it. "You've seen what a big deal we make about that, so not doing it would send a bad message. Julia and I will see this through. Even if every one of you opts out, we would've proved we have a firm line. From that point of view I don't care who opts out, or if all of you do, but I'm looking forward to the possibility of getting to know you better if you pass this test." "If this is a test, what do I get if I pass?" "Haha, not even a good try. It's not a game show. You simply get to keep playing the game of 'Show Mark How Interested and How Honest You Are'." "I shouldn't have to chase you. Guys chase girls, not the other way around." "That's normally true, yes. I've found out what I came over for, so I'll leave you to it. Bye." "Wait! Wait. Aren't you going to argue with me?" "About guys chasing girls normally?" Savannah nodded. "No. I'm not going to argue with you at all. If you want to have a normal life, that's your choice. I want a girl who wants to be part of an extra-ordinary life. I'm not going to waste time answering trivial questions, or by trying to convince you to stay in. If you're so undecided that you need convincing, then it'd be better if you opt out. I'll see you later, let me know your decision then. Bye for now." I walked away, proud of myself. I thought I'd done very well. Perhaps because she'd started getting me angry with her stupid questions, or maybe because all my testosterone had been drained last night and this morning, so my brain could work. Later that morning Julia mentioned to me that she'd talked to Savannah and that she was undecided. I told her I'd had the same experience. I asked Julia, "The grope will happen at lunch?" "Yes. I have a little speech that I'll slot her into, depending on her decision." "What happens if she's not at lunch?" "You'll do it sometime later, or we'll tell her we've opted her out whether she wants to be or not. We'll discuss that after lunch. I did think about telling her it'd be at lunch and she had to come, but I'm not that bothered and I'd rather not create the precedence of the girls knowing when." "Fine by me." Personally, I hoped she comes to lunch. I was looking forward to groping her. She's hot. ^ Lunchtime finally arrived. I was very much looking forward to progressing Julia's plan to help Chloe, both in her life and into my bed (the first item was the most important, but the second the most eagerly anticipated). But, as good as the plan and its twin goals were, I was NOT looking forward to this particular encounter. I kept my mind firmly on the 'big picture', ambling as instructed. Chloe caught up with me shortly after I left my locker, heading for our lunch spot. I saw her coming, hurrying toward me while looking very happy. I looked at her face, and only her face. I called to her, "Hello Chloe. You look very happy today?" I nearly said, "look very pretty," but it'd be best not say that sort of thing yet. I was only making a random compliment anyway. She smiled even more as she closed the remaining distance. She stopped in front of me and proudly declared, "Mark, I've got a present for you." Chloe held up a plastic container. I couldn't see what it contained, but in my experience such containers often contain food, it was a promisingly large container, and this is an EXCELLENT time of day to give me food (I get very hungry around lunchtime). I expressed my very sincere interest. "I got up early this morning and made this for you myself, and I've just heated it up for you..." #1: #3: " ... I know you like this, because I heard there were lots of jokes about it, and it's very appropriate to our friendship." Chloe opened the lid from the edge nearest to me, and lifted it to show me PIZZA! Good girl! She passed me the container, saying, "I noticed the toppings you liked the most on Sunday, so there are two different toppings on those pieces..." #1: <"Like" isn't a strong enough word to describe my feelings for her.> "You made me PIZZA!" "Yes!" "You made it yourself?" #1: #2: #3: Since her gift was food, I could improve on what Julia and I had agreed I was to say next, by making it even worse. "Wow Chloe. Now there are three things I know about you that are really yummy." "What?" asked an extremely happy and proud Chloe. "Pizza, your left tit and your right tit." I forced my face to remain neutral, while I watched Chloe's face break. I HATED watching it. Her "happy and proud" expression moved through: disbelief, shock, dismay, and then anguish. A huge emotional distance to traverse, and I watched for all the three or four seconds it took. That I strongly believed this would end well didn't diminish my torment. Chloe had no knowledge of Julia's plan for her [Chloe's] future, so there was no such brake on her torment, unfortunately. I felt a shit load worse than I'd expected, and I had expected to feel bad. I felt so bad that I'd totally lost my appetite. I even felt slightly sick. I pushed Chloe's container out from my body, hoping she'd snatch it back. But she didn't; that wasn't her style. Instead she slumped, hung her head, turned, and shambled slowly away. I looked up to check, and Lily was on the job of covertly shadowing Chloe. Unfortunately there'd been some witnesses, something I hadn't thought of a way of preventing. I'd talked quietly, but I'd been overheard. Not being a nobody in this school meant they all knew who I was. For certain all the guys knew Chloe too. My looking up gave the witnesses the opportunity to express their opinions. "You asshole!" was one girl's, who I was pleased to see rushed after Chloe. The other two girls were less emotive, but left little doubt of their disapproval. The guys laughed. Other than my having already noted the names of the girls I knew, in the hope of being able to talk with them convincingly in a few days, there wasn't anything I could do except leave the scene of the crime. I didn't think my saying, "Don't worry, it's all part of my cunning plan to make her happy," would work. I headed off to find Julia to tell her "mission accomplished", carrying Chloe's offering and my brown bag, neither of which I wanted anything to do with. I suddenly remembered that I had to happily entertain a large bunch of girls at lunch - FUCK! I was not in the mood. I thought of ditching them, and would've done so if Ava hadn't been running around getting 11th grade girls to come too. I didn't want to disappoint Ava on her first 'job' since her adoption, but I wasn't in the fucking mood to be entertaining. By thinking very hard of the big picture, I managed to improve my mood all the way up to very lousy by the time I approached the group. I'd circled around somewhat, to get to my destination without joining up with any of the other girls heading that way. It took me longer, but that was fine too. I also noticed the same four guys who'd been watching us yesterday. They were throwing a football around sort of near, but not too near, the girls. It didn't take a genius to work out what they had planned. They'd be getting a surprise soon. Julia had arranged the girls in a half-circle, all facing in toward us at the focus. I had approached the open half of the semi-circle, to avoid the throng, but the throng consequently saw me coming, which caused Julia, Carol and Ava to turn around. Obviously I was very unhappy, and my three girls rushed up to me. Julia told the other two, "Mark had to do something tough to Chloe a few minutes ago." To me, she asked, "It was harder than you thought, Mark?" "It was crueler than I thought; she was badly hurt. This 'hurt to help' shit sucks big time. Did you know about this, Julia?" I indicated Chloe's food container. "Yes, she told me." "Did she tell you she'd noticed what flavors I liked on Sunday, BEFORE any of our talks with her?" "Yes. She got worried this morning and wanted to check with me that she'd gotten it right. I told her she knew more about your pizza preferences than I did, but what guy doesn't like meat." I pushed the container toward Julia, adding my brown bag. "Take these. I can't eat." "THAT bad?" asked Julia, in an attempt at levity. It fell completely flat. "Yeah. 'Like ashes in my mouth.' I've never understood that expression before, but I sure do now." Julia pushed and prodded me into sitting down with the group. Julia told them all, "Mark's just finished doing something very difficult and he's a bit shaken by it. We'll leave him to recover while I attempt to overcome my natural shyness and cobble together a few sentences." Most of the girls here knew Julia, so laughed at that. ^ I'm tempted to not report this lunchtime conversation, as I took no interest in it at the time, but biographical accuracy demands some explanation. Carol and Ava sat with me, comforting me. Katelin tried to make her way through the throng to help too, but Julia diverted Katelin into talking about her date with me. I got the impression that they'd been talking about Carol before my arrival, but that got dropped under the circumstances. Katelin was at a loss for words. And then she found a whole lot of them, and her mouth was off and running. She RAVED about how nice I was, "He's on a WHOLE different level than other guys. Guys will be nice today to get into your panties tomorrow, but Mark was looking months and YEARS ahead. What he said could change my life FOREVER. Not just my life, but my whole family's. It was incredible! And SMART! I couldn't believe how smart it was. He saw things about me that I would have sworn weren't true, things I'm ashamed of now, but he knew exactly the right way of fixing them, making me see them for myself." That was a brief summary of her rave. Katelin used lots of words, but couldn't find the right ones, so she kept going on and on. I had no doubt her head was spinning, because that's when her tongue works the most. The other girls wanted to know what I'd done that was so wonderful. Julia interrupted, "I've suggested to Katelin that she not discuss that. She and Mark discussed something that is very specific and personal to Katelin, and it would make it harder for her to benefit from Mark's suggestion if it was widely known. I'm sure it would impress you about Mark, but Katelin shouldn't make that much of a sacrifice just to impress you. That'd be foolish. I think everyone can see that Katelin was impressed by Mark's niceness, and that's good enough." "I'm not just impressed; I'm blown away. Totally blown away..." and her tongue was off and running again. A lot of the girls wanted to know what the sex was like. They'd asked several times, but had been unable to divert Katelin off her "mind-blowing niceness" theme. Julia eventually forced Katelin to stop repeating herself, and to talk about the sex. Once Katelin got properly on to that topic, she was effusive all over again. A lot more detailed too. As has previously been well established in this document, girls have no shame. The multiple girl occupancy of the bed didn't go unnoticed or uncommented on by the audience. Katelin hurriedly informed them that she had nothing to do with that, insisting, "I only had normal sex." Julia made sure everyone understood that Katelin was not pressured to participate in anything. Katelin emphatically confirmed that no one had tried to start any "funny business" with her. No one mentioned the "Pussy Juice Lubricant" incident. After several minutes of describing my awesomeness in the sack, Katelin thought she finished with, "I don't think I'm good enough for Mark. I don't think I'll ever be, and I don't think any of you are either. I don't mean to insult any of you, but Mark is incredible. He's on a whole different level than any of us. I'm going to keep trying, because Mark wants me to. It's impossible not to, because everything he's asked me to do is totally for my benefit, and not for him at all. It's the kindest, most unselfish thing any boy has EVER done for me. EVER!" Julia wanted a different ending, asking, "Katelin, how long did you and Mark have sex for, in total, last night and this morning?" "Umm, probably only about three hours with me." Katelin's "only" was queried, with some astonishment. "{Giggle}. Yeah, it seems silly. I meant because Mark could have gone on for far longer. I fell asleep on him last night, and we ran out of time this morning. God knows how long he could go for if he wanted to." Julia asked, "Of those three hours how long was spent not actually having sex? With Mark resting, or your stopping for any other reason." "None! He NEVER stops! It's orgasm after orgasm after orgasm. I don't know how many - I got too blown away by it all - but there was a LOT! Until I got so tired I had to stop. But he kept going with you and Ava for HOURS more." Julia asked, "Did Mark spend any time going down on you?" "I'll say! He likes that, and he's very, very good at it. Umm. I think he is, anyway. I haven't done that much, because I only like normal sex. But he made me feel GREAT." "He spent how long doing that?" "Gosh. I guess half an hour or more. Probably more, I guess. It's very hard to say." "That's fine. How long did you spend going down on him?" The answer was immediately obvious by the way Katelin hung her head, but she still said, "Umm, I don't do things like that. I just like to do normal things." Katelin was starting to earn laughs from that line. "So, in total, Mark spent three hours giving you nonstop sexual pleasure. Every single second of it. Think about that all of you." They thought about it. ^ Early on in Katelin's talk, the ball-throwing boys went into action, with the throws somehow causing them to edge closer and closer to 'my' group (if I could claim 'possession' of 60-odd girls). I was in a foul mood, and I wasn't going to put up with any invasive crap from boys who knew they weren't invited. I waited just long enough to confirm what they were doing, then I acted. Normally, when they were throwing to the most-distant (from us) guy, the throws were short, so he had to advance closer to us. Throws to the closest (to us) guy were long, so he had to move closer to us too. I waited for a throw to the guy most distant from us. It would've naturally fallen a little short, but I NP'd the ball up and over his head. 10.5 pounds of push on a football was considerably more than I needed, although it was a little tricky because I couldn't just grab the ball the way I normally do when I'm flying something with NP, because the ball was rapidly spinning. Instead I propelled it with a succession of momentary NP-pushes. The catcher backpedaled to get under it. The trouble was that the ball 'seemed' to have caught a breeze, because it kept flying farther and farther behind him. His ball-catching experience had never been with balls under acceleration, so he under-compensated badly, and the ball sailed clear over his head. Then when it bounced, it was in the direction even farther away from him, so he chased after it. It kept bouncing away, so he kept chasing. It kept bouncing away, heading down the length of the school's field. After a few dozen yards he stopped in amazement, but the ball kept going. He waited for it to slow down and stop, but it didn't. He looked back at his friends, now some distance behind him. One of them yelled something (at a guess, "Get my ball!") so the would-be catcher took off after it again. The other three stood around wondering what to do. Looking at the increasingly distant ball, at each other, and at my group. Eventually they took off after their ball-chasing friend. We have a big school, with a nice, big, LONG field. We were sitting near one end of it and I have good eyesight, so I was able to keep the ball going for a considerable distance before I worried about not seeing it well enough; at which point I knocked it over the fence into a neighboring house's property. The last time I bothered to look at the boys, they were a distant group talking to each other beside the fence the ball had disappeared over. Footballs don't bounce 'properly', which caused me some grief, although it did allow me to 'whack' the ball on the bounce in such a way to make it 'dodge' around the other groups of kids in the way. No doubt the four boys gained a new respect for the random vagaries of the wind, haha. I wouldn't use this tactic again, but I was in a bad mood today and thought a one-time incident like this was okay. ^ As promised yesterday, Julia next raised last Sunday's bowling/hot tub party date. Some of the 11th graders hadn't heard about my bowling 300, and were duly impressed when that was quickly mentioned. But Julia quickly got past that and onto the details she wanted to discuss. Under the guise of talking about the morality Julia and I were strictly adhering to, Julia managed to provide many sexually explicit, audience-stunning examples. Particularly stunned were the 11th graders, who'd missed out on the many classroom reports from my recently boinked girls. Predictably, when Julia mentioned how bad it was for the girls to grope my cock, there were several sniggers and comments to the effect of, "Ha! I bet he loved it." Julia JUMPED on that! There was talk about consent, and a couple of other issues. I liked, "Mark spent three hours pleasuring Katelin nonstop, and never once asked her to spend even a few seconds pleasuring him, did he Katelin?" "No. I was very selfish. I feel bad about that now. It's just that I only like..." Julia interrupted with, "Yes, we know, Katelin." There was considerable laughter. Julia added, "Katelin, we - Mark and I - aren't going to belittle your beliefs or pressure you to change them. Unlike some of the girls here, we are too moral for that. You think Mark is the most incredible, nicest guy you will ever meet, don't you?" "Oh yes! Very much. He's absolutely..." "Thanks. I just wanted you to say, 'Yes, ' although I'm happy to see your enthusiasm. You have a belief that you don't like going down on a guy. Quite a few of the girls laughed at you. You also have a belief that Mark is the most incredible and nicest guy in the world, but many of the girls here don't share that belief. I believe that the one you've got right is a million times more important than the other one." Julia gave it a second, then added, "Although most guys would probably put those the other way around." -- When Julia could resume, she said, "I was saying that, for Mark, giving pleasure to the girl is far more important than taking it. Of the three hours he spent pleasuring Katelin, somewhere between half and a full hour was spent going down on her. How many of you have got boyfriends who'll spend so much on your pleasure?" Several of the girls put their hands up, some proudly so, and started boasting about their boyfriends. Julia quickly yelled them down, "Hang on, I haven't finished yet. Keep your hand up if your boyfriend doesn't ask you to return the favor. Not even the slightest hint, push, puppy-dog eyes, or whatever. Who doesn't apply the tiniest fraction of pressure." All the hands came down. Which I knew was more of a comment on me than on the other guys. Julia keeps telling me to be more assertive, but it's hard to remember that in the middle of having sex. Julia said, "Like I said before, giving pleasure to the girl is more important to Mark than taking it. When Mark was being groped on Sunday, he would've been most concerned about not upsetting the girls." One girl yelled out, "Maybe he doesn't like it." Julia answered, "Have you ever met a guy? He likes it fine; you have my personal guarantee on that, haha. Or maybe someone will suggest that the reason he spent all the time giving the girls what they wanted was because he forgot about asking them to do things for his pleasure? If so, I believe his being groped would have reminded him. The point is that all the girls that wanted to grope him did, and that was the end of it. -- "Not once during the whole party did Mark ask any girl to touch him. He was letting them tell him what they wanted over and over again, but he never asked for anything back. Obviously he could've if he'd wanted to, as it would have been churlish for the girls to refuse a request from him. Plus there were plenty of girls who would've been delighted to rub his cock for him, but he never asked. You all know how smart he is, so it's not as if he was too dumb to realize he could ask, and that the girls would be happy to do it." (Actually, yes it was. Socially dumb in this case; or at least socially uncomfortable and lacking in confidence.) -- "It didn't happen again because Mark didn't want it to happen. He was groped, not given pleasure. Of all the girls who were there, most of which are here now, are there any who believe what they did was right, and that it'd be fine for them to do the same thing again?" There were none. Julia said, "Which leads me on to..." and she went on to discuss what I call "revenge gropings". Julia had much better descriptions for them. She even managed to make them sound like a moral imperative. Soon Savannah was called forward. I'd forgotten about having to do a revenge groping until Julia had raised the subject several minutes before. I hadn't bothered looking up to see if Savannah was in the crowd, but she was, and was soon standing in front of me. I looked at Julia, saying, "I really don't want to do this." "Do as much or as little as you want. Let's get it done and over with." Fine with me. By which I meant, not fine, but even more not worth the pain-in-the-ass nuisance of making an issue out of it. I climbed to my feet, momentarily squeezed one of Savannah's tits, then sat down again. "That's it?" exclaimed Savannah, in a disbelieving voice. Adding, "That's all you're going to do?" I ignored her. "But I thought you fancied me?" #2: I groaned. "I thought you thought I was sexy?" I demanded, "For Christ's sake shut up you stupid girl!" I decided I should follow my own advice too, before I was REALLY rude, by saying what I was thinking. Julia pushed Savannah away, telling her, "Go. Sit. Keep quiet." I stood up again, telling Julia, "I'm going for a walk." "You're really hurting?" "Yeah." "Do you want any of us to come with you?" "No. Yes, Carol." Carol jumped to her feet, and we walked off together. I heard some of the girls ask Julia what was wrong. "He hurt a girl who was very vulnerable." "But I thought he was supposed to be nice?" I didn't hear any more. ------- Chapter 134: No One Touches the Hair! Wednesday, April 27, 2005 (Continued) I wanted to go somewhere quiet. The library was my first thought, but then I thought of the car, so I walked Carol there. We talked, and Carol was very good. In truth, much of my little meltdown had been caused by my listening to all the crap talk, Savannah's crap being the last straw. Carol asked what had happened, as she hadn't been involved enough in the planning about Chloe to know what I had to do when Chloe did something nice for me. I told her, and she reassured me that Chloe had heard thousands of comments like mine over the years, and that it wouldn't hurt her nearly as much as I believed. I had no trouble believing the first part of that, having heard many of them being said to her during the last year myself. The second part I wasn't sure about, as this time had hurt her a lot more because she'd gotten hopeful about me. Just before the end of lunch my phone rang. I flicked it off. Then Carol's rang. Carol answered hers, "Hi, Julia." "Yeah, we're fine. He didn't like hurting Chloe." "I'll tell him." Carol turned to me. "Julia says she's very sorry that she did not appreciate how much doing that would hurt you, and for not recognizing it afterward either." Partway into dictating my response to Carol, I realized I could tell Julia direct. I took Carol's phone, and said, "I didn't realize how much it'd affect me either. It was horrible to watch. She was so happy and proud until I ruined it." Julia said, "Lily couldn't talk easily, but I understand that Lily's sitting in another cubicle in the same bathroom. Chloe cried a great deal initially, but she's calmed down now. The plan with Lily was that I'd relieve her rather than force her to miss a class, but she'll miss one if we need her to, if you want me to come to you?" "No need. I'm okay. We're sitting in the car, and Carol's very comforting. I'll probably sit out of the next class, then be okay after that." We chatted a bit more, Julia pointing out that she'd probably have to use text when she was with Chloe, and would prefer not to so Chloe wouldn't realize there was someone in the room with her. Julia had to go, "So I can get into a stall while there are still other girls coming and going." I tried to send Carol to class. She refused, saying, "It's only Math. It's no problem, I'll just make you do all my homework for me." I doubted it was Math, but that was fine. By halfway through the next period, Carol had me describing the "Whole different level of niceness" thing Katelin had referred to. Carol thought it was very funny that it'd all come about because I didn't want to name which martial art I was an expert in, to avoid having my claim of being an expert exposed. I can't say I was happy, but I was feeling a lot less tormented, which was a huge improvement. Carol insisted that Julia's plan was a good one, and Chloe would have years, if not decades, of good feelings because of what we were doing. It was a good point, although I didn't enjoy being reminded that the plan called for me to keep saying the same things to Chloe. They'd have a rapidly diminishing effect - the first being by far the worst - but it was still not pleasant to think about. I knew things were better when I started feeling hungry. We got out of the car in plenty of time for our getting to our next classes. I gave Carol a good hug and a heartfelt "Thank you." She looked around, saw the coast was clear, and said, "I like being your wife." That gave me a flood of good feelings. "Yeah. That's working out pretty good, isn't it?" "More sex would be good." She was teasing me, but without doubt more sex would be good. I didn't have any sex at all planned, now that Laila's clique had been canceled, so I said, "I'm free every night, even tonight. We should get together as soon as possible. Tonight or tomorrow night, I guess, depending on whether Ava wants to stay with me after the dinner party. Tonight's a very important night for her, so I should let her stay if she wants. It's too early to let her know about us - not until she's proved her ability to keep secrets - but we can almost certainly sleep together tomorrow. Would you like that?" Carol said, "Ava will almost certainly spend tonight at her place. She'll need time to talk with her parents after the dinner. If she goes to her place, can we sleep together tonight?" "Yes please. I'd love that." Remembering Vanessa's comment about needing private, one-on-one time, I asked, "Would you prefer to sleep with just me, or Julia too?" "Julia too please. It's great having all three of us together. Besides Julia will need some comforting after hurting you so much today, and we can make a LOT more noise in her bedroom than ours." The middle point was one that I had failed to think of. Julia hadn't hurt me, per se, but I knew what Carol meant, and Julia would need some comforting. There was going to be a lot of comforting going on tonight. I gave Carol a brief kiss, telling her, "When we're alone I'll give you the kiss I'm really feeling," and we headed to our lockers. I picked up my bag and books, and headed to my next class. A couple of minutes before class was due to start I got a call from Julia, "Chloe would like to meet you after this class so she can suck your tonsils out of your throat." I heard giggling in the background. "How does that sound?" I was in class. It hadn't started yet, but there were plenty of potential eavesdroppers, so I just said, "I was tired of them anyway." "He says he was tired of them anyway." More background giggling. "Sounds like you've got a date for a tonsillectomy." I suggested, "I'll meet you outside your classroom. Is that okay with her?" "If she was any more okay, she'd have an accident." More giggles. I'd meant to convey that outside the classroom might be insufficiently private, Chloe not being a very demonstrative person (that's not just a reference to her breasts, but to her entire personality. Remember how quiet she was in the pizza restaurant after bowling). Never mind; I'd meet her outside of class, and I'd let her set the tone for our behavior. Class started. I alternated between paying attention to my schoolwork, daydreaming, and wondering why Chloe was so far ahead of schedule. Thank God that she was, as all the giggling indicated a considerably happier mood than I'd last seen her in. I became aware that I was REALLY hungry, and I couldn't help wondering where my lunch was. I hoped wife#1 had saved it for her man. Naturally Julia would save Chloe's container, but would she save the contents? Maybe she'd eaten them after I left, as pizza is well-nigh irresistible. In which case, what became of my bagged lunch? Given that I could have been fantasizing over Chloe's progress and where that would be lead to, you might think my focus on food indicates an extreme degree of hunger. While it was true that I was very hungry, as my last meal had been several hours ago and I'm still a growing boy (height, and Julia thinks, muscular definition too. She swears my body has gotten noticeably better in the few weeks she's known me), the main reason I wasn't daydreaming about Chloe was because nothing was going to happen for a while yet, no matter how much she fancied my little wobbly bit (tonsils). Nonetheless, I eagerly slipped out of class five minutes before it ended. It's great having that privilege, especially in times of medical emergency, as I was heading for a tonsillectomy. I was standing outside their class when the bell rang. Julia and Chloe were among the first out of the room. Seeing me, Julia wisely stepped to the side. Chloe saw me moments later, and yelled, "I'm so..." as she launched herself at me. That conversation was so short because the corridor is not very wide, therefore our lips had not been very far apart when Chloe had spotted me. It didn't take her long to reduce that distance to zero. I immediately feared that Julia's comment about Chloe's wanting my tonsils had been factual. What Chloe lacked in practical kissing experience, she more than made up for with suction. Nor did she need to breathe, no doubt because she'd sucked the contents out of my lungs. After several seconds I managed to pull my head back a little, to get a look at her face. I also couldn't help noticing the crowd of incredulous classmates. Pretty much the entire class, and all incredulous. Chloe literally backs up in apprehension whenever any boy gets into her comfort zone, which is large enough to qualify for its own zip code - it needs to be, because her breasts occupy most of that space (sorry about that; I felt it was an obligatory macho joke) - so her passionately launching herself at a something containing a Y-chromosome was unprecedented. "Sorry," finished Chloe. #1: #2: <"If in doubt, seek more information."> #4: I looked around, and said, "Can a guy get a little privacy when he kisses a pretty girl, please?" No one moved, so I guess the answer is "No." I said to Chloe, "Shall we take it outside? To get a little more privacy." I was hoping to shame everyone into leaving, but that didn't work on anyone either. Julia said, "I've got your bag, Chloe. You two head off; I'll follow." I detached Chloe's hand from around my neck, held it in my hand, and we walked outside. After only a couple of steps Chloe said, "I'm sorry I doubted you. I hurt you a lot, didn't I?" No short answer seemed fair, so I said, "We'll talk when we get outside." Hopefully after Julia has explained what's going on. We left the throng, the girls muttering confused thoughts among themselves, the guys yelling what they seemed to consider were humorous comments. Outside I used Essential Male Relationship Survival Technique Thing To Say #2: I said, "Sorry, I don't understand. Can you please explain?" (Survival Technique #1 is obviously, "Sorry, it's entirely my fault." Once a guy is in a relationship with a girl, most of the smart things he can say to her start with "Sorry.") Julia answered, "Chloe realized that you'd never say something cruel like that - especially to her! - without a good reason. She missed one class, but when she came to the second, several of the girls asked her what was wrong..." Chloe interrupted, "I told them I'd done something very stupid with you, and they said, 'Oh, you're the girl!' Then they told me all about how upset you'd been at lunch. I felt TERRIBLE! I'd made a horrible mistake thinking you were just like every other boy. I don't know how I could have been so stupid. I know you are..." "Chloe, sweetie. I saw that you were also badly hurt by what I said. We could spend hours apologizing profusely to each other, and we'd probably both be right to do so." With obvious humor, I added, "Even though it was mostly my fault!" I poked my tongue out at her, to lighten the mood. "I'm prepared to call it even, and forget about it, except we're not quite even yet. You still owe me one thing." "I do? What?" "You've kissed me, but you haven't given me a chance to kiss you back. That's VERY NOT FAIR!" "{Giggle}." She didn't say anything else, so I assumed that giggle had been permission. I put my arm around her, and leaned in slowly to give her plenty of opportunity to object. Unfortunately I also gave her plenty of opportunity to talk. "I don't think I'm very good at kissing. I haven't done it much." #2: "What you lack in experience, you more than make up for with loveliness. Remember that you know I think you're a lovely person." "I know. {Giggle}. I'm glad I heard you say that. It was one of the things that helped me stop crying." #4: #1: #4: #2: Chloe asked, "You were testing me, weren't you?" "That was one reason, yes." "I did very badly, didn't I?" "You eventually passed, which is what matters the most. The test had no time limit." I didn't want to outright accept her apology, because it was important that she remembered and learned to be open around me (by "open", I'm mostly referring to what she should do with her blouse). Chloe hadn't finished telling herself off, "I caused you a lot of pain that I shouldn't have. I should have known right away that you'd normally never say anything like that." "I don't know why you would expect to know that right away. After all, it was the truth, your left and right tits are very yummy." There was moment of dismay, but easily less than a second. She said, "I'm not going to fail twice. I trust you now. Oh! - I just realized that I didn't trust you before - when I showed you my breasts in the bathroom. Or I wouldn't have reacted the way I did today. You knew that, didn't you?" As it happened - thanks to Julia's explaining so much - I actually did know that, and for once wouldn't be pretending to be much more knowledgeable than I was, "Yes. I knew that Chloe." Some nice bullshit occurred to me (our plan for Chloe called for lots of bullshit, so I was on the lookout for opportunities). I added, "Remember I semi-agreed with you when you asked whether I was testing you today? I said that was one of the reasons?" Chloe agreed, "Yes." "My testing you was actually relatively unimportant, since I knew the answer already. I knew you'd initially fail, but that you'd eventually realize I wouldn't normally talk with anyone like that. What's more important than my seeing whether or not you passed the test, is YOU seeing whether or not you passed it. Now you know that the Chloe who stood topless in front of me, that insisted that she trusted me, actually didn't. Did she?" Chloe looked down bashfully, "No, she didn't." After a moment to make the point, Chloe looked up to say, "I trust you now though. You taught me a very good lesson." I said, "Changing the subject briefly Chloe. I don't like to be a liar, and I said something that I'd like to make true. I said your tits were yummy, so one day I am going to have to rub pizza all over your breasts, then lick it all off, and declare that you truly are yummy." "{Giggle}. I'm not going to fail that test again Mark!" "That wasn't a test, Chloe. I WILL rub pizza on your breasts and lick it off." That gave her pause. I waited while she thought about it. She eventually said, "Really? You want to do that?" "Yummy!" "{Giggle}." After another couple of seconds' thought, "I've NEVER done anything like that before." "I should hope NOT! Pizza should be treated with RESPECT! You can't go around rubbing it all over breasts willy-nilly! Some things are sacred!" "Haha. You're funny." All that talk about pizza prompted me to ask about another physical need of mine, "Ahh, Julia, I don't suppose you saved any of my lunch, did you? I'm very hungry." Julia said, "I think there's a scrap or two left." She started looking in her bag. At this stage even "a scrap or two" would be welcome. Especially as I'd just realized that I was going running right after school. I would HAVE to raid the fridge(s) when I dropped the girls off, because I'd be SERIOUSLY hungry by then, but I wouldn't be able to eat nearly as much as I wanted. Running 26 miles on a full stomach wouldn't be a good idea. Chloe asked, "You didn't eat any lunch? Not even my pizza?" "I'm sorry, sweetie, but I lost my appetite after hurting you. I'm fantastically impressed by what you did though. I'm just sorry I couldn't be the one to eat it." Julia held Chloe's container out to me and removed the lid, showing me ALL the pizza, in all its glory. Untouched! "Scraps?" I accused, as I grabbed the container. "Sometimes it's better when you don't know in advance, haha." I had been raised not to talk with my mouth full, so Julia escaped any comeback I might've had. It would have been weak anyway, because she was currently my absolute favorite human being: she'd saved my pizza! It wasn't until I was working my way rapidly through the second piece that I realized Chloe was waiting on tenterhooks. So much for my being observant of social interactions. I'd been busy observing the pizza. It was too hard to stop mid-piece, so I finished that off, swallowed, then said to a very eagerly waiting Chloe. "Chloe, I was so hungry I didn't even taste those. Sorry, but I need a LOT of food, and it is well after lunchtime. I normally eat right at the beginning of lunchtime too. I'll savor the remaining pieces much better now my hunger's been eased." Rather than pause to let her express disappointment, I kept talking, "Let's try this piece. It looks good, and... , mmm. Mmm." When I'd swallowed, "This is VERY nice pizza! Well done! I'm impressed." It truly was good. How much of that opinion was due to my hunger I couldn't tell, but it seemed delicious and I was thoroughly enjoying eating it. "Really? You like it? You're not just saying that?" "Chloe, I have a hope - it's only a hope because there's a long way to go yet - but I have a hope that we might have a relationship that lasts a long time. Possibly a VERY long time." It was a very good thing that we were all sitting down. In particular, that Chloe was sitting down, because she would have collapsed if she'd been standing. It seems silly to use the phrase, "Her legs turned to jelly" when someone is sitting down, but that's what would have happened had she been standing. What I'd said had knocked the air out of her. I'd hardly thought what I'd said was that dramatic, but she seemed to think it was. Maybe I'd overdone it with the last "VERY". Probably because of my guilt at hurting her so badly, my pleasure at eating this truly delicious pizza, and my general sympathy for her situation. -- I continued, pleased by the effect of what I'd said on her but ignoring it, "You've seen how much effort I have, and am, putting into helping you develop the correct attitude to your breasts, haven't you?" I'd probably worded that too accurately, but after I'd said it, I figured she wouldn't notice. "Yes." "Given how long we might know each other, don't you think I'd make an effort to correct you about something that was far more important than your breasts?" "Ahh, umm. I don't understand?" "You didn't seem to believe me when I said how much I liked your pizza. Believe me, if your pizza cooking needed correcting, I'd make that a much higher priority than worrying about your silly, old breasts. Pizza is IMPORTANT!" "Haha, haha. You're so funny, and so nice. You're very good at finding funny ways to make my breasts seem unimportant." "No, that's not right Chloe. You've made a mistake there. I wasn't trying to make your breasts seem unimportant by comparing them to pizza." "You weren't?" "No. Not at all. You've got lovely breasts." I was actually saying this too early in the plan, but I'd only say it once then move on, so no real harm, and planting the seed might help a little later on. I continued, "You've heard me say several times that, 'I'd never let a girl's breasts influence my relationship with her', haven't you?" "Yes. You've said lots of times." "Have you ever heard me say, 'I'd never let how a girl cooks pizza influence my relationship with her'?" "Haha. No, you've never said that. {Giggle}." "There's a reason you haven't. I WOULD let it influence me." "Haha." I just looked at her steadily until she got it. Eventually Chloe said, "Huh? You're not joking?" "No I'm not. I WOULD let how a girl cooks pizza influence my relationship with her. If she noticed what toppings I like, got up early, cooked it for me, brought it to school, reheated it, and then gave it to me. In other words, cooked it with care and love. Then, 'Yes', I would let that influence me a great deal." It wasn't easy extracting it from my tight pants, but I eventually managed to pass her my hanky. I figured that any of hers were probably drenched already. We had very little time left, so I couldn't give her long. I added, "That's certainly more important than breasts, isn't it Chloe?" I got a wet, broken, "Yes" from her, accompanied by some nods, just to make sure the message got through. I added, "The fact that your pizza is truly delicious is a lovely bonus, but it's not as important as what you and I have learned about you today, is it Chloe?" All this stuff was seat of the pants bullshit, as usual. Julia had given me a reasonably good understanding of the psychology of what we wanted to do with and for Chloe, which was pretty straightforward - as it needed to be for me to be able to operate without step-by-step instructions from Julia. It boiled down to Chloe's attitude about herself, which is why I'd included "you" in "what you and I have learned". Chloe's attitude to herself was far more important than her attitude to me. That she trusted me was very helpful, because it made it easier for me to keep working on her, but otherwise wasn't important in the grand scheme of her life. I had to admit that improving her life had to be our main goal, although my getting into her blouse made a damned good secondary goal! I was out of time, and I hadn't judged it well as she was still crying too much for sensible conversation. I really needed a few more minutes for her to calm down enough to realize a couple of things, but she'd work them out herself okay. I stood up, saying, "In the parking lot on Sunday, I tried to convince you that I valued you as a person. You wouldn't believe me then, but I hope you're starting to now." I felt guilty over using that line. I shouldn't have used it as it was very selfish of me. Being valued for herself was what Chloe most wanted a boy to do, and my 'reminding' her to think of me as doing so had been intended to increase her desire for me personally. That was selfish of me as I shouldn't really be trying to increase her desire for me, but it's hard to resist, especially as it was such a good line. -- I leaned over and kissed the top of her head, then said, "You owed me a kiss before we could call the hurt we did each other even today, so now it's even. Let's forget that hurt, and look forward from here. I know I am; very much." Chloe's head was bowed, and she was crying happy tears this time, girls being very changeable. Julia was beaming with pride. I already knew I'd done good, but it still felt great to see Julia's pride in me. I walked off, carrying the pizza container as I wasn't stupid enough to lose it twice in one day. I pulled the next piece out and started eating it. Chloe - bless her - had supplied a good quantity. And it was good to the last bite too. My next class was one I shared with Chloe, so I went to the 11th grade class instead, just to avoid her. That was part of the plan too. The plan didn't require me to avoid all of her classes, I just felt like avoiding this one. The plan just required that I avoid any relationship with her. It wasn't the most intuitively obvious way into her blouse, but Julia had made up the plan, so "intuitively obvious" doesn't enter into it anywhere. I managed to avoid Chloe for the rest of the day. I didn't avoid the Chloe issue though, as several other people asked me about it. Most of the comments were about Chloe kissing me in the corridor. A lot of my fellow 10th graders had seen that, and they couldn't wait to ask me about it. And ask they did, repeatedly, especially the boys. Apparently I wasn't the only boy that'd noticed the size of Chloe's breasts. My answer was, "It's personal." Often repeated for the slow of thinking. Depending how the various guys worded follow-up, "Man, she's HOT!", "You lucky bastard, she's got fantastic tits", etc., my usual reply was something along the lines of, "She's a very nice person." It wasn't a devastating comeback, because you're not going to get guys to stop saying what they say, but it might give some of them pause next time. And maybe make them consider that there are other things to think about. And, yes, I am aware that I'm being - at least in part - a hypocrite. A couple of people made accusatory reference to my "Three yummy things" 'joke'. My answer to them was, "Chloe would be the best person to talk with about that." Julia told me later that Chloe missed me in class. I told her, "I went to the 11th grade class. I thought it might be a good idea to let Chloe cool down for a while. I might have overdone it a bit." "You were FANTASTIC!..." Julia went on to praise me effusively. She also mentioned Katelin too, saying, "I wish I hadn't missed seeing you in action with Katelin, when you impressed her so much." I knew Julia didn't mean "action" being sex, but "action" being talking (Julia has some weird priorities). Julia's showering with Ava when I'd stumbled mostly blindly into the bullshit of getting Katelin to prove her ability to commit to love meant Julia regretted not seeing how brilliant I'd been (ha!). I was proud of myself. I'd had two successes in a row with girls. It was a new personal best. ^ Just for the sake of completeness, I'll mention a few things Julia discussed with the crowd of girls during the group discussion at the lunch that I'd walked away from. There'd been a lot of interest in Carol before I'd arrived, and more after I'd left. Just the usual questions, with the additional comment about my choosing my sister as a source of comfort after I left. Some of the 11th graders thought it was weird that I left my girlfriend behind in favor of my sister, but more than enough girls had directly or indirectly heard of my "I Love My Sister Carol" speeches that the questioning girls were put right - which, in fact, was right, unlike most of the bullshit that we've fooled the girls into believing about me. My modesty was discussed at some stage, and my lack of modest clothing was used as a counter argument. Julia confessed her role in my clothing choices. She, of course, turned my failed attempt to prevent her dressing me into a compliment about my willingness to go to personally embarrassing lengths to please her. Ava's having a strong relationship with Julia and me had come up early. Ava's arriving with a large group of 11th graders and kissing Julia affectionately had kicked off that conversation. There was considerable disappointment expressed by many of the 10th graders, "Now that Mark's picked the girlfriend he was looking for." Julia and Ava both said I was still searching. "It's a selection process. Lots of girls get rejected early on, just like we reject 99% of the boys that talk with us. The survivors get to be girlfriends to various degrees, while they get to know each other better. Obviously some of them will fail to make the cut or might even choose to pull out. There's still a long way to go yet. You'll know it's over when you see Mark walk up the aisle, until then nothing's final. That's similar to any other boy, except there are so many girls wanting Mark that they have to be dealt with simultaneously, so we end up having dates with twenty five girls and Mark, like Sunday, or threesomes in bed like Ava, Mark and I did last night. It's unusual, but life with Mark is going to be fantastically unusual too." After I left with Carol, Julia talked some more about that issue, mentioning the lack of jealousy between her and Ava, and that Mark was not only looking for a girlfriend, or two, but multiple assistants. The 11th graders, particularly, hooted at the lifestyle implications of that, so Julia went into "Mark Selling Mode", describing her opinion of what the lifestyle could be like. Private jets flying to Europe's fashion capitals came up more than once. Julia included, "You hoot at Mark getting sex. Mark will be able to get endless sex in his life. Just ask any of the girls he's already slept with; they'll leap at the chance to get back into bed with him. The assistants won't be giving Mark anything he wouldn't be able to get a thousand times over. THEY, on the other hand, will be getting better sex and a better life than they could possibly get anywhere else." The 11th graders were causing some trouble by not immediately agreeing with everything Julia said. Julia spent a little while saying that Mark would be in their classes next year, so they'd get some chance to find out how impressive and nice he was for themselves, "Although you'll be lucky to get his attention, because he's going to be so busy finishing his college degree next year." That surprised several of the 11th graders, so Julia explained the college situation in her usual leaving-out-the-inconvenient-details way. Ava apologized to Julia for not getting the word out better. Julia replied, "You've had less than a week, and I don't even care that much. I'm less interested in quantity of girls than I used to be. Mark's at this school for another eleven months, so there's plenty of time for the good girls to attract our attention." ^ At the end of school we all met up in the parking lot: Carol and Donna, Julia and Ava, and me (of course). As soon as Ava and I met, I told her that I would be running a marathon shortly, and gave her the related instructions, including overriding her concerns. Donna arrived toward the end of that conversation, and when she understood the subject, she immediately begged, "Please can I come?" "No, sweetie..." #1: #3: #1: So I backtracked, " ... Actually Donna, that might be fine. Let me think about it and I'll let you know soon." #2: I suggested dropping my sisters at their home first, then Julia at hers, I'd meet Ava there, leave my car and go running with Ava. Donna answered, "Remember you said I can check out your clothes at Julia's place for lunch tomorrow." I'd completely forgotten about that. "Okay, we'll go to Julia's first. You'll have to be quick though, as I need to get back from the run, shower and dress before the dinner party starts." Julia said, "I'll help you, Donna." I said, "Ava, can I meet you at my place instead, and can you buy some water on the way, please? I presume I need water don't I? I've seen those water tables on TV sometimes." "I'll get what you'll need." It was getting logistically difficult just to drive home from school. In the car, on the way to Julia's, the first thing I said was, "Julia, is it okay if Carol and I stay with you tonight, after the dinner party? Assuming Ava doesn't want to stay." "I doubt Ava will stay. That will be wonderful, thank you." "I've got no idea why you're thanking me, but moving on." I had to word this carefully, because Donna was in the car. "Remember why I'm doing this run with Ava. I don't see any strong reason not to add Donna for the same reason. The only problem might be working out which if we need to, but I think that wouldn't be a major problem. What do you think?" I hoped that hadn't been too cryptic. Julia thought for a couple of seconds, then, "Seems like a good idea to me." "In that case we agree. Donna, you can come if you want. What's going to happen is that I'm going to run a marathon, with you and..." "A marathon? Right now? You haven't been doing any training, or anything, have you?" I nearly said, "I've been having LOTS of sex," but then canceled that, as I didn't want to rub it in that Donna couldn't participate as much as she wanted in that particular activity. Instead I said, "No, no training. Just like I didn't do any training for the 10k. Ava will measure out 26 miles using her car's odometer, and I'll run it while you and Ava drive it. You won't be running yourself, so you might find it a bit boring." "I don't mind that and I'll be happy to talk with Ava. But running a marathon isn't like running 10k. It's completely different on the body. You'll hit the wall. You haven't done any training or preparation for that, have you?" #2: #3: "What's 'the wall' Donna?" Donna, with some concern, explained, "It's when your body runs out of glycogen." #2: #1: #2: Donna correctly interpreted my expression, and added, "Have you heard of Glucose?" I said "Yes," because I had heard of it. "It's where your energy comes from. Bodies don't have enough to run a marathon, and run out after about twenty miles. You get suddenly tired. It's called 'hitting the wall'. After the wall your energy has to come from fat which is not nearly so good. You don't know any of this, do you?" "No, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a problem." #3: #2: #1: #2: It took a little doing, but Donna accepted our further assurances, especially after I'd said that I'd stop if I got in any difficulty. My possibly dropping dead having been discussed, Julia and Donna turned to the more important issue of what sort of clothes Donna wanted me to wear to her Duckling lunch tomorrow. I mostly succeeded in tuning out, but couldn't help reacting to Julia's saying, "When you're choosing his pants remember it'd be a good idea to choose a pair that it's easy to get his cock out of. Not a stiff fabric, like jeans. Ideally with a wide opening fly too, so girls can get their hands in." "Really!" asked Donna in happy surprise, echoing how I felt. "Sure," said Julia. "It'd be foolish to want to do something at the time, and find something Mark was wearing made it too hard. We also wouldn't want Mark to wear a fly that was slow to do back up, in case a teacher got suspicious and came over to investigate. We need to be able to put ourselves back together very quickly. Girls just have to push their skirts down, but Mark will take a lot longer, so bear that in mind." "Okay. Wouldn't it be easier if Mark wasn't wearing panties too?" "Sure. That's up to you. Mark said you could choose his clothes." Julia looked at me, and this time I was sure her innocent look was entirely fake. Donna said, "Cool. No panties then. {Giggle}. That's going to be so funny." They all agreed. I didn't bother correcting Donna, as it made no logical difference whether I wasn't wearing panties, or wasn't wearing underwear. I certainly wouldn't have volunteered to go underwear-less, but I silently agreed to do so for Donna. All the girls were going to be pantiless for me, so my matching them seemed only fair. Julia said, "It'd probably be a good idea to shave Mark's pubic hair off too, so it doesn't get caught..." "WHAT! NO WAY! I'm not doing that!" "Why not? All us girls do it for you, so it seems only fair." "No way! Guys do NOT do that!" "But it might get caught in a zip. Wouldn't you prefer..." "No, I would not! And you can't put ribbons in it, plait it, or put it in ponytails either. Guys hair is left as is - ALWAYS!" "What about just trimming it?" "No. NOTHING. Leave it TOTALLY alone. I'm pretty sure that's illegal anyway." "So it's fine for girls to shave, but not guys?" "Exactly right. Well done. Next topic please." "Why is it okay for girls but not guys? It's pubic hair for both of us. Yours will grow back, you know." "First, it will NOT grow back; because it WON'T be cut off in the first place. Second, girls shave so guys can get at their 'bits', which are recessed. Guys' bits are proudly external, specifically - and this is important - so their hair doesn't have to be cut. Third, there are very important health considerations. You've heard of 'chest colds'? Without hair guys can get 'ball colds'. It's very dangerous. You wouldn't want my balls to turn blue and fall off, would you? Fourth - and this is an absolute killer reason - if other guys saw me in the showers with no hair down there, I'd be the laughing stock of school. Of Oregon! You'd have no chance of finding any more girlfriends for me, because I'd be surrounded by every homo for a hundred miles!" "Haha. Chloe was right, you are very funny." "That's a pity, because I'm being deadly serious. No one touches the hair! Not to mention: 'Fifth: I am NEVER letting anyone down there with a pair of scissors in their hand.' What'd happen if they sneezed! Carol, as the future mother to my children, you should be speaking up." "What's that?" asked Donna. #1: Donna had an excited follow-up question, "Are you pregnant, Carol?" Carol said, "No I'm not. Mark, what do you want to say?" "Umm, Donna. You know how Julia and Carol are my wives, right? According to our private ceremony. Wives normally have children with their husbands, so I sometimes jokingly call Carol 'mother of my children.' It was especially relevant to that discussion was all, and I needed help to defend myself from Julia. That makes sense, right?" "Sure. I don't believe it though. Do Mom and Dad know?" #3: #2: #3: #2: "Sweetie, Carol and I have discussed it..." "Cool!" " ... as something we MIGHT do AFTER Carol graduates. So that's more than four years even before we start seriously thinking about it, okay? You cannot tell ANYONE about it. We'd deny it, but it could cause serious trouble." "I know THAT. I haven't told anyone anything I shouldn't. I love all the stuff we do together. Do Mom and Dad know?" "There's nothing to know yet. But they do know that it is a faint possibility several years from now." "Cool. That's going to be so neat!" "What's going to be neat?" "When Carol's a mom. I think you'll be a good mom, Carol. Hey! I'll be an Aunt. Aunt Donna, {giggle}. That's going to be so weird. It's going to be so fantastic when you're a mom." Donna was way too excited, and getting more so. Julia said, "Donna, it's important you don't discuss this with anyone. We don't even want you to discuss it with us. It's far too secret to risk anyone overhearing. Don't even mention it to us or your mom and dad. Drop it totally, okay. In four years Mark might talk with you about it, but you don't bring it up before. Forget you heard it for four years, got it?" "Okay. I think it's cool though." I said, "GRRR, Donna!" I told you I was good at English. Julia had a better approach, "Mark, why would every homo in a hundred miles chase you if you shaved your nether regions? What has shaving got to do with gay guys?" "They're both unnatural acts involving the same area of the body. They're bound to go together, it stands to reason." "Haha. Good one. You're funny even when you're not trying. But you've given me an idea: I'll ask Rocky. He'll know." "Argh. Just what I DON'T need: Rocky taking an interest in my pubic region." "Hey!" said Donna. "Julia, you finish school much sooner than Carol. Are you going to..." Julia interrupted VERY firmly, "DONNA Anderson. If you're asking me what I think you're asking me, you're going to be in SERIOUS trouble. We told you to totally zip it less than a minute ago." "But..." "NO buts. Not to mention that it's none of your business. Mark, I'm losing interest in our having lunch with Donna's friends. Why don't we drive your sisters straight to your home rather than check out your clothes?" Donna gave it up, "All right. You win. I still..." With a steely voice, Julia asked, "You STILL what, Donna?" "Umm... , I still think Mark should shave, just like you said." Thereby indicating which of us Donna thought the most important to suck up to. Carol said, "We could have a vote, haha." I said, "I agree. All LORDS in favor of shaving, say, 'Unnatural Act'." I waited a full quarter of a second, but no lords spoke up. So I concluded, "The motion fails miserably." #1: Inside Julia's house I told the girls I was going to my study. I needn't have bothered, because none of them heard me. They were in "Clothes Mode", so an earthquake wouldn't have registered with them. I searched "wall marathon glucose" quite proud of myself for having a smart search idea, especially when it led me to exactly what I wanted to know. #3: #2: #1: #2: Back in Julia's bedroom, Donna was having major difficulties making a choice. Seeing me return, Julia pushed Donna to decide. I remember the lesson I'd been given about how girls choose clothes in the morning, and was fearful that this could take a long time. Fortunately Donna knew a silly nursery rhyme she could recite while pointing to each choice in turn, thereby proving that she had a while to go before reaching maturity. #3: #1: Donna looked back regretfully at the clothes left on the bed, proving that the brain-custardization process had already started. We left Julia with Chloe's container to wash so it could be returned tomorrow, and my sisters and I headed to my place. On the way home I suddenly realized, "Oh Carol! Did you want to come to watch me run too? I'm sorry I forgot to ask you before." It wasn't until well after I'd finished asking that I thought about Carol's impact on the "truth test" nature of this run. Which I dismissed as soon as I thought of it; Carol wasn't going to blab. "No thanks. I'm worried about meeting Ava's parents and want to make a good first impression, so I need to get ready." #3: It took me a couple of seconds to realize that the probable explanation was that if she came with us she'd likely only have minutes to get ready after we returned. #1: Just for fun, I said, "If you want to create a good first impression, I can strongly recommend the dress you wore to the restaurant with Cindy. The black dress, remember?" "Oh yes. I remember. I'm not surprised you do either, haha. Although you haven't mentioned it since?" "Believe me! I have NOT forgotten that dress." "I somehow don't think it'd give the first impression I should be going for, especially as the dinner is mostly about you and Julia." "I hope you're not suggesting that I wear it?" "Haha. No, I think that'd be the wrong first impression too, haha." ------- Chapter 135: World-Record Marathon Wednesday, April 27, 2005 (Continued) Ava was waiting for us at home, so all I had to do was run in, change into somewhat more suitable attire than my school clothes, and then run out again. Donna was already in the car, eager to get my run started. I directed Ava to the road Julia and I had decided on. Once we arrived there, I got Ava to measure the length of the segment that I would run back and forth on. It was 6.4 miles, so a marathon would require two "backs", two "forths" and an extra 0.6 miles to make up the full distance, marathons being 26.2 miles long. There was the issue of the car's odometer not being considered very accurate, but I waved it away uncaringly, saying "Let's measure 27 miles then, so there's no doubt." So we found the point that was 1.4 miles into the fifth leg. Ava said, "You are going to be cursing that extra distance when you have to run it." "We'll see. I think you might be surprised about that." Just before I started running, when we were parked on the side of the road, I said, "Now listen VERY carefully you two, I'm about to say something very serious. Ava, this is an ORDER, and you know what that means, don't you?" "Oh. Yes, I understand." Her face became suddenly serious, so I knew she did. "Donna, I want you to understand that what I am going to tell you is VERY important, okay. I know you'll have no idea why, and may even disagree with me, but I don't care about any of that. I am TELLING you something, and if you disagree I'll tell Ava to immediately take you home, okay?" "Okay. What is it?" "I don't want either of you to tell ANYBODY about this run. Not what my time was, nor any general comments about how fast or slow I was. Not even that I ran a marathon. Don't raise the subject of my running today, and if anyone asks about it, say you were too busy talking to each other to pay any attention to me. Do you understand? I don't want ANYBODY to know ANYTHING. That's very important to me. Have you got it?" Ava nodded, but Donna asked, "Why not?" I was very pleased to see by Ava's wince that she recognized that as a "Why?" question, and that they were bad. I answered, "I'm not going to tell you. All you need to know is that I do not want anybody to know anything about it. I don't even want them to know that something interesting happened, so if someone asks you about it, don't say 'I'm not allowed to answer, ' because that'd make them curious. Just say something innocent, like, 'I don't know, I was too busy talking.' Do you understand?" Donna repeated, "Don't tell anybody anything?" I nodded. "What about Mom and Dad or Carol?" I'd forgotten about Carol, and my first thought was that it would be okay to tell Carol. But, on second thought, it'd be a better test to exclude everyone. I'd warn Carol and Julia to tell me if Donna or Ava blabbed to them. I answered, "Not ANYBODY! Not Mom, Dad or Carol. Not Julia either. It's good you checked with me what I meant, but in this case I truly mean nobody at all. Okay?" Ava asked, "What about if you have a medical problem and we need to call for help?" "Good question, Ava. In that case you can certainly call for help. I'd still prefer you not to mention 'marathon' or my time though - just say I was running for a while. You can tell them for how long if they absolutely need it, but I shouldn't think so. If you do need to tell them, tell me later who you told and what you said to them. Do you both fully understand what I want?" Ava did, but Donna wanted to know, "But why can't I tell Carol? She's your..." Fortunately I was paying full attention to Donna, because I had a flash of where that "she's your" was going, especially after the so recent conversation about Carol and me having babies together. I interrupted damned fast, "DONNA! I am well aware that Carol is my SISTER. I don't need you to remind me of that." By the look on Donna's face, it was obvious that "sister" had not been her next word, and she knew that I knew. I commanded, "There will be NO more conversation about why. I have told you what I want. Do you understand it or not?" "Yes, Mark. I'm very sorry," from a VERY contrite Donna. It would've been ironic for Donna to let that piece of information slip, given that the entire purpose of this run was because it was too dangerous to test Ava with that exact knowledge, it being one of of my "Big 3" secrets: Carol, NP and blobs. I'm not counting the BIG, "End of Human Civilization" secret. That's so secret it's NEVER going to be on any list. I made a mental note to read Donna the riot act for her almost-slip at the first opportunity, and could tell she was expecting it. The fact that I'd let slip the baby thing in the car wasn't going to hold me back. There were a few minor details to arrange, such as how to get water and food to me, as apparently food as well as water was a good idea. We decided to have Ava drive alongside me and Donna would pass it out her window. I warned the girls not to worry about the pace I would be running, and that I would be careful not to overexert myself. I suggested that Donna get out of the car and run with me sometimes, just to check everything was okay, and so she could reassure Ava. We synchronized watches. After all the hassle of the preparation, the rest of it was relatively easy. I warmed up, something my soccer coach always insists on before any training or games, waited until our watches were on a convenient time, then I started running. I wanted to do a very good time, to excite the girls more and make the blab test more meaningful, so I deliberately nudged above what I thought my optimal speed was. Feeling the first effects of fatigue prompted me to slow fractionally, and after the usual slow-down-to-recover-then-speed-up-again process, I was soon running at my slightly faster new optimal rate, without the cast and with being centered. With the superb degree of muscular control I have, I can hold a specific pace very accurately. Having said that, I would occasionally nudge it up a bit, just to check that I did start to get fatigued, then I'd drop back to my optimal rate. That meant I was running with a small amount of fatigue, but it was very small and not worth worrying about. It was actually useful, because if it reduced then it told me that I wasn't running fast enough. Clearly I could have run faster if I'd been willing to accept the consequent fatigue. After all, every other marathon runner fatigues themselves! I didn't want to do that. My total lack of experience at long-distance running could easily lead me into making an error, and I especially wanted to see if I could do this with negligible fatigue, which meant no wall hitting. According to the website I'd read, the human body doesn't contain enough glycogen to run more than about twenty miles, especially at the speed I'd be going and with my lack of preparation to build up my body's ability to store glycogen (although I think I'd accidentally done one thing right: I'd carb' loaded before the run. "Pizza, food of champions!"). If I did run out of glycogen I'd certainly feel it, as the website said it felt like an elephant jumping onto your back, which didn't sound like the sort of thing you'd fail to notice. If I felt the elephant, that'd mean that running drew energy from my body. After one mile, Ava and Donna told me, "You're going WAY too fast. You won't last the distance. Slow down." I assured them that everything was fine. After two miles my reassurance had worn off, and they urged me to slow down again. I tried, "It's not a serious race. If I get tired I'll stop. Don't worry about it." Ditto with minor variations at the three-mile mark. I amused myself by thinking: 26 miles in about 1 hour 50 minutes means I'm going at something like 14 miles per hour. Each mile takes about (and here's where you can tell I'm good at mathematics) 1/14th of an hour. Call it 4 minutes. If Ava drives alongside me for one minute every mile, urging me to slow down, that's going to be 25% of the total running time. That's an awful lot of conversation. I don't think a real marathon runner would appreciate that. I just chuckled though. Not only did I think that I didn't use glycogen, I didn't seem to use much oxygen either. I could probably sing the whole way, which would have the benefit of forcing Ava and Donna to drive farther away, because I'm a REALLY bad singer. The next time they pulled up to warn me to slow down (every four and a bit minutes, regular as clockwork), I decided to start singing as they got close. Loudly and happily. They got the hint, or maybe it just hurt them too much. I was offered some water around the five-mile mark. Accompanied by some expression of concern at how fast I was going. "I'm perfectly fine, I promise. If you're not careful, I'll start singing. Just before the first turnaround, the girls started getting very excited, screaming at me to "Keep going!" #4: #2: I kept going, pretty much at exactly the same speed I'd been doing when they'd been telling me to slow down. Ava zoomed ahead in the car, parked, and they both got out and impatiently waited for me to reach them. They were jumping up and down. I had time to realize probably what for. I wasn't sure of the facts, but I knew they'd soon confirm it if I was right. Sure enough, as soon as I was close Donna started yelling, "Faster! Go faster!" All I did was yell ahead, "I wish you'd make up your minds." "You'll beat the WORLD RECORD." "That's nice. For what?" I continued my current speed. "10k. Where we're standing is where we think 10k is. You're beating the record. Run faster, come on!" "Why run faster?" "So you can beat it by MORE!" I was very close to them now, so could talk more conversationally, "But I'm running a marathon, not a 10k." Ava said, "You'll never finish a marathon at this pace." Personally I thought I'd finish a marathon at exactly this pace. I was close enough to them now, and obviously not going to speed up, that they just watched, eyes glued to their watches, which was silly as they'd only estimated the distance. As I crossed their estimated not-finish line they both squealed and tried to hug me. I'm inexperienced at running marathons, but I was pretty sure it'd be quite a lot harder with two girls hanging off me, so I dodged around them (thanks to proximity), and kept on running. That was not what they expected, and they stood dumbstruck. I called back, "Catch up and run with me for a while. You can pick up the car on the way back." It wasn't too far to the turnaround and back to the car, so they could both do it at this pace. They sprinted up to then fell in beside me. They wanted to rave about the time. I disappointed them greatly by saying, "It's nice that you're excited, but I'm here to run a marathon." My margin over the 10k world record, by their figuring, was about forty seconds, which was hardly impressive. Well, I had to admit, beating any world record should probably be considered impressive, but not nearly as impressive as shaving fifteen minutes off the marathon record was going to be. I continued, "I asked you to run alongside me to remind you of my request before the race. Don't tell ANYBODY ANYTHING, remember?" "But," pointed out Donna, "you just ran a WORLD RECORD. Don't you want to tell Carol? You MUST want to tell Carol!" "If I want to tell her, then I will. But YOU will not tell anyone." "But..." "There is no 'but' Donna. You promised not to tell anyone, and I'm holding you to it." "I didn't actually say 'I promise'." "That's true, you didn't. I was assuming you were an adult and didn't need to be forced to say 'I promise' like you were a little child. If you insist on being treated as a child, then I can do that too, for years if necessary." One important consequence of which Donna was very aware of. "But why don't you want Carol to know?" "That's not what I said Donna. I might tell her, or maybe I'll tell Mom and Dad and they'll tell Carol. None of that is the issue. What I want is for YOU not to tell anybody. If you can't do that, then Ava can easily drive you home right now, then come back here while I'm still running." "Argh! It's not fair. Why won't you let me tell anyone?" "You know, Donna, there are a lot of things I could say to make this easier for you - to calm you down and make you feel happier - but I'm not going to say a single one of them. You made a commitment to me, and you understand what that commitment requires. If you break that commitment, the consequences will be on your head." Part of Donna's trouble included that she was not disciplined enough to be able to draw clear lines between events. She should be happy at my running success, and treat the restriction as another issue. But that wasn't happening; Donna was unhappy about everything, and heading toward being pissed off, because I was being so unreasonable. Ava asked, "Can I try to cheer Donna up?" I'd been deliberating keeping Ava out of the conversation, because I wanted her to be as free as possible to keep or break my order, but I had no reason to disallow her request. It wasn't going to take us much longer to reach the car, so I said, "Sure, but I'll say something first. Donna, I'm disappointed in you. You accepted the rules before I started running, and all I've done is remind you of what you agreed to, so it's unfair of you to get in a bad mood about it. I thought it would be fun to have you come with us, but I'm starting to regret allowing it now. I'm almost tempted to ask Ava not to cheer you up, because it'd serve you right to stew in your own juices for while. Ava can try though, but wait until you're in the car so you can leave me out of it." I knew I was being mean, especially as I could easily think of several ways of cheering her up, but Donna was going to have to learn to accept my restrictions, whether she understood them or not, otherwise things like NP and blobs would never be shown to her. I'd much rather make an ugly scene out of this than anything really important. We arrived back at the car and the girls got in it and resumed driving behind me. Four minutes don't take long to pass (well, they take pretty close to four minutes, but you know what I mean), and girls talk slowly, so I covered quite a few miles while the girls talked, broken occasionally by Ava sticking her head out of the window to yell, "Do you need anything Mark?" "I'm fine." Close to the second turnaround Ava drove ahead and parked her car facing in the direction of my third leg. She got out and waited for me to reach her, then ran along with me. Ava looked me up and down critically. "You're not far from the halfway point now." "Yeah, I know." "You look the same as when you started. How do you feel?" "The same as when I started. Running like this is not difficult for me." "So I see. You're not even sweating much, are you?" "No. I don't sweat much these days." "I noticed that last night too. I wish I had a thermometer; I'd like to know whether you're losing body heat properly. You should be sweating more. With anyone else, I'd think they were dehydrated and get them to start drinking plenty of water, but I'm worried about doing that with you." "Why?" "Too much water can make you sick." "Water? Really?" "Yes, quite badly. It can even cause death. It's a common problem with marathon runners, although usually slow ones. Dehydration can be a serious problem too, especially with a good runner. I wish I understood your physiology better, because I can't decide whether to give you a lot of water, or just small amounts." #3: She sounded even more like a doctor after another minute, during which she'd asked me about a long list of symptoms for dehydration and over-hydration. It's a comforting feeling to have a girlfriend who's interested in my possible diarrhea. Ava decided I was not dehydrated, and prescribed an energy bar and a limited water intake. How were my feet? Any chaffing? And a few other such questions. Everything was fine. "Your pace is extraordinary. You know that, don't you?" "Yes." "How long can you keep to this pace?" "I expect for 26.2 miles." Ava looked at her watch, then said, "We're almost exactly at the halfway point, which makes it 55 minutes for the half. One hour 50 for the full if you hold the pace. That's MILES under the world record. You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?" "I was pretty sure, yes. I always run very fast when there's a good meal waiting at the end of it. Changing the subject, how's Donna?" "Sulking a little. I don't know her so I didn't do a very good job of cheering her up. Your time for the half will get her attention though." "Don't worry too much about Donna. It'll do her good to have to accept some frustration and she bounces back quickly." We were coming up to the car, so Ava slowed down. I waved to Donna on the way past, but I didn't get a return wave. Halfway down the third leg the car pulled up beside me and Donna passed me a water bottle, accompanied with, "I'm sorry Mark." "What are you sorry for, sweetie?" "Umm. Arguing with you." "Especially for losing the argument, I bet?" Donna smiled, "Yeah. Especially that!" "Why shouldn't you have argued with me?" "Ava told me. Because you'd made a decision and I had to follow it. I didn't have a good reason to get you to change your decision. I was just being a spoiled little girl who wanted to get her way with everything." Which explained why it took Donna so long to get over her sulk. "I bet you didn't like to be told that, did you?" "No. Are you really going to finish in one fifty?" "I'm a little worried about the wall, but if that doesn't affect me, then I should be well under two hours, yes." "That's impossible, you know?" "It'll be interesting to see then, won't it?" "I'll say! I'm glad you let me come. Sorry I was so bad before." "I'm glad you're here too, sweetie. I'd give you a kiss, but it's a bit awkward now." "That's okay. You can give me TWO at the end, {giggle}." Ava decided that was the end of the conversation, and pulled the car back. There were cars passing in either direction from time to time, so she had to be careful. Ava and Donna both accompanied me on either side of the third turnaround. Ava took me through the list of symptoms again, none of which I had, not even the trots, which Donna thought was a humorous pun. Ava warned me, "You could hit the wall at any time. I'm worried that there's just Donna and me to help you, so if you hit it, just let your speed drop way down and let me come check you out, okay?" "Okay. But I feel fine so I don't think I'll hit it." "You'll feel fine right up to the time you hit it. That's why it's called the wall." That made sense. An elephant jumping on my back would be a sudden development. "Got it. I'll just say, 'So far so good' then." Ava drove behind me as usual, except maybe a little farther back in case I suddenly slowed down, but she was easily close enough to see that I was running fine. Donna frequently stuck her head out to call out "How you doing?" But my answer was always the same. Physically I was fine. Mentally, other than my nervousness over hitting the wall, I was mostly bored. If it wasn't for the bouncing up and down, it would've been good to bring a book to read. That'd almost be doable, because I could have one eyeball pointed down at the book, and the other eyeball watching where I was running. I'd expected Ava to park the car at the 27-mile finishing line when I crossed it the penultimate time, so the girls could run with me from there to the turnaround, then back to the finish for the last time, but they stayed in the car behind me when I passed that point. Shortly thereafter she pulled ahead and parked at the 26.2-mile finishing point. When I'd caught up they fell into step with me. Doctor West checked me over, then I said, "I see you stopped at 26.2. I think I'd prefer to run to 27 miles. I don't see any reason why not, and I'd like to be sure that I actually did a marathon, rather than have any doubts." "It's going to add about three minutes to your time." "To borrow Donna's word, that's the difference between impossible, and three minutes faster than impossible. I don't think it matters." The car had been parked 0.6 miles from the turnaround, making it a 1.2-mile round trip back to it, much farther than the distance the girls normally ran with me. They were having to push themselves hard to keep up with me, so even before we reached the turnaround I said, "Wait for me here, and I'll go to the turnaround and back here alone." They readily agreed, and even walked slowly back to the car, to reduce the distance they'd have to run when I got back to them. I completed the turnaround and was soon back with them. As we ran to the car, Ava remarked, "I can't believe you're doing this." "You're just going to have to believe it. I don't want to miss dinner by doing it again for you." Donna proudly declared, "I believe it! Mark's VERY special." I smiled as I joked, "You're not too bad yourself, especially at sucking up!" As we approached the car, Ava looked at her watch, waited for me to reach the point we'd chosen, and then declared, "One hour forty nine, and twenty three seconds." "Wow," said Donna. "Wow indeed," agreed Ava. "See you in three minutes," I waved back at them. They soon overtook me in the car, and were waiting at the second finish line when I crossed it. "One hour fifty two, and forty five seconds." I couldn't reply, as Donna was collecting kisses. Apparently the interest rate for slow payment on kisses is exorbitant. Ava demanded her fair share, which seemed reasonable to me. When the initial euphoria was over, the girls wanted to talk. They had a lot to say, none of which mattered to me. I said, "Let's head home. We can talk in the car, if you must." I got in the car, which was a hint they couldn't ignore. In the car, Ava's first questions were about my health, even having to restrain Donna while she did so. It didn't take long though, as there was nothing to report. Ava commented, "But you're not even tired. That's not natural." I didn't want her thinking to go down that road, so I borrowed from the genetic mutation hypothesis, "It's natural, but in a new way. I'll explain that more later. Don't worry about it now." Mainly because Donna was about to burst with excitement. On the way back to my place they bombarded me with squeals, questions and comments. All predictable and ultimately irrelevant. When they slowed down enough that I had a good chance to complete a full sentence, I said, "None of that really matters. I wanted to try it, and it went how I thought it would. Thank you both very much for your help, I appreciated having you both with me. And now it's over, does anyone know what we're having for dinner?" It wasn't that easy, and I had to reinforce the message a few times. "Running is NOT important to me. It's very 'not important.' In fact, it's rather boring. You both enjoy it, and that's good for you, but it's not for me. Just like I enjoy math and you don't. I'll do the 10k run on Saturday as I promised Donna, and that's the last run I intend to do which involves a measured distance or a stopwatch. By the way, Donna - in case you're wondering - I will NOT be running Saturday's 10k in a world-record time. I'll aim for whatever time I ran the original race in. I need to look that up. Where can I find that out?" Both girls told me my time. "Thanks. I'll need to work out the lap times so I can adjust my speed on Saturday." The girls quickly worked that out for me. #3: #1: "By the way, Ava, did you know I was going to the running club on Saturday? To repeat my 10k run, as you just heard." "Yeah, Donna told me all about it while we were driving." Ava eventually raised the issue I hoped she would, "You're not going to let me tell my parents, are you?" I was very glad she asked, because it proved she was thinking about things. Always a good trait in a girl you could well end up giving really big secrets too. Importantly, it almost certainly meant she wouldn't tell her parents about it, which would be a very impressive way of passing my trustworthiness test. "No, I'm not. I had already made that decision before I ordered you not to tell anyone." "You know that tonight is super-important to me, and that my parents have to be impressed by you?" "Yes, I know." "You're being the world's fastest marathoner by fifteen minutes is VERY impressive! I can't believe how stupid that statement is! It's FAR more than impressive, it's mind-blowing. Whatever it is, I'd LOVE to be allowed to tell my parents about it." "I'm sure you would, but the answer is still 'No.' Don't worry too much about impressing your parents, because you'll have help with that. Julia enjoys nothing more than convincing people that I'm impressive." "Haha. That's true. All right, if that's how you want it." Donna opened her mouth, but that's as far as I let her get. I said, "Donna, are you about to do what I think, AGAIN?" Donna decided that she wasn't. I could have made the point that my being a fast long-distance runner was hardly a relevant qualification for supporting and helping the West's daughter. Maybe 100,000 years ago, for Mr. and Mrs. Ug's daughter, when hunting was an essential male skill. But being able to run down antelope wasn't high on the list of desirable boyfriend traits these days. I didn't mention this, because I wanted Ava to remain tempted otherwise it wasn't a test. For that reason, I didn't say anything else either. #1: #3: #2: #1: #3: #2: #1: #3: #1: #3: #1: #2: [["From the Universe" is correct.]] After a couple of minutes' silence, Donna said, "I'm bursting, but you won't let me tell ANYONE! That's NOT right. It's too amazing not to talk about it. The people at the club would freak out if they knew." I said nothing. "Well?" asked Donna. "Well what?" "What about what I said?" "What about it?" I asked, somewhat less than helpfully. "Argh. Do you agree with what I said?" "Yes, it's true, they would freak out if they knew." "So?" "So what?" "Argh! So will you change your mind and let me tell them?" "Why?" I was probably enjoying myself too much, but it was too hard to resist. "BECAUSE of what I just said!" "You didn't say anything I didn't already know." "Huh?" "When I asked you not to tell anyone, I already knew your club members would freak out. I don't care about their freaking out so I still don't want you to tell them. I don't want you to tell anyone. I thought I'd made that perfectly clear already?" "But WHY?" "You already know that I'm not going to tell you that. We had this discussion when I passed 10k and I don't want to have it all over again." "You're being MEAN!" "It certainly looks that way." Mainly because it was that way, but I didn't want to reinforce her belief by confirming it. "This conversation is over." An unhappy, unaccepting Donna continued to try to get me to change my mind, but she didn't have a leg to stand on. Plus I completely ignored her, so she had to give up. That didn't make her any happier. We arrived back at my home. As I and a sullen Donna were getting out of the car, Ava said "I have to go home immediately to get ready for the dinner. I'll come with my parents. See you soon and congratulations, although 'congratulations' seems like a silly thing to say after something so incredible." "It's fine, Ava. See you soon." "I won't tell them, or anyone." "Good. Thanks." I believed her too. Ava pulled away and I followed the stomping Donna into the house. I arrived inside as Mom was in the process of asking Donna, "How did it go?" Donna answered, "Mark ran a marathon faster than the WORLD RECORD." Then she turned around and glared at me, with "SO THERE!" written all over her face. Mom had seen me enter the room, so asked me, "Really? Faster than the WORLD record?" I decided to make Donna stew, rather than rip into her. So I said, "Yeah. I knew I would. I even did it within a few seconds of the time I expected, so it didn't tell me anything much. It's no big deal because I have no interest in running. I'm going to go have a shower." #1: Mom chuckled, "You're a weird boy, Mark, but I guess you already know that. Carol's in your room and your clothes for this evening are already laid out. Your dad's in the shower but he won't be long. I'm looking forward to this dinner; it's going to be very interesting." I wandered out of the room, pretending not to notice Donna's defiance was now struggling with her confusion over Mom's lack of reaction to my accomplishment, and my lack of reaction to her [Donna's] naughtiness. At this stage I didn't particularly care if Donna got on the phone and told the news to everyone she knew who owned a pair of running shoes. If anyone approached me about it, I was simply going to laugh and say Donna hadn't noticed we'd dropped one of the 6.4-mile legs because I wanted to get back in time for dinner. That would extrapolate to give me a time more like ten or fifteen minutes OVER the record. Still a very good time and entirely believable for someone who was good enough to win a 10k. I knew whose story - Donna's or mine - would be believed. Plus there was the fact that our distance measuring process could easily have been wrong by several hundred feet. Donna would just get laughed at, and the story would disappear. In our bedroom, I closed the door and told Carol what had happened, including Donna's untrustworthiness. "Oh no. The silly girl," was Carol's sad opinion. We discussed related stuff for a little while, Carol warning, "If you have a big argument about this with Donna, she might get revenge by telling people about you and me." That would be very, very bad - Mom and Dad go to prison and split the family up level of bad. Donna had been told this, but a reminder wouldn't be a bad idea. Especially a reminder from Mom, who other than being the mom, was also not the enemy like I was at the moment. I said, "Good point. I'll mention it to Mom. Otherwise I'm going to ignore the issue. If it never comes up again, I'll be quite happy. I just won't trust Donna with any more secrets for a long time. But if it does come up, yeah, she could get very angry. I'll be careful about that. I've lost interest in doing any sex stuff with her too. Oh!, the Ducklings tomorrow. That's not going to work well if Donna and I are in bad moods with each other. I know I could cheer her up before then, but I don't want to. I think she should suffer for as long as possible." "Cancel it then. You don't even know any of the Ducklings and it's far more important for Donna to learn the lesson." I agreed with all of that, but I'd been REALLY looking forward to playing with the Ducklings. Carol must have seen my face, as she added, "For a change, it'd be nice to have a lunch with just the four of us. If you like, we'll all take our panties off for you, haha." That did sound very nice, except for one sour note: I didn't want to have lunch with Donna, and I especially didn't want to get into any pantiless games with her. It took me a second or so, then I said, "Oh. 'The four of us' is with Ava, not Donna?" "Yes. Sorry, that's what I meant. It's getting hard to keep track, isn't it?" I heard Dad yell, "The shower's free," so I went to have mine. #1: #2: #3: #1: #3: #1: #2: Mom came to my bedroom right after I came out of the shower. "What's wrong with Donna?" I told her, including that I needed to know whether she was trustworthy if I was going to be doing any sex stuff with her, and because of other things like "NP". I gave Mom a brief reminder what NP was. I added, "There's a new thing I'm going to show you and Dad soon too. That's part of what I called you up about yesterday, to ask if you were free tonight. This thing with Ava has bumped that, but we'll get back to it soon." "Oh. I assumed Ava and her parents were the purpose. There's another thing like whatever-you-called-it?" "'NP'. Yes, something similar, but it can wait for now. I made a very big deal to Donna about her not telling ANYBODY about my running today, which I repeatedly told her included not you and Dad. She totally understood that she was breaking her commitment, and she did it spitefully. It's not so much that she thought you and Dad had a right to know, because I'd told her that I could easily tell you myself, and she understood that I might tell others too. She never argued that you should know; she only argued that she wanted to be the one to tell people. You just happened to be the first person she saw, so she told you to spite me. She's been acting childishly for at least half the time since my run started, because we had a repeat of the whole argument after I broke the 10k world record. She simply refused to accept that she had to abide by her commitment. Ava spent the best part of an hour trying to make her see that. She's just too childish yet." Mom said, "I certainly don't disagree that she is too young for many of the things you're doing. Chronologically you and Carol are too young too, although you're both much more mature than Donna. But your test was not easy for Donna, especially your letting her know that you might tell others but not giving her any reason why she couldn't." "If I showed her NP, do you think she'd understand the reasons why that had to be kept secret?" "No, she wouldn't have a clue. I'm sure I can't imagine all the reasons either, but I can imagine enough of them." "One thing that worries me is that if Donna and I get into an argument - which is quite likely, because I'm going to pull back from some of the things I've been doing with her - then she could try to get revenge on me by blabbing about Carol and me." I could see by the look on Mom's face that I didn't need to explain the consequences of that any further. I added, "Possibly during dinner tonight, because we're going to be talking all around that issue." Mom said, "I'll go have a talk with Donna. In fact, your father and Donna together. I assume you don't mind your father knowing all this?" "The only secrets between you and Dad should be what I've bought each of you for Christmas. Umm, it might be best not to let Donna know that she was being tested. She might be offended by that. Julia's standard line is that I'm such a genius no one can understand my reasons. 'My reasons are my own' sort of thing." "I know what to say." Mom left and I started getting dressed in the underwear and other clothes laid out for me. Fortunately in clothes a lot less flamingly homosexual than normal. We wouldn't want the Wests to get that impression of me. Which reminded me to compliment Carol on her outfit. She was looking very nice and proper, but I have to confess to being somewhat biased on the "nice" part of that. Rather than leave our room and possibly intrude on Donna's lecture, Carol and I passed the time in our room. "Don't mess my hair," she requested. "I don't see how I could since you shave where my hand is going." "{Giggle}." My cellphone rang, and I spent some time bringing Julia up to date. I was thanking Julia for suggesting we didn't do it on a single 26-mile stretch of road because the turnarounds had turned out to be very useful, when a contrite Donna knocked and entered the room. I concluded the call and turned to Donna. Donna said, "I am VERY sorry, Mark. I didn't mean to break my commitment to you." Which was obviously Mom's wording, probably used because Donna had foolishly tried the "I never said I promise" loophole on Mom. I wasn't going to let her off lightly, so I said, "Yes you did. You did it very deliberately." "Umm." Donna twisted in the wind, trying to think of any response. Eventually, "I'm VERY sorry." "Good. I'm glad to hear it. I'm sorry too." "What for?" "I'm sorry to feel so disappointed in you. I wish I didn't, but unfortunately I do." "Oh. Umm, what's going to happen now?" "Nothing much. Just the usual I guess. Did you have anything specific in mind?" "Umm, what about lunch tomorrow. You're still going to do that, aren't you?" "No, of course not. It's going to take me a lot longer than tomorrow to get over the consequences of your decision." "But I said I was sorry." "Sorry doesn't undo the consequences, Donna." I could see she didn't understand that, so I spelt it out, "I'll explain what that means. If you told ANYONE about Carol and me, then Mom and Dad would go to jail. Not even the same jail, Donna, because men and women are kept separate." I assumed that applied to married convicts. "They wouldn't see each other or any of their friends for YEARS! All because you blabbed. Do you think that if you said 'sorry' afterward, the bosses of the prisons are going to say, 'Little Donna Anderson says she's sorry she blabbed, so we'll let her criminal parents out of jail so they can all go back to being a happy family together'? NO WAY Donna! -- "If you blab, our family would NEVER be allowed to get back together again. All five of us would be split up. It wouldn't matter how many times you said sorry. You could say it over and over again for YEARS, and nothing would change. Saying sorry does not make 'everything all better.' You deliberately broke your commitment to me, and your saying sorry now doesn't change that fact. I am glad you're sorry, but I told you at the beginning that if you broke your word then there would be consequences. One of them is that I don't want to have lunch with you and your Ducklings tomorrow, no matter how many times you say you're sorry." "But I didn't know..." "That's crap, Donna. You knew what your commitment was and I clearly told you there'd be consequences if you broke it. You didn't once ask me what the consequences would be. You just wanted to do what you wanted to do, and you didn't care about what I wanted. You have no excuse at all, this is 100% your doing and your fault." #1: "But I didn't understand..." "You understood that I insisted you not tell anyone, and you understood that telling Mom was deliberately breaking your word to me. You did it out of deliberate spite." Donna was on the verge of tears, so I hurriedly added, "You need to have a talk with Mom about how you regain someone's trust after you've lost it." Donna left the room in tears. #2: Carol said, "You were hard on her." "Yeah, I know. The Williamses have been frightening me recently. I listened to Vanessa and Julia both scare the crap out of Ava about what could happen to me, which scared the crap out of me too. Donna's not thinking properly worries me a great deal. She was in the process of accidentally telling Ava that you were my wife just before the run started. I cut her off, but she was going to do it." "Oh. That was bad of her." "You're telling me! I kind of don't mind that so much, because I make accidental slips of the tongue too, like I did calling you 'future mother of my children.' It was said inside the car and it was a secret only from Donna, because we didn't want her to get weird over the idea of having babies with me, so I wasn't on my guard. I have some sympathy for Donna's letting something slip by accident, but deliberately telling a secret out of childish spite is a whole different thing. At the moment the only real secret she knows is about you and me, and we can put a great deal of family pressure on her to keep that quiet, but what about NP and blobs? Those are just about me, so if she got pissed off with me, she could blab about those to someone just to get even at me. I know I didn't fully understand the importance of keeping those two secrets, so I'm sure Donna won't understand their importance hardly at all. I was hard on her because I want her to grow up as fast as possible. You and I have got nearly a year and half before we move out of Corvallis, and a lot could go wrong in that time if Donna doesn't wise up. -- "Changing the subject somewhat, Ava seemed to totally accept my order to not talk about my run. She wants to tell her parents, but I don't think she will. I was impressed by her obedience. That reminds me, I should ask Mom and Dad not to tell anyone about my run either, because that could confuse my test. I'll go do that now." "It's just about time for us to leave, so I'll come with you." Mom was comforting a blubbering Donna, with Dad standing nearby. It was a good idea for Donna to hear how adults did this, so I said, "Mom, Dad; just like I asked Ava and Donna, I'd like you not to tell anyone about my run please, not even the Williamses. I'll tell them in my own way in my own time. Okay?" It was hardly likely they'd refuse, given all the drama with Donna, and they both said, "Sure." #2: #3: I added, "That goes for you too, Donna. Just because you blabbed once doesn't mean you can go around blabbing to even more people." Donna's crying doubled in volume. Mom rolled her eyes at me, 'thanking' me for my help with settling Donna down. I said, "I guess Carol and I can go in my car now. We'll probably stay the night with Julia there so I'll need the car, and I'd like to be there when the Wests arrive." Mom agreed that I should go now. On the way, Carol said, "It's amazing that you can run a marathon under the world record." "Yes it is." I wasn't sure what else to say, but Carol was happy to leave that aspect of the topic there. "Ava must've been very excited?" Ava being the topic now. "Yes she was, but not as much as you probably imagine. I'm sure she understood that what I did was impossible. Especially when she saw that I wasn't tired at the end. I should've been exhausted, not fresh. She commented that 'it wasn't natural.' I think I'll have to tell her the genetic mutation hypothesis. Ava doesn't need it the way the parents do - to justify you and me being together - but she's probably going to see more of my secrets in the future, so it should help her not freak out about them." [Prof and Vanessa are parenting me so much, are considered my parents-in-law, and I'm in their home so often, that I'm starting to use the term "the parents" as shorthand for Mom, Dad, Prof and Vanessa.] "You know what the real explanation is, don't you?" "My love, I will NEVER tell a single word of that to ANYBODY, EVER! It would be very, very bad. Indescribably bad." Carol said, "It seems wonderful, from everything I've seen?" "Thank you for that, but it's impossible for me to explain why it's so bad. I understand that it looks like a good thing, and I agree it'd be wonderful if everyone was like me, but it's not as it appears. I will take the secret to my grave, and no one will ever get a single word about it out of me." #4: #2: #3: #2: At the Williams' place, Julia quickly roped Carol into helping in the kitchen, and I was told, "Dad's hiding in his study. You might enjoy a conversation with him." I had no idea why, but I was happy to help him hide from all the kitchen work. I started moving away, until Julia added, "AFTER you give me a kiss." "Oh, okay. But I'm hoping to make a good first impression, so don't mess up my hair." I got a little laugh and a big kiss. After which Julia looked at me critically, and said, "Have you brushed your hair at all?" "Umm. Sort of. I was waiting until all the kissing had finished." "Go and talk with Dad, THEN brush your hair." "Yes, dear." I left the room while Julia was telling Vanessa, "I even have to pick out the clothes he wears. Guys are hopeless, aren't they?" I thought it best to keep walking, especially because I hoped I knew what Prof wanted to talk with me about. In his study, Prof said, "Julia told me you had to hang up on her before she could pass on the good news. Vanessa and I talked to some of our research subjects today and got very consistent and usable responses from them. We'll call some more subjects tomorrow, but today's results lead us to believe that there might be a quick and easy solution. If tomorrow confirms it, we'll start on the solution almost immediately, and we might be down there, doing it for real, in just a few days." I'd jumped the gun several times before, so I was a bit hesitant about getting enthusiastic immediately. I checked, "Really? Not just finishing the research early, but actually doing the real thing? We might have the millions in a few days?" "Yes, YOU might." "I don't care which one of us has them, just so long as one of us does. A few days! Wow! When? How?" "It's too early to say yet, particularly about the when. We'll need to talk with one of the big bosses at the target casino, and he might be on vacation when we call, for example. We'll just have to wait and see." "What about how?" "Let's wait a day on that. I'd like to get a few more confirmations, and decide on our approach, before we discuss it. I just wanted to let you know that it looks good so far. It'll give you some confidence in your conversation with Ava's parents." Being a few days away from being a multi-millionaire did feel good, but "a few days away" is an awfully big gap. Prof said, "On Vanessa's desk, over there, is the list of BCC electives with Vanessa's comments. Take it away and review the choices. Pick which ones you want to do, and one or two extras because there might be some trouble at OSU's end on some of them. They're not all offered every year. If you could let me know in a few days, that'd be good." "I'd better work on them soon then, because I'm sure as hell going to be distracted when your research is finished." "Yes, Vanessa and Julia are getting excited too." Julia I could understand, but "Vanessa?" "Oh yes. You may think females get carried away when they're buying clothes, but you've not seen anything until you've seen them decorating a new house, especially if they've got access to a great deal of money. It's going to be a nightmare." #2: #4: #3: I wandered off, to take the BCC stuff upstairs. I couldn't resist diverting to the kitchen, to bask in the good news with Julia. On the way I thought of something else I couldn't resist doing. I also passed Donna, Dad and The Boys in the hallway. Presumably on their way to the Guys' Room or to see Prof. Donna tried to smile at me, but had a lot of trouble carrying it off. In the kitchen, now additionally occupied by Mom, I said to Julia, "'In a few days.' That's fantastic!" Mom and Carol hadn't heard the news yet, so we brought them up to date, careful not to use any words like "casino" or "roulette". There had been too many slips of the tongue recently. There was considerable enthusiasm from everyone, including Vanessa and Mom, right up to the time I started the tease I'd thought of, "It'll be so wonderful to have so much money. I've seen those professional decorators on TV and I've always thought it'd be great to be able to afford one. I never thought I'd be able to afford it in MY own home though, but I will. You ladies will be able to stand back and let the decorators do everything. Won't that be great?" -- By the time I got to my question, the silence was answer enough. In fact, the silence and the looks on their faces were so painful I couldn't bear to draw it out any longer - they were suffering! "Haha. Relax. I'm teasing you. I wouldn't be so cruel! Imagine depriving you of that much pleasure." -- They relaxed, but there was still some residual doubt so I added, "We'll decide on a budget, and you can go to town with it. I'll run away and hide, and wait until it's all over. How does that sound?" That sounded just fine. This time Julia deliberately messed my hair, then sent me upstairs to brush it. In the kitchen doorway I had a quick, internal debate and decided on what I thought was a painfully low number, but believable, and I said, "A budget of $10,000 will be enough, won't it?" The females laughed. Vanessa said, "Were you hoping to have any dinner tonight? Haha." #2: I went upstairs, dropping the BCC notes in my study. I realized that Prof hadn't asked about my studying this coming morning. If I'd been him, I wouldn't have been able to resist reminding me. Then I wisely went to brush my hair. ------- Chapter 136: Mr. and Mrs. West; the Easy Half Wednesday, April 27, 2005 (Continued) It was well after my normal dinnertime and I was hungry, plus there were some excellent smells to encourage my hunger, so I was getting underfoot searching around in the kitchen for any surplus pieces of food when the Wests arrived. I suddenly realized that no one had told me the plan for tonight! I didn't even know if there was a plan for tonight. Tonight was IMPORTANT, and I was very uncomfortable with not knowing anything about anything. I should've realized this earlier, but I'd been VERY hungry. I blurted, "Help! How are we handling this tonight? What should I do?" Vanessa said, "Just be yourself. Relax, it'll be fine." Even though I could probably carry out the "be yourself" part of that plan reasonably well, I couldn't relax. Being unrelaxed was myself when something important was happening and I didn't know what to do - that's precisely why I'd asked for help. Sometimes I wished females knew logic, as it'd considerably improve their ability to give useful advice. I went to meet the Wests at the front door, with - Vanessa decreed - just Vanessa and Mom with me. Ava ran forward and latched onto me. When her parents caught up, Ava said, "Mom and Dad, this is my... ," Ava turned to me to ask, "Boyfriend?" I said, "Sounds good to me." I couldn't think of an alternative, especially not one we could tell her parents before they'd so much as stepped inside the house. " ... my boyfriend, Mark Anderson. Mark these are my parents, Katie and Carson West." We did the "Nice to meet you" stuff while they scrutinized me very closely. I was glad I'd brushed my hair. Then I introduced my mom, as "my mom", and Vanessa as "a friend of the family". After which, Katie (Ava's mom) said, "Ava's been very mysterious about tonight. She wouldn't even explain why we're having dinner in the Williams' house rather than the Anderson's?" In other words, "Who are you?" to Vanessa. Vanessa said, "Come in, I'll introduce you to everyone else and we'll sit down to dinner. Mark's hungry. I realize you don't appreciate the urgency of that yet, but you will." Ava giggled. "We'll have dinner almost immediately, so we can spend the rest of the evening talking freely. All will be explained in due course." I hoped not "all", but the bit about sitting down to dinner sounded good. The Wests were ushered in and directed through to the dining room. While the usual, "You've got a very nice home, Vanessa," etc., were going on, I volunteered to go get the others. I found nearly everyone in the living room, which was next to the dining room. When I got them to move into the dining room I saw that my wives had already joined the other women. Because I was trying to be seen as mature and responsible, I introduced the Wests to the new arrivals: Dad, Prof, Andrew, Robert, and - last and currently least - Donna. I checked, very maturely I thought, "And were you introduced to my sister Carol and Julia Williams, Mr. and Mrs. West?" "Yes, thank you." #3: Mom made the comment, "Please excuse Donna's look. She recently misbehaved and is still recovering from the telling off she got. She's normally a very good girl." Donna hung her head while the Wests indicated that they accepted that such things happen. Vanessa directed us all to be seated: herself at one end, Prof at the other, "Mark, you're over there, with Ava beside you. Julia and Carol, you're on Mark's other side." Ava's and my parents were placed opposite us, with The Boys and Donna filling in the gaps. As people were starting to get settled, Vanessa said, "Ava and Carol, would you help me bring the food in please?" #2: #3: As the designated individuals were heading to the kitchen, Katie West asked, "I'm still puzzled about why we're having dinner here?" Julia said, "I'm one of Ava's girlfriends, Mrs. West. My family is very close to Mark's family, and I suggested having it here." "Oh, is that all. I'm surprised Ava was so secretive about it then." "Because that's only a partial explanation, Mrs. West. It was difficult for Ava to tell you anything without telling you everything, and we thought it was better to do that face to face with all of us. My mother will satisfy your curiosity shortly. Mom's very good at explaining things. She lectures in ethics at OSU, and a lot of that material is conceptually very difficult to convey." #4: Prof said, "As you probably guessed from my nickname, I'm also at OSU. I'm a professor of Mathematics there. Not as relevant to day-to-day life as Vanessa's subject, but I enjoy it. So does Mark, by the way. He's one year away from finishing his Bachelor in Mathematics." Carson (or, as I think of him, Mr. West), said, "Ahh. We wondered how old Mark was. Ava wouldn't even tell us that. It's unlike her to be so secretive." Prof said, "Rather than getting into the subject of Mark's age and related topics, can I suggest we put all that on hold temporarily. Ava is very happy now, so please just accept that everything is fine for the moment. Vanessa is a good cook and it'd be a pity to miss the pleasure of this meal because we were concentrating on serious issues. With your approval, can we pass the time by your spending a few minutes talking about yourselves. Ava has told us that you are both accountants, but that's as much as I know. Where do you work?" Very much aware that they were being diverted, the Wests nonetheless cooperated by talking about their jobs. They both worked as in-house cost accountants, for different firms, but met when they'd worked for the same firm many years ago... During that discussion, the food started arriving; large dishes of it for the center of the table. Sadly, it wasn't roast chicken; merely some sort of meaty pasta dish, with a variety of different vegetable side-dishes. It still smelled fantastic and looked delicious. My mouth started salivating. Carol brought in the dinner plates which had been warming in the oven. The size of the plate that she put in front of me caused a couple of eyebrows to rise; one on each West parent. They were sitting opposite me, so could hardly fail to notice. #3: #4: After the last dish was placed, the girls were seating themselves, and my hands were itching to leap into plate-loading mode, Vanessa said to the Wests, "We do not say grace, but we will wait for you, if you wish to." I hoped they didn't, because I didn't want to wait any longer. "That's all right," said Mrs. West, my new favorite of the two of them. Dishing up began. Ava's chair had moved to be very friendly to my chair, so she was ideally placed to help me load up my plate, with me helping by telling her "more" from time-to-time. "Really?" she asked the first time, having already put what she considered - but I did not - a lot of that dish on my plate. "Yes please. I'm VERY hungry." "{Giggle}." I wasn't sitting idle, of course. I couldn't possibly resist helping her help me, by loading the contents of other dishes onto my plate. And onto hers too, because her parents were looking on. Julia, sitting a decent distance to my other side, was not showing me any special attention. Nor was there anything significant going on between Julia and Carol. When we was about to start eating, Mrs. West observed, "That's a great deal of food, Mark. Are you going to eat all that?" #3: I said, "I have a metabolism that requires me to eat a lot. Here and at my home I have an extra-large plate to help with that. Plus I'm especially hungry now because I missed my usual after-school snack and it's well after my normal dinnertime." "Aren't you in danger of putting on a lot of weight?" I was wearing non-revealing clothes so my shape, especially my freakishly narrow waist, was well hidden. I obviously wasn't fat, but how slim I was couldn't be seen. Ava leaped to my defense, "Mark exercises a lot, Mom. He is very, very fit. He went..." Ava turned to me, and asked, "Can I say you went for a run?" "Sure. Generalities are fine." Ava resumed, "He went for a long run after school, Mom. That's why he missed his snack and is so hungry now." Ava was slightly wrong: I wasn't hungry now because of the run, and I don't exercise hardly at all. Well, I probably do if you count all the sex, but I don't think of that as "exercise". Neither of those errors were worth correcting her about in front of her parents, especially not the full extent of the second error. Both her parents' faces fell, and her mother said with considerable disappointment, "Oh, he's a runner." Her very disappointed, and almost scathing comment reminded me of Ava's saying her parents hadn't wanted her to look for "a good man" at her running club. This needed fixing! I immediately insisted, "I am NOT a runner, Mr. and Mrs. West. I went for a run today because I've been doing a great deal of study lately, and I needed to get some exercise. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been for a run in the last couple of years." I nearly said, " ... other than being required to, for PE at school," but thought I'd leave school out of it for now. -- I continued, "My sister Donna is an enthusiastic runner and belongs to the same club as Ava. I've gone for a pre-breakfast run with her twice in my life. I ran in a 10k race a couple of weeks ago mostly as a favor to Donna, and I went on a run today. Otherwise the only running I do is for soccer. That's my ENTIRE running history. To be completely honest, I'll also be going to Donna's athletic club this coming Saturday, and doing a little run there, but that's a one-time thing and I won't be going back." -- It wouldn't do any harm to insult running, so I added, "I think running around in circles is silly and boring. Plus I would far rather spend the time studying." #4: < ... or having sex.> #3: They still appeared doubtful. So I added, "Ava told us that you didn't want her to look for her next boyfriend at her running club, and I want to assure you that she didn't. I've never been to any running club, and other than this coming Saturday, I have no intention of ever doing so. I am not a runner. My future is in my head, not my legs." While the Wests thought about that, Donna said, "Are you still going to my club on Saturday?" "I made a commitment to them to do so, sweetie." Giving her something to think about. I made my belly rumble loudly. They got the hint, and we were able to start eating. They appeared to no longer be unhappy about my being a runner, just unhappy about everything in general. A couple of bites into the meal, Mr. West asked me, "Ava told you that we'd asked her not to get another boyfriend from the Athletic Club?" You may not be surprised to know that I was temporarily unable to answer due to my mouth being full, but Vanessa fielded it, "I believe Ava has told us everything, including your preference for her looking elsewhere than that club because of her sexual history with men from there. She's also told us of the systematic way you got her to search for 'a good man', your cancers, your prognoses, and your concern that her inheritance not be tricked away from her. I believe that covers the main points?" "It seems Ava has told you a great deal more than she should have." "Yes. She's a credit to you. You can be very proud of her." #2: "What do you mean?" "Ava correctly identified that Mark will be the most important man in her life for the next several years. She decided that such an important relationship had to be started with total honesty, so she opened her life to him. To us all, because most of us were with her at the time. Many girls would've been economical with the truth to maximize their chances of starting a relationship with Mark, but not Ava. We are all very impressed by her. Her honesty and wisdom are two reasons why both the Williams and Anderson families are so willing to support and help Ava over the next few years." Vanessa did not allow any of the follow-up questions, saying, "Please, after the meal. We can spend several hours answering your questions then." The rest of the meal was full of small talk. Not only involving the Wests, as Vanessa discussed some small family stuff with The Boys, for example. It was normality, even if forced. I was amused to note the Wests expressions when I started helping myself to seconds. Vanessa noted them too, and commented, "Katie, I predict that you'll be buying a large plate shortly too." Ava laughed, "Yeah, we'll need one of those. Mark eats a LOT!" Mrs. West primly replied, "We haven't yet decided whether we will allow this relationship." Vanessa visibly thought better of whatever her reply would have been, but Ava didn't, beseeching, "Mom, you HAVE TO! Mark is..." Vanessa said, "Ava, it's okay. There are several hours of more talk with come and no one has made a decision yet. I think Mark wants you to pass him that dish," correctly pointing to a dish I had my eyes on. The rest of the meal was more "normality". Dessert was also delicious, and I enjoyed one and half Mark-sized bowls of it. When my bowl was first produced, Vanessa said, "It serves a dual role, for Mark's dessert and for his cereal in the morning. Just so you know." #2: #4: #2: Both Wests noted the comment, but decided to leave it alone. Perhaps wisely, as Vanessa was obviously prepared. That sort of describes the tone of the dinner. It wasn't a laughter-filled meal, but no one caused trouble either. The Wests were civil, stiff, and too quick to disapprove if given half an excuse. Everyone was civil back to them. There was a great deal of mutual sounding out of each other going on. Questions about what The Boys were doing at OSU, what grades Julia, Carol and Donna were in. Stuff like that, with the questions about me being deflected. When dessert was finished, Vanessa got us to move to the living room for coffees and conversation. Robert said, "Andrew and I will clear the table and take care of the dishes, Mom." Vanessa answered, "Thanks. Just do the bare minimum please because I'd like you to come back and sit in on our discussion." It was obvious to the Wests that The Boys were not involved in any of this, so Katie said, "There's no need. I'm sure they've got better things to do." Vanessa answered, "No one in either family has anything more important to do than demonstrate their commitment to Ava." Vanessa is really good at firing zingers at people, and that one rocked the Wests back a bit, but they didn't comment. We made our way to the living room. Vanessa got me to sit on a sofa, and without prompting, Ava planted herself on my lap. Again her parents chose not to make an issue out of it. Vanessa put Julia next to me, and Carol next to her. There was a little furniture rearranging to get everyone able to look at everyone else, but it was soon achieved. Both my parents and Julia's had to double-up on single-seaters, but they had wide armrests so it wasn't a problem. Donna was on the floor, rather than sit next to the Wests on their sofa, and The Boys also sat on the floor after they finished the tidying up. Vanessa led off, "I know you already have several questions, but it will be more efficient if I give you more information first, and then you can ask whatever questions you wish." The Wests consented to that. "Before we start, I will repeat that Ava has told us of your cancers and prognoses. You have our sympathies, BUT," Vanessa forestalled the imminent comments, "tonight is not the time for a sympathetic discussion about your illnesses. We do not know each other well enough to do that justice, and more importantly, tonight's discussion is about Ava and Mark. Do you agree?" "Yes. That is why we came." "And why you were invited. Good. From what Ava has said, you have been very direct with her about your illnesses and what the consequences are likely to be. Because your prognoses are central to Ava's circumstances over the next few years, would you object if I am similarly direct?" "That would be best." "Thank you. If at any time during the conversation you need to stop in order to collect yourself, don't hesitate to ask. We respect that this may be very uncomfortable for you." "Thank you." Vanessa gave a little nod to acknowledge their thanks, then carried on, "Last night everyone in our two families promised Ava that we'll do our best to help and support her over the next few years. To be, when required, her surrogate families. Andrew and Robert told her that they wished to be treated as her brothers, and Ava has responded by teasing them mercilessly already." That lightened the mood a little, and Ava helped further by adding, "Julia says I've got seventeen years of brother teasing to catch up on, and I should grab every chance I get. So far it's been a lot of fun." Vanessa said, "Andrew's reasonably good with cars and has offered to help Ava if she has car troubles. Robert is apparently only good for opening jars, but he's offered to do that for her, if she needs it. Without belittling the male contribution at all, Ava will especially need female support when the times come. That will primarily come from Julia and Carol, but Felicity and I will be involved too. We'll be supporting Ava almost as if she was part of our families." "But why? We don't know you people." "I'll come to the why shortly. Let me give you the rest of the facts first. You're right about not knowing us. Even Ava doesn't know us, as she met most of us for the first time only last night. This has come about because of Mark and Julia. Primarily Mark. Mark and Julia are supporting Ava, and everyone else is supporting Mark and Julia in their doing so." I had my arms around Ava's waist, and Julia had now taken one of Ava's hands, and was holding it in Ava's lap. None of which had been commented on by Ava's parents. -- "In the future, when you are no longer able to do so, we'll provide Ava with thanksgiving dinners, career guidance, teach her what she needs to know to maintain a property such as dealing with repairmen such as plumbers and electricians, and all the usual family stuff. Probably with the occasional admonishment, as young women have been known to go astray from time to time. All of these things are in no way taking away from your rights or obligations, as I am only talking about when you are no longer able to parent her yourselves. Until that time, Ava is all yours. At most we'll provide shoulders for her to cry on, if they're needed. Other than 'Why', which I'll come to later, do you have any questions about our role?" Mrs. West checked, "You ALL want to be Ava's parents and family after we're gone?" "From when you're too sick to parent her, yes. There's no legal contract in this; no adoption or anything like that. Ava will be an adult and not bound to us in any way, so she can come and go as she pleases. Which reminds me of one significant difference between our roles and that of a normal parent. Normally parents will try to stay in contact with their adult children. They will usually try to enforce such contact. It's a subtle point, but we won't be like that. We want Ava to become independent as soon as she is able, and to make her own way in the world, so we won't encourage her to cling to us. We won't drive her away, but we won't pressure her to remain in contact either. Our role is to help rather than to hold. Ava is almost an adult, she will inherit sufficient wealth to support herself..." Mr. West started reacting, but Vanessa said, "I want to talk about money later, but I'd like to give you the big picture before we get into details, if that's okay?" Mr. West nodded so Vanessa continued, "She'll be able to support herself financially. After a few years, her relationship with us should be much more one of a friend than as a daughter. Although she'll have our permission to continue teasing Andrew and Robert until she's caught up on her seventeen years' worth. -- "Now let me turn to Mark. Mark is central to what has happened and why, and you need to understand some things about him in order to understand what Ava has fallen into, other than Mark's lap right now. I understand from what Ava said about your systematic approach to her finding a good man, that you consider intelligence to be of prime importance, correct?" "We told her to start looking among intelligent boys, yes. If all else is equal, an intelligent husband is better than an unintelligent one." "My point is that you didn't tell her, 'If all else is equal, a tall husband is better than a short one', or any other criterion. You made high intelligence the starting point." "Yes." "I married a guy called 'Prof', so I agree with you. I know IQ score is a simplistic way to judge someone's academic potential, let alone their ability to make good life decisions, but in purely IQ terms, could I venture a guess that you would be happy if Ava's boyfriend had an IQ above 120 or so. Maybe even above 130. You are familiar with IQ scores, aren't you?" #3: #2: Mr. West answered, "Yes, we are." After some quick conferring, more by looks than words, he added, "We'd be happy if Ava's final boyfriend - her husband - had an IQ something like that. There are a multitude of other factors that are important to being a good husband..." "Yes. I don't want my interruption to seem rude, but we are only talking about IQ at the moment. 'All else being equal', if you wish. I just wanted you to confirm that you considered IQ very important, and get a feeling for what values you considered acceptable. Have you noticed that teenage girls don't always behave the way you expect?" I'd been sitting there, telling myself with a degree of dread, So Vanessa's question about teenage girls caught me by surprise. I gave a little start of surprise. My reaction got the Wests attention, so I answered their curiosity with, "Sorry, I was expecting Vanessa to say something else." I'd had another idea while I was talking, and thought it'd be interesting to see the Wests' reactions to it, so I looked at Vanessa and added, "You mean I'm not the only one who finds teenage girls unpredictable?" I looked at the Wests. Their small smiles could be considered a success. Very small from Mrs., but reasonable from Mr. The rest of the room chuckled more freely, but it was the Wests that mattered. I was pleased to see they had some humor and sense of reality, as I'd been starting to wonder. Vanessa apparently decided that my question didn't need an answer, nor her preceding one either. Vanessa carried on addressing the Wests. "You sent Ava out to find AN intelligent boyfriend, but she greatly over-performed; she brought back THE MOST intelligent boyfriend." They struggled to decipher what Vanessa meant. Vanessa gave them a second, then added, "If you need a context, I could say Mark's the most intelligent boy in Corvallis." "Oh, you mean he's a genius." "To agree to that would be misleading. Geniuses are a dime a dozen where Prof and I work. We deal with dozens or even hundreds of students who meet the definition of genius every day of the week. I'm saying that Mark is THE MOST intelligent boy in Corvallis. If all the geniuses in Corvallis got together - and there are a large number of them, because of the university - then they'd ALL look up to Mark. It's safe to say that Mark exceeds your hope of a 130 IQ boyfriend by a considerable margin. Your daughter MASSIVELY over-performed." Julia added, "As Ava would say, Mark is a 'super-genius'." Ava giggled happily. "He's really that smart?" asked Mr. West. Prof said, "I told you Mark is doing his Bachelor in Mathematics, and that I'm a professor of Mathematics, so obviously I'm aware of what's going on with Mark's studies. There is a frenzy of excitement in my department over Mark. We have NEVER had a student of his caliber before, and Mathematics attracts far more than its fair share of geniuses. Geniuses come and go in our department, and no one raises an eyebrow, but my whole department is currently running around like chickens with their heads cut off, organizing and reorganizing ourselves to give Mark what he needs next year." "Oh," said Mrs. West. Unfortunately followed a couple of seconds later by her asking, "But what can he see in Ava?" That instantly made her no longer my favorite. -- A lot of people in the room stiffened in response to that, which Mrs. West couldn't help notice. "I didn't mean it like that. Well, to be blunt, I partly did. If he's as intelligent as you say, then why is he spending time with a girl like Ava? She's far beneath his intellectual level, and I have to worry that he's using her." "For sex, you mean?" asked Vanessa bluntly, adding, "If we can agree to being frank about your illnesses, I presume there's little point in pretending we're not aware that young people enjoy sex?" #2: #4: #2: Mrs. West smiled briefly to concede the point. "Yes, I meant for sex." Vanessa said, "We'll return to sex later. It's not an unexpected issue when dealing with teenagers. It's in the same basket as money, being something we need to tidy up at the end, after you've got a good grasp of the big picture. For the moment I'll point out that EVERY girl is less intelligent than Mark, and he's too nice a boy to treat all girls as sexual playthings, the way you fear he's treating Ava. In answer to your question about what Mark sees in Ava, let's just say that Mark likes Ava and leave it at that. There are other contributing factors, such as Ava's attitude to Mark and your illnesses, but his liking of Ava is at the core of it." "Okay." "Putting Mark's intellectual prowess to the side for the moment, let's turn to another of your criteria: physical ability. Ava told me that you wanted her to find someone who was good at sports." "Yes. We want her to have a fit, healthy partner. Not a professional athlete, because their careers are too hard on their spouses and are too brief, but fit and healthy would be ideal." "I've got some good news for you then, because Ava massively over-performed on that criterion too. Mark is an exceptionally capable athlete." "He's an athlete TOO? As well as being a genius?" "Not just 'an athlete', but an exceptional athlete." "Come on! That's not believable. He can't be both of those things." "I agree it strains credibility. However, everything I'm about to say is verifiable. I'll give you some examples of some of Mark's athletic feats: -- "We have a games room with a pool table. Robert and Andrew grew up competing with each other and they're both very good at those games. They've literally spent thousands of hours practicing. Mark first came to this house having never played 8-ball, snooker or billiards. After far less practice than my sons have had, he beats them. We'll all go watch him demonstrate in a few minutes." Mr. West said, "That's not necessary." "It IS necessary. It's very important you understand enough about Mark to be able to make good decisions about your daughter's future. Ten minutes of your time is an investment that will be well rewarded. It'll give me a chance to refresh the coffees too. Mark got a score of 300 at bowling last Sunday. You know what that means, don't you?" "A perfect game. He bowled 300?" "Yes indeed. There were plenty of witnesses, including many of Julia's classmates." Ava said, "It's true. Dad. I've heard lots of them talking about it." Vanessa said, "If it's important to you, you can always take Mark back to the bowling alley again, and watch him play. He may not get 300 again, but you'll see that he is an extremely good bowler..." #3: #2: " ... Mark mentioned he ran in a 10k race a couple of weeks ago. That was an important race with some very high caliber runners entered. Mark neglected to mention that he came in first." "Hang on!" interjected Mrs. West. "I remember Ava talking about going to see that race, because it was a big deal with some national-level guys running. Mark can't have won that race. He told us earlier that he wasn't a runner, so he DEFINITELY couldn't have won that race. Someone is lying here." "Katie, I entirely understand that you think that way. However, everything I've said is true and verifiable. You can call up the club and ask them who won the 10k two weeks ago. They will tell you 'Mark Anderson.' They will have pictures of the event, so you can check we're not pulling some sort of trick on you. You could ask his time, go online to confirm that it's a spectacular time, then you could ask Mark to repeat his run while you timed him. All of those things can be easily done, and they would prove Mark's ability conclusively, wouldn't they?" "I guess. They would prove he could win, but they wouldn't prove his other claim: that he wasn't a runner. They'd make that claim very doubtful indeed. People do not win races at that level without a great deal of training. I know what I'm talking about, because we've supported Ava's athletics training for many years, and I've seen how much effort people put into their development." "What you said is true for, as far I know, every athlete EXCEPT Mark. Mark has an incredible amount of natural ability. I do literally mean 'incredible'. It is not credible unless you've seen it for yourself. Felicity, didn't you tell me that your phone was ringing off the wall after Mark's win?" Mom confirmed, "I'll say! The next two or three days were a real pain. Virtually every officer from Donna's club called up to beg Mark to join. I had state and national teams call me, and the media too. I had to get very abrupt to discourage them. Mark didn't want anything to do with any of them. He was very clear about his lack of interest. He has no interest whatsoever in being a runner." Vanessa took over, "Mark has no interest in running, doesn't belong to any club, and doesn't train. If you made the effort to call around every running club, every coach, even every good runner, none of them will have heard of a Mark Anderson until he turned up one day, won a 10k race, then disappeared again. Mark simply doesn't care about running, or most other sports either, but he has exceptional natural skill. -- "I was saving the best to the last: soccer. Mark's sole sport, that he plays purely for fun, is soccer. Prof and I watched him play last weekend and it was the most absurd disparity of skill I've ever seen. It was like taking the best soccer player in the world and putting him into the middle of a schoolboy game. To say 'Mark ran circles around them' doesn't come close to conveying what happened." Julia added, "Mark single-handedly destroyed and demoralized the opposition." "Well put Julia." Turning back to the Wests, "I urge you to catch one of Mark's games. You'll be very, very impressed by his athleticism. It's truly spectacular." Ava told her parents, "Mark's next game is in Salem at 3pm this Saturday. I'm going to make sure I see it because I've missed the last few. It'd be great if you came with me to see it. Please? I REALLY want you to see how amazing Mark is. Mark is super-..." "Okay, I guess we can." Mr. and Mrs. checked with each other, and Mrs. West said, "That should be okay." While Ava was thanking them, Vanessa said, "This would be a good time to demonstrate your 8-ball skills, Mark. I'll make some more coffee." Mrs. West said, "I'll help you with the coffee, Vanessa." Vanessa said, "Not this time, thanks. It's far more important you learn to appreciate Mark's athleticism." "I don't know how to play any of those games, so I won't understand what's happening anyway." "You'll understand enough, trust me. I'm mostly just boiling water anyway, which doesn't need two of us." Prof led the way, with everyone but Vanessa following him to the Guys' Room. Donna rushed ahead, calling back, "I'll rack the balls for you, Mark." It went pretty much the same as it did during the hot tub party a few days earlier. The closest I came to having a bad moment is when I joked with myself about offering Andrew and Robert the usual stakes. I was never going to say it out loud, not with Mom and Donna in the room. I had two matches, one each versus Andrew and Robert. Both the "best-of-3" matches took only two games. On The Boys' breaks I let their balls roll without interference, so Robert actually got to play two extra shots, but that was it for their involvement. On all four games I only needed one turn to win. Even Mrs. West could appreciate how much better I was than my opponents. The Wests were also very impressed when Dad pointed out my ambidexterity during the first game. Vanessa had come in at the beginning of the fourth game, and watched with the rest. At the end she said, "Although you couldn't tell from that game, and presumably not the earlier ones either, my sons are very good at this game. They both made useful supplements to their college funds by playing for money, especially in their undergrad days. But you can see that Mark is in a different league entirely. Bear in mind that he also won that 10k running race, bowled 300 last weekend and is an incredible soccer player. He's probably better at soccer than any other sport because he enjoys it so much. He's not merely good at these sports, Mark is exceptionally good at them. He has national, if not international, levels of ability at several sports." Dad said, "You can add basketball to that mix too." "We simply don't know how many sports he could excel in. No one had any idea he was any good at running until the 10k a couple of weeks ago. He's not good at any of these sports because he trains at them, he simply has a phenomenal level of natural ability. I'm quite sure that he could pick up almost any sport and be nationally competitive at it." Mom said, "Vanessa, remember when his Aikido instructor came around here a few weeks ago." "Yes, that's another example. Mark started a martial art... , when was it, Mark?" "Umm, about three weeks ago." I didn't want the Wests to think I was into fighting, so I said to them, "It's called Aikido. It's a totally defensive martial art, so there are no attacking moves at all. No punches, kicks and any of that stuff. It's 100% non-aggressive, and is very mental and philosophical. I like it very much." Donna was waiting for me to say it, so I added, "My sister Donna found it for me, and suggested I have a look at it, and I find it suits me very much." Vanessa said, "After one lesson, Mark's instructor was raving over Mark's abilities. He's never seen a student like Mark." Mom added, "Mark gets private lessons from his instructor now, three hours on Monday nights for one-on-one training. The instructor is doing it for free because he's so excited about training Mark." Vanessa said, "You wanted Ava to find someone who was 'fit and healthy', and Ava has massively overachieved on that criterion too. So that's two massive over-achievements now: Mark's a genius even among geniuses, genius enough to get Prof's department dizzy with excitement; and Mark's also an incredible athlete, with a phenomenal level of natural ability at a wide variety of sports and skills." Julia said, "Mom, can I suggest two little additions to the athletic category." Vanessa nodded. Julia continued, "Mark, grab some of the balls while we're standing here, and juggle like you did on Sunday." That was easy enough, so I got them to stand back a few steps, uncentered myself, and juggled eight of the 8-ball balls for a minute or so. The Wests were impressed, as were all the others that hadn't seen this trick before, such as Mom and Dad. Mom said, "Ahh, now I understand why Carol was trying to juggle." I was immediately worried that Mom would say too much, but she looked to be very aware of what she was saying. Mom added, "Is that really as easy for you as Carol said it was?" "I have to concentrate obviously, but it's not hard, no." Mr. West asked, "How long did it take you to learn that, Mark?" I couldn't think of a reason not to tell the truth, so I said, "I fumbled around totally ineffectually a few times as a kid, but that was of no consequence at all. About a year or two ago I juggled four pairs of balled up socks for about thirty seconds. I was okay at it, but not great. -- "A few months ago I had an idea about how to do it better, and I tried four socks again. My idea worked perfectly, and I could juggle four pairs faultlessly. Maybe I juggled them for about a minute. Not long after that it occurred to me that my idea would work with more balls, so I tried it with eight, and I could immediately do that too. -- "In total, for me to be able to juggle eight balls took me about a minute and a half of practice, plus having the right idea pop into my head. Since then I think I've done it three times, each for about a minute. Call it five minutes of total practice up until today." "That's extraordinary." Vanessa agreed, "At the risk of sounding cute: 'That's Mark.' His physical abilities are extraordinary, and his mental abilities are even more so." There was a twinkle in Vanessa's eye when she said the last, because she was thinking beyond just the IQ that the Wests would think she meant. Julia said, "Before my mom starts summarizing too much, let me do the second little idea I had. Mr. and Mrs. West, you wanted to see whether Ava's boyfriend was 'fit and healthy', right?" They agreed. #2: "Take your shirt off please, Mark." "Ahh." Ava exclaimed, "Very good idea!" "Ahh, I'm not really comfortable with..." Vanessa expressed her opinion clearly, "Phooey Mark. You're going to be running around shirtless for much of the summer, so the Wests are bound to see your chest many times. It would help your case if you obliged us now." I surrendered to the inevitable, and slowly reached for my buttons. Ava was delighted, "Wait till you see this, Mom. You're just going to die. OH NO! I'm sorry, I didn't..." Vanessa said, "Ava, it's perfectly normal for that to happen. With their illnesses on your mind that'll happen many times. They'll also say the same things to each other and to you. It's embarrassing, but all of us know it's just a figure of speech. Let's forget about it. I agree with your meaning, by the way, because the first time I saw Mark's body I nearly had a heart attack too. He's gorgeous, isn't he?" Ava asked, "You don't mind that I said that, Mom?" "You've probably said it to me a thousand times and we've never noticed before. Of course I don't mind, you didn't mean anything by it." While Ava was happily helping me unbutton my shirt, Katie nodded a "Thank you" at Vanessa, who smiled a "You're welcome" back. When Ava pulled my shirt off, Mrs. West said, "My!" After a second, she added, "I think he passes the 'fit and healthy' test." "He does indeed," agreed Mr. West. Ava said, "Look at his waist. Isn't it incredible!" Ava was tugging my pants down, to give her mom a better look. My belt kept me safe, and it was going to continue to do so. Vanessa exclaimed happily, "It's to die for!" Ava didn't notice immediately, but then suddenly looked at Vanessa, "You said it too, Vanessa." "What? Oh, 'To die for.' Yes, that's one of my favorite expressions. It seems better than 'Wet my panties' at my age, haha. Turn around Mark, so we can see your butt." #2: #3: "Ahh. I don't really have to show you my butt, do I? I don't think butt-showing is part of the normal boyfriend approval process." "It's not," agreed Vanessa. "We just want to see it for fun." #4: With mock outrage, although still with some real outrage, I said, "What part of 'fit and healthy' requires me to show off my butt?" Mrs. West said, "Where did Mark put all that food?" #2: #3: Vanessa said, "I've often wondered that myself, but you can see that it's not ruining his figure, is it? You can put your shirt back on Mark, and let's all return to the living room." ^ [[I'd also sometimes wondered where all the food went, the narrowness of my waist making that an obvious question. I'd always known nothing 'magical' happened because I could feel the food in my stomach, not to mention that it eventually came out the other end! The answer is in two parts: First, stomachs are positioned sufficiently north of the waist that being narrow waisted is not particularly relevant. Second, while a person of my general size could eat as much as I did at this time in my biography, doing so would make them feel uncomfortably full, even given how stretchable stomachs are. My body was capable of improving itself in several ways (my musculature, for example), and the increase in stomach capacity needed to accommodate the amount of food I ate was a minor adjustment. It was easily carried out, especially as my upper-chest had expanded to create a significant amount of additional volume. That my body was capable of improving itself was the result of my powerful subconscious and lower levels (my sub-subconscious, if they can be called such). Everyone has heard stories about how strong belief can affect your health, such as the very strong effect placebos have. The body is affected by the mind in many quite powerful ways. FOUR minds have a vastly increased ability to affect the body. I subconsciously wanted to be taller, fitter, stronger and healthier, so my body became so. I was interested enough in the power of mind-over-body to do some research, discovering the following: "The placebo effect has been known since the early 20th century. Generally one third of a control group taking a placebo shows improvement, and Harvard's Herbert Benson says that the placebo effect yields beneficial clinical results in 60-90% of diseases, including angina pectoris, bronchial asthma, herpes simplex, and duodenal ulcers. (Benson & Friedman 1996.)" "Placebo response rates all the way from zero to 100% have been reported in virtually every clinical condition studied. The so-called effect appears to be both universal and utterly unpredictable." "A brain-imaging study found that depressed patients who responded to the placebo effect showed changes in cerebral blood flow which were similar to the changes in brain function seen in patients who responded to anti-depressant medication. (Leuchter 2002). Other studies argue that up to 75% of the effectiveness of anti-depressant medication is due to the placebo-effect rather than the treatment itself. (Khan et al. 2000.)" Drug trials used to have the possible new medication's results measured against a control group that took nothing, but so powerful is the placebo effect that most modern drug trials have two control groups: a group that receives nothing, and another group that receives placebos, that way the efficaciousness of the drug's active ingredient(s) and its placebo effect can each be quantified. In addition, and in all honesty, I was a weak-willed person, so no part of my mind put the brakes on any of my subconscious-driven changes. Just in case it occurs to any of my readers, I TRULY did not want a larger cock. First, it was never something that worried me. In my entire life to date, no girl has EVER scorned it, because - until very recently - no girl has ever seen it. Second, Julia is a small girl. I truly did not want to become any bigger, because I thought that would be unkind.]] ^ In the living room, over fresh coffees and softer drinks for the younger participants, in my case milk and the obligatory cookies, Vanessa continued. "We've already talked about my claims about Mark's athleticism can be verified. You'll also see him play soccer on Saturday, you've already seen him play 8-ball, juggle, and his torso; the latter being particularly impressive, haha. -- "Verifying his intellectual abilities is also easy, as we could arrange a meeting for you with independent people who're aware of Mark's educational accomplishments, such as the Head of OSU's Math Department, or someone from the Corvallis Board of Education. -- "I'm going to mention your sociability criteria only briefly. That's more difficult for us to prove to you, so I'll restrict myself to Ava's opinion of Mark's sociability. Ava has several times seen Mark in social settings, surrounded by many people, even many dozens of people. Those people were often gathering because of Mark. He was their center of their attention. Let me simply ask Ava this: Ava, is Mark popular? Not 'popular' in the belittle-anyone-beneath-you, school sense, but in the well-liked, friendly sense. Do lots of people like Mark, and are interested in him?" Ava was smiling, and clearly knew EXACTLY what Vanessa was talking about, especially appreciating that Vanessa was saying "people" rather than "girls". Plus, of course, Ava wanted her parents to think I was popular. Ava answered, "Oh yes! Mark is VERY popular. SUPER-popular, haha." Mrs. West said, "That's been puzzling me. How and where did Ava get to know Mark? I can't work that out. Where did you meet Mark, Ava?" Vanessa immediately answered, "Katie, I want to keep that as a mystery for just a little longer. Let me summarize: You instructed Ava to look for a good guy using a methodical system of your own devising. Ava did as you requested, which led to her discovering Mark. Mark is a super-genius, so he blew the scale on those measures. Mark is also an athletic phenomenon, so he blew the scale on those measures too. You just heard Ava say that he is super-popular, so he also blew the scale on those measures. You heard me say, quite a while ago, that both the Williams and Anderson families have already promised Ava that they will help and support her for several years. I also told you that it happened because of Mark more than anyone else. I hope that'll go a large way toward convincing you that Mark is a very good boy. It's also clear by Ava's enthusiasm for jumping onto his lap, that Ava thinks he's a good person. Do you think Mark is a good person, Ava?" Ava's mouth opened, but nothing came out. After a second, she said, "I can't find big enough words for it Mom. 'Super-super-good', with lots of 'supers'. He's the most..." Vanessa said, "That's all we need, thanks, sweetie." To the Wests, Vanessa said, "Let's count that as another 'blew the scale'. Mark far exceeded every single measure you gave Ava to consider. Let me remind you that those results weren't a matter of Ava's opinion. Mark DID win the 10k race, he DOES score more goals playing soccer than every other player on both sides combined. There is no doubt of Mark's athleticism. There is also no doubt of his genius; Ava has seen real proof of that. There is also no doubt of his popularity, not when Ava sees dozens of people going out of their ways to be around Mark, ask questions about him, etc. Ava is absolutely certain of her findings about Mark. She knows that objectively using your methodical approach, and subjectively, as you can tell by her obvious happiness at being with Mark right now. Ava knows she is sitting in the lap of the most amazing guy she will ever meet, and he has his arms around her." Vanessa paused. Ava wormed her way into my lap even more, looking as happy as she possibly could. Mrs. West asked, "Ava, is everything Mrs. Williams said true? Her claims, and your feelings for Mark?" "EVERYTHING is totally true, Mom. Vanessa is a very smart lady, and every single thing she said is true. She's right that I know it for sure too. It's not me falling for a boy just because he's handsome or he sweet-talked me. Mark is EVERYTHING you told me to look for. He's SUPER-everything you told me to look for, {giggle}." Vanessa said, "I'll mention that Ava's opinion is the result of her studying Mark for several months, using the tool that you gave her. It's not the result of a schoolgirl infatuation. She knows what she's talking about, and everyone in his and my family agrees with her. Prof and I agree with Ava, for example, and it's been a very long time since I fell for a boy because of a schoolgirl infatuation." "Even longer in my case," injected Prof. "I'll digress for a moment. One of my fears is that you might believe we are making this up as some sort of confidence game to get our hands on Ava's money. Ava told us yesterday that you are rightly concerned about gold-diggers. I'll address that issue now..." Vanessa went on to explain that I'd had a business idea that was likely to come to fruition soon, and that it would be worth enough that I didn't need Ava's money. In effect, "Mark's a genius, so his ability to earn money far exceeds what Ava's wealth will be, and he has no interest in hers." -- Vanessa added at the end, "When we discussed this with Ava, I was concerned that she had no knowledge of any trust. I hope that you will be arranging for her inheritance to be protected in a trust?" Mr. West answered, "Yes, naturally. We haven't mentioned it to her yet because we haven't decided who the trustees will be." The conversation got technical about trust issues, but included Vanessa insisting on provisions to keep Ava's money out of any of our hands, such as the trustees reviewing all the financial dealings between Ava and all Williamses and Andersons. That topic ended with the Wests reassured that Ava's money was safe from us. Vanessa continued, "Putting that issue entirely to the side, let me ask whether in your profession you sometimes have to explain something to another person, and although they prefer a simple answer, you know that they won't understand until you've given them the necessary background. That happens to you sometimes, doesn't it?" "Yes. That's quite common. There are several different ways of accounting for the same set of costs. Which should be used is very context dependent." "I thought it would be. Usually quick and simple approaches work, but occasionally life is too complex. This is one such situation. Mark is so unusual that your normal way of thinking about boyfriends won't work well. That's why I've so carefully ducked some of your questions, so I could give you the necessary background first. -- "In some respects I'd like to adjourn our conversation now, to let you go away and spend several days checking all our claims about Mark. Then, when you're convinced that everything we've said is true, we'd resume our talk. I don't think doing that is necessary in this case though. If we were going to ask you for some sort of binding decision or commitment at the end of this talk, such as writing us a check, then I would want you to proceed very carefully. But we're not looking for a commitment from you. We're simply trying to help you understand a situation that already exists. In the event that you don't fully understand it, then I'm sure Ava won't stop explaining it to you until she's got you convinced. In my experience, that's what teenage girls who're sure they're right do, haha. Unless you have any questions about what I've covered so far, I'll continue on to the heart of the matter?" "The heart please. Especially after this build up." ------- Chapter 137: Mr. and Mrs. West; the Tricky Half Wednesday, April 27, 2005 (Continued) "Very well. A few months ago Ava started measuring guys according to your system, which led her to discover Mark. The more she studied him, the more impressed and attracted she was. Soon she was hooked, which is hardly surprising, given what we've already told you about him. Unfortunately for Ava, there were two aspects of Mark that Ava thought you would disapprove of, so she didn't discuss him with you. She feared that you would tell her to forget about him and to find someone more suitable. Nor did she approach Mark either, fearing your disapproval. Ava didn't know what to do, so she did nothing. -- "Time passed, during which all she achieved was to become increasingly attracted to Mark. No other boy had a hope of getting her interest, not given how incredible Mark is at everything. Ava was hooked, but unable to act. Then a month ago, Mark got himself a girlfriend. Ava watched the two of them have a wonderful, highly successful relationship together. I imagine that was a very rough time for Ava..." "I'll say. But not anymore." Ava demonstrated her happiness by hugging me tighter and giving me a quick kiss. She was smart enough to do no more than quietly squeeze Julia's hand. "No, not anymore," agreed Vanessa. "Mark's having a successful relationship with another girl became a third reason for Ava not to tell you about him. But she couldn't stop thinking about him, and she couldn't start being interested in any other boy. Another month went by, during which you started expressing concern about the time that was passing. Try to visualize the difficulty she was in: Mark was doubtless the most fantastic guy she had ever met, but she felt unable to move forward or move away. She was horribly stuck, and you were starting to worry about time. -- "Then a week and a half ago, Ava was standing by the finish line of the national-level 10k race that she was so interested in, when Mark appeared out of nowhere at the head of the pack. Remember that until that moment Ava had no idea that Mark ran at all. But he ran past her and finished in first place." "I thought Ava's behavior was strange after that race, but she wouldn't tell me why," offered Mrs. West. "The best guy she had ever seen just performed yet another incredible accomplishment right in front of her. By the following Monday, Ava had decided that she had to act. She asked Mark out, with - I'm sure - no hope of his accepting. Her expectation was that Mark would turn her down, and then she'd have to start looking for a second choice, who she knew would compare extremely unfavorably with Mark. To her considerable surprise, Mark called Ava, put his girlfriend on the phone, and his girlfriend started giving Ava good advice on how to get Mark to date her." "What? Mark's girlfriend wanted Ava to date Mark?" "Yes. I'm sure you could generate lots of questions and comments about that development, but I'm going to skip all of that. I'm simply going to say that Mark's girlfriend's advice worked, and in the last week Ava has spent some quality time with Mark." Ava giggled, but - thank God! - didn't go into details. "Earlier I said there were two reasons why Ava didn't tell you about Mark; that there were two problems with him that she thought you'd disapprove of. One of those was that, until about a week ago, Ava thought Mark was socially inept." "But you said Mark was very social. You even said he blew the gauge, or scale, or whatever the expression was." "Until a week ago Ava thought he was inept. About a week ago Mark's girlfriend got him to stop hiding his light under a bushel, and to start interacting socially in the way she knew he could. Mark has recently been doing a great deal more socializing than normal, so Ava has seen that many people enjoy his company, that he's nice, funny, attentive, and all the usual social skills. He has the skills in abundance, he just needs the confidence to use them. Mark's main fault is that he's too passive. It's not a good trait for him to have, as he's going to need to be a great deal more assertive in the future. Fortunately he's got a bossy girlfriend... ," Ava giggled again. I almost felt like giggling myself, that being safer than emphatically agreeing with Vanessa, but this was probably a very good time to do more of that passivity I'm accused of. " ... who has his best interests very much in mind, and who is pushing him into developing social confidence and assertiveness." Mrs. West asked, "You keep talking about his girlfriend as if she still exists. I don't understand how we can be talking about him having a girlfriend while he's got his arms around Ava. Ava, why aren't you upset about Mark having a girlfriend?" Vanessa beat Ava to answering, "Katie, we are ALMOST at the point where all the pieces will start coming together. Give me a couple more minutes please." Katie nodded. -- "Last evening Ava promised Mark that she would be his girlfriend for at least the next few years. In return Mark promised to help and support her until she's able to stand on her own two feet. Consequently our two families are rallying behind Mark to help him help Ava. -- "I'm sure you would've preferred to have Ava discuss her choice of boyfriend with you first, and for you to get to know him before she made any sort of commitment to him, but that didn't happen. Ava knew a good thing when she saw it, and she leaped for it. Ava is now Mark's girlfriend, and as you can see, she's very happy with that situation. Ava is now the committed girlfriend of Mark, an intellectual prodigy, an athletic virtuoso, socially skillful, and a very good person, as you'll find out for yourself as you get to know him. Not only does Ava have a boyfriend now, but she has two extra families full of people who will help and support her through your illnesses, and for some years thereafter. I'll remind you that we won't be touching Ava's money, and that we believe Mark will be rich himself, sooner rather than later. -- "As that stands, Ava has walked into a dream come true. There are two complicating issues I've deliberately held back until now. Both of which you'll initially see as disadvantages, but I believe are not: Mark is fifteen years old, and he does have another girlfriend, the girl sitting beside him, my daughter Julia." #2: #4: It didn't take them long to start expressing their opinions, and the conversation was somewhat muddled for a while. I was surprised and happy to see that they were puzzled more than angry. That doesn't mean there wasn't some anger, just that there was more puzzlement. There was quite a lot of that. Vanessa let them ask a couple of questions, but she didn't answer them until she was ready. Then she took control of the conversation again, "I'll explain Mark's age first, as that's the simpler of the two issues. Mark's a genius. Last year he skipped a grade, this year he's doing 10th and 11th grades as well as some college courses, and next year he'll do 12th grade and finish his Bachelor in Mathematics. You wondered where Ava met Mark. The answer couldn't be simpler: he's in some of her classes at school." Vanessa let them talk again. It didn't take long for Mrs. West to say, "But we wanted Ava to get an older boyfriend." Vanessa grabbed that, "WHY Katie? Did you want someone who'd be educationally more advanced than Ava? Mark has the head of OSU's Math Department excited about his educational prospects! Did you want someone more physically developed? You've seen Mark without his shirt on and know he could compete nationally at running and several other sports. Do you want someone who can support her financially even though she'll have her own money? You heard us say that Mark's going to be wealthy soon. With his abilities, he can earn as much money as he wants. Did you want someone older so he could support Ava emotionally? Mark's perfectly capable of supporting her that way as he's a great deal more caring and considerate than the undergraduates I deal with daily. Not to mention Mark is bringing two whole families of additional supporters with him. Ava will have more support than she'll know what to do with. So pray tell Katie, what would an older boyfriend provide for Ava better than Mark could?" Katie floundered for an answer. Vanessa pressed her for one, and Mrs. West was forced to concede that her comment had been a poor one. Whereupon Vanessa told her off, "I put a lot of time and effort into making you aware of Mark's uniqueness so you would understand that his being so unusual meant that the simple ways of thinking about this situation wouldn't work. Then, despite all my efforts, you complained that Mark doesn't abide by some simple-minded rule of thumb you have about boys' age. You didn't stop to think about what OUTCOMES are important! Ava's happiness is at stake here, so lazy thinking is NOT the way to go. Think before throwing complaints around." Vanessa paused, to see that the two Wests got the message. #2: #4: Then Vanessa added, "I suppose the next thing you'll be complaining about is Mark having two girlfriends?" Vanessa folded her arms and arched an eyebrow at the Wests. It was clearly a challenge. Of course the Wests were going to complain about that! They'd already started doing so, but Vanessa had ignored on it to address their "Too young" complaint first. Before they could start, Vanessa added, "Let me point out one obvious fact: that one of his two girlfriends is Prof's and my daughter! Every thought and emotion that you're having has passed through our minds too, yet we clearly support this. Of course a boy having two girlfriends at the same time is unusual, and usually bad, but Mark is an EXTREMELY unusual boy. Don't make a rule-of-thumb mistake like you did about his age. Think of the outcomes you want for Ava. She seems very happy with the situation, so that should tell you that she's getting outcomes she's very happy with, and therefore something unusual is going on. I should mention that one of the reasons Ava, Mark and Julia get on so well together is because the two girls are lovers too. It's a three-way relationship." Vanessa had succeeded at stopping the Wests worrying about my age. After that the conversation got more free-flowing. That's a polite way of saying that the Wests wouldn't let Vanessa control the conversation, as they started demanding answers, especially of Ava. The three of us put our arms around each other, and presented an image of mutual happiness and support as she fielded her parents' questions: "Yes, Mom, I really am bisexual. I wasn't until a week ago, but I am now. I like it, especially with Julia and Mark." Fortunately Ava's parents were too focused on the three of us to pick up on the implications of Ava saying "especially". It didn't take long for Mr. West to make a derogatory comment about my motivation being sexual. I'd been admiring the unnatural restraint Julia had shown leaving all the talking up to Vanessa, but it couldn't last forever. Julia politely responded, "Mark is a fantastic lover. Ava and I both get far more enjoyment from our sessions with him than he gets from us." Ava enthusiastically agreed, "I'LL SAY! Mark is AWESOME! He's miles better than any other guy I've EVER had. Mom, he's INCREDIBLE! He's the most super lover you can imagine." Ava's enthusiasm was embarrassing her parents, so you can imagine what Mrs. West thought of Vanessa asking, "I've always thought the number of orgasms the girl had was a good indication of the male's selflessness and generosity. Wouldn't you agree, Katie?" "Ahh." "Seriously, I think it's an excellent indicator. Prof and I had to soundproof Julia's bedroom when she and Mark first became lovers. Julia would be screaming in orgasm several times an hour, for hour after hour. Mark gives as many orgasms as the girl wants. Ten orgasms or more is the norm, unless there's not enough time for the girl to have that many. Mark will - literally - spend hours pleasuring his lover. He gives far, far more pleasure than he takes." "Mom," said Ava, "remember last Saturday when I couldn't go to the club because my muscles were too sore. I said I'd strained myself by training too hard." Mrs. West didn't like where this was going, but admitted, "I remember." "{Giggle}. It wasn't exactly 'training' that'd strained my muscles. Not the training you thought. I spent the night with Mark and I thought I was fitter than him. Boy oh boy was that a mistake! Mark fu ... Sorry. Umm, Mark WORE me out. I've never had a boy wear me out before, but Mark sure did. I couldn't tell you how many orgasms I had. I got so many I could barely think, let alone count. He's incredible, Mom!" Vanessa said, "I think that addresses whether he's using Julia and Ava for his selfish pleasure. I'll add another reason I'm sure he's not doing that. Mark's got plenty of other girls throwing themselves at him. He has no need to sit through a meeting like this, or adopt any sort of pretense at all, just to get sex. All he has to do is crook his little finger, and they'll come running in their droves." "Oh dear." "Why do you say that, Katie? Do you prefer Ava's boyfriend to be unattractive to other girls? I'm interested in hearing why you think a guy that every other girl rejects would be good for Ava?" "That's not what I meant. We don't want Ava to be with a playboy..." "I said there are dozens of girls throwing themselves at Mark. I didn't say he was catching them, and I certainly didn't say he was chasing them. You're making the mistake of using yet another rule of thumb: that when it comes to sex guys 'listen to their little head more than their big head.' Mark's a genius. Even among geniuses he'd be considered a genius. So let me put this colorfully: can you imagine the size of the little head Mark would have to have, for it to dominate his big head?" Even I pictured that, and I already knew exactly what size my little head was. Ava giggled. I whispered to her, "Next time we're alone, you'd better check to see if it's got any bigger." She giggled some more, leaving her parents in no doubt as to the subject matter of my whisper. I'd figured it was okay, as Vanessa was being up-front - and then some! - about our having a sexual relationship. Vanessa said, "There are two other things you've not realized. First, in most relationships there's only one boy and one girl. If another girl turns up, she must be in competition with the first girl, and the eventual loser will be left with nothing. That competition can get very nasty, as I'm sure you've seen many times. That's not the case here. Ava's not threatened by another girl. For a start, there's already another one and she helped Ava become friends with Mark. That doesn't sound like nasty competition, does it? -- "If yet another suitable girl turns up, they can work out for themselves how to handle that. It's their relationship, not ours, so I'm not going to stick my nose in. I don't have any experience being in a threesome, so I'm not qualified to do more than give general advice. I'm certainly not qualified to insist that my opinion should dominate over theirs. Maybe you or Carson have experience of living in a threesome relationship? Maybe accountants are wilder than your reputation would have us believe?" Mr. West gave a small chuckle, then admitted, "When it comes to Katie and me, we reinforce accountants' boring reputation. We've led a quiet life." "Just so long as it's been a happy one. What I'm about to say is the most important point I'll be making this evening. You already know that children have to be allowed some freedom in order to learn about life. When you're gone - which is going to be distressingly soon - Ava is going to be solely responsible for ALL of her decisions: big and small. If you keep her safely under your wing, then in a year's time she'll be thrown into the deep end of life, to sink or swim without you. It would be far better to find out whether Ava can swim while you're still around to rescue her. -- "Because of your timeframe, my advice to you is that from now on you let Ava do WHATEVER she thinks is best. Advise her, but very gently. The less you say the better, because you're preparing her for when you'll be unable to say anything. Let her make her own decisions, ESPECIALLY the big ones. From now on, your job is not to keep her dry, or even to prevent her getting into water that is too deep for her. You job is to watch her learn to swim even if she's struggling, and to step in ONLY if she starts to drown. Let her make mistakes now, rather than later. That means you do nothing now, because she's clearly not in distress so doesn't need rescuing. Even if you think she's doing something wrong, it's her mistake to make. When she realizes her mistake - if it turns out to be one - then you can help her learn the lesson, but don't deprive her of necessary lessons by stopping her mistakes from happening. -- "I'm sure you understand that point as well as I do; it's just that it's hard to get out of a 17-year habit of protecting your little girl. I'll leave you to think about that, and I'm sure we'll have more talks in the future. More equal ones, hopefully, where I'll be a less of a lecturer than I've been tonight. -- "Let me backtrack to when I was answering your concern about girls threatening Ava's relationship with Mark. I said there were two things you didn't realize. The first was that their relationship is not exclusive, so another girl - even beyond Julia - is not a threat. It's not a winner-take-all competition. The second point I want to make is about Ava. She has an enthusiastic attitude to sex. Did it occur to you that if another girl joins in, she'll quite possibly be brought in by your newly liberated - and therefore currently very enthusiastic - bisexual daughter?" When that sunk in, "Oh." Vanessa immediately added. "Did you notice that while we've been talking about girls threatening Ava's relationship with Mark, Ava's been sitting on Mark's lap with a happy smile on her face, showing not a trace of concern. Your girl is feeling VERY safe and secure with Mark and Julia. She's also in a very sexual relationship. With feelings of love, security and sexuality all around her, Ava will want to experiment sexually. The key word is 'experiment', as in 'learning'. I know it's emotionally difficult to watch your daughter jump into the deep end, but that's what you have to do. There's even a case for your pushing her in, although that won't be necessary when it comes to sex because Ava's got PLENTY of self-motivation in that area. -- "I don't know Ava well enough to know her strengths and weaknesses in terms of life-skills, but I do know that she feels unprepared to stand alone. When Ava was talking to me about her need to be with Mark, and when she and Mark were discussing their commitments to each other, there were only two things Ava wanted, and she mentioned them repeatedly: she wants to be supported during your illnesses, which she knows will be very hard on her; and she wants help with her life afterward, by which she meant parent-type help: how to look after a house, career guidance, and especially loving support so she doesn't feel so alone. -- "Judging by the way you got her to search for a new boyfriend, you are very methodical people. I'd like to suggest you use that skill to start remedying Ava's life-skill deficiencies. There are the obvious reasons, such as Ava needing to learn those skills anyway and to ease her anxiety about them, but I have another motive as well: I think it'd help remind you not to slip back into a 'protect Ava from the world' attitude. In fact, it'd encourage you to throw her into more deep ends, because in order to teach her some of those skills, you need to make her do them. If there are any handyman jobs around your house that could be done, put Ava in charge of them..." From here on I'm going to be mostly summarizing the conversation, as it lasted a long time and the point I was most interested in - Ava's being given freedom to act as she wanted - has already been quoted. Although I cheated somewhat by moving it forward, as it actually occurred later in the evening, when the Wests were more relaxed and open. To quote the evening's conversation in full would serve no useful purpose, so I will be omitting large sections of it and paraphrasing what little I do give. I will concentrate mostly on what Vanessa said, as she led the conversation. Be aware that Vanessa didn't dominate it nearly as much as she did earlier, or as the following would indicate. Mr. and Mrs. West wouldn't have relaxed and become more amenable had Vanessa continue to lecture at them. There were several times when the conversation wandered down digressions for several minutes, often for purely social reasons. I'll leave those out, except for one wonderful digression by Robert, which I can't resist including below. There were times where Vanessa needed to slowly and carefully prod the Wests into the 'right way' of thinking about something (i.e., Vanessa's way). Some issues took a great deal longer to resolve than presented below. ^ A topic Vanessa raised was, "Ava also repeatedly mentioned how eager she was to rent a place with Mark and Julia, to demonstrate to you that their relationship worked practically as well as emotionally." The Wests were aware of the renting issue. They'd even discussed it with Ava a couple of months ago, as part of a non-specific plan for how her relationship with a new boyfriend could develop. They intended to pay her way, as the money would be hers shortly anyway. We discussed renting from a variety of angles, one of the main ones being how much time Ava would spend away from her parents, which would be irreplaceably lost. It was generally felt that there were better ways for us to show we were good together than taking Ava away from her parents for so much time. If we had a house, maybe she could live sometimes with us, and sometimes with her parents. Alternate nights, every other week, or more likely whenever Ava felt the need to be in either place (I'd learned not to schedule girls). Vanessa mentioned there was a possibility of Mark buying his own house, and "Is there any problem with them all living in that rather than a rental?" The Wests thought there was none. There were several issues, but I particularly liked Mr. West saying, "MARK will buy a house? Will your business earn enough to meet the payments on a house, Mark?" He'd remembered an earlier comment of Vanessa's that I had a business idea that might be coming to fruition soon. I answered, "The business hasn't started yet so I can't say for sure, but if it goes as we expect, we should be able to afford a house." "What sort of business are you thinking of starting?" Prof answered, "A VERY complicated one! I'm helping out with some of the mathematics, as I'm a professor of mathematics, but there's no way I could contemplate doing what Mark is planning. My work is just in a corner of it, as I can't comprehend the whole thing. It's financial, is about all I can say." Another housing issue was Ava saying, "Oh, I thought we'd live in my house, after... , you know. If you had your own house too, where would we live?" Prof answered that one, "That's a long time away Ava, and there's no need to decide in advance. Maybe you would choose whichever house the three of you liked the most, and rent out or sell the other. Or maybe you wouldn't live in either of them, because you'd choose to leave Corvallis." Although I talk with the Williamses and my parents as if I thought I'd be leaving Corvallis at the end of the next school year, I have doubts about how likely that is, because I don't think there's much chance of me finishing my degree by then. I was therefore happy not to discuss the 'moving from Corvallis' issue with Ava. No one else followed that point up, which surprised me somewhat. If I'd been as confident of my graduating as I knew they were, I would have told Ava of the likelihood of our moving elsewhere. ^ We were discussing my having dinner with the Wests one evening soon, so they could get to know me (several times we had to remind them to say, "and Julia." They were having trouble getting that straight. I blamed it on their daughter, for not being 'straight', haha). Anyway, in the course of discussing what time we'd come, I mentioned that I'd be the one driving Julia and me to their home. No one spotted it immediately, but several seconds later, Mr. West said, "Hang on. Mark, didn't you say you'd drive Julia and you over?" "Sure." "But you're too young to drive." So Julia got to do her "Driver License Thing" again. She was a little cautious this time, saying nothing about the issuing date. "Surely this is a fake?" Dad said, "I was with Mark when the DMV very reluctantly issued it. The boss of the place was very unhappy about it, but he coughed up." "But I was sure the legal minimum was sixteen, not fourteen. I'm sure it's not fourteen. The idea of having 14-year olds driving cars is terrifying!" Prof said, "It was only issued a couple of weeks ago. We got the DMV to backdate the issue date a year because we wanted Mark to have an unrestricted license. It would've been inconvenient if he couldn't have driven Julia around." Prof was having a little fun at Mr. West's expense. Mr. West wasn't sure which issue to tackle first, but he finally decided on, "You wanted your daughter to be driven around by a 15-year old boy?" "Mark's a better driver than I am, Carson." Prof pulled up his trouser leg to show his prosthetic and gave a very quick, "I lost my lower-leg in a car accident because a friend of mine was a bad driver. He and his girlfriend were killed. Vanessa and I were in the backseat and survived, but not intact. My family and I are EXTREMELY conscious of car safety, but I have no hesitation in letting Mark drive my family, even though he's only had two weeks experience. He's a world-class athlete with a genius IQ. He can drive better than anyone else here." Mr. West couldn't argue with that, but he still had lots of questions about the DMV side of things. Prof answer boiled down to, "The law allows for licenses to be issued to people younger than sixteen under exceptional circumstances. OSU's Dean convinced the Mayor that it would be good for the city to help Mark. The Dean and Mayor talked to the State DMV, and they ordered the local DMV to cooperate. It wasn't difficult." An incredulous Mr. West checked, "The Dean AND the Mayor got the DMV to give Mark a license?" Prof nodded. Mr. West asked, "But WHY? Why on Earth would they care about a 15-year old boy getting his license?" "For the good of Corvallis in the Mayor's case. For the good of OSU in the Dean's case," said Prof, helpfully. Mr. West didn't get it, and said as much: "I don't get it." Julia had done her "Driver License Thing", and now Prof got to do his "Einstein Thing". Little comments like, "Tens of billions of people for centuries are going to know who Mark Anderson is or was," were quite good attention getters. Helped by a few extras, such as, "Corvallis is going to become a major tourist destination for hundreds of thousands of people wanting to visit the key locations in Mark's early life." The Wests' reactions could be summed up by Mrs. West's, "Oh my!" Personally I thought Prof might have overdone it a tad, and I agreed with the Wests doubt when they asked, "Do you really think that'll happen?" "We think so. The Math Department at OSU thinks so. The Dean and Mayor think so." Vanessa said, "I told you Ava massively overachieved when you told her to go out and find a smart boy, haha." After that things got a LOT easier with the Wests. I could even make a joke I plagiarized from some TV show or other, "Prof is exaggerating my intelligence wildly, Mr. West. I let my two girlfriends meet each other - how stupid is that!" I made a mental note to work Julia's Driver License Thing into the conversations with future girlfriends' parents MUCH earlier. Don't think I'm joking either! Chloe's parents were on the top of that list. It wouldn't be nearly as effective without a lot of the stuff that had been said about me earlier, but we should be able to work out something that was much quicker and easier than tonight had been. Vanessa enjoyed asking oh-so-innocently, "Katie, would you like to know which store I found Mark's large plate and bowl in?" Katie recalled her previous response and blushed slightly in shame. But she saw the humor in it, and rallied to reply, "That would be kind of you." Vanessa recited the name, bless her. ^ Not long after that, a concerned Katie (as she suggested I call her) asked, "Which girl will Mark marry?" Vanessa fielded that one. "That's one of the aspects of this that annoys me. The traditional view of a two-wife relationship is that each girl would be getting only half a husband. But the reality with these three is that each girl is getting two loves rather than half of one. They are all twice as loved as in a traditional marriage, yet society won't let them have a three-way marriage. That - as kids say - sucks! It's important that Mark treats both girls fairly, to avoid ill feelings, so he can't marry either of them. That only leaves the obvious possibility, but I don't think they'd do that either." "Ahh, what obvious possibility?" "That Ava and Julia get married together. They are in a three-way relationship after all, so that's an equal possibility and some states allow same-sex marriages." "Oh my! I never thought of that." Vanessa said, "I don't think they'll do it though. It'd keep both girls equal, which would be good, but it excludes Mark, which I don't thing either girl would want. It also suffers from the major problem of how they would cater for another girl joining their group." "ANOTHER girl?" "Sure. Ava might have a best friend that she likes very much, and that girl might hit it off with Julia and Mark. If the four of them got along very well enough together, there's no reason the new girl couldn't move in with them. Every person would have three loves rather than two. If they can make it work, it's a great deal better than a traditional marriage. Ava, Julia and Mark all like girls as loves and lovers, so that could easily happen. I'd be surprised if it doesn't." "Oh my. That's very... , umm, strange." "It certainly is! And also very loving. If they can make it work, it'd be a beautiful relationship to live in. One day there are going to be some very strange biographies written about Mark, haha." [[This is a self-written biography, but I'll count Vanessa's comment as a direct hit.]] ^ One little incident was Ava suddenly asking, "Mom and Dad, could I get a bigger bed for my room please? Big enough for Mark and Julia to sleep over some nights." Vanessa chuckled, "We had to do that. Julia seems to be getting a great benefit out it though, haha." The Wests looked a little pained, and Vanessa did the eyebrow thing at them. Katie said, "We're trying to save money. To pass on as much as we can. You understand that, don't you?" "Of course. Considering it's for the benefit of all three of them, we'll go thirds each, including in any new linen you'll need. You'll probably find that you can sell Ava's existing bed for roughly what your third will cost, so it'll be cashflow neutral for you - just to prove I know some accounting terms too, haha. It would be good if all three of them could stay overnight sometimes, as that'll give you much better opportunities to get to know Mark and Julia, and to see them all in a domestic setting." Prof added, "If you don't already have them, I strongly suggest you also buy two pairs of earplugs. I'm embarrassed to admit that my little girl is more than a little loud." A somewhat embarrassed Katie said, "We'll look into it." Vanessa got a thoughtful look on her face. I found out why several days later. [It was an important point to do with southern Italy, because that's how females' brains work.] ^ It took a long time, but Carson finally said, "Ahh!, I remember now. You're the boy who got beat up by so many of the school's football players, aren't you? I had a feeling I'd heard your name somewhere before." "Ahh yes. That was me. Not exactly my finest moment, I'm afraid." Fortunately there wasn't much to say about that particular incident, other than my confirming that my taking up a defensive martial art wasn't totally unrelated. Julia got to use Annette Neumeyer as an example of my purity again. I REALLY must remember to send Annette a "Thank You" note. ^ In a time of some joking around, Robert said (this is his digression, that I mentioned earlier), "Katie and Carson, I have a concern. When I was talking to Ava last night, she seemed to have no knowledge of the Big Brother Rules. I presume you didn't bother to teach her any of them, because she wasn't lucky enough to have a big brother, let alone two the way Julia is truly fortunate?" The Wests were confused. Robert said, "This is too important to leave Ava uneducated about. She has two big brothers now, so she needs to know this stuff. Fortunately I went to the library today and I got this out." Robert reached into a plastic bag he'd brought into the room with him, and pulled out a small, hardcover book. He held it up, and the cover pictured a family of four, with the boy being noticeably older than the girl. The title was, "The Big Brother Rules." Robert passed it to Carson, asking, "Would you read out number twenty three from the back cover, please Carson?" Carson looked at the book's front and back with some puzzlement. He located #23 on the list at the back, and read out, "Younger sisters have to wash their big brother's car when it's dirty." Robert turned to Ava, saying, "See! I told you. My car's getting dirtier every day, so I hope you won't take too long to perform your little sisterly duties." Andrew added, "I wouldn't take too long if I was you Ava, because mine will need washing soon too." I suddenly remembered that I was a big brother too. "Hey, this is great, I've got two little sisters. I'm going to have a VERY clean car, haha." Most of us knew it must be a trick, but we were trying to keep straight faces about it. Ava was looking worried, and her parents puzzled. They didn't know about Williams' propensity to tease yet. Carson made the mistake of opening the book to read it. After flicking through several pages, he removed the front of the dust jacket, to look at the book's front hard cover. He said, "This is a book about geophysics." Robert waved it off, "Oh, I must have gotten the dust jackets mixed up. Don't worry about that, Ava can just follow the rules that are printed on the back of the jacket." Carson chuckled, and handed the book over to Ava, saying, "You'd better learn that list, young lady. It looks like you're going to be very busy now that you've got two big brothers." Because Ava was sitting on my lap, I could read the list with her. After reading the first one, I said, "Just as well you've already got a girlfriend, Robert. That saves Ava having to parade her girlfriends in front of you." "Yes, but it's always nice to know rule #1 is there if I need it. Ashley might forget just how lucky she is." Julia pointed out, "Ashley's well aware of that. She often complains to me about it, haha." Ava got down to one of the rules she had to respond to, "I can't believe I have to iron your SOCKS! That's silly!" Robert said, "Don't blame me! Take it up with the author." "Eww yuck! 'Trim the hair on your back'! No way; that's disgusting! It's bad enough I have to scratch your back when you get an itch you can't reach." Unfortunately several of the audience started laughing. Ava's suspicions were aroused, and eventually she realized she was being had. Before she could make her accusation, Robert told her, "That's for getting Andrew so well this morning, sweetie. Us big brothers have to stick up for each other, especially as there's getting to be a dangerously large number of little sisters around here these days." "You made this all up for me?" "Yeah. It was fun. I got a bunch of my friends together at lunch and we brainstormed the list of rules. It kept us laughing all lunchtime. Making up the cover only took a few minutes. Time well spent, to see the look on your face. Have a look at the author; I enjoyed that part too." Ava turned the 'book' over. The author was "Ipulla Vasleg". It took me a second, and then I showed Ava by using two fingers to expose one word at a time ("I - pull - aVas - leg"). Ava giggled. Julia said, "Big brothers don't realize that we're punished enough just by having them. Teasing us is adding insult to injury." Donna told everyone, "My big brother is wonderful." She'd been trying VERY hard to recover lost ground. Everyone in the room knew she'd done something wrong involving me. The 'book' got passed around so everyone could admire it, earning Robert some praise, especially from Ava. He also got a hug and kiss on the cheek from her, although Julia told Ava off for encouraging them. Ava was pleased, and her parents very much so. I'm sure everyone was. ^ I was too scared to bring the subject up myself, and no one else seemed to, so I whispered to Ava, telling her to wait a while before asking so no one would associate it with me whispering to her. A few minutes later Ava said, "Mom and Dad, now that I've blabbed to everyone here about your being sick, do you still want me to keep it quiet with other people?" The Wests didn't even need to confer. Katie said, "We'd still like to keep it quiet if we could. Why, is there someone else you want to blab to?" Fortunately that was said in humor. I hadn't whispered my reason to Ava, and I suspected she might have forgotten the original reason when we discussed it yesterday. It seemed safe for me to speak up now as the Wests hadn't reacted badly to the question, so I said, "The three of us were wondering how to explain our relationship to our schoolmates. Yesterday, when we were talking a lot about how our two families have informally adopted Ava because you're sick, telling others seemed like a nice thing to say. Now it sounds silly though. We can just say that Ava's our girlfriend and leave you out of it completely." "That would be our choice, thanks. Umm. Did you just say you tell people that Ava was 'OUR girlfriend', as in your and Julia's girlfriend?" "Sure. Are you worried about the girls' bisexual thing?" "Ahh, yes. Won't that cause trouble for the girls?" I didn't want to mention that Julia and Carol had paved the way, so I just said, "No, not really. There are other girls in bisexual relationships that are known about at school, and they're pretty much accepted now. There are some boys who behave stupidly occasionally, but there are always boys like that, and even that's mostly settled down now. Pretty much all the girls don't care. In fact, they're even better than that, because a lot of the other girls are supportive. You don't care about being known as a couple, do you, Ava and Julia?" "No," from Ava. | "No," from Julia, who added, "We'll be a triple with you, rather than a couple, but that won't make any difference. Except to make quite a few people envious, I imagine, haha." "Oops. Here I am trying to impress my new girlfriend's parents that I'll make a good boyfriend, and I forgot I was one. That's not a good start! I'm sure there won't be much of a problem at school. I'm quite confident that'll it'll enhance Ava's status in the school and bring her closer to a lot of other people." Katie asked, "Ava, you don't mind your classmates and friends knowing you're bisexual?" "Are you kidding! I think it's great. A lot of them know already anyway, because we were open about it yesterday. I can't wait until Mark comes to my classes and I can smooch him in front of everyone." "Smooching Mark isn't bisexual. I was asking about you and Julia." "Oh yeah, I got carried away thinking about showing off my being with Mark. Umm, Julia doesn't come to my classes so I can't show off about being with her, but I meet her and Mark at lunch a lot, and we're affectionate together then so lots of people will see that. I'm happy with that; I'm not worried at all." I said, "I'm a bit worried. First, I forget I'm your boyfriend, and then you think I'm a girl. We're going to have to practice this boyfriend-girlfriend thing some more because we're not very good at it, haha." ^ Vanessa asked the Wests, "How much time are you going to take off work?" Carson said, "We thought we'd work as long as we could. You know..." I didn't, but Vanessa obviously did, and the topic ended there. ^ The last issue of any note occurred when the three Wests were preparing to leave. Carson made a comment to the effect that they gave their consent for me to date their daughter. He said it mostly tongue-in-cheek as their consent had been obvious during the last couple of hours, and he wasn't expecting much of a reply. However Vanessa said, "You should realize that Ava, Mark and Julia have ALREADY made their commitments to each other. They did that last night. In that respect no one needs your consent. However - and this is an important point - Ava would never have committed to Mark had she not been sure that you would approve of her decision. I already know her well enough to know that she'd rather cut off her arm than hurt you. It speaks volumes for her trust in your judgment that she was confident you'd see past the, shall I say, 'rather unusual nature' of her new relationship; and that you'd see the goodness in it, and in the people involved. You haven't given your consent to the relationship, because it's already a done-deal. What you've done is tell Ava that you think she made a good decision. It's probably the most important decision of her life so far, so I'm sure your approval of it is very important to her. -- "There's another aspect that I especially like, and which you should be aware of. Ava made ALL of this happen. You sent her out to find a new boyfriend about four months ago, and she correctly identified an incredible guy, even though he was deliberately keeping a very low profile. So low that virtually no girl was aware that Mark had any merit at all. Ava pursued him, and successfully formed a mutually valuable relationship with him. Note that I didn't say 'she caught him', 'she won him', or any other such possessive phrase. Ava created a MUTUALLY valuable relationship. She even convinced Mark's girlfriend to let her into their relationship, which is truly impressive. Ava frequently denigrates herself, saying that she's not smart. It may be true that her book-smarts aren't great, but she has achieved more with Mark and Julia than dozens of other girls have been able to, many of them supposedly much smarter than Ava. Ava tells me that she and you are worried about her life-skills. I think Ava's more important life-skills are something you can be proud of." On that upbeat note, the dinner party drew to a close. Ava rushed around and thanked everyone VERY enthusiastically, as she was bubbling over with happiness about how well it'd gone. Me too, because it could so easily have been a disaster. Ava and her parents left shortly thereafter. No doubt there'd be some interesting discussions in their car and home this evening, but it was as Vanessa had said, a done-deal. ^ There was also an important non-event: at no time during the evening did Ava mention I'd run a marathon, let alone in a world-record time. Vanessa had done most of the talking early on, but there'd been plenty of normal conversation after the hour or so Vanessa had needed. Some of the open conversation even mentioning running, so Ava had several opportunities to easily mention my unofficial world record. Her need to impress her parents wasn't quite as high as I'd expected it to be, because Vanessa had done such a good job selling me earlier, but Ava still must've been tempted. I was very happy that she'd resisted so well that she never even asked me for permission to mention it. As far I could tell, Ava had forgotten all about my run. Obviously she wouldn't have, so she'd pleased me very much. ^ When the Wests had gone, I copied Ava, and also went around and thanking everyone VERY enthusiastically, especially Vanessa. I should've known it wasn't as simple as that. Vanessa pointed out sternly, "They've given up on Ava searching for any other guy. Whatever guy she could have found might have made her happy and been good for her, so that puts a considerable onus on you. Looking after her is going to take some real time, effort and emotion from you, so don't think you've got a free gift. Quite the contrary, okay?" "Umm, yes Vanessa. I think I appreciate that. I know I don't know how much effort it's going to be, but I know it's going to be significant. I also know Julia needs someone she can rely on to help her with a lot of the stuff she does for me, so if my helping Ava helps Julia help me, then everyone wins, don't they?" "Haha. Well put. You're right that Julia needs help, and that does seem like a good chain of winning. I'll add that I think Ava's going to get more out of her relationship with you, than you are from her. Not because you'll put more effort into the relationship - you'll be too busy to do that - but because she values so highly what you can so easily provide. That can ease your conscience somewhat. By the way, this might end up costing you a sizable chunk of cash. How would you feel about that?" "Umm, confused, mostly. Won't she have plenty of her own money? Not that I'm begrudging her anything, I'm just puzzled." Vanessa said, "We'll talk about it more when you've got some money to worry about, and we'll talk more about getting that tomorrow evening." The parents wanted to talk in private, so the kids volunteered to finish the clean up in the kitchen. Donna too, happy to look good around me. Robert and Andrew were thanked for their support, and let go to do whatever they wanted to do. When we'd finished cleaning up, it was time to head up to bed - which meant unloading Donna on Mom and Dad. The four of us went in to see the adults, to bid them some more "Thank yous" and "Goodnights". Donna soon realized we were about to leave her, and she jumped into "Pathetic Groveling Apology Mode", begging my forgiveness for breaking her word before. Vanessa eyebrows went up. She'd seen all evening that something was up with Donna, and now she asked what it was. I explained, "I went for a run after school, taking Ava and Donna. Before the run I told them both - in no uncertain terms - that they MUST NOT tell ANYONE anything about my run. I said 'anyone', and I made sure Donna knew that included Mom, Dad, Carol, and everybody else. Donna promised to keep quiet. We measured out a marathon using the car's odometer and I started running it. I passed the 10k distance in just under the world record, and the girls got very excited." Prof asked, "Really? Under the world record?" "Yeah, about thirty seconds under, although the car's odometer wouldn't have been very accurate so it doesn't mean much. -- "When Donna and Ava got excited at 10k, I reinforced that they MUST not tell anyone. Again they agreed. I finished the marathon in about one hour, fifty minutes, which is about fifteen minutes under the world record. All the way home Donna was going on and on about wanting to tell people. Ava was fine - in fact, Ava was much better than fine; she was superb - but Donna was a pain. I told her over and over again that I didn't want her to tell anyone, but she wouldn't take no for an answer. The moment we got home, Donna stared me right in the face while she broke her promise by telling Mom." Donna burst into tears. She wasn't capable of talking so we ignored her for the moment. Prof said to me, "I did hear you correctly, didn't I? FIFTEEN minutes UNDER the WORLD record?" "Yes Prof. I know that seems somewhat amazing, but I don't really care about it. It was pretty much exactly the time I though I'd get. I did the run for another reason." Vanessa said, "I think I can guess. Half success, half failure, yes?" "So far, yes. I thought I'd wait a week or two to make sure." "I take it that the run was in the middle of nowhere? No other witnesses?" "No, just Ava, Donna and me." "That was a good idea, Mark. Well done. I'll think about it overnight, and we'll have a talk over breakfast, okay?" "That would be good, thanks. I'm quite upset by the result, and don't really know what to do about it." "I can imagine. We'll talk in the morning." Vanessa had finished, so Dad asked, "You REALLY don't care about beating the world record?" "Well, I think it's cool that I can, but I don't expect I'll ever run another marathon, so it counts for nothing in that respect. Its only real value to me is in giving me a couple of small clues about how my body works. I only have very vague, almost useless ideas about that, which is annoying. I don't think I'll ever understand much, but I wish I did." [[Actually, as you'll discover, I eventually understood everything, but the path to that knowledge wasn't easy.]] I remembered something, "Oh, while I remember. None of you tell anyone please. That's important. You understand why, don't you Vanessa?" "Yes. I'll explain it to Prof later." Mom said, "I'm pretty sure I understand, but Steven was probably too distracted to think about it, haha. We won't tell anyone, so don't worry about that." "No one would believe us anyway," added Dad. The three of us headed upstairs after listening to another blubbery apology from Donna, with me amused by the fact that all four parents believed me. It's great having gullible parents! Not so much about the marathon, but for the genetic hypothesis justification for what Carol and I were going to be doing in about one minute from now. My timing was out, because we talked for a while first. Girls like to talk a LOT! I still haven't worked out why - especially at a time like this! - but you have to humor them because they're the only people with breasts AND they're the cooks, so they're REALLY in control! We did some bringing each other up to date. Explaining more about my trustworthiness marathon test for example, especially about how well Ava had reacted, and how abysmally Donna had. We discussed how I was thinking of giving Ava a week or two to prove herself capable of keeping the marathon secret, and then we'd decide about telling her one or more of what I think of as "The Big Three Secrets". We talked about that for a little while, joking that as Nipple Power was named in honor of Ava's nipples, she should learn about that. Carol opined, "On the other hand, it'd be great if all four of us could go to bed together." Julia and I heartily agreed with that. Julia kept the conversation short because she was tired from her lack of sleep last night, saying, "There's no need to decide which yet, and we can tell her two or even all three. Let's not worry about it now." I raised the subject of Chloe, because she crosses my minds from time to time. The plan calls for her to be getting anxious about now, so I feel for her, unfortunately only mentally so far. Julia said, "I turned my phone off before dinner. Let's see if Chloe has tried to contact me." Julia turned her phone back on, and happily, "Yes she has. Good girl. Three calls and two texts. Let's see..." Julia read through the texts. "Just what we thought: she wants to talk with me, wants to know what's happening and when, which no doubt means, 'When's Mark going to ask me out?' I won't call her now, despite her 'anytime' plea. I've got a couple of other messages, let me check them before I turn it off again." Carol was happy to ignore her phone, so she and I occupied ourselves somehow until Julia joined in. It was already quite late, well after 11pm when we started getting physical, and I was a little worried that I wouldn't get any studying done again tomorrow morning. I was saved from that embarrassment by Julia's being so tired that she didn't last long, dropping off to sleep before midnight. Carol and I enjoyed a quiet extra one, then cuddled and talked for a little while before she drifted off. I'd run out of awake wives, so I went to sleep too. ------- Chapter 138: I Don't Put My Toys Away, or in Chloe's Case, Manage to Get Them Out Thursday, April 28, 2005 I didn't wake up until after 4am, so my studying time on the new computer system(s) wasn't very long. However, it was very good, as the work flowed much easier. Two reasons stood out. First, the screens are BIG! It's amazing how much better that is for something like lectures, where working out the meaning of a tricky bit can be much easier if the surrounding material is visible. Second, my desk area is now used only for making my own handwritten notes, keeping it very clean and easy to use. My memory is so good these days that I don't make many manual notes, but I do make some. I had my two pads, two pens, and two mouses arranged so I could move between note-taking and screen scrolling very neatly. (Or "two mice"? That would be correct if they were the animal versions, but for some reason "two mouses" seems better in that sentence.) I didn't study for long enough to get any sort of useful statistics for how much faster my study rate had increased, but it felt something like what I'd guessed, about 20%. The two girls came in, naked again. I don't understand how they can walk around naked, but I'm far too much of a genius to discourage it. Julia pulled my robe open, saying, "I woke up horny this morning. Would you become hard please, so I can sit on you?" "What? You want to, umm, put it in you?" "Yes please. That would feel very nice." "But your father could walk in at any moment!" "So? He'll just see me sitting on your lap." Our argument went the way of all of our arguments. When Julia was firmly 'ensconced', she asked me to demonstrate how the new computer set up worked. I had to take my hands off where they were, slide the chair forward and reach for the mouses. I like to finish my study sessions neatly - after I understand something, and before starting on the next block of new material - so I started finishing off what I'd been working on when the girls arrived. Unfortunately for my concentration, Julia started squeezing me. Given that she was ensconced, I guess I can say that she was squeezing me with her sconce. I have several times in this biography stated that I am very good at concentrating on things, aren't easily distracted, etc. It turns out that my ability to concentrate has a limit. I don't know what that limit is, merely that being squeezed by a sconce put me way, way over it. Not only was I not studying, sometimes I even forgot to think. Carol asked, "Do you normally study with your eyes closed? Doesn't that make it harder? Haha." "Argh. Do you know what she's doing to me?" "I can see her thighs flexing. I'd be asking for my turn, except we need a condom. I start the pills in a day or two, you know?" "Oh yes, I know all right! I'm looking forward to that very much. It'll be great to be able to bounce back and forth between the two of you without having to stop to get a rubber on. Not to mention it feels much better." "Soon you'll be able to bounce back and forth between three of us, with Ava." "I hadn't forgotten her. It's just that I can't count to such a high number, because my math studies are always being interrupted." Julia suggested, "How about we go back to the bedroom, and take care of the interruption properly?" I know better than to argue. I carried Julia all the way back to the bedroom still firmly ensconced. Back in the bedroom, Carol and I ganged up on the interruption, taking very good care of it. The moment I saw Prof at breakfast, I immediately said, "Prof, the new computer system is a GREAT help to my studying. It's too early to know for sure, but I think my 20% improvement guess was probably about right. I enjoy working with it, thanks very much." "Good. I'm glad to hear it. Don't forget it was Julia who got the ball rolling by telling us about your poor procedure." "I'm NOT going to thank her. She did it for entirely SELFISH reasons - this morning she demanded I spend the 20% time saved back in bed with her, making her feel good. You'd better not tell OSU that all their investment is doing is giving Julia more sex, haha." Julia said, "I think it's worth every dollar they spent. Good for them!" When we'd finished joking around with that, the conversation turned to the Wests. In the course of that conversation a natural opening occurred to tell The Boys about my world record marathon run. I decided to tell them about it, for a variety of reasons: It wasn't a damaging secret if it got out, I was very comfortable they wouldn't blab (and even if they did it wasn't likely to upset Ava's test as the people they'd blab to would be different), it was a good idea to find out if Andrew and Robert were trustworthy, and perhaps most important because it was more applicable, it'd give them confidence that their parents and Julia had good reason to treat me so unusually. I had several times seen that they couldn't comprehend why their parents were behaving so bizarrely around me. So after telling them it was a secret not to be repeated, I told them about my run. They were amazed, and then amazed again that I didn't care. I explained its purpose had been to confirm my guess about my body, and also to test Ava. I ended with, "Donna asked to come along at the last minute. That didn't work out too well for her, unfortunately." Which started a discussion with Vanessa about how to handle Donna. Vanessa's advice boiled down to, "She's got the message now, so you don't need to punish her anymore. Don't trust her with any more secrets, but treat her much the same as you have been in the past, otherwise you risk damaging your relationship with her." I was very aware that the Ducklings' lunch was planned for today. I discussed that issue with Vanessa, who advised, "Have the lunch. To cancel it would be to punish Donna pointlessly. Just don't do anything that requires more trust. Remember that the reason you took her on your marathon test was to check out her suitability for greater secrets in the future. That she failed means her future won't have new secrets in it, but it doesn't mean you should subtract non-secret things from your existing relationship with her." "We were planning a fairly sexy lunch. Not so much planning, as it was probably going to happen that way." "Don't allow anything that would get you in trouble if it became known. Hopefully you wouldn't have taken too much risk anyway, but play even safer now." Julia's phone went off, she checked the caller ID. Julia said, "It's Chloe. I'll answer her but keep it short. You might enjoy listening in, Mark." -- "Good morning, Chloe. How are you?" "Yes, sorry about that. We had a big dinner party last night, and I crashed right after. I've only just turned my phone on, but I'm at the breakfast table. Is there something quick you wanted to talk about?" "Oh, Mark. I agree that's an important topic. What about him?" "I don't know. Didn't he say he wanted a long-term relationship with you? If so, there's no great hurry, is there?" "Why don't you ask him, Chloe?" "You don't have his number. I actually meant you should ask him at school. Face to face is always better." "It wouldn't be right for me to give you his number. I'm sorry, but you can imagine how bad it'd be if every girl that fancied Mark had his number. His phone would never stop ringing, mostly from girls he has no interest in. He's too smart to waste his time on most of the silly girls who would try to chase him. Even though I know he thinks you're special, even very special, I have to respect the importance of his time by not giving it out myself." "You can ask. No harm in that, but expect to be turned down. I'd be stunned if he gave you his number. If he does, it'd be an enormous compliment to you." "No, he hasn't asked me for your number. He's BUSY. It's only been one evening since you started showing Mark how much you love him." "What's that? You DON'T love him? Okay. I'll be talking to him soon, so I'll tell him that." "But if you don't love him, what's the harm in my telling him that?" "Haha. I'm sorry Chloe, I'm teasing you. Remember that when you showed yourself topless to Mark, it only took him a second to understand everything, including what your true feelings were. He understood you better than you understood yourself, and far faster too. So he already knows you love him. How could you possibly think you could hide something as big as that from Mark? I was teasing about my telling him you didn't love him. He'd look at me like I was stupid if I tried to tell him that." "Just tell him you love him, Chloe. Get it in the open so you can stop worrying about it. Mark's in no doubt, I'm in no doubt, you're the only one who is worried about being open and honest. That probably means you don't trust him yet, which you might want to think about." "I'm sorry, Chloe, I don't have time to discuss that now. I have to finish my breakfast. I suggest you talk with Mark about it. He understands this a lot better than we do. See you at school, bye." Robert asked, "I'm curious how many girlfriends you think Mark needs?" Julia said, "She's a nice girl with spectacular tits. Even I have to say that, and I don't normally think of girls that way. She'll make a great temporary girlfriend for Mark, until she gets her attitude straightened out, and then she'll probably find someone more suitable for her." Which proved to me that I did NOT "understand this a lot better than Chloe and Julia do." Which I knew already, as everything I understood about Chloe I got directly from Julia in the first place. I asked, "Ahh, 'temporary'? That's the first time you've mentioned that." Julia answered, "Sorry. We spend so much time planning her falling in, I haven't had time to talk about her falling out. Isn't it fairly obvious?" "Last night Ava forgot I wasn't a girl. This morning you're making the same mistake. Remember I'm a BOY! We don't understand ANY of this stuff." "Haha. I'm tempted to classify this as one of those situations that you'll enjoy more if you don't know in advance, but for her sake I'd better explain. She doesn't love you. She never talked to you until Sunday and barely knows you. She just thinks it's love because she's never had a boy interested in her that she believed she could trust. That sudden freedom from paranoia and fear is a wonderful relief for her. She WANTS to love you, even thinks that she should love you, but she doesn't. Infatuated yes; in love no. Once she learns she can trust other guys, she'll start discovering there are plenty of nice ones around. Sooner or later she'll find one to fall in real love with. That is why we're teaching her she can trust other guys, after all." "Oh yeah, I guess it is. I didn't think it through that far. I guess everything you said is kind of obvious, but I'm glad you were here to explain it to me. Umm, if she doesn't really love me, why were you pushing her into admitting that she does?" "Once she admits it, she'll stop questioning herself about it. There'll be two benefits, and you can decide for yourself which is the most important: we'll be able to help her a lot more if she's not holding herself back in any way, and you'll be able to have a LOT MORE FUN if she's not holding herself back in any way. Haha." "Hmm. Tough call on deciding which is the most important. I guess it'll depend on whether my existing girlfriends have been treating me properly recently." "I can't say I'll treat you properly as often as you want, because that's physically dangerous. Robert, that's another reason why Mark needs several girlfriends: he'd wear out only two or three. Mark demolished the marathon world record, so imagine what that fitness would do to your poor, helpless, little sister." Robert imagined, "Put a smile on her face?" We chatted some more about Ava, but nothing new came up. Julia asked for a copy of the fake dust jacket to give to Ava. "Ava appreciated it a lot, so it'd be nice to give it to her as a souvenir." Robert said, "Sure. I'll get it for you after breakfast." Robert came in for some more praise for having done that. He insisted he'd only done it because his car was dirty. I let Vanessa and Prof know that I'd be having dinner at my house after visiting Katelin's, but I'd come over afterward to talk about the business progress. As soon as we were in the car, on the way to my place to pick up Donna, I asked Julia something I'd been too bashful to ask around the breakfast table, "Julia, why don't you think Chloe will fall in love with me? Don't you think I'm lovable?" "You KNOW I think you are, and I've got EXCELLENT taste and very high standards, haha. Chloe's infatuation will be temporary because YOU won't let her be a permanent girlfriend. I think she's probably too much like Carol, which will attract you to her initially, but won't work in the long run because she'll suffer from the comparison. She'll get a crush on you, and maybe even fall for you more than that, but she'll eventually see that she doesn't have enough of your heart and she'll move on. That's my current opinion, which could change as we get to know her better. Especially if she turns out to be more dissimilar to Carol than I expect." "Okay. Thanks." Carol asked, "Don't you think another girl like me would be good?" I wasn't sure whether she was asking me or Julia, but I answered anyway, "I was just daydreaming about that! Two identical Carols would be WONDERFUL, but Julia worded it well when she said Chloe would suffer from the comparison. She's going to get unhappy at coming second all the time. That doesn't happen with you and Julia, because I don't compare you. You're so different from each other that it doesn't make sense to compare you. Ava's different in another way too, although that's less important because we're not thinking of her as a wife. But I can't see Chloe being happy at being considered a half-Carol." #2: Julia asked, "Mark do you know what to say if Chloe declares that she loves you?" "Pretty much the same as I say to almost anything she asks: 'She's not ready yet.' I'd wrap it up in compliments and thank yous, but I'd refuse to act on it, or allow her to act on it. Right?" "Yes, good. What about if she asks for your phone number?" "Hmm, that's bit hard to refuse. I could say 'she's not ready' again, but it's not as if giving her my phone number is a major commitment." "She's going to want to talk with you for HOURS! I can almost guarantee that she's going to be effusive. What are you going to do if she calls you every night before going to sleep, and wants to spend ages talking romantic nonsense back and forth?" "That would be VERY bad. Impossibly bad. There's nearly always something going on, and not the sort of thing I want to stop in the middle of for a long, mushy, telephone conversation." "If you simply give her your number, she's going to assume the usual boyfriend-girlfriend start-of-relationship etiquette, which would probably cost you at least an hour a night, or if you cut it short, cost you a very distraught girl the next day. So you have to change that expectation. Do it when she asks for your number, and do it kindly. Can you do that?" "I can't think of a kind way now, but I think I will in time. It's obviously going to happen sooner or later, so I'd better start thinking about it." Which means getting my two spare minds onto the job. "It'll happen early today. Chloe was frustrated and anxious because she couldn't talk with you yesterday. She won't want that to happen again. On the topic of girls consuming your time, Robert's question about how many girlfriends you want is a good one. We don't so much need a specific limit on the number of them, but we do have to be careful they don't consume too much of your time. Ava will take quite a lot, although she'll effectively give some back by being helpful." Without doubt, having to go to school is a damned nuisance. It consumes a vast amount of time, which could be put to much more enjoyable use with multiple girlfriends. Roll on summer! During the drive to my place, Julia gave Ava a quick call. Ava did most of the talking, so after the call was ended Julia reported, "Everything's good at her end. Her parents still can't get their head around how unique you are, but they appreciate how much support we're offering her. I was worried they'd wake up this morning and realize Mom manipulated them, or they'd suddenly decide the sex situation was unacceptable, but neither of those seems to have happened. I think her parents will work out fine." At home a very contrite Donna apologized again, while Mom looked on. I replied, "Yes. I understand that, Donna." I resisted saying several things that I wanted to say, because of Vanessa's advice. In the car I told her, "Donna, if you want we'll still have lunch with the Ducklings today. HOWEVER," I loudly stressed, to stem Donna's resurgence of enthusiasm, "it will NOT be anything like as sexy as we discussed before. It'll be much more like an ordinary lunch. We'll just sit around and talk." "Oh. Umm, what about RPS? They've all been practicing." "I don't care if they have. We're not going to be doing anything sexy like I did with that girl at Carol's lunch." "Oh." Julia said, "Mark. The Ducklings are very excited to meet you, and it's not their fault that Donna couldn't keep a secret. Since they've been practicing so much, how about having a real RPS competition. An elimination tournament until only one girl is left. Let her sit on your lap and cuddle for a few minutes. Something to make the winner happy, and get them all to think that you're a very fair and reasonable guy. What do you think?" I thought her saying "fair and reasonable guy" was a bit of a giveaway that Julia was politely manipulating me. That didn't mean she was wrong though. In fact, it probably meant I was wrong, as that's the way these things often seem to work. I said, "Okay, we'll do something with RPS, but it won't be much. It CERTAINLY won't be anything like giving her an orgasm. Girls that age are too young for that sort of stuff anyway." "Ahh..." started Donna. Julia interrupted, "Leave it, Donna. If you behave like a 9-year old, then you're going to be treated like a 9-year old. Mark sees your friends as similar to you, so they'll be treated that way too." "But I didn't mean to act like that. I was just..." Julia interrupted, "You DID mean to act like that! You deliberately looked right at Mark while you told your mother. Mature people do NOT behave like that. Last night you saw Mark ask my parents not to tell anyone, and they all quietly and maturely agreed. They didn't kick up a fuss and argue like you did. Stop saying thing like, 'I didn't mean to', 'I didn't realize', and 'I didn't understand'. You KNEW it was Mark's secret, and you deliberately chose to break your promise to him. Everything you did is 100% your fault, and everybody in both families knows you did a bad thing, including you. The sooner you stop denying it and start taking responsibility for your childish decision, the better. You've seriously disappointed all of us, and it's going to take you months of behaving perfectly before Mark's going to trust you again." That was the end of Donna for the rest of the trip. I was glad she was sitting behind me, so I couldn't see her face. When we got to school, Julia told Donna to stay in the car so the two of them could have a talk. Carol and I were asked to leave them to it. When Julia caught up to me a few minutes later, I asked her what she'd said to Donna. "I talked about the future and what she has to do from now on. She'll be all right. I expect she'll be EXTREMELY well behaved for a while, haha." It didn't take Chloe long to find me, spotting me still some distance from my first class. She rushed up to me, then stopped short, not sure what to do next. "Good morning, Chloe." "Umm, good morning, Mark. And Julia too." Julia was attached to my arm, of course. Chloe continued, "Umm. I was hoping to talk with you yesterday Mark, but I, ahh, didn't have your phone number." "Well, we can talk now. What did you want to talk with me about?" "Umm, about you and me." "That's a nice topic. Oh, while I remember, here's your pizza container back. Thank you VERY much for that, both toppings were delicious. You make very nice pizza." I dug her container out of my backpack, and gave it to her, adding, "What did you want to say about you and me?" "Umm. I'm not sure, exactly. I just wanted to talk with you, to find out what you thought about what happened yesterday, and what's going to happen next?" Now was an EXCELLENT time to make the point about me being busy, especially because the events in a couple of days might not sound nearly as impressive as what I could say now (I'd been thinking about this on the way to school). I said, "Chloe, I spent all of yesterday evening, from before dinner to bedtime, with two old people who're dying of cancer shortly. They've got some major responsibilities in their lives which I'm taking over for them when they die, and last night I was proving to them that even though I'm only fifteen, I'm capable and trustworthy. In many respects, they were making the biggest decision of their lives, to trust me with something so important to them, so it was an intense evening. -- "After school today, but before dinner, I'm visiting a family that has some serious problems with the kids being horrible to each other. I'm trying to help them become more loving, like my sisters and I are. -- "After dinner I've got a meeting to work on a business idea of mine. I've got two... , 'employees' I guess you'd call them, who've been doing some important research for me for several days, and they need to inform me of their findings and then we have to decide what we do next. There's a lot of money at stake, at least $100,000, and about a dozen people are relying on me to do it right. The business totally depends on me, as it was my idea originally and no one else can do what I can do for it, so everybody is waiting for me. -- "So which of those activities should I interrupt so I can talk with you?" It was an unanswerable question, not made any easier when Julia said, "Not to mention Mark's doing two grades and college. He has an enormous amount of homework from those, because while he's sitting in one class, he's missing what happens in the other grade and the college lectures, both of which he has to read through when he gets a chance. Mark does at least ten times as many hours of homework as me, to keep up all his studies." Julia made it sound much worse than it was, because school is actually REALLY inefficient. It only takes a fraction as long to learn a class's worth of material as an actual class takes. In practice I do virtually all my 11th grade reading for one day during the next day's 10th grade classes, and still follow everything that's occurring in class. Usually the only schoolwork I have to do outside of school hours is assignments that I can't easily do in class. I should mention that since my second merge to four minds, this process has become substantially easier. Even just in the last few weeks, I'm finding it easier and easier to keep up with all my schoolwork. Not dramatically easier, but certainly usefully so. Chloe was dumbstruck, but still managed to say - because "dumbstruck" is only a figure of speech with a girl - "You really do all those things?" A silly question, but she needed to say something, as it's a genetic compulsion. "Sure..." Julia said, "I've told you that Mark is not a normal teenage boy, Chloe. He doesn't sit at home playing computer games, or whatever other silly activities most teenage boys do. Mark does Mark-level things, appropriate to his enormous abilities." #3: #1: #4: "Oh. I didn't know." #4: I said, "Chloe. You know I like you, don't you? In fact, a great deal?" "You do?" #1: #4: "How could I not like you a great deal? You're a lovely person. Now that I think of it, you heard me use those exact same words to describe you to Julia. You were in the cubicle, remember?" She didn't even pretend to have forgotten, simply saying, "Yes, I remember." "Good. I like you a lot and you know that for a fact, thanks to my big mouth. However - and this is an important 'however' - we are not yet boyfriend and girlfriend." "We're not?" "Have I asked you for a date? Have I rubbed pizza all over your naked breasts and licked it off?" #1: She eventually lifted her head, and asked me, "Why haven't you?" "You mean, apart from me being so hungry I ate all the pizza, so didn't have any left to do that with? Haha..." #1: " ... Sorry, Chloe. Sometimes I have a stupid sense of humor. I haven't asked you for a date because it's too soon. You're not ready yet. Remember how I knew in the bathroom that you weren't ready to trust me? Your trust in me has improved, but you're still not ready to be a good girlfriend yet. Relationships are important - especially with someone as nice as you - so we don't want to start ours too early, do we?" "I don't understand?" "Yes, I know you don't. I'm not teasing you though; I'm thinking ahead. One day you'll understand. Unfortunately I can't tell you what you have to do. It has to come from within you to be an honest reflection of who you are. It's important to your life, and I don't want to shortcut the process just because I'm greedy and impatient to have you as my girlfriend." There wasn't much she could say to that, which had been my intention. The plan was for me to be mysterious and tell her to keep trying. She'd turn to Julia, and Julia would be a lot more convincing and believable than I could be; while still giving me all the credit. How's that for a fair division of the work? Chloe asked, "Are you really impatient to have me as your girlfriend?" With gusto, I declared, "ABSOLUTELY! No doubt about that at all." Chloe smiled happily. "But more importantly than having you as my girlfriend, is having a relationship which is good for both of us. As much as I want to take you in my arms, in a good relationship the people care for each other in ways far beyond just wanting to be in bed with them. Your life will be a lot better if I restrain my impatience, so that's what I'm forcing myself to do." I was very pleased to see that Chloe certainly noticed my "in bed" comment, but she didn't react negatively. She didn't lick her lips or anything as overt as that, but that didn't matter too much. If she didn't refuse, then it would happen. And if it happened, I'd rock her inexperienced little world, and she'd be all mine. She was lost for words again. Knowing that it wouldn't take her long to find some, I said, "Good things take time, sweetie, and I think you're a VERY good thing. I'll wait until you're ready, no matter how long that takes." I particularly enjoyed saying that, as Chloe didn't want me to wait at all; she wanted it NOW! This would drive her to Julia in even more desperation, and at the same time make her think I was a very honorable guy. It was a lovely little piece of trickery. "But how long ... I don't know what you're waiting for, or how long, or anything. What do I have to do to be your girlfriend?" "I don't know whether you've noticed this before Chloe, but there are some boys who are just interested in girls for sex. Have you noticed that?" Chloe understood I was joking, and giggled. "I'm one of the guys who is NOT like that. I want to have a very good relationship with you. I can't understand why guys are so superficial, as having a true friend is a wonderful feeling AND it transforms the sex into lovemaking, which is so much better. If I wait, that's the sort of relationship we could have. If we started our relationship now, it'd be starting without a good foundation, and would end up just being a sexual relationship. You are far too nice a person for me to settle just for sex. I want sex AND friendship with you... ," #4: " ... where friendship is obviously by far the most important. Although, to be polite, I shouldn't make assumptions about you. You DO want friendship as well as sex, don't you? Not just sex by itself? If that's all you want, then I'm not the right guy for you." Julia had to look away, in order to keep a straight face. #3: "Umm. Friendship would be good." "Of course it would. I know my question seemed silly, but I've noticed that a lot of people don't have a mature attitude to sex. They don't treat it as a natural and good part of life. Instead they get all secretive and weird about it, so I've learned it's a good idea to double-check what people are thinking about it. I never thought you'd have anything other than a healthy, mature attitude about it, but it was worth a quick question to check. I couldn't imagine you wouldn't value friendship, especially considering how much you love me. Naturally you'd want to..." "{Gasp}. You... , you said 'love'. You said I loved you." "Sure. It's obvious." All this conversation was just a pile of bull manure. A big pile, at that. I was simply throwing good-sounding crap around, knowing that Julia would later use it to manipulate Chloe in whatever direction Julia wanted. I was effectively giving Julia ammunition. The 'love' thing was a little different, but only in that I said it to support something Julia had already said. It still provided more ammunition for her to use later too. "How do you know? How DID you know?" "Heavens Chloe, there's proof all over the place. Your face lit up when I arrived a few minutes ago. You want to share your feelings with me, my approval is very important to you, you hang on my every word, etc. You're a very giving person, so falling in love makes you glow. With the way you feel about guys, you couldn't have shown me your breasts on Tuesday unless you had very strong feelings for me. Including trust, and we all know that trust is the essential foundation for love. You've shown me so much trust, that anyone could see that love was already present." I turned to Julia, asking, "Julia, you knew Chloe loved me, didn't you?" "Of course. It didn't need a genius to work that out. It's obvious, especially when she's with you." "Chloe, this sounds like a silly joke, but it's not: 'You've never been good at hiding big things.' That's not a reference to your body, it's a reference to your personality. You're a very open, honest person. All year long I've seen how much you've been hurt by guys. Even though you tried to hide the hurts, there's no way you could, because their effects on you were too big and you're such an open person. You couldn't hide hurts when you wanted to, so you certainly can't hide love when you're so happy." Chloe had an expression of part incredulity, part dismay, when she asked, "You knew I was being hurt?" "Sadly, I saw it many times." "But you hardly ever looked at me. You almost NEVER looked at me." "I could hardly have said I considered you a lovely person unless I'd looked at you. I looked at you quite often, because I DO think you're a lovely person. I just did my best to make sure you didn't notice me looking at you." That was probably the first true thing I'd said all conversation. "But why?" "Because you would've believed I was staring at your tits, just like you assume every boy always is. I couldn't talk with you for the same reason, because you would've assumed I was after your tits. I couldn't stand up in class and make a speech to try to help you the way I did for Carol, because you would've assumed I was after your tits. Anything any guy does involving you, you always assume he's after your tits. There was nothing I could do, so I did nothing except avoid offending you. The one time I did try hard - in the parking lot after bowling on Sunday - you assumed I was after your tits. -- "If it wasn't for the lucky coincidence that I was going to an extremely unusual party where lots of your female classmates learned enough about me to realize that I wasn't that sort of boy, and then Julia making a HUGE effort to get so many of those girls to talk with you about that party, then I wouldn't be standing here talking to you now. You owe Julia an enormous amount of gratitude, because if she hadn't done what she did I would never have talked to you again, and you never would have wanted me to. Remember that Julia's my part-time girlfriend, and STILL she helped me help you. NO other girl would've been so extraordinarily caring for you as Julia has been." I'd intended to work in some sort of commitment to stand up in class and make a speech to help Chloe, as I'd done for Carol. I was already planning to give such a speech as it was part of the same plan of Julia's that had Carol flash her tits in class, so my committing to do it now, then delivering on it in a few days, would impress Chloe. But I'd gotten distracted into talking about Julia instead. I'd figured that building Julia up in Chloe's eyes was more useful than promising a speech that she'd get anyway, especially as I should be able to work that promise into our next conversation. Chloe started effusively thanking Julia. I decided it was a good time to make my escape, as I was running out of meaningless crap to say. I interrupted Chloe's gushing to say, "I'll leave you to it. I need to go have a talk with someone." I wasn't sure who yet, but I'd find someone. That caught Chloe by surprise, and she floundered for a second or two before she worked out the crux of the matter, "But I don't understand. What happens now? Am I your girlfriend or what? I don't understand?" Hardly surprising, given that I'd spread a whole lot of informationally empty BS around the place. I said, "When you're ready, sweetie, I'll ask you to become my girlfriend, my lover, and my friend. I very much hope that's soon, but that's up to you. In the meanwhile we're just friends, although that's pretty good in my opinion. We'll talk a lot, I'll copy your homework answers, and we'll do the usual school friends things like enjoying each other's company. I'll leave you two talking while I go do my other thing. Nice talking to you, Chloe. Catch you both later, bye." #4: "But... , but what do I have to do to get ready? I don't..." I kept walking, while Julia was saying, "Shush, Chloe. To be a good girlfriend for Mark you have to let him be in charge of the timing for things. You heard him say how busy he is, and the sorts of projects he's busy with. They're too important to be interrupted when you haven't yet proved yourself ready to be his girlfriend..." I'd moved too far away to catch the rest, but I had no trouble imagining what Julia would be saying. In about thirty seconds it'd include something like, "I don't know how he wants you to get ready either Chloe. He's a GENIUS, so he often thinks far beyond my level. Maybe we can work it out together. Do you want me to help you, sweetie?" Said the spider to the gorgeously titted fly. When Julia and I next had a chance to chat about Chloe, Julia said, "Everything's looking great. You did a good job on her." I started patting myself on the back, when Julia added, "But, by God, are you EVER long-winded! You got the right result, so you're much better than you used to be, but you're not usually going to have the luxury of taking so much time. I know you like to be gentle and considerate, but sometimes you can get much more done, much faster, by being blunter." "I'm not disagreeing with you - in fact, I do agree with what you just said - but my talk with Chloe wasn't a good example of me being too slow. I deliberately used nearly all the time we had to spread as much BS around as I could, to make things easier for you later. I had nothing else to do, so there was no reason not to stand around working on Chloe." "Sorry. I thought you did have something else to do." "No. I left at the end because I'd more or less run out of crap to say, and it left you with a couple of minutes to work your magic on her. BUT don't apologize again, because you're right that I'm too slow, even though that wasn't a good example." In the first class, before we started, I gave Alexis a good morning kiss. It didn't have any of the drama of yesterday, and when it was over she complained, "What, no pussy rub. I've gone commando expecting one." All but one male head in the class immediately and pointlessly lowered to look at Alexis' jeans. Given that every single male would have already noticed if Alexis had been going bottomless, their hearing that she wasn't wearing panties made no difference to what they'd see if they looked at her. It wasn't as if her jeans had somehow magically vanished in the last couple of seconds. Guys are very hopeful; usually stupidly so, but that's guys for you. I was standing right in front of her, so close that our chests were pressed together, so the only male head that hadn't looked down had been mine. That would've accidentally made me look cool, calm and mature to all the girls in class (the boys all looking elsewhere rather than at me), which was a nice little boost to my reputation, I thought. Coolness isn't commonly associated with me, except by the occasional accident. Looking Alexis in the eyes, I reached down with both hands, unbuttoned the top of her fly, then lowered the zip. Every boy was silent and staring. The {zip} sound had their total attention; not that their attentions had moved far after her "commando" comment, especially as she'd said it brazenly, not caring how many heard. Or perhaps wanting them to. Alexis had a BIG smile on her face, so being careful not to expose her, I reached into her jeans with one hand. "My, my; so you are. That's exactly what I like about you Alexis, you're so 'open and honest', haha." She chuckled, then requested, "Harder." "You'll take whatever I give you; lump it or leave it." "Oh, lump it. Definitely lump it, haha." So I did as she wanted, I rubbed her lump harder. Guys were craning their necks to get a look, but they had no chance. I was standing in front of Alexis so the only angle they had was in from the sides, which offered them nothing because the outward leaning sides of her fly blocked side-on views. Not to mention that because God had very conveniently put our longest finger in the middle of each hand, my other fingers covered her fully. I couldn't use hardly anything in the way of good technique because her jeans were too restrictive. I just rubbed her clit, occasionally venturing a little farther south to check out her increasing juiciness. After about thirty seconds, I gave her clit an extra hard rub, dipped my finger into her pussy to wet it as much as possible, then pulled my hand out. "Aww, that was just getting good. I'm horny now." "Yes, I could tell." I stuck my tongue out, and ran my finger down it several times, turning it around so I could clean every side. Now I had a problem. I didn't want to say "Delicious!" because that was my usual comment. If I said it en masse to the whole class now, then when I later said it to some of the class's girls individually, presuming Julia or I get the better looking ones into my bed (fingers crossed), then the repetition might not please them. On the other hand I had to say something. Or did I? I decided I didn't. I stuck my finger entirely in my mouth, turned and walked away. I knew Alexis was decent. Even though her fly was undone, her jeans were stiff enough that there was barely any gap between the two sides, and certainly not at the base of the fly, where it mattered. Lots of guys rushed around to get a front-on view. Other than a slight intake of breath, I don't know how Alexis reacted, because I was walking away. She called, "Aren't you going to do me up?" I was about to say something about her being horny and maybe needing to finish herself off, when I had a much better idea. I pulled my finger out of my mouth, and without even turning around, loudly said, "I don't put my toys away." I got quite a few laughs for that, including from Alexis. #3: #4: #1: #4: #1: When I'd sat down, still sucking my finger, I looked at Alexis, and she smiled happily at me, calling, "Thanks." "My pleasure. If we keep doing this every morning, I'm going to start enjoying coming to school." Everyone knows I'm the most studious student in the school, so they got the joke. Admittedly a nerdy joke, rather than a cool one, but two cool jokes in a row was too much to expect. I looked around the class, curious to see what they thought. As far as I could tell, all seemed fine. It'd obviously been done in fun, and no one looked like they were angry, disgusted, or anything else too bad. It'd probably been too sexual for some of the girls, as some of them looked bashful. On the other hand, a lot of the class obviously totally approved, with Alexis and Julia at the top of that list, plus plenty of others. I noticed that Savannah was looking at me funny, which I thought was due to my pathetic grope of her yesterday. I'd been quite pissed off with her self-centered complaining then, but I didn't feel so bad about it now; the Chloe situation having improved enormously since then. Not to mention that Savannah WAS very sexy, except for the fact that she had a high opinion of herself because of it, which I didn't like at all. I'd thought of Savannah as being an "ugly" person (personality-wise) when I was walking away from the lunch with Carol, but maybe she wouldn't be so bad if she was brought down a notch or two. #1: So I decided to ignore her. Julia was talking to me, and I had plenty of work I could do during class, so ignoring Savannah was easy. When class ended, Savannah came over and asked, "Are you feeling better now, Mark?" "Yes, thank you." While I continued to pack up my stuff. "Ahh..." "I'll tell you outside Savannah. Where others won't overhear." "Tell me what?" "I presume you wanted to ask why I did so little to you yesterday?" "Ahh, yes." Outside I told her, "It's not necessary for me to grope you girls as much as you groped me to make the point that you should be respectful to guys. I'll only properly grope a girl if she desires me and she's sexy enough for me to enjoy it." As expected, Savannah said, "But I DO like you. That's why I went to see you bowl and why I took my bra off at the lunch. And especially why I did what I did in the hot tub." "I know all that. I also know you've been waiting for me to ask you out. But I said that the girl had to like me AND I had to think she was sexy. Why did you arrogantly assume that I think you're sexy? That arrogance of yours turns me off. You're too full of yourself to be good company, and that's what I most look for in a good girlfriend. You have to either lower your standards for the quality of guy you want, or have a good look at your attitude. I sincerely wish you good luck if you try the second choice, because you would be good company if you dumped your superiority complex. Catch you around." #1: #3: #2: #3: #2: #3: #2: When I was talking to Julia later in the day, I asked, "What do you generally think of Savannah?" Julia said, "As a girl for you, you mean?" "Yeah." "She's sexy, and she's turned on by the idea of you and Carol. I think she's got too high an opinion of herself to be a good girlfriend though." "Why did you include her in the group of girls for me then?" "Didn't I just answer that? That's the question I thought I was answering." "I meant, why did you include her in the group if she wouldn't be a good girlfriend?" "Because that wasn't the sole criterion. Girlfriends consume a lot of time so you'll never be able to have more than three or four at a time. We want you to have... , not necessarily 'relationships', let's say 'dealings', with far more than three or four girls. Savannah was included because she's sexy. I had an idea that you enjoyed sexy girls. If that's not true, I can easily find plenty of unsexy girls for you? They'll be VERY easy to seduce, haha." "I wouldn't want to put you to all the bother of changing your criteria. Let's stay with the current approach, shall we? Haha. I made the mistake of assuming all the girls were possible girlfriends. I'll remember they're not from now on." "Good." "So what are they for then? I'm a bit fuzzy on that." "You've lost track of the forest because of all the pretty trees. Some are for girlfriends, some just to have fun with, and some just to learn from. Savannah believes in herself so much that her attitude makes guys fall into line, so you'll learn not to fall for that. Remember that the parents think you're playing around mostly to protect yourself in the future. Because your business idea has been coming along so well recently, I've been able to tell Mom and Dad, 'I told you so!' That's been good. I bulldozed them into supporting your playing around, and they weren't sure it was a good idea, but it's looking better and better all the time." "Why is it looking better? It's been pretty good the whole time." "Ava is one reason. Mom approves of what we're doing for her, even if it happened because I got stupidly carried away. But the main reason is that Mom and Dad can see you're getting much better with girls generally. Not just from what I tell them either; they see it for themselves. Mom saw Anna lying on top of you in the hot tub, when Anna was saying she was in love with you. Mom could see you were uncomfortable because you knew Anna was being silly, whereas a month ago you would have been telling her you loved her back, if only to make her feel better. Dad came into the room when you were screwing Lily, and could see you had a lot more self-assurance around girls. When one of the girls stays overnight we see you and her at the breakfast table and can judge your improving attitudes from that too. There are plenty of opportunities for us to see that you're rapidly improving. We originally thought we had a year or more to toughen you up, but it'll have been only a month if your money comes in soon, so Mom and Dad are very pleased that I pushed them into supporting your 'female education'. You're going to need it when news of your wealth gets spread around." I knew better than to suggest keeping it quiet. I wanted us to have the mansion, and that's not the sort of thing people fail to notice, or that Julia would fail to broadcast. We chatted a bit longer, and then I remembered my original issue, and I asked, "So if Savannah tries to trick me, you don't mind me trying to trick her back? Having a bit of fun with her head?" "I highly approve, especially with someone like Savannah. She'll manipulate you every way she can for totally selfish reasons, so she's fair game. What did you have in mind?" "A while ago she asked me why I didn't grope her more yesterday. She couldn't understand why I wouldn't want to take advantage of her very sexy body. I told her I think she's too arrogant to be sexy, and she should either lower her standards for the quality of guy she wants, or fix her head. I'm guessing that she'll not want to lower her standards, haha. Especially if I get rich. I think she'll put on some sort of goody two-shoes act to try to fool me. I was thinking I could lead her on by giving her some hope, and take her to bed and say she's not very good, and tell her to try harder. It'd be fun to get her to try harder and harder. I'd be curious how far she'd go if her ego was being questioned like that." "Good boy! Her ego is certainly the way to lead her around. That sounds great. You could have a lot of fun with that, and it'd be good practice for you." ------- Chapter 139: Half a Lunch with the Ducklings Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Continued) The rest of the time before lunch didn't have anything major happen, mostly just some friendly chatting with quite a few girls, including more 11th graders than normal - some of the politer ones that'd been to our lunch yesterday. Several girls asked about lunch today, checking that Julia and I were still going to be busy elsewhere, as Julia had apparently told them yesterday. I noticed one of the football chasing guys listening in to one such conversation, so they were probably going to be a nuisance the next time we have lunch at high school. The girl who'd been most upset by my nasty comment to Chloe yesterday had observed that Chloe was being extraordinarily friendly to me today. Chloe often smiled and waved to me, was coming over to talk with me about whatever excuse she could think of. She was even putting her hand on my arm, which was NOT Chloe's normal style at all. So the upset witness queried me about it, with considerable curiosity. Rather than telling her to talk with Chloe, I said, "Chloe worked out the reason I said that. It was very different than it seemed, and she appreciates what I did, as you can see. You didn't actually believe I'd say something like that to anyone, let alone Chloe, did you? Have you ever seen or heard me do anything like that before?" "No. That's why I was so shocked. If it'd been most of the other guys saying that I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But I don't understand why you did it though? Chloe hates comments like that." "She certainly does. Luckily for her she knows I'm not like other guys. I'm going to stop here though, as I don't believe Chloe would like us talking about her personal issues. I appreciate your interest stems from your concern for Chloe, but it would be much more polite if you talked to her directly about this. As you know, I am an extremely polite young gentleman when it comes to Chloe, haha." At lunchtime, Julia, Ava and I met up and walked down to the middle school together. I asked a question that'd been on my mind, "Ava, how are things at your home?" We spent most of the walk talking about Ava's parents. Ava's description boiled down to her parents still being somewhat in shock, and that they were worried. They weren't yet ready to celebrate Ava's success in landing me. Ava added, "They'll be fine. Mom even said it wasn't as if they could force me to find another boyfriend. I told her, 'Or girlfriend, ' and she did her best to laugh at that. They can see I'm happy, even if they aren't yet. They are pleased about how much support I'm going to get. Your mom did such a good job on them about that, Julia. She impressed them very much and they believe her assurances that I'm going to be looked after very well." I said, "Yeah, Vanessa comes across as so capable, anyone would be silly to argue with her." Julia one-upped me, "If you think that's bad, try arguing with Dad sometime. He doesn't put his foot down often, but when he does, it's hard down." Having been told off by him a couple of times, I had no doubt of it. There was one small interlude that occurred halfway through the above conversation. Both girls were wearing noticeably short skirts, which made me wonder whether they were wearing panties, even though I knew the idea of a sexy lunch had been scuttled. Nonetheless, being a curious sort of guy, I eventually succumbed to the temptation of asking, "Ahh, girls, are you following the original dress plan for today?" Julia quickly answered, "Why don't you feel under our skirts to find out?" We were halfway between the two 'schools', which means we were in the admin area. There were several teachers near us on their way to their lunchroom, so it was not the best time to act on Julia's suggestion. I nearly turned her joke back on her by suggesting they raise their skirts to show me, but then I feared that Julia might do it. I played safe, by saying, "I think I'll wait and see." "Seeing is one way. Feeling would be better." "Both are pretty good in my opinion, but I don't think it's going to be one of those lunches. This is going to be more subdued than we thought originally." "Sure, but there are still going to be pussies flashing all over the place. Ava, Carol and I don't want to feel left out. Donna too, I imagine, although I forgot to discuss her specifically." "Huh? Everyone's going commando? Didn't we tell Donna to cool it today?" "We did. It's true that we don't want you to do anything you could get in trouble for if a blabbermouth blabbered, haha, but there's no real trouble for you if all the girls forget to dress properly. The Ducklings want to show themselves to you, so why should we punish them for Donna's mistake?" "Umm. I guess we shouldn't. I'm not sure Donna will figure that out though. We were reasonably explicit in the car about this being an ordinary lunch." "Don't worry," said Julia, "I explained it during my little talk with her." "You 'explained' that the Ducklings should still take their panties off?" "Yes. I'm a naughty girl. You should put me over your knee and spank me, especially dressed the way I am now, haha. I know the Ducklings are your project, but I'm just putting them back to how you originally wanted, before Donna's misbehavior upset things. The Ducklings won't even know that the status of their panty-wearing changed, then changed back, so I'm not usurping your role by giving them any instructions. I did it because I was sure you'd prefer the Ducklings to be excited and happy this lunch, rather than sad and disappointed. 'Excited, happy AND flashing.' You'll enjoy that more, won't you?" "'Excited, happy AND flashing'? Hmm, I guess I might enjoy that more. That doesn't mean I'm going to let you off your spanking! That's too good an invitation not to take advantage of." I had an idea about what to do about that, and didn't want to ruin the surprise, so I said nothing more. Not so much because Julia would enjoy it more if she didn't know in advance, but because I would. A few seconds later I realized something, "Hey. You got me to wear one of the see-through shirts today." "Of course. You don't want the Ducklings to think that Ava and I have an unattractive boyfriend, do you? That'd be bad for our reputation." Yep, Julia was going to get spanked all right! After a few seconds more thought, I checked, "The basic idea is to excite the Ducklings, and even do some sexy things, but among the girls only. Not for me to get personally sexy with any of them, right?" "That would be best. We don't want to make a big, depressing deal out of it, but it'd be a good little lesson for her if Donna got the impression that you didn't enjoy yourself as much as you could've because you were scared of her blabbing. In reality it's more likely that one of the other girls would talk, and they're so young that it'd be good idea to be cautious anyway. Carol's classmates are two years older, so more trustworthy and less trouble for you if someone does talk. You're fifteen, so you're not going to get in big trouble for sucking on a 14-year old's nipple, but a 12-year old's is pushing it." We were well clear of the admin block, and I wanted the Ducklings to see that I had a threesome going to sexy up the atmosphere, so I took Ava's hand in mine. Previously Julia had been holding my lower-arm the way she normally does when we walk, but Ava had just been walking on my other side without any physical contact between us. That had been a good idea when there'd been several teachers within easy sight of us, especially as high-school students are discouraged from going down to middle school (and vice versa). It's not prohibited, but questions are often asked. Having lunch with my little sister - or when Carol comes up, with her big brother - is fine. But dressed the way I am and holding two girls' hands might get us a little too much attention. We didn't want a teacher to decide to come check us out halfway through lunch! For the rest of the walk, we reverted to talking about Ava's parents. She had quite a lot to say about them and their reactions to the dinner party and its revelations, but there wasn't much in the way of real information involved, so I won't bother quoting it here. We approached Donna's group with me attached to both girls. Before I got close enough to see up any skirts, Donna and Carol rose to their feet to greet me. Donna looked worried; good! The rest of the girls immediately stood too. I started the introductions, "Girls, this is Julia Williams. Julia is my number one girlfriend and lover. This is Ava West, my latest girlfriend and lover. Ava joined Julia and me only a few days ago, but already the three of us have some fantastic times in bed together." I could see that a few of the girls weren't shocked, which meant they hadn't understood yet. They'd get it eventually, after I got Ava and Julia to play with each other's pussies. I had made a mental note a few days ago to be very nice to Donna at this lunch. Apparently my being nice to my sisters put me above virtually every other brother the Ducklings had ever heard of. So I said, "And, of course, you know my other two girlfriends and lovers, Carol and Donna." Some of the Ducklings were still gasping in shock over my relationship with Julia and Ava, so it was difficult to tell how many of the new gasps were belated reactions to that introduction, or were in response to my latest comment. My sisters were standing facing me too, and looked just as shocked. I winked at them as I moved to put my arms around, then turned them around to face the Ducklings, clarifying, "They are my 'love - hers'. Two words. I was teasing you by telling you the truth. In a silly way I admit, but still the truth as I do love them both." I tightened my hugs briefly. -- "And they are my 'girls' and 'friends'. They're good friends who happen to be girls. Actually Donna only just became a girl as I consider it. Until recently we used to run around together, play basketball, get muddy, and do guy-type things. Then she foolishly started growing those bumpy things on her front. They're GREAT on other girls, but they're a nuisance on a sister. Now it's virtually impossible for me to get into the bathroom because either Carol or Donna is in there making herself look even prettier. Good grief, they're both pretty enough already, so why do they have to spend hours in the bathroom! Anyway, now I've introduced my foolishly bumpy sisters, and my two real girlfriends, Julia and Ava, what are all your names?" Having bewildered them all, it took a few seconds to get the introductions underway. I made Donna do the introductions in a way that made it easy for me to see each of them clearly, and put a name to each face. I uncentered and got each of my minds to take turns memorizing names, as I'd done at Carol's lunch. When we got to the end, I mentally checked that I had names for all of them. I was confident enough to say, "Have any of you noticed that when it comes to pretty girls, boys act very stupidly?" I got some giggly agreement. I continued, "You'd think that my having two lovers already would be enough, but 'No', being a boy I still remember the names of the pretty girls far easier than ordinary-looking girls. I'll go through you all, and call out the names of the girls I remember, which will be those girls who I think are pretty." I quickly worked my way through all the girls, touching them on their shoulders and saying their names. To my relief I got all their names right. To their relief too. At the end, they started asking each other, "Was that everyone?", "Did he miss anyone?" I said, "Put your hand up if you're pretty." That caused some interesting confusion. I gave them a few seconds, then added, "I only remember the names of pretty girls, so put your hand up if I remembered your name." Most of them put their hands up, but three did not. I called out their three names, then added, "I remember your names, so you must be pretty." They didn't appear convinced, so it was time to use the big guns. I walked over and kissed each of them on the cheek. The third girl tried for a lip kiss - so much for her lacking in confidence! - but I said, "It wouldn't be fair to the other two, so on the cheek only please." When I'd kissed her I said, "You may not believe I remembered your names because you're pretty, but I DEFINITELY only kiss pretty girls. Every single one of you here is pretty. When I was in 6th grade I don't remember the whole grade had this many pretty girls. I'm impressed you have so many pretty girlfriends, Donna." I wasn't exaggerating much either, this was a fine bunch of young girls. Their natural good looks were helped considerably by every single one of them wearing a short skirt, which wonderfully stimulated my imagination. Donna said, "Most of them aren't my girlfriends. They want to be YOUR girlfriend! That's what being a Duckling means." #4: #1: #2: "Do you girls like being called Ducklings?" That was greeted with lots of giggles. One of the girls eventually, bashfully, admitted, "We think it's very exciting. We're all very happy to be your Ducklings." "Show him, Chelsea," suggested one of the girls to another. Chelsea looked reluctant. "Go on," several of the girls urged Chelsea. "If you don't, I will," said one of the others. "Go on, Chelsea. You said you would and we all think yours is the best." "Okay, I will." #2: #1: #2: Donna commanded, "Get into position everyone, like I told you." As the girls all started moving, Donna said, "Mark, you know how ducks have a cute tail? It sort of flicks up at the end?" #1: #4: I quickly answered Donna, "Yes. They look very cute." I added the last sentence as some anticipatory appreciation, as all our minds had the same suspicion about what was coming next. Donna continued, "The girls that could have all trimmed their hair to look like a duck's tail. Chelsea's looks the best. Show him Chels." Chelsea looked around, saw we had privacy, apart from the two dozen members of our lunch party, and smiled at me nervously as she raised the front of her skirt. It would've been impolite not to look. Mom has raised me to be very polite, so I had a very good look. Chelsea had removed all her pussy hair, except for a thin vertical strip above her clit. That strip was shaved short at the top, and for about two-thirds of the way down, then the bottom third became increasingly long, so it gave the illusion of a little "flick up a the end," to quote Donna. "VERY nice," I told her pussy. I've never met a pussy I haven't liked, and that continues to be the case, especially with that cute effect. I looked up at the pussy's owner, and said, "Very cute, Chelsea. You've done a nice job. Ducklings are cute, and so are you." Chelsea blushed with pleasure, bashfully saying, "Thank you, Egg. Oh, we can call you Egg, can't we? Donna normally calls you Mark, but most of us say Egg." "Egg is fine. Lots of people call me that and I quite like it." I almost reached for her tail, then thought better of it. Rubbing her pussy would easily fit into the category of "Activities That Would Get Me Into Trouble If It Was Blabbed About". Not to mention that if we started off doing this, who knows what we might be up to by the end of lunchtime. I'd better not do it, but I did remember that I wanted to ramp up the bisexuality side of things, so I turned around and I called, "Julia and Ava. Do you want to come have a look at a very cute pussy?" "Yes please," said Julia. "I was hoping you'd ask." Julia looked eager, although I suspect it was more act than actual. "Me too." agreed Ava. "Oh," said Chelsea. I looked at Chelsea as I was moving away, and she seemed okay with it. The other girls had all agreed that she had the best one, which presumably meant they'd all looked, so Chelsea could hardly be shy. She'd just been surprised. Interestingly Chelsea mostly looked at me, while I was standing a few feet away from her, rather than down at Julia and Ava kneeling in front of her. After several seconds I said, "Good girl, Chelsea. You're a good Duckling." I had no real idea what she thought being a Duckling meant, but whatever it was, she was definitely being a good one. "Thank you. I really want to be one." #4: Chelsea's stated desire caused all the other Ducklings (or would-be Ducklings?) to call out similarly, with a great deal of eagerness. They were very eager for acceptance, and I wanted to reassure them. I was intending to say something like, "You're all very pretty, and would make wonderful Ducklings," but I thought better of it. Instead I said, "You're all very pretty, which is important, but there are lots of other things a good Duckling needs to be. Who can tell me what the main ones are?" They all knew, and they called them out in a big, mixed-up overlapping of eager voices. I was also pleased to hear many repeats of, "Donna says..." It was quickly apparent that Donna had been saying quite a lot to get the Ducklings to behave the way I wanted, which was wonderful of her. The Ducklings seemed to have taken Donna's instructions to heart, which was wonderful of them. Their answers expressed the same things in several ways, but they certainly had the right ideas, saying things like "We have to do what you say." Some of them added, "Donna says that's very important," and I couldn't help but agree. Another common comment was, "There might be quite a lot of sexy stuff, with you and sometimes with girls." #4: #1: "Very good, girls. Donna has told you correctly. Let's sit down and have lunch, and there are a couple of things I want to tell you." Carol called out, "Hang on please. I'd like to see Chelsea's duck tail up close while the other girls are still in position." "Oh yes. Sorry Carol, I keep forgetting you're interested in such things." I HAD forgotten, but to be fair to myself, there were a lot of distractions. I'd started my sentence intending to conclude it with a point about not thinking of my sisters as being sexual, to make it less likely any of the Ducklings would suspect I was an incestuously naughty boy, but it seemed best to stop where I did. Any more might've been suspiciously belaboring it too much. Ava and Julia moved away, and Carol took their place in front of Chelsea. Carol looked at the duck tail for a few seconds, then reached up and started brushing her fingers through the hair. Carol said, "Chelsea, do you know I am a lesbian?" #4: "Umm, yes. Donna said you and Mark's girlfriends sometimes, umm, you know." "Have you ever had sex with another girl?" "Umm. No. Not really." "If you spend time with Mark, you're probably going to do lots of sexy things. Some with him, some with girls. Are you ready for that?" "I think so. Donna said that if we wanted to be Ducklings we had to do whatever sex stuff Mark wanted, and she said he does a lot of that. It's scary, but I REALLY want to have sex with him." "Have you ever had sex with a boy before?" "Just kissing and stuff." "Do you want Mark to kiss you?" "Oh yes. That would be wonderful." "And do you want him to take your clothes off, and kiss you all over your body? To kiss you lips, suck your nipples and lick your pussy?" Chelsea's body shivered with anticipation, "Oh yes. I would LOVE that! Donna says he makes girls feel very, very good." "Yes, he does. You couldn't choose a better guy to be your first. Or your second, third and every other number too, haha. Every girl says he's the best she's ever had. You're very brave being the first girl here to show herself, and also in letting me touch you, so I hope you succeed at getting Mark to be your lover." All the girls were listening anyway, but Carol moved away from Chelsea a little, to address them easier, "There are dozens of girls promising my brother they'll do whatever he wants. There are dozens just in my 8th grade classes, plus more than a hundred in high school. To have any chance of Mark choosing to spend time with you, you're going to have to behave perfectly. Chelsea has set a great example so far. She's been sexy, obedient, truthful, let Mark and his girlfriends look at her closely, let any of us who wanted to touch her, hasn't talked too much or tried to beg Mark. She's done EXACTLY the right things, and I hope you'll all do just as well. -- "One day one of you might be invited to be Mark's girlfriend - maybe for one night, maybe for longer, or maybe even forever. If that happens, hundreds of girls will be incredibly envious of you, and it'll be the most amazing thing that could ever happen to you. So good luck, Ducklings!" While Carol was talking, I whispered to Julia, "This is not like Carol, and especially because in the car we said this lunch was just going to be an ordinary one." Julia answered, "I texted her earlier. She's just setting the mood. What you choose to get them to do is up to you." "Ahh, I see." Carol turned to Julia, "Is there anything you want to say now, Julia?" "Only to agree with everything you said, darling. -- "Chelsea, you have set a very good example. The rest of you, notice that she did what we wanted, exactly the way we wanted it. She also didn't make a fuss about anything. She didn't complain when Mark didn't touch her, for example, even though I'm sure she was wishing he would. Chelsea was excellent. That's how good every girl has to be, especially a Duckling, because Mark is so much older, smarter and more experienced than any of you." Julia looked at me, and I said, "Let's sit down and eat." I was looking forward to the eating part, of course, but also to the sitting down part. I expected to see a LOT of pussies when all the Ducklings sat down. I told my group how I wanted them to sit: Donna to my right, Julia to my left, then Ava and Carol farther left. The Ducklings had more trouble positioning themselves. They all wanted to sit facing me, but there were too many of them. Jostling was starting to get a little serious, until Julia spoke up. "Ducklings! Behave yourselves. We'll let you all have turns sitting close to Mark." Julia pointed out several of the girls, choosing those that were conveniently already in a good position to sit in front, saying, "You sit closest first, then a third of the way through lunch, you'll swap over..." I spoke up, "Actually Julia, I'm going to choose different girls to sit near to me first. Seeing them push each other to be in front was interesting. I don't like pushy, bossy girls; I much prefer helpful, cooperative, nice girls. The girls that let themselves be pushed away are much more likely to be the sort of girls I want, so will the following girls please come and sit at the front." I called out seven girls' names. I hadn't been paying much attention to the jostling, nor had that concept occurred to me until Julia was already arranging her solution, but I'd noticed enough to make it easy to pick out seven names. Once I'd called the names, I turned to start taking my lunch out of its bag, leaving Julia to duckherd the Ducklings into position. It took the girls at the front a while to moved back, and the girls at the back to move forward, so I managed to get a couple of bites down before I stopped eating to enjoy the sight of them all sitting down. Chelsea was one of the seven I'd named, and she was the first to sit and spread her legs so I got a great view. A couple of the other front-row girls weren't shy either, so they were very soon similarly displayed. The other four were more reluctant, modest, or whatever their 'problem' was, but they were eventually all sitting. I'd enjoyed looking at each of them in turn, and had smiled or made some small encouraging comment each time. The last of the seven girls to sit was a slightly different story - she sat modestly, and didn't expose herself to me. This was not good Duckling behavior! I like looking at pussies. They're almost 'right up there' with breasts, if you'll excuse the anatomical inaccuracy, so it was worth making a little effort to see if this terrible state of affairs could be remedied. I said the girl's name, "Susan," (I'm VERY pleased how good my memory is now), then "I can't help noticing that you're sitting modestly. I was particularly looking forward to looking at your pussy." This was a true statement. Not particularly as compared to other girls' pussies, but particularly when compared to looking at her knees or other boring body parts. "It's entirely your choice whether you show me, of course, but maybe there's a problem I can help you with. Is there a reason why you don't want to show me?" With a little bit of encouragement, the reason emerged. Susan confessed, "I'm embarrassed that I'm not very developed. I look like a little girl, and I don't have any hair at all. I'm too young." She was starting to get weepy, which I did not want at all, so I quickly said, "That's definitely NOT a problem. Look at my number one girlfriend! Julia is even smaller than you are, and she's my favorite of all the girls I've known." I knew Carol would forgive me for that lie. Besides, something important was at stake. I turned to Julia, and commanded, "Julia, show the girls your pussy. Be careful the rest of the school doesn't see." The Ducklings had their backs to the school, so we were 'facing' it, with more than just her face, if Julia wasn't careful. Julia said, "Certainly." Then she rearranged her legs and raised her skirt just far enough to let those sitting close see. I said, "See, Julia has no hair either. She shaves it off because I like it that way. I like my girlfriends to be smooth, so if you've got no hair at all then that's wonderful, because you skin must feel perfectly smooth. So your being hairless is NO problem at all! That's why I'm having lunch with all of you. I think girls your age are sexy! Older girls can get very full of themselves after they've had boys chasing them for a few years. I like it that you're young. I don't think less of you because of it; I think more! Now that I know you're hairless, Susan, I ESPECIALLY want to look at you, so please sit the same way as the other girls." "Really?" "I like my girlfriends to be hairless because that makes it much better to lick them. If we were in private now, I'd ask if I could lick you. I'd lick you over and over again, until you'd had several orgasms. Ahh, do girls your..." #4: " ... Umm. I was starting to get egotistical there, by assuming that my licking you would turn you on. Let's just say that I REALLY like hairless pussies. Because we're at school I can't show you how much, but if you watch me for the next several minutes, you'll see that I'll be looking at your pussy a lot. That's presuming you give me the pleasure of letting me look at all. Pretty please?" #4: #2: Susan hesitantly opened her legs a little, and I made appreciative noises, so she opened wider. Soon she was as exposed as the others. I said, "Thanks, Susan. You're very beautiful." I'd intended to get her to raise her skirt even higher, so she'd be more visible than the other girls, but, #1: < I think that's enough. We've probably even overdone it somewhat already. It's not as if we actually prefer undeveloped girls, is it? We'd much rather girls looked like Chloe or Carol.> So I left it at that, making a mental note that I should look at Susan and smile happily from time to time. Every girl that I could see apparently had no panties, and you can trust me that I checked VERY carefully. Unfortunately I couldn't see every girl, as some were obscured behind others, so to be sure I asked, "Are none of you wearing panties?" That was answered with a lot of giggling [for the whole lunch, pretty much every question I asked was greeted with giggles]. It slowly emerged that at the start of lunchtime Donna had gathered them all in one of the bathrooms, and they'd all had to take their panties off. There'd been a group 'skirt-raise' to prove they'd all done it, before they were allowed to come out on to the field. #4: Obviously I had to encourage such attitudes and behaviors, so I said, "I'm VERY impressed. This is EXACTLY how I wanted my Ducklings to behave. You listen to Donna when she's getting you to do things she knows I like, and you're all so beautiful and sexy for me. Not just taking your panties off, but those of you who have hair, shaving it off except for a duck tail. You make me want to come down to have lunch with you more often..." #1: " ... and maybe to do other things." I was REALLY bugged by my decision not to touch the girls. My fingers were itching to play with their oh-so-available and wonderfully displayed pussies, and most of them had breasts I would've loved to play with too. I was sure most of them would leap at the chance to sit on my lap, so playing with them would've been extremely easy. But, very unfortunately, I was too scared. A high-school boy coming down to middle school and finger-fucking one or more 12-year old girls would easily cause the Principal to blow his stack. Donna's blabbing about my marathon time had increased my awareness of that fear, as had Julia's agreeing that I should be careful with these girls. But - dammit! - their pussies were begging for me to touch them. Sigh. To make it harder for me to break my own decision, I continued with, "Unfortunately, as sexy, beautiful and exciting as all of you are, and as much as I'd love to have turns with you all sitting on my lap, I can't do things like that at school. It only takes one person to blab, and I could be in an enormous amount of trouble with the Principal. So today I'll mostly just be enjoying myself watching you." A pleasingly large number of them protested. "We won't tell anyone," and, "But we want to sit in your lap." Stuff like that. Donna was noticeably quiet though. One girl smartly suggested, "If we ALL sit in your lap, then no one can complain." "I'm sorry, but one of you might boast about it. Some people boast far too easily. We talked before about what makes a good Duckling, and I'll mention that keeping secrets is very important too. One person could ruin it for everyone, and that would mean all of us would miss out on a lot of fun. Not telling anyone else what the Ducklings do will mean that I can do more with you. Probably not at school though. Here I'll mostly just get to know you, and then I can invite which of you I like the most to meet outside of school, and we can do a lot more stuff in private. So far I'm very impressed by all of you. Taking your panties off and showing yourselves to me is wonderful Duckling stuff." We chatted about that a bit, then I added, "I'm thinking of buying a house soon. If I do, I could invite my favorite Ducklings around to play games with me one Saturday or Sunday. How does that sound?" They thought that sounded WONDERFUL! And I thought it was wonderful how enthusiastic they were at "playing games" with me in private! There was some confusion though, "How can you buy a house?", "You're too young," or just more giggles at my silliness. I insisted, "I really am serious; I might do it soon. Buying houses takes time, but it could happen over summer. If it does, I might get your phone numbers off Donna and call to invite you around. But here's something very, very important. If I do give you the address of my new house, you must NOT tell Donna or Carol. Even if they beg you to, you MUST keep it secret from them. The whole reason for buying a second house is so Dad and I can use a bathroom without having to wait for three hours. If you tell Donna or Carol one of them will lock herself in the new bathroom and Dad and I will be stuck all over again." They all laughed at my joke, proving that they were all well aware that females are incapable of sharing bathrooms fairly. I'd barely started my lunch, so I encouraged everyone to start eating. Quite a few of them were too excited to eat, which was just silly! Girls are weird creatures. I was curious, and it wouldn't interrupt my eating much, so I asked them to talk about their sexual experiences. They were very reluctant, so I had to interrupt my eating to reassure them, "There isn't a right or wrong amount of experience. I don't care if you've never kissed a boy, or how much more than that you've done. It's not your experience that matters to me, nor your bodies' maturity. I put Chelsea and Susan in the front row, one each of the most physically mature and the least. Both are fine with me. -- "You know I picked the girls for the front row because I liked their attitude. Chelsea and Susan stood back when others pushed forward. Chelsea doesn't seem to be shy, so maybe she stood back because she thought I'd seen her enough already and she should let someone else have a turn. If so, that'd be a great attitude. Susan was probably shy or scared, which means she was even more courageous to come to this lunch without her panties on. Given her worry about showing herself to me, that she came to lunch at all probably means that she likes me a very great deal, which I also appreciate her for..." "Oh yes!" exclaimed Susan. "I think you're a dream. I'd do ANYTHING to be your girlfriend. You're the most wonderful, fantastic... ," #2: #1: I interrupted, "Thank you, Susan. I'm glad you like me so much. You mentioned 'girlfriend', which is the point I'd nearly made. I'm looking for another girlfriend. I won't deny that the sex-games we'll play will be fun, but there's a lot more to them than that. Mainly they're an excellent way for me to find out whether any of you are the sort of girl that I'm looking for. Your lack of physical maturity doesn't matter, Susan, because anyone I choose as my girlfriend will be with me for years. She'll have plenty of time to mature. Nor does how little experience you've had, because if you become my girlfriend you're going to get a LOT MORE experience. A HUGE amount more!" That got lots of nervous giggles. -- "Much more important than your physical maturity is your emotional maturity. I'm looking for a girlfriend that has a positive, happy, mature attitude to sex. I get the impression that you're such a girl, Susan." It would've been more accurate to say I thought she'd be fairly easy to push into doing whatever I wanted. Which, as it happens, means that she has a good attitude to sex, haha. "Me!" exclaimed a disbelieving Susan. Quite a few of the other girls' expressions registered surprise too. "Sure. I bet you enjoy sex." A safe assumption, I thought, because anyone would have to be insane not to. "Umm. I've never done anything like that." "First, you don't need to have done anything to have an attitude about it. I know that if I came over to you and kissed you, you'd like that very much, wouldn't you?" "Oh yes! I'd LOVE that." "And I bet you'd love it if after kissing you, I leaned down and kissed that beautiful pussy of yours." Susan blushed again. Not for the first time this lunch, and certainly not for the last, given what I had in mind for her. While I was waiting for Susan to respond, Julia said, "For the girls who can't see, Susan is blushing, she's very happy, and unless I'm mistaken, her pussy is starting to show her excitement." "Oh no!" cried Susan, pushing her skirt down and snapping her legs shut in panic. Exactly the opposite of what I'd intended to get her to do shortly. I had to do some repair work. "Susan, sweetie, I have the same problem. Well, not EXACTLY the same. When I think of you, my cock starts to get hard." Actually, my cock would have exploded several times by now if I hadn't been doing continual go-softs. You try having that many young girls' bare pussies pointed at your face, and see what happens to you! "You can be very proud that you have that effect on me. There's a 10th grade girl in some of my classes who has an extremely nice body and who has heaps of guys chasing after her, and she was complaining to me this morning about my not responding to her sexually. She thinks I should be turned on by her, but I'm not because I don't like her attitude. If you could see her body, you'd be amazed that I prefer you, but I do." Unfortunately Susan wasn't responding. She was still looking at the ground, with her legs firmly pressed together. #1: #2: #2 sent #1 and #4 a couple of mental images of his plan, with a little bit of 'verbal' explanation. #1: Looking away from Susan, and around to get all the girls' attentions, I said, "I'm sure you all get the idea that you can have an attitude to sex without having done much of it. I'm sure you've all done quite a lot of it though, including what you do when you're by yourself. Who of you DOESN'T play with herself sometimes?" Given the way I'd asked it, it was no surprise no hands went up. "Hmm, maybe you're too shy to admit that. Let me ask it this way, who of you DOES play with herself sometimes?" Only four girls put their hands up. Far too few for me to make the joke I'd intended. Also unfortunately, none of the four were in the front row, which is what I needed for the main thing I wanted to do. I listed their four names, than added, "Well done to the four of you. I will remember that you answered maturely and sensibly. Put your hands down for now, and all of you listen to me CAREFULLY. Apart from the four girls who put their hands up, I'm extremely disappointed in the rest of you. You aren't ordinary girls. You want to become my DUCKLINGS! Nor am I an ordinary boy. There are dozens - probably hundreds - of high-school and college girls who want me as their boyfriend. If you can't put your hand up to answer a simple question, what hope can I have that you'd be any good at being my girlfriend? A good girlfriend has to THINK, has to take the initiative sometimes, has to be helpful, and CERTAINLY has to answer questions rather than sit still and look like a dummy." Remembering Vanessa's idea that diminishing the number of girls was the only way to break the remaining girls out of their ruts, I said, "I've got a good mind to tell all of you, except the four good Ducklings, to go away, so I can have my lunch with just those four. That way I could talk with them a lot more than I can with all twenty of you here. I could get to know them better, and find which one of them I liked the most. I WON'T do that THIS TIME, but I will be sorely tempted to if you act like such bad Ducklings again. In the future when I ask you a question, I want all of you to answer it immediately and truthfully, got it?" None of them immediately answered my question. I hadn't expected them to, as it didn't really stand out as a question, but I wanted to make my point so I held my watch up in front of my face, and said, "GOT IT? 10, 9, 8, 7... ," A couple of the smart ones got it, and called out, "I understand, Egg" and "Yes!" That woke everyone else up, and they started answering. "That's better. I'm serious about not putting up with silly behavior. Any one of you, or more than one of you, could have some incredible experiences with me, but that depends TOTALLY on your behaving properly. Did Donna tell you what happened to the girl that misbehaved by hanging on to me too long at Carol's lunch?" Only a few of them answered verbally, most nodded, and the rest were too busy looking despondent to answer. I looked at my watch again, and started, "10, 9... ," A chorus of "Yeses." "MUCH better, and exactly how good Ducklings should behave. Let's start again then, put your hand up if you've played with yourself." Most of them put their hand up immediately and quickly. Some were more hesitant, and looked around first, before raising their hands. I said, "Better, but still not perfect. The following girls hesitated and looked around before answering." I listed the girls who'd not met my high standard for obedience, then added, "You do not need other girls' permission to answer my questions. If I ask, you answer. Put your hands down ready for another question. Right. How many of you have ever given another girl a sexy kiss before?" About a third of the hands went up quickly. About a third stayed down quickly (I know that makes no sense, but I could see that their answers were definite "Nos"), and a third dithered. While the dithering was going on, I said, "Everyone lower your hands. Now listen carefully. I am going to ask that question again. This time any girl that looks like she can't make up her mind to answer or not, will be told to leave this group, and go have lunch somewhere else. She will never have a chance to be a Duckling ever again. I'm not worried whether the answer is yes or no; either is perfectly fine. What I hate to see is girls that can't decide whether to answer or not. I'll give you five seconds to make up your mind how you're going to answer, and then I'm going to ask again." I waited five seconds, then, "How many of you have ever given another girl a sexy kiss before?" No one dithered. Roughly a 50/50 result, not that I cared that much. "Good. Hands down ready for the next question. How many of you have kissed a boy sexily before?" LESS than the number who'd kissed a girl! There was something wrong with that! On the other hand, that so many had kissed girls was sexy. Oh well, moving on, "Hands down. How many of you have ever seen a cock?" Giggles, but also rapid answering. Not everyone had seen a cock, although I'd love to change that, if I could arrange the right circumstances. Then I noticed one girl dithering. I was about to give her a hard time, but she noticed me looking at her, and with a very worried voice said, "I'm really sorry, Egg, but I'm not sure of the answer." "What's the problem?" "A guy flashed us one day, but he was too far away and too quick, so I didn't really see anything. Except that he did flash, so I suppose I did. I'm not in trouble for not answering, am I?" "Not at all. I get angry at girls who do not obey, or who're too immature to answer truthfully, or for other silly behaviors like that. You truly don't know the right answer, and that's perfectly okay. In fact, I'm impressed by your honesty. Hands down ready for the next question. Okay. How many of you want to kiss me?" The questions caused a small amount of chaos, as many of them took it as a bit of a joke and stopped to giggle. Some of the others seemed to think it might be a trick question, and tried to work out the trick. But most of the girls soon had their hands up. I particularly liked one girl's attitude, she put both hands high in the air, and waved them vigorously, calling out, "Me! I do! I want to." "Good girl. That sort of enthusiasm is how you make me want to kiss you. That's enough questions for now, because I want to have my lunch. I'll give you something to think about though. When I first arrived, you all said that you knew Ducklings had to do what I said, and had to like sex, but most of you couldn't even put your hand up in answer to a very simple sex question. That disappointed me and was a bad sign. Even though you all said you understood what it means to be a Duckling, I fear many of you don't. So I have to test you. After I've eaten we are going to play a game similar to the question game, only this time I will be telling you to DO sexy things. You can refuse if you want, but that'll mean you're no good for being a Duckling. While I'm eating, each of you should think about whether you really want to be a Duckling. Being a Duckling means you WILL DO sexy things - with other girls to start with, and if you are sexy enough, eventually with me. Now let me eat." I started eating, ignoring the many questions that they had to ask me: "What things?", "What will we have to do?", "Who with?", etc. I pretended not to hear so I could concentrate on my too-long-delayed lunch. I already had some good ideas for how to answer their questions, but only after I'd eaten. Julia started laughing at them, which shut them up pretty quickly. When they were quiet, Julia said, "When Mark wanted you to answer questions, you were too shy. Now he has asked you to be quiet so he can eat his lunch, and you won't stop talking. I bet he's taking note of which girls are obeying his request to be quiet, and which aren't. Twenty Ducklings is too many; four or five well-behaved girls would be perfect. Mark said that how you behave is the most important, yet many of you are misbehaving. That's not very smart of you, is it?" None of them answered Julia. Apparently I'd foolishly only trained them to answer MY questions. They did fall quiet though. "That's better," declared Julia. "It's still not perfect though, because complete silence is boring. Mark can't talk while he's eating, but he can still listen. Mark asked about your sexual experiences before, and none of you answered verbally, so I'll restart that. Whichever one of you has had the most sexual experience, tell us about it." That produced some shifting of positions, muttering, throat clearing, and the like, none of which was interesting conversation. Julia said, "I'm not going to help you anymore. Mark is watching and listening, and he's looking for girls who have an open, honest, mature attitude to sex. If you all sit there like silly little girls, he'll think you're silly little girls. If any of you talk like a mature, sensible girl who likes sex, then he'll think that's what you are." Fortunately one of the girls said, "I've rubbed a boy's penis. Has anyone done more than that?" A few said they'd equaled that feat. One girl said, "I've kissed one." "Eww, gross." Which she decided made her the winner, so she started describing all about the gross time she'd kissed her brother's friend's penis. A minute or so into that conversation, Carol said, "I think those boys are heading this way." In a few seconds it was clear that a group of boys were coming toward us. Julia announced, "Boys coming. Cover yourself, and talk about the sale that's on at [a name I'd never heard of before]." ALL the girls INSTANTLY started raving about the wonderful clothes that store was selling. When the boys got close enough, I recognized the leading boy as the younger brother of one of my soccer teammates. He was into soccer too, and often came to watch his brother's games. Unfortunately, before they'd gotten close enough for me to politely tell them to go away again, one of them turned and yelled back to some other boys farther away, "Egg's here!" Several people heard, and started heading over. Unsurprisingly, when he reached us, the boy I recognized and his friends started talking to me about soccer, raving about how fantastically I'd played in the last couple of games. Ordinarily soccer would be a perfectly acceptable topic, but their timing was considerably less than ideal. I couldn't, for example, see any pussies at all, let alone get the girls in the front row to kiss and rub each other's pussies as I'd intended. I said, "Guys. I'm glad you like soccer, but we can talk about that after any game. Right now I've come down to have lunch with my sisters and their friends." "How many goals are you going to get against Salem? I bet you can get at least a dozen!" "I REALLY would like to have lunch with..." "How do you always get around the defenders so easily?" From another boy, "Did you go to a training camp, or something?" From yet another boy, "I wish I was as good as you, Egg." In the distance I heard, "IT'S EGG!" More and more middle-school kids were running my way. Including some girls, but twenty ducklings in the hand who're showing me their bushes are worth far more than any number of other kids. Nuisances were arriving faster than I could've sent them away, assuming they would've actually gone when I told them to, which none of them were. Chaos ensued, then got worse. Soon several different people were attempting to have several different conversations with me. Julia stood beside me (I'd risen, in a failed attempt to be more authoritative when I'd asked them to leave), smiling in amusement at my helplessness. I said to her, "Thanks for the help." "You're welcome. You have to learn to handle this sort of fracas." Then she went back to smiling. I could see over the heads of the crowd that even more kids were coming. A few of the existing crowd were running away, but I feared it was to fetch their friends. It was hopeless, as there was no possibility whatsoever of getting back the privacy we so desperately needed. Even if I screamed for everyone to leave, and a miracle happened and they all did, there was going to be a continual stream of new arrivals. The crowd got too large to just stand on the open side of our lunch group, and they started circling me completely, walking among and often on top of the Ducklings. All my original lunch group had to stand in self-defense. Julia stayed close and tight against me, while the rest were already cut off and were being pushed farther away. I was getting nowhere with, "No I didn't go to training camp. I had a broken arm! Now please step back, you're crowding too close." Or, a little later, "NO, it's not a pretty shirt; it's a stupid shirt. Please step back!" It was a stupid situation. They were crowding around me, even though I wasn't talking to hardly any of them. They were yelling at me, yelling back and forth at each other, and no one was listening to anyone else, least of all to my requests that they back up. Eventually I had no choice. I leaned down to Julia's ear and yelled sufficiently loudly for her to hear, "Help!" Julia yelled back, "I'm too little." She was smiling sweetly at me. Julia was tucked safely under my arm, and there wasn't too much jostling anyway, but 'smiling sweetly' was doubtless deliberate. She knew I'd be unhappy, but her smile was telling me she was leaving it to me to manage this mess. It was obviously impossible to control the crowd, so I told her, "Let's get out of here. Go back to high school." "You go. I'll stay and talk with the girls a while. I'll meet you at your locker in fifteen minutes." I was just about to make a break for it, when I remembered the rest of my lunch. Its fate was sadly obvious, as it was under the crowd's feet. Damn! I was therefore in an even worse mood when I PUSHED through the crowd and strode off briskly in the direction of the high-school lunchroom, to buy something to eat. The crowd was very surprised by my sudden departure, yelling after me "Where are you going?", "What about what I just said?", "Are you coming back?" God knows why they thought I'd want to stay in the middle of that! Some of them followed me various distances, but they dropped off when they realized I wasn't going to stop to talk any time soon. When I was reasonably clear, I looked back at the trail of people behind me. The thought of waiting a few minutes and then 'sneaking' back had occurred to me, but it obviously wouldn't work. They weren't all departing, some preferring to stand around and talk. It only needed one of them to see me come back, and the chaos would repeat even faster. I couldn't even see my group behind the idiots that were standing around in puzzlement at my sudden departure, so I gave up on them and went back to the high school. ------- Chapter 140: I Decide to Become an Internet Millionaire Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Continued) I was still in a bad mood fifteen minutes later, and cursing how stupid people could be, when Julia and Ava arrived. "What a pain in the ass that was! I can't believe how stupid they all were. Did they honestly think I could have ten different conversations, with forty different people all trying to butt in?" Julia said, "Yes, they were stupid, but they wanted to be around you because you're a big deal to them. The good news is that it's probably going to happen to you most of the times you visit the middle school, so you're going to get lots of practice at handling it. Have you given that any thought?" "How can you call that good news? That's just more pains in the ass. And, 'No, ' I haven't given any thought to how to handle it. I've just been cursing it." "I agree that it's a pain that such things happen, but they do, and they're going to get worse. So how are you going to handle it?" "I suspect you don't consider, 'By staying away from middle school, ' an acceptable answer?" "It's probably going to happen in high school too, once you're rich. It might also start happening at your soccer games too, and other places you go. Practicing on the middle-school kids is good news because you do HAVE to learn. You can't keep running away. Nor can you allow yourself to get so pissed off every time it happens, otherwise you'll be going through life permanently pissed off. You're a very sweet guy, but you're too worried about offending people by standing up for yourself, even though they're offending you at the time. This is definitely one of those situations where you need to 'toughen up'. Do you agree?" "{Sigh}. You're right. How do I handle it though? It was chaos, so surely the only answer would be for me to do a lot of very loud and very rude screaming, to tell them all to get lost?" "That'd be one approach, but not ideal if you don't want people to think poorly of you. I've got some better ideas, but let's talk about it tonight, after I've had some time to research it." "Huh. How could you possibly research that crap?" "The same way I research almost every other problem serving you brings up - I google it initially, and sometimes ask Mom later. This problem is one every famous person has, which is surely common enough to have material available online. It's probably even common enough to have had psychological studies done on it. I'll research it while you're at Katelin's house, and tell you what I find later." "Ahh, thanks." "All part of the service. What did you think of the Ducklings?" "I thought they were pretty silly, actually. I think Donna did a superb job of telling them what they had to do, but when it came time to do it, their brains turned to mush. Nice pussies though, haha. The annoying thing is that the only thing we can do at school is talk, but conversation is what they're worst at. Your idea of my having a house next to school would have been perfect! We wouldn't have had to talk much, and we would have completely avoided all that fame crap." "Yeah, but we can't do much about it now. The Ducklings were very disappointed that everything got messed up, and would love another chance with you. I didn't say much to them, mostly repeating what you'd already said, and that you'd get back to them through Donna." "Thanks. I can't say I'm in any sort of hurry to repeat that lunch. Because of the mess at the end of it obviously, but even the time before that wasn't particularly enjoyable." "They're your project, so I shouldn't give you advice about that." "Yeah, I know. Changing the subject, why do you think the fame stuff was so much worse this time than when I had lunch with Carol's group?" "Maybe because the first boys yelled out so loudly and excitedly. You know what troublemakers soccer players are, haha. It might be because Carol and Donna have been talking you up more. Or maybe when you walked through middle school after Carol's lunch, people regretted missing you, so when they saw you today they came running." "Yeah, I guess it could be any of those." "Personally I think it's because that shirt shows your nipples off so well, haha." My classmates and even some of my teachers remind me of that frequently enough that I didn't need Julia to mention it. We discussed less embarrassing stuff for the rest of lunch. Other than Katelin's excited interactions with me (she'd somehow got the impression that I was an amazingly wonderful person), and her excited double-checking that I'd be coming to her place just before dinner this evening, only two things worth mentioning occurred before the end of the school day: some guys caused me a little trouble, and Chloe was troubled, as follows. When I was packing up my desk after a class ended, half a dozen unhappy looking guys approached me and one of them said, "We'd like to talk with you about something." "Sure. Talk away." "We'll wait until the class has emptied some more." #1: I said, "I'll be emptying along with everybody else, so you might end up talking to yourselves. I suggest you start talking now, and you can walk me to my next class." I finished packing my bag, and stood. One of them moved to stand between me and the door, saying, "We want to talk in private, not in a crowded hallway." "You can talk in private all you want, but I'm walking to my next class. It's in A Block, so we can talk while we're between blocks if you like." I walked sideways away from the direct line to the door, past a couple of desks, getting me clear of the would-be conversationalists, and giving me an unobstructed path out, which I took. There were still several of our classmates in the room, and I was prepared to yell out to them to get help had the six guys done anything stupid, but it proved unnecessary as the six followed me out of the room. I walked a little faster than my usual pace out of this block, and across to A block. I'm extremely good at walking through crowds, so my six followers had to run to stay with me. When we were outside, three of them fell in alongside each side of me, and one of them said, "We don't think it's fair that so many girls are spending time with you." #3: <"Fair"! Are they really as moronic as that?> I answered, "That all depends on how you define 'fair', doesn't it?" "Huh?" | "What do you mean? | "No it doesn't; it's not fair." #3: "English isn't my best subject, but even I can tell that 'fair' was the key word in your complaint. You described the entire situation as 'not fair'. So please tell me what you mean by that?" "You're not going to talk your way out of this, smart-ass!" "I'm trying to get YOU to talk, not me. You said 'it wasn't fair'. What does 'fair' mean?" "You know what fair means! Everybody knows that." "When I didn't have any girlfriends for the years before this one, did any of you think that was unfair and make any efforts to get me one?" "You're not being fair NOW." "I think it's fair that the girls get to choose who they spend their time with. Don't you agree?" "That's not what we mean..." "You complained that so many girls were choosing to spend their time with me, so presumably you don't like the girls being able to choose for themselves. The only possible solution to that is to force the girls to spend their time with specific boys. Leaving aside the rather interesting issues of who will be doing the choosing and the forcing, have you considered discussing this new approach to fairness with the Principal? He's big on fairness, so maybe he could help you force the girls to behave the way you want." It couldn't do any harm to remind them about the Principal. "Listen, asshole. We don't like it that YOU are encouraging so many girls to chase you. THAT'S not fair!" I pretended shock, "You don't like me being NICE! Wow. I never realized I was being so underhanded, sneaky and unfair. All these years my parents have been telling me to be a nice person, and it's actually unfair. Who'd have thought!" I wasn't doing a very good job of placating them. They were so stupid I was unable to resist being facetious, although - in my defense - I had wisely stopped myself saying some of the most inflammatory thoughts that'd crossed my mind. We'd just arrived at then entrance to A Block, and I probably should stop enjoying myself at their expense. I stopped walking and addressed them, "In all seriousness, every one of you would love to have so many girls chasing after you. And if that happened, you'd laugh your head off at anyone complaining about you being unfair. What you're really complaining about is that you can't compete with me. Competition is THE essential part of finding girlfriends. You don't expect the Principal to allocate one girl to one boy at the start of the every year, do you? Is that your idea of fair? God help the poor guy who got Jenny Coniff." (Imagine your worst nightmare of a girlfriend. You'd happily choose that girl's uglier sister over Jenny Coniff.) "Boys compete for girlfriends, and girls compete for boyfriends. That's how it works for everyone, including me and all of you. If you want to do better, then try harder. I've heard each of you make rude comments to girls in class, seen you leering down their blouses, and other macho crap like that. You've never seen me do that stuff. If you choose to behave so unattractively to girls, then it's obvious that girls won't be attracted to you. Next time you're sitting in class, look at how most of the guys behave, and ask yourself what girl in her right mind would want anything to do with any of them! Unlike what you said, I don't encourage so many girls to chase me. The simple fact is that 90% of the guys in school drive girls away by being assholes. Any guy who's even moderately nice gets plenty of choice." I had worked out a speech to give to guys when my 'unfairness' became too much of an issue, but this wasn't it. Instead I was 'stealing' from the speech I'd half-prepared for when Carol flashed her tits in one of my classes soon. It seemed the better of the two approaches in this circumstance. The guys had been aggressive when I'd been pulling their chains, but they'd calmed down and listened when I'd started talking seriously. If we'd been alone in a room together, their aggressiveness might've come out, but with dozens of other students walking past continuously, they'd controlled themselves. Because they were listening, and because I enjoy teasing morons, I couldn't resist adding a little joke (they wouldn't get it yet, but my other minds did). I said, "Actually there's another way of getting girls to like you: be rich, girls love that! Instant popularity! About a week ago Julia suggested I think about buying a house, so I've started looking into making money. If you guys want to have lots of girls chasing you, why don't you spend some time after school researching ways of making a good bundle of money. There are thousands of ways, especially on the internet, because it doesn't care how old you are." "Don't be stupid; we're only sixteen..." "At my home we've only got one computer that the whole family shares. It's several years old, has got a pathetic dial-up connection, we're fairly poor so I don't have a lot of money to invest, and I'm only FIFTEEN; yet I think it's possible to make good money using the internet. If you guys don't want to even try, that's your choice, just don't come complaining to me about how unfair everything is. Especially as you've got far more free time than I have, because I spend damn near all my time studying the 11th grade classes." The internet suggestion was crap of course. Once I win the millions we hope for, people are certain to ask me how. I don't want to tell them it was from roulette, so I vaguely intend to say, "I did something very clever on the internet." I thought it'd be a good cover story, so I was using it now. I continued, "I've told you two guaranteed ways of getting girls to chase you: be nice to them, or get rich. If you make an effort, all of you are capable of doing both of those. I'll be interested to see how you get on, and I certainly won't complain of unfairness if you succeed. Good luck and goodbye." I slipped inside the main doors of the block. Half of the guys were in my next class, but I left them outside to discuss the issue among themselves. #1: #4: #3: #4: #3: [In the next class, the guys didn't offend any girls, so I was hopeful that they'd listened. By the end of the next school day their behavior had descended all the way back to normal (it should really be called "subhuman", except that virtually every boy acts that way). I guess they must've decided to gain popularity by becoming rich, haha.] The afternoon's Chloe event went like this. Chloe approached me and asked what it was she needed to do to become my girlfriend. She asked with considerable passion and anxiety, which was wonderful to see. Holding back my smile, I less-than-helpfully replied, "I very much appreciate that you want to become my girlfriend, Chloe, and I thank you for the compliment you are giving me, but - and I know this sounds backward - you're such a lovely person that I don't want us to quickly jump into a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. If I was only interested in my own pleasure, I'd instantly agree, but you're far too lovely a person for me to give into my selfish impatience like that. For your benefit, I must not give in to my feelings for you until I think you're ready." "But I don't know what I need to do to get ready. If you tell me what it is, I'll do it. I promise I'll do it, because I really want to be your girlfriend. PLEASE tell me?" "I want you to be my girlfriend too, but I also want you to be happy about your whole life, not just the part of it that is our relationship. I know you don't understand now, but you'll eventually realize that what I'm doing is being your friend. To me, that's the most important part of being a boyfriend. I value you for who you are, rather than just for your body, and 'who you are' isn't quite ready to be my girlfriend yet." "But I REALLY want to be. I don't understand why you can't tell me what I need to do. It'd be a lot easier for me to do it, if I knew what it was. That makes sense, doesn't it?" "I'll give you a fake example, but it will help you understand my thinking better. Imagine if the reason was that you didn't like dogs enough. If I told you that, you could PRETEND to like dogs in order to be my girlfriend. Obviously that's not the real reason, but whatever it is, I want to see you change all by yourself, so I know your change is a real one. You NEED to make the change I have in mind, Chloe, for the betterment of your whole life. -- "I'm confident that one day you'll realize it and start changing your behavior yourself. When you've changed it enough, I'll ask you to be my girlfriend. If I told you the reason now, and your behavior changed, how could I tell whether if it was because you were pretending or because you honestly understood that I was right? That doubt and uncertainty would be a very poor foundation for our relationship, darling. It is precisely because you love me so much, and because I care for you so much, that it's best that I not tell you." "You called me 'darling'. Am I really your darling?" I'd deliberately inserted the 'darling' among the rest of that bullshit to give her more hope, as I was starting to fear she'd give up on our relationship. I answered, "You noticed that, did you? I noticed I said that too. I was thinking about what I was going to say next, which was about the feelings we have for each other, and 'darling' just came out. It seems that I do think of you that way, doesn't it? -- "In all seriousness - DARLING - you already know that I have very good feelings for you. Plus I'm like every other boy in thinking you're very beautiful and very sexy, so I'm VERY much looking forward to our being lovers. But because I care for what's best for you so much, I'm not going to start a sexual relationship with you yet." #3: #1: #3: #1: Chloe said, "Umm, I'm not sure we'll become lovers as fast as you're saying. It might take quite a while before we're both ready for that." #4: #1: "Chloe, listen carefully. When I decide the time is right, we will become lovers. I won't ask your opinion, I will simply take your hand and take you to bed. I know that sounds wrong, and ordinarily it would be, but there are very strong reasons why I will do it exactly that way..." #4: " ... I'm going to be the boss of our relationship. You are completely inexperienced and you don't understand what's going on nearly as well as I do. Remember when you showed me your breasts? You would've sworn that you trusted me then, but I instantly knew you didn't, and that my going along with what you wanted would've caused a disaster in our relationship. Plus I'm putting a GREAT deal of thought into doing what's best for YOU. Not what's best for me, but for you! Have you given any thought whatsoever to making this relationship as good as possible for me? Don't bother answering, because I know you haven't. It's not that you're selfish - because I know you're a very giving person - it's that you're too overwhelmed by all the powerful, new emotions you're feeling for me. You're not able to make good decisions about any of this, especially not about something as emotional as becoming lovers. -- "When I decide the time is right, that is when we'll become lovers. I've already very clearly proved to you that I'm acting in your best interests rather than mine, and that I understand what we're doing far more than you do, so if you refuse to come to bed with me, the only possible reason would be that you don't trust me. If you don't trust me, tell me now, so I can walk away?" "No! No. I'm sorry, Mark. You're totally right. I'm ashamed that I haven't been thinking about what's best for you. I can't believe how self-centered I've been. This whole time it's been obvious that you've been thinking about helping me, and I never gave a single thought to helping you in any way. I feel horrible about that! That's a terrible..." "Chloe, relax! It doesn't matter at all. You don't need to do any thinking because," I held my hands out in front of my chest, as if cupping two very large breasts, "you've got WONDERFUL breasts!" A look of pain appeared on her face and she stepped back from me. But then she relaxed as she realized that I'm FAR more mature than other boys, proving that she wasn't a smart girl (that didn't affect my interest in her, because she has wonderful breasts). Chloe smiled, "I'm not going to fall for that one again." "You DID fall for it, darling. Only for a second, which is far better than the hour or so you fell for it the first time, but being hurt was still your first instinctive reaction. If I'd said, 'You've got wonderful ears, ' you wouldn't have felt any hurt at all. You would've instantly thought I was being silly. You should think about those different reactions, but not now. -- "Now I'll tell you the real reason you don't have to worry about being self-centered. I'm the boss of our relationship, and my job includes thinking about it from every angle and from both our points of view. As the boss, I've told you what you need to do, which is to make yourself ready to be a good girlfriend. I don't want you to be worrying about what's good for me. That's a distraction you don't need, especially because I'm not your boyfriend yet. I wouldn't have called you 'darling' if I was worried about your being self-centered, so there's no need for you to worry about it either. Once we're in a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship and are lovers, then I'm confident that you'll be very giving. Until then, the best thing for both of us is for you to concentrate on thinking about yourself. What I want you to achieve might take a long time, possibly a very long time, so please focus on it." A worried Chloe asked, "'A long time'? How long?" "I don't know. That's up to you. You have to figure out what attitude change you need to make, and then make it part of who you are. That certainly won't be quick, but it's important so it needs to be done. Don't worry, because I'll wait for you however long it takes you. You are a truly wonderful person, and well worth waiting for. We've got to run to our classes now, Chloe. I'll talk with you later, bye." I ran off, laughing to myself at the look of dismay on her face. A desperate Chloe would very soon be asking Julia for help. I was so proud of myself, that I had the thought that I should change my project from the Ducklings to Chloe. But then I remembered that virtually everything I'd done with Chloe was under Julia's firm direction. I'd done very poorly in my attempt to convince her to trust me in the parking lot on Sunday, and since then Julia had orchestrated everything: Giving all the girls at the hot tub party an overwhelmingly convincing impression that I was far more mature and trustworthy than I really was, specifically so the next step worked well. Getting them all to work on Chloe for me. Convincing Chloe to show me her breasts, after which I'd wanted to accept her as my girlfriend, but Julia refused to let me. Getting Chloe motivated to give me a gift (pizza), after which I'd wanted to accept her as my girlfriend, if not wife (haha), but Julia refused to let me, and Chloe's change of attitude that we were working on now, during which - eventually - Julia would be allowing me to accept Chloe as my girlfriend. If I'd been in charge of the Chloe Project, it wouldn't have gotten anywhere, including not getting anywhere helpful for Chloe. My original plan had been a simple, one-step trick intended to let me get permission to grab hold of her tits, so it was hardly impressive, beneficial to her, or long-lasting. All things considered, I was mighty glad Julia was running the Chloe Project. When it was time to go home, Donna arrived at the parking lot with many of the would-be Ducklings. Donna said, "They want to say sorry for what happened at lunch." As far as I was concerned, there'd been two major problems with lunch: the Ducklings had acted too childishly (hardly surprising, really), and the throng of idiots. So I asked, "What specifically are they apologizing for?" One of them answered, "Umm, for the way you were forced to leave. For the crowd." "That wasn't your fault, so you don't have to apologize for that. It wasn't a very good lunch anyway, so I didn't mind being chased away." One of them asked, "Umm, it wasn't?" "No, I'm afraid not. Nearly all of you weren't obedient enough. Donna had done a very good job telling you what good Ducklings needed to do, and you all said you knew how, but almost none of you behaved properly. It's just as well that Carol's friends are better at that sort of thing." -- Turning to my group, I said, "Let's go." I started getting into the car. The Ducklings panicked. It was quite a funny sight. Lots of assurances yelled at me, pleadings for me to stop, promises they'd listen better next time, etc. From half in the car, answered, "I'll think about the Ducklings, and I'll tell Donna what I decide. She'll let you know. Stand back from the car girls, I don't want to run any of you over." Shutting the car door cut off their imploring cries. Donna and Carol wanted to discuss the Ducklings, although I was a bit tired of the topic. To please my sisters, I rekindled my enthusiasm by remembering what all those naked pussies had looked like. That had been a truly marvelous sight! Donna naturally wanted to know what was going to happen next. I had a big problem answering that because I didn't know how to 'use' them. I didn't want to talk with the Ducklings because that'd be very tedious. The only way to get fun out of them was to do sexual things, but that seemed undoable at school. It was hard enough at the best of times, but completely impossible in the middle of a mob of idiots yelling questions at me. I thought about avoiding the fame crap by inviting the Ducklings to have lunch with me in the high school, but I didn't want anyone to see me spending time with girls as young as that, let alone risk their seeing me with a Duckling sitting on my lap, or worse. Meeting them out of school seemed the only possibility, but I couldn't invite them to my house because they'd see that Carol and I were sharing a bedroom which had just one big bed! Nor did I want to invite them to Julia's house, as the Ducklings' young age made that too embarrassing again. Nowhere else I could think of was private enough. There's plenty of 'nature' around Corvallis, with lots of nature walks, national forests, and the like, but getting the parents of a bunch of 12-year olds to deliver their unsupervised daughters to a remote forest location wasn't going to happen. I was stumped. I said, "I don't know, Donna. I'm stumped. I don't know what to do with them. School seems too much of a mess, but I can't think of where we could get privacy outside of school. Our house is no good because there's no way we could stop twenty girls from getting curious about there only being one bed in our bedroom and sticking their noses into the closets. You know what girls are like when it comes to closets! Their seeing my and Carol's clothes in that room would be very bad. Moving all our stuff back and forth is too much of a pain. I don't want to inflict a whole lot of excitable 12-year old girls on Vanessa and Co. either. -- "I need to give it some thought. But while I remember, let me say that I thought you did an EXCELLENT job of getting the Ducklings ready for that lunch. You'd said all the right things to them, did your best to get them in the right mood, get them obedient, etc. I was very impressed with how well you'd done all that." "Thanks. I tried very hard. Mostly I just copied what I'd heard Julia say. Julia's very good at that stuff." "She certainly is! Julia often has the same trouble you had though. You told the Ducklings all the right things, but then they almost totally failed to do what you'd told them. That was disappointing. You can tell them that too. I need to think about what to do with them, but at the moment, nothing comes to mind." #4: #1: I'd half-hoped - actually probably more than three-quarters-hoped - that Julia would have a suggestion for what I should do with the Ducklings, but she said nothing. Having my own project wasn't much fun when I was stumped. I dropped Julia at her home, telling her, "I'll be going to Katelin's at five, then dinner at my house. I'm very much looking forward to talking to your parents after that. I hope their news is good." "Me too. It'd be good to have a lot more money, because we need to take you shopping for some more clothes soon." "Haha. I'll see you later, Julia." As I was driving off, #1: #3: #1: #4: #1: I'd been pretty cruel to Donna as a result of her marathon blunder, so it was time to be nice. "Donna, do you want to play some basketball when we get home?" "Yes please! Neat." We goofed around for half an hour or so, then I decided I should goof around with Carol (fair's fair). She was in our bedroom, which was very convenient for the type of goofing around I had in mind. I finished my game with Donna, went inside and told Carol, "I've goofed around with Donna, and now I think I should goof around with you. That'd be fair, wouldn't it?" Carol agreed, "Fairness is very important. My period's about to start, so how about you just remove those clothes and lie on the bed so I can goof off with your body?" I was five minutes late setting off for Katelin's, but in an EXCELLENT mood. ------- Chapter 141: Visiting Katelin Eaton's Family Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Continued) Katelin was bouncing up and down outside her home when I pulled up. She bounced around to the driver's door and pulled me out of the car. "Come on! I can't wait to introduce you to my family." I was dragged inside. I immediately recognized the two youngest boys. One was a senior, which was pretty much all I knew about him. The youngest was a guy called Gunner, currently in the 9th grade. He'd been in some of my 8th grade classes last year and he was a bully. He'd caused me some trouble, even in just the few months before I'd been advanced out of his reach, from middle school to 9th grade in high school. "Haha!" Gunner laughed with contempt. "I wondered whether my stupid sister's latest BOY-friend was you. 'Martial arts expert' - ha! You're a pussy." One of the older boys asked, "You know him, Gunner?" "Yeah. He was in my class some of last year. A pathetic wimp. Even Katelin can do better than him." #1: #2: Before I could move, Katelin sprang to my defense, "Shut it, Gunner! Mark's the most incredible guy I've ever..." I could see that Gunner was going to come straight back at her, and a big argument was not something I wanted. So I interrupted, "Katelin, let everyone say whatever they want. Remember that I came here to see how your family chooses to behave." I didn't know what her family would think of my statement, but I didn't care either. I'd be out of here soon, probably never to return. I could see Katelin relax, so I took the couple of steps necessary to reach her parents, extended my hand, and said, "Nice to meet you Mr. and Mrs. Eaton. I'm Mark Anderson. I'm in several of your daughter's classes at school." #1: #2: While we were shaking hands, Mrs. Eaton said, "Yes, we know all about you. Katelin's been singing your praises nonstop for the last couple of days. You've made a very strong impression, young man." "He's not a man, he's a wimp." I ignored Gunner, but Mrs. Eaton ordered, "Shut it, Gunner." #3: #2: Mr. Eaton, while he was shaking my hand, said, "Sorry about Gunner. He shouldn't talk like that to Katelin's new boyfriend." #1: Katelin said, "Dad! I keep telling you, Mark's not my boyfriend. He's Julia's boyfriend." Mrs. Eaton chuckled, then added, "You praise a boy so much and he comes to visit, then he's your boyfriend. Doesn't matter how much you say he's not." "I'm not Katelin's boyfriend, Mrs. Eaton. It's nice that she thinks enough of me to praise me, but that's not enough to create a relationship between us. And I've only visited today so when Katelin talks about her family with me, I can put faces to names. That's why I'll only be here for a few minutes. Speaking of names, I don't know the names of your other three sons yet." Katelin and her mom both responded to the hint. I let Mrs. Eaton lead me from son to son. I hoped Katelin would get the hint that I wanted her to be passive. It wasn't important, but I'd rather get to know everyone else. I was first introduced to Don, the oldest, then Junior, the second oldest of the five children. They didn't bother explaining the inappropriateness of his name. While Junior was shaking my hand, he started squeezing it extremely hard. It hurt, although it was bearable. I didn't have much of a plan for this visit, other than studying their natural reactions. If I started a whole lot of drama, nothing would be 'natural' about whatever followed. It was more interesting and useful for me just to let them do their things, so I ignored the pain, standing there and taking it. While Junior was squeezing, I had an idea, #1: #2: So I imagined the pain disappearing... , and it did. Cool. #3: #1: That was very easy too. We settled on about 10% of the pain coming through, which wasn't much more than a slight annoyance. Mrs. Eaton had moved on to introduce me to the next son. She started speaking, "This is Wayne..." I interrupted, "Excuse me, Mrs. Eaton. I'll be with you in a minute or two. I have to wait until Junior gets tired of trying to break my hand." Everyone looked at Junior. It was obvious from the tension in his hand and face that he was squeezing very hard. "Junior!" yelled his father. "Let go," A message he reinforced with a slap across the back of Junior's head. Junior was letting go anyway. Being a very cool sort of guy, I immediately moved to son number three, stuck out my hand, and said, "Pleased to meet you, Wayne." He looked at my hand, then up and me, "How's your hand?" "It's fine. Just between you and me, I don't think Junior's very strong. Not if he can't hurt a - what did Gunner call me? - 'pathetic wimp'. I've seen you around school. You're a senior aren't you?" "Yeah. Nearly finished, thank God. I've seen you too, you're 'Egg', aren't you?" "Yes, that's me." Wayne turned to Katelin and asked her, "Why didn't you say your new boyfriend was Egg?" "He's NOT my boyfriend! He's Julia's boyfriend. Why can't you get that?" #2: #3: #1: #2: Wayne corrected, "Why didn't you say your FRIEND was Egg?" "I don't know. I didn't think about it." Wayne told everyone else, "Egg means Eccentric Graceful Genius. That's what you are, isn't it, Mark?" "That's what the letters stand for, yes. I am those three things; to some degree anyway." "You're a smart-ass," declared Junior. "That would make my nickname 'Eggsa', which doesn't work so well, so I don't think it'll catch on." #2: #3: Katelin said, "I told you Mark would be good at dance, Mom. He's even got 'Graceful' in his nickname." #1: Sure enough, that provoked laughter from all five males, the father included. Can't say I was too surprised by that. He was a short but very physical looking guy. Wide shoulders, thick arms, and that sort of thing. He looked very strong, and I was mighty glad he hadn't tried to squeeze my hand. I could easily imagine that'd cause real damage. #3: #2: #3: #1, #2: #2: The laughter was running out, so I put a puzzled expression on my face, and asked, "I'm surprised ANY of the males laughed at my being graceful, let alone all of you. Katelin told me you were all into various martial arts, so surely you understand what my being graceful means?" They didn't. I got blank looks and, "What?" | "It means you're a sissy, haha." | "It doesn't mean anything." #1: #2: #3: #2: "Whatever martial arts each of you do, have you spent a lot of time training with the very top grades? With fourth dan or above, say, depending on what your terminology is? Wayne, have you trained at that level?" "No." "Don? Junior? Gunner? Mr. Eaton?" All of them answered in the negative. #2: ("Dan" is how grades above black belt are counted. Higher dan numbers are better. 1st, 2nd and 3rd dans are good, going on very good. 4th and 5th dan are seriously good. 6th dan and above are awesomely good, and increasingly rare.) "Do any of you regularly train at any level of a single black belt or above? Wayne?" I was asking Wayne first, because I thought he was the one most likely to answer me, hopefully encouraging the others to do so too. Again all the answers were in the negative. #2: #1, #3: #2: "But you've all watched people of that level train, haven't you?" "Sure. So what?" "Have you noticed that every advanced martial artist moves with grace?" #1: #2: #3: "You're not a black belt! You're a wimp. A pathetic, pussy wimp," opined Gunner, earning him some laughs. "I did not claim to be a black belt. Nor a 'pathetic pussy wimp' either, come to that. I was explaining why I was surprised that you laughed at the idea of someone being graceful. I would've thought that given your interests in martial arts, and that top-level practitioners are all graceful, then gracefulness would be something you'd admire and respect. But I'm starting to think that respect is not something that happens a lot around here. Do any of you respect your sister for bringing her friend to this house?" "Haha, don't be stupid," was the consensus of their replies. Katelin said, "I told you, Mark. They're all pains!" I'd seen enough of her family now; more than enough, actually. I would've left now, except that I needed to do something to give myself some credibility, and then I needed to hit them over the head with my credibility, so Katelin could achieve something with them. Time to move to the next stage. I wasn't sure what it'd be yet, except that it was different than this stage, and it'd be happening next. While a couple of them were jeering back at her, I said - loudly over the jeers, so everyone could hear it - "Katelin, I've only heard one comment that concerns me here, and you just made it. Your brothers are playing childish status games with me, but they're meaningless because their opinions are irrelevant to my life. But your comment made them retaliate in kind, and causes long-term destruction within your family. I'm walking away in a few minutes but you live here. Your comment was unnecessary, destructive and foolish. Can you tell me a SINGLE way in which your comment was useful, helpful or otherwise positive?" Katelin hung her head, saying, "No Mark. I'm sorry." I knew someone would, but if they hadn't, I would've raised the issue anyway. It was Mrs. Eaton who asked, "What was that about?" We were all still standing, which was silly. It wouldn't do any harm to remind them of decent social etiquette, so I said, "It was about Katelin's brothers. I am here today because of them. Before I explain that, may we please sit down in the living room, and Katelin, would you get me a glass of milk please?" "Yes, Mark, sorry." "You don't need to apologize for that." As far as I was concerned, Mrs. Eaton should have been the apologizer. However, she did herd us all into the living room while Katelin was getting my drink. Don wandered off too, returning with beers for all the guys, except a coke for Gunner. Gunner greeted that with a disgusted, "Coke!" I was disgusted too, over his clearly being allowed beer normally. Katelin brought me a glass of milk, and I patted my lap for her to sit on. She looked surprised, but quickly jumped on and I put my spare hand around her waist. A development that did not go uncommented on by her brothers. I chose to respond to Gunner, as he was the one I knew my comment would most likely apply to, and the one I was safest goading, "I like having a nice, pretty girl sit on my lap. You should try it some time." As expected, his older brothers immediately teased him about not having a girlfriend to do it with. When I got a chance, I said, "Gee Gunner. The pathetic pussy wimp can get a pretty girl to sit on his lap, but you can't. You're obviously very clever with words, so how would you describe a boy who's even worse than a 'pathetic pussy wimp'?" Gunner leaped to his feet, with - I noticed - clenched fists, "Why you asshole..." Before anything could start, I said in a totally relaxed fashion, "Thanks, Gunner. You can sit down now. You've done what I wanted." "What?" "I just wanted to check something, and I have now, so thanks very much." Ignoring Gunner, because I was fairly safely hidden under Katelin, I turned to Mrs. Eaton and said, "You asked me what's going on. The answer to that is your daughter has asked me to help her improve her relationships with her brothers. I have come here today to see what they and their relationships with Katelin are like. It's now clear to me that they do not deserve the badmouthing Katelin has been giving them, and she's been well out of line to do so." "What!" shrieked Katelin, rapidly spinning on my lap, so she could yell in my face. "They're assholes! They've been horrible to you from the moment you arrived. How can you possibly..." I opened my legs, causing Katelin to suddenly fall to the floor. It proved to be an extremely effective way of shutting her up. I told her, "I like NICE girls sitting on my lap. A nice girl wouldn't have spoken the way you did, would she, Katelin?" -- While Katelin was thinking about that, I tried for some comic relief. I looked at Mrs. Eaton, saying, "See! Do you believe I'm not Katelin's boyfriend now? Haha. I wouldn't DARE do that to my girlfriend." -- Mr. Eaton was not amused. He was the opposite of that, and he was about to express it. Before he ordered me out of his house, I quickly said, "Sir, I owe you an apology and explanation. I am VERY sorry that I have angered you, and very sorry that you think I am treating your daughter badly." -- Katelin had just got to her feet, so I asked her, "Katelin, why did I shock you like that? Answer carefully, because your father will kick me out of his house otherwise." "I'm kicking you out right fucking now! Get outta here, and don't you ever..." "Dad! PLEASE let him stay. It was ALL my fault." Katelin looked at me, and asked, "Right?" "I wouldn't have done it otherwise." Facing her father again, Katelin said, "I DESERVED it, Daddy. I want Mark to stay. PLEASE." Katelin paused, so I jumped in with, "Sir, I did that because Katelin had asked me to. Have you ever had to repair a piece a machinery and the best way to get the stupid thing to work is to give it whack with a hammer?" Mr. Eaton looked like a hammer-whacking type of guy. "Katelin needed a jolt. She wasn't hurt or injured, she was just surprised. I've told her over and over again not to badmouth her brothers. I have tried asking nicely several times but she won't stop doing it. Now she might think twice before she causes trouble." "I deserved it, Daddy. Mark keeps telling me to mind what I say, but I keep opening my big mouth. I don't mind that he did it to me." Mr. Eaton was relaxing, so I said, "Don't tell my girlfriend I'd noticed, but Katelin's ass has got PLENTY of padding, so it wouldn't have hurt her at all." There were some chuckles at that. Katelin pretended outrage, but even she chuckled. Luckily it was obvious I was joking. Katelin is slim, fit, and does a lot of dance, so she has a particularly nice ass. I patted my lap, saying, "Katelin, sit." She sat on my lap, but gingerly, so I said, "Don't worry, Katelin. You're perfectly safe provided you don't badmouth your brothers again." -- I turned to her father. "Sir, there are two ways of helping someone. You can tell them what they need to do then walk away, leaving them to hopefully do it alone. Or the second way, which is much better. That's where you roll up your sleeves, stick your hands into the mess, and work with the person you're helping. Katelin has asked me to help her in the second way, and she gave me permission to do it in whatever way I thought best. To her CONSIDERABLE surprise, I thought it was best to dump her ass on the floor. Some of my methods are unusual, but Katelin knows she can tell me to stop helping her whenever she wants. She trusts me though. That's why she asked for my help in the first place, why she asked you to let me stay, and why she's sitting on my lap again. You didn't know any of that background, so I apologize for not taking that into consideration when I decided how to respond to Katelin's misbehavior. I could easily have done something else, and in hindsight doing what I did in front of her parents wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done. On the other hand, it was an EXCELLENT way of shutting her up. I had no idea I could stop a girl talking so quickly." #3: [[This is something I found very hard to resist, especially now that I was starting to get some self-confidence with people. By the time one mind stops talking, the other two have had ideas of their own. By the time they've had their turns, the first mind has had more ideas, etc. It's especially common in important situations because each mind wants us to do the best possible job. It's a frequent consequence of my unusual thought processes, so I've left it in rather than only giving one mind's speech. The purpose of this autobiography is to teach you about me, so abridging my speech is not appropriate. In this specific case, my speech had also become more 'proper', in an unconscious reaction to my poor opinion of the Eatons. This was another consequence of my gaining confidence, because it was making me a bit of a smart-ass, as I'd recently been accused.]] Since the vast majority of my audience was male, that went down well. When the chuckles were over, I said, "Katelin, returning to what we were discussing before. I believe I had just said your brothers did not deserve the badmouthing you had been giving them, and you were out of line to do so. If I remember correctly, you had a strong reaction to that. Would you like to try expressing your reaction again? Unless you want your ass to meet the floor again, you should probably use different words than last time." "Umm. I was surprised you said that." "That's a very cautious version. I wonder why, haha. I seem to remember that you also strongly disagreed, especially because of the way your brothers had treated me since I arrived. Correct?" "Yes. They were horrible. Squeezing your hand, calling you names... ," "I can remember what they did. I don't need you to list their every action for me. Do you think you are a good person, Katelin?" "Yes. Ahh, yes. Mostly I am." "But since I arrived, EVERYTHING you've said to or about your brothers has been unpleasant, if not downright nasty. Without doubt your brothers have said a lot of bad things too. If you think you're a good person even though you talk badly, why can't they be good people too? The answer is that you are all good people. -- "You want to improve your relationships with your brothers, that's the desire of a good heart. Your brothers aren't nasty or malicious toward you. They ARE stupidly macho, but that's to be expected in a family with so many males. There's so much young male behavior in this house, and it's been here for so many years, that it's become a habit for all of you. 'Young male behavior' is the LAST behavior you want inside a family, because it's competitive, destructive and isolating. It makes everyone lonely and unhappy." Unfortunately the boys started making nasty comments, some aimed at me, some at Katelin. My two non-speaking minds, with a little back and forth with the speaking mind, had been brainstorming how to impress the boys using martial arts, preferably without getting ourselves beaten to a pulp in the process. We'd decided on several impressive looking tricks making good use of my special abilities. Now seemed like a good time to start on them. "I can see it's pointless for me to talk any more about this now, because none of you think I have any credibility. I think I should change my approach. How about I give you some martial arts demonstrations instead. How does that sound?" Everyone's interest was suddenly raised. Gunner declared, "You don't know ANYTHING. You're a bag of shit." Don asked, "What could a smart-ass BOY like you possibly show us!" #2: We discussed #2's idea, and after much thought decided, I said, "I'm leaving. From the moment I arrived in this house I was insulted, abused, ridiculed and physically attacked. All of which was entirely undeserved, as I have been nothing but a polite and respectful guest in your home. It's especially annoying, because I came here to help you. You call yourselves martial artists, but all you do is bring shame on yourselves, and shame on whatever arts you pretend to study. You're so full of unwarranted aggressive competitiveness that you have no concept of human decency anymore. I don't like you, and I don't want to spend any more time in your company. Sorry Katelin, but your brothers are obnoxious. I'm leaving. See you at school." I had gently pushed Katelin off my lap during my speech and I was standing by now. The derisory comments had started halfway through, and had risen to shouts by the end of it. Apparently they didn't take kindly to my insult-then-leave approach, exactly as I'd intended. I walked toward the door. Junior jumped into the way. "You're not running away you cowardly asshole." He carried on with more insults, but I ignored them. I turned to the father, and said loudly, "Mr. Eaton. Are you going to tell your sons not to kidnap me, or do I have to fight my way out?" "You're a big mouthed smart-ass, kid. This's your own fuckin' fault." "Have it your way, sir." Katelin had been running from brother to brother, and then to her dad, begging everyone to leave me alone. They'd been ignoring her at best, usually roughly pushing her away. She never stopped trying though, bless her. Mrs. Eaton was sitting in her chair, totally uselessly. Mr. Eaton was leaning back in his chair, with a grin of anticipation on his face. The door out of the room was now blocked by Don, Junior and Gunner, all grinning or yelling the worst insults they could think up. Wayne was standing to the side of the living room. He was not goading me, but he was alert. I had the feeling he would watch rather than participate, which was very welcome, as he'd be coming from another direction which would've made my plan much less likely to succeed. I was standing in the middle of the room. I mentally rehearsed the sequence of events that I wanted, planned where I had to step, and what blows I was going to make. I was confident enough of the sequence I had planned that I thought I could make the "martial arts demonstration" even more effective by using only my right hand, so I reached down with my left hand to pick up my still half-full glass of milk. I could drop it quickly enough if things turned out worse than I expected. Or I could even throw it in one or maybe two of their faces, their temporary blindness buying me some more time. I took a small sip, stalling for time while I used some NP-fingertips to push against one of my own eyeballs. I started with a light push - of course! - and increased it until it felt painful. It required a maximum push from one mind into one eyeball to feel painful. I wanted more than mere "painful", but not too much more, so I'd use one and half minds per eyeball. That was actually the maximum force I had if I did both eyeballs at the same time, which is what I preferred, so my NP force was only just strong enough. It was possible I might have been able to use Active Centering to get two minds' of force per eyeball, but I didn't want to risk losing center during a fight, and I was pretty sure one and half minds' force would be enough, and two minds would probably be dangerously too much. Still holding the glass, I addressed the three boys blocking the door. "I'm not going to attack you. It'd be unfair of me to attack idiots as stupid as you. I'm going to finish my drink and then use my cellphone to call my parents to come and get me." I tapped my pocket. "I expect you three cowards will stand there the whole time, like the pathetic little pussies you are." They'd already gotten themselves wound right up, and that easily got them to charge me. Gunner had been displaced from the prime spot in front of the door by his bigger brothers, so he necessarily had to wait for Don and Junior to be the first wave. Those two charged straight at me. I let Don take a few steps to get him close enough to me for the following to be plausible. I VERY quickly stepped forward, shot my right hand with two fingers extended directly toward his eyes, then I rapidly backpedaled while withdrawing my arm. It looked like a stiff-fingered jab, except that I got no closer than two yards away from Don. At the instant my fingers were closest to his eyeballs, I max-NP'd one and a half mind's fingertips into each of those eyeballs (two minds made one fingertip each, the third mind made two, putting one each behind the first minds' fingertips to help push). Don screamed and his hands flew to his eyes. While Don's eyes were shut and covered with his hands, I NP-pushed his rear foot behind his front one. He tripped and went down, screaming "My EYES!" Junior looked sideways at Don at the same time as I NP-tripped him in exactly the same way as I had Don, thankful that I'd practiced this on so many running jocks at school. Junior tripped and started falling toward me, ruining his ability to defend himself. I stepped forward and to his side to where Don would've been, had he not been in the process of collapsing to the floor. I punched the side of Junior's chin almost as hard as I could. I even remembered to turn down the pain I'd receive from my own fist. I have very wide shoulders and a great deal of arm and upper-body strength, plus I was swiveling at the hips as I turned to face Junior too, so my punch was VERY hard. Junior's ki showed his going unconscious instantly. I'd hit him so soon after the start of his tripping, that none of the observers would notice that he'd tripped first. I pulled my right fist back, stepped to my right, so I was lined up on the still advancing Gunner. I NP-tapped Gunner on his shoulder away from me. He turned his head to see what had done it, and I gave him a somewhat reduced-force version of the same punch I'd felled Junior with. It had the same effect. I'd pulled both punches compared to how hard I could have hit them - Gunner's more so, as he was smaller and weaker - but I hadn't pulled them very much, as I wanted these guys to go down and stay there for quite a while. I swiveled to face everyone else. None of them was moving yet, so while the three bodies were still heading for the floor I casually raised my glass of milk to my mouth and took another sip. Mr. Eaton leaped to his feet (slow reactions, I guess). I smiled at him, while I took another sip. He hesitated. I said, "In all seriousness, sir, I think you should sit down." I looked straight into his eyes, and he glared right back. After a couple of seconds, I added, "From the moment I arrived in this house you have allowed your boys to treat me appallingly, and you deliberately permitted their three-on-one attack just now. I have no respect for you whatsoever, and would enjoy putting you down if you're stupid enough to try to attack me." He looked at Wayne. Wayne was stationary, although one pace closer to me than he'd been when the fight started. He'd taken a step while I was busy with his brothers, but had stopped now. Wayne shrugged toward his father, telling him, "It looks like it's over." I said, "Seriously Mr. Eaton, sit down. You may think you're a tough, strong guy, but that won't matter as you won't get any closer to laying a hand on me than any of your stupid children did. Speaking of your children," I looked toward Mrs. Eaton. "I'm worried about Don's eyes. I tried to poke them just hard enough to temporarily blind him, but he was charging me at the time so it was difficult to judge. I didn't feel either of his eyeballs burst, but you should have a look to see if he needs an ambulance." Don was clearly in considerable pain, groaning and sobbing in a ball on the floor, with his hands over his eyes. I stepped away from the bodies to make room for Mrs. Eaton, whenever she summoned the initiative to get out of her chair. It took her several seconds to get moving. Mr. Eaton was still hesitating. He'd done it for long enough now that he probably wasn't going to attack. If he did, he'd quickly develop eye and foot troubles too. I said to Wayne, "You don't want to be part of the martial arts demonstration too, Wayne?" "I don't think so. 'Demonstration'?" "Sure. They were demanding a martial arts demonstration. Do you think I chose appropriately? I was thinking about catching flies like in that old Karate Kid movie, but I suspected they were too full of macho bullshit to be impressed by it." There was a fly flying in front of me, so my right hand shot out and caught it gently between my thumb and forefinger. I held it up, showing it to Wayne. It was still buzzing away, so Wayne noticed it easily. I let it go, also letting go of my glass of milk at the same time. My two hands flew to achieve the swap - my right hand moved to grab the falling glass, while my left hand shot out and grabbed the fly again. I held the recaptured fly out to Wayne, while I took another sip of milk. When he'd had long enough to appreciate the recapture, I dropped the glass of milk entirely, letting it fall straight down. That hand shot out and caught another fly, so I now had a fly in each hand. I caught the glass of milk on the top of my shoe, still upright and without spilling a drop. I balanced it there for a second or two, then kicked it straight up in the air again. While it was still rising, my left hand released its fly, but my right hand shot out and recapture it gently between the middle two fingers. I held up that hand to Wayne, showing him the two gently held flies, while my free hand caught the glass of milk at the top of its trajectory, again without a drop being spilt. I took another sip, then opened my fingers to let the flies go. The flies left as fast as they could. [All the above juggling was done with NP, of course. The mostly empty glass of milk was easily moved up and down with NP. Playing with flies had been one of the demonstration items I'd worked out before I decided to beat up the boys instead. Catching the flies was incredibly easy with NP because its fingertips are invisible and can move as fast as I can think their movement when they're not carrying anything. I'd caught both the flies on the window before the fight, in preparation for what I'd intended to demonstrate before the goading got to me, and it'd been no effort for the on-duty mind to keep them in their stationary NP-boxes during the very short fight. It looked like I'd caught them in my real fingers, but I actually had two NP-plates holding them top and bottom. I'd canceled the rest of the box holding them so the sound of their wings could be heard, making them sound normal (in a pissed off way). Physicist readers will know F=ma, which rearranges to give a=F/m. The mass of a fly is tiny, so I can give them a truly huge acceleration, so it didn't matter where a fly wanted to go, it was going EXACTLY where I wanted it, so pretending to catch them with my real fingers was an easy matter of moving the flies to wherever my real fingers were going.] Wayne and Mr. Eaton had been impressed by my little game, and I didn't believe they were going to attack me. Mrs. Eaton was checking Don, whose groans were slowly subsiding. I sat down on my original chair, and patted my lap, saying, "Come and sit on my lap, Katelin. You look like you need some comforting." "I thought they were going to kill you!" "I'm sorry I made you worry so much. There was never any possibility of any of them even touching me. I could beat them with one hand tied behind my back." I raised my glass of milk, in case any of them hadn't realized how cool I was. #1: #2: #3: I asked, "How is Don, Mrs. Eaton?" "I think he'll be all right. His eyes are very red though." "Sorry about that. I would've preferred to simply knock him out the same as the others, but the situation was a little bit awkward." Wayne chuckled at that. That reminded me about him. I asked, "Your brothers were boringly predictable, but I didn't know what you would do, Wayne. You decided not to attack me too?" Katelin said, "Wayne's the only nice one." Katelin was well snuggled into my lap so opening my legs wouldn't work as here was too much chair under her. Instead I picked her up and dumped her on the floor beside the chair. "Oof." "You're not a very fast learner, are you Katelin?" "I didn't know we were still doing that." "I told you to NEVER insult your brothers. What part of 'never' confuses you?" Katelin got to her feet, and climbed back into my lap. She said, "Sorry. I'll try to do better." "You'd have trouble doing any worse. Almost every single thing you say about your brothers is an insult. Even the way you complimented Wayne was done by insulting the others. Why couldn't you have simply said, 'Wayne is nice'? You've got a very bad habit, Katelin." "Yeah, I'm starting to see that." Mr. Eaton asked, "Why are you still here? You wanted to leave." There were lots of ways it could have turned out that would have had me leaving, but there wasn't any hostility going on now, so I made up an answer, "Leaving was never a big deal. I can do that whenever I want. I said I wanted to leave to make it obvious that I was attacked by a family of criminals and that I had no choice except to defend myself. If you're stupid enough to call the police about this, it'll be most of your family that gets in trouble, not me." "It'd be your word against all of ours. You wouldn't stand a chance." I had an amusing idea. "The only way I could possibly be in any trouble at all, would be if all your family lied to the police, swore false statements, perjured yourselves in court, and that sort of thing." With a superior attitude, Mr. Eaton crowed, "So?" "I'm sure no one in your family is that dishonest." I had little difficulty believing that several of them were, but I'd said that to make it likely that he'd confirm they were dishonest. Mr. Eaton then far exceeded my hope. I'd been hoping he'd say something like, "Sure we would," but what he did was to give a very sarcastic laugh then say, "Been there, done that, smart-ass! Haha." #1: #2: I said, "I'm sure you'd never swear a false statement over something as serious as assault?" "None of your goddamn business. If you've hurt my boys, you'd better starting living in fear, asshole." #2: #3: #1, #2: I took my hands off Katelin's waist, and held them high in the air to either side of her. I said, "It's time for me to leave, Katelin. Please let me get up." As Katelin was rising, Mr. Eaton started crowing, "Haha. Run away little boy. We've got you right where we want you now and you're fucked! Haha. What a fucking stupid little smart-ass you are! Haha." I ignored him. I stood, with my hands still held well out from my body. I took a couple of steps, so I was standing with the doorway behind me. I didn't exactly have a clear exit, not with the bodies on the floor. Mrs. Eaton and a slowly reviving Don were partly in the way too, but I didn't think they'd be up to stopping me when the time came for me to leave. Proximity would make it easy for me to avoid their grabs anyway. I faced Mr. Eaton, and loudly said, "See where my hands are, Mr. Eaton." I waved them, in case he'd forgotten what hands were. I slowly and deliberately lowered my right hand to my pants pocket as I said, "Two fingers only." I reached in, and pulled out my cellphone with my thumb and forefinger only, grasping it at the top, with my fingers clearly well away from any keys. I lifted it up, so it was face high, and slightly to the side of my line of sight to Mr. Eaton. I was the only person who could see the screen, so I was the only one who could see it flash rapidly as I used NP-fingertips to hunt for the "Tape Recorder" function that I remember seeing mentioned in the manual. Amusingly I'd read it to check whether my phone had a camera after I'd pretended it did to fake out the last Biff, and now I was using my phone to fake out someone else. My phone was proving to be very useful. I kept talking to stall for time, "Notice that both my hands are away from any buttons, and if you think back carefully, you'll be able to remember that I haven't had my hands anywhere near my pocket since before I was attacked." I had found the function I wanted, and had selected it, so my phone was now recording our conversation. I continued to speak for a while, "I realized a long time ago, Mr. Eaton, that everyone here was your family and that there was only one of me. Junior attacked me before I'd been in the house a minute, and Gunner was clearly spoiling for a fight too. You did nothing to stop them. In fact, you later encouraged their violence. Long before the first time I was seriously attacked I turned on the tape recorder function of my phone." While I was moving the phone so Katelin could see the display, my fingers slid around to cover the bottom part of the display, so the running time couldn't be seen. If she did get a quick glimpse of it, which I'd ensure was all she'd get, I'd talked for long enough for the display to be believable as "hours : minutes", rather than "minutes : seconds". As the phone was nearing Katelin's face, I said, "Katelin, what does the display read?" Katelin quoted, "Recording." I pulled it back to me, moved my finger, and lied, "Recording for fifteen minutes and some seconds. I've got all your boys' taunts and threats, their attacks on me, our discussion of their attacks, your threat to lie in court about what happened today, and your boast that you've already lied to the police. So, please Mr. Eaton, feel free to call the police about what happened here today." I'd decided not to add anything about me calling the police shortly. I thought it likely that my and Julia's parents would advise that, but I didn't see any point in threatening him with it. It'd only inflame the situation, and I'd much prefer to get out of here quietly. Instead of threatening him, I started putting my phone back in my pocket, saying, "I'm leaving now..." Before I could apologize and say goodbye to Katelin, Mr. Eaton leaped out of his chair and came charging across the room at me, his arms stretched out in claws in front of him, reaching for my phone and roaring somewhat incoherently, although I did catch enough to know that he wanted my phone. That reinforced my suspicion that he had something serious to cover up. #1: #2: I yelled, "STOP Mr. Eaton!" From the perspective of a physicist, my yell helped. It would've propelled some air molecules in his direction, increasing the air resistance he had to overcome to reach me. It might have gained me one, or possibly even two, nanoseconds. He was at the appropriate distance from me, so I waited until his rear foot started moving forward, then pushed it sideways. ^ Ankle-tapping is SO good! People are so vulnerable when they're running. First, the act of running has both feet off the ground some of the time, and it's difficult to get much more vulnerable to a push than then. And second, especially in a combat situation where an attacker wants to get his hands on me, he leans to far forward to run, making his running technique into what can be accurately described as a series of controlled forward falls. Delaying the arrival of the leg that's about to absorb all the body's weight by even half a second is disastrous for the runner. Putting some numbers on it, let's say a runner is going at the rate of 100 yards in 10 seconds. That means in 0.5 seconds he'd go 5 yards. Let's say only 3 yards because he's a slow runner and not up to his full speed. If the foot that's about to become the supporting foot is delayed 0.5 seconds by getting hooked behind the other leg, then the runner's upper-body is 3 yards past where it would have been had the supporting foot landed at the correct time. Given that the average human is less than 2 yards tall, moving the upper-body 3 yards forward of its support creates somewhat of a problem: the runner's center of gravity is SO FAR forward of his support that he's going down. Human reaction time is at best about 0.2 seconds - and is often much slower, especially to surprising events or if large limbs have to be moved considerable distances - so there's no way a runner can recover from such a trip. Even using an unrealistically short 0.2 seconds in the above calculation, rather than 0.5, results in 1.2 yards of additional off balance-ness. The guy is going DOWN! To make this technique even better, when someone starts falling by surprise, EVERYTHING they were thinking of is forgotten! Their entire attention goes into reacting to their fall, leaving me free to do whatever I want while they momentarily defenseless and moving in a very predictable way. To be complete, I should also mention two additional issues. First, the one problem with this technique is that the recipient has to be running. If someone walks forward to attack me, or is already standing beside me, then I can't use it. Second, I'd initially thought - back when first trying out this technique on jocks at school - that my ten pounds of sideways push may not be enough. In fact, it's ample. Runners are not expecting any sideways force at all, and the muscles they could use to resist such a force are completely relaxed. The weight of the leg is an issue though, and the first time I'd tried to trip someone (Biff#4), I'd started too late because I'd underestimated the slow acceleration resulting from the leg's mass. But I've practiced so much that I know when to start now, for different running speeds, and I even know how to adjust if the guy is running in a more upright posture. ^ Mr. Eaton tripped and instantly started falling. At the speed he was running, falling is scary, so his hands instantly started moving inward and down to break his fall. I moved forward and to my right, turning left to face Mr. Eaton. I used my left hand to push his nearest arm farther inward so I could get closer to him. That's a frequent part of several Aikido techniques, so I'd trained at it. I stepped a little closer and with my right fist, punched the side of his face as hard as I possibly could, which was REALLY hard. He was built like brick outhouse, so I didn't pull my punch at all. [I had, as a precaution, turned my pain feedback off before the punch. When I turned it back on again a few seconds later, my hand HURT! I turned 90% of it back off again, and gently felt my hand. Nothing seemed broken, but it was several minutes before I removed all the pain suppression.] Mr. Eaton fell mostly on top of Don, Mrs. Eaton having fled while Mr. Eaton had been charging me. Mr. Eaton wasn't a tall guy, but he was very solid and moving fast, so he hit Don hard. Don groaned from the impact. I had trouble not laughing, as my piling the bodies on top of each other was rather funny. I quickly looked at Wayne, but he hadn't moved. Mrs. Eaton was hiding behind a chair some distance away, and Katelin was standing a couple of yards away. Because I was looking at her, I asked, "Does this normally happen when you bring your boyfriends home, Katelin?" Katelin was still in shock from seeing her father felled. It's one thing for boys to fight, and I was sure it was quite normal in this house, but seeing her father knocked out was a whole different thing. She managed a weak laugh, then "No. I don't bring boys home anymore." "Imagine my surprise." Making sure Wayne could see I had an honest smile on my face, I joked, "Wayne, I feel I should walk over there and knock you out too because you're ruining my completing the whole set, haha. I'm joking, of course. I'd never attack anyone; I'll only defend myself. -- "I can't believe how STUPID your family is. I don't even have to vary my technique! I knock them out one after the other in exactly the same way. You live in an unbelievably stupid and violent family. To be serious now though, I'm going to leave shortly, but I'm worried about what's going to happen to Katelin while I'm away. Katelin invited me here, and I can easily imagine her getting blamed for this clusterfuck, even though ALL the violence was started by the males of this family. Will Katelin be safe when these morons wake up?" I looked at the three surviving family members. Mrs. Eaton was no help, she was still standing behind a chair, using it as a shield between me and her, and she was refusing to meet my eyes, let alone answer me. Wayne said, "Nothing like this has happened before, so I don't know. Maybe she should go with you?" Katelin came closer to me, saying, "I think I should go with you. Just to play safe. Dad's got a bad temper, and I don't want to be around when he wakes up." "I'd let you come with me, but I'll suggest a better alternative: go somewhere else, to one of your girlfriend's houses probably. When I came here, I came in friendship and with an honest desire to help. You shouldn't be blamed for any part of what happened, but if you leave with me now, then you're leaving with someone your father and brothers are probably going to consider an enemy. I'm going home to talk with my parents about this, play them what my phone recorded, and get their advice. If they say, 'Call the police, ' I will do that. There could be a great deal of trouble in this house, and if you've gone off with the person these morons think caused the trouble, then you'll be an enemy too. It might be better if you go to a neutral place, but it's up to you?" "I want to go with you." Wayne said, "You'd piss Dad off, Katie. Hide somewhere else." I didn't want her with me either. She'd be able to corroborate my story, but I didn't expect to need corroboration. Beyond that questionable benefit, she'd be another Ava-type situation, potentially needing lots of support, especially if she thought she could do without her family. Another much lower-quality version of Ava just two days after Ava 'joined' my two families would be ridiculous. I said, "Do you want a lift to someone's place, Katelin, or will you take your bike?" "It doesn't seem right to leave you." "I'm not some sort of Prince Charming who has slain the wicked dragon and rescued the princess. You're not my girlfriend, and even if you want to be, I somehow don't think your parents will be giving their approval. You belong in this family, so don't alienate them." "Okay." ------- Chapter 142: More Demonstrations Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Continued) Leaving Katelin's transport arrangements aside for the moment, I followed up on an idea I'd just had. Knowing my tape recorder was still running, and hoping it could pick up our voices when it was in my pocket, I said, "Wayne, if I call the police, are you going to get caught up in the lies your father told them?" "I'm not involved in that." #1: "Let me hazard a guess, it involves violence, and probably Don, or maybe Junior?" "Lucky guess. I want to ask you a question. I don't understand your fights. The first ones took me by surprise, but I was watching Dad's carefully, and it was too easy. How did you beat him so easily?" I was pleased that he hadn't said something like, "Dad was falling even before you hit him." I'd delivered my punches very soon after the trip happened because that was when my attackers were the most distracted, but also because I very much wanted no one to notice the impossible trips. To divert him from his suspicion I decided to do something I'd thought of back when I'd intended to give a martial arts demonstration using various tricks, like the flies, so I said, "Wayne. Find a piece of something very small: a piece of lint, a piece of fingernail, anything like that." "Umm. How about a coin?" "No. I want something very light. So light I couldn't throw it farther than an inch or two. Lint, for example." Wayne had found something on the sofa. "How about a hair?" "Even better than what I was thinking of. If you can, tie a knot or two in it, to make it look totally unique." While Wayne was doing that, I said, "Katelin, if you go stand by Wayne, you might enjoy this too. Mrs. Eaton. I have been verbally and physically attacked from the moment I arrived in your house, and not once have you said a word to stop your children or husband from behaving with deliberate violence toward me. I have a very low opinion of your character, and will quite happily never speak to you again. However, you don't need to cower behind that chair. I haven't attacked anyone yet, and won't do so. So join Wayne for this little demonstration of mine if you wish, or sit in the chair, or go make yourself a cup of coffee, or whatever you want. Feel free to move around; it is your home, after all. Or if your fear is because you're a victim too, then I'd suggest that this evening might be a perfect time for you to talk with the police about it." I ignored her, instead turning to Don, who was now pushing his father off him. I was happy to see that his eyes were open and fully occupied by eyeballs. Having seen how long it took him to recover, I had used too much force, which was worth remembering for the next time I needed to NP someone's eyeballs. "Don, I'm glad to see you've recovered. I was worried I'd poked you too hard and had permanently damaged your eyes. That's not a technique I've practiced very often, for obvious reasons. Am I going to have any more trouble with you, or are you finally going to use your brain?" "I'm not going to attack you again, if that's what you mean. You beat EVERYBODY?" It wasn't really a question because he could see the bodies. I said, "Not Wayne, obviously. Wayne's the only nice one." It took Katelin a couple of seconds, then she said, "Hey! That's what you told me off for saying!" "Sure. You're not allowed to insult your brothers, because you want to build better relationships with them. I can call them assholes if I want. Actually, I honestly don't think they're that bad. They're just stupidly macho and their father has let them get away with it for years. Probably encouraged it, even. The only real asshole in this family is your father. If he hadn't attacked me, I'd still be sitting down with you on my lap, waiting for all the boys to recover from the 'martial arts demonstration' that they insisted I provide. I would've put the whole thing behind me and carried on chatting. Unfortunately your father's attack on me and his boasting that he lied to the police - and perhaps in court too - changed everything." I was looking at Wayne very carefully when I mentioned "court", and I got the impression that the lying had gotten that far. -- I turned back to Don to ask, "Don, do you want to watch this little martial arts demonstration. I was intending to show you guys a few things like this, before you went all stupid on me." "Why are you still here? Why are you being NICE to us? You should have left ages ago." "I can do whatever I want. I don't have the slightest fear of any of you, individually or collectively. I'm perfectly happy chatting to Katelin - she's pretty, although her ass is getting misshapen because she falls on it so often. I'm quite happy talking to Wayne as he's the only nice one. I'm even willing to talk with you. You've got a major problem with stupidity, so I'll try to clue you up a bit. Hopefully you'll start behaving like a decent human being. Can you see properly?" "Yeah, I can see fine. They hurt though. How the hell did you do that to me? You were too far away." "I'm a martial arts expert, just like Katelin told you. Not that anyone in this family will get good enough, but when you get good at martial arts, you learn to move FAST. I can move VERY FAST. That's what I'm about to demonstrate, in a much less painful way than you forced me to. Come and stand next to Wayne." I turned to back to Wayne, saying, "Wayne. I do need to leave shortly, so let's do this quickly." I pulled my sleeves, so my forearms were bare. [As an aside, back when I had first thought of visiting Katelin's family - which had been when I'd been in bed with Katelin a couple of evenings ago - I'd intended to wear my school clothes because I'd thought they'd provoke some reactions from her family. I'd been worried about not getting enough reactions from a brief visit to judge them by, so I'd thought those clothes would help. I'd forgotten all about that intention when I'd gotten dressed after Carol's very enjoyable blowjob, as I'd been distracted and running late. I'd quickly put on some of my ordinary, casual, shapeless clothes, and rushed out the door. As it turned out, I'd gotten plenty of reactions from the family, but - amusingly - might have gotten less had I been wearing my school clothes, as the boys might've been more cautious had they seen my physique as clearly as my school clothes display it. Gunner's first insults that I was a pussy and a pathetic wimp would have been obviously wrong, so the whole downward spiral might not have started. I must remember to tell Julia that clothes can make important first impressions.] Facing Wayne and Katelin, with Mrs. Eaton still hiding behind her chair but looking less fearful, I extended both of my arms straight and angled down, so my hands were a little above waist level and angled to either side so they were about a yard apart. My hands were wide open and palms upward. I said, "My hands are empty, just to prove I don't have a copy of your hair hidden in either of them. There's no way I could copy it, as I haven't gotten close enough to see it yet, let alone be able to knot one in exactly the same way. But to be perfectly sure..." I slapped my open-fingered hands together, brushed their palms quickly against each other to prove they were empty, then returned them to their previous positions. Don had gotten to his feet a little while ago, and had stood where he was, presumably listening to me. Even after I'd invited him to watch my demo, he hadn't moved. A few seconds ago I'd heard him start to walk slowly around to join Wayne and Katelin, which had been fine with me. The way we were standing in the room, Don could've joined the audience by walking either in front of or behind me, but he chose to walk behind me. That didn't register as significant until he got close enough for my proximity sense to pick up that he was planning to punch me in my left side, then kick me in the same spot on my right. [[I didn't know hardly anything about human biology at the time - NOTHING like what I know now - but Don was intending to damage both of my kidneys. There's one on both sides, slightly to the rear, at about the level of the floating ribs. Kidney punches are illegal in various contact sports (boxing, for example), because of how bad injuries to even one can be. What Don was intending to do to me was very bad. Had I known that, I would have reacted very differently than I did, but at the time I thought he was simply intending to hit me because that's what macho idiots do.]] Don's intention was still an intention, as he wasn't quite in position to act on it yet (I can sense commitment to an action in its ki). I had time to decide what to do. My minds discussed it, and we decided to pretend to have no clue while we let him make his attack. I would move to a few inches to my right when he punched my left side, to make his punch miss in a way that Wayne and Katelin would see. Then as soon as he launched his kick, I'd duck beneath it, catch it, then raise it over his head, putting him on his ass. Then I'd take a couple of quick steps away, and see what happened. Ideally to talk him into calming down, otherwise to trip him and punch his lights out, as he'd missed that pleasure the first time. I carried on as if I knew nothing, letting Katelin and Wayne check that my hands were truly empty. That's when Don attacked. I did exactly as I'd planned, as I knew his plan hadn't changed. He was VERY quick, as he'd mentally rehearsed exactly what he wanted to do, but it wasn't hard for me to be even quicker, as I had forewarning and a superbly conditioned body. His first attack was a quick jab, rather than a punch which had a lot of follow-through, so his miss as I dodged sideways didn't upset his balance or even register on his thoughts as he was too focused on performing his more complicated kick. He was already swinging his upper-torso down to his left and his right leg up and around, to power his foot into my right side. He was aiming at a point well above my waist, so it was easy for me to squat and duck under. I also spun around to face him at the same time. As his kicking leg passed over my head I reached up to grab its upper-thigh just below his buttocks, to be as close as possible to his center of gravity. I simultaneously stood and heaved very strongly upward, which sent Don flying up and backward, spinning sideways too, as a result of the considerable momentum of his kick. I was several paces away, casually looking in his direction, while he was still coming down. I had time, so I looked at Mrs. Eaton, and told her, "How could you possibly bring up your children to believe that it is acceptable to attack someone from behind and without warning. You and your husband are appallingly bad parents." Katelin had exclaimed, "Oh no!" while I was lecturing the "Mother Of Year (Booby Prize Division) Winner." Wayne waited until I'd finished, then he said, "Here we go again." Not that I'd cared much, but I'd figured that Don probably had a reasonable amount of martial arts experience, so he should know how to land properly. As it turned out, he landed quite heavily. I guess the surprise, height I'd launched him to, and the twisting motion caused by his roundhouse kick had made things difficult for him. He'd landed on carpet though, so it wouldn't have hurt too much. After the loud, "Oof," of his landing, he jumped to his feet and adopted a fancy looking attack stance. I was VERY casually leaning on a chair at the end of the room, with one leg crossed over the other and resting on its toes. I like to think that my stance looked the scariest. For the ankle-tapping technique to work (it's actually more of a push than a tap, but "ankle-tapping" sounds much cooler than "ankle-pushing"), my opponent has to be running, so I said, "You really are a stupid, stupid boy, aren't you?" Don is, I would guess, 23 or 24. Being called a "boy" by a boy would be inflammatory all by itself, even without the two "stupids" which I'd used so the repetition would help his comprehension. I figured his comprehension needed all the help it could get, as he was demonstrably stupid. Probably surprised at his attack's failure too. Wayne called out, "Don, I bet you $100 Katelin's boyfriend wins." "He's NOT my boyfriend!" "I bet you wish he was." Katelin didn't answer that. After a second, Wayne called to Don, "Do we have a deal?" Don looked at me. I looked at him, "You couldn't touch me when you attacked without warning from behind, so what makes you think you have a chance front on?" No reaction, so I tried, "You attacked me three-to-one from the front last time. How did that work out for you?" Wayne laughed, and even Katelin joined in. After a few seconds, Don relaxed his stance, in defeat. I said, "Aww. I was hoping to knock you out. It would have been amusing to see how often I could use exactly the same technique on the same people." Wayne laughed again. Don didn't, and probably not because he'd been covering his eyes during my previous uses of that punching technique. I walked back to standing in front of Wayne and Katelin again, offering my back to Don. I had my ears strained to hear if he came running at me, and my eyes were studying Katelin and Wayne for any warning of an attack. I extended my hands as I had earlier, saying, "Let's try to finish this, shall we. My hands are empty, right?" Wayne said, "You're not worried about Don being behind you, are you?" I loudly answered, "Shh, I'm hoping he tries again. I REALLY want to knock him out." "Haha." "Back to the demo. Notice what I'm doing to my right hand." I turned it palm down, then closed that hand into a fist. "If you two keep an eye on that hand during this demonstration, you'll see that it doesn't open and doesn't move." Don hadn't moved, so I called back over my shoulder, "Don, are you coming to see this? Because if you don't come right now, you're going to miss it?" "Fuck off, asshole," and he stomped out of the room, slamming the door behind him. I was tempted to say, "The asshole just fucked off," but I figured Wayne and Katelin had probably formed their own opinions about that by now. God knows what Mrs. Eaton thought. I said, "Place the hair in my left hand please, Wayne." He did so, and I said, "I want the two of you to watch my fists. Don't take your eyes off them." I slowly closed my fist over the hair, then rotated my hand so it was palm down. "This little demonstration is an answer to your question, Wayne, about how I could so rapidly conclude the - shall we call it, 'fight'? - with your father. The answer is that I am FAST! I showed you that with the flies before. You should try catching flies yourself. Between your thumb and forefinger, and so gently that they are held but not damaged. You'll find it quite difficult. Anyway, back to my demonstration. I'm going to turn my left hand back over again now, nice and slowly, to make it easy to watch." I did exactly that. "I'm going to slowly open my hand now. Watch closely." I slowly opened it. "If you look, you'll see that the hair is not there anymore. There's nothing impressive about that, but I hope you'll be impressed when I tell you that the hair is now in my other hand." Both of them made sounds of surprise. I said, "I'm going to turn my right hand slowly over, then open it. Watch carefully." I did so, they looked carefully, and were amazed to see the hair. "How did you do THAT?" exclaimed Katelin. "First, Wayne, please check it's the same hair, has the same knots, all that sort of thing." Wayne picked the hair out of my hand and held it up to look at it closely. He declared, "It's the same hair all right. That's a great trick. How did you do it?" While I was answering, I also reached up and took back the hair from Wayne. I said, "I told you, I'm FAST! I did that demonstration because there's no way to get the hair from one hand to the other without moving the hands together. You can spend as long as you want thinking about it, and I don't believe you'll find another way." [My arms had been sloping downward at about forty five degrees, so it was trivially easy to open my fingers slightly (invisible from above), NP-fly the hair out of the left hand (I'd been holding it with NP-fingertips from before I'd closed that fist), fly it up to my armpit immediately under the underside of my arm where no one could see it, around my back, and down the underside of the other arm, then push the hair into my right hand.] I held up the hair in front of me, and said, "You did a good job of knotting it." I said that not out of admiration for the knot, but so they knew that I had the hair. Wayne said, "Thanks, it was tricky to do." I'd already lowered my hand, grabbed the hair with NP, and was flying it around behind but to the side of Wayne, to where I could still see the location, otherwise the NP-fingertip would cancel. Hairs weigh almost nothing, so have almost infinite acceleration when NP'd. I can fly them as fast as my eyeballs can move to follow the NP-point. So all I needed to do was casually glance away from Wayne for a moment. I turned to Katelin, and said, "Can you think of a way of doing the trick?" Wayne turned his head to look at Katelin. I used that moment to fly the hair just inside the top of Wayne's shirt pocket. I very lightly NP-held it there, to make sure it wouldn't get blown out and lost. I was using so little force that if Wayne moved, he wouldn't notice the fingertip because it'd be moved with him. Katelin started answering, "No, I've got..." "Sorry to interrupt, Katelin, but I'd like you to do something for me. Please slowly and carefully pull the top of Wayne's shirt pocket open, in such a way that you and Wayne can both see inside it." I moved to the side, ostensibly to get out of her way, but really so I could maintain line of sight to the pocket. (That hadn't been a problem under my forearms earlier as that was all done inside my proximity range.) I didn't have to give them any more instructions, as both of them saw it and gasped in surprise. I said, "Pick it out carefully, Wayne, and check it's the right hair." Shortly, "It is. That's incredible! How on Earth could you do that?" "I told you: I'm FAST! Can I have the hair back please?" Wayne gave it to me. I held it upright between thumb and forefinger, saying, "You can both see it, can't you?" "Yes," x 2. I slowly moved away from them, still holding the hair up in the air. When I was five or six steps away, I opened my fingers and simultaneously blew hard. Several times, to make sure. "All gone." I walked back to them dusting my hands together. The hair was, of course, NP-flying rapidly in the direction I wanted. I walked back to them again. "Don's eyeballs found out how fast I can move. I took him down from the front while he was coming to attack me, but he never got a chance to even think about raising a hand against me, let alone land any sort of attack." I had been looking at Wayne, and Katelin had been looking from me to Wayne. Specifically to our faces, which requires Katelin to look up as she's significantly shorter than both of us. While she was looking up, she was not looking down (you can tell why people think I'm a genius!), and she was wearing a blouse that had inspired my idea for this repetition of my trick. So while she was looking at Wayne, I quickly did something I've diligently practiced for several years: I surreptitiously looked down inside a girl's blouse. I was NP-holding the hair in the middle, so about half an inch or so from one end. I poked that end between her bra and breast, careful not to touch her flesh with an NP-fingertip. The hair was far too light and small for her to notice it. I could only spare her a quick glance, so I soon lost the line of sight and the NP-points canceled. I glanced down her blouse again a few seconds later, and I could see the hair as the knot helped. I said, "Wayne. I asked Katelin to do me a favor a minute ago by looking in your shirt pocket. Can you do me a similar favor please?" "Haha, really? You've done it again?" "Yes. Stand still please, Katelin. If you move you could dislodge it." Katelin froze. I suddenly realized that there was a problem with the place I had chosen, so I added, "It'd be a good idea if you inhaled. DON'T exhale; JUST inhale and hold your breath. Please do it now." She did so. I backed away about three steps, saying, "I'll get well out of the way. Wayne, will you carefully undo the top two buttons of Katelin's blouse. The two that are already done up, I mean. HOLD your breath Katelin." I was very tempted to joke about being a dirty pervert and all this was a cunning plan to see Katelin's tits, but Katelin might laugh. In the event that she did laugh, which people have sometimes been known to do to my jokes, the hair might move. As much as I would enjoy searching deep into Katelin's bra for the hair, it might have fallen out rather than in, which would be a pity. Wayne checked, "You want me to undo Katelin's blouse?" "Sure. I'm assuming there's no big deal about your seeing the top of her bra. Tell me if that horribly clashes with your family morals, although it's hard to imagine that this family has many morals, given the dishonorable violence demonstrated by most of its members and the parental tolerance and encouragement of it." I was hoping to shame the mother into doing something about the problem. Wayne did as I'd asked. I said, "If you pull the right side of her blouse away from her chest, you should be able to see the hair tucked into the top of her right cup of her bra. In about the 2 o'clock position. I hope it's still there, as her breathing might have dislodged..." "I see it." He reached in and pulled it out. I noticed he didn't ask permission, but then he didn't touch her either, so no biggie either way. I was about to tell Katelin she could breathe normally now, but she beat me to it by suddenly exhaling. While Katelin was doing herself back up, Wayne said, "There's no way in the world you could undo her buttons, tuck the hair in, then do them back up, without her noticing - no matter how fast you are!" #1: I laughed, "Haha. No, of course not. I tucked it in from the top, without undoing any buttons. If you look at her blouse from the right angle, you can see that I could easily do that. I don't know about you, but I've spent YEARS staring down girls' blouses. I'm a 'Make Love Not War' type of guy, so I'm more expert on breasts than fighting." I got some good laughs. -- "I got you to undo her buttons for either of two reasons. Either because I got carried away being overly dramatic, or because I'm not Katelin's boyfriend so I used the only opportunity I'll have to get a good look at her chest." To Katelin I said, "Thanks Katelin. You're very attractive." (That's what guys say when a girl's got nice tits.) Katelin smiled in appreciation for my lying to her family, as I'd seen her naked when we'd been fucking two evenings earlier. I said, "In all seriousness, obviously I'm sort of tricking you. You've got no idea how I did those tricks, and I'm not going to tell you. But I will tell you some things. I have NEVER done that trick before. I'm not a magician who spends hour after hour practicing some sleight-of-hand illusion. I used a martial art skill that I am VERY good at, in a deliberately amusing way. Now that I've invented it and seen how well it works, I'm looking forward to using it on other people. My girlfriend and sisters are definitely going to be teased by it. -- "You saw me grabbing flies. I've never practiced grabbing flies like that either. I've flailed around at them sometimes, when they're a nuisance, but I've never tried catching them that way before. I knew I could though, because I know my martial arts abilities. I am, as Katelin truthfully told you all, an expert in some aspects of martial arts. -- "Enough about me. I find it not only incredibly rude, but incredibly stupid, that virtually all of your family started attacking me from the moment I arrived. None of them had ANY idea of my capabilities. How can they possibly be so stupid as to attack someone, especially to seriously attack someone, when they had no idea what they were dealing with. The level of macho stupidity in this house has risen so high that it's far above any sane level. Your father is clearly at fault, with your pathetic mother - for whatever reason she's pathetic - allowing it to happen. My advice to you two is to make a serious effort to rescue the children of this family, but if you can't, then move out. There's heaps of cheap, student accommodation in this town, so get your own place, where you're not going to be sucked into the violence this family generates. Of course that's just my personal opinion. You'd probably get far better advice from some sort of professional family counselor. -- "That's it, I'm outta here. Somehow, saying 'It's been a pleasure' doesn't seem appropriate, so I'll just say goodbye." Katelin gushed, "I'm VERY sorry for what happened, Mark. It's been the horriblest thing I've ever seen. My family are..." "Katelin, you don't have to tell me what your family are. I know what they are, and I'd rather not think about it. You don't need to apologize to me either, you are the person LEAST responsible for this mess. It's you I feel sorry for. I know tonight was far worse than normal because I wouldn't let them beat me up the way they wanted. But although you may not see this much violence normally, it is clearly part of their personalities, and that's sick. I just remembered: do you want a lift somewhere else, or will you take your bike?" "I'll bike." "Good girl. I'll walk you out. Wayne, it was a pleasure talking to you. You are the only nice one, just like Katelin said. Probably the only one with two brain cells to rub together, from what I saw. Take care. I don't know what my parents will recommend, but my guess is the police will be here in an hour or two. -- "Mrs. Eaton. Words fail me when it comes to your abrogation of responsibility. On second thought, I doubt you understand big words like that, so I'll rephrase it. Bringing up kids is an important job that you're failing miserably at, because you're not even trying. That's what it looks like to me. Maybe there are good reasons for your lack of character, but no one here has offered me any excuse for your inaction, so I'm starting to think the fault is yours. That's all I'm going to say about you." I took Katelin's hand, and walked toward the living room door. I was amused that when I got close enough to proximity sense Gunner, I could tell that he was awake and busy being two different animals at the same time: a chicken playing possum. He was a truly gifted young man, haha. I hadn't hit him as hard as Junior or Mr. Eaton, so it made sense for him to wake first. As I walked past him, I suddenly bent down and yelled "BOO!" into his ear. His whole body spasmed in surprise. His eyes flew open in fright, so I raised my hands in claws and went "Grrr." I tried to look frightening, but it was very hard not breaking out into laughter. Gunner scrambled to his feet and ran away in panic. It was very funny, and I had no reason to hold it back, so I started laughing as Gunner wrenched the living room door open and ran straight into a hand that plunged a large knife into his side. "FUCK!" In Don's voice. | #1, #2, #3: | Screams of agony from Gunner. #1: #2: #3: #1, #2: No one else had reacted yet. I grabbed Katelin by the back of her jeans, and RAN her down to the far side of the room, her feet never touched the floor, yelling, "WAYNE! Fucking stupid Don has knifed Gunner, thinking it was me. Grab your mom and hide behind something. Who knows what the hell Don will do now." I flew Katelin behind a seat, pushed her down, and held her there. I looked back toward the door. Gunner was partly visible and screaming a lot. At least he was still alive. There was no sign of Don. #1: #2: #3: #2: "Wayne, are there any guns in the house?" "Of course." #2: #3: Katelin was starting to peek around the sofa. Keeping one eye on the doorway, I grabbed her, and pulled her back. I didn't want to yell "Lie flat," because it'd be better that Don not hear that so he wouldn't adjust his aim, so I whispered in Katelin's ear. "He could have a gun. Lie flat and don't fucking move." I pushed her into position, using all the gentleness that the situation required, so none at all. When Katelin was flat, I put my hand on her back and held her down. "Wayne!" When he looked, I mouthed "Flat", pointing at Katelin. He got the idea, and pushed his mom into that position. I pulled out my phone, had to hit "Okay" to accept the default name ("Recording") from the seemingly finished tape recording function, then I dialed 9-1-1, and got through. "This is Mark Anderson at," [I gave the Eatons' address]. "We need an ambulance and LOTS of cops. We have a violent mid-20s male called Don Eaton who has knifed one person already. There are guns in the house, and we are hiding behind sofas in the living room." "Can you..." "Fucking asshole," from Don charging into the room. #1: #1 sent us a picture of what we were going to do. #2: #3: #2: Keeping my eyes on Don, I dropped the phone, stood and walked into a clear area, "Knifing your own brother; how pathetically stupid are you!" As soon as he'd seen me, Don had started charging. He was close enough now so I ankle-tapped him, swiveled to the other side than usual, and used my other hand to punch the side of his head as HARD as I could, while wishing I could do it harder. He dropped like the sack of shit he was. Proximity showed he was unconscious. With the amount of force I'd put into the punch, I had no doubt he was VERY unconscious. I looked back. Wayne had been watching, and the first thing he said was, "Same technique again." "I was worried about overusing one hand so I used the other side. I'm still going to count it as number four though. You and your mom check Gunner please. I'll keep an eye on all the sleeping morons." Wayne pulled his mom up and they rushed to Gunner. On the way past, Wayne kicked the knife out of Don's hand. I'd been intending to leave it there to look good for the police when they arrived, as I knew Don was unconscious and I was intending to stand near him to make sure he remained that way, but it didn't matter as there were prints all over it and enough witnesses. His screaming attack was probably recorded by the emergency operator too. Which reminded me about my phone still being on the emergency call. I moved back to Katelin. Being a girl, she'd interpreted my "Stay flat" command as "Stay flat until Don comes charging into the room, then rise up to make sure you get a good look at everything." I told her, "Don's knocked out and it's all over. You can stand the rest of the way up now. Go check on Gunner if you like. Just don't touch the..." I had been intending to tell her not to touch the knife, to preserve the prints, but she launched herself at me. If she was busy kissing me, she wasn't in any danger of destroying the prints, so I might as well kiss her back. I kissed her a few times, then said, "I'd better get back on the phone. Stay away from the knife, okay?" She played safe by staying away from everything that wasn't me. I reached down for the phone, and said, "I'm back. The assailant charged me with a knife and I knocked him out. We still need the ambulance urgently because Don knifed one of his brothers earlier. We're going to need lots of cops to untangle this mess, but there's no urgency anymore." While I'd been speaking, I'd walked over to Father and Junior Fuckwits, and they were both still out cold. #1: #2: #3: "I need to hang up now. I have to..." "Don't hang up, sir. It's important you stay on the line..." "I'm a minor and I need to call my parents. I've just been attacked by a knife-wielding homicidal maniac, and that's exactly the sort of stuff I know my parents would like to be informed about. Besides, it's dinnertime and I'm hungry, so they can bring my dinner with them. This is going to take a LONG TIME to untangle." I hung up. #1: #3: #2: #1: [To explain, we'd boasted with the intention of getting Wayne to convince the other boys to stop attacking me, and then to use that as the "thin edge of the wedge," to try to make them see they shouldn't attack anyone, because sooner or later they were bound to attack someone much meaner than I was. By my staying around and remaining in conversation with them, rather than leaving immediately, I hoped I'd be able to help Katelin's project too. Both of those good intentions were doomed now.] I called home, and Mom answered. I couldn't remember hearing how you should tell your parents stuff like this, so I started with the important stuff, "I know I'm late for dinner. Is it cooked already?" "Yes. We're just about to sit down to it. I was going to call to see where you are." "Have you got a pen and paper? I'll give you the address. You'll need it shortly." "Oh, why?" "Let me do it my way. Have you got the pen and paper?" "Yes." "Okay, the address is," I gave Mom the Eatons' address; their current address, as I suspected that several of them might be residing elsewhere soon, for a variety of reasons. "The second thing I'd like, is for you and Dad to bring my dinner here right now. I'm hungry, I'm stuck here, and you're going to have to come here now anyway." "And why would that be?" "There was some fighting and I had to call the cops. They're on the way now. I'm fine. No one came close to laying a finger on me, although a few of them tried. There are several males in this family and most of them attacked me, including the father. I knocked them all out, except for one of them who got a knife and tried to attack me with that. He failed totally, but he stabbed one of his brothers first." "Oh my God! Are you all right?" "Mom, I'm as good at fighting as I am at soccer or bowling, okay? None of them touched me. Every time one of them came near me, I knocked him out before he knew I'd moved. None of my fights lasted more than one second. The only problems are that the father also attacked me so I had to knock him out, and one of the boys stabbed his own brother because he stupidly thought the brother was me. When he did find me, I immediately knocked him out too. I hear the sirens coming, Mom. PLEASE bring my food when you come, and please call the Williamses too. I REALLY have to go. Sorry about this. See you soon. Love you, bye." I figured my going on about the food would give Mom a clear message that everything was fine. Also, she might bring the food. I went to Gunner. He was lying on his back, with Wayne holding his shirt to the wound to stem the blood. Wayne saw me coming, and said, "I think he'll be fine. He just seems to be bleeding, and that shouldn't matter with the ambulance so close." I didn't know how accurate his diagnosis was, especially as it might have been intended to cheer Gunner up. Gunner was conscious and groaning, so he didn't seem too bad. If he was groaning then he wasn't dead, which was pretty much the extent of my medical knowledge. The sirens were very close, so I said, "Katelin, Wayne; the cops will play my tape and might want you to explain about the hair trick. I'd appreciate your not making a big deal out of that." They both nodded. I wanted to ask them whether they'd side with their family or with me (i.e., lie or tell the truth, respectively). But I'd soon find out and asking them wasn't going to achieve anything. My phone rang. It was Prof so I answered. The sirens sounded like they were in the next room, which Prof could doubtless hear. Prof yelled, "Don't tell ANYBODY ANYTHING. Say you're a minor and you're waiting for your parents. NOT a word more than that. It's VERY important. Got that!" "Yes." "If they ask you what day of the week it is, what do you tell them?" "I'm a minor waiting for my parents. Can I tell them my name?" "Name, address and age and nothing else until we arrive. Vanessa's talking to our lawyer now. I've got to hang up so I can drive. We'll be there in a few minutes. See you soon. Bye." Katelin was opening the front door. A smart move, as moments later about 4,500 cops came pouring through. I guess my emergency call had gotten their attention. With my hands in the air because the cops looked SERIOUS, I pointed to the living room, saying, "The bad guys are all in there." In other words, "I'm a good guy," and by implication, "Please don't shoot me." The cops did their, "Enter a room full of bad guys" routine. They got way more casual when they discovered that all the bad guys were sleeping. There were still about 3,500 cops in the hallway just inside the front door (the living room doorway opens into the hall a few feet inside the front door, so that's where we were standing), most of whom were asking questions. I soon identified myself, and then I started getting a LOT of practice saying, "I'm a minor and I'm waiting for my parents to arrive." I would've felt embarrassed saying that in front of Katelin and Wayne - as how could I expect them to say good things about me if I was refusing to speak myself? - but the cops had quickly separated us. Katelin and Wayne were nearby, but if I talked normally there was no way they could hear me over the ambient noise, of which there was a great deal. I was questioned over and over again, and it felt very awkward to answer, "Why are you in this house?" as just as one of MANY possible examples, with "I'm a minor." One early question that I did answer was, "Which guy is the alleged assailant?" I decided this was information that the cops should know, so I said, "The two guys closest to the doorway should be considered bad guys, but the baddest guy is the guy who wielded the knife. He's the guy farthest in." "What did the other two do?" "I'm a minor and I'm waiting for my parents to arrive." "Who are those three?" "I'm a minor and I'm waiting for my parents to arrive." "We were told there was one assailant. Why do you say there was three?" "I'm a minor." The cops were not pleased, and let me know it. They tried a number of rather obvious tricks: "You called us, so tell us why", "If you've got nothing to hide...", "Listen kid, we can't waste the whole night with you", etc. At least one of Katelin, Wayne or Mrs. Eaton must've been talking, because I was soon being asked questions like, "If Miss Eaton isn't your girlfriend, what're you doing visiting her house?" "I'm a minor." The ambulance arrived soon after the first cops. The paramedics treated Gunner first, and he was quickly wheeled away, with his mother in attendance. In some respects, Gunner's role as a "bad guy" should've been mentioned, but what with my being a minor who was waiting for his parents, it wasn't going to happen for a while. Gunner's 'getting away' didn't worry me, as I figured he wasn't going to be going far or causing any problems for a while. I'd asked for "an ambulance" singular, but the emergency operator must've decided that a knife-wielding guy running around a house with guns in it might possibly result in the need for more than one. Other paramedics went into the living room, and soon I heard Mr. Eaton's voice roaring out. Shortly after that, Junior was wheeled out on a stretcher. He was conscious and moaning. Shortly after that, the attitude of the cops around me changed for the worst. Easiest described by quoting one of the questions I was asked: "Why did you assault everybody?" I could answer that question very easily, "I'm a minor and I'm waiting for my parents to arrive." There was chaos all around me, as LOTS of different people were doing many different things, including being very belligerent and aggressive toward me. But at the same time it was also very orderly. No one was running, cops had time to stand and gossip with each other, and it was just another day at the office for them. It was very disorienting. With all the questions, taunts and threats I was incessantly bombarded with - and the fear they caused me - the result was that I was MIGHTY glad to be a minor who was waiting for his parents, and even gladder that said parents were on their way. The threats I referred to were such as, "Things are going to go VERY badly for you, if you don't cooperate, SIR." Or a large cop sticking his face right into mine, and sneering down at me. I was recognized as the victim in the Biff assaults, so I was taunted with that too, "Get yourself in a lot of fights, don't you. What'd you do to start this one?" The cops had many different ways of being intimidating and creating fear. There were all sorts of activities going on: photographers flashing cameras all over the place, paramedics wanting to check me out, new cops rotating in to have their turns asking me the same questions as the previous cops had, or to ask me new questions as they were getting an increasingly clear picture of what had happened. They were increasingly aggressive toward me about my role in it too. My family finally arrived. They'd actually been very quick in real-time, but what felt like far too long subjectively. After they'd pushed through to me, reassured themselves that I was fine, etc., they finally released me from my previous instruction on what I could say. Now I had to say, "I'm a minor and I'm waiting for my lawyer to arrive." I asked Dad, "I have a lawyer?" "You do now. He's on the way. The Williamses too." My sisters had also come, and there was lots of hugging and kissing. Rather too much from Carol, and I had to get her to cool it. It was hard to reassure them, when there were a dozen cops standing all around me. Some with their pads open and pens poised, ready to record my every word, so I said the only thing I could, "I'm fine," repeatedly. I was truly MUCH finer now, as it was a HUGE relief to have my parents here! There was one piece of distressing news from my family though. In answer to my asking her about it, Mom said, "No. I didn't have time to bring your dinner with us." "If something like this ever happens again, I'm not going to give you the address until you've got my dinner all packed up ready to go." I was overdoing the dinner thing to hopefully reassure my family, but I was also truly hungry and definitely would've preferred Mom to have brought food with her. A large part of my hunger problem was that I could smell the Eatons' dinner cooking. Probably overcooking by now, as the mother had gone with the paramedics. It'd be a terrible thing to let good food go to waste, so I said, "Carol, could you find Katelin please, and ask her if I can have some food out of her kitchen?" I thought it best to ask for permission in case the Eatons accused me of stealing their food, and because I was EXTREMELY eager to find out what Katelin's attitude to me was. Would she be helpful, or was she loyal to her family? The aggressive questioning the cops had been inflicting on me had me VERY worried about that. The cops initially reacted by refusing to let me eat. I was beginning to realize that given a choice about how to react to anything, cops will choose to be assholes every time. What conceivable reason could they have for not letting me eat at dinnertime! I enjoyed Mom's hitting the roof, "My son has an extreme physiological condition that requires him to eat at very specific times. If you stop him eating, and he suffers a..." I can't spell most of the words Mom used from here on. She works in the medical field, although in sales, but she can still throw impressive sounding medical words around when she wants to. The cops, of course, backed down; dismissing the issue in a way that implied it was never important, and that their giving up on it in no way reduced their hugely impressive macho-ness. [MUCH later I asked Mom about my "extreme physiological condition?" She answered with a smile, "Hunger's a physiological condition."] When Carol returned with Katelin's consent, Dad said, "Let's all go to the kitchen." The cops didn't like letting me out of the bedroom they'd gotten me cornered in. Dad had to make an issue about whether I was under arrest or not. After some more macho bullshit, including several threats about "Things not looking good for him," and "He'll probably be arrested shortly," the cops begrudgingly let me walk the fifteen yards to the kitchen. As well as being the source of food, that was also where Katelin was. [I found out later that I'd come very close to being arrested. On the emergency call I'd said I'd knocked Don out. That by itself would've been fine and possibly even made me a hero, except that when Mr. Eaton had been revived, he'd accused me of every crime he could think of. Early on in their questionings, Katelin and Wayne had said that I'd knocked out everyone in the living room, which is the sort of statement that cops have a very direct response to. Fortunately Katelin and Wayne had also repeatedly said that I had only defended myself when their family had attacked me. Their good testimony, plus my non-aggressive attitude toward the cops, saved me from being handcuffed and everything else that would've followed from that. The cops decided to wait and see. That approach worked well for me, because the more Mr. Eaton said - and he never stopped talking - the less credibility he had. To be complete I should add that Mrs. Eaton said next to nothing before she left, and Gunner's stab and Junior's broken jaw kept them from talking before they were taken away.] In the kitchen my peace of mind received an immediate boost when Katelin saw me, as she immediately ran into my arms. She hadn't been surrounded by cops the way I'd been, as she'd knocked-out considerably fewer people than I had, so none of the cops were able to stop her in time. The cops were visibly unhappy at this development, but I maintained the room's average by being HUGELY happy as it boded VERY well for the Eaton family not ganging up on me. Everything was fine after that. Both Katelin and Wayne consented to my having something to eat. Katelin started getting it, but Mom took over so Katelin could remain on my lap. Mom's encouraging that told me how seriously Mom thought this situation was. Katelin commented, "Don and Daddy are in big trouble, aren't they?" I wasn't sure about that. What little I knew of the law required me to press charges against my assailants, but none of the cops had asked me anything like that. The impression I had was that the cops expected most of the family to press charges against me. If the cops didn't let me make charges against the family, and if Gunner didn't press charges against Don, would the whole family get off? I didn't know enough about how the law worked to have an opinion, only enough to be nervous that if they didn't get in trouble, then probably I would. My true answer should have been, "I hope so," but I more diplomatically said, "I don't know, Katelin. We'll have to wait and see." I thought to add, "If they somehow get off this, they'll get into some other trouble sooner or later. That's the sort of people they are." Hopefully that'd appease Katelin's conscience, and make it easier for her to rat out her father and brother now. Wayne said, "Don's been in trouble before." The cops wanted us not to talk about it, but they weren't willing to physically separate us, so all they achieved was to interrupt us a lot. Prof, Vanessa and Julia arrived, so I had to say, "I'm perfectly fine" another fifty times. Julia wanted to know what had happened, but my four parents (counting Prof and Vanessa as parents-in-law), wouldn't let me talk. Katelin and Wayne were only too happy to explain, but the cops wouldn't let them. Katelin managed to say enough "Mark was wonderful"-type statements for my girls to feel better. I helped by throwing in some more, "I'm perfectly fines." I had one little bit of fun. Julia had made Katelin move over, so that both of them were on my lap. One of the most obnoxious cops - and there was a considerable amount of competition for that title - came into the kitchen and sneered something about "Casanova." I didn't catch anything else, as there were several conversations going on around me, but it was clearly an insult. I couldn't resist looking at him and saying, "This must happen to you a lot, with your interpersonal skills." I'd deliberate sounded very sincere, but no one had any doubt about my true meaning. He didn't receive his co-workers' laughter with good grace, but he couldn't do any more than glower at me. My lawyer arrived not long after that, which was probably just as well, or else my returning confidence might've caused me to become even more of a smart-ass. I'd been expecting my lawyer to be the guy who'd helped with the school negotiation, but the new guy was a stranger. I got to spend plenty of time with him over the next few hours though. After my lawyer introduced himself to us as Jackson Walker, and confirmed I'd said nothing, he went off to have a talk with the boss cop. He came back ten minutes later, saying, "We're going to take this to the police station. I need an interview room where I can talk with Mark confidentially. I'll know what we're dealing with after that." There were a few logistical issues, such as the police insisting that they would be providing my transport. My parents tried to insist that they'd bring me in their car, but Mr. Walker told them, "Mark might be charged, so they're not going to let him out of their control." That didn't cheer anybody up. He also wanted only Mom and Dad to be in on my interview with him, but no one else in my two families wanted to be left behind. Katelin wanted to come too, but I eased her out of the idea. "Thank you VERY much for your support, Katelin, but you'll just make your family think you're their enemy, and you're not going to be allowed to be with me anyway. You heard Mr. Walker say it'll just be my parents and me. You should stay with Wayne and wait for news about the various members of your family." Wayne agreed with me, and Katelin conceded. Wayne looked forlorn, so I said, "I'm sorry about all this, Wayne." Wayne shrugged forlornly. Having achieved exactly nothing, we were ushered out of the house. While I was getting into the backseat of a police car, I was shocked to see Mr. Eaton walking out of the house, as I'd thought he was long gone. There was a cop to either side of him, but he was not restrained in any way. To the cop currently 'helping' me into the car, I nodded to Mr. Eaton, and said, "He should be in handcuffs." "Why?" I almost started explaining, but remembered I was a minor who was waiting to talk with his lawyer, so I shut up and got into the car. ------- Chapter 143: Helping the Police with Their Inquiries Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Continued) The trip to the station took only a few minutes. The cops made casual conversation with me, most of their comments being casual questions about recent events. I said nothing. I was escorted to the interview room and had to wait a little while until my lawyer and parents arrived. Soon we were ready to start. With pen poised, Mr. Walker said, "Start at the beginning, Mark. Go slowly and give me as much detail as you can." "You want all the details?" "Yes. You never know what might be important." "That's going to take a long time. Wouldn't it be better for me to give you an overview first, so you can ask me details about important parts of it?" "Let's do it my way, shall we." "Okay. You asked for it." I started. "I'll start with a little background material first. A couple of days ago Katelin and I ... You know who Katelin is, don't you? The daughter. The larger of the two girls sitting on my lap in the kitchen when you arrived." "If I don't know something, I'll ask. You just describe what happened." "Okay. A couple of days ago Katelin and I were talking. I have extremely good relationships with my sisters, and Katelin wanted better relationships with her brothers. I agreed to help her try to achieve that. I gave her a little bit of advice and I suggested I pop in to see her family briefly. Just to get a feel for them, so that when she talked about them to me I'd have a face to put the name to, and an idea of what sort of people they were. My intention was to have nothing to do with her family after that, beyond being someone she could talk with about them, as a non-participating source of advice. -- "This afternoon, half an hour before dinner, is when we arranged for me to pop in..." I'd been deliberately vague during the background, but I went on to give him EVERY detail I could remember from the moment I arrived at the Eatons' home. I could remember a LOT of details! I ordinarily have three extremely good active memories these days, and I'd been concentrating very hard on remembering everything during my visit because I'd believed it'd be a short one and I'd been worried about not getting enough information from her family to form useful impressions about them. It took me five minutes to get from the first spoken sentence (Katelin's, "Come on! I can't wait to introduce you to my family."), to the second (Gunner's, "Haha! I wondered whether my stupid sister's latest BOY-friend was you. 'Martial arts expert' - ha! You're a pussy."). I described the house's exterior, their cars, the house's interior in the rooms I'd walked through, where I'd met the family, their expressions upon seeing me, my prior knowledge of Gunner and Wayne from school. I gave him all of the conversation before the introductions started, and during the introductions themselves. I gave him my thoughts as they had occurred to me, such as not thinking highly of the parents for allowing Gunner to insult me the way he did. I included Junior's hand squeeze of course, as well as the lack of normal social etiquette as exampled by my having to be asked to be introduced, not asked to sit, and not offered a drink. The introduction was taking a LONG time to recount. Before I got to Wayne calling me "Egg", the lawyer stopped me, saying, "Are you honestly remembering this level of detail?" "Sure. I have a very good memory." Mom chuckled. "This is going to take a long time, isn't it?" "It's taking me about four times longer to describe than it took in reality. Later on things get more complicated, so let's assume an overall six-to-one ratio. Probably ten to twelve hours to tell you, plus however long it takes to answer your questions." "Okay. You've made your point. You'll have to speed it up." I resisted making a joke about his "you never know what details will be important." Instead I said, "I'll give you an overview then." I sped up considerably. I soon got to Wayne recognizing me as "Egg", and I had to mention it because there was a great deal of animosity from the boys after that, especially during our "Graceful" discussion. He questioned my being a genius. "You're a genius?" "Yes." "Very intelligent?" Several facetious answers occurred to each of my minds, but he was on my side, so I just said, "Yes. Very." "Do you do well at school?" "Yes. Is there a reason we are hung up on this point? How does my intelligence have any relevance to what happened?" "If you're doing well at school I'll have more leverage with the DA, if it comes down to that." "Early last school year I was advanced from 8th to 9th grade. This year I am doing 10th and 11th grades simultaneously, as well as several college courses toward a Bachelor in Mathematics. Next year I'll do 12th grade and finish my bachelor's. I'm on schedule to finish school and a four-year college degree at the age of sixteen, six years ahead of normal. Will that impress the DA?" "I imagine it will. That's very impressive." "Good. Shall I carry on?" "Please." I quickly skimmed through the constant insults I'd been given, until I got to the point where I had announced that I was leaving, and the boys had physically blocked the door and refused to let me out. They'd ranted and raved at me, and I quoted some of the things they'd said, especially quotes that included their violent refusal to let me leave the room. "Are those the exact words they used?" This wasn't the first time he'd asked me the same question, so I answered more firmly this time, "If I quote someone, you can always assume it's 100% accurate. If I'm paraphrasing or I'm not sure of my accuracy, then I'll let you know." I continued, and my lawyer particularly liked my asking, "Mr. Eaton. Are you going to tell your sons not to kidnap me, or do I have to fight my way out?" And his answer, "You're a big mouthed smart-ass, kid. This's your own fuckin' fault." I also made a big deal about Katelin's running around the room, begging everyone to leave me alone, and how roughly she'd been turned down, including by her father. I skipped all the goading I'd given her brothers, to save time and because it was obviously not relevant. Instead I said, "I was standing unaggressively in the center of the room, still drinking the glass of milk I'd had to request for myself. I told them that I'd finish the milk then call my parents to come get me. The boys reacted very badly to that, and Don, Junior and Gunner all attacked me. When the three attackers got close enough to me I dealt with each of them as quickly and cleanly as I could. Don was the oldest and scariest, so I poked him in the eyeballs hard enough to hurt him but not enough to injure. That temporarily blinded him, and he dropped from the pain. I dodged Junior's attack and punched him once on the side of the head, which knocked him out. Then I dodged Gunner's attack and I punched him once on the side of the head too, also knocking him out. -- "That was it. All over in three blows. I didn't touch them after that. Mr. Eaton leaped out of his chair, and was about to attack me, but I managed to talk him into sitting down again. Wayne never moved, and he also helped me convince his father to sit down. He's the only nice brother." My lawyer asked incredulously, "You knocked out Don, Junior AND Gunner Eaton?" "Yes to Junior and Gunner; Don I poked in the eyes. He was conscious but out of action for a while. Not long enough, as it turned out." "What did they do to you?" "They attacked me. Are you asking what blows they landed on me?" "Yes." "None. I told you what happened. They attacked, and I dropped them one by one. None of them touched me. They TRIED to, but they failed. Katelin and Wayne can confirm that their brothers were attacking me though, so I was defending myself. I was standing in the center of the room drinking my glass of milk, they yelled violent threats and obscenities at me, and then charged me. I was talking calmly and quietly, the same as I am now. They attacked me, and I did the bare minimum I could to protect myself. As soon as I was safe, I even asked Mrs. Eaton to check Don's eyes because I was worried about them. They were fine though; fine enough that he could attack me several more times later on." "Three guys attacked you, and none of them landed a blow, and you 'dropped them'?" "Yes. And in answer to your next obvious question, No, I am not an experienced fighter. This is the first time I have tried to hit anyone in years. I've been attacked by bullies at school, even badly assaulted by them sometimes - the police will have records of some recent attacks on my by the school's football team that you should probably read up on - but I've never fought back before today. I had no choice today because those guys weren't going to be content with slapping me around and flushing my head in the toilet. They were violently angry and intending to seriously hurt me, as Don's stabbing of Gunner later proved. Don mistook Gunner for me, by the way. I HAD to do what I could to defend myself." "So how did you win the fight so easily then? You don't expect anyone to believe you got that lucky, do you?" "I've had three lessons from an Aikido instructor. Aikido is a martial art. It's purely defensive and doesn't have any punches, kicks or all the usual stuff you associate with martial arts. Aikido is more spiritual and mental than physical. I used my new Aikido skills. Unfortunately, none of the Aikido lessons I've had included what to do about more than one attacker, so I had to decide what to do for myself, and knocking them out seemed the quickest and safest way to end the fight. And - in answer to your next question - yes, THREE Aikido lessons taught me a great deal. I am a very, very quick study. I'm a genius, remember? As I see it, aren't the only really important facts that they attacked me and I defended myself by doing the least I possibly could?" "Those are important, yes. But so is having a believable story. Yours is not believable." "Katelin and Wayne will verify it. Call up my Aikido instructor and ask him how quick I learn. I can give you his number whenever you want. The only reason you don't believe me is because you've never dealt with anyone who learns as fast as I do before. I'm unusual, so my accomplishments seem so unlikely that they're unbelievable. How likely is it that a 16-year old boy will graduate college next year? Professor Williams is my girlfriend's father, and he's probably in the waiting room now. He's a professor of Mathematics at OSU who can confirm that I'm on schedule to achieve that. My beating three guys with so little training and zero experience is not likely either, but I did it. Regardless of any of that, THEY attacked ME!" Dad said, "I have no doubt that everything Mark said is the truth. He is a physical genius as well as a mental one. He bowled 300 last Sunday, for instance. If anyone could learn how to defend himself from three attackers in three lessons, then it's Mark." Mr. Walker said, "Why did Gunner Eaton deride your being a martial arts expert when you first arrived at the house?" "Good question. Katelin's brothers and father all do martial arts. They're a very aggressive family. Katelin tried to build me up to her family by telling them something she thought they'd be impressed by. Unfortunately, with their being aggressively competitive macho idiots, all it did was make them want to attack me even more." "So you beat three experienced martial artists without their landing a blow on you?" "Yes. I wouldn't be impressed by that as I'm pretty sure none of them are any good at their martial arts. I knocked out Junior and Gunner with exactly the same technique: I stepped to their side as they were running toward me, and punched them on the side of the head. It wasn't exactly rocket science. When the father attacked me, I stepped to his side and punched him the same way. When Don attacked me with the knife, I stepped to his side and punched him exactly the same. They were so angry, violent and stupid that they simply charged at me time after time. I kept doing exactly the same thing and it kept working. I have a feeling that if I hadn't called the cops, I'd still be there knocking them out one-by-one, in the same manner over and over again. They really are an incredibly stupid bunch of people. What I did wasn't very impressive: I simply found something that worked, and I kept using it." #1: #2: #1: #2: Mr. Walker said, "Let's move along. What happened next?" I skipped over the irrelevant catching of flies and balancing a glass of milk on my foot tricks. I said, "I was worried about Don Eaton's eyes, and I thought I'd likely knocked all the aggression out of the boys, so I waited to see how Don was. Mr. Eaton was still very aggressive though, and he got worked up. Soon he hit upon the brilliant idea of waiting until his boys all woke up then calling the police and charging me with assaulting them. I pointed out that the whole family would have to lie to the police and maybe in court, and he said, 'Been there, done that.' I'm pretty sure he was telling the truth too." "Really? What were the exact words?" "I said, 'The only way I could possibly be in any trouble at all, would be if all your family lied to the police, swore false statements, perjured yourselves in court, and that sort of thing.' And he said, 'Been there, done that, smart-ass!', then he laughed. I'm pretty sure he was telling the truth, because both he and Don attacked me to get the tape recording back. Before you ask, that's the next thing to tell you. I'll get to that in a second. -- "When Mr. Eaton said 'Been there, done that, ' I decided that my previous reason for visiting this family - to get to know them well enough to be a good listener for Katelin - was now unimportant. If the Eatons had really lied to the police and maybe the court, there could be someone innocent in jail. I wanted to go home immediately to talk with my parents about what to do next. Almost certainly we'd then call the police to report what I'd learned. -- "I got up to leave, but I worried that if I called the police from home and sent them to the Eatons, the Eatons would just lie again. They could easily say that I was making up the whole thing, and maybe they'd even file assault charges against me and all lie to the police about that. Their word against mine when there was so many of them was a worry. So I had an idea which would help the police find out the truth about whatever the 'Been there, done that' meant, and would also protect me from the Eatons lying about me attacking them. In the center of the room, I pulled my cellphone out of my pocket. I'm very agile and dexterous, so I was able to turn on the tape recording function on my cellphone while I was pulling it out, but in a way they wouldn't have seen. I held it up in the air, theatrically keeping my fingers away from the buttons. I asked Katelin to read the screen, and she called out, 'Recording'. I told Mr. Eaton that it'd been recording for fifteen minutes, and that I had all the yelled threats from his sons, their refusing to let me leave, his encouraging them, their attacks on me, and his saying that he'd previously lied to the police and courts, so there was no way I was scared of his threat to falsely accuse me. -- "My idea was to tell the police that I had the fifteen minute recording, even though I'd only started it fifteen seconds earlier, and the police would be able to fake Mr. Eaton out." I could see that Mr. Walker was very interested in this development. I continued. "Having made Mr. Eaton believe that I had a tape recording of everything, I told him that I was leaving, but he reacted by charging out of his chair and screaming straight at me, demanding that I give him my phone. I yelled at him to stop, but he didn't. I didn't think I'd be able to run away because he was already moving fast and I was standing still. I was caught flatfooted because I NEVER expected to be attacked by a father. Katelin's brothers' attacks were not so surprising as they're just stupid boys really, even though Don is over twenty, but Mr. Eaton's was a complete shock to me. -- "Anyway, it was almost certainly impossible for me to get away, so I stepped to the side and punched him on the side of the head, just like always works with the Eatons. I knocked him out, thank God! Do you want me to keep talking, and tell you what happened for the rest of the time, or shall we try to listen to the recording? I haven't had a chance to do so yet, so I don't know what sort of quality it is." Mr. Walker had no doubts, "The recording please. If you've got a recording of Mr. Eaton Senior's attacking you, then that changes things considerably. His version of this afternoon's events is considerably different than yours." "Okay." I pulled out my cellphone, and had to play around a bit to find the function again. Under "Voice Recorder" there were two choices: "Record" and "Recordings list". I selected the latter option and three lines displayed: Recording 04-28-2005 3:00 The "3:00" worried me. Judging by its being below the date, it looked like the time the recording started (i.e., 3pm), except that I'd started it well after 3:00. Leaving that aside, I found the "Playback" option, and selected it. We heard my voice saying, "I realized a long time ago, Mr. Eaton, that everyone here was your family and that there was only one of me. Junior attacked me before I'd been in the house a minute, and Gunner was clearly spoiling for a fight too. You did nothing to stop them. In fact, you later encouraged their violence. Long before the first time I was attacked I turned on the tape recorder function of my phone." I hit the 'Stop' button. I said, "We've got a problem. The phone displayed what I though was the time the recording started. It said today's date and 'three, colon, zero, zero.' I thought it was 3pm, which was the wrong time. I was watching the display just now, and it was counting down from three minutes. I think the whole recording is probably only three minutes long! If that's the case, we're not going to get much." Mr. Walker said, "There's nothing we can do about that now. Play what you've got please." "Okay." I looked for a "Continue" or "Resume" button, but there wasn't one, only "Play", which started from the beginning again. My voice repeated, "I realized a long time ago, Mr. Eaton, that everyone here was your family and that there was only one of me. Junior attacked me before I'd been in the house a minute, and Gunner was clearly spoiling for a fight too. You did nothing to stop them. In fact, you later encouraged their violence. Long before the first time I was attacked I turned on the tape recorder function of my phone." There was a small pause, as I'd been moving the phone closer to Katelin for her to read, then my more distant voice asking, "Katelin, what does the display read?" Katelin answering, "Recording." My voice, "Recording for fifteen minutes and some seconds. I've got all your boys' taunts and threats, their attacks on me, our discussion of their attacks, your threat to lie in court about what happened today, and your boast that you've already lied to the police. So, please Mr. Eaton, feel free to call the police about what happened here today. I'm leaving now..." The next couple of seconds were filled with the sound of Mr. Eaton's roars and his charge across the room. You could make out his demanding the phone. My voice yelling, "STOP Mr. Eaton!" The sound quality muffled halfway through that, as I'd put the phone in my pocket. We could all hear that Mr. Eaton did not stop. In fact, his roars got dramatically louder as he got closer to the phone. A second later there was the loud of the impact of my fist on the side of Mr. Eaton's head, closely followed by the thump and groan of his body landing on top of Don. Because I thought it was cool, I said, "He landed on top of Don. That was Don's groan." A couple of seconds later my quite badly muffled voice, "Does this normally happen when you bring your boyfriends home, Katelin?" My little audience laughed at my joke. All four of us in the interview room were in a MUCH better mood now. I picked up my phone and found a way to turn the volume up the max, as the muffling was quite bad. "No. I don't bring boys home anymore." "Imagine my surprise. Wayne, I feel I should walk over there and knock you out too because you're ruining my completing the whole set, haha. I'm joking, of course, I'd never attack anyone; I'll only defend myself. -- "I can't believe how STUPID your family is. I don't even have to vary my technique! I knock them out one after the other in exactly the same way. You live in an unbelievably stupid and violent family. To be serious now though, I'm going to leave shortly, but I'm worried about what's going to happen to Katelin while I'm away. Katelin invited me here, and I can easily imagine her getting blamed for this clusterfuck, even though ALL the violence was started by members of your family. Will Katelin be safe when these morons wake up?" Mom noted my use of the 'cluster' word. Dad uses it VERY occasionally, and he's learned not to use it around Mom. I had no doubt I was going to learn the same lesson soon too. On the other hand, I believed my sincere concern for Katelin came over wonderfully. Wayne's very muffled and distant voice, "Nothing like this has happened before, so I don't know. Maybe she should go with you?" Katelin's voice, "I think I should go with you. Just to play safe. Dad's got a bad temper, and I don't want to be around when he wakes up." I LOVED Katelin's, "Dad's got a bad temper" comment! "I'd let you come with me, but I'll also suggest another alternative: go somewhere else, to one of your girlfriend's houses probably. When I came here, I came in friendship and with an honest desire to help. You shouldn't be blamed for any part of what happened, Katelin, but if you leave with me now, then you're leaving with someone your father and brothers are probably going to consider as an enemy. I'm going home to talk with my parents about this, play them what my phone recorded, and get their advice. If they say, 'Call the police, ' I will do that. There could be a great deal of trouble in this house, and if you've gone off with the person these morons think caused the trouble, then you'll be an enemy too. It might be better if you go to a neutral place, but it's up to you?" "I want to go with you." Wayne said, "Katie, somewhere else would be better. You'd anger Dad, maybe even make an enemy out of him. It's not worth it just for a few hours of hiding. Go somewhere else." I said, "Do you want a lift to someone's place, Katelin, or will you take your bike?" "It doesn't seem right to leave you." "I'm not some sort of Prince Charming who has slain the wicked dragon and rescued the princess. You're not my girlfriend, and even if you want to be, I somehow don't think your parents will be giving..." I'd been watching the display, and the counter had reached 0:00 exactly as the playback stopped. I said, "That's it. That's all we got. There's NOTHING about Don's attacks, damn!" #1: [A little explanation for you: My family is cautious with money, so Dad had bought me a cheap cellphone. It had no camera and only a three-minute audio recording limit.] Mr. Walker said, "First thing, let's get a copy of that." He pulled a Dictaphone out of his briefcase, dictated a description: "Copy of recording obtained from Mark Anderson's cellphone, April 28, 2005, of incident at the Eaton household." He paused his recording, then told me, "I'll turn on my recorder, then you play that again please Mark. Would everyone stay quiet please, so it's an accurate copy." We did as he asked, listening quietly to the whole recording again, smiling widely. At the end, Mr. Walker checked his recording, which was fine. He said to us, "Mr. Eaton's version of events is totally at odds with that recording. Which means he is - as you described him - stupid, because you showed him that you were recording him. That's even why he attacked you. I'm not going to inform the police about this recording immediately, not until I know that Mr. Eaton has committed himself in writing. Once he's done that, any retraction and new accusation against Mark will have no credibility. I cannot imagine how you could possibly be in any trouble now, Mark." The Andersons whooped it up, in our fairly quiet way. A great deal of smiling and congratulating of me ensued. Mr. Walker said, "Mr. Eaton, in the excitement of the moment, seems to have forgotten about that tape. If he hasn't already, he'll shortly be signing his statement and I expect also making a formal complaint against Mark, as his story is full of accusations. If I have it pictured properly, Junior and Gunner Eaton were unconscious when you revealed that you were recording your visit, yes?" "That's correct. Don was awake. I think that's why he attacked me so viciously, to get the recording back. Wayne told me later that the thing that Mr. Eaton had lied to the police about involved Don, so naturally Don would want to destroy the recording. Mrs. Eaton was awake, of course. She's a pathetic woman, as I said during my description of the introductions. She got worse as things turned ugly. I've got no idea whether she'll remember the recording, or think to tell anyone in her family." "Don't worry about that. As I understand the situation, it's mainly Don Eaton and Mr. Eaton Senior that matter. Junior and Gunner Eaton won't get more than a slap on the wrist. Neither of them actually struck a blow on you, at any time, did they?" "Not really, no. Junior squeezed my hand extremely hard when I arrived. Otherwise they only tried to attack me the once, and I knocked them both out before they did anything more than verbally threaten me." "Is your memory of the words spoken so accurate that your quotes could be presented to the Eatons as a believable transcript of a tape recording?" "I would think my memory is pretty much word perfect. I was paying a lot of attention to what was going on, and I have an extraordinarily good memory. If I'm a word or two off, I doubt any of the Eatons would detect the inaccuracy, if that's what you're thinking of?" "Yes. With your permission I'll give the police a copy of some of your juicier quotes. They might want to use them to, 'fake out' - using your term - Mr. Eaton, to find out what he'd lied about previously. He's going to be highly vulnerable when they play him his assault on you, as they'll claim it to be an extract of the much longer recording you told him you'd made. A few well-placed quotes from elsewhere in the 'transcript', and he should collapse. None of that will work if he has a lawyer, but people like he seems to be often don't think they need one. For now, go on with your story please." "Okay. After knocking Mr. Eaton out, I talked to Katelin and Wayne for a while. I thought I was safe, because the only bad Eaton who wasn't unconscious was Don, and I erroneously assumed he was just a stupid egotist who would stop his competitive posturing after seeing that I'd dealt with four of his family so easily. While I was talking to Katelin and Wayne, Don got to his feet and stumbled weakly toward us. I invited him to join our discussion, and he limped around to do so. He walked behind me, and when he was in the right position - right behind me - he viciously attacked again. No warning and from behind. Even his limping had been an act. He's a vicious coward. His attacks - a nasty punch and a hard swinging kick - would've been extremely painful if they'd landed." [They would've been a lot worse than that, but I didn't know that at this time.] -- "Fortunately I got a sense of what he was about to do, and I ducked in time. He missed me both times. I pushed him away from me and I rapidly backed up. When he got to his feet, Wayne and I talked him out of attacking me again, and he stomped out of the room, swearing. -- "Shortly after that I told Katelin and Wayne that I was leaving to go home and talk with my parents about what'd happened. We chatted about my giving Katelin a lift somewhere, but she said she'd take her bike. We walked toward the door out of the living room. Just before we got to it, we passed Junior and Gunner lying on the floor. I noticed that Gunner was awake but was playing possum. For fun I leaned down and yelled "Boo" in his ear. He jumped up and ran out of the room. -- "Don had closed the living room door behind him when he'd left earlier, and when Gunner opened it and ran through the doorway, Don stabbed him. I'm sure Don was standing in ambush behind the door, expecting me to be the first through. I don't know what would've happened if I'd let Katelin proceed me, which I almost certainly would've done because unlike the Eatons, my mudder has 'brung me up proper. Hopefully he would've hesitated if he saw Katelin coming out first, or maybe that family doesn't know about 'Ladies First'. -- "Anyway, after stabbing Gunner, Don yelled 'Fuck'; I'm sure because he'd realized he'd made a mistake. I grabbed Katelin and ran her back into the room, and I got Wayne to do the same to his mother. We hid behind sofas and chairs at the far end of the room. My idea was to get everyone well away from the door, so if Don came into the room I'd have plenty of room to tackle him in. A nice, orderly fight, well away from everyone else, so there'd be no problems." "You thought taking on a man with a knife was 'no problem'?" "I meant 'no problem' like Gunner's problem. I didn't want any of the others to get stabbed accidentally because we were too close together. -- "Once we were at the far end of the room, I asked Wayne whether there were any guns in the house. He said there were, and that had me shit scared. One of my Aikido lessons had included how to disarm someone with a knife, but I haven't been trained on avoiding bullets yet! I was VERY worried about that. We hadn't seen Don since we'd seen his hand stab Gunner. By the way, Don just left Gunner lying on the floor. Don didn't try to give him any aid at all. Don simply vanished while we ran farther into the room. -- "That's when I called 9-1-1. I'm not sure where Don was or what he was thinking. If he was waiting just outside the door again, surely he didn't expect me to walk into that ambush. Whatever he was doing, he let me get most of the 9-1-1 call done before he charged into the room. He charged in waving just a knife, so I was HUGELY relieved. I ran out into the middle of the room, and let him charge me. When he got close, I moved to the side and punched him in the head, just like I always do to Eatons. It invariably knocks them out. I think they must have very tiny brains. That was the end of all the fighting. We were trying to help Gunner when the cops and paramedics arrived a few minutes later. -- "That's about all you need, I guess? I could tell you lots of stupid things about cops, if you want?" "Haha. No, I don't think that's pertinent to your case. Let me check that I have this straight. Mr. Eaton Senior attacked you just the once, that was captured on your recording, yes?" "Yes." "You knocked him out, and he was still unconscious when the police arrived?" "Yes." "Don Eaton attacked you three times. The first time was when you wanted to leave. He and his other two brothers blocked the door out of the room, then they attacked you. You poked his eyes, and knocked out the other two, correct?" "Yes." "Why didn't you knock out Don that time?" "That technique requires I slip around to his side, and then punch the side of his head. I couldn't get around Don's side because Don and Junior were running at me side by side, and there wasn't enough room because of the placement of the furniture. I had to take Don on from directly in front, and the safest way to do that was to dart in, jab his eyes when my arm was at its maximum reach, and dart away again. Once he'd collapsed, I had room to get side-on with Junior and Gunner. -- "While I remember - although it sounds like it doesn't matter now - I pulled my punches on all three of them. I could have poked Don's eyes much harder than I did, and you can imagine the result of that! With Junior and Gunner, especially Gunner, I didn't hit them as hard as I could. I truly was trying to be as gentle as possible." "Junior may not agree, you broke his jaw." "Oh. I didn't know that. I didn't want to hit him that hard. That's not life threatening or terrible in any way is it. It'll mend like any other broken bone?" "Yeah. He'll be eating liquid meals for quite a while. At worst it's inconvenient, which I wouldn't concern yourself about too much." "Will it get me in legal trouble?" "I shouldn't think so. You took a personal risk to help uncover a past dishonesty of the Eatons by starting your tape recording bluff with Mr. Eaton Senior. The police will appreciate that, and the DA won't have any interest in prosecuting you for today's incident after he hears your tape. The police will help get Mr. Eaton to confess that three of his sons attacked you. I already know that you've got two of his children backing up your version, so I can't see that you've got anything to worry about. -- "Let me finish checking the main points. The three brothers attacked you, and you knocked out Junior and Gunner. Junior took no further part in any of the events, did he?" "No. He was unconscious the whole time. I didn't realize I'd hit him so hard. Umm, I hit both Mr. Eaton, and Don the last time, very hard. I saw Mr. Eaton walking around and he seemed uninjured. What about Don? Did I break his jaw, or anything like that?" "Not that I heard. If a guy comes at you with a knife, especially after he's already stabbed someone else, you can break whatever parts of him you want. No one's going to complain about that. So Junior was out of action. Gunner didn't attack you again after his first attempt, correct?" "Yeah. I knocked him out, he played possum until I booed him. He ran out of the room and got stabbed. Have you heard about his condition?" "The paramedics said he wasn't badly hurt, as far as they could tell. Stab wounds can suddenly turn nasty sometimes, if something vital is nicked so it later ruptures, so the paramedics' comments aren't definitive. His condition is not your problem. Don stabbed Gunner and I don't think the DA will prosecute you for saying 'Boo'. -- "On the tape recording, you said - as part of your bluff - that you had recorded Mr. Eaton's sons attacking you. You were referring to the attack when the three of them blocked the door, correct?" "Yes." "So the sequence was the three sons attacked you, then you started your tape recorder bluff as you were leaving, and Mr. Eaton Senior attacked you, which you got on tape. Later Don tried to punch and kick you from behind, and you just pushed him away, correct?" "Pretty much. I ducked under his kick as it passed over my head. I grabbed his upper-thigh and pushed upward. He went flying over backward. By the time he'd landed and got up, I'd moved well away. Wayne and I talked him out of attacking again. Or we thought we had. In retrospect, he'd just decided to attack me in another way; rather than barehanded from the front, he preferred a knife from ambush." "Which was the last attack. Okay, I'm clear on the sequence. I'll go and get this fixed now. Do I have your approval to play my copy of your tape, and to read out any quotes from my notes that I deem appropriate?" We agreed. "I'd like you to stay in this room and not to communicate with your friends yet. So far it's only my opinion that Mark is in the clear, and I find that the DA doesn't always agree with my opinions. I need to find out where the police are at in their investigation, what they're intending to do, what Mr. Eaton Senior has done, etc. Also, if Mr. Eaton doesn't have a lawyer and they decide to carry out your bluff on him, having you and your friends whooping it up around the station might alert someone best not alerted. Please just remain incommunicado for a little longer, and I'll try to get back as soon as I can, okay?" We agreed, and he left, after saying, "I'll probably be half an hour or so. I'm sure you'll find something to talk about." As I knew she would, Mom did what moms do at such times. She turned of me, and demanded, "How on Earth could you be so stupid as to..." I asked Dad, "Who do you like for the Superbowl this year, Dad?" I'm pretty sure I said the question right. I've heard football nuts say that thousands of times over the years, but I've always tuned out. I've got no idea what the football situation is in April, or any other month come to that, so my question might've been ridiculous. Hopefully it was, because that would be even better. It's not like me to ignore Mom so rudely, and suicidally, and it's even less like me to initiate a football discussion with Dad. Dad got it first, probably because while it was conceivable that I might be rude to Mom, my expressing an interest in football was just too bizarre to be real. Or maybe Mom's being slow on the uptake was just because she was busy on her tirade. I preferred my first suggestion, as I'd really like to think that Dad appreciated my attitude to football. Dad thought about it a second, while Mom added another couple of words to her tirade, then he winked at me. He turned to Mom, then sharply demanded, "Can it, Felicity!" That shut Mom up. Dad NEVER speaks to her like that! Judging from his smile, I think he enjoyed having justification to do so though. In the silence, I said, "Katelin and Wayne seem like nice people, don't they, Mom? What did you think of them? Katelin's not my girlfriend, as you heard me deny on the tape, so I think it's great that she and Wayne supported me, even though it meant their family was going to get in trouble." The penny dropped for Mom during my comments about Katelin and Wayne, although she less than helpfully said, "You don't want to talk about it?" I certainly didn't want to talk about my having special abilities while I was inside a police station. I didn't even want to talk about my not wanting to talk about them, in case the police recorded what was said in their own rooms. So I gave an answer I knew Mom would realize was false, especially because I NP-pinched her lips together while I was giving it, "We agreed I was old enough now to make a lot of my own decisions. I won't try to justify those decisions to you. I did what I did, and that's it. Now, what did you think of Katelin and Wayne?" I canceled the NP-grip on her lips, permitting Mom to say that they seemed nice. That started a nice, time-wasting, innocent conversation. There was plenty to talk about, so we passed the time without problem. I had fun giving Mom a very stern, tongue-in-cheek rebuke for not bringing my dinner when they'd come, despite my very clear instruction to her to do so. I told my parents, "I hope that the girl I marry will be capable of following perfectly simple instructions. How hard could it have been to put my dinner in a plastic container and put it in the car?" Forty five minutes after he'd left us, Mr. Walker returned. He walked in with a smile and gave us the thumbs-up. It wasn't particularly lawyerly, but we didn't hold it against him. He explained, "It's all taken care of. Your recording made their day, and Mr. Eaton Senior and Don Eaton will be charged shortly. Possibly Junior and Gunner also; although if so, I imagine those charges will be dropped later. The police have a good idea what Mr. Eaton's 'Been there, done that' was referring to, and they seemed pleased at that..." "What was it?" "I don't know. They didn't say and I didn't ask; it's none of our business. You can go home shortly and they'll be in contact in the next day or two, so you can ask them yourself if you wish." Dad said, "That's it? We can just leave and go home?" "Yes. Mark was never arrested so he's free to leave. There'll be someone here shortly to make their own copy of that recording, but after that there's no reason for you to stay here. Wait here, and I'll go get your friends and daughters." A minute or two later, the interview room was packed with people, and filled with much joyous celebrating. A policeman came in with a tape recorder that was considerably more impressive than the Dictaphone my lawyer had used. He got us all to quiet down, warned us to keep quiet, and he recorded my playing it back again, while the Williamses and my sisters listened avidly. When Mr. Eaton charged me, Carol exclaimed, "Oh no!" The policeman stopped his recording, glared at Carol, then starting shooing everyone out of the room. Donna said, "It's not fair. I want to hear what happened." I said, "I'll play it again after the policeman's finished, Donna. You can listen to it as many times as you want." I suddenly thought I'd better check that with the policeman, so I asked him, "That's right, isn't it?" "It's your recording. You can do whatever you want with it." Mr. Walker said, "I advise you not to publicize it for a few days, not until the Eatons have been taken care of." "I've got no intention of publicizing it ever." [Except for quoting it verbatim in my internet-accessible autobiography.] Everyone got pushed out. I stayed to control my phone, and Mr. Walker stayed too, presumably in case some sort of legal situation developed with his client. Seven minutes later the recording and a verifying playback had been completed successfully. The policeman left, letting my families come back in, and I had to play the tape all over again a couple more times. The tension was off now, so everyone was mostly amused by the tape, although not Mom when Donna giggled at my saying "clusterfuck". [Just to alert you to a little something, in the previous paragraph I wrote "my families". Earlier in this autobiography I used to write "my two families", and earlier still, "my family and the Williamses". The Williamses are becoming so involved in my and Carol's lives that they are effectively becoming a second set of parents to us. I don't call Vanessa and Prof "Mom" and "Dad" - that thought had never occurred to me - but for convenience I have started referring to our collective as "my families". It was doubly appropriate because we were hoping to live in the same home soon.] By the end of my seventh (I thought) playback repetition, I was mighty glad that Dad had bought such a cheap phone. If it'd stored fifteen minutes, or an hour, or whatever good phones hold, I would've boringly wasted a great deal of time. On the other hand, I was MIGHTY glad it stored anything at all, as my Plan B wouldn't have worked anywhere near as well. If I hadn't been able to find my phone's recording function, I was going to write a text message saying "Recording. Duration 15:05 min.", show it quickly to Katelin, and hope she didn't spot the fake. Mr. Walker mentioned, "Strictly speaking, you're not supposed to record conversations in other people's houses without their prior consent. Clearly the police weren't the least concerned about your technical breach, and you could easily claim it was done in self-defense this time, but you shouldn't make a habit of it." "It was the first and hopefully last time." My families, the girls mostly, still had about a million questions about what had happened outside the "3:00" period. I was starting to answer their questions when Mr. Walker said, "You should go home now. You can talk all you want there." We decided that both families would drive to the Williams', to continue grilling me there. That'd save me having to repeat the whole story twice, and I wanted to talk with Prof and Vanessa about their roulette research afterward. Mr. Walker requested we not talk on our way out, "To avoid anyone overhearing anything about the tape. Mr. Eaton will be lawyering up about now, and there could be friends of his family here too." He escorted us off the premises, bidding us "Goodnight, I'll be in touch." We got in our cars and drove off. I forestalled the new questions by immediately calling Katelin to check how she was. She was okay. She'd talked to her mother at the hospital, and both Gunner and Junior were going to be fine. I didn't mention the tape, but I did say, "My interview went well. As it turned out your and Wayne's statements weren't necessary. I appreciate them very much though, because they stopped the cops from treating me badly initially, so thanks very much for that. But in the long run, your statements won't be relevant. The cops have plenty of evidence against Don, what with his fingerprints on the knife and everything. And they have enough against your father too. The cops don't appreciate an adult attacking a 15-year old boy, so I think your father will be in some serious trouble. Don too, obviously, as he stabbed Gunner. So don't blame yourself about anything to do with this, Katelin. Wayne shouldn't blame himself either; please tell him that. Your statements weren't needed today, and even if you hadn't invited me to your house, something like this would have happened sooner or later anyway." "Yeah, I know. It's very scary though." "I'm sure it is, but I think your family life would have been scarier without it. With your father and Don off the scene for a while, hopefully your mother will start being a better parent and you'll have a better home environment. Most importantly, I think, Junior and Gunner might become decent people now, rather than the thugs they were turning into. If they've got any brains at all, today's events should teach them that stupid, macho violence isn't a successful way to approach life. They're both going to be in the hospital for a few days, is that right?" "I think so. Two or three days, I guess. I'll know more when Wayne and I go see them after the cops are finished here. Another hour or two, they say." "This may sound a little silly, but that gives you a few days to form a good relationship with Wayne. Without the older macho males around, and with Wayne being 'the only nice one, ' you two have a good chance to spend some quality time together. If anything like that happened in my family, my sisters would be climbing into my lap for as much comforting as we could share. If you could do that, talk with him openly, be very appreciative, and those sorts of things, then when the other boys get home you might be able to get them to join in. That's not part of any silly test I'm setting you, that's simply my advice about what would make your family happier. If you and your mother don't act to pull your family together emotionally, it'll probably fall apart. What do you think?" "I don't know. It's all a bit much for me right now." "That's the best time to do it. All three of you are more open than normal, so it's a great time to take the first step. You've already let Wayne undo you blouse and look at your tits, so how hard can a cuddle be! Haha. He seems like a good guy, and probably just as much in need of comforting as you are. It's much easier for girls to take the first step than a guy who's trying hard to seem strong. I'd better go, sweetie, I've got two girls who want to climb into my lap. I like it and so will Wayne. I'll talk with you tomorrow at school if you're there, otherwise I'll phone. Bye." The girls in question were strapped down by their seatbelts, but I'd wanted to end the call and that seemed an appropriate way. The moment the call ended, the questions restarted. I tried telling them, "Shouldn't we hold off on the questions until we're all together, so I don't have to repeat myself?" Apparently my having to repeat myself wasn't a major concern to the girls. Certainly not as major as satisfying their curiosity. So I was kept busy talking all the way to the Williams'. Donna was very happy when I told her, "It's a good thing you found Aikido for me, Donna, because I would have lost all of those fights without what I'd learned there." Actually, those fights wouldn't have happened, as I would never have let them develop, and especially because I wouldn't have told Katelin that I was into the martial arts in the first place, but Donna was happy. Once we were all at the Williams', and my lap was very well occupied, I had to tell my complete story all over again, especially as Andrew joined in, Robert being away. I got to repeat myself several times, and play the recording a couple more times. More than anything else, I had to repeat my assurance that it was EASY and I hadn't been in any danger. "Beating the Eatons was even easier than beating Andrew and Robert at 8-ball, which wasn't hard at all, haha." Nothing of any significance was said, although saying all the insignificant stuff took quite a while. Eventually my family called it a night at about 10pm, leaving me some time to talk with Prof and Vanessa about something much more interesting. ^ [A few loose ends worth tidying up, out of consideration to my readers: First, I later asked the police what the Eatons had lied about, but they refused to tell me. In researching this autobiography I learned that it was to do with a break-in that Don had committed. He'd broken into a home at night, beaten up the owner, robbed the place and left. The police were reasonably sure he'd done it, but didn't have enough evidence. Mr. and Mrs. Eaton had sworn that he was at home watching TV with them at the time, and Don had gotten off. Second, the Eatons did have guns in the house. After their own home had been broken into twice and they'd lost their guns both times, Mr. Eaton had been forced to keep the replacement guns locked up in a gun-safe installed in his bedroom. The key to it was on his key ring in his pocket. After I'd avoided Don's second attack, the one from behind, Don had left the room in disgust and fear, only later thinking of attacking me again. He didn't want to come back to get the keys, because he'd figured either I'd beat him up, or Wayne would realize what he was after and warn me. Don had tried to break into the cabinet, but failed. The police later found scratches all over it, household items which had been damaged by their misuse as crowbars, and plenty of Don's fingerprints. Don had taken short breaks from his safe-cracking attempt to gather more tools and listen at the doorway to the living room, before returning to the safe. On one such visit he heard me about to leave, so he set his ambush with the knife he was keeping on him. After the screwed up ambush, and our disappearing back into the living room, he returned to his routine of attempting to get into the safe alternating with listening outside the living room. One such quick visit let him hear the in-progress 9-1-1 call. He rushed in to try to get the phone off me so he could destroy the incriminating recording before the cops arrived. Third, the police let Mr. Eaton commit himself in writing, both in his signed statement about what had happened during my visit, and in his complaints against me. He hadn't lawyered up because he'd been confident that he'd win against me, thinking that enough of his family would back him up, and it was inarguable that they'd all been knocked out. Without a lawyer present to review the evidence properly, the police's ambushing of Mr. Eaton was trivially easy. They played him an 'extract' from my tape (his assault on me), read him some 'quotes' from the purported transcript of the entire tape, and told him he was screwed, especially because he had nothing to plea bargain with. "The only thing you know that we're faintly interested in, is what your 'Been there, done that' comment was about, and we don't care much about that. You and Don Eaton are going to spend so long in jail anyway, that we don't care about anything else. Mark Anderson's tape recording gives us EVERYTHING we need to send you both away for a long time. Half the guys in the station have listened to it, and we've been laughing our heads off at you. As Mark Anderson often said, you're very stupid." Despite the cops stated lack of interest, Mr. Eaton assured them that his information was valuable and it was worth taking some time off his sentence. He negotiated as well as he did everything else, and got a small reduction in return for explaining what he'd been referring to, and recanting his previous sworn alibi for Don. He also had to make a full confession of this afternoon's activity. Even before he was halfway through my introductions to the family, the cop had stopped him three times, saying, "That's not what it said on the tape," (which was true). "I believe Mark Anderson said," the cop would leaf through some papers, then quote whatever extract my lawyer had given him. By the time Mr. Eaton's wording had been corrected three times, he'd lost all hope. I didn't think the cops were smart pretending my tape had been running right from the introductions, but maybe they were, because Mr. Eaton didn't spot the inconsistency with what I'd told him about when I'd started it.] ------- Chapter 144: Planning for Binion's Thursday, April 28, 2005 (Continued) When my family had left to go home, Prof, Vanessa, Julia and I went to the adults' study. There, Prof said, "Almost everyone we talked to suggested Binion's Horseshoe Casino. Some of them had other ideas as well, but Binion's was easily the most frequently mentioned and seems the easiest answer to our problem. Most of our advisors said we'd just need to turn up with the money and tell them what we wanted. It'd get bumped up to the boss, but he should approve it. It's happened several times in the past and Binion's pride themselves on people literally walking in off the street and placing high wagers. They obviously advertise it well, because it was very widely known. -- "So, theoretically, we could fly down to Vegas right now and get our wager accepted. We don't need to do any preparation to make that happen." You can imagine how happy I was at this point! "Unfortunately there are a couple of problems..." #1: " ... All the historic examples we were able to find out about were even-odds wagers. Usually betting on red or black on a roulette spin. We want to bet on a single number at 35-to-1 odds and there's no history of Binion's accepting a bet like that. However, their advertising clearly states they'll accept ANY wager on their games, so they shouldn't refuse ours. They're not legally bound to accept it though, and we were told several times that if someone turned up and tried to place a wager so large that Binion's couldn't pay out on it, then they'd have to refuse. Our initial bet will be quite small though, so even at 35-to-1, the possible payout is of a similar size to the payouts on bets they've accepted before. -- "All things considered, Vanessa and I think they'll accept our wager, but the obvious next step is for us to phone them to ask. We want to do that anyway, for other reasons, such as anonymity. It's not essential, but we'd prefer my name is kept out of the press, as we want to publicly claim that you earned the money. We could still claim that, because we could claim you developed 'the system' we used, but I'd rather people think you earned the money in a more acceptable way. Anyway, calling first also tells us whether they'll let us play. If they say, 'No', we can go to Plan B." In response to my obvious interest, Prof said, "Let's not worry about that now. Hopefully we'll never need it, as it's not nearly as good as a quick hit-and-run on Binion's. -- "I said there were two problems with Binion's. Assuming they accept our first wager and it wins, we have a significant problem placing a second wager. Their advertising repeatedly states, 'Your maximum bet is your first bet.' What I had in mind originally, and still prefer, is that we go down with $100,000, but we only bet $50,000 the first time. It'd make it easier if we could bet the $100,000 and be guaranteed of winning it, but that's too risky. You might get nervous, someone might bump you at the critical time, or someone might step between you and the wheel, blocking your sight of it, etc. Too many things like that could go wrong, so we bet half our money. If our first bet loses, I'll keep betting half of our remaining money, until we win, or until you walk away because there's some problem that you can't overcome. -- "Assuming our first bet wins, then we win a profit of 35 times $50,000, which is $1.75 million. We want more than that - because we're very greedy people, haha - so we want to keep betting. The amount we want to win is $10 million. $10 million less the tax on it, less the two $1 million emergency funds, less the amounts you indicated you wanted to pay all the 'minor participants', leaves you about $2.7 million for the mansion and any incidental expenses - new cars, etc. With what Julia and Vanessa have been talking about doing at the mansion, you're not going to have a great deal left over. In other words, $10 million is the minimum you need to achieve the goals you've set. -- "To win $10 million, $1.75 million at a time, would take six wins in a row. The chance of us winning six 1-in-38 odds rolls in a row, by luck, is just under 1-in-3 billion. Binion's management are NOT going to stand by and watch us win spin after spin! Even winning two spins in a row would make them deeply suspicious. Any more than that and they'd be certain to stop us playing and probably accuse us of cheating. -- "So to win $10 million we have to increase our bet, which is in conflict with their 'Your maximum bet is your first bet' rule. The obvious solution is for us to go away and come back another day. Winning $1.75 million would enable us to immediately start looking for and maybe to purchase a mansion of the size we're talking about. All our other uses of the $10 million are deferrable until after we get possession, including the tax on the first win, but the $600,000 tax bill would become a problem if we couldn't do the second bet for any reason. -- "We'll ask Binion's at the end of our first visit when we can come back and bet more. If they say any time less than a month or so - that's the shortest it could take to get possession of a new house - then there's no problem. If they insist on a time that's much longer, then we'd just get someone else to front you. Not Vanessa or either of The Boys because the commonality of surname would give it away, but your father for example. That's an issue to worry about on another day. Vanessa had an idea for our cover story with Binion's. I'll ask her to tell you." Vanessa took over, "Prof will call Binion's, probably tomorrow. He'll tell them that he's in a terrible situation, and that he desperately needs to have a million dollars, but all he's got is $100,000. He'll say that his only hope is to go to Binion's, bet half his money - $50,000 - on a single number on roulette. If that loses, which he'll say it probably will, to keep betting half of what he's got left, until he either wins the million, or is wiped out. -- "Binion's won't care about any of that. Casinos only care that people bring them money, and they've probably heard a million sob stories, so they'll have no interest in Prof's. When you play, you will be doing what Prof told Binion's: betting half your money, including halving your bets if you lose. Eventually, we hope, you'll have a very good win. Hopefully on the first spin, but it could be later. -- "What happens next depends on how many losses you have first. Assuming you win on the first spin, as you say you can, then you win $1.75 million. Prof has told Binion's that he needs $1 million, which he'll remind them of, so he'll have $750,000 of 'extra money'. After he finishes acting shocked that he won, Prof will say that he wants to bet the extra money, 'while his luck is running so hot'. -- "More likely than not, Binion's won't let him, because it breaches their maximum bet rule. Prof will ask how long he has to wait before he can come back and bet what he wants. If they say an hour, six hours, or even a day, you could stay down there and try again when you're allowed to. If they delay you any longer than that, you come home, and we get on with buying the mansion. When the time is right, you and Prof - or you and someone else - go down again and bet what you need to bet to bring the total up to $10 million." Prof said, "They're most likely not going to let us play again any time soon, in which case we'll go home, and make a whole new plan while we're waiting, based on our greater knowledge of how they work. There's no point in planning now for our second stage of betting under that possibility. Assuming we're allowed to play again within an hour or so, then we have to have our betting plan already worked out. We might need to change it if something unexpected happens, but I'd much rather have our scenarios all worked out in advance. -- "There are many different scenarios based on how many losses we have first. If we have five or more losses before our first win, then the win doesn't even get us back to our original stake. We can keep playing if we want to, though, because we're still betting less than the maximum we established by our first $50,000 bet. If we lose about twelve times in a row, it won't be worth continuing, even if you discover what to do. We'd have to win too many spins in a row to get up to $10 million. We'd be better off leaving, and if we were absolutely sure, come back another day with another starting bankroll. Of course, if we're losing spin after spin, it'll be up to you to let me know whether it's worth going on. If there's an insurmountable problem, you should walk away. If I see you do that, I'll call it quits too, as there's no point in throwing our money away. -- "But, assuming we get a win on the first spin, then we have $750,000 extra. I wouldn't attempt to bet that much on a single number. If that won, it would take our total win to $28 million, and it's doubtful Binion's would be able to honor that. It's pointless risking our successfully walking away with $10 million, to chase $28 million that can't be paid. For that same reason, it's highly doubtful Binion's would accept that bet in the first place. -- "My plan is, with $750,000 extra, to bet $250,000 on each of three different numbers. That nets a profit of $8.25 million. That plus the $1.75 million from the first spin, is exactly $10 million, and very neatly equals your goal. One reason I particularly like doing it this way, is that it doesn't make our winning twice in a row look so suspicious. Winning two 1-in-38 spins in a row has a 1-in-1444 chance, which is getting worryingly unlikely. But wining a 1-in-38, then a 3-in-38, totals 1-in-481, which isn't so shocking. -- "Hopefully Binion's would also think that if we'd been cheating then we would have bet on a single number again. Why would we waste $500,000 betting on two other numbers if we knew which one was going to win? Hopefully that'll give us some appearance of honesty. I'll even make sure I choose three numbers that are well apart, so it doesn't look like I know anything about where the ball is going to land. -- "There are many other scenarios for if we lose the first spin, then win our $25,000 bet, or if we lose the first two spins, etc. I won't bore you with them, as they don't affect your job. I can show you the spreadsheets for them later, but the bottom line of all of them is that we achieve a total win of $10 million, or as little over that as possible. I wanted to minimize the amount we win more than $10 million because doing so makes our gambling seem more believable and less like cheating. We don't want our win to be held up in the courts for years because it seems too unlikely. -- "Structurally, there are two major changes we could make to what I've described. The first is to include deliberate losses. Vanessa and I have discussed different ways of doing that: losing before our first win, losing after our first win but before our second. Maybe both, and maybe so many losses that we end up needing to win several more spins to reach our goal. -- "It seems to us that if you arrive at the casino a few minutes before I do, and practice for a while - not betting, just practicing your technique on their tables - then there's a good chance you'll be confident of 100% accuracy. If that's the case, you could pass me a signal, and we could adopt a cat-and-mouse type of approach. I'd still never bet all our money on one spin, in case someone blocked your sight at a critical moment, but other than those sorts of accidents, a 100% accuracy skill would enable us to play all sorts of misdirection games. We could have many $50,000 bets, for example, even dozens of them, only winning very rarely, to look more normal. -- "Vanessa and I laid out many different betting scenarios, and tried to look at them as a casino boss would. To our eyes, they didn't seem much more believable than simply winning two spins one after the other. The problem with losing, of course, is that we need to win more to compensate for it, so the total of all our wins has to rise. We think the casino bosses are going to notice the number of wins as much as anything else, so seeing three or four wins in a short period, even with a few losses spread among them, could look even more suspicious than two wins in a row. -- "There's also the worry that the cat-and-mouse approach takes much longer. It'd be very annoying, for example, if you or I got kicked out of the casino before we could put in the final win. If we go bang-bang - that's what Vanessa and I call getting two successive wins - it could be over much faster, so there'd be less time for anything to go wrong. Do you have any preferences on what we should do about throwing in some deliberate losses?" I answered, "Yes I do. We should DEFINITELY do whatever you think is best, because I haven't got a clue! Haha. Seriously, I've got no idea how casino people think. I'll totally defer to you about all of this." "I was more asking because there might be some aspects of your ability that make different betting systems better. Bang-bang might be harder or easier than other approaches?" "No, there's nothing like that. Only the obvious point that the fewer games we play, the less often I have to do my thing. That appeals to me." "Okay. We prefer the bang-bang strategy too. That's assuming we're allowed to almost immediately play again, with a bet over the initial maximum. If we have to come home, we might do something completely different than bang-bang. We're not going to worry about those scenarios now. -- "Moving on, the second structural issue is whether or not you can achieve 100%. You did on our test run, but maybe Binion's will be different for some reason. Is that possible?" "Umm. I don't know enough about casinos, so I can't tell whether Binion's would have the same style of wheels. If they used balls that weighed more than about five pounds, then I might start having trouble. If the balls weight ten or twenty pounds I'd be in big trouble, but they'd have to be ridiculously large balls, I would think. And the wheel itself would have to be much larger too, because the pockets would have to be larger, unless the ball just sits on top of a pocket. -- "Also, if they didn't have those little metal things halfway up the wheel, to make the ball bounce around so much, then that'd complicate things a bit. I've only seen the wheels at the casino we went to, and on that video you showed me, and they looked the same. -- "I've seen roulette wheels in movies or on TV, and they seemed the same too, but I wasn't exactly studying them. It SEEMS they're all the same, but I won't know for sure until I'm in Binion's and get some practice. For all I know there could be some weird complicating reason, like fluctuating magnetic fields, or something. Which reminds me, isn't there a risk that Binion's will cheat if there's a lot of money at stake?" Vanessa answered, "We don't know, which is another reason why we don't want to bet all the money on one spin. If they do cheat, it should be apparent to you, shouldn't it?" "Perhaps. Sorry, but there are too many unknowns for me to be sure of anything. That doesn't create a warm, secure feeling, does it?" "No, but you get to practice for a while before Prof commits any money. If you think there's a problem you can send Prof a signal to abort, and he can tell them he has a bad feeling and doesn't want to do it yet. Your being able to practice first makes a big difference to our confidence in this scheme. From what we can tell, Prof will be able to choose which table he plays on. That's what's happened to people who've done something similar in Binion's before. He can walk around and choose the same table you're on. So you'll even have been practicing on the same table. If you've had several perfect results in a row, you should be able to get at least one more when Prof's betting." "Yeah. It'd certainly be a horrible shock if I've had a dozen perfect results, then get Prof's first bet wrong. It won't be because I'm too nervous, because I can control myself better than that. It'd be an external reason, and that'd be worrying. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?" Prof said, "Yes. Let me show you my profit share schedule, assuming we win $10 million, and see what you think of it." Prof handed me a page, saying, "I've taken out the tax right at the start, so all these numbers are after-tax. In practice, the actual amounts that'll go into our bank accounts will be 50% higher than these figures, so each person can pay their own tax, which will vary somewhat but I've assumed 33%." The page said: Pre-Tax, $10,000,000 After-Tax, $6,666,667 Mark, 56%, $3,733,333 F & S, 10%, $666,667 V & P, 25%, $1,666,667 Andrew, 1.5%, $100,000 Robert, 1.5%, $100,000 Julia, 3%, $200,000 Carol, 3%, $200,000 Prof explained, "There are two types of payments buried in there: Gifts and what I'll call Earned, although that's a bit of a joke. Andrew's, Robert's, Julia's and Carol's shares are entirely gifts: arbitrary amounts you indicated you wanted them to get. You also made an issue out of the two sets of parents getting a good chunk, so I've allocated enough percentage points to give each pair of parents two-thirds of a million each. Actually a million before tax, which is a very pleasantly round number. Those gifts are why the amount we need to win has risen all the way to $10 million. -- "You'll notice that 'V & P' - Vanessa and Prof - are getting $1,666,667. The $1 million part of that is going to the emergency fund. Your parents - 'F & S' - are getting their million fund out of your share. I know you don't care about those divisions, but the IRS can get snooty, and splitting the money this way is more justifiable as your parents didn't provide much capital investment. So after your paying tax and the Anderson's $1 million emergency fund, you'd have $2.7 million left. That's to buy the mansion, with a little left over to go clothes shopping with Julia." Julia laughed, adding, "I hope so, because my $200,000 won't last long, haha." Prof asked, "Of your $2.7 million, you probably shouldn't spend more than about $1.7 million on the initial purchase of the mansion. That should leave enough for the detached wing, alterations to both buildings, furnishings, etc. When we first started looking at mansions, we had about $1.5 million in mind as the purchase price, so that's risen usefully. So what do you think of the shares? Do they look something like what you had in mind?" I said, "I think Julia and Carol should get more, being my..." I was cut off by Julia kissing me. Prof took advantage of my silence to speak, "The problem is justifying that to the IRS. We can justify your share based on your capital input, and mostly because it was your idea - you being an acknowledged mathematical genius makes that hard for them to argue with. But it'd be very hard to explain what 13- and 16-year old girls did to justify more than $200,000. Other than kiss you so much, from what I can see, haha. The only real input they could justifiably have is freeing up your time so you could use it on this project. Allocating them 3% each is probably not excessive for that, but much more than 3% would be awkward to justify." "In that case I think it's perfect as is." The others talked about the split some more, but I thought it was fine. Vanessa raised the issue that I was spending my share on the house that everyone would be benefiting from, and there was a very good chance that the vast majority of my money would be used up, leaving me with not much. She suggested knocking a couple of percentage points off their share. I interrupted and vetoed that. "Prof has set up the percentages the way I told him I wanted, and I'm quite happy that I might be the first person to run out. I can always get more one way or another. I will always have me in my life, whereas if something bad happens you may not. My intent is to pay you as much as possible up-front for all you've done for me, rather than 'owe' it to you. We all know this casino idea never would've gotten off the ground without all the help you and Prof have given me. Not to mention all the help you've given me in so many other areas..." You get the idea, LOTS of mutual expressions of appreciation went around for a while. When everybody had thanked everybody else a sufficient number of times, I asked, "So what happens now?" Prof said, "Vanessa and I have a reasonable idea of what I want to say to Binion's when I call them, but we're going to mull that over until tomorrow just in case further thoughts occur to us. We want to get our first approach to Binion's right, so waiting a day is advisable. Assuming we call them tomorrow night and all goes well, then we could be going to Vegas very soon. I want to go via Los Angeles on a weekday so I can set up a bank account there, and another one when we first arrive in Vegas. If we win, I don't want our winnings wired directly into our normal Corvallis branch. The bank staff are going to gossip if a wire for $1.75 million or $10 million comes in from Binion's Horseshoe Casino. We want Binion's payment to go into a Vegas account, which we'll immediately wire to my new account in LA. I'm going to use two different banks to make it even harder for Binion's to pull the money back if something makes them want to try that. -- "We'll wire it from LA to Corvallis in irregular lumps and to different accounts. If it's only $1.75 million, which is the most likely winning result, we'll wire it mostly to your account, and maybe some to your parents, on different days, to obscure the total. If it's the full $10 million, we can still spread the wires over a couple of weeks, and we can do the profit split you okayed at the same time. The amounts will actually be 50% more, as they'll be pre-tax, but the percentages will be as agreed. Your family and my family use different banks, so no one should be able to work out where the money came from. How does that sound?" "A hell of a lot better than my last vacation job, haha. It sounds wonderful." "Yes, it's not too shabby. So, if tomorrow's phone call to Binion's goes well, we can probably head off Monday morning. Fly to LA, set up an account, fly to Vegas, set up an account, and then go win some money to put into the accounts. How does that sound?" "Monday! Wow. That sounds superb. Umm, what time will we be back on Monday?" "It's impossible to say. If we win our first bet, Binion's could tell us we can increase our limit if we wait four hours, for example. I also wouldn't be at all surprised if you come back before me." "Really! Why?" "Especially if we win $10 million, Binion's might not want to pay me. I might have to stay down there for a few days to get lawyers on the case, etc. After the playing is finished, you'll head straight to the airport and straight home. There's no merit in you hanging around. Your getting connected to this would cause nothing but problems, so you leave. I've already told my department that I'll probably need next week off, so I'm able to hang around and do whatever needs doing. Vanessa and I have been researching this too, and there are several things we can do to put pressure on Binion's to release the funds." "Wow. I REALLY underestimated the complexity of this job, didn't I?" "We're just playing safe. The previous winners from Binion's never had any trouble being paid, but none of them won as much as we are aiming for, nor so suspiciously, so we're playing safe. There's a lot of money at stake, so we're preparing carefully." I spent some more time thanking them, they spent some more time thanking me. "After all," Prof said, "you're paying us a million before tax, and the emergency fund will be in our name too, so it seems reasonable that we should actually do some work! Haha." We joked around a bit, then I thought to ask, "You knew that my family use a different bank than yours, so I'm guessing you asked my parents?" "Yes. I asked for their account numbers - yours and Carol's too - for business purposes. They don't know any more than that. Why?" "They don't know how much money they could be getting?" "No, they've no idea. They're going to get a pleasant surprise when a million dollars are deposited, aren't they?" "Especially when we tell them that it's nothing to do with the mansion, that it's entirely theirs. Hehe, I'm looking forward to that. I just thought of something: can we do this on Tuesday rather than Monday please? Would that be okay?" "Sure. Have you got something important on Monday?" "Monday evening is when my Aikido instructor spends three hours giving me one-on-one training. It's incredibly good training - far better than I could receive in a one-hour class with a couple dozen other students. I probably learn twenty or thirty times as much, so I'm loath to miss it, especially considering how useful Aikido has been recently. The $10 million can wait a day, haha. How bizarre it is, to say that!" Prof said, "Not something you hear very often. It's fine for me too, so Tuesday it is. I'm assuming you've got no problem taking a day off school?" Prof was smiling to indicate he knew that answer to that. "Hmm, let's see. School versus $10 million - hard call! Haha. Yes, I think I can take time off school." "Tuesday it is then. Hopefully by Wednesday you'll owe the Government a great deal of tax. That's not likely as I expect $1.75 million is the best we can hope for out of the first trip." "Yeah, I understand that. The timing for that is up to Binion's so we'll just have to wait and see." "That's right." Julia, who'd been thoughtful recently, said, "I'm right, aren't I, that Mark's share is 56% of $10 million pre-tax, which is obviously $5.6 million?" "That's right, $5.6 million pre-tax. Assuming we win $10 million, obviously." "I didn't know about your idea to have accounts in Vegas and LA. I'm just thinking about how that'd work. You said you wouldn't send the money up in one lump, to avoid people knowing where it came from. That you'd drip feed it over a couple of weeks." "Yes. There might be a big time gap between the first and second wins though, depending on Binion's." "Sure, I got that. I was just thinking about how we'd 'go public' about Mark's money. I've been thinking about that over the last week or so, and I didn't like the idea of a huge lump of money arriving all at once. Your way is much better. I was just imagining spreading out Mark's money's, so it arrives at the rate of about $1 million per week, or $200,000 per day. It'd take about six weeks for all of it to arrive. We could pretend he had a business in LA, and that he earned money every day, which he sent up once per week. So every day at school I could ask Mark how his business went yesterday evening, and he'd say something like, 'Oh, pretty good - about $245,000', or, 'Only $125,000 yesterday, because I had an assignment I had to do'. Keep the average at about $200,000 per day, and transfer up the weekly total each week. After six weeks, he could say that $5.6 million is enough for a while, and he'll put the business on hold while he studies for his exams. That sort of money being earned day after day would seriously impress everybody. They'd be creaming themselves about his casual attitude, and his stopping his business to study for the exams. That'd work, wouldn't it?" We all chuckled or laughed. Vanessa commented, "You do like your little schemes, Julia." "They're good fun. We wouldn't necessarily do it exactly like that, because that sounds a bit contrived, but something along those lines could be fun. Can you send the money up daily, rather than weekly?" "You can do wires whenever you want. Several times a day, if you wish. There's a small fee, but I think Mark will be able to afford those. Or, seeing as how this seems to be for your enjoyment, you should pay them." Julia said, "I like the idea of daily better. If there's any doubt around school - and there's bound to be - then after a few days Mark can bring in a printout of his account. Daily deposits of roughly $200,000 for several days will look suitably impressive! If someone's mother, father or older sibling works in the bank, and is nosey, they can confirm the transfers are real and do come from LA. All we need is a good sounding explanation of what his business is, because he's bound to be asked that over and over." Vanessa suggested, "Seeing as how he's pretending to operate out of Los Angeles, how about he trades in silicone futures, haha." I knew what futures trading was, as I'd seen it mentioned on TV a few times. And I knew that silicone was a reference to breast augmentation. I may not know much about biology, but breasts are somewhat of a hobby of mine, so I tend to pay attention to every conversation I hear that mentions them. While Prof and Julia chuckled, I asked, "Do people really trade silicone futures?" Vanessa let me down gently, "No, I made that up. I was making a joke about LA. To be serious though, something like futures trading is a plausible sort of business for you to claim. Somewhat appropriate too, as you'll be controlling where the roulette ball will be in the near future, haha. Your cover-story business can't be anything like a factory, as they take too long to set up and couldn't simply stop after six weeks. Prof could bring a book home on futures trading and you could skim through it enough to be able to sound knowledgeable. It's a very mathematical field - even I know that - so it would be entirely believable for you to be very good at it. Julia could make your first few days' income much lower than $200,000, while you 'learned' the business, as it were. That'd add a day or two on at the end, but that doesn't matter." Prof added, "If you want to make Mark seem more impressive, Julia - as you seem to enjoy doing so much - then don't maintain a $200,000 average. Let the weeks start low, like Vanessa suggested, but make them increase in value so by the last couple of weeks he's earning $300,000 or $400,000 per day. That might mean it only takes four weeks or so for all $5.6 million to arrive, but I don't think that matters. Just tell everyone he's stopping to study that much earlier. He's got two grades and college courses, so that's not unreasonable. I suggest you make the last day just over $500,000, because people will remember that Mark was earning half a million dollars a day when he stopped. That will blow their minds even more." "That's WONDERFUL, Dad. Thanks very much! What do you think, Mark?" "Actually, it blows my mind too. That would be very, very impressive; no doubt at all. But what I earn per day is hardly something you can casually drop into conversation at school, is it? That's going to sound horrendously boastful and contrived, like you said before." "I've been thinking about that problem too, and I've got a solution. You're right that casually dropping it into conversation wouldn't work, especially because I want as many girls as possible to know and we couldn't casually drop it into twenty different conversations every day. No, I'm going to do some futures trading on your futures profits, haha. I'm going to create a competition where the girls have to guess your previous evening's earnings, and we'll announce the winner - that'll be the closest guess - each lunchtime. We'll get the school to put up some sort of suggestion box thing, and we'll use it for the girls to put their entries in every day. We can delegate all the collecting and sorting-through work to Ava, as she won't sabotage other girls' entries so she can win herself. The winning girl can get some sort of prize from you. Believe me!, they will ALL want to spend some time with you. Will they EVER! Haha. -- "Oh! I just thought. We can have a notice board above the suggestion box showing a graph or list of all your previous days' earnings. It's going to be HUGE, haha. Every girl in school is going to study that board every day and cream herself imagining you are her boyfriend. I need to think about that some more because I'm sure I can improve on it yet. You get the idea, don't you?" "That you're an evil genius? Yeah, I get that. It'd be spectacular, all right. Won't I come across as incredibly boastful though, posting that information for everyone to read?" "No, for the same reason that none of the girls think you're arrogant for dressing the way you do. I've made sure they all know I pushed you into it and that you're doing it just to make me happy. I've explained that many times already, because girls talk about your clothing quite often. I'll just make sure that everyone knows this competition is my idea, which is true. You'll only have to look bashful and embarrassed, which is something you're a natural at. This is going to be a lot of fun. Can you imagine the day after the last day? Everyone will know your days are getting better and better, because they'll be studying that board like hawks, and you'll reach a day just over $500,000, then the next day will be NOTHING, because you've stopped to concentrate on your schoolwork. They won't be able to stop thinking that if you'd 'worked' just one more evening, you could have another HALF A MILLION dollars, or more. That'll warp their little brains, haha. -- "Oh! Here's another point. We'll be saying you're working in the evenings. What if people ask you, 'Would you earn more if you worked all day?' Obviously the answer will be 'Yes, but it's only money so why bother working so hard.' Hmm, that's not very good. How about, 'I know I can earn as much money as I want, so why bust a gut doing it quickly. I'm only fifteen, so I don't need more than a few million now. Maybe in a few years I'll need hundreds of millions, but not yet.' {Snigger}, this is going to be SO MUCH FUN!" Julia was smiling from ear to ear. Actually, probably even wider than that. She was even happier than when she took me clothes shopping! Vanessa said, "Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's too good, Julia. The newspapers would get to hear of it, and they'd be certain to run a huge story about it, including a photo of your daily profits' board. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it went state-wide or even national. In fact, almost certainly national. It's a house of cards that would collapse when people dug into it. Plus the stories would attract every con artist, burglar and other unsavory types from miles around. They're all going to think a 15-year old boy is an easy target. You don't need to make Mark that attractive to sell him. Have him buy a nice car, the way you were telling me before, let it be known that he's bought a million dollar plus house, and that's all you'll need to do; word will spread and girls will be eager enough for your purposes." "DAMN. You're right, Mom. But it would've been SO MUCH FUN!" "Yes, it would have, right up to the time it caused a great deal of trouble. You don't have to sell Mark. There are more than enough girls interested in him already: you, Carol and Ava will occupy a lot of his time. Chloe too, from what you've been telling me." "Oh yes, Chloe. I forgot about her. I've got to send her a text message tonight. I'm glad you reminded me." "One of the reasons you wanted Mark to play around was so that he got more relationship experience with girls, especially so he could get to know how girls operate. From what I've seen, he's so busy having first dates that he doesn't have time to get any relationship experience. By all means have the occasional mass dates like the bowling date, and implement the pipeline idea if you wish, but make it eliminate girls very rapidly and don't let Mark invest much time with girls still in the pipeline. Let him have enough time to start having second and subsequent dates. The girls I've seen around our breakfast table certainly looked like they'd love second dates." "They certainly would! I think you're right again, as usual. The trouble is that I enjoy selling Mark so much. I love seeing so many girls chasing after him. The Futures Profits Board would've been fantastic, especially two or three weeks in. I could easily imagine girls staring at that board in rapture, and fainting because they got so overcome looking at those numbers and thinking about Mark. That would have been incredible!" "Yes. But what possible use to Mark would an unconscious girl be? This is your ego talking, Julia. We've discussed before that you should think less about quantity of girls, and more about quality. Not once when you were discussing your Board idea, did you talk about quality; it was all quantity driven. You were even going to have a daily prize for the closest guessing girl. That prize would've used up some of Mark's time, with a girl of completely random quality. That's not a very smart use of his time, is it?" "I was going to make the prize something like sitting next to Mark at lunch, which he would've been having anyway. That wouldn't waste any of his time, but it would waste his attention, so your point is valid. Part of the problem is that I know how to get more girls interested in Mark, but what I don't know is how to get better girls. That's an ENTIRELY different process, and one that has me stuck because damned near every girl does nothing to prove she has any quality at all." Vanessa said, "I just had a little idea. It's about our earlier topic, but I'll mention it while I remember. You were worried about Mark's turning up with $5.6 million one day wouldn't look like a business result. There's no reason you couldn't tell people that Mark has been futures trading for a few weeks out of a company in LA, and he's just closed his account and cashed up, after accumulating a profit of $5.6 million. You could add, 'Not bad profit for two weeks work, huh?', just to reinforce the timeframe involved. -- "If you wanted to, you could also casually mention something to Mark during your next mass lunch - tomorrow maybe - about wanting to book his time for something, and he could reply, 'Sorry, I'll be busy doing my futures trading then.' You could ask, 'Oh, how's that going? I keep forgetting to ask.' Mark would be vague in his reply, 'I'm still learning, ' or better still, 'It's going okay, but I know I can do better.' You would've planted the seed that he's been doing it for a little while, and you could use that seed whenever the money does come through." "That's a good idea. Both parts of it: saying the sudden income came from a longer time period of work, and planting the seed. I think I'll definitely plant that seed tomorrow. We're all in agreement that futures trading is Mark's cover story?" We all thought it was a good idea. Prof said, "I'll find a good book or two on day trading to bring home." #4: #1: #4: #1: (For those of you who don't know, "Day Trading" is the activity of trading financial assets - whether futures, currencies, shares, or any other volatile financial product - on a short timeframe basis, rather than buying them for long-term holding.) I said, "I'm always happy to read more math books. Especially if there's not going to be an exam afterward! I just need to learn some jargon so I can sound impressive, right?" Prof answered, "Yes. You should refuse to get into detailed discussions. You can say you have your own mathematical models and they're confidential. Most futures traders say the same thing, so that'd be perfectly acceptable. I've heard several discussions about the industry, so I can fill you in with some appropriate responses." I nodded. Julia said, "Mom, I'll try to give some more thought to the quality issue. It's not the first time I've said that though. It's tricky, because so many of the girls are so useless that way." I was in a good mood, so I suggested, "How about we just choose the girls with big tits then? That's easy to determine." Julia said, "Haha. You've got the biggest 10th grade girl in your sights already. Isn't Chloe enough for you?" (Actually, Chloe wouldn't be the biggest-breasted 10th grader. There were a few bigger than her, but they're FAT, often grossly so. We're not counting girls who're that fat. We're going to try hard not to think about them again, shudder.) I answered Julia, "I'm just joking, so don't worry about it. I do like Vanessa's idea of my having time for some second dates though. I definitely want to spend most of my time with you and Carol, plus Ava now, and perhaps Chloe soon too. The occasional mass date is fine, but - as Vanessa said - I'd like to have a chance for some second dates. -- "I like Alexis' attitude, and she and I have fun before first period these days. I was thinking I'd like to thank her for being so much fun by asking her for a date in a week or two. Not right away, but in a week or two would be good. A second date with Pat would be nice too, which would probably mean Lily as well, as those two are pretty tight these days. It'd be an unnecessary insult to exclude Lily, especially as she's been very helpful. Those are the only girls I feel motivated to have a repeat date with. I might have to spend some time with Katelin too - considering what I've done to her family - although I'm trying hard to keep her at a distance. -- "My joke about big tits was a silly way of me saying that, just like you, I'm stumped when it comes to encouraging the girls to behave in a high-quality way. Most of them are far too busy being self-centered to give any thought to pleasing the guy." Vanessa asked, "You've had a few mass lunches now, haven't you Julia? With lots of the 10th grade girls attending?" "Yes, three of them. Some 11th grade girls came to the third. There was the pizza parlor lunch too; that was quite a mass of girls." "How about having a pop quiz about Mark? Prepare it over the weekend and then get all the 10th grade girls at Monday's lunch to do a quiz on Mark-related topics. Don't warn them about it in advance; just try to get as many as possible to come to Monday's lunch with pen and paper. Question them about things you've talked about at the lunches, but also that have been mentioned elsewhere. If a girl is genuinely interested in Mark, she would've been seeking more information about him, so you don't have to restrict your questions to material you know they've all heard. Be as unfair as you want with some of the questions, because that'll tell you which girls are the most motivated. You can even be VERY unfair, and ask questions that no one should know the answers to. Any girl who guesses one of those right might understand Mark well. -- "You could even ask them what business Mark is working on now, as it gives you a way to plant the seed - when you go through the answers with them at the following lunch - and their answers might be interesting, because one of their guesses might be an even better cover story than a futures' trader. -- "You'll have to bring their quizzes home to score them all, so it's a time investment for you, but it shouldn't be too bad and Ava can help. I suggest that at the start of the quiz you tell them that only the top-scoring half of the girls will be invited to future lunches with Mark. It'll be a very public lesson on the perils of being self-centered, and set a valuable example to the 11th grade girls and surviving 10th graders. Plus, and very usefully, it'll get rid of half the girls who would otherwise be wasting your and Mark's time." "I like it, Mom! Those lunches are getting unwieldy, so that's an EXCELLENT way to thin the ranks. I can think of several good questions already. Thanks, that's a very good idea for how to find quality girls." #4: #1: #4: #2: #4: #1: #4: We had pretty much finished our conversation with Prof and Vanessa, and soon headed up to bed, so I didn't have to worry about this important issue for long. [While I think to mention it, conversations usually don't flow as directly as they're written herein. Julia stopped us to ask did we want coffee, or milk and cookies in my case (as it happened, I did). People had to go to the toilet at times. Carol called to wish me goodnight before she went to sleep, and to check that I hadn't gone into delayed shock, or some such. Carol put Donna on the line too, so she could tell me how happy she was that I liked Aikido so much. Stuff like that. All too boring to mention every time, but I thought it should be mentioned at least once. I especially didn't want you thinking that I'd forgotten Carol, or vice versa. One of the issues with having two wives, and so far usually sleeping with only one of them at a time, is that the other will usually call to say goodnight. Actually, I'm usually the one calling, because they're afraid of catching me at an awkward moment. Ava's in that calling group now too.] While we were getting ready for bed, I said, "Something just occurred to me. Isn't there a danger that your pop quiz might eliminate nearly all of the good looking girls? They do tend to be the most self-centered." Julia smiled at me, "So that means we should eliminate them." I was pretty sure Julia knew exactly what I meant, and that I was digging myself a deeper hole, but I tried my best, "But I kind of prefer dating pretty girls, like you, darling." "Oh? I'd like to think we're together because of my personality?" "That too, of course, sweetie." "No problem then. The girls with good personalities will do well on the test, and a few of them might be good looking." #1: #4: #1, #2: "Because I'm an immature, sexist, male pig, I'd really like to make sure there were a good number of pretty girls left, preferably with big tits too." #1: "Haha. Is the poor boy worried?" "Yes. Worried about that, and my imminent teasing too." "I'm curious how important beauty is to you..." #4: " ... Let's say there are twenty five questions, and that the girls get about fifteen right on average. Should beautiful girls get one extra point, or two extra points, or even five? Five points would make a large difference to someone's placing. How many points is beauty worth to you?" #4: #2: #1: I crossed my fingers and answered, "I wouldn't think about it in those terms. How about after you've marked all the quizzes, you tell me which girls are about to be eliminated, and I maybe think about bumping a few of them up? After I carefully think about how badly they did on the quiz, of course." "Haha. Good save. Okay, we'll do that. Let's talk about Chloe now. She called me just after I got home from school, begging for help with you, 'Because what Mark wants me to do will take me MONTHS. Or maybe I'll NEVER be able to do it. I can't wait that long.' She was quite panicky." "Oh dear. What a pity. I hope you were able to help her?" ^ [I'll quote Julia and Chloe's conversation, as if I'd been listening. Julia had said, "I'll try to help you Chloe, but it won't be easy. Mark is so smart he's almost impossible to argue with, and he cares about you a great deal so he's already spent ages thinking this through very carefully. His mind will be made up and his opinion firmly held. Also, he hasn't told me what he's waiting for you to do either, so that makes it even harder for me. -- "I realize this is enormously important for you, so I'm going to spend this evening thinking about it, and I'll talk with you some more at school tomorrow. We'll discuss the best strategy for my trying to change his mind tomorrow evening. This evening isn't a good time to talk with Mark anyway, because he's got that family with dysfunctional siblings to visit and then that important meeting with the people who're working on his business idea. He won't have much time to talk with me after all that, and he's likely to be distracted too, so it'd be wise to wait until tomorrow evening. I'm probably going to get only one chance at this, so I don't want to rush it. How does that plan sound?" Chloe had asked, "Are you sure you can't do it tonight?" "I don't even know HOW to do it yet. Mark is never wrong about something that he thinks seriously about, and I know he's spent ages thinking about you. I expect it'll take me several hours of very, very hard work to change his mind about how best to proceed with you. I'm willing to try that hard because I think you're worth it, but trying to do it in a hurry would be foolish. This could change your whole life, so it's too important to risk failing because of a lack of patience. I'll think about it carefully tonight and talk with you tomorrow morning." "Okay. I guess I can wait until tomorrow. Thank you very much, Julia. I don't know what I'd do without your help. Go crazy, I think. I've never felt this way about anyone before, and I don't know what to do..." "I know, sweetie. The most important thing in your life is happening, but you've got zero experience at it. That's got to be very scary for you. Falling in love with your first boyfriend is scary enough normally, but when he's the most amazing guy on the planet, and he does things so differently than normal boys, it's got to be scary and VERY confusing too. That's one reason I'm so willing to help you. Although I feel sorry for how frightening this is for you, one fantastic thing is that we both know for a fact that Mark cares for you a great deal. That must make you feel so much better?" The rest of their conversation was just them gushing back and forth about me. There was no information exchanged, as it was just typical girly talk.] ^ Julia told me, "I'll talk with Chloe tomorrow. I already know what I'm going to tell her. It shouldn't take long." [It took far longer than Julia expected. Chloe talked more, and Julia had some opportunities and ideas that she couldn't resist working in. Julia started her planned discussion with Chloe between two of the morning classes, and didn't cover a fraction of what she'd intended, so they ended up allocating all of lunchtime to it.] Julia and I chatted briefly about other stuff, such as: ^ When she'd gotten home from school, Julia had done some research on how famous people handle crowds of people. She hadn't found much useful material before the Eaton Incident derailed her plans, but she told me what little she did learn, plus a couple of her own ideas. There wasn't much, so it didn't take long. ^ Julia asked me, "Are you really as good at fighting as you said?" "Yes." "Wow." ^ Julia mentioned, "What a pity having that 'Daily Profits Board' idea was too good. It would have been HUGE. Even the teachers and the Principal would have been blown away by that." "Yes. That's the problem. Oh, I just thought, how come you wanted a physical notice board? Why not put it on my website? Isn't that sort of stuff what the website is for?" "A physical board would've been MUCH better. People would've gathered around it at school, and gazed rapturously at it. That would've had far more impact than people individually browsing the website. Anyway, it's a dead issue now. Even putting that information on the website would be too much. Much better we just occasionally drop figures in conversation with some of the girls. That way if reporters sniff around you can just tell them to go away and they're not going to have anything much to write about." "Speaking of reporters," I said, "I imagine there's going to be some hoopla about the Eatons Incident." "Yeah," agreed Julia. "Possibly even two hoopla's worth. You have strange expressions sometimes, Mark. You'll probably have a reporter or two chasing you tomorrow." "Yeah. Hey! I just realized I'm not worried about that. Last time I had reporters chasing after me I HATED it. Now I don't really care. Well, that's not quite true as obviously I wish they'd go away, but you know what I mean." "You're getting more self-confident. That's a very pleasing sign." "It is good, isn't it? All your good work is starting to pay off. Well done, darling!" "I can't take ALL the credit. Maybe only 95%. After all, you helped a little too, {chuckle}." That earned her a little bit of fooling around, but it was late so we didn't do it for long. It was a nice way to end the day though; none nicer! ------- Chapter 145: My Body Gets a Guard Friday, April 29, 2005 We'd gone to sleep about 11:30pm, so I awoke about 3:45am. Study was enjoyable, as usual. The new computer system is cool, but my enjoyment is mostly because math is such a fun subject. The college courses are a little bit challenging, but only a little. Enough to keep me focused and interested, but never enough to make me sweat. If I hit a problem where the solution isn't included in the material I'm studying, it usually doesn't take me long to work it out from the textbook, or google a solution if it's something normally taught in the 12th grade. Or if it's an issue that's not holding me up and I can't be bothered researching it, I usually just wait to ask Prof over breakfast. This study session's progress was particularly good, which was very satisfying. I finished studying fifteen minutes earlier than normal, because I wanted to spend some time talking to Mom and Dad before school. I hurried Julia's and my morning showers and dressing, and headed downstairs for breakfast. During breakfast, Vanessa passed me the morning newspaper, pointing to an article. The Eaton Incident, of course. The story was fairly prominently placed at the top of page three, so there wasn't much chance that anyone would miss it, unfortunately. The article only had the official details, presented in a humorous tone. It reported that "A local 10th grade girl's family seems to have taken great exception to the boyfriend she'd brought home, a Mr. Mark Anderson, aged 16" (although I was actually fifteen). The most pertinent paragraph was, "The father and two of the four brothers were knocked unconscious, one with a broken jaw, by Mark Anderson, but not before a third brother, Mr. Gunner Eaton, was stabbed in the stomach in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity, allegedly by the eldest brother, Mr. Don Eaton. Assault charges have been filed against Mr. Eaton Senior, the father, and Mr. Don Eaton. Mrs. Janet Eaton and Miss Katelin Eaton - the young woman whose boyfriend was at the center of the incident - refused to comment beyond confirming the above. Mr. Mark Anderson could not be located for comment. A police spokesperson confirms that no charges will be filed against Mr. Anderson, the victim of the alleged assaults." I called home, got Mom, checked that she'd seen the article (she had), and then I complained that she owed me a sixteenth birthday present that I hadn't received yet. I also told her, "I'll be coming around a few minutes early, so we can talk then," so it was only a short call. I imagined it would be hard to get hold of Katelin, but she answered on the first ring (caller ID is a wonderful thing). The Eatons had been inundated with calls, but she'd been letting her mom answer the house phone and she'd been ignoring most of the calls to her cell. Katelin reported that she and Wayne had visited the hospital last night. Both brothers would be fine, and Katelin even cracked a joke with me about Junior's broken jaw. Gunner's stab wound wasn't deep. She'd been told that its shallowness was presumably because Don had realized he had the wrong target and had pulled back. Junior would be home later today, Gunner probably the day after. Both were sporting spectacular bruises on their faces where I'd hit them, especially Junior. Gunner wouldn't be going back to school for a while, which meant I wouldn't have the pleasure of encountering him in a hallway. [When he did finally return to school, he avoided me.] The police had told the Eatons that they [the police] were still "interested in" Junior and Gunner for assaulting me. The Eatons' lawyer, as they had one now, had scoffed at the police's claimed interest in Gunner. Junior, being an adult, was more at risk, but he hadn't actually touched me so probably nothing much was going to happen to him either. Katelin said, "My father didn't touch you either, but the tape made him look very bad." I asked, "You know about the tape now?" "Yeah. I haven't heard it yet, but our lawyer has. Dad had told the police that you had attacked everyone including him, but the tape proves you didn't. I can't believe how stupid he was to lie about that when he knew you had a tape. Because he lied, he's in even more trouble now." Mrs. Eaton was also booked in for a police interview and advised to have her lawyer with her. She was in some trouble too, over lying to the police about my fights and Don's alibi. [She ended up pleading guilty and was just fined.] I didn't want to spend long on the phone with Katelin, so I checked she'd be at school today. "Yes. Wayne and I both will." "I'll talk with you there. I've got to go, bye." [In the long run, Junior and Gunner, escaped with a telling off, Mrs. Eaton with a perjury conviction, fine, and a lawyer's bill. Mr. Eaton was in more serious trouble, for inciting his sons to attack me and for attacking me himself. In the circumstances none of the charges were very serious as his assault on me had been attempted rather than actual, but I was a minor and he had a history of having been involved in several fights before, so he didn't get cut any slack. He got nine months 'inside'. Don was in considerably more trouble, as his "I stabbed the wrong guy" wasn't a great defense. He plea bargained, confessed the burglary, denied he'd been involved in any others (which was a lie a dozen times over), and got four years. I wasn't hopeful that he'd use them to turn over a new leaf, as he'd had too many of his formative years being trained to be violent.] I called Ava. No one in her family had seen the article yet, as they didn't waste much time reading newspapers. I briefly told her about it, as it was bound to be talked about at school, and left it up to her whether to tell her parents or not. [She didn't at the time, but saved the page until she'd gotten the full story from Julia and me at school, and then she showed her parents the article and provided them with all the missing details, which I thought was pretty smart of her.] Then I quickly finished my breakfast and we headed off to my home. I asked to talk with Mom and Dad alone in their room. Once we had privacy, I started telling Mom off, "Mom, in the police interview room you started ripping into me for being so stupid as to get into fights, and all the totally predictable stuff mothers say at such times. You CANNOT talk like that in the middle of a police station! There's far too much risk of you getting worked up and making some loud reference to my special abilities. There's also no way I can answer your accusations without referring to my abilities myself, so the entire conversation was pointless and dangerous. -- "We MUST NOT let the authorities know about my abilities, and you were trying to talk about them right in the middle of the most authoritarian building in Corvallis. Not to mention that the cops love phone taps and that sort of stuff, and they could easily have put a microphone in their own room. You thoughtlessly took a completely unnecessary and dangerous risk, just so you could yell pointless and predictable stuff at me. You did much the same thing in the hospital when I had my cast removed. Why do you repeatedly try to get me into serious trouble when we're in the presence of the people who are the most dangerous to me?" After a little back and forth, Mom's defense emerged, "Okay, I'll admit I should have waited, but you were still incredibly stupid to get involved in so many fights. You should have gotten out as fast as you could, and never come back! You hung around needlessly and got attacked over and over again. You were INSANELY stupid..." Mom was working herself up again, so I shocked her by yelling, "SHUT UP, Mom!" She did; hardly surprising really. "You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, which is complete garbage..." I continued, and was hard on Mom. I hoped it wouldn't do any harm, and that it would help in the future. I had a feeling I was going to be getting into more fights soon, as the boys at school were getting increasingly envious about me, and there'd be even more envy when I was rich (fingers crossed). So Mom needed to control her mouth around other people much better. I'll quote part of the ensuing conversation. I told Mom, "You called me 'incredibly stupid', and 'insanely stupid'. My school grades would indicate otherwise, but maybe you have a very good reason for believing your accusations are correct?" Mom calmly asserted, "It IS stupid to get involved in needless fights." "They weren't needless fights. I was trying to show Katelin's brothers that thoughtless violence was a foolish behavior. I was trying to help Katelin develop good relationships with them, and the first step had to be to get them to stop being so aggressively macho." "But you could have been VERY seriously hurt." "No I couldn't. Unlike your frequent assertions, I am NOT stupid. If there'd been any chance of my getting hurt - especially seriously hurt - I would've been outta there! There was no chance of it, so I stayed to continue to help Katelin. I was perfectly happy letting them attack me over and over again, and I'd still be there now letting them keep trying, if Don hadn't escalated things so far. You're treating me like I'm an ordinary boy, which you know isn't the case. You heard all about how I dealt with the Eatons yesterday, so you know I had no problem taking care of them all. None of them ever laid a finger on me, not even when I was attacked from behind. You can make as many silly comments about me as you want at home, but do NOT lose control of yourself and start yelling stuff that could give me away in the middle of a police station. That TRULY was stupid." "But he had a KNIFE. You could have been seriously injured." "Mom, I was laughing to myself when I saw him attack me with a knife. There was no way he could touch me with it. After I knocked him out, I didn't even bother removing the knife from his hand. If he woke up, I didn't care if he had a knife. He might as well have been holding a feather duster!" "What about a gun? He could have had a gun. I heard you tell our lawyer that you were scared about that." "I'm hardly going to tell a stranger that I wasn't scared of a gun, am I? That would make ME stupid! There was a SMALL chance that a gun could have hurt SOMEONE, but it was VERY small. Maybe 1% that he would have hit one of us before I took him down. Not a risk I was happy with, because being shot can be bad news, but 1% is still a very, very small number." Dad said, "Are you really that good? That if he'd walked into the room with a gun, you'd take him down 99 times out of 100?" "Your math is wrong, Dad. I said there was a 1% chance he'd hit 'someone', so only a quarter of a percent chance of him hitting me. There were four of us, and even if he hit me, it might've been somewhere not too bad, like in the arm or leg. Unless he put me out of action, I'd have no trouble taking him down. You might as well say he had something like one chance in a thousand of beating me. That's similar to the chance of you or Mom having a fender bender in any one day, which is hardly something you agonize over. Someone firing a gun could easily be more serious than a fender bender, but 99 times out of a 100 it would've ended exactly the same as it did yesterday, with Don going down and no one else being touched. -- "Mom won't be happy to hear this, but I'm actually GLAD that the Eatons attacked me. It was a great experience for me because I learned some things about myself. I thought I was very good at defending myself, but the truth is that I am VERY, VERY good. I'm never going to be the victim of bullying at school again, that's for sure! Mom's raving at me for taking stupid risks fighting makes as much sense as if she'd raved at ... I don't know, maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger for stupidly risking straining his muscles by picking up a cup of coffee. With my abilities, Mom's raving at me is just as silly as that. -- "Mom doesn't know my abilities, so I don't mind her getting upset at what appears to be my stupidity, but I do VERY MUCH mind that she chose to have her rant in the middle of a police station! If you've got a problem, Mom, FOR GOD'S SAKE wait until we're somewhere safe before you start a tirade! Or better yet, give me credit for knowing what I'm capable of doing better than you do. There was no purpose to your yelling in the police station, other than to vent your anxiety, and that lack of self-control could get our whole family locked up in a lab for the rest of our short lives. You heard all the stuff Prof and Vanessa worried about, but still you had to get irrational and loud in a police station. I'm sure Prof and Vanessa would never lose control of themselves like that." There was a little more back and forth, but Mom's goose was cooked (although I prefer chicken). Mom had to apologize to me, and then I had to apologize to her, because that's how these things work. I jokingly told her, "If you do something like that again Mom, I might have to punch YOU unconscious to protect us all." It was sort-of-a-joke, and sort-of-not, which she understood. To lighten the mood and to impress Mom and Dad, I quickly reenacted the "hide the hair game" that I'd shown Katelin and Wayne. They had no idea how it got from my left to my right hand, so were impressed by that. Not as much as they should've been though, as we see so much of that stuff on TV. They realized I was using NP when I started the "look in your pocket" part of the show. That was fine; we'd had some fun, and they'd been reminded that I was very unusual. Dad said, "You could make a good living as a stage magician." Which reminded me of something. I said, "Dad, you have NO IDEA! Remember that comment and we'll discuss it later." I refused to explain any further. Dad had reminded me of my intended light blob demonstration, which I planned to be the first half of a session with my parents to reinforce the rightness of Carol and me being together, since Mom was having trouble accepting my sex-life. That discussion was so important that I wasn't going to waste the impressive effects of light blobs by demonstrating them now. I was conscious that I was having trouble finding the time to show my blobs to the four parents. One solution was to show it to all four of them at one time, and tonight would probably be a VERY good time, while the Eaton Incident and my tirade against Mom's tirade were still fresh in Mom's mind. I said, "Mom, remember I wanted to have a chat with you a couple of evenings ago, but it got bumped by Ava's parents' dinner party? I'm thinking about doing it tonight. Are you and Dad free tonight?" "Yes. What have you got in mind?" I wasn't going to tell her that, but I said, "I was originally intending to do something with you and Dad one night, then most of it with Vanessa and Prof the next night. There's a bit of it that Vanessa and Prof don't need to see so I was going to do it in two sessions, but there's no reason why I can't do it with all four of you at the same time. Probably even better, come to think of it. I'm thinking that I'll come here for dinner tonight, then after dinner we'll go over to the Williams' and I'll do my thing with all four of you in Julia's bedroom. I like the security aspect of doing it there, as it's soundproof, lightproof, and upstairs so impossible for someone to get close to. It'll probably take half an hour or so. How does that sound?" "That's fine by us. Are you going to tell us what it's about?" "Oh no. You'll enjoy it FAR more if you don't know, haha. I need to check if the Williamses will be available." I called them, quickly explained what little I wanted to explain - using careful language because I was on the phone, and because Mom was listening to me on the phone so it'd be another lesson for her. The Williamses were available, so it was on for tonight. I apologized to my mother for speaking to her so rudely, she apologized for being so thoughtless (that's how these things work), and I left the room, thinking to myself about whether to do the halo trick, now that the demonstration would be somewhere so secure. As small final point, Mom mentioned that she'd been called by reporters a couple of times yesterday evening, wanting to interview me and my parents. She'd turned them down, of course. I confirmed to her that turning them down was an excellent choice. ^ In case you think my confidence about facing a gun-armed Don was deliberately deceitful, then shame on you for thinking that I'd deceive my parents! Children should never do such a thing, unless they are big-titted teenage girls sneaking out for an assignation with me. I should explain a little something that'd happened. #4 had been on duty most of the time we'd been at Katelin's and right through to the end of our interview with Mr. Walker. This was WAY beyond his normal duty time, but there was so much important stuff going on that we needed as much continuity of minds as possible. When we finally let #4 rotate back into being active and were bringing him up to date, the two minds that were briefing him had mentioned how worried they'd been about the possibility of Don having a gun. #4 had asked, , like it was no big deal. The rest of us had questioned #4's nonchalance, and he'd answered it was because he assumed we'd do the obvious. The others of us hadn't thought of any "the obvious" way of handling someone coming after us with a gun, so the two briefing minds asked #4 what he was thinking of, as it sounded like a VERY useful thing to know. #4's explanation started a fun discussion, with lots of amusing mental pictures going back and forth between us. By far the most likely event - if Don had obtained a gun - was that he would've come into the room carrying it. We didn't have much of a problem if he'd done that, because we would see his eyes. He'd reacted so strongly to 1.5 minds' worth of eye poke, so three minds worth into one eye, quickly followed by the other eye, should do the job nicely. Given the way he'd reacted last time - staying in a screaming heap holding his hands to his face for the best part of a minute - he'd probably drop the gun. If he did, we'd NP it away, unless it weighed too much in which case we'd flip it end for end across the floor. If after being blinded, rather than dropping the gun he tried to use it, we'd NP-tap his shoulder to make him spin around, and NP-push his gun hand around, so he'd end up having no idea where the targets were. There was VERY little chance of someone recently blinded and in that much agony, being pushed around like that, hitting us with random shots. We'd have to be extraordinarily unlucky. Our greatest threat would have come from his hiding outside in the hallway, sticking his hand around the doorframe, and firing blindly into the room. That would be an extremely unlikely choice for Don, especially as it'd mess up his own home, but if he did that we'd have to stop him. Our major weapon of blinding him wouldn't be possible because he wouldn't be showing us his eyes. #4's idea had been to use light blobs in this case. We'd fly multicolor light blobs through the doorway. We could also have used NP to bang on the hallway wall opposite the door, and used it to fly sofa cushions out into the hallway. In other words, distract Don terribly. During which time we'd run up to beside the doorway. There'd be a very good chance we could do that without Don hearing us, especially if we used NP to make lots of knocking sounds in the hallway, and even more especially if he was freaked out enough to fire his gun at the flying cushions or blobs. From beside the doorway we could probably proximity sense him through the wall when he was close to it, including knowing where his gun arm was (we would've been able to sense which arm had the gun quite easily, as the act of aiming something causes ki to radiate along the aim). We'd know the right time to whip through the doorway and take him on. Again, eyes first, then hold the gun away if necessary, while we knocked him out. Or whatever other tactic seemed appropriate at the time. Alternatively, if we didn't want to run into the hallway because he was firing at the blobs, we could keep distracting him until he'd run out of bullets, or he freaked out so much that he moved somewhere we could see his eyes. There were lots of options, depending on what he did, so we'd be bound to get some sort of opportunity. Once we started talking about things like this, we thought of other options. If the gun was pointed somewhere safe, we could use NP to pull the trigger (actually, we'd push the trigger, but it'd produce the same result). Having the gun go off by itself would use up bullets and freak out the possessor. Hopefully he'd look down the barrel to see what was wrong! If he did that, I truly would be seriously tempted, especially because all the evidence would be that he'd committed suicide. With someone like Don Eaton, it would hardly be a terrible loss to society. We'd already used NP to tap Gunner's shoulder as a distraction, but we could have made that even more distracting. Tapping a guys balls would be certain to get his undivided attention, as guys are REALLY sensitive to touches in that area, especially in fights. One thing we'd learned from Aikido is that when you push someone's hand to the left (say), they'll automatically try to push it back, which takes time. If Don stuck the gun into the room blindly, and we didn't want him to lower his aim, one of the things we could have done was NP the gun sideways. He'd react by pushing it back the other way. That'd occupy him for at least a second, during which time he wouldn't be correcting his aim, could be using up bullets if he was firing, and I could be doing whatever else I wanted to do. We had other ideas for a non-gun-armed opponent. Create two small, bright-as-possible light blobs immediately in front of each of an opponent's eyes. Small blobs can't be made bright enough to be blinding, but they'd still obscure his vision wonderfully for a second, especially as his eyes would have to refocus a couple of times and he'd be HIGHLY distracted. We had fun imagining how distracting light blobs could be in a combat situation. An opponent should run to avoid them if they looked like they were going to impact on his body, and if we had plenty of time we could even make them seem sentient, like we'd done with the green frog when we'd demonstrated light blobs to Julia and Carol. These ideas assumed we didn't mind our opponent seeing light blobs, so it'd have to be a very serious fight, but not so serious that we wanted to permanently blind the person. We figured out, or at least hoped, that even in a face-to-face fight with a guy we'd been unable to trip, we'd still have a very good chance of winning. We'd have our proximity sense giving us excellent warning of his intentions, be able to NP-tap our opponent in unexpected places, and maybe conjure a light blob right in front of both his eyes at a critical moment, such as when I was about to hit him in the side of the head. There were quite a few options, depending on how much we wanted him to learn of our special abilities. We wouldn't want to create a history of dozens of people who'd seen funny lights when fighting us, but the occasional incident would probably be okay. Another encouraging thing was that our punches seem to be very good at knocking people out, which is very useful in a fight! So, if Don had obtained a gun, we almost certainly would've been okay, presuming we'd thought of using light blobs and other distractions in time. Given that Don stabbed Gunner, Don obviously wasn't practicing much self-control at the time, so light blobs and flying cushions should have easily succeeded at freaking him out. Amusingly, a blind person (as he would've shortly become) would have no credibility trying to claim he saw colored balls flying around just before his eyes went pop; especially not a blind criminal. ^ I'd talked to Mom for too long, so we all had to immediately jump into the car and head to school. On the way, my sisters wanted to talk about the article. I repeated my joke about them owing me my sixteenth birthday presents, but don't think it really worked. Oh well, it'd been worth a try. When they were talked out a little, Carol asked me, "Is there any stuff we shouldn't talk about at school? Any secret Mark stuff?" That shut Donna up! I hadn't told them about the ankle-taps or how I turned the tape recorder on, so everything seemed fine, I thought. I said, "The only secret thing I can think of is the tape. The police wanted to use that to ambush Mr. Eaton, but I'm pretty sure they would've already done that. It'd probably be best not to talk about it anyway, just to play safe. Other than that, there are no 'Mark secrets' that I can think of. Can anyone else think on anything we need to hide?" Carol asked, "What if people ask how you managed to beat up so many of them?" I said to Julia, "You don't have a pressing need to sell me as some sort of martial arts genius, do you? As far as I'm concerned, I'm just happy to say that the Eatons are pathetic fighters. That I hit them once and they fell down. Is that okay?" Julia answered, "Do you think that's the story Katelin and Wayne are already telling people? They must have had quite a few of their friends call them, and they've probably talked about how good you are. How about just saying you've been training recently, and you're learning fast. That even has the merit of being true." Donna's subsequent, "Great! I can't wait to tell all my friends all about those fights," didn't inspire much confidence that she'd be modest on my behalf. "Okay, that'll have to be the way you describe it. Personally I'm going to refuse to discuss the incident, but it seems no one else is going to be so reticent. -- "I don't think there are any 'Mark Secrets', so to change the subject, I've invited Mom, Dad and Julia's parents to Julia's bedroom for a private chat after dinner tonight, and to show them something 'colorful'." Donna was in the car, so some discretion was required. It must've been a good hint, because Carol and Julia clearly got it. "After that, I want to talk with them - Mom mostly - about some relationship stuff concerning Carol and me. It's a relationship thing, so only Carol and Julia are invited. You're both free after dinner tonight, aren't you?" "Yes," x 2. "Good. It'll only take thirty minutes or so, depending on how much chatting happens afterward." The girls wanted to know what I'd be saying about my relationship with Carol, so I spent the rest of the trip telling them about it, getting their suggestions, etc. It involved Carol, so she had lots to say. It was a plan to convince people to do what I wanted, so Julia had lots to say too. Donna asked to be included in the conversation in Julia's bedroom, but I firmly refused that. She didn't push it, knowing she'd ruined her trustworthiness. After arriving at school, it didn't take long to find out that this was going to be different from a normal day; this was going to be "Macho Idiot Day." Enough guys had read the article, to tell every other guy, so they could all behave like stupid, immature, macho idiots around me. Wherever I went, I was instantly the center of male attention. In my opinion, that's exactly the wrong gender for me to be in the middle of. If I had to be surrounded with idiots at all, I'd still prefer female idiots, because female idiots can grow perfectly nice sets of tits, while idiotic males have no redeeming features at all. All they have is damned annoying behaviors. Not every male behaved stupidly at the sight of me, merely about half of them, which brought the number down to two or three hundred. I find one idiotic male hard to enough to put up with, so you can imagine what I thought of two or three hundred! Most of them behaved like idiots: yahooing it up, backslapping me, making stupid comments, yelling stupid questions, even louder yelling stupid boasts, and stupid whatever-else-they-could-think-of-to-be-stupid-about. Thank God it's Friday, so the stupidity would have a chance to calm down over the weekend. What concerned me the most were all the guys for whom behaving as an idiot wasn't enough, as quite of few of them insisted on behaving as over-the-top macho idiots. They obviously thought it'd make them look really cool to be seen getting aggressive with me. I was deliberately taunted, jostled, badmouthed, challenged, and all the rest of the highly sophisticated social interaction repertoire boys use in such circumstances. It was a pain in the ass (metaphorically only, I'm happy to say). All the crap would've been a literal pain though, if I'd not avoided so many of the false-camaraderie punches aimed at my upper-arms, proximity letting me dodge them. The type of male attracted to this macho competitiveness is not the type who stops when asked to. Quite the reverse, as my asking them to stop only made them do it more. This may seem like males are being illogical, so I need to explain in more depth: They're trying to establish their dominance, so when I say "Stop" - or even worse, "Please stop" - they sense weakness and they push harder to ensure their dominance is unmistakable to everyone. It's quite logical really, and VERY annoying. During class time there wasn't much they could do beyond stupid comments, which the teachers discouraged, but outside of class time the competitive macho idiots were a damned nuisance. I wasn't serious worried, because I was pretty damned confident that I could defend myself if any of them got too physical, but all their crap was VERY annoying, especially when my not rising to the occasion (by lowering myself to their level), encouraged them. I restricted myself to verbal retorts, trying different themes to find one that worked, such as, "Stop being so childish", or "I'm not going to play your stupid macho games, so go and annoy someone else", or "I've already knocked four people out and that's enough for one week. Come and see me next week for your turn." None of my verbal tactics helped at all, boys being boys. In other words: damned stupid macho idiots. After a couple of hours of school, I was fed up with it, and it was getting steadily worse as more boys were getting involved and the forcefulness of all their taunts increased. It should be obvious to you, but I'll spell out that all this crap was motivated by the guys' envy over my success with girls. It was actually Julia who was doing the seducing on my behalf, but the boys were having too much fun ripping me down to appreciate fine nuances like that. I tried to think of a way to get it stopped: Getting them to appoint a champion and then beating the living snot out of him. As appealing as this idea was - and it was VERY appealing by now - the school authorities would be pissed off with my fighting, and it'd doubtless only encourage the others to try their luck. Giving some sort of exhibition of how good I was, such as using proximity to avoid the blows from a volunteer 'assistant'. The trouble was that I didn't have any sort of impressive offensive demonstration, only defensive, and idiots wouldn't be impressed by that. No doubt they'd each believe that they would be able to hit me, even if several other people had failed to do so. Being the one that succeeded at hitting me would be a status gaining accomplishment, so I'd almost certainly only invite more punches by trying this idea. Going home for the day. I was seriously tempted, as it was Friday. The trouble with that plan was it'd make many guys believe I'd run away. They'd take it as a sign of weakness and would be eager to be even more confrontational on Monday. I was pretty sure Julia wouldn't be pleased by my running away either, as she's several times told me, "Don't run away from your problems." The Williamses live that stuff, which makes it hard for me not to. I still hadn't made up my mind what to do by the time the penultimate class before lunch ended. The teacher quickly left after the bell, leaving the way clear for several of the boys to gather tightly around me, hemming me in so they could start their macho bullshit with me. I had to stand there and take it until the next class's teacher arrived, so I took a considerable amount of abuse. If I didn't do something to fight back soon, it was going to get even worse, and there wasn't much room for "worse" left, short of a full-on brawl. That'd be damned messy, as it'd probably be a many-on-one fight. So I left the class just after it started, and went to talk with my good friend, the Principal. I was going to put the mess into his lap and let him sort it out. A 'running away' of sorts, but the deciding factor to me was that it seemed inevitable that there was going to be a fight soon. I'd have no friendly witnesses if I was buried in a group, as had just happened, so I'd be helpless against their lies afterward. I could easily imagine the Principal seizing the opportunity to expel me from school, and that had very serious repercussions such as my not being able to take 11th grade exams at the end of the year. I got in to see him easily, and started by telling him, "I have a serious problem that I need your help with. Yesterday evening I visited a girl's house and several male members of her family attacked me. There was an article about it in this morning's paper..." "Yes, I read it. You get yourself into a lot of fights, don't you?" If he'd said it in a normal tone of voice I wouldn't have given his comment a second thought, but he'd been sneering at me. Apart from anything else, it was a good indication that my fear of being expelled for fighting was all too accurate. I pulled out my cellphone, and asked him, "I'm sure you know the phone number for the Corvallis Board of Education. What is it please?" That wasn't the sort of thing that the Principal wanted to hear. He asked, "Why?" "I came in here clearly stating that I wanted your help with a serious issue, one involving violence. Instead of responding the way a good Principal would - with concern and attention - your only response was to make a sneering cheap shot at me. As I want my serious problem fixed, and you're too mean spirited to do so, I have to contact someone who knows how to solve problems in high schools. Either give me the Board's phone number, or I'll find a phone book and look it up myself. On the other hand, I'm sure Mom has it memorized..." The Principal indicated that he was perfectly capable of listening to my problem. I was tempted to stick it to him even more as I was in a very bad mood from ALL the crap I'd already suffered through, so I had ZERO tolerance for his crap. I even knew what I was going to say: "You really are a poor Principal, aren't you?" And when he complained, respond, "Oh, so it's only you that's allowed to make cheap shots. You can hand them out, but you can't take them. What sort of person does that make you?" I was in a VERY bad mood. Fortunately even my IQ was up to the task of working out that it'd probably be best not to do that. Instead I swallowed my pissed off mood, and said, "Thank you. Because of the newspaper article, many of the boys have decided that it makes them look cool to hassle me. Their hassling is getting more and more verbally and physically abusive because I'm refusing to respond to it. Very soon it's likely to result in violence. I don't want that to happen, so I'm asking for your help." "If they're troubling you, just walk away. Go find a teacher if you have to." "At the end of my last class, a dozen boys surrounded me, standing shoulder to shoulder two deep all around me. There was no way I could walk one step, let alone out of the room to find a teacher. I would have had to fight my way out. You aren't really suggesting that I fight my way out, are you?" "Certainly not!" "So what do you suggest then?" "Why not leave the room with your teacher?" "What do I do when the same happens in a hallway because the teacher went in the opposite direction to my next class? Or in the next class if that teacher hasn't arrived yet, or at lunchtime?" "I can't believe the problem is that bad, just from that article." "The article is just one factor. A lot of the guys in my classes are envious that so many girls are interested in me. They've been complaining about it recently, and now they're working up to taking out their frustrations physically." The Principal hadn't been overwhelmingly convinced by that additional reason. Not even underwhelmingly convinced either. There was no whelming of any sort going on. He said, dismissively, "It doesn't sound all that bad to me." I'd been preparing for him to tell me to stop encouraging the girls, and to suggest I dress normally. If I'd thought Julia would let me go back to my old clothes because the Principal suggested it, I would've been tempted to keep my mouth shut, but she wouldn't. My planned response would have been, "So the clothing style of the victim of violence excuses the violence does it? I'm sure would-be rapists will be delighted to know that's school policy." But, as it happened, he didn't recommend I change my dress style. It appeared that he didn't credit the size of 'the girl problem' (from the other boys' perspective; certainly not mine), so I had to let him know that his idea that it didn't "sound bad" was incorrect. I said, "Very well. I suggest you call the hospital to get them to send several ambulances over, because there are going to be a lot of boys with broken bones and concussions shortly. I'll call my mother and let her know that you refused to protect me after my asking for it." Needless to say, the discussion resumed, starting with his telling me off for making threats of violence. I ripped into him for that, pointing out that I'd been on the receiving end of hundreds of threats of violence from dozens of boys since I'd arrived at school and I was asking for his help in stopping it, which so far he'd been uncaringly useless at. After some more back and forth, we ended up agreeing on a teacher accompanying me around school for the rest of the day, which was pretty much what I thought would happen. It wouldn't gain me any respect with the boys who wanted to hassle me, but the 'respect' of stupid macho assholes wasn't worth spit. Only the respect of reasonably intelligent guys had some value to me, and it was a fairly safe bet that not many of them were participating in my hassling. The hallways would be empty now as classes were in progress, so I would be safe heading back to my class. I thanked him, told him what room I was going back to, and he said he'd send someone before the period ended. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it wasn't yet the full solution as getting a teacher to guard me was only the first part of my plan. I headed back to class. Back in class, well before it ended, another teacher entered the room, whispered to the normal teacher, then took a position standing at the back of the class. The normal teacher told us, "Ignore Mr. Young; he's just observing," and went on with the class. I wrote the note my plan required, but I was only preparing it for when I'd need it later. I kept it ready in my pocket. Having an observer in class is no big deal because it happens from time to time, so no one thought much of it. When the bell rang, and the usual teacher left, several guys, especially those who'd participated in my last hemming-in, were surprised and frustrated when the Mr. Young didn't leave. They were even more frustrated when he followed me out of the room, and walked with me out into the field for lunchtime. ^ I need to break that thread for a moment, to mention a few other things that had happened during the morning. My "Good Morning" greeting of Alexis had NOT happened, because I'd been surrounded by idiots instead. That hadn't been a good swap, so my day got off to a bad start right there. Later in the day I got a kiss from her, but I still felt annoyed over the throng of silly boys blocking our normal fun morning game. During the morning and afternoon Julia started spreading the word to the 10th grade girls that if they were interested in me, they should make sure they came to our lunch next Monday, bringing a pen and paper. Despite their curiosity, Julia refused to give a reason, but she stressed it was important if they were interested in dating me. Julia started her talk with Chloe during the first inter-period break, but it became apparent that it was going to take longer than one or two such breaks, so Julia suggested they have lunch together. Just the two of them, as Julia specifically didn't want me with them. I'll describe Julia and Chloe's talk later, but it meant Julia left me in charge of entertaining all the girls at lunchtime. Julia insisted that I not tell them about the Mark-quiz planned for Monday's lunch. Normally entertaining all the girls would've been a bit daunting, as I prefer to be a listener than the center of attention, but today would be fine because I had an obvious subject in Katelin. I'd talked to Katelin as soon as I could after arriving at school. Under the circumstances, she was fine. Even better than I'd expected, as she'd probably known something like yesterday afternoon was going to happen sooner or later. Their house had been the subject of a police search warrant a few months ago, for example, and that sort of stuff tends to raise the expectation of future trouble. After Julia's telling me that I was in charge of keeping the girls amused over lunch, I suggested to Katelin that she stop bothering to answer all the questions she was getting, instead telling her questioners that we could discuss it all together at lunch. Katelin thought that was an excellent idea, as did I, as it let me leave most of the talking to her. I did make one mistake though, I forgot that unattractive girls (either ugly or unpleasant) would be interested in Katelin's story, so she ended up inviting several undesirable new girls to 'my' lunch. Wayne had also sought me out mid-morning. I was happy to see that there was no animosity from him. I hadn't expected any, but it was nice to have that confirmed. We chatted a bit, and it made sense for me to invite him to join me at lunch. I told him where "my group" normally sat if the weather was fine (which it usually was at this time of year, including today). He said he'd come. In case you're wondering, I had no issue with inviting him to join my previously one-male-only lunch group. It couldn't do any harm, as he was hardly going to win all 40-odd girls away from me, and it wasn't as if we normally did or said things that had to be kept secret. The girls all had their panties on, for example. I'd also tell the girls who he was and why he was invited, so they wouldn't think they could start inviting guys (that would be bad!). The worst that could happen would be if he continued to turn up every lunchtime, which I'd fix by changing the location of our lunch meetings and not telling him about it. He'd look foolish chasing after us. The main reason for inviting him was to help make me more attractive to the girls by demonstrating to them that I got along with two of Katelin's family, including a male member, so I can't be a completely violent monster. It would make me look more sensitive and caring, making it easier to get hold of their tits because girls eat up that sensitive, caring stuff. ^ I fell in alongside Mr. Young (he was well named, as he was fairly young, so presumably a good choice as a bodyguard). We chatted while we walked, and I briefly explained how my class 'mates' had gotten all excited about the fighting aspect of the article, and were trying to goad me into fighting them as a way of gaining status for themselves, and that their goading was getting seriously aggressive, punching me hard on the upper-arm in deliberately false-camaraderie, etc. I apologized for the inconvenience he was being put to. Mr. Young responded with, "Such are the joys of teaching young minds," which I laughed at. I was tempted to make some comment to the effect that most of the guys hassling me probably didn't have minds, but it was better that I appear totally nonbelligerent so that when I eventually 'belligered' all over their asses it'd be more plausible that I'd been forced to. I was assuming that'd be a necessity, as it seemed far more likely than not. As we were arriving at the gathering group, I told Mr. Young, "I normally sit with a large group of girls in a semi-circle facing my core group of girls. Not all of my core group will be here today, so you might as well sit near me. Not so you're handy to protect me, because I don't think it's very likely that a group of girls is going to attack me, and if they did I'd enjoy losing, haha. What are you doing for food, seeing as how I've taken you away from your lunch?" "I'll find something later." Which wasn't very definite, so I made a small mental note. When we arrived at the meeting spot, Katelin and Ava stood close to me, with Lily and Pat close too. I told Katelin that Wayne said he'd come, which pleased her, and we chatted a bit. After another minute there were enough girls, so I called the meeting to order (I spend a lot of time with Julia). I got their attention. That took a while, because 60-odd girls can make a great deal of noise. Heck, ONE girl can make a great deal of noise. "60-odd" because the usual 40-odd 10th graders were supplemented by some extra 11th graders, and several extra 10th graders who'd been invited by Katelin. There were also a few miscellaneous girls from 9th and 12th grades, but not many. I said, "Today's lunch will be a little different than our previous ones. For a start, Julia won't be here, so it'll automatically be a great deal quieter, haha. If any of you tell her I said that, this'll probably be the LAST lunch I ever have! -- "This is Mr. Young. Most of you have probably noticed that the boys have been getting increasingly belligerent toward me today?" Several of the girls agreed, which pleased me. I'd deliberately steered the introduction that way, because I wanted Mr. Young see that it wasn't just my opinion. -- "I had some real trouble at the end of my previous period so I went to see the Principal about it, before it got any worse. 'Any worse' would have meant fighting, and I'd much rather be a lover than fighter." I got some good laughs and jokes in response, although the presence of a teacher considerably reduced the number of invitations I normally would've gotten from an opening like that. -- "The Principal appointed Mr. Young as my 'bodyguard', to keep the other boys behaving properly around me. Hopefully things will be back to normal by Monday." I didn't think so, but it was good for me to sound peaceful and passive in front of Mr. Young. In front of the girls too, come to that. "I've told Mr. Young that he only has to guard my body from boys, NOT girls, so none of you have to be nervous to be near me. Not nervous of Mr. Young anyway; you might need to be nervous of ME!" I did a leering, groping act for a second. -- "While I remember, Mr. Young has given up his lunchtime so he can guard my body, and he hasn't got any food with him. I don't understand why, but for some reason I never seem to have any food left when I've finished my lunch..." That got some chuckles from the girls who knew about my appetite, which I was happy to see was most of them. " ... So if any of you have some fruit or something left over when you've finished, Mr. Young would probably appreciate it." I'm constantly appalled by how little girls eat, and several of them immediately started passing pieces of their lunch forward. He protested, but before very long, he had more than he could eat. I made a mental note to help him with his lunch later. That seemed only fair, as I'd helped him get it in the first place. I'd previously noticed a bunch of guys walking our way. I could now make out that they were Wayne and about a dozen other guys, which very definitely hadn't been what I had in mind when I'd invited him. There wasn't much I could do about it now though. I carried on talking to the girls, "A lot of you have been asking Katelin questions about the incident at her home last evening. You probably would've been asking me too, except that you couldn't get past the wall of overly excited boys that've been around me all day. To save us having to repeat ourselves dozens of times, I suggested to Katelin we use this lunch to go through it once en masse. Katelin's brother Wayne is just about here too. Here he comes now." I pointed behind the girls, and most of them turned to look at Wayne's group. I waved and called out to him, "Wayne, come around and sit next to Katelin, where everyone can see you. The girls want to ask Katelin lots of questions, and you might want to share the answering with her. Can your friends sit to the side for the moment please." Wayne looked at all the girls. He'd been approaching from their rear and hadn't appreciated that these were all girls (girls are best 'appreciated' from the front). He commented, "Wow, there's a lot of interest in your story, Katelin." His thinking all the girls were here to listen to Katelin hopefully meant he wouldn't try to come down this end of the field in the future lunchtimes. Carol was in sight, so I vaguely waved in her direction, saying, "Carol's nearly here, so we'll wait for her before we start. While we're waiting, Wayne, not that I mind but I was expecting you to come alone. How come you brought so many others?" I didn't mind for today, but I certainly would if they turned up for future lunches, or if they tried to hit on any of the girls here. Not because I was possessive, but because I didn't want these lunches to sink down to that level. Wayne answered, "They just wanted to meet you. I've been talking about you, and they were curious." "Let me get Katelin's talk underway comfortably, and I'll join your group for a while." Unfortunately, the guys group wasn't particularly listening to me (so much for Wayne's stated reason for bringing them). They were busy showing a great deal more curiosity in the girls than in me. Not that I particularly wanted them to be curious about me, but that was the lesser of the two evils. I called out, "Guys! Please sit in a group over there." I pointed where I wanted them to sit, several yards off to the side. I wanted them to stop looking at the girls and to move away from them. "We can sit wherever we want," declared one of them. A footballer, I suspected. "Yeah," agreed some of his friends. They proceeded to prove the point by sitting next to the girls and immediately starting to chat with them. The girls were sitting in a fairly tight group so there wasn't enough room between individual girls, so the guys had sat on the edge of 'my' group. Carol arrived while they were making themselves comfortable. I said, "Hi, sweetie. Don't bother sitting." (Everyone other than me was sitting now.) Wayne's friends were seniors, and I've always thought it was stupid that girls were fascinated by and preferred guys who had nothing going for them other than their being born a year or two earlier than the girl. 9th, 10th and presumably 11th grade girls all seem to go gaga over the attention of a senior guy. It's quite pathetic, although it won't be in less than five months when I come back to school as a senior. If these girls were equally blighted by that stupid attitude (from my current perspective), then what I was about to do would fail miserably, in which case Julia wouldn't have to prepare a pop quiz. I went ahead with my little idea anyway, as the result would be interesting. I called out, "Are you guys all comfortable now?" Several of them assured me they were. Which also got them to stop talking to the girls they were sitting next to, and meant I had a second's silence when they'd finished answering me. I said loudly, "I'm going to have my lunch thirty yards over that way. Sorry for the inconvenience, but any GIRLS are invited to come join me." I hurriedly added directly to Mr. Young, "You too, of course, sir." Carol was already holding my arm, so we moved in the direction I'd indicated. It was directly away from the senior guys, but you probably knew that already. It would be interesting to see how many and which of the girls followed me. Several of the girls were on their feet and moving before I'd barely taken a step: Ava, Lily, Pat, Alexis, and several others that I knew were particularly interested in me. Katelin too fortunately, but predictably. Which reminded me, so I called back, "You're welcome too, WAYNE, but only you." By now nearly all the girls were laughing at the put-down our standing up was putting down on the sitting guys. In very short order EVERY girl was on her feet and walking away. I attributed that to either my being totally irresistible or peer pressure. I hoped it was the first reason. In my experience, most seniors are arrogant, even to the extent of being assholes - another attitude of mine that would be reversing in five months. Or on second thought, probably not - so I thought there'd be a good chance of further trouble. I was very aware that I had Mr. Young with me and that I'd moved AWAY from the boys, so they'd be the troublemakers if anything happened. The guys had jumped to their feet too, but had milled around trying to work out what they should do, so me and the girls made our getaway. Mr. Young came with us, but Wayne stayed to remonstrate with his friends, which was one of the reasons they'd stayed behind rather than follow. They let us settle in our new location (I remained standing), while the girls emitted lots of scornful laughter. The girls' laughter and Mr. Young's presence - he was obviously a teacher - probably explained why the guys didn't hurry after us. Wayne came over to me while the girls were still sorting themselves out, and asked me, "If they agree not to be assholes, can they come and sit where you want, and talk with you later?" I couldn't resist, and none of the guys were within earshot so it wasn't too inflammatory, so I said, "From what I saw, I think they're promising the impossible. How about they just promise to hold it in for THIS lunchtime?" After the laughter, including a pleasing chuckle from Mr. Young, I added, "Sure. There," I pointed to a spot relatively even farther away from us than the first spot I'd ask them to sit at. "I'll get Katelin started, then come talk with your guys." It was easy to get Katelin under way, I simply announced loud enough for all the girls to hear, "Katelin, how about you start by telling the story of what happened, and I'll talk with the boys until you've finished, then Wayne and I will come back here to help you answer the questions?" That was fine with Katelin; she even seemed eager to start. I started disengaging from Carol, only to find that she'd rather come with me, which I had absolutely no problem with. Ava asked, "Sorry Mark, but is it okay if I stay and listen to Katelin? I want to find out what happened so I can tell my parents." "Of course, Ava." It seemed appropriate to give her a reassuring kiss on the cheek, and I moved to do so. Apparently I was wrong, because she moved to take it on the lips. Sometimes being wrong is good, so I made the best of my mistake. I disengaged my lips, then used them to tell Mr. Young, "I'll just be over there, and you'll probably enjoy yourself more listening to Katelin's story than whatever those characters want to talk about. I'll be back in a few minutes anyway." He nodded. I added, "Besides, it's going to take you while to eat all your lunch." There was no harm in reminding him of 'my' generosity. -- To Katelin I said, "Katelin, just give me a call when you're ready, and Wayne and I will come back." "Sure. Thanks." "No problem, sweetie." Carol and I headed toward the boys, and Katelin started her story, which led to my discovering a new ability. Katelin started her story at a point in time two days earlier than I'd expected. She said, "Most of you know that I slept with Mark, Julia and Ava on Tuesday night, right?" Even though he was several yards behind me, and well outside my proximity range, I could magically tell that Mr. Young was shocked, haha. I looked back at him, and sure enough, his expression was one of surprise. He looked at me. I'd expected Katelin to start with my arrival at her house, but I fibbed a little by calling back to him, "I told you you'd enjoy it more, haha." Katelin started telling the girls about my offering to help her improve her relationship with her brothers. That wasn't quite how it'd happened, but it was a good choice for how to present it. I resumed my short journey to the boys (they were three years older than me, but they behaved like silly boys, so I'll call them "boys"). ------- Chapter 146: Lunch with the Two Nice Eatons Friday, April 29, 2005 (Continued) Carol and I arrived at the boys and we sat in front of them. While I was opening my lunch (it'd never left my hand, ESPECIALLY not after the disaster that had befallen an earlier incarnation of it at the Duckling visit), I said to Wayne, "Katelin's telling her story. Judging from what I heard she's telling the long version, so I've probably got a while to talk here. When she finishes she'll call out, and you and I will go help her answer the girls' questions, okay?" "Yeah, that's fine." "So what can I do for you guys?" As little as possible would be my choice, because of the disruption they'd already caused, although I'd thoroughly enjoyed how well the put-down had worked. I was also feeling uncharitable toward them because none of them had introduced themselves to us, and worst of all, they were staring at Carol's chest considerably more often than I would've liked, which was not at all. All things considered, they were annoying me. I couldn't really blame them for their last 'offense', as Carol was dressed particularly sexily today, but I blamed them for it anyway. [Carol was wearing another of the outfits Julia had chosen for me to admire Carol in. It was quite low cut and had been chosen for today's attire because it was very suitable for the tit-flashing trick we were ready to play on Chloe, as soon as she was judged ready for it. Julia kept saying, "It'll be any day now."] It turned out that the boys wanted to hear about the fighting. Imagine my surprise! During our brief conversation thus far, most of them had continued to stare at Carol's chest. Even when I put my spare, non-lunch-eating arm around her, they kept staring. Occasionally looking at me, but mostly at those two specific parts of Carol. It got annoying, and then even more annoying. I waited until it was my turn to speak, then I turned and called out to the girls behind me, "GIRLS! Sorry to interrupt. These guys keep staring at Carol's chest. What do we say to guys who try to hit on Carol? All together now, on the count of three: 1, 2, 3!" The chorus yelled back, "SHE'S A LESBIAN, DUMMY! Haha." "Thanks girls." I turned back to the 'boys'. "Will you 18-year old seniors please stop staring at the tits of my 13-year old, lesbian sister. Neither she nor I appreciate it. Try to demonstrate some maturity please." I'd been stupid bringing up the "lesbian" issue, as it just got them more excited. (There must be a logical reason why guys react that way to lesbians, and when I figure out what it is, I'll let you know. Regardless of its doubtless being highly logical, it was still very annoying at the moment.) There were several different reactions: "Thirteen? No way!", "Your sister's hot, dude", more sensibly, "Oops" and "Sorry", but my personal favorite for the Most Annoying Prize was, "She's NOT your girlfriend; good!" I seized on the last one. Looking at him, "Why on Earth is it good?" He looked bashful and didn't answer. "Seriously. I'd love to know why Carol's being my sister and not my girlfriend is good? What part of '13-year old lesbian' did you fail to understand? You can count to thirteen, can't you?" Charitably assuming he could, I pressed on with, "When you get home, ask your mommy to explain what 'lesbian' means. Your brain cell must be confused because you seem to think she might return your interest in her." By now the others were laughing at him. Obviously not because they were much better themselves; just because that's what guys do to each other. He came back with a brilliant defense, "You've got your arm around her!" "What's that got to do with ANYTHING?" I thought I knew what he'd say, and sure enough, "She can't dislike guys if she cuddles with you like that." Carol beat me to it though. She said, "EEK! You're a GUY, Mark! Why didn't you tell me?" She recoiled out of my arm in mock-shock, then laughingly added, as she stood up, "I'll go back to the others; I'm too distracting here. Seniors are no better than 8th grade boys: get them near a pair of tits and their brains stop working, haha." Carol walked off, laughing. I was VERY impressed by her strength of character. Admittedly what she'd said was pretty similar to what Julia had told her to say when she flashed her tits in my class, but I was still impressed by her delivering the line with such confidence. "Thanks for driving her away," complained one of the others to the guy I'd teased. I told the complainer, "Another one of you that doesn't understand 'lesbian'. What's the matter with you people?" "I know what it means. Doesn't mean I can't enjoy looking at her though." "YES it does! That's the point. She doesn't enjoy the attention of males; it makes her uncomfortable. Why on Earth would you stare at a girl's tits knowing that you were making her uncomfortable? Go find some girl who enjoys parading around for guys and stare at her instead. Staring at a lesbian is inconsiderate and impolite." "Then she shouldn't wear a top like that!" "Her GIRLFRIEND bought it for her. She wears it because her GIRLFRIEND likes looking at her. And, yes, I know guys take advantage and stare at her too. I'd just expected that when you found out that she was a lesbian, seniors would be mature and considerate enough to look away. Never mind. It's obviously pointless to discuss polite behavior with you. Let's drop the topic before it ruins my appetite." I like to think that I'd mainly made a big issue out of it to convince their dirty little minds not to read anything into my having my protective arm around my sister. By emphasizing 'lesbian' so strongly, they shouldn't think there was anything sexual between Carol and me. In reality though, I think I jumped on the chance to belittle them just because they'd pissed me off so much already. Wayne said, "I didn't know she was your sister either. You're very friendly with her." "That would be because she's one of my best friends. Near the top of that list actually. We've shared a lot of our life together, funnily enough. She's had a difficult time coming to terms with her sexuality, so I like to support her as much as I can. Your 'friends' certainly don't make her feel any more comfortable with herself." It certainly couldn't do any harm to accentuate Carol's reported orientation. -- "Never mind her being a lesbian for a moment, you CAN'T go around lusting after 13-year old girls. You're going to get yourself in serious trouble if you get caught doing anything about that, ESPECIALLY if I catch you doing anything about it with my sister!" I continued, with an amused tone of voice, "Which has brought us right back to the topic of me beating people to a pulp, so what did you want to know about the fights?" They wanted to know everything. They wanted me to describe them in detail, which I could easily do. They wouldn't be particularly accurate details, but that didn't worry me. I figured that it might be a good idea to impress these guys enough to put them off trying to get all competitive with me, so I started, "The first attack was when I was standing in the middle of the living room drinking a glass of milk. Don, Junior and Gunner were blocking the door and wouldn't let me out. Wayne, do these guys know who your brothers are, their ages, etc.?" "Yeah. I told them all that stuff already." "That makes it easier. Anyway, the three of them charged me - Don and Junior side by side, with Gunner running in behind Junior. Don was the oldest and I guessed probably the best brawler, so I started with him. I poked him in the eyes just hard enough to temporarily blind him and to cause him a great deal of pain. He collapsed..." "Hang on. How did you poke him?" I answered by extending my right hand with the first two fingers extended and separated. To make my answer even easier to understand - given that they hadn't understood a concept as simple as "lesbian" - I mock-poked a point of air a few inches ahead of my hand. I even said, "Poke" at the right moment to make it REALLY easy for them. "What did Don do?" "He collapsed screaming, covering his eyes with his hands. A bit too late, haha." "I meant, what did Don do when you moved in to poke him? We want all the details." "I'm giving you all the details. He was charging at me, with Junior alongside him. I poked him - in the way I showed you - and he collapsed screaming. All he did was lie on the floor screaming, then groaning for quite a while after that." I knew what their problem was, but I was enjoying pretending not to. Mostly, though, I was simply being uncooperative by making the conversation go slowly. Eventually I could end this crap and go back to the girls. "What did Don do when you moved to poke him? He must've seen you coming and done something." "I stepped forward and poked him too fast for him to react. He didn't do anything to stop me." "But he must have seen you coming." "Sure he did. But I was too far away for him to do anything when I first started moving, three or four yards I guess. And before he could react, I'd poked him and it was all over. The only movement of his I had to react to was to avoid his falling body landing on me as it went down." "That's hard to believe..." "They probably have visiting hours at Don's prison. Go ask him." I'd not long before thought it might be a good idea to mention prison, to make sure these guys remembered some caution, rather than getting all macho on me. -- That gave them a pause, which I filled by saying, "Wayne, did you tell them about my catching flies?" "Yeah, but they didn't believe me." "Why would they think you'd lie about that?" I'd asked a question I knew had no good answer. I'd done so only to stall a bit, while I thought about doing a speed demonstration. I first thought of doing a LIGHT eyeball poke on one of them, but decided that it'd be better to 'slap' one of them on an ear instead, using NP of course, but pretending to move my hand as if doing so for real. The eyeball poke would be completely safe for my target, as I could control my NP force very accurately. Even if my target leaned forward at the same time, it made no difference. If I used a 0.5 pound push, for example, and he leaned forward, he'd simply push my NP-fingertip away, except for a 0.5 pound differential force. I preferred an ear slap simply because it was less scary for the recipient, and he was less likely to be scared into reacting aggressively. Plus I really shouldn't go on about eyeballs all the time. Eyeball poking is my only special attack, so I shouldn't advertise it. [To explain my writing, "I could control my NP force very accurately". I could NOT "accurately" choose 0.237 pounds, for example. I didn't mean "accurately" in that sense. When I'm pushing with an NP-fingertip, I visualize how hard I want to push, similar to how you visualize doing the same thing with your real fingers, only I do it better because I've had a lot of very precise practice flying things around. Unless I change that visualization, the force won't change. It's like setting an unmarked dial to a position; unless I move the dial, the force doesn't change. If a certain visualization corresponds to 0.8 pounds, say, then that's how hard the push will be, whether the guy leans forward or leans back (leaning back usually isn't a problem, because NP-points are massless so I can move them forward at an effectively infinite speed, provided I want to follow my target).] #1: #3: #1: Wayne shrugged, indicating he didn't know why they thought he'd lied about the flies. "I'll give you a speed demonstration then. You," I pointed to the guy in front of me. "Sit like this." I sat in seiza (sitting upright with my knees and ankles together and under me, my ass resting on my ankles). He copied me. I shuffled my position until I was the right distance in front of him, with our knees nearly touching. I rose up on my knees, to make it possible for me to reach him, moving my hands up to be in reasonable starting positions, then I announced, "I'm going to slap - LIGHTLY slap - his left then right ears." To my slightly worried looking target, I said, "They won't be hard enough to hurt, so don't worry. Try to block my hands if you want. Watch my speed carefully guys." Before they really could get ready to watch carefully, I shot my right hand toward his left ear. Before it got there I NP-'slapped' his ear with a momentary 3.5 pound poke, at the same time as I deliberately changed my hand's direction so it started swinging away. He'd only just started reacting, when I did the same on the other side. It was all over in next to no time. (If you move your hand REALLY fast, it's very hard for an observer to know exactly where it went. Try it if you want; I'll wait.) I sat back on my heels. My target's reactions clearly told them that I'd made contact on both sides. It was also clear that his attempts to block me had been pathetically late. They were VERY impressed by my speed, haha. Some of them wanted to argue, but that was easily countered. I asked my target, "Did I, or did I not, hit each of your ears?" "You sure did! You were FAST!" "Fast enough to catch flies?" "I think so!" Naturally they all demanded the next turn of me doing it to them. I very definitely didn't want to repeat the exercise, as there was far too much chance of them catching on that I was somehow cheating. I had a quick discussion among myselves, and we decided to "Get Yoda on them." If nothing else, it was a great way to stall, hoping Katelin would finish soon. I called, "Sit down and calm down. Wayne has told you I caught flies, I just demonstrated my speed right in front of you, and you know that I demolished three of Wayne's brothers and his father. Have any of you guys ever done any martial arts training before?" I didn't care about the answer, as I was only using the question as a bridge to change the subject. It turned out that most of them had, which was hardly surprising given their interest in the fighting aspect of the story. I started Yoda-izing them, which is simply another name for bullshitting them, "There are two ways to learn martial arts: with your body or with your mind. The vast majority of students learn with their bodies, including Wayne's three brothers and father. And, I am sure, all of you that've studied a martial art. It's very easy to fall into that approach because martial arts - whichever one you're doing - look like they're a physical activity. Students are punching, kicking, flying through the air, etc., and all those things certainly seem very physical. If a student works at the physical aspects of an art, he can learn, advance, and get quite good. He'll never be an expert, but he can get reasonably good. A good sensei will be looking for students who start to understand the mentality of their art. There are probably plenty of poor senseis who don't even understand that themselves, but a good sensei will understand it. Eventually, using only the physical approach, a student's improvement rate will start leveling off. He'll reach the limit of what his body can physically do with - and this is VERY important - with an undisciplined and untrained mind. The mind is far more important than the body if a student wants to get extremely good at a martial art." -- This was bullshit based on the stuff I'd read in the Aikido books, plus crap taken out of what I'd seen on TV or in the movies. I didn't know what movies specifically; I was just quoting from the 'culture' of martial arts. It was just plausible sounding bullshit. Because it was the sort of stuff it was, they'd all heard something like it before, and were - more or less - nodding along. It was therefore safe for me to ask, "Those of you who have trained, have your senseis talked to you about the importance of concentration, focus, and those sorts of mental things?" Several of them confirmed it. -- "They were trying to encourage you down the road of mental development. Unfortunately very, very few students take that path. They'd much rather go punch something than discipline their minds. The mental path is not easy, and it takes a great deal of self-discipline. I'll give you a contrary example, all of you were clamoring for me to repeat my speed demonstration. 'Clamoring' is NOT the behavior of a disciplined mind. It's the behavior of an uncontrolled, undisciplined mind. After your undisciplined demonstration, I would very confidently predict that none of you are very advanced in whatever arts you are learning?" They were eighteen years old, so how advanced could they possibly be? No one claimed they were advanced. -- "To unlock the full potential of your body, you have to have an EXTREMELY focused mind. I could not have hit his ears unless my mind was 100% focused on the job." That was the first reasonably true thing I'd said! "Likewise when I was catching flies. The speed required isn't that hard to achieve; an undisciplined person can move fast enough to catch a fly in their hand if they're lucky. The hardest part of my catching flies was to grab them by pinching them gently between my thumb and forefinger. That requires incredible control! You try that sometime, and you'll know what I mean. I'm sure that none of you could repeat that feat. If you were extraordinarily lucky, you might pinch a fly between thumb and forefinger, but you'd almost certainly crush it in your haste. I wasn't fluking my catches, as I caught several flies in a row, which couldn't have been pure luck. -- "I beat Wayne's family because all of them had minds that were - to put it mildly! - completely lacking in self-control. I had every footstep, every hand movement, and every body turn planned in advance. My mind was TOTALLY focused on what it was doing, when, how, why, etc. They charged toward me like the thoughtless idiots they were. They never had a chance against me. Did Wayne tell you that I deliberately kept a glass of milk in one hand when the three boys attacked me the first time?" Wayne answered, "I told them you had a glass, but I didn't know it was deliberate?" "Yeah. I stood up because I knew they were going to attack, then I picked up the glass so I could take the three of them down, then show you and your dad that I hadn't needed to use both hands and that I hadn't spilt a drop. I thought that'd be the most effective way of teaching you to give up trying to fight me. Your dad didn't have the self-control to remember the lesson though. Even before I'd stood up, I had that whole fight planned out in my head, including turning to you and your dad and theatrically taking another drink when your brothers were down." It was an exaggeration, which made it more truthful than most of this bullshit. -- "You guys know my nickname is 'Egg', right? And what the last 'G' stands for? Genius?" They knew. -- "I'm lucky enough to be extraordinarily intelligent, so when I started learning martial arts it was the mental side that appealed to me the most, and which made the most sense to me. That's the path I went down right from the beginning, and that's why I'm so good now. None of you guys will ever be as good as me, but if you want to get a whole lot better forget about the fighting part of martial arts, because that's an external activity. Instead concentrate internally, on your own mental self-discipline." #4: Unfortunately I'd taken that particular thread of bullshit as far as it could go without starting to sound lame. I had to think of what to do next, because I'd looked back and Katelin was still going strong. I was debating doing something else, like using proximity to avoid being attacked from the rear, or identify who each of them was when they were behind me. Or alternatively, blindfold myself and pick them out of a shuffled lineup, presuming I got them to tell me their names first. I could spread quite a lot of bullshit about the quality of my other senses, hearing and smell, when my mind was strongly focused. I liked something that involved a blindfold, as that gave me an excuse to take my shirt off to use as the blindfold. Showing them my torso would impress them, but my main reason was so a lot of the girls sitting just a few yards away could see me shirtless, haha. My internal debate went on for quite a while, because there were quite a few pros and cons involved in doing a demonstration along the lines I was thinking of. Some of them started asking me questions. Normally I prefer to control the topics, but the questions were easy so I let them continue: "Where do you train?" "In my head." "No, I meant what dojo?" "Yes, I know you meant that. That's relatively unimportant. It's FAR more important what you do in your head. Let's say you train for three hours a week in a dojo. How many hours do you spend OUTSIDE the dojo? Twenty hours a day times seven days is 140 hours, less 3 in a dojo, so 137 hours you spend training outside a dojo, 3 hours inside. Obviously whatever you do outside a dojo is FAR more important. I train my mind as much as I can. If I train it 140 hours per week, rather than 3, I learn a lot faster. Obviously I have to do schoolwork and other things, so I'm not thinking about martial arts all 140 hours, but I am disciplining my mind virtually all the time." When I started the calculation part of the above, I'd been intending to use sixteen hours per day, as the number of hours a normal person is awake. At the last second I changed to twenty hours, because that was the number of hours that I was awake, which I could make up some impressive bullshit about. I hoped someone would ask me why I'd used twenty, but they were so eager to ask more questions about fighting that no one noticed the twenty. They REALLY need to discipline their minds, haha. The advantage of several asking questions simultaneously was that I got to pick the question I wanted to answer. The one I picked was, "What martial art do you do?" "It doesn't matter. Whichever one you do, you use the same mind. It's your mind which is important." The questioner didn't want to accept my answer, but I chose another clamorer, "What grade are you?" "I've never been graded. I don't train that way." "Huh? Why not?" Grades are very important in martial arts, so my answer made no sense. Which was exactly as I'd intended, as it gave me a chance to spout more time-wasting bullshit. I continued to shovel it, "How do you grade what someone does in their mind? When you UNDERSTAND martial arts individual techniques become meaningless. They become part of the 'All', rather than an individual thing. When I did the fly catching demo at Wayne's place, I told him that I'd never tried catching flies before, but I'd known I could do so if I wanted to. Because I knew my capabilities were up to the task. -- "When you understand enough you can make up techniques as you go. Even that's not a good way of putting it, because I don't make up a technique; I just do what I want to do. If it happens to be something I've never done before, then I guess that'd make it a new technique, but that's not how I think of it. -- "I know the capabilities of my opponent. I probably know where they're moving and what they intending to do as well. I know my own capabilities, so I just decide what to do and I do it. It's more of a flow than anything else. I realize that seems to contradict my earlier statement that I planned out in advance what I was going to be doing, but it's not really a contradiction. I saw Wayne's brothers' movements in my head, and worked out my flow to work with theirs. If any of you get good enough, you'll understand what I mean." #1: "Who's your sensei? Do you even have a sensei?" The second question pleased me, as it indicated that this idiot believed me. By the looks on their faces, more of them did too. "I have a sensei, but I'm not going to tell you who he is." "Why not?" "Because none of you are anywhere near good enough to waste his time answering your phone calls." Most of them said something like, "Oh," but one of them took exception, belligerently demanding, "How do you know how good any of us are? For all you know I could be good enough!" I gave a good laugh. I was intending to make it quite a long one, but I could see that he didn't take it at all well so I cut it off, and asked, "What does the middle letter of my nickname stand for? The first 'G'?" Several of them worked it out, "Graceful." "Right. And why am I graceful?" "Huh?" "How did I learn to be graceful? I wasn't born that way, you know. I learned it. How does one become graceful?" Not that it mattered, but I hadn't expected an answer. I was going to answer it myself, but several of them did so for me. They made a variety of guesses, all of which were roughly on the target I'd set up for them, e.g., "Through your training", "Because your mind's focused on the way you move", etc. "Yeah, you've pretty much got it. My mind and body are one. Not perfectly yet, because I'm still learning... ," #4: " ... but they're a lot more unified than your bodies are. I've watched all of you move, and you all move like drunken oxen. I don't intend that to be an insult, because almost EVERYONE moves like drunken oxen as far as I'm concerned. That's why my nickname includes 'Graceful', and - I'm guessing - none of yours do." A couple of them took exception to being called 'drunken oxen'. That might not have been a smart move on my part, even though I'd depersonalized it by saying "EVERYONE". I think they'd stopped thinking about what I'd said after they heard what they considered an insult. With an abusively sarcastic tone of voice, one of them demanded, "I suppose you think you can beat ME?" With supreme confidence, I said, "I THINK I can beat all of you at once. YOU, by yourself, I wouldn't even bother standing up for." That way, if he did charge me, there'd be no doubt who the aggressor was. I didn't think an attack was likely though. Most of the other guys had been convinced I knew what I was talking about, and I had cleaned up Wayne's family after all. They restrained the big-mouthed guy. I was reminded of a bullshit topic I'd originally intended to use with the Eaton boys, back when they'd been conscious enough to listen. I needed to take control of the conversation, and waste more time with it. I said, "Let's think about the aspects of a good fighter, seeing as how you're so fighting oriented. Speed is extremely important, and I've already demonstrated how fast I am. None of you would've been able to block my slaps to your ears. If he hasn't yet described it well enough to you, get Wayne to tell you EXACTLY what I achieved in my fly catching demo. When any of you can do that, I'll apologize, but I'm sure NONE of you will ever be as fast as I am now." -- "Let's consider precision. That's very important too. I said I'd only hit this guy's ears hard enough for him to notice, but not to hurt. I bet if he thought about it, he'd agree that I hit both ears with exactly the same amount of force. Can you confirm that?" "Umm. I think so. They felt about the same." "Thanks for saying so. Same with catching flies between thumb and forefinger without damaging them. That requires a considerable amount of precision." I didn't mention my precise eyeball poking because I wanted to downplay that technique. While I was thinking of what to say next, a nicely time-wasting idea came to my mind. "Are any of you wearing a ring? I see you are. Can I borrow it for a second please?" With a little bit of reluctance, he handed it over. I said, "I'm wearing a ring, quite a large one," I held my finger up, to show them the ring and to subtly express my opinion of them, "but for my next demonstration I want to use a ring I've never held before, so you know I haven't been practicing with it." I directed the owner to take several steps away from me, then kneel and lay his hand palm up on the ground. -- "I'm going to throw your ring at your hand. It's going to land on your palm and stop there. You won't even have to close your fist to trap it. Just keep your hand flat on the grass where it is. I'm even going to throw from this kneeling position, which is fairly uncomfortable and not something I've practiced. Here it comes." I threw it, as accurately as I could, toward his hand. I almost immediately caught the ring with NP, and guided it to the center of his palm, where - surprise, surprise - it dropped flat, without even bouncing. It was quite a long throw, about six or seven yards, and a small target, so it was a fairly impressive throw. I said, "You can try that yourself some other time if you wish. I expect you'll find it quite difficult. Remember I got it dead on target, without it bouncing, exactly as I predicted, and on my very first try. Precision is very important in a fight. I could easily jab exactly on the nerve that immobilizes one of your legs, for example. Or - if I was in a particularly bad mood - into a nerve that would paralyze your throat. The fight very quickly goes out of a guy when he's completely unable to draw a breath, especially if I punched him in the gut to knock the air out of him as well. The fight's over then, and it's only a matter of how long I make him wait before I let him breathe again." #1: "Enough about precision. Let's move on to power. I knocked out all of Wayne's brothers and his father with one punch each. That's powerful punching. Too powerfully, actually, because I unintentionally broke Junior's jaw. I'd pulled that punch, but either not enough, or more likely Junior has a weak jaw. Part of my power comes from my speed. You saw how fast my hand moved when I slapped those ears - or maybe you DIDN'T see how fast my hand moved, haha. Can you imagine a fist crashing into your face at that speed?" I'd deliberately used a graphic image, and most of them visibly reacted to it. Good. I stood up gracefully, and pulled off my shirt and dropped it on the ground a little behind me. It was a figure hugging shirt, but my torso is a LOT more impressive when it's bare, as the musculature is pronounced, even VERY pronounced these days. "Six-pack abs" is the LEAST of what I've got going for me. The guys were VERY impressed, and - I was delighted to hear from behind - the noises coming from the girls behind me changed entirely. There were "Ooh's", "Ah's", and other expressions of approval. "If you've got it, flaunt it," I virtually never say about myself. Girls' tits are an entirely and delightfully different matter though. I asked casually, "Do any of you want me to punch you with all the power and speed I can put into it?" I rippled a few muscles to help them decide. None of them took me up on my offer. -- I'd previously thought about using proximity to avoid being punched, and I'd been very undecided about it. I decided to do it now. I was bored of this conversation, and wanted to end it quickly and effectively. I also wanted to show my chest to the girls, so I needed an excuse to turn and face them, and I figured it was a reasonably safe demonstration because my sensei knew that ability existed, making it not too freaky. These guys also seemed to respond to physical demonstrations better than talks. I said, "Wayne, remember when Don attacked me from behind and I dodged his punch and kick?" "Yeah. He was right behind you, so I don't know how he missed." "He missed because I moved out of the way. I'll show you what I mean, come over here. The rest of you guys should circle around me and Wayne, so you get better views." I explained what I wanted Wayne to do, which was just a number of individual attacks of his choosing, a few seconds apart. Not a flurry of blows, because I'd just jump forward and that'd prove nothing. Nor wrestling grabs either. Just punches, kicks, and even head butts from behind, if he wanted. -- I suddenly remembered, and called out, "Mr. Young. Don't worry about what appears to be happening next. It's a deliberate demonstration, not a fight. I trust Wayne, so don't worry about it." Mr. Young had been too far away to hear what we were planning, so he had no reason to be concerned yet, and after my warning hopefully wouldn't when the demo started. The other thing I thought of, was the danger of one of the other guys getting suddenly macho, and trying to attack me from behind too. It didn't matter, I decided, I'd just duck it and call the demo off. In an open field like this, I should be easily able to run away to avoid him for as long as I wanted, which would look good in front of Mr. Young. If the guy chasing me was very fast, I'd just NP-trip him. If I had to deal to one or more of my classmates next week, Mr. Young would believe I'd been given no choice. Wayne needed a little bit of encouraging, but he eventually punched at me. It was slow, and Mom could've avoided it (well, maybe not, but you get the idea). I told him, "You're on the right track, but faster and harder please." He sped up a bit, and I dodged that one too. After a few more attacks, we got into a rhythm, where he made an attack, let me return to my position, he'd wait a few seconds then attacked differently. His attacks got faster, but that didn't make much difference, as he still spent a second or two thinking about them first. I ducked them all in the most impressive way possible. For example, when he tried to punch the back of my head, I bowed it just enough for the blow to miss, but to brush my hair. When he kicked one of my legs, I raised it out of the way, but didn't otherwise move. The audience was VERY impressed. Both audiences: the boys and girls. The girls were too far away to appreciate nearly all of the martial arts part of the demonstration, but they were still impressed by my body. The guys were amazed, making all sort of stupid comments and asking many stupid questions. I talked during the demo, spreading plenty of bullshit about how a disciplined mind enabled the senses to focus in incredible levels of perception and precision, enabling me to have good ideas about what Wayne would try next, blah, blah. After about the tenth or twelve attempt, I decided they were impressed enough, so I turned and said, "Demo's over. Thanks, Wayne." "My turn!" yelled one of the others "No! I want to go next." "Me after you!" There were a lot more calls, about two or three yells from each of them. I turned to Wayne, and shook my head sadly as I loudly asked him over the din, "Are they always like this?" Wayne laughed a little bashfully, adding, "Sorry." They'd caught my meaning and quieted down. I repeated, "The demo is OVER. You came here for a purpose, to talk with me about the fight at the Eatons. I have given you far more than you deserved or expected, and now the discussion is over. I was hoping to convince you to discipline your minds, and it's unfortunately obvious that I've wasted my time. I'm now going to put my time to a much more enjoyable use, by sitting with all the pretty girls. Goodbye and good luck with your training." I bent down to pick up my shirt, not 'bothering' to put it on, and started walking back to all the pretty girls. And a few less than pretty ones, but that didn't matter for the moment, although it should be corrected eventually. You can imagine my surprise when the guys didn't want to leave, one of them calling, "I want to try hitting you like Wayne. He wasn't any good and I can do it better." "We want to know how you can do that?" said another one. "Who's your sensei?" asked yet another. "Blah, blah," said all the others. I'd tuned out, but I could tell there was plenty of noise coming out of their mouths. I turned around, held up my hand until I had silence, and said, "Okay. I'll fight one of you. Who's it to be?" A few of them immediately and loudly volunteered, trying to shout each other down. It took the rest of them several seconds to point out that I had said "fight". "What do you mean 'fight'?" "You intruded on my lunchtime without invitation and rudely from the moment you arrived. You horned in on the girls when I asked you not to, forcing everyone to move away. You were never polite enough to introduce yourselves, you drove my sister away by making her so uncomfortable with your stares at her breasts, and you've argued with me repeatedly, including refusing to accept my twice saying that the demo is over and telling you goodbye as a clear request that you leave. Despite all my best efforts you are continuing to be rude and obnoxious. Consequently you've pissed me off, and I'd very much enjoy fighting one of you. Which one of you wants to fight me? First, I mean. The mood I'm in now, I'm perfectly happy to fight as many of you as want to come at me. Come on, who's first?" "We don't want to FIGHT. We want..." "Then why are you so goddamned annoying? I've got a bunch of pretty girls over there who'll hug and kiss me, versus a bunch of rude, undisciplined, considerably-less-than-pretty guys, who I've already wasted far too much time on. You have overstayed your welcome, so it's time for you to go away. Goodbye." I turned my back on them, and walked back to the girls, carrying my shirt. There was a moderate amount of grumbling behind me. Less than expected, which was good. I particularly enjoyed hearing, " ... he'd eat you for breakfast!" Wayne mustered them, and eventually got them to depart. He also called a, "Sorry" out to me too, but I didn't bother acknowledging it. I did nearly turn around to tell him not to come back, but it'd be better that I pass that message through Katelin rather than risk restarting a conversation with those guys. #4: #1: #3: I'd arrived back at the predominately pretty people's party, and everyone was looking at me, so I asked, "Have any of you girls ever noticed that guys NEVER know when to stop, always keep pushing for more, and they're just plain RUDE?" While several of the girls were laughingly telling me that, "Yes, we have noticed that," I put my shirt on. Lifting it up over my head and pulling it down did nice things to my muscles. Judging by the number of sudden inhalations anyway, as my eyes were covered at the time. When I got the shirt on, I pretended not to notice the looks on many of their faces. I turned to Katelin, and said, "Katelin, just in case Wayne couldn't work it out for himself, would you please ask him not to repeat today please. No more visiting our lunch group." "Okay. Sorry, Mark..." "You've got nothing to apologize for, sweetie. It's not your fault your brother suffers from being a boy and has friends who're boys too. It occurs to me that I am MIGHTY glad Carol got all the homosexual genes in our family, because I'd have to lobotomize myself if I fancied people like those." Carol laughed, "Now you know EXACTLY how I feel!" #4: #3: #1: I asked, "Where are you up to in the story, Katelin?" "Sort of finished, I guess. We were just talking." "Oh, I thought you were going to call me when it was question time." "We haven't really been doing question and answer, we've just been talking. You looked too busy to interrupt." "Okay. For future reference though, I prefer the company of nice girls to immature guys - which, as far as I can tell - pretty much means nearly all guys." Lots of laughing agreements, and several, "Not you Egg/Mark." I settled down and we started chatting. It didn't take long for Mr. Young to say, "Mark, from everything I've heard here, and seen," he nodded toward where the guys had been, "it doesn't seem that you need protecting at all." #1: Rather than pretend not to understand him, I thought it'd be better to be smart. I asked, "Did the Principal ask you to protect ME?" "Yes." "That's NOT what I asked him for. Not that it matters, because you'd act the same anyway, but your job isn't to protect me, but to protect my immature male classmates. Your hanging around is stopping them from acting stupidly. Before you appeared they were hemming me in, jostling me, punching me on the shoulder, ostensibly as some sort of male comradeship thing but actually far harder than that because they want to get me riled into responding. All I've been doing is ignoring their taunts and trying to get away, but that just encourages most of them to push their aggressiveness even further. -- "I could easily ignore their taunts from now to the end of the school year, if that was all they did, as my self-esteem issues are VERY well taken care of by my being surrounded by all the nicest and prettiest girls in school, haha. Not to mention that the opinions of idiots are easily ignored. But the boys are going to get tired of their insults and taunts being ignored, and then they're going to start fighting me. A dozen guys could hurt me very badly if I didn't defend myself, so I'd have to fight back. If that happens, a lot of them are going to get hurt. Probably badly, because there are so many of them I'm not going to be able to be gentle. I warned the Principal that if he doesn't do anything to stop it, then he's probably going to have to call for several ambulances, which wouldn't do this school's reputation for violence any good. -- "I've talked a lot, but it's important you understand what's going on. I believe I might've mentioned once or twice that boys can behave stupidly. They don't think about the consequences of their actions. If they succeed in forcing me to defend myself, the consequences aren't going to be good for them or the school. I'm also a little worried about the Principal expelling me for fighting, although that's not a big deal as every other educational organization in Corvallis would beg for me to join them. In the long-run, expelling me would just damage this school's reputation even further." It would also separate me from Carol and Julia at least for the rest of this year, because I wouldn't disrupt their schooling so close to the exams. I'd made my being expelled seem the least important point, but it was really my main reason, as I wasn't much worried about putting people into the hospital if they attacked me, and certainly not about adding to the school's reputation for violence, as it richly deserved it. Mr. Young looked like he understood and agreed with every one of my points, which was EXCELLENT. It's a great feeling when a plan works perfectly. "I see," he said. "I'll try to convey that to Mrs. Adams, and then I'll talk with the Principal too, of course." "Why would you talk with Mrs. Adams?" "She's taking over from me right after lunch. I've got classes to teach all afternoon." #4: #1: #3: #4: In case you think I was planning to have a brawl with all my male classmates, let me assure you that I wasn't. I'd be perfectly happy if no fighting at all occurred, especially as the idea of being surrounded and attacked from all directions by lots of guys was VERY unappealing. I wasn't terrified of it, mostly because if it happened I was going to hit them HARD, and to hell with the consequences, more broken jaws would be fine with me. I'd put several of them down as fast as I could, and then get away (good plan, eh?). I wasn't worried about being hemmed in at the end of class again as I can leave class early if I want to, and I'd be doing so for however many days it took for the level of testosterone to diminish, except for the one time my plan called for me to allow it to happen, under carefully controlled circumstances. Although Mr. Young's departure threw that into doubt, dammit. I was vulnerable only in hallways and in the open. In both cases there'd be heaps of witnesses that I could play to, and good chances for me to get away. I was doing all this - seeing the Principal, getting Mr. Young to understand (largely wasted, unfortunately), and my little sub-plan with the note - as preparation for IF I was attacked, NOT as preparation for me attacking them. Having said that, I thought it was almost certain that I would be attacked, as there was so much aggressive hostility toward me already and it was bound to get worse, especially because I was hiding behind a teacher. A fight wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as I should be able to make it obvious that the other guys were the aggressors this time, and if I beat them to a pulp, it should clear the air for the rest of the year, hopefully. For the rest of lunchtime we just chatted away. I helped Mr. Young with his leftover food that none of the girls wanted returned. Sometimes we chatted about the Eaton Incident, sometimes about other stuff. One such "other stuff" was me being asked to remove my shirt again, to which I replied, "I will if all of you will, haha." I'd forgotten about Alexis. She called out, "Okay," and whipped her T-shirt off. She was wearing a bra, so it wasn't a big deal, but you have to admire her attitude. You can admire a few other things while you're at it too, if you like, but I think her attitude is impressive enough all by itself. Mr. Young reacted before any of the other girls could summon up the courage to emulate the admirable Alexis. In his teacher voice, "I don't think that's a good idea, miss. Please put it back on." I joked to him, "In my book, ideas don't come more gooder than that! Haha." I hoped he wasn't an English teacher. To Alexis I said, "Thanks, spanky. I'll give you an extra good kiss Monday morning in appreciation." "Two! I missed out on my normal kiss this morning." I wondered what Mr. Young thought of my sex-life. Kissing Alexis and calling her "Spanky", I had Ava and Carol in my arms on either side (he might not know Carol was my sister), and he'd heard Katelin say I'd slept with her, Julia and Ava. Alexis and I had already partly made up for our missed early morning kiss by exchanging one mid-morning, so she was just being greedy. I had no problem agreeing with her demand though. "Two it is then. You drive a hard bargain. You'd better put your shirt back on, Alexis." "Only when you take yours off." "Yeah!" x dozens of girls. I felt awkward now, which was good, because that made me look modest. I looked at Mr. Young, who just shrugged. I told him, "You seriously need to reexamine your concept of 'good ideas'." "Come on!" x lots of girls. "I suppose so then." I took my shirt off, to a great deal of general approval, Ooh's and Ah's. There was a considerable amount of comment, which I will skip over, because I truly am modest and girls HAVE NO SHAME! Julia turned up five minutes before we'd had to break up, as she'd said she'd try to do. She was smiling, which was a good sign. Considering what was at stake - the best tits in school - it was a VERY good sign. Without being asked, Ava moved over to make room for Julia in my arms, whereupon Ava leaned back into Julia's arms while Julia was kissing me, and then the two girls kissed. I KNEW Mr. Young's eyebrows went up at that. Julia said, "How's lunch been?" I said, "All right. Just an ordinary lunch, really." One of the girls laughing said, "A LOT quieter, without you here, Julia." A lot of the girls looked at me when they laughed. Julia looked at me suspiciously, but with humor. I said, "Some guy made some comment to that effect. I'm pretty sure he's gone now, and he'll never do it again, and he's very sorry. He's a very nice guy, so you shouldn't hold it against him. Did I mention he's very sorry? Haha." Julia said, "I forgive him. Only because he looks so good without a shirt on though." "Alexis wouldn't put hers back on until I took mine off." "I see," said Julia. "Just an ordinary lunch." Then she whispered to me, "Why is there a teacher here?" as I hadn't overlapped with Julia since visiting the Principal. I briefly explained, in a way that made me sound good to Mr. Young. At the end of my brief explanation about the troublesome boys, I added, "Don't get involved in this, Julia. They're doing lots of pushing, shoving and that sort of stuff, and you could easily get hurt accidentally. Leave this to the macho brutes like me and Mr. Young here." I got some chuckles and a concerned nod of agreement from Julia. -- To change the subject, I asked, "How was your lunch with..." Julia's hand squeezed me a little, and she said, "Good. I'll tell you later." Which meant "Not now". Hopefully it actually meant, "Not now and Chloe is yours any time you want her." Carol had to go soon after that, and as usual, she stood, kissed me on the cheek, Julia on the lips, and these days Ava on the lips too. Neither of the last two kisses were just little pecks either. Mr. Young was getting an educational experience! When we all stood up a minute or two later, Julia took the opportunity to get me to stand still, while she had a serious look at my torso. She walked all around me, then said, "Your exercise regime has produced significant improvements since I first met you." We both were well aware that I had no such regime. "It's difficult to imagine how your body could get any better." "Umm, thank you. I like yours too." Lame, but I was embarrassed. Julia just laughed, then held up my shirt that she'd picked it up off the ground when she'd stood up. I took the hint and put it on. The audience made several disappointed comments, but they had to live with the show ending. It'd had the desired effect anyway: increasing their desire for my bod. We headed back. Now that Carol was gone, Ava was able to occupy that hand, so I walked hand-in-hand with Ava and Julia (hand-on-arm, in Julia's case). Mr. Young commented, "You have an unusual social-life, Mark." A number of replies crossed my mind, but I settled for, "Yes. It's funny how life works out sometimes." That being vague, modest and passive, it was consistent with my not being the sort of person to get involved in fights. It was something I've heard adults say quite often, although I'm sure they've had NO IDEA just how 'funny' life can sometimes be. ------- Chapter 147: Julia Bullshits Chloe Friday, April 29, 2005 (Continued) I'll give you Julia's talk with Chloe now. It was spread over a couple of breaks, then mostly at lunch, but I'll simplify by presenting it as a continuous conversation. Julia told Chloe, "I've thought of an idea for getting Mark to tell you what he wants you to do. I'll start by asking Mark to tell me. Do I have your permission to ask Mark that, Chloe?" "What do you mean?" "I'm going to be asking him his personal thoughts about you. They could be considered private between you and him, so I'm making sure you're okay with my asking Mark for that information. I'm making sure that I'm treating you and your privacy properly. Do I have your permission?" "Of course. I want you to help me." "I know I'm being overly cautious. It's because Mark and I are very careful about morality. Also because you and I might be sharing a boyfriend, so it's important to treat each other properly. That'll be easy for me, because I like you and I understand Mark a lot better than you do. I imagine that'll be harder for you though, because you don't understand how it's possible to share a boyfriend, do you?" "No. I've been worried about that too. There are lots of things about Mark that I don't understand. You and Mark have both said you spend half your time with Carol, but what about the half you spend with Mark? How will that affect Mark and me? I don't understand Ava either. At lunch yesterday you said that she was Mark's girlfriend now, except that the three of you don't behave like she's a normal girlfriend, so I don't understand that..." "Let me guess, the one thing you are sure of, is that you've never felt for any other boy the way you feel for Mark?" "That's the ONLY thing I'm sure of! Everything else is very confusing..." "We're getting off the topic of how I will help you find out how Mark wants you to change, but let me make a couple of quick points. Your confusion is natural. Mark is so exceptional and does such unusual things that a lot of our normal ways of thinking don't apply to him. Here's one little example: you need a very mature, sensible boyfriend. One who can see past your breasts, to see the person you really are. Who would've thought that would be a boy even younger than us. -- "Your confusion isn't because Mark is doing bad or wrong things - that's not how he behaves at all! - but he is doing things that you don't understand. Once you start having a relationship with Mark, you'll learn how it works and your confusion will go away, to be replaced with a great deal of happiness. You'll learn that it's marvelous that Ava and I are Mark's girlfriends at the same time as you. There's obviously no deceit or dishonesty involved, as we're totally open and honest with each other. One example of how well it works would be that if I offered to Ava to leave Mark entirely to her, she would beg me to stay. Likewise if she offered to leave him, I'd also beg her to stay. It works very well for both of us, and it will with you too." "Umm, Julia, that's another thing I'm worried about. You and Ava, umm, do things in bed together. With each other. I don't think I'd fit in with that." "You don't have to worry about that at all. Ava and I aren't going to pressure you for sex. Didn't the girls tell you on Sunday that we bent over backward to avoid pressuring them?" "Yes." "Then stop worrying about it. Mark and I are very moral. We're not going to force you into anything you don't want. Mark won't let you get involved in any sex until he knows you're ready. Mark won't even touch you himself until he's absolutely sure you're ready, even though there must be times you must feel so much desire for him that it drives you crazy." "Umm. I'm confused about that too. I tried to talk with Mark about it, but he immediately put his foot down and said it was his decision about when we have sex." Chloe went on to tell Julia about that part of Chloe's and my earlier conversation (about me being the boss, and I will take her virginity when I judge the time is right). Chloe had been too embarrassed to mention that to Julia before, but she was getting desperate now. At the end of Chloe's description, Julia said, "Mark is totally right. When he tells you it's time, thank him very much, take off your clothes, and jump into the bed. I know Mark confuses you, but there are a few things you know for certain about him already. You know that he'd NEVER touch you until he knew you were totally ready. He was reluctant to play with Pat and the other girls' breasts when they were snuggled up to him in the hot tub and begging him to touch them. They had to grab his hand and put it on their breasts themselves." "{Giggle}. Yeah, they told me about that. They couldn't understand how he could be so cautious. He's obviously not scared of girls..." "Let's not go down that digression now. Mark will NOT touch your breasts or take you to bed until he is totally convinced you're ready. I know he is very eager to have you as his girlfriend and lover, but..." "He is! Really? He doesn't show it." "He shows it every day; you just don't know him well enough to see it. He desires you a great deal because he likes you so much, BUT he will ignore his own desires until he is sure that you are ready AND that taking you to bed is the right thing to do. That is something he understands far better than we do. We both saw him instantly realize your going topless would ruin your relationship with him later, so it was the wrong thing to do. I hope that one day you will trust Mark, Chloe. Your life will..." "But I DO trust him. I'm totally convinced he's not after me because of my breasts. Mark's the most amazing..." "You do NOT trust him totally. When Mark told you he would decide when you and him would become lovers, you should've said, 'Yes, Mark, ' and that would have been the end of the issue. We would not be talking about it now. So you obviously do NOT trust him totally! At BEST you trust him about your breasts, but - and you of all people should know this - your breasts aren't all of you! Trusting Mark about your breasts is only the tiniest fraction of trusting him with your entire life." "Oh no! You're right. I'm SO STUPID. I can't see past my STUPID breasts AGAIN! I never realized how..." "Don't be too hard on yourself. You've had years of being distrustful because of them, so treating Mark properly isn't easy for you. It's important you succeed though, because you can't have a good relationship with him unless you trust him. -- "You also showed your lack of trust in him when you worried about Ava and me being his girlfriends. We are Mark's girlfriends by HIS choice - as you will be too - and you should trust that he has good reasons for having his relationships the way he does. Especially because you know Mark's not selfish! One great proof of how unselfish he is, is that he says he'll wait months before he'll accept you as his girlfriend. Any other boy would have grabbed you the first time you smiled at him. I'm sure Mark's ENTIRE reason for waiting is because it's best for you, because that's the sort of guy he is. Most people doubtless think that Mark's having two or three girlfriends is his being greedy, but I'll tell you for a fact that Ava and I get far more out of our relationship with Mark than he gets from us. We'd do anything for him, but most of the time he's happy just making us happy. Mark has more than one girlfriend because he likes GIVING so much. It's obvious that he doesn't want to take from you, does he? He wants to give. You understand that, don't you?" "Yes, you're right. He could easily take from me, if he was like every other boy. He hasn't tried to kiss me, or touch me, or anything. When I was topless, he wouldn't even look at me." "So it's nonsense for you to worry about him having Ava and me as his girlfriends, isn't it? He's not selfishly trying to grab as much as he can. He's giving as much as he can, just as he wants to give to you when you're ready. Obviously Ava and I aren't in competition with you. Am I behaving like I think you're a competitor for Mark's attentions? I don't think so! You should be proud and happy that the boy you love is capable of having so many high-quality relationships. Very few boys could make everybody feel so wonderful, but Mark can. But instead of being happy and proud, you were distrustful and worried. -- "Before you interrupt, I'll give you one more example." (Which meant that Julia had just had one more good idea. One that I was VERY pleased about, but was mainly intended just to make things smoother if Chloe became a regular girlfriend.) "You worried about not fitting in with the girl-on-girl sex that goes on around Mark. I don't understand why you were worried about that. Mark would NEVER push you to do something that wasn't appropriate for you. You've got nothing to worry about it, because just as Mark has told you that he'll decide when he'll take you to bed, I'm sure he'll also decide whether or not, and when, you will ever go to bed with a girl..." "{Gasp}. But I've never had..." "Chloe, you're not listening. Mark will decide! He KNOWS what's best for you. If he decides girl-on-girl sex is not appropriate for you, which it sounds like it's not, then he won't let you do it. Even if you tried to talk him into it, as some sort of way of impressing or pleasing him, he won't let you do it. But if he decides it's appropriate for you, then it will be. -- "That's three examples of your demonstrating that you don't trust Mark, just from our short conversation. That there are so many obvious examples of your distrust saddens me..." Julia had to spend the next few minutes consoling a blubbery, self-recriminating Chloe. Not only for the above, but also because Chloe admitted, "{Sob}. You're right. He made a joke about my stupid breasts yesterday, and I reacted badly. Not for long, but he saw it, and even commented on it. {Sob}. I'm a TERRIBLE person. I shouldn't be his girlfriend. I'm not..." "Chloe, your breasts aren't 'stupid' the way you keep saying; they're wonderful breasts. They're so wonderful many boys can't control themselves. What IS stupid is how much they've damaged your ability to trust someone as obviously trustworthy as Mark. Your statement that you shouldn't be his girlfriend is silly and unnecessary. Mark thinks you should be his girlfriend. He easily knows you well enough to judge that. I trust his judgment, so I have no doubt that he's right. If you think you shouldn't be his girlfriend, then you're disagreeing with Mark, which is now the fourth example of your not trusting his judgment. Almost every time you open your mouth you prove how untrusting you are. It's frightening, isn't it?" "{Sob}." "This entire conversation would've been unnecessary if you truly did trust Mark, but it has been a very worthwhile conversation, because it's given you a very clear picture of how suspicious and untrusting you are. I know that intellectually you understand that you can trust Mark totally, but it hasn't sunk in deep enough yet, so your emotional reactions are very unfair. You've started the process, but you've got a way to go yet. I know it's very difficult to make changes like that, but there's no doubt that you're in the wrong and that you have to change. I suggest you start by spending a lot of time thinking about the four examples I gave you, and doing your best to convince yourself that you can trust Mark about them. Do you remember what the four examples were?" "Umm. Sorry. I'm too upset to think clearly." "Get a pen and paper out of your bag and I'll give them to you again." After the necessary pause, Julia slowly recited, "One: that Mark will decide when you will become lovers. Two: you worried needlessly about Ava and I being his girlfriends. Three: you worried needlessly about girl-on-girl sex. And four: you thought you shouldn't be Mark's girlfriend. I could add a fifth, about your reacting badly when Mark mentions your breasts, but you know about that and you're already getting better at it. Have you got all those?" "Yes. {Sniff}." "The four items are things that you should leave for Mark to decide. You have to think about that list carefully and really convince yourself deep down inside that Mark is far more capable of making the right decisions than you are. Look at how silly your idea of proving you trusted him by showing him your breasts was! He thought through all the future implications of that in a second. -- "The girl-on-girl sex item is probably the most extreme. Before I started going out with Mark I would've sworn on a stack of bibles that I'd never want to touch another girl. Never in my life had I felt even the faintest interest in that, but now I'm the half-time lover of a lesbian, and sometimes have threesomes! I was amazed to discover that I enjoy it, especially if Mark is involved. When Ava first started seeing Mark, she told him she was bisexual, but Mark knew right from the beginning that she wasn't. But now she's similar to me. A few nights ago Mark had sex with Katelin, and after he'd finished with her, Ava and I jumped into the bed and the two of us had sex with Mark. Katelin lay on the side of the bed watching us, both at night and when we did more the next morning. Not once did Mark say a single word to her about her joining in. Mark knew it wasn't a good idea for Katelin. Last but not least, Mark slept with Pat and Lily a week ago. He gently pushed them into touching each other, and by the next morning they'd both discovered that they really enjoyed it. You've seen that they're best friends now! I've never bothered asking, but I'd guess that the two of them have had sex together since their night with Mark. If you asked them, I'm sure they'd tell you, because they're quite proud of their new-found bisexuality. -- "In every case Mark knew exactly the right thing to do. I know you think you're like Katelin, and you might even be right. Or you might be like me, and be amazed to find out that you enjoy it. The impressive truth is that Mark can read your desires far better than you can, which is hard to believe but I've seen it over and over now. My guess is that we deny we have such feelings so well that we hide them even from ourselves, but Mark is such a genius that he can tell. I don't know whether you are like Katelin or like me. I'm not going to waste any time worrying about it, because I've learned to trust Mark about issues like that. If you hadn't mentioned it, I never would've given it a thought. Your worrying about it is silly, because Mark will know what's best for you. Mark is very good at unselfishly knowing what is best. If you truly trusted him, you'd stop worrying about it too. -- "I doubt anything will happen for months, or maybe ever, but if Mark ever asks you to make love to another girl, I strongly suggest you say, 'Yes, Mark, ' and jump to it. Not only is Mark certain to be right, but even more seriously, you've shown Mark that you don't trust him FAR too often. If you keep hurting him so badly, you risk him deciding to give up on you. You seriously need to start showing him some trust. You understand what I'm saying, don't you?" "Yes. I have been very bad to him, it's true. I didn't realize how bad until you explained it. I think I should get some professional help, because I've messed my head up badly, haven't I?" "Haha. No, I don't think that at all. I'm not the least bit worried about your needing professional help." "You're not?" "No, not at all. Mark has spent a great deal of time thinking about you and your needs, and he's never said anything about your needing help. Instead he's made many comments that he thinks you'll be a wonderful girlfriend. He's got a lot of faith in you, and I've got total faith in him, so I'm not worried at all. If you trust Mark, you shouldn't be worried either. If you don't believe us, and you seek help, you'd be telling Mark - yet again - that you don't trust his judgment. That would be a very bad thing to do, Chloe. -- "Another reason I'm not worried about it, is because I can see you intellectually understand that you can trust Mark, it's just that you're struggling to break the bad habit you've got. But you've only been trying for a couple of days! That's NOTHING! If you've still got a trust problem in six months, then get some help. Until then, have faith in Mark." "Okay, I will. I'm not sure about my having sex with girls, but I trust him about breaking my bad habit. I hope that's all it is, just a bad habit. You've made me very aware that I'm far worse than I thought I was. I didn't even think I was at fault at all!" "I'm sure your problem is mostly habitual. You're too good a person to be truly black-hearted deep down inside. I'm also sure Mark will know what to do about your having sex with girls too. From what you've been saying, you're probably like Katelin, so Mark will tell you not to. But if he says you would grow to like sex with girls, then I would take his word for it. If you trusted Mark's judgment you wouldn't worry about it, but if you are worried, why not simply ask him what he thinks about your having sex with girls?" "Oh no, I couldn't. I'd be too embarrassed." "I hate to say it again Chloe, but that just proves again that you don't trust Mark. If you go to Mark and ask him something you're concerned about, he is going to see your concern, carefully consider your question, and answer as best he can. He likes helping people he cares for, and he would enjoy helping ease your worry. -- "Let's put ALL this other stuff to the side for now, and get back to what we're supposed to be talking about: how to convince Mark to tell you what it is you need to do to become a good girlfriend for him. Remember, that's what we intended to talk about?" "Yeah, we got very distracted, didn't we?" "We certainly did. Usefully though, because now you've got a much better idea of how often your distrust must have hurt Mark, and how much harder you're going to have to try. You've got a lot of work to do yet, especially in finding ways to show Mark that you are starting to trust him, because he's got to be feeling very discouraged by now. That's very important, because the last thing you want him to do is give up on you. That'd be a disaster!" "But how could I show him that?" "I can think of some ways, but they're not important for now. Let's plan my talk with Mark tonight. I told you yesterday afternoon that I'd think about it. I came up with some good thoughts. First, what is it that Mark is waiting for you to do? I hadn't previously bothered to think what that might be, because I trust Mark to do the right things for you. Since our phone call yesterday I've been trying to think what it could be, but I can't work it out. You still don't know what it is, do you?" "I've been racking my brain, but I can't think of anything except maybe that I don't trust him enough yet." "I'm sure it's not that. Mark's reason is one he wants to keep secret from you, but we discuss your trust issue every day so that's not it." "Umm, what about my having sex with girls? Could that be it?" "Haha. Of course not. What a funny idea!" "Why is it so funny?" "Mark's not worried about SEX! That's the LAST THING on his mind. He cares about people, not their bodies. It's something else he wants you to do." "He's a strange boy, isn't he? A GOOD boy, I mean." "He's very good and very strange, haha. I've lost track of the number of times I was sure he was doing something silly - even obviously silly - only to find out later that he was doing the right thing the whole time. In the early days of my relationship with him, I used to laugh when I saw him try to do something silly, and I'd correct him. He'd smile, thank me, and do it the way I suggested. An hour later, or a week later, I'd find out that he knew what he was doing the whole time and it only LOOKED silly. He never rubbed it in. He just let me learn to trust his judgment at my own pace. I can't imagine any other boy behaving like that. But back to the subject: we agree that we don't know what the secret change Mark is waiting for you to do?" "No. I can't think of anything at all. I wish I knew, because I'd do whatever he wanted." "Oh, really? Even have sex with girls? Don't bother answering, Chloe; I don't care what your answer is. It's up to you to decide how much you trust Mark, and decide whether your saying you'll do 'whatever he wants' is true or just meaningless hot air. -- "Neither of us can figure out Mark's secret, so I have to ask him. I have to know what it is before I can argue with him about it. I'm fairly sure he'll tell me what it is. Obviously he wants to keep it a secret from you, but he trusts me, so he'll tell me and ask me not to tell you. Here's where we have the first potential problem: when Mark tells me his reason, I might agree that you should not know what it is." "You mean no one would tell me?" "That's correct, no one..." "Oh no! That'd be terrible. It might take me months and months to work it out. Maybe years, or maybe never! That means I'd never get to be Mark's girlfriend..." "CHLOE! I said that MIGHT happen; I didn't say it would. Mark might get hit by a bus tomorrow too. If you stop our talk to cry about everything that might happen, this is going to be a very long conversation." "I'm sorry. This is very important to me. I NEED to be Mark's girlfriend. He's the only boy I've ever cared for, or ever expect to. There's no one as wonderful as him..." "You don't have to tell me that! I KNOW he's very special. I'll carry on with the main topic. Presuming I don't think the reason should be secret, then I'll try to convince him to tell it to you. Convincing Mark is NOT going to be easy, to put it mildly. I think it's probably going to be impossible to convince Mark he's wrong, so that won't be..." "OH NO! You HAVE TO convince him..." " ... SO THAT WON'T BE what I'll be doing! I'm going to use a completely different approach. Going head to head with Mark, by trying to out-argue and out-think him, is not something I could succeed at, especially when he's had days to think about something and I've only had minutes. I'd fail if I was silly enough to argue with him that way. What I'm going to do is to try to convince him that he's being SELFISH not to tell you. Mark hates the idea of being selfish, so the moment I mention that, he's going to listen very seriously and very worriedly to what I'm saying." "That's very clever, Julia. I would never have thought of that!" "Don't start congratulating me yet. Accusing him of being selfish just gets his attention, not his agreement. I will still have to convince him that he truly is being selfish. I won't know how to do that until he tells me what the secret reason is. I'm hoping that I'll be able to think of reasons to convince him that keeping the knowledge from you is somehow selfish. Provided I can make a reasonable case for that, then I only need to convince him that telling you the secret isn't too bad. I don't need to convince him that it's the best option, merely that it's not too bad. Mark's desire to be unselfish will make him choose to tell you. Do you understand what I mean?" "Yes I do. It's very, very clever. I'm very impressed." "Actually it's not all that smart. I know I can't win a head-to-head argument with Mark. About small things he nearly always gives way to me, even if he knows he's right, but with something as important to him as you are, there's no way he'd agree to do the wrong thing just to humor me. He's spent days thinking about you, so there's no way I'd be able to convince him he's wrong, so I have to be sneaky. Fortunately I know what a huge softy Mark is, so I can try to use it to your advantage. I'm sure it's going to be VERY difficult. Mark believes not telling you is the best thing for you, and moving him away from that belief is going to be VERY hard work. I've asked him to spend the night with me so we can stay up quite late arguing about it. I'll text you when it's over, telling you whether I've won or lost. It'll probably be very late and I'll be exhausted, so please don't call me back. We can talk about it tomorrow, okay?" Chloe launched into an effusive stream of "thank yous," going on and on with them, including, "I don't know how I could possibly thank you for all this, Julia." "That's easy: make Mark happy. That's all I want, and that's everything I want. If you make Mark happy, all my efforts will have been rewarded. If you don't, then I will be extremely disappointed in you." Chloe effusively promised she would do her absolute best. Julia couldn't resist, "In all honesty, Chloe, even though I think you're fundamentally a lovely person - I agree with Mark about that - so far you've disappointed me a great deal. It's too early to tell, but I'm worried. I haven't once heard you give a quick and simple, 'Yes, Mark, ' to anything he's said to you. You make a fuss about EVERY little thing. You make an issue about WHEN you'd become his lover. There's no doubt you'd leap at the chance if Mark asked you to his bed, but you still feel you have to make a fuss about when. I can't understand that. -- "You also worried about two other girls loving him, even though love is a wonderful thing and there's not nearly enough of it in the world or in Mark's life, and you seem to want to disobey Mark if he asks you to give and receive pleasure with another girl, as if that was some sort of sin. You say you love Mark, but to me your love seems to be very concerned about what you want without regard to what he wants. -- "I'm putting a huge effort into helping you be successful with him. If our situations were reversed, I doubt you'd try so hard to help me join you as his girlfriend. I'm busting my hump to help you because I love Mark. He cares for you, and he wants you as his girlfriend, and that's all I need to know. Carol as his sister, plus Ava and I as his girlfriends, are all in love with him, and largely with each other, and we all selflessly help each other. When Mark asks us to do something, or even if we just know that he would appreciate it, we happily rush off to do it for him. It doesn't matter whether we personally enjoy it or not. Our enjoyment comes from making him happy. You don't seem interested in that at all. You seem to be judgmental, distrustful, and totally preoccupied with yourself. -- "Mark thinks you'll be a good girlfriend, and if he thinks that, then we should both believe it. I haven't seen as much evidence of that as I'd like to, but he's sure about it, so I have to believe you're capable of loving him properly. Which means a LOT less selfishly than you've been so far. I know that you can be a very giving person, so I'm hoping that all the fuss you're causing is just because of your nervous inexperience, and that you'll settle down and start behaving properly soon. You know that Mark is totally trustworthy, so why not simply say 'Yes, Mark' to everything he asks? It's ridiculous to believe that Mark would take advantage of you. If he takes you to bed, you're going to enjoy it ten times more than he is because he's a fantastic lover. You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain, but you somehow can't say, 'Yes'." -- Julia took a deep breath, visibly gathered her wits, then said, "I'm sorry, Chloe. I got far too carried away. I REALLY am sorry. I'm very stressed out worrying about arguing with Mark tonight. I HATE arguing with him! He's the most important person in my life, so deliberately planning to argue with him gives me some horrible feelings. I took them out on you, and I apologize for that. Please forgive me?" By now Chloe was shamed by Julia's accusations. Chloe managed to say, "Ahh, Julia. I don't think you need to apologize. I think everything you said is true. I have been very selfish and foolish. I'm horrified at how clearly you showed me that..." "I'm still sorry, Chloe. I shouldn't have unloaded my stress onto you like that. It's not your fault you're so inexperienced. Well actually it is. What I mean is that I shouldn't judge you harshly because you don't know something. You're not stupid; just uninformed. That's easily fixed, and you'll learn without me ripping into you like that. Let's not talk about it any more, not until tomorrow. Please don't talk with me for the rest of the day. I need to be as stress-free as possible, so I can do the best job I can in my argument with Mark tonight. That's going to be very hard and unpleasant as it is." "You're STILL going to do that?" "Yes, of course." "But you're stressed out about it too much. I don't want you to do it now Julia. I'd rather wait, the way Mark wants me to. My impatience is not worth your being so upset." "I'm not doing it for you anymore Chloe; I'm doing it for Mark. You can't stop me now." "I don't understand?" "Because I've just realized that Mark's plan of waiting for you to work it out for yourself is totally unacceptable, so I'm going to make up every reason I can think of to change his mind about it." [This point had truly only just occurred to Julia. Most of the previous conversation she'd roughly worked out in advance, except for the girl-on-girl sex stuff, which had been Julia seizing an opportunity to work on a worry that Chloe might be another fussy britches like Katelin! At this point, roughly at the end of what she'd intended to say, Julia had realized there was a better way of doing it.] -- "Mark is very smart, but he is also FAR too unselfish. He will hurt himself rather than hurt you, and I don't agree with that. I've just realized that Mark is probably going to be waiting for many months for you to improve yourself. Quite possibly a year or more. Over that time you're not going to be getting any experience at being a good girlfriend, which means you're going to be repeatedly making silly, distrustful, ignorant mistakes, just like you have been for the last few days. You're going to be hurting Mark OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Mark will allow you to cause him that much pain, because that's the sort of guy he is - BUT I WON'T ALLOW IT! -- "I'm going to try my hardest to convince him to tell you IMMEDIATELY, and for you, Mark and I to work on making you change the way he wants as fast as possible. That way you can become his girlfriend much faster, and you'll learn to stop hurting him so much. The pain you must be causing him HAS TO STOP! I don't care that he thinks you'll have a better life if he waits a year for you to work it out for yourself. As far as I'm concerned, that year of pain for him is not worth it. He can tell you the secret immediately, and then we'll all help you learn the lesson properly, so the rest of your life is just as good as it would be." "Oh. I never realized how much trouble I was causing..." "Yes you are, but that doesn't matter. Mark wants you as his girlfriend, so I'll do everything I can to help him achieve it. That's what love is. The needs of the person you love are more important than your own. That's why Mark is willing to let you hurt him for a year or more, because he believes it will be better for you. Love is why I am NOT willing to let him do that. I will find another way to make your life just as good, even if it takes me a lot more time and effort, because I do not want Mark to suffer for a year or more." "Wow! I didn't understand ANY of this. I've never heard of ANYBODY living their lives like this. Maybe in a dramatic movie, but never in real life." "Mark inspires love. Do you understand that in the argument tonight, I'm not just going to be arguing that Mark should tell you what you need to do to be a good girlfriend. I'm also going to be pushing him to accept you as his girlfriend as fast as possible; hopefully tomorrow?" "TOMORROW! That's FAR too soon. Whatever Mark wants me to do, and especially all the stuff you've just been telling me, I had NO idea about that stuff! There's no way I can be a good girlfriend tomorrow!" "It's going to be done as fast as possible. You're hurting Mark every day, and that's NOT acceptable. I'm going to try my hardest to argue Mark into accepting you as his girlfriend as soon as possible, hopefully tomorrow because the fastest way of getting you to stop hurting Mark is to get you as much experience as possible as fast as possible. I'm going to push you in the deep end, if Mark allows me to. You're a good person, but you're far too ignorant about the right way to behave in a loving relationship. You can learn that 'on the job.' I know you want to learn to be a good girlfriend, so it won't take us long to get you up to speed. That's what I'm going to be trying for with Mark tonight. You're not going to argue with me about it, are you, Chloe?" Julia's last sentence was said with a deliberately menacing tone, which Chloe quickly responded to, "No! It's just happening so fast and unexpected. I WANT to be Mark's girlfriend, I just never expected all this..." "That's because I only just realized that Mark was deliberately allowing you to hurt him so much for your long-term benefit. That's TOTALLY unacceptable to me! What have you got planned for tomorrow afternoon, Chloe?" "Umm, nothing." "Will your parents allow you to have dinner at my house tomorrow? My Mom can call yours if you like." "Sure. That'd be no problem." "Good. If I win my argument tonight, you can come to my place in the afternoon and Mark will fuck your brains out." "{GASP!}. WHAT! Umm..." "Shut up, Chloe! I'm pushing you in the deep end, and loving relationships include sex, so you're getting sex. Nearly all of the distrust you show Mark is stupidly about sex. He is NOT trying to use you for SEX! That's GLARINGLY obvious to EVERYONE, and even you can see that! But, even though you CAN see it, you're still acting like a nervous, distrustful, silly little virgin. So tomorrow, if I win my argument, you lose your virginity. About damned time too, in my opinion. If you'd lost it already, you'd be treating Mark a hell of a lot better than you have been. A week from now you'll be telling me off for not pushing you into Mark's bed even sooner, and you'll be phoning Mark eagerly inviting yourself around for more sex. -- "I'm not unsympathetic, Chloe, because I can easily remember how nervous I was about losing my virginity, but I also remember how free I felt after it was all over. Your nervousness is making you very distrustful and that's going to stop. I WILL push you into Mark's bed as fast as I can arrange it, and don't you DARE do anything other than smile sweetly and say 'Yes Mark'. Have you got that Chloe?" "Ahh..." "Chloe! You are hurting the man I love, and the man YOU love. If you don't say, 'Yes Mark, ' I'm going to go tell him that I don't want you as one of his girlfriends. That'd be the end of you. Once this has been resolved properly, I will apologize to you for threatening that, but not until then. I will NOT allow you to hurt my love unnecessarily. Your virginity is TOTALLY unnecessary and it's making life difficult for everyone, including you. If you've got ANY idea of what's good for you, say 'Yes Mark, ' Chloe." "Umm, 'Yes Mark'." "Good girl! If all goes well, by dinnertime tomorrow you'll have the biggest smile on your face you've ever had. You'll be Mark's girlfriend and lover, and you'll be thanking me for my lack of patience. Do you have any questions? Any SENSIBLE questions! I'm not in the mood for any silly, giggly nonsense." "You're scary, Julia." "Good. You're lucky Donna's not here, because she would've beaten you up if she'd realized how much you were hurting her brother. When you give your heart to Mark, you'll defend him just as much as I do. That's what love does to you. -- "I need to warn you that I can't promise you'll become Mark's girlfriend and lover tomorrow. I wish I could, because I strongly want it to happen, but I have to convince Mark to change his entire approach with you. That won't be easy, especially because I can't tell him that my real reason is that I don't want him to be hurt. The trouble is that he's perfectly willing to let you keep hurting him month after month, for as long as it takes for you to change yourself. You should think about what that tells you about Mark. It's clear that you were hurting him in every single conversation you had with him, yet he didn't show any sign of it. That's extraordinary! NO ordinary guy would volunteer to suffer so much just because he thought it would be better for you in the long run. Any other guy would have grabbed you the first chance he had. I hope you're starting to get some idea of how lucky you are?" "I'm JUST starting to Julia. I never realized all of you had such strong emotions, and I NEVER realized how wonderful Mark is. I'm ASTONISHED at how selfless and giving he is. I can't get my head around how wonderful he must be! I sure don't deserve him. I don't deserve someone even a tenth as good as he is. I'm just a silly little girl, and he's incredible." "I agree you don't deserve him. Neither does Ava, nor do I. But Mark doesn't think about whether anyone 'deserves' him or not, he only cares about whether the person is a good, giving person. Or, in your case, that you've got great big tits." After a very brief negative reaction, Chloe started laughing, Julia chuckling along with her. When Chloe finished, she said, "I was very stupid about them, wasn't I?" "Yes, you were. Unfortunately I suspect you still are. However, I'm happy that you're FINALLY starting to appreciate how incredible Mark is." "Umm, yes. I want to be Mark's girlfriend, but I'm afraid that I don't think I should be. I don't think I'm good enough. The feelings you have for Mark are amazing. I like him very much, and he makes me feel wonderful, but my feelings are nothing compared to how strong yours are. I feel like a..." "Chloe, shut up! I'm exaggerating, but I don't care what you think! Mark wants you as his girlfriend, so Mark's going to get you as his girlfriend. He KNOWS it's best for you. He wouldn't want you as his girlfriend unless he knew you would love him and benefit from such a relationship. He's totally unselfish that way. So stop trying to get out of it. It IS going to happen! Say 'Yes Julia, ' Chloe." "Yes, Julia." "Good girl. I can't order Mark around, but I am damn well going to order YOU around. I'm not going to stand for any more silly, nervous, virgin schoolgirl nonsense. If I yell 'Jump, ' you jump. If I yell 'Jump into Mark's bed, ' you'll do it. If I tell you to make him more pizza, or carry his books, or kiss his ass; that's what you'll do, and you'll do it INSTANTLY! I won't stand for any hesitation or argument. I'm doing this for Mark's and YOUR huge benefit. There's no way in the world you deserve a man as wonderful as Mark, and I won't tolerate any stupidity from you about it. I can't even call it 'selfish stupidity', because it's not selfish. You will be FAR happier with Mark than without him, so you truly are stupid if your nervousness or distrust delays that even a minute. It's obvious that your life is going to be hugely better the moment you are Mark's girlfriend, so you will do EXACTLY what I say! Say, 'Yes Julia'." "Yes, Julia." "Good. Now go away and don't talk with me for the rest of today. I'm EXTREMELY worried about how I'll get Mark to change his mind tonight. That's far more important than I thought it was before, and I was stressed about it even then." "You'll call me when it's over, won't you, please Julia? I won't be able to sleep until I hear from you." "Chloe, I expect to be exhausted! Mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted. I will TRY to text you, but there's no way I'm going to be up to having a conversation with you. I don't think you realize how important my argument tonight is. I have to convince Mark to stop being willing to hurt himself for other people's benefit. You're just one example, because he does it far too much with other people too. There's no need for him to sacrifice ANY of himself, let alone as much as he is currently intending." "I've REALLY learned from you, Julia. I swear all my fears about Mark and my breasts are completely gone. The things you've explained to me have gotten rid of them a dozen times over. Now I'm worried that I'm nowhere near good enough for Mark. I'm just..." "That's Mark's decision. I'm not going to repeat all that again. Your judgments about him have been so incredibly wrong that words fail me, so from now on, until you learn better, I will be making the judgments for you. Have you got that, Chloe? Say 'Yes Julia'." "Haha. Yes Julia. You are being very good to me. Thank you very much. I can't believe how much trouble I've caused, and how much effort you are going to for me." "The quick answer, is that I'm not doing it for you, but for Mark, because this is what he wants. I'd do exactly the same for any other girl. However, the truth is that I'm very glad that you're the girl. I like you a lot myself, and I think you'll be a wonderful girlfriend for Mark. That's why all this is so funny." "Eh? How is it funny?" "Oh, me and Mark. I told you I liked you, as if it was a happy accident. Of course it wasn't! Mark would never pick a girl as his girlfriend unless he knew she would fit in well with the other people in his life. Mark KNEW I would like you, otherwise he never would've wanted you as his girlfriend. That's how we all are - Mark, me, Ava and Carol. We all do everything we can for Mark and each other, and everyone does the same back again. That's how good relationships work. Once you spend more time with Mark and us you'll see how well it works." "Wow. This is much deeper than I thought." "Yes. You're so inexperienced it's impossible for you to understand. All your silly nervousness, doubts, distrusts, and every other negative thing you do are foolish. They help no one at all, and they especially do not help you. At home tonight, practice saying 'Yes Mark' over and over again. It really is the best thing for you to do." "Yeah. I'm starting to see that. It's very hard to have that much faith in a boy though." "I understand that. Certainly many boys would take advantage of you, but Mark CAN'T. It's just not possible for him to behave that way. Mark is SO much smarter, more caring, more giving, and more mature, that he can't act the way you're worried about. Except that there is ONE thing he's very un-giving about - I wouldn't be at all surprised if he selfishly asked you to make him more pizza. That won't be for your benefit at all; that'd be ENTIRELY for his own selfish enjoyment, haha." "Haha. I'll be happy to make him some more. Shall I do it tomorrow morning?" "No. No need for that again so soon, sweetie. It was nice of you to offer though." [WHAT WAS JULIA THINKING!] "Let's see how my argument goes tonight. While I think about it; when you're at home practicing saying 'Yes Mark' over and over again. If you get bored, try saying 'Yes Julia.' That'd be a good idea too." "'Yes Julia!' Haha. But you're right, I understand that. I would never have gotten Mark as my boyfriend without your knowing what I should do, would I?" "You never had a snowball's chance in Hell, sweetie. Your distrust and inexperience with boys would've destroyed any chance you had of starting a relationship with him, even though he must like you a great deal. Either that or I've underestimated how much Mark loves big tits." "Haha..." "Good girl! You didn't flinch at all. You're getting great at that." "Oh I'm not worried about that anymore. You've convinced me." "Good. On that nice note, please leave me alone for the rest of the day. I'll go meet Mark where we have lunch, so you go somewhere else. I need to think very carefully about this evening, and talking to you would be very distracting." "Okay. Thank you VERY, VERY MUCH, Julia. I owe you so much for all the effort you are going to." "Just do everything you can to make Mark happy, that's all I ask. Bye." Julia walked away. Whenever Chloe was around for the rest of the day, Julia looked very worried and thoughtful. ------- Chapter 148: Nine Jostling Bullies Friday, April 29, 2005 (Continued) Mr. Young walked me to my class, earning me some glares from other guys, and left me there after the normal teacher arrived, telling me "I'll talk with the Principal as soon as I can." The classroom was noisy, as class hadn't started yet, but several of the guys had heard Mr. Young's statement, which lowered their opinion of me even further. Mrs. Adams arrived shortly after the class started, whispered to our teacher, then moved to the back of the class to "observe". Her presence was not welcomed by half of the proud Y-chromosome bearers in the room. As soon as the bell rang at the end of class, I jumped up to talk with Mrs. Adams, in part to make it clear to everyone that she and I were connected, and also to ask her, "Are you looking after me next period?" "No." "Who will it be?" "I don't know." Apart from some comments about "chicken" and "teacher's pet" (which would make me a pet chicken, I guess), nothing visible happened. The macho boys had decided that I was a pathetic coward, which automatically increased their desire to attack me, which caused them to get even more frustrated at their inability to do so, which further increased their desire to take out their frustration by attacking me. It was appropriately described as a "vicious circle". I'd predicted those obvious consequences even before I'd gone to the Principal to talk him into appointing some sort of 'bodyguard', as EVERY boy at school knows that going to the teachers for such help is cowardly, and what that'd lead to the very first time the coward can't find a teacher's skirts to hide behind. My "Note Plan" was timed to take advantage of the idiots' increasing frustration, provided I could get a cooperative bodyguard. Next period my bodyguard was Pete Sanchez. I'd had him as my teacher before and he was a fairly relaxed guy. I immediately started writing a much longer note than my first version had been (my plan was flexible enough not to be dependent on him wearing skirts). I had to explain the situation, my response to it, what I wanted him to do, what I'd be doing, what outcomes I was expecting, etc. None of it was complicated, but it took a lot of explaining. Mid-class I crossed my fingers and passed him the small essay. It wasn't essential that he cooperate, as there was no downside to his refusing, but there was a good upside if he did and it worked the way I was pretty sure it would. Five minutes before the end of class, he excused himself from the room, saying, "Excuse me. I have to prepare for my next class." Which was exactly what I'd asked him to do and say. Even before he was out of the room the macho idiots (a redundant term, if ever there was one) got visibly excited. Pete (as most of the kids call him) noticed it too. That's how idiotic the idiots were: they hadn't even waited for him to get out of the room. He carried on leaving anyway. The idiots weren't suspicious that it took me so long to pack my bag after the bell rang. Presuming you've met schoolboy idiots before, I guess you won't be surprised by their stupidity. Very soon the class was substantially empty, and I was once again hemmed in. My plan called for Pete to walk out of the room and go far enough away to be out of sight of the doorway so guys who left wouldn't rush back inside to warn their friends, then a minute or so after the end-of-period bell had sounded, by which time the room would be mostly empty, he was to come back and stand outside the doorway listening. In my note I'd said I would keep my hands in my pockets and say nothing, so Pete would know that I hadn't provoked these guys. It wasn't a perfect plan, as he'd be away while the hemming-in started, but it was the best I could do. I had thought to use my cellphone to record the talk - three minutes would be enough - but I'd checked and I had to delete my earlier recording first because my phone's total capacity was three minutes. I chose not to because I didn't think the additional evidence would be necessary, as it'd be damned obvious that they were attacking me rather than me attacking all of them. The only other significant part of my plan was that Pete would listen as long as possible. I could call him in by calling out "HELP!" After I was hemmed in, the macho idiots quickly started making up for lost time, so things got ugly pretty damned fast! Which made me realize there was a flaw in my plan: if I called "HELP!" before Pete got back to the doorway, there'd be no one of authority to hear me, our last teacher having gone already. I soon had to take my hands out of my pockets to help me keep my balance as I was pushed around, and to deflect the worst slaps and punches. They weren't fighting me yet, just goading me in a VERY physical manner. There was a great deal of verbal taunting, insults, etc., especially as I was silent, which was clearly an encouraging sign of weakness. The goal of my plan had been to let Pete listen for long enough to be sure that these guys were aggressive all by themselves and especially that I wasn't provoking them. That way if I got into any more fights, regardless of who with, I could use Pete as a character witness that I was a passive guy and any fighting must've been instigated by my unprovoked opponent(s). I thought that'd take a while to establish, and my note to Pete had asked him to listen or look around the corner for as long as possible. But I'd underestimated how aggressive the idiots were. The good news was that I'd also underestimated Pete's lack of tolerance for what he heard, and then witnessed when he stuck his head around the doorway. He decided not to simply break it up and send us on our way (with him escorting me), the way I'd planned. I'd thought my plan would establish my passive, unaggressive attitude with the school authorities, for when a fight really did start. Instead, when Pete heard and saw what was going on, he BLEW his stack! He came tearing into the room, yelling at the idiots, "STOP THIS INSTANT!" After some fierce screams from him, the ashen-faced boys were sat down and I was separated from them. Pete instructed a passing student to get the Principal. I quickly intervened, saying "I have an easier way." I pulled my cellphone out, and speed dialed the school's number. I'd set up in advance, for exactly this sort of circumstance. I resisted the temptation to say, "Mark Anderson calling for the Principal on yet another matter of violence," (or similar). Instead I simply passed the phone to Pete, telling him, "I've called the school. You take over." Pete got through to the Principal, gave him a quick synopsis, and I gleaned that the Principal had said he'd come. Pete hung up and passed me my phone back. I quietly said, "Umm, Pete. I don't want you to get in trouble for leaving me unguarded for a few minutes, especially because I asked you to." "Don't worry about it," he dismissed immediately. "No, seriously. Tell him you had to go to the toilet, okay? I couldn't care less about those idiots, or being jostled by them, but you shouldn't get in trouble for doing what I asked." That penetrated, and he thought about it for a second. "Okay. Thanks." "No, thank YOU. Now the school knows how serious it is. I tried to tell the Principal but he wouldn't believe me." That hadn't been the intent of my plan, but it sounded good. While we were waiting for the Principal, I realized it was a little surprising that the school's big boss was involved in such a small incident. I mentioned that to Pete, to pass the time as much as anything else. "Anything involving you goes to the Principal." "Oh yeah. Silly me." The Principal arrived, Pete told him what had happened, that he'd had to go to the toilet, had returned just after the bell, had seen and heard... , followed by a description of what he'd seen and heard. The Principal was horrified by what Pete recounted, and the suddenly-very-un-macho idiots got yelled at a whole lot more, that being just the start of lots of yelling they'd be on the receiving end of. I particularly enjoyed that lots of other students got to witness the idiots' humiliation and trouble. The story would spread wonderfully. I didn't see any point in missing my next class by hanging around this crap, so I stuck out my hand to offer to shake the Principal's. While he was getting over his surprise, I said, "THANK you very much for doing EXACTLY the right thing in having teachers look after me. Especially someone as smart as Pete Sanchez. As he had to go, it was brilliant the way he winked at me, gave a false reason for leaving the class, then came back so quickly that nothing too bad could develop. He fooled the idiots into showing their true intentions brilliantly. I'm very impressed. And don't worry about me being upset about the jostling, punches, slaps, insults, etc. They were bad, of course, but a very small price to pay for what would've happened if Pete hadn't been so smart. It's great to see that this school is responding to the violence problem so intelligently." The Principal had recovered from his surprise. He had, no doubt, thought he was up another shit creek without a paddle. He'd finished shaking my hand, so I shook Pete's, "Thanks Pete. I think you saved the school having to call for several ambulances. This would be a great time to ask your boss for a pay raise, haha. I'll head off to my next class now, bye." I left Pete with a very amused smile on his face, and the Principal with a very relieved smile on his. No one else in the room was smiling though, as I was out of the room by then. ^ [Just to describe the aftermath of this little incident. Our school recently declared a zero tolerance policy on bullying. One guy surrounded by nine others who were hemming him in, slapping, punching, pushing, insulting, and daring him to do anything about it, managed to squeeze within the definition of "bullying". Especially as they'd deliberately sought out opportunities to do exactly this, and had repeated their behavior on more than one occasion during the day. That'd been mentioned by someone back at the scene of the crime. By me, if I remember correctly, haha. Their sorry (but macho) asses were therefore dragged to the admin block, where they were verbally reamed, and then their parents were called, etc. Not long after the Principal got back to his office to start his disciplining procedure, Mr. Young got a chance to warn him that Mark Anderson was an EXTREMELY good martial artist, who Mr. Young had no doubt would seriously injure a large number of students if they were stupid enough to attack him. With the crisis that would've caused him very much in mind, the Principal carried on. In due course he got to relieve his stress by reaming out the parents for bringing such incredibly stupid sons into the world (my words, but you get the idea). What their vicious, cowardly, stupid sons did was explained to their parents at length, stressing that their sons had repeatedly and deliberately gone out of their way to carry out their attacks, and including that their behavior was witnessed by a teacher and that the school would cooperate fully with the police if charges were filed. What the "zero" in "zero tolerance" meant was explained to them. (I would have said, "What part of 'zero' don't you understand?", but the Principal missed the opportunity.) The boys were suspended until the Monday after next, and told to clean out their lockers, "Because there's a good chance that sometime during the next week we'll decide not to allow you back to school at all. I'm still thinking about whether to expel you." The parents were urged to investigate other educational options for their sons, "Because there is no place in this school for students who deliberately gang up to assault another student, especially without provocation." The Principal called my mom later in the evening, to keep her up to date, to most emphatically assure her that everything was under control, and to ask her whether or not the police would be getting involved. Mom said, "I've got no idea what you're talking about," because I hadn't bothered to tell her about it. Mom hung up to talk with me. In her next conversation with the Principal, she told him, "Mark says he's very happy with how you and especially Mr. Sanchez handled the situation. He has no intention of talking to the police, because that would unfairly damage the school's reputation. As far as he's concerned it's all over, and I'm following his lead on that." "If you don't mind me asking, how good is Mark at martial arts?" Mom said, "You should ask Mark directly. He's the best person to answer questions like that. Bye." [I'd blasted Mom in the morning for talking too much about me, and had VERY effectively demonstrated my light blobs to her (described later) not long before the Principal rang, so Mom wasn't saying ANYTHING to ANYBODY about me!] By the end of the day, the Principal had obtained enough information from my teachers, my bodyguards, grilling the nine boys, and other sources, to correctly decide that not all the possible culprits had been dealt with. So on the following Monday morning, all the 10th graders were assembled and again harangued on the zero tolerance to bullying policy. The unsuspended macho idiots, having heard all about what happened to the first nine and hearing that harangue, had very good reason to behave themselves for the rest of the school year. Having "very good reason" didn't stop some of them screwing up a week and a half later (what part of "macho idiots" don't you understand? Haha). I'll describe that in due course. When their suspension expired, seven of the original nine macho idiots - now somewhat less idiotic and considerably less macho - returned. Two of the parents had taken the Principal's advice that their sons should change schools (the Principal had been VERY angry, imagining how the local and state Boards of Education would have reacted had I been attacked by multiple students and several hospitalizations had resulted). On that Monday morning, the seven boys were sat down and given a preemptive reaming, to put them in the right frame of mind for their resumption of schooling.] ^ There wasn't much school time left, and I was well guarded, so no further events of any significance occurred. On the way to the cars, Julia and I met up with Ava, so I started telling them about the "Nine Macho Idiots Bullying Episode", especially Pete Sanchez's role it in. I treated the whole thing as unimportant, so the girls didn't get too worked up. Julia said, "Let's hope they all wise up." "Yes," I agreed, "let's hope so." By definition, idiots aren't all that good at wising up, but we could still "hope". In the car I praised Carol's maturity, telling the others of her confidently delivered lines at lunch: "EEK! You're a GUY! Why didn't you tell me, Mark?" "I'll go back to the others, I'm too distracting here. Seniors are no better than 8th grade boys: get them near a pair of tits and their brains stop working." "Now you know EXACTLY how I feel!" to my comment about being glad I wasn't another Anderson homosexual. That started a big praising session. I praised Carol, including for how good she looked today, telling her that "Thirteen out of thirteen senior boys agree with me." Julia agreed that Carol was both a lovely and beautiful person. But FAR more important - in both of their opinions - was Carol and Julia praising me. I had to praise Julia for making it all possible, which Carol agreed with. Julia assured both of us that it was only because of me. And around it went, with Donna adding her endorsements from time to time. It pretty much occupied the entire time required to get to Julia's place. In the last couple of minutes I remembered my getting all the girls up, to move them away from the senior boys. I told Julia about it, to give her a laugh. I was also quite proud that it'd worked so well. Julia said, "Yeah, I heard all about it. The girls enjoyed themselves." I should've known Julia would've found out about it. We dropped Julia off, telling her, "We'll see you after dinner," and we headed home. At home Carol and I settled down to talk. I like doing this, as it involves lots of horizontal cuddling on our bed. I told her, "Mom sometimes has trouble remembering that our situation is as unusual as it is. The morning after you, Donna and I slept together, you said Mom was unhappy with the sex sounds we made, even though it wasn't full-on sex with Donna. At the police station she started getting 'all motherly' on my ass. The usual, 'How could you be so stupid, ' etc., when it was obvious that it I was willing to stand up to the Eatons because of my special abilities, but she'd forgotten about those. -- "When Mom forgets about how unusual I am, she gets unhappy with whatever's going on, so I want to make it easier for her to remember that I'm special by showing her and the other three parents my light blobs. They're mostly useless, but they're CERTAINLY memorable if I do something impressive with them. Hopefully that alone will be enough to convince Mom to cut us a lot more slack, but when I'm talking to them afterward, I'll make sure I push the genetic button really hard about you and I having kids eventually. Donna I'll only mention theoretically, because she's got a LOT of growing up to do before I want to even starting thinking about that. The other button to press, I think, is how happy we are together. Moms love hearing that stuff. What do you think?" Carol was fairly relaxed about it. "I don't think it's a big deal. Dad's very cool about everything, and Mom will get there eventually. Donna's good nearly all the time, but can you imagine three kids all behaving like Donna when she's being childish? Mom's had years of that from us! That makes me happy that I'm starting the birth control pills tomorrow morning, haha." "Have you gone off the idea of having babies with me? Even a little bit off?" "I get panicky about being responsible for your dinner on Mondays, so can you imagine me with babies! I want us to have them just as much, but not ANY time soon! There's a huge amount of stuff I have to learn, and I don't learn at your speed. I can't imagine ever feeling ready, but other young women obviously manage, so I guess I will. Meanwhile I'm glad to be on the pill, and I'm glad Julia, Ava and I don't need rubbers from now on. That'll be better for you..." The conversation rambled, which was fine with me. I'll even talk about clothes shopping if I can do so while lying with Carol in my arms. That topic wouldn't be my first choice, but you know what I mean. I briefly described how I wanted to start my light blob demo to Dad, and Carol thought that was very funny. I asked her not to laugh at the time, and to quietly tell Julia not to laugh at the time too. After which I showed my appreciation for the much-admired top she was wearing. I had other stuff to do, including finalizing my BCC choices for Vanessa, which was nagging on my conscience, so Carol and I eventually got up to do the less enjoyable stuff. In due course Mom and Dad came home and we had dinner. They were curious about what we were going to be doing at the Williams', but I easily resisted their questions. I was looking forward to surprising Dad far too much to spoil it by telling them. Without doubt, I would enjoy myself far more if Dad didn't know. I did ask him, "You don't have any medical problems with your heart, do you Dad?" "No. Why?" "No particular reason. Just making sure you'll be able to handle a surprise all right. You are getting on a bit, you know?" I lived long enough to finish dinner, clean up, and then head to the Williams'. ------- Chapter 149: Dad Meets the "Killers" Friday, April 29, 2005 (Continued) At the Williams', I had the opportunity to briefly pull Julia and Carol away to another room, tell them what I was going to do, quell their laughter, then tell them what I wanted them to do. Then we all went up to Julia's bedroom, Donna and The Boys excepted. To the four parents I said, "I have a few reasons for showing you what I'm about to show you, but the most recent reason is to address Mom's concern at my ability to handle someone attacking me with a gun." Which immediately created a serious atmosphere in the room. -- "Prof isn't credible as a scary person, so Dad, you're going to have to play the role of the 'violently deranged homicidal idiot'. Do you think you can do that? Haha." Plus I didn't want to kill Prof by giving him a heart attack. I made Mom, Vanessa and Prof sit on the bed, leaning on the headboard with their feet down the bed. I got Carol and Julia to sit on either side of them, telling them, "Carol and Julia. When this starts, it's likely that one of the parents will try to get off the bed. Your job is to hold them back. That's important, okay. It could be dangerous if people are running around randomly, just like it would be dangerous in a real combat situation." Knowing that I was just setting up the parents with a good dollop of bullshit, my two girls had to struggle to avoid laughing. They managed to nod seriously. I placed Dad at the opposite end of the room, by the door. Julia's room had a vanity table with a wide-topped stool, very much like a piano stool. I took it over to near Dad, and stood it on its end a few feet in from the door's wall. I told Dad to pretend he was standing in a hallway, and the side of the stool represented the side of the doorway into the living room at the Eatons' house. Admittedly the pretend-one-sided-doorway was only about two feet tall, but we could extend it higher in our imaginations. While he was pretending things, I also gave Dad one of Julia's many hairbrushes to use as a pretend gun. (Why would someone need three different hairbrushes?) I got Dad to crouch behind the stool, as crouching would work better, with the 'gun' in his hand. "If it helps you get in character as a mean, nasty, angry man, pretend I've just crashed your car, haha." I was going to cheat horribly, by making blobs fly all around Dad. If he'd been standing in a real hallway, I wouldn't have had line of sight, but despite what I'd said in my explanation to the parents, the purpose of the demo wasn't anything to do with being a realistic combat simulation. As I walked back to my position at the other side of the room, leaving Dad crouching behind the stool, I put on a severe, concerned tone of voice, and addressed the adults on the bed, "No matter what happens, everyone else please stay EXACTLY where you are. Don't even THINK about getting off the bed. Apart from anything else, there's a mean, nasty, hairbrush-armed criminal on the loose." -- I got some chuckles, which I probably shouldn't have gone for, as I was trying to build a scary mood, so I added, "I mean what I say about not moving. Hang onto each other, and DON'T move." By now I was in position. I turned to face Dad, and started my demonstration. I was going to pretend that blobs were sentient, as that was far more scary and made all sorts of interesting ideas possible, so I held one hand palm up in front of me, and loudly called, "KILLER! COME!" A head-sized, bright red blob - red being the color Dad would hopefully associate with danger - appeared above my palm. I immediately pointed my other hand at Dad and yelled, "GET HIM!" The blob instantly flew rapidly across the room, straight at Dad's head. Dad fell on his ass and scrambled backward to get out of the way. I had the blob shoot through the area where Dad's head had been, then start to circle up and around in a cool-looking curve, ready to line up for another 'attack' on Dad. Meanwhile all the other parents had reacted, Mom especially, who was starting to get off the bed, presumably to run to Dad's defense. I have no idea what she thought she was going to do when she got there, but I yelled, "MOM! FREEZE! They're DANGEROUS!" I'd said "they're" even though there was only one as I thought that made the effect seem more believable, and also because there'd be more shortly. The blob made another swooping dive for Dad's head. Dad threw himself flat to avoid it. The blob flew back to the center of the room, and quickly split into two blobs, each about three-quarters of the original size. They separated and moved to be able to attack Dad from two directions. One of them darted in quickly, then darted back out again as Dad threw himself sideways and attempted to swing his fist at it. While Dad was distracted, the other blob charged in, apparently missing but scarily streaking right past Dad's eyes. Dad was more than enough freaked out by now; WAY more than enough actually. Plus the hairbrush was where I wanted it. Dad had dropped it right at the beginning, and I'd NP'd it sideways along the floor while everyone else was totally distracted. I held up both my hands palm up, and commanded the blobs, "KILLERS! RETURN!" They returned to me (as Killers go, they're very obedient ones). They were quickly hovering over my palms, and I commanded them, "Summon an Immobilizer!" They shot into the center of the room, high up near the ceiling, then they started orbiting in a circle about two feet in diameter, accelerating rapidly. Within a couple of seconds they were a blur. A small, dark green blob appeared about three feet below them, and rapidly grew in size. Soon it was the largest size I could create, about six feet in diameter. I called, "ENOUGH." The 'Killer' blobs instantly stopped. I held up my palms, and they both returned to hover above them. I instructed, "IMMOBILIZER, force that man," nodding toward Dad, "into the corner of the room, and hold him there. If he tries to escape, shock him unconscious." "Oh no!" from Mom. Dad didn't look too pleased either. The Immobilizer blob advanced on Dad. A six-foot diameter blob is DAMNED near impossible to dodge, especially when Killer blobs are hovering one on either side of it, to block any possible escape path. I called, "Dad, QUICKLY! Crouch into the corner of the room, then DO NOT MOVE!" The blobs were already herding him toward a corner, so he didn't have far to go. He followed my instructions to the letter. The blobs were at maximum brightness, but were still somewhat transparent, so we could see what Dad was doing. One red blob shot up, so it was directly above Dad's extremely fearful head. That blob moved a little, circling and bobbing slowly, seeming very alert. The large, green blob moved so that Dad was squeezed into the corner rather than risk touching the "Immobilizer". The last Killer blob flew toward the bed, to 'inspect' the people on it. It hovered above Julia's chest, about three feet away from her, then moved slowly sideways, 'looking' at everyone. The adults shrank back from it. After it had 'looked at' Carol, it flew to me, stopping a couple of feet in front of my face. I said, "Guard the bed. If anyone tries to get off, you know what to do." It nodded up and down a couple of times, then flew itself to above the center of the bed. NO ONE was going to move. I told everyone, "Provided no one moves, nothing bad will happen." Also even if they did move, but I didn't mention that. I let them experience their imprisonment for a few seconds, while I deliberately walked across the room to demonstrate that I had complete freedom. Dad's leg must've been getting uncomfortable, as he changed his position. The red blob above him dropped alarmingly and the green blob moved a little closer too. Mom shrieked a warning, Dad looked up, then froze rock solid. The red blob appeared to think about it, circled around a little, then raised itself back to its lookout position just below the ceiling. The green blob backed off a little too. The adults all breathed a sigh of relief. I reached the place in the room I wanted to be: near where I'd NP'd the hairbrush along the floor, and where I could also see Dad and the bed, one eye on each. I NP-flew the hairbrush up to about shoulder height, about three feet from me and pointing at Dad. They all saw the movement, and saw that it was pointed at Dad. I said, "If this was a real gun, I could be pulling the trigger now. Even if I was fifty feet away, I could be pulling the trigger with my ability. Any guy who comes after me with a pistol is quite likely going to end up looking down the barrel of his own gun. Perhaps fatally, if the situation demands it." #2: #1: #3: [Next time we had a chance we tested that. It wasn't easy, but I managed to hold a sandwich out of my mouth long enough to push an NP-fingertip into the butter. The impression was perfectly smooth, with no hint of a fingerprint. And as #4 pointed out, fingerprints are caused by the skin's oil. It was pretty unlikely that NP-fingertips produced oil.] Mom started saying something, so the red blob guarding the bed zoomed to be above her but lower than it had been. That shut her up! If only it was always that easy. I instructed the blob, "It's okay. Let her talk." It raised itself a little. Mom added doubtful to her look of extreme worry, but she said, "How much danger is Steven in?" I was about to end the demonstration anyway, so I used Mom's question by answering, "None whatsoever. None of you are in danger, or ever were. These things couldn't harm a fly. They're an optical illusion only." I canceled all the blobs, then corrected, "Maybe not 'illusion'. Optical 'effect' would be a better description." The parents were in too much shock to respond quickly, but Julia and Carol started laughing. They'd been barely able to hold it in before, so now they let loose. Their laughter and complete absence of blobs sped the parents' recoveries considerably. I said, "You can stand up, Dad. The ENTIRE thing was a fake. You were never in any danger, except maybe of wetting your pants. I'm sorry I scared you so much but Mom made a big deal about how stupid I was, and she needed to see that I have some unusual and highly effective ways of defending myself." I half-feared I'd be severely told off for scaring everybody so badly, so I was getting in a preemptive shifting of the blame. Dad asked, still fearfully, "They're not really aliens?" I laughed at the idea. #1: I said, "They were effectively an optical illusion. You could've stood up and walked right through them. You wouldn't even have felt anything. Stand up, Dad, and come sit with the others. I'll explain." I helped him to his feet, as he was a bit wobbly. I got them all to sit on the bed normally, fetched the stool so I could sit on it facing them, which immediately created two additional seats for my wives, one on each of my legs. With my arms around my girls, I started explaining blobs to the parents. "I create them myself. They are my creation and completely under my control. They're not aliens, demons or any other figment of humanity's collective imagination." I was referring to demons. Personally I've always thought aliens were far more likely than not. Virtually certain, in fact, given the immensity of the Universe. [[True many times over, as I later learned. There actually are several races of aliens who do look quite similar to the blobs I used on this day, as spheres are an energy-efficient shape for a formless (usually a cloud of particles) life. I find the coincidence amusing.]] When the parents had calmed down enough, I created a small blob in front of the girls. As my hands were full of girls - a highly satisfactory situation that needed no changing - I got the girls to wave their hands through the blob. This caused some concern among the parents, but before they could do anything about it, the girls had already waved several times. After a bit more encouragement, I got the parents doing the same thing. They started understanding my, "It's just light" comment. I added, "You're not frightened of walking through a flashlight beam are you? Or the main light in this room is on, so you're walking though light all the time." The comparisons weren't fair ones, and Prof was soon commenting on the difference, "But we're passing our hands through the SOURCE of the light. Lightbulbs get hot and have a physical presence, but there's none of that here." I wasn't going to talk about heat blobs, mainly because they'd just confuse the issue, so I simply said, "Yes, you're right. I'm creating the light out of nothing. I don't understand all the issues involved, but it's pure energy of a particular frequency and therefore color, so it doesn't need a filament, or a flame like a candle does. It's also related to my NP, although exactly how is unclear to me. I just know that I can create them in lots of different colors, sizes, and brightnesses. I can also fly them around, just like I can use NP to fly things around." I created a wide variety of new blobs, and had them fly around for a few seconds, then canceled all but one, which I had expand and shrink, change color, change luminosity. Then I stabilized it, and flew it through my and the girls' bodies. That shocked the parents again. It's one thing to wave your hands through something; it's a much scarier experience to see that something fly through a loved-one's body. I repeated, "Relax, it's just light." The girls helped by giggling. It's what girls do best; that and clothes shopping. Dad eventually got it. He said, "I could have stood up and walked through them any time I wanted?" "Sure. They're just light. Not even bright light. You're surrounded by light all the time, and it doesn't do you any harm. You can't even feel it." "I've never been so terrified IN MY LIFE! I thought I was a goner; and it was NOTHING the whole time. I can't believe how stupid I was!" "You weren't stupid. Every other adult was equally fooled. Personally I'm impressed you handled it so well. I was prepared to get rid of them the instant I thought I'd pushed you too far, but you didn't freak out as you could well have. Mom was just as scared as you were. When Mom tried to speak I shut her up just by moving the red blob - I call them 'light blobs', by the way - by moving it closer to her. You know how hard it is to shut Mom up, so she must've been as terrified of them as you were, haha. -- "Look, I know I scared you all a great deal. Perhaps I even scared you too much, but if I'd shown you these things in a harmless way and then described how I'd handle an attacker, you'd never believe me about how scary they can be. More to the point, MOM would never have believed me. Mom was getting thoughtlessly motherly on me, and she needed to see that I can defend myself a great deal better than a normal boy can. I had a fit, strong, grown man cowering in fear in the corner of the room without my needing to get within ten feet of him. And I just realized I missed the PERFECT opportunity to ask for an increase in my allowance! Damn, haha. -- "Dad was calm and collected when we started, and he trusted me because I'm his son. Imagine someone like Don who was already worked up and panicky. He would've TOTALLY freaked out. If Don had gotten hold of a gun, and dropped it like Dad did, then I would fetched it the way I did the hairbrush, so then he'd be defenseless and I'd have the gun. If he'd kept the gun, he probably would have shot all his bullets at the blobs, which would've been completely ineffective because he couldn't kill light, then I could knock him out the same way I did all the others. -- "There are other possible scenarios, like if Don had charged at one of the blobs. There were things I could have done then too. So I wasn't very concerned about Don having a gun. I was pleased he only had a knife, that was trivially easy to take care of, but even a gun wouldn't have been a big deal." [In case you're wondering what I would have done if Dad had charged at a blob. If I thought Dad was too emotional, I'd have canceled all the blobs and ended the demo. But if he looked relatively okay, I would've backed the green blob away to avoid contact, then had a red blob swoop through Dad's ankles at the same time as I ankle-tapped him. He would've thought the blob did it. While he was crashed on the floor I would have parked a blob on his head and NP-pressed the top of his skull, verbally warning him, "DON'T MOVE, DAD! These things eat people's brains!" Years of watching silly science fiction movies being put to good use. Personally, if I'd been Dad, red spheres were zooming around the room, one had tripped me up, and one was pressing on the top of my delicious skull, then I would've held very, very still. Maybe you're braver than me?] There were a few other issues that came up. Mom complained, "But they were intelligent." I created a large, green frog, and had it jump around the room while I said "Ribbit" a few times. Then I explained that they were just blobs that were moving in a way that SEEMED intelligent, but were really just something I was making them do to seem that way. I had a bit of fun adding, "I'll prove it to you Mom." I created a new blob, made it hover in front of me. I asked it, "Tell me blob, are you intelligent?" The blob 'shook its head' (moved from side to side). I said, "See Mom. Even it agrees it's not intelligent, haha." It nodded its agreement. My sense of humor was a bit much for Mom initially, but Prof had a good laugh. -- "Just because something looks like something, that doesn't mean it is. For example, my hand looks like a gun." I held it up, in the classic forefinger-extended, thumb-raised, other-fingers-closed shape. When they were watching, I 'shot' it three times, each time calling out "Bang" and moving my thumb momentarily forward. Three red 'bullets' streaked out, disappearing when they hit the opposite wall. -- "Those weren't real bullets, of course. They were just small blobs that I made you think could be bullets. Watch, and I'll shoot Prof. Before anyone could react too much, I shot Prof three times, having the bullets pass straight through his stomach and out the other side. That got their attention! To his credit Prof just laughed, because he understood by now. -- I added, "Can you imagine how Don would have reacted, had I 'shot' him like that? With slower 'bullets', to give him time to dive out of the way of them. I could even have the bullets circle around for a second attack." I gave them a brief demo to show them what I meant. "Don would've been freaking out even more. All these things at least buy me a useful chunk of time, or they could make Don run screaming from the house, or cower in fear, drop his gun, use up all his bullets, etc. I can't imagine how a guy could keep his mind on attacking me with all that stuff happening around him. And remember that I'm very good at fighting in a purely physical way, as I didn't have to use ANY of these tricks to take care of any of the Eatons." There were quite a few more questions, several of which I didn't know the answer to, and several I refused to answer. They'd learned enough, and were impressed enough, so giving them more information had no advantage that I could see. I told them as much, using somewhat different words. Vanessa had a good point, which I suspect she knew the answer to before she mentioned it. She commented, rather than questioned, "You wouldn't want to show your abilities to a guy, and then let him go afterward, would you." "No. But I'm unlikely to have to show him unless he's got a gun, so he's provided his own solution to that problem, hasn't he?" I was curious what Vanessa - the ethicist - would think of that. She just looked grim, then nodded silently. To help Mom and Dad get it, I looked around to find the hairbrush, NP'd it up to point at them, then said, "Bang, bang. You're dead." "Oh," x 3, from Mom, Dad and Carol. | Julia said, "Goody," so the ethicist's daughter seemed to have even less problem than her mother with it. I added, "It's not necessarily that simple, as he might've used up all the bullets shooting at the blobs, for example. Or there could be other people around, or other complications. If anything serious ever happens, I'll have to play it by ear. I just know that there are quite a few very unusual things that I can do, nearly all of which won't leave any forensic evidence, such as my fingerprints not being on the gun. If an armed thug attacked me, and letting him go could imperil me or especially my whole family, then I'm not going to be feeling very charitable toward him, am I?" -- I let them mull that over for a few seconds, before adding, "Fortunately all my problems so far have been caused by laughably stupid idiots, and they've been extremely easy to take care off. I told Mom and Dad this morning that I'm glad the Eatons attacked me. I'm actually VERY glad, because I only worked out most of what we've been discussing as a result of those attacks. I've learned a great deal about how to handle myself in one of these situations, and that could be extremely useful one day." #1: #2: I let the conversation ramble for a few minutes, then took control again. "I showed you all that because I wanted to give all of you, but especially Mom, a very clear - and colorful - demonstration of just how unusual I am. Have any of you heard of anyone who can do these things?" I created a few more blobs, and had them fly around, just in case they'd forgotten. There was a unanimous and very vocal negative response. I canceled all the blobs, then said, "I can think of one historic person that might have been able to." They all looked puzzled. After a couple of seconds I said, "Can you imagine what would happen if I walked into the Vatican like this?" I created my halo effect, poor though it was. They all got it immediately. I don't know whether the Bible says Jesus ever 'wore' a halo, but they made the connection anyway. [[You might be amused to know that the concept of halos was borrowed from the Egyptians before the birth of Jesus. The worship of Ra was a big deal at the time the Jews were kicked out of Egypt, and they took with them the image that those favored by the Sun God should be surrounded by a nimbus of light. Every time you see a Christian painting that features a halo, you're looking at a polytheistic heathen symbol. I find that rather amusing, especially because possession of a halo would be accepted by modern-day Christians as proof that someone was HUGELY divinely favored, if not fully divine, and I doubt very much that Christians would have Ra in mind. From a larger perspective, a GREAT deal of the bible isn't original, but was borrowed from a multitude of sources, many of which provably predated Jesus. The Christians would have you believe that the bible was imparted by God to mankind, but the reality is that it evolved (a doubly 'dirty' word) out of long-held human superstitions.]] The question I'd asked when I'd created the halo - about walking into the Vatican - was meant to be a rhetorical one. Really just an excuse to mention the word "Vatican", as without that reminder they might not have recognized my halo effect. Vanessa answered my question though, by saying, "That would be an EXCEPTIONALLY bad idea." I canceled the blobs then said, "Sure. I only said it to make you think 'Religion'. My fake halo is so poor I was worried that you wouldn't recognize it. I can't really see the Vatican providing me with nuns the way Julia provides me with schoolgirls, so I think I'll stay just where I am, thanks very much, haha." -- "The aliens that Dad was worried about, the 'bullets' from my hand-gun, the rather pathetic green frog, and the halo, are all just fake effects using the blobs of light. I just wanted to give you another example. If I'm ever attacked by a highly religious gunman, I might try it, haha. -- "I had a number of reasons for giving you all this demonstration. First to convince you all, and especially Mom, that I am FAR more capable of defending myself than you were aware. Mom started the usual 'How could you be so stupid' tirade in the middle of the police station. She was motivated by concern, but if she'd opened her mouth a bit wider and blurted out one of my secrets, we'd have a GREAT deal more to be concerned about that a few idiots. There was no need for Mom's tirade, as taking down those guys was trivially easy for me. Hopefully Mom and the rest of you will be a lot less worried if I get into fights again. That's much more likely than not considering how much envy there is of me among the boys at school. Many boys are idiots who think every problem can be fixed by beating someone up, so they're quite likely to try that on me. -- "My second reason for demonstrating blobs to you is more general than fighting. I want you all to realize that I can have very unusual ways of doing all sorts of things, not just fighting. If I do something in the future - fighting or otherwise - that you think is stupid, then it's entirely possible that it only looks stupid because you're not aware of what I can do. Or, again entirely possible, I might be stupid! I'm certainly not going to try to claim I'm never going to be stupid again. My point is that when something happens that looks like I've been stupid, no matter whether it's fighting or something else - DON'T blow your stack in public the way Mom did. There's FAR too much risk of one of you getting carried away and saying too much in the passion of the moment. Bite your tongue until you get me somewhere private, THEN ask me for an explanation. If I was truly stupid, blow your stack as much as you want in private. -- "Mom knows I'm aiming that statement mostly at her. I'm doing so fully aware that she's had a dozen years of catching me behaving very stupidly many, many times. It's only been very recently that I've started changing a lot - the last month or two really - so it would be unfair of me to expect Mom to instantly break what was a decade-long, entirely justified habit. The point of the colorful demonstration was to make it easier for you to remember, Mom, rather than a criticism. They are VERY memorable, aren't they?" I got some chuckling agreement from everyone, and a VERY emphatic, "I'm NEVER going to forget them, that's for sure!" from Dad. "Yeah. Sorry about that, Dad. I was a bit worried that it would be too much for you. Now you know why I asked about your heart at dinner." "You should have asked about my bladder. That was terrifying! Calling them Killer and Immobilizer was a dirty trick." "Haha. Yes, I rather liked that myself. All part of the mind-game of course, otherwise you might not have been scared of the pretty lights at all. It wouldn't have worked nearly as well if I'd called them 'Spotty' and 'Dotty', haha." Prof suggested, "When Mark's finished here, we can go downstairs and get you a whiskey, Steven." "That'd go down very well, Prof. You're driving home tonight, Fely. I feel the need for two or three strong whiskeys! Phew. Next time PLEASE pick someone else for your demonstrations, Mark. That really was the most frightening thing I've ever experienced." "Sorry about that, Dad. I was worried..." "Don't worry about it. It may have aged me five years and my hair may turn white, but you made your point very, very well. A few whiskeys will see me right. If I'm ever so stupid as to doubt you in the future, just sic another Killer onto me, haha." I said, "There's one last subject I want to get into. I was just starting when I said that no one else has ever been able to do what I can do. To say that I am 'very unique' is a redundant expression, but I'll go so far as to say that I'm EXTRAORDINARILY unique. Seriously, I don't think anyone, in the tens of thousands of years that humans have existed, has ever had my abilities. It would be rather a pity for humanity if I lived for a few decades then died of old age, and that was the end of it. That's why it's so important that Carol and I are together, and that we have children. Mom - because she's been so close to us for so many years - keeps forgetting that I'm so unusual, and that Carol's and my circumstances are so unique. -- "If my abilities are genetic, our children may have them even stronger, which is an incredible thought! Or maybe they'd have them at the same level of ability as me, or maybe not at all; but it's essential to find out. If it's genetic my sperm samples might do the job, but what if the babies' abilities need to be triggered in some way and only I can do that by being around them? Or what if it's not genetic at all, but my abilities can somehow be mentally transferred to a new baby when I conceive it? I'm just taking wild guesses, of course," more like bullshitting based on years of reading silly fantasy novels, "but the guesses are no wilder than the reality we've already got. -- "Donna slept with Carol and me a few nights ago, and we did some sexy things. Donna didn't do much, but she did watch Carol and me make love. The next morning Mom was out of sorts somewhat. Which would certainly have been understandable if we'd been normal kids, to put it mildly, but it's not unreasonable given what we've got ahead of us. I'll even confidently claim that it's a GOOD thing that the Anderson kids feel that way, because it could be very sad for humanity if we had zero sexual interest for each other. -- "More generally, even with just Carol and me, Mom occasionally forgets how important it is that we're together. Hopefully the colorful demonstration will have made it easier for Mom to remember the big picture, and be happy that Carol and I are in a relationship. Especially because we're so GOOD together. Not only good for humanity, but good for each other. Carol and I are VERY happy together. I can't imagine that it's possible for me to feel any happier, and I know Carol feels the same way. As far as I'm concerned, other than some stupid society prejudices that we have to be careful not to trigger, everything about Carol's and my relationship is WONDERFUL, and Mom should think that way too. Have I convinced you, or do I have to summon more Killer blobs?" I did anyway, just to remind them while they were thinking of their answer. Carol spoke up and gave a heartfelt endorsement for how wonderful our relationship was for her. It was effectively just a repeat of what I'd said, but a more feminine version of it, and therefore even more effective on Mom. All the adults had been reacting positively to the last few minutes of my and Carol's talk. Prof and Vanessa had long been convinced that Carol and I should be together, and were now doubly so. Dad had been happy enough before, and had to be even less likely of making a fuss now. Mom was the only potential killjoy. She certainly understood the lesson now, and even agreed with it, which I'd been pretty sure she would because she's a smart person. Not in Prof's or Vanessa's league, but still way smarter than me. She agreed with me NOW, the question being whether she'd be able to override her parenting instincts the next time we were in a police station or hospital, or future times her children got sexy together, although there wasn't any chance of that happening with Donna again for quite a while. There wasn't any point in lecturing any more, so instead I acted on a fun little idea I'd had. I said, "Honestly Dad, I don't know why you were scared of them. Look at this." I leaned toward one of the red blobs, and suddenly said, "Boo!" It streaked across the room, and tried to hide behind the corner of Julia's vanity table. Bobbing down so only the top part of it could be seen, as it if were peeking over the top. "They're chickens, Dad." Dad laughed, then asked, "You move them with your mind, right? Which makes them look like they're doing real things." I assumed Dad meant they looked sentient. I answered, "Yeah, with my mind. Just like your two hands can have a conversation with each other." I got my two hands to 'talk' to each other (fingers extended and flat on the top, thumb underneath, open and close them like a mouth talking). "They look like they're smart, but they're just hands, of course." "I mean, how can you get the blobs to move? How do you move them with your mind?" The conversation was wandering away from the reasons for having it, but that was done as well as it could be, so I let the conversation wander, answering that and later questions where I could. Dad's "What other abilities do you think you'll discover?" required some diplomacy to answer. Mom asked, "What else can you do? That you can tell us about, I mean." I thought for a second, then said, "Actually, I do have one ability that I've never told anyone about, that is FAR more useful than flying pretty lights around a room." I had everyone's undivided attention, so I proceeded, "Sometimes people are sitting around talking far too much, and dinner is not being prepared, so I do this..." I made my belly rumble quite loudly. Stopping and restarting it a few times, accompanied by much laughter. "No, no. Don't laugh! This is serious. I've NEVER had anyone attack me with a gun, but my dinner has been held up by needless talk several times. This is an EXCELLENT ability, and it's proved its worth repeatedly." -- When the chuckles finished, I added, "If that doesn't convince you that I should have lots a babies with Carol, I don't know what will!" -- When those chuckles had died away, I said, "To be SLIGHTLY more serious. Mom, and the rest of you too, I believe I should minimize how much information I give you about me. There's nothing that any of you can do with the information, so it's useless to give it to you, and the more you know, the greater the risk of an accidental slip of the tongue. I'm not going to be rabidly secretive - you already know most of my abilities - but there ARE a few minor secrets still tucked away. I'm intending to keep them secret even though they're no big deal, just because there's simply no benefit in divulging them. I've just realized that I should have kept my belly rumble secret too, as it isn't going to work NEARLY as well in the future. Damn, that was a seriously bad error of judgment! Anyway, in answer to your question, Mom: from time to time I might show you new stuff - presuming there's a reason to do so - but my general inclination is to show you very little. I hope that's okay with all of you, because it'd be hard to get me to change my mind about that." Especially the civilization destroying BIG secret! Vanessa very quickly and firmly agreed, followed by the others. We chatted for another couple of minutes, then I had an idea just as Mom was saying, "Shall we go downstairs now, and get Steven his whiskeys?" I said, "Hang on, Mom. I've just thought of something I want to do. It'll only take a few seconds. Stay where you are, and let me turn the lights off, as this'll be better in the dark." I flicked the lights off using NP, and there were some small gasps in the sudden darkness. Dad asked, "How did you do that, Mark?" "The same way I fly things around, Dad. I can push things from a distance, so pushing a light switch is extremely easy. It's far easier than flying things, and very convenient when I'm too lazy to get up and cross the room." While I'd been answering Dad, my other two active minds had worked out the details of what we'd be doing. They sent the mind that had been busy speaking a mental image so we could coordinate our activities, then we created all the blobs. It would have been good to practice in a mirror, but I was fairly sure this would work well enough. I have an excellent awareness of where my body is these days - probably a perfect awareness by now - so it was easy to create two eyeball-sized red blobs centered just behind my eyeballs so they 'leaked' red light out. Two green blobs in my nostrils for the grossness factor, two yellow-green balls in the back of my mouth and a small distance down my throat just to look weird, and I was particularly proud of two purple Devil's horns on the top of my head, each of three balls arranged as a pyramid, overlapping highly to give their sides a better shape. That made twelve blobs, my maximum without risking the on-duty mind decentering. I imagined that I looked delightfully devilish. The sudden effect, in the darkness, caused several gasps of surprise, and then considerable laughter. Julia said, "Walk into the Vatican looking like THAT, and ask for some young, virgin nuns too. That'd get a reaction all right, haha." "If I wanted to really confuse them, I could alternate between this and the fake halo every few seconds. That'd really get their vestments in a twist, haha." They'd seen enough, so I canceled all the special effects, then created a couple of big, bright blobs to light the room. I pointed casually at the blobs, explaining, "It's cheaper than burning the Williams' electricity. Shall we go downstairs and get Dad his medicinal whiskey now?" On the way out of the room, Mom said to me, "I'm sorry, Mark. I'll try to do better." "Thanks Mom. I know your struggle is only because you've done so much of my earlier parenting. I'll try to help by not doing truly stupid things so often." "Haha. It's been a while since you've done anything stupid." "I must be due for a real doozie then!" It was bad statistical methodology, but a reasonable thing to say. ------- Chapter 150: The Business Takes a Small Step Forward Friday, April 29, 2005 (Continued) We all headed for the Guys' Room, joining Donna and The Boys. Prof made Dad a big, strong whiskey. Dad asked, "Are you going to join me, Prof?" "I've got to make an important phone call for Mark's business soon so I want to keep my wits about me. If you let me borrow Mark, we could do that now, then come back and join you?" "Sure." Vanessa said, "I need to be involved too, so if you'll excuse me too." Julia said, "Can I listen in too please?" Carol also stirred, and looked interested. Probably waiting to hear what answer Julia received. Prof said, "I think we'd better keep the numbers to a minimum. I don't want to be distracted, and no one else should talk with me during this call anyway." "Okay," conceded Julia. Carol gave up too. Prof, Vanessa and I walked down the hall to Prof's study, where Prof made the call. It took quite a while, because Prof had to work his way up the hierarchy, until he got to "The Man": Ted Binion. Prof described what he wanted to do (to condense it: "I desperately need a million, but only have a hundred thou. I'll bet half of what I have left on a single roulette number until I win a million or have nothing left. Will you take that action, the way your advertising says?"), and Ted immediately agreed. [I couldn't hear, but Prof later told me Ted had said, "Sure, we're happy to." They were VERY anticlimactic words for such a hugely important deal for us.] There were some details Prof wanted to discuss. For example, Prof told Ted that he wanted to use a false name because anonymity was an issue. Prof didn't mind Ted knowing his real name, but he wanted the number of people who knew it kept to a minimum. Apparently Ted explained something to do with the number of people who had to know, but Prof waved it off, saying, "Whatever you need to do is fine with me, but I don't want my real name getting out in public. I also want to wear a hat and glasses at the time." There was some back and forth about Prof's wanting to wear a disguise, which Prof settled with, "I want to be confidential IN PUBLIC. In private is not an issue. If you want me to go into a private room and remove my disguise, then that's fine. My only concern is publicity. It would cause me a great deal of difficulty with my family if this got out, whether I win or lose. I've read stories about people who have come to your casino like I have to, and it seems their real names are used in those stories. I know you need to know my real name, but I want to use a fake name in any publicity you do about this afterward, with all your floor staff, and everywhere else my real name isn't essential. Is that all right?" It was. Prof checked that he could turn up to play Tuesday late afternoon or early evening. That was okay too. Getting the hundred thousand dollars down to Vegas was discussed and resolved. Prof would wire it, Ted would transfer Prof to the person who could provide the details at the end of the call. I heard Prof turn down the offer of a limousine from the airport. Pity, as I would've enjoyed a ride in a limo, like I was an important person, or something. Ted explained where Prof should go when he arrived at the casino, and the next thing I knew, Prof was saying "Thanks, see you Tuesday." Moments later Prof was frantically shushing me, then writing down the account details for where he had to wire the money. Then he hung up and said, "NOW you can celebrate, but this room isn't soundproof so be careful what you say." My premature celebrating, the subsequent shushing, and the volume restriction, kind of spoiled the moment. I was much more restrained on my second attempt, but still smiled from ear to ear. Prof said, "Don't whoop it up in front of your family. This is supposed to be a business, and businesses are boring. Follow my lead, okay?" The call had taken about thirty minutes, and we were all conscious of that, so we quickly headed back to the Guys' Room, me in the rear, following their lead. In the Guys' Room, Prof immediately said, "Sorry we took so long. Business calls can be a drag. It went well though." Julia excitedly exclaimed, "It DID?" In a monotone voice I droned, "Sure. I'll tell you more about it later." Which is what we always say when we mean "Not in front of these people." Julia answered, "Oh. Good." Carol was puzzled by the subdued reaction to a call that "went well", so she asked, "We're going to get the mansion?" Vanessa answered, "We are one step closer to it. There are several more steps yet, but we're getting closer." "Oh. Good, I guess." "Yes, it is good, sweetie. Businesses don't succeed overnight, so you shouldn't expect a miracle. Just a succession of small, forward steps." "Okay." Prof said, "There are a couple of details I need to mention to you. The first is that I'll need Mark on Tuesday next week, for virtually the whole day and into the evening probably. He'll have to skip school, so we can fly down to Los Angeles." Mom checked, "LA?" "Yes. There's a bit of traveling around once we're there, but we start in LA. It'll just be Mark and me going, and I hope that's okay with you?" "Sure. Are you going to tell us what you'll be doing there?" "Just boring paperwork, actually. Setting up a bank account, mail service, and things like that. But my answer to your real question, is that if you want to know what Mark's business is, then you should ask Mark." Mom looked at me, and before she could bother, I shook my head, saying, "Sorry Mom. If it succeeds, you'll get to spend the profits afterward. I think that'll be 'compensation' enough, haha. Seriously, this is one of those 'the fewer people who know the better' situations." With Mom's attitude to gambling, ESPECIALLY in this case! Prof said, "Tuesday will be the first trip. There will probably be others after that on. I hope so anyway. We won't know about the timing for those until after Tuesday's visit. We'll also need your and Mark's investments transferred into my account on Monday morning. In the morning and as cleared funds, because I need to wire it out on Monday afternoon." "All of it?" That was only $5,000 from Mom and Dad, but I knew Mom was thinking of the $50,000. To make it easier on her, and without saying the actual amounts in front of Donna, I said, "90% of it is mine, Mom, and I'm perfectly happy to transfer my share over. It is needed, exactly as Prof said." "Oh, okay then. Monday morning?" Prof answered, "Yes please." They discussed some of the technical banking details. That's even more boring than business normally is, so I'll leave that out. #4: #2: #4: #2: #4: #2: Prof said, "I think I'll have that whiskey now. To celebrate our small step forward." Dad - who sounded and looked like he'd had a few while we were on the phone - said, "I'll join you." Mom gave him a look. Actually, "The Look." Dad argued with The Look, something no man in his right mind would normally ever do, "You did see what I went through upstairs, didn't you? Let's see how you do when it's your turn for something like that. It's a Friday night, Fely, I can sleep in tomorrow morning, and I'm going to have one - or even two - more with Prof. I'm not badly stressed, but there's no reason not to unwind either. Unwinding would be good." "I'm sorry. Upstairs was extreme, wasn't it?" "If I hadn't seen that Mark was in charge of them, I would have shit myself." He was serious too. Prof interrupted, "Do you want something soft, Felicity? Or a glass of wine? You could have something heavier if you want, because Mark can drive you home." "I'll have a glass of white wine please." "Me too," agreed Vanessa. I said, "I'll have the hard stuff too: Ginger Ale on the rocks please, bartender! I feel like celebrating." A couple of minutes later, Andrew said, "I'm intrigued by what had Steven so scared he would've shit himself. Any chance of getting an explanation?" Vanessa said, "You can ask Mark. It's up to him." Andrew looked at me. I answered, "I'm almost tempted to give you a DEMONSTRATION, but you're wearing nice pants." The parents laughed. Andrew guessed, "I don't think I'd enjoy that, would I?" Prof said, "I'd probably have to send Robert out for more whiskey, haha." I said, "Let me show you something else though. Pull a hair out of your head, and put a couple of knots in it so you know it's unique and so you can recognize it easily." I'd shown "Hide the Hair" to Mom and Dad in their bedroom to relieve the tension after telling Mom off the first time for her police station tirade, but no one else had seen it, so I got everyone who was interested - which turned out to be everyone - to gather around. A couple of minutes later they were telling each other how impressed they were by my speed (at transferring the hair from my left to my right hands). They were even more impressed when I transferred it from my right hand to under my left shoe. Julia and Carol very quickly worked out what I was doing, because they'd seen me flying things around many times, such as getting rid of old and fetching new rubbers. Prof was right behind them in realizing how I was doing it, closely followed by Vanessa. The Boys and Donna were stumped, much to their frustration. The Boys were particularly annoyed by their inability to work it out, especially when it was obvious that their parents knew how I was doing it. The Boys were extra frustrated because they didn't know that their parents had the advantage of prior knowledge about my NP ability. Donna also wanted very much to know how I was doing it, and she's not the most patient of people, so she didn't appreciate my, "I'm sorry Donna. A good magician doesn't divulge his tricks." "Argh!" Donna's lack of self-control wasn't something I was going to pander to these days, so I ignored her frustration. Because Andrew had suffered the rejection of having his inquiry about what had happened upstairs turned down, not to mention the pain of pulling a hair out of his head, I gave him the pleasure of discovering the hair tucked into Carol's bra. Andrew's no dummy. After retrieving it, and holding it up to look at carefully to confirm it was the right hair, he said, "Would anyone believe me if I said it wasn't the right hair, and that I should keep searching Carol's bra?" We all believed he was amusingly hopeful, but nothing else. Robert said, "This would be a good thing to do next time Sophia or Ashley are around. It'd also give us another chance to see if we can work out how the heck Mark's doing it!" Which reminded me of something I'd forgotten (which are the best things to be reminded of). I said, "Dad, remember this morning you said I'd be a good stage magician, and I told you I'd remind you of it?" "Yeah." "Imagine what I could do with what I showed you upstairs." I don't know what ideas they each had, but there was lots of laughing, then pausing to imagine something else, then more laughing. Even several minutes later, one of the parents would suddenly burst out laughing, then apologize by saying, "Sorry, I just thought of something else for Mark's magic act." We chatted a while long, then my parents decided it was time for them to head home. Carol said, "Is it okay if I stay the night here please?" Carol was asking just as a formality, but got permission easier than she expected when Dad emphatically said, "I am NOT going to say 'No' to Mark about that! Who knows what he'd dream up to do to me. Haha. Here're the keys Fely. Have fun kids. Come on Donna." At the point of departure, Dad shook my hand, saying, "That was VERY impressive, Mark. Of course you know that already, but I don't mind telling you again. I can't say I enjoyed it - I did NOT enjoy it, that's for sure! - but it was one hell of an experience. I'm ALMOST glad I was on the receiving end. Very well done. Amazing AND smart." Dad slapped me on the back in congratulations, then made his way to the car. Whiskey must loosen his tongue. He'll talk about "things" happily, but he's not normally so loquacious about feelings. Mom repeated her assurance that she'd try to do better. Donna tried, "I wish I knew what everyone is talking about?" but she didn't suddenly receive the answers she wanted, so she had to get into the car too. As soon as the front door was closed Julia asked, "Money making on Tuesday?" "The first visit, yes. One point seven five should be doable on Tuesday, I hope. We're getting a shot at it anyway." I was choosing my words carefully, as The Boys were around somewhere. "Let's go upstairs to celebrate!" "EXCELLENT idea!" The three of us ran upstairs. It was too early to be counting 1.75 million chickens before they crossed the bridge, but we didn't let that diminish our celebrating. And if you think Carol's period excluded her from participating, you underestimate the imaginations and motivations of three sex-crazed teenagers. Even after we'd wound down somewhat, it was still too early to go to sleep. Julia said, "Good, I need to tell you about my conversation with Chloe." Despite my just having a considerable amount of very enjoyable sex, I was still VERY interested in hearing about Chloe (guys are very consistent people). "Goody. I've been looking forward to hearing about this. We're getting close, aren't we?" "Yes WE are. My guess is you'll have Chloe in this bed on Wednesday or Thursday next week." "Oh, that long. I thought it'd be sooner than that." "You poor guy. I almost feel sorry for you, haha. We could do it much faster, even tomorrow if we wanted, but delaying bedding her for a few more days will work out better. Let me explain what happened when I talked to her, because it didn't go as I expected." "Okay. Explain away. I'm all ears." Carol said, "I'm pretty sure that's not an ear poking me in the butt, haha." I rearranged my non-ear so it was poking Carol more effectively, then signaled Julia to continue. "My talk took a lot longer than I expected because Chloe kept digressing, and later on I had a couple of good ideas which took me quite a while to make the best use of. I wanted to keep the conversation focused on Chloe and you, but right from the start she kept raising issues that concerned her, so I had to address them. She was 'confused' - her word - about Ava and me being involved with you as well, which was her polite way of asking why she couldn't have you all to herself. -- "Then she digressed even further, into worrying about Ava and me having sex together, whether she'd have to have sex with girls, and your telling her that you'd be in charge of when you and her had sex. I used all her fears as evidence of her still not trusting you. I beat her up quite badly about that, especially as she's very sensitive to the trust issue now. It's been central to her life for years, and she was putting all the blame for it on boys. Now she's realizing that a great deal of the reason for that mistrust lies within her, which is a great start for getting her to change. -- "She'll be a nuisance if she remains so prissy, and I know you'd enjoy her more if she was bisexual, so I told her that you know about girls having sex with other girls better than the girls do themselves. I didn't say you'd tell her to have sex with girls, merely that you'd know better than her whether she should do it or not. I even said I thought it sounded like she shouldn't, but that you'd let her know later. She fell for it, but not with total acceptance. I've got some ideas for how to encourage her more, which I'll come back to after I've finished telling you about yesterday's conversation." I made a mental note to remind Julia to do so, in case she forgot. This is a topic that I'm VERY interested in. NOT, I hasten to add, just because I'm a pervert who enjoys seeing girl-on-girl sex. But also (even mainly, I insist) for everyone's mutual enjoyment. It's great that I can cuddle in bed with two or more girls, and if things start happening, having everyone cool with everything makes it a wonderful experience. Having Chloe get all negative - whether condemning, nervous, or whatever - would upset the mood for everyone. It'd be much better if she was educated into being enthusiastic. Julia continued, "I did such a good job of ripping into Chloe, that she wondered about getting professional counseling. I had to put her off that idea! What a nuisance that'd be, haha. I eventually got back to my intended topic, about how I would try to convince you to tell Chloe your secret. I told her all the points that we planned. Carol, I know I never got around to telling you the plan in detail, but that doesn't matter much because I ended up discarding that plan. Just as I was finishing with Chloe, I had a MUCH better idea. -- "At the start of my conversation with Chloe, she'd brought up four things she was concerned about: your abnormally large numbers of girlfriends, her having sex with you being at your choosing, girl-on-girl sex, and something else I've forgotten for the moment. I had turned her concerns around and used them to attack her about her failure to trust you, which was unfair of me because it was reasonable for her to ask me about her concerns. The new idea I had was to tell her that if I'd spotted her being so distrustful so often, then genius Mark must spot her being distrustful toward him over and over again. I did a BIG rant about how incredibly wonderful Mark is to volunteer to accept months of pain from Chloe in order to selflessly help her. I went on and on about how wonderful our love is, especially how incredible Mark is, and how dedicated Carol, Ava and I are to loving and supporting Mark and each other. I laid it on very thick and I blew Chloe's socks off. I'm regretting overdoing it now because we want her to be able to find herself another guy later, but I may have set too high a standard for what love is. She's so emotionally wide open and vulnerable about love that her eagerness encouraged me too much. Anyway, my new idea was to pretend to lose my cool with her over how much her distrust is hurting Mark. I went on and on about Mark being far too generous, giving, self-sacrificing etc., for accepting so much pain from her. By the time I'd finished, she thought you could walk on water, Mark, haha." -- "I told her that I was absolutely going to try my hardest to talk you out of sacrificing yourself so much for her benefit. I blamed everything on my leaving it to you and Chloe to manage your relationship. I claimed that Chloe's lack of experience and your selfless generosity resulted in a far too slow, painful experience, and that I was taking control now. I got Chloe to agree to do whatever I tell her to do from now on, so I can push her into your bed, get her fucked, and then pointed in the right direction to overcome her foolish breast paranoia. I told her I was going to have a BIG argument with you tonight about your being so self-sacrificing, and that I'd try to get you to be willing to take her immediately, maybe even tomorrow. So she'll be at home now, anxiously waiting to hear the result of my argument with you. Are there any questions?" There were quite a few questions, because there was a lot Carol and I hadn't understood. The explanation hadn't been up to Julia's normal standard, maybe because she was distracted by other recent events. We'd also interrupted it midway to call Ava, and spend a while chatting to her. Julia, Carol and I all talked to Ava, not revealing that we were in bed together. Ava said she'd see me at the Athletic Club tomorrow morning, and that she and her parents were going to go up to Salem to watch my soccer game in the afternoon, which I was pleased about. Impressing her parents was a good idea. Ava also asked me, "At the Club, can I act like you're my boyfriend?" "Of course. Not so much that we get arrested for committing an indecent act in public, but anything short of that is very fine with me, haha. Why would you think it wouldn't be?" It turned out she was feeling a little insecure. The best reassurance I could think of for over the phone was, "Ava, sweetie, I'm looking forward to when you and I are living in the same house. Julia's looking forward to that too. I don't have any other girlfriends that I'm thinking of doing that with. Julia wants Carol with us too, so you and I will have a lot of quality time together." The last would seem true from Ava's perspective, as she believed that Julia and Carol would spend half their time with each other, leaving me free for Ava. I added, "I don't think Julia's coming to the Club or my soccer game tomorrow. Let me check ... No, she's got other things to do. You'll have me all to yourself. You can be my girlfriend to your heart's content." After the call, we discussed Ava briefly. One comment of mine was, "So far there's been no sign that Ava has blabbed about my marathon time. I expect that if she has, or she does, it'll come out at the running club tomorrow morning, but fingers crossed she keeps her word. It'd be great to be able to tell her about Carol and me." Carol agreed, "I'll say! I've been having fun thinking how we'd do that." I asked, and was amused that Carol had a very nice little plan already prepared. It was only a "little" plan; not a full-fledged, multi-stage monster like most of Julia's plans are, but it would still be fun. Julia liked it too, laughing, then adding, "We can build it up even more than that, by adding individual stages that you can talk with Ava about. You can even get Ava to talk with me and Mark about the issue too. We could make it last a week or two, and have a lot of fun with it. We can talk about that later, when Mark thinks it's time to open up to Ava." Julia was hijacking Carol's plan, which would've upset me if Carol hadn't been so obviously happy to hear Julia's comments. I still made a mental note to ask Julia to restrain herself when the time came to finalize the plan. I liked the idea of Carol having the pleasure of being in charge for once. We got back to discussing Chloe (my saying, "Let's go back to discussing Chloe," might've had something to do with that). After some more talking, Carol and I were satisfied that we understood that situation well. Julia then explained what we'd be doing next. It was a good plan, even though it was VERY frustrating having to wait several more days knowing that Julia could tell Chloe to jump into my bed right now. Although that required Chloe not to have changed her attitude since her talk with Julia, something a frightened virgin could easily do, requiring Julia to straighten her out again. We had a little fun with one aspect. Julia said, "I should try to reduce the number of outright lies I tell on your behalf, Mark. I told Chloe I'd be arguing with you tonight, so we should have an argument. So here goes, 'Mark, you should NOT wait a year for Chloe.'" "Umm, 'Yes I should'?" I looked at Julia, to make sure I had understood her properly. She smiled at me, saying, "No! I insist. You should not. {Giggle}." "Okay. I give up. You've out-argued me, haha." "Good," declared Julia. "Now I'll be telling the truth, haha. Let me write the text message for Chloe." Julia wrote her message, then showed it to me: "It was quicker than I thought. Succeeded mostly. Mark will tell secret soon. I sleep now." I laughed at the first sentence. I laughed again after Julia said, "I won't send it now. I'll leave it ready, so when you wake up to study you can hit 'Send'. Okay? That'll be about 2am, won't it?" "You're evil, Julia! Yes, about 2:00, probably 2:30 if we chat a bit longer." "Good. See I also didn't lie when I wrote 'I sleep now', haha. 2:00 or 2:30 would be perfect timing. It'll give her the idea that I had a very hard night arguing with you. She'll appreciate me all the more. Have we finished? It's been quite a day and I'm tired." I was APPALLED by Julia's thoughtlessness! "Julia, you haven't explained your plan for getting Chloe to have sex with girls?" "Oh yeah. This is what I had in mind. When I was talking to Chloe yesterday..." Julia described her idea. It wasn't a complete plan, but it was a very good step along the way. Amusing too. I won't describe it yet, because you'll enjoy it more if... (you know how that goes, haha. I understand why Julia enjoys saying that so often, because it really is a lot of fun). Julia didn't seem as enthusiastic as I thought she should be at the idea of her having sex with Chloe, so I asked her about it. Julia said, "I don't have any sexual attraction for her. Obviously I can see that she's good looking, but I'm not emotionally attracted to her. I'm not repulsed either, Mark, so don't look so worried. Carol was very different for me, because I knew you were very emotional about her. Ava was also different, because I knew right from the start that she'd be very useful to me and I loved the way she looked up to you so much. I'm less involved with Chloe because she's mainly just a game for you, and there's quite a lot of annoying negativity involved with her at the moment. If she ever gets to the stage where she's comfortable enough with all of us being sexual together, and she starts to contribute, then I'm sure I'll warm to her." "Oh. That's a pity." "It's not a pity, Mark. No one will miss out on anything, least of all me. I get all the loving I need from you and Carol. If I want some good, fun sex, then Ava's a very good choice. Chloe will be concentrating on you initially, and she's sufficiently non-bisexual that you shouldn't push her toward girls for a while. Let her get comfortable and secure first. Then when it's time to start doing something about that, my feelings might well have changed, especially if she's doing a good job of making you happy. It's truly not a problem, Mark." "Ahh, okay. If you say so. I still think it's a pity though." "Haha. If I thought I was in danger of missing out, I'd manipulate her into making sure I didn't. I'm already getting everything I want, and I'm very happy about that. I don't have the time or energy for any more sex anyway. That'd be like wanting FOUR helpings of roast chicken at dinner. That'd be foolish gluttony, wouldn't it?" Julia was well aware that I thought four helpings of roast chicken was about the perfect number. "I CERTAINLY agree that YOU shouldn't have four helpings of roast chicken. Okay, I'll accept your assurances, even though..." Julia finished for me, " ... you think it's a pity. Yes, I got that. The main thing Chloe's got going for her - that differentiates her from all the other girls - is the size of her breasts. If breasts were important to me, I'd be more than satisfied by Carol's. But even lesbian girls aren't as attracted to girls' breasts as much as every male on the planet seems to be. Let's just wait and see how Chloe works out, and what she's like once she stops her silliness. After a couple of sessions with you, she could turn into an entirely different person and I'll see what I think of her then." #1: <"Entirely different person", but with the same breasts I hope!> "Okay. Out of curiosity, how do you know lesbian girls aren't attracted to breasts? It seems unlikely that you've asked them about that." "I don't need to ask them; it's obvious." #1: #3: #1: #2: #1: #3: We chatted, kissed and cuddled a bit more, then it was time for sleep. If it hadn't been for my ability to go to sleep instantly, I would have stayed awake for ages thinking about our trip to Vegas in just four days, with perhaps a few diversions to think about Chloe's breasts. I'd LOVE to see her sitting on my cock and... After a few more minutes, I ordered myself to sleep. ------- Chapter 151: Chloe Learns "The Secret"; Part One Saturday, April 30, 2005 I woke at about 2:45am, climbed over Julia, sent Chloe's text message, then - after some fooling around to work out how because I'm not very technologically adept - I turned Julia's phone off. I was looking forward to finding out whether Chloe had stayed up waiting for that text. After my first breakfast, I had a nice, long, highly productive study session. My most productive session yet, even with the time I took off to finalize my BCC electives for Vanessa. That didn't take long as I mostly accepted her recommendations. I'll take on a guy armed with a gun, but I'm not brave enough to disagree with Vanessa! Not without good reason, and I didn't have a good reason to disagree with her ideas about these courses. I ended up selecting the following, in descending order of Vanessa's priority: "Ethics", "Ethics and Power". (These were the two courses that Vanessa gave three ticks to.) "Public Speaking", "Interpersonal Communication". (Two ticks each.) "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology", "Science and Religion", "Human Sexuality". (One tick each, and I swear the last course truly was Vanessa's recommendation.) These were my personal choices: "Systems Thinking and Practice", "World History I: Ancient Civilizations". The next two were effectively compulsory. I hoped one look at my body would get them credited. [No such luck, as they had too much book learning.] Lifetime Fitness for Health, Lifetime Fitness: Running I'd tried hard to find a course that provided any leadership material, but apparently leadership is not considered important, because among the hundreds of BCC courses OSU offers, there was NOTHING about leadership! I was very unimpressed by that, because if there's one thing I'm learning from Julia - other than how to seduce girls - it's the importance of leadership. The changes she has made to my life by the way she is "leading" me and many girls are ASTONISHING! The electives totaled three credits over what I needed, in case one course was unavailable. I hoped it was Human Sexuality, as I could easily imagine all the loser guys who would sign up for that! If all the courses were available and I had to skip one of them, that'd be it. I reached a good stopping point in my studying a few minutes before Julia would normally come to see me, so I decided to stop early and go see the girls. They were lying in bed facing each other, very close together and with their arms apparently over each other's waists. Both were awake and I presumed had been talking (they'd stopped when I opened the door). "Good morning, darlings." Carol answered, "Good morning, Lord. How about our Lord takes his robe off and comes to bed?" "Yes, dear." The robe hit the floor (I could hang it up later), and I jumped onto the bed. For poking fun at her Lord (that was my excuse, anyway), Carol deserved some serious poking back. One of her holes was out of action, but I found another one. It was easy, as I knew where to look. That'll teach her to show some respect! Julia and I exchanged a more conventional morning greeting, although Carol's joining in probably rendered it somewhat other than conventional, then the three of us settled down for some more cuddling and talking. Nothing of any consequence though, just: Some more joking about poor Dad's alien attack. About Ava, including a little comment from me that we shouldn't assume she wants to spend every moment with her parents, and not to pressure her to by that assumption. Carol added, "So the sooner she learns about our being lovers, the better," which Julia and I totally agreed with. Chloe was mentioned. Julia asked the mentioner, "What time did you send the text to Chloe?" "About 2:40. If she was staying up, she would've had a VERY late and worrying night. I'm curious whether she did or not. I know it sounds selfish, but I hope she was waiting up. I'd like to think she was that hooked." "I'll find out for you. I haven't had a chance to think about what to do with Chloe next. You're busy with your running and soccer from about 10 this morning to dinnertime, aren't you?" "Yeah. From about 9:30, because I'll have to get Donna from home first." "Chloe will want to see you as soon as possible. She'll be bursting with curiosity, and probably several other things, haha. I'll offer her a choice between waiting until Monday at school, or coming around this evening. Anyone want to put their money on Monday?" "I was kind of thinking of having a normal date with Ava this evening. Normal-ish, anyway. I was thinking of the four of us all going out somewhere; a movie or whatever. Something normal, so Ava feels more like a girlfriend and less ignored. It will be Saturday evening, after all. What do you think?" "I think that's a good idea. It'll mean bumping Chloe to Sunday though." "Yeah. I was worried about that. She's going to be anxious. At least, I HOPE she's going to be anxious." Julia thought for a second, then said, "I'd excluded letting her come over right away, because we're all still in bed and Carol's here, but now that I think about it, that might work out VERY well. Let's see if she's up yet." Julia reached for her phone, but I said, "Allow me." I floated it to her. All three of us think my being able to do 'little things' like that is pretty cool. "Thank you, my Lord." "You're welcome, darling." Julia turned her phone on, and soon found out, "Yep, Chloe's been calling already. I'll let her call me. While we're waiting I'll tell you what I have in mind if she comes over right away." It only took a minute to explain the main idea, and we were joking around by suggesting humorous additions when Julia's phone rang. Julia checked the display, "It's Chloe. I'll let it ring a few times." -- Julia lay fully down in the bed, put her head on the pillow, then VERY sleepily answered, "Wha?" A few seconds later, "Who?" "Oh, Chloe. Sorry, 'm sleepy. What time is it?" "Oh God, it's too early. {Groan}. I didn't get enough sleep last night. I had a VERY hard night. Getting Mark to change his mind is not easy. Did you get my text last night?" "Yeah, it was this morning. You must be tired too, with so little sleep." After a few seconds, Julia gave me the thumbs-up, which I assumed meant Chloe had stayed awake waiting for the text. "I'm glad you're excited, but you didn't have to work your brain to a frazzle last night, trying to out-argue Mark." "What?" "Mark should be the one to explain. You'll have to come over and talk with him sometime. Let me think. Umm, he's doing a favor for his youngest sister from about 9:30 this morning to just after lunch. Then he's got an away game of soccer which he won't get back from until dinnertime, and then he's going out with a group of people tonight. So I guess you can see him Sunday sometime, or wait until Monday at school." We could all hear the shrieks of dismay during the last sentence. "No. Not over the phone. It's a very personal thing so face to face is best. If you're really in a hurry, you could come over right now. I'm going back to sleep, but Mom will let you in. Come up to my room and wake me. Do you know where..." Julia put down the phone and giggled. "She was running out the door before she'd finished saying goodbye. Her little feet will be pedaling flat out, haha, so I'd better get up and warn the family what's going to happen and tell them what I want them to do. You've probably got about five minutes before you'll have to go hide in the study, Carol, sorry." Julia quickly got out of bed, grabbing and donning my robe off the floor, which was an amusing contrast to what would come later, and she headed out of the room to hunt down her family. Carol and I spent a few minutes joking about the shock Chloe was going to get, then Carol got up, tidied away what clothes of hers that were visible from where she'd left them last night, and left to go untidy the study bed. Julia arrived back shortly thereafter, giggling and predicting, "This is going to be fun." She put away the robe in the closet, then - naked - snuggled into bed, adopting a position where all she had to do was shut her eyes to look asleep. We talked quietly, until there was a very light knock on the door. We would've missed it, had we not been waiting. Julia instantly shut her eyes and stopped talking. (The knock had come at a random time, at which Julia happened to be the one talking. What were the odds of that?) I waited for the door to open, but all that happened was another knock. I waited a couple of seconds, then whispered to Julia, "I'll let her in." It didn't take long for Julia to realize the implication of that, and she gave a short, quiet giggle. I got out of bed and walked naked across to the door. I opened it as if it was the most natural thing in the world to answer doors naked. Chloe got a shock. Her eyes first took in my topless state, then shot down to check how far down my toplessness extended. All the way to the bottom, she discovered, or she would when I turned around. Her eyes bulged, her mouth fell open, but she somehow managed, "Oh my..." In case you've forgotten, Chloe hadn't attended the hot tub party after the bowling group date, so she hadn't seen me naked before. "Come in, Chloe. I think Julia wants me to wake her when you arrive." I walked back to the bed, wishing I had eyes in the back of my head to see Chloe's expression, as I've been told that I have a REALLY cute butt, haha. I climbed back into bed, mostly covering myself, but the sheet somehow ONLY JUST covered the important part, so Chloe would be tantalized. I shook Julia, "Wake up, Julia. Chloe's here?" "Wha?" "Chloe's here." "Already?" "Haha. You've been sleeping, so how could you know how long it's been?" "Don' ask me to think." Julia pulled herself up into a sitting position, which exposed her chest, of course. "Hi Chloe. Oh that's right, you want to talk with Mark about your relationship, don't you? Come and sit on the bed, so we can talk with you properly." Chloe had only taken a couple of steps into the room. "Umm." "Come on! Have a seat." Julia pointed to the side of the bed, near me. Chloe, still in shock and probably suffering from a lack of sleep too, although she was too worked up to show it now, slowly made her way to the indicated spot and sat on the bed. The true geniuses among my readership (as opposed to people like me, who only let others claim I'm a genius), will have anticipated the obvious result. The sheet, which had previously only just covered my cock, now didn't. Chloe's sitting on the bed had pulled the sheet down. This development did not go unnoticed by Chloe, even though it wasn't a very big development, especially as I was under strict orders to remain soft throughout (I keep fearing Julia is going to explode when she realized the connection between my conscious control of my cock and the Annette Neumeyer Incident, but so far there's been nothing. I'm FAR too scared to ask why). Chloe's eyes and entire attention were on my cock. Not a lot of conversation was happening. I was debating whether to deliberately pull the sheet up, or to move around casually in a way that 'accidentally' covered me again, when, #3: I used NP to pinch Julia's lips together briefly as a covert way of telling her to be quiet. I waited a few seconds, then said, "It's called a cock, Chloe." "What? OH! I'M SO SORRY. I didn't mean to stare. HONEST! I'm so..." "Chloe! Relax. It's just a cock. I don't care if you stare at it. It makes it difficult to have a conversation with you, but I'm guessing you haven't seen many of them before so it's natural for you to be a little distracted. Do you want to come closer so you can have a good look?" "Oh no! Umm. No, I couldn't." "Okay. Would it make it easier for you to talk if I covered my cock? You'll have to get off the bed for a moment, so I can pull the sheet up." "Umm." Chloe stood. I suspect her brain wasn't actually working, and she'd stood only because it was the last thing I'd said. I pulled up the sheet, and a red-faced Chloe was settling back on the bed when Carol walked naked into the room, rubbing her eyes and looking very 'just got out of bed'. Carol asked, "Do you guys want to ... Oh, hi Chloe. Do you guys want to have a soak in the hot tub before breakfast? I'm feeling crampy because of my period and I'd like a soak." I said, "If you're feeling sore we'll join you. It's boring having a soak by yourself. We haven't even started talking yet, so we can easily do that in the tub." Julia and I got out of bed, and headed for the door. Poor Chloe was going to injure her neck trying to find somewhere she could safely look. There were far too many naked bodies moving around for her comfort, although one of them seemed to have an irresistible fascination for her: mine, I'm very happy to say. Chloe stood, but seemed undecided about what to do next. Julia said, "Come on, Chloe. Didn't you rush over here to talk with Mark?" We started walking along the hallway toward the stairs, forcing Chloe to follow after us. On the way downstairs, Carol said, "Seeing as how I interrupted you, I'll get the orange juices. Do you want a juice, Chloe?" "Umm. Julia's mother's in the kitchen." "Good. But did you want a juice? If you biked over you might be thirsty." Carol's getting the juices had been planned, but I had a little idea, so I added, "If you're feeling crampy, I'll get the juices for you, Carol. You should get in the tub." Julia said, "I'LL get them, because Chloe came to talk with you, Mark. I need to talk with Mom about something she and I are doing together later today anyway. Chloe, I'll get you a drink. Your mouth is open in shock half the time, so it must be drying out, haha." Julia left us, and I said, "Follow me, Chloe." Her eyes were on my cute butt half the time, so I figured she'd manage that. To make conversation, I said, "Carol. Are you going to stay here today, or should I take you home when I go to pick up Donna?" "Take me home please. I've got some things I want to do there, and I think Julia's going to be busy." "Okay. I'll be leaving at about 9:30." "No problem. I'll be ready." Carol and I climbed into the hot tub. Carol sighed with pleasure, while I said to Chloe, "Do you want to get in too?" The idea had obviously not occurred to Chloe, judging by the shock and panic on her face, accompanied by an urgent, "NO! Umm, no thanks." I suggested, "Let's wait until Julia arrives before we start talking. Julia put a huge amount of effort into her argument with me yesterday evening, so she should see the result of it. Tell me, did you really stay up waiting for Julia's text message? Wasn't it after 2am when you got it?" "2:42. I was too nervous to sleep." "You must be very tired now then. You don't look it though." "I'm too excited now. Umm, am I really going to be your girlfriend now?" "I want to wait for Julia. She often used you as an example last night, but you weren't the focus of our discussion, so I don't know the full extent of what you and Julia have been saying to each other. I'm also reluctant to start talking about our relationship until Julia is here, because I don't want there to be any misunderstandings among the three of us. Julia got very emotional last night, so my relationship with you obviously means a great deal to her." "Oh." Rather than wait for Chloe to finish struggling to work out what to say about that - which looked like it might take a while - I sat up on the edge of the hot tub. Her eyes went straight for my cock. I said, "Seeing we have to wait for Julia anyway, this would be a good time for you to look at my cock." "Oh no. I couldn't!" "Chloe, you already ARE. I obviously don't mind because I'm inviting you to. When we're boyfriend and girlfriend, I'll enjoy looking at your body too. I'm showing you my body a bit early, but I'm very pleased to see how much you like looking at it." "You are?" "Of course. I'd be upset if my potential girlfriend wasn't interested in my body. You're giving me a compliment by looking at me." I could see Chloe dither about how to respond to that. She decided on, "But you never look at my body." I just said, "Of course not." Julia had taught me well. Julia's arriving with a tray of drinks saved me having to invent the reason for my latest BS. While Julia was distributing the drinks, Carol said, "Chloe, I can't imagine why you're so interested in looking at his cock anyway. It's only a tiny, little thing." Carol held up her thumb and forefinger, indicating an insultingly short distance. This wasn't in the plan, so Carol was improvising. So much for my teaching her to respect her Lord earlier this morning. "Why you little scamp! I'll have you know that there's a reason I'm called your 'Big Brother'." "Haha," laughed Carol. "It's certainly not for THAT! For your brain, I would believe. Now that I've complimented your best feature - your brain - can I ask for a backrub please, my lower back is sore?" "Sure, sweetie. How do you want me to do it?" "Sit back in the pool please, with your legs together. I'll sit sideways on your legs. Put your left arm around my waist to hold me, and rub my lower back with the other. Yes, like that. That's great, thanks very much. All along the small of my back please, and a little bit lower too. Yes, that's wonderful." -- To Chloe, Carol added, "Big Brothers can be very nice at times. Do you have any brothers or sisters, Chloe?" "Only a younger brother. Three years younger. Umm, we're not as close as you and Mark." "With breasts as big as yours, you must get a sore back sometimes. So who do you get to massage you?" "No one. They pass eventually, or I take a pain killer." "Poor you. I feel sorry for girls who aren't lucky enough to have a brother as good as Mark. Which I guess must be every girl, because Mark's the best brother in the world." Carol leaned into my chest, saying, "Thanks very much Mark. You're wonderful. My back feels much better, and I should let you concentrate on your talk with Chloe." Carol kissed me on the cheek, then said, "I love you, Mark." "I love you too, sweetie. In fact, I loved you first. I'm older, so I saw you coming, haha. Let me know if you want me to rub your back again." "I sure will. You've got wonderfully strong and gentle hands." Carol stood up and moved to take a seat elsewhere in the tub. Julia's plan had been "Carol, you sit on Mark's lap and be affectionate for a little while, then get off. Mark, find an excuse to stand up so Chloe can see you're soft." I had an easy excuse for that, as my drink was a little out of reach. I could have slid sideways to get it, but I stood and took a step. Chloe's eyes looked at my cock, and I do believe her face registered some surprise. I had also been surprised. Not at my cock's limp state, as go-softs guaranteed that, but at Carol's excellent fulfillment of the plan. She was getting very self-assured. While I was getting settled, Julia started, "Chloe, let me tell you what happened last night. Mark's and Carol's parents came over yesterday evening, and they left about 8. After that I asked Mark if I could talk with him in my room, and I started doing what I'd told you I'd do. The argument wasn't about you per se, but you're the most extreme example of Mark's willingness to hurt himself..." I felt I had to react in some way, so I shuffled a little, then said, "Ahh, actually, I don't think..." Julia said, "Yes I know. We spent AGES discussing that last night." ("Ages" must be a very short unit of measure; roughly about a second.) "I'll have my little say, and then you can tell Chloe whatever you like, okay?" "Of course. I do want Chloe to understand your perspective, so I shouldn't have interrupted. Sorry." Julia looked at Chloe, and asked, "Isn't he wonderful?" Without waiting for the obvious (I like to think) answer, Julia continued, "I'll make it short. Mark and I argued about you, and his approach generally. I'd expected it to be extremely difficult, but I was surprised how little time it took." Chloe was surprised by this statement too. "Yes," said Julia. "I know what time you got my message, but the argument WAS shorter than I expected. That should give you some idea of how bad I expected it to be." "Oh." "Yes, 'oh' indeed. Getting Mark to change his mind when he's already carefully thought something through is not as easy as you think. To cut a long story short, I completely failed to change his mind." "What! Oh NO!" Chloe slumped and she started moaning. Julia quickly added, "No, Chloe. I didn't mean it that way. I'm sorry. Mark WILL be telling you his secret. NOT because I convinced him, but because he could see how upset I was about his not taking you as his girlfriend as fast as possible. You and I are getting what we want, just for a different reason than we thought it'd be." Chloe didn't know which way was up at the moment. Not just because of Julia's psychological torture zigzag (which I think she did mostly for fun, although she'd probably claim it was practice), but also from lack of sleep and her being too emotionally worked up. Perhaps from the sight of my second best feature too. Chloe managed to identify the most important point though, or maybe she was grasping at the straw she most wanted. She hesitantly asked, "I'm going to be Mark's girlfriend?" Julia said, "Remember the text message I sent you Chloe. I said I, 'succeeded MOSTLY.' It's not as simple as your becoming Mark's girlfriend now." "It's not?" asked a very worried Chloe. I'd been thinking while Julia had been talking, and I'd had a couple of ideas, so I said, "Let me explain, Julia. I think you're making this harder on poor Chloe than it needs to be." The real reason for my interruption was because I'd been worried for the last few days that our justification for the new behaviors we wanted from Chloe seemed too weak, but I'd just realized that I could do better. It's not like me to interrupt Julia mid-bullshit - in fact, I don't think I've ever done it before - so I got her attention. She looked at me, I nodded, so she said, "Okay." ------- Chapter 152: Chloe Learns "The Secret"; Part Two Saturday, April 30, 2005 (Continued) I took over, "Chloe, I'm very shortly going to tell you what Julia calls, 'The Secret'; what I was waiting for you to work out for yourself. Once you know it, you'll be able to start changing yourself immediately. Knowing Julia, she'll be helping you as much as she can, because that's the sort of person she is. And, to save Julia the trouble of saying it, I'll add that I'll help you too. Julia would no doubt point out that's the sort of person I am too. We'll both try to help you. That's what friends do. -- "What Julia didn't know..." Robert must've won the coin toss (I'm only guessing how they decided which of the two boys would come in), because he wandered into the room. When he saw us he said, "I've found you, good. Oh you've got a guest. Hi, I'm Robert Williams, Julia's brother." Robert offered his hand. Chloe took it saying, "I'm Chloe Moon. I'm in some of Mark's and Julia's classes at school." (This is my first mention of Chloe's surname. As I'm sure you can imagine, it provided a rich source of jokes for the boys at school. Not that it really made any real difference, because boys will behave like boys anyway.) Robert said, "Nice to meet you, Chloe. Good morning Carol, Mark and Julia. Have any of you seen the label gun? I've been looking..." "Oh no," exclaimed Carol, leaping to her feet. "I've got it in my bag. I borrowed it yesterday and never put it back. I'll go get it now." Carol moved to get out of the tub, but Robert quickly put up his hand, saying, "No need for you to get out Carol. Just tell me where it is and I'll get it." "Oh. Thanks. I'm very sorry I didn't put it back. It's in my bag, which is on the floor next to the bed in Mark's study. It might have been pushed under the bed, so you might have to search a little." "No problem. I have your permission to look in your bag?" "Of course. It's just the little bag I carry stuff back and forth between my home and here. There's only a change of clothes and stuff like that in it. Help yourself. And sorry again for not putting it away like I should have." "There's no problem. I haven't been panicking about it. Sit down and enjoy your soak." -- Robert started leaving, then changed his mind, turning back to say, "Chloe, is this your first time in this house?" "Yes." "If you'll allow me a slight presumption then, let me say that I'm sure your figure causes lots of boys to make fools of themselves, but you're in very good company with Mark. He's one of the good guys. Nice to meet you. See you all at breakfast probably. Bye." "Sorry again," called Carol. Robert just waved over his shoulder as he left the room. It didn't really matter whether Chloe commented on it, because if she didn't then we would later, but she did. Chloe said, "Carol! Julia's brother saw you naked!" "Sure, but it wasn't sexual. Robert's not like that. No one in Julia's family is." "But he saw EVERYTHING! You don't have any hair, and, umm..." "Haha. I'm sorry, Chloe, I shouldn't laugh at your embarrassment. Robert didn't look at me sexually. Did he look like he was leering at me? I HATE when boys leer at me. I'm a lesbian, you know, so it's offensive to me. But Robert's not like that. When he looks at me, it doesn't mean anything. It wouldn't matter whether I had a swimsuit on or not." I said, "A simple way of thinking about it, Chloe, is that Robert SAW Carol, but he did not TAKE anything from her. He especially didn't take her nudity as having any sexual relevance to his relationship with her. It was empty of any sexual meaning, just like Carol sitting on my lap while I gave her a backrub was innocent too. You were surprised my cock was soft after Carol got up because you're too focused on sex, especially on bodies being sexual, and you don't consider people's minds and personalities. That's EXACTLY what you've spent years condemning boys for." "Oh no! You're right. I'm..." "You're MUCH better than those guys, Chloe. The vast majority of those boys were treating every girl's body as a sex object, especially girls with big breasts. They didn't care whether the girls wanted to be considered that way or not. In short, they were assholes. For years you've been on the receiving end of the unwanted attentions of thousands of infantile asshole boys, and you've become too sensitive to their attitude. You've even absorbed part of their way of thinking, but it's NOT the real you, it's just a bad habit you've learned from others. I am sure that you're not an 'infantile asshole boy', haha. You're definitely not 'infantile' and you're far too nice to be an 'asshole'. As to whether you're a 'boy' or not, I'm going to check that out VERY thoroughly at the appropriate time." "{Giggle}. When?" "I'm getting to that, sweetie. Back to Carol and Robert briefly. Carol's statement about a swimsuit making no difference wasn't quite accurate. Carol's being nude meant that Robert could easily show Carol that he respects her as a person by his reacting normally, and Carol showed Robert that she trusts him by not worrying about his seeing her body. My younger sister Donna also has good relationship with Robert, but a quite different one. She teases him that when she's old enough to have sex, she's going to come looking for him. She's got the poor guy worried because Donna acts like she's ready now, although Mom and Dad have a SLIGHTLY different opinion, haha. It's all teasing, of course, and it's based on Donna trusting Robert too. My point being that Robert is a trustworthy guy. You don't know very many trustworthy boys, do you Chloe?" "Huh. Umm, no, I don't. Like you said before, boys are infantile ass ... Well, you know. They're not very nice, and DEFINITELY not trustworthy!" "What you said is sadly true, because the majority of boys are untrustworthy, especially when it comes to large-breasted girls. But there's another sad aspect. There are a many more trustworthy boys than you think. And before you disagree, I'm sure that you would never have gained as much trust as you have in me if Julia hadn't put so much effort into making you see that. Knowing Julia, I'm sure she put a HUGE amount of effort into helping you see that; far more than she's told me she did. Am I right that you wouldn't have trusted me without Julia's huge effort, Chloe?" Chloe answered sorrowfully, "Yeah. I'm sorry to say that she had to try very hard." In a much more upbeat tone, "But I TOTALLY trust you now!" "No you don't Chloe, but that's a minor issue that I'll mention later. The point I want to make now is that if it hadn't been for Julia's exceptional efforts, you would have missed out on trusting me. I wonder how many other guys who're just as trustworthy as me you've missed out on finding out about?" "Ha! Not very many, that's for SURE! None probably. There are no other boys like you Mark, I'm sure of that!" "You might be right when it comes to my intelligence, and maybe in relatively useless things like running a 10k race very fast, but you're VERY wrong when it comes to trust. Robert is trustworthy. Julia's other brother Andrew is equally trustworthy. Being trustworthy is actually quite easy. The guy just has to value the girl as a person rather than as a sex object, and there are quite a few guys who're good enough to do that. I will admit that they're in the minority, but there are still many of them. The reason you haven't identified who they are, is because you refuse to believe they exist. -- "It may be unfair of me, but I'm going to drop that whole subject now. I only brought it up because Robert and Carol gave us such a good demonstration of trust. You can think about it in your own time. I'm not worried about it much, because your disbelief about other guys being trustworthy will correct itself in time, once you learn the other things I want you to learn. Which brings me back to my main subject. -- "I was saying before Robert came in that I was about to tell you what Julia calls 'The Secret', and that all of us will help you work on achieving it. I was just about to say that Julia will be surprised to hear that there are actually several secrets, not just one." "There are?" asked both Chloe and Julia. Julia was particularly surprised, because I was going well off our agreed script. It'd only been an outline, but it outlined only one secret. "Yeah." I was going to particularly enjoy the next little while, although I was sure I'd pay for it later. "Both of you, Julia and Chloe, have been far too simplistic, even naively so. Human beings are very complex, confused, contrary creatures. 'Crazy' sometimes too, just to throw in another appropriate 'C' word. Thinking I only had one reason for wanting Chloe to take her time, is as simplistic as Chloe thinking she trusts me totally, as she keeps claiming. Chloe was surprised I was soft when Carol got off my lap, so she didn't trust me not to be sexually attracted to my sister. -- "No! Don't worry, Chloe, that just makes you human. I'm rather glad you're human, haha. 99% of other people would've had the same suspicion, and most of them would've gotten upset just at the sight of Carol and me being naked together, let alone her climbing onto my lap. You reacted considerably better than most people would have. My point is that trust isn't a 'totally on' or 'totally off' thing. It's got all sorts of nuances and shades of gray. -- I couldn't resist it, so I added, "Anyway, the whole idea of my being sexually attracted to Carol is ridiculous. Sure she's a lovely person with a great body. I'm aware of that. But it's impossible to get my memories out of my mind. I remember her at every mealtime when she was one or two years old, and the DISGUSTING messes she made all over her face, the high chair, and virtually the entire kitchen. Even over me sometimes. She was GROSS! Haha. And don't start me on the mess she made in the living room the one time she got out of her diaper - YUCK! Believe me, those disgusting memories are indelibly burned into my poor brain. How could I possibly be sexually attracted to a girl who gave me those memories? Haha." Carol and I had a little fun teasing each other following that. Chloe could wait. Then I resumed my main thread, "Just as the trust issue is more complicated than you thought, Chloe, your becoming a good girlfriend for me is more complicated than Julia thought. In fact, considerably more complicated." I was going to enjoy the next bit. "Julia is often far too simplistic about people. Especially about teenage girls. There is nothing more complicated and confusing on the planet than teenage girls! They're a NIGHTMARE to try to understand, even for a genius like me, haha. -- "People are very complex, and there are always many, many issues going on. Juggling and balancing them all can be extremely difficult, especially because people often hide a lot of what's important to them." I was making up what I hoped was impressive sounding bullshit. It had no real informational content, but it made me sound good, everyone was nodding, and Julia was smiling proudly. "What I'm saying is that I have several reasons for wanting to make you develop and mature at your own pace, and Julia hasn't changed my mind about preferring that. But my preference isn't a strong one, and I can see that Julia is VERY upset about my going so slowly with you, so I'll let her have her way on this issue. I will give her what she wants, and what you want, by attempting to make you my girlfriend as quickly as possible. -- I interrupted Chloe's sudden burst of excitement. "BEFORE you get too excited, Chloe, there are a few more things I want to say. It's VERY hard to get the undivided attention of pretty girls, so I'm going to take full advantage of it while I can. First I want to tell Julia WHY I'm letting her get her way. I wouldn't normally give in to her just because she was upset about something. Normally I'd try to make her understand why she was wrong, but in this case I'm going to make her learn the lesson for herself. Julia was far too simplistic and naïve about your being a good girlfriend for me. There are all sorts of issues that Julia never thought of, and her believing that there was only one secret, was - quite frankly - silly. For YOUR own good, Julia and I are going to help you learn to become a good girlfriend for me. For JULIA'S own good, Julia is going to do exactly what I just said: help you learn to be a good girlfriend. The act of teaching you, will teach Julia how naïve she was. It will teach her to understand people better than her overly simplistic view. 'The teacher will learn from the pupil.' Different lessons - in fact, VERY different lessons - but of considerable benefit to both of you. You'll be traveling down the same road together, but you'll have quite different learning experiences. Do you both understand?" They both did, and Carol too. Everyone thought I was a profound GENIUS! In reality, I'd just been unhappy with our planned excuse. We wanted Chloe to be more relaxed about her tits, but our justification for it had been weak. What I'd just done was simply to throw heaps of impressive sounding bullshit around, and pretend that I had many more very important and highly intelligent reasons. Which - and this is very important - I was NOT going to reveal. When they'd finished gushing, I added, "Julia argued me into it, so Julia can take responsibility for making it happen. She will learn that people are much trickier than she thinks." "You're right, Mark," agreed Julia. "I think I will learn that." "Yes you will. You need to see the long-term implications of what you are trying to do. You created this, and now you're facing the consequences of it. There's a lesson in there somewhere for you." I was of course talking about me, not about Chloe. Julia understood that, and smiled widely in approval. And, I had no doubt, in anticipation of the revenge she was going to inflict on me when we were next alone. -- Back to Chloe though, as she was the one with the fantastic tits, not me. I said, "As I said, there are many issues facing you, Chloe. It would be unproductive, and even cruel, for me to list them now. All that would do would be to overwhelm and depress you. The fact of the matter is that I think you are already a lovely person. You KNOW that, because you accidentally overheard me say exactly that to Julia on one of those many occasions when I was hanging around inside the girls' bathroom, haha. So please don't take any of my criticisms as saying you're a bad person. You are a LOVELY person; that's why I'm happy to spend so much time thinking about you and talking with you. I'll tell you just three of my reasons. There are more, of course, because people are so complex, but these three are suitable for mentioning today. Of the three, there's only one that you need to start acting on, so don't be too daunted. I'm giving the other two just to help you understand the sort of things I'm thinking about. -- "The first reason - which isn't something you need to worry about now - is that you don't yet have a good understanding of what love is. You've said you love me a couple of times, which I treat as a very nice compliment, but you don't really understand what that means. You're naturally a very giving person, but when it comes to boys your defensiveness about your body gets in the way of your expressing your natural generosity of spirit. Love is, of course, a totally giving emotion. Until you learn to stop being so defensive, and stop shrinking inward so often, then you'll be unable to love properly. -- "I'm not talking about just with me either; I'm talking about with everybody. You need to destroy the chains that are holding your heart back, not just unlock them when you're alone with me, only to put them back whenever anyone else walks into the room. I am sure you'll be a very loving person when you free your heart, but right now you're far too suspicious to be able to give much. This is an issue for another day. I'm just planting a seed now, and you can think about it in your own time." I'd simply started with something from what Julia had said about her long lunchtime discussion with Chloe yesterday, and then built whatever crossed my mind on top of that start. My entire purpose in mentioning "Love" was simply to gain credibility by telling Chloe something she already agreed with. -- "My second reason - which will become the second thing you need to start working on, but not until the next reason is going well - is what Robert showed you: there are other trustworthy guys out there. You need to learn how to identify good guys and how to trust them. Your life will be lonely and unsuccessful if you don't. I fear, for example, how your career will go in whatever field you get into. You're likely to often have male bosses, male coworkers, male customers, etc. If you treat them all as negatively as you clearly treat every boy at school, then things aren't going to go well for you. You're so negative that you'll probably get fired from every job after a few weeks. In school you can mostly ignore all the boys, but that's not the case once you start working. Don't worry about that yet, as your career is a few years away. I'm just thinking ahead." Over the years I've heard stories about sexual problems at work from both of my parents, plus on TV too, so I knew it was a serious issue. Julia's and my excuse for Chloe to change as we wanted, was based (weakly, I thought) on "No man is an island" (or "girl" in her case). I'd spent some time trying to think of an example that could be relevant to her, and her career was the best I'd thought of. -- "Now I'll tell you the thing that I want you to start working on immediately. It may sound silly, but it's actually far more profound than it sounds." I'd said that because it DID sound silly, and because it was NOT much more profound. Well, maybe a little bit, but not nearly as much as Chloe's serious looking nods indicated she already thought it would be. "When a boy behaves like an immature asshole toward you, Chloe - makes a rude comment about your tits, for example - it just means that he's an immature asshole." Chloe waited for the rest of it, then realized there wasn't any more. Thought about it a second, then said, "I don't understand?" "It means he's a bad person. It does not mean YOU are bad in any way. Nor does it mean that every other boy is bad. If a boy behaves like an asshole, it just means that he's an asshole. I can see you don't understand, so I'll be very explicit. From now on I want you to start unbuttoning the top buttons of your blouses at school, and to start wearing lower cut..." "Oh no! I COULDN'T!" "Do you understand the consequences of that belief, Chloe?" "Huh? No, what?" "You are refusing to even try to be my girlfriend. That's a pity, because I thought you wanted to be my girlfriend." "I DO! Umm. Do you mean I HAVE TO unbutton my blouses at school to be your girlfriend?" "Yes. It's actually quite important to me." "But... , but that's CRAZY! Why on Earth would you want me to do THAT! If you want to see my breasts, just ask. I'll show you now." Chloe was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, which she started pulling over the top of her head. She suddenly paused mid-pull, I suspect because she'd remembered there were other guys in the house, who - shudder - sometimes walked into the room! She was looking at the door worriedly when I said, "Your stripping is pointless, Chloe. This has got nothing to do with what I want to see. I do NOT want to see your body until we are boyfriend and girlfriend. I didn't look at you in the girls' bathroom, and I won't look at you here." Chloe pulled her T-shirt down in confused relief, then asked, "But I don't understand?" "You didn't have any hesitation in calling my requirement 'CRAZY' though. You were quite scathing about it. Are you always so insulting about things you don't understand? I will often be doing things that you don't understand, and I don't want to be subjected to a tirade of insults and accusations every time you fail to be as intelligent as me." #3: "Oh no! I didn't mean it like that..." "So you called me 'CRAZY' in a nice way. Is that what you're saying?" I tilted my head sideways and looked inquiringly at her. -- I let her absorb that little sarcastic blow, then I added, "When have I EVER done anything with you that was to my benefit rather than yours? Give me one single example of that? And while you're thinking about that, remind me how much you said you trusted me. 'Totally', wasn't it?" Chloe's face fell in defeat, not helped by Julia's laughing at her. Chloe looked at Julia, who said, "NOW can you imagine how difficult my argument with Mark was last night? You opened your mouth and shoved your foot all the way into it, and you've got no one to blame but yourself. You should've known better than to think Mark is crazy, let alone to accuse him of it. Let this be a lesson for you. If Mark does something you don't understand, even if it seems crazy, keep your accusations to yourself and POLITELY ask him for an explanation. Okay?" Chloe contritely agreed, "Yes. Mark, I'm very sorry. I was totally, umm. I was totally out of line. I shouldn't have talked like that. Please forgive me?" "Of course I forgive you, sweetie. But please be more careful in the future. You know me well enough by now to know that your accusation was completely unfounded. It wouldn't reflect well on your character if you repeated such behavior." "I won't. It was just that it was such a shock." "I know it was, and that's one of the reasons I forgave you so easily. I do have some bad news for you though: a lot of the things I'll do with you will shock you. You might have noticed that I have a rather unusual lifestyle? Naked sisters through to multiple girlfriends. Chances are that you're going to get shocked again, so you need to learn to be more careful." "Yes. I understand that now. I'm sorry. I'll try to do better in the future." "Good for you. My asking - actually 'requiring' - you to unbutton your blouses and to start wearing lower cut tops has got nothing to do with my seeing you like that. Even if we were in different schools, I'd be telling you to do exactly the same thing. It's entirely for your benefit." This was mostly true. I would've been happy to take Chloe to bed now, but Julia wanted to use the opportunity to start changing Chloe's attitudes so she would have a better life. "Judging by your, 'That's crazy' comment, I'm guessing you don't understand?" "Umm, no. Sorry." "That's okay. You'll often not understand my reasons for doing things. Julia can tell you she often has that problem." Julia instantly agreed, "Oh yes. Very, very often. Almost all the time. He's a very incomprehensible boy, haha." "Thank you very much, Julia. You're rarely so enthusiastically agreeable." I reached over, grabbed her, and pulled her onto my lap. "So I can more easily get hold of you, to show you my appreciation, the next time you're so agreeable about a self-depreciating joke of mine." "Eek! {Giggle}." "Chloe, now that I have Julia firmly under my thumb, back to your issue. Have you heard the expression, 'No man is an island'?" "Yes." "When you become my girlfriend, the two of us won't be 'an island'. We're not going to suddenly disappear out of Corvallis and live the rest of our lives on a deserted tropical island for just the two of us. Nor will we be going into my bedroom, shutting the door, and never coming out; although that does have its appeal, haha. The two of us will meet lots of other people, of course: our classmates, friends, parents, sisters or brothers. You know what I mean: everybody else." Chloe was nodding along, so I continued, "You'd probably be excellent company on a Pacific island. I can happily imagine you wearing a little coconut bikini, haha. I can also imagine you and I locked in my bedroom sometimes too, and that's also a nice thought." I was pleased to see that Chloe, although nervous, seemed to agree. -- "When Robert came into this room, I didn't even think of trying to cover Carol. I have no problem at all with Robert seeing Carol naked, not even when she stood up and showed him everything she's got. You heard my speech in class about Carol, so you know my sister means a HUGE amount to me. I wouldn't hesitate to leap to her defense if I needed to. Doubly so when it comes to guys and sex, because she's a lesbian. But I trust Robert, and my lack of concern about him seeing my sister naked shows Robert that I trust him, which helps the relationship between him and me. You understand that, don't you?" "Yes. Your and Julia's families are a lot more open about bodies than mine is." "I haven't met your family, so I can't judge for myself, but that seems likely. But the issue isn't bodies; it's trust. What you are really saying is that our two families are more TRUSTING than yours, which is sad. -- "Let me get back to my main thread. You saw that I didn't move to cover up Carol when Robert came in. Now let's pretend we are like we are now, except that you are also naked and in the hot tub. How would you react if Robert walked in? What about if my father walked in? Would you let them look at your body? Would you stand up and offer to walk naked through the house with them to fetch something? Or would you show that you were suspicious and fearful of them? You WOULD be fearful, wouldn't you Chloe?" "Yes, but that's not fair, I don't know Robert. You shouldn't expect me to be comfortable naked in front of strange men." "You're not comfortable being fully clothed in the same classroom as boys you've been in school with for years. Julia, Carol and I clearly trust Robert totally, and we are with you as well, so you should trust Robert. But I'm sure that if I fetched Robert back here, then asked you to stand up and turn around slowly so he could look at you, even fully dressed as you are, you'd be very unhappy. If I asked you to take your clothes off, you'd be HORRIFIED! I'd never do that of course, but I don't need to do it for all of us to see how upset you are at the thought. -- "My point is that you already have good reasons to trust Robert, especially because you saw how wonderfully he treated Carol, but you refuse to trust him. You said it was unfair of me to expect you to be comfortable in front of strange men, but I'm pretty sure there are almost no circumstances under which you would be comfortable being naked with any man, stranger or not. You treat every guy with so much suspicion and fear right from the start, that there's no way trust can develop. Your attitude would poison any chance of that. -- "DON'T bother commenting, Chloe; that's not even my main point. Go back to imagining you are naked in the tub and Robert walks in. Not only would you panic and try to hide yourself, but because you'd be my girlfriend, I would also have to leap to try to cover you up, because boyfriends protect their girlfriends. Robert would see that I didn't trust him, which would damage my relationship with him. It's even worse than that, because I know you'd be just as bad if you were wearing a swimsuit, so I couldn't bring you into the hot tub at all. I couldn't even bring you anywhere in this house, because there are often males here, and you permanently show too much suspicion of males, even when you've got all your clothes on. That means I wouldn't be able to spend as much time with Julia and her very nice family. -- "I doubt I could take you ANYWHERE, because wherever we went there could be boys who are my friends, and your fear would damage my relationships with them. Unfortunately, ANY boy who has you as his girlfriend is going to have nearly all of his other relationships damaged." My work was done - Chloe was bawling her eyes out. She'd understood my point, had no way of countering it, and the hope and excitement she'd rushed over here with had come crashing down. To be replaced with blubbering. I whispered to Julia, "Wait a minute." I didn't have a handkerchief on me, so I got out of the tub, walked around Chloe - as a measure of her distress, she didn't even check out my cock - grabbed a towel and quickly got the worst of the water off me. I discarded the towel then moved in front of Chloe and put my two hands on her shoulders. She tried to pull away, but I didn't let her. I pulled her forward and around to be square on to me. Her head was bowed, which meant she was now staring directly at my cock. When she saw it, her breath suddenly caught, then her sobbing stopped and she looked up at me. I said, "You need to remember a few things, Chloe. First, you know for a fact that I think you're a lovely person. And since you overheard me say that, you've cooked me a pizza, so you can imagine how much I like you now! -- "Second, I DO want you to be my girlfriend. You may think that's hard to believe after what I just said, but it's true. I wouldn't have dangled my cock in front of you to get your attention if I didn't want you to get used to the sight of my body. I'd only do that to a girlfriend, or to a girl who I am very sure will become my girlfriend. -- "Third, I said that Julia and I will help you change. The first step of getting you to change is to make you aware of how bad the problem is. I just did that. It was hurtful, but it had to be done. -- "Fourth, I've already told you what you need to do to start changing yourself: you need to start undoing a few buttons on your blouses, and you need to remember that when a boy behaves like an immature asshole toward you, it just means that he's an immature asshole. It doesn't mean you are, or that every other boy is. If you put those two things together, you'll be cured. I'm simplifying a little, but not too much. -- "Fifth, I said much earlier that one of the main reasons I've opened up to you today, rather than wait for you to mature at your own rate, is so Julia can learn that people aren't as simple as she thinks they are. Don't get me wrong, Julia is very smart about people. She is FAR better than most people when it comes to understanding other people. I'm sure you've already spent enough time talking with Julia for you to know that. But from my perspective, if Julia thinks she can deliberately intend to spend several hours trying to argue me out of something I've thought carefully about already, then she's got another thing coming! It was foolishly arrogant of her to believe she had a chance of out-thinking me in a situation like that, especially about a girl who I care about as much as you. She has a reason for her arrogance, because she is genuinely smart about people, but NOT compared to me. For her hubris, I am now going to go to breakfast, and I'm going to leave it to Julia to start helping you learn what you need to learn. I'm sure Julia can take it from here, now that I've pointed the way. -- "Julia, if you don't know what to do, I'm always available to give you some advice. However, you're responsible for virtually everything that's happened this morning, so try to do your best to live up to it without running to me for help." Behind Chloe's back, Julia stuck out her tongue at me, but she was smiling VERY proudly and happily. -- "Carol, remember that I'll be leaving at 9:30 if you want a lift. I'll go upstairs to get dressed, then have my breakfast. There are a few things I need to talk with Vanessa about too." Carol started getting out of the tub, saying, "I'll come with you Mark. I'm hungry too." I looked at Julia and Chloe. "Ladies, I'll leave you to it." Julia was now leaning over the near side of the tub, to be near Chloe. That meant that she was also close to me, so I took the couple of steps over to her and leaned to kiss her briefly. Julia said, "I'll do my best for Chloe, Mark. I want to live up to the high standard you've set." She must've been referring to my high standard of bullshit. "Good." I walked back in front of Chloe, and lifted her face with my hands. "Chloe, you are going to be a VERY good girlfriend. You're a good listener. Most people aren't good listeners, especially when they're hearing things which are unpleasant to them, but you are." Actually, she'd just shrunk in on herself rather than being a good listener, but I needed to build her up. "You'll learn a great deal, and become a FAR happier person than you've been for the last few years, if you listen to Julia and me." I leaned down and gave Chloe a nice kiss on her lips. When I let her head go, it dropped again. To lift the mood, I cheerfully said, "I don't think I need to do so much talking. The only thing Chloe seems interested in is staring at my cock." Chloe's head shot up. "Sorry! I wasn't..." "Chloe, you can look all you want. Enjoying each other's bodies is part of a good relationship. I'm glad you find it fascinating, and I'm sure you'll be doing a great deal more than just looking at it soon." "I've never..." "I'm sure there are MANY things you've never done yet. Julia can explain all of that; she's quite an expert in that department too, haha. I'm sorry I'm busy today, but you're in good hands with Julia. I've got to go, bye for now." I grabbed the towel, put it around my waist, and Carol and I left the room together. As I was leaving, Julia was asking Chloe, "He's got a nice cock, hasn't he?" "{Giggle}, yeah. EVERYTHING about him is nice." After a brief pause, "He's awesomely smart, isn't he?" "Very, very... ," I was too far away, but I hoped it was going to end "nice cock." As soon as we were in the bedroom, with the door closed behind us, Carol jumped into my arms, trying to laugh, kiss, and talk all at the same time. The talking parts, stitched together, were, "You were VERY good, Mark. I was very impressed! Chloe's got NO CHANCE of resisting you, and that's not counting how much your cock fascinates her, haha. With Julia working on her as well, she's toast, haha." "Actually, half of what I said came from Julia in the first place. The 'No man is an island' and the damage we claimed she'd do to all my other relationships came from Julia. Mostly what I did was improvise some impressive sounding bullshit to make it seem that I had more ideas and knowledge than I really did. It did go over well, but only because Julia had explained Chloe to me so well." "{Raspberry}. Julia was IMPRESSED! She wouldn't have been if you were just parroting her stuff." My protest was muffled by more kisses. When I got control of my lips back, I asked, "How much has Julia told you about what we're doing with Chloe?" "Not much, but enough for me to understand, I think. I know Julia wants to stop her being so sensitive about her breasts, so I understand why you aren't making her your girlfriend right away. I think that's very nice of you." That ended the conversation for a while, after which I worried about time, so I urged Carol to get dressed. I grabbed my BCC notes from the study, then went in search of breakfast and Vanessa, in that order. We'd missed the family breakfast, but I knew my way around the kitchen very well by now, so I quickly got my and Carol's breakfasts assembled. We were eating them when Vanessa wandered in. Before I could swallow, Vanessa asked, "How did it go with Chloe?" Carol answered, "Great. Mark and Julia are a superb team, especially Mark. He..." I interrupted, "Shush please, Carol. They might be coming out." "Oh, okay. They're still in the hot tub room I think, Vanessa. Mark and I have to leave at 9:30, so we've left them to it." I said, "It went well, Vanessa. Robert was very helpful too." "Yes, so I gathered. He complained to me that when I ask him to be helpful, it usually involves something like a spade, wheelbarrow and a few hours of hard labor in the garden. I think he enjoys helping you more, haha." Carol said, "He was a gentleman; he didn't even look down at me." "It still beat gardening." I interrupted, "Vanessa, I've got my BCC choices finalized. Here they are." We discussed my choices, and what would happen at OSU's end once Vanessa delivered them. I was taking those courses at the start of the next academic year, so nothing much was going to happen at my end until then. Vanessa took my notes with her when she left. Julia (wrapped in a towel) and Chloe emerged five minutes before Carol and I were due to leave. Julia said, "We thought we should see you off. I'm going to take Chloe up to show her your study, then we're going to talk in my room for a while." I already knew the trip to the study was on the agenda, because Julia had told us that when she was describing her plan for Chloe's visit. It was mostly so Chloe would see the messed-up bed in that room, where Julia would say Carol slept last night. I did think of one real point to add, "Okay. If you touch my computers, would you please not lose my places in the two lectures. That'll save me having to search for them again." "Okay, Mark. Have you got a few minutes before you go?" "Sure, about five minutes. Why?" Julia said, "One of the things that I've been worried about a little, now that Chloe is so close to becoming your girlfriend, is how you think she'll fit in with the bisexual sex that goes on around you?" Julia and I had already prepared my answer for this question. Julia had obviously decided now was a good time to ask it. Judging from Chloe's reaction, the question came as a great surprise to her. I pretended not to see Chloe's reaction saying, "I haven't even thought about me having sex with Chloe yet, and you're worried about a third person?" A somewhat incredulous and concerned Chloe interrupted, "You haven't?" #4: "No. You're not my girlfriend yet. I don't even know when that'll be, as that's mostly up to you. Julia and I will be helping you get ready as fast as possible, but when depends on how quickly you change your attitudes. Until you're my girlfriend, it'd be rude of me to think of you like that." "It would? Oh." "But I hope YOU have been thinking of me that way; that'd please me. I hold myself to a different standard of behavior than most people. Umm, to put it simply, 'Increased understanding should come with increased care.' That's not perfect, but it's close enough to the way I feel. Because I understand more, I should be even more careful about how I treat people, especially people who're important to me, which includes you. With my understanding, it would be too easy for me to manipulate people selfishly, so I try to keep my thoughts as pure as possible." (You might be surprised to know that my last sentence is perfectly true, it's just that "as pure as possible" is a VERY low standard!) -- I added an extra thought, "That's also why I don't have any trouble controlling myself when Carol sits on my lap in the hot tub. Even though she's beautiful and has what every other guy would consider a sexy body, I don't let myself think that way. -- "With my understanding of people, I have to be careful not to manipulate them, but I don't think there's much chance of your ever being able to manipulate me, or hide any of your motives from me, so feel free to think of me as much as you want, in any way you want. Very sexual ways would be an EXCELLENT choice, haha." "You're an amazing guy." "Thank you. Let me get back to Julia's question, even though it's obviously your question rather than Julia's, isn't it?" "Umm. Yeah. How did you know?" "Julia said she'd been worrying about it, but I know Julia WOULDN'T worry about that because she knows me well enough to confidently leave it up to my judgment. She was obviously asking on your behalf, because you embarrass so easily. You don't have to be embarrassed about being inexperienced. Everybody goes through being inexperienced and worrying about their first time. Inexperience is more than normal, it's compulsory. -- "In answer to YOUR question, and this is just my immediate, off-the-top-of-my-head answer. I haven't spent ANY time thinking about you and me having sex, let alone adding another girl, so this is just a very rough first guess, okay?" "Okay. I understand that." "My answer is in a couple of parts. I'll start by pointing out that if you had a strong opinion about having sex with a girl - whether in favor of it or against it - then you wouldn't bother to ask me my opinion. So, obviously, you're not sure. You're in the gray area in between. In answer to where you are in that gray area, I'd say that you were fairly strongly NON-bisexual. I can't see you having sex with girls." Chloe looked quite relieved, as we'd thought she'd be. -- I continued, "HOWEVER," which grabbed her attention, "I believe you'll find that you want to MAKE LOVE to the right girl. You are the sort of person who is a very generous, giving, lover. By 'lover', I don't mean the physical lovemaking sense, as it's normally used. I mean emotionally. You are capable of being very good at loving. You will give a great deal of yourself to the right person, or persons. If you're lucky enough to develop feelings for a girl that include respect, caring, appreciation, trust, and similar loving feelings, and if the girl returns those feelings for you, then I can very easily imagine your expressing it physically. You are the sort of girl who wants to give as much as she possibly can, and if you feel loved and safe, you would give yourself physically too. In fact, it'd be hard to hold you back, not that any of us would be so cruel as to try to stop you. So, in short, I can't see you having sex with a girl, but I can see you making love. Now that I know you're worried about this issue, I'll think about it more, but I'm reasonably confident in my first answer, okay?" "I had NO IDEA I was like that. Are you sure?" Julia had told me the Chloe was a giving sort of girl, although the only real indication I had of that was her giving me a piece of her pizza after bowling. But - more than anything else - I was sure every girl would like to think she was a very generous giver. That's the sort of crap they put into horoscopes to make everyone believe they're accurate, because everyone likes to think that about themselves. "Yes, I'm quite sure. I've spent a considerably amount of time thinking about you recently. Not about this aspect of you of course, but what I just described is completely consistent with your personality. Your generosity of heart is one of the major reasons I'm so interested in you, so I've thought about that a lot. I'm not saying that what I described will necessarily happen. You've got to meet the right girl and you both have to like each other enough. There's also the possibility that your parents or our culture might have brainwashed you into believing that some types of loving are bad, although God knows how love could ever be bad. If you've been taught that strongly enough, you'll hold yourself back from it, even though deep down inside you'll want it. -- "I hope your loving another girl does happen to you, because giving love is a wonderful feeling, and it's wonderfulness doesn't care what the genders are. I'll remind you of one other thing. If I spend a long time thinking about something, it's EXTREMELY unlikely I arrive at the wrong answer. I think our conversation in the hot tub room showed you how far ahead of most people's understanding mine is, right?" "Yes. You were MILES ahead of Julia and me. Especially me." "I'd better explain something, because - judging by your reaction - I suspect you haven't thought of it." In fact, I'd just thought of it myself. "Right now the whole concept of physical lovemaking is scary for you. You've never done it with anyone, boy or girl, so it's a scary unknown for you. By the time you've slept with me a few times - if you'll excuse my immodesty - you'll be saying 'yippee' whenever I invite you over. You'll be ready, willing and VERY eager. You'll know that sex is great fun, and that it's most definitely NOT scary. So once you're a happy non-virgin, the idea of making love to a girl will naturally be a great deal more attractive to you than it is now. Did you allow for that pre-condition when you reacted to my 'No to sex, yes to love' answer, or did you judge it based on your current attitude to lovemaking?" "Ahh, no. I hadn't thought of that." "Okay. It was obvious to me, but I should've explained that first. I have many more reasons and aspects that I could discuss with you. I could probably spend an hour or two going through them all, and by then I'm sure I would have had many more additional thoughts, but I don't have time to go into any of them right now. Can I just give you my advice instead several hours' worth of reasons?" "Sure. Yes please?" "My advice is simply, 'Don't worry about it.' With your permission, I'm rather hoping that I'm the first person to make love to you. Would that be okay with you?" "Oh yes, {giggle}." "After we've made love a few times, and you've got a much better idea what physical lovemaking is about, we can discuss it again if you wish. Or, if you prefer, just do what Julia does for issues like this: she leaves them to me to think through carefully, and to come up with the right decision. I'm pretty good at issues like this, Chloe, and whatever I decide will be best for you." "Yes, I can see that. The next time I have a worry like that, I should ask you myself, shouldn't I?" "Rather than trying to sneak it through Julia, yes. But if you have a worry, by all means ask Julia before you ask me, because I'm often too busy to answer simple questions, especially if explaining my reasons would take two or three hours. Julia is pretty smart herself and is perfectly capable of answering simple questions." I'll pay for that later. I added, "I do have to go now, sorry." We stood up and headed out. When I kissed Julia and Chloe goodbye, Chloe was in a much better mood than the last time I'd kissed her, but I didn't allow her to prolong the kiss at all. I didn't want her to feel she'd succeeded yet. She still had to start showing some skin at school. Or to put it more maturely, as Julia does, we were going to use her eagerness for me as the bait to motivate her to start changing her personality in ways that would be good for the rest of her life. And hopefully get her to flash some tit too. ------- Chapter 153: Repeating the 10k at Donna's Athletic Club Saturday, April 30, 2005 (Continued) When Carol and I got home, I was greeted by a nervous Donna who said, "I was afraid you'd forgotten?" I checked my watch: 9:45. "There's plenty of time. Let me get some better clothes on. The weather's a bit iffy though; will it be canceled if it starts raining?" Donna looked at me like I was silly, "No, of course not. Especially because heaps of people want to see you run another 10k." I hoped because they wanted to see an impressive run, rather than they hoped to see me fail or exposed as a cheat. I just said, "Let me get changed then I'll drive you to the club." "Okay. Hurry." As far as I could tell there was no special need for me to arrive 'on time'. I was just going to chat a bit, run around their track for half an hour, then head home for lunch and probably catch up on some chores. Maybe I should run VERY slowly. I got changed, put on some warmer clothes over top, grabbed a raincoat in case I had to run in the rain with the crazy people, and headed out. Before I got away, Mom intercepted me to ask, "Mark, what are you intending to do for your anniversary with Julia?" "Huh? What anniversary?" "Tomorrow is May 1st and your first date with Julia was April 1st, so it'll be your one-month anniversary." "That's an anniversary?" "Yes it is, if you want to stay in her good graces." "Oh. What should I do?" "Something appreciative, romantic and thoughtful would be fine." "Thanks very much, Mom. You're a GREAT help!" "No problem. Don't forget you've got another first anniversary on the 14th too." "ANOTHER one?" "Your wedding anniversary. You'd better not forget that or you'll be in BIG trouble, twice over!" "I thought 'anniversary' meant 'annual'. Don't they have the same root word because of the common 'ann'." "It does mean annual, but not showing your appreciation to your loved ones does mean you'd be in big trouble. It's traditional to do that on monthly 'anniversaries' for the first few months." "Okay, thanks for the warnings. Just out of curiosity, why is it that the guy has to do these things? Surely it should be an equality thing? We both went on the first date, all three of us got married. You're speaking like it's my responsibility." "Not to put too fine a point on it, it's because guys have to show their appreciation to the girl for deigning to accept them. I know that's not the way Julia and Carol look at your relationship, but I think you should still show them how much you appreciate them anyway." "There's something rather insulting to guys at the base of that reason, but I suspect I shouldn't kick up a fuss about that." "You suspect right. Put some thought into your wedding anniversary on the 14th. That one's especially important." "Okay. Thanks." Dad intercepted my departure next, checking that I'd have a couple of hours at home between running and soccer. "Your mother has been complaining that the gutters need cleaning. I've been putting it off but it looks like it'll have to be today." "No problem. I should be home about 11 or 11:30 at the latest." Just before I left home, I sent Ava a text message saying Donna and I were on the way, then we climbed into 'my' car and drove off. I drove slowly to give me more time to check with Donna whether she'd blabbed to anyone else about my marathon running session, or whether she would blab when we got to the club today. A very anguished Donna promised me earnestly that she'd learned her lesson, including "I'll NEVER do that." "You mean, you'd never do it AGAIN?" By the time we got to the Club, Donna was very subdued. I'd given her a hard time because I wanted to be as sure as I could that if I heard any blabbed talk, then it must've come from Ava. Also, if Donna did get carried away and blabbed today, I think my repeated warnings would easily cause her guilt to be visible on her face, so I wouldn't have any trouble discovering who the blabbermouth had been. Ava was waiting for us when we pulled into the Club's parking lot a few minutes later. With Donna quietly attached to one of my hands, and Ava happily attached to the other, we walked into the Club's grounds. I was led into the clubhouse, where I was introduced to some of the 'important' people (how important could someone be just because they were in charge of people who ran around in circles?). I was polite and non-committal in response to their attempts to encourage me to run more. I was now much less worried about being proselytized at than I had been back when I'd first agreed to come here today, but I was still less than impressed by their recruitment and similar efforts. Mom had made it clear on the phone that I didn't want them to try to convince me to join, and the big boss had agreed, but the attempts had started almost immediately. The first few times I was told, "You should join this club," or more politely, "Are you interested in joining?", I responded by telling them I wasn't interested. I tried answering in various ways, such as: "I'm too busy", "I'm not that interested in running", "I don't like organized sports", or other words to that effect. All they did was start a debate about my reasons or the merits of joining this club. I eventually learned a better response: when someone asked me about joining, I turned my back and walked away from them. That killed any chance of a debate! They'd been told not to ask me, so if they did, they were being rude to me first. The first time I did this took Donna and Ava by surprise, and they'd rushed after me. I told the girls, "They were told not to ask me to join, and they keep doing it, so I'm just going to walk away." Donna particularly enjoyed it. By the third repeat, she started giggling as soon as she heard "join". It didn't take long after my arrival for someone to ask me whether I'd run any marathons. The question surprised me, so I jumped a little. Donna jumped a lot more, but Ava hardly at all. The question was an innocent one, as far as I could tell, so I answered truthfully, "I'm not interested in marathons." The questioner, a guy of middling 'importance' in the club, had seen our reactions though, so he pressed the issue. "What's your best time?" "It was terribly embarrassing, and I don't want to talk about it." "What was your time?" I turned around and walked away. He'd figure it out, or not. Marathons were raised several more times by other people, but Donna and I had our reactions under control. I sometimes got away with a simple answer ("I've never run one" seemed to work best), but sometimes the questioner would want to extrapolate my 10k times, or suggested I should run a marathon, or some other unwanted conversation. I'd say, "I'm not interested and don't want to talk about it." If they persisted after that, I turned and walked away. I did that quite a few times, for one reason or another. While I was wandering around meeting the 'important' people, I got a tap on my shoulder. I proximity sensed it coming, of course, but I let things like that take their natural course rather than causing unnecessary questions, especially when I recognize the person or that the intention is harmless. I turned my head. My hands were captured by Donna and Ava, so turning the rest of me took longer, but I quickly saw that the shoulder-tapper was Cindy, the girl who'd called me "Handsome" before the 10k race, and who had left before dinner could be served at the fancy restaurant. I said, "Hi Cindy." "I heard you were coming today. I thought you'd come looking for me." "Huh?" #4: #1: #4: None of us could think of a reason, so I started laughing. When she'd gotten that message, I said, "Cindy, I'd totally forgotten that you belonged to this club. I came here as a favor to Donna." Several ideas occurred to me for letting Cindy know that I didn't need to come searching for girlfriends. Some of them were very boastful (they were true, but a long way from being modest), but I settled on a simple, "Ava is my girlfriend now." I held up Ava's hand with mine, to 'prove' it. "So I see. Ava goes through a lot of the guys here, so it won't last long." I was tempted to turn my back and walk away again (I'm starting to quite like doing that, as it saves a LOT of needless unpleasant discussion), but I wanted to say something to defend an Ava who was clearly about to rise to the occasion herself. I said, "The only reason it wouldn't last long would be if I wasn't good enough for Ava, as she's an EXCELLENT girlfriend. It wasn't nice talking to you Cindy, bye." I turned, grabbed Ava and Donna's hands, and walked away towing Ava behind me. I commented, to no one in particular, but Ava's hearing me was intended, "She's certainly full of herself. Not a very nice girl." Ava agreed, "She can't talk; she's had more boyfriends than I have!" "It doesn't matter, Ava. And you don't need to defend yourself to me either. I know everything I need to know about you to be perfectly happy to have you as my girlfriend." I turned to my other side, to look at Donna, "Donna, let's go find the Ducklings. So I've got some potential girlfriends lined up, in case Ava decides I'm not good enough for her." From Ava, "Ha! Like that's gonna happen." Donna pulled us in the direction the Ducklings would likely be. In the car Donna had said six or seven of them were runners and should be here. Our progress through the crowd was much interrupted, but none of the conversations were of any consequence so they didn't last long. However, I was quite annoyed at the number of times I'd heard the word, "if" in sentences such as, "if you can really run that fast..." Doubts about my time weren't expressed all that frequently, but each time was very annoying. The Ducklings were sitting in a larger group of predominately young girls, and they leaped to their feet when they saw me, calling out, "It's Egg!" (or less often, "It's Mark!") Several of the other girls quickly followed. Within a few seconds I was surrounded by young girls. Worse things have happened - everything else since I'd arrived - so this was a definite improvement. I decentered, saying, "I know the names of:..." I pointed to each of the Ducklings I'd met before, saying their names, with each of my minds taking turns controlling my mouth, pointing arm and finger. One of the Ducklings happily exclaimed, "You remembered my name!" It wasn't a particularly smart comment, but she was pretty (which is the more important of the two traits for a Duckling), so I motioned her closer, and bent down to whisper in her ear, "I always remember the names of pretty girls, especially VERY pretty ones like you." "{Squeal}." Judging from her reaction, I'd just made her week. While I was making that week, I was also having an internal conversation, #3: #1, #4: #2: We discussed it a bit, and decided to experiment when we got home by getting one mind to read a book, and the others to try to access that memory. #3: We stood around chatting: The dumb-but-pretty girl I'd complimented told the others what I'd said (which generated more squeals), I was introduced to some of the non-Duckling girls, although there were soon too many of them to bother with introductions. Donna was told how lucky she was to be my sister, to which she enthusiastically agreed, as Donna was very happy at the moment. Ava was envied even more, and asked to explain how she got to be my girlfriend. She thought for a second, then answered, "I'm in the 11th grade, and Mark's in some of my classes." I whispered to her, "You forgot to mention the photos you put in my locker." I was debating whether I should mention that to the Ducklings, because I wouldn't mind at all if some of them copied that tactic. On the other hand, they were very young and I shouldn't really be encouraging such behavior. Ava blushed a little, then started saying, "It worked, didn't..." Some guy, in his mid-20s I guess, talked right over the top of Ava, saying to me, "I hear you're going to try to prove your 10k time..." "Do you MIND! I'm talking to someone else." "I just wanted..." "I couldn't give a hoot what you wanted. I want you to learn some politeness." I saw no reason not to, so I said, "I'm busy trying to flirt with my sister's pretty girlfriends, so go away." He left, accompanied by much giggling. I was tired of the innuendoes about my honesty, so I said to Donna, "Sweetie, I think I'd better run the 10k sooner rather than later. How do I go about getting that started?" Donna excitedly said, "I'll tell the President." By the time she'd finished telling me that, she was already well on her way to the illustriously titled boss of the Pointless Circle Runners. I flirted for a few more minutes, and then the Public Address system announced, "Attention everyone. Mark Anderson, the winner of the blah, blah..." (it went on for far too long). To condense it considerably, my "demonstration run" was going to start after the next race finished in about ten minutes. I was to start in lane one and any serious 10k runners who wanted to run with me could find themselves other lanes. Casual runners were invited to run in a group behind us. There were instructions about runners getting lapped to pull to the outside, and other minutiae I couldn't care less about. I was amused by the President's statement, "I am told that Mark will be ATTEMPTING to reproduce the same time he achieved on race day." It was said with considerable skepticism, which contrasted with my total confidence quite amusingly. If he knew how fast I could truly run 10k, he'd wet himself. I checked with Ava that I correctly remembered what lap time I needed to run to finish with the same time, and she confirmed it. I'd thought I had it right, but it was worth double checking as I'd look very stupid forty minutes from now if I'd gotten it wrong. Or maybe twenty minutes from now, or 70 minutes, depending on how wrong it might've been. As soon as I started taking off my jacket, twenty girls offered, then clamored, for the honor of holding it for me. Several joking responses occurred to me ("I'll let you hold my clothes, if I can hold yours"), but I decided giving voice to my thoughts probably wasn't a good idea, especially if the girls agreed, since there were FAR too many adults around, i.e., any. I made a mental note to make the same offer in a more private venue. I feared my clothes being pulled apart by girls squabbling over them, so I played safe by giving my tracksuit top to Ava. Donna arrived back while I was removing my tracksuit bottoms, which also went to Ava, then Donna eagerly led me toward the very special place from which the circle running started. Quite a crowd started drifting that way too. There was clearly a lot of interest in watching me run around in circles for just over half an hour. I resolved to do my best to look fascinating, although keeping it up for that long would be a challenge. Thirty minutes would be stretching my fascinatingness to its limits. Donna introduced me to the guy who had the important job of making sure all the circle runners started at the same time. We had to wait a few minutes for the current race to finish the requisite number of circles, so I spent the time warming up and chatting to Donna and Ava. They weren't going to start with me, but would join one of the later laps, "just for fun." Soon it was time for me to take my starting position. There were quite a few other "serious 10k runners" lined up beside me, about two dozen of them, although some looked considerably more serious than others. The most serious looked very grim and determined, including the guy who had rudely interrupted Ava. I was very amused by the contrast between their clothing and mine. I was wearing whatever baggy shorts and T-shirt I'd first laid my hands on, plus an old pair of "running shoes". They weren't proper running shoes in any respect, being mere casual, wear-to-school shoes. I vaguely knew what Mom spent on Donna's running shoes, and the price tag on mine had contained considerably fewer digits. Given the seriousness of the looks on some of my competitor's faces, including Mr. Rude's, I decided that I was going to win this demonstration run, even if I had to run faster than my race day time. I thought it unlikely, but if I had any serious competitors one or two K's out from the finish, I'd pick up the pace and burn them off. There was a large bunch of assorted casual runners grouped behind me. I'm not sure why, but they all seemed interested in participating. They were a much happier bunch, laughing and joking with each other. Theirs was a MUCH better attitude, but I couldn't think of a way of letting them know I approved. I couldn't, for example, run with them, because that'd ruin my time. I decided not to worry about it, as I was outta here in forty five minutes or so anyway. It was nearly time to start, so I looked at my watch to catch the correct starting time. The gun went off, and we all surged forward. I had a pretty good feel for what my optimal running rate was, but not for the slower rate that I wanted now. I quickly sped up until I was not far below optimal, and then held that pace. A couple of the serious 10k runners shot ahead of me - not Mr. Rude, I noticed - but most of them were content to match my starting speed, falling in behind me so they could run the corners in the shortest distance. I was running in third place. A slowly increasingly distant third, as first and second were outpacing me slightly, not that I cared. It didn't take me long to notice that the club's timing board gave me a lot of information, although I really only needed the accumulating race time, saving me from having to calculate it from my watch. My first lap was 25 seconds too slow, so I sped up quite a bit. The next was 10 seconds slow (making 35 in total). I sped up again. The next was 10 seconds too fast, so I maintained that pace for three and a half laps to recover the deficit, then I slowed a little. After that I just had to make very minor adjustments. The two runners ahead of me couldn't maintain the pace, so I lost a little time running around them, and a few casual runners weren't as fast at getting out of my way when I lapped them as they should've been, but none of these were more than hiccups. Apart from the two runners I've already mentioned, no other serious runner tried to pass me. Several casuals ran alongside me for a while, including Ava and Donna. Several minutes earlier I'd remembered that I'd told Julia and Carol this morning that I was contemplating a 'normal' date with Ava this evening (my idea of "normal" meaning just me and my three regular lovers). I hadn't thought to mention it to Ava earlier, so when she fell in beside me I asked her, "Ava, I was thinking earlier today that you haven't spent much time with us the last couple of days, so what do you say the four of us - you, me, Julia and Carol - go out tonight? Movies and dinner, or something like that." "That'd be great. Can I stay the night too please?" I had to think about that, because Carol complicated the issue (actually, it was society's stupid prejudices and rules that complicated the issue). Carol had slept with Julia and me last night, and we hadn't spent much time with Ava recently, so Ava's request seemed reasonable. I answered, "I think so. Let me check with Julia later to make sure she hasn't made other plans, and one of us will call you about it, okay?" "Sure. You're the boss, boss. I don't think you're a very bossy boss though." "Funnily enough, Julia says the same thing." I don't know what the other people around us thought of this conversation, but there wasn't anything troublesome in it. If anything, they seemed most surprised that I was having a conversation at all, rather than the content of it. They started talking to me more, and to quite a few people's surprise, I was virtually a "casual runner" myself, in that I was perfectly happy to chat away, provided they didn't go on about marathons or boringly start raving about how good I was, or that I should slow down, or otherwise give me the benefit of their advice. I couldn't "turn my back and walk away" on people who got too annoying, but they took the hint when I warned them off clearly enough. I looked back from time to time, especially after the halfway point, and could see that the serious runners were increasingly falling behind, or giving up entirely. Even though we were often mixed up with casual runners, it was easy to tell who the serious runners were; they were the ones with pained expressions on their faces. The biggest difficulty I had was in deciding whether to take my shirt off or not. There were quite a few good looking girls watching me, and I was tempted to take off my shirt to impress them. I could pretend to mop my brow, as if I was sweating, which I wasn't. I thought about it over a couple of laps, eventually deciding not to. Girls from outside of school would need more time out of my evenings in order to build any sort of relationship, and I didn't want to make that commitment just because they looked pretty. There were plenty of pretty girls at school to choose from, who had the advantage of having something in common with me to talk about (school), and they didn't need to have the basic facts of my life explained to them. After twenty minutes I was so far ahead that there was no one who could even think of mounting a challenge. I stuck to my pace of course, and I kept chatting to any casuals that ran alongside me. I did, however, speed up a very small amount for the last couple of laps, to make sure I finished a few seconds faster than I had on race day; that being my way of saying, "So there!" to the doubters who thought I might've cheated. I crossed the line, accompanied by quite a few casuals, with me deliberately talking about a clichéd unimportant thing ("I'm glad it didn't rain, because running around in the rain wouldn't have been much fun") as a joke with myself about how unimportant running in circles was. I had to hang around for a while after the race, mainly because there were so many people around me that I couldn't escape. I lost track of how many times people asked me about joining their club. I just ignored the question, and turned around to talk with someone else, that being about the only advantage of being surrounded by people. When I caught sight of Ava and Donna, I got them to join me inside the throng. They forced people a little further away from me, which was good. I caught sight of one of Donna's friends, and turned to talk with her. She exclaimed, "You weren't even tired after the race!" Quite a few others had commented on that, and I'd usually just shrugged, or said, "I'm feeling good today," or something else equally uninformative. But for the pretty girl my answer was different. I told her, "Give me your hand." When she did, I moved it up inside my T-shirt, and placed it against my heart. "Not beating fast at all, not even from a pretty girl touching me." "{Giggle}." Accompanied by a lovely blush. I had to remove her hand myself. I was asked lots of questions I didn't want to answer, such as "How fast could you run a 10k if you really pushed yourself?" To most of these questions I answered something like, "I don't know", "I don't care", "I'm not interested", and that sort of thing. Soon after my demonstration finished, the President got on the PA again and did a rave about the demonstration in specific, and my running in general. It was just more "blah, blah." I listened initially, but it went from bad to worse, so I mostly tuned out and carried on talking to Donna or Ava. The only thing that mattered was that the atmosphere of the crowd was considerably more positive than before the race, thus I could consider the job to be well done. So when I got too bored of the same repeated comments, I took back my clothes from Ava, said, "I'm about to leave. Donna, do you want to stay here or come back with me?" "Do you have to go so soon?" Donna was thoroughly enjoying her vicarious victory and being the slightly off center of attention. "Yep. Dad wants me to help him at home." That sounded better than "I have to hold the ladder," which is what my helping with the gutters means. "Aww." "Staying or going, Donna?" "I'll stay. I'll get someone to give me a ride home later." "Okay, see you later. Ava, I'll see you at soccer in Salem, right?" "Yes, we'll be there. I'm looking forward to it very much. It'll be great for Mom and Dad to see you play, and I haven't seen any of your games since you suddenly got better after your cast came off. You'll play just as well today, won't you?" "I can't imagine why I wouldn't, especially with you and your parents watching." "Good." I turned to the crowd and yelled, "Make way please. I'm going home now." They preferred otherwise, wanting to repeat the same comments and questions several more times, but I walked in the direction of the parking lot and they opened up in front of me. Ava quickly caught up with me, to tell me, "You should probably go thank the President for letting you run." My initial reaction was otherwise, as I'd sort of been forced into this. But that wasn't really the President's fault, and he had let me tie up that track for forty minutes, so I agreed and changed direction to head toward the clubhouse, figuring the President wouldn't be far away from the PA microphone. On the way I remembered that no one had made a comment like, "I hear you can run a marathon faster than the world record?" That was an extremely pleasing non-event. Ava came with me, leaving Donna to enjoy what limelight she could keep. We found the club's President, I thanked him for the use of his track, and he eagerly tried to talk me into joining his club. He looked far too enthusiastic and I had no doubt he was perfectly willing to spend at least the next thirty minutes extolling the wonderful virtues of organized circle running. "No! That's been made clear to you already, including by my mother as a condition of my coming here today. So now you're breaking your word and being rude." I turned around and walked out. I was REALLY starting to enjoy doing that! Ava caught up, and said, "You can't blame him for trying. It'd be a big deal for the club to have you as a member." "I do blame him. Despite his giving his word to my mother to discourage people from trying to recruit me, I'm pretty sure he didn't put the word out against it, and he twice tried it himself, so I have a low opinion of him. It might've been good for his club, but that doesn't excuse his dishonesty and rudeness." [[It's all too common. People are often dishonest and rude for their group's benefit, whether their group is an athletic club, a nation, or somewhere in between. They don't care about the 'outsiders' they're abusing, and more seriously, they don't care that they're behaving immorally. There's a pervasive behavior that morals are applied only within a person's own definition of their chosen group, which is a very slippery slope down which very many people are throwing themselves.]] On the way to the car, Donna ran up to thank me for coming today. I knew she'd eventually remember that I'd come here for her benefit, and then she'd thank me, but it was nice that she'd remembered so quickly. She'd been very distracted by being the off-center of attention, so I was somewhat surprised she'd thought to thank me so quickly. "You're welcome, sweetie. From what I could see, people seem much more positive about my win now, so that's good. I'd better head off so I can help Dad." "Did you like any of the girls? Do you want to meet any of them again? They want to meet you, {giggle}." "It was fun to flirt with them, but I can't think of any good way of meeting with them with privacy." "I could invite some of them home." "But we couldn't use the bedrooms without moving all your and my stuff back and forth, and it's not worth that bother. We can't even keep them in the living room, because there's too much risk of one of them going to the toilet, then getting curious and snooping around the bedrooms. Let's wait for a few days. We'll be able to invite them to our mansion easily, and there's a chance there might be some good news about that soon." "Really? We're getting it soon? With my horse and everything?" "Haha. That's not what I said, sweetie. In a few days we MIGHT have some good news about it. Just wait a few days. I'll be able to tell you a lot more after that, okay?" "Okay. I hope we can get it soon though." "You and me both." I waited until I got home to call Julia, because the call would be free. I wasn't rich yet, and might even be much poorer shortly, if things went badly. Prof answered their landline, and fetched Julia for me. "Hi darling, it's Mark here." "How many boys call me 'darling' that I need you to tell me your name?" We have this conversation at least once a week, because Mom has trained us to always state our name at the beginning of a phone conversation. It's an unbreakable habit now. I invented another appropriate answer, "You're so beautiful I should probably say 'It's Mark ANDERSON here, ' just in case you've got several Marks who call you 'darling'. I'll get down to business, because Dad's waiting for me to help him with a chore. I talked to Ava at the Athletic Club about..." "How did that go, at the Club?" "Fine. No problem. I ran another 10k a few seconds faster than on the big race day. Everyone seemed very happy after I'd proved I could do it, and I got asked to join the club about two hundred times. Most importantly, both Ava and Donna seem to have fully behaved themselves, so that's great, especially about Ava, because I'm looking forward to letting her get closer to us. Speaking of Ava, I asked her about our having a normal date tonight. You, me, Ava and Carol. Going out somewhere, possibly movies and dinner I thought, but I don't really care about where we go. Ava asked if she could stay the night, and I thought that was probably okay because Carol stayed with you last night and we haven't seen Ava for a while. Mom probably wouldn't be too happy with Carol staying away too many nights in a row anyway. Is that okay with you?" (You might notice that I was being careful with what I said in this conversation. I didn't mention that Donna and Ava had secrets I was worried about, or that I'd beaten the marathon world record. I also said "Carol stayed with you" because "Carol stayed with us" was too revealing. This caution was all because of the Government's possible surveillance. Talking on the phone is such a familiar process and it seems to involve just the two participants, so it's hard to remember to be careful. I feared that we sometimes did say too much, but I do try to remember to be cautious.) "That sounds good. It'd be nice to go out, although I haven't got anything to wear." All of my minds were taken by surprise by that, so there was a sudden silence, then Julia started laughing. At my expense, I suspect, but I didn't ask for confirmation. "I'm sure you'll find some old rags you can put on. Can I ask you to decide what we're doing and phone Ava and Carol with the details please? I'm a little busy right now, and then I'm going to be away for soccer. You're not too busy are you?" "No. That's fine. I'm going through my mistakes with Mom. We're having a good session, but I can easily take a little time off. Mom needs to do some other things too." "Oh. That sounds far too serious for me to interrupt. I shouldn't even be talking to you now..." "It's FINE, Mark. I'm not being raked over the coals or anything like that. It's just a learning exercise. I'm enjoying it, but we need breaks from time to time, so you can easily leave this to me. What sort of movie do you want to see?" "Umm. You choose, just so long as it's got spaceships, lots of naked girls and plenty of explosions." "Haha. Considering there are three girls and only one boy on this date, I wouldn't pin your hopes on something like that." "I know compromise is important in relationships, so I'll settle for spaceships, explosions and just TOPLESS girls." "From what I remember is playing at the moment, the only topless girls you're likely to see are the three of us." "That'd work! Haha. I'll leave it to you; I'm not fussy." [A tactical error on my part, as the movie didn't have any spaceships (not even one!), no explosions and no topless girls. Julia has no idea what constitutes a good movie.] ^ Helping Dad clean the gutters is a fairly short job, but I knew it would just be the start of a list of outdoor chores, especially because I'd been too busy to pull my weight recently. Dad had already cleaned the gutters on three sides of our house, and was doing other things while waiting for me before doing the fourth. On that side the ground is hard and irregular, so he prefers to have someone hold the ladder for him. The ladder was already at one end of the fourth side, so a couple of minutes later I was hanging on to the bottom of the ladder while Dad was at its other end, scooping muck out of the gutter and into the bucket he was carrying. When you're standing on a precarious ladder, about eight or nine feet above the ground, you can't lean far to either side, so Dad would clean the gutter that the ladder was resting on, out to about three feet to either side, then he'd climb down, move the ladder about seven feet sideways, climb it again, and repeat the process. My job isn't exactly intellectually challenging, so my mind wandered. I like to keep my eyes on what he's doing, to anticipate the ladder's possibly twisting one way or another in response to Dad's leaning that way. I know what cleaning the gutters entails because Dad has taken me up the ladder on one of the safe sides to show me. It struck me that NP might be useful, so on the next ladder move, I said to Dad, "Let me go up this time please?" "It's okay. I'll do it." "Let me try at least once please. I've got an idea that might make it much quicker and easier." Offering to make a messy chore "much quicker and easier" is a pretty good incentive, so Dad let me go up the ladder, after the usual parental, "Be careful." I was tempted to remind him who the "graceful" member of the family was, but that was unappreciative and petty. I simply said, "Yes, Dad." When I got to the top, I quickly saw that my idea wouldn't work. Damn! My idea had been to create twelve fingertips, make them as wide as possible (they can each be from 0.5 to 2 inches wide), place them side by side to cover 24 inches. Slide them down that length of one side of the gutter, to push all that side's muck to the bottom, slide them down the facing side, so now all the muck for a two-foot length of gutter would be a nice long heap on the bottom, then use NP to push the whole lot toward me, whereupon I'd scoop it into the bucket. Then repeat for the next two-foot length of gutter, without moving the ladder at all. With luck and good eyesight, I might be able to do the whole length of this side of the house without moving the ladder. At most, I thought, I might have to move the ladder once, if I couldn't see the far end of the gutter well enough. Unfortunately there was one major problem: the roof overlapped the gutter, blocking my vision of the inside half of it. I tried my idea on the outside side of the gutter, and it worked perfectly. Then I tried pushing the muck toward me, and that worked perfectly too, although I had to break it into two sweeps as the muck accumulated so much that it was going to overflow the gutter. I was tempted to use NP to try to scoop all the muck into the bucket, but I feared a neighbor seeing it, because it would look weird. Everything else I was doing was inside the gutters and out of sight, unless the CIA had a satellite camera zoomed in on our gutters, which I thought was relatively unlikely. NP can work out of sight if I can feel my way to where I want the fingertips to be and they're within my proximity range (within three feet of the center of my body: just below my belly button and halfway between my front and back). I took a step up, to get my belly button at gutter level, then moved the twelve touching fingertips under the roof line, and on to the top of the inside edge of the gutter. When I pushed down, virtually no muck at all appeared. #1: I checked with my hand, in case NP had failed to do the job properly for some reason. My hand didn't find any muck. Excellent. I figured what few leaves and whatever else were hidden on that side didn't matter anyway. So I started cleaning the gutters two feet at a time working out from where I was. Because of my independent eyeball control, I was even able to be manually scooping up one pile of muck, while my NP-fingertips were busy creating the next two foot's worth of pile and sliding it to me. I also spotted that when I was sliding a pile toward me, it would pick up stuff on the bottom half of the inside side of the gutter, so only the top half of the inside side would be left as is, and that would be virtually pristine already. I was doing a very good job, and barely having to lift a real finger! I got about half the length of the gutter done without having to move the ladder. Beyond that it was getting hard for me to see clearly, as the gutter was running directly away from me. I was up the ladder for much longer than I should've been for doing a normal job, but Dad said nothing. I guessed because he could tell I was putting a lot of muck into the bucket. Once it got hard for me to see, and it was obvious that I might as well move the ladder once and finish off the remaining length from a better position, I descended. I passed the bucket down to Dad. He looked into it, seeing much more than when he'd handed it to me. He smiled. I picked up the ladder and moved it along the side of the house all the way to the approximate midway point of the dirty section, then climbed partway up the ladder. Dad had emptied the bucket by now, and he returned to give it back to me and hold the ladder again. I ascended the rest of the way (justifying the title of my autobiography). Having no need to experiment, and shorter sliding distances, meant it didn't take me long to finish the job. I climbed down, showed Dad the inside of the bucket, and said, "Do you want to go up and have a look?" "I'm looking forward to it." I held the ladder for him. He ascended, looked, whistled, and descended to tell me, "You're doing the gutters from now on." "Oops, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Haha. I should check something with you though. I couldn't get at any stuff on the gutter that's covered by the roof. The bottom half of that side I could sweep up, but anything high up under the roof will still be there. There's not much up there, though is there?" "No. And it doesn't block the water flow up there either. What you've done is perfectly fine and far quicker than it'd normally take. So you can defeat gunmen and clean gutters, you're a useful boy." I looked around in a little panic when he started talking about gunmen, in case there might be someone near us who shouldn't hear stuff like that. Dad saw me, and added, "Sorry. I shouldn't say anything, should I?" "I prefer not. I'm probably being way too cautious, but I don't see any problem with being too cautious, whereas I do see a MAJOR problem with what could happen if we were not cautious enough. I normally wouldn't dream of doing ANYTHING outside, but I figured that inside the gutters was safe. If someone asked why I was scooping up so much from just two places along the whole side, I could simply say that water had created two big piles, and they wouldn't be able to tell otherwise. But talking about," I lowered my voice considerably, "gunmen, and stuff like that, would be a bad habit. Better to say nothing." "Nothing it is then. I don't even want to know how you did the cleaning. It doesn't matter to me, as it's your job from now on, haha. Dump the leaves, then come back and you can help me cut that damned tree back again." When we were setting up to prune the big tree that dominates our backyard, I half-expected Dad to ask me if I had any 'special' ideas about how to tackle this job. I was very pleased that he said nothing of the sort, saving me from getting tough on him in response if he had. It was a nuisance of a job. We had to rope individual branches twice, chainsaw them, then lower them carefully to the ground. Lowering them had to be done in a way that took the removed limb away from the tree as well as down, so the branches below weren't damaged (that's why two ropes had to be attached). Simply letting the chainsawed limb fall to the ground might badly scrape lower branches, or otherwise make the tree look "ugly", which Mom disapproved of. Sometimes getting the rope around the part of the limb we wanted was tricky, and required several failed casts of the rope before we got one that succeeded. I was thinking about the merits of taking over that part of the job and using NP to pull the rope in the desired direction, when Dad, cursing at yet another casting failure, turned to me to ask, "I don't suppose..." "NO! And if you ask anything like that again, I'll totally forget how to clean gutters and you can have that job back. It's a slippery slope Dad, and it leads straight to MAJOR problems, so DON'T get on it. Okay?" "Okay. Sorry." I regretted cleaning the gutters now. #4: I was still tempted to surreptitiously use NP to help with the rope, because it was frustrating him trying to get it in the right place, but I didn't want Dad to suspect I was doing so. I wouldn't even let him give me the rope to throw, in case I had a lucky cast and he thought I'd 'cheated' in some way. The less he thought about such things occurring anywhere around him, the less he would talk about them. My skills could NOT be used or discussed out in the open. Dad and I toiled away with the "damned tree" until Mom called us in for lunch. I knew it was an irresponsible attitude, but if it'd been up to me I wouldn't have bothered pruning the tree. I'd wait to see whether I made enough money to buy the mansion, buy it, and leave the "damned tree" to whoever bought this place from Mom and Dad. Either Dad didn't really believe we'd be buying a mansion soon, or he was being responsible. Probably both. After lunch we did a bit more toiling with the tree, and then it was time for me to get ready for soccer. Dad wasn't sorry to see me go, as the tree is a two person job, so he could stop now. ------- Chapter 154: Soccer Game Versus a Salem Team Saturday, April 30, 2005 (Continued) I drove to the school, and then got on the bus with the rest of the team and our coach. There was a great deal of laughter and high spirits during the 45-minute trip north to Salem, as this was the first real game we'd gone to with the expectation of beating our opponents' socks off. I'd only played two games since I'd discovered my proximity sense. There was no special anticipation before the first of those two, because no one had known that my soccer skills had improved, not even me. And the second game had been a 'friendly' that didn't count in our league. This time we had a 45-minute bus trip to a real game, so we whooped it up all the way. I even did some whooping myself, because my teammates' enthusiasm was infectious. Occasionally the coach managed to get us to discuss some tactics, but the team didn't think it needed tactics when it had me, whoop! When we arrived at the field, we had some spare time before the game. Coach had no hopes of getting us to listen to anything serious, so he let us do whatever we wanted. I went in search of the Wests. I was pleasantly surprised to see the three of them standing in a larger group of my supporters, although I was a little worried what Mr. and Mrs. West thought of all of my supporters being girls, other than the two older Chinese people standing with Lily; presumably her parents. I joined the group, greeting Ava and her parents first; kissing Ava and putting my arm around her waist briefly, so her parents had no doubt as to my priorities. Next I greeted Pat and Lily, then Lily introduced me to her parents. I'd not met her parents before, not even to see them from a distance, so I was a little curious. In short (partly because they both were, haha), they were "very Chinese" in their look, size, accents, mannerisms and lack of English. Mrs. Cheng was even standing a little behind her husband; beside him, but several inches back too. Lily was effusive in her introduction of me. "Father, Mother," (Lily used the Chinese words for these, but their meanings were obvious), "meet Mark Anderson." Lily then said a brief burst of Chinese, which I obviously had no comprehension of at the time. [To be more accurate, it was Cantonese. Much later I learned what she'd said included, "You'll see that I'm right."] After a firm handshake with Mr. Cheng (he was no softie), and a small bow from Mrs. Cheng, which I bowed back to guessing that a handshake wasn't appropriate, Lily said, "Father's business has fitness. That is why they come. Favor please Mark? Take shirt off so Father see please?" "Umm..." "YES!" from all my female supporters. | "Come on Mark. We want to see too." | "Yeah, come on Mark." There were several more encouraging calls, and it wasn't that big a deal, so I took my shirt off. All the girls quickly expressed their approval. Mr. Cheng was silent, walking around me and studying my body critically. His intentness was unsettling, but proximity showed him to have no intent other than walking around me. Three-quarters of the way around he spoke more Chinese ["You are correct about his physical form, Daughter."] Lily translated for me, "Father say you be model, Mark. In magazine." "Haha. I DON'T think so!" Mr. Cheng returned to his original spot, then spoke in heavily accented English, "Thank you. Dress please." I put my shirt back on, to the sound of several "Aww's." I hadn't finished greeting everyone, so I wandered around doing that, ending back with Ava, with my arm around her waist again. All the girls had made a point of proudly telling me that they'd come to watch me play. I worried what Ava's parents would think of the obvious interest all these girls had in me, but they seemed aware but unconcerned. Given my importance to their daughter, this surprised me. I whispered to Ava, "Your parents aren't worried about other girls wanting me?" "They're okay. I'll tell you later." [Ava did so. It was a combination of several influences, one of the best ones being that her parents had several times heard the girls saying things like, "You're so lucky, Ava. I wish Mark was my boyfriend." My concentrating on Ava was very good too. Ava had also extended one of Vanessa's points, telling her parents that my helping her in the future didn't depend on her being my girlfriend. She told her parents that she was very happy to have the support of the Andersons and Williams families, her romantic relationship with Julia and me was more of a very welcome bonus than a necessity.] Despite Ava's reassurance of her parents being okay, I chose not to act on my idea of a couple of days ago of inviting Pat out on another date. Necessarily with Lily, as those two girls went hand in hand these days, including right this instant. That was something I was initially surprised Lily would do in front of her parents, until I remembered that Asians don't make a big deal out of same-sex handholding. Asking Pat out in front of Ava's parents probably wouldn't be welcome, but asking Lily out on the same date in front of her parents would be a HUGE no-no. I didn't know much about Chinese culture, but I knew it was very conservative about sex. Asking their daughter out on a threesome date right in front of them would NOT be a good idea! Asking that could wait until we were at school. The group chatted about inconsequential stuff for a few minutes ("Did we think we'd win?", etc. - the "we" was because my teammates hadn't been slow to join my group of pretty girls), and then it was time for us to start our warming up, as Coach has a bee in his bonnet about warming up properly. The game started, and it rapidly proved itself to be entirely consistent with the strategic consensus we'd expressed during the bus trip up: "Whoop, whoop, we're going to whip their asses." It was a repeat of our previous two games. If I got the ball, there was something like an 80 to 90% chance I'd get a goal. Salem saved a few, but nowhere near enough. My little group of a dozen supporters, counting the four parents, had a lot of fun yelling their huge approval at me whenever I was anywhere near them. Mr. and Mrs. Cheng weren't the yelling type, but Mr. Cheng was filming the game on the tiniest camcorder I've ever seen, less than half the size of any of the others around the field. In case you worry about it, right from the first game in which I used proximity I've been aware that some of the parents record the games. There's nothing to see when I use proximity, so my successful dodging around the defenders so often looks like I've either got excellent reactions (which I do), or make lucky guesses if my zig occurred before my opponent's zag. If pressed for an explanation, I'll just say that my genius allows me to read their body language signals faster and better than most players can, but it's subconscious so I can't really explain it. If pressed REALLY hard, I can make reference to my Aikido training, because detecting people's movement is a publicly acknowledged Aikido skill, albeit a very advanced one, usually requiring many years of training. Having NP recorded on videotape would be a very different issue, but since my first couple of in-game experiments with it, I've never used NP during a game. There's no need to, because I "whip their asses" anyway. One unexpected event occurred during the game. After I'd scored my first couple of goals in the second half, and was going for my third, one of the defenders 'lost it', he came charging at me, fists swinging. His new 'tactic' caught me by surprise, and he almost managed to hit me. I had to dive to the side to avoid him, automatically doing an Aikido roll, which - rather coolly - almost instantly had me back on my feet ready to dodge again. He came charging after me, chasing me around the field, leaving the ball completely forgotten. The ref was repeatedly blowing his whistle, but my angry opponent wasn't listening. It wasn't uncommon for our opponents to try for some very hard tackles on me, but they were hampered by having to look at least a little soccer-like. This was very different; he simply wanted to punch me. I could easily have put my would-be attacker down, either by punching him or just by ankle-tapping him with NP, but I had a whole field to run around in so there was no pressing need for such tactics. I avoided running near any of his teammates in case they decided to help him, instead angling toward the ref. It didn't last long. He could see that he wasn't going to catch me, especially as plenty of players, some of the spectators and his coach were heading for him. Plus the ref was blowing his whistle REALLY hard AND waving the red card wildly. My attacker slowed to a walk, then allowed himself to be led off the field. We restarted the game, with his team having to finish with one less defender. That made no difference to their chances, as they had none. They were visibly glad when the game was finally all over. Being humiliated is no fun, but having the humiliation last one and a half hours is... , well, I guess it's also no fun, but you know what I mean. My team, on the other hand, were of the opinion that humiliating the other team for an hour and a half was a great deal of fun, and it deserved to be celebrated with plenty of whoops. My team would have plenty of time on the bus to celebrate together, so I didn't bother celebrating with them now. Instead I moved to meet my personal entourage of supporters. The eight girls were running toward me, with the parents following with more decorum, so the girls met me first. They used my victory as an excuse to kiss me. I used it as an excuse to accept their kisses. Mr. and Mrs. West arrived and effusively expressed their astonishment at my performance, "We were told you were good, but that was AMAZING. You single-handedly... ," etc. I wasn't listening all that much, because there were still plenty of excited girls who wanted more kisses. Some were on their second or third turns, which was delightfully greedy of them. Mr. and Mrs. Cheng arrived, and Mr. Cheng waited for a gap in the girls to shake my hand. While shaking my hand he looked at me carefully, then spoke Chinese to Lily, who translated his question, "Father ask you not tired?" I answered Lily, "No, sir. I'm quite fit." His next question, via Lily, was, "You are both sides equal? Not left, not right?" "The word is 'am-bi-dex-trous'. Yes, I am ambidextrous." Mr. Cheng understood. He smiled very happily, put out his hand to shake mine, so I took his. He pumped my arm up and down quite a few times, saying, "Very good. Honor meet you." He was still holding my hand - now long enough to start feeling uncomfortable to me - and he added to my uncertainty by bowing too. I have no idea about Chinese bowing etiquette, but bowing back seemed reasonable, so I just copied what he'd done. He pumped my arm a few more times, then finally let go. The Chengs withdrew a few steps, leaving the opportunity open for more kissing. I snagged Ava with one arm, holding her, and started giving her the mirror of every other kiss from other girls. After the third such duplication she realized what I was doing, so I said, "I think it's fair that you get what every other girl gets, don't you?" "Haha. I think that's VERY fair." I couldn't say anything like, "And if the other seven girls all want sex with me, then you're going to be a VERY tired girl," because of her parents being within earshot. I did, however, think it was an interesting method of keeping a girlfriend happy about me getting physical with other girls. The more the other girls got, the more my girlfriend would get. That should stop her being jealous, and even make her want me to get sexy with other girls. (I don't need such a system since my girlfriends already have wonderful attitudes, but if any of my male readers are having trouble with a jealous girlfriend, then you have my permission to give it a try with her. Let me know how you get on? Being a very moral guy - just as Julia - I must point out that this system is very logical, and that your girlfriend is not only a girl, but a jealous one. You have been warned.) There were many interruptions from other spectators congratulating me, and stuff like that, but I'll leave them out of the following: A few minutes later a very happy - even beaming - Lily approached my little kissing group. She said, "Mark, Father and Mother want invite you to dinner, you choose day." "There's no need for that..." I was thinking what else I could say, as that didn't seem enough, but I wasn't sure what the etiquette was for turning down dinner invitations from complete strangers of the Chinese persuasion, when Lily said, "Father think you VERY special. So we have VERY special Chinese meal. VERY! Big honor to me and you. You first my friend they invite special dinner for. Very important. Very fun too. You invite many girlfriends, your family, Julia's family, anyone. Many people good. Food very, very special. I tell Mother you like roast chicken. Mother say she make many different roast chicken dishes. Number one delicious food in Corvallis. Everyone very happy. You say yes, please?" Lily's voice had started with a sense of urgency, and had moved into beseeching. It sounded important to her, although I had NO idea why. What do I know about Chinese culture? And although it doesn't seem possible, I'm sure I know even less about Chinese females than I do about American ones. It sounded like something much more important than a casual dinner, especially because they sounded like they wanted to invite everyone I knew, but I was completely in the dark as to why. The talk about roast chickens had caught my attention too, especially as I was feeling hungry. Lily's saying "Food very, very special" sounded very, very interesting. "I don't know. It sounds like it'll be a lot of trouble." Lily said, "No. Big honor. Honor for you, and honor for me because Father honor my friend. Honor important for Chinese. Please, you and everyone you want? Shame if you say no. Please?" "I'm not used to anything like this. I've never..." "Good, you try. Julia say you very important. You learn about Chinese people because China important country." I couldn't see any real reason not to accept, but it sounded weird. The food sounded good, but the whole thing seemed weird. I asked, "I don't understand why your parents want to honor me? It is me they're trying to honor, right?" "Yes, you. Father invite you. You invite family and friends. You number one. Chinese say intelligent VERY important. Father know you special man." I suddenly thought of my hopefully being rich in a few days, so I asked, "I won't have to do something back for them will I? Like I'll be under some sort of obligation?" I don't know what sort of obligation they thought a 15-year old boy could meet, but best to be cautious. "No! Gift for you. You only talk nice to Father. Father important man in Hong Kong, so maybe good you talk." "Shouldn't I talk with your mother too, for all the work of the meal? It sounds like a lot of work." "Father invite you. Umm, hard to say. Talk with Father for all dinner. Talk with Mother for 'Nice dish', 'Nice house'. Father invite, so talk with Father. If Mother invite, then talk with Mother, but Father invite. Father, Mother know you American, so okay you not know. Is okay. Dinner for you, so no worry. Please come? Please?" It sounded important, and what little I knew about the Chinese was that they can put on very fancy meals, presumably especially for important events like inviting me - God knows why that was important though. I was tempted, but worried by it apparently being important. Lily seemed too intense. I asked some more questions, and Lily started assuring me that I had nothing to worry about, that it would be a fun, friendly dinner, with anyone that I wanted to invite and have fun with. I was somewhat confused by her reassurances, because it sounded like she was deliberately making it sound unimportant, whereas at the beginning it'd sounded very important. I was probably being stupidly suspicious over something what wasn't anything more than a language difficulty, but Lily seemed to be saying whatever she thought most convincing at the time, perhaps regardless of the truth. [Much later I found out that my suspicion was largely correct. Lily's 'explanations' had been worded in ways that she thought would best motivate me.] I couldn't see how I could usefully ask her any more questions now, so I stalled with, "Julia is in charge of my social appointments, and sometimes she books me days in advance without my knowing about it, so I need to talk with her first. We'll talk with you about it tomorrow at the Liaison Meeting. Is that okay?" (We have our first Liaison Meeting tomorrow, which Lily will be attending.) "Yes. Remember you choose when. Any day okay. Tell me what day, how many people. I tell Mother. Easy." "I remember. Let me talk with Julia." "Thank you. I'll tell Father what you say." Lily moved off to do so. #1: #2: #4: #1: Ava said, "That sounds like it'll be a fantastic meal!" "And let me guess, you like Chinese food, right? And you heard Lily say I can invite all my girlfriends?" "Haha, yes. Guilty." I couldn't ask Ava what she thought of Lily's intensity, not with all the other girls around us, especially Pat as she was Lily's friend. I could ask Pat something though, "Pat, did you know anything about that dinner invitation?" "No, Lily never mentioned it to me. I guess her parents just decided on it now, so maybe Lily didn't know either. I'd go if I were you, because Lily's home is very beautiful, and I bet her mother would put on a great dinner." "Have you eaten there?" "No. I just spent a couple of hours there one afternoon. It's got lots of Chinese furniture, or what I guess must be Chinese. It doesn't look like an American home at all. Their food is probably very authentic too." Pat wasn't quite licking her lips, but she was close. I couldn't invite her now, as I wasn't sure I would be going myself, and all the other girls would immediately want invitations too, but I made a mental note that if I did decide to go, maybe Lily should invite Pat. I looked around, wondering what to talk about next, but I saw some of my teammates running toward me. "Coach says it's time to get on the bus, Egg. Also it's time for you to pass out some of the phone numbers for the girls you've got hanging around you. So many just for you is being greedy, and teammates should share." He was still in high spirits following our win. He turned the girls, saying, "Hello girls. I'm Peter, very nearly our team's star player." The girls booed him down. In a lull, I said, "I'd better go. See most of you at school on..." "Ride back with us Mark?" "There's more room in my car!" Ava offered, "Or you can come back with us?" I remembered our date tonight, so I asked Ava, "Julia got hold of you about tonight, didn't she?" "Yes. I'm going home to get changed, then on to her house. I'll see you there." "Good." Over the noise of the other girls asking what Ava and I had just been talking about, I loudly said, "I'll go on the bus girls, sorry." I WAS sorry, because I could easily imagine how great it'd be sitting in the backseat of a car full of extremely available girls. Unfortunately, I could also imagine that the driver would be far too distracted, even if I did only a fraction of the things I was already imagining. I was also aware that my soccer team only had four more games before we'll be officially disbanding for the year. We would probably get together for fun games from time to time over summer, but it wouldn't have the same team spirit. I also had some doubts about whether I'd be able to play next year, both because of my study workload (a college degree in ONE year!), and because my ability was so great now that in some respects I spoiled the games. A number of the girls asked, "Can we go back on the bus with you?" With incredulity I exclaimed, "You want to get on a bus with a bunch of hyped up boys like Peter! You're living dangerously." "All RIGHT!" Peter prematurely celebrated. My other nearby teammates enthusiastically and foolishly agreed, thereby giving the girls very good warning. I added, "I doubt very much that Coach would allow girls on the bus. Sorry, you'll have to go back the way you came. I appreciate your coming though. Maybe a quick last kiss from each of you before I go?" The kisses weren't so quick. One of my teammates earned a quick laugh though, when he tried to pretend there was a line of guys the girls had to kiss their way down. Lily rushed back for her kiss, a quick one on my cheek. Her parents looked in the other direction, to avoid seeing their wayward daughter's scandalous behavior. Ava was last, and then I was outta there, followed by my unkissed, complaining teammates. At the bus, Coach confirmed my suspicion when he answered Peter's question with, "No, I won't allow any girls to ride back with us. What are you thinking! Never mind, I know. Get on the bus, pea brain." We play in a league with several other nearby schools. Nothing of any importance, just as a source of some competitive motivation. There'd been a mathematical chance that we'd get in the playoffs for the top places today. It was a very small chance, as we had to win our game today (that part was easy), and every top team had to lose theirs. We'd held out no real hope of that happening, so there were only a few quiet groans when we got the bad news during the trip home. My suddenly becoming a devastating striker had come too late in the school year for it to lift our ranking enough to get us into the playoffs. There were some, "We'll clean up next year"-type comments, which I let pass. I had several months before I had to decide, and anything could happen by then. [[And it did.]] I suggested, "Coach, as the last four games are just going to be for fun, how about I only play for one half? Most of these guys can't get any girls' phone numbers because they look so pathetic playing next to me. I've got enough girlfriends now, so how about I let them have a chance to get one before summer arrives?" Once all the "Boos" and other derisory hoots died away, we had a semi-reasonable discussion (mostly "semi"), and the team agreed that'd be good, "Just so long as you play enough that we win the games." I probably only needed to play twenty minutes or so to guarantee that, so we agreed I'd sit out the first half to give them a normal game for the first forty five minutes. Then I'd start in the second half, play until we were several goals ahead, then sit out unless needed again. I said, "Good. While you're all busy kicking a silly ball the first half, I'll be free to cruise the sidelines to get all the pretty girls' phone numbers." "BOO!" The rest of the short trip was devoted to such important issues as, "Just how many girlfriends have you got?" "Only two, Julia and Ava. The rest are just - I'll say - 'casual overnight guests'." "{Groan}. Bastard!" Another question, "Which girl are you going to take to the end-of-year dance?" "I haven't thought about it. All of them, I guess. However many girlfriends I have by then. Three or four probably, as there should be a third one joining in a few days." "{Groan}. Bastard!" "You'd take them ALL on one date. Wouldn't that cause problems?" "Not at all. We often have group dates - we're having one tonight actually. The girls get on great together. Sometimes if I'm busy with one of the casual girls Julia and Ava will sleep with each other." "You mean they..." "Yep." "{Groan}. You lucky bastard!" "So after your date tonight, the three of you will..." "Yep." "{GROAN}." It was fun teasing them with the truth. They were envious as anything, but being soccer players (i.e., good guys) they wouldn't act badly toward me because of it. Only repeatedly call me a bastard, but in a nice way. Because they were good guys, I gave them the benefit of my wisdom: "It's not that hard, guys. Being nice is 90% of what you need to do," (having Julia's help is the other 95%). "Stop all the macho bullshit you do with other guys. You don't want to date guys, so why play those stupid games? You want to impress girls, and girls love guys who're nice. There are so few nice guys at school that you'll have your pick..." I outlined my "be nice, don't be nasty" philosophy. It's commonsense, but it's not cool and it's certainly not macho, so schoolboys don't want to know. Even, I am sad to say, soccer-playing schoolboys. Their preferred idea was that I gave them my rejects, but I somehow couldn't see the girls involved being too happy with that idea. [[In retrospect, my How To Get Your Pick Of Many Girls philosophy was way too simplistic. In terms of achieving its stated goal, it was better than the guys' normal approach, but it had significant problems. A boy can't simply stop acting macho, as it's programmed into males, and more importantly, into society. We live in a very status conscious society, led by males (in the sense that male statuses are those most prominently displayed), so males have to learn how to compete with each other. A male won't learn sophisticated status gaining, displaying and acknowledging techniques, unless he works his way through the crude, schoolboy techniques first. Unfortunately for him, at the expense of not getting nearly as many schoolgirls as he would want.]] The bus dropped a few of the team off as we passed through town on the way to school, but most of us went to the end of the line. I gave a couple of guys a lift to their places, then went home. ------- Chapter 155: The Evening Before Our First Anniversary Saturday, April 30, 2005 (Continued) Mom was preparing dinner in the kitchen. "Hi Mom. Do you know that Carol and I are going out tonight, with Julia and Ava? I think we are anyway; I need to check." "Yes, I've heard. This is just for the three of us." I started eating pieces of the ingredients. Mom didn't object, as she always cooks 'too much' (silly concept), as leftovers disappear from our fridge amazingly quickly. Mom asked, "Did you win?" "Yes. Much the same result as the last two games. Ava's parents were VERY impressed, which was good; I want them to have faith in her decision. Lily Cheng's parents were there too, and they invited me to a fancy dinner at their place sometime. Heaps of delicious Chinese food apparently, but I need to talk with Julia about it first. Oh, and we didn't make the playoffs." "Better luck next year then." "Yeah, that's what the team says, although we'll lose three of the best players when they graduate in a few weeks." "I somehow don't think that'll make much difference." "No, probably not. Is Dad around?" "He's in the garage." I wandered out to talk with him. "Hi Dad, do you want me to do any more outside work before I get showered." After the usual "How did the game go?" digression, Dad declined my further services. "You don't want to cut any more branches off the tree?" "The Damned Tree can stay the way it is for another year, that's if I don't pour gas around its roots before then." That being Dad's usual killing-it-off threat. (Doing so would 'suck' - by osmosis - water out of the tree, drying it out and killing it.) I headed back inside, and was surprised not to find Carol in our bedroom, studying or something. I returned to the kitchen to ask Mom, who told me, "She went out with some girlfriends. She should be back soon, because the stores are closed now." Chuckling to myself, I went to have my shower. I'd nearly finished when Carol joined me, "To help, and I need a shower too." I'd nearly finished, so I asked Carol to wash me all over again, and then I washed her. Then we washed our favorite parts a few more times, until the hot water started running out. #3: While we were getting dressed I asked Carol, "What're the details for tonight?" "We meet at Julia's about 6 or so. The movie starts at 6:30, then we have dinner afterward." "What movie are we going to see?" "'Million Dollar Baby'. It's supposed to be very good." I hadn't heard anything about it and it didn't sound very science-fictiony, but I had three girls to distract myself with. I noticed something. "Carol, I couldn't help noticing that you put your top on without a bra going on first." "Julia said the girls weren't allowed to wear bras tonight. She only said 'girls' though, so I guess you can wear one if you want, haha. Your chest measurement is bigger than mine, but I'm sure we could make it work with a couple of pairs of socks and a safety pin." "It maybe be bigger, but it's NOWHERE near as beautiful. I think I'll stick to the no bra theme too, as I wouldn't want to be the 'very odd man out', haha." After I was dressed, I was tempted to do some tests to see if I could find out what was happening with my possible "Memory Leakage" (how I'd remember the Duckling's name "too easily"), but there still wasn't time. I'd probably do it when I got up to study tomorrow morning. Instead I enjoyed myself watching Carol brush her hair, as the movements it created were thoroughly enjoyable. Carol saw me looking, and 'jiggled' for me. What a lovely girl! She has very nice hair too. I heard Donna arrive home (she's a noisy girl, so her arrival is hard to miss), and decided I should talk with her to find out how the Athletic Club worked out after I left. I gave Carol a kiss and a grope, just to let her know I appreciated her, then said, "I'll talk with Donna before we go. If I watch you jiggle like that any longer, your hair is going to get badly messed up." Donna told me that after I'd left, MANY people had told her that I should join their club, and her girlfriends would like to meet me again. They were even more eager than before, after seeing me run around in a circle so impressively. I chatted casually with Donna, a bit about my soccer game today, but mostly about what had happened at her Club to try to get a sense of whether she'd mentioned my marathon to anyone. She seemed guiltless, which was great. Carol came into Donna's room, letting me know she was ready to go. On the way past Mom, Carol said, "Mom. I think Ava's staying with Mark and Julia tonight, but I might sleep in the spare bed in Mark's study rather than get a lift home, if it's too late to inconvenience someone. Is that okay please?" Mom answered, "Sure." After my blobs demo I wouldn't expect Mom to make much fuss about Carol staying at the Williams'. As soon as we were in the car, Carol said, "I had a little idea while I was brushing my hair. More of a little joke, really. If we all get in the hot tub tonight, I could wait until Julia and Ava have gotten your cock nice and hard, and then I could sit on your lap in a way that Ava sees your cock go soft. That'd give me more fun when I get her to talk me into trying to have sex with you." "If it'd give you more fun, then consider it done. If a girl can't ask her brother to go soft for her, what use is having a brother? Haha. Quite frankly, I'm amazed I can go soft with you at all. You are VERY sexy." "You're twice as sexy as me. I can prove it. Look, twice as many parts of my body have gotten hard than yours have, haha." "And very nice hard things they are too. Leaving your hard things aside for the moment - because I'm driving, unfortunately - can I check something with you. Tomorrow's is the 1st, which is one month after my first date with Julia..." "Ahh, you remembered." "OF COURSE I did! IMMEDIATELY after Mom reminded me, haha. She also reminded me about our wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks, although I like to think I would've worked that out for myself. I'm glad she played safe by mentioning it though. Anyway, back to tomorrow's anniversary. I was thinking of doing something quite simple: just making her a nice breakfast in bed, with a vase of flowers and a little speech. Some nice music, if I can find a good CD in her collection. What do you think? That's not too paltry, is it?" "It's fine. You just have to show you remembered and show you appreciate her. It's the wedding anniversary that a man normally has to do something special for, but that doesn't matter much in your case." "Why not? Mom implied it was a big deal, and it seems that way to me too." "Because you're our Lord, not our husband. The normal rules don't apply." "Nonetheless I think I'll play safe and treat THAT rule as if it did apply. I'm not going to take that risk!" "Seriously, I don't think you have to. That's not the way I feel. You're so fantastic it seems silly for you to thank us for marrying you. I doubt Julia thinks any different. It's not as if you don't already show us a dozen times every day that you love us. Being yourself next 14th will be perfectly fine by me. Maybe some extra bed-time cuddling would be nice. Anything else you want to do is up to you, but you don't have to fear being in any sort of trouble about it." "I understand what you're saying, but I hope I do more than some extra cuddles. I haven't thought about it yet, and don't want to yet either - let's concentrate on tomorrow's anniversary. I was worried that Julia might feel put out because it won't be just me and her alone at breakfast tomorrow morning. Ava will be there, and from what you told Mom, maybe you too. Not that I've got any objection to..." "Relax. I know what you mean and Julia won't mind at all. All you need to do is show her that you appreciate her, which will be the same whether or not Ava and I are there." "Good. Thanks. I was worried about it." "You've got nothing to worry about. Your normal self is fantastic so you'd have to do a whole lot worse than you normally do to get in trouble with us." "Thanks, I feel less worried now. One last little thing, as soon as I can after we arrive there now, I want to get a couple of minutes alone with Vanessa, so I can ask her about picking some flowers from her garden early in the morning. I'd like to ask her before we go to the movie, so I can stop worrying about that. Can you try to distract Julia for me please?" "Sure." Ava's car was already outside Julia's house. Julia and Ava were chatting to Vanessa in the kitchen, which was a pity because it stopped me having the private word with Vanessa I wanted. I greeted the two girls, kissing them, and carefully checking that they were abiding by the 'no bra' edict. When I rubbed her breast, Julia giggled, then said, "In some ways you're the least typical guy ever, but in other ways you're just like every other guy." "That's because no guy has to be a genius to work out how wonderful breasts are. That's delightfully self-evident." It's amazing how comfortable I've got talking like this in front of Vanessa. "So it's safe to assume that you approve of us not wearing bras for our date?" "Heavens yes! Thoroughly approve. I'm a very lucky guy." Carol interrupted with, "Speaking of lucky people, can I have a quiet word with Julia and Ava, in your bedroom please, Julia?" "Sure," answered Julia, with curiosity. We started going upstairs, but Carol said, "Not you please, Mark. Why don't you see if there's anything interesting in the fridge. Dinner's a couple of hours away so you probably need a snack." I had, in fact, been sorry to leave the kitchen so quickly, so I was very easily persuaded to remain behind. It was a good opportunity to talk with Vanessa too, which - I realized - might've been Carol's intention. I had been busy greeting Carol and Julia, so now I greeted Vanessa - in a far less tactile manner. After the girls were well out of earshot, and I'd shut the kitchen door to be doubly safe, I asked, "Vanessa, Mom pointed out to me that tomorrow is the one-month anniversary of Julia's and my first date. I was thinking of making a nice breakfast in bed for her tomorrow morning, and making a small speech. Very small, just an appreciation thing. I was hoping I could put a little vase of flowers on the tray, and that I could pick them from your garden early tomorrow morning." Vanessa has a very nice garden, and it's spring time, so there are plenty of flowers in bloom. Enough for me to be able to use a few, I hoped. Vanessa soon had me organized: showing me where the trays were ("you'll need two, with there being so many of you,"), where the vase would be ("I'll pick the flowers tonight, and have them all ready in the vase hidden in this cupboard,"), and she suggested that I drive to the french bakery early in the morning to pick up some fresh croissants, "Julia likes croissants and that's the only place that sells good ones. They can be difficult to cut when they're fresh, so use this knife because it's the sharpest. Then give them about five seconds each in the microwave to warm them a little. This is the jelly she'll most like on them... ," you get the idea, Vanessa soon had me VERY well organized. Then Vanessa checked that I hadn't forgotten my wedding anniversary on the 14th. "No. Or to be more accurate, Mom has already reminded me about it. I haven't given it any thought yet, except I want to see if my business idea works first, because having an extra $1.75 million will change my budget somewhat, haha." I had my head in the fridge when the girls returned. Figuring Carol had lured them upstairs on a pretense, I didn't ask them what they'd talked about. Plus, as I've already mentioned, my head was in the fridge. The girls let me have a snack, then we set off for the movies. We saw "Million Dollar Baby", about a girl who wants to be a boxer. It was a reasonable movie, but not great (there were no spaceships). Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman are both good actors, and the girl was okay despite having small tits, which I didn't think was allowed in Hollywood. I sat between Julia and Ava, so I was able to amuse myself during the boring parts. I also enjoyed seeing Carol take advantage of Ava's obedience. Unfortunately it was a busy night and we were tightly surrounded by adults, so our games had to be kept very low key, but we still managed to have fun. One amusing incident was due to a woman sitting in the row behind us. She muttered disapproval at my kissing Julia and then Ava, so Julia got me to lean forward so the two girls could kiss each other. The woman exclaimed in shock, "Well I never!" which I had to struggle mightily hard to resist responding to, as the middle of a movie theater wasn't a good place to cause trouble. Several people shushed her, and we celebrated our moral victory by repeating the kisses. I enjoyed some of the looks we got as we walked to dinner, as we were all holding hands. ------- Chapter 156: Planning for Two Dinner Parties Saturday, April 30, 2005 (Continued) Dinner wasn't at a fancy place, but I enjoyed it more than the movie. Our waitress was subjected to the sight of Ava's hands being inside Carol's top, clearly rolling Carol's nipples. The poor girl (the waitress I mean; not Carol or Ava), didn't know where to look. She knew where NOT to look though, and for the rest of the meal refused to look at Carol. Unfortunately for her, on her second visit to the table, it just so happened that I was doing the same thing to Julia, so now there were two places she couldn't look. On her third visit I was doing it to Ava, which pretty much meant that for all the rest of our meal we were served by a waitress who wouldn't look at any of us. She was young and naïve, although a little less naïve by the end of the evening. We were just having some fun. It wasn't as if we were exposing ourselves; all she was seeing was someone's hands inside someone else's blouse, which was hardly a big deal. While I'm on the topic of blouses - that area being something I've long been particularly interested in - if girls' shirts are called blouses (God knows why), why aren't girls' T-shirts called T-blouses? As a follow-up question, why is it that logic never applies to anything related to females? With three girls, there were topics that one of them knew about, but another didn't, so we had quite a few things to talk about. For example, Ava didn't have much idea about what we were doing with Chloe, so we told her. During the course of that discussion Julia 'informed' Ava that Chloe would probably become another fairly full-time girlfriend for me. I would've 'warned' Ava, but Julia is way more commanding than me. I'm improving, but I've got a LONG way to go to be as bossy as Julia! Ava was cool with Chloe joining in. Her attitude was, "What Mark wants, Mark gets." She's got a wonderful attitude! Ava had no difficulty suggesting the reason for my interest in Chloe. While I was thinking about how much truth to include in my response, in case my reason got back to Chloe, Julia said, "It's not only the obvious reason, and it's not only so she can be Mark's girlfriend. Mark could have bedded her days ago if that was all he was interested in. We're trying to do more than that. Chloe's got a major problem with being paranoid about her breasts..." Julia gave some examples, then went on to describe the general idea of the last part of the Chloe Plan. Ava praised Julia and me for our good intentions. Praising Julia was fine, as it'd been her idea and plan, but praising me was undeserved. When I attempted to pass all the credit to Julia, Julia said, "{Raspberry}. I couldn't do A THING to help Chloe without you. If I attempted to say something to her about the problem of having large breasts, she'd look at me like I was crazy. What could I possibly know about that topic! Haha. Even if she listened to me, I've got no way of motivating her to act. No, our helping her is only possible because of you. I wouldn't have even bothered to think about doing it, if you hadn't given me the opportunity." "But..." I started. "No 'buts', Mark. Accept praise when it's deserved." "But..." "I suppose you're going to say 'it's undeserved'?" "Well, yes. I was. Mainly because it IS undeserved." "Ava can make up her own mind about that." Before I could say "But..." for the third time, Julia started an explanation or what I think of as the "Tit Flashing Plan". Julia didn't actually tell Ava that tits would be flashed, merely that Carol and Ava were to come when I called, after adjusting their clothes to show more breast, so I could make the point to Chloe that boys look at any and every breast, so she shouldn't take it personally. Ava was perfectly happy with it, with "happy" being the key word - she thought it sounded like fun. Having lost all chance I had to rightfully direct Ava's praise to where it should go, and after having accepted Ava's hug and kiss to express how impressed she was with me, I changed the subject. Julia and Carol didn't know about Lily's father inviting me to dinner. I briefly described the event, to which their collective response could be summarized as, "Yummy!" I explained that I was worried about accepting it because Lily had been far too eager. I recounted my and Lily's conversation, with Ava adding her perspective. Julia and Carol accepted that Lily had been eager, but they didn't see it as being suspicious. Carol said, "What girl wouldn't be eager to have you come to dinner with her parents?" I understood that - while being amazed that it could be true - but felt that Lily's eagerness had more to it than that. I couldn't convince Julia or Carol though. I couldn't even convince myself, as it was merely an indefinite suspicion of mine. Julia had fun in pointing out, "It's not as if you've got millions of dollars, is it?" The girls urged me to accept, and to invite them too. Julia adding, "If you're feeling paranoid, invite your parents and several other people. Also, in the days before you can tell several of your classmates that you're having dinner with Lily's family on whatever day. Let Lily hear you say that. If they have any malicious purpose, that'd surely cause them to cancel it." "Okay. I'll admit that I can't justify my suspicion. I'm probably just misreading Lily. What do I know about girls, especially Chinese ones! I'll tell her tomorrow that I accept. Other than you three shameless moochers, who else should I invite?" The girls told me that I should invite: The three of them (they repeated this point, to make sure I had it firmly memorized). The rest of my family: Mom, Dad and Donna. Ava's parents, to give them an interesting experience, with the added bonus of their seeing that I was respected (apparently) by the Chengs. Chloe, if she was officially my girlfriend by then, which was likely. Vanessa and Prof, if they wanted to go. Perhaps Chloe's parents, as every other girlfriend's parents would be there. "Whoa! That's a dozen people already, not even counting me. We can't inflict that many people on them!" "Why not? From what you said, they want you to invite a lot of people." "We don't HAVE TO invite that many. Maybe Lily was just exaggerating to make their point that I can invite some more people? Inviting a dozen people is a big imposition. Plus it's probably not a good idea to invite Chloe's parents anyway, because they'll see that I have an 'unconventional' number of girlfriends. That could cause some problems with Chloe." Julia said, "I half-agree about not inviting Chloe's parents. But when Chloe is your girlfriend, it'd be foolish to try to keep from them that you've got other girlfriends. Corvallis is small enough that if they ask around about you, they're going to find out. But it might be a good idea not to rub their noses in it immediately after Chloe becomes your girlfriend. Let them see how happy she is for a while first, before giving them the 'unconventional' news. Also, if you're worried about numbers, why not ask Lily tomorrow? Ask her what she thinks of a dozen or two. She should know whether that's acceptable or not." "Okay. I'll do that. Lily also said for me to choose whatever day I wanted, but we can leave that to them, can't we? I'm busy Monday and probably Tuesday evenings, but any other evening is fine with me, and I doubt they'll want to do it that soon anyway. Do any of you have any other evenings you can't make, so we can warn Lily to avoid those?" None of them did. "Okay, I'll tell Lily that her parents can pick any evening after Tuesday." Ava said, "My parents also wanted to invite you and Julia to dinner soon. This morning they ordered a big bed for my room, and it should be delivered mid-week. They want to be able to invite you and Julia around, and to have you stay the night, to get to know you better and to show their support for our relationship. It'll just be an ordinary dinner, nothing as fancy as Lily's. They were thinking Friday or Saturday, so we wouldn't have to go to school the next day. That way we could all sit around chatting in the morning. Is that okay? We don't want to impose on you too..." Julia jumped in, "Ava, I've got a list of things I want to talk with your parents about that's a mile-long. Visiting them is not an imposition at all, because I'm going to be visiting them many times over the next few months anyway. It's PERFECT, especially if we can talk the next morning too." A puzzled Ava asked, "What do you need to talk with them so much about?" "You! Everything from lots of stories about your childhood through to their dreams for your future, and especially the typical ways you misbehave, haha. I want to learn lots of things about you, so that my and Mark's moms and I can do a good job of taking over from your mom. I want your parents to see that we're taking the responsibility seriously and that we'll do a good job of looking after you." "Wow. They're going to be very happy. Thank you VERY much, Julia." "It'll be fun. I'm expecting to hear lots of funny stories. I'm sure Mom and Felicity will be getting together with Katie behind our backs too. We'll make sure your parents are happy with your decision, Ava. We know that's very important to you. -- "Can I suggest your parents extend their invitation to Carol too. The four of us will be together more often than not, so they should get to know her too." "I'm sure that'll be fine. You're invited too, Carol. We don't have another bed, because Mom and Dad use the other bedroom as an office, but we've got a sofa, or an airbed if you prefer. Or maybe," and I could see Ava get a funny look on her face, which I couldn't interpret, "you could sleep in the bed with the rest of us. Would that be okay, MARK?" Again with a funny emphasis. I was starting to worry about Ava's knowing about Carol and me, but Carol's little giggle and Julia's smirk meant that there was something else going on. I opened my mouth to ask, but Julia cut me off with, "You'll find out. Don't worry about it now." "This is one of those, 'You'll enjoy it better if you don't know' situations, isn't it?" "Sort of." By now all three girls were smiling and giggling, so it was obvious who was going to be enjoying it the most. (I'll give you a hint, there are three of them and they all belong to the same gender.) "You 'ladies' - and I use the word doubtfully - just tell me where to go and what to do, and I promise to look suitably embarrassed at the time. How does that sound?" They agreed it sounded, "Perfect." Ava said, "We'll let Lily's parents choose their night first, then decide what to do about my parents' invitation. Is that all right?" Julia said, "Yes. We'll make it either Friday or Saturday, the way your parents wanted. Whichever evening the Chengs don't choose. You should tell your mom that we'll be having the Chengs' banquet either the previous evening or the next one, so her meal should be fairly light. Remind them that Mark eats a lot please." "Haha. They know. They've mentioned how much they saw him eat at your house. I'll remind Mom though." #1: #2: #1: "Just out of curiosity, Julia, you asked for a 'fairly light meal', then said I'd eat a lot. Wouldn't that make it a heavy meal? For me, I mean." "No. I meant 'light' as in 'not rich'. No fancy sauces and dessert shouldn't be very sweet." "'Light' means 'not rich'. I thought 'poor' meant 'not rich'?" "You couldn't ask for a poor meal. That means bad." "So let me get this straight ... No, on second thought, I think I'll leave it alone. I am, however, convinced that a woman's place is in the kitchen; no one else could understand such a twisted vocabulary, haha. If we've finished discussing the dinners, can I change the subject please?" They agreed I could. -- I said, "Ava, the reason I went to the Athletic Club this morning was because I was worried there was doubt about the legitimacy of my win a couple of weeks ago, and those doubts might cause Donna some trouble. Do you think my run today helped that at all?" Actually, I was using that as an excuse to get on to the topic of the Club. I wanted to find out whether Ava had blabbed about my marathon time. Talking about sleeping with Carol had reminded me, not that I'd really needed the reminder, as the thought of taking all my girlfriends to bed at the same time frequently crosses my mind. I talked with Ava for a few minutes, not really caring what we were saying. Then I asked, "I was worried about Donna telling someone about my world-record 10k or marathon times. Did you hear anything that would make you suspicious that she'd blabbed?" Ava answered, "No, nothing suspicious. There was a lot of talk about what your marathon time would be. When people extrapolated your 10k time, they got somewhere about two hours twenty, but your being so fresh at the end of the 10k confuses them. Everyone thinks you could have run the 10k faster than you did, but they couldn't agree on how much faster. It was funny listening to them." Which gave me the opportunity to ask the question I'd been waiting for, "You didn't tell them anything about my marathon time?" "Never said a word. You told me not to, but I wasn't even tempted because no one would've believed me. I did some reading on marathons on Thursday night. Did you know that over the last twenty years, the men's record has improved only 2%. You improved it 12 or 13%. There are also quite a few very reputable experts who're convinced that two hours is unbreakable. If I'd said anything, I would've been laughed at." There was no hint of any guilt or embarrassment on Ava's face, only amusement. I hadn't been able to be so direct when I'd been talking with Donna, because her blabbing to Mom would have caused her to show guilt whether or not she'd blabbed at the Club, but indications were that both girls had behaved themselves recently, with Ava's behaving being not just recent, but ever since my marathon. I could see that Julia was also very happy with Ava's answer. Carol was happy, but that was shown to be for a different reason when she chuckled and happily said, "Our guy is a miracle. Isn't that neat?" Ava was the one who agreed the most emphatically, and she knew the least about me. She started raving, but I asked her to stop, "I VERY much want to keep a low profile about being so special, please Ava, so getting too excited in the middle of a restaurant is not a good idea." "Oh, sorry. If people knew, there'd be a lot of trouble, wouldn't there?" I guessed she meant "trouble" as in lots of publicity. In the full range of my abilities was known, publicity would be the least of my troubles. I didn't have any trouble answering, "Yes. Probably VERY bad trouble. The less said the better. In fact, let's change the subject. Hmm ... I know. What did your parents think of the trouble I had at Katelin Eaton's house? You showed them the article, didn't you?" "Yeah. I talked to them about it last night. They weren't happy that you were involved in so much trouble, even if it was the father's and oldest brother's fault. But on the way back from Salem, they said they were very pleased you ran away from that player who tried to attack you. It was good for them to see you avoid fighting." "I didn't think of that from your parents' point of view. That worked out much better than the other things I could have done." "Yeah. They're not into sporting stuff very much. They think being fit is good, but not when people go overboard about it, like they think you have." "Huh? Why do they think I've gone overboard?" "Because they've seen you without your shirt on twice now, and they saw how you weren't tired after the game. People don't get that cut and fit without spending a huge amount of time working on it. They think you must spend too much." "Haha, if only they knew!" Julia and Carol laughed along with me too. "They'd never believe how little training I do, so there's no point in trying to convince them of that. If you want you can tell them that I'm cutting down on the amount of sports I do so I can concentrate on my studies. That should make them happy." Julia asked, "You're cutting down on soccer?" "Yeah. I discussed it with Coach and the team on the way back. For the last four games of the year I'm only going to play for a few minutes in the second half; just enough so my team wins. The rest of the time they'll play a normal game. There's nothing at stake and it'll be less cruel on our opponents." Ava said she'd tell them, and we moved on to the topic of tomorrow's Liaison Meeting. Julia said there wasn't much to discuss, mainly just Vanessa's idea about the diminishing pipeline of groups of girls, who were responsible for arranging the dates for me to attend. Then Julia asked me, "Who do you want to be 'Liaison of the Week'?" "Umm, it has to be Lily, doesn't it? She's done the most, and she's very willing. Besides, that'll give me a chance to 'pump' her for information about her parents' dinner." "Haha. No one can 'pump' like you." The rest of our conversation was simply lighthearted chatting, and not of any consequence. We fooled around a little physically, 'poor Ava' (with a happy smile on her face) was ordered to do several minor but delightful things to each of us. Mostly surreptitious rubbings, although the girls did go to the bathroom together and come back with happy smiles on their faces. They didn't explain why, but I've recently begun to suspect that the Secret Meetings females go to must be held inside their bathrooms, because they always seem to go in groups and I can't identify any other secret time or place they could learn the bizarre things they know. In the car on the way back to Julia's house, Carol volunteered to watch a DVD, "to give you three a chance to let loose in the bedroom." "What about you?" asked Julia. "You must be as turned on as the rest of us." "It's my time of the month, so I don't feel like it so much. You've got plenty of good DVDs so I can keep myself occupied." I suggested, "Why don't we divide up two and two? We can use the bed in the study, and change partners after a while." Carol declined, "I'm fine thanks, Mark. You enjoy Julia and Ava together and I'll watch a movie. I don't feel much like having sex anyway." I somehow doubted that was true, as Carol had enjoyed playing around at the restaurant just as much as any of us. Possibly even more, as she likes a bit of public exhibitionism. I think she just didn't want to get in the way, which was a pity. The sooner we didn't have to hide the full extent of Carol's and my relationship from Ava, the better. We already knew Ava was cool with it, so it was only a matter of her proving herself trustworthy, which was "So far, so perfect." When we got home, we chatted briefly with Vanessa and Prof, then went to the Guys' Room to make sure Carol knew how to use the DVD player. Carol told us, "Come and get me when you've finished," as we left to go up to Julia's room to have sex. We started at about 10:15. I did have a good time, but I rushed it because I wasn't comfortable leaving Carol sitting alone. I felt somewhat depressed about missing her, although I couldn't use that phrase with Ava yet. Just before 11:00, after the girls had enjoyed near simultaneous climaxes (because I'd arranged things that way), I declared, "I'm feeling guilty about our enjoying ourselves while Carol is lonely, and it's getting sort of late too so I'll go downstairs and see how she is." By the time I'd gotten a robe out of the closet, Julia had recovered enough to say, "Let's all have a quick shower and go down together. We're all very messy." That was true. Not having to use rubbers results in noticeably more mess, especially as the girls like me to cum fairly often. I quite like it too. We carried robes to the bathroom and had very quick showers. When we walked through the hot tub room, on the way to the Guys' Room, we were surprised to find Carol, Andrew and Sophia in the hot tub, laughing at something Andrew had just said. I remembered that we were trying to avoid shocking The Boys' girls (Sophia and Ashley), but it was too late to stop Sophia seeing Ava. Sophia started greeting us, getting as far as, "Hello Jul..." when the penny visibly dropped. She looked at all three of us, then asked, "You look like you've just been having sex?" Julia asked, "Do you want to take this one, Andrew?" "Haha. Thanks, sis. You're right, Sophia. I told you before that Julia's bisexual. Ava is... , by the way, Sophia meet Ava; Ava, Sophia." Ava waved, "Hi, Sophia." "Hi." Andrew resumed, "Ava is their new girlfriend." "'Their girlfriend'? That sounds, umm, 'unusual'. Didn't you tell me that Carol was Julia's girlfriend?" Julia answered, "Carol and I are VERY good girlfriends. Not to put too fine a point on it, the four of us are also a very friendly group. Except not Carol and Mark obviously, which is why Carol was waiting down here, so Ava and I could spend some quality time with Mark in my bedroom." "So the four of you... ?" "Not four at a time, no, because Mark and Carol don't have that sort of relationship. If we start having sex, one of them will leave the room, which is why Carol's in the tub now. But all the other combinations happen. Does that answer your question?" "Does it ever!" To Andrew, Sophia asked, "What does Vanessa think of this? She knows, I guess?" "Yeah, Mom and Dad know. To Robert's and my surprise, they're positively encouraging it. I have to say that they," indicating the four of us, "all seem very happy together. Not just because of the sex, but mainly because of their friendships. It's mighty unusual, but it seems to work for them. But I hope you're not thinking about emulating them?" "Haha. Not in your dreams." Andrew, quite wisely I thought, said, "It wasn't the guy's dream that made it happen in their case. It started with Mark and Julia in an ordinary relationship, and then Julia added Carol, which obviously isn't to Mark's benefit." Julia added, "Not to mention that Carol's a lesbian, so she's doubly off-limits for Mark. This relationship is definitely to my advantage more than anyone else's." Carol wasn't going to take that sitting down (although she was). "No way! I am FAR better off than you are." Ava was standing up, but she wasn't going to take that sitting down either, "You're both wrong. I'm MILES better off than anyone else! Seriously! This is beyond my wildest dreams for how wonderful a relationship could be." "But..." started Carol. I interrupted, "See what you've started, Sophia? -- "Carol, we came down to tell you we've finished and to see if you want to come up now, so we can talk for a while before going to bed." To Sophia I added, "Two different beds, Sophia, in case you're wondering." "Haha. The thought had crossed my mind. You've got a great setup, Mark, but it must be a nuisance that Carol's your sister." "Everything you said is wrong. It's not my setup; it's Julia that made it happen." That was literally true, but I was effectively lying about whose benefit it'd been done for. -- "Second, Carol being my sister is not a nuisance. It's right at the top of the very best things that have ever happened in my life. I know you didn't mean it that way, but I wanted to make the point anyway. -- "Third, it's not a nuisance that Carol comes on my group dates, or is with us so much, because she's never been happier than she has been for the last few weeks, and I get to enjoy seeing her being so happy. That's one of the highlights of my life at the moment." I was, essentially, giving a condensed "I Love My Sister" speech. I thought it necessary to allay Sophia's dirty thoughts. I hadn't intended it, but I'd also created a nice solution to a little problem that had been worrying me. Carol was naked in the hot tub (Andrew and Sophia were wearing swimsuits though). This was the first time that Carol had been naked in front of any of the Williamses in a purely natural way rather than for her sexual kick or part of a plan, and I was pleased to see it that she felt safe and relaxed about it. What Sophia thought of Andrew seeing a well-built naked girl wasn't my problem, so I ignored it. But I did have a little problem knowing how to react to Carol's nakedness. I was having trouble looking at Carol because Sophia had made me so self-conscious. That was going to get even more awkward for me when Carol started getting out of the tub, so I decided to use it my awkwardness to get away. I continued, "Sophia, normally Carol and I are comfortable being naked together in the hot tub because there's a lot of trust between us, but our discussion has made me uncomfortably self-conscious, so I think I'll head back upstairs now. Girls, come join me when you're ready. No hurry." I turned to leave, at the same time as Sophia started apologizing. I slowed enough to say, "Don't worry about it. It's my fault for being so self-conscious. Besides, this way I get to keep my robe on rather than having to be the gallant and embarrassingly naked gentleman. Nice to meet you again. Bye." I left the room, accompanied by Sophia apologizing for driving me off. I waved over my shoulder. ------- Chapter 157: I Leak Saturday, April 30, 2005 (Continued) When I was in Julia's room again, I thought I might have some time before the girls arrived. I was eager to test what I ironically thought of as my "Memory Leakage Problem". Leakage isn't a problem - NOT having leakage is! Having four separate memories is a nuisance. We've had to become used to it, but we'd much rather be able to access each other's memories. But - far more seriously than mere nuisance - we've recently realized that not being able to share memories is probably going to cause us at least one serious problem. ^ [Some explanation is required to help you appreciate the magnitude of the issue. Ideally all of my minds would experience and remember everything, but this doesn't happen for three reasons: The first reason is because of "Inactive On Duty". The mind that is on duty doesn't remember most of what happens during that time. Memory of a single past event isn't a problem, because three active minds would've seen it. When we later need to remember it, at least two of the then active minds will have a memory of it. But for multiple events, where it might be important to consider all of them together in order to get a full understanding, it's possible that each of my minds might've missed one or more of those events. There are two possible solutions to this problem of being on duty. The solution we use is when a mind comes off duty, we try to tell it everything it needs to know to bring it up to date. This isn't a perfect solution, as sometimes there's too much stuff to recount, or something that might become important later wasn't mentioned at the time because it seemed insignificant then. But most of the time this solution works well. We practice "Active On Duty" quite often, but it's so vulnerable to distraction that it can't be considered a solution. We're getting better at it though, so maybe in a year or so we'll be good enough at it to make it our normal procedure. Maybe a year or two after that, we'll be so good at it that even major distractions won't cause us to lose center. Those times are only guesses, because it's very difficult to estimate progress with something so subjective. And even when we think we're perfect at it - maybe five or ten years from now - something REALLY distracting might happen which will cause us to lose center. The other solution would be to have no minds on duty, except on occasion when we deliberate wanted to, such as emergencies or to lazily turn the bedroom lights off. We rejected this as projecting ki, strengthening NP, and centering, are clearly so important that we want to practice them. The second reason why a mind might miss out on knowing something is a very mundane reason, but still important: it might have been distracted. My minds get distracted much more often than you'll imagine, because it's our deliberate intention that they do so. When we're talking to someone, one mind will be focused on the conversation, but the other active minds will be seeking distractions. In other words, they'll try to be aware of what else is going on around us because that way we learn a lot more. This is similar in effect to being on duty in that the non-focusing minds can miss learning something, but it's not nearly as severe because they still listen in (with 'half an ear', as it were). The problem is only severe when something captures their attention so completely that they become totally distracted from the main conversation, or when the main conversation becomes so interesting that it captures all our attentions. Distraction, as a reason to miss something, occurs countless times a day, but it's usually of a very short duration, listening in with half an ear greatly reduces its effect, and it's very easy for the non-focused minds to be brought up to date if they feel they missed something. Another reason it's usually not a major problem - despite its being our normal way of operating - is that most things occur slowly enough to not need our full attention. Let's say I'm having a conversation with someone, but also eavesdropping on another conversation going on nearby. One mind can focus on each, and they can pass comments back and forth in real-time (including the third active mind in the internal conversation too), so none of the active minds miss out on knowing what's happening in either conversation. Nonetheless, occasionally one or more of my active minds will be truly distracted, so they might not know what else happened. Many times a day my minds will be chatting with each other, when one of them will say, "I don't have any memory of what you are talking about," or, "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?" This occurs so frequently we've developed a shorthand phrase for it; we just say, "I've got a hole," or "Have you got a hole?" (It's not an anatomical comment.) [[In writing this autobiography, I've left those out, because they are very frequent, repetitious, dull, and mostly irrelevant as my minds can usually fill in each other's memory holes then carry on without it having had any real-world effect.]] I am, however, seriously worried that I won't be able to compensate for the third cause of gaps in my memory, those caused by my double-speed, "Divide and Conquer" college studying approach. Deciding which mind is going to learn (or not learn) each subject is much more complex than it first seemed, because different sets of knowledge can sometimes combine in ways that multiply out to give us awkward choices about who learns what. With 'only' four minds, it doesn't take much complexity to exhaust our capacity. The severity of this problem occurred to me after Prof enrolled me in two more courses, when I realized that I will have to choose which minds study them. I'm studying Algebra and Calculus college courses now, so minds #1 and #2 know Algebra (call it "A"), with #3 and #4 knowing Calculus (call it "B"), and I'm about to start two more courses ("C" and "D"). Which minds should learn "C" and which "D"? (The way things have developed, I'll actually be doing independent chunks of "C" and "D" with different pairs of minds, which complicates things even worse. I'll ignore that complication in this discussion). Should #1 and #2 learn "C", or #1 and #3, or some other pair of minds? The answer depends on all the courses AFTER "C" and "D". If learning "E" requires knowledge of "A" and "C", while learning "F" requires knowledge of "B" and "D", then that dictates which minds learn "C" and "D". But if "E" requires "A" and "D", then that changes things. By the time I've finished my fourth course, each of my four minds might know a unique combination of two courses, with every combination accounted for. Then which minds learn "E" and "F"? Because I've only got four minds, by the time I've learned "E" and "F" there will be some missing combinations. Which ones I should miss depends on the needs of future courses. "G" might need "A", "C" and "E", which is only one course from each pair, so I'd better make sure that the single mind of mine that learned "A" and "C" also learns "E" in preference to "F". But what about if "H" also needs "A", "C" and "E"? The theoretical solution to that is to delay learning "H" until after "G" is finished, but that ripple could cause an increasing number of future schedule and coordination problems. It all gets horribly worrying, and it seems all too likely that this is going to bite me on my ass one day as there are so many college courses and they build on each other. If I make the wrong choices, I might not be able to study two courses simultaneously further downstream, halving my study rate. Potentially even less efficient is if multiple minds have to converse together before they can pool enough knowledge to understand the current lecture. It's very easy to imagine that by the time I'm doing third and fourth year courses - the hardest ones, which I'm already very worried about - that I'll be in big trouble trying to get my minds to pool their knowledge anything close to efficiently. I only recently realized this problem. It might seem that I should've discovered it at school, but it doesn't happen there, for two reasons: Every school subject is independent. For example, if one mind specialized in English (although that'd be too cruel), then it wouldn't matter that the other minds missed out on that subject's - I'll charitably call it - knowledge, whereas there are dozens of college courses which are ALL Mathematics. The second, and main reason I don't have such problems at school, is because school is SLOW! I can have an 11th grade textbook or notes open on my desk while a 10th grade class is in progress, and all my active minds can digest everything we're doing, as well as explaining to the mind that was on duty during the last class what we learned during the previous hour. But this isn't the case with my college studying. Each pair of minds is learning their subject at full speed, leaving no capacity to learn the other subject. I hope you can see by now that I've become SERIOUSLY worried about this issue, on top of all my already worrying about college being too difficult for me, so the possibility of memory leaking from one mind into the others is extremely appealing! To solve the problem of there being too many prerequisite course combinations, I need each of my mind's knowledge and understandings to "leak" into each other, so I'm very eager to explore that possibility.] ^ Julia has a small bookcase in her room, containing a few books. She used to have more, but she had to sacrifice wall space to gain more closets; a sacrifice she'd apparently had no reluctance over. The books are mostly romance twaddle, but they're still usable as a memory test. They'll make a very good test actually, as it's hard to imagine stuff that I'd be less interested in remembering. The rough idea for testing I'd had several hours previously, was to have one of my minds open a book at a random page while the other minds concentrated on being Inactive On Duty. The active mind would consciously note the page number. Then the on-duty minds would come off duty and attempt to 'remember' the page number. Then we'd repeat the test with different types of facts, such as reading the description of a character to see if the image it created was differently retrievable than a number, looking at the picture on the front of the book (although they all pictured a heroine in the arms of a handsome, bare-chested hunk, so we'd have to try to retrieve the fine details). We'd also decided to see if motivation made a difference, mainly whether the owner of the memory could make it more or less private, not that privacy had much meaning for us. We knew that we could choose who we internally chatted to, so it seemed reasonable that retrieving memories might be similarly controllable. How much effort the receiving mind put into retrieving the information was another issue. All of these presuming anything at all could be retrieved, otherwise the test series was going to be very short. We started on the first test, grabbing a book and having only one mind look at a page number. It didn't send the number to the other minds as we normally do when we chat or send pictures, but it tried to 'want' them to be able to access the memory. There was no mental action associated with that 'want' (we couldn't think of how to do anything like that anyway), merely trying to more strongly feel our sincere desire that this work. We'd agreed that each of the three receiving minds were to say when they thought they had the answer, but not say what it was until all three were ready. About two or three seconds after the retrieval attempt started, #2: A few more seconds went by with no word from #3 or #4. #2: #4: #3: #2: #4: #1 had used his finger to keep his place in the book, and he opened it, showing us page 73. #1: #2: We repeated the test. None of the minds could get the answer until they tried HARD to relive the experience of creating the memory, and then it worked perfectly again. We tried another variation, where #1 wanted to keep the memory private. We weren't sure it was possible for #1 to feel this privacy motivation, as privacy wasn't a big deal with any of us since sharing the same body means we share its embarrassments no matter which of us causes them. Another demotivating reason was that we all preferred this test to fail. If it succeeded, it might mean that the owner of a memory had to make a conscious effort to allow it to be shared at the time it was created, which would be a pain. #1 did his best to be selfish when he looked at the page number, and also while the rest of us were trying to access the memory. Apparently he succeeded, because no matter how hard the other minds wanted to retrieve the memory, they couldn't. We did another willing-to-share test, just to make sure we hadn't broken anything, and it worked fine. So the owner's attitude to sharing was important, but was it his attitude at the time the memory was created, or when the attempt was made to retrieve it? To test this the owner would want the memory to be private when he created it, then he'd change his mind a minute later. We did the first half, and the other three minds couldn't access the memory. During the minute I was waiting, the girls arrived. They didn't disturb my concentration, because I wasn't concentrating; I was chatting among myself to kill time while the minute passed. So when the girls came in, I was happy to talk with them. The first thing I noticed was that Carol was not naked (I've specially trained myself to notice things like that). She'd wrapped herself in a towel, which she unfortunately kept on, probably because of Ava and me being in the same room. I also noticed that the girls were all chatting away happily, which was good. I'd been a little concerned that I might have told Sophia off too harshly, and caused some sort of problem. To be sure, I asked, "Was Sophia okay after I left? I was a little concerned I might have offended her, or something." Julia answered, "She's fine. You came across very well, I thought. We stayed for a few minutes because she had more questions. She was very curious about how it worked, so we had to make up some good stories. Your being our Lord would have been too much for her to handle. Sophia is fairly straitlaced, so she was scandalized enough without our mentioning that." -- Spotting the book in my hand, Julia said, "I see you've finally developed some good taste in literature. I've got some boxes of them in storage downstairs. Would you like to take a box or two home with you?" "No way! I was testing my memory. In fact, can you all give me a few seconds of silence please, while I finish my current test." "Silence" is another one of those concepts that girls' brains aren't wired to grasp, along with "logic", "sensible clothes shopping", and "everyone is equally responsible for anniversary celebrations", so they immediately asked me questions about what I was doing. I gave them a VERY brief explanation, "Doing a memory test. I truly do want you all to stand completely still and not make any noise. Please, just for a few seconds, so I can concentrate." I know I was asking for a lot, wanting three girls in the one room not to talk, but it was only for a few seconds. They agreed, which I took to mean, "We'll try our best, but we can't make any promises." In the ensuing unnatural silence, #1 tried to share the memory of the page number, and the others tried hard to retrieve it. They all got a number, which when we compared them, agreed with the place in the book our finger was holding. We considered this to be very good news. Julia, seeing me looking at the book then smile happily, broke her silence (five seconds was pretty impressive, I thought), "What're you doing?" I couldn't tell her anything that involved multiple minds, but it was safe to say, "As you know, I read two different college courses at the same time, but I've recently realized there's potentially a serious problem integrating my memory of the two subjects. That doesn't matter much for school subjects because I learn them so slowly - at the speed the teachers set - that I can integrate them as I go, but I'm learning the college courses as fast as I can, which doesn't give me time to do any integration. Since two-thirds of my college courses will be mathematics, and there are lots of prerequisites, I need to manage my memory of them much better than I am now. I've just started working on a method that might allow me to do that." Julia instructed Carol and Ava, "Put your hand up if you understood ANY of that." They all laughed instead. I tried again, "Maybe I should have just said that I'm trying to improve the way my memory works." "Please improve mine too while you're at it, haha." "Mine too!" requested Carol. "I thought your memory was already very good?" "It is, but I'm kind of abusing it when I study two subjects at once. If I don't find a way of making my memory handle that better, I might have to drop back to studying just one college mathematics course at a time, which would VERY disappointing and embarrassing, especially after having my computer system upgraded. My double-speed studying has worked so well at school that I didn't realize I'd have a problem with the college courses until recently." Julia checked, "You might really have to go back to studying only one course at a time?" "I'm afraid so. If I can't get my memory problem licked, then I'll have to have a detailed talk with Prof about how the Math courses are structured. The BCC courses are independent, so I can double-speed all of those, but some of the Math courses might have to be done as my sole focus at the time. Don't worry about it yet, Julia. It'll be a couple of weeks at least before I have to talk with your father, and my initial memory work has been slightly hopeful, so I have my fingers crossed about that. I'll keep working on it, and we'll see how it pans out." [By the way, I often say, "I have my fingers crossed," even though no one in their right mind would expect that to somehow bring luck, or that luck is 'bring-able'. I have four minds, all of whom are permanently "in their right mind", with the possible exception of #4, so I certainly don't believe in such a stupid superstition. I use the expression quite often precisely because it is so stupid, as my sense of humor appreciates irony. I though I'd better explain that, in case you either thought I was stupidly superstitious, or your sense of humor isn't so advanced.] "Okay, I guess. I wish I understood more about how your head works sometimes. I can't imagine how you can read two different lectures at the same time, let alone remember them." After a brief pause, Julia suddenly exclaimed, "Wait a minute! You got 100% on both your tests, so there can't be anything wrong with your memory." "The difficulty I have is more complex and indirect than tests of my first two subjects will uncover. It's to do with how I'll remember these subjects while studying later ones. I might be able to solve it soon anyway, so I can't be bothered getting into a long-winded technical explanation with you, especially because there's no possibility of you being able to give me any useful advice because you can't imagine how I do what I'm doing. Changing the subject: Carol, are you staying here tonight, or shall I take you home?" All three girls overreacted to my question. Ava, especially, broke into a silly grin. Something was up. Carol said, "I'm going to stay, although Sophia has messed up my plan a little, I think. I was thinking it'd be nice for the four of us to sleep together. That's what I asked Julia and Ava about, before we went to the movie. But with Sophia staying the night I probably should sleep in the study, don't you think?" "Hmm. I think we can get away with you sleeping here. Sophia knows you waited downstairs while we had sex, and even if she found out you slept with us, we'd say we didn't want you to be lonely. Vanessa and Prof would downplay it for us too. Or to put it another way: Why not? It's going to be innocent, so go for it I say. What do you think, Julia?" It SHOULD be innocent, but the girls were obviously up to something. It was in a direction I was happy to go in, so I was helping them along. I wasn't sure of the details - they wouldn't be revealing the full incest secret, because that's my call - but it looked liked a positive development so I was happy. Julia said, "I agreed before we knew about Sophia, and I don't think she's enough of a problem to change my opinion. She's been Andrew's girlfriend for a couple of years so we know her fairly well. I can't imagine her making a scene, especially because everyone else in my family will tell her to stop being so silly. I like Carol's original plan." "Good!" declared Carol. "Let's go to bed then. I'm tired after sitting in the hot tub." Carol pulled off her towel, threw it over the vanity table seat, and headed for the bed. I was a little surprised to see she was wearing panties, not to mention disappointed, but then I remembered that it was her time of the month. (In the last month I've learned a great deal about some aspects of female biology that I had less than no interest in, ESPECIALLY including their sanitary needs - Yeech!). ^ [[You can imagine my surprise when I learned that there's an un-offered version of the birth control pill that safely eliminates periods in women, freeing them from the mess, back pains, mood swings, cramps (or even worse pains for some women), lost productivity (whether at work or any other activity), etc. Widespread use of those pills would've considerably improved the quality of life for potentially billions of women, especially for the significant number of them - many millions - who have difficult periods. They also would've resulted in a boost to the economy considerably greater than the cost of the pills, so arguably should've been provided free of charge by each country's government. Medical science has known about it for several decades, but 'overlooked' it for most of that time. In recent years there have been increasing calls for its being made available, but the attitude of the 'authorities' (mostly middle-aged Christian men) has been to block it, with no good reason given. It's even better than existing birth control pills in several other ways, including the side-effect that it slightly, but usefully, reduces the rates of a few types of cancer. That's a side-effect discovered from the large-scale trials that the pill has successfully passed. The real reason why it's been blocked is because these 'good Christian' men believe that women are SUPPOSED to suffer. What a bizarre concept! The bible (using lower-case to show my contempt) states that god chose to punish Eve "and her female descendants" (how is punishing unborn descendants EVER moral?) for her eating the forbidden fruit, by inflicting women with childbirth pains. These 'good Christian' men consider periods close enough to the same thing that they consciously or subconsciously believe women should continue to experience the pain and discomfort of periods. Words fail me! Given that my autobiography is well over a million words at this point, and you know that words very rarely fail me, my writing that is solely an expression of my disgust. My American readers might be interested to know that the debate over this pill has reached the 'highest level' (again with heavy sarcasm), with President Bush agreeing not making that pill available. He's a 'good Christian'! I'm also disgusted by a religion which prides itself for a book which happily boasts that their god chose to deliberately inflict childbirth pains on women. Over the course of humanity's existence, pregnancy has directly caused the deaths of about 1% of all expectant mothers, whether the baby was carried to term or not. In pre-history, and most of history until only a very few generations ago, the average woman tried to have about ten children, so pregnancy had a 10% chance of killing the average women. Many hundreds of million women and many tens of millions of babies have died for something the bible happily boasts that god deliberately made happen! Of course there is no such 'God', but my comment is not about 'Him', but about the attitudes of men who would write such crap in the first place, and everyone since who has revered such an entity. I don't have to wonder what would have happened had men been inflicted with a source of pain and inconvenience as bad as women's periods. The male authorities would certainly have searched for and released a pill that eliminated that! I can't help but think of the super-popular Viagra, which - for the vast majority of its users - is nothing more than a boost to their ego.]] ^ I was still thinking about whether it was a good idea for us to all sleep together naked (one pair of panties between the four of us didn't count for much), when Julia and Ava shucked their robes. Julia held her hand out to me, for mine. Out of automatic embarrassment, I nearly asked Julia, "Do you think it's a good idea to do this naked?", but she obviously did as she was naked already. I'd made a big deal in front of everyone, including Ava, that my family was cool about nudity in front of each other, so I could hardly make a fuss now. And then I realized that I actually wanted to get Ava used to Carol and me being together, so why was I hesitating? I removed my robe and handed it to Julia. Ava was already in bed, on one side, and Carol was standing by the other side, waiting for me to get in. I briefly worried about the sleeping positions, but they were obvious: Ava on one side, then it had to be me or else I'd end up between Julia and Carol, which wouldn't be right. After me Julia then Carol. Carol could have slept outside of Ava, but Carol was emotionally much closer to Julia, so next to Julia made more sense. Theoretically I could have slept on an outside edge, but that had long since been established as "forbidden territory" for the Lord. Having that clear in my head, I got in the bed, and slid over so I was close to Ava. I was facing Ava, so I had a good opportunity to sound her out. I asked, "Ava, what do you think about Carol being in the bed with us? With me, I mean, even if Julia is between us?" Ava just giggled. The reason for the giggle became obvious fairly quickly. Carol rolled into my proximity sense range while Julia was still walking around the bed. Rather than leaving a gap for Julia, Carol scooted all the way over, pressed herself against my back, and put an arm around my waist. Ava giggled again, adding, "You should see the look on your face! Haha." I could easily imagine the look on my face, "confused" (over how to react) was a pretty safe bet. In times like this it pays to say nothing of any substance. I waited to see, and as I'd suspected, Julia got into bed and settled on the outside of Carol. "Umm," I ventured, "I can't help noticing that there's one more sister sleeping next to me than I'm used to. How did that happen?" "{Giggle}," from Ava, confirming my certainty that I'd been the only one not in the know. Carol said, "I love you very much, Mark, and I want to know what it feels like to fall asleep with your arms around me." This was obviously for Ava's benefit, as Carol and I sleep together more nights than not these days (stupid English!), so I would play the scene for Ava. Obviously this had been another of those occasions where THEY enjoyed themselves more if I didn't know in advance. I was facing Ava, so I said, "Excuse me, Ava. I'd better roll over so I can look my sweet, innocent, naïve, young sister in the eyes, so I can try to work out what to do about her strange idea." Ava giggled, "I think it's a WONDERFUL idea." I took that as consent to roll over, so I did. Carol and Julia were both smiling very happily. "If you were intending to surprise me, you certainly succeeded." Carol answered, "You're willing to do it though, aren't you?" "It'll make you happy?" "It'll make me VERY happy. I love you very much." Which, I guessed, was the main point of this exercise: letting Ava think that it was Carol who was pushing for more contact between her and me. My role would obviously be that of the reluctant brother. "I love you too, sweetie. I love you even more than roast chicken, and I can't praise you more than that." I got some laughs for that, Julia complained, "You've never said you love me that much!" "That's because you far too often land me in troublesome situations with no warning. And you've taught Carol and Ava your trick too. This is a bit of a shock." Julia said, "Carol sits on your lap and you cuddle her in the hot tub, which is similar to this." "I guess, but this is still a shock. Obviously I'm the only one who has any hesitation though, right? All three of you are okay with this?" All three girls indicated they were enthusiastically okay with it, Carol especially. "Looks like I'm outvoted yet again. How do you want to do this, sweetie?" "I only want to do it if you're happy to. I shouldn't make you uncomfortable." "I'm getting over the shock. You know I like being with you, I just never expected it to be 24 hours a day. I like cuddling you too, so this is fine. You keep saying you love me, and you know I love you very much too, and there aren't too many things in life better than holding someone you love." "Thank you. It means a lot to me. I want to spoon, with your arms around me. I'll just roll over ... Good. Now put your top arm around my waist. Thank you, that's wonderful." The fact that my hard cock was sticking between Carol's legs reminded me about it. I did a go-soft in case Ava made a grab for it. I also played the concerned, reluctant brother some more, by saying, "Ahh, sweetie. I just thought of a problem. Sometimes a boy's, umm, 'thing' gets hard at night. We can't help it; it just happens. I'm worried that you might wake up in the middle of the night and think something terrible is happening." "Oh, Mark, you'd NEVER do anything 'terrible' to me. Besides, every girl knows that guys can't control their cocks. Normally cocks control the guys, haha. I'm not worried about things like that with you. You've never got hard because of me before, so I know you don't think of me that way. You'd probably be dreaming about Julia or Ava. I feel comfortable and safe now, so can we go to sleep please?" Normally I'd NP the light switch off now, but I remembered Ava's "Nipple Power" joke. "Excuse me Carol, I've got to roll over for a second, so I can use Ava's nipple to turn the lights out." I earned some giggles for that, especially from Ava. I took hold of her nipple, pointed it in the general direction of the switch, and squeezed. In the dark, I rolled back toward Carol again, while Ava was giggling even more. Ava announced, "That's so funny! I wish I knew how you do it though." "It's easy. First you find a REALLY good looking nipple, then you point it at..." "{Giggle}. Hey, I wonder if Carol has magic nipples. You should try her nipples, Mark." "I can't. Carol's my sister, and sisters don't have nipples. They don't have breasts, and most of the time I prefer to think they don't even have bodies." The location of my right hand would have made a liar out of me, but Ava couldn't know that. There were two bodies between it and Ava, it was under the covers, and Ava couldn't move without my proximity giving me advance warning. "Haha. Boy, are you ever in denial! Carol's got a fantastic body, and her nipples are..." Julia interrupted, "Ava. I think Mark knows that, but he prefers not to dwell on it. He's a wonderful brother to Carol, so we should respect his boundaries. Let's snuggle up and go to sleep, shall we?" Which meant Julia thought we'd achieved enough with Ava. There were several kisses and "Goodnight darlings", "Goodnight my loves", and the like. Ava snuggled up closer to me. Her hand slid south, all the way to the "South Pole", which fortunately wasn't at all pole-like. Ava didn't react, so I couldn't tell whether she was surprised or not. Hopefully, after all our trickery, "not". Ava let go after a few seconds, using her hand to hug me normally instead. Julia moved closer to Carol, her hand joining mine on Carol's breast. We stroked her gently, causing Carol to say, "Mmm. I like this." I was just about to order myself to sleep, when I realized that Carol shouldn't know about that, so I said, "Carol, has Julia told you that I fall asleep quickly?" "Yeah." After a brief pause, "I'm curious to see it." "I'll hold you for a couple of minutes, because we both like that, and then I'll fall asleep. -- "Ava, I'll be waking up early to do some studying. Sometime between 3:00 and 3:30. I'll have to climb out over you, but I'll try not to wake you up too much." "You're getting up at 3am on a SUNDAY morning to STUDY! Boy, you're crazy, haha." "I won't argue with you, even though Math courses are obviously fun to study." "Haha. Okay, goodnight crazy darling." I held Carol for a couple of minutes, then went to sleep. ------- Chapter 158: My Second Foursome that Wasn't Really Sunday, May 1, 2005 I woke up at the expected time, checked to make sure I was still crazy enough to study, decided I was, so started climbing over Ava. I created a very dim light blob to light my way, ready to cancel it if Ava started waking, but the only problem I had was that when I was halfway over Ava, she sleepily decided to hug me. Even with proximity, it's pretty much impossible to dodge something like that when you're straddling the perpetrator, so I got caught. It took me a minute to gently disentangle myself, and finish climbing out of bed. I had early breakfast, during which my minds joked about trying to get the Andersons and Williams to adopt Hobbit mealtimes: first breakfast, second breakfast, brunch, elevensies, lunch, etc. It'd suit me very nicely. After early breakfast, the first thing I did when I got to the study was a lot more memory tests. They refined last night's discovery about the importance of the attitude of the owner of the memory. A positive or negative attitude allowed or disallowed access. As best we could, we tried to do an experiment where the owner was indifferent to his memory being accessed. It was impossible to guarantee complete indifference, but we got a result anyway: the owner had to be positively eager to share the memory, or else it didn't work. Similarly, the other minds had to put quite a lot of effort into retrieving the memory, so this process only functioned when both ends of it were striving to make it succeed. That reasonably well matched our remembering Katrina's name at the Athletic Club. We had been trying hard to remember names during the Duckling lunch introductions, and more importantly, all four of us had been trying reasonably hard to make sure we called the girls by their right names at the club. Tests confirmed that memory leakage worked the same regardless of which mind was the memory's owner or retriever. We'd have been very surprised if it hadn't been consistent. Nor did it matter how many owners there were. We did an experiment where three minds looked at the page number, and the one mind left tried to retrieve it. It took just as much effort. Interestingly, he didn't have to specifically 'target' one of the three minds' memories; merely visualize the event and 'read' the page number out of someone's memory. We repeated the same experiment with three minds all trying to block the access, and they succeeded in preventing it. Then two trying to block it and one wanting to share; the memory was accessed successfully. We found out that the 'content' of the memory - whether a page number, picture, graph or anything else - didn't make any difference. As far as we could tell anyway, as testing some non-sight memories wasn't easy. Very happily, we discovered that "understanding" was a memory. Or maybe it was bundled with the memory that it was the understanding of. We discovered this by reading through a textbook until we found a concept we couldn't understand. We let one mind work on it, while the other three chatted about something very distracting: how INCREDIBLE Chloe would look in a small, thin, bikini top. The three minds involved got VERY worked up thinking about that, so much so that one of them forgot the purpose of the distraction and sent the studying mind a visual image of what they imagined Chloe would look like. Needless to say, that significantly delayed the studying mind's understanding of the textbook's concept. When the studying mind eventually managed to regain concentration long enough to understand the textbook material, we did the test. The other minds accessed his memory, they got more than just the text he'd been reading, but a "bundle" of other stuff too, such as that the material had been on the right hand page of the book, some of the studying mind's impressions and opinions of it, and - most importantly - his understanding of it. We immediately wanted to test to make sure we could access each other's college studies, but ran straight into a mental brick wall. The accessing minds didn't know what to visualize, so they had no idea how to 'get at' the memory. Even when the two owner minds wrote down quite explicit descriptions of the material (a sample formula, for example), we couldn't get it to work. Memory is supposed to be associative, so associating off a formula should've worked, but it didn't. We did a few minutes of real studying, then tried to access each other's material. This we succeeded at, so long as both sides of the process put in the necessary effort. We kept trying other things: Re-accessing one of last night's page number tests (succeeded). Accessing the memory of a very recent event without telling the owner mind which memory was the target (failed). Accessing an old memory that the context was very well known and which had made a strong impression: our first visit to "Raging Rocky's Rags" (the mind that had been on duty then, #4, learned something he'd not been told about. He didn't thank us for the memory). Both sides of the process had to have a VERY clear idea of what memory was being targeted, the owner had to be deliberately positive about his memory being shared, and the retriever had to try hard to get it. When it worked, it worked perfectly, especially with how it included understanding, but it was far too limited and too difficult to be of much practical use to us. Bummer! My brain was frazzled from the testing effort and the depressing results, so I wandered downstairs for a cheer-me-up snack. While walking, I wondered whether I should immediately drop back to studying only one course at a time, and maybe even restart the courses from where I'd first started studying them simultaneously. Restarting would be a waste of a week and a half if I never needed to have all four minds know both courses, so that implied I should wait and see. On the other hand, if I carried on studying two simultaneously, and did hit a real need, then I might need to repeat four weeks of studying. The middle option - not restarting, but only doing one course at a time from now on - wasn't possible as my minds didn't have the background knowledge in the other pair's course to let them start midway like that. It was either restart, or carry on as I was doing. If I carried on at double the rate, I would face another decision when I was ready to start the third course. By the end of my milk and cookies, I'd decided to carry on at my double-speed rate until the end of these two courses, and then reconsider. It shouldn't have been so important, but the killer issue was the embarrassment of admitting to Prof and OSU that my studies were going to take nearly twice as long as I'd previously indicated, and almost permanently turning off one computer. I'd only be able to use two when studying two BCC courses simultaneously because all of those were totally independent, which wouldn't happen for months yet. I'd practice the memory retrieval tests frequently and look for better techniques, and hope I got usefully better at memory sharing by the time I finished these two courses in about a week and a half. Or maybe something else might happen. This was my main hope, as I keep discovering new things about myself. There's no guarantee that there's any more left to discover - for all I know, this mentally exhausting memory retrieval ability is my last 'trick' - but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope like crazy that something useful turns up in the next one and half weeks. I knew I was being foolishly optimistic, but it put off the evil day of having to come clean to Prof about my studying rate reducing. I went back upstairs and studied. Initially not as enthusiastically as before I realized how troublesome my double-speed approach could be, but after a while I cheered up and starting enjoying myself, because math is fun. I stopped early to go to the bakery for croissants, getting three dozen, because there were nine of us in the house this morning and I'm a staunch believer that there should always be leftovers. (You may not know this, but the word "leftover" derives from the ancient Greek, meaning, "for Mark to have later." Especially if it involves roast chicken.) To get Julia's anniversary breakfast ready, all I had to do was follow Vanessa's instructions. They weren't difficult, so I soon had two trays ready to take upstairs. I had a momentary temptation to put all the heavy stuff on one tray for me to carry, and use NP to carry the light one ahead of me. It was a humorous image, but it wouldn't be so funny if Sophia happened to get up early. Not to mention that her screaming might make me drop the NP'd tray, and that'd be a waste of good food. I carried one tray up and put it on the floor outside our bedroom door, then popped into the study to write a note, "Spare croissants. Help yourself." Back in the kitchen, I left the note on top of the bag of spare croissants. I'd put plenty on my two trays, so the bag contained leftovers, but I still hoped there'd be leftover leftovers for later in the day. I took the second tray up. Julia was conveniently sleeping on the edge of the bed, so she was wakened by the smell of a fresh croissant being waved just under her nose. The first words Julia said were, "Mmm. You remembered! How lovely." I answered quietly, "Actually Mom reminded me yesterday. And before you ask, pretty much everyone has reminded me not to forget the 14th. Apparently that'd be VERY bad! Before Ava wakes up and I have to keep to my "Mark Knows Everything" act, let me say that a month ago I knew NOTHING. Somehow a couple of croissants seems a rather inadequate way of acknowledging how HUGELY I owe you." "{Raspberry}..." #2: " ... It's me that feels honored to be able to..." The ensuing 'discussion' about who owed whom the most, woke Carol and Ava. They congratulated me for being such a wonderful boyfriend. In other words, for my being able to follow Mom's and Vanessa's instructions. Which, when I thought about it, probably was what becoming a good boyfriend required. God knows there was no chance of a boy working it out for himself. Everyone said nice things to everybody else, and we all had a very pleasant breakfast. Is there anything better than sitting in bed with three almost totally naked girls and plenty of food? (Other than the obvious: there being even more food.) Eventually Ava thought to ask, "Carol, did you like sleeping in Mark's arms last night?" Carol enthused, "Oh yes! It was wonderful. Thanks for letting me do that, Mark. I've never felt like that before. Would you mind if I asked Mom and Dad if we could do that sometimes at home?" I inhaled some croissant flakes in surprise, including at Carol's smartness. It took me a few coughs and mouthfuls of drink to clear my throat. While I was doing that, I couldn't help think that Mom and Dad probably already suspect that Carol and I might cuddle sometimes, in our new double bed. Ava asked Carol, "Would your parents really agree to that?" "I think so. They trust Mark, and they know he'd never do anything I didn't want him to do. Also this is my idea, not Mark's, so that should give them even more confidence. I'm not worried about them, only that Mark hasn't agreed yet?" "Ahh, it's okay with me, sweetie. I only hesitated because I was surprised. The only thing that worries me is that word of it might get out. People would get all worked up about it, so the four of us will have to keep it a secret. I don't mean to pick on you Ava, but I've only known you a short while. Can you keep this secret?" Ava said, "I TOTALLY approve, so NO WAY am I going to spoil it! You two love each other so much, you should sleep together EVERY night!" I couldn't resist a little subtle tease to get Ava even more worked up, "Nothing like that's going to happen. As it is, Carol and I are hardly ever home on the same nights anyway because either she's sleeping with Julia here, or I am." Ava answered much as I predicted, "You can BOTH sleep here! You could do that as often as you wanted." "Haha. Now you're being REALLY cruel to poor Julia. Making her sleep in a bed with both her lovers but not be able to have sex with either of them because Carol and I would both be terribly uncomfortable. Are you trying to ruin Julia's sex-life? Haha." "No, no. Nothing like that! I don't understand why all of you can't have..." "Ava! No more please. I'm Carol's big brother, and I take protecting her very seriously, so please don't go in that direction, or you'll upset her. Carol's request to sleep with me is 100% pure. She's a lesbian, remember? So your thinking would be as upsetting to Carol as suggesting that I sleep with another guy; and that's NEVER going to happen! No more talk about this please. I'm going to change the subject, and remind you that we're now trusting you with three secrets. Can you keep them all?" Fairly obviously Carol was laying the foundation for her telling Ava in a few days that she [Carol], wanted to have sex with me. In which case, enough had been said already. [Carol's plan was to confess her new desire for me to Ava, and ask Ava's help. Initially Carol would ask for help to resist her desire (we all expected Ava's advice - in the unlikely event that she tried to give any - would prove to be terribly unsuccessful), and then Carol would ask Ava's help in Carol's seduction of me. Carol would be having fun tricking Ava, and Ava would end up taking a lot of the responsibility for bringing us together. Ideally, if Carol did it right, Ava might end up thinking that she was almost totally responsible for making us lovers. Not only should that make Ava far less likely to blab, but we'd also make sure Ava told any future core group girls, such as maybe Chloe when the time was right, that she [Ava] was responsible for pushing Mark and Carol together. My role would be to be EXTREMELY reluctant, which would be fun for me too, as long as it didn't take too long.] Ava looked puzzled for a second or two, then, "Three? I can only think of two: you and Carol 100% pure sleeping together, and your marathon run." "The third secret is that you've got magic nipples." "{Giggle}. I'd look stupid trying to tell people I had magic nipples! That'd be very funny, haha." "I bet that at least half of them would want to check your nipples though. You understand, don't you Ava, that your magic nipples are really a secret of mine, not of yours?" "I thought there might be a hidden light switches somewhere that you or Julia were using, and you were fooling me by claiming it was to do with your squeezing my nipples. It's VERY funny though, so I enjoy it." "That's a good theory, but how do you explain your magic nose then?" Now I had to quickly think what her nose could do, that couldn't be explained by hidden switches. Ava asked, "I've got a magic nose too? {Giggle}. What does my nose do Mark?" "You don't know?" "No, but I can't wait to find out." "Let me show you." I'd had an idea, it would be fun, I saw no strong reason why not, and Ava was conveniently sitting up in bed, so... I reached out and squeezed the end of her nose. I then held up my watch (with by my hands clearly visible), and counted down, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, now!" "EEK!" That'd been caused by two pairs of NP-fingertips briefly squeezing both of Ava's what the "N" of "NP" stood for. (I had tried to think of another use for a magic nose, but for some reason my minds were fixated on Ava's nipples, so this is what we decided on.) Let's see her explain this with a hidden switch! Some of my more astute readers might have discerned by now that I'm rather attracted to breasts, which naturally includes nipples (by which I mean that "my attraction to breasts naturally makes me attracted to nipples." What I wrote also ambiguously means, "breasts naturally include nipples", but as this paragraph is addressed to my more astute readers, I figure you should've already astutely discovered that fact for yourselves). Being attracted to breasts, and - naturally - to nipples, this effect of Ava's magic nose was irresistible. "See! You have a magic nose." "HOW DID YOU DO THAT?" "I just reached out with my hand and did this." I reached out and squeezed her nose again, then raised my watch, "5, 4, 3... ," Ava suddenly realized she had an excellent opportunity to observe her magic nose in action. She quickly tilted her head down, staring at her nipples intently. "... 2, 1, now!" "Eek! I SAW IT! I saw my nipples move. Something squeezed my nipples, but I didn't see ANYTHING! I felt it too. That's IMPOSSIBLE! How on Earth did you do that?" "I just reached out with my hand and did this." I reached for Ava's nose again. She pulled back, saying, "No, no! How did you touch my nipples?" "Would it help you if I showed you what Carol's magic ear does?" Julia and Carol were sitting behind me (during breakfast I'd been placed in the center position of the bed again, this time with Julia next to me, as it was our anniversary), and they were both laughing happily at poor Ava's amazement. My unexpected mentioning of Carol caused her to stop laughing in surprise. Julia laughed even louder though. Carol recovered almost immediately, asking, "What does my magic ear do? {Giggle}." (I wonder if my astute readers can guess? That's assuming I've got any astute readers left.) I had to climb out from under the covers to do this properly. I moved so I was kneeling on the bed, toward the bottom of it, facing all the girls. I asked, "Ava, I should ask you whether you want me to demonstrate Carol's right or left ear? They give slightly different effects." Ava said, "I don't know! I don't know what they do. I'm very confused. What do your ears do, Carol?" Carol answered, "I don't know. I didn't know I had magic ears, {giggle}." "Just pick 'left' or 'right', Ava. I doesn't matter which, and you'll understand in a few seconds." "Ahh, okay. 'Right' then." I stretched out, Carol turned her head to help, and I squeezed her right earlobe briefly. I sat back on my heels, held up my watch, and called, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1, now!" All of the girls had been staring at Carol's nipples (showing remarkably good taste, in my opinion), so Ava's "EEK!" took everyone by surprise (including Ava, but you probably already knew that, as that's pretty much the only time people say "EEK!" I thought I'd explain though, just in case you're not very astute). I had NP-squeezed Ava's right nipple. Ava's, not Carol's, because it was a better way to tease Ava. Ava quickly grabbed her breast and examined it, looking for ANY explanation. All she saw was her usual, lovely, breast. She quickly gave up on that, looking up and stating, "Something squeezed my nipple again! Just one nipple this time. What's going on?" What was going on was mostly lots of laughter from Carol and Julia. Which pleased me, as they could have been warning me to stop this game. They must've felt good about trusting Ava with some more knowledge about NP (not theoretically detailed "knowledge"; more the hands-on experience kind of knowledge). Their laughter also reassured Ava. I said, "Let me show you what Carol's left ear does Ava." Without waiting for an answer, I stretched for Carol's left ear, and squeezed it. "5, 4, 3... ," Poor Ava didn't know where to look. Her attention jumped around between me, Carol's nipples, and her own. "... 2, 1, now!" I NP'd Ava's left nipple "Eek. The other one this time. What's going on?" Then in a fearful voice, Ava asked, "Is it," she added in a breathless whisper, "a ghost?" I presumed she'd whispered so the ghost wouldn't hear. Ava looked quite worried, so I hastened to reassure her, "No, sweetie. It's 100% me. I REALLY like your nipples! That's why when I squeezed Carol's ears, I still squeezed your nipples. Besides, I wouldn't touch my sister's nipples, would I? That wouldn't be right." "But it CAN'T be you! You're way over there. I was watching one time and saw my nipples move and there was NOTHING there! It's IMPOSSIBLE! But I don't..." "Ava, sweetie. I promise you that it is me. Remember that I am super, super intelligent, aren't I? "Umm, yes?" "I discovered how to do something special. There are no ghosts involved, or anything like that. Not that I believe in them, but aren't ghosts supposed to be cold and clammy? What touched you wasn't cold or hot, was it?" [NP-fingertips have no mass, so they cannot have any heat, as Heat = Temperature times Mass. I'm simplifying somewhat, but not unfairly in this circumstance. Not being able to have any heat, they can't seem cold by drawing heat from Ava's flesh.] #1: #4: #2: I started moving back to my position in the bed, so I could hug Ava properly. She answered my hot/cold question while I was moving, "No, it didn't feel cold. It really is you, and not a ghost?" "It's me. It's not a ghost, an alien, an angel or a devil. Not a leprechaun, pixie, or invisible unicorn either. Thank God it's not an invisible unicorn! Can you imagine the invisible piles of horseshit on the floor! I wouldn't be walking around this room in bare feet, that's for sure, haha. It's 100% me, Ava. Remember I told you a few days ago that I called my trick of turning off the lights 'Nipple Power', in honor of your lovely nipples..." "Oh! It's the same trick as the lights! I'd forgotten about that. So there are no hidden light switches, are there?" "Nope. It's all me. Well, to be more accurate, it's me and your nipples. That's why it's called 'Nipple Power'." "I don't believe my nipples have got ANYTHING to do with it! They're completely ordinary nipples. They don't have..." "AVA! How dare you! Your nipples are NOT 'completely ordinary'. That's silly talk!" -- I leaned down, close to her nipples, and whispered to them - loudly enough for everyone to hear - "Ignore her, girls. She doesn't know what she's talking about. I've spent YEARS studying nipples very, very studiously - I've looked at the pictures in DOZENS of dirty magazines and countless websites in my pursuit of knowledge - and I can say that you two are absolutely beautiful nipples. Not just one of you, but BOTH of you!" -- By now Ava was giggling, so I added, still talking to Ava's nipples, "Will you two girls please hold still when I'm talking to you. It's VERY distracting of you to jiggle around like that. How can I concentrate on what I'm saying?" Ava seemed sufficiently relaxed now, so I straightened up, and put my arms around her for a hug. Unfortunately she stiffened, staring at one of my hands as it moved near her breasts. Obviously I can't allow any girl to be reluctant about my touching her breasts, so this issue urgently needed to be taken care of. "Ava, please don't be afraid of me. There's no need to be. Julia and Carol have known about my 'Nipple Power' for ages, and they obviously feel safe with me. Carol even made a big deal about how safe she felt sleeping in my arms..." Ava looked past me, to ask the girls (by which I mean Julia and Carol, not her own nipples), "You both knew Mark could do... , whatever it is?" Carol answered, "Sure. Mark's VERY special! You are very lucky to be Mark's girlfriend; even more lucky than you think you are." Julia added, "Remember when we exchanged our commitments last Tuesday. Remember I said that there were secrets involving Mark that you had to keep? He just showed you what I had in mind. Mark is the only person in the world who can do what he just did, and he's shown VERY few people. There's nothing special about breasts, but Mark is INCREDIBLY unique. He paid you a huge compliment by sharing his ability with you, including the message that he trusts you enormously. You should be loving him for the gift of his trust, like Carol and I do, rather than getting fussy about your breasts." Julia's points worked well on Ava, who had really only been surprised. Ava melted into my arms, gushing her appreciation and even love. Problem solved, especially as Julia kept adding even more stuff about how wonderful and caring I was. Julia and Ava were too embarrassing for me to listen to, being far too sentimental, plus I couldn't listen to their heresy about there being "nothing special about breasts", so my mind wandered. Looking for something to distract myself with, I realized that I didn't have Julia's certainty that I was the only person in the world who had Nipple Power, although I was pretty sure that no one else would call it that. I thought I was very likely the only such person with that ability, but I couldn't ever be sure. It wasn't as if people like me would advertise their abilities, as that'd surely be suicidal. [[Later I could easily tell for sure as I gained access to what I called a Consciousness Map, which allowed me to locate minds easier than looking up people in a phone book, especially for powerful minds.]] If my early calculation of the chance of someone repeating my dying-during-déjà-vu experience was even roughly correct, then the odds were astronomically against there ever having been another person like me. But I couldn't be sure of that, as my calculation had contained a lot of guesswork. There was the additional factor that anyone who'd gone through two merges like me, would only have a 25% chance of still being in this w-dimension. If there was one more such person, then 25% of all the Mark Anderson's (in all the W-Dimension) would have such person in his world. It'd be good to meet him, providing he was a good guy. Or - I suddenly thought to hope - a sexy girl! That'd be cool. [In case you've forgotten, the "W-Dimension" is the name I give to the entire concept of another dimension next to the X-, Y- and Z-Dimensions. I consider "W" to be short for "Wow". I call each instance in the W-Dimension, i.e., each parallel dimension, a "w-dimension", with lower cases. For short, I usually omit the "w-" prefix as it's the only dimension I'm usually discussing.] When I thought about it, any merged girl would certainly be sexy. My face and body had changed enormously for the better, especially in the last couple of months, and the same should happen to a girl's body. Not exactly the same, of course. In her case, she'd change in ways appropriate for the female standard of fitness and beauty, i.e., she'd grow bigger tits. I was enjoying myself imagining the incredible sex I could have with a female version of me (because of our stamina, vigor, ability to 'read' our partner's body's responses, etc.), when it occurred to me that a female version of me didn't have to be 15-years old; she could be 95! That destroyed my fantasy! Ava was back to normal. Even better than that actually, after the job Julia had done making Ava appreciate how honored she'd been to have her nipples squeezed by me in that way. To make sure she was fine, I put my real hand on her belly and then slid it up to her breasts. Ava accepted my caress happily, totally without hesitation or flinching, so everything was fine. I caressed her for the next few minutes, because I'm a thorough sort of guy. When Julia stopped talking, Ava turned to me, "What else can you do with whatever it is? What is it anyway? I can't guess how..." I interrupted, "Ava, I'm not going to answer your questions or explain. I wanted you to know a little about it, so you have some idea of what you're getting mixed up with." Actually, I'd just got a little carried away, but I might as well make it sound good. "I am TOTALLY unlike other guys. Well, not 'totally', because I do like breasts quite a lot, haha. But for you to stay with us, you have to keep our secrets. Not just keep them most of the time, but keep them perfectly, not be curious about..." "I'll keep them! I will! I promise I won't tell anyone." I'd been intending to say more, but Ava seemed 100% definite already. Nothing wrong with her being more than 100% though, so I said, "Good. I'd like to be your friend for a long time, but that'd be hard to do if scientists have taken my brain out of my skull so they could study it." "Huh? Eww! They wouldn't do that, would they?" "Probably not to start with. I'm sure they'd just lock me up and experiment on me for a few years first. But once they'd finished all their experiments, I'm sure they'd want to have a good look at my brain. The secrets you have about me aren't just interesting gossip that it'd be fun to tell others. My secrets are a LOT more serious than that!" Ava emphatically swore, promised and assured me that she'd keep my secrets. Then she thought of a new point, "You shouldn't have shown me that stuff. It's too scary." "Maybe you're right, but I didn't really have any choice because your nipples are IRRESISTIBLE." I leaned over and started sucking on one of them. When Ava's giggling had died down, Julia said, "Ava, I'm not too worried about them taking Mark's brain out, because boys don't use their brains much anyway. It's far more important that you don't tell anyone about Mark sleeping with his sister, because then they might cut something far more useful off!" Ava started giggling again. I figured I'd made my point with Ava's point, so I rolled back to my sitting position to protest my being used as a sex object. Before I could start my weak protest, Julia swung her far leg up and over my hip, so she was now sitting on top of me. All four of us had been sitting up in bed, eating our breakfast, chatting, etc., with the covers at waist level, so there'd been no reason for me to bother with go-hards or go-softs. I'd simply let my body react naturally. There were three naked pairs of breasts around me, and I'd just been sucking on one of them, so guess what had "naturally" happened? I'll give you a clue: Julia was taking advantage of it. "Oh goody!" said Julia, expressing her delight. Julia reached down with both hands, held me upright, then raised herself a little so she could rub my cock back and forth over the outside of her pussy to help her lubricate. "Umm, Julia. Do you think we should be doing this in front of Carol?" Something I thought Ava should hear me say, especially because Carol had such a clear view of what Julia was doing. "It's our anniversary, so we definitely should be doing this. Carol can look away if she's uncomfortable, or she can look if she's curious. If she's curious, I can't think of anyone better to show her than us two. Besides, I'm horny. Ahh, that feels good," as Julia lowered herself onto me. I looked at Carol, who laughed while she covered her eyes with her hands, fingers spread wide in the childish way of giving herself an unobstructed view. Ava was also laughing, which was about what I'd expected from her. She's got a lot of great attitudes. Julia started raising and lowering herself, giving everyone a clear view. I looked at Carol again, asking, "You're not uncomfortable, sweetie?" "I'm curious, like Julia said. I've never seen this done before and I've been wondering about it recently. Besides, I know you're not going to do anything bad to me. Just pretend I'm not here, and do what you'd normally do." "I'm VERY aware that you're here, but I'll try." Julia enjoyed her exhibitionism, but after a few minutes she was so worked up that the raising and lowering action wasn't enough for her. Normally she'd sit down to she could rock back and forth, but that wouldn't be any good for her audience. Julia had a better idea, "Turn me over and fuck me properly please. I think Carol wants to see how good you are." For fun I pretended to disagree, "I'm sure the sight of my ass going up and down between your legs is the last thing Carol wants to see. That's a terrible idea, isn't it, Carol?" Carol naively asked, "Umm, that's how a guy and girl normally have sex, isn't it? From what little I know." "I think it's pretty common. It'd be fairly repulsive for you to look at though, wouldn't it?" "I'm not a lesbian because guys repulse me, and even if they did, that wouldn't apply to you. I just prefer girls, is all. I'd like to see Julia have a good time with you. She's told me several times how good you make her feel, and I'd like to see that." "If you insist, I'll do it. I'm sure you won't like looking at it though." I hugged Julia to me with one hand, while I flipped us over. That pretty much put us straight into the right position. Julia and I both like it when I hold her legs up in the air by resting them on the top of my arms, so I did that, then started fucking her. Carol moved her head closer, ostensibly to get a better look. And, in fact, to get a better look. To accentuate my innocence and to tease her a little, I said, "Carol, I'm doing my best to pretend you're not here, but your head is so close I keep seeing it. I'm going to go soft if I keep seeing you, and I don't think Julia would appreciate that. Would you move back a little please." "Okay. Sorry." Carol moved back, and I turned my head a little toward Ava to appear even more non-incestuous. I proceeded to give my sister her demonstration. Ava has been gaining a lot of experience at threesomes recently, and she joined in when I encouraged her to, especially to Julia's enjoyment. Ava was kissing Julia, caressing and sucking Julia's breasts, and rubbing her clit. I was pounding away, and occasionally doing a little NP work on Julia's nipples and clit, when Ava left them clear. Julia LOVES my NP. Between my and Ava's stimulations, plus Carol's watching (because that had a sexual meaning behind it too), Julia was having a great time. We were ALL having a great time. After a few more minutes, Carol suddenly announced, "I can't watch any longer. I'm going to have a shower." I looked at Carol in surprise. She was obviously turned on. In fact, I could quickly tell that she was deliberately overacting it. This was still part of Carol's little game. Carol wanted to show Ava that she [Carol] was experiencing sexual attraction for me, but wasn't willing to face it, let alone act on it. I was about to say something like, "Okay. We'll see you downstairs," but I had a better idea. Instead I said, "I understand. I told you that you wouldn't like it." Which played into Carol's act nicely. Carol hesitated, then said, "Umm, yes. Something like that." Ava started explaining, "It's not that, Mark. It's..." Julia put her hand over Ava's mouth, "This is a time for sex, not talking." Ava got the message. As soon as Carol had left the room, I told Julia and Ava, "I knew I shouldn't have let her watch. She's too innocent to see something like this." Ava knew very well that Carol wasn't innocent, as they'd had sex together, plus Carol has several times ordered Ava to play sexual games, usually in public and to their mutual enjoyment. Ava smiled at how naively cute I was being. I pretended not to see Ava look at Julia for permission to comment, and Julia's shaking her head in refusal. Julia said, "Leaving me like this would be cruel, so can we please get back to business?" Julia thrust her hips a few times, just in case we hadn't realized what 'business' she had in mind. Julia was in a very good mood, as she was both mid-fuck and enjoying seeing a plan working nicely (I wouldn't like to guess which of those two was giving her the greater happiness). Behind my fake-worried expression, I was also chuckling to myself, so we were both happy to restart 'business'. Ava joined in, and we soon took Julia the rest of the way to her one-month anniversary present. Julia had quite a good orgasm, so she went to sleep for a few seconds. Fortunately I had a spare girl, so I didn't have to waste any time. I moved over to Ava. A few seconds later Julia joined in. Ava was very aroused, which I thought was partly because she was so eager for Carol and me to get together. I couldn't tell whether that was the case, because Ava's arousal could have been entirely due to how much she enjoys sex. She's VERY enthusiastic about it, so she was dumb to describe herself as "not very smart". Anyway, Julia's being awake now, and Ava's being so aroused, gave me an opportunity for a little tease. I said, "Maybe rather than having more sex with Ava, I should go check on Carol? I'm a bit worried about her, especially because she had a strange look on her face when she left." Ava expressed her opinion while I was still talking, "Oh no!" She then had enough self-control to wait until I finished. Julia spoke first, "Carol is fine, Mark. Plus your interrupting her now would be the last thing she'd want. Give her some more time before you go talk with her." I knew exactly what Julia wanted Ava to think, but it took Ava a second or two longer, then she started giggling. I couldn't really ignore that, so I said, "Sometimes I don't understand girls. How can you giggle at poor Carol being so shocked at what she saw?" Ava couldn't think of a good answer, so Julia answered for her, "I think Ava is just relieved that you can stay here and keep having sex with her. She must be very turned on by now, and it would be very rude of you to leave right now." Ava was nodding her head rapidly, in an enthusiastic agreement with that excuse. I said, "Sorry Ava, I didn't think of that. I was too worried about Carol. That was rude of me, so let's see if I can make it up to you by giving you an ESPECIALLY good time." "Yes please!" So Julia and I tortured Ava for a while, getting her hotter and hotter, but not letting her climax. We kept that up until she was begging for it, and then we kept it up some more, because that was a LOT more fun, hehe. Poor Ava was almost bouncing off the walls in frustration before we took pity on her. As I'd promised, she had an ESPECIALLY good time; at the end, anyway. When we were cuddling afterward, I put my tongue in my cheek and asked, "I'm still worried about Carol. Do you think she would have calmed down enough by now, Julia?" Julia managed to keep a concerned expression on her face when she answered, "Yes, I'm sure she's finished calming down by now. You should go talk with her Mark. Ava and I will stay here for a few minutes, because I want to talk with Ava about something." Ava was struggling to hold back her giggles. I got out of bed, saying, "Okay. I'll go and see. She should be finished in the shower by now, so I'll have one too. See you two later." I put on a robe, picked up the last half-croissant, and left chewing it. I had a feeling I knew what Julia wanted to talk with Ava about, and it would amuse me, so when I left the room I didn't close the door properly. I stood out of sight in the hallway, eavesdropping. I was right. Almost immediately Julia started talking, "I know it's obvious to both of us, but we can't tell Mark that Carol is starting to have sexual feelings for him. We shouldn't mention it to Carol either." "Why not? They love each other to pieces! I've never met two people who should be together as much as Mark and Carol." "I totally agree. I love them both, and there's nothing more I'd like to see than the two of them able to express their love to each other fully. Not to mention how fantastic it'd be to be able to have sex with both of them at the same time, rather than having to keep them separate every time sex starts. I'm sure you'd like to have sex with both of them at the same time wouldn't you? Or with all four of us together?" "That'd be super fantastic! But it's not my main reason. I just think they SHOULD be lovers, and it's a crime that they're not. There's so much love between them that it hurts to see them not go all the way." "I agree, but we can't say anything to either of them about it, especially not to Mark. This is their business, and they have to work it out for themselves. I think that Carol will do something sooner or later, and I intend to give her my total support at the time, but I'm not going to do anything until Carol or Mark asks me to. Mark is totally blind to Carol's starting to get those feelings for him, and it's not our place to open his eyes. They have a fantastic relationship now, and we are NOT going to take responsibility for possibly upsetting it, especially not just to save them a few days. I want to just wait and see, okay?" "Okay, I understand. They deserve to be together though, because they love each other so much." "Yes they do. I feel sorry for Carol. She's only just come to terms with her being a lesbian, and now she's starting to have sexual feelings for her brother. Obviously all the sex she's had recently has opened her eyes and loosened her up, so she's started thinking about things that never would've occurred to her before. It must be a very confusing time for her. Oh, I just had another thought. The moment Donna learns that Carol is having sex with Mark, Donna is going to be leaping on top on him and demanding that all sisters should be treated equally, haha." "Haha. You might be right. She can be very demanding about whatever she wants." "Yeah, she's very direct. She's also very physical and she loves her big brother too. I doubt that she's a lesbian, so when she learns that Carol's having sex with Mark, she's going to demand her fair share. Carol thinks more about other people than she does about herself, so I'm sure that's something that worries her." When Carol, Julia and I had discussed Carol's little plan, none of us had mentioned this point, but it was a good one for Carol to bring up with Ava when the time came, so I made a mental note to tell Carol about it. "Thinking about Donna has made me realize that this has implications for their whole family. What are their parents going to think about Carol and Mark becoming lovers? It's not as if the two of them are going to be able to hide it from their parents, is it?" "Oh no! You're right. They're so much in love they're bound to give it away almost immediately. That's bad news. Parents get very upset about things like that, don't they?" "I think so. I think they could also get in big trouble with the police if it got out. This has to be kept VERY secret." "I hadn't thought about Donna or their parents. What a pity; they would have been so good together." I revised my mental note, now intending to tell Carol to pretend to be concerned about Donna AND our parents. "Don't give up on the idea, Ava. Felicity and Steven are very open-minded parents. They let you and me sleep with Carol, for example. Plus I'm sure they trust that Mark and Carol do love each other and are trustworthy. Let's just say nothing and wait to see what happens. It's Carol's and Mark's decision, and we'll support whatever they do, okay?" "I'm not going to say anything. It won't be 'they' doing anything about it though; it'll be Carol. Mark's clueless. For such a smart guy, he's amazingly dumb about Carol." "He certainly is! Not because he's dumb, but because he's so nice. It simply doesn't occur to him to think anything like that could exist between Carol and him. If Carol decides to go ahead with it, she's going to have to hit him in the head with a sledgehammer to get him to see it, haha." "Yeah, or shove her pussy into his face, haha. That'd work too!" Julia had made the point she wanted to: that Carol would set the schedule for this issue, so Julia bridged to a new subject, "Speaking of pussies and faces, I've got a pussy full of Mark's cum. I wonder if I can find anyone to lick it out of me." "{Giggle}. Pick me! Pick me! Haha." ------- Chapter 159: My Stupid Way to Look Noble Sunday, May 1, 2005 (Continued) I doubted Julia and Ava would be saying anything for a while, so it was a good time for me to leave. As I expected, so much time had passed that Carol wasn't in the bathroom. I was a bit too stinky to wander around the house for something that wasn't urgent, so I had a quick shower first. I finished my shower before Julia and Ava arrived - I must have left more cum in Julia than I'd thought - so I went looking for Carol. She wasn't in the kitchen. Sadly, neither were any croissants, damn! On the way to check the hot tub and the Guys' Rooms, I heard her voice coming out of Prof and Vanessa's study. I headed that way. Before I arrived I heard enough to understand that Carol was describing how I'd reacted when the Duckling lunch came unstuck because of what I call the "fame throng" (or "damned fame throng", depending on my mood). It wasn't a secret topic - just as well, with the door open - but it was still embarrassing for me to walk in to. I solved my dilemma by calling ahead, "Is that you, Carol?" "In here!" Prof, Vanessa and Carol were sitting in the center of their study, chatting. Carol was wrapped in towels, which was good with Sophia maybe still in the house. I sat next to Carol on the sofa, and she immediately relocated herself to my lap. Vanessa said, "Carol was telling us that your fame is starting to cause you problems." "Yeah, I heard from the hallway. Our lunch with the Ducklings got messed up because of it." "What lessons did you learn from it?" #2: #4: "My first lesson was that crowds of people are a pain in the backside. An unmanageable, rude, stupid pain in the backside. In their desire to be friendly with me, they trampled all over my LUNCH! Can you imagine anything LESS friendly to me! Haha. I can laugh at that now, but I was damned annoyed at the time. -- "Umm, Julia did some online research for me on how to handle such situations. There wasn't much apparently. Some stuff about taking control of the crowd early before it gets too large or too unruly, meeting them halfway so when I separate from them they'll know our meeting is over, setting rules for their behavior, and stuff like that. Julia did say that even if I did everything perfectly, crowds will often still be uncontrollable." "Yes, crowds are known for it. I'll be interested to hear how you get on next time." #2: #1: "Ahh, I'm not sure there's going to be a next time. I was trying to think of another way of meeting with the Ducklings. Somewhere away from all the other people." "I can guarantee there'll be plenty of next times. Once it's well known that you're rich, it could become a common occurrence. I suggest you to use middle school to practice what Julia told you, because you'll never have a crowd that's easier to dominate than a bunch of 12- to 14-year olds. That way when you start having trouble with high-school students, or people in public later, then you'll be more confident about what to do. After years of teaching unruly mobs myself, I can tell you that confidence is very important." "I guess you're right. I also guess I'd better do this sooner rather than later." Prof agreed, "I should think so, yes. I can't imagine any sensible reason why they'd make us wait more than a week between our first and second business trips. Maybe they'd say a month out of caution because we'd won on our first visit, but I'd be surprised because what would they use those extra three weeks for? I'll try to talk them into a week, so it might be all over in less than a week and a half, and then you'll be publicly known as being very rich, all going well." "Wow! I'd better pick another day for a Duckling lunch soon. Next Thursday or Friday, I guess. That'll make Donna happy." Vanessa said, "Good. If you can, let yourself be seen, so you get to practice controlling the crowd." "Yeah. It's not going to be a sexy meeting, unfortunately. I'm going to make damned sure I hang on to my lunch next time too! -- "Changing the topic, I came looking for Carol to mention a couple of things to her, but now I think about it, we should check this idea with you two, and probably with our parents too." Turning to Carol, I asked, "Carol, what do you think about discussing your little plan about Ava and us now?" My question had been deliberately vague in case Carol objected, but she was fine with it, "It's a serious issue, so that'd be a good idea." I was about to start, when I remembered the door was open. There was no reason not to close it the easy way, so I said, "I'll just close the door." Carol started getting off my lap, telling me, "I'll get it," but by then I'd already started pushing it closed with NP. Carol, Prof and Vanessa all chuckled. When the door had closed, Prof said, "That's a great ability for a lazy person." "Yeah, but unfortunately I can't do the single most useful thing I want with it." As he knew I wanted him to, Prof bit, "Oh, what is that?" "I'd love to be able to lie in bed and fly cookies up from the kitchen whenever I felt like one. Unfortunately I need line of sight." Prof asked, "Who'd have right of way on the stairs, the human or the flying cookie?" Carol suggested, "The human could solve that problem by eating the cookie." "Mutiny! Any more crazy talk like that and I'll flip you over and spank your bottom. My cookies are sacred and are NOT to be interfered with!" Vanessa said, "I, for one, am very glad you can't raid the kitchen from your bedroom. I can too easily imagine food disappearing as fast as I could cook it, with no hand in sight for me to slap. We'd have to issue the rest of the family butterfly nets whenever it was dinnertime. Speaking of which, I gather from Carol that your anniversary breakfast went well? I know your spare croissants went down well with everyone else, thank you for those." "You're welcome. All of them got eaten, did they?" "Yes. Don't look so sad, I'm sure we can find something else for you." "Good. Maybe in a little while though, because I'm not hungry yet. I was just disappointed that they're all gone. Sort of a matter of principle. Anyway, the reason I closed the door was to discuss an issue to do with Ava. Ava's going to be part of our core group, as I call it, for another couple of years at least, and there's no way we want to try to keep the reality of Carol's and my relationship from Ava for that long. It's already a nuisance avoiding being too affectionate, let alone EXTREMELY affectionate, like we should've been this morning, if you get my drift?" They indicated that they got my drift. It wasn't exactly the hardest drift to get. I continued, "We know Ava's not worried about brothers and sisters having sex. In fact she thinks Carol and I are crazy for not going at it hammer and tongs already. We all think Ava's trustworthy too, mostly because she comes across that way. I'm pretty sure she hasn't blabbed about my marathon time, or about my Nipple Power." [I'd already told Prof and Vanessa the derivation of that name, when I told them that "TK" was changing to "NP".] -- "Carol's idea is that when I decide to trust Ava - probably in a few days - then Carol will have a fake heart-to-heart talk with Ava, about Carol's just starting to develop sexual feelings for me. The idea is to get Ava to push Carol and me together, to make her think she's responsible for it. That way she'll be even less likely to blab about it. Also so that if we decide to let any other girls know about it, we can get Ava involved in that too, so the new girls will know Ava was the instigator. If we can, we'll even make Ava work quite hard to convince me to bed Carol..." Carol interrupted, "Yeah, and I'm going to approach her for advice on how to resist my desires. She's going to have to work hard to push us together." "I haven't discussed this much with Julia or Carol, but there's an opportunity to tie Chloe in. According to Julia's plan, Chloe will probably become my girlfriend in a few days time, two or three probably. Julia is pretty sure that Chloe won't be a long-term girlfriend; about a year or so Julia thinks, and I'm certainly not going to disagree with Julia over ANYTHING involving understanding girls. For a good chunk of that year Chloe's going to be pretty dependent on me, so it'll be a pain trying to hide my relationship with Carol from her. My idea is that if Carol holds off on her talk with Ava for a few extra days, then we'll have a chance to quietly sound out Chloe about her attitude to Carol and me, then maybe Carol can have her fake heart-to-heart talk with Ava and Chloe together. So we'd get the same benefits for Chloe as I mentioned for Ava. So, I guess the questions I'd like your opinion on are: should we tell Ava at all? Is our way of telling her - by fooling her into thinking that she's brought us together - the best way? And then the same questions about Chloe." Vanessa said, "We also saw that Ava didn't seem to have any emotional bias against sibling incest when she was teasing Andrew. That and what Julia has told us makes us think you're right about that aspect of her personality. In terms of her trustworthiness, after her parents, you and Julia are the most important people in her life now, and she believes she needs you, so I think it's very unlikely that she'll 'rat you out', so to speak. Perhaps by accident if she didn't know something was a secret, but if you're very explicit to her about what you want her to keep quiet about, I think she'll likely be trustworthy. -- "However, there is one aspect that I think you're not giving nearly enough weight to: the fury of a woman scorned. People are very easy to get on with while they're getting what they want, but when they stop getting what they want out of a relationship, they can get extremely bitter, vindictive and revengeful. A high proportion of the divorces I've seen people go through have had one or both of the parties turn nasty. It's 50/50 on whether it's the man or woman, but it's the woman often enough that you have to take warning from it. I'm not so worried about Ava because what she seems to want you and Julia are able to provide, but I hardly know Chloe. She might be all sweetness and light while she's getting closer to you, but what if she proposes marriage to you in a year's time and you refuse her. She could easily decide that if she can't have you, then she'll do her worst to ensure no other girl can either, by getting you sent to jail perhaps. That sort of behavior is far more common than you would've seen at your age, but Prof and I have seen it many times." "MANY times," agreed Prof. Vanessa continued, "You should plan for half of your serious girlfriends feeling vengeful if you refuse something they have their heart set on, so you'd be wise to make sure they don't have anything they can easily use against you. It'd be extremely easy for them to use your relationship with Carol, as that'd take just a single phone call to the police. You should try to minimize that risk by making it very clear up-front that you're in multi-way relationships, so marriage is NEVER going to happen. Stress that every time even a hint of her desiring marriage comes up in conversation. But even with that sort of preparation, you're still going to get vengeful ex-girlfriends often enough that you should be extremely cautious about who you tell your secrets to. My advice about Chloe is to put off telling her as long as possible, ideally forever, and certainly not to bring telling her forward just because it neatly fits into your telling Ava at the same time. Wait until you absolutely have to tell her before you even start thinking about it, rather than leaping ahead unnecessarily. It's quite possible that her parents might forbid her sleeping overnight with you, for example, which would mean you'd never have a pressing need to tell her about Carol." "Okay Vanessa. You've convinced me about Chloe. I was trying to solve an inconvenience before it even happened, and that's not worth the risk." "No it's not, especially because it's not just you that'd be at risk, but Carol, Donna and your parents too. You need a great deal more reason than merely 'inconvenience' before you put them at that much risk. While I'm mentioning them, you should also talk with your parents about this before you tell Ava. You're making decisions that can dramatically affect their lives, so they have a right to be involved in the decision. There's no pressing need to tell Ava as you can always wait a few more days, so you've got no excuse not to consult your parents." "Okay. We'll definitely do that." "Good. I can't even guess how Ava will react when your relationship with her comes to an end. There's no way of knowing how someone will react when they think their situation has changed badly. Someone who behaved like a saint for years when times were good, might turn into a vengeful bitch if she felt unfairly rejected. The key word is 'unfairly'. People can behave very, very badly if they think they've been treated unfairly. It's common for people to feel justified in committing murder if their feelings were unfairly hurt. That's totally irrational and disproportionate, but all too common. So none of us can predict how Ava will behave if she feels you were unfair to her. -- "The only measure you can take is try to make sure she never thinks you've been badly unfair to her. That's not as simple as always treating her in a way you think is fair, because people can have very unbalanced ideas about what they think is fair for them - two people contributing equal efforts to something will usually think they're personally putting in 70% because people overvalue their own contributions. When the relationship ends, each person can easily get angry at their impression that they were putting in twice as much effort as the other. Just because you think you're being more than fair, doesn't mean the girl thinks you are, and won't feel cheated afterward. By all means do your best with Ava, but don't naively assume that will be enough. -- "Another approach is to manage her expectations. If she never expects to marry you, she'll be less likely to feel unfairly treated when you don't. I'll give you an example of something I think would work quite well. I should start by saying that I like Carol's idea about her fake heart-to-heart and everything that follows from that. I imagine Julia liked it too, as it's exactly the sort of trickery that Julia loves." Carol emphatically agreed, "I'll say she did! I'm sure she's going to want to discuss it at length, as soon as we get some time alone." "Yes, and add to it, I'm sure. Julia does tend to get carried away with plans that appeal to her. Don't let her push you off the line you want to take, Carol. Remember that you'll be taking the greatest role in this little trickery, and you have to be able to bring it off convincingly. That'll be much easier for you if you're following a plan that you're happy with. -- "My point about Ava is that you should arrange it so Ava and Julia get a chance for a private talk about you and Mark getting physical, before anyone tells Mark that it might happen. Get Julia to point out to Ava that if Mark starts having a complete relationship with Carol, then he'll never want to marry anyone. 'He loves Carol so much, that he'll never want to marry any other girl.' Not Ava, not Julia, and not anyone else. Let Ava ponder on that for a while, without Julia's input. If Ava is the sort of person I think she is, she'll come to the decision that Mark and Carol should still become lovers. It'll be her own decision to give up on marrying Mark, which will be far more effective at destroying her expectation of that happening than Mark telling her he won't." Carol exclaimed, "That's an amazingly good idea Vanessa. Poor Ava, that's going to make her feel very hollow." "That's what will make it so effective." Vanessa seemed to be obsessing about marriage, so I asked, "Umm, Vanessa, you keep mentioning girls getting upset about not marrying me. The first time or two you mentioned it, I though it was just an example, but you seem to be thinking it's the biggest worry?" "I do think it's the biggest worry. I said earlier that about half of your girlfriends will feel vengeful when you break up with them. Here's another - but much more accurate - rule of thumb: the proportion of your serious girlfriends who'll be hoping to marry you will be EXACTLY 100%. They will ALL want to marry you, and a high proportion of them will do more than just 'hope' for it: they'll actively try to make it happen, and you know that 'all's fair in love and war.' -- "Girls instinctively want to find a mate and bind him to them. They are also culturally conditioned, legally and financially advantaged if they do so. You might as well say that girls are FORCED to get a guy locked to them. Your politely telling them to 'forget it', isn't going to have a snowball's chance in Hell of standing up to all the other influences driving them. EVERY serious girlfriend you have is going to be praying for the chance to marry you. I'm mixing my metaphors very inappropriately, but some of those girls are going to sell their souls for the chance to get you in front of a church's altar, haha." "Umm. But there's been no sign of that so far. Julia's not like that. Carol can't really, and Ava's not like that either." "Julia's heart would leap for joy if you asked her to marry you. When her head caught up, she'd turn you down, but don't doubt what her fundamental desire is for. That's why it's important that you do little things like your breakfast in bed this morning. -- "Don't look so worried, Mark. Julia has never been happier than she's been the last few weeks. You don't have to worry about hurting her, because you're not. She's having a grand time. It's just that 'marriage' is a magic word to a girl, and they can't help themselves when they hear it. Julia knows and approves that you're not going to marry her in the foreseeable future. But girls such as Chloe aren't going to understand the consequences of your uniqueness nearly as well as Julia does. They're going to try to marry you, and they may not take kindly to being turned down. So everything you can do to reduce the emotional investments the girls put into their dreams of marrying you, the less of a backlash you'll get when they finally understand they're not going to achieve that dream. You don't look like you're following me, Mark. What's the matter?" "I'm worried about Julia. I never realized that marriage was so important to her. I'm being selfish playing around with other girls and there's no good reason why I couldn't marry her. I can't marry Carol, but there's no reason..." "{Raspberry}," from Carol, right in my ear. To explain the logic of her argument better, Carol added, "What part of, 'Julia has never been happier, ' don't your understand? She wouldn't marry you if you asked her anyway, so why are you worried about it?" "But Vanessa said Julia's heart would leap for joy if I asked..." Vanessa interrupted, "You only hear what you want to hear, don't you? I also said, 'Julia knows and approves that you're not going to marry her', and, 'she's having a grand time.' You're definitely a 'the glass is half empty' sort of guy, aren't you?" Carol answered for me, "No he's not. Mark will think the glass is 'almost empty', he'll worry about it, feel sorry for it, and will spend the next half an hour apologizing to it. Haha. Your heart's in the right place, darling, but your brain's very dumb sometimes. Julia is VERY happy, and she wouldn't marry you if you begged her to, especially when you're offering out of pity." Vanessa added, "Julia has a mission for her life now: helping and looking after you. She knows that's far more important than the ordinary dream of a marriage, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and 2.3 children. Before you arrived on the scene, her biggest challenge was getting more than a third of her Girl Guide troop to help with their fundraising drive. Now she's intimately involved in what she believes is one of the most important developments that has ever happened to the human race. She spent years dreaming about getting married, so it's going to take a while for her to get it out of her system, but that's all that's happening, Mark. You're not mistreating or taking advantage of her. She feels enormously privileged, not used. -- "If you proposed to her, then once she recovers from the surprise, she's going to be disappointed in you. She'll know it's a silly idea, and she'll be even less impressed that it's motivated by unrealistic pity, as Carol rightly said. You've replaced her rather ordinary dream of marriage with something far grander and more fantastic. She is truly far better off than she would be with some ordinary Mr. Right. Have you got that?" "I guess so. I just didn't like to think of her suffering because of my selfishness..." "Stop being so deliberately thick-headed! Not to mention that this is all about nothing anyway, as you're only fifteen so the most you can do is get engaged and then wait a couple of years. The essential point is that you're giving Julia far more than you're taking away, so she's not suffering at all. She's HAPPY, for goodness sake! You're such an unrealistic, depressing pessimist. I've answered enough of your questions about Ava and Chloe for you to fill in the gaps, and I'm tired of this silly conversation, so go upstairs now and ask Julia to explain it to you." Carol got to her feet, to let me up. I knew I'd made a fool of myself, so I was happy to escape, but I didn't want to repeat my mistake with Julia, so as I was getting to my feet, I said, "Umm, I think she's with Ava now, but I'll talk with her later." "So sorting out whether or not you're marrying Julia is less important than asking Ava to leave the room for a few minutes. I'm sure Julia will be impressed by that." Carol's laughter saved me from having to answer, while she followed me out of the room. In the hallway I paused, not sure where I should go next. Carol knew though. Taking my arm she said, "Come on. Let's go tell Julia what you did." I couldn't think of any way of getting Julia to never talk with her mother ever again, so I was doomed to have to face this sooner or later. "{Sigh}. I was stupid, wasn't I?" "Yep," answered Carol, helpfully. "You had good intentions, but you were miles off target." We found Julia and Ava having a shower, which was a pity (not that they were having a shower, but that we found them, sigh). Carol told them we wanted to talk with Julia privately in the bedroom soon. I saw the excitement in Ava's face, so she'd presumably leaped to the conclusion that it was to do with Carol and me being together. To set Ava right, I said to Julia, "I said some very stupid things to your mother, and she's ordered me to repeat them to you so you can tell me off again. We'll wait in the bedroom. Take as long as you want in the shower. Three or four years would be about right." While we were waiting for them in the bedroom, I thought about the justification for removing Ava from the room during the discussion, and wondered whether I could think of a way of extending it so Julia had to leave during the discussion too. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of a good reason. Ava came in with Julia, but before I could repeat my request for privacy, Ava said, "I just came to take the breakfast dishes down to the kitchen." I said, "Thanks." Julia added, "By the look on Mark's face, this won't take long." I had no idea how Julia could tell that from the look on my face, but the last thing I wanted to do was talk about this issue any more than I had to, so I didn't ask. Ava left the room with everything, except the vase of flowers, and I shut the door behind her, then started my confession, "Umm, I went looking for Carol, and found her talking to your parents in their study. They were talking about how the Duckling lunch had been messed up by all the other kids wanting to gather around me. We talked about that a bit, and when it was finished, I asked for their opinion on our telling Ava about Carol and me. I was also thinking that it might be a good idea that when Carol asks Ava for advice about her desire for me, she asks Ava and Chloe together, that way we could get double the benefit from the one plan. So I asked Vanessa her opinion of telling Chloe that way too. -- "When your mother answered, she strongly suggested telling as few girls about Carol and me as possible, and certainly not to tell Chloe just because it was convenient to tell her at the same time as Ava. Vanessa kept going on about how a lot of the girls could get vengeful when they found out that I wasn't going to marry them, and they could blab to the authorities about Carol and me. The conversation took longer than that, of course, because I'm only summarizing..." Julia observed, "It's a long-winded summary." "Umm. That's probably because I'm trying to stall. I'm not looking forward to getting to the embarrassing part. Umm, anyway, I was saying I was summarizing. I meant that Vanessa was repeatedly mentioning how girls could get upset when they failed to get me to marry them." Julia had been nodding along in agreement, and now chose to say, "Sure. All this is straightforward. When are we getting to the problem?" "Umm, about now. I though your mom was overstating how many girls would want to marry me. She said 100% of them would, and..." Julia interrupted, "You didn't call Mom a liar, or anything crazy like that, did you?" "No, of course not! I'd never do that. I POLITELY expressed doubt that 100% of the girls - who were my serious girlfriends, she was talking about - would be as upset as she said they'd be when I refused to marry them. That didn't seem right to me for two reasons. First because we're obviously going to tell all my girlfriends that marriage isn't going to happen. We've already told Ava that, and we'll tell Chloe and everyone else who gets close to me. It wouldn't happen even if Chloe's breasts were twice as big, haha." My attempt at a joke was ignored by both girls. Julia's only comment was, "Are you saying that you thought that girls wouldn't want to marry you because you'd told them going in that it wasn't going to happen?" "Umm, maybe not quite like that. Maybe some of them still might hold out some hope for it, but they could hardly get upset when they found out that the answer really was no. That'd be what they were told all along, so they couldn't get upset, could they? That'd make no sense at all." "Haha Mark. You really don't know much about girls, do you? OF COURSE they're going to be upset. They're going to have their heart and hopes pinned on a future where you are theirs. Having their heart broken and hopes crushed is going to make quite a few of them very angry..." Julia launched into her explanation of where I'd gone wrong. I was sorely tempted to let Julia explain for as long as she wanted, as I could see that it'd keep her occupied for ages, but I could also see that Carol was about to interrupt. It was better I did, so I said, "Excuse me, Julia, but that's not actually the thing that I went wrong about. I haven't gotten to that yet." "But you did go wrong about that. You were silly to think that just telling girls you weren't going to marry them, would stop them setting their hearts on it." "Umm, maybe I was. Although logically I should be right. BUT! - before you get started on it again - that wasn't my biggest mistake. I didn't even say that reason out loud, so your mother never knew I was thinking it..." "Then why are we discussing it?" "Umm. I'm just giving my reasons for thinking Vanessa was overstating how fixated my girlfriends would be on marrying me." "How about you just tell me what happened, because that'd be a good way for me to find out what happened, wouldn't it?" #3: "Sorry Julia. I'm embarrassed about the second reason I thought Vanessa was wrong." I took a breath, then took the plunge. "I told Vanessa that I hadn't seen any sign of it, because you and Ava hadn't shown any sign of wanting to marry me. Carol legally can't, of course. Your mom said your heart would leap for joy if I asked you, but when your head caught up, you'd say no. I thought it was selfish of me to deprive you of that joy, and I suggested that maybe I should marry you. Your mom tried to convince me I was being silly, and I didn't agree with her fast enough." "That's it? That's what you're so embarrassed about?" I started agreeing, but there was a traitor in the room. Carol said, "Not really. Mark left out most of the important parts of the conversation about marrying you. What really happened was..." It turns out that good memories run in my family. Carol had been paying attention, and she repeated it virtually verbatim. When Carol finished, Julia first reaction was to check, "That's it? That's what you're guilty of?" #2: "Umm, yes. Sorry." Julia started laughing. #4: "Poor Mom must have been climbing the wall, haha..." #2: " ... Let me get this straight..." #3: " ... You asked a question about Ava and Chloe, and Mom generalized it to all of your serious girlfriends, then Mom used me as an example to help you understand, and in response to Mom's example, you decided you should propose marriage to me. You didn't go into the conversation wanting to talk about marrying me. It just kind of came up, and in response you thought you should propose. Is that right?" Put like that, it sounded silly. Unfortunately it also sounded true. "Umm, yes. But Vanessa made me realize how unhappy my selfishness is making you. I don't need to have lots of girlfriends, and I'd be perfectly happy to have just you. You're an amazing girl and I'd be..." "Don't talk such twaddle! If Carol's description was accurate, Mom never once called you selfish or said I was unhappy. Did she say either of those things?" "Ahh, no, not really. She did say your heart would leap with joy if I proposed, so my not proposing is depriving you of that joy. And it's obvious that I am selfish about wanting to have so many girlfriends and so much casual sex." "Hmm. Mark, at this point I've got some choices about how to proceed: -- "I could rant and rave at you for being such a stupid idiot. You definitely deserve that approach, but it'd be the least helpful direction to go in. Personally I prefer it though, because I very much want to rant and rave at you. Calling you an idiot would be fun too. -- "Or I could talk calmly about the symptoms of your behavior. Like how the amount of short-term joy you'd bring me would be completely swamped by the trouble your action would cause. I'd ask you when were you were intending to break up with Carol, Ava and Chloe? Because why get married if you weren't intending to change your lifestyle and behavior? I'd also ask why you thought a non-existent problem needed to be solved? Because it's not as if I wander around the house moaning and wailing about how bad my life is these days, is it? -- "Or we could tackle the root cause of your behavior. Which direction would you like me to go in, darling?" #2: "Umm. I think I'm required to choose the 'Root Causes' option." "That is the sensible choice, although I would also have been happy with the 'Ranting, Raving and Idiot Calling' option. Before we start on the root causes, I need to say a couple of things to put this discussion in context. -- "First, yesterday Mom and I spent a few hours talking through all my current plans, with Mom being especially critical everywhere she thought I was getting carried away. I made that mistake very badly with Ava, far worse than your silliness downstairs just now. Your silly idea wouldn't have gone anywhere, as Mom, Dad and I all would have laughed it out of existence, whereas my mistake with Ava forced us into making a commitment to her which will last several years. That Ava might work out well for us doesn't excuse my behavior at all. To make my fault even worse, Mom and Dad have warned me about my getting carried away many times, but I keep doing it. It's a very serious fault of mine. -- "On the other hand, the next time you do something similar, it might have much greater consequences. For instances, maybe when the first of Ava's parents is dying, you'll propose to her in front of both of her parents in an attempt to cheer her up. You might even promise to marry her quickly, so they'll see that she'll be well looked after. How would you get out of that? Don't bother objecting that you'd never do that. You didn't consider Carol when you suggested you should propose to me, so how much faith can we have in your considering Carol and me when you propose to Ava? It's the nature of your behavior not to think about what you're doing. You'll understand that better when Mom explains it." "Ahh, Julia. I don't think your mom wants to talk with me now." "What makes you say that?" "She kicked me out of the room, saying she was 'tired of this silly conversation.' I don't think she'd welcome me back so soon." "Of course she will. This is a different conversation. Besides, she'll be doing most of the talking, so if it's silly it'll be her own fault, haha." Somehow I didn't find the situation all that amusing. Julia then demanded, "Come on, let's go." Julia and Carol got to their feet. Instead I just said, "Do we have to?" "Don't be such a chicken, Mark. Mom's not your enemy; she's on YOUR side. She's got your best interests at heart. Mom understands your problem well. She explained some of it to me a few days ago but I didn't pay much attention because I thought you'd outgrown it. You clearly haven't, so you need to understand it so you're less likely to repeat it. You don't want to badly hurt Carol or me, do you?" "No, of course not!" "Good. Follow us then." Blackmail is UGLY! Julia and Carol resumed their journey and I had to follow them. -- Julia explained as she walked, over her shoulder so I could hear, "I grumbled to Mom about your being so pessimistic about people you care about. You seize on a negative thing - me not feeling the joy of hearing your proposal in this case - and you try to fix it, even though there are dozens of much greater reasons for me to be happy. Mom told me that your behavior had nothing to do with pessimism or fixing something, but as I told you a couple of minutes ago, I didn't listen carefully enough to Mom's explanation. I was mostly thinking about the main topic Mom and I were talking about. Let's swing past the kitchen briefly, to see how Ava is." Julia was leading, so that's what we did. Carol had fallen back to take my arm, to provide me with some moral support for my having to face Vanessa again. That's a scary thing to do, when you know you're in the wrong. Carol told me, "I don't mind what you said. It wouldn't have changed anything important. All three of us would still have been," Carol held up her ring finger, showing me her ring. Stupid me hadn't thought about that either! I replied, "Yeah. You're right. I was VERY stupid! I don't know what I was thinking!" Sweetie pointed out, "I'm pretty sure you weren't thinking, like Julia just said. Which is not like you, so I'm curious to hear what Vanessa's explanation is." I was curious too. Also: fearful, worried, embarrassed, scared, and several other emotions. Curious was on the list though, just below all the bad emotions. In the kitchen we found Ava and Vanessa chatting while Vanessa was making a pot of tea. Julia said, "Mom, Mark would like to know the root cause of his behavior." It wasn't a true statement, but it'd probably be best for me not to correct her. "I don't remember it well enough, so can you explain it please?" "Sure. Good boy, Mark." "Ahh, thank you." Vanessa said, "Let me finish making the tea, and we'll all go into our study to discuss it." Ava said, "If you like, you can start now and I'll bring it when it's ready?" Vanessa disagreed, "I think it'll be better if you listen to this conversation, Ava. I'm sure Julia has given you the impression that Mark's a faultless superman, so it'd be good for you to see that he has human faults, just like all the rest of us. Julia is very much in love with Mark, and she gets rather over-enthusiastic about how wonderful he is." #2: #4: Ava said, "Mark IS wonderful!" #4: "Yes he is," agreed Vanessa. "But he's not faultless. Understanding each other's faults is an important part of any relationship, so you can help each other overcome them, and more easily forgive each other when someone makes a mistake." "Okay. But I don't think I'll ever have to forgive Mark for anything. Or Julia either. They're very good people." There was a minute or so of gushy stuff, thanking Ava for her wonderfully unrealistic approval. Vanessa did say, "It'll happen, Ava. People get stressed sometimes, short-tempered, or even accidentally hurtful because they were distracted by something else." The teapot was loaded onto a tray, with the requested number of cups (not one for me. In a betrayal of my half-English ancestry, I don't like tea). I carried the tray, while we all followed Vanessa to her study. Vanessa briefly explained our reappearance to Prof, then turned to address all of us, "This won't take long because it's quite simple and common. We all do it from time to time, although Mark more so. Mark is subconsciously on the lookout for opportunities for him to act which meet two criteria: -- "First, his action has to make him look good. So it has to be helpful to someone, apparently unselfish, etc. This is a very common and praiseworthy behavior, and there's nothing wrong with it at all. Where Mark has trouble is with his second criterion. -- "Second, his course of action has to have overwhelming problems, that either make it impossible for him to do what he's setting out to do, or they create enormously negative consequences afterward." #2: "When such an opportunity arises - as it did in here a few minutes ago - Mark often leaps at it, volunteering to do whatever the relevant action is. It's no good trying to talk him out of it by pointing out the overwhelming problems, because Mark's already well aware of the problems. He WANTS problems, because he wants the outcome to be a failure or a disaster. Mark refuses to consciously think about the problems, because he doesn't want to admit to himself that the idea is a foolish one. Nor will he participate in a discussion about the problems, in case he's forced to acknowledge they exist, which would stop him proceeding with his action. -- "His subconscious goal is to carry out his good deed, but either to have it fail because of all the problems, or to have it create a disastrous mess. That way he can feel noble about his self-sacrifice, which appeals to his ego. It's a common behavior of people who are under-achievers, because it gives them a rare opportunity for feeling noble, as well as an excuse for not achieving anything." Carol exclaimed, "But Mark's not an under-achiever. He's awesome at EVERYTHING he does!" "But he was an under-achiever back when he learned to behave that way. It's an old habit of his. You've raised a key point though. Most under-achievers continue to under-achieve, unless something turns their life around. Mark HUGELY OVER-achieved turning his life around, haha. I'm sure that he'll soon learn to take enough pride from his considerable real accomplishments that he won't need to create artificial failures to feel good about himself. The worry is what he might do before he learns to stop this self-sacrificing behavior. If all he does is try things like today, which were never going to happen, then he just looks foolish. We'll forgive him for that, because we all behave foolishly from time to time. But if Mark accomplishes one of his foolish schemes, then he could cause a considerable amount of trouble and hurt." Julia said, "I don't want Mark to get his self-esteem from his self-sacrifice. Mark's life is far too valuable to have it screwed up by some sort of doomed, noble sacrifice." Vanessa said, "We are all in agreement with that, EXCEPT Mark. That's the problem. If he valued his life and accomplishments highly enough, he wouldn't need to set himself up for failures which had in-built excuses." Ava asked, "Can I ask something?" "Of course you can. You're part of the group now. Let me guess, you want to know what Mark did in here before?" "That's right. I can't understand what you're talking about." Vanessa said, "I was partly intending not to mention it, because it'll distract you, but your understanding is more important. What happened was that Prof and I were talking to Mark and Carol about some of the girls at your school. One of the points we mentioned was about how every girl who became Mark's serious girlfriend will want to marry him." "I'll say!" agreed Ava. "They'd be MAD not to." "Mark felt sorry that Julia would be wanting to marry him, so he suggested to us that he should propose marriage to Julia." Ava reacted as all girls do at such times. She leaped to her feet, yahooing, yelling congratulations... , and then stopping, puzzled that no one else was reacting. "Umm. What's wrong?" Julia answered, "I'm not going to marry Mark. It's not the right thing to do." "Huh? But you love Mark, and Mark loves you. It's PERFECT! You could live together and everything. We're intending to do that anyway, with me... , oh, everyone knew that already, didn't they?" "Sure. I don't have any secrets from my parents. They know the four of us will be living together sooner or later. Let me explain why I won't marry Mark. Let me start by asking you: Would you marry Mark if he asked you?" "GOD Y ... Hang on. Is this ... Umm..." "It's all right, Ava. It's not a trick question or a trap. Of course you'd answer with a very enthusiastic 'Yes'. I'd have been shocked if you'd said 'No'. I've had a few more weeks to think about the answer than you have, and my relationship with Mark started with just him and me, so naturally I thought about marriage. Let me ask you a question I asked myself: Would Mark's life be improved by marrying you?" "Oh." Then Ava REALLY got the point of the question, "OH!" And then Ava generalized her answer, "OH NO! That's TERRIBLE! Poor you, Julia. And poor Mark too. What's going to happen?" Then Ava added, "Oh, and poor me too, haha. Not that I ever expected to marry Mark. But someone's got to marry him, don't they?" Julia answered, "No one girl is going to be good enough to marry him. Everyone else in this room already knew that, so Mark's suggestion was silly. If I'd been silly enough to actually marry him, it would have caused trouble in the future. I would've felt I was holding him back, there would have been regrets, resentments and many other problems. Mark foolishly thought he'd sacrifice our future happiness in order to - he thought - give me the thrill of hearing him propose to me. The thrill wouldn't even have lasted a second, because I've long since accepted that Mark and I aren't going to marry like any other ordinary couple would. Do you understand now that what Mark suggested was something that looked good at first glance, but was really a very bad idea?" "Umm. Sort of. His marrying you doesn't seem all that bad to me, Julia. You're an amazing girl, so if anyone is..." "Ava, you're forgetting a few things. Remember 'Nipple Power', Mark is VERY unusual..." "Oh yeah, I forgot." "There are other reasons I don't want to spend ages explaining to you now. This isn't meant to be a conversation about the pros and cons of marriage. Just take it from all of us that Mark's idea of proposing to me was a VERY silly, and potentially quite destructive idea, okay?" "Okay. I understand what Vanessa was talking about better now, thank you." Julia said, "So back to Mark's problem. What do we do about it?" Vanessa answered, "There's little you can do. Mark has to understand that he's been destructive to himself and hurtful to those around him, and then he has to change himself. No one can do that for him. With anyone else, I'd suggest praising him for his accomplishments to build his sense of pride, but I know you three are already singing his praises as much as you can, so that's not the issue. -- "If you see him try to do another one of these potential disasters, then obviously speak up and warn him off. It'll be fairly easy to tell when he's behaving this way, because he'll refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of the problems. If he's simply had a bad idea, as we all do sometimes, he'll discuss it normally, but if he refuses to acknowledge the issues then he's in one of these self-destructive kicks of his. -- "I wouldn't get too worried about it, as I'm sure Mark's already in the process of outgrowing that behavior. Clearly he can have relapses, but he'll come right without any major interventions. Right now I suggest you take him to your room, and leave him there for a while to think and recover." The time spent explaining my proposal idea to Ava was a distraction for everyone else, but it gave me time to think through and internally discuss what Vanessa had been saying about me. When she'd first started talking about my looking for opportunities to do things with bad consequences, I'd thought she'd been talking complete nonsense. But once Vanessa had started explaining why I behaved that way, too many of her points had made sense to me - where "too many of her points" was pretty much, "all of them". By midway through Ava's distraction I'd accepted that Vanessa was completely right, so the only issue left was how I should react to it. I thought about that through the rest of the conversation with Ava, up to Vanessa's finishing just now. I had been unable to find a loophole it what summarized to, "I'd been VERY stupid," and it was obvious that I should own up to it, so I said, "Actually Vanessa, I don't need to go upstairs to think and recover. It doesn't take much thinking when I've been so obviously stupid. My apologies to all of you that I've hurt or annoyed; I must have been damned annoying. I'll try not to do it again. I think that's less likely now, but if you catch me doing so, please remind me of this conversation. Or kick me in the ass - whichever you feel like doing. Can we change the subject now please, because I'm painfully embarrassed about how stupid I was." Vanessa said, "Well done." | Julia echoed, "Well done, darling." | Carol just jumped onto my lap and hugged me while everyone else was talking. ------- Chapter 160: More Shopping, Excellent! Sunday, May 1, 2005 (Continued) When things settled down a little, Julia said, "I can change the subject for you, because there's a little shopping we need to do. Now would be a good time to do it." I said, "But isn't the Liaison Meeting due to start at 1:00? There's no way you can get any shopping done in two hours, especially - and this is very important - because we have to have lunch before the Liaisons arrive." "Don't worry. I know exactly what we're buying and which store to go to. It won't take two hours, and if it somehow does, you can get a pizza delivered to eat while the meeting is on. Is that bribery enough?" "Yes, definitely." It was even good enough to cheer me up after the embarrassing discussion with Vanessa. I realized that, according to what Julia had said, I'd only get a pizza if shopping took two hours. I knew I'd get pizza though, because I found it hard to imagine shopping taking less than two hours. Even if it somehow took less, having mentioned "pizza" to me, it would be cruel not to let me have one. Julia stood, thanked Vanessa for the talk, which I had to echo even though I hadn't enjoyed any part of it, and we all left the room. Julia asked, "Carol, Ava; do you want to come with us?" I may not know much about girls, but I do know how they answer, "Do you want to come shopping?" "Sure," from Ava. | "Yes please. What are we buying?" asked Carol. Julia answered, "It's nearly summer so Mark needs some new swimsuits." "Good idea!" "Umm, Julia," I said, "I don't need new swimsuits. I've got a couple of perfectly good pairs at home." "I'm sure they're not appropriate for your new body." "Yes they are. They've both got drawstrings, so I can pull them tight even though my waist is narrower than it was last year. Anyway, it's only the very beginning of May, so it's not even summer yet." "Mark, you don't wait until the season starts to buy new clothes; you buy them ahead of time because that's when stores get the next season's range in, so that's when you've got the greatest choice. Despite your protests about having a couple of pairs already, I'm sure they're not suitable, so we might as well get their replacements now. Don't you agree, girls?" Carol and Ava enthusiastically agreed, Ava saying, "I'd LOVE to help Mark buy new swimsuits. That's going to be sexy fun, haha." I didn't think it would be, but anyway, "Honestly Julia! I don't need another pair. You haven't even seen what I've got now, so how can you possibly know they're not suitable any longer?" "And yet somehow I know. What do you think Carol, does Mark need new swimsuits?" Carol had no hesitation. "Does he ever! His current ones are big, baggy, board shorts. They're ugly khaki green, both of them! He bought two identical pairs, even the same color, if you can believe that!" "Unfortunately," said Julia, "I can believe that. Any salesperson who took advantage of a poor male customer like that should be put up against a wall and shot! It's criminal that they would abuse their customers so badly." "They didn't abuse me! I got a VERY good deal. They were having a 2-for-1 sale on an already cheap price at the end of the summer. They'll last me for many years so I did very well out of it." "{SIGH}," theatrically from Julia. Carol and Ava laughed. We were in our bedroom now, and Julia said, "Grab your keys and let's go, Mark. We've only got an hour and a half, because we have to pick up Donna on the way back." Donna was officially a Liaison, so she was coming to the meeting too. "But I just explained that I don't need new swimsuits." Julia disagreed, "Not only do you need them, but it sounds like an emergency. There's not a moment to lose, haha." Because it was an emergency, Julia picked up my keys herself. "There's a pizza at the end of this for you, and we're only going to buy a couple of pairs from one store, so how bad can it be?" A real genius would have known the answer to that, but I'm not that smart, plus I was distracted by the mention of pizza. Carol and Ava were also urging me to "Come on." "{Sigh}. All right, even though it's completely unnecessary." Shortly after we started driving, I had a horrible thought. "We're not going to Rocky's are we? I'm horrified to imagine what his idea of swimwear could be. I refuse to been seen dead in a G-String! I get the shivers just thinking about them." "Relax Mark. We're going to a perfectly ordinary store to buy perfectly ordinary, mass-market, off-the-rack swimsuits. You've got nothing to worry about." #4: Ava said, "Rocky's is a great store, isn't it?" "It's fantastic," agreed Carol. "I'd never been there before Julia took us a week or two ago. They've got some incredible..." I desperately tuned out. #4: <{Sigh}. One day we've got to get ourselves a good girlfriend. "Good", as in not evil, like these ones are!> #1: #3: #4: #1: #3, #4: "Julia, I don't need a new swimsuit, but I'm pretty sure Chloe does. Not right now, but in a week or two would probably be a very good time to take her shopping, don't you think? We could build it into what she has to do to prove she's learned what she needs to learn." I was being vague because I didn't know how Ava would respond to Julia's and my deliberate manipulation of Chloe, especially this sexual aspect. But as soon as I stopped talking, Ava said, "Oh boy! Chloe would look VERY sexy in the right swimsuit. Umm, that's what you mean, isn't it Mark? You want her to look sexy?" #4: Julia answered for me, "Exactly right, Ava. I'm amused that you became doubtful though. Any other guy and he'd be lusting after seeing Chloe in a little bikini, but you're right that Mark's motives are more complicated than that. I'm sure you remember how uninterested he was in your nude photos?" "Oh yeah. And what happened to my photos anyway?" I didn't have a clue, but Julia did, "I've got your letter and photos safely put away. I want to keep them because they might become important in the future." "Eh? Why would they be important? I don't want anyone else to see them. I didn't even want YOU to see them originally, haha. I didn't understand about you then, but I still don't want anyone else to see the photos or read the letter." Julia said, "Almost anything could happen with Mark's life. He might end up being the most important man in the world, and we three girls might be world famous too. It's possible that your letter and photos might become historically important. That sounds silly, but most historically important things started as ordinary items. Another thought I had was that you might want to show them to your parents before they died. You might want them to know you better, and I think your letter and photos show you to be a very good and honest person. The sort of person they'd be proud of." "Oh, I don't think I could do that. I'd be very embarrassed." "It's a sweet letter, Ava, and in your shoes I think I'd show it and the photos to my parents in a few months time, especially after they see how well things are working out with Mark and you. But you don't have to decide about that now. That's the point; I'm keeping them safe in case there's a future need. I have no intention of showing anybody, and I especially have no intention of embarrassing you. You're my girlfriend now, as well as someone I'm looking after, so you don't have anything to worry about. I know you'd forgotten about them until they came up in conversation just now, so you can't be too concerned. Leave them with me, okay? You can trust me, you know?" "Okay Julia. But please don't show them to anyone without asking me?" "I think promises like that are a little too childish for us now, Ava. We're nearly adults, and you should trust my judgment. I know you are a fairly modest girl who wouldn't like the letter or photos to get out, so I promise I will act responsibly, okay?" "Yes, all right. I still feel uneasy though." "Thanks for your confidence in me. You weren't uneasy about them five minutes ago, sweetie, so I'm sure it'll pass quickly. My keeping them probably won't matter, but maybe one day you'll thank me for keeping them. -- "Let's get back to Chloe. I told you before that Chloe's terribly paranoid about her body. That's why you and Carol are going to go into Mark's and her class sometime soon, with your tops adjusted so they show plenty of breast. That's one small plan Carol and I have to help improve Chloe's attitude to her body. It's currently impossible for her to have a long-term relationship with any good guy, as a friend or a boyfriend, but she's desperate to have Mark as her boyfriend so he's been refusing to agree to that until she changes her attitude. We're making her do various things to eventually teach her to loosen up and stop being so negative about herself and guys. Once she's learned her lessons well enough, Mark will take her as one of his girlfriends and we'll continue to improve her attitude. We hope that in a few months she'll be confident enough that she'll realize that not all guys are automatically evil, and she should be able to find some trustworthy ones, hopefully even a good boyfriend. We want to help fix her attitude so she can get on with her life properly, to have a chance of getting a good job, a good husband, raising a normal family, etc. At the moment there's no way she could do any of that. Mark's idea of getting her to buy a sexy swimsuit in a week or two is a good test for her." "She's very lucky you and Mark are helping her. That's two of us you're helping now, Chloe and me." "Yeah," agreed Julia. "But in some ways you and Chloe are opposites. Chloe doesn't trust any boys, but from what you told us before, you're too trusting. Chloe's had very few attempts to have a boyfriend and she's driven them all away in a few days, but you've had boyfriends more often than not for the last few years. Mainly what we're teaching her is to change her attitude so she can get a boyfriend. We don't have to teach you how to get a boyfriend, do we, Ava?" "Haha. Not hardly! How to stop them chasing me now that I'm taken would be much more useful." I offered, "I'll come to more of your classes, so the guys can see us together, if that'd stop them bothering you? Also, you know you're not really 'taken', don't you? You can have a boyfriend if you want." "I do NOT want, Mark. I've got a boyfriend, a girlfriend, and a girl-lover - that's you Carol. What other guy is going to let me spend most of my time with the three of you rather than him? Guys aren't bothering me, Mark; they're just doing their usual flirting. I'm fine, although I wish guys did have an off-switch." Carol and Julia enthusiastically agreed with Ava. I stood up for my gender (it's not often I do it, but on this point I was sure I was in the right), "The problem isn't that guys don't have an off-switch, it's that girls don't have an on-switch. Positive solutions are better than negative ones, and the world would be a much happier place if that was the case." Julia had a different opinion, "Much happier for GUYS. Also NOTHING would get done; guys would be screwing around ALL the time. And God help the good looking girls! Every girl would have to dress as ugly as possible to protect herself. Is that what you want, Mark?" "Ahh, no. That might be a small, technical flaw in my idea. How about every girl has an on-switch, but only I know where it is?" "Deal, provided every guy except you has an off-switch." "That's PERFECTLY fine by me. There are some small implementation problems to overcome, but I'll see what I can do, haha." Julia said, "Please get it done as fast as you can. We'd love to be able to switch guys off whenever we wanted. -- "Where were we? Oh, yeah, comparing Chloe and Ava. I also had a couple of similarities in mind. Remember you're opposites about trust and boyfriends, but you're similar in that Mark and I want to achieve something specific with each of you. With you Ava, it's to help you get through your parents' illnesses. With Chloe it's getting her able to have normal relationships with guys. The other similarity is that when Chloe catches up, you're both going to be Mark's girlfriends. Chloe's a virgin of course, and she's heard me and other girls saying how good Mark is, but I'm sure that deep down inside she thinks sex isn't a good thing. It's going to be very funny seeing that attitude of hers get blown away by Mark. She's in for a VERY big surprise, haha." "I'll say!" agreed Ava. Carol laughed her agreement too, then sensibly added, "All the other girls are begging Mark for a repeat session. Chloe's going to find it very strange to beg for sex." "Park anywhere along here," said Julia, because we'd arrived. "I think getting Chloe to buy new swimsuits is an excellent way of judging her progress, but I think she's far too likely to suspect you're suggesting it so you can stare at her body. She knows we're trying to change her attitude, but that's still going to be her main thought. I think we have to show her that sex with you is far better for her than she currently thinks. To use one of your favorite expressions: I've got some good news and some bad news. I think you should take Chloe to bed sooner than we thought, and give her a very, very good time, BUT do not have a good time yourself. Give her as many orgasms as you can, but leave her a virgin. So it'll be totally unselfish sex. That'll start to shake some of her silly preconceptions loose. What do you think?" "If that'll help Chloe, I'll do it for her. All things considered, I'm willing to get Chloe naked and play with her breasts." "Good. It'd be best not to tell her what's going to happen. Just take her by the hand and lead her into the bedroom. She'll assume you're consummating the start of her being your girlfriend, so that should make her agreeable. After that she'll be wiped out from all her orgasms, but confused about why you didn't make love to her, so we'll be able to teach her some good lessons. She still won't buy a sexy enough swimsuit the first time we send her out shopping, but by the third or fourth times she should have caught on." #4: I asked, "Julia, I don't understand the 'third or fourth times' comment you made? I thought we'd simply take Chloe bikini shopping. Why would we need to do it three or four times?" "Because there's no way Chloe will even think about putting on a bikini, let alone one as small as you want to see her in. We'll have to work her up to it. Or 'down to it' in this case, as they'll be getting progressively smaller. I'll tell her at school tomorrow that we're going to the Aquatic Center on the weekend, and that she's to buy herself a sexy new swimsuit to show that she trusts you. That'll put her in a real dilemma, as she'll have to wear it in public at the pool. It won't be nearly sexy enough, but we can repeat the same thing every few weeks, and she'll eventually get one sexy enough. By the way, Ava, please don't tell Chloe about our plans for her, or even that we have plans. She knows we're trying to help her, but she'd get paranoid if she knew we made plans about it. That's silly, but it's how people are." "No problem, especially because you're doing it for her benefit. The only way I can pay you back for everything you're doing for me is to be helpful, so any way you want me to help, just say so. I should get a sexy bikini for myself, shouldn't I? So I can be an example for Chloe. That's if I can come swimming with you?" Even before I could answer (and I was very eager to assure Ava that she could - indeed, SHOULD - buy herself a sexy bikini), Julia said, "Of course you're invited. The more girls the better, because that'll make Chloe feel safer. It'll also show her up badly, because Carol and I bought sexy swimsuits a couple of weeks ago, and if you wear one too, she'll stand out as being very frumpy, which will be good." "I'll do that. Does the store we're going to sell girls' swimwear too, Julia?" "Yes. It's a surf store, so plenty of gear for males and females. More for females, of course. It's aimed at the teenage and college markets so they've got heaps of good gear for us to look at. Quite a lot of it is fairly sexy too. This is where Carol and I bought ours." "Good. Normally I don't wear sexy clothes, so this is going to be interesting." This was more than merely "interesting"; it was a subject of CONSIDERABLE importance. I said, "Ava, I'm surprised you don't wear sexy clothes. You've got a very fit, good looking body, and you've got a very enthusiastic attitude to sex, so I'm surprised you don't dress sexier than you do?" "Mom and Dad don't like to see me dressed like that. Mom always dressed me middle-of-the-road, and I do the same now. It's not as if girls have to dress sexy to attract guys. Just having a pulse is enough, haha." We'd parked a couple of minutes ago, and had been finishing our conversation before getting out. Julia must have decided we'd finished, because she said, "Speaking of sexy swimwear, shall we go find something for Mark?" All the girls thought this was an excellent idea, and quickly leaped out of the car. I followed, somewhat more reluctantly. As soon as we were walking down the sidewalk, I said, "Ahh, Julia, I don't want anything too sexy. Just ordinary, male swimsuits. Okay?" "Sure. We're going to get something that hundreds of thousands of guys wear. Don't worry." Funnily enough, I kept worrying. I'd seen Julia's swimsuit, and it was VERY sexy. Ordinarily that'd be a very good thing, but not if I was going to be pushed to buy something similar, ESPECIALLY because the bottom of Julia's suit showed a great deal more of her bottom than I wanted to show of mine, which was NONE! I would've thought it'd be illegal for a store to sell men's swimsuits cut like Julia's and certainly illegal for men to wear them in public, and quite possibly illegal to wear them in private too! I couldn't imagine "hundreds of thousands of guys" would wear swimsuits that were G-strings rather than decent, so I was somewhat reassured. To distract myself until we reached the store, I said, "Ava. I do remember something that I particularly thought of when I looked at your photos: your tan lines were conservative. You don't have to buy a sexy bikini if you wouldn't be comfortable in it. We don't need you..." Julia interrupted me. "Mark, Ava's got plenty of confidence about her body. With good cause too, because it's in great condition and looks very attractive." That earned Julia a smile from Ava. "I'm sure she's happy to wear a sexy bikini for us, aren't you, Ava?" "More than happy; I want to! It's very nice that you're concerned about me, Mark, but Julia's right. It'll be fun, and I'm glad to be able to help you with Chloe. I don't want to dress sexily around my parents, but when we're together will be fine. I'd feel left out if Julia and Carol were sexy and I wasn't." Ava seemed sincere and happy, but I suspected Julia's answer on behalf of Ava had been some sort of psychological ploy to get Ava to agree. On the other hand, I wasn't highly motivated to argue Ava out of her position, so I said, "Good. I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy seeing you in a sexy bikini. Your body would suit a bikini very well." I hadn't really planned to say the last bit, but I'd been imagining what Ava would look like in a small bikini, and the images my three minds had been sending back and forth were very appealing. I felt my comment was entirely accurate and justified. So, of course, all three girls spent the rest of our walk to the store teasing me about it. As soon as we entered the store, Ava made sure I heard her ask an assistant, "Where are the VERY small bikinis?" She had to almost yell, over the loud music they were playing. The stores where I buy my clothes are never as impractical as this. #4: #1: Julia and Carol led me to the guys' swimwear section. It was about 5% of the store's floor space. There were some other guys' clothing, but at least 75% of the store was for females. Just as I'd feared, we walked right past the nice, comfortable, practical, baggy board shorts, and straight to the Speedos - sigh. Both girls knew what size I was, and started emptying that section of the rack, pulling them out to show each other, discussing which colors would complement me the best. Girls really are very illogical and silly. In this case because how could they possibly match my coloring when I'm white at the beginning of summer and brown by the end? I observed, "They're not very big, are they?" Carol said something that cheered me up, "They are rather small, but not nearly as small as what we've got." I hadn't seen Carol's new swimsuit yet, so I was extremely pleased to hear her say "we". I was now looking forward to going to the Aquatic Center EVEN more! Carol and Julia agreed on two choices, and told me to go try them on. I sometimes feel sorry for guys who aren't Lords; they must get ordered around TERRIBLY! I obediently headed to the changing rooms, followed by my two slave drivers. Ava was still going through the racks in her section, so I suggested to Julia and Carol, "Why don't you help Ava and I'll look after myself?" "No," disagreed Julia. "We'll take care of you first, then help Ava." That was a pity. I'd been hoping to try the two pairs on myself, declare them fine, get dressed properly, then leave the changing room. Now I knew I was going to have to parade each of them in front of my girls, which meant repeatedly coming out of the changing room and into the store. No doubt I'd have to do 'twirls' too. Excellent! The changing room had a sign telling customers to leave their underwear on when trying on swimsuits ("For hygiene reasons..."). I took my pants off to put the first pair on. It was very tight around my hips and ass, but that's the penalty of such a stupid design. It looked fine to me, except that I looked ABSOLUTELY stupid because of my underwear sticking out everywhere! There was NO WAY I was going to walk out into the store looking as stupid as this, and there was no point in trying on the other pair because they were the same size, so I got dressed in my pants again, then carried the swimsuits out to Julia, telling her, "They're fine." Julia explained patiently, "You have to SHOW US, Mark. We can't tell whether they're fine or not unless we see them." "I've seen them," ("them" was an exaggeration but I was comfortable making it; certainly much more comfortable than I'd be with the alternative scenarios), "and they're fine." "We have to see them, Mark. Guys aren't to be trusted with something as important as choosing clothes. Please go back, try one on, them come out and show us." "{Giggle}." From Carol, rather than me, just in case you hadn't guessed that. "But I have to keep my underwear on and I look totally stupid with them sticking out from under the Speedos." "We know you have to. We've bought swimsuits here ourselves. It happens hundreds of times a day so no one cares. Try on the blue ones first. Go on." "But..." There's no point in my wasting ink reporting the rest of our discussion, just like there was no point in my wasting my breath arguing about it in the first place. I went back to the changing room. Off with my pants again, on with the blue pair. I stuck my head out the drape. "Come and have a look." "Come out, Mark. We can't see properly crammed into a changing room." "I don't want to." I'll give you three guesses what happened next. Out in the store (how is it possible that any sentence containing "Out in" can be valid English?), Julia said, "You have to raise your shirt because we can't see anything." Sigh. I raised my shirt. "{Giggle}." That was Carol unable to stop herself laughing at how ridiculous I looked. Julia instructed, "Give us a twirl." Twirling allowed me to notice several people looking at me with amusement. Excellent. Julia next did what all females are genetically compelled to do, she grabbed hold of the waistband and jerked. "Aren't they a little loose." "They are NOW. The drawstring slipped when you jerked it. I'll just do it tighter." "Or - and here's an idea, Mark - we could buy the right size to start with. Let me check." Julia reached out and undid the drawstring, then stuck her hand inside the waistband. Normally a very welcome action, but not so much now. "That's too loose. What do you think Carol?" Carol followed her genetic compulsion. "I agree. Shall we try two sizes down, especially if he's still getting narrower?" "Yeah, we'd better. At this rate he's going to be another size smaller by next weekend." "I'll get them," volunteered Carol, who headed back to the rack. I dropped my shirt and was just about to flee back to the changing, when Julia said, "Hang on, Mark. Wait for Carol to bring you the new suits. Has your waist really got narrower or are the suit sizes off?" "Umm, I think I'm a bit narrower. I started using the next hole on my belt a couple of days ago." "You've already got proportionally the narrowest waist I've ever seen on a guy, even in magazine photos. How much narrower are you going to get?" "I've got no idea. It's happening all by itself." "You look considerably more muscular now than I remember you being the first few times I saw you, including your abs and whatever the muscles on the sides are called. If your waist is getting narrower while your muscles are bulking up, then your stomach must be getting MUCH smaller. It's starting to become a worry. Surely it's going to start detrimentally affecting your health soon?" "My health seems superb. I certainly don't feel any ill effects. I know it's happening rapidly, as it's only been just over two months since, umm, since my body started changing like this..." I'd nearly said, "since my second merge," but it'd be a good idea not to get into that level of detail in the middle of a store, even if it had a stereo blaring out loud noises that vaguely resembled music. The second merge is when the physiological changes had really accelerated. The first merge had improved my coordination and other subtle or minor benefits, but it took the second merge for the dramatic changes to start. The differences between my 'old' body (of just 9.5 weeks ago) and this one, are amazing. I'd started dating Julia exactly one month ago, so she'd missed seeing the majority of the changes, or she probably would've been even more concerned now. " ... I do feel perfectly healthy. I'm not worried at all at the moment, although there's obviously got to be a lower limit." "Well, PLEASE don't get any narrower! We'd better start keeping regular track of your measurements because I'm starting to worry. We'll do that when I get your home. If your waist continues to shrink we might have to get you checked out by a doctor." "I don't think it's as simple as asking me to stop, Julia, but for what it's worth, I hope it stops now too." ^ [[Which shows you how little I knew because that's pretty much EXACTLY how it worked. Julia had asked me not to get any narrower and I could see she was seriously concerned about it, which made me want to not get any narrower, so I didn't. I stopped "on a dime": Julia measured me daily for a while, and there wasn't any further reduction in my waist size. I'd started getting narrower after my second merge because my subconscious wanted my body to be as healthy as possible, and it suddenly had enough power over my body to make it happen. Once I'd noticed the reshaping, I'd consciously liked the effect, which had accelerated the change significantly because my conscious mind(s) have a great deal of power over my subconsciouses. After seeing Julia's concern, I consciously wanted to stop my waist narrowing any more. My conscious desire was easily sufficiently strong enough to arrest the process. On the related issue of my musculature. If I'd consciously wanted to, I could've quickly out-bulked Arnold Schwarzenegger at his best, but I've always associated being muscle-bound with bullies and jocks (that's almost redundant, as there's a large overlap in those two sets). I'd been smart enough not to want to beat them at their own game, so my body hadn't gone that way. My very recent bulking up had simply been the result of the increased hostility from so many guys at school. Violence seemed imminent, so my subconscious started getting my body ready for it, by stimulating muscle growth. At this time in my autobiography, I had a VERY adaptable body.]] ^ Carol came back with a blue and BRIGHT red pair, saying, "The selection isn't so good at this size, but I think bright red will look good. What do you think Julia?" "I agree. He'll stand out wonderfully." I knew what I thought, but somehow no one seemed to ask me. I restricted my protest to asking, "Is there a khaki pair?" "{Raspberry}," from my lovely sister. Followed by, "Here, funny boy, try these. Try the red one first please." I knew when I was beaten - before we'd gotten inside the store. In fact, probably about the time Julia had thought to suggest, "Let's go shopping." - so I accepted the suits from Carol, taking them back to the changing room. The red pair were TIGHT! I slunk back out into the store to show my two 'moms'. I performed the obligatory twirl, Julia checked the drawstring was untied then jerked the waistband, then pronounced herself satisfied. Carol agreed, adding, "Red looks good on you, Mark." "Umm, thanks. It's great to know I'll look good while being seen coming from miles away. Umm, they're VERY tight. I think they might be a size too small." Julia stuck her hand down my waistband again. "Turn around." When I was facing away, she stuck her hand down the waistband at my back, took it out then pinched the fabric (and my ass!) and pulled it out. "No, it looks fine to me. What do you think Carol?" "I think it looks great. Very sexy. You'll gain some space when you wear it without underwear." "Yeah, maybe 1/32nd of an inch if I'm lucky. Can I stop making a spectacle of myself in the middle of the store now please?" "Sure. Go try the other pair on please." "Why? It's the same size." "But," Julia patiently pointed out the obvious, "it's not the same color. I know you're only a guy, so not aware of this, but color is fairly important when buying clothes. We need to see what it looks like on you." "Can't I just hold it in front of me? That makes sense, doesn't it?" "No, it doesn't. Please try the blue pair on, Mark." I knew when I was beaten - which, on second thought, was probably when I got out of bed this morning. I thought the blue pair was just as bad. The girls' opinion was consistent too, saying it was good. "But," opined Julia, "it's not as attention getting as the red pair. Let's have a look at the other choices." The girls walked back to the rack. I wasn't happy about walking across the entire store with my underwear sticking out of these ridiculously small Speedos. Even with my shirt dropped down, only half the embarrassment was covered. I had just decided to wait (i.e., hide) in the changing room, when Julia called back, "Come on, Mark." "I'll wait in the changing room." "Come with us. We might need your opinion." It's a pity Mom doesn't let me gamble, because I would have put good money on that NOT happening. But I know when I'm beaten - which, I was beginning to suspect, was probably at the beginning of my first date with Julia - so I entertained the whole store by walking across the room to the rack. Because God loves to humiliate me, the rack was about as far from the changing room as it was possible to get without being out on the sidewalk. The entire range of my new size was small enough that Carol could have easily brought it all to the changing room for me; but that's not how these things are done. A black and yellow two-tone pair caught Julia's eye. "What do you think?" Do I have to tell you who Julia was asking? "I like them," answered Carol. "I don't wear yellow." We left my two new swimsuits at the counter while we checked to see how Ava was getting on. Ava was happy, "They've got a GREAT selection, haven't they? This is good fun. I've got my shortlist in the dressing room; I'll get them." Ava returned a few seconds later with more bikinis than the total number of Speedos that'd been in my size. #1: Ava held up the first, asking for our opinion. This was very important to me, so I paid careful attention. Julia said, "Mark, go and talk with one of the pretty girls while we work on Ava's selection." "But I want to participate. I really want to make sure Ava gets a good bikini. She's got a great body for the right sort of bikini, and I've got some very clear ideas about what I'd like to see her in." ^ "Hi. My name's Mark. You seem to be killing time and my girlfriends told me to go talk with someone while they pick out a bikini. For some reason they think I shouldn't be allowed to participate in the selection process, even though I've spent most of my life avidly studying bikinis. How are you?" "Haha. I'm fine. 'Girlfriends' plural? How many girlfriends do you have?" "Two out of those three. The middle-height girl is my sister, but she's just as bad as the other two when they all get together. Two girlfriends is normally a good number, but NOT when I'm silly enough to go shopping with them. Then it's several girlfriends too many. Let me ask you a question, in your role as an independent, unbiased person. I'm having trouble understanding this female equality thing that all us guys are told we have to do these days. We were all at Julia's house - Julia is the short one - half an hour ago, and Julia declared that I needed some new swimsuits. I have two perfectly good swimsuits at home that Julia hasn't even seen, but she didn't care about that. She insisted I needed new ones. She dragged me here, then chose what suits I had to buy. Not only wasn't my opinion asked for, but when I expressed it, it was ignored. If guys and girls are equal, then I should have an equal say over Ava's bikini purchase, shouldn't I? After all, don't girls buy bikinis to please their boyfriends? So it's totally logical that I should choose which one I like the most. Instead I was told to 'go away and talk with one of the pretty girls.' Does that seem fair to you? What happened to equality?" "You think I'm pretty?" #1: "Let me answer your question this way. Did you see me walking back and forth across the store with my underwear sticking out of my swimsuit?" I knew she had. She'd looked quite often, which was largely why I was killing time talking to her. That and she was moderately pretty. "{Giggle}. Yeah, I saw that." "I was obedient enough to walk back and forth over something that embarrassing, so when I was told to 'go talk with a pretty girl, ' I obediently came to talk with you." "{Giggle}. You could be making up the 'pretty girl' stuff. They might have just told you to go away for a while." "That's true, but I can prove that easily. We'll ask them what they told me. Come with me for a moment." I put my hand on her shoulder and gently steered her toward my group. She complied easily enough. I took my hand away again, as I wasn't really interested in her. She enjoyed looking at guys walking around with their underwear sticking out, so all things considered, she probably wasn't good girlfriend material. I asked her, "What's your name, so I can introduce you?" "Oh, sorry. Emily." "Nice to meet you, Pretty Emily." "{Giggle}." #4: "Girls, this is Emily. Emily this is my sister Carol, and my two girlfriends Julia and Ava." My tormentors greeted Emily. I said, "I won't intrude long. I just wanted to ask Julia, what did you tell me to go away and do?" Julia answered, "Talk with a pretty girl. It looks like you found one." "Yes." | "{Giggle}. You don't mind that your boyfriend already has another girlfriend and talks to even more girls?" "We WANT him to talk with other girls. We usually have sex with the three of us as a threesome, but he gives Ava and me so many orgasms we have to beg him to stop. Another girl would give us a chance to wear him out. He's so awesomely fit that two girls aren't enough." #1: "The three of you... ?" Ava thought it was her turn, "I'll say! Mark's FANTASTIC in bed. I've had several boyfriends and he's better than all of them put together." "Wow. I've never met anyone ... Hey, you're not pulling my leg, are you?" It might not have been safe to let Julia respond to that, so I said, "Sorry to interrupt your bikini evaluation, girls. Emily and I will go away so you can get on with it. Come on, Pretty Emily." Julia smiled as I started steering Moderately Pretty Emily away. While walking away, I explained to her, "Sorry to interrupt you, but we've got a bunch of friends coming over soon, so my girls don't have long to talk." "Are they really your girls? Is what they said true?" It was rather immodest, but I didn't care about Emily, so I answered, "Yes and yes, but it's a bit difficult to prove in the middle of a store, isn't it? Haha." "Are you trying to pick me up?" "Emily, my girls didn't want me to interfere with their shopping, so they told me to go talk with a pretty girl. That's all that's going on. I've got two girlfriends, so I don't need any more. I've been told to kill some time, and talking to a pretty girl is a pleasant way of doing it. You didn't seem to be shopping either, so I figured you also had time to kill. Are you waiting for someone too?" "Yeah. Umm. Umm." Emily had a funny look on her face, which she finally explained, "I'm waiting for my boyfriend. He's in a boring store down the street, and I said I'd meet him here. He's not a very good boyfriend." "What a pity for you then." "You don't mind that I have a boyfriend?" "Pretty girls usually do. I'd be foolish to mind. I'm not trying to pick you up; we're just killing time together while our partners do their shopping." "Except you've got more partners than me. What's that like?" "It's TERRIBLE. They take HOURS to do clothes shopping and they all boss me around: 'Try this on', 'Try that on', 'Give us a twirl.' It never ends." "Haha. That's not what I meant. I meant what's it like... , in bed?" "It's fantastic! We're all good friends with each other, as you can tell by our shopping together. Julia and Ava are both bisexual, so all three of us make love to each other. It works out very, very well." "Wow. Not just you in the middle, but all three of you?" "Yep. If I can't make it some nights, the girls get together by themselves. Likewise if one of the girls is busy, the other girl and I will get together. And often all three of us, like last night. It's an equality thing." #4: #1: #3: I continued, "Certainly not just me in the middle. You heard both the girls say I was a great lover, and that wouldn't be the case if I selfishly kept myself in the middle. I try to give the girls as much pleasure as I can, which is why they have so many orgasms, like Julia told you. Do you and your boyfriend have sex?" "How many orgasms do they have?" #4: "That depends on how long we make love for. Probably an average of three or four orgasms an hour for each of them, so if we make love for three hours, they'll each have about ten." "TEN EACH! No way! You must be pulling my leg. No guy could do that." "It's not just me. There are three of us in bed, which is sexier, so we're all turned on more than normal and orgasm quicker. Second, two people working on a third can get their 'victim' very excited very quickly. Third, I am VERY good at sex. Even with just one girl, I can give her that many orgasms. Whether you believe me or not, I don't care. I'd rather be over there helping choose Ava's bikini, but apparently they're happier giving me a surprise later. If you don't want to talk about me because you think I'm exaggerating, how about we talk about you? I'm only killing time anyway. Are you at school, college, or what Emily?" "Can you really ... oh no!" The guy walking through the doorway was obviously her Mr. Right. He seemed to think so anyway, judging by the frown on his face at seeing his girlfriend talking to a guy, although Emily's "oh no" indicated she might not rate him quite as highly as "Right". He marched toward us. I thought about quickly walking away, but decided to stay. What the heck, I was only killing time anyway. He was only an ordinary looking guy, like Emily, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen I thought, and smaller than me. His being smaller than me was good, because I thought it'd be unlikely for him to start anything. Julia had, as usual, told me what to wear this morning, so it was figure flattering and the width of my shoulders and muscular chest were clearly outlined by the shirt. He pointedly ignored me, marching up to Emily, grabbing her hand and demanding, "Let's go!" Emily was pulled away, giving me a wistful look over her shoulder, which Mr. Right fortunately didn't see. In the doorway there was a slight scuffle as Emily broke his grip. She headed for the counter only a few steps away, arguing with Mr. Right. What about I couldn't tell because the music drowned out EVERYTHING. Emily talked to an assistant, was given a piece of paper and a pen, then she walked toward my girls, still not looking at me. As she walked she was holding the paper to her chest while she was writing on it. Mr. Right scuttled after her but she kept what she was writing too close to her chest for him to read it. When Emily reached my girls, she folded the paper and gave it to Ava, turned, grabbed Mr. Right's hand, and pulled him toward the door. Mr. Right hesitated, clearly wanting to get hold of the note, but Ava had glanced at it then quickly put it in her pocket. He let himself be dragged toward the door, Emily dropping the pen on the counter on the way past. Mr. Apparently-Less-Than-Right glared at me, obviously suspecting what I suspected was the truth. I quickly dismissed the idea of waving goodbye to Pretty Emily, and it probably be best not to wave to Ava either. I thought it might be better for me to look uninvolved, so I reached down and grabbed whatever was in front of me to pretend to be shopping. When I held it up to see what it was, I blushed, and quickly put it down again. I looked around quickly, but no more than half the people in the store had seen me. Excellent. Why can't - in a store that sells to guys and girls - there be enough guys' stuff to give me a decent chance of not looking like a pervert? I turned away from the rack of tiny things I was standing at, and went looking for anything else. When Emily and her boyfriend had gone, I made my way to the guys' corner of the store, grabbed some board shorts, and held them up while I walked toward the changing rooms, where Ava was. The shorts being cover for my walking that way, in case Mr. Right stuck his head back in the store. Ava handed me the note before I had a chance to ask for it. I held it behind the shorts, while I had a quick look: a phone number followed by "Em" with the "m" being messily unfinished. I looked back at the doorway, to make sure it was okay to keep talking to Ava. Apart from half the people in the store still watching this little drama, the way was clear. I put the note in my pocket, which caused a couple of guys to start clapping (I couldn't hear them over the 'background' music, but their hand movements caught my eye). I gave them a little bow, and just for fun, then gave Ava a "Thank you" kiss. That gave them something more to clap about. Whereupon Julia wanted a kiss too, as did Carol. I expected Carol to kiss me on the cheek, but she went straight for my lips. I didn't object, but kept it short. I didn't know anyone else in here, and I guess we could always claim we were teasing the guys who were clapping. Who were now CONSIDERABLY more impressed, much to my girls' amusement. I said, "I feel a bit awkward going to chat with anyone else in the store now. Are you girls nearly finished?" "Not hardly!" declared Julia. "Buying a bikini is NOT easy. There are a lot of factors to consider..." "And here I was thinking that you could just grab whatever was closest to hand, because Ava is certain to look sexy and beautiful in it." "Haha," from all the girls. "What say I wander down the street to do some window-shopping, and then come back in about fifteen minutes?" "Make it thirty, okay? We'll buzz you if we finish earlier." (In our group, "buzz" means call the cellphone, let it trill once, then hang up. Caller ID gives a quick and free way of providing the recipient with a single bit of pre-arranged information, in this case that the girls had finished shopping.) "Okay. Happy shopping! Remember - and this is important - 'think small'. Ava's very sexy, and it'd be a shame if you..." "Leave it to us, Mark. I think we can manage to find something you'll like." "Something SMALL that I'll like!" "You normally tell me off for being redundant, and now you are. Go do your 'window-shopping'. Don't eat too much though, or you won't need a pizza." "Ahh, you saw through my cover story." "I know you. Both your appetite AND your taste in bikinis." "How do you know my taste in bikinis? We've never talked about them." "But somehow I think I still know. I must be a genius too! Go enjoy your lunch. See if you can get some more phone numbers from pretty girls." "She wasn't all that pretty, but she had a..." "GO!" I went. "Wait! Come back." Three kisses later, I was again told to, "Go." ------- Chapter 161: My Idea of Window Shopping Sunday, May 1, 2005 (Continued) Emily and her apparently sexually inadequate boyfriend had turned right, so I thought it'd be a good idea for me to turn left. I found a good place to window-shop. Coincidentally they served good food, and it would have been rude to stare out of their window without buying something, so I placed an order. I ate slowly, figuring I probably had the best part of an hour to kill. From time to time someone from school would recognize me through the window. Sometimes they and whoever they were with came in to talk to me. Most of my visitors came and went fairly quickly, but a group did build up, ordered their own lunches, and thereafter I was in an expanding crowd. My seat by the window ensured that, which I thought was a weird sign of how strange my life had become since Julia started "packaging and promoting" me. Nothing individually important happened, but the aggregate was interesting. Many more people than I would've thought would want to, were genuinely happy to have the chance to spend some time with me. I enjoyed the girls' company the most (because girls are better company, to talk with or just to look at), but even the guys were reasonable today. The guys I see most of at school, my classmates, recently fall into one of two camps: hostile because I've "unfairly taken too many girls," or are quiet and uninvolved. Because the latter group doesn't interact with me, nearly all my masculine interactions at school are negative, but today's guys were much better. Most of them were from other grades, but even the couple of them that were in one or more of my classes were better behaved. The pissed-off guys must have chosen not to come in, as statistically speaking there should've been a few of those. A few things amused me: The place I'd chosen to have my lunch at ended up getting a significant amount of extra business, just because I'd sat in it. Virtually all the girls from my school asked, "Where's Julia?", demonstrating that they were all very well aware of Julia's role in my life. I answered, "Buying clothes. I'm hiding in here," or variations thereon. Several of the people that were led in by their friends didn't know me, usually because they went to different schools. It was amusing and often embarrassing to hear how I was described to these strangers. Guys tended to describe my success with girls and sporting prowess. Girls mentioned how popular I was, how nice, how well I dressed, and sometimes even my genius. Not so much amusing, but I still thought it interesting, was that late-coming girls often asked, "I didn't know you were friends with these people, Mark?" whereas guys hardly ever asked that. Social networks are much more important to girls than guys. A group of 9th grade girls joined us for a while, on their way to a movie. I knew several of them, from having been in their classes last school year. Some of them looked rather attractive, and I started regretting that we hadn't done anything about recruiting a 9th grade Liaison yet. Once they were settled in, one of the prettier ones called out across the tables, "Where's Julia, Mark? Have you broken up with her?" I'd answered those questions a few times already, but never with this many pretty girls listening to the second question's answer, which made a difference. Rather than again answering with the usual, "We're still together. She's shopping; I'm hiding," I instead said, "I get asked that very often; several times today and quite often at school." I was exaggerating, so this pretty girl didn't get embarrassed when I added, "I don't know why you asked Felicity, but usually it's because the girl wants to know if I'm available..." (she's called Felicity, the same name as my mom, which is COMPLETELY irrelevant to my thinking that she [the younger Felicity] is pretty). "Oh no. That's not why I'm asking. I'm just..." "Don't worry about it. I'll answer anyway, because some of the other girls might be interested, and hopefully word might get around so I won't get asked about it so often. Whether or not I've broken up with Julia doesn't have any effect on my availability. Julia WANTS me to have another girlfriend. To have several, until I find the one that I like the most. For example, not half an hour ago Julia helped me chat-up one of the girls in the store with us, and I have her phone number in my pocket now. It'd be fair to say that with Julia's help, I'm even MORE available than I was before." Actually, I was 100% available before, it's just that now I'm noticeably more successful at getting myself availed of (i.e., >0%). "Julia could be trying to trick you. To see if you're faithful." To keep my story simple I'd previously decided not to mention Ava, but now seemed a good time to reverse that decision. I had in mind what I wanted to say, but it wasn't suitable for yelling out across the table because half the room would hear it. I got up and walked around to Felicity. Because she was a latecomer, she was sitting at the far end of the group of tables from where I'd been, so when I stood by her I was facing all the rest of my 'visitors' and had my back to most of the other patrons in the place. I could safely talk loud enough for the people on my tables to hear me. Felicity's group weren't the only girls here, and I wanted them all to hear this. "Tell me what you think of this then, Felicity, and the rest of you too. Last Tuesday an 11th grade girl called Ava became my second 'official' girlfriend. On Wednesday evening Julia's parents put on a dinner party for Ava's and my parents, so Ava's parents could meet her new boyfriend (that's me), his other girlfriend (that's Julia), and the rest of Julia's and my families. Since then Julia, Ava and I have slept together several times, and the girls have given each other heaps of orgasms. They're shopping together for a bikini for Ava right now, because..." The rest of my intended words were drowned out by the guys at my tables being unable to hold back their excitement. For the next few minutes I was the center of excited, unintelligent, entirely predictable conversation, although I was more "shouted at" than "conversed with". I frantically hushed them, to stop their causing a scene in the café as some of the things they were yelling were very NOT appropriate in public. I, of course, acted maturely, as if I couldn't understand why these silly boys were so childish. Mature men - like me - accept threesomes as a perfectly natural part of our lives, barely worthy of comment - other than my raising the subject in the first place, haha. When I'd managed to calm the boys down sufficiently for me to talk with Felicity again, I told her and the other girls, "As I was saying, I'm sure Julia's not trying to trick me. This is how we live. Most guys find their preferred girlfriend by trying one after the other, but Julia prefers me to try as many as I can simultaneously, that way I can get to know more girls, so I have a much better chance of finding one that suits me very well." "Why isn't she jealous?" asked one of the other 9th graders. "Julia's bisexual. A nuance I think most of the guys here quickly discerned from my earlier comments. Julia and my slightly younger sister Carol are an item too. Julia spends half her time with Carol, and she doesn't think it's fair for me not to have a full-time girlfriend so she's encouraging me to find one. Also, Julia's going to be in my life for a long time, because she's going to be in Carol's for a long time, so she's not worried about being pushed out of her relationship with me by a new girl. The new girl has to at least tolerate Julia being around some of the time, otherwise the new girl won't work out. Obviously Ava far more than tolerates it though. Ava's mainly my girlfriend, but she and Julia get on extremely well together, in bed and out of it. So there's no jealousy between Julia and Ava at all, only friendship." One of the guys eagerly started asking, "What about..." "No!" I interrupted. "But you don't know what I was asking." "Usually when I'm explaining Julia's and my relationships, as soon as I mention Carol some pathetically moronic walking bag of male hormones will ask me about Carol and me getting together, ideally in a threesome with Julia. So what was your question?" "Umm." After a slight pause he either decided to be courageous, or couldn't think of an alternative, or couldn't let go of the sexual image he'd thought of (my money was on the last possibility). Whatever the reason, he asked, "It's a good question. What about you and her? If you and Julia can sleep with Ava, why not with Carol?" "Gee, maybe because she's my SISTER! When you get home, I STRONGLY recommend you stick your head in the toilet and keep flushing it until you've washed the crap out, okay?..." #2: #3: " ... Not to mention small practical difficulties such as my parents killing me for raping my 13-year old sister, and then having my worthless carcass thrown in jail for at least a hundred years! Good grief! Have you got ANY concept of how that would screw-up my family and screw-up my life? You do actually have a brain cell in that head, don't you? Or is it full of testosterone and crap?" "That's not fair! I didn't mean rape her. I meant both of you doing it for FUN." "First, the reason Carol likes Julia is because Carol's a lesbian, so it would have to be rape, wouldn't it?" "Oh. I didn't know. That's different." He was happy to escape out of this loophole. "That makes no difference whatsoever! It wouldn't matter if she was 100% hetero and on her hands and knees in front of me begging for it. She's my SISTER for God's sake! There is no way in the world I am going to screw-up everything that's important in my life for something as meaningless as physical sex. Nor would she, obviously, because people in my family do have brain cells. I love my sister already, and I'm perfectly happy to show it in the traditional way, by giving her a clothing voucher on her birthday." Thus making me appear to be the perfect brother to my female audience, which was who I was playing to. I added, "Do you have a sister?" He really didn't want to answer that. He hesitated long enough for one of his 'friends' to supply, "Yeah, two. One older, one younger." I said, "In that case, when you get home, still flush the crap out of your head the way I said. That's URGENT, so make that the very first thing you do. After that, go to your sisters and give them my SINCERE sympathies for having you as a brother. Then when you're at your dinner table tonight, say, 'Mom and Dad, I was telling a guy from school today, in front of a couple of dozen witnesses, that he should have sex with his sister. That's a perfectly reasonable thing for me to publicly insist on and defend, isn't it?' Send me a postcard to let me know how the next several years of intensive therapy goes for you!" When the laughter died down, I said, "I really shouldn't be too hard on Crap-For-Brains here, because - as I said - EVERY time I talk about Julia, Carol and me, some sex-addled moron of a male asks that question. And the reason one of them always asks, is because pretty much ALL males are sex-addled morons. Every other guy was thinking it; he was just the first one to open his mouth about it. -- "To all the guys here: You should ALL go home and flush your heads, and if you still think it's a good idea after that, then have a talk with your parents about it. I'm not saying that as a joke. It's FAR better you get yelled at for a while than you actually believe that crap." I knew none of the guys would talk to their parents, because in reality they did understand that it was wrong. But that didn't stop them instantly hoping other guys were doing it, because the other end of the double standard seemed sexy. I didn't want to give them ANY possibility of thinking that about me though, so I'd come down hard on the idea of Carol and me doing anything so terrible. I wanted them all to know that I was adamantly opposed to brothers having sex with their sisters. I was certainly opposed to any of THEM doing it, because that'd reduce the number of girls available for me! After giving the boys a couple of seconds to be embarrassed by all the female laughter, I continued, "To all the girls here: How is it even REMOTELY possible that any of you think guys are attractive? I know in Biology we were told that males have brains, but as soon as sex comes up, every guy's brains seem to TOTALLY disappear. Given how often guys think about sex, having their brains totally disappear for 99% of the time is a SERIOUS problem! I can't understand why every girl on the planet isn't a lesbian. Not that I'm encouraging you to - heaven forbid! - but I'm even thinking of becoming one myself! Males are... , I guess the right word is 'disappointing'. I don't know how you girls can keep persevering with us, but thank God you do!" The girls had a great many of humorous comments to make, so I lost control of the conversation for a while. Not that it was really a conversation. It was the first time I'd "held court" as the center of attention of a decent-sized group. Julia and my other helpers weren't here, and I was not only managing all by myself, but was able to hold their attention amazingly well. Not only that, but I was also succeeding in getting some of the girls interested in me. That had to be almost entirely due to the reputation that Julia had created for me around school, but it was still a very ego-boosting experience for me. It was a buzz. I thought the thread of conversation had been lost, but after a few minutes of noisy conversation, one of the girls asked, "Hey Mark, were you telling us about Julia not being jealous?" I'd been waiting for an opportunity to get the conversation back on to the track that led to being able to find a good 9th grade Liaison, so I said, "Was I? Oh yeah, I was. I thought I'd mostly answered that. Julia isn't jealous because she thinks I deserve a full-time girlfriend and Julia's also hoping to share her with me anyway. There's certainly no jealousy involved..." I was worrying about how to move ahead from there, but another girl solved that problem for me by interrupting to ask, "Would another girl have to... , you know? With Julia and Ava?" I answered, "The way you've worded the question, of course she wouldn't 'HAVE TO'. I don't want to think about what 'have to' could entail! But I know that's not what you meant. You meant, 'Could a girl be my girlfriend without doing that?' Right?" The original questioner nodded. -- Loosely based on a real person, Chloe in this case, I answered, "Funnily enough you're not the first girl to ask that, haha. Julia has a friend who isn't that way inclined, and Julia thinks the girl and I would be good for each other. Especially me for her, not that it matters much," just enough for me to look good by mentioning it. "Julia has been trying hard to get that girl and me together. There are a couple of complicating issues which I won't go into now, so it's taking a lot of effort from Julia. It wasn't one of her issues, but that girl also recently asked the same question, and Julia's answer was the same as I'd give: I'm looking for a girlfriend for ME, so it'd be REALLY good if she was attracted to guys! Anything beyond that is a bonus; something good, but not essential. Just like being a good cook would be a bonus, or not dragging me out on too many clothes shopping trips. Does that answer your question?" I was bullshitting as much as anything else (or even more). It was good way to kill time, and it made Julia and me seem wonderful. My BS sounded much better than a simple, "No, she doesn't have to." In reality, any new girlfriend pretty much DID have to have sex with the other of my girls, but I knew it was better to corrupt them once they were caught rather than warn them off in advance. For some crazy reason, most girls aren't eager at the idea of girl-on-girl sex, and have to be tricked into discovering how wonderful it really is. One of the guys asked, "So how many girlfriends do you want?" I was enjoying being center stage, so I decided to spin a lot more bullshit, "Where most guys go wrong is in believing quantity is more important than quality. That's at least the wrong way around, but as far as I'm concerned, quality is the ONLY criterion." The girls were nodding along. In the interests of scientific accuracy, I should mention that sometimes quality and quantity can't be treated separately because they're so closely related; with breasts, for example. Especially because the greater the quantity of a breast (how big it is), and the quantity of breasts (how many different ones you can get your hands on), then the greater the quality of life. -- "Having a girlfriend is a highly competitive relationship." That had a few of them puzzled, until I explained, "I try my hardest to make Julia happier than she makes me. She tries hard to beat me the other way around. It's a fun competition, especially as we both win regardless of who wins. You can tell there must be a female involved somewhere, because that sentence makes no logical sense, haha. -- "That 'competition' also exists between Ava and me, and between Julia and Ava. That's why the three of us work so well together. Julia's putting so much effort into bringing in the straight girl that I just mentioned is one obvious example of her trying hard to do something for me. There's nothing in it for Julia, other than making me and the girl happy, but that's the sort of relationship we have. -- "The limit to how many girlfriends I can have is not simple. The easiest answer is however many I can play the 'Happiness Competition' with. If I can continue to believe I can give them more happiness than they give me, and if I've still got spare time and energy, then I could theoretically add another girlfriend. Presuming I've found one that I want to add, and who wants to be added. It's obviously a non-issue if there are no candidates." -- Some of the girls looked like they might be interested in being "candidates", but I didn't want the distraction of going down that path right now, so I pressed straight on. "I have to be VERY sure that I don't get too close to any sort of limit because people's lives go up and down unpredictably. Julia or Ava could have some sort of crisis in their lives - one of their parents could get badly injured in a car accident for example - and my girlfriend would need a great deal more support from me. I'd hate to fail her in her hour of need because I'd selfishly taken on too many girls. That's one mistake I'm absolutely determined to avoid, because that'd make me a bad boyfriend. That's another 'quality is more important than quantity' issue." Actually, it was a, "How to make the girls who're listening think I'm incredibly wonderful" issue. They were eating it up. -- "Complicating how many girlfriends I can have further is that the girlfriends interact together. Julia and Ava give each other a lot of happiness without involving me, even though I'm the reason they know each other. If all my girlfriends got along so superbly together, I could have more of them. -- Looking around my tables reminded me of another issue, "Another issue is how often I see the girls normally. It's easier to have a girlfriend if I naturally see her often. Who's in several of my classes for example. In my high school would be good too, which is an issue that I'm somewhat sorry about, because there are some nice girls here who aren't from my school. A potential girlfriend who lived in Salem probably wouldn't work at all. Practicality is unavoidably a consideration." -- I couldn't immediately think of any other complications, so I said to the guy who'd asked me the question. "There are other issues, but those are the main ones that I can think of right now. Have I answered your question?" I had my punchline ready, hoping I'd have a chance of using it. He answered, "Haha, not really. I thought you'd say 'Two' or 'Three', not go on like that." I could use that. "Oh! You wanted the SIMPLE answer!" I paused momentarily, then, "You don't seriously think that there are ANY simple answers to ANY question involving girls do you? Girls complicate EVERYTHING! They behave incomprehensibly, think illogically, spend half their lives in clothing stores but never have the right outfit to wear... ," I was drowned out by laughter before I'd barely started on all the jokes I had. (Can I call them "jokes" if they're true? Maybe I should have written, "material"?) When the laughter died a little, I theatrically shook my head sadly, then said, "You've got a lot to learn about girls, and take it from someone with two girlfriends, everything you learn comes as a horrible surprise. They really are the bewilderingly illogical and inconsistent. But I CAN give you a very simple, logical, masculine answer to your 'How many girlfriends' question, if you like?" -- He sort of nodded, so I said, "Virtually every guy would, if he was honest, admit that the number of girlfriends he wants is one more than he has right now, haha. So if I was the same as most guys, my answer to your question would have been a simple, 'Three.' That's a little too simple, because there's the usual masculine exception, but we all know what that is so I don't have to say it." Everyone was looking puzzled, even the guys, who really should've known better. It didn't take long for someone to say, "What is it?" With the appropriate hand movements I said, "Well OBVIOUSLY I'm going to accept number four if she's got really big tits! Duh! You call yourself guys! What's the matter with you? Haha." I'd spread enough How-Wonderful-I-Am bullshit by now, so everyone thought the juxtaposition was a good joke. (Apparently you CAN call something a "joke" if it's true! That didn't take long to discover, did it?) -- "To answer the question more seriously, Julia and Ava are both very happy now. Well, they are RIGHT NOW, because they're shopping, but I mean they're very happy in our relationship. They're both actively working to help me find another girlfriend, so I'll certainly add one more when I find the right girl. If a fourth girl later comes along who I like, especially if we all like her, then we'll have to think about that, but I'd much rather err on the conservative side and only add a fourth if it was unanimous among all four girls and me..." #1: #2: " ... There are real-world issues too, like someone might move out of state, or one of the girls might meet a guy she prefers to me, or stuff like that." Most of the girls here didn't know me very well, and of the few that knew me personally - rather than by reputation - most of them were 9th grade girls who knew the Mark of a year ago. I've changed a GREAT deal since then, mostly because Julia is in the middle of completely reworking my personality. In our mass 10th grade lunches, there would've been a chorus of objections to the possibility of any girl meeting a better guy than me, but that didn't happen here. There wasn't even a single voiced objection, but I could see that a few of the girls thought it was unlikely, which was nice of them (to be so gullible). Apart from anything else, my bullshit being so well received helped confirm my recent theory about what it takes to be successful with girls. ^ [On the off-chance that you're interested, I'll mention what I think it takes to be successful with girls now, even though it's somewhat of a digression. If you're a guy - because my theory is for me, and I'm a guy (mentioned just in case you're not following well) - then you can get heaps of girls if you've got the following: Bullshit. Being good at spreading bullshit is a definite advantage. Not necessarily lying, but not necessarily not-lying either. Let's call it, "Saying the right things in the right way." Experience. The more experience you've got, the easier it is, which makes getting started a real bummer. (Warning: if your bum's involved, someone is doing something VERY wrong. Call for help IMMEDIATELY!). A Good Attitude. Being both nice and confident (see "Bullshit" above) is important. There are different ways of being nice, depending on the girl and situation, but it's always a big deal. At the start of chatting with a girl, having a casual attitude is a particularly important, especially if you can show them that your attitude will correctly be a seriously caring one later. For example, Chloe believes I'm in no hurry at all to make her my girlfriend because caring for her is more important than something as irrelevant as sex. Once she's swallowed that bait sufficiently, she'll offer her body to me. Having a ridiculously tight or revealing shirt, with the body to go with it. And, if you will excuse me anticipating the future somewhat. I'm pretty sure: Having a few million dollars will help too. For most of my readers, it's likely that the last two items will be absent. I'm happy to say that Bullshit, Experience and A Good Attitude will still work moderately often. I'm sorry to say that it only works "moderately often", i.e., not as often as any guy would like, because as we all know, quantity of girlfriends is VERY important. The above is my general advice to guys, so I've left out having Julia seduce girls for you. She's busy seducing girls for me, so you can't have her services. More generally though, the recommendations of other girls, including sisters, counts for a VERY great deal, especially in school where your social interactions are witnessed by so many other girls.] ^ "How could your, Julia's and Ava's parents all allow you to do this? I can't imagine how that dinner party didn't end in a big scene and lots of tears." "Umm. That's harder to answer. I guess because even before the dinner party, my family and Julia's family knew each other pretty well, and especially because the four parents knew Julia and I could handle a threesome very well. They'd seen that Julia, Carol and I were in a loving threesome. Carol and I have a superb brother-sister relationship, far better than in most families that I've seen. During the day, Julia, Carol and I spend a great deal of quality time together, which the parents have witnessed on many occasions. So when Ava joined in, Julia's and my parents had faith that it'd work well right from the beginning. So at the dinner party it was only a matter..." My phone 'buzzed' (trilled once, then stopped). I checked the caller ID, and it'd been Julia. "Sorry everyone, but it's time for me to go. My girls finished shopping before closing time and I have to go witness that miracle. Nice talking to you all, bye." The call had come considerably earlier than I'd expected. I'd wasted time enjoying the ego-boost of successfully grandstanding to the group, and I hadn't made enough progress toward getting the 9th grade girls moving in the direction I wanted. There wasn't any time left now. I had to leave, but the effort might not have been wasted provided at least one of them was interested enough to speak up. I 'casually' started leaving (as per the third bullet point above), hoping for one eager girl. As it happened, several of them urged, "Wait! Don't go", "What's your phone number?", "How do we see you again?", etc. The guys mostly just said, "Bye," which was perfectly fine with me. I answered the girls, "We're meeting several friends at home in a few minutes so I can't hang around. Nor will I give out my phone number because too many people will call me." Something I was particularly conscious of, especially if Prof and I win the $1.75 million in a couple of days, because I knew Julia would make sure word of my being rich got out. I asked one of the eager looking girls, "Felicity?" "Yes!" "After I've gone, get a pen and paper from a waitress, circulate it for all the girls who're interested to put their names and phone numbers down. With your grades and schools would be a good idea too please. Then it's your job to give it to me or Julia at school. Don't forget to put your own name on it. Okay?" "You want my number?" "I want EVERY girl's number who's interested in me having it, certainly including yours. I'll arrange another group lunch, or something similar, so those that want to can carry on from where we've left off now. I've got to go, bye." I ignored the girls' questions (for example, Felicity's, "But I'm only fifteen and you've already got a 17-year old girlfriend"), and I ignored the guys' comments even more. Felicity's task was easy enough that she should be able to carry it out without any further input from me. Admittedly it was unusual to get a prospective girlfriend to deliver several other girls' phone numbers, but she should be able to do it, although I'd be highly suspicious if the final list only had her name on it! There was one technical problem: I didn't know all the girls' names because many of them hadn't bothered introducing themselves and I hadn't bothered asking them, so the list would be partially meaningless. I didn't care because: I DID know the names of all the pretty girls (funny how that happens). I wasn't going to be calling any of them for one-on-one dates anyway, only another group thing. They might as well all come to that, regardless of whether or not I could put a face to a name. My main interest was in getting a 9th grade Liaison appointed, and to have her start gathering a large group of her pretty peers for me (a laudable goal, I thought). I'll mention this at the Liaison Meeting shortly. ------- Chapter 162: Discussions About Some Girls' Not-So-Private Parts Sunday, May 1, 2005 (Continued) I found my girls outside the surf store. I asked, "Did you find a good bikini for Ava?" "Yes," they all agreed. "Good. Can I see it please?" Ava started reaching into her bag, but Julia told her, "Mark will enjoy it more if he sees you in it, Ava." "Oh yeah," agreed Ava. "Goody. Let's get home then." I herded the girls into motion, back toward our car. Then I remembered my Speedos. Julia was carrying one of the store's bags, which presumably contained them, but I should ask just in case they'd been forgotten. On the other hand, maybe it'd be good if they had been forgotten. But then I'd have to come back and try everything on all over again and give some more twirls with my underwear sticking out. That possibility decided me, so I said, "Julia, did you remember to pick up my silly swimsuits from the counter?" "No, but I remembered to get your SEXY swimsuits. I've got them here, so you don't have to worry about coming back again." "Ahh. That's good." Actually there wasn't a "good" in any of this, but I guess not having to come back and do it all over again was the lesser evil, and I do suspect that there is something intrinsically evil about Speedos. If not "evil", then certainly "unnatural". Before we got to the car, Ava asked, "Did you get any more pretty girls' phone numbers, Mark? That was funny in the store. Her boyfriend wasn't very happy, haha." "Yeah, it was funny. I was only killing time, but he took it more seriously. The girl - I jokingly called her 'Pretty Emily' - wasn't especially pretty. Certainly not as pretty as any of you beautiful girls..." After the consequent expressions of appreciation, my subsequent even more forceful reiterations, their further appreciation, etc., I continued, "Emily was reasonably good looking, and she seemed to have a good figure, but the thing that interested me the most was that she seemed fascinated by our..." I had to wait until a couple of other people had walked past us in the opposite direction, then, " ... group sex. She might be fun to play with. What do you think, Julia?" "By all means play with her if you want. That's how you'll have fun and gain interesting new experiences to learn from. Seeing as how you met her in the swimwear store, it'd be appropriate to invite her to meet us at the Aquatic Center when we go there with Chloe?" "Umm. Won't that complicate things with Chloe? I think Pretty Emily wants plenty of kinky sexy stuff, and Chloe isn't ready for anything like that yet." Julia said, "The only significant thoughts I've had about the Aquatic Center were that it'd be a good way of testing Chloe, and that you'd enjoy yourself in a pool with several swimsuit-wearing girls. At first glance it's too good an opportunity not to invite several girls, so adding Pretty Emily shouldn't cause any problems. I should be able to think of a way of making Emily help us with Chloe." Knowing Julia, I was sure she could. -- "None of the details are decided yet. I have to decide on what I want my objectives for the event to be, and then that'll determine how many girls are invited, which girls, etc. It's a week away, so there's no hurry to decide on that. Probably there'll be several girls, so Emily can be easily added, but I'll let you know later, okay?" "Very okay, thanks." It truly was okay. Julia always arranges events to make them pleasurable for me. Sometimes she can't resist getting some pleasure for herself at my expense, like holding back Ava's showing me her new bikini, but it's usually a small and temporary price I have to pay, although a frequent one I've noticed. I also knew that if I said, "I want to manage this," she'd let me take over. She'd even be happy to do so, because she wants me to be more commanding. But for something as important as getting many sexy girls into swimsuits, I was perfectly happy to leave it ENTIRELY to Julia. I took a cue from Julia, and I wondered about MY objective for the event. That took about a nanosecond to decide, so I spent the rest of the walk to the car thinking about how good it was going to be. My minds agreed on, "Very, very good." I was reminded of something that I'd been curious about recently, but it was better to wait until we were inside the car before discussing it. As soon as we were in the car, Julia reminded, "Don't forget we have to pick up Donna." "I haven't forgotten. Speaking vaguely of brother and sister stuff, Carol, how did Andrew and Sophia react to your getting into the hot tub naked with them?" "That was amusing. I didn't want to intrude on your having sex by coming into your room to get something to wear in the tub, so I asked them if they minded my going naked. Andrew agreed while Sophia was still trying to think about it. She was a bit shocked, I think. In the tub she made a comment about hoping Andrew was trustworthy. Andrew told her I was a lesbian and half his sister-in-law twice - from being Julia's boyfriend's sister and being Julia's lover - so it wasn't his trustworthiness that was at risk, but Sophia's. He said, 'Carol's already got two female lovers; maybe she'll want another one.' He had some fun teasing Sophia, but not too much because he's not stupid. I'm glad your family and my family can be naked together, Julia. Having that much trust is a good feeling." "Yes it is," agreed Julia. "Although my family weren't used to so much of it before. I still laugh to myself about getting Dad to come into the Guys' Room when all the girls were naked and Mark was screwing Lily. That was VERY funny. You and Ava missed that, unfortunately, but it was hilarious!" I had to say, "I wish I'd missed it. You may have thought it was hilarious, but I thought it was highly embarrassing. I was totally naked and in the middle of screwing Lily!" "Yes, I did notice that, haha. You handled it very well though. Amazingly well, now that I think about it." "I think I was probably blown away by all the naked girls and all the sex games we'd been playing. It was rather overwhelming." Julia agreed, in respect of what interested her, "It was fun seeing how far I could push them. They were weak, weren't they?" "Yeah," I agreed. "Although if they were anything like as overwhelmed as I was, it's hardly surprising. I was especially amazed you talked them into accepting my groping them at school, but I'm even more amazed that they haven't rebelled sometime during the last week." "I think they mostly don't believe it. When you do grope one girl, it's just her in isolation, so she feels too weak to refuse. So far anyway. One of the later girls might make an issue out of it. Who are you intending to do next, and how rudely?" "I've given it almost no thought; I forget about it most of the time. The one thought I did have was about Eileen. Remember she gave up her turn to Tianna at the end? When Laci took too much time?" "Sure. What about Eileen?" "She was one of the girls who groped my cock earlier, so she's on the list for me to grope back, but she wasn't up to doing anything in the hot tub at the end, and she nicely gave up her turn to Tianna, so I had the idea of doing something nice for her. Maybe sitting her on my lap and giving her some hugs and kisses, and letting her choose how I grope her. I'd suggest a single pat her ass through her clothes, as a very token following of the groping rules." Julia said, "That sounds good. You should do that." "Oh. I thought you wouldn't be pleased about me being so passive. I didn't do hardly anything to Savannah, and I thought my doing something weak with Eileen wouldn't be good." "You'll be doing something nice, rather than weak. We can make sure the girls understand that. The best way to cancel out the impression of your being weak is to do something strong immediately afterward. How about after you nicely grope Eileen, you immediately rudely grope Laci?" "Umm, how rudely?" "Finger-fucking her cunt would probably be rude enough. What do you think Carol and Ava, would that be rude? Haha." Carol and Ava laughed their agreement. "You want me to finger her cunt in front of other people! Isn't that going way too far? That could cause a lot of trouble." "I don't think so. Remember that she can opt out of being one of your potential girlfriends, so if it's done, it'll be with her permission. Do it with her standing and your hand under her skirt. No one will see anything, although what you're doing will be blatantly obvious, especially if the room's quiet enough for them to hear it. Do it before a class starts, when Eileen and Laci are both there. You can do that, can't you?" "Umm, I guess so. It's more extreme than I'd choose." Which, apparently, wasn't an issue that Julia cared about. Julia pulled out her cellphone, and moments later was saying, "Eileen, remember how nice you were last Sunday, when you gave up your turn on Mark's lap to Tianna? Mark was impressed by that, so he's going to do something very kind for you at school: he's going to grope you nicely tomorrow." We all heard Eileen's, "Oh no!" "Don't worry. It'll be something very minor like a single pat on the butt, on top of all your clothes. He has to do something that can be vaguely called a 'grope'. How does sitting in Mark's lap, spending a little while kissing and cuddling him, and letting him give you a quick pat on the ass when you get up sound?" "Good. We'll plan on that then." "Because you DID grope his cock last Sunday, but how nice you were in the tub more than made up for that, so he'll make his so-called 'Revenge Grope' as nice for you as he can. It'll only be for thirty seconds, Eileen, but have fun thinking about it. I'll see you at school tomorrow, bye." Julia hung up then immediately dialed again. "Hi Laci. I'm sure you remember that last Sunday you and several of the other girls groped Mark's cock and you all agreed that it was fair for him to grope you back. He's going to be groping a couple of you tomorrow at school, including you." We all heard Laci's, "Oh no!" Girls may be inconsistent and unpredictable, but apparently not when it comes to their reaction to being told they're going to be groped in public. "I strongly suggest you wear a short skirt or dress to school tomorrow. If you wear jeans or shorts, you'll have to take them off before Mark can start, and that'd be terribly embarrassing." "You know the answer to that. We told you several times that you can opt out, which means you'll never be invited out with Mark ever again. From your behavior last Sunday, you're obviously hot for Mark?" We all heard her answer to that too, "God Yes! He's..." Laci's voice quieted too much for me to hear what I was. Julia listened with an amused smile on her face. After about a minute, Julia suddenly announced, "That's settled then. Mark will grope you tomorrow, and you can spend until then dreaming about his hands rubbing your body. Bye." Julia disconnected in the middle of Laci's protestation, then laughingly said, "I bet she spends the rest of the day locked in her bedroom. That girl's got a serious case of the hots for you, haha. You know what to do tomorrow, don't you, Mark? Before a class starts when both girls are in the room, do Eileen then Laci. Make sure you allow enough time before the teacher arrives." "Got it, thanks Julia. This is going to cause an interesting scene in class." "It certainly is. Let me alter your instructions a little: do this when Eileen, Laci AND ME are in the class. I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes myself, haha." "I wish I could see it," hoped Ava. "I missed the party last Sunday too." Julia reassured her, "Everything will be fine from now on, sweetie. We've got years of fun ahead of us, so missing a few days early on won't matter. The Liaison Meeting we're about to have will be similar anyway. There will be fewer of us, but we'll all be naked and there'll be plenty of hanky-panky." "There will?" asked Ava and me simultaneously. Julia looked at me, "Unless you'd prefer all the girls to remain fully dressed and to behave in a business-like manner at all times?" "Hmm, I might need some time to think about that." A small pause, then, "What's say we try the sexy nude option today, to see how that works out? I might be surprised, and find that I enjoy it, haha." While they were chuckling, I had a sudden thought, "Oh, what about Donna? She's going to be at the meeting and we can't be sexy in front of her." Julia said, "I think we can. It's a nuisance trying to hide all the sex we do from Donna, and it must annoy her too. She's only going to be watching, not having any real sex herself - except maybe some girl-on-girl stuff, which no one cares much about - and I don't see any strong reason why she can't watch if she wants to. The best way to train her to be trustworthy, is to start by giving her secrets that she wants to keep." "Oh boy!" exclaimed Carol. "Donna's going to love it!" Carol was assuming I'd agree. A reasonable assumption, given how often I argued with Julia (I do argue with her occasionally. The yellow and black swimsuit in the bag by her feet representing the average result). Nonetheless, this situation was serious enough to be worth some thought. I was fine with Donna having girl-on-girl sex if she wanted some. That's a perfectly natural, fun, healthy activity. My only worries were her not getting physical with me, and her not accidentally blabbing about how much sex there was between my sisters and me. I didn't want her to get so frustrated during the meeting that she complained, "It's not fair; you let me play with your cock last time," or, "Why can't I fuck you like Carol does?" While I was thinking about the precedence effects from this (would Donna demand even more sex next time, or would her seeing other girls sit on my cock make her feel she could ask for the same access sometime soon), Ava asked, "Is Donna a lesbian too?" Both Carol and Julia said, "No," but Julia added, "Why do you ask, Ava?" "You mentioned her having sex with a girl, and Carol said Donna's going to love seeing us all naked." Julia said, "I can see why you thought so, but we didn't mean to give you that impression. Donna's at that age where her body's starting to change, so she's got hormones all over the place. That's awkward enough normally, but you can imagine how frustrating it is for Donna. She lives with Mark, sees him naked sometimes, knows he has sex with many other girls, that he's exceptionally good at it, and she loves him a great deal. But she's also too young to have sex with him and she's his sister. It drives her up the wall with frustration sometimes. She masturbates like crazy thinking about Mark. She's even got a vibrator that she's constantly asking her mother for new batteries for. Imagine what it'd be like, Ava, if you lived with Mark but weren't supposed to have sex with him. Donna's not a lesbian, but I bet Mark wishes she was sometimes, haha." #1: #2: #3: Ava said, "Poor Donna. She is young, but you'd better do something about her soon." #2: #3: Julia said, "Yeah, I know. The trouble is Mark would prefer to wait twenty years, but Donna thinks twenty seconds is too long. Finding an acceptable compromise isn't going to be easy. Mark's worried about taking advantage of her." "{Raspberry}," from Ava. I wanted to take a lot of satisfaction at that raspberry being blown at Julia rather than at the usual target of them. It HAD been blown at Julia (good), but it had been about me and my being worried (bad). But my comment was fictitious, as Julia had just made it up (good). But worrying about taking advantage of Donna was a valid worry (bad). Scorekeeping raspberries is not easy, although I'm pretty sure I'm losing. Ava clarified, "It's not like Mark's tricking or forcing her. Donna's begging for it. She should get an electric vibrator, by the way. They're much better, and cheaper to run too, if she uses it a lot." #3: #1: #4: #1: #4: #3: #4: #1, #3: In the bedroom, we didn't even have to break step to undress, and I was already wearing a rubber, so we were in action as soon as we'd dropped our clothes on Julia's vanity and the towels on the floor. We climbed on the bed, and started smooching. Pat was not as wildly excited to be in bed with me as any girl should be, in my humble opinion. Clearly there had to be a serious reason. Talk wasn't really what I wanted to be doing at the moment, but Pat wasn't actively participating in what I wanted, and it was her that I most wanted to do it with, so I didn't have much choice. I asked her, "What's the matter, beautiful?" It was clear that I was talking to Pat. Not only was I looking at her, but there was ABSOLUTELY nothing the matter with Lily. Lily was in a VERY happy mood. From the moment we'd arrived in the room, she'd been repeatedly telling me how thankful she was that I was going to let her serve me, and how much she was looking forward to doing it for me. Pat answered, "I'm uncomfortable about Ava joining us. I hardly know her and..." Clearly Pat's foolish and unnecessary notions had to be dispensed with, and I couldn't resist a little joke with my other selves. Looking up at the ceiling, I exclaimed, "Oh! What a weird feeling!" "What?" they both asked. "I'm feeling déjà vu. Didn't exactly the same girl say exactly the same thing to me, in the exact same bed, about a week and half ago? Oh, that's right, it wasn't 'exactly' the same words - you used a different name. What was it? Oh yes, 'Lily'. You were uncomfortable about LILY, because you hardly knew her. Gosh, so much discomfort! You poor thing, Pat. I feel sorry for you." "{Giggle}. Okay, it did work out well last time." Lily asked, "What 'daja view'?" #3: #4: #1: #4: #3: "It's another language, Lily. Latin or French I think. It means when you feel something is happening which you think you've already done before. Sort of an echo in your mind. It feels very weird. I was joking with Pat because she said the same sort of thing when she was here last time." Halfway through my explanation Lily started nodding, having understood what I meant. One of my minds (obviously the least intelligent one), couldn't stop himself asking, "Do Chinese people have déjà vu too, Lily?" "Yes. Is a very strange feeling." #4: [[Actually, the propensity to experience déjà vu is slightly influenced by the person's native language, as that has subtle but surprisingly broad influences on the structure of human brains.]] "Pat, I was right last time about how much you'd enjoy sex with Lily. Ava is a lot of fun in bed, and I'm sure you'll enjoy her a great deal too." In fact, I was sure she'd enjoy Ava even more than she enjoyed Lily, but that wasn't the sort of thing to say right in front of Lily. "I know a thing or two about sex, so I know what I'm talking about. Plus I like you, and I'd never push you to do something I wasn't sure you'd enjoy..." #4: " ... I'll give you a money-back guarantee. Double your money back if you're not 100% SATISFIED, haha." "I almost wish we did have to pay you, then I could buy your services more often, haha. One and a half weeks between visits is a long time, especially after I broke up with my boyfriend." "You've been filling the gap with Lily pretty happily, from what I could tell. You know that you didn't have to break up with your boyfriend. Or you could get back together with him, if you want. I'm using rubbers with you, so I'm not requiring you to be monogamous with me." "Nah, I don't want to. He's been an asshole since I broke up with him, so he'd be the last guy I want to date. I was just moaning that I can't have sex with you as often as I want to. Probably just as well, because I wouldn't get anything else done if I could." "Okay. I had a third thought when you mentioned paying for my... , 'services', shall we say. Julia wants me to think about earning enough money for a house. Let's see ... Julia said 700 girls at our school. $100 each, gives $70,000. That's a pretty good start to a housing fund. Seeing as we're only lying around bed talking, I might give that some serious thought. Of course, if you two got started again, and started kissing me passionately, I might get distracted enough to save you a hundred dollars each." Apparently they both decided that saving a hundred dollars made kissing me worth it. Pat wasn't as enthusiastic as I would've liked, but she was good enough for my purposes. Plus I was reasonably sure that when Ava joined in, Ava's outgoing attitude and skill at sex would finish Pat's corruption. #1: #4: #1: A few minutes later, Julia amused me by walking in without knocking. I was licking Pat at the time, and when she saw Julia coming, she tried to close her legs. I thought it would be more 'educational' to prevent that, so I put my head back between her legs and carried on licking. Pat made a half-hearted struggle, but I had my arms around her legs so she was helpless short of making a major scene. Lily was very much taking her cues from me, so she went back to working on Pat's top half. Pat gave up, just laying there, letting us. Julia reached the bed, and could see that Pat was not participating. Julia commented, "Don't you think Mark's a fantastic pussy-licker, Pat?" "Ahh. I guess," reluctantly admitted Pat. "Oh dear," expressed Julia sadly. "It doesn't look like you're doing very well. I think I'll ask Ava to take you home too. I'll strip so Lily and I can give Mark a good time." "It's all right," said Pat. "It's NOT all right. The reason you are on my bed is to give my boyfriend a good time. Lying there like a log and not even making happy noises is NOT giving him a good time. Mark, roll over and lie on your back." Which I did, of course. Julia instructed Pat, "Either climb onto Mark's cock and start fucking him properly, or get dressed to go home." "Ahh, I'm not used to an audience. I'm a little shy." Julia was sympathetic, "I'll give you five seconds to stop being shy, or I'll strip and climb on his cock instead of you. Five, four, three... ," Pat started moving quickly. It officially took her a couple of seconds too long before I was fully inside, but Julia can be forgiving sometimes. Truly, she can. It happens when everything is going exactly the way she wants. "Move those hips, girl!" commanded Julia. Pat moved them. Julia and I both smiled (same cause, different reasons). "Good girl. Now stop so I can talk with you." I stopped smiling. "You're a good girl, but you were being foolish for several reasons. You're here for Mark's pleasure, and Mark gets none from having sex with a corpse! Mark gets most of his pleasure from giving pleasure, and you were showing no pleasure at all. Your lying passively is totally unacceptable. The stupid thing is that we all know that if you got your act together, you and everyone else would have a great time, so you're being your own worst enemy. -- "You know very well that there are going to be many girls in Mark's life. If you truly can't abide the thought of anyone else watching you, then you'd better pack up and leave, because it's going to happen regularly. Have you EVER seen Mark do anything harmful to ANYONE?" "Umm, no. I'm sorry, Julia." #4: "Sit there and think about how silly you were, while I talk with Lily. -- "Lily, we've contacted all three families, and everyone can make it. I couldn't get hold of one of my brothers, but I got his girlfriend and she confirmed they'd come, which was probably a more reliable answer than I would have gotten from him. That means Chloe and Alexis are the only unknowns, but I'd be surprised if they said no. Tell your mother sixteen of us certainly, but most likely eighteen, okay?" "Yes, very good. Saturday and eighteen people. I call Mother after I finish making Mark happy." "Good girl, Lily. Pat, are you going to be a good girl too, or should I call one of the hundred or so other girls who want to be exactly where you are?" "I'll be good. It's just taking me a while to get used to having sex like it happens with Mark." "I understand that, and I don't blame for you struggling with it. BUT you didn't give any thought to pleasing Mark, and that's what I blame you for. If you struggle to do something WHILE you're trying to please Mark, that's fine; but you were being selfish, and I can't abide girls who are selfish with Mark. That's the mistake Dakota made, and you know what happened to her, don't you?" "I'll be MUCH better, Julia, see." Pat rocked her hips back and forth a few times, to prove it. Personally I wasn't convinced. She should have rocked her hips more vigorously to be more convincing. Julia said, "In all seriousness, Mark is so selfless that he'll spend hours trying to cheer someone up, which irritates me intensely when the only reason the person is unhappy is because they're being silly. You KNOW you will enjoy sex with Mark, and you KNOW he would never do anything to harm you, so in the future show some trust and assume Mark has your best interests in heart. I know it took him hours to talk you into having sex with Lily the first time, and that worked out well for you didn't it?" Pat looked at me guiltily, recognizing that I'd already made this point. My first reaction was to keep a blank face so Pat didn't feel so bad. #4: So I said, "Wow, déjà vu again. That'd be, 'déjà vu ja vu'." No one else got my joke, but that was okay as my other two active minds did. (In case your sense of humor is under-developed, I'll explain that what I'd done was to create an experiential echo at the end of a word that means 'experiential echo'. It's a one-word joke, which I think very clearly demonstrates how elegant my sense of humor is. See if you can think of any one-word jokes of your own? I'll put another one at the end of this chapter for you.) Pat was oblivious to the joke, but recognized my main point well enough. She looked shamed and hung her head. As well she should, for not giving me the quality of sex I deserve! Julia looked at me inquiringly, so I explained (no doubt making Pat feel worse), "I made the same point to her. I also made another point similar to one of yours, that I wouldn't push her to do anything that I wasn't sure she'd enjoy." Then I realized we weren't talking about the same thing, so I added, "Pat was shy about Ava joining in, just like she was shy about you seeing her having sex just now. She's foolishly and needlessly shy. It's not like anything bad is going to happen to her. She's going to end up enjoying herself more, so it is rather silly of her." Julia said, "She'll either learn quickly, or be replaced quickly. It's up to her. Ava's taking Donna home, then she'll join you in here. I'll ask her later whether Pat needs to be fired or not. Carol and I will be in your study, for about an hour I think. Mom would like to know whether you're staying for dinner?" "I think I should spend some time at home, so I'll have dinner there. Please thank your mom." "No worries. I'll let your mom know too. You'll take Carol home, I presume?" "Sure." "That's everything I wanted to say. I'll let you get back to it - which I hope will be a much better 'it' than I saw before." Pat started trying to reassure Julia again, but Julia just walked out, saying, "See you in an hour or so. Have fun." So Pat transferred her reassurances to me, but I interrupted her with, "Pat, less lip, more hip!" I can be very smooth when I put one of my minds to it. #4: #1: We got back to 'it', as instructed by Julia. Julia had given us an hour, which wasn't long, especially to make three girls happy, so I decided not to fuck around, so to speak. I flipped Pat over, and hammered her in the traditional manner. She was a little slow getting started, but with Lily and me both working on her we were soon getting all the usual responses. By the time Pat reached her orgasm she was unsurprisingly in a MUCH better mood than earlier. To keep her that way I wanted to keep her busy, so I put the girls into a 69 with Lily on top, so I could do Lily doggy style while Pat was kept busy working on Lily from underneath. As soon as I got my cock into Lily, she started showing GREAT enthusiasm for that development. Lily was emitting lots of moans, encouraging words, body movements. "Fuck me, Mark!", "Harder! More!", "Yes, faster!", "Cum in me Mark! Cum! Cum!" She may not know much Latin or French, but she had a good grasp of modern American vocabulary. "Ahh, Lily. I'm wearing a rubber." "I know. But cumming in me is number one best. Very sexy. I LOVE IT! Yes, harder, faster. You cum too. Oh, SO good." Lily was bouncing around having a GREAT time. Either Pat had developed extraordinary abilities with her tongue, or Lily was a very excited girl, because Lily was reaching her orgasm extremely quickly. She was urging me to cum in her, which I agreed to. It was an EXCELLENT idea because for the last couple of hours I'd been looking at naked girls and having them take turns on my cock, so I was long overdue for a good cum. A few seconds later, Lily's moans started rapidly rising in volume, and very soon she was screaming, "AIEEE!" Being a man of my word, I let myself cum, about a second or two after she did. I felt heaps of delightful contraction from Lily and I thoroughly enjoyed my cum, but not nearly as much as Lily obviously and loudly enjoyed hers. Lily collapsed on top of Pat. It took Pat a little struggle to clear room to talk in, before Pat could said, "Boy, she was VERY excited! I've never seen her like that before." "I'll say! She was as excited as I've seen any girl. If you've developed some new tricks with your tongue, I hope you'll teach them to me?" "Haha. It wasn't me. If you've got some new tricks with your cock, I hope you'll use them on me, haha. She's very excited that you agreed about her serving you. I've never heard of a girl wanting to serve like that before. I guess it must be very Chinese if her parents agree. My parents would have heart attacks if I told them I was going to do anything like that. They'd even have heart attacks if I told them LILY was going to do it." "Yeah. Have heart attacks, and then go to the authorities to complain about me. I'm not sure what the complaint would actually be, as it's hardly involuntary, to put it mildly!" "Just as well my parents hardly ever ask me which of my friends have given themselves into sexual slavery recently, so the subject probably won't come up. But if it does, I'll try to remember not to mention you and Lily, haha. More to the point: what about your parents? Or Julia's parents too, I guess, if Lily comes here often. Are you going to tell them? Because they might find out anyway." I didn't expect any major problems with either set of parents. Probably not even any minor problems. Explaining that to Pat might be a bit awkward, so I just said, "I'll give it some thought." Lily was starting to find some energy, and was beginning to move again. I'd noticed that the girls knew their ways around each other's bodies a lot more confidently than the last time I'd seen them together, back when I'd introduced them to this particular type of 'enlightenment', and I was rather eager to see them making out together, so I asked them to lay on their sides facing each other, and to start making out while I changed rubbers. Lily asked, "You cum inside me?" "Inside the rubber inside of you, yes." "Ahh, VERY good!" Lily was very happy with my confirmation. "Why is it so good, Lily? I can't see that it makes any real difference." "VERY important! Umm, good for relax you, good for health, good for yin yang balance. Hard to explain in English. Also very dishonor on me if you don't. That's why I get pill, so you can do best way." "Umm, if I'm going to cum inside you without a rubber, you have to make ABSOLUTELY sure you never forget to take the pill. That's very important too." "I show you packet every day. You see you can trust me. Very important you trust me." I didn't know whether Lily meant "every day" literally, but it was unnecessarily excessive. Every now and then was fine, as the packets have each pill numbered so it would be easy to see that she was keeping current. Checking just on the days I was going to screw her would be sufficient. I tried to tell her that, but she wouldn't accept it, "I carry and show you EVERY day at school, and when I see you Saturday and Sunday. Trust you and me very important. I trust you; you trust me. I show you." The thought of her showing me her pill packet every day at school was somewhat embarrassing, but I didn't appear to have much choice. It would be safest and the most reassuring too, so I gave up trying to talk her out of it. By now I was wearing a new rubber. I snuggled in behind Pat, raising my head on a couple of pillows folded in half, so I could get a clear view of what the girls were doing to each other. I had no need of a go-hard, that's for sure! I took a moment or three to admire them in action, then joined in (literally, choosing Pat to join myself into). We soon had some very enjoyable three-way action going. There was a knock on the door. It's too hard to hold a conversation through the almost soundproof door, so I just yelled, "Come in." It obviously wasn't Julia, but hopefully it'd be Ava. I was very comfortable exactly where I was, and didn't want to un-join. It was Ava who entered. I immediately resumed some slow thrusts into Pat. Pat had stiffened in shyness, so I quietly told her, "Relax and participate, or I'll tell Julia on you. You need to get used to this, Pat, and you ARE going to enjoy it." By now Ava was beside the bed, and she asked, "Can I join in?" I answered for all of us, "Yes please. I'm sure we'll all enjoy that. Pat's not sure of that yet so let's start by giving her a good time." Ava started undressing, saying, "Sorry I'm a little late. Your parents thought of some more questions between Julia's call and my arriving there. They kept me talking for a while..." Mrs. Cheng was in charge of all the dinner preparations, so I couldn't imagine how my parents could talk about that for long. And her referring to both my parents didn't make much sense either, as Dad would be uninterested in the planning for a dinner party, unless they wanted his help with a barbeque, and I doubted that was the case. " ... They teased me about it too, and also asked me how Donna had behaved herself. I said she was very good. That was okay, wasn't it?" "Sure, she was almost perfect, but I'm confused about my parents teasing you. How could they tease you about a dinner party?" "They teased me about Lily serving you. Didn't Julia tell you that she told your parents about it?" "No, not that it's a big deal. How did my parents react?" "They were amused mostly, especially your dad and Donna, although Donna complained ... No, it doesn't matter." Ava's sudden decision not to tell me what Donna had complained about might've been a good idea, so I let it drop. Ava restarted, "Julia also told her parents, but we didn't tell mine. Maybe we will later, but they need to get to know you better first. I told them we'll have dinner with them on Friday night. Is that okay?" "Sure. It's going to be a great weekend for food! Let's roll Pat onto her back so we can all work on her at once." I had to disconnect, but only for a few seconds. Soon we were going at it again. I quickly noticed that Ava was treating Pat very nicely: lots of compliments about her body and beauty, was making sure Pat was happy ("Do you like this?", "Do you want a pillow?"), etc. It wasn't Ava's normal gung-ho style, so I suspected Julia had given Ava some advice. #4: #3: #1: #4: #3: #4: #3: #4: It only took a few minutes before Pat started showing us that she quite liked having sex this way. She'd relaxed, and had then started getting more and more aroused. Hardly surprising, really. A few minutes later Pat's climax was approaching nicely. Just for fun, when she was very close, I got the girls to slow down. We held Pat a little short of her goal, much to her frustration. I told her, "I don't know, Pat. It might've been wrong of me to insist on Ava's involvement. I'm beginning to think we should discuss that for a while. Human relationships are tricky things, and there are many aspects we should have considered..." I kept the teasing going, while Pat was getting increasing strident about my getting back to business. "Are you trying to tell me that you're happy that Ava's involved now?" "Fuck yes! Please stop teasing me. Finish me off PLEASE! I'm SO close!" "Are you sure you're sincere? You're not just trying to humor me?" Apparently she was VERY sincere, and had very little sense of humor about it. I took pity on her, signaling Ava and Lily to go for it again. Pat cried in relief, "YES!" as I started thrusting in earnest (in PAT, I hasten to clarify. Any Earnests can stay well away from me). After Pat's climax I checked the time, and we really only had time for one more good one, which had to be Ava's of course. Lily and I started on Ava immediately, leaving Pat to join in when she had recovered sufficiently. We spend some time having fun with Ava, with Lily showing nothing but total enthusiasm. Even, I suspected, overdone enthusiasm. I was pretty sure Lily was deliberately trying hard to please me, which - unsurprisingly - pleased me very much. I couldn't fault her attitude, and I SURE wasn't going to try to 'correct' it! Pat joined in after a little while. She was hesitant at first, but decreasingly so, in response to Ava several times saying things like, "Oh yes, just like that, Pat," or, "You're very good, Pat." I didn't need the rubber with Ava, so at the appropriate time I pulled it off and threw it in the trash can (I'm an EXCELLENT shot when I throw small things, thanks to NP), and started inserting myself into Ava. Lily saw my action, and said, "Dinner Saturday, doctor Sunday," she pointed at my cock in Ava, "me Wednesday. Then I make you very happy many times. I try very hard make you very, very happy man." That sounded good to me. I was too busy to discuss it further, so I just said, "Good. Let's make Ava happy now." Ava agreed with that idea, and Lily obeyed, so we returned to assuring Ava's happiness. Just before the hour was up, Ava and I had a good cum. In addition to my usual thought of: , I had two others. First, that Julia would probably arrive one hour after she'd told me "See you in one hour or so," as she'd repeated it, so it'd be better to have us still in action when she arrived. Pat, and to a MUCH lesser extent Lily, need to learn to get used to multiple girls. Second, I wasn't sure - having no clue - what Lily thought was so wonderful about me cumming in her, but I'd just cum in Ava, so I asked, "Lily, you like my cum, right?" "Yes." "Do you want to lick it out of Ava?" I was curious to see what Lily's reaction would be. I knew what Ava's would be, as she and Julia often 'cleaned' each other (I usually didn't join in when they did that, as it wasn't really my thing, because it was really my stuff). Julia has me trained not to mind going down on a girl after I've cum in said girl, but it's not the highlight of my week. Lily showed a short hesitation, then said, "Okay," and moved to start doing so. It was a middle-of-the-road response. No revulsion, but not the wild enthusiasm I'd semi-expected. So my cum apparently had no Chinese mystical significance. Not that my not gaining understanding was a big deal, as I was well used to not understanding females' motivations by now. The added confusion caused by the cultural difference and Lily's English not being very good meant that I probably had no chance of learning what was going on. I understood the result well enough though, and that was entirely acceptable to me. We fooled around together, with my making sure Pat was involved, for the five minutes it took for Julia to come in. Julia's first comment was, "I see Pat's much happier than last time I saw her." "Yes," agreed Pat. "I'm sorry, Julia. I had a good time. Ava's a nice girl." #4: #1: #3: #4: Julia asked, "Exactly what are you sorry for, Pat?" It was very much the type of question Vanessa would've asked. "Umm," stalled Pat, knowing she'd better get this right. "For being a nuisance, of course." Pat looked at Julia, to confirm that more was required, "and also because, umm," and then in a rush, "I wasn't trying hard enough to make Mark happy." Julia corrected, "You weren't trying AT ALL to make Mark happy, but I'll accept that answer. Are you sorry for any other reasons?" "Umm, for being selfish?" "That's just another way of saying you weren't trying to make Mark happy. How about 'Not trusting Mark'?" "Oh yes! I'm sorry for that too. I should've trusted Mark more." "You should have trusted him TOTALLY, but 'more' would be a good start. How do you think you'd do if I put you in one of the pipeline groups and made your Liaison job depend on your being the sole survivor of the intake?" Pat didn't like the sound of that! Before she could put voice to it, Julia added, "You should know Mark's preferences better than any of the other girls in the group, but it's no good your knowing Mark if you don't bother to use that knowledge. I wonder whether the best way to cure your shyness might be for Mark to invite all his soccer team around to watch you next time." #1: Julia turned to me, "Would your team come to watch Pat bouncing up and down on you when she was naked?" Ava started giggling, saying, "That'd be fun. I'd like to see that too." #3: #4: #1: #3: #4: I answered, "I'm sure they'd love to see Pat naked. She's a beautiful girl with a very good figure. The problem wouldn't be getting them to come, but getting them to leave afterward." "You wouldn't!" exclaimed Pat, in horror. "No, of course not. Mark and I would only do things with you that we know you'd like, otherwise you wouldn't and shouldn't trust us. I'm simply pointing out that what you were shy about was trivial. It never ceases to amaze me how reluctant girls are to do one single thing which is slightly outside their comfort zone, even though they're getting far more from Mark than they're being required to give. I guess most girls must be incurably selfish." "Not me! I'm good now. I see what I was doing wrong, and I won't do it again." "I'll say one more thing to you. When you get home, spend some time thinking about how far you are willing to go to stay with Mark. Would you have sex with a different girl, if Mark wanted you to?" "Yes, definitely. I know the answer to that now." "What about with another guy if Mark wanted you to?" #4: #3: #4: #1: "Umm..." "What about with his entire soccer team. Plus the coach, for good measure, haha." "I'm really not comfortable..." "Don't worry about answering, Pat. Mark would never ask you to do those things, so your answers are irrelevant. They were just obvious examples to give you. My point is that you've got limits, and you should think about where they are. That way if Mark asks you to do anything that's new to you but inside your comfort zone, you can adapt quickly rather than lying like a corpse for God knows how long, wasting everybody's time while you dither. -- "I know that if Mark had asked Ava or me that question, we'd be on our back with our legs spread before you'd finished saying 'Umm'. What's a few minutes of discomfort compared to the chance of a lifetime with Mark? I don't expect you to be as committed to Mark as Ava and I are, but you should have some idea of your level of commitment. Think about it when you get home." "Okay. But I don't think I'd like to have sex with a dozen guys." "Which is exactly the self-centered point of view that I was talking about. If Mark asked me the same thing, my reaction would be that if that's what I had to do to make Mark happy, then I'd do it. You think about things from your point of view, while I think about them from Mark's. I'm not blaming you too much for it though, because you're not Mark's girlfriend. I'm just giving you something to think about, in part so you'll be better able to talk with other girls in your role as Liaison. -- "Changing the subject: Carol and I have finished updating the website's documents, Mark. I got Carol to do most of the typing while I called the 12th grade phone numbers we have. I've told them there'll be a website advertised around school starting tomorrow for girls who are interested in dating you, and there'll be a lunch meeting on Wednesday to discuss it. I asked them to spread the word, although I doubt most of them will. Hopefully one or two will, but it's not essential. -- "Carol and I had one little idea. Where we usually have our lunch is where we wanted to go to get away from everyone, but it has become where everyone goes to meet us. We've chosen a different spot for Wednesday's meeting, and for all the group meetings from now on. We've included a note that you'll often have lunch in the meeting spot, so girls can meet you there to ask any questions they might have, but if they see you eating lunch somewhere else, including in the lunchroom on a wet day, they're not to approach. That probably won't work too well, but at least it'll give us an excuse to yell at girls to go away when we want to have a private lunch or a day off from the masses. -- "My last point is that once we advertise the site around school, more than just pretty girls will look at it. There are going to be many curious boys, and quite possibly some adults will find out about it too. There's nothing incriminating there, but you'll be on the receiving end of quite a few different reactions. Are you worried about that enough to stop using it, or we could water it down for you?" "Water it down how?" I asked. "By making it nothing more than a place where we advertise meeting times, where we'd spread all the information verbally." "That wouldn't work. I'm sure I don't know half the things you're going to use the website for, but even what I know about won't work verbally. Once the pipeline's in operation, things will be happening faster than you can feed them back to everyone verbally." Julia was nodding along with me, so there was no reason for me to keep talking (who was I convincing?). -- I changed tack, "I couldn't care less about boys hassling me verbally. If they take it beyond verbal, they're fools, and they're the ones who're going to suffer. The Eatons' fracas showed me that I don't have much to worry about from physical aggression. Nah, go for it. I can easily handle some ridicule. You've done a lot of work on it already and it should be interesting to see what happens." "Thanks." Julia pulled some pieces of paper out of her pocket, saying, "This is what I want written on the boards around school. I'll get a dozen or so girls to write them in every room to blanket the high school. I'll give you each one of these before you leave, but have a look now." Julia passed a couple to us: Any girls interested in EGG, see: www.EggsSearch.com.hk password: 'EGG' expanded, one word, no punctuation or spaces. PLEASE LEAVE ("PLEASE LEAVE" is what people write under their messages to request teachers not rub them off in the course of their lessons. The teachers are pretty good about it, provided the messages are infrequent and are in an unused and unwanted corner of the board. Julia was being her typically thorough self in reminding the writers about it.) Julia commented, "Any girl who's too dumb to work out the password, is too dumb for you to date." "It's fine by me. One problem might be that jealous boys rub them off as fast as they're written up." "That's true. I'll warn the girls that if that happens they'll have to guard them until enough girls have seen them, or maybe better, ask the teacher if they can write a note up just as class is about to start. The teacher wouldn't let a boy rub it off immediately." "Good idea. There'll be a lot of people curious about my absence on Tuesday. I presume you'll be telling them I'm at OSU all day?" "Yeah." Julia then smiled, adding, "If in doubt, tell the truth." There, of course, being no doubt in this case, and a similar amount of the truth. "I've got no other comments. I guess we should get up and get showered now?" "Yes please. I've got some things to do this afternoon. Another driving lesson and homework; mundane things like that. You'll be studying tomorrow morning?" "Yeah. I'll be reaching the point where one of the courses has an assignment too. Prof should have already put it in the study..." "He has," confirmed Julia. "Good. It shouldn't take me long. Prof told me just to read it through and only do the questions that look tricky. I wish our school assignments worked like that!" "Yeah, that'd be great. You know that Dad's doing that just for you, that college assignments don't work like that normally?" "Yeah, he explained that. The assignment is really just a way for the lecturer to check everyone is keeping up. Prof checks me at the breakfast table often enough, and my test results were reasonably good, haha." The four of us who were sticky and smelly (four! A new record), got up, grabbed our discarded towels, and headed for the shower. We didn't play around unnecessarily, as Julia was waiting. I did need (so it wasn't "unnecessary") to play around with Pat a little. She needed some cheering up after Julia's little lecture. I joked and reassured her into feeling better. I also felt her into feeling better too; I particularly enjoyed that cheering up technique. My offer to drive her home relieved her even more, as she'd been a little worried about being driven by Lily. ^ (As promised above, another of my favorite one-word jokes is "entorpy". The physicists among you should recognize it as a word that has suffered a loss of order.) ------- Chapter 168: Ruminations on G-String Bikinis Sunday, May 1, 2005 (Continued) As soon as we started heading downstairs, Lily became visibly eager to leave. Not in the sense that she was in a hurry, more that she seemed excited to be leaving, creating one more Lily-mystery. She made the time to ask me, "When you home, park car inside or outside?" "I park it on the street. Why?" Lily smiled, "You see later." I could only think of one possibility, but it seemed so unlikely it wasn't worth mentioning. I would wait for "You see later" to happen. While we were making the rest of our farewells, Lily already rushing to her car, I explained to Julia that I was dropping Pat off because Lily only had a restricted license. Julia looked surprise, but didn't make a comment. Maybe because it would have been drowned out by the sound of Lily's car accelerating down the street. Not quite "in a cloud of burning rubber", but not far short of it. Lily was long gone by the time we were ready to get into my car. Pat insisted on sitting in the back, explaining, "It'll save me some explaining when you're seen dropping me off. Parents can be a pain sometimes." It meant Carol could sit next to me, which was no hardship at all for me. #3: On the way to Pat's place, I asked her what Lily's driving quality was like. "I've had half a dozen rides with her, and she seems fine. I was surprised to hear her say she didn't have her full license. I assumed she did because she offers to pick me up." "How do you feel about riding with her in the future?" "Okay, I guess. I'd rather go with someone who was legal though. Thanks for taking me home now." "Seems the least I could do, considering how much pleasure you've given me recently." "Haha. We could argue about who gained the most out of that. It's been a weird day: Julia was right to tell me off for being silly, and you were right that Ava was very nice in bed. I've never had sex with so many people before, but it was good fun." "I think most people haven't had sex with so many people before, so you've probably had an unusual experience. You could ask around, if you want to find out for sure." "Haha, I think not. The other weird thing was Lily. Her being so determined to serve you was VERY strange. I knew she was interested in you, but I had no idea she had that in mind. I've never heard of anyone doing anything like that before. Have you?" "No, never. I agree it's very strange. I don't understand why she's doing it, but it's obviously important to her." "Yeah. Are you going to do what she wants: call her in the middle of the night for sex?" "First I'm going to make sure Mr. Cheng and I talk about it at the dinner, to make sure her parents really are as approving as she says. In the bizarre event that they are, I think I probably will do what she wants once, possibly twice, per week. Mostly during daylight hours. It seems extremely important to her and even her parents too. The only reason I can think of for not doing it, is because it seems insanely inconvenient for her, but she's made it clear that's irrelevant. I wouldn't mind if I called her and she told me she'd rather go back to sleep, but somehow I can't see that happening, can you?" "Not hardly. She's a strange one." #1: #3: #4: #3: #1: #4: #3: #4: #1: #3: "Yeah, she seems strange. Obviously she's not really, if her parents agree with it. It'll just be a cultural thing that we don't understand. I'll agree that it's a very strange cultural thing though. By the way, I won't just be calling Lily for sex in the middle of the night. I'll try to find opportunities for her to do more normal things with me, Julia and whoever else. I wouldn't be surprised if Lily's new relationship with me results in your being around more often, assuming that you'd like that and that Julia hasn't scared you off?" "Julia did scare me, but not off. I don't enjoy the times she's scarily intense about you, but everything else is very enjoyable. My old boyfriend would have freaked out if he'd seen me half an hour ago. He often tried to push me to do more things and I always refused." "Oh, what sort of things?" "NOTHING like as wild as the things I do with you! I still can't believe I had sex with a girl I'd barely spoken to before." "Had it, and enjoyed it." "Yeah, I can't believe that part either. Ahh, I can't see myself ever agreeing to have sex with other boys for you though, especially not your whole soccer team. I hope you don't mind too much?" "About that specifically, I don't mind at all. I can't see myself ever asking you to so it's never going to be an issue. But there might be other things that I want you to do which your refusal could be disappointing. Or maybe even a nuisance or worse." "Like what?" "I don't know. If they'd come up already, I would have asked you already." Actually Pat would have been an excellent person to do the tit flash for Chloe (Pat's tits are pretty damned good. Not in Chloe's league of course, but still VERY nice). But Carol had that uncovering covered, especially as Carol's complete cooperation was guaranteed. The fact that Carol was known as a 13-year old lesbian was also useful, although just as a cherry on top. I didn't want to mention that plan to Pat now though, because we had to make sure Chloe never found out that it was planned in advance so the fewer people that knew, the better. I liked one of the half-ideas that crossed my mind as a result of Pat's question, so I said, "I remember we talked about G-string or thong bikinis last time we were together. I've got something coming up soon where it might be useful to have you wear one of those, with an appropriately small top as well." (This was the visit to the Aquatic Center with Chloe.) "Haha. You've been looking at me naked for the last few hours, and you're trying to claim it'd be 'useful' for me to wear an indecent bikini. You've got some weird ideas." I had mentioned the G-string bikini example both because it allowed me to claim I was altruistic, and especially because it included a G-string bikini. (Pat was right that I must be weird, because even after seeing her nude, I STILL would like to see her in a thong bikini.) I said, "The reason your wearing one would be useful is for someone else's benefit, not for my visual pleasure. For another girl's benefit, in case you're still worrying about my soccer team. Sometimes I get involved in some strange things. You don't know about hardly any of those, but they happen quite often." I was mostly talking crap. I was helping Chloe so I could later help myself to her body. As another example of a "strange thing" I've got myself involved in, Julia and I are helping Ava for the next few years, but once again it's because I'd wanted more sex and we overshot the target. Lily was another example of a strange thing, so I added, "If I let Lily come over in the middle of the night, and other similar things, it's not because I need her for sex; I get all the great sex I need from Julia and Ava. I can't say I understand how, but my doing so would apparently be helping Lily in some way too. My motives for seeing you in a tiny bikini would seem obvious, and I won't disagree with the obvious, but in this case you've got the main reason wrong." "Oh." Then with a very concerned tone in her voice, "Do you really want me to buy a bikini like that?" The answer was an emphatic "YES!" but there was almost two months before summer vacation started and Pat was clearly reluctant, so it was better to go slow. I still wanted to get her into one, of course, but slowly would be better. I said, "No. If I'd wanted you to do that, I would've asked you outright rather than hinting at it. Although you've got a great body and would look fantastic in such a bikini, you'd be far too self-conscious. I'm trying to teach the girl to be more confident, so you wouldn't help." -- I thought of a little addition. It was slightly nasty, and therefore irresistible, "Carol is going to be doing it. Her willingness to help me exceeds just about every other consideration in her life, certainly including something as minor as self-consciousness. I'm very lucky to have a sister as wonderful as her." Carol predictably answered, "Not NEARLY as lucky as I am to have a brother like you. Not by MILES!" "I disagree. I'm pretty sure you look MUCH better in a thong bikini than I do." "Maybe we should both put one on, and ask several people what they think?" "Ha! Like THAT'S gonna happen!" Pat, half-scandalized, asked, "Carol, are you really going to wear a thong bikini in public?" "I trust Mark TOTALLY, which is a very good feeling to have about someone. Agreeing to flash a bit of skin is easy. To be honest, I have a thong one-piece, not a bikini. Julia and I think my one-piece is much sexier for my body than a bikini. Like most guys, Mark's got the idea that smaller is sexier. Guys aren't very sophisticated when it comes to sexiness, or about everything else either, come to that, haha." #4: #1: #3: #4: [When we'd avoided Pretty Emily's boyfriend's eyes by pretending to shop, we'd picked up a thong bikini and held it up in front of ourselves. I hoped it looked like we were just perving at it, because the alternative was that we were sizing it against our own body!] After a couple of seconds' thought, Pat asked, "Would Julia really sleep with the whole soccer team for Mark?" #4: #1: #4: Carol said, "Pat, you're playing in the big league now. Mark is so many miles above ordinary guys that he's worth far more effort than you're making so far. More and more girls are recognizing how important he is, so you're going to get crowded out if you don't start trying harder." "But I don't want to have sex with his soccer team! That's not normal. No guy should ask a girl to do that!" Carol opened her mouth to say something, but thought better of it. She closed her mouth, and just shrugged. "Why'd you shrug?" demanded Pat. Carol paused, then said, "Because you don't get it. You're not even thinking in the right direction, so it sounds like you won't ever get it." "What do you mean? What 'right direction'?" "Mark wouldn't even hold your breast in the hot tub last Sunday, remember?" Carol saw Pat did. "So what's the chance he'd ask you to have sex with his soccer team?" "He never would. So all this is about nothing?" "No, it's about if he did ask you to, you should. He'd have to have a very, very serious reason to ask that, wouldn't he?" "But he's only a 16-year old boy, no - a FIFTEEN-year old boy, so how could he possibly have a reason that serious? Much more likely he'd be trying to show off for his friends. You know what boys are like!" #4: Carol answered, "Obviously having sex with his team is a stupid example, but don't focus on that specifically; think more generally. You've seen Mark doing incredible things: his genius at school, his bowling 300, and many other things. You've heard Julia say many times how important he is, and you've seen that Julia and I are convinced of his importance. But you won't accept it yourself. You lack the courage to put yourself in his hands, which is a pity, because you're going to be pushed away if you don't find the courage and trust soon." We'd arrived at Pat's house during Carol's talk, and had parked. Pat briefly said, "I'm not used to trusting boys that much. They'd take advantage terribly." "You don't have to tell ME that! Their misbehavior turned me into a lesbian, remember. But we're talking about Mark. Obviously you're happy to be taken advantage of sexually by him, but what about if he asked you to give him all your money? Would you do that? Or - 'oh the horror' - EVEN wear a small bikini in public?" "My parents would NEVER let me wear a bikini like that." I was getting bored with this conversation. Pat wasn't going to suddenly see the light, and this was a very good moment to finish the conversation (with buying a small bikini the last thought in her mind), so I said, "There you go then! If your parents won't let you, they won't let you. I've got some things I need to do, Pat, so thanks for everything. I guess you don't want me to kiss you goodbye in front of your house?" "Ahh, no. But, umm... ," "I've got to go, and there's no hurry to think about things like Julia and Carol suggested. Take your time. I'll see you at school tomorrow." "Ahh, okay. Goodbye. Thanks for the lift, and the fun back at Julia's. Sorry I was so reluctant at the beginning. I'm not..." "All's well that ends well, Pat. And the middle was pretty enjoyable too! Haha." I had a good idea for the very last thing to say, so I added, "I don't know whether Julia or I will invite you to go swimming with us next weekend. We haven't had time to plan it yet. But if we do invite you, please don't turn up in a sexy bikini. You'd look nice, but you'd be too self-conscious. Helping the other girl is far more important to me than looking at your body. See you tomorrow, bye." Pat took my very strong hint and started getting out of the car, even though girls HATE leaving emotional issues unresolved. While she was getting out, I had some thoughts about what I'd just said, #3: #4: We tossed it around for a while, and came up with some thoughts we were quite proud of, because it meant we were learning about the terribly tricky things that girls are. The two main aspects were: We can't have girls thinking they understand us or what's going on. If they understand, the next thing you know they'll be making decisions. We definitely don't want that! They'll decide to do crazy things like go shopping rather than have sex, or decide not to wear tiny bikinis, or other disasters. In other words, their priorities are wrong (i.e., different from my priorities). This is mostly about girls like Pat. Obviously it's only half as bad to have Julia in charge because she's great at enhancing my sex-life. She's a disaster for my shopping-life, and she occasionally does silly things like agree to let Carol buy a one-piece swimsuit rather than a G-string bikini, but I have to accept those problems for the greater good. Or to put it another way, I've got to take the great with the terrible. Girls seem to have this uncontrollable urge to think the best of guys. Thank God, because if guys were treated with the respect they deserved, humanity would have long since gone extinct (so girls' perception failures must be genetically programmed into them, which is probably the explanation for why they're so illogical - the survival of the species depends on it!). When a guy confuses a girl - which is easily done, simply by telling her not to wear a sexy bikini, as that goes against everything she's ever learned about guys - her mind doesn't know what to think, and grasps at straws. Girls' in-built optimism about guys makes them put their confusion in the best possible light, i.e., they're convinced the guy must be even better than they'd previously understood him to be. I guess that if girls had a bad opinion of a guy in the first place, being confused about him might make them decide he was even worse, but it's been too long since I was in that position, and I didn't notice people well enough back then. The most important aspect is the first. You MUST confuse girls! If I'd left Pat with a positive, friendly, easily understood last thought, then she would've known what to think. For the reasons given in Aspect #1, if you want to get a girl to do what you want her to do (and what guy doesn't?), letting her make the decisions is fatal. Her understanding the situation is a VERY undesirable outcome, ESPECIALLY with a desirable girl. With so many guys chasing them, they tend to form the opinion that they're more important than any one guy. Which is doubtless true, but I mustn't allow that belief to be applied to me. By leaving Pat not knowing what to think, she'd flail around mentally, grasping at whatever straws occurred to her. In this case the closest straws were that I was a wonderful person, and that her self-consciousness about wearing a tiny bikini was some sort of problem, and that it was hampering the very worthwhile and selfless thing I was apparently doing for someone else. Ideally Pat would soon feel compelled to buy herself a G-string bikini. I gave it about a 30% chance, whereas simply asking her to buy a G-string bikini would've been a waste of breath. 30% wasn't much, but it was a very valuable start. After one or two further confusing reminders, the accumulative effect should make her buying such a bikini almost certain. Ignoring - of course - the nonsense about her parents not approving. What possible relevance did that have? If Pat didn't have a good hiding place, she could keep her bikini at my place, as it wouldn't be taking up much room and she obviously won't need to wear it except when she is with me. ^ [[I've written that with the same tongue-in-cheek attitude as we (my minds) had when we first thought it through. Although our discussion had been humorous at the time, even then we'd appreciated that there were some aspects of truth to our amusing theory. We didn't grasp them all, but we did grasp some. Pat didn't understand much about me. Partly because we hadn't shown her the serious stuff (NP, blobs, beating world records, etc.), but mainly because the full implications of what she had seen (e.g., bowling 300, winning the 10k, etc.) hadn't occurred to her. Hardly surprising, as she was only sixteen. Pat's lack of comprehension would prove to be typical of the people (mostly kids) I dealt with, as very few of them would comprehend the significance of what I could do. Thus a good technique for manipulating Pat would be widely applicable. If I wanted someone who didn't understand what was happening to do something for me, often the best thing to do was to confuse them while scattering a few desirable 'straws' around for them to grasp at. If someone didn't feel confused, then they would feel that they knew what the situation was. From this erroneous base, their decisions and actions would be outside my control, and quite likely not what I wanted them to be; whether that was their buying a G-string bikini, or something more important. (I have to admit that there are some things in life more important than getting well-built girls into G-string bikinis. There are also a great number of LESS important things too). It didn't occur to me at the time, but I'd picked up my small insight about confusing people from watching Julia operate, as it was one of her techniques. As I became more aware of it as a technique, I more often spotted Julia using it, and I got better at using it myself. As you'll read later, I went on to use it very often, and sometimes in situations VASTLY more important than getting gorgeous girls into G-string bikinis.]] ^ As Carol and I were pulling away from Pat's house, I said, "You talked to Pat very well, Carol. I was impressed by how well you tried to convince her." Carol answered, "But I didn't convince her. I might as well not have bothered." "No, not at all. You've planted the seed. Or more accurately, you've probably watered a seed that was already planted. You helped, and maybe the next time you or Julia talk with her about it she'll start to understand. -- "But mainly I was praising you for how well you spoke. Pat's not being able to see things the same way you, Julia and Ava do doesn't subtract from how impressively you spoke. If you speak like that to other girls, I'm sure you'll sway many of them. Somehow I get the feeling that there's going to be a huge number of girls coming down the pipeline at me soon, haha." "Yeah, forty eight at a time. That's going to keep you busy. Not TOO busy, I hope?" "I know you didn't get any loving today, which must have been frustrating for you. I've been planning for us to spend some quality time in our room this afternoon. That's what I meant when I told Pat I had something else to do. I'd MUCH rather be in our room with you, than sitting around talking to her." "Drive faster!" "Haha. I'm on the speed limit already, but I admire your attitude. There was one thing you didn't say to Pat that I thought was so obvious it must have occurred to you. Not that I'm criticizing, because I don't think it would have mattered what you told her, but how come you didn't make the point that you'd sleep with my soccer team if I'd asked you to? Coming from a lesbian, that would have been a very powerful statement." "Haha Mark. That's SUCH a male thing to say. Not only wouldn't I talk like that, but Pat doesn't think of things that way either. Sleeping with your team is a very silly example. I can't understand why Julia used it. It's very unlike her to talk with a girl that way. To you maybe, but not to a girl." "Oh. Umm, I don't know why Julia used that example on Pat, but Julia found out a while ago that Ava would like to be caught having sex in public. One of the possible scenarios, was for her and me to be caught by my soccer team. Ava doesn't want to have sex with them, just with me while they watch." "That'd be very sexy. I wish I could be involved in that too!" "Haha. Unfortunately that'd have far more dire consequences than my being caught with Ava. It's academic anyway, even with Ava, because I haven't yet thought of a way of making it work." "Why not?" asked Carol, very eagerly. "Two big problems worry me: That they might all want to have sex with Ava, and some of them might have cellphone cameras." "Of course they'll want to have sex with Ava. You mean they might try to force it?" "Yeah. Maybe at the time, or maybe later. If they decide Ava's some sort of slut, they might feel they're allowed to hit on her aggressively. Some guys can get pretty silly about sex." "So you have to make sure they understand she's yours. You'll be fucking her, so that should be obvious. Oh, drive faster Mark." I glanced at Carol, and saw that it didn't really matter how fast I drove, because she wasn't waiting until we got home. #4: I suspected that now isn't a good time to discuss the problems of cellphone cameras. Which reminded me that I should use some of the $1.75 million to buy myself a better cellphone. #4: I told Carol, "I could be fucking Ava doggie style, while her head is between your legs, licking your pussy. You'd both be naked, and the guys would be able to see EVERYTHING you've got. Ava would be rocked back and forth by my thrusts, letting all the guys catch glimpses of your beautiful, wet pussy. Your wonderful large breasts would be exposed the whole time, and I'd be squeezing your erect nipples with my invisible fingertips, to arouse you as much as possible..." #1: #4: #1: #4: #1, #3: "Ohh, YES!" I occasionally had to concentrate on driving, but for most of the rest of the trip home I was able to keep NP'ing Carol. Something she was very happy about, especially after she realized that if she lifted her skirt high enough, and pulled her panties to the right with her right hand, then I had a clear line of sight to her pussy and clit. ------- Chapter 169: Dad and I Get Our Cars Washed Sunday, May 1, 2005 (Continued) It only took a few minutes to get home, by which time Carol was VERY eager to get me inside. As soon as the car was nearly stopped, Carol was opening her door and demanding, "Come on! Hurry up!" "Haha. I'm coming; I'm coming. I'll just get the pizza out of the trunk." (I didn't bother writing earlier that I'd taken the pizza when I'd left the Williams'. You should know by now that there was no chance was of me leaving it behind. Julia had put it in the trunk for me, explaining, "I don't want it to smell up the car," as if the smell of pizza was somehow a bad thing!) "Leave it! It's not going anywhere." It's VERY hard to leave pizza, but I forced myself to do it. Sex with a very horny Carol was an excellent alternative. That, and she was dragging me by the arm so I didn't have much choice. On the way up the path, I teased, "I wonder if Dad wants me to do any chores?" Carol just pulled my arm harder. I said, "Hi, Mom. Bye, Mom," as I was dragged past Mom. In our room, as Carol's clothes were flying off her, she demanded, "Tell me what we'll be doing in front of your team again." #4: #3: #4: #3: #4: We put our enthusiasm to good use. After several rapid repeats of the "good use" (it'd turned out to be a VERY good use!), there were some knocks on our door, with Mom calling out, "It's just me." "Hang on!" After some scrambling to get under the covers, I called, "Come." Mom stuck her head in the door, saying, "There's a little Asian girl outside washing your car. I guess that would be Lily, and I guess you weren't expecting her, judging by your current activities?" "Ahh. It had crossed my mind that she might come over to do that, but a wild animal distracted me, and I, ouch! Did you know that there's perfectly good pizza in the, ouch! Haha. I'd better get up and talk with her, otherwise she might come in when we're not ready for her." Mom said, "That thought had crossed my mind. It might be a good idea to have a quick shower first too." I turned to Carol, "Sorry. Either we lock her out of the house, or I have to bring her in and introduce her around." "It's okay, you've taken the edge off. We can have an early night after dinner. I'll have a shower right after you, so stall her outside for five minutes before you bring her in." "Sure. I'll take my time getting the pizza out of, ouch. Haha." -- Holding Carol's hands in self-defense, I turned to Mom, "Thanks for the warning, Mom." "No problem. You know, this is the first time I've seen you two like this. Not actually 'having sex', but you know what I mean. It's rather strange for me." I was debating saying something like, "It'd probably be even weirder for us to see you and Dad doing it, especially because old people aren't supposed to have sex." I kept my mouth shut though, as it was a bit mean. I was trying to think of an improved version when Carol spoke up, "We'll do it more then, so you can get used to it. I wouldn't want you to feel strange in your own home, haha." That was a better answer than any version of mine would've been, so I said, "That's a good idea Carol. Let me know if I can be of any assistance." "Haha. I think I'll be able to fit you in somewhere." Mom said, "I'll leave you to it then," closing the door as her head withdrew. As we were getting up, Carol said, "I wonder why Lily's so eager. It's not anything like love, because she didn't seem upset about your leaving Corvallis when you graduate." "No. I agree it's not love. Devotion, but not in the way we normally mean it..." While I was talking, I was getting some casual clothes to change into after my shower, rather than the clothes Julia makes me wear in public. Carol interrupted her talk about Lily for something more important to her, telling me, "I'll choose some clothes for you. You go have your shower." Julia often uses the exact same words, so I'm well trained by now. With Carol catching that attitude, it looks like I'll never be able to choose my own clothes in the future. I went to have my shower. In the shower, it humorously occurred to me to wonder why none of my other willing serving girls had ever washed my car (whether it was "my car" or "Julia's car" didn't matter, just so long as someone washed it for me). I also wondered how Lily knew my address. She'd never been here before, and she'd never asked me where I lived. Carol brought in some truly "casual" casual clothes (sweats), I thanked her, got dressed, and went out to talk with Lily and get the pizza. Lily was working very industriously. When she saw me, she rushed over smiling, gave me a kiss, then rushed back to work. I caught up to her, and gallantly chatted with her while she worked. I had five minutes to waste so Carol could remove the smell from her body, so I asked, "How come you're washing my car, Lily?" "It dirty. I serve you." "You don't need to do this Lily. I can easily wash the car myself." "Then why dirty?" Lily's big smile showed she knew she'd gotten me with that one. I hesitated, trying to think of a good answer, which gave Lily the chance to add, "You important man. I not important. I happy do for you." #2: We decided to be generous and helpful. "Okay Lily, you win. Next time you don't need to bring your own water though," She'd brought a jerry can full, some of which she'd poured into a bucket. It must have been very heavy and difficult for her. "You can use our hose. I'll show you where it is in a few minutes. I'm curious that you knew where I live? You never asked me." "Easy." "Ahh, okay. Did you tell your mother about the dinner being on Saturday evening, and how many people?" "Yes. Father and Mother very happy. Will be VERY special meal and VERY good food. You enjoy very much." I had no doubt that I would. There are a couple of Chinese restaurants that we go to occasionally, and I've always enjoyed their food. One of them especially so, as it has an "All you can eat buffet" which had been particularly enjoyable when we'd gone there the last time. [My last merge, and hence increased appetite, was only nine or ten weeks ago, so we'd only been to one of them since then. My family doesn't eat out often, even in fairly cheap places like the Chinese restaurants we go to.] "Good. I'm looking forward to it. Is eighteen people not too many for your mother?" "Is very good. No problem. Mother very happy. Father very happy. Lily VERY happy, haha." "Okay, that's good. I left the pizza in the trunk. I'll get it while I remember." Not that I'd ever forgotten! #4: I removed the pizza box from the trunk, noticing that I now had almost the best smelling car trunk in Corvallis, beaten only by all the trunks of the pizza delivery vehicles. "Lily, I'll show you where the hose is, and then I'll take you inside to introduce you to Mom and Dad." "Okay." Lily downed tools to follow me around the side of the house. On the way, Lily said, "Mother said dinner seven o'clock. Okay?" "Yes, that's fine." After taking care of the important car-washing instructions, I took Lily inside and made the introductions. Donna was a few houses down the street, at a friends' place, but everyone else was here. Mom said, "So you want to serve Mark, Lily?" "Yes. Very much." "Why? I'm sure even in China serving a man this way is not usual." "Because Mark is VERY important man." "He's not important. He's just a 15-year old boy." #2: #4: #1: Lily answered, "Umm. Mark important now because important later. I think VERY important later." Dad said, "Yeah, especially if I can talk him into taking up basketball." Mom chuckled, while Lily looked very puzzled. Dad explained, "It's a joke I have with Fely. I tease her that Mark should get into professional sports. Fely has a different opinion." "Me too," I added. "Me too!" Lily loyally added. Grabbing my arm and holding it just like Julia does. "Sports stupid!" #4: #2: #4: #1: #4: #1: Dad's turn to chuckle, while Mom asked, "What sort of things are you going to do to serve Mark, Lily?" "Anything. Everything girl does for man. Wash clothes, make bed, make food, buy clothes, umm, and more. I can't think now." #4: #2: #1: #2: Mom said, "Everything inside this house is my job, but you're welcome to serve him outside it. Washing his car is good, as he never seems to get around to that." "Outside only?" Mom nodded. After a little thought, Lily suddenly declared, "I make Mark lunch for school!" We brownbag our lunches. Us kids make our own in the mornings, which these days usually means Carol makes them all, as she makes mine and hers, so she might as well make Donna's at the same time. Sometimes Donna has a turn, which she does fine at, as making sandwiches and dropping a piece of fruit into a bag isn't exactly rocket science. The point being that Lily's making my lunch wouldn't save me any effort, and wouldn't save my sisters much effort either, as they still need their own. The ingredients still have to be laid out, applied, put away, etc. We've had years of practice at mass-producing them quickly, so doing a few less sandwiches (okay, "quite a few less sandwiches") wouldn't save much. Lily looked very pleased with herself, so I carefully tried to turn her off the idea. "Ahh, Lily. There's no need. I always have lunch with Carol, and we make our lunch in the morning together. Making one less lunch wouldn't save much work." Carol had joined us before the introductions had finished, so she was listening. I hoped she wouldn't take my "we make" the wrong way. I was trying to hide from Lily how much Carol does for me, in case Lily eventually got suspicious at just how much that was. Lily suddenly looked even happier, "NO PROBLEM! I make Carol lunch too! Carol very important to you, so I make two!" Lily was very happy, actually clapping her hands together. It seemed a very Chinese mannerism. Which left me with a bit of a dilemma. I didn't really want to ask her to make Donna's as well, although judging by how happy she was to make Carol's, it wouldn't be a problem. The main issue was getting the lunch to Donna. If Lily brought our lunches to school, either Donna would have to come up to high school, or someone down to middle school, every morning or lunchtime. That'd be a nuisance. Mom said, "Why don't you try it for a while, and see how it goes. You might enjoy the change." It would certainly be a change. At the group lunches I'd noticed that Lily always had something very Chinese, usually eating it out of a plastic container with chopsticks. (Chopsticks hold no fear for me. I used to be embarrassingly useless at them - "Bring me a fork please!" - but since my first merge I've become agile with them, and since my second merge, VERY adept.) "Okay Lily, we'll take you up on your offer. Lunch for Carol and me at school." "Very good. I make delicious lunches." That remained to be seen, but first two ESSENTIAL points needed to be confirmed. "Starting tomorrow, right? That's not too much trouble is it?" It'd be a tragedy if neither of us provided lunch for me tomorrow. "Yes, yes. Tomorrow. No trouble." [[It was literally "no trouble" for Lily. I didn't find out until researching this, but Lily never made any of my lunches. The Chengs had a Chinese woman living with them as their housekeeper (housemaid, servant, or whatever the right word is. No doubt they used a Chinese word anyway). That lady did all the routine cooking, including Lily's lunches. Lily told her to make Carol's and mine, and Lily took the credit for it. Had Mom agreed to Lily doing my washing and ironing, Lily would have driven the pile home, got their housekeeper to do it, and then driven it back.]] The remaining essential issue was, "You know I eat much more than normal people, right? So I need a BIG lunch." "Yes." #1: "You're going to make me a BIG lunch?" Holding out my hands, to indicate a very big BIG. "Tomorrow, a BIG lunch for me, and an ordinary-sized lunch for Carol, right?" "Haha. Yes Mark. I understand. I look after you good. I see you eat, so I know." #1: I suggested, "Shall I give you the combination to my locker, so you can put Carol's and my lunches in there when you arrive, rather than your carrying them around?" We're not really supposed to let anyone else know our locker combinations, but this is IMPORTANT! "Okay?" "It's: 1, 4, 1, 5. Can you remember that? It's the first four decimal places of pi." "I remember. '1, 4, 1, 5.' Is a very good Chinese number." "Really?" "Yes. The Heavens favor you." [[Lily was bullshitting as it wasn't even a good Chinese number, let alone a "very good" one. She did it to stroke my ego so I'd feel good around her. How dare she bullshit a member of the opposite sex to get what she wanted! What a scurrilous tactic!]] Feeling foolishly proud of myself, I mentioned a much less important point, "And remember that I won't be at school on Tuesday, so just Carol's lunch that day." "Okay. Thank you. What else I do for you?" #4: "I can't think of anything else right now, thanks. I'll let you know if I think of anything later." "Wash car and lunch not enough. More please?" #4: #1: #4: #2: I said, "Wash car, lunches, and sex, Lily." Predictably Lily had looked a little surprised at my mentioning sex, so I said, "Mom and Dad know I have heaps of sex, so you don't have to worry about them discovering us." #4: #1: Lily was happy with that news, "Good. More easy." Mom said, "Speaking of sex, Julia told me that Mark can call you up any time day or night for sex. You will come rushing over for him. Is that's correct?" "Yes. Is very important to Chinese." "And your mother and father are okay with that?" "Mother, Father VERY happy! Very proud." It was hard to doubt Lily, as she had a BIG smile on her face and her whole body posture was radiating "PROUD!" Mom still managed to look doubtful though, asking, "Why are they so proud?" By the look on Mom's face, Mom wanted to ask, "Why on Earth would they be proud of THAT!" "Mark VERY important man! Serving important man is GREAT honor. More important; more honor. Mark VERY important!" "Serving, including sex? Your mother and father know that you're intending to have sex with Mark?" #4: #1: Lily answered, "Yes. They very happy. Mother and me to doctor after Mark dinner, to make sure I healthy to serve, and to..." Lily stopped and visibly reconsidered what she'd been about to say, then said, "and to have no disease." In an insistent tone, Mom demanded, "What were you going to say the first time, Lily? Before you changed your mind." Lily was braver than me, because she actually thought about whether she should answer Mom or not. Then, judging by her expression, she decided to tell the truth, "And to get pill. Like Julia and Ava." #2: #1: #4: #2: #1: #4: #1: #4: #2: #1: #2: #4: #2: Mom said, "Good. I'm glad your mother and you are being responsible. I'm still surprised though. I thought Chinese people were conservative about sex?" "Yes. But Chinese know good that important men have lots of sex. Is our belief, better than silly America. Is very honorable for girl to serve important man. You talk with Father on Saturday, he will tell you." "Why just your father? Why not talk with your mother too?" "Is man business. Mark important man, so about Mark talk with Father. Mother know, but Father boss of man business." #1: #2: Mom said, "Okay. We'll talk with your father on Saturday." "Good." Looking up at me, Lily said, "'Wash car, lunch and sex.' Lunch big, sex big, car small, haha. I do more things?" I answered, "I think that's enough for now, thanks Lily. If I think of something else I'll ask you." "Good. I wash car now?" "Ahh, okay. Thanks." "Thank YOU," Lily insisted, before she ran out, happy to get back to washing my car. #4: #1: After Lily had bounced out of the room, Dad chuckled, "God knows how you do it, Mark. I thought Julia's and Carol's willingness was impressive enough, but Lily leaves them in her dust." "Yeah, I noticed that too. Carol, Julia and Ava would happily do whatever I asked them, but they're not as demanding as Lily is about being used in such a one-sided way. Ahh, I heard Mom ask Lily about my phoning her for sex day or night, so I guess Julia told you all the details about that? Did she tell you about the, umm, duration of Lily's proposed visits." "Yeah," said Dad, "Lily's happy to be used as a cum dump." Mom screeched, "STEVEN! You can't talk like that..." Dad's laughing cut Mom off. "You're right. We should protect the kids from learning about sex. Oops, too late. They're right in the middle of DOING it, Fely, so not saying the words isn't going to protect them from anything." "I wasn't trying to protect them from sex, but from being insultingly rude." "I doubt Lily would be insulted, but the thing that gets me is that our kids have unusual sex-lives, so some of the things they're doing ONLY have insulting descriptions. How are we going to talk with them about their activities if we can't call a spade a spade. Namby-pamby euphemisms don't cut it. It's not as if Mark is treating her insultingly, is he?" Mom didn't seem particularly angry - more thoughtful than anything - but it'd be good to defuse the situation a little. I said, "At the current rate, Mom, I'm going to have to start inventing my own words soon anyway, because my lifestyle is going off the map." Mom chuckled briefly, then asked me, "Did you know that phrase already?" Only 25% of me did, but I could truthfully say, "Sure. I used it myself not long ago. Not out loud, but when I was thinking to myself about Lily. How else would you describe Lily's middle-of-the-night offer? 'Scratching my itch REALLY quickly'? Dad's phrase describes the situation exactly. And Lily even said the faster I could do it, the happier she'd be, because it meant I could get back to my studying quicker. It's her self-appointed task, so it can't be an insult to call her what she demands to be." Carol added, "I wasn't offended or shocked when Dad used the phrase, because it fit. Isn't lack of shock a good indication that the phrase was okay?" "You knew the phrase already?" "Sure. It's nowhere near the worst I've ever heard, and like Mark said, it's actually exactly what Lily wants to be used for. She's not offering to make love with Mark; she's offering to get rid of his distraction as fast as she can - or HE can, I guess - so Mark can get to work." "You kids are growing up too fast. It was only a month ago that I was teaching Mark that it'd be polite to call Julia the morning after their first date!" I pointed out, "And about the same time you also taught me the importance of not saying 'Eww' when I went down on a girl." "Yes, as a lesson in how to be polite. 'Cum dump' is NOT polite." "I bet ... I figure, that if I told Lily, 'You're a good cum dump, ' she'd be very happy once the meaning was explained to her. How about after a week or two I tell her that in front of you, so you can see for yourself?" Mom's improving mood disappeared, "You CAN'T be telling me that you're actually going to use her that way! Surely?" "Lily is positively demanding that I do. She threatened that if I didn't call her in the middle of the night, then she'd starting getting up at 2am every morning, driving around to Julia's, and waiting outside for me to let her in or tell her to go home. So my hands are tied - which reminds me of some other sex questions I have, haha. -- "Seriously, Mom, it's not exactly my style to be mistreating a girl, is it? We'll talk with her parents first, and if they understand and approve, then I'll probably call her occasionally. I'll watch carefully to make sure she's not falling asleep at school, or losing enthusiasm for it, or anything like that. It's not as if I need the sex, so it'll only be occasional. Thirty seconds of effort seems a small price to pay to make her feel so happy." Dad chuckled at that, adding, "Thirty whole seconds! You're spoiling the girl Mark, haha. By the way, after you've finished with her, can I get her to do the same for me?" "STEVEN!" exclaimed Mom in shock. "What? My car needs washing too." Dad got some VERY good laughs from us for that neat trap. Dad couldn't resist adding to it. "Honestly, Fely, I'm a happily married man, so you know having a clean car is top priority for me, haha." Mom gave him a mock punch on the shoulder, "You got me good on that one. Okay, I'm sorry I objected to your calling a girl a 'cum dump'. I can't imagine what I was thinking! Haha." Dad said, "I should apologize too, because I couldn't resist jerking your chain. It's not often I know I'm in the right about something like that. We do have to be more up-front and honest with the kids about stuff they're doing." "Yeah, you're right. If they're doing it, it'd be silly to insist on using euphemisms." "Exactly," agreed Dad. "All this talk about 'car washing' has gotten me in a certain mood. How about we retire to our room for a while. Maybe you can 'wash my car' for me?" "Haha. Now who's talking euphemisms." "Shush Fely. Not in front of the kids, haha. Shall we go?" "Sounds good to me. Carol, if I'm not back in thirty seconds, can you finish the dinner preparations for me please. You should be able to work out what to do." "Umm, okay," from Carol. While Dad was chuckling, "I'll get you for that thirty seconds! I'll have you know that it's going to take you a lot longer than that, because I've got a very big 'car', haha." Mom said, "I'll accept that it's a very DIRTY car," as they disappeared toward their bedroom. #4: #2: "That was funny," ventured Carol. "They don't normally let us know when they're going to have sex." "Thankfully! Good for Dad, taking Mom on head to head like that. Not only did he win, he's even getting his car washed, haha." "I'd better have a look at dinner," worried Carol. I followed her, mostly to provide moral support, and maybe to peel a spud or two. On the way I remembered that "cum dump" had entered the conversation because I was halfway through comparing Lily to my other three willing serving girls. I decided not to follow Mom and Dad so I could complete my conversation with them. Looking around the kitchen, I couldn't make sense of what was meant to be happening for dinner, but fortunately Carol could. Just as well, as there wasn't enough pizza for everyone. And I did get to help her by peeling and slicing a spud or eight. Some sort of hamburger meat in a pan with potato slices on top, then cooked in the oven. "Do you know what temperature to use?" I asked, proud that I knew ovens had temperatures. "Not really. I'll just put it on a medium heat and Mom can sort that out when she's finished washing Dad's car, {giggle}." I was impressed that Carol was so confident about cooking. Personally I didn't even know what "medium heat" was (I checked the oven dial, and it just had a list of numbers rather than, "low", "medium", "high"). But Carol not only knew, she also knew that it was okay to leave dinner cooking like that. Carol had been nervous about being in charge of dinner with no guidance available, so I was pleased to hear her being relaxed enough to giggle. I had an ulterior motive too. While we'd been making dinner, I'd been tempted to play around with her, Dad not being the only one who felt the need to have his 'car washed'. I hadn't done so, fearing Carol wouldn't have appreciated it if she was stressing about dinner. Now that I knew she was relaxed, my hands felt a need to wander. I find the idea of 'sneaking up' behind a girl while she's bent over to be quite arousing, and there's a lot of sexy bending over involved in preparing a meal, over sinks and cutting boards especially. (To be honest, there are not a lot of things a pretty girl can do that I don't find sexy, but bending over a counter certainly isn't one of them.) I 'snuck up' behind Carol, running my hands up the outside of her legs, over her hips and around her waist. She giggled while I embraced her, rubbing her ass against my cock. "You're very happy to see dinner prepared, aren't you? {Giggle}." (That'd be yet another thing that a pretty girl can do to turn me on.) "Haha. Yeah, that's part of it. But mainly because it's hard for me to keep my hands off you." "You sweet-talker you. It's sounding like Mom and Dad aren't going to be finished in thirty MINUTES..." It was "sounding" that way, because we could occasionally hear sounds from their bedroom, which is quite close to the kitchen. " ... so I'd better finish the rest of dinner." "There's more?" "Yes, the greens. Remember them?" "Oh. I'd forgotten about those." Carol got some green things out, and asked me to chop them. "I've got a better idea. YOU chop them, but not at the sink, over here at this counter." I quickly carried the chopping board, knife, a bowl and the broccoli to the new location. "Now, if you bend over here, move you feet back a little, spread your legs wider. Excellent. Now chop slowly, and keep your eyes open for Lily coming in. If you need me I'll be down here." I knelt behind Carol, putting my head up inside her skirt. "{Giggle}." Carol took my instruction to chop slowly to heart, chopping EXTREMELY slowly. After three or four minutes I still hadn't heard the first chop, although my hearing was often muffled, so I might've missed it. Things were going very well, with Carol now rocking back and forth on my face, moaning quietly, when she suddenly exclaimed, "Lily's coming!" Carol jumped off my face, crouching down behind the counter, saying "My expression will give me away. You talk with her. Wipe your face first." Carol and I both wiped my face, and I rose. It'd be easier to stop Lily discovering Carol's facial expression if I went outside, so I quickly headed to the door. Lily saw me coming through the kitchen window, so waited for me. When I opened the door, Lily proudly said, "I finished now. I go home, okay?" I didn't want her coming inside. Everyone in the house was either having sex, or had all too recently been having it! I didn't know whether there was something in the water, but by now there'd probably be something in the air. But simply saying, "Bye" to Lily seemed too abrupt and ungrateful, so I said, "Let me admire the job you've done." I steered Lily back to my car. "I not wash well, but is cleaner." I looked, and her description was accurate. "It's FAR better than it was Lily. Thank you very much." "I do every week. Get better. Today first time." "Do you mean the first time you've washed my car, or any car?" I suspected the latter, judging by the job she'd done. An automatic carwash would've done a better job, although the Andersons don't waste money on unnecessary costs. "Sorry. Any car. I get better." I gave her further reassurances and appreciation. Lily insisted that she'd wash my car every weekend, I just had to call her to tell her when was a convenient time. I found that even harder to contemplate than calling up for sex. Lily was able to read my reluctance in my expression. She insisted it was what she wanted, but she wasn't very convinced by my "I will try." Lily told me, "I sometimes come your house, Julia's house. I see car, I wash. I not disturb you. I be no trouble." #1: "Lily, how about when I know my car's going to be stationary for several hours, I text you with where and for how long. Then - IF it's convenient for you - you can wash it sometime during those hours. If it's not convenient, DON'T worry about it. I don't mind missing some weekends." [[Lily had grown up with servants around her (servants are cheap in Hong Kong), so had no problem with telling people what to do. She thought my reluctance was stupid, but she was careful never to show that thought. She was actually pleased about my weakness, as it made it easier for her to push me into doing what she wanted, in this case, to create in me a sense of obligation toward her. Her father had told her to do that, as well as be around me as often as possible so I could easily have sex with her.]] "EVERY weekend, or I wash at school Monday." #2: "Okay Lily, you win. I'll try to let you know a good time during the weekend." "Good. I go now. Bye." She gave me a sexy kiss [[doing so on the street is a very un-Chinese behavior, but she wanted me to think of her as my lover]], then she left. The rest of the late-afternoon and evening wasn't particularly noteworthy. Carol had finished getting the greens ready. Mom and Dad soon emerged from their room. Mom approved Carol's dinner preparations, while Dad told me, "I'm in the mood for some car washing. Let's go do them now, Mark." For a second I thought it was some sort of joke, but it wasn't. I didn't have a leg to stand on, excuse-wise, so Dad washed his car while I washed Mom's. I also gave areas of mine that Lily had missed a quick wash, the center of the roof particularly. Dinner was immediately after we'd finished, and it tasted good. I praised her, "This is delicious, Carol. The broccoli is sliced strangely though. Was your hand steady?" Donna arrived an hour or so later, and we had an informal family chat in the living room about what was going on generally in our lives. No big deal, just keeping the parents informed about stuff I didn't mind them being informed about (as opposed to the other things). We hadn't done much family chatting for a while, so it was a good catch up, and it was made all the better by my finishing off all but one piece of the pizza. I was saving that piece for breakfast tomorrow, because I've been told that it's important to get the day off to a good start. We didn't discuss anything in depth, just touching on different things. From how Donna reacted to seeing my cock hard in the hot tub earlier today, to whether I was getting nervous about the trip with Prof on Tuesday. Mom tried to dig for information about that, which was easily and politely avoided. It did remind me of Julia's idea that I pretend to be a day trader [I'd been skimming parts of Prof's books when I had free moments] and that I spread the income over several days, presuming we won. I made a mental note to talk with Prof about that on our way down to Vegas, so what we told people later would be consistent. We'd be coming back separately, so it could be too late to wait for success before discussing it. While I remember to mention it, the two day-trading books were full of technical jargon. I'd learned enough of it to very easily fool a non-trader, including classmates, into thinking I was an expert. But other than that, I mostly thought the books were silly. I was very unimpressed by the mathematical approach they both advocated. In a nutshell, they advocated trying huge numbers of curve fitting parameters until you found some values that fit historical data well, then using them in the future trades. That was bad mathematics and VERY bad science, as there was no theorized cause or hypothesis testing. Although I thought the books advocated a bad approach, I had no idea what the right approach was, so don't (NOT for a moment) think that I had any insight into how to be a real day trader. If a book told you to build a spaceship out of empty coke cans, with vinegar and baking soda as the propellant, the obvious silliness of its advice wouldn't give you any knowledge about how to build a real one. I knew as much about being a real day trader as I did about building a real spaceship. After our family chat, Carol and I phoned Ava and Julia for our nightly contacts, then as previously requested by Carol, she and I went to bed early. Carol asked, "Now, where were you when Lily's washing your car interrupted us?" I showed her where I'd been, and we took it from there. I didn't have far to take it, so I compensated by taking it there several times. Cuddling afterward, I mentioned, "One good thing about Lily is that she should be one more girl for you to play with, like the games you play with Ava." "Umm. Do you want me to, or do you think I want to?" "I thought you'd want to. Don't you want another girl who'd follow your orders?" "Not Lily, I don't think. She doesn't push my buttons. Ava and I are good and getting better as I'm getting to like her. We'll be even better when she knows about you and me. It'll be fantastic when the four of us can be the four of us, haha. Ava's going to feel wonderful to be included in that." "Yes, she will. That'll be very nice. Thanks to Donna, that's probably going to happen sooner rather than later. I was kind of hoping to wait at least a week after my marathon run before deciding whether we trusted Ava enough. Maybe even a week and a half, to give her time to visit her running club twice. But thanks to Donna's speeding things up, it looks like that's not going to happen. I don't feel uncomfortable about it, because Ava certainly comes across as being trustworthy, doesn't she?" [I should mention that I'd warned Mom and Dad several days ago to expect calls from the Athletic Club after I ran there, and to be especially listening for any references to me running a marathon. One of the topics we'd touched on in the living room a couple of hours ago had been Mom reporting that they'd received several calls from club people after my 10k run last Saturday, and only one of them had mentioned a marathon. The guy had said, "There's a marathon coming up in a few months. Does Mark want to train with the club for that?" Mom's answer had been politer than mine would've been.] Carol agreed, "Yes, she does. I thought you trusted her already, after all the NP tricks you showed her." "Yeah, I got a little carried away with that. Can't say I feel too worried about it though. Now that Donna's let half the cat out of the bag about you and me, how do you want to let Ava know about the other half?" "When I was talking to her on the phone just before, she asked me whether anything more had happened about that. I told her we'd been too busy. Which is sort of true, because we'd been too busy having sex, haha." "Yeah, we had no time to talk about it. Besides, my mouth was full half the time, haha. Ava asked me the same thing too. She obviously wants us to do the dirty deed." "Do you still want to trick her in some way? Why not just tell her?" "I'd still like to have her think she was partly responsible. Not so much for Ava herself, but for any future girls we get close to. Ava could convincingly tell them that she pushed us into it. Donna ruined our ability to make Ava think she was virtually solely responsible for it, but we should be able to get her to feel some responsibility." "We could do what we intended before. I'll tell her that you're trying to be a total gentleman by pretending you don't know about me having feelings for you, and that I don't want to force the issue because I'm not sure about my feelings, and then we're back to where we would have been, with her having to convince me to approach you. I could play very reluctant to make her push me hard. That way she'd think she was very responsible." "Very good. Let's do that. I'll tell Julia after I finish studying tomorrow morning." "When do you want me to start?" "I think you might as well start tomorrow. It should take a few days. In fact, if you play hard to convince, it could take several days. Probably even more than we'd want, but it'd be good to do it properly. If you start tomorrow, you could maybe have a good, long heart-to-heart talk with her on Tuesday when I'm away. Do you think you can pull that off? Keep the act up, I mean, so Ava doesn't see through your faking." "Yeah, it'll be easy. I can't believe we're together as it is, so pretending to be apart and nervous about getting together will be easy. I can easily recreate those emotions." "It sounds like I need to do something now to prove that we're together." So I did. Twice, because the scientific method demands that all proofs should be repeatable. After twice doing my best to reassure Carol, we got into our sleeping positions: spooning with Carol on the inside, one of my hands on her breast, and my cock inside her. Since discovering my go-hard ability, the girls have become shameless about requesting, "Make it hard and put it in me please, Mark." It makes me feel like a trained seal. Or, more accurately, a "very happy trained seal." They like the feel of me in them when they're going to sleep. Apparently I go soft soon after I go asleep. I asked them whether they wanted me to order my body to stay hard (I guessed it might be possible of), but they declined, in case it caused me discomfort when I slept. And, as Julia convincingly put it, "If it was hard when one of us rolled over, it might snap off, and that wouldn't be good." Just before I went to sleep, Carol said, "It's a pity Donna opened her mouth, but thank goodness she didn't say more in front of someone other than Ava. That could've been VERY big trouble." "Yeah. The mistake I made was letting her argue. She doesn't have enough self-control to be able to keep secrets when she's arguing. I'll try not to argue with her about anything to do with sex again, especially in front of anyone else. I think I'll explain that to her on the way to school tomorrow." ------- Chapter 170: I Leak Better Monday, May 2, 2005 I woke up after the usual four hours and a handful of minutes, got dressed in the same sweats I'd worn last night, and eagerly had my delicious pre-breakfast pizza. Thus fortified, I drove my clean car to Julia's. Getting dressed reminded me of yet another reason to get a mansion: it was a nuisance to have to drive my clothes back and forth to maintain a reasonable selection in both places. Admittedly that wasn't as important as having wild, unrestrained sex with dozens of Ducklings, Carol's friends or whoever else we wanted to invite into the privacy of our own home, but it would still be nice to have one less thing to worry about, if only because that'd leave more time for sex! The Calculus assignment was under one of the keyboards, but I could ignore it until I'd finished another couple of lectures. I was just getting started when I remembered that I should practice the memory leak stuff again. I didn't expect practicing to help, but it would have been foolish not to. I understand so little about my abilities that there's always the hope that something good might come out of practicing. Not much hope, unfortunately. I'd been nonstop practicing projecting ki out of the top of my head (sometimes in other directions too, just to vary it), and I'd also been pushing walls and the ground almost continuously with my NP fingertips (an especially tedious activity), and there'd been no noticeable improvement in either ability. Probably my maximum NP force was up to 14.3 pounds by now, but that wasn't noticeable outside of a Physics lab. After three weeks of almost nonstop (while awake) practice of those two abilities, I didn't expect memory leakage to get better with so little practice over just a day. Other things, like my body, have been getting rapidly better for the last couple of months with virtually no 'practice' (i.e., no relevant physical exercise). Other abilities, such as my having independent eyeballs, were impossible when I first tried them, then somehow became so easy that I started using them independently without being conscious of it. The general rule seemed to be that my mental abilities seem relatively unchangeable once I acquire them, while my physical abilities take much longer to develop and improve, which did not make me hopeful about improving the "Lack of Memory Leakage" problem. I tested it anyway, as it was such a big problem and the tests were quick. I did a similar test to that of yesterday's, by picking a random word on a random page. We concentrated hard on sending and receiving the word, and it worked, just as it had yesterday. I repeated the test, dialing back on the effort a little, to check that it'd fail now, as it'd taken damn near a maximum effort yesterday. To my surprise, the next word got through. #1: #4: #1: <{Raspberry}.> We did it again, and succeeded again. Then with about a 20%-of-maximum effort (we subjectively guessed), which also worked. #2: That failed. The group consensus was, A few more experiments, and we had it worked out. Both sender and retriever had to put effort into the process, but it was only about 10% of the effort required yesterday. #4: #2: #1: #2: #4: #2: We started our studying. [Because we were very motivated to have our memories leak, quite often during the day, when any two minds didn't have anything else to do, we practiced transferring memories. What we discovered added confusion to our lack of knowledge, as it got steadily easier, although "steadily" is a simplification. Occasional practice seemed to help, so out of curiosity we did no practice for a couple of hours, which did seem to result in a somewhat reduced improvement over that time. But if we practiced virtually nonstop for an hour, it didn't seem to have much more effect than a mild level of practice. ("Seem" is a key word, as making these judgments was problematic at best. The hourly changes were small, and our judgments of effort were entirely subjective.) After the few hours of experimenting, we pretty much maintained a small level of practice for the rest of the day. By the end of the day, if we had to put a number on it, we'd say the effort required was down to nearly a half of what it'd been at the start of the day, so from about 10% of maximum effort to about 6%.] We finished the last lecture before the assignment, turned the assignment face up, and read through it. It looked easy. I'd thought it would, but it was a relief to have that confirmed. I decided to play safe by actually answering some of the questions. For the first time I used one of the programs on the main computer besides the browser - I fired up Excel and wrote a tiny spreadsheet to generate five random numbers between 1 and 25 inclusive (the number of problems in the assignment). I suppose I could've done every fifth problem, but I like playing with spreadsheets. In you'll excuse a small digression, I had an idea for a spreadsheet that I was very much looking forward to writing. If we win in Vegas, I'm going to write a "Day Trading Profit Simulator", which will create my fake daily profit values, similar to what Julia had said. Starting small, with random fluctuations up and down while it trends up to a final value of just over $500,000 in a day (I'm assuming we succeed and that I do this after the last trip, so there's my share of $10 million to allocate to different days). I had some cool ideas for how I wanted to write it, but first we had to have some money to apportion. I did the five problems, writing them up properly to give to Prof at breakfast. Doing just five didn't take long, so I was soon back to my normal studying. Julia came in at her usual time. Snuggled into my lap and required me to wish her "Good morning" in a sufficiently thorough manner. When we'd finished the kissing, she checked that everything was going well, the assignment was okay, and anything else she could think of to ask. I had a few points of my own to mention, including telling Julia about Carol's modified plan to get Ava to push Carol into my arms. "Into your bed," corrected Julia. "Into my lecherous clutches." Which Julia thought was even better. She also thought Carol's plan was a good one, and agreed with starting it today. I told her about Lily's washing my car, and asked her what she thought about Lily not driving legally. Julia said, "I've got too many other things to work on, so I'm going to ignore it, other than making sure none of us ride in her car. I've told Mom and Dad, so they won't let anyone of ours be her passenger either." "I'm surprised they don't do a lot more than that. They're going to let her keep driving that way?" "They might; I didn't ask. They might talk with her parents about it on Saturday, but I've got too many other things to worry about." "I won't worry then. For what it's worth, Pat says Lily is a reasonably good driver." Julia just shrugged. "I'll go shower. You coming?" #1: I didn't need to write an Excel random number generator spreadsheet to help decide. When she was laying out my clothes after our shower, Julia asked, "What clothes do you want to wear on your trip tomorrow?" That took me by surprise. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times Julia has asked me what clothes I want to wear, and still have several fingers left over. I'd have to double-check to make sure I didn't have six left over, that's how rare it is. Not to mention that tomorrow was a whole day away. Who thinks about their clothes that far ahead? "Ahh, I haven't thought much about it." "I suppose you'd wait until you were about to get dressed in them?" "That's the usual process, yes." "Haha..." #1: " ... You're such a boy. What would happen if the clothes you wanted needed to be washed?" "It's quite complicated, especially for so early in the morning, but I'll try to explain how it works. I'd either wear them anyway if they weren't too dirty, or I'd wear something else. Did you follow that? Sorry it was so complicated, haha. I'm only a boy, so I'm well aware that there are bound to be at least a dozen things wrong with what I just said. Aren't I lucky that I've got you to look after me?" "Good save at the end there. For a while it sounded like you were heading for trouble, haha. With great difficulty, I'll resist the temptation to list all the reasons your answer is wrong. Let's get back to tomorrow's clothing choice?" "The only thoughts I had on it was that I was WAY overdressed when we did our test visit. Judging from what I saw, people dress BADLY in casinos. I'm not going to be betting much myself..." #2: " ... so it'd be better that I don't look rich, because that'd make me stand out. Vegas is hot, so cool clothes would be good." "Won't you be inside the casino nearly all the time?" "We've got some things to do around town first. Open up a bank account at least. I don't know what else or how long it'll take. I don't want to wear shorts, because we'll be traveling down and back, and that could be too cold for shorts." "Okay. How about black jeans, white T-shirt and the leather jacket? That'll be very different from what Dad will be wearing, so people will be less likely to connect you." "Sounds fine. Just so long as the pockets aren't so tight that I can't get $1.75 million in, haha." At breakfast I gave Prof the assignment and my answers, telling him, "All the questions looked easy. I chose five at random just to make sure. Would you have a look at them when you've got a moment, to see whether I'm on the right track?" It only took him five moments to look at them immediately. "They're all correct, Mark. Good." "It's no big deal. They're very basic questions. Straight out of the lectures, no tricky stuff or anything. I doubt anyone would have any difficulty with them." "I know. They're only intended to make sure you're keeping up with the basic material. That's why I said not to bother doing all of them." "Ahh, yes. Silly me for telling you how your own job is done." "Yes. Maybe one day, when someone gives you some praise, you could just say, 'Thank you, ' rather than trying to downplay your achievement." Prof gave me just long enough to feel uncomfortable, before he added, "Although you are getting better at that." And then he went on to talk about the other course, checking where I was up to, whether I had any small questions, etc. Just the usual morning progress check-up. The presence of The Boys prevented me asking Prof about how much cash I needed to take tomorrow, so I stalled by eating my breakfast (it's one of my favorite stalling techniques). Finally I had to say, "Prof, I've got a couple of questions about tomorrow. Can we discuss them in your study please?" "Sure." In his study, "I've thought of three questions: First, how much cash should I take?" "I've got that ready. I'll give it to you tomorrow morning." "You know I meant more than my contribution to the $100,000 stake don't you? I mean to buy my own chips, pay for the taxi fare back to the airport, and whatever else I need." "Yes. I've got all that covered. I'll discuss it with you then, rather than holding you up now." "Okay. Question two then, I guess. Should I bring my real license with me? Obviously I have to take the fake one, but should I take the real one too? I worry about being caught with two of them if I'm searched for any reason, but I'm also worried about not having the real one if I need to prove my ID somewhere." "We'll take our own cars to the airport because we'll come back separately, but leave it in your car when we go on our trip. We'll need to prove your real age when we open your bank account, but a driver's license for a 15-year old would cause more trouble than it's worth. Your mother will give you a small pile of documents this evening. That's all you'll need to bring." "Oh. What sort of documents?" "Bureaucratic necessities: your birth certificate, proof of address, bank statements from your current bank, a letter of introduction from them, new account applications already signed by your parents. That's most of it." "Sheesh! All that just to open a new account?" "Yeah. Banks are very fussy these days. That's not everything you need either, but the rest is already taken care of." "I didn't know I was going to get a new account. I thought you'd have new accounts in Vegas and LA, and you'd send the money to my account in Corvallis?" "That was my original intention, but I decided to play safer and to open an account for you in LA too. It hides the money from snoops a little better, and I like the idea of the deposits into your account in Corvallis coming from your account in LA. It backs up the day trading cover story better than it coming from an account of mine. It's not a big deal, but as we're going to be setting one up for me, we might as well do one for you at the same time." "Ahh, okay. My last question is probably silly, but I thought I'd check anyway. Julia suggested I wear black jeans, a white T-shirt and a leather jacket. Is that okay, as far as you know?" "I'm sure it doesn't matter at all. Any normal clothes would be fine. On the second trip we'll have to worry about your look more, because we'd prefer they not recognize you as the same spectator as the first time, but it's too soon to worry about that now. Is that all?" "Yes thanks." I had time to grab a cookie, and then we were on our way. A little early, because I wanted to spend a few extra minutes talking to my family about an idea I'd had to teach Donna a lesson. Just before I'd gone to sleep, I'd been thinking that we'd made a mistake arguing with Donna. It'd be relatively easy to avoid such arguments in the future by saying, "I'm not going to argue with you, Donna. When you get into an argument your mouth causes us major problems, like it did with Ava last time." And then walking away from or ignoring her if she persisted. That would avoid arguments, but it wouldn't teach her much. This morning I'd had an idea for a VERY powerful lesson for her. I explained what I had in mind to Julia on the way to my place. Julia said, "It's too cruel to do it just before she has to go to school. She wouldn't recover in time. It'd be better to do it after school. If you do it this evening, you can leave her stewing while you're away all day Tuesday." "Poor Donna. It'll grow her up in a hurry, but she's not going to enjoy it at all." "She needs to learn that your secrets aren't just fun things to know. Speaking of taking responsibility, I had a phone call from Laci while you were talking to Dad. She said she didn't have any suitable clothes to wear today, and it'd be better to cancel the grope." "Haha. What'd you say?" "I repeated what I told her before: that jeans would be fine, you'd just have to pull them down before you started. I suspect she'll be wearing a skirt today." At my place, Carol was already worrying about cooking my dinner this evening, starting with what house would I be in. "I'll come home after school, so I'll have dinner here. After Aikido I think I'll go to the Williams'. I'm getting very nervous about tomorrow, and want to be around Prof in case things come up we have to discuss." Mom, always a trier, attempted to obtain some information about what we'd be doing. I didn't fall for that, but I did use it as an excuse to talk with Mom and Dad privately, saying, "I need to talk with you and Dad privately in your bedroom, about some of the documents I need to take with me tomorrow." In their room, I started with, "I actually want to talk with you about Ava first, and then Donna. Julia, Carol and I all think we can tell Ava about Carol and me being lovers. As you know, that was the point of the marathon test, and she seems to be passing that without difficulty. She didn't say anything to her parents at the dinner, which must've been a very big temptation to overcome, and it seems she didn't say anything at the club either. Julia, Carol and I discussed it with Vanessa and Prof yesterday, and now with you. We think Ava's totally trustworthy, and that there's probably less chance of her giving the secret away than me doing so accidentally. She's not jealous, hasn't got her heart set on marrying me, or any other reason we can think of that'd cause her to snitch on us if she doesn't get what she wants. She IS getting what she wants, and she's visibly happy about it. After Donna's accident, Ava knows Carol desires me, and she's very eager to get us together. She's so aware of the issue now that chances are she'll catch us out sooner or later, so if you approve, Carol's going to let Ava persuade her into trying me out, so Ava will feel some responsibility for it. I'm asking you if you agree that Ava can be told?" Mom and Dad had known this decision was coming up, so their approval took considerably less time than my verbose question had. I was even surprised how easily they agreed. [[They'd exaggerated the danger to us to keep us cautious. We didn't have time this morning for them to make a fake fuss over reluctantly agreeing.]] "Good, thanks. About Donna then. Donna doesn't know that we were intending to tell Ava anyway, and I'm not so worried about that secret as my NP and blobs. If Donna learns about those somehow, I'm VERY worried about her blabbing about them because she won't understand why they have to be kept secret. I thought of using her ignorance of our planning to tell Ava anyway to teach Donna a very tough lesson about the need to keep my secrets secret. What do you think of..." I quickly told Mom and Dad my nasty idea. They agreed that we'd do it this evening, before I went to Aikido. Mom said, "I'll make sure Donna doesn't go out playing with someone, and I'd better make sure there's a good supply of handkerchiefs ready, because it's going to bust Donna up big time." "You don't think it's too nasty, especially if it's left up in the air until I get back?" "She's overdue to learn that secrets aren't simply a fun way of spreading gossip. With the things you've shown Steven and me, and especially after Prof and Vanessa made us see the implications of them, it'd be a VERY good idea for Donna to learn to keep secrets. A couple of days of misery will teach her a valuable lesson." "Oh boy," said Dad. "Poor Donna." To hide the topic of the conversation from Donna, I asked Mom to leave the bedroom talking about what she had to do for Prof today, which prompted Mom to start talking about it for real even before we left the room, "Yeah, Prof told me all about that. I'll go to the bank this morning to get everything organized for you, including transferring the money into Prof's account. I hope your trip is successful because that's a lot of money." "I sure hope so too. A LOT more than you do, I suspect. Don't forget the Prof and Vanessa are matching the money too." "I know, but it doesn't stop me worrying." #3: #2: We walked out of the bedroom talking paperwork stuff. Now I just had to tell Carol about my nasty plan. It was time to go, and Donna rushed out to the car, as usual. That gave me a chance to tell Carol, "Don't mention anything about you, me and Ava in the car. I'll tell you why after we get to school and Donna has run off to her classes." In the car, Donna complained (not seriously), "I've got to make my own lunch every day now. How come Lily doesn't make some more for me?" The easiest answer was, "You'd have to come up to high school every morning to collect it. It'd take you ten times longer to walk back and forth than it takes you to make your lunch." "Same as Carol." "Carol comes up from middle school to eat lunch with me anyway. I'll have her lunch with me and she won't need to walk one extra step. You'd have to walk all the way back and forth." "I could have lunch with you too. That'd be fair." Several unsatisfactory answers crossed my mind. "You're too young" wouldn't go down well. I also rejected saying "Carol has lunch with us because she's my sister AND because she's Julia's lover. Which high-school girl is going to become your lover?" I settled for holding up my ring finger so Donna could clearly see it over my shoulder, and saying, "Donna, have you forgotten about this?" "Oh yeah." Whatever Donna thought of it, it was enough to keep her quiet. Maybe because she'd realized she was making a nuisance of herself. Julia filled the gap, chatting most of the rest of the way to school, telling us she was excited about all the interesting things that were happening: announcing the website today as the start of the pipeline process, and my business trip with her father tomorrow. About the latter, Julia added, "I REALLY hope that goes well, Mark!" Tongue in cheek, I said, "It is about time to start hoping for success, isn't it? Or maybe I'll wait until tomorrow before I make the mental effort. I could spend the time thinking about more important things, like Chloe's breasts, haha." "Oh yes," said Julia. "I'd better do something about Chloe today." Which was why I'd dropped Chloe's name. I hadn't heard Julia mention it for a while, so I was gently reminding her. When we got to school, Donna shot off as normal. Carol hung back, and I gave her a brief summary of what I intended to do with Donna. "Oh poor Donna." Carol echoed Dad's words almost perfectly. "Yeah, but Mom, Dad and Julia all agree that she needs to learn this lesson. Do you agree too?" "I do. Your secrets are too important to be treated casually. It'll do her good in the long run and it'll protect you." I added a few more things, because Carol's "Oh poor Donna" had come halfway through my summary. After another "Poor Donna" from Carol, we split up to go to our respective classes. ------- Chapter 171: Revenge Gropes Monday, May 2, 2005 (Continued) I went via my locker to get the necessary books, etc. There was a worrying absence of Chinese lunches, but hopefully only because I'd beaten Lily to school. Alexis was the first girl I saw that I had to talk with, although not much talking would be required with Eileen and Laci. I wanted to invite Alexis to Lily's dinner in relative privacy, rather than in the middle of class, so I walked up to her. It was fun watching her face. Because of our daily game she knew something was going to happen, but had no idea what. When I was close enough, I suddenly bent down and hoisted her over my shoulder. I stood and started carrying her out of the room, all without our saying a word, other than a "{Giggle}," from Alexis. As I carried her down the hallway, she asked me, "Where are we going?" "Quiet, woman!" "{Giggle}." #2: #4: We passed plenty of other kids coming in. Most laughed, but a couple of girls checked to make sure nothing bad was happening. Alexis reassured them, "We're playing a game where good things happen to me." As soon as we were outside, I walked away from the path for a few yards, then dumped her onto one of the outdoor bench seats apparently roughly, but actually being careful that she landed well and wasn't hurt. It's useful to have plenty of strength. I put one foot up on the seat beside her, leaning my elbow on it so my face was in hers. "I'm going to a high-quality Chinese dinner party on Saturday. I'm taking my family and several girlfriends. If you've got a semi-formal dress you can come too." "Are you asking me on a date?" "I'm TELLING you that you can come, woman, IF you've got a modest, good dress. Do you own a dress?" "Yes, woman has dresses, haha." "A GOOD dress? Not some slaggy, indecent rag." "I've got both sorts, haha. Do you want to see me..." "Woman talks too much. You're coming Saturday. Ask Julia for the details. Now, thank me for letting you come." "Haha. Thank you for letting..." "Woman STILL talking too much! Thank me by KISSING me." "Ha... , mmpff." As I grabbed her head and pulled it into a kiss. We had a very nice kiss. Alexis is a good kisser, surprisingly soft and gentle. Then I ended it and stood up. Alexis said, "Remember you said you'd give me two kisses this morning?" I'd forgotten about that, so I said, "I'LL decide when I kiss you, NOT you! Good grief! Next thing you'll be telling me your OPINIONS!" "Haha." "I've thought about it, and I DEMAND my second kiss NOW!" "Ha... , mmpff." Alexis was in no hurry to end this one either, but eventually I did. Immediately after disconnecting lips, I put my hands under her armpits to pull her to her feet. Then I bent down and pulled her over my shoulder again, stood up, and carried her back inside. On the way, from somewhere over my back, Alexis' voice said, "I like you. You're fun." "You too. You talk too much, but you're a good kisser, so I come out ahead." In a half-boasting, half-asking tone of voice, Alexis added to her list of skills by claiming, "I'm good at fucking too?" I think my answer surprised her (it certainly surprised most of me), "Not as good as me." "Ahh, no. You're right about that." After a short pause, "So when are we going to do it again? Saturday?" "I haven't decided yet, Alexis. I haven't forgotten though, and I do enjoy thinking about it from time to time. I'll ask you sooner or later, and probably sooner." "Good. 'Ask me' or 'tell me'?" I was going to give her an answer that would've made me sound very nice - something along the lines of, "There are some things I'm comfortable playing games with you about Alexis, but I think I'd prefer to ASK you for sex. You're a nice girl... ," etc. - except I'd walked into our classroom and come face to face with the Principal; which meant he was face-to-something-entirely-different with Alexis. He sternly demanded, "Mr. Anderson, why are you carrying a girl like that?" #4: #2: #3: #2: We decided to go for truthful but humorous, because having Alexis over my shoulder made humor irresistible. "It's hard to tell from your angle, sir, but we're good friends. We greet each other in funny ways every morning." I turned ninety degrees, and lowered Alexis to her feet. Saying, "There you go, miss. Let me know if you see another terrifying mouse." Alexis was NOT the dainty, feminine type of girl to be scared by a mouse, so Alexis and the class chuckled at that image. "Miss Joseph, was that ride voluntary?" "Hell yeah! Mark can carry me any way he wants. I've got some other positions I'd like him to try too." "That'd be enough of that, thank you," said the humorless Principal as he turned away. #2: #3: #4: The start-of-class bell rang. The Principal did a little rant about the bullies who'd attacked me last Friday (more like "hassled me", but I wasn't going to correct him), and about bullying in general. One of his comments was that every first period class was going to listen to their teacher read out a school announcement on the subject of bullying. After his rant, he left, and the teacher read the announcement. Just more of the usual "zero tolerance to bullying blah blah." I shouldn't denigrate it, as every little bit would help. It would, however, only help a little bit. I had no expectation of it single-handedly eliminating bullying from the school. The Principal should've pulled his head out of his ass years ago, and not let the bullying behavior become such a problem in the first place. Now that it was firmly established, it was going to take more than the reading of a few announcements to make bullies learn that what had been normal was now no longer acceptable. While I was half-listening to the teacher read the announcement, I had time to notice a few things: Eileen was looking particularly pretty today. Laci was looking particularly worried today, in a skirt. Chloe was looking exactly the same as every other day, with her blouse buttoned up all the way to her neck. So much for my 'request' that she loosen up. The top right of the board had: Any girls interested in EGG, see: www.EggsSearch.com.hk password: 'EGG' expanded, one word, no punctuation or spaces. Lunch today: bring pen and paper PLEASE LEAVE Chloe not having any buttons undone disappointed me. Probably every other boy in class too, but I had greater reason than normal. I thought I'd done a superb job of bullshitting her on Saturday morning, but it seems not to have worked. There was some good news though, as Lily didn't have an, "Oops, I forgot your lunch" guilty expression. She smiled happily at me. I was looking forward to checking out my locker. Hopefully it'd smell nearly as good as the trunk of my car. After the announcement, the teacher made some quick, personal comments against bullying, which were better than those on the official sounding announcement, and then he started hurrying through the lesson. When the bell went, I leaned over to say to Julia, "Chloe's forgotten about my sermon from the hot tub. I thought I'd done a superb job." "You did better than that, you were awesome. That wasn't just my opinion, it was hers too. You blew her away. I'll have a talk with her." Julia went to do that. According to Julia's plan, I wasn't meant to get involved with Chloe at school, so I went to talk with Lily. My avoiding Chloe wasn't because Julia or I feared I'd mess it up. Chloe's psychology was simple enough that we weren't worried about that. I was avoiding her so Chloe would take my absence from her life as a signal that she had to try harder. Or by the look of her this morning, try at all. Lily happily confirmed that Carol's and my lunches were in my locker. Even before I could ask, she added, "Big lunch for you." She was showing signs of developing into an excellent serving girl. Eileen was waiting to talk with me. The top priority issues having been satisfactorily completed, I turned to her, saying, "Eileen, you're looking especially pretty this morning. That's a lovely dress. That's a nice way of telling me that you're looking forward to our cuddle and kiss." She lapped that up, blushing mildly and smiling widely. "Thank you. You've got so many girlfriends I'm surprised you noticed me." #1: "You always dress well, and I know you're always very thoughtful about what you wear. Of course I noticed you made an extra effort today." I knew she was "always very thoughtful" about her clothes because I was pretty sure that she was always female. They have an obsessive genetic compulsion to obsess about clothes. #2: I added, "To be polite, I should make sure that you're still okay with what Julia said: sitting on my lap for thirty seconds of kissing and cuddling. As much kissing as YOU wish, because I won't force anything like that on you. And then when you get up, I'll pat your ass lightly. Is that okay with you?" "Yes, thank you. That sounds very nice." #1: "Because you're looking so pretty today, I'm feeling even more tempted by you than usual. With your permission, would you mind if I maybe rub your delightful derriere just a little bit more than I said before? Just lightly, on the outside of your skirt while you're sitting on my lap." #3: #2: #1: #3: #1: Eileen asked, "Really? You want to do more?" "If you give me permission. Is it okay with you if I touch you just a little bit more than Julia said on the phone?" "Just a little bit?" "Yes, just a little bit, on your little butt." "{Giggle}. Okay. That'd be okay." Eileen was visibly happy. I started thinking I was getting pretty good at making girls happy, but realized I was being FAR too hopeful. I headed off to my next class. The website notice was already on the board when I arrived, which was especially cool because Julia wasn't in this class so one of her minions must have done it for her/me. I was repeatedly asked what the story was with the website; by representatives of one too many genders, unfortunately. [An event which repeated itself several more times during the day.] When there were guys in the audience, I replied, "Julia and I are trying to find me a new girlfriend, because Julia is too busy with Carol to be my full-time girlfriend. There are too many interested girls for us to deal with them one on one, and Julia is tired of repeating herself countless times, so Julia set up a website to tell the girls what they need to know." Hoping to put the guys off reading it, I sometimes said, "You don't need to bother reading it guys, because none of you are ANYWHERE near pretty enough to be my girlfriend." When I was talking to girls only, my answer was more like, "I'm hoping to find a new girlfriend, but the usual way of doing so was preventing some very nice girls - like some of you around me now - from getting close enough for us to get to know each other in a dating setting. The website describes the new way we're going to arrange my initial dates. It gives as many girls as want to the chance to go on dates with me, while also making sure that girls that don't suit me, or me them, don't block other girls from having a fair chance. Have a read of it before lunchtime on Wednesday if you can, because there's going to be a big meeting then for anyone who's interested." There were nearly always follow-up questions, but "Read the website" was what I insisted on with the girls, while trying to avoid saying it whenever guys were around. The only other thing that happened before the second period class started were some questions about the bullying announcement, and the incident behind it. This time I wanted guys to hear my answer. I did my best to make sure they all got the clear message that bullying could now very easily lead to expulsion. I don't think they really believed it though. Male fascination with violence meant half the guys at school still wanted to talk about the incident behind the incident, i.e., the fight at the Eatons'. I told them, "Sorry, but the police told me not to talk about it." Untrue, but it was a very convenient excuse. It almost inevitably led to, "You can tell us." "Nope. I don't want them getting off on a technicality just because you were curious. I'm saying nothing until after the trial." End of second period gave the guys the chance to ask all the fascinating questions about violence that they'd thought up during the class. "Sorry, I'm in a hurry, bye." I was telling the truth too, as I wanted to find out what the situation was with Chloe. I got to third period class quickly. Julia arrived soon after me, so I was able to ask her about Chloe. Julia reported, "She's got two excuses: her mother makes her dress modestly, and she doesn't believe you can be interested in a girl like her. She's also scared, because she's sure every boy in school is going to start staring down her blouse." "The last one's probably true, but her worrying about my being interested in her pisses me off. After all the time and effort we've put into her! Oh look, Laci just came in - that means you, Eileen and Laci are all here. Do you want to do the grope now? We should have enough time." "Yeah, go for it. The quicker the better, before the teacher arrives." I called, "Eileen! It's time. Come here quickly please." I urged her forward with hand motions, and she came to me quickly. Laci spotted what was about to happen, and she looked a great deal less enthusiastic about it than Eileen. I asked loud enough for the class to hear - I specifically wanted Laci to hear, but it'd be good if word got around the other revenge-grope girls too - "Eileen, do you want to opt out, or to accept your 30-second grope?" That caught the attention of the guys in the room. I was smiling encouragement, but she still felt the need to ask, "Like we said before?" I was glad she wasn't more specific, because that didn't give enough away to spoil Laci's surprise. I answered, "Exactly as we said before. Do you accept?" "Yes." I grabbed the nearest seat and sat on it. "For your punishment, you must start by sitting on my lap." That she happily did. I put my arms around her and pulled her into a cuddle. I whispered, "Kiss me as much as you want." Apparently she wanted as much as she could get. She threw her arms around my shoulders and started kissing enthusiastically. Not particularly well, but enthusiasm counts for a lot. More than technique, because that's easily learned (I was NOT going to ask Julia how good I was a month ago!). I slid my hand down to her ass and gently rubbed the top of it, doing it obviously so the observers would see my "grope". I think Eileen noticed, but she didn't seem to care and all her attention remained focused on her kissing me. Surprisingly soon Julia called, "Time's up. Stop." I stopped, but Eileen didn't; her enthusiasm was still going strong. I pushed her away and off my lap, as it would be FAR better to get Laci finished before a teacher arrived than get caught. I told Eileen, because it had a double-purpose, "I'm a stickler for the rules, Eileen, including the 30-second rule." Actually it was Julia that had been the stickler. I finished with, "But thank you for that. I hope you enjoyed that as much as me?" #1: Alexis had come in partway through, and had watched with amusement. Eileen gushed, "Oh yes. Very much. I want to do it again." "Sorry, no time now." I called out, "Laci, you're next. Come here." A MUCH more enthusiastic Laci ran up to me, and started sitting on my lap. "Hold it." I held her off. "Laci, do you want to opt out, or to accept your 30-second grope?" "Accept! Accept!" While she tried to sit on my lap again. "For your punishment, stand up straight and turn to face away from me." I put a hand on each of her hips and pushed her into position. I was still sitting in the seat because it'd make my intended groping much easier, but being turned to face away from me confused Laci. She could sit in my lap. It wouldn't be as convenient for kissing as a sideways position, but it was still theoretically possible that something similar to Eileen's experience was going to happen to her. She tried to sit, but I was still holding her hips and I forced her to remain standing. She asked, "Huh?" I said, "Cross your arms and spread your legs, Laci." The first command was to keep her hands from interfering with me while I was interfering with her. My commands gave Laci a pretty good clue that her experience was definitely not going to be the same as Eileen's. As expected she wanted to turn around to talk about it, but I used my hands to hold her hips so she couldn't move. Her question was obvious, so I saved time by preemptively answering it, "It's MY choice how I grope every one of you misbehaving girls. Eileen was very nice to Tianna, but your stealing extra time wasn't nice, so your grope is going to be different. I'm a stickler for the rules and you agreed to thirty seconds of my choice before. You can say 'Opt out' any time you want and you'll never go out with me again. Do you want to opt out?" "What are you going to do?" "Almost exactly the same as you did to me." "Oh." After a short pause, "Really? You mean..." "Yes. I don't have time, Laci. We're doing this RIGHT NOW or I'll consider that you've opted out. Cross your arms and spread your legs far enough apart for me to get my hand between them." Every guy was already totally riveted, so what I'd just said made no difference. But if it'd been possible for them to watch harder, they would have. Laci didn't move. I said, "What a pity, I thought you liked me. Oh well. Julia, cross Laci of the list." I stood up. Laci called, "Wait! Wait! I need time." "You didn't give me any. I'll give you ten seconds though. 'Opting out in 10, 9, 8, 7... , '" Laci groaned, spread her legs and crossed her arms. I sat down, reached up under her skirt with both hands, and quickly pulled her panties down to mid-calf. Every guy was already totally riveted, so what I'd just done made no difference ... Actually, cancel that. I just noticed that a couple of the guys were now watching less closely, because they'd gotten so excited they were having trouble controlling themselves. Laci's hands started reaching down to pull her panties back up, while she told me, "You CAN'T..." "What was I wearing when you did this to me?" "{Groan}." She abandoned her panty recovery. "I'm going to start now. Fold your hand again and you've got to stand still for thirty seconds, unless you call out 'Opt out', which you can do any time you want to stop me. Do I have your permission to start, or do you want to opt out?" I'd asked a silly question, because Laci was silent. I helped her find her voice by saying, "Continuing the countdown: Opting out in 6, 5, 4... , '" "{Groan}. Do it." The whole class had heard her consent, so I started doing it. The good news was that I didn't have to worry about the teacher coming in, because there was a solid wall of guys around the front of Laci. If the teacher did walk in, there was no way she could see anything. The bad news was that the wall crouched down so it could look up Laci's short skirt. Laci groaned at the same time as I said, "Block their view with your hands, but don't get in my way." She had her hands well placed long before I'd finished my sentence (the spoken sentence I mean, as the sentence I just wrote could ambiguously refer to another type of sentence. English is bizarre for having words with TOTALLY disparate meanings). As fast as Laci had moved, some of the guys did get a free shot. I could tell that because of my superb observational skills, and because a couple of them yelled out things like, "I SAW IT! I saw the WHOLE thing. Wow!" They really were pathetic. Just when I thought guys couldn't get any more pathetic, they got even more pathetic (to be truthful, I never actually thought they couldn't, but that's how the expression goes). They started trying to push themselves into positions where they could get a look. I was behind Laci so couldn't tell directly, but I had no doubt that Laci would be making sure that there was no such position. A bunch of guys, all crouching very low, who suddenly all tried to find better positions, resulted in a collapsed pile of struggling, cursing, pushing, pathetic boys. It was quite funny. Me and quite a few girls laughed. Not Laci though, she wasn't seeing ANY humor in the situation. She wasn't feeling sexually excited either. I was doing my best to give her a good time, but she was so uncomfortable that it was a totally wasted effort. Carol probably would've gotten off on the exhibitionism of it, but Laci hated it. Just when I thought guys couldn't get any more pathetic, a couple of them started crawling forward, trying to get their head between Laci's feet. Other boys saw their plan, and pulled them back so they could do it themselves. Which led to yet other guys, or the original ones, pulling them back, ad infinitum (or maybe "ad patheticum" would be more appropriate. Not good Latin, but good descriptiveness). The net result was that no boy got another look. "Time's up. Stop," from Julia. Never has a girl corrected her clothing as fast as Laci did. I nearly lost my hand! "That was HORRIBLE!" complained Laci. I felt sorry for her, and also impressed that she'd persevered. Lest I get too sympathetic, I reminded myself of her silly selfishness in the hot tub eight days ago. Back before I'd started this little event, I'd wondered whether it would be too much for her to handle. I'd thought she'd probably bail out early, but I hadn't cared enough to soften my intended actions. Although Laci was hot for me and had a good body, her silliness in the hot tub had made me largely indifferent to her fate. Having buckets of spare girls was an attitude-changing experience for me. Nonetheless, I should give her some comfort now. I stood and gave her a hug, saying, "Very well done, Laci. I'm impressed by your courage. I'd say you took it like a man, except all the would-be men were rolling around on the floor making complete fools of themselves, and I wouldn't like to insult you by comparing you to them." I looked down at the guys, and just when I thought guys couldn't get any more pathetic, a couple of them were resuming crawling forward, to get into position to look up Laci's skirt again. #3: I would have told the guys off, but without brains I don't think they'd understand me. I solved the problem by leading Laci several steps away. One of the guys, a pathetic one, groaned. When I was hugging and leading Laci, I was conscious that a couple of the fingers on my right hand were damp. Laci had not lubricated, but to make the grope complete I had inserted a couple of fingers all the way into her, getting them wet. That wetness had subsequently been partly rubbed away or dried out, but my fingers were still damp. Even with their only being damp, it didn't seem right to let my fingers touch her clothes. I was about to pull my hanky out when I had a better idea. "Excuse me for a few seconds, Laci." Still with an arm around her, I turned back to the room, "Alexis! Get your pretty butt over here!" "Coming!" Alexis' pretty butt bounced over here. The guys had been sorting themselves out, standing up, and talking embarrassingly immature excited crap to each other, but my calling for a third potential gropee immediately got their undivided attention. God knows what they thought was going to happen, but for their sake I hoped no one tried to crawl between Alexis' legs. She'd stomp his head flat! While God was at it, God knows what Alexis thought was going to happen. But whatever it was, it didn't stop her bouncing her butt over here. When she reported for duty, I held my two damp fingers up in front of her face, saying, "They're wet. Suck them clean." "I'm not into, mmpff." I'd pushed the fingers into her mouth, raising my other hand to hold the back of her head. I added, "You talk too much, woman!" Another mind had an addition: "Mouth suck, not attitude. Got that?" #3: #1: I knew she got it, because she was already tonguing my fingers clean. I'd guessed that Alexis wouldn't freak out. She may not be into girl-on-girl action, but she enjoyed the game we played, and she wasn't the sort to get all hysterical over something as trivial as a bit of juice from another girl. [I can't resist pointing out, as an afterthought, that there would have been a GREAT deal of hysterical behavior had someone tried to put a bit of juice from another guy into my mouth!] I removed my hand from the back of Alexis' head, and put it back around Laci. Poor Laci had already been looking shattered from her experience, and having Alexis tasting her juices shook her even further. Her day was NOT off to a good start. I was very impressed by her staunch persistence, and was wondering what I could do to reward her, when the teacher arrived. It took longer than usual for her to settle the class down, during which Julia congratulated me. Soon everything was boringly humdrum again, although there was more talk than normal during class, which pissed the teacher off, but fortunately no one explained what I'd been doing. When the end-of-period bell rang, many of the guys rushed to ask me questions about what had happened. It was easy to answer them: "What makes you think that it was ANY of your business?" -- That was too indirect for them, so I tried, "It's none of your business!" -- That didn't work either, so I tried, "Seriously, the reason you don't know what it was about, is because it's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!" While I was making no progress at all, Laci had her own problems. I heard her scream, "GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME, ASSHOLE!" #4: I quickly made my way through the circle of guys around me, into the circle of guys around Laci, figuring that I should protect her as I might be partially responsible for her predicament. Just as I was nearing her, Laci suddenly jumped forward, obviously goosed from behind. I proximity sensed another one of the guys near me start to slide his hand around to intercept Laci's ass, so I reached out and knocked it away. Telling him, "Don't be so pathetic." "I wasn't doing anything!" Arguing would be a total waste of time, so I ignored him. I pulled Laci forward, putting my arm around her. Trying to lighten the mood I said, "How's your day going so far?" She couldn't believe her ears, then gushed, "This is HORRIBLE! I've never been so humiliated in my life. You were terrible making me do that so I could go out with you. Now every guy in school is going to be groping me wherever I go." I was working out a good way to apologize for that unforeseen consequence, when one of my minds had a better idea. I enthusiastically said, "I agree. It's a horrible and degrading experience. No one should ever have to go through it." It wasn't the response Laci expected, and I enjoyed seeing the confusion on her face. I added, "Having a group of your classmates grabbing at you for their own pleasure, with no regard whatsoever for your feelings, is appalling behavior." Julia had long since worked out where I was going with it, but Laci was so focused on her own problems that she hadn't. She was not totally self-absorbed though, and did realize something was up. She looked confused, saying, "Huh?" I asked her, "So why did you do it?" "Huh?" "The Sunday before last, at Julia's place, why did you do it to me? At least now you've got some idea of how bad it was for me, although it was obviously far worse for me than the little taste of it that you're experiencing now." "But..." "But nothing. You've got clothes on; I didn't. You can scream "Hands off, asshole," but I had to be a good host and not ruin the day for everyone. You can go to the office and make a sexual harassment complaint against any of guys who do it to you. There are plenty of witnesses, so the culprits would be hauled over the coals, their parents called, and they'd be suspended. If they even looked at you funny after that, they'd be expelled. You've got it easy compared to me." I'd spelled out the 'legal' process so the idiots - all the guys gathered hopefully/pathetically around us - might wake up and realize how stupid they were being. Just because Laci had permitted me to finger her, how could they possibly believe that gave them permission to try the same? On second thought, they obviously knew they didn't have permission as that's why their gropings had been surreptitious. It was just that any sex happening anywhere near them caused their brains to shutdown, leaving them under the control of that single-minded, insanely stupid thing in their pants. "But..." "If you're about to say 'But you're a guy', I suggest you keep that piece of idiocy to yourself. Do you seriously think that the same behavior that has you so pissed off is acceptable the other way around! I'd like to hear your moral justification for that." "But you enjoyed it! We all saw you!" "Your saw me be polite about it. I've got a very good girlfriend, so I don't have to put up with comparative strangers grabbing at me. Enough of this silly topic. If any of these guys cause you a problem, go to the office and make a complaint. They'll get what they deserve." "You really didn't enjoy it last Sunday?" "Have I invited you all back so you can do it to me again?" "Oh. I'm sorry, Mark. I didn't know." "That's partly why I put you through what you just experienced. To be fair, some guys would've enjoyed it, but you should've known that I was not one of them, and you DEFINITELY should've asked first! -- "By the way, I know a couple of girls who would have enjoyed what I did to you, so do you think I can use that as justification to do it to any girl I want, the way you used some boys liking it as justification for doing it to me?" "Ahh, no. I was wrong. I'm sorry." "Apology accepted. I'd say you and I are even now, so..." "Which girls?" from Dorian, one of the guys around us. I was momentarily confused about what Dorian was talking about, so he eagerly added, "Which girls would enjoy being felt up that way?" The real answer was Carol and perhaps Ava and Alexis, which was close enough to a total of "a couple of girls." My verbal answer was CONSIDERABLY different though, "You can't seriously be thinking of YOUR trying to do that to them. They'd scream bloody murder! Just because a girl lets me do something doesn't mean she's automatically giving you permission to do the same. Although, judging by the number of gropes Laci's been receiving, several of you actually seem to think that. That's so incredibly stupid, I'm speechless." Not literally, of course, I'd just come to the end of what I wanted to say. -- Then I had a funny idea, so I asked Dorian, "Is your best idea for how to get sex to follow me around and hit on any girl who desires me?" I had some follow-on lines ready, but Alexis and Julia preempted them. Alexis said, "He's got NO chance of getting any by himself, haha." Julia added, "That's the worst idea I've EVER heard! What girl is going to want Dorian after having Mark? Haha." Dorian's, "I didn't mean..." was drowned out by the resultant laughter. Some of it from the girls around me, but most of it from other guys. Guys enjoy tearing each other down. When it was quiet enough, I called out, "Party's over. I've got to get going. Make way, coming through." I put my hands on Laci's shoulders, and pushed her through the crowd ahead of me. If there's one thing I am reasonably sure of, it's that guys are pathetic. That's a good general rule, applicable pretty much all the time. And when guys are sexually excited, they make their normal level of pathetic look good. By pushing Laci ahead of me, and by deliberately staring over one of my shoulders back at Julia, Laci's ass was completely unguarded. One of the guys, Logan, lived down to my low expectations. I waited until my proximity sense showed his hand was a fraction of a second away from contact, and I dropped my hand down to grab his wrist a moment after he made contact with Laci's ass. Laci squealed and jumped forward, while I held Logan's hand where it was. I called out, "I've caught him, Laci. Sorry I was a fraction of a second too late." Actually, I was exactly on time for what I wanted. Logan had tried to pull his arm away, but I'd used a little Aikido trick. As part of the same movement as my grab, so he had no time to react to it, I'd moved his wrist a couple of inches diagonally down and away from him. While it was moving, it was easy for me to also twist my gripping hand to lever his elbow downward. Because he'd reached out to the side to grope Laci, my adjustments resulted in him being bent over and pulled sideways a little more than he'd positioned himself for. As a result, nearly all of his weight was on his near foot and he wasn't able to pull his hand back (his pulling just resulted in his body moving toward his hand because I was holding that immobile). By the time he'd adjusted his position to get better leverage and stability, several people had seen the caught red-handed location of his hand. I continued, "Several people have now witnessed the location of Logan's hand. Exactly behind where your behind was, the instant after it was rubbed. Plus I saw his hand reach out and rub your ass. My advice is that you go to the office and make a sexual harassment complaint against him." Logan yanked his arm back, and I let it go, my point having been made. He started protesting vehemently but I ignored him. Laci looked indecisive, so I added, "It's up to you, but I think these idiots will keep groping you. Logan very clearly heard you say you hated being groped, but he did it again..." "No I didn't! I didn't touch her." Which everyone ignored. " ... so he doesn't deserve any sympathy at all." Laci said, "But you might get in trouble too." Which was nice of her. I'd already thought about that, and had considered it an acceptable risk. I did feel truly sorry for subjecting Laci to all these idiots groping her. It hadn't occurred to me that they'd be so pathetic (silly me!). I answered, "I shouldn't think so. First, there's no need for you to mention my earlier actions in your complaint against Logan. Just put down in writing that Logan groped your ass as you were leaving the class. -- "Second, his bringing up what I did to you doesn't excuse his crime at all. He'd still be in exactly the same amount of trouble. -- "Third, I asked you for your permission several times, and you accepted several times. I even told you in advance what I was going to be doing to you, whereas Logan grabbed your ass sneakily, thinking that no one would know who it was. At worst, I'd be told off for a PDA with my girlfriend." ("Public Display of Affection", although describing finger-fucking as "affection" is a bit of a stretch.) -- "Fourth, if he does bring it up, I'll describe his crawling around on the floor so he could look up your dress. I'm sure the Principal and his parents will be VERY impressed by that behavior. Not only will he prove himself to be a pathetic loser, but it'll put his grope into the context of an ongoing campaign of sexual harassment against you, so he'd get the book thrown at him. Since he'd tried to do something sexual both before and after class, the Principal would probably count it as two premeditated offences and expel him." I would've preferred the Principal not to know about my revenge groping activity. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be in serious trouble for it, but I'd be even safer if he never heard about it, so my list of reasons was designed to convince Logan to keep his mouth shut about it. -- At the end of my little list, I had a better idea. "If you're reluctant to complain formally, I suggest you go to the office, get two or three sexual harassment complaint forms, fill out one of them about Logan but don't take it back immediately. If anyone else gropes you, or if Logan does it again, file every complaint you can..." "I won't! I won't!" insisted Logan. "Please don't, blah blah... ," whatever it was he said; I'd gone back to ignoring him. " ... That should be enough to stop these idiots from behaving so badly. You do want to stop them groping you, don't you?" "Absolutely! Okay. I'll do that. That's a good idea." "Good. And Laci, PURELY for your safety, I'll be keeping a VERY close eye on your ass for the next few days." #3: The rest of the class thought it was funny too. ^ A few loose ends: While walking away I got a chance to tell Julia, "I invited Alexis to the dinner on Saturday. She tells me she's got a suitable dress, but we were playing a game so I couldn't ask her lots of questions, not that I would have understood the answers anyway. Can you please double-check the girly things with her, to make sure she won't embarrass anyone?" As word spread to them, which took less than five minutes, the remaining revenge-grope girls started looking very worried. I had too many other things on my mind (by which I mean the upcoming casino visit rather than schoolwork. Who worries about schoolwork?), so I decided to let the girls stew. I'd treated Eileen very well, and they knew Laci deserved a bad grope, so they should settle down quickly. A day or two of worry wouldn't do them any harm, a sentiment of mine that mainly resulted from how wonderfully well my post-grope bullshit worked on Laci, making her feel truly mortified about how badly she'd treated me. I liked having the moral high ground. Several more guys asked me why Laci had let me do that. I told them, "Like I said last time you asked me, it's none of your business." Laci later asked me why I'd treated Eileen and her so differently. "Because the two of you behaved differently last Sunday. Eileen wasn't perfect, but her generosity to Tianna counted for a great deal in my eyes. I like people who are kind and considerate, rather than grabbing everything they can get for themselves." When she'd recovered from that little dig, Laci tried to guilt me into a date with her. To paraphrase her longer, sneakier, approach: "That was a terribly humiliating thing you put me through, but it was worth it to be able to date you. So when are we going on our date?" "Haha. Not even a good try, Laci. I know you understand things better than that. I have no obligation to you, or you to me; we're even. I was impressed by your perseverance, so that did raise my opinion of you. I'll think about, but I imagine I'm going to be very busy with the pipeline dates. Have a read of the website and you'll understand what I mean." Lastly, and getting close to leastly, Eileen commented to me that she was very, VERY thankful that I hadn't done to her what I'd done to Laci (for some reason, Eileen seemed reluctant to say "finger-fuck"). "You didn't deserve it, Eileen. But even if I'd been mean and silly enough to try it with you, it never would've happened. You would've opted out immediately. I wouldn't even want to do that with you in private." As I was sure she would, Eileen asked, "You wouldn't. Why not?" "I'm sure I could give you a great deal more pleasure in other ways, sweetie." I don't know what "other ways" she thought of, but she blushed. I left it there, because nothing much was likely to happen with Eileen since she suffered from the fault of being too innocent to be one of my girls. Not necessarily an incurable fault, but I wasn't likely to ever make the necessary effort, which should give you a good hint about the size of her breasts. ------- Chapter 172: It Hurt My Head Monday, May 2, 2005 (Continued) Speaking of Chloe, I had to do something about her appallingly defeatist, cowardly, non-cooperative, totally unacceptable attitude. And while I was talking to her, I had to get her to undo some buttons too. I checked with Julia that my presence wasn't needed for her pop quiz, so I could spend lunchtime trying to straighten Chloe out. Julia agreed, and wished me good luck. I approached Chloe. She was nervous to see me coming, and so she should be, with her having such a terrible attitude. I told her, "You and I need to have a serious talk at lunchtime. I'll meet you by your locker at the start of lunch, okay?" "Umm, why?" "You know very well why. Because you're making one of the biggest mistakes of your life." I might've been laying that on a bit thick, but I was willing to justify it by making up as much bullshit as I needed to. "You'll be at your locker?" "I don't really think..." "Let me put it this way. If you're not at your locker, then I'm going to discuss our relationship with you before and after every class we have, in front of every one of our classmates, day after day until the exams are over. We WILL talk about this, one way or another. I will be at your locker at the start of lunchtime. If you don't want to be embarrassed in class day after day, I strongly suggest you be there too." I walked off, chuckling to myself at her reaction. #1: #3: #2: #3: #2: #1: #2: #1: #2: #3: I took Julia to my locker at lunchtime, to give her the smaller of the two Chinese lunch containers and one of the pairs of chopsticks for Carol. I couldn't resist opening my container for a look. The food was unrecognizable, but there was plenty of it and it smelled delicious. Happy at those two wonderful attributes of my lunch, I closed the container and went to find Chloe, to work on satisfying another appetite of mine. She was waiting by her locker. #3: #2: #3: Somewhat tersely, and without smiling, I said to her, "Follow me." I was pretending to be angry at her 'betrayal'. Chloe followed, as we maneuvered through the crowd around the lockers. I took us outside and toward the school's admin block. The vast majority of kids prefer to have their lunch as far from supervision as possible, so we'd easily be able to find a seat out of everyone's hearing. When we were seated, I said, "Lunch first, Chloe. Apart from anything else, I need to calm down. I'm quite upset with you. Even angry, and I don't want to talk with you when I'm angry." "Oh. Why are you angry?" "Lunch first." I pulled out my lunch, grasped the chopsticks, and took the first piece of whatever it was with considerable curiosity. Delicious! The other pieces followed considerably faster. It was some sort of chopped up meat on a bed of rice. A flavor I'd never had before, but it was delicious. Chloe asked, "You're eating Chinese food?" #3: I answered, "Yes," and kept eating. I was NOT going to get into a discussion about Lily's providing me with lunch from now on. God knows how I could explain to Chloe why Lily was serving me, considering I couldn't even explain it to myself. One thing was for sure, I wanted Lily to keep making lunch for me, because it was wonderful! And there was too much for me too, which was even more wonderful (that meant I had that most wonderful of things: leftovers!). Lily's servitude was rapidly becoming a truly excellent development. The quality of lunch also had me very much looking forward to Saturday's dinner. [I'll mention now that Lily provided Carol and me with a daily supply of delicious and highly appreciated lunches. Always delicious, always plentiful, and always different, which was quite a novelty for a guy who was used to the same few sandwich fillings year after year. Rice featured frequently, but every dish was distinctly different. It was enjoyed immensely, for the short while it lasted.] When I'd eventually had enough food, and had closed the container of what were now leftovers (lovely girl, that Lily), I turned to Chloe. In a stern voice, I opened the conversation with, "I presume you're physically capable of undoing buttons? You don't have a terrible muscular disease that makes it impossible for you to undo them? It's not too complicated for you? Your parents did show you how as a child?" I was far too stern for Chloe to find my questions funny. She just said, "Yes." "On Saturday morning I spent a considerable amount of time explaining how important it is that you start unbuttoning the top of your blouses at school. You said you understood. You were even impressed by the depth of my thinking and understanding. Yet every single one of your buttons is done up. You just confirmed that you were capable of undoing them, so that means you are deliberately refusing to, correct?" "It's not that. My mother wants me to dress modestly." "And you obey your mother in the matter of your dress?" "Yes. She's my mother." I pulled out my cellphone, held it up, and asked, "What's your mother's number?" Funnily enough, Chloe didn't give it to me. Instead she asked, "Why?" "I'm curious to find out how she can insist on your having every single button done up, yet she lets you trick guys into the girls' bathroom so you can wave your naked tits at them." #3: Unsurprisingly, Chloe didn't have a good answer, which was a pity because a good answer would have been truly impressive. She did manage to say "Ahh," though. "Let me take a wild guess, your mother wouldn't approve of your stripping and waving your tits around at a school?" "It wasn't as bad as that. It was only..." "WOULD she, or would she not, have approved of what you did?" I waited for a couple of seconds, but Chloe didn't answer. So I said, "No problem. We'll continue this discussion on Wednesday, to give me time to visit your home to ask your mother myself." "Ha-ha," from Chloe. Not really a humorous laugh. More sarcastic than anything, I guess. She clearly didn't think I was serious. With a totally serious face, which I'd been maintaining the whole conversation so far, "If you don't think I'm serious then you don't know me very well. Right now you're worse than useless as a girlfriend, so I've got nothing to lose by visiting your home and asking your mother. It'd serve you right. Girls shouldn't be allowed to wave their tits at boys and lie to them as much as you've lied to me." "I have NOT lied to you. I've only ever..." "Crap! You lied to me about your refusal to undo a button being because your mother wants you to dress modestly. The reason you didn't undo a button has got NOTHING to do with your mother. When have I EVER lied to you, Chloe?" Chloe didn't know whether to address the lying accusation or my most recent question, which was largely why I'd asked the question. I'd learned from the best (best that I knew of, anyway). Julia loves to put a zig at the end of a zag (or sometimes - to really confuse people - a zag after a zig). After half a second or so, I repeated louder, "When have I EVER lied to you? Come on, answer the question! It's a very easy one." "Umm, never. You've never lied to me." "No, I haven't," which made yet another one. "It's a great pity you aren't equally moral. From what Julia told me, you lied to her at least twice too. You told her that same pathetic mother excuse, and you told her you didn't believe I could be interested you. Not only do you tell lies, but you do it often, and they're pathetically transparent nonsense." -- I waited for a moment or two, but Chloe didn't pick up on the point I left for her. So I raised it again, "Why on Earth would you lie to Julia about believing I wasn't interested in you? Julia knows damned well that I'm very interested in you, and she knows damned well that you know that too." "You are?" "You can't POSSIBLY be asking me whether I'm interested in you! You know for a fact that I am." "I DON'T know that. I'm just a silly girl and you're the most amazing genius I've ever met. There's..." #3: "GOOD GRIEF, GIRL! Julia and I spent HOURS arguing on Friday night because of you. She and I together and separately have spent hour after hour talking and thinking about you. Especially me obviously, because I am so attracted to you. It's a week later, but I'd STILL be standing in the damned bowling alley's parking lot talking to you, if Julia hadn't dragged me away..." "{Giggle}." I went on to detail all the times over the last several days that I'd thought of Chloe. I won't bother listing them all here, because you wouldn't recognize most of them. [See if you can guess why? Hint: my honesty is inversely proportional to the girl's bra size. (Not linearly proportional either, and not even proportional to the square. I've never measured my honesty quantitatively, but I'm pretty sure the relationship is inversely proportional to the conical volume).] In other words, I bullshitted her, wildly exaggerating how much time and effort I'd spent on her. By halfway through my recitation, Chloe wasn't even listening properly; she was too busy being happy. So I kept going, making the rest of the list even less accurate. After I'd finished that fiction, I added, "Chloe! Do I have emotions?" "Huh? What do you mean?" "I mean, do I have emotions? It's a simple question. Do I sometimes feel sad, or happy, or angry?" "Of course. But why are you..." "The next time you want reassurance, walk up to me and tell me, 'Mark, I'm feeling insecure. Would you please reassure me that you like me.' That would have saved me a great deal of anger and worry. Julia too. Everyone feels insecure sometimes, and they need reassurance at those times. That's a normal part of every relationship, and there's no shame or embarrassment in it. I know you needed reassurance, but you did a bad thing: you lied to try to trick me into reassuring you. Lies cannot be used to strengthen a relationship, they only damage it. I appreciate that you're very inexperienced at relationships, so I am not going to hold it against you, but please do not do it again. Julia and I do not want there to be any deceit in our relationships with you." "I'm sorry. I'm not very good at this type of..." "No you're not, which makes listening to me and taking my advice even more obviously the right thing to do. As well as making it important that you tell the truth. You won't get good at relationships if you use dishonesty. And why bother lying? It's not as if I'm trying to take advantage of you in any way, is it?" "No, it's not. I know you wouldn't do that." "So you trust me?" "Yes. You know that, I told you that on Saturday." "Then why didn't you trust me enough to tell me you were feeling insecure and needed reassurance?" "Umm." Chloe hung her head, then added, "I'm no good, am I?" "That's nonsense. You cook delicious pizza. That's actually not a joke, but I need to explain why not. There've now been several times when you've insisted to me that you trust me totally, and then a few days later you do something that shows that you don't trust me. I told you on Saturday morning that Julia was being too simplistic thinking that there was only one secret I had about you. You are also being too simplistic about trust. When you tell me you're sure you trust me totally, I know that you can't know if that's true. How can you be positive you trust me about things that have never happened yet? You're definitely improving, because you now not only trust me with your body, but you even want to give it to me, but there are still plenty of ways your trust in me has yet to be tested. If I asked you to climb onto the roof of a 10-story building and jump off, you'd think I was crazy. Even if I said, 'Don't worry, you can trust me, ' I'm sure you'd laugh in my face, and then go home to tell your mother that your boyfriend has gone crazy. -- "When you described yourself as 'no good', that was also an incorrect statement, like your telling me that you totally trust me. People are too complex for a blanket statement to be totally true. There are some things you're very good at, like cooking pizza. And there are some things that you're not good at, like anything you would've learned from prior relationships with guys. There are some things you aren't good at now, which I'm sure you'll become very good at. An obvious example of that is making love. Being a virgin you obviously are not skilled, but I'm sure you will become a good lover in time. I'm looking forward to teaching you VERY often, haha." Chloe commented, "You talk about sex with me quite often." #3: #2: "What reasons do you think I have for doing that, Chloe?" "Umm. I don't know." "I'm sure you don't know all of my reasons, but you should be able to guess the easy ones?" "Umm, you're checking to see whether I get angry, like you did when you first started talking about my breasts?" "Yes. That's the first reason I had. Can you think of another reason?" "Umm. No. Not at the moment." "One reasonable guess would be that I was looking forward to having sex with you." "Ohh." While Chloe was deciding how to react to that, I copied her by giving the issue a little more thought. More than once today I'd thought that Chloe needed a damned good fuck to knock all the foolishness out of her. It might've been too hopeful to expect to remove "all the foolishness", but the fuck still seemed justified. I also thought about Julia's idea of my taking Chloe to bed and giving her a VERY good time, but leaving her a virgin. That should create a great deal more desire in her to move forward, so she'd hopefully start doing the things we wanted her to do. That approach actually delayed my getting sex from her in preference for working on Julia's altruistic goal for Chloe. Of the two alternatives, fucking her outright had plenty of appeal, but it was short-term appeal. Julia's "Orgasm the Virgin" plan was better, so decided to move ahead with it. But a zig before the main zag would make her think even more highly of me. I had a few points I wanted to cover in this discussion, and getting too much into sex would probably prevent that, so I'd bring them up now. "Chloe, I'm going to change the subject totally away from sex. There's something else more important I wish to discuss. You know I like you a great deal, as you overheard me say that I think you're a lovely girl. My opinion of you is causing me to try to achieve two major goals with you. One of them is what we've been talking about, which is your becoming my girlfriend. I would enjoy having you as my girlfriend, provided you're honest with me and you start taking my advice much better than you have been recently. -- "The second goal is much more important than my enjoyment of your company. Julia and I are very concerned about the quality of your life. Your WHOLE life, starting right now, but especially after you graduate school. You don't have good relationships with males. You get visibly uncomfortable if any guy comes within six feet of you, and you're visibly fearful if one is standing next to you. When you get a job, you're going to be unable to work with your co-workers, bosses, customers, etc. You can ignore guys at school, but you can't ignore them when you get a job. I could say a lot more about that, but I don't think I need to. I can see by the look on your face that you know what I mean?" "Yeah. I hate the idea of getting a job. Lots of male bosses use their authority to force their female staff to do indecent things." #3: #2: "Julia and I know how to greatly improve your life, like we told you before, remember?" "I remember, but I don't understand how?" "I certainly can't explain it now. It'd take hours, if not days. And I doubt I could get you to understand the complicated parts anyway." "But you're only fifteen. I know you're a genius, but you've never worked full time, so how could you know what to do? You don't even know what sort of job I'll get." #1: #3: "Chloe, do you trust Julia and me?" "Yes, of course. Mostly." #2: #3: "Good. That makes things much easier for everyone. So there are two reasons for my spending time with you: hoping you'll become a good girlfriend for me, and so Julia and I can make the rest of your life much happier. And of the two, the second is by far the most important. You understand those points, don't you?" "Yes, if you say so." #1: #2: #3: Showing the patience of a saint - but no other saintly attitudes, especially not chastity - I said, "Good. I'm glad you understand. Remember, on Saturday we said that your unbuttoning your blouse was something that it was important to do for the SECOND reason. I said it wasn't for my personal pleasure or anything like that. I'd still want you to unbutton your blouse even if I went to a different school and I never saw you. It was for YOUR benefit, not mine. Do you remember that part of the conversation on Saturday?" "Umm, I'm not sure. I was very tired and excited, and you were waving your, umm, your 'thing' around. It was very distracting." #1: #2: Trying to lighten the mood a little, while I was also trying to summon more patience, I said, "It's called a 'cock', Chloe. Or, in my case, it's called, 'That Wonderful, Awe-Inspiring, Perfect Example of Manliness'. But you can call it 'cock' for short, if you like." "{Giggle}. Okay. 'Cock', {giggle}." #1: #2: #3: "Congratulations, you're now a potty-mouth like almost every other kid at our school. Back to the main point. On Saturday I rather brilliantly convinced you to come to school with some buttons undone. Unfortunately my cock was too awe-inspiring and you've forgotten, but fortunately you trust me, so all I need to say is that it's very important for Julia's and my helping your future that you start to undo a button or two. So would you please undo one button now, Chloe." Her hands didn't even move; just her mouth, "I don't understand why?" "I know you don't, sweetie, but it's important. You can trust Julia and me on this point, because we've given it a great deal of thought and discussion." "But this might be one of the times I shouldn't trust you, even though you say to." "Why wouldn't you trust us? It's not like we're getting any personal gain out of this. Your blouse will still be buttoned higher than virtually every other girl's in school." "This might be like your example of jumping off a 10-story building. You said I shouldn't trust you, even if you said to trust you about jumping." #1: #2: #3: "Chloe, sweetie, my ten-story building example was to teach you that trust is not a simple yes-or-no concept. In the case of a ten-story building, your life is at stake, so you'd require an impossible level of trust to justify jumping off the roof. But undoing a single button is such a trivial event that there's no comparison at all. You hardly need any trust at all to make undoing a button a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Other girls adjust their buttons simply because the wind changes, and you can't get more trivial than that. Julia and I are asking you to do a very simple, trivial thing, so please humor us and do it." #1: #2: #3: "But..." #2: <{Groan}.> " ... boys will stare at me." #1: #3: #2: #3: #2: #1: #3: #2: #1: #2: #1: #3: A quick exchange of suggestions, a mental crossing of the fingers, and we went for it. I stood up and grabbed my leftovers, while declaring, "That's it! I've had MORE than enough. I'm tired of having insults thrown in my face over and over again." "But I didn't insult you!" "I asked you to undo a button, and you refused because 'guys would stare at you'. For Christ's sake, I'm a GENIUS! Don't you think I might have thought of THAT! I've thought of things YEARS ahead of where we are now, and you're throwing the most glaringly obvious thing back in my face, as if I was so stupid I couldn't think of it for myself. You're totally fucked in the head about your damned stupid breasts. You're more fixated on them than every boy in school. At least boys get on with their lives 99% of the time. You're so obsessed about them you can't even remember who you're talking to..." #3: #1: " ... I'm sick of your lies to Julia and me, two people who're busting their humps to help you, simply because we used to think you were a nice person..." #2: <"Thar she blows!"> I ostensibly ignored the sound of Chloe's sudden sobs and moans, continuing loud enough for her to hear, " ... I'm sick of your stupidity. I'm sick of your treating me like I was stupid. I'm sick of being treated as if I wasn't doing ALL of this for your benefit. And more than anything, I'm VERY sick of your telling me over and over again that you trust me, when you obviously don't trust me at all." I paused, but Chloe just sat there crying, rather than defending herself the way I wanted. So more drawing out was required. A direct question should do it, "What on Earth was the point of your lying over and over again about your trusting me, when you so obviously don't?" A direct question did not do it; Chloe kept crying. "I should have known you wouldn't know how to trust anyone. You've never been able to look past the end of your tits, so how could you possibly learn to judge when people had good intentions or not." #1: "Have a good life, bye." I turned and walked away. I'd taken a couple of steps when Chloe moaned, "I DO trust you." #3: #2: #1: #2: #1, #3: "Prove it then. Undo a button." "I don't want to." "Have a good life then. Bye." "Wait, wait. Come back. I'll do it." I turned, and walked half the way back to Chloe, stopping about three steps away. She hadn't moved. I waited a couple of seconds, nothing happened, so I said, "Have a good life, bye." #1: #2: "I'm doing it!" I turned, and wonder-of-wonders, she ACTUALLY was undoing her top button. #1: #3: #2: Chloe finished undoing her button, and dropped her hand to her lap. Chloe's blouse had many buttons on it - three times as many as a normal blouse - so the two sides of her collar didn't fall apart because the next button was too close. From the right angle someone might've been able to see an extra sliver of skin, but it would hardly have been the most erotic experience of their life; not compared to, for example, having your head looking up from between Laci's feet at the right time. "Well done, Chloe. I was starting to doubt it was possible for you to do that." "You forced me to." Said tersely, but not angrily. More of a blunt statement of fact, with some slight pride and happiness that she'd managed to accomplish the task. #1: #2: #3: #1: #2: "Yeah, I'm such a forceful bully, Chloe. That's my reputation all over school - 'big, bad Mark Anderson.' To prove what a bully I am, undo another button." "What! You want me to undo ANOTHER button?" "That's what I said. Stop wasting time. Undo it right now, because I've got far better things to do if you don't." Chloe stuck her chin out, and stated firmly. "I don't want to, and you can't make me!" #1: #2: "And I have no intention of trying to. Helping you is far too much trouble, and I can't be bothered anymore. Bye." "I'll do it! Come back. Look, I'm doing it!" I looked back over my shoulder, and sure enough, she was "doing it." #2: I looked up into the sky, craning my neck backward, and swiveling around to look all over the sky above me. "What are you doing?" asked Chloe. "For such an Earth shattering event as Chloe Moon undoing two buttons, I'm waiting for the lightning bolts to come crashing down from the Heavens to destroy me with divine wrath." "{Giggle}." #1: #2: #1: "I'm glad you're in a good mood, because it's time to undo another button." "No. That's not fair. I've done more than enough already." #3: #2: "Two buttons on that blouse is NOTHING! It's got damn near twenty buttons on it. Undoing a third one won't come close to showing any cleavage, so there's..." "I'm NOT going to show any cleavage. That's completely..." "But you WILL undo the third button, and you'll do it now. It's pointless you making a fuss about it, because on that blouse a third button still doesn't show anything." "I don't want to. It's unfair of you to force me to." #1: #3: #2: #1: #3: I said, "If you can't see that I'm doing it for your benefit, then there's no point in my wasting any more time with you. Bye." This time Chloe kept me waiting until I was on my fourth step, before she called, "Come back. I'll do it." I turned, and Chloe's hands were moving to her button. I started walking back, and the closer I got to her, the slower her hands moved. They reached her button, and did nothing. Chloe looked at me. I said, "Do it." "I don't think it's..." I turned and walked away. "Wait! Come back!" I stopped, but did not turn. Still facing away from her, I said loudly enough for her to hear, "Have you done it?" A short pause, "Yes, but you're being VERY mean to me." I turned, checked, and Chloe had unbuttoned the next one. I walked right up to her, and looked down her blouse. Still no sign of anything interesting, so I said, "Not enough yet. Undo another one." "No way! Mom would get very upset if she could see me now." "10, 9, 8, 7... ," Chloe complained, "You can't treat me like this!" #1: #2: #3: "... 6, 5, 4, 3, 2... ," "Stop! This isn't fair!" "... 1, bye!" I walked off again. #2: From Chloe, "Argh. You shouldn't force me this way." I kept walking. "Stop! Okay, okay, you win. Come back." #1: #2: I stopped walking, but kept facing away. I didn't even say anything, waiting to see how trainable she is. After couple of seconds of silence, I started walking again. I'd barely gone half a step, when "Stop. I'll do it. There, it's done! Come back please." I walked back. She'd told the truth, and I stood next to her to contemplate the 'necessity' of undoing a fifth button. Chloe was wearing one of those prim and proper white blouses. Stiff, with frills up both sides of the buttonholes. It wasn't close to flopping open the way a lightweight blouse would have, but from the perfect position (pretty much where I was standing, as Chloe was still sitting on the seat), I could see the beginning of some cleavage through the narrow gap offered by the blouse. From anywhere other than the perfect position, there'd be no sight of anything interesting, merely an inch width of neck, the gap narrowing down to the button just above the top of her breast. Speaking as a red-blooded American male, the current amount of breast exposure was pretty damned pathetic. Chloe, as she was now, would still be one of the most conservatively dressed girls at school. I had three issues to think about: Could I talk Chloe into keeping her blouse unbuttoned? The whole effort would have been largely useless otherwise. Undoing one more button would start to have a dramatic effect. None of the preceding inch-by-inch gains had achieved anything of significance, but the next button would be different. I've spent several years studying the mechanical forces involved in the interactions between blouses and breasts. Undoing one more button would allow the considerable outward pressure of her breasts to push her blouse open MUCH wider. The skin exposed would substantially increase, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The trouble was that it seemed extremely unlikely Chloe would agree with having so much exposed. Even if I managed to push her into it now, she was far more likely to do her buttons back up if they did show a significant amount of cleavage. The way she was now was modest enough that she should be more likely to leave them undone. Having the current four buttons undone was ALMOST enough to be interesting. The boys in her classes would be stunned to see Chloe with ANY buttons undone, and would almost certainly overreact stupidly. But there was actually nothing to see, so they'd eventually calm down. One more button undone would decrease male intelligence way too far. It'd result in guys running at her, pushing each other for the best viewing locations, fights, etc. It'd cause a small riot. The last point decided me. In general, I didn't mind a bunch of guys making complete idiots of themselves. They did it so often anyway, whether I minded or not. If someone like Savannah caused a riot by wearing an extremely sexy top, then I'd stand back and laugh. But Chloe's being the center of a riot would be too much for her on her first day of 'un-buttoned-ness'. Too much Chloe-cleavage, too fast, would cause all the little boy-brains to go haywire. So it'd be better to slowly, non-traumatically, increase how many buttons she had undone. Having reached my decision to stop at four buttons today, I moved onto Phase Two: working out how to convince her to keep them undone in class, both today and tomorrow. Deciding to leave the buttons as is, was an easy decision, but Phase Two was much more complicated. For a start, I didn't have a clue what in hell she was thinking. Being forceful in a new context, with other people around, when I didn't know what I was doing or what she was thinking, seemed WAY too dangerous. So I decided to use the rest of lunchtime to build rapport with Chloe just by wasting time in pleasant conversation. When we ran out of lunchtime, I'd ask her nicely to leave her blouse unbuttoned. Rather than looming over her, I sat down next to her to have a nice, friendly chat. We chatted away, talking about all sorts of crap. It wasn't easy because I had nothing in common with her. For example, I loved her breasts and she didn't. I had to talk about how her studying was going, what her favorite subjects were, and crap like that. She was happy though. In fact, she was eating it up. She LOVED having my attention. Toward the end of lunchtime I said, "Chloe, I like the look of you much more that way. You look more relaxed, normal, well adjusted and friendlier. It's a good image for you. I'm happy with your buttons exactly the way they are now." My comments had made Chloe smile happily. I was just about to congratulate myselves when she added, "You shouldn't have forced me to unbutton my blouse like that. It's wrong for me to be so exposed." Ignoring the fact that she could hardly be considered to be exposed, I said, "I SHOULD have forced you. It was necessary and I'd do it again. You know that I know what's best for you. I know that FAR better than you do, that's for sure!" "Oh." #2: #1: #2: #3: "Chloe, not only will I do it again, if I deem it necessary, but I have to warn you about two serious things. Are you listening?" "Yes, Mark." "Good. You have to realize that I do NOT have an endless supply of patience, and you are in danger of exhausting what patience I do have..." #1: " ... So you'd better make sure that you learn what's required, so I don't have to do that so often..." #2: " ... And if I do have to insist you undo your buttons again, you'd better make sure you do so much faster than you did earlier. If I don't see improvements, then I'm going to lose patience with you. I don't mind that you're inexperienced with relationships, but I will mind very much if you refuse to learn. Do you understand?" "It's not my fault you forced me to do things against my will." #3: #2: "It WILL be your fault if I have to keep doing it. A good girlfriend learns to anticipate her boyfriend, especially when she knows her boyfriend is FAR smarter about these things than she is. How much do you know about sex, Chloe?" "Umm. Not much." "And how much do I know?" She answered with enthusiasm, "The other girls say you're incredible. I don't understand why you can want to be my friend when you've got so many other girls chasing after you..." She started gushing stuff, including several positive comments about me, which is not the sort of attitude I expect minutes after a girl virtually accuses me of rape. I didn't understand her, but she seemed happy, so something must be going right. Don't ask me what though. I was thinking about how to interrupt her latest irrelevant deluge of crap in a way that made her as conscious as possible of my value to her, for when I asked her to leave the buttons undone for the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow, but the bell sounded. Chloe INSTANTLY started doing up her buttons, stopping mid-word to concentrate on getting the job done as quickly as possible. I protested, "Chloe, it's important for your future that..." I stopped, because she'd finished doing them all up. Chloe looked up at me, as if to indicate, "I wasn't listening. Did I hear some noise coming out of your mouth?" I started again, "Chloe, I wanted you to leave your buttons undone." She got to her feet, saying, "Don't be silly! We have to go to class now." She proved the point, by starting to walk briskly back that way, leaving me to rush to catch up. I had NO IDEA what to do about her buttons and attitude now. The only tactic that I knew worked was to threaten to walk away, which was a difficult threat to carry off convincingly when I was rushing to catch up to her. I decided to do nothing with Chloe until Julia explained to me what the hell was going on. We reached my locker first, and when I stopped, Chloe paused to thank me for a WONDERFUL lunch. Several possible answers were rejected one after the other: "My pleasure", "I enjoyed it too", "We must do it again sometime" (I greatly wished NEVER to do it again; it hurt my head). I settled for saying, "Thank you." ------- Chapter 173: Ridiculed Monday, May 2, 2005 (Continued) I located Julia, who told me, "We had great fun with the pop quiz about you. There was lots of joking around, so you missed a good time." That was true, I did miss having a good time. I'd been too busy beating my head against a brick wall. Julia continued, "Carol, Ava and I are going to mark them after school tomorrow, to keep us busy until we hear how your trip went. We'll go through the answers at the Wednesday lunchtime meeting, just before the Pipeline Q&A starts. That'll give us a chance to do some boasting about you before the girls confront the reality of that competition. How did your lunch go?" "Frustrating, confusing, annoying. If you listened to Chloe, you'd think it was the best lunch she's ever had, even though I 'forced her to do terrible things.' I'll tell you about it this evening, so you can explain it to me. My head hurts trying to make sense of it. Life would be so much easier if girls made sense." "Did you succeed with getting her to undo some buttons?" "In a sensible world, that would have a 'Yes' or 'No' answer. Did I mention that my lunch was confusing?" "Haha. Okay, we'll talk about it tonight." We both noticed that Chloe's buttons were done up all the way to her neck, as usual, for the rest of the day. She was always very happy to see me, just not happy enough to undo a button. As soon as I saw Lily, I thanked her very much for the delicious lunch, adding, "What was I eating, because it was delicious?" Lily answered, "Rice and, umm, I don't know word. Small animal." "Pig, or was it some sort of bird?" Lily was shaking her head. She said, "Makes sound, miaow, miaow." Julia's and Lily's laughter alerted me to the possibility that my anguish might be unnecessary. I asked Lily, "You were joking?" "Yes. Your face very funny. Today you had moo, moo, haha. Beef." A little suspiciously, I asked, "Beef? It didn't taste like any beef I've had before." "Cantonese recipe. Was enough?" "Yes, thank you. It was the perfect amount." (Having leftovers IS perfect.) I checked again, "You sure it was beef? Not cat?" Julia chuckled, telling me, "Lily was pulling your leg. Or maybe that should be 'pulling your tail', haha. You're a little gullible sometimes, darling. I had a taste of Carol's, and it was definitely beef, okay?" "Okay, if you say so." Nonetheless, I made a mental note to look carefully at what I was given in the future. [That proved to be an impractical idea, because: (a) I didn't know what I was looking for (perhaps whiskers?), and (b) By lunchtime I was always too hungry to worry about being suspicious. Especially because the meals were always delicious.] For the rest of the afternoon, girls frequently asked me questions which were obviously from the pop quiz, as girls don't normally walk up to me and ask, "What was the total number of goals you scored in your last three soccer games, Mark?" I answered the first couple of times, but soon found out that doing so only led to more girls asking more questions. I had to change my answer to, "Sorry girls, but Julia's going to be giving the answers at Wednesday's lunch." I heard a few girls make reference to "The Prize". I asked Julia what that was, and she answered, "The usual." I was pretty sure she didn't mean a gift basket, but I double-checked, "You mean..." "Yep." "Oh." #4: #1: #4: Felicity (the one I fancied sleeping with; the 9th grade girl), found me between the first and second periods after lunch. "Mark, have you got time to talk? And how come you never dressed like that last year?" #3: #4: All of us decided to stay and talk with her. The truthful explanation of why I didn't dress this way last year was far too complicated and embarrassing to explain, and I couldn't be bothered making anything up either, so I just said, "I have time, Felicity. I was hoping you'd find me." "I was waiting for you to come to me." #2: With what looked like genuine puzzlement - but was, in fact, neither genuine nor puzzlement - I asked, "Why would I do that?" "Didn't you say you wanted my phone number?" Felicity pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and held it out to me. It was a SMALL piece of paper, about the right size to hold a single phone number. I opened it, to see her name and phone number. I held it out to offer it back to her, saying, "I don't know how much you know about me, but I don't have time to waste on people who're playing unhelpful games." I thought of explaining what she was doing wrong, but I decided to save my valuable time. I'd wait to see whether she'd 'fess up and apologize immediately. Instead she said, "What do you mean?" "You know I asked you to collect the phone numbers of all the girls who were interested, and to bring them to me or Julia. If you're incapable of doing something as simple as that, I don't think I'll waste my time phoning you. You can have this back," I waved her piece of paper again. "I'm looking for a girlfriend who is reasonably intelligent and capable." It didn't last long, but it was amusing to watch her indecision. It was a toss-up between storming off in a huff, or staying. Staying won, but it was a close call - something I could easily tell because my proximity sense twice showed her having the short-lived intention of walking away. Felicity shrugged, took the little piece of paper back, and extracted a larger one from her pocket. Of - I now noticed - quite a pretty and somewhat low-cut dress. (I had, of course, "noticed" that the dress was low-cut before, but it only just occurred to me now that she had dressed to impress me.) She held it out, saying, "You can't blame a girl for trying." "I can, however, be unimpressed by her. If you'd sought me out this morning and given me the full list without any game playing, I would've been impressed and pleased. I'm also not impressed by a girl who I've barely spoken fifty words to all year, thinking she has the right to control which girls give me their phone numbers. All things considered, you're not off to a good start, despite the nice dress." When a girl wears a lowish-cut dress, you should ALWAYS show appreciation. That way they'll wear them more often, and the world will be a nicer, happier, better place. "Wow; you've changed! You NEVER used to talk like that before." True, thanks to Julia. Not only had Julia given me the confidence to speak this way, but even more importantly, had provided me with several dozen alternatives to Felicity, so I didn't really care whether Felicity came or went. This is a good example of the Attitude part of my, "Bullshit, Experience and a Good Attitude" approach to picking up girls. "Yes, I have changed. You knew that already, as you commented on my clothes when you arrived." I thought it'd be a good idea to remind her on my clothes, just in case she was a girl and therefore fascinated by clothes. In case she was impressed by intelligence as well, I added, "I'm also extremely busy. I'm doing 10th and 11th grade this year, as well as a working on my college degree, so I don't have time for the time-wasting game playing that you inflict on the boys you're used to. Have you seen the notices about my website?" "Ahh, yeah. 'EggsSearch', right?" "Yes. It describes the system I'm going to use for finding a girlfriend. I can't choose one in the usual way because I'm too busy and there are too many girls interested. I'm hoping a group of 9th grade girls will try, including you. Would you please encourage all the girls in your classes to read the website tonight or tomorrow night. There's going to be a Question & Answer session about it at lunchtime on Wednesday." "Ahh. I'm not sure what you want me to do?" "Encourage girls in your classes to read the website. At the beginning of your classes for the rest of today and tomorrow, stand up and draw their attention to the notice, and tell them what it's about. It'll only take you thirty seconds or so." "You want me to help you get MORE girls?" "Exactly right. You'll also impress me with your helpfulness, and I imagine many of the girls in your classes will be impressed by your having a connection with me. That's if you want it? If you don't, let me know now and I'll easily find some other girls in your classes to help me." "Ahh, no, that's all right. What do you want me to tell them exactly?" "'Any girls interested in dating me should read that website before lunchtime on Wednesday, then come to the meeting place that's mentioned on the site.' You should read it yourself tonight. Can you do that?" "Sure." "Good. I'll see you at Wednesday's lunch then. Thanks." I started moving off, but Felicity said, "Ahh, Mark. Umm, I thought you might ask me out." "Felicity, I appreciate your interest in me, but you haven't done anything to interest me in you yet. I'm not a silly little boy who's going to fall all over himself just because you're wearing a low-cut dress. You need to treat me a lot more maturely than that..." #4: " ... and you need to behave maturely yourself. You're good looking and you do dress well, but there are more than a hundred girls in this school that the same could be said of. Beauty obviously isn't my sole criterion, or I'd have a hundred girlfriends already. I have other criteria as well, and you haven't even started on achieving any of those yet. If you do a good job with the EggsSearch announcements, I'll hear about it and will be impressed and pleased. That's enough of a goal for you for the next few days." "I have to do things to impress YOU! That's very arrogant. Normally guys..." "Yes, I'm sure guys normally do chase after you. If you think it's arrogant of me to freely admit that I have criteria for a girlfriend above and beyond simple physical beauty, then I'm sorry for you. As far as I'm concerned, the ONLY positive aspect you've shown me today is that you've got quite nice breasts. Excuse me if that's not enough to turn me into a gibbering idiot who'd chase you all over school for another look. If that's the sort of boyfriend you want, then we're not going to hit it off. But if you want a mature, sensible, boyfriend, then I might be your man. I have to go now, thanks for the list, bye." #3: I opened it to check, and saw Felicity's name and number right at the top, in bright red. I also noticed that some of the girls had notes alongside their names. Those notes were usually things like "CV 9th", but there was also an "SCS 9th." Sondarm Christian School is the fourth largest high school in Corvallis (actually just outside of the city), but apparently not one that's very good at instilling Christian values into its young students if one of them put her name on a list to date a complete stranger after a brief lunch where there was so much sex talk. I had the idea of giving this list of phone numbers to Ava, asking her to call all the 9th grade girls from our school except Felicity, to ask them to also spread the word about the website, adding, "Your helpfulness will impress Mark." Ava was my choice for the job because it wasn't important enough to bother Julia with, and it'd be good to get Ava to do little tasks for us. I dithered a bit over whether to do that or not, because I would've preferred to first give Felicity time to demonstrate her level of helpfulness. The trouble was that there wasn't enough time between now and Wednesday. I decided to put Ava on the job. Tough luck if Felicity got her feathers ruffled. She should've been more enthusiastic about carrying out my wishes, that being an attitude that every pretty girl in a low-cut top should have. It should teach Felicity a lesson, although a somewhat muddled one because she might think the lesson was, "Don't give Mark other girls' phone numbers." I didn't care enough to worry about it. When I was next sitting in class, I went down the list and noted the school and grade against as many of the other girls as I knew. The afternoon was dominated by one major development. Someone - probably more than one of them - had gone to my website during lunchtime and had printed out copies of everything. These copies were passed around my classes; and I guessed probably other classes too. That would've been great, except for one important detail: the vast majority of passing around and reading was being done by GUYS. As guys do, they formed into groups and got themselves worked up about it. I came in for an increasing amount of mockery, insults, derision, and every other form of ridicule they could think of. I ignored them. You can't talk with guys when they're in full-on, tear-someone-down mode, especially when you're that someone and it's a many-to-one situation. Even if I came up with a brilliantly convincing counter-argument, no guy is going to risk ridicule by backing down from his loudly stated position in front of other guys. ^ [[Continuing to do things known to be wrong, rather than look silly by admitting a mistake and backing down, is a genetic failing carried on the Y-chromosome. Thus it occurs in every male, from high-school boy to President. For some reason, it seems to ESPECIALLY occur in high-school boys and Presidents. That's not a political dig at the current or any other President, but actually a very true and worrying flaw in democratic countries' political systems. Any politician who admits he made a mistake is throwing away his career. His opponents - who are continually looking for any weakness they can exploit - will seize on his admission and use it to rip him to shreds. His backers will drop him, never to back him ever again. How many times have you heard, "Admitting you have a problem is the first step in fixing it"? It's a universal truth, except in politics, because politicians are mostly concerned with avoiding the truth. To get anywhere near the top of the political system, it's essential for a politician to NEVER admit to making a mistake. After twenty or thirty years of living and successfully competing in that culture, no President is going to react to things going wrong with any sort of appropriate response, such as stopping whatever it might be. Unless he can find a way of backing down that puts the blame entirely on someone else, he's going to insist he's right and push even harder to prove that he believes he's right and that he's a strong, decisive leader. The system guarantees Presidents that will turn fuck-ups into FUCK-UPS.]] ^ The boys' ridicule wasn't totally one-sided; Julia got in a good one: Some guys were ripping into me for the arrogance of my scheme. Jesse made the mistake of mockingly taunting, "You must think you're God's gift to girls." Julia was sitting next to me, and she immediately called back, "I wrote every word of that website, and I know for a fact that Mark IS God's gift to girls." Julia looked at the ceiling, raised her hands, and called out, "Thank you God, for the gift of Mark. He is truly AWESOME! Now can you do something about the very poor quality of other boys, especially Jesse." Jesse did not appreciate the laughter from all the girls who were listening. I couldn't resist adding, "It WOULD take a divine intervention. Have you SEEN the clothes he wears!" Julia laughed at my in-joke. The rest of the girls and some of the guys just laughed at Jesse. Notwithstanding that comeback, I was taking far more abuse than I was giving back. I didn't care all that much, as I certainly didn't take it personally and my ego wasn't threatened by it, but it was definitely increasingly unpleasant being surrounded by so much nastiness. The guys had some apparent merit to their position, as it was arrogant of me to set things up so girls competed for me (the guys were ignoring the inconvenient fact that Julia had set it up). Having a valid justification gave the boys the feeling that they had the moral high ground, and thus free rein to vent all their jealousy at me. It was, of course, all about jealousy. Anyone who genuinely thought I was arrogant, and who had no other axe to grind, should merely have sat quietly and avoided having anything to do with me in the future. More than half the guys were sitting quietly, but hopefully not because they thought I was intolerably arrogant. They were the sensible guys, who wouldn't get involved in aggressive ridiculing of anyone. Another indication that it was jealousy based, was Julia's saying the website was entirely her work. That should've stopped all of the insults, or at least given them considerable pause; instead it had no effect at all. The guys wanted to vent, so vent they were going to. It was easy for them to ignore any implausible reason to the contrary. Can you imagine one of the guys saying, "Julia, you set up the website, not Mark?", "Oh. In that case, I'm sorry, Mark. My mistake. Come on guys, we shouldn't ridicule Mark." The guys that participated had a desire to ridicule me, no doubt because they were instinctively driven to believe that tearing me down would make girls look upon them more favorably. They felt my supposed arrogance gave them a good excuse for doing so (all arguments to the contrary being ignored), so they enthusiastically ridiculed me. Peer pressure encouraged so many other guys to join in, then competition fueled the escalation of their attacks, because each guys wanted to stand out as the coolest of my persecutors. The only constraints on them were the lack of opportunity and too many teachers, rather than any self-discipline or wisdom among the perpetrators. For schoolwork reasons I could half-justify spending last period with the 11th grade class. I wouldn't have done so normally, but avoiding the macho bullshit was a very good additional reason, as was the fact that Ava would be there, so I could give her the list from Felicity. I'd enjoy reinforcing her status as my girlfriend by showing her some affection in her class too. So right after the penultimate class finished, I grabbed Julia and we walked out of the class while the teacher was still in the room so the guys couldn't hem me in like nine of them had done the previous Friday. I quickly told her where I'd be and why, then I headed off to that classroom. Hopefully the guys would calm down by the time I returned to school on Wednesday, although I was aware that if they didn't calm down, then my absence on Tuesday would be seen as a sign of cowardice, therefore weakness, therefore attacking me would be a good idea. I'd cross that bridge after I'd finished counting the chickens, a category that no longer included me. I arrived at her next class before Ava did, but had no trouble occupying the couple of minutes waiting, as many of her male and female classmates had questions about the website. Fortunately the males were far less aggressive, no doubt because I hadn't been taking 'their' girls out of circulation, the way I had in the 10th grade. The only affect on the 11th grade males, unless some of them had 10th grade girlfriends, was my 'taking' Ava, who hadn't been dating anyone for several months anyway. The writing was on the wall (actually, on the website) that some 11th grade girls could chase me, and that aspect was raised almost immediately. Most of the class wasn't here yet, but word would get around, so I answered the question in a way I hoped was acceptable to both the guys and girls, "Sure, 11th grade girls can form a group, as it's open to every high-school grade. There isn't even a requirement that everyone in a group comes from the same grade, although that'd make it easier for the group to plan their dates. -- "One thing we're trying hard to do is to make this as minimally disruptive to everyone as possible. The guys in my 10th grade classes are getting bent out of shape because they think I am taking all 'their' girls. Leaving alone that they claim possession of the girls in their grade - which actually puts the girls off going anywhere near the dummies that claim that - what they're failing to realize is that I don't want to take ALL the girls. The whole pipeline idea is geared to reducing the number of girls as fast as humanly possible. With forty eight girls in an intake, after one date a week with each group, for three weeks, there'll only be four or five girls still going. The other forty four will be back in circulation, which should make all their 'possessors' happy." "But you'll be keeping all the best girls," objected one of my audience. (Can you guess his gender?) I'd had this accusation shouted at me several times already since lunch, so I had an answer already worked out, "First, what on Earth does 'best' mean? 'Best' for me might be completely different than 'best' for you. It most likely would be, if you think girls can be measured on a single linear scale. My two current girlfriends are Julia Williams and Ava West, neither of whom has large breasts, especially Julia. A lot of guys consider large-breasted girls to be the 'best', so I seem to be sending the 'best' ones back. Of course I like being with Julia and Ava for what they're like on the inside, regardless of anything as juvenile as breast size. -- "Second, I won't be 'keeping' ANY girls. Do you think I'm locking them up in a dungeon? The girls can obviously come and go as they wish." With a smile on my face to show them I was joking, "It's a very difficult concept for me to get my head around, but I have to admit it's faintly conceivable that maybe one - or even two! - of the girls might not like me. They might leave their pipeline group on their own accord! It'd be ego-crushing, but I'll try my best to accept the possibility that girls might believe they have a say in who they date. -- "Third, I chose four girls left out of forty eight after three weeks just as an example. The pipeline concept keeps operating week after week, so the number of girls you say I am 'keeping' halves after every date. There'll be more intakes, and mergers between smaller groups, but as a general rule the number keeps halving. The whole purpose of the pipeline is to get RID of girls, not to keep them." Ava arrived, and happily snuggled under my arm. I asked the audience, "The pipeline idea wasn't mine, Julia's or Ava's. Do you know who suggested I use it?" I could see they didn't, so I supplied the answer, "Julia's mother. Julia wants me to have another girlfriend, but there were too many potential girlfriends for Julia to manage. It was wearing her out, so her mother suggested the pipeline system as a good way of reducing the number of girls as fast as possible, down to the ones I consider the best for me." I couldn't resist asking the original questioner, "Anyway, why are you worried about how long girls stay in the pipeline..." #1: #3: #1: #4: So I finished with that. Having successfully made the point that I was no threat to them (I hoped they fell for it), I would answer later questions much quicker. The next question was actually for Ava. She was asked, "Are you really going to share Mark?" "I'm already sharing him with Julia, and I'm hoping to share him with another girl soon." Ava had an unusual grin on her face. I figured she was referring to Carol because Julia had told me that Carol spent quite a while talking to Ava at lunchtime about her [Carol's] having strange emotions for her brother. Carol and Ava hadn't participating in the quiz themselves because they'd help write it. I ignored Ava's wicked grin, but was prepared to claim I thought she was referring to Chloe, if it came up. [Carol later told me about her "strange feelings" talk with Ava. It was pretty much as we'd discussed before. Carol admitted she already had unusual feelings for me, but insisted she didn't want to act on them. She also asked questions like, "What does it feel like to make love to a guy?" Carol sent out signals that she was conflicted and confused. Ava, of course, wasn't the least bit conflicted or confused about what Carol should do. They agreed to talk about it more tomorrow.] And the next question was for Ava too, "Is he really as good as I've heard?" I said, "HELLO! I'm standing right here! How can that have escaped your notice? Why do females have no shame? Lack of honesty is sometimes good - Ava, make sure you tell some superb lies about me - but lack of shame is too much!" "I'll ask you later, Ava," chuckled the original questioner. "Okay," said Ava. "But he's the BEST. Better than the best! He can..." "HELLO! I'm still here. Same guy, same place, same sense of shame and modesty." I put my tongue in my cheek to add, "I don't know much about girls, Ava, but one thing I'm positive about, is that they don't want to hear all the sordid little details about our sex-life." The girls had a different opinion, laughing at my 'mistake' and insisting that they wanted to know every sordid detail, "The more sordid the better." The teacher's arrival had a dampening effect of the level of sordidness, teachers not being big fans of it during class time. Or any time probably, school teachers being very boring people. When class finished, several of the students wanted to continue our conversation, and they gathered around. The first question was, from a guy, was, "What do you do that makes you so good at sex?" I didn't know any of my 11th grade classmates well, but from what I'd seen of the questioner, he seemed a reasonable guy. His question was probably well intentioned, but I couldn't tell him, and I didn't have time. I said, "I'm sorry everyone, but I can't stay to talk. I drive several people home after school and they'll be waiting for me. I have to talk about some boyfriend-girlfriend stuff with Ava first, and then I have to rush. Sorry." They didn't move much, so I grabbed Ava and took her outside to talk. I gave her the list I'd gotten from Felicity, and told her what I wanted her to do. She was enthusiastic to help. I said, "Thanks. Don't waste too much time on it though, as they're only 9th graders so it's unlikely any of their parents are going to make dating easy." I told her the outline of the unpleasant surprise Donna was going to get at home tonight. Ava's comment was the same as everyone else's, "Poor Donna." Because I'd raised the subject of Carol and me (that's what Donna was going to get told off for blabbing about), Ava tried to talk about that, but I shut her down. "I don't have time, and I'm very uncomfortable that it came up in the first place. I'm sure if we let it lie, it'll go away. It's just a phase Carol's going through." "Haha. I DON'T think so Mark! Carol is..." "I'm not going to take advantage of my sister. She'll grow out of it. And we should definitely NOT be talking about it at school. Everyone will be waiting for me by the car, so I've got to go. Thanks for doing the phoning." I gave her a kiss then ran off. ^ [A small point, but the next day there was a discussion in Ava's class about me driving. Someone had realized I was too young to have a license, let alone be allowed to drive non-family. Others of them had seen me driving (they park in the student parking lot too), so there was some curiosity. Ava assured them I had my license. When they next had a chance to ask me personally about it, I produced my license and showed it around. I got the expected, "It's got to be a fake." "If it was a fake, don't you think I would have thought to backdate my birthday? It's legit. My dad went to the DMV with me when I took the tests and had it issued." It was a small thing, as most of them had their licenses, but it added to my reputation with them.] ------- Chapter 174: Poor Donna's Lesson Monday, May 2, 2005 (Continued) At home, Carol pulled Ava's vibrator out of her bag to show me. Carol plugged it in and turned it on. It was an impressive machine, with a little 'thumb' that stuck out and ... Well, if you're a female you know what it did (besides boggle my mind). If you're a male you've got no need to know, and it's kind of disquieting to see, so I'll not describe it. I was tempted to ask for a real demonstration, in our bedroom rather than the kitchen, but Carol was starting to stress out about making dinner for me. Getting a demo from Donna was also totally off the cards for a while, especially this evening. I helped Carol a little, did a little schoolwork, read a bit more about day trading, and generally killed time until Mom and Dad were both home. Mom was the last one home. She gave me the documents I needed (bank stuff mostly), and checked on dinner, which she pronounced as good as she would've made, which pleased Carol and me. Important dinner stuff having been finished, I called a family meeting. When everyone was gathered, with Mom, Dad and Carol all pretending to be curious, and Donna not pretending, I said, "I've got a serious issue I need to talk with the whole family about. Donna's saying too much in front of Ava is causing us a major problem." Donna's face fell. "Last night Carol and I both talked to Ava on the phone, and she interrogated both of us about our getting together sexually. Of course we both said we wouldn't ever do anything like that, but it's obvious that Ava isn't going to leave it alone. -- "At school today, Ava raised the subject again, with Carol and later with me. Talking about it at school is VERY scary, but Ava is so convinced it's a good idea that she's too excited to be careful. We've been trying VERY hard to put her off, but it's obvious that she's going to keep trying to get us together, because she believes that Carol and I love each other so much that we should be together. -- "Not only that, but she's watching us like a hawk whenever she sees us together. Ava's looking for the slightest sign of any interest between us, so she can pounce on it and claim it proves we should be together. With her watching us so closely, it's not going to take her long to catch us. -- "There's also a VERY serious danger that she'll start talking to other people about how good Carol and I would be together, and how great it is that Carol desires me, and stuff like that. She'll try to recruit other people to help push us together. Obviously that's going to cause the word to start spreading, and as soon as that happens we're in BIG trouble. Mom, Dad and I could very easily end up in jail. -- "At the time I thought Julia's saving of Donna's terrible give away was superb, but it's proving impossible to repair the damage Donna did." Donna tried to apologize, which I shut down. "It's FAR too late for apologies, Donna. We've got a serious problem, and we need to discuss it so we can work out what to do. Apologies don't help us decide anything. -- "We HAVE to do something, and we have to do it almost immediately, before Ava either discovers that we're lovers already, or she accidentally spreads the word to someone who starts repeating it. Ava doesn't have any siblings, so she obviously doesn't understand how bad the situation is, and how seriously the authorities would react. -- "I think there are only three possible choices. The first is we tell Ava that Carol and I are already lovers. If we tell her, then we're all taking a HUGE risk. If she EVER got angry with us she could call the cops in a fit of bad temper. Or if - like Donna - she isn't any good at keeping her mouth shut, she could blab in front of someone else. The more people who know a secret, the greater the chance of it getting out, so telling Ava is certainly the most dangerous choice. Mom, Dad and I would go to jail, with Carol and Donna probably being sent to live with grandma and grandpa in Seattle. -- "The second choice is we totally break up with Ava. All of us never see her again. That means that when her parents start dying in few months, Julia and I break our promises to help her. We'd have to completely ignore her even though she'll be in agony over her parents dying and our rejection of her. -- "Or the third choice is that Carol and I totally stop loving each other. We'd have to put the original beds back, go back to our original bedrooms, stop hanging around together, never go out in groups together, etc. -- "Those are the only three choices I can think of. Because Donna opened her mouth so thoughtlessly, we have to choose between risking half of us going to jail, putting Ava through agony when her parents die, or Carol and I have to stop loving each other. Can anyone think of any other possibilities?" Poor Donna was a wreck! She'd felt guilty the moment she understood what the topic was, and by the end of my list, she was sobbing. Dad said, "DONNA! Stop crying! You caused a problem and we have to solve it. Your crying is making it harder for us to hear each other, so please stop." [I've often wondered how females' screaming and crying could possibly have evolved. A saber-tooth tiger runs into the cave where Mr. and Mrs. Ug are living, and Mrs. Ug starts carrying on the way women do. If I was the saber-tooth, the VERY first thing I would do would be to put a stop to that horrible noise. Mrs. Ug wouldn't survive being quieted by a saber-tooth, which would piss off her genes. In other words, Donna's crying had no beneficial effect at all. All it did was waste time, annoy people, and let us know that she was feeling sorry for herself; none of which enhance problem solving or survival of her genes. On the other hand, if I was Miss Ug, and facing the prospect of being sent to live in Seattle with her grandparents, I think I'd cry too and hopefully the saber-tooth would eat me.] No one else could think of any other choices. If Donna could, which I doubted, she certainly couldn't articulate them. Mom said, "In the option where you break up with Carol, you'll have to break up with Donna totally too. If you suddenly stop spending time with Carol, but spend time with Donna, Ava's going to suspect you're having an affair with Donna. You'll have to stop spending any time with both your sisters." "Waaaa!" (Don't ask me to spell the noise Donna made. It was loud, anguished, and wet.) "Yeah. Good point, Mom. So we have to choose between telling Ava which risks breaking up our family, betraying Ava in her time of desperate need, or my breaking up with both my sisters, so I avoid them in public and private. Is that how you see it Mom and Dad?" "Yes," they both agreed. Carol agreed too, and Donna's considered opinion was more, "Waaaa!" Mom said, "You know Ava better than any of us, Mark. When do you think we need to decide by?" "I can't do anything about it until after I get back tomorrow, but I think we'll have to do it almost immediately because Ava's already discussing it at school with Carol and me. It isn't going to take her long to start discussing it with other people. Let's have a family meeting tomorrow night to decide which of the three options we'll pick. I don't know what time I'll be back, but it shouldn't be too late." Mom said, "Even if it is late, we'll wake everyone up. This is too important." Which sounded impressive. Mom added, "You'd better have your dinner, so you can get to Aikido on time." Carol and I went to look after my stomach, leaving Mom and Dad to look after poor Donna. In the kitchen, I mentioned to Carol how nice our lunch had been. She enthusiastically agreed. With mixed feelings, I told Carol I'd leave my lunch leftovers behind, for Mom and Dad to sample, to give them some anticipation for Saturday's dinner. ^ It took a while for Donna to be able to function again, and I'd gone to Aikido by then. Mom and Carol sat Donna down and had a talk with her. A small part of what follows was from ideas I'd given them, but mostly it was their own doing. Mom said, "We told you it was a big secret, Donna. If you spill the beans on a big secret, it has big results. That's what 'big secret' means. It doesn't mean 'lots of fun'. We told you over and over again that it was extremely serious so you had to keep it secret. You said you understood and you promised to do it. Now you've caused a problem. If we do nothing, Ava will unintentionally cause a disaster, so we have to do something. The only question is which of those three choices do we take." Donna expressed her opinion that the best choice was that I had to break up with Ava. Mom gave Donna a VERY dirty look, then asked her, "Mark PROMISED to help Ava when her parents died. Good people do NOT break promises, and I'm APPALLED that you think that's what Mark should do!" Carol added, "Ava's parents are DYING, Donna. Can you imagine what it must be like for a girl who has no brothers or sisters to have both her parents dying? Mark would NEVER dump Ava and leave her to face that alone! Even if he hadn't promised her, he would never be that cruel. He has to choose one of the other two choices: either break up with you and me, or tell Ava about him and me." Donna thought, "He should tell Ava then." Mom explained, "If he stops being a loving brother to the two of you, the only bad thing that happens is that you can't show any love for each other. If he tells Ava, and Ava blabs to someone the way you did, then the authorities won't just break Mark and you up, but they'd break up the entire family. Mark, Steven and I would go to jail, and you two would be sent to your grandparents in Seattle. Telling Ava is WONDERFUL if she keeps the secret, but it's HORRIBLE if she blabs. It's by far the most dangerous choice. I can't see Mark choosing to put the family in so much danger." "But, but, that means he has to break up with us." Carol answered, "Mark can easily stop having any sexual fun with you Donna. Which he should do anyway, because you're so bad at keeping secrets. He can easily stop inviting you to all the things he does. No more Liaison meetings or visiting your Ducklings, not taking you to Lily's family dinner, and everything else like that. But he can't break up with me." Carol held up her ring finger, "Mark married me. We have to stay together." (Our ceremony hadn't included the "till death us do part" vow, but that omission made no difference.) "But that means he can't do anything?" said a confused Donna. Mom corrected her, "It doesn't mean he can't do anything Donna. It means that every possible choice is a disaster, including if he does nothing. We're fucked." From Mom, that language was a slap in the face for Donna. "The only good situation was if you kept your mouth shut. That's why your father, me, Mark, Carol, Julia and Vanessa told you over and over again that you MUST keep it shut. But you didn't keep it shut, did you?" After an interlude for some more crying (fortunately out of earshot of any saber-toothed tigers), Carol said, "I hope he breaks up with me and Donna. That's the best choice." "But you can't," pointed out Donna, "you're married to him." "I know. I wanted to have his babies too." Carol took her ring off, and put it on the table. Donna understood what it indicated, and cried, "NO! You can't! You love Mark and Mark loves you!" Carol said, "I think I want to be alone in my room for a while." She got up and left the kitchen, leaving the ring behind. [All of this stuff was Carol's idea. A superbly powerful one too. She'd had a while to think of it, but I was still very impressed when I heard about it.] Donna started freaking out. This was FAR too horrible and real for her to be able to handle. Mom grabbed her, telling her, "Sit down, Donna. It's no good your going to see Carol because she won't want to see you. You're the cause of this mess. If only you'd kept your promise." Donna was a total mess now, and was going to remain that way for the foreseeable future. Carol had been VASTLY more effective than anything I'd thought of. So upset was Donna, that Mom and Dad kept at least one eye on her at all times. While Dad covered that duty, Mom slipped out of the room to send me a text message, asking me to call her mobile as soon as I'd finished Aikido. Mom put her cellphone on vibrate, and into her pocket. Just before 9pm, Mom left Dad in charge of supervising Donna, and Mom went to "check on Carol." Carol was in our room, killing time by doing homework. Mom had previously visited to report on Donna, and to tell her that they'd keep Donna out of her hair. When Aikido finished and I called Mom, she told me what Carol had done, and, "You should come home right now to finish this off because it wouldn't be a good idea to leave Donna like this for another day." "No, I imagine it wouldn't. I'll come right away. I'll end it the same way I told you originally, except I'll build in a little of what Carol's done. She hasn't put her ring back on, has she?" "No. I've got it in my pocket." "Good. Leave it there please. I'll see you in a few minutes." I called Julia to tell her I had to go home for a few minutes first, then I left the dojo. ^ Everyone appeared surprised to see me return home. Another family meeting was convened. I said, "I was thinking about it during Aikido. It's too serious to leave unresolved, so I think we have to decide right now." "It's mostly your decision, Mark. What do you want to do?" "I don't WANT to do anything. But Donna's breaking her promise has forced me into making a choice. Carol, I just noticed that your ring is missing?" "Yes," agreed Carol. "I took it off." "It's not your place to take it off, Carol. I'm the Lord, and that's my decision. But you're right, it's the obvious choice..." "OH NO!" from Donna. It took a few minutes before I was able to resume. "I'm certainly not going to break my promise to Ava. That'd be an appallingly horrible thing to do and no decent person goes around breaking promises. And Carol and I would be incredibly selfish if we risked our whole family just so Carol and I could be happy together." I made better use of the delay caused by Donna bursting into loud wails again; I started the second half of my dinner while Mom re-calmed Donna. (Why is there never a saber-toothed tiger around when you want one? The last time one passed through Corvallis would've been about 9,000 years ago, so another one was long overdue.) When we could continue, I said, "I would also be selfish to make a decision that affected the family without consulting you. The issue boils down to how much we trust Ava. If I thought she was as terrible at keeping important secrets as Donna is, there'd be no choice; Carol and I would have to break up. Fortunately, we know Ava is not as terrible as Donna. Donna couldn't keep my marathon run a secret for five seconds, but Ava hasn't told anyone for five days so far..." I talked about Ava for several minutes. There were very few details that I could talk about, so I talked about Ava's maturity (not missing the opportunity to point out Donna's lack of it), her giving nature (whereas Donna told my marathon secret out of selfish spite, and spilled the beans about Carol's and my secret because Donna's selfish desire for sex was greater than her ability to think about what she was saying). But mostly I said good things about Ava. To give Donna the maximum scare, the family seemed very indecisive about Ava - teetering on the point of agreeing to tell her or not. I particularly enjoyed copying Julia's zigzag approach. Every minute or so I'd introduce something bad or worrying about Ava, such as "When her parents die, she will be very distraught. Who knows what she might say when she's so upset," alternating with something good, such as, "It's only a serious danger for seventeen months. After next summer I'll be going to a university somewhere out of Corvallis - Carol and Julia with me, I hope - so we won't be seeing Ava nearly so often." Donna was a wreck before we started, so it didn't take many zigzags before she was utterly lost. I also had a good idea while I was mid-zag. A couple of minutes later I suggested, "How about this as an idea: We tell Ava, but we tell her SLOWLY. We never tell her that we're already lovers, but we start with some hints that Carol's and my getting together might be possible in the future. Then we slowly increase how much we say and do about it. Maybe Carol and I start kissing, for example. We might be able to spread it out over a week, if we're lucky. That way we can get a better idea about Ava's trustworthiness, without her thinking that anything has actually happened yet. If that idea's agreeable to everyone, Carol could put her ring back on, and we could pray that Ava doesn't make any mistakes over the next few days. What does everyone think?" Donna quickly told us that she thought it was a wonderful idea, which Mom jumped on. "If we agree to trust Ava, and three months from now she makes an accidental mistake so we go to prison, then it would have been YOUR fault. But if Mark and Carol break up now, nothing worse can happen in the future. If you vote to trust Ava, you are voting to trust that she will NEVER deliberately or accidentally let the secret out. Think about your girlfriends at school. How good are they at NEVER telling a secret? Would you trust them with a secret that could send your whole family to prison?" It was clear that Donna wouldn't trust them. A good decision, as in my experience 12-year old girls are lousy at keeping secrets. -- Mom continued, "Trusting Ava is very, very scary, Donna. She's five years older and more mature than your friends, and she's a nice girl, but can you trust her with all of our lives?" There were a few more minutes of stuff like this, then the family reluctantly agreed that Carol and I would tell Ava "slowly". By this time Donna was too worn out to be able to react much, but she was relieved. I'd had the idea of hamming up some theatrical "Put The Ring Back On Carol" scene, but it would have been too fake. Donna had already gotten the message powerfully enough, so I started preparing to leave. I pointed out to Donna that because we were telling Ava "slowly", Donna couldn't ever tell Ava that Carol and I were lovers already, nor could she talk with Ava about it at all for a week or two, because she could mess everything up. Donna emphatically promised never to tell anybody anything ever again, which had pretty much been what we'd been aiming for. I made "I'm about to leave" noises shortly after that, causing Donna to breathe a sigh of relief that it was all over. Mom jumped all over Donna: "How DARE you say that! You forced your brother into having to make a TERRIBLE decision. He's putting the whole family at risk by telling Ava, and he's going to be worried sick about it for months and years from now, and all you can say is 'Thank goodness it's all over.' If Ava ever causes us trouble, Mark's going to blame himself for not breaking up with Carol. He's going to be worrying about Ava every day. Every time Ava talks about him and Carol he's going to remember how much risk we're taking. He's never going to be as happy as he could be in the future, because he's always going to be worried sick that he made the wrong decision, and worried that things could go wrong at any moment." There were more lessons like that, mostly to make Donna appreciate that this was an ongoing issue, so she wouldn't forget it. I liked one point that Mom made, "If Mark had broken up with Carol, he couldn't have lived here anymore. It would've been torture for him. He would have gone to live with Julia permanently. Your thoughtlessness nearly lost Steven and me our son, and Carol her brother and husband. You did a VERY, VERY bad thing, Donna." After I'd left, Mom and Dad started rebuilding Donna. By the time Donna was sent to bed, she was totally exhausted. Carol invited her to sleep in the double bed, for mutual comfort, which Donna greatly appreciated. Donna fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow, so the comfort lasted about five seconds. Later, the rest of us agreed that we'd taught Donna an effective lesson about the importance of keeping secrets. Hopefully Donna would be mature and trustworthy from now on. [I'm a firm believer in the importance of anniversaries, so over the next several weeks I FREQUENTLY commented on my anniversaries to Donna: "Ava has known about Carol and me for one day so far, Donna, and the family aren't in prison yet. That's good." Ditto after two days, one week, two weeks, every month, and every other opportunity I could grab. Plus if there was a strange noise in the evening, one of us would say, "I hope that's not the police come to arrest us all because Donna blabbed to Ava." Or if Mom (or Dad) was delayed at work later than normal, one of us would comment in Donna's hearing, "I hope Mom's not late because the police are interrogating her," etc. Donna got DOZENS of ongoing reminders of the serious consequences of blabbing.] ------- Chapter 175: Aikido Training and Casino Preparation Monday, May 2, 2005 (Continued) Describing poor Donna's lesson caused me to skip over Aikido, so I'll go back and fill in that gap now. There were only a few noteworthy points. The first was my raising the Eaton Incident with Sensei, which I did almost immediately. Sensei had seen the article in the paper, and had intended to raise it himself. I briefly described the incident, especially each of the fight scenarios, and asked him what a good aikidoka would have done. [I should explain that Aikido is an extremely good defensive art, but it doesn't disable the attackers in any way. In fact, it barely causes them even momentary pain. You can immobilize a guy on the ground, and hold him there as long as you want. But he's completely uninjured so the moment you let him go he can jump to his feet and attack again. This is not a problem if there's only one attacker (don't let go!), but seemed unsolvable to me if there are multiple attackers, as you have to let the first guy go in order to defend yourself from the second.] Sensei answered, "There are several different answers, depending on the situation and the skill level of the aikidoka. In your situation, you might've been able to deflect the three boys' attacks sufficient to be able to get out of the door and run away. Most fights are caused by passion and pride rather than necessity, so leaving is often the best choice; although infrequently exercised." I started justifying my decision not to run, but Sensei waved it away. "An advanced aikidoka should have been able to project sufficient calmness that violence was averted, or to defuse it if it started. Failing that, knocking your opponents out was certainly morally acceptable. Not in accordance with Aikido's methodology though, because it relies on the direct application of considerable physical force. Aikido techniques can all be executed without requiring strength, by old men such as me, for example." I asked, "What would you have done then?" "Presuming you mean that I am unable to leave or to avert the violence?" I nodded. "If I could safely do so, I would deflect their attacks for a while, hoping they would become disheartened enough to give up. Being sent sprawling over the back of a sofa, or thrown into a wall, would be good ways to make them reconsider their actions. -- "If that failed to deter them, the next recourse for an aikidoka is to break limbs, especially arms. In the dojo we teach you to relax your holds the moment uke" (Japanese for "attacker") "experiences pain, but if you continue to twist uke's limb, then a joint will give way. Obviously we do not wish to teach that to beginners, nor do we stress it in the advanced grades either. It is more something that you will pick up as you progress. The purpose of Aikido is certainly not for you to learn how to injure people, and not even to learn how to defend yourself, but to learn about yourself." "It's not to learn to defend yourself? It's a martial art, and self-defense is the only martial aspect it's got." "If an aikidoka spent his entire life learning Aikido, and went to his deathbed an old man never having had a single fight in his life, he would not rue the waste of all that training time. Remember that there are no competitions in most styles of Aikido, and those that have them are recent inventions not in accordance with true Aikido principals, in my opinion. So my hypothetical aikidoka would have never used the martial aspect of Aikido. Yet it would not occur to him that learning Aikido had been a waste of his time. The martial aspect is merely the path, it is not the purpose. -- "That is why Aikido does not overly concern itself with practical defenses against multiple opponents. By the time a student is advanced enough to be capable of using the techniques that would be required, he should be advanced enough to prefer to learn more about the 'Art' than the 'Martial'. Another reason is that an advanced Aikidoka should be able to defend himself under most circumstances, whether or not he had specifically trained for them. -- "In the advanced classes we occasionally have a little fun with our students by putting them in situations they are not trained for. We might tie their ankles together with a belt, allowing only a little slack, and then require them to defend themselves; or we go to a park, give one of them a raw egg to carry and defend, and tell the attackers to try to break it somehow. Training in thigh deep water is another such idea. We want to see how the students adapt, and in particular whether the new techniques they're forced to invent reflect an intuitive understanding of Aikido principles. -- "With regard to your question about how you should have defended yourself at the Eatons', a good answer would be, 'However you want'. We are not teaching a rigid set of procedures; we are teaching a way of self-improvement that just happens to have some martial applications. I would have done something different than knocking them out, but that is immaterial. The difference in intent IS material though. If you fought for personal gain - to win the girl or to impress people at school - then that would be something I would disapprove of." "No, nothing like that. I was only trying..." Sensei waved my reassurances away, and soon after that we started warming up for our training. Another item of note was that my learning rate suffered a major setback. Sensei introduced me to the bo (a wooden pole, something like 1.5 inches in diameter and more than 5 feet long). Much of my normally very rapid Aikido learning came from my proximity sensing what Sensei was intending. The hand-to-hand techniques we'd learned in previous lessons were taught with Sensei and me grappling with each other, so he was always within my proximity range. Proximity has a three-foot range, and it's not a good idea to stand within three feet of a man who is rapidly swinging a five-foot pole around! Bo techniques were mostly taught with me sitting on the side of the mat while Sensei demonstrated the moves several feet away. It was immediately obvious to me that my learning rate was going to suffer badly. There were some occasions when we got within three feet of each other, giving me some benefit from proximity, but it was infrequent so Sensei was going to notice that I was much slower at learning than normal. I was unsure what to say about it. Over the last few weeks we'd spent enough time training together that I knew Sensei had no idea how useful my proximity sense was. Had he any idea, he would've made dozens of references to it, saying things like, "Sense where I am intending to push; that's what you should be doing." He clearly didn't have a sense like mine, and I was pretty sure he hadn't even heard of anyone having such a sense. We'd discussed ki many times during our training, and nothing like my abilities had ever been mentioned. He didn't talk about sensing intentions at all, which - if he had a sense like mine - was an inexplicable omission in fight training. I had thought about this carefully, and had decided that Sensei knew only five things about my proximity sense: the name I'd given it, that it had a three-foot range, that I can identify who is standing near me, and I can detect punches coming at me, that I can move through crowds easier because of it. He otherwise seemed to assume that my ability was similar to his, which seemed to be so weak as to be almost useless. From his comments over the weeks I had formed the idea that his proximity sense was extremely vague. [[If proximity is likened to a visual sense, it's as if his 'picture' of a person was rendered in only one or two pixels. In other words, it's almost useless. I suspected he had nothing more than a vague idea of where the person intended to be. (His sense was also extremely range limited, although I didn't learn that until after this point in time.) Whereas my sense was probably the equivalent of a hundred pixels. Enough to identify the person and to pick out intended limb movements.]] When he tested my ability at Julia's house, Sensei had intended to punch me, and had been pleased that I'd dodged away. That meant he knew such a reaction was possible, which implied he knew of proximity working at a level of detail that punches could be 'seen'. In which case, why didn't he repeatedly talk about limb movements during every training session? I decided that in his sense, a punch can't have been sensed as a punch; likely as nothing more than a vague sense of something coming at the top half of his body (like the top 'pixel' of an opponent was coming at him). [[Aikidoka can sense a punch because the attacker is putting ALL his ki into it. My pixel metaphor is too spatial, whereas proximity is about ki. Intense ki is detectable by advanced aikidoka even from limbs that are too small to be detected in two-pixel 'picture'.]] All of which left me with the question about how much to divulge to Sensei. I didn't have any good justification for asking him not to teach the bo. Saying, "Sorry, I'm allergic to wood," wasn't going to fly. So either I said nothing and my learning rate would noticeably reduce, or I came clean about needing to be within three feet of him, which would naturally led to his asking, "Why?" I decided to say nothing for the moment, until I learned more about how different I was from normal aikidoka. I was still my usual highly coordinated, observant self, but Sensei soon commented that I wasn't picking bo techniques up nearly as quickly as I normally did. "Maybe I'm not used to having things in my hands, or something like that. It's a lot different than the techniques we were doing before." We did cover a reasonable amount of material, as I still learned faster than other students and my body was better at putting into practice what I did learn. Some of it was I able to pick up fast, when it was within my proximity range. For example, some of the techniques for disarming an attacker with a bo had us within three feet of each other. One of them required me to 'spoon' into Sensei's belly in preparation for throwing him over my shoulder, and spooning is as close as it's possible for any male to get to me. By the way, Aikidoka don't train to defend themselves from an attacker wielding a five-foot long wooden pole because they think it's likely to happen. It's simply another way of teaching the principles of Aikido. We also did some hand-to-hand practice too, as every lesson includes my repeating all the techniques I've learned so far. Near the end of our session Sensei inquired about my being tired from all the unaccustomed activity, which gave me a good opportunity to get onto the topic I wanted. "No, I'm not tired. I wasn't tired after last week's session either, nor did I have any sore muscles the next day. I'm in very good shape, but as you've said several times, physical strength isn't required for Aikido. It's the mental side of Aikido that's the most important. I can't imagine you ever teaching me a physical technique which amazes me greatly, but I CAN imagine me learning something mental that was profoundly impressive." That started the discussion I wanted. I was angling to have Sensei describe his ki abilities in detail, especially anything to do with what I called the "proximity sense," such as his gracefully navigating a mat full of students throwing each other around in odd directions. Unfortunately I had to call Mom at 9:00, so we had to cut it short before I learned anything useful, but I got some more books to read - including the best ones he had on kiatsu, as I had Ava's parents in mind - and Sensei said we'd resume the conversation next session. ^ My call to Mom required me to go home to finish off Donna's lesson in keeping her mouth shut about secrets (as already described), after which I went to Julia's. Prof, Vanessa, Julia and I went to their study to have a planning session for tomorrow. I gave Prof the pile of documents from Mom. He checked through them and pronounced himself happy that they contained what the LA bank would need. Otherwise we spent a while discussing what I should do if various scenarios occurred. Prof gave me the name and number of a lawyer to call if I needed one; "If you get arrested, for example." I programmed it into my phone. He added, "I'll give you $2,000 cash as emergency money and to buy chips with. Ideally you should only buy a few dollars' worth of cash chips and not place a single bet. Hang around as if you're thinking about betting, trying to get a 'feel for the wheel', and the other nonsense statements we heard on our test trip. If you don't bet, you can't get in any legal trouble for underage gambling. I'm worried that if the casino somehow connects you and me, they might be able to use your being an underage gambler as an excuse to forfeit my winnings. I don't think that's likely, but they won't like losing as much as we're trying to win, so they could be willing to seize on such a weak pretext. We wouldn't want our winnings to be held up in court for several years, would we?" "Haha. No, that'd be a bummer of epic proportions. 'No betting'. I got it." "Good. Another reason to only buy a small value of cash chips is so you can leave as fast as possible. Don't cash them in, don't color them up. Just put them in your pocket and leave. When it's time for you to leave, the quicker you're out of there the better." ("Color them up" means changing many smaller denomination chips for fewer larger denomination ones. Players will usually color up before leaving a table, so they can easily carry their chips to the cashier.) "Okay." Under most circumstances the plan was for me to immediately take a taxi to the airport, and to grab the first even semi-sensible northward-heading plane out of Vegas. Then to make my way to Corvallis however I wished. Regardless of our success or failure, my getting away as quickly as possible was stressed. There would be nothing I could do to help Prof regardless of what was happening, and my getting roped into any problem could make things very messy indeed. The basic plan was that Prof would arrive at the casino a few minutes ahead of me. He'd have stuff to do with the management that would take some time, after which he'd come looking for me at the roulette table closest to the front door. We knew from some of the articles about people who'd previously placed very large bets at Binion's that they were allowed to choose the table they wanted to play on. We'd play on the roulette table closest to the front door; both to make it easier for me to leave, and as an easy rendezvous place as neither of us knew the layout of the casino and we didn't want to scout it beforehand. We didn't have to play that specific table - if it was already too full of people, for example - just so long as Prof could find me somewhere in that area. While Prof was doing his stuff with the management, I would be making sure NP worked on my chosen table. If NP didn't work, or there was some other problem like that, then as soon as Prof arrived at my table I was to turn away and leave the casino. Prof would see me leave and pretend to get cold feet. He'd tell the casino he needed some fresh air to clear his head. He'd get outside the building and call me to discuss the problem. Ideally - if NP was working and I was ready to proceed - I was to signal Prof with how accurate I could be. We were obviously hoping for my accuracy to be 100%, the same as on the trial, but we couldn't be sure until I tried. When I'd caught Prof's eye, I'd scratch the very outside of my right shoulder for 100% accuracy, with the very outside of my left shoulder representing 0%, with places in between being linearly interpolated (any plan that involved linear interpolation had my approval!). So, for example, scratching the right side of my neck would mean about 60% accurate. Prof would bet accordingly. He had all the betting patterns pre-worked out and memorized, because they were highly dependent on my accuracy. All I had to do was try to hit the number, unless he had put the bet down with his left hand, in which case I was to deliberately miss the number. That would happen if Prof felt the need to allay the casino's suspicion by having a loss, which would very often be needed if my accuracy was fairly low so we'd need to play for an hour or more to accumulate the winnings we wanted. I 'should' have 100% accuracy, so Prof's first bet 'should' win. Despite what "should" happen, I could imagine my relief if it does happen that way! If we do win the $1.75 million, then one tricky issue would arise: It would be better for us if we could win all the money in the one visit as we'd get the money sooner, it'd avoid the casino spotting the coincidence that I was in the area each time Prof won, and the casino wouldn't have had time to change the game in any way which ruined it for us. Winning our total amount quickly was so much better that, presuming we won the first, Prof would immediately ask to be allowed to be allowed to play again with an increased maximum bet. Binion's would almost certainly quote their, "Your first bet is your maximum bet" line, telling Prof to go away and come back some time later. Prof would try to convince them to let him bet more "While luck is with me". He'd also try to imply that if he went away, he'd probably not come back at all, thereby giving Binion's no chance of getting their money back. If he was able talk them into allowing him to place a much larger bet, it'd be a bummer if I was sitting on a plane flying away from Vegas! So I had to hang around after the first win, unless it was obvious that Prof wasn't going to be allowed to bet again, or I got worried about anything, or Prof sent me home by calling my cellphone. Prof's sending me home couldn't be done with a visual signal, like him scratching the top of his head, because I might not be able to see that - Prof being a short guy and likely surrounded by an excited crowd after winning $1.75 million. He'd have his phone in his belt pouch, and would trigger a speed-dial call to me by feel, which he'd hang up after a few rings. There were more scenarios, but what I should do in most of them was obvious, mostly "Get out of Vegas as fast as possible." For example, I didn't need to be told what to do if cops turned up and slapped handcuffs on Prof while he was playing, but Prof and Vanessa told me anyway: "Get out of Vegas as fast as possible, call the lawyer when you're out of the casino and no one can overhear you, not even a cabbie. Don't stay in Vegas to help the lawyer, because you CANNOT help, okay?" Or if I was arrested: "Say nothing, call the lawyer when the police let you, and keep saying nothing to the police until he arrives. Obviously don't tell him anything about NP. You were simply watching Prof play and you got arrested. You've got no idea why. Worst that can happen is you get in trouble for the fake ID, which you can live with. Got it?" Prof made the obvious point, "The casino and cops can be as suspicious as they want, but there's no physical proof whatsoever, so keeping our mouths shut will eventually get us free, AND will get us our money. If we admit to any cheating at all, the money is instantly forfeit and we're in serious legal problems." I was also warned that it was very likely that Prof would be surrounded by plenty of casino staff, especially security guards after he won. I shouldn't freak out if he was escorted away from the table. That was only to be expected. Even if the guards looked angry and manhandled Prof, the best thing I could do was get out of Vegas as quickly as possible. That was repeated over and over again, at least a dozen times more than necessary, but it was obviously something Prof and Vanessa were very worried about. "I got it, 'Get out of Vegas, call the lawyer and Vanessa'." "Good," said Vanessa, "and of those three, getting out of Vegas is the most important. Don't call me or the lawyer while you're in the cab either. The police or casino could easily track down the driver, and we don't want ANYONE except the lawyer to know you're connected to Prof. I want you to use your phone as little as you can. The less you use it, the less chance there is of anyone overhearing anything. Even if you have what looks like a total success, I STILL don't want you to get excited and phone Julia, Carol, me or anyone else. It only takes one person to overhear you and we could lose it all and be in big trouble. -- "I'd prefer that you wait until you're out of Vegas before you contact anyone, and then the best thing would be to do nothing more than sending me a text message saying something innocuous like, 'As hoped, ' if you win the $1.75 million; or, 'No good, ' if you couldn't succeed. A message that could be explained as referring to catching the flight you wanted or something else innocent. It's not like we can do anything about it, so there's no need to take ANY risk to inform us. Send me an innocuous message and I'll inform the others, okay?" Julia complained, "Ouch. That's going to keep Carol and me in suspense even longer. I understand why, but we're going to be on tenterhooks." Vanessa said, "If the result is a loss, I'm in no hurry to hear it; if it's a win, it doesn't mean anything until Prof and the money are both back home." By the time we'd gone through everything Prof and Vanessa had thought of, it was quite late, and we had a reasonably important day tomorrow, so we headed off to bed. In bed Julia was very excited. Unfortunately she expressed it verbally, which wasn't my first pick for how excitement should be expressed in bed. She kept saying things like, "When we've got the money we can spend it on..." She had quite a list. Also, "I wonder when you can get the rest of it?" "Ahh, Julia. You're being FAR too optimistic. Our getting the money is by no means certain." "I've got plenty of faith in you. I'm sure you can do it. It's exciting isn't it? What sort of car do you want to buy?" I tried to calm her down to something vaguely close to reasonable, but she didn't believe me. Apparently Julia thought I could do anything. #1: I tried quite hard to convince her to be reasonable, because I didn't want her to be badly upset if we failed. Now that it was getting so close, my confidence in my bringing it off was getting very shaky. But my trying to talk Julia down was pointless, as she had a worryingly over-inflated opinion of my abilities. So I let her get back to prattling away about what she wanted to spend the money on, and whatever else passed through her far too optimistic head. My minds wandered, not really listening to Julia (well, one of them had to, to avoid seeming rude, but the others wandered). I remembered that I wanted to ask Julia about Chloe's lunchtime behavior, but it didn't sound like Julia was in a mood to talk about Chloe, so I didn't bring her up. Several minutes of prattle later, I gave a big yawn then said, "We should get to sleep Julia. It's a BIG day tomorrow and I need to be at my best." "Oh, I'm sorry! You should have said something sooner. Goodnight, darling." Julia stopped talking, rolled over into our spooning position, and sighed happily. I flicked the lights off and waited for it. Five seconds later Julia suddenly sat up, "Hey! You only need four hours sleep! We could talk for another two or three hours and you'd still be as fresh as a daisy in the morning." "I was worried about you, Julia. You're going to have a very stressful day tomorrow, and a lack of sleep would make that much more difficult for you." "Aww, you're such a thoughtful guy." "I know. Now lie down and go to sleep, darling." She did so, but a few seconds a later Julia sweetly suggested, "Do you think we could..." "Okay, but we should make it a fairly quick one." Ten minutes later, #4: #3: ------- Part 8: Action at Binion's ------- Chapter 176: Heading to Vegas Tuesday, May 3, 2005 We'd gone to sleep just after half past midnight as Julia's considerable excitement had become non-verbal, which was far more enjoyable for me, so I awoke about 4:40am. Studying didn't appeal all that much, but something to eat would be nice, and I wanted to find out if we'd had an overnight improvement in our ability to share memories, as we'd had the previous night. We started testing our memory during first-breakfast, using a cookbook we found in the kitchen. We very quickly found out that sharing memory was now a piece of cake (actually, according to the page we were using, it was a "Beef Wellington", but you know what I mean). It was now as close to effortless as made no difference. I still needed to find out how functional it was, specifically, whether the minds who'd studied Algebra could understand Calculus, and vice versa. I had the perfect test up in my study: the Calculus assignment. I'd have the two minds that had not learned Calculus attempt some of the questions on it. I was also extremely curious about how the massive reduction in effort - from 100% down to sub-1% - was possible in just two days. I thought about that during the rest of breakfast, and had some ideas that I thought might have been relevant: Although we don't tend to think of it being so, the brain is a physical construct, like muscles and bones. The rest of my body had physically improved very dramatically over the last nine or ten weeks, so why not my memory too? Surely memory is largely a physical process, in that the memories are stored physically somewhere in the brain. I also wondered, "How could a one-hundred fold reduction in effort be achieved in just two days?" My body had never improved at a rate ANYTHING like that before, so how could that part of my body that was my brain change so much? I decided there probably hadn't been a hundred-fold improvement at all. It surely takes some energy for the brain to retrieve a memory, and make itself consciously aware of the fact. Let's say it normally takes 1.000 Joules for an easily retrieved memory (which is certainly the wrong value, but it'll do for my purposes here). Back when I had to put virtually 100% effort into retrieving a memory from a different mind, that didn't mean I'd used 100.000 Joules. The amount of conscious effort didn't have to correlate linearly to what happened at the physical level. For all I knew, 100% effort used 1.001 Joules! There was no way I could measure how much difference mentally 'trying hard' made to the expenditure of energy within my brain, so I simply stopped worrying about the question. I didn't solve the problem, but I was happy enough simply to doubt it was a hundred-fold improvement. ^ [[The above point about memory being physical, motivates me to make a small digression about memory and brains. First, memory is far less of a physical storage process than you might think. Memory is: HIGHLY mutable, rather than being analogous to facts stored permanently on a hard disk. HIGHLY redundant, so gaps can be filled in, often very 'creatively'. Somewhat similar to Error Correcting in computers/communications, but highly dependent on the emotions associated with the gap. HIGHLY multi-layered, similar to there being indexes, indexes of indexes, meta-indexes, etc. HIGHLY associative, in other words, it has some very weird indexes. Very importantly, HIGHLY meta-level analyzed. And rather bizarrely, it's not nearly as much a physical process as you'd think, although that aspect is invisible to modern science because it has very little understanding of how memory functions are performed, and even less about the related aspects of the Universe. I'll start explaining the penultimate point, "meta-level analyzed", with an example. I remember that I've never been introduced to Chloe's parents. How can I remember the absence of something? My mind certainly doesn't search every single memory I've got and find that none of them contain such an introduction. A great deal of our sense of self is formed from memories that we're constantly consciously and especially subconsciously aware of. One simplistic computer analogy is that they're in RAM rather than on hard disk. In humans there's a great deal of overlap between 'program' and 'data', which is another simplistic analogy. How we behave, our personalities, beliefs, etc. (i.e., the program that 'runs' us) is substantially written and re-written by the 'data' we encounter (i.e., by what happens to us, which immediately becomes our memories). Memories are part of who we are (our 'program') so a great deal of meta-level memory is necessarily constantly active within our mind, because our personality is always active, even when asleep (e.g., neurotic people have more bad dreams than happy people). Constantly active are not just the memories themselves, but analyzed summaries of them, such as my never having met Chloe's parents. That analysis is necessary so we know who we are; in other words, our self-image. Not just whether we think we're an honest person, but whether we really are an honest person. Ditto for greedy, lazy, and every other personality trait. These functions are performed and maintained subconsciously, otherwise when we wake up every morning, our brains would have to go through an enormous 'startup' procedure to rediscover/recreate everything we think and know about ourselves and our life. The subconscious is VASTLY bigger, more capable, more complex, and more important than we're consciously aware! Too large to be wholly contained in our brain, which probably surprises you. Brains are FULL of all sorts of lower level functions, not leaving enough room for many of the higher memory functions, or for your mind itself. Here's one example of something your brain does that you're probably not aware of. People can be rendered blind by receiving severe brain damage in their brain's visual processing center. They report seeing nothing but flat gray, even if their eyes are shut (if you think about that for a moment, you'll realize that shutting their eyes makes no difference). Clearly they can't recognize faces, read books, etc., but if you throw them a ball, they'll catch it. They've got no idea how they caught it. They'd swear black and blue that they never saw it, don't know what color the ball is, who threw it, or any other visual detail. All they see is an unrelenting single shade of gray. Catching a ball they don't even know is being thrown at them is possible because the subconscious maintains its own visual processing center in a more primitive part of the human brain. It has a very limited functionality (which does include catching balls), and is totally inaccessible to the conscious mind - that's the key point: there's a SHIT LOAD of stuff that happens inside your head that you've got no idea about! The subconscious visual processing center is a hang-over from our VERY early evolution, long before we even looked like monkeys, but it's still functional today. It's not relevant, but I'm amused that in those TV courtroom dramas where the pretending-to-be-blind-baddie gives himself away by catching something the hero throws, the baddie could truly be blind. I use this example because visual processing is a complex task. Somewhere between 25 to 30% of human brain matter is devoted to it. There are so many functions going on inside human brains that minds and memories are largely "out-sourced", that being the last of the bullet points above. I'll say more about that much later.]] ^ Upstairs in our study, I pulled out the Calculus assignment and got the Algebra minds to try answering problems that we hadn't done before. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that they retrieved all the memories they needed to complete the problems correctly. The fact that these were old memories, from before we started working on sharing our memories, was very welcome. The bad news was that it was slow because they couldn't index into the correct memories accurately, and it required a great deal of active cooperation from the owning mind. It had to be willing to let each of the fairly specific memories go. It was doable, but painfully slow. We were discussing the implications on our college studies, when, #1: Which made sense, so we studied for a while instead. We had a momentary distraction when we remembered the cool spreadsheet we'd thought of writing, the one that simulated daily profits for a day trader. I was tempted to write it now, because it'd be fun, but resisted. We'd wait until we actually had some profit to simulate. I went back to studying. Julia came in about half an hour earlier than normal, immediately saying, "How can you study at a time like this?" "You're right. Clearly I should have been spending my time trying to make sense of Chloe's behavior." "Huh? What about Chloe?" "She behaved very strangely at lunch yesterday. She..." I gave Julia a quick description of Chloe's behavior, or as I think of it, misbehavior; although I suspected that her mother would have the opposite viewpoint. I finished my recounting and waited for Julia to make everything clear. Julia said, "Weird. I can understand her not wanting to undo them, and having undone them, her doing them straight back up again when lunch ended, but why would she not get angry with you forcing her to undo them?" "I was kind of hoping you'd tell me that. You don't know?" "No. It doesn't make any sense," admitted Julia. I wisely rejected the first few replies that occurred to me, eventually saying, "If you don't understand her, you can imagine how confused I am." "Don't worry, we'll ask Mom at breakfast. How's the studying going?" #1: "It's going well, although I didn't get much done this morning because we went to sleep so late. Which reminds me, shouldn't you still be in bed." "I'm too excited. It's going to be so wonderful to have lots of money." "Don't you think you're being just a wee bit optimistic?" "No. I'm sure you can do it. Maybe we can go back to bed and celebrate for a while?" "Now you're crossing the bridge before the eggs have even been laid. But we can practice for the possibility that we might have something to celebrate, if you like." Julia was already on her feet and pulling my arm, so I was pretty sure the answer to "if you like" was positive. I let her lead me into temptation, mainly because she got a headstart on me, otherwise I'd have been leading her. #2: At breakfast, my girlfriend told her mother, "Mark's got a problem seducing Chloe. Tell Mom what you told me, Mark." I repeated my lunchtime story. Before I got to the end Andrew and Robert were both nodding along. I finished through to Chloe doing up her buttons at the end of lunch, then asked The Boys, "I couldn't understand Chloe's behavior, but you two seem to recognize it?" Robert said, "Sure. I've had a couple of girlfriends like her, including one extreme example." Andrew agreed, "I've had one too, although nothing as extreme as Robert's old girlfriend. It's not that uncommon." I asked, "But what is it? I've got no idea." Robert answered, "I can't say I ever spent much time thinking about it deeply, but it seemed to me that those girls wanted to have sex, but they'd been taught it was a bad thing, so they wanted the boy to 'force' them. That way they got what they wanted, but were blameless." Julia said, "In this case, not 'having sex', but undoing buttons. You're saying Chloe wanted to undo her buttons for Mark, but her parents had taught her it was a bad thing to do?" Robert said, "Or maybe she taught herself it was a bad thing. I think the key thing is that she needed to be 'forced' to do it, so it was Mark's responsibility instead of hers. Personally I found it to be a pain in the ass. I can imagine some guys might like it, but I can't imagine you'll be one of them, Mark." "How do you mean?" I asked. "You have to force the girl to do what you want. Do you like forcing girls?" "I'd never force a girl, but Chloe didn't need to be forced. I never touched or threatened to touch her. I only had to walk away." "You didn't use physical force, but you did use emotional force. You threatened to break up with her if she didn't undo a button, which was still coercive. I got very tired of having to do it, and broke up with the girls who required it." Julia asked, "So how did you get them to stop it?" Robert said, "I never did. I dropped them and moved on." "Same here," echoed Andrew. "You can try asking Chloe to behave normally, but if you get her to change you'll be doing better than I did. My advice would be not to waste time on her. Dump her and find someone less screwed up. From what I've seen, that'll take you thirty seconds, haha." Both Julia and I disagreed with Andrew's advice. We both tried to speak at the same time, and got tangled up. Once we got past the "after you", "no, after you" stage, it turned out that we had quite different reasons. Julia's reason was, "We're trying to 'unscrew' Chloe." | My response was, "Getting her to undo her buttons at school isn't important enough to break up with her over." Andrew shrugged. "Up to you. I couldn't get the girl I knew to change even a small amount. I don't think Robert could either?" Robert shook his head. Andrew continued, "You've got plenty of girls to choose from, so why persist with a messed up one? My prediction is you'll end up getting too annoyed with her, so you'll dump her." #2: Robert said, "I agree. If she's anything like the girls I dated, you'll get pissed off quickly. My advice is to talk with her about it, to give her a chance to explain or change. But if she doesn't improve quickly, don't waste your time and energy on her. Dump her and move on." #1: I said, "Don't you think that's an overreaction to her being uncomfortable unbuttoning her blouse at school? That hardly makes her a bad girlfriend." I was aware that getting Chloe to unbutton her blouse was an important first step in Julia's plan to teach her that boys being idiots wasn't something she needed to take personally, but its importance to Julia did not make it important to Robert and Andrew, so their advice did seem like an overreaction. Robert said, "In my experience, having to pretend to use force is required to get the girl to do everything over wherever she draws the line. If she's making a fuss about undoing even the top button of a blouse, then she's going to make a fuss about everything to do with sex. It'll drive you up the wall." Julia said, "Chloe's already admitted she'd like to have sex with Mark, so maybe her problem is just about how she looks in public?" Robert shrugged, "Perhaps. I just know that I wasted too much time on the first girlfriend like this that I had, and I got less patient with that personality each time since then. Good relationships require giving, but these girls can't give physically. That makes them bad girlfriends as far as I'm concerned. She's got psychological problems, and you don't want a girlfriend like that." "I agree," said Andrew. "Undoing buttons at school is irrelevant, but if she requires force in private, I'd have a talk with her. Give her one chance, and if she doesn't show good reason or good improvement, dump her. Like Robert said, she's psychologically damaged and she won't be a good girlfriend. That's presuming she can't turn the behavior off. If she's doing it for fun or some other reason she can control, then that'd be fine, but if she can't turn it off, then she'll drive you up the wall." #3: #1: #3: I said, "Julia, what do you think about inviting Chloe around one afternoon soon, to check out the magnitude of the problem? Maybe check a couple of other magnitudes, while I'm in the area, haha. Remember the idea you had about giving her a very good - but one-sided - time. Maybe we should do that soon?" "No reason why not. You're free tomorrow after school, aren't you?" "Yeah. I agree that's the earliest time we can do it. It's probably not worth canceling today's trip just for Chloe, is it? Haha." Julia, Prof and Vanessa chuckled their agreement with that. Julia said, "When I see her at school, I'll ask her to come here after school tomorrow." "What reason will you give her?" "Something like, 'Mark wants to spend some time alone with you in our bedroom.' How does that sound?" "Accurate, but won't she misinterpret it to mean more than is really going to happen?" "Doubtless, so it'll be interesting to see how she reacts under pressure. If she makes too much fuss, I'll promise her she'll leave a virgin, but I hope she doesn't need that reassurance." I hoped so too, because I MUCH preferred her to want to lose her virginity with me. If she needed the assurance of remaining a virgin, then things were not going in the direction I wanted. Prof and I had to head off quickly because we wanted to be in LA when the banks opened, so we could get to Vegas and win our money - fingers crossed - early enough in the day to get the money deposited into our Vegas account, and then transferred out immediately, to make it harder for Binion's to renege or get the money back if they got suspicious later. Finishing our gambling that early meant we had to start early, so we were getting an early flight. We left the breakfast table and gathered our gear from Prof's study. I already had my overnight-recharged cellphone (Carol and I have the same model, hence two chargers. One we leave in our room at home, one in Julia's room). Prof gave me $2,000 in cash, "I suggest you split it into two or three bundles. I've read that pickpockets can be a problem in casinos." I laughed, "NO ONE can pick my pockets. It's not possible." My proximity sense would clearly show the attempt in time for me to intercept the hand. [[Actually I was wrong. My knowledge of pickpocketing was rudimentary, so I was imagining it being a slow, sneaky activity. A more common method is quite different: distract the target totally then quickly pick his pocket, often using a team of two or more people. I have three active minds, so distracting me is harder than normal, but certainly not impossible. If I was sufficiently distracted, I wouldn't notice what my proximity was sensing, just as a distracted normal person doesn't notice the touches of a quick pickpocket 'attack'.]] Prof queried, "You sound confident?" "I am. An aspect of one of my special abilities. Remember I can sense people behind me and even who they are. You saw that when my Aikido Sensei tested me here a few weeks ago?" Prof nodded. "People can't sneak up on me, and they certainly can't sneak their hand into my pocket." "Good," declared Prof. "You can carry the hundred thou' then." Prof pulled back his jacket and started undoing his shirt around his belly, to reveal a money belt. "You've got the $100,000 in cash? I thought you wired it to Vegas?" "I reconsidered. I thought someone at the bank might put two and two together if I wired $100,000 to Binion's and the next day an elderly gentleman is reported as turning $100,000 into $1.75 million. Another clue would come from our winning the rest of the $10 million not long after that, then a few days later our two families are rich. Now they have no reason to associate me with Binion's, which is better. I was worried about carrying it around, but letting you have it until just before we go to the casino is much better, especially with your martial arts ability." It was a good thing that I was so confident in my anti-pickpocketing ability, otherwise I would have been a great deal more nervous than I was. ^ [[It was also a good thing I also had no idea about one of our country's "War on Drugs" laws. Quite frequently, airport travelers who have large amounts of cash on them - $10,000 is easily enough - have it confiscated by the airport police even if it's absolutely clear that it is their own money, such as their carrying their bank statement and withdrawal receipt for the amount. The only reason the police officer needs is "suspicion there might be a drug connection", which is why it doesn't matter that it's provably your own money, because you could be buying drugs with your own money. Grounds given by police in the past include such weak and obviously self-serving statements as, "I didn't like the Subject's attitude when responding to my questions. It made me suspicious that he was involved with drugs." It is then up to the individual to prove in court that the money was his and that it had no connection to drugs at all, both where it was earned from, and where it was intended to be spent. In other words, the owner of the money is considered guilty unless he can prove his innocence. Even if this is possible - which it often isn't, because it can be impossible to "prove" how someone intended to spend their money - it typically takes many months and costs several thousands of dollars in legal fees, which is not reimbursed by the police if their seizure is ruled invalid. For relatively small seizures many people don't make the effort, in which case the police keep the money. Fortunately, even if our $100,000 had been confiscated, we almost certainly would've gotten it back, as there was plenty of evidence for the source of the money and the purpose of our trip as Prof and Vanessa had talked to his accountant about what we were intending to do, they had spreadsheets of betting systems, pages of notes about Vegas, etc. It would have delayed us by many months, and cost us a considerable amount of effort and expense.]] ^ I lifted my T-shirt and put the money belt on. $100,000 is a surprisingly small bundle, so when I rotated the belt to put the money inside the curve of my waist just above my left hip, and with my T-shirt lowered and my jacket hanging normally, the bulge of the belt wasn't visible at all. Prof said, "That looks perfect. I've got your fake license and everything else we need. We'll drive to the airport in convoy in our own cars. Are you ready to go?" "Oh boy! Yeah. I'll just go to the bathroom first." After some very sincere wishes of "Have a good trip", "Good luck", and the like, Prof and I set off. We'd arranged a stopping point south of town at a good place for me to put my disguise on, as it was better to wear it than have to explain to the paranoid airport security staff why I was carry a disguise. We glued the sideburns on and applied the makeup to my jawline and cheeks. Prof had a disguise too: a floppy hat and large dark glasses, but he was carrying those in his jacket pocket. He had permission to wear them in the casino, to protect his anonymity. Prof kept the alcohol spray in a Ziploc bag in his pocket, telling me he'd take it through airport security and give it to me in Vegas. [He subsequently had to explain it to them, "I have a skin problem. I spray this on, then wipe the area." It was a small bottle, and he was allowed to keep it.] I haven't flown for a few years, but air travel has sure changed; I remember enjoying my last trip. Fortunately we had no luggage, or it would've been even worse. Prof was carrying two large envelopes full of documents, both already stamped and addressed back to his home, and the small spray bottle, but that was all we had. The less said about the trip the better. I'll just say we eventually arrived in LA, and got a taxi to the bank. Prof had made an appointment, and they were surprisingly happy to see us. I soon found out why, Prof had told them there'd be a low seven digits sum wired to them in the next few days. Prof started our visit by double-checking that they could meet our requirements for wiring funds to other accounts the way we wanted, which meant our being able to do it from Corvallis, to specific accounts we were authorizing now. They confirmed they could, so we completed the paperwork involved in opening both our accounts. It was painfully slow, but it was also sure, as Prof was well prepared. After which we headed back to the airport. In a private moment, I commented to Prof about his being so optimistic in telling the bank we'd be transferring in "low seven digits". Prof answered, "I wish I were certain, but I'm not. I only said that to ensure the bank's prompt cooperation. If we don't transfer any money in, what they think of us won't matter." At the bank Prof had carefully made sure all of my documents, and none of his, were in one of the envelopes, which he'd then sealed. He dropped that one into a mailbox at the airport, and we then got ourselves onto the next flight to Vegas. That flight was even more unpleasant than our previous one. We caught a taxi to near the Vegas bank. After we'd been dropped off on the next block, in case there were surveillance cameras outside the bank, Prof pulled out his phone and called Binion's. Once he got through a couple of secretaries, he said, "Would you let Ted Binion know that Ivan Roberts is in town. I'll be arriving at Binion's in about an hour." Ivan Roberts was Prof's cover name. Binion's top management knew his real name, but they'd agreed to use his fake name on the floor and in any publicity that happened. Prof told me, "Wait here, rather than come into the bank with me. I'm opening an account for me only, and the casino will know about this account, so I'd rather no one in the bank sees you. I'm told the casinos have a great deal of power in Vegas, maybe enough to interview the bank staff or even access their video system, so let's play safe by leaving you out here. You saw how long it took to open two accounts last time, so I guess I should be about three-quarters of that. I'll call you if there's a problem." That gave me somewhat over half an hour to wait. I found a good spot nearby. I chose a shaded place because it was afternoon by now and hotter than I'm used to. My seat was also shielded on the sides and I could see anyone approaching me, as I was very conscious that I was carrying $102,000, which I very much wanted to keep carrying! I spent the time doing several memory sharing tests, mainly as something to do. There was no appreciable effort required, so no discernable reduction in effort. Otherwise I just stayed alert, making sure no one came near me without my being aware of them. It took Prof a little longer than I expected to come back, but no big deal. He told me, "All done. Let's walk farther down the street until we find a place to mail this," he indicated his envelope of documents to be mailed back home. "Keep your eye open for a good spot for us to transfer the belt. I don't want to do that on the street." We passed a food place, and I was thirsty, so I suggested getting a drink and swapping the belt in the bathroom. Prof agreed so we did that, transferring the spray bottle too. The waitress also told us where the nearest mailbox was, which we would have found for ourselves going the way we were, but good to know. We wandered down the street, posted the envelope, then Prof said, "We'll separate by a hundred yards or so, then wave down cabs to take us to Binion's. Wait five minutes after I've gone before you do. I'll have to meet a boss, have the money counted, and go through whatever paperwork they require. I would've expected that to take quite a while, except the stories we read implied people could walk in off the street and slap down a big bet almost immediately. I doubt it's as quick as that in reality, but I don't know how long it'll take. You might have to wait only ten minutes, or over an hour. I won't be able to call you either. You'll see me when you see me, okay?" "Sure. I'll hang around not betting for as long as it takes. If you have a problem, I guess the signal is still to call my phone then hang up, right? That sends me outside until you can call me to tell me what's going on." "Yeah, we'll stick with that. Remember that if Binion's insist I play on a particular table then I'll speed dial your phone, hang up, wait a few seconds and do it again. That's your signal to start walking around looking for me. I'll stall them by waiting until I feel lucky. There was a story about a young guy who waited nearly an hour before placing his big bet, so that should be fine. If I wait thirty minutes or so and still haven't seen you, I'll go to the bathroom and call or text you from there, okay?" "Yep. If we end up on a different table than I expect, don't place your bet right away. Let me have some practice first, to confirm NP will work fine. I'll scratch my shoulder with the accuracy message when I'm ready." "Okay. It'll pay for you to spend a few minutes walking around the casino when you first arrive, to get an idea where the other roulette tables are." "Okay. I can't think of anything else, can you?" We'd already discussed these points back in Corvallis, but both of us wanted to make sure we had it straight now. "No. You're ready?" "Yeah. Ready and getting very nervous. I'll turn that off when I get to the casino, but I'm enjoying the buzz at the moment." "I wish I could turn my nervousness off. Okay, I'll walk down the street a ways and you go the other way so we're not associated by the first cabbie." Prof turned and walked away. I did the same in the other direction. A nervous few minutes later, I hailed a cab, got in the back and told him "Binion's Horseshoe casino please." In the cab I could feel how worried I was. Justifiably worried, because I had a great deal to be nervous about. Consider the physical construction of the roulette wheel: There were many changes that could be made to it that would kill this scheme. If the sides were sloped steeper, then the ball could be forced into a pocket while the wheel was rotating faster, perhaps too fast for me to see where my target number was! Or if the wheel was much smaller, with necessarily smaller pockets and ball, then the centrifugal force keeping the ball out of the pocket would be much reduced, which again might have permitted a higher speed 'capture'. Just the simple absence of the bumps around the wheel which made the ball bounce around would have made my job much harder as a very important part of my job was making the movements of the ball look natural. There were all sorts of extreme changes that could have caused me trouble, such as latches on the pockets so the very first pocket the ball contacted would latch shut, capturing the ball. Or reversing the way the system worked by having the ball released from the center of a nearly stationary wheel, which had the pockets on the outside. As the wheel rotated faster and faster, the ball would rise and eventually be captured in a pocket on the outside. Having randomly waving flippers (like in a pin ball machine) would be a pain, and probably significantly reduce my accuracy. They could also build all sorts of machines to generate a random number out of 38 possibilities, and I had no difficulty imagining many designs that would ruin my ability to influence the outcome. Plus there were all the other things I could worry about: being forced to stand too far away from the wheel to see it clearly enough, being moved away from the table after Prof had bet the $50,000 but before the ball had landed in a pocket so Prof would only have a 1-in-38 chance of winning, Prof and I not being able to find each other at all, Binion's calling the whole thing off, etc., etc. I could feel I was very hyper. Hyper-nervous, hyper-excited and hyper-I'm-bound-to-make-a-mistake-unless-I-calm-down, so I ordered my body to relax. It took a couple of seconds, but feeling the nervousness drain out of me was a strange sensation. The contrast in feelings made me realize how extremely nervous I had been. Relaxing my body caused my minds to relax noticeably too (bodies and minds affect each other to a considerable degree). Nonetheless I had to renew my "Relax" command fairly frequently, because my mind kept trying to get nervous, and because adrenaline takes a while to fade. I pulled the spray bottle out of my jacket and sprayed my hands and face. "Hey, whatcha doin?" "Putting on perfume." Which shut him up nicely. ------- Chapter 177: Bet One Tuesday, May 3, 2005 (Continued) Binion's Horseshoe Casino is certainly at a different scale than Spirit Mountain. Overwhelmingly larger, with a far greater number of self-deluded idiots/customers. I got asked for ID soon after I walked into the gambling area. I had a struggle digging my wallet out of my tight pocket, so I told the security guard, "Sorry, my girlfriend insists I wear tight pants. Apparently I've got a cute ass. And don't you dare look at it, or I'll call Security on your ass." He chuckled, quickly checked my card, passed it back, and wished me, "Good luck." I didn't tell him I had something better. #1: #3: While I was making my way through all the slot machines I had the idea of using NP to push the wheels of one of them into winning positions. The wheels were behind glass, and I hadn't tested NP through glass. It'd failed through a telephoto camera lens, but I guessed NP would work through optically neutral glass. Nor did I know whether physically pushing the wheels might set off all sorts of alarms. I could easily conduct an experiment by trying it on someone else's machine so if any alarms went off I wouldn't be involved. Right now probably wasn't the best time to get involved in something other than what I'd come here for, and this casino probably wasn't the best one to experiment in either. It was an idea for another day though, as some of the slot machine jackpots were well worth winning. I found the table games area and located the roulette table closest to the front door. With great trepidation, and a prayer to a God I don't believe in - which I hoped He wouldn't hold against me right now - I looked to see how the wheel was physically constructed... The wheel and ball looked IDENTICAL to the one used at Spirit Mountain, other than some irrelevant decorative differences, which was a HUGE relief. The first potential obstacle didn't seem to exist. I was very eager to test my NP, but Prof had requested that I wander around enough to know where all the various roulette tables were in case I had to quickly find Prof on another one. At Spirit Mountain that could have been done while standing in one spot, but it was a very different situation here. I wandered around quickly, because it was a big place and I'd hate to not be ready for Prof if he turned up at the short end of his time estimate. There were an impressive number of roulette tables, quite a few of which were closed. Presumably because Tuesday afternoon wasn't their busy period. After my quick scout I hurried back to our target table. There were several non-bettors hanging around it, so I chose not to buy any chips immediately. I waited until I could do my first test, which was to 'weigh' the ball, to avoid the risk of sending it flying across the room like last time I'd gotten its weight wrong. I weighed it the same way I'd done it at Spirit Mountain: I waited until it was in a slot with the wheel virtually stationary, then I used an NP-fingertip to VERY lightly start to push it out of the slot. A little tricky, because the wheel was still rotating slowly, but there was no hurry because the dealers take a while to make all the payouts. I slowly increased my push, until the point when I felt the ball wobble. It weighed about the same as the ball at Spirit Mountain. The weight of the ball had been my biggest remaining concern, so I was now feeling very good. As best I could tell, we had exactly the same situation as at Spirit Mountain, where I'd been 100% accurate. I was still worried about the unforeseen, but everything I could see looked fantastic. Now to start testing my accuracy at hitting a target. I looked at my watch's second hand, to get a random target: 44 seconds. Subtracting 38 gave 6 as my target. On the next spin I tried to hit 6. I took it very carefully initially, getting my timing perfect and deliberately under-nudging the ball to make sure nothing peculiar happened. It seemed to respond properly, so I reduced the amount by which I "pulled my punches" (or "nudges"). My highest priority was to avoid doing anything that would look suspicious, especially when the casino management replayed the videotapes. Prof had warned me that they'd be certain to review the recent spins, to see if anything untoward had happened. As a result of my caution the ball was not perfectly positioned when the wheel slowed down. I didn't try to force it into number 6, so it missed by a couple of slots. I was EXTREMELY happy with the situation, because the ball had reacted to my NP-pushes exactly as it should've. I was confident that the only reason I'd missed was because I'd been overly cautious on my first test (actually, I'd been "correctly cautious", but you know what I mean). The second test was aimed at number 16. I was still extremely careful to get my timing correct as I didn't want the ball to appear to bounce off a bumper when it wasn't anywhere near one, but was no longer overly cautious with the amount of force I used. I did my best to steer the ball to where I wanted it. It moved well, and the ball was well placed as the wheel slowed. By the time the ball was starting to roll/bounce over the pockets, it was very close to number 16. The easiest way to get it in the right pocket - the method with the highest accuracy and realism - is not to keep nudging it, but to grasp it with several fingertips and carry it there, while pretending to make it bounce around a little. Now that the wheel and ball were slow enough, it was with considerable satisfaction that I gasped the ball, moved it so it looked like it bounced a couple of slots back and forth, and then dropped it neatly into number 16. There I let it go, so it could rattle around naturally, just using a fingertip to block the exit to the pocket so it wouldn't roll out again. After a couple of seconds it stopped trying, settling down in its temporary home. #2: #1: #3: Notice from the above internal conversation that #4 was on duty. We'd been worried that he'd get distracted by all the sexy girls we thought we'd encounter. The Vegas casino scenes that we'd seen in movies had been full of very glamorous and sexy girls, and this was a "Strip Casino" after all. It turned out that our worries (and hopes) had been largely unnecessary. There were, for example, no strippers. Apparently you can't trust Hollywood in at least the four w-dimensions that my minds had experience of, and I suspected probably a few others as well. We nailed the next two spins too, making three out of three (I wasn't counting the first, overly cautious test). #2: #1: #3: #1: The next two tests were successful, which made it five out of five real tests. Also important was my feeling of confidence that I could do easily this. I definitely had to concentrate very intently on what I was doing, but only for a period of about thirty seconds. Most of the other patrons stared at the wheel at the same time, so I didn't even have to worry about my standing out then. Other than the concentration required, it really was fairly easy. The ball bounces a LOT, so it's easy to bounce it around until it's in the target area, and then to make sure that the bounces mostly go back and forth around the target. It's done on a rotating inclined plane, but toward the end the ball is moving - on average - in the same direction and with the same speed as the wheel, so there's no relative motion. As per our discussion, we decided to miss the next couple of spins. While I was sitting out, one of the dealers - a female - asked me, "Are you waiting for someone?" "Why do you say that?" "You keep looking at your watch, and looking around like you're waiting for someone to come." #1: "You're observant. Yeah, I'm waiting for my girlfriend. She arranged to meet me here. It's not like her to be late; in fact, she usually gives me a hard time when I'm late, so I'm a bit worried I've got the wrong meeting spot. I'll give her another ten minutes, then see." #3: #2: The dealer went back to her work. I waited until I'd missed a couple of spins, then did my thing on the next one. Again successfully. "Do you want some chips?" the dealer asked me. "Yes, I think I might as well. Give me $50 in five dollar cash chips please." Prof had explained that cash chips were better to get than color chips, because color chips would have to be converted to cash chips before I could leave the table. When it came time for me to leave, I didn't want anything to slow me down. It took her far less time to get out the ten chips than it did for me to extract my wallet from my pocket. When I got it out and looked up, she was waiting. "Sorry, tight pants." "So I see." I dug out one of Prof's $100 bills, and place it on the table. The dealer looked at it, then at me, saying, "We can't give change, sir." "What? Oh, yeah. Stupid me. My mind's elsewhere. Make it twenty chips then, thanks." #2: #3: #2: #1: #2: We'd internally discussed casino cheating before. With magnets, we thought repulsion was more likely than attraction, but in either event it'd likely be pretty weak as the ball was so light it wouldn't need much, and the less magnetic force they used, the more inconspicuous its effect and the equipment would be. Near the end, when I was carrying the ball, I'd feel the ball trying to move unnaturally if it was subject to any force like that, in which case our 10.5 pounds of NP-push would surely be sufficient to overcome whatever force they'd be using. So if they tried to repulse the ball out of our target pocket, I'd damned well push it in and hold it there. Likewise if they tried to attract it into the wrong pocket, I'd make sure it appeared to bounce out, even if it took me a hell of a lot of NP to do it. They could hardly complain about their cheating equipment failing. The other cheating method that seemed plausible was a needle sticking up to block access to the pocket we were betting on. I'd use an NP-fingertip to check the pocket was clear at the appropriate time. If a needle did appear, it'd have to be a very thin one to avoid being seen, so it should be easy to bend flat or break off. There could be other cheating methods, but I'd just have to stay alert and be quick to respond, as I would only have seconds at the end of a spin. Trying to win $10 million was a BIG worry! I deliberately didn't influence the next spin. When the one after that was about to start, with my having already chosen its result, the dealer asked, "Are you going to bet?" #2: #1: We have to stand close to the wheel so we can see it very clearly, which also has the advantage of making our head tilt down when we're looking at it, hiding our eyeballs. When we're doing our thing, one eyeball is tracking the ball, and the other is tracking the target number. One smoothly rotating eyeball, while the other eyeball 'bounces' back and forth wildly, wouldn't be a good thing to have anyone notice. I had sunglasses with me, but preferred not to wear them in case they made me look suspicious. I answered, "I'm thinking about it, but I'm not really much of a gambler. That's more my girlfriend's thing, which is probably why she's late." #1: #2: #1: #3: #2: Prof - looking silly in his floppy hat and dark sunglasses - was heading our way, with a couple of guys in suits and a couple of security guards. They were still some distance away, but they were heading in the right direction. It was hard to tell whether Prof had seen me already (he didn't wave!), but he'd certainly see me soon if he hadn't. #3: #1, #2: #2: #1: #2: #1: "Olivia, if I start playing could you keep your eyes open for a blonde girl, tall and very thin, wearing a red dress? She's probably coming from over in that direction somewhere." I nodded over my shoulder in the direction of Prof. The dealer looked, then inhaled. She instantly moved over to her nearest co-worker, telling him, "Brian's coming." They suddenly looked very efficient: standing straight, moving quickly, etc. I'd been expecting Ted Binion. I didn't know who Brian was, although by the staffs' reaction he was obviously a big boss. I'd been vaguely intending to flirt with Olivia while Ted (or whomever) was coming, but she was now working far too industriously to be flirted with. I was in no hurry to react to Prof. He could arrive at the table and soak up the 'vibe' for as long as he wanted before deciding whether to play it or not. I noticed that the situation was actually fairly well placed to help him a little. There was a game in progress, meaning the bets were all placed and we were waiting for the ball to decide where to land. I looked at all the bets, and located the square with the highest stack of chips on it. It took me a second or two to work out what pocket number that was, because there were so many chips all over the betting area that the numbers were obscured. Prof and I hadn't discussed this, but I couldn't see anything wrong with making that number win, which would create a happy table atmosphere and an excuse for Prof to choose to play on this table. On second thought, it might be a little safer to choose the second most heavily bet-on number. That'd still make a lot of players happy, and wouldn't stand out as such an unusual event. Then I reconsidered yet again. I didn't want the number with the most chips on it, but the number with the most different colored chips, so as many players as possible would win something. That was an entirely different number because the most valuable numbers had big stacks of chips of one color. To appear less unusual, I chose the second most popular number (thus my fourth opinion of what number to have win!). Side bets (red/black, high/low, the dozens, etc.) complicated my choice. I didn't bother to count all of those meticulously, just making a rough estimate of what seemed to be the second most popular target number. Having made my choice, I turned to the wheel. It wasn't too late, because three active minds can do jobs like that very quickly. A few seconds later Prof arrived at the far end of the table. We'd agreed he'd play from the far end, well away from the wheel. We thought it made him appear more innocent and less connected to me. I ignored him. I would have anyway, but I had to because I was concentrating on doing my thing to the ball. Several seconds later the ball came to rest, and the number was announced. Quite a few people declared their satisfaction at the result. Because I was standing by the wheel, I could naturally look at the betting area and easily see Prof and his little entourage. I saw Prof looking in my direction, so I started rubbing my right shoulder as I turned back to the dealer. "That was a popular spin, Olivia," she'd been the one to spin it. "Well done." She ignored me, being far too busy impressing Brian with how good she was at her job. To be fair to her, there were more than the usual number of players who had to be paid. From what I could see from my casual glances, Prof appeared to have told them that he'd chosen this table. They were well out of my earshot at the far end of the noisy crowd, but his decision became obvious when I saw Prof's entourage clearing room for him at the end of the table. That caused a little unhappiness from the patrons who were urged sideways, until one of the security guards put a rack of chips down in front of Prof. Shooting off a gun couldn't have gotten a more instant reaction than placing what I guessed was $100,000 worth of chips on the table. I didn't have a clue what colors different denomination chips were, other than the very small chips I'd seen while playing here, but everyone else around the table seemed to be fully aware of the color codes. "Wow!" | "Christ, look at that!" | Sudden inhalations of breath. | And many similar reactions all around the table. Everyone was now looking at Prof, so I did so too. Prof was flanked by the two guys in suits, with the two guards standing behind and to either side of Prof, so he was well circled. One of the suits was talking to Prof, who was looking around while he was listening. I scratched my right shoulder again. I'm sure Prof saw it, but he made no sign of it, looking right past me. Of course he had to do that, but I wished I was REALLY sure he'd seen it. I was getting nervous again, so it was time for yet another "Relax" command. Everybody was looking at Prof, what they could see of him anyway. Almost no one was betting, waiting to see what would happen. Prof pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. [He'd already told me about it. It was a long list of numbers for him to bet on, derived from his family's birthdays, the date he married Vanessa, and many other 'lucky numbers'. In other words, a total load of crap.] Some more conversation between Prof and Suit#1 (presumably Brian), then Prof put his piece of paper down to start pulling out chips from his rack. Unfortunately his hands were shaking and he couldn't pile them up properly. After messing it up twice he gave up, spoke to Suit#1, who spoke to Suit#2, who took over the job (which pretty much confirmed that Suit#1 was Big Boss Brian). Very quickly about a dozen chips of one of the colors Prof had were piled up in front of him. I didn't have to wonder how much that represented, because players all around the table were saying "$50,000", "Fifty grand", or if they were particularly cool, "Fifty big ones." #1: Prof picked up his piece of paper in his shaking hand. Even from my distance I could see the shake. Whether acting or real I couldn't tell, but if he was acting he was doing a damned good job. He looked at it, then told Suit#2 something. Suit#2 pushed the stack of ten chips forward, calling out to the nearest dealer, "All on 21." The audience all went "Fuck!" or "Christ!" (If the terms are interchangeable, why is the Church so anti-sex?) The dealer moved Prof's chips the rest of the way to that square. #1: There was a flurry of betting from the other patrons, with every man and his dog also wanting to bet on 21. The roulette staff (a couple more seemed to have appeared out of nowhere) managed it well, making sure that things were orderly, secure, and that none of Prof's chips mysteriously disappeared as other patrons placed bets on the same square. It took several times as long as normal to get all the bets placed, then Suit#2 (who was standing next to the ball-spinning dealer), gave her the nod. "No more bets!" was called by one of the other dealers, then Olivia did her wheel and ball spinning thing. I was wedged up against the table, as there was now a much-expanded crowd of excited people gathered around, all craning for a look at the wheel. I was being pushed and jostled, but thank God NP doesn't work like real fingers. Real fingers are connected to the body (by hands and arms, in case you're not good at biology), so jostling the body would effectively jostle the fingers, ruining their ability to do any precise work. NP-fingertips weren't positioned relative to my body, but at an absolute point in space determined by my concentrating on that point. Provided I kept watching the ball and wheel carefully, I could maintain my precision even if my body was being moved roughly, PROVIDED I didn't lose my concentration! Being jostled made concentration harder, but - BELIEVE ME - I was trying VERY hard! For the first two-thirds of the total spinning time, I don't care what's happening. The ball is still on the outer rim, traveling too fast to come down enough to hit any projections. Even when it first starts bouncing around, it's doing far too much of it and the wheel is going too fast to make influencing the ball of any use. The last thirty seconds or so is when I have to do my thing. So I was able to spend the first minute making sure that the people pushing on me gave me some respect. I glared at them, demanded, "Stop pushing me" in a menacing way, jostled them right back even harder, etc. After a minute of that, my neighbors got the idea that I was a rude person and that they really shouldn't jostle me. They were trying their best not to, although not with full success because people behind them were pushing them too. Nonetheless, I'd reduced the nuisance value helpfully. I'd also taken a solid stance and had braced myself against the table. Then I did a serious "RELAX" command (actually several Go-Away-Various-Specific-Nervousness-Symptoms commands. I've just collectively called it "Relax" as a shorthand name). The wheel was going slow enough for me to locate pocket number 21, so I checked it using NP, and there was no needle or other obstruction in it or immediately in front of its mouth. The mind watching that pocket would maintain a fingertip inside the pocket as a continuous check for monkey business, until it was time for the ball to fall in. The wall of the pocket would push the fingertip around, keeping it in place without the owning mind having to concentrate on moving it. #3: #1: It was time to start flicking the ball. My first flick didn't work nearly as effectively as it should have, the ball flicking away much slower than I'd expected. The next flick confirmed it: the ball was roughly twice as heavy as before. At the very least, that made the casino people sneaky bastards, but the ball being the same size immediately made me worry about their intending to do a magnetism cheat. It was too early to detect or do anything about that yet, so I concentrated on doing my normal job. I could easily adapt my flicking to the ball's being heavier, and I had plenty of time to get it right. I typically flick the ball fifteen to twenty five times during one spin, so the first two being weak flicks was so easily corrected that it was virtually irrelevant. More than half the time I let the ball bounce naturally, and a couple of weak flicks did far less 'damage' to my achieving my goal than a single bad bounce would've, and there are many bad bounces during one game. #2: <#3, you'll need to hold it in the pocket much longer at the end, in case a magnet repulses it.> #3: #2: I needed to "Relax" myself a couple more times, to firmly hold my stance against the crowd's pressure, and to concentrate intently, but those were incidentals. Even concentration wasn't that critical. Not that I did, but had I looked away I could've immediately looked back, reformed the NP-points, located the ball and target pocket, and carried on from there, probably with no decreased accuracy if it wasn't in the critical last couple of seconds. Those seconds were going to be a worry though, because they were going to require intense concentration against the crowd's going crazy, and I also had to be extremely quick and careful - two things it's hard to combine - in how I responded to any cheating from the casino. The wheel and ball were still moving very quickly, so I had the luxury of several seconds to think about the consequences of the ball's change in weight. Even at double the previous weight, it was still easily light enough to need only one mind to flick it, so that important aspect was fine. Although, on second thought and after having watched for a few more seconds, I realized that the heavier ball naturally didn't bounce around as much as the lighter one had, so I would use the same strength flicks as I'd used on the lighter ball. I would have to change some of the directions of my flicks as the new ball's changes in direction shouldn't be as extreme as the lighter ball's had been, and I will probably have to flick more often since each flick will achieve less. Thinking about it, the new weight didn't make it any harder or easier for me to make my flicks look realistic - the balls bounce around so much normally that damned near any flicks seem natural provided I time them properly, which is nothing to do with the ball's weight. What the new weight did do was affect my accuracy. That wasn't an issue mid-game because I could just do some more flicks to get the ball back where I wanted it, but it was an issue end-game, because there are so few bounces that a poorly aimed flick could cause real problems. I could think of two solutions to that: practice flicking during the mid-game so my flicks would be more accurate in the end-game, and do as few flicks as possible in the end-game, by grabbing the ball earlier than I would have otherwise. Thinking of grabbing it earlier made me realize that a heavier ball should naturally be 'lazier' in the end-game, stopping sooner - while the wheel is going faster - than I'm used to. I would have to make sure I took control of it in even earlier than I first thought, or the whole game might be over with it in the wrong pocket or too far from the right one for me to get it there reasonably. I was VERY glad I thought of that in time! I did another "Relax", cranked up my concentration to a whole new level of intensity, and got back to work, watching and thinking VERY carefully! I didn't do anything fancy, but I did more of it, and with very careful studying of how the heavier ball responded. Worried about the game finishing quicker because of the ball being 'lazier' and harder to move far, I made damned sure to get and keep the ball closer to its target than I normally would (leading the target by an amount depending on the wheel's speed). By the time the ball's negative velocity - with respect to the direction of the pockets - had been eliminated, and the ball had absorbed enough momentum from the wheel that it was roughly matching the rotational speed of the pockets, it was bouncing back and forth above the target pocket. Not only did that make life easier for me in the last ten seconds, but it should make our imminent win look more believable from the casino's point of view, I hoped. I had spent quite a while trying to think of ways to cheat at roulette, so I could think of ways to defeat them if the casino tried them. I hadn't managed to imagine any non-NP cheating system which could cause the still bouncing ball to be over the target at this stage of the game. Magnets and needles, for example, couldn't do that. From above the target, having the ball drop into 21 looked perfectly natural and believable, I again hoped (I was doing a lot of hoping). Certainly much more so than the ball rolling over many intervening pockets in the last couple of seconds, an effect which needles and magnets could produce. I had my head down, not looking at anybody. All I could tell was that the crowd around me could see the ball's handiness to 21 too, because their noise level was rising steadily, with sudden peaks in reaction to good or bad bounces. When the ball finally lost enough speed to let it make its first impact with the pockets, I made it do so very close to 21, and bounce around that immediate area. I was going to reproduce something I'd seen balls do several times, and which I thought looked particularly innocent. I paid huge attention to the feedback I was getting from my fingertips, wanting to know if the ball tried to go somewhere on its own initiative, inspired by a magnet. There was no indication of that, and the target pocket remained free of needles or other obstructions, as did the area immediately outside the target, and the pockets to either side of it. My frequent, tiny flicks kept the ball near 21, and as soon as I possibly could, I grabbed the ball with four NP-fingertips. Getting possession of it made me feel MUCH better, because I was now far more capable of detecting and defeating unnatural influences on the ball. So far there was no sign of that. I 'bounced' the ball - by sliding it along the wheel's surface on an arc that looked like it was rolling - to a couple of pockets ahead of 21 ("ahead" in the direction the wheel was moving), and let it enter that pocket. Then the ball seemed to fall prey to centrifugal force, by slowly rolling out of that pocket and tipping backward around the intervening wall into the next pocket, only one ahead of 21. There it dithered, but slowly rolled out again because of that gosh darned centrifugal force. Pocket 21 still contained no needles, its mouth was still open and unobstructed, and the ball was still moving freely under my control. It slowly rolled over the wall ahead of 21, and then slowly into 21. It dithered, rattled around a little, and finally settled. I held the ball firmly in place while the crowd went WILD! I was afraid to take my NP-fingertips off it, in case it somehow rolled out of the pocket (because of that fucking centrifugal force, magnets, or some other device). I'd detected no sign of any cheating - other than the little trickiness with the weight of the ball - but I would hate to give them an opportunity. The longer the ball stayed in the pocket, the more reluctant Binion's should be to push it out, if they had that capability. Eventually, as the wheel slowed, it'd be utterly unbelievable for the ball to suddenly leave the pocket. I had to keep watching the wheel rotate, so I could keep the restraining fingertip in the right place. Everyone else was screaming, but I was standing like a suspicious statue. To stall, I started acting excited while still staring at the wheel. I pointed at it and yelled, "LOOK AT THAT!" Everyone else was yelling, so no one heard a word I said, but that didn't matter. I waved my arms around, yelled some more, and generally used up several seconds. I moved my NP-fingertips back a fraction, to make sure the wheel was now going slow enough that the ball wouldn't roll out again. It didn't even wobble, so that was good. I canceled my fingertip, saw the ball didn't move, then raised my head to look around. Prof was being held upright by Suit#1 and a security guard. Prof's head was looking down, so I couldn't see his face clearly. I could see that he was conscious and struggling to hold himself up. Prof had told me that he'd have to put on some sort of surprised act, and I hoped like hell that was what I was seeing. I spared a quick look back at the wheel, to make sure the ball was still in 21, which it was. Looking back at Prof, I could see that Suit#1 and the guard were bearing almost all of Prof's weight, and looking very concerned and unhappy, pretty much the opposite of all the patrons. Suit#2 was on his mobile phone, and the ordinary dealers were watching the bets like hawks, which was rather impressive given all the distractions that were going on. One distraction particularly amused me: many of the patrons were arguing about how much Prof had won. They all agreed he'd won a fortune, but they couldn't agree on how much. Prof had several times told me that 35-to-1 on $50,000 is $1.75 million, but I could have worked it out for myself in less than a second, but half the patrons were involved in lengthy discussions about whether it was $175,000, $1.75 million or $17.5 million. I was very surprised that they had the first three numerals right but couldn't agree on the number of zeroes. Surely getting the "175" correct was MUCH harder than the number of zeroes. I understood when I overheard someone saying "$5 pays $175, so $50,000 has four more zeroes." Obviously they all knew what $5 paid, as they'd probably seen that happen thousands of times. What they couldn't do was put four zeroes on the end of $175 accurately. 1.75E2 to 1.75E6 was too hard for them! No wonder they were gamblers. Mind you, I was REPEATEDLY watching the ball to make sure it didn't leave its current pocket, and none of the other gamblers were so silly as to worry about that. ^ Order was slowly restored over the next several minutes. More casino staff and security guards arrived from all directions, the latter chasing away the additional patrons who were also arriving from all directions, attracted by the uproar. A stool was fetched for Prof to sit on, and some sort of medical person arrived to check on him. He appeared okay. Shocked and overcome, but okay. All the winning bets except for Prof's were paid out. For a few seconds I worried about Prof's not being paid, until I realized it wasn't for any nefarious reason: this table simply didn't have $1.75 million worth of chips to give him. I could easily see their piles of cash chips. The highest denomination looked like it was $500, and there were only a couple dozen of them, a long way short of the 3,500 they'd need. Once all the other bets were paid, Prof's bet was spread out so the individual chips could be seen, it was counted, and returned to him. Suit#2 put it back in the case, and gave it to one of the security guards standing next to him. The other patrons and I were made to step back from the edge of the table by security guards. I noticed that we were being looked at up and down carefully. I soon proximity sensed a plainclothes person moving through the crowd of patrons looking us up and down and rubbing against us. I presume looking for signs of some sort of secret cheating equipment. They - because I spotted more of them - were being covert, so they weren't frisking anyone. And they obviously weren't finding anything either. I was momentarily tempted to make some smart comment like, "Sorry, I've got a girlfriend and you're not my type," but I thought better of it. I also thought better of saying something like, "How often does something like that happen?", or of holding my jacket open so he could see me better. The best thing to do was to copy what most of the other patrons were doing, which was to stand back from the table and talk excitedly to their neighbors, unaware that any security operation was happening. I had a horrible thought about them asking for all our IDs and noting down the details for checking later, but happily they didn't do that. I decided that if they started asking other patrons for ID, then I was going to immediately walk out, presuming they didn't try to stop me. There'd been several patrons leave since Prof's win, so singling out those that'd remained seemed largely pointless as anyone who had cheated with detectable equipment would have left as fast as possible. Security guards also crawled under the table, inspecting its underside. I couldn't imagine any machine that could cause the ball movements that I'd created, but you certainly couldn't fault them for looking. One security guard told me, "Move along." I replied, "I was here before all the drama. My girlfriend told me to meet her here, and that's what I'm doing. The dealer Olivia," I pointed at her, "can confirm that." He lost interest, moving off to chase someone else away. He was just trying to thin the crowd. Plenty of guys in suits had arrived, but the next suit to arrive was obviously the BIG boss. All the other suits turned to him, giving him their attention. He walked straight through most of them, to talk with Suit#1 (Brian) and Prof. I was too far away to hear what they were saying over the crowd's noise, but they were saying plenty. One pleasing thing I noticed was that he [Ted Binion, I soon overheard other customers say] seemed happy, he was smiling, slapped Prof's shoulder and shook Prof's hand with enthusiasm, and generally seemed to have a very positive attitude. All the other suits had facial expressions as if Prof's win was coming out of their paycheck. I had to kill time while Prof found out whether he was going to be allowed to bet his three bets of $250,000. I didn't want to stand beside the table in case Olivia started pressuring me to bet. The last thing I wanted was to bet, then for Binion's to somehow find out that I was underage and connected to Prof, and use that as an excuse not to pay us the $1.75 million WE HAD NOW WON! So I used my "Waiting for my girlfriend" cover story, by looking at my watch, looking around the area impatiently. Walking several yards in one direction, looking around, walking back to the table, then off in another direction. I was staying in the area so I could see what was happening with Prof, but not so close that I could be pressured to bet. After five minutes of stalling, I saw Prof's group stop talking. Prof gingerly got off his stool, with solicitous attention from Ted Binion and the other nearby suits, and they walked deeper into the casino. Prof walked more old man-ish than normal, but otherwise looked fine. He was smiling too, which was hardly surprising. He, of course, ignored me. #2: #1: We did exactly that, changing chips being easier because Olivia had been replaced with another dealer. [[She was being grilled by several security people, a standard part of their security procedure after a big win.]] Having completed the chip-changing transaction, I was at a loss about what to do next. It didn't seem a good idea to hang around the table, but I couldn't go too far away either. I looked at my watch pointedly, and looked around the room for my mythical girlfriend. She's going to be in big trouble when she finally turns up! I asked the dealer, "Where do I change my chip for cash?" He told me where the cage was, but it was so far away I wouldn't be able to see this table from it, so I canceled my plan for getting Prof's $100 back. I know it seems silly, but wasting $100 goes against all my upbringing, so not being able to cash it upset me. There were some slot machines nearby (in Vegas there are always slot machines nearby, especially inside a casino!). I went over to an unoccupied machine and sat so I could overlook the table gaming area, ostensibly so I could see my girlfriend coming. I looked at my watch again, then settled down to wait. #1: #3: #2: #1: We checked no one was around us, then called #4 off duty, to tell him the good news. #4: We dislike not being centered. It's too useful, especially having a proximity sense in worrisome environment, such as a casino we'd just conned for $1.75 million. #1: #4: #1: After #4 had re-centered, we tried to kill time by chatting among ourselves. #3: #2: #1: [I later found out the good news and the bad news. Good news: NP works through plain glass. Bad news: the result of each spin for a slot machine is determined by a computer, which then instructs the machine's wheels to spin to those positions. If a wheel stops in a different position, a malfunction alarm triggers. Slot machines payouts are voided if there's a malfunction, plus there could well be suspicion from the casino. There are probably some of the very old mechanical slot machines around, but they certainly wouldn't be connected up to any jackpot worth winning. The idea was dead.] #2: #1: #3: #1, #2: At the speed we chat internally, we were soon down to some pretty inane subjects. We stopped wasting time that way, practicing memory sharing exercises instead. The exercises might or might not help, but they definitely passed the time. With the occasional glances at my watch and frowns when I couldn't see my mythical girlfriend anywhere (that's the trouble with mythical girlfriends, although they do have good tits). About twenty five minutes after I'd seen Prof and the casino bosses walk away from our table, my cellphone rang. I grabbed for it automatically. #1: I stood, and unclipped the phone from my belt (it's too big to fit in my pockets. A matchbox is too big to fit in my pockets!). I looked at the display, and it was Prof. I looked at it, waiting for a few seconds. On the third ring it disconnected. #2: #3: #2: #3: I put my phone away, looked at my watch, said, "Fuck her," to no one because it might look good in a video, if they bothered to look at me where I was now, and started walking quickly toward the exit. Four steps later my phone started ringing again. #1: I stopped to pull my phone out. It was Prof. ------- Chapter 178: Bet Two Tuesday, May 3, 2005 (Continued) I couldn't pretended to answer it while it was still ringing because it would still be making the ringing sound and I didn't know whether the casino's video cameras picked up sound as well. If they did, my making that mistake would be far too suspicious. I looked at the display until I saw the disconnect. I pretended to thumb the "Answer" button and then I said, "Hello, sweetie. Are you held up somewhere?" "In the casino. Where?" I turned and started quickly walking farther into the casino, looking around for my mythical girlfriend, while asking her for directions on the phone. #1: #2: #3: #2: I hurried, saying, "I'm hurrying, sweetie," to my phone. I was about two-thirds of the way into the casino before I spotted them. The group was walking my way: Prof, the Biggest Boss (Ted Binion), Suit#1 (Brian Whomever), half a dozen security guys and half a dozen other staff (suits and dealers). "Hey, sweetie, I see a really big bettor. I'll call you back." #1: #3: I was standing in a walkway between the roped off groups of tables (think "hallway", but without the walls, the sides being gaming tables), so unless Prof's group turned off very soon, they were going to walk right into me. #1: "I got to go, sweetie. I'll call you later, bye." I pretended to hang up, put my phone away, then moved to the side of the walkway. I did my best to look impressed as they walked past me. Prof ignored me, although some of the other staff glanced at me. Not with any intensity though, thank God (the one I don't believe in, who's been doing such a great job so far today, and who I pray continues to do so for just a little longer). After they were all past me, I followed them, doing my best to look impressed and curious. I soon found out why Prof buzzed me twice; they didn't go back to the original table. Instead Ted Binion suddenly indicated one of the closed tables. The group turned toward it. The dealers removed the plastic cover from the wheel (closed roulette tables have big, plastic covers over the wheel, the color chips, and whatever else is stored in that area). The security guards did their security checking stuff, including crawling under the table, examining the ball, and the wheel. I most definitely didn't want to be the only spectator, like I would be if I approached closer. Fortunately there were a couple of other people who'd been walking down the walkway who'd slowed down to look at what was happening. Probably curious at the unusual sight of the security guys crawling around on their hands and knees under a table. When they reached me, I said, "Hey, that short guy, in the funny hat. I saw him bet fifty grand on a single number half an hour ago, and he WON! I think he's going to do it again! Can you imagine that! Winning nearly two million in a single spin. Isn't that incredible?" They certainly thought so, and drifted over to have a closer look. There were other people coming down the walkway, but they weren't up to me yet, so while waiting for them I watched my first two 'helpers' approach the table. They were intercepted by a security guard. #1: Several more people reached me, and I repeated my story while watching the first couple. From what I could see they were allowed to watch, but from a distance. My story caught on with the people I was talking to, and started being repeated farther down the walkway as other people arrived. It'd be reasonable to say it caught on like a brushfire, because I could hear the excitement building already. I thought the crowd-gathering was probably self-sustaining now, I didn't want to look too obviously like I was deliberately gathering a crowd, and it was very important that I got a good observation location, so I put on my impressed, curious and excited expression, and wandered over. I headed to the wheel end of the table, of course. Prof was at the opposite end, so there was no risk of my getting suspiciously close to him. I was intercepted by one of the security guards, who told me to keep my distance. Shortly after that a few of the other guards arrived carrying several of those little crowd-control poles with ropes between them (bollards or stanchions). They set them out so as to keep the spectators beyond arms-reach of the table. The casino was taking steps to prevent any possible interference, unfortunately making it harder for me to interfere! By keeping me four or five feet farther away than normal, it was going to be far harder for me to see the wheel and ball well enough. If I couldn't do it, the correct signal to Prof would be for me to walk away, but I wasn't sure whether the situation was that bad. I had beaten the crowd to the best position for what I had to do, so I couldn't improve my position at all. Although maybe in the excitement of the last thirty seconds, I'd be able to slide the post forward with my foot, and reduce the distance. That'd be a perfectly natural thing for someone to do, and I'd look innocent if I kept my hands in the open the whole time. That was to be hoped for, but not relied upon. The question was whether I see the ball, the pockets and the little obstructions the ball bounces off, well enough to make the ball act normally and know what to aim for? Thinking about it, the obstructions were the biggest issue. The ball going into the pocket occurs at low speed, so that's relatively easy. But my ball flicking occurs at much higher speeds and up to a couple dozen times per game. If I timed even one of my flicks wrong, it could look totally unnatural on the security video. We'd doubtless forfeit all our profits from both games, and they'd be EXTREMELY interested in finding out how Prof had done it. After several seconds of hard thinking, I thought of a solution. Not perfect, but probably good enough. Before I was due to flick the ball, I could position a fingertip on the side of the obstacle that the ball was soon to bounce off, letting my fingertip 'ride' around in contact with the obstacle. As soon as I feel the ball contact the fingertip, I'd flick. There was an issue with reaction times, but I didn't think it was a serious problem. A normal finger would take something like a quarter of a second from being contacted to starting its flick, which would be far too long, but there were no nerves or muscles involved in my process. I believe I get the sensory feedback from my NP-fingertips instantly, and when I mentally order them to move, they move instantly. My total reaction time is, I hoped, purely the time for me to think about what to do. Given that I was expecting the ball's contact, and already knew what flick I wanted to give it, I should be able to react very quickly. I'd better test that. I located someone moving about ten yards away from me, and I positioned an NP-fingertip in their path, directly in line with a visual reference on the far wall so I would know the precise instant the person contacted it. He walked into it, and as far as I could tell, I felt his forehead hitting my fingertip instantly. He scratched his forehead, but by then my attention was moving elsewhere. I repeated the experiment several more times, with various moving things (not always people's foreheads), at various distances, from very close to far away, and I always seemed to get the tactile feedback instantly. I then experimented on flicking things, such as the hem of a skirt, watching carefully to see if there was any delay. I was pretty sure there wouldn't be, because I would have noticed it already when flying things around my bedroom. Looking very closely now confirmed another instant response. However the fingertip was getting its command from my brain, the message wasn't traveling down a long, slow nerve-wire. Likewise for the tactile feedback coming back to me. God knows how that was getting to me, but it was very fast. [[I did find out, but not for quite a while.]] I turned my attention back to the wheel again. The first thing I noticed was the ball sitting in one of the pockets, so I 'weighed' it. It was a light one. I thought the same weight as I'd been playing with before Prof arrived at the other table. So long as it didn't weigh more than about three pounds I'd be fine. It weighed far less than that, so that was perfect, as it'd only need the usual flicks. My only real problem was my distance from the wheel. I couldn't decide whether I could do this or not. A quick glance at Prof showed me that he was looking worried too. From where I was standing I couldn't read the numbers on the far side of the wheel. That meant keeping track of the target number when the wheel was rotating quickly was going to be harder, because half the time I'd only roughly know where it was. This was quite annoying, because as the wheel slowed down it'd be out of sight for steadily increasing times. It'd also mean I'd have to reacquire the target every time it came back into sight. I really needed three eyeballs: for the ball, for roughly where I thought the target pocket was, and a third eye to be watching the spot where each number became visible, to reacquire the target because I'd hate to miss it. I realized that my weird eyeball movements might get spotted, because my head wouldn't be pointing down. A good solution was to use my hands to shield them, as if I had a spotlight in my eyes. It might look a bit strange, but not as strange as my eyeballs would, and it had the advantage of showing the casino that I wasn't using my hands to operate any cheating device. Another fear occurred to me: what would I do if a security guard stood between me and the wheel? Moving sideways might be tricky if there was a big crowd, and early indications were that there was going to be a BIG crowd! Some idiot had started the story about the old guy's last win, and I could hear people around me talking about it excitedly. Some of them had even told me (I can split my attention to look natural while I'm busy thinking). To reduce the chance of a guard blocking my sight, the only thing I could think of was that after I'd finished working out how to do this (if I could), then I'd turn my back on the table and behave casually, chatting to my neighbors, etc. In other words, look non-threatening and not like someone who needed to be singled out for having their view blocked. If I was blocked, I might be able to get the guard to move by using NP in some way, such as by NP-'kicking' his ankle in a way that made it seem that someone next to me had done it. There were eight security guards here, and I thought some of them were bound to guard the wheel closely during the game, so this could be a problem. Eight guards would make a hell of a wall, especially because most of them were damned big! Hopefully several of them would stay with Prof, so the remaining guards would be spread out and be less likely to block my view. When I do my thing normally, one eye follows the ball, one the target pocket, and they communicate their subject's positions to the third mind using clock positions, just like pilots in movies do. The coordinating mind works out what flicks to give the ball, to get the two items in the same position at about the time that the ball should have slowed down enough to start contacting the pockets. Needing an eyeball to ensure I reacquired the target pocket when it came back into sight was going to complicate that process. We could guess the target's position when it was going out of sight at 9 o'clock through to 3 o'clock (or if I could edge a little closer, from 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock - those times relative to my position, standing below 6 o'clock and looking 'north'), but that introduced the risk of having my accuracy reduced. One of the suits checked the wheel again, rotating it back and forth, to make sure it moved freely, I guess. He left it spinning slowly, which gave me an idea. I formed an NP-fingertip, and put it in one of the pockets nearest me, letting the pocket wall push it around. After it'd rotated farther, I couldn't read the number as that written on the floor of the pocket, but my NP-fingertip protruded higher than that. Its being invisible meant I couldn't see it, but I always know where my ki-effects are, and I could see where it was. That meant I didn't have to worry about it self-canceling, and I had a perfect sense of where the pocket was while it was traveling around the far side of the wheel. I lost sight of it momentarily as it went behind the spindle (the wheel's thin axle, which stuck up in the air and was decorated with metallic knobs), but NP-fingertips survive loss of line of sight for half a second, which was easily long enough for it to revolve back into sight. Tracking the target pocket by putting an NP-fingertip in it worked perfectly. It also meant that I could hold the ball in the pocket all the way around the wheel if it was still spinning a little too fast, although I'd prefer to delay the ball entering the pocket until the wheel was nice and slow. Using a fingertip position tracker was possibly even better than what we'd been doing before. I probably didn't even need to do my counter-rotating eyeball thing, but if we bet again, I'll retain it because I wanted to minimize the changes to my successful system. What about the last few seconds? I would have to make sure they started occurring at the 3 o'clock position, and were all over with by 9 o'clock. That was actually a lot easier than it might seem. If I was ready to do the last few seconds but the target pocket was at 12 o'clock say, I'd just make the ball do one extra LITTLE bounce outward (say toward 1 o'clock). By the time the ball fell back toward the pocket, the target pocket would be around to 3 o'clock or so. I mentally thought through the whole spin, trying to find any problems. I couldn't think of anything I couldn't handle. I wasn't 100% sure, but 90% felt about right. I'd still love to be able to edge closer if I could. Another foot or two would be a HUGE help (reducing the failure rate from 10% to 1% is a HUGE help when there's nearly $9 million at stake). What other risks were there? Having my sight blocked by a guard was one I'd already thought of. If that happened I could probably either force myself sideways, at the risk of pissing off the person next to me. Hopefully I'd be able to do it early on in the spin, while the ball was still moving too fast. If nothing else I could give the guys whose space I pushed into my $100 chip to calm him down. With my possibly being able to trick the guard into moving, two possible solutions existed. The casino might suddenly decide to move all the spectators ten yards farther away, which would destroy my chances, but that'd take a while to accomplish, so probably wouldn't be done while the game was on. If it was done in advance, Prof should have a chance to refuse to bet. The casino surely couldn't force him to bet, so if things suddenly looked impossible, he always had the option of walking away with his $1.75 million win. I couldn't brace my stance as well as I could last time, as I had nothing to hold on to. My hands would be covering my eyes, so I had nothing to hold on with either. So jostling could be a problem. Maybe I shouldn't have created the crowd, but too late for that concern now. I didn't think asking them all to leave would work or be a good idea. I glanced at Prof, and he was looking in my direction. I got the impression he needed me to tell him whether I could do this. #2: #1: #2, #3: #3: #2: I rubbed my shoulder causally, a couple of inches in from the outside of my right shoulder. Prof saw the signal and turned away casually. #3: I turned to my neighbors and joined in with their conversation, inane as it was. I even moved a few inches back from the rope, to let the guards know that they didn't have to worry about me trying to force my way as close as possible to the table. #1: #3: We didn't have any other ideas of significance, spending the next few minutes in casual conversation with my neighbors, and less-than-casual conversation with myself. I REALLY appreciated the "Relax" command! It may not be as useful as go-soft, but ten million dollars' worth of useful is still quite a lot. I MIGHT have been able to do my job without "Relax", but I wouldn't want to have bet on it. I was making frequent glances at Prof and the suits around him. So was everyone else, so my looking was fine. I saw Ted Binion say something to Suit#1, who pulled a small pad out of his pocket, handing it to his boss. Ted wrote on it for a few seconds, then passed the pad and pen to Prof. Prof casually looked up. At me obviously ("obvious" from our points of view; hopefully not from the casino's. He was looking down the length of the table, so they should believe he was merely looking at the game, which was not unreasonable). I didn't want to repeat my shoulder scratching as the repetition might look suspicious on the video replays, so I quickly looked down, adjusted my belt, then quickly looked up again. I hoped that looked like a nod. #1: #2: #3: #1: [We subsequently taught them that one tap on the top of the head meant "No", and two meant "Yes"; although doing that wasn't exactly our first priority when we finally got home.] I saw Prof sign the pad then pass it back. Ted took the pad, but refused the pen, laughingly saying something to Prof. Prof tried to laugh back, but clearly wasn't in the mood for humor. He stuck the pen in his jacket's top pocket though. I guessed Ted had said something like, "Keep it as a souvenir." [Prof confirmed my guess later. He also told me he dumped the pen at the first opportunity, having seen too many spy movies.] Ted tore off the pad's front sheet, kept the page but gave the pad back to the guy who'd given it to him. Ted stood and loudly called for quiet. #1: #2: #3: #1: Ted quieted the crowd quickly, then started a little speech, "Ladies and gentlemen. I am Ted Binion, manager of Binion's Horseshoe Casino. Welcome to you all, and thank you for playing in my casino. You're about to witness an extraordinary event. Earlier today Mr. Roberts," Ted pointed to Prof, "came to Binion's with $100,000. He needed $1 million, and came here to get it - knowing our international reputation for taking bets of any size on our tables." "Mr. Roberts had a betting system which had him betting half of his remaining money on a sequence of pre-chosen single numbers. He came with $100,000, so his first bet was $50,000, ALL on a single number, number 21! Binion's happily accepted his wager, and the dealer spun up. One minute later the ball came to rest on," Ted paused to build tension, "TWENTY ONE! Winning Mr. Roberts $1.75 MILLION!" Yells and yahoos from the crowd. Me too. I had no problem at all acting enthusiastic. Several seconds later, when Ted was able to continue, "Mr. Roberts is feeling LUCKY! HAHA. He wants ONE more bet before he leaves. He is betting this marker," Ted waved the piece of paper (apparently a "marker", whatever that is), "on a street - on three numbers - on the spin you're about to witness. The marker is for EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!" (For those of you who have lived sinless lives, a "marker" is similar to a bank check, drawn against Prof's account at the casino. A "street" is a bet on a row of three sequential numbers, 1, 2 and 3; or 4, 5 and 6; up to 34, 35 and 36.) The crowd went wild. I went confused. #1: #3: #2: #1: #2: I turned to the neighbor I considered the most sensible. That he was waving his arms around and screaming was not encouraging. I got his attention, then asked, "Betting on a street is three consecutive numbers, right? Like 1, 2, 3." "Yeah." "Do they all pay the same? Does it matter which one the ball lands on?" Looking at me like I was stupid, he answered, "Of course not." #1: I asked him, "What does it pay?" But he'd lost interest in talking to an ignorant non-gambler. #3: #1: #2: I turned to my neighbor on the other side, got her attention, and asked, "A street is when you bet on three numbers, and they each pay 11-to-1, right?" "Yeah. About $9 million if it hits. I wish I had that money." "Yeah, me too. So he gets $9 million regardless of which of the three numbers the ball lands on?" She frowned at me, so I quickly added, "I'm sorry. I don't know much about roulette." "That's okay. Yeah, all the numbers are the same. I wonder why he didn't bet an even mil'; that would've been REALLY cool to see." "It sure would've. Thanks." #1: #3: #2: #3: #1: #3: #2: #3: We looked. Seventeen seconds past the minute, so we'll be going for the first number of the three. #1: #2: Ted was calling for silence again. When he got the ruckus to still, he said, "$850,000 pays $9.35 MILLION if it hits." Ruckus erupted again. #1: #3: #1: "You are witnessing casino HISTORY ladies and gentlemen. Only at BINION'S HORSESHOE CASINO could you see this! Let's applaud Mr. Roberts for choosing Binion's!" Ted started the clapping for his own business, and all the patrons unhesitatingly joined in, including me. Prof was looking too nervous, and didn't join in. After Ted had quieted everyone down again, no small feat because the crowd had swollen substantially by now, he announced, "Dealer! SPIN UP!" The security guards suddenly stood more attentively, watching the crowd very carefully. The VERY good news was that the guards did it from where they already were, which was perfect for me because none of them were obscuring my view. If you think of the wheel end of the roulette table as a square, then the guards were at all four corners. I was standing in the middle of the bottom side, so I was in the clear. There were two more guards down the length of the table, both on the side open to the public (the other side was roped off, as is common in all the casinos I've visited so far), and two guards were down by Prof. The plainclothes guards scattered around the outside of the crowd didn't matter to me. The dealer made a bit of a production out of wiggling the wheel back and forth, before spinning it strongly. Then he flicked the ball in the opposite direction, which is how it's always done. #2: #3: #2: #1: We stared at Prof. He was looking up at the table, although he had no hope of seeing into the wheel from his low chair. He looked at Ted, and then his eyes slid over us without pausing. His hands didn't indicate anything. After fifteen increasingly panicky seconds, Ted started walking up the non-public side of table, holding the marker in the air and waving it slowly and dramatically. At about the table's midway point he announced, "Mr. Roberts is betting here..." He paused, folded the marker in half, and placed it protruding into the row containing 25, 26 and 27, announcing, "On numbers 25, 26 and 27." #2: [I didn't learn until I had a chance to talk with Prof privately, but for his first bet Prof had been instructed to place his bet BEFORE the wheel was "spun up" (i.e., the wheel and ball were put in motion). Neither of us knew why, but the reason was because there are computers which people can have hidden on their body which can clock the rotational speeds of the wheel and ball, and predict with a useful degree of accuracy where the ball will land. Certainly not the exact number, but even if they only got it down to which half of the wheel, being paid 35-to-1 on a 1-in-19 chance would be hugely profitable. By making Prof bet before the spin started, Binion's were eliminating the risk of his, or a hidden partner of his, using such a computer. Changing the ball also threw off any previous statistics any cheats might've gathered. For the second bet, Prof didn't choose the number at all! Ted chose it after the ball was in motion, thereby eliminating many other possible cheating risks.] Ted called, "NO MORE BETS," and waved his hand over the table in the way roulette dealers always do to indicate the end of betting. Several members of the audience started protesting that they wanted to bet too, but Ted quickly overrode them, "I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen, but we want to give everyone a clear view of history being made at Binion's Horseshoe Casino." Turning to Prof, he called, "GOOD LUCK, MR. ROBERTS!" That wish was echoed by dozens of the audience. If wishing had an effect, Prof was onto a sure thing. It would take another half a minute or so before the ball started dropping off the outer lip of the wheel, which is a very long time in such a situation. The crowd was well behaved. Plenty of talk and yells, but no jostling. Most of them weren't in a position where they'd be able to see the result happening anyway, so there was no reason for them to jostle. In my area, though, I was pleased to notice a slight shuffling inward. There was a rope-holding post about a foot to my left, with two other posts at the corners of the table, near the guards. I was hoping my neighbor to my left would slide his post forward. If he didn't, I probably would, otherwise my moving forward would put a very noticeable bend into the rope, which might cause a guard to come down and stand in front of me. I did NOT want that! But if the nearby post was moved forward, my forward progress wouldn't stand out. I said to the neighbor in question, "I wish I was closer!" "Yeah. Me too. I wish I had $850,000 too." "When the ball starts bouncing around, I'm going to try to move closer. How about you slide that post forward with your foot, so we can both get a better look? The crowd is bound to be pushing us forward anyway, and I want to tell all my friends that I was right on top of the wheel when someone might've won nearly ten million." "Yeah, that'd be a cool story." "It'd be an AWESOME story, especially if he won. Can you imagine how upset you'd be if you didn't get close enough to clearly see that win?" "That'd be terrible." #3: #2: #3: As it turned out, our neighbor was quite good at pushing it forward. He put his foot against the base, and crept it forward an eighth of an inch at a time. Slow, but almost continuous. #1: #2: Predictably, when the ball dropped down from the rim, the crowd's excitement rose a notch. We did a RELAX command. I turned to my neighbor, "Not a very good view from way out here, is it?" "No. We've got the best seats in the house, but we still can't see good enough. I'll slide the thing faster." "Good idea! We're NEVER going to get another chance to see something like this ever again!" "You're right." He accelerated the "thing" with his foot all the way up to about a quarter of an inch per second. The guards started getting pressured by the audience around them, and my very good friend took advantage of the distractions by claiming a quick inch or two whenever he could. I did another go-relax, then formed some fingertips, ready to do the first couple of small testing flicks. I didn't know where the target was yet, but it didn't matter for a while. The ball was still going in the opposite direction to the wheel, so the ball and wheel were lapping each other (in opposite directions) roughly every second, way too fast for there to be any point in trying to flick the ball toward the target. I practiced putting NP-fingertips on an obstruction, and riding it around with the wheel. Being able to see and feel the obstruction made it easy. I tried it on both sides of the obstruction, the front (so the obstruction pushed the NP-fingertip around), and the rear (so I had to move the fingertip to keep up with, and in contact with, the obstruction). Both were easy, as I'd known they would be. The ball was still bouncing around wildly, but within a few seconds I had a chance for my first little flick. It moved exactly how it should have for such a weak flick - I'd killed a little of its momentum, but not much. It'd pushed my weak fingertip away, and hit the obstruction itself, bouncing away wildly, but less wildly than it would've without my intervention. When the ball is slower, and my flicks are stronger, they'll be strong enough to make the ball change direction, rather than just slowing it down like this one did. I've done this often enough now to be able to handle this. After one more practice I was reasonably sure the casino hadn't done a ball substitution. Presumably they'd not thought it necessary, as this was the table's first spin, or maybe they kept a light ball because the last game had used a heavier one. I concentrated on spotting 25. #1: #2: #1: #3: In a few seconds #1 started reciting the clock positions as the target pocket passed them. The fingertip in pocket 25 let us know that it was clear of unwelcome obstructions. The thought had occurred to me that Ted might have chosen to play on this table because it was "The Cheating Table", so I was worried about that possibility. #2: #3: Another couple of shuffling steps forward, and it was about time to start trying to line up for our target. I moved my hands up to shade my eyes, used the eyeball that #1 wasn't using to give Prof a quick glance. He was sitting in his chair, looking like he was NOT enjoying himself at all. He had a glass of what looked like water in his hand, and was raising it for a sip. I looked back at the wheel. A jostle from behind gave me an excuse to slide forward another couple of inches. I watched for a few seconds, and saw that the ball was starting to look like its average backward velocity, compared to the wheel's motion, was about to become a very slightly forward. It wasn't going as fast as the wheel, so the target pocket was lapping the ball frequently. More collisions with obstructions would, on average, speed the ball up so its velocity started matching the wheel's. There was no real need for any work yet, but I could do a practice flick or two. I did them when the ball was near me, for better visibility, and both worked fine. The crowd was even louder now. There was a great deal of buzz, some jostling, and definitely some shuffling closer. My friendly neighbor said, "Exciting isn't it?" Without looking at him, #2 said, "Yeah. Fingers crossed for the old guy. I hope he wins and the shock doesn't kill him. That'd be a bummer." I didn't believe that would happen, but I was a little worried. Prof didn't look like he was enjoying himself, and he'd seemed shaky a few times since we'd arrived at the casino. It was time for me to get to work. The target was still lapping the ball, but not for much longer. It was #3's job to make sure that the ball picked up forward velocity at such a rate and in such a place, that when its rotational speed equaled the target's, the ball would be more or less above the target. To be somewhat simplistic, if I flicked the ball into the area of the target, and let it bounce normally, then its next bounce direction could be forward or back. Let's call it back. Now that it was going backward relative to the wheel, it was more likely to bounce forward because it was meeting the obstacles head-on. If it was then knocked forward, the next bounce would more likely be backward, etc. So the ball would end up going back and forth in the same general area. This is too simplistic, mainly because the obstructions are designed to cause the ball to bounce in all sorts of directions, not just back the way it came. More often than not the bounce reverses the ball's direction, but only about 60% of the time, although that percentage depends on the relative speed of the ball and its angle of travel. I like to leave the ball to do its own bouncing, but if two sequential bounces are in the same direction, then the ball is getting too far away from the target, so I have to intervene. I'll flick it back the way it came to get it close to the target again. That might take more than one flick, and sometimes takes several if the damned thing keeps coming straight back again. Once it's near the target, I'll let it behave naturally again. With the definition of "near the target" getting tighter as the ball and wheel slow down. I initially flicked the ball only when it was nearest to me. Using fingertips to detect when the ball was about to hit the anticipated obstacle seemed to work well. Thank God NP-fingertips move at near infinite speed, so I could get them into position the moment I realize the ball is heading for a particular obstacle. I was very happy that no one around me made any, "That was a weird bounce"-type comments, and it all looked perfect to me, using #2's eye, the one that was tracking the ball. After some near-side practice, I was confident that I could flick the ball off an obstacle, even when it was on the side opposite me, although I hoped to do that as little as possible. I didn't need to for a while, as the ball was covering a lot of territory so I could wait a couple of seconds until it was in the near-side, and then encourage it forward or back, as desired. Later, when things had slowed, the ball was too likely to stay in one area, so if it was on the far-side and it started getting too far outside my desired location and speed range, then I'd have to flick it. I think I did a pretty good job in the early and middle stages of my work. It wasn't as 'tidy' as I could've done had I been standing next to the table, as I sometimes had to do more suboptimal flicks than I would have preferred because I didn't want to risk a tricky flick on the far-side, but the ball's bouncing is deliberately engineered to be very erratic, so it doesn't look "tidy" anyway. I got the ball positioned so that when it was roughly matching the speed of the pockets, it was roughly above the 25, with the natural bouncing back and forth going on. The wheel was still going too fast for the ball to be pocketed, so I let it keep doing its thing naturally, flicking it back into position when necessary. Normally I'd let the system slow down until the ball was a few seconds away from entering a pocket, then I'd grab it and move it however I wanted. This time things were a little trickier, because I had to get the ball ready for the final phase to start at about the 3 o'clock position. I couldn't hold the ball at 3 o'clock and wait for the target to come around, as that wouldn't look natural at all. The ball had to be traveling at almost exactly the same speed as the wheel, with only the centrifugal force caused by the rotational speed of the wheel keeping the ball away from dropping into a pocket. I had to watch carefully to make sure that the wheel wasn't so slow that the ball headed for a pocket at the 8 o'clock position (say). I could've forced it into the target pocket, but it would probably not have looked natural. Trying to do natural looking little bounces against the pockets themselves when they were on the far side and I couldn't see them clearly was not a good idea. The ball was within four pockets of the target when the physics of the situation had slowed down enough for the ball to start 'thinking' about which pocket it liked the look of. This happened when the wheel was at about 11 o'clock. All the nearby spectators had been slowly and unstoppably pressing inward (I certainly hadn't tried to stop them). This was keeping the security guards busy, so my very good friend and I had made some very useful progress. He'd made several comments about being eager to get closer, but I was pretty sure he wasn't as eager as I was! By the time the final phase started we must've gained two or three feet on our starting position. I didn't have any spare eyeballs, so I wasn't looking at what was happening. I was keeping pace with my neighbors mostly by the feel of the barrier rope on my thighs and my proximity sense. One of the security guards had yelled in our direction, "Keep your hands behind the rope!" I guessed it was a warning to the guys in my area. My hands were fixed to my forehead, but the others guys around me had been waving their hands around erratically (according to proximity). A two-foot gap between us and the table was still heaps of security for the casino. Both security guards could see that the area was clear, and the video cameras would show that too. There was apparently no chance of us doing anything to influence the game. So when the ball decided to closely check out some of the local pockets while it was going around the far side, it wasn't hard for me to make it bounce just a little harder away from a pocket than it should have. Rolling up the curve of the wheel then back down again occupied it until about the 1 o'clock position. It actually rolled into a pocket (not 25) at 1 o'clock, but it rolled straight out again without my intervention, as the system was still going a little too fast for it to settle down. I would have made damned sure rolled it out anyway! The ball was rolling back toward the pockets at about 4 o'clock, so it was clearly visible to me. 25 was about three pockets ahead, and I knew how to play this. I let the ball naturally come into contact with whatever wall it wanted. If it contacted a wall at such an angle that it bounced forward, I would grab it and move it forward to 25. If it contacted a wall at an angle to bounce it backward, I would grab it, let it bounce backward a couple of pockets, but to impact the next pocked wall at a sharp angle, which would kick it directly forward. If it rolled into the pocket, I'd grab it, have it appear to roll out about an inch beyond the pocket before curving back in to make its next large forward bounce look reasonable. The ball was still going fast enough relative to the wheel to make its skipping over three or four pockets look entirely reasonable. In our last game, the ball had dribbled backward over the preceding walls, to finally settle in the target, so this win would look very different. As it turned out, the ball even cooperated. After naturally exiting the wrong pocket and going up slightly, when it rolled back in toward the pockets, it hit a wall that bounced it forward. I grabbed it quickly, before people saw enough of its movement to be able to judge how it should have moved. I slid it forward in a natural looking arc that curved it right into pocket 25. I released the ball but held a fingertip over the mouth of the pocket, letting the ball ricochet back and forth across the width of the pocket. The ball quickly stopped bouncing, then I put a fingertip of top of it to clamp it firmly in place. From the moment the ball had arced over the intervening pockets and into 25, to the time I clamped it, took about two seconds. The game had finished so quickly that it caught people by surprise. They recovered fast though, and they recovered NOISILY. Pandemonium broke out. Followed by Pandemonium's big brother, and then the rest of his family. And then by their noisier neighbors. I still had to hold the ball firmly, but I could raise my arms in the air and scream like everyone else. I got bumped badly, and pushed toward the table, but I was able to maintain my balance and concentration well enough. Even if I got badly bumped, I still had half a second to get my eyes back on the wheel before the fingertip would cancel, so being jostled wasn't as upsetting as it could've been without that half-second grace period. I still had to hold the ball for several more seconds to give the wheel time to slow down that it would look completely ridiculous for the ball to pop out again. There was a HUGE amount of money involved, so I was making DAMNED SURE! I grabbed my good neighbor's arm. Because of my proximity sense I didn't need to look to do that, but I did so anyway, using a less than a half second's glance to locate his arm. That was safe because I could feel the ball was still in the pocket, and my movement would look more natural on the video replays. I pointed at the ball, and screamed, "LOOK AT THAT! Isn't that incredible. Oh my God, the old guy's won whatever it was. Over nine million I think." At the end of that time-wasting cry, I relaxed my hold on the ball, moving the fingertip back toward the entrance to the pocket, so it blocked the ball from leaving. The wheel was slowly rotating the ball into view, and it was sitting there as proud as could be. Because it was coming so close to us, I had a good excuse to keep looking at it. I yelled to my still hugged neighbor (normally I don't hug guys, but every man has his price, mine being $9.35 million, before tax). Pointing at the ball again and yelling, "Have you ever see anything so beautiful! Sitting right there in 25. Isn't it amazing? The old guy came with $100,000, and he's leaving with over $10 million. How awesome is that!" He was yelling stuff back at me. God knows what; it was VERY noisy! The security guards near us had been swamped by everyone wanting to see the miracle. The guards rallied and were pushing everyone back. One of them had worked his way down the side of the table, pushing everyone away, and he'd reached me. I did my best to help him push me away from the table, but it wasn't easy. He was yelling "BACK UP!" I could hear him clearly, because he was yelling right at me. I doubt his words reached more than a couple of people though, before they were swallowed by the cacophony (pandemonium's neighbor). I managed to get a glance down-table, to check on Prof. I was rather worried about his health, and almost feared the worst. I couldn't tell what his health was like though, as where he'd been sitting was buried in casino patrons, screaming congratulations at him, or maybe begging him for money, there being no possible way for me to hear what they were saying. Guys with big chests, thick arms and cheap suits were appearing from all directions, wading into and dispersing the throng around Prof. I managed, aided by some pushes from the very nice security guard who hadn't blocked my view earlier, to gain some separation from the table. He left me to go push some other people. I looked at the wheel again. It was revolving much slower now, with the ball still in 25. That was good to know. I looked around in other directions, using the excuse that I had to scream at the various people around me, who were already all screaming at each other. Apart from large numbers of very excited people, I couldn't see anything much. Looking away from the public, toward the other unopened tables, I saw some more uniformed security guys running this way. It was probably a good idea for me to go very soon, but I wanted to see Prof first, if I could. I looked again, and was pleased to see that the patrons had largely been cleared from around him, none too gently either, judging by the pushing still going on. He was still sitting, but was yelling at one of the casino people, so he seemed fine; disheveled, but fine. There were casino people closing in around him, so my view started getting cut off again. One of my last views was of him getting to his feet, showing me that the front of his pants were very wet; I hoped from the glass of water he'd been holding. [He later confirmed that guess. I believed him, but I teased him anyway.] Prof was leaving the area, the ball was still in 25, and the wheel effectively stationary, so it was time for me not to be. ------- Chapter 179: Leaving the Scene, Twice Tuesday, May 3, 2005 (Continued) I started forcing my way through the crowd around the table. People were happy to let me out, because that meant they could slip closer to see how incredible a roulette ball sitting in pocket number 25 looked. Once I was through the worst of the crowd, I looked at my watch, playacting for my terribly late mythical girlfriend. I noticed that it was still early enough that Prof might be able to get our winnings wired into our bank before they closed for the day. Pretending to be a boy who was late to meet his girlfriend, I rushed toward the first table we'd played on. #2: #1: #3: <$11.1 million. Prof worked out that our share was 56%, didn't he? That's what I remember.> #1: #2: #3: #2: #3: We got to the original table, made a quick production out of looking around for a mythical girlfriend, looked at my watch, said, "Damn girl!" to myself, then rushed toward the front door of the casino. It's amazing how scary front doors can be. As I got closer and closer to them, I kept expecting sirens to go off, steel shutters to slam down over the doors, and six uniform-wearing gorillas to appear out of nowhere to tackle me. Looking at my watch as I rushed out the doors must have convinced the six gorillas that I was innocent, because no one tackled me. It only took a few moments to grab a taxi, jump in, and say, "Airport please. Quickly if you can, I'm running late." We got all the way to the airport without being surrounded by siren-blaring security cars or Apache gunship helicopters (I watch too many movies). At the airport, I had the choice of using my open return ticket, or the emergency cash for another airline if it'd get me away much quicker. I could get a flight to LA boarding in fifteen minutes using my ticket, then a 90-minute delay before catching the first of the next two legs to Corvallis. It required a little more cash and wasn't the most direct route to Corvallis, as LA is south-west of Vegas, but it was the quickest reasonably convenient way out of Vegas, so I took it. I was momentarily tempted to ask if they took Binion's Casino $100 chips, but figured I shouldn't draw attention to myself as a Binion's player, just in case any gorillas come looking for me shortly. For the quarter hour I had to wait, I was on tenterhooks, constantly looking out for any gorilla-ish looking, suit-wearing guys, but none turned up. Even sitting in the plane waiting for takeoff was nerve-racking. Takeoff was a MIGHTY good feeling! I start to relax naturally for the first time. In LA, the first thing I did was check to see if I could get on a quicker flight to Corvallis ("No."), then I found a corner away from everyone else. I sent Vanessa a text message, "Very good trip. I'll be landing in Corvallis in about 4 hours. You can call me if you wish." There was no response for about five minutes, so I went to the bookshop to find something to occupy myself with. I found a small, interesting looking sci-fi book and purchased that. Figuring Vanessa wasn't going to call, I went to my departure gate, sat there, and started reading my book. I had only read a couple of pages when, #4: #2: #4: #3: #2: #4: #3: Another page into the book, my phone started ringing. It was Vanessa. "Hi Vanessa. Did you get my message?" "Yes. I was giving a lecture but it just finished. How good is a 'very good trip'?" "Hang on. I'll just walk to somewhere quieter." Pause. "That's better. We won $11.1 million." #2: "WHAT! Already? You don't have to go back another day?" "All done. First go was fifty thou' as we planned. That won 1.75. Second was supposed to be 750 thou' but Prof bet 850. I don't know why, because I couldn't talk with him, of course. But it won so we got the ten mil' we expected plus an extra 1.1 mil', making 11.1 in total." "So how's Prof?" "Last I saw he was fine. He was yelling at some casino guy to make himself heard over the pandemonium. I shot off as fast as possible as we planned, so he was still with them. I can't tell you anything more than that." #2: #4: "Congratulations, Mark, you pulled it off. Well done. I'm most impressed." "It was a LOT more nerve-racking and complex than I thought it'd be. I could NEVER have done it without you and Prof, especially Prof today. I SERIOUSLY underestimated how tough his job was. His job was a HELL of a lot harder than mine, and I only saw a fraction of what he had to do. I'm going to have a talk with him about your profit share percentage when he gets back. He earned a lot more today than I was thinking of before." "Haha. Thanks for your sentiment, but I don't think so. You're already giving us a very large amount for a few days' part-time work. Prof's a tough old rooster; he doesn't mind it when the going gets tough. Do you have any idea when I'll hear from him?" "No, none at all. Sorry. You could call him, couldn't you?" "Perhaps, but I'd rather wait. He'll call me when he can. Where are you now?" "At the airport in LA. Coming here increased my distance from home, but it was the quickest way out of Vegas. I've got a flight to Portland and then Corvallis, but it doesn't leave for a while." "Are you coming to my place, or back to yours?" "I'll definitely go to yours. I want to meet up with Prof as soon as possible, and I can't even use the phone at my place because I don't want Mom and Dad to know anything." "Okay. I'll cook some extra dinner for you. I think you've probably earned it today, haha. I'll tell Julia the good news when I get home, and get her to invite Carol over tonight too, but I'll ask them not to phone you, okay?" "Yeah. That's fine. I'm REALLY looking forward to getting there, and not just for the dinner this time, haha." "Okay. Well done again, Mark. I look forward to hearing all about it." "Right after I finish eating, haha. Okay, see you then, bye." I went back to my book. I finished it five minutes before we were due to board. It was an enjoyable book, but not worth keeping as my memory is too good these days to bother re-reading books. Inexplicably, neither Julia nor Carol is into sci-fi, so there was no reason to carry it home. I found a likely looking traveler, and asked him whether he wanted it. "Gee, thanks very much. I haven't read that one yet." "No problem. Enjoy." The flight was about as bad as all the others, but at least it was taking me toward home. Well, to the next best thing, toward the Williams'. In the future, I should be able to travel first class. The next leg through Portland was uneventful, but when I turned my cellphone back on after landing in Corvallis, there was a recent text message from a number my phone didn't have a name for. The message read, "Call this number as soon as you are in your car. URGENT." I did so. The call connected, and before I could get even say "Hello," Vanessa's voice said, "Listen carefully and do not talk. Drive quickly to the place you go to on Monday nights. Do not call anyone. Someone will meet you there. Bye." Vanessa hung up. #4: #1: #3: #1, #4: I saw Vanessa's car in the dojo's parking lot, and drove up to it. She jumped out of it, rushing over toward me. I braked and she went to get in the passenger door. It was locked, so I had to undo my seatbelt and lean across to unlock it as this old thing doesn't have power locks. Vanessa looked visibly impatient. As soon as the door was unlocked she jumped in, commanding "Drive!" A second later, "Forget the seatbelt! MOVE IT!" I forgot the seatbelt and planted my foot. "Get out of town then onto Peoria Road." Vanessa was spinning in the seat, with her head swiveling in every possible direction. #1: Once we were well under way, Vanessa settled down, put on her seatbelt, and told me to do the same. Adding, "Keep a careful eye open for anyone following us." "Okay." I check my rear vision. It was after ten o'clock on a Tuesday night, so the road was nearly empty. There were only a couple of cars ahead of us, and a couple behind. Before I could ask, Vanessa said, "Prof called a couple of times, and I've got some news for you." "Yes, I figured you had." "Yeah. Binion's are claiming that Prof cheated, and they're refusing to pay out..." "OH NO! That's terrible. What are..." "It's what Prof and I half-expected, so don't get too worried. Remember that Prof's on a week's vacation from OSU, which we did in case they let you do your second bet a day or two later, or in case they refused to pay and we had to sic a lawyer on them. It's not as bad as you might think. Just because Binion's don't want to pay doesn't mean they won't have to. Many businesses would prefer to refuse to pay their bills, but it doesn't work that way. -- "Prof and I already had a Las Vegas lawyer chosen for this possibility; a guy called Patrick Christensen. He's taken on the big casinos many times and has a good reputation. Prof had Patrick's name and number in his cellphone, but Prof's phone went missing in the mayhem after his big win. Binion's were reluctant to let Prof use a phone, but he borrowed a customer's. Prof called me for Patrick's number, then got through to him. After which he called me back and told me what we need to do. -- "Prof said Patrick's response was that it's a simple case. Binion's don't have a chance, and they'll know they don't have a chance. What they're doing is stalling the payout for as long as they can while they throw investigators at this hoping to uncover something they can use to justify their refusal to pay. Patrick says they'll know they've only got a few days, so they'll be all over us as fast as they can. -- "Prof didn't mention you to anyone, of course, so this is Prof's rather than Patrick's advice, but Prof thinks it would be an extremely bad idea if any of the investigators saw you. They'll be looking for accomplices because Prof couldn't have done anything from where he was sitting, so the investigators will definitely have pictures of everyone who was near the wheels. You pretended not to know Prof in the casino, so if they see you in our house or even anywhere in Corvallis, then they're going to be instantly suspicious and they're going to want to question you. They'll be in a hurry, so we expect they'd be very rough with you. There's $11 million at stake, and people will commit murder for far less than that, so we're very afraid of what they might do to you to get you to explain how Prof managed to win, and where they can get their hands on proof that Prof cheated. -- " So you can't have anything to do with our family for a few days. Don't come to our house, don't call, don't talk with Julia at school, don't go to her classes. It might even be best to skip school entirely for the next few days, in case they send someone into school to look at all the students. I can't imagine why they'd do that, but it's possible. -- "Prof thinks they stole his phone. Either deliberately, or maybe it got knocked out of its pouch and they've found it but are refusing to give it back. Either way, they have a list of names and phone numbers from him. We've got no idea whether they can get phone taps done, but to play safe we're assuming all our phones are tapped. In case you're wondering, when I talked to you after you landed, I was using one of the disposable phones Prof and I had for our casino research. Neither of their numbers were programmed into Prof's normal cellphone, so Binion's can't know about them. -- "Patrick intends to spend tomorrow writing up the court papers and press releases. He'll show them to Binion's on Thursday morning, as a warning, threatening to go public on Friday if they don't pay up. He thinks they will, because this incident will cause Binion's a great deal of damage. It's a large enough sum that it's credible that Binion's refusal to pay might be because they can't afford to pay it. The court documents and press releases will both mention that possibility. -- "Once that word gets out, Binion's will be in trouble no matter what they do. If they do pay you, people will assume the company is now out of cash. If they don't pay, people will assume they're already out of cash. Large gamblers will avoid Binion's like the plague if word of their reneging gets out. That'll start a vicious circle, which could gut Binion's business in just a few weeks. Ted Binion chose the numbers and placed the big bet himself, not Prof. Refusing to pay a bet he placed himself would make Ted Binion a laughing stock, and that's one thing he will definitely NOT want to happen. According to Patrick and the research Prof and I did before, Ted Binion takes his reputation very seriously. Do you understand the situation?" "Life is not easy." "Haha. That's true. To be more explicit, for the next few days we're going to be assuming that Binion's investigators are lurking behind very bush. If they never see you, they won't realize that you're the guy in their videos. You didn't broadcast your name, did you?" "No. The only person who could've learned my name is the security guard who checked my ID on entry. That guy must look at thousands of IDs a day, so he's extremely unlikely to remember my name, even if he read it. And he's not likely to be looking through the list of Prof's phones contacts either, so I can't see him putting the two items together." "Good. If they don't find out about you, then they won't find any credible justification to refuse payment. Patrick will be pushing it forward as fast as possible, so you have to stay totally out of sight for just a few days." "That worries me a bit. I can't do that at home. If I behaved naturally, anyone watching our place because the Andersons are in Prof's phone would probably get looks or photographs of me. Mom and Dad are going to get seriously freaked and suspicious if I hide in my room for several days, and I can't imagine how I could explain that to them. I agree I have to hide, but not at home. How about I hide in your place, so I can study all day and get company in the evenings. Julia's room is soundproof, my study could have the window locked and blocked off, and the upstairs bathroom has frosted glass, so I could safely live up there for a few days." "The idea is to separate you and us. Putting you in our house is not my idea of separation." "No, I must admit that's unusual, but if I never show my face, why wouldn't it work? I won't go downstairs until we've got the money, and I could get a huge amount of my college studies done." "No. I don't like it. I agree it'd be nicer for you and more productive, but it's simply not worth the risk. What would you do if some of Binion's investigators broke into the house during the day in order to search for clues about how Prof cheated?" "They wouldn't do that, would they?" "Eleven million dollars, Mark. Now that I think about that, it's probably more likely than not, so I'd better contact a security company about getting some guards arranged. I'd better go through Prof's and my computers and delete all our casino work too, just in case. Do you have any casino work on your computer?" "Umm, yes I do. Prof sent me a couple of emails with pictures of roulette wheels, and there's a Word document with some old comments and questions for Prof in it. They can all be deleted. You should be able to find them easily, because I've hardly got any documents. They're on the right hand computer. The left hand one has got nothing on it. You'd better ask Robert about how to properly delete files too. I've heard plenty of stories about people recovering files that the owner thought had been deleted." "Will do. Do you have plenty of cash still?" "Yes. I've hardly spent anything. $100 for a casino chip, a small airfare difference and a taxi ride were the only expenses." "You have a Binion's casino chip with you?" "Yeah. Prof wanted me to leave the casino without delay, so I didn't get a chance to cash it." "Throw it out the window please." "Huh? A hundred dollars out the window?" "Absolutely. It ties you to the casino, which is bad. I don't want it either, because Prof's still in Vegas, so how did I get it? It's potentially far more trouble than it's worth. Are there any cars following us?" "I don't think so." "Next time you get around a blind corner, see if you can find a safe spot to pull off the road. Douse your lights and we'll see if anything comes past. Then you'll dig a hole in the ground and bury the chip." The road Vanessa had directed me to drive down had quickly taken us into farmland, so there were very few houses, few intersections, and virtually no traffic. I soon went around a good corner, pulled well into a farmer's long driveway, and turned my lights off. We listened for a couple of minutes, but no other cars drove past. "Okay, bury the chip." There were fields on either side of the driveway, so that was easily done. When I got back in the car, Vanessa said, "Let's head back to my car please." Once we were under way again, Vanessa continued, "I asked if you had cash so I could suggest you go on a little road trip for a few days. Drive up to Salem and Portland then maybe down the coast and then back to Corvallis. See some of the country. It's too risky to let you stay in Corvallis. I just realized this car is registered to us, for example. What if one of the investigators recognized you from the casino, and saw you in a car registered to the Williamses?" "Very good point. You're probably right that it is too risky for me to hang around town, so it sounds like I have to take a road trip by myself. What a pain." It had occurred to me that the Williamses might be tricking me, but I had no doubt of which was the most likely between it was a trick to steal from me, or their telling the truth about Binion's being upset at losing $11 million. "Sorry about that. There are some safety things that are obvious, but I'll mention them anyway. Binion's will have no reason to be more interested in a guy called Mark Anderson than anyone else in Prof's phone list, unless something happens to draw their attention to you. If they discover how important you are, I'm sure they could hire people who'd quickly find you. So the key is not to draw any attention to yourself in the first place. No phone calls to Julia where you exchange daydreams about buying a mansion, as an obvious example. I hope Binion's can't bug us, but it'd be much better to assume they could. One wrong word could sink $11 million, so be VERY careful! Let's give you a false name. How does Peter Hillary sound?" "Fine by me. Peter Hillary I am." "When you talk with any of my family, say you're Peter Hillary. I strongly suggest you never call any of us though. I can't think of any reason that's worth risking $11 million for, can you?" "Ahh, no. Not off the top of my head. I'm guessing that feeling lonely would fall a little short." "If you want company, call up Binion's and tell them where you are. You'll have plenty of company very quickly. Calling your mom at work once a day is probably okay, but use a public phone and leave the area immediately afterward. Leave your cellphone turned off, turning it on only to check for messages, then turn it off again and leave the area. -- "If you absolutely have to get hold of me, call me through OSU's main switchboard and say you're Peter Hillary. If I need to contact you I'll use one of our disposable phones to send your phone a message. Julia will tell Carol, Ava, Chloe, Lily and the others that you're extremely busy for a few days, not to call you, nor to expect your calls. I'll tell your parents that the business is keeping you busy in LA for a few days. -- "Travel around randomly, staying in different places every night. I suggest you call yourself yet another name when you're chatting with whomever you meet. I'll leave your fake ID and disguise with you because I don't want them to be discovered if my home gets searched. I suggest you remove your makeup and sideburns now, because the glue is not good for your skin long term. I can't think of a reason you'd need your false ID, so I suggest you hide it somewhere in the car. -- "That's all I can think of at the moment. It's a pity I didn't think to pack you any clothes... , which makes me think I should move all your clothes into one of The Boys bedrooms, otherwise any searchers might wonder who sleeps with Julia who's not there now. I'd better delete the digital photos we have of you too. That's a pity." [Robert backed them up to a thumb drive first, which was entrusted to a friend for a few days, so they were recovered afterward.] I said, "I've got the idea: it's a serious business." "Yeah, eleven million dollars' worth of serious. Get lost and stay lost. I won't send you any progress reports. For all I know, Binion's have got every phone on Prof's list tapped, including yours, so I don't want to send it any message that have any meaning to Binion's. That'd connect you to them, which would get them very interested in you. I know you've got a dinner party with the Wests on Friday night and Lily's parents on Saturday. To play safe I'll get the Wests to change to Sunday. Is that all right by you?" "Sure. Six of one, half a dozen of the other." "Let's hope it's all over by then. I suggest you change your clothes as soon as you can because those are what you wore at Binion's. Get a hat, sunglasses and some clothes that look different. Behave yourself and keep a low profile. Don't go into a bar just because you've got an ID that can get you in. Avoiding people would be a good idea." Vanessa got me to drop her off within walking distance of her car. "Make sure you're not followed, and have a good, low-key vacation." It was hard to get the idea that it might be a trick out of my head, but I honestly didn't think so. Even more importantly - although it seems weird to think this - I didn't really care. Yesterday I didn't have $11.1 million. If I didn't have $11.1 million a week from now, then life would go on much as it had before. Financially anyway, as the loss of the Williams' friendships would be a major blow. Even the Andersons' $50,000 half-stake had been 90% 'free money'. Plus I was reasonably sure I could make money in other ways. Slot machines perhaps - not at Binion's though! - or something else less nerve-racking and troublesome than roulette. I headed north out of Corvallis with nothing but the car, the clothes on my back, and just under $2,000 in cash. Thank goodness Prof had given me that, because I wouldn't have gotten far on my thirty-odd dollars. ^ To keep this biography's threads in sync chronologically, I'll briefly mention a few points from Prof's experiences during his time at Binion's. Prof had hammed up his shakiness and weakness. He'd had those feelings to a substantial degree, so it hadn't been difficult for him to exaggerate them. His act had been entirely believable (certainly I'd been worried), but as Vanessa had said, Prof was a "tough old rooster". My fears had been groundless. After his first win, Prof had gone into his spiel to Ted Binion about wanting to place another bet. "I've got $750,000 more than I need. While luck is with me I want to... ," etc. But Ted Binion refused permission. His, "Your first bet is your maximum bet" rule existed for good reason, specifically to stop the casino being taken to the cleaners by a clever cheating scheme. There was some back and forth on the issue, including Prof dropping the hint that maybe he'd use the $750,000 to buy his two sons new houses, as they'd be moving out of the family home when they graduated in a few months. In other words, Binion's money would be sunk into houses, so Ted wouldn't be able to get 'his' money back. Ted repeatedly refused, saying, "If you want to place a larger bet, you have to come back another day." They got into the issue of defining exactly what "another day" meant. Ted said, "two or three days would be fine." Prof asked/protested, "But what possible good can it do you to force me to go home and then to risk that I'll decide not to come back a few days later?" Fortunately Ted didn't say something useless like, "It's policy." Instead he gave an actual answer, "For security reasons we disallow people placing continually larger bets on the one game. Not that I'm accusing you personally, but they could have the fix in, and we'd be screwed. When you come back there'll be different staff, we would have replaced the wheel, and other changes like that. Everything will be on the up and up." Prof took a risk, and lucked into a convincing approach, "I don't care what staff or table I play on, so you choose them, Ted. You can even choose the numbers, for all I care." "What! You don't even want to choose your bet yourself?" "I think I've got luck with me today. If I'm right, luck will look after me, even if you pick the numbers." "Let me get this right. I pick the table, the dealer, the bet - everything?" "When you say 'the bet', you mean the numbers, not the amount, right? Because I've only got $750,000 spare. I don't want to bet any more than that." Ted confirmed, "Yeah, I mean where the bet is placed. We can cover 750 grand spread over three numbers as you requested. I wouldn't agree to fewer numbers." "That's okay, I'd feel uncomfortable putting it all on one number anyway. Luck's been kind to me today, and I don't want to push it too hard. Three numbers of your choice is fine with me." "Most people who come here to place large bets do it by betting on red or black." "I needed to turn $100,000 into a million, so I had to take long-odds shots. I had the great luck to hit it first try, and I'm not going to use up my luck now on low payout bets. I want to make one more spin, and then I'm gone. Surely a big casino like this can afford my betting on three numbers, especially if you choose them so you know there's no monkey business?" Ted thought about it. He'd been in the casino business virtually his whole life, as he'd been eight years old when his father had bought the casino which was renamed "Binion's Horseshoe Casino", and it'd been run as a family business. Ted knew MANY ways of cheating at roulette - but not a single one of them would work under the setup he was thinking of: bringing in a new wheel to replace the table's existing wheel (that'd been done before we got to the table), checking the table over first, keeping everyone far enough away from the table that they couldn't influence the wheel or ball; using a closed table that no one had been near for hours; not allowing any practice spins that people could use to clock the wheel; using a dealer he knew was trustworthy; and even placing Prof in a chair so low that he couldn't see into the wheel. Ted was sure there was no way of cheating that could overcome the restrictions he had in mind. Ted was also eager to get a good chunk of his money back. Getting $750,000 back repaired nearly half the damage done by the first loss, plus there was the fact that gamblers who said "I'll just have one more bet" are far more likely than not to have several more bets, so Ted might get all his money back plus Prof's original $100,000. Prof appeared to be kosher, and there truly was a very real danger of Prof's not returning if he was sent home first. Ted had easily spotted that Prof was not an experienced gambler, and would almost certainly calm down and start thinking sensibly when he got home. Accepting the bet was a risk, of course, but it was far more likely to lose than to win, especially if it was concentrated on only a few numbers. Ted had previously thought of a small hole in Prof's cover story, but had not bothered pointing it out. He did so now, looking at Prof very, very closely when saying, "You told me you needed just the mil', right?" "Yes, that's right." "If you bet the 750, you'd still be holding 1.1, because there's the hundred grand that you came with. If your story's true, you should also bet the extra hundred grand?" We lucked out here. Prof, being an extremely inexperienced gambler, was visualizing our having three individual $250,000 bets. [When he'd worked out the profit from this bet, he'd even done: $250,000 x 35 (= the win) minus $250,000 x 2 (the two losing bets that the casino would keep).] Now Prof thought Ted was coercing him into placing a fourth bet of $100,000. It was obvious to Prof that I'd make one of the big bets win, so the $100,000 would be lost. Effectively Ted was insisting on Prof throwing away $100,000 (ouch!). Prof's immediate reaction was unhappiness. Ted had been looking VERY closely at Prof, to see how enthusiastic Prof was. Ted knew that if the fix was in, then Prof would be delighted at being able to bet even more. Prof's immediate unhappy response was VERY convincing; so much so that it convinced Ted that Prof truly was kosher. Ted was thinking "street" the whole time, while Prof was thinking "individual numbers", the misunderstanding causing Prof to give Ted the perfect reaction. That reaction convinced Ted, and from that moment our second game was on. Despite his initial reaction, Prof didn't object, as we'd still win $8.15 million from the bet, rather than the planned 8.25. Ted was fully aware that the bet(s) could've been placed on individual numbers, but he much preferred to place them on a street. Most roulette cheating methods are not precisely accurate - they can only get the ball into a general area rather than into one specific pocket - so Ted didn't want the bets to be placed on adjacent pockets. The arrangement of numbers on the wheel is such that consecutive numbers are always well separated, so betting on a street was the safest three-number bet. Ted was VERY much a showman, as indicated by his casino being the only one that accepted such huge bets, and the PR ("Public Relations") value to Binion's of accepting a single $850,000 bet was far greater than accepting three bets of $283,333 (Ted was happy to leave the bet at $850,000 rather than $750,000. If Prof was reluctant, then Ted was eager, and it made no real difference). There was no need for Prof and Ted to discuss the bets further, so Ted never discovered the misunderstanding. Prof had been slightly confused by his signing the marker for $850,000 at the table, but he'd assumed it was so they could withdraw that value of chips from his account. You can imagine Prof's delight when he heard Ted tell the crowd that Mr. Roberts was betting the marker on a street (Prof knew what a street was in roulette parlance, he just didn't think in terms of them). Fortunately everyone was looking at Ted, and Ted was looking at the crowd, so Prof's quickly hidden expression of delight was not observed. Ted was not so happy after Prof's second bet won. Prof was ushered into a back room and subjected to a great deal of malevolent grilling. One aspect of which was especially noteworthy. In the course of the grilling, Prof was told to 'assume the position' against a wall, to be 'patted down'. Prof refused, but they insisted that if he didn't, they'd declare him a cheat and he'd forfeit his bet and the $100,000 he'd come with. Plus the obligatory, "Besides, if you're really innocent, you've got nothing to hide, so why not prove it?" Prof complained and objected, because doing so might be useful later, then he reluctantly complied, as there was no reason not to. As soon as the security boss felt Prof's artificial leg, "What's this?" He didn't wait for Prof's answer, pulling up Prof's trouser leg to check for himself. "He's got an artificial leg," the security guy told the room, which caused a considerable stir of interest. "Take it off so we can search it." "What! You've got to be joking!" They weren't joking. A fact which they conveyed in a threatening manner. Not of physical violence (that was NEVER explicitly voiced, although guards deliberately loomed over Prof, got into his face, etc.). They coerced him about his artificial leg with the usual threats to have him declared a cheat and his win forfeited. Prof demanded, "What could I POSSIBLY have in my leg that could make me win at roulette? That's nonsense." Nonetheless they were highly insistent. [[In fact, an artificial leg would be a marvelous hiding place for several pieces of equipment that could be used to cheat at roulette. Two very different examples: the computer used to time the ball and wheel, to predict where the ball will come to rest; and an air-compressor to blow air up a hidden tube which ran up Prof's pants, shirt then down his sleeve, used to blow on the ball. Both of these have been used in casinos many times. The fact that neither of them could possibly have influenced the game from where Prof had been sitting was irrelevant. The security guards considered it highly suspicious of Prof to have an artificial leg, so they were determined to search it.]] "Take it off!" Prof objected, "I can't. All the straps and buckles are under my pants. I can't take my leg off unless I take my pants off first." Having deliberately planted the idea (not that he needed to) Prof knew what was coming next. He had no real objection to it, but it'd play better if he was outraged. "Take your pants off then. We demand the right to search your false leg." (The "right" to make people take their pants off must be in a part of the Constitution that we didn't cover in Civics class.) Prof was outraged, embarrassed, ashamed, hurt, etc. In other words, he quite enjoyed the acting, as he wasn't the sort of guy to care less about being seen in his underwear, but he knew the casino's search was illegal and would count against them very badly once lawyers got involved. In the face of Prof's outrage, etc., they persisted, especially because, "It's very suspicious that you're so good at walking with that leg that we couldn't tell it was artificial before." They were suspicious of everything, including that Prof claimed he'd lost his cellphone; they'd accused him of, "Getting rid of the evidence, were you?" After much protest, Prof begrudgingly removed his pants and then his leg. They avidly pounced on it, but were sadly disappointed to come up empty footed. Once Prof got his leg back (no easy task, as they were reluctant to hand it back), reattached it and redressed, he asked to use a phone to call his wife. They were not cooperative. "No problem, I'll borrow one from another patron. Please lead me back to the public area." They weren't happy with that either. Prof stood and moved toward the door. It was already blocked by a security guard, but a couple more moved to 'help' block the door, in case Prof was somehow able to get past one gorilla. Prof turned to Ted, "I have cooperated with this farce so far, but being forced to strip and having my leg removed was the final indignity. I wish to leave now. Are you going to let me go, or are you holding me against my will, which I believe is called kidnapping?" "We'll let you go when you tell us how you did it." "If the door is still being blocked ten seconds from now, I will be making a kidnapping complaint." About five minutes later, Prof got let out. Prof's lawyer expressed sympathy while smiling from ear to ear in anticipation of a very easy and enjoyable case. In their certainty that Prof must be a cheat, Binion's had been indefensibly stupid, legally speaking. ------- Chapter 180: On The Lam Tuesday, May 3 to Friday, May 6, 2005 Vanessa's paranoia about being followed was a good attitude for me to emulate, so when I was out of Corvallis I did a similar test, turning into a side road, driving a mile or two, then pulling off the road and killing my lights just after I'd gone around a corner that blocked visibility. There was no sign of pursuit, so I returned to the main highway, and just went north. When Vanessa had first talked about me going on a road trip until Friday, I'd imagined going 'around the block', something like north to Salem, west to the coast, south, then inland back to Corvallis. But I'd realized that was thinking too small. I'd be too easily intercepted as there's basically only one road down the coast. After thinking about it for a few minutes, it seemed that the further I was away from Corvallis, the less chance there was of me being found, so I decided to go quite a long way north and then head east. Driving a car registered to the Williamses was not ideal, but replacing it was difficult. I couldn't see a car rental place giving a car to a 15-year old even if he did have a license. Giving them my fake ID might cause all sorts of trouble if they could do online checks of licenses. I had no idea whether they could, but it seemed like something they'd want to do, and it would immediately result in the police being called. I wasn't going to steal a car, which left buying one, which I didn't like either. It'd use up a good chunk of my cash, there could be ID troubles again, I wouldn't want to have a breakdown. I'd also have to stash Julia's car somewhere because I didn't want to sell it, as that'd be an extremely suspicious transaction if the investigators did a search on vehicles owned by the Williamses. I decided to go as far north as I could before refueling, so if they looked for my car by asking gas stations, they'd have to ask a ridiculous number of them. In just over three hours - a good chunk of which was spent battling my way through Portland, even at that time of night - I was two hundred miles away from home, in Olympia, WA, the road heading inland toward Seattle. Dad's parents live in Seattle, but I certainly wasn't going to go there. I needed gas and food shortly after Olympia, so I pulled into a gas station. While paying, I noticed a rack of flyers that included a brochure for a fishing lodge. That gave me a better idea than I'd had before, so I changed my plan. I finished paying, then drove south, back into Olympia and took WA-8 west. Twenty odd miles west took me to a small township called McCleary. I found a secluded place to park, locked the car's doors, and settled down for a succession of 30-minute naps, using my ability to order myself to sleep for that time. I went to sleep, woke up, looked around to see if everything still looked safe, and then went back to sleep again, until the stores opened. When I woke up after my first nap it was damned cold. I had the idea of ordering my body to feel warm. It took me a little while to imagine what warmth felt like, and then my order worked. After a few more seconds I worried that it might not be a good idea, because maybe my body was burning a lot of calories. I'd bought some food at the gas station, but not as much as I'd wanted because I didn't want the attendant to remember me, and I'd already eaten all of it. I canceled the warm feeling, instead merely ordering myself to sleep. I ended up getting more hours of sleep than I normally required, which I thought was a good idea in case things got difficult later. When the town started coming to life, I started up the car and went looking for breakfasts (plural, as I had two of them in different places, to avoid being memorable). Then I went shopping for cheap clothes, several days' food (none of which needed cooking), and a few other odds and ends: toothbrush and -paste, a flashlight, two blankets, a gym bag, a can opener, Swiss Army pocket knife, some books, etc. When my purchases were loaded into my car, and I was ready to go, I drove to a public phone I'd noticed earlier. I turned on my cellphone. There were no messages from anyone, which surprised me, so I turned my cellphone off, then dialed Mom's work number on the public phone. Once I got through to her, Mom said, "Hi Mark. Vanessa tells me you're tied up in LA for a few days?" Mom's voice sounded normal and not particularly concerned, so she presumably believed that story. "Yeah. No big deal. The business is more complicated than we thought. Early indications are good, but I'm going to be VERY busy by the looks of it. I'll check in from time to time, probably once a day. I'm concentrating on stuff nearly all the time so my cellphone's turned off, so don't worry if you can't get through if you call it. I'm trying to get finished here as quick as I can, so I can get home to some meals where the cook knows how much I need to eat." "Haha. Good to know I'm appreciated for something." There was a little more, but just the usual mothering stuff, like, "What about clothes? You didn't expect to be away so long." "Mom, they have clothing stores in LA, and Julia hasn't been my girlfriend so long that I've forgotten how to buy clothes. It's already taken care of. Time for me to get back to the grindstone. I'll talk with you later, probably tomorrow because I think I'll be working late tonight. Bye." I hung up, got in my car, and drove off to the west. A couple of streets away I started a loop which took me back to the main highway heading east on WA-8. I passed through Olympia and kept going east on I-5, then I-90. My little 'jiggle' west to McCleary had been to confuse any pursuers. Driving north from Corvallis takes you straight to Puget Sound, at which point you're forced to either turn west or east, or get wet. By phoning from McCleary in the morning, I hoped that any pursuers would think I was heading west toward the coast. Instead I was heading inland, to go fishing on one of the lakes. It seemed to me that the only way the baddies could find me was to find my car first. Parking it at some remote fishing lodge seemed a good way of making that difficult. I had a map that showed several lakes inland, so I headed toward them. I had plenty of time for memory tests while I was driving. The usual tests were easy and simple, so we got more creative. For example, mind #1 created an algebra problem and sent it to #3. #3 had to retrieve the knowledge necessary to answer it, and did so fairly easily. It required some effort, but not much. #3 was 'indexing' into the knowledge far better than we'd managed yesterday. To make the test even harder, after sending another problem to #3, #1 concentrated on NOT letting #3 retrieve any knowledge. #3 was able to solve the problem, presumably by retrieving the knowledge from #2, but it was noticeably more difficult, presumably because #2 didn't know what the problem was, and therefore didn't know what memories were required to solve it. Another test we did was to have both Algebra-knowledgeably minds refusing to allow their knowledge to be accessed after the problem was sent, which stopped #3 cold. We tried many other combinations, and the final result was that our memory sharing ability was usefully better than it had been yesterday. It wasn't perfect, as the owner of a memory could access it much easier than someone else, and it was even more difficult if the owner didn't know what the retriever wanted. We thought it was now good enough - we hoped - that we no longer had to fear the multiplicity of prerequisites in our college courses. As a simple example, #1 and #2 knew algebra, but we thought #3 and #4 could successfully study next year's algebra course. It'd be slower and take more effort, but we thought it was doable. Plus we expected our memory accesses to continue to get better, although we had ZERO idea of how that was being achieved, other than "Our body is getting better," which wasn't exactly a detailed explanation from which accurate predictions could be made. I drove a long way, all the way across Washington and into Idaho. I had a little, hopefully helpful idea. I stopped to buy a set of screwdrivers, then in every town I passed through, I drove around a little looking for a car of the same make, model and color (roughly) as mine. It took a few towns until I found one parked in a good spot. I parked my car, stood somewhere I could see what I was doing, and used NP to unscrew that car's license plates, surreptitiously floating them under a few cars then I bent down and put them in the bag I was carrying. NP is very handy. I resumed my journey. When I found somewhere nice and quiet, I stopped to manually put my new plates on, keeping my old ones in the trunk under the mat. Having false plates should make it much harder for Binion's minions to find me. I'll repeat the same trick every day in case someone reports their plates missing and the cops look for them. I was aiming for Sandpoint, a small city on Lake Pend Oreille. Before I got there I started seeing billboards for the sort of thing I was looking for. When I saw a very rundown looking sign that gave directions ("15 miles [arrow]"), I turned off to follow the arrow, arriving at a suitable looking place - by which I mean it looked like it needed the business and would welcome cash - at about 6pm. The trip had covered just over four hundred miles and taken about eight hours. My plan was to spend the night here, spend most of tomorrow (Thursday) fishing, coming back to the lodge in time to drive into Sandpoint before Mom finished work. Then I'll check my cellphone, call Mom from a public phone, then skedaddle by driving south during the evening and night. If anyone was chasing me, I'd be long gone before they could possibly get to a little place like Sandpoint. I doubted they had people they could call already stationed in Sandpoint, which they might well have in large cities. It wasn't a difficult plan to follow. The guy was willing to ignore paperwork for a cash payment. It was surprisingly expensive, but affordable for one night. I refused the expensive guided fishing charter he offered me, saying, "My father used to take me out fishing in a rowboat when I was a boy. He died a few months ago and I just want to recapture those memories. Let me have a little dinghy and a cheap rod, and that'd be perfect." Not a total fabrication, as Dad and I have gone out fishing like that a few times, enough so that I knew the theory of how to row, although Dad had done most of it as I'd been too clumsy. The lodge owner probably had the impression that I wanted to lay low for a day, but that was ok. Even if he called the cops and told them my car's plate number, it wouldn't matter as the owner of those plates probably wasn't a wanted felon. "Certainly Mr. Jones." (That's me, Tucker Jones.) "Have you got your license already?" "Huh?" "Your fishing license. The wardens are very vigilant, so you have to have a license." "I never thought of it. What's involved in getting one?" He started describing the process, but very early in his description he mentioned that it required ID, so I didn't need to know any more. I interrupted him with, "Don't worry about it. I'll just go out for a paddle; that'll be just as good. That's okay, isn't it?" "It's fine." We made the abbreviated arrangements, then I retired to my room. I had dinner alone, to avoid having to make up plausible lies to the few other guests in the dining room, then went to bed, ordering my body to sleep in fifteen minute chunks so I could do frequent checks around the area to make sure nothing worrisome was happening. I got up in time for my crack-of-dawn fishing. ^ I had a pleasant day's bobbing around on the lake. I enjoyed rowing, as my rowing ability had unsurprisingly improved dramatically, and I could go quite fast, even without NP assistance. I let the boat drift while I read some books, and I did catch a couple of fish - I had come here to fish, after all. I used NP-cages, as large as I could make them. Being invisible, fish would swim into them, and bump their sides, which I could feel and it told me when to close the trap. I just lifted the box to the surface, admired the fish, then let it go. During the day, a warden did check whether I was fishing, easily seeing that I wasn't and didn't have any of the gear, so it was just as well that I hadn't tried to fish without a license (it pays to be honest). Plus I didn't want to spend several more days driving around the country with dead fish in my car. I also had some very successful memory tests. Memory sharing had improved even further; less effort being required to access even more vaguely indexed memories. Accessing each other's college memories had improved considerably more than non-college memories. While that was very welcome, it was also very puzzling. But I guess the entire process was puzzling, and impossible to understand, so there was no point it getting worked up about it. In town I filled up with gas again and bought a quite a few more provisions. When I was lined up to pay for them, I saw a headline in the rack of papers for sale, "$11 Million Win from Binion's Casino." That paper got quickly added to my pile of purchases. I read it as soon as I was back in my car. The article was pretty much a repeat of what Ted Binion had said in his speech before Prof's second bet, plus the result of the second bet. There was no picture of Prof, he was named only as Mr. Ivan Roberts. There were very few quotes attributed to Binion's, and those were promotional rather than about the event itself, such as "Binion's is proud to be the casino of choice for real gamblers." Nothing they were quoted as saying confirmed that the bet had been paid. There was no quote from Prof, just "Mr. Roberts could not be contacted for comment." I drove to a public phone, then checked my cellphone. No messages again, either verbal or text, which surprised me even more than it had last time I'd checked. It felt weird that no one was contacting me. I turned it off and called Mom's work number on the public phone. Mom's greeting was somewhat different than yesterday's, "Mark! Thank God. There are people ALL over town looking for you... "Looking for ME? Personally?" "Yes, for you. Whatever you're doing to hide, do it better. Vanessa says you've got to stay hidden. She hopes it'll be over tomorrow, but she warns that it might not. I've got a list of things to tell you, hang on." A small pause, then, "Okay. First, your cellphone is giving your position away whenever it's on and they'll be able to get access to that information, so throw your phone away. Second, abandon the car, they'll know about it by now. Don't buy airtickets in your name. You need ID, so don't buy any commercial airtickets. If you must travel by air, contact a flying club or small air charter company, and get them to fly you informally if you can. If they do get your real name, their passenger data often isn't loaded into any of the big databases in a timely manner. Better to use buses or something like that." Mom went on to give me advice about stuff that Mom had no business knowing. Someone had been giving her pointers. She finished with, "Here's a new phone number for you to call Mark. Are you listening carefully?" "Yes." "The first digit is..." Mom proceeded to give me a series of trick questions for each digit. My favorite was, "The last digit of the date that you lost your virginity; not the month, but the day of the month, the 1 to 31 number." (April 1st, so "1".) At the end Mom said, "Have you got them all?" "Yeah, no problem." "Good. Best to call it during work hours, but you can call other times if necessary. Don't worry if it takes a long time for someone to answer, just hang on. Don't call it now because you've got to get moving. Tomorrow would be good though. Take care and we look forward to having a very good talk with you about this when you return. Love from all of us, bye." #1: #2: #3: #1: #2: I turned it back on, did the deleting. There weren't many numbers so it didn't take long, even with pausing to memorize a few numbers just in case, such as for Dad's work and OSU. I walked around the truck, but couldn't find a place to wedge it that I thought it'd stay in for more than a mile of two, considering how much I expected the truck to vibrate and bounce around. I noticed another much more practical truck: a flatbed truck carrying a load of building material: wood, boxes of nails, pipes, and all sorts of other stuff. I walked past it, tossing my phone in, using NP to push it somewhere inconspicuous. I didn't know where the truck was going, but I doubted it'd be five hundred miles south to Boise, Idaho. Then I got in my car, drove north a couple of blocks, west a couple of blocks, then turned south, for the same reason as the last time I'd done this, just in case the baddies found someone who'd seen me walking around, and they remembered which way I'd driven. Not likely, but playing safe seemed like a very good idea. I'd already decided to head for Boise, and Mom's information hadn't changed that decision. One nice aspect to the trip was that the first half was in a consistent SW direction and was heading almost straight for Corvallis. I wouldn't get closer than three hundred miles away though, so I wouldn't meet any baddie-filled cars coming from Corvallis. The second half of my trip to Boise was consistently SE. If the baddies somehow saw my car during the remaining daylight, I'd be doing a 90-degree turn before they could deploy to catch me, and they'd be fooled about where I was going. It was about five hundred miles to Boise, and took me over nine hours because I drove carefully and stopped for a good-sized meal from the food I had with me a dozen miles after the 90-degree left turn. That was also a good opportunity to put the newly acquired plates on my car. I was on schedule to arrive in Boise between 3am and 4am on Friday morning, which I didn't think was a good time to be wandering around a city, so I found a safe spot outside of town, parked, had another good meal, and a few 30-minute naps. I drove into Boise about an hour before I guessed sunrise would be, found a 24-hour covered parking lot in the center of town, parked in a secluded corner of it, packed my travel bag with everything I thought I'd need, and caught a taxi to the bus station. It was closed until 6am, but they had their schedules posted where I could read them. I wanted the first bus east or west. Not north, because I'd just come from there, and definitely not south because that'd take me into Nevada, which would be a bad idea as the casino would have the most power in its home state. East was my preference, as it gave me more freedom of movement for my next trip. There was a bus heading east departing at 10:40am, later than I would've preferred, which was 6:01am, but it was the best choice. I hung around the ticket window when it opened, to see if they asked for ID when someone bought a ticket. They didn't, so I bought a ticket to Salt Lake City in the name of Nathan Morris. My intention was to get off less than halfway through the trip, at Twin Falls, and hitchhike northwest from there. I had four and a half hours to kill, and I didn't want to hang around the bus station because in the movies they're always saying, "Stake out the airport, train and bus stations," so I went for a walk. I passed the first couple of eating places, then entered the third, ordered a small meal, and settled in. I didn't want to call the number Mom had given me until just before I left, in case it somehow gave my location away, so I waited until it was nearly time to head back to the station. I put my best "I'm a nice guy" expression on, and asked someone, "Please may I borrow your cellphone. I foolishly left mine at home. I'm happy to pay you a few dollars to cover the call." They happily lent me their phone for free. I called the number, and after several rings Vanessa answered. It was nice to know I'd decoded Mom's cryptic clues correctly. "Hi Vanessa, it's Peter Hillary here." "Good to hear from you Pete. Is all well with you and the kids?" "Great thanks Vanessa. It's amazing how fast they grow up." "Yes indeed. I know you're calling because of your legal interest, and I have to get back to work, so I'll just say that Prof's lawyer had given them a pay up deadline of 10 o'clock today," it was just after that now. "At 9:55 they said they would comply, but they tried to stall by handing over a check despite the settlement contract stating that the money had to be wired into Prof's account by 10. They've been granted an extension to 11. If the money isn't in Prof's account by then, AND he's been able to transfer it out, then Prof's lawyer will be going public. He's standing on the courthouse steps now, ready to file and with several press people waiting to see why he's called a press conference. -- "Binion's SAY they're going to settle, but we won't know until 11. They might be telling the truth, or it might be a trick. It's impossible to know, although Prof's lawyer is confident they will settle. If you call me sometime after 11, I'll be able to tell you what happened. Otherwise everything and everyone is fine here. We must have you over for dinner one night soon, to tell you all about it." "That'd be nice, Vanessa. You know I'm always happy to have one of your dinners. I'm going to be busy for a while, but I'll try to make the time to call you later. Give my regards to your family, and good luck with your legal battle, bye." I returned the lady's phone, thanked her very much, and hoped she didn't get an army of casino investigators descending on her in a few hours. I grabbed my bag and legged it for the bus station, after repeating my "Turning The Wrong Way And Doing A Block-Wide Loop" tactic. Despite the deadline being so close, I was still going to get on the bus. Mom's warnings about getting out of town immediately after making a phone call had me worried. For all I knew, Binion's were using a fake agreement to pay up as a way of smoking me out. I was EXTREMELY unhappy that they were looking for me personally, and extremely eager that they not find me. At the station I was very glad to see that they weren't asking for IDs before people could get on the bus. That'd been worrying me, as it'd force me to give my real name, either to transfer the ticket I had, or to buy a new one. I got on the bus, sitting as close to the exit as possible so I could get out in a hurry if I needed to. We pulled out on time, and I spent the first part of the trip being friendly with a couple of people around me because I wanted to borrow one of their phones in a couple of hours. I'd phone Vanessa again just before Twin Falls, then get off the bus regardless of what her news was. It was a real pain having to leave the area after every phone call. It'd be so much easier if I could find a nice, quiet place and stay there, but such was not the case. Vanessa's giving me bad news would send me off on another avoidance leg; good news would, I hoped, send me home. I borrowed a phone just before Twin Falls, at about 1:30pm, and called Vanessa, introducing myself with just a, "Hi, it's me again" as I wasn't known as Peter Hillary on the bus. Vanessa reported, "Good news. It looks like everything's sorted. All of the money is now in Prof's LA accounts, and Prof's on his way home. You can do the same, I think. It'd be a good idea to take your time, to give everything a chance to settle down here and to make sure nothing comes unstuck. Can you do that?" "Sure, easy." "Good. Keep a low profile and check in on this number every few hours to make sure all's well." "Will do. What do Mom and Dad know?" "That you went to LA and stirred up some money men by doing some extremely unusual transactions. Things that they didn't think were possible. Legal, but very unconventional. You caught everyone flatfooted and made some very useful money on the international markets. They hired PIs to track you down because they want to pick your brains so they can use your technique to make even more money themselves, before news of it becomes too widespread and people start understanding it. You didn't want your brains picked by a group of money-hungry guys in a desperate hurry, so you've gone on a sudden vacation. -- "Binion's PIs have cooperated by keeping their client totally confidential, because the very last thing Binion's want is to have this become public. We're told that most of the PIs won't even know who they're ultimately working for; that they'll be subcontractors who've been told the bare minimum. Your parents are worried, but they're not angry. Prof's being involved in this gives you a great deal of credibility. I think that when you get to Corvallis you should check in with us first, so we can bring you up to date." "Okay. I'm sure you've got a great deal to tell me." "Yeah, Prof and I have both been having an interesting time of it lately. Do you know when you'll be getting here?" Conscious that several people around me could hear what I was saying, I couldn't say, "Is it safe to give that information over the phone?" Instead I said, "Do you really want my opinion about that? Wouldn't I be better off keeping that to myself?" "No one knows about this phone or the one you're calling from, I presume. So there's no way they can tap them. Where I am now I can't be overheard. We're safe." "Okay. In that case I'd guess something like eleven or twelve hours from now." "That's good. Make sure you call when you're about thirty minutes out, so we can let you in. Our security has been considerably upgraded since your last visit." "Okay, see you then. And thanks for all your efforts. Sorry to put you to so much trouble." "We're benefiting from this as well, Mark. The million-dollar gift you're giving us is good pay for a week's work, plus your having to flee is mostly our fault because we completely underestimated how quickly they'd discover you. They had you identified before mid-morning on the first day, and they were pulling out all the stops looking for you by lunchtime. Prof and I should've disguised you a great deal better than we did. I'd say 'we'll know better next time', but somehow I don't think Binion's would be happy to see you again." "Probably not. I'd better go. Talk with you soon, thanks, bye." I gave the guy his phone back, and pushed $5 on him too. "Honestly take it. That call saved me from wasting a lot of time. I've got to get off at Twin Falls and change my journey. Besides, if you're traveling by bus you're probably not very wealthy, so I shouldn't leave you to pay for the call." Just before I got off at Twin Falls, my seat-mates asked where I was going to now. I figured Vegas was something like eleven or twelve hours away, the time they'd heard me tell Vanessa, so I told them Vegas. If the baddies were still baddies, and tracked these guys down, that'd be a believable and useless story. I was very tempted to find an ATM to check my LA account's balance, but feared it'd pinpoint my location somehow, so I gave up on the idea. [Prof had pre-warned the LA bank that we wanted immediate access to our accounts, including having ATM cards ready for us.] I waited for the bus to go, then started hitchhiking back to Boise. I'd been brought up to fear hitchhiking, but with my proximity sense telling me what the driver was about to do, I had no real worry. Boise was only two hours away and straight up the main road, so getting a lift wasn't difficult. I approached my car carefully, but there was no sign of any baddies around it. I drove out of the parking lot, filled up with gas, and headed for home. According to my map, it was just over five hundred miles, on I-84 virtually the whole way. It'd take me eight hours or so, especially as I was impatient to get home, so my foot would be heavier than normal. That would make my arrival time somewhat after midnight. A while after the midway point I stopped to use a public phone to check in with Vanessa again. I was very happy to hear Prof's voice, "Hi Mark. How's your vacation going?" "When I finish school, I don't think I'll get a job as a long-distance truck driver. It's too boring." "I don't think you'll have to worry about paid employment for a while. The money is in our control now, and the only way Binion's can get it back is to sue for it. Patrick says they wouldn't dream of doing that unless they had strong proof that I cheated, and that's not going to happen. They've had to agree to pull all their people out and to stop chasing you, because we're still threatening them with our going public and suing them for their abuses. You can come back, because they wouldn't dare try to intercept you now. Are you still on schedule for about 1am?" "Maybe a little earlier. Just after midnight I think." "Good. I've got someone tugging on my arm. Do you want to talk with her?" "If I said 'No, ' I have to go on the lam again because she'd be out to kill me. Yeah, put her on, thanks Prof. See you soon." Females get all emotional when they've been worried. They also get all emotional when they're excited, AND also when they're bursting with pride for their fella. All three at once rendered Julia incapable of expressing her feelings coherently, so she expressed them incoherently for several minutes. When she started saying, "I was right when I said you'd..." I quickly talked over top of her to cut her off. If I guessed the rest of that sentence correctly, it could be very dangerous to me if Binion's could hear it. Julia realized her mistake and was more careful thereafter. I'd said all the necessary boyfriend things: "Yes, I missed you too", "No, I was never in danger", etc. #1: < We could've been in danger if we'd been able to go fishing, because we might have caught our finger on a fish hook.> Once Julia slowed down, I asked, "How's Carol?" "She's at your place. Mom, Dad and I visited earlier today. They're all okay. They know all the investigators have been pulled back and that you'll be arriving tomorrow morning. Dad wants you to come here first so we can let you know everything that happened to him and in town. After you've got the story straight, you should go home. Hang on, Dad wants to talk with you again." Prof took over, "Mark, just to play completely safe, I'll get one of The Boys to drive out and meet you when you get close to town, and he'll follow you back to our place. My lawyer assures me they won't go after you like that - apparently there are understood 'rules' for how these things are played out, and that would breach them - but there's no harm in sending Andrew or Robert on a little drive. When you get close, give us a call on this number, and we'll arrange a rendezvous." "Okay, will do." Julia 'needed' to talk with me some more, but I soon pointed out to her, "You are aware that I'm in a phone booth, aren't you? I'm not making any forward progress while I'm talking to you, so if you want to see me you're going to have to let me get back in my car." "I know. It's just so good to hear your voice." "Is it that I have a truly wonderful voice, or a truly terrible body, that you'd rather listen to me than see me in person?" "You stinker! Okay, hang up and start driving again." A few "I love yous" later, I was able to hang up. I drove to a dark location, put the car's original plates on, disposed of the others, then resumed my journey. Another 3.5 hours of driving got me to Albany, about twenty minutes drive from home. I called the number again. Prof suggested I meet The Boys outside the police station, which I thought was an excellent rendezvous spot, especially as it's not far from the bridge into town. When I got there, Andrew, Robert and Julia were waiting for me. Julia welcomed me back, and I hardly got to use my voice at all. Julia and I drove to the Williams', followed by The Boys. Julia talked nonstop. I was hoping to ask whether The Boys knew we'd been to a casino, but Julia never paused to draw breath so I didn't get the chance. The drive to the Williams' house was uneventful. I'd just turned the car off when two big uniformed guys walked around the side of the Williams' house and headed toward us. "FUCK!" as I frantically scrambled to put the keys back in the ignition to turn the car back on. "They're OUR security, Mark. Mom hired them. Sorry, I should've told you." I thought 99% of the stuff Julia had gushed at me hadn't been as NEARLY important as saving me from having a fucking heart attack, but I said, "That's okay." The Boys, Julia and I headed in, Julia telling the guards, "He's a friend." They nodded and went back to patrolling the grounds. Inside we almost immediately encountered a strange young guy. Vanessa introduced us, "This is Mark, Julia's boyfriend; and this is Andrew, Sophia's younger brother" (same name as Julia's brother, but a different guy entirely. He's not mentioned after this, so don't worry about it). "Andrew's been helping us guard the house for the last few nights. We'll tell you about it later. Andrew, you'd better get back to your patrol." "Yes ma'am." Prof said, "Let's take it to Julia's room." Once that door was closed, we really let loose! Lots of laughter, hugs, backslaps and handshakes. In the presence of The Boys, I was careful with my language, and soon noticed that nothing was said about "casino", "Binion's", "$11.1 million", or anything else specific to what we'd been doing. Once things had calmed a little, Vanessa said, "Are you hungry, Mark?" "Yes, very much. I skipped eating much in the last few hours in order to get here earlier." "I've got some food saved for you. I'll go warm it up. Andrew and Robert, I think you should leave now, so they can talk openly." "Okay, Mom. Well done achieving whatever it is you achieved, Mark. I'm sure I'd be very impressed if I had a clue, haha." Robert said something similar, then The Boys and Vanessa left, shutting the door behind them. Prof turned on Julia's little stereo, turned the volume up high, then we sat in a tight group so we could talk with each other in relatively quiet words. Prof explained, "We're almost certainly not bugged because we took strong precautions to keep them out of our homes, they would have had even more trouble getting into this room, and even if they did, they'd be crazy to still have the bugs going now, but try to exercise some caution in what you say." ------- Chapter 181: Meanwhile, What Had Been Happening in Vegas Tuesday, May 3 to Friday, May 6, 2005 I asked, "The Boys don't know what we did?" Prof answered, "No. There was no need to tell them, and doubtless it's better that they don't know. Vanessa did sit them down to reinforce the message that their knowing would only increase the danger to them and to everyone else in the two families. They know we wouldn't exclude them without good reason, so they're not upset about it. To the contrary, after hearing about the effort 'The LA Money Men' - as we call them - put into finding you, they're happy not to know. -- "Even though they don't know what we've been up to, The Boys have been very helpful the last few days. We had pairs of security guards patrolling our and your houses 24/7, because we were extremely worried about Binion's people installing bugs. But we were also worried about the guards being bribed to look the other way, so Andrew and Robert took a few days off. Robert stayed at your home during the day; Andrew stayed here. Making sure the guards didn't let anyone in, and checking on them several times during the day. Guarding the guards, as it were. We also employed Sophia's brother and his girlfriend to stay awake in each house during the night. To patrol around inside while everyone else was sleeping. We were VERY determined that we didn't want any bugs inside our homes." #3: #4: #3: #1: #3: I said, "That was wonderful of The Boys. That must have disrupted their work badly." "It probably helped them. They were able to work productively without all the interruptions they'd normally get. They've got laptops, so they were fine. I think they'll also consider themselves very well repaid when they get their payments." "Not as well paid as YOU should be! What you had to do was amazing! I'm glad you won the extra $1.1 million, because you, Vanessa and your boys all need to be paid more than we agreed before. How come you bet $850,000, by the way? That's puzzling me." "We won't take any more than we agreed to. You're greatly overestimating how much effort it was for each of us. As people get older they get better at facing pressure and overcoming challenges, so none of us found the last few days nearly as hard as you seem to think it was for us. The extra 1.1 will go into your share. You need it more than us. After paying tax, the Anderson emergency fund, and buying the mansion - with all that'll entail - there won't be all that much left over. I'm sure Julia won't have any trouble spending it for you." Julia agreed, "I've already got several ideas, haha." Prof said, "I'll start telling you what happened to me from when I arrived at Binion's, which will include the explanation for the $850,000 when I get that far." "Okay. But while I remember, can't we get the houses 'swept for bugs' like they do on TV? That's what they call it, isn't it? I don't want to have to be careful of every single thing I say and do until we move into the mansion." "No indeed," agreed Prof. "One of the first things I did in Vegas after learning that Binion's people were after you, was hire a good PI, and have him explain to me what the PIs who'd be chasing you would be doing, and how you should avoid them. I also asked him about getting rid of bugs. It's not nearly as simple as it appears on TV. The cheapest bugs are like you see on TV. They take only a few minutes to find, because they're transmitting all the time. -- "There are bugs that don't transmit at all, they just record until they run out of memory. The bug owner has to manually collect those bugs to find out what they contain. They wouldn't have used those bugs exclusively in our houses, because they'd want live feed, but they could have planted some transmitting bugs, and some recording bugs. -- "The next level of quality is a bug that stores what it hears until it receives a signal instructing it to transmit. It condenses hours of conversation into a burst of a few seconds of transmission, so there's almost no chance of detecting the transmission. Those can be set to transmit live too, if the owner wants. -- "Then there's another type of bug that's even better than the previous type because when it transmits it's extremely rapidly changing frequencies, making it even harder to detect. There are also bugs that are inactive until they get woken up, either by time or external signal; or that can be turned off by a simple transmission, when the owner thinks we might be looking for them. -- "In short, finding top quality bugs is a great deal more difficult than it appears on TV. You can tell I take it seriously though. We're going to mind what we do and say until early next week, then I'm going to hire a team of professionals to go through both houses and all our cars. Patrick has told Binion's that if we find a single bug anywhere then we're going public. They assure him that there are none, but they would say that regardless. If there are any, they're on notice to remove them. Does that answer your question well enough?" "More than well enough, thanks. We mind our P's and Q's until the sweepers tell us we're clean." "Yes. Your family knows that too. We don't think there are bugs in the houses, because we think we've prevented anyone gaining access, but we're assuming the worst until we learn otherwise. It would've been easy to bug our cars, so we're definitely assuming they aren't safe. You should assume yours isn't safe either, now that it's parked outside our house. Now I'll tell you what I've been doing for the last few days..." Prof recounted his story. The first part of which, up until he contacted his lawyer, I've given already. First thing Wednesday, Patrick (Prof's lawyer) requested Binion's pay his client's winnings and return his initial stake immediately. Failing that they were put on notice to preserve for evidence in a lawsuit their videotapes of the entirety of Prof's visit, including but not limited to his two games and his visit to the Interview Room. Patrick also requested copies of same. Patrick had predicted that Binion's would relatively quickly provide the tapes of Prof's play, but would not provide the tapes from the Interview Room. That's what typically happened in such cases, and what did happen in this one. The tapes sent to Patrick were of a deliberately degraded quality, but were good enough to confirm every word Prof had said, and for Patrick to see that cheating by any known method appeared impossible. Midday Wednesday, Prof learned from Vanessa that Binion's investigators were hot on Mark's heels. Previously Prof had not mentioned me to Patrick, not expecting that my presence would come to light (it took less than two hours in Corvallis for Binion's investigators to ID me!). So Prof told Patrick about me, "My daughter's boyfriend wanted to watch, but he was only fifteen, and that's why he pretended not to know me. He didn't want to disrupt my game in the likely event that he was detected and removed from the casino. He has nothing to do with this other than as a spectator. I believe he bought some chips, in order to justify his hanging around, but I don't think he gambled at all. Now Binion's have investigators running all around Corvallis looking for him, convinced that he's somehow responsible for my winning just because he watched both of my games." My presence wasn't of any legal consequence, so it changed nothing as far as Patrick was concerned. Patrick had 'invited' Binion's lawyers to a meeting on Thursday morning, which I'll paraphrase. Patrick started by giving Binion's lawyers copies of the lawsuit he was going to file at 10am the next day (Friday), and the press statement he was going to release at the same time. Both documents would deeply embarrass Binion's, and made Ted Binion out as being particularly stupid for claiming that cheating was possible under such circumstances. The lawsuit was not just for the $11.2 million that Binion's were holding (what we'd won plus our original stake), but for every other cause of action imaginable. For example, it included sexual harassment because when Prof had been legless, one of the security guards had rubbed the sock Prof wore over his stump. Patrick's secretary had the amusing task of locating and printing out website postings from people who got their sexual kicks doing exactly that on amputees, the printouts were to be used as supporting evidence for a sexual harassment claim. That an old man had his trousers removed and was sexually harassed in a casino backroom in the presence of Ted Binion could be written up as a VERY entertaining article, one that would further damage Ted's existing reputation and give him an entirely new one. The court documents requested an urgent hearing, one of the justifications for which was an insinuation that Binion's might have solvency problems which would only get worse once news of their big loss got out. The press release went even further, strongly implying Binion's refusal to pay had to be caused by their being insolvent because there was no other reason, cheating obviously being impossible under the very clearly and embarrassingly described circumstances. Binion's lawyers' attempt at a verbal counterattack was that they knew Mark Anderson had been involved in the scam. When pressed they had difficulty explaining how, but they did come up with, "If he's innocent, why is he avoiding us?" "Because he thinks he's in terrible trouble for being under-age in your casino. You've got people hunting for him all over town, which has got to be truly frightening experience for a young boy with a guilty conscience. Is that the best proof of cheating you've got, that a young boy is scared of your small army? Do you honestly believe you'll be able to convince a judge that your client doesn't have to pay an $11 million loss purely because the two games were witnessed by a 15-year old boy?" -- Patrick added, "Thank you for reminding me about Mark Anderson. Your client is hounding a minor into being so fearful for his safety that he's too scared to go home to his parents at night. As that harassment is occurring in Corvallis, we'll be filing a separate suit in Oregon, where the courts are less predisposed toward casinos than is the case in Nevada. How much damage do you think that suit will do to your client, both from the award itself, and from the substantial negative publicity it will excite? You should also consider the consequences for your client if something unfortunate should happen to Mark Anderson while he is on the run because of your client's goons. -- "Speaking of harassment, your client's treatment of Mr. Williams was truly appalling. Forcing him to strip and remove his artificial leg. What was Ted thinking! My client informs me that he was intimidated, threatened and not let out of the room when he wished to leave. I am looking forward to seeing those videotapes. I wonder whether my client should make a kidnapping complaint to the FBI? I'm sure they would enjoy investigating Ted Binion again." [The Binion family had been an early Vegas casino owner, back in the days when the industry leaders associated with, or were, criminals. The FBI had been actively interested in the family for decades, and was often a thorn in their sides.] -- "Your client chose the numbers to bet on after the ball was already in motion. The only ways to rig a game under those circumstances require equipment to be installed in the wheel itself, which was clearly not the case here. I am sure your client is well aware that the odds of Mr. Williams winning those two bets are in the same ballpark as being dealt a Hold'em Poker hand of Ace King suited. On the balance of probabilities, what's more likely: that Mr. Williams had a very small run of good luck, or there's a new way of cheating at roulette which is so fantastical that your client, with all his expertise, cannot even begin to suggest how it might have been done? -- "All Ted is doing is ruining his reputation because a customer had a two-bet winning streak. Everyone is going to laugh at Ted, and then they're going to stay away from his casino, because no one is going to trust Binion's to pay them after word of this gets out. Your client needs to suck it up and take it like a man. If he accepts big wagers, sometimes he's going to take big losses. Paranoia has its place in the casino business, but Ted has taken it to an absurd level in this case. -- "Delay does not serve Mr. Williams. He wants his fairly won money, we want the harassment of Mark Anderson to cease, and it appears your client might be having solvency problems. If not already, then when that press release runs in every newspaper in the world. Do you think I need a haircut? Because I expect to be getting a great deal of TV exposure in the next few days. -- "I'll be filing these papers at 10am tomorrow morning and holding the press conference immediately thereafter. You have until then to transfer Mr. Williams' winnings and original stake into his account..." The mechanics of what Patrick wanted were detailed in a settlement statement, which included the payment specifics, pulling the investigators out and ceasing all surveillance, undertaking to protect Mr. Williams' anonymity, providing the missing videotapes, and several other points. Binion's lawyers objected to handing over the Interview Room's videotapes, as unnecessary in the event of settlement. Patrick insisted, "Think of it as a sign of good faith. We can obtain them from your client very easily. I could get a court order for their release within a few days, or cheaper and easier would be for Mr. Williams to make a kidnapping charge with the FBI. Or your client could hand them over voluntarily. It's his choice." They requested more time. "No. Either your client is an honorable man who will make good on his gambling debts, in which case payment could be made in ten minutes; or he's dishonorable, in which there's no point in agreeing to a delay. From Tuesday to Friday will have given his experts three days to take the wheels apart and scrutinize the videos, which is more than ample time. You can see that we're ready to file right now, but we're giving you until 10am tomorrow, but NO more. We will not have Mark Anderson on the run and sleeping rough over the weekend." At various times they also ventured every other excuse they could think of: "Perhaps our client would feel more inclined to settle if he understood Mr. Williams' original reason for needing $1 million?" To which Patrick had responded with "That's immaterial," which is as close as a lawyer can get to blowing a raspberry. The investigators had been unable to discover a reason for Prof's "urgent need" for a million, which increased their suspicion. "It's deeply suspicious that Mark Anderson happens to be a mathematical genius." Patrick answered, "Good luck telling a LEARNED judge that being intelligent is indicative of dishonesty! Mr. Williams is a Professor of Mathematics, so his friends are naturally going to be intelligent, mathematically oriented people. MAYBE you'd have a possible line of inquiry if Mark Anderson had placed the bet after carefully studying the wheel and ball in motion, but TED chose the bet! Mark's intelligence had no possible application." "We're very suspicious of that too. Gamblers do not let other people choose their numbers for them." Patrick answered, "Mr. Williams is NOT a gambler. I've spent several hours talking to him and he knows very little about gambling or Vegas, which makes your claim that he's invented an undetectable way of cheating at roulette even more absurd. I'm sure you will not be so foolish as to advance these absurd innuendoes in court, so stop wasting my time with them today." Patrick's last statement of any substance was, "I'm sure Ted doesn't know of a cheating method which could have worked, let alone be able to prove that Mr. Williams used it. Ted doesn't have even the glimmer of a legal leg to stand on. We've all seen countless examples of gamblers having a big win and then doubling up. That's all that happened with Mr. Williams. His big bet had 3 chances in 38 of winning, and one of those chances came up. Your client needs to pay up on that before 10am tomorrow, or his business will suffer far greater damage than the direct cost of Mr. Williams' lucky win, which the courts will order paid anyway." Binion's lawyers went back to their client very much aware that they weren't holding any of the cards. Binion's had a suspicion they'd been scammed, but there was absolutely no proof of it, either in the casino or in what they'd been able to discover from their investigations. There'd been a video camera zoomed in on the wheels for both bets, but video recordings have a certain number of frames per second and a slightly mistimed flick looked the same as a bounce that'd happened between frames. To the naked eye - even in slow motion - the balls' motions looked fine. If they'd been able to zoom in on the video to see exact impact angles, and used a sophisticated computer program to track ball trajectories, they would've found evidence of my activities, but their video systems didn't have that much resolution and they weren't looking in that area. They were looking for things like needles, magnets, blowers, or other such influences in the final moments of a game. With all such outside influences, the balls would've suddenly changed direction unnaturally, i.e., not during a bounce. But they never did that in either of our two games. From everything they could see, the balls had not been influenced at all. The chance of Prof winning those two bets wasn't outrageous, and Binion's couldn't begin to imagine how such a scam could've been made to work. Ted also put a lot of store in Prof's reluctant response to the extra $100,000 bet. There was the consideration that if they didn't pay, both the casino and Ted would be internationally ridiculed, taken to court, and almost certainly have to pay anyway. Given the choice between paying immediately, or suffering a great deal of damage to their business and then having to pay later, there really wasn't much choice. Especially as the chance of their discovering provable evidence of cheating was now far too low to make the risk worthwhile. There was a considerable amount of "without prejudice" communication (meaning negotiation that had no legal significance unless it concluded successfully) between the two legal firms during the run up to the 10am Friday deadline, culminating in Binion's last minute attempt to settle by check - which wouldn't have cleared for weeks as Binion's would've gotten their bank to be grossly inefficient, a tactic that'd been used before in Vegas - giving Binion's a great deal more time to search for reasons to justify their stopping the check. Patrick roundly abused Binion's lawyers for being party to such a foolishly transparent trick, especially as it directly contradicted the signed settlement contract which specified the exact payment method. Then he gave Binion's one more hour to do it properly. Patrick made it very clear that there were not going to be any more games. Pay up properly, or he'd pass his handouts to the waiting news people, so the world would learn about Binion's refusal to pay out on a bet they'd placed themselves. Binion's delayed until the last possible moment, but they paid. Patrick called Prof who was in his bank manager's office and already aware that the money had just arrived. On Patrick's call, Prof transferred the money to his and my LA accounts, confirmed its arrival in LA with the LA bank, phoned confirmation to Patrick, and the deal was finished. There were several odds and ends, such as Binion's continuing to insist they couldn't return Prof's cellphone because they didn't have it, and Prof and I were banned from Binion's. Patrick said it was certain that Prof's and my names and photos would be provided to all the other Vegas casinos as possible cheats, so we'd be well advised not to try gambling in Vegas again. It sounded like good advice to me. ------- Chapter 182: Meanwhile, What Had Been Happening in Corvallis Tuesday, May 3 to Friday, May 6, 2005 Vanessa's story interrelates too much with Mom's and the PIs, so I'll merge their stories to make them more comprehensible. Vanessa's fun and games started when Prof called her early Tuesday evening, after he'd started talking to Patrick. Patrick had mentioned that Binion's would send investigators to Corvallis. Prof had excused himself, called Vanessa, warned her that there could well be investigators in Corvallis already, and to keep Mark totally out of sight. I thought Vanessa had overreacted by sending me fleeing in such a dramatic fashion, but from her point of view she wanted to keep me out of the clutches of big, violent, immoral men (she had a terrible opinion of casinos) who'd just been ripped off to the tune of $11 million. From her point of view, it was impossible to overreact. Not that Vanessa knew the following, but Binion's people had been suspicious about my standing so close to the wheel at both of Prof's wins, so when they supplied the pictures of all the possible accomplices to their investigators, mine was right on the top of the stack as the most likely accomplice. My picture had been in the local newspaper often enough that the investigators sent to Corvallis quickly found someone who recognized me as being familiar, "I've seen him somewhere before. In the paper I think. I can't remember his name though." It didn't take long for them to go through the paper's back issues to locate the photo of me winning the 10k race. That gave them my name, and while they were searching the paper's archives, they did a search for "Anderson", which took them to the article about the Eaton Incident, which gave them my school and a slightly erroneous age. Mid-morning they sent an honest-looking, middle-aged, female investigator to my school, asking to see me about a family matter. There she learned that I'd been at OSU all yesterday and was there again today (Julia had extended her cover story, including telling the office because I'd be gone for several days). The investigator had asked the obvious questions: "What's OSU?", "Why is a 16-year old boy going there?" Which taught her that I was a genius. Another PI who was questioning students coming and going from school soon gained them the news that I was Julia Williams' 15-year old boyfriend. Alarm bells were ringing back at Binion's HQ now, especially because Prof and I had ignored each other in the casino. Binion's dispatched more investigators to Corvallis, correctly suspecting they were onto something important. Finding an individual student out of the 20,000 that go to OSU would be next to impossible, but they knew I was studying mathematics so one of them went to the Mathematics Department's office to ask for my schedule. Needless to say, when he asked for "Mark Anderson's schedule please" the office lady called Maureen over. The PI explained his request to Maureen, who told him she'd look it up. Maureen knew Prof was away, so she tapped away on her computer, as if to pull up my records. In fact she was instant messaging Vanessa to call Maureen back to avoid the "suspicious person" seeing Maureen place a call in the open-plan office. Maureen, being the senior secretary, sits the farthest from the inquiries window, so her call couldn't be overheard. Vanessa knew this must be a PI looking for me. Obviously I wouldn't be found here, as I'd left town the previous evening, but Vanessa thought this was an ideal opportunity to buy me some time. Maureen was willing to cooperate (who was she going to trust, a stranger standing at her window, or Prof and Vanessa whom she'd known and liked for years?). Vanessa and Maureen cooked up a little plan, doing the necessary checking first. While Maureen pretended to still be talking on the phone, Vanessa had put her on hold so Vanessa could call the lecturer they'd chosen, a guy Maureen and Vanessa had thought would cooperate and who had a lecture at a suitable time. Vanessa asked him for a favor, quickly explaining what she wanted him to do and promising to explain why later. He agreed, provided they weren't police officers. Vanessa reconnected with Maureen, updating her with progress and agreeing on what to do next. Maureen hung up then went back to the window to ask, "Are you a police officer or is this a private inquiry?" "Private, but it's important I get hold of him." "Sure, no problem. Who were you were looking for again?" "Mark Anderson." "Okay. Because you're not a police officer I can't give you his complete schedule, but I can tell you what his next class will be. I'll just go look it up now; hang on." Maureen went back to her desk, did some typing, then returned to the window, telling him a lecture room number and a time three hours later. "Will he definitely be there?" "We don't take attendance; this is a university, not a school. Most students choose to attend their lectures." After the PI had left, Maureen gathered "her girls" together (the other secretaries) and told them all to direct all inquiries about Mark Anderson or Prof to her. "Why? What's happening?" "I don't know much. Vanessa said that Prof and Mark are in Los Angeles. They've pulled some sort of clever move in the financial markets and the big boys have hired PIs to track them down because they want to find out how they did it. Prof and Mark don't want to be found yet, so we're stalling the investigators." One of the 'girls' (who was older than Maureen) wondered, "I wonder how much they made?" Maureen said, "I got the impression they're still doing it, and that's why they don't want to be found. I guess the longer we stall, the more money Prof will make." Maureen called the lecturer to confirm that the inquirer had not been a policeman. Four PIs were scattered around the lecture hall doors to intercept my arrival at the 2pm lecture. They were frustrated by my no-show. They waited a few minutes, in case I was running late, then they entered the lecture hall to try to scan the crowd, in case I'd somehow got in unobserved. That incurred the ire of the lecturer who told them to behave, "And who the hell are you anyway?" "We're looking for a student. Perhaps you can help us locate him, Mark Anderson. Do you know where he is?" "Yes. I'll tell you after the lecture." "It's important, can you tell us now please?" "No! I will tell you AFTER the lecture. You are disrupting the entire class. One more word from you and I'll call campus security." So the PIs sat through a calculus lecture. It delayed them another hour, but at least they had the pleasure of an hour of calculus. At the end of which, "You said you'd tell us where Mark Anderson is?" "Are you police officers?" "No, but it's important we find him." "He came to my office earlier, to pick up the lecture notes because he had a clash. He said something about having an appointment in the Student Lounge at the same time. You might still catch him there." "Argh! Why didn't you tell us that earlier?" "Because I am answerable to the university and the hundreds of fee paying students who were waiting for me to get back to their lecture. They have priority over whoever you are." Another PI asked, "Where is the Student Lounge?" "There are several of them, but he was probably talking about the one that is..." Accurate directions were provided, in the sense that there was a Student Lounge at the end of them. The PIs rushed off. They missed me. Hardly surprising, as I was several hundred miles away at the time. It wasn't essential that it work, but Vanessa had sent one of the young secretaries from her department to the Lounge, on the good chance that the PIs would do what they did next, which was to start showing my picture around and asking if anyone had seen me recently. The secretary didn't know what I looked like, but there weren't that many other students being hunted at the moment. She approached one of the PIs while pretending to be merely curiosity. When she was shown my photo, she said what she'd agreed to, "Sure, I've seen him. We had a stamp collecting club meeting here just before. You just missed him. He's still around though, because he arranged a meeting with one of the guys to buy a stamp from him." "Do you know where and when they're meeting?" "I don't know. I only overheard part of their conversation. I got the impression it was in the next hour or two, but probably not in this room. Maybe one of the other student rooms, or in one of the libraries." "How many student rooms and libraries are there?" "Heaps. I have to go now. Good luck finding him." "Wait! What was the name of the other guy?" "I don't know." "What did he look like?" "Like a guy who collects stamps. I've got to go." She went to Vanessa, and reported her success. The four PIs at OSU quickly located a detailed map of OSU, and discovered that there were far too many possible meeting points for just the four of them to cover. They called their problem in. The head investigators, those in the know and in charge of the operation, had a problem. Their team had quickly discovered that the Williams' residence was guarded by a private security firm. After finding my name, they'd located my address and found that guarded too. That greatly frustrated their ability to search for physical evidence. They could assign underlings to the usual mundane tasks like photographing the family members, getting background information about us, etc., but none of that was going to provide them with what they most wanted: proof that we'd cheated. Their best hope was obviously in coercing a 15-year old accomplice to confess, which they thought wouldn't be difficult once they found me. They seemed to have a good chance of locating me at OSU, which would be ideal, as it was well away from my parents and without the tight supervision of school. Thus finding me at OSU was a priority. They needed more people at OSU, so they pulled everybody off whatever they were doing, and sent them on Vanessa's wild goose chase. They had even less success than they'd had in the Student Lounge, because no one recognized my photo. Vanessa's intent had just been to waste some of their time, which it certainly did. Far more man-hours than she would've guessed. There were two additional consequences: They didn't see Julia get a lift home from school from a friend. She'd been observed being taken to school by Vanessa, but the PI hadn't thought her mode of transport worthy of highlighting, and it was a different PI who'd obtained a list of the Williams' cars a couple of hours later. Julia's Honda wasn't noticed as missing. Those that knew about it assumed she'd taken it to school. If she'd been seen coming home in another car, the discrepancy might have been noticed. Although they'd already found out which cellphone carrier I used, and had access to my phone records [phone company employees sell/give away private information outrageously often] they hadn't pushed as hard for information as they could have. They knew I was at OSU, so they hadn't needed to ask the phone company employee to dig into the system far enough to locate my phone. I had turned my phone on briefly when I was in McCleary, but only to check for messages of which there'd been none. I hadn't made a call, so the phone company guy had simply told the PIs that I hadn't used my phone. I rather enjoyed the next bit, so I'll reproduce it verbatim. While the PIs were trying to track me down, they had the idea that I might have another lecture sometime in the afternoon, so the PI who'd previously asked Maureen for my schedule tried again. Vanessa and Maureen had thought this might happen. Maureen said, "Let me check." Maureen walked back to her desk. Tap, tap, tap. Then back to the window. "No, not today." "What about tomorrow?" "Let me check." Maureen walked back to her desk. Tap, tap, tap. Then back to the window. "He's got a tutorial at 10am." "What's a tutorial?" "It's halfway between an informal study group and a lecture. Students are advised to attend them, but they're only sometimes compulsory, depending on the circumstances." "What room will it be in?" "We don't have access to that information here." "Who does have access to it?" "The tutors book their own rooms and keep track of their students." "How do I contact Mark's tutor then?" "We don't store that information. Tutors are allocated in class." "How do I find out who his tutor is?" "You could ask his lecturer." "Who is his lecturer, and how do I contact him?" "Let me check." Maureen walked back to her desk. Tap, tap, tap. Then back to the window. "It's the same lecturer as you saw last time." "Where can I find him?" "It's no good looking for him now. You need to see him during his office hours. He doesn't carry around all the paperwork for hundreds of students." "Aren't his office hours 9 to 5?" "No. In universities, 'office hours' means when a lecturer will be in his office and available to answer questions. Most of the time they're giving lectures, doing research, writing papers, marking assignments, etc. Their time is very carefully managed. If you want to ask an administrative question of a lecturer, it has to be during his office hours." "When are his office hours then?" "Let me check." Maureen walked back to her desk. Tap, tap, tap. Then back to the window. "Tomorrow his office hours are from 11 to 12." "Thanks. Hey, that's no good. I'm trying to find out where Mark Anderson will be at 10 o'clock. By 11 o'clock it's too late, isn't it?" "Yes. Tutorials last an hour. Fifty minutes, to be precise." "It doesn't make any sense that I can't find out where he is until after he's gone. There's got to be a better way?" "I'm sorry. I'm just following departmental policy. I'm just a lowly secretary; I don't make the rules, you know." "But it's important I find Mark Anderson." "In that case I suggest you arrange to meet him outside his next lecture." "When and where is that?" "I explained that to you the last time you were here. I can only give you the details of the NEXT item on a student's schedule. His next item is his tutorial. If you want the details of his next lecture you'll have to come back after his tutorial finishes. Any time after 11 will be fine." "This is crazy! I need to contract Mark Anderson urgently. There must be a way of contacting students urgently." "Certainly. Are you faculty, immediately family or a policeman?" "Ahh, no. None of those." "Then the best I can do is suggest you write him a note and I'll make sure he gets it." "But I need to talk with him." "Then write him a note explaining why, and asking him to call you. Do you wish to leave a note?" "Ahh, no. Not at the moment." "I'll get back to work then. Don't hesitate to ask if you need any more help." After they were sure he was gone, the secretaries all cracked up. [The idea was to keep the PIs hopeful about finding me at OSU, so they'd keep wasting manpower on it. Maureen and Vanessa had to keep coming up with many different excuses for me to miss lectures. Doing my schedule one item at a time gave them a lot more control.] It wasn't until I didn't come home for dinner that the PIs started getting quite worried about my location. They got one of the younger-sounding PIs to call my home and ask for me. "Who's calling?" asked Mom. "Peter, Mrs. Anderson. I'm one of Mark's classmates at OSU." (They clearly hadn't done NEARLY enough background research on me yet!). Mom immediately knew 'Peter' was one of the PIs hired by the LA money men that Vanessa had warned her about. "Mark's not here at the moment, Peter. I'll tell him you called." "When are you expecting him? I'm hoping to get his help with an assignment that's due tomorrow." "I'm not sure. He's a busy boy." "Do you know where he is?" Mothers should know where their young children are; a habit Mom had fifteen years of practice at so she didn't really consider saying "No." Nor was she going to say the truth. A lie was ideal, and fair considering that 'Peter' was lying to her. Mom thought about where I could be at this time of night. Peter referring to an OSU assignment gave Mom the idea of telling him, "I think he's at the library." "Would that be the Math Library, the General Library, or one of the other faculty libraries?" After the stamp collector hunt, Peter knew all about the multitude of libraries at OSU. Mom thought that was an excellent question, so she answered, "You'll have to look for yourself, sorry." "I'll do that, thanks ma'am." Back to OSU they went. Not all of them, as reinforcements had arrived by now. There were other tasks that still needed doing, such as surveilling the two family homes in the hope that an opportunity arose to sneak in. A couple of hours later, the PIs were starting to get more than a little annoyed by their inability to locate me. They'd unsuccessfully searched every library they could get into (some had closed), I hadn't come home, or to the Williams' house either. "Hello Mrs. Anderson. It's Peter here again. I couldn't find Mark in any of the libraries. I was wondering whether you'd heard from him?" Mom had suspected they wouldn't be able to find me. She asked, "Did you try the Public Library?" (formally the Corvallis-Benton Country Public Library, nothing to do with OSU.) "The Public Library?" "Sure. He just said he'd be at the library. I assumed he meant OSU, but he could've meant the Public Library." Actually Mom had been thinking of the Public Library when she'd first mentioned "library" to Peter. [Mom uses it quite often, such as getting the martial arts videotape that turned me onto Aikido, and a couple of books Donna was reading about Karate. The Andersons were too frugal to buy books unnecessarily.] After Peter had questioned Mom about which of the many OSU libraries she meant, Mom had thought letting him believe she meant an OSU library was best, and it had given her the idea what to say if 'Peter' rang back after failing to find me. Peter said, "Okay. Thanks." One of the options open to the PIs was to call my cellphone and ask me where I was. But I was presumably on alert as my house was being guarded by hired security and Robert Williams during the day (they knew who he was because they'd run his plates, and had followed him back to the Williams' when he was replaced by my parents coming home). It was unlikely I'd tell a stranger where I was, and it might make me run for cover, so they elected not to take that route. I was still going to OSU, so I obviously wasn't being very careful. They'd corner me sooner or later. I wasn't at the Public Library either. They decided to merely wait for me to come home, and follow me when I left tomorrow morning. They'd get a chance for some 'quality time' with me tomorrow morning. To their distress, the only people to arrive were the new shift of our security guards, clearly intending to patrol all night, and a young woman who subsequently patrolled the house from the inside. Much the same happened at the Williams' residence, except the internal patroller was a boy. During the night Mom or Dad got up at random intervals to check that all was well, and that the internal guard wasn't watching TV or otherwise not doing her job - which was to check all the rooms virtually constantly. All the doors were left open with the lights on. Donna was sleeping with Carol in the double bed. What the girl thought of that was the least of Mom's and Dad's worries. Mom or Dad would stay up long enough to give the girl a break, then they'd go back to sleep again. It was a bit hard on them, but it'd only be for a few nights. Similarly at the Williams', with either of The Boys or Vanessa getting up and checking on things. I never came home, so the PIs thought I was most likely staying at a friend's place. Or maybe I'd been smuggled into the Williams' home by hiding in the back of a car until it was parked in the garage, and had thereafter stayed out of sight. All the drapes were drawn throughout both houses, so my hiding out inside the Williams' wouldn't have been hard. My home had a detached garage, was single-level and not so well draped, so my hiding there was unlikely. My going on the lam was considered the least likely possibility as I'd been at OSU during the day. They'd have to try to acquire me at OSU or school tomorrow. So Wednesday ended with the PIs thinking they were on to something, but totally unable to get close enough to confirm it. Thursday morning, as the kids were being taken to school, one of the PIs thought to ask, "Isn't there a Honda Civic registered to Julia Williams? Where is it?" Which soon become, "Has it been seen since we arrived?" It might've been at a mechanic's being repaired, as it was an old car. Or maybe it'd just been sold. Or maybe the missing car was connected with the missing Mark. But they knew I was fifteen, so I couldn't be driving it legally. I shouldn't even know how to drive yet. Unfortunately (in the PIs' opinion), they hadn't identified me until mid-morning yesterday, so they had no idea what transport I'd used to get to OSU. It seemed unlikely that my parents would let me habitually drive illegally. If I'd been panicked into fleeing, my taking the car might have been believable, presuming I was a 15-year old who knew how to drive, but I'd apparently been wandering around OSU all day. The PIs were confused. They did their best to reacquire me. There were no walls or fences around OSU, people came and went along every road, every path, between every building, across every field - there was no way the PIs couldn't reliably monitor the entrances, but they stationed several people around the Math Department building at OSU, with more checking out the libraries and student lounges. They also staked out OSU's parking lots for my Honda or to catch a lucky glimpse of me. My high school has one main entrance, with a foot and bike path in the back way, so monitoring the people entering school was much easier. The PIs didn't see me enter school, of course. From their point of view, one possible reason for their missing me was that the volume of foot, bike and vehicular traffic was so high they couldn't be sure I hadn't gotten in unobserved. A couple of the students who'd been shown my picture and asked about me mid-morning Wednesday had told Julia about it, which she passed onto Vanessa yesterday evening. Vanessa realized that the PIs might have discovered Mark attended OSU by asking at school, especially because Julia was explaining Mark's absence by saying he was at OSU. So Vanessa had called my mom as soon as they were both at work, which led to Mom calling the school. The school confirmed that a woman had been asking for me yesterday. Mom said what she and Vanessa had planned, "That woman was the front person for a weapons development company that aggressively tried to pressure Mark into to signing up with them. They'd heard what a genius he is and wanted to get the jump on all the other hi-tech firms that will be bidding for him. They annoyed Mark considerably yesterday, even disrupting one of his lectures. They were aggressive enough that I wouldn't be surprise if they come back again today. For the next few days would you please refuse to answer any question about any member of my family. Not even confirming whether or not they're at school. Vanessa Williams also wants you not to answer any questions about her daughter Julia in case they know that Mark spends a lot of time with her. Will you do that for us please?" "Yes. I'm very sorry. The woman said it was a family matter." "I can't say I'm surprised. Weapons companies aren't known for their honesty. No real harm done, but please refuse to confirm or deny that you've heard of anyone called Mark, let alone whether he's in class today, okay?" "Yes, certainly we will. I'll make sure everyone here knows." Vanessa had enjoyed the scam she and Maureen had pulled off the day before, and had briefly described it to Mom. That gave Mom enough information to have a cute idea. Mom added, "If they do turn up today, would you pass on a message to them from Mark. 'Their behavior at OSU yesterday annoyed him considerably, and if they ever do it again, he won't hesitate to call campus security on them.' Can you do that please?" "It'll give me pleasure. I don't like being lied to." "Thank you very much." It was only a quarter of an hour later that the school's office lady got to say, "We will not answer any more questions about Mark Anderson. I am extremely annoyed at your lying to me yesterday. Mark is annoyed too. He says if you annoy him at OSU again, he'll immediately call campus security on you. Now get lost before I call our security!" Shortly after that, a young student approached OSU's Math Department office and tried to find out where Mark Anderson would be. Maureen put the fear of God into him (actually, "fear of the Head Secretary", but the two aren't dissimilar inside a large organization), gave him some effective warnings never to be someone's lackey again, and sent him packing out the back way. By mid-morning Thursday, the PIs had been unable to determine whether I was at school, OSU, or somewhere else, but it seemed they must've gotten close to me yesterday. Then the local head of the operation got a call from Vegas telling him they had to get proof of our cheating by 10am tomorrow. "We can't get into their houses because they are guarded inside and out 24/7, and even if we could get in, anything incriminating would be long gone by now. We can't locate Mark Anderson. We got close to him yesterday, but there are tens of thousands of students at that university. I don't think it's going to be possible in that timeframe." "What would help?" "A lot more people; we need to comb that university. It's a nightmare to search. There are thousands of students, hundreds of rooms, and every hour or so everyone gets up and changes location. We have to keep re-searching the same areas over and over again." "I'll send another thirty or forty guys. Most of them will be independents from the nearby cities, okay?" "It's just grunt work, so that'll be fine. How far over the line do you want us to go?" "What've you got in mind?" "We can't get bugs into their houses, but we can bug their cars and maybe their workplaces?" "Approved, but don't get caught. Going over the line has to be invisible or the targets will go public. The boss insists on that." "That's tying our hands. This doesn't look doable with the limits we've got, especially the time limit." "I told the boss that already. That's his call." He'd called it sensibly. Doing something extreme - like having twenty men storm the houses and turn them inside out looking for proof of cheating - would cost Binion's far more than $11 million. It'd cost them everything, even if they found the proof. They discussed various possible actions, some of which were approved, some were not. One of the measures they did take was to throw more money at their contact in my cellphone carrier. They soon learned that my cell had been turned off since Tuesday evening, except for a minute on Wednesday morning when it'd been turned on at a place called McCleary, WA. "Where the fuck is McCleary?" They learned it was a small town two hundred miles north of Corvallis. "What the fuck was he doing in McCleary? And how did he get back to OSU so quickly?" The time between the two 'sightings'- my cellphone's usage at McCleary and when they thought I was at OSU - was 3.5 hours, and it was a 3.5 hour drive so it was JUST possible, but not by bus. They decided that I was probably lying low by living with friends in McCleary, commuting to OSU in the Honda Civic, perhaps driven by someone else. They sent some people to McCleary. They had a busy day accumulating a great deal of useless information about me, Prof and the other members of the two families. Trivia like the number of speeding tickets we'd each got wasn't going to break this case for them, but the nature of such investigations is that the more information that's gathered, the more chance that an important clue would be included. They couldn't find a reason for Prof to need urgently $1 million. They put quite a lot of effort into that, but it was a difficult aspect to research. Neither could they find ANYTHING that indicated we were likely to be gambling cheats. Our being into math was a worry as that screamed suspicion that we'd invented a super-system, except that the number had been pre-chosen for the first bet and chosen by Ted for the second. They sent some of their trusted people to all the nearby casinos, and our pictures were recognized at Spirit Mountain. Spirit Mountain's boss informed his Vegas compatriots that we'd been there once very recently, we hadn't any idea how to play, had lost a trivial amount, and had left. Our visit was over a week ago, so the videotapes had been overwritten. Spirit Mountain was surprised to learn I was underage, but they couldn't remember anything about my ID (despite their security guard having checked it three times). They naturally connected the inquiry to the huge win at Binion's that was all over the news, especially within the casino industry, but the investigators merely said, "We cannot comment. I'm sure you understand." Our names had never been mentioned, and no photos were left behind. It didn't take the PIs long to find out I wasn't at school by dressing a couple of young agents as school kids and sending them into school pretending to be "new students" when they were searching the place. They learned that I drove a Honda Civic to school every day and that I had my license, which they soon confirmed with the DMV. How a 14-year old could get a license had them scratching their heads, but they couldn't find that out through any of their usual DMV contacts. They also learned about www.EggsSearch.com.hk, as it was the talk of the school, especially after the big lunchtime meeting to discuss it the previous day. They weren't sure how to react to it. The pipeline scheme was laughable, but very many of the girls at school were excitedly talking about signing up for it. A lot of the information the PIs had learned about me earlier had been factual rather than subjective, so some of the things they heard about me at school surprised, worried and confused them. For example, they already knew to be worried about their physical safety when approaching me because one of the first things they'd learned about me was that I'd had no difficulty taking down three martial arts-trained adult members of the Eaton family; but at school they heard me described in words - which when translated into 'Adult' - meant, "inoffensive", "a gentleman", "quiet and unassuming." Words like "hunk" having no bearing on their investigation. They bugged Vanessa's, Prof's (found at the airport), Mom's and Dad's cars easily. The Boys' cars were too risky, as they were parked where they could be observed by the patrolling security guards and neighbors. The neighbors had been put on alert by seeing our security guards, and the neighbors' suspicions had driven the PIs away from their parked observation posts several times. Bugging The Boys' cars was saved until they could be done under the cover of darkness. The PIs also put location trackers on all the cars, the reinforcements from Vegas having brought with them a considerable amount of additional equipment. Dad's workplace was a factory floor, so they weren't be able to bug that. Bugging Vanessa's office was easy because there were all sorts of people walking up and down the corridors, the doors all had the lecturers' names on them, Vanessa was often out of her office, and the locks they used were a joke for a pro. They bugged Prof's too, even though he was in Vegas, because it was so easy. Mom's company took security fairly seriously - industrial espionage was not uncommon in her industry - so the PIs couldn't bug Mom's workplace without spending time learning exactly what Mom did, then setting up a suitable cover story to allow someone to spend time with her. They didn't have the time to do that. Breaking into Mom's workplace at night was deemed too risky. There were many other activities going on, such as running down the calls that appeared on any of our phone records and finding out whether the other party could be associated with roulette cheating, as one of the strongest possibilities was that Prof and/or I were front men for the real cheat. The baddies had all sorts of other drains on their time too, for example, they'd outstripped the supply of rental cars in Corvallis and the surrounding towns. That constrained their maneuverability until they'd ferried enough cars to Corvallis. They were unable to intercept me going to my tutorial, so they sent another PI to talk with the Math Department office, to find where I was scheduled to be next. Maureen handled the inquiry. "Let me check." Maureen walked back to her desk. Tap, tap, tap. Then back to the window. "He's registered for a special lecture at 5pm." "Nothing before then?" "No, not today. He should be at that lecture though, because it's in his area of interest and it's quite special. He should find it very exciting." There was a lecture, but exciting it was not going to be. Not just because I didn't even have an "area of interest" yet. It was one of the faculty presenting the results of some of his research. Even for Mathematics, it was going to be dull. "What room would that be in?" Maureen supplied that. "Thanks." As the PI started walking away, Maureen called, "Hang on. Are you intending to go into the room, or just wait outside?" "Umm. I should be able to find him outside, shouldn't I?" "I would imagine so. I'm not sure how popular the lecture will be, but he might arrive in the middle of a big group and get inside before you can get his attention. You won't be allowed to enter the room unless you're registered. We can't allow gatecrashers to events like this, you know." "What's involved in registering?" "Let me check if there are any spare tickets." Maureen walked back to her desk. Tap, tap, tap. Then back to the window. "You're in luck, there are vacancies. Registrations are supposed to be closed already, but I can give you a receipt that you can produce if you're asked for it. That'll be $95 please." "Ninety five dollars!" "Yes. You're quite lucky you can get in at all. You don't have to register if you're happy to be kept out of the room. It's up to you?" The PI would include it in his expense claim, so he coughed up. "Just the one, is it?" asked Maureen. "Umm. Is it a very large room?" Unfortunately for Maureen, and hardly surprisingly given the subject matter, it wasn't. "No, it's not." "One will be fine then, thank you." Maureen wrote up a receipt for, "Lecture Registration x 1" and handed it over, adding, "Produce this if you're asked, and enjoy yourself." Maureen and Vanessa had known that they wouldn't be able to keep fooling the PIs about my continual absences. In fact, they were astonished that the PIs were still trying. Vanessa had considered her little trick as nothing more than a time-wasting joke, an attitude that Maureen had picked up on. The $95 rip-off had been Maureen's spur of the moment idea, arising out of her contempt for the PIs. After the PI had wandered off, Maureen announced to her girls, who'd all been listening avidly, "That's going to end up in our Christmas Fund if I have anything to do with it!" Given that Maureen was in charge of coding up the daily accounting transactions for 'her' Department, it was certainly going to end up in the staff Christmas Fund. [In truth, the OSU confusion didn't make much difference. It worked for so long because there was no other source of information about my whereabouts (by far the most important reason for that was my keeping my cellphone turned off). Even if Vanessa hadn't had her little idea, the lack of any other information would have left the PIs without a direction to go in.] At 4:30pm I turned on my cellphone to check for messages. Then turned it off again. At 4:35 the PIs were informed that my phone had just 'appeared' in Sandpoint, Idaho. "Idaho! Where the fuck is Sandpoint and what the hell is he doing there?" What I was doing was calling Mom. If they'd been able to bug Mom's workplace they would've heard Mom tell me to dump my car, and giving me a cryptic quiz of a phone number, none of which would've helped them much, other than telling them I was on the lam. Fifteen minutes later they got another call from their helpful source in my cellphone company. "Mark Anderson's phone is back on and staying on by the look of it." A team was sent to Sandpoint, Idaho. A trip that took them 4.5 hours to arrange and fly, as without prior warning the best they could do was to charter a fairly slow aircraft. Amusingly, they would have more or less flown over top of me, as my trip to Boise was originally in a straight line to Corvallis. There was zero chance of their spotting any car from their altitude, let alone mine, but it was still amusing. They hadn't been ready to move long distances quickly, something they fixed by chartering a much faster jet in San Francisco and sending it to Corvallis in case it was needed. The builder's truck that I'd thrown my phone on the back of hadn't driven far, unfortunately. He was a local carpenter who'd stopped off to buy some stuff while returning home from working on a customer's new house. When the first PI team arrived in Sandpoint, they rented cars and quickly went to the area their cellphone mole had given them as the best estimate of my phone's location. There aren't a lot of cellphone towers in Sandpoint, as it's a community of only a few thousand people, so there was a large margin of error in the location estimate. Nonetheless, their mole was able to tell them roughly where the phone was, and that it'd been moving; the implication being that I was active in the area. The PIs drove around, but were unable to spot me or the Honda Civic anywhere, probably because it and I were three hundred miles away. It was being driven farther away all the time too, although that wouldn't have affected their chance of spotting it much. The PIs had to do it the hard way, so they called for more help. They were sent a lot more, as this seemed the best lead on me. Lots of help made no difference at all. I seemed to be somewhere in a residential area, but they decided against knocking on doors in case that led to the cops being called. They set up observation posts on all the possible street exits, conducted roving patrols and binocular searches of the houses inside the area, in case I stuck my head up. They hoped to acquire me in the morning. But if they did, they'd have to be all over me damned fast because the 10am deadline was looming. An 'interrogation team' was sent to Sandpoint. Not torturers, as that level of action was far beyond what was approved. The interrogators were a couple of senior guys who knew the full picture, and who thought they'd be able to quickly intimidate a 15-year old boy. Back in Corvallis, the PIs still weren't getting anywhere. They'd successfully bugged The Boys' cars while they were parked outside their home after dinner, but that was of no help as the cars weren't used all night. Included in the equipment sent north were some very small window mounted bugs. They could be stuck to the outside of windows to pick up sound from within the room. There were two problems with that: in both houses all the drapes were closed which partially reduced the bugs' effectiveness, but the greatest problem what that the security guards frequently checked the windows carefully. Although the bugs were impressively small, they'd still be quickly discovered. There wouldn't be any doubt what they were, or on whose behest they had been planted. The suggestion of using them was vetoed. They tried having an apparent married couple (a male and female PI holding hands) casually walk past my home and get into conversation with the security guards, to either discover information, or to pull them away from the house long enough that the backyard could be penetrated and the rear of the house entered in order to bug a couple of rooms. But the guards had been well briefed with the usual LA money men story, and had been told that an attempt on the house was highly likely tonight, so they refused to be drawn into conversation, returning to their rounds almost immediately, which sent the two would-be cat burglars in our backyard running to clear the area, tails between their legs. The same was simultaneously being done at the Williams', with a little more success. The Williams' house is substantially larger than ours, so it took the guards longer to patrol it. It also had an extensive garden, giving the baddies plenty of hiding places, so their approach and escape times could be cut shorter. They managed to get one of the windows open, but all the windows had the drapes pinned closed and pinned to the wall around the window frame. To get into the room the drapes would have to be forced apart, which would be immediately visible from within, and not something they could put back into the original position when they left. They were on a reconnaissance mission only, to find out whether it was possible to get into the house. They were under strict orders not to get caught because that would ruin the negotiations going on in Vegas. The risk of Prof almost certainly going public, versus the highly questionable benefit of getting someone inside the house for a few minutes, was a no-brainer. After encountering the drape problem, the two 'burglars' closed the window then retreated to report. They had the floor plans for the house, and knew the window they'd gotten access to would let them into what I've been calling the Guys' Room. Prof and Vanessa had extended their house a couple of times during the many years they'd owned it, and there were two rooms labeled "Study" in the plans, one downstairs, one upstairs. The PIs had no chance of getting upstairs without taking a totally unacceptable risk of detection, but they might be able to get into the downstairs study. It meant going from the Guys' Room, through the Hot Tub Room, down a hallway, then into the study. They could plant bugs there, check for evidence of roulette cheating, then leave either through its window, or back the way they'd got in. There was a significant chance of discovery, particularly as it was likely the family patrolled inside their house. (This was mostly supposition. The Andersons' house was easier to look into, and they'd been seen patrolling. It was likely the Williamses did so too, as the modi operandi of the two families were otherwise the same.) Then there was the problem of how to re-pin the drapes after exiting. Or, alternatively, pin them immediately after entering, then leave through a door, which also had problems. They passed the problem upward. Who passed it upward again. The word came back down, "No." The likely damage from being detected was far greater than the likelihood of discovering something useful; incriminating evidence was not going to be left lying around waiting to be found within a few minutes' search or from taking copies of any hard disks. In addition, the house phone line was apparently not being used to call anyone important (they had the phone records for ALL our phones), and even if they got the right study, and it was used for conversation, the chance of an alerted household having a conversation that gave everything away and led to usable evidence fast enough was too low. The only real chance of a breakthrough was in locating me, and "intimidating the boy into confessing and explaining how they did it." The baddies couldn't think of any acceptable approach, given the constraints imposed on their actions, so they ended up effectively doing nothing overnight. Friday morning the PIs didn't bother trying the Math Department office again. They'd gotten the $95 hint that it was not going to be helpful. The Sandpoint builder was an early starter, and was on the job before phone carrier's mole was. When the mole arrived at work, he found out that my phone had moved. The Honda hadn't been seen, but the phone was now outside the area the baddies had under observation. They quickly relocated to the new area ("area" being plus or minus a mile or two), but had no luck in the new location either. They started canvassing people ("Have you seen this boy?"), but no one had seen me, not even the builder. The builder found my phone about 9:30am. When he did, he tried to look through the list of names and numbers for a clue to help him find the owner (e.g., "Mom 555-1234"). But there were no phone numbers stored, which puzzled him. So he called back the last number that'd called my phone. He got a "Your call cannot be connected to this number" message, which made even less sense because that number had recently called my phone. [It was Prof's cellphone number, from when he'd buzzed my phone in the casino. Prof had quickly reported his phone stolen to stop Binion's receiving his calls.] The builder decided the phone was far too fishy, and it was only a cheap-looking one anyway, so he turned it off, wiped his fingerprints off it, wrapped his hand in a rag, then threw the phone far over the back fence and into the trees behind his building site. There was no way he wanted to get into a mess with the authorities trying to explain how a fishy phone had ended up in his truck. From the PI's point of view, I'd tried to call Prof from somewhere in Sandpoint just before the deadline, then I'd dropped off their radar by turning my phone off. They had a last paroxysm of activity, trying to find me before I moved out of the area untraceably. Just before I'd left the café before getting on the bus to leave Boise, I'd called the cryptic phone number Mom had given me, and had talked to Vanessa. Vanessa had borrowed someone else's phone for a few days, and had been taking a long time to answer it because she walked out of her office before doing so as she was well aware that her office was insecure. It was an unnecessary precaution, because the baddies didn't have the numbers for either the calling or receiving phones, and Vanessa didn't say anything that gave away my location, because I never told her what it was. Not to mention that it was far too late for them to even get to Boise, let alone find where I'd gone after I'd left that city. The frantic PIs in Sandpoint got an extra hour when the deadline was extended to 11am, but time was never their problem; my being at the other end of the state was. Shortly after 11am they got a call telling them to pack it up and go home; that it was all over. By the time I called Vanessa from the bus at 1:30pm, most of the subcontracted PIs had already been paid off - in cash, so there'd be no trace to Binion's - and had left town. A few guys had to remain behind to collect the bugs and car tracking units. The last of these (off The Boys' cars) couldn't be retrieved until after nightfall, but they'd finished everything and left before I arrived in town just after midnight. Patrick updated his lawsuit and news release documents to reflect that the $11.2 million had been paid, and he provided the modified documents to Binion's lawyer, saying, "If there is any sign of any investigation or harassment whatsoever against any member of the Williams or Anderson family, or if Binion's release any details of what happened - including Mr. Williams' real name - then we will sue Binion's for everything from sexual assault on Mr. Williams' stump, harassment of a minor to the extent that he ran away from home in fear for his life, through to interest on the money you withheld for several days. I wouldn't expect to win a major settlement, but I would expect to do irreparable damage your client's reputation." Ted knew there was no point in starting anything, especially as it was likely that the bulk of the money would quickly disappear, and so would be irrecoverable. Ted still very much wanted to know how it'd been done, that's if something had "been done." Ted couldn't make up his mind about that. It smelled like a scam, but intellectually it seemed impossible. There were all sorts of conflicting signals, such as Prof's opening a bank account in Vegas minutes before he entered the casino. Why would he open an account unless he knew he was going to win? But no scam artist in his right mind would commit such an obvious give away. Even if Prof was only a front man, his backer wouldn't have overlooked something as obvious as that. Ted was confused. The only thing he wasn't confused about, was that he was NEVER going to accept a large wager on roulette ever again! ------- Chapter 183: Meanwhile, a Few Loose Ends Saturday, May 7, 2005 By this time I'd told them my story too, which had mostly been a matter of me saying, "While you were doing that, I was driving to X," where "X" was about the only part of my story that changed from day to day. There'd been a few interruptions to the smooth flow of story telling. The first occurring early when Prof remembered to ask me where my fake ID and disguise was. I told him I'd hidden them in the car, and he made us go out and get them immediately, "In case the other side searches your car and finds them." Once we were back inside, Prof said, "I'm tempted to destroy this, but there's probably no need to be so paranoid anymore. It might be useful one day, so I'll hide it away again." The second interruption was when I'd remembered to offer Prof the balance of his $2,000 back. He said, "Keep it. I wouldn't like to empty your wallet until we're sure everything is back to normal. Besides, we're earning interest on the money at a fairly impressive rate. I don't think a grand or two either way is of much importance." The third was when I described how I hadn't thrown my cellphone away the way I'd been told to, but had left it turned on and had hidden it in a guy's truck. That got some laughs, and a comment from Julia, "It's a pity we'll never know how much trouble that caused them." [[I've just finished describing exactly that a few paragraphs above, so obviously I did find out how much trouble it caused them. But not until I researched it for this autobiography.]] Vanessa said, "Now that you're back, you can report your phone lost. Who's your carrier?" I told her. "Same as mine. I've got their number in my phone, let's call them now." Vanessa was doing it as she was talking, so she wasn't really asking a question. A few minutes later my phone was ancient history, thereby saving me from having to listen to all the messages from my LA bank, offering their new, highly valued customer all sorts of wonderful offers on essential services like life insurance, money management, and my "very own customized, personal banking team", who were, I would've been told, "dedicated to serving me." It was sad to think that because I'd canceled my phone, my dedicated team was left languishing in LA, with no contact with the person they'd dedicated their lives to. "Good," said Julia, "now we can buy you a decent phone." "You may not want to do that," said Prof. "My Vegas PI told me some horror stories about mobile phones. For the last year or two some of the phones, especially the top-end ones, have had a feature which allows them to load software updates automatically, like Windows does, except the phone's owner doesn't know it's happened. If you've got one of those phones, the phone companies can install software in a specific person's phone whenever they want. -- "One of the things they frequently do for the FBI, is install software in a target's phone which makes his phone look normal, including looking turned off when he thinks he has turned it off, but it's really still turned on. It's set up to make calls whenever the phone company tells it to, with nothing showing on the phone's display. If the guy walks into a meeting the FBI wants to listen in to, they tell the phone company to get his phone to call their number, and they record every word heard through the phone, which is usually everything because they've got great microphones on them. The FBI doesn't even need a warrant, because they're not planting a bug or doing a phone tap. The guy's phone actually calls the FBI, and they're allowed to record what they hear! I don't think it'd be a good idea for us to carry around microphones that the phone company can turn on whenever they want, do you?" "Good God, NO!" Was pretty much everyone's opinion. "What about our phones?" asked Vanessa. "Ours are all too old to have that so-called feature. Mark and I are both going to need a new phone shortly, so I'll get my advisor to email me a list of the phone models not to buy. He said he had such a list." Julia told me, "I'll quickly tell you what's been happening at school. We had the big lunch on Wednesday and got a good turnout. We easily got the first two pipeline groups picked already, and there are others waiting. I did that earlier today - 'earlier yesterday', I mean, as it's past midnight now. I only picked two groups - not the three I originally intended for the first intake - because Carol, Ava and I selfishly want more time with you, to make up for all the time you've spent avoiding us over the last few days." There was a little joking and some mutual hugging for a few seconds, then Julia continued, "The first pipeline dates with each group are next Friday night and Sunday daytime, to give them time to prepare." I said, "The Sunday date will have to be changed to after that weekend. I won't be available. I'm going to be busy celebrating my wedding anniversary." "That's on Saturday." "I'm planning to do a LOT of celebrating! We won't be back until Sunday night, or maybe Monday morning. I haven't had a chance to research the details yet." "Where are we going?" "Away," I said, with an, I'm-not-telling-you smile. "Oh, goody! I don't have a thing to wear either! I'm REALLY looking forward to going shopping. Your bank account is burning a hole in my pocket, haha." "No shopping." "Excuse me?" "No clothes shopping. Not until I give you permission, which certainly won't be before our anniversary." "What! But that's a WHOLE week away! Carol and I are going to lose two whole weekends; those are prime shopping days!" "Who's the Lord?" "I said I'd die to protect you, but I never said anything about giving up shopping! That's asking too much, haha. Seriously? No shopping AT ALL, not even for clothes suitable for a wedding anniversary night out?" "Not even for a new handkerchief. I'm being fair though; the same restriction is going to apply to Carol too, haha. To be totally fair, I'll even apply it to myself. How's that?" "Cruel and unusual. We've got $11 million in the bank, and we can't go shopping! That's unnatural." "I'm just trying to make sure there's some money left over to buy a mansion with..." "That reminds me," interrupted Vanessa, "we can start contacting realtors again..." "Not now, Mom," interrupted Julia back. "Mark's talking about something more serious! Do you really mean NO shopping. As in 'None'?" "Yes, as in none, zero, zilch and nada. I have my reasons. I'm pretty sure you'll be happy once you understand." I did have my reasons. I'd spent part of my very boring driving time thinking about how to celebrate our wedding anniversary, and I'd come up with something I was pretty sure Julia and Carol would like. "You're taking a big risk, coming between two females and their shopping. Are you sure you know what you're doing? Okay, I'll restrain myself for a week. It's going to hurt though." "I'll kiss it better." "I don't think your lips can reach where it's already starting to hurt: in my soul! Sorry Mom, now we can go back to your less important question about where we'll be living." Vanessa said, "Which I believe was the reason why we wanted the money in the first place. I was thinking that Felicity and I should start looking at houses again this weekend. There's no reason to hold off, is there?" "Not that I can think of," agreed Prof. "Sooner the better," from me. "In fact, even sooner than sooner would be even more better. I'm very eager." "Good. Tell your mother to give me a call to discuss it in the morning, please." "Will do." Julia said, "Let me finish the school things while I remember, if only to distract me from the anguish I am feeling because of your cruelty. The second pipeline group's date has to be after the weekend of the 14th, right?" "Yeah, but not Aikido night. Any evening after Monday is fine." "Okay, I'll tell them. Speaking of dates, we changed dinner with Ava's parents to Sunday night. Ava doesn't know you've been having trouble. She thinks that you've been working hard in LA. She's been encouraging Carol to do you know what, but there's been no progress on that front. As far as I can tell, I don't think any of the investigators discovered Ava was one of your girlfriends, so I don't think she got involved in any of that. I've talked to her every day, and she never said anything. I think it's just been life as usual for her. -- "The dinner with Lily's family is still on for tonight. I invited Chloe for you, mainly because there was no reason not to. I've talked with her a little, trying to get her head straightened out about that silly, wanting-to-be-forced thing, but I doubt I've achieved anything. I've been too worried about you to worry about her. That's about it for school, I guess." "What about all the schoolwork I've missed? Did you get copies of everything?" "Sure. It's all in your study, both the 10th and 11th grade stuff. I didn't bother mentioning it because it's not an important part of school, haha." Prof said, "We should let you get back to your family shortly, but we need to agree on what you're going to tell them, and everyone else too. So far no one has connected us to Binion's. Simplest would be to keep the existing story going: that we went to LA and carried out a very clever financial coup down there, with me fronting you because you're a mathematical genius. Some unnamed big LA money men hired investigators to find you to pick your brain, or to find your notes. -- "It's reasonable for us not to provide any more detail than that, but there are two ways the true story could get out. First, someone in Vegas leaks my name. Not many people down there know my real name: Patrick does, some bank people, and some of Binion's people. I'd be astonished if Patrick leaked it. I've had very stern words with the bank managers, which I followed up in writing, threatening them with dire penalties if there's a leak. Screams from customers with $11 million and a lawyer carry a lot of weight, so they should be scared enough. Binion's is the most likely source of a leak. Patrick has put a lot of pressure on Ted Binion not to let any of his people leak my name. He's been told that if his company makes anything public, then I'll make everything public, and he's got a great deal more to lose than I have. He should lean on his people very heavily to keep their mouths shut. -- "The second way our cover story could be busted would be if we transferred $11.1 or $11.2 million into Corvallis - people in the bank here would make the connection. So I'm going to circle the money a bit - into Corvallis, out to another account I'll open somewhere other than Vegas, back to LA, then the same money back to Corvallis again. I'll make it look as if about $15 to $18 million came from LA into your Corvallis account." I asked, "I'm not going to have to pay tax on $15 to $18 million am I? Obviously not, or you wouldn't be doing it, would you?" "No, I certainly would not! You pay tax on profits, and there's no profit involved in circling the same money around so it arrives in the same account more than once. The accountant who will be doing the tax returns for us will know the original source of the money, and he'll have the bank statements and wire transfer receipts for all the transactions, so he'll easily be able to see what we've done. In any event, if we circled $18 million through your account, and $6 million remains at the end, you could tell any casual inquirer that you had $12 million worth of expenses. Businesses have expenses, so that'd be credible. "To make the circling work we have to transfer the money to Corvallis in several lumps, spread over a week or so. The way the cover story has unfolded implies that we've already made the money, but there's no reason we couldn't explain the money's arriving daily by saying that some of the contracts are only just coming due. -- "In summary, I don't see any reason why we can't stick to the 'LA Financial Coup' story. If anybody searches for it, they won't find anything, but that's no problem because the public don't get to see what happens inside that industry anyway. It does billions of dollars of transactions a day, so our little coup going unnoticed would be believable." Julia added, "The teachers and most of the kids at school think you've been at OSU, although stories of strange people looking for you have spread, so there's a fair amount of curiosity. You should start by trying to stick to the OSU story. When the kids at school press you about the strange people looking for you, you could crumble and admit you skipped school to do a week's work in LA. They'd fall for that easily." "You must be looking forward to telling the girls at school that I'm rich now?" I asked politely. I was positive Julia would be busting a gut to spill the beans (I hope the image that mixed metaphor creates isn't too graphic for you). To my astonishment, Julia answered, "I'm planning to wait a few days." After a brief pause, she added, "Haha, Mark. I've surprised you, haven't I? Mom and I want to show you what a huge difference your being rich will make to the way people treat you. On Monday there are going to be lots of reactions to your weeklong absence, the pipeline starting, and everyone knowing that people were trying to find you, so I want to wait a few days to let that settle down before your being rich gets out. That way the contrast will be clear. If you spend the first few days sticking to your 'I was at OSU' story, then begrudgingly admit the LA story was what really happened, then you'll look modest and impressive. How does that sound?" "Fine by me. After the events of the last few days, I don't care too much about what happens at school. I'll probably get back into it later, but I feel a bit disconnected at the moment." "Ohh, you poor darling!" I received a few minutes of sympathy and loving. It was very gushy, and mostly non-verbal, so I'll skip over it. It's very nice to be so cared for. It's hard to keep a good person down (I'm referring to Julia), because as soon as she saw I was reassured enough, she got straight back onto her planned social machinations. "Darling, would I be correct in thinking that you've got something special planned for our anniversary? You wouldn't be asking me not to shop without a VERY good reason, would you?" "First, I did not ASK you not to shop, I commanded it with all my Lordly authority. Second, yes, you're right. I do have something special in mind. I need to do some research and phone calling first, because I couldn't do that when I was on the lam, but I think it should be doable." "Will it be expensive and impress the girls at school if they hear about it?" "I think it will pass those two criteria quite easily." "Goody! In that case I might not say anything about your being rich until after our anniversary. What you've got planned is the sort of thing I could boast about at school, isn't it?" "It's impossible to imagine you NOT boasting about it." "Great! That's what we'll do then. Politely stick to the story that you were at OSU, then after next weekend I'll be unable to restrain myself about whatever it is that happened, so your being rich will get out. It is going to be expensive, isn't it? With all this money, it'd be a sin not to do something impressively expensive." Vanessa laughed, adding, "I'm beginning to think it's our daughter that needs to learn money management skills, not Mark." "I resent that totally unfounded slur on my character!" declared Julia. "It's Mark's idea, not mine. I'm just innocently sounding him out about it. Perhaps showing a small amount of enthusiasm, but you can't blame a girl for that, haha. What is it, Mark?" I said, "It's a secret. One you shouldn't get too excited about yet because I have to confirm my idea will work. I've never done anything like this before, so there could be unforeseen problems." Julia waved her hand, "Sure, but you'll make it happen. If need be, just throw more money at it. That fixes a lot of problems. I am right that it'll be expensive, right?" "That's mostly up to you and Carol." "Oh goody!" Prof said, "You might have made a VERY expensive mistake there, Mark, haha. If I were you, tomorrow I'd tell Julia your idea wasn't practical, so you'll be buying her and Carol a bunch of flowers instead." Julia let her father know what she thought of that suggestion. After he cried "Uncle," I asked, "Speaking of Carol, how much does she know about what's been happening?" Julia answered, "I've been keeping her up to date at school each day, so she knows most of it. Not that you're back already, or some of the small details I just learned when Mom and Dad told you, but most of it." Vanessa said, "It's up to you how much you tell your parents, Mark. We've abided by your wish to keep them unaware of the casino connection because that's your secret to control. Do you want to come clean and tell them all about Vegas, or do you want to stick to the LA story with them?" "Ahh, I'm rather surprised you're offering me the choice. This would be a good time to ask you why you haven't told them the truth already? While I was away, I thought you would." Prof answered, "It's your responsibility. We don't like deceiving your parents, but their needs come after yours. You have to learn to make large decisions and to manage the consequences of them, including taking responsibility when they go wrong. We can see that your life is quickly accumulating major responsibilities, and is going to include even larger ones in the future, so we have to let you learn how to handle them. In only a year or two, you're going to be out in the big, wide world, making all of your own decisions. That doesn't give you long to learn." [[As Prof more or less said, he and Vanessa were willing to lie to my parents not because the lies were necessary, or even a good idea, but because they were MY idea - or more accurately, keeping Mom and Dad in the dark was my idea, the exact details of the cover story not being important. Prof and Vanessa wanted me to take responsibility for things, and the lack of time available to train me required cutting some corners. If the secret blew up in my face - something they thought it probably would - then I'd learn some lessons from that too.]] "Oh. I never thought of that issue." "It's an important one, but we'll discuss that some other day." The look on Prof's face made me realize that he was worried about being bugged, so we should discuss some things, such as my abilities being the reason my future responsibilities might be so significant. Vanessa added, "Don't worry about this now, Mark. We have months to discuss the big picture. I'm sure your family wants to see you as soon as possible, so we'll just talk about the immediate issues now." "Umm, okay. About the LA story then. I'd like to tell Mom and Dad the truth, of course, but Mom would blow her stack big time. She'd have a serious meltdown about our risking our lives so stupidly and immorally, which is how she'd see it. She'd be bent out of shape for months. What really puts me off coming clean is I wouldn't be at all surprised if she refused to have anything to do with the mansion, which would REALLY screw things up. It seems totally pointless to let her worry about gambling, and possibly stop the mansion purchase, when there isn't going to be any more gambling. I think we're all VERY agreed on that, aren't we?" Everyone was quite emphatic in their agreement. Our earlier naïve idea that I could go down to Vegas whenever I needed to top up our bank accounts with a few more millions was truly dead and buried. I continued, "Dad would be okay to tell - he'd even be impressed - but I'd rather not tell him without telling Mom as well. I don't see any point in keeping the topic alive. The sooner it's forgotten, the better." Vanessa agreed, "Okay. We'll go with that. The real story might get out anyway, probably in the next few days if it does. I'm sure there are reporters searching for Ivan Roberts. I heard one interview where Binion's said Ivan Roberts was a foreigner, and that 'Roberts' was an Americanization of his real surname, which would have thrown the reporters off the scent nicely. Binion's are publicly keeping up their end of the bargain, but it's got to be a 50/50 chance whether Prof's name ever gets out, so don't dig yourself too deep a hole with your parents." I nodded. Unfortunately, in this situation it was going to be difficult to dig half a hole. "I suggest you keep your story as truthful as possible. Tell them that you did fly back from LA to Corvallis when you did, about getting the message from me to arrange the meeting by your Aikido club, your driving north, etc. Everything after that can be exactly what really happened. Just be vague about what happened in LA, okay?" "Yes. I can easily say I don't want to tell them about LA because the fewer people who know the details, the better." "Yes. Also remember to watch what you say and do in your house for the next few days. You should assume the house is bugged until that's been checked out, so don't do anything with any girls who will be upset if their activity becomes public knowledge." By which Vanessa meant Carol, so, "Bummer!" "Yes, it's unfortunate, but we don't want Binion's to try to blackmail you if they think you're likely to prefer to protect the girl. I think your family should keep their security going overnight. We'll be keeping ours going until the morning, just in case Binion's think they have a quick chance. -- "We're about done here I think. We should convoy you to your home to make sure nothing happens, then leave you to your family reunion. I'm sure they won't mind you waking them up." "Good. I'm looking forward to getting home. Julia, you don't have anything planned for me during the weekend, do you? Just Lily's and Ava's parents' dinners?" "Yes, that's all. Why?" "I was thinking that I should spend a fair bit of time at home, so Mom and Dad are reassured by my being around. I'll take some of my schoolwork with me, and spend most of the day catching up on that on the kitchen table, and fending off their questions, no doubt. You didn't mention our going to the Aquatic Center, so I presume that's off?" "Yeah. I wasn't sure when you'd be back or that you'd have time for it. Do you want me to call around and set it up for Sunday?" I would have happily made the time for it, if it'd been booked already, but Julia was probably right, "No. Thanks anyway, but I'm not sure how much time I should spend at home. We should do that some other time, when things settle down. Maybe one week night?" "Fine by me," agreed Julia. "I've got more spare time than I thought, now that I'm not allowed to do any shopping." Julia poked her tongue out at me. "Haha. It's only for a while. I'll let you loose before long." "You've already said not before our anniversary. With $11 million in the bank begging to be spent, that's already a lifetime!" It was time for me to head home. I collected a pile of my schoolwork from my study and we set off, Julia and me in our car, Prof and Vanessa in Prof's. Almost immediately, Julia said, "Car shopping is on the list too." Just for fun, knowing that I had zero chance of making it stick, "This car faithfully took me halfway around America." It was an exaggeration, but it sounded good and wasn't something I was worried about having any possible bugs overhear. "It'd be a shame to get rid of such a good, reliable car." "{Raspberry}..." #2: " ... We'll get you a reliable car. A much more impressive, reliable, NEW car." "You're right. The new model Honda Civics look very nice." "{Raspberry}. Leave it to me. I've got some good ideas already." #3: #2: #4: #2: #4: Which reminded me to tell Julia, "I don't think I'll come back and study at your house in the morning. I'd better stay at home. And by the time I get enough sleep, there'll probably be almost no studying time left anyway." "Sure. I wasn't expecting you to come back. I'd like to visit you later though. Maybe when you're ready, Ava can come pick me up, and we can come to your place?" "Sounds good to me. When all the family gushy stuff has finished. If Ava comes, how much do you think I should tell her?" "I don't think you should tell her anything about Vegas. There's no point in her knowing anything about that. But you could tell her that you earned a lot of money in LA. Don't say $11.1 million because that'd give it away. That's been mentioned on the news often enough that you don't want to say that figure to anyone. Tell her a few million. Like Dad said, say that some of the contracts haven't been paid yet so you don't know what the final value is. Remember to tell her to keep it quiet. It'll be more than a week until you publicly admit your wealth, so it'll be a good trustworthiness test for her." "Good point. I'll do that. By the way, keeping my wealth secret for another week means no car shopping until after our anniversary." "Sure, that can easily wait." #2: ------- Chapter 184: The Non-Prodigal Son Returns Home Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) Both cars parked in front of my home and we all got out. Prof told me, "We need to introduce you to the guards first." One of the guards was standing close to us, the other much farther back, which struck me as a sensible tactic, based on my extensive knowledge of security procedures, gleaned from several years of TV watching. The guards obviously knew Prof and Vanessa, who introduced me. The Williamses stayed with me until I'd unlocked the door, let us in, and introduced myself to the young woman whose job it was to scream if someone tried to sneak into the house. [Prof had been assured by his PI advisor and Patrick - both with total confidence - that Binion's would NEVER authorize the use of force. Sneaky illegalities were to be expected, but overt criminality wouldn't happen.] The Williamses started leaving as I went to rouse Mom and Dad. Dad met me halfway. He'd been sleeping lightly and had been wakened by our noise. Soon there was a LOT more noise. We had a GREAT reunion! Lots of hugs, tears and talking, with Carol providing the most of the first two reactions, and Mom most of the last one. One somewhat upsetting thing I noticed was that everyone's nightwear wasn't their usual. They were all dressed in shorts and T-shirts, presumably so they could leap out of bed and do whatever needed to be done if there was any trouble. When the gushing had died down far enough that people actually became coherent, the questions started. I was conscious of the girl who was wandering around the house, so the first real thing I said was, "If you want to get into details, we should take it into one of the bedrooms and close the door." It turned out that they did want to get into details. I turned on Mom's bedside radio fairly loudly, to provide some covering noise, and said, "Let's not get too detailed. Prof's going to arrange to have the houses checked for bugs early next week, so we shouldn't say too much before that's been done." By which time everyone would have calmed down a great deal. I wasn't worried about the 'buggers' - a pun Mom would understand - hearing my comment. It'd motivate them to remove their bugs, which was fine by me. [As I mentioned earlier, there were none. The only indoors places that had been bugged were Vanessa's and Prof's university offices, and those bugs were gone already.] Mom urgently asked, "Where've you been?" I started giving her a lighthearted review of my travels, beginning from when the flight from LA had touched down in Corvallis. It didn't take long for Mom to express worry about the danger I'd been in. I agreed with her, "I was very scared. It almost bit me." "Huh? What almost bit you?" "The big, nasty fish. It took a dislike to me, and didn't appreciate me catching it. I almost lost the tip of one of my fingers." I had INTENDED to go fishing, I did catch a couple of them in NP-boxes, and it's not as if fishermen are known for telling the truth, is it? My making it funny might help calm Mom down. "You went fishing?" asked Dad. "Sure. I spent all of Thursday very enjoyably floating around in a rowboat on Lake Pend Oreille. That's a lovely lake in Idaho, with good fishing. I can recommend it. I forgot to take any sunscreen, so I nearly got a bit of sunburn too, so I guess that could be considered dangerous too, couldn't it? Haha. -- "I was NEVER in any danger, Mom. I was having a vacation for a few days. It was quite relaxing. I didn't eat as good as home though; any chance of anything good in the fridge?" "I'll get it!" Carol jumped off my lap to get something for me. I'd been hoping Mom would volunteer as food preparation activities relax mothers, but Carol was a good second choice for someone in need of relaxing. "I never had any problems, Mom. I just went from place to place, did some fishing, read some books, got plenty of sleep, saw some of the country. There was a bit more driving than I'm used to," by a factor of a thousand, "but no big deal. I quite enjoyed it." "But they could've caught you!" "They never got close," I said, taking a guess, "and it wouldn't have been a big deal if they had. I'd much rather have spent the time fishing, but having to say, 'I'm not going to tell you' a few hundred times wouldn't have been a big deal. They just wanted to know how I did it, or to find my notes about how I did it. There weren't any notes, but they didn't know that. They had a chance to earn some serious money if they could get my cooperation in time. I didn't want to be bothered with them, so I avoided them. And I've still got a few contracts that are yet to come due - over the next few days - which I didn't want to be messed up by anything they tried to do. It was simply easier to stay out of their reach." "But they could have tortured you! People will do anything for large amounts of money." I laughed heartily. "Mom, you watch FAR too much TV! There was never any possibility of their torturing me. They needed my active cooperation. I've got a head full of complex mathematical formula, rules for when to use which formula, how to combine them, etc. It's all incredibly complicated. There's absolutely no way they could torture that stuff out of me. Even with my active cooperation and honest intent to explain it as well as I could, it'd still take me several hours to explain what I was doing and how. I could leave out one tiny piece and they'd never know. It's not the sort of material you're going to get out of someone if they were screaming in pain. -- "They know how complicated their business is, and they know they needed my active cooperation. Or, failing that, they were hoping I might have left extensive notes somewhere, but you know the way I study so you know I'm not big on taking prolific notes. More likely than not, they'd spend most of the time begging me to join their company, be their partner or whatever. They were basically just very rushed headhunters; in the business, not criminal sense. -- "I'm not interested in the business. I just thought it was a good way to make some money, so we could afford to buy a nice mansion, and somewhere for Donna to keep her horse." That instantly got a very excited and happy Donna onto my side. The next little while was spent on horse-related questions: "When can I get one?", "When can I start looking for one?", "Where will we keep it?", "How many can I get?", "Should I get a boy or girl horse?", "Can't we get it earlier, and keep it here for a while?", etc. I'm sure I don't have to tell you what sort of answers Donna got. When we managed to get back to what everyone other than Donna considered the main topic, I said, "Mom, did Prof or Vanessa ever suggest that you were in danger of being kidnapped and tortured to force me into coming back and telling them what I'd done?" "No. They said there was no physical danger. We just had to worry about break-ins, bugs, and that sort of thing." "That should answer your question then. They were in a hurry, and they're rich, so they threw a lot of PIs into finding me, but that was all that was happening. Some of their PIs might've been nosier than they legally should have been, but you never gave them a chance to do much, and now it's all over anyway because they only had a brief window to get ahead of their competitors. Prof and Vanessa suggest that you keep the security going overnight, but when daylight arrives everything will be back to normal. Not quite normal, because we've got more money now." #1: Dad asked, "How much money?" "I haven't got the final figure yet, Dad. That'll take another week because some of the contracts haven't come due yet. I'm not sure exactly, but it'll be a few million." Both families had talked about buying a mansion and creating two $1 million emergency funds, but judging by my parents' reaction, they hadn't really believed it. Donna was quickest off the mark, announcing, "Oh boy! We can buy LOTS of horses!" Mom incredulously asked, "A few MILLION?" Then a second later, "DOLLARS?" Carol climbed back on my lap by now, smiled happily at me, and informed me my food would be heated enough soon. [She fetched it for me after the {Ding}, in a couple of minutes.] "Haha, yes Mom, dollars. I've got no idea what you thought the alternative to dollars might've been. In a few days we should have enough of them for a nice mansion. Probably for bit of frivolity too." #2: #3: #1: "By the way, I prefer not to let anybody know that I'm rich yet. Julia wants to hold off on that until after our anniversary." I squeezed Carol's waist and NP'd her lips closed for a moment, letting her know she was included, but not to say anything. "The money will be arriving in dribs and drabs next week, and I don't know how much it'll be yet. And Julia wants things to settle down at school, so I'll be able to tell how differently people act when they know I'm rich. So please don't tell anyone about it." #1: My request for secrecy confirmed Mom's suspicion, "You don't know that you're actually going to get this money, do you? It might all evaporate." "I shouldn't think so. A good chunk of it is already in our bank accounts in LA. The only way it could evaporate is if someone emptied them. Only Prof and I can do that, and I trust him. The money wouldn't have gotten into that account without Prof putting it in." #3: #2: #1, #3: "Which reminds me, Mom, Vanessa asked me to ask you to phone her in the morning when you get up. She wants to start mansion shopping. The sooner the better as far as I'm concerned." "This is real?" "I know I've got an unusual sense of humor, but this would be a pretty poor joke. It's as real as it can be short of having the cash piled up in front of us. Unless something very strange happens, the money will start arriving on Monday. I know you won't really believe me until you see it, so let's drop it until Monday, okay? It's only a couple of days. And remember everyone, please keep the money secret. That especially means you, Donna." Donna didn't need to ask why she was being picked on. She answered sincerely, "I promise I won't tell anyone. I'll be good this time." "Good. So what happened to you guys while I was enjoying my sightseeing and fishing vacation?" They filled me in, the conversation zigzagging a fair bit as they thought of additional questions to ask me. Not much had actually HAPPENED to them, but they'd sure had a hell of a time worrying about everything that COULD happen. I felt sorry to have inflicted so much worry on them. I made a mental note to ask Prof to put $1 million into Mom and Dad's account first thing Monday, on the expectation that it'd cheer them up somewhat. One comment that came up was Mom asking, "Before you went to LA, you said this was only the first trip. There aren't going to be any more 'adventures' like this, are there?" Mom was asking with the tone of voice mothers use to indicate that their question better be answered the right way, or else! "It was the only such adventure, Mom. It was more successful that we planned, but much more trouble too. If we need more money in the future, we'll find some other way of doing it." The conversation lasted quite a while, until after 3am. Whereupon Dad said, "I'd like to get some sleep tonight. The rest of this talk can wait until the morning, okay?" Mom and the girls were very tired too, so Dad had little trouble getting agreement from everyone. Mom said, "You'll have to sleep in..." I overrode her, saying loudly, "In my shorts and T-shirt, in case something happens. Yeah, I can see that Mom." I'd thought Mom was about to say, " ... in your old bed." Or possibly something even more incriminating. Carol was sad, but there was nothing she could say. She was reluctant to let me go, but there was nothing she could do about that either. Eventually we started moving out of Mom and Dad's bedroom. Dad told Mom, "I'll check the property first." Dad was tired, but I only need four hours sleep, so I said, "Leave it to me, Dad. You need your sleep, and I had plenty of rest on my vacation. I'll get up several times during the night too, so you and Mom can sleep straight through." "Thanks. I'm pretty bushed. I do a circuit or two with the guards, checking all the windows and grounds. Here's a flashlight." Dad gave me a big flashlight he had by his bed. Mom said, "Is it safe for you to go outside at night, Mark?" The question had already crossed my mind, including that the security guards might try to nab me (paranoia is a hard habit to break), but with my special abilities it'd take a ridiculous effort to overcome me, unless they used tranquilizer darts or a net, and that was getting both silly and ridiculous. "Mom, let me remind you of two things: the Eatons and Dad cowering in the corner of Julia's room." Good luck to any buggers trying to make sense of the last reference. "If anyone comes after me, you should worry about them rather than me. I've still got my shoes on so I'll check around outside. Go to bed everyone else." Dad said, "I'm not going to argue. Mark can look after himself better than I can, and I'm short of sleep. I can sleep straight through, right Mark?" "Sleep like a log, Dad. Thanks for holding the fort and sorry I caused so much trouble." "You can tell me in the morning. Goodnight all." We were in Mom and Dad's bedroom, so Dad was effectively saying a polite, "Go away now please." We left the room, and the girls headed down the hallway, a bit reluctantly. I cheered Donna up by slapping her butt and saying, "Giddyup horsy." "{Giggle}. When can I get a horse?" "Haha. Go to bed, Donna." "Can I get two horses, after all, you've..." "Donna! You better have not been about to say what I thought." She looked around quickly, seeing our internal, walking, burglar alarm. Donna's face fell. "How many horses can you ride at a time? That's how many we'll get. When you learn to ride two at once, let me know, and I'll buy you a second one. Until then, giddyup to bed." Donna trotted away, before she put yet another hoof in her mouth. I gave Carol a hug, saying, "Goodnight, sweetie. It's a pity you aren't as easy to cheer up as Donna. You don't want a horse do you? I think Donna would like you to want another one." "No, I don't want a horse. I'm glad you're back. It was a VERY worrying time." "Yeah, sorry about that. I've got one idea for how to make it up to you though. It starts with your not being allowed to go clothes shopping." "Huh?" "That's a more polite response than Julia gave me, haha. Trust me, I think you'll like it. I need to do some research to make sure my idea is doable, but I think it should be. In which case, 'No clothes shopping for you and Julia.' Julia said my money was burning a hole in her pocket," Carol giggled, "and she couldn't wait to go shopping. I told her she has to wait until I say she can, and that you have to wait too. A smart girl like you should be able to work out an idea of what I have in mind. You can think about that in bed." I slapped Carol on the butt, saying, "Now you giddyup too." Carol gave me a kiss on the cheek. "Goodnight Mark." "Goodnight, sweetie." I told our walking burglar alarm that I was going outside to check with the guards. I stood on the front step, waiting to see that they would come around to me, which they did a few seconds later. I joined them, "Dad's too tired, so I'll do a circuit or two with you guys." We did a couple of circuits, checking everything VERY carefully. The first thing I noticed was a portable toilet in the backyard. That made sense, as we wouldn't want big, strange security guards going into a house with defenseless girls. Nothing of any significance happened. I thanked them for guarding the house so well. They waved it off with "It's our job." They tried to find out what it was all about. Which I waved off, "Sorry, it's not my place to say." #1: Inside, I had much the same conversation with my girlfriend's brother's girlfriend's brother's girlfriend (or, for short, "Alarm-Girl". I knew her real name was Dana, but you might've noticed that I have a peculiar sense of humor). I also asked her, "Do you need a break now? I've had plenty of sleep recently, so I'm in no hurry to go to bed." "Yes, please." I flicked through my schoolwork while she did a quick check of the house - which was good to see - then went to the toilet and made herself a small snack and drink. I told her, "I'll get up every half an hour or so to give you a break." I looked in on my sisters. All the doors were open and lights on, to make things easier for Alarm-Girl and harder for the baddies. Both girls were sound asleep already. In my room I took my shoes and socks off, but left the rest of my clothes on. I got into bed, set my internal alarm for twenty five minutes, and went to sleep. When I awoke, I lay quietly to see whether Alarm-Girl was doing her job properly, which she was. So I got up and joined her. It took very little time to check the house: for the two occupied bedrooms just visually look to see that the drapes were still pinned down, physically check inside the other rooms, then wander around and do it again. Each time I got up - every thirty minutes or so - we had a little chat, but nothing of any significance happened. She was curious about the people who might try to sneak in to plant bugs, but I politely refused to answer that. In one of our later conversations, she asked about Donna and Carol sleeping in the same bed. "No, they're not lovers. If Donna was any more heterosexual there'd be boys under the window howling the way tomcats do when a female cat is on heat. A pity that's not happening, because young boys prowling all around the property would save us having to pay for your time, haha. Nah, there's nothing to it. At times like the last few days, it's good that they can comfort each other." I was tempted to ask her about her being scared, but I didn't want to raise the issue. [She had been, especially the first night, but there were two security guards outside, Vanessa had reassured her in advance that all we were worried about was sneaky guys, "who'll run like frightened rabbits if you say 'Boo' to them," and Mom or Dad had been up almost half the time during the first night.] I did ask her whether anyone had approached her to ask her for information about our family. She denied it, and she looked truthful. I wouldn't have been surprised if the baddies had tried to bribe her, but apparently they'd decided not to. Dad and Mom each got up once during the night. I missed them both times, but Alarm-Girl told me. She also said Dad did a circuit with the outside guys, which I thought was a good idea so I did the same later. ------- Part 9: A New Lifestyle Begins ------- Chapter 185: A Breakfast for Millionaires Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) At daybreak, I felt much more relaxed and secure. Life was good, provided there were several million dollars in my LA account! I was quite eager to go to an ATM to check that. I'd had more or less enough sleep, so I went outside and offered to get the guys some coffee or whatever. They happily accepted more coffee, as their flasks were drained. I figured fresh coffee was the least I could give them for helping us survive the night. Alarm-Girl didn't need anything as she'd had plenty of chances to snack when I relieved her twice-hourly. I made myself a small breakfast. I killed a little time starting on my schoolwork, waiting for someone to wake up. Carol and Donna were first, so I said to Carol, "Do you want to come for a drive to get some nice food from the bakery?" Carol was eager, and Donna too. "Sorry Donna, but I'll just take Carol this time." "But I want to come too." I just looked at her silently, until she got the message that I truly did just want to take Carol. "Oh, okay. I'll wait here." That'd been my plan. I was learning not to argue with Donna. Carol had to do her morning rituals and change clothes. Macho guys like me don't need to change clothes, especially if they're afraid that their drawers and closet contain nothing but their little sister's clothes. I'd get changed when Dana left. I was very eager to get some salmon bagels, and there was something else I wanted to do... , what was it? Oh yeah, check to see whether I was a multi-millionaire or not. A little explanation about the "salmon bagels" mention: We have a bakery - "Happy Foods" - fairly near where we live. It's run by a Korean family that came to Corvallis via several years in Australia, and they sell an unusual range of food. They make most of it themselves, and some of it can be a little expensive, but Mom likes going there because they have English styles of cakes (it's a pastiche of a patisserie, with particularly pleasing provender). I was eager to get the salmon bagels, as I like salmon very much. It's too expensive for the Andersons normally, but hopefully not today! Thinking of the bakery, I offered, "Dana, do you want anything from Happy Foods? Croissants, bagels, or whatever?" "No thanks. I'll go home for breakfast when your parents are up." Outside I asked the security guards, "Guys, do you want anything from the bakery? I'm going to Happy Foods. Croissants, bagels, or whatever?" "If you're going there, some of their hot meat pies would be great." #1: "How many do you want?" "Would three or four be okay?" "I'm guessing you mean three or four each, right? I somehow can't see big guys like you sharing three pies between you." "Yeah, each. That's not too many?" "I'm feeling appreciative for surviving the night, so eight hot meat pies it is." #2: Walking to the car, I quietly told Carol, "Careful what you say in the car." "Yeah. We've been careful for days." One of the indications of her carefulness was Carol not attaching herself to my arm as usual. That had to be hard on her, considering how much she must've been worried about and missing me. In the car, I started driving toward the bank. I was initially reluctant to tell Carol where we were going, in case the baddies heard it on a bug and used the knowledge of where we were going to set up an ambush, but I realized I was being silly. Paranoia is a pain in the ass (because it sneaks up from behind when you're not looking). I told Carol, "I want to go via the bank to check my account balance. I haven't had a chance to do that yet. I probably did have a chance when I was driving to town last night, but I didn't think about it then. Now I'm having trouble thinking of anything else, haha." "It's good to have you back. You've had an amazing time." "Yes and no. Watching Prof play was amazing. That lasted about ten minutes in total. The rest of the time was pretty boring." I'd given Carol a wink halfway through, to let her know that my comment about Prof's play was deliberately deceptive. "Did you really spend a day fishing?" "Yeah. I enjoyed it. It was very pleasant bobbing on the boat, reading a book, leaning back and relaxing. I caught a few fish too, although I let them go afterward. It was a very enjoyable day." For the first time I was hoping that my car was bugged. -- I added, "I feel sorry for you guys though. I almost hope the bad guys release Prof's real name, because I'd love to sue them for all the harassment and to make sure the public knew what sore losers they are." Making that the second time I wished my car was bugged. Carol said, "I hope everything gets back to normal soon." I knew EXACTLY what she meant! "Yeah, me too. Big time." I used NP to gently stroke her cheek. Not enough to show up on any camera, but enough for Carol to feel it. "Hopefully Monday. I'll hurry Prof up about that." When we got to the bank, Carol got out of the car at the same time as I did. I was a little worried about her seeing what I was about to do, in case there was $0 in the account, but it would have been too important a secret to keep from her. I'd also taken note that Julia had kept Carol fully in the loop, which was obviously the right thing to do with a wife, even if it increased her worry at times - that logic obviously not applying to mothers. With a rapidly increasing heartbeat, I inserted the card and pressed the necessary buttons. The screen cleared, paused for a couple of eternities, then displayed... "Account balance... $8,000,000.00" "Wow!" | "{Screech}." I think mine was the "Wow!", but I wouldn't swear to it. I had no idea why the value was $8 million, rather than $11.1, $11.2 or half of either of those values if Prof had split the amount evenly across the two LA accounts. But neither did I care, $8 million was good enough for me! Carol hugged me fiercely. "I'm SO proud of you!" "I'm rather proud of myself too! I've actually got $8 million in an account of mine; that's amazing. Wow." We stood there, trying to let it sink in. I said, "I feel too shaky; you'd better drive." "Haha. Boy oh boy, it's huge. That's going to change our lives. Mom and Dad are going to be blown away. It's going to take a lot of pressure off them. Mom will be able to visit her parents whenever she wants, and all sorts of other things." "Yeah, and Dad will be able to take time off work, so he can relax by tinkering with our lawnmower at home all day, haha. Let's get breakfast, my treat." I grabbed the ATM card, not wanting to leave that behind! "Haha. I wish I could kiss you." "Not as much as I wish I could kiss you. I want to celebrate, and the best I can do is buy you a piece of cake." "We can't stand around here. Can you drive?" "Sure, nerves aren't a problem." We went to the VERY well named "Happy Foods", and behaved rather silly, buying anything and everything we liked the look of, plus eight hot meat pies. We returned triumphant and giggling from our successful pillaging of the bakery. On the way inside I stopped to look through the many bags to find which one contained the meat pies, found it, and gave it to the guys. They were happy, although not NEARLY as happy as Carol and I were. Mom and Dad were up, and were bemused by the quantity of food we'd bought, and by our silly giggles and obvious happiness. Carol explained, "We're celebrating. This is 'Teenagers Go Wild' Anderson style: we bought one of every single type of everything they had in the place! Haha." "And a LOT more of our favorites. Salmon bagel anyone? I got ALL of them, haha." "We're going to need plates. A LOT of plates! Haha." Soon Mom and Dad were laughing along too, Donna's mouth being full. I cleared my schoolwork off the table, and we laid out all the food, laughing at our silliness in buying so much of it. Dana yielded to the wide array of temptation, and had some chocolate cake. I had as many salmon bagels as I could manage, with appropriate constraint because there were quite a few cakes I had my eyes on. Dad asked me, "I take it that you think everything bad is over?" "I think so. Probably we should check with Prof first, but from my point of view life seems pretty good about now." "I might call him then, and if he's fine with it, end the security?" "Go for it, Dad." Dad called the Williamses, and it was fine with Prof. Then the women got hold of the phones, and started talking real estate. Mom's side of the conversation went as follows: "Pardon? Did I just hear you correctly?" "Okay, I'll be over in an hour. I'll bring a great deal of food with me. Mark and Carol went to the bakery and bought pretty much everything they had." "No, seriously. There's enough food here to feed everyone in your family." "Sure. See you soon." Mom hung up then told us, "The Williamses are coming over. They were about to have breakfast anyway. Vanessa and Julia have been looking at real estate online, and they say there's a lot more choice in our price bracket than when we looked three weeks ago. I don't even know what our price bracket is. What is it, Mark?" "Umm, I'm not sure myself. I could guess, but I could easily leave something out of my calculation. You'd better wait a few minutes to ask Vanessa when they arrive." "Okay. Vanessa says there are three or four good looking properties listed. She wants to see them today. She's not just window-shopping this time, but talking about making an honest-to-God offer soon! This is really happening, isn't it?" Carol giggled. "It certainly is. There are going to be some changes around here. Well, not around here. Around wherever it is we end up living, haha." Dana said, "I'll head home now then. Is that all right?" "That's great, thanks Dana," agreed Dad. "It sounds like we won't need you again. Thanks very much for doing such a good job." There was more of that sort of stuff, Dad paid her, and she left. I said, "I'll have a quick shower. Or maybe a slow, thorough shower would be better, because it's been a while since I had one." After my shower, I checked the drawers in my current room, and they had my clothes in them. I changed into some clean clothes and was back in the kitchen working on another pastry when two cars of Williamses arrived. They'd brought a couple of bottles of champagne and some glasses, and we all had a very happy celebratory drink. Small, in the teenagers' cases, but that was fine with me as I didn't like the stuff much anyway, although I SURE did like the reason for drinking it! The Williamses descended on the food, and it was soon clear that salmon bagels were a firm favorite for most of their family too. We actually ran out of them, although not food in general. When the Williamses had eaten enough, Vanessa announced, "We've been discussing the housing situation at home. Robert and Andrew like the idea of their staying in our existing house, and moving Ashley and Sophia in, no doubt to do the cooking and cleaning. They've already tossed a coin for who gets the master bedroom. Andrew won that, so Robert gets the best study. You can tell they can't wait to push their poor old parents out into the cold as quickly as possible." Prof said, "We've been waiting for them to leave home for years, but now they're staying and we're leaving. They out-waited us, the cunning devils." Vanessa said, "What The Boys are really doing is house-sitting while we see how having our two families in the same house works out. Their staying in our current house reduces the number of bedrooms we need in the new place down to a much more common number, giving us a great deal more choice." #2: #3: Prof started talking, so I quietly asked Vanessa about the bug danger. She quietly told me back, "It doesn't matter for this conversation. Good that you're being cautious though." Prof was saying, "Recent events have highlighted how important security can be. If we'd all been in one house, security and communication would have been much easier." That'd been one of Mom's major annoyances during my absence, Vanessa wouldn't let Mom get into phone conversations with her about what was happening. "For that reason alone, I'd like us to relocate quickly. Another reason for speed is that some of the younger members of our group may not be in Corvallis for much more than a year. Living insecurely for many months while we search for the perfect house doesn't make sense given that timeframe. Our budget is higher than we previously thought and we need three fewer bedrooms - for The Boys and their study - which gives us more choice and makes it easier for us to find a suitable place quickly." Mom jumped in, "What is our budget? All I know is that your trip was financially successful." Prof said, "I can't give you an exact figure yet, there's also quite a lot of flexibility in the budget, and there's also the issue of the detached building for the youngsters. Some of the online properties had various outbuildings already, which could substantially reduce that cost. With those provisions noted, we could probably make offers in the $2 to $2.5 million dollar range. We could even..." Mom made a sort of strangled groaning sound. Vanessa said, "Would you like some more champagne, Felicity? Haha." What Mom most wanted was to sit down. While she was doing both, Prof resumed, "I was about to say that we could even go above $3 million, but it'd absorb nearly all of our financial flexibility, so I'd rather not. If a $3 million property was perfect for us we'd probably go for it, but that's unlikely because of our unusual requirements. It's also unlikely because there are far fewer properties listed in the three millions, rather than the twos, so chances are we'll buy something in the two million dollar range and make the necessary alterations." "That's more than ten times what this house is worth!" said my stunned mother. "Are we really going to buy a two million dollar house soon?" "Yes, Felicity. Vanessa thinks you two can find somewhere that's suitable for us relatively quickly, and we should close on it as soon as possible. One of our criteria is to find a property that we can renovate either very quickly before we move in, or while we're in residence. If we can find a place like that, we could be living in it a couple of months from now." Vanessa said, "I've got printouts of four properties which are suitable for further investigation in my satchel, just from fifteen minutes of browsing this morning. Plus realtors will have properties on their books that we couldn't find in our quick search. When we went looking three weeks ago, we had half the budget and we wanted three more bedrooms. Now we've got a great deal of choice. I'd be surprised if we can't find something suitable quickly. I wouldn't go so far as to say 'time is of the essence', but Prof and I would like our home security to be much better than it is now. Let me show you the printouts in my satchel." Mom thought that was an excellent idea. While the mothers were doing that, Prof started joking with Dad about all the extra lawnmower maintenance the much larger property would cause him. I heard a woman's voice raised in anger from outside, and looked out in sudden fear and my usual paranoia. I relaxed very quickly, as it was only Mrs. Roberts remonstrating with one of our security guards. She's our most nosey neighbor, and no relation to Mr. Ivan Roberts, the lucky winner of $11.1 million from Binion's. Dad said, "She comes over at least once a day. I'll go deal with her again." Which left Prof free for me to talk with, starting with, "Prof, I hope we can get the place checked for bugs soon. It's a REAL pain living this way!" "I agree. I intend to work on that after breakfast. When I get home I'll contact my PI for his advice on phone models and the right firm to use for sweeping our places." "Thanks. Maybe less important now, but when I was talking to Mom last night she had trouble accepting your financial success. I had a mental note to ask you to transfer my parents' share into their account on Monday. There's no reason why not, is there? Not for such a small amount." "How about I transfer a chunk into your Corvallis account on Monday morning, and you write out checks for the other disbursements. Holding her check should please your mother. Do you remember the shares?" "I'm not sure. Things have changed somewhat." Prof worked out what I was referring to (his betting $850,000 rather than the $750,000 we'd planned on). He said, "That changes nothing." Prof leaned in to whisper in my ear, which mostly meant I lowered my ear so he could reach it, "The Boys 150 each, Julia and Carol 300 each, your parents 1 mil' in total." Prof stood back, asking, "Okay?" "They're the before tax values. So they pay their own taxes, right?" "Yes, it has to be done that way. I'll transfer more than enough into your account, because I want to circulate some, but please don't write checks for more than the values I just told you, okay?" "That raises the next question I was going to ask you: I don't have a checkbook. If I go to the bank at lunchtime and ask them for a checkbook, they'll give me one won't they?" "They'll fall all over themselves. They'll also offer you all sorts of other products and services. Don't sign up for anything except a checkbook. Don't even let them waste your time talking about anything else. Most bank products are poor value, so just tell them to mail the brochures to your home. It might be educational for you to read them, but at your leisure. When you're at the bank, I'll get you to do a wire transfer for me too please. I'll open another account Monday morning and get that bank to text the details to Julia's phone. If you do that wire on Monday, we'll be able to get a couple of circles done by Friday, which will be enough." #3: <$11.1 million less the amounts Prof told us leaves $9.2 million. There's a $1 million gift to Prof and Vanessa, and the two $1 million emergency funds which need 1.5 pre-tax each, so $5.2 million left, so just under $3.5 million left for us after tax. That's nice, isn't it?> #2: #1: #3: #2: I asked Prof, "I want to use a credit card next weekend. How do I go about getting one of those?" "Ask the bank for one on Monday. Make sure you tell them you need it by the end of the week. Just get a basic card for now. They'll probably give you a form that you'll have to get your parents to sign as guarantors for your debts. That means they guarantee to cover your debts if you can't pay them. Isn't that amusing?" "Yeah." Dad had returned from dealing with Mrs. Roberts and wanted to talk with Prof about something. I could hear Mom in the living room, getting excited as she was looking through Vanessa's printouts. I was more than a little interested in what $2 to $2.5 million worth of house looked like, so I went to check. Julia passed me several pages stapled together, saying, "This is the one I like the best." A couple of seconds later I said, "Wow, this is GORGEOUS! And expensive - $2.9 million! How can a house have 4 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms? That seems wrong, somehow. And what's half a bathroom anyway? Wow, look at this picture..." I carried on like that for a while, proving that Mom wasn't the only Anderson who could get excited over expensive real estate. Donna showed me her favorite. After glancing at the first picture I saw why - there was a horse corralled beside the house. A cheap property at only $1.95 million, but it was still Donna's favorite. I commented, "I was hoping to find a house that didn't have big, ugly animals living next door." Donna just laughed, knowing better than to fall for that. Vanessa said, "Most of the properties we're looking at will be large enough for a horse. We want a house with a great deal of privacy, which usually means several acres of land." After I'd looked through all four bundles, I said, "All of these are wonderful houses. They blow me away. I've never even visited a house as good as any of these, let alone lived in one." "So you'd be happy if we bought any of these?" asked Vanessa. "Absolutely. They're gorgeous." "It's a good thing the women are in charge of the decision then. I'd be surprised if at least half of them aren't totally unsuitable for us. We need two master bedrooms, for example. One of the four listings says it has two master suites, but then it praises only one of them without mentioning the other, which raises questions. The other houses might be able to be renovated to create a second master bedroom - that'd be quite easy if they already have two bedrooms beside each other, with a bathroom on either end - but we can't tell that from this information. Then there's the question of where the semi-detached dwelling goes. You can't just plop another small house beside the main house. We need to see the layout of the property for that." "Tell you what, I think I'll delegate mansion-buying to the two mothers. How does that sound?" "Very sensible of you. We'll try to live up to your high expectations. We'll be leaving shortly as I'm eager to move on this." Mom and I both said, "Me too," at the same time. When Mom and Vanessa were about to go, Julia asked me if she could go with them. I didn't know what was going to happen today. I had planned to stay around the house so Mom could be reassured by my presence, but that plan came unstuck when Mom couldn't wait to abandon me to go mansion-shopping. Dad wasn't the type to need reassurance, so I was at a loose end. I said, "I need to research our anniversary celebration, which starts with some online browsing, so I should go to your place. I guess I could do that and then maybe catch up on my schoolwork and maybe OSU studying? I should call my soccer coach a bit later too, to find out what's happening with this afternoon's game." "Excellent. Thanks. Bye." Julia was gone. I'd meant my suggestion only as the start of a conversation about what was going to happening today, but apparently Julia knew what she wanted to happen. Carol said, "Can I study with you, please Mark? I'd like to be around you for a while. It was scary you being away and we didn't know where you were." "Sure you can, sweetie." It'd be nice to have someone near me, and it'd be nice to cheer Carol up, but it'd also be DAMNED hard to behave myself in the presence of the potential bugs. I wanted very much to pull Carol onto my lap and do totally unbrotherly things with her. Carol said, "You should invite Ava around too. She's been missing you. Maybe we could have lunch together." Oops. I'd forgotten about Ava. "That's a very good idea. You've got her number in your phone, haven't you? Because my phone is history and I never bothered trying to remember it when I programmed it in." "Sure." "Can I call her now, and tell her to meet us at the Williams' at lunchtime?" "I'll get my phone." Normally I would have looked up Ava's home number, and used our landline to call it on the chance she was at home. Instead I rang Ava's mobile straight from Carol's. I was turning profligate already. When I called her number, Ava answered, "Hi Carol. Any news about Mark?" I deepened my voice to accentuate the difference even more, and said, "Funny you should ask that." "You're back!" "Yep. Got in early this morning. Are you free for lunch?" "I'm free now! Are you all right?" "I'm perfectly fine." "Carol and Julia were worried about you being gone." "Yeah, I know. They're fine now. Julia bounced back quickly and she's already away doing something I'll tell you about later. Carol still wants to stay near me, in case I disappear again. We're at home now, but we're going to the Williams' in a few minutes. I need to do a few things there." "So what time can I come over?" "How about lunchtime? Vanessa's..." "Aww. Can't I come earlier?" #3: #2: #3: I held my hand over the phone's mic. "Carol, do you mind Ava's coming earlier?" "No, of course not." I put the phone to my ear again, "Ava..." "I heard. What time can I come?" "Give me about an hour and a half please." "Okay, thanks. See you then." I made a mental note to learn how to put someone on hold on my new phone. I called my soccer coach - his number I knew because I call it fairly often. He said, "I'd heard you were away?" "I was, but I got back early this morning. What's the game situation for today?" I learned that we had another away game, but departure time is only a couple of hours away, and it's against a poor team. My team didn't need me, and I didn't want to leave town again so soon, so I asked, "Do you mind if I miss this game? I've been away for several days and I've got a lot of catching up to do." "We thought you weren't coming anyway. After the last game you said you only wanted to play if we needed your help, which I doubt we will this game. Your taking the game off is fine with me." "Thanks. I'll talk to you about the one after that another day. Bye." People were cleaning up the remnants of breakfast and making ready to leave. I checked with Prof that it was okay for Carol and me to come to his place, and got the expected answer. Donna asked for a lift to her athletic club. Dad said he'd call the security guards in, tell them their assignment here was finished and let them finish off whatever of our remaining breakfast they wanted (there was still some food left, as Carol and I had gotten more than a little carried away with how much we'd bought). Prof agreed, saying he would let his guards go when he got back. He and The Boys left. And that was that; my welcome back was finished. The salmon bagels, pastries, pieces of cake and champagne were nice, but the lack of sex was disappointing. Salmon bagels are nice, but they're not in the same league as sex with Carol and Julia. I collected my schoolwork and Donna. Carol got what she needed to get, and we headed off. On the way to her club, I asked, "Donna, you're such a fast runner, what do you want a horse for?" When that joke had run its course, I asked her, "Have you asked whether you're allowed to ride a horse to school?" For a second Donna got excited, and then realized it wasn't going to happen, and I'd known that the whole time. I suggested, "Maybe you could take it to 'Show n Tell'?" Donna didn't fall for that one. I thought to ask, "Have you ever ridden a horse before?" I'd tried it a couple of times; briefly. Horse riding wasn't the sort of thing someone as physically inept as I used to be wanted to risk often. "Sure. Lots of times." "Where?" "I've got friends who've got horses. I ride them when I go to their places." "I had no idea. Do Mom and Dad know?" A guilty looking Donna said, "Umm, I'm not sure. I've never asked them." "Haha. I don't think it's meant to work that way. I have a feeling you're supposed to ask Mom and Dad permission to do things like that first." "They're letting me have a horse!" "Yes, they are. Imagine their surprise when they see that you know exactly how to ride it the very first time." #2: #4: #3: #4: Donna was still thinking about the horse dilemma. So I helped her, "I suggest you start telling Mom and Dad that some of your girlfriends have horses, and ask them if you can practice at their places. I imagine they'd agree, if you were supervised by the girls' parents." "Okay. Thanks. I never thought about that." Which reminded me that she doesn't think too good, so I reminded her, "And remember, Donna, don't tell anyone about me having any money. I would very much prefer you not to say anything about my absence. At most only that I was working hard on something that you don't know about. I want you to say as little as possible." "I know! I'm not going to spill any more secrets." #2: "So have you thought of a name for your horse yet?" It turned out that she'd been giving the subject considerable thought, so it kept her talking safely the rest of the way to her club. At the Williams' house, we took our stuff up to the study, where I said, "Carol, could you please stay out of the office for a while. Otherwise the surprise will be spoiled." "Sure. I'll do some studying in Julia's room." "Thanks. I don't know how long I'll be, but I'd guess maybe an hour." "Okay." I typed in my search request: "air charter jet". I got plenty of hits. I selected the first half a dozen links so I could read their front-pages to get an idea of how this sort of thing worked. The second site had a comment that they can arrange ground transportation, which caught my eye. Reading further I saw they had a concierge service. I had a feeling I knew what that meant, and that it'd be good for me. I clicked the link, and there was a picture of pretty girl holding a telephone, with text saying she'd arrange everything, from collecting dry cleaning through to obtaining concert tickets. I hadn't thought of going to a concert but it was a good idea for an evening activity. I got the impression from the description of the service that it only applied to someone who was a customer already, but what the hell: there was no harm in trying and she looked pretty. They said call 24 hours a day, so I called their number. A pretty-sounding woman answered. "Hi. My name's Mark Anderson. I've never used your service before, but can you give me a quote for what I've got in mind..." I gave a very quick overview of what I wanted, and I was told they'd be happy to help. I gave more details, and it couldn't have been easier. As far as I could tell, she didn't bat an eye when I said a sentence that contained "bed" and "my two girlfriends." I'd thought it best to temporarily demote Carol from "sister-wife" to "girlfriend", given my intended use of the aforementioned bed. We talked about the bed issue for a while, because it wasn't quite as I expected it to be. She explained my options, and I chose the one she recommended. Limousine transport at the other end was easy. I asked her recommendation for a hotel near the area I wanted. She gave me a choice of three. I told her I hadn't stayed in any of those before, and asked her to pick one. She did, adding "I assume you want a sweet?" "Sure." She knew what I was doing better than I did, so if she thought confectionery was appropriate, then that was fine with me, although it did seem a strangely unimportant question. I asked her what concerts were available Saturday evening. "Would you also consider a theater show, sir?" "I'd consider pretty much anything you suggest." She asked me for my email address and immediately emailed me the list of available concerts and theater shows. I looked at it, and managed to recognize some of the names. But my choosing one was hopeless. It'd be MUCH better to get Vanessa's and Mom's input on that, so I said, "Can I get back to you later about which concert or show we want?" "Yes, sir." We chose the few remaining details, and she said they'd have a quote emailed to me in a few minutes. I said, "I won't be able to call you back until Monday, okay?" To be more accurate, I wouldn't be able to pay for any deposit or even quote a credit card number until Monday. "That's fine, sir." I hung up and read some of the other companies' websites until the quote came through. It was an OUCH type of quote, with a LOT of zeroes. Not as many as I had in my account, but a scary number of them nonetheless. The amount wasn't totally unexpected, as another company's site gave indicative pricing and I'd worked out what it'd roughly cost, but it was still large enough that I thought I'd better run my idea past my only existing financial advisor: Prof. I printed out the quote and concert/theater list, turned off the monitor in case Carol popped in, and went in search of Prof, finding him in his study. "Ahh, Prof. While I was on the lam I had an idea for a good anniversary present for Julia. She has several times tried to sell me to other girls by telling them that one day I'd be rich enough to fly them on a private jet to Paris, Rome or Milan to buy the latest fashions. I don't even know where Milan is, but every single girl Julia mentioned her idea to has known. Apparently girls must be better at geography than guys. Chartering a jet to fly to Paris, or wherever Milan is, sounded wildly excessive, but I thought I could charter one to fly to LA, and to take her to Rodeo Drive. Here's the quote. What do you think?" Prof looked at it, and whistled at the approximately $20,000 total. #2: "For this much you COULD fly to Paris or Milan - which is in Italy, by the way. Flying by commercial jet, not charter. But I understand that's not what you're trying to achieve. There's no doubt that Julia will love this. I hope you're not intending to do this on every monthly anniversary?" "Haha. No. Definitely just this one. It's really more of a celebration of your success in Vegas than an anniversary present." "I assumed that was the case, but thought I'd better check. Some people do go crazy when they get some money, and you were starting to show all the symptoms, haha. -- "I see the vast majority of the cost is the plane, which is charged by the hour of flight time. Adding more passengers is hardly going to make any difference to the total at all. Do you know how many passengers this plane can carry?" "I don't know, but I know their website has that information. The saleslady said it was a mid-sized jet because the small jets didn't have the minimum level of bed facilities that I wanted. I don't think I need to explain that to you, do I?" "I think I can guess. It's only a two-hour flight, so I'm guessing it's not in case you get sleepy. It is your anniversary, after all." "My thinking exactly. Shall I go back upstairs and check the seating capacity?" "Or we could do it on the computer I'm sitting in front of." "Ohh, yeah." Prof typed in the website given on their quote, and a few seconds later, "It looks like it seats nine. By the look of the diagram, that includes people sitting on the bed. It's not much of a bed, is it. I had images of a queen-sized bed in its own bedroom." "Yeah, that's what I was originally hoping for too. You do NOT want to know the hourly cost for a jet big enough to have its own bedroom with a big bed. It was very scary." "I'm glad to see you have some sense of moderation. Okay, for this plane you could fly nine people to LA and back for effectively no extra. If you put them up in the hotel, and especially if you paid for their shopping on Rodeo Drive, that'd RAPIDLY change. You obviously wouldn't be silly enough to give other girls your credit card, because they could buy themselves million dollar diamonds on Rodeo Drive. I was going to say you could trust Julia and your sister, if you took her, but I'm having second thoughts about Julia. That girl's idea of moderation is excessive already. Heaven help you if she ever tries to be excessive! -- "I think Julia would be perfectly happy to have other girls with her on this trip. Certainly Carol and Ava, which takes you up to four passengers, so there's room for five more. I know there are some other girls you've invited to the dinner tonight, so maybe some of them, or maybe a couple of Julia's girlfriends. I know she doesn't spend much time with them now because she's so devoted to you, but she might want their company. It's your present to her really, so she should choose." "Ahh, I was thinking of this trip being a surprise." "I think you're better off telling her as soon as possible. She's going to get an enormous amount of pleasure anticipating and planning for this trip. She'll have all the stores in Rodeo Drive mapped out and scheduled well in advance. That'll maximize her pleasure a long way above what a surprise trip would provide." "You're right. I would've gotten that wrong. Thanks Prof, that's very good advice." "My pleasure. You can talk with her about taking other girls. Let her choose. Clearly ONLY the Anniversary Girl gets special treatment. By the looks of the quote, a very fancy hotel room, and I'd suggest $10,000 cash toward Rodeo Drive." "Ten thousand! Wow. Here I was thinking I was spending too much already." "Possibly you are, but if you're in for twenty, you might as well make it thirty, and round off the experience for her properly. The money earns $10,000 from interest in a week and half anyway..." I interrupted him, "Haha. You worked that out too. At 5% it's just over $10,000 per week. How come you said 'a week and a half'? Is the rate only about 3.3%?" "No, it's about 5%. Remember tax. All your private expenditure is post-tax, so you have to allow 50% longer." "Bummer. I don't like paying tax." "You, me and everyone else. Where was I? Oh yes, Julia's anticipation. If you tell her that you're flying her to Rodeo Drive with $10,000 spending money, she'll be dreaming how to spend it for the next week, so it'll bring her a great deal pleasure. You should have two categories of girls on this trip: most of them will be girls that you don't want to throw money at. They're getting a free flight, see if you can get cheap rooms in the hotel, and as many girls into each room as you can. Let them do their own shopping, although you'll be covering dinners and the like. What are you planning to do Saturday night?" "I've got a couple of lists here." I pulled them out of my pocket and showed them to Prof. "I was going to ask Vanessa's advice on which Julia would like the most." Prof said, "Now you can give the list to Julia and let her choose. Once she's chosen, you can ask the other girls whether they want to go or not. Those that do you could easily pick up their tickets. Any girls that don't can look after themselves. You understand where I'm going with that attitude, don't you?" "Yeah, I got it. I'm looking after Julia, and they can ride along cheaply, or look after themselves." "Yeah, much like that. You might want to treat Carol and Ava somewhat specially. I'd leave that up to you, but I'd keep the $10,000 gift as the total, not a per-girl gift." I'd been worrying about that, but the possible bugs had made it too difficult to ask. Good on Prof for working it in so nicely. Another thing I very much appreciated was that Prof's advice saved me from an unpleasant task. Thirty minutes ago I'd been planning to sit Ava down sometime soon to apologize for leaving her behind next weekend. I wouldn't have been able to tell her that it was Julia's, Carol's and my wedding anniversary, so I'd been thinking I'd have to explain it as some sort of "special celebration" for just the three of us. I was sure Ava wouldn't be hurt as she doesn't consider herself as worthy of me as Julia and Carol, but I still hadn't been looking forward to rejecting her. But Prof's idea of opening it up made that worry go away, presuming Julia included Ava, which I was sure she would. There was a downside to inviting more girls, as it'd be harder to have sex with Carol. It'd be impossible in the plane, as the bed only had a curtain that could be drawn to separate it from the other seats, which wouldn't hide what we were doing at all. We'd have to use some subterfuge in the hotel to get Carol to stay with Julia and me overnight. I knew Ava would be VERY happy to help with that! If Carol wanted sex in the plane - and who wouldn't! - she could have it with Julia and Ava. "Okay, I think I've got the gist of it now. I'll sit Julia down sometime later today and tell her about the trip, probably after the dinner." "Tell her before dinner. The sooner you tell her the more time she'll have to savor it, and knowing Julia she might want to play some mind-games with the girls at dinner. Julia loves that sort of thing." "You're right again, Prof. Silly me; I nearly deprived her of her second greatest pleasure, 'mind games' coming after 'shopping', with 'Mark' somewhere further down the list. A thought just occurred to me. Do you and Vanessa want to come down to LA with us? We've got five spare seats." "I doubt it, thanks, but I'll keep the lists of the theater shows and concerts. I'll show them to Vanessa when she comes back, in case one of them greatly appeals to her. You can reprint the lists for Julia can't you?" "Yeah, I've got them. You'd be most welcome to come with us to LA. Your advice has improved my present enormously, and I'm sure Julia would enjoy having you with her." "Thanks, Mark. Let's wait to see what Vanessa thinks, if I can calm her down from her house-hunting excitement enough to tell her about it. I'll give you one more idea. Rather than going down Saturday morning and coming back Sunday, you should let Julia choose the times. She might want to stay Sunday night and come back early Monday morning, for example." "Okay. I'll mention that, thanks." On the way back upstairs I figured it might be better not to tell Ava I was rich yet. I'd tell Julia and Carol about the anniversary trip first, then let them decide who they wanted to invite and how they wanted to tell them. They could have the pleasure of telling Ava. When I got back to the study, turned my monitor back on, and went into my email software to reprint the two lists, I saw there was a new email from the same company. It was from the pretty concierge lady. To summarize, she said, "The internal fitouts of planes differ. I've found an alternative plane that is the same physical size, with two fewer seats but a bed much closer to what you wanted. It's the same cost as the hard quote already sent. Please let me know which plane you'd prefer as soon as possible, because either could be booked by someone else." I started the printing of the two lists I wanted, then called the nice lady. "Thanks for locating the second plane. Am I correct in assuming that the maximum number of passengers of each plane is nine and seven respectively?" "Yes, that is correct. Are you considering increasing the number of passengers?" "Yes. Only considering it at this stage. There's no problem with that, is there?" "No, sir. It's your plane for the duration. We don't need to know the number of passengers in advance unless you want meals catered, which you've already said you don't. Please be aware that FAA" (Federal Aviation Administration) "regulations strictly forbid us from exceeding the maximum passenger counts, nine or seven, as you said." "I understand. Thanks very much. I'll get back to you as soon as I can." "Thank you, sir. Don't hesitate to call if you have any further questions." #2: #3: #4: #2: #4: #3: #2: #3: #4: #2: #4: I folded the lists and put them in my pocket, exited all the software that would give away what I'd been researching, then went to tell Carol I'd finished. I went to Julia's room. Carol was lying on the bed with some schoolwork scattered around her. Seeing her lying on the bed was VERY tempting! It hurt, but I had to resist. I said, "I've finished what I was doing, Carol." "That didn't take long." "No. It was much quicker and easier than I thought..." #2: " ... I found a very helpful and efficient company who made it much easier. I even had time to talk with Prof about it too. It looks like my idea is a real goer. I'm looking forward to telling you and Julia about it when she gets back." "I had the impression it was going to be a secret?" "That's one of the things Prof convinced me to change. It'll be more fun to tell you so you can look forward to it. Hopefully it'll stop Julia telling me, 'You'll enjoy it more if you don't know, ' so many times. I'm going to do my schoolwork back in the study. Do you want to come?" Carol unhappily said, "Yeah," getting up to follow me back to the study. I understood Carol's unhappiness, and I felt the same way myself, there was a perfectly good bed going to waste. Which is why we had to go back to the study. ------- Chapter 186: My First Day as a Millionaire Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) Once I was sitting at my desk again, with my schoolwork open around me, I couldn't help noticing that this wasn't a particularly thrilling way to spend my first morning as a multi-millionaire, but I couldn't think of what else to do (not strictly true, as Carol was sitting a few feet away and I had no trouble thinking of what I'd like to do with her). To distract myself, I decided to spoil myself by writing the sexy spreadsheet that I'd thought of before: Julia had suggested a big notice board at school that would list my day-by-day profits from my day trading cover story. Prof had suggested the profits started low and built up higher and higher, reaching just over half a million at the end. I wanted to write a spreadsheet that would generate the daily values for me, in a fun way. I fired up Excel and specified the first three variables from which everything else was going to flow: Amount To Allocate: $6,700,000. Over How Many Days: Julia had suggested $500,000 as the top value. Linearly between $0 and $500,000 meant an average daily profit of $250,000, but I wanted a learning curve rather than linear, so the average might be closer to $350,000. That would need 19-odd days. So I started with an initial value of 20 in this field. Learning Ratio: I chose 5. This was how much better I wanted to seem to get. My last day's profit would be 5 times higher than my first day's profit, with the days in between interpolated. In the working area of the spreadsheet, I had the first column containing the day number, from 1 to HowManyDays (20). The second column was a "Base Amount", a flat allocation of the amount, AmountToAllocate / HowManyDays ($6,700,000 / 20 = $335,000). The next column was a little fancier. I wanted it to be a "Learning Factor", a factor that modified the base amount up or down to simulate me apparently having a learning rate. I wanted to multiply the first day's profit by 1/Sqrt{LearningRatio}, and the last day's profit by Sqrt{LearningRatio}, so the last day's profit would be LearningRatio (5) times higher than the first's, and to interpolate the other 18 days. That was quite easy to do, but resulted in a distortion because the linear interpolation between 0.45 and 2.24 produced an average value of 1.34. The factor had to average 1.00, or I'd end up 'earning' more than $6.7 million. The obvious solution was to normalize all the ratios by dividing them by 1.34. So I ended up with a "Learning Factor Raw" column, followed by "Learning Factor Normalized" column, which was the previous row's value divided by the average of the previous column. The next two columns were two random numbers between 0.5 to 1.5, with the next column ("Random") being the average of the previous two, as a simple way of dampening the random variations. The last column was the "Daily Profit", calculated as the "Base Amount" ($335,000) times "Learning Factor Normalized" times "Random". I rounded the answer to the nearest thousand, which looked nicer. The Daily Profit formula had an IF statement, so if DayNumber equaled HowManyDays (i.e., it was the last day), then its value was AmoutToAllocate minus the sum of all the previous daily profits, to guarantee that the total amount of profit was correct. Then I created a graph of the "Daily Profit" column. I hit F9 (Recalculate) repeatedly, waiting for a graph that looked as if I'd learned quickly initially then slowed down, had the last day with a value just over $500,000, and in which the daily variations looked 'nice'. It only took a few seconds to hit a combination of random numbers that produced a sexy looking graph, so I copy/pasted the resultant values into the next column (so they wouldn't be lost the next time Excel recalculated). The last two values were $501,000 and $519,000, so I cheated by manually changing them to $499,000 and $521,000. I could imagine the excitement that would have occurred at school if I'd reached $499,000 in one day, followed by $521,000 the next, followed a day later by $0 because, "I stopped because I have enough money now, and besides, exams are coming up soon and I really should do some revision." I leaned back to admire the spreadsheet. I thought of showing it to Carol, but it wasn't really her thing, so I just admired it for a few more seconds, then exited Excel. Sigh. My non-sexual way of celebrating my wealth over with, I turned to my schoolwork. Us multimillionaires lead exciting lives. Half an hour later there was a knock on the study door. "Just me," called Prof's voice. Prof entered, then told us, "My PI advisor got back to me with the information I requested. I've booked a company to come to Corvallis on Monday to sweep our houses, cars and workplaces. It'll take them most of the day and they'll need access to your car at some stage. After school should be fine. They'll either be at your house or ours, so find them and give them your car to check, okay?" "With pleasure." [Both Mom and Dad took a risk by declining to have their workplaces swept. Dad didn't have one, and laughed at the idea of someone spending hours listening to lawn mowers being discussed and assembled. He didn't talk about anything sensitive to our family in the middle of the factory floor anyway. Mom would have to inform her boss to have her workplace swept by a security team (they'd notice several guys waving electronic instruments all over the place, crawling under desks, lifting the ceiling tiles, etc.) Actually Mom wouldn't be able to get the team anywhere near her desk unless she got permission first, and that would have to go way up the ladder in her company, and would no doubt piss off several senior managers. Mom discussed it with Vanessa and Prof and they agreed not to worry about it. If there were any bugs on us, the baddies should be frantically getting rid of them, knowing that a team was coming to sweep for them on Monday. Prof and Vanessa weren't concerned about having to tell their bosses. Prof said his Department Head would find it amusing and interesting.] Prof continued, "I've also got the list of phone models not to buy. I'm going to go buy myself a new one now, do you want me to pick you up one too?" "Yes please. I've gotten used to having one and find it a nuisance to be without." Carol started making peculiar noises, so we turned to look at her. She explained, "Guys are weird! How can you just let Prof buy a phone for you sight unseen? Don't you want to check them all out yourself?" "Why? I just want a phone. If I went with Prof, I'd buy the first one they showed me, and Prof can do that just as well as I can. Actually Prof, you should probably call Julia first, in case she's got some specific requirements. I know she talked about getting one with a camera, which might be useful one day. And maybe one that can record more than three minutes of audio too, although I can't say I'm fussed about either issue particularly." "Okay. I'll call her from the store once I see what choices they've got." "But," objected Carol, "don't you care what it looks like? The color, style, image, etc." "Good point, Carol. Prof, please get me a phone that conveys the image that I'm a wonderful guy, very smart and with a great sense of humor. If it comes in a color that makes girls want to remove their panties, then that'd be good too." "Haha. Of course. I was thinking of going for, 'Distinguished and Refined' myself. I think Vanessa would be upset with me if I bought a phone that caused girls panties to fall down all around me." Carol accused, "Guys are impossible! You've got no idea how important it is to choose the right phone, have you?" We agreed we didn't. "Don't blame me if Julia takes one look at it, throws it away, then takes you to the store herself." "Umm, yeah, I can see that happening. Maybe I should let Julia choose my phone. She does tend to have pretty strong opinions about unimportant stuff like this." Carol poked her tongue out at me. Prof chuckled. "Okay. I'll just get one for myself." Prof left. I made a mental note to think about buying Carol a new cellphone - of her choice - for her birthday in a couple of months. [Carol beat me to it, getting herself a new one almost immediately. I made a mental note that I needed a new mental note for what to get Carol for her birthday.] Carol said, "I saved you from making a big mistake there." "It's a good thing my sister can help me avoid mistakes with my girlfriend, and vice versa, because I sure need help." We went back to schoolwork, until I heard the doorbell ring. I suspected Ava was early, so Carol and I went down to check. Yep. It was a nice reunion, although Ava was much less frantic than I'd expected. She hadn't known enough to be worried, merely that Carol and Julia had been worried. It was soon clear that she also didn't know about the danger of being overheard by bugs, because she started talking about Carol's and my relationship. Fortunately I could cut her off fast enough, saying, "Ava, let's go somewhere pleasant to talk, and have some lunch in a while too. Can we go in your car, because I've been driving hundreds of miles recently." Also because we didn't have to worry about her car having a bug. That was agreed. We told Andrew we were going for a drive, then headed out. We got in the car, and started driving down Julia's street. Ava asked, "Where're we going?" No one cared much, and after a minute or two Ava said, "Can I ask for something?" "Of course. What have you got in mind?" "I missed seeing you bowl 300 because I'd been a bad girl just before that. Can we see if we can get a lane and you do that again. I like bowling, and I'd love to see you do that." I didn't want all the drama again, but I'd previously thought of a solution to that. That left the problem of the baddies following me to the bowling alley and seeing me do my thing there. It was unlikely, but it was possible, and it might give them a clue about how Prof had won at roulette. I said, "Okay. But there are a couple of conditions. First, I will bowl strikes every time, but every frame we'll rearrange who bowls when, that way the scorekeeping computer won't know that I've bowled a perfect game. I don't want all the fuss or publicity of another perfect game. Do you understand what I mean?" "I think so." "That won't be as exciting as the usual way, but you'll see that I've done it, even if the computer and all the other patrons don't understand that I did. Do you still want to do it?" "There won't be any excitement at all. That's a pity, but I guess I'd still like to see you do it, even if it will seem very flat." "The second condition is that I want to drive us to the alley." "It's not far. It's easier if I do it." #3: "Ava, I ORDER you to pull the car over and let me drive." "Oh. All right." Carol started looking frantically around, so I quickly said, "Carol, everything's fine. I'm just training Ava." "Oh. I was worried for a second." "Yeah, sorry. I didn't think of that." Ava had pulled over, we swapped seats, and I started off. I explained, "I'm going to do some strange driving to check to see whether anyone's following us." "Don't crash my car please! I don't want..." "Sorry Ava. I won't do that. When I said 'strange driving', I didn't mean dangerous or fast. It'll be fine. I wouldn't want to crash a car with most of my favorite girls in it, would I?" Carol suggested, "Not to mention you as well." "Yeah, that's a good point too. I'm sorry I've worried you both in the space of a single minute. I think I should shut up now, to avoid saying something else stupid." I did some strange but very safe driving. If anyone was following me, they were doing so by helicopter. Having thought of that, I parked and stuck my head out the window. No visible helicopters. We eventually arrived at the bowling alley. I got Ava to book it and get the shoes, in case the counter staff recognized me. Carol was going to have a game too, which was good. She'd sat out the last time we were here. Carol warned us, "I hope you won't mind. I won't be any good." "Of course we won't mind, sweetie. It's not a competition. We're just having fun and killing some time before lunch. It'll be good to see you enjoying yourself. Besides, I've got a feeling that at least a third of the time your scorecard is going to show strikes." We had to wait for a lane, it being a busy day, so we got a booth in their little food area and chatted over drinks. Quietly, because my conversations tend to be weird. I told Ava more about my "Driving halfway around America in order to do a bit of fishing." It was a pretty boring story, so it didn't take long. I was deliberately avoided mentioning any hint of financial success, thinking that Julia might prefer to be the one to tell Ava about that. Unusually for me, I was quite proud of myself for bringing off the roulette coup, admittedly with a LOT of help from Prof. But Julia was FAR more proud of me than I was, so she'd get much more pleasure from breaking the news to Ava than I would. Ava and Carol talked more about the school social scene. We spent quite a while talking about the pop quiz about me, and the progress being made with the pipeline system. Apparently there'd been a great deal of talk about me last week, which had taken on extra weight when strange people started asking questions about me. Carol and Ava went into quite a lot of detail about some of the stuff, like what some of the questions had been on the pop quiz, which girls had gotten what scores, what some of the funnier answers had been, etc. Also which girls had already joined pipeline groups, either in the first intake or waiting to be chosen for the second or third intakes a few weeks from now. I recognized a fair proportion of the names, but I really didn't care much about the groups' memberships. I'm sure that had I been at school the whole time, I would have been very interested in the conversation, but it seemed somewhat trivial in comparison to recent events in my life. I thought about next weekend's trip to LA. I could see that we might find Ava's help useful in fooling the other girls about Carol's not being in our room overnight. From Ava's point of view, Carol and I being in a hotel away from parental supervision was a perfect opportunity for us. From my point of view, it was "the sooner the better" for Ava to succeed in pushing Carol and me together. Julia was certain to invite other girls on the trip. The opportunity to play mind-games with the extra girls she took, and the girls she chose not to take, would be irresistible. Not to mention that taking other girls would GUARANTEE that the story would get ALL over school. Unfortunately, it also meant that Carol and I wouldn't be able to do anything in the plane, which was a great pity because having sex in a plane's bed would be SO COOL! Which would make getting Carol into my bed in the hotel even more 'urgent'. I very much liked the idea of Julia, Carol, Ava and I all sleeping together in LA. I made a mental note to check with the pretty concierge that the hotel bed would be big enough for four. She was going to start getting the RIGHT impression about me. Eventually, as I knew she would, Ava started edging toward the topic of Carol and me getting together, "Did you miss Carol while you were away?" "I missed all my family, Ava." "No, I mean ESPECIALLY Carol?" I looked at Ava seriously, quietly asking, "Ava, how are you doing at keeping my secrets?" Ava was a little startled at the change of topic, then she said, "I haven't said anything to anybody. I know better than to do that." "Nothing about any marathons?" "Nothing. Not even to Mom or Dad. I promise I haven't." "Nothing about Nipple Power?" "I wouldn't even know HOW to talk about that! I've said nothing about it. That's why I'm not locked up in padded room, haha." "Because unless you're TOTALLY trustworthy, I can't even start to think about Carol the way you're hinting." Ava urged me to believe her, "I am! I promise. I haven't said a word to anyone about any of it. I won't ever break my word about any of that." "I'm not accusing you of anything. I've been away and busy, so I have no reason to believe you've said anything. I'm just making sure you understand how important it is that you keep ALL my secrets." "I do, I do. You're very, very special, and I'm going to prove that you can trust me. I don't want to let you down. I think it's incredible that you've let me into your life the way you have. I'm just an ordinary girl and you're..." "You can stop right there. I didn't pick hundreds of ordinary girls but I did pick you, so you can't be ordinary. I'm just saying that I won't even BEGIN to think about Carol that way unless I could trust you. And I have to trust you for the long term too. Not just for a week for two, but for years. I don't want you to spill the beans a year from now. Actually, you won't be able to spill the beans even if you wanted to, because I'm not going to do anything for a year or two anyway." "What? I don't understand." "I'll START thinking about it now, but it's going to take me a year or two before I decide to do anything. It's a very serious step, and it can't be undone, so I'm going to be extremely careful. Besides, Carol and I will know each other our whole life, so there's no hurry." "But you two are PERFECT! You..." "Shush, Ava. Not so loud." Ava continued much quieter, "I'm sorry. It's just that you HAVE to! It'd be sin not to." "There's no hurry, it's definitely not something that should be hurried, especially as both of us have to be totally convinced it's a good idea. I haven't had time to even start thinking about it yet, and I doubt Carol's that interested anyway, so I..." "She is! She is. Tell him Carol. Carol told me she's having those feelings." Carol said, "I also said it was something I thought I'd grow out of. Just a hormone imbalance, or something." "But you two..." I interrupted, "This probably isn't the best place to talk about it, Ava. We should drop it, okay?" "But... {sigh}. I guess so. When can we talk about it?" "I expect I won't be so busy after exams have finished." "But that's MONTHS away!" "Haha. Less than 2, but I guess 1.75 months counts as 'months away'. Anyway, there's no need for me to even think about it unless Carol feels strongly enough about it, which she obviously doesn't." I made a mental note to suggest to Carol that she tell Ava virtually the same thing (that Carol was waiting for me). That'd drive Ava up the wall! I added, "Changing the subject slightly, I have a feeling you might be learning a new secret shortly Ava. Julia will be telling you something good. Maybe tonight, or..." "Julia's PREGNANT!" "Haha. That's not it. Sorry to disappoint you, but you're not going to be 'Aunt Ava' anytime soon. It's something else entirely different. Julia might tell you tonight, or sometime in the next few days." "What is it?" "You must think I'm MUCH braver than I am, to steal Julia's thunder like that. I won't even buy myself a new cellphone without her approval, so there's..." "{Giggle}," from Carol. It was nice to know my little joke was appreciated, so I gave her a smile as I kept talking, " ... no chance of me spoiling her fun by telling you. You'll have to wait and see." "Meanie! How about a hint?" "Sorry. That's not a good way of keeping something secret." "Then why did you tell me there was a secret in the first place?" "Because I'm a 'meanie', haha. I thought you might enjoy the anticipation, and I knew I'd enjoy the teasing, haha." Ava showed me the point of her tongue. I wasn't sure what and when Julia would tell Ava, but I knew Julia would either be telling Ava that she [Ava] was invited on a private jet to LA, or she'd just be telling Ava that I was rich. Either message was currently a secret, and would probably remain a secret for a few days after Ava learned of it. I subtly changed the subject, "Were your parents okay with their dinner changing to Sunday?" "Yes, meanie. It made no difference to them. Are you still going to stay overnight? We've got school the next day, but there's no reason you couldn't stay overnight, is there?" "Have you discussed this with Julia already?" "Yeah. She said you all could: you, her and Carol. If we squeeze close all four of us will be able to sleep in the bed." "What do your parents think of that idea?" "Umm, they might be thinking that Carol will be on the sofa." "And if they get up before us in the morning?" "Umm. It'll be okay. I'll say Carol slept on the other side than you did." "What happens if there's some giggling and playing around while Carol's in the room. Obviously there won't be anything full-on, because that'd be inappropriate, but there could be a bit of playing around. Wouldn't your parents be scandalized by that?" "We could be quiet." "Haha. Somehow I suspect that four people playing around aren't going to be quiet enough. And I obviously meant playing around in two PAIRS Ava, not all together, so stop looking so hopeful. I don't like the idea of upsetting your parents. They've got more than enough to deal with already. What do they think of you being in a threesome?" "Mostly they ignore it. They call you my boyfriend, but call Julia, 'Julia'. Things like that." "They're not angry, or upset?" "No. I wouldn't let them pick on Julia. She's being VERY good to me." #4: "Your parents are already letting you do what you want, so there's no need to bulldoze them about anything. I'd be happy if all we did was gently encourage them to be more comfortable about the threesome they know about. Adding more can come after they're comfortable with the first part. Let's keep whatever sex we have consistent with what they already know. If it seems okay for Carol to sleep in the same bed, then we can do it, but no playing around. Okay?" Ava agreed, "Okay. I didn't think about it from their point of view." "It's fine. One thing I'm a little worried about is that I lost a lot of college studying time while I was away. I need to catch up, so I'll get up early at your place and drive to the Williams' to study. I'll come back to your place about the time everybody's waking up, so you'll barely know I've gone. My being away half the night will be a good excuse for Carol sleeping in the bed." "Aww, do you have to leave?" "You'll be asleep yourself, so you'll never know." "But it doesn't feel right." "I understand, but you're going to have to get used to it. I can't afford to lose the time or I'll badly disappoint Prof, and I VERY much do not want to disappoint him." Carol said, "Ava, you can't hold him back. A good girlfriend wouldn't do that. We can't keep up with him, and we'd be wrong to ask him to slow down." Ava said, "You're right. I was being selfish. Sorry, Mark." "That's okay. I think you've adapted to our relationship fantastically well in every other way, so don't worry about it. I'll make a confession that sometimes I do silly things too. I lost my cellphone during my trip, and earlier today I was going to let Prof choose my new phone for me when he bought a new one for himself. How silly was that!" Ava had no trouble laughing quite loudly at me. Carol joined in, and I suffered their ridicule and abuse for a couple of minutes. When I had a chance I asked, "Ava, how are your parents holding up health-wise?" "Pretty good to look at. They sometimes don't feel well, but they're both on meds which control most of it. Why?" "I was just asking in general. I know almost nothing about cancer, how it affects people, how it's treated, or any of that stuff. Do they like Chinese food?" "They don't eat it much..." "Oops. Sorry, Ava; I just thought of something. Carol, do you know if Lily knows I'm back in town? I'd hate for her to still think I was away, or not be sure whether the dinner was on or not." "I don't know," answered Carol. "Do you want to borrow my phone to call her?" "I didn't memorize her number. Can I borrow your phone to call Julia please?" "Of course." Carol handed it over, saying, "Speed dial 2." I could guess who #1 was. I called Julia. Before I could say a word, Julia gushed, "Carol! We're having the BEST time. We've looked at some FANTASTIC homes." Julia heard an excited but surprisingly deep-throated 'Carol' say, "That's GREAT news! How soon will it happen?" (I was choosing my language to hide from Ava what we were talking about.) "Oh, hi darling. No time soon. None of the ones we've seen are suitable." "I thought you said..." #1: " ... Never mind. I called to ask about Lily. Does she know I'm back? I'm worried about her family being very inconvenienced over the dinner." "Yeah, she knows. She's been very worried about you, and asking me two or three times a day for news about you." "Oh. I'm surprised to hear that. She never struck me as that sort of girl." "No, me neither," agreed Julia. "I don't understand her." "Boy! If you don't, then I'm going to give up even trying to. I've got NO chance! I'm surprised she hasn't called me then." "I told her you'd lost your phone and that you were too busy catching up on all the stuff you'd missed while you were away. How did the work on our anniversary present go?" "Very well." Figuring that if anticipation was good, then anticipation of anticipation had to be good too, I added, "It's looking fantastic. You're going to love it. I'm going to tell you and Carol all about it when you get back." "I thought you wanted to keep it a secret?" "Maybe I should. What do you think, should I tell you in advance about the fantastic, wonderful, awesome time you're going to have, or should I keep it secret until it happens? "Tell! Tell NOW! It sounds REALLY good?" "It's even better than that! It's REALLY, REALLY good, haha." "So what is it?" "I'll tell you when you get back. I want to see the look on your face." "Tell me now and I'll get Mom to photograph my face." "Haha. Not even close. I'll wait for you to get back. Changing the subject, Prof volunteered to pick me up a cellphone when he got one for himself, but I..." "You DIDN'T! Please tell me you didn't? Dad's got no idea what style of phone to get for you." To get her back for raising my hopes about having found a house for us already, I said, "They all make calls, so what does it matter?" "Argh! Even you can't be that foolish. You must know that you couldn't let Dad buy you one. It'd be totally wrong." #1: "Of course I didn't let him buy me one, Julia! What sort of dummy do you think I am?" Before she could answer, I added, "Carol and I discussed the pros and cons, and we mutually decided that it might be better to let you be involved in such an important decision." "Phew. You had me worried there. Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that Carol saved the day, right?" "She might have even have saved the whole week, given how critically important this issue is." "You don't get it, do you?" "I don't even get that there's anything to get. Don't worry, I won't buy one without your 'guidance'." "Thank goodness! It's good that you've got two girlfriends, so we can take turns looking after you." "Sounds good to me. I'll let you get back to your onerous, boring task." "Thank Carol for me please. Love you both, bye." #2: I gave the phone back to Carol, saying, "Julia says she loves you and 'Thanks' over the cellphone thing. Apparently my letting Prof buy my phone would have been a VERY bad idea." "I thought so." "You thought right. I think you probably saved my life, haha. Anyway, Lily knows I'm back, so no worries there." We chatted for a few more minutes, then got our turn to play. Carol was pretty bad at bowling, but we didn't care. Both Ava and I started giving her some pointers, but I quickly learned to let Ava be the head coach, as she was much better at giving useful bowling advice than I was. I knew very little about bowling, other than how to cheat to get 300 every time. Carol improved noticeably during the game, especially because Ava gave up some of her turns to Carol. My swapping bowling positions every frame meant none of us cared two hoots about following the correct procedures. Carol enjoyed herself. I only had a couple of minor problems. The first couple of balls I was worried about being rusty and accidentally guttering them. So I concentrated on bowling straight down the middle. It was easy, so I soon relaxed and just let my body do its usual high-coordination thing. The second minor problem was a few kids from school recognizing me and came over to chat. They didn't know me well enough to know about the "strange people asking questions", so I didn't have to get into that boring cover story explanation again. The only problem they caused was in delaying the game a bit, because I didn't want to bowl strikes while they were watching, in case they felt compelled to hang around and watch. I encouraged them to move on before I bowled. Everything else went fine. I bowled twelve strikes in a row. It was very low key, as no one else noticed. After the 12th Ava looked at me, and could see I wasn't the least excited. She said, "You don't care that you can do that, do you?" "Nope. Couldn't care less. It's about as exciting as brushing my teeth." "No one would pay you millions to watch you brush your teeth, but you could earn big money bowling." I was tempted to make some sort of comment like, "Who cares about a few million," but I didn't want to spoil the surprise by hinting in advance. So I just said, "It would take far too much of my time, take me away from home all the time, and I'd find it extremely boring. Shall we wander over to the pizza place and have lunch? Not too much though, because we've got a great dinner coming up." Carol said, "Lily's been bringing my lunch every day, and it's been very nice every time. If ordinary lunches are so nice, tonight's dinner should be fantastic." After my huge breakfast I wasn't that hungry, but pizza is hard to resist. I consoled myself by promising to skip my mid-afternoon snack. We had a great time in the pizzeria. Ava sat on my lap, which she normally misses out on because Julia and Carol have first dibs. I enjoyed taking advantage of her. Carol sat beside me farther inside the booth, so no one could easily see her. So I took sneaky advantage of her too, when Ava couldn't see or with NP (I wouldn't want Carol to feel left out). By the end of lunch one of my appetites had been fully satisfied and another fully aroused. Much to Ava's amusement, because she was sitting on it. Which caused a problem: how to organize the sex I was VERY much in the mood for. Ideally I'd be able to have sex with both of them, but - damn it! - that was probably a week away. I couldn't have sex with Carol at our or Julia's homes because of the possible bugs, nor in Ava's home or car because of Ava seeing the sister thing. And I couldn't really have sex with Ava either, because after my scary absence I should have sex with Carol and Julia first because girls get sentimental about that sort of stuff. So even with wasn't going to happen until after the houses were cleaned of bugs. Unless I could borrow Ava's car to take Carol somewhere private and without Ava, which would be difficult to explain. Life was excessively and unnecessarily complicated! I was horny and I had two willing girls, between bugs, puritanical laws and female sentimentality, I wasn't going to get any of what I wanted. Ava got very frisky, and suggested we headed back to Julia's place, telling me, "I want sex!" There's nothing subtle about Ava's attitude to sex, especially not in our group. Carol giggled, "Good idea. I'm sure Mark's even hornier than you are. He's not used to going without." "Umm, Carol. Don't you think I should wait, so my first time is with Julia?" I used NP to make sure Carol knew I included her too. "No, I don't think so. Ava looks like she doesn't want to wait, do you, Ava?" "No. Can I drive back please, Mark? I drive faster than you, haha. Let's go!" Ava jumped up and started pulling me to my feet. The baddies probably hadn't installed video camera bugs, and I didn't really mind them recording the sounds of Ava and me having sex, and I was VERY horny. I'd have to make sure I didn't do anything 'impossible' such as NP'ing Ava's breasts in a clearly visible manner. I'd also have to be careful Ava didn't say anything important, but I had a good idea for how to keep her speechless. Plus, as Carol was sliding out, I double-checked, "Are you sure Julia wouldn't mind?" Carol answered, "I'm sure Ava would, if you delayed her, haha. When has Julia ever minded you doing that, especially with Ava?" #1: No one that lived inside my head argued. On the short, rapid walk back to the car, with a girl on either side, Ava leaned forward to innocently ask, "Carol, would you like to join us?" "Haha. You're not going to give up, are you?" #2: Ava answered, "Not when it's so perfect. It'd be so easy. We could lock the door and the room's soundproof, so no one would know." Carol answered, "Sorry Ava, but I'm not ready for that step. I don't think I ever will be." Ava kept trying, until we got to the car. After that she had to concentrate on her high-speed driving. At the Williams', Carol said, "I'll tell The Boys we're back, then go to the study. You two have fun." Ava had already pulled me halfway up the stairs. I was alert for her saying anything we wouldn't want overheard, but she only had one thing on her mind. I didn't know much about how normal guys have sex (an ignorance I am very happy with), but I guessed I should give Ava seven or eight orgasms. That seemed enough to make any buggers feel inadequate, but not so many as to make me seem extraordinary. So Ava leaped into bed, and I started having very vigorous sex with her. "Oh yeah!" Ava exclaimed. Over the next couple of hours, if Ava tried to say any more than that, I stopped her. Sometimes by suddenly thrusting much harder, or by suddenly grabbing one of her sensitive 'bits', or whatever other sexual activity seemed a good idea at the time. After being cut off several times, Ava suddenly realized that she wasn't being allowed to talk. Her response was typical: she commented on it. "Hey, you're not letting me... , ouch!" (I'd slapped her ass, as it was a prominently displayed target at the time). "You're using me... , ouch!", "For sex. Ouch! You brute. Ouch! Haha." Ava thought that was a great game, and several times used it to spur me to even greater efforts. But after a couple of hours of nonstop, even-more-vigorous-than-normal sex, Ava was worn out. It takes quite a lot to wear Ava out, so today's session should definitely have pissed off any buggers. Walking down the hallway to the shower, Ava commented, "That was fun, the way you wouldn't let ... Oh no! {Giggle}." Because I'd picked her up and was carrying her back to the bedroom. I'd thought of doing it right where we were, in the hallway, but was too worried about leaving a mess on the carpet. A pity, as the risk of being seen would've appealed to her. I dumped her on the bed, did a go-hard, then gave her a no-nonsense, missionary-position drilling. As soon as she'd had her orgasm, I hoisted her over my shoulder and carried her down the hallway to the shower. She giggled, but was too scared/wise/tired/sore to say anything. I carried her into the bathroom, lowered her to her feet carefully, then turned the shower on. Ava looked at me, and made mouth opening and closing motions, non-verbally asking whether she was allowed to be verbal. I very slowly said, "M-a-y-b-e." I pulled her into the shower, then added, "You can probably say a few words, but I'm still feeling horny so you're taking a risk." "{Giggle}." Ava chose her words carefully, "Good Fun. Thank you." "You're good fun yourself, so 'Thank you' too." "Ha! I can barely stand, so THANK YOU, haha. That was awesome. You're incredible in bed. I'm having a great time with you, Julia and Carol. I really appreciate how nice everyone is to me, even your and Julia's parents." #2 : #4: We had a nice, friendly shower, with plenty of enjoyable cuddling and kissing. On the way back to the bedroom I said, "I wonder if Andrew or Robert is walking around?", then I grabbed Ava's towel off her. "Eek." She lunged for her towel, but I danced out of reach. I looked over her shoulder, and said, "Hi Andrew." Ava spun around, saw I'd lied, poked her tongue out at me, then ran naked back to the bedroom. When I joined her, Ava started talking about my little tease. I interrupted with, "Oh, you're talking. You must want some more." I advanced on her, and she ran away around the bed, giggling. I stopped, to let her dress in silence, apart from the occasional giggle. Then we went to the study so Ava could say goodbye to Carol. Carol was working on Julia's computer, and was happy to be interrupted. We chatted a bit about a safe subject - how much Ava enjoyed having sex with me - until Ava started a sentence that was clearly going to be about Carol and me. I didn't want the buggers to hear that, so I interrupted. The non-verbal sex joke would have seemed silly, so I just said, "Let's talk about it on the way downstairs. Or better still, NOT talk about it." I shepherded Ava out. Carol and I followed, and we went downstairs to see Ava off. It was only for three hours or so, as everyone was meeting here at 6:30 before setting off for the Chengs'. As soon as Ava's car had driven off, and before we went back inside, I told Carol, "I felt guilty about going with Ava first. It should have been two other special girls." "Your feeling that way is more than enough." "That's very well put!" "I had a feeling you'd bring it up again. It honestly doesn't matter, so don't worry about it." "I don't understand girls, which I'm sure doesn't surprise you. I thought it'd be emotionally important to make love to those two girls first, but it seems I was wrong. And I thought buying a cellphone was a trivial issue, but both you and Julia let me know I was certainly wrong about that. It seems like an appliance is more important than my demonstrating my love after my scary absence, which can't be right." "You're right - you don't understand girls, haha. Those two girls know how much you love them, so you don't have to deprive yourself and Ava to prove it. Especially when it's going to take a few more days before you can. The cellphone's easy to explain too. You know girls are careful about their clothes, right?" "I'm not sure 'careful' is the right word, but I'll agree with it for now." "Imagine a girl had to pick an article of clothing that she was going to wear every day for years. Can you imagine how important that'd be? That's what a cellphone is. You know how seriously Julia takes her and your clothing." "Ahh, I see what you mean. It makes sense, although it's not sensible. It's just a phone. This is one of those things that's important because Julia thinks it's important, regardless of whether it really is or not." "I suggest you don't describe it that way to her. It's important because every girl thinks it is. Shall we go inside?" "Oh yeah." Carol added, "And you were going to let Prof buy your phone! Can you imagine Julia letting Prof buy your clothes for you?" "Haha. No, perhaps not. I don't think she'd like to see me in whatever those clothes are that Prof wears." "No, I don't think she'd like that." "Changing the subject, how come you were using Julia's computer rather than the closest of mine? It has a much bigger screen and my desk is bigger than Julia's too." "I know it's silly, but it doesn't seem right to use your computer. I know it's only a computer, but using Julia's is fine. I was only writing an English assignment." "I'm sure OSU wouldn't mind. And they'd never know, so you might as well use it if you want." "You really don't understand girls." #1: #2: #4: Carol and I went back to the study. In the room, Carol gave me a sheet of paper. "Prof came back while you were busy with Ava. This is his list of phone models not to buy." "Thanks." I put it in one of the desk drawers and we got back to studying. Julia called Carol's phone about 5pm, letting us know that they'd be home in about half an hour, and that they were having a great time. "I'm glad you're 'having a great time, ' but I was rather hoping you'd be able to say, 'We've found a house to buy.' How are you getting on vis-à-vis actually buying a house?" "You can't just go out and buy a house, Mark. It doesn't work that way. Umm, I guess the best way to describe it is that it's very similar to buying clothes..." "Would that be like guys buy clothes, or girls? Because there's a difference, you know?" "Haha. Yeah, I'd noticed that. It's like buying clothes PROPERLY. First of all we have to scout the market, get a feel for what's available, price ranges, how desperate sellers generally are, etc. There are a huge number of things to consider when buying a property, so we have to look at lots of them to get a good feel for the relative importance and availability of each factor. Then we go back to look at those properties that we thought were reasonable the first time, as well as any new listings. If they measure up after that visit, then we start getting serious." "So it'd be fair to say you're not likely to buy one this weekend?" "Not even close. It's almost impossible to imagine we'll find what we want as is. We want what Mom's been calling 'The Teenagers' Wing' to be semi-detached - meaning away from the main house, but attached to it by some sort of closed-in walkway. None of the homes we've looked at have one of those, or are built with an attached wing that's close enough to our needs. We also want two master bedrooms with en-suites for both sets of parents, very good privacy, security, and other things. We're not going to find a house that has everything, so we're going to have to create a shortlist of possible homes then hire an architect to advise on the time and cost for their alterations. You get the idea?" "Sadly, yes. It's going to take much longer than I thought." "I'm afraid so, but we're working hard on it. We're going out again all of tomorrow and we should be able to do a few weeknights too. Everybody wants to do this as soon as possible. I've got some questions for you. Some of the properties we've looked at have had features we hadn't thought of before. Do you want an airstrip?" "To land a plane on, you mean?" "Exactly." "I'd love to be able to fly, but I hardly think we need a house with its own airport! That's just bizarre. Do people really have those on their own property?" "One place we looked at does. A grass airstrip, not an airport. It's a big property. Forty acres if I remember correctly. The owner lives in San Francisco and flies in for the weekends. Never mind. If you don't want one, it doesn't matter. One house had a couple of bowling lanes. Does that appeal to you?" "Not at all. It's funny though, because that's exactly what we did today. Ava missed seeing me bowl last time, and she wanted to see it, so we went back and I did it again. We took turns bowling first, so it was nice and quiet. Quiet is good, especially these days." The last comment should remind Julia why I can't say "bowling 300" over the possibly bugged phones. "Was she happy?" "Sort of. With the scorecard all mixed up we were mostly just playing for fun. Changing the subject; Ava wanted to welcome me home in what she considered a suitable fashion. I was thinking I should delay Ava until after my special girls, but Carol told me that I didn't need to wait for them. That's okay with you, isn't it?" "That would have been Monday night at the earliest." "Yeah, I'm VERY aware of that. Unless we drove to another town and booked into a hotel." "We're too busy for that and it doesn't appeal much. I'm booked up every day and evening until Monday evening anyway. It's sweet that you had the thought, but Carol was right. It's perfectly fine for Ava to go first. It's not as if Carol and I missed out..." #2: " ... because Ava went first. There was no reason to delay Ava when you both had time and wanted to." I said, "Okay. Let's get back to the house search. Was there anything else to tell me?" "I was saving the question that I thought might interest you the most for last. Do you want a property that has fishing on it? Some of the places we've looked at have streams or even small lakes, and they have fish in them." "I can't say I'm excited over it. Dad and I go fishing maybe once every couple of years, so it's not exactly a big deal. But it's an interesting idea. Maybe Dad or Prof would enjoy it? Are the fish big enough to eat?" "I'm told so. Bass and trout seem to be normal. Have you got time for more questions?" "Sure. Ask away." "Thanks. I'm not sure how much time we'll have to discuss it tonight, because I don't want to do it in front of the other girls yet." "Sure, I understand." "What's your attitude to a swimming pool - does the place have to have one, you don't care, or what?" "Don't really care; I've never been much of a swimmer. I like the hot tub you've got though; I'd definitely like one of those in the new place." "They can be installed quickly, so we're not too worried about whether the place has one already or not, although nearly all of them do. Swimming pools are less common though, and take longer to install. What about a home-theater room? Super-big screen and leather seats, like a small and very comfortable movie theater. Does that appeal?" "I hardly every watch TV, especially these days, so I don't care at all. Dad watches a lot of sports though, so he'd probably like it." "Most of these places have a room like our Guys' Room, with a bar, pool table, etc. That's a better place for sports watching. I'm talking more about a small movie theater room?" "In that case, it's definitely not of any interest to me." "Seeing as how I just mentioned it, do you want a Guys' Room?" "I'm not fussed either way. Probably good if the place had one though, for Dad mostly, and for any entertaining. Dad would love a room like that." "You're very easy to please. The only thing you've definitely wanted is a hot tub, and they're common and easy. What's that?" (Julia was talking to Vanessa, I guessed). Julia laughed, then said, "Mom wants to know if you want a wine cellar? Haha." Just to prove I wasn't easy, I said, "Definitely. That'll be necessary one day." "Huh? I didn't expect that. Do you really want a wine cellar?" "Absolutely. One day I'm eventually going to be old enough to buy a bottle of wine and I'll need somewhere to keep it." "Haha, very good." Julia passed my comment on to the moms and I heard their chuckles. Then she asked me, "Lastly, do you have an opinion about how much land you want? There are essentially three types of properties, and hardly any properties fit in the gaps between the types. Small properties: one acre or less, like our existing homes. Most of those are in town. Medium-sized: three to five acres, usually fully landscaped and around the outside of a town. Very large properties: with thirty acres or more. They've usually got a fair amount of bush, trees or are vineyards. They're quite a few miles from the nearest town." "We're not into vineyards, are we? We don't even have a wine cellar." "No, none of us are into making wine. Several of the places on our list for this weekend are operating vineyards. If one of those houses suited us the most, we could buy the property, rip up the vines and sell off all the equipment. That'd leave us with some landscaping to do, but that's far less of an issue than getting the right house to start with." "Okay. It just took me by surprise, is all. Umm, you were asking about property sizes, weren't you?" "Yeah. Do you have a reason for preferring a certain size of property?" "I have no preference. I've never given it any thought. Big enough for Donna's horse, and for Dad to have an excuse to buy a fancy lawnmower. I don't have any need for myself." "So in summary," said Julia, "you don't have any requirements at all. Is that right?" "A BIG bedroom! And I have a feeling that it's going to need to have a HUGE closet!" "That was the first thing I thought of! Can you think of anything else YOU need?" "A good study, but I'm sure Vanessa hasn't forgotten that." "No, she hasn't. The two studies - yours and theirs - are Mom's top priorities." "PLEASE tell me you mean second priorities, AFTER the kitchen! A guy can't study on an empty stomach, after all." "Gee, I hope the moms have remembered that we need a kitchen. I meant the studies were top priority AFTER the essential rooms." "Dad's always wanted a good workshop." "Your mom mentioned that. Don't worry about the adults and Donna; the moms can look after all their things better than we can. Just think about what you want for your wing. There's no urgency; I'm only talking about it now because we're driving to our next viewing. We're very unlikely to find what we want anyway, so will probably have to get it designed and built. That'll give us plenty of time to think about it." I gave it a bit more thought, then said, "We're going to need a lot of garages. Four adults in their area; me, you and Ava in our area, plus room for visitors to park. I've a feeling we're going to have big crowds around from time to time too, like the party after bowling a couple of weeks ago. Next year most of my daily contacts will be with seniors or college students, and they'll be driving cars." "We haven't overlooked garages either. Most of these places have three- or four-car garages. Four would be perfect for the adults. We'll need to build a large garage alongside your wing, with room for at least four cars, but five or six would be better." "Five or six! That sounds wildly excessive. I really can't see myself ever having that many girlfriends. It gets too hard to be a good boyfriend to so many. They're very time-consuming, you know?" "I'm sure you meant to say that you enjoy spending time with your current girlfriends so much, that there's very little time left for anyone else. -- "About our garages? I was thinking that you, Ava and I will need four spots because you might have two cars." "Why would I want two cars? I just recently pointed out to Donna that she was silly wanting more than one horse, because she could only ride one at a time. She'll tease me if I have two cars, so you'd better tell me what my excuse will be?" "I was thinking you should have something sexy and impressive for everyday driving, such as back and forth to school. Plus something like a large SUV for when you're transporting more people." "You sure like spending money! My having two cars has got to be excessive. If the 'sexy car' is too small for us, don't buy it. Or maybe don't buy the SUV. Why can't any extra people provide their own transportation? Go in Ava's or your car, or whatever. I bet you were thinking of both cars being brand new, weren't you?" "Of course. You've got an image to maintain." "Three weeks ago my image was of a guy who wore comfortable, loose, casual clothing. How come I didn't have to maintain that image?" "Haha, good one. Don't worry about the SUV idea, I'm still thinking about that, and we're months away from having to decide on how many garages we need." "Months? That long?" "'Fraid so. We'll have to live in the main house and park our cars in the open until our wing is ready." "Oh. That's disappointing." "I don't think you'll feel that way at the time. Wait until you see the quality of some of these houses. You'll be too busy enjoying yourself to be disappointed. Your mother is having raptures over living in any of these places. We're arriving at the last place now. Let me know if you think of anything else you want. Why did I say 'else' just then? Let me know if you think of ANYTHING you want, haha. Bye for now." #4: #1: #2: I filled Carol in with the parts of the conversation that she hadn't been able to work out, then we got back to our schoolwork. ------- Chapter 187: Anniversary Present Revealed Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) Carol stopped studying early, so she could have a shower and start getting ready. It hurt to watch her go to the shower alone. It would be a CONSIDERABLE understatement to say she'd been a temptation all day. I REALLY wanted to take her in my arms, a desire that was not helped by Carol's dressing so attractively. Not overtly sexy, but certainly good enough to easily remind me how good she looked naked. If it wasn't for my ability to concentrate having become so good, probably from all the practice of being on duty, I wouldn't have gotten any work done at all. I let her go to the shower alone. Sigh. Julia and Vanessa arrived home at 5:35. I know it was 5:35, because Julia rushed into the room and cried with anguish, "It's 5:35! You've got less than an hour to get ready!" Julia was telling the truth, because I had 'only' 55 minutes. Sometimes - fortunately not often - Julia seems to mistake me for a girl. It takes me five minutes, tops, to get ready. The logic of my position was unassailable, but I have learned a couple of things about girls. The first was not to use logic on them. (For those of you who're curious, the second is that if you accidentally breach Rule#1, the best thing to do is immediately apologize and ask their forgiveness. Do NOT - and this is VERY important - do NOT point out that they're being illogical. Yes, I know that logic is by its very nature above personal issues, but you do NOT use it on a girl. They don't appreciate logic, hate it being forced on them, and nearly always take your use of it as a very personal insult. Hence if you do accidentally breach Rule#1, Rule#2 is to apologize profusely.) So I jumped to my feet, saying, "Thank goodness you're back. I was getting worried that I was running out of time and I'd have to choose what to wear myself. Quick, tell me what I should wear?" Julia's sarcasm detector completely failed to do its job because her total attention turned to a clothing issue. We rushed into the bedroom, Julia opened my closet and started pondering the issue. I asked, "So how was the day overall? Did you make much forward progress?" "Yes. Hang on, Mark. Let me think about this first." Silly me. I was very worried when - after a couple of minutes' hard thinking - Julia produced exactly what I would have chosen (one of the top-quality outfits Julia had bought when we thought I'd need to dress up to go to a casino). It was scary that I might be starting to think like a girl. I got dressed, then wondered what to do for the next fifty minutes. "I can see you're busy, Julia, so I'll stay out of your way. I'll be in the study if you need me." Julia was deep in thought about serious stuff - deciding what she should wear - so she didn't really hear me. I reminded her, "Remember that I need some time to tell you about your anniversary present. Before dinner would be best." That got her attention. "Oh yes! What is it? I'm very eager to know." "It's probably best you get dressed first, otherwise you might run out of time and be rushed into a poor clothing selection decision. We wouldn't want that! So you and Carol should come and see me in the study when you're ready." Carol and Julia came to the study surprisingly quickly. "You two look lovely." "Thank you. What's our anniversary present?" #1: "I was thinking that for our anniversary next Saturday, I'd book a private, luxury jet to fly us down to LA. We'd spend the day shopping on Rodeo Drive, go to a great mmpff..." "WHEE!" said Carol, the girl that wasn't kissing me. Then she couldn't restrain herself, and joined in with the kisses. The girls obviously weren't, but I was still aware of the damned bugs. I figured a sound bug wouldn't be able to tell who was kissing whom, and even if there was video, anyone who knew girls knew that mentioning Rodeo Drive was an extremely extenuating circumstance. Besides, there was no practical way to stop the girls kissing me. There was chaos for quite a while. Very delightful, happy chaos. During with I was informed, "OH MY GOD! You're WONDERFUL. We love you. You're the best guy EVER!", etc. When I got a chance, I said, "You haven't let me finish. There's more to tell you yet." "MORE! It's already FANTASTIC!" "We'll go to a great show on Saturday evening, stay in a luxury hotel overnight, and fly back in the same private jet sometime on Sunday, depending on what you want to do Sunday." More screams, hugs, kisses and dances for joy. After another couple of minutes, "Haha. Hang on, there's more." "NO! More?" "Haha. Yep. I was thinking there'd be no point in your going to Rodeo Drive without plenty of money, so I'm going to add $10,000 cash." I worded it carefully, to make sure they didn't think it was $10,000 each. "Oh my GOD! You're..." More kissing and laughter left that hanging. Whatever I was, I was pretty sure it was a good thing. "There's more." "NO WAY! I'm going to burst, haha." "The plane's got a bed in it. We can make love in the plane! How cool is that!" With far less excited voices, "Oh. That's good." | "That's nice." #4: #3: "More importantly, there are also some extra seats. It doesn't cost any more to take passengers in the plane, so if you want to, you can invite some more people. There are two planes we could take. One can carry seven people, the other nine." #1: #4: #3: Julia said, "How can it not cost more for more people?" "I'm hiring the whole plane, so I've got all the seats already. If we leave any of them empty it makes no difference. The only real difference is in hotel accommodation, dinner and show tickets. None of those are very expensive, so I'll cover those. They can pay their own costs on Rodeo Drive though." Julia giggled, adding, "Yeah, that could get VERY expensive! This is amazing. How did you think of something so fantastic?" #4: I said, "Because I have a deep and profound understanding of how the female psyche operates. That and I remember you saying the same thing. Remember how you told some girls I'd one day be able to fly girls to Paris, Rome or Milan for fashion shopping trips?" "Ahh yes, I do. Wow. This is fantastic. I'm overwhelmed." "Me too," agreed Carol. "This is the most amazing present I've even heard of, let alone have someone give to me. Thank you, Mark. I love you so much." "You're welcome, sweetie. I like to spoil my sisters from time to time." I rolled my eyes toward the ceiling, and I saw that Carol got it. I added, "I've got a list of shows we could see Saturday evening. Hang on." I disengaged myself from the girls enough to reach into the drawer. I pulled out the two lists and passed them over, "One's a list of concerts, the other's theater shows. If you choose which one you want to see, I can arrange tickets for us. If you think of taking anyone else, then you should ask them if they want to go to the same show too, so I can get tickets for them too. Which reminds me, Julia, I don't know whether you want to or not - it's entirely up to you, because it's your present - but if you want to take other girls you can probably use this trip for some excellent mind-games with who you choose or don't choose." "Oh boy! You're right. I never thought of that..." #3: #4: #1: #4: To make sure Carol knew she wasn't excluded, I said, "Julia, you and Carol should get together to decide who to invite, what show you want to see, what you want to do on the Sunday before we come back, maybe what you want to spend the $10,000 on." "Clothes!" "Haha. Yes Carol, I was assuming that." "They have FANTASTIC clothes on Rodeo Drive, Mark. The very best brands." "Yes. I have heard that it's a reasonably good shopping area..." "Ha!" " ... And while you're thinking about that, you can think about the exact schedule too. We could go down Friday night and/or come back early Monday morning, if you want." "Gosh," profaned Julia. "There's so much to think about. Can we really invite more people?" "Sure. Up to a total of seven or nine. The 7-seater plane is a little better, but if you wanted to invite a total of eight or nine, that'd be okay too. I need to book the plane, hotel and show tickets, so I'd suggest that you try to make up your mind about numbers fairly quickly." Julia asked, "Do you count as one of the seven or nine, or is it really eight or ten?" "I haven't made any adjustments like that. The three of us count as three, so there's room for four or six more." Julia looked at Carol, "Ava, right?" "Of course." "You don't mind if we invite Ava, do you?" "Not at all. You could make it just the three of us if you wanted, but if you invited anyone else, I thought Ava would be at the top of the list." "This is too fantastic not to invite others. This is awesome." "Oh, I should say that I mentioned to Prof that he and Vanessa might want to come. Prof was very helpful. I was going to keep it secret until we were in the plane, but he said you'd like to know as soon as possible, so you could anticipate and plan it. He was very right, wasn't he?" "I'll say. What a great dad! So that means we've only got one or three more seats. That's not many. What's the difference between the planes?" "Umm, the plane that sounds smaller is actually the same physical size, but it's more luxurious inside. -- "I need to correct you about one thing. I told Prof that he and Vanessa could come if they want, but he didn't say yes. He thought probably not, but he's going to ask if Vanessa wants to see any of the shows. -- "Another little thing I should tell you is that I told Ava that you'd tell her a secret soon, probably tonight. I had in mind that'd be you inviting her on this trip, but if you'd decided not to invite her, it could just be that we were rich now. Not that it's essential, but as you are sure that you're going to invite her, I'd like you to do it almost immediately, but tell her to keep it a secret. I want to find out how good she is at keeping secrets." The last sentence was deliberately worded a little incorrectly, because I didn't want the buggers to hear that I already had other secrets. Julia agreed, "Good idea. The four of us can drive to Lily's together, and we can tell her in the car. That'll be fun. It'll also be very good to see whether she can restrain her excitement in front of the other girls." "Yeah. She won't have any time at all to calm down, so it'll be a pretty hard test for her." "You said you needed the numbers fairly quickly, right?" I nodded, while I watched the wheels turning in Julia's head. She continued, "I don't think I'll tell the other girls tonight. Let's give Ava's test until Monday. I'll get Mom and Dad to decide before then, so I know how many seats we've got, and then I think I'll tell individual girls that they're being considered, but they're not to tell anyone. It'll be interesting to see if any of them can't keep their mouths shut. It'll be torture for them, but I'll make their place on the plane depend on it. It doesn't matter too much, but it'd be ideal if the rest of school didn't hear about your being rich until the next week, and this would be a superb way for them to hear about it. Every girl in school is going to wet herself thinking about it." Already I could see that Prof's, "Tell them immediately" advice was very good advice indeed. Julia was having great fun thinking through all the machinations. Julia added, "Who do you want to come, darling?" "This is your choice. Prof also suggested that you might want to invite one or more of your girlfriends from before you started spending all your time with me. It's up to you." "I don't think so. My life is very happily centered on you now. My girlfriends will sink or swim based on how well they get on with you, which is mostly poorly, as they don't seem to understand how hard they should be trying. I'm more than happy with the friendships I'm making because of you, especially with Carol." The girls hugged. "Ava too. I like her too. It's amazing how many girls can't stop behaving pretentiously toward guys, but Ava doesn't have that problem with you." "I certainly agree with you about Ava. Alexis is like that too. She knows what she wants and is perfectly happy for everyone to know it. No pretense at all about any of that. It easy to have fun with her." "So you want Alexis to be one of the girls who comes to Rodeo Drive?" #3: "It's your choice, Julia." "I want to take the girls that'll please you the most." We went back and forth about this a few times, and Julia eventually won. I'd been thinking about my list, so when Julia finally insisted that I state my preferences, I said, "One of the things that amazes me about the girls I've been getting to know recently, is how few of them are actually good company. A couple of months ago I would've fallen all over myself for the chance to spend time with any of them, but now I can't even fill half a dozen seats. Alexis would be good to take, just for her fun value. She's not really girlfriend material, but she's good fun. -- "Lily isn't fun at all. She's very useful to us, and the sexual power is a thrill to a guy, even though it probably shouldn't be. I think Lily will be a good experience for me, but this trip is about sentimentality and fun, so she wouldn't fit in. -- "Katelin would be okay to take. She's having a tough time with her family in so much legal trouble because of me, so it'd be a good way to partially make up for all the trouble I've caused her. -- "Pat's very pretty and nice, but there's no strong spark there. I wouldn't object to taking her, but she's really only near the top of the list because there's not much competition. -- "Chloe is the last of the girls we're seeing tonight. Before the last lunch I had with her I would've been eager to invite her, but that lunch disillusioned me about her. I definitely don't want to force a girl for sex; it's TOTALLY against my character. Even though Andrew and Robert explained that she really wants it and is only pretending not to, her making me act like some sort of rapist, even just with verbal force, is a big turn-off for me. That's about it. Any other girl we took would be more of a getting-to-know-her trip than anything else." "So Alexis is top of the list, with Chloe next, then Pat and Katelin about equal." "I wouldn't have put Chloe in second place; more likely in last place. I don't like her attitude very much. We have to choose which girls fairly quickly, and Chloe won't learn to behave properly in time. I'm starting to doubt she'll learn at all." Julia said, "I predict Chloe's attitude will change dramatically the instant she hears you're rich. Her family is painfully poor, so I'd expect your wealth to make a big difference to her." "Enough for her to stop the silly, wanting-to-be-forced game?" "I don't think it's a game, as such. She believes sex is bad, but wants it from you, so she needs the excuse that she was forced. But that'll be academic shortly. Once she knows you're rich it'll be perfectly fine for her to throw herself at you." I started chuckling, but quickly noticed that I was the only one who thought Julia's comment had been funny. "Really? My having money changes sex from morally wrong to morally right?" "Let's just say it'll change her opinion of acceptable behavior. Her family is PAINFULLY poor, Mark. Not destitute, but they're struggling. Your being rich will make a very large difference." "Oh. I didn't realize you knew her family so well." "I don't; I've never met them. You can tell from her clothes. Chloe takes pride in her appearance. Not to attract boys, obviously, but to be neat and tidy, well groomed, etc. There's no way she'd keep wearing the clothes she does unless she had no choice. They're out of fashion, old, worn, and she doesn't have many of them. I imagine she gets most of her clothes secondhand. I would never insult her by asking her about anything like that, but that's what it looks like. You can tell a lot about people from their clothes." "Apparently you're right. And you think my being rich will make a big difference to the way she behaves toward me?" "I'd be amazed if it didn't. She likes you very much already, she's emotionally hungry for any good boyfriend, and she does want you to take her body, even though she's conflicted about it. Your being rich should easily be enough to motivate her to throw her body at you. The timing is a pity in her case, because the dollar signs will swamp the education we were trying to give her. It's a pity we couldn't keep your money a secret from her, but that's not going to happen. If not before, then when we get back from LA, this is going to go around the school like wildfire. Around the girls at least; I don't know how much interest the boys have in money." "I don't think guys have much interest. I can't recall ever hearing a discussion among guys about some other guy's money. It just occurred to me that the plan we had for Carol to come to my class and flash isn't going to be necessary anymore, is it?" "No," agreed Julia. "We should tell Alexis, Chloe, Pat and Katelin about the shopping trip before the end of Monday, so Chloe's attitude should change then." "Ohh." Carol laughed, saying, "You look so disappointed. Were you looking forward to it?" "Yeah. I would've enjoyed it." "Why don't you do it Monday morning then?" "There's no need anymore, sweetie. That plan was only going to be one little step in Chloe's education, and it'd be irrelevant as Chloe's behavior is going to do a 180 anyway." "There is a need: you'd enjoy it. That's all the reason I need." "You'd still, umm, do that. Even though it's not going to help Chloe at all?" "I was never doing it for Chloe; I was doing it for you. To help you help Chloe, and to help you get Chloe. But if you want me to do it just for fun, that's fine with me. I'd enjoy it myself, but I'd do it anyway." Carol widened her smile then said, "Good SISTERS do things to make their BROTHERS happy." I clearly heard the "wife" and "Lord". "That's VERY nice of you. What a good SISTER you are!" "Ha! Compared to what you're doing for us, it's nothing." "Thanks very much anyway. I'm doubtless immature, but it still tickles my fancy. I'll have to maneuver Chloe into the right sort of conversation as soon as I can, hopefully first period. I'll phone you and Ava as we planned. Oops, I won't have a phone." "Don't worry," said Julia. "I wouldn't miss this. I'll stick with you Monday morning, so you'll be able to use my phone." "We don't have the same classes every period. I'll try to make it happen when you're with me, but I might need to borrow someone else's phone to call Carol and Ava. I know your and Carol's numbers, but I never paid attention to Ava's. Do you have it, please Julia?" Julia looked it up on her phone and showed it to me. I glanced at it, then said, "Thanks." "You'll remember it until Monday so easily?" "Yeah. Provided I pay attention, my memory is very good these days. There's another subject I've been saving. Carol, the project that you're working on with Ava, you know the one I mean?" Carol checked, "The one Ava was pushing for while we were talking today?" "Yeah, that. It seems to me that in the LA hotel room on Saturday night would be a perfect place and time to let her be successful. Julia could participate in the success too. What do you think?" "That's perfect." Julia agreed too, "I think that's a wonderful idea. Can you get it ready by then, Carol?" "My side's easy. I only need to talk with her privately for a couple of minutes to get her frantic about it. I'll do that as soon as we can get some time alone. Sometime this evening should be easy." I was itching to ask what Carol was going to say, but the DAMNED bugs stopped me. It was unbelievable what a pain they were! I was going to make damned sure the cellphone I bought didn't have any software downloading capability, that was for damned sure! Julia said, "I've been saving a topic too: how we tell the various girls that they're being considered for the trip. Ava is automatically invited, and I gather Alexis has a firm seat too, right Mark?" I proved my increase in maturity by ignoring the pun. "Yes. I presume you mean that there won't be any mind-games with Alexis or Ava, right?" "Yes, that's what I mean. It gets a little trickier now. If Mom and Dad don't come, which I don't think they will - I think they'll let this be a teenagers' weekend away - then there's the three of us here, Ava and Alexis, assuming they can both come, which I think is a safe assumption as any girl would have to be locked up to keep her away from this. So that's five passengers. You said seven or nine, so there are two or four to go. I get the impression that you prefer the plane that's only got seven seats, right?" "Ahh, yeah. I guess I really should confess that it's because it's got a much better bed. The 9-seater's bed is like a small sofa, but the 7-seater's bed is a real double-bed. I kind of like the idea of having sex in a bed in a plane. It'd be WAY cool!" Julia and Carol both laughed at me, but not too cruelly. Julia added, "You can have sex with most of us any time you want, including bending over a seat in the plane if you wanted, but you still want the bed." I nodded guiltily at being caught, but enthusiastically at being able to do it. I'm bilingual in Nod. Julia said, "I think seven people are enough for this trip. Any more would make the weekend a little awkward to manage, and each of us wouldn't get as much time with you as we'd like. The smaller plane means only two more seats for Chloe, Katelin and Pat, so we're going to have to make a choice." I said, "I was thinking that I'd like to see how Alexis behaves tonight. She's a rough girl, and I'm a little worried about her not fitting in well. We'll be staying in a nice hotel, going to nice stores, nice restaurants, etc., so I wouldn't want Alexis to behave badly." "I don't think she'll behave that badly. Her rough attitude is by choice rather than because she was brought up white-trash and doesn't know better. But we'll see that tonight, and the other girls too. We can decide which of the girls tomorrow, and ask them Monday afternoon. You obviously don't want me to play mind-games with Katelin, if you're considering her out of sympathy." "No, that wouldn't be nice." "There isn't anything we're trying to achieve with Pat. She's happily yours already, as much as you want. Chloe's the only one we could be tricky with. I can think of a couple of things we could do with her, but I doubt they're worth the bother. Whether or not you invite her on the trip, she's still going to find out you're rich, and she'll still throw herself at you." "What sort of tricky things were you thinking of for her?" "I know you want to see her in a small bikini, so telling her that her seat on the plane depended on her buying a suitably small bikini and going to the Aquatic Center with you one evening before the trip. You should give her the money for it, but I'm confident you wouldn't mind paying for a small bikini for Chloe." "You got that right! Except that I'd much rather pay for a TINY bikini. Only because I'm trying to save money, and I presume bikinis with less fabric are cheaper, haha. -- "Making Chloe go to the pools in the type of bikini I'd like to see her in would be too cruel, I think. I'd love to see her in a small bikini, and there's no reason why she should be so unhealthily against the idea - she'd look awesome and she should be proud of that - but forcing her to be sexy in public wouldn't help her, would it?" "No. To change her attitudes you mostly have to take small steps and let her get used to it. Something dramatic might help, but exposing her at the local pool would be much more likely to make her even more self-conscious, if that's possible. Another idea I had for Chloe, which appeals much more, is to have her fuck you. Bring her around to my house one evening. You strip naked and lie face up on my bed. Make that 'cock up', haha. Chloe has to walk into the room, strip naked, climb on and fuck you. You don't say a word the whole time, so it's as far away from forcing her as you can get. I'd walk in and out of the room too, to check how capable she is of fitting into your lifestyle. You'd fuck her a couple of times at school too, such as in a bathroom like when she first flashed you. Let's make sure she's going to behave like a real girlfriend for you before we waste a seat on her. If Chloe turns out to be useless, then give her seat to Pat." #1: "That sounds like a very good idea. I'd hate to take her to LA, and then find she's going to behave as stupidly as she did at my lunch with her." "That's what I thought. There's a problem though." "Yeah, I know." "Oh, I'm surprised you spotted it. Or maybe you've spotted a different problem. What was yours?" "Now I'm worried. I was thinking that under your second idea Chloe wouldn't end up with a small bikini. I bet your idea is different, isn't it?" "Haha. Yeah, just a little. Mine is to point out that if you deflower Chloe, then you're obligated not to dump her anytime soon, because that'd harm her. You wouldn't have to take her to LA, but you would have to keep making time for her, even if she turns out to be a nuisance. Not for too long - to the end of the school year would be long enough - but you should put enough effort into the relationship that she didn't think she was used for sex. We've chosen to gain power over Chloe, so we shouldn't abuse it by acting irresponsibly." "But we should use it to get her into a small bikini though, shouldn't we?" "Haha. Yes we should, if only so genius Mark can get his one-track mind onto another track. One of the possible things we can do on Sunday is go to Venice Beach to stroll along the Boardwalk. That's the place that has all the bikini babes on roller skates, street entertainers, etc. You could buy Chloe a bikini and make her..." "SOLD! That's what we're doing on Sunday! You girls are getting nearly the whole weekend for doing your shopping and other obsessive behaviors. I'm claiming dibs on Sunday afternoon at that place. With - I emphasize - ALL of you in bikinis. I haven't even seen Carol's or Ava's new swimsuits..." #1: #4: #1: " ... Not that I particularly care about Carol's, but I'm very eager to see what Ava looks like in hers. The other girls too, especially Chloe. We'll have to tell all the girls to pack their smallest swimsuits. What about Chloe though? Her suits will be crap. She won't buy a good one herself, so should we go back to the store and buy one for her ourselves, or should we get her one in LA?" "I admire your enthusiasm for clothes shopping, haha. It'd be much better if Chloe was with us when we bought one for her. Different body shapes suit different styles and you'd need to see them on her to know what worked best for her. Plus trying them on is important to get the perfect fit. Wouldn't you like to see Chloe modeling different bikinis?" I had been about to make a comment complaining about all the "body shape" fussing - Chloe's body shape was impossible to miss - but Julia's last point was VERY convincing. "Gee, now that you mention it, I guess I probably would. Unless I had something else I wanted to do more, which I can't think of off the top of my head, haha." Julia said, "I suggest we include shopping for a new bikini for Chloe as part of our Venice Beach experience. She'd be far enough away from Corvallis that she should be less self-conscious. Hopefully she would have already seen a few exhibitionist girls skating past, so she should be a lot less paranoid about it." "Will they have bikini stores at the beach?" "I don't know, but it would seem like an obvious business to have there. We can ask at the hotel on Saturday. If not, I'm reasonably confident we'll be able to find a store selling small bikinis somewhere in LA." "Excellent. I'm looking forward to walking down the boardwalk with all of you in sexy swimsuits. That'll be VERY enjoyable!" "We agree. Are you going to take the red, or the black and yellow Speedos?" "Oops, I didn't think of that. I don't really need to do that, do I? I'm sure guys don't parade around like that, do they?" "Tell you what, why don't you wear a pair of Speedos under your normal shorts, and if we see some other guys showing off their bodies, then you can take your shorts off. That sounds fair, doesn't it?" [The next Sunday I had to make a mental note to be FAR more cautious whenever Julia says, "That sounds fair, doesn't it?" Sometimes I am way too gullible, especially immediately after Julia has got me imagining Chloe trying on lots of different bikinis.] Carol had gotten around to looking at the list of concerts, and suddenly started squealing and waving the page under Julia's nose. Julia was more refined, mature and subdued, so after she read it she only squealed half as loud as Carol. They looked down the list, and soon discovered another squeal-worthy concert. I was glad they were happy, but I had a terrible feeling that any concert that made young girls squeal was probably going to have the opposite effect on me. Our door was knocked on. Andrew said, "Most of the people are downstairs. What are you two looking so happy about?" Julia bounced over to hug me fiercely, telling Andrew, "You wouldn't believe what Mark's got planned for next weekend!" Andrew answered, "I don't believe most of what Mark does, even when I'm watching him. #4: I said, "Let's go downstairs. You can tell Andrew later, Julia." "Okay. We need to find out whether Mom and Dad want to come too." #3: #4: ------- Chapter 188: Getting Ready to Go to the Chengs' Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) Walking downstairs, we could hear the noise of several conversations coming from various directions. We started with the kitchen, because that's where the most important people tend to congregate - a joke that is unfair to Prof. After seeing him in action in Vegas, and with that scheme having worked so fantastically, my respect for him has leaped even higher. Sure enough, the cooks were all there: Mom, Vanessa and Katie West. Also Ava and Sophia. We greeted everyone. I asked, "How come no one came to get us sooner, we were only chatting?" #2: [It's worth mentioning that our internal conversation was still improving in efficiency. The last message was actually more like, <"Oops." + "Imply to Ava's Mom" + + .> Our messages increasingly can't be directly rendered into typed words, and even those parts that are in words are increasingly ungrammatical. You - my readers - would struggle to decipher the meanings of literal transcriptions of the English parts of our messages. That doesn't affect us as our minds work in much the same way and we're evolving our shorthand communications as we go. As a considerate author, I will continue to 'translate' our messages into what I would have said, had I been restricted to reasonably grammatically correct English.] I added, "We had some schoolwork open, but we were mostly talking." Vanessa said, "Prof told us you were busy. It's fine. Julia, can I borrow you for a quick chat?" Carol and I did social niceties chit-chat while Vanessa and Julia moved to the far end of the kitchen, had a quiet talk for a few seconds then returned. Julia preempted my question by telling me, "I'll tell you later." [She told me in the car. It was only Vanessa saying that she and Prof wouldn't come to LA with us, and asking whether Julia wanted Mark's wealth and house-buying to be kept secret. Julia had answered the question with, "Yes please. Ideally until just after we get back from LA."] Julia, Carol, Ava and I wandered through to the dining room and living room to meet most of everyone else. Donna was wearing the pretty dress she'd worn to our wedding, and came in for some compliments from the four of us. Of the three extra girls I'd invited, Pat and Chloe hadn't arrived yet, but we found Alexis in the living room chatting to the menfolk. She was dressed in an attractive and appropriate dress, and was even wearing nice shoes rather than her usual combat boots. I greeted her, "I'm glad to see you, Alexis. You're looking very nice." In case you were expecting Alexis to transform from an ugly duckling into the proverbial princess, let me tell you that my life isn't a Disney production. (I somehow doubt they'll ever want to buy the rights to my life story!). Alexis was never an ugly duckling anyway - she was reasonably good looking, although her hair was too short to be "pretty", and even I could tell that her approach to makeup was rudimentary. I pointed at her legs, saying, "What are those?" Alexis, and everyone listening to us - which was most of the people in the room - looked down in puzzlement. -- I gave it a second or two, then added, "Oh, they're LEGS! I'm so used to seeing you in black jeans and boots that I didn't recognize them for a while. How long have you had those?" "Haha. You've seen me naked with my legs waving in the air." #2: #4: #3: "Of course I remember. But they were pointing upward that time. Now they're pointing down, so I had trouble recognizing them. Joking aside, you look very different in a dress. It's nice to see you this way." "Thank you. You look very classy yourself. That's some nice clothes you've got on." "What, these old things? They're just something Julia spent all day dragging me around town to buy." Vanessa stuck her head in the room, calling, "Julia, Mrs. Moon is here with Chloe to see you." I started following Julia, but Julia cautioned me, "I doubt Chloe's told her parents about you. It might be best if you stay here." Fine by me, so I stayed. Which gave Alexis the chance to start questioning me, "Where have you been for the last week?" I didn't want to use the OSU lie on Alexis because she'd learn otherwise when she was invited on next weekend's shopping trip. "I've been busy. I had some things I wanted to do, so I skipped a few days of school." "There are stories about people asking questions about you around school." "So I've heard." "Are you in trouble?" "Nope. Quite the opposite actually. Everything's looking pretty damned good at the moment, and I'm not just talking about seeing you in a dress." "How about OUT of the dress? When's that gonna happen again?" #4: I said, "That's mostly going to depend on Julia and Ava." Not strictly true, but it'd sound good for Mr. West. "It will?" asked both Alexis and Ava. "Yep. Ava will find out why first. Ava, you'll come to Lily's with Julia, Carol and me. They've got a nice little surprise to tell you on the way. Alexis, you'll probably find out in a few days." I thought it was okay to tell Alexis that, because I was reasonably impressed by her having dressed up so nicely. She'd have to make a complete mess-up at tonight's dinner to lose her seat, and Julia had already told me that was unlikely. "Cool," opined Ava. "Is that the secret you mentioned before?" "Yep. And don't bother asking what it is now." "Oh. Okay. I have to wait till the car?" Alexis asked, "So we're going to have sex soon?" "You'll have to wait and see, but quite likely." Which was explicit enough that Ava's dad was looking like he was going to say something. -- To steal his thunder a bit, I said, "Alexis, have you met my girlfriend Ava's father, Carson West? I think your comments might have concerned him a little." Alexis said, "I thought everyone knew you had sex with lots of girls? Julia said you'd invited several of your girlfriends tonight, so I assumed everyone was cool with it." Alexis looked worried now, and Mr. West even more so. I'd successfully worried two people now. My reassurance skills needed improving. Ava started trying to reassure her dad, "It's okay, Dad. I know all about Mark's girlfriends. I have lunch with most of them every day at school. I don't mind at all. I think it's amazing that someone as popular as Mark and Julia have let me into their lives so much." While Ava was doing her best, I was having a quick internal debate. I'd come up with a few thoughts that seemed good. One of them was that I'd tell the Wests that I was worth about $6.5 million (before taxes, argh!). That should convince them I was not an ordinary boy, and that - hopefully - ordinary rules didn't apply to me (except, unfortunately, the damned tax rules). It'd be best to have that conversation during dinner at their place tomorrow. When Ava paused, I spoke my other idea, "We can talk about this much easier at your place tomorrow evening, Mr. West. I apologize that this has come as a bit of a shock, but remember that your dinner was originally scheduled for last night, so I would've had a chance to explain everything then." If I'd thought of it. "For the moment I can give you one thing to think about. A couple of weeks ago Ava and I made a commitment to each other. Not a marriage commitment obviously, but still a commitment that we both take seriously. Ava is abiding by her side of the commitment wonderfully well; and without wanting to sound too boastful, Julia and I are keeping up our end very well, aren't we, Ava?" Ava enthusiastically agreed, "I'll say! Mark and Julia are FANTASTIC to me. I'm having the best time, Dad, and I know they'll be wonderful to me later. Everything's perfect." I said, "I made a commitment to Ava, which I am doing my best to keep. That commitment did NOT include my being sexually faithful to her. Ava didn't ask for it, and neither did I offer it, so it's irrelevant to our relationship. I know we call each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but that's just because there's not a word that describes our relationship and it's easier to say 'girlfriend' than explaining the unusual nuances to everyone we meet. But if you judge us by how boyfriends and girlfriends normally behave, then you're going to get all sorts of wrong impressions." I thought my point was logically flawless, so Mr. West - being male and therefore logical - should be convinced. No such luck; he still looked worried. Prof spoke up, "Well said, Mark. Carson, I was present when Mark, Julia and Ava exchanged their commitments. As best I can judge, they are more than meeting their commitments to each other. They all seem very happy to be in each other's company, so I have no doubt that everything is going perfectly. Why aren't you judging Mark harshly because he doesn't cook Ava's meals at night, the way a good mother would?" Mr. West was a thoughtful guy, so he didn't open his mouth until he'd thought about it. Then he said, "Your point being he's just as much not Ava's mother as he's not her boyfriend?" "Correct. It'd be foolish to judge them by a criterion they weren't trying to achieve. Would you drive your car into the river, then criticize it because it didn't float? Their relationship wasn't designed for monogamy. If Ava had insisted on it, she wouldn't have gotten the relationship because Mark was already committed to Julia, and he's not the sort of boy who breaks commitments. Luckily for Ava, Julia believes that no girl should possess 100% of Mark, not even herself, so she's willing to share. Ava believes the same, so she's also willing to share. Neither girl has a problem with Mark being with other girls. I suggest you talk with your wife about this, because several of Mark's girlfriends will be joining us tonight." "You and Vanessa are comfortable with this?" "Not only are we 'comfortable with it, ' we actively encourage it. A couple of months ago Vanessa and I couldn't have imagined ever supporting anyone's partner doing that, let alone our daughter's, but a couple of months ago I could not have imagined anyone like Mark either. Hopefully you'll get to know Mark well enough yourself, but in the meantime I suggest you remember that your daughter has to make her own decisions, and she's made this one very enthusiastically." Mr. West turned to me, determinedly saying, "We'll talk about this tomorrow." "Of course, sir. As much as you want." #2: #4: Mr. West walked out of the room, presumably to tell his wife the bad news about me. Alexis said, "I'm sorry, Mark. I didn't mean to cause trouble." "It's not your fault at all. Tonight there's going to be you, Chloe, Pat, Lily, Julia and Ava around me. Ava's parents are both accountants, so they're bound to work out that the total number of girlfriends is more than one, haha. Actually they know about Julia already, but you know what I mean. You just happened to be the girl that arrived the earliest, which certainly isn't a fault. The only fault is mine, for stupidly not anticipating such an obvious problem. Unfortunately not all parents are as incredibly tolerant as Julia's." Prof was standing nearby, and that'd been my way of saying "Thanks" to him. He smiled back. Alexis agreed, "'Tolerant'! They HELP you screw around. Julia's so straight I never would have thought her parents would be like that." "Please try harder to insult someone. You're wearing a dress for the first time I've seen, so I'm itching to pull it up and put you over my knees, spanky." "Haha. Any time you want, big boy." Prof said, "I'll go check that the Wests are okay." "Before you go, I haven't seen Robert and Ashley?" "They're meeting us there. Ashley has something that's holding her up." Prof left, and to make conversation as much as anything, I said, "I wonder what's keeping Julia and Chloe." Alexis said, "She's so screwed in the head about sex, why are you wasting your time on her?" From what Julia said about Chloe's upcoming change in behavior, she was going to end up coming to LA. If Alexis and Ava were going to spend the weekend in Chloe's company, it might be a good idea to give them some explanation of what was going on with her. I said, "Actually, her head is the main reason..." #4: " ... You two can keep this to yourselves, can't you?" Alexis and Ava nodded. I moved so I could keep an eye out for anyone getting near us (we were standing at the far end of the living room, so that was easy), then I continued, "I won't mention names, but there are too many girls at school who have overly high opinions of their bodies and beauty, and they treat other people badly as a result. I've seen them mistreat you many times Alexis, so you know what I mean?" "Yeah. They're bitches all right." "Yeah. They put so much effort into being superior, that it makes them inferior. If it wasn't such a waste, I'd find the irony of that very amusing. You two are totally different from them. Neither of you puts on any pretense of superiority. Your openness, honesty and willingness to be yourselves is a major part of why I like both of you so much." A surprised Alexis exclaimed, "You like me! I thought you were just playing around with me." "Not at all. I wouldn't have invited you tonight unless I liked you." "You invited Chloe and Pat, and I haven't noticed that you like them much." "Hmm. You caught me there. I was speaking without thinking, and ended up being thoughtlessly trite. I'll try again. I invited Julia and Ava tonight because they are my girlfriends. I invited you, Chloe and Pat each for different reasons. The reason I invited you was because I like you and enjoy the fun we have together. So in answer to your sort-of-accusation, I DO like you, and I'm NOT just playing around with you, whatever you think that means." "But you're miles out of my league. Why would you waste time on me?" "To quote what I said three seconds ago, 'Because I like you and enjoy the fun we have together.' That's easily a good enough reason for me to spend time with you. You need to go see the person who decides who goes into what league, and get yourself moved a hell of a long way up from where you think you are now. In my opinion, you and Ava are both easily superior to the so-called - and self-called - 'superior' girls." Ava was comfortable enough with our relationship already not to need the reassurance, but Alexis was very surprised and pleased. That didn't stop her saying, "But you could date half the girls in school if you wanted. I think you ARE going to date half the girls, with Julia's pipeline." "Yeah, but I'm sure that nearly all of them will be miles below my league, not like my present company." It was weird to talk about myself as if I was top-league material. Clearly Alexis thought I was, and I intellectually knew that Julia had made it happen, but it was not a concept that sat easily alongside my image of myself. They weren't even in the same room as each other. I had only intended to give Alexis a brief compliment on the way through explaining Chloe, so it was well past time to get back onto track. I said, "Of course my brain could be addled by seeing you in a dress, and by those two white things you've got poking downward from under it." Both girls reacted by looking down to see what I was referring to, which I thought was quite amusing. They'd both worked out what the two white things I'd referred to were, so I continued, "Before I got distracted by pointing out the error in the league placements, I was heading toward saying that Chloe's problem comes from her being sexy to guys too. In her case, it's more extreme than and different from the usual Beautiful Arrogant Girl Syndrome, but it's still rooted in her seeing how much guys are attracted to her. Most girls react to that by thinking they're superior, Chloe's reaction is to believe that every guy is a rapist just waiting to pounce on her. That's exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea. -- "Too many of the 'beautiful girls' are ugly on the inside, but I think Chloe's personality is fundamental quite nice, so I'm much more inclined to try to help her than I would be to help the internally ugly girls. Julia and I are trying to straighten out Chloe's attitude to guys. If we can do that, she'll have a much better life, and we think she'll actually be good company. I can't say we're having much success, but it's worth a try. I invited her tonight because there's going to be me and Julia's two brothers there, none of whom are going to look like they're going to pounce on top of her. Hopefully it'll help Chloe realize that not all guys are wanna-be rapists." Alexis laughed, then added, "I thought you'd invited her because you wanted to fuck her, haha. Trust you to have a complicated reason." "Complicated and damned hard. Why is it that people say, 'It's a woman's prerogative to change her mind, ' but when I try to get one to change her mind about something, it's like hitting my head against a brick wall?" Alexis' answer was, "You think you've got problems! How is it that when I want a guy to go slow, his hands are all over me; but when I want one particular guy to go fast, he won't move at all? That's very frustrating. Unlike Wonder Tits, I do like sex, and I'd like another go at you. I've heard stories about how many hours you can go for, and I'd love to have an overnighter with you." #4: #2: #3: "I'm seriously tempted. It's definitely getting time that we did that properly, isn't it?" "Damn right it is! You only gave me a little taste before, and I've been hanging out for the real thing ever since." "You know I've been away, so I definitely have to catch up with Julia and Ava first, and spend time with my family, by the middle of the week I might be able to invite you around. What's your attitude to threesomes?" "Fantastic with two guys, but two girls doesn't do anything for me." #3: #4: Julia, Carol, Chloe and Pat were all heading toward us, with Chloe in the lead. When she saw me, she rushed across the room and into my rather surprised arms. #4: Chloe exclaimed, "Praise God you're okay. I was so worried. There were all sorts of stories going around about you being in trouble." #4: <"Praise God"! That's not a good sign. Please tell me we haven't put all this effort into a girl who's a useless Christian?> #2: #3: #2: #4: #2: #4: #3: #2: I said, "I don't think 'Praise God' has got anything to do with me getting back. More like 'Praise Honda'. I drove Julia's car for many hundreds of miles without a single problem." "Umm. But where did you go? And why were people after you?" #2: #4: #3: I answered, "They were talent scouts doing background checks on me while I was on the road." "Huh? What do you mean?" The other girls were curious too. "Have you noticed that I've got a REALLY cute butt?" I turned around, bent over and stuck my butt out. And in case Chloe was an even more ignorant virgin than I feared, I pointed at it. Chloe blushed (looking at a fully dressed butt. Oh the shame!). Pat looked confused, and most of the other girls were smiling, knowing that Chloe was being teased. While still bent over and pointing at my butt, I talked over my shoulder to Chloe. "Have you heard of a men's underwear company called Jockey?" "Umm, yeah." "They're considering me for the job of 'Jockey Butt for 2006'. I had to drive around several cities and towns, stripping down to my Jockeys and sticking out my butt to hundreds of women, so Jockey's researchers could see how attracted females were to my ass. If enough women voted for it, my butt will be sticking out of giant billboards all over America next year. Cool eh?" It was Carol's laughter that first gave it away. I stood up while the others started laughing. Even Chloe eventually started chuckling. I said, "Sorry Chloe, but I couldn't resist a chance to point out to everyone how cute my butt is, haha. In reality I was using my other end. I told everyone at school I was at OSU, but actually I went to Los Angeles to do a bit of research on a little business idea I had. Pat, you were at the hot tub party after bowling. Do you remember Julia talked about me maybe buying a house? I think she repeated it at school a day or two later." Pat said, "Yeah, I remember. We all chose what part of getting it ready we could do. I remember you wanted a pizza oven." #3: #4: #3: [Later on in the evening, during the Chengs' dinner, I quietly reminded Julia that pizza places did home delivery, so I didn't really need to choose a new house based on its having a pizza oven.] I continued, "Julia was somewhat interested in my getting a house, so I was researching a possible business idea I had. The research turned out to be more interesting and complicated than I expected, so it took me a few extra days. I've got permission to go to OSU, but not to go wandering off to LA whenever I feel like it, so please keep it quiet; I don't want the Principal to find out that I cut school." Pat asked, "So who were the people who were asking questions about you?" "They were just PIs: Private Investigators. There are some rich people who heard I was doing some interesting research. They wanted to talk with me about it so they hired a few PIs to run around looking for me. It's no big deal; it's just the easiest way for rich people to find someone. I don't want to seem rude, but I've had to explain this over and over again, and it was a very boring story the first time. I'd rather talk about much more interesting things, like what happened at school while I was away?" They weren't so easily diverted. Chloe asked, "You were never in any danger?" "Of being bored, yes; of anything dangerous, no. They just wanted to talk with me. I wasn't at home and I'd stupidly lost my mobile somewhere. They could easily have waited a few days, but they're rich, so they told their secretary to hire some PIs to find me. As simple as that." Julia said, "I think PIs have to take exams and be licensed. They could lose their licenses if they broke the law, which would mean they'd lose their job. All they did was ask some questions they thought might make it easier to find Mark." Back when I'd been talking to Alexis, and she'd mentioned the pipeline scheme, a thought had crossed my mind. I hadn't bothered mentioning it then, but it was worth a try now, "Carol and Ava told me some of the names of the girls who've joined pipeline groups, but I can't remember Chloe, Pat or Alexis being mentioned. I hope that doesn't mean none of you like me?" They all talked at once, and fairly predictably. After a few seconds, Julia explained, "The pipeline is so you can get to know what it's like to date girls you haven't dated before. You're already dating these girls, so I told them they don't need to go through the pipeline." Chloe said, "Thank goodness!", which was echoed by the others. Chloe's verbal expression's lack of religious invocations pleased me. The girls got into a discussion about how hard it would be to survive through the pipeline. Julia didn't miss the opportunity to say, "Just because you don't have to compete with the girls in a pipeline group doesn't mean any of you can take your dating Mark for granted. If Mark meets several girls he likes very much through the pipeline process, you might find he doesn't have much time for you anymore. You still need to be the best dates you can, or you'll miss out in the future." The implications of that were still being talked about when we were told it was time to leave. Chloe, Pat and Alexis all wanted to come with me. They weren't immediately agreeable with the idea that I only take my core group of Julia, Carol and Ava (although Ava was less "core" than the others. My life is getting complicated). There was room for one more in my car, but Julia had to get a little insistent to keep it empty. The girls needed to be allocated to other cars. Mr. West offered Alexis a ride in their car, and I saw Alexis realize it was a trap, then being the sort of girl she is, smile and accept. There was going to be an interesting conversation during that trip! Chloe and Pat got a place with my family, while Vanessa and Prof took Andrew and Sophia, then we were on our way. Soon after we started driving, Ava asked, "When are you going to tell me the new secret?" #1: Fortunately she'd finished. Julia turned to face Ava (Julia was in the front seat, Ava behind her), saying, "Now. Unfortunately we don't have time to build this up as much as I'd like..." #2: " ... At the dinner party we had for your parents at my place, Mom told them that you'd hugely overachieved in finding an intelligent boyfriend. Remember?" "Sure. Mark's a genius even among geniuses." "That's right. Also that you'd overachieved at finding a guy who was athletically fit and healthy." Ava nodded. "Of course the real overachiever is Mark. He overachieves intellectually and athletically, right?" "I'll say, he's awesome." "I agree, but saving praising him for another time, we agree that Mark's an overachiever. What do you think happened when I asked Mark to look into whether he could afford to buy a house, and he went to LA to check out a business idea he had?" "Umm. He overachieved?" "Yes he did. Can you guess what that means?" "He's already got a new house?" "That's a good guess, but not what I had in mind. I'll save time by telling you that when he went to do his research about making money, he found that it was easier than he'd thought. Which just means that he was much smarter than the other people. Because it looked easy, he thought he might as well stay in LA a few extra days to earn the money right away. That'd save him having to come back later." "Oh. So you can afford to buy a house already, Mark?" "It looks that way, Ava." "Wow! Just from one week's work?" #2: "Pretty much." "Are you going to buy a house for us to live in, rather than our renting one?" "I think so. I'd like the four of us to be able to live together." "That'd be wonderful. I'd love to be with you guys as much as I could. I'd still want to spend a lot of time with my parents though." Julia lost patience with this not going as dramatically as she wanted. She took over, saying, "Of course, Ava. You've missed one point though. Remember that Mark's an overachiever, so what type of house do you think he can afford?" "Umm. I don't know. I guess a good one, by the way you're talking?" "Yes, VERY good!" "Are you sure? Houses are very expensive. I know a little about that, because Mom and Dad got our place valued and talked with me about it. Ours is worth about $310,000, and the average is $205,000. Almost no one earns that much in just one week, only stars and the top bosses of great big companies. I don't think Jockey would pay that much to take photographs of Mark's ass, haha." Julia smiled happily, innocently asking me, "How much did you earn last week, darling?" "Umm. It's a little complicated, but I guess the simple answer would be about six point five." I deliberately left the units off, knowing Julia would enjoy telling Ava that bit. Julia smiled in anticipation, looking at Ava and waiting for the question. Ava frowned, saying, "You can't mean 6.5 houses worth - that's over a million dollars. 6.5 what Julia?" Julia's smile broadened even wider, "6.5 MILLION DOLLARS, Ava. Mark's rich." "NO WAY!" Carol giggled while Julia said, "Yes way. We spent all today looking at houses. Mark's given us a budget of up to 2.5 million dollars to buy a house with." Let me take this opportunity to give you - my readers - an important safety tip: Do NOT tell your girlfriend that you're $6.5 million richer than she thought while you're driving a car in traffic! Ava lunged from her backseat at me. Fortunately she was immediately arrested by her seatbelt. She started fumbling frantically for the release, while I equally frantically started pulling over to park, yelling to the girls, "No hugging until I've parked! I don't want to crash." Carol and Julia restrained Ava until I'd carefully stopped the car, conscious that Prof was parking his car immediately behind me, with the Wests parking after him. As soon as the car stopped, Ava started. She was all over me, with her legs still waving in the air, somewhere in the back half of the car. Screams, hugs, kisses, praises, then more screams, hugs, kisses and praises. It was loud and chaotic, especially as the other girls got into the act too. Prof walked to my window to see what the cause of the delay was. In case he somehow couldn't tell from Ava's screams, I wound my window down to tell him, "Julia just told Ava that I'm rich. It's going to take her a couple of minutes to calm down, so I suggest the rest of you carry on and we'll meet you there shortly." "Is it true?" asked Ava incredulously. "It certainly is, Ava. I'll get the convoy moving again." Prof walked back to his car, and soon the others were driving past us. After Ava had settled down somewhat, I told Julia, "You should tell Ava about next weekend, before I start the car again." "What about next weekend?" excitedly demanded an overwhelmed Ava. Julia answered, "Next weekend Mark's hiring a private luxury jet to fly us to Rodeo Drive, to go shopping with $10,000 cash." Telling a girlfriend you've got $6.5 million is certainly good news, but it suffers from being indirect, as money is just a means to an end. Telling her she's going shopping on Rodeo Drive is, apparently, the best possible "end". The previous level of excitement was easily exceeded. It was far too noisy to talk, so I chatted with myself: #3: #2: #1: #3: (You might notice that I've got a lot to learn about girls.) As soon as I could be heard, I said, "We should get driving again. We don't want to keep everyone waiting or worried about where we've gotten to. Can you all buckle up please, and NO unbuckling until we get there." Ava had to praise and kiss me some more first, but she was eventually gracelessly pushed back into the backseat, re-seated and buckled up. I said, "No more unbuckling, right? I'm still scared by the thought of how bad the crash would've been if Ava hadn't been held back the first time." Ava said, "Sorry, I didn't know what I was doing. It's unbelievable that you can earn millions of dollars in a few days..." And her mouth was off and running again. I took a risk by assuming that my message had penetrated, and that it was safe to start driving again. When Ava paused for breath, Julia said, "Ava, there are seven seats on the plane next Saturday. There are the four of us plus we're going to invite some other girls. Probably Alexis, Chloe and Katelin, depending on how they behave tonight and whether they can come." "They'll be able to come, all right! They'd kill anyone who got in their way, haha." "I would have thought so, until I met Chloe's mom just before. She's terribly overprotective, so there's no way she'll agree. If Chloe comes, she'll have to lie about it. It's not certain she'll be invited anyway, because we're going to make it conditional on her fucking Mark a few times before next weekend. Chloe's got some serious sexual hang-ups, so she could easily fail to do what she has to. By the way, Mark's probably going to do that low-cut breast showing scene in one of his classes early Monday. Hopefully it might help straighten Chloe's head a little. You remember the plan, don't you?" "Sure. I've been wearing the right sort of clothes the last week or so. I just have to enter the room with Carol, showing lots of breast. I don't even have to talk, so it's easy." "You've got it. We're nearly there," meaning nearly at Lily's. Julia had been giving me directions, as she knew the address, "but I've got one more thing to remind you Ava. Everything we just told you is a secret. You can't tell anyone." "But it's WAY too good to keep secret! You HAVE TO tell people. You've got to be bursting to tell?" "Yeah, I am. But we're keeping it secret for now. You know that it's very important that Mark's girlfriends can keep secrets, right?" "Yes. He has so many of them too." I wasn't sure whether Ava's "so many" referred to girlfriends or secrets, but I cleared my throat, giving Julia a warning look. If there were any buggers, we didn't want Ava to give away that I had secrets, especially because we were saying $6.5 million of the money was mine rather than Prof's. I wasn't too worried about saying that now as the whole town was going to know that in a week, and we could make up a reasonable explanation for it, especially because I'd put up nearly half the initial money. Julia pressed on making her point to Ava, "I want to test the other girls. On Monday afternoon I'm going to individually invite the three girls that we might take. I'm going to tell them Mark's rich and about the shopping trip, but I'm also going to swear them to secrecy. I'm not even going to tell them who the other girls are that we're inviting, so they can't talk with anyone, or know who to blame if word gets out. If the trip or Mark's being rich becomes known before next weekend, I'll try to find out which girl can't be trusted. She'll have her invitation withdrawn, and she won't get close to Mark ever again." "Wow. I'd kill myself if that happened to me. I hope for their sakes none of them are so stupid." #2: #3: Which reminded me of something, so I said, "By the way, Ava, the other girls are being invited just because it doesn't cost any more to fly them. I'm hiring the whole plane, which costs the same whether the seats are full or empty. I just have to pay for a hotel room, which they can share, dinner and that sort of thing. I'm not going to be forking out any money for their shopping either. This trip is really just for my very special girls." Carol said, "And Mark's letting us choose a concert we can go to on the Saturday night. There's a JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE concert! He's going to buy us all tickets!" "Wow. That'd be fantastic." #1: #2: #3: I said, "I don't want to be a wet blanket girls, but I don't know whether I can get tickets for that concert yet. I'll need to call up the saleslady tomorrow to check for you. Or maybe I should wait until Monday, so we know how many want to see him." Carol said, "They'll ALL want to see him. He's VERY sexy!" #2: "Okay, I'll check whether they have seven tickets tomorrow." Julia said, "Could you call them now?" "I'm pretty sure I remember the number, and they say they're open 24/7, so I can if you want. Is there really that much of a hurry?" "Yes. Those tickets will sell out quickly, and if we can't go, it'd be good to find out before we get our hopes too high." "Okay. I'll pull over again." I parked, borrowed Julia's phone and made the call. A different lady answered, but it only took her a couple of seconds to pull up my file and understand who I was. "Do you have any spare tickets for the Justin Timberlake concert next Saturday evening?" "Let me check." A short pause. "We have four left, sir. Would you like three of them?" "Ahh, no. There's probably going to be seven of us on the plane, so we'd like seven, if you could?" "We've just got the four, but we might be able to obtain three more for you. They will be at market price." "Ahh, what's that likely to be?" "I would guess something like $500 or $600 each." "Let me put you on hold for a second." Remembering my recent mental note, I found the hold button and pressed it, then turned to Julia, "They have four tickets, but any extras will cost something like $500 or $600 each. Nearly $2,000 in total. I'm not comfortable spending that much money on the other girls." "Then don't," advised Julia. "I'll tell them that we bought our tickets to the concert before we invited them, which will even be true. They can either buy their own tickets or find something else to do." "I'm a little worried about leaving three young girls unattended in a big city." "Then pay $100 to hire a babysitter to look after them until we get back. Surely hotels provide that service." I got back on the phone, telling the lady, "Just the four will be fine, thanks." "Very good, sir. Would you like to arrange accommodation for your additional guests?" Not while Ava was listening. I said, "I'm pushed for time now. I'll get back to you tomorrow, thanks." We ended the call and I passed Julia's phone back to her. I resumed our journey. The girls were bubbling away about the trip, but I interrupted with a question, "Julia, what was that about Chloe's mother being protective?" Julia answered, "I believe I said, 'terribly overprotective.' She came in when she delivered Chloe, spending several minutes obtaining a detailed description of tonight's dinner, especially including how many boys were going to be there, who they were, did they have their own girlfriends with them, etc. I'd say that Chloe's breast-size and breast-attitude both come from her mother. Her clothing style too, come to that. Chloe's mom looked and behaved like a 20-year older and more entrenched Chloe." "That's not good." "Yes and no. Mothers do have a lot of power, but I've heard rumors that some teenagers don't always abide by their mother's wishes, if you can imagine that! Not us, of course, we're perfect children! Chloe's attitude might be more her mother's attitude than what Chloe truly believes, so it might be easier to change Chloe than we thought." "Let's hope so." We were driving into Lily's place now, so that ended out conversation. ------- Chapter 189: Dinner With the Chengs; Creating a Family Heirloom Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) We parked in the drive behind all the other cars, got out and started walking toward the front door. I commented to Julia, "This is a VERY nice looking house." Julia answered, "After I've seen inside I'll give you my guess of what it's worth. That way you'll have an idea of how your place will compare." Ava muttered, "Millions of dollars. I still can't get over it." "Shh, here comes Lily." Lily rushed up, but with Carol and Julia on my arms, there was no easy way for Lily to hug me. Lily stopped short, then said, "Welcome. You good, Mark?" "Very good, thank you." Ava giggled. As far as Ava was concerned, I was VERY, VERY good. "We worry about you gone. Was trouble?" "No, it wasn't trouble. I was researching an idea I had. It just took longer than I expected." Ava giggled again, causing Lily to look at Ava wonderingly. I added, "Ava knows what I was doing the last few days, and she knows your concern is unnecessary. Shall we go inside?" Lily led the way to the living room. I was amazed by how wonderful the house was - it was easily the most beautiful house I'd been in. I'd been impressed by the Williams' house, but this was considerably better. Also very Chinese, although I'd never been in a Chinese family's house before, so my opinion probably didn't count for much. I just knew that there were lots of beautiful Chinese-looking things around the place. Everyone else was in the living room. It was an impressively large living room. Although some people were standing in groups, there were easily enough chairs and sofas for all of us to sit. In addition to me and all my invitees (which totaled eighteen people), there was Lily, her father, an even older Chinese man [Lily's grandfather, I later learned], another Chinese couple and their son, who looked about the same ages as the Chengs [Lily's uncle and his family]. No sign of Mrs. Cheng, but I was delighted by the delicious smells she was presumably busy adding to. I headed toward Mr. Cheng. "Hello sir. Thank you for inviting so many of us." Lily had followed me. Her father looked to her, and she provided a quick translation into Chinese. Mr. Cheng looked back at me and gave me a very heavily accented, "You welcome. Our honor. Please," Mr. Cheng indicated the elderly man who had risen to stand beside Mr. Cheng. Lily provided, "This is my father's father. My grandfather. He and Grandmother are visiting." I shook his hand while he spoke Chinese to me. Lily translated, "Grandfather and Grandmother has no English. He is very pleased to meet you." I found it a weird feeling to talk with a guy who didn't understand what I was saying, but I told him I was pleased to meet him too. I then introduced my sister Carol, and my two girlfriends: Julia and Ava. Lily passed that on. (I'll stop following every sentence with a version of "Lily translated." You should have the idea by now.) I was curious to see Mr. Cheng's reaction to my having two girlfriends, especially as his daughter wanted to be something sort of similar. Lily had said he'd be okay with it, but I was still interested. The way we were standing had Carol beside me, with Julia beside her and then Ava, so I couldn't put my arm around a "girlfriend", to reinforce that message, but I'd make sure I did so several times during the night. He greeted the three girls without any untoward expression, just smiles. I was then taken across the room a little, to be introduced to "Father's brother", his wife and their son. All of them spoke some English, especially Tony (the son, Lily's cousin). All the relatives lived in Hong Kong, and were visiting for a while. After those introductions, Lily said, "I tell Grandmother and Mother you are here." She started walking toward the kitchen, judging by smells coming from that direction, so I eagerly followed. Lily stopped me, saying, "You wait." I waited (Julia has me well trained to follow orders). It was probably wise not to let me into the kitchen, because I've been known to steal snacks sometimes. Julia was standing next to me, so I quietly asked her, "What do you think the house is worth?" I was very impressed by it, and was extremely curious to know how my mansion would compare. Julia laughed, adding, "Mark, I've got no idea how many bedrooms or bathrooms it's got, how modern the kitchen is, or any of its other features. I couldn't possibly guess yet." "Oh. I just thought it looked very beautiful." "You're not looking at the house; you're looking at the furnishings. Try to imagine every room as totally bare; completely empty of every single piece of furniture." Which made sense, which unavoidably meant I'd been silly again. To change the subject, I said, "You mean the same way I like to imagine every girl I meet is totally bare?" "Haha. As if! But you're getting the idea. I'll let you know when I've got an idea of a value." We did a bit of socializing before I saw the three generations of Cheng women enter the room. My core group of three girls and I moved to greet the cooks, with a big, friendly smile on my face. It was nearly 7pm, so well after my usual dinnertime. I'd deliberately missed my mid-afternoon snack, and the smells were delicious, so there was a BIG smile on my face. I hoped there was a BIG quantity of food to put into my face. We repeated the introductions, including me seeing how they reacted to the plural "girlfriends". They accepted it as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I made a couple of very enthusiastic comments about how much I was looking forward to dinner, which the ladies seemed very happy to hear. After the ladies left us, I said to my girls, "I feel a little embarrassed about not introducing the other three girls to everyone. I fear I'm slighting them. I might go spend some time with them. Is that okay with all of you?" Of course it was, so I went to join Chloe, Alexis and Pat. I apologized to them for not introducing them as well, adding, "I didn't mean to slight any of you; it just seemed too awkward and imposing on our hosts' time to introduce so many people at once. I'll make sure I spend time with each of you this evening. Is that okay?" They assured me it was, that I was a very nice guy to be so considerate, that they didn't mind and they understood that they had to take turns with me. Then Julia walked up to announce, "Lily's going to take us for a tour of the house. Who wants to come?" Every single one of the girls leaped to her feet and rushed off, leaving me alone. They'd all behaved as if they knew I wasn't going to come with them, and I knew such tours were generally female-only. That left me looking a bit silly all by myself, so I looked around, catching Mr. West's eye, so I wandered over to talk with Ava's parents. Mr. West said, "We had an interesting talk with Alexis on the way over." "Yes, I was sure you would. I saw her think about your little trap and decide to go, so I was sure she'd have something to say. She's not the sort of girl who hesitates to speak her mind." "No, she's not. She enjoyed 'setting us straight, ' - her words. She was very blunt in her compliments about you." "Umm. I'm not sure how to respond to that. Alexis and I just get along well. She's similar to Ava in some ways; a lot blunter, but equally unpretentious and honest, which I like very much..." #3: #2: #3: #2: " ... They're both very honest about liking sex too. They don't try to use it as bait, or to obligate the guy, or any of that crap. It makes for much better relationships because we can talk about real stuff rather than play games all the time." I'd been watching closely. They hadn't gotten angry. Their reaction was more discomfort than anything else. So I said, "I can see that talking about it is making you uncomfortable?" Mrs. West answered, "We've gone from being used to hardly talking about it at all - maybe behind a closed door in a one-on-one conversation with Ava - to having a car ride in which one of our daughter's boyfriend's lovers set us straight that it was perfectly correct for you to have other lovers, as did the mother and father of another of your girlfriends not long before. We should be getting angry about it, but somehow we can't. Every other adult is so positive and accepting that we have no support for getting angry. It's very strange and uncomfortable." "My mother sometimes has problems with the situation too. She agrees intellectually, but occasionally her mothering instincts automatically take her the other way. She corrects herself when she has a chance to think about it, but I can see that she still struggles. Vanessa and Prof are totally supportive though, as you saw. Even more than supportive, as they helped Julia persuade me into this in the first place." "I bet you didn't need much persuading!" commented Mr. West, a little too bitterly for my liking. I lied, but in a good cause, "Actually I did, but ignore that for a moment. I understand the sentiment behind your comment, but it's too much of an automatic reaction to be accurate in this case. You made a comment just before that I let slide, but it has more relevance now. Mrs. West referred to Vanessa and Prof as 'the mother and father of another of my girlfriends.' Let me remind you that Julia is also Ava's lover and girlfriend. Julia spends more time with Ava than I do, and that'll be much more so when I start doing many more college courses next school year. -- "Our three-way relationship is in full strength in every direction, so no one is better off than anyone else, and there's no taking advantage of or being taken advantage of. Remember that Julia talked me into this lifestyle, so I obviously didn't take advantage of her. Ava came along later, but she knew right from the beginning what she was being offered. Remember that we told you at the last dinner party that I gave Ava's phone number to Julia, and it was Julia that talked to Ava initially. One of the reasons I did that was so Ava couldn't possibly be under any misapprehensions about the importance of Julia in my life and relationships. Ava leaped at the chance to join Julia and me, so I can truthfully say that both girls didn't require any convincing at all, whereas it took Julia and her parents several days to convince me. -- "It's easy to understand why you made your, 'You didn't need much persuading' comment, but it and its implied criticism that I'm being selfish are wrong. Does your daughter behave as though I'm taking advantage of her? You saw that I had to pull the car over to the side of the street on the way here. That was because Ava was so joyous and excited that she couldn't stop hugging and kissing me, even though I was driving at the time, which isn't the action of someone who is not happy in her relationship. I agree this situation is unusual, and is easily misinterpreted as being to Ava's detriment, but once you get to know us you'll see how good it is for your daughter." #1: #2: #3: Mrs. West answered, "We have to agree that Ava's very happy, and some of your other points are good ones, but it's still hard to see how it can be good for Ava that you have so many girlfriends. That has to reduce the time you have available for Ava." "Sure, but it gives her heaps of quality time with Julia, and also with Carol too as Julia and Carol spend a lot of time together. If I monopolized Ava's time, she wouldn't have those times. In total, Ava is considerably better off, especially because she's going to need a lot of emotional support later, which Julia and especially Carol will be much better at giving her than any teenage boy would. -- "There's another reason you might find weird, but it's surprisingly important. My having multiple girlfriends is teaching me things that I can quickly use to treat Ava better. You know I'm very smart, so I learn very quickly. I'll admit that it's hellishly hard to understand girls, but to the extent that any guy can, I'm learning about them quickly. I imagine that you have an impression of me as a guy who has had a great deal of experience with girls. Am I right?" Mr. West answered, "My impression is that all the young girls here are your lovers, so I would say that makes you very experienced." "I lost my virginity one month and six days ago, appropriately enough on April Fools' Day, because I was a total fool about girls before then." I could see the Wests were both surprised. I made it even stronger, "That was with Julia, of course, the VERY first girlfriend I've ever had, so I truly knew nothing at that time. Julia didn't talk me into having sex with another girl until April, 21. So I've been gaining experience with other girls for just over two weeks now. I can see by the surprised looks on your faces that you take my point about how fast I learn, especially with Julia and her family helping me. I would have been a terrible boyfriend for Ava six weeks ago, but because of the experience and understanding I'm gaining, I'm pretty good at making her happy now, and I should continue to get better week by week, as I gain more experience and understanding. -- "I could give you more reasons, but I think we should probably postpone the rest of this conversation until tomorrow's dinner. What do you think?" Mr. West said, "Alexis was insistent that literally half the girls at your school want to be your girlfriend. You've gone from never having had a girlfriend a month ago, to what we see today, in just a month?" "In a month and six days, yes. I'm not joking when I make sure those six days are included. At the rate I learn, six days is a useful period, especially because I've had an ENORMOUS amount of help from Julia and her family. They've pushed me into all sorts of educational situations, saved me from many blunders and pointed out many lessons. That, combined with my learning so quickly - you know I'm due to finish my bachelor's degree next year - means I'm learning about girls quickly. -- "That's why you think Prof's and Vanessa's behaviors are so strange. They understand how unusual I am, and they behave in a way appropriate to my uniqueness. But because you don't understand that yet, their and my behaviors seem weird to you. -- "Or maybe I just made all that up to justify my having sex with your daughter and lots of other girls. I'll leave that for you to decide, haha. I really think we should save this until tomorrow, when we can talk about it more easily. This dinner is meant to be in my honor - for reasons which are too Chinese for me to understand - but I think I should probably circulate." They didn't object, so I left them. I had no real need to circulate; the girls were still gone, leaving an assortment of parents, The Boys and their girlfriends, and some Chinese who spoke little English. Circulating was just a good excuse to leave the Wests at what seemed like a good stopping point. I was proud of how good I was getting at justifying my having sex with lots of girls. I'd probably oversold myself, but I'd soon be telling them that I'd earned $6.7 million in the last few days. I was pretty sure that'd impress the socks off them. They were accountants, after all. I chatted with The Boys and their girlfriends for a few minutes. Nothing of any consequence, so I'll skip reporting it here. Lily returned with her entourage of young girls. They headed for me, which was fine with me. I didn't have to ask them what they thought of the place; they were gushing nonstop to each other as they crossed the room toward me. When they arrived, I maneuvered myself so I had an arm around Alexis' and Pat's waists. Both thought that was a very welcome development. I had decided to be a little cold toward Chloe. Not badly, but enough to let her know that she had to try harder to please me, including wearing much better tops! I had been intending to undo some of her buttons this evening. Not to any immodest degree, but enough to make the point that I wanted her to start behaving like a sensible person. After lunch at school she'd immediately done her buttons up, but she would have had no excuse to do so here, as no one was going to leer at her. But once again she'd frustrated my making any progress with her, and it annoyed me. I could see that Chloe was very conscious that I was hugging the other girls but not her, but there was nothing she could do about it. Lily asked me, "Everything okay?" "Great, thank you." "I show mothers," Lily looked toward the three mothers I'd invited, "house now?" "Absolutely. Maybe Sophia and Ashley too." I indicated who they were, in case Lily hadn't caught their names. "I'm sure they're dying to see it." Perhaps not the best sentence to say to someone who spoke poor English, but Lily seemed to understand it well enough. She left to gather her next tour group, who were very easily gathered, I noticed. The girls around me started enthusing about the house again. Chloe seemed particularly envious, but that might have been me reacting too much to Julia's statement about Chloe being poor. I noticed that Chloe's outfit seemed a little worn, but that might have been me being pissed off at it. The girls all raved for another couple of minutes. Clearly the house was superior to all of theirs, and had made a big impact on them, which made me even more interested in finding out what it was worth. I was sure Julia must have a value by now, but I guessed she didn't want to say it or talk real estate stuff with the girls around me. Tony (Lily's cousin) approached. He asked me, "You have many girlfriends?" I was momentarily tempted to say, "American girls are easy," but quickly reconsidered. The girls wouldn't appreciate it, and there was no need to tease Tony either, as his attitude seemed polite and interested, unlike if this question had come from some of the guys at school. They would've followed it with complaints about me being 'unfair' and likely a demand that I gave them some of 'my' girls. Tony was fine though. He was Chinese, and the only Chinese girl I'd taken was his cousin Lily. That left him with about six hundred million Chinese females to choose from, which should be enough. I answered politely, "Yes. I introduced you to Julia and Ava before. They are my most important girlfriends." I removed my hand from Alexis' waist momentarily, to use as a pointing device. "Carol and Donna over there are my two sisters. Alexis and Pat here are my casual girlfriends." Tony looked a little puzzled. I guessed at the cause, and explained, "Casual means sometimes. Alexis and Pat are sometimes my girlfriends, like tonight, but I spend most of my time with Julia and Ava. Do you understand?" "Yes." I'd been internally debating what to say about Chloe. I chose, "And this is Chloe. She wants to be my girlfriend. I'd like her to be, but she's not trying hard enough." Chloe's face fell further than I'd intended, so I quickly added, "Which is a pity, because she's a very nice girl." That helped a little. In the bathroom she'd overheard me say that she was a "lovely girl". Now she was merely "very nice". Soon my description would be "nice", and I had a fear that not long after that she'd be "a disappointing waste." Tony asked, "Hong Kong girls very unhappy if boyfriend has more girlfriends. Your girlfriends not angry?" It was more fun (for me) to make them answer, so I deflected the question by looking around at them, asking "Girls, you wanna take that?" Alexis was the first the answer, confidently saying, "I'm happy to get whatever piece of Mark that I can, haha." I tried to frown at her, but I couldn't stop it turning into a smile. Pat and Chloe (especially Chloe) were uncomfortable at having to answer. Pat said, "I'd like to spend more time with Mark, but it's okay." Chloe looked at the floor and mumbled something. I had the feeling her comment had been self-pitying, so I didn't bother asking her to repeat it more clearly. Nor did anyone else. Tony looked toward Julia and Ava. Julia said, "Our happiness doesn't come from what we want, but from what Mark wants. If Mark is happy with twenty girlfriends, then we are happy. If Mark is happy with no girlfriends, then we are happy." Julia would NOT be happy if I had no girlfriends, but neither would I, so I guess our happinesses are in sync. With Julia's dedication to me, her explanation was truly accurate, plus it had the added bonus of putting the other girls in their place. Tony said, "You good girlfriend." Julia corrected him, "WE," pointing a finger back and forth from Ava to herself, "are good girlfriends." Tony looked at me, "Only two girlfriends?" #2: #3: I answered, "So far." "How many you want?" I shrugged, adding, "It's very hard to find good girlfriends. I want everyone to be happy, but it's hard to find girls who can share happily." Tony chuckled, "Yes, VERY hard, haha. Same in Hong Kong. Same everywhere." He gave me a small nod of the head then wandered chuckling back to his family. Pat asked Julia and Ava, "Do you really believe Mark is that much your boss?" Before either girl could answer, Chloe said to me, "I AM trying to be your girlfriend." I had to bite my tongue to stop my bitter laughter, and then I had to bite it again to stop my bitter retort. Judging by the delicious smells wafting around the room, I would be well advised to keep my tongue uninjured. I didn't want to get into any unpleasantness, so I said, "This isn't the time or place to talk about it, Chloe." One of my minds remembered that we needed to set Chloe up for Carol's tit flash in class, so I added, "Can you come to school ten minutes early on Monday? I'll meet you by your locker and we can talk then, okay?" Chloe happily agreed to that. Happy that she was getting my attention, I suspected. Lily returned with the older females, talked to her father, and then the two of them approached me. Lily asked intensely, "Mark, you show magic to my family please?" I was momentarily worried about what she meant - there's so much that I do that could be considered magic - but then I remembered that we'd played the "Hide The Hair" game with her. I checked, "You mean with one of your hairs?" "Yes. Was VERY good! You do again please?" Lily and her father both looked VERY eager to see it again, but I wasn't all that happy with the idea. Seeing my expression, Lily said, "PLEASE. Chinese LOVE magic. Everyone very happy." I'd seen Chinese acrobats and circus acts on TV so often that I'd gained the impression that they were something that was very popular in China, and I guessed magic tricks might be included in their interest. I didn't really like being the center of attention of so many people, but there was no real reason not to repeat the trick as I'd shown it to several people already, and there was no way they could see how I was doing it as hairs are nearly invisible and weigh so little that I can move one almost as fast as my eyeballs can track across a room. I had a momentary fear of their having set up cameras around the room. I had a quick look around, but couldn't see anything. And - quite frankly - it'd probably be impossible for a camera to catch it anyway - hairs are damned near impossible to see beyond a few inches away. There was no way they could have very high quality cameras zoomed in to every part of the room. I'd make sure that Lily didn't try to position me in a specific spot to do the trick though, just to make sure. "Okay Lily. I'll..." Lily immediately clapped for joy, hugged me, then unnecessarily translated my acceptance to her father. She then called out in Chinese to her aunt and uncle across the room, who suddenly looked excited. Tony quickly headed for the kitchen, returning with Mrs. Cheng and Lily's grandmother. The Chinese all looked extremely happy and eager. Some of my invitees had seen it before, but quite a few hadn't, and were picking up on the hosts' excitement. It was clearly going to be a bit of a show. I got them to form a large circle, so everyone could see me in the center. I'd used Carol as my assistant the last time with Lily, so I decided on Julia this time. When everyone was roughly in position I loudly asked Lily for one of her hairs. She said something to her father, who then extracted a handkerchief from his pocket, carefully unfolded it, pinched a hair between two fingers and passed it to me. I looked at it: a white hair and a black hair intertwined and knotted in a two-colored loop. Certainly not the sort of thing anyone could copy easily. I walked slowly around the inside of the circle of spectators, letting everyone see the two hairs held upward between my right thumb and forefinger (showmanship really). While I was doing that Lily explained, "Grandmother and my hair." Grandmother smiled proudly. I completed the circle, stopping in front of Mr. Cheng again. "I will now carefully put the hair in my other palm. Those of you who are close enough to see, watch carefully." Lily translated for her father, and the nearby people watched intently while I held my left hand palm up, well in front of my body. I slowly and carefully tipped my right hand over and placed the hair into my left palm, then slowly moved my right hand away. I said, "Lily, can you see the hair on my hand?" I was already holding it with NP, in case her breath would have blown it away. She confirmed she could see it, as did others nearby. I slowly closed my fist, then rotated my wrist so the back of my hand was now uppermost. A second later the hair had been sent flying up the underside of my arm, and was being held in my armpit. I raised my fist high in the air, over my head. Everyone's eyes followed it my fist, as I lowered the hair to my ankle level. Still holding my closed fist high over my head, I slowly walked toward the ring of spectators, at a point roughly opposite where Julia was standing. When I was just inside the ring of spectators on that side, I turned to face inward, which let me see Julia. I zoomed the hair across the floor and up to her right hand. I used a couple of other NP-fingertips to let her know I wanted her to open her right hand. Julia had seen this trick before, so she knew what was required of her, and the hair was very soon safely in her grasp. I dramatically commanded, "Julia, extend your closed right fist in front of you please. Turn it over so the fingers are on top but your fist remains closed. Excellent, thanks. Everyone, watch closely while I make the transfer." I pointed at my closed left fist with my right hand's forefinger, kept pointing for a couple of seconds of silence, then suddenly yelled "TRANSFER!" at the same instant as my right forefinger suddenly moved to point vigorously at Julia's fist. Several people jumped in surprise, some giggled or laughed. When that'd settled down I said, "The hair is now in Julia's hand. Good trick, eh? Shall we have dinner now, or are any of you so disbelieving that you need Julia to open her hand to prove it?" The skeptics (pretty much everyone) demanded that Julia open her hand. I said, "I'm hurt that none of you are willing to take my word, but seeing as how you insist, Julia slowly and carefully open your fist please. Watch carefully those of you close enough to see." A couple of seconds later there was a sudden hubbub of amazement around Julia, with much laughter and shouted congratulations. On her own initiative, Julia paraded around the circle to show everyone the hair. I was a hit, and there was a great deal of noisy amazement. As I had done at the Eatons', I started thinking about a follow-on trick I could do with the hair. I thought of an idea, so when Julia finished her circuit I intercepted her and recovered the hair. I held it up, about to start my second spiel, when I noticed a better possibility than what I was planning. Lily's grandfather had taken his glasses off, and was cleaning them with a hanky. I took hold of the hair with two pairs of NP-fingertips, in such a way that the loop was held open. I pretended to still be holding it casually, but I'd actually dropped it and flown the hair to a place near Grandfather (as Lily called him). He soon finished cleaning his glasses, so I quickly flew the hair loop onto one of the arms (often called temples, which seems weird to me) of his glasses, pushing it about halfway down the arm and holding it lightly there. With these two NP-fingertips dialed down to have very little force, so if Grandfather moved his glasses, he'd move the fingertips too, without noticing. That was fine with me, I just wanted to use them to keep the hair from falling off entirely, or from sliding all the way to the lens where it would probably catch his eye. Just as he was about to put his glasses on, I held my fist up in the air, yelling loudly over the noise of the room, "Who wants to see it again?" That got everyone's attention, including Grandfather's. He paused, then resumed putting his glasses on while keeping his eyes on my fist, thus not seeing the hair on the side of his glasses. I had everyone's silent attention. I pointed my other finger at my raised fist, waited a couple of seconds, then yelled, "TRANSFER!" at the same instant as my forefinger suddenly pointed at Grandfather's head. That surprised several people, especially Grandfather. Several of the people had immediately looked at Julia, but it took only a second for them to notice that others were looking elsewhere, and to see that I was pointing at a puzzled, but stoic Grandfather. Still pointing, I said, "Lily, would you ask your grandmother to walk up to your grandfather please." That was done. When Grandmother was in place, I said, "Lily, please ask your grandmother to look on the right-hand side of your grandfather's glasses. A couple of seconds for the translation, a second for Grandmother to look closely, then a loud "Eee yah!" from her. Followed by a great deal of excited Chinese jabbering around the room. Soon Grandmother was standing beside Grandfather, pointing to the side of the glasses, and demonstrating by miming with her fingers that the loop of hair was over the arm. I was impressed by her intelligence, because she had quickly realized how impossible it was to get a loop over the arm of the glasses while they were on his head (which is when I'd yelled "Transfer"). I'd been ready to explain that myself, but Grandmother did it for me. The REALLY cute part of this trick was that virtually no one would have noticed that Grandfather had cleaned his glasses a minute ago, because no one notices such a minor, everyday action. Almost everybody was REALLY impressed, especially the Chinese, who were ecstatic. Prof and Vanessa were looking a little concerned though, so I decided it'd be best not to be any more impressive. We had several minutes of enjoyable hubbub. Grandfather walked around with his glasses still on, showing everyone the loop of hair. Many of the crowd demanded an explanation and a repeat performance from me. "Sorry, a good magician doesn't give away the secrets of his trade," and, "I couldn't possibly do it again. Magic is very tiring on an empty stomach." The hint didn't work, unfortunately. In response to Prof's and Vanessa's concern, I also insisted, "Of course it's a trick! I read how to do it in a book and practiced it for a while. It's pretty good, isn't it?" Also, "Sorry, it's the only trick I know. I'm too busy with all my studies to take the time to learn another one," and, "No, I don't want to do it again. If I do it too many times people will see through it, and that'd spoil the fun." I was the center of attention for a while, earning me lots of hugs and kisses. Alexis told me it made her horny, which earned her a laugh and a smack on the ass. Chloe gave me a big hug and was reluctant to let me go afterward. I could impress the metaphorical pants off her, but couldn't impress a single real button undone. I noticed that Mr. Cheng retrieved the hair and re-wrapped it carefully in his handkerchief, which I thought was strange, but irrelevant. [[The Cheng's kept it as a treasured family heirloom, intending to pass it on to future generations. People are weird.]] After things had settled down, Lily and her father approached me again. Lily said, "Father show you house and talk about me. Okay?" I would've preferred to have our talk after dinner, in case something went wrong and we got kicked out. With all the smells we'd been tantalized by, being kicked out would be a tragedy. I did want to see the rest of the house, and I did want to check that Mr. Cheng was agreeable with what Lily was offering, and it was awkward to put them off, so I said, "Yes, that'd be great." Julia asked, "Would it be okay if I came too, please Lily?" "I think so. I ask Father." Lily and her father talked for a minute, with the father looking at Julia a couple of times. Eventually Lily told us, "Julia okay. No more. Is private." We started our tour, the men walking in front, the girls behind. Lily had to gently pull Julia back to achieve that arrangement, as Julia would normally be glued to my arm. We walked upstairs, and slowly around the house. Mr. Cheng and I talking loud enough so Lily could hear us, so she could provide the translations. Mr. Cheng quickly raised the topic of Lily serving me. The conversation took a while. It was stop/start when we looked in each new room, and when Lily's poor English caused difficulties. But we eventually arrived at an understanding that Mr. Cheng would be honored if I used his daughter. I couldn't imagine EVER having this conversation with an American father! Ava's parents certainly didn't have that attitude. The trouble was that it'd be very easy for Lily to be mistranslating back and forth, and for all I knew Mr. Cheng might only be agreeing that Lily could continue to wash my car. Lily's insistence that I use her sexually gave me a thrill. It probably shouldn't, but I'd do my best to live with the shame of being so immature. In fact, I was looking forward to it. But first I needed to be directly assured by Mr. Cheng that he understood and agreed that we were including sex, but how could I ask him that? I figured he probably knew the word "fuck", but I didn't want to indicate Lily and me, then say "Fuck okay?" If he didn't agree, then my being so explicit might not go down well. Same problem with making a circle with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, and thrusting the other hand's forefinger in and out of the circle. Mr. Cheng spoke a little English, so I tried, "Lily my girlfriend, okay?" He looked a little puzzled, then spoke Chinese back to Lily. Lily said, "Is okay, but Father thought you wanted me serve you, not be girlfriend." The English language seriously needs several new words to describe relationships. It stupidly uses "girlfriend" for all sorts of relationships. I couldn't use "cum dump", even if her father knew what it meant, or ESPECIALLY if he knew! "Girlfriend" could be used to describe Julia, Carol, Lily, Alexis, Pat, and Chloe, but it was at least partially inaccurate in every case, and in different ways too, just to confuse things further. The Eskimos apparently have dozens of words for snow, but we have only one word for every romantic and sexual relationship with a girl. From what I could tell, Chinese might be a better language in this respect, as it seemed likely that they had a word to describe the type of 'girlfriend' Lily was offering to be. It was no good asking Lily for it now though, she might tell me the Chinese word for "car-washer." I said, "Sorry Lily. I'll try again." I tried a couple of other approaches, without success, until I finally and nervously said, "Lily and me, sex, okay?" Mr. Cheng nodded enthusiastically. "Yes. Yes. Sex very good." #2: #1: <"The washing of cars"? Yeah, I agree he should know the word. Short of giving obscene gestures - which I'd rather we didn't - I think we have all the confirmation we need.> #2: #3: The rest of our tour of their truly wonderful home was spent with Mr. Cheng asking me things about myself, mostly about my school and college work. He was interested not only in my current degree, but what degrees I'd be doing after that, what career I'd be doing, and similar questions, the answers for which I had no idea about. I gave polite, non-committal answers. Lily explained, "Education very important to Chinese." We'd finished upstairs and were working our way around the downstairs level (not to the kitchen, dammit. I'd been hoping to snag a snack or several). I could hear some banging sounds, and after we'd finished most of the house, Mr. Cheng asked (through Lily), "You do martial arts?" "Yes. A little." "Tony training. We look." In their backyard Tony was carrying out vicious attacks with a wooden sword against a wooden post. He'd changed into a gi since I'd last seen him, just before we went on this tour, and was now leaping around like he knew what he was doing. The poor post was receiving an impressively brutal thrashing, and it didn't look like it had a chance of winning. We were walking across the edge of Tony's training area, when Tony suddenly whirled and came rushing at me, his sword held over the back of his head, ready to come crashing down on top of mine. #4: #2: Both visually and with proximity, Mr. Cheng was just standing still in order to watch. #3: #4: #2: #3: [It's worth mentioning again that our internal communication can be FAST, especially about physical actions, because it's easy to send pictures of physical stuff. With recent practice, we've gotten quite good at that, even being able to send a movie. It's far easier than you might think, because all we do is imagine something, and then send whatever we imagine. It's always rough and incomplete, but that doesn't matter because we can easily interpret each other's thoughts. Most of the above was communicated by pictures: the sword stopping just above our head, or our hiding behind Mr. Cheng, for examples. It literally takes only a small fraction of a second to have the thought, imagine it, and send the image to the other minds.] We quickly leaped behind Mr. Cheng, making sure to keep him directly between Tony and ourself, but far enough away that Tony couldn't lean over Mr. Cheng and hit us with his wooden sword. It was a solid piece of wood, not a flimsy toy. He'd been bashing the shit out of a wooden post with it, and there was NO WAY we wanted to be bashed that hard with it. Tony angled his charge to follow my evasion, but he was blocked by Mr. Cheng. He made a couple of attempts to dodge around Mr. Cheng, which I matched to keep us opposite each other, then Mr. Cheng barked something in Chinese. Tony lowered his sword and relaxed. Mr. Cheng angrily told Tony off. Not that I understood a word, but the tone of voice was unmistakable. Tony tried arguing back a couple of times, but Mr. Cheng clearly won. Tony gave a bow, then walked into the house, watched carefully by me the whole way. Mr. Cheng talked to me. While Lily was translating I moved into a position where I could keep an eye on the whole of the house, in case Tony came out again. Lily translated, "I tell Father you good fighter, see story in newspaper. Father ask why you run away?" "Running away is MUCH better. There's no chance of anyone getting hurt if there is no fight. Besides, we're here for dinner, not fighting. Fighting at a dinner party must be very dishonorable." Mr. Cheng responded via Lily, "Same you run away from angry soccer boy?" I remembered the Chengs had seen my last soccer game, when the defender had tried to attack me after getting pissed off at my nearly always getting past him. I answered, "Yes. Exactly the same. Should not fight on a soccer field or at a dinner party. Running away is better." "Are you scared?" "No. I avoided Tony because not-fighting nearly always better than fighting. At the soccer game the angry boy gave up and went away. Now Tony gone away. Much simpler and easier. No problems anywhere." "You don't like fighting?" "No, not at all. I like pretty girls and good food." I was starting to worry that this was becoming an interrogation, but Mr. Cheng's next comment was, "Very wise. I think eat soon." We went inside. I kept a careful eye out for Tony, but didn't see any sign of him. Because Julia was walking behind me, I couldn't talk privately to her until we were back in the living room, but as soon as I could I whispered to her, "Did Tony's attack seem weird to you?" "Weird and frightening, yeah. Do you know why he tried to attack you?" "No idea. Let's ask Lily." We did so. Lily said, "I ask Father." She reported back, "Father say Tony stupid boy. Like scare you. Not real fight, just scare. Doesn't matter. Tony stay in room now, go back Hong Kong tomorrow. You enjoy dinner." "He's being sent back to Hong Kong JUST for that?" "Go Hong Kong anyway. Grandfather, Grandmother, Uncle, Aunt, Tony go to Hong Kong tomorrow." "Oh. That's okay then." We never saw Tony again. [[Tony's attack had not been a real one. He'd been instructed to test my martial arts ability by Mr. Cheng, who was curious about how good I was. Unfortunately for the test, my running behind Mr. Cheng had been neither martial nor artful, and it showed them nothing of my ability. Mr. Cheng had indeed told Tony off afterward, for attacking me so uselessly. Tony had countered, "How was I to know he'd run behind you like a little girl behind her mother?"]] There were a few minutes of chatting in the living room, some about the house, some with people trying to dig the secret of my magic hair trick out of me. "We can't work out how you did it, especially the second one. Can you tell us?" I teased them by looking all around me, to check the coast was clear, then I leaned forward and got them all to huddle around furtively. Then I whispered, "Don't tell anyone, but it was... , magic!" I got a lighthearted kick on the shins, two weak punches on the arm, and some laughter. I added, "I could teach you, but I'd have to kill you afterward." Actually, I'd have to kill them first. Then we were called into the dining room. ------- Chapter 190: Dinner With the Chengs; Laps of My Lap Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) The Chengs had a western style table large enough for all two dozen of us to sit around. There wasn't any seating order imposed, so we could sit wherever we wanted. I quickly moved to an area of the table where I could observe the doors into the room, as I was worried about Tony turning into another Don Eaton. The seating developed into three groups: a third was Chinese, a third adult Americans, and a third was me, my sisters and girlfriends, all of whom wanted to sit next to me. Things seemed informal, so I asked, "Lily, can we change seats during the dinner?" "Sure. Dinner is for talking. Move around is good." I announced that I'd start with Julia and Carol beside me, and the rest could have turns later, which created some lighthearted grumbles from the less well-trained girls, with Chloe exceeding "lighthearted grumbling" in the direction of "petulant". I was tempted to say something like, "Just because you've got big tits doesn't give you the right to push my best friends away from me, Chloe," but thought I'd better not. I wanted to, but suspected Chloe was fragile tonight. She was somewhat clingy and trying hard (in her opinion) to ingratiate herself with me. Harsh words from me would probably result in too many tears (she'd cry, I'd miss my dinner, then I'd cry). With so much at stake, judging by the delicious smells, I resolved to be nice. Lily supplied knives and forks to everybody that wanted them, which several people did. I declined. Lily asked me, "You can use chopsticks?" "Sure, no problem." Mr. Cheng said something, while Lily translated as, "Father says maybe you were Chinese in an earlier life." In my two immediately earlier lives I'd been Mark Andersons, but God knows what might have happened before that. I answered, "With the smell of this dinner, I'm planning to be Chinese in all my future lives." Lily translated that, and it went down well with all the Chinese around the table. [[In case you're interested, when humans die, they die. It's not an overly complicated process! No past lives, future lives, spirits wandering around, Pearly Gates, resurrection on Judgment Day, coming back as a cow, or ANY of the huge piles of crap that have been shoveled about the event. Can't say I was surprised to learn that, but I imagine some of you are. And, no, dying during déjà vu isn't a loophole any longer.]] Soon food started flowing out of the kitchen and onto the table, carried by Mrs. Cheng, Grandmother, and two other Chinese women I'd never seen before. It seemed impolite to ask who they were (other than WONDERFUL people, for bringing me food), so I said nothing. I noticed there weren't enough seats for them, so I guessed they were helpers. As soon as the first plate was put on the table, Lily rotated it around to me, saying, "Mark, chicken for you. Have some." "Umm, shouldn't I wait for your mother and grandmother to sit down?" "Food more important. You try." Have I mentioned that the food smelled delicious and that I was hungry? I grabbed my chopsticks and tried a piece of what Lily was offering. "Wow! This is fantastic!" I grabbed another piece quickly, before Lily passed the plate to anyone else. In the time that'd taken me, several more plates had arrived, and the other Chinese were starting to help themselves and gesturing for everyone else to do so too. Table-wide conversation was drowned out by the noise of everyone starting to eat, offering plates to their neighbors, praising the food, etc. Once there was a fair amount of food on the table, Mrs. Cheng and Grandmother sat down, and started loading their plates too. The Chinese set the tone for the dinner, and a very noisy tone it was. Yelling across the table, laughing loudly, passing plates of food around, etc., were all natural. I wasn't totally surprised, because I'd been in Chinese restaurants a few times, and seen some tables of Chinese people behaving similarly, but being in the middle of it was a new experience for me. [[The Chinese for "good restaurant" is literally "noisy restaurant". Their restaurants usually have hard surfaces on the floor, walls and ceiling to better reflect the sound of the social interactions that are their essential purpose. Thus noisy restaurants are considered happy and good ones.]] Conversation was not my priority; food was, and it was AWESOME! Easily the best I have EVER had. I wasn't the only local to think that either; equivalent comments were being made over and over again. Lily had pulled rank and had reserved a seat for herself next to Julia ("To tell Mark what each dish is.") From her position Lily many times pointed out individual dishes, lifted samples onto my plate, described what they were, etc. What they ALL were was VERY delicious. I was having a great time! New dishes were pouring out of the kitchen all the time. Each plate was smaller than a normal dinner plate, so twenty five people could empty it with ease. The helpers were kept busy removing empty plates and replacing them with delicious, full ones; a process that met with my wholehearted approval. As Lily had promised, there were several chicken dishes, all of which were superb. Julia soon decided that it was acceptable for her to sit on my lap. Lily quickly slid into the empty seat. Chopsticks are quite good in respect that I could have one hand around Julia and use the other to feed myself. I soon discovered a problem though, I could no longer lean close enough to the table to avoid dropping or dripping food onto my or Julia's good clothes. Clearly I had to find a solution! I found a good one. I formed a max-sized (2 inch) NP-fingertip immediately under the food I was carrying to my mouth, so close that it was touching the food. I could make it almost perfectly flat on the top, so any drips remained with the food, so no one could see that it had dripped. The NP-'plate' also prevented me from dropping the food entirely, so my and Julia's clothes were safe. I had plenty of practice, as it takes a very huge number of chopstick-loads to fill me up, so I got very good at it. By moving the loads quickly to my mouth, it was impossible for anyone to see anything unusual (I couldn't, and I was looking for it). The only weird thing was the feeling of my closing my mouth on an NP-fingertip. I canceled it immediately, obviously, as it was in the way of my eating. I'd been waiting for Julia to whisper 2.8 or 3.6 or some other number to me, being what she thought the value of the house was. All I needed was a single number, which she could've easily told me, but she said nothing. Initially food was more important, but once I'd had enough food to take the edge off my hunger, I took advantage of her sitting on my lap to whisper (quite a loud whisper, because dinner was very noisy), "What's the value of the house?" "I can't give you a quick answer. It's more complicated than that." I couldn't see how it could be the least bit complicated. When people sell a house, they set a price. It's a single number, so surely Julia could give me her estimate of what that single number would be if this house was put on the market. However, in the past whenever I've thought something was simple and Julia said it was complicated, I was invariably wrong. I consoled myself by eating some more food. After several minutes, Julia gave up her seat to Ava. Ava weighs more than Julia (or to be fair to Ava, Julia weighs a lot less than anyone else), but my body has had plenty of practice at girls sitting on my lap and I don't find it difficult. And so the dinner progressed. We had a fantastic dinner. We were at the dinner table for FAR longer than we normally are at home, so there was plenty of time for lots of conversation, for all the girls to have turns with the favored seats to either side of me, and on my lap. It was easily the best meal I've ever had. It was so much better than any other meal I've experienced that there was no competition. I'll mention a few less important (than the food) specific events that occurred during dinner: ^ Most importantly, everyone had a great time. The food was FANTASTIC (I'll probably keep saying that), the atmosphere was VERY relaxed and friendly, with a great deal of laughter and loud conversation. There was also a complete absence of formality, with people freely swapping seats, conversing in all directions, etc. I came in for a fair amount of attention from the Chinese, with all of them visiting me at various times. Not saying anything substantial, really just to get an impression of me. Which was natural enough, as the dinner was meant to be in my honor. I never bothered trying to find out why, because I was pretty sure that I wouldn't understand it. Lily's uncle and aunt had a little English, but not much, leaving Lily as the sole translator, so she was a very busy girl. She tried to spend as much time as she could looking after me, but providing translation services whenever any of the Chinese wanted to talk with any of my party took most of her time, as it happened many times during the meal. As often as not Lily was out of her seat, walking around the table to talk with others. I overheard enough of her conversations to know that I was often being talked about, for example, when Lily's mother was asking my mother questions about me. As busy as she was, Lily still found occasions to sit on my lap. Shortly after she gained that seat on one of her short visits, there was a hubbub of excitement from the Chinese. It was easy to work out why, as they were all staring at my chopsticks. Lily had sat on my lap in the reverse orientation from the previous girls, so I'd swapped the chopsticks to my other hand and carried on eating (nothing was going to interfere with my eating! Especially because new dishes of previously un-sampled delicacies kept arriving). Presumably one of the Chinese folk had noticed my hand swap, and had alerted the others, so they were now all excited over my ambidexterity. I am TOTALLY ambidextrous, with not the slightest feeling of awkwardness on either side, so eating with the other hand was no a big deal for me, but it impressed them. Several of them tried changing hands, laughing at the struggle and resultant mess. I came in for some more praise. On another of Lily's brief lap visits - she tried to grab a few moments between my swapping between the other girls - Lily asked, "Julia say you no phone?" "Yeah, I lost it a couple of days ago." "I buy you new phone in Hong Kong." "No need, thanks Lily. I need one soon. I'll buy it Monday." Lily insisted, "I buy you Monday." "Huh? I thought you said Hong Kong." "Yes. I go Hong Kong tomorrow. Back school Tuesday. Give you phone Tuesday." "You're going all the way to Hong Kong for two days?" "Yes. I tell you before. After dinner Father say I serve you yes. I go doctor. Come back have," Lily looked around to make sure she couldn't be overheard, then said, "sex." "You're going to a doctor in Hong Kong?" "Yes. Hong Kong doctor better than American doctor..." #3: #4: #2: " ... and Hong Kong phone better than American phone." #3: "I need to choose my phone carefully, Lily. I have a list of specific models that I need to avoid." "Give me list, I not buy." "I have it at Julia's house." "Email. I buy you VERY good phone! The best. Give you Tuesday." #2: I called out, "Julia! Can I borrow you please?" Julia walked around to us. "Yes?" "Apparently Lily's going to Hong Kong tomorrow and she's offered to buy me a new cellphone there. The trouble..." "That's wonderful! When are you back, Lily?" "Tuesday." "You're going for just two days?" "Yes. I see doctor for healthy for Mark." "Will you have time to buy a phone?" "Easy." "That'd be fantastic! Thanks very much." "I serve Mark very good." "Yes indeed. VERY good!" I butted in, "Julia, you forgot that there's a list of models I don't want to own." "We'll email the list to Lily when we get home." "Umm, it's not as simple as that. What if the model numbers are different in Hong Kong, or if they've got models we don't have here. We need to make sure we avoid any phone that has the software updating feature." "If Dad's email doesn't already have that comment on it, we'll add it before we send it to Lily." "But it'll be in English! They won't understand what it means." "Lily, will it be a problem having our needs written in English?" "If I don't know, I get someone to write in Chinese. Is easy." Julia added to me, "When Lily brings the phone back, the first thing we'll do is look up its specs online. If it has the bad feature we'll give it back to Lily and I'll buy you one. It's worth waiting one more day for the chance to get a latest model from Hong Kong." Tuning to Lily, Julia said, "LATEST model, right?" "Number one best phone for Mark!" "Good girl. There you go, Mark; all settled." "Ahh, I'm confused. Why is it that Lily can buy me a phone - in a foreign country! - but Prof can't buy me one from the local store?" #2: #4: "Dad has NO sense of style. I mean ABSOLUTELY none. He's great at many things, but NEVER let him anywhere near a decision that involves any sense of style. He's a mathematician, for goodness sake!" "Hey, I resent that! Mathematicians are very smart people." "Smart yes; stylish NO! I've been to his department's formal and informal dinners. If their socks match, they're having a good fashion day. Lily has a GREAT sense of style. You've seen the clothes she wears and that she's got great taste in cellphones. She's on her third phone this year, and they've all been gorgeous. She knows what she's doing when it comes to phones. We're talking about her bringing back a phone from Hong Kong, Mark. From HONG KONG!" "I take it that Hong Kong phones are good?" "You've seen the three phones Lily's had this year, so what do you think?" "Ahh, I can't say I've noticed any of her phones." "What? None of them?" "Umm, no. I spend most of my time staring at girls' tits." "Haha. Of course you do, silly me. I should have made allowances for that, haha. Lily's bringing you back the latest model phone from Hong Kong is wonderful. It'll put you months ahead of anyone else." "And being months ahead is somehow important?" "Absolutely! Almost no one will have the same phone as you, not for months." Which I knew was somehow important. Don't ask me how or why, but it was. I was smart enough not to ask Julia for an explanation. She'd think I was still being stupid, and her explanation wouldn't make sense anyway. It wasn't as if I'd have done anything special to get the phone - merely have someone bring it back from Hong Kong for me - so how could that possibly make me impressive in any way? Thanks to Carol's explanation about the fashion importance of phones, I was also smart enough not to say, "But it's only a phone, for goodness sake." I made a mental note to thank Carol for saving me from another "Mark's an imbecile" look. I surrendered, "Thanks, Lily. I look forward to seeing the phone." Note that I said "seeing the phone." A guy who didn't understand girls to the enormous extent that I do would've said, "using the phone." I don't know much about girls, but I knew this was ALL about look. Not once had a single useful function of the phone been mentioned. -- Which reminded me, so I said, "By the way Julia, do I want a phone that has a camera?" "Ideally, but it depends." Julia launched into a conversation with Lily about what style of phone would best suit me. I feared I knew what the camera decision depended on: how it affected the style of the phone. I was too scared to confirm my fear. How can girls be so disconnected from reality that they'd choose to reduce the functionality of something they were buying merely to have it look better while it wasn't doing the full job they bought it for? I listened to the intense style discussion for a few seconds, then had to excuse myself to go sit in the seat that Julia had come from. #3: #4: #2: #4: #3: #4: #2: ^ Chloe eventually had a turn of sitting on my lap. I'd already decided to be nice to her, rather than risk upsetting the evening. Also because she'd been trying to be nice all evening, with "trying" being the key word. From the way I'd introduced her to Tony, she knew our relationship wasn't going well, so she'd been deliberately pleasant ever since, in a trying hard needy sort of way. I put my spare arm around her waist, and cursed her attitude yet again. Ordinarily I would have liked to cop a few feels while she was so accessible. Nothing publicly obvious or embarrassing, but I could have easily hugged her, pressing her nearest breast into my chest, or I could have had my eating arm reach sideways in front of her ostensibly to reach for a dish, but really to press my arm into a breast. That sort of thing. But with her bra being made out of steel plating that was half an inch thick, there'd be no pleasure in it. Chloe tried to jolly me along, excitedly telling me how wonderful the house was, the meal is, and my magic trick had been. After a few minutes of pretty much one-sided conversation, Chloe asked me, "You don't seem very happy. What's the matter?" What I wanted to say (REALLY wanted to say!) was something like, "How could you be so stupid as to deliberately piss me off by wearing a top that proves you're completely ignoring all the efforts Julia and I are going to, in our attempt to get your fucked-in-the-head attitude straightened out." I'd wanted to say that from the moment I'd first seen her this evening, but suspecting that it probably wasn't the wisest thing to say, I was searching for a good alternative, something I could say to her to let her know what I felt, without it being too negative. The trouble was that I couldn't think of anything positive to say about Chloe at the moment. When Chloe asked me her question, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. "Chloe, have you noticed that the clothes I've worn to school for the last couple of weeks are different than what I wore before then?" "Of course. You dress wonderfully now." #4: "Chloe, I HATE the way I dress these days. Do you seriously think I like parading around like a homosexual porn star! I'm a modest, unassuming, quiet guy. NOT the sort of guy that enjoys strutting around in transparent shirts, or shirts that are so cut off that they only cover the top half of my torso." Actually, I was getting used to dressing in my new style. I didn't enjoy it, but I could see that I'd eventually get to the stage where it wasn't so unpleasant. Obviously I'd never get to the stage where I wanted to buy such clothes for myself, but Julia was never going to let me do that anyway. "Why do you dress that way then?" "Because Julia makes me. Two weekends ago, Julia dragged me around menswear stores for the WHOLE day, making me try on clothes I wouldn't be seen dead in. I did it for several reasons: to make Julia happy, because she said it'd make me happier once I was over the embarrassment, because she said it was more honest if I showed people who I really was, and because she wanted me to face the world head-on rather than trying to hide myself from it. I agreed to dress the way I do at school because I had faith in Julia's judgment..." #2: " ... and I've learned that Julia was right. It's only been a couple of weeks, but already I can see that all her reasons were good ones. Julia knew what she was talking about when it came to me, and she knows what she's talking about when it comes to you too." "Oh." "Yes. This conversation is about you rather than me. Julia and I both know that you need to stop shrinking away from 50% of the people you meet, and the way to do that starts with your dressing less conservatively." "Oh no, I can't. My parents don't let me have clothes like other girls." From what Julia had told me about Chloe's mom, that was quite likely true, but there were still possibilities. "So when you've left home, undo a few buttons." "My parents wouldn't like that." "They'll never know. You need to start somewhere, and that's a very safe and easy way to do it." "I couldn't. I don't feel comfortable doing things my parents wouldn't approve of. I'm a good girl, not some tramp that any boy could get pregnant or worse." #3: #4: #2: #4: I took a wild guess about something. I was going to simply ask her about it, but then I had an evil idea (I was practicing for my applying for the job as the Devil). I looked at my watch pointedly, so Chloe saw me. Then I said, "I was about to ask you something, but there's no need because they'll be here in a minute or two." "Who'll be here?" "A while ago, when Julia saw the huge amount of food, she suggested inviting more people. It sounded like a good idea to me, so I told her to call them. You said you're not comfortable doing things your parents wouldn't approve of, and I was going to ask you whether they'd approve of your sitting in a boy's lap like you are now. But there's no need to ask you because all you girls' parents will be arriving in a minute or two." Chloe leaped out of my lap and was halfway across the room before her feet touched the floor. I was EXTREMELY impressed by her speed and athleticism. Conversation around the table stopped when everyone turned to look at what on Earth was happening. To relax everyone, except Chloe probably, I started laughing. Reassured that it was a joke, most people returned to their own conversations. Donna was sitting next to me, so I asked her, "Donna, my lap's extremely suddenly empty. Do you want a turn on it?" "Sure." Donna climbed on, asking, "Why did the other girl run away so quickly? Did you pinch her ass?" "I was sorely tempted to, but no. I gave her an honesty test, which she failed. Shh, here she comes." Chloe had edged back close enough to ask, "You were joking, weren't you?" "Not joking, no. Think of it as a scientific experiment. You said you were uncomfortable doing anything your parents would disapprove of, and I wanted to find out whether you were telling the truth or not. Now I know that you'll do what YOU like, even if you know your parents would disapprove, just so long as you won't get caught. Which has destroyed your using your parents as an excuse ever again. From now on I am going to interpret everything you do, or refuse to do, as being solely your choice. Donna's seat is empty now Chloe, so have a seat, here's your knife, fork and plate." I slid them over, then ignored Chloe while I talked to Donna about how wonderful the food was; that being the first subject that came to mind. Chloe hesitated, then reluctantly took the seat. Eventually there was a gap in the conversation between Donna and me, which Chloe filled, "Mark, my parents truly wouldn't like me dressing like a slut at school." "No one is asking you to dress like a slut..." #4: #2: " ... and your parents truly wouldn't have liked you to be sitting on my lap either, but you were eager to, so I'm going to ignore everything you say about your parents opinions. I'm getting extremely tired of you refusing to take responsibility for your decisions and actions. I'm also getting extremely tired of having to discuss your childish excuses with you. Think about your situation between now and Monday morning, and then we'll try to have an adult conversation about our relationship. Let's please make it an HONEST conversation. Julia and I have been extremely careful to be totally honest with you about everything we've said, and I don't appreciate your using dishonest and irrelevant justifications for your decisions. You're virtually an adult now, and it's about time you started behaving responsibly." #3: #2: #4: I turned to Donna, saying, "Sweetie, could you pass me some of that chicken please." "Boy, you told her!" Chloe was sitting right beside us, listening to every word we said. I couldn't resist, "Maybe I should have put her over my knee and spanked her bare bottom. What do you think?" "{Giggle}. That would have been funny. She does behave like a little girl, so that'd be fair, haha. Why don't you get a better girlfriend?" "Unless Chloe starts accepting responsibility for her decisions, that's probably going to happen soon." Which was a good message to finish with, so I changed the subject, "Speaking of little girls, what's happening with the Ducklings? I missed the lunch I was booked to have with them last Thursday, didn't I?" "Yeah. Julia said I could change it to next Thursday. Is that okay?" "Sure." Donna and I chatted away, as well as with the other people around us, except for the very subdued Chloe. After ten minutes I asked Chloe, "Why are you so quiet?" "Because you don't like me!" "I think you're a lovely girl. You overheard me saying so in the bathroom a few days ago. Has your personality changed in the last few days?" "You told me off." "Exactly. Parents tell their children off all the time, but that doesn't mean they don't like their children. If I didn't like you I wouldn't have bothered making the effort to point out what you'd done wrong. I DO like you Chloe, a GREAT deal." That made her smile, so it was time for a Julia-inspired zigzag. "But I do NOT like your wasting my time. Our future together is up to you. If you start to make an effort to change in the way Julia and I want you to, then everything will be great. But if you persist in refusing to improve yourself, then we won't last long. It'd be a pity, because I do like you, but sooner or later I have to recognize that there's no point in trying to help you become a good girlfriend if you're not willing to be one." "But I do want to be your girlfriend. I think you're an incredible guy." "The issue isn't whether I'm an incredible guy, but whether you can become a good girlfriend. I told you when I was in the hot tub at Julia's place that your current attitude would be destructive to all my other friendships, such as with Julia's brothers. As much as I like you, I'm not going to choose you to the detriment of everyone else in my life. It's not enough that both you and I want you to be my girlfriend, you also have to learn to be non-fearful and non-accusatory to every guy you meet. Julia and I know how to help you achieve that. It's quite easy, but not if you refuse to help and keep making dishonest excuses for your behavior. Just saying you want to be my girlfriend isn't enough; you have to start doing what it takes to deserve to be my girlfriend. It's up to you. Think about it, and we'll discuss it Monday morning." #2: #4: #3: ^ I'd been wary of having Carol on my lap, but I figured that after Donna, there was no harm in Carol having a turn. We behaved very circumspectly, and discussed all the obvious things, like how WONDERFUL the food was! Nothing of significance happened. I mentioned it just in case you thought I might have forgotten about Carol. That was NOT going to happen! While I'm on the topic of family, during one of my wanders around the table, talking to various people, Dad mentioned that our nosey neighbor, Mrs. Roberts, had been over shortly after the security guards had left. Dad was bemoaning her intrusions. I said, "So tell her a cover story that'll stop her being so worried." "Like what?" I was quite pleased that Dad was asking me for advice on how to lie. He must think I'm maturing nicely. "How about telling her that I'm such a genius that Coca-Cola asked me to do some work on inventing a new flavor for them. They had to let me read their secret recipe, so the guards were there to stop Pepsi from sending any spies to look at it. Now I've finished and the recipe is back in its bank vault, the guards aren't needed anymore. If she asks about me being away for a few days, say I wasn't really away, that was just something the family said to fool Pepsi. I was working hard in my bedroom the whole time. That's a nice, safe story, and she's too dumb to know any better." Mom and Dad laughed, but Mom pointed out, "You know she's going to tell other people. They aren't going to swallow it." Which earned Mom a little chuckle. "It'll stall her for a day or two, and by then she might have found something else to be nosey about. Hopefully we won't be living there much longer anyway, so who cares if she embarrasses herself by repeating it, especially if Dad asks her to keep it quiet." ^ By way of contrast, Alexis was a lot of fun on my lap. She was happy and joked around, often quite lewdly, but that was fine as there was so much noise the Chinese wouldn't have heard it, or probably understood it either. Alexis was also very appreciative. She thanked me several times for being so nice to her. To which I replied, "I treat you much the same as you treat me. We're both very straightforward with each other." "Yeah, but you're the boss all the time. I wish I was the boss sometimes!" "You'd invite me to lovely dinners like this?" "Yeah, between my legs. One course, but as much as you could eat, haha." I'd been a good boy all evening, largely because the Chinese looked at me quite often, but I couldn't resist any longer. It was Alexis' fault, she'd raised the subject. The table had a very large tablecloth on it, which hung well over the sides. I put my chopsticks down, lowered my hand to Alexis' legs then slid it up between her legs. Alexis was delighted, "Fuck yeah. I'm horny. All the way, don't fuck around." "You're always horny." "Around you I am. And you are too," my cock had just got hard enough for her to feel. "Good. I was worried I didn't do it for you." "Apparently you do. Ahh, Alexis, where are your panties?" "I'm not used to wearing dresses and I think I forgot something, haha. I was hoping you'd discover that sometime tonight." "All good discoverers explore the area, don't they?" "Yeah. In case they want to make a map, {giggle}." "Or maybe to stick a flag pole in, to claim the area." "Now yer talking. I need a good, hard, 'claiming', haha. I don't 'claim' easy, so you'd better do it several times, haha." I couldn't even claim her once at the table, unfortunately. Nor could I even finger-fuck her properly, not with so many people watching, especially when I remembered that Lily had requested that we dress modestly, which I thought should probably be interpreted as excluding finger-fucking girls at the dinner table. The dinner party was informal, but not that much! I gave her a few more seconds' worth, while I said, "Lily requested modesty tonight, so I'm sorry that I can't do this properly. I think a couple of people are suspicious already." "Damn. I'm VERY horny now!" "Yes, I can tell." I withdrew my hand, causing Alexis to complain, "Aww." "I'll try to think of a way of making up for it. Julia or I will let you know on Monday." I was thinking of our inviting her on next weekend's trip. That'd probably be a good way of making up for stopping too soon. Alexis laughed, "You and Julia are strange." "I agree. Now I've got a problem with what to do with your juices on my fingers. I was going to get you to lick it off, but that'd confirm anyone's suspicion." "You could try putting it back where it came from." "Haha. Good try. I hate to waste good pussy juice, but I guess I have to wipe it on the tablecloth." "Don't worry, there's plenty more where that came from." I wiped my hand on the tablecloth. Not something I'd do at most people's houses, but the tablecloth already had dozens of food spills on it, as everyone who wasn't using NP was making quite a mess. ^ Pat's visit was also enjoyable. She's an especially good looking girl, and with a very nice figure, so having her sit on my lap was no hardship at all. She also raved over the house and food, adding, "I'm amazed they're putting all this on for you. I don't mean anything bad about you, but they've gone to a HECK of a lot of trouble. They must have spent days in the kitchen getting everything ready." "It's a SPECTACULAR meal all right. I've never eaten this well in my whole life." "Do you understand why Lily wants to serve you?" "I wish I knew. If you find out, please explain it to me. It's something very Chinese, that's for sure. As best I can understand - and I'm sure I'm missing most of it - it's an honorable thing for a Chinese girl to serve a guy she thinks is 'a great man'. Apparently I qualify, although I'm not a man, nor done anything great yet." "I mostly meant, how is she going to serve you?" "So far she's washed my car, offered to buy me a new cellphone in Hong Kong, and caused this dinner to happen. As far as I'm concerned, this dinner alone makes her the best Chinese serving girl I've ever had, haha. I understand that a big part of her duties is serving me sexually. She's almost fanatical about that, and as best I can tell her Father is entirely in favor of it too. It's very strange, especially because I thought Chinese girls were supposed to be modest." "Yeah, she told me her family supports her. It's a strange practice. It's a bit wasted on you though, because you've already got several girls who'll have sex with you. I'd love another time with you, and every other girl here would too. Not Chloe, but everyone else would. -- "Speaking of Chloe, I was surprised you invited her. I heard you tell the Chinese boy that she wants to be your girlfriend, but that applies to dozens of girls, so how come you invited her tonight?" Pat was interrogating me a bit, but so long as it didn't intrude on my eating or get too personal, I didn't really mind. I don't spend much time with Pat, so it was probably natural for her to have some questions, and girls tend to be very curious about relationships. I was surprised that Pat hadn't mentioned Chloe's tits, so I did. I asked her, "How come you don't think I invited her because of her tits?" "Haha. Any other boy and I would think that, but not with you. You're too mature for that." #4: #1: "Why do you think I'm too mature to like tits?" "I know I've got nice ones. Boys are always talking to them rather than my face, always trying to get a grab, etc., but not you. You wouldn't even hold them in the hot tub a couple of weeks ago, and when we were making love you spent far longer between my legs than you did up top." Both examples were correct, but Pat's reasoning was wrong. I hadn't fondled her in the hot tub because that'd been only three days after the first time Julia had pushed me into having sex with anyone else. I'd still been very uncertain and insecure about what to do, especially in that intimidatingly large crowd. A repeat of the hot tub party now would see a VERY different Mark! And I'd spent more time between Pat's legs than on her tits during sex because that's the best place to give a girl pleasure. I very much enjoy giving girls a good time, so I enjoy spending most of my time working the southern region. "Excellent reasoning, Pat, you're a smart girl." Not strictly true, but I was being nice because she's got lovely tits. "The reasons Chloe is here are somewhat complicated. I believe she'd make some guy a good girlfriend if he could..." "You've GOT to be joking! She's scared to be in the same room as a boy!" I could easily forgive Pat's interruption, because the idea of Chloe being a good girlfriend was ridiculous. "You're right about that now, but Julia and I think we have a chance to change her. Not a high chance, but it'd turn her life around if we could get rid of her paranoia. She's a nice girl at heart, and I think it's not really her fault. Her attitude seems to be coming from her parents brainwashing her. Plus she did give me some pizza at school one day recently, and that counts for a lot, haha." "That's very nice of you. It is sad that she's so scared of guys. I get the same sort of attention that she's so panicky about, and it's mostly a pain, but not nearly as bad as she thinks it is. From the right boy, it's even very welcome." The last was said with a big smile directed straight at me, letting me know I was "the right boy." "Thank you, Pat. If we weren't surrounded by adults I'd leer and ogle at you for all I was worth, just to make you feel welcomed, haha." If Julia was right about Chloe's throwing herself at me when she knew I was rich (and I doubted Julia would be wrong about a girly thing like that), then in a couple of days Pat was going to see Chloe throwing herself at me. Somehow I expected that I'd be catching her. To make that look a little better in Pat's eyes, I added, "To be honest, it's Julia who's doing most of the work to help Chloe. Chloe desires me because she thinks I'm the only guy she can trust not to be after her for her breasts, so my job is to be bait while Julia tries to get Chloe to change her behavior and attitude. To start with, we're just trying to get her to stop hiding all the time. Sadly we're not having any success so far, so we might have to try another approach soon. Either that or I'm not very good bait, haha." Pat chuckled, "Then her fear must've affected her eyesight, haha." "Eyesight! So much for my thinking girls were attracted to me for my sparkling personality and sense of humor. Oh well, I guess there are worse things than being treated as a sex object, like NOT being treated as a sex object, haha." "Speaking of sex objects, I wouldn't object to some more sex. Lily and I have fun, but I'd prefer to have the real thing from you. Is there any chance of us getting together sometime soon, please?" #4: #1: #3: #1: #4: #1: #4: "I only just got back to town this morning, Pat. I'm still trying to catch up and haven't looked at whatever else I need to do this coming week. I haven't even spent any quality time with Julia yet. I'm sorry, but I have to get back to you later about that. I bet someone as beautiful as you isn't used to a guy putting you off, are you?" #4: #1: Pat agreed, "No, it's not often a guy turns down sex with me. Maybe I'm losing my looks?" "If you think you're losing your looks, then you've already lost your marbles! You're easily one of the most beautiful girls at school..." #1: #4: #3: ^ Lily moved around a lot. On one of her frequent returns, she mentioned that she wouldn't be at school on Monday. She apologized profusely, but she wouldn't be able to provide lunch for Carol and me that day, "but Tuesday okay." "I'm sure we can manage one day Lily. We managed for years before you, so don't worry about it." Lily then asked, "Your car dirty. Where tomorrow morning?" "Aren't you going to Hong Kong tomorrow?" "Yes. But wash your car in morning. Where please?" I could tell by the determined look on her face that there was no point in trying to refuse. I said, "Let me check with my family first. I've been away for a while and they may want me to stay at home tonight." I checked, and they were feeling very happy and satisfied at the moment, and they didn't require me to stay home. Julia also agreed with my sleeping with her, "Although" she said, "I might be too full to do anything." After telling Julia to immediately stop eating, and noticing that my Lordly authority didn't extend that far, I told Lily that my car would be outside Julia's house. ------- Chapter 191: All Good Things Come to an End Saturday, May 7, 2005 (Continued) Toward the end of the meal, I discovered one thing about Chinese culture that was most welcome: they take it as a compliment when you eat a lot of their food. They were VERY complimented by me! Mrs. Cheng took considerable pride in how much I put away, and she joyously encouraged me to keep adding to it. I did my best, but even I have a limit; a highly complimentary limit, but a finite one. Shortly thereafter, I discovered another thing I liked about Chinese culture, they love to package up their hugely excessive leftovers and give them to the guest of honor. That may have been something they did just for me this time, but it was this time that mattered the most to me, so I considered it a triumph of Chinese culture. I was given enough food to EASILY last until Monday's lunch, so it looked like I'd be eating Chinese for lunch after all. Between their fantastic food, their very friendly dinner table atmosphere, their generosity with the aforementioned fantastic food, and their giving away their daughters into sexual servitude, I was rapidly becoming a fan of Chinese culture. #1: The goodbye process was long and involved. A great deal of handshaking, bowing, and a HUGE amount of smiling; FAR, FAR more than Americans would have done. So much for the Chinese reputation of being expressionless. With their lack of English, some of the Chinese resorted to little acts. Grandfather tapped the side of his glasses were I'd placed the loop of hair, and made several enthusiastic signs of approval. Mrs. Cheng pointed to my belly and extended hers, rubbing it as if it was extremely full. She laughed and gave several thumbs-up signals, happy that I'd eaten so much, which made two of us. In the course of the goodbyes, I asked Lily, "Would it be okay for me to thank the people that worked in the kitchen?" The two women had been going back and forth all evening. Mrs. Cheng had often gone to the kitchen to check on things, but she'd spent about 75% of her time at the table, so the others had done a lot of the work during the evening, although there must have been a HUGE amount of prior work involved in cooking so many different dishes. Lily passed my request onto Mother, who was only too happy. She rushed into the kitchen to fetch them, and FOUR Chinese emerged! The two women I'd seen before, plus two men I'd never seen before. [Later, at school, I asked Lily to explain who the men were. She said, "Chef number 1, chef number 2," which wasn't a particularly helpful explanation. It didn't seem worth pursuing though.] [[They'd been hired to help from a good Chinese restaurant in Portland. Mrs. Cheng had done all the organizing, menu selection, etc., but the two chefs had done most of the cooking, with Mrs. Cheng strongly in charge of Quality Control; several dishes had been deemed not of sufficient quality. One of the women was the Cheng's housekeeper/cook, and the other was a local Chinese woman who was a general helper for the evening.]] I gave a short (because it had to go via Lily) but heart- and stomach-felt speech, praising them and Mrs. Cheng for the BEST meal of my life. There were loud agreements from all my invitees. The recipients of our praise beamed happily and bowed often. The goodbyes had to be restarted, in the course of which Mr. Cheng said something to Lily, who rushed off. She quickly returned carrying a pad and pen. Lily knelt at my feet, placing the pad on the floor beside her. She undid the laces on my shoes, removed it and my sock, put the pad under it and traced the shape of my foot. She redressed my foot, then repeated the procedure with my other foot. Mr. Cheng carefully observed, and seemed satisfied with the job Lily was doing. When Lily stood, I asked, "Why?" Lily smiled sneakily, saying, "You see Tuesday." #3: After further goodbyes inside, we moved outside, where my group started saying goodbye to each other. I wanted to kiss all my girlfriends goodnight, but Lily and her parents had followed us out. I quietly asked Lily, "Would it dishonor you in front of your parents if I kissed Chloe goodnight?" "No, no. Is fine." Lily made shooing motions, urging me to do so. "Are you sure?" "Yes, sure." I was shooed some more. I had to kiss Chloe right now, as the travel arrangements had me dropping Alexis and Pat at their houses then taking Julia and Ava on to Julia's house for the night. Mom and Dad were dropping Chloe at her home. She didn't want a boy to drop her off, in case her parents saw, further reducing my opinion of them and the diminishing likelihood of Chloe being an enjoyable girlfriend for me. I was a little concerned at how Chloe might react if I just grabbed her for a kiss, so I asked her first, "Chloe, can I give you a kiss goodnight?" A variety of emotions passed across her face, doubt and happiness being the main two. I took her in my arms and gave her a reasonable kiss. She was too inexperienced to give me a reasonable one back, but she'd look awesome in a tiny bikini, so I made allowances. She was smiling afterward though, so at least I'd left her happy. It was probably the high point of her sexual life, and that's more of a sad fact than a joke. When I moved to take Lily into my arms to kiss her, she got all shy, whispering to me, "Only hug." Clearly because her parents were watching, which seemed weird given that they both knew that Lily was going to be serving me (Mrs. Cheng had also made a quiet but happy reference to that during the meal). Sometimes girls think strangely. I thanked the Chengs again and again for such a wonderful evening, until we finally made our departures. While still putting on our seatbelts, I said, "I am MIGHTY glad that I wore loose pants!" The rest of the trip was spent with everyone enthusiastically endorsing my sentiment, and praising the evening in general. We'd all had a great time. Ava amused me with a little comment though, "Mom was very glad to see so many people come out of the kitchen at the end. Now she's got an excuse when her dinner tomorrow doesn't compare to the Chengs'." I said, "Dinner in the White House wouldn't compare to the Chengs'! That was spectacular. Tell her not to worry, because I don't expect to be hungry for at least another week. If I keep eating like I did tonight, something's going to burst, so something very simple would be welcome. If she's still not reassured, tell her I'd prefer to eat lighter so I can have sex with her daughter properly afterward. I'm going to have trouble doing that tonight!" Amid the chuckles, Julia said, "I'm so stuffed there's no room in my body for you to insert anything more, haha." Ava agreed, "Me too. The food was just too delicious to stop, and there was always another dish I hadn't tried yet." I felt sorry for Julia. Not only because she was going to miss out on my inserting anything into her (hehe), but also because she can only eat very small amounts. I'd guess a third as much as I do (or maybe only a quarter if I'm pushing myself). Presumably she gets the same enjoyment from the taste of the food as I do, but she can only enjoy as third as much of it. That'd be a real bummer on a night like tonight! Alexis and Pat both gave me enthusiastic kisses when I dropped them off, thanking me for a great night. I insisted, "It was no trouble." Shortly after we were down to just Julia, Ava and me, and were heading toward Julia's place, Julia raised the subject, "Would you like to know what I thought the value of the Chengs' house was, Mark?" "Yes please! I thought you were never going to tell me." "Of course I was going to tell you. It just requires more explanation than I could give you while the others were around." I couldn't see how it could require any explanation at all, but it soon turned out that I was wrong (what a surprise). Julia continued, "Ava, our man said we can afford to buy a house costing up to $2.5 million. He wants to know what I thought the Chengs' house was worth, so he'd have an idea what sort of house $2.5 million would buy. He's too busy to go looking at houses himself, although we'll obviously show him our shortlist when we get that far, so he can choose which one he likes the most." I remember Dad's explanation about how that'd work. They'd let me keep choosing the one I liked the most, out of a reducing selection, until I chose the one they wanted, then they'd congratulate me on my wise decision. -- Julia proceeded to disprove my idea that a single number was a sufficient answer, "There are two problems with valuing the Chengs' house. First, I didn't see the kitchen, which is the most important room in the house..." #1: " ... I asked to, but Lily said the people were far too busy for us to get in their way. I didn't appreciate how true that was at the time, but I certainly do now. There must have been an enormous amount of work involved in putting that dinner together. I'll just assume they have an above average kitchen. It seemed to function very well, but I wish I'd seen how it was designed because that makes a big difference. The second problem is that their house is on a small property in town. We're looking to buy at least a few acres, which means out of town. That makes a numerical comparison misleading. -- "If I said the Chengs' was worth $1 million, the first thing Mark would do, would be to try to imagine a house twice as good." (I was already trying to do exactly that.) "But that's not including the value of the land or of the location. That house on the same-sized property located twenty minutes drive from town would probably be worth less than half of it's value in town. But if it was located on twenty acres 5 minutes drive from town, it could be worth triple its town value. I can't give Mark a fair comparison unless I talk about land and location too, and what we're looking to buy is not the same as the Chengs have got. Do you understand that, Mark?" "I got it, thanks. I'm impressed by how well you understand real estate." "Every time I say something smart or knowledgeable, you assume I thought of it myself. Most of it comes from Mom or Google, or in this case by my spending all day talking real estate with a realtor. She talked about property values in terms of their size and distance from town several times. All I'm doing is parroting her. -- "To give you the comparison you want. If the Chengs' house was located outside of, but fairly near to town, on three to five acres, then the listing price would probably be about $1.5 million. If it was located twenty or thirty minutes away from the nearest town, and had twenty to fifty acres, then it'd still be listed at about 1.5. Those are the two types of properties that we're mostly looking at, so I won't give you any other examples. They didn't have a swimming pool, much of a view, or other things that would affect the value, but put simply, the houses we're looking at are about 25% larger and about 50% more expensive than the Chengs'." "Wow. That's incredible. I can't even imagine how a house could be better than the Chengs'." "Haha, Mark. There are dozens of ways the Chengs' house could have been easily improved: a marble staircase, more wood paneling, better bathroom fittings, but I can see you don't understand. Don't worry about it, we'll show you before you need to choose." I wasn't worried about my "needing to choose," because I knew I'd have LOTS of 'guidance' for that 'decision'. I was just highly curious. During my tour of the Chengs' house, I'd tried to do what Julia had suggested: to visualize the rooms without the furnishings. Even 'naked', the Chengs' house had been better than the Williams' house, and there was simply no point in comparing the Chengs' house to our current one. Ava had said the average house was worth $205,000. I'll take a guess that ours is worth $150,000, about one-tenth as much as the Chengs' (ignoring land and location, which Julia would tell me off for). That our mansion might be 50% better again was unimaginable to me. Nice to think about though. The rest of the drive was spent with Ava and Julia gushing about houses, and how wonderful I was to be rich. One thought did cross my mind, #3: #1: #3: A little later, Ava commented that it was a pity her parents didn't know about me being rich. I told her, "I intend to tell them at dinner tomorrow night." "REALLY? That's fantastic! Thanks Mark. Oh boy, they're going to be so impressed." "Would you like to be the one that tells them?" "Hehe. That'd be great. Can I tell them you're looking to buy a house?" "Sure. That's part and parcel of the same thing. Is that how you want to tell them?" "Yeah. They'll be blown away by your buying a house." #1: #3: Speaking of her parents' reaction to my house buying reminded me of their reaction to my having multiple girlfriends. I asked, "Ava, before dinner your parents were a little bent out of shape about me having too many girlfriends. What were they like later?" Ava had spent quite a while talking to her parents, too far away for me to eavesdrop over the considerable ambient noise. The Wests had certainly seemed happy enough by the time we'd exchanged "Goodnights" at the end of the evening, but I was curious to know. Ava answered, "I told them to stop being so silly, haha. It's not often I tell them that, so I enjoyed surprising them. There's no way I can get a boy as good as you for my own, so it's silly of them to make an issue out of it." "Well put," agreed Julia. "I said much the same thing to my parents at the beginning, except I never used the word 'silly'. I missed my chance, haha." When we got home, we had to go to the kitchen to put the food we had in the fridge. Prof and Vanessa were having a coffee so we chatted with them for a little while. I refused milk and cookies, probably the first time I'd done that since my appetite increased two and half months ago. The discussion got on to Ava's parents, and how they were managing to accept my differences. Ava happily told Prof and Vanessa, "Mark's given me permission to tell my parents about his buying a house and being rich. Oh!" Ava turned to me, "Mark, can I tell them about the shopping trip to LA too?" "Sure. It's all part of my having money. Don't bother checking individual things with me, Ava. You can tell your parents anything about my money and what I do with it, unless I specifically say not to mention something. Also, I'd like them not to tell anyone else until after we get back from LA, but then it'll be public knowledge." "Okay. Thanks." Facing Vanessa again, "That'll super-impress Mom and Dad. It's so funny that they were worried about me saying too much in case Mark might be after our money. He could make what our house is worth in a few minutes." #3: <"A few minutes"? It's about one-twentieth of what we earned. Ava thinks we earned it over four days, so a fifth of a day. A couple of hours then. That should impress them. Do you think they'll stop worrying about the number of girlfriends we have after they learn that we can easily afford them?> #4: #3: Prof and Vanessa told us that the Wests had asked them several questions about me, and they'd listened carefully when other people were talking about me. Vanessa summarized by saying, "We told them some facts about you, but they're only just starting to absorb some of the implications. They're handling it well, and I don't believe they'll become so angry that they try to pull Ava out of the relationship." The conversation moved onto discussing the Wests' health, which I listened to carefully because I didn't understand hardly anything about what was going to happen to them. In the course of that discussion Vanessa suddenly said, "Mark, can I have a private talk with you in our study please?" All eyes swiveled around to Vanessa. Julia asked, "What about, Mom?" Vanessa chuckled, "Is my daughter unaware of the meaning of 'private'? After our talk, Mark can choose to tell you, or not. Shall we go, Mark?" "Sure." In the study Vanessa said to me, "When Katie and Carson came for the dinner party here, they said they were going to work for as long as they physically could, not take any vacations nor spend any money unnecessarily, so they can pass as much as possible on to Ava. They're overreacting, because a 17-year old girl doesn't need as much as they're going to leave her, but I understand their desire to leave her with as much as they can. -- "The pity of it is that they'll never get to do some of the things they've probably been thinking about doing after Ava leaves home. Prof and I have talked about doing a tour around Italy after all our kids are independent. I want to tour Tuscany for the usual reasons, and Prof wants to visit the areas of some of the famous Renaissance mathematicians because he's a bit of a math history buff. If the Wests had hopes for a trip of their own, they would've given them up. They're losing their last precious months of health to their jobs. -- "I suggest you tell them to go on vacation together, and you'll reimburse Ava for whatever they spend on themselves. You'd want to put a limit on it, but my impression is that they're very frugal people, so I doubt if they'd have profligate plans. If you did this, it'd raise their opinion of you a great deal. Not just because you can afford it, but because you're kind and caring enough to make the offer. -- "You'll have to make it soon because as they get sicker, it's going become more difficult for them both to be feeling good enough at the same time to travel. So whatever it is they want to do, they should do it as soon as possible, which unfortunately doesn't give you weeks to get to know them before you decide whether to do it or not." #1: #4: "I'm not against the idea Vanessa, but I'm getting worried about running out of money. After buying the new house, I'm going to have about one million left to cover the renovations, furnishings and whatever else comes along. I'd hate to run out of money before we bought a bed, haha. Binion's aren't going to let us back, that's for sure! And no other casino will take bets anywhere near large enough to make a difference, even if they let us in the door after seeing our photographs from Binion's. At the VERY most we could make $3,500 per spin, and they're not going to let us win many of those in a row before we've got trouble." "I agree that it's a problem. We should do a budget for you, but that can't be usefully done until we have the new place under contract and the renovations are costed. I'm not suggesting you be frivolous, but I wouldn't worry too much about running out. You're giving us and your parents a million each. I'm sure we'd have no problem spending some of that on the new house." "But that's supposed to be a gift to the parents, not to be spent on the house! You should spend it on yourself." "So I'll spend it decorating our bedroom and study. Perhaps in buying a bed for my daughter if you run out, haha. I'm not too worried about money. We'd prefer that you concentrate on your studies rather than spend time on moneymaking schemes, especially given how worrying the last scheme became. I have no doubt you'll earn very good money in the future, so don't worry too much about running low. I'm fairly confident that Ava's parents won't even have planned anything grandiose. I'd be surprised if they'd spend more than $10,000 on themselves." "Oh, is that all. I thought we were talking several times that. I don't mind giving them up to $10,000. That's barely 1% of the amount I've got left after buying the house, which is hardly going to be noticeable." "Good. You don't have to decide now, and I won't say anything to anyone." "It's an easy decision. I can easily imagine if my parents were that sick, how stupid it'd be for them to go to their separate jobs day after day. That should be the least of their priorities. Sure as hell I wouldn't want to go to school if I was in their situation. They should spend time together, ideally doing something they've looked forward to for years, like you said. The Wests would have to provide me with a REALLY bad meal tomorrow to change my mind, haha. I'll tell them tomorrow, after Ava's had the fun of telling them I'm rich." When we re-entered the kitchen, Julia's looked at me with obvious curiosity. I told her, "You'll enjoy it more if you don't know about it in advance. By the way, we need an abbreviation for that, as it comes up so often." "How about 'spoilsport' whenever you use it on me, and 'serve you right' whenever I use it on you?" "Haha. Not quite what I had in mind, but the inequality of it does remind me of something I intended to ask Vanessa or Mom. Vanessa, why is it that when there's an anniversary it's the guy that has to provide the present? I would have thought anniversaries should be celebrated equally." I'd asked the same question back when I'd had the anniversary of Julia's and my first date, but it'd be fun to ask again. With any luck it might make Julia feel some shame (but probably not). Julia quickly said, "Careful how you answer Mom, Dad's listening too." Vanessa said, "How's this: In some people's relationships there's a more equal exchange of gifts on anniversaries, but the females you see here look after our men so well for 364 days of the year, that it'd be terribly discourteous of the men not to show their enthusiastic appreciation on the single day that is the anniversary of their relationships' formation. We girls wouldn't want to diminish the value of our man's appreciation by offsetting it with gifts of our own, so we magnanimously let the men exercise the full range of their chivalrous instincts without restraint or competition. How does that sound?" Julia graded her mothers answer, "Understated Mom, but not bad for a first attempt, haha. There you go, Mark. An inadequate explanation, but it's on the right track." "I've learned a profound truth: not to ask for an explanation from someone with a vested interest." Julia, Ava and I went to the bedroom. I remembered that I shouldn't use NP to flick light switches in case the buggers had video camera bugs, so I manually turned on a bedside light. Ava didn't notice my change in behavior. After we'd undressed and climbed into bed, our sexual activity was limited to hugs and kisses, our stomachs being far too bloated. I asked, "Julia, do you know how good the doctors are in Hong Kong?" "No, why?" "That's what Lily's going to Hong Kong for, to be checked out for me. I'm worried that their contraceptives won't be good enough." "You told me she offered to show her pills to you every day to prove she was taking them. Get the brand name and google it." "What if it doesn't have a brand name?" "I don't think people would distribute pills without a name on them, but if there's no name, ask Lily why not. If you're still worried, insist that she gets her contraceptives here. Obviously her parents are okay with her having sex, so they can easily get the pill for her. Worst outcome is you have to use a condom for a few days." "In that case I have another question. Why is it that problems I worry about, you always solve very easily?" Julia chuckled. "I can't always solve them, but I agree I do solve them quicker than you sometimes. Less often recently. You didn't have any initiative when we first started going out, but you're getting much better, especially if it's in an area you're comfortable with. Female health issues still make your thinking wobbly, but you're improving in leaps and bounds." "If I've improved at all, it's all due to your efforts." "Which is why you get to buy the anniversary present." "Haha. I walked right into that, didn't I?" After some mutual appreciation, mostly expressed non-verbally and non-vigorously, I said, "I have yet another question, about my schedule for the coming week. I definitely want some quality time with my most favorite girls, but I was also hoping I might be able to schedule some time for Pat and Alexis, especially Pat because I'm starting to feel guilty about not inviting her on the flying bed trip." "Huh? Oh, you mean the shopping trip..." "You call it 'shopping trip', I call it 'flying bed trip'. You have your priorities wrong." "Haha. I think you'll be outvoted six-to-one on that. You've clearly lost sight of the purpose of the trip, but seeing as how you're paying, I'll generously let you call it whatever name you want, even if it's misleading." "Thank you, darling. That's very flexible of you. I was asking whether I'll have time for Pat or Alexis this coming week? Let's assume Monday and Tuesday nights are spoken for." I hoped Julia understood it was because I wanted to sleep with Carol and her. Julia answered, "I've got nothing booked on any day between school letting out and dinnertime, except for Chloe. I want her to deflower herself on top of you as soon as possible. That's a condition of her coming on the plane, and I want to get it done quickly so you can screw her on at least three or four different occasions before the trip, including at school if you need to get the numbers up. That way she'll be well broken-in before the trip, so she shouldn't pull any of her prima donna behavior during it." "You're actually going to tell her that's a condition for her getting on the plane? Isn't that going to risk her getting very angry in the middle of school, and my being rich screamed about earlier than you want?" "I wouldn't hesitate to lay down the requirement like that, but I'm intending to do it in a more enjoyable way. I'm going to get into a conversation with her Monday afternoon and casually mention how much I'm looking forward to my shopping trip to Rodeo Drive next weekend. She's bound to ask about it..." "OF COURSE she will. She's a girl and you're talking about shopping on Rodeo Drive!" "Exactly. I'll tell her that you've rented a private jet and you're flying some of your lovers down to LA for a day's shopping on Rodeo, the Justin Timberlake concert, a luxury hotel overnight then flying back Sunday. I'm reasonably sure she'll have some questions about that..." Ava's and my laughter conveyed our agreement. " ... Which will lead to me explaining that you're rich. Then I'll make the casual comment to her that it's a pity she isn't one of your lovers, otherwise she'd be invited along, but it's almost too late for that because you've got to confirm the passengers by Tuesday night. It'll be easy to insist that you're only taking lovers, so she'll only have one option if she wants to go. She naively thinks she's mostly in love with you already, so learning you're rich and taking girls to Rodeo Drive should make her love blossom EXTREMELY quickly, followed moments later by her legs flying apart, haha." "That's brilliant! You're REALLY going to enjoy that, aren't you?" "It'll be one of life's little pleasures, yes. It'll avoid the angry scene that you were worried about too. I'll swear her to secrecy, telling her that any of the girls will lose their seats if they tell anyone, etc. All you have to do is tell her that you doubt she's ready, and use that to get her to do all the work for her deflowering, so she can't claim she was forced. If you can screw her a few times next week in ways which she also can't possibly claim were forced, then she's going to have to stop trying to claim that nonsense. Your usual sexual magic will also be teaching her that sex is great fun, so she should become eager for it. Hopefully by next weekend her needing to be forced will have been totally fucked out of her." Ava asked, "What's this about forcing Chloe?" We explained, after which Ava said, "That's just STUPID! That girl badly needs to get fucked. Does she honestly think that sex is bad?" Julia answered, "Yes, I think she does. Her body wants it, but her parents have brainwashed her into thinking it's wrong. To make it even worse for her, she's seen Mark naked. Not just a glimpse either, but full-frontal for several minutes when he was standing right next to her, so she's ripe for the plucking. I'll tell her my story on Monday afternoon so she'll probably want a session with you as soon as possible, Mark. You'll only need an hour or so with her the first time, so you can do that either Monday or Tuesday right after school, can't you?" "Sure, except that your father's got those people coming to do some work on our two homes and the cars, remember?" "I CERTAINLY do. I'm looking forward to that being over with. I'm guessing they should have finished at least one of the two houses by then. I'll get a phone number from Dad and we'll call it for a progress report just before we leave school." Ava looked curious. Julia preempted her question by saying, "Don't worry about it. It's just a nuisance that's being fixed." Ava is good at taking our word for things like that, so it was as good as forgotten. Julia continued, "I'm thinking that if Chloe doesn't do the deed by the end of Tuesday, then we scrub her from the trip. That's why I'm telling her you have to confirm the passengers by Tuesday night. There's no need to give her any longer, because there won't be time for you to fuck her often enough before the trip to get all the nonsense out of her. Plus if she delays it to Wednesday, then she'll delay it longer and longer, and then there'd be a big scene Saturday morning. -- "There are a couple more small problems with Chloe. Her parents won't let her fly to LA for a weekend with a boy, so she'll have to lie to them about having a sleepover here. I'll get Mom to talk with Chloe's mom by Wednesday night at the latest, to confirm the sleepover is acceptable, otherwise we'll invite someone else on the trip. -- "Another problem is that when you start fucking her, she'll have to restrain herself from bouncing around at home with a great, big smile on her face. If her parents get suspicious, the first thing they'll do is cancel her sleepover. We should both warn her about that. -- "One thing that's worked out nicely is that her parents think Chloe and I are becoming good friends, because she told them that I invited her to the dinner tonight. That means her coming to my house some afternoons and for a sleepover will seem reasonably natural. Fast, but not unreasonable, especially if Mom backs it up. I'll try to get a chance to visit her home too, even if only for a couple of hours one evening. Tuesday or Wednesday would be perfect, so I could pretend to suddenly think of having a sleepover. -- "So the afternoons are mostly left open for Chloe. In the evenings there are a couple of commitments: The first pipeline date is Friday, and Mackenzie wants her prize some time..." [When Carol, Ava and I had been waiting for our bowling game, Carol had told me that Mackenzie Norris was the girl who'd won the Pop Quiz competition. I haven't mentioned her before in this biography, so I'll quickly introduce her now. Mackenzie is a 10th grader who came to the bowling and hot tub party a couple of weeks ago. In my opinion she's uninteresting, which is why she hasn't been mentioned earlier. But it seems she's interested enough in me to win the pop quiz. She's reasonably good looking, and had been one of the more modest girls at the hot tub party. She had ended up stripping, but she had NOT taken a quickie-fuck at the end of that date, openly telling me that she was a virgin, so Carol's news that Mackenzie had won the quiz hadn't given me any hope for a night of wild passion.] " ... When is up to you, but my suggestion is that you make it as soon as you can because your life could get very hectic when news of your wealth gets out next week. She just wants an ordinary first date; something like a dinner and a movie. She doesn't want to sleep with you overnight or any of the usual wild stuff. She's allowed to date, but you'll have to meet her parents, chat while they check you out, and bring her back by whatever time they set. Just the usual procedure. Is that okay with you?" "It's fine. To her parents I'm simply a boy in her class who has become interested in her, and we're going on a first date, right?" "That's what I understand she truly wants the reality to be, so it'd be the best explanation to give them." "You've got her number, I presume?" "Of course. I'm a GOOD girlfriend! Haha." "I'll call her tomorrow morning then. I guess I have to choose the restaurant, movie and whatever else?" "Yes, just like any other first date. Do you need any help?" "No, it's nothing to get in a sweat about. It'll have to be Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday evening though. Will she be allowed to date mid-week?" "I didn't get down to that level of detail. You'll have to ask her. She and Pipeline 1A#1 are your only two evening commitments, and you have no overnight commitments." "What does 'Pipeline 1A#1' mean?" "On the website each pipeline group is identified and the initials of the girls in it are listed. '1A' is intake 1, group A. '1B' being the other group that's active now. When they're merged they'll become '1C'. The '#1' means the first date for that group. On the website the result of date #1 will be listed alongside each girl: blank meaning she survived; yellow, orange or red being the color of the card they got. If you can, a brief comment for each girl and the date as a whole would be good. That way we can teach all the girls who check the website to behave better based on the experiences of a few at a time." "I got it. You're very well organized." "I have to be. Many of the girls at school will be checking the site regularly, so it has to be well structured and simple." "You ARE a good girlfriend! So back to the reason I asked for my schedule in the first place: choosing times to have Alexis and Pat stay the night. Depending on Mackenzie, I'll have two mid-week evenings free, and every overnight is free from Wednesday." I thought of a small correction, "Actually not Friday overnight, because Saturday morning is important to me." Julia smiled happily, "Good boy," then gave me my reward hug and kiss. Ava asked, "What's important about Saturday morning?" Julia said, "Saturday the 14th is Mark's and my anniversary. He wants to wake up next to me rather than Pat or Alexis." "Aww, that's sweet. Now I understand the little conversation about anniversary presents downstairs. Going to LA is Mark's anniversary present to you?" #2: #3: #2: #4: #2: #4: We didn't need to tell each other the background to the issue, but for your information: Ava had been watching me at school for two or three months, so knew when Julia and I had first started hanging out together. That'd been late March when I'd returned to school with a broken arm courtesy of Annette Neumeyer's multitude of Biffs, and nowhere near the 14th of either March or April. To me it seemed obvious that Ava should think the 14th was the anniversary of the first time Julia and I had had sex, as having first sex would be a logical date to commemorate, that being the best indicator of a relationship becoming serious. But somehow I doubted that a girl would look at the issue so logically, even a girl that enjoyed sex as much as Ava. I don't know what assumption Ava had made, or what explanation Julia had prepared, if any, but I'll play safe if it comes up by getting Julia to answer it. #3: #4: #2: #3: #2, #4: The girls and I chatted a bit more, Julia raising an important subject, "It's quite likely that some of the girls will have trouble getting permission from their parents for a weekend in LA. My parents are perfectly comfortable with it. Have you talked to your parents about taking Carol?" "Ahh, no. I never thought to. I seem to have gotten used to assuming I can make decisions like that. I'd better ask them asap, in case they get upset about my assuming their consent." "That'd be a good idea. Ava, your parents won't object, will they?" "Umm, I don't think so, but I'm not sure. I've never asked for something like this before." Ava looked worried, but Julia said, "Don't worry about it. We'll bring it up tomorrow night, and I'll correct them if they don't agree fast enough." Ava and I were both surprised by Julia's confidence (if not cheekiness). Julia added, "I just have to repeat the same things Mom said to them during the dinner party a couple of weeks ago. It shouldn't be difficult to get them to agree. That leaves Alexis, Katelin and Chloe. Chloe will have to outright lie. I don't know enough about Alexis' and Katelin's families to know whether they'd get permission or not. We'll have to give them a deadline to get it by, because we don't want any last minute withdrawals. Unless they talk, in which case I'll fire their ass in an instant. That'd be a superb lesson for every other girl to hear. I almost hope someone does break the secret, because it'd be fantastic to cancel their invitation in front of the whole class." I was still chuckling over that when Ava asked, "Aren't they going to have to tell their parents that Mark's rich to get permission?" "Hmm, good point. Maybe we might need to say it's an all-expenses paid competition prize, or something. I'll talk with Alexis and Katelin first, to see if that might be a problem." Just before we went to sleep, I remembered to ask, "Julia, what's the story on the Liaison Meeting tomorrow?" "Oops. I told everyone else but forgot to tell you; I canceled it. There wasn't much point. You were away most of the time since the last one, Lily will be away, and all the Liaisons are up to date with what's going on." "Okay, thanks." We manually turned off the bedside lights, made a few last comments about how wonderful the meal had been, and went to sleep shortly after that. ------- Chapter 192: More About Memories Sunday, May 8, 2005 Sunday morning I got up to study as usual, remembering not to use a light blob to light my way. I started with some memory sharing tests, and found it even easier than the last time I'd tested it. It took no noticeable effort, either for the "retriever" or the "sender". (Sending memories was so easy now - requiring nothing more than being willing - that at this time we started referring to the two participants as the "retriever" and "owner". "Sender" wasn't appropriate because it misleadingly implied that person had to do something.) Although it was effortless, it wasn't perfect. It wasn't even dramatically better than the last time we'd tested it. The remaining restraint was what I thought of as an indexing problem, and that had only improved a little. An algebra-trained mind trying to do a calculus problem (for example), didn't know precisely what calculus knowledge it needed, so it took some time for the right knowledge to 'appear' in the retriever's mind. This delay varied, but was often a handful of seconds, which is a heck of a long time to take to remember something. I wasn't complaining though; I was too busy being happy. It was incredible that we could share memories and knowledge at all, and I was extremely happy that my ability to do so was good enough to eliminate the major problem I had been facing with the college courses being so interrelated. I had been living in fear that I'd have to get every mind to study every subject, which would have slowed me down by a factor of two, plus required me to redo the currently two courses with the teams swapped. It also would have meant sending one of my two computer systems back to OSU, which would be embarrassing to me and Prof. ^ [[In a normal mind the memories are managed subconsciously. You don't consciously 'file' your memories, create indexes, etc. Even when you consciously retrieve a memory, it's really nothing more than a conscious request to your subconscious to get it for you. The subconscious - among its HUGE number of other tasks - is the 'librarian' of your memories. The subconscious mind is no dummy. In some respects it's far smarter than your conscious mind, including because it can process information a GREAT deal faster, not being slowed down by the artificially reduced speed at which your conscious thought crawls. That's trained into you by the mechanical limits of human speech and hearing, in a process that makes as much sense as the Space Shuttles' engine size being restricted by the width of horses' asses. Both are logically absurd, stupidly restrictive, but true. My four subconsciouses had learned to communicate and cooperate with each other; by definition, without my consciously being aware of it. So when I had a memory retrieval need, it was possible for two (or more) subconsciouses to work out what I needed, retrieve it from the owner's memory, send it to the retriever's conscious mind. The process was very similar to an ordinary memory retrieval, except for the parts where the subconsciouses worked out what I needed, which took a variable amount of back and forth communication between them, and transferring the resultant memory/knowledge across the 'bridge' between minds. In some cases, the quickest and easiest approach was for the retriever's subconscious to tell the owner's subconscious what the problem was, so the owner's subconscious could get all the memories it knew would be needed to solve it. This was the easiest approach for nearly all of my college work, because the 'problem space' was so limited. In other words, the retriever's subconscious could define or repeat the problem to the owner's subconscious very quickly and easily. In other cases though, the 'problem space' was far too large to transfer (e.g., in social settings). In which case it was more a matter of the owner's subconscious suggesting possible memories, which were accepted or rejected depending on their fit to the problem. Minds are constantly looking for ways to be efficient. To a large degree, that's what "intelligence" is, an intelligent person having an efficiently organized and mind and brain. This occurs both at the conscious level (you consciously learn tricks to solve problems faster - see "Example" four paragraphs below) and definitely at the subconscious level (it MUST get more efficient, because experiences accumulate throughout life, and interrelationships between those experiences grow exponentially). Thus what I have described above - my subconsciouses learning to cooperate in memory retrieval - was entirely consistent with normal brain/mind functionality, just extended into a multi-mind situation. All of this was occurring without my consciously being aware of it, except to have the initial need to be able to access each other's memories. One VERY nice consequence of this internal methodology was that whenever the subconsciouses worked on a memory retrieval task, they swapped memory indexes back and forth, which they remembered. (To a much lesser extent, the memories themselves too, but I'm mostly talking about the indexes.) The more calculus problems an algebra-trained mind worked on, the more calculus indexes it accumulated in its own mind. In other words, we got more and more efficient at accessing each other's memories, eventually to the extent that it was usually not noticeably slower than accessing our own memories, depending on the subject. A problem involving rapidly changing knowledge wouldn't have had a chance to be shared around, but a stable body of knowledge would have its indexes 'cached' in every mind. Because we were happy to share our memories, something our subconsciouses were well aware of, the cunning little devils got clever enough to preempt the sharing process in some areas of knowledge, such as our college studies. As new knowledge came in to one mind, it would file it away like a good librarian should, but it would also tell the other librarians what it'd just done, providing them with the indexes in case they later wanted the knowledge. This was a large process (think of the number of indexes you have for all your memories, especially as every memory has multiple indexes!), so it took several weeks. It was also considerably complicated by a major event that occurred within that timeframe (which we'll get to soon), but when it was done, my life was considerably easier. Not just f0r my college studying either. For example, after a mind came off duty, the process of bringing him up to date with what he'd missed became much quicker, easier and more complete, as he had many of the memory indexes in place already. "Example" of a problem-solving trick at the conscious level, as mentioned above, is a little technique to square any number ending in "5" (e.g., 205^2). Drop the 5, remembering only the rest of the number (in this case 20). Multiply that by itself plus one, i.e., x(x+1), (e.g., 20 x 21 = 420). Append "25" onto the back of the answer (in the following, the "&" symbol means "append"): e.g., 420 & 25 = 42025. In other words, 205^2 = 42,025. Thus 15^2 = 1x2 & 25 = 225. 25^2 = 2x3 & 25 = 625, etc. I read this in a math book I was reading for 'fun' when I was about ten (me = geek). I thought it was very cute, so I remembered it (correction: me = geek^2). I have used it in school several times, often dramatically impressing the class, as doing 65^2=4225 as fast as 6x7=42, looked impressive. Everyone thought I was very intelligent. I knew they were wrong, because it was merely a trick, but I enjoyed the momentary attention and glory, which I rarely got normally. But - I have subsequently learned - they were correct to think I was intelligent. Traditional "intelligence" is a mind that knows many such tricks. The fact that nearly all of those tricks are subconscious doesn't make them any less "tricks", or the person any more deserving of being called "intelligent".]] ^ After my successful memory sharing tests, I happily turned to my normal studies, having a usefully productive session. I stopped just before everyone else would wake up, to review my progress. I was about halfway through both the courses, and had been studying them for about 2.5 weeks now, although I'd lost several days when I'd been on the lam. I worked out what my hourly progress rate (measured in "lectures per hour") had been since I'd gotten the second computer, and how many lectures I had left to do. That gave me a number of hours of study required. When I guessed my study time for the next few days, I calculated completion dates about a week and a half away. That was pleasingly quick! It depended on the number of hours I put in, so it was necessarily uncertain, but it was still nice. I wouldn't actually have "completed" the courses; I just would have just caught up to the real classes. They were nearly finished, so it was almost the same thing. Finals weren't until the week starting June 13, with the last day for lectures being Friday, June 3. If I caught up ten days from now (the 18th of May), I'd still have a couple of weeks of lecturers to do, but that wouldn't take me long at all. From about the 18th, I'd be able to start the third course. Cool! I'd finished studying at good points, so rather than restart I went back to the bedroom to celebrate my good mood by taking liberties with the girls' bodies. Julia needed to start her mansion shopping early, so it was a shorter liberty-taking session than Ava and I would've liked, but we all have to make sacrifices sometimes. During our showering and dressing, Julia explained why she was hitting the road so early. Yesterday's realtor had taken them to a property that had been okay, but nothing special. Vanessa had liked the look of the neighbor's place better, so the women were going to knock on the neighbor's door early this morning, before they started with today's agent. I asked, "Why not see it with an agent, like normal?" "Because it's not on the market." "You mean you're just going to walk up to a stranger's door and ask if they want to sell their house?" "Sure. The worse they can do is say 'No.' Admittedly the attempt cost me some enjoyable lovemaking, but you two can make good for my sacrifice some other time, haha." "That's VERY cheeky." "It's a little bit cheeky, that's all. Anyway, that's why the early start. Sorry about that." [Vanessa, Mom and Julia interrupted that family's breakfast, and talked their way into getting a brief tour, but the place wasn't particularly suitable. I mentioned the event only to illustrate how utterly shameless females can be. The thought of doing something like that would NEVER have crossed any of my minds.] At breakfast I said, "Prof, I projected my current studying rate, and I think I'll catch up to the real Algebra class about the middle of next week. Calculus might be a day or two later. Those times depend on my achieving my estimates for how many hours I'll be able to study, but that's roughly when I should be able to start the third course." "Is that faster or slower than you expected?" "Sort of both, actually. It's a little slower in calendar days because I lost several of them when I was away last week. But it's faster in study hours as I seem to be doing somewhat better than I expected with the new computer system." [There was another factor operating that changed my learning rate, but I wouldn't learn of it for nearly a year.] "That's excellent." We discussed that for a bit, then moved into a very complimentary discussion about last night's meal. It came in for several very positive comments, about half of them from me. Julia asked me, "What are you going to be doing today?" "I haven't thought about it much. I've got to call Mackenzie and I'd like to catch up on my studying. Lily is supposed to be coming around this morning to wash my car, so I should wait for her. Then I think I'll go home and check what chores Dad wants me to do, and otherwise catch up on all my schoolwork." After they'd all teased me enough for making poor Lily wash my car, Julia gave me Mackenzie's number, reading it out of her phone. After which she explained, "That's her family's landline number. She doesn't have a cellphone." "Is that legal? Aren't 16-year old girls required by law to have cellphones?" "It's certainly cruel and unusual punishment by her parents. Torture even. Without doubt they should be locked up and the key thrown away." Vanessa and Julia said they planned to be away all day. Vanessa reminded the family that there were plenty of Chinese leftovers in the fridge. Which was a pity, because I'd been hoping they'd forget, hehe. I said, "Normally I'd feel embarrassed at putting you to so much work, Vanessa, but the impression I get from Julia is that she's loving it." Julia protested, "Only because I'm willing to work so hard to please my man. I get no personal pleasure whatsoever." "{Raspberry}. In that case I'm sure you don't need to go. Vanessa and Mom would manage fine without you. You could stay and help me study. Turn the pages of my books, for example." Somehow Julia thought sticking her nose into other people's homes would be a better use of her time. Vanessa and Julia finished their breakfasts quickly, then left to collect my mom for their uninvited invasion of the unsuspecting strangers' home. Ava also left, to go back to her home. Andrew and Sophia emerged from their room as we were cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Seeing me, Sophia said, "Your trick of getting those hairs on those glasses last night is bugging me. I'd REALLY like to know how you did it?" #3: "Sorry Sophia. I haven't even told Vanessa, and she's in charge of feeding me, so I'm afraid you've got no chance of finding out. It was a great dinner though, wasn't it? Have you ever eaten like that before?" "You're not going to tell us?" "Exactly right. It's such a simple trick that if you knew the answer you'd be disappointed. Your not knowing is more fun." "How can it be simple? You weren't standing near him and he doesn't speak English so you couldn't have asked for his help." I turned to Andrew, "Julia also wants to know everything. I thought it was just my bad luck to get an insatiably curious girlfriend, but I see the problem is more widespread than that. Are they all like that?" "I'm afraid so," confirmed Andrew. "It's a good thing I don't know, or it'd be tortured out of me. Do you want some coffee, Sophia?" I said, "I'll go back to my study." Hopefully Andrew wouldn't let Sophia spend breakfast talking about my trick. #4: #3: ------- Chapter 193: Meeting the Norrises Sunday, May 8, 2005 (Continued) Prof and Vanessa hadn't bothered putting a phone in my study, so I went up to Julia's bedroom to call Mackenzie. On the way I tried to think of something more interesting to do than a movie and dinner. I hadn't thought of anything by the time I got to the phone, mainly because I knew almost nothing about Mackenzie; unlike her about me, given that she'd won the quiz. I didn't care about not having an idea, as it wasn't an important date and I didn't need to finalize it immediately anyway. It was just something to think about on the way to the phone. I called her number, and a woman's voice answered, presumably Mrs. Norris. #4: #2: "Hello. Is that Mrs. Norris, Mackenzie's mother?" "Yes it is. How may I help you?" "My name is Mark Anderson, I'm one of Mackenzie's classmates. But can I talk with you for a moment, before you call her please?" "Ahh, okay. What's on your mind?" "If it's okay with you, I'm going to ask Mackenzie if she will go out on a date with me. I've never asked her out before, so it's possible she might turn me down, but if she agrees could I please call you back in fifteen minutes to ask you what Mackenzie's favorite food is, what some of her hobbies or favorite activities are, so I can plan a first date she'll enjoy?" "You're very confident young man." "Not so much, ma'am, that's why I'm asking for your help. I could spend all day worrying about it and not come up with anything Mackenzie would enjoy nearly as much as if you helped." "I'll get Mackenzie for you, and we'll see what happens after that. Hang on." Followed by a muffled yell of, "Mackenzie, it's a boy for you!" #2: A few seconds later I heard footsteps running to the phone, then, "Hello?" I could hear Mrs. Norris walk away, so I didn't have to worry about being overheard. "Hi Mackenzie, it's Mark Anderson here." "Mark! You're back?" "Yep, got in early yesterday morning. I'll be back at school on Monday. Julia told me you won her quiz and what prize you wanted, so I'm calling now to formally request the pleasure of your company for a date one evening soon. Would you do me the honor?" "Of course, silly, {giggle}. What have you got in mind?" "I haven't had a chance to catch up with what happened while I was away yet, so I haven't thought about next week much. I'm calling now just to touch bases with you, to make sure I know what's going on. If it's okay with you I'll think about it today, and talk with you about it on Monday. Is that okay?" "Sure. What night do you want to go out?" "That's the next question I was planning to ask you. Are you allowed to date school nights, or just on the weekend?" "Friday or Saturday mostly, why?" "I'm going out of town this weekend, and Julia has already booked me for the first of the pipeline dates on Friday night. I can't change that as it'd inconvenience sixteen people, so we might have to delay our date to the weekend after next." "Oh. That's two weeks away." "Yeah, sorry." "What about tonight? Are you free tonight?" asked a hopeful Mackenzie. "Sorry, I'm busy again. A family dinner type of thing which can't be postponed. Let's not worry too much about the when yet Mackenzie. Our date's definitely on, and I'll talk with you about it tomorrow, okay?" "Okay. Thanks very much." "No need to thank me; you earned it. I'm curious how you were so knowledgeable about me, but we can talk about that on our date." I wasn't going to waste a conversation item on the phone now, as I expected to need every distraction I could find on our date. Sex seemed very unlikely, and Mackenzie isn't a particularly outgoing girl, so I expected a dull evening. Just before I hung up Mackenzie suddenly said, "Oh Mark! Can I ask you a favor while I think of it?" "Ask away." "Whenever it is that we have our date, could you please not wear the clothes you wear to school. I don't think my parents would approve." I couldn't resist saying, "Okay Mackenzie. Just to make you happy, I'll turn up naked, bye," and hung up. Chuckling to myself, I called home and chatted with Dad for a few minutes, telling him I'd be there some time in the morning. I asked, "If I hang around here for a while and drive home slowly, is there a good chance you'll have finished all the chores before I get home?" "Not a chance. I'll make sure I save you a few." Then I chatted with Carol, who mostly talked about how excited Mom and Donna were. Mom for being able to own and furnish a wonderful new home, Donna for being able to gallop around the outside of it. When it was time to, I hung up from Carol and called Mackenzie's number again. Mrs. Norris answered the phone. "Hello Mrs. Norris. It's Mark Anderson again." "Hello Mark. You don't have to tell me what Mackenzie's decision was, because the girls have been whooping it up since your call." "Girls? Has Mackenzie got some classmates there?" "No, her sisters. We've got three daughters. It seems they all want to date you." "Oh. I didn't even know Mackenzie had a sister, let alone two with such questionable judgment." "That's not how I expected 'the school stud' to talk." "That's what they called me, 'the school stud'?" "Yes indeed. They're quite envious of Mackenzie." "No one's ever called me a 'stud' in my hearing before. That feels weird. And it occurs to me that it's not the ideal thing for a mother to hear about a boy who wants a date with her daughter. Is my alleged studliness of concern, Mrs. Norris?" "They assure me you're a nice boy, and you don't come across how I imagined the school stud would, but I do have some concerns." "I'm spending today doing chores and studying, which I can interrupt for a while. I was intending to ask your advice about a good date for Mackenzie, so how about I come to your house and we do that in person? That'll give you a chance to gain an impression of me." "That sounds reasonable. How about now?" "I need to put you on hold for about one minute while I check something first. Is that okay?" "That's fine." "Thanks. I'll be back in a minute." I dropped the phone on the bed and shot downstairs and outside, to check on my car as I couldn't see it from Julia's bedroom. It was washed already, apart from the top of the roof that Lily couldn't reach, and probably couldn't even see. I ran back inside, picked up the phone, and said, "Hello, I'm back. Are you still there?" "Yes." "Coming right now is ideal. If you give me your address I'll be there in a few minutes." "Do you have a pen and paper?" "Yes." I didn't, but I had a good memory. I expected this to be the first and least of several 'simplifications of the truth' that I'd be making this morning. Mrs. Norris gave me her address, then, "Do you know where that is?" "No ma'am, but I have a map in the car. I'll find it. I'll see you in a few minutes." #1: #3: #1: I'd showered after having sex with Ava and Julia, and was already dressed tidily but casually. Not as I do for school, and not naked as Mackenzie had requested. I grabbed my wallet and keys, let Prof know that I was leaving, then left. I paused to wipe the roof of my car with a rag we keep in it, as there was still enough water on it to make cleaning the missed area easy. While driving to Mackenzie's, I thought to call Lily to thank her for washing my car, but then remembered that I didn't have a phone. Oh well, she'd be an unthanked serving girl today. I found the Norris's house easily. Mr. Norris let me in, even before I got to the front door. "Come in... , Mark, isn't it?" "Yes, sir. Mark Anderson." "Come into the living room, Mark. The girls decided they all needed to get changed when they heard you were coming, and their mother is supervising them. How is it that all three girls are so excited about your visit?" "Until ten minutes ago I didn't even know that Mackenzie had any sisters. Maybe when I see them I'll recognize them, and have a better idea of why." "I understand you've got quite a reputation around school?" "I thought a large part of my reputation was that I was a quiet, smart, hardworking student. I got up at 3am this morning to start studying, and I'm going to spend most of today doing chores and more studying. I'm a very diligent student who does very well at school. But Mrs. Norris told me that your girls called me 'the school stud'. I've never heard that term applied to me before, so I'm apparently not too well clued in to my own reputation. I'm aware that there are girls who are attracted to me at school, but I thought it was mostly because I was a high-achiever rather than a 'stud'." "What are you a high-achiever at?" "There are really only two possible areas: sir, academically and sports. I'm doing very well academically, especially in Math and Physics. I'm also good at most sports, although I only play soccer regularly. Sports take second place to my studies in my priorities." #4: #3: "If you are so popular, why are you interested in Mackenzie?" "It's really not much more than a 'Get To Know You' date, sir. We're in some classes together, but we're both quiet in class so we don't know each other very well. One of the other girls in our class told me that Mackenzie was interested in me. With three daughters I'm sure you know how that 'friend-tells-a-friend' process works. So I called her this morning to see if she'd go out on one date with me. Since the two of us don't actually know each other very well, the chance of it turning into anything significant..." I heard the sounds of either a herd of elephants galloping down the hallway, or some excited schoolgirls. I shouldn't exaggerate, so it might have been only half a herd. I quickly and loudly finished my sentence, " ... is low." I stood as the prettily dressed girls ran into the room. First in was one of Donna's Ducklings, who was also a member of the Athletic Club (hence her arriving first). Closely following her was one of Carol's friends, who'd come to the group lunch Carol had held a couple of weeks ago, then Mackenzie. "Good morning Mackenzie, Claire and Diana. And Mrs. Norris, nice to meet you." Mrs. Norris said, "So you know our girls." "Yes indeed. Claire is friends with my sister Donna and they're are in the Athletic Club together. Diana is friends with my sister Carol. Now I understand why your daughters have such high opinions of me: I promised my sisters very good birthday presents if they spread good stories about me around their girlfriends at school. Looks like it worked, haha." Diana and Claire were visibly happy to be remembered. I particularly remembered Claire as she was one of the more outgoing Ducklings. She had a very different personality from Mackenzie, although apparently the same taste in boys. Claire proudly disagreed with me, "Donna says Mark's the best brother in the world. He's GREAT! He visits her at lunchtime sometimes, and he came to the club a week ago because he was worried about her..." "That's nothing," interrupted Diana. "You should hear how much Carol loves Mark. I don't know anyone who cares for her brother so much. Most girls think their brothers are a pain, but Carol worships the ground Mark walks on." "That's nothing," deliberately echoed Mackenzie, with a smile on her face. "I see Carol every lunchtime, because she comes to high school to eat lunch with Mark and Julia..." #1: " ... Mark and Carol get on like they're best friends, and the best thing I have EVER heard was Mark giving his speeches about Carol's coming out. Most of the girls in the room were crying by the time he'd finished, including me." #4: ("Custard" being an Anderson family euphemism usually employed when Mom is listening. It's become somewhat of a habit as well as a term we use for situations which aren't bad enough to use "shit".) #3: #1: #4: #3: #4: Mrs. Norris did the eyebrow thing at Mackenzie, who understood it to mean "Please explain in more detail." (Eyebrows have an impressive bandwidth, given their ability to move only a limited distance along one axis.) Mackenzie expanded, "Carol came out as a lesbian about a month ago, and a lot of the boys started behaving totally immature about it. They were hitting on her, teasing her, crowding around her. Being total jerks. Mark went around several classes giving a speech about how much he loved and supported his sister. I can't describe it well enough, but by the time he finished speaking there were girls bawling all over the place, and the boys were totally taught a lesson. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever heard. Half the girls in class fell in love with Mark because of that speech. It was awesome!" "Well, well. It appears we misjudged you, Mark." "I can still be 'the school stud', though can't I? It's not often a math geek gets that reputation, and I'd hate to lose it so quickly." Mackenzie and Diana both shrieked, "Mom! You told him." While they were doing that, Claire advanced on me. Proximity showed me what she intended, and there was no reason why not, so I let her push me backward into my seat. What I hadn't foreseen was her then immediately leaping into my lap. I was still falling, so it would have taken a silly amount of gymnastics to avoid her. I took the easy way out, letting Claire achieve her goal. After all, it'd be her that got in any trouble, not me. There was a howl of protest from her two sisters, and some quick rebukes from both of her parents. Claire chose to ignore her parents, instead just proudly telling her sisters, "You snooze, you lose. I got first dibs." The parents started ordering Claire to get up. I held up a hand to stop them - I had two spare hands; they were NOT going to touch 12-year old Claire while her parents looked on - saying, "My sisters frequently do the same to me, which is probably where Claire got the idea from. She's copying Donna. She's very similar to my sister: no hesitations and no subtlety." "No politeness either," chastised Mrs. Norris. "Get up, Claire." Mr. Norris was more direct, he lifted Claire off me. Her hands remained locked around my neck, until I bowed my head enough that her hands slipped over the back of my head. "Aww," from Claire, as her father carried her a safe distance away. "Sorry about that," apologized Mrs. Norris. "It was the highlight of my visit; I'll go back home chuckling. Can I tell Donna what you did, Claire?" "Huh? What do you mean?" "Would it embarrass you around school if I told Donna? I don't mind pretty girls throwing themselves at me, but you might not want your classmates hearing about it." I was just spouting moral-sounding crap to impress the parents. They had three pretty daughters, all of whom were interested in me, so fooling them about my morality was a good idea. "You think I'm pretty?" Her parents were relaxed enough to chuckle at their little girl, so I was on reasonably safe ground. "Yes, I think you're pretty. And I'll be completely honest by adding that Diana is also pretty, as is Mackenzie. I'll even make sure I stay in your mother's good graces by saying she's pretty too. I'll leave it up to you to tell Donna about your flying visit to my lap." -- I turned to Mrs. Norris, "I don't want to be rude, but my father is waiting for me to get back home to my chores. You made a couple of comments earlier which I thought indicated approval for my taking Mackenzie out on a date. Did I understand you correctly?" "Please, Mom?" urged Mackenzie. A momentary look between the parents, then Mrs. Norris said, "Yes, that's okay." The three girls all cheered the decision, Mackenzie's cheers instead being of the "Thank you" variety. I also told Mrs. Norris, "Thank you." Not that I'd particularly cared either way. While that was going on, I stood. Mackenzie moved across the room, to stand beside me, but that was as 'romantic' as she could bring herself to be in front of her parents. No actual touching between us, not that I particularly wanted her to touch me in front of all her family, I'm just describing her caution. The thought of kinky sex with two or three sisters had crossed my minds (several minds, several times each), but the parents were clearly cautious and restrictive people, Mackenzie had told me in the hot tub that she was a virgin, and that seemed likely to be true. Diana seemed similar to Mackenzie, and Claire was only twelve, an age when girls have trouble keeping secrets or controlling themselves. Getting involved with them was more trouble than it was worth; potentially a LOT more trouble! I resisted my lascivious thoughts and got back to business, saying, "I'm sorry, Mackenzie, but this isn't a social visit. I can't stay and chat. I've got a backlog of stuff to catch up on after my absence." I turned to Mrs. Norris, adding, "If you've got a couple of minutes I'd like to talk with you privately please, as we discussed on the phone earlier?" "That's fine. Girls, would you leave us alone please. Shut the door behind you." None of the girls saw any reason why they should leave, and they wanted to know why their mother wanted them to. Mr. Norris looked curious too, although he hadn't been asked to leave. I can't say I was impressed by the total absence of alacrity with which the girls obeyed their parents. On the other hand, female curiosity about relationship stuff is close to being an unstoppable force, and if I think about it long enough, I might be able to think of how I could benefit from teenage girls who are interested in me and who don't obey their parents. Mackenzie asked me what I was going to talk about, so I loudly answered, "I'm going to ask your mother where each of you is the most ticklish, to be able to defend myself in case Claire's behavior is common in this family." I'd thought of tickling Claire when she'd been on my lap, but had decided it was probably wise to play safe as the situation had been too ticklish. The parents herded their girls out and shut the door. Mrs. Norris came back to the end of the room where I was waiting and started telling me about Mackenzie's likes ("she likes ordinary food, she plays the saxophone... ,"). It didn't take long for Mr. Norris to lose interest in the conversation. When he started making his departure, there was the sound of a small amount of chaos behind the living room door, as three girls collided with each other in their haste to leave the scene of the eavesdropping crime. I heard him calling after them, "This would be a very good time to clean your rooms, girls." "Aww, Dad!" He shooed them away, closing the living room door behind him. Mrs. Norris only took another minute or so to finish her list. I didn't have any brilliant ideas, but hopefully Mom would when I repeated it to her over lunch. I said, "Thank you for that. I'll try to come up with something she'll enjoy. There's one last issue that I hope you can help us with. I'm already booked to be out of town this weekend. When I talked to Mackenzie on the phone she was disappointed in having to wait two whole weeks for our date, so I was hoping you would give us permission for a mid-week date. Obviously we'd come back earlier than a weekend date, and abide by any other restrictions you'd require." "We don't ordinarily allow her to have week night dates." "Yes, ma'am. I'm mentioning it now because I'm sure Mackenzie will be asking you about it. If Mackenzie's got the same amount of patience as Claire, two weeks will seem like forever." I added a small chuckle, prepared to cut it off if Mrs. Norris didn't have much of a sense of humor. Mrs. Norris chuckled a little though, so that was okay. She added, "You'll have her home by 9:30?" "Any time you nominate is perfectly fine." #4: I could see Mrs. Norris was a little surprised by my happy acceptance, so I added, "This is only a 'Get To Know Each Other' date; there are no strong feelings either way. Before you say that Mackenzie is acting otherwise, she only knows me by reputation, not personally. We've barely spoken to each other all year. I think her sisters might have been getting her worked up somewhat too." I had a helpful additional idea, so I added, "All things considered a nice, quiet, and early mid-week date might be the best thing. It'd give Mackenzie a chance to wind down a little. Don't you think that'd be best?" I must have overdone it a little, because Mrs. Norris accused me of the truth, "You sound like you're not very interested in her?" "If that'd been the case, I'd have taken her to the new Star Wars movie, rather than make the effort to question you about what sort of things she enjoys. I don't want an UNREALISTIC date with Mackenzie, Mrs. Norris. I have very good emotional relationships with my sisters, and they've taught me that honest friendship with girls is worth far more than what most guys try to achieve with their deceits and exaggerations. My parents have said a thing or two about that too. A nice, quiet mid-week date, with no unrealistic expectations or undue excitement would suit me perfectly." "You're an unusual boy." "I do get told that fairly often, although I wish people would use a less ambiguous word. Am I unusual enough to be granted permission for a date some time in the middle of this coming week please?" "As it happens, there's an orchid show coming up that Mackenzie would like to see. Orchids are her hobby. Would you take her to a flower show?" "If she'll enjoy it, sure. It sounds perfect." Actually, it sounded boring, but I expected to be bored on our date anyway. Boredom's not too much of a problem for me because I've got in-built friends to talk with. "Can you tell me where and when it is?" That was soon done. Mrs. Norris and I agreed that 5pm Thursday evening sounded ideal. All I had to do was ask Mom for the name of a restaurant that served "ordinary" food, and the hard work was done. On the way out of the living room, I asked, "Which is better: tell her where we're going, or keep it secret?" "Secret might be more fun, that's if you don't mind her getting excited on the date?" "Excited over flowers is fine; it's getting excited over me which is inappropriate this early in a possible relationship." Music to a mother's ears. A tune I thought a good idea to sing, in case there was any chance at all of some several-sister shenanigans. Mrs. Norris said, "I'll get Mackenzie." "Can I just call out to them instead? Claire's similarity to my sister Donna amuses me, and I'd get a little chuckle at seeing her come running down the hall." Mrs. Norris chuckled. "We're trying to get her to stop that, but go ahead." I faced down the hallway and called, "Girls! I'm leaving." {Crash. Bang}, as Claire did her best to run through her room's door. She came tearing down the hallway, until her mother came into sight. The possibility of her mother still being next to me obviously hadn't occurred to Claire, because she suddenly looked guilty and decelerated by a couple of warp factors. Nonetheless she was well ahead of her sisters. Claire skidded to a halt alongside me, on the other side to her mother. She cupped her hands around her mouth and stretched up to whisper to me. I bent down to help. She whispered VERY quietly, "I took my panties off." I chuckled, "Good girl. I'll tell Donna. She will be pleased." Mrs. Norris looked at me curiously. I hammed, "I can't tell YOU; you're an ADULT!" #4: The message was accompanied by an image of Claire running down downstairs with her dress being blown up to her waist, while Mrs. Norris and I stood at the bottom, looking up at Claire's bare pussy. #3: #4: The two other sisters arriving gave me the opportunity to use NP to rub Claire's ass through her dress. Anyone else looking at me would have seen both my hands well away from Claire's body, but one of those hands was out of Claire's sight behind her, so she would assume I was using it rather than performing impossible magic. Claire gave a little start of surprise, then happily leaned against me. I only kept it going for a second or two, as holding my hand behind her would start looking unnatural. I put it on her shoulder to turn her to face toward me a little, I said, "I bet you and Donna are good friends, yes?" I'd seen how well they got along at the running club, so I was mostly just making conversation, while hopefully reinforcing her mom's impression that I thought of Claire like a little sister. If Mrs. Norris knew what I did to my sisters she might be less comfortable with that belief. Claire had only just started her enthusiastic agreement when Mackenzie and Diana arrived. Mackenzie demanded, "Claire, let me get next to my... , Mark." No one missed the Freudian slip, and Mackenzie had to bear some teasing. I said, "Make room, please Claire. I'll be seeing you on Thursday anyway, because I'm coming down to middle school to have lunch with Donna and her friends then." "I know. Donna told us. I hope it goes better than the last one." "Me too. My lunch got trampled then, which was very disappointing." Before Mrs. Norris could ask questions about that, I continued straight on with, "Speaking of Thursday, you and I have a date this Thursday evening Mackenzie." "Thursday?" Mackenzie looked at her mother, who nodded. I said, "It wasn't easy to convince your mother to allow a mid-week date Mackenzie. She drove a hard bargain, but you only have to write my next two English assignments for me." Mackenzie was initially puzzled, but her mom's chuckle ruined it. I told Mrs. Norris, "I told you I was interested in Mackenzie for her mind, but I didn't say I had no ulterior motives." That didn't get as much of a laugh from Mrs. Norris as I would've liked, but it did get a small smile. Once the girls had stopped responding, I said, "I'll pick you up here at 5pm on Thursday, Mackenzie. We're doing something for a couple of hours first, than then we're having dinner about 7:30. Home by 9:30." "What are we doing first?" "I'm hoping to give you a nice surprise, but if I don't get back to my studies soon we might have to work on my English homework." "You're not going to tell me?" "I can give you a hint, if you like?" "Yes please." "It's dirty." Mackenzie looked shocked, her two sisters giggled, and Mrs. Norris smiled even less than last time. Mackenzie looked at her mother in confusion. Mrs. Norris said nothing, her brief smile long gone. She even looked like she might have regretted it. Diana said, "Wow, lucky you. I wish I could go on a..." at which point Diana caught sight of her mom's expression. I leaned down and whispered to her, "I wish you could too." I stood back and watched while she blushed red. I quickly said, "This is such fun. Just like teasing my sisters, except none of you know any of my Big Brother Tricks. I'll have to ask Carol and Donna not to wise you up. That'd be such a pity." I turned to Mrs. Norris, "Thank you for your help, Mrs. Norris. I'm sure Mackenzie will enjoy her date much more because of it." I turned to the sisters, "Young ladies, nice to meet you again. I'll see you on Thursday, and I have a feeling you'll still be up at 9:30, ready to pounce on Mackenzie for all the details when she gets home." They giggled in anticipation of that. "Mackenzie, I'll see you at school tomorrow..." "I'll walk you to your car." "Me too," said two echoes. Taking a fairly safe bet that even Diana was too young to be allowed to date, I told the two sisters, "When you're old enough to be allowed to date, I'm sure you wouldn't like it if your two sisters followed you outside when you wanted to say goodbye to your date. I've enjoyed funning around with you both, but I came here for Mackenzie, so I'll let her say goodbye to me alone, okay?" It wasn't really okay, but it was what happened. When Mackenzie and I got outside, I could hear Mr. Norris banging away around the back of the house, which explained his absence. By the car, Mackenzie said, "Umm, Mark. I've heard about some of your dates, and I'm not ready for..." I held up my hand to stop her, then, "We are not having a dirty date the way you think. Your mother would never approve of that, so stop worrying about it. Have you ever heard of any girl saying I pushed her further than she wanted to go?" "Ahh, no. But they all want to go all the way." "No, only the ones you've heard boasting. You'll have a date that YOU enjoy, not a date that Alexis would enjoy. I won't get the two of you confused, okay?" "Okay. My sisters are very interested in you too. They're very jealous of me." "We can talk on our date, Mackenzie. I do have to go now." I got in the car and left. I had seen that Mackenzie had hoped I'd kiss her goodbye, but I had no doubt that several pairs of eyes had been watching us. Better to establish a reputation as a good boy first, so I could be a naughty boy later, if somewhere from one to three opportunities arose. Donna was away, playing at a girlfriend's house somewhere, but Carol was home so I told her about my visit to Diana Norris's place and the situation with Mackenzie and Claire. Carol asked, "What are you going to do with them?" "Very little for now. I have to have one date with Mackenzie, but she's almost certainly too virginal and dull for me. The younger the sister the more willing, but also the less appropriate. Maybe once we've got the mansion we could invite them all over and see what games we could play, but it's too hard without perfect privacy." Dad had several jobs for me. A few were the usual regular chores, but most were maintenance jobs that'd been very low priority for a long time. With the possibility that we might be putting the house on the market soon, these jobs got activated. Mom and Dad both had a long list. One good moment was Mrs. Roberts coming over. She marched up to me, stridently stating, "Your father told me a preposterous story about why there were security guards..." I turned to Dad and demanded, "You didn't blab about Coca-Cola did you?" Mrs. Roberts butted in, "You mean it's true?" "Y ... No. No it's not. It's a made up story. Dad should never have told you such nonsense." "I wasn't born yesterday, young man. I can tell it is true. Don't you try to deny it!" I tried really hard, but I couldn't convince her that it was a made up story. Another good moment was Carol interrupting my work to whisper to me what her idea was for Ava's encouraging our incest, "When we're at Ava's place tonight, she's bound to make a reference to you and me. When she does, I'll take her aside and ask her not to, because it's agony for me. I'll tell her your being away made me realize how much I love and need you, but I can't do anything about it because I'm supposed to be a lesbian, you're my brother, you've already got heaps of girlfriends much better than me, and it's obvious you don't want me that way. When she tries to encourage you, you can tell her that's a silly idea because I'm a lesbian and it's obvious I don't want you that way. She'll have kittens trying to get us together." "I like it. Simple, easy, and torture on poor Ava. She should feel responsible by the time she's run back and forth a few times." Otherwise I spent most of my second day as a multi-millionaire doing simple, manual jobs with Dad. Donna came home later, and I told her about Claire's great attitude, including her going commando for me, and my rubbing her ass when no one could see. I didn't mention that I thought Mackenzie was boring to Donna, fearing it'd be repeated; I merely said "I like Claire's personality very much. I have a date with Mackenzie on Thursday and I'll see how that goes before I think about her sisters." Vanessa and Julia arrived with Mom about half an hour before we had to leave for dinner at the Wests'. All three were happy and excited. I caught their mood, and excitedly checked, "Have you found somewhere for us?" Julia answered, "We saw some better places today, but it's too soon to tell much. Mom's got to check some of our assumptions with an architect and get some advice on what we should be looking for, and there are still a few listings that might be suitable that we haven't had time to look at yet. A couple more evenings should take care of those, then we can start deciding which properties are on the initial shortlist." "Then how come you're all so happy and excited?" "Because we made some good progress today. It's not a fast process, Mark." "I'm starting to get that idea. Even when you're excited, it's only about taking one step forward." "You've got it. I don't have time to talk any more. Sorry, but I've to get home to shower and dress." Julia still had time to tell me what clothes to take to Ava's so I could wear them to school tomorrow. Then she and Vanessa left. Mom had more time, but no useful additional information. Seeing my frustration, Mom said, "With $2.5 million we have plenty of choice. There aren't any properties that perfectly meet our needs, but there are several that could be made suitable with some renovations. We'll be buying one as soon as we sensibly can. We're going as quickly as we can." I remembered to ask Mom for permission for Carol and me to go to LA next weekend. Mom's answer was, "I can't say I'm happy with it, but I know how much Julia's looking forward to it, and I'm sure Carol is equally excited. I know you can take care of yourself fairly well, but there could be problems or threats in LA that you're not used to and won't recognize in time. I've even heard stories of people going missing inside of LAX, so you shouldn't take anything for granted. Neither of you are used to big cities, and Carol's only thirteen, so for heaven's sake stick like glue to Carol. If she's EVER out of your sight you'd better have a damned good reason for it, especially at that concert on Saturday night, okay?" "Yes Mom. Thanks." "You'll be in deep shit if anything happens to anyone on this trip. This is way more responsibility than I am comfortable with you having yet." I earnestly promised Mom that I'd be VERY, VERY careful. Her fears were reasonable ones, so now I was scared too. I made a very strong mental note to make sure nothing went wrong, and especially not to lose Carol at LAX or anywhere else. ------- Chapter 194: Dinner With the Wests Sunday, May 8, 2005 (Continued) I won't describe this small dinner party in detail. It went well, and for the most part was very predictable (e.g., Katie predictably apologized for the dinner not being up to yesterday's standard. We predictably insisted her dinner was wonderful, etc.). I'll mention some of the good parts of the evening. Early on Carson and I were chatting in the living room. To make conversation, he asked me, "How's that business idea of yours coming along?" I didn't want to steal Ava's thunder when she told her parents about my wealth later, but I didn't want to lie either, so I used a flat voice to say, "Oh, that's ended. I don't have any plans to spend any more time in that area." "That's a pity." "I wouldn't say it was a pity. It was an interesting experience, and beneficial in several ways. I learned some good lessons from it. I'd have done things differently had I known in advance." "That's good. You're young yet. There's plenty of time for work after you've finished your education." "Yes. I don't know how long that'll take though. To listen to Prof and Vanessa, they want me to get several degrees. But speaking of education reminds me to ask you about my leaving here for a few hours in what you'd consider the middle of the night. I only sleep for four hours a night, then I get up to go studying on the computers I have at Julia's place. I'll come back here about the time you're all waking up..." That started quite a long conversation, with several explanations required. The business issue was forgotten. Over dessert, I said, "Ava, now might be a good time to ask your parents for permission for what we intend to do next weekend." Katie and Carson were alerted by Ava's happy laugh, her "Neat!", and all of our increased attentions. With a very big grin, Ava said, "It's Julia and Mark's anniversary this weekend." Ava turned to Julia, "It's actually on the weekend, isn't it?" "Yes. The 14th, which is Saturday." "Thanks. So for their anniversary Mark's rented a private jet to fly half a dozen of their friends to LA to go shopping on Rodeo Drive. They're going to a Justin Timberlake concert Saturday night, staying in a luxury hotel and flying back Sunday." Turning back to Julia, Ava said, "There was something else I've forgotten?" Julia suggested, "The cash for shopping?" "Yes, that was it, {giggle}. Mark's also throwing in $10,000 cash for us to go shopping with. Julia would like me to help her spend Mark's money, so can I go to LA with them next weekend please, {giggle}?" The Wests weren't as much fun as I'd hoped, as all that happened was that Katie asked, "What's the explanation, Ava?" "{Giggle}. Mark's rich Mom! He skipped school for most of the last week, went to LA and earned $6.5 million. He's a MILLIONAIRE! Isn't he incredible! Neither parent believed Ava. Carson looked at me, saying, "What's the point of this nonsense?" I answered, "Ava left out one fact she thought was irrelevant, but you might find significant. Prof and I went to LA together last Tuesday. We worked on this together, and Prof saw me earn the money. It might be a good idea for you to call him for confirmation." "I think I'll take you up on that." They had a phone in the kitchen, so it didn't take long for Carson to get through to Prof. While he was doing so, Ava told me, "I didn't know Prof was with you. I don't think anyone told me that. Or if they did, it got blown out of my head by all the excitement." I said, "Now that I think about it, I think you're right. We just said I'd earned it, and you believed us. Sorry I implied you'd forgotten it." "You've..." Ava was cut off by her father getting Prof on the line. Carson's side of the conversation follows: "Mark just told us an unbelievable story about earning a large sum of money?" "He told us $6.5 million." Carson turned to Katie, exclaiming "Prof says it's true!" Raising the phone, he asked, "How does a 15-year old boy earn $6.5 million?" Carson mostly listened for a couple of minutes, looking stunned. Then, "You're absolutely positive?" Several seconds of listening later, Carson said, "I'm absolutely astonished. I'll tell Katie. Thanks, Prof." Carson hung up, then said, "I think I need a drink." He looked shaky, but Ava leaped to her feet saying, "I'll get you one Dad. Whiskey?" "Ahh, maybe I'd better not, dear. I'm not supposed to drink alcohol now. On second thought, to hell with it. A whiskey would be great, thanks Ava. Just a single." Ava asked, "Mom, do you want anything?" "No thanks." Katie looked at Carson as he regained his seat, asking him, "It's true?" "Every word. Prof and Vanessa invested $50,000, as did Mark's family. Prof and Mark went to LA on Tuesday. Prof fronted Mark because Mark's too young to enter into contracts, and Mark turned the $100,000 into several million dollars. Prof says they've taken most of the profits already, and the majority of the money is already in his and Mark's personal accounts. He also passed on a message from Vanessa, reminding us that she'd told us that Mark was an overachiever. Somehow that phrase doesn't do you justice, Mark." Ava put her father's drink down in front of him. He looked at it without comprehension for a few seconds, and then realized what it was. He took a sip (Ava's parents weren't the 'down the hatch' types), during which I noticed his hand was shaking noticeably. Katie said, "You've really got $6.5 million?" "Give or take a few hundred thousand, yes. The final numbers aren't in yet, but it'll be very close to that. That's before tax. Unfortunately I have to give the Government over $2 million of it. That sucks big time!" "You've earned more in a few days than Carson and I have earned in our entire lives! How on Earth does a 15-year old boy earn $6.5 million in one week?" "Four days," corrected Ava. "He got lazy, {giggle}. So can I go shopping in LA with them this weekend?" I said, "I think your parents need a little longer to come to grips with this yet, Ava." -- I much preferred not to talk day trading with the Wests, in case they knew something about it. I had an impressively complicated spiel prepared, but it was better to avoid it if I could. So I used something Prof had once said, "In all honesty, you wouldn't understand. I don't mean to belittle you in any way, but I was doing stuff that I'm pretty sure hasn't been done before. The trip itself only took four days, but Prof and I spent some time working on my idea for a few weeks before the trip, and Prof could never get his head around it. He did more than just front me because I was underage, but he could only operate in one corner of what went on." It was vaguely true, but not really. Ava said, "Mom, I haven't told you the best part yet. Mark's buying a $2.5 million house! Julia, her mom and Mark's mom have been busy all day yesterday and today looking at houses. They're looking for a house big enough for both their families to live in..." Ava went on to describe our plan, including the semi-detached wing for Mark, Julia, Carol, and Ava when she wasn't staying with her parents. Talking about a new house got all the females excited, and there was quite a discussion on the topic. In the course of which Julia said a small thing which caught my attention. A sentence of hers contained, " ... about $2.5 million." #2: #3, #4: I said, "Julia, the budget for buying the house is $2 to $2.5 million, not 'ABOUT $2.5 million, ' the way you just said." "Sure," agreed Julia, suspiciously thoughtlessly. "Were you listening to me, Julia? BETWEEN 2 and 2.5 is NOT the same thing as ABOUT 2.5." Julia answered casually, "It's more or less the same." That was self-contradictory statement, but this was no time to be pointing out logical absurdities. I came at it a different way, "The largest check I will write is $2.5 million. If you try to buy a property that costs more than that, you're responsible for any excess, because you're not getting it from me!" "Oh, you're serious." "Have you been misled by all the other times I've thrown millions of dollars around casually?" A contrite Julia said, "I'm sorry, Mark. I wasn't listening." Then a second later she added, "Umm, I hate to say this, but it's not quite as simple as that. The renovation costs complicate things. My understanding was that the $2 to $2.5 million budget excluded renovation costs. If we had a choice between a $2.5 million property that needed $200,000 of renovations, or a $2.6 million property that needed no renovations, we'd be better off getting the $2.6 million property. We should have a budget that includes renovations, but that's tricky because we can't do any better than take wild guesses at what each property's renovations could cost, not until we get an architect in, and they cost money and take time..." I said, "Buy NEITHER of those properties! Find one that costs $2.1 million and needs $200,000 of renovations. So what if it doesn't end up as fancy as the others! My problem isn't in making the budget clear enough so you know exactly the maximum amount you can spend, but your attitude of trying to spend as much as you possibly can on everything. I would FAR rather have a few hundred thousand left over from our budget, than spend every last penny of it because you wanted us to crap in gold-plated toilets." In a VERY meek, child-like manner, Julia climbed into my lap and hugged me, saying, "I LOVE it when you act so masterfully." She squeezed me again, then, "I'm sorry I was getting carried away. I know you and Dad went though a great deal to earn that money, and I should be more careful about spending it." I decided to be less than magnanimous in victory, "DAMN right! Prof and I do NOT want to repeat last week." Aware that the Wests were listening, I added, "It was incredibly hard and worrying..." #3: " ... In the middle of it I was even worried that Prof was going to have a heart attack because of how hard it was. If you'd been there, Julia, you'd be a damn sight more cautious about spending as much as possible now." "I'm sorry." Ava exclaimed, "Boy! I've never seen Mark tell you off like that before Julia." Katie warned, "Ava! Hush." Julia said, "It's all right, Katie. I'm proud of Mark when he stands up for himself so well. Not so proud of myself for causing it, but I'll live. It's very good that Mark put his foot down so firmly. He was totally right, and I knew it in advance too. I just got carried away." Julia reverted to hugging me silently. After a few seconds, Carson asked, "So it was hard work, Mark?" "VERY hard. There were things going on in all directions, some of which I didn't understand. There was a great deal of money involved, far too many ways we could screw-up, and it was all happening very quickly. It was a VERY unenjoyable experience! I sort of misled you earlier, when I said my business had ended. It HAS ended, but I allowed you to keep the impression that it failed because Ava wanted the fun of breaking the news to you. But I was totally truthful when I said, 'I learned some good lessons, and I'd have done things differently.' I learned that making large amounts of money that way is a HELL of a lot harder than I expected. So much so that Prof and I aren't going to repeat that business. If we ever need any more money, I'll think of an easier way of getting it." "It must have been very hard indeed then, if you're willing to walk away from a way of making millions of dollars." "I'm not 'walking away from it', I'm RUNNING, haha. I think I could find other ways to make money, if I needed to. You saw me play soccer, so you know professional soccer would be a possibility. It wouldn't be my first choice, but it's an example of what I mean. I sincerely hope I can avoid having to make more money for the next few years. It's a pain I could do without." Carson laughed, "Every adult thinks the same thing." After a few more minutes of inconsequential conversation on this topic, Ava reminded her parents, "So can I please go to Rodeo Drive with Mark and Julia next weekend, to help them spend Mark's money?" There were the predictable objections: "It'll cost too much to take Ava as well." I answered with, "It costs NOTHING to take Ava. I've rented the whole plane, so all the seats are mine whether or not I put a person in them. And Ava will be staying in our room in the hotel, so there's no extra cost there either." "Wouldn't you rather be alone for your anniversary?" Answer, "No. We're inviting other friends already. Ava is the friend we'd most like to come. Julia can't be expected to be able to go shopping on Rodeo Drive by herself; she needs help!" Safety was mentioned. With my fingers crossed that I was telling the truth, I explained it wasn't a problem. "We're staying in a top quality hotel for a single night, I don't imagine that Rodeo Drive can be a dangerous street, except to bank balances! We'll be in a group the whole time, and I pity anyone who tries to cause any of the girls trouble with me looking after them." Consent was eventually given, with the usual admonishments and cautions from the parents, and the usual assurances and promises from us. Julia added, "By the way, we're keeping Mark's wealth secret for a few days, until we come back from Rodeo Drive. Would you please not tell anyone until then?" They both agreed. A few minutes of conversation later, I asked Ava's parents, "I was talking to Vanessa a while ago, and she was saying that when all their kids are independent, she and Prof want to visit Italy. That's been their dream for quite a few years, from what I could gather. What about you two, have you got a dream trip planned?" They looked a little uncomfortable. Katie said, "We don't have time for a trip." "How long can a trip take: one week, two weeks? Surely you could take a couple of weeks off work?" More hesitation, and now the girls were also starting to look a little worried about my pushing the subject. I moved faster, saying, "At Julia's place a couple of weeks ago - at the dinner party when we first met - you said you were trying to pass on as much money as you could to Ava. With my ability to make money, that's no longer much of an issue. It's not reasonable for you to spend all your time at work rather than with each other on a dream trip, so book yourself on your trip as soon as you possibly can, and I'll give Ava whatever amount of money you spend on your trip, up to $10,000 say. That way your trip isn't disadvantaging Ava at all." Julia was sitting up all excited, smiling from ear to ear and even clapping for joy a couple of times. "That's SO lovely..." "We couldn't possibly accept. It's very generous of you, but we've just heard you tell Julia to conserve your money..." I already had my counter to this objection worked out. "I'm confident that my yelling at Julia just saved me AT LEAST two or three hundred thousand dollars. If I yelled at her again I could probably save another hundred thou'. Not to mention that I can EASILY reduce the budget if I want to - I'm sure I'd manage to enjoy living in a house that cost only a 'meager' $2 million. Spending $10,000 on your trip is an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to how much money I just saved." [Speaking of house budgets, Julia totally accepted that she'd been in the wrong. She understood that she'd been trying to spend as much as she possibly could, and almost certainly would've spent even more if I hadn't put my foot down. Plus, she did have a very good idea of how hard it'd been for Prof and me to earn that money, so she should've been more cautious with it. Thus, when we did buy our new house, she made sure it was within my STRICTLY enforced $2 to $2.5 million budget. What we spent wasn't a dollar over budget, because it was EXACTLY $2.5 million! Which I considered to be a considerable victory. Imagine what would have happened if I hadn't put my foot down! Or maybe we were in budget because Julia was on the other side of the world at the time.] I added, "Another point is that I'm giving Julia the same amount for her shopping spree on Rodeo Drive, and it'll only last her a few hours there," Obviously it'd last longer than that, but it made for a good story. I pressed on before Katie could contradict me. "Whereas it will bring you pleasure for a heck of a lot longer than a few hours. You two NEED to spend time together, doing something that you'd love to do, rather than working as long as you possibly can. That'd be a CRIME. I can too easily imagine my parents in your situation, and I would be horrified if they were intending to sacrifice their remaining time together for something as unimportant as money." "We can't let you spend that much money on us. You don't even know us..." "I'm not spending the money on you; I'm giving it to Ava. That seems like I'm splitting logical hairs, but the obvious truth of the matter is that I wouldn't be offering it to you if you weren't Ava's parents. As much as anything, I'm creating a good memory for Ava, that she'll have for the rest of her life. As you can see, she very much wants you to do this." Ava was already urging her parents to accept, girls being extraordinarily unhesitant to spend their boyfriend's money. Julia and even Carol were in on the act now, when they weren't busy praising me. Katie and Carson were still hesitant. I had a cute idea. #4: #2: I said, "You drive a hard bargain, so I'll up my offer. I'll reimburse your trip's cost - up to $10,000 - plus 10% MORE than it costs. In other words, if you don't go on this trip, Ava will be financially disadvantaged. As good parents, you wouldn't be so irresponsible as to disadvantage your daughter, would you?" Everyone kept pouring the pressure on, and they eventually weakened. They didn't actually agree, instead stopping about halfway there, saying, "Thank you very much, but we need to think about it." I'd been receiving a lot of praise, a large part of which was undeserved, as the idea had been entirely Vanessa's. I hadn't wanted to distract the conversation by mentioning Vanessa's role until after the 'battle' was over. Now that we'd probably gotten as far as we could this evening, I was about to mention it, when I had a better idea. I got up and walked to their phone, watched by everyone. I dialed Julia's home number then asked to speak to Vanessa. When she came on the line I said, "Vanessa, we've just had a drawn out argument with Katie and Carson over your idea that I reimburse Ava for their going on a trip together soon. I've never met people so reluctant to spend someone else's money. It's a pity your daughter isn't more like that." I stuck out my tongue and smiled at Julia, so she knew I was mostly joking. "For some reason they object to taking orders from a 15-year old boy, so can I please ask you to make sure they get themselves organized and away on this trip. I've got no real idea of what's involved in organizing something like this, but I'm sure you do, and can tell if they're stalling. If they do stall, could you please yell at them, or kick their butts, or whatever it is you do to get uncooperative adults to behave sensibly." Vanessa laughingly agreed, then asked to speak to Katie. I held the phone up, saying, "Katie, Vanessa would like to talk with you, please. You'd better do what she says, because she's scary when she doesn't get her way." Katie's side of the conversation wasn't particularly interesting. Katie didn't know what they'd do or when, telling Vanessa, "I need to talk with Carson, Mark's only just sprung it on us." There were some, "Yes, okays" and similar agreements, which had to be a good sign. Also the occasional reference to me, such as, "Yes, he's a VERY unusual boy." When Katie hung up, she told her husband, "Vanessa's going to call tomorrow morning to discuss what we've decided overnight. Looks like we have to plan a trip." "Good," agreed Carson, "I like the sound of that much better than working." To me he said, "Thank you, Mark. We'll take care of this ourselves without accepting your money." "In that case I'll just assume you spent $10,000 and I'll give $11,000 to Ava. I think I'll wait until after she comes back from Rodeo Drive though, otherwise it might be wasted." Julia leaped to immediately correct my mistake, "Buying good quality clothes is NEVER a waste. Second, you don't want people to see you with a poorly dressed girlfriend. Third, it's immoral to go to Rodeo Drive and not shop. You wouldn't want Ava to behave immorally would you? Oops, I take that back. Fourth, think of the great memories you'd be giving Ava. It's nice that you're helping her parents, but this is SHOPPING that we're talking about, haha." Ava asked her parents, "Where are you going to go? Have you got ideas, like Julia's parents to Italy?" "Yes we have, but we'll discuss them tonight and let you know tomorrow morning." We discussed the issue for another couple of minutes, mostly everyone praising me, and me trying to deflect it onto Vanessa: "As you heard me say to Vanessa, it was her idea originally. I'm just passing it on." I got a raspberry for that. Katie said, "I guess I should buy you a large plate now, Mark." For whatever reason, Katie hadn't gotten around to going to the store that Vanessa had recommended a couple of weeks ago, so I'd been eating my dinner on normal-sized crockery. In a serious-sounding voice, I said, "I think you need to do considerably more than that!" I gave her just long enough to get worried, then held up my normal-sized dessert bowl, "A large bowl too please. This is my third helping of dessert, and I'm worried that people will be starting to think I'm a pig." The teenagers did the dishes while Katie and Carson were sat in chairs nearby and told to supervise. At an opportune moment I raised a subject that I knew was of concern to Ava's parents, "Carson, yesterday you got a bit of a shock about the number of girlfriends I had. I thought you might want to discuss it tonight?" "Yes, but I was intending to have quiet word with you about it." "There's no need for it to be private, and there are some reasons for it not to be: it was actually Julia's idea so she can explain it better than I can, plus Julia and Ava are my main girlfriends so they have an important interest in the conversation." "Okay, we can discuss it now if you wish. Although I must admit that it's hard to be critical about you now, after what we learned about you over dinner, and your generosity to us." Julia butted in, as I knew she would sooner or later (my money had been on sooner). "Exactly! That's what happened to me too. I told you that the 14th is Mark's and my anniversary. It's not the anniversary of our first date - that was April 1st - so can you guess what it is the anniversary of?" They had no guesses, not even the obvious "first time we had sex" option. So I filled the silence by telling them, "It was a day well worth celebrating for the rest of our lives: it was the first time Julia's mother served me dinner on a big plate." I got some good laughs for that. Julia said, "I have a slightly different reason. I've had two relationships with Mark. The first lasted from a few days before April 1, included our first date on April 1, and then died on April 14. That was the relationship in which I thought Mark was my boyfriend and then my Mr. Right, as I got to know him better over that time. During that time I thought we might be partners. -- "On April 14 I realized that Mark's potential was SO much greater than mine would ever be. I don't just mean slightly greater, but off-the-scale greater. If you need a reminder of his potential, remember that even at the age of fifteen he can earn several million dollars in four days. What's he going to be capable of when he's an adult?" That point hit home very successfully. "The idea of our being in any sort of partnership was preposterous because partners have to be roughly equal, and it was also selfish because I didn't deserve someone as fantastic as Mark and I'd be holding him back. April 14 was the start of my second relationship with Mark, when I devoted my life to helping him achieve his awesome potential. Not only do I not mind his having multiple girlfriends, I want him to, because he can learn many useful lessons about life and people by doing so. Plus he can have fun, which given how much studying he does, is perfectly fine with me. -- "In case you somehow think I'm being taken advantage of, let me tell you that I'm having the time of my life. I've got a mission I think is incredibly important, I'm making great friendships, I get to do fun things like help to buy two million dollar houses and go shopping on Rodeo Drive with a pocket full of cash, and I get to spend most of my time with Mark, a guy I'd never be able to hang on to normally. My life is perfect, and it keeps getting better." I said, "Julia didn't explain the magnitude of the help she's giving me. She left out that I was terribly insecure and shy when we started dating, and that she's brought me a long way out of my shell. Not all the way out yet, but far better than I used to be." Katie said, "It's hard to see how you could have been shy and insecure in the first place." "I certainly was. I was socially and physically inept when I was younger. My greatest accomplishment was to be barely intellectually average. I even had an ugly, pimply face. Then everything started coming together wonderfully well for me in late-adolescence, about a year and a half ago. My abilities improved so much so that I went from inept to genius in almost everything, but my lack of self-confidence was so ingrained that I didn't push myself forward. Julia came along and provided the push. Julia is very, very good at being pushy, haha. That's one of the reasons she's enjoying her life so much these days: she's got both the opportunity and justification to push someone around, haha." Julia attacked me with her wet dish-towel, so I quickly added, "She has opportunity, justification AND my thanks. She's improving my life enormously. Just - ouch! - not at the moment." While Julia was punishing me, Carol took over, "Julia, Ava and I are all having fun sharing our different relationships with Mark, plus we can all see how fast Mark's confidence is improving. Mine too. It's great for me to be in the center of this and see dozens of 16-year old girls behave so stupidly. I never thought I'd look down at girls three years older than me, but they really don't understand what's going on. Mark's popularity also rubs off on me, making me popular with the girls in my own grade. I also used to be shy, similar to Mark, but a lot less now." Katie said, "What about you Ava? Shyness was never your problem, so what do you get out of Mark having several girlfriends?" Ava answered, "He had Julia as his main girlfriend, plus lots of other wannabe girlfriends when I made my commitment to him, so I knew what the story was when I joined. Julia made VERY sure I knew what I was joining in advance so I wouldn't get any bad surprises. I haven't either; it's been far better than I expected. But I guess I personally don't get much from Mark's having other girlfriends. I enjoy helping Mark and Julia with them, arranging meetings or spreading information, or whatever else I can do to help. Occasionally I'll have sex with Mark and another girl, but not..." "Ava!" "Haha Mom, I knew you'd do that. I keep telling you that you need to get used to me being bisexual. Julia and I are lovers and you know that sometimes Julia, Mark and I go to bed together, so we like group sex. You should have known that sex would be one of the answers when you asked me what I got out of Mark having other girlfriends?" #1: #3: #4: #1: #4: #3: #1: [[In about 5% of the w-dimensions, Mom and Dad's first child was a female, replacing me. (5%, not 50%, because of the effect of the W-Dimension synchronization processes.) I never had déjà vu with any of those girls because déjà vu only occurs when the minds on either side are VERY similar, so much so that they have to be the 'same' person. My mind is WAY different from that of a female's (phew!) whether or not she was a first-born Anderson child. I couldn't have déjà vu with a Carol or a Donna, so not with a 'Mary' either, even with her being my age.]] Ava continued, "You saw Lily and Pat at the dinner last night, Mom. Last Sunday Mark and I had a very enjoyable time in bed with them..." "Ava! That's enough thank you. I've got the idea." "You need to get used to it. It's part of who I am now. I mainly enjoy being in bed with Mark and Julia. They're very important to me, and very good to me." "Yes, I know. It's just hard to get used to." "I'll keep giving you practice, haha. But for your question, I don't get much out of Mark having other girlfriends. There are some silly things like other girls envying me or wanting to gossip with me, but that doesn't matter much. One good thing is that some of my best friends are starting to get more interested in Mark. Sooner or later they'll ask me to introduce them one on one. That'll be good." "You'd really introduce Mark to more girls?" "You should see Mark at lunchtime: there are DOZENS of hopeful girls sitting around him. There'll be hundreds when word gets out that he's rich. I couldn't keep girls away from him if I tried. Your thinking I need protection is wrong. I've told you before that my relationship with Mark has got nothing to do with his girlfriends. It doesn't matter how many he's got, it's still going to be Mark, Julia and me just like it is now. We made a commitment to each other that we're keeping and it was stronger than a boyfriend-girlfriend one. We even swore it in front of all of Julia's family, like a formal wedding ceremony. If Julia or Mark didn't treat me properly, according to their promises, Vanessa and Prof would be all over their cases." That issue was discussed for a while, but it rambled around quite a lot so I won't quote it. Ava eventually circled the topic back to her having sex with other girls sometimes, whereupon Julia decided the time was right to add, "And Carol soon too, I think. Carol and Ava are starting to get along well, as I predicted they would. Chances are they'll become regular lovers soon." "MORE sex?" questioned Katie. Julia answered, "I prefer to think of it as more friendship, Katie. My relationship with Ava has its foundation in friendship, like all good, long-term relationships do. Ava and Carol are becoming good friends too. You've seen them interact tonight, and they're obviously friends. I know changes are happening faster than you're used to, but none of these changes are doing Ava any harm. Her boyfriend's got considerably more money than you thought, and she's forming an important new friendship with Carol. Neither of those sound like they should cause much concern, do they?" "No. Isn't Carol way too young for sex?" "Her body obviously isn't, but you mean her emotional maturity. You've seen her behavior tonight, she's as mature as anyone here. Carol's in a class a year ahead of her age, and she's more sensible than most of those girls. Plus her parents gave her permission several weeks ago, so they don't think she's too young. For lesbian sex I mean; not guys. Carol's a lesbian, so we're only talking about girl-on-girl sex." "Oh dear. I didn't know any of that. There's so much happening recently. It's hard to get used to it all." Julia grinned, put on a stern motherly voice, shook her forefinger in front of Katie, admonishing her, "You've got no one to blame but yourself young lady. Don't you come running to me looking for sympathy." Katie smiled weakly, asking, "What did I do wrong?" "You told Ava to go out and find the best guy she could. She brought back a guy so exceptional that changes occur around him far faster than around normal people. I'm warning you that you'd better get used to unusual things in your lives, because Mark is going to keep creating them. Although I don't think we can blame him for Carol's being a lesbian, haha. -- "My and his families are learning to handle the events that Mark creates. Can you imagine the huge number of changes that are going to result from Mark's being rich now? Both families are moving into a new home, changing their lifestyles enormously, etc., all because Mark took a few days off school last week. Already Mark's got you to take a week or two off work and go for a trip somewhere. With Mark in your life, things are going to happen to you. You have to either get used to it, or you have to take Ava to your workplace and introduce her to a nice, safe, junior accountant. Are there any junior accountants at your work who earn $6.5 million per week?" "Haha. No, I'm reasonably sure there aren't." "You'd better get used to rapid changes then." -- Julia stopped, then had another idea. She restarted with, "At the dinner party at my house Wednesday before last, when you first met Mark, what would've happened if we'd told you that Mark was going to take a few days off school next week and earn $6.5 million? Would you have believed us, or thought we were all crazy people?" Carson said, "I still think it's hard to believe. I don't intend to cast aspersions, but we haven't seen any proof. I'm a skeptical person, and I'm having trouble accepting it. I hope you understand that I'm not wanting to..." Julia interrupted, "I understand. For some reason you find it hard to believe a 15-year old boy can earn $6.5 million. Mark's going to his bank at lunchtime tomorrow, so you could meet him there..." I interrupted, "There's probably an easier way Julia. We could go to an ATM right now and I could call up the account balance of my LA account. That'd only take five minutes back and forth." "I'd like to do that," agreed Carson. "It'd be good to see proof immediately, especially before we get our hopes up for a vacation trip." That was agreed. People started sorting out who was going to go. Initially everyone wanted to, but that was six, which was one more than we could fit in a car comfortably. Carol volunteered to stay, as she'd already seen the balance. Ava volunteered to stay to keep Carol happy, adding, "I don't need to see any proof. I trust Mark and Julia." Julia said she'd stay too, adding, "We can talk about the houses I've been looking at, and dream about our living in one of them." So it was down to just me and Ava's parents. Apparently females are allowed to change their minds. I was getting increasingly nervous about the money being there. I'd checked early Saturday morning, but it was now late Sunday evening and who knows what might have happened over that time. I said, "Ahh Julia. I wonder whether I should call Prof, to check the money is still there. Maybe he's moved it, or something, since Saturday morning." Julia said, "I didn't think you could move money on the weekend?" Carson said, "You can. Using an ATM, for example." "Okay Mark, give Dad a quick call." I did, and Prof told me, "I've done nothing. I was intending to transfer the money out tomorrow morning, but it should still be there now." I hung up, then informed everyone, "Prof says it'll still be there. I'll guess we'll go find out." We went in my car because it was parked in their driveway. Carson held the front passenger's door open for Katie, leaving me free to get in quickly. Katie and I had our seatbelts on well before Carson, but I waited until he was buckled up before I started the car. Katie noticed and commented on it. I said, "It's one of Prof's rules. 'The engine doesn't go on until all the seatbelts are on.' It's a big deal for his family and a habit for me now." So I scored some Brownie Points with Ava's parents. I drove us to an ATM, feeling increasingly nervous. I inserted the card and pressed the necessary buttons. As soon as the machine starting thinking I said, "You can look now." (They'd looked away rather than stare at my pin number.) All three of us were staring intently at the screen when "$8,000,000.00" appeared, much to my relief and their amazement. #4: #3: #1: #3: (Prof had access to my LA account, but not to my Corvallis account. He could transfer money into it, but not out again. That's why I had to do the circling transfer for him tomorrow.) I'd asked the nice ATM for a printed copy of my balance, so when that extruded I passed it to Katie, then withdrew my card. I nonchalantly said, "Shall we head back. I noticed there was a little dessert left, and I'm worried about the girls finishing it off before I do." In the car Katie asked, "I thought you said $6.5 million, but there's 8?" I knew just enough about accountancy to joke, "What I did in LA was very complex and I see I might need to teach you an advanced business concept. Have either of you ever heard of something called, 'Expenses'?" Carson chuckled, "I believe we might have encountered the term a few times in our careers." "That makes it easier to explain then. My business has a few expenses it hasn't paid yet, and some more money coming in yet too. The $8 million is merely what happens to be in the account at the moment. By the end of next week everything should be finalized, and there'll be about $6.5 million left." The Wests started what was obviously going to be the first of many serious questions about my business. I'd worked out what I thought was a reasonable way of refusing such requests, which I tried now, "I put a lot of hard work into developing my business. That makes it my private business, and I intend to keep it both mine and private. I will only answer questions if you NEED to know the answers, not simply to satisfy your curiosity." I expected questions to continue anyway, so I was prepared to respond with, "Why do you need to know that?", but the Wests surprised and pleased me by giving up immediately. Katie did ask, "That's an incredible amount of money for a 15-year old to have." I laughed, then explained, "That's what I thought too, but it's astonishing how fast it disappears. Between taxes; buying, renovating and furnishing the new house; and giving my parents a million..." Actually, the one million that was coming out of my share was going to the Anderson Emergency Fund. The one million that my parents would be getting as a gift that they could spend was coming out of the rest of the $11.1 million. It would have been difficult to explain why we needed an emergency fund, and we definitely didn't want to mention $11.1 million to anyone, as that'd too easily make them think of Binion's. I'd also thought of not mentioning my parents getting a million, but I had no doubt they'd be spending chunks of it (new cars, etc.), so it wasn't going to be a secret for long. Katie interrupted, "That's very generous of you." "They've been very helpful to me. There have been small things like my not existing without them, and how much it costs Mom to keep feeding me every week, haha. So it seems not unreasonable. But between taxes, the new house and my parents, there'll probably only be couple of hundred thou' left. That's a lot more than I had a week ago, but it's not anything like a fortune." "You could easily save half a million by going for a cheaper house?" "That's the last place I'd try to save money. It's very, very important to keep the cooks happy! Downgrading the house could cause them to go on strike, and that'd be a disaster." Katie laughed, which gave Carson the opportunity to say, "You were saying at home that Prof can transfer money out of your account. You're trusting him with $8 million?" "Yeah, I am. I thought about it, and decided I do trust him. Prof and Vanessa are exceptional people. They understood the implications of..." #4: #4: " ... my intelligence very quickly. They're quite sure I can earn big money in the future. Even very big money, so stealing $8 million from me now would be short-sighted. There are several other reasons which I won't bother going into now. I do trust them, and even if the worst happened, I'd be back to where I was a week ago, which wouldn't be the end of the world." When we got back, the girls came running out of Ava's bedroom, giggling and looking somewhat disheveled. I had no doubt it was deliberate (it was classic Julia). Katie and Carson chose not to say anything about it. Ava asked, "Well?" Katie and Carson were smiling, so there was not doubt as to the result, but Katie handed the printout to Ava. "Eight million! I thought it was only 6.5?" I thought of a better joke than repeating my "advanced business concept" line. Instead I said, "{SIGH}. It's so hard to impress girlfriends." Ava knew something was coming, "{Giggle}, why?" "You said, 'ONLY 6.5'. I can imagine you introducing me to your classmate friends: 'This is Mark. He's a reasonably nice guy, but he's ONLY got 6.5 million dollars.' What on Earth does a guy have to do to impress a girl around here!" "{Giggle}. You know what I meant." "That you'd like me to have more money?" "That'd be good! You do have a lot of girlfriends, so you're going to need a lot of money, haha." "But if I had a lot of money, then I'd have even more girlfriends, so then I'd need EVEN more money, which would attract EVEN more girlfriends. Soon every girl on the planet would be my girlfriend. I don't think I could live with all the teasing." Julia said, "We'd better tease him as much as we can now, before he gets so many girlfriends we get drowned out." When the girls finished teasing me about teasing me, I told Ava, "To explain why the bank has $8 million in it now, there's more money coming in yet, and more expenses going out. There'll be ONLY 6.5 left at the end of the week. Sorry about that." Later in the evening, Katie made a comment about getting the linen for Carol to sleep on the sofa. Carol said, "No need, thank you. We checked out Ava's new bed while you were at the ATM, and we think the four of us can squeeze into it. Mark leaves in the middle of the night, so it'll only be a tight fit for half the time." "Don't you think you'll be more comfortable on the sofa or airbed?" "No thanks. I'd much rather sleep with my friends and Mark." "Ahh, do you think that's appropriate for you to be sleeping in the same bed as your brother at your age?" "I can't imagine anywhere safer. Besides, Julia and Ava will protect Mark from being ravished by the lesbian, haha. If you think there's any chance of Mark hurting me in any way, then you don't know Mark at all. He's seen me naked heaps of times but he's never shown the tiniest sign of doing anything wrong." #3: Carol had held up her thumb and forefinger to indicate an insultingly tiny "tiniest". Julia added, "You've seen the hot tub in our house. We - Mark, Carol, I, and whoever else - use it a couple of times a week. We hardly ever bother with swimsuits. Carol has sat on Mark's lap in it when they've both been naked plenty of times, and he's never shown the tiniest interest." Julia again provided the insulting demonstration of "tiny". -- "There's no risk of Mark misbehaving. He loves and protects Carol too much for that. The only risk would be your reacting badly to their being in the same bed, and that doesn't seem likely, given Ava's extreme attitude to it." Predictably Katie asked, "What extreme attitude, Ava?" Ava looked caught, unsure what to say. Julia said, "It's okay, Ava. Tell your parents what you've been trying to achieve with Mark and Carol." "You want me to tell?" "There's no harm in telling them what you tried. It's not as if you succeeded, is it?" "That's for sure!" Turning to her mom, Ava said, "I've been trying my HARDEST to get Mark and Carol to have sex with each..." "AVA! How could you say such a thing!" Carson added, "Brothers and sisters can't do that, Ava." "Sure they can; they've got the same equipment as everyone else, hehe. It's just a stupid law, Dad. Mark and Carol love each other to pieces, and it'd be fantastic if they were lovers as well." "No it wouldn't. They'd get into terrible trouble. Society doesn't accept incest. It goes crazy whenever it suspects it." Julia interjected, "You don't have to bother trying to convince, Ava. Her opinion doesn't rule the day; only Mark's and Carol's. Ava, how much success have you had at convincing Mark and Carol?" "NONE! It's like hitting my head against a brick wall. They refuse to see how fantastic it'd be..." Julia interrupted again, "There's nothing to worry about, Katie. Mark and Carol have had plenty of opportunities. Their parents obviously trust them. They're letting Mark take Carol to LA and put her up in a hotel, all without any adult supervision..." Ava saw the possibilities. "YEAH! That'd be perfect. It'd be so easy to..." Julia chuckled, "Down girl! Haha. You know you're not going to be able to convince even one of them, let alone both." Ava's excitement drained out of her, "Oh yeah. It's such a pity. They'd be so good together." "They are together, in ways much more important than sexually." "{Sigh}. I know, but it's still such a pity. If Mark had been my brother, I'd be all over him." Katie said, "I think you'd find that if you grew up with someone, you wouldn't feel that way Ava." Ava parroted, "I think you'd find that if I grew up with Mark, then I'd be all over him, haha. I can't understand how Carol's not attracted to him. She loves him, and he's such a hunk, and so great in bed. She doesn't know what she's missing out on!" Katie chastised, "If you were any more explicit, she'd know exactly. You should stop making a nuisance of yourself about this, Ava." Julia beat me to Ava's defense (we didn't want Ava to stop trying!). Julia said, "Ava's not being a nuisance. Her heart is full of good intent and caring. It's nice to see how unselfish she is. Plus it's rather funny to see her try." Katie said, "Ava might be annoying Carol or Mark though. Carol?" "I think it's lovely that she cares so much. I don't mind at all." "Mark?" "Ava's wonderful. What I object to are the blatant lies told by Carol and Julia." That got everyone's attention! Katie asked, "Oh?" I explained, "They both referred to an important part of my anatomy as 'tiny'." I held up my hand, demonstrating the insultingly narrow thumb and forefinger gap. "Whereas the reality is much more like," I held up my two hands about two feet apart. "Haha," laughed Julia, "that's not even the size of your ego. Thank God it's not the size of anything else either, or you'd have to find yourself a freakish new girlfriend." "Now who's the one telling blatant lies?" accused Carol. The core topic's conversation never restarted properly. Katie merely told Ava to behave before she made too much of a nuisance of herself, and then we moved on to other topics. At bedtime Julia suggested, "You use the bathroom first Mark, as we might take quite a while." "The word 'might' must have a meaning I'm unfamiliar with. In my vocabulary it implies uncertainty and doubt. How did you mean it?" I used the bathroom first, then waited in bed while the girls had their turn. Quite a while after the girls went into the bathroom, I could hear through the walls Ava suddenly exclaim, "OH MY GOD! That's wonderful! You've got to..." Julia and Carol hushed her up. "But..." "Hush!" Followed by conversation too quiet for me to hear. Shortly after that the girls rushed back to the bedroom, with Ava in the lead, calling ahead, "Mark, you'll never guess..." "Hush!" from both the girls. Julia clamped a hand over Ava's mouth, adding, "We told you to keep it quiet." "But he has to mmpff..." "No he doesn't. Not now, not here." "But mmpff..." "Not a word, Ava. It's not safe here." "But..." "No buts. Not here, not now." "ARGH! It's not fair. I'm dying to tell him." "You'll live. I think someone better sleep between you and Mark." "Carol!" "Haha. I think not. Hmm." Julia thought about the sleeping arrangements for a second, then added, "There's a problem. Mark's not allowed to sleep on the edge because he has to have girls on either side of him. But we don't want Ava's parents to see him sleeping next to Carol and its easiest for him to climb over me when he gets up to study, so that means Ava does have to sleep next to Mark after all. Ava, will you keep quiet until a better time?" "I could whisper VERY quietly." "No. You'd get too excited and end up yelling it. Besides there's nothing that can be done about it now anyway." "But he should know." "Later. It's waited this long, it can wait a while longer." "Argh!" It was about time I said something, so I asked, "Have you girls had an exciting idea about how to spend all the money?" "No," answered Ava. "Carol told us mmpff..." "Ava, hush!" insisted Julia. To me Julia said, "It's nothing to worry about now, Mark. It should wait until later. Shouldn't it, Ava?" "Argh. I don't know how you can be so calm. It's the best thing..." "Shush. Just let it go." We got into bed. Wearing T-shirts and the like unfortunately, but squeezed close, which was nice. From the easiest side to get out of the bed, our sleeping positions were: Julia, me, Ava then Carol. Ava tried to cuddle up to me, to whisper in my ear, but Julia was facing me to watch for exactly that. Julia said, "I think you'd better go to sleep right away, Mark. Let's hope Ava can restrain herself enough so she doesn't wake you up unnecessarily." Thereby giving Ava that exact idea. "Okay. Goodnight to all my favorite girls in the whole world." They returned similar expressions, with Ava adding a sigh of frustration. ------- Chapter 195: Tit Flashing Monday, May 9, 2005 I was shaken awake sometime in the middle of the night. When she knew I was awake, Ava urgently whispered to me, "Carol desires you. She wants to have sex with you." "Haha. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a guy." "Yes, I know. Carol's in love with you. Properly in love, with sex and everything." "Boy, are you ever confused. I'm a GUY! The type of guy who is not a girl. Carol's a lesbian, so there's no way she can like me in that way." "She does! She told us! Isn't that wonderful?" "I'm sure you misunderstood Ava. Carol obviously meant something else." "No! She meant she wants to have sex with you." "You must have dreamed it then, because I'm sure it's not true. I need to get my sleep, so goodnight, sweetie." "But it IS true! She told Julia and me." "Whatever you say, sweetie. Goodnight." "But it's TRUE. I SWEAR it is." "We'll have a good laugh about it at breakfast. Pleasant dreams, sweetie. Goodnight." "ARGH!" I ordered myself back to sleep again. I woke after I'd had enough sleep. When I started climbing over Julia, she woke, and wished me "'Mornin', darling." When I clamber over Julia, she normally rolls over and goes back to sleep as quickly as possible, rather than talking to me. Mid-clamber, I said, "Sorry. Go back to sleep, darling." "I wanna tell you 'bout Ava." Julia's mouth hadn't woken up all the way yet. At about the same time I proximity sensed Ava waking up. I quickly canceled the light blob. My mental reactions are much faster than Ava's ability to rouse herself from sleep, so I easily had time to make sure she didn't see it. I sensed Ava decide to play possum. Ava might have heard what Julia said, so I NP-pinched Julia's lips together, while quietly saying, "We'll talk at breakfast. Ava woke up..." I tapped Julia's forehead a couple of times simultaneously with the last two words, hoping she'd get the hint that Ava was awake now, " ... earlier, and told me about a funny dream she had. I'll tell you about it later. You go back to sleep now." Julia nodded. Even if I'd been using full strength, which I wasn't close to, NP is so weak that she'd not have any trouble nodding. Ava doesn't keep her drapes as tightly sealed as Julia or Carol and I do so it wasn't totally dark and I was easily able to get dressed, and then quietly tiptoed out. I did some more memory sharing tests/exercises, and they seemed to have improved a little, as the indexing time seemed a little faster, although it was hard to tell because they varied considerably. (I won't bother to mention this issue again in the future, as it's become a standard part of my morning routine and the future results have been mentioned already.) Studying was enjoyable as usual. As was fairly common, I ran into a couple of problems caused by not knowing some Math because of my incomplete schooling, but I was able to find out what I needed by googling around rather than waiting to ask Prof later, especially as I was going back to Ava's before breakfast. I arrived back at the Wests' house about the right time, as I could see a couple of lights on. I let myself in with the key Carson had lent me the night before, chatted with Katie in the kitchen for a couple of minutes, then went to Ava's bedroom. The girls were awake and talking. As soon as they saw me, Ava leaped up and said, "Mark..." Julia interrupted, "Ava! You know what Carol said!" "But he..." "Let it be, Ava." "Argh." When Ava subsided, I asked, "What was that about?" Julia answered, "It doesn't matter Mark. Just girl secrets." "I don't want to get involved with any of those! Changing the subject, did Ava tell you about the funny dream that she woke me up about?" Ava tried to speak, but Julia got in first, "Yes. Poor Ava wants it to be true so much she nearly convinced herself. Never mind. How did your studying go?" "Fine thank you..." We chatted about things other than Carol's lust for me, much to Ava's frustration. When Ava left the room a few minutes later, Julia whispered to me, "Carol told Ava she didn't want you to know because it's obvious that you don't want her, and telling you would just cause trouble. Now you just need to make a very light hint that it's a pity, or something like that. That'll encourage Ava to believe it's possible." "Okay. No problem. I'll go back to the kitchen and let you girls dress, because it wouldn't be appropriate for me to see my sister get dressed, hehe." At the breakfast table I asked Ava's parents, "So have you chosen your dream trip?" Carson said, "Yes. We've always wanted to..." He went on to describe a trip around some places in America. "That's it? I can't believe that's all you want for your dream vacation?" "That's what we've been looking forward to Mark." "It is," confirmed Ava. "I've heard them talking about it." "But now that money's no object, surely you can think of something more exciting than that?" "Money's never 'no object', but thank you for the offer to treat it as such. Katie and I would be perfectly happy with a trip like that. You did say last night that the purpose was for us to spend time together, which we can do on that trip just as well as anywhere else. Probably better than somewhere like Italy, where we'd be battling to understand where we were, how to get what we wanted, etc. This way we can concentrate on each other." "That's very true. I didn't think of that. When are you going to do it?" "We need to talk with our bosses, but neither of us expects much delay there. We'll probably have to work for a week or two. We'll let you know later." Shortly after that, Ava commented, "Mark, doesn't Carol look pretty this morning?" I restrained my laughter, looked briefly at Carol, then answered Ava, "Yes she does, but she looks pretty every morning so that's hardly a surprise." "Don't you think she's looking sexy?" "Of course. We're doing that thing with Chloe this morning." Katie frowned, "Ava, are you still on the same subject as last night?" Ava mumbled something then fell silent. Katie started telling Ava off, which seemed unfair to allow given that we'd deliberately put Ava in this position, so I interrupted, "Katie, it's all right. We don't mind. Ava's only wasting her breath; she's not annoying us. She's got good intentions, even if what she wants is impossible. -- "To change the subject, Julia, you remember that Prof's going to text you with the account details for me to do a transfer to. I know you usually do, but could you make sure you keep an eye on your cellphone and let me know when you've got that information, please?" "Sure. I'm looking forward to seeing what phones Lily brings back for us." "You're treating my phone as communal property now?" "Huh?" "You said 'us', as if you were intending to share my phone." "No. We asked her to get phones for us too - Carol and I." I was slowly learning about girls, so I knew better, but I still couldn't resist saying, "Both your phones broke at the SAME time! What're the odds of that! What'd you do, bang them together or something?" "NEW phones, from HONG KONG! Carol's phone is a very old model and totally inappropriate for your sister to have. I have no choice about upgrading mine, because how would it look if you and Carol had lovely phones and I had my old thing?" "I almost feel sorry for you. I didn't realize that being my girlfriend was such a worrisome position." "I'm glad you're starting to appreciate the sacrifices I have to make. There are one or two tiny compensations," Julia held up her hand, to illustrate the usual half-inch insult, "but I have to be constantly on the alert to avoid causing people to think poorly of you." "I wonder whether I should go back to dressing in my old clothes, in order to lower the onerous standard you have to so constantly strive to attain." "That wouldn't lower the standard, it'd remove it entirely. I'd hate for you to be inconsistent, so we'd have to build you a little hovel at the bottom of the garden while the rest of us lived in the mansion." "Wouldn't my girlfriend live with me in my hovel?" "Hovel dwellers aren't allowed to be rich, so I'll be too busy correcting that situation by spending your excess cash." "Couldn't you leave that to Carol?" "I'll be helping her. Surely you don't expect poor Carol to carry out such an onerous, worrisome task all by herself? You have no concept of how difficult it is to look after you." "I feel sorry for all the dozens of girls who are lining up for the position as my girlfriend then. Someone really should tell them what they're letting themselves in for, especially that the compensations are so tiny." I held up my hands two feet apart. "Carol and I would tell them, but we need all the help we can get. Hopefully among all the dozens of girls interested in you, there might be one or two masochistic enough to hang around for a while." "As much as I'm enjoying this, especially because I think I'm winning, we have to stop. Remember that we've got to be at school ten minutes early." "I accept your badly worded surrender. I'll be ready in a minute." The girls bustled around getting ready while I thanked Katie and Carson for their hospitality. Then they thanked me, and it went around again. Eventually Julia, Carol and I headed out. We were delayed while picking up Donna because Mom wanted to ask us several questions about our dinner with the Wests, which I answered very briefly. We were going to meet Chloe, so Mom would have to get the full version of my answers some other time. We arrived at school a little later than we wanted, but not too badly. As Julia and I were hurrying to find Chloe, we passed several other kids who made a big deal about me being back. "Hey Egg, you're back. Where ya been, Man?" Or, "Mark! It's great to see you back. We were worried about you. Is everything okay?" Or, "Haha. You finally found the balls to show you face again, eh?" To all of them we bustled straight past, saying "Sorry, I'm in a hurry. Can't stop to talk." Chloe was in the designated spot, and she smiled happily when she saw us. Several other earlier arrivers at school wanted to talk to me about my absence, all the fascinating rumors, etc. Ordinary that would have been tedious, and now it was also holding up our tit-flashing plan. We quickly moved Chloe away, explaining to the others, "Sorry, we have to talk with Chloe about something first. We'll be back in a few minutes." We took Chloe outside and around the back of the block. There we did our best to convince her to loosen up. I repeated my, "If you remain so fearful of every male, you'd damage my male friendships. Do you want to be my girlfriend?" "Oh yes. I'd love to be your girlfriend. I think you're the only guy I can trust, and you're so..." "That's part of the problem. I don't want you to be able to trust only me. If you want to be my girlfriend you need to start showing us that you can be less fearful of every guy, and showing us that you can learn to trust the good ones and handle the idiotic ones properly. Being fearful of all guys is not healthy for you or for our relationship." "I'll try. Already I trust you, so that's good." "It's not good enough. It's far too slow, presuming there's any forward progress at all. You need to learn that you don't actually have anything to fear from guys in normal daily contacts. If they stare at you..." We went through all the usual arguments, and Chloe went through her usual pathetic defenses/refusals. After five minutes of it, I angled the conversation toward what I needed to do. "Why won't you unbutton a few buttons at school from now on?" "I'm not comfortable exposing myself at school." "No one is asking you to expose yourself, just undo a few buttons, wear some lower cut tops, and show a little cleavage. In other words, dress like most other girls." "That's what I mean. I'm not comfortable exposing myself like that." "So how do you intend to get comfortable?" "I prefer to keep covered up. Otherwise boys will be staring at me all the time, trying to feel me up and all those types of things." "A lot of them will stare, yes. And a few might even try to feel you up, but so what? It's hardly the end of the world. Guys look at every girl's breasts, but somehow every other girl manages to survive, and go on to have good lives and successful relationships. You are NOT going to have a good life or a successful relationship, not unless you learn to stand up to guys rather than shrinking in fear whenever one comes within six feet of you. Especially when any of my friends come anywhere near you. Because many guys are rude, inconsiderate idiots doesn't mean you have to treat every guy in fear, whether or not he's ever done anything bad to you. Plus being stared it is hardly 'bad'. You shouldn't let it affect your life at all. I'll prove it to you." I turned to Julia. "Julia, can I borrow your phone please?" "Of course. Who are you going to call?" "Carol." "I'll dial her for you." A couple of seconds later Julia passed me her phone, saying, "It's ringing." When Carol answered I said, "Hi Carol, it's Mark here. You remember me don't you, your tall, good looking, modest brother?" "Yes, cute butt, you've got it. I didn't notice what you wore to school today. Have you got a top on that can be rearranged to show a lot of cleavage?" "Good. You remember Chloe, of course?" "Good. Can you do us a favor please. I'd like you to come into my class showing heaps of cleavage - two heaps actually - to let the guys stare at you. I want Chloe to see that guys are idiots who'll look at any girl's tits, and that it doesn't mean anything except that guys are rude idiots. Pretend you're delivering a message to me, as I've lost my cellphone. Can you do that for me, please?" Chloe started protesting that it was unnecessary, "You don't have to make Carol do that. I know boys look at every girl." I briefly interrupted my conversation with Carol to tell Chloe, "We're doing this anyway. Even if it has only a tiny chance of success, it's still worth doing, because your attitude desperately needs to be fixed. You know you're unhappy as you are now." -- Back to Carol I said, "Thanks, sweetie. In about two minutes. Can you be at..." I gave Carol directions to the exact room, as she hadn't learned the layout of the high-school rooms yet and it wouldn't be ideal if she rushed into the wrong room. As I was hanging up, Julia suggested, "Why not ask Ava to help too?" "Good idea. Let's do it while we're walking quickly to the classroom." Julia dialed Ava's speed dial number for me, then passed the phone back. I repeated my request, which Ava accepted. By then we were back inside the building, so we hurried down the hallway and into our class. Chloe again tried to protest that it was unnecessary, but we didn't listen to her. Especially because we weren't doing it for Chloe anyway, but for Carol's and my own pleasure. It might possibly help Chloe, but according to Julia, Chloe's finding out that I was a millionaire in a few hours would sweep every other consideration away. We entered the classroom and moved to one side of it, so Carol would be able to face the entire room for her flash. About half the class was already in the room, chatting among themselves. My arrival caused a stir, and many of them followed me to talk. Most of the girls, expressing concern at my absence, and curiosity about it; and several of the guys, taunting me about my running away for several days because I couldn't face the humiliation caused by my pathetic pipeline scheme. So there were a lot of people and noise, but no real communication going on. I didn't want the guys to drift away, so I didn't ignore them as I normally would have. I told them, "I didn't run away; I've been busy. I've got several other things I'm involved in besides school." "Yeah, right!" I kept it up for the best part of a minute, until Carol and Ava pushed their way through the crowd. What a lovely sight they were! Carol's top completely fallen off her left shoulder, taking that bra strap with it, so the blouse's left collar was dangling just above her elbow. That exposed most of the left side of her chest, including a good portion of that side of her bra, which was beautifully effective at flattering her breasts. The right side of her blouse was flapping loosely too, so PLENTY of Carol's considerable cleavage was visible. Ava had adopted a different approach. Her blouse was unbuttoned a long way down, and tucked tightly into her skirt's waistband in a way that pulled her blouse wide open, clearly revealing her very low-cut bra. Her breasts weren't nearly as dramatic as Carol's, but seeing the uppermost edges of her areola was ample compensation. The guys were GOBSMACKED! Which isn't actually saying much, because it doesn't take a lot of breast to gobsmack a guy. Both girls were exposing considerably more than the minimum gobsmack inducing level. Carol said, "We've got an urgent message for you Mark. Phew, I'm out of breath. I'm not used to running." Carol handed me a note, while her breasts heaved with her heavy breathing. Some of the guys were starting to breathe heavily too, while they stared with unabashed lust at the two girls' chests, especially Carol's. In a random group of guys, I would expect some of them to be polite, and either to look away or be surreptitious about their perving, but these guys had gathered around me to torment me for my cowardliness, so none of them was familiar with the concept of politeness. I looked at the note: "NP is URGENTLY needed on its namesake!" I chuckled. Carol started her tirade, "Good grief! Look at these idiots ogling Ava and me. Anyone would think they'd never seen a breast before." Several of the girls around made comments. Some were jokes along they lines of, "They haven't," but most of the comments were like, "You're showing a LOT, Carol." Carol said, "I was running. Things bounce around, haha." Carol pointed at one of the guys, "Look at him! He's actually drooling. How pathetic is that!" The singled out guy frantically wiped his mouth. I didn't think he had been drooling, but I wasn't going to say so. Carol continued, "I thought the boys in middle school were immature, but the boys in your class are just as bad, Mark. Even worse, they drool. Yuck! Look at them. I'm telling them off and they still can't keep from staring at our breasts. They're pathetic! I bet they'll mess themselves if I do this." Carol flipped the left side of her bra down, totally exposing that breast. "CAROL!" squealed Ava, amid all the groans from the guys. I wouldn't have been surprised if some of them had 'drooled' into their shorts. The closest guy reached out his hands, like he was a hypnotized zombie, unable to resist. He was pathetic, although I'd quite like to do the same thing (in a non-pathetic way, of course). Carol laughed and stepped back out of reach, wiggling her shoulders from side-to-side a couple of times, to VERY good effect. She added, "I thought 16-year old boys would be like you Mark, but they're even more pathetic than 13-year old boys." Some of the girls around us were shocked (none more so than Chloe), but some were more amused than anything. A couple made comments like, "They're NOTHING like Mark!" Ava had recovered from her surprise. She had breasts only half the size of Carol, so she compensated by pulling down the cups on both sides of her bra at once, laughing, "This is fun. Look at the losers. Get a good look boys, because you're never going to see these puppies again, haha." We'd asked Ava to back up Carol's verbal ridiculing the boys. We'd not once asked her to flash, but our not mentioning that wasn't going to stop her now. She looked like she was enjoying herself! Over the noise, Alexis called out, "Mark! Is this a private party, or can anyone join in?" "Go for it, spanky." Alexis lifted up the bottom of the front of her T-shirt with both hands, catching the underside of her bra cups and lifting those over her breasts too. When her hands were holding her T-shirt and bra up by her neck, she copied Carol's previous action by wiggling her shoulders from side to side. Pat yelled, "Mark, is this for Chloe?" A fair guess, as Julia and I were standing beside Chloe, and I'd explained to Pat at Lily's dinner a lot of what we were trying to do with Chloe. I nodded. Pat said something short I couldn't hear, then she copied Alexis' action. In moments there were seven tits waving around, and the boys in class were going insane. There were nearly nine breasts exposed, as proximity showed me that Julia was thinking of pulling her top up too, but she chickened out, then started doing it, and then chickened out again. She ended up not doing it, just laughing at the circus. #3: #4: #3: #4: #1: #4: #1: #3: #4: #3: While the boys were so distracted, I formed a couple of NP-fingertips, using them to squeeze Carol's exposed nipple several times. It was already hard, and Carol's face was flushed and smiling very happily, so she was having a great time. She loved my additional contribution though, giving me a big smile and mouthing a silent "Thank you" - or maybe she'd actually said it out loud; it was hard to tell among all the noise. I had no idea whether any of the boys noticed Carol's nipple indenting strangely, but I figured that even if they had seen nipples up close before, they were too excited to notice what I'd done. After a few more seconds of bedlam, Carol put herself away, pulling her blouse up to its normal position and doing up the buttons. There were groans of dismay from the guys as all the other exhibitionists followed suit. In a couple of seconds the show was all over. Carol hadn't finished her ridiculing though. "Good grief!" she announced. "Now TWO little boys are drooling." Every little boy immediately wiped his mouth, which caused several of the girls to burst out laughing. "How can boys be so stupid and immature to get that excited at the sight of a 13-year old lesbian's breasts. Thank God I'm a lesbian, because I'd never want to have anything to do with these losers." For Chloe's benefit, I would've liked to say that not all guys are losers, but every guy in the room - except for yours truly - had acted like a tit-struck fool, rushing forward to see as much as they could. Hardly surprising really, and I knew I would've done so too, had my life worked out less unusually. A few people drifted away, but most gathered around to ask questions like, "What on Earth was that all about?" (from a girl), or "When are you going to do it again?", or, "Wow, you've got great tits, Pat." (These from guys, with the guy who made the last comment lacking the courage to follow his smooth line with a request for a date.) I raised my hands and got everyone to quiet down somewhat. I explained loudly, "That was to show Chloe how stupid and pathetic boys are about tits. Do you think it succeeded?" There was a chorus of feminine voices yelling their agreement, and quite a few male ones too. The guys had no hesitation in admitting they were pathetic, and we could all see how eagerly they were hoping for another opportunity to prove it. -- When I got control again, "We also wanted to show Chloe that the girls aren't harmed in any way. All that happened was that some boys made fools of themselves. Chloe doesn't need to live in fear of boys, because they're mostly too pathetic to be feared." More feminine agreement. "Actually, the plan was simply that Carol and Ava came in with their blouses showing a lot of cleavage. Carol got carried away, then Ava copied her, then Alexis and Pat." I looked around for Alexis and Pat, then motioned them closer to me. I put my arms around them, saying, "Good for you two. Thanks very much for joining in. Hopefully it'll make the lesson even stronger for Chloe. And I'd also like to thank you on behalf of every boy in this class." When the laughter ceased, I said one of my predetermined lines, "Carol, the idea was just to let the guys make fools of themselves by their staring at your cleavage, so how come you exposed yourself so much more than that?" Carol answered, "You said my showing cleavage could help Chloe, so I thought showing more might help her more. I know she's got the crazy idea that something bad will happen if a guy sees her skin, and I wanted to show her that nothing bad happens even if guys see a LOT of skin, haha. All that happens is that guys turn into drooling, gibbering idiots; certainly nothing to be afraid of. I just wanted to help you help her. It was no big deal; I was just flashing a tit. I've never done anything like that before and I quite enjoyed it. I'd like to do it again. Do you have any guy friends who aren't a bunch of pathetic losers?" Carol's last idea took me by surprise as we'd never discussed it. But it actually suited the situation very well because we wanted Chloe to think there were good guys other than me (although that was stage two of her improvement, stage one being just to get her to stop being so fearful of every guy), and it'd be very amusing to torture these guys, so I said, "Sure. I've got several friends who've got mental ages higher than thirteen..." #4: I continued, " ... I was going to throw a party for them soon. How about you and Ava are in charge of 'Party Entertainment'? Haha. You could put on a show for them, if you want?" Carol turned to Ava, telling her, "Yeah. We'll work up something sexy and fun to get them into party mode." Carol reached out and caressed the side of one of Ava's breasts, which caused inhalations of breath from half the people in the room. Carol looked Ava in the eyes, telling her, "I'm sure I'll think of something we can do." Ava said, "Oh boy. I've never done anything like that before." "Me neither, but it's going to be fun to think about." Carol turned to me, "I have to get to class, Mark. Okay?" "Sure. Thanks for exceeding my idea so effectively, sweetie." "My pleasure. I always enjoy seeing how pathetic guys are." -- To Ava, Carol said, "Let's go, lover." Which caused another stir. Carol took Ava's hand, and they started leaving the room. It was well past time for Chloe to say something, so I turned to her, "So what'd you think of the show that..." I was interrupted by Carol's and Ava's laughter. I looked that way, to see the two girls by the doorway, next to a rapidly backpedaling male classmate of mine. Carol yelled back at me, "Just when I thought guys couldn't be any more pathetic, they prove me wrong. Mark, please explain to Penis-Brain that hitting on 13-year old lesbians is unbelievably stupid." "I'm on it, Carol. You two better get to your classes." -- As the girls hurried from the room, I called out, "Hey Penis-Brain! Hitting on 13-year old lesbians is unbelievably stupid." Which earned me several laughs. -- When they died down, I asked, "Seriously Penis-Brain, I REALLY want to know what on Earth were you thinking when you were hitting on my little sister? Did you think all the drool on your chin would make you irresistibly attractive to a lesbian? Maybe you thought it made you look like such a sissy that you had a chance?" #4: #1: #4: #1: I was just about to turn back to Chloe, when the teacher arrived. The bell would be going momentarily, so I gave Alexis and Pat quick kisses and "Thank yous." Pat asked me, "Do you think that'll help Chloe?" "Probably not enough, but you never know. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected though, partly thanks to you two." "Mainly Carol. I'm amazed at how confident she is for such a young girl." "She's blossoming, that's for sure." The bell rang. During class I decided that Pat was definitely going to get Katelin's seat. I'd been inviting Katelin most out of sympathy, which wasn't a good enough reason. Pat was more fun. Not just today either, as I had a very nice memory of her and Lily flashing their almost bare asses at me not long after I'd slept with the two of them. There wasn't much of her body that she hadn't shown me in class! An attitude like that should be rewarded. I whispered to Julia, "Pat gets Katelin's invite." "Good idea. Wasn't Carol wonderful?" "Awesome!" When the end of class bell rang, rather than the usual rush for everyone to leave, some of the guys gathered around me to ask, "When's the party?" "You can't be thinking you'll be getting invites?" By the looks on their faces, they had been hoping that. "Most of you were taunting and insulting me with your stupid idea that I spent last week hiding in shame. Then you made complete fools of yourselves lusting after my lesbian sister and the other girls. And the only reason you want to come to the party is sexual; nothing to do with friendship with me. Now excuse me, I want to talk with my real friend." They looked around to see who my real friend was, but they couldn't spot anyone they recognized as that person. "Good grief! I meant Julia! It is possible to have a friendship with a girl, you know." #1: Julia and I managed to talk with Chloe between classes. After giving the matter some thought, Chloe's considered opinion was, "I don't feel comfortable exposing myself, and my parents wouldn't approve either." She wrapped it in sweet-sounding bullshit, but it boiled down to nothing having changed for her. Chloe praised me for going to such lengths for her, and for caring for her so much. "But," Chloe said, "there's no need. I'm perfectly happy being your girlfriend." She didn't see any need to change, especially now that she thought I was going to be her boyfriend. If the "Flying Bed Trip" hadn't been coming up, I would've happily left Chloe to stew for a month or two, not asking her out until she'd started behaving better. I still came very close to telling Julia not to invite Chloe, and to give her seat to Katelin instead (Katelin would be getting dizzy, if she knew how often she was being rotated on and off seats), but I'd already talked myself into thinking Katelin wasn't a very good choice. I decided to let Julia go ahead with her mind-game 'invite' to Chloe, and to see how Chloe responded. As Julia had previously described, Chloe's invitation was conditional on her becoming my lover before the trip, so if Chloe fucked up fucking me, then she'd miss out of the trip, which would please Katelin. Back on April 29 (the Friday just over a week ago), nine guys had encircled me and tried to taunt me into a vastly out-numbered fight while Pete Sanchez, my teacher 'bodyguard', was out of the room. They'd been suspended for a week, so seven of the nine were back at school today, the parents of the other two having decided it'd be better to transfer them to another school. Those parents hadn't overreacted, as the Principal had REALLY let loose on their kids. He thought his job was on the line, and he wasn't going to let a bunch of idiot kids get him fired. The seven had started today with a meeting in the Principal's office, where he'd read them the riot act again. If they so much as looked at me sideways, or hassled anyone else, they'd be expelled. [Later in the day, two of them apologized to me for their part in the April 29 activities, and told me about this morning's "riot act reading".] Some of them had been in my first class, but they arrived halfway through, having been held up in the Principal's office. So they missed being tempted to join in the early, "You've been too scared to come to school" taunting that the other guys did. They missed the tit flashing fun too, but that's off my topic. A surprisingly large number of the girls at school, especially 10th grade girls, and even more many of the prettiest of them, were eager to join pipeline groups. That was something that the majority of 10th grade boys - and a few boys from other grades, mostly juniors and seniors - weren't happy about. Most of the boys wouldn't do anything more than grumble about it, but there were quite a few who were angry, and who believed - or had allowed themselves to be talked into believing - that my absence last week was because I was a coward. There's no one better to attack than a coward, so I came in for a lot of abuse. Mostly ridicule over the pipeline scheme and taunting at being too chicken to come to school most of last week. Some boys tried hard to throw other offenses in my face too, such as the way I dressed, or how pathetic I was in trying to seduce Chloe, including that I had to get my little sister to help me. They were throwing whatever crap they could dredge up. Having $6.5 million in my bank account made me totally indifferent to their opinions of me. Compared to me, they were the losers: physically, academically, romantically, financially, and probably several other -ally's that I couldn't be bothered trying to think of. But the abuse was bad enough that Julia expressed concern to me. I told her that "I really couldn't care less. It'll either fade away in a few days, or some of them will try something, in which case they'll soon learn they shouldn't have." "What are you going to do?" "If someone attacks me, then the Principal's methods will have failed, so I'll try to teach them to wise up by breaking a few bones. That should have a good chance of dissuading future strife. Guys' jealousy is going to get worse, especially after news of my money gets out, so they're likely to need a lesson sooner rather than later. I should make it a very effective one so they stop trying to compete with the image of me that you've created, and they especially should stop trying to physically tear me down. There are hundreds of girls in school that I'll never get around to, so guys should put their efforts into trying to be a good second choice for any of them." "Make sure you can't get in any trouble for it," worried Julia. "We don't want you to get expelled or arrested." "They'll have to attack me first, and I'm quite happy to take a punch or two because I can move so that the punches just glance harmlessly off me. I'm not worried about it. Just between you and me, I'm even looking forward to it a little. All this abuse is starting to piss me off." "Good boy." "You want me to beat the shit out of whoever comes at me?" "Hell yeah. Beat the shit out of them, then give them a kick in the balls for me. Do you remember the conversation you and I had with Mom about socially humiliating the next guy to attack you?" I nodded. "That'd be good, but the guys seem to be acting in packs against you, the cowards. I can't see how we can socially humiliate a pack, so beating the shit out of them sounds perfect to me." "Yeah, I was thinking the same thing." "Just make sure you can't get in any trouble for it." "I'll be careful." Nothing of any consequence happened before lunch. There was lots of tough-guy macho crap from quite a few guys, jostling, and trying to 'accidentally' collide with me in hallways. The last tactic NEVER succeeded because of my proximity, and they sometimes stumbling themselves, which embarrassed them. There was heaps of verbal abuse too. On the other hand, several guys who'd never previously made any effort to be friendly to me, suddenly tried to get VERY friendly. Their interest dropped off dramatically when I said, "What a pity I've already reached the maximum number of people I can invite to my party." There were also heaps of questions about my absence last week (questions, as opposed to taunts). I got tired of saying, "I was busy, at OSU mostly." And I often had to add, "Yeah, I keep hearing a story about some people asking questions about me, but no one asked me anything last week, so I can't explain it." Chloe, Alexis and Pat also spent some time thanking me again for inviting them to Lily's dinner. Chloe was particularly effusive, I suspected because she felt her position as my girlfriend wasn't as secure as she wanted. She even took the opportunity to praise me for my fancy computer system. Julia had shown it to her a week ago, but Chloe hadn't thought to praise me for it until now. Chloe seemed to have very little understanding of the whole boyfriend-girlfriend process, especially what it took to be one of my girlfriends. As far as I could tell, her deciding to let me be her boyfriend seemed to be her opinion of the definitive step. She knew I wanted her to try harder, and she knew I had other girlfriends, but the logic of the situation didn't seem to have penetrated. No doubt the few other guys she'd accepted as boyfriends had leaped at the initial chance. Alexis pointed out that I hadn't given her a good morning kiss yet. I said, "I think you deserve two, one for each of the lovely things you waved around in class." That was fine with her. She also asked me to explain the Chloe thing, so I gave her a very cut down version of what I'd told Pat. I met my soccer coach, and chatted with him a bit. The team won its previous game easily, as expected. I told him I'd be in LA next weekend, but I'd try to make the game after that. "That'd be the second to last game. It'll be at home, so I hope you can make it. We're up against a team we'd have trouble beating without your contribution." "I'll do my best, Coach, but things are getting a little crazy for me these days." The last pre-lunch point that's worth mentioning is that Julia got the text message from Prof about the bank transfer he wanted me to do. He said he'd transferred $8 million into my Corvallis account, and he wanted me to transfer $3 million of it into the new account he'd sent the details of to Julia. Julia carefully wrote the details on a piece of paper, not wanting to transfer $3 million into the wrong account! She passed it to me. I drove to the bank at lunchtime, eating the lunch Mom had prepared for me which I'd picked up when I collected Donna, my sex slave being too busy buying cellphones for us to make my lunch. I'd prearranged for Mom to do that. Important things I don't leave to chance. At the bank, I checked my local account's balance using the ATM outside the bank, thinking I'd feel stupid walking into the bank and talking about million dollar transfers if my account just held the usual amount. Unfortunately the account balance just showed the usual amount, which was a VERY bad feeling. I checked the account balance for my LA account: $0. I wouldn't have minded seeing $8 million there, but I couldn't decide whether $0 was actually bad. Prof had presumably sent the money somewhere, but where? I didn't have a cellphone to call him with, and rather than borrow one off a passerby, I decided to try inside the bank. I asked a teller, "I was expecting a wire transfer into my account this morning, but I just checked my account balance on the ATM outside and it doesn't show up yet. Can you tell me anything about it?" "When and where was the transfer executed?" "In Los Angeles this morning, probably about 10am or so." "It wouldn't show up yet. Do you want me to check with someone who deals with wires more than I do?" "Yes please." "What's your name and account number please?" I gave her the printout from the ATM, which listed that information. "And how much was the transfer for?" "Umm. I'd rather not say. Do you need that to find it?" "Are you missing one transfer out of several, or is this the only one that should be happening?" "I see what you mean. It's the only one." "I'll go check for you." A minute or so later she returned smiling broadly, indicating behind me, "The manager will see you now, Mr. Anderson." I turned to see another broadly smiling bank person. It was soon apparent that I was one of his favorite customers. He wasn't quite skipping for joy, but probably only because he was too fat to accomplish something so acrobatic. In his office, he explained that they knew about the incoming $8 million transfer, but it wouldn't appear in my ATM balance until after midnight. Apparently something to do with the way their computers updated account balances. He was effusive about offering to help me with anything I wanted, so I said, "Good. I need three things done. First, I want to wire $3 million to this account," as I handed over the note Julia had given me. We did the paperwork for that. It couldn't be actioned until tomorrow, which necessitated my using his phone to call Prof to make sure that was okay. He was out of his office, so I left an innocuous voicemail message saying that his transfer would be actioned tomorrow morning, and for him to contact the bank manager, "who is only too happy to help," or me via Julia if that was a problem. My second need was a checkbook, which was easy, with a temporary one being provided immediately. I asked, "I'm going to be writing checks for a couple of million. Will the money not being in the account yet cause a problem?" I learned it wouldn't be a problem unless someone tried to cash a check today. They weren't going to get their checks until this evening, so that was fine. My last need was for a credit card I could use on the weekend. That was considerably more difficult. There were all sorts of questions on the form that were difficult for me to answer in a way the credit card company would like. For example, I expected my income from now on to be $0, apart from some interest. Interest was a wonderful monthly income now, but would drop precipitously when we bought our mansion, whenever that'd be. It turned out that the only practical way to get a credit card before next weekend was to apply for a child's credit card under one of my parents' cards. The manager wanted to call one of my parents to make sure they'd approve of me having a card on their account. I looked at him for a few seconds, waiting for him to get it. He didn't, so I explained, "If you were my mother or father, how much would you appreciate having your job interrupted to be asked whether you'd cover the credit card debts of a son with $8 million in the bank? Do you honestly think there's any chance whatsoever of my parents declining?" It turned out that for such a valued customer (where "valued" should have more honestly been "valuable") it was possible to fast-track my application through the system. There were still forms for my parents to fill out that had to be returned to the bank tomorrow. My business done, I moved to leave. His business wasn't quite done though. He said, "The law requires us to 'get to know' our customers, especially those customers who are moving large sums of money. The threat of terrorism being what it is." I was momentarily tempted to make a joke along the lines of, "And how many terrorists have you caught in Corvallis so far?", but I knew that was unfair. The money could be useful to terrorists regardless of whether it came through a small city's bank. Instead I said, "Let's hope terrorists are stupid enough to use 15-year old boys as cover. So what does 'get to know' entail? I know you're already aware of my family's details." (During our session in his office, he'd made some reference to them, and to my age. I'd thought just because he was curious and nosey, but apparently he was legally required to be nosey.) He talked vaguely for a while, trying to be nosey without appearing to be nosey, but it came down to his wanting to know where the money came from and what we intended to do with it. He didn't say so outright, but that's what he wanted to know. My being fifteen had cranked his curiosity all the way to "max". I didn't want to answer any of his "Where did it come from" questions, so I said, "If you give me another of your cards I'll pass it on to my accountant. He can give you whatever business details you want." I didn't even know who 'my' accountant was yet, but I'd give the card to Prof to pass on. I was sure Prof could tell the accountant what was permissible to tell this guy. The manager gave me another of his cards, so he seemed happy with my answer. I added, "As to spending the money, a large chunk goes to tax and most of the balance on a very nice new house." He immediately tried to interest me in a home financing loan, which made no sense to me whatsoever. I had several million dollars and I'd just told him that most of it was going to be spent on a new home, so why would I need a loan? Rather than getting into a discussion, I repeated what Prof had told me, "Any home loan information, or anything else you want to sell me, put it in an envelope and mail it to me. I have to get back to school now. If I don't get good grades, I won't be able to get a good job when I graduate." I left him thinking about that. ------- Chapter 196: More Macho Bullshit: the 'Castration' Attack Monday, May 9, 2005 (Continued) I got back to school before lunchtime had ended, so I went looking for Julia and the others. They weren't in our usual spot, but I remembered her saying something about having a different meeting spot for our non-private meetings, so I went looking for that. It wasn't hard to find, it being a very large group of girls. Most lunchtime groups are half a dozen or so people, so a group ten times that size stood out, even when they were sitting down. I noticed several guys hanging around the periphery, which didn't please me. I was starting to form the opinion that I should be going to a girls-only school. Perhaps with a few ugly male soccer players also permitted to give me a team to play with. The girls saw me as I got closer, and I was welcomed noisily. I was introduced to the girls who were in the two first pipeline groups, twenty of those thirty two girls were here. Pipeline Group 1A was a 10th grade group, 1B was 11th grade. I joked with some of the girls I knew well enough to think of relevant jokes for, and generally pretended much more enthusiasm and interest than I really had. It was just as well the girls were arranging the pipeline dates because I had too many other things going on to give it much priority. I hoped my lack of enthusiasm was caused by my being away during the first week, so I'd missed all the excitement and buzz. The alternative was that I'd lost interest in the pipeline system even before it'd started, which didn't bode well for a long, successful process. That'd be disappointing after all of Julia's work and all the abuse I was taking for it. I checked whether Group 1B knew they'd been bumped out of the weekend, to Tuesday evening, and they did know. I apologized, simply saying, "I'll be out of town that weekend. Sorry about that." "Where're you going?" "It's not fully planned yet, but I'll tell you about it next week." The rest of the balance of lunchtime was spent on dull conversation: more of the same questions about my absence last week, how my OSU studies were going (from girls who believed the "I was at OSU" cover story), and, "No, I don't know who the strangers asking questions about me were. Maybe Hugh Hefner was feeling threatened and he hired people to check out his competition." Between the first and second periods after lunch I had to take a pee, as I hadn't had time during lunch. Julia waited for me outside as I went in to take care of business. I was standing at the urinal, minding my own business, when I heard the hallway door crash open and some guys come in. Almost immediately one of them said, "There he is." I looked over my shoulder, and immediately recognized trouble, as most of the guys coming into the room had been in my face several times already today. They were now glaring at me as they walked straight toward me. As fast as humanly possible, I cut my business short and zipped up. Stopping early isn't easy, being an unnatural act, but I definitely didn't want my manhood to be swinging out in front of me during a possible fight. They were aggressively ordering everyone else to "get the fuck outta here," which the other guys were obeying with alacrity. These guys looked pissed! I'd learned Aikido on a wide-open floor with plenty of room to move. That wasn't going to happen here, especially because the six goons had already blocked off most of the room. If I couldn't get room to maneuver in, the best I could do was to get into a small area, to limit how many of them could come at me at a time. I retreated down the urinal (it was one of those long stainless steel jobs, that a dozen guys can stand at simultaneously), until my path was blocked by the wall of the first toilet cubicle. I was facing diagonally out of the corner: the cubicle wall to my left, the urinal to my right, with my back to the corner they formed. My retreat had pleased the assholes considerably, but it also pleased me too, as now only one or two of them could attack me at a time. I thought they'd prefer individual attacks over a mass pile up, as that would most likely result in our rolling around on the urinal's grating (that guys stood on to pee), and possibly even rolling into the urinal itself. They wouldn't want to risk that. Individual attacks one or two at a time from my front gave me a good chance, as I could proximity sense every move coming. With six-to-one odds against me, I certainly wasn't going to be pulling any punches when I fought their attacks off, so as each of them came at me, he was going to be put down as hard and fast as possible. I figured I had a pretty good chance of working my way through all six of them before they could do much to me. My proximity sense through the thin cubicle wall that I was standing next to told me that there was a guy in there (proximity doesn't show gender unless the person is intending to do a gender-specific action, such as jerking off or clothes shopping. But all things considered, my money was on him being a guy). He was determinedly sitting still. That gave me an audience to play to verbally, which was fantastic because I could say one thing and do another and the 'witnesses' would believe what he'd heard. More likely than not, there were guys in some of the other cubicles too. I hadn't been keeping track while I was peeing, but it seemed likely, so I should have a few verbal witnesses. All the visible spectators had left by the time the Head-Goon reached me. I recognized him by sight as a senior. He was about the same height as me, although he'd be heavier because I'm so slim. There was one junior who I recognized, Conrad, a guy that I knew fancied Ava, although I didn't give him much chance of scoring with her after this, regardless of the outcome. The other four were all sophomores, although only two of them had classes with me. They formed a group behind their leader, and the obligatory taunting began. It seems crazy to me, but apparently it's important for a group of macho bullies to posture for a while, to show each other how cool they are. Normally I could have added, "and to work themselves up," but this group seemed pretty worked up already. The committee leader explained their collective grievance. Apparently I had too many girls. Or, as they expressed it, "We'll see if any girls want you after we rip your balls off." "Yeah, after we rip your balls off," echoed some of his followers. #1: #3: #1, #4: After a couple more taunts, Head-Goon said something about his losing his girlfriend because of me. It was about time for me to start letting the witnesses hear that I didn't want to fight, so I said, "I don't know who she is. To avoid this fight I'll agree never to date her though. Who is she?" "Pat Osmond, asshole. She's already broken up with me because of you..." #4: " ... You're not going to talk your way out of this, fancy pants." #1: <"Fancy pants"? What the hell sort of insult is that?> I ignored the apparently inflammatory fanciness of my pants, saying instead, "I don't want to fight you guys." They jeered. The best possible way of guaranteeing guys attack you, is to ask not to be attacked. The words I said may have been, "I don't want to fight," but what they heard was, "I'm a pathetic wimp who can't stand up for himself. Hit me as much as you want, because I'm too pussy to fight back." While they were jeering my cowardliness, Head-Goon (whatever his name was, I didn't know) dramatically escalated the seriousness of the situation by pulling a large pair of scissors out of his right pocket, holding it underhanded like it was a knife. #3: #4: ^ [I should explain the last point. Aikido teaches several extremely effective wrist techniques. Normally used to immobilize the attacker or sometimes to get him to release a knife or handgun, but breaking wrists requires only continuing to apply the technique beyond the point we'd stop in training. It couldn't be simpler. Minds are extremely important in Aikido, both your own and the attacker's. If I grabbed Head-Goon's wrist and tried to twist it, he'd concentrate on locking it, and I'd be unable to achieve anything. We'd be struggling, getting nowhere, while the five other attackers would be pummeling the shit out of me. For the wrist techniques to work the attacker's mind can't be concentrating on locking his wrist. That's usually achieved by moving the attacker off balance, because then all his attention is on avoiding his imminent fall. His wrist becomes as easy to twist as a wet noodle, and it'd snap as easy as a dry noodle (noodles might not be the best simile). I had very little room to move in, so getting Head-Goon off balance would be problematic in this situation, but fortunately I have a much faster and more reliable ways of distracting his concentration - a quick NP-push on either his crotch or nose would do the job. Half a second later his wrist would be broken and the scissors would be falling to the floor, where I could kick them under the cubicle. If that didn't work there were always the eyeballs, either a partial push like I'd done with Don Eaton, or popping one or both of them, if the situation demanded it. I figured I wasn't in immediate danger from being stabbed with the scissors because proximity meant I could probably avoid his first stab or two. I could be in trouble after that though, because his helpers might manage to restrain me so I couldn't avoid subsequent attempts. So I had a little bit of a safety margin to work with, but not much.] ^ For the witnesses, I said, "Why are you holding a big pair of scissors like a knife?" "I'm gonna cut your balls off, motherfucker." #3: Some of his Head-Goon's gang seemed surprised and uneasy by the news of the scissors. They glanced down at Head-Goon's hands, although most of them couldn't see the scissors as they were held down by his right side and most of his gang was behind and to his left. It was definitely a good idea to reduce the number of attackers if I could, so I said, "I'm defenseless and you're six-to-one with a huge pair of scissors as a weapon. This is criminal..." I was going to say something like, "and you'll all go to jail for a long time if you attack me," but Head-Goon either decided he was so cool by now that he didn't need to posture any more, or he didn't want me saying anything further, because he suddenly decided to thrust his scissors toward my groin. I could sense that he wasn't actually intending to stab me. That hand's ki projection showed its attack to be a jab that would stop several inches short of my groin. That was good news! He was using it as a feint for his punching me in the face with his other hand. I was still going to put him down hard though. No way was I going to leave a pissed off, active opponent holding a large pair of scissors, especially when he seemed to have a thing about my groin. During his scissors thrust he wasn't even thinking of that hand, as he was already concentrating on his punch, so it was very easy for me to slide to his right a little, using my right arm to deflect his stab to his left. I didn't do that to ensure the stab would miss me, as he wasn't intending to do that anyway. It was to get his stabbing hand in the perfect position for my left hand to grab hold of the back of his hand, with my thumb just behind his smallest two knuckles and my fingers wrapped around the base of his thumb. It's part of one of the first Aikido defenses I'd learned. (You can do it to your own hand: put one hand up in front of your face, palm facing you, put your other hand's thumb just below hand1's two smallest knuckles and hand2's fingers around hand1's thumb.) As his scissors jab started its return movement, I applied an extremely rapid twist of my hands and hips, and there was a loud crack as I felt his wrist break. (Hold arm1 stationary while you push hand2's thumb forward and slightly downward and pull its fingers back. Your wrist will start hurting. Done rapidly and forcefully, the wrist is broken.) He'd barely started his 'war cry' to go with his attack, when the totally unexpected pain cut it off. The Aikido technique had required me to move further to Head-Goon's right so I could get at the back of his right hand, which put me hard against the cubicle wall. One of the 10th graders was to Head-Goon's right [his younger brother, I later learned], and he now had a reasonably clear run at me. He'd also been perfectly placed to see his brother's scissors attack start, so he was the first of the gang to move in for his attack. He was about four steps away, and starting to run in to grab me. I didn't have any more time to spend on Ex-Head-Goon; not even not to wait for the scissors to fall or to NP them away in a natural looking way, so I dropped his limp wrist, expecting that he'd be useless for a while. I needed to get away from being pinned against the cubicle wall, but the first thing I did was NP-hit Charging Boy in the groin. It wasn't a hard hit, but it was definitely noticeable. He was already leaning forward to run, and now he looked down at his groin to find out what had hit it. That enabled to take a large step to my right, in front of Head-Goon again, who was now safely falling rather than coming at me. When he looked up, Charging Boy would see that his charge would pass to my left. I had room and time because the other guys were only just starting to react, as they hadn't seen the scissors attack at all. Charging Boy was just starting to look up when I did my very usual ankle-tap, sending him tripping forward. I put my left hand on his neck, holding it down and pushing it toward the urinal. As his ass got within range I put my right hand on it and pushed him HARD, headfirst into the urinal's stainless steel wall. Ex-Head-Goon had caught a breath after losing it to the shockingly unexpected pain of his broken wrist, and his first scream started just as the top of his brother's head impacted at high-speed into the wall of the urinal. My pushing Charging Boy had turned my back on the group. That's not nearly as bad for me as it would be for other people, as I can still sense three feet behind me. Conrad had been to his leader's left, so it would be him I sensed about to put his arm around my throat from behind. [They had somewhat planned their attack on me. Head-Goon was going to punch at me a couple of times to keep me distracted, his two lieutenants would try to pin me, one low (Charging Boy, who was the shorter of the two lieutenants), the other (Conrad) coming in high. Once I was grabbed, Head-Goon was going to start pounding me, with the others joining in the fun however they thought would best teach me to be fair with how many girls I allowed to chase me.] Conrad hadn't had time to process what had happened yet, so he naturally went to grab me around the neck. Especially because I was irresistibly facing away from him now and slightly bent over from when I'd pushed Charging Boy. If you're being grabbed around the neck from behind in the usual way, with one of the attacker's forearms around the front of your neck so that its hand is grasping your opposite shoulder, there's a throw which is so ridiculously easy and effective that I'm surprised anybody grabs anybody else around the neck from behind. To simplify slightly, the defender just has to rapidly bow from the waist. It's a little more complicated than that, but not much. Its effect is very much the same as putting a ruler on your desk with some of it sticking over the edge, then hitting down on the protruding length of ruler: it's catapulted through the air. Conrad wasn't intending to punch me or anything like that; merely to grab me around the neck with his right arm and grab my left arm with his, and to hold me immobile. So I let him. As soon as his arm was around my neck I grasped it with my two hands and pressed it tight into my collar bones, made sure my ass was hard up against his belly, then bowed rapidly from the waist, keeping my knees locked straight. Conrad went cartwheeling over my back, just like the ruler off the edge of the desk. In the dojo, Sensei had trained me to keep a very firm hold on the arm my opponent had around my neck. There were two reasons for this. The first is that my action of bowing pulls that arm forward and down, which pulls his body over my ass and back. That's what transfers the motive power of the catapult from me to him. If I bowed and let my opponent's grip slip, all that would happen is that I'd bow in place, leaving him standing behind me, looking at my ass. The second reason is an important safety one. If I hang onto his arm the whole time then his upper-body scribes a small internal circle following my bow forward and down, forcing his feet to scribe a very much larger exterior circle, his feet going all the way over the top and landing 'palm' down on the floor well in front of me, which is a very safe manner for the attacker to have his movement arrested. I can then relax my grip on his arm, and lower his upper torso slightly so he can sit on the floor. Then I back away leaving him free to stand up so we can practice the technique again. If the defender's grip is lost halfway through the technique, when the attacker's lower body is roughly vertical overhead, the attacker would continue cartwheeling through the air. That would be so impossibly disorientating that it'd be virtually impossible to land safely, even on dojo mats. So Sensei had always stressed that it was vital for safety that I always hung onto his arm securely all through the technique. I didn't let Conrad go; instead I pulled his arm off me and pushed it away when Conrad's body was approaching vertical, to give it the maximum flight distance. The room's ceiling didn't let him gain much height before his feet hit it, impeding his flight. To visualize his position, start by think of him as being upside-down, dangling from the ceiling as if his feet were glued to it. That's only roughly accurate, as he was also flying rapidly toward the urinal's wall, and his head was higher than that image suggests because his body wasn't ramrod straight and his feet hit the ceiling at an angle as they spun in their circle, which stopped his spin, but not most of his rapid horizontal movement. Moments later he impacted the urinal wall with his head and upper-body, then he dropped headfirst three feet or so straight down into the piss trough. His head wedged itself at high speed between the urinal wall and the grating we stand on to piss. It ripped a fair bit off skin the side of his head, then held it firm while his body slumped to side, leaning sloppily into the corner of the urinal, still mostly vertical. The back row of attackers, three 10th graders, had followed Conrad toward me. From their point of view things didn't seem too bad yet. Head-Goon was kneeling on the ground with his back to them, so they couldn't see what he was doing, other than sitting still and screaming (he was cradling his broken wrist). Charging Boy had been slammed into the urinal moments before Conrad successfully grabbed me from behind, so the other three hadn't had time to see that Charging Boy wasn't getting up. What the three 10th graders had most clearly seen, especially because they were focused on me, was that Conrad had successfully grabbed me, so they rushed to follow Conrad so they could have their fun at my expense. Their rush was totally disrupted when Conrad's feet came flying backward off the ground and around in a large vertical circle. Two of them had to scatter to avoid being kicked by Conrad's flying feet, and the third was deflected when one of the others ran into him. They were just resuming their charge at me about the time I stood and turned to face them. They were spread out somewhat, so I decided to run to my right, in the direction of the hallway door. That'd give me room to move, and would spread them out so they didn't all arrive at me at the same time. I started running up the room, noticing for the first time Julia and some guys were standing at the far end watching. I didn't have time for any more than the briefest glance, because the opponent closest to the exit was going to cut me off before I could get past him. With two other opponents close by, one of whom was very close, I didn't have time to waste. Having played several soccer games with proximity, each game containing many dozens of repeated practices of dodging around people, I wouldn't have any trouble getting past this guy, especially as I could use my hands to push him out of the way. But I didn't want to get away. What I wanted to do was fight them one by one, breaking a part of each of them. I zigzagged a bit as I ran toward the room's exit. I could read my closest opponent's movements well enough with sight, and then with proximity when I was near enough, that he soon ended up out of position to intercept me. His body was wrong-footed and moving the wrong way to tackle me head on, but he reached out with his right hand to try to grab me as I went past. That was a mistake because nearly all the Aikido techniques I've learned so far start with the opponent reaching out with one hand, usually to grasp. His hand was extended in front of his body, and it just so happens that there's an Aikido technique which would do the job perfectly. I grabbed his wrist with both of hands, twisting his arm so his elbow was rotated down and in toward his belly until his hand was palm up. Keeping the twist on his wrist applied so his body was awkward for him to move, I lifted his hand and I swiveled to face back the way I'd come, using the power of my swivel to push his hand back over his right shoulder. Visualize my holding his right hand palm down on his right shoulder, except that I'd moved it behind his right shoulder several inches, so he was arched backward somewhat. Then I pushed his hand vertically straight down toward the floor. I was standing beside his right shoulder, facing in the opposite direction to him. One of the reasons I'd chosen this technique was that it turned me back to face the last two attackers, so I could see them coming, and so they'd catch up to me. The other reason I'd chosen this technique was that when his hand was halfway down his back there was no flexibility left in his arm whatsoever. The only way he could take strain off his arm was to bend his entire body backward, which bodies aren't good at doing. When he was just starting to fall over backward (which is how this technique usually goes, leading to an immobilization hold), and he thus had no control over his body anymore, I simply twisted my whole body ninety degrees around to my left. If you hold an arm out straight in front of you with its thumb on top, you can bend your elbow so your forearm raises and lowers along the line of your arm. Stop in the position where your upper-arm is horizontal and forearm vertical. You can easily rotate your forearm ninety degrees toward your belly (on a different axis than your previous bends), but you can't rotate it nearly as easily or as far AWAY from your belly, toward the outside of your body. Elbows don't bend than way. Unlike the example I just gave you, I had my current attacker's arm behind his back, but it still couldn't rotate toward the outside of his body. That's the angle I rotated my entire body, taking his forearm with me. His elbow snapped. The two remaining guys had been chasing me away from where the first three went down, so they hadn't really noticed that they were the only two left on their feet. There wasn't even much sound from the first three either, only Head-Goon's groans and sobs. One of the chargers was very close now, so I pushed the current falling guy hard at the nearest charger. Falling Guy headed for the lower-legs of the guy who was nearly on me, forcing him to leap out of the way. A prolonged 'ankle-tap' while he was still in the air on the foot he would have landed on put him in all sorts of difficulty. Both his feet were nowhere near where they needed to be support his weight, so he started falling doing a twisting nosedive into the floor. Out of reflex he reached out to grab anything that might hold him up. Me in this case. I intercepted his grab using exactly the same technique as I'd used with Head-Goon. I took hold of the back of his hand and twisted quickly, breaking his wrist while he was still falling to the floor. The previous attacker, who I called "Falling Guy", had been bent way over backward, where it's hard to breathe because the chest is so stretched, and he'd been too busy falling to get a scream out quickly. He caught his wind about the same time as my latest victim discovered a reason for screaming, both of them conveniently screaming about the same time as last attacker arrived. Mr. Lucky Last arrived punching. I turned slightly so his first punch slid off me. I could easily have avoided it, but I figured my being punched few times would make a better story for the authorities: school and police. I let him swing a couple more times while I pretended to try to get past him to escape. In reality I now had plenty of room to move, and with my ability to read his intentions there was no way he could stop me doing whatever I wanted. At the moment, that was to let him deliver a few more glancing blows to me. I thought four was a good number, so on number five I intercepted his hand and twisted his palm up and out, so his elbow rotated even more to the outside. Done correctly it forces the attacker to bend forward to ease the tension on his elbow (it's a "come along" hold similar to bending someone's arm up behind their back, except you do it out to their side and it forces them to bend over rather than stand on the tiptoes). I quickly looked around. None of the other attackers was any threat, and if I was going to do anything to this guy, it had to be right away otherwise it'd look unnecessary, so I applied the technique too strongly to his wrist, breaking his arm. The last three guys were all screaming now, and weren't going anywhere. I ran forward toward Head-Goon. I REALLY wanted to break his other wrist, to put him out of action for a long time, so I was checking on him in the hope that he'd pick up the scissors in his good hand and would try for me again. I circled around to spot the scissors, and they were lying on the floor in front of him. He was facing away from the witnesses at the far end of the room, and I was sorely tempted to yell "Put the scissors down", then break his remaining wrist. I regretfully decided that I'd be pushing my luck too far if I did that. That meant I had to sadly give up on my image of his being totally dependent on others for the next couple of months. He wouldn't have been able to feed himself, take a piss, wipe his ass, take his final exams, or anything. Plus, with the recent loss of Pat as his girlfriend and with two broken wrists, his sex-life would be non-existent. Speaking of which, I spared a quick glance at the two guys in the urinal, making sure they weren't drowning. There wasn't enough fluid in the trough. I was tempted to add the half-load I still had, but it probably wasn't a good idea. With my hopeful eye on Head-Goon, I bent down and picked up the scissors by the very tip of the sharp end. Holding them aloft, I walked back toward my spectators. I dropped them in a sink a safe distance from the bad people, then walked the rest of the way to Julia and the others. When I got close the exclamations started. I held up my hand for silence. For the spectators' silence anyway, as there was still a fair amount of screaming coming from my ex-attackers. "Has anyone called 9-1-1?" No one had. It'd been far too much fun to watch. I asked for Julia's phone. She handed it over, saying, "Careful what you say." "It should be fine. You all saw them attack me six-to-one with that large pair of scissors, didn't you?" That unleashed a cacophony of comments, like, "Oh my god! That was the most incredible fight I've ever seen", "You were incredible", etc. There were about twenty spectators crowded into the far end of the bathroom, all of whom produced useless but very supportive noise. I waited a few seconds, hoping some sensible answers to my question would emerge, but none did. I yelled "SHUT UP!" Then, "Julia, when did you come in?" "I saw the guy with his arms around you from behind." "Were you the first one in?" "I was close behind the first. I pushed some of them back in after they'd been chased out, because I knew something bad was happening." "Was it clear that I was trying to defend myself?" "Crystal clear. One guy had his arms around you. When you got free of him and tried to run away, the other three cut you off and kept attacking you, and you never attacked any of them more than the once you needed." "Good girl. I'll call 9-1-1 now." I placed the call, and made it very ordinary, merely saying that there'd been a serious fight at school, and we needed enough ambulances for six people. I gave my name, but didn't stay on the line. I'd been tempted to say, "Six guys ambushed me in the bathroom and tried to hold me down while they cut off my cock with a large pair of scissors," but it was far too easy to imagine that tape on the national news. That's what my story was going to be, but there was no advantage in making it part of the 9-1-1 call. A couple of the guys had emerged from the cubicles at the far end, but they were wary of walking past the screaming bodies. More people were piling into the room from the hallway now too, so it was soon going to turn to chaos as usual. I yelled, "No one go farther into the room. It's a crime scene and the cops will be pissed off if a mob of you trample all over it. I'll go help the innocent guys get past the criminals. All of you stay here." I motioned the guys at the far end to stay there, and I walked down to them with exaggerated care, skirting well clear of the four non-urinal-located bad guys. When I got down to the far end I asked, "Has anyone checked to make sure none of the other cubicles are occupied?" We did a quick search, and it was just these two guys. One of them asked, "What happened?" I was happy to tell/program them, "The ringleader lost his girlfriend a couple of weeks ago and blames me for it, even though she told me she wanted to break up with him anyway. He decided to get even and I think talked these other guys into helping him. They must have been watching me, because they ambushed me in here. They were going to hold me down and cut my balls and cock off with the big pair of scissors I put in the sink over there." They reacted with horror, and most importantly, with belief as it meshed with what they'd heard. I programmed them with my version of reality for only another thirty seconds, before a teacher pushed his way into the room, saw the guys lying on the floor, went to check the first and got SCREAMED at when he jostled the arm. The teacher looked a bit panicky, but I knew he was a reasonable guy so I waved him to come to us. The two guys I was with seemed happy to stay where they were, and I was certainly happy to keep talking to them. When the teacher arrived I told him, "9-1-1's been called. The ambulances and cops should be here very shortly. I wouldn't go near those guys if I was you. At least one of them had a concealed weapon and tried to use it." "What happened here?" "The six of them tried to hold me down so they could cut my balls and cock off with a pair of scissors." "Oh my God. That's terrible." "I'm inclined to agree." "Are you injured?" "Just a few bruises and that sort of thing. I defended myself very vigorously." #4: #1: Teacher asked some more questions. All predictable stuff of no consequence, except that it was very nice that my two aural witnesses backed up my story without hesitation. I wanted to chat with Julia, to make sure everything was fine at her end of the room, although she looked happy enough. The other end of the room was rapidly filling with people and getting more chaotic, so I told the teacher, "I think you'd better take control at the other end. It's a crime scene for a very serious attempted assault and the cops may not want a crowd spilling any farther into the room. We'll follow you. It'd be best not to get too close to any of the bad guys, just in case." The "bad guys" were starting to talk. Asking for help and for explanations about what was happening or going to happen. The guy who was wedged upside-down in the urinal had found his voice enough to moan loudly too. They were being ignored, as no one wanted to help guys who'd attempted what they had. My "attempted castration" accusation was mostly bullshit, but that was okay with me. First and most importantly, it provided me with an excuse for injuring them so severely. Second, if Head-Goon got in serious trouble for it, then that was his own stupid fault. Bringing a large pair of scissors to a premeditated six-on-one ambush, pulling them out then jabbing with them, could very easily have led to a real injury. People get carried away in fights, so his fifth or six punch could easily have been done with the scissors-carrying hand, sticking them right into me. As far as I was concerned, people who live by the scissors die by the scissors, or at least get in serious shit because of them. That's one of the risks of bringing weapons to a fight. I had some sympathy for most of the other five, because they'd looked surprised and some of them unhappy when the scissors had first been mentioned. But they'd gone ahead with their six-on-one fight, so it was looking like tough shit for them too. People who start fights in bathrooms should expect tough shit. Another reason I'd gone for the worst accusation I could, was that I thought it'd be easier to go hard initially and then soften my position later if I changed my mind, rather than the other way around. I'd sound out the four parents tonight, to see what they thought I should do about the severity of my accusation, but my expectation was that I'd stick to my accusation all the way. Vanessa's bloodthirstiness in the public humiliation discussion we'd had with Julia didn't lead me to expect any sympathy from her for these idiots. It was amusing listening to the crowd describe the events to each other and the newcomers. The horror of the intended attack and the expertise of my self-defense had them very excited. My version of what had happened was repeated over and over, with no dissenting voices. The two listeners from the cubicles happily added their knowledge about the start of fight, and I was very happy to hear them include the threats the baddies had made to cut off my balls, and my attempts to talk them out of attacking me. Last but not least (other than physically), Julia was very proud of me, praising, hugging and kissing me. In the course of which I formed a delightful suspicion: I whispered loudly in her ear, "Are you bra-less?" "Yes. I'll explain later." [It was quite a long while later, but I'll mention it now. Julia had gone bra-less this morning, intending to help out with Carol's tit flash, although she was nervous about it. When the event started, Carol got so much support that Julia felt silly not joining in. But she felt even sillier about joining in and NOT having anyone look at her. "No one was going to look at my little breasts. I would have felt like an idiot trying to wave them around and being treated as if I was invisible. Before it started I was afraid that people WOULD look; while it was happening I was afraid that people WOULDN'T look, so I chickened out." I started reassuring her, and got laughed at for my efforts. Julia's self-image - I was informed - was strong enough not to depend on the size of her tits, other than making her feel silly about competing for attention in a tit flashing spectacle.] I told Julia that the Head-Goon was Pat's ex-boyfriend, and it might be a good idea to warn Pat that she might be questioned about her relationship with me, and to tell her to play down the sex aspect, especially the group-sex part of it. Her story should be that she'd broken up with her ex because of his own deficiencies. She'd socialized with me and some of my friends, but we wouldn't call ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend. I also asked Julia to let Carol, Ava and my parents know, especially that I wasn't harmed and shouldn't be in any trouble with so many good witnesses backing me up, which Julia would have told them even without my suggestion. I didn't bother mentioning the Conrad and Ava connection, as it'd never come up during the attack. I'd tell Ava about it later. Julia left the room to make the calls, returning several minutes later. By which time, order had been imposed on the chaos in the bathroom and hallway, most of the kids had been sent on their way, the Principal and Deputy Principal had arrived and were pissed off to learn that I was at the center of yet another incident (inside a bathroom was a good place to be pissed off). The first wave of ambulances and cops had turned up soon after the Principles. All the baddies had to be taken away in a succession of ambulances. Nothing noteworthy about that, although it was amusing that they had to unscrew the urinal's grating to get Vertical Piss Face out (as I called him, to differentiate him from Horizontal Piss Face, as both their faces had ended up in the piss). Several of the cops and I recognized each other. They weren't pleased when they learned of my involvement either, but I gained an element of sympathy when I explained, "Those six guys stormed into the bathroom while I was mid-pee, chased out everybody else they saw, then attacked me six-to-one, trying to hold me down and cut my cock and balls off with that pair of scissors in the sink over there. There were a couple of dozen witnesses." Several of the nearby witnesses called out their confirmations. All the police stuff went much the way you'd expect. It was a clear case of jealousy gone crazy, as the cubicle-listeners had heard Head-Goon talk about his losing his girlfriend and say that the scissors were to, "Cut off your balls, motherfucker." I said, "I have no idea why the other guys attacked me, other than they also said they wanted to rip my balls off." I resisted several jokes that came to mind, as it's not a good idea to seem like a smart-ass with the cops - they don't like the competition. They also don't like people who're just smart - even though there's no competition about that. I didn't mention Conrad and Ava, as I was sure Conrad was only a hopeful wannabe boyfriend for Ava. Probably all five were hopeful wannabes with various girls who were interested in me. Or maybe they'd signed up just because they enjoyed a good fight. They should be happy, because the unanimous consensus of all the spectators was that it'd been a GREAT fight. The cops wanted me to recount the fight in detail, but, "It's all a blur; I don't remember much. I remember the leader stabbing at my crotch with the scissors, and I remember them trying to get hold of me. One got behind me and had his arm around my throat and was starting to choke me. I remember being punched several times. You'll have to ask the witnesses for the details, because I was too busy panicking and trying to fight my way out of here. -- "I do remember two things though. After the whole attack was over, one of the witnesses commented that I'd never gone to any of the attackers; they'd always charged at me. I'd fought each of them off, then left them where they fell as I tried to move toward the door. I never touched any of them except to defend myself while they were attacking me, and as soon as they stopped, I stopped. -- "The second thing I remember is that after it was over I went back toward the main bad guy to get the scissors off him, as I was worried about him going berserk with them again. They were lying on the floor and I picked them up without touching him at all. Even though he was leader of all the attackers, it never crossed my mind to put kick him or do anything else aggressive. I just recovered the scissors then moved away from all of them to call 9-1-1." I'd been saving a cute little idea for when there were plenty of cops around. When a goodly number were gathered around listening to my story, I asked, "I was mid-pee when I was attacked, and never had a chance to finish it. It feels uncomfortable and I'd really like to finish now. Is that okay with you guys?" Thus reinforcing my vulnerability at the time of the attack. From the cops' point of view, the on-scene interviews were easy going. Heaps of witnesses, all of whom agreed with each other, and no evidence to contradict any of it. The only difficulty I had with the cops was in restraining myself from responding to their "Bad Cop" routine: Aggressive accusations that I was a violent troublemaker. To which I responded, "I was literally 'minding my own business' including saying nothing when they attacked me, I did nothing beyond defending myself, and I called 9-1-1 at the first opportunity. I don't accept that I was either violent or a troublemaker." Insinuations that my getting into so many serious fights recently meant that I must be the cause of all of them. I said, "All the fights had witnesses, all of whom said that I was the innocent victim, so I don't think your hypothesis is correct." Accusations that I'd used excessive force. My answer, "What they were intending to do could've killed me. Those of them with broken bones will be back to normal in a few weeks, and the other two have just got headaches. There were SIX of them, so I had to do something to stop them in their tracks. What I did wasn't excessive, it was the LEAST I could do that'd work. I'll remind you that I inflicted only one wound on each attacker. If I'd been 'excessive' the way you claim, I would've kept hurting them, but every witness will confirm I didn't. I was 'minimal', not 'excessive'." Goading me about my being so popular with the girls (they hadn't needed to ask many spectators to find out about my popularity with girls and the pipeline scheme). My line was, "Thank you, I enjoy being popular with girls." There wasn't much of it, as there were many enthusiastic witnesses that I was the intended victim. They just wanted to get a read on whether I was the sort of person who might have encouraged the attack in some way. Apparently just asking wasn't acceptable police procedure. The cops eventually left, after the usual comment that they might need a more detailed statement from me soon. ------- Chapter 197: Aftermath of the So-Called Castration Attack Monday, May 9, 2005 (Continued) Unlike the police, the Principal did want to cause me trouble. I was ordered to go to his office, where he started yelling at me for causing all these troubles. Today's fracas was going to cause him a GREAT deal of trouble, so it had to be someone else's fault, and he was laying the blame squarely on my shoulders. I let him rant and rave, hoping it'd just be a short-term letting off of steam. I spent the time thinking about what I should do if it was more than just steam. I didn't want a war with the Principal, and I certainly didn't want to declare one unnecessarily, but I definitely didn't like the idea of him declaring war on me and my not defending myself. His rants were mostly hot air, and he didn't actually tell me I was suspended or expelled, but he did threaten to revoke my special privileges and he said, "If you're involved in one more such incident or commit a single breach of school rules, then you'll be out of here so fast your head will spin." I prefer my head to do as little spinning as possible, and battling the Principal for reinstatement after I'd been expelled would be harder than stopping him expelling me in the first place. Nor did I want to lose my privileges, especially as I failed to see the connection between my being able to come and go from classes to help me cope with two grades' of work, and Head-Goon's forming a gang to help him violently take out his anger over losing his girlfriend. Lastly and worriedly, I feared the Principal was very likely to find a pretext to use against me soon. There was my skipping school to go to LA, my playing with so many girls, the jealousy that'd be caused when my wealth became common knowledge, the pipeline just starting, and God knows what else might happen. It was probably only a matter of days before he'd think he had sufficient reason to get rid of his problem. When I had a chance, I said, "It's true that I'm a highly effective lightning rod for violence, but I don't cause the lightning, I merely attract it..." #1: #4: " ... Bullies have been attacking smart kids since forever. Expelling me from school because I'm an irresistible target for bullies won't solve the problem; it'll just shift it onto other targets. The blame belongs to the bullies, not the victims. I'm sure you're aware by now that I've never had anything to do with Liam Hill," (the Head-Goon). "I only learned his name from someone in the crowd who recognized him after the fight was over. I didn't taunt Liam, I didn't boast around school that I'd stolen his girlfriend, or any of those types of things. I didn't even know he existed until he attacked me. He formed a gang to ambush and attack me for two reasons, neither of which I had any part in. Because his girlfriend broke up with him, which is hardly an uncommon occurrence and certainly not sufficient justification for such an assault. And because year after year students in this school have seen violence go unpunished, so they've learned that it's a safe and easy way to get what they want." The Principal wanted to argue, but I overrode him by insisting, "That point was made over and over again in the anti-bullying talks we all had to listen to. Are you saying that the experts that talked to us were all wrong?" The Principal looked like he was going to cut me off shortly, so I had to scare him into shutting up for a while. I added, "I'm looking forward to telling the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education that you wouldn't even let me talk to you about bullying after I was nearly castrated in your school, that you tried to blame me for the whole thing, and that your views on bullying are opposite that of all the experts we've listened to in assemblies." That took the wind out of his sails, and more importantly, out of his mouth. Trying to think of a threat credible enough to scare the Principal into letting me have my say, made me think of the Boards. To get him in trouble, I'd said something about the Principal disagreeing with the bullying experts, which reminded me of something useful: Everyone in the school had been made to attend anti-bullying lectures recently, as part of the school's new Zero Tolerance program. Unlike a lot of the kids - especially the ones that needed it the most - I'd actually listened to the speakers. One of their points had struck me quite strongly. The speaker had said that the school's becoming zero tolerant to bullying was only the beginning of many years of effort, because kids who'd already experienced several years of bullying as victims were going to grow larger, and become bullies themselves. By keeping to an extremely vigilant zero-tolerance policy, the new bullies wouldn't be able to abuse the younger kids so badly. So when the younger kids grew older, they wouldn't abuse the then-younger kids so badly, etc. It would take several cycles of students to get the school 'clean'. The speaker was focused on the school and the school alone. She spoke as if students ceased to exist upon graduating. I'd sat there thinking about the school being 'cleaned' by year after year dumping its bullies into society. Now that I'd thought of it, I was going to use that idea to scare the crap out of the Principal. I did a zigzag Julia would be proud of, "You know that $45,000 you paid me two weeks ago to settle our previous disputes?" Not liking where the conversation had lurched, his reply was a worriedly drawn-out, "Y-e-s." "Do you know what 'Day Trading' is? Short-term trading of currency, futures and other volatile financial instruments?" "I've heard of it." "And I know you're aware that I am a genius. I've been part-time day trading with the $45,000 seed money you were forced to give me. So far I'm up over six million dollars." "What! Preposterous." He started telling me off for lying to him. During his tirade I pulled out my billfold and extracted one of my bank manager's cards. I held it up in front of the Principal, to get his attention. I knew how to use the Principal's phone from the previous times I'd used it, so I picked it up, selected an external line, then dialed the bank manager's number. I introduced myself, and was quickly put through. I asked, "That transfer from my personal account in LA to my personal account in your branch, did you say it'll appear in tomorrow's or the day after's balance?" Then I asked, "And how much was it for exactly, down to the cent?" I held the phone so the Principal could hear the bank manager say, "Exactly eight million dollars. No extra dollars or cents." "Thanks very much. That's all I needed. Bye." I hung up, then said to the Principal, "I have a couple of million of expenses out of that eight, so I'll net six million before taxes. There are some other contracts in place that will be paying out over the next few days, so by Friday I'll have closer to $7 million in net profit. -- "I know for a fact," I lied, "that the 10th graders in today's assault were frequently involved in bullying incidents starting a few years ago, and they've becoming increasing violent in recent years. I imagine that if the 11th and 12th grade classmates of those two guys are questioned, they'll confirm they were also trained to be violent in this school too. There has been so much bullying in this school for so long that year after year there've been a huge number of boys fed into Corvallis's society that believe that violence is a successful, unpunished way of solving problems. -- "I am thinking about paying experts to do a research study that identifies the additional violent crimes caused in Corvallis because of your past lax attitude to bullying. It'd start with using the student rolls for the last several years and checking how many of them now have criminal records for violent crime, compared to other Corvallis schools. I'm sure your school will show up as having trained a higher proportion of criminals than any other school in the area, probably at a rate that got worse year after year as you let violence breed greater violence for several years. The study will list the crimes, the victims, the pain and misery caused, the monetary cost, and everything else that the experts I'll hire can think of. I'm sure they'll be able to identify an appalling level of negative consequences, as graduates would've left this school believing violence was easy and safe, so many of them would've tried it, caused harm, and often got caught. -- "I'll pay to have the study delivered to every family in Corvallis, and make sure it has a cover title of, 'The Cost of Additional Violent Crime in Corvallis Caused by Gaige Adams'." (The Principal.) "I'm sure the experts will be able to extrapolate the negative consequences out for decades, talk about the increased taxes required to pay for the additional policemen that'd be required, and whatever else they can think of." He'd recovered from the shock of my having millions of dollars, and from the surprise of my threatening him, and now he was extremely pissed off. He was yelling, "How dare you, blah, blah..." I ignored him. I much preferred not to have to leave this school, so I couldn't walk out of his office as the start of carrying out my threat to get the study done, so I had to stay in the room. If I'd had my cellphone, I would've pulled it out to call the Dean of OSU for his advice on how to get such a study done. Instead I sat listening to his angry tirade. It took a while, but eventually I managed to inject, "You threatened to expel me for something I had no responsibility for; so I threatened to expel you for something you have enormous responsibility for. Plus I have millions of dollars of my own money, the support of the Dean of OSU, I'm sure the Boards of Education will fall all over themselves to help me, the Mayor of Corvallis has already started doing me favors because he knows how important I'll be for the future of this city. Need I go on?" I'd asked the last question because I'd run out of scary sounding components to my threat, but also because I could see that he understood the size of trouble he was in. -- To rub it in even further, I added, "Is there anyone at all who'd actually be on your side?" I gave him a moment to think about that, then, "I have no doubt that my study would destroy your career, and would have me - the victim of hundreds of beatings in your school - smelling like roses for having succeeded despite all the obstacles you put in my way, and for alerting society to the danger your approach to schooling causes. With a bit of money spent of publicizing it, I might be able to get your name known all over the country as the epitome of a bad way to run a school. -- "Did you learn nothing from the fate of those six boys? They attacked me without provocation, and I defended myself extremely well. You just attacked me again, threatening me with loss of privileges and expulsion because some guy I'd never heard of couldn't handle his girlfriend leaving him. I will defend myself just as capably against your attack as I did against Liam's gang. I won't break your arm, but I will break your career. I would be more than happy to deal with another Principal, and I'm sure I could rely on the Boards of Education to find me a damned good one, especially if I offered them a sizable donation if I graduated after having experienced a new Principal who was helpful, easy to get along with, and was more concerned with graduating successful students than blaming victims of violence for his own failure to take responsibility for letting it go unchecked for several years. -- "You've got three options. First, you can resign - something very few people would be sad to see happen. Second, attempt to threaten or attack me in some way, in which case I will get rid of you in the way I described. I'd be more than happy to get you replaced by another Principal, so you're already on very thin ice as far as I'm concerned. Or third, you can start treating me like the most valuable and important student in your school, rather than the source of all your problems. That means no more threats from you. If I stub my toe and bleed on a path, I don't want to be expelled for defacing school property. If I'm attacked again - envy about my being a millionaire will likely lead to that - I will defend myself as much as necessary. -- "Friday a week and a half ago, I let nine boys surround me, taunt, push, slap and punch me, but I did absolutely nothing back to any of them, even though I easily could have. That's because I am NOT a violent person and I was willing to let them abuse me without responding because their attacks weren't life threatening. Today I was nearly castrated and could well have bled to death, so my fighting back was necessary. In the future I will continue to act as maturely and responsibly as possible, and you will not only NOT attack me with ridiculous threats, but you'll protect and support me as if you were mature and responsible too. By the way, I strongly suggest you keep news of my wealth to yourself. The longer that takes for that to get out, the longer it'll take envy to motivate other people into attacking me again. -- "I don't want to hear you ever threaten me with expulsion, loss of privilege, or any other type of negative treatment ever again. Nor will you threaten my sisters or friends either. By threatening to withdraw my so-called privileges, you raised the issue of them. My 'privileges' are so I can learn better and faster, which is what your job is ALL about! That you threatened to make my education more difficult confirms my low opinion of you. -- "From now on, if I decide I need another 'privilege', I'll tell you what it is and you'll grant it. Next year I'll be doing 12th grade as well as finishing off my Bachelors in Mathematics. I'll be extremely busy, so to save time I might buy one of the houses bordering on the school and set it up as a study, with another of the $15,000 computer systems that OSU has already given me, a library, and a gate in the fence between that house and school. I don't want any crap from you about me going back and forth, or my sisters or anyone else I invite." Unfortunately I didn't expect to buy that house, as I was already worried about running out of money. But it served as an impressively expensive and justifiable example of a future privilege. -- "The only way I'll listen to any objections from you is if the negative effect of what I'm doing is comparable to the harm you've caused by graduating hundreds of violent bullies into society." -- "I didn't want a war with you. I've got far more important things to do, and God knows you've got plenty of work too, but you declared it by starting with the threats. Between my millions and help from the Dean of OSU and the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education, I'm sure I'll win your war so fast your head will spin. I'll leave you to decide whether to cooperate with me or to ruin your career and have yourself go down in history in all the biographies that'll be written about me as a truly terrible Principal. I look forward to seeing how you treat me and this incident over the next few days." I left the room. During my speech the Principal had been denying, protesting and trying to take back his threats, but I'd yelled right over the top of him when necessary, or just talked as he started giving up, as there was no good reason for me to stop short. Quite the opposite, as I was sure he'd soon have more ammunition to use against me; most likely because of more violence or something involving naked girls. So it was best that I seize this opportunity to redefine our relationship. It was unlikely that I'd get a better incident than this, as blaming me for it was truly absurd. Boys who've lost their girlfriend should NOT consider castrating their successor to be an acceptable option! And neither was my breaking a few easily healed wrists or arms disproportionate compared to what everyone thought my assailants were trying to do to me. Plus it was completely true that I'd been on the receiving end of bullying hundreds of times at his school, so I carried a great deal of animosity toward the Principal. If he works hard to stop bullying, I'll ignore him, but if he causes me grief, I am more than happy to fuck him over, which I genuinely thought I could do, exactly as I'd described. If my speech backfired - if he discovered a spine and fought back - the worst that could happen was that I'd be expelled. I really didn't see that being anything more than a very short-term problem. I could probably choose between changing schools, getting him removed and myself reinstated here, or getting the Corvallis or Oregon Boards of Education to force him to take me back. So I essentially had nothing other than a temporary inconvenience to lose, and free run of the school to gain. In case you think that my action was extremely foolish, or that I was pushing my luck way too far, my answer is that I was VERY aware that the Principal was already in major shit with the Boards of Education - so much so that he might lose his job over this incident anyway. It was entirely possible that all I needed to do to get him fired was to tell his bosses what he'd threatened me with in his office. He was already on such terribly thin ice with them that he had almost no way of kicking up a fuss. His aggressive accusations against me had probably been a desperate attempt to coerce me into accepting the blame for today. He knew he was looking down the barrels of career-damaging guns, so he'd probably been desperate to browbeat me into accepting blame for this latest disaster. Unfortunately for him, it'd backfired, and now his position was under threat from below as well as above. I was effectively telling him that I could blackmail him now. In a practical sense I could do it because I was extremely secure and he was extremely insecure. In a moral sense I could do it because he had no moral credit whatsoever. He was selfish and flawed enough that I had no hesitation in pressuring him further. It was, truly, his own fault. Morally I didn't feel dirtied either. I would continue to study hard and get good grades. When I had spare time at school and wanted to have some fun and games with it, my leverage over him should smooth the way. It wasn't as if I'd tried to use that power in some totally selfish, damaging way, such as getting him to rearrange the class memberships so all the boys in mine were replaced with great looking girls, or to make the inter-period breaks longer (although that was tempting). I hadn't even asked for my own private room with a key and a bed. Mostly I just wanted to be able to get on with my studies without having to worry about the external crap he was trying to load on me. Besides, at the current rate there wouldn't be any boys left in my 10th grade classes soon, so I would have a room of girls to myself. [In the hours and days that followed, the Principal didn't try to shift any of the blame onto me. For example, he got to give yet another anti-violence speech - this time to all the high-school boys in the school hall. During which he put 100% of the blame onto the six culprits. He also expressed considerable frustration that "You boys are failing to understand that violence is wrong." Which only went to prove how dumb he was. Boys LOVE violence, and they'd been getting away with it at school for years, so a few speeches were hardly going to stop the behavior. He kept his job, largely (I believed) because my family and I didn't demand otherwise. My attitude was, "I don't care either way." Which was the truth, as it wasn't as if a new Principal was going to make any difference, and I certainly wasn't worried about bullies anymore.] Julia had called my mom as I'd asked her to. Julia had more or less said, "Mark was attacked at school again. It's all over and he wasn't touched, so there's nothing to worry about. I saw the whole thing, and he was amazingly impressive. He'll tell you about it when you get home tonight." I'd not gotten my parents involved. I probably should have, what with my being a minor and my talking to the police, but I thought I was on pretty safe ground and there was nothing they could do except worry. So they didn't hear any details until they got home. Mom, being Mom, immediately flipped her lid. "Mom, why are you flipping your lid?" "You could've been seriously hurt!" "No I couldn't. To hurt me they had to be able to touch me, and I didn't allow that." Not strictly true, but sometimes it's better not to let Mom learn the actual facts, because they tend to upset her. "But there were SIX of them!" "In all honesty, the only difference how many of them made was in how badly I hurt them. If there'd been just one, I could have held him down without hurting a hair on his head. If there'd been sixty, I would have had to hurt the first dozen or so very badly indeed, until the survivors got the hint and ran away. Six was no big deal. Every time one of them tried to grab or punch me, I broke his arm. Funnily enough, none of them made a second attempt. The whole fight lasted only a few seconds because I broke their arms the first time each of them reached for me." Julia was with me while I was telling my parents, and she backed me up with complete calmness and confidence, saying, "They didn't have a chance to land even one punch, Felicity. It was so one-sided it wasn't even a fight." Earlier Julia had suspected that I'd deliberately let the last guy land a few glancing punches. She'd confirmed her suspicion with me while we were waiting for the cops, and wasn't counting those punches now. When Mom was semi-calm again, I risked moving on to the next part of the news, "I knew it was only a matter of time before some guys attacked me, and I'd already decided to hurt them badly, which is why I broke four of their arms. So the whole thing went exactly according to my plan. One of the guys even provided me with a wonderful excuse for injuring them so much, he said and did some really stupid things, so I could claim he was trying to castrate me." "WHAT!" "Relax Mom..." "HOW CAN YOU TELL ME TO RELAX! He was trying to..." "And I'm TRYING to get you to relax. Just because someone's trying to do something, doesn't mean they've got a snowball's chance in hell of success. It was just a dinky little pair of scissors, and he was stupid to say he could cut anything with them. It was absurd, but it gave me the excuse to break a few arms. He was a blustering idiot, and it took me less than a second to break his wrist. Remember how my sensei tried to punch me from behind when he was testing me at the Williams'. What's the chance a stupid boy could get near me when he was coming from the front and even being so stupid as to tell me in advance what he was going to try to do? Beating him was easier than taking candy off a baby. I wasn't the least bit worried. Given how many very good reasons I've got for not wanting to be a eunuch, if I wasn't worried you shouldn't be either." Mom was now only half-flipped. To save time I decided to be more convincing. We were in the living room, which was a bit exposed, so I said, "Let's take this to Carol's bedroom. I want to show you something. Wait for me there, because I need to get some demonstration equipment first." They went to the bedroom. I went to the kitchen. I put a dessert spoon in my pocket, and picked up the biggest, nastiest looking carving knife we had. I held it hidden against my side, so seeing it early wouldn't spoil the surprise. In the bedroom the first thing I said was, "Donna, you wait in your room. I'm going to do something I want to be a secret and you're not good enough at keeping secrets." Donna must've been overdue for a reminder because she protested. So I gave her the necessary reminder, "Have you forgotten that our whole family could go to jail any day because you blabbed in front of Ava? I'm not going to argue with you; go to your room. I'm not going to do a thing while you're here. Shut the door behind you." When that was accomplished I said, "Stand up in the middle of the room, please Dad." I walked so I was standing a couple of feet in front of Dad. "Hold out your hand palm up." He did. I put the knife handle in it, then said, "Try to stab me." "Eek!" from Mom. "Stop! What are you doing? Are you crazy?" Just the usual Mother stuff. We've all heard it a thousand times. Dad hadn't moved, and wouldn't have anyway, so Mom's panic attack was unnecessary. Funny though (I VERY silently thought). "What's the matter, Mom?" Mom told me what the matter was. Apparently it was something to do with me being insane. Dad chuckled, which didn't help Mom's frame of mind at all. I told her, "He's not going to succeed, so I'm perfectly safe." Mom bluntly reiterated her belief that "insane" was a more accurate description of what I was. I pulled the dessert spoon out of my pocket, saying, "Okay. Use this instead then, Dad. We'll have to pretend it's a knife, which makes for a much weaker demonstration, but I guess it'll make Mom happier." Mom didn't appreciate my not using the spoon right from the beginning. I said, "I didn't do it just to twist your tail. I have another reason for wanting the knife, which I'll get to later. And quite frankly, the knife shouldn't have twisted your tail in the first place. You should have learned to trust me by now, so you should've let Dad use the knife." I got Dad to hold the spoon with the bowl end facing me, telling him, "REALLY try to stab me. Full-speed, just as if I was your enemy. You'll miss me, but even if you connected, I can easily absorb a punch with that. Are you ready to go?" We did it. Of course he didn't attack me with full speed, but at least it wasn't so slow as to be pathetic. He hadn't seen any of my Aikido techniques, so he got a hell of a surprise when I took the spoon off him. I didn't break his wrist, but the shot of pain the technique causes isn't any fun. I grabbed the spoon off him and 'stabbed' him in the neck with it. It all happened so fast and so much by surprise that he hadn't even begun to react by the time a spoon would have been sticking out of his neck. I said, "My first attacker is dead without touching me. Do you want to try again, Dad?" "Very good. Yeah I do, faster this time." He really went for it too. Dad doesn't mind a bit of rough-housing, and I'd asked him to, so he tried to disembowel me with the bowl of the spoon. I was more careful with the technique this time, making sure he was off balance before trying to twist his wrist, but the result was still his ending up with a theoretical knife sticking out of his neck. I was tempted to do it a third time with my eyes shut, but that was showing off rather than reproducing a real attack. Instead I just said, "Mom, if Dad had been holding a knife or a pair of scissors, the result wouldn't have changed. He never got the spoon close enough to my body to stab me, so it didn't matter what he was carrying. With the stupid goon at school I didn't even bother with any of that taking the weapon off him and using it against him stuff; I just immediately broke his wrist. You heard how fast Dad said, 'Oww.' The boy at school was totally out of action even before his first thrust was halfway to my body. He spent the rest of the one-sided fight sitting on the floor crying. -- "I have other options as well. See the knife Dad put down." I point to where Dad had carefully placed the knife on my little study desk. It flew up in the air, turned around to point at Mom, then started flying toward her. Not too fast, but fast enough to be scary. Having a knife come point-first straight toward your eyes is uncomfortable, so Mom moved sideways. The knife followed her, which freaked her out a little. I'd made my point, without the point getting too close to Mom's face, so I stopped the knife, hovering it menacingly in front of her. "How much attacking is a guy going to be doing if that's happening to him?" I grabbed the knife out of the air and manually returned it to the desk, which was quicker and easier than NP'ing it there. "I could also do this, Mom." I made throwing motion with my hand, and a small, bright red blob flew very fast out of my hand and straight at Mom's face, expanding to half the size of her head as it got closer to her because that looked more threatening. It moved so fast that Mom had time to see it coming, but not enough time to get out of the way. The blob flew right into her face and out the back, where I canceled it, by which time Mom had screamed and thrown herself sideways - way too late. When she recovered from the fright, she started telling me that she didn't appreciate that demonstration at all. Donna came back partway through Mom's tirade, worried about Mom's scream (she claimed, although she might also have been worried that she was missing out). There was no need to demonstrate anything else, so I let her stay. I let Mom finish, then said, "Then stop making these discussions necessary. Every time I get attacked you have a major worry meltdown and kick up a big fuss about it. I'm bound to get attacked again when news of my being rich gets out, and when more girls get involved in the pipeline scheme. Are you going to keep worrying yourself needlessly, or are you going to accept the fact that the idiots at school can't hurt me? There are so many things I can do to defend myself that the only question is how badly I hurt them." Actually that wasn't the "only question", or even the main question. It was about the number three question. Ahead of it is the question about how much of my special abilities I was willing to let my attackers see. Flying knives, light blobs or popping eyeballs are not things I'd like to use in front of a crowd of people at school. Then there's the tricky question about how much physical risk I am willing to accept in return for keeping my abilities secret, but mentioning the word "risk" to Mom wouldn't be a good idea; mothers go into "Max-Illogical Mode" when they believe their children are at risk. There was some more arguing, but not much. I had a little fun saying a word to Mom that she'd LONG ago told me never to use again. I said, "Mom, I live in fear of their attacks to exactly the same degree as I live in fear of their calling me a 'Doo-doo Head'. Neither can hurt me." Fortunately Mom didn't carry out her historic threat to wash my mouth out with soap. Mom did say, "But they could attack you by surprise." "Here's the spoon, Mom. If you can stab me with it any time in the next week I'll give up having any more girlfriends and give all my money to charity. Or you could give the spoon to Donna, and I'll buy her one horse for every time she succeeds in stabbing me with it." Donna didn't really know what we were talking about, but she LOVED the sound of this idea, and tried hard to get the spoon off Mom, doubtless so she could immediately start attacking me with it. "Other than when I'm asleep, which I don't do a lot of at school, you'll never be able to take me by surprise. You saw when my sensei tried to punch me from behind without warning; did he surprise me? I CAN'T be attacked by surprise." Again not strictly true. I'd been surprised by being hit in the back of the head by flying footballs, for example. Footballs not having 'intent' that I could read (they have less mental presence than their throwers, although not much less). It wasn't worth trying to differentiate long-distance and short-distance attacks with Mom, especially as there were no long-distance attacks that I gave any credence to (things like a sniper gunning for me, or someone trying to run me down with their car, were too unlikely to worry about). Mom thoughtlessly retorted, "Don't be silly, EVERYONE can be taken by surprise!" That comment made me mad! Half a dozen responses immediately occurred to me, and they were all negative. I struggled for a few seconds, trying to come up with a semi-acceptable response. Mom saw the expression on my face, and realized her mistake about the same time as I said, "I will tell you ONE more time that I CANNOT be attacked by surprise. You'd think I'd know that about myself, wouldn't you? Since when have you known more about how my brain works than I do? And since when have the restrictions that applied to 'everyone' necessarily applied to me? You know I can do other things that 'everybody' can't, so why not being unsurprisable too? And I do NOT appreciate being called silly for trying to help you accurately understand my abilities so you wouldn't worry so much every time someone attacks me. There's no point in a conversation if you prefer to open your mouth to make thoughtless accusations rather than thinking, so from now on you can worry all you want after each time I'm attacked; it's no skin off my nose." I probably got a bit carried away, but it wouldn't do any harm. I haven't mentioned it much in this biography, but Mom had a very bad habit of accusing anyone she disagreed with of insanity, stridently exclaiming, "Are you insane!" at them. Vanessa had called her on it, and Mom had been trying hard to break the habit. Mom's telling me, "Don't be silly," was effectively the same thing, so I didn't have any compunction about jumping on her for it. Mom knew she'd been thoughtless, and apologized. I pointed out that the mindset behind her accusing someone of being insane was the same as accusing them of being silly, and it was going to piss off her listeners just as much if she got in the habit of it, and that it'd certainly pissed me off just now! Dad agreed with me, telling Mom, "I'd not accuse anyone of being silly without having a think about it first, especially with Mark." This conversation occurred just before my pre-Aikido half-dinner. We'd run out of time for any more arguing, and it was a good time to stop. Dad did ask me to show him how I'd taken the spoon off him so easily, which I promised to do some other time. ------- The next few sections are jumping ahead a few days. In subsequent days the Boards of Education wanted me to change schools. I lied, "That won't reduce the level of violence at school, it'll just shift it to targets who can't defend themselves nearly as well as I can. If I'd changed schools last time you'd asked, then Patricia Osmond would still have broken up with Liam Hill, he would've blamed some other guy for his failure, and that boy would now be a eunuch or dead. I've only got a handful of weeks left in this year and I don't want to change schools now. Next year might be different, but I'll see how the rest of this year goes first." They claimed my refusal to change schools meant we'd be unable to sue them for any negative consequences. A few tens of thousands of dollars wasn't the big deal it had been a couple of weeks ago, so I didn't care much, but I liked Mom's answer, "If any student is attacked and sues, and the court decides that the school - which now has a very well establish reputation for crimes of violence - did not take sufficient measures to protect its students, then the suit will be successful. That's true regardless of whether the victim was Mark or anyone else. You should be concentrating on how to prevent further violence, rather than squirming away from lawsuits. If it helps focus your thinking, imagine the suit that might result from a castration being successfully performed on another student." The school substantially improved its anti-violence measures, adding security cameras in the hallways, security guards roving the school, a full-time anti-bullying counselor, etc. It would've happened with or without Mom's statements, as there was a huge public reaction to the attack, with strident calls to "stamp out violence" (that phrase was used several times. The irony of it was either appalling or amusing; I wasn't sure which). ^ The one or two dozen boys who'd witnessed the fight raved about how deadly I was, how I'd casually broken arms so easily, how I'd sent Conrad flying across the room upside-down, how well I'd moved, how the six guys never stood a chance, etc. Which resulted in me being thronged with guys for the next few days, excitedly wanting to talk about the fascinating subject of violence. Some of them were almost wetting themselves with excitement. I refused to talk about any aspect of the fight, which confused the heck out of them. How could a guy who was REALLY good at fighting not want to talk about it? That made no sense, especially not to any of the guys who were crowding around me. I ended up using class time to repeat a little speech a few times. I derided the boys for their immature fascination with violence, told them I wouldn't answer any of their puerile questions about the incident, "and I will ESPECIALLY not teach any of you how break people's arms! As if I would ever teach that to boys who're fascinated by violence. I much prefer to spend my time doing and talking about positive things, not violence. I'm a 'make love, not war' type of guy, so stop trying to talk with me about fighting. You're wasting your and my time, and making yourself look childish while you're at it." My speech was not entirely true, as I had gotten a perverse thrill out of clobbering the six guys so effectively, but there was no need to mention that. Pedantic truth should not stand in the way of impressing girls with how mature and sensible I am, especially if I can stop all the stupid macho questions at the same time. Nor was my speech complete, because I also wanted the guys to know that any of them that attacked me in the future would get arms broken, or worse. Teachers tend to disapprove of statements like that, so I had to spread that message informally. ^ I'd had a talk with Vanessa and Prof about whether I should soften my accusation against the six boys, especially the castration component. Their advice was not to. They had a bunch of reasons: Doing so might cause me problems with the police or school. The harder these guys went down the more effective the lesson on other boys. This was a big issue for Vanessa and Prof. My safety was more important to them than going soft on these guys. I asked, "I thought it'd be ethical to treat everyone equally?" Vanessa answered, "That's too simplistic. It's important that society as a whole strives to value all its members equally, but we're deciding an individual case, not a broad societal issue. If all else was equal, or unknown, then people should be valued equally; but we know that's not the case here, and it'd be foolish to ignore that you and they have widely different values to mankind. There are other issues too, like the positive value of their providing a deterrence to dissuade other potential attackers, but your value is the determining factor." The attackers had known they were doing something dangerous and risky. They might've accidentally killed me, for example. They'd chosen to risk being charged with a serious crime, and that's what had happened to them. It was their decision, so their consequences. "On a more human level, they went out of their way to treat you as unfairly as they could, so why should you go out of your way to treat them fairly?" The police investigation was straightforward and the final outcome was never in doubt. The baddies protested that they'd never intended to castrate me, just to "teach him a lesson not to allow so many girls to chase after him." Their excuse was 100% true, but 0% effective, so they were removed from my life. The 18-year old Head-Goon was removed for a particularly long time. ^ Lastly - and so leastly it had a negative value: the media. The media LOVED the story, as it was WONDERFULLY salacious. There was one aspect of the media frenzy that worried me far more than any other. The first time I'd been involved in something like this (with all the Biffs), my love-life had been severely constrained by fear that reporters would be checking up on me. This time we paid for some expert advice on how to manage the situation better. For example, I agreed to do one interview, but it was very much on our terms. I answered the questions I didn't mind answering, e.g., "No, Patricia Osmond has never been my girlfriend. We are classmates and have friends in common, but I've never been to her house nor she to mine. Nor have we ever been alone together. As I understand it, she simply decided to break up with her boyfriend a couple of weeks ago and he decided that it had to be someone's fault other than his own. He picked me. Seeing as how he was to blame for it, if any of you see him, you might want to suggest that he should castrate himself." The last point was my logical sense of humor exceeding my media training. Another answer I had to give several times was, "I don't consider myself any sort of martial arts expert. I've had fewer than six lessons in my entire life, so what do you think? More likely I won because I'm fairly athletic and was VERY motivated." Other questions got terse answers, e.g., "Why are you involved in so many fights in and out of school?" got answered with "Bad luck." And "I hear you're very successful with girls?" got answered with "Not until I'm eighteen." I got to say "No comment" many times. For examples, to questions about my love-life, who my girlfriend was, and, "Is it true you're a genius?" I'd been advised to only answer questions that were on topic, otherwise the interview could widen out of control, so even innocuous off-topic questions got "No comment". The Principal had been behaving himself, so I didn't make any derogatory comments about him or the school, only things like, "My school's administrators are trying hard to teach that violence is wrong and unacceptable." There wasn't much chance of that being the sound-bite that'd lead the news. Other than in that single interview, every other reporter's question - when they phoned us, for example - was answered "No comment". Pat got to say that a lot too, as it didn't take them long to track down "The girl at the center of the love triangle," to quote what I was told one article said. We got a lawyer to lean on the media who were showing any sign of hanging around. We had to give them a couple of days because the story was "in the public interest," but beyond that could be deemed harassment of a minor and a bunch of even bigger legal words. Apparently I was still recovering from the trauma of the event, and their continual attention might ruin my life and cause me millions of dollars of psychiatric bills. We probably wouldn't have won anything, but after a couple of days the story had largely played out so even the small trouble we were threatening them with was more trouble and expense than the story was worth for them, so the reporters disappeared. I had to keep my sex-life low key for a few days, but by then only the local paper was still interested, and then only because of concern about the school. The police had happily confirmed that they weren't interested in me, I'd merely been the intended victim. ^ The last consequence of any note was my telling Vanessa, Prof and Julia about my blackmailing my Principal (not that I'd asked him for anything yet). I told them about the conversation I'd had with him, my reasons for it, and asked them what they thought. Julia's response was immediate (even before I'd finished my story) and enthusiastic. I thought I'd be reasonably okay with Vanessa and Prof because I knew both of them had a low opinion of the Principal. Plus the Principal's attempting to blame me for the attack was ridiculous. Even if I'd crowed all over school about stealing Pat from Head-Goon, his getting a gang of six to attack me in the bathroom was not justifiable. There was nothing that I could've done - let alone actually did - that made me blameworthy, and I certainly hadn't done anything inflammatory in the bathroom to cause the attack, so the Principal's blaming me was totally out of line. Vanessa reined Julia's excitement in with, "I don't agree with using your power over him for much. Stopping him from punishing you for something you shouldn't be punished for is acceptable, but not to gain undeserved things. I'd be against anything that interfered with his ability to run the school properly, drained the school's resources unfairly, or caused him to breach the trust other people have placed him. If you did any of those things you'd be stealing from the other students by reducing the quality of the education they'd be getting. -- "The Principal allocating Mark a room for his own private study would deprive the school of the use of a room that it probably needs, unless it's got unused rooms going spare, which I doubt. Even if Mark parked his own RV on school grounds, it's still going to drain resources from the school to manage the paperwork associated with it, answer parents' questions about the apparent favoritism, deal with the discipline problems it could easily cause, etc. For most of the ideas that have probably crossed your mind, Julia, you can't take fair advantage of your Principal without also taking unfair advantage of your fellow students." "Darn!" said Julia. "I understand what you're saying, but it would have been so good to have him under our thumb." "It's possible that you might be able to make good use of him in the future - which 'good' being an important word. Mark will need to miss many days of school next year because he'll be at OSU, and you don't want the Principal to make trouble over that. Not that he'd dare to because the Boards of Education wouldn't allow it. You had the idea of a noticeboard for Mark a while ago. What you wanted to use it for wasn't a good idea, but if you need a noticeboard for something else, using your leverage to obtain permission for it would be okay, especially if you paid or even slightly overpaid for getting it made and installed. That's provided there's somewhere to install it that wouldn't disrupt normal school operations. You two understand my attitude don't you?" We agreed we did. Vanessa added, "Blackmail is an ugly word and an ugly practice. Letting your Principal see you've got an iron fist is reasonable, but I'd put it inside a velvet glove now, and leave it there. Be nice to him. Apart from anything else, ordering him around over trivial things risks getting him angry enough to extract revenge in some way, and he's in position to have considerable influence over Mark, Carol and Donna for several years yet, presuming he doesn't lose his job in the interim." "Okay," I said. "Because of your previous point about not stealing from the other students, there's not much we can use him for anyway." "That's just as well, otherwise Julia might've gotten carried away, and this is NOT something that it'd be a good idea to get carried away with! I suggest you think very carefully before you attempt to use your influence over him for anything more than stopping him from punishing you unfairly. I much prefer you discuss any idea you have with us before you try it." "Will do. I can't think of anything now anyway." "Good. I'm tempted to support your iron fist by having a talk with someone in our Sociology Department about your study idea and getting them to call your Principal so he knows you're serious, but it's too difficult to manage. You want to start the study, and then freeze it, but you won't have that much control. I think we have to wait and see if he behaves himself." ------- Chapter 198: Parking Lot Fun and Games Monday, May 9, 2005 (Continued) Back to real-time, resuming my story just after the attempted castration. Between the cops and the Principal, I didn't go to any classes for the rest of the day. I finished with the Principal just before school let out, so I went to Julia's last class and stood outside her room waiting for the final bell. When the bell rang, the usual end-of-school stampede out of the classroom occurred. It didn't take a genius to know not to stand by the door, so I was leaning against the opposite wall. The first guys through the door (it's always guys, for some reason), saw me and hesitated. A near-fatal error on their part, as the following guys crashed into them. It was hard to tell whether they recovered from their hesitation, or were simply bulldozed out of the way, but within seconds I was surrounded by a throng of extremely excited idiots wanting to know all about the fight. You can tell how excited they were, because they were still on school grounds after the final bell. Or maybe that's an indication of how idiotic they were. I had less than no interest in talking with a bunch of excited macho idiots about the fight, especially as most of them wouldn't have given me the time of day this morning. I break a few arms, and suddenly I'm their best friends. I spent a minute or so refusing to answer their questions, only telling them only two things: First, "They attacked me so I broke their arms and called the police. That's what I'm going to be doing whenever I'm attacked from now on." Second, "Go home." I kept repeating the second point until I heard Julia's voice demanding to be let through to me, whereupon I changed to saying, "Let Julia through." Eventually she got through to me. She tried to ask me if everything was okay, and I tried to answer, but conversation was almost impossible. Julia yelled, "Let's go back inside the room." That was quite a good idea. Teenagers walking back into a classroom after school ends is in the same league as vampires walking into churches: it's anathema to them, verging on a physical impossibility. It was funny following Julia as she pushed her way through the boys again. She had no subtlety at all. "Out of the way!" followed moments later by hefty pushes. At the doorway I turned to announce one more time, "I'm not going to answer your questions; I'm going to talk with my girlfriend. You might as well go home." #2: There were still several people inside the room, nearly all of them girls. No sign of Pat or Alexis, but Chloe came running at me, flying into my arms. #4: #2: "Oh my God, Mark. Julia says you're r ... oof." The "oof" was because I'd punched her in the belly. I thought she was about to say "rich", and I didn't have time to get a hand to her mouth to stop her as she had her arms around me, trapping my arms below hers. Besides, I'd rather enjoyed punching her. She'd been pissing me off lately and she hadn't even asked, "Are you all right?" I hadn't punched her hard, but Chloe's not used to guys punching her in the belly (there are very few guys with arms long enough to reach that far), so she was surprised into silence. Taking advantage of the short opportunity, I told her, "Didn't Julia tell you to keep that quiet?" "Oh yeah. I was just so excited!" Chloe said, starting to get excited again. I corrected her, "You mean you were 'Just so STUPID.' Didn't Julia tell you what would happen if you blabbed it?" "Umm. No more..." Chloe paused, reluctant to complete the sentence. I answered, "Yeah. No more, and none in the first place either. Now if you don't mind," as I pushed her hands off me, "I want to talk with my girlfriend." "But I want to..." "NOT now, Chloe. I want to talk with Julia." One of the other girls asked, "What was that about?" I answered, "Chloe's mouth is even bigger than her tits." That caused some shocked expressions among the audience. I explained, "Sorry, but I'm annoyed. She was told something in confidence and told to keep it quiet, but at the very first opportunity she was about to yell it out so everyone could hear. Weren't you, Chloe?" "Umm, yes, but I was so excited." "And your mouth is even bigger than your tits." I looked at the small crowd, saying, "What? I'm not going to pretend Chloe doesn't have tits. That's just as stupid as thinking they're the only thing about her that matters, like most guys do. I'm a realist. They're neither more nor less significant than what they are, which is big but not as big as her mouth. Now if you don't mind, I have a lot of things to talk with Julia about." #4: Julia and I walked toward one of the corners of the room. I heard some of the girls asking Chloe what the secret was. I called back, "Chloe, you know what the consequence will be if you tell anyone." From what Julia had told me previously and from what I could see now, I had no doubt that poor Chloe wanted to come running after me, then to somehow make me fall head over heels in love with her. I suspected it was very important to her that those things happened before the Tuesday night deadline to confirm who was going on the trip to Rodeo Drive, but my annoyance left her with no idea how to proceed. Undoing a few buttons apparently didn't occur to her. Chloe needed to become my lover very quickly, but instead she'd nearly given away the secret and had annoyed me, so was now even further from her goal. Julia's chuckles hadn't helped either. I was treating her this way for two reasons. Partly because it might make her try harder from now on, which was something she BADLY needed to do, but mostly because her behavior over the last few days, right up to the current moment, had pissed me off and I enjoyed expressing it. Julia and I had spent a lot of time talking with Chloe, and she'd sometimes seemed to be making progress, but her verbal progress didn't translate into one iota of physical progress. Even now that she knew I was rich, not a single button had come undone. That may sound as if I'm stupidly fixated, but they're an excellent indicator of Chloe's obsession, fearfulness, and probably half a dozen other insulting traits that I can't be bothered listing. It didn't take long for me to quietly tell Julia, "No problem with the cops or Principal so far. I have some things to tell you, but that'd be best done at home. You told Chloe, Pat and Alexis?" "Yeah. It was a lot of fun. They're blown away by you. Really blown away! I haven't had so much fun for a long time." "Since the last time we had sex, or maybe even the last time you went clothes shopping?" "Maybe if we could have sex WHILE we were shopping, that might come close, haha. Pat and Alexis are VERY happy to be invited. Alexis says she can easily come, her parents don't know where she is half the time anyway. Pat says her parents would have a fit, so she's going to lie to them." "Of course; we are going to Rodeo Drive, after all." "You seem to have the wrong idea about girls, Mark. We don't spend all our time thinking about shopping; not even a quarter of it. Most of the time we spend thinking about landing a man rich enough to pay for our shopping, haha." "That I can believe. We shouldn't spend long here because my sisters will be waiting by the car. What's the story on Chloe for this afternoon?" "Your house has been cleaned, and Chloe wants to do it. Shall we get her to walk with us to the parking lot, so you can talk with her?" There weren't many people left, a worried looking Chloe and half a dozen other girls. The others mostly just wanted to know that everything was okay with me, that I wasn't in serious trouble, or anything like that. They were concerned about me personally, which was nice, so I took a minute or so to reassure them. Julia asked Chloe to walk with us, which she accepted with alacrity and relief. During our walk to the car, when we were far enough away from anyone else, Julia started by saying, "Mark, Chloe's hanging around because she's decided she wants to take her relationship with you to the next level." Chloe nodded vigorously. I teased, "We don't have a level at the moment, so what's level number one? Does she want to carry my schoolbag?" Julia chuckled, so Chloe spoke up, "No. No. I want to, umm..." Chloe couldn't say it. Julia finished for her, "She wants to go to bed with you." Chloe was nodding agreement, but I said, "I doubt it. She won't be ready for that for months, if ever." "No. I'm ready. I am. I want to, Mark." "You say that now, but if we try it you'll play that pathetic game where you try to make me force you. I have no interest in that stupidity. It's a big turn-off for me." "I won't do that! I WANT to, umm, go to bed with you." "Probably just because of what Julia told you about me before. Not for a good reason." "Definitely not! That's just a coincidence. I've been thinking about it for a long time, and I was going to give myself to you today anyway. You're the most wonderful guy I've ever met, and I think I'm..." "I don't believe you can do it without being forced, Chloe. You're not ready for a normal relationship. You can't even undo a few buttons on your top." #4: #3: #2: Chloe looked around, checking it was safe, although I've no idea what she would consider unsafe. Even a dozen guys lined up with binoculars weren't going to see anything. She said, "That's just because I forgot. See, no problem." Chloe undid one button, then dropped her hands to her side again. #2: #3: #4: #2: #4: <{Groan}.> A few seconds later I had a thought. I asked, "Julia, I have to get my car cleaned too. How can we manage all the back and forth that's required?" "Hmm, good point. I know they did your place first, and they're all at mine now. Shall I call to find out if my room's finished, so you and Chloe can use that while your car's being done?" "That'd make things easier, thanks." The rest of the walk was spent listening to Julia on the phone. We arrived at our car as she was finishing. Carol and Donna were there, with several other people: some Ducklings, some of Carol's friends, and an assortment of others. Mostly girls, but some guys as well. Pat, Alexis and Ava off to the side too, talking to each other. Chloe was looking nervous, but I couldn't tell whether it was from being seen with me, from worry that I'd tell everyone she was about to lose her virginity (and maybe get pregnant or worse), or from her being only half-dressed. Nor did I care. I greeted and hugged my sisters first, asking, "I hope you weren't worried?" Carol answered, "Not about the fight because we heard you won that easily. But we were worried about what happened after that?" "The police were fine. Unnecessarily aggressive toward me, but that's just what cops do. The Principal was a pain, but I doubt anything bad will come of it. Everything's fine." "Did they really want to cut your, you know, off?" Presuming "they" didn't refer to the police or Principal, I said, "That's what they threatened. They never got close to achieving it though. I'll tell you all about it in private later. I see you've brought some friends." I spent a few minutes reassuring everybody that everything was fine. Just the usual stuff, plus several jokes about how tragic it would have been had the six guys succeeded. A couple of the guys in the crowd were from the jostling incident two Fridays ago, who wanted to know, "Could you have done that to us?" "There were nine of you standing all around me, so I probably would've been rougher. If you'd gotten any more aggressive last Friday, you'd be in the same sort of trouble that today's idiots are: hospital then prison." "Good thing we listened to the Principal this morning then. He read us the riot act, warning us not to be stupid again. The guys that attacked you today invited us to join in. We're very glad we didn't. Sorry about last Friday." #3: "Don't worry about it." A few of the guys were my soccer teammates checking up on me. Either that or they'd just come because they had an irresistible list of soccer-themed jokes they wanted to use: "Didn't they know you never pass the ball?", "Didn't they like the way you were dribbling?", and some more that were even worse, as hard to believe as that is. It's tragic how few people have got a sense of humor as good as the four of mine. A few were guys who wanted to know where I learned to fight so well. "I watched the original 'Batman and Robin' TV series over and over again. Those guys REALLY knew how to fight!" There were other stupid questions, to which I gave even stupider answers, as hard to believe as that is, until they got the very blunt hint and left. Much more enjoyable were the girls. I particularly enjoyed Diana and Claire Norris, Mackenzie's younger sisters. They'd each come with one of my sisters, wanting to see me again. I'd backed up against the side of my car so I could face the crowd that was grouped around me. I got Diana and Claire to come stand on either side of me, so I could put my arms around their waists while I thanked them for their concern and similar time wasting blah, blah. A few seconds after the two younger Norris girls had passed through the crowd to reach me, my little crowd had reformed so as to be pretty tightly grouped around the three of us. The crowd was standing close enough that no one could see my hands way down on the girls' waists. Claire was the youngest and naughtiest (the latter making her the best), and she'd gone pantiless last time I'd seen her, so I slid my hand from her waist to her ass and started feeling for any panty bands. Unsuccessfully, a failure I was happy with. After a few seconds Claire stood on tiptoes to whisper to me, "Donna says good Ducklings shouldn't wear them around you." "Donna is absolutely right! You're a very good Duckling, Claire." "The BEST!" she claimed. Such a claim required substantiation. I was partly bent over to hear her, so that hand was lower than normal. It grabbed a fold of her skirt, raising it as I stood upright. Then I started gathering more and more of her skirt's fabric, pulling the back hem up toward my hand. There was no protest from Claire; quite the contrary, as she put her arm around my waist and squeezed in a manner that I decided clearly meant: "You have permission to feel my naked ass." In a few more seconds I'd gathered up enough fabric to reach the hem, when it was easy to simply extend my fingers on the inside and raise my whole hand so I could start rubbing her delightfully bare ass. I enjoyed that for a few seconds, then bent down to whisper in Diana's (the other sister) ear, "You wouldn't like it if I favored Claire over you, would you?" Unsure of what I meant, Diana nonetheless agreed, "No." "Then I should do this." I slid my hand from her waist down onto her ass. "Oh." "There's more, beautiful Diana. This is what I've done with Claire..." I reached down as far as I could without bending down suspiciously, then started gathering her dress up as I had for Claire, standing up straight as I did so. I resumed talking to whomever in the crowd wanted to chat (plenty of volunteers for that). When I reached Diana's hem I quickly moved my hand onto her bottom (panty-clad, unfortunately). Diana stiffened and blushed a little, but didn't protest. After a few seconds to let her get used to it, I whispered to her again, "I'm going to do exactly the same to you as I am to Claire." Quickly, so I'd still be facing her and able to see her reaction, I moved my hand up to the waistband of her panties, and pulled it as far down as I could reach, to just below her ass cheeks. The panties were still held up around her hips and stomach, so the back tried to slide back up when I let them go, but I quickly put my hand inside them, so the band just rode up over my fingers, stopping when it reached my wrist. I rubbed my hand over her ass. In a quavering voice, "You're doing this to Claire too?" I kept rubbing while I said, "When you get home, you two should talk about this. If you both agree, I'm going to do more things with you two in the future. Right now I'm doing MORE than this to Claire. I'm doing this..." I slid one finger into her ass crack, sending it toward her pussy. Another of Carol's friends called out, "Diana, what'd he say that make you go so red?" Diana was too busy trying to hold herself together to answer, as my fingertip was starting to rub the outside of her pussy, so I answered the yelled question, "I whispered something very naughty to her. You can ask her when you're alone." Diana asked me, "I can tell?" "Any girl you trust, sure. Your parents or Mackenzie probably wouldn't be a good idea." "Not Mackenzie?" "She seems too conservative to be as much fun as you and Claire are, but let me check that out on my date with her and if she seems like a fun girl, I'll give you permission after that." "Okay." Then in a rush, "I love you Mark!" Accompanied by an even more extreme blush. "Good girl. Now spread your legs a little wider and put your arm around my waist." The latter instruction was mainly so she'd feel Claire doing the same, to reinforce that both of them were having the same done to them, to make it harder for them to refuse. I'll assume that I don't have to tell you what the former instruction was for. Diana immediately carried out both instructions. I stood up straight again. I'd misled Diana, in that I hadn't been fingering Claire's pussy. It wasn't possible, as my bending toward Diana shortened the reach of my other hand too much. But now that I was upright, I bent my knees a little, dropping me an inch or so, and I slid my fingers toward Claire's pussy. Like a good Duckling should, Claire anticipated my need and spread her legs for me. Also tightening her grip on my waist. I whispered to Claire, "I'm doing exactly the same to Diana." "Really! {Giggle}. I didn't think she would." "You two are both good girls." In that they were both bad girls. Claire was the goodest at being the baddest, but Diana compensated for that by having a much more developed figure. I hadn't specifically checked, but Diana was probably fourteen, and easily developed enough to count as "fully developed" as many older girls. Her being only fourteen, I hoped she might develop more yet (more is always welcome). Claire was presumably twelve. Fortunately she was more developed than my late-starting sister Donna, but still only half as much as Diana. Maybe even less than half, although I'd have to get them both naked to be sure of that, ideally both at the same time, for scientific and other reasons. I made a mental note to carry out that comparison at the earliest convenient opportunity. I spent the next five minutes or so chatting to whomever wanted to chat, while I fingered both girls. They were at different stages in their physical developments, but they both lubricated plenty. All three of us enjoyed my conversation, although I did restrain myself from getting too energetic in front of so many people, in case it would embarrass them too much, or cause problems. The crowd was thinning out, as many of them had had their curiosity satisfied enough to prefer going home. Chloe was off to the side looking forlorn. With, I was pissed off to notice, all of her blouse's buttons done up. She can damn well stay forlorn then. It was past time that I should've talked to Ava, Alexis and Pat, so I regretfully pulled my two fingers out of the girls, and removed my hands - careful to keep my fingers wet (for Alexis' benefit; or at least, for her consumption). Both girls made disappointed sounds, with Claire's being considerably louder than Diana's soft complaint. I told them both, "Thanks girls. You're both lovely and good company. We'll do that again sometime, but I have to go talk with some of my other friends now." Claire was okay, but Diana hung on to my waist. I had an easy fix for that, "Sweetie, you're a lovely girl, but I have lots of other people to talk with. You can't hang on to me." She wasn't convinced yet, but I knew the next sentence would do it. "Remember what happened to Gia when I had lunch with lots of Carol's friends about two weeks ago?" Gia was the girl that'd hung on to me too long after I'd sucked her nipples into an orgasm (more emotionally than physically caused, which meant it was mostly my reputation that'd given her an orgasm). Julia had fired Gia's ass for being selfish. Diana remembered all right! She let go with panicky alacrity, looked worried as hell, and started apologizing profusely. I quickly reassured, "Relax Diana. I LIKE you. I'd give you plenty of warning before refusing to have anything to do with you again. But you do need to remember that you can't demand all of me for yourself. There are too many girls I have to get to know yet, before I can decide to stay with one girl forever. I like you very much though." To give her hope. Hope being a marvelous way of keeping girls' legs open. I was tempted to make a joke about "sisters should share", but thought it might be overheard, which could make people suspicious about me and my sisters. Seeing that Diana and Claire were okay, I gave them a last hug, then walked over to Ava & Co. "I'm sorry I kept you waiting. I should've come over sooner, but I was having fun with the two girls beside me." I held up my two index fingers in front of Alexis, instructing her, "Open up and concentrate Alexis. There'll be a quiz about this later." Alexis opened up, said "Huh?", then re-opened again. "Concentrate on the tastes. I'll explain why later. This finger is from the younger girl, Claire. She was on my left. Are you ready?" Alexis gave me a wry look, then nodded. I said, "Remember the taste," as I put it in her mouth. She sucked and licked it clean. After a few seconds I pulled it out, then held the other one in front of her mouth. "This is from the other girl, Diana. Open up when you're ready to memorize her taste." After a couple of second Alexis opened up again. We repeated the procedure. I said, "You want me to fuck you again, right Alexis?" "Fuck yeah, 'specially after what Julia told me." Pat jumped in reaction to that, exclaiming to Alexis, "Did Julia tell you the same thing she told me?" The penny had clearly dropped (actually considerably more than one penny). I got in ahead of Alexis' answer with, "A small part of Julia's and my intention was that the few people we told didn't know who else we'd told. You chose your words carefully, Alexis, but Pat also knew, so now you both know that you both know. Keep it to yourselves please, at least until after the trip. Ava knows too, by the way." Pat asked, "You really are... , you know?" "Four-letter word, starting with 'R' and which makes girls itchy to go shopping. Yep, I'm happy to say that I am." There was a mini-celebration, as Pat and Alexis squealed quietly, and hugged me fiercely. They started exclaiming, "I can't believe it!", "You're so incredible," and the like. "Hush the comments, girls. Did Julia warn you what'd happen if one of you blabbed the secret?" I could see Julia had. I added, "I'd hate for that to happen to either of you, but I'd do it if either of you blabbed, even if it was by accident because you got too excited to mind what you said." Actually, either of them blabbing wouldn't be nearly as bad as if Ava did it - that'd be VERY upsetting - but there was nothing wrong with letting Pat and Alexis know that I enjoyed their company. The best thing was to change the subject. I had been interrupted early in my explanation of why I wanted Alexis to memorize the pussy juice tastes, so that was the obvious thing to get back to. But thinking of it reminded me of Alexis' comment, which I found very curious. From my point of view, a girl being rich or poor would make no difference to how much I wanted to fuck her. On second thought, there was probably an inverse relationship: rich girls would probably be insufferable, and poor girls (like Chloe) were suddenly much more cooperative now that I was so much richer than them. So I had to ask, "Alexis, when I asked you about wanting to fuck me, you said you did even more after Julia's news. Does that really make you want to fuck me more than before?" "Fuck yes! It's a huge turn-on. I'm as horny as a ... I don't know. Something fucking horny, that's for sure. I wish you'd strip me naked and take me right here." #4: #3: "What about you Pat? How does it affect you?" "Umm, yeah. I wouldn't have worded it like Alexis did, but she's right. I'm not turned on enough to be stripped naked in the middle of the student parking lot, but it still affects me. There aren't going to be many girls who don't get weak-kneed when they think about you now." Alexis corrected, "Weak knees and dripping wet panties. Speaking of dripping wet, what's with the finger tasting?" "For the rest of this year I'm going to give you different girls' pussy juices to taste. If you guess whose they are, I'll give you a fuck. How does that sound?" "Great, but I'll fuck you any time you want anyway." "I know. I appreciate that too, so I shouldn't make light of it. There are other girls who say the same thing, who I don't appreciate for it, but I like your forthrightness very much. Part of the reason for the game is that I'll enjoy it; I'll get a kick out of 'making' you taste different girls. But part of the reason is that if you guess right, then I'll be honor-bound to make time for you, and I kind of like that. If left to myself, I will spend time with you occasionally, but I'm so busy it won't be as often as I'd like. So the guessing game is a way of forcing myself to spend more time with you. Does that make some kind of weird sense?" "Yeah. WEIRD sense, but I get it. It's the weirdest compliment I ever got." "We're both weird people, in our own ways, so that seems appropriate. By the way, when I said I'd get a kick out of 'making' you, you know that it's voluntary, don't you?" "You start talking like that Mark, people are gonna think you're going soft, haha. Of course I know. You wouldn't say 'boo' to anyone if you didn't know they were okay with it." "I might break a few of their arms though!" "Those assholes asked for it. Serves the fuckers right. Did I mention that your beating the shit out of so many guys turns me on EVEN more?" "Really?" "Christ yeah! I'm fucking HORNY, Mark. Did I mention that I wouldn't mind if you stripped me naked and fucked me right now?" "Haha. Yeah, I seem to remember that you did. As bad as that, huh?" "As GOOD as that; I love feeling horny. Not as much as I love feeling the horny pounded out of me though. I'm not making it up; I REALLY want to get fucked. So how about it?" "I'm damned horny now too, so I'd love to, but my day is packed already. My mother's going to have a major meltdown over my fight, I've got a problem with the Principal that I need advice on, and I've got a club I always go to for three hours on Mondays. After my weird compliment you know I want to, and I want to now even more than normal, but I can't do it, sorry." "Damn! Now I'll have to get some other prick to do it, and I wanted it to be you." #4: #2: "Sorry Alexis. I'll make it up to you on the weekend. Did Julia mention," I looked around, and we were okay, "that the plane has a bed in it?" "Cool! No, she mostly talked about Rodeo Drive, which doesn't interest me all that much." "You ARE a girl, aren't you? Because if you're not, you're not getting anywhere near my flying bed." "Do you want me to show you the juice running down my leg." She put her hands on the top button of her fly. I was sorely tempted, especially because I was sure she wasn't bluffing, but I REALLY did have to get moving. I was holding up my group's getting home, and as fun as this was, it was eating into Chloe-fucking time. That was a major issue, because I was SERIOUSLY horny now. "I'm seriously tempted Alexis, but I'm running late already. I'll take the risk of assuming you're a girl. I WILL take you up on that offer in the plane though." "Or sooner!" "Maybe so. Head off home, I'll see you tomorrow." I gave Alexis and Pat a kiss, and a slight push to get them moving (actually a slap on the ass for Alexis). I felt a little uncomfortable with their seeing Chloe get into my car, for reasons which were probably silly, but I didn't bother trying to analyze. Ava had been hanging patiently on my arm the whole time I was talking to Pat and Alexis, so I turned to her now. "Just about everyone else has left, and I left one of the most important girls to last. That's bad manners for me. Sorry about that." "No worries. I enjoy listening to your talking to other girls. It's amazing to see how interested in you they are. Alexis is right that there are going to be a lot of very eager girls when Julia's news gets out." I was amused that Ava thought it was Julia's news, but it was Julia that'd told Ava, and it is Julia that tells most people everything about me. I agreed, "Yeah, Julia warned me about that too. That's why we're waiting a week before letting it get out, to let the pipeline thing settle down somewhat, so I can easily see what a difference it makes." Ava worriedly said, "I can see you're fine and everything, but the main reason I hung around is to tell you that one of the guys was Conrad. He's been after me for months, so that'll be why he attacked you. I feel terrible that I..." "Phooey Ava! You've got no fault in this at all. Not even the tiniest sliver of any fault. I already knew about Conrad liking you and it doesn't worry me at all, except that I'm worried about your worrying about it, haha. I didn't tell the police anything about you and Conrad because I didn't want them to bother you, so with any luck it's a total non-issue. -- "I'm actually happy that Conrad joined in, because he looked pretty good face down in the piss trough. The story is that I sent him 'flying halfway across the room', so he's helped my reputation considerably. And I'm hardly going to blame you for being attractive. It's a trait I like in my girlfriends. To tell you the truth, I rather enjoyed today's fight. Can you please send me even more idiots next time, because I'll need more than six to keep improving my reputation." "You really don't mind?" "I ENJOYED it! He didn't hurt me in the slightest, and it was good for my reputation to deal with him so dramatically. Another point is that I'm going to be in your grade next year, so it's good that they're starting the get the message to leave me alone already." After a kiss and an ass rub, Ava was reassured and happy. Almost everyone had gone now, just my passengers and Diana still left. Diana was talking to Carol, but she broke off as soon as she saw me start to walk back to them. She rushed the few feet to me and threw her arms around me, babbling semi-coherent romantic gushy stuff at me. I picked her up and kept walking. #4: #2: #3: I put Diana down beside the car. I didn't want to waste time on her, so I said, "Diana, you have to listen very carefully while I tell you some facts. Are you listening?" "Yes." "You know there are lots of girls wanting to be my girlfriend, right?" "Yes. That's why I'm so happy." Her answer confused me for a moment, but I guessed she meant she was happy to get so much of my attention given how much competition there was. I was more interested in telling her how I wanted her to behave than worrying about her current thoughts, so I ignored the issue. I said, "Do you know who my number one best girlfriend is at the moment? It's not you, in case you're hoping that. It's one of the other girls here." "Umm. It was Julia when you had lunch with us before. Is it still Julia?" "Yes it is. Smart girl! Do you know who my second best girlfriend is?" Diana looked around. The only non-sister here was Chloe standing a few feet away, so Diana pointed to her, saying, "That girl?" I enjoyed saying, "No. Not even close. Chloe's not a girlfriend at all at the moment. She might never be, unless she improves her behavior considerably. My second best girlfriend is Ava, who was the girl over there who I kissed goodbye a few seconds ago. Let me tell you two MAJOR reasons why Julia and Ava are my best girlfriends. Of course they're beautiful and smart, but there are plenty of girls who are beautiful and smart. What makes them so wonderful for me are two things they do very, very well." I looked up to Chloe, saying, "Chloe, if you can't hear what I'm saying, you should come closer, because this is important to all the girls who're interested in me, not just sweet Diana here." Chloe looked like she'd like to walk farther AWAY, but she couldn't help herself, and she reluctantly moved closer. God knows what was going through her head. I certainly didn't bother trying to think about it. "Diana, did you notice where Julia and Ava were standing when I was fingering your and Claire's pussies?" As intended, Diana was shocked. She gasped, then flushed bright red. "You're dealing with 10th and 11th grade people now, Diana. We're much more comfortable talking about and having sex. If you spend any time with us you'll have to get used to it, otherwise you won't fit in. Carol must have mentioned that to you?" "Yes. It was a surprise though. I'm not used to people talking about it like that." "You'll get used to it, especially because you've got a very nice pussy." Again with the surprise reaction, but far less this time, and it couldn't compete with her happiness. "You really like it?" "Oh yes. One of the nicest I've touched, and I've touched a lot of them. I look forward to touching yours again many times, and to licking and tasting it too." "Ohh! I've never let a boy do that before." "Good. Don't let any of them. I'm going to be your first. But back to my question, where were Julia and Ava when I was fingering your and Claire's pussies?" With a small blush, Diana said, "Julia was over there," indicating the correct location, "and I guess Ava was where I saw you talking to her before?" "Both correct, well done. They were both standing back to give me room to talk with all the other girls that were here, including you and Claire. Neither Julia nor Ava would crowd me. They know I like to talk with pretty girls, and they both want me to get to know other girls. Make sure you remember that; I'll repeat it: 'They don't crowd me so I can get to know other girls.' It's very important, so memorize it, okay?" "Okay. Umm, why do they want you to know other girls?" "I don't have time to explain it now, but I will explain it to you soon after I've licked your pussy so well that you've had an orgasm." #4: I continued, "And the second very special thing about Julia and Ava is that they're clever enough to know that they have to be obedient to me. I've got so many girls who want to be my girlfriend that I'm not going to bother with any girl who disobeys me, or who says, 'No' to me. That's one reason why I like you. You were wonderfully cooperative when I was feeling your and Claire's pussies. In fact, you were perfect. A lot of girls would have made a fuss, or pretended to be reluctant, or if they were particularly annoying, would have required me to force them into it. It's hard to believe, but some girls are like that, even though it's a pain in the ass. But you were wonderful, Diana. If you're that smart all the time, you and I will get on very well, because you'll be better than 90% of the girls I have already decided will never become my girlfriend. That's the second important rule you need to remember: 'Be helpful and obedient to Mark.' Have you got that one?" "Yes. 'Be helpful and obedient to you'." "Good girl. I'll give you an example. Julia come here please, and stand in front of Diana." As I was positive she would, Julia moved quickly into position. "Now put a hand under Diana's dress and rub her pussy." Diana exclaimed "Oh!", went red (surprising no one), but otherwise froze in position, allowing Julia to do as I'd asked. I didn't ask Julia to stop, letting it keep going and going. Passed the point when Diana got over the initial shock, and long enough for Diana to realize that this was going to keep on going. I waited to see if she'd object, but she didn't. To my delight, her face started showing signs of arousal, which was PERFECT. I gave her another fifteen seconds, then said, "Thanks Julia." As Julia withdrew her hand, Diana's hips moved forward, trying to retain contact. EXCELLENT girl! Julia raised her finger to her lips, tasting Diana. Diana blushed. I had visualized Julia rubbing the outside of Diana's panties, in which case Julia's licking her finger would be more theatrical than necessary, but I approved in either event (it had all occurred under Diana's skirt, and my proximity sense isn't detailed enough for me to have known what Julia had done). While Julia was doing that, Carol took the couple of steps to Diana, giving her a big hug saying, "Diana, you're doing FANTASTICALLY well. I'm so proud of you! You couldn't do it any better; you're PERFECT!" Diana smiled bravely, but proudly. It'd been a shock to her, but she had done VERY well. "I agree with Carol, Diana. You've done extremely well. I'm very impressed and very pleased. I don't mean this as a criticism, because I truly am VERY pleased with you, but you weren't quite perfect the way Carol said." Diana's face fell. "Diana, you were still FANTASTIC! This is only the first time you and I have done something like this, so it's impossible for you to be perfect, because you don't know what I like well enough yet to do it every time. I'll just tell you a couple of things to think about, so you'll be even closer to perfect next time. There definitely will be a next time too, because you're doing so well. The first little thing you could have done was move your feet apart a little when Julia was rubbing you, to make it easier for her." "Oh," at the same time as she moved one foot sideways. Too late, of course, but you've got to love the attitude, "Good girl. You've got a fantastic attitude. The second thing you could have done which would have been better is not wear any panties." Another gasp, but only a faint blush (I was losing my touch). I didn't know whether she knew about Claire's adherence to the Duckling rule that Donna enforced so wonderfully, but she would now. I said, "Claire took off her panties before she came here." The look of surprise on Diana's face removed my uncertainty. "Yes. Claire's got a fantastic attitude too. She took her panties off just in case I had a chance to play with her. If you'd done so, that would have made it easier for me to finger you before, and Julia just now too." I earned a better blush this time. "You've been so great today, that my comments about your moving your feet apart and panties aren't criticisms; they're merely things for you to think about." I decided not to ask her to be pantiless next time. I'd leave it to her, and see what happened. My money was on her being a good girl (as I judge it). I was just about to stop, when one of my minds (#4, unsurprisingly) had a "two birds with one stone" idea. I said, "You've been so wonderful Diana, that I'll give you one more example to think about. Chloe, can you come a little closer please." Chloe was obviously fearful to do so, but reluctantly stepped forward. To Diana I explained, "Chloe's been trying to talk me into letting her be my girlfriend for a long time now." Actually not that long objectively, but it sure felt like it subjectively; hitting your head against a brick wall gets old fast. "Julia and I have spent MANY hours talking to her about what it requires, so Chloe has a very clear understanding now." I turned to Chloe, "Undo the buttons on your blouse please, Chloe." It was NOT what she wanted to hear. Her hands hesitated, moved up a few inches, then down again. Paused, then up to undo one button. When her hands were by her side again, "Chloe, I said to undo the BUTTONS, meaning ALL of them." "No way! Not in the middle of school. In private I can, but not at school. Other boys could walk past..." There were only a few people still moving around, and we were standing in a group facing each other, so it was extremely unlikely anyone would have seen anything. I wasn't asking her to take her blouse off entirely, just undo the front, so nobody was going to see anything, except maybe a glimpse of bra big enough to sail around the world in! I held up my hand to cut off the crap. I wasn't even looking at Chloe, but at Diana. I said, "I said I'd give you another example. That's an example of a girl who doesn't have a good chance of becoming my girlfriend. Not unless she can prove herself to be much better in the next hour or two." I'd added the last sentence because I didn't want Chloe to think she was doomed. Not until I'd gotten her naked and fucked her at least once. "Chloe has had HOURS of explanation from Julia and me, and you haven't even had five minutes, but already I have great confidence in you." Diana smiled proudly. I added, "I see you're wearing a blouse with buttons Diana, so please undo them all for me." A momentary hesitation, which I put down to surprise, then the lovely girl started complying. I copied the trick Julia had gotten me to do with Chloe in the girls' bathroom: I looked Diana in the eyes, and eyes only. I didn't look at her body at all. She looked at me several times while she was unbuttoning - to see how I was reacting - so she'd seen that I wasn't looking down at her. When she finished unbuttoning, she even pulled her blouse open for me. I got that from peripheral vision and proximity, as I kept my eyes on her eyes. I doubted it was possible, but in the impossible event that Chloe had unbuttoned her blouse all the way, I very much doubted that she would have held the sides open for me to get a good look. I said, "That was perfect, thank you Diana. Please do your blouse back up now." She didn't move. "But you haven't looked yet." "I'm not going to look this time. I'll look next time - I'm even eager to do so, because you're so attractive - but not this time. Start buttoning up, and I'll explain why." Diana started buttoning. "Not looking is my way of making an important point. If I looked I'd get five seconds of pleasure. That would be nice, but it's only breasts. Being a boy, I like breasts, but I'd be stupid to think they mattered very much. Far more important than what your breasts look like, is the fact that you were obedient to me. You did what I wanted, you did it immediately, without complaining or asking for a long-winded explanation first, without doing only one-tenth of the job, or any other silliness. You did it perfectly. That means that you're better than almost all of the girls who chase me, who think that just because they've got a great body that I should automatically put up with all their emotional nonsense. They must think I'm very stupid if they don't give me credit for knowing that a girl's personality is far more important than her body. You have an excellent personality, so you and I - and probably Claire too - will be spending more time together." #2: #4: #3: I added, "There are two types of girls Diana: those that spend most of the time thinking about themselves, especially that they're better than boys; and girls who aren't self-centered. Far too many girls are full of themselves, especially the pretty ones. I'm sure you know girls in your grade who strut around like they're God's gift to everybody, right?" Diana obviously had no trouble thinking of some, so I carried straight on, "But not you. You're the rare combination of a girl who is both pretty and not full of herself because of it. My asking you to unbutton your blouse was a sexy thing, but it wasn't about sex for me. I didn't even look, so you know that's true. I've found that things to do with sex are an excellent way of quickly finding out what sort of personality a girl has, because if a girl's self-centered, it'll be about her body and sex. You passed with flying colors, so I know you've got a personality that I'd like to get to know better..." #4: " ... You've definitely got the sort of personality I look for in a girlfriend, and I look forward to our spending more time together, but you know that you're not my girlfriend yet, don't you?" Diana hung her head, sadly admitting, "Yes." "Don't hang your head, sweetie; look up and smile. You've made a FANTASTIC start. Seriously, look up and smile." I lifted her head for her. "You know when you're having a serious shopping day, you don't just buy the first thing you see that looks reasonable. That'd be silly! You spend a good part of the day looking through all the stores to get a good feel for what sort of clothes are available, what the fashions are, and all the other important factors." None of which I could think of, but I could see she understood. "Then once you've got all the information you need, you go back and start looking seriously, especially at the clothes that caught your eye the first time. Right?" "Sure." She was wondering why I was reciting such obvious stuff in so much detail. "I'm 'shopping' for a new girlfriend, and that's even MORE important than buying pretty clothes! Haha. So I'm being very careful and thorough. I'm still in the early stage of having a quick look at everything, so it's too early for me to make a decision yet. But I've met you, and I've thought to myself, 'Wow, she's fantastic. I am DEFINITELY going to come back and look at her again.' I've seen many dozens of girls that I have no interest in seeing again, and there are hardly any that have impressed me, but you sure have. It's too early for me to choose a girlfriend yet, but when it's time, it could be you. You've done very, very well, and you can be very proud of yourself." -- I didn't have to tell her to smile again; she was doing so already. I made the point I'd been heading toward, "We want to spend more time together Diana, so you have to be careful that you don't give anything away to your parents. To Mackenzie either, because she might complain about you to your parents. Talking privately with Claire is fine, and with Carol, of course, but I suggest not with anyone else. And be very careful not to give anything away when I come to your house on Thursday. Don't be all gushy and romantic, don't push in front of Mackenzie, don't tell everyone how much you love me, or things like that. We don't want your parents to stop you seeing me, do we? That'd be terrible!" "I'll be good., Mark. You really do like me?" "Heaps and heaps, Diana. Now give me a kiss, then we all have to go home." She put her arms around my neck and kissed me enthusiastically. I put my hand on her ass, and rubbed that enthusiastically. I guess we had different priorities. Then I sent her on her way. ------- Chapter 199: I Smoothly Invite Chloe to Climb Onto My Cock Monday, May 9, 2005 (Continued) Chloe had been looking increasingly unhappy all through my conversation with Diana, so as soon as Diana was out of earshot I turned to Chloe and said, "I hope you were listening carefully, because most of that was for your benefit." "It was?" asked a surprised Chloe. "Of course. Wasn't that obvious? Julia and I have spent ages talking to you, and you just don't seem to get it. I thought your listening to my talking to someone else might give you a different perspective, and make it easier for you to understand. I hope I didn't spend all that time and effort for nothing? Let's get in the car and talk on the way." Carol looked concerned. I guessed that I might not like her friend, so I gave her a wink and a smile, hopefully reassuring her that everything was fine. While we were all getting in the car, I had an excellent idea for a way of motivating Chloe. I was very proud of it, because it was such a complete contrast for how I used to behave. I remembered my very first phone conversation with Ava, when I'd asked her permission to show her letter and photos to Julia. Ava had gotten upset, and I'd gotten totally pathetic in my useless attempts to cheer her up. Julia had grabbed the phone off me and had asked Ava, "Do you want to be his girlfriend?" Julia had dangled the bait Ava wanted rather than flounder around with wishy-washy platitudes. Julia was sitting in the front seat, so I could easily give her a wink when I started saying, "While I remember, Julia, I got a new checkbook from the bank at lunchtime today. As soon as I've finished with Chloe this afternoon, I'll be writing out the million dollar checks for my and your parents." Donna and Chloe were both startled. Carol not so much, but probably because she'd learned about it already, or maybe just assumed I was tricking Chloe. I added, "Please keep that to yourself everyone, because I want to see the look of surprise on the four parents' faces when I hand them their checks." Julia, playing along, said, "I'm looking forward to seeing that too." Chloe couldn't hold back any longer, "You're giving away TWO MILLION DOLLARS!" "Sure. Giving a million to Mom and Dad isn't really giving it away, because they're family. Mom will probably spend most of that buying my food anyway, haha. And I'll give a million to the Williamses because Julia is my main girlfriend. I think it's important to show them my appreciation. Besides it's only a million dollars, so it's not a big deal." Chloe produced a kind of strangled sound, as she tried to talk with paralyzed vocal chords and a brain that'd shut down in shock. I 'explained' (hehe), "Chloe, it took me a couple of days to get used to what I was doing, but after that I was earning two million per day. If I run out of money, I'll just go back to work for a few days. Giving Julia and her family a million dollars is something I can replace in half a day. It's hardly a big deal." "OH MY GOD! You can do that! You can earn millions of dollars a day?" "Sure. It's pretty hard work - much harder than schoolwork - but why wouldn't I be able to? And this was just my first business idea, so if I bothered to think about it I could probably think of something even better. But I can't be bothered. I'm only fifteen, so I don't need much. A million each for my parents and my main girlfriend's family. I'll spend three million or so on a new house. The trip to LA and probably a new car. I can't think of much else that I want." "Urggle," from Chloe. Julia added, "You need some more clothes, Mark. Don't forget that." "Thanks for reminding me, Julia. And a couple of hundred dollars for new clothes." "{Raspberry}," from my beloved main girlfriend. Donna was also getting very excited at the idea that I had an infinite supply of money, and she started listing item after item that we needed to buy. Twelve-year old girls have some weird ideas for how to spend money. Donna's excitement went through the roof when she realized, "We can buy EVERYTHING!" I'd correct her slight misapprehension later, as she was very usefully helping Chloe get worked up, not that Chloe needed much help. Chloe had her own list of things I should spend my unlimited supply of money on. Sometimes as amusing as Donna's, but to her credit Chloe did include, "You could give fortunes to dozens of charities!" and then spoiled my impression by following it with, "You could build an incredible concert venue, and hire the best bands in the world to play in it." I let her run on for a bit, until I had to set her right, "Chloe, why on Earth would I want to own every clothing store in town? The only reason I did this was because Julia suggested a couple of weeks ago that I look into buying a house. It was worth taking a few days off school to make her happy - she is my main girlfriend, after all - so that's what I did. Once I was doing it, I thought I might as well stick at it until the end of Friday, but $6.5 million is actually more than I need now. I have no intention of doing any more work for the moment. I'm back at school now, and that's where I'll be staying." "But you could be RICH! Super, super rich. The richest man in America even!" "Sure, but why? I have all the money I need now to buy everything I want. If I want any more money in the future, I'll get it then. I'm not going to work hard now to earn money I've got no use for. That'd be silly." Chloe kept it up until we got to my house. My attitude was impossible for her to grasp. It was quite funny listening to her silly arguments. There were only two that are worth mentioning: Her first was, "If you earned more, you could give millions to charity. That'd be wonderful." I answered, "You're right. I think I might do that sometime. Probably over summer when I'm not so busy with my studies. I'll dedicate a day to a charity, and give whatever I earn that day to that charity." "What, keep none of it?" "It's for CHARITY, Chloe. And I have plenty of money for myself already." That wasn't the result that Chloe had been hoping for. Chloe's second noteworthy point was, "You could give a lot of money away to all your friends. Or just your girlfriends." "That wouldn't be a good idea. Then I'd never know whether girls like me for me, or for my money. Julia and her family will get the most, because Julia's my main girlfriend and her family have been very good to me from before I was rich. Ava's family are getting some too..." "AVA TOO! Another million for her?" "Not a million, because she's my number two girlfriend and I haven't known her or her family as long. But certainly something for her. Quite a lot less though, because it would make people behave strangely if I threw too much money around. By the time I get down to girlfriends like Alexis - who I like quite a lot, because of her honesty and wonderful attitude to sex - I'll just take her on this trip and maybe buy her a new pair of black jeans, because she probably needs another pair, haha. I'm definitely not going to be giving away much money, and even then, just to a few people I liked before they knew I was rich." "Like me! Remember I told you I loved you ages ago, and I showed you my breasts, and everything." We arrived at my home at this point (Donna's and Chloe's lists of what they could spend my money on had been very long). I walked my sisters inside so I could make sure they knew what reality was. I told them, "Prof and I are NOT going to earn any more money. That crap I told Chloe about $2 million per day was a lie to motivate her to start listening to Julia and me." Donna was very disappointed. I also got them to promise not to tell Mom or Dad anything about me giving them any money. Back in the car, on the way to Julia's, I resumed, "Chloe, I do remember that you said you loved me, and I do seem to remember something about you showing me your breasts, but you should remember that Alexis is my lover and you've seen how well she and I get on, but as I told you before, she's only getting this trip and a new pair of jeans. You're not even my lover, let alone my girlfriend, so you won't be even getting this trip unless you do a lot better by Tuesday evening. This trip is an overnight trip and we're staying in a hotel, so it's just for my lovers. And for Carol too, because Julia and Ava are her lovers. If you'd been my main girlfriend already, you and your family would've gotten a million dollars, but you wouldn't do what Julia and I asked." Julia's quiet chuckle was lost under Chloe's groan, then, "But I didn't know!" "Sure you did. I've heard Julia tell you and all the other girls over and over again how the sky's the limit for anything I set out to do. When Julia suggested a couple of weeks ago that I look into buying a house, I'm sure Julia expected me to make a few million dollars for it. I overachieve at school and college, I overachieve at sports, at sex, and even at fighting. I overachieve at EVERYTHING, and you knew that. It was your fault that you didn't think about me overachieving at making money. I even know why you made that mistake. Do you want me to tell you, Chloe?" Not really, no, but she couldn't resist. Chloe fatalistically asked, "Why?" "If you'd listened to Julia and me when we first started talking to you, and had immediately done what we wanted - like Diana was doing a few minutes ago - then you'd be getting a big check this evening." That wasn't my point, but I hadn't been able to resist rubbing it in. "The reason you didn't think about me enough, is because every time we talked to you, the ONLY thing you could think about was how much you didn't want any boys to see your breasts. You're so fixated on your breasts that you're making bad decisions over and over again. You decided to treat me suspiciously in the bowling alley's parking lot rather than be friendly, you decided not to do what we wanted the next Monday, and all the many times we've asked you to do things since then. Those decisions stopped you becoming my number two girlfriend, because Ava didn't become my girlfriend until several days after the bowling date. You had several opportunities, but you blew them all because of your fixation on your breasts. -- "And in case you think your breasts are at fault, then that's just more of the same stupid thinking. Your breasts are NOT to blame! You have fantastic breasts, and most of the girls at school would kill to have breasts like yours. Nor can you blame other boys, because they had nothing to do with you and me getting together. The reason you're not an important girlfriend of mine comes entirely from within your head. It was your mind that was unfriendly to me in the parking lot; not your breasts. It was your mind that refused to do what we wanted; not your breasts. You accuse boys of being unable to stop thinking about them, but the truth is that you're even worse. You spend most of your life guarding your breasts from every single male, as if something terrible would happen if any boy saw any part of your chest. Carol and half the girls in our class exposed their entire top half this morning, nipples and all. Did any of them suffer from it? They laughed at the stupid boys, had some fun, then got on with their lives. You'd have to remind them about it now, because it wasn't important enough for them to keep thinking about. Even though your breasts are more attractive than any of the other girls', you would've killed yourself rather than flash your tits along with the others, which makes no sense at all. Yours are the BEST, Chloe! You should enjoy being so beautiful, rather than living in fear of it. When you learn to enjoy your wonderful breasts, then you're going to make much better decisions about the guys around you. Not missing opportunities like you did with me, and who knows how many other nice guys you've already ruined your chances with. Then you'll have a much happier and more successful life." I'd gone way beyond what I'd originally intended to say, but I'd gotten carried away because this was a subject that was close to my heart. With those two advantages over other girls, Chloe should be having a great life. Which wouldn't only be to her benefit, but to all the guys who got pleasure from them, with me right at the top of that list, other boys not being something I was that concerned about, although it'd be nice if Chloe eventually found a good one for her husband. Even though I'd gotten overly involved in my argument, I still thought I'd done a damned convincing job. I finally stopped my impassioned plea, letting Chloe respond. She said, "Please Mark, I just want to become your girlfriend. I love you very much, and I NEED to be your girlfriend. I've wanted to for a long time; weeks and weeks. You still want me, don't you?" I looked at Julia, who rolled her eyes at me, out of Chloe's sight. I said, "Of course I do, sweetie." I didn't even have the energy to joke, "You've got lovely breasts." #1: #3: #2: #1: #2: #3: #2: Julia asked, "Have you finished, Mark?" I held back what I wanted to say. I rolled my eyes back at Julia, and with forced politeness said, "Yes thank you." Julia turned further around to talk with Chloe, "Chloe, is your mother at home?" "Of course. Oh you're right! I need to call her. Mark's being... , umm. I'd better call her now. Can I borrow your phone please, Julia?" "Sure." Julia handed it over. #2: #1: #2: I listened unashamedly, as I'd decided not to have any shame about how I dealt with Chloe from now on. Chloe said she was doing homework at Julia Williams' place. After checking with Julia, Chloe said, "I'll be home before dinner, Mom." Consent was apparently given. Chloe hung up and handed the phone back to Julia. There'd been unsurprisingly few mentions of doomed virginities or week-long love affairs. I asked, "Chloe, does your mom work?" Chloe answered, "No, she's a housewife. She looks after us." It wasn't worth pursuing, especially as we were about to arrive at Julia's. As soon as we'd left school, Julia had told me that we could use her bedroom, so I'd dropped my sisters home first - Carol had to cook dinner for the whole family as Mom was going mansion shopping with Vanessa and Julia as soon as she could - then I'd headed to Julia's. I parked outside and we walked in. Julia said, "Give me your keys. When we get inside, you two go straight upstairs and I'll take care of everything else." "Okay." We walked in, Julia first, calling "Where are you guys?" loudly out, to find the bug removal crew. I took Chloe's hand and pulled her upstairs while one of the guys called back to Julia, and she went in search of them in the back of the house somewhere. Chloe asked, "There are guys in here?" "Yes." "Who are they?" "They're just doing some work for the Williamses. Nothing that matters to us." "But they might come into the room and see me, you know, without any clothes on." #1: "There's a lock on Julia's bedroom door." "I don't feel comfortable doing, you know, while there are guys in the house." "I think you'll find that you need at least one guy to do 'you know'." "I know that!..." #3: " ... I mean I don't like having OTHER guys in the house." "Even though the room is soundproofed and has a lock?" "I just don't feel comfortable." "{Sigh}. Okay, I'll take you back to school so you can ride your bike home." I turned us around and started walking back down the hallway to the stairs. We'd gotten within six feet of the door to Julia's room, which was probably a record close call for Chloe's virginity. After we started descending the stairs, Chloe said, "Umm, what about the weekend?" "I can't fuck you on the weekend; I'm going away. I thought Julia told you about that?" "Ahh, I mean, can I come?" "I've already clearly stated that the trip is ONLY for lovers, so the answer is obvious." We'd arrived at the bottom of the stairs. According to my act I should go get my keys, but I was pretty sure they'd be unnecessary, and I didn't want to look silly by getting then returning them, so I just waited for Chloe's response. "Can I come here tomorrow after school?" "It's not my house. You should ask Julia, although I'm pretty sure she'll be out looking at multimillion dollar houses for me." That wouldn't be until later in the evening, but it sounded too good not to use. "You'll be here though, won't you?" "I doubt it. I'll almost certainly be out with one of my lovers. There are only seven seats on the plane because it's very luxurious, so my lovers are very eager to convince me to take them. I'll be with one of them, and somehow I doubt you'll want to join us?" #1: #2: #1: #3: #1: "But," worried Chloe, "Tuesday's the last chance." "It's the deadline for the LA trip, sure. That's why other girls want to spend time with me. You don't have to worry about that though." "I don't?" "No. You said you'd loved me for 'weeks and weeks', so we can easily get together sometime after I get back. Another few days won't matter to you, and love's much more important than some silly, expensive shopping trip anyway." "No! Ahh. That is, umm, I'd like to be your girlfriend as soon as I can." "The trip to LA is for my LOVERS, Chloe. A couple of the girls I've already invited are lovers, but not girlfriends. If you want to come, you have to be one of my lovers. Are you saying you want to be one of my lovers as soon as you can, so you have a chance to come to Rodeo Drive?" "Yes. That's what I mean." "That easy then, because 'as soon as you can' is right now. You really need to make up your mind, or I'll call up one of the other girls. I'm getting tired of this silliness. Either you love me or you don't." "I do! It's just, umm." That's where she stopped. Her being able to demonstrate her love for me had hit the apparently insurmountable barrier of "umm". "I'll get my keys and take you back to school." I started walking to where I thought Julia probably was, somewhere down the hallway to the hot tub room or Prof's and Vanessa's study. "No! No! Come back Mark. We can do it now." I stopped where I was, calling back, "Are you sure? No more stupid indecision or fooling around?" "Yes. I'm sure. Come back." #1: Even before I got back she asked, "You said the door's got a lock?" "Yes it has." "And drapes?" "It's a bedroom, so what do you think?" I started walking upstairs. Chloe could find her way, or not, as she chose. She came running up the stairs after me. It's a pity I don't have eyes in the back of my head, because I bet her expression would have been amusingly stupid. Chloe caught up to my hand, grasped it and tried to pull me back, saying, "Slow down, Mark. Wait for me." She'd already caught up, and I wasn't walking that fast, so her request was silly nonsense (what a surprise). To save the argument, I slowed significantly, but kept walking. We were walking so slowly it was silly. It would've been even slower, except that I was in the lead pulling her reluctant hand. The rest of her wasn't eager either. Just as I got her into the bedroom, I realized I should have gotten a towel from the bathroom to catch any blood, either from her losing her virginity, or because I burst a blood vessel from all the frustration. There was no way we could walk to the bathroom and back at Chloe's slow rate, because I had less than two hours before I had to be home before Aikido. I walked over to the closets, opened one of the doors and said, "There are coat hangers in here, if you want to hang up your clothes." I'd walked around her, to be closer to the room's door than she was, so I said, "You get undressed, I'll get a towel. I'll be back in a few seconds." I quickly walked out of the room, but not before seeing Chloe make a half-hearted attempt to reach out and grab me. God knows how much that would have slowed down a ten-second job. I rapidly walked to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and then strode back. I almost broke my wrist on the bedroom door as I tried to open it while continuing to walk forward, not expecting it to be locked. I knocked loudly, calling out, "Let me in, Chloe." Faintly from the inside, "Who is it?" There were several comments I was tempted to make, "A very pissed off, short-tempered, ex-potential boyfriend." Or, "The famous Corvallis rapist-murderer." Instead I controlled myself, yelling only, "Mark." #3: #1: #3: I heard her disengage the lock, so I opened the door and entered the room again. Chloe was still fully dressed; not even a button undone - what a surprise. All she'd done was lock the door and close the drapes. I closed the door again, locked it and turned the room's main light on, as the only other light was a tiny amount entering from behind the edges of the drapes. Chloe demanded, "Turn off the light." "Huh? Why?" "We're getting undressed." #1: #2: #1: "You've already seen me naked Chloe, and I've seen you topless, which is surely what you're most worried about. I don't want to undress in the dark, and there's no need for so much modesty." Chloe recited, "'Modesty is a Virtue'. People should always be modest Mark, it's what people in a civilized society do. Otherwise we'd be no better than savages." #3: #2: I flicked the light switch off, walked to the bed, stripped, spread the towel across the middle of the bed, pulled a rubber out of the nearest drawer (my eyes had adapted enough to guide me in the familiar room), did a "go-hard", put the rubber on, then lay on my back. Chloe hadn't moved other than back and forth a bit, achieving nothing, as usual. I announced, "You've got EXACTLY five minutes, Chloe, starting... , now!" I'd held up my left wrist, to look at my watch. There should have been enough light for her to see it, not that I cared particularly. I put my arm down, and waited. And waited some more. After about twenty seconds of motionless silence, Chloe asked, "Five minutes for what?" "You've now got four and a half minutes to get naked and start having sex with me. I told you this before. I'm not going to force you in any way whatsoever. You're going to do everything. If you don't do it, then we won't be lovers, and I'll call some other girl to come over. You've now got four minutes and fifteen seconds." "You can't make me do that!" "I'm NOT making you. That's the whole point of my just lying here. Four minutes to go." "But it's not supposed to be like this!" "You want flowers and romance. To be taken out to dinner and all those things?" "YES! That's the proper way." "Sure. The first dating evening I've got free is the Friday after next, that'll be May 20. No wait! That's allocated for a pipeline date." No it wasn't, but it sounded better this way. "How about Saturday May 28? Are you free that night? Three minutes forty five left." "Argh no! It has to be today or tomorrow." "It's hardly going to be possible to pack a romantic courtship into 24 hours, especially because I've already told you I'm busy tomorrow. I have to get home soon because I have heaps of things to do this evening, so the next hour and half is the only time there is. That's presuming you want to have any chance of flying to Rodeo Drive with my other lovers. If that doesn't worry you, you can wait until the pipeline dates are finished at the end of the school year, and maybe we'll have a chance for a date or two over summer. Three minutes fifteen." "This isn't fair. I didn't want to do it this way." She sounded on the verge of tears, which didn't worry me much, as I'd only have to put up with it for three minutes and ten seconds. "Downstairs only a couple of minutes ago you said you wanted to make love to me 'as soon as you can.' You can right now, so what are you complaining about? This is exactly what you asked for. Two minutes forty five." Chloe was lost for words, so there was a couple of seconds of peaceful silence. I broke it by helpfully saying, "I told you that you had to be naked. Lovers don't wear clothes in bed. You've only got two minutes thirty left, so it looks like you're going to fail, Chloe." I sat up, picked up Julia's bedside phone, and started dialing her mobile number. "WHAT are your doing?" panicked Chloe. "There's no way you can get undressed in just over two minutes, so I'm calling another girl." Julia answered, so I said, "Hello Kathy," just a random name, "Mark Anderson here. My current date hasn't worked out. I'm thinking about inviting you around for sex. Are you..." Chloe had groaned, rushed around the bed, grabbed hold of the phone's base, and fumbled around until she'd disconnected the call. I put the handset down, telling Chloe, "No problem. I'll call her back in one minute forty five. If you want this, you have to strip very fast." With anguish, and not a little anger too, "I can't do it this way. It's WRONG!" "I'm surprised. I thought you loved me. One minute thirty." "ARGH!" #3: #2: #1: #3: "You're doing a very good job of convincing me you don't love me for my millions of dollars, by convincing me you don't love me at all." Her hands flew up to her blouse's top button, but then flopped around quivering ineffectually. My mentioning the millions of dollars had clearly helped, but I was beginning to think that a gun to the head wouldn't be enough, especially because pulling the trigger would be hellishly hard to resist. How someone could be so screwed up about something that was so much fun - not to mention essential for the survival of the species so therefore a powerful fundamental urge - was a huge indictment. I wasn't sure whether it was an indictment of her or her fucked-in-the-head parents, but there was plenty of indictment to go around so I blamed the entire Moon family. I had several thoughts in mind. The first, and certainly the top-most, was that I was definitely not going to 'force' Chloe to give me sex. There was NO way I was going through this CRAP every time. Either she learned to do it voluntarily, or it wasn't going to happen. Not far behind that thought, was me wondering whether I wanted to do this at all. She had a spectacular body, but her beliefs and behaviors were horrendously annoying, and surely insane as well. And even if she did eventually fuck herself on me, would that break her conditioning enough to make future sessions bearable. Unless she showed dramatic improvements from session to session, I'd very soon decide I didn't want any more sessions. In which case, why bother having the first pathetic one. If I did want to motivate her, I could think of three ways: Mentioning money again. Possibly promising to spend some on her. Money seemed very important to her, so this was more likely than anything else to work, but damned if I wanted to waste money on her, although paying for a lobotomy wouldn't be a waste. Jealousy might motivate her, with Diana probably being the freshest and most effective memory. My getting up and starting to get dressed might spur her into action. I could combine ideas too, for example, by mentioning Diana while getting dressed. I didn't have long to make a decision, barely one minute. Plus it'd take time to do it, and she'd need time to react. I decide that I simply didn't care. Chloe had very successfully destroyed my enthusiasm for having sex with her. Considering how much enthusiasm I'd had originally, that was a hell of an accomplishment. I kept on doing nothing. At the appropriate time I held up my left wrist, waited to make sure, then said, "One minute." Chloe made a groan, and her hands fluttered some more, but they were still not achieving anything. She was looking at me, waiting for me to say something that made everything better somehow, although God knows what. Thinking about what I could say, made me wonder what would happen if I said, "I order you to strip." It'd work on several of my girls: Julia, Carol, Ava and Lily. Alexis too, but for a different reason. I suspected it might work with Chloe, because it looked to me as if she was desperately waiting for me to say something that absolved her of the responsibility for doing anything sexual. The trouble was that I was sure a simple order wouldn't be sufficient. She'd kick up a fuss over every piece of clothing, complain about being forced to undress, then refuse to go anywhere near the bed until I 'forced' her to do that too. It'd be damned near endless, and it'd occur every damned time I wanted sex with her, assuming I ever did again. #1: #2. #3: Chloe was waiting for me to say something, so I didn't disappoint her: "Fifty seconds." A short while later (you can probably work out how long for yourself), I intoned, "Forty five seconds." Chloe started looking panicky, made a silly squeaky noise, then urgently, "I WANT to be your girlfriend!" I had no desire to say anything - she knew what she needed to do - so I just looked back at my watch. A few seconds later, "Thirty seconds." "Mark I WANT TO! I really do! I love you. I want to be your girlfriend." "Twenty seconds." "STOP! It's not FAIR. I want to talk with you. People should talk about their relationships..." "Ten seconds." "I'll do it Mark! I really will. I just need to talk with you first. This isn't the way I..." "Time's up!" I swung my legs off the other side of the bed from the one Chloe was standing next to, stood, grabbing the towel off the bed to wrap around my waist. The quicker I could get out of the room the better, but with other people in the house I wanted to be wearing more than just a rubber. Chloe, screaming and sobbing, ran around the end of the bed then rushed to me, with her arms wide to grab me. I'd practiced avoiding that attack only a couple of hours ago, so I was on the top of my game. The bed was to her right, so I ducked under her left arm, holding it up with one of my hands to make getting under it easier. Once past her, I pushed her left upper-arm forward until her upper-body was twisted to face the bed, then I shoved her onto it. I ran for the door, unlocking it with NP on the way. I was out and heading down the hallway before she'd gotten off the bed. ------- Chapter 200: The End of Chloe Monday, May 9, 2005 (Continued) At the base of the stairs I called loudly for Julia, who answered from the kitchen, which was only a few steps away. I jogged into the kitchen. Julia was in the kitchen with Robert and a couple of the bug sweeper guys, who were doing their thing with an impressive looking bunch of equipment being wheeled around on a trolley. Despite my being dressed in only a towel, I'd been hoping that Julia wasn't alone, figuring that Chloe would behave herself better in front of strangers. I'd heard her open the bedroom door just as I entered the kitchen, so she was probably coming to look for me. I would've preferred her to go straight home, but I doubted that'd happen, as she had no transport and she loved me. I didn't quite run to be 'hiding' behind Julia for when Chloe arrived, but I did rush up to Julia and put my arm around her. "That bad?" asked Julia. "Impossible. She's insane. I don't want to put up with her crap any more." I could hear her shoes running down the stairs (she hadn't even removed those). "Get rid of her forever?" "Yes please." Julia called out, "In the kitchen, Chloe!" Chloe came running in, skidding to a halt when she saw so many people. Julia looked at Chloe for a second or two, then said, "Chloe, you said you wanted to come here because you wanted to have sex with Mark. So why have you still got all your clothes on?" The bug removing guys had been curious when I'd come running in wearing just a towel. Now that a huge-titted pretty girl had come in, and her removing her clothes had been mentioned, their attention was totally on Chloe. One of them had been wearing headphones, but his partner had nudged him, and he'd dropped them to his shoulders, and they were both now unashamedly watching with interest. Robert, Julia and I were looking at Chloe too, which was way more attention than Chloe wanted, especially male attention, and even more especially with sex being the topic. Chloe nervously said, "Umm, I'd like to talk with Mark alone please." Julia answered, "Mark came down here because he was tired of talking to you. Isn't that right, Mark?" "You can say that again!" "Mark doesn't want to talk with you, Chloe. You've had weeks of talking to him. Today was 'put up or shut up' time, and by the looks of how fully dressed you are, you didn't 'put up' or 'put out', haha." We all laughed at that, including the bug removal guys (the "anti-buggers", to give them an anti-bad connotation that "debuggers" lacks). "That's what I want to talk with him about. He only gave me five minutes, and that's not nearly long enough." "You've had WEEKS of talking. At school today you were begging me to let you come here for sex with Mark, so why is it that Mark looks ready and you're still fully dressed?" "Because he did it all WRONG! It's not supposed to be that way." "You're absolutely right, you have to take your clothes off first." Laughter from around the room, which Chloe did not appreciate. "NO! That's NOT what I mean. He made me do EVERYTHING." "He can't have 'made you do everything' very well then, because it looks like you've done nothing. Do you, or do you not, want to have sex with Mark?" "I want to be his GIRLFRIEND. That's the right way of doing it." "I think that's the best way of doing it too. I'll call you a taxi to take you back to your bike, and from now on Mark will invite you out on dates whenever he's got time." "But he's NEVER got time! He's too busy. And I want to get the chance to buy some beautiful, new dresses in Rodeo Drive this weekend. I don't have any dresses like that." "If you can afford to buy several Rodeo Drive dresses, then you can easily afford to buy your own cheap plane ticket back and forth. If you've got thousands of dollars of spare cash, why don't you buy nicer clothes in Corvallis, rather than the secondhand ones you wear?" "Umm." "Let me guess," said Julia, not guessing at all. "You were expecting Mark to fly you to LA and back, put you up in a classy hotel overnight, take you out to fancy restaurants and a show, and spend several thousands of dollars buying you expensive, designer dresses, all at his expense, even though you're not his girlfriend and you refuse to put out. Have I got that right?" "That's NOT FAIR! People shouldn't have sex before they're married! I'm willing to let him if I know he's my boyfriend, but he has to prove that first. I'm making a very big compromise, so he has to too. That's what people do in good relationships!" "There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't know where to start! I'm especially amused that you think someone buying you thousand-dollar dresses proves he's your boyfriend, and your saying that you'd 'LET' someone have sex with you if they did that. But leaving those aside, I'd say your major problem is that you might be 'willing to let' Mark have sex with you, but he's no longer willing to spend any time in your company. I think it'd be an excellent idea if you explained to me what happened upstairs just now. That way I'll know if Mark did anything wrong." #2: #1: #3: Chloe exclaimed, "He did EVERYTHING wrong! He just lay on the bed and did nothing. Not even under the covers!" "He was naked?" "Yes! With his thing sticking up." The spectators were already starting to laugh when Julia amused them even more by answering, "Oh no! How terrible for you." As soon the laughter had died down enough, a straight-faced Julia continued, "What did he do then?" "Nothing! He just lay there." "So all this drama is because Mark was lazy?" I couldn't help chuckling at that one. Chloe was proving to be a surprisingly good source of amusement. "No, you don't understand. He did nothing! He insisted I had to take all my clothes off and, you know." "I don't know, that's why I'm asking you." "You KNOW!" Chloe insisted. "You mean climb onto his cock and fuck him?" Good girls don't talk that way, but Chloe's reaction confirmed Julia's suggestion. (Chloe WAS a good girl: good and insane.) Chloe added to her litany of my appalling behavior, "He just lay there counting down five minutes. It was the rudest, most inconsiderate, egotistical and disgusting way to treat a girl that I've ever heard of!" "You're right. I can certainly see why you don't want to be his girlfriend." "Exactly! Ahh, no. That's not right. I DO want to be his girlfriend." "Ahh, yes. The thousand-dollar dresses. I'd forgotten those." "No! Not because of them. Because I LOVE him!" "So during this five minutes that Mark was lying on the bed doing nothing, was he grabbing hold of your tits, or sticking his hands up your dress, or anything bad like that?" "NO! I told you already. He was doing NOTHING! He should've been talking to me nicely, being sweet, telling me how much he cared for me, and all those things. Not just counting down five minutes." "I see. So he never got anywhere near your panties?" "What! Of course not. You're not listening to me. He lay on the bed counting down the stupid five minutes, then he ran down here. His behavior was terrible! I've never heard of anybody being so cold-hearted and immoral. There was no romance or loving or anything. It was just about sex, and that's WRONG!" "He didn't rape you?" "I KEEP telling you that HE JUST LAY THERE! Demanding that I take my own clothes off and get on top of him. That's NOT love; that's dirty sex. He shouldn't treat girls like that! I don't know how you can stay with him. He's a terrible boy!" Chloe had gotten herself worked up over the immorality of it all. Personally I enjoy immorality, but apparently Chloe doesn't, although I doubt her opinion is a well-informed one. Julia answered, "He suits me fine. Now that you've told us all that he didn't molest you in any way, it's time you left. Do you want me to call a taxi or your mother?" "Huh? What do you mean? I don't want to leave. I want to be Mark's girlfriend." Which earned her some chuckles from the bug guys. "But he doesn't want you. You're not his type." #2: "But I love him! Mark, you tell her. You know I love you. I showed you my breasts at school, remember? I don't want to leave; I want to marry you. You're wonderful. You're the only boy I know who doesn't care about my breasts..." Still ranting crap, Chloe rushed at me. I started backing away, but Julia said, "Hold her." #1: Chloe rushed into my chest (more bruises) throwing her arms around me and blubbering stuff about her loving me and other crap that I tried hard not to hear. Behind Chloe's back, Julia pulled out her phone and placed a call, then motioned me to put my arms around Chloe. I did so, then moments later Julia said, "Mrs. Moon, it's Julia Williams here." Chloe screamed, "NO!" and tried to run at Julia. I held onto Chloe tightly, as I knew she was good at cutting off phone calls. Julia moved away, so she could have her conversation. Chloe screamed, cried, pleaded, declared her undying love for me, and generally was a pain in the ass for the minute or so that Julia took. On Julia's return, she waited for a moment of comparative quiet, then told Chloe, "Your mother's coming to get you." "NOOO!" "I just told her that you're emotionally upset and she needed to come get you, but I didn't tell her why. I suggest you calm down so Mark can get dressed, because if your mother sees him in a towel you're going to be in big trouble." "I don't want to leave! I'm staying with Mark. I love him! I'm going to stay with him FOREVER!" #3: "Don't be silly, Chloe, he doesn't want you. You ARE leaving. You don't have a choice about it." After some more anguished sobs and incoherent blubbering, Julia managed to insert, "The five of us all heard you repeatedly complain that Mark didn't do anything to you upstairs. If you attempt to make some ridiculous accusation that Mark tried to rape you, or something like that, then we'll easily turn you into a laughing stock, just like Annette Neumeyer became." #3: Chloe declared, "This is ALL your fault! Mark and I were perfect together, until you ruined everything!" #2: Julia countered, "If you don't behave yourself now and in the future, I'll tell your mother that you came here for sex, and were planning to go to LA with Mark on the weekend." "You wouldn't!" "That depends on whether you behave yourself. I suggest you calm..." "If you tell on me, I'll tell everyone the secret I know about Mark." #1: #3: #2: #1: I could see that Julia was trying to figure out which secret too. Julia looked at me, and I shrugged my ignorance. Julia asked, "What secret?" "That Mark's rich!" Julia and I burst out laughing, with relief and astonishment at her stupidity. "What?" demanded Chloe. "You told me it was very important to keep it secret! So if you tell my mother, I'll tell everyone about Mark." "You silly girl," accurately described Julia. "The reason we wanted to keep it secret was so hundreds of girls wouldn't start throwing themselves at him. If you think making that happen is a good way of getting revenge on him, then he's not going to complain; he's going to be too busy fucking them all, haha." Chloe deflated. Her spirit did anyway; other parts of her retained all their inflatedness. #3: #1: Julia said, "I just had an idea. You want to be Mark's girlfriend, don't you, Chloe?" "Yes!" an excited and rejuvenated Chloe happily agreed. "There might be a way. Hmm, let me think." Chloe looked on with happy anticipation, and me with confusion. I had no idea what Julia was on about, but there was nothing particularly unusual about that. After a couple of seconds Julia said, "I think it'll work. The first thing you need to do is rush upstairs to get dressed, Mark. Come back as quickly as you can. You can let Chloe go, she'll be calm now, won't you, Chloe?" "Yes. What are you going to do, Julia?" "Let me think about it while Mark's getting dressed. Away you go, Mark." I was feeling insecure in just the towel, so I was happy to get dressed. Chloe was in control of herself, so I let go of her to rush upstairs as Julia had instructed. I dressed, thinking about the situation. I couldn't see any way that Julia could fix Chloe, and I was reasonably sure Julia didn't want me to agree to marry her, so I was still puzzled when I returned downstairs. I stood beside Julia. The two anti-bug guys were working again, and Robert was watching a pot of coffee make itself. [Not that it matters much, but while I was away Julia had refused to answer Chloe's questions about what she had in mind. Chloe had also asked what the strangers were doing (it was very electronic, with several pieces of advanced looking equipment). Julia had said, "They're doing some work for Dad. It's not our business, Chloe."] Julia started unveiling her plan after I returned to the kitchen, "Chloe, you love Mark, don't you?" "Oh yes! He's the most amazing boy I've ever met. He..." Chloe blathered on for some time. Especially because when she started slowing down, Julia prompted her to carry on, saying things like, "Don't forget how good he is at sports." Eventually Chloe's answer dragged to an end. Julia said, "I can see you love him, and will do anything for him, but the question is how to convince Mark of that, right?" "Yes. That's right. He's wonderful." "VERY wonderful," corrected Julia. "I'd do anything for him, and I'm sure you would too, right?" "Of course. That's what wives do for husbands. I know we're not married, but I'd do it earlier than I should for Mark, because he's so special." "Yes, he is. I'm glad you understand that. A very large part of the reason Mark rejected you earlier is because you're far too sensitive about your breasts." Turning to me, "That's right, isn't it, Mark?" I could easily see that Julia wanted me to agree, which wasn't hard to do, "Yes indeed." "So, Chloe, all you need to do is show Mark that you're over that problem. That should be easy, because you said you'd do anything for him." "Umm. There's no need for that. I'm happy being Mark's girlfriend already." "That's not the issue. Everybody at school knows you're too sensitive about them. So you have to prove to Mark that you're over that now." "Can't he just take my word?" "Normally he would, but it was only a few minutes ago that you threatened to break your promise to keep his secret. It's hard to take the word of someone who'd break promises so easily, so it'd be best if you prove it." "Oh. How?" "Just copy what so many girls did in class this morning. If so many of them can do it, then it should be easy for you to do it now, because there are only three guys here. I won't count Mark, because he's already seen you." "But I can't do it here Julia, there are men here!" "That's the point. Doing it in an empty room wouldn't prove anything." "But I shouldn't have to do this. It's not right to expose myself like that." "You don't have to do it. I thought I made that clear." Julia stood quietly for a few seconds, while Chloe struggled to put it together. I was similarly confused, but I didn't bother trying to understand. Chloe wasn't worth any more mental effort. After a few seconds, Chloe said, "I don't understand. First you said I had to do it, now you say I don't have to. I don't want to do it." "Then don't. No one made the girls do it in class this morning, and no one's making you now. It's your choice. You do whatever you want, and the consequences will be whatever they will be." "Ahh, what consequences?" "You think about it while we give all the guys coffees." (The coffeemaker had performed its function.) "There are several them in other rooms, so it'll take us a few minutes. Wait here for us." Robert had been putting things on trays - several mugs, milk, sugar, etc. We made up coffees for the two guys in this room, then left to serve everyone else. Chloe was too nervous to be left with two unknown men, so she followed after us. She got appreciative looks from every debugging guy we found, which she didn't appreciate. We were reminded that there was one guy up in my study. On the relatively long walk there, Julia said, "Chloe, you understand that when you make decisions, there are consequences, right?" "I guess." "I'll give you an example. If you want more money and decide to rob a bank, that decision would have consequences, probably your going to jail. Similarly if you decide NOT to do something. Say you were riding home from school and saw an old person on the side of the street having a medical problem. You could run to help the person, or run into a house to call 9-1-1, or you could decide to do nothing and keep riding home. Deciding to do nothing will have consequences, possibly including the old person's death. So deciding to do something, or deciding not to do something, both have consequences that you're responsible for, because it was your decision. Do you understand?" "Sure. That's obvious. Why are you saying that?" We arrived at the study. I'd expected the guy to be doing electronic stuff around the room, but he was working on Julia's computer. The same program was running on all three computers. Listing file names rapidly, with "Passed" alongside each. While he was being served his coffee, I took a guess, and worded my question vaguely, "Are you looking for software that shouldn't be there?" "Including that, yes. There's a whole raft of things they can do if they..." "That's okay. I just wanted my guess confirmed. I wouldn't understand the details anyway." Chloe asked, "What are all these guys doing, Julia?" "I've already told you that it's something for Dad and it's none of our business." "I was just curious. It looks very complicated?" "You've got more important things to think about, like taking responsibility for your decision to do, or not to do, something." "What do you mean?" On the way back to the kitchen, Julia explained, "Every time you're around Mark, you're making decisions about what to do or not to do, and those decisions have consequences. You don't even have to be talking to Mark at the time. When the other girls were exposing themselves, you decided not to join in. If you had..." "Oh no! I couldn't do that. There were lots of boys who would've seen, and that..." "CHLOE! You COULD have done it, but you DECIDED not to. That was your choice. Maybe you think it was an impossible choice, but the other girls didn't have any problem with it. They enjoyed themselves. There was nothing physically stopping you, it was all in your head." We were back in the kitchen, and Robert started putting things away. Julia said, "Your mother should have been here already, so you must have very little time left. What is your decision about doing what Mark wants to see you do?" "I don't understand?" "Are you going to do now what the girls did at school?" "But you said I didn't have to do that?" "Just like you don't have to stop to help a sick, old man at the side of the street. You don't 'have to, ' but there are consequences." "But I don't want to do that. It's wrong." "That's fine then. Not WANTING to do something is a personal decision, and if that's yours, that's fine. Do you want a drink of fruit juice, or something, until your mother arrives? She's very slow." "She has to get a taxi because we don't have a second car. So I don't have to do that thing, you know, the bad thing?" She very weakly mimicked lifting her blouse. "Mark and I have never made you do anything. All your choices are your choices." "I can still be Mark's girlfriend and go shopping with the rest of you?" Chloe's upbeat voice indicated she seemed to believe it was going to happen that way. Until Julia corrected Chloe's bizarre fantasy, "Of course not. We've told you several times what type of girls are going." "But that's not fair!" "It IS fair that Mark gets to choose who goes. He's paying!" "But it's not fair that he's making me do a bad thing." "It's only you that thinks it's bad, Chloe. Every other girl has no problem with it. Or maybe Mark is a bad man, so it'd be a good idea for you to avoid him in the future." #3: "But I want to be his girlfriend." "You want to be the girlfriend of a boy who makes you do bad things. That seems very strange to me?" #2: "No. You don't understand. I LOVE Mark! He's the most fantastic guy I've ever met, and he's the only one that doesn't care about my, you know." "You had a chance to demonstrate your love upstairs, and you DECIDED not to. Most girls show their love in better ways than getting their boyfriend to buy them expensive dresses." "That's not what I mean! You're twisting my words. Mark didn't give me a FAIR chance upstairs either! He just lay on his back looking at his watch. He didn't do anything." "Where on EARTH is your mother? It shouldn't have taken her anywhere near this long to get a taxi here." "She has to get a taxi with a woman driver. There aren't many of those so sometimes we have to wait a while." Julia looked at me and rolled her eyes. To Chloe she asked, "I'm afraid I know the answer, but why a woman driver?" "Because the men taxi drivers are very rude. They stare and make indecent comments." Julia looked at me, saying, "I can't do this any more. I'm going to explode." I said, "I know EXACTLY how you feel!" Chloe asked, "What? Taxi drivers are rude. Everybody knows that." I had an idea, "Let's wait outside, so these guys can finish their job without our being in the way." I shepherded the girls out of the kitchen. At the front door I gallantly motioned, "After you, Chloe." Chloe preceded us. I blocked Julia, stood in the doorway myself, calling, "I've just remembered something, Chloe. Wait there." I closed the door and locked it. "Oh God! She's IMPOSSIBLE!" groaned Julia, leaning against the wall. "I couldn't agree more. Which is the sincerest statement I've made for a very long time. How come you tried again? Getting her to flash the bug guys and all that." "I wasn't trying again, I knew she'd refuse. She was so hysterical I feared she'd make stupid accusations to her mother, who'd then go rushing to the police, and all that nonsense would happen. All I was doing was giving her hope to calm her down, and stalling until her mother arrived. I never expected her mother to take so goddamned long though. Longer than my patience could last. I should have told her Chloe was on death's door, that way she might have risked getting a male taxi driver. Can you believe how screwed up they are?" "Having experienced it, yes I can." Robert came out of the kitchen, "I wondered where you were when I saw her walk out by herself. Are you hiding in here?" Julia said, "Yeah. Mark locked the door to keep us safe. If you ever break up with Ashley, I believe Chloe will likely be free, if you're interested?" "I'd rather shoot myself. Repeatedly if necessary. Let's go back to the kitchen so I can see whether a taxi comes." "Good idea. We'll stand out of sight. My head will explode if I have to listen to any more." We commiserated with each other for a minute or so, Julia and I standing out of Chloe's sight through the window, then Robert informed us, "A taxi just pulled up. A big-breasted woman is getting out. They're talking. The taxi's waiting. Are you going to go out and talk with them?" Julia answered, "{Groan}. I guess I have to, but let's wait a while first. Hopefully they'll leave." We waited a little while, but they didn't leave. Robert told us, "The mother's storming up the path. She looks pissed." Julia said, "Let me talk with her alone. The sight of a male might make things worse, plus I thought this might happen so I have an idea." Robert and I gave the prospect of meeting an angry, older, version of Chloe considerable thought, and decided to defer to Julia's request to leave it to her. The doorknocker was repeatedly slammed into the front door. I said, "Good luck. If you need me I'll be hiding under our bed." That was inaccurate, as Robert and I stood in the kitchen doorway, out of sight but close enough to hear. We heard Julia open the door, immediately followed by a very loud and demanding, "Are you the little slut who tried to force my daughter into showing her breasts to a room full of men?" Julia answered much quieter, "Has Chloe accused me of that?" "She certainly has! Your parents may let you behave like a Jezebel, but you are not going to try to lead my daughter astray. I'm going to call your parents this evening to demand they put a stop to your depravity." "Remember that I called you to come here, Mrs. Moon, so why would I do something objectionable moments before you're due to arrive? I think the two of us should talk with Chloe about this, so we can get to the bottom of it." Mrs. Moon blustered a bit more, but followed Julia as she walked toward Chloe. Robert and I rushed to the corner of the kitchen window to watch. We could see Julia talking to Chloe for a minute or so, with Chloe looking angry (or something similar; we were too far away to see clearly). Then Julia turned to Mrs. Moon and said just a few words, whereupon half of Corvallis heard Mrs. Moon screech "WHAT!" "Good pair of lungs on that woman," observed Robert. Mrs. Moon turned on Chloe and started ripping into her. We couldn't hear the words, but it was unmistakable that Mrs. Moon was incredibly angry at Chloe. Chloe collapsed, falling to the ground and crying while her mother kept abusing her. Julia left them to it (a good decision, I thought), walking back inside. When Julia joined us, I asked her, "What on Earth did you say to cause that major blowup?" Julia explained, "I thought Chloe might try to cause trouble by making an accusation about us to her mother. I'd already thought about what I could say to derail it, although I much preferred not to. I checked and double-checked with Chloe that she wanted to start making accusations, but she stuck to it, getting even more indignant. She thought she'd totally lost you, and was lashing out by pretending to be full of righteous indignation about how badly we'd treated her. The stupid girl had lost LA, but she hadn't lost you permanently. If she'd worked hard on changing her attitude, we would've helped her, but she preferred to cause trouble. -- "I could see that Chloe and her mom could easily get work themselves into a frenzy, creating even more serious accusations, so I had to stop them. I told Mrs. Moon that I had invited Chloe to show her breasts to the four guys inside, but only because Chloe had been asking me to do things like that for her recently, 'Just a few days ago she got me to bring my boyfriend into a girls' bathroom at school, where she'd stripped completely topless in one of the stalls. He had no idea what she was about to do, and there were a dozen girls who were listening through the bathroom door when she jumped out to flash herself at him.' The guilt was all over Chloe's face, so that was the end of her pretending moral outrage at us. I tried to suggest they send Chloe to counseling, but I don't think Mrs. Moon was listening, so I came back inside." I wouldn't have thought it possible five minutes ago, but I felt sorry for Chloe. The sad, stupid, screwed up, money-hungry girl. One of the sad things (there were many) was that what I knew of her basic personality was that she was a nice girl. Unfortunately the other 90% of her personality was a screwed-up mess. ------- Some 'extracts' from the future, jumping ahead of the current chronological point of my autobiography. Julia warned her parents in case the Moons called, but they didn't. Julia had a talk with Vanessa and my mom during their real estate session that evening. Julia was particularly interested to know whether some sort of obligatory counseling could be arranged, as Julia considered that Chloe's parents were probably to blame for Chloe's being psychological damaged (they were, and Chloe was). Our moms' opinions boiled down to, "If her parents worshipped an orbiting teapot and had done a tenth of the damage to Chloe that you've described, then action could be taken. But because their attitude is Christian, it's therefore moral and right, so no one will intervene." (The "orbiting teapot" is a reference by Vanessa to "Russell's Teapot". If you're interested, google it; you might be amused by the point it's making.) Chloe never returned to our school, as the Moons felt their daughter's going so far astray had to be the result of evil influences (actually it was the result of a teenage boy's desire for tits, but that was undoubtedly the same thing in the Moons' eyes). I later found out that she transferred to a girls-only Christian school. I was surprised she hadn't been in one from the beginning, but it was because the school was more expensive. Because Chloe's mental health and moral purity required prompt action, the Moons were willing to pay the extra. You can imagine how little Chloe's attitude to guys was made healthier and more realistic by her going to a girls-only Christian school. Clearly Chloe needed some serious counseling, so the Moons paid for breast reduction surgery. That did nothing to cure Chloe's already fully entrenched attitudes toward guys, and (in my opinion), criminally removed two wonderful breasts from the world. I had trouble imagining how a surgeon could 'destroy' (by rendering ordinary, plus scars) such wonderful breasts, but the surgeon was responsible for only the physical loss. The wonderfulness of Chloe's breasts had long since been destroyed by her parents, who'd also ruined what should've been the wonderful life of a beautiful girl. The Moons felt strongly that a woman's place was at home, but their daughter's mental health was at stake, so Mrs. Moon had to get a job to cover the school fees and surgery financing, as their medical insurance didn't cover it. There was no possibility of their trying to pay for counseling, but they prayed especially hard for Chloe, so that was fine. After our not seeing Chloe at school for a couple of days, Julia called Chloe's home. Mrs. Moon firmly told Julia not to call again. Most of the above information was obtained by Carol sweet-talking Chloe's 7th grade brother for the news on Chloe. [[That was the last contact any of us had with the family until I was powerful enough to undo all the damage that'd been done to Chloe (all the Chloes, in all the w-dimensions she was in). In the course of writing this autobiography, I am researching the events I'm writing about. When my writing was approaching this point in time, some of my minds were sent to check out the situation with Chloe. Finding out how sad that was, and being partially responsible, I took corrective actions. I didn't fix her parents' heads, they being largely irrelevant now; I just gave the Chloes an 'insight' that her breasts in specific, and sex in general, should bring happiness. She now believes that strongly enough to be immune to her parents' crap. Her breasts will grow back to their original size, with all the surgery damage removed, including to permit her to breastfeed her babies when she has them. Hopefully she'll have some large-breasted daughters who'll ridicule their maternal grandparents' beliefs. I will confess that I'm taking a liberty with one of the Chloes, by letting her demonstrate her new attitude with me at this exact moment. I'll have finished writing this autobiography before my session with Chloe will have got far so you won't be reading about what it's like to have sex with her, but so far it's going great, which is how it should be.]] ^ One loose end was that I'd been puzzled by Chloe's inconsistent behavior toward me, the best example of which was her stripping topless in the girls' bathroom at school, but not undoing a single button during the five minutes countdown, when she'd known I was a millionaire. The explanation isn't complicated, just a little long. First, she was a girl who had dreams of happiness so strong that they were almost a physical longing, because there was so much unhappiness in her and her parents' lives, but she didn't have the first clue about how to make any of her dreams come true. Many of those dreams were pinned on meeting her vision of Mr. Right, who'd pluck her out of her current miserable life and deposit her into his wonderful existence. But she was her own worst enemy when it came to making a relationship with a male work (actually her parents had long since been her worst enemies, but you know what I mean). That strong desire to find her Mr. Right, then her destructive inability to make a relationship work, caused plenty of inconsistent behaviors. Second, she was conflicted by several opposing forces: She desired money greatly, but she'd been taught greed was a sin, by the same people who taught her to desire money so much. She needed an emotional friendship with a male, but she'd been taught to fear them. She desired sex; it is a biological imperative after all. I'm sure you know what her parents had taught her about that! (Including that avoiding burning in Hell for all eternity had two essential prerequisites: she had to be married to the guy, and the lights had to be off.) As far as I can tell, Christianity believes that having fun is Bad, and having it with the opposite sex is Evil! This creates a problem for girls Chloe's age, because "having fun" for them largely revolves around the opposite gender. A group of teenage girls in private will spend a considerable proportion of their time talking about boys and boy-related issues. Chloe had no understanding or experience with boys, some appalling beliefs, strong desires, and a whole bunch of influences pushing her in opposing directions. Mix in all the weirdness associated with me having multiple girlfriends, and there was almost no chance of Chloe behaving consistently. She also had virtually no understanding of me personally. At the dinner after bowling, she would've given her pizza to me, Robert, or another boy if any more had been with us. Her action was merely a weak reaching out attempt by her, to make some sort of emotional connection to a boy, that being something she was unable to do in normal conversation. She didn't know me worth a damn, so as soon as I showed emotional interest in her, all she saw - and wanted to see - was her fairytale image of a knight in shining armor coming to make her happy. Showing me her breasts in the bathroom had been safe enough, as it wasn't going to lead to our having sex. She did it because it was early enough in our 'relationship' that she hadn't seen that her fantasy image of me was wrong. She was effectively showing her breast to her knight in shining armor, rather than Mark Anderson. The five-minute climb-on-my-cock countdown was an entirely different situation. Chloe had gotten to know me a lot better by then, and the fantasy image she had of me had been badly damaged, such as by my having multiple lovers, fingering Diana's pussy just before, and similar non-knightly activities. Plus, unlike the bathroom tit-flash event, Chloe knew that burn-in-Hell sex was going to follow immediately after, and she wasn't able to do that, although she would have been more flexible on that point had I proved my commitment to her by buying her some designer dresses first. Chloe's entire relationship with me was one inconsistency after another, culminating in the high-pressure final scene. The pressure also came from the five minutes timeframe, the must-be-lovers-by-Tuesday timeframe, my having millions of dollars, and my having other lovers being repeatedly referred to. The pressure was too much for Chloe to handle, as she had a particularly low capability of handling pressure, so her various inculcated beliefs and psychoses emerged. ^ In closing the topic of Chloe, I'll mention a couple of amusing thoughts: First, another example of her inconsistency. After years of buying secondhand dresses, she was salivating at the prospect of going to Rodeo Drive. In her dreams, her knight in shining armor was standing next to a very well-dressed Chloe. After many years of having to make do with very cheap clothes, Julia introduced Chloe to the knowledge that I was rich by talking about a shopping trip to Rodeo Drive. My buying beautiful dresses for her symbolized her dream-life coming true. Her immediate next thought after beautiful new dresses was getting me to pay for her breast reduction surgery (she wasn't aware that it was anathema to me). Reduction surgery was something she wanted very, very much, and had been unsuccessfully saving toward for a long time. Chloe planned to ask me to pay for her surgery as soon as we were committed to each other, something she had been sure wouldn't take long, now that my becoming rich made me absolutely perfect for her. In her dream/fantasy, that'd probably happen right after the trip to LA. It never occurred to Chloe that such surgery would ruin the fit of the designer dresses she'd bought days before. Beautiful dresses were one dream, breast reduction was another dream, and the two dreams weren't checked for inter-dream consistency. Second, during the five-minute countdown, Chloe was desperately waiting for any excuse to abrogate her responsibility, so it would've been very easy for me to pressure her into undressing and getting on my cock. I could've used almost any threat to 'force' her, or any promise to make it justifiable. Had I, for example, ordered her to stand still while I undressed her, she would've complied. After all, I was much bigger and stronger than her, so she was physically helpless to stop me, although she would have endlessly and annoyingly protested my actions, to reinforce her opinion of her own reluctance. After she was naked, if I'd lain on my back on the bed and told her, "If you prove your love by getting on top of me, I will buy you some beautiful dresses in LA," then she would've leaped for me. Once on top of me, there was no way she was going to do the fucking. She would have flustered around, been reluctant to touch my 'thing', not known exactly where to sit, been unable to hold it upright to sit on it, etc. Even though the engineering complexity of "put the round peg in the round hole" was utterly minimal, Chloe wouldn't have been able to achieve that, and her failure would've been accompanied by loud and endless complaining, protesting and denying. No way was she going to take responsibility for SEX! (Not unless I'd promised marriage first, then she would've consummated my promise blindingly fast, to make it 'impossible' for me to get away.) Had I taken responsibility for the sex, e.g., by holding her up, positioning my cock, then pulling her down onto me, she would then have sat there, saying, "There, I've done it now." I would've said, "You've done nothing yet, other than remove your hymen, which I never made an issue about. I told you that seats on my plane are for my lovers, and so far we aren't lovers. All you've done is half of a single in-and-out. You need to do a great deal more to come close to being counted as a lover." "But I gave you my VIRGINITY! That's a very precious, blah, blah..." ad nauseum. Getting Chloe to move her hips back and forth would have been a major drama: "I'm too sore. I've already given you everything, so there's no need to do anything else." "I don't know what to do. I've never done this before!" "It's wrong for a woman to do sexual things. That's what the man does." "No, I can't move any faster. I'm not very good at sports stuff." "I feel very uncomfortable sitting up like this, it's too revealing and indecent. I want to get under the covers. I'm a good girl, and modesty is a virtue, you know." Getting her to do every little thing would've been a succession of annoying battles ("What do you mean 'bounce'? I can't do THAT! It'd make my, you know, wobble."). Her complaints/denials/refusals/etc. would've started affecting me like fingernails on a blackboard. After a few more minutes, fingernails on a blackboard would have been a welcome way of drowning out her crap. The only way I would've gotten anything like pleasure out of the experience would've been to flip her onto her back and fuck her myself, while she lay there like a log. And YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW what would have happened if I'd tried to lick her between her legs! That'd be WRONG - in flashing, red, capital letters, with a screaming warning siren. She would NEVER have allowed it. Burning in Hell for all eternity is too good for people who do UNTHINKABLE things like that. Had I gagged her and tied her spread-eagle on the bed (which surely would have been tempting by now, especially the gagging part), and then licked her, she wouldn't have enjoyed it, thereby defeating the purpose of the exercise. I'm sure you've got the idea by now: sex with Chloe would've been very fucking pathetic fucking. It would've annoyed me beyond all reason, and I would've hated it. My decision to do nothing other than count down the time was a DAMNED good decision! It saved me a HUGE amount of grief. By way of contrast, if I'd told Ava, "You've got five minutes to undress and get on my cock," Ava would be in midair - clothes flying off and yelling "Geronimo!" - even before I'd gotten halfway through my sentence. She would've landed on my cock, been rocking her hips in at least four different directions, and yelling, "Ride 'em cowboy!" LONG before I recovered the breath to say, "Four minutes forty five." And that's presuming I even got to start telling Ava, "You've got five minutes..." If Ava and I had been alone in a bedroom, chances are she would have already thrown me on the bed and been pulling her clothes off with my cock in her mouth. Which reminds me that I didn't mention what Chloe's willingness to perform that particular oral act would have been. I suspect you can work it out for yourself. ^ [[Originally - before we started merging - there were a very large number of different Mark Andersons across the W-Dimension. We didn't exist in every w-dimension instance. In some, for example, one of my maternal-side would-be ancestors died as a boy in a coal mine accident in Wales 250 years ago. There are a similarly large number, but not total coverage, of Chloes. So in some w-dimensions there is a Mark Anderson, but no Chloe Moon, or vice versa. One of the consequences of there being so many copies of a person, is that for the purpose of writing this autobiography, we had to choose to follow the ascendancy of a representative single one of me (initially called #1 herein, later changed to #2 to make the numbering scheme consistent). It would've been absurd to make this autobiography 'complete', as that'd need 'countless' repeats of the near-identical lives of all of the single-minded Mark Andersons, then countless/2 near-repeats for every double-minded me, then countless/4 for quad-minded me, etc. There was a very good reason for choosing the Mark-mind that we did, but that can wait until later. The representative me that we made the focus of this autobiography had a Chloe Moon in the w-dimension he is in at this chronological point in our autobiography. That's the Chloe that you've just read about. But there's nothing special about her compared to all the other Chloe Moons. Across all of the Mark Andersons, we've had experiences with many different Chloes. That's how I know what it was like to have sex with her if I'd done the five-minute countdown differently. The Chloe I'm having sex with now wasn't the Chloe mentioned in the text above, she's just a Chloe that happened to be one of the Chloes who is conveniently alone at home while I'm writing my autobiography. One of my bodies is having sex with one of the Chloes and all of me are enjoying it. As is the Chloe, naturally. Literally "naturally", as her parents' brainwashing has been removed. [I just had a thought, and checked a few Mrs. Moons. As I surmised, Chloe's parents' sex-life is appalling. They set an extraordinarily low standard at the beginning of their married life, and they've had a couple of decades to fall into an even duller routine. Picking your nose is more fun than their sex-lives! Seriously! Even if you're not very good at picking your nose, it's STILL more fun than the duty-bound, perfunctory, sorry-excuse-for-sex they barely do, in order to meet their perceived obligations to each other. I'm glad I've saved Chloe from that.] I'll return to the point about this autobiography being from the point of view of a representative one of us, just to explain the "representative" is a somewhat misleading word. In other w-dimensions I had quite different lives. In some, for example, Dad stupidly had an affair while Mom was pregnant with me. Mom caught him, left him, returned to England and divorced him. His every attempt to beg for forgiveness was shot down, as Mom cursed herself for stupidity trusting him in the first place. I was born and raised in England, so there was no Carol, Donna or Julia in my life! Mom later remarried and had one or more children, but clearly my life was dramatically different. In most of those lives I didn't commit suicide, and in none of them did I commit suicide during déjà vu. As a less dramatic difference, in some other w-dimensions, American Mark Andersons lost sight in one eye to a bully when I was twelve. My family and the Williamses were considerably impressed by my ability to regenerate it! (Fortunately the damage hadn't been visible to the casual observer, so it didn't cause trouble with 'the authorities'). You get the idea: lots of different things had happened to different Marks in different w-dimensions.]] ------- Chapter 201: Giving Away Big Checks Monday, May 9, 2005 (Continued) I said, "Poor Chloe," as we watched her mother drag the Jezebel into the taxi, and be driven off. Robert left us to do his own stuff. Julia and I wandered upstairs to her room, talking. Right at the top of my list of things to talk about was: "I am VERY sorry I ruined your plan for helping Chloe. It's just that..." "Stop, Mark! What you did was WONDERFUL! I am very, very happy that you showed the strength of character to stand up for yourself despite it going against my plan. I'm delighted that you're toughening up. Yes, I would've liked to help Chloe, but helping you is millions of times more important. A month ago you would've cravenly done whatever Chloe wanted, and you would've apologized to her nonstop while doing it, but today you were decisive and staunch even though you thought you were letting me down. You spent longer on Chloe than I thought she was worth, but I still think it's amazing how much you've changed in just a few weeks. I'm DELIGHTED by you." I knew she was right, but I thought I could have done better. When I tried to talk about it, the moment I said, "But", Julia cut me off. Other than more praises of me, one of her points was, "She threatened us, which was very stupid of her. But it's not all bad news. Her mother now thinks Chloe gets a sexual thrill out of flashing her tits at guys. With her mother's attitude to breasts, she's bound to think that needs urgent action. Hopefully she'll rush Chloe into badly needed counseling. I'll talk with Mom later, to see if there's any way we can make sure Chloe gets help, because what her parents are doing to her must be child abuse." "I agree with that. The whole female taxi driver thing still makes me laugh. With horror, if you know what I mean." "Yeah. Her daughter needed her, but she still waited for a female driver. Enough about Chloe. Should I invite Katelin on our trip tomorrow?" That appeared to be the end of that, so I let the topic change. "I guess so. I'd better call the company to confirm the seven-seater plane and arrange to pay the deposit. It's a pity Mackenzie's parents wouldn't allow me to take Diana and Claire on the trip. Not that we have enough seats, or that it makes sense in other ways either, but they were fun to play with in the parking lot." "You can do the same to the rest of us whenever you want, so what makes doing it with them so special?" "That they're sisters is sexy. On second thought, that's not so important, as I'd still have enjoyed it whether they were sisters or not. It's not because they're prettier than you or my other girls, because they're not. I guess there's the thrill of playing with a girl I haven't played with before, plus the 'Corruption of Innocence' aspect. That sounds like the name of a melodramatic movie. I don't know for certain that they're innocent, but they both seemed that way. It's strange, because I know I can have better sex with you or my others, but I still like playing with them." "Yes, 'strange' is one word for it. I've never had an urge to do anything like that to boys, so your urge must be another of those illogical male behaviors." Julia smiled at me, confirming it was a tease. -- "Never mind. You enjoy it, so that's fine. I'm reminded about something I wanted to tell you. Your talk with Diana about how she has to behave around you took about ten times longer than it needed. She was already eating out of your hand, so you just had to tell her what you wanted. Don't lay out your reasons step-by-tiny-step. I know you're trying to be gentle, but it's gentler just to tell her what you want than to make her concentrate on a slow, careful series of logical steps. With a long process like that, she would have worried about the destination, or that she'd make a mistake, or that you must think she's dumb. When you're already in control of someone, just tell them what you want, okay?" "Okay. I'll try to remember. Maybe I treated her so cautiously because you've shown me how deadly little girls can be, haha. Chloe learned that the hard way, after making that accusation against you." "Can't say I've ever thought of myself as deadly before. I've got to go downstairs shortly, to be deadly to some carrots and other vegetables for dinner. What are your plans for this evening?" "Umm. Start by calling the airplane people to confirm the plane, get their bank account number to pay the deposit tomorrow and ask about booking a hotel room for the other girls. Prof suggested being cheap with them, so I can put them into as few cheap rooms as possible, right?" "Definitely. You and your three main girls in your room, the seat-fillers in a lower-quality room. It'll do them good to see that our room is much better than theirs. It'll give them something to aspire to." I asked, "I'd call them 'bed-warmers' rather than 'seat-fillers', and I'm amused by your status game, but that's all good. Won't we need to book a separate room for Carol though? I guess we'd say it was for Carol and Ava, to make it look better. Or do you think we can get away with only pretending to book another room?" "Neither. Our room is a suite isn't it?" "Ahh. I do remember something like that. I'm not sure what that means though?" "You'll see when we get there, but it includes having more than one bed. The four of us can quite legitimately stay in a suite. We'll tell the other girls that you'll be in one bed with me mostly, and Carol in the other with Ava mostly." "That's perfect then!" "Yes it is. I'll make sure I tell Ava that the four of us will be in a suite, as that'll get her excited about getting you and Carol together. For the other three girls you just need one more cheap room. They can rough it by sleeping in one bed together if they have to." Julia left me to go be deadly to some vegetables. I went to my study to ask the anti-bugger whether I could receive an email on my computer. "Sure. I'll be finished here in a couple of minutes, then it's all yours. No sign of anything improper. Is this your desk, with the two 30-inch panels?" (I'd pointed at them when I'd asked about receiving an email, "on my computer.") "Yeah, that's where I work." "It's an unusual setup, having the two computers with the screens side by side like that, and one of the machines hardly being used." I didn't know how he knew that, but he obviously did. "I work somewhat unusually. I like the two large screens though; they're a pleasure to use." "They're impressive all right." I excused myself to go back to the bedroom to make the call. Everything was easy: the seven-seater was still available, so it was allocated to us. The extra hotel room was booked while I was on hold as it only took a few seconds, and they said they'd send me their account details for my bank wire. The whole thing took very little time. Known I was going to write some checks, I'd kept my checkbook with me when I'd dropped my schoolbag at home, leaving my bag being my excuse to walk my sisters inside so I could tell Donna that I wasn't going to be earning $2 million per day ever again. I pulled out my checkbook now and started writing. The complete profit split, with my share adjusted because Prof had conveniently won more than we'd planned, were: Person: Pre-Tax; After-Tax Me: $6,700,000; $4,466,667 (Note) F & S: $1,000,000; $666,667 V & P: $2,500,000; $1,666,667 (Note) Andrew: $150,000; $100,000 Robert: $150,000; $100,000 Julia: $300,000; $200,000 Carol: $300,000; $200,000 Total: $11,100,000; $7,400,000 Note: $1,000,000 to be subtracted for Emergency Funds. I wrote the checks for Andrew, Robert, Julia and Carol. For Mom and Dad's check, I made the amount $1,005,000, to return their $5,000 investment. Altogether, it was nearly two million dollars in checks; a new record for a single day's expenditure for me. I particularly admired Mom and Dad's check, and suspected they would too. I put them all in my pocket with Julia's on top so I could pull it out easily. I went downstairs to the kitchen. Julia was doing food preparation work, which is something that I'd not normally interrupt, but I couldn't resist saying, "Looks like you're doing a good job." "Not really. It's just something simple so we can hit the road quickly when Mom gets home." "Nonetheless I'm impressed, and I think you should be rewarded appropriately." I pulled her check out of my pocket and passed it to her. Julia knew what it really was for, of course - it'd be terrible if she thought she was going to get $300,000 every time she cooked dinner! - but liked the little joke. She admired her check for a few seconds, then said, "YOU'RE amazing! It's incredible that you can earn as much as you did." "Your father helped me a GREAT deal. I couldn't have earned even as much as you're holding by myself." "I'm sure Dad was very helpful, but he wasn't 'amazing'. There's no one like you." "And I wouldn't have achieved a fraction of what I have without your motivation and help." We had a mutual admiration conversation, which Julia won. After which I said, "One of the first things I've learned about having more money is that I have to go to the bank a lot more often. I have to go again tomorrow lunchtime to wire our deposit to the airplane company because I don't have a credit card yet, and to drop off the credit card forms Mom and Dad have to sign this evening. Seeing as I'm going to be in the area, do you want me to take your check to your bank and deposit it for you?" "Yes thanks. On second thought, no. I've never deposited a check like this before, and I've got nothing planned for lunchtime tomorrow, so I'll come with you and deposit it myself." "Okay. I've also got checks for Robert and Andrew, but I'm not sure when to hand them over. The sooner the better from The Boys' point of view I'm sure, but I'll be going home soon and I think I'd better spend the night there, because Mom's going to be bent out of shape when I tell her about today's fight." "Today's massacre, you mean. What I saw wasn't a fight. None of them came close to even slightly hurting you, but you crippled each of them as easily as you wanted." "I don't think Mom's reaction will be as confident..." "I'll come with you. I'll finish making dinner, grab something for myself, and then come with you to provide moral support. It won't take me long. Is that okay?" "Sure. Thanks. Mom tends to get very worked up at such times, so having you there might help. So what about The Boys' checks? Should I leave them here or take them with me, for another day, or what?" Julia suggestion was, "I don't think you need to wait for Mom and Dad, because this is your gift to The Boys. Even though they're twins and get bundled together often, there's no need to do everything simultaneously with them. Give Robert his check now. I doubt Andrew will be home anytime soon, so leave his check with Robert. That way Andrew will probably get it tonight and you can still thank him verbally next time you see him. The checks are for 150 thou', right?" "Yep. That's what we agreed, isn't it?" "Yeah. I'm just being nosey. I'm fairly sure they've got no idea it's coming. Let's go give Robert his one now. I want to see his face." Julia was getting excited at the prospect, and there was no compelling reason why not, so we went in search of Robert. On the way we encountered some of the debugger guys, and I realized I should ask, "Umm, excuse me. My car is one of the ones you guys are checking, and I have to leave soon..." Julia interrupted, "I asked them to do it immediately, when I handed over your keys." One of the bug guys said, "I think it's been done, but ask the boss. He's in your backyard at the moment." So we went out the back door, while I wondered what he'd be doing outside. They were 'sweeping' (I guess that's the right word) the exterior walls of the house. My car had been done, was reported as being clean, and I was given my keys back. He added, "We'll be finishing in about half an hour. We haven't found anything so far today, so it looks like you've got nothing to worry about for now." "Ahh, why did you add, 'for now'?" "Because whoever you were worried about could come back tomorrow. We can only check the situation now." "Of course. Silly me. I didn't think first." Julia said, "Don't worry about it, Mark. Let's go talk with Robert." On the way to find Robert, Julia said, "That 'for now' was probably his standard salesmanship line that he says to everyone. Making us worry enough to invite him back is good for his business." "Good point." We found Robert in The Boys' study (which the Williamses called "The Library", because "The Boys' Study" was a facetious nickname for the Guys' Room.) I asked him, "Do you want to take a break from schoolwork to play some high-stakes 8-ball?" "Not with you I don't! There's obviously a story behind that question, especially with the look on Julia's face?" "I thought you might enjoy some high-stakes gambling now that you can afford it," as I passed his check over. He looked at it, then looked again! His eyes bugged open. "What's this for?" I had thought how to word this carefully, for maximum effect, "I figure you deserve a very large compensation for the terribly onerous task of living with Julia." "You BEAST!" Julia let go my arm so she could start hitting it with both of hers. I defended myself bravely, but she got several more punches and slaps in. When she'd fully expressed her righteous indignation (there'd been a lot of that happening around here recently), she hugged my arm again, explaining to Robert, "It's for being helpful to Mark's business, guarding the houses during the day, and things like that." I agreed, "Yeah, that'd be the second reason." Which earned me another little slap on the arm. Then we had to do the I-Can't-Accept-This thing, with Robert saying, "It's a small fortune. It's ridiculous." I gave him a nicely mathematical reason, "You contributed your time and effort to help me earn what I earned. You know I earned that in just a few days. If we total up all the hours everyone put in, your fair share is a lot of money." He was strangely unconvinced, "No way were the few little things I did worth this much." Julia tried, "Dad and Mom have already approved the amount. If you argue they'll give us your account numbers and we'll deposit it ourselves." "How can they think such a huge amount of money is fair?" Julia said, "I know. It should be reduced to a tiny fraction of that, because of the pleasure you get from living with me." I said, "There's a real reason which is no laughing matter. The last business I did got a bit worrisome, making it a good example of something that I worry about fairly frequently. Some of the stuff I can do is rather weird, and it's possible that being associated with me might result in your being caught up in unpleasant stuff. That payment is larger than seems normal because the situation is more worrying than it would normally be." I could see that he'd gotten the point, and I'd sobered the mood. -- "Prof and I have talked about that risk. Not much, but he's certainly got a much better appreciation of the issue than I have. I'm just a schoolboy, so what do I know about how the world works? He says that check is appropriate, and I'm sure he's right, so bank it before Julia uses the money to buy the new dresses she tells me she so badly needs." I'd won the argument. There was some more conversation, but it was just exchanges of appreciation. I ended by handing Robert the check for Andrew, saying, "Here's Andrew's check. Julia and I will be going back to my place shortly, so we'll probably miss seeing him tonight. I'll thank him in person the next time I see him, but I thought he might like his check sooner rather than later. Can you please tell him the three main reasons for it: my appreciation, the worrying stuff, and having to live with Julia. Not necessarily in that order." "Haha. I'll be sure to pass that on. I never imagined Julia having a boyfriend who'd be giving us money like this." I said, "The boyfriend never imagined it either. Oh, I just remembered that you have to pay tax on that. The nice Government will be taking $50,000 off you." "Fuck! Is that right?" "'Fraid so. Your father will tell you all about it. You'd better tell Andrew that too, in case he goes out and spends all of his, because then he'd have trouble paying his tax." "That sucks." "Yeah, big time." Julia said, "Mark and I will be in the kitchen for a few minutes, then we're going to his place. The security guys said they'll be finishing in about fifteen minutes or so, but we'll be gone by then. Can you tell Mom where I'll be, please?" "Sure. Thanks again, Mark." "Thanks for your help." Julia and I went back to the kitchen, she quickly finished making her family's dinner, made herself a small snack (she eats a ridiculously small amount of food), then we headed off to my place. On the way home, I wondered about giving Carol her check in front of Donna. Donna would expect to be treated equally, and would be $300,000 worth of disappointed when she wasn't. Even at twelve, Donna knew money was very useful, because you can buy running shoes and horses with it. Carol wasn't getting the money because she was my sister, but because we considered her my wife, something it wouldn't do any harm to remind Donna of. I decided not to avoid Donna when I handed Carol her check, but I would have to say a few words about the differences between wives and non-wives. When we got home, Carol was working in the kitchen and there was no sign of Donna. When we walked in, Carol immediately said, "I've taken the phone off the hook. It never stopped ringing with people wanting to talk about the fight. I thought you'd prefer I cook dinner than gossip on the phone?" "You got that right, and as a reward, have this." I passed over her check. Dinner cooking was put on hold while Carol expressed her admiration of me. Julia joined in, I insisted it went both ways, and there was lots of kissing and other expressions of affection. Carol was too nervous about being responsible for the whole family's dinner to be lured into the bedroom, so the "expressions of affection" were limited, resulting in the celebration ending after only a few minutes. I remembered to mention that the Government would take a third (Carol thought that sucked), and Julia invited Carol to come to the bank with us at lunchtime tomorrow to deposit it. I was eventually shooed out of the kitchen, so I left the girls there while I went to change into my gi and do some homework until I thought to pop back into the kitchen to put the phone back on the hook but unplug it from the wall, which was far more covert. I didn't want Mom or Dad to spot that the phone was disabled in case they enabled it, because then they might hear about the fight before I'd eased them into it gently. Dad normally gets home at the same time every day, unless they're doing overtime at his work, which isn't often. Mom got home promptly too, so she could go mansion shopping. When Mom and Dad were together, I causally mentioned, "I went to the bank today to get a checkbook for myself. One of the first checks I wrote was to return your $5,000 investment. I've got it somewhere." I patted and searched each of my pockets, attempting to look absent-mindedly uncaring about the check. While I was doing that I added, "Prof and I earned a bit more than we expected, so I added some of the spare money to your check. Ahh, here it is." I held it up so Mom and Dad could both read it. "What the f... , fudge," from Dad. | "What!" from Mom. Then Mom added, "Oh, that's the Emergency Fund. For a second there you had my heart pounding, Mark. That's still a mighty impressive looking check though." "I'll say!" agreed Dad. "I've never seen a check that large before. What a pity the money can't be spent." I was used to thinking that the Anderson half of the Emergency Fund money would come out of my share, so I hadn't realized they'd assume it was for that. That meant I could have some more fun. "I've got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?" Dad said, "Good first. Anything involving a million dollars I want to hear the good news first, even if it doesn't last long, haha." "Okay. The good news is that million ISN'T the Emergency Fund money; I've still got that in my account. The money you're holding is spare money. It's yours to spend on my groceries and any less essential items." They had trouble believing it. I couldn't imagine why. I reassured them, "Seriously! It's SPARE money. It's not needed for the Emergency Fund, for the new house, or anything else. It's all yours, to do whatever you want with. Actually, it's not quite all yours; that's the bad news part. You have to pay tax on it, so you'll lose a third. Prof can give you all the details about that." "That sucks!" declared Dad. "Yep, that's pretty much everyone's opinion. I gave smaller checks to Carol, Julia and her brothers, and everyone agrees that it sucks; with me agreeing even more than the rest of you. That's just the way it has to be." Prof had allowed for tax when he worked out how much we were going to bet, so it really made no difference to how much everyone ended up with. That didn't stop it sucking though! Mom asked, "So this is just like receiving a million dollar bonus at work, right?" "I guess so, but you should talk with Prof. He's set it all up with an accountant, and he can tell you what you need to know. About the only thing I know about tax is that it sucks. You'll end up with about two-thirds of a million, which you can use for anything you want. Dad could buy himself a decent lawnmower so he doesn't have to keep tinkering with ours. And you can go visit your parents whenever you want, or fly them out here. It's all yours. Have fun!" "It's not needed to buy the house, furnish it, or anything like that?" "I'm pretty sure I've got that covered, provided you women don't go over the budget." Julia and Carol were hanging off my arms, so Julia heard that little reminder. Julia said, "Mark gave me a hard time for getting carried away. We'll talk about that when we're driving around tonight, but if we try to buy a property that's too expensive, Mark's going to make me pay for the balance out of my share." "You've got some money too?" "Yes. Mark gave Carol and me $300,000 each, with another three hundred thousand shared between my brothers." "Aww," moaned Carol. "I was hoping you wouldn't tell them. I was going to ask for an increase in my allowance, haha." "Speaking of things like that," I said, "the bank needs my parents to guarantee my credit card. Now seems like an excellent time to ask you to complete the forms. I'll go get them." I'd left them in my bag, so I got them from my room and returned them to the kitchen. Mom and Dad threw caution to the wind, and agreed to do the necessary paperwork. There was talk about what to do with the money. Boring things like paying off the mortgage on our current house. There wasn't much left on it - chicken feed by my current standards - but Mom and Dad both loved the idea of getting rid of it. Mom definitely wanted all of us to go visit her family in England sometime during the summer vacation. Dad didn't have any real ideas. He said, "It'd be nice to have newer cars, but most of what I want will be in the new house. One thing that would be nice is going on some good vacation trips. And maybe when you kids are a bit older, Fely and I can take an extra week off work and go somewhere just the two of us." "Yeah," I agreed, "you could go to a Superbowl, Dad." Dad laughed happily, Mom snorted. Mom asked me, "You didn't give anything to Donna?" "No. Carol didn't get money because she was my sister, but because she was my," I held up my ring finger, as I was too self-conscious or paranoid to say "wife" out loud. "Same for Julia, of course." I didn't mention that The Boys were paid for the risk they took. It's not a good idea to tell a mother than her son is at risk. Now that Mom was in a very good mood, I said, "Mom, did Julia call you to tell you I was in a fight at school?" "Yeah she did. I meant to ask you about that, but you distracted me with that check. She said it was all over and you weren't touched. What happened?" Mom's good mood lasted for another ten seconds. I've already described that conversation, so I'll skip it now. Carol announced that dinner was ready. The food was good, but the atmosphere was strained because of the emotional fallout from my argument with Mom. Fortunately Mom was in a hurry to go mansion shopping, so dinner didn't last long. Carol had asked Mom and Julia if she could accompany them, which was fine, so after they rushed their dinner, they rushed out the door to go collect Vanessa. I had a few minutes before my Aikido lesson, so I showed Dad the two techniques I knew to get knives out of people's hands. While I was impressing him, I took the opportunity to say, "Can you have a talk with Mom tonight please, about getting her to stop being such a pain over fights. I didn't rile those guys up today, didn't badmouth them or anything like that. I was standing at the urinal minding my own business when they came after me. It was entirely because they were jealous, and the only way I can stop that happening is to stop being so successful. Does Mom want me to start flunking some exams so I don't look like such a nerd, and to give all my money away? It's going to be even worse after news of my being rich gets out because even more girls are going to chase me, and I don't want to keep having these emotional scenes with Mom." "I'll talk with her, but you can't blame her for being concerned." "Concerned is okay; flipping out and creating a major drama is not. She needs to start getting real. There are bound to be more fights at school this year and next. There's been a lot of macho bullying at school for years, and the guys who're into that - which is plenty of them - aren't going to wise up overnight. Mom knows they can't hurt me, so what's the point in having a thirty-minute meltdown over a fight that didn't even last thirty seconds and didn't harm a hair on my head?" "Okay. Leave it to me. I've got an idea how to handle it." ^ [In bed that night, Dad did a pretty good job of getting Mom to accept reality. The condensed version of what he said was, "Once the other kids at school know Mark's got millions, girls will be all over him, and a lot of the boys are going to be pissed off. Mark's right that he's going to be attacked several more times before he graduates. That's unavoidable. Do you want him to tell you about each attack, or keep them secret from you? Because if you keep carrying on like you did before dinner, he's going to stop telling you about them." There was much more than that, of course, such as Mom suggesting that I should change schools. Dad answered, "Mark wouldn't leave Julia and Carol, he'd have the same problem in the new school, and the only people who get hurt from these attacks are the attackers, so Mark's got nothing to be scared of to make him run away." Dad told Mom, "Don't you think Mark's already doing everything he can to avoid being attacked, so what are you trying to achieve by yelling at him for half an hour?" Mom said, "He should be more careful." Dad answered, "He was standing at the pisser taking a leak. How could he POSSIBLY do that 'more carefully'? And why should he bother? None of these attacks ever hurt him. They're over in a few seconds and he doesn't even raise a sweat. Fights are part of growing up for a guy, Fely, and your making such a drama out of them is making a mountain out of something much smaller than a molehill. What you're doing is pointless and annoying, and you're risking making Mark unwilling to talk with you about his life, so I suggest you stop it."] ^ I went to the kitchen and reconnected the phone. I nibbled my food for about a minute, then the phone rang. I answered it, put on a deep voice, saying "Hello?" Mom has taught us to answer with our names, but I wasn't going to do it this time. It was a girl whose voice I didn't recognize, asking excitedly, "Is that you, Mark?" "No. How may I help you?" "Can I speak to Carol?" "She's not here, and won't be back till late." "Can I leave a message for her to call Liz please. As soon as she can, it's urgent." "Do you go to Carol's school?" "Yes. I'm in her class." "Then you'll see Carol before she's able to phone you. What is the nature of the urgency?" "Oh. It doesn't matter. I'll talk with her tomorrow. Thanks Mr. Anderson." I hung up. Thirty seconds later the phone rang. One of my soccer teammates wanting to talk about the fight. "Sorry," I said, "I'm about to leave the house, and I don't enjoy talking about fights, other than to spread the word that anyone else who attacks me is going to get his arm broken and the police called, okay? I've got to go, bye." A minute later the phone rang again. Soon after I'd hung up from that, it did it again. I left it off the hook after that, and went to tell Dad what I'd done. Then I went to Aikido. ------- Chapter 202: Aikido; Lessons in Ki Monday, May 9, 2005 (Continued) I handed the books I'd borrowed last week back to Sensei, saying, "Unfortunately, they weren't very helpful to me. I'm trying to learn more about ki and kiatsu, but all the books are too vague about it." I wanted to know whether I could use kiatsu to cure Ava's parents. Unfortunately the books were pathetic. Some of them made wonderful claims about what kiatsu could achieve, even mentioning it helped against cancer, so that aspect of the books was good, but every other aspect was terrible. All they had was vague, wishy-washy drivel. There was nothing even remotely definitive about cause or effect, just drivel about what the authors thought should be done. If kiatsu really worked, it would be very easy to prove it scientifically since one area of science that was very well understood and worked well was the statistical analysis of medical trials. Not only didn't the books provide any proof, they didn't even refer to the existence of any proof. It was very discouraging. Because helping Ava's parents was so important, I'd also spent quite a while browsing topics like "kiatsu proof" and "kiatsu cancer", but didn't find a single useful entry. There are millions of aikidoka around the world, and no shortage of people who are looking for cures, so the lack of ANY definitive study results was damning, and a damned disappointment. I had doubts that kiatsu worked at all, as I was guessing that my accelerated healing rate was probably due to my body's actions rather than my mind's. My appendix scar was now only a faint blemish, but I had never administered kiatsu to it. Sensei answered, "It is difficult to write about something which is so intangible." "Can we cut short the physical part of the lesson to spend some time talking about ki tonight please? Ki is the aspect of Aikido that I'm most interested in." "We should do that. Normal students take so long to develop their ki that I spread my comments about it over many months, but doing so with you would be incorrect." We got on with the warming up and the physical aspect of the training, including quite a lot more bo work, because I wasn't learning that as fast or as well. During our halftime break, while we were sharing my food in the kitchen, I told Sensei, "I'm embarrassed to tell you that I got involved in another fight. I know good aikidoka seek to avoid combat, but I was attacked by six guys at school this afternoon." "Oh?" Sensei looked concerned. Obviously not about my health, because we'd been training happily for nearly two hours. About my morality, I guessed. "I definitely don't want you to think poorly of me, so I guess I need to tell you a few things about me. It's embarrassing, because I have to be rather immodest, which I'm not used to, but here goes. -- "You've commented on how fast I learn Aikido. Actually, I learn nearly everything that fast, because I'm a bit of a genius. So I'm acing all my schoolwork, which causes some jealousy. I'm also very good at sports, which causes more jealousy. And what causes the most jealousy of all, is that I'm very successful with the girls at school. Many of them are chasing me to be my girlfriend, which quite a few of the other boys at school think is very unfair, and their response is to try to 'teach me a lesson' by beating me up. -- "Our Principal has been lax on bullying for many years, so there are lots of boys at school who think that physical violence is an easy option. I was in the bathroom today after lunch when six guys stormed in and tried to cut off my, you know." I pointed south as Sensei is an old-fashioned English gentleman, and I didn't want to use any word he might find offensive. "Crown jewels?" he suggested. "Haha. Yeah, exactly." I felt bad lying to him about that, but it made my fight tactics seem so much more appropriate. "They had a large pair of scissors with them, and they seemed determined to use them on me." "Oh dear. That would motivate one to defend oneself, haha. Obviously you survived intact, so what became of the six assailants?" "I'll tell you in a second, but let me duck it for the moment. I had a moral problem, which is mostly what I want to talk with you about. I could have knocked them out like I did with the Eatons, like we talked about last week. That'd cause the least possible damage to them. Merely headaches and bruises, I guess. The problem is that I expect to be the target for several more attacks yet. There's quite a high level of aggression directed at me from a significant number of boys at school who're annoyed that I'm doing better at everything than they are. Instead of raising the standard of their own behavior, their approach is to try to tear me down." Sensei nodded, obviously aware of that boyish strategy. -- "There's also something about me that's going to become public knowledge next week, which is going to make the other boys even more jealous. I'll tell you about that next week, but it'll REALLY annoy plenty of boys." I wanted to offer to pay Sensei for these lessons, but I still had trouble believing the money would really, truly, turn up in my bank account. I semi-expected trouble with the checks I'd handed out, but I'd done so knowing they were to family, so if there was a problem with them, it'd only be embarrassing internally. I'm going to divert to an ATM on the way to study at the Williams' tomorrow morning, to find out whether the millions of dollars actually show as being in my Corvallis account, and if not call around the check recipients and get them to hold off banking them until the problem is fixed. I didn't want to offer to pay Sensei whatever he wanted per week, which for three hours of one-on-one training would have to be a significant amount, and then find out that I didn't have any money, so I was going to wait until next Monday before telling him I was rich. I continued, "Expecting a lot more attacks, I though it might be better to try to scare off all the other would-be attackers by dealing with today's attackers pretty harshly. I remembered what you said last week about breaking arms, so that's what I did. The guy who had the scissors I used Kote gaeshi," (the name of the Aikido technique), "hard enough to break his wrist. When the next two guys attacked me I didn't have time for anything much, so I just pushed or threw them into a wall hard enough to stun or knock them out. Against the last three I had more time, so I broke one of their arms each. Then I called 9-1-1. The whole school saw all the ambulances and police cars, and the fight is big news around school because about twenty guys witnessed it, so it should serve as a very good deterrent for all the other guys who've been thinking of teaching me a lesson. What I want to know is what you think of the morality of what I did, breaking arms rather than just knocking them out?" Sensei was going to read all this stuff in the newspaper tomorrow morning and for the next few days, so there wasn't any way I could avoid him finding out. I might as well be up-front about it, as it wasn't going to make him think any worse of me. Sensei asked, "What did the police have to say about your actions?" "There was no talk of their arresting me, if that's what you're asking about. I was the intended victim. There were witnesses who heard the guys threaten to cut my crown jewels off, and plenty of witnesses saw that I didn't attack any of them. Each time an attacker came at me, I dealt with him, then left him crying on the floor. I never went back to any of them to hurt them any more. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get into any legal trouble over it. It was a premeditated six-on-one attack on me by guys who'd been badmouthing me all day, and recruiting other guys to join in on their planned attack on me, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they called or texted each other when one of them saw me go into the bathroom." I'd just thought of that, and made a mental note to call the cops to tell them that, as well as about their recruiting guys to join their planned attack, as the suspended guys had told me in the parking lot. Sensei answered, "Morally, the attack you describe was heinous both in intent and in having six assailants, so you would be allowed considerable latitude in your response. However, what strikes me is your confidence. You talk as if you had control of the situation, and had choices about how to respond. Were you that confident at the time?" "Pretty much. There were a couple of moments when I didn't have much choice, but they lasted only a second or two. Those moments were with the two guys who didn't get broken arms; otherwise I would've broken their arms too. It's because I had choice that I had a moral dilemma. No choice obviously means no dilemma. I didn't tell the cops this, but I could've defended myself without injuring any of them, but I figured hurting them badly was the best thing to do. -- "When guys attack me like this, they often end up with a criminal record, which is an insanely stupid thing for them to risk just because they're annoyed that more girls are interested in me than in them. I figure a broken arm is NOTHING compared to a criminal record, but the idiots at school seem to think that what they do in school is somehow immune from the police. I think they'd almost certainly be scared of getting a broken arm, so I'm hoping that my getting tough with the guys today will deter a lot of the idiots from making the mistake of attacking me in the future." Sensei suggested, "It would also impress the girls at school?" "Haha. I know where you're going with that, and you couldn't be more wrong. I have absolutely no need to do anything to impress girls. I was attacked because so many of them are ALREADY interested in me, and wait until you hear what I'll tell you next Monday. Also, I don't know much about girls, but I do know they're not impressed by violence. Not any of the girls I'd want to be friends with anyway. I know a lot of guys think fighting makes them look cool with girls, but I think that's just stupid macho aggression crap. Guys fight because guys like to fight. The best thing I ever did to impress girls was to stand up in class and make a speech about how much I loved my sister, which was hardly a macho thing to do. So - to sidestep your little verbal trap - no, I didn't do it to impress girls. The ONLY reason was to serve as a deterrent for any more guys thinking to attack me." [[There are several different forces working on guys and girls, but it wouldn't be too far off to say that girls are as instinctively motivated to mate with the alpha male, as boys are to try to be the alpha male. Violence, per se, doesn't attract most girls, but the demonstration of physical superiority over other males certainly does (there has to be a reason football jocks are so popular!). So my answer to Sensei had been unintentionally inaccurate. It didn't matter though, as he wasn't interested in scientific accuracy, only in my attitude. Amusingly, the fact that I proved I was a vastly superior fighter, and my modestly downplaying it, significantly impressed the girls at school, the opposite of what the six assailants had wanted.]] Sensei and I discussed the issue some more, and his attitude boiled down to, "There is nothing inherently wrong with broken arms. I climbed a tree when I was boy, lost my grip, fell and broke my arm. Just a childhood accident of no lasting significance, other than I learned to be more careful when climbing trees; a lesson whose sole benefit is now in my verbally passing it on to my grandchildren. -- "The answer to your moral dilemma lies not in the fact of broken arms, nor in your act of breaking their arms, but in your motivation for doing so. Necessity would be an acceptable motivation, but you say that was not the case. Deterring future potential assailants so as to minimize the harm they do to their own lives is laudable, but if there was any component of self-aggrandizement in your decision, then the morality of it is questionable. Only you are in a position to be able to judge your motivations." After we'd discussed that issue a bit, Sensei said, "One of the disadvantages of your learning the physical forms so quickly is that you are not being exposed to the philosophy of Aikido. You also need to practice your techniques against a range of different people rather than me all the time, so I think it would be a good idea for you to attend an advanced class one night. Not this Wednesday, but next, can you attend a class?" "Certainly. Aikido has a high priority with me, so I'll try hard to fit in with anything you want." #3: #4: We got back to our training, which was more hand-to-hand stuff. I enjoy that more, because I understand it at a deeper level, although I do understand why Aikido includes bo techniques. [To explain, Aikido is very 'circular'. You don't meet the attack head-on, either with your head or any other part of your anatomy. Instead you deflect the attack sideways, so its force is either lost, or better still, used to defeat the attacker. Using a bo teaches the student to think in much larger circles, potentially up to thirteen feet in diameter. You may be surprised to learn that most of the bo techniques are with the DEFENDER holding the bo, and using it to defeat the attacker. Not by banging him on the head with it, or ramming its end into his belly (nothing 'Aikido' about those techniques), but by thinking of the bo as an extension of the defender's arm, and using it to perform many of the same techniques that would be used if the attacker had grabbed the defender's wrist (for example). There are other techniques specific to the bo, but the purpose of all of them is to teach Aikido principles and techniques, rather than batter the attacker.] We stopped the physical forms early to discuss ki. It was an awkward discussion in two respects: I didn't want to tell Sensei how my ki abilities worked. It was easy to keep NP a secret from him, but proximity was awkward to talk around. He thought he couldn't show me ki. In the physical forms he could show me how to move my body parts around, but ki was invisible for him. It was difficult for Sensei to talk to me, or me to him, about something he couldn't see. We talked in metaphors mostly, his favorite one being that of a jet of water. Imagine Dad and Sensei are repeating the lapel gripping demonstration that they'd first done at the Williams'. That technique can be easily explained in terms of the jet-of-water metaphor. When Dad is grasping Sensei's lapels, Dad's concentration, intent, etc., can be thought of as a jet of metaphorical water that flows down his arm toward his fist. It's easiest to visualize by imagining that Dad's arm is literally a jet of water. The size and strength of the jet is how powerfully Dad's mind is focusing on the task. When Sensei drops his arm on to the top of Dad's, Sensei is metaphorically directing the jet of water that is his ki vertically downward into the jet of water that is Dad's. As Sensei has spent decades learning Aikido, his jet is larger and more powerful than Dad's, so Dad's little jet gets deflected downward. That means Dad no longer has any 'intent' focused on his grip, making it unmotivated, and easily brushed down as Dad's arm is swept downward by Sensei's. Sensei was unable to break my grip on his lapel because my ki (my jet of water) is more powerful than his. Sensei has one mind (I'm sure of that), which has spent many years disciplining itself, so it has developed ki which is about three times more powerful than an untrained person's, but it's not more powerful than my untrained four minds' worth of ki. [[I didn't know the exact value yet, but four minds gave me sixteen times as much ki as non-aikidoka.]] Using another metaphor, Sensei had learned to strengthen his ki in much the same way as someone who'd learned to play the piano without any sensory feedback (no seeing, touching or hearing the piano). In other words, as if he was sitting on a stool in front of a big, empty space. To make it worse, he'd been taught by a teacher (his Sensei) who'd never seen, touched or heard a piano either! It's a wonder aikidoka develop their ki at all. To be more accurate, they do get some sensory feedback from how well their techniques work, but it's effectively still an 'invisible' type of feedback, working so indirectly that it's almost impossible for them to tell how well they're doing, especially because their opponent's ki influences the results, as do both their moods, whether they're hurrying, distracted by external events (an argument with a girlfriend, pressure at work, lack of sleep, etc.), too crowded on the training mats, or dozens of other factors, the effects of which are all totally invisible to them. Not only did I have the sensory feedback I needed to learn to control my ki FAR faster, I also had the huge help of starting with four minds. They gave me four major benefits: The ability to be always centered, so I could train my ki with far more efficiency than other aikidoka. The ability to generate far more ki than a normal person. [[Not "generate", but "tap". With four minds, sixteen times as much, as it's a square function.]] My subconsciouses could force my body to grow in desirable ways, including my brain in ways that made my ki work better, as indicated by my NP force getting stronger, albeit slowly. [[I've listed this point because I thought it was true at the time. In fact, it's almost entirely false. The ability of my brain to adapt had very little effect on my ki abilities as they're almost totally dependent on my mind. Minds are surprisingly independent of brains.]] Four minds enabled the proximity sense to work very well. That I can 'see' my ki with proximity instantly makes it FAR easier for me to discipline my use of it. I can focus it, and see the focus take effect. I can concentrate hard on making it as powerful as possible, and immediately see what methods of concentration work the best. I can see when my concentration is lapsing and take immediate steps to correct it. I can see when my ki is being deflected by someone else's, so I can 'fight back'. And when my ki is deflecting someone else's ki, I can vector that properly so the opponent's resultant actions are exactly what I want. ^ [[With respect to the point immediately above, and reusing the pixel metaphor I mentioned earlier in this autobiography: with four minds, my proximity sense could be likened to a 100 pixel color picture. Had I discovered Aikido earlier, I would've seen that proximity with two minds was like having a 10 pixel gray-scale image. With one mind it's like a single pixel black or white picture, which can hardly be called a "picture". It gives a binary piece of information, specifically that when someone is standing inside your personal space, you can sometimes get a 'feeling' about it, provided you're not distracted. This is off topic, but while I think of it, I'll give an interesting example of the power of the subconscious to make changes within the body. A guy I know went scuba diving with an ear infection. The water pressure pushed the infection farther into his body, so it infected a major nerve pathway on that (the left) side of his face, causing the nerve sheath to inflame, expand, strangle and kill the 'wire'. He lost all muscular control over the left side of his face from below the eye. When he smiled, for example, only the right side of his mouth curled up; the left side of his face hung totally slack, as every muscle in it was totally relaxed in the absence of any nerve impulses telling them to contract. When he drank liquids without keeping his head tilted back, all the liquids ran out of the left side of his mouth because he couldn't close the lips on that side. His speech was highly slurred, his facial expressions were bizarre, etc. A couple of months after he lost the nerve, the left side of his face started sporadically twitching in strange ways, including some very large twitches, which made him look even more bizarre. Over the next few months he slowly regained all his normal muscular controls. What happened was that his body grew a new nerve pathway, sending branch connections to all of his facial muscles, test-fired the muscles over and over again, until his subconscious learned where all the connections went and how much 'juice' to give them to get the thousands of different desired results (or combinations of results) for each muscle(s). The reconnecting and re-learning of how to use half his face was impressively (and comically) performed entirely by his subconscious. I mention this not because of its relevance to the previous section (because it's not), but because I just thought of it, and it's a good example. At many places throughout my autobiography there are references to the power of the subconscious. As the example shows, they are amazingly capable. My having four of them at this time, with only one body to control, and with human bodies having some amazingly capable repair mechanisms, gave my subconsciouses a lot of influence over my body.]] ^ Back to my discussion with Sensei. We talked around the issue, me trying to find out the range of his abilities without giving away that mine were much greater. My ki abilities are in either of two categories: the ability to project ki, or to detect it. I can project ki in three main ways: NP, blobs and what I call "The Ki of Personal Intent" (e.g., hanging on to Sensei's lapel when he tries to brush my arm away). There's a fourth possible ability: kiatsu. The Aikido books that mention kiatsu, say it's done by projecting ki, but I've got so little experience with it that it's barely worth including on this list. I had doubts it was real, because even at fifteen I knew people get weird about wanting to believe in miraculous healing. If kiatsu is a real phenomenon, it has to be a VERY weak one, otherwise there'd be a public frenzy about Aikido and kiatsu, which there isn't. I can detect ki in one obvious way, my proximity sense. Plus, tentatively, the "moving in harmony with the Universe" ability, as discussed immediately below. I'm uncertain about how to categorize my ability to move more gracefully when centered. This is nothing to do with my body being well coordinated already; it's an additional effect. If I uncenter to walk back and forth across an empty room, then recenter and repeat the journey, the second experience feels smoother than the first. My running test proved that my optimal speed is slightly higher when centered, which is almost certainly this effect. My body is the same and there are no other people around, so it's not because I'm avoiding colliding with them. I can't proximity sense that anything is happening, nor get any other clue to explain why moving while centered feels better, so it's a puzzle. I'm inclined to place it in the "detect ki" category, rather than a "projecting ki" ability, but that's mostly a vague guess. [[It really needed to be in a category of its own because most of my logic was wrong. The spatial construction of the Universe is considerably more complex than humans are aware, and the traditional 3D view of it is simplistic, but moving through it felt easier when centered not because it was easier, but because the Universe could supply me with slightly more energy when I was centered, raising my optimal speed. It felt nicer simply because being centered is a type of meditation which feels nicer when moving than when stationary, which is misleading, as human perceptions so often are. That Aikido books call it "moving in harmony with the Universe" is a poor choice of phrase. While it is possible to work with or against the Universe's natural functions - riding a bike uphill is harder work than riding it down - my walking across a room centered or uncentered didn't require different energy expenditures.]] As best as I can tell, Sensei has only one way of projecting ki, what I call "Personal Intent". He's never mentioned "Blobs" or "Nipple Power" (or what I'd recognize to be those abilities). He has talked about healing, but has not claimed any expertise at it. Sensei certainly has one way of detecting ki, his much less informative version of my proximity sense. I don't know whether he has a "moving in harmony" ability. He thinks he does, and that's how he described it, but his avoiding students rolling around the mats is actually his proximity sense in operation. He says he feels smoother when centered, but whether he could run faster when centered, as a measurable example of "moving in harmony", is doubtful. If so, it wouldn't be much of an improvement. He always talks about "projecting ki" as if it squirts out of our bodies, which is why he uses the jet of water metaphor. I cautiously asked him, "Rather than ki always projecting away from me, is there a way of sending it in other directions? Sideways across the front of me, or around corners, or anything?" I wasn't particularly interested in this topic. It came about just out of my trying to gain information from him by asking a wide variety of questions in terms that he was familiar with. "Now you are getting into very advanced techniques. It is possible to lead your opponent's ki. Do you remember your first visit here, when you still had your arm in a cast. I invited you to try to grab my wrist, and as you tried I moved it away, causing you to fall over forward?" "Yes, I remember it well. That was cool. You got me to fall over without touching me." "Correct. What I did was invite you to reach for my wrist, which caused you to project your ki out of your hand as you reached forward for my wrist. I tried to reinforce the ki flowing down your arm by adding my ki to yours. The extra ki caused you to extend too far and bend over too much as I moved my wrist away and down, causing you to lose your balance and fall. Another way of thinking about it is that my ki pulled so much of your consciousness into your hand that it forgot to keep track of what was happening to your body, so you overextended. That is inaccurate in several important respects, but it describes the effect on uke well. Do you remember feeling surprised when you started falling?" (To remind you, "uke" is Japanese for "attacker".) "Haha, I was just going to say EXACTLY the same thing! You're right, I had no idea at all that I was off balance. All I remember doing is reaching for your wrist, then I was suddenly falling over with no idea of how it happened. It was like I blacked out for the second or so in which I lost my balance." "Yes, that is what it feels like. I held my wrist out to you with my fingers bent under and pointing down, so they were pointing in the same direction as your extending arm. What I tried to do was visualize my ki flowing out of my wrist in the direction my fingers were pointing, so toward the floor in the direction that you were leaning. I think it works in a similar way to lowering a hose into a pool of water. The water squirting out of the hose pulls some of the surrounding water along with it, including some of the water that is behind the nozzle of the hose. I believe my ki is pulling your ki along with it, maybe pulling your concentration too. In Aikido we always stress 'pushing' rather than 'pulling', especially with ki, because it's incorrect to think of a jet of water as 'pulling' anything, but in this rare circumstance, pulling seems to be what is happening." "You sound a lot less definite than you normally do when you talk about ki?" "Because I AM less definite. I can perform normal techniques successfully any number of times, but if I used that technique on you a few more times it would stop working, because you would learn to keep some awareness of your body. That technique is at the edge of my ability, and I do not understand it well. Masters at levels higher than mine are more skilled in leading their opponent's ki, but it is a very rare ability, and I have not heard a good explanation for how it works." I thought I might be able to do it, and I wanted to find out whether I could. I could have tested it on anyone at home (Dad or Donna would be good picks), but I had no problem with Sensei knowing I was very good at already known Aikido abilities. It was the unknown abilities that I didn't want him to know about, like NP, or a proximity sense so much better than his that it was effectively a new ability. So I enthusiastically asked, "Can I try doing that no touch fall technique on you please?" "Certainly. There's no harm in trying, although I've trained with masters who've used it on me several times so it is not likely to work well." ^ I need to fill in a little gap in my biography. Thus far I have made very little reference to my using my "Ki of Personal Intent", which is the ki that everyone radiates whenever they intend to move their body. It's an absolutely fundamental part of Aikido training, and it's used by every aikidoka in virtually every technique. Whenever I do anything resembling a physical Aikido technique, I use it as a matter of course. For example, I used it when I pushed Chloe onto the bed earlier today so I could run out of the room. I'd ducked under her outside arm, then pushed her upper-arm forward and around toward the bed. As I'd pushed her arm forward I'd sent my ki flowing down my pushing arm, onto her upper-arm, then down her arm. Keeping my ki flowing that way made it harder for her to pull her arm back, because before she could do that, she had to reverse the flow of her own ki down that arm. That was much harder for her, because her ki was being swept along by mine. I'd also used my ki to help propel the attacker who I'd pushed headfirst into the urinal's wall: ki to help hold his head down, and moments later the other hand pushed his tail bone to send him flying forward, again with my ki flowing out of my hand, up his spine and out the top of it, to keep him moving that way. The theory of ki being that he'd find it harder to stop his forward movement because that'd first require that his "Intention Ki" go backward, which it couldn't do until it had to overcome my forward flowing ki. Against the other attackers I used standard Aikido techniques, all of which had me using my ki as I'd been taught. Using ki to help move opponents the way the defender wants them to go is basic Aikido. Even brand new beginners at their very first lesson are told to do this. Sensei has been telling me to do it dozens of times per lesson, so I do it. Proximity sensing my and my opponents' ki made doing so very easy. To what extent it actually worked I couldn't say for sure, as I'd never scientifically tested it (how to measure the effect of intent? Although measuring reaction times would be interesting). But I'd seen that my ki swamped Sensei's and my opponents' ki, so I believed it probably worked fine. (Most beginner aikidoka would, I guessed, have difficulty believing in ki. I didn't have that problem, as I could very clearly see that it was real.) ^ Sensei's metaphor about a hose of water in a pool of water pulling the opponent's ki forward was wrong. I'd proximity sensed countless ki interactions, and there's no such effect. The hose of water metaphor is an extremely good one, because ki streams do interact very much in the way that jets of water would, but they are independent jets operating in a vacuum, not in a 'pool' of water/ki which can transfer an effect from one jet to another. If there is any such effect, it must be so small that it doesn't show up in my proximity sense, which means it's certainly too small to have any practical consequence. Ki is WEAK. The largest ki projection I can produce, which shows up clear as day in my proximity sense, has very little effect on anyone else: maybe making it possible for me to move their hand an extra inch or two, or delaying for half a second their resisting a movement I'm making their body do. Those are hardly dramatic effects. If all my ki produces such a small effect, an amount of ki so small as to be invisible to my proximity sense will have NO practical effect. [[I was wrong in a couple of important respects. First, the Universe is made of ki, in the sense that it's also made of matter and energy, as ki is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. It is EVERYWHERE, so there's no such thing as a "vacuum of ki". It's just that the Universal ki is normally not doing anything at a level large enough for me to sense. Second, ki can be very, very strong, but not the amount that I or anyone around me could generate. My reason for calling ki weak was as accurate as my calling gravity weak because no one I knew generated much gravity.]] The question I'd asked Sensei which had started this discussion had been about creating a projection of ki in a way that wasn't like squirting a jet of water out of my body. That'd been the only way Sensei had ever told me to create a flow of "Intention Ki", and it was also the only way I'd ever seen anyone create ki. It always projects from our bodies. Aikidoka can deliberately project "Intention Ki" without actually moving our body that way, but it's still a projection of ki. (It's almost the same as your aiming your finger at something; that projects ki out of your finger although you don't have to intend to move it toward your target.) Those factors meant I thought Sensei's "hose in a body of water" metaphor was wrong, meant his explanation for how the "No Touch Falling Down Technique" (whatever that was in Japanese) worked was wrong. It must be done only by creating a flow of ki inside my opponent's ki and PUSHING his in the direction I wanted it to go, which was down his arm and toward the floor. I decided to try that for myself. We stood in the appropriate position and I extended one of my hands out from my body, offering it to him as his grabbing target. We don't ask, "Ready?" when we train, so Sensei simply reached out to grab my wrist. I sensed his ki extending from his hand to my wrist. I tried to reinforce the flow of his ki out of his hand with my ki, but it wasn't as easy as I thought. Creating NP-fingertips and blobs is a very deliberate action, but Intention Ki is different. Everybody has it and all they need to do to create it is to intend to perform a physical action. I create or reinforce mine when a technique requires me to use ki particularly well, by focusing on strengthening my existing ki. It's difficult to strengthen something that's not there in the first place, as I had no ki coming out of Sensei's arm. I was still mentally messing around, trying to get Intention Ki to exist somewhere where I had no physical connection, when I felt Sensei grab my wrist, as I'd forgotten to move it. I said, "Sorry. I'm having trouble coming up with a good mental image for reinforcing your ki. I'm used to projecting ki out of my own body, not out of yours." "I imagine ki flowing out of my wrist, creating a vacuum behind it, which is where uke's hand is coming from. I imagine uke's ki being sucked down his arm and into my flow. The stronger I can make my flow, the more of his ki I can suck across the gap, siphoning even more down his arm. Do you understand what siphoning is?" "Yes, and I understand the physics of your image too." "Good. Do not think about YOU sucking my ki, because that would pull the ki inward, which is not what we are trying to do here. You need to push as much of your ki as you can out of your hand, so that IT sucks my ki with it." I knew he was wrong, but I couldn't tell him how I knew. In physics, different forces interact with themselves in different ways. Magnetism, electricity, gravity, mechanical forces, etc. all have their own ways of influencing themselves. For example, magnets can attract or repulse, whereas gravity can only attract. Magnetic fields operate on a curve, while gravity attracts in a straight line. From what I'd sensed since I'd discovered my proximity sense, two different ki streams had to overlap to affect each other, and the interaction's effect was very much like the jets of water metaphor. Two magnetic streams wouldn't behave anything like that, and two gravity fields would pass through each other with no effect. The best I could say to Sensei was, "I don't like your 'sucking' metaphor. I realize it's only a metaphor so I shouldn't be too fussy, but it doesn't feel right to me. I'm trying to understand ki better, so I don't want to get into the habit of using what I feel is an inaccurate metaphor. I'll give you some other examples that I know it's not. You know about magnets. Put two close together and they'll attract or repel each other, depending on which poles are involved. It's not as if two people's ki interact magnetically: attracting or repulsing in some way. -- "I think ki-flows behave very much like your jet of water metaphor, influencing each other, merging and flowing in a new direction. Magnetic attraction wouldn't do that. Ki obviously has no physical presence, so none of the physical forces like gravity, electromagnetic or subatomic forces apply, but I thought it might function in a way analogous to one of them. If I understood how ki interacts, it might be possible to somehow grab your ki and pull it down your arm, similar to grabbing hold of the end of your fingers and pulling your hand forward and down, until you fell over." "I do not know of any scientific explanation for ki, Mark. I do not believe a machine has ever been built which can detect or measure it. I would believe it to be a figment of the imagination, if it were not for my experiencing its effects. I have no real explanation for what it is, or how it works. I only have a visualization tool which seems to work well, which is the jet of water example I use so often. Visualizing it that way helps me and my students the most. If you are able to develop a better understanding of ki, aikidoka all over the world would be very appreciative." ^ [[I understand it perfectly now, of course. I could describe it even well enough for human engineers to build a pair of goggles that enabled you to see it by providing artificial proximity. But understanding what ki is isn't the limiting factor for humans; it's having only one mind. The very best aikidoka are already up against the one-mind limit, as are the leading practitioners of some of the other mentally oriented martial arts. My providing help would just result in people reaching the limit more easily, which I don't see much merit in. Such glasses seem fairly pointless, so I'll invent them in only a few w-dimensions (a comment you'll understand much later). In case you're wondering, I am NOT going to relax the one-mind limit. Humanity's development - and from what I've seen so far, all of life's development - doesn't go down that road. I'll be the only entity with powerfully merged minds. There are plenty of species, what you'd call "aliens", who possess more ability with ki than human minds can exercise. Some of them have more than one mind, in the crude sense that conjoined twins do, or as a distributed processing approach that some dinosaurs are thought to have had. None of these species come close to having the control over ki that a multiply mind-merged entity can achieve. Those aliens may have impressive abilities compared to a normal human, but they still have very finite limits.]] ^ I said, "I don't have a better metaphor. I was just casting around trying to find one that'd help with this technique. I can't think of anything, so I'll try visualizing what you suggested. Can we try again, slowly to give me time to work on my image please." "Okay. One thing I find that works well is to let uke's hand get as close to grabbing as possible. The smaller the gap between the hands, the better the suction effect from your ki." "Okay." I extended my wrist again, and Sensei slowly reached to grab it. I immediately realized that his comment about a gap was incorrect. Or to be nicer, not relevant. Yes, there was a gap between the hands, but I wasn't trying to work with his physical hand, but with his ki, and that extended all the way to my wrists. There was no "gap" between his ki and my hand, so I should be able to start using my ki to 'suck' - I disagreed with that word - his ki forward regardless of how far his hand was away, as long as it was close enough for him to have a good flow of his ki from his hand to mine. The second thing I noticed was that his ki enveloped my wrist because he was intending to wrap his fingers around it. That meant that if I visualized my ki flowing out of my wrist in the direction of my fingers, down and away from Sensei, then my ki would overlap with his slightly, which was obviously the answer to how the technique worked. It wasn't a "sucking" process, but a "dragging" one. Sensei was moving quite slowly, with his hand still some distance from mine when I started visualizing my ki flowing in the direction I wanted his arm to keep going in, also trying to visualize my ki dragging with it that portion of his ki that mine overlapped with. Most Aikido techniques have me using my ki to overpower my opponent's, so not only can I move his body the way I want, but can even get his body to cooperate with what I want by using my stronger ki to lead his intent. I've practiced this hundreds of times with Sensei, as it's part of virtually every technique we do. Normally in techniques we reinforce uke's ki through his body and then outward, but in this technique I was reinforcing Sensei's ki once it was already out of his body. Other than that difference, it was very much the same as we normally do, in that my ki was being used to push his in the direction I wanted him to move. I could easily do that, and did so. There were two things I noticed in rapid succession. The first was that the 'look' in proximity of Sensei's ki changed a little. I can't say it looked redder, or brighter, or anything like that, because proximity is not a visual sense. All I can say is that it was different in a way I'd not experienced in proximity before. The second thing I noticed was that Sensei sped up his grab for my wrist. He shouldn't have done that deliberately. When we are practicing, we do a technique at a constant speed, otherwise it throws the student's timing off. Sensei's speeding up was almost certainly because I was dragging his ki successfully, pulling his arm forward and down. I started moving my wrist down and away in front of him while his hand was still a few inches away from it, as an experiment to see if I had his ki well trapped. I was continuing to project more ki out of my wrist in the direction my fingers were pointing, and I continued to visualize it taking his ki with it. The 'look' of his ki in proximity continued to change in the same way it had been, only more so. I got him so far stretched forward and bent over that he started teetering, then the ki coming out of his arm suddenly ceased, he wobbled a bit, then stood up, saying, "VERY good, Mark! Very, very good." "I didn't get you to fall over though." "That technique has been used on me so many times that it is largely ineffective now. It is more of a trick than a real technique, and I have experienced the trick too many times to be fooled by it again. Regardless of whether I fell, you genuinely had my ki under your control, which is very impressive." "I came up with a good visualization." Actually I'd 'seen' a good visualization, but that was too much information to be giving Sensei. "It differed from yours in two respects. First, you talked about a gap between our hands. That's physically true, but it's irrelevant. Your ki extended all the way to my wrist, and it is on your ki that this technique is performed, so the physical gap is not the issue. I think I could've used this technique if your hand had been twelve inches away from mine, just so long as you were focused on grabbing me. From too far away and you wouldn't have been very committed, so you might have easily changed your mind, but so long as you were committed to grabbing me, I don't think the distance is an issue. -- "The second thing I did was something other than trying to suck your ki out of your arm, the way you described. What I did was visualize your ki as a sort of phantom hand wrapped around my wrist. I didn't try to visualize an actual hand, phantom or otherwise, I just assumed that your intent was to grab my wrist, so that's what your ki would do. That meant that if I visualized my ki starting its flow from my wrist, it would be created in the same area as your ki was focused, so I tried to imagine my ki dragging your ki with it. -- "You were constantly projecting more ki, as was I of course, so I had to imagine that the ki I was projecting was continuously dragging your new ki with it. I was projecting mine farther and faster than yours, so your ki got increasingly 'stretched' - that's how I think of it. I didn't suck any more ki out of you; what I did was stretch the same amount of ki. I don't think it's possible to suck any more ki out of someone. You produce your own ki based on how focused you are on performing an action, and I can't make you produce more. All I can do is redirect whatever ki you put out, in this case by stretching it with my ki." "Very interesting. That seems a valid visualization, and is consistent with what I know of ki. I like your last point about sucking more out being a poor image. I think I will practice with that image myself. I do not think it changes the way we think about our basic techniques, does it?" "Umm, no, I don't think it does. When we merge ki normally, the existing metaphor works fine. But when you're trying to lead someone's ki like we just did, I think my image is better. It feels more 'accurate' to me, which is just a feeling, of course. This is the only technique you've shown me which I can use it on, so I shouldn't generalize it to all such techniques." "I cannot improve on that much myself, Mark, as I cannot perform many of those techniques myself. But I will think about how suitable your idea might be for them. I do have one small criticism of your physical technique though. When you move your hand down, you should also angle it slightly away from your body. Otherwise when uke starts falling, he might fall into your legs, or be able to grab you to hold himself up. If you direct him to the side slightly, he will have nothing in front of him." "Good point. I have some more general questions about ki, rather than on this technique. Can I ask those, rather than us getting technique-specific?" "Certainly. That is one of the purposes of the end-of-class talks." "From what I've seen and read so far, there appear to be only two effects from projecting ki: overlapping with opponents' ki to influence the movements of their bodies, and kiatsu. Do you know of any others?" "I cannot think of any more. What sort of effects are you thinking might be possible?" "Ki appears to be a type of energy, and energy can do different things. Think of all the different things electricity can be used for. To give you a humorous English example of something ki might be able to be used for, imagining dropping a teabag into a cold cup of water, then heating the water with ki." "Haha, that would be handy, but I have never heard of anything like that. I doubt it very much indeed. If that were possible, then it would be easy to build a machine to measure someone's ability to project ki, by how far or how fast the temperature rose." "Good point. I'm asking out of ignorance, because a few weeks ago I'd never heard of Aikido or ki, but I'm very curious about the subject and I seem to have a natural aptitude for it, so I'm wondering what else it can be used for. Is it just influencing people's movements and perhaps some minor healing, or can it be used to stop it from raining, or make flashlight batteries last longer, or anything else?" "As far as I know, nothing else. You told me that you can run slightly faster when you are centered, and that your physique might have improved because of ki. You are the only person I know of who has made those claims. But that reminds me that some people claim that some of the original Aikido masters, especially O Sensei," (Morihei Ueshiba, the originator of Aikido), "were able to do some very special things. Every martial art has a mythology of such claims, which I think are nothing more than wishful thinking, but for what it is worth, I remember a claim that someone filmed O Sensei in a training session in which he asked several of his students to attack him. According to the story, the film proved he moved faster than humanly possible. That story is decades old, and I strongly doubt it, because the film has never surfaced, and old cameras were very unreliable, so it could easily have been filming at the wrong speed. -- "Another claim I heard was that one of the old masters, I forget which, had ki so strong that he could have someone stand behind a shoji screen, and the master could direct his ki so powerfully at the other person that he felt it as a hard punch. In the story the shoji screen is undamaged, although I am not sure whether that makes the story more or less fantastical." #1: #3: #4: Sensei continued, "Stories like those abound in most martial arts, and they are always very unconvincing. There is no reason why a modern master cannot be as good as an ancient master, yet no living master makes claim to any fantastic ability. These stories are always about masters who are now dead, and thus cannot be called upon to demonstrate the technique." #1: #3: #4: I said, "I'm much more interested in what current masters can do. They can demonstrate it, explain it and teach it, which has to be far more useful than some old story that all you can do is be impressed by, presuming you believe it. What sort of stuff can the best live aikidoka do?" "Nothing fantastical. Their ki and understanding of Aikido is so high that they operate more instinctively and what appears to be casually. They can control uke with their ki more, so they use physical control less, which minimizes their physical movements. You can see that for yourself, in any of the online movies or DVDs." "Huh? There's Aikido stuff online?" "Yes. I am surprised you did not know that, with your being so interested in borrowing books. There are many Aikido resources on the Internet. Some are better than others, some are so poor or misleading that I would prefer them not to be online, but such is the Internet. If you want to devote the time to it, I am sure you will find most of the mythological claims I mentioned earlier. You will also find several movies of masters training, and a plethora of shops that will sell you DVDs on every aspect of Aikido that they can think of. You did not know this, Mark?" "To my embarrassment, no. I'm an exceptional guy in many ways, one of which is that I'm exceptionally stupid about computers. I've got a bad habit of not thinking to google something if I've got any other way of finding out what I need, even if googling would still help. I'll spend some time on it before our next class." #3: #4: #1: #4: #1: #4: #3: I asked, "I'll save time by not asking you any more questions about the uses of ki, because I might read enough about that online. Let me ask you a question about you. When I saw you training in the full class, you moved gracefully around the mat, avoiding all the students who were rolling every which way. How do you do that?" "You told me that you can do that too - in the hallways at school you said - so what about it are you trying to find out?" "Actually, pretty much everything. I want to hear the way you describe it, in your own words. I haven't seen this described other than in extremely vague terms in any of the books, so I'm curious to find out how similar or different our two approaches are." "There is not much to tell. The only way I have to make it work is not to try to make it work." "I see! That's very useful, thanks very much, haha. But perhaps just a little more explanation would be good?" "You want even MORE details! Okay. It only works if I am centered and if I do not think about what I am doing. I stroll around casually thinking about the students' techniques or anything other than my path. I let my body pick its own path." "Subconsciously, in other words?" "Precisely. If I consciously control my movements, students collide with me more often. It is a common ability with experienced aikidoka. More of a consequence than an ability, I think. As we advance we become more attuned to what is going on around us. Clearly it is so subtle that it is below our ability to detect consciously, but I have always assumed it was my body avoiding their ki. Part of 'moving in harmony with the Universe.' I believe it is the same process as avoiding an unexpected blow, which I know you can also do." "Yeah. So avoiding blows is subconscious for you too?" "Yes. I have to be centered and the blow has to be very strongly intentioned, not a casual strike, otherwise my body does not react. I have to be relaxed too, so my body is free to move, similarly to my avoiding students on the mat. I believe it is the same ability. By your questions I guess it works differently for you, Mark?" "Yes and no. Mostly the same, except I'm so new to this I don't think my body has learned to react so well yet. I get a kind of uncomfortable feeling, until I move out of the way. Quite a strong feeling of discomfort when you pretended to punch me at the Williams'. But I think I'm internalizing that now, so I'm reacting more subconsciously than I used to. Probably in a few weeks I'll be like you." I wasn't totally lying, just mostly. The true part was about the internalization process happening, although the timing of that was untrue. When I walk down a busy hallway I no longer have to plan my way around the intended paths of every person that I approach; I just stroll along letting my body do its thing. If one of the other students intends to step across my path, my body will react to the ki of his intention by stopping me short, speeding me up to get ahead of him, angling me around him, or whatever my subconscious decides will work best. Our brains have a whole pile of instincts for avoiding collisions, and they kick in automatically and subconsciously. Those instincts in my brain are now triggered by other people's ki projections. Just as you would automatically navigate around people when walking down a busy street, frequent practice in the school hallways has taught me to 'thoughtlessly' (at the conscious level) navigate around where I detect people are intending to move toward. So frequently is Julia attached to my arm, that I've even learned to subconsciously navigate taking her presence into account. I added, "I hoped you might have a better explanation. Especially that it was something you were conscious about, because that way it would be easier to improve it by training." "Sorry, not me. I think some of the senior masters get better at detecting surprise attacks, but I have not heard anything that would imply their awareness was conscious. I am reminded of another story I heard about O Sensei. According to the story, he challenged his students to try to attack him by surprise; any time day or night. They were unable to, even if one of them sneaked into his bedroom in the middle of the night. He always woke and faced his putative attacker in time. Even if the story is true, it might simply be that O Sensei was a light sleeper, or maybe he tied a string from the door to his room to his toe, or some similar trick. Or, like you, he might simply have awoken because he got an uncomfortable feeling." #1: #4: <'Fraid so. We're going to have to learn how to improve our abilities all by ourself. Even the masters don't sound particularly special. Not NEARLY as special as we could show ourself to be.> #3: We ended the session and I went to my home. The mansion-shopping women had arrived at my home not long before me, and were chatting away when I walked in. Julia told me, "The realtor showed us a place that could be very suitable." I knew better than to get excited, so I just said, "That's good." "Seriously, it was a VERY good place. The best we've seen so far." "I can get excited?" "There's not much point in that, because nothing much is going to happen for a while." "If it's so good, shouldn't we grab it, before someone else does?" "Unlikely. It's been on the market for months. That's why the agent was slow to show it to us." "Doesn't that mean it's not a very good place?" "It's overpriced for what most people are looking for, but it suits our needs better than it suits other people's needs, and it's much better for us than nearly all of the other properties we've seen. We'll check some assumptions with an architect, and then we'll see." I went back to my original statement, "That's good." Julia decided to stay the night here with Carol and me, which meant she had to tell her mother what clothes of hers to give me to bring back here in the morning. Apparently she trusted me with her life, but not to bring the clothes she wanted. I made her apologize for that slight once we were in bed. I enjoyed the 'apology' so much, I made Carol apologize for it too. It was particularly enjoyable because Julia started praising me for how confident and staunch I'd been once I'd made my decision to dump Chloe. I laughed at that because it was Julia that did all the dumping while I hid behind her in the kitchen. Julia agreed, "Exactly, that's why you're the Lord and I'm your follower. You make the decisions and I carry them out. I'm so happy that you're getting more decisive. Roll on your back so I can demonstrate my happiness again." I like what happens when Julia is proud of me. ------- Chapter 203: Lily Returns Tuesday, May 10, 2005 Even though we'd wasted valuable study time late last night, my first job this morning was a detour to an ATM, where - once again - my heart was in my mouth waiting to see the account balance... It had a delightful number of zeroes, with a very nice "8" in front. The numbers on the back being chump change; something like a day's interest! I took out $100 while I was here, then headed off to do some studying. I started by browsing Aikido on both computers, two minds per computer. Each pair followed different links, looking for any interesting material. When we found anything good, all four minds looked at it. We found out that there were lots of different styles of Aikido, some far more martial than art, others so art they sounded totally wishy-washy. As far as I knew there was only one Aikido club in Corvallis, and it seemed about one-third physical and two-thirds mental in what it considered important - although most of the initial training was necessarily physical - a division which suited me almost perfectly. Plus Sensei could presumably adapt his one-on-one teaching to what I wanted, if I made an issue out of something. Some styles of Aikido had competitions which caught my attention for a second. Not because I wanted the glory of winning - that's definitely not my style - but so I could measure myself against other people. I decided I didn't need to, because Sensei was giving me plenty of feedback about that, and I'd presumably get more during the advanced class next week. I was very puzzled about how they could have competitions in Aikido though. Two aikidoka facing each other, competing to defend themselves better than the other guy? All they had to do was take a step back each, and it was all over. Unless they took turns attacking each other, which would give the attacker motivation to be a non-cooperative smart-ass. I stopped wasting time thinking about it. There were plenty of places I could buy Aikido stuff, some of which looked interesting, so I book-marked a couple of the biggest stores for when I had a credit card. I also read a lot of text. Aikido stories, people's experiences, comparisons with other martial arts, etc. Nearly all of it was completely irrelevant, or even worse in my opinion ("Who would win between a Karate and Aikido black belt?" I couldn't care less!), but it was interesting to see what other aikidoka were interested in. Far too many seemed interested in fighting, which I thought was silly, but I suspected there was a sizable silent majority of 'good' students who were happy keeping their opinions to themselves. Those people would tend to be less aggressive in the real world and on the internet, I felt sure. I had previously reached the conclusion that I was very unlikely to ever find anyone like me, probably because no such person existed, either at all, or at least in this w-dimension. If they'd merged twice, which is when my abilities seemed to take off, there'd only be a 25% chance they'd be in this dimension. With obviously even lower chances if they'd merged more than twice. Even if they did exist here, I still doubted I'd find them by reading websites. Nonetheless, I still was hopeful I'd come across something that gave me an "Oh my God!" moment. I did have several of those, by always as part of thinking, "Oh my God, how could people spend time writing this garbage." Nor did I see anything that was super-impressive, or which gave me a brilliant idea for something else I could do with my abilities. There were a few minor ideas, but nothing that made me want to rush out and try them. As an example, one idea that'd occurred to me from time to time, and which Sensei had reminded me of with one of his O Sensei stories yesterday, was to keep one or more of my minds awake when 'I' was asleep. We might be able to take turns during the day, while the rest of the minds kept the body going. I hadn't done anything about it because I felt sure my body and minds needed sleep and I didn't want to risk messing around with that. I'd heard that people could go insane through lack of sleep, which would be a very good thing to avoid. Plus I was already active twenty out of the 24 hours per day, so there wasn't much gain to be had. I did a couple of hours study, and then showered and dressed in the clothes Julia had dictated last night. I did think of digging out the grungiest clothes Julia had, putting them in a bag, then delivering them to her as if they'd come from her mom, saying, "Your mom couldn't understand why you wanted to wear these clothes to school, but here you go." But as momentarily tempting as that had been I shouldn't make fun of something that someone important to me cares to much about, even if they are being silly. Teasing people who aren't important to me is a different matter. That caution certainly wouldn't apply to some non-friends: Chloe's parents for example, as I'd love to mock their beliefs, i.e., treat them realistically. Vanessa got Julia's fresh clothes together for me. Just as well, because I would have felt very uncomfortable rooting through Julia's underwear drawer. At breakfast Andrew and Robert were very appreciative of my generosity. We exchanged all the usual platitudes. (You know the ones I mean, for when you give away $300,000.) I raised the risk element issue, which Prof reinforced, as it'd been his point originally. Regardless of my motivation, The Boys were very happy, even though they thought having to pay tax on my gift sucked. I gave Prof my bank manager's card and explained to him "The bank manager needs to 'get to know me', to make sure I'm not an international terrorist plotting the downfall of the United States in between my dates with pretty girls. He wanted to know about my business, so I said I'd get my accountant to call him. He'd know better how to answer those sorts of questions, wouldn't he?" "He would, but it's so easy I'll give your manager a call myself. He'll just be covering his ass, so it won't take long." I wasn't sure what that meant, but I had very little interest in my bank manager's big ass, so we went on to the usual chat about studying. After that we talked briefly about Chloe, and then finally about mansion shopping. I expressed interest in the recent mansion-shopping developments, but Vanessa advised that I had to continue to "wait and see", which seemed to be entailing a lot of my waiting, but not much of my seeing. After some last "Thank yous" from The Boys, I drove to my home to pick up the girls. Julia was wrapped in a towel. I suggested, "I think you look well enough dressed for school already." "Nah, white's out of fashion this season." "No one has officially informed me of that so you've doubtless got it wrong, but here's the bag anyway." I reluctantly gave it to her and she went back to the bedroom to get dressed. Mom gave me an apology for getting so upset about my fight yesterday. It wasn't the most heartfelt of apologies, as she was mostly apologizing for getting "too upset", which left open the issue about how much was the correct amount of upset: 10% less than she'd done, or 90% less? I accepted her apology, then Mom said, "Carol says you're going to the bank at lunchtime?" "Do you want me to bank your hard-earned money?" "If you would, please." "No problem. Any more plans about what to spend it on?" "Your father's going to look into newer cars for us. Him and me, I mean. I understand Julia and you will find your own car." "Something like that, yes. We haven't discussed it much, but I'm sure it'll come up sooner rather than later." "What I want most is a family trip back to England to catch up with everyone there. Sometime during your summer vacation. That's okay with you, isn't it?" "If you want to catch up with 'everyone' in England it might take longer than three months, but if it's just your family then that's fine. I've got nothing planned for summer, other than Prof twisting my arm to do some studying, which can certainly be interrupted for a family visit." [Prof suggested, and I did, take a laptop so I could study in the wee small hours while I was away.] #2: #4: #2: #4: "Good," declared Mom. "I'd better start getting passports for everyone." My sisters and I didn't have passports yet, never having gone overseas before. #1: I added, "You haven't forgotten Julia coming with us, have you?" "No. She's included in our family, even if it's unofficial. We discussed it with her at breakfast and she's looking forward to it." I thought of something, "The phone's quiet. Did you take it off the hook?" "Yes. We had to have it off all night. I put it back on for a few minutes this morning, but that soon got tiresome. I'll be glad when it dies down. I think I'll look into getting a phone service." "What's that?" "When someone calls our number, it doesn't ring here, but at the service. One of their staff answers it, and checks if the caller is on our list. If they are, they get put through, otherwise the service takes a message which they email to us, or phone through when they've got several; whichever we want." "What an excellent idea! Personally I couldn't care less about the phone being off the hook, as anyone who's important to me has my mobile number, but if it bothers you, go for it." "I won't be home much today, because we've got a few more places on the list to see this evening. I'll see what it's like on Wednesday. I might still make inquiries though, because I'm we might need it sooner or later." "If I was a betting sort of guy, I'd bet you were right." In the car I checked with Julia, "I was thinking about the weekend's trip. It's only one night, which I'm obviously going to be spending with the two of you mostly, it being our anniversary and all. You're not worried about Ava being there as well, are you?" "No, Ava's fine. Carol and I spend plenty of time with you anyway. Ava is fun, and I'm sure she'll be more than happy if you sleep between Carol and me on Saturday night." "Haha, yeah, she sure would." "The important thing is that you show us you appreciate us. That's what anniversaries are for, after all. As long as we can see you're thinking of us, Ava's being there is fine." "If I've finished adding up the bill from Rodeo Drive by then, I'll TRY to think appreciatively of you, haha. The second thought that worried me a little is how much time I'll have for the other girls. If we fly down early in the morning, we should have finished all the shopping by lunchtime, right?" "Ha-ha, Mark." "Am I being just a wee bit hopeful?" "Wildly delusional would be a better description. With luck we might have time for dinner before we go to the concert." "If I die of starvation on Saturday evening, the plane won't take you back on Sunday, so you'd better look after me! Okay, more realistically, you girls shop ALL DAY, rushing back to the hotel to get fancied up for a nice dinner somewhere before we go on to the concert. Sound about right?" "Sounds perfect. I do believe you're starting to understand how girls work." "Don't worry, it'll pass. By the time we get back from the concert it'll be fairly late, and we'll probably go to bed to celebrate our anniversary in the correct way: with sex rather than shopping. Then we'll spend Sunday doing tourist things, so when will the other girls get to spend any time with me? - he asks egotistically." "When you say 'spend time with you', you mean have sex, don't you? Because they'll be spending most of both days in your company." "Yeah, I guess I am. I didn't mean to speak so indirectly, but that's what it boils down to. Partly where I'm going with this is wondering whether I should have the girls stay overnight between now and then, to make up for not being able to sleep with them during the trip. I don't have anything particular in mind; I'm just asking your opinion." "You're not under ANY obligation to them, Mark. Quite the reverse, as you're doing them a favor by taking them on the trip. They'll be falling all over themselves to thank you, whether or not they get any private time with you. But there are some opportunities. They can play with you in the plane going either way. I seem to vaguely remember some mention of a bed. That was right, wasn't it?" "I think I might've heard something about that. I didn't really feel obligated; just worried about them having a good time, and that they'd expect it to include some sex with me." "Assuming the lucky coincidence that the plane does have a bed, I'm sure you'll have time to give those girls a spin on it. If they REALLY want to have sex with you, ask them whether they want you to come to their room early Sunday morning, at 5am or so. Carol, Ava and I will probably need to sleep in for a while on Sunday morning, so you can give the other girls a good workout until we wake up and phone their room. There might be an issue with some of them being uncomfortable with so many people at once, but I don't think there'll be much discomfort. If there is, I'm sure you'll be able to work something out at the time." "I'm a bit worried about the discomfort angle too, especially with Katelin. I don't want to hear any more, 'but I only like normal sex.' That got tiresome very fast." Julia answered, "I doubt you'll have much problem for two reasons. When I invite Katelin, I'll make sure she understands that you're taking a group of girls down, and that group sex is going to happen. She doesn't have to participate, but she does have to stop being a wet blanket. There's also the point that 'normal sex' for a girl who thinks she has a shot at a multimillionaire, is 'any damned sex he wants'! Haha. So I think you'll find Katelin is more relaxed than last time. Alexis isn't prissy about sex, and Pat's fairly well convinced that threesomes and foursomes are fun, so I think you'll be fine. That's assuming they're willing to be woken up early Sunday morning, which is more likely to be a problem. But don't worry about it. They're obligated to you, not the other way around. All you have to do is tell them what you want to do, and let them participate as they wish." Half the reason I'd asked was because Chloe's self-destruction gave me some free time I didn't expect. Both Alexis and Pat had been asking me for another date. Obviously the LA trip would count - it'd better! - but I'd been wondering about spending an evening or night with them before the weekend, probably individually. Never mind; it'd probably be a good idea for me to spend time at home, as my social life is bound to get a little hectic once my wealth becomes public knowledge. From the moment we got out of the car, school was a pain. Everyone wanted to hear all the tedious details of yesterday afternoon's fight from me. In answer to their first question (pretty much regardless of what it was), I said, "All I want to say is that I'm tired of idiots attacking me, so from now on they're going to get their arms broken and the police called to take their asses to jail." In answer to their second question (regardless of what it was), "That's all I want to say, so let us through," (or, " ... go away," if I was already where I wanted to be). There were some bright points: Alexis and Pat gave me very enthusiastic "Good morning" kisses. Alexis inquired about the health of the target of yesterday's attack, and wanted to know whether she could do a variation of "kiss it better" that involved sucking. The middle of a classroom shortly before the teacher was due to arrive probably wasn't the best time or place, so I suggested we wait until the weekend. Many other girls were very solicitous and friendly; quite a few of them were VERY friendly. I was confused, because I always thought girls were repelled by violence. I mostly enjoyed the attention, although at times there was so much of it that it was a nuisance. I also wish I understood why the girls were suddenly so attracted to me, because I wasn't sure whether I should be accepting their attention or pushing it away. Girls can be very confusing some times (not all the time; as they hardly ever confuse me when I'm sleeping). There was no sign of Chloe. (You know what happens with her after this, so I'll stop the daily lack-of-progress reports about Chloe.) Julia took Katelin aside for a conversation. I was standing several yards away, but it was still funny watching the astonishment and delight on Katelin's face. She wanted to come rushing to me, but Julia physically held her back until Julia had finished. Then Katelin came rushing over to ask "Is it true?" and the other predictable questions. Once those were answered and the conversation became more productive, one difference between her and the other girls' reaction to the Flying Bed Invitation was that Katelin didn't want to lie to her mother about the trip, and she asked me to come to her house one evening soon to explain it and ask permission. I told her I'd probably be able to do it this evening, but would call her first; Julia had her number. Lily arrived somewhat late to school, meeting us at the end of the penultimate class before lunchtime. She told us she'd put lunch in my locker (I'd been worried about that), and she handed over boxes containing my, Julia's and Carol's new phones. "Sorry, no time to," and she used her fingers to mime either plugging the charger into my phone, or a man having sex with it. Even to my eyes, my phone was gorgeous, with what I later learned was called a "brushed metal" cover (no cheap plastic for me!). It was dark blue, but with a dark red 'under sheen' (I have no idea whether that's the right phrase, because I'm a guy). I would've thought that metal with a red sheen under a mainly blue color was impossible, but I was holding proof of it in my hands. Lily put the phone next to my ring, which is more of a tube, so there's quite a lot of it, and they matched really well. The 'under sheen' of the phone wasn't the same color as the ring, but somehow they worked together. Even more as mysteriously, the red and blue of the phone somehow didn't clash, so the whole thing worked very nicely. I had no idea how colors could coordinate like that, but they obviously could. Julia praised Lily HIGHLY for achieving such a wonderful thing. Our audience - privacy was almost impossible today, as my breaking four guys' arms apparently made me Mr. Popular - all went gaga over my phone, from which you can probably deduce that most of the audience was female. Lily received a LOT of praise for her remarkably good taste, and I received many compliments for my new phone. I'd done nothing to justify being complimented, but apparently it doesn't work that way. Not that any of the females cared about the internals, but I had a quick look. The phone was very small, and the buttons were necessarily the same, so much so that I'd almost need to use NP to push them (NP-fingertips have a half-inch minimum diameter, but a rounded tip unless I choose to flatten them). I had a little fiddle, test pushing some of the buttons with my fingers, and they seemed large enough for me to be able to press one at a time, but only just. I saw that it also had a camera, which might be useful next time a jock insists on a date with Julia. When the externals of my phone had been ooh'd and ah'd over enough, Julia opened her and Carol's boxes. Their phones were different, and it wasn't obvious to me which girl got which phone, but Julia clearly knew, as she immediately referred to "my phone" or "Carol's phone". Both phones were deemed to be wonderful by Julia and the assorted spectators, who were very envious. Lily received some more praise. To me Julia said, "We can go to the store and get a SIM card for you at lunchtime, and we can charge them in class when we get back. That way they'll be operational before school lets out." "Ahh, we need to check about that bad feature." "I'm sure Lily wouldn't make that mistake, but I'll call Andrew or Robert now. They spend most of their time working on their theses, so I can easily interrupt one of them. Especially after your gift to them." Julia called Andrew on her existing, poorly-reflecting-my- elevated-status phone. Julia's side of the conversation was, "Andrew, are you able to do a few minutes googling for me and Mark?" "Haha, yeah, I thought so. Thanks. I've got three cellphone models that I'd like to find out if they have a feature that allows their software to be updated by being downloaded automatically, like Windows does?" He knew, so Julia read out the three model numbers, asking him to text the answer back to her phone. Lily said quietly to us, "I want say private thing." She was looking around worriedly at the girls around us. Julia enjoys opportunities to order people around, so she immediately called out loudly, "Everyone back up. Lily wants to talk with us in private. Get back. Farther. Back, back. Thank you." Lily looked around then quietly told us, "Doctor say me very good. Pill Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; so Thursday we big sex, yes?" I had two issues with that, one of which was a BIG issue. I asked, "Is the pill you're taking Chinese medicine, or a proper American pill?" "I show you." Lily dug into her bag then held up a blister pack of pills. There were two missing from days numbered 8 and 9. I knew from seeing Julia and Carol take theirs that Lily had started partway into her cycle. Which was about the sum total of my knowledge on such matters. Julia looked at the brand name and said, "Any time after Wednesday would be fine." I asked Julia, "American pills?" Julia said, "Probably international pills. But to answer what you meant, yes, they're one of the new types of hormone pills. Effectively the same as all the rest of us are taking, although they work slightly differently because one of the hormones is different." "Good. That's one less worry. Lily, you said Thursday. I'd rather wait a little longer, just to make sure the pills are working." Lily looked unhappy. "I've got one of the pipeline dates on Friday evening, and I'm going away for the weekend," Lily was looking even more unhappy. I was going to suggest any day next week, but I squeezed it forward a bit by saying, "So how about Sunday or Monday?" "So long?" accompanied by a sad pout. Julia suggested, "Why not Friday night after your pipeline date? Hopefully some of the sixteen girls would have made you horny, and you'll be able to take it out on Lily. Call her as your date is ending and tell her what house to go to." I knew it was pointless raising the objection that it might be getting late. I couldn't think of any other objections, and Lily seemed much happier. Just to make absolutely sure, I asked Julia, "You think the pills will be effective by Friday?" "The pill manufacturers wouldn't say 'three days' unless the pills were safe then, otherwise they'd be facing thousands of lawsuits from all the mothers who had waited three days. Friday will be fine." I looked at Lily, "Friday then." I didn't have to ask Lily's opinion, as she jumped forward to give me a big hug and lots of "Thank yous." Far more demonstrative than she normally is, so Lily was obviously VERY happy, as a pretty girl should be when I agree to let her give me sex. When Lily had finished expressing her appreciation for my beneficence, she added, "I have gifts for you. I give tonight?" Beneficence was flying in all directions. "I don't need any gifts, Lily. There's no need to bother." "Already have. My honor serve you, so gifts. I come tonight?" Julia said, "You don't have anything on tonight, do you, Mark?" "Ahh, no. Visiting Katelin's mother some time, which I'll probably do shortly after dinner. Otherwise I was just going to hang around at home." "The moms and I - and Carol too, if she wants to come - will be out early in the evening, finishing off the last few items on our list. How about calling Lily to come over when we get home, which should be around 8pm? I'm very curious to see what she's got you." Julia's curiosity would be just as satisfied by seeing the gifts after Lily had left, but that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as being there for the actual unwrapping. I asked Lily, "Is 8pm not too late? You must be tired after your trip." "Is okay. You call me at 8, yes?" "When Julia gets to my house. It may be a little earlier or later, but around 8, yes." "Good. I hope you like." I hoped so too, although I suspected she was just bringing me a pair of shoes, because I remembered that she'd traced my feet after dinner at her house. It was a good thing feet don't expand from eating a big meal, otherwise the tracings would have been WAY oversized after that meal. After the end of the next class, which was also the beginning of lunch, Julia showed me Andrew's text message, "None list that feature. Other models do, so probably not have, but 'absence of proof, etc.' I've emailed question to their tech supports, will advise." Julia said, "I don't understand what he meant by 'absence of proof, etc.', but the overall meaning is good enough. No one's trying to locate you now, so let's carry on assuming everything's fine." "Okay. I can explain the 'absence of proof' thing if you want?" "Does it change the meaning of Andrews answer?" "No, but it's an important rule of logic." "In that case, no thanks." -- A couple of seconds later Julia started laughing, then added, "Poor Mark. Was I teasing you too cruelly just then? You can tell me now." "If I could revenge tease you by not telling you, I'd do so, but I know you wouldn't care. I will tell you, because you should at least know what logical rules you'll doubtless be spending the rest of your life ignoring. The full quote is, 'Absence of proof is not proof of absence.' If the feature WAS listed for one of the phones, we could reasonably assume the phone had the feature, but it not being listed doesn't prove anything either way. Not in isolation anyway, as other phones having the feature listed is additional information which has a logical implication." -- Julia looked a bit blank, so I added, "The list of features probably didn't include that the phone had ten buttons labeled from zero to nine. That omission doesn't prove the phone doesn't have those buttons, it just means someone decided not to include it in the list. The phone might have the software update feature, but someone didn't bother putting it on the list." Julia asked, "Sure; 'maybe someone didn't bother putting it on the list' is easy to understand. That's all Andrew had to say." "Maybe so, but I'm trying to teach you about a rule of logic which has application beyond people making up lists." "Like what?" "That 'absence of proof' rule is often used when talking about UFOs. That there's an absence of definitive proof that UFOs are real, doesn't mean they're not real. If just means that the question is still open." "I'm not interested in UFOs. That's just for crazy people." I gave up. It's worrying to contemplate, but teaching girls about logic might be similar to their trying to teach me about fashion. Not similar in importance OBVIOUSLY!, but similar in effect, in that both teachings might simply be unable to 'take' with the opposite sex. As Mom would say, "like water off a duck's back" (although I doubt she's ever taken the time to hold a duck and then pour water on its back while she studied what happened). [In due course Andrew got the answers to his emails from the two different phone manufacturers involved. None of the phones had the bad feature. Lily had done well.] ------- Chapter 204: Discovering a New Way to Project Ki Tuesday, May 10, 2005 (Continued) During the morning I carried out several ki experiments, building on the almost successful "Make Someone Fall Down Without Touching Them" technique from last evening with Sensei. Having so many people gather around me at school was a pain, but it did provide me with plenty of 'volunteers'. Most of my volunteers were girls, as they were the ones who were reaching out to touch me the most. I wasn't doing anything harmful to them, so girls were just as good as guys for most of what I did. I soon confirmed that I could 'reel someone in' fairly easily. If someone was reaching for my hand, I could make them grab toward me faster than they expected. I was grasping their ki with mine and projecting mine farther in the direction they were moving, pushing their ki farther away from them, but in a direction that resulted in an effect that was indistinguishable from my towing them faster toward me. Ki is always projected and never sucked. As an experiment I tried sucking my or someone else's ki, but it just doesn't work that way. It's an energy I can tap from the Universe (somehow?), then radiate. I don't know what the mechanism for it is, other than it requires that I'm centered to be able to 'see' it with my proximity sense or use the very weird ki abilities I have: NP and blobs. Intention Ki, which everyone has, just seems to be something that we all project away from ourselves. I could have an equally unknown mechanism for sucking it in, but somehow that doesn't feel possible. A metaphor I had was an extension of Sensei's "jet of water". If I was a dam on a river, I could open a small floodgate to let water jet out of me in a particular direction, but I (as a dam) couldn't do anything to make the water go in the other direction. I had a feeling that there was a pool of energy in the Universe, flowing all over the place (and that's what I thought "moving in harmony with the Universe" meant moving in sympathy with, even though I couldn't sense that flow). I could tap into it, and redirect it out of me, but reversing the flow wasn't going to happen. Imagine opening a dam's floodgate and trying to empty a bucket of water back into the lake behind it! This metaphor felt reasonable, but it was still far more a figment of my imagination than based on much in the way of facts. [[It's not a great metaphor, but it captures some aspects fairly well and is useful enough for now. Later on I find a way of reversing the flow, an effect I also name after Ava, although not for a reason as happy as the inspiration of "Nipple Power".]] The next obvious experiment was to 'tow' their ki in the wrong direction. When next someone tried to reach for my hand (I'd be holding it out a little, to make it an easy grab or touch for girls), I overlapped their ki with mine, then projected mine at ninety degrees to their intended movement. It made logical sense that their hand should be towed off target, but I was still delighted when it happened exactly that way. That seemed far more interesting and useful than accelerating them toward me. It had one major limiting factor though, as soon as they noticed that they were missing their target, they adjusted their aim. It still worked a little, but it was best when someone wasn't watching their movement, such as when they were looking me in the face while reaching for my arm. If next time someone tried to stab me with a pair of emasculating scissors, by using the sideways "ki-tow" I'll be able to deflect them off target. How much effect I could get in such a violent situation was yet to be discovered, but I thought probably only an inch or two. I guessed people stab with something like fifty pounds of force, plus there's a lot of momentum and inertia involved, so vectoring their angle of thrust to the side wasn't going to have much effect. My ki is several times stronger than an untrained person's, but it's not strong enough to tow a violently thrusting arm wildly off target. I might get a better result by using a sideways NP-push, even though that was only a paltry 10.5 pounds. However, a ki-tow would be better than using NP in two interrelated respects. The attacker would feel an NP-push on their hand, so they'd correctly think something freaky was going on, which might cause me trouble when they talked about it later. Second, their natural reaction - if not to scream and run away - would be to immediately push against the force to correct its effect. A ki-tow is undetectable because I'm effectively redirecting their intention, which their hand then follows. It is detectable when they see that their hand is off target, but they'll just assume they missed for some reason. In my Aikido training, I'd nearly always been told to project my ki from my hands or wrist. Very occasionally from my elbow or center, but there was almost never a need to project ki from anywhere else. So it was a strange feeling to try to project ki from other parts of my body. When someone was in the process of slapping me on the shoulder from behind, I tried to project ki from the area they were about to slap, so as to overlap with their ki, out through the front of my shoulder, to tow them into a harder slap. I didn't project ki out of strange places as well as I did out of my hands, so I started practicing the projection part of the technique, without waiting for a 'volunteer'. Projecting ki worked reasonably well out of 'corners' of my body: my elbows, the ends of my shoulders, top of my head, etc. As if the 'corner' represented the end of the hose the metaphorical water was jetting out of. I tried projecting from a nipple, and that was almost as good as a 'corner', so "Nipple Power" wasn't totally misnamed. Projecting ki from a non-corner, such as the middle of my chest, was noticeably 'poorer' (by which I mean less ki was radiated, and it tended to spray out wider rather than in the focused stream I wanted). It was even poorer still when I tried to project it from the middle of my chest at an odd angle, so it started in the center of my chest, but traveled inward through my body and emerged out of my left buttock, for example. Unexpectedly, projecting ki from my center wasn't easy in any direction. I'd thought there was something special about the center, so it might've been able to project ki well, but that wasn't the case. The "Corner Effect" seemed far more likely to be psychological than real, so I practiced hard for most of a class, trying several approaches including all sorts of hose imagery. I did improve somewhat, but from practice rather than finding an image that worked. Despite my improvement, I still couldn't get non-corners to produce as much ki, or ki that was as well-focused, as from corners. Toward the end of class, I hit upon something that worked well. I'd been imagining variations of a hose running from my center, the presumed source of my ki [[wrong]], to the point I wanted my ki to start radiating from. I'd been using the middle of my left shoulder blade as the ki's starting point, with it emerging out the middle of my chest. I tried having the hose running out of my body in an exterior loop until it pointed at my shoulder blade, like a large "C". Or running purely within my body, other than the minimum protrusion it needed to be able to squirt inward from outside of my shoulder blade, although that required a sharp bend in the hose. Neither of those, nor every other variation that I could think of (wide or narrow hoses, for example) produced good quality ki streams. I was mentally trying to think of images that might get rid of the problem of the hose having a sharp bend at its end, while still having the 'water' flow in the right direction. I tried to avoid the sharp bend by having the hose squirting along the skin on my back, with an angled deflector redirecting the ki inward and through my body. We were discussing where to place the deflector: immediately in front of the end of the hose, a couple of inches in front, have the end of the hose sliced at an angle with the longest part on the outside, from which the deflector extended, etc. During this discussion one of my minds created a mental image of a hand, with an index finger pointing to show us where he thought the deflector should be, and then he moved the finger to point in the direction he wanted the deflector to direct the water. Something about that image felt right to the owner, so he immediately tried to direct ki from the index finger, and it flowed very nicely in exactly the direction he was pointing. I threw the imaginary hose away, to play around with an imaginary pointing finger, which immediately proved to be an excellent mental crutch (that surely being what all the imagery was). That image was more flexible because it could be located anywhere and point in any direction. It was also very familiar and intuitive. I could easily imagine my hand behind my back, with a finger extended, pointing at my shoulder blade in a direction toward the middle of my chest. It was actually easier to imagine than to do for real, as real arms aren't that flexible. I didn't have to imagine the whole arm, just the hand with its extended finger. With a little practice, I made it even easier just by imagining the last couple of inches of a finger. We look at our fingers most of our lives, so we're VERY familiar with what they look like. Imagining ki projecting from my finger was very easy, and the whole thing worked fantastically well. I realized why 'corners' were easier to project ki from. It was because I'm used to pointing with corners. If your hands are full, you sometimes point with your head, elbow, or shoulder. Even pointing with a nipple was intuitively obvious enough that it made projecting ki from one easy. Whereas I found projecting ki from a calf muscle difficult. Pointing with, and projecting ki from, fingers was perfect. I could even imagine a finger inside my calf muscle, pointing and projecting in the right direction. I wasn't projecting ki from odd parts of my body; I was projecting it from an imaginary finger, located and oriented however I wanted. Which created a VERY interesting question: could I imagine a finger separate from my body, and project ki from it? I imagined a finger a foot or so in front of me, pointing sideways. Then I turned on the faucet, and I could see the ki flow sideways in front of me. I was so excited at the flexibility of this new discovery that the teacher asked me if I was all right. "Sorry, I just solved a tricky mental problem I've been working on. Nothing to do with your class, sorry. Just pretend I'm not here." "As you're pretending about me, haha." (The humor because I got very good grades in her class, so she was happy with me.) She returned to her lesson, I returned to my experiments. I wondered how flexible it was. It was trivially easy to imagine a pointing finger, even one not connected to my body. With a few minutes practice, it got even easier and more effective at projecting a great flow of ki. I could easily imagine a disembodied hand floating anywhere in the room, oriented so its index finger pointed in any direction I wanted. I had a small experimental problem though, as I can only see ki if it's within three feet of my center. I could see ki extending from an imaginary finger a few inches in front of me, but if I moved it six feet away, I couldn't distinguish whether it was: (a) projecting ki that I couldn't see, or (b) not projecting ki at all. Someone standing four feet away from me, projecting ki toward me, e.g., if they're about to start running to me to give me a hug, has their ki become visible at the three-foot mark. So I imagined a finger just out of the three-foot range and had it project ki back toward me. No ki appeared. It wasn't definitive proof, but I was reasonably sure that no ki was being created. ^ [Let me digress in tidying up a few possible misunderstandings, and giving you a better understanding of ki: The imagined fingers are literally only "imagined", exactly as you would imagine them. They are not physically created in any way - not like NP-fingertips - so they're nothing to do with ki themselves. The ki I can project from them is real ki, but not the fingers themselves are in no sense real. Those fingers serve only as a mental crutch for me, giving me something to focus on that defines the location and direction of the ki I want to create, as well as being something that I am used to projecting a direction from (that's what "pointing" is), thereby making projecting ki from them even easier. I always knew they were nothing but a visualization aid, which is why I so quickly reduced them to a finger, and didn't hesitate to scale them up or down if I wanted a wide or narrow flow of ki. The second misunderstanding you might have is over the nature of the ki I was projecting. It is "Intention Ki". It is not a physical force in any sense. Blobs radiate electromagnetically, NP-fingertips apply mechanical force. For all I know I could create gravity and the two nuclear forces too, although I'm sure they'd be undetectably weak. Intention Ki is none of these forces; it's a Conscious effect only. My other abilities affect the Universe's Matter or Energy; intention affects only the Universe's Consciousness, which interacts with our minds, so has a small effect on them, as previously described. As a slight additional digression, I wrote that "blobs radiate electromagnetically." Electricity is also electromagnetic, so theoretically it might've been possible for me to create it. Normal ways of creating it include lightning, by chemical reaction, or with an electric generator, none of which I could reproduce with my meager abilities.] [[Humanity currently understands there to be four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. Mechanical force is not a fundamental force, as it's created from the fundamental forces, nearly always from electromagnetic. At this time in my autobiography, I had naively assumed NP was a mechanical force, without thinking about it deeply enough. Had I done so, I would've realized that mechanical forces (friction, tension, etc.) occur where atoms interact electromagnetically, but NP-fingertips are massless so they clearly don't contain atoms. This should have immediately created the question, "How on Earth do NP-fingertips manage to exert a mechanical force then?" That question hadn't occurred to me yet, but I'll answer it now. NP works because the mechanical force it exerts is created solely by a fifth fundamental force that humans aren't aware is so important: ki. Humanity has conjectured that there's a fifth fundamental force, but has made very little progress in identifying it. Humanity is also trying hard to unify the fundamental forces into single model. You won't get there until you understand the role Consciousness-Ki plays in the Universe. When you do unify your model of the fundamental forces, you'll understand that they interact in some mighty interesting ways. Among the many useful consequences - such as sophisticated minds! - is my ability to generate/tap all five forces, although I'd only done two of the five - electromagnetic and ki - at this point in time.]] ^ Intention Ki has absolutely no effect on another person unless it interacts with their ki in the right way. So my projecting Intention Ki across part of an empty room was irrelevant. Even if someone walked through the path of my ki, nothing was going to happen. Imagine you are intending to reach for a glass on a table a few steps away, and someone walks between you and the table. They are walking through the ki of your intention. You know from your own experiences that there's no effect on them. Certainly nothing as absurd as the intervening person suddenly acting as your puppet! If that was the case, boys would walk around in pairs, pretending to intend to take each other's bras off, hoping a pair of girls would walk between them. Discard any image you have of me remote-controlling someone else. Their movements are controlled by their muscles, which are fired by their own nerve impulses; none of which I can affect. What I can do is use my ki to influence their ki. So, first, they have to be generating some of their own ki. If their left hand is relaxed and dangling beside their body, it would be pointless my directing any ki at it, as there'd be no ki of theirs for mine to influence. I might as well be sending my ki through a piece of wood. If they were intending to do something with that hand, reach out to grab my arm say, then my ki can interact with theirs, but unless I am being very deliberate, the interaction is momentary and achieves nothing. Imagine two hoses waving around squirting water; their jets might occasionally cross each other, but it's rare. With a very deliberate, prolonged manipulation of the other person's ki with mine, I can reel their grab in faster or tow it to the side. I'm still not controlling their muscles. Their ki is generated by their intention, which is either conscious or subconscious, but is always theirs. By tugging on their ki, I am exerting an influence on their subconscious. An example might make this clearer. If, after you read these instructions, you concentrate 100% of your attention on the top right corner of the room you are in, you should then find it impossible to reach out with your left hand to pick up something to your left. Moving your left arm requires that you divert attention from the top corner, which this exercise doesn't allow because I specified 100%, thus you should not be able to move your hand at all. Through these words I have redirected your consciousness in a way that prevented the muscles of your left arm from working. I didn't affect those muscles directly, only by altering your ability to control your own intentions. In a fight I can't insist my attacker concentrates 100% of his attention on the top right corner of the room, so I can't redirect his attention with that method. What I can do is redirect his ki a little, but only "a little". By moving his intention, I also move his (sub)consciousness. When Sensei was reaching for my hand and I was constantly stretching his ki farther forward than he was intending, the effect was to pull - and keep pulling - his focus into his reach, and away from what was happening to the rest of his body (if you were concentrating on the top right corner properly, you shouldn't have been aware of your left hand, right foot, or any other part of your body). It wasn't until his body was so far off balance that it staggered that his consciousness was distracted enough from his reaching that he was able to stop it, instantly canceling his reaching ki, which left me with no ability to 'pull' him any farther forward. There are a few reasons why the "No Touching Falling Down" technique works so well (having an attacker fall over is "so well" as far as I'm concerned). The main reason is because it involves reinforcing what an attacker is already attempting to do. It's much easier to reinforce someone's existing intention than to tow their ki sideways. Also very important for that technique's success is that it's safe to do so. An attacker is - by definition - trying to "attack", which is not something you'd normally want to reinforce; certainly not if he was jabbing at your groin with a pair of scissors, for example. The third reason the technique works so well is that it causes the attacker to bend over and stretch out in front of them so much that they fall over. There'd be little point in reinforcing their existing desire if nothing untoward happened at the end. The vast majority of times ki is used in Aikido is to reinforce an action that an attacker should want to stop doing. For example, when Head-Goon tried to stab me with his scissors, one of the basic Aikido techniques is for me to move to the side of the arm he's thrusting with, grab that wrist and hand, and push it farther forward with my own hand and ki. This results in it going so far forward that it pulls his shoulder forward and down, making him lean forward and become off balance. Continuing to push his arm forward starts pulling his body forward, so he starts stepping forward to get his legs under his center of gravity. Now the defender has control of uke's balance and movement, so the fight is effectively over. The ki part of this technique is that when uke is stabbing forward, his ki is going forward. If I can move to the side, grip his wrist, and add my ki to his forward-going ki, then he's less able to reverse his ki, delaying the necessary first stage - the intention - of his pulling his arm back for another attack. In Aikido we talk about using the attack itself to defeat the attacker. That means quite a lot more than just using the physical momentum of his attack, the way I do when I ram someone's head into a wall when they charge me like a bull. It also means using his mental momentum. Because ki cannot control an opponent like a zombie, Aikido has developed techniques where ki is used to subtly reinforce the existing intention of the attacker in a way that leads him into trouble (off balance, etc.). If ki was more powerful, or could control an opponent's muscles directly, then Aikido would have an entirely different approach. There's a little trick we sometimes use in Aikido to get an opponent's ki flowing in the direction we want so we can then reinforce it, because if they have no ki flowing, we have nothing to work with: we 'brush' their body in the desired direction. Consider the example of the last attack's lieutenant that I pushed into the urinal wall. He was already rushing forward and I'd ankle tapped him so he was falling forward too, so I didn't need this trick, but let's pretend that I haven't tripped him but he's still bent over at ninety degrees, and so the top of his head is pointed at the urinal. I'm standing beside him, one hand on the top of his head to keep it down, and the other hand on his ass to push him (as had been the case), BUT in this example he is stationary and has no intention of moving in any direction, so isn't radiating any ki of his own. I could physically push him, but he would physically resist, using his legs to brake whatever forward motion I could give him. He would also naturally try to stand up, which would also make pushing him to the wall far less effective, especially if he could use his hands to absorb the impact. The trick is to brush my hand across the top of his head in a forward direction. He feels that brush happening, and for a moment thinks about it. Because my brush is going forward, his attention moves forward. I'd already have my ki flowing forward, so as soon as his ki starts, it's swept along with mine. Then I push him hard on the ass, while keeping my ki flowing forward out the top of his head, straight toward the urinal wall. Because his ki is being propelled forward, for a few moments he can't intend to brake or intend to stand up. If I'm quick enough, and my ki is strong enough, I can push him unresisting into the wall, or at least delay his reaction by a few fractions of a second, which could make a big difference. Similarly, a few paragraphs above when I said I move to the side of the stab, grab uke's wrist and push it forward physically and with my ki. When I grabbed uke's wrist, I would actually lightly grab a little farther back up the forearm than the wrist, then let my hand slide forward until it reached his wrist. That not only keeps my hand safely away from the knife, but it creates a forward brushing sensation down uke's forearm, hopefully creating forward ki in him because reinforcing that is much more effective than trying to overcome the backward ki he's going to have when he starts pulling his arm back. By now you should understand that my being able to direct my Intention Ki not just outward from my body, but from anywhere I could imagine it within three feet of my center, didn't come close to making me capable of controlling someone's mind or body. If they were within three feet of me, I could probably get them to drop their pen off the side of their desk when they were trying to put it down near its edge, but that's about it. It's FAR too weak and there are too many constraints on its use, for it to be useful in any but a few special circumstances. I could temporarily and SLIGHTLY bend or exaggerate someone's intended movement when they were within three feet of me. Yawn! One last clarification point before I get back to the biography itself. Each of my minds could project all of my Intention Ki, provided the other minds weren't intending to do anything else at the same time. If there were two intentions going on at once, and the total ki was below the maximum because the actions were unimportant, then there was no issue. But if the intentions were strong, then the ki was automatically allocated in proportion to the amount of intent in each. This is how it works in a single-minded person. If they reach out with both hands at the same time, both hands project ki in amounts as described just above, normally equally, unless one hand was reaching for a piece of pizza or a breast! (One way of measuring my hunger would be to have one of my hands reach for one of those delightful objects, and judge the relative strengths of their ki projections. I'd call that experiment silly, except it involves naked breasts and pizza, so it obviously should be repeated as often as possible.) The fact that I had four minds meant I could tap sixteen times as much Intention Ki from the Universe, which was then available for any of my minds to direct. This functioned differently from NP-fingertips and blobs, where each mind could summon up to a maximum of four, regardless of whether any of the other minds had any going, so one mind could not create all sixteen. [[The reason for Intention Ki being different from my newly discovered ki-abilities is because a mind is something that is intrinsically able to tap ki from the Universe (that's actually an essential prerequisite for a mind, and it can also effectively serve as the definition of "Mind"). From when a mind is first created - even before its owner's birth in the case of mammals - it is tapping Intention Ki from the Universe. Whereas NP and other such abilities are extrinsic abilities so they're less integrated and automatic. By the way, on Earth, Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer programs are a LONG way from being minds by my definition. In contrast, all animals have minds, although they tap far less ki than humans. It is the same ki, from the same source, and used in the same way.]] ^ As an experiment, I tried to 'ankle-tap' someone using Intention Ki rather than NP. It had the advantage of being undetectable, but the massive disadvantage of needing to be done within three feet of my center, which meant the victim had to be walking extremely close to me - either beside or immediately in front or behind. It had another disadvantage too: it didn't work! It was too weak. I wasn't able to deflect their foot enough to make them trip. The best I achieved after many failures was a very small stumble. I was also tempted to do a "No Touch Fall Down" technique on a 'volunteer', but it was too much - it might have caused funny stories about me, or damage the person if they landed badly on the hard floor. Plus I was sure that I could do it, so I didn't need to prove it to myself. One experiment I repeated a few times solved the question about whether a finger imagined to be more than three feet away from my center radiated ki or not. I couldn't see the ki, but that didn't mean it didn't exist. With the ability to deflect people's movements I had something that I could see, so I tried a couple of dozen times to deflect someone's movement when they were slightly out of my range. Not once did I have any effect at all, so I concluded that my imaginary fingertips could only radiate Intention Ki if they were within my proximity range. Otherwise I just practiced my new ability on people I encountered around school. It was wonderfully flexible, which is always a good thing, but it suffered very badly from being pitifully weak and constrained by my three-foot-from-my-center proximity range limit. ------- Chapter 205: It Didn't Hurt Me, So You'll Hardly Feel a Thing Tuesday, May 10, 2005 (Continued) Julia and I headed to our lockers to collect lunch. I ate mine quickly, while walking to the car. Everyone should have a Chinese sex-slave; they make damned good lunches! We met Carol at the car, then drove to the bank. Carol got in the line to deposit her and our parents' checks, with Julia keeping her company. I went to give the bank manager the completed "Dependent Child's Subsidiary Credit Card Application Form." He received it, saying, "Good. I'm having the card couriered to me here. Do you have a cellphone that I can call you on when it arrives?" "I'm getting a new one right after my sister finishes depositing the checks I wrote out to her and my parents. I don't have the number yet, but I'll give you a call later to give it to you." That concluded my business with him, but he wanted to chat some more. He said the transfer I'd made out yesterday had already been processed this morning, then he wanted to talk about how I got to be so successful at day trading (Prof must have called him already). I had an answer prepared for that, "Sorry, my models are private. They're worth a lot of money, so obviously I don't discuss them with anyone. You probably wouldn't understand anyway, because they're very complex." "I've had many years in the finance industry, so I'm sure I would understand anything you've developed." "Haha. You haven't got a hope of understanding ANY of it." Which would be true if I'd bothered to tell him the technical explanation I'd prepared, as it was all super-impressive sounding bullshit. Instead I just said, "A Professor of Mathematics couldn't understand the math behind it, so I don't think you've got much chance. How many years of doctorate level or higher Mathematics research have you done?" #1: #3: It turned out that doctorate level mathematics (or higher) wasn't something bank managers spend much time doing. Not even as a hobby, which reduced my opinion of them. I made my escape before he could get into how many years of such research I'd done. I joined Carol and Julia in the line, it being long because it was lunchtime. The teller did a double-take when she saw Carol's deposit, looked at Carol, then said, "Nice one." Carol, making sure I could hear, said, "I'm looking forward to going clothes shopping this weekend." "I bet!" agreed the teller, a young woman. Or more accurately, an envious young woman. Mom and Dad's check was deposited next, but elicited only a raised eyebrow. On the way out of the bank Julia said, "To save time, let's split up. I'll do my banking, you get your phone taken care of, and we'll meet back at the car?" We did that, Carol and I walking off, with Carol firmly attached to the arm of her favorite brother. In the phone store I got a, "Wow, NICE phone!" "Thanks. A friend returned from Hong Kong this morning. It's fresh out of the box just a few minutes ago. I lost my old phone a few days ago and reported it lost. Now that I've got a new phone can we... ," etc. They could even give me the same phone number I'd used before, which was convenient for the few people that had it already programmed into their phones. We had to wait at our car for a few minutes for Julia to arrive, then we headed back to school. Halfway to school Carol's phone rang (her old one). Carol said, "Hi Mom," then listened for a thirty seconds. Turning to me, Carol said, "We have to go back to the bank. There's a problem with your check account. It has no money in it so the checks will bounce." "WHAT! There was eight million in there this morning. Where the hell did it go?" I would have expressed myself considerably stronger, except that Mom was still on the line so would hear what I said. I had another thought, "And how did the manager transfer out the three million for Prof. This doesn't make any damned sense." I did a U-turn to head back to the fucking bank! Carol listened to Mom some more, while I stewed and sweated. Then Carol explained to me, "There's still five million in your savings account, but there's none in your check account, so the checks will bounce." "Surely they'll take the money out of the savings account, won't they?" "Not according to Mom. You've got to transfer money into your check account to cover any checks you write out." "Morons! It's all my money, and if I write out a check and sign it with my name, isn't it obvious I want the check to be paid!" I ranted while I drove. Carol got more explanation from Mom. The bank manager had called up my account after I'd left the bank and had noticed there was no money in my check account. I'd told him I was writing checks, so he'd called Mom, who'd called Carol, suspecting she'd be with me. Mom had to get back to work, after passing on the message that I should get the bank manager to explain the rules to me. At the bank, the manager came out to meet me. It's only a small place, and he can see the main area from his office. He was very proud of himself for having spotted the problem and getting the message through to me. He was less than pleased by my pissed off response that they should OBVIOUSLY take the money out of my savings account. Apparently that's not the way it's done. Checks get paid out of the check account. "Okay. So transfer all the damned money into the check account then, so we don't have to play this stupid game anymore." "If you do that you won't earn any interest on the money. On that much money, the interest is a sizable amount." "Yes, I AM aware of that! You're telling me check accounts don't have any interest?" "No." "So set it up so that checks I write are paid out of my savings account then." "We can't do that. Checks always come out of check accounts." "But it's all MY MONEY! If I write a check, I obviously want it to be paid. Why can't the bank simply pay it out of either account? It's hardly complicated." "It's not the way things are done. Saving accounts are for earning interest, check account are for paying checks. They don't mix together." "Let me guess why: it's because that'd be far too convenient for your customers?" He didn't appreciate my sarcasm, but I didn't appreciate the stupid structure of the accounts either, so that made us even. "So every time I write some checks I have to come to the damned bank and transfer money to pay the checks, or I can transfer a large sum now and lose interest. I can either waste my time messing around, or lose a lot of interest, correct?" He was not impressed by my analysis. He restricted himself to saying, "We can make it more convenient for you. Your ATM card can be linked to both accounts so you can transfer the money at any ATM, or we can set you up for internet banking, so you can do the transfer from any computer with internet access, although it'd be safer to do it only from your home computer." "NONE of which would be necessary if you paid checks out of my savings account. What a pain in the ass!" "No one else complains..." "I bet EVERYONE else complains, but you don't listen to them and they eventually learn to put up with it. I refuse to believe ANYONE is happy at having to juggle two accounts and transfer money back and forth between them when it would be trivially easy to have one account that earned interest and which checks were paid out of. It's a stupid system. But it's pointless standing here wasting even more of my time arguing about it. What do I need to do to turn this unnecessary pain in the ass into an unnecessary half-pain in the ass?" That, and transferring the money to cover the checks, took most of the rest of lunchtime. Excellent! The afternoon wasn't noteworthy. More of the usual male fascination with violence, although that was diminishing because of my refusal to talk about it, and its slowly becoming old news. Lily, Alexis, Pat and Katelin were particularly attentive all day. Pat and Katelin seemed the most deliberate in their attentiveness. Alexis was amused by being in the know, while Lily was simply happy, and even joyful. She didn't know about my being rich, so her happiness was nothing other than an honest enjoyment from her being my sexual slave. Isn't that nice? On the topic of Lily, and being somewhat less humorous (although not for long, knowing me), she didn't act like a slave toward me. She did act very happy though, causing some people to comment on her being so "happy and bouncy". That was noticeable, because Lily isn't normally demonstrative in any way, let alone "bouncy". When girls asked Lily why she'd missed school yesterday, she didn't say she'd gone to Hong Kong to be checked out by a doctor to ensure she'd be a healthy sex-slave for me; merely that she was busy on family stuff. Nor was she clingy or jealous of the other girls around me. Thank goodness, because it wouldn't have done her any good if she had been. She was just 'around' whenever she could be; smiling a lot, and 'bouncing'. Someone who did appear to be having a little trouble with jealousy was Mackenzie. After some meaningless comments about looking forward to our date, she told me, "My sisters like you a lot." "Good." "It is? Why?" "Much better than their disliking me. That would be unpleasant. Positive emotions are much better." "I mean they like you a LOT. More than they should." "Good." "Ahh, why is that good?" "Because I like them. They're both nice girls." I didn't bother explaining to her that to a teenage boy, that meant "sexy and easy." Mackenzie is fairly pretty 16-year old girl, and if she doesn't know that about guys already, then she must be so stupid it'd be pointless to try to explain it to her. Nonetheless, even as succinctly stated, Mackenzie wasn't too impressed by my answer. She said, "Ahh... ," and then visibly struggled to invent a polite way of saying what she thought. I preempted her, "Mackenzie, sweetie, let me tell you a couple of facts of life. There's no point in your getting jealous or possessive about me at all." She started denying it, but I kept right on with, "That you have two sisters that I like is to your advantage, not the reverse. There are many dozens of girls that are interested in me, so two more has virtually no negative effect competitively for you, but it can have a sizable positive effect. After our date on Thursday, I'm much more likely to want to visit your family again because you have two nice, friendly and beautiful sisters. The three of you are good company for a guy, and you should be using that to your combined advantage. You should be happy that they're interested in me, and the three of you should cooperate with each other." -- I could see that Mackenzie was unconvinced, and that she had every intention of remaining so, but one of my minds reminded me of the zinger I'd used on Katelin, so I added, "This is not about the attitudes between your sisters and me; it's about your attitude to them. You heard my speech in class about Carol. I selflessly and happily shared MY girlfriend with MY sister long before Julia pushed me into looking for another girlfriend. I was prepared to have half a girlfriend for the rest of my life for Carol's sake, and I would've considered my life enriched by being involved in so much happiness! If you love your sisters, you should be trying to enrich their lives, not selfishly trying to keep things from them." I could see that'd hit home, but overkill was good, so, "And if you're the sort of person who doesn't love her sisters, then you and I aren't going to last much beyond Thursday, which would be a pity." #4: #1: #2: Mackenzie started apologizing. I could tell it was just going to be the usual, predictable blah blah, so I interrupted after the first blah to accept/stop her apology. I added, "I know you must have been studying me to have won the quiz. Now that I know about your interest in me, I'll be watching you carefully too, especially your attitude with your sisters. It'll be interesting to see whether you are a sharing person like me, or a clingy, jealous girl. I hope you're not like that?" Mackenzie told me that she wasn't selfish. I told me that I wasn't convinced (literally, as one of my minds had told the others that it wasn't convinced, and they'd all agreed). Julia and I had both 'borrowed' the school's electricity supply to charge our phones during the afternoon. I'd read the manual during class too, just with one mind, because we could memory-share the knowledge - so cool! I wanted to make sure I knew about all its functions for future emergencies. Julia had dismissively said, "I'll read mine later," in a way that clearly conveyed that "later" meant "never". When they were charged enough, Julia transferred her SIM card into her new phone, and I called it from my new phone. We walked side by side talking to each other using our phones. They worked fine. I took a few still pictures and a video of a school building, just to make sure I knew how. I moaned, "Now I've got to program in all the numbers." Julia said, "Most of the ones you'll need are on my card. When we get home I'll load my card into your phone and copy all its numbers into your phone's memory. You'll have to edit a few names, because entries like 'Mom' and 'Dad' won't be right for you, but that'll save you a most of the effort." I'd just finished reading the manual, so I knew her idea would work, nonetheless I said, "That's VERY smart. Especially because you haven't read the manual, and I've a feeling you've never read the manual for any of your phones." Julia shrugged, saying, "It's just a phone." Julia was lying. It's not "just a phone"; it's a fashion statement, an ESSENTIAL social networking tool, and THEN a phone. It's so important to them, that girls somehow absorb the technical knowledge required for getting the best from their phones out of thin air. They certainly never read their manuals. Doing so would be logical, so it's obviously not what happens. How their technical knowledge absorption process works is unknown to me, but I'm very envious. I'm ecstatic that it only takes one of my minds to read something for all four of us to know it, but girls seem to be able to know things with none of their minds having read it, which is truly impressive and highly enviable. There was once again a crowd gathered around my car. Fewer 10th graders, but even more of Carol's and Donna's friends, including Diana and Claire. I wanted to get rid of the high-school kids first, so I announced, "We don't have time to talk with everyone today. The high-schoolers I can see any day, so you might as well go home now. See me at lunch or between classes. Unless you want to talk about the fight, in which case don't bother wasting your time, because I have nothing to say about it. Now, all the 6th graders gather around me." The high-schoolers started drifting away as the Ducklings pushed their way to the front. A process that was interrupted for a few minutes when everyone had to admire my and Julia's new phones. I called for Claire to stand in front of me. When she was in position, I bent down and started kissing her on the lips, surprising everyone. There were sudden exclamations from throughout the audience, and even Claire took a second or two to react, then she threw her hands around my neck and pulling herself into the kiss. I did something slightly different: I put my hand under the front of her dress and started rubbing her bare pussy. She hummed her approval into the kiss, her legs and hips demonstrated her approval too. I only kept it going for a few seconds, because there were too many girls to greet. When I took my hand away and broke off the kiss, Claire didn't relax her grip on my neck. I told her loudly enough for all the nearby girls to hear. "You must let go, Claire, or I'll never kiss you again." That worked. I told the girls around us. "I kissed Claire because she showed me she had a good, sharing attitude yesterday. It's a pity she partly spoiled my good impression by getting clingy just now, but I'm sure she won't make that mistake again." "I won't! I'm sorry..." "Shh, Claire. I don't have time to talk about it. Okay everyone. I'm going to quickly greet each of you. After I do please move to the back so the other girls can come forward. Claire, you've had your turn, so please move to the back." "But I..." "CLAIRE! If I gave every girl as long as I've already given you, I'd still be here in an hour. I don't have TIME! I insist on treating people fairly, and I can't afford to have hour-long conversations after school. Move it!" I slapped her ass, because it was asking for it. I turned to one of the other Ducklings, greeted her by name (Lucy), complimented her on her nice dress, gave her a very quick kiss on the cheek, then turned to greet the next girl. "But," said Lucy, "Claire got real kiss." I looked up, "Donna!" "Yes?" "Lucy cannot come to the next Duckling event, which is the lunch. After that she can join back in if she behaves herself." (She was quite pretty.) "She selfishly only considered what she wanted, not what I wanted. And she stupidly didn't listen to me when I explained why I can't spend a minute on every girl." "But it's not fair. I only..." My giving her a solid push away from me stopped that. Or at least got it far enough away from me that I didn't have to bother with it anymore. I turned back to the third Duckling, calling her by name again, said something nice, then added, "Sorry I don't have time for any kisses because I've wasted too much time explaining the obvious." I walked around the Ducklings, as that was easier than getting them to move around as I wished, greeting them by name. Memory sharing was working REALLY well, because we deliberately put one mind in charge of the mouth as a test, and he knew all the names. I gave each of the Ducklings a compliment, a quick one-handed hug, or some other little sign of affection. With one particularly good looking Duckling, I bent down to whisper in her ear, "Are you wearing panties?" "No. Donna..." "Good girl. Can I use my hand to check?" "No. Yes! I mean yes!" She was flustered and flushed. I was pleased and aroused. I leaned down to give her a kiss on the lips and a few seconds of pussy rubbing. I stopped the kiss but kept feeling her, while I said, "Tell the other Ducklings I did this. I don't have time to check them all, but I will check some girls occasionally, especially the very pretty girls, like you." I moved onto the next Duckling. When I'd finished them all, Donna introduced me to two new ones, adding "They wanted to come today. Is it okay to add more Ducklings?" "If they're nice girls, pretty, and know all the rules about what it means to be a Duckling. How to dress when they meet me, how they can't stop to argue with me about anything because there are too many girls for me to argue with everyone, and things like that." "They don't know everything yet, but I'll tell them tomorrow." "I can see they're pretty girls, but are they also nice? We don't want any troublemakers, spoiled or selfish girls, or anything like that." "They're okay, and they're very excited to meet you." "That sounds fine then." I greeted the two girls by name, then added, "You need to listen to Donna explain everything. And if I get a chance, I'll check your haircuts at lunch on Thursday." I was surprised that they were puzzled, especially when the other Ducklings all laughed. -- I said, "Donna will explain." Greeting Carol's friends went more smoothly. They'd learned from the Ducklings, and I didn't do any under-skirt groping. When I got to Diana I told her, "Mackenzie was getting jealous of you and Claire being interested in me. Whatever you told her, I hope it wasn't in front of your parents?" "Ahh, no. It was just with Mackenzie." "Be careful you don't ruin it for yourselves because I've got the feeling that Mackenzie is unhappy with my liking you. You'd better warn Claire too. You have to be careful not to show too much interest in me when I'm there on Thursday." "I'll tell her." By the time I got to the end of the greetings I'd already decided that this would be the last such event. The girls had to stop coming here like this. It'd wasted fifteen to twenty minutes today, holding up Julia, Carol, Donna and me from getting home. Not that I had anything important on today, but the others might have had homework to do, and other days could be worse. The most annoying thing was that a lot of the girls were very pretty - even downright sexy - but there was nothing I could do about it. It was also very non-ideal for them, as they each got very little time with me. I could also imagine it getting worse after I was rich, as a lot more girls would want to join in. So at the end I announced, "Listen up everyone. I don't want you to come here like this again." After the moans, "Seriously. It's a terrible way to meet: we don't have time to talk with each other, we've got other students walking around us constantly, it holds everybody up from getting home to do their homework or whatever else people have to do. It doesn't work and I don't want to do it anymore. From now my family and I are going to immediately get in the car and drive away, so I strongly suggest you don't waste your time coming here at the end of school." "But we never get to see you." "If you want to 'see me', then sit on the grass and watch me walk to the car. But if you meant 'talk with me', then you didn't do that today anyway. There's just too many of you, and standing on the side of a parking lot at when everyone is going home is a terrible time and place to try to socialize. I'll be having lunch with Donna's friends on Thursday, we'll arrange a time for a lunch with Carol's friends sometime after that - DON'T ask me when yet!" Because I could see that several of them were about to. "In all seriousness, we're not going to get much socializing done until summer. Then we can probably spend all day together some days." Many of the girls loved the sound of that, but some still complained, "But that's AGES away!" "If anyone thinks of a better idea, tell my sisters, but meeting in the parking lot isn't going to happen anymore. It just wastes everybody's time. My family and I are going home now. Goodbye." I walked the few yards to the car, quickly followed by my passengers and a group of protesting girls. Protesting was only going to make me even more determined to leave. They should've tried stripping. We got in the car. I warned all my passengers to keep a careful watch that I didn't run over any silly girls while I maneuvered out of the parking lot, then we drove home. Julia asked, "You don't want meetings like that again, even though you get to play with some pretty girls' pussies?" "Haha. I saw you spot that. I thought I'd enjoy it, which is why I got rid of the all the high-school kids first. But it just doesn't work at that time and place. Plus I rapidly lost interest when the first couple of girls complained about not having enough time. It's more trouble than it's worth." "It's good to see you being so mature about it." "Don't get your hopes up about that, you haven't heard the next thing I'm planning to tell Donna." "Haha. Now I'm interested. Tell her." Donna sits behind me in the car, so I just called out to her, "Donna, I would have played with more of the Ducklings' pussies before, but I was worried about one of them screaming or getting upset if I groped her. I didn't have time to quietly ask each of them, and I didn't want to ask about it out loud to all of them at once because it was hardly the thing to be yelling out in public. So at the lunch on Thursday I want to get each of the Ducklings to tell me in front of all the other Ducklings whether I have permission to do that, or not. Does that sound all right?" "That's why they take their panties off when they come to see you. I only let them be a Duckling if they'll let you do sexy things, because that's what you said Ducklings were for." I kind of knew that, but I see the Ducklings so infrequently that it seems rude to walk up to them and grope their pussies. I was also too scared to do it, which I guess made me a pussy too. I said, "I just want to play safe. It would be a bad thing to get in trouble for." "Okay. They'll agree though. They all want to be your favorite like Claire is." I opened my mouth to explain the Claire wasn't my favorite, she was merely ... I was trying to think of a polite way to word what she merely was, when, #2: I couldn't think of a reason, other than it not really being true, which is not something that normally worries me much - and never worries me at all when bare pussies are involved - so I dropped the issue. We'd agreed to all go to my house, where I spent some time goofing off with Donna while Julia and Carol did their homework together. After some quality time with Donna, I went inside to carry out a kiatsu experiment I'd thought of during my ki discussion with Sensei yesterday. I was annoyed that there was no decent information about kiatsu, not online or even in the books Sensei said were the best kiatsu books available. That meant I had to find out for myself. I had designed an experiment that would allow me to identify both my body's own and my kiatsu-assisted healing rates. I needed help from my wives, so I went to see them in Carol's and my bedroom. I asked them, "I need two volunteers for a little experiment. You've said you'll jump off cliffs for me, so this should be easy." "Oh?" asked Julia, correctly being suspicious. "Remember that Sensei told us all that my broken arm might heal faster than normal?" They nodded. "I want to understand myself, so it's about time I tested that. More importantly, I want to learn more about Aikido's ability to heal people, in case I might be able to help Ava's parents." I could see both girls react to that very positively. They weren't so impressed by my next statement, "I'm going to give myself two little cuts, and each of you one little cut. Carol's and one of mine I'm going to leave to heal naturally. Julia's and my other one I'm going to try to heal faster. That'll tell me whether I heal faster than other people, and whether I can deliberately speed the process in myself or in someone else." "How are you going to cut us?" "Over the sink in the kitchen. I'll use one of the knives. I thought on the side of the hand would be a good place to do it." "How deep?" "More than just a scratch, because that could heal so fast that small variations in how much I scratched everyone could hide the true results. It'll just be a little cut though. I'm getting two cuts, and I'll do them first so you'll see it's no big deal." For girls who'd insisted they'd jump off cliffs for me, they were showing a remarkable lack of enthusiasm for this very interesting experiment. "Umm, wouldn't Donna be better for this? She always getting cuts and scrapes," suggested Carol. I enjoyed teasing Carol: "That might be a good idea, Carol. It might be better to keep it entirely in the family because the genes are similar. So just me, you and Donna." "Umm..." Carol tried to think of an acceptable way of telling me that she was thinking that Donna could replace her, rather than replacing Julia. I gave her a second or two of indecision, then added, "Unfortunately Donna's not as trustworthy as you and Julia, so it'd be best to have my two wonderful wives help me. What's a little pain compared to the love you have for me?" Not insignificant, apparently. "Couldn't you find out some other way, like asking your teacher?" asked Julia. "I've already talked about it with him, as well as read several Aikido books on the subject and spent quite a long time doing internet research, and they're all useless. Plus my abilities are so much stronger than other people's that even if the books had been very informative, that information wouldn't apply to me. You know that I sometimes find out a big thing about myself by starting with a small question, so doing experiments is good. It is for a VERY good cause - Ava's parents - after all. They'll only be little cuts, so it's no big deal. I'm going to be cutting myself twice to your once each, so I obviously think it's well worth doing." They were considerably less than eager, but they had no alternatives, and I eventually pushed them into it. In the kitchen they were horrified that I was just going to pick up a knife and cut myself. "It could be dirty! What about infection! You've got to clean it properly and disinfect it." That took a few minutes to do to their satisfaction, after which I turned off my feeling in my left hand and sliced its edge - both girls looking on in horrid fascination, especially the "horrid" part. The last time I'd accidentally got cut had been well before my second merge, and I had a fantasy that I'd shortly discover that I could heal instantly now. Logically I didn't believe it, but it'd always looked VERY cool on TV, and it'd be an amazing ability to have. I even had two chances of having such an ability: my body was superb in various ways, possibly including healing; and my ki abilities were superb, so maybe kiatsu on myself would be miraculous. The cut bled a little, so I held it under the faucet so I could watch the cut. Unfortunately it didn't close up and disappear miraculously. Meanwhile we'd been talking. Immediately after the cut Julia had exclaimed, "OUCH! That looked like it hurt." "Nah, it didn't hurt me, so you'll be fine. I hardly felt a thing." True, although the same wouldn't apply to them. Unfortunately there was nothing I could do about that. "It really didn't hurt?" "Nothing worth commenting on. You're both brave girls, so I'm sure you'll do fine." I was sure they could take considerable pain if they needed to. For example, bad fitting shoes wouldn't stop them from shopping on Rodeo Drive all day. But I had a suspicion that they'd considered getting deliberately cut to be a very different matter. I watched the cut carefully for about a minute, looking for any sign of miraculous healing. Julia got impatient, "Shouldn't we put a Band-Aid on it?" The girls had half a doctor's surgery ready to apply to our cuts. "Not yet. This is a science experiment, not an accident that needs to be treated as soon as possible. Give me another minute." I help up my right hand, pointing it at the cut, and projecting ki from it into the cut. The Aikido books that mentioned kiatsu said that this would help healing. I watched closely, hoping my second chance at miraculous healing would come true. After several seconds of nothing happening, I started suspecting I wasn't going to regenerate miraculously for any reason. I gave it a couple of minutes, but there was no apparent change. I didn't have instantaneous healing, or even "pretty fast healing". Meanwhile the girls had asked me what I was doing, as I looked silly. So I'd been passing the time telling them about kiatsu and ki, as it was described in the Aikido books. After an appropriate pause in the conversation, about two minutes into it, I decided that I obviously didn't have an incredible healing ability. I removed my hand from under the water, wiping the water off, saying, "Let's see if it coagulates normally." I held it flat on the counter, still continuing to project ki into it. It was a thin cut, so a crust formed pretty quickly. When it was sealed enough, I picked up the knife and repeated the cut on other hand as identically as I could. The girls were horribly fascinated again. Carol said, "You don't even look like you cared. You just picked up the knife and cut yourself as if it was nothing." I caveman-grunted, "Me macho he-man. Ug!" I didn't need to repeat the hopeful waiting for instant healing, and this cut wasn't going to get the ki treatment, so I just held the newly cut hand flat until it congealed. I chatted with the girls with encouragement about how little it hurt or mattered, and how brave they were, and that what little pain there would be, would quickly pass, etc. When I was ready I picked up the knife, and asked, "Who wants to go first?" They mostly wanted to go elsewhere, but Julia extended her hand, "Let's get it over with. Do it quick." "Of course. You'll hardly feel a thing." A couple of seconds later, Julia let me know that she did, in fact, feel a thing. She felt it most acutely, and she expressed her opinion on the matter very clearly and loudly. "It'll pass in a few seconds, darling. Just hold it still. Careful! You'll get blood on your lovely dress." My last comment calmed her down somewhat. I got her to hold it steady while I projected ki into it. I see Julia more often during the day, so she was going to be the girl who got the ki treatment, so I could compare her healing rate to Carol's, who wouldn't be getting any ki. Just as one of my hands would get ki and the other not. After a couple of minutes, Julia asked, "Can I put a Band-Aid on it?" "Sure." I didn't think that'd make a difference, and if it did, it'd be doing so to all four cuts equally. I left my cuts uncovered for the moment though, as I wanted to keep an eye on them in case the "instant healing" ability took a while to get started. It was Carol's turn. She bravely stuck out her hand and cowardly screwed her eyes shut. I quickly repeated the cut. Carol's opinion was even more vociferously expressed than Julia's had been. For a normally very placid girl, she can be amazingly expressive at times. While we were treating Carol's cut, the two girls told me how onerous it was to be my wives, that this was above and beyond the call of duty, that I owed them for this, and otherwise let me know how self-sacrificing they were. The last comment didn't mesh too well with the preceding ones, but that was just me being foolishly logical. One comment they repeated in various forms was, "I can't believe you could cut yourself so casually. It HURT! You didn't even blink an eye when you were slicing yourself." Now that both of them were well past the pain, it was probably safe to tell them, "Ahh, actually I cheated. I turned the pain off." "Huh?" "I can control my body pretty well. I can stop the physical feeling of being nervous, for example. I can also stop feeling pain. I don't know how it works, but it's easy. I turned the feeling off in my hands before I cut them, so I felt nothing." It wasn't easy for them to express indignation and amazement at the same time, so they concentrated on indignation. I was accused of various crimes. Tried and convicted in very short order too. I had three defenses: "You know I would've turned your pain off if I could." "I had to turn my own pain off because that way I could make all four cuts identical. If mine had hurt me, I would have cut differently, which would have compromised the science." This excuse suffered very badly from the flaw of being perfectly logical. "If you can hit me with your hands like that, they can't be very badly injured!" I had to suffer their complaints and abuse for a couple of minutes, with my giving them lots of praise, sympathy and appreciation; because logic sure as hell hadn't worked! They eventually calmed down enough to give a last, "But it HURT!", then asked about my turning-pain-off ability. I explained, "I don't know how, but I can control some sensory feelings, like being able to turn off feeling nervous when I was in Vegas. I probably would've muffed that if I hadn't been able to calm myself down. Turning pain down or off is the same thing." I'd been VERY careful to not mention anything that could remind Julia of my go-soft ability and I'd specified "sensory feelings" rather than "physiological control". I didn't use any examples of body-controlling actions such as my going to sleep instantly, and I'd used a dismissive, bored tone of voice, as if there was nothing interesting to discuss. Julia asked, "Like making your cock hard, soft or cum?" #2: #1: "Yeah, that's another example. I can rumble my belly too. I should probably do some reading on the human body's physiological reactions to see if there are more useful ones that I could do, but I'd probably have to read quite a few books because I've a feeling it's a big field." Julia let me know, "That'd be a better experiment than cutting up your wives!" "Ahh, yes. Sorry about that. But wouldn't you like to know that I might be able to help Katie and Carson?" "I understand why you did it, but it still wasn't fun." I took the opportunity to explain that I'd be trying to cure Julia's hand using my ki, to see how it compared to Carol's. In case Carol was offended that she was the one being untreated, I quickly explained, "It's because I see Julia more often during the day, so I can give her lots of ki. That's what the experiment calls for." Carol was okay, as the pain had gone by now. Only the indignation remained. ^ [It took several more days, but I'll give you the results of the experiment now. The two ki-treated cuts healed faster than their respective un-treated controls (Julia's cut versus Carol's, one of my hands versus the other), but not much faster. Factoring in how much time I'd spent projecting ki into the ki-treated cuts, I figured they'd healed maybe 10-20% faster (call it 15%) during the times they were receiving kiatsu, assuming all else was equal. My two cuts healed about three times faster than the girls' cuts, which was very nice and impressive, but a long way short of the million times faster I'd been fantasizing about. No wonder there weren't any decent medical studies on kiatsu, because its effect is tiny. My ki is far stronger than other peoples, so the +15% healing rate would only be something like +1% for them, which would be less than the experimental error so not noticeable. In other words, kiatsu healing might as well have been a fantasy, because every claim made for it was greatly exaggerated. [[That's true when kiatsu is used to treat other people, but aikidoka are better off. I had assumed my two results (+15% for kiatsu, and +200% for my body's healing) were independent. In fact, a small but useful proportion of my body's +200% came from the prior effect of my very strong ki on my entire body. Ki had helped my subconsciouses 'tune up' my body, making it work even better, including heal better. Well-trained aikidoka do resist disease and do heal faster than normal people, because they have better-healing bodies. They might as well not bother to use kiatsu on the injury though, as it only helps by a very few percent presuming the aikidoka is an advanced one. An Aikido student of a few years or less isn't going to notice any gain from self-administered kiatsu.]] The results were very bad news for my hopes of curing Katie and Carson. Intellectually I'd always greatly doubted I'd be able to even help them, let alone cure them, but emotionally the fantasy had been very appealing to me. There was a reason hospitals didn't employ teams of aikidoka to help difficult cases. I would've preferred my fantasy to be achievable, but its not being so did avoid the onerous situation I would've been in had it been possible, as I would've had to put my entire life on hold for maybe several months, to spend every waking hour with Katie or Carson, sending ki into them as many hours a day as I could manage. I would've done it if necessary, but it would've been a massive inconvenience, and possibly very risky if word of my healing them got out.] ^ After Julia had forgiven me for the experiment, she loaded all her phone numbers into my phone, and I went through them all, editing them as appropriate. I didn't need to edit many, but she had a LOT of numbers to scroll through. We did some homework together, some dinner preparation and eating, and then the females left to go mansion shopping again. I waited half an hour to give Katelin's much reduced household time to have their dinner, I temporarily turned off my phone sending its number, then I called Katelin (I had her phone number in my phone now, as I pretty much had every phone number in Corvallis in my phone now). It was convenient for me to come immediately, but Katelin suggested it would be a much better idea if she and her mother came to me, so I wouldn't encounter any of the Eaton males. The household wasn't as reduced as I'd thought, as some of the boys hadn't been charged and Mr. Eaton senior was out on bail. Not Don though, as he'd been deemed a flight risk. I agreed that their coming to my home was a MUCH better idea. They arrived a few minutes later. Dad had been watching a game, but it was a poor one so he had no trouble killing the tube to greet my guests. Drinks were offered and refused, Mrs. Eaton saying, "No thanks, we just had dinner. I'd rather satisfy my curiosity. Katelin's been very excited and secretive." Katelin told me, "I haven't told Mom anything, because Julia said it was important to keep it secret." "Good, thanks." To Mrs. Eaton I said, "It's a simple situation. This weekend is the one-month anniversary of Julia Williams becoming my girlfriend. I am reliably informed - by the same Julia Williams - that it's more than my life's worth not to show my appreciation appropriately. Where her definition of 'appropriately' seems to be the same as my definition of 'massively over the top'. I would've thought it was obvious that anniversaries would be a mutual appreciation situation, but apparently it doesn't work that way at all. I asked Julia and her mother why that is, and received suspiciously self-serving answers. I've decided to play safe, and am planning an over the top anniversary celebration. -- "The other half of the background explanation is that I made the very serious mistake of coming into quite a lot of money a few days ago. I obviously should've delayed that until after my anniversary, but it's too late now. In the last month I've noticed that Julia is quite fond of going clothes shopping, so I thought a suitable, over the top anniversary present was to take her shopping on Rodeo Drive." -- I was enjoying myself giving this comical explanation, and I could see Katelin and her mother were enjoying it too, but I destroyed the impression I'd created about my being smart by adding, "That's in Los Angeles, you know?" They knew. I pressed on, "Traveling to LA by an ordinary plane would be cramped, uncomfortable and not have NEARLY enough luggage allowance for the return trip. It's also not 'over the top' in any but an altitude sense, so I've rented our own plane for the weekend. We'll be flying down to LA on Saturday morning in time for the stores to open, because apparently shopping on Rodeo Drive is more important than sleeping. I suspect it's more important than breathing too. The same plane will be flying us back Sunday afternoon. -- "Because I've booked the whole plane, the cost is the same whether or not the seats are occupied. Julia insists we fill all the seats with other girls, because apparently Julia isn't the only girl who enjoys clothes shopping, and not letting other girls have a free trip to Rodeo Drive is illegal, against the Geneva Convention, and it breaks the 11th Commandment. Plus all the girls in Corvallis would hate me for the rest of their lives if I let an empty seat fly back and forth. -- "There are only seven seats because it's a smallish jet. We're taking my sister Carol, who's thirteen; a friend of Julia's and my families called Ava, who's seventeen; and some of Julia's classmates. Katelin's got one of the very sought-after invitations too, in part to make up for some of the unhappiness I've caused her." Most of this paragraph was intended to make it more likely for Mrs. Eaton to consent. If my 13-year old sister was going, Katelin should be allowed too. A more mature 17-year old girl was mentioned to help Mrs. Eaton believe they'd be looked after. And there was an implied entreaty not to cause her daughter even more unhappiness. -- "I've already booked another room in our hotel for the three additional girls to triple up in, so that doesn't cost any more whether or not Katelin comes. Everyone else has already accepted, so it's just a matter of your agreeing to let Katelin come too?" I soon learned it wasn't "just a matter of her agreeing." First there were the questions. "Who're the adults that are going with you?" There wasn't a good answer to that, but I tried to establish several reasons why adults weren't needed: "We'll be spending all day on Rodeo Drive, which has to be a very safe street"; "We'll only be away one night, which will be in a very fancy hotel"; "Other parents have agreed, including mine for my 13-year old sister"; and I very politely reminded her that "I can physically take care of myself and anyone with me if someone tried to cause any trouble." "I wouldn't want Katelin to fly in a little plane. They're not very safe." "It's not a little plane like you're thinking of. It's a luxury jet like you see in the movies; that fly very important people around in luxury. It's got extra-large leather seats for everyone, it flies very high and fast, etc. It's a REALLY impressive plane! It'd be much safer than an ordinary commercial plane, or VIPs wouldn't fly around in it." "That must be very expensive?" "Did I mention that Julia has insisted on 'over the top'? Haha. I can afford it, Mrs. Eaton. I'm not buying the plane, only hiring it for the weekend. The key point is that it's a superb plane, and certainly safe." In the course of the some of the following questions (I won't bother recording them), I was amused at being able to say, "It's a girls' shopping trip, Mrs. Eaton, as my anniversary present to Julia. I'm certainly not taking any boys on my anniversary trip, so you don't have to worry about any misbehavior. There's just me to worry about, but I'm on my anniversary with my girlfriend, so I think Katelin's virtue is probably fairly safe, haha. Not to mention that at the end of a day's shopping with six girls, all I'll want to do is bang my head against a wall for several hours, to drive the pain out." There was more, as Mrs. Eaton was not happy with the idea. But she also wasn't unhappy enough to refuse outright. She made a comment about having to think about it and talk it over with her husband. At which time, I realized that I didn't want that to happen. I said, "I'm sorry, but I'd REALLY rather you not do that. It seems likely to me that he'd refuse just because I was involved, which would be unfair to Katelin. But what I'm most worried about is his knowing that I'm wealthy. Not to put too fine a point on it, I don't trust him. And if he told Don, I DEFINITELY wouldn't trust Don not to arrange something unpleasant to get revenge on me. I can't stop you telling him, but I'd withdraw Katelin's invitation before I'd agree to his being told. It's just not worth the risk for me and my family." While Katelin anguished at her mother, I thought of more to say. I intruded with, "Let me point out a lesson from what I just said: I'm a very cautious guy. So if you let Katelin come to LA with the other girls, we're not going to be doing anything wild - that's not my scene at all! After a long day's shopping my first choice would be to stick my head in a bucket of water, but failing that, a quiet time in the hotel and early to bed. I suggest that you get Katelin to call you after we check in, to tell you the room numbers we'll have. You can call her on the hotel's landline every hour during the evening, to make sure she's in one of the rooms." Mrs. Eaton thought that was a good idea. Katelin's face showed she didn't, but tough cheese. I didn't want the three girls who weren't going to the country and western concert to be out on the town themselves; not when I was taking responsibility for them! Any other night they could do whatever they want - and Alexis probably does - but not that night. This trip WAS a shopping trip. Admittedly with plenty of sex thrown in, but that could safely be done inside the jet and hotel, so it had no relevance to our current conversation about safety. Mrs. Eaton was indecisive. Dad spoke up, "Mark's a very smart and very capable young man, and Julia's no slouch either. He knows he's taking on a big responsibility looking after six girls, and he'll do it carefully. We've agreed to let him take Carol because we think he's up to it, and because we know Carol will follow his instructions carefully. If your daughter does as Mark instructs, I'm sure she'll be safe. I'd say the only real risk is of your daughter ignoring Mark's instructions and wandering off. That's what you have to trust her not to do." That resulted in impassioned pleadings from Katelin to her mother, in which Katelin pretty much promised to never disobey anyone ever again in her entire life, starting with me. She also promised to call her mother every five minutes starting from the moment she got on the plane until she got home on Sunday. I added, "During the day time we're going to be walking around in a group, and in the evening Katelin's going to be in a hotel room with the other girls. I'm going to hire one of the women who works in the hotel to check on them every half an hour or so, to make sure there's no misbehavior. Not a babysitter per se, but you know what I mean. I intend to make very sure none of the girls get me in trouble with their parents. I've got a very large carrot too, because any girl that even looks like she might cause difficulty isn't going to be invited on any trip like this again. They'd rather cut off their arms than miss out, so I expect the girls will be very docile and well behaved." Apart from the fact that I was damned sure that there wouldn't ever be a second trip like this - it was far too expensive, I was already worried about how fast the money was disappearing, and we were never going to be let into a casino again - it was otherwise an excellent thing to say. Not only would the temptation of a mythical second trip motivate the girls to be extremely well behaved on this trip, but after we got back, the same mythical trip would motivate every girl at school to extreme MIS-behavior, in an attempt to win one of the next seats. I hoped they didn't hold their breath, while they were on their back proving why they should be put on the shortlist. My babysitter and carrot points worked very well. Mrs. Eaton teetered over into giving her consent, to Katelin's wild joy. She hugged her mom fiercely, then rushed around the room hugging me and even Dad, to his amusement. I thought of joking about her "hugging two guys already, and you haven't even got to LA yet," but thought I'd better leave well enough alone. After many more "Thank yous", several more admonishments from her mother, all of which were met with fervent promises to behave and do as Mark said (I resisted more jokes), Katelin and her mother eventually left, Katelin bouncing out the door. But not before I reminded them to keep my having any money at all, and the trip, secret. After they'd left, Dad and I joked about females being so crazy about shopping. I added, "The crazy thing is that Katelin and the other girls won't have enough money to buy anything on Rodeo Drive. They're only going to be window-shopping. It's hard to imagine a more pointless activity." Dad added, "They'll get a blast helping Julia, Carol and Ava spend the $10,000." "I'm surprised you know the details so accurately. I didn't realize you were so interested in my shopping trip. Maybe I should have invited you?" "That'll be the day! I'd pay good money to avoid that, which I can afford now, thanks to you. Your mother told me all about it last night. No doubt because it happened to come up during the women's chat last evening." [At school the next day, I asked Katelin, "Won't Saturday be boring for you, not having enough money of your own to be able to buy anything much?" I was answered with a high-pitched squeal that sounded something like, "Are you KIDDING! It's going to be FANTASTIC!..." She carried on squealing and raving. It was hard to understand, but as best I could tell, Saturday was going to be the highlight of her life. That seemed to be her attitude. I couldn't bring myself to ask Pat and Alexis the same question, as a guy can only handle so much squealed shopping enthusiasm in one lifetime.] On the subject of parental approval for going to LA, Pat was going to make do without it. Her parents had been told a very watered down version of the truth: that Julia, Pat and a couple of other girls were driving up to Salem for a big shopping trip, and that they'd all be sleeping at Julia's house when they got back. They'd be having a very 'girly' weekend, and she'd be home sometime Sunday afternoon. I knew she'd get to LA all right, but I had my fingers crossed that nothing would go wrong while she was there, otherwise her parents would be grounding her for several years. Pat thought it was worth the risk. Alexis' parents were fine with her flying overnight to LA. ------- Chapter 206: Lily's Gifts Tuesday, May 10, 2005 (Continued) Julia called me when the mansion shoppers started heading home, asking me to call for Lily to come with her presents. The mansion shoppers arrived first, Mom reporting, "We didn't find anything good this evening, but we didn't expect to. We've now seen all the possibly suitable properties that are on the market, so we'll draw up our shortlist and start reviewing them more carefully." Carol was especially looking forward to that, because she hadn't seen many of the best houses on the weekend. "It's incredible that we could be living in a house like the ones I saw. Mark, they're fantastic! They've got..." Carol started raving about all the various features these houses had. I nodded encouragingly at parquet flooring and granite balustrades. Or was it granite flooring and parquet balustrades? Not knowing what half the words meant didn't help me. Fortunately Lily arrived soon after Carol started. I happily rushed to answer her knock on the front door, and even more happily helped her carry her several bags in. After all the greetings and settling everybody down, I got to open my presents. It was just like my birthday, except all the presents came from one person. The first one was a small box that opened to reveal a new watch. A big, chunky, real-man's watch. The wonderful thing was that its face was the IDENTICAL color to my ring. I put them side by side, and they matched perfectly. Julia asked, "Do you like it Mark?" "I love it! I think it's fantastic." I stripped off the old watch, putting on the new one. The band wasn't the right size, but I knew that was easily taken care of later. Both the ring and watch were on my same hand, and only a few inches apart, so their matching so precisely really stood out. Julia exclaimed, "Well done, Lily! How did you find a watch with a color so close to Mark's ring? It's almost perfect." "Luck. I see in store. Big watch okay, Mark?" "It's VERY good. I like it much better than a small watch. I'm wearing this one from now on, as soon as the band's adjusted." -- I turned to Julia, asking, "Julia, why did you say the color was close to my ring, when it's exactly the same?" "It's not the same, but it's very close. You have to look fairly hard to see they're different." So I looked at them again, considerably more than "fairly hard." Then I told Julia, "They're identical." All the females disagreed with me. I took the watch off to hold it right beside my ring, and I stared at them intently. I asked the room, "How is it possible that two objects look like they have identical coloring to me, but have different colors to the females? That doesn't make any sense." Mom explained, "Females can see shades guys can't. It doesn't matter in this case because the shades are close enough that people won't be able to tell when you're wearing them and moving around." "Certainly not the males, by the sounds of it." I was motioned to pass the watch around so everyone could look at it closely. I passed it to Carol, who exclaimed, "My God! It weighs a ton. Are you really going to wear this thing?" "Absolutely. I think it's a great watch." "You're going to walk in circles!" Carol passed it to Donna, who pretended to be pulled to the floor by its weight. As it went around the room, the females were all shocked by its weight, telling me, "You'll fall over sideways", "Once you sit down you'll never get up again," and the like. They weren't just joking, but genuinely couldn't believe that I would want to wear a watch that heavy. "You can't talk, Mom. I've picked up your handbag sometimes, and it weighs a lot more than that watch." "I can put my bag down. You'll be carrying that around all the time." "I think you're all exaggerating. It's simply a good, solid watch; not anything more than that. Obviously guys do wear watches that heavy, or the company wouldn't have made it." Julia said, "It's a very good brand too: Breitling. They make excellent watches. While I remember, you'll have to wear your cellphone on the right now Mark." "But you told me to wear it on the left because it complemented my ring so well. The watch is virtually the same color, so it must still match?" "Three colorful pieces so close together is too many." "Matching depends on color AND the number of pieces?" "Yes," answered Julia, with the other females nodding their agreement. "Who makes up these BIZARRE rules!" Vanessa said, "This year I think it's being done by Susan Duffy. She's a farmer's wife in Montana. She's not very good at it. Too much time hanging around with cows, I guess." While the females were teasing me, Dad told me he liked the watch, adding, "I wouldn't mind one like it myself." That made the score 2-0; the females' votes clearly being irrelevant about masculine watches. I praised Lily for having more sense than American women, very sincerely thanking her for my wonderful new watch. Smiling happily, Lily moved on to the next gift, opening a bag to extract the first of two shoe boxes, passing it to me. I wasn't looking forward to this. Buying shoes in a pain in the ass, as well as a pain in the foot. Not as bad as that literally (especially the ass part), but it involves uncomfortable trial and error, lots of walking back and forth, rejecting many uncomfortable pairs, etc. It wasn't likely that Lily's purchases would be any good. The first box contained a very nice looking pair of what's called "men's dress shoes", despite men very rarely wearing them with dresses. Several of the women said, "Ohh, nice shoes!" or the like. Followed immediately by calls of, "Try them on." That was the part I was hoping to put off until I had privacy, so the likely bad fit wouldn't happened in front of Lily and so many other people. I said, "I'll try them on later." You can probably guess how they all responded to that. A few seconds later the first shoe was being held open and ready for me. It'd only taken a second to get it ready as the shoes didn't have laces, just a velcro patch. That makes them sound cheap, but that's absolutely not how they looked. They were brightly polished, very dark gray leather, with the velcro hidden under a leather panel. Having no laces and a flat same-leather panel over that area gave them a very sleek, elegant, expensive look. I cautiously put the first one on, expecting to have to control my expression when the discomfort started. I got it all the way on and there was still no discomfort. It felt like a great fit. "Let me try the other one too." Soon I was walking back and forth, saying, "How is it possible that Lily can buy me shoes that fit perfectly just from drawing the outline of my feet, but I have to try on half the store when Mom takes me shopping for good shoes and I still never end up with a pair that fits as well as these?" I didn't get an answer, so I praised Lily again. Mom queried, "Are they really that good?" "The most comfortable dress shoes I've ever had, and they're better than most of the casual shoes I've worn." Mom made me stand in front of her so she could do that pressing-her-thumb-into-the-front-of-my-shoe thing, to check the length of the shoe versus the length of my foot. She expressed her satisfaction with the result. I couldn't imagine what would happen if you walked into an American shoe store with two drawings of feet of someone several thousand miles away and asked for shoes to fit, but however it's done in Hong Kong, they're obviously GENIUSES at it. Mom's test was unnecessary, as there was no chance they'd get the length wrong. After walking around some more so the women who considered themselves in charge of my clothes could express how impressed they were with how good the shoes looked, Lily held out the second shoe box. I took it out of her hands with considerably more confidence than I'd had with the previous box. I opened it to reveal a pair of black boots. Not boots in the "work boot" sense, which is what I've seen the most; these were boots that were like dress shoes at the bottom, but not ending at ankle-height. Instead their leather rose up the leg, two-thirds of the way to my knees. I'd never worn "dress boots" (I'm only guessing at that name) before, and was quite curious what they'd be like. I quickly removed the dress shoes and slipped the first boot on. Pulling up the zip produced a strange sensation, as I've never had my lower leg encased in anything before, but it felt good. The inside of the 'tube' of the boot was padded, so it was a comfortable feeling. The shoe end of the boot felt very good too. While I was sitting down I put the other boot on, then stood up to walk around. "Well?" asked Mom, not satisfied with my broad smile. "I need to correct something I said about the previous shoes. I said they were, 'the most comfortable shoes I'd ever had.' I now realize that they're better described as, 'the LEAST UN-comfortable shoes'. They fit so well they didn't produce any discomfort. These, on the other hand, ARE the most COMFORTABLE footwear I've ever worn. Not just 'no discomfort', but they're actually comfortable. Dad, when you come home from a hard day at work and complain that your feet hurt, you should have a pair of boots like these, to put on to make your feet feel better. These are GOOD!" Mom had to press the toes of the boots. I think it's a genetic compulsion, no doubt caused by a minor gene on the females' shopping-chromosome. I got to parade back and forth, show everyone the padding inside the boots, and generally rave about how good they felt. They didn't look quite as classy as the dress shoes, but I had no doubt which pair I preferred. Girls can be crazy enough to wear shoes that must be horrendously uncomfortable, just because they look good, but that's not the priority I apply to my own footwear. At one point I said, "I'd much rather walk around wearing these than track shoes. I'm going to start wearing these to school every day." I was told that shoes shouldn't be worn every day, that, "They'll last far longer if they're worn every second day; much more than twice as long." I wanted them to last for the rest of my life, so I took that advice to heart, "Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it is then." I praised Lily YET again. She was a SUPERB sex-slave, and I hadn't even had sex with her since she'd achieved that new status. "I very happy you like. Shoes from very famous China shoe factory. Very, very big. Very good shoes." "I'll say!" #1: #2: #3: Unfortunately the rest of the bags contained clothes. They were very nice clothes - I know that, because Julia said they were - but it's hard to get enthusiastic about clothes. I was, however, particularly appreciative that they were generally baggier and much more conservative (i.e., less flamingly homosexual) than the clothes Julia normally gets me to wear. I wasn't appreciative of having to model them in front of everyone, especially the part where I had to get changed from one to another. Changing shoes I had no trouble with; changing pants was a different matter. My opinion was overruled, naturally. I'd have thought my opinion should be the most important, since I was the one repeatedly getting almost-naked, but apparently it doesn't work that way. All the women sincerely complimented Lily on each article. An aspect of Julia's praise had me puzzled, so I asked her, "Julia, most of these are more conservative and baggier than the clothes you politely request that I wear these days, so I'm wondering when I'm going to get a chance to wear them?" My fashion advisor/boss answered, "Starting from next Monday. It's time we bridged you across to a new look." "I am NOT complaining, but my last 'look' only started three weeks ago. I'm going to need a LOT more money if you're going to change my look every three weeks." "We'll see." Which was a VERY ominous statement. "We'll only be partially changing your look. You need to start wearing higher quality clothes to go with your wealth. Your money is a lot sexier and more important than your body, so we'll emphasize that, reducing your wearing sexy clothes to once or twice per week so the girls won't forget. Most of the clothes Lily bought are clearly high quality, so they'll be very suitable for school." Lily asked, "Mark has money?" Julia answered, "Yeah. That's secret for now, Lily, so please keep it to yourself until I tell you it's okay to talk about it. Okay?" "How much money?" "Ahh, quite a lot Lily. But you can't tell anyone." "Tell Father and Mother?" "Not until I tell you it's okay. Maybe next week, but wait until I tell you." "Okay. How Mark get money?" "When he was away last week." "Four days?" Julia nodded. "How much money?" "A few million dollars Lily. I'll tell you more about..." "MILLION! Mark RICH?" "Yes, he's very rich. Don't forget it's a secret though." Lily held up four fingers, asking, "Mark rich FOUR days? Not Father, Mother?", pointing to my parents. Julia reiterated, "It was all Mark's doing. Mark is a VERY special guy." "IYEE! Mark is..." Lily excitedly spouted Chinese for several seconds. She was a VERY happy, excited and proud looking girl. [[The translation of what she said, summarized, was: "Mark is a god!" (in the Chinese sense; a human who has developed demigod powers, rather than a divine creation like an angel), and "I KNEW I was right. Father and Mother are going to be SO pleased!"]] Lily realized she was talking to herself, cut it off, and rushed over to me. She stopped just short, exclaiming, "You VERY special man! Number one special! Thank you, thank you." She dropped to her knees, hugging my thighs, to particularly thank my knees. Lily was quite emotional, but I understood so little about her motivation that I preferred just to let her do her thing. She was certainly happy enough, so nothing needed fixing. I exchanged amused looks with the others, until Lily finished thanking my knees. She climbed to her feet, saying, "Thank you for I serve you. VERY big honor! I am luckiest girl." Considering that all I'd done for her was to let her wash my car, invite me to an exceptional meal, and give me some wonderful presents, I thought her thanking me was probably undeserved. "Umm, you're welcome. It's really nothing." Because it REALLY was nothing. I could see that she wanted to give me a hug, but she felt constrained from doing so. God knows why; with her being my sex-slave I wouldn't have thought a hug was something for her to be reluctant about. She wanted one, so I put my arms around her, and she immediately grabbed hold of me, hanging on tightly and saying "Thank you" to my nipples. "There, there." As far as I can work out, that means: "I don't have a clue what's going on, but I'll stay here until you calm down." Eventually Lily calmed down, and we got back to looking at - and unfortunately modeling - the last few of my clothing gifts. Then Lily started saying "Goodbye," to leave. Julia, Mom and I all stopped her, all asking the same thing, "How much do we owe you for all these gifts and the phones?" Lily's answer was very determined, "NO. No pay me. Me serve Mark. Cannot pay; is my honor." We tried several times, but she was adamant about it. I was amused when Julia said, "The reason I told you Mark was rich was so you knew you didn't have to pay. He can EASILY pay you back. It's nothing to him!" I had a feeling the total bill was considerably more than "nothing", but I still added my agreement, "Absolutely! I want to pay. I haven't done anything to deserve all these gifts." "You let me serve!" Julia tried, "Let Mark pay, Lily. He is rich now, so he..." "Yes RICH! So not pay." "Huh?" stumbled Julia. I was surprised Julia was confused, because she should be used to female logic by now. She asked, "Why shouldn't he pay because he's rich?" "More rich, more special, more not pay. More honor me." We argued some more, but the only concession we got was that Lily was fine with our paying for Julia's and Carol's phones, but nothing else. When Julia asked Lily how much for the two phones, Lily spent a couple of seconds computing, then named an amount. "Each?" asked Julia. "Together." "That's very cheap. Are you sure that's right?" "Sure. Hong Kong everything more cheap." "I'll give you the money at school tomorrow, okay?" "Okay. I go now." Lily gave me another big hug, and told my nipples that they were, "Number one special man" again. Julia reminded her to keep my being rich a secret from anyone, including her parents, until after next weekend. Lily agreed then she left. [[The very first thing Lily did when she got home was to tell her parents that I'd earned several million dollars in four days last week, followed by a proud, but respectful, "I told you so!"]] As we walked back inside, we all agreed that Lily was either a very strange girl, or she was a normal girl and Chinese were very strange people; we couldn't tell which. We went back to the living room to pick up all my stuff and put it away, or so I thought. Carol picked up a pair of pants and offered it to me, saying, "Try these on, Mark." "I already have. They fit fine." "Yes, I know. I want to see how they go with the shirt you're wearing." "Haha. You're just trying to get me to take my pants off." "That thought MAY have crossed my mind, but I do want to see what the combination looks like." "Yeah," agreed Julia. "Try them on." "Can't I just hold them in front?" "Don't be silly. Come on, we haven't got all night." We did, unfortunately, have nearly thirty minutes of getting Mark to try on combination after combination, helped considerably by Julia and Carol making repeated trips to my bedroom to bring back pants or shirts they thought might go particularly well with something that was already in the living room. Pretty much all the clothes in my bedroom eventually ended up in the living room. Both moms participated in my psychological abuse; Dad disappearing remarkably quickly in my half-hour of need. The females had a grand time. Even Donna enjoyed teasing me, she sneaked out to my bedroom to obtain a pair of my underwear (out of my UNDERWEAR drawer!), then returned to the living room, held them out and innocently suggested, "Change into these, Mark." When they weren't commenting on clothes, because I was in the middle of changing outfits, they talked about their mansion-shopping, and a whole bunch of other uninteresting topics. I was REALLY interested in getting into a mansion, but they didn't talk about anything that caught my attention. They kept going on about the type of faucets one of the bathrooms had, or how they couldn't possibly manage with both families and only a four-burner stove, or "Those drapes have to go! What were they thinking?", etc., etc., etc. I tuned out as much as possible, other than following their instructions: "Try this on", "Give us a twirl". Groan. I did notice a couple of little things. The first was when Carol came back into the living room with her new phone, telling us it was fully charged now. Donna was VERY eager to have Carol's old phone. Mom gave the answer I'm sure has been repeated millions of times all over the world: "If you can pay for the plan, you can have it." "Umm, how much does it cost?" "Probably about $20 per month, if you don't make too many calls." Which wouldn't take long to drain all of Donna's savings. "Oh. Umm, couldn't you pay, please Mom?" "We can't..." And then Mom stopped, because the usual, "We can't afford it" excuse was no longer true. Mom restarted, "We don't see any need for you to have a phone, Donna." "But Carol's got one." Carol said, "You heard Julia tell Lily she'd pay for the phones. I'll pay half of that, and I'm paying the monthly bill from now on too." "But you don't have much more money than I do." "I'm married to Mark, Donna. I share his money." "Mark, can you pay for my phone please. I'm doing you lots of favors with the Ducklings." I said, "I thought you were doing those things to be nice to me, and because you enjoyed being popular and in charge. Are you just doing them to force me to spend money on you?" "Ahh..." Donna thought for a couple of seconds, then hit on another approach, "What about all the money I won for you?" "I thought you gave it to me as a present? Are you taking your present back now, rather than letting me buy a horse with it?" Donna tried a couple of other approaches, but she didn't achieve anything other than making herself increasingly frustrated. Donna doesn't handle frustration well, and subtlety isn't her strong point either, so she ended up storming out of the room, yelling, "It's not fair!" as she slammed a door shut behind her. After she'd gone, I told Mom and Dad, "I could see you didn't want her to have one, but I wouldn't mind paying for it. Twenty dollars a month is nothing, and she is generally a good sister." "She doesn't need one, Mark. She doesn't talk on the phone as it is. She'd rather be outside running around doing something physical than socializing over the phone. She was just being greedy when she realized Carol's old phone was up for grabs, which isn't a behavior we're going to reward." "Tricky stuff this being a parent." #2: #3: #2: Mom said, "Paying attention is half of it. It does have its compensations. I quite liked the compensation you gave us last night, for instance, haha." They got back to playing dress-up with their doll (me), while chatting back and forth with each other. The second little thing that intruded on my awareness was a reference to the orchids that one of the houses they'd visited had growing in a small commercial venture on their land. I said, "That reminds me. I'm taking Mackenzie - she's the winner of the 'Mark Anderson Pop Quiz' Julia and Carol ran a few days ago - to the orchid show on Thursday evening. I'm told she only likes 'ordinary food', so can you recommend a good restaurant to take her to after the show?" So they all started talking about orchids and the orchid show. It's a good thing I have more patience than Donna. In the course of which I heard them mention that there'd be orchids for sale. I'd vaguely intended to bring Mackenzie a bouquet of flowers at the start of the date - because she'd wanted a "proper first date" for her prize - but now I wondered whether buying her an orchid at the show might be nicer. Several minutes later I got a chance to squeeze my question in, "What do you think of my buying Mackenzie an orchid at the show rather than a bouquet of flowers like guys normally do? Her mom said Mackenzie likes orchids, so that'd be all right, wouldn't it?" Mom said, "It'd be very nice. It'd last a lot longer than a bouquet too, provided she knows how to look after it properly?" "I think she does. Her mother said orchids were her hobby." Vanessa added, "There'll be many types of orchids for sale. Most should be around twenty or thirty dollars, but there'll be some worth more than a hundred." "I don't want to get carried away. She's not really my type, but she won the competition and wanted a 'proper first date' as her prize, so I should put some effort into it." "Good for you," praised Vanessa. Mom said, "You say that so naturally, Vanessa. I still find it strange that Mark has the lifestyle that he does. When I was dating Steven, my mother would have said something VERY different from 'Good for you, ' to his dating some other girl." "Even more so in my case. My parents were from the generation before yours. Mark would still not be allowed to hold Julia's hand nor see her in private, if I had the same attitude as my mother did. Archibald's going on a date with another girl never came up in conversation, but my mother's reaction would've been impressive, haha." They started talking "The Old Days" stuff. I listened for a bit, wondering if Vanessa would mention her wild past, as I remembered concluding that she and Prof had done group sex at some stage, reading between the lines of what she'd said when she was talking to Julia and me about it. Boringly, her conversation had no interesting bits. My mind wandered. I thought about not being interested in impressing Mackenzie, but it'd be nice if her younger sisters could hang around to socialize with me after I brought Mackenzie home from dinner. It should be early enough that they'd still be up, and I was sure they'd be eager to hang around (if not too eager). So I needed to think of an excuse to justify their staying up. I gave that some thought, and the best idea I came up with was magic. Only a few days ago I'd decided not to do any more public exhibitions of magic, but this time I could prepare an explanation in advance. It should be relatively easy to do a real magic trick, but have a fake explanation that made it look plausible. That'd depend on the trick, so I gave that some thought. Almost immediately I had a nice idea for the orchid I was going to buy her. I spent a little time turning the idea into a design that I could easily do with NP, but it'd be possible to do with the right apparatus and plenty of practice. I thought of a problem. "Vanessa, if I buy Mackenzie an orchid, how big is it likely to be? The pot and the plant?" "They'll sell a range of sizes, from half-inch seedlings in two-inch pots, up to three-foot mature plants in six-inch pots. Most will be in the middle of that range." I'd have to get a smallish one, but it sounded as if there'd be enough choice. "Thanks. I'm planning some entertainment for afterward. A magic trick like I did at Lily's place, but this time I'm going to have some apparatus prepared to show the parents afterward, as if I really did use sleight of hand. That way Mackenzie and her sisters will be entertained, but the parents will believe the mundane explanation. Best of both worlds without being too impressive, like I was at Lily's." "Yes. Prof and I also thought that was too impressive. It'd be best not to do something that magical again." "I've already decided not to. Not that it seemed to have any bad consequences last time, because the Chinese sure loved it!" The orchid size was suitable for my intended trick. It just had to be small enough to hide behind my jacket, and what Vanessa had described was even smaller than I'd hoped for. I needed more than one trick, so I thought about the second one for a while, between twirls. I was stuck for a few minutes, until I decided to stick with the old tried-and-true: the 'Hide The Hair' game. With an explanation prepared, it was easy. Two good tricks should be enough to get the parents to understand that the girls were hooked and wanted to hang around with me. If I needed more I should be able to improvise with whatever was happening at the time. That decided, it was time to stop being a living doll. I had a convenient excuse now. "Sorry girls and ladies. I have to call an end to this very enjoyable game of dress-up because I need to do some preparation. Mom, can I borrow a couple of safety pins please?" Julia said, "This hasn't been a game; it's serious. We have to split your new clothes between here and my place, so it's important to know which new articles match other clothes you've got here, that way we can put together complete ensembles for you." "Wow! It's a good thing you're on the job, because that never would have occurred to me. Who knows what sort of badly matched combinations I could have ended up wearing to school." Julia knew I was jerking her chain, but that was okay. She was in a good mood because she'd been able to have serious clothing conversations with Carol and the mothers, and I'd been cooperative for what felt like about ten years. Julia responded in kind, "I know! I would have died of shame. All the girls at school would have been laughing at me for letting my boyfriend dress himself. I'd never live it down." "And nor should you, after allowing a social disaster like that to occur. Shall I leave you girls to sort out my clothes and put whichever ones you want back in my closet, while I get my magic equipment organized?" "Yes please," agreed Julia, which was more than fine with me. All I needed were two safety pins and a few pieces of string, and to do a little assembly work. If I messed around, I should be able to stall for long enough for the girls to have sorted out my clothes. Mom gave me the pins and then went to talk with Donna. I grabbed the jacket I'd be wearing for Thursday's date off the floor (imagine their leaving my clothes on the floor! Don't they know clothes are important?), and took it to the kitchen to very slowly work on it. I was making the final adjustments to my fake magic apparatus when Mom and a subdued Donna walked in. Donna started apologizing for her misbehavior. I let her get enough of it out, then interrupted her, "Don't worry about it, Donna. I've got something MUCH more interesting I want to do. I learned a new Aikido technique last night, and I'm itching to try it on someone. It needs to be someone fairly tough, so you or Dad would be best. It's a very fancy technique, but if I do it right, the person is going to fall over and look REALLY silly, so should I do it on you or Dad?" "Dad! What are you going to do to him?" "I'm not going to touch him. He's going to fall over all by himself." "Huh? I don't understand." "You go get Dad out of his bedroom, and get him to come to the living room. Don't tell him why though, okay?" "Okay, haha." Zoom. Mom looked at me in the 'Please explain' manner. "Like I told Donna. I learned something yesterday but haven't had a chance to practice it yet. I'm eager to try it, and if it works it might be a little rough. It's nothing scary like the last thing I did to Dad in Julia's bedroom; it's a perfectly ordinary Aikido technique, but it will look quite strange and entertaining, so I thought it'd distract Donna nicely." Donna towed Dad into the kitchen. I said, "Dad, you showed some interest in Aikido when I showed you how to take a knife off someone. I've got another technique I want to try out on you." Then I repeated what I'd told Mom about it not being scary. After a little reassurance, he agreed. We went through to the living room, where I told the others what I'd told Mom and Dad, adding, "I thought you might be amused by it, and be impressed by what Aikido can do; assuming I can do it properly, which I think I can. It'll only take a minute. If you would all stand to either side, so Dad and I have got plenty of room." While they were doing that I had a little idea. I excused myself for a second, ran to the kitchen and grabbed a can of beer out of the fridge. Back in the living room I stopped in front of Dad, extending the beer with my right hand, although lower than you'd normally do it. "Reach out and take the beer out of my hand, Dad." He was a little hesitant after the pain he'd received trying to attack me with a spoon, but he's a tough guy who's quite fond of beer, so he reached out to grab it. I already had a fingertip imagined, floating immediately above his hand pointing at the beer. His ki started as soon as he intended to reach forward, and I immediately poured as much ki as I could along the same path. Pushing his ki in this manner, with his and my ki totally overlapping, works far better than what I'd done with Sensei last night. So right from the get-go Dad was being strongly encouraged into overreaching. I moved the can down ahead of Dad's reach, remembering to go sideways away from me a little too. Dad's hand followed it unerringly. Dad's got a long reach, so I had to slide half a step backward to get him to extend far enough to overbalance. I kept my ki pouring forward with his, and his never faltered: he kept reaching and reaching. Dad started toppling, and his ki STILL didn't falter - he REALLY wanted that beer! - so I kept mine going too. It wasn't until he had already toppled and was halfway to the floor that he suddenly woke up to his situation. Both of his hands were out of position to arrest his fall, one stretched over his head and the other down by his side. He barely had time to grunt in surprise and begin to move his hands, when he hit the carpet with his chest and face. "Oof! What the hell?", while most of the audience chuckled, including Mom when she could see Dad was okay. A confused Dad climbed to his feet, frowning and asking, "How did I end up on the floor?" Donna laughingly told him, "You fell over. Mark told me he'd make you fall over without even touching you, and he did it! You looked VERY silly! Why did you fall over?" "Don't ask me! I don't remember a thing. All I remember is reaching for the beer, then the next thing I knew I was taking a face full of carpet. I don't remember Mark doing anything to me?" Dad's last question was aimed at me, but Donna beat me to it, "He didn't do anything. You fell over all by yourself. You're very clumsy, haha." I didn't want to get into the mental powers aspect too much, so I just explained, "I didn't do anything to you, just moved the beer away as you reached for it. There's a trick involved that causes you to put so much attention on getting the beer that you don't notice that you're overreaching and overbalancing. Sensei showed it to me yesterday, but we didn't have time to practice it. Today I worked out what I thought would be a good way of doing it, which I wanted to test. Thanks for being my 'fall guy', haha." "I still don't understand what happened?" Mom said, "It looked silly from this side. You reached for the can, Mark pulled it away, you kept reaching until you were bending forward so much you fell over." I added, "It's difficult for me to explain. It's quite an advanced Aikido technique. It's not very useful, but it's good to know that I can do it." Dad said, "Making people fall over sounds useful to me. They're not going to be fighting you much if they keep doing that." "Unfortunately it's not nearly as good as that. I can only make someone fall over if everything is just right. I couldn't have used it against any of the six guys who attacked me in the bathroom, for example." "Maybe you should carry a can of beer around school then?" "If you can convince the Principal I need it for self-defense, then I'll start taking one." #3: We exchanged pictures of a few techniques where the new ability would be helpful. One example is with a technique I've already mentioned. One of the defenses to a knife attack is to get to the side of the thrust, put a hand on the attacker's knife hand, and push that hand even farther forward than the intended thrust would have taken it. That moves the attacker off balance, starting him falling forward. It's a technique that is a bit tricky though, because it can be hard to get into position before uke starts pulling the knife back. Using my new ability to project ki from locations other than from my body, I can be reinforcing uke's forward thrusting ki even before I'm in position, giving me longer to get into position. I wondered whether, if my ki was far stronger, I might be able to get uke to thrust so far forward he'd fall over. On second thought, I was pretty sure that without the focus of the beer bottle or other such target, it wouldn't work well enough to make someone fall. Thrusts, punches, etc. all have an expected withdrawal movement, which I might be able to delay a little, but I was sure I wouldn't be able to eliminate entirely. My Aikido demonstration over with, Vanessa started making noises about going home. Seeing as Julia was here already, she elected to stay another night, which meant the whole, "Mom, can you get my clothes for Mark to bring tomorrow morning please..." thing had to be done again. I asked, "What's happening with the mansion buying? Someone said something about a shortlist?" Vanessa answered, "It's going to take us another day or two to choose an architect and finalize our shortlist. We'll have about eight or nine properties on it, which we'll talk through with the architect to give us a better idea of what's involved. We'll cut that down to a short-shortlist, then put him or her to work preparing time and cost estimates for them. Then we'll have enough information to start getting serious." "More stages yet, even before you get serious." "Yes. We're rushing to do it much faster than is normally the case. Most people take months." "{Sigh}, I know. I appreciate that you're all spending time on it every day, but I wish it was something that could be done faster." We went to sleep fairly early, I suspected because the girls were exhausted after the emotional high of playing dress-up with my new clothes. ------- Chapter 207: Ava's Clever Idea Wednesday, May 11, 2005 I had a good study session, getting in plenty of undistracted hours. I felt good about it too, especially knowing that memory sharing meant that I wasn't going down a blind alley that I'd have to fix by re-studying both courses with my minds swapped. At breakfast Prof was pleased with my progress, and he added, "You have another assignment coming up shortly. I'll drop it in your study, but just review it like you did for the last one." I collected Julia's clothes from Vanessa, and delivered them to my home. The girls directed me to go to school via an ATM, so they could withdraw Lily's payment for their phones. Carol giving her half to Julia, to pass on to Lily. Julia did that soon after our arrival, while I stood there thanking Lily for being so wonderful. "You welcome. Friday we have big fun?" "Yes indeed. I'll even take these wonderful boots off for it, haha." During the morning the three 'seat-filler' girls were very happy with me. Pat was especially excited and bouncy, exclaiming, "Only three days to go! I'm getting VERY excited." I was pleased to make her so happy, as it's very enjoyable to see Pat bounce (have I mentioned that she has rather nice breasts?). I was reminded to check something, "Did Julia tell you we're going to Venice Beach on the Sunday, just to stroll along the walkway with you girls in small bikinis?" "No, she never mentioned that." I rushed to Julia. "Julia! Julia! I just found out something that could ruin the entire trip." "Oh no! What?" "I think you totally failed to tell the girls to bring tiny bikinis for the walk along Venice Beach on Sunday!" It took quite a while for Julia to recover enough to see any humor in my joke. "You've already seen the girls naked, but some of them failing to wear tiny bikinis on Sunday would 'ruin the entire trip.' Don't you think that's unnecessary?" "You've already got two closets full of clothes. Don't you think doing any more clothes shopping is unnecessary?" "Haha. Okay, you've convinced me. I'll tell them. Carol, Ava and I have suitable swimsuits, but the others may not. Do you want to buy them suits in LA?" "I think you just hit upon the ONLY type of clothes shopping I'd enjoy. Provided you don't chase me out of the store like you did last time. Seeing as how I'm paying and a pervert, I want to be in charge. Telling them what to try on and which one they'll be walking out of the store wearing." Julia said, "I'll give them a choice, but I'll make sure they know how much you'll enjoy shopping with them." Pat and Katelin approached me later, asking, "Ahh, how small are you thinking?" "I'm tempted to say we'd start with the smallest bikinis in the store and then cut the excess material off, but that might be too mean. Definitely sexy though. Hide-from-your-parents-or-they'll-have-a-fit sexy. Summer's coming soon, and I want to take some of my favorite girls swimming. I'm expecting to have quite a few girls interested in me by then, and I'm enjoyably anticipating their competing to get my attention. The smaller the bikini, the greater my attention. I'm VERY immature that way." I figured multimillionaires can get away with being immature, especially when they're male and only fifteen. "Oh." They said they'd think about it, and walked away looking worried. When I next saw Alexis I asked her, "Did Julia tell you about wearing a sexy bikini on Sunday?" "Yep. I don't have one that small, but she said you'd like to buy us one, right?" "I'm male, aren't I? You don't seem worried about it at all? Pat and Katelin had concerns about my buying something too sexy for them." "I flashed my tits in class, so who cares about wearing a small bikini? You want me to wear dental floss, I'll wear it. I figure you can afford to bail me out if I get arrested." "Good girl!" In one of my little conversations with Katelin, I remembered a question that'd occurred to me during her visit yesterday. I hadn't wanted to take any unnecessary risks in front of her mother, but I could ask now, "How are you getting along with your brothers these days?" Katelin suddenly looked worried, as she answered, "Okay, I guess. Wayne's a lot better. Junior and Gunner are just as bad, if not worse. They don't like you, and they blame me for bringing you home." #4: #1: #4: I wasn't surprised to hear Gunner was still unpleasant toward Katelin because I'd seen him a few times around school recently, and he always gives me very dirty looks. No more than that, which is finally wise of him. I made light of Katelin's comment by saying, "They REALLY are stupid, aren't they? They insulted me, tried to crush my hand, refused to let me leave, then attacked me; but somehow it's your fault. It doesn't sound like they learned much. At least you've got one reasonably sensible brother." "Yeah. It's given Wayne a scare, but the others have just got angry." "Some people are their own worst enemies. Never mind." I changed the subject, which caused Katelin to suddenly look relieved. I was puzzled, so I asked, "Why were you so worried just before, Katelin?" "Oh," she said, looking worried again. "Ahh, I thought you might be unhappy that I'm failing your test, and not let me come to LA." "Don't worry about that. Not even a little bit. I told you before that the test is canceled, and I meant it. It's your life, so you live it your way. I think you and your brothers are missing out on being happier people, but I'm DEFINITELY not getting involved again! You're not going to lose your place on the trip unless you do something I dislike, such as blabbing about my secret, or getting really annoyingly negative about my sex-life. You know there's going to be some group sex on this trip, assuming I can wrestle any of you girls away from the stores." "Yeah, Julia told me." "It's unlikely much of it will one-on-one in a private room. If you want some fun, there are probably going to be a few other girls involved too. If you're not comfortable, please don't make any depressing comments, just leave the room." "Julia's already warned me. The first time was a big shock to me, but I'm over that now. I know you better too, and you're a much better guy than I thought before, so I'll behave myself. Except Mom and Dad probably wouldn't see it that way, haha." "Good." #1: #2: I hadn't properly attended any lunch this week yet, so Julia had deliberately spread the word that I should be at this one. Once everyone had arrived, there must have been nearly a hundred people. Unfortunately I had to write "people" rather than "girls", because there were quite a few guys in attendance too. About a dozen standing or sitting in small groups around the periphery, with another half a dozen sitting next to THEIR - they made it obvious - girlfriends. [This is a good point for a small digression. I'm a little worried that I've given you the impression that every girl in school was after me. The ones I write about are ones that are, so if that's all you read, you might think that's all there is. That's not the case at all. As Julia has previously mentioned, there are approximately 700 girls at my high school, about 80 of which were sitting in front of me right now, at the largest gathering I've ever had. Eighty girls is a huge number to be interested in one guy, but it represents only about 10% of possible number. Julia had spread the word that only good looking girls need try to chase me, so that had theoretically discouraged the attendance of some of the girls who would've liked to date me, but most of the C-list or lower girls had turned up out of curiosity anyway.] The first order of business was my delicious Chinese lunch, while the girls chatted among themselves. While I was eating, Julia quietly told me that she'd found out earlier in the day that one of the other 10th grade girls had called Chloe last night, and had been told by Mrs. Moon that Chloe had changed schools because our school was "immoral and a bad influence." Mrs. Moon had also told the calling girl that she didn't want anyone from our school to call Chloe. Carol had already found out the first part of that news, and we already knew that the Moons didn't want to hear from us, but it was sad that they were cutting off contact from everyone at this school. There was other chat, but none of it was relevant to pretty much anything at all. Once my mouth was free for less essential activities, I was surprised that I didn't get to use it much. The girls were happy talking among themselves most of the time, and the group was so large that there were pockets of conversation throughout it. Most of Pipeline Group 1A was sitting together. Julia asked them, "Is Friday's date planning under control?" I listened carefully, because I hadn't heard a word about what it was going to be, and I was getting curious now. Several of them spoke at once, all saying variations of, "Everything's fine," which was less than informative. I asked, "I haven't heard what the date is yet? Is it a secret, or something?" "We'd rather not say," was the consensus answer. One girl added, "We're fairly confident you'll like it, even though it's hard to think of something sixteen girls can do for just one guy." Which caused quite a lot of hilarity and joking around all the listeners. When she got a chance, the spokesgirl for 1A said, "Not THAT! Julia said none of that in the first two dates. We've got to make Mark happy another way. That's tricky, because 'that' is the only thing guys have on their mind, haha." There was more joking about that. I liked the comment of Clara, one of the members of 1A, who told everyone, "Wait till it's your turns; it's trickier than you think. We're used to guys planning most of the dates, and we can easily give them a good time by letting them have some you-know-what. But without that, and trying to find something fair for all sixteen of us, is a challenge." I liked the comment about giving guys "you-know-what." The bit about being fair was ok too. Group 1B, who were 11th graders, told Julia, "We'll choose our date on the weekend. We want to see what happens to the other group first." I thought that was leaving it worryingly late for the date on Tuesday, in my humble opinion. I hope they realize how important I am! Other than checking on the two pipeline groups, the rest was just free-form discussion. Most of it was of no import, but I'll give a few slightly significant extracts: One girl announced a medical update on the broken arm injuries (nothing worth repeating here), which caused some jokes. There were some jealous looking boyfriends in earshot, so I made a comment about any idiots who attacked me from now on would get hospitalized, arrested and expelled. Julia was asked when she'd choose which groups would be Pipeline Groups 2A and 2B. There were a lot of girls interested in that, to the visible displeasure of some of their boyfriends. Julia answered, "Maybe the end of next week or beginning of the next." Another girl asked me where I'd been the last couple of lunchtimes. I enjoyed answering, "Family business." I thought it was a little amusing (the pun on "business"), and maybe some of them might remember it when news of my being rich comes out. Mackenzie's was asked about her pop quiz prize. She told them, "I'm having a date with Mark on Thursday. JUST a date! Nothing sexy. My mom let me have a mid-week date, which is strange. Mark won't tell me where we're going either." Even though Mackenzie was sitting fairly close, I loudly said, "I did give you a hint though, Mackenzie. Tell the girls what I said." Mackenzie blushed a little, telling the girls, "Mark told my mom we were going on a 'dirty date.' Mom didn't get upset, which is NOT what I'd expect her to do." The rest of the lunch conversation isn't worth reporting on, other than saying that my popularity was noticeably higher than it'd been at the last group lunch. The girls hung on my every word, laughed at all my jokes, wanted to be near me, and LOVED my new cellphone. During one of the afternoon's journeys from one classroom to the next, a group of about a dozen guys approached me in a non-threatening manner, to express their disapproval at so many girls being interested in me. Apparently (you should make sure you're sitting down when you read this, because it's quite shocking), the boys thought I was "being unfair." I'd prepared a speech for exactly this situation ages ago, and had used extracts from it several times in short conversations with guys over the last couple of weeks, so I was well practiced at trotting it out. I knew it had no chance of success, but I had some spare time and it made me sound good for any girls walking past. I adopted a loud, speech-making voice to discourage interruption and for any wandering-past girls, "Listen up, guys. You want to narrow the difference between us when it comes to having girls interested in you. There are two different ways of achieving that: You can try to drag me down, like the last six guys tried. They're headed for jail, where THEY are going to be the girlfriends! Or you can narrow the gap by improving yourselves. A couple of years ago I was like you: wishing I was better with girls. I decided to do something about it." Which was true, I'd committed suicide. "There are four things I decided to improve. First, physique. It just takes exercise and good nutrition. Don't complain that your body doesn't attract girls; start an exercise program. Second, clothes. Once you've got the body, buy good clothes. Girls think clothes are very important, and it's girls you're trying to impress, so it's obvious what you need to do. I recommend Raging Rocky's Rags. Third, good grades. I get up to study at 3am nearly every morning, including Saturdays and Sundays. Fourth, and by far the most important, BE NICE TO GIRLS! Be their friends, like them for people. Some of them are REALLY good people!" #4: My shoveling was interrupted by some of the guys starting to make inane comments to me. Which I guess was fair, considering how inane my comments had been. Their comments to my much-abbreviated speech were the usual sorts of things: "No, that's not what we mean." (Translation: "We don't want to make any effort.") "We just want you to stop encouraging so many girls to chase you." (Translation: "We're idiots.") "Your pipeline dating idea has got most of the girls in school focused on you." I didn't respond to most of their comments as I wasn't actually talking to them but to the girls who were listening to us, and I couldn't twist most of the interruptions around to make me sound good. I did respond to the last point with the usual counter-argument, "Half the girls will be eliminated from their pipeline group every date. After three dates there are two girls left and fourteen are back in circulation. The pipeline rules are that I won't date those girls again at least until the next school year, and at least half of those I won't date again even then. They'll be available for you again, BUT they're not going to waste their time on boys who aren't prepared to make any effort to be more attractive for girls, and who won't be NICE to them. That's all you have to do guys. There are seven hundred girls in this school, and very few guys who are nice enough to them. If you improve your behavior, good girls will find you." After addressing a few of the points that I could use, I simply raised my voice and carried on with another part of my speech, "I'm EXTREMELY grateful to my wonderful sisters for waking me up to how nice some girls are, and how enjoyable their company can be. If you value girls for WHO they are, rather than WHAT you guys want to use them for, then you'll have far happier lives. Seriously, if you leer and make snide comments at a girl because she wears a low-cut top one day, she's going to remember, and she's also going to tell her girlfriends that you're a pig. The main reason you don't have more girls chasing after you is because you keep making yourself look bad. If you want girls to be nice to you; BE NICE TO THEM! It's hardly rocket science. -- "Exercise, dress well, study, being nice, and if at all possible, value girls for the wonderful people many of them are. But I can see most of you aren't interested in that. You want girls to throw themselves at your feet without your having done anything to deserve it. In that case, get an after-school job and earn a few million dollars. That'll get plenty of a certain type of girl to throw herself at you, haha." I could see that, as expected, I'd failed to penetrate the guys' thick skulls. Guys who're stupid enough to complain to me that I'm not being fair, are hardly likely to agree that exercise and studying hard are good ideas. Plenty of female passersby had heard me though. Word would spread that I'd said nice things about how wonderful girls can be, and had urged guys to treat girls nicer. So, ironically, these idiots had helped me be even more successful with girls. What constantly amazes me is why guys think complaining to me is a good idea. Surely they can't seriously expect me to say, "Oh my God you're right; I AM being unfair! I'll stop dating pretty girls immediately. Please let me make up for my mistake by giving you three or four of the best ones." That was enough of that pointless, boring crap, so I excused myself to go to my next class. When we got to the parking lot at the end of school, there were several girls hopefully hanging around, including both of Mackenzie's sisters. Carol and Donna were already by the car, so I simply waved at the crowed as we got in the car and drove off. They'll learn. In the car I said, "I've got to get my watch band adjusted because it needs a couple of links taken out and this watch is too fancy for Dad to adjust like he normally does. Do you want me to drop you home first, or do you want to hang around the stores while it's being done?" "We can window-shop for a while." We parked in town and I went to take care of my business, while two girls with a great deal of money in their bank accounts went window-shopping. The lady who I dealt with commented, "Nice watch." She hadn't exclaimed it with great enthusiasm, or anything extreme like that, merely commented, but she did give me the idea of asking, "Do you know what it's roughly worth?" "We don't deal with Breitlings often, but I'd guess about a thousand." "Wow! I had no idea it was worth that much." "They're a good watch. Did someone give it to you as a gift?" "Yeah, just last night. They bought it in Hong Kong." We finished arranging what I wanted done and I was asked to come back in thirty minutes, so I did a little shopping myself: two anniversary cards for the girls (the clerk didn't ask why I needed two), and a couple of interesting looking books for myself. I didn't see the girls, but I have noticed that we tend to be interested in different types of stores, so that wasn't surprising. I did send Julia a "30 minutes" text message, so they could pace themselves. I spent most of the half hour skimming-without-buying some books about psychic powers. They were silly, but they passed the time. Unfortunately they didn't give me any good ideas for things to try. The lady recognized me when I walked back into the watch store. She called out, "It's all done. I'll get it for you." I'd read the watch's manual while playing dress-up last evening, and I'd set the watch for the correct day, date and time then. All I had to do was put it on now and admire it. #1: While I was putting it on, she said, "I asked our watchmaker to check whether it's a genuine Breitling because there are a lot of fakes sold in Hong Kong. He says it is genuine, so it's a very nice present. It matches your ring very well too. It's almost perfect." "Yes, I noticed that too. It's a wonderful present." I wandered back to the car, impressed by the quality of the Chinese sex-slave I had and checking the time frequently. I REALLY like my new watch. #2: #4: I sent Julia another message, "I'm back at car. Take your time." I wasn't in a hurry, as the only plan I had for this evening was a blitz on all my schoolwork. I hadn't caught up from my being on the lam yet, although this evening should accomplish that easily. Having plenty of time, and expecting the rich girls to be a while, I settled into the car and started reading one of my books. About two minutes later the girls arrived. The one time in my life I was happy for them to keep shopping, they return immediately. God has a perverse sense of humor. [[I consider myself your God now, so you can judge that last sentence for yourself.]] With disbelief, I asked, "No purchases?" "We were just looking." Girls are strangely unpredictable, when they aren't too busy being unpredictably strange. After we got rolling I said, "I'm thinking of spending the evening catching up on all my schoolwork. If Julia's right about next week being chaotic after news of my money gets out, it'd be a good idea for me to get totally up to date. I'll do that at Julia's so I can use the good computer for any stuff that needs it. What do the rest of you want to do?" My two girls wanted to keep me company, and Donna was happy to be dropped at home. Julia said, "I'm thinking about holding off on leaking your being rich until after the 11th grade pipeline date on Tuesday. It might be interesting for you to see their behavior as it is now, and then see it change when news of your wealth gets out. None of those girls know you personally - all their interest is because of your reputation and looks - so their attitude change should be interesting. What do you think?" "Fine by me. I suspect that when it finally does become public knowledge, I'll wish you'd delayed it even longer." "I'm still thinking about it. Plus it may leak before then anyway." "Up to you. Changing the subject, the watch store said my new watch is worth about a thousand dollars." Both Carol and Donna gasped somewhat at that news, but Julia seemed totally unfazed. I continued, "That's a hell of a lot of money for Lily to spend on me, plus whatever she spent on all the other presents." Carol and Donna thought so too, quite emphatically. I asked, "Julia, you knew the value of the watch already?" "Not accurately. I knew it was a good brand though. Not top of the line, but good enough that the price didn't surprise me." "I hate to imagine what 'top of the line' watches cost then. A thousand dollars is already way over the top for something that just tells the time." "Haha. You really don't understand fashion and image, do you? I wouldn't be surprised if people have spent a million dollars on a watch, if they wanted one with enough big diamonds on it. I do know that there are many watches worth much more than yours. That's not important though. Lily bought you a very nice watch - it would've been cheaper in Hong Kong, by the way - and it matches your ring very well, so I'm impressed by her commitment to you. I don't understand it, but everyone seems to be doing well out of it and are happy." We did schoolwork until dinner. After that we visited Ava and her parents at their place for a couple of hours, as we all agreed that was better than schoolwork. It was pleasant talking to them again. They were starting to plan their trip, and were getting excited about it. Accountants must excite easily, as their trip was just around a few states. We'd been teasing Ava at school over her wanting to get Carol and me together. Julia had already told Ava that all four of us would be in the same hotel suite on Saturday night, so Ava was busting a gut to have us consummate our sibling relationship there. The only trouble was that Carol and I had both told Ava that we were sure the other person didn't desire us. Carol had also told Ava that she [Carol] fancied me so much she felt like bursting sometimes, but was very confused about me not being a girl. I was playing innocent. Initially, in the face of Ava's attempts to get me to admit it, I had refused to confirm or deny that I had sexual or romantic feelings for Carol. Lately I'd been weakening, saying things like, "Whoever finally gets Carol as a life partner is going to be a VERY lucky girl," which both encouraged and drove Ava crazy. We were playing dim right through Ava's doing her best to make either of us see the light. Frustrating her even more was that she was having to do it in a way that didn't get her parents' attention. Presumably they'd told her off for it after our previous visit, because Ava was being so careful during this one. We did have some time away from her parents, during which Ava 'forced' me to admit that, "I don't look at Carol's body, Ava. That wouldn't be polite. But, yes, I am aware that she has a very sexy body." Whereupon Ava got very excited, until I added, "I'm aware of it because all the guys in my soccer team think she's very sexy, so she must be." "What do YOU think Mark?" "I try not to think about it." "Ah ha! You 'TRY' not to. That means you must think she's sexy." "Carol is two things which are much more important than that to me Ava. She's my sister AND a good cook! How great is that! Haha." "Argh. No. I mean do YOU think she's sexy?" "I guess so..." "AH HA! I knew it!" " ... from a girls' perspective. You find Carol sexy, don't you, Julia?" Julia agreed, "Yes. Very sexy, and very sweet too, she's a lovely girl." "I agree. Carol certainly is very sweet and lovely." Ava REALLY wanted to know, "But is she SEXY from YOUR point of view, Mark?" "I can't really give you my perspective, but I can easily give a male perspective. Males think Carol is INCREDIBLY sexy and very, very hot." "So you DO think Carol is sexy!" "I've never understood why males think lesbians are incredibly sexy and hot. Why is that? Because it makes no sense to me." "Argh!" You get the idea: poor Ava was working very, very hard, and making very, very little headway. Just enough to keep her trying, and so our eventual surrender on Saturday night would look reasonable. A while later, when we started talking about leaving - "To get back to our schoolwork" - Ava asked, "Can I come over and sleep with you guys tonight?" I thought about it. We had intended it to be Julia, Carol and me, but we'd slept together the two previous nights, so it'd probably be okay for Carol to sleep on the bed in the study, or I could take her home. Julia leaped to answer Ava, "That'd be great, as long as you don't mind sleeping four to the bed again, because Carol will be sleeping with us too. She asked if she could sleep between Mark and me tonight because she wants to enjoy falling asleep in our arms." Carol looked down shyly, or possibly to hide her mirth. Ava exclaimed, "That's wonderful! Umm, what do you think of that Mark?" "I'm glad Carol and I are so close that she feels safe with me." "That's not what I mean! I mean, umm ... I mean, will you like having her in your arms?" "Of course. I love making Carol happy. Anything she wants is fine by me." "What if she wanted to have sex?" "That's perfectly fine Ava. I think it's a good thing." All three girls were initially puzzled, but Julia and Carol figured it out, and left it to Ava to ask, "You DO? I don't understand. I thought you didn't want to?" "If she wants sex in order to be even happier, then I'll very happy to help. I'll go to the study to leave the three of you to it." "Argh! That's not what I meant. I meant what if she wanted to have sex WITH YOU?" "Haha, Ava. You might as well have said, 'What if she wants to have sex with the entire football team.' She's NEVER going to want that." "But she DOES! With you I mean, not with the football team." Ava's qualifier had ruined my next way of deflecting her. I couldn't think of another joke, so now was a good time to settle her down. I said, "You must have had a sheltered upbringing if you don't know what a lesbian is. Seriously, Carol knows she can talk with me about anything, and she's not mentioned this. The status quo is perfect because Carol's never been happier and we're all getting along very well. The girls have even got enough money to go shopping whenever they want, so life is perfect. Shall we say goodbye to your parents now?" In the car back to Julia's place, with Ava safely out of earshot as she'd be coming a little later, Julia described her little plan for tonight. Our study was big enough for the four of us, once Julia obtained another chair. I moved left and Carol moved right, leaving room for Ava in the middle, where my computer used to be when I had just the one. We worked away like good students, Ava occasionally expressing amazement at my doing two things at once. I chuckled to myself, because it could have been a great deal more impressive if I'd made the effort to learn to type using NP-fingertips. I hadn't bothered because it'd take quite a lot of practice to get sufficiently proficient that the typing mind could still study productively, plus I hardly ever have occasion to type and do something else with my hands since I do 80% of my schoolwork at school during other classes, with most of the rest usually done at my desk at my home. In neither location do I use a computer. I got up to date with all my schoolwork, ready for the disruption of next week. [[Next week certainly did turn out to be a major disruption, but if I'd known how much, I would have prepared for it other than by doing schoolwork.]] I remembered Julia's comment about getting used to using the internet more, so I googled "orchid" to learn a little about them before tomorrow's date, figuring that might make the date less boring. I was quite impressed by the amazing variations, so maybe I'd enjoy the orchid show more than I expected. I also learned that my "dirty date" joke was largely inaccurate, as most orchids don't grow in dirt. Ava had already finished her schoolwork and had wandered off in search of entertainment elsewhere in the house. Julia suggested I entertain Ava until Julia and Carol had caught up on their work. That sounded good to me, as I'd rather use my testicles than read about them (I'd just learned that "orchid" is Greek for testicles. On that topic, "avocado" has the same meaning in Aztec. Ancient botanists were a dirty bunch of people. Next time you see a girl sniffing an orchid or eating an avocado, you can ask her, "Do you like testicles?" Be prepared to explain fast). I was about to leave the room when a problem occurred to me. "If Ava and I are alone together, she's going to talk about Carol and me. Probably very earnestly, so it'd be hard to put her off. I think I'll stay here with you two rather than get Ava worked up. I'll study my college courses until you're finished, then we can go find her together." Carol and Julia hurried through the rest of their work, then we searched for Ava together. She was sitting in the living room with the rest of the family, half watching TV, half chatting. We joined in, me putting Ava on my lap to make up for neglecting her. At bedtime, when the four of us were in Julia's room, Carol, Julia and I stripped off then climbed into bed. Ava's eyes opened in shock. She said, "You're going to sleep together naked?" I said, "Sure. Why wouldn't we?" "Ahh. I don't know. I'm just surprised. I thought you didn't want to get sexy with Carol?" "We're not getting sexy, we're just sleeping together naked. Carol sits on my lap in the hot tub naked, and this is even more innocent because in a couple of minutes I'll be asleep." "Aren't you worried about someone seeing? What about if Vanessa or Prof came in?" "That wouldn't worry me. They know us well enough by now to know I wouldn't do anything bad to Carol. I'd just tell them the truth, that Carol wanted to sleep with my arms around her." "You'll sleep together naked like it means nothing, but you won't 'sleep together'. You two are weird!" "It does mean something," said Carol. "It means we love each other." "Exactly," I agreed. "Weird," repeated Ava, shaking her head. Her conversation had surprised me, but I guess Ava must've decided to try to understand our relationship rather than keep unsuccessfully trying to push it. Julia arranged the sleeping positions so I was between her and Carol, with Ava outside of Carol. That was inconsistent with what we'd told Ava earlier (Carol between Julia and me), but it didn't matter. Carol spooned into my belly, then asked, "Hold my breast, please Mark." Getting Ava's attention instantly! I said, "I'm pretty sure sisters aren't supposed to have breasts, Carol. I've never noticed any on Donna. Are you sure?" "I want to feel what it's like to have a boy I love hold my breasts tenderly." "Okay, if that's what you want. Let me know if I make you feel uncomfortable." "I already know that's not going to happen." My hand cupped one of Carol's breasts, causing her to exhale, "Ahhh, that's nice." Ava asked her, "You like it?" "Very much. It feels wonderful." Ava asked eagerly, "What about you, Mark; what do you think?" "I'm trying very hard not to think, Ava." "But if you were, you'd be thinking that Carol has wonderful breasts, wouldn't you?" "Please don't talk like that. I can't let myself think about things like that." "Why not? What would happen?" "Nothing that should. It'd be best if I went to sleep now, so goodnight everyone." "Goodnight, darling," from Julia. | "Goodnight, Mark," from Carol. | "Wait, wait," from Ava. I NP'd the lights off, then pretended to fall asleep. In the car I'd said that I'd fake it, because I wanted to eavesdrop. Carol said, "It's no use Ava. I can feel he's fallen asleep." "I'll wake him up. He shouldn't run away like that." Ava started reaching over Carol, to shake me awake, but Carol said, "There's no point waking him; he'd just go straight back to sleep again. He could do that before you got one word out. He's an amazing guy." "Amazingly BLIND! Why can't he see that you want to be his lover?" "I'm not sure I do. I've never done it with a boy, or even wanted to, so I don't understand my feelings." "I bet you'd like it if Mark's hand was caressing your breast now?" "Yeah, that'd be very nice." "You want him then. I'm sure about that." "But I'm a lesbian." "Not when it comes to Mark, you're not. You just asked him to hold your breast, and you said it'd be nice if he'd caressed it. You may be a lesbian with other boys, but you're not with Mark." "Maybe you're right, but it doesn't matter because Mark doesn't want me. I could feel his cock with my bottom, and it was soft the whole time." "No way are you are lesbian! Not if you let Mark's cock touch you and you didn't move away. I bet you were hoping for it to get hard, weren't you?" "Umm, maybe a little. It would've been nice to know Mark thought I was sexy, but he doesn't." "I think he does. He said he couldn't let himself think about your breasts. He was trying to fight his feelings. That's why he made himself go to sleep so fast, because he was worried about our getting him to admit he does think you're sexy." "Even if that was true, he's not going to do anything about it." "I know. He's so stubborn I could scream sometimes. Julia, do you have any ideas? You've been very quiet?" Julia agreed, "I've been quiet because I don't know what to do about this. I can't make up my mind whether to help you or not. I do think you're right that Mark and Carol could be lovers, but there's a big problem about society not wanting it." "Society can take a running jump! It's none of their business. Carol and Mark together is too good to go to waste." Julia said, "They would be good together, but you can't ignore society like that. There are some very powerful busybodies who could cause enormous problems if word got out. If you can somehow talk Mark into doing this, you're going to have to guard this secret with your life. This is far more serious than Mark's marathon run. With this the authorities could break up Mark's family, especially him and Carol. You do understand that there'd be police, social workers, media stories, and all sorts of trouble?" "Yeah, I know. I've seen stories on TV before. Mark and Carol are different though. They SHOULD be together!" "If they weren't brother and sister I'd totally agree with you, but that makes everything far scarier. One good thing: I think their parents and my parents would be okay with it." "Wow, that'd mean they could sleep together every night. That'd be fantastic! What do you think of that, Carol?" "Umm. This is all going a bit fast for me. I'm not even sure I have those feelings." Ava was sure, "OF COURSE you do! I bet if I felt your pussy now, it'd be damp because of all this talk about your having sex with Mark. Am I right?" Carol admitted shyly, "Umm, yeah." Julia asked, "So what are you going to do about it, Ava?" Ava started making suggestions, which Julia or Carol criticized. It went on for quite a while, as my wives refused to actively help, making Ava do all the work. A few of the points that came up are worth mentioning: Ava was desperately eager to make it happen on Saturday night. "Being so far away from home should make Mark easier to convince." Julia refused to make helpful suggestions, saying, "It's a lovely idea, but it's scary that the secret might get out. I don't feel comfortable enough about it to actively suggest things to help it happen." Ava spent quite a while trying to convince Julia it was a good idea. She presented many good reasons, but met with no success, because the plan required Julia to be neutral. Julia did have one idea for afterward, "We can't let the parents know in advance. They'll refuse to give Mark and Carol permission, and Mark won't go against their wishes. The only time to tell them is after it's over, presuming it happens. Obviously Carol should be the one to tell them, so they know she wants it." Julia killed any suggestion of a trick, such as if Mark got hard during the night, Carol quickly mounting him then waking him up to present him with a fait accompli. "That's non-consensual sex; rape in other words. Not violent, but still rape. This has to be done openly, honestly and with love, not sneakily without permission." Julia and Carol planted the seeds. In the course of the conversation, which was considerably longer than the bullet point summaries because they're girls, they casually repeated that last quoted word ("permission") a few times, such as Julia saying, "No tricks. Whatever happens has to be with Mark's permission." Then Carol added another seed, "I just thought of something. I think maybe Mark does want me, because he quickly agreed to hold my breast when I asked him too." Shortly after that Ava suddenly yelled, "I'VE GOT IT!" "Shhh, you'll wake Mark." "Oh, sorry. Is he still asleep?" Julia checked, declaring, "Yeah, he's sleeping like a baby." Ava excitedly - but quietly - explained, "Mark will do ANYTHING for Carol. I've often heard him say that, and he's always very attentive and helpful to her. I figure that on Saturday night Carol should just ask Mark to make love to her. It's so simple I'm amazed no one thought of it before. There's no trickery involved, it's honest, and Mark will give his permission first, like you said he has to. I think he'll ask Carol if she's sure, and then he'll do it, just like he did with holding her breast. He loves Carol so much he can't say no to her. What do you think? It'll work, won't it?" Julia said, "I think it's the best idea you've had. I like that it's honest, and I think that Mark might well agree." Carol said, "I don't think I could do that." Which caused Ava to spend the next several minutes earnestly talking Carol into trying. Ava eventually coerced Carol into reluctantly agreeing to try. Ava raved for a couple of minutes about how wonderful it was going to be, including, "Wait till you've had sex with Mark, Carol. He's REALLY good! It'll be the best sex you'll ever have." Carol said, "I've heard the girls say that, but it's hard to imagine that such a puny, little thing can give much pleasure." When I heard "puny, little thing," I formed a couple of NP-fingertips, ran them down Carol's back, so she wouldn't be surprised when they pinched her ass. Carol had one of her hands holding my hand to her breast, and she gave my hand a little squeeze in acknowledgment, then she added, "It's only the size of my little finger, so I can't see what all the fuss is about." I pinched Carol's ass again, without warning, as she was deliberately asking for it. I also did a go-hard and poked her in the ass with it. I was tempted to use NP to line my cock up with Carol's pussy, then to use NP to give her the idea to open her top leg and push her hips back - but I feared that Ava might kiss Carol goodnight shortly, and maybe check to see whether Carol was wet. Ava's finding my cock inside Carol's pussy would pretty much give our game away (actually, I'd proximity sense Ava's hand approach, but to get out in time might result in suspicious movement, so it'd be best not to). Ava joked around for a few minutes, working off some of her excitement over her wonderful idea, then the girls called it a night. I was very horny by now and strongly tempted to fool around with Carol subtly, but it was too risky. I avoided the temptation by truly ordering myself to sleep. ------- Chapter 208: Duckling Lunch Thursday, May 12, 2005 Ava was sound asleep when I woke, so I used a dim light blob positioned where Ava couldn't see the blob itself if she woke. I climbed out over top of Julia, then positioned the blob in front of my chest while I grabbed a robe and went to have my first breakfast. Study was another nicely productive session, until three naked girls walked in. Productivity took a bit of a nosedive then. After all the girls had their turn on my lap, with appropriate greetings in each case, we walked back to the bedroom. On the way I asked, "You all feel comfortable walking around the house naked?" I was mostly asking Ava, but it was Julia who answered, "We think it's a good way of saying 'Good morning' to you. You agree, judging by the smile on your face when we walked in." "I STRONGLY agree! It's even better than studying math." "Haha. High praise indeed." When we were all around the breakfast table - after having gotten dressed - I asked Vanessa, "I've been thinking about putting on an end-of-year party for my soccer team. Something really nice. Do you think it might be possible to have it at the mansion?" "I can't answer that yet. Almost all of the houses we looked at were occupied and you've got to allow the sellers time to move out. How much time each of them would need is something we haven't got into yet. That's one of the factors we'll consider when we choose the shortlist, but it's an unknown for now." Seeing my look Vanessa added, "You don't have to send out the invitations for another few weeks, do you?" "No, not really." "In two or three weeks we'll have a shortlist, and we'll have asked each of them about their timings. We'll be able to give you a better answer then, especially about the properties we like the most." "Okay, thanks. I wish buying a new house was easier though. Even though we have enough money to definitely buy one, it's still impossible to plan anything." Julia said, "You want to put on something special for your team?" "Not stupidly over the top, but something very nice. With plenty of good food - because food's important - good entertainment and that sort of thing." "Maybe some pretty girls walking around in bikinis?" "Umm, I'd thought of that, but I doubt the girls would appreciate being used for entertainment purposes like that." "That's easy," declared Julia. "We announce you're putting on a party for your soccer team and ask for volunteers to be bikini-clad visual entertainment. Only VISUAL. Plenty of girls will want to get your attention and having an excuse to strut around in front of you in a bikini will please them. It'll be easy to get two girls for every guy, and to make sure they circulate rather than risk your displeasure by crowding around you. Some of your team have girlfriends already, right?" "Sure. Soccer players are VERY cool!" "Maybe only a dozen volunteers then, and I'll warn them off being too friendly with any of the guys with girlfriends, because we don't want any unpleasantness. If this is at your new house you'll have your choice of curious volunteers. I'm a little puzzled why you're so eager to give your teammates a good time when you don't treat other guys like that? You're not inviting any guys other than your teammates, are you?" "I'm just thinking of the team, as they're the guys I get on best with. Most of the guys at school spend most of their time in stupid macho competition with each other, which I find inane and annoying. The rest generally form their own little groups and don't socialize with guys outside their group, so I haven't had anything to do with them, and there's no reason to invite them." "Why not invite some of the decent guys anyway? It's the end of the year, so it's not really about making friends, but it'll leave the more mature guys with a good impression of you. You'd also give the party a better atmosphere if there were more people. If you want the girls to wear bikinis it'll probably be an afternoon party, so it'll mostly be chatting. I'll make sure the girls know that the best way to please you is for them to circulate, so the guys will all get plenty of attention. They'll have a great time." "I'll say!" I had no difficulty imagining what I would've thought of being invited to a party like this a few months ago. "But what about the girls? Won't they find it tedious to have to socialize with guys they wouldn't normally talk with?" "Are you kidding! They'd kill to visit you at your new mansion and get a tour of it. Plus your soccer team is spread across the grades so we'll choose volunteers from across the grades too. Most of the girls won't know most of the guys so they won't have any reason not to talk with most of them, especially with our keeping an eye on them to make sure they circulate." "Sounds like you've got it well planned. It sounds good." "I've BARELY started! There are dozens of details to decide on yet, not to mention actually doing something about them." "Let me think. 'Girls in bikinis' has been decided on, so I think you've pretty much taken care of the essentials. Any other details are inconsequential." When we arrived at my place to pick up Donna, the first words out of her mouth were, "You haven't forgotten lunch today, have you?" "I NEVER forget lunch! It's one of the most important meals of the day, right up there with breakfast and dinner." "No, {giggle}. I mean lunch with the Ducklings?" "I haven't forgotten. We'll be there." At school, I proudly showed Lily that I was wearing my new watch, without saying out loud that Lily had bought it for me. I'd kept that fact quiet because I could see that she was deliberately keeping her new relationship with me low key. It was probably a safe bet that our classmates wouldn't understand Lily's being my sexual slave, since even I didn't. It seemed that both Lily and I wanted to keep it quiet: me because I wanted to avoid unanswerable questions, and her for God knows what reason - I was quite confused about that. Lily insisted it was a huge honor for her to serve me, but the only people I knew of that she'd told were her parents, who might never meet me again, so where was the honor coming from? Girls are strange. Several girls complimented me for how my new watch "almost perfectly" matched my ring. Some of them also complimented me by saying things like, "And you're very clever for wearing your really cool new phone on the other side." My response was, "That's because I understand the single most important rule about the fashionable coordination of colors." With eager interest and enthusiasm they asked, "What?" "Do whatever Julia tells me." When I got a bit of privacy with Lily, I told her, "While you were in Hong Kong, I arranged to go away this weekend with Julia, my sister Carol, and some other girls. We're leaving pretty early on Saturday morning, so it'd be best if after our celebration of your new status on Friday, you go home to sleep. Normally I'd be happy to have you sleep overnight, but it won't work out this time. Sorry about that." "Okay. Is fine." "What do you want to do on Friday? Do you want to go out for dinner together, or anything like that?" "I want sex. Until cannot any more. Please, yes?" "Sure. I'll call you when I finish dinner, and you come over. Is that good?" "Yes, is good. Thank you." "You're welcome." Girls are strange. I discovered I'd made a tactical mistake the evening before. The usual 'teaching' process is the teacher repeating the same point two or three times, then writing it on the board and explaining it yet again. Then asking a question about it to one of the class, who usually answers incorrectly, and around we go again. In other words - BORING! In all seriousness, in an entire school day there's probably less than forty five minutes of actual LEARNING. All the rest is repetition and even less worthwhile time-wasting crap. Being totally caught up on all my subjects gave me nothing to do while that tedium was occurring, so I spent a good chunk of the morning daydreaming about what I could do with the Ducklings at lunchtime, with frequent go-softs so I wouldn't embarrass myself in class. The go-soft interruptions didn't stop me having several interesting ideas, some of which were actually legally possible at school, if we were careful. At lunchtime Julia, Ava and I met and headed to middle school. As soon as we got close to the admin buildings we saw - and were seen by - a couple of dozen middle-school kids. "There he is!" they yelled as they started rushing toward me. "Good luck," wished Julia. I tightened my grip on Carol's and my lunches, told Julia and Ava to "Stay here," then stepped forward to meet the little brats halfway. The boys pushed their way to the front, running and yelling questions at me, mostly about the latest fight. The girls weren't slow at running at me either. Apparently ladylike behavior isn't taught in the secret female classes until they're a little older. I held my arms outstretched to both sides in an attempt to block the kids from encircling me. I wanted them to stop in front of me so I could look them all in the eyes. I also started yelling at them, "SHUT UP! Calm down! Stop acting like idiots." They ran RIGHT up to me, stopping just in front, then having other idiots running into their backs, pushing them forward so they bumped into me. #1: I stepped back a couple of steps to protect my lunch from being crushed. They followed, but they'd now slowed down enough that the late arrivals didn't push the first arrivals into me. I'd given up my yelling at them to "Stop and shut up," figuring that they were so stupid they'd be able to wrap their tiny little brains around only one task at a time. The first task had been my attempting to get them to stop just in front of me. They'd more or less completed that slightly too difficult task by now, so the next task I was going to challenge them with was shutting up. They were still yelling questions all over the top of each other, but I ignored them all, repeatedly bellowing, "SHUT UP," while I used my non-lunch-containing hand to motion for them to quiet down. It wasn't easy, because each time it got a little quiet, at least one of them was unable to resist yelling out his or her questions. The fact that none of their questions were being answered didn't stop them stupidly continuing to yell them. I was astonished by how stupid they were! [[My thoughts at this time were very naïve. Having their questions answered was unnecessary. Just talking at a celebrity is enough. It's the thrill of association they're after, not getting answers. Although if I did talk back to them - regardless of what I said - that'd be even more thrilling. It's stupid that a person they wouldn't have noticed a month ago can now send them into such irrational behavior, but that's how fame affects humans. Other social mammals have similar behaviors too. For most of mammalian evolution, "fame" has equaled "very high survival success". Ingratiating with a big-shot has been a strongly pro-survival behavior for hundreds of thousands of years, so it's a well-developed instinct. Amusingly, it's counter-survival in humans now, because the current human culture of celebrity is so destructive. Maybe in a few tens of thousands of years the human reaction to fame will have swung back to be rational. I'm not holding my breath for it.]] When the mini-mob had quieted a bit, I gave them another very simple task to perform, "SIT DOWN!" They weren't happy to do that. I repeated it several times, adding, "I won't answer any of your questions until you're ALL sitting down." I'd figured out after the last Duckling lunch fiasco that getting the mob to sit would be a good idea, as it should enable me (still standing) to dominate them easier, and it should induce a more subdued behavior. I singled out one of the guys immediately in front of me, glared right into his face, and ordered him to "SIT!" He wilted, then sat. I managed to do the same to his neighbor, and so on. It spread and got easier, so soon I had them all sitting on their asses. I knew better than to ask them any questions, so I just told them off then set the rules. "Your behavior is appallingly stupid, rude and inconsiderate. Waiting in ambush for me, then charging at me before I'm even out of high school, and all of you yelling questions over and over again, is absolutely pointless and childish. I'm going to middle school to have lunch with my little sister. Are any of you my sister?" I pointed at the guy in front of me, my finger right in his face, demanding, "Are you my little sister?" He lowered his head in embarrassment. "No? Then what makes you think I would welcome you running right into my chest so you bounced off me, all the time yelling stupid, childish questions?" I let them think about that for a second or two, then I continued, "This is what we're going to do. My two friends and I are going to resume our journey to see my sister. When we are past you, you may get to your feet, and in a tight, well-behaved group, you may follow no closer than ten yards behind us. You will NOT run into me again, you will NOT yell any questions. You WILL follow politely and sensibly. Any other kids that we meet will be told to join your well-behaved group. When we arrive at where my sister is, I will show you where to sit, which will be several dozen yards away from my sister and her friends. AFTER I have finished eating my lunch - because it's extremely rude of you to intrude on me before I've even had a chance to eat - I will come over to your group and talk with you for a few minutes. But ONLY if you behave politely and sensibly between now and then. After our discussion, I will return to my sister's group, and you will get up and leave the area so I can no longer see you. Have you got it?" Only shameful silence. I pointed to the guy I'd singled out before, "Well, Little Girl, are you going to behave yourself or act like a rude idiot again?" He mumbled an embarrassed, "No." "Good. When we are past, you may all get up and walk SILENTLY and politely behind us." Patting myself on the back for doing such a good job, I turned to find my girls. They were standing a few yards back. We formed up, walked around the idiots, who started getting to their feet early. I growled, "I said to stay sitting UNTIL we are past! How hard is that to understand!" They subsided. Once I was past them I preferred not to look back, but I could hear them get to their feet. Fortunately, I'd done a good job of browbeating all the 'crazy' out of them, so their voices were still. We wandered around the corner of the admin block and into middle-school territory, where more than a hundred kids yelled, "There he is," and rushed toward us. "We saw him first!" came some yells from behind. "Fuck!" came a yell from me. "Good luck!" yelled Julia, followed by a laugh, as she knew I was doomed. I quickly passed the lunches to Ava, then strode forward to bravely try to control the largest mass of idiots. I held my arms out, yelled "STOP!" and was mobbed for my efforts. They and the group from behind completely encircled me, yelling stuff that I couldn't hear 99% of. Why would one kid out of over a hundred other yelling kids think his yelling was worth the effort? On the other hand, I don't know why I bothered yelling back either, because my yells and strong hand motions for them to quiet down had no effect at all. I kept trying, but it was utterly pointless. I looked around for Ava. There was no hope of my seeing Julia as she was too short, but I might be able to see Ava. I looked unsuccessfully around for a few seconds and was starting to worry, until I saw Ava stand up with Julia on her shoulders, giving me the first laugh I'd had this lunchtime. I made an "I'm helpless" shrug at them. Julia pointed at the nearby admin building. Figuring that if I went with them, Julia and Ava wouldn't be able to get in through the crowd, I pointed at Julia then at the admin building. Then I pointed at myself, at my watch, held up one finger, then at the admin building. I wanted her to understand that I'd follow one minute behind her. Julia made the thumbs-up gesture, leaned down to speak to Ava, then was lowered out of sight. Ava reappeared, and her head headed toward the admin block. (Sometimes English amuses me, but I've got a peculiar sense of humor so that's probably my fault.) I waited for another minute, passing the time shaking off or slapping away the hands that were hanging on to me, and pointlessly yelling at them to behave themselves and shut up (either would be very welcome). After the minute, I pushed my way toward the admin building's doors, shoving brats left and right out of my way. To my astonishment, they appeared astonished that I was leaving. Several of them grabbed me, to stop me because they hadn't finished talking to me yet, but I shook them off and kept plowing my way forward. By the time I was through most of the pack, I was only a few dozen yards away from the door, so I quickly rushed the remaining distance and in through the doors. Julia and Ava - carrying my lunch, bless her - were talking to one of the office ladies. I thought about trying to hold the doors shut, but figured there were too many brats, so I rushed to my girls. I heard Julia saying, "Here he is now. There's probably going to be..." The doors slammed open and the brats started pouring in. The office lady shot out of the office, into the reception area in front of the would-be horde, where she shrieked, "WHAT'S THE MEANING OF THIS!" I knew it had no meaning, but she wasn't asking me. The brats stopped, fearful and abashed to be faced with an apparently irate adult. The trouble was that the kids outside kept coming inside. When they saw the situation, they were abashed too, but unable to back out because of yet more arrivals. More kids kept pushing in. It took the best part of a minute for the kids' urgent requests to be let out to slowly filter backward enough to have an effect. The inward pressure ceased, and the rearmost kids started making their escape, motivated by the office lady's strident tirade rebuking the crowd. The high tide of about fifty kids ebbed, with the last few turning their backs on us and running away as fast as they could go. I was tempted to joke with the office lady, but her apparent irate mood survived the last of the brats leaving, and was turned on the three of us. Still with a pinched look on her face, "What's all this nonsense about?" Julia answered, "The three of us were delivering lunch to one of Mark's sisters in middle school, when those kids recognized him and mobbed him like he was a celebrity. We ran in here to escape." We were soundly berated for encouraging such a scene. We had no business letting "whatever that was" develop, and we'd better not do it again or we'd be in trouble. She was also going to report this event (i.e., "tell on us") to the Principal. After the office lady returned to her office, Julia said, "I'll take Carol's lunch to her, and tell them that lunch with you is off because someone let out the news that you were coming. I'll bring Carol and Donna - if she wants to come - back to have lunch with us. Where do you want to meet?" We arranged that, then Julia added, "Let me go first. I'll tell anyone hanging around waiting for you that you're not going to middle school because of them." #2: #1: Ava and I joked about it for a little while, then we left together. I saw several brat-ish looking kids hanging around, but Ava and I turned hard left and walked back into high school. After several yards, I asked Ava, "Are any of them following?" Ava looked, then reported, "Not at the moment. They're just looking. You're going to have to hire bodyguards to keep you safe from 12-year olds at school, haha." "They're pathetic. There was no point to that lunacy - all they did was drive me away without having a single one of their questions answered. Thank God it's only at middle school that such lunacy happens." We reached our rendezvous spot, just out of sight behind the first building. Ava checked again, and there were no followers, so I finally got to start having my lunch. Ten minutes later Julia, Carol and Donna turned up. Donna looked very concerned and rushed up to apologize. "I'm sure it's not your fault, Donna. It's the fault of whoever leaked the word, and the fault of all those idiots who thought mobbing me would be fun." Donna looked unconvinced, so I added, "Don't worry about it. I don't care enough for it to matter. The Ducklings have missed out because they spread the word too much. Which was pretty silly of whoever did it after what happened last time." "They're very disappointed. They want to know if they can come to high school to have lunch with you instead?" I'd thought about that already. I couldn't play with 6th graders in high school because there was too much chance of being seen, which would be embarrassing and could cause trouble, but it'd be okay to have lunch with my sisters plus any friends they brought with them. I answered, "Not today because that mob of idiots would follow them. It looks like my coming to middle school is going to be too much trouble from now on, so I guess you'll have to come to me. You and Carol can bring your groups, but there are going to have to be some changes. No more hanky-panky because it's too risky. The Ducklings should stay pantiless - because that's what good Ducklings do - but I won't be able to do anything about it. Because it's just going to be social, we might as well combine the Ducklings and Carol's friends at the same time. For goodness sake, make SURE you don't let a crowd of idiots follow you when you come. If they try, you'll have to find a teacher to get rid of them. -- "To do anything more than chat, we're going to have to find a private place outside of school, especially for the Ducklings, because they're so young and so much younger than me. It's a big pity, but I think it has to be purely social at school from now on. Has anyone got any comments? Julia?" "Sounds fine to me. We'll have to choose a meeting spot away from where we normally eat to avoid having too many gatecrashers, but that's easy enough." "When can we do it?" asked Donna. "I'm not arranging anything for next week because word of my money might get out by then. Even if Julia tries to keep it quiet until later, it could easily leak right after the trip. It either has to be a couple of weeks away, or maybe tomorrow. Is there any reason why we can't do it tomorrow?" My sisters preferred tomorrow, so we decided on that. The rest of lunch we just chatted about inconsequential details. I went home via my bank immediately after school. The bank manager had left a message that my credit card was ready to be picked up, plus Prof wanted me to do the next of the money-circling transfers that I had to do. He'd told me that my account in Corvallis would end up receiving enough of the same money twice to have a total of $16.2 million deposited, but that'd take another few days yet. The bank manager handed over my card and all the crap that came with it, smugly telling me, "I told you we'd get it arranged for you. This is the first time you've had a card isn't it?" "Yeah." "Do you know you need to sign the back? Here's a pen. It'd be best to do that right away." While I was doing that, he was kissing my ass; in other words, telling me with self-satisfaction, "If there's anything else we can do to be of service, don't hesitate to ask, blah, blah..." ------- Chapter 209: My Date With Mackenzie; The Dull Part Thursday, May 12, 2005 (Continued) The rest of the day was the same old same old, until my date with Mackenzie. I arrived at Mackenzie's house to pick her up at 5pm, and was met by all three sisters, In front of everyone else, Claire rushed toward me with her arms extended for a hug. So much for her keeping a low profile. There was no point in trying to avoid her hug, so I crouched down as I would to accept a hug from a child, and let her run to me. "Hi, Mark." "Hello, Claire." I openly gave her a hug for second or two, saying loudly enough for everyone to hear, "I'm only a boy, so my brain goes a little fuzzy whenever I'm near a beautiful girl. Now I'm near three, so I'm very confused. I thought I was here to pick up Mackenzie, but maybe I've got that wrong. Which beautiful sister is it that I'm supposed to be taking out this evening?" "Me!" announced Claire. "Are you sure? Mackenzie is dressed up very nicely; too nicely to be hanging around the house." I let go of Claire and stood up, which broke her grip on me. I turned her with a hand on her shoulder, then we walked closer to the rest of the family. "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Norris, Diana, and I hope the reason I came here this evening: Mackenzie." Mackenzie didn't look too pleased by the greeting I'd received, but she put on a smile and verbally greeted me. No hug though. Mr. Norris said, "We saw the stories about you in the newspaper. What..." Claire interjected herself into the conversation, raving about how incredible I was to beat up six guys so coolly. I'd checked with Mackenzie at school that her parents weren't going to have a meltdown or cancel our date because of that fight, so I wasn't worried about the topic being raised now. I would have been surprised if it hadn't been, parents being parents. Meanwhile Claire had segued into bemoaning the disaster at lunchtime. That caught Mrs. Norris's attention, so she looked at me inquiringly, adding, "Oh?" in case I didn't understand Eyebrow. I answered, "I tried to go to middle school to have lunch with my sisters and some of their friends today, which apparently included Claire. Unfortunately I got mobbed by a bunch of excitable, silly kids before I could get there, and I had to beat a retreat back to high school. My sisters came to me instead, so we had lunch together anyway, but without Claire and any of the rest of my sisters' friends." "We're having lunch with you tomorrow though!" exclaimed Claire excitedly. "So I understand." Mrs. Norris asked, "Why would you get mobbed at school?" "Goodness knows! It was a totally irrational behavior, and very annoying too." Diana added, "Because he's so COOL, Mom! Mark's VERY popular at school. All the girls think he's dreamy, and the boys think he's a hero..." "Like I said, it's totally irrational. A few dozen of the least self-controlled middle-school kids mobbed me on the way to see my sisters. I could have pushed through them, but they would have followed and turned my lunch into a madhouse, so I retreated back to high school. It's amazing how crazy large groups of people can become." Mr. Norris said, "Back to the incident at school. We'd like to know your explanation for it?" I doubted he was interested in a mob of middle-school kids, so presumably he meant the fight. I answered, "It's pretty straightforward, sir. Some of that mob mentality exists in high school too. Not as bad, thank goodness, but it's still there. Some of the boys got jealous of me for doing so well academically, athletically and socially, so they decided to get revenge by removing part of my anatomy." (That aspect of the incident had been prominently mentioned in the newspaper stories, usually in the headline.) "I always thought I got along with people because of my warm personality and sparkling wit, but apparently they decided to exact their revenge elsewhere. Naturally I defended myself, but because there were six of them I had to be rougher than I would have liked. That's about it." "The newspaper said you weren't injured?" "Do you normally ask guys who date Mackenzie questions about the functionality of their private parts? Haha. Sorry, I couldn't resist that." He was chuckling a little, but not so much that I wanted to milk it. I continued, "In answer to your question, no, I was not injured." "I find it amazing that you can beat up six guys without getting a scratch." "I didn't 'beat up' anyone, sir. I've never beaten up anybody in my life. I didn't initiate a single attack against any of those six. Whenever each of them attacked me I broke his arm. Or, in two cases, just pushed them into the wall hard enough to stun them. The moment each of them stopped attacking me, I left them alone. That's not beating someone up; that's self-defense. Maybe I'm being overly fussy about the language, but I don't want you to believe I'm the sort of person who beats people up." "Mackenzie has already insisted you aren't like that..." Mackenzie had already described to me how it'd taken her quite a while to allay her parents' concerns about me. There were a few more minutes of talk on the subject, but it was just hot air as far as I was concerned. My interest in the family was mainly in the two younger daughters - as I was already pretty sure that Mackenzie wouldn't work out - and that interest had to be covert. I was very careful and polite to the parents half out of my honoring the prize Mackenzie had won, and half so the younger sisters would be able to visit my sisters (and me) when we got the mansion, with all the privacy my having my own detached house would provide. Just before Mackenzie and I were about to leave, I asked, "I've got a little entertainment prepared for all the girls on my return. Claire and Diana will be up at 9:30, won't they?" Their mother answered, "It is a weeknight, and they really should be..." "Aww MOM! We want to see what Mark's going to do." Claire turned to me, "What are you going to do?" "You'll have to wait and see. It'll only take ten minutes or so, Mrs. Norris, and I'm sure the girls will enjoy it, especially Mackenzie." "Me? I thought it was for Claire and Diana." "I did say it was for 'all the girls.' Please tell me that you are a girl? I'd like to be sure of that before we start our date." Mackenzie could have made something humorous out of it, but she boringly said, "You know I am." I didn't have much hope that our date was going to be a bundle of laughs. I probably wasn't going to be unbundled laughs either. I added, "Good. Not only did I say the entertainment was for all the girls - which happily includes you - but this is our date night, so it will be mainly for your entertainment. Anything else would be inappropriate and inconsiderate of me." I was sorely tempted to add, "So there's no need for you to be miffed whenever your sisters get any attention from me," but I figured it wouldn't be the best way of starting a date. We headed off on our "dirty date". That orchids didn't grow in dirt was an omen for this date, as I was pretty sure there wasn't going to be any 'dirtiness' anywhere during this evening. Mackenzie was not noticeably friendly in the car, not until I pulled into the orchid show's parking lot; then she got very happy. I'll spare you a description of an orchid show. I'll just say that as flower shows go, it wasn't as bad as I'd imagined (it 'grew' on me). There are some fairly impressive looking orchids, and several of them are called "Dracula [various somethings]," which is pretty cool. Mackenzie loved it, which was the main point. I spent the nearly two hours internally chatting with myself, partially listening to Mackenzie rave over the various flowers, and making my way through crowds of mostly middle-aged ladies, a surprising large number of middle-aged men, and a smattering of other demographic groups. Toward the end of the time, I surreptitiously bought one of the little orchids that were for sale, with the scientific name of "Broughtonia sanguinea" (its name was of no interest to me whatsoever, and I imagine not to you either, but it becomes relevant shortly). It was easy to fold the bag so it formed a narrow column. I put it in the outside pocket of my jacket, making sure to keep that side facing away from Mackenzie for the last quarter-hour of our visit. When time was up, I walked Mackenzie back to the car, sat her in it, then walked around to my side. I put my jacket on the backseat, hiding the orchid by wedging it between the back of the driver's seat and the frame of the car. The restaurant conversation was pleasant, mainly because Mackenzie was in a very good mood for two reasons: she'd spent the last two hours doing something she loved, and she thought I was an excellent date, even though I'd done nothing except hang around while she spent the last two hours doing something she loved. She was also pleased because we were in an upmarket restaurant that served high quality 'ordinary food' (I'd finally got a recommendation out of the mothers last evening). With Mackenzie's good mood and my having three minds to keep the conversation going, we had a congenial dinner. More congenial for her than for me, as she was too bland for my tastes. The one thing that could've livened up my interest in her, I resisted doing anything about, as I didn't use any of the conversational opportunities that arose to remind Mackenzie that she should share me with her sisters. I saw no chance of my reminders helping, and she would probably get upset about them. I was attentive and nice, hoping that Mackenzie would tell her girlfriends at school what wonderful company I was, as a good addition to all the sexual advertising that'd been going on recently. By the time we left the restaurant I had her eating out of the palm of my hand, provided I continued to do only what she wanted me to do. That's the sort of girl I thought she was. She was unstinting in her praise and appreciation for such a wonderful date, and for my being so nice to her, but I felt that if I'd gone an inch over the line - located about a quarter of the way to first base - she would've changed her tune very quickly. It didn't worry me. I was going to be leaping into bed with Carol and Julia soon, so I wasn't going to be the least bit sexually frustrated. I'd FAR rather have sex with my wives than with Mackenzie anyway, so it was very easy for me not to be an octopus. I put my jacket on the backseat again before I drove her home, that way I could recover the orchid surreptitiously when I retrieved my jacket. We arrived at her home a few minutes before 9:30 because I'm a very moral person, and I escorted her up the path to her front door with me carrying my jacket over my other arm with the orchid hidden under it. At the front door I let Mackenzie enter the house first, while I stalled by wiping my shoes on the mat. I was NP'ing (so I wouldn't have to bend over) the orchid bag down to the ground next to the house's wall, outside and just beside the doorway. Then I entered the house. Mrs. Norris had already yelled, "Mark and Mackenzie are back!" down the hallway, so the same time as I walked into the house, Claire and Diana came running down the hallway. We all arrived at about the same time, including Mr. Norris from the living room. The most interesting of the arrivals was Diana, as she was wearing quite a sexy nightie. Not even close to blatantly sexy - not transparent or with large gaps, for example - but it was still very nice. Short-ish, very slightly translucent, and tight enough that it showed her unrestrained figure off very nicely. I could tell from my lifelong, dedicated self-training, that she wasn't wearing a bra and probably not panties either. On second thought, almost certainly not panties, as she would have talked to Claire about the Ducklings not wearing them and I'd asked her not to when we'd talked in the parking lot after school. What a lovely girl! Her lack of apparel didn't go unnoticed by her mother, "DIANA! What are you wearing! Go put a robe on this instant!" "Why? It's just Mark. He's okay." The bright red blush on her face and the very erect nipples indicated I was affecting her more than "just Mark" should. Mrs. Norris raised her hand, pointing down the hallway, commanding, "Cover yourself this INSTANT!" Diana hung her head, then walked the few steps to the hallway. There she half-turned to ask her Mom, "Are you sure?" Thereby giving me a very nice look at her side profile. Her mother growled, which probably meant she was VERY sure. Diana ran down the hallway, leaving Claire laughing, Mackenzie with a pinched look on her face, Mrs. Norris muttering, and Mr. Norris saying, "I'm sorry about that exhibition, Mark. She's normally a good girl." After a moment's thought, I said, "I'm sorry about your problem Mr. Norris. I hope it's not too bad, what with your being reasonably young still." "Huh? What are you talking about?" "You apologized to a teenage boy for Diana's exhibition, so I assume you've got senile dementia." I smiled broadly, hoping he'd take it as a joke. Fortunately he did, and gave a chuckle at his silliness. I wouldn't have tried that with Mrs. Norris, but Mr. seemed a bit more relaxed. I said, "Mackenzie, while we're waiting for Diana to dress more modestly, why don't you tell your family how our date went." That immediately cheered Mackenzie up, and she started raving about how wonderful her evening had been, thereby repairing any damage I might've caused to my reputation with her straitlaced parents. Diana returned so quickly - indicating that she'd just thrown a robe on top - that Mackenzie had barely started her description. Which was perfect. Her parents had already seen that Mackenzie was extremely happy, which would've made them happy, and Diana's return gave me an excuse to interrupt before I had to listen to an even-more-boring rehash of a date that'd been boring the first time. Diana entered the room. Everyone looked at her, causing her to blush again. I used that to justify my interrupting Mackenzie. I said, "Ahh, the innocence of being fourteen. I remember it like it was only last year." Hopefully my condescending attitude to Diana would stop her family from thinking that I had any interest in her. The unusual wording caught people's attention, but after the second or two it took for the penny to drop, only the three girls laughed. The parents looked puzzled. Mackenzie explained to them, "It WAS last year for Mark. He's only fifteen." I'd made my joke assuming the parents would get it immediately, as I'd assumed at least one of the girls would have already mentioned my age to them. Although now that I think about it, the newspaper stories keep saying that I'm sixteen. I was reaching for my wallet during the few seconds it took Mr. Norris. He beat me slightly, "Hang on a minute! You were driving Mackenzie around tonight ... What's this?" "It's my driver's license. If you check the issue date, you'll see it's over a year ago so I have an unrestricted license. My driving Mackenzie was perfectly legal. Mackenzie knew that, because she's already seen my license on a couple of other occasions. When I made my quip about being the innocence of fourteen being a year ago, I thought you were already aware that I was fifteen, so I'm sorry I've caused you some momentary concern. That license is not a fake; it's 100% legal, issued by the DMV here in Corvallis." "I don't believe you. They do NOT issue licenses to 14-year olds. That's ridiculous. This is a fake!" Sidestepping the problem of a 14-year old getting a license, I answered, "I've just finished telling you that it is 100% legal and that it was issued by our DMV. It is NOT a fake. My father was with me when I took all the exams and when it was issued to me by one of the bosses of the DMV. I got it earlier than normal people because the Dean of OSU and the Mayor pressured the State DMV to pressure the local DMV to issue it to me." Mrs. Norris got into the act, saying, "That's preposterous. No one in their right mind would believe that story." I turned to Mackenzie, "How much have you told your parents about my being special?" "I haven't really. Just that you're very nice, and things like that." "Normally I'd appreciate your discretion, but it's not going to make this any easier." I turned back to the parents. They weren't the sort of people that would appreciate any monkey business, so I didn't copy Julia's normal tactic, instead being very straight even if economical by saying, "The law allows for driving licenses to be issued to people younger than normal if there is a good reason to do so. OSU's Dean and the Mayor convinced the DMV that there was a good reason in my case, so the DMV issued it after I sat some incredibly fierce tests." Mrs. Norris demanded, "What possible reason could they have for giving a 14-year old a license?" It was clear from her tone that she did not believe there was an answer. "The reason was: 'For the good of Corvallis.' That's why the Mayor was involved. The Dean was involved because of my importance to OSU." "What a stupid reason." "The Mayor did not think so, and he's in a good position to judge." #1: So I added, "This is more trouble than it's worth. Please give me my license back and I'll go home." The girls had been politely silent so far, but they all erupted in protest at my leaving, Mackenzie also telling her parents they were wrong because my license was legal. She added, "He drives his sisters to school and back every day. His parents wouldn't let him do that unless it was legal." I was reaching out toward my license, but Mr. Norris pulled his hand back, saying, "I'm not going to hand over an illegal license." Now I was pissed. I'd gone to a lot of effort to get that license, and I didn't want to have to face Mr. Asshole Smith from the DMV to get a replacement for it. #1: #2: #1: I pushed my hand forward again, saying, "PLEASE give me my license. It is mine and you have no right to keep it." "No. I'm going to keep it and give it to the police tomorrow." #2: I stepped back, pulling my cellphone off my right hip. When I'd gone through the phone numbers I'd gotten from Julia, I'd seen that one of them was "Directory Assistance", which I'd never thought of putting into my phone before. I called it up while the girls remonstrated with their parents. When the operators answered, I asked, "Please give me the number for the police station in Corvallis, Oregon please?" That caused a hush in the Norris household, quickly followed by, "What are you doing?"-type questions, which I ignored. Seconds later I was through to the police. "My name is Mark Anderson. I am at the Norris residence at [the address]. I have just delivered one of the Norris girls home after our first date, and Mr. Norris asked to see my driver's license. I showed him, and he now refuses to hand it back despite my asking for it several times. I'd rather not make a theft charge against him, so is there an easier way to resolve this?" Whereupon I got transferred to someone else, and had to repeat the speech again, which ruined much of the drama. Meanwhile the Norris family didn't know what to do. The parents thought they'd be the ones reporting me to the cops, and had probably thought I was bluffing when I'd first started using my phone, but this was starting to look too real for their comfort. The girls were effectively running around in circles, going nowhere. Not literally, but their begging was having no effect. I was asked whether I was in any physical danger. Not hardly! But I settled with saying, "No. Mr. Norris simply refuses to return my license. I'd report it stolen and get a new one from the DMV, but I don't like the length of their lines, and I don't want to get him in trouble for stealing if it can be avoided." To his (the cop's) next suggestion, I answered, "I'm calling you on my cellphone, and I don't want to pass it to Mr. Norris because I don't trust him to return my private property." "I'll tell him." I turned to Mr. Norris, to say, "You either call the police station and ask for the duty desk, or they'll send a policeman here." "I'll call them," decided Mr. Looking Worried. He went to their landline phone. They had a flip-top index thing with numbers in it, obviously including the number of the station because he placed the call within seconds, asking for the duty desk. I got put on hold while the cop answered the new call. Mr. Norris gave his version of the situation, "The boy is 15-years old and has a license with an issue date more than a year ago, so when he was fourteen. I've never heard of that before so I'm holding it in case it's a fake." A few seconds later he started reading out the license number. A short pause, then, "Yes, 'Mark Anderson, born November 9, 1989.' You've got the same?" A few seconds later Mr. Norris told me, "He's talking to his sergeant about it." The tableau was frozen. I dismissed the idea of trying to make conversation, as everybody was too tense for it to work. I spent the time working out what I would say to the three possible outcomes: the cops saying it was legitimate, illegitimate, or we didn't get an answer for some reason. After a couple of minutes, Mr. Norris suddenly paid more attention to his phone, then he exclaimed, "What! Are you sure?" Closely followed by, "But I've never heard of a 14-year old getting a license?" Then, "Yes, all right." An unhappy looking Mr. Norris hung up. His unhappiness prompted me to revise my prepared speech appropriately. I heard a tiny voice coming from my cellphone. I put it to my ear, "Hello, I'm here. I missed what you said before, sorry?" The cop said, "My sergeant tells me that your license is legal and I've informed Mr. Norris of that. Is everything all right at your end?" "I still don't have my license back. Please hang on while I try to obtain it." I extended my hand toward Mr. Norris, rudely snapped my fingers, then held out my open hand. Mr. Norris reluctantly closed the distance, placed the license in my hand, muttering, "Sorry." I ignored Mr. Norris, instead speaking into my phone, "I have it now. Thanks for your help." "You're welcome. I've never heard of a 14-year old getting a driver's license before. How did you achieve that?" "You can ask Mr. Roy Smith at the DMV if you want to know. If you don't mind, I'd rather get out of this unpleasant house now. Thanks and bye." I hung up then started putting my license away in my wallet. The girls rushed to me and started begging me to stay, the younger two much more so than Mackenzie. I didn't think much of Mackenzie because she had backed away from me during the confrontation, choosing to stand close to her mother rather than support me, even though she knew my license was legit. I let the girls beg me, stalling by putting away my license carefully, waiting for the right line. Claire soon said the perfect words, "But you promised to do something for us when you got back." "That's true, I did. And I do like to keep my commitments, being an honest person, despite your parents' many allegations." That was their cue, and Mr. Norris took it nicely. He immediately said, "I'm sorry. I've never heard of a 14-year old getting a license so I thought it must be a fake." "I will respond to your apology later. There are two things I want to do first. First, Diana, come closer please." Diana stepped forward. I steered her toward a nearby chair, sat in it myself, then patted my lap, "Have a seat, Diana." Diana looked at her mother, but I immediately said, "I'm inviting you to sit on my lap so I can talk with you about something personal. I wouldn't misbehave anyway, but especially not in front of parents who're so quick to be suspicious and to throw nasty allegations around. If they want to throw any more, they just need to hit 'Redial' on their phone. I'm sure the policeman on the duty desk would love to hear from them again." Mrs. Norris had been on the verge of objecting to Diana sitting on my lap, but my last sentence quelled her sufficiently. Diana was well protected by her thick robe, so there was no reason for her parents to fear her sitting on my lap, even though it was unusual. I put both my arms around Diana's waist, to help her settle on my lap. I had moved the chair so I was facing the other four members of the family, who were standing in a group a few feet from me. I told the parents, "In my family, my sisters and I do this so often it's rare that we're not doing it. Mackenzie has seen both of my sisters on my lap several times, and your other daughters have probably seen it a few times too. We're a very close family, and we like to hug, especially when we talk about something personal." -- To Diana I said, "I've got four reasons for wanting to talk with you like this. The first is to compliment you for your bravery. I know you're a shy girl, especially when it comes to boys, so you must have been very nervous and scared to run out in what I am sure is your sexiest nightie. Congratulations on your bravery. Well..." Mrs. Norris interrupted, "Diana's behavior was NOT acceptable! She and I are going to have a serious talk about her actions..." Mrs. Norris carried on in that vein for a little while. I gave Diana a smile and a couple of squeezes around her waist to keep her spirits up. When Mrs. Norris finished, I looked at Diana, and resumed my interrupted compliment. "As I was saying Diana, I compliment you on your bravery. I was very impressed by the strength of character you showed..." Mrs. Norris predictably couldn't resist, "It was NOT acceptable! Weren't you listening to me young man!..." I held up my hand, waiting for Mrs. Norris to pause. She added another couple of sentences, repeating her earlier comments. When I had silence, I said, "With respect," not much though, "YOU are not listening to ME. I am complimenting Diana PURELY for her bravery. It's a positive character trait, so it's worthy of being complimented. Diana is a shy girl, so I would like to nurture and encourage that spark of bravery. You are haranguing her for the WAY she chose to demonstrate her bravery, which is not something I've said a single word about yet. I am repeatedly attempting to get onto that topic, but you keep interrupting me to accuse me of not listening to you. Can I please complete my conversation with Diana, and then we can discuss it all you want?" "Humf." To Diana, I continued, "As I was saying, Diana, I am impressed by your bravery. Now to rush ahead to the topic of greatest interest to your mother. You're very young, so you've only just started feeling attraction for boys. Naturally you're just starting to learn how to express your feelings when you find a boy you like. Some ways of expressing those feelings are better than others. I appreciate the compliment you paid me by your - as your mother accused - 'running around half-naked, ' but it wasn't the best thing to do. Using your body to attract a boy risks attracting him for the wrong reason. He'll be interested in your body rather than in you as a person. If you meet a boy that you like, just talk with him. You're a nice person, and a nice boy will be attracted to you without your needing to do any more than that. You will find much more trustworthy and better quality boyfriends that way, okay?" "Okay," Diana quietly agreed. She was subdued, probably thinking that I was telling her off, that I hadn't appreciated her display, and that I thought she was too young. In fact my speech was entirely for her parents' benefit. (Actually for MY benefit, but you know what I mean). I'd fix Diana's mood shortly. I said, "When the time comes for you to start socializing with boys, there's no need to be so revealing. Boys and girls can find much more subtle and acceptable ways of telling each other they like the other person. A nice smile, looking into each other's eyes, saying nice things to each other, and what seems to be the favorite method at your age - telling your girlfriends that you like the boy, so they tell their girlfriends, who tell their boyfriends, who tell their friends, until word that you like him FINALLY reaches your boy. All of these are good methods, and MUCH less likely to get your mother yelling at you, okay?" Another subdued, "Okay." It was time for the mood fix. "Good girl. I said there were four things I wanted to talk with you about." I started a go-hard, needing to be as hard as possible so it could be felt through her thick robe. While that was growing, I was saying, "The first was to compliment your bravery and to tell you that boys and girls can find ways to communicate their feelings for each other without making mothers unhappy." When I'd helped Diana settle onto my lap, I'd made sure to arrange an easy-to-detect position for her. My cock started pressing into the underside of her leg, and proximity showed her attention suddenly focused entirely on that leg. I squeezed her waist a couple of times, to cover any movement she might make in reaction to my cock. I also said, "Remember to pay attention to keeping your parents happy. They know what's best for you." Every parent believes that's true, so it was music to their ears. Every teenager knows that's crap, and my cock pressing against the underside of her leg gave Diana a clear indication of what my true feelings were. "When you find a boy you like, and who likes you," I formed a couple of NP-fingertips and used them to wiggle my cock back and forth against her leg, "then try to be more subtle than running around half-naked. I'm sure the boys will like it, but if your parents are anything like mine they'll throw a fit. So cheer up, be a good girl, and in another hundred years or so they might let you do all the naked running around you want, okay?" I knew it was okay, because Diana's mood had greatly improved upon receiving my subtle message. She laughed, threw her arms around my neck, and hugged me, enthusing, "You're SO wonderful! Carol's so lucky to have you as a brother." I hugged Diana back, answering, "I'm pretty lucky to have Carol as a sister too, even though sisters are a LOT of work! I think you'd be a very nice sister too. I'll let Carol know that if she needs a break from being my sister, you wouldn't mind swapping for her, okay?" "I'd LOVE that! I don't think she'll want to swap though." "I hope not. No insult to you intended, but I'm very happy with the sisters I've got now. It's taken me YEARS to get them trained just the way I like them!" "Haha." "If I wasn't so incredibly fussy about exactly how I like my sisters to do all my chores, I'd be happy to have you as another sister, because you're a lovely girl. You're very sweet and I like talking to you. Have I convinced you that you just have to be your normal, lovely self to make any sensible boy like you, and you don't have to run around the house half-naked?" "{Giggle}, yeah. I won't do that again. You really like me?" "You know I do," I wiggled my cock to make sure she got the message. "But you've asked the wrong question. The question isn't whether I like you, but whether you are likable. Which you are, VERY likable. Just be yourself with any boys you like, and don't try to attract them with your body. You're so nice you don't need to do that to attract a nice boy, and boys that need that reason to be attracted to you don't deserve someone as nice as you, okay?" "Yes." Diana started choking up, but she managed to get a, "Thank you" out, before she sobbed and threw her arms around my neck again. Repeating, "Thank you, thank you," several times. I looked at the rest of the family. Mrs. Norris was looking abashed; as well she should. Ranting, raving and threatening to send Diana to her room was unnecessarily cruel. Mr. Norris was smiling a little, the driver's license unpleasantness forgotten. Mackenzie looked like she was sucking a lemon, and Claire was smiling very happily. I told them, "I've got two more points I want to make with Diana. They won't take long, and then I'll get onto the entertainment I promised to provide." Diana whispered very quietly in my ear, "I love you." It was a safe bet that no one else had heard it, as it was so quiet and Diana's head was facing away from all the others. I wiggled my cock in acknowledgment. It seemed appropriate, somehow. I pulled Diana out of her hug so I could face her to say, "Earlier on I complimented you on your bravery. You also impressed me in another way. You showed good judgment about who to show yourself to. You picked a trustworthy boy. Remember Annette Neumeyer tried something similar. Much more blatant and for a bad reason, but the same sort of thing. She failed totally because that sort of thing doesn't interest me unless I like the girl a great deal." I wiggled my cock against her leg a few more times. Diana's broad smile indicated that she got the message. I turned to Mackenzie, ignoring the fact that the lemon was lasting a long time. I asked, "Mackenzie, during our date did I ever make any improper moves toward you? Any sly innuendoes, unwelcome looks or touches?" Mackenzie answered, "No, nothing like that. It was a WONDERFUL date. I enjoyed myself very much." She was now smiling, happy at the memory of a successful - from her point of view - date. "Thanks. And I suggest you explain the significance of the 'Annette Neumeyer Incident' to your parents sometime after I leave, because I noticed they didn't understand that part of the conversation." -- I turned back to Diana, "Despite my being much more trustworthy than most guys, and despite your being on the waiting list to be one of my sisters, I still have TWO ulterior motives for sitting you on my lap. Not just one, but TWO. Let that be a lesson to you: teenage boys ALWAYS have sneaky reasons! You never know what evil thoughts might be going through their heads, haha." I wiggled my cock again, so she knew exactly what evil thoughts were going through my head. She giggled her agreement. Proximity showed me that she was about move her leg back and forth, to feel me better, so I stopped her by squeezing her waist and saying, "Sit still, I've nearly finished." I started a go-soft (all the way soft). I also reached up to her head, grasped the hair I'd already separated from its neighbors using NP, and yanked it out. "Oww! You pulled my hair!" "Yep, sorry about that. I did warn you that I had two ulterior motives. Pulling your hair was one of them. I needed one of your hairs for the entertainment I promised you. The other ulterior motive I'll save to talk about just before I leave. You can get up now, Diana, so I can start my magic show." "Magic!" squealed Claire. "Yippee!" Diana had a different concern. She quietly asked me, "Get up? Are you sure?" I answered loudly, as it was less suspicious than talking quietly, "Yep, up you get, sweetie." I lifted Diana off me as I stood. She couldn't help looking at my nether region worriedly. Her parents noticed, which was rather good. I used it, by running my palm over my pants, showing everyone that there was nothing there (a little more than "nothing", but you know what I mean). I said, "It's nice that you like me, Diana, but I'm sorry to tell you that I think of you as being so similar to my sister Carol that I'm not going to have those feelings for you. I like that you and Claire are so similar to both my sisters." They were both somewhat similar to Donna in their stage of emotional (im)maturity, but more advanced physically, especially Diana. I added, "It makes me enjoy your company more. Your names even start with 'D' and 'C' like my sisters' names do, although the other way around." Diana looked confused and a little unhappy at my convincing denial of "those feelings." The parents and Mackenzie were happy though, especially Mackenzie, who was also looking very smug about it. Before Mrs. Norris could start criticizing Diana about her latest sexual transgression, I adopted a more public announcement tone, "I'm going to do two magic tricks, both being gifts for Mackenzie." That pleased Mackenzie considerably. This date was definitely back on track as far as she was concerned. Personally, the parts of the date I'd most enjoyed had been when Mackenzie was sucking a lemon. ------- Chapter 210: My Date With Mackenzie; The Magic Part Thursday, May 12, 2005 (Continued) "Please give me a few seconds to prepare. I need to tie the hair that Diana so kindly donated into a knot." Diana and Claire giggled, with Mackenzie joining in with a small chuckle too. Plus small smiles from the parents. I made a small loop in one end of the hair, then wove the long end around and around the loop, pulling the loop a little smaller as I went, until I ran out of hair. Hair being somewhat stiff, the tension in the loop kept it in a loop shape and prevented it from coming undone. I was holding it with NP too, as extra security against it becoming unraveled, especially for later when I would be moving it around. I retreated a couple of steps until I was about four yards from the family. "Come back and stand next to me please, Diana." I used a hand on her upper-back to guide her into position on my right, so we were both facing our audience. I held up the hair in front of her face with my left hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger. "Have a good look at it. It's definitely your hair, isn't it?" While I'd been talking, I'd also been running my right hand down Diana's back, out of sight of everyone else. It arrived at her ass just as I was finishing. I squeezed her ass slowly and gently enough not to shock her, as she started answering. "It is," Diana confirmed, with a big smile on her face, secure in the knowledge that I didn't think of her as a sister. Little did she know! I dropped the hair onto my palm. "Can you see the hair on my palm?" "Yes." "Good girl. Watch closely everyone, so you can see there's no funny business." I slowly closed my fist on the hair, then turned my hand over. My fist was at waist height, as usual with this trick. Within seconds the hair was safely out of my hand, up the underside of my arm, around my back, then down to floor level by going down behind my right leg. "Diana, I'd like you to walk around the side, to the right, keeping well away from my hand so everyone can keep it under clear observation. Stop there. Good. Now I want you to lean carefully forward, so you don't block anyone's view, and kiss the back of my hand." "{Giggle}. Kiss it?" "Yes please. I'm a little embarrassed to say so in the presence of such nice, young ladies, but magic needs a little bit of sexual power to make it work. Sorry about that, but I didn't write the rulebook for magic. That's just how it works. This is a very easy spell, so just a little kiss will do." Diana was such a good girl (from my point of view), that she didn't even look at her parents for permission. "Okay." She bowed forward and kissed the back of my hand, secretly licking it with her tongue during the kiss. GOOD GIRL! "Good girl. You did that perfectly. Now back away a couple of steps, then go around behind your family and stand next to your mother." My eyes followed Diana, because my NP-fingertips were carrying the hair immediately behind her. When she was walking around behind her family, I was looping the hair over one of the buttons halfway down the side of Mackenzie's long dress. The hair loop was just a little wider than the button (which I'd looked at carefully enough in the car to memorize its size). I'd chosen that destination because it was believable that the loop could stay in that position for a reasonable period of time. When Diana was with her family again, I slowly raised my fist until it was high in the air. I extended one finger, pointing it at Mackenzie, who shifted nervously. "Hold still please, Mackenzie, you're making it harder for me to make the magical connection." Mackenzie froze in place. "Thank you." I looked intently at Mackenzie for a few seconds, then frowned. I said, "I didn't estimate the range properly. I need just a little bit more magical energy. Would the three girls please blow a few kisses at my fist." Claire and Diane immediately giggled and started doing so. Mackenzie joined in, but slower and with less enthusiasm. (To be fair, the younger girls were VERY enthusiastic.) After one blown kiss from Mackenzie, and three or four noisy efforts from each of the other girls, I said, "Okay. I've got enough now. Thanks, girls." I pointed my right index finger at my raised left fist. I started moving my pointing right hand in circles, sideways relative to my left fist, and as wide as my elbow would allow (about twenty four inches). I slowly moved my right arm closer and closer to my left fist, accelerating the circle and diminishing the radius as it got closer. By the time my right hand was a six inches away from my raised fist, it was rotating as fast as I could possibly move it. This had taken about ten seconds, and had built the tension nicely. Everyone was dead quiet. My rapidly spinning right hand suddenly rushed forward to slap the back of my left fist. At the same time as the loud {SLAP} sound, I yelled, "JUMP!" My audience all jumped in surprise. When they settled I said, "Mackenzie, if you carefully lift the side of your dress which has the buttons, about halfway down you'll find the hair looped over one of the buttons." Mackenzie did that, while her sisters scrambled to get into position to see. I ALMOST got a glimpse of one of Mackenzie's naked knees, setting a new highlight for my sexual activity with Mackenzie this evening. "I see it! I see it!" squealed Claire. "There, on that button." As Mackenzie lifted it off the button, I said, "Show it to Diana so she can confirm it's hers." Diana inspected it, excitedly yelling, "That's it! That's the same hair! That's incredible. How did you do that? It's impossible. You were miles away." Claire and Diane rushed to me, to tug on my arms and beg me to tell them how I did it. Mackenzie and her parents looked impressed too, they were just too dignified to express it. Amidst the two girls' clamor, I got a chance to say, "I didn't do much. Diane did most of the work; you saw her kiss my hand." "Haha. No, really, how did you do it?" "Diana did it. She's REALLY good at kissing. Say! You didn't get so good by kissing lots of boys, did you, Diana?" That made her blush fiercely, and quiet down for a few seconds. When they next had to draw breaths at the same time, giving me a moment of silence to use, I said, "That was ONLY a warm up. The REALLY impressive trick is my next one. Do you want to see that?" "YES! YES!" I put my hands on their shoulders, saying, "In that case, go stand with your family, while I start to summon the concentration I'll need for the next spell. It is FAR harder than the first one, so I need to prepare myself." I gave them a little push, and they eagerly rejoined their family. I explained, "Mackenzie. I said both magic tricks were gifts for you. The first one is really just a little joke. We've had a single four-hour date, so I've given you a very temporary ring. Guys are supposed to give girls rings eventually, but a hair ring is the best our relationship deserves at the moment. However, the second spell will produce something much more long lasting and more to your tastes. It is a real gift, and I'm sure you will enjoy it." -- "The first spell was easy, all I had to do was magically move something that already existed. The next spell is MUCH more complex though. I'm going to be creating something out of nothing. I saw earlier that you love orchids, so I am going to create an orchid out of thin air for you." "WOW!" from my two favorite girls, followed by more refined expressions from my least favorite. Mackenzie spoke into the clamor, with some incredulity, "You're going to make me an orchid?" "I think it'd be a perfectly appropriate magic spell to finish our date with. Years from now, when you're caring for the plant, you'll be able to remember this date, and you'll know that it is a very, very special orchid. Very few people have plants that were conjured out of thin air you know. Only people who're friends with a very powerful magician such as me." Mackenzie's expression was a hard to decipher mixture of several emotions. She was getting excited, but didn't want to be. She was happy, but upset that I was so friendly with her sisters. She was impressed, even though she didn't believe in magic. And there were probably some more incompatible pairs, but I couldn't be bothered trying to identify them. If there was any "horny", its opposite was winning easily. Mr. and Mrs. Norris were somewhat impressed and amused; Mr. Norris being freer with his facial expressions than his wife. I was doing a delicate balancing act with my talking about spells, magic and sex; those being words I wouldn't be surprised to hear parental objections to. I particularly wanted to talk about sex in a very mature, sensible fashion, as I had when Diana was on my lap, because I wanted the parents to trust me and believe their daughters were safe to visit my home. Convincing them of my trustworthiness couldn't be done to the extent and at the speed I wanted by totally ignoring the subject of sex, so I had to push it a bit. If the parents continue to seem okay, I'll cautiously ramp up the sexual references; but if they become unhappy, I'll dial back. I was also hoping that their embarrassment over my license would help keep their objections unvoiced. Spells and magic I'd excuse as entertainment if challenged about them, and I could downplay them totally by talking about my magic show as if it was only an act of manual dexterity. I'd prefer to keep talking about magic though, because it provided a way for me to mention sexual issues without making the sexual references specific or threatening to any of the girls. I continued, "Actually, I'm not powerful enough to make it out of purely thin air; I need just a tiny amount of help. Mrs. Norris, may I please borrow a small saucer. An old teacup saucer would be perfect, or one of the saucers I see you have under some of your potted plants. Do you have something like that available please?" We were standing in the open-plan dining room, separated from the kitchen by an "island" (as I later learned they're called, when I started seeing the shortlist of mansions). Mrs. Norris said, "I'll get you one." I followed her toward the kitchen, explaining, "I need to put the right amount of water in it too, so I'll come with you." She extracted an old saucer from the back of a cupboard. I took it to the sink and put a couple of drops of water in it, then carried it carefully back to the family. I placed it on the table, saying, "I've got the perfect amount of water in it so no one touch it please. Now Mackenzie, I'd like you to get something for me please. I need a tiny corner of an orchid's leaf. About an eighth of an inch square. Can you get that for me please?" "Okay." Mackenzie took a couple of steps toward the hallway, when I said, "Hang on! Let me check exactly which species of leaf I want. I'll just get out my magic X-ray telescope." I mimed pulling a small, invisible telescope out of my jacket's inside pocket, formed my fingers on both hands into circles, then held them up to my left eye so I could look through both as if they were a tube. I had a fair idea where Mackenzie's bedroom was from where I'd seen the girls run from in this and my previous visit to this house, so I aimed my 'telescope' in the right direction, looking at the wall while I rotated both my hands as if I was adjusting a focus ring. After a couple of seconds I said, "Ahh, got it now. Let me see, hmm. Ahh, excellent! I see you've got a Broughtonia," (that's the same family or genus or whatever it is, that I'd bought her, although I'd bought her a species that she didn't have). I pretended to lower my telescope, saying, "Would you bring me a tiny piece of Broughtonia leaf please Mackenzie. That'll make my spell easier." The two girls had, of course, been giggling during my old-fashioned sea captain imitation. The next time Diana said something that expressed doubt that I had a "magic X-ray telescope," I said, "Of course it's real. You can't see it because it's an X-RAY telescope. You can't see X-rays; everybody knows that! I'll prove it really works." I held up my 'telescope' to my eye again, pointing it down at Diana's waist, saying, "I'll tell you what color panties you're wearing." Followed a second later by my ordering my face to blush fiercely. I rapidly lowered my telescope, saying with a very abashed and apologetic manner, "Oops, sorry! I forgot you weren't wearing any. I'd better put this right away." I quickly pushed the two halves of my telescope together, then put it back inside my jacket pocket. I kept a sheepish look on my face, acting embarrassed by what I had seen. No one had believed for a second that I had a magic X-ray telescope, but my blushing and abashed act had been very convincing, so my audience was confused. They knew it was ridiculous, but it almost seemed believable. Claire excitedly asked, "Could you really see her cun... , umm, you know?" Still looking shy, I said, "A gentleman would not talk about such matters. The less said about my mistake, the better." I added to Diana, "Sorry Diana. I won't do that again." "It's okay. I don't mind," accompanied by a smile. "DIANA!" criticized her mother. In an attempt to soften up the mother, I asked, "Mrs. Norris, you just told Diana off for letting me look at her when she's covered by a great big robe. SURELY you don't believe I really have a magic X-ray telescope, do you?" Mrs. Norris wasn't so easily softened up. "She was consenting to your looking at more than that, regardless of whether you can or not." "I was trying to be humorous, but I'll try being real instead. What she was REALLY trying to do - in her inexperienced way - was flirt. She likes me, but she knows that I'm treating her as I would my sister, which is giving her the confidence to take risks to learn from. She is surrounded by her family, in her own home, with a boy she trusts and who won't take advantage of her. It's the safest, most secure environment she could possibly be in to learn an important new behavior. If you don't let her learn in a safe environment, then you risk her learning in an unsafe environment." #1: Mr. Norris said, "Good point," which earned him an unpleasant look from his wife. He added, "What? Diana WAS flirting, and she is in a safe environment, exactly as he said." I interrupted, "Do you mind if we get back to my creating an orchid for Mackenzie? I think that's the best thing to do now." Mr. Norris agreed, "That'd be best." I turned to Mackenzie, "Please get that piece of leaf that I need, Mackenzie. A Broughtonia please." Mackenzie went to do that. I looked at Diana, caught her eye, and gave her a wink and a smile, which made her smile in relief. Claire said, "What color panties am I wearing Mark?" #4: "CLAIRE! That is not decent behavior..." I quickly interrupted, "Sorry Claire. Your mother won't let me use my magic X-ray telescope to check your clothing..." #4: " ... I think we'd better not say anything else on that topic, girls. Let's just wait for Mackenzie to return." While I was waiting for Mackenzie, I had a talk with myself. My plan had called for me taking the moral high ground with the family, to be fun, positive, forgiving, etc., all the way to the end of the evening, and then to try to use my position to make them believe I had buckets of integrity and morality by criticizing their lack of those attributes during the "Driver's License Nastiness". But the evening had gone downhill even further with Mrs. Norris's prissiness over the talk about the girls' panties. Now I felt tempted to walk out, throwing Mackenzie's orchid back at her as I left. Admittedly I'd dialed the sexiness of the entertainment up a few notches above what it could've been, but it was hardly worth the level of condemnation it was getting. How could people be so pathetically fearful about everything that even hinted of sex? #4: #1: #4: #1, #2: #4: #1: #2: #1: #2: Mackenzie returned with the piece I wanted. I presumed it was the one I wanted, as I hadn't been watching her with my magic X-ray telescope. "Thank you." I took it from her and dropped it in the saucer. I'd planned to make an issue out of trimming it to exactly the right size, with lots of impressive sounding bullshit to build excitement for the trick, but I couldn't be bothered anymore. I just said, "I just need a little bit of dirt now. I noticed there's a garden by the front door, so I'll get it from there." There's a very short hallway between the room we were in and the front door. I picked up the saucer with one hand, and carried it toward the front door. Halfway there I turned to say, "I forgot something. I should really have a large handkerchief to cover the magic while it's happening, but I don't have a hanky large enough to cover a whole orchid with me. I'll have to use my jacket. Hang on while I take it off." I put the saucer on the floor behind me, took my jacket off, then let it fall - open side down - onto the floor in front of me (I was facing my audience). I stretched it out and patted it flat, saying, "Just to show you that it's too flat to have any orchids hidden in it." "What about the telescope?" called Claire. Which caused a small frown on the mother's face. "You're right, but it's made of X-rays which can go through anything, so it doesn't make a lump in the jacket. It's not part of the trick from now on, so it doesn't matter, Claire." I picked up the jacket with one hand, pinching it in the middle of the back and lifting like it was a large hanky. I picked up the saucer with the other hand and walked the rest of the way to the front door. I lowered the jacket and saucer to the floor in front of the door, but where they wouldn't get hit when it opened. I called back, "As you can see, nothing funny going on. I'll just get a pinch of dirt now." I opened the door, nipped out, and grabbed a pinch of dirt quickly. I was simultaneously using NP to lift the orchid out of the bag, and had it floating immediately beside the doorway barely above ground level. Then I returned just inside the doorway. I picked up the saucer, and made a production of sprinkling the dirt in it. I then did a pirouette, while saying, "Nothing hidden anywhere." I bent down and picked up the jacket with a pinch as before, except this time my pinch was off-center, so when I raise the jacket, the side of it closest to my audience would hang significantly lower than the back. I stood up slowly. Having both my hands full - the jacket in one and saucer in the other - I had to close the door with my foot, using that as the apparent reason for my slowness. I pretended to stumble a little, then got my foot hooked around the door properly, and closed behind me. In the meanwhile, the orchid had slipped around the doorway and into the back of the jacket, thanks to a bit of NP'ing. The jacket had easily obscured the orchid from the family. As is the case with many houses in Corvallis, the Norris's house was set back from the street, with a path leading to the front door. There were no visible observers, and there were plenty of garden bushes obscuring the view too. It was virtually impossible for any observer - had there been one - to have the perfect angle down the path to have seen anything happen at floor level. Plus the movement of the orchid was reasonably consistent with it being pulled in by a string. I stood with the saucer carried out in front of me by one hand, with both my eyes on it, and with it being handled with caution, as if it were fragile. The jacket was pinched by the other hand. I gave that hand no visible attention at all as I stood up, so the jacket was dangling from my hand down by my waist. I carried the saucer toward the audience, saying, "Careful, don't bump the saucer. Give it plenty of room." They all watched the saucer. I walked to the nearest edge of the dining room table, placing the saucer very carefully on it, then sliding it another foot farther in. They all peered at it. "You can all see that it contains a few drops of water, a fragment of Broughtonia leaf, and a sprinkling of dirt." I changed hands holding the jacket, so the new hand's position was more central. I held the now freed hand out to the side, palm up with the fingers spread, flexing and rotating them around in my attempt of a mystical manner. I said, "I'm about to start casting the spell. Take your last look at the saucer before I cover it and start the spell." I gave them a few seconds, then casually extended the jacket over the saucer, lowering it so the jacket brushed the table all around the saucer. The saucer was within three feet of my center, so I had no problem holding the orchid up with proximity, nor in lowering it into the saucer quietly. I faced Claire, "Claire, I need you to say the magic words and do the magic action. Say 'orchid-cadabra.' That's like 'abracadabra', but with 'orchid' at the front. 'Orchid-cadabra.' You can practice saying it a couple of times if you like." Claire repeated it falteringly, but correctly, twice. "Can you say it a little faster please, otherwise it'll grow too slowly." She practiced a couple more times, until I said, "That's great, thanks. When I count to three, say the word at the saucer once, then blow it a kiss to give the magic power to work. Are you ready?" "Yes." "Good. 1, 2, 3!" "Orchid-cadabra. {Kiss}." "It worked perfectly, Claire! Well done. I can already tell that you've created the orchid exactly the way I wanted. Do you want to lift the jacket yourself, so everyone can see what you've done." "Yes please." "Good. Take a hold of the jacket near where my hand is. I'll let go, then you just lift it straight up, okay?" "Yes." We made the hand swap, then Claire lifted the jacket, to reveal the pot and small orchid sitting in the saucer. There were squeals from the girls, even including Mackenzie. No squeals from the parents, but even they were impressed. BUT, unfortunately, I was more than a little annoyed by it all. I'd worked out a marvelous build up, with lots of tension building and some funny sexiness from the girls, but because of Mrs. Norris's attitude I had skipped nearly all of it, including all the best parts. I felt cheated and disappointed. I also had a good joke worked out for my next trick. I had no doubt the girls would have been excited by the magic, and would have asked for another one. I was going to promise them an even more spectacular trick, do some fancy talking, then say it needed three beautiful virgins to dance around the table. Once they were dancing I was going to say, "Hmm, it's not working. What have I done wrong? Oh, I remember now: the beautiful virgins have to dance around the table NAKED!" Then I was going to tease them, and joke about how tricky some boys will be in order to see naked girls, etc. I could have turned it into something quite funny, and made lots of self-depreciating but mature-sounding jokes about myself. But NOT with Mrs. Norris in the room! I had my doubts about Mr. Norris too. I collected my jacket off Claire, folding it over my arm while the girls all made very excited and appreciative noises. The parents adding a few too. Diana and Claire were VERY excited and happy. I enjoyed seeing how happy the two younger girls were. Among all the anticlimactic (for me, not for them) expressions of excitement that followed, I said, "I'm sorry it's not larger and in bloom, Mackenzie. I was planning to produce something much more spectacular, but magic needs a little sexual energy to make it work, and that's especially true about nature and growing magic. I could see your mother is uncomfortable with that topic, and this is her house and you are all her daughters, so I have to respect her boundaries." I was trying to do some moral high ground grabbing, but I don't think it worked very well because Mrs. Norris disapproved of even mentioning the existence of sex. Mackenzie accused, "That's exactly the same container and everything that they were selling at the show!" "Thank you. I've never seen a Broughtonia sanguinea before, so I had to copy the design from the show. There was no reason not to, so I copied the pot and the little stick that tells you the name too. If I've done it properly, it should be indistinguishable from one of the pots from the show." That left her with nowhere to go. She did thank me for it very much though. I even got a hug. Wow! Last, but certainly not least in frequency, the girls many times asked me, "How did you do the tricks?" "I will NOT tell you, sorry. I did those tricks to entertain you, and I know that if I tell you how I did them you'll feel let down and sad. What I am prepared to do, is tell you parents how I did them, but in another room so you can't hear. If your parents want to spoil the fun by telling you later, that's their prerogative as parents." The girls urged their parents to find out, and Mr. Norris said, "I am very curious myself." We adjourned to the living room, to the far end where any little ears at the door wouldn't be able to hear us, especially after I suggested turning on the TV to drown us out. "Any preference for which one I tell you first, in case you decide to stop after one?" "I don't have any preference." He looked at Mrs. Norris, who had no preference either. "Chronologically then, starting with the hair. I decided to do the orchid trick several days ago. That's the only one I planned before the date. Otherwise I was just going to make up some tricks on the spur of the moment. When Mackenzie and I were walking around the flower show I saw one of Diana's hairs on the back of Mackenzie's top, so I plucked it off and put it in my pocket. When she went to the bathroom in the restaurant I wove it into the loop. I made sure she stood beside me when I was paying for the meal. As the cashier was processing my credit card I bent down to tie the laces on my shoes." I pointed to my boots, showing the Norris's that they had no laces. [By the way, I'd successfully tested my credit card at dinner, as it was MUCH better to find out if it didn't work now than in LA on the weekend.] "When I was pretending to tie my laces, I knelt down, pulled the loop of hair out of my pocket, and carefully put it over the button of Mackenzie's dress. The hair you all saw me pull from Diana's hair was a total red herring. And the reason I wove them in a loop was so no one would know the two hairs were different lengths. When I pretended to 'jump' it to Mackenzie's dress, the hair was still in my fist. When you were all looking at the hair Claire found, I opened the loop of hair I had, then dropped it on the floor." "Oh. You're right, that is disappointing." I shrugged, not caring about their disappointment. I asked, "Do you want to know the orchid trick?" "Might as well." My jacket was still over my arm. I opened it up so the two loops of string that were safety-pinned to the inside of the shoulders could be seen. "I bought the orchid at the show obviously. Quietly and near the end so Mackenzie wouldn't see me while she was distracted by something else. It was small enough to keep it hidden from her, especially as her attention was on the displays, not me. -- "When I walked from the car into the house, I stopped to wipe my shoes carefully at the front door. What I was really doing was letting Mackenzie get ahead so I could drop the orchid right beside the outside of the front door. Its bag should still be there, if it hasn't blown away. When I went to get the dirt, I also got the orchid, slipping it inside the house and mounting it inside the string loops in my jacket. -- "When I walked back into the dining room I repeatedly told everyone to watch out for the saucer, so none of you would look at my jacket. When I lowered the jacket over the saucer, it was just a matter of a little tilting and side-to-side movement to get the strings from under the pot. A little bit awkward, but everyone was looking at Claire while I got her to rehearse her word." "Very good. Again so simple once you know." "Yep, and disappointing. My advice is not to tell the girls, as they'll enjoy the tricks more if they don't know. By all means tell them that there's no such thing as real magic. I wouldn't want them growing up believing in that nonsense. I talked it up just to make it more entertaining. And now is a good time for me to head home." I put my jacket on as I started walking for the door. Mr. Norris called out, "What about the X-ray telescope trick?" "There wasn't any so-called magical trick, just a bit of entertaining theater." "You identified one of Mackenzie's plants?" "I spent two hours walking around an orchid show with her. What's the chance she said, 'I've got one of those, ' at least once?" "Good point. What about when you, umm, blushed?" "Diana wasn't wearing a bra or panties when she came out in her nightie. When she was sent back to get her robe, she was very quick, so I figured she hadn't done anything more than throw it on. I took a pretty safe gamble when I said 'Oops, sorry.' Otherwise all I did was deliberately blush and act embarrassed, which was just theater, as I said." "You can deliberately blush?" "Sure. Otherwise I wouldn't have done that bit of theater. It was the blush that made it work." I didn't demonstrate my blush to him. It wasn't any bother, taking only a second's thought, but I didn't like either parent so I wasn't going to be any more cooperative than I needed to be, especially because Mrs. Norris had looked at me sourly when I mentioned Diana not wearing a bra or panties. All I'd wanted to achieve was to make sure they knew my 'magic' was boringly mundane, and that they'd tell their girls so. Blushing on demand was surplus, so I didn't volunteer it. (By the way, I understand that "panties" and "pants" are plural because in the old days pant legs were separate pieces and there were two of them, but if there's ever been a piece of apparel CRYING OUT to be named in the plural, it has to be a bra. But it's singular, so how stupid is English!). "Yes it was. I was almost convinced you'd... , well, you know." "I know. But I hadn't and I wouldn't, even if I had a magical X-ray telescope. I was just teasing Diana in the same sort of way I tease my sister Carol. They're at the age where they're simultaneously self-conscious but just starting to become interested in boys, so a tease like that conflicts them nicely. It wouldn't work well on younger girls like Claire and my sister Donna, because they aren't self-conscious enough yet." "You've got a very good understanding of girls. I can't remember being so knowledgeable when I was fifteen." #4: "Not hardly, sir! Any guy who claims he understands girls is claiming the impossible. I've just got two sisters who're very similar to your younger daughters. I spend a great deal of time with my sisters because we have excellent friendships, so I know them very well. I just treat Claire and Diana the same way as I would my sisters, and it works well." -- I'd reached my tolerance limit, so I added, "I have to get up before 3am tomorrow morning, so I would very much like to head off now. Thank you for your hospitality this evening, and for allowing a mid-week date, Mrs. Norris. Goodnight." It wasn't as easy as that, unfortunately. The parents followed me back to the girls. The first thing I said to them was, "I've explained to your parents how I did the tricks. My advice is not to try to find out because it's more fun not knowing how they're done." What was the chance that stopped their curiosity? They immediately started beseeching their parents for the explanations. I interrupted, "You can beg your parents to your hearts content after I leave. I'm sorry, girls, but I have to go now. I'm getting up before 3am tomorrow morning, so I'm going to get less than five hours sleep as it is." None of them wanted me to go, including Mackenzie, who suddenly started getting clingy. She hadn't come near my body all evening, but now that I wanted to leave, she wanted to hang on to me. It was enough to make me think girls are inconsistent. After I insisted that I was going, Diana wanted to know when I'd be coming back. Claire echoed the question, with Mackenzie upping the stakes by asking when our next date would be. The answer I wanted to say was, "When we could either go ice skating in Hell, or have a foursome with your sisters, whichever occurs first." I modified that slightly, instead saying, "Let me sleep on it. We can discuss it at school." I eventually convinced everyone that I was leaving. While I was shaking Mr. Norris's hand, he said, "Sorry about the misunderstanding earlier." Now I REALLY wanted to say something! I was itching to say, "That was NOT a misunderstanding; we understood each other perfectly. You repeatedly accused me of being a criminal and a liar. Then despite my clearly worded requests, you repeatedly refused to give me back my property until told to do so by a policeman. Your attempt to label that incident a 'misunderstanding' is a weak attempt to avoid taking responsibility for your actions." Plus I could throw in some references to his slurring my whole family by implying they were complicit in the crime because they let me drive my sisters to school every day. And I could get VERY upset at the insinuation that my parents and I would risk my sisters' lives by driving illegally. I would REALLY enjoy saying those things, but I couldn't without getting him pissed off with me. I also couldn't bring myself to say "It's okay." Instead I merely nodded, withdrew my hand from his, then turned away to leave the room. Mackenzie walked me to my car, the younger girls forbidden to accompany us. She clung to my arm, as if I was leaving her life forever (smart girl). Outside the front door I momentarily interrupted our walk to stoop to pick up the empty orchid bag. "What's that?" asked Mackenzie. "The bag the orchid came in." "Oh." After a moment's (wasted) thought, "So it really was a trick?" "No, I really can create life out of nothing, but I can't make fully grown life. That's why your seedling is not a fully-grown plant, and why Julia is so small. I didn't have enough power to make my best girlfriend any taller." Mackenzie didn't appreciate my reference to Julia as "my best girlfriend", which was EXACTLY why I'd said it. A dose of reality wouldn't do her any harm at all, and it was as close as I would let myself get to expressing dissatisfaction over the date. It took her a couple of seconds to decide how to respond, but she wisely chose to treat my comment as a joke, making a late chuckle. When we reached my car, Mackenzie let go of my arm, stopped and turned to face me, ready for her kiss. I could sense her intending to put her arms around my neck. I took half a step backward, saying, "I'm sure your sisters are watching so we shouldn't kiss. I don't want to give them the wrong idea," (i.e., that I had any interest in Mackenzie). I started walking around to the driver's door. In one respect I should have kissed her goodnight, as that would have been in the spirit of the prize she had won; but I considered there was also an obligation on her to put at least a little effort into giving me an enjoyable evening. She'd failed miserably, so I'd cut about two seconds off my duties for the evening. "But... ," protested Mackenzie. Who then fell silent. I stopped beside my door, with a car safely between us. I said, "I'm not going to kiss you. I would happily kiss Alexis because she enjoys casual sex, but you don't so it wouldn't be appropriate with you. I would happily kiss Julia and Ava because they are my girlfriends, but you aren't so it wouldn't be appropriate for that reason either. It's inappropriate and immoral for me to kiss you, or for you to kiss me. I'm a very moral person, and I know you and your parents are too." They weren't, but I had no doubt they thought they were. "If you and I ever have a sexual relationship, then kissing will be fine, along with lots of screwing, group sex, pussy licking, and fun things like that." The look on her face was exactly as I'd expected, but still very amusing. "Or if you become my girlfriend, then kissing will be fine too." #1: Mackenzie said, "But we had a WONDERFUL date. You were charming and attentive. And polite, funny and lots of other things too. It was the best date I've ever had, so I thought you must want to be my boyfriend." Unfortunately Mackenzie started walking around the car so she could discuss the issue face to face with me. Girls CANNOT have a conversation at a distance like we were. It's just not possible for them, as they feel compelled to get closer. Yet they can somehow happily spend hours talking on the phone. It's almost enough to make me think girls are inconsistent. I didn't want to get into a painfully long discussion about it, so I was sorely tempted to jump into the car - and lock the doors! - but I didn't want to leave the "Or if you become my girlfriend," point outstanding as it was. I sighed, gritted my teeth, and waited for Mackenzie to come around to me. Before she arrived, I got in a quick, "I have to get up before 3am, so I don't have time for a long talk." Not to mention that I wanted to get home to enjoy the company of two lovely girls. "But this is important!" #4: "What is it you want?" "I want to be your girlfriend." "You know there are about two hundred other girls who want the same thing. Join a pipeline group and go through that process like every other girl." #1: #2: "But I thought tonight meant I was your girlfriend already?" "Not once tonight have I referred to you as my girlfriend. All that has happened is that you won a competition Julia ran. The prize you wanted was a date with me. You've had the date, and now everything goes back to normal." "But I want to be your girlfriend." "Listen to me. Personal integrity is VERY important to me. You saw that at the hot tub party at Julia's place, because we ALWAYS gave every girl several opportunities to easily back out if she wanted. You've seen me 'revenge grope' a couple of girls since then, and they're always given opportunities to opt out. -- "You fairly won a prize, and I fairly did what you requested. In fact I did it so well it was the best date you've ever had, which is good. But letting you jump ahead of the other two hundred girls who also want to be my girlfriend would be unfair to all of them. There's no way I'm going to break my sense of integrity two hundred times over because you want to unfairly extend your one-evening prize into a long-term commitment. That you want to do that gives me a bad impression of your personal integrity, which is DEFINITELY not the sort of girlfriend I want!" With exasperation, "But tonight's been fantastic! You and I are perfect together. How can you not see that?" "Blame me for being excessively moral. I didn't try to start anything sexual with you this evening, and you appreciated that. When Diana was sitting on my lap, I didn't have any feelings for her either; to her disappointment when she stood up and checked. My moral integrity is so strong that even girls as pretty as you and Diana can't make me bend even a little bit. There are far too many girls interested in me, so I have set up fair rules for how I will treat them all. I will NOT be giving you special treatment. My personal morality doesn't allow it, and I'm getting very concerned about your morality, since you keep asking me to be unfair to so many people. I'm starting to think you're selfish and immoral, which is not how I want to think of you. You need to go inside now, before you damage my opinion of you any further." "But..." But nothing, because Mackenzie couldn't think of a useable comeback. I got in the car and drove away, leaving Mackenzie struggling to find a way out of her moral dilemma. #4: #2: #4: #1: Julia and Carol were still up, talking to Vanessa in the living room. "How did it go?" asked Julia. "Boring, then unpleasant. I disliked both parents a lot. They're both negatively judgmental people, long before they've heard all the facts and without their bothering to think what they're saying first. Particularly Mrs. Norris about sex. If you want to make Mrs. Norris give you a condemning look, say 'panties'. -- "Mackenzie is a waste of space for dating purposes. Her idea of a successful date is where the boy spends all evening concentrated on making her happy, with his hands locked behind his back. Because I was so attentive and well behaved, Mackenzie decided she and I are perfect together, and she wants to be my girlfriend. I've told her it would be immoral for me to jump her ahead of all the other two hundred girls who also want to be my girlfriend, so she should join a pipeline group. She wasn't very happy with that idea, but I insisted I was too moral to make her my girlfriend unfairly. -- "The only good part of the evening was some interaction with Diana mostly, and a bit with Claire. Mrs. Norris hasn't yet convinced them that young ladies should act like boringly repressed wet blankets, so it's actually possible to have fun with them. When you run quizzes in the future, can you please lie about who the winner is." "Haha. I'm surprised it went so badly. I thought any girl who could win that quiz would be devoted to you." "You'd think so. She certainly wasn't devoted to me at any time tonight. I don't want to waste any more of my life thinking about her, except that her sisters are nice and I feel sorry for them. I had to keep biting my tongue to stop myself from telling Mackenzie and her parents what I thought of them, because I didn't want them to forbid Diana and Claire from visiting us. The thing that gets me about the parents is that they both had very poor personal integrity and morals, but if I'd even hinted at that, they would have hit the roof with indignation." Vanessa said, "It's common, Mark. When people are convinced they're right, they stop learning. Arrogant people - whether it's intellectual or moral arrogance - are very difficult to work with. It's generally best to avoid them if you can." "That sounds like an EXCELLENT plan. I'll put it into action immediately." We headed upstairs, and the girls cheered me up four times between them. While we were chatting afterward I mentioned I had my credit card now, and that it'd worked fine when I'd paid for dinner. Julia said, "That's good." We talked about other things for a few minutes, until Julia thought to ask, "About your credit card. Did you get a high enough credit limit on it? The hotel and meals are going to add up to quite a lot, plus the $10,000 gift toward our shopping bill." "The implication that you're going to spend more than $10,000 on shopping is just SCARY, but that aside, I don't know anything about the credit limit. The bank manager never asked me about it." "Uh oh. You'd better find out what your limit is." "How?" "Did the card come with the banks 'Conditions of Use' booklet and all sorts of other paperwork?" "Yeah. I wasn't going to waste my time reading through all that legalistic crap, which I wouldn't understand anyway, so I dropped it in the trash can outside the bank." "You need to keep stuff like that, in case there are problems or questions, like there is now. Does your card have a 1-800 number on the back?" "I don't know. Do you want me to look?" "We'd better find out as soon as we can." I was lying in bed, naked and with an arm around each girl. My billfold was across the room on Julia's vanity table. I flew it over, landing it on Julia's chest. I said, "My hands are full; you look." There was a 1-800 number. Julia refused my request that she call them, "They won't talk with me. You'll have to call them." I got Julia to dial the number, then I used NP to hold the phone next to my ear, my arms still around my girls. Eventually, after establishing that I was who I said I was, the lady informed me that my credit limit was $500. "Argh! That's useless! I need more than that. Much, much more." "Would you like a higher credit limit, sir?" "Yes please. I guess something like $15,000 or $20,000. Can you change it to something like that?" "I'll get the application forms sent out to you. They'll be reviewed when you send them back." "I need it for this weekend." "That's not possible, sir. It takes three weeks after you return the application." By the tone of her voice, it was especially not possible for morons. Julia had been listening in. She said, "Get the forms sent anyway, and we'll figure out something else for the weekend." I asked the now frosty lady for the forms. When I hung up Julia said, "Just take whatever cash you need. You've already paid for the plane, right?" "Yeah. First time individual customers have to pay in advance." "$20,000 should be enough then. I'll be taking my credit card, so we'll be fine." "I SINCERELY hope $20,000 'should be enough'. I've already kissed goodbye to the $10,000 for your shopping, but another $10,000 on the hotel and meals is considerably more than I wanted to spend." "You can bring the leftover money back. It'd be a terrible tragedy if we found something absolutely wonderful to buy, but we didn't have enough money on us at the time." "Yes, that would be a tragedy. Okay, I'll go to the bank YET AGAIN tomorrow. I'm getting sick and tired of having to go there damned near every day." The girls decided I needed cheering up again, one more time each. ------- Chapter 211: Unlucky 13th (Not for Me Though) Friday, May 13, 2005 I've heard that many people won't fly on Friday the 13ths, so it's a pity I didn't marry Julia and Carol a month ago today, because it might have saved me an expensive shopping trip. That's assuming superstition would win over the lure of Rodeo Drive, which is highly doubtful. I did have some bad luck today, Mackenzie was waiting for me to arrive at the school's parking lot. As soon as I got out of the car, she was on to me. "Mark, after you left I remembered that on your website it says you can override the rules, so it IS fair to make me your girlfriend!" "Of course it's not FAIR. It just means it's doable. If I grabbed one of the girls out of the parking lot and asked her to be my girlfriend right now, you wouldn't think I was being fair. You'd be very pissed off at me." Julia said, "Mackenzie, the reason the website has a statement that Mark can do something outside the normal rules is so he can remedy an injustice. If he red-carded a girl but found out later she'd been set up for failure by another girl, he'd reinstate the victim and red-card the troublemaker. Mark's exemption from the usual rules is NOT so individual girls can ask him for special treatment, otherwise every girl in school will be asking him for special treatment. I don't know what you're worried about anyway. All you need to do is join a pipeline group, because you're almost certain to win." "I am?" #3: "Of course. Your winning the quiz proves you know more about Mark than any other girl, plus you've been on a date with him now, so you've learned even more. You've got a huge advantage over other girls. When Mark's famous, your earning your place by winning the pipeline competition will be far more impressive than if you got special treatment. You'll be featured in countless magazine articles and TV shows. Millions of girls all over the world will be enormously impressed by you because of that. You'll probably become a very important and powerful person yourself, because of all the credibility that'll give you." "Wow. You really think so?" #4: "Absolutely. What girl has got a chance anywhere near as good as yours? You easily meet all the usual measures like attractiveness, clothing style, makeup skills, etc., and you know Mark better than anyone else. Plus you've got your two very unfair advantages, so I don't see how you can fail." "What unfair advantages?" "Diana and Claire." "Oh, them." "You're right to be cautious about using them. They give you such a huge advantage over other girls that it's not fair at all. The other girls could get quite upset about your winning Mark just because he likes your sisters so much." I quickly inserted, "The fact that your sisters remind me so much of my sisters - who I love so deeply - shouldn't be allowed to affect your chance of having a wonderful future with me." Julia gave me a smile and a wink behind Mackenzie's back, then told her, "Exactly. I was very impressed by your not taking your sisters on your date with Mark last night. If one of the girls from school saw you doing that, and realized what a huge advantage it gave you, she might get upset about it." "But I want Mark to love me for who I am." "Good girl," said Julia. "I admire your competing on exactly the same terms as the hundreds of other girls who're interested in Mark. You're a very moral person." "You said I'd win that way." "I said you'd, 'almost certainly win.' You can't be certain; that's silly. You wouldn't win if you wore old clothes, chewed gum and swore all evening. It's very important you make an effort. If you try hard enough you'll almost certainly win, but if you don't try hard enough, then you won't. It's up to you. What you need to do is obvious, and if you do it your chance of winning Mark will be as close to certain as it's possible to get." "What do I need to do?" "You don't want other girls to see you using your sisters. That'll upset the girls who don't have sisters the same age as Mark's, which is nearly all of them, and when you're famous some of the disappointed girls could make public allegations against you winning Mark unfairly. You want to be famous and respected, so the obvious thing to do is to encourage and help your sisters to spend time with Mark's sisters when Mark's there, that way he'll be able to play big brother four times over, which he'll love. Just make sure you let Mark know that you're providing your sisters with an alibi for your parents, and he'll think very highly of you for helping get all four girls together." #4: Mackenzie exclaimed, "Or EVEN better Julia! Mom won't let me date Mark more than once a week. Now I can go out with my sisters, then leave them with Mark's sisters so Mark and I can go somewhere together." #1: "You missed the point. The idea is for Mark to spend time playing Big Brother with your sisters. He has to stay with them to do that." "But why would he want to spend time with my sisters when he could spend it with me?" #4: Julia was somewhat politer than I would've been, "For the same reason Mark often spends time with his sisters rather than with me or Ava; he loves spending time with his sisters." We'd arrived at our first class, so the stupid conversation was pushed to the side by my saying "Good morning" to my friends in class. Mackenzie took a dim view of my way of exchanging greetings, standing beside me and glaring. Alexis - with her legs around my waist and my hands under her ass to hold her up - nodded her head toward Mackenzie, asking me loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, "What's wrong with prune face?" "Are you sure 'prune'? I thought 'lemon'. Last night I took Mackenzie out on the date she won from the pop quiz, and now she thinks she owns me." "Haha," laughed Alexis. "Did you fuck her that good? Oh look: 'Angry Lemon', haha." I said, "Mackenzie, why don't you tell Alexis how the date went." Mackenzie was very eager to start ranting, so, "He did NO SUCH THING! Mark was a perfect gentleman! He took me to the orchid show, and then to a very nice... ," Alexis interrupted, "You wasted your date looking at flowers! God, what a fool you are..." "Not everyone is a slut like you. Some of us know how to behave properly." Alexis was getting riled, and started trying to get down from my hold. I could easily imagine the carnage that'd result from that, so I held Alexis tight, whispering in her ear opposite Mackenzie, "Relax. It was a TERRIBLE date. You don't need to fight." Alexis chuckled. Mackenzie suspiciously demanded, "What'd you tell her?" I answered, half-truthfully, "I ordered her to relax. I like girls who're obedient, so I'm happy she did. I'm NOT pleased with you though, Mackenzie. You've seen me greet Alexis like this every morning for the last couple of weeks. We obviously both enjoy it. Why are you trying to stop me doing something I enjoy? That's very unfriendly and inconsiderate of you." "But you shouldn't do such things now." "I can't help it Mackenzie, I've got a weakness for friendly, open, honest, happy, fun, obedient sluts. In other words, girls who're the opposite of you." That little zinger caused some laughter around the room. -- "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to get back to greeting Alexis." I started another kiss with Alexis, not expecting Mackenzie to object because I'd demolished her so well already. Silly me; Mackenzie objected, "But you shouldn't, now that you know how perfect we are together." I regretfully disconnected my lips, turned to Mackenzie yet again, and said, "Do you think having a very high sense of integrity and living by a strict moral code is very important?" "VERY!" crowed Mackenzie proudly. "Did you really have such a good date last night Mackenzie?" Mackenzie started raving about how fantastic the date and I were. She got very enthusiastic and worked up. I had only two reasons to be nice to Mackenzie: it helped my access to her sisters, and her saying nice things about my date with her would improve my reputation for non-sexual activity. After a minute the second reason was pretty well achieved, and was therefore no longer a reason to be nice to her. I interrupted her mid-acclamation. "Mackenzie! I'm glad you had such a fantastic date with me..." "I'll say! You were everything I thought you'd be. You were..." "QUIET! I have a very high sense of integrity and moral code, so I am happy that I've discharged my obligation to the winner of the quiz by giving you such a fantastic date. There is now no obligation on either of us. I am CERTAINLY not under an obligation to be faithful to you. One date does not entitle you to dictate the rest of my life. This is the last time I will warn you about it; next time I will red card you. So I STRONGLY suggest you go away and let me kiss some pretty girls." "But we're PERFECT together!" "So perfect you're about to be red-carded if you annoy me any more." Speaking of "perfect", I was perfectly willing to red card her. I was sick of her crap and I could still access her sisters through mine, plus I'd had a REALLY nasty idea to help with the access issue. Mackenzie's behavior cried out for some "nasty". "But..." I held up one finger in front of Mackenzie's face, adding, "ONE more word, Mackenzie." Tricky things girls. Mackenzie turned to Julia to ask, "What's going on, Julia?" "You're annoying Mark so much he's about to red card you. You're annoying me too." Turning to me Julia asked, "Mark, if Mackenzie says one more word to me about her relationship with you, would you red card her please?" "It'd be my pleasure." "Argh!" complained Mackenzie. Then, to the room in general, "It's not fair! We're PERFECT together. Why can't he see that?" I said, "Mackenzie, if I hear ONE more word from you about our relationship, regardless of who you are talking to, then I'm red-carding you. I am sick to death of your crap." "But we're perfect together. How can you not see..." "RED CARD! Our relationship is dead. Go away and stop annoying me." "But you're making a HUGE mistake. We belong together. You can't blah, blah..." It was difficult to hear her over the laughs, especially as I was doing my best not to listen. Mackenzie's mouth flapped for a while longer, then she collapsed into tears. She was bawling when the teacher walked in. "What's going on here?" asked the teacher. Mackenzie couldn't bring herself to answer, which gave me time to start my nasty idea. I explained, "I told Mackenzie I refused to have a sexual relationship with her." It was a very unfair of me to include "sexual", but tough cheese; she hadn't exactly been fair to me either. Mackenzie struggled to get control enough to protest that description, but the teacher got in well ahead of her, "Looks like you've got your hands full with Alexis anyway. Sit down Mackenzie. You too Alexis, on your CHAIR." Alexis said, "But I haven't had a chance to ask Mark whether he'll have a sexual relationship with me." "Looks like you already are. Climb down, Alexis, the bell's about to ring." Mackenzie started protesting my description, but our teacher was totally uninterested. He shut her down and insisted she take her seat. Julia told me, "Well done, darling," then class started. Mackenzie's blubbering was a problem during class, but Teach had had no sympathy for her and he bluntly told her to put a sock in it. As soon as the end of class bell went, Mackenzie made a beeline for me, to everyone's amusement. As she neared me, I loudly called, "No Mackenzie, I will not have sex with you, marry you, have children and live happily ever after with you." "That's not fair! I never said anything about sex. You shouldn't keep saying that." "I know you don't want to be my girlfriend so we can have casual sex, so it must be so we can get married and have children. I've got some shocking news for you, and I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but having children requires that you actually have sex. I'm surprised you didn't know that already." Most of the class had hung around to witness this drama, looking forward to being entertained some more. They laughed at my joke, very much displeasing Mackenzie, but she collected herself, then launched into her prepared speech, "I've been thinking about it, and I can prove we're perfect for each other Mark. You know I won the quiz, and that..." I interrupted, "I'm not going to have sex with you, Mackenzie." "I'm NOT talking about sex! I'm talking about your being my boyfriend..." "And eventually getting married and having children. But I don't want to have sex with you. It would be immoral of me to lure you into a marriage that had no sex in it, so I'm not going to do it. I'm too moral to do that. Not everyone is as immoral as you Mackenzie." "But I'm NOT immoral! I'm a good girl." "Be a good girl and go away then. Our relationship is dead. I suggest you set your sights on a boy who's more interested in sex than I am." "I DON'T want sex! Stop going on about it. I want..." "If you don't want sex then we're in perfect agreement. Let's avoid each other totally, that way you won't be tempted again." "You're getting it ALL wrong. I want us to be FRIENDS! Sex has got nothing to do with it." "I'm going to have to make a complaint about you if you keep persisting in this sexual fantasy about you and me." "I DON'T have a sexual fantasy about you. Why won't you listen? I just want us to..." "Bye, Mackenzie. I have to go to my next class now." I started walking off, accompanied by a very amused, although somewhat confused, Julia. Mackenzie trotted after me, beseeching, "Don't go! You're making a BIG mistake. You and I are..." "I somehow don't think I'm making a mistake. I don't know much about girls, but I know I don't want to have sex with you. Stop chasing me or I'll go to the office to make a sexual harassment complaint against you, and they'll call your mother. I'm sure you don't want that." I kept walking, while Mackenzie thought about how much she REALLY didn't want that. She let me go, and returned to the room to get her bag. That was the end of the entertainment for everyone. I didn't have a chance to talk with Julia for a while because too many people rushed after us, wanting to know, "What was that all about?" When we finally got some privacy, Julia wanted to know the same thing. I told her what my nasty plan was, intending to ask her whether she thought it was too nasty. I had to wait for her to stop laughing before I could ask. "Wicked! Mackenzie's not going to be pleased, but she'll get over it. Her parents will keep a close eye on her for a while, which is probably a good thing. I worked out a while ago that she might have won the quiz about you because she's got an unhealthy fixation on you." "You're probably right, but I think it's mostly because of the date. It was so close to her opinion of ideal that something flipped in her head. Plus there's the undisputed fact that I'm irresistible, so we shouldn't blame the poor girl." "That's true. Even in her madness she does show remarkably good taste, haha. I think we can improve on your plan a little. You should call her parents after dinner to express your concern about Mackenzie, and also to ask whether it is safe for your sisters to associate with Diana and Claire. You can play up your Big Brother act. You'll have to warn Diana and Claire that you're going to do it, in case their parents grill them." "Good idea. We'll do that." "I'm very proud of how you handled her. A month ago you wouldn't have done so well." "That's for sure! I would've made it even worse. I owe you a great deal." "That's true, but the FIRST trip to Rodeo Drive will make up for most of that..." "Ha! 'First trip' indeed! The next time I rent a seven-seater private jet, all it's going to do is fly in circles until I've boinked all six girls on the bed, then land, pick up six more girls, and repeat the process until I run out of girls." "If my landing is in LA that'll be fine with me. But back to my point. You would've learned everything I've taught you anyway. It would've taken you longer, with a few unnecessary dramas along the way, but you still would've gotten there. You're learning about people and how to assert yourself very quickly. You're responsible for most of what you've learned, not me." "You've also helped by giving me experiences I NEVER would have had otherwise. You've done a lot better than save me a few weeks or a few months. You've probably saved me YEARS of making stupid, painful mistakes." "Do I get anniversary presents for all the time I saved?" We joked around for a while. Then Julia added a couple of sensible comments, "During the first class I was thinking about Mackenzie. I had a couple of thoughts that are superseded now, but I'll tell you anyway. Mackenzie's behavior would've become even worse after she learned you're rich, so it's best to get rid of her now. Also, she's obviously unsuitable for being even peripherally involved in your lifestyle, so it's better to get her out of it before she learned anything that could cause you trouble, such as your playing around with her sisters. All things considered, I'm VERY glad you red-carded her. She was going to be more trouble than she was worth." "Agreed. Not to mention that she's a pain in the ass." Mackenzie tried to approach me again at the beginning of lunchtime, but was quickly chased off - which was a nice change - by my threatening to go to the office to complain about her. Carol and Donna had no trouble with other middle-school kids following them when they brought their friends to high school for lunch. During the car ride to school Julia had suggested not telling any of the girls about it, not even the girls they were bringing. Carol and Donna were to just ask their girls to gather at lunchtime, telling them, "Mark's not coming to have lunch with us, but I want to get together at lunchtime to talk about him." The two groups had met, then walked a roundabout route to high school, and then to our comparatively remote lunch spot. Not all the girls had thought it was important enough to break their other engagements to attend, but most had, including Diana and Claire. In the car I'd asked both my sisters to ensure their respective Norris girl definitely came, but my sisters later told me that Diana and Claire hadn't needed any extra encouragement. The downside to this plan was that the Ducklings still had their panties on, but we all have to make sacrifices. If word had gotten out, and they'd been followed by half of the middle school, I wouldn't have seen any pussy anyway. They were all very excited and happy to be having lunch with me, especially the Ducklings. It was third time lucky for them, and on Friday the 13th too. I welcomed them all by name, which delighted each of them in turn. Lucy, the Duckling who was supposed to be banned from attending one event, was present. I'd forgotten about her when we'd planned this in the car. She'd not attended yesterday's aborted Duckling lunch, but that shouldn't really have counted as a punishment. Never mind; she was quite pretty. Early on in the "Hello" process I paused to make an announcement loud enough for everyone to hear, "Ducklings. Some of you are nervous about being - I shall call it - 'overdressed'." I paused for the giggles. "Don't be. You didn't know that you were coming here, so I don't mind. There's too much risk of our being interrupted so we'll have to behave ourselves today anyway, so don't worry about remedying the problem. Plus the weather is a bit unpleasant to be getting cold drafts in such an important place." It was raining very lightly. Drizzle is common enough in Corvallis that we ignore it, treating it the same as mist. It's a good way to spot the tourists though. They treat drizzle as rain, the wimps. During the greetings I complimented every girl who was dressed in a way I approved of, and I gave Diana and Claire each a hug and kiss on the cheek, to the envy of the other girls. At the end of the greetings I announced, "Some of you are probably wondering why Diana and Claire got special treatment. They deserve it, and I'll tell you why. Last week Julia held a pop quiz at lunchtime for all the high-school girls who were interested in me. The quiz was about me, with questions such as my birthday, my soccer scores, and some rather naughty questions I'm sure all you girls are too sweet and innocent to be interested in." I paused for the giggles, then continued, "The winner was Mackenzie Norris, Diana and Claire's big sister. I met Diana and Claire before and after my date with Mackenzie, and I was very pleased with how well they behaved toward me. Plus both girls behaved perfectly in the parking lot on Monday, when most of you came to see me after the fight." Diana and Claire blushed proudly over the memory of my fingering their pussies. "Both of them are darlings, and I'm glad I know them. I hope there are other girls as good as these two, or even half as good would be great. -- "I can see some of you look sad that I got to know Claire and Diana first. Maybe you think it's unfair, or something like that. If you do, then you're 100% wrong. Most of you probably know that the last two times I've tried to come to middle school I've been chased off by dozens of very annoying, badly behaved brats. If Claire and Diana had been unpleasant to me last evening, I would've decided to give up on meeting any middle-school girls for the rest of the school year. But because Claire and Diana are wonderful, they make me very enthusiastic about getting to know the rest of you, so I asked my sisters to bring you here today, only one day after the last attempt at a lunch. Diana and Claire have made my getting to know the rest of you far more likely, and you owe them big thanks for that, not upset looks." The other girls told the very happy Norris girls nice things, while the Norris girls beamed their appreciation at me. "Let me warn you about one other thing which is very important to me. I HATE jealousy, possessiveness, envy, and those types of emotions. They are negative, destructive, nasty emotions. If I see any of you showing any of those, I'll never allow you anywhere near me again. We call it being 'red-carded', like in soccer. It means being kicked out of the game. In this case, being PERMANENTLY banned from socializing with me. It's very serious, so to all those girls who were looking enviously at Claire and Diana a few minutes ago, you need to immediately stop thinking like that, or you're going to get red-carded." #2: #4: #1: #4: #1: #2, #4: [[You can tell that I still had a lot to learn about girls. It's slightly embarrassing to record these thoughts, but they make an interesting contrast to two later instances in which I thought about Carol and I being separated.]] "I guess most of you have read my website, yes?" There were lots of confirmation noises. Carol spoke up, "I think all my friends have read it." Donna echoed, "All the Ducklings too. I think so, because they talk about it a lot." "Good, so you all know what 'red card' means. Unfortunately a couple of hours ago I had to red card Mackenzie Norris." "Oh no!" from Claire. Diana's face fell too. "Don't worry, you two. I still think YOU are wonderful girls; just not your big sister. After just one date with me she got horribly jealous whenever I kissed another girl, which was a huge problem, because I kiss a LOT of girls! Haha. And she got very strange about sex too, but I won't go into that now. What I want to do is take Diana and Claire to one side for a few minutes, to explain to them what happened. Otherwise Mackenzie could tell them all sorts of horrible stories when they get home from school. I'll let Julia entertain the rest of you for a few minutes." Julia said, "I'll come with you because I saw everything that Mackenzie did. We'll only be a few minutes, so I suggest Ava and Carol tell the rest of the girls about the quiz. What some of the question were, and some of the funny answers we got. We had some good laughs over those." I led Diana, Claire and Julia (my impartial witness) to the side. The two Norris girls looked downcast, so I moved between them and put an arm around each shoulder, hugging them to me as we walked. Claire immediately put her arm around my waist. She asked, "It's okay?" I answered, "It's okay for everyone except Mackenzie. It's certainly okay for you two. I definitely want to spend more time with you two. I think you're both marvelous girls. Beautiful, sweet, well-behaved, happy, friendly, lovely girls." We were far enough away so I stopped, and we formed a small circle. "Let me start by telling you what Mackenzie did. She was waiting in the parking lot for me to arrive this morning, and she was glued to me after that. There are some girls in my class that I get along well with, and we give each other some nice 'good morning' kisses every day. Mackenzie has seen that happening every morning for weeks, but this morning she was jealous and angry about it. After only one date she decided she and I were perfect together, that I shouldn't look at any other girl, and no other girl should look at me. Mackenzie was crazy, because I strongly disliked last night's date, and never..." Diana exclaimed, "You did! Mackenzie thought it was the best date she's ever had." "Her prize for the quiz was a date with me, so I did my best to give her a good date, because that was the honorable thing for me to do. I behaved the way she liked, so naturally she had a great time. She stupidly assumed that I had a great time too, which I most definitely did not. It was an EXTREMELY boring date! She spent the first two hours running around looking at flowers and pretty much ignoring me. Then we had dinner where she mostly wanted to talk about her interests. And there was no sex, of course! In Mackenzie's opinion sex is a dirty, unpleasant thing. I don't know how she can know that, considering she's never tried it. I've tried it many times, and I know for a fact that when it's with a girl that I like, sex is a huge amount of happy, enjoyable fun. That's why I very much enjoy doing sexy things with you two." Both girls excitedly asked, "You do?" "Absolutely. I like both of you very much. Unlike Mackenzie and your mother, I know that sex with people you like is great, and the more you like them the better it is. I like both of you, so doing more sexual things with you two would be great fun. That's if you like me enough to do sexy things with me?" The question was totally unnecessary, given the expressions of delight already on their faces, but it's polite to ask. The girls ran all over each other and themselves in their voluble, enthusiastic declarations. It was music to my loins. Diana asked, "Umm, how much sex? How far will you go?" "I'm going to treat you both as adults, and give you an adult answer. Provided we have total privacy at the time, such as being locked in a bedroom with just me and one or both of you, then this is my rule for how far we go..." #4: #2: " ... It depends on just two things. The first thing is how far the girl - or girls - want to go. If you want to stop, I will stop. If you want to go halfway, that's as far as I'll go. Obviously I've had a lot more experience than you, so I will probably suggest things you're not sure about, and I might say, 'Trust me, I think you'll like this.' But if you tell me 'No, ' then I won't do it. -- "Sex is ONLY fun if everybody wants it. Last night, for example, Mackenzie didn't want ANY sex, so I didn't even try to touch her. You don't have anything to fear from me. Unlike most boys who're desperate to have sex and don't want to stop, I can very easily get sex from other girls if you don't want to. That makes it extremely easy for me to be a gentleman, and it makes it very safe for you. -- "I said it depends on two things. The first is how far the girls want to go. The second is how far I want to go. If Mackenzie asked me for sex, I'd tell her 'No way in the world!' I wouldn't even give her a goodnight kiss last night because I'd disliked the date so much." Claire exclaimed, "We saw that! She tried to kiss you and you ran away, then she followed you. It made us laugh." "Do you parents know she tried to kiss me and I avoided it?" The girls bashfully admitted, "Yeah. We were joking about it, and they told us off." "That's great. I'm glad that happened. I'll explain why shortly, so don't worry about it now. I was explaining to you that how much sex I have with girls depends on how far they want to go, and how far I want to go. Which is obvious, right?" "Yeah," x 2. "I'm going to treat you two girls as lovely, young adults. I think you are big enough and smart enough to decide for yourself how much sex you want. If we are all together in a bedroom, then I'm not going to tell you to stop because I think you're too young. I'll let you decide how far you want to go. If you want to just kiss, that's all I'll do. If you want me to lick your pussies until you have orgasms, I'll do that." Diana - clearly coming out of her shell - asked, "Wow. You'd lick us? I thought boys didn't like doing that?" Julia answered, "Mark LOVES doing it, and he's very, VERY good. He'll give you the best feelings you've ever had. FAR more exciting and wonderful than playing with yourself." "Wow." Then cautiously, but hopefully, "Would you really do that to us, Mark?" "That's what I'm saying. If we have privacy, I will do whatever you want. As much as you want. You are mature enough to decide what you want." Claire blurted, "You'd even FUCK us?" Diana squealed an automatic reprimand, "CLAIRE!" Then she spoiled it by looking at me, and asking, "Would you really do that?" "If we have enough privacy, I'll do whatever you want." "I want! I want!" declared young Claire. #4: Diana blushed, and bashfully admitted, "I'd like that too. Please." After a brief pause, "I'd REALLY like that, but, umm, why would you waste your time on little girls like us? You can get any girl you want, and most of them are much better than us." "They are NOT better than you. They're older, but they're not better. Look at Mackenzie, she'd be a terrible girlfriend. I'm guessing because she believed your mother's bullshit about sex being bad. I'm glad you two haven't been convinced by that nonsense, but Mackenzie's older so she's had to listen to it for longer than you have. In your case, that you're younger is a good thing. -- "Did you know that even at the beginning of this week Mackenzie was making nasty comments to me complaining about you two liking me. She selfishly wanted to keep me all to herself, rather than let you two get ANY enjoyment from my company. That was very nasty of her, and very stupid too, because she knows I share Julia with my sister. I think sharing is wonderful, which is one of the reasons I like you two so much. -- "Last night when I had you on my lap, Diana, Mackenzie had a face like she was sucking a lemon, but Claire had a big smile on her face because she was happy that I was making you happy. You've both got lovely personalities, and older Mackenzie is NOT better than you two; she is considerably worse. Many older girls are similar to Mackenzie, and very few of them make me as happy as you two do. Does that answer your question, Diana?" "Carol keeps telling us how nice you are, but it's amazing that you could like us when you could have any girlfriend you wanted." "Diana, it's BECAUSE I could have so many girlfriends that I like you..." "Huh?" " ... It's taught me to value the personality of the person far more than external things like how old they are, or how big their tits are, or if they have their own car, or any other stupid thing like that. I like both of you so much because you both have lovely personalities, regardless of any external issues like age." #4: I added, "By the way, because I like you so much that there's a word Claire used that I want to correct. Claire asked whether I'd fuck you. I don't want to fuck you two, but I do want to make love to you. That's a far, far nicer experience." Diana gave a groan, as she rushed forward the couple of steps to throw her arms around me to hug herself tightly to me. "You're so wonderful! You're the nicest guy I've EVER met." #4: #2: Claire was just starting to move toward me, to copy her sister. I held up and hand to stop her, saying, "I'm taking far too long to talk with you, so I'm going to have to speed up very quickly. Back up, Diana, and listen to me. Sorry to be rude, but there's still quite a lot I have to say." I gently pushed her away from me. "First, you have to keep this a secret from Mackenzie, or she'll get INCREDIBLY nasty and jealous. That means even several months from now, if you're arguing with Mackenzie they way sisters sometimes do, if you yell at her that 'Mark likes me the best', then that'll be the end of it. She'll kick up a hell of a fuss, your parents would probably call my parents, and you'd never see me again. And GOD HELP YOU if you tell Mackenzie you've had sex with me. Your parents would EXPLODE! They'd call the police, they'd probably transfer you to another school, you'd be locked in your rooms outside of school hours. It'd be a HUGE disaster!" #4: #2: "I said before that I would make love to you. I'm not going to do that right away. We're going to work up to it slowly, over several visits. We could all get in serious trouble if either of you blabs, so I'll do a little bit first, then wait for a while to make sure you keep that a secret. I have to trust you because it could cause big trouble. I can see you're disappointed, but I'm not going to argue about it. When it comes to where and when we have any sex, I'm TOTALLY the boss, okay?" "Yes Mark," from Diana. | "Yes, but I hope it's soon," from Claire. "I don't know yet. It depends on how much freedom your parents will give you. The easiest way would be if your parents would give you permission to visit my sisters at our home sometimes. I'll be there, and I'll 'borrow' you from my sisters for a while to take you into a bedroom for some sexy fun, which will get increasingly sexy as I learn that you're good at keeping secrets from Mackenzie and your parents." -- "For your parents to give you permission to visit my sisters they have to trust us, so this is the plan I came up with. When I red-carded Mackenzie, I kept loudly telling her things like, 'No, I won't have sex with you', and 'Stop asking me for sex.' That confused her, because she never asked for sex. All she wanted was to be my girlfriend, which in her stupid opinion doesn't include sex. I told her that being my girlfriend was so we'd get married one day, and have a family, so that obviously included sex. I told her over and over again - in front of the whole class - that I didn't want to have sex with her. My plan is that one of you, probably Diana, calls your mother just as school finishes. You can call your mother, can't you Diana?" "If I get a phone, yeah. I wouldn't unless it's an emergency though." "That's sort of my plan. You call her and tell her that there's a story going all around school that Mackenzie flipped out this morning and she begged me over and over again to have sex with her..." "Uh oh! Mom will hit the roof!" "Yeah, unfortunately that's unavoidable. You have to tell your mom that Mackenzie repeatedly begged for sex, so you can also tell her that I totally refused, 'Because Mark's a good boy, and he would never have sex like that.' The idea is to make your parents think I'm totally safe. -- "Until your mother gets home it'd be best you pretend to Mackenzie that you don't know anything. Then when your mother gets home she'll immediately confront Mackenzie. You can say you called your mother because you were concerned after hearing the story go all around school. Mackenzie will believe that, because she did make a fool of herself in front of the whole class. Claire can say she heard about it too. -- "Because you called your mother and told her first, and because both of you back up the story, Mackenzie's explanation won't be believed. She'll have great trouble denying it because it is mostly true. If you need to, you could suggest to your mother that she call up one of Mackenzie's classmates to ask her. Mackenzie should give up if your mother starts to do that. -- "The important thing is to make sure your parents know that, 'Mark would never have sex.' Now you know why I love it that your parents know I ran away when Mackenzie tried to kiss me last night." Claire giggled, then said, "Mackenzie is going to get it. Mom will totally freak." "We won't do this plan if you two think it's too nasty. Not doing it will make it harder for us to get together privately, but you don't have to do it if you don't want to. What do you think?" "I wanna do it," declared Claire, with no hesitation whatsoever. After a second's thought, "Me too," from Diana. "Mackenzie gets all high and mighty on us, so it'll serve her right. And I'd love for you to be my first, Mark." "Me too!" from Claire. "First and second and third and lots more times too!" "I'm looking forward to being both your firsts too, thank you. But back to the plan. After dinner, I'm going to call your parents to say two things. First that I'm concerned about Mackenzie's overreacting so much to just one date, and asking your parents to make sure she stops asking me for sex, because I'm not that sort of guy. Second, I'm going to say that I take my responsibility as my sisters big brother very seriously, that I'm very protective of them, and that I'm worried about my sisters being such good friends with you two, in case you are as sexually immoral as Mackenzie. -- "Don't look so worried. That's all made up nonsense to make your parents think my family is very moral, so they'll be comfortable with your visiting my sisters. You have to give me advice about whether the second half of my calling up plan is a good idea. If your parents don't trust you to be good girls, it would probably be best that I just say the first half, about me being concerned about Mackenzie. But if your parents do trust you, I think the second half would work well. -- "But you need to be careful what you say to your parents this evening. No making comments like, 'I want to have sex with Mark too.' You should only say things like, 'Mackenzie, how could you! You're far too young for sex, and you weren't even engaged to him yet, let alone married.' Or, 'When I'm Mackenzie's age I'm never going to shamelessly run around after a boy like that.' Claire might even be able to say, 'Yuck, how can you like a boy! They're gross!' That's if Claire hasn't shown any interest in boys before." Claire giggled, then, "I haven't told Mom and Dad. Mom's been such a pain to Mackenzie and Diana about that stuff that I've kept it secret." "Smart girl. Another reason I'd like to mention the second part is because it plants the seed with your parents about my sisters inviting you over, so when you are invited, your parents will be more likely to agree. It sounds like your parents will definitely think that Claire is innocent. What about you Diana? Have you been making comments around the house about how wonderful you think I am, or things like that?" "Umm, some. Especially after you left last night." "Was it sexual, or just about me being nice?" "I would NEVER say sexual stuff in front of Mom. Especially after I copped it for looking at your pants when I got off your lap. How did you make your cock go away so quickly?" #4: "I imagined having sex with your mother." Both girls cracked up at that. Diana added, "I don't think they do that anymore. I've never heard them." "I REALLY prefer not to talk about your mother's sex-life please! You're turning me off the idea of ever having sex again." "Haha." "So do you think it's okay for me to mention my fake worry about you two being pure enough for my family?" "I think so," said Diana. "I talked to Mackenzie about how much I liked you, but I didn't tell Mom or Dad." "I'm not worried about Mackenzie. Your mother probably won't believe a word Mackenzie says about me. If you can, make some nice comments about how well-behaved both my sisters are too. So are we going to do everything I suggested?" "Yes please, especially the part where you do sexy things with me," agreed Claire. #4: Diana said, "It's going to be bad at home tonight." "Yeah. Mackenzie will be bawling her eyes out. She's going to have a terrible night, but in the long run she will learn that she can't have one date with a guy then believe she can own and control him, the way she tried with me. She was getting shitty at me because some girls like me, including you two. She wanted me to spend the rest of my life being deliberately unpleasant to half the people I meet, just to make her happy, and that's insanely jealous and selfish of her. If you two can bear it, tonight should be good for Mackenzie, and it should make it easier for you to visit my home too, which will make our doing sexy things together MUCH easier." "Okay, I'll call Mom. Just before we go home, you said?" "I thought that was best. Your mom has to hear it from you first, because that makes your story more believable than whatever Mackenzie will say. It'd be better to do it over the phone, rather than at home when Mackenzie is right beside you, but if you call earlier than just after last class, your mother might come rushing to school to grab Mackenzie away, and that could get messy. Just before you go home is the perfect time." "Okay. I'll do it then. When will we be able to visit you?" "I'm sorry, but I don't know the answer to that. It depends on too many things, like your parents. You need to have patience. I'm planning to see you several times, probably spread over several months. Slow and steady is DEFINITELY the best way to do this. If you try to visit my house several times per week, your parents are going to get very suspicious very quickly. But if we go nice and slow, we'll be able to get far more visits. -- "Don't forget that I need to start slow and see that you can keep little secrets before I trust you with big secrets. For that to work there has to be time between each visit so I know you've managed to keep quiet. Plus you'll sometimes see me when you come in bigger groups, because Donna or Carol will sometimes invite all the girls that are here to come visit. That probably won't be until we're on summer vacation, but we should be able to do that several times, and do some sexy things with all the girls." Julia added to the girls, "You shouldn't tell any of your friends about this conversation. Tell them we spent the whole time talking about Mackenzie. If you tell them Mark has agreed to have sex with you, the story will spread around school so fast, that someone will get jealous and tell their parents, who'd tell your parents, and then you'd never get close enough to Mark for a kiss, let alone making love to him. Don't tell the other girls you're getting any special treatment, or one of them is going to ruin it for you. Okay?" "Boy!" moaned Claire, "It's going to be hard keeping having sex with Mark secret." Julia answered, "That would depend on whether you want you and Diana to keep having it. I hope you're smart enough that you don't think boasting to your girlfriends is more important than you and your sister still seeing Mark?" "Ahh, no. I see what you mean, but it's going to hurt keeping that secret." "It's very smart of Mark to build up slowly then, so you'll get practice keeping quiet about smaller secrets. That'll make it easier for you." "Yeah. I hope it's soon though." "I bet you do. He's the BEST! He's the most fantastic guy you'll ever meet, and you're very lucky he's interested in you, so you'd better be very careful about doing everything Mark says." "We will, won't we, Diana?" Diana agreed, "I'll do ANYTHING Mark wants." Diana turned to me, "I think you're awesome, Mark. Sometimes you're so nice to me I almost explode." "I'd better be careful not to be too nice to you then. It'd be such a waste of a lovely girl if you exploded, not to mention messy. Let's go rejoin the other girls." [Later Julia told me, "The conversation you had with Claire and Diana was FAR too slow." "Yeah, I forgot your advice about that. I was enjoying myself too much."] Judging by the frequent sounds of laughter that'd drifted across to us from the group, Ava and Carol had been entertaining all the other girls well. They were in a good mood when we returned, joking about some of the quiz answers. I soon learned what one of their favorite answers had been, when several of the girls urged me to start up my male prostitute business. They were laughingly eager to be my customers. I naively asked, "I was thinking of charging $5. That's not too much, is it?" One girl yelled over the laughter, "We should get 'Friends Of Your Sisters Discount'", which another girl modified, "No, I want 'Two For The Price Of One, ' instead, haha." The general consensus was that after a few such improvements, my price was acceptable. There were some more quiz-related jokes, then Julia sobered the mood by describing what Mackenzie had done to get herself red-carded. She followed it up with, "For the first week or two of being Mark's girlfriend, I was angry half the time. Girls were making passes at Mark left, right and center. Sometimes shamelessly right in front of me, sometimes sneakily putting their phone numbers in his pocket..." I couldn't resist hopefully adding, "I've even had girls put naked pictures of themselves in my locker. I'm sure you can imagine what a terrible shock that was, haha." Julia quickly and sternly announced, "Do NOT do that! We'll be very angry if you do. You'd be red-carded, kicked out of the Ducklings, and none of us will ever talk to you again. Lots of other sexy things are fine, but NOT giving Mark naughty pictures." I was very surprised by Julia's reaction. Not to mention disappointed, but I will mention it because I was VERY disappointed. When I looked at Julia for an explanation, she just said, "I'll explain later." [A week or so earlier Vanessa had shown Julia an article about a 16-year old girl who'd taken naked pictures of herself and had given them to her 16-year old boyfriend. The police had somehow found out, and the boy was arrested for having pornographic pictures of an underage girl. It was perfectly legal for them to have sex together because they were within 3 years of each other, but the law said it was illegal for anyone to have sexual pictures of under 18-year olds regardless of the possessor's age. He was going to be found guilty, serve jail time and end up on the Sex Offenders Register because the idiots who wrote the law didn't think about allowing for a girlfriend giving her boyfriend a personal gift, and hadn't written in any clauses that gave him any possibility of an escape. Vanessa had suggested Julia cancel the idea of girls sending in database forms with their photographs attached, which is why nothing had happened with that idea. Julia had forgotten to mention Vanessa's article to me, but the prospect of 12-year old girls giving me naked photographs of themselves quickly reminded her. Ava's pictures were VERY well secured in the Williams' house.] Julia completed her anti-jealousy story to the girls, then asked, "Diana and Claire, do you want to tell everyone about Mark's visits to your house? I understand he did some fun things?" Diana and Claire happily launched into a duet story about how wonderful I was. I'd expected them to talk about my magic tricks, but they concentrated almost totally on how nice I'd been to them. They talked for quite a while, especially because they each kept adding things to each other's story. The highlight was Diana's describing how I'd stood up to her mother's abusing her for "running around half-naked," and how I'd talked to her [Diana, not her mother] with such patience and caring. Diana told her story well, and was visibly moved by the end of it, half-melting the hearts of many of her listeners. After the last, "Aww, that's so sweet," I said, "I stood up to Diana's mother for two reasons. First - and I cannot emphasize this too much - I am a STRONG believer in the right of beautiful, sexy young women to run around AT LEAST half-naked whenever I visit their house." That caused considerable laughter and follow-on jokes: I claimed it should be compulsory, they claimed it applied to their visitor too, etc. After things settled down, I continued, "The second reason I stood up to Mrs. Norris - obviously not the main one though, because Diana looks fantastic half-naked - was how impressed I was by Diana's courage. Half of you should know her well enough to appreciate that it was a scary thing for her to do in front of her parents. Very scary, because Mrs. Norris has a TERRIBLY bad attitude to anything sexy. Courage like that should be appreciated and rewarded, not yelled at. I was very pleased and delighted to see Diana's self-confidence." Lunch was a great success. No pussy shots, but the girls left with raised opinions of me, and good lessons about how much I disliked jealousy but enjoyed girls running around half-naked. I went to the bank right after school (yet again!), to withdraw the $20,000 cash I'd need. I was hoping to avoid the banker manager but he saw me standing in the line and came over all smiling and happy. I felt like bending him over and ramming my useless credit card up his fat ass, so when he saw the expression on my face it wiped the smile off his. In the middle of a public line was not the best place to have a detailed discussion about how many millions of dollars were in my account, but I angrily said, "Do you know what the credit limit is on that useless piece of crap card you got for me?" "Ahh, the same as it is on all dependent minors' cards. They all have that limit." I wanted to rant, "I'm hiring a luxury, private jet to fly a dozen friends to LA for the weekend. Shopping on Rodeo Drive, staying in fancy hotel suites, seeing an expensive show, and all the works. How long do you think a fucking $500 limit will last?" Unfortunately this encounter was already the most interesting thing happening in the bank and I had the undivided attention of all the people in the line, and I'd barely started. I settled for ranting, "Every time I come to this bank - which is every damned day - you ooze all over the place telling me how happy you are to be of service, but that doesn't actually include THINKING, does it? I was very clear with you that I needed a card for this weekend. Not only is the pathetic card you got for me obviously useless, but relying on it would have been EXTREMELY embarrassing, inconvenient and ruined the entire weekend for several of my friends and me. There's no time too get a useful credit limit approved so I have to make a special trip here yet again, line up, and get enough cash out. Why didn't you THINK to get a card with an appropriate limit, or at least THINK to warn me how pathetic the current limit is?" "We should discuss this in my office." "So I can lose my place in the line purely so you can tell me how happy you are to be of service all over again. There isn't anything to discuss. You were thoughtless, it's caused me inconvenience and annoyance, and it's far too late to fix it now. Why don't you spend the time you'll save by NOT talking to me, by thinking about how to serve your customers better. How to make the line that always seems to be here shorter and faster would be a damned good place to start." A couple of the other customers in the line laughed their agreement at that. "I'm sorry you feel that way. I did provide you with good service, better than you would have gotten at other banks, blah, blah..." And then he strode off, to hide in his office. Julia and Carol had been standing next to me the whole time. They were both, and especially Julia, happy with my performance. The other customers wanted to talk with me about it, but I refused. I got my money, which required a long delay while they rushed around to get that much cash. They helpfully put it a bag to keep it hidden, and then we finally left. I gave the bag to Julia, to keep safe at her house while I was on my pipeline date. ------- Chapter 212: Pipeline Date 1A#1; The First Half Friday, May 13, 2005 (Continued) The arrangement for the pipeline date was that I was going to be picked up from home at 6pm, and I was warned not to eat anything in advance because there was going to be an excessive amount of food. They refused to divulge any other information, but already I liked the sound of this date. Julia reminded me of the colored cards. I didn't really need the reminder, but she was mostly making sure of my resolve: Red: if I never wanted to date the girl ever again in my life. Orange: if I wouldn't date the girl again until the start of the next school year. Yellow: to eliminate her from this pipeline group, but let her join another group one more time this year. At least half the girls had to be carded, with yellow being no more than half the eliminations. Julia wanted brief comments for the date as a whole, and for each of the girls, concentrating on their reasons for being eliminated or kept. Julia asked me, "Do you think you'll be able to look the girls in the face when you card half of them at the end of the date Mark?" "I know if I don't, you will randomly. I know you won't hesitate to do that..." "Not at all. I'll even eliminate an extra girl, just to toughen you up for next time." "That's very considerate of you. I won't have any problem red-carding girls who behave badly. Not after practicing on Mackenzie earlier. I would've red-carded her much earlier if it hadn't been for her two sisters. Obviously I'm more than happy to identify the girls I want to keep. The problem I foresee is that most of the girls are going to fall in the middle: nothing particularly good about them, nor particularly bad. It's going to be tough carding a girl who has done nothing wrong, especially when I've been in these girls' classes all year, and have to keep looking at them for the rest of the year. That could get awkward if they think I treated them unfairly." "Not doing enough right, IS doing something wrong. Also, try to give them believable justifications for their cards, which will be easier if you get most of the girls to open up and participate about something. Especially on the first dates for each group, you'll need to make sure you encourage every girl to participate enough for you to get some idea of her personality." "I'll try. I wish you were coming with me though. A good girlfriend should come with her boyfriend when he's on a date with sixteen other girls, haha." "You're a big boy now. I trust you can manage sixteen girls without little, ol' me holding your hand." "Let's hope the eliminated girls don't get too emotional. I'm egotistically guessing they will be somewhat upset, given they're putting in some effort tonight." "Some of them may not try hard, and they'll probably be the ones most likely to be eliminated, but they'll still get upset at the implied insult. The competition is going to get even more intense and emotional when you're known to be rich, so you're bound to have problems with some girls, which will be an interesting learning experience for you." "Excellent! That's something wonderful to look forward to. By the way, do you know what's happening tonight?" "Of course. I wouldn't let them take my boyfriend away unless I knew what they were intending to do with him, haha." "So what's happening then?" "They asked me not to tell you. I would tell you if I thought it was a good idea to, but there's no need. They've got a good date planned and you should enjoy it." I was at home, hungrily waiting to be picked up for the date. At the risk of delaying my having dinner a few minutes, I'd decided to wait in the living room until the girl or girls came inside to get me, rather than my walking out to meet the car the moment it arrived. I had my family primed to be cool about me dating sixteen girls at once, as I thought it might be good for that fact to be reinforced on the rumor mill. Mom wasn't happy about the pipeline scheme, but it was very obvious to her that there was nothing she could do to stop it, because it would've started another huge fight with my two wives, the girls that Mom was trying to protect. I had to listen to a mini-lecture from her, but Mom did agree to make the best of a bad situation (her opinion; not mine) and to put on a happy face when whoever was picking me up arrived. When the car arrived, it parked on the street and one girl came up the drive to knock on our door. Mom answered the door, then she escorted the girl into the living room, saying from the doorway, "Mark, one-sixteenth of your date is here. If the other fifteen are as pretty as May, you're going to have an enjoyable night." May was too busy looking at me to turn around to see that Mom was not smiling. "Hi May. Mom's right, you do look very pretty. I don't believe I've noticed you wearing that dress to school before." May smiled happily (you can't go wrong complimenting a girl's dress when she's obviously made an effort to dress nicely), "It's too nice to wear to school." "On behalf of all the boys at school... 'Aww.' Lucky for me tonight, though. Are you the only one who has come to get me?" "No. Sophia and Jessica are in the car. We weren't sure about all of us coming in, but from what your mom said it didn't matter." "Not at all; my family knows all about the pipeline system. Shall we go?" Mom and Donna followed us down to the car to see what clothes the other girls were wearing. Carol was with Julia at Ava's place, where they were taking advantage of my absence to spend time with Ava's parents to get to know them and their thoughts about Ava better. It'd be a good conversation, but Carol had mentioned her disappointment in not seeing the clothes of the sixteen girls on my date. Mom had volunteered to be nosey on Carol's behalf. In the course of looking at the extra girls, Mom commented, "It's a pity Carol and Julia won't see what the sixteen of you are wearing this evening. She would've enjoyed that. Mark, try to remember what the other thirteen girls are wearing, so you can describe their outfits in detail to Carol." "Haha. Like THAT'S gonna happen! Teenage boys are USELESS at things like that, because they spend all their time concentrating on what UNDER the dresses." In the car, as we were driving to wherever it was we were going to, Jessica said, "Julia has told us that your and her parents don't mind you dating so many girls. It's hard to believe they're so accepting. My parents wouldn't be." "There are two reasons they're so cool about it: The logic of the situation is fairly compelling. Just like we've told everybody at the lunches and the like, I'm sufficiently unusual that many of the normal rules don't apply. There's no way I can date one girl for a few weeks or months to see whether I like her, then try another girl, etc. I'd be a hundred years old before I found out that girl number 123 was my favorite, and I doubt she'd still be waiting for me. -- "And where logic doesn't convince people, Julia does. It's hard for my parents or hers to protect Julia by insisting I stay faithful to her, when Julia is the one arranging most of my dates, and she'd get angry if any of the parents objected to my dating other girls. She's an unusual girl." "She says it's because you're such an exceptional guy." "We're well matched then, both weirdoes. Changing the subject, when are you going to tell me what the arrangement for tonight is, with particular regard to when food will be served, because I'm getting VERY hungry?" May exclaimed, "Food! Oh my gosh, I knew we forgot something." The laughter of the other girls quelled my panic. May continued, "We're going to Carina's house. Everyone else is there, and we'll tell you what the plan for tonight is once we're all together. If we hunt around their kitchen hard enough, we might be able to find something for you to nibble on." When we arrived at our destination, I was escorted into the kitchen, to be greeted by a truly wonderful scene: thirteen girls cooking up a storm! There was food EVERYWHERE! Except in my belly, but I was pretty sure that problem was going to be very well fixed. By the way, the girls were looking very nice too, although most of them were wearing aprons, indicating that they had exactly the right priorities. I'll write most of the following conversations as if one girl was speaking. In practice they took turns, added to each other's points, spoke simultaneously, etc. There were sixteen girls, so you can imagine how chaotic the conversations sometimes were! "We've heard you like eating..." "That's a scurrilous rumor started by someone to trying to besmirch my good name. I totally and unreservedly deny it." Then I made my belly rumble loudly. After the laughter, "Did you do that deliberately?" "Rumble my belly like this you mean," I did it again. "Sure. Don't tell me none of you can do that whenever you want? No? I bet you can't make songs by pumping a hand in your armpit either? What about belching the Star Spangled Banner?" "Haha." "These are ESSENTIAL skills! Every boy learns them before they're ten, so you know they must be important. How can you possibly expect to be successful in life if you can't belch the national anthem? People will think you're unpatriotic. I've always thought girls spend far too long in clothing stores, and now I know your education is being seriously neglected in the 'Body Noises' department. If food wasn't even more important, we'd be spending the rest of the evening working on making a belching choir out of the sixteen of you. I bet none of you even know what key you belch in, do you?" It was a sad commentary on our school's music department that none of them did. Eventually they were able to restart their explanation of tonight's date. "We heard you like eating..." They looked at me, expecting a rumble. I said, "It's clear that none of you have the refined level of body noise aesthetic appreciation I prefer in my audiences, so please proceed with your explanation." "Haha. Okay. We paired up to produce eight different dishes. Three different mains, three different desserts, and two pairs on snack foods for before and after dinner. We've done most of the cooking already, just a few final things need finishing off or heating. Now you're here, the idea is that one girl from each pair will socialize with you while the other half works on their food, and they'll swap back and forth so you'll get to spend time with everyone. There are soccer DVDs for you to watch in the den while we're not at the dining table. We decided we didn't want to turn this into a cooking competition, so we're not going to tell you who cooked what. We just want you to enjoy the food. -- "Carina twisted her parents' arms into going out for the evening, so we've got the place to ourselves until 10 o'clock. The idea is we just stay here and socialize for the evening, because we figured with sixteen of us there isn't time to socialize and do any activity. I think that's everything. What do you think?" I rumbled my belly. "Haha." "You see what a succinct, accurate form of communication you're missing out on. Seriously, I'm very impressed by your plan. I think you've perfectly captured the idea of the 16-girl pipeline date. Well done." They urged me to go through to the den, but I said, "Before we do that, I want to say some things to all of you. Can I do that now, or will that interfere with your cooking?" -- Now was fine, so I said, "The pipeline system is designed to input a very large number of girls and have a good chance of finding the one or two that I like the most. The pipeline is not designed to compare every girl with every other girl the way exam scores do. If every girl in this group is excellent, then half of you are still going to be eliminated. If group 1B only has average girls in it, then some of them will survive longer than the excellent girls who were eliminated from this group. It is incorrect to compare ACROSS groups, because all my decisions are made purely WITHIN each group. -- "If 160 girls enter the pipeline, then there will be 158 eliminations. The system isn't designed to compare those 158 with each other. That would require a vastly more complex system, with many more dates and many more months. All for no real purpose because those girls are all going to be eliminated anyway. The system is focused on, and is pretty ruthless about, identifying the one or two girls I'd most like as girlfriends. It has to be ruthless to be able to process the very large number of interested girls Julia keeps talking about. -- "All of which is a long-winded way of me getting ready to apologize. I am sorry that at the end of this date I am going to eliminate half of you. You've been in my classes all year, and will be for another six weeks. You're all nice girls, and I'm happy to chat with any of you at school, including those of you that I eliminate this evening. I'm VERY much NOT looking forward to the eliminations at the end of this date. If you were all grade 9 girls, for example, that aren't involved in my life, it'd be much easier for me. But you're all in my life at school, which will make the end of this evening very tough on me. -- "But I have to be strict. If I keep girls in a group because I'm too weak or soft-hearted to eliminate them, then I'm not doing anyone a favor. I'm only delaying the inevitable, because at the end of the day there will only be one or two girls who aren't eliminated. That's an important point I hope you all appreciate. If I eliminated only one girl at the end of a date, it's obvious that all that would achieve would be an enormous lengthening of the time it'd take to get down to the final one or two girls. I am not going to be eliminating half of you because I'm nasty; I will be doing it because the system demands it." "We understand Mark. Julia has explained it to us and the website is clear too." "Yeah, I know, but I still hate the idea of any of you getting angry with me, especially if it carried over into our school life. But I'll move forward, assuming you appreciate the situation. I'll add another wrinkle. My choosing which girls to keep or eliminate is based on my subjective opinion, which could be seen as unfair. You may look at the girls I decided to keep, and ask yourself, "Why on Earth did Mark keep her?" You may disagree with my choices, but obviously I'm trying to find my final girlfriend, so my opinion rules. If I want to choose a girl because she can belch my favorite song, then that's my choice, even if you think I'm stupid and that you would have been a better girl for me." "We all saw or heard about Mackenzie, Mark. She thought she was perfect for you. How such a determined virgin could think that escapes me, but she did, so she's a PERFECT example of how a girl can get it wrong." "Good example. Okay, my next point is that it's obviously no good to tell you all to try hard, or to wish you all 'Good luck', or any blanket comment like that. I will make one similar sort of comment though. This is obviously the first pipeline date, but I've spent time with groups of girls before. One thing I've noticed is that it's very common for quite a large proportion of the girls in a group to be quiet. I have to eliminate half of you, so if half have impressed me and half have done nothing, then it's the quiet ones that'll go, even though they might be lovely people. That you've structured this date to be groups of eight for some of the time will help, but it's still worth my mentioning this issue. -- "Earlier today Julia worded it well with me. I worried about having to eliminate girls who'd done nothing wrong, and Julia said: 'Not doing enough right IS doing something wrong.' The quieter girls among you should remember that. I don't mean I want a rowdy evening. Noise for the sake of it won't impress me, but I do want to get to know you all better, and I can't do that if you don't talk. Which probably means I should shut up to give you a chance to talk, haha. -- "I have one final comment. I have to make a private phone call some time tonight. It should only take a few minutes, and any time between 6:30 and 8:00 would be fine. You don't have to tell me now, but if a little gap opens up between those times, that'd be great." We got on with the date, which meant I got taken to the den, sat down, offered a drink, and most importantly, an interesting range of finger foods. Not snacks out of a packet, but real food they'd made themselves. Little squares of bread, with salmon, some white stuff, and a sprig of something green on them, for example. I could have wolfed them down by the handful, but tried to restrain myself to sampling each of the offerings no more than two or three times - unless they were particularly nice, which most of them were. The girls put on a soccer DVD. It wasn't a movie, just a collection of unconnected, fancy-footwork segments. I'd intended to ignore it, but a lot of the segments were very impressive, and I couldn't help myself rewinding several times to look at them properly. I was embarrassed the first couple of times I wanted to do that, but the girls said, "That's what it's on for. We want you to enjoy the evening, and Julia said sex wasn't allowed, so the next two things you like are food and soccer, right?" "Maybe mathematics, although I can't imagine how you'd do that on a date. That sounds FAR too nerdy." I sat in what was obviously the father's chair, the eight girls (more or less, as they came and went) sat around me, and we chatted. It was a very good setup. The DVD was undemanding of my attention, conversation was simple and casual, there were few enough girls so I could always make easy eye contact with any of them, and there was no time pressure on me. I just relaxed and let it happen. Once things had been rolling along for several minutes, I started picking up on useful patterns of behavior. One that I picked up on quickly, was with Mia, a girl who was particularly good looking, well endowed, and dressed so a lot of her endowment was clearly visible. Her sole strategy, so far, seemed to be to lean forward often. She spoke often enough, but didn't put any effort into following the conversation or thinking about her contribution. She'd lean forward to say the first thought that crossed her mind. She caught my attention quickly, smiled smugly, and seemed to think her position was secure. Some girls were very focused on me, to the extent that they would always respond to comments of mine, but usually not to comments from other girls. Whereas other girls would converse much more with their friends than with me. That was perfectly fine and natural, but it raised the question about how much non-Mark conversation was 'allowed' before I should start counting it against the girls involved. That's a trickier question than it seems for several reasons, including that the girls are meant to be impressing me. If they prefer to talk with each other, that would imply they'd never make the effort to be a good girlfriend. On the other hand, it'd be silly if they only talked to me and not to each other. That'd indicate they were too fixated on me and might not fit into my life with Julia, Carol and Ava. It wasn't at all clear to me where the 'good ground' in the middle was. As there has to be, there were girls who were quieter than others. They all knew each other well, and were familiar and comfortable with my presence, so even the quiet girls contributed from time to time. Julia had suggested I draw the quiet girls out, but I didn't think any of these ones needed much prodding. They'd already been cooking together since school finished, so were already "in action" to their natural levels. Because I was deliberately keeping track of how often each girl spoke, I was pleased to notice that there were a couple of other girls who did lots of drawing out for me, by repeatedly asking the other girls, especially the quieter ones, for their comments. There were other dynamics going on, and I spotted new ones from time to time during the evening. I'd not paid much attention before to how groups interrelate (usually I'd watched just one person, e.g., how Julia managed a group of girls), so watching a group so carefully was an interesting experience. With one mind centered, one mind conversing, that left two minds to study the girls. I found that I could see an impressive number of behaviors. One example was when the girls were cooking in the kitchen they always wore aprons to protect their clothes. Initially they were very careful to take their aprons off before they came into the den, presumably so they'd look pretty for me. After a while one of the girls forgot to remove her apron. I noticed a couple of girls see the new arrivals' clothing mistake, and open their mouths to point it out, but then guiltily and competitively decide to shut their mouths. A second later another girl reminded the apron-wearer of her mistake, causing one of the sneaky girls to frown momentarily. The winner of the pipeline system would be a girl who pleased me more than any other girl - that's obvious - but I didn't want her to win by destructively competing with the other girls. As a metaphor, I wanted the girls to compete like they were in a running race rather than a boxing match. This was because the eventual winner had to cooperate with Carol, Julia and Ava. Destructive competitiveness within my core group was such an appalling idea that any girls I saw behaving that way instantly got demoted several places down my mental list. Destructive competitiveness was such a bad behavior that I quickly realized that it had to be one of the main things I looked for. [[That tells you my perspective on the pipeline. It wasn't to provide me with dozens of girls I could play with in a high-pressure competition situation where they'd push themselves to do much more than they normally would. Nor was it to provide girls I'd keep apart from my core group, maybe just to use and discard. I was assuming the purpose of the pipeline system was to provide a winner or two, and that the winner(s) would socialize with my core group to a considerable extent. Many guys would've delighted in 'milking the pipeline' for all it was worth; but my thoughts were on the end of the process rather than the fun I could have during it. This was nice of me, but it was also weak of me. I was thinking about after the process had finished because I was uncomfortable about many of the human aspects during the process, hence my initial speech to the girls.]] I'd previously decided that during the carding I'd try to give accurate comments to each of the girls, but as the date developed, I revisited that decision. I needed to keep secret that destructive competitiveness was an issue. If I made its importance common knowledge, it'd be too easy for girls in the future pipeline dates to hide it from me during the few hours of a date, which might result in a destructive girl ending up getting into my core group. That decision gave rise to further thoughts about other possible destructive behaviors. There were two types of faults a girl could make on a date with me: Faults caused by a fundamental personality problem (in my humble opinion). Such as destructive competitiveness, jealousy, dishonesty, arrogance, stupidity, etc. Faults not fundamental. Initial shyness shouldn't count against a girl in the long run, because she'd soon get used to me. Factual mistakes were also correctable, such as if they hadn't prepared enough food for me, or the DVD had been of football rather than soccer. I didn't want to give the girls ANY feedback about fundamental faults, so future pipeline girls wouldn't know exactly how to fake me out. This meant I couldn't praise fundamental virtues either, because praising a girl's non-competitiveness sent as clear a message as criticizing competitiveness. That left my giving justifications for the allocation of cards based on non-fundamental issues, which would be silly. If non-fundamental mistakes occurred, the obvious reaction was just to make comments in my website's text files, to teach all future girls not to make those little mistakes. The result of this logic was that I shouldn't give any personal feedback at all. The idea of feedback was to train later girls how to give me better dates, but it seemed to me that it was considerably more important to find girls with the right fundamental personalities. They could give me good dates for months to come, so what did a few poor dates early on matter? I decided I'd better call Julia to check my logic. I'd do that right after I called Mr. or Mrs. Norris. Last, and somewhat to my surprise, least, I should mention why I've mentioned so little about how the girls were dressed (sorry Carol). It didn't matter to me. All the girls were pretty or better, or they wouldn't have had the confidence to put themselves into a pipeline group. [Actually, it was mainly because Julia had bluntly made sure that everyone knew that unattractive girls didn't have a hope of succeeding, and would be foolish to try.] All the girls had dressed nicely. Not OTT, all-day-in-a-beauty-parlor nice, because they hadn't had time to do that and cook since school ended, but still noticeably better than at school. Somewhat to my surprise, none of them was wearing very sexy clothes, although some of their outfits worked rather well at the right angles, or in one delightful case, when backlit; something the girl was well aware of and chose to demonstrate to my pleasure several times. Before long I mostly stopped noticing their clothes, concentrating on them as persons instead. I think because extreme hunger had made me lightheaded. The main meal was ready about half an hour after I arrived, so the girls requested my presence in the dining room. They only had to ask me once. There was a huge amount of food, as there were seventeen people to feed. Eighteen if you count me twice, which is how hungry I felt. Although if you allow for how much girls eat, there only needed to be enough food for about ten average people. Their plan was for a slow, chatty dinner, as we had plenty of time. That was fine with me, as it allowed more time for seconds and thirds. The girls had intended to keep the responsibility for individual dishes secret from me, but it was obvious who the creators were from the looks on their faces when I took my first mouthful and gave my first opinion of each dish. I pretended not to notice, praising the group generally for each dish. After I'd tried all three main courses, one of the girls asked me, "Which is your favorite?" "I'm not going to say. There's no way any of you can know my personal taste in food, so I don't want any of you to think that's part of my opinion of your value as girlfriends. I am happy that your and Alexandra's chicken dish is just as well cooked as Sophia's and Victoria's fish dish, or Kaiya's and Clara's unusual salad." "You know who did what!" "Sure. I could claim I was very observant, but the real reason is that my favorite thing in the whole world to look at is pretty girls bringing me food, so of course I noticed, haha." Mia added, "What about naked girls bringing you food!" "Not if they had large breasts, of course." Which is not something a proudly well-endowed girl likes to hear. She frowned, "Why not?" "Because they could block my view of the food! Large breasts are well and good, but you can't compare them to the visual splendor of a well-cooked meal, can you?" "Oh." Which was all Mia could think of saying, while the other girls chuckled. Mia was currently in elimination territory in the bottom half of my list. That was a pity for a girl with such nice breasts, so I decided to give her some help, "I was deliberately teasing you, Mia, but I should directly address the issue. That you have nice breasts is to your advantage - I am a boy after all - but it's NOWHERE near enough of an advantage that you can rest on your laurels thinking that a low-cut top and large breasts will ensure your success. -- "Julia and Ava are my girlfriends now, and neither is well endowed, so breast size is clearly not that important to me. Plus, by simple statistics, obviously half the pipeline girls will have breasts larger than average, so there'll be plenty of other girls who have large breasts AND who make efforts to be good in other ways." [Actually, significantly more than half the pipeline girls will have breasts larger than the average. The reason for this statistical anomaly has already been given, not far above.] "Oh," said Mia again, looking worried. The other girls looked happy though. Carina, a lesser endowed girl, commented, "I was worried about that." "You almost certainly worried too much. Sure physical beauty is one of my criteria, which for a guy includes breasts, but I don't like them so much that they're going to change my opinion of a girl up or down much. There are many factors considerably more important than breast size." "Good," opined Carina. Mia didn't look like she thought it was good, so I added, "Don't be upset, Mia. You've got an advantage over most other girls. It's not as big an advantage as you hoped, but it's still an advantage. I've also got nothing against girls who wear low-cut tops either, so that's two things you've got going for you tonight." Unfortunately for Mia's peace of mind, I couldn't resist adding, "I'm curious about something though. I don't understand why girls with large breasts so often think they don't need to use anything else to attract guys. The only guys they'll attract will be guys to whom that's all that matters. They've got to be incredibly shallow guys, who'd likely leave the moment they see a girl with even larger breasts, so they'd hardly be ideal boyfriends." That started a discussion about how pathetic guys are. It was highly insulting, amusing and true. I didn't mind at all, because I agreed with everything they said, except their frequent, "But not you, Mark. You're far too mature to be so stupid." Their unanimous laughed responses to my main points can be summarized as: Girls with large breasts so often think they don't need to use anything else: "Because they don't!" The only guys they'll attract will be guys to whom that's all that matters: "That's EVERY guy!" They've got to be incredibly shallow guys: "That's EVERY guy!" Who'd likely leave the moment they see a girl with even larger breasts: "That's EVERY guy!" So they'd hardly be ideal boyfriends: "You can say that again!" After their insults and moans about how terrible guys are, I generously I suggested, "I should force all the other boys at school to develop much more mature attitudes by keeping all the large-breasted girls to myself." My noble, self-sacrificing suggestion was laughed down. Conversation continued, although mostly at a somewhat higher level, until we'd all eaten enough of the mains. My opinion of "enough" came in for a considerable amount of joking. "That's not fair. It's VERY hard work having a girlfriend. I've got two of them, so I have to eat a lot to keep my energy levels up, otherwise they'd exhaust me." The girls started a philosophical discussion about my having multiple girlfriends. I said, "I don't want to defend or explain it myself this evening. That would have me doing nearly all the talking, which wouldn't help me get to know each of you any better. Your talking about it among yourselves is fine, but I'll just observe. Personally I think it's been discussed at school so many times that nothing new is likely to arise out of talking about it this evening." They agreed, and suggested that now would be a good time for me to make my phone call, while they were clearing the table of the leftover mains. I excused myself, went to the den, closed the door, then called the Norris's number to secure the sexual services of their two younger daughters, although I'd word it differently. My call was answered by Mr. Norris, so: "Hello Mr. Norris, it's Mark Anderson here." "Oh." "I'm calling because I am very concerned about Mackenzie's misbehavior at school today. Did she tell you about it?" "We've heard all about it..." "Good. I wasn't looking forward to breaking it to you. I don't want to get into a discussion about my version versus whatever Mackenzie told you, and I'd prefer to forget the whole unpleasant incident as quickly as possible, but I do have two specific concerns that I want to raise with you. Both are quite serious, but also very quick, so I'd appreciate a minute of your time." "Carry on." "The reason I agreed to a date with Mackenzie was because our mutual friend assured me Mackenzie was a good girl. When I visited your house I was pleased to see that your family all seemed to have very high standards, so I was shocked by Mackenzie's blatant propositioning of me at school. Obviously it made me extremely uncomfortable at the time and I will never date her again, but it occurred to me afterward that Mackenzie can't normally behave like that because she does have a good reputation at school. I guess she must have had some sort of emotional disturbance, and I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to help her return to her normal, decent behavior?" "I don't think so. We have the situation under control, and she won't be behaving like that again." "That's good to know. My second concern is even more important to me, because it involves my two younger sisters. I take my responsibility as their big brother very seriously, so I'm very caring and protective of them. In that role - and please forgive the necessary implication - but I wouldn't be comfortable with my sisters being such good friends with Mackenzie's younger sisters if they behaved as immorally as Mackenzie did. I get the impression that Mackenzie's misbehavior was an aberration, and not something that your family approves of, but for my sisters' welfare I have to check whether your younger daughters are likely to lead my little sisters astray from decent behavior?" "They'd better not! They'd get what for, if they did any such thing!" "With respect, sir," (the usual amount) "knowing they'd be punished afterward is not sufficiently convincing for me. I don't want them to corrupt my sisters' moral well-being in the first place. Do your younger daughters have a history of immoral behavior?" "NO they do not! I should be having this conversation with your parents, young man. Would you put one of them on please." Oops. I'd hoped to get the conversation over with fast enough that this wouldn't come up. I gave him the bullshit I'd prepared, "I have earned my parents' respect over the years, sir, and they grant me a great deal of responsibility. In this case I know your family, whereas they've never talked to you, so they believe I'll be able to form a more accurate opinion about my sisters' vulnerability. I will talk with them after, and if they feel your younger daughters are inappropriate company for my sisters, then they will instruct my sisters to avoid your daughters and to tell all their friends that they should avoid them too." "I'm sure there's no need for that. The misbehavior was Mackenzie's alone. Diana and Claire would never behave that badly, and Mackenzie won't do it again either." "My sisters will be happy to hear that. I know they spend a lot of time with Diana and Claire, and they were initially very happy when they learned I was going on a date with Mackenzie. They thought she'd be an appropriate girl for me. They don't think that now of course, not after they heard about Mackenzie's behavior." "Oh, they heard about it too?" "Unfortunately, yes. They were very embarrassed and concerned. I had to spend quite a long time reassuring them after school. They felt partly responsible, because their thinking Diana and Claire were such good girls led them into encouraging me to go on the date with Mackenzie. Mackenzie's misbehavior has caused quite a lot of upset in my family." "Not as much as it has here! I'm surprised to hear how moral you and your family are. Last night you were freely talking - even joking - about sex, and you defended Diana running around half-naked." I had anticipated this point too, because I was aware that my current strategy of seeming so straitlaced did contrast with my behavior at their home. I countered with, "Sir, first I did NOT defend Diana's attire. I complimented her for her bravery, and then I did my best to teach her why it was inappropriate to express it the way she did, exactly as I would have if one of my sisters misbehaved that way. In no way did I, or do I, defend her running around half-naked. -- "Second, in my family we believe the Devil works in the shadows, so we try to shine light on issues such as sex. We talk about it maturely and sensibly as a family, as it's much easier for us to stay on the decent path in the light. After all, Jesus wasn't afraid of talking about sex." #3: #1: "That's a very mature attitude, young man." #3: "It's the way I've been raised, sir. I learn a great deal of useful information from our family discussions, including that Diana's behavior last night was because she doesn't yet know how to properly react to feelings she's never had before. I just told her much the same thing I heard my mother tell Carol. My little sisters and I spend a lot of time together, so my parents have taught me what to look out for so I can keep them safe. Even safe from themselves, if you understand my meaning?" "I do. That's an unusual thing for parents to trust a young man with." "It's because of how much time I spend with my sisters. My parents think I make an ideal chaperon. Actually there's not much trust required, because my sisters are so well behaved. That's why they're so cautious about their friendships with Diana and Claire now. From what you've said, it sounds safe for them to keep associating with your younger daughters. They'll be relieved by that. Obviously we'll only allow the girls to meet under appropriate supervision outside of school hours for the next few months, but at least they can still remain friends. We're in the middle of a dinner party, so please excuse me hanging up now, sir." #2: #1: I called home to talk with Mom. In general conversation waiting for my date to start, I'd mentioned the Mackenzie situation to Mom and Dad, so they knew enough that all I had to do was update them with the bare outline of the recent conversation, and tell Mom (very politely) what I would like her to do if the Norrises called. I was vague on why I wanted Mom to do what I requested. Unfortunately moms don't like being in the dark, and they've got very suspicious minds, because Mom sternly asked, "Tell me you're not trying to seduce one of Donna's classmates?" #1: #2: "Mom, Donna's Ducklings do things en masse. That's partly why they're called 'Ducklings': because they're always in a group. There is an element of sexy fun in it, because they're at that age when they get giggly crushes easily, but it's harmless fun. Donna's enjoying herself managing them all, and that's a good learning experience for her. It's making her much more popular too, which is good. -- "From my point of view, whether Claire and Diana are included is irrelevant, because Donna and Carol have got heaps of other girlfriends, but I'd like to save them from being excluded by their parents. The Norris parents are horribly judgmental and killjoys, so I'd like to give the girls some outlet. I didn't get around to telling you much about my date, but I'll do it next chance we get. The parents are TERRIBLY repressive, which I'm pretty sure is why Mackenzie flipped her lid the way she did. If they call, and you say what I said, that'll at least keep the options open until we have a chance to talk about it in person." Mom cautiously agreed, conditional on our having a 'chat' soon. ^ [After my phone call, Mr. Norris talked to Mrs. Norris, which spurred them to reopen the issue with Mackenzie, during which the parents mentioned how moral I was. Mackenzie instantly and thoughtlessly objected, "Mark's having sex with HALF THE GIRLS IN OUR CLASS!" thereby putting herself in even hotter water with her parents, regardless of whether or not they believed her, which they didn't. In the face of their disbelief, Mackenzie tried to prove it by showing her parents the website, but the Norris's had neither the patience nor parenting skills, so they didn't let her. Not that it would've mattered much, as the Hong Kong address and the absence of identifying information would have quickly lost her parents' interest. Nor did the Norrises make the effort to find my parents phone number. Mackenzie was obviously such an immoral girl that nothing she said was believed enough to bother checking. If they had called, I'd asked Mom to say something like, "Mark's a VERY moral boy; obviously, as he turned your daughter's immoral propositions down. We asked Mark to resolve this issue with you himself. Did he not explain that to you? So please talk directly with him in the future, and I don't appreciate the implication that you do not trust him. It is your daughter who's immoral, not my son." I doubt Mom would have worded it so firmly if she'd been called, but she wasn't, so that issue was moot.] ^ [As Mom had insisted, I had my little 'chat' with her early the following week. Mom's had a real humdinger ready for me, "What would happen the next time Mrs. Norris takes her daughters to their gynecologist for a check up, and learns that there are fewer virgins in her family than she expected?" I knew what would happen: Mrs. Norris would have a nuclear explosion, would wring confessions from the girls, and I'd be in very deep and angry shit. My conversation with Mom ended almost immediately. Soon afterward I invented a plan to get around the lack-of-obstacle obstacle. I had weeks before I would trust the two girls enough for full-on sex, so the next time I had a chance for a private talk with the girls I'd explain my plan. If they agreed (which they almost certainly would), and if they thought they could carry it off, then I'd get Claire to bust her own hymen. After allowing a few weeks to let Claire heal and things with Mackenzie to be long blown over, Diana would be pretending to do the splits in her bedroom, would bust her own hymen, and would yell for her mother to come because she was bleeding. In the ensuing discussion Claire would tearfully admit that hers had broken months ago doing PE at school, but she'd been too frightened to tell anyone that she wasn't a virgin anymore, because her mother had told her she'd go to Hell forever. If the two girls cried a lot - about going to Hell, or being kicked out of the family, or whatever else Mrs. Norris had doubtless threatened them with - then their mother would spend most of her time trying to reassure them, and the incident should pass without too much difficulty for the girls. I thought it was a good plan, and I had a very good idea how to celebrate its eventual success.] ^ I then called Julia to check my logic for never giving any carding feedback. Julia answered my call with, "Mark, what's wrong?" "Nothing. The date's going better than I expected. I had an idea about something I want to check with you..." I quickly explained my logic, using destructive competitiveness as my prime example. Julia said, "I think you're right. Good thinking." That's the trouble with girls - they're very occasionally logical, just often enough to keep me confused. -- "Some feedback about the date as a whole would still be useful though. That'll help other girls provide dates you enjoy more." "I'm more than happy to do that." [Later Julia told me how pleased she was with my maturity. My problem meant I was more interested in getting good quality friends for all of us out of the far end of the pipeline system, rather than my playing with multiple girls during their competing for me, which had been what Julia had assumed I'd most enjoy doing. Maturity is a damned sneaky thing, as I had no idea when it'd sneaked up on me like that.] ------- Chapter 213: Pipeline Date 1A#1; The Second Half Friday, May 13, 2005 (Continued) I went back to the dining room. "Sorry I took a little longer than I expected. I hope you haven't eaten all the desserts already?" Luckily they hadn't, so we were soon digging into some nice desserts (aren't all desserts nice?). Toward the end, when my mouth wasn't so busy, I said, "I took longer on the phone than I expected because I had an idea about the carding process that I wanted to check with Julia. We'd intended that I would provide quite a lot of feedback at the end of every pipeline date: what the date as a whole was like, plus what each girl did right or wrong. I'm still going to give my impression of the date overall, but now no personal feedback whatsoever, I'll just name which girls get which cards." There were several worried and confused looks. I explained, "It's because I'll be spending so little time with each girl during the pipeline process that it'd be relatively easy for any girl to fake the personality traits I like. If I give feedback, later girls will know more and more about how to act. Not only would that give later groups and advantage over earlier ones, but there's too much chance that the entire purpose of the pipeline would be ruined because I would probably end up choosing a girl who was temporarily acting the way I wanted. I'd much rather get to know each of you as honestly as possible, so I end up in a good relationship at the end." They easily understood what I meant, so I didn't need to say any more, but I added something anyway, "I'm somewhat disappointed that I have to cancel the individual feedback. I'd like to be able to thank and praise the girls who'd done well, and I'd even like to tell the girls who'd made mistakes what their mistakes were, so they could learn from them. I'd just be giving my opinion, but at least it'd be an unbiased and honest opinion. Knowing guys the way I do, I suspect that girls don't usually get honest feedback from us." The girls bemoaned that for a while. "Guys have only two ways of relating to a girl. Doing everything they can think of to get into our panties, or with anger when they get told they aren't getting there." "Or they ignore us," added another girl, "until they strike out with another girl, and then they're suddenly our best friends." "I agree, guys are pathetic. One-track minds the lot of us. Whereas Girls have two tracks: clothes AND makeup!" "And keeping guys out of our panties, so THREE tracks!" "Not all guys," corrected Mia. "Some guy I'd welcome." Mia was looking straight at me, so it wasn't difficult to guess who she had in mind. #1: #3: The other girls were mostly disapproving. By unspoken agreement, there'd been no blatant sexuality all evening, something I agreed with, so Mia's comment stood out. In many other situations it would've been fine, but it was too much of a contrast for this situation. I didn't want to drag the friendly atmosphere down by putting her down too harshly, so I said, "So far I'm enjoying this evening more than I expected. There were large helpings of wonderful food, and it's been enjoyable to talk with girls without having to worry about sexual undertones, let alone overtones. I think that comment of yours went too far, Mia." "Sorry." Mia's apology had been a glum one. She'd either realized she'd gone too far, or she'd run out of ways to attract a boy, because she looked like she'd given up. I said, "To change the subject, one of the phone conversations I had just before dessert was with the parents of a girl who's interested in me. Not any of your parents, you'll probably be glad to know, haha." -- There were a few chuckles from around the table, after which I said, "It amazes me how much parents vary. Julia has great parents, but the parents on the phone were terrible. I imagine there'd be an interesting range of reactions if the parents of each of you walked in and saw us now. Sixteen girls dressed up very nicely and putting a considerable effort into feeding and entertaining one boy is an unusual situation. Carina, do your parents know the full story about tonight?" Carina answered, "They know most of it. I told them we're all interested in you, and rather than competing behind each other's backs we decided to be open about it. They're impressed that we're so sensible and able to cooperate together, but Julia made us do it this way. I didn't say anything about there being other groups either." "So you've been very honest about the small picture, but silent about the big picture. I find that's often the best approach with my parents too. They get confused when they get too much information, haha. What about the parents of the rest of you? How much do they know about tonight, or how would they react if they walked in now?" There weren't many answers, and most of those were fairly brief. The girls looked hesitant and nervous. I ventured, "Let me guess: you're nervous that I'm judging you on your answers?" Nods from around the table. "I guess it is a suspiciously artificial question and you're right that I'm judging you on your answers, but despite that, you should ignore your suspicions and answer as if you don't care. I'll explain in a roundabout way, because I get to talk about breasts again. Specifically about Mia's breasts. Mia started by using her breasts as bait to attract me. Then she made her comment about letting me into her panties, offering another of her sexual organs as bait. Doubtless it's because of my incredible genius that I'm already aware that girls have sexual organs. I'm even fortunate enough to have had experiences with several of them. I think I can say without much chance of being wrong, that they're actually quite a lot of fun." I paused for the giggles, then carried on, "If I was desperate to have sex, the way most guys are, sex would be great bait. But I'm not desperate; I can get as much sex as I want - Julia even had to insist that there be no sex on the early pipeline dates because she thought there was too much risk of it - so sex has lost its power as bait for me. Plus I'm assuming that when I finally choose one or two girlfriends at the very end of the pipeline process, their sexual organs and mine will often be getting together for our MUTUAL enjoyment. Sex is what people do to give pleasure. It shouldn't be used to trick the other person. -- "What could you use as bait for me? Not sex. Large breasts aren't that big a deal for me, as Julia proves. Good cooking is great, but I live at home and am several years away from worrying about the cooking skills of my girlfriends. Money isn't going to work as bait because I have all I need for now." Actually, I wished I had more. -- "The only thing you can use to interest me is your personality. Nothing else has any significant influence. So when I ask you a question - about your parents or anything else - my advice is to answer in a way that best expresses your personality. If I like your personality, and you don't speak up, you risk getting eliminated because I didn't find out enough to realize I would like you. If I don't like your personality, then you're going to get eliminated sooner or later anyway, so you might as well speak up and get it over with." "Can I speak bluntly, Mark?" asked Jessica. "What did I just say about expressing your personality?" I smiled broadly to show there was no sting in it. "Okay. There IS a point in hanging on. It'd be embarrassing to be eliminated early, and the longer we can hang on the better we can get to know you, which might help our chances. I'd also like to last long enough to have sex with you. I've heard how good you are, and I'd like to experience that at least once." A couple more girls gave clear reiterations of the same sentiment. "Good points, Jessica. Julia and I haven't been able to think about every nuance of the pipeline system so it's good to get your thoughts. I understand the embarrassment point, but I'm guessing it won't be as bad as you fear. After Tuesday there'll be sixteen eliminated girls to spread the embarrassment across. In another couple of weeks there'll be another sixteen from the next intake, plus something like twelve more from this intake, making forty four. After another two weeks it'll be more like a hundred girls, so embarrassment is only going to be a short-term problem. I suspect that even in the short term, other girls should hesitate to tease you because they might be eliminated in the first round themselves if they join a group. You've also got the retort that at least you had the courage to try, which is more than the hecklers probably have. -- "Hanging on so you get to know me better sounds good, but I don't think it'll work in practice. Only four of you are going to survive two dates, and almost certainly none of those four will be girls who were keeping a low profile as a way of hanging on. There's also the issue that if you keep quiet, that'll make me think you're a dull girl, which will count against you in all the future eliminations you'll be facing. Compared to the questionable benefit of learning a little bit more about me, the risk of being eliminated makes it a poor strategy. Hanging on to have sex with me has the same problem, although I thank you for your compliment. Sex with me isn't going to happen until the third date at the soonest, but more likely after 1A and 1B are merged. You'll have to be in the top four out of thirty two to reach that date, or maybe even the top two, so I can't see 'hanging on for sex' getting you that far. Girls who survive that long will have done so by showing me that their personalities suit me." "Damn!" "Haha Jessica. Now you're showing your personality, so good for you. Before we get back to my question about your parents, let me say that I do think parents are important. Before I choose my final girlfriends I will meet their parents." That was greeted by some groans. I asked the groaners to explain why they'd groaned, which led to some funny stories, although I felt sorry for the girls who had to live with restrictive or embarrassing parents. I was sent to the den, while the girls did eight on/eight off with the cleaning duties. I spent the last part of the date asking some trickier questions to help me finalize my carding decisions. Questions like, "Whose idea was the structure for tonight's date?" And when the eight girls had changed, I asked the same question again, getting a noticeably different answer. Then, when all sixteen were together later, I asked them to explain the discrepancy. NOT to give me the right answer, but explain why there were two different answers, which was a much harder question. Another question was, "If I told you that I wanted you to collectively decide who got what color cards, how would you do it? Just the how, not the who, because I don't want to start any trouble between you." "I suppose we'd vote." It wasn't hard to point out a couple of fatal flaws in that politically correct idea. "You're meant to be choosing girls based on who I'd like as a girlfriend, but I bet you've all got very different opinions about that, especially because I've been deliberately silent about my preferences. So how could voting about an unknown possibly produce good results? To make it even worse, you're not electing a representative government, but girls you'll be competing further with, so the smart move is to vote for who you think are the worst ones. That's the opposite of what I want to see happen." I said several things to put pressure on them, like threatening to eliminate more than eight if they didn't do a good job, leading one of them to comment, "You're deliberately putting pressure on us." "Exactly right. The entire purpose of this evening is to help find me a good girlfriend, and that includes the ability to handle pressure." I didn't really need a girlfriend who could handle pressure, but it sounded like a good excuse. I was pressuring them so their natural personalities became clearer, especially their competitiveness and ability to work with others, both traits I'd very much like to know which girls had the most of. -- "You're right that I like good food, good conversation and well-dressed, beautiful girls. Mia's right that I like low-cut blouses too. But I need a girlfriend who can do more than those things. I'll give you a hypothetical example. OSU is treating me as a SERIOUSLY important student. Assuming I don't burn out or hit some kind of mental wall first, then when I graduate my Bachelor of Science next year the ceremony at OSU could be a MAJOR event. Let's say I had to go away to do something else while OSU planned my graduation, and that I left my girlfriend - one of you - to represent my interests during that planning. And let's say you saw that I'd strongly dislike what OSU was planning. Your ability to stand up for yourself, to convince others to accept your input, and to handle the pressure of it, would be important. That's why I've got you to do something now that involves the same skills: standing up for yourself, convincing others, and handling pressure." There were an amusing range of reactions, including disbelief, fright and being impressed. I pointed out, "Haha. Some of you said, 'But we're too young to boss adults around, ' and others said I should leave Julia in charge, so you amusingly contradicted each other. Julia certainly wouldn't hesitate to leap forward to defend my interests, but maybe she was away with me doing whatever else I was up to. -- "Maybe I should've given you a less adult example. Let's say that after I pass my final exams at OSU, the Sorbonne University - which I believe is in Paris - invites me to come over to decide whether I want to study there. They'll pay for the airfares and accommodation for four people for a week, so I delegate the job of choosing who to take to one of you. I believe I've heard somewhere that they sell nice clothes in Paris, so maybe some girls would like to come on a free trip to Paris with me. The girl I put in charge of choosing who comes would be inundated with frantic requests. Dealing with a bunch of adults at OSU would be a walk in the park compared to dealing with a horde of Paris-hungry teenage girls, haha. -- "So back to the task I'm testing you with now: designing me a good system for allocating cards. I want to see how you each handle such tasks." They returned to it with a vengeance, clearly motivated by the thought of a free trip to Paris. They taught me more about themselves than I'd learned all evening, which was a decent amount. Even their deciding how to decide anything was interesting. There were HEAPS of opportunities for conflict and cooperation. People are not one-dimensional. That's a statement everyone will readily agree with, but it's still surprising to see how multi-dimensional people are. For example, Carina was one of the most useful girls in the discussion, even though she never suggested a single idea. Her usefulness came from her being helpful to the others in a variety of ways. Some other girls had heaps of ideas, of mixed quality. Another girl took on the role of boss of the discussion. She didn't contribute much to the task directly, but she kept the discussion flowing fairly well so the other girls made progress. She also made sure all the girls got to contribute, and she calmed down the heated moments. There was no 'best' girl, because it was an apples and oranges situation. Was a helpful girl better than an ideas girl, better than a good coordinator, better than someone who was good at fleshing out details, better than someone who was good at finding valid reasons why an idea wouldn't work, etc.? It's MUCH easier to decide between girls based on their tit sizes, haha. I told them to stop before they'd reached an answer, as time was moving on. They were so involved in the issue that they wanted to keep going, but I said, "It was just a way of helping me understand each of you. You're repeating the same behaviors now, so there's no point in carrying on. I don't actually need your system, as I'll be making my own carding decisions. Another reason for stopping now is that we've finished all the delicious snack foods several minutes ago, and you've all been too involved in the discussion to replenish the plates. That's a MAJOR problem, haha." That broke them out of the task AND it got me more snacks, so it'd been an excellent thing to say. I did some other 'tricks' on them. For example, I asked, "Carina, please come and sit on my lap." That was a very surprising thing for me to say as there'd been no physical contact so far, and it caused a variety of reactions among all the girls. I was most looking for any nasty expressions, and I saw several, which was hardly surprising in a competitive situation. I thanked Carina for all the extra work she'd gone to by having this event in her home, gave her some squeezes and a kiss on the cheek, then sent her back to her normal seat. I closely watched how the other girls behaved toward Carina for the next several minutes, and how she behaved toward them, including the ones that appeared upset. At 9:30 I asked, "Carina, would you prefer this date to be over and us all to be gone before your parents come home, or doesn't it matter?" "It doesn't matter. We've done all the cleaning up already, and I'm not worried about them meeting you. They're very curious to meet you, so I wouldn't be surprised if they arrived home early hoping to catch you before you left." I liked her answer, especially that she wasn't embarrassed about my meeting her parents. Carina was already easily in the top half of my list, mostly because of her helpfulness. I'd decided that she wasn't helpful because this date was at her house; but that this date was at her house because she was helpful. "There goes my idea that we all take our clothes off and have a wild orgy for the last twenty nine minutes. I guess sitting around and talking is nearly as good, haha." I was obviously teasing, so I got some lighthearted responses. While being careful not to look at any particular girl with more attention than any other, I announced, "I've finished deciding who gets what cards." No lighthearted reactions to that. "You all tried hard to make this a good date so I suspect the eliminated girls won't be pleased. I honestly don't know how displeased though, because this is my first pipeline date, so I'd like to delay giving the results until Carina's parents are in the house. Not in the room, but elsewhere in the house would be good so their presence would help keep a lid on any adverse reactions. I know I sound egotistical, but you understand my worry, don't you?" They did. There were a couple attempts to cajole individual answers from me, but they were easily refused. I was interested to note that most girls were pessimistic, some didn't reveal their expectation, and only one girl smiled happily. Amusingly the sole optimistic girl was Natalie, who was on my red-card list. Her red-carding and being wrong both had the same cause: her arrogance. To reinforce that the card decisions were finalized - they weren't of course; I just wanted to see how the girls behaved when they thought there was nothing at stake - I said, "I won't give you individual feedback, but I will comment on the date as a whole. As I mentioned before, I think it was an EXCELLENT idea. It was exactly the sort of date I need for a group's first pipeline date. It made it much easier for me to get to know you and to make my decisions than I expected..." I spent a couple of minutes honestly congratulating them, and dishonestly driving home the idea that the date was over. Then I asked, "I was surprised that when I told you I'd made my decisions, that three-quarters of you looked like you were sure you'd lost. I'm only eliminating eight girls, so why were so many of you pessimistic?" We talked about that for a while, and the answer that evolved was, "You're too unusual. We don't know what you want, but we're pretty sure we don't live up to your standards." The next question I asked was, "This date was so well done, I'm curious what this group's second date will be. Have you had any ideas about that?" "No. Half of us won't be in it, and we were focused on this one." "Pity, I was looking forward to anticipating the next date. Seeing as we have time to kill until Carina's parents come home, why don't you start discussing what to do on it, as if each of you were one of the surviving eight." It was hard for them to get started. Natalie - the soon-to-be surprised optimistic girl - was eager, and a few of the other girls joined in, but most of the girls weren't interested and only put in partial efforts, or merely pretended to get involved. A few made no effort whatsoever. I had a few girls in the middle of my list, thus on both sides of and close to the elimination line. They weren't separated by much, so it was possible that a staunch effort by someone just below the line, or a pathetic effort by someone just above it, might've caused a change to the results. But all those girls responded unenthusiastically, so nothing was achieved. The overall effort was so low that I canceled my request. I changed the topic to which of the girls currently had boyfriends, and how they reconciled that with being in the pipeline. There was some hesitation and uncertainty, clearly indicating that some girls didn't want to admit they were cheating on their boyfriends. Another girl said, "It depends on what you count as a boyfriend. I've been out with Cody a couple of times, but mainly just to have someone to go out with. I wouldn't call him a real boyfriend." Many of the girls claimed to be in the same situation. Either a lot of them were using it as an easy excuse, or a large proportion of girls use boys for their own purposes, which would be fair. When it came to reconciling having a boyfriend (real or not) with being in the pipeline, it was usually a case of "What they don't know won't hurt them." Julia's only displaying the girls' initials on the website gave enough anonymity in most cases, especially as many of the boys wouldn't know when the dates were taking place. Kaiya had an amusing answer, "I told my boyfriend I was joining a pipeline group, and he was plenty pissed by it. I remember the words I told him exactly enough: 'If Christina Aguilera knocked on your door, you wouldn't remember my name. Mark's the same for me, so I'm taking my shot at him. You've got two choices: I take my shot and you break up with me, or I take my shot and you don't break up with me. Those are your ONLY two choices. I'll ask you for your decision AFTER my pipeline dates are over. Don't bother me until then.' -- "He's a nice guy - except for his having a thing for Christina Aguilera - but he's stupid if he thinks he's in the same league as you. It'll do him good to be reminded I'm not automatically his, because he's been getting lazy. That's unacceptable in a boyfriend, isn't it girls?" The girls enthusiastically agreed that lazy boyfriends were totally unacceptable, even those who'd denied they had boyfriends. I moved Kaiya one spot higher on my list. She was already safely above the line - unsurprising, given her attitude to me and her forthrightness - but I enjoyed moving her up anyway. The girls were still joking about correct boyfriend behavior when Carina's father called out, "Carina!" from somewhere else in the house. Carina got up, calling, "In the den, Dad." I stood to be ready to greet the parents. They came in, spotted the 'odd man out', and came over to introduce themselves to me. Mrs. Durham said, "So you're the famous Mark Anderson. We've been hearing your name a great deal over the last few weeks." She quickly looked me up and down, then tongue-in-cheek added, "I can see why Carina's so interested in you." I never know how to respond to comments like her first sentence or two, so I tried to joke with Mrs. Durham's joke. "Carina keeps insisting it's because of my personality, but you must know your daughter." I turned to Carina, "Shame on you for claiming your motives were pure." "He's lying, Mom! I never said my interest was pure. He's too yummy for that." Mr. Durham commented, "Yes, I believe you've mentioned that already. So Mark, you've got to choose between sixteen girls?" "Tell me about it! Two and half weeks ago it would have been easy, but now I haven't got a clue how to do it. Back then I was perfectly well-adjusted, normal, teenage boy. Comfortable and secure in my understanding of the world and how it worked. That would have been the ideal time for me to have this choice. But about two weeks ago I must have matured, or something, because I woke up with a horrible suspicion that girls were actually people too, and I couldn't just chase after whatever girl was attached to the biggest breasts in sight. I'm very confused about what to do now. Is there a guidebook somewhere on how to choose the right girl?" "Don't ask me," declared Mr. Durham. "I was the chosen, not the chooser. I didn't have any choice at all, did I dear?" "Nope, and you still don't. I don't think there's any such guidebook, Mark. The market for it is too small, because any guy who matures out of being a teenager - which takes some of them more years than it should - is quickly snapped up and taken out of circulation. You're going to have to figure this one out all by yourself." "I was afraid you'd say that. Fortunately there are some EXCELLENT side benefits involved in the process, such as superb meals." We spent a couple of minutes talking about the food, and all the work the girls had put into cooking it for me. I hadn't bothered before, but I had an easy opportunity to name the two cooks for each of the three desserts, making the girls laugh at their inability to keep that part of their date secret. I added, "Let that be a lesson to you girls, it's impossible for females to keep secrets from guys, and you shouldn't bother to even try." Several people suggested I might've gotten that wrong. That 16-year old girls were already totally and confidently aware of how gullible guys are was not good news for guys. I am MIGHTY glad I've got Julia and Carol looking after my interests so well, pointing out my gullible mistakes and educating me away from them. We chatted with the parents for a few more minutes, then they left us. The atmosphere quieted down immediately. I said, "Yes, it's time for the cards. It's a pity it has to come to this after such a nice date, but I can't see the seventeen of us doing all our dating as one, big block for the rest of our lives, so the numbers have to be reduced. I have eight cards to announce - three red, two orange and three yellow. I hope you're all mature enough to accept the results without unpleasantness and drama?" "We can take it," said one girl, most of the others indicating they could too. "Remember that being eliminated doesn't mean you're bad people, or any such nonsense. It just means you're not ideal for me, according to my entirely subjective and rather unusual tastes, including some strange ideas about my future needs from a girlfriend. All of you can very easily get plenty of other guys, so this is just a tiny blip in your life." They were waiting. -- "Okay. I'll call out the names of the yellows first, then the oranges, then reds. I won't be explaining anything, as I told you all before." -- I took a breath, steeled myself, noted where the exit was in case I had to run for it, then said, "The three yellows are: Alexandra, Daisy and Sophia." "What!" exclaimed Daisy. "I worked for HOURS on your meal. You can't treat me like this!" I said nothing, leaving the thirteen unnamed girls to try to calm Daisy down. But after a couple more comments about my unfairness, she stormed out of the room. The other two yellows were glum, but okay. #2: #3: #2: "The two oranges are: Jasmine and Morgan." Groans, but no histrionics. "The three reds are: Jayden, Mia, and Natalie." Natalie exclaimed, "You've GOT to be joking! You can't be giving ME a red card!" Mrs. Durham entered the room, asking, "What's going on?" Carina explained, "Mark just cut the number of girls in half, and some of them aren't happy. Did you see Daisy running out?" "Yeah. She's good at stomping." "I'll talk with her tomorrow when she's calmed down." Several of the other girls spoke up and said they'd do the same thing too. Mrs. Durham looked at Natalie, asking, "What about you? You seemed upset when I came in." Natalie said, "Umm. I'm okay." She looked at me, asking, "You weren't joking? You're red-carding me?" For Mrs. Durham's benefit more than Natalie's, I said, "Yes Natalie. I'm sorry. You're beautiful, but there are other traits I'm more interested in. I did warn you that I have some strange ideas. You'll have no trouble at all finding a boyfriend though; half the guys in school would fall all over themselves for the chance." "More than half," suggested Victoria, who was ignored. "I know THAT, but I want you! I can't understand why you'd reject me. Most guys would love to be my boyfriend, so why not you?" "It's a matter of taste Natalie, so it's totally subjective. For some hard to say reason you don't appeal to me. Maybe it's because you're too beautiful. It would be scary having a girlfriend as beautiful as you; it's very intimidating." "You really think that?" asked a happier Natalie. "That's my guess. Not that I'm comparing your personalities at all, but I didn't respond to Annette Neumeyer's beauty either, and she was also exceptionally beautiful. I did warn you that I'm strange." Natalie seemed willing to believe it was all my fault, so we appeared to have calmed that potential problem. Mrs. Durham asked her daughter, "You seem happy, Carina. I'm guessing Mark didn't find you intimidatingly beautiful?" With a large smile on her face, Carina answered, "My deficiencies have helped me this evening." "Well done. I'll leave you to it again." Mrs. Durham left the room. Sophia, one of the yellow-carded girls, asked, "Mark, I know you said you wouldn't give feedback, but I'd REALLY like to know what I did wrong so I can avoid making the same mistake next time?" "I feared a yellow-carded girl would ask that. I give a yellow card if I think the girl can do better, and it's obviously better for me if she does improve, so I'd like to answer you. The problem is that there are going to be dozens of yellowed girls, so if I give them advice then the wider population of girls is going to learn far too much, and future girls will put on false acts to compensate. -- "If a girl tries hard enough, as most of you did tonight, it's going to come down to how well our personalities match, rather than whether you did anything 'right' or 'wrong'. If you try again, then the only advice I can give you is to be yourself as much as possible. Don't try to behave 'right' if it's not true to your personality. All that'd do is delay your elimination by a few dates. It's better for everyone if we just be ourselves." Sophia said, "I already know your personality matches what I want. It's only whether you like me enough." "I understand you feel that way - otherwise you wouldn't be in a pipeline group - but it's not entirely true. Most of you don't know me very well, so when you do get to know me you might find I'm not such a good catch for you after all. That's one of the reasons why I talked about using the pipeline to find more than one girlfriend. In reality there might be three or four girls left when the pipeline system is declared finished, and I'll date those girls until we find out which pairing works out best for me and the girl." That justification for ending up with more than one girl hadn't occurred to me before, but it was a good one. I made a mental note to use it in the future. -- "I don't want to be rude, but I'd like to leave now. I've got several more things I have to do tonight, and I've got a very busy weekend ahead of me too. May, can you give me a lift home now please?" "Sure. Happy to." Natalie said, "I think you're making a mistake, Mark. I can easily make you want me. At least change my result to yellow so I can join another group." "If I'm making a mistake, then I'll live with the consequences. Not to mention that it'd be a mess if girls knew they could talk me into changing the color of their cards. The decision to give you a red card has to stay as it is, for better or for worse. You weren't my girlfriend a week ago, and you aren't my girlfriend now, so life goes on exactly as before." Carina asked, "Do you want some leftovers, Mark? We've got plenty, and it was cooked for you." "And wonderfully cooked too! Normally I'd leap at the chance for some high quality leftovers - because there never seems to be enough food in our fridge at home, haha - but I'm going away this weekend so I won't get a chance to eat it. I'll turn your offer down with a very sincere, 'Sorry'." "Okay. I'm sorry about something too: I'd like to come with you when May drives you home, but I'd better stay here to help see everyone off." "I understand. It's a somewhat awkward way to end a date, but I have to rudely leave immediately, as I'm already worried about running later than I expected to be. Goodnight to all of you. Thank you for a pleasant evening, except for the unavoidable bit at the end. To the girls I carded, one cheery thought is that there are a very large number of girls lined up to get into a pipeline group, which means there are heaps of lonely boys at school at the moment. You've almost got your pick of all the other boys at school, so have some fun with that. To the eight girls who did meet my strange criteria, an extra big 'thank you', and I look forward to your #2 date. Goodnight all." I left the room quickly out. They all followed me, of course, but at least I was heading in the right direction. I had to stop to thank Mr. and Mrs. Durham. Mr. Durham said, "I understand you've just told half the girls to give up on you?" "That's correct, sir." "Based on how much you liked the girls, correct?" "Actually that's partially true, but somewhat simplistic. There were other factors beyond that." "Such as what, Mark?" "If I saw a girl I liked removing money from my wallet, she'd be unsuitable." "Good answer. My intended question was about Carina. I understand she's still in the running in your unusual competition?" He had no idea how unusual. "Yes, sir." "I hope you're not leading Carina on because this was done in her house? She's very interested in you, and that would be unfairly cruel." "DAD! You don't need to do this. Mark wouldn't treat anyone like that." I could see that her mother and father would still like to hear the answer though. They were nice people, and their concern was a reasonable one. I didn't want to answer in front of the girls though. I looked at the girls, saying, "I'm going to answer Mr. Durham's question, but for reasons previously discussed I don't want any of you to hear the answer. All of you please go back to the den. Quickly, because I don't have time to waste." The only time fifteen girls ever go anywhere quickly is when there's a really great clothing sale on. Even worse this time, because it sounded like my answer was going to be interesting. Predictably they dragged their heels, my "quickly" statement having somehow escaped their notice. I added, "I'm watching eight of you with particular attention. Eight is still far too many, so drag your heels at your peril." That got them motivated. While they were leaving, I joked to the parents in response to the looks on their faces, "There are very few opportunities I get to order girls around and have them do anything other than laugh at me, so I rather enjoyed that. I'm pressed for time, so I'll save some by saying that Carina can explain why I don't want any of the girls to hear my answer. -- "'Am I leading Carina on?' No. I have the luxury of choosing from sixteen girls, so I simply chose the eight best tonight. The survivors and I will have future dates fairly regularly, and I'll continue to halve the number of remaining candidates. I don't want to lead someone on who's not suitable for me because that'd mean bumping out a girl who was. That'd reduce my chance of choosing the best girl for me at the end. -- "'Was Carina retained because this was put on in her house?' In part, yes, but not for the reason you fear. Unless my guess is wrong, the reason the date occurred in this house is because Carina helpfully volunteered the use of it. I saw plenty of evidence of Carina's helpfulness tonight, above and beyond her role as hostess. She's a helpful girl, which says all sorts of good things about her personality, so that's the major reason why she's in the top eight. There are other reasons too but none of them are relevant to your question. -- "I'd appreciate your not telling Carina what my answer is. She'd almost certainly become self-conscious about her helpfulness, and I'd also have to largely ignore it as a factor because it'd no longer be a reliable indicator of her true personality. You'd be canceling what I think of as one of her major advantages, okay?" "That's a subtle point." "I have to choose between sixteen girls. Subtlety is essential, because they are gosh darned tricky things to try to understand at the best of times. If they knew my decision-making processes, they could totally fake me out. I don't want to be rude, but I still have heaps of things I need to do tonight and it's after 10 now. I'm sure Carina can answer any other questions you've got. I'll go get the girls now?" He nodded, so I trotted off to get the girls and to resume our departure. On our way past her parents, Carina asked her father, "What'd Mark say?" Mr. Durham answered, "He said, 'Don't be silly, it's because Carina's got nice tits.'" "Ha! I haven't shown them to him - YET! Haha. Not that the sight would have much affect on Mark; he's too mature to get worked up about breasts." "I strongly object to that slur on my character. I DO get worked up about breasts. They combine fantastically with my other favorite thing in the world." Carina couldn't resist, "I'll bite, what is your other favorite thing?" "PIZZA!" "How on Earth can you combine pizza and breasts?" "You rub pizza on your breasts and I lick it off! What could be better than that? The hot cheese can be a bit tricky though; you need to be careful about that." "Ouch! I didn't know you were a pervert, Mark." "You see perversion; I see an efficient way of combining two very enjoyable activities. Unfortunately I don't have time to debate the issue now. Goodnight, Mr. and Mrs. Durham. Thank you for the use of your home. Goodnight girls, see you at school next week." I finally got out the door, accompanied by May, Kaiya and Aaliyah, who were going to drive home with me. We talked nonstop for the short journey. They girls were all buzzed by having survived the first elimination, and had plenty to talk about. "Do you really like eating pizza off girls' breasts?" "A hell of a lot more than off guys' breasts! But I must confess I've never actually done it. It was just a joke that appealed to my silly and possibly perverted sense of humor. It's NOT a hint for what I want in my second date with you girls, so please think of something else for that." "I don't think we would've decided on that, but thanks for the warning." They spent some time trying to fish for reasons for their survival or other girls' cardings. I gave them nothing, instead telling them to give it up, then changed the subject by asking, "Why did you tell Julia you'd pick me up and drive me back, rather than letting me drive myself?" "Julia said we should do as much as possible for you on the date so you can concentrate on getting to know all of us, so we included chauffeuring in that." "I guess it does give me some extra time to talk with you. But what would've happened if I'd red-carded you, May? You might not have wanted to drive me home. Or maybe you'd want to drive me into a tree!" "We had a couple of other possible drivers lined up. It wasn't likely you'd card all of us, but if you did, we could've gotten you a taxi." "I originally assumed it was something the date required, but I think I'd rather drive myself in the future. Tonight I'm only going home to pick up my car, and then I have to drive somewhere else. It would have been quicker for me to drive directly there from the Durham's if I'd had my car. I don't think the extra little bit of conversation makes enough difference to matter." "Oh, sorry." "No need to apologize. You were following Julia's instructions to the best of your ability - which I've learned is a VERY wise thing to do, haha. There are bound to be unanticipated issues with the pipeline system. I'll get Julia to put quite a few of the things I said to you on the website for all the other girls to read, so I don't have to repeat them every time. Especially what I said at the very beginning and at the very end." "About liking to eat pizza off girls' breasts?" "Now I'm getting hungry AND horny. And before any of you volunteer for a naughty addition to our date, I'm unfortunately also in a hurry." "Rats!" complained Kaiya. I joked, "Did you want a pizza too?" "If I could suck it off your cock. Mind the hot cheese though, haha." "Truly OUCH! That puts me off the pizza part, but I still like the idea of you sucking my cock though." "Just say the word!" "All in good time Kaiya. I'm not going to do anything extra with any of the girls who're in an active pipeline group. That's probably not on the website, but it should be pretty obvious. We are trying to make the process fair, which is another reason why I should drive myself, so none of the other girls get upset about a few girls getting some private time with me before and after the date." Kaiya said, "Back to the cock-sucking. It's surprising to hear you talk like that, because you were so non-sexual during the date. If I didn't know your reputation, I'd have thought you weren't into sex." "I'm happy to confirm that I'm VERY into sex, but it seems best to keep it out of the big pipeline dates. When sex starts, pretty much everything else stops, making it harder for me to learn much about your personalities. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually believe personalities are more important than bodies. Please don't repeat that to anyone, because it's very embarrassing." Aaliyah asked, "You'd rather talk with sixteen girls than have sex with them?" "At the same time you mean?" Aaliyah nodded. "I've only got one pair of eyes, two hands, one mouth and one cock - although I'm told it's a very nice one. If I've got sixteen naked girls around me, I have to take my eyes off one of them to look at another one. Same with hands, lips, etc. All I'm doing is moving from one body to another, which is pointless exercise if I don't know any of the girls well enough to differentiate them from each other. I might as well be having sex with sixteen identical clones, or sixteen hundred. It makes no difference if there's no emotional difference between them." #1: #3: #4: #3: #4: "There aren't many guys as mature as you. Most of them think more is better." "I've got an unfair advantage. I just need to imagine my life if I had two or more Julias. More is NOT better when you know you can barely stand up to one!" "Is the big, strong man afraid of the tiny, little girl?" "Yes." "Haha." May pulled up next to my car then asked, "Any chance of goodnight kisses?" "Sure. Kiss each other as much as you want. Thanks for the lift and the enjoyable date. Goodnight girls." I got out of May's car and into mine, waving to the girls as they drove off. ------- Chapter 214: Lily's Sexual Servitude Celebration Friday, May 13, 2005 (Continued) I called Lily. "Hi Lily, it's Mark here. It's half an hour later than I thought we'd start, so do you still want to have your sex celebration?" "YES! I outside Julia's now. Very hope you come soon." "Haha. Okay, I'll come now. See you in a few minutes." I hung up, started the car, and sped toward Julia's. I was feeling horny from all the pretty girls at the pipeline date, the cock sucking talk with Kaiya, anticipation of the flying bed fun in a few hours, and from anticipating some full-on sex with Lily. I was so horny I probably went one, or for short bursts, possibly even two miles per hour over the speed limit. I slowed down when I got near Prof's home, in fear of him seeing me behave so wildly. My headlights showed Lily standing impatiently beside her car. She had my car's door open before I had the engine turned off, then her lips glued to mine while I was still reaching for the seatbelt latch. By the time I was ready to get out of the car, she was fully in it, on my lap and kissing me passionately. It was difficult to talk with her tongue in my mouth, and she was far too worked up to listen anyway. Lily's a small girl, so I rotated myself ninety degrees to get my legs out of the car, then inched myself forward enough that I could stand up while holding her under her ass. I pushed the car door closed with my ass, then used NP through the window to push the door's lock down. Lily was far too involved in kissing me to notice the NP use. Lily was SERIOUSLY horny, far more so than I'd ever seen her before. She was possibly even hornier than I'd ever seen Julia, Carol or Ava, and there have been times when I've seen each of them VERY horny indeed. I could easily smell Lily's need, even though we were outside in the otherwise fresh air. I carried her to the Williams' front door, while she kept kissing and trying to rub her pussy against me. I had to take one hand off her squirming ass to unlock the door, then I started walking up to Julia's room. "Faster!" It's very difficult to jog upstairs carrying a writhing sex maniac who has her tongue down your throat, but I was motivated enough to try my best. In Julia's room I lowered Lily toward the floor, saying, "You need to take your clothes off." She didn't need to be told twice. Even once had probably been unnecessary. Her dress was off before I'd bent over far enough to reach my shoes. Fortunately their velcro patch made them very quick to remove. Lily was naked before I had my socks off, telling me, "Faster!" She danced from foot to foot impatiently as I started undoing my shirt. Her hands darted for my belt. Thanks to our combined efforts I was soon shirtless, with my pants and underwear around my ankles. That was good enough for Lily - she pushed me onto the bed and leaped on top of me. I was still kicking off my pants when she had her hand firmly around my firmness and was lowering herself onto me. She dropped straight down onto my cock, and the lake of liquid between her legs made my cock slide home without the slightest of frictional hang-ups. My cock's dryness neither mattered nor lasted long. Lily started driving herself back and forth on my cock, with an increasing look of joy on her face. Lily started quickly and never looked back. She fucked herself on me, faster and faster, bringing herself off less than two minutes after she'd started. When she caught her breath, Lily asked eagerly, "You, umm..." She used her two hands to mime an explosion. "The word you want is 'cum'. Or you could say 'orgasm' too. And, no, I didn't cum. You were too fast for me; I need time to warm up." I could've cum if I'd wanted to, but there'd been no need to do anything other than let nature take its course so far. Plus I had a feeling that Lily's excitement was going to last for quite a while, so I was more likely to need go-slows than go-cums. "{Giggle}, I 'warm up' in car long time. Am very warm, haha." "Good. Let's try this position then." I rolled her over, and started having the first of what turned out to be several very vigorous wicked ways with her. Lily was VERY enthusiastic and you can't beat having an enthusiastic girl in bed, except obviously by having several enthusiastic girls in bed. When it comes to sex, what I most like a girl to do, and what Lily did exceptionally, is be happy. Many times when girls have decided to hit on me, they slither up to me, look me in the eyes, and breathlessly offer, "I'll do ANYTHING you want." That's what most of them consider their ultimate selling line, as if letting me "do anything" was a big deal. I haven't bothered mentioning it, but I still get hit on quite often. When I see a sexily dressed, older, beautiful girl swaying her way directly toward me - clearly believing that her exuded sexuality makes her irresistible - I know there's a high chance she's going to offer to let me do "anything" I want. It's become boringly predictable and I've got about a 90% success rate at guessing which girls are going to say it; it's the ones who believe they're doing me a favor by offering their body to me. Their inflated egos are such a turnoff. Sometimes I'm tempted to say, "Good! The last girl I chained to the wall and whipped complained too much about the pain, blood loss and scars. I'm glad you're volunteering to replace her." Unfortunately, tempting as that tease is, I don't want to get a reputation for doing that. I don't need "anything." All I want is what any guy ordinarily wants. Nothing exotic or over the top, just good, old fashioned fucking, maybe some anal as a diversion for when a girl's pussy has had too much fucking over the previous hours and so needs a rest, plus plenty of threesome or foursome bisexual action - just ordinary stuff that any girl can easily do. What makes a girl's company in bed special for me is not whether she'll do "anything", but whether she shows lots of enjoyment for that ordinary stuff. Lily was enjoying herself so much she was almost glowing with happiness. She LOVED serving me, and got a huge thrill out of doing her job properly. She did her job properly so many times that she drained me dry. To be more accurate, I drained myself dry because it was a lot of fun seeing the pleasure Lily got each time she brought me off. Lily enjoyed my cumming FAR more than Julia, Carol or Ava do. Apparently making the man cum is a very important part of a Chinese serving girl's job, which was one of the few things that made sense given what she'd told me about relaxing the man. I fucked Lily very vigorously. In part to give her the enjoyment she loved so much, in part because I had little choice as she was a wildcat for more fucking, and also because my main girls were waiting up for me at Ava's. I impressed by Lily's enthusiasm, happiness, dedication, vigor, and most of all, her endurance. She lasted for two hours of nonstop, high-energy sex. It wasn't just general sex (kissing, fondling, going down on, etc.), but full-on, nonstop fucking. All Lily wanted to do was fuck. She'd been past the need for foreplay before I'd gotten out of my car, plus she insisted that it was her job to bring me off, not my job to pleasure her, and who was I to argue. But after the two hours, she'd clearly reached the point where it hurt her to move. Her pussy was bruised, her muscles were strained and sore (especially her smile muscles). She gingerly spread her legs, winced, then hopefully asked, "Again, yes?" "I think you've had enough. And you've drained me dry. I'm sure I couldn't cum again." I could, of course, as often as I wanted to issue go-cum commands. There'd be virtually nothing to show for them though, as I was drained and my body would need several hours to replenish its supply. "No more cum?" "No. You've got every drop I had. You did an EXCELLENT job of it. You were amazingly eager to have sex, far more so than the other times I've been in bed with you." "Serving you VERY important. I LOVE make you cum!" "Haha. Yes, I noticed that. I enjoyed our session very much, but I think we'll stop now. I can't cum anymore, so we have to stop." Lily was lying on her back, so she didn't actually move, but her whole body slumped as she sighed and relaxed. Her body was extremely relieved that it was all over. "Will you be okay to drive home?" I needed to know that, because I was intending to fetch my main girls back here. "Little rest, then okay." "I'll have a quick shower then. Do you want a shower? I can carry you, if you want?" "No shower. Rest then home. Thank you." "Are you sure. You're VERY messy? You'll make a mess in your car." "No matter. You shower; I rest." Lily weakly waved me away, so I went to have a shower. I took a dry towel back to the bedroom with me, for Lily to sit on in her car. She was overflowing with liquid from her own arousal and all my cums, so she'd soon end up sitting in a puddle in her car if she didn't use a towel. She was still lying on the bed. After I dressed, Lily requested that I dress her where she lay. I picked up her panties from the floor and put them over each of her feet, and pulled them up for her. Same for the dress, coming from the other direction. Lily said, "Oh, I forgot." She pulled her packet of pills out of her dress's pocket, showing me the requisite number had been used. "Haha. It's a bit late to show me now. I never thought you'd forget, especially not after going all the way to Hong Kong and back to be ready for me. Don't worry about it." I gathered up everything I needed for myself, then carried Lily down to her car, one arm under the back of her legs holding the towel too, the other arm under her shoulders. Lily keyed the remote door opener for me. When I held her close enough to, she physically opened the door, and then threw the towel onto the seat. I maneuvered her into the car and placed her on her seat. "Are you sure you'll be okay to drive?" "Is okay. Again Sunday night, yes?" "Haha. It's the same answer as last time you asked: 'I don't know.' I'll call you when I want to. I enjoyed myself tonight so it should be fairly soon. Maybe not for so long though." "I serve you anytime, any long." "Yes, I know Lily. Your serving me is 'number one important'." "VERY number one important, haha. Thank you Mark. I am VERY happy I serve you so much. Mother, Father very happy too." I hoped she wasn't going to tell her parents what it sounded like she was going to tell them, but I didn't have a hope of understanding what was going on with them, so it wasn't worth discussing. "Okay. Goodnight. Drive carefully." I watched her as she started up and drove off, to make sure she could. She drove fine. It was just after 1am, so I didn't call Julia in case she was asleep. I just her a text: "Okay I come get you now?" I got straight back, "Yes pls." They were all waiting outside for me when I arrived, Ava with a bag containing what she'd need for the next few days. After the greetings, the first thing Julia said was, "How was the pipeline date?" "Hang on, Julia. Before we drive off, Ava, do you have everything you need?" "Yes thanks." "Including the sexy little bikini you bought the other day that you've very meanly not let me see yet?" "Nah. I just borrowed one of Mom's old swimsuits. That's okay isn't it?" "For your sake I hope so, otherwise you'll be walking along that beach naked." "Haha. I'll take the risk. I think you'll like what I've got packed." "Good. In that case I can move on to less important matters, like the pipeline date..." I started driving home, telling the girls the details of the date, especially including the cardings. When I'd finished, Carol said, "You left out the MOST important details Mark, what were all the girls wearing? Haha." "All of them were wearing clothes. Are there any more questions I can helpfully answer?" They had questions about all sorts of stuff I never would have thought to include in my summary. What a surprise. The questions lasted all the way to Julia's. When we got upstairs, and she saw the bed, Julia exclaimed, "How can two people make that many wet spots! I'll get some fresh sheets." Julia delegated the sheet changing to Carol and Ava, while Julia and I updated the pipeline website, putting Y, O, or R alongside eight of the girls' names, with the date feedback being, "Home-cooked 6-course dinner for 17, Soccer DVD in background, lots of conversation in foreground. Captured spirit of #1 date excellently. Enjoyable." Julia thought she'd finished until I said, "I also gave three or four little speeches to the girls that should be included in the standard documents, so I don't have to repeat them every time." Julia checked, "It'd take a fair while to type them up?" "Yeah. Forty five minutes or so, I'd guess." "It's too late now, so they can wait until we return. I'm a faster typist than you, so I'll type them, if you write them down on paper sometime soon. The flight will take a couple of hours either way, so that'll give you plenty of time." "It's going to be a little difficult writing while both my hands are full of naked girls while we're rolling around on the bed. Maybe we could stop the shopping a few hours early to work on it together?" "I'd like to help you, but it's my wedding anniversary and girls can't do paperwork on that day. Maybe we could skip going to Venice Beach on Sunday?" "Or maybe I'll get up earlier and type it up for you. Now that I think about it, it's about time I learned to type properly." "Good idea. It's the only useful physical skill I can think of that you do poorly, so you should make the effort to learn it better. There are programs you can download that help you learn to type. Google for one of them when you get up." We went back to the bedroom. Carol and Ava had finished making the bed, and were in the process of getting into it. Being the observant guy that I am, I noticed that they were both naked, so I stripped and moved around to the side of the bed that meant I wouldn't be next to Carol, as that issue wasn't due to be resolved for another twenty hours yet. "No Mark," corrected Ava. "You go on the other side." "But that'd put me next to Carol. Wouldn't it be better for me to be between my girlfriends?" "Carol wants to talk with you about something." "We'll have plenty of time to talk on the plane tomorrow. It's a two hour flight." I resumed getting into the 'wrong' side. "It's private, so she has to tell you now. Carol's very nervous about it, so it'd be better if you were holding her when she was talking." I looked at Carol, "Do you want me to sleep next to you?" Carol answered, "Ava says I have to tell you something." "It's important?" "Ava says it is. I think I'd rather not talk about it though." "Carol!" exclaimed Ava. "You've GOT to tell him." "You really think so?" sighed Carol. "YES! It could be the most wonderful thing you could do for your life." I said to Carol, "It sounds like you should tell me then, and I'm getting cold standing here, so I'll come around to your side." Once I was snuggled between Carol and Julia, facing Carol, she started, "Donna blurted out my secret a couple of weeks ago, about my starting to think about you as a boyfriend..." "I remember, although I'm trying not to. Obviously you'll get over it. Hopefully soon, because it can't be comfortable for you." "Umm. I'm not really getting over it, Mark." Carol paused, looked over my shoulder at Ava on the other side of the bed, asking, "Ava, are you sure I should do this?" "YES! You've got to! It's SUPER-fantastic. It's the best thing EVER!" "{Sigh}. I'm too scared. What about you Julia, what do you think?" Julia answered, "Ava seems very sure, and she's willing to take responsibility for her actions." "I am! I am! I KNOW I'm right. Do it, Carol, PLEASE. Trust me; everything will work out wonderfully for you. And for Mark too." "{Sigh}. Okay, I guess. But this is all your doing, Ava." "I KNOW I'm right. You two are perfect together. ANYONE can see that!" "If you say so." Turning to me, Carol said, "I'm not really getting over my feelings, Mark. They're getting stronger. Just a little bit though." "CAROL! Tell him the truth! It's a LOT more than, 'just a little bit'." "{Sigh}. Like Ava says, I'm liking you more. Sometimes I can't help myself wanting to do things with you." "You mean like you were my real girlfriend? Go on dates to the movies and stuff like that?" "Yeah. That's what I mean." "But you go out with me already. You mean you want dates with just you and me alone?" Ava didn't have enough patience for this game. Not at the best of times, but certainly not now that she was so excited. "Mark, Carol wants to do PHYSICAL things with you. Not just go on dates..." "Ava!" exclaimed Carol. "I wasn't ready to say that yet." "You'll NEVER be ready. I have to keep pushing you or you'll do nothing." I asked, "You want to do 'physical things' Carol? You mean like bowling?" Ava couldn't stand it any longer, "Argh! I can't believe how thick you are! She wants to have SEX with you! Real honest-to-goodness sex. She wants you to fuck her. She wants to be your lover exactly like Julia and I are. The three of us all want to sleep with you, have sex with you, and everything else, as often as we can. All together or individually. Do you get it?" With shock, I asked Carol, "Really? Sex and everything?" "I'm sorry Mark, but I do, a little bit." Ava wasn't going to let Carol backslide, "Stop saying, 'just a little bit.' You want to be his lover just as much as Julia and I do; maybe even more!" I interrupted, "It doesn't really matter, Ava. I've never thought of Carol that way, so I can't do anything about it." "We know. That's why I thought we should tell you before the trip, to give you time to get used to it." "I don't understand. What's the trip got to do with this?" "Because it'll be the perfect time for you and Carol to become lovers. We'll be miles away from any parents, with complete freedom and no worries about being caught or anything like that. We'll all be in good moods, and it'd be a wonderful thing to do." "There's a big problem. Or maybe I should say a small problem. To put it bluntly, I'm not going to be able to get hard, so it ain't gonna happen." "{Giggle}. Don't worry, I've already got a plan for that. And it's going to work too. I've been watching you carefully, and you're not angry or upset even a little about Carol wanting you." "Of course not. I wouldn't get angry about being loved, even if it's in a way a sister doesn't normally love her brother. But not being angry is a long way away from being able to make love to someone." With a big smile on her face, Ava announced, "Leave that to me. I'm going to make this work." I could see that Carol and Julia didn't know what Ava had in mind, but I didn't think it mattered. All we were trying to do was get Ava to feel responsible for getting Carol and me together, which she was now proudly beaming about doing. Julia said, "I guess we'll wait and see, although I think 'not see' is what will happen, as Mark can be very hard to convince sometimes. From the state of the sheets when we arrived, Lily didn't have any difficulty convincing you to have sex with her, Mark?" "That's for sure! She didn't give me a choice anyway, she was all over me from literally the moment I arrived. Almost before I'd parked, she had the car door open and was leaping on top of me. She would've had sex in the middle of the street if I hadn't carried her into the house and up here. She was WILD for it! She enjoyed the sex we had other times, but this evening she was an entirely different, sex-mad, person. I bet she's going to be sore tomorrow." "Sounds like you had a good time." "I was too busy to count, but I probably had a dozen good times. The 'Chinese serving girl' thing is pretty amazing. It's changed Lily's attitude to sex enormously. She was entirely focused on giving me the best time she could. That was far more important to her than her own orgasms. She had them, but they were incidental; even a distraction sometimes. Her happiness was almost entirely dependent on my having a good time, so - funnily enough - I had a VERY good time, haha." "She's a strange girl," opined Julia. "I'd suspect she was trying to steal you away from us, but there's no sign of any jealousy, anger, or anything like that." "I pretty sure that's not it. She's never made the slightest hint of wanting me to herself. It's an entirely one-way relationship. She serves me, and I don't do anything for her. It's weird, but so far it's working well. I'm ESPECIALLY pleased that my ring, watch and phone are so stylishly color coordinated." "Haha. Good boy, now you're learning. Wild sex only lasts a few hours, but being stylish lasts for months." It was possible for us to have a really silly conversation now, but the girls would need all their sleep for the busy day they were going to have tomorrow, so I suggested, "Maybe we should get to sleep. It's nearly 2am now, and it'd be sad if you ran out of energy before you'd been into every Rodeo Drive store." They agreed that'd be very sad, so I reached over to squeeze Ava's nipple to turn the lights off. I hadn't gotten around to asking them anything about their visit with Ava's parents, so I made a mental note to do that when doing so wouldn't risk making them too tired for shopping. Julia asked, "Please wake us at 6, Mark." Groans issued from Ava and Carol, although I'm sure they knew every step of the itinerary. "Sure. Goodnight darlings." I waited for the echoes, then went to sleep. ------- Chapter 215: Flying to Rodeo Drive; Bad Use of a Bed Saturday, May 14, 2005 I woke at 5:55am. Julia's idea that I start to learn to type wasn't going to happen this morning as we'd talked for too long after her suggestion. I had to wake the girls up almost immediately, Pat was due to arrive at 6:30, and we were meeting Alexis and Katelin at the plane at 6:45. The plane would wait for us all day if necessary, but every minute we were late was a minute less of shopping, and therefore a tragic and irrecoverable loss. When I'd brought Lily into the room, I'd seen three small suitcases beside the bedroom door. I'd asked Julia about them before we'd gone to sleep, and she'd confirmed my guess that she and Carol had packed for the three of us before Ava had picked them up, laughingly adding that all our swimsuits were packed, including my Speedos. So all we needed to do was get up, get dressed, have a quick breakfast, drop our bags in the car, and head off, preferably with Pat. I hadn't asked Julia what would happen if Pat didn't arrive on time. I could guess, and I further guessed that Julia had told Pat exactly what the consequence would be, so I doubted Pat would be late. All three girls were sound asleep, Ava being the one that I most wanted to be that way. I gently woke Carol, kissing her mouth so she wouldn't wake Ava, and because I like kissing her. When she was conscious enough, I quietly spoke, "Happy anniversary, my wife." She loved hearing that! I got a beaming smile, a hug, and a very nice kiss. Carol broke contact to quietly ask, "Ava?" "Asleep. I'll know a couple of seconds before she wakes up enough to listen to us." "In that case, happy anniversary, my Lord. I love you very, very much." I gave her a beaming smile, a hug and another very nice kiss. Then I said, "Let's wake our wife." I rolled over to wake Julia the same way I had Carol, for the same two reasons. Carol had moved up the bed, to see over my shoulder. While I was still kissing Julia, Carol said quietly, "Happy anniversary, my wife." I broke off my kiss to say the same thing. Julia answered, "Happy anniversary, my wife and Lord," proving she wasn't fully awake, or she would have put "Lord" first. Carol kissed Julia, then we all kissed each other again, including an appropriate, long and very enjoyable three-way kiss. Julia said, "Damn that we don't have more time. I'd love to spend some time making love to you two now." "Me too," from Carol and me. "{Sigh}," from Julia. "Wake Ava with a kiss, Mark. Start her day nicely." "Wouldn't my kissing her awake AND her going to Rodeo Drive be too much pleasure for any girl to handle in one day?" "Haha. I'm sure she'll enjoy trying to manage." Julia moved to give me easier access to Ava, so I leaned over to kiss her awake. When she was, I broke the kiss, "Good morning, Ava. Welcome to Shopping Day!" "YAY! I'm looking forward to that!" "One thing I'm sure of is that you're a female, so of course you are." "Haha. And happy anniversary to you and Julia too!" "Thank you," x 2. Carol couldn't participate in that little conversation, but she gave me a hug under the sheet. "Time to get up!" urged Julia. "Let's get cracking; we've got a big day ahead of us." Energized naked girls leaped out of bed, eager for the big day to get to the good part. Julia had my clothes for the day already planned, so they were quickly thrown at me. Thrown, because Julia was in a hurry because she was fully aware that every minute we were late would be a tragic and irrecoverable loss of very valuable shopping time. She also threw me the bag of money, saying, "Guard that with your life. It's VERY important, and it'd ruin our whole weekend if you lost it." "Thanks very much." Everything went according to plan, although noisier than I'd expected because the girls were so excited. Actually I was too, but I suspected their excitement wasn't due to very soon having sex in a bed while flying in a luxury jet. Pat arrived ten minutes early, her weekend's clothes and etc. (girls carry an amazing amount of etc.) in a backpack because she'd come by bike. I was still eating, so Julia put Pat's bike in the garage. They returned to the kitchen and chatted with each other and me while I finished my breakfast. Ava asked Pat, "What did your parents think of your leaving the house so early?" "They're still asleep. I told them last night we'd be leaving early, but I didn't tell them how early. I left them a note saying I got too excited about the shopping trip, so I've gone to Julia's early. They think I'm a little crazy about shopping, especially Dad, so they'll get a laugh out of that." I resisted making several very tempting comments, concentrating on eating my breakfast. I didn't want to be responsible for being even a minute late, because that'd be a tragic and irrecoverable mistake, and probably an unforgivable one. Vanessa came down at 6:30, to wish us a "Happy anniversary" - discreetly managing to include Carol - and to see everyone off. And, I suspect, to share in the excitement because the girls were getting pretty buzzed by now. She helpfully said, "Leave the dishes; you don't want to be late." It was more than my life was worth to insist that we could do them, and none of the girls felt inclined to protest, so Vanessa's offer was accepted without a word of reluctance. We loaded up the car and set off five minutes early, all of them urging me on. Julia saying, "We should've let Ava drive. She goes faster." I'd been told they'd be waiting for us to the left of the terminal, so I parked on the extreme left of the public parking lot. We grabbed our gear and eagerly went in search of our plane. Before we'd gone more than a few steps, there was a horn beep behind us. A station wagon was driving through the parking lot toward us. Katelin presumably, as I expected Alexis to arrive on the back of a Harley, arms around the waist of a guy called Tiny that I'd prefer not to meet down a dark alley. When the wagon got close enough, I could see that I didn't recognize the parent-aged couple in the front seat. Shortly after that I spotted Alexis waving from the backseat. I'd several times wondered what Alexis' parents were like, so it appeared I was about to find out, unless she'd hitchhiked at 6:30am, which wouldn't surprise me. They drove up to us, stopped, and Alexis jumped out to rush over and give me a big hug and a kiss. "I'm so excited! Thank you so much for inviting me." She didn't wait for my answer, rushing to hug Julia, Ava, Carol and Pat, gushing to all of them as they all gushed back. Her dad teased from the wagon, "You've forgotten your case, Lex. Shall I fetch it for you?" Alexis momentarily interrupted her gushing to call, "Thanks, Dad," over her shoulder. From what I could tell, there was no need for us to go to Rodeo Drive, as the girls seemed to have detailed knowledge of every store and all its contents. God knows how. I'm not exaggerating either; they were excitedly comparing the styles of dresses currently on display in two of the stores. If they knew the stores' contents so well, why not just phone their order in? #4: #2: Mr. Joseph approached me; Mrs. Joseph unwisely heading for the overexcited girls. He dumped Alexis' case and slapped me on my shoulder, introduced himself as Ben, pointed to his wife to tell me she was Vicky, then he said "So you're the dude that's got Alexis' panties in a twist the last few days?" To my side, Alexis suddenly exclaimed, "Oh my God. Am I wearing panties?" She pulled her zip down. The brief glance I had of her bending forward to check had been quite comical, but I thought I'd better look away. "Oh yeah. Phew. Woulda been embarrassing in a store." Her parents laughed. While I was looking elsewhere than at Alexis' panties, I noticed Katelin's mother's car driving toward us. I announced, "Here comes Katelin." Ben (Alexis' parents were obviously the sort of people who wanted to be called by their first names) said, "Thanks for takin' Alexis. She's buzzed over it." "She's good fun, so we'll enjoy having her along. I've never seen her act so girly before though. So much for her 'Tough Girl' image." "Tough girl is still girl. Point 'em at a store and they flip. You're brave takin' so many of 'em." "Either brave or foolish. I'm starting to suspect 'foolish'. Ask me when we're back, presuming I survive that long." Katelin's mother braked to a halt, which had only a momentary effect on Katelin's forward velocity because she immediately leaped out of the car to rush over to us. Again not pausing to collect her luggage, so I made a mental note to be careful not to leave any bags behind on the return trip, as these girls seemed very unreliable. Ben seemed to put Katelin off from rushing up to me, but Vicky had no such affect on Katelin's redirected rush toward the girls. I told Ben, "I'll get Katelin's bag for her. It seems to have slipped her mind." "Funny how that happens." He joined the girls while I got the bag. Mrs. Eaton greeted me, looking more concerned than the Josephs. Actually, that's an unhelpful comparison, as the Josephs had no sign of any concern at all, so I'll just say that Mrs. Eaton looked concerned. The females spent a couple of minutes gushing some more, then Julia yelled out, "Everyone's here, so let's go to the plane." "Yeah!" agreed all the females. They rushed off, leaving Ben and me with every piece of luggage. Seven bags were too many for the two of us to carry. I was tempted to sit on one of the bags to wait for the girls' eventual return. I wondered how long it'd take them. Unfortunately it might take quite a long time, especially if they got all gushy over the plane. Those minutes would be a tragic and irrecoverable loss, and none of the girls would be likely to see any humor in the situation. Ben saw the humor though, looking around him and chuckling, "You're gonna have a fun weekend." I called, very loudly, to have a hope of being audible over the girls' gushing at each other, "JULIA!" She turned and I pointed at the bags. The girls came rushing back, loaded up Ben and me, with Ava and Alexis carrying the two leftover pieces. "Come on, Mark! Walk faster." The girls, being mostly unencumbered and mostly insane, were the first ones around the corner of the terminal. They stopped, and I heard several "Wows." | Alexis said, "Christ! Are we going in that?" | Vicky exclaimed, "Cool!" When the two pack-males/mules (I'm suspicious about those two words being so similar) got around the corner a few seconds later, there it was. A hundred yards away sat a VERY sexy looking plane, just like in the movies. I said, "Wow, that's a SEXY plane!" "Sure as shit is. That's a hell of a ride," agreed Ben. #4: <#3, come out. Have a look at this.> #3: #2: #1: The stairs were folded down, with two uniformed guys - the crew presumably - descending them. The girls got their legs moving again, and we all headed toward the plane. The crew met us halfway, relieved the girls of their bags and one from each mule, then escorted us to the plane. The girls rushed up the stairs. Vicky asked the crew, "Can spectators go inside?" "You're welcome to, ma'am." So the two mothers followed the girls up the stairs. Ben and I followed the crew to the cargo compartment, putting our bags down next to the others. Ben said, "Let's check it out?" "I'm eager myself." We headed for the stairs. #4: #1: #2: Ben preceded me up the stairs, so he got to see the interior before I did. He took one look, then over his shoulder to say, "Dude! One guy, six chicks, and a plane with a bed. You're in Nirvana!" He moved forward, allowing me to get inside. At the front were large, leather seats, some paired and some single. Some were occupied by various girls, but I wasn't interested in that. Down the back, occupying nearly the whole width of the cabin, was the justification for the whole trip: a fully made up bed, all ready for action, even with two girls already sitting on it, Ava and Alexis. #4: "Look what I've found to play on, Dad! Cool plane, eh?" "Damn straight! They don't come any cooler than this." Vicky said, "You checked you were wearing panties too soon, Alexis! The time to check is after you land, haha." Ben added, "Don't open a window, in case they blow out." Vicky said, "Haha, I remember that. Brings back memories of the old VW Combi." "Yeah. We had good times in that." There was obviously no problem with the Josephs, except they might want to try the bed out themselves, holding up our departure irrecoverably. Mrs. Eaton was considerably less accepting though. Katelin could see the uncertainty in her mom's expression, "I'm doing this, Mom. I'd never forgive you if you pulled me out now." Mrs. Eaton looked at her daughter, looked at me for a few seconds. I kept a bland face, not sure what to say Then she told her daughter, "We'll talk when you get back." Katelin smiled happily. Talking THEN sounded great. There was some more ooh'ing and ah'ing about the plane, trying the seats out, sitting on the bed, Ben commenting, "I hope this crate flies slow. Arriving will be a bummer," and many other expressions of approval, quite a few of which were from me. The crew came back onboard, prompting Mrs. Eaton to say, "Looks like you're about to leave." One of the crew said, "Mr. Anderson sets the schedule, ma'am. We'll wait in the cabin until you're ready." There wasn't much to see: the seats, the bed, plus a toilet and very small kitchen at the rear. Ben and I had a look in the cockpit. Very impressive, although I knew almost nothing about what I was looking at, only recognizing the steering wheel thing and what I thought were the throttles. When the parents started making noises about leaving, I asked them not to tell anyone about my having money. "We're cool with that," said Vicky. "Alexis told us." "I remember," said Mrs. Eaton. The parents said they'd watch the takeoff and wished us a good trip in their different ways, Mrs. Eaton saying, "Have a good time, dear. Be careful." Vicky saying, "Have a blast, Alexis, and don't waste a second being careful." Ben punching me on the shoulder, saying, "Have a good one, dude." There was a tiny amount of paperwork with the pilots getting our names, some brief instructions, then we buckled up and the plane started rolling. A couple of minutes later we were streaking down the runway, then rocketing steeply upward. Julia and I were sitting next to each other in one of the pairs of seats, Ava and Carol in the other pair, with the other girls in the singles. Julia squeezed my hand, saying, "Boy! We're on our way. This is going to be an amazing weekend." The prediction received enthusiastic endorsement from everyone. Katelin said, "I was so scared Mom was going to pull me off when she saw the bed." "That would've been a bummer all right," agreed Alexis. "So who's going first on the bed, Mark?" "By the look on your face, you're eager to volunteer?" "Christ yes! Anytime, anywhere, but especially right now on that bed. Besides, my parents would never let me live it down if I didn't try it out." "We need to wait for the plane to level off, and first honor should go to Julia, seeing as how this trip is for her." Julia said, "I don't want the first honor, but I'll take the first dishonor. How does that sound?" [Later I learned she didn't care either way about joining the Mile High Club, but she was happy to make me happy. She's a VERY good girlfriend. Weird, but very good.] "Even better. Ava, as girlfriend number two, do you want a try after Julia, or maybe with Julia and me, or with Carol. What do you think about that?" Sorting out the schedule took a while (sexual politics are tricky). First Julia and Ava both preferred one-on-one with me, but they couldn't come out and say that until they were sure I didn't mind. It took some indirect hinting around the issue. Then it was Carol's turn. Did she want a session with Julia and/or Ava? Carol was happy to wait until tonight. Alexis was VERY eager to go next, so that took no time at all to establish. Pat and Katelin were strangely unenthusiastic, until it emerged that they were worried about everybody watching. Julia said, "The curtain will be closed in case one of the pilots comes back." The bed had a curtain which would run around the open sides, just like hospital beds do. The curtain and its ceiling track were obvious. "Oh, that's okay then," said a relieved Katelin. "You're normally so open I was worried." Julia explained, "You misunderstand my openness. We're here for Mark's benefit. I'm going to be drawing the curtain because I know Mark wouldn't like a pilot to see him naked, not because I don't want to be seen. If Mark wanted the curtain open, it'd be open. It's not that I'm open; it's that I will do whatever Mark wants. I know that's not how you're used to thinking about guys, but that's what it's going to take to play in Mark's league." The "Fasten Seatbelts" sign had gone off during Julia's explanation. I got up to try the bed out. It was quickly obvious that the plane's steep climb made bed gymnastics impractical, regardless of whether I oriented my body so my head was facing forward, sideways or back. Damn! Julia looked at me enquiringly, and I shook my head sadly. Julia turned to Carol, saying, "Sweetie, would you ask the pilots how much longer until the bed will be flat enough for sex please?" Carol blushed, which made Ava laugh. Julia and I smiled, knowing that Carol enjoyed sexual embarrassment. Ava said, "I'll give you a hand, Carol." Ava followed Carol to the cabin. Carol knocked on the door, and it was opened from within. From the doorway Carol started repeating the words Julia had given her, while Ava put her hand under the back of Carol's skirt and fondled Carol ass. Carol's question faltered, then she resumed, finishing it while Ava continued fondling and some of the rest of us chuckled at the sight. While I'm thinking about Carol's dress, I'll mention that the girls were all very nicely dressed. You'd think that because they were buying new clothes, it'd be okay to wear old ones that obviously needed replacing, but apparently that's not the case. They'd all dressed up to go shopping. Even Alexis had on what appeared to be her cleanest and nicest black jeans and T-shirt. Julia had selected my clothes, so even I was well dressed. The pilot answered, "Another fifteen minutes will get us to our cruising altitude." #1: I whiled away the rest of the time the plane spent climbing by occasionally being included in the excited chatting that was going back and forth between all the girls. Most of it was about clothing, during which I zoned out. I managed to get in one question, "Alexis, no one ever shortens your name, but I heard your father do it. How come no one else shortens it?" "I don't like it. Mom or Dad occasionally do it to tease me, but they know better than to push it. If you did it, I'd throw you out the door." Said with a smile, but I got the message that I should stick with "Alexis". I said, "I can't say I've ever tried, but I suspect that I can't fly as well as this plane. So you'd beat me to LA and Rodeo Drive, then how'd I be able to buy you a new pair of black jeans?" Alexis excitedly asked, "You're going to buy us something? Julia said you were only going to buy stuff for her, Carol and Ava." The other "seat warmers" perked up to listen intently. "I think it'd be nice if the three of you had something to show for the trip. Nothing major, just a little something each. Especially if it keeps me safe from being thrown out of the door." "Cool! Thanks." Alexis, Pat and Katelin had a sudden surge in their level of shopping excitement, which pretty much prevented my getting another word in for several minutes. I distracted them for a while by taking several photos with my phone, as it made good sense to do that while the plane was too tilted to use the bed. Wasting time taking photographs when the plane was horizontal truly would be a tragic waste of time. There wasn't much interior to photograph, so the process didn't take long, even with the various combinations of group shots. We even borrowed one of the pilots to take some shots of all of us together. Then the girls went back to talking about clothes. I waited for the plane to level off. The pilots had said fifteen minutes, but it felt far longer, especially because listening to girls talk about clothes always makes time pass painfully slowly. It was tough to sit through all the clothes talk when I was so eager to do something that required neither clothes nor talk. Eventually the plane started tipping into a more bed-usable position. I played it cool by saying "Yippee!" only once as I grabbed Julia to tow her to the bed. I pulled the curtain (she was right about my not wanting to be seen by the pilots) and started stripping. Every minute counted and was irrecoverable, except by asking the pilots to fly in circles for a while, which would immediately cause six angry girls to throw me out the door. Having sex in a good bed in a plane is just like having it in a normal bedroom, only FAR cooler, so I had a great time. I'd forgotten to look at my watch before we started, but I decided it didn't matter, I'd give Julia a good time then guess how long it'd been and adjust the other girls' times accordingly. We had a couple of very enjoyable quick ones, and then Julia wanted to cuddle. Fine by me, as long as we didn't spend too long doing it. Julia said some very wonderful things about me, cuddled me, murmured something about being tired, and then fell asleep. #1: #3: #2: #1, #3: I gently disentangled myself, pulled my underwear on, then emerged from behind the curtain carrying the rest of my clothes and motioning the girls to be quiet in case my being almost naked caused them to make enough noise to wake Julia. I explained, "Julia's fallen asleep, so please be quiet. Julia, Carol and Ava only got four hours sleep last night, and tonight will probably be a late one too, so I'd rather let her sleep. Do you two," looking at Carol and Ava, "want to join her for a nap?" They agreed that'd be a good idea. Alexis said, "No sex for you and me?" "I'm sorry, Alexis, not on this flight. Letting the three of them have a nap is a good idea, otherwise they might be too tired to enjoy the shopping." "Damn. You look so good like that." I started getting dressed, saying, "There's the return flight. Being tired after that is unimportant because there's only school the next day. Plus I'll be available for you three very late Saturday night or very early Sunday morning. You can sleep while we're at the concert, so you won't need so much later in the night. Julia said she told you that was one of the rules of this trip, right?" "That we have to stay in the hotel when you're at the show? Yeah, she told us." "I'm willing to be considered mostly responsible for you during daylight hours when I'm with you, but not Saturday night when I'm elsewhere. That's why I'm going to get someone from the hotel to check on you every half an hour. So if you do go out and get a broken arm because a drunk knocked you over, or get raped, or whatever, then I'll be able to prove your sneaking out was entirely your responsibility. I'll wash my hands of you and you'll never get invited to another of my events. That'll happen if you just sneak out, whether or not you get in any trouble." Pat said, "Julia explained most of that already. Mom and Dad would ground me for life if they found out about me being in LA, so I can't risk anything happening. I'll be a good girl." Alexis said, "My parents might let me go out, but it wouldn't be any fun by myself, so I'll stay behind too." I looked at Katelin for the final answer, "When Mom and I came to your place, you told Mom I'd be staying in the hotel after dinner. She made me promise to do that, or she wouldn't have let me come. I'm sure she'll call me once or twice too." "Good. One consolation is that if you all get a few hours of sleep while we're at the concert, then you'll be able to have a couple of hours of sex with me and still get the same number of hours sleep as Julia and the others do. As you'll all be such good girls, I'll try to make that more fun than aimlessly wandering around a city by yourselves." Alexis asked, "Does that mean I'll FINALLY get to have a real fuck with you?" "I did bring a large supply of rubbers with me, and it would be a terrible pity to have to bring them all the way back." "That's a good enough reason for me, haha." For the rest of the trip we talked about other subjects, and sometimes about sex again too. I was asked several questions, such as: "Won't you need to catch up on your sleep too?" I answered, "No, I don't need as much sleep as most people. I usually use the time I gain studying mathematics, but having sex is a very good alternative." "What are you going to do with all your money?" "Mostly buy and furnish a house. I don't have any plans beyond that." They wanted to know all about the type of house I was looking for. I told them, "Don't ask me, I'm male, and therefore not allowed to know things like that. Julia, Vanessa and my mom are working on it. I'm pretty sure they'll show me the house I'm buying before I sign the contract, but I wouldn't bet on it. Any questions about the house, you should direct at Julia." There were quite a few questions about the pipeline date I'd just had, and about the whole pipeline process, which I answered consistent with what Julia and I had been telling other girls. The main secret we were keeping was that the pipeline's purpose wasn't really to find me one or two final girlfriends, but for me to have some learning experiences. [[That's what I consciously thought at the time, even though when carding the pipeline girls it was their suitability as a long-term girlfriend to my entire core group that I most thought of. I knew at least 50% of the pipeline's purpose was for me to have fun, and that the "learning experiences" was more of a parental justification than a reason, but I wasn't comfortable using girls so one-sidedly in such an egotistical system, so I tended to 'forget' about the selfish pleasure reason and focus on the good reason, and especially on making my core girls happy.]] Mid-discussion I excused myself to talk with the pilots. "Some of the girls are sleeping on the bed. I was wondering how much longer before we start going down, because I'm pretty sure they wouldn't appreciate being tilted out of bed in their sleep." "We'll stay close to level when we descend, so they can sleep until a few minutes before we land. I'll put on the 'Fasten Seatbelts' sign a couple of minutes early to give you time to rouse them and get them into their seats." "How can the plane descend if it doesn't point its nose toward the ground? I would have thought going up and going down were symmetric?" "If we descended by pointing the nose down, we'd accelerate and gain too much speed to be safe. What we do is keep the plane level and slow down. The wings don't generate enough lift, so the plane becomes more of a glider, going forward but slowly sinking too." #1: "I see. So the girls can sleep for an extra twenty minutes?" "A little longer than that because we lose altitude slower than we gained it, but you've got the right idea." "Okay, thanks." #4: #1: Toward the end of the flight, one of the pilots came back to talk with me about the return trip arrangements. We hadn't decided on a return time more precisely than "late Sunday afternoon or early evening," so he gave me a number to call when I had a more accurate idea. I tried to apologize for our vagueness, but he waved it away, "It's a normal part of the job. Don't worry about it." The "Fasten Seatbelts" sign eventually came on, so I went to rouse the sleeping beauties. They looked cute, but they still had to be woken up. I brought them back into the world in a way I knew they'd enjoy. I recited the magic words guaranteed to wake girls happily, "Who wants to go shopping? Rodeo Drive anyone? Look, a 50% discount sale. Last chance for shopping; the stores close in ten minutes." The last one started producing some reaction. "We're about to land?" asked Julia, evidently more knowledgeable than me about how planes work. "Yep. You need to get dressed and in your seats." Carol and Ava had taken off their outer clothes too, presumably because shopping in rumbled clothes wouldn't be acceptable. The other girls had voiced an idea a few minutes ago, so I repeated it now, "It'd be a good time to have a quick pee too, because you're not going to want to waste irrecoverable shopping time for such mundane matters." That got them up and dressing. I like watching girls getting dressed (thereby proving that I'm kinky), so I perved for several seconds before going back to my seat. When Julia joined me, she asked, "You let us sleep the whole flight?" "I kept you up late waiting for me last night, and tonight I intend to keep you busy too, so letting you sleep was a good idea." "But you missed out on taking the other girls to bed." "I didn't miss out with you though, and you were the most important." "Aww, you say the sweetest things." #3: #2: We got a good view of LA's morning smog as we descended; a very different image than when leaving green Corvallis. The landing was so smooth the girls could've stayed in bed for it. The plane taxied to a halt, and almost immediately a long, white limo drove up and parked near the plane. Everyone thought that was very cool. One of the crew lowered the stairs and the girls were soon ooh'ing and ah'ing over the limo. Ooh'ing and ah'ing was a little beneath my dignity, but I still had a good look at it. It was the first limo I'd seen up close. Julia went to check on the size of the plane's cargo space, no doubt concerned that they wouldn't be able to transport several stores' worth of clothing back home. She talked to the crewman who was helping the chauffeur transfer the luggage. I couldn't hear what they said, but Julia seemed happy. (The external cargo space was reasonable, there were smaller storage compartments inside the cabin, and there'd be enough room if the girls got rid of most of the packaging that each item would come in.) Julia gave my phone to the chauffeur and asked him to get several photos encompassing us, the car and the plane. Once those were taken and checked, we were on our way to the hotel, as there was no time to waste! As soon as we were in the limo, Julia announced to everyone, "One thing I want all of you to look out for is a car model suitable for Mark to buy. There should be plenty of good examples in LA, so when you see any cool cars this weekend, point them out to me, okay?" I wasn't even surprised Julia told them to point the cars out to her, rather than to me. I had no doubt that the car would be chosen primarily for its image rather than its usefulness as a means of transportation, and therefore Julia would deem selecting it well within her jurisdiction. I'd previously wondered why the new car thing had never come up before, and now I knew why: Julia was using this weekend as a scouting trip for cars, when she wasn't otherwise busy clothes shopping. The girls thought my buying a fancy, new car was an excellent idea; I suspected mostly because it involved spending a lot of money in a shopping activity. It didn't take long for the girls to start pointing out possible cars. Julia quickly added a requirement, "It has to have a backseat. Remember he drives his sisters and me to school." That reduced the number of possibilities, but there were still several. When one was pointed out that Julia liked the look of, and no one knew what it was, she'd intercom the chauffeur who was usually able to tell her what the car was, if it was still in sight. It didn't take too long to see what I was looking for. I nodded out the window, saying, "There's a car that I REALLY like!" "Where?" asked Julia and half the girls. "On the left. Isn't it obvious?" "No. Which one?" "The light green one two lanes over." Julia got it first, started laughing and slapped me on the shoulder playfully. She explained to the other girls, "He's pointing out the Honda Civic, same as he's got now. This is exactly why we can't leave him in charge of deciding what his new car will be." #3: #4: By the time we got to the hotel Julia had used her cellphone to photograph and note several possible makes and models. At the hotel, I heard Julia tell the chauffeur, "We won't be long." I quietly asked her, "Ahh, isn't the limo only booked to bring us here?" "I changed the arrangement. Now he's taking us to Rodeo Drive, as well as to and from the concert. We're booked into a good restaurant within easy walking distance, so we won't need the car for that, and otherwise we'll use ordinary taxis. When we know the time we'll be returning to the plane, I'll call for another limo, because we want to finish the weekend in style." "When did you do the rearrangements?" "Several days ago. Remember you used my phone to call the airplane company when we were driving to Lily's for dinner. I saved the number and called back later to check a few details. The only things I did were to extend the use of the limo and book the restaurant, everything else was fine." "Oh. Good idea. That'll save valuable shopping time." "My thought exactly." The checking-in procedure was simple. Our suite was ready for occupancy, but not the extra room for the other girls because the existing occupants hadn't checked out yet. Julia told the hotel staff, "Put all our cases in the suite, give us the two keys, and we'll be back after the stores close." I asked, "We're not going to the room now?" "There's no reason to, and the stores will be opening already." We trouped out to the limo again. The driver asked, "Where to?" I said, "I vote for the beach. Are there any other votes?" ------- Chapter 216: In Los Angeles; Very Good Use of a Bed Saturday, May 14, 2005 (Continued) The limo dropped us off at one end of Rodeo Drive. I had come fully prepared, $20,000 in one jacket pocket and a paperback book in the other, as I'd had a feeling that I'd need a distraction and that there wouldn't be any science fiction bookshops on Rodeo Drive. Shopping is shopping, which is another way of saying "dreadfully dull". On Rodeo Drive you can make that "insanely expensive in a dreadfully dull way." For example, Julia looked longingly at a thousand-dollar handbag. I'd seen her use a handbag twice in all the time I'd know her, plus she admitted that she didn't have a dress that matched the bag, so she'd have to buy that too. Personally I thought she had so many dresses already that she must be able to match every conceivable color of handbag, but apparently not. I kept my opinion to myself (I did a lot of that today). That's just one of MANY examples of lunacy throughout the day. Given all the lunacy and the topic's dreadful dullness, I'll restrict my comments about the day to just a few points. The girls had a GREAT time. I enjoyed that part of it. Lunch was nice too. The vast majority of the stores were extremely boring. It was a never-ending succession of: womenswear, menswear, jewelry, perfume, and handbag stores. Over and over again. To my surprise, there was one store I quite enjoyed. Even more surprising, it was a women's clothing store. It had some very sexy, animal-skin patterned clothing. Carol bought a wrap-around tie top with a leopard skin pattern. It was VERY thin and left the perfect amount of cleavage exposed - pretty much all of it - so it was VERY sexy. I had difficulty keeping a brotherly expression on my face and drool off my chin. One outfit worth mentioning, because it'll come up again in a few days, is the pair of black jeans and black T-shirt that Alexis chose and I bought from the same, drool-inducing store. The top was shaped exactly the same as a T-shirt, but the fabric wasn't cotton, that's for sure. I don't know what it was, but it was thinner, glistened, had an embossed texture repeated all over it, and was a damn sight sexier than any T-shirt I've ever seen. Down the left side of the front was a long, vertical dark brown leather panel, with the designer's name, "Roberto Cavalli", written sideways in stylized tiger stripes. The back was the interesting part, which is a VERY unusual opinion for me to have about a girl's top! There was a wide, downward pointing triangle cut out of the shirt, high on the back, just below the shoulders. The horizontal side of the triangle went across most of the width of the T-shirt (about twelve inches), with the bottom corner of the triangle centered on the spine only about three inches below the top side, so it was a very shallow, very wide, downward pointing triangle. It was bordered all around by an inch-wide strip of the same dark brown leather as the front panel. There was a second triangle cutout two-thirds of the way down the back of the T-shirt, identical to the one above, other than necessarily being less wide. There was a third triangle, identical to the two above it other than its again being horizontally smaller by the same factor. The VERY interesting fact about the third triangle was its location: it was cut out of the back of the jeans, just below the belt line, and the cut exposed enough skin that the top of Alexis' butt cheeks and a decent (cough, cough) length of her butt crack were clearly visible. It looked HOT when she walked! It was brazenly rude and sexy, and at the same time done with class. The three triangles visually 'worked' to somehow create an appealing effect even without the sexuality of it. Both Alexis and I loved it on first sight. I got plenty of sightings of it, because it was important to get exactly the right size, especially for the T-shirt as it couldn't be worn tucked in at the back. Nor could it be worn not tucked in, because bare flesh just above the jeans would have spoiled the look. There was a clamping arrangement built into the back of the jeans to hold the bottom of the shirt, thus the shirt couldn't be too long or too short, or it wouldn't hang right. The outfit worked wonderfully and suited Alexis' personality perfectly. There was never any doubt that I was going to buy it for her, despite the price. Pat and Katelin each found something they wanted for their "little" gift from me, each of the three "little" gifts costing me several hundred dollars. Next time someone wants a souvenir, I'll buy them a postcard. Pat's and Katelin's purchases were both things they could show their mothers, so they didn't do much for me. They were extremely happy, and I guess that's the most important thing. Alexis could show her outfit to her mother too, but Vicky (Alexis' mom) was obviously at the permissive end of the spectrum of mothers. Julia, Carol and Ava - OF COURSE! - had three FANTASTIC times spending their $10,000. Ava was slow to start, not really believing she was included, but Julia and Carol quickly corrected Ava's reluctance, and soon all three girls were giddy with spending-frenzy excitement. Despite their euphoria, they didn't forget the basic discipline of shopping. First they scouted ALL the stores on Rodeo Drive, all six girls making much discussed mental lists about all the possible things to spend the $10,000 on. Unlike my car scouting, the girls didn't need to record the clothing information in their cellphones, because girls have HIGHLY trained memories for this stuff. They were regretful that they didn't have enough time to do another scouting pass through all the most interesting stores. I expressed sympathy, that being a good alternative to my true feelings. So on the second pass, the money started flying out. To give them credit, they kept a very good track on the remaining balance of their three budgets; a third each, to Ava's amazed delight. Ava stopped a little under her budget, Carol and Julia both didn't hesitate to go over theirs, but they paid the difference with Julia's credit card, Carol promising to pay her back. Prof had originally suggested the $10,000 sum to me, and I certainly hadn't thought it'd be inadequate, but - silly us - it certainly had been. I would normally have said that clothing shopping had to be the most boring activity imaginable, but surely accompanying someone else while they clothes shopped has to be even worse (I certainly thought it was). Yet the three extra girls all had a ball looking at all the stores and contributing their input to the spending of $10,000, even if it wasn't on them. Actually damned near another $2,000 was on them! Something I absolutely hadn't intended, but it got away from me. Who would've thought that jokingly offering to buy a pair of black jeans for Alexis would have ended up costing me nearly $2,000? For my three girls the only slightly sour note to the day was their inability to find much to buy for me that I would accept. The, "that I would accept" condition was important, because they could easily have spent tens of thousands on me if I'd let them. There was a surprising amount of menswear available, many pieces of which I was told were perfect for me. My subtle answer was, "Thank you very much, but you're insane. I'm a 15-year old boy who's still growing. I have absolutely no need for a suit costing several thousand dollars, and by the time I do, I will have long since outgrown it. It'll be thrown away before I wear it even once. Ditto for horrendously expensive shoes, and considerably less polite than ditto for your showing me any more male handbags." There was a truly amazing number of gay handbags for sale. No wonder LA is called the "City of Sin". In desperation to buy me something, they even suggested jewelry, trying to encourage me by saying, "Bling is very fashionable with guys these days." "Yeah right! The day I become a Black, gangsta rapper out of an LA ghetto, then you can buy me bling." [I mentioned this because the facetious description of myself turned out to be amazingly prophetic, as I only got one word wrong.] "The only thing I want you to buy for me is very small bikinis, because I have very simple and unselfish pleasures." They still expressed frustration from time to time, especially Julia, so I tried another approach: "I honestly don't have any objection to you buying me something, but it has to be useful. Buying me REALLY expensive useless stuff just because you think you have to balance what you're spending on yourselves is silly. I get enormous value from you in ways that I haven't got a hope of repaying in the same way, such as your and your parents' advice to me. This day is my way of repaying some of that, so you're not under an obligation to match it dollar for dollar, and I'd be very unimpressed if you foolishly bought me a $350 gold-plated toenail clipper, or a belt that costs more than ten whole cows." Not that I knew what cows cost, but it sounded good. Between Julia's accepting that argument and my strident refusals, I ended up getting only three shirts, one pair of pants and one jacket. All of which I had to admit were very nice. A couple of the shirts made me look "funky", according to the salesman. I've been 'funkless' my whole life, but apparently not in those shirts, the salesman assured me. We headed back to the hotel as soon as I could talk the girls into it, which was moments after the last store closed. All of us went up to our suite, including the extra girls because their bags and shopping were there - Julia had gotten the stores to send most of our purchases to our room. For the prices we were paying, they could damn well deliver. The suite was GORGEOUS: two bedrooms, both with beds big enough for the four of us; a huge bathroom with a hot tub and shower, both big enough for all seven of us; and a living room. It OOZED luxury from every direction. The girls went gaga, and I probably went at least ga myself. Pat commented, "Wow, I hope our room's like this." Julia quickly answered, "It's not. You're booked into an ordinary room. Mark gets the best. Sometimes you're close enough to him to benefit, like flying down on the luxury jet or the meal we'll be having shortly; but other times you're not so close, such as your room not being as good as this one or your not going to the concert. You're still miles ahead of all the girls having boring weekends back at home. They're going to be very envious when they learn about your being on this trip." "You can say that again," agreed Katelin. "How are you going to tell them?" "I haven't decided yet, but it should be done in a fun way. Let's talk about it over dinner." Dinner was only an hour and a half away, so the girls had to cut their conversation short in order to start getting ready. Alexis, Katelin and Pat extracted their luggage and shopping bags from the larger pile, then went down to their room. I was ready in fifteen minutes because I'm a guy, and also so I could watch the girls get repeatedly dressed and undressed as they tried on many of their purchases, which I guess is a repetition of the first reason. I took the opportunity to arrange for the hotel to send a female to periodically check on the three girls we'd be leaving in their room (Julia corrected me, to say they'd be in our room). Carol and Julia were wearing their "little black dresses," the same ones they'd worn on the date with Cindy (I am very aware that means they had no reason to try on most of their purchases again. Since when did "reason" apply to girls' shopping?). I LOVED Carol's dress. In Ava's presence I couldn't express my appreciation the way I wanted - by standing behind her and sliding my hands onto her breasts under the thin straps - but I did give her a wide-smiling thumbs-up gesture when Ava had her back to me. Julia had 'suggested' that part of Ava's buying today should be a dress suitable for tonight. When Ava saw Julia's and Carol's dresses, Ava said, "Thank goodness you talked me into buying my dress. The one I packed looks like a housecoat compared to your two." The one Ava had bought certainly didn't look like a housecoat though. At the time Julia had talked Ava into buying it, Julia had said, "Mark's girls have to be able to dress sexily, from bikinis all the way to eveningwear, so you need to get something special, Ava." I thought that specific instance of Julia's clothes-shopping logic was impeccable, and I was very happy when Ava bought a sexy dress too, so all three of my girls were looking at least absolutely gorgeous, and in one case, spectacular. Ava asked me, "What do you think about Carol's dress being so sexy?" "I think it's fantastic." Excitedly Ava exclaimed, "I knew it! I knew you would." "Sure. I'm very pleased that she has so much self-confidence. It's wonderful that Julia has helped Carol blossom so much." "Oh." While we waited for the other girls to arrive, I had many opportunities to use NP to lightly stroke the sides of Carol's breasts, where they weren't covered by the strap that ran over them. Carol enjoyed that, especially when Ava was out of sight of one breast so I could pull that strap to the side to NP the nipple from across the room. When the other three girls came up, they looked at my three, and each of the newcomers said something like, "Wow!", followed by lots of gushing back and forth. My three were all dressed better than the others, which I'm positive Julia thought was exactly how it should be. Once the gushing sounded like it was nearly over, I held the door open, saying, "Ladies, shall we walk to the restaurant. I'm quite hungry and I've had a VERY hard day." It was perhaps a little unkind, but I'd had a HARD day! Truly; it had been tough on me. Good to see the girls have so much fun, but it'd gone on for HOURS, so my nerves were a little raw. They got the hint, and said they'd be ready to go almost immediately, just needing a few last minute makeup, hair and other essential checks and adjustments, then some photographs of each other and around the suite. It only took twenty minutes, which was miraculous. The restaurant was very nice (if you didn't look at the prices; horrendous if you did. A restaurant that charged that much in Corvallis wouldn't get ANY customers). The service was attentive, as restaurant service usual is when Carol wears that dress. The other girls were looking great, but it was clear where the waiters' eyes were most often looking. I had plenty of food, as all six girls gave me samples off their plates; that being one of the two main advantages of having six girlfriends. One of the topics of conversation was how to break the news to the rest of the school that I was rich. Julia didn't want me to brag about it myself, nor did she want to do it before Wednesday, so I'd have the 11th grade pipeline date without their knowing about my wealth. Various ideas were discussed, but we settled on the way that Alexis was begging for. She was going to come to school on Wednesday wearing her new outfit. It was a pretty safe bet that everyone in the class would notice it. She'd casually mention that she'd gotten it on Rodeo Drive during the weekend. Which led to another pretty safe bet: that EVERY girl in the class would want a LOT more information. Alexis would happen to have some printed out photographs from the weekend with her, and would pass those around. That'd nicely do the job of letting the school know that I was rich. We were using my phone to record this weekend for posterity because the girls didn't have any spare time to worry about cameras. I knew from reading my phone's manual that I could unload the photos to a computer, but I'd never done any photo transferring like that before. I mentioned that to Julia, who reassured me, "It'll be easy, just like an ordinary digital camera." Which I'd also never used, but presumably Julia had, so I'd make sure she was with me when I did it. After dinner we strolled back to our room. Carol got quickly changed into something more complete. She explained, "I can't do ANY sudden moves in that other dress, let alone dancing around at a concert." Personally I wouldn't have minded her dancing around in it, and there were probably a few million other guys in LA who wouldn't have minded either. Actually, judging from what I'd seen in some of the stores earlier today, a considerably lower proportion of guys than should've been the case. Julia gave Alexis, Katelin and Pat a bit of a lecture, the central theme of which was, "Don't mess-up your relationship with Mark by misbehaving in any way," then we left them to enjoy the luxury of our much better room. Theirs didn't even have a hot tub in it; how primitive was that! On the topic of things our room had, it had a safe, which now contained my excess cash. I thought the idea of having a safe in our new house might be handy and quietly mentioned it to Julia. Not only had she already thought of it, it'd been almost the first thing she'd thought of when mentally listing what we needed. She whispered back, "You have secrets." Our limo was waiting, and we headed off to the "pop" concert. I'd discovered over dinner that Justin Timberlake was not a country and western singer as I'd thought. Apparently he was a "pop" singer. Not "popular" enough for me to know about him, but that meant approximately nothing, because I have about the same interest in music as I have in football, although it had occurred to me that I could become a pretty good piano player, what with my having twenty two fingertips (assuming one mind remained on duty). We had VERY good seats (the air charter company always bought the best, knowing their clients wouldn't want merely average seats), and the girls had a great time. As far as I could tell, Justin Timberlake's main appeal was his sexiness, which didn't quite have the same effect on me as it did on the girls. I enjoyed my girls enjoying his show though, so that was good. I didn't actually dislike his music, and the show did have a superb crowd atmosphere, so it was okay. There was even one of his songs that I quite liked. It was about love and sex, a hint that doesn't narrow it down at all. All things considered - especially my girls' happiness - I enjoyed the experience. I'd never been to a concert even one-tenth the size of this one, or one-tenth as professionally staged, so it was a fun new experience for me. I joked to myself that I should get used to being surrounded by thousands of excited, screaming girls, in case Julia is understating the effect of my being rich on girls' hormones. On the limo ride back, the girls were still totally buzzed, which I hoped would last until bedtime. Alexis and Co. had been semi-well-behaved girls: they were still in our room, but when all the girls started gushing back and forth about Justin-sigh-Timberlake, it was soon apparent that the stay-at-home girls were tipsy. Alexis produced a half-empty bottle of whiskey, declaring, "Don't worry, I didn't buy it through room service. I brought it with me." She'd somehow overlooked mentioning it earlier, but they'd behaved well enough so I didn't care about the underage drinking when I was meant to be responsible for them. That they'd used the hot tub and were now dressed only in hotel robes that were having 'terrible' trouble staying closed didn't do their case any harm either. Three girls don't all have their robes gape open by accident, so they were more than merely tipsy, they were "delightfully tipsy," and well on their way to making me very glad I'd brought them on this trip. My girls were also in a very good mood from the concert and Justin-sigh-Timberlake, so things rapidly became more and more interesting. My plan had been to have sex with my three core girls, let them fall asleep, then visit the other girls in their room; but plans have to be reconsidered when a room full of girls all decide they're way overdressed, and then collectively decide that so am I. We ended up having a rather enjoyable party. Two parties really, with Carol in one bedroom and me in the other, with the other girls swapping back and forth from time to time. Early on Ava had taken Julia to Carol's room, leaving me with Alexis, Katelin and Pat. Alexis had never had a real session with me, despite her begging for one several times, so I singled her out for some of my undivided and very vigorous attention. Knowing she liked it rough, I pounded her pussy mercilessly until she begged me to stop, whereupon I flipped her over, worked my way into her ass, and started fucking that, getting Pat to slide underneath to 69 with Alexis, while Katelin did what she felt comfortable with, once she'd gotten over the shock of my fucking Alexis in the ass so abnormally, and then the shock of Alexis telling her, "You don't know what you're missing; I love getting fucked in the ass." By the time we finished with her, Alexis was incredulous, happy, and pretty much wiped out. I let her recover by having her provide supporting licks and kisses to me and whoever else I was drilling. Alexis' and Katelin's non-bisexuality turned out to be less of a problem than I expected. Alexis said, "Are you kidding! I'd fuck a goat if you asked me to. Not right now though, please." #4: #2: We decided not to ask. Katelin's reason for participating in the girl-on-girl sex was, "I've seen it happen a few times around you, and everyone seems to enjoy it and nothing bad happens, so I thought I'd try it. Also, I've had a lot of whiskey." I didn't think she'd had much, but who was I to criticize her self-justification. She wasn't especially enthusiastic about everything we did, but she was MILES better than she'd been in the past. It still wasn't "normal sex", but it only involved one species, so it didn't push Katelin's boundaries as far as Alexis offer would have. We had nothing urgent planned for tomorrow morning; in other words, no more clothes shopping that had to start at the crack of their front doors, so we were all happy to spend quite a while enjoying ourselves now. With five girls (Carol wasn't included in my count) it took an enjoyably long time, even with Julia and Ava telling me to concentrate on the other three. It didn't take a genius to work out what they had in mind: the gleam in Ava's eye indicating that they wanted me to wear out the extra girls so my core group could have a more private session with me later, when they could get Carol and me together. The three visitors to our room started getting tired after a couple of hours, with Alexis even earlier than that. They'd doubtless been too excited to sleep well the previous night, and they hadn't taken my hint to have a nap while the rest of us were at the concert, so they didn't have much endurance. Julia and Ava played up their tiredness, and soon the extra girls had our robes back on, and we'd sent them on their way, stumbling back to their room. As soon as they were out of the room, Ava got me to lay on my back on the bed, then she mounted me, sliding herself up and down a few times while she launched into her spiel about how much Carol desired me, how perfect Carol and I were together, etc. Just the same old stuff she'd said several times before. Ava insisted that Carol was ready to make love to me, and wanted to do it now. Carol played her part by reluctantly admitting and apologizing that she did have "improper feelings" for me, which caused Ava to quickly correct Carol's terminology. It could've gone on for a long time, but it was late and Ava was already well established as being responsible for this. So I saved time by saying to Carol, "I can't say I understand how it happened to you, but I don't mind that you've drifted into desiring me. I don't think it matters much though, as I'm unable to do anything about it." That was my prompt to Ava, for her to explain her cunning plan. I was rather curious to hear it; not that it mattered much, because I had a very good feeling about its chance of success, no matter what it was. Ava excitedly described it, "You're very hard and wet now. Carol's very wet too, from the sex she's been having and from excitement about making love with you soon. In a few seconds I'll jump off so Carol can jump on. Once you're inside her, you'll see how wonderful sex with her is, and everything will be great after that." (Perhaps "cunning" wasn't the best description for Ava's plan.) I pretended to be somewhat shocked, "What! Carol just jumps on top of me? No romance or foreplay or anything like that - straight to full-on sex. I thought we start with just some kissing on the lips, and get used to that for a few months before we thought about anything else." Ava had other ideas, "You two are hopeless! Carol wants to have SEX with you. Look at her! She's naked, hot, wet and ready; and you want to give her a KISS! You're crazy." "You really want to have sex with me, Carol? With my cock inside you, and everything?" "Yes. Sorry." "But you're a virgin, so you won't be able to simply leap on top of me like Ava says. It'll be a lot more painful and less enjoyable for you, so it might be better not to do it." Ava provided the answer, "Carol hasn't got her hymen; she busted that ages ago. She can jump on top of you right now, and she should. Stop delaying it. Carol wants to do this, and I thought you liked doing things for your sisters." "Doing THINGS, yes. Doing THEM is entirely different. I'd rather go slowly and carefully." Carol added, "I'm on the pill, so you don't have to worry about that. Mom put me on it when you started having sex, just to play safe in case I started having sex too. I'm glad she did now, because I've heard how much you prefer not to use condoms." "You really, truly want to do this?" "Yes please." "I don't know. It's a very big step and once we do it, we can't undo it. Ava, you understand girls better than I do. Are you sure this is a good idea?" Ava was VERY sure, and spent some time telling me all over again. Eventually I said, "Okay. Against my better judgment I'll let you try this. I hope Ava knows what she's doing." "YES!" celebrated Ava, prematurely as it turned out. Ava got Carol to stand nearby, then Ava pumped herself up and down on my cock a few more times, then jumped off. While Carol was climbing onto the bed, I did a go-soft. Poor Ava couldn't believe her eyes. "Oh no! How on Earth could you go limp? Look at Carol! She's GORGEOUS! Every guy at school would kill to be where you are now..." Carol had stopped halfway to her destination, unsure what to do next. I knew what to say though. With subtle stresses I said, "I'm sure you're right that Carol is gorgeous Ava, but when I LOOK at her, all I SEE is my sister. When I SAW you get off, and SAW Carol coming, I lost my desire. I'm sorry, but I can't SEE what I can do about it." Ava declared, "I've got it! We'll do it again, but this time with your eyes shut, so you won't see her coming. Try to imagine it's Julia getting on you. Carol, you stay where you are so you can get on quickly. Now I've just got to get Mark hard again. Shut your eyes and think dirty thoughts, Mark." I like to think of myself as a cooperative sort of guy, and I enjoy thinking dirty thoughts even when no one has told me to, so I did as Ava suggested. Ava helped by sucking on my cock. Ava had been worried, but to her delight and no one else's surprise, I quickly got hard again. With proximity I could sense Ava pull Carol forward with one hand, while Ava's other hand held my cock upright and pumped it slowly. I could feel the bed move as Carol knee-walked herself forward, but I said nothing. I figured that Ava's holding my cock upright and inserting it into Carol as she sat down was a convincing act of her taking responsibility. Carol was quickly into position, Ava held my cock at the right angle, and Carol lowered herself onto it. "YES!" exclaimed Ava, more excited and happy than either of the participants. "What do I do now?" asked Carol. Ava answered, "Go up and down. Quickly, before he goes soft." Carol kept her hips exactly where they were, and merely raised and lowered her arms. "No! Not like that. Raise and lower your hips." Ava used one hand to hold Carol's nearest foot in place, with the other hand to push Carol's ass up. Carol rose too high, so my cock pulled out, then she said, "Oh, it came out. Is it supposed to do that?" "Quick, put it back in! Mark, whatever you do, keep thinking dirty thoughts." I was already thinking dirty thoughts, so that was easy. Ava put my cock back in Carol, and coached her on how much to move up and down. Carol soon got the idea. Ava asked, "What do you think, Carol?" "Hmm. It's very nice. Nicer than a vibrator. Am I really making love to Mark now?" "Yep. You and Mark are lovers now. This is the start of a wonderful relationship for you two. Mark, what do you think?" I answered, "I'm thinking about Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears licking ice cream off Jessica Simpson's body." "No! I mean about what Carol's doing. Doesn't it feel wonderful that you two are lovers now?" "I'm trying my hardest not to think about that, in case I go soft again." Before Ava could respond, Carol asked, "Going up and down like this is going to get boring soon. What else are cocks good for?" Poor Ava had her work cut out for her. Carol needed to be shown EXACTLY what to do, because she was too innocent to have any idea herself. As Carol said, "I've never been interested in boys, so I've ignored everything I saw or heard about cocks." It only took Ava a couple of minutes to say, "Mark, it's too hard for me to tell Carol what to do. You need to make love to her, so she'll learn." "But if I open my eyes, I might go soft." "How could you possibly go soft with such a beautiful, sexy girl on the end of your cock? That you love too! If it happens, we'll start again, but I don't believe any guy could have that problem with Carol; she's far too sexy!" "Okay, I'll try." I opened my eyes, looked at Carol for a couple of seconds, then said, "Uh oh, I'm going soft." I shut my eyes again. "{Groan}," from Ava. "How can you not think Carol's sexy? She's FAR sexier than I am, and you NEVER have any problem staying hard with me." I said, "I've got an idea. Maybe more movement would help me." I took a hold of Carol and flipped us over to be in the missionary position. After making some minor limb adjustments, I asked, "Are you sure you want us to do this, Carol?" "I'm not sure. It's not working out like I thought, and cocks seem pretty boring so far. Maybe we should go back to being ordinary brothers and sisters?" "NO!" protested Ava. "You've got to give it a chance. Let Mark make love to you properly, PLEASE!" "I suppose I could, but I'm starting to think I made a big deal out of nothing. I should have been happy with my vibrator. Maybe I'll like it better when Mark starts vibrating his cock. Is that what you're going to do now?" I patiently explained, "Guys can't vibrate their cocks, Carol." Ava had recovered from the surprise, so could ask incredulously, "Do you really think cocks can vibrate?" Carol said, "I've never thought about them before. I just assumed that vibrators are meant to be like cocks, so cocks must vibrate too. If they don't then they can't be much use, because vibrators aren't worth bothering with when their batteries run out. -- "I'm starting to think I should give up on this idea. It seems a lot of trouble to go to for something that's not even as good as a dead vibrator, especially because you've got to fuss around trying to get a cock hard before you can start to use it, and then they go soft too soon." "Mark!" pleaded Ava. "PLEASE show her. She's got NO IDEA what she's talking about!" "I quite like the idea of Carol thinking this way. It'll keep her safe from wanting a sexual relationship with guys." "Argh! She's NOT going to have sexual relationships with guys. She's a lesbian, for God's sake! She's obviously NEVER had any interest in guys, just in you recently. You're in position, so just fuck her already, before I tear my hair out." I couldn't resist saying, "On your head be it," but Ava was too worked up to notice so my joke went right over her head. I started thrusting in and out of Carol, saying, "I'll open my eyes now, and see whether I go soft." Carol said, "It doesn't really matter. I'm getting sleepy, so we should probably give up anyway." "Argh!" from Ava. Despite Carol's claimed sleepiness, I kept my thrusting going. After several of them, Ava asked me, "Are you staying hard?" "So far, but it's VERY strange looking at Carol while I'm doing this. I could lose it at any second." "DON'T lose it! Carol has to learn how good it is. I can't believe how ignorant she is." Carol corrected Ava, "I know everything I need to know about boys: they're useless nuisances. Why should I bother learning anything more, ESPECIALLY about their cocks?" "Just wait and see. Come on Mark, show her." "I'm trying, but it's not easy." Actually, it was very easy and most enjoyable, plus teasing Ava was icing on the cake. After a few more thrusts, Carol said, "Oh. This is starting to feel nice." "I told you!" crowed Ava. "Just you wait and see, Mark's barely started yet." Every minute or so, as I slowly picked up speed, Carol would make more and more enthusiastic comments. After several minutes, Carol had progressed all the way to, "AVA! Why didn't you tell me it was this good?" "I did tell you! I've told you that a dozen times." "You said it was good, but you NEVER said it was ANYTHING like this! This is INCREDIBLE! Oh my God!" "{Giggle}," from a far less anxious and much happier looking Ava. I kept making love to Carol. Carol and I were both very turned on to be doing this in front of Ava, and I had somehow managed to avoid the dreadful inconvenience of going soft again, so you'll be unsurprised to know that Carol and I quickly reached our orgasms. As soon as her orgasm finished, Carol said, "AGAIN! Do it again. It's FAR better than a vibrator." Like the first one, the second one didn't take long either. Carol and I were VERY turned on. After that had finished, Julia said, "I hate to be a party pooper, but it's 3am. We need to get to sleep." "But I never want to stop," protested Carol. "I need to make up for lost time, because it's been very unfair of you two to keep Mark to yourselves. Why didn't anyone tell me how good sex with him was?" Ava laughed. Julia added another argument, "You should take it easy. Remember you were technically a virgin until a few minutes ago, so your body might need time to adapt. Maybe you should stay away from Mark for a month or two?" "HA! Like that's EVER going to happen again, not now that I've discovered how much Ava was downplaying how good Mark is. I'll agree to going to sleep, provided I can sleep with Mark's cock inside me." We were already dressed for bed (naked), so it took mere seconds for us to roll over and pull the covers up. Then I remembered a task, "Let's see if Ava's magic nipples can turn off the lights in this room." "{Giggle}." I reached over to squeeze Ava's nipple, while I visually located all the light switches I could see. I flicked them all off, but found there were some lights in the other room whose switch was out of my line of sight. "Sorry, I can't get the lights in the other bedroom. Ava's nipple doesn't work that far away." Carol said, "Ava can turn them off. That'll serve her right for keeping quiet about how good sex with you is. I can't believe she didn't talk me into having sex with you weeks ago. Even when she did try, it was a pathetically weak, half-hearted effort. I think she was selfishly trying to keep you to herself as much as possible." Ava chuckled as she got out of bed to turn off the remaining lights. I turned on one of our lights for when Ava returned, then whispered to my wives, "That went very well. She must feel responsible for it." "Yeah," agreed both girls. As Ava was climbing back into bed, Carol said, "You've forgotten something Mark. Cock in my pussy please." "Yes, my love." "Ahh," signed Carol happily. I'd been waiting for Ava to ask, and she finally did: "You don't have any trouble getting hard now, Mark?" "Not from the moment when I saw how much pleasure I was giving Carol." "Aww, isn't he sweet?" asked Ava. Both of my wives agreed, as they jolly well should. I said, "I've got two quick things to say. First, thank you very much Ava, for talking us into this. Second, shame on you Ava, for not talking us into this weeks ago!" "Haha. You've got no idea how hard it was! I couldn't believe how blind you two were. I felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall most of the time. It was worth it though." "Let's hope so," said Julia. "The job's not over, because we have to break it to their parents yet. Mark and Carol aren't going to be able to hide it from their parents, especially not Carol, because she's turned into such a cock-hungry slut." "Haha. Yeah, that's me. Provided the cock's got Mark on the other end of it. I'm still a lesbian as far as every other boy is concerned. I don't want them anywhere near me." "I hope your parents don't get upset," worried Ava. "That'd be a disaster." Julia reassured, "Leave it to us. I've got an idea for how to tell them that I'm fairly sure will work." "Great! How?" "Don't worry about it now. It's too late for a long conversation. I'm also fairly sure my parents will be okay with it too. I'll break it to them after Felicity and Steven agree, hopefully. What about your parents, Ava? We don't need to tell them, but how do you think they'd react?" "I don't understand why everyone wouldn't agree with it, especially if they knew Mark and Carol, but I know people get very weird about it. It's hard to guess about my parents. I'd like to think they'd agree with me that it's wonderful, but I'm not sure they would." Julia said, "Yeah, I'm not sure how they'd react either. There's no need for them to know, so let's keep it secret from them. Just to make sure you absolutely understand, Ava, I don't want you to tell ANYONE! Not your parents, our parents, or anyone else, okay?" "I understand. This is another 'Mark secret.' I'm getting used to keeping Mark's secrets. I've never known a guy with so many secrets, but they're all big ones so I understand they have to be kept." We exchanged "Goodnights", with Carol's including, "Goodnight Mark, goodnight Mark's cock." We all agreed it was nice that we could all sleep together now, and Ava added, "Yeah, but what I can't wait for is all of us having sex together. That's going to be super fantastic from now on." We all agreed, especially Carol. Then we settled down to sleep. ------- Chapter 217: Sunday in Los Angeles; Doctor Mark Sunday, May 15, 2005 Before I'd gone to sleep, I'd wondered what to do when I woke up. It'd be about 7:15am, and I was pretty sure none of the girls in either room would appreciate being woken at that time, although the humor of waking Alexis for more sex made me smile. Alexis had been leaning on Pat when she'd left. I'd given her rough sex, the way she likes it but it must have taken a toll on her body, so I was sure my knocking on her door after her getting only four hours of sleep would be the last thing she'd want. It was funny to think about, just not to do. I decided to do a little bit of local sightseeing: to have a look through the hotel, check out its swimming pool, gymnasium, and whatever other facilities it had. If I happened to encounter the restaurant on the first floor for breakfast, all the better. After that I'd walk around the neighborhood. So when I woke at the expected time, my first task was to get out of bed without disturbing the girls. Not for the first time, I wished there was a better way of doing this than clambering over one of the girls. Fortunately, Julia is getting used to my climbing over her by now, so I was able to do so without her becoming more than half-awake for a few seconds. I got changed in the other room, wrote a note on the pad by the telephone, left it propped up on the bedside table, then went for my walk. I was VERY impressed by the hotel, right up to the point when I saw the price for a breakfast. I was a millionaire, but that wouldn't last long if I bought breakfast for all the girls. I asked for directions to a bakery from the front desk, and went for a walk. I ended up walking a long way to get all the ingredients (croissants, jelly, fruit juice, etc.), but I knew the girls' bodies wouldn't be in a hurry to wake up. In the note I'd left them, I'd requested they call my cellphone when they woke up. After buying the necessary ingredients for breakfast for everyone plus having a first breakfast by myself - all for a total cost less than the cost of one breakfast in the hotel - I still hadn't received a call, so I went for an aimless wander. I was mostly just killing time, so I didn't care where I was going. I wanted to be able to get back to the hotel fairly quickly when Julia called me, so I passed the time by walking a large circle around the hotel. That gave me an experience of something I've never seen so strongly before, let alone been on the receiving end of: blatant, full-on, racial prejudice. At one point in my wanderings I was the only white person in sight, walking through a Black residential neighborhood. It was early, so there weren't many people about, but nearly every one of them glared aggressively at me, young children being the only exceptions. No one talked to me; they just glared with unblinking animosity for the tens of seconds it took for me to walk past them. I never felt to be in any real danger, but I was glad to have my special abilities and that it was only a couple of blocks before I reached a main street. Prejudice gets raised as an issue often enough that I've thought about it theoretically many times, but to be personally involved in such a strong example of it was a wholly different experience for me, especially as it was in the reverse of the direction I've always thought about it going. I've heard Black people say countless times that prejudice is bad, and I thought they all felt that way, yet virtually every Black person I'd walked past had been blatantly racially prejudiced against me, and had wanted me to know it. [[My understanding of the many instinctual, psychological and cultural drivers for prejudice were, at this time, not even good enough to be called naïve, so I'll spare you my then thoughts on the matter. Let's just say I didn't know what to think, other than I knew at the personal level it was very unpleasant, and at the larger level very sad. Unfortunately it's human nature, and not just White humans.]] I headed back to the hotel at 9:30am, still not having heard from anyone. I found my girls chatting in bed, not having emerged far enough to see my note. I held up the grocery bags, saying, "Anyone for croissants?" Not only was "anyone" for them, but "everyone" was. Julia instructed, "Call the others." "Do you think they'll be awake now?" "If not, they need to be woken up. We're supposed to check out soon. Get them to clear everything out of their room and bring their bags up here for breakfast. Our robes too, in case the hotel charges us for leaving them in the wrong room. Then call the front desk and tell them we'll be checking out of this room at 11, but the other room will be clear at 10, okay?" "Only if you let me kiss you all first." Ava laughed with happiness when after I kissed Julia, I kissed Carol very enthusiastically. I made the phone calls while the three girls made inroads on the breakfast I'd fetched. In due course the others arrived, dumped their bags and happily dug into breakfast. What with all the playing around that was required (fun in the shower, me being chased out of the second bedroom so I wouldn't see anyone's swimsuit, etc.), we only narrowly managed to get out of the room by 11. We left our VERY large pile of luggage - most of it the girls' shopping - with the hotel, then headed out for some sightseeing. I'll skip most of the day, as it was just sightseeing. The day did have some good points, most of them barely hidden by very small bikinis. Julia, Carol and Ava once again proved how wonderful they are as girlfriends, by taking off their blouses on the Venice Beach Boardwalk, to reveal almost everything. Carol had a one piece that seemed to be nothing more than a small collection of unusually arranged thin strips that somehow joined together in a stable, legal manner. Ava was wearing a thin, black, shiny bikini that molded itself to her athletically slim figure perfectly, and Julia was wearing the delightful bikini I'd already seen her wear in the hot tub, and was perfectly happy to see again. The other three girls had nothing that came close to what my girls were wearing, so we had to go shopping. Julia had found out where there was a large swimwear store next to the Boardwalk, so we went looking for it. Alexis had previously said she'd wear anything I wanted, and she repeated that statement on the way to the store. We didn't have time to waste today (try doing all the tourist things in LA in a single late-starting day), so as soon as we entered the store, I asked one of the assistants, "Where are your sexiest bikinis?" Scattered all around the store, it turned out. They didn't display their bikinis sorted by sexiness, which wasn't very helpful of them. We had to start searching through the racks, and I soon started enjoying myself, as bikini shopping is great fun, especially when I discovered that some of the bikinis they sell in LA are WAY sexier than the ones they sell in Corvallis - they had tiny, SEE-THROUGH bikinis! The breast cups (more like "breast Band-Aids") were made of a fabric that had hundreds of regularly spaced small holes in it, so even in the very small locations that the bikini had any fabric, it didn't have much fabric. There's a lot to be said for a bikini which is almost entirely absent. The bottom half was made from the same fabric and had no lining. It was a G-string with a small, perforated panel that would barely cover the wearer's pussy, and even covered, the pussy would be visible. The guy who invented these - somehow I felt sure it was a guy - was BRILLIANT! To my delighted surprise, Alexis said, "Find one in my size, and I'll try it on for you." I may have been surprised, but I wasn't stupid! - I started searching. Julia found her one in the right size and black, which was appropriate for Alexis. She put it on, and it was blatant, in-your-face, sex-on-display. I loved it! Carol said, "I think all of Mark's regular girls should have one." I must have died and gone to Heaven without noticing, because Carol in one of these tiny, gauzy bikinis would be truly and delightfully obscene. Most of the girls were shocked. Not Julia though, she just laughed and praised, "Good girl!" A sentiment I TOTALLY agreed with. #4: Julia cunningly added, "You're right, Carol. We need suits like that for when it's just all us lovers somewhere private." Thereby giving Carol an excuse to buy one. Julia, Ava and Carol started searching out their own obscene swimsuits. Katelin and Pat couldn't bring themselves to go that far. They didn't even want to go as far as the suits that my three girls had bought in Corvallis. I expected Julia to put some pressure on Katelin and Pat to be VERY sexy, but Julia was surprisingly relaxed about it. Her only real encouragement was when she said, "You know there are going to be a lot of girls around Mark over summer, especially when the news of his money gets out. I'm sure it won't take long into summer before you'll be wishing you'd chosen suits that were more to Mark's liking." Pat soon mentioned a major problem, "But Mom would kill me if she found a suit like these in my room." Julia said, "So give it to me to keep for you." "You'd do that?" "It's easy. Unlike your parents, mine won't object to racy bikinis. They saw Mark surrounded by a twenty naked girls a few weekends ago, so this is tame by comparison." Katelin raised the next problem, "Umm, are we ever going to wear the new bikinis in public?" Julia answered, "Not anywhere like the Aquatic Center, as there's too much chance of that getting back to your parents. But you might wear them if a group of us goes swimming at a remote beach or swimming hole, or at Mark's new place if he buys one with a pool." #4: "Will other guys be around?" "You know enough about Mark to know that's not likely, but I can't make promises about the future. No one will be making you go on such a date, Katelin. If your embarrassment is more important to you than being with Mark, stay at home." They eventually bought suits that were about the same sexiness as those my girls had bought in Corvallis. That was a success as far as I was concerned, as their new bikinis were damned sexy. They were WAY sexier than either girl had ever worn before, and they looked VERY good in them, especially Pat. So I ended up buying two sexy and four obscene swimsuits (fortunately I'd saved a lot of money by fetching our breakfasts). That was the good news. The bad news was that Julia bought me an obscene suit too. Actually about 15% of a suit, because 85% of it was missing. I put up a good fight, just like I do with every other protest that I lose. All the other girls protested too; they thought Julia should buy me several of them. We left the store with Carol, Julia and Ava wearing the swimsuits they'd brought from Corvallis. They were all wearing skirts or shorts, so only the swimsuit tops were on display, but that was fine with me because that's the best half for visual appreciation. The obscene tops stayed in their bags, as there were thousands of people walking around so some discretion was called for. Pat and Katelin wore their new suits, which was brave of them and I appreciated it, especially in Pat's case, as she had more to appreciate. Alexis had asked me, "Which of my suits do you want me to wear, Mark?" "Thanks for asking, but wearing what you came down with is fine for now. It's too public out there for your wonderful new suit." Speaking of "out there", Venice Beach wasn't quite what I expected; there were more tourists, more path-side stalls and entertainers, and fewer sexy roller-skating bikini girls. Something else I hadn't expected was to come across an outdoor gym, where lots of guys were showing off and occasionally doing some weight-training. Julia said, "Mark, I seem to recall your agreeing to strip down to your Speedos if you saw other guys dressed similarly." "You knew this was here, didn't you?" #1: It was quickly apparent that my six verging-on-ex-friends were more interested in me changing into my new 'European' swimsuit, than my "boring, old Speedos." #4: In self-defense, I quickly stripped down to my Speedos, which earned me some yelled out invitations from the muscle builders to join them. I wouldn't be seen dead EVER going to go near guys who walked around in public with their asses hanging out! I strolled off quickly, with the six giggling girls rushing to catch up to me. There was one event that occurred during our sightseeing day which was especially unusual. It also happened on the Venice Beach Walkway (or "Boardwalk", or whatever it's called). The Walkway is a chaotic place. There are people selling all sorts of crap; religious weirdoes and other nutcases; entertainers such as dancers, musicians and jugglers; and thousands of tourists. The seven of us were careful to stay reasonably close together, which meant we were traveling quite slowly as we had to stop whenever one of us was interested in something. I was standing to the side, waiting for Alexis to finish admiring a huge guy's many tattoos while the other girls browsed the nearby 'stores' (stuff displayed on mats spread on the ground). A young husband and wife walked hand-in-hand toward me. I was assuming they were married because the woman was heavily pregnant. The mother-to-be walked close enough to come within my proximity range, and I could immediately tell there was something wrong with the baby. I haven't encountered many pregnant women, but I have sensed enough of them to know how a late-pregnancy baby should 'look' in proximity. From her size, this woman's pregnancy was obviously in the last month, yet there was almost no focus to the baby's intentions. It wasn't asleep, and it wasn't still, so it had intended movements, but its intentions were far 'fuzzier' and more erratic than they should've been. I walked behind her for a few steps, to make sure what I was sensing wasn't a momentary effect, which it wasn't. I couldn't decide what to do about it, if anything, but I was pretty sure Julia would make a better decision than me. The couple were walking at a pretty steady rate, not stopping to gawk at anything, so I didn't have much time. I rushed back to Julia. I didn't have time for a full explanation, and didn't want to give one where the other girls could overhear, so I quickly told her, "I've got a tricky problem I need your private advice on. I don't have time to explain now, and we have to rush off. Let's get the other girls to wait for us here." Julia immediately and determinedly started calling the other girls over. Carol and Ava responded quickly, but the others weren't quick. Katelin strolled back, but Pat and Alexis called back, "Why?", and, "I won't be long." Julia didn't stop to argue. She said, "Carol and Ava. You're in charge. Make everyone wait on the grass over there. Mark and I have an emergency." Katelin looked around panicky, asking, "What's wrong?" Julia ignored her. To me she said, "Lead on." I took her hand and we jogged off down the path to catch up to the pregnant woman. Katelin was still asking questions when we left her behind. I'd been worried that the pregnant woman might turn off the path before I got her in my sight again, in which case I'd not be able to find her again in the crowd, so I was relieved when I caught sight of her up ahead. I slowed, so I could quietly tell Julia, "See that pregnant woman and her husband ahead of us?" "The one in the lime green track suit?" "Yeah. There's something wrong with the baby, and I don't know what to do about it." "What's wrong with it?" "Remember how my Aikido Sensei tested my ability to detect an incoming punch, even from behind?" Julia nodded. "It's not mind reading, or any nonsense like that, merely an Aikido ability that I happen to be extraordinarily good at. When someone decides to make a physical movement, their mind projects their ki first, which I can read. I know you won't understand that, but it's like they imagine what they're just about to do, and I can read that imagination. Babies in the womb deliberately move themselves around too, which I can also read..." Julia interrupted in surprise, "REALLY? Even though the baby is inside her?" "Yeah. But that baby is not thinking properly about what it's doing. I sensed that when they walked past me before, and I'd like to get close enough to confirm it again, but if it is the same, what should we do about it?" "Can you check the baby again now?" "I need to be within three feet because it only works at short range. Let's walk up behind them." We walked faster to catch up. Once I was within range, I told Julia, "It's the same." We slowed down so we could talk without their hearing us. Julia asked me several questions about the medical situation: Was it a mental or physical problem? Was it recent? Could it be fixed? What would the symptoms be? Did it demand urgent action? What sex what the baby? Etc. I could answer the first question, "It's almost certainly a mental problem," but my other answers were nearly always, "I don't know." The gender question got answered with, "I definitely don't know. It's impossible for me to tell that from how someone intends to move and arm or leg." When Julia gave up on her questions, she said, "I think the best thing to do is to suggest they get the baby checked out as soon as they can, especially if there are any mental tests the doctors can do. I'll do the talking because it might seem better coming from a girl. You stand to one side and look unconnected to me. I'd prefer they not know about you, in case they get angry enough to call the police. After I talk with them, we'll both walk back to the others." That's what we did. Julia kept following them at their pace, while I moved onto the grass beside the path then accelerated to get ahead of them a little. I stopped to ostensibly look at a mime artist, although I was really looking past him to watch Julia. She walked around the front of the parents-to-be and started talking to them. I was too far away to hear anything, but the first minute was nice and calm, then they started getting worked up, their bodies stiffened and they started waving their arms around, especially the assumed husband. Julia talked a bit longer, then quickly left in the direction of the other girls. I stayed for a few seconds, to watch the couple having a heated discussion with each other. They didn't watch Julia leave, and they seemed totally oblivious to anyone else. Their voices were rising, and other people were starting to stare at them, or walk wide circles around them. I took off after Julia, catching up with her easily although she's very hard to find in a crowd. I said, "Let's walk back on the grass, it's less crowded. They seemed to be arguing with each other after you left." Julia agreed, "Yeah, that was starting as I left. The mother was into drugs. She said she'd given them up after she found out she was pregnant, but the father wasn't happy about what I told them." "They believed you?" "Yeah. They weren't smart people, and people believe almost anything in LA. I think the mother was already suspicious that things weren't going right." I couldn't think of anything else to ask about the couple, but I could say, "Thanks very much. I didn't know what I should do, or even if I should do anything at all." "No problem. I'm happy to help you, although I doubt our warning helped them. I'm amazed by your abilities. Is that really something you learned in Aikido?" "Yes and no. You've seen a training session, and there were no very pregnant women involved, but an obvious part of fighting is anticipating your opponent's movements. I don't understand why or how, but people give off a mental energy when they're intending to move, and Aikido students learn how to read it. So I did learn it in Aikido, but I am very, very good at reading other people's ki - far better than my sensei is - so it's not as if anyone else could learn to sense a baby's mental health by going to Aikido classes for a while. I'm pretty sure Sensei couldn't detect anything wrong with that baby. It's possible some of the very top Aikido masters might be able to, but I'm guessing not many of them, if any." Julia she grasped my arm fiercely, saying, "You're incredible." A couple of seconds later she added, "Maybe you should be studying medicine instead of mathematics?" "I'd faint at the sight of blood. I have to shut my eyes when they show anything gory on TV. All I did was detect that the baby wasn't thinking about its movements clearly. Detecting thoughts about movement isn't sufficient to make me a good doctor. I could tell how many babies a pregnant woman was carrying, and I might be able to tell whether someone was sleeping, in a coma or braindead, but doctors have got machines that do all those things anyway. I can't think of any other medical use." "What about healing cuts faster, like you're testing on Carol and me?" "It's barely faster than normal healing. I don't know what I'm going to do in my life, but I hope it's something far more interesting than spending all day hanging around in a hospital helping people's cuts heal 15% faster during the time I'm focusing on them." "So this is why you've suddenly got so much better at soccer. You'd be good at many competitive sports, wouldn't you?" "It's only got a three-foot range, so sports like tennis wouldn't work but I'd probably be pretty good at close sports like boxing." "Ahh, no wonder you're so good at fighting." "Yeah, knowing what the other guy is about to do is a big advantage." Julia stopped asking questions, being content to hold my arm proudly. We walked quickly back to the rest of our group, who saw us coming and jumped to their feet. Carol and Ava were well behaved, but the other three greeted us with questions about what we'd rushed off to do. Julia told them, "It's none of your business." That's the most interesting type of business, so it didn't put them off at all. Their responses were effectively, "Yeah, but what was it all about?" Julia answered, "Listen carefully, because I'll explain this only once." Alexis, Pat and Katelin gathered around, listening intently. Julia said, "It's none of your business. Mark's an exceptionally unusual guy, and there are things he does that you haven't got a hope of understanding, so he's not going to waste his time trying to explain them to you." "Did he do something illegal?" "{Sigh}. I've seen enough of Venice Beach. Let's go to Hollywood Boulevard now." We did sightseeing activities for the rest of the day, had a casual meal, collected our bags from the hotel, and returned to the airport in the early evening using a different limo and driver than we'd had before. I thought it was really cool that the limo could take us right to the steps of the plane. The driver thought it was cool too; the sight of a private jet clearly giving him ideas of a substantial tip. Reality is often disappointing, as he'd made the mistake of not helping unload all our luggage, leaving it mostly to me and the two pilots. Soon after the flight took off, Julia commented how tired she was, with most of the girls agreeing. Alexis immediately begged, "PLEASE can Mark and I have sex on the bed before you waste it by falling asleep?" I wasn't tired. For that, and for other reasons, I backed Alexis up by saying, "I wouldn't want to disappoint Alexis' parents." Ava added, "I'd like to try it too." Soon most of the girls had volunteered. Carol unfortunately couldn't, and Katelin was uncertain, explaining, "I'd like to, but it might be better if I could tell Mom I didn't. I'd like to tell her to 'get real' about my sleeping with Mark, but it'd be best to go easy on her." I had plenty of other girls and an irrecoverable shortage of time, so I didn't let Katelin's parental concerns worry me, instead getting busy with the others. I thoroughly enjoyed the girls thanking me for the trip for well over an hour, until the "Fasten Seatbelts" sign came on. Alexis' and Katelin's parents greeted us when we disembarked (the girls had called before leaving LA, giving our ETA - "Estimated Time of Arrival"). There was considerable gushing and raving over how wonderful it'd been. Ben asked Alexis, "How was the bed?" "GREAT! Talk about fucking in style. It was a fantastic weekend for sex. I did some fun things I'd never done before." "Like what?" asked her mother, with curiosity. "We..." I put my arm on her shoulder, whispering, "Not in front of Katelin's mother." I'd noticed that Mrs. Eaton was listening carefully, with an increasingly annoyed expression on her face. "Oh yeah. Sorry." To her parents, Alexis said, "I'll tell you later. It wasn't anything you guys haven't done already, but new for me." There was enough light in the area, so more photographs were taken. Alexis wanted a shot of her, her parents and me under the plane; then Katelin wanted the equivalent with her mother too. Eventually we thanked the pilots and walked back to our cars. While Alexis was loading up her car she said, "Wait till you see the outfit Mark bought me Mom, it's fantastic. I'm going to wear it to school on Wednesday, which will be a scream." After more hugs, kisses and heartfelt "Thank yous", Alexis, Katelin and their respective parents drove off. We drove Pat to Julia's to pick up her bike. We deferred talking with Prof and Vanessa until after we'd taken care of Pat and Ava. Saying goodbye to Pat took a few minutes because of all the gushing. We'd be seeing each other in twelve hours, but that didn't eliminate the need for many heartfelt expressions of appreciation. I added to the delay a little, by wishing Pat, "Good luck with your parents. I hope your cover story holds up." "I hope so too, but it was worth it even if they find out. I had a FANTASTIC weekend. Thanks very much for the dress." Pat lifted her shopping bag. I'd been anticipating her thanking me "for the sex." "Sex" and "dress" sound sufficiently similar that I was momentarily confused when she held up her shopping bag, until I realized how silly I'd been. As soon as Pat rode away, Ava said, "Alone at last! I've been BUSTING to ask Mark and Carol properly how they feel about being lovers now?" Carol said, "I feel WONDERFUL! It's the best thing that's ever happened in my life. I owe you a big favor for pushing me into it, Ava." Ava waved the last comment away, to eagerly ask me, "What about you, Mark? What do you think of it?" "I'm all for it after seeing Carol in her new swimsuit." I got playfully beaten up. "Okay. I'll answer seriously. It's great to have Carol as one of my girlfriends, because I don't have enough sexy girlfriends." I got beaten up again. "Haha. Okay, okay! I'll admit that she's the best girlfriend I've got, but mainly because the rest of you are setting such a low standard." -- "Ow! Ow! Now I'm starting to regret having ANY of you as girlfriends. Already you've corrupted Carol into hitting me even though I complimented her." I was eventually forced to admit having the same sentiments about our relationship as Carol had expressed. Ava celebrated her victory, "I KNEW I was right! You two are so perfect together. I've never seen two people who loved each other so much..." "Don't get carried away yet," interrupted Julia. "We've still got to break it to their parents. Let's hope they feel the same way you do." "When are you going to do that?" Julia answered, "I thought the three of us should spend tonight at their place, then tomorrow night at my place, so we can tell both sets of parents quickly." "Oh boy. I hope it goes well. You'll tell me at school tomorrow?" "Of course, especially since you're almost totally responsible for it." We delivered Ava home, which involved going inside to talk with her parents for a while. That quickly turned into a fashion show when Ava started opening her boxes and bags to hold up her purchases. Soon after that, I was sent out to the car to fetch Carol's and Julia's purchases. That required me to make several trips. The females had a great time. Carson and I sat in the corner making appropriate noises at appropriate times, and quiet groans otherwise. Unlike Pat, these girls hadn't removed the price tags, so it didn't take long for Katie to say, "You spent a LOT of money, Mark!" "I managed to bring some money back, which I consider a great victory. Besides, the girls all said they didn't have enough dresses, and they'd die if they didn't buy whatever dress they were holding up at the time. Initially I thought they were exaggerating, but they assured me they weren't, so I don't think I had any choice. It'd reflect very badly on me if all the girls dropped dead the first time I took them on a trip somewhere." It took most of an hour - although talking about clothes nonstop made it seem much longer - before we could leave, Ava wishing us, "Good luck," as we drove off. I said, "How is it that the one outfit that I most wanted Ava to model never appeared?" The girls didn't get it. I knew for a fact they certainly had every one of each other's outfits memorized, but they couldn't work out what I meant. I explained, "Her new bikini." "Haha. Yeah, funny that. She didn't ask me to keep it for her, so she's got it, but I bet it's hidden already." Arriving at home immediately meant having another fashion show. Even worse this time, as Mom made me try on my new clothes too. Toward the end of the show, as Carol was showing off one of her purchases, she said, "Our next items will be more to Dad's taste than Mom's." That caught Dad's attention, so he was looking on with interest when Carol and Julia walked back into the room wearing their new bikinis. Both of them were effectively naked, but somehow managed to seem considerably more indecent than that. Dad was quick to quip (Mom was still trying to catch her breath), saying, "I hope you bought another one for Fely." Donna said, "Wow. I hope you got one for me too! You can see EVERYTHING! The girls at school would freak if I had a suit like that." Mom said, "Never mind the girls, the BOYS would freak. You'd be killed in the rush. I hope you're not intending to wear those in public. That'd be a bad idea. I doubt they're legal, and the last thing we want is the police sniffing around here because they think something improper might be happening." #2: #1: Carol answered, "They're for private use, like around the new house's pool. We're not going to wear them to the Aquatic Center or anywhere like that." "You'd get kicked out of the Center in those. Either that or they'd call the police. You're certainly not the modest girl you used to be a couple of months ago." "No," agreed Carol. "Mark and Julia have brought me out of my shell." "So we see," agreed Dad. Mom asked, "Has Ava got a matching suit?" Julia answered, "She and Alexis both have one. Pat and Katelin didn't go this far, but their new ones are still sexy. It's going to be fun getting Mark's regular girls to wear suits like these." Dad said, "This summer's going to be very interesting." I agreed, "I'm looking forward to it already." But then I thought of a very serious problem, "But Julia, how can you get the other girls to wear swimsuits like these? Even if you could talk them into it, we're not going to fly back and forth to LA just for bikinis. It's tempting, but it's a little excessive." "They can order them over the internet because suits like these don't need to be carefully sized. I'm not going to push everyone into wearing them, because it'll backfire if too many of them feel uncomfortable about it. I'll just let peer pressure and greed make them decide for themselves that they should get them. If it's their own idea they'll push themselves further. It'll take a bit longer, but the end result will be much better." "You like your little games, don't you?" "Yes, plus it's important to practice motivating people." "Sorry, did you say 'motivate' or 'manipulate'?" "I said, 'practice getting them to make Mark happy.' Did I get that wrong?" "Not hardly. My only issue is that I'm surprised you think you need to practice that, because you're pretty damned good at it already." Donna had been getting impatient. She blurted out, "I want a suit like that! I want to be sexy too. Please, can I buy one over the internet, please Mom?" "You're FAR too young for clothes like those. Where on Earth would you wear them?" "Around the pool, like Julia said before. It'd be fantastic to wear one of those when the Ducklings are visiting. They'd FLIP!" #4: #3: #1: #4: #3: #4: #3: #4: Meanwhile Donna was explaining that she was virtually the same age as Carol, and if it was good enough for Carol to wear a suit like that, then it was certainly good enough for Donna, in Donna's somewhat biased opinion. "I'll have to think about it, Donna," said Mom, who didn't look too eager to do that thinking. "They're VERY indecent and VERY unsuitable for young girls to wear, even for Carol and Julia except for their being married." "But I REALLY want one!" "Yes, I can see that." Mom looked at us older kids to explain, "Donna's been using Ava's vibrator a lot this weekend, including just before you arrived. She's..." "It's GREAT!" declared Donna. "Much better than the battery one. I DEFINITELY want one of those, even if I have to spend my money." I asked, "How come it's taken you so long to try it?" "I wasn't going to use it when there might have been bugs in my room. I didn't want any dirty old men perving at me. I kind of forgot about it until yesterday, but I've been using it ever since. It's GREAT! You could buy me one now that you're rich, can't you?" Donna didn't do herself any favors by asking that way. She earned herself a mini-lecture from Mom about greed (you know how it went: "Just because Mark's rich doesn't mean he's going to buy you everything you want..."), after which Donna was much more subdued. Carol said, "We did buy you some presents in LA, Donna. Do you want them now or would you prefer to wait till your birthday?" Donna brightened considerably. "NOW!" "It's only two and a half months to your birthday. That's close enough that we might as well wait, don't you think?" Carol was smiling, knowing full well that two and half months was the same as two and half forevers for Donna. Actually, it was probably the equivalent of at least five forevers. "I can't wait ALL the way to August; that AGES!" (Donna's birthday is August 1st.) I couldn't resist, "When you wanted a bikini like these, didn't you say there was almost no difference between your and Carol's age? So if thirteen months is 'practically the same', it should be easy for you to wait till August." Donna knew I was teasing, and treated my comment the way she thought it deserved; she poked her tongue out at me. Adding, in case anyone was in doubt about her opinion, "This is TOTALLY different." Carol and Julia had picked out some clothes for Donna in LA. I'd contributed too, by handing over the money. So we had a few bits and pieces for Donna. Not an obscene bikini though. That'd never occurred to me, as I'd been HIGHLY distracted at the time. Carol commented, "They're not even wrapped up, or anything. Maybe we should wait until next weekend before you try them on?" Donna thought otherwise, and expressed her opinion very clearly. Carol laughed, then went to get the bags with Donna's gifts in them. Donna had a delightful time opening each bag, then trying each item on. I had a delightful time because Carol and Julia were still in their bikinis, something I thought was probably deliberate (good girls!). I got to see Donna strip down to her panties repeatedly, but the sight didn't do much for me. Playing sex games with her appealed, but not the mere sight, especially as there was so little to see. Donna loved everything, and when she got to the end of her little pile, she rushed around to thank the three of us. I was given a very unsisterly kiss, which I suspect was more Donna taking advantage of the opportunity rather than thanking me. When I peeled Donna off me, Julia said, "Carol and I have got a few more things to show you yet." As they walked out of the living room on their way to our bedroom to get changed, Julia called back, "Come with us, Donna, I've got something to show you." Donna happily gamboled after them. A couple of minutes later they came back, dressed in their next outfits, and with Donna dressed in Julia's bikini. The bikini was every bit as obscene on Donna as it had been on Julia, particularly the bottom half, as the tiny panel was thin and tight so it molded itself to the wearer's pussy, and it was easily see-through enough to show more than it hid. The top looked a little silly on Donna, as she had no breasts yet, merely bumps immediately under her nipples. Donna looked at me, saying sadly, "I don't think the top looks any good on me?" I could easily hear the question mark, so the answer was obvious, "I'm happy to say that I think otherwise. I think you look very sexy." I saw Mom frown out of the corner of my eye, but Donna's reaction was entirely different. She smiled from ear to ear, then jumped into my lap to thank me by kissing me, in another act of opportunistic appreciation. I almost felt like a heel, because she did look a little silly. If she wore a bikini like this when the Ducklings came to visit my new mansion's pool, then they might think she was a little silly too, but that was a price I was willing for her to pay in order to create a sexy atmosphere and to encourage the Ducklings into wearing similar suits. Virtually all of the Ducklings were more physically developed than Donna, so they'd look damned good in such bikinis. Even the couple that weren't would still be a lovely sight, with their pussies and asses so well displayed. I cheered myself up from risking Donna's embarrassment when I realized that I doubted any of the Ducklings would be silly enough to laugh at Donna, considering Donna controlled their access to me. Mom said, "Maybe for your birthday, Donna." "But that's AGES away!" Donna was still sitting in my lap, so I could easily whisper to her, "Don't argue now. When we get the new house, start by swimming naked. Mom will be glad to let you wear anything after that." "{Giggle}." Donna turned to Mom to say, "Okay, Mom." Mom looked at me suspiciously. I claimed, "I avoided an argument. Isn't that a good thing?" Mom's continued look of suspicion wasn't reassuring. Maybe Donna shouldn't have giggled. The fashion show continued though, including Mom requesting that Donna get dressed in her PJs. After the fashion show, Julia and Carol told Mom and Dad about the trick we'd played on Ava. Mom and Dad laughed at the descriptions of some of the teases, and we briefly discussed how to talk with Ava about it in the future. I had an idea during the discussion, and asked, "Let me tell Ava, please. I've got another tease I want to inflict on her. Girls who make me sit through fashion shows deserve all the teasing I can think of." They agreed to my teasing Ava, and seemed totally unthreatened by my statement. I made a mental note that I clearly hadn't been teasing them nearly enough. We also warned Donna that she still had to be damned careful to watch her mouth, to not let anyone else know, and not to talk with Ava about it at school in case someone overheard. I made another mental note to warn Ava not to let Donna talk about it anywhere public, to make another thoughtless disclosure less likely. Mom gave me an update on the mansion shopping. She and Vanessa had spent a little while visiting a few newly listed properties, but nothing interesting had appeared. More usefully, they'd had a good talk with the architect. He now had a very good idea of what we wanted, and the moms knew more about what to look for when deciding what properties went onto the shortlist. They'd be deciding on those over the next few days, then getting the architect to visit them so he could give time and cost estimates to help decide on the short-shortlist (three or maybe four properties), which he'd cost much more accurately. I said, "One thing I've been thinking about, is that I'd really like to have a pool. When you're deciding on which places go on the shortlist, would you include that please?" "After seeing those so-called bikinis, I have no doubt as to why. Most of the properties have a pool, and I'll bear it in mind." Carol and Julia were very tired, so we had an early night. In our room, they first had to decide which of my and Carol's clothes stayed in this house, and which got taken back to Julia's. The chosen clothes were placed in the living room so I could collect them on the way to my morning study session without waking the girls. Julia added, "When you're at my place, can you put the photos on a memory stick please, so we can get them printed after school tomorrow." "I've read the manual on how to transfer them off the phone, but I've never used a memory stick before. How do I use that?" Julia explained, and it sounded simple enough, even for a computer dummy like me. I dug out the cable that came with my phone and put it next to my keys, while the girls started deciding which photos could be deleted. I was allowed a say in the decision making, which was unusually nice of them. When that was done, we finally got to go to bed, and I finally got to thank Carol for buying such a wonderful bikini. I was especially thankful to her, because it was Carol who'd suggested that all my regulars should have one, and it was her that looked the best in one. Plus she'd missed out on having fun with me on the airplane's bed, so she was definitely deserving of some quality attention. The girls laughed at me when I asked them to put their bikini tops back on while we had sex. ------- Chapter 218: I Add "Typist" to My Job Skills Monday, May 16, 2005 I woke and climbed out of bed over Carol, who remained dead to the world throughout my graceless clambering. I collected my gear and the clothes, loaded up the car, and drove to the Williams'. I put the clothes away as I'd been instructed, had my first breakfast, then went to the study where I did the job of transferring the photos from my phone to the memory stick. It was surprisingly easy, so that was a relief. Inspired by some of the photos, I decided to check out online bikini stores. Julia is often telling me I should google more, and this was an EXCELLENT learning opportunity. To my delight there were heaps of places. Some of the best ones (i.e., those that sold the sexiest bikinis) were in Australia, which put Australia on my list of countries I'd most like to visit, especially its beaches. I was amused to see that G-string type bikinis were nearly twice as expensive as boring bikinis. They obviously used far less material, and the work involved in making one had to be the same or less, so that didn't make any sense to me. I've noticed that all the best things in life seem to be more expensive, even if there's no rational reason for it. Next I googled something else that interested me, "How many senses do humans have?" I was surprised to see that estimates ranged all over the place, from three to forty or so, none of which included an even vaguely accurate description of my proximity sense. I didn't spend long on this, as clearly there was no firm answer, or even much understanding. The next subject I wanted to google was "kiatsu" again. My experience with the pregnant woman in LA had rekindled my hope of being able to help Ava's parents. I followed all sorts of links that took me to many strange sites, all of which strongly reinforced my impression that people get VERY weird about spiritualistic or magical healing, but I read nothing whatsoever that gave me any confidence that it had any merit. I stuck at it for quite a while, but it was a total waste of time and I felt sorry for the electrons that had delivered so much dreck to my computer. Not finding anything encouraging, plus my knowing that my kiatsu increased healing rates about 15%, killed my hope for Ava's parents. If I spent four hours a day giving them kiatsu, so two hours each, then their healing rate would improve by 15% times 2/24, being 1.25%. Their cancers were virulent, aggressive, and would have effectively eaten them alive in a few more months, so their spending four hours with me every day for a paltry 1.25% bonus to their healing rate was pointless. They'd waste more time making themselves available for me than I could possibly gain for them, not that they'd let me grab so much of their remaining time for something so silly. In the movies, and especially in the fantasy books I used to have time to read, the hero has some magical power that saves the day, but this wasn't like that, and not just because I didn't need to do it to "win the girl" because I already had her. I obviously didn't see myself as a hero either. The main difference was that there wasn't enough difference: my ki was just like everyone else's. I had more of it, but it was otherwise the same. Every time Ava's parents moved, they were generating their own ki and it was flowing through parts of their body. They would be subconsciously projecting their own ki through their cancers very often, and they were still facing death in only a few months. Cancers are NASTY, and I knew kiatsu was very weak. I wasn't going to be able to save them. My last non-college studying activity was to type up the extra speeches I had made during my pipeline dates, as part of my learning to type faster. I'd never had the need to do much typing before, as my long-ago-learned, two-fingered, "hunting and pecking" style had done the job, especially because I had the keyboard layout memorized so the "hunting" part took no time. I started by googling "Learn to type", and reading what various sites said. Most of them offered typing training in a form that didn't suit me. I didn't want to use both my physical hands, nor did I want to use enough NP-fingertips to simulate two physical hands. I wanted to use one mind only, which meant a maximum of four fingertips. Multiple minds would have coordination problems, not just in hitting the keys in the right order, but in composing the text to type. I couldn't think of any disadvantage in using only one mind to type with, because one unencumbered NP-fingertip, being massless, could range over the entire keyboard as fast as my mind could think, producing a one-fingered, super-high-speed version of my physical "hunting and pecking". I wouldn't be able to do all my typing with one fingertip because of the occasional need to simultaneously press an ordinary key with the "Shift", "Ctrl" and/or "Alt" keys, although I rarely used the latter two. I would have been better off with a keyboard with two complete sets of keys, one set unshifted and the other set shifted. That way my NP-fingertip could have flown all over the place very quickly, and I wouldn't have had to bother learning to synchronize with the "Shift" key. That'd be a very impractical setup for an ordinary typist, so I doubted such keyboards existed. [[Had I know a little more about writing software, I could have easily got it going using the two keyboards that I already had on my desk, but a software solution never occurred to me.]] All the sites made a big deal about not looking at the keyboard when typing, which made sense, so I did some experiments with trying to type the alphabet with an NP-fingertip without looking at the keyboard. I made so many mistakes that the 26-letter result looked like a long Czechoslovakian word. The problem was that I didn't have an accurate enough way of knowing exactly where any letter was, so I'd often hit one of its neighbors. Some more playing around let me find a solution: I created one NP-fingertip and placed it on the center of the left "Shift" key. I placed another fingertip on the center of the "Backspace" key. Then I typed with a third fingertip. The first two fingertips gave me fixed points to navigate from, so it was just a matter of learning where each letter was relative to my two markers. I looked at the keyboard so I could accurately place my typing fingertip on the "a", then I memorized its position in proximity. I looked away from the keyboard, then practiced moving the fingertip away, then moving it back to type an "a". I did that several times. I got it right every time. Then I repeated the exercise for "b", etc. I ignored the numeric keypad as all those keys are pointless duplicates for me, but it still took nearly half an hour to memorize the locations of all the other keys. Then all I had to do was practice. Knowing the layout of the keyboard from my previous experience made the task easier, and soon I was able to type accurate sentences, admittedly without capital letters and fairly slowly compared to what I should be able to do, but it was a good start. One of the websites had a typing game, where I had to type words that were the names of alien spaceships that were trying to land on Earth. It had caught my attention because of its sci-fi theme. When I got a name right, the spaceship would blow up. I started at level 1, getting only a few slow-moving spaceships called names like: "red", "cat", "big". I upped the game to level 3, getting more and faster-moving spaceships called four- or five-letter names. That was already within my capabilities, so I changed the game's level to 6. That was harder, and I'm sad to say that the aliens conquered Earth a few times (sorry about that). After a bit more practice, I was good enough to keep Earth safe, so I incremented the game's level to 7. That was easy, so I went to level 8. Before long I was on level 10, then 12, etc. The game topped out at level 20, which was REALLY fast, with fun spaceship names like: "eat all humans", "suck your brains", "cow vivisection" and "take me to your leader". I didn't see "anal probe", but probably because that spaceship was sneaking up the back way. The game had been fun, and it's always satisfying to save the Earth from alien invasions. Plus my typing had gotten REALLY fast and necessarily accurate too, because if I mistyped a spaceship's name it wouldn't blow up. The game didn't have any capital letters, numbers, punctuation or any of the other symbols ($, %, ^, etc.) in it, so I needed to do something to learn to use those. I left the fate of the Earth in the hands (literally) of the next person to go to that site, so I could spend some time practicing the use of the "Shift" key. I found a website that had plenty of text, and I practiced retyping it into a Word document, capitalizing the first letter of every word. Once I had the "Shift" key well coordinated, I opened a clean Word document and started typing up my pipeline speeches. I flew through the job, typing the speeches in about half the time it'd taken to speak them on the date. When that was finished and emailed to Julia, I carried out an interesting little test. When I'd been learning to type, all three of my active minds had learned while #3 had remained on duty the entire time. Because only one mind had typed at a time, each of the active minds had taken turns every few minutes. Once a skill (or skill level) was learned by one mind, the second mind to learn it took about half the time, and the third mind taking about a third of the original time, on average (it varied somewhat). We'd repeatedly altered the order of the minds, so we knew the time reductions were probably a memory sharing effect, rather than one of my minds being smarter. We'd deliberately left #3 on duty the whole time because we wanted to confirm that memory sharing included mental skills. We were already pretty sure it did, but getting #3 "up to speed" would be starting from scratch rather than a series of incremental improvements. We called #3 off duty and got him to learn to type starting from the beginning: memorizing the key positions. It'd taken about two hours for the three minds to learn to type, but it only took quarter of an hour for #3, which was consistent with it being about four times faster than the first mind to learn a skill. Memory sharing was conveniently broad in its usefulness. We patted ourselves on the back happily, had a celebratory cookie, and then started our college studies. I finished all the posted Algebra lectures well before breakfast, despite the wasted time. Although time spent researching tiny bikinis should not be considered "wasted". Nor, I guess, should time spent learning to type extremely fast. Calculus was still a few hours away from catching up to the real-time class, but that didn't stop #1 and #2 moving on to the third subject - Calculus 252. The Calculus course I'd not quite finished yet was Calculus 251, the prerequisite to 252. Starting 252 a few hours before I'd finished 251 was unlikely to cause any problem, and if it did we could easily find something else for #1 and #2 to do while waiting for #3 and #4 to finish. More 'research' on tiny bikinis perhaps. At breakfast, I told Prof, "I've finished all the posted Algebra lectures and have just started on Calculus 252. I haven't quite caught up in 251, but should do that tomorrow morning." "Very good. That's a couple of days ahead of the last indication you gave me." "Yes, it's going well." Mostly we talked about our weekend in LA. Julia wasn't here to defend herself, so I had the freedom to entertain them with stories about the insane attitude to shopping the girls had repeatedly demonstrated on Saturday. On second thought, the "repeatedly" wasn't correct, as they'd been insane just once, for eight hours. I arrived at my home a bit early, so I went in to chat, and especially to make sure dinner for my Aikido evening was under control. I also told Julia, "I typed up the things I said during the last pipeline date that I think should be part of the website, and emailed the document to you. I did the photo transfer too. The memory stick is in my pocket." Julia said, "Thanks. We'll go to a photo store after school to get some sets printed, and I'll update the website when I get home." Mom said, "If you're going to a photo store, please get some passport photos for you, Carol and Donna. I'll need them for the passport applications. The store will know what you need." "Sure." Julia informed me, "Plan to be busy a few afternoons after school, because we need to start shopping for a new car for you. I'll do some googling this evening, and we'll start visiting car lots tomorrow after you've dropped your sisters home from school. Okay?" Julia's question was more rhetorical than anything else, and I accepted the inevitable by saying, "Yes." Carol said, "I'd like to help Mark shop, please?" Julia answered, "The beginning will be tedious. Wait until we've decided on the shortlist, and then you can come with us to help with the final choice." #1: #2: <{Sigh}.> I said, "How are you going to help me buy a car and choose which properties get on the shortlist? Both of those are going to happen over the next few days." "I know! I want to do both, but I don't want to delay either of them. Even if I can't revisit the properties, I'll make sure I get a chance to talk with our moms about the shortlist before it's finalized. Someone has to make sure your best interests are being looked after properly." "You mean that you get a big enough closet?" "That's not a 'best interest' item, that's an 'essential item'. If you're making mistakes like that, it's just as well you've got me looking after you." "It was your idea we get a mansion in the first place, so I guess it's only fair that you have to do all the work of choosing it." "Exactly. Good boy." Ava was waiting for us at the school's parking lot. As she was rushing over, I told everyone in the car, "I'm going to tease Ava. Keep a very straight face and look serious." Ava arrived, eagerly asking, "What'd your parents say about you-know-what?" Keeping a serious look on my face, I said, "Let's get away from other people, so I can tell you." We walked to the side of the main path, away from other ears, then I told Ava, "I've been kicked out of my bedroom. Donna's always wanted a room for herself, and now she's got mine." "Oh dear." After a brief pause, "What's going to happen now?" "I've been forced to share Carol's room." It took her a couple of moments, then a suddenly hopeful look appeared on her face, "What! You and Carol together?" I smiled, "Yeah, I have to share a double bed with her. I hope she doesn't snore." "YAY!" As Ava started dancing for joy, bouncing from person to person, hugging and telling us how she knew she was right, how happy she was, etc. When Ava got around to me again, she told me off, "You had me worried! I thought something bad had happened." "Sorry, I couldn't resist. In my defense, I did suffer through a whole day of shopping with half a dozen girls on Saturday, and I only teased you for a few seconds, so you're still miles ahead." Ava was in too good a mood to hold my tease against me. Donna finished laughing then took off at her usual speed. Carol gave Ava a kiss, then said, "Thanks for bringing Mark and me together. Mom and Dad let the three of us sleep together last night, and it was wonderful." Ava was beaming with pride, very happy with herself. After some more expressions of happiness, Carol said, "I've got your vibrator in my bag, thanks Ava. Donna loved it. I know what to buy her for her birthday now, if she can wait that long." Carol handed it over then left us. Julia, Ava and I headed toward our classes together, Ava still chuckling over how wonderful it was that my parents agreed. I remembered my mental note, so I asked Ava not to let Donna talk about it anywhere that wasn't very private, and preferably nowhere at all. Alexis, Pat and Katelin were very affectionate in their "Good mornings" to me. Pat had gotten away with her subterfuge, although her parents had been suspicious about her being away for the entire weekend. Pat's only having one dress to show for her trip was suspicious too, until Pat pointed out the tag to her mom, and explained that she'd blown all her budget on the one dress, but she'd still had a great time helping all the other girls shop. Alexis' only trouble with her parents was her mother's teasing her about not buying something as sexy as the triangle outfit for her mom. Katelin was less forthcoming about her reception at home, but reading between the lines, it appeared that she and her mother had had some sort of serious discussion after Katelin's return. Katelin didn't provide any details, but she said, "Everything's okay." [[Her mother had started a conversation about whether Katelin had had sex with me. Katelin answered by giving her mother both barrels, telling her how wonderful I am versus what a loser her mother had married, including, "Mark earned more money last week than Dad's earned in his whole life, and Mark's only fifteen." Katelin insisted she was going to take her chance with me, even if it was a very small chance, and her mother had to be crazy to object to having a tiny chance of having Mark as a son-in-law. It was quite a serious conversation, Katelin saying that her mother had done such a poor job of choosing a husband that she no longer had the right to control Katelin's sex-life. Katelin's Mom wasn't much of a mother, so Katelin was probably right to assert her independence, although that was more true in general than specifically with me, because Katelin never stood any chance of marrying me, not even with her improved attitudinal flexibility to non-normal sex.]] Lily joined in with being more affectionate toward me than she'd been in school before. I asked her why, and her answer translated to, "Safety in numbers." She didn't want our relationship to be known, but she was very happy to be affectionate with me if she could do so without standing out. She also wanted to know when she could serve me again, with a look on her face that clearly indicated that "serve me" didn't mean "wash my car", except euphemistically. I enjoyed our last session, so I answered, "I've got another pipeline date tomorrow evening. Does that suit you?" "ANY time suit me. You number one." "Okay, tomorrow evening it is. I'll give you a call like last time. We may not have as much time though, maybe only an hour or so." "One minute, one hour. Only important you happy and," Lily looked around, then concluded, "you cum." I could live with that. Last Friday's pipeline date came in for a great deal of discussion, including some sarcastic comments from guys. I told them that their comments were almost enough to make me give up dating anyone other than Julia. The guys had been sarcastic to me, so I'd been sarcastic right back at them. The pipeline was the main topic of conversation at lunch, which was another mass meeting. I refused to answer questions about what individual girls had done right or wrong. My position was simply, "It truly was a very enjoyable date. All the girls did very well, and I'd be very happy to have another date just like it again, but the pipeline rules require that half the girls have to be eliminated no matter how fantastic the date was." I repeated that several times, in different ways, explaining again that the purpose of the pipeline was to find just the best few girls for me, not to rank the girls that were eliminated along the way. I repeated and expanded on my justification for having more than one girl 'winning' the pipeline process, "Many of the girls who'll be entering the pipeline won't know me well. I'll be doing my best to choose girls whose personalities SEEM to suit me, but when the pipeline process ends it'll still take a few months for the final girls and me to get to know each other very well. That's why it makes sense for there to be something like three or four 'winners', because our feelings for each other will continue to evolve when the pipeline ends." It was just crap, as I had no intention of ever choosing a final girl to be my final girlfriend, let alone a traditional wife! But there was no need to say that. The girls had been told over and over again not to think about me as a normal guy, so if they assumed I'd be having a lifelong monogamous relationship with the final winning girl (singular), then that was their problem. Julia and I had never promised that I'd marry the final winner, only that by participating in the pipeline system, the girls had a better chance, which was true, because their chance improved from zero to tiny. Another consideration was that because my college studying was going so well, I was beginning to hope that I MIGHT (highly uncertain!) be able to finish my degree next year. IF that happened (a big "IF"), I'd almost certainly be leaving Corvallis after next summer. If the pipeline system was kept operating next school year, there might not be any time after the pipeline ends. I'd be declaring who the winner was, and then leaving. I didn't mention that issue either. Julia told the girls there'd be some new material added to the website later this evening, and she checked with members of Group 1B how their date planning was coming along. They answered, "Fine. We're sure Mark will enjoy it." After school, we headed to the photo store. On the way Donna asked, "Julia, can I bring your bikini to school tomorrow please? I want to put it on to show the Ducklings what your older girlfriends are wearing." Julia answered, "Anything to do with the Ducklings, ask Mark. They're his project." I said, "Funny you should mention that, Donna. It just so happens that I was thinking about the Ducklings and those bikinis earlier today. Isn't that a coincidence? Haha. Here's what I think you should do. First, don't say anything until Thursday. We're letting Alexis have the fun of telling our classmates that I'm rich. She's doing that on Wednesday, so on Thursday you can take Julia's bikini to school, show it to the Ducklings, and talk all about the trip to LA. We'll even give you a set of the photographs so you can show them around. That should get the Ducklings excited." "Neat!" "The second thought I had was that if you did just what you said, there'd be far too much risk of some of the Ducklings going home and trying to buy a bikini like that themselves. If any parents found out - and parents are VERY nosey people - there could be a lot of trouble for the girls, and for you and me when the parents found out more. So you should tell the Ducklings not to try to buy a bikini themselves. When you tell them that I'm rich, you can also tell them that any money I've got left over after my girlfriends' shopping trips is going to be used to buy a wonderful mansion, and we'll invite them around sometimes. The first time they come they can use my computer to shop for sexy bikinis online, and get them delivered to our house so their parents will never know. Most stores say they take only two to three days to deliver, so the Ducklings could come over on a Monday or Tuesday after school, and have the suits ready for use by the weekend. How does that sound?" "Fantastic! They're going to think you're wonderful. Oh boy, I hope we get the new house soon." I did a quick internal check, which confirmed that my opinion on that matter hadn't changed, so I said, "Me too." Julia said, "It's going to be a fair while yet. A few weeks to choose one then negotiate the contract, then however long the owners need to move out, then however long the renovations and furnishing takes. It's likely to be months rather than weeks." For once I totally agreed with Donna's expressing her lack of patience. Julia added, "We'll have a better idea once we identify the shortlisted properties, because we'll have asked them how much time they need to move out. The architect will be able to give us an estimate for the renovation times too." I knew that already, but it didn't make Donna or me feel any better. More likely than not, we wouldn't be able to move into the new place before summer ended, which would be a huge bummer. Not to mention a serious loss of business for the bikini manufacturing industry. By the way, I'd decided against buying a pile of bikinis in advance, because: The stores did deliver quickly enough for the owners to order early in the week for use on the weekend. Even the Australian stores stated only a week and a half for delivery. It'd occurred to me that the girls would enjoy the process of choosing their own suits. If there's one thing I know about girls - which is about the right number - it's that they LOVE shopping! It'd also occurred to me that I could bookmark a dozen online stores, then each girl in turn could sit on my lap in front of the computer, so she could make her own choice while I enjoyed myself feeling her up, thereby making the shopping experience enjoyable for both of us. In addition to letting the girls buy their own bikinis, I'd still buy some extra as spares for emergencies, probably from Australia, to get some different and sexier looks. Julia was right that these styles of bikinis weren't fussy about sizes (S, M, L and XL were the only sizes for most of them), so I would probably buy a dozen or two spares, in an assortment of sizes, colors and in the two fabrics that appealed to me: "mesh" and "sheer". Carol asked, "Do you want me to show my bikini off to my friends, Mark?" Before I could make the obvious answer, Julia said, "I'll tell you what to do later, Carol." "Okay," agreed Carol. I opened my mouth to ask a question that had just occurred to me, but Julia preempted me by saying, "You'll enjoy it more if you don't know in advance." Julia tends to be right when she says that, which makes it even more frustrating. Getting copies of all the photos on the stick was easy, just plug it in and press a few buttons, including that we wanted seven sets. Six for the girls on the trip plus an extra set for Donna, as hers would probably get grubby and have pictures go missing. I'd share Carol's or Julia's. When they were printed and censored (some of the pictures were NOT for general distribution) I gave a set to Donna. She looked through them and was blown away by the luxury we'd enjoyed. She was clearly envious. To forestall her getting in a bad mood over missing out, I said, "Some girls like luxury shopping, and some like horses. Which do you prefer?" As I knew it would, that immediately cheered her up. Once she'd finished expressing gratitude for the horse, Donna added, "The Ducklings are going to go crazy when they see those bikinis." "You're going to have a great deal of fun on Thursday then, aren't you?" "I'll say!" [That turned out to be a terribly inaccurate prediction.] After getting the passport photos done I went to my bank (YET AGAIN! Sheesh), to deposit my leftover cash, keeping a thousand back for Sensei. Funnily enough the bank manager didn't come out to greet me this time. He must've been busy thinking about how to reduce the size of the line, because he hadn't solved that problem yet. Carol got me to stop briefly so she could get some fresh vegetables for dinner tonight. We dropped Donna at home, I picked up my gi, left the passport photos for Mom, then we went to Julia's. I carried the groceries into the kitchen. (Guys do carrying; girls wear tiny see-through bikinis. It works out well). Julia checked that Vanessa had left some meat thawing in the fridge for Carol, then said, "I'll go to our study to work on the website. You'll be okay down here for a while, Carol?" "I think so, thanks." "Come on, Mark." Julia took my arm and pulled me toward the doorway, so I knew she meant it. On the way upstairs Julia quietly told me, "It's good for Carol to learn to manage alone. It'll build her confidence too. I'll check in a while, but she should be fine." Julia went to the study, so I followed her curious what she'd think of the pipeline stuff I'd written. I would have preferred to follow her to the bedroom, after all the talk about the bikinis and Ducklings, but hopefully later. While her machine was powering up, Julia asked me, "Did you learn to type better, or use your two-fingered method to type whatever you've sent me?" "I spent a couple of hours learning to type faster, including the time to type up the new stuff." "I'm curious to see how good you are now? Knowing you, I bet you're impressively fast." "It's nice that you've got confidence in your boyfriend. Shall I give you a demo?" "Yes please." I sat in front of my computer, opened a blank Word document then moved it to the top of the screen. Then I opened a new browser window and sized it to be below the empty Word window. I typed in the address of a site that I knew had plenty of text (www.EggsSearch.com.hk), and opened the largest of the documents Julia and already put there. I put my two NP position markers on the keyboard, then swiveled my chair to look at Julia. "I'll retype what you've already got into Word, okay?" "Yeah, that's a good example." I kept my body facing Julia, only turning my head to look over my right shoulder at the screen so I could read the text I was copying, then I started typing as fast as I could. Several of the sites I'd looked at this morning had a way of measuring my words per minute typing speed. There'd been no point in my doing their tests, and I feared it might have been indiscreet, so I don't know what my speed is in "words per minute", but I know it's FAST! The new text flew across the Word document, and the keyboard made a very impressive machinegun sound. "Christ!" exclaimed a very unladylike Julia, surprised by the sudden transition from {silence} to {machinegun}. -- After a few seconds, Julia concluded, "That's incredible. YOU'RE incredible. I've never seen anyone type this fast before, especially without hands, haha." I kept it up until I approached the end of the source text that I could read. I could have kept typing while I used one hand on the mouse to scroll the source text down, but that would have changed which window had focus, so the typing would have been sent to the browser window rather than the Word document - stupid Windows operating system! [[Actually, it's a function of the mouse driver. Some drivers will allow the mouse wheel to scroll inactive windows under the mouse pointer.]] Rather than play around, I simply stopped. I asked Julia, "Good demo?" "VERY good demo. You chose to type with NP?" "Yeah. I didn't bother trying to learn to type with my real hands. NP-fingertips can move anywhere on the keyboard as fast as I can think of the letter. There's no physical reaction time, no inertia from having to move lumps of bone and flesh around, no having to stretch out to reach for a key. It's so superior there was no point in wasting time on the physical method. Plus it leaves my hands free for moving the mouse or eating cookies." "It's incredibly impressive, like everything else about you. Even though I was expecting you to be fast, I'm still blown away by that. You won't be able to use it in public though." "No, but I hardly ever type when there's anyone else around. On those rare occasions I'll go back to my two-fingered style. I'm sure I could fairly easily learn to type properly, but it'd never be even a quarter as fast as I can type with NP, so why bother learning." Julia gave me a kiss, which did nothing to reduce my level of horniness, then she turned to her computer and began reviewing the email I'd sent her. I started looking at the Aikido stores that I'd bookmarked before. Now that I had a credit card, I could buy stuff online. With its credit limit, a little bit of online shopping was about all it was good for. After a few minutes, Julia pronounced herself happy with what I'd written, and set about pasting it into her main document. She also put it on the website as a standalone document, so users who'd already read the main document could read the new stuff easily. It'd only taken Julia about ten minutes, during which time I hadn't purchased anything. All the books I'd borrowed hadn't been useful to me, so I didn't see much point in buying any of my own. There were heaps of DVDs available, but I'd FAR rather learn from Sensei because that allowed me to see the flows of ki. A two-dimension DVD couldn't compete with what could be thought of as a four-dimensional lesson (the normal three dimensions plus my being able to sense Sensei's ki). Nor was there anything else I wanted, but I had noted what a gi was worth, to make sure I paid Sensei back the correct amount for it. Julia said, "That's done. I'll check on Carol?" "I'll come with you. I've finished with what I was doing too." Carol was drying and putting away the utensils she'd used to make dinner. #4: Julia asked, "All done?" "Yep. It's in the oven." We spent a while praising Carol's improving cooking skills and confidence. Carol dismissed our statements saying, "It was nothing, I just followed the recipe." We praised her again anyway, then Julia said, "Mark showed me how good he is at typing now. He spent a couple of hours practicing this morning, so guess how good he is now?" "Very good?" guess Carol. "No," answered Julia. "He's far better than that. Can you come to the study to see a demo?" "Sure. I'll just finish tidying up." That took us only a few seconds, then we returned to the study. I arranged the Word and browser windows as before, while Julia told Carol, "Wait till you see this. It's WAY better than your guess of 'very good.' He's incredible." When I was ready to start, and the girls were staring at the screen, I did nothing. After a few seconds Julia said, "Why aren't you typing Mark?" "There's something blocking my ability. I'm trying to work out what it is. Ahh! I got it now; there are too many skirts in this room." Julia had been looking very worried about my ability being blocked, right up until my last few words, "What! {Giggle}. You're pulling our legs?" "Let's do a scientific test. Why don't you two take your skirts off and put them on the floor outside the room. Maybe your panties too, to play safe." Carol laughingly suggested, "Somehow I think 'playing safe' is the wrong description." She's a wonderful girl, so she said that while unbuttoning the top of her skirt (something I've often wished NP could do. Unfortunately it's not precise or strong enough to undo most buttons, especially when they're tight, like the one above Carol's skirt's zip was). The girls must have been eager to see my typing demonstration, because they were soon bottomless, holding their skirts and panties in their hands. "You really want us to put them outside?" asked Carol. "In the interests of scientific experimental integrity, yes. I think that'd be best, don't you?" "Yes, but not for that reason, haha." They folded up their skirts carefully and put them on the floor outside the room, with their panties on top, joking about what anyone would think if they saw them. #2: #1: I said, "Julia's already seen this, so I should give Carol the best view. Come here and sit on my lap Carol." "Won't that make it harder for you?" "Yes, but my typing won't be affected, if that's what you mean." Carol climbed on, then asked, "Can you type with your hands down there?" "Watch." I started typing. "Oh my God! Look how fast that is!" After a few seconds of similar exclamations, Carol spun around on my lap and started passionately kissing me. I considered the demonstration to be successfully concluded. I was looking for the opportunity to ask for what I wanted, when Carol gave me the perfect opening. She said, "Next time I've got a long English assignment, guess who I'm coming to?" Carol likes English (she's otherwise a smart girl though), and she tends to write long stories for her assignments (why on Earth would anyone in their right mind want to write long stories?). She types them up too, whereas I handwrite the smallest possible assignments. "That's going to require payment in advance, and it's very convenient that you don't have panties on, so let's do it now. Stand up and lean forward so your elbows are on the desk. Yes, just like that." While I was getting out of my pants, Julia moved to be kneeling in front of Carol's legs and facing her, and then started licking. I was standing behind Carol only a few seconds later. Julia gave my cock a couple of wet sucks, then aimed it at Carol. I took the hint and moved my hips forward. And back, and forward, repeatedly. I was a bit worried about the skirts and panties being outside our room, and I was horny, so I went for a fast one. Carol was getting heaps of stimulation from Julia, my rapidly thrusting cock, and from my NP-fingertips on her ass and asshole, plus I suspected that having her skirt and panties outside the room turned her on too, so it took only a few minutes before she was climaxing. I was ready even before Carol was, so as soon as Carol started cumming, I stopped my mini-go-softs and came almost immediately. "Goody," declared Julia from below, as she started licking up our combined juices. I pulled out a few seconds later, enabling Julia to get a couple of good mouthfuls from Carol, then to lick my cock clean before returning her mouth to continue to lap out Carol's pussy. After a few more swipes of her tongue, Julia asked, "My turn please?" as she climbed out from under Carol. I was still holding Carol up after her orgasm, my hands around each of her hips. I asked her, "Can you stand by yourself, Carol?" "I think so, but I'll kneel now anyway." I let go and Carol sank to her knees. I've got this rather distressing idea that orgasms are more powerful and enjoyable for girls than they are for guys (I described it as "distressing" because of which of those genders I am). Take what we'd just done as an example. Carol's legs would have buckled causing her to fall to the floor had I not held her up, while my legs obviously remained strong enough to support us both. Julia will even pass out for up to a couple of minutes after an especially good orgasm. She did that more often than not in the early days of our relationship, and it still occurs after she has a particularly strong climax, which mostly happens when she's feeling very emotional about me for some reason. I don't begrudge the girls their pleasure, of course, I just wish guys got as much. ^ [[My idea was mostly wrong. Two individuals (regardless of gender) can have different strengths of physical reaction because their bodies are different (the nerve endings closer to the surface of the skin in one compared to the other, for example), but there's no significant difference in average magnitude of response between the two genders. There are two differences immediately following the orgasms though: Emotionally, females want to surrender to the experience, whereas males are in an "I've conquered" mood. Physiologically, our bodies release different hormones immediately post-orgasm. In males the hormones make us sleepy, the opposite in females, making them slightly more alert. These two effects usually act in different directions. For example, after sex guys often want to leave, but other times they roll over and fall asleep. Which effect dominates depends on the situation. Guys in a conquering tribe or army, who're raping the losers' females, have evolved to rape as many as possible (i.e., not to fall asleep; that'd be seriously counter-survival!). Whereas guys who're married and supporting a family had better choose to fall asleep rather than leave (if they want the chance to have any more sex with that woman!). Evolution has conspired to maximize guys' chances of having more sex. For females, when they feel safe their emotional response dominates their reaction, otherwise their physiological response wins (the opposite way around from males, which I find amusingly revealing).]] ^ Julia assumed the position, and it would've been both rude and inconsiderate to ignore her, so I did a go-hard and set about repeating my previous actions. Carol soon joined in, and we all had another good time. After Carol had cleaned us (not so messy this time, as "mess" is one aspect that I can't repeat as well), I picked Julia up and lay her over my shoulder, telling Carol, "Please check that there's no one walking around in the hallway or in the bathroom. I wouldn't want anyone to see Julia or me half-dressed like this." When Carol opened the door and bent over for the clothes, I added, "Leave those. Just look around then come back to report. We'll wait here." Carol blushed happily, then scampered down the hallway. I stuck my head out the door so I could watch her ass. When she was halfway down the hallway, I gave her a wolf-whistle because that's the sort of brother I am. She jumped in panic, thinking it was from someone else. Seeing it was me she laughed, gave me a wave, then turned to finish her reconnoiter. Carol returned to report that there was no one else between the study and the bathroom. I instructed her to pick up the skirts and panties, "Carry them in both hands over your head, so they don't get dirty." And so she felt maximally exposed. Immediately after our group shower, and without letting Carol dress, I made her check the way was clear to the bedroom. She checked, then came back to report it was. With Carol still naked, we walked to the bedroom. As we passed the top of the stairs, I said, "Don't you think you should go check on dinner, Carol?" Walking down the stairs and into the kitchen is a very 'risky' journey, as the stairs descend into the foyer, giving anyone walking in the front door a very good view. Julia and I watched Carol scuttle downstairs. When she got near the bottom I used NP to rattle the umbrellas in the stand next to the front door. "Eek!" Carol stopped, looking back at us in panic (again), but - I was amused to notice - not moving her hands to cover herself. I motioned her to continue. She realized no one was at the front door, so completed her rush to the kitchen. Julia and I went to the bedroom to get dressed. A flushed and happy Carol joined us a couple of minutes later, reporting that dinner was cooking fine. Carol was excited by her risky journey, which was an opportunity not to be missed. I said, "Good, then there's time for this." I lay her on the bed, kissed her, then kissed my way down her body. Julia joined in, and we committed several indecent acts upon our very willing victim. Robert didn't come home for dinner, which was probably wise. Not because Carol's dinner wasn't nice - because it was - but because he missed out on Julia and Carol telling Vanessa ALL about their shopping experiences in LA, complete with photographs (many of the photos I'd been told to take were on Rodeo Drive). You can imagine how sad I was when I had to leave to go to Aikido. During my departure, I did get the opportunity to briefly interrupt Julia to remind her to tell her family about the obviously less important matter - judging by its not having been mentioned yet - of Ava's finally succeeding in getting Carol and me together, then I left to go to Aikido. ------- Chapter 219: Aikido; External Ki Projection Monday, May 16, 2005 (Continued) Aikido was great, as usual. Every week I learn more techniques, which is great in itself, but its best consequence is not that I know more techniques, but that it's giving me a slowly increasing understanding of Aikido as a whole. Like someone giving me more and more pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, I'm starting to see more of the whole picture. I don't mean to imply that there's a hidden secret that was slowly becoming clear to me, or a final revelation that I was heading toward, or anything mystical like that. The word "hidden" was especially not relevant, as Sensei was doing his utmost to explain everything as clearly as he could. The problem for teaching and learning Aikido is that it's unlike anything else in life, so there's not a good vocabulary for it, the new concepts are so foreign to the students' existing ways of thinking that they're extremely hard to grasp, etc. It's somewhat like the proverbial, "trying to teach a blind man about color." The more I learned, the more sense I could make out of the underlying principles. For example, every week Sensei says things like, "Use uke's force against him," or, "Move in a circle." My understanding of what these mean was now FAR deeper than even just a month ago, especially now that I'd learned more about how to get the attacker's ki and mine to interact. Now I'm increasingly understanding what those expressions of Sensei's mean, how to do them well, and most importantly, why they should be done. The fundamental aspects of Aikido are very important. Maybe not for everyone else, but I think they will be increasingly so for me because I should be able to get so much deeper into them. There are obviously some incredibly profound truths behind whatever ki is, and it's hugely satisfying to know that week by week, I'm understanding more about it. I'm sure I won't learn everything I want to from Aikido, because its masters have always been limited by being single-minded humans (I'm assuming, but there's been no indication otherwise in any of the books, websites or elsewhere), but I greatly appreciate every thing that I can learn about ki. At the lesson's halfway point we stopped for our usual snack. I grabbed the food container from the seat I'd left it on, also taking my jacket with the money for Sensei in it. On the way to the kitchen for our snack break, Sensei commented, "I have not noticed your name in the newspaper for any new incidents this week." "No, thank goodness. Breaking those arms last Monday seems to have served as a good deterrent so far. Remember how last week I said I'd tell you something this week which was likely to make the fighting issue even worse?" "I remember." "Back when you first offered to give me private lessons we talked about my paying for them. You waved that off, and I didn't make an issue out of it at the time because I couldn't afford private lessons anyway. I told you that I might have some money coming in soon, and that happened a few days ago. I'm quite wealthy now, which means there's going to be even more jealousy of me at school, so I wouldn't be surprised if more idiots try to "teach me a lesson." Also I can now easily afford to pay for these lessons. I've got some money for you in my bag." While I was digging it out, Sensei started protesting, "I told you last time that I do not need payment. That is even more true now that I have seen how rapidly you are learning, and how advanced you already are." "Everything I've learned about Aikido I learned from you, or I taught myself building on the foundations you'd given me. I may be learning quickly, but that learning is totally dependent on you, and there's no reason why I shouldn't pay you for it. You're teaching me, which is your job, and your students normally pay you for doing that. I can certainly afford it now, so here you go," as I placed in front of him the ten $100 notes I'd kept separate for him. He said it was too much. I said it wasn't enough. We went back and forth several times, finally settling on a nice, round $100 per week. He insisted that the gi did not require additional payment, nor did my going to any other classes during the week, as I would be this Wednesday. He tried to give half the money back, as I'd only had half the number of classes $1,000 paid for. I waved that off, saying, "I can't be bothered paying week by week. I'll just give you a thousand every couple of months." "I will count this as payment until the end of June. Thereafter $800 per two months." "$900 and you've got a deal." Sensei agreed to that. He didn't know it, but I felt disappointed about paying like this. Back when I used to fantasize about all the different ways I could spend my many millions - before I started worrying running out of them - I had a fantasy about buying the building the dojo was in and letting Sensei use it for free for as long as he wanted. I can't afford that now, so I'm left with giving Sensei a paltry few hundred dollars every month. As usual, we stopped the physical training before the end of our lesson to have a discussion about some aspect of the bigger picture. I told Sensei, "I did some thinking about our ki discussion last week, and came up with something that works well for me. In the technique we did at the end of last week, which I call the 'No Touch Fall Over Technique'. By the way, does that have a real name?" "Not that I am aware of. It is more of a trick than a technique, but when we are discussing it, it is usually described as 'Leading Uke's Ki', because it's the easiest way to demonstrate that action. Call it however you wish." "My name's more descriptive of what appears to happen, but yours describes the actual process better, so I'll call it the 'Leading Uke Trick'. In it you held your arm out with your hand bent under so it pointed the way you wanted to project your ki. I've developed a way which is considerably more flexible than that." "Oh?" Sensei had a very interested expression on his face, which was a nice compliment for me. "Let me show you." I stood in the correct stance and extended my right arm for Sensei to grab, with my hand and fingers deliberately pointing straight down. Normally they're angled back a bit, for safety reasons, but I wanted the pointing down to be graphically clear. Sensei reached for my wrist. I visualized a finger beside his wrist, to my right of it (so his left), and pointing much the same direction as his fingers were, so toward my hand. As he extended his hand to reach for mine, his ki emerged. I poured my ki out of my imaginary finger into his ki, then I moved my imaginary finger farther out to my right, still projecting ki into Sensei's stream. His ki was bent to my left, and his hand moved to follow. I moved my imaginary finger farther out to my right, bending his ki stream even farther left. I could've started with my ki meeting his at right angles, but I discovered that it works slightly better to get the two ki streams merged first. It takes a little more mental imagination, but it can deflect hands noticeably farther - up to a WHOLE inch more! Naturally enough his hand reached forward but deviated to my left, so he missed the grab. He looked down in surprise, to see his hand a few inches to the side of mine. I should explain that uke doesn't stare at my wrist when attempting to grab it as narrowing attention like that is foolish and unnecessary. Uke looks at me as a whole, which mostly means looking toward my face (our heads being on roughly the same level), but without focusing on anything in particular. He can see all of my body, even if the lower part of it is mostly in his peripheral vision. It's like shaking hands with someone, but with even less attention on the hands because Aikido is a whole-body activity. If I'd moved my wrist sideways the movement would have caught his attention. Sensei knew I hadn't moved a muscle, and that it'd been his 'fault' that he'd missed his grab. "Try again," I invited. He took a step back to start again. Obviously he could have grabbed me from where his hand was now, but that'd be silly. We were here to train and learn, not to 'win' by grabbing my hand sneakily. I applied my technique in the other direction this time, because that'd demonstrate greater flexibility. Not because I thought he might try to compensate for his previous sideways drift. He wouldn't do that even unconsciously, because training requires repeating the same actions. Even if the technique was one that caused him to feel pain, which many of them briefly do, he'd repeat his 'attack' the same way every time. Of course he missed to the other side. He looked down again, with much less surprise and with some admiration. "VERY good! I have never seen anyone cause a sideways movement like that before. How did you do it?" "Quite differently than what we'd discussed at the end of the last lesson. That worked under the right circumstances, but it had two problems: It required my hand to be pointing in the direction I wanted you to move, which is inflexible. And it worked by my ki starting where yours was ending, so they overlapped and I could tow yours in the desired direction. That struck me as being both inflexible in the circumstances when it could be used, and possibly quite weak too, if the overlap was small. For example, imagine you were standing to my side, and were about to stab my upper-arm with a knife. Your ki may not extend all the way to my body, because the length of the knife keeps it away, especially if the intention is only a quick in-and-out jab. Even if your ki did extend to my arm, it's difficult for me to project ki strongly from my upper-arm. -- "I played around with various images until I found one that worked very well for me. I find it easier to imagine ki projecting from my fingers than from anywhere else on my body, so I pretend I have a disembodied finger wherever I want it. Nothing to do with any of my natural fingers. It's an imaginary eleventh one, not that I count them at the time. For example, if I wanted your grab to miss my hand by going too low, I would imagine that my finger was floating above your wrist, pointing in the same direction as you are reaching. I don't worry about how my finger got there, I just imagine that's where it is. -- "When you started reaching for me, you'd be projecting ki of course. I'd project as much ki as I could from my imaginary finger into your ki stream, so our ki streams would be merging and flowing together. Then I'd imagine my finger fairly quickly rotating to point downward, deflecting the stream of your ki downward. As your ki and hand veered down I'd angle my finger down more, increasing the deflection. As you saw from the two demos, your hand ended up a few inches away from its target. I spent most of a day at school practicing that on anyone who was reaching out to touch me. I was usually able to deflect their hands an inch or two away from where they'd intended, depending on how fast they were moving, so I know the technique works for me. Maybe it'd work for you too?" Sensei said, "I shall certainly try, once I have recovered from the shock! I have NEVER heard of anything like this before. You imagine a finger hovering in midair somewhere?" "Yes. I started imagining a whole hand, but found I only needed a finger. My thinking about fingers started when I thought about projecting ki normally. When I project ki out of my real hand, I just visualize the projection. I don't think about where the ki is coming from; only where it is going to. Somehow the ki flows from my hand without me giving any thought to creating it. We often project ki from our wrist rather than hand or fingers, and there's the one technique where we project ki from an elbow. Plus when you did your 'Thinking Light Or Heavy' demonstration, you were projecting ki from your center. There's nothing special about fingers, hands, wrists, elbows or centers when it comes to their being good manufacturing sites for ki, so I decided that ki can be created anywhere in our bodies, and possibly anywhere NOT inside our bodies too." [[That's because ki is tapped inside our minds, and our bodies are inside our minds. Inside our proximity range being the important fact at the moment.]] Sensei's eyes opened WIDE at my last comment! "Ki also seems to be created without effort or thought. I don't understand how or why that is, but everyone is creating and projecting ki whenever they are intending to move their body, so it's obviously an intrinsic part of being human." [[It is NOT created "without effort and thought." It is created WITH both of those, but subconsciously, which means we're not consciously aware of it. But I was right about it being "an intrinsic part of being human", although I didn't know why at the time. In the larger sense, it's because ki is an intrinsic part of the Universe, so it's necessarily an intrinsic part of EVERYTHING, including humans. More specifically, my definition of "mind" includes it being able to tap ki from the Universe. Humans intrinsically have minds. My saying it takes effort to create ki is simplistic. It does, but we also gain energy from the Universal ki. Most creatures aren't good enough at tapping the Universal ki, so the net result is a small energy loss (an "effort"). This was not the case with me. I had so much mind-power that I could tap sixteen times as much ki as a normal human, resulting in my having a net gain of energy, although energies involved were in different forms. I had to consume a lot of food to fuel part of my increased mentation, although the ki supply helped fuel that too. Ki also helped fuel my body's physical activities. If I kept the exercise rate below the ki supply rate (e.g., I ran below my optimal running rate), I didn't need to use chemical energy.]] "The creation of ki seems as easy as it could possibly be, so it seems to me that the important aspect is not creating ki, but projecting it. Hands work best with ki, not because hands can create ki any better than any other part of our bodies, but because we point with our fingers all our lives, so we're mentally very comfortable with pointing and projecting, which are very similar..." "That makes good sense." "Yes, I thought so. It seemed to me that if I could create ki in midair, then all I needed was a way of helping me project it. Fingers are good for pointing with, so that was an obvious choice. I visualized an imaginary finger and projected ki from it, and it felt comfortable. I tested it on my classmates, and was happy to find out that it worked, as you saw from my demonstrations. Not that it's important, but I find that I have to imagine my own finger. If I imagine someone else's, it won't project ki. That's probably a self-defeating mental image rather than a scientific requirement, but just so you know." Sensei was struggling with being excited and stunned at the same time, "I am sure I understood what you said, but this is so revolutionary that I want to double-check. You can create a stream of ki at any point in space, flowing in any direction, independent of any part of your body. Is that right?" "Other than one restriction that I haven't mentioned yet, yes, that's right. It seems I can't do this too far from my body. I can easily imagine a finger twenty feet away, but it doesn't seem to project any ki. I don't know why, but there's a definite limit at three feet." Sensei said, "Even with that restriction, your discovery is still absolutely amazing! It could have a PROFOUND impact on Aikido. Completely new techniques might be invented, and existing techniques modified. This could result in the largest change to Aikido since it was created." "There's one aspect you haven't taken into account, Sensei: it's WEAK. As you know, I've got VERY strong ki, but I could only deflect your slow moving hand a few inches and I was trying as hard as I could. If you'd been moving at a natural speed and with stronger intent the result might have been so little as to be useless. The 'Leading Uke Trick' is called a trick because it only works if the conditions are perfect. My idea helps a little, but it's not a revolution. As far as I can see, it has only one use. That's in techniques where uke's ki is flowing in a direction that you want him to keep moving in, but it's difficult to get your body into position before he starts pulling back. With this technique you can reinforce his forward movement for the second or two it takes to get your hand on him to push him physically. One of the knife techniques you showed me is like that." "Yes, I know the one you mean. Your invention may not make a critical difference to a technique Mark, but it allows the use of ki to guide uke's movements before physical contact is made with flexibility never before possible, which is a MAJOR development. It is going to create a great deal of excitement around the Aikido world..." I interrupted, "In that case I want to make two points. First, I STRONGLY suggest you try it yourself before you mention it to anyone. It works for me, but I'm not an average aikidoka, so maybe it won't work for anyone else. I know you can do the Leading Uke Trick, but creating ki in midair is a whole different issue. The good news is that it's very easy to practice, because you can use it on all the people you come in contact with during the day. -- "My second point is one I'm ADAMANT about. I do NOT want my name connected to this idea. I do not want ANY of the credit, the fame, or ANYTHING! If the idea works, you can tell everyone it was your idea..." "You deserve credit for this. It is a very clever and..." "NO Sensei! I have a VERY strong aversion to getting involved in any of that. I told you after you tested me at the Williams' home that I wanted to keep knowledge of my abilities low key. You agreed to be 'properly circumspect', if I remember your words correctly. Blabbing my name all around the world is NOT being 'properly circumspect'! I don't want you to mention my abilities or name to a SINGLE person, let alone to the entire Aikido world." "All right, Mark, I will respect your wishes. I will also do as you first suggested, by trying it myself. If it works it would be easy to get the idea out anonymously. A well-written explanation sent anonymously to several Aikido journals would do that very well." Sensei wanted to repeat my demonstration with the roles swapped so he could try the technique. I gave him a more detailed explanation of what to do, showing him with a real finger where he should imagine his and answering a few of his questions, then we tried it for real. There was no way for me to know whether he was imagining a finger properly or not, but proximity showed me that there was no ki whatsoever being projected alongside mine as I was reaching for him. It appeared that Sensei couldn't do the new technique. That was disappointing, but not surprising, because my other fancy ki tricks - NP and blobs - were probably things he couldn't do either, even if I explained the ideas as accurately as possible - not that I was going to! I didn't want to tell Sensei that I can see ki fairly clearly with my proximity sense, so I kept quiet about his obvious failure to externally generate it. I carried on with the motions of my 'attack', reaching forward to grab his wrist. To my surprise, his ki suddenly appeared in my proximity sense when my hand was a few inches away from his. That was great, as it gave me hope that Aikido masters might have some of my interesting abilities, something that Sensei's failure to demonstrate, or even know about, had been making me pessimistic about. Sensei's ki was projecting into mine at a nearly a ninety degree angle from the side, where I'd told him his imaginary finger should be when my hand was this close to his. His ki is not as strong as mine, even if I was only casually reaching for his wrist, so it wasn't deflecting mine much. That didn't concern me, especially because he would have the stronger ki when using the technique on anyone else. I had a small problem about what to say to Sensei. I didn't want to tell him the truth about the level of detail I can sense, but telling him something would be helpful and should probably be okay. He already knew I had a "proximity sense", including that I used that name. When he'd tested me at the Williams' place he found out that I could sense incoming punches and identify people sneaking up behind me, provided they were within three feet of my center. (I had been indiscreet when I'd first talked to him about the extent of my Aikido-related skills. At the time I hadn't realized how far ahead of his they were.) I decided that it'd be safe enough to be vague about my abilities. I said, "At the end, when my hand was only a few inches from yours, I believe I felt something happening. Let's do it again with my eyes closed and with me concentrating on my trying to feel your ki." Closing my eyes was irrelevant because my proximity sense worked either way, but it would make my talking about the effects of his ki more believable. On this attempt I moved my hand even slower, and again there was no ki from him until my hand was quite close to his. When I sensed his ki appear I said, "Ahh! I feel something." I stopped my reaching movement and opened my eyes, saying, "The great news is that I'm pretty sure I felt your ki at this point. That means you're projecting ki from somewhere which is not part of your body, which is fantastic. But I'm puzzled about why I didn't feel it much earlier. You were projecting ki earlier, weren't you?" "Yes, right from the start. I am sure I was centered correctly, but shall we try it again?" I wasn't positive that being centered was required for this new technique as I'd never had the idea of testing it uncentered at school - so habitual is being centered for me now. Thinking about it now, I thought the technique would require being centered since that seems to be required to do any 'tricks' with ki (NP, proximity, etc.). Normal ki, as it comes out of everyone's bodies when they move, doesn't require anyone to be centered, so I could be wrong, but I thought creating a ki projection outside of our bodies was sufficiently 'tricky' that it'd require being centered. ^ [[Sensei had told us at the Williams' that centering produces an altered state of consciousness. While that is true to a small degree, it's a side-effect. Much more important is that it produces an altered state of SUB-consciousness, permitting the subconscious to perform two abilities it cannot do outside of that altered state: Deliberately tap into the Universal ki. (Some tapping occurs anyway, but it's at a level FAR beneath the subconscious, halfway to the cellular level.) Tunnel information between the mind and the Universal Consciousness. As explained earlier in this biography, the Universe is built from three fundamental components: Space-Time, Matter-Energy, and Consciousness-Ki. Each pair is tightly coupled with its partner, and to various degrees they can be thought of as being the same thing as they can transform back and forth. The three pairs can also interact and interchange with each other, although less easily. Regarding the first bullet-pointed ability above. Tapping ki from the Universe doesn't have a supply problem, as there is a truly HUGE amount of ki available. Human scientists currently believe that every bit of matter and energy that they can detect, increased by the right factor to account for their seeing only a portion of the Universe, accounts for less than 5% of the total of what actually exists. 95% of the matter and energy is missing! Your scientists believe 23% of what's missing is what they call "Dark Matter", and 72% is "Dark Energy" - where "Dark" means "We can only guess, but we really haven't got a clue." Those percentage allocations are quite wrong because your scientists don't know about the third fundamental building block, Consciousness-Ki, nor how it interacts with the other two (the 95% was calculated by analyzing observable interactions, the analysis being rendered worthless by leaving out the third factor), but they still serve to give you an idea about how hugely significant and powerful the Consciousness-Ki aspect is. Not all of the Dark Energy can be tapped, but a large proportion of it can be. Given that it's many times greater than the total energy supply of the observable Universe, that's a LOT! So tapping ki is NOT supply constrained! It is limited only by the tapper's mental ability to draw on it. Regarding the second bullet-pointed ability above, tunneling is a two-way information exchanging process (matter and energy are excluded from the simplest type of tunneling, which was all I was capable of at this point of my autobiography). Consciousness-Ki is everywhere, as it coexists with the other two fundamental components of the Universe: Matter-Energy and Space-Time. As a metaphor for the Universe, consider your computer display. Every pixel has red, green and blue sub-pixels, each contributing 0-100% of their maximum, the relative proportions varying from place to place across your screen. Simplistically, every 'pixel' in the Universe has three sub-pixels (or six, depending on your definitional precision): Matter-Energy, Space-Time and Consciousness-Ki, each contributing 0-100% of what they are capable of, varying from place to place throughout the Universe. The point of the metaphor being that Consciousness is in every 'pixel' of the Universe, so it is everywhere. Human scientists are starting to understand "Quantum Tunneling" or "Quantum Entanglement", including that it/they can be used to transfer information. Those experiments work because they're very crude and inefficient interactions with the Universe's Consciousness. Because of the fourfold increase in the power of my subconscious mind, my interactions were more advanced (actually "less crude"). I can tunnel information for the tapping of ki through to a remote Consciousness 'pixel' more easily, so the tapping takes effect outside of my body but inside my mind (my proximity range), without the intervening Universe (Space-Time, Matter-Energy and Consciousness-Ki) being involved in any way. Less easily, but subconsciously so I'm not aware of the effort required, I can create ki effects outside my body and mind, which is what happens when I send NP and light blobs more than three feet away from me. The mind-power of the user (in my case, the power of my amalgam of minds) limits these abilities, restricting the amount of ki that can be tapped, the tunneling distance, and the tunnel's sophistication (the type and bandwidth of information that flows between my mind and the ki effect). Humans as a species can't do much to significantly increase the power of our minds. Skills can be developed by individual humans, but are lost again when that human dies, having no effect on the power of the species' minds. It takes millennia for a species to evolve more powerful minds. As individuals, we can't increase the processing power of our CPU in our lifetime (to use a computer analogy), but there is one way to increase total processing power: as I accidentally discovered, it can be done by becoming dual-core and quad-core by merging minds across w-dimensions. By the way, it's not a mistake to include Space-Time as one of the components of each pixel. In a computer display, the pixels are arranged across a two-dimensional space, so it seems incorrect to think of them 'containing' space. Space is where they're AT, NOT what they're made of. The computer display metaphor isn't perfect for describing the Universe. In the Universe, Space-Time is one of the fundamental building blocks of every component. That is very, very weird shit! Imagine changing a pixel's space or time value, without changing those of its 'neighbors'. It's too head-bending to explain yet, just take my word for it (if you can't trust the Word of your God, who can you trust?)]] ^ Sensei made sure he was centered, and I tried to slowly grab his hand again, with exactly the same result: Sensei's ki didn't begin to flow until my hand was easily within twelve inches of his. #1: I said, "Sensei, I know I've got a very clear limit at about three feet from my center. Beyond that I cannot project ki from an imaginary finger, nor can I sense who is sneaking up behind me. I'm starting to think your limit is about two feet, because that's about the distance from your center that I start to feel your ki deflecting my hand. Let's repeat the technique again, but with you holding your hand right next to your stomach. I should feel your ki start to deflect my hand from much farther away from you hand." Sensei asked, "Is your ability to detect my ki good enough for you to know so clearly when it starts?" "If I close my eyes, move slowly, and concentrate on feeling for it, then I think so. It's subtle, but it is detectable." "That is more than I can do. I have never been consciously aware of anyone's ki influencing mine." I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I just shrugged, "I'm just lucky, I guess. I seem to have a natural aptitude for this stuff." #2: "Indeed you do." We performed my modified 'attack', and to my surprise I didn't detect Sensei's ki until I was the usual distance from his hand. #2: We did that, and once again Sensei's ki started flowing when my hand was within twelve inches of his hand, which had to be over four feet from his center. "I don't understand it, Sensei. There is absolutely no doubt that there's a definite limit of a three-foot radius sphere centered on my center - the coincidence in terms being much more than a coincidence, I thought. Yet your limit seems to be about nine or ten inches from your hand regardless of how far it is from your center. How about you hold you hands straight up in the air, and I'll crouch down and reach for your ankle. Try to deflect my hands as normal." We soon found out that his ki started working when my hand got within several inches of his ankle, even though it was six feet from his hands. A couple more tests confirmed that Sensei's limit was somewhat less than twelve inches from the nearest part of his body, which was weirdly different than the way my limit worked. Our discussion and experimentation had taken us to 9pm, which is when we normally finish. There was no necessity to stop at that moment though, so we talked about it some more. One of the things I said was, "The good news is that you can project ki from an imaginary finger. As I understand it, you've never done that before?" "No. I have never thought to try. Nor has anyone else to my knowledge. Are you absolutely sure you can feel my ki?" "I am pretty sure, but we can easily prove it. I will very slowly reach for your hand. You project ki to deflect me as normal. When I first feel you ki I will tell you, then you should turn it on and off at random intervals. I will call out whether I feel it or not. Don't change it quickly, because it's too subtle for me to handle rapid changes. I'll have to keep moving my hand forward to create the ki stream for you to influence, so I'll probably have to pull it back and restart several times because sensing your ki is slow and subtle." We did that, with me pretending to concentrate hard and be uncertain for a second or so after each alternation. Several hesitant but correct calls later, Sensei was convinced that he truly was projecting ki out of nothing. "Congratulations Sensei. You're probably the second person in the world to ever do that." "Haha. That may well be true, but the congratulations must go to the discoverer of the ability. Maybe I should start paying you $100 per week for lessons." "I don't think so! I've taught you one idea, and you've taught me countless. Give me a nickel next week and we'll call it quits. The great news is that you can do it, but the confusing news is that your limit has a different structure than mine, and the bad news is your limit appears to be not much more than six inches, which doesn't give you much time to deflect someone's movement." Sensei said, "It is six inches more than I had an hour ago, and it is considerably more flexible than I had before too, because I can do it anywhere around my body. As you did with your classmates, I should be able to confirm and practice this on other people during the day." "Yes. I think you'll find that works better than it did here with me. My ki is too strong for you to deflect it much, but other people's will be much easier for you to influence. Even with it only being a few inches when I do it, I think you should see some noticeable deflections, especially if you're deflecting a precise movement - someone picking up a pen for example - rather than someone giving you a backslap or anything broad like that." His three-to-one ki advantage over other people should make it easy for him to use this technique on untrained people. The deflections will be small, maybe not ever exceeding an inch, but they should be noticeable sometimes, and would totally prove the technique worked. "I am very eager to try that out." We called it a night. I had intended to chat about some of the Aikido websites I'd browsed - about there being different Aikido styles, competitions, and other things that were different from what we did in this dojo, but I had zero intention of changing styles or senseis, so it was only idle chatter that could wait. I confirmed with Sensei that I'd see him at 8:15pm on Wednesday, as the advanced class ran from 8:30pm to 9:30, then I left. ------- Chapter 220: Julia Thinks About My Image; I Think About My Proximity Range Monday, May 16, 2005 (Continued) I drove home puzzling about why Sensei's range limit worked so unlike mine. I had absolutely no doubt that mine was a three-foot radius sphere centered on my belly; that'd been proved countless times. For example, when the bell rang at the end of a class and everyone tried to get out the door at the same time, I'd be in a throng of jostling people. Between their leg, arm and head movements, there was enough ki flowing around me to 'paint' what was very clearly a belly-centered sphere in my proximity sense. I also had no doubt about Sensei's limit's shape. The experimental evidence was clear, and I didn't for a moment believe he was faking me out in any way. For that to be the case he'd have to be deliberately lying, which was ridiculous, and his belly centered range would have to be larger than mine as the experiment in which his arm was held out to the side at shoulder height showed him generating ki over four feet from his center. I knew for a fact that his ki was significantly weaker than mine, so a longer range seemed unlikely, especially because I was the one with all the special abilities. Whatever the rule is that governs how far away from our bodies that we can create ki, it must surely operate the same in both our cases. I knew older people's bodies sagged more than younger people's because of the loss of muscle tone and gravity's stretching action over the decades, etc. Those actions and their effect make logical sense. But Sensei's limit outlining his body rather than being a sphere had no possible logical cause that I could imagine, whether age-related or for any other reason. I thought about it while driving back to Julia's, but I gained no insights and only frustration. At Julia's I socialized with her family and Carol in the living room. Chatting about various things for a while, until Julia went upstairs and returned with information on various car models for - she said - "us to consider." Julia was well prepared - no surprise there - with a few pages printed out for each model, including a color picture, the manufacturer's sales claims and list of major features, independent safety reports, and second-hand sales prices. Andrew and Robert knew quite a lot about cars, and their comments eliminated about a third of the models from the list. I looked at the prices and wanted to eliminate the remaining two-thirds. My failure to eliminate any at all taught me that Andrew and Robert had more say about my new car than I did, with Julia having by far the most say. There was no point whatsoever in me protesting, "You CAN'T be serious about spending this much money!" because it was abundantly clear that Julia was both serious and determined. I protested anyway, and as predicted, there had been no point whatsoever. During the car-by-car discussion, my mobile rang. It was Sensei, who excitedly told me, "I enlisted my wife's cooperation when I got home. I am very happy to report that your new technique worked wonderfully on her. This is a profoundly important discovery, Mark, the most important advance in Aikido in many years. We need to write up a very detailed article describing everything you told me in class and as much extra material as you can. I can add sections on its consequences on the techniques and how to teach..." "Whoa there, Sensei! You're charging ahead too fast. I could only deflect my classmates a couple of inches at the most, but you're talking as if you could spin your wife in circles?" "Haha. No, nothing like that. About an inch was all I could achieve and that was under quite artificial circumstances. The magnitude of the effect is small, but the implications are nonetheless very profound. It adds an entirely new fundamental technique on top of Aikido's existing practices, it validates and expands on claims about Aikido that many aikidoka have trouble accepting, and it will improve many of our existing techniques and lead to the creation of new ones. It will create a furor among aikidoka all over the world. -- "One reason you might be underestimating its significance is because I have been teaching you the forms statically. At the higher grades the training is much more free-flowing and with less physical contact, so your new technique will be much more useful. You will see that on Wednesday. I have been reviewing all the techniques I teach, and nearly all of them can be improved by incorporating your idea. It is marvelously flexible too, so I am sure there will be some very interesting new techniques developed from it. I honestly cannot think of any other development in Aikido which has been as important as I think this is." "I'll take your word for it. I don't mind writing up my thoughts on the technique for anonymous publication, but I'd like some time first, to see if I can figure out why your and my limits were so differently structured. Ideally, the article should describe the constraints correctly, and I'd like to solve that problem first in case the solution gives new insights into the process." "That makes sense. I intended to talk only briefly tonight. We can talk about it more on Wednesday." "Provided no one can overhear us, that's fine. I'll call you if something comes up before then. Give my apologies to your wife for turning her into a helpless guinea pig, and goodnight." "Thank you very much for your idea, Mark. Goodnight." When I hung up, there were several curious looks around the room. From my lap (as from there she could better supervise my reviewing her car information) Julia asked, "That sounded interesting?" "I taught Sensei a new technique this evening. I didn't think it was a big deal, but he's quite excited about it. It looks like we'll be writing up an article describing it for publication in several Aikido journals in order to spread the word. Anonymously though, because I'd prefer to keep a low profile." Prof said, "I thought your sensei was meant to teach you?" "He teaches me a great deal. This was the first time I've taught him something useful. It was just an unusual, little idea that occurred to me a few days ago. To tell the truth, I'm somewhat surprised that Sensei could do it." [[He could because it involved the projection of Intention Ki, which was something Sensei was very experienced with. I was correct in my impression that Sensei couldn't create NP-fingertips or blobs, as they were new forms of energy beyond his single mind's capabilities.]] "One reason I'm glad I taught it to him is that his way of doing it has a puzzling difference to the way I do it. I might learn something interesting if I can figure out why we're different." Robert asked, "What was it you taught him?" "It's too difficult to explain because you don't have any of the background, but I can easily demonstrate it to you if you want?" Robert suspiciously asked, "You're not going to break my arm like you did the kids at your school, are you?" "Only if you try to cut off my crown jewels with a pair of scissors. To show you what I showed Sensei, I don't even touch you, so it's totally safe." "Go on, Robert," urged Julia, without volunteering herself. Julia got up to let me up. I positioned Robert at the right distance in front of me and I extended one arm toward him, holding my hand as an offer to shake hands. "I'm not going to move a single muscle Robert, so you don't have anything to worry about. I'm going to be a statue. In your own time, casually reach out and shake my hand, the same as you would for anyone else. Don't think this is any sort of combat, because I'm not going to hurt you even a tiny amount. Just think 'handshake'." I gave him those instructions because I thought the usual Aikido instruction of "Grab my wrist" might have caused him to stare at my wrist while he was doing it, which would make deflecting his hand more difficult as he'd be more focused and would automatically correct any deflection. I also tried to maintain eye contact with him, as a way of encouraging him to keep looking at my eyes rather than my hand. -- He paused, so I prompted, "How do you do, Robert? Nice to meet you." That worked nicely. He relaxed, then reached out to shake my hand. His hand passed behind the back of my hand, so he closed his fingers on nothing. He looked down, and was surprised to see his hand a couple of inches away from mine. "That's what I taught Sensei." I put my hand down and walked back to my seat because I didn't want to get into a repetitious demonstration or a detailed explanation. "Deflecting someone's intended movement" sounded too much like magic. Robert said, "I don't understand. What just happened?" "Your hand missed its target. That would be quite a useful thing to be able to do to your opponent in a fight - so all his punches missed, for example - but unfortunately it only worked on you because you were relaxed and moving slowly. In a combat situation it'd only make you veer off target by half an inch or so, which wouldn't make any practical difference. That's why I said I didn't think it was a big deal, but Sensei likes it because he likes the reasons behind why it works." Not strictly true, but it'd do. "That's what I don't understand. How did you make my hand miss yours?" "I used a modification to an advanced Aikido technique. Last week Sensei showed me how to pull an attacker's hand farther forward than he intended. I invented a way of moving an attacker's hand sideways rather than forward. I know I'm not explaining how, but you're like a blind man asking me to explain an advanced color technique; you don't have the necessary understanding or vocabulary. If you joined Sensei's Aikido class you'd be able to do it too, after training for ten or twenty years." "I'm not THAT curious! How long have you been doing Aikido?" "Less than two months, but I learn some things very fast. You spent ten or twenty years learning 8-ball, but it only took me half an hour to get up to your level." "It only took you QUARTER of an hour to get BETTER than our level, but I take your point. I still think how I missed your hand was bizarre. That you could deliberately make that happen was like magic." "That's the trouble with trying to explain it: it seems like magic to someone who hasn't done Aikido for a few years. Sensei wants me to write an article about it for publishing in Aikido journals around the world. He's sure my idea will catch on, so in a few months there'll probably be millions of Aikido students all over the world being taught what I just did to you, which obviously means it's not magic. I want to keep my involvement in inventing it secret because I don't need all the time-wasting crap that goes with being famous for something. The last thing I need is hundreds or thousands of Aikido students running all around me wanting to ask endlessly stupid questions, the way excitable people do when they get in a crowd. And I CERTAINLY don't want the general public to know about it, because they'll think it's magic. The consequences of that horrify me!" "So we don't talk about it?" asked Robert. "Not a word please. As far as you know, Aikido is a way of folding paper into funny looking swans." Everyone got my joke and point. Julia said, "Can we go back to the more important question of what car will help create the best new image for Mark?" Which is, as everyone knows, the way cars should be chosen. Certainly price didn't seem to be one of Julia's concerns. Fortunately her parents stopped Julia from being 'too' insane. Some of her cars were over $100,000, which - in my humble opinion - left mere insanity in its dust. I reinforced her parents' cautioning, by exclaiming, "Do you know how many dresses I could buy for that sort of money!" It must have worked, because all the cars over $100,000 were discarded. That didn't cheer me up much, as it was impossible to cheer me up when 'we' were still seriously considering cars worth over $90,000. Knowing Julia, if the limit is $100,000, she'll spend $99,999 + on-road costs. We ended up with a list of about twenty cars to investigate further. The CHEAPEST was $40,000! I never thought I'd see the day when I WANTED to spend $40,000 on a car. We chatted a bit more, about considerably less expensive topics, then headed upstairs. In the bedroom, I told Julia, "We better have lots of sex while we can, because pretty soon I won't have enough money left to buy the gas to drive here from home." "It's not that bad. A brand new car will last you several years, by which time I'm sure you'll either be earning big money or have had one or two more quick-money schemes like Binion's. You've had only half a dozen Aikido lessons and you've already taught your instructor something he's excited about. You're an amazingly capable and intelligent guy, so I don't have any fears about that. But can I still take you up on your suggestion that we have lots of sex?" Julia's, "No worries, you'll earn money later" attitude was very different from the frugal way I'd been brought up, but I was distracted from arguing about it because Julia had assumed the answer to her last question was "Yes." (To be fair, that's my usual answer to Julia, especially on that topic). Carol joined Julia in making the same assumption too, so what was a guy to do? I did it six times, because I think Julia was excited by the prospect of spending lots of money on a high quality fashion statement. Afterward Julia and Carol cuddled close, then quickly drifted off to sleep. I lay there thinking about the puzzling difference between Sensei's and my range limits. I should point out that when I write "thinking about" in such contexts, I also mean discussing it internally. Very often the best way to create ideas about how to solve a problem is to discuss the issue with someone. I could do that inside my own head, which gives me a big advantage when it comes to finding solutions to problems. I thought about it for quite a while, and two thoughts stood out: If Sensei can create external ki over four feet from his center, I should be able to. Egotistical perhaps, but I thought it was reasonable. I have to be centered to get into correct mental state for external ki tricks, but that's the only role the center seems to play. Ki is not created in the center, then somehow 'piped' to the body location it is projected from; rather ki can be created anywhere in the body and even externally. [[Ki isn't "created" of course, but I didn't know that at this time. Nor did I know much about minds.]] Even with the lights out I could experiment easily, by putting my arm up in the air and projecting ki from it. Ki projected from bodies can extend several feet. I can proximity 'see' it only when it's within three feet of my center, so projecting it from my raised hand to 'see' where it 'disappears' tells me exactly where my limit is. The way I was lying and holding my arm, it disappeared only a few inches beyond the end of my hand. The more I thought about the puzzling difference between Sensei and me, the more I came to believe that I was limiting myself in some way; probably because when I first started doing this stuff I'd had a strong belief in the importance of the center. Now that I'd had more experience and knew more, especially about Sensei's abilities, my center-centric belief was being eroded. Which was all it took! I was suddenly able to proximity sense my ki CONSIDERABLE farther away from my upraised hand than previously. About three feet away, according to the spatial information proximity gives me. I double-checked the new situation by creating a dim light blob to give me just enough light to see, then to imagine fingertips in a sequence of various locations relative to my hand and center, using them to do what I was starting to think of as "External Intention-Ki Projection" (a name that DEFINITELY needed improvement, especially when compared with "Nipple Power" and "Blobs"). I was quickly able to confirm that my limit now had exactly the same structure as Sensei's, but at three feet rather than his sub-one-foot limit. I triple-checked it by lowering my hand and trying to create an NP-fingertip four feet above me. It failed, so I raised my arm and tried again. It succeeded. Some more similar tests showed me that I could create NP-fingertips anywhere within three feet of any part of my body. We briefly discussed the consequences of the new limit. There were several, but none of them were major. In terms of the proximity sense, most of the useful stuff we sense occurs around belly level anyway. Proximity gained in three ways: A gain of at least three inches, as our skin was that much closer to anything than our center, it being that far inside my body. That gain could be increased considerably by my extending part of my body outward (probably a hand). In other words, if I was interested in someone's intentions and they were a little too far away, I could reach out with my hand toward them. I'd be even better at soccer now, because previously I'd been unable to detect much of my opponents' footwork. Their leg movements and body direction had been detectable far enough away to be very useful, but their footwork had been detectable only if they were standing very close to me, or the foot in question was raised considerably. I'd now be able to pick up little passing flicks of the ball. (I'd been able to detect bigger passes because they involved leg movements, and detect flicks around me when the opponent intended to chase after the ball, but passing kicks that involved minimal leg movement had been a problem.) In terms of the outward uses of ki, rather than the inward (proximity), there were also a couple of minor gains: External Intention-Ki Projection now had a larger volume in which an imaginary finger could project ki, which didn't matter much because that ability was so ineffective. I'd be able to create NP-fingertips and blobs without line-of-sight problems in that same increased volume. We considered the type of mistake we'd made: allowing an assumption to 'blind' us. It was amazing that something as simple as our believing our limit was a sphere centered on our center could have rendered us literally 'blind' (in proximity) to things we should have been able to sense. That'd been a POWERFUL mistake! I'd made incorrect assumptions about things many times before in my life, and I couldn't recall any of them ever having such a powerful effect. ^ [[I didn't understand for quite a while, but there were two reasons that compounded to make the effect so powerful. First, it is the subconscious that does all the ki processing, passing the results to the conscious mind. There's nothing unusual about that, as the subconscious deals with all the routine details of running our bodies. For example, when you want to lift a glass, you certainly don't consciously plan out all the limb and finger movements involved, what muscles will be needed for each movement, what nerves need to send impulses to each muscle, what strength and duration for those impulses, etc. I subconsciously believed I couldn't send or receive ki information outside of my three-foot radius sphere, so my subconscious didn't try to do it. Most of our functional abilities, such as throwing a ball, we learn incrementally, so we never get a definitive yes/no situation such as I'd had with my assumption. Second, subconsciouses operate in many different ways than their self-aware 'boss'. They don't get bored, for example, which is highly desirable given that their attention to their jobs keeps us alive. They've got a phenomenal attention to detail compared to our conscious minds (e.g., there are hundreds of steps involved in lifting a glass of water. If I had to consciously plan them all, I'd go buy a straw). When it comes to 'thinking', subconsciouses still think differently. They can be incredibly smart, as you know when you sometimes wake up in the morning with a solution to a complex problem now obvious to you. Or they can be incredibly dumb, because they not only unquestionably accept assumptions, they actually reinforce them. If you have a bias of any sort (everybody has many of them, positive and negative), then your subconscious will only make you aware of confirmatory events, and will ignore contradictory evidence. It knows that you want to have your beliefs confirmed as that makes you happy. As an example, if you buy a new car, you'll notice far more of that model on the road than you did previously, as your subconscious brings them to your attention to validate your purchasing decision. Or if you believe any racial stereotype, then your subconscious will draw your conscious attention to examples of that stereotype being fulfilled, and will downplay counterexamples. The vulnerability of my subconscious to my belief in the limit being a three-foot sphere, and its being in charge of performing all the ki manipulations, caused my 'blindness'. It's a good thing I hadn't talked to Sensei about my "central limit theorem" (excuse the mathematical pun) just before we did the experiments, or he might've been talked into having the same limit himself, especially because his maximum range is nine inches, which would've been almost totally useless.]] ^ I spent a few minutes wondering if I'd gotten anything else wrong because of another silly preconception. I couldn't think of anything, but did think of one more useful aspect to my new proximity range. When I wake up every morning and want to get up to go studying, I create a dim light blob to light my way (I've got reasonably good night-vision, but nothing even slightly miraculous. In both Julia's and Carol's bedrooms, the drapes block virtually all the light from outside, so I need some extra light). When I create the blob I try to do it at floor level beside the bed, so the light doesn't shine directly into the girls' eyes. The difficulty is that I sleep between the girls, so creating the blob on the floor is not easy. What I've done to date is to move myself to one side far enough so three feet from my belly extends over the edge of the mattress, so I could create a blob without the line of sight problem. Now I should be able to lay on my back in the center of the bed, extend my hand sideways, and create a blob on the floor beside the bed. I tried that now, and it worked faultlessly. I created an NP-point beside the blob, having no doubt that it'd work, but just being thorough. It worked fine. I amused myself by canceling the blob and NP-point by moving my hand back. As soon as my hand was more than three feet away, they ceased to exist, first the light blob as soon as my hand was too far away, then the NP-point half a second later. (Yet another thing I don't understand about my abilities is why NP-points which are out of my proximity range persist for half a second after they're out of my sight. Or alternatively, why light blobs don't persist that half a second.) Every ki ability I had worked in the expanded volume, so I relaxed. The preconception seemed to have been totally eliminated now. [[I laugh at my thoughts at this time. There were several preconceptions still limiting my use of my ki abilities. They didn't limit my raw power - I only had four minds' worth and I often used all of it - but they certainly limited the flexibility of my using that power. To give one example, an earlier experiment of mine had confirmed that my proximity sense was less effective through a closed door, exactly as I'd expected it to be. In other words, it confirmed my preconception. In fact, intervening matter has no effect on the proximity sensing process whatsoever, because proximity information "tunnels" through the intervening space, as explained not far above. Another preconception was that our maximum NP force was allocated across minds equally. Assuming I had 16 pounds (just to make the numbers easy), I believed each mind had 4 pounds of maximum force, and that each fingertip a mind created had a maximum force equal to 4 pounds divided by the number of fingertips it had going. Without my preconception, my maximum force could've been allocated with total flexibility, which would've made using NP far easier. Apart when I wrote the description of how I first learned how to fly things around, I haven't described the process much, but it's VERY fiddly! If it wasn't so cool, I'd not bother with it, because it is a big bother. Having more flexible maximum forces per fingertip would have made using it considerably less of a fiddle most almost every use more complicated than flicking a light switch.]] [[While I think of it, allow me to add a small digression triggered by my "I only had four minds' worth" comment. In normal life, four people can't produce fantastically more of anything compared to one person, so how does my having four minds enable me to create these fantastic ki-effects? Think of it this way: 3.5 million years ago humanity wasn't even in the modern human form yet (that happened about 50,000 years ago, depending on your definition of "modern human"). Our ancestors weren't even in the "Homo" genus, let alone the "sapiens" species. 3.5 million years ago our ancestors were "Australopithecus africanus", which had a brain size one-third of modern humans. It's a little difficult to check, but let's assume their consciousness and subconsciousness ratios were even less than a third, say a quarter. You can think of my having four minds as being of much the same significance as 3.5 million years of human evolution. Either compare me backward to Australopithecus africanus, or to whatever you think humanity might be 3.5 million years in the future, assuming humanity's evolution isn't artificially manipulated, which it obviously is going to be.]] We stopped worrying about our having any more preconceptions, and started discussing Sensei. Since Sensei had learned External Intention-Ki Projection, might he be able to learn to create NP-fingertips or blobs? Should we attempt to find out? After some discussion we decided to say nothing to him about those abilities. There were far too many seriously negative consequences and not enough positive ones. What good would it do us to teach him to create NP-fingertips? Whether or not he succeeded, it wasn't a good idea to get him to try making them. One little point that came up was, #3: #1: Happy that we'd very intelligently removed our silly preconception and improved our range to its maximum, we ordered ourselves to sleep. ------- Chapter 221: A Signing of Appreciation Tuesday, May 17, 2005 Waking up, I remembered to take advantage of my new proximity range when I created a dim light blob to help me clamber over Julia. I choose her to exit over more often than Carol because Julia is easier to climb over and she sleeps more soundly. The study session went well, enabling me to catch up to the real class in Calculus 251 just before my study session ended. Once a week, I'll go through the recently posted Calc' 251 or Algebra lectures, but I'll mostly be working through the independent chunks of Calc' 252 until it's finished, and then my fourth course, "General Physics with Calculus" (PH 211). I was looking forward to that one, as physics and math combined was just about the perfect course, in the absence of a course titled, "The Mathematics of Breasts and Pizza". Finals started on June 13, one day short of four weeks away. I wanted to get at least 75% through the fourth course by then, to give me a shot at passing its exam with a decent grade, so that gave me about two weeks per course. My very first OSU study session had been on April 20, one day more than four weeks ago. I had done two courses in the last four weeks, so another two courses in the same time period should be easy, especially as my various speed improvement methods would apply for the entire period. I did expect to lose some time preparing for the two grades' worth of school exams, but I was well on top of those so I wasn't too worried, even if I spent quite a while reviewing my less successful subjects. Unfortunately, even my wonderfully improved memory wasn't much use in English. As far as I could tell, nothing much helped with that subject, not even IQ. You just had to have the same sort of mind as the people who are attracted to teaching that subject, which I fortunately didn't have. At breakfast I informed Prof that I'd effectively finished the first two courses and the next two should be easily completed before finals' week. Prof and Vanessa were very happy. Andrew pretended to grumble, "If I don't finish my doctorate soon, Mark's going to beat me to it! Can't you do something to slow him down, Julia? Throw some more girls at him maybe?" Robert was at Ashley's, so I was spared having them ganging up on me. "He just wears them out. He's three degrees behind you, so you've probably got three years." In the last week or so I'd started getting just a little hopeful that the third and fourth year courses may not be the killers that I feared them to be. That slight reduction in my level of pessimism did not extend to convincing me I could knock off a bachelor's, a master's and a doctorate in successive years! I hoped Julia didn't truly believe her dig at Andrew. Ava met us at school exactly as she'd done yesterday, wanting to know what Julia's parents thought of Carol's and my new relationship. I was disappointed that I couldn't think of a good tease, so I just told her, "They're fine with it. Everything's perfect with both families, even with Andrew and Robert. Everyone has sworn to keep it secret. The three of us slept together last night, had a good time, and the Williamses were perfectly cool about it at breakfast." "That means you can sleep together EVERY night! That must be super-fantastic for you both!" "Not so much for Carol," I said, "but it is super-fantastic for me." "Huh? Why isn't it so good for me?" asked Carol. "Are you KIDDING! Have you seen how INCREDIBLY sexy you are? I get FAR more benefit than you do." I got some hugs and laughs for that, especially from Ava, who couldn't resist telling me that she'd told me so. Ava was VERY happy with how it'd turned out, so I asked her, "Do you want a foursome tonight, Ava? I'll be a bit late because of the pipeline date, but you can start without me, can't you?" Ava smiled happily, but politely asked, "Wouldn't you rather catch up with all the time you've lost with Carol?" "Carol and I have got the rest of our lives for that. You are responsible for pushing us together, so we should thank you in an appropriate way. All of us screwing your brains out sounds appropriate. What do you think?" "Never mind 'appropriate'; it sounds like a great fun. Count me in! What time should I come?" I left the girls to arrange that as I'd be away most of the time. During the arranging, Julia mentioned to Ava, "I'll give you the photos of the weekend when you come over. There are some very good ones." Ava was very happy about that too. She had a lot to be happy about from the last few days. On the topic of photos, we told Alexis, Katelin and Pat that we had sets of photos from the weekend for them, but we'd hand them over after the last class so they wouldn't accidentally give the game away by looking at them earlier. That frustrated them, which probably meant it'd been a good idea. We arranged a meeting place for after the last class. I was pleasantly surprised that news of my wealth hadn't leaked yet, either from these three girls, their parents, anyone from the bank, or God knows who else who might have acquired knowledge of it. I was glad that everyone was doing so well at keeping secrets. Of course, these girls very much wanted to stay on my good side; that was obvious from the VERY attentive way they treated me since learning I was rich. They'd all proved their interest in me before learning of my wealth, so their having that additional motivation didn't annoy me, not as much as I will be annoyed by any girls who started start throwing themselves at me from tomorrow on. I was also looking forward to the fun of Alexis coming to school in her new outfit tomorrow. I was considerably less eager about the news of my wealth being broadcast, but I knew there was no way to avoid it, and not just because I'd soon be driving around in a ridiculously expensive new car. Julia and her family wanted me to learn some lessons, so I didn't stand a chance of holding back that happening. After I'd set up the foursome to celebrate Ava's success in getting Carol and me together, I remembered that Lily was expecting another session tonight. My core girls would be waiting for me, and as much as I'd enjoyed my last session with Lily, I'd much rather be in bed with Carol, Julia and Ava. Nor could I invite Lily to join us, as that'd bump Carol out of the room, as I wasn't even tempted to tell Lily about Carol. Lily may seem totally devoted to me, but I didn't understand her motivation, so trusting her wasn't happening. Seeing Chloe's meltdown made me very cautious about trusting people with dangerous secrets. I decided to wait until lunchtime and try to find out some details about this evening's pipeline date first, and then to resolve my accidental double-booking. At lunch, representatives of the 11th grade pipeline group gave me some details about my date with them this evening: I was to bring my swimsuit. That was a very good sign, as maybe they'd be displaying themselves in their swimwear. I have a strong fondness for pretty girls in small bikinis, especially when the girls are well endowed. I probably don't need to keep repeating that fact, but I want to make sure this autobiography doesn't understate the important points. The girls talking to me were all larger than average where it mattered, so I was a very happy chappy. The chief spokesgirl said, "We'll be providing a dinner we know you'll like." Another VERY good sign. I was to meet them at the driveway going into a fancy motel just out of town at 6:00pm. I hardly knew anything about the place, other than what I'd seen driving past. From the road, it appeared to be small and luxurious. I wasn't sure what to think about the rendezvous point. I could see Julia was unsure about it too, but after a couple of seconds she decided not to bother about it. She knew that the girls and I knew about the "no sex" rule for the first couple of pipeline dates, so there was no need to mention it again. Normally a date that included sixteen 11th grade girls in bikinis (I hoped!), would CERTAINLY result in my needing Lily's services afterward, but not when I had Carol, Julia and Ava waiting for me; although I suspected they wouldn't be twiddling their thumbs while they were waiting. Twiddling something almost certainly, but not thumbs. I asked the Group 1B girls, "What time do you think the date will end?" "That's up to you Mark. It can go all night if you want." #1: #4: #1: #3: #4: #3: #4: #1: #4: #1: #4: #1: #4: #1: Having arrived at a plan to do nothing of any consequence, we got back to the issue at hand, deciding whether or how to fit Lily into this evening's entertainment. I ended up deciding to do something which Lily had originally assured me would still make her happy. I pulled her to one side between afternoon classes. "Lily, you told me your service for me could be as quick as I wanted, even just one minute, right?" "Yes. Is right. Many important man too busy, but sex is, umm. They think about sex too much. Stop them working good. So quick sex, quick cum. Is my job. I am very happy do for you ANY time. Long, short, every time is very good." My need for quick sex wasn't because I was too horny to concentrate on working well. I just had too many dates in one evening, so Lily's was going to be cut VERY short! "This evening is going to be very quick like that. I want to see that you can serve me like that, and it suits me to do it tonight. We're not even going to do it in a house. I'm going to meet you somewhere between where my pipeline date is and Julia's house, and we'll do it in the back of your car. Okay?" I'd been looking at her reaction closely, but I saw nothing but happiness. Lily smiled very widely and, I was sure, sincerely, "Yes. I am VERY happy Mark! Any time is VERY good." #1: #2: #3: We arranged a somewhat secluded place to meet. With her English being not so good, it was a bit troublesome to make sure she knew exactly where I meant. Halfway through my third attempt to explain where I was thinking of, I'd been tempted to make it the school parking lot, but the school was getting more security conscious these days, so there was a risk we might get caught by a security guard. We'd be quick (haha), but I didn't want to take the risk of being caught with my pants down. I liked having something over the Principal, and didn't want him to have a legitimate excuse to get me out of his hair. But Lily and I finally got it sorted. Last time I called Lily for a fuck she'd waited in her car for me, so I warned Lily not to wait at that exact spot, as it was secluded enough that it might be risky for her. I told her I'd try to finish my date before 10pm, and for her to wait somewhere nearby but well lit until I called her. #1: #3: After last bell, Alexis, Katelin, Pat, Julia and I met to pass out of the sets of photographs. We didn't want to do it in the parking lot, or even in our car in the parking lot, because there were too many people wandering around. We'd picked a spot where no one would be passing near us without our seeing them coming many yards away, in plenty of time to hide the photos. We'd told Carol at lunchtime about our being delayed to do this, so she and Donna would wait for us at our car. It only took a few minutes. The three girls quickly flicked through their sets, laughing and joking about some of the shots. Julia stopped a big discussion from happening, including saying, "You can talk about them all you want tomorrow. All of you can bring your photos to school if you want, not just Alexis. Just don't show them to anyone before Alexis does. I've still got the files on the memory stick, so you can get more printed if you lose any." Alexis picked out one of her and me that she particularly liked, held it up to show me, asking, "Will you autograph this one for me please, Mark? If you're going to be as famous as Julia says, it'd be cool to have your autograph on our picture." "Sure. I'm happy to." While I was extracting a pen from my bag, Alexis added, "Can you write, 'Thanks for the fuck Alexis, Love Mark.' Is that asking too much?" I stalled by continuing to get a pen and a book to write against. Julia didn't jump in with a comment, so I assumed she thought it was okay. I straightened up saying, "I don't think that's right, but I'll do my best." "Oh, okay. Thanks." Alexis handed over her photograph. Holding the book so no one could see, I wrote, "Thanks for the GREAT fucks Alexis. You're fantastic, Love Mark." I underlined "GREAT", signed it, then showed it to Julia. #3: #2: #4: I was somewhat surprised that Julia accepted it so easily; she just chuckled happily. I passed the photo to Alexis. Alexis was delighted by the surprise, and put a considerable effort into demonstrating her appreciation to me. I spent a minute enjoying that, then peeled her off me. Katelin and Pat had appreciated my giving Alexis better than she'd asked for, and they wanted my autograph too, but with very safe/boring comments, especially Pat's, because her parents didn't know she was having any sort of relationship with me. Julia declared the meeting closed. As we were about to leave Pat asked, "Are you going to get Mark to autograph a picture, Julia?" Julia answered, "I haven't thought about it. I'll have a look through the photos and see if any look suitable." The group of us walked toward the school's exit together. Once we got near enough to our car to separate from them, Julia said, "I didn't want to tell them this, but I have no interest in collecting your autograph. I intend to be with you for the rest of my life, but they don't have that hope." "No, but they don't seem too upset about it. Perhaps a person's attitude to having mementos is a good way of revealing whether they're in love or not. I was surprised you were so accepting of my explicit autograph to Alexis. Weren't you worried about that coming back to bite me in the future?" "Not really. My thinking about that has changed over the last few weeks, especially since I've seen how many girls want to be in a pipeline group. Until you graduate, you're going to have most of the girls in school wanting to be your girlfriend, so when researchers dig into your school days every person they talk with is going to stress your success with girls. We'd look stupid if we tried to insist that with hundreds of girls throwing themselves at you, you never had sex with any of them, especially when so many of them will say that you did. What you wrote to Alexis is explicit, but I don't think it changes anything." "Okay. On the topic of girls, do you know what the pipeline date tonight is going to be?" "No, they haven't told me anything more than you've heard. I'm a bit worried about their choice of venue, but they and you know the rules." On the way to my place to drop my sisters off, I asked them, "I was thinking earlier that I'd like to, umm, spend some more time with Diana and Claire Norris. Do you know if they're still happy to see me?" Both Carol and Donna laughed. Carol got in first with, "Diana sure is! She very proudly showed me that she's shaved her pussy hair into a duck tail even though she's not a Duckling. She can't wait to show it to you. She wants you to know how eager she is for you." #3: #2: #4: #2: I waited for Donna to finish saying, "Claire's got the hots for you too. She can't wait to see you again." "That's good. There's an issue though. When I told Mom about what'd been happening with the Norrises, Mom was smart enough to realize that I had dishonorable intentions toward the younger sisters. She warned me that there'd be hell to pay the next time Mrs. Norris took her younger daughters to their doctor if they didn't have their hymens anymore. Mom was trying to put me off, which she did for a while, but then I thought that it might be possible to have the two girls bust their hymens first..." I described my plan, adding the extra bit that, "It'd be a good idea for both girls to let their hair grow normally from now on, so when their mother sees them in a couple of weeks they'll look natural. Is two weeks long enough for that hair to regrow?" "Three or four weeks would be better," answered Julia. "But you don't have to decide now. Claire should bust her hymen next time she's in the shower, then the girls wait until their hair looks natural before Diana has her splits accident." The girls discussed some of the practical issues of my plan, such as: Making sure they didn't have a gynecologist visit coming anytime soon, or the doctor might be able to detect that the tears were recent or self-inflicted. That I should not have sex with the girls before their gyno visit, in case their being sexually active would be detected. Then they started discussing how best to bust hymens so they'd look torn rather than punctured, and how Claire and Diana should both make sure they busted theirs so thoroughly that there was very little fleshy membrane remaining. I was already very uncomfortable, so that discussion sent shivers up my spine! I did my best to TOTALLY ignore my ears. When we pulled up outside our house, and the conversation's grossness level dropped to an acceptable level, I asked, "Neither of you said anything about whether Diana or Claire would be happy to cooperate. There's the obvious implication that full-on sex is going to happen. Will they be happy with that?" I got laughed at again. Donna added, "I'll take her place if Claire doesn't want to! But I know she will. I'll tell her at school tomorrow and take my vibrator so she can bust herself with it right away." #2: #4: Julia said, "That'll be fine with Claire, but Diana should do what we said before." Putting her forefingers of both hands in and ripping it apart. Shudder! After my sisters got out, I asked Julia, "You haven't said whether you approve or disapprove of my intention toward the Norris girls?" "I didn't think you needed a comment. Diana's obviously fine, because she's only a year younger than you. You're both underage, but being underage with Diana is legally the same as being underage with me. Society will consider Claire on the margin, if not on the other side of the margin, but I knew that when the Ducklings were started. Provided you're suitably discreet, such as not giving her an autograph like you did for Alexis, or not doing it in front of witnesses, then you should be fine. You are the Lord, so I won't try to stop you doing anything unless it's obviously a bad mistake." "Like not buying an expensive enough car?" "It's not about money, but about conveying the right image, but you're right that getting the wrong car would be a serious mistake." "So it's just a coincidence that the cars with the right image are all so expensive?" "Not at all. Style and quality both cost money. You don't really want a lecture about this do you?" "No. I was trying to work some sort of tease into the conversation, but I should have known better than tease you about something so sacred. Forget it. Back to the Norrises. You said 'no witnesses', but I was kind of hoping to have both girls at the same time. Do you think that'd be okay?" "That'd be fine. I was more thinking about your not having intercourse with all the Ducklings in a big group. If one of them later misbehaved and you kicked her out of the Ducklings, she might get angry enough to rat you out. There's too much chance of that happening, and you'd be in hot water with so many non-virgin witnesses whose stories coincided. I'm not worried about Claire and Diana. They seem to have a very devoted and non-possessive attitude to you, so they're not likely to feel vengeful. But even if they did, a whole class witnessed Mackenzie's irrationality so it wouldn't be hard to discredit her sisters. They'll be lying to their mother and maybe gynecologist about their hymens, which we could use against them. Plus Carol, Ava and I can swear you were with us at the time. Provided you have some care you shouldn't have much to worry about with them." "Good. I don't actually want to take them to bed the way I would invite Alexis, for example. I want to flirt with them, tease them and play sex games, but I can quite easily imagine that leading to their sitting on my cock." "So can I, especially once your sisters tell them to lose their hymens. Sex with you will be on the top of their minds." I parked on the street in an area where there are several car lots, Julia and I got out and walked into the first of the lots. Actually the third one on this side of the street, as the first two didn't have a car on Julia's list. She only wanted us to look at REALLY expensive cars! Some salespeople saw us wandering around the lot, but none of them bothered to walk over to us. I told Julia, "We're going to have trouble being taken seriously, especially with me dressed the way I am." "Yeah. Don't worry about it for now. This is just a scouting mission so we don't need much help. Once we've chosen which places we're interested in, we'll do something to get their attention." Neither Julia nor I had ever been to a car lot before, so it took us some walking around to notice that the best cars are parked inside their internal showroom. We were - I was assured - interested in the "best cars", so we entered their building. There was a greater concentration of staff inside, one of whom approached us to ask, "Can I help you?" Julia told him the car we were interested in learning more about. He wasn't impressed by our inquiry, but took us across the room to see one. It was gorgeous, as all the cars on Julia's list were. It looked FAR better in reality and up close than it did in Julia's printed photo. In fact it looked so good I even got a little bit excited about owning such a car, until I noticed the price. We got to sit in it, front seats and rear because Julia wanted to know what it'd be like for the passengers, as it was a sports car with rear seats that were smaller than normal seats. The salesman showed us various features, but he spent most of his time looking around for real customers, rather than who he had decided were obviously two dreamers. Even Julia's printouts and note taking didn't change his initial impression. Once we'd seen all that we could easily see, Julia said, "We'd like to take it for a test drive please." The salesman responded, "We don't have a demonstrator available for a test drive at the moment." "When will you have?" "I'm not sure. Maybe if you came back with your parents." #1: Julia asked him for one of his cards, wrote some stuff on the back of it, then we left to go to the next lot. I asked her, "What'd you write on his card?" She pulled it out to show me. It said, "Inattentive, refused test drive without parents, condescending." Julia explained, "If that car makes it to our shortlist, it'll be useful to have negative things to say during the negotiation. I hope most places treat us poorly." The first lot's treat of us was about average. The staff on some lots were ruder ("Please don't touch!"), and some nicer. We even got a couple of test drives, which I THOROUGHLY enjoyed because the cars were HUGELY better than our old Honda Civic! We called it quits before we'd finished all the lots, and certainly before we'd seen a significant proportion of the cars on Julia's list, because many of them weren't available in Corvallis. Julia didn't seem worried about that, which confused me. One thing Julia is, is thorough, but how could she make a shortlist if half the cars weren't available to look at? I asked her about it. "It's not our problem. I'll call up the head offices and tell them what we want. If they can't arrange to deliver a demonstrator to Corvallis for us to look at, then we don't want to buy one anyway." "Wow! I never would have thought of asking them to do that. Do car companies do that?" "I don't know, but they should bend over backward for something like an $80,000 sale. If they won't go that far to make a sale, they're not going to be any good at servicing the car, are they?" "That makes sense, I guess." "When you're dealing with salespeople, you make them run around after you, not the other way around. When we visit the rest of the car lots, I'll let you do most of the talking. It'll be a good experience for you." On the way back home, I had to admit that I'd quite enjoyed it. The cars were all fantastic, and even the unpleasant salespeople made me chuckle to myself because I knew I'd enjoy Julia's revenge on them. I kept telling myself that the new car was only going to cost two or three times what I'd spent on the weekend to LA. If I said that fast enough it didn't sound too bad. I did wonder whether I should call the boss of my old summer job again, to ask if I could un-resign. I had a small dinner with Julia's family to keep me going. Carol was still at our place (Ava would pick her up when she came later), but Andrew's girlfriend Sophia was having dinner with us, so the conversation had to be less bizarre than normal. After making sure I put my Speedos on under my pants, Julia let me go to my "meeting", as we'd called it for Sophia's benefit. ------- Chapter 222: Two Wonderful Rights Become a Wrong Tuesday, May 17, 2005 (Continued) I arrived at the designated time. A couple of the group's girls were waiting for me just inside the driveway. They jumped in my car and directed me where to drive. The motel had a large building, presumably with some rooms, the restaurant, and whatever other facilities would be open to everyone. It also had several detached bungalows scattered around the grounds, one of which I was directed to drive to. The bungalow was like a small, luxurious house. Even better, as it contained sixteen good looking, prettily dressed girls. We did all the greetings stuff, including doing some introductions because - to my amusement - I didn't know who two of the girls were. They hadn't even turned up at any of the recent mass lunches so had never talked to me or even seen me talking to other people. They were willing to compete to date me, even though we'd had zero contact with each other! Not that I knew much more about the girls whose names I did know, because I'd had so little to do with them all year that their names was about all I knew. While the introductions were going on, I happily noticed some very nice smells. My reaction had been noticed, so I was then introduced to the kitchen. It was very small, which mattered not, because it already contained a large pile of food, including several pizza boxes. I smiled happily. It may not have been as impressive an effort as Chloe's home cooked pizza, but there's nothing wrong with delivered pizza (nothing whatsoever!). I was then taken to see what would be the backyard if this had been an ordinary house. It was a small fenced off area that contained a large hot tub. "We've booked the bungalow for the night. This is our date: to feed you your favorite food and to have a hot tub party. We figure we can all squeeze in together. You don't mind a squeeze, do you?" She rubbed her body up against mine, laughing. I smiled while saying, "I'll do my best to put up with the inconvenience." I was given the rest of the tour, the master bedroom being particularly pointed out, "Just in case you want to use it later." Said with an anticipatory look in her eye, which wasn't going to do her any good. This should have been a near-ideal date - pizza and girls in bikinis! - but I was already getting some negative impressions. There was too much overt sexuality going on (and I CAN'T believe I'm complaining about that!), most of the girls seemed far too sure of themselves, except a few that seemed sullen and annoyed, there was music playing too loudly from a portable stereo, and I'd seen far too many bottles of alcohol. A small amount of beer or wine would've been fine, but not as much as they had, and especially not the top-shelf spirits. Everybody getting tipsy or drunk would greatly reduce my ability to get to know their personalities. I've got nothing against bikini-clad girls getting drunk (I used to pray for exactly that), but this wasn't the time. I only just realized it now, but there will be VERY few times that are the right time for me to drink alcohol, as I'll have to be EXTREMELY cautious with it. It'd be a disaster if I got tipsy and decided to impress a room full of people. My having to avoid drugs and alcohol is probably the only aspect of my having special abilities that Mom will be 100% happy with, when I tell her. I'll save mentioning it for the next time she expresses some unhappiness over something I'm doing. We started by eating. There wasn't room for seventeen people around the barely six-seater dining table, so people sat all over the place. Dinner was reasonably enjoyable, as they looked after me well, bringing me whatever I wanted - I turned down booze, sticking to coke - and the girls circulated, so I got a chance to talk with all of them. There were some things that didn't go so well. The loud stereo was too loud. I could hear my conversations okay, but I couldn't hear what other people in the room were saying to each other (eavesdropping, if you like, but helpful for me to get to know them). I had already decided not to ask for mistakes to be corrected on pipeline dates. If they asked me what I thought of the stereo volume, I'd tell them; but they didn't ask, so I didn't tell, and it stayed too loud. There was a considerable amount of heavy sexual flirting from most of the girls (which, bizarrely, I still considered a negative), and quite a lot of competitiveness. For example, they were often taking personal credit for every aspect of the date they could lay claim to, including some things other girls objected to. The more aggressively competitive girls often squeezed out the weaker-willed girls, pushing them to the rear and ignoring them. It wasn't the best of dates, even with all the pizza (alcohol and heavy sexuality can be inappropriate at times, but pizza is ALWAYS wonderful). After dinner was cleared away, we were told to move to the hot tub. I received several offers to help me undress, all of which I turned down. The pizza had provided a gastronomic pleasure, but otherwise dinner had been unpleasant. Sixteen girls in small swimsuits provided a visual pleasure, but otherwise the post-dinner period was unpleasant too. I soon found out that their idea of "hot tub party" was a "hot tub PARTY!" That would have been great at other times, such as my intended soccer team party, but it was a pretty bad idea at a "Get To Know You" date. The stereo and booze had been brought to the backyard, and there was a great deal of flirting and revelry. It even seemed forced, I thought. I didn't throw cold water on their activities, instead remaining neutral to let them do as they wished. I wasn't actually having a bad time (a dozen almost naked girls were very sexually flirting with me!), I just thought they were stupid as it was the wrong sort of behavior for a first pipeline date. They clearly hadn't listened to what Julia had said about me at the lunches because this behavior contradicted almost everything Julia had said about what I liked. The only thing they got right was the pizza. They were way too competitive against each other, which was probably the worst thing they could do; and they were arrogant, which was the second worst thing. I hate arrogance anyway, and I shuddered at the thought of any girl being arrogant toward me in front of Julia. They were arrogantly assuming that they'd be able to twist me around their little fingers just by flirting with me, and that the sexiest flirter would win. A few months ago they would've blown me away and their tactic would have totally worked, but now I simply enjoyed it while thinking they were stupid. Most of them were putting so much effort into being the best flirter that they didn't have time to do anything else. Except for the half dozen girls who'd decided that they didn't have what it takes to play that game, so they sat on the far side of the tub or didn't bother getting into it at all, and either tuned out or sulked. Some of their stupidity was very unpleasant, such as two of them arguing over what CD to play next, but most of it was tolerable. I sat back and watched with a small, polite smile on my face, responding to their comments and actions as seemed reasonable. There was one behavior I didn't let them get away with. The first time a breast 'accidentally' fell out of a bikini top I told the owner to put it back. She did so giggling, even though I was frowning. It didn't take very long before another girl had the same accident. I managed to get them to turn the stereo off while I told them that the rules for tonight were for no sex. I considered bare breasts to be over that line, so if it happened again the girl would be red-carded for breaking the rule. That sowed quite a lot of confusion, as boys weren't supposed to behave that way, and using sex as bait was the sole strategy of all of the girls that were trying. ^ Just in case you think I've developed a sudden aversion to large, naked female breasts, I'd better explain some of my earlier thinking. I had already decided that this group was almost certainly doomed; competitiveness, arrogance and stupidity do NOT make for good girlfriends! Sadly, not even if they have large breasts that keep falling out of their bikini tops. They were insultingly treating me as if I were stupid and easily manipulated, and the last thing I want is a girlfriend who thinks she has power over me. I didn't know any of these girls hardly at all, so I didn't care about red-carding them. There was even a benefit in doing so, because if I got rid of a whole group, that'd free up some of my time to play with a girl of my choosing. So - not to put too fine a point on it - Group 1B was screwed, once I'd had some more pizza. There were really only two outstanding issues: whether any of the girls were worth being eliminated with only a yellow card, and how to get the best possible message out to all the other girls at school. I decided the second issue was best achieved by making sure there were several yellow-carded girls, as they'd have more reason to talk about this date, helping to spread the messages I'd plant. There were about ten or eleven girls who were competitive flirters, and six or five who were passive (one girl couldn't make up her mind which category she was in). My initial position was that I would red card the flirters and yellow card the passive girls, but it was easy to see that was too simplistic. One of the passive girls was sulking very unpleasantly, so she was firmly placed on the red card list. #3: #2: #3: Which is why when the breasts started accidentally falling out of their holders, I used that event to start my strategy for the rest of the evening. I stopped being so smiley faced about everything that was happening, and started showing and expressing my opinions. That didn't mean I suddenly got nasty. I didn't, for example, say, "Eww yuck, a breast! Put it away! Put it away!" I quite like breasts, and I certainly wouldn't want word to spread that I didn't! I just started showing my sensible and mature attitude to them, saying "Put it away, it's against the rules." ^ Later, for example, one of the girls deliberately let her shoulder strap fall down her arm, then encouraged it to keep dropping lower, so it was pulling the front of her bikini cup down. I looked her in the eyes and said, "Tracey, are you aware that there are about seven hundred girls in our high school?" "Ahh. I guess that's about right." "I'm pretty good at mathematics, so I make that about 1,400 nipples. So why do you think that your showing me that you have one nipple out of 1,400 is going to raise my opinion of you?" She looked down, then said, "Oh sorry. I hadn't noticed." She pulled up her strap. I said loudly, over the music, "There are many things I want in a girlfriend. I'll tell you a couple of them now. First, I want her to have nipples. Do any of you not have nipples?" I looked around for a second, then continued, "Good, that point is settled then. -- "The second thing I want in a girlfriend is honesty. You should think about that, Tracey." "Huh? What do you mean?" In a loud voice and looking around, I invited, "Put your hand up anyone who thinks Tracey was honest when she said she hadn't noticed her strap had fallen down so far that it had exposed her nipple?" A few seconds later I added, "There are no hands up, Tracy, not even yours." Her hand shot up. "Are you sure? Remember honesty is important to me." It turned out that she was not sure one way or the other. I didn't say any more on the topic. I wanted to confuse them rather than describe exactly what they needed to be. Another example was when we were dancing - we didn't spend all the time in the tub: several times I went back to the kitchen for more pizza, for example. Two of the girls decided to try to push my buttons by getting sexy with each other. They hadn't planned it, but dancing around me they'd drifted into dancing with each other, tried to be sexy individually, then it evolved into an increasingly steamy girl-on-girl show. Once it was clear what was happening, I turned my back on them and walked a couple of paces away, saying to whoever was around me, "That'll make my choosing which girls to eliminate easier; two of them are lesbians." That comment got back to the two 'lesbians' a minute later (I was somewhat surprised it got back to them at all). They came rushing over to correct my mistake. "We're not lesbians, Mark. We were putting on a show for you. Most guys like that sort of thing. Honestly I'm not a lesbian; I wouldn't be hoping to be your girlfriend if I was." I answered, "Let me add two more things to what I want in a girlfriend. On the list there's already nipples and honesty. Now we can add that her sexual orientation should be not lesbian, and she should respect my intelligence. By the way, who told you that I'd said you were lesbians?" "Ahh. Molly." "Thanks." I did not explain my "respect my intelligence" comment, nor did I look at Molly. Rather than clear up any of the confusion I'd caused, I went to get some more pizza. There were so many silly behaviors that I had heaps of opportunities to say more things. Just their competitiveness alone produced near-constant opportunities. I let almost all of the opportunities go past uncommented upon. I made only a handful of such comments, spread over the next hour and a half. Any of the girls who were intelligently looking for signals from me got more than enough indication that a change of strategy would be a very good idea; so they should stop either their passivity or competitively flirting, and start to talk with me properly. I had a little success. A few of them showed they had more than one mode of behavior, but their changes fell a long way short of what was necessary to make a significant difference to my opinion of them. To a large degree that was my fault, and I felt a little guilty about that. I never encouraged their new behaviors. One of the girls would say something good (for example, asking two of the others to stop arguing), and would look at me for my approval, but I would pretend to be oblivious. I couldn't use the excuse that the girls should have been strong enough and confident enough in what was the right behaviors that they shouldn't have needed my validation, because I didn't believe it. Not all girls are as strongly self-confident as Julia, and nor would I want all my girlfriends to be like her. If a girl like Carol was in this group, she would have been swept into the corner by the behavior of the majority. I knew that, so I really should've helped such girls. Instead it suited my strategy to let them flounder with uncertainty as I wanted to eliminate the entire group at the end and for the smarter ones of them to realize - and tell other girls at school - that I'd had good cause to do so. The girls that were improving their behavior now did earn yellow cards from their efforts, and I'd reward them verbally at the end too. About 9:15 I quietly went inside and locked myself in the bathroom so I could get dressed, wringing out my Speedos in the sink. When I emerged fully dressed, there were several immediate expressions of unhappiness from the girls. My leaving so early can't have been a good sign. Indeed, it wasn't. I got them all together, got them to kill the stereo, then said, "I'm not leaving this instant. There are several things I want to say first, including the eliminations. This date had a purpose, and that purpose has almost been achieved, and there's no point in my staying beyond that." "But it's early. Can't you stay?" "Julia and I have told you several times, and it's clear on the website too, that the purpose of the pipeline system is to find the best possible girlfriend for me. And the purpose of the pipeline dates is for me to get to know the girls well enough that I can eliminate the girls who don't suit me as fast as possible. That's especially true for the first one or two dates for each group, because there'll obviously be girls in every group who aren't my type. Pipeline dates aren't for wild parties with comparative strangers. Why would I stay here with a bunch of strangers when I can go home to spend time with my family? Especially when I already know that my personality doesn't suit many of your personalities. That most of you were waving your breasts in my face and pressing them against me every chance you got doesn't make nearly as much difference to me as most of you seem to think. Breasts are nice, but I'm not going to let them control my social life. That'd be stupid, which is one thing I am not." The was some more of it, layering on more bad news, such as, "I would've left earlier, but it's been hard to get to know you with the loud music drowning out conversations, and with the constant flirting getting in the way of seeing you as other than one-dimensional personalities." I threw in some comments about me being mature and sensible, which I won't bother giving examples of, because they were just the usual, good-sounding bullshit. I finally got to the point when I said, "There are five yellow cards. To put in simply, these five girls gave me some reason to respect them. Whether for their intelligence, honesty, or for several other reasons." I didn't list those other reasons, because they included such things as lack of competitiveness. "They're welcome to join another group this or next year. They are:..." I recited the five names. Some of them groaned, or looked upset in other ways. To them, I said, "Don't be upset; you're actually the best girls here. Compared to what I was looking for, this date was badly chosen, badly executed, and full of bad behavior. Everyone else gets red cards. Group 1B no longer exists." Responses varied considerably. There was disdain ("Who needs you anyway"), denial ("You've got to be joking"), but mostly there was anger ("How dare you..."). They did NOT take kindly to being treated so rudely after all the trouble they'd gone to, blah, blah... Clearly the time for talk was past, so I quickly made my exit. Some of them followed me out, continuing to harangue, plead or abuse me. I made a mental note to park my car facing out in the future, to allow quicker escapes. I drove to the place I'd arranged to meet Lily. I'd told her I'd try to finish the date before 10pm, and the last date had gone later than expected, so I wasn't hopeful that she'd be at the rendezvous point at 9:35. She wasn't. I wouldn't have minded carrying on to Julia's, but Lily thinks serving me is a big deal, so I didn't want to disappoint her. I sent her a text message, "Just to let you know, my date will finish soon." I decided to spend the waiting time practicing some of my ki skills. Not light blobs, as they'd be a little too dramatic at nighttime! I'd almost never used NP outside at night, so that was worth experimenting with. Plus I liked to test my limits from time to time, to see if they were increasing at all. The first test I did was to pick up a pebble with a couple of NP-fingertips, and send it flying down the street. As expected, the fingertips VERY soon canceled. I repeated the same experiment without a pebble, and the fingertips canceled at the same point. I had pretty well established from daytime experiments that my maximum range depends on my ability to see the where the fingertips are. Fortunately I'm not required to see the fingertips themselves - just as well, as they're invisible! - merely to see where they are. On sunny days my maximum distance is considerably farther than on drizzling days, and unsurprisingly, it's way shorter at nighttime. I received a text message from Lily, "Cumming." I chuckled at the spelling, then got back to my tests. Heat blobs and zero luminescent light blobs canceled at exactly the same distance as NP-fingertips. I turned on my car's headlights and sent a heat blob down their beam. Being able to see farther increased my range. I created a dim, yellow light blob inside a headlight's beam, and sent that down the beam. At the end of the beam I let it carry on, figuring it wouldn't stand out too much for anyone looking at it. Plus it was moving fast and I'd cancel it soon anyway. To my surprise it canceled itself sooner than I expected. I theorized that not only do I have to clearly see where the ki-effect currently is, but the intervening space between it and me too. That seemed consistent with the failure I'd experienced looking through a camera's zoom lens. I tried creating a bright light blob next to a street light farther down the street. It was within my daylight range, but I couldn't do it now. Probably because there was too much darkness in between, I thought. I couldn't think of any other experiments that I could safely do. Zipping bright light blobs around, or creating a chain of such blobs to light a path farther into the darkness than one blob could go, would be worthwhile experiments but too freaky for any accidental witness. I used the side mirrors on my car to see what affect mirrors had on my ability. Those experiments didn't take long, because mirrors didn't allow my abilities to work. I tried some experiments through two sheets of glass. From outside my car looking straight through the left and right door windows, or looking in the door window and out the front windshield. It didn't take much distortion to kill my ability. Straight through two vertical sheets of glass worked fine, but virtually every other arrangement involving two sheets of glass didn't work. One of the advantages of living in a small town is not having to wait long for your sex-slave to arrive. I was horny after seeing all the nubile flesh during the pipeline date, and having a lot of it rubbed up against me, so I was very pleased to see Lily arrive so quickly, especially as I'd been worried about her misunderstanding the location. When Lily parked I opened the driver's door for her because I'm a gentleman. She stood up in front of me, I took her in my arms and kissed her passionately. Lily kissed me right back, rubbing her body against me and her hand over the front of my well-tented pants. I'd had to do heaps of go-softs during the pipeline date - my brain had disliked the date but my cock had loved it! - but I wasn't doing go-softs now. It was a pleasure to let it do its own thing, and a pleasure that Lily knew exactly how I wanted her to behave. It got even better when Lily pulled my zip down, then turned 180 degrees, pulled her panties down, lifted her skirt up, and bent at the waist so her head was inside her car. One hand was holding on to the car seat, the other was between her legs getting herself ready. "Good girl!" Not only did I admire her attitude, I also liked her choice of position, as I've got a thing about coming up behind girls and getting sexy with them. There were no spectators visible, although they'd see us before I saw them as Lily's car door being open meant the light was on. I decided to take Lily up on her offer anyway because this was going to be quick. I dropped my pants, stepping out of them with one foot but leaving the other in so I could put them back on in a hurry in case we were discovered. I grabbed her hips and slid myself into her. Lily was already wet so we were going for it immediately. I didn't use any trick; no go-hards, -softs or -cums. I just fucked her as fast as I could and let nature take its course. It must have been a pretty short course, because it took me only a minute to cum. Lily had started wet, and had gotten more excited during the fuck, but it was all over before she had an orgasm. Despite that she gave a happy cheer when I came. When I pulled out, Lily spun around, sat on the driver's seat, leaned back, raised her legs, offering, "Again?" #3: #4: "No, that's all I wanted, thanks Lily. You can go back home now." I reached down to pull up my pants, picking up Lily's panties while I was at it. I looked at her carefully when I handed the panties over. There was no sign of any negative emotion. Lily was smiling from ear to ear, looking very happy and pleased with herself. She put her legs together and slid her panties on. When she raised her ass for the final pull she held the raised position long enough to grab a towel from the passenger's seat to put under her (she'd returned the Williams' towel to Julia at school one day). While I was finishing doing up my fly and belt, Lily said, "Any time, call me. Okay?" "Yes, so I see. You really don't mind even one minute, do you?" "Only important you cum. I serve you, not you serve me." #4: Which reminded me, "You are certainly serving me well. By the way, the last text message you sent me said you were 'coming', but you spelled it 'c, u, m, m, i, n, g.' Did you know that spelling was for the sexy cumming, not for the traveling coming?" "{Giggle}. After you told me word I look it up. I send text joke to you." "Good one. I thought so, but I thought I should check just in case you're using the wrong spelling when you write things for school." "{Giggle}. Just for joke with you." "Okay. Goodnight Lily. Thanks for being so happy to serve me." "You not need thank me. Is my honor. I VERY happy to serve you. Any time you want, okay?" "Yes, I understand that. Okay, goodnight." I walked back to my car, amazed that she didn't even want me to say "Thank you" at the end of the minute. I arrived at Julia's before 10:00. I let myself in with my key and could hear laughter coming from the living room, so I headed that way. All the Williamses and my girls were in there. I was momentarily shocked to see Ava sitting on Andrew's lap and Carol on Robert's, but it was obviously innocent. Ava was the only person who looked worried - not Carol, Andrew, Robert or any of the non-participants, which I thought was very good. They trusted me to trust them. Ava started getting up, but I waved her back down, "Andrew doesn't look nearly embarrassed enough yet, Ava. You need to tease him some more before you get up. The only reason I'd be unhappy is if you were planning another clothes shopping trip." I adopted a stern looking expression (plenty of inspiration from the teachers at school), demanding, "You're not doing that are you? Anything else would be fine compared to that terrible possibility!" "Haha. No, you're safe for a while." Ava subsided back onto Andrew, while I headed for Julia to provide her with a lap to sit on. Julia said, "You're home earlier than I expected. How did it go?" "They dressed in swimsuits and spent all their time trying to coarsely out-flirt and out-innuendo each other. I'm surprised half my skin hasn't been worn off from all the times they rubbed their breasts back and forth on me. Not that I object to such behavior, but it was pretty much the only thing they did. They arrogantly assumed they could twist me around their little fingers by offering sex. They even had loud music playing the whole time, because conversation wasn't important to them. The worst was that they were highly competitive with each other, which is a huge negative with me. With you three girls totally in my life, the last thing I need is a new girlfriend who's competitive." "You carded them all?" "Yep. Five of them weren't as aggressive so they only got yellows, but everyone else got reds. That group doesn't exist now. I probably overdid it a bit, but I figured you'd be able to make good use out of something so dramatic." "You figured right. I suspected it might not be a good date because they seemed so sure of themselves, but they were even more foolish than I thought. Your rejecting casual sex so firmly is going to make a lot of girls raise their opinion of you." "And a lot of boys LOWER their opinion of me! I wasn't really objecting to the flirting. If they'd done everything else right and still flirted, that would've been okay. But they stupidly believed that flirting was ALL it would take to make me want them as a girlfriend. The real killer was their competitiveness, but please don't publicize that issue. It's so important I don't want any of the future pipeline girls to be forewarned about it. I want to see their natural competitiveness." "I agree. We'll publicize that the group was eliminated because they were blatantly sexual and made no attempt to help you get to know them as people. I can build on that nicely." "How about saying, 'the group was eliminated because they insultingly underestimated my maturity by believing that I had no interest in girls beyond the sexual.' That's even more impressively misleading." I earned several laughs from my audience, with some comments accusing me of misleading them by claiming it was misleading. My sense of humor was apparently starting to rub off on them, so there's a good chance my autobiography will become even funnier from my quoting their future comments. "I'd be happy to agree with you that I'm mature, except that getting rid of a whole pipeline group frees up more of my time to have sex with other girls, and about the only thing I understand about girls is that they're illogical, so I confidently expect that when news of me turning down sex with a dozen girl gets around, a couple hundred more girls will illogically start chasing me even harder. I'll end up getting far more sex. What was that about me being mature?" They laughingly agreed to take back my being "mature", but insisted on replacing it with "smart". Julia suggested, "Maybe the three of us should take you upstairs now, before those two hundred girls start throwing themselves at you?" The first place we went to upstairs was the study to update my website with this evening's results. During which Julia commented, "I'm glad there were five yellow cards. They'll help spread the description of tonight's date." "Yes, that's mostly why I made them yellows. Those were mostly the passive girls; the ones that didn't bother to flirt with me because they didn't think they were pretty or big-titted enough. They mostly just sat in the background not doing much of anything. I asked a couple of them, and they confirmed they'd been outvoted for what the date should be like, but they still should've done their best to impress me or help me to get to know them. Logically speaking, whatever strategy the majority of girls were using - heavy flirting in this case - it would've been smart of the other girls to adopt a different strategy, that way if I didn't like the majority strategy they'd almost certainly win. But they mostly just sulked, which means they also assumed I'd be a sucker for free sex. Their opinion of me was the same as the flirters', plus they were too pathetic to try any strategy at all, so I should have red-carded them. I didn't because I thought giving the non-sexual girls yellow cards would confirm my misleading claim to be mature." Ava exclaimed, "Wow, you're SMART! Other guys' brains stop working whenever girls get sexy, but you think of stuff I'd NEVER be able to work out." "I had hours to think about it, so it's not so impressive, Ava. And there was certainly nothing else going on during the date that required me to think. I bet if you were on a date with sixteen guys, you'd be VERY alert. Same with me. It's a matter of self-defense." Julia said, "I agree with Ava. You're VERY smart. I can remember being scared of leaving you alone with girls just a few weeks ago because you'd most likely create problems. Now you're confident and smart. Tonight you did perfectly. You're learning very, very fast." "Let's go to the bedroom where I can show you some other things I've learned in the last few weeks." A few minutes later Carol asked with puzzlement, "How come I can taste sex on your cock?" "That's from Lily. A few days ago I agreed to let her 'serve me' again after this evening's pipeline date, but when we decided to have a foursome tonight Lily had to be bumped or have her time hugely reduced. She gets such a thrill out of serving me that she doesn't care whether she cums or not - just so long as I do - so she agreed to have a REALLY quick session with me somewhere between the date and here. I met her at the end of that small street the Schmidts live on. She stood outside her driver's door, bent over, and I fucked her from behind in the middle of the street. Despite my being so mature, I was pretty damned horny after having a dozen swimsuit-clad girls rub themselves all over me, so I just went for it and the whole thing was over in a minute. I previously had trouble believing her claim not to care how fast I was, but she was wonderfully happy when she drove away. I've decided I don't understand girls." Julia said, "She's obviously getting whatever she wants out of the relationship. Some of our classmates have asked me whether Lily is your girlfriend now, because she's so happy when she's near you these days." "What do you tell them? Because damned if I'd know how to explain the relationship." "I just say she's enjoying being your Liaison. That's a much easier explanation." "Good answer. Moving the subject a little bit sideways. I didn't want to include Lily in a long session tonight because I'd much rather be with you three. I had momentarily thought of letting her know about the new development between Carol and me so she could join in as well, but I don't want to tell her. I think it's fantastic that Ava made it possible for the four of us to be together like this, and I'm perfectly happy the way we are now." That got some nice mushy agreements, and then we got back to the business at hand. Or in Carol's case, at mouth. You probably won't be surprised when I say that I've discovered that foursomes are even better than threesomes. Apart from the general principle that more of a good thing has got to be even better, I have a specific reason. When I'm having sex with a girl I care about greatly, sometimes our emotions make it feel right for the girl and me to concentrate solely on each other, even if there are other girl(s) in the bed. That bonding moment can sometimes last several minutes, which in a threesome means the other girl is being ignored for a long time. Actually, I shouldn't have said that the other person is a girl, because sometimes Carol and Julia have had moments like that, although less often than I do with either of them. With us the third person has never gotten upset about it - quite the reverse, as they can see there are good feelings going on - but I've recently learned that in a foursome there isn't that small nagging guilt for ignoring the third person. If two people are having such a moment in a foursome, the other two can entertain each other. So foursomes have that emotional advantage over threesomes. Not to mention there are 50% more tits and pussies too, so it's all good! There is, however, one disadvantage with a foursome: it tends to result in less sleep. More people means more sexual combinations which takes longer, and then there's more talking afterward. The net value is still WAY positive! I'm just making my pros and cons list complete. In our chatting afterward, Ava commented, "It'll be so nice when you get your new house. You three will be sleeping like this every night, and me too sometimes. It'll be so lovely to live like that." We all strongly agreed, and spent a while imagining it and telling each other how much it appealed. Julia made an interesting comment, "I'm going to make sure that Mark's wing contains at least two double bedrooms. More would be good, but at least two is important. Mark's bedroom and bed will be huge, of course, but I want another bedroom with a double bed in it so we can have quality time in pairs sometimes. Remember Mom talked about the need for that a few weeks ago?" "Yes," confirmed Carol. "I do. I was even thinking something similar not long ago myself." (My thoughts about the merits of foursomes, especially about the emotional moments aspect of three- and four-somes, was spurred by thinking about the issue that Julia had just raised.) Julia explained what she was talking about to Ava, adding, "Now that I think about it, Mark hasn't spent any time alone with Ava for quite a while, and it might be a good idea if you and I spend some time with Donna, Carol. Shall we have 'Quality Time' sessions tomorrow night? Mark and Ava here, Carol and I in Carol's room." I agreed, "Good idea. The three of you have spent time together, and with Ava's parents too, but I've been too busy to spend quality time with Ava. Do you want to do that, Ava?" Ava laughingly asked, "That's got to be a trick question, right? Haha. I'd love to." We discussed some of the practicalities. There were still some car lots that Julia wanted us to visit, and I had my advanced Aikido class from 8:30 to 9:30. Those dealt with, Julia asked, "What do you think about my buying Donna an electric vibrator like Ava's after school, and giving it to her when I see her?" "I'm sure Mom will appreciate not having to buy so many batteries. Other than that obvious benefit, I'm not sure. I don't want to encourage Donna to get into sex because she's still too young to be trustworthy, but it's not going to be possible to keep her from seeing how much sex is going on. Obviously changing one vibrator for another makes no real difference, but I don't want her to leap to the conclusion that we're intending for her to get more sexual. When you give it to her, can you make sure she doesn't think we're encouraging her in any way?" "Sure. We'll spend most of the evening talking to her, so that'll be easy." Ava volunteered, "I'll get one after school, Julia, so you and Mark can look at cars. I'll bring it to wherever you are." Julia said, "Thanks, sweetie. Tell me how much it is too, so I can pay you back. You shouldn't be paying for Donna's sex-life." I added, "And nor should you, Julia. Tell ME how much it is, Ava, and I'll pay you back." Julia disagreed with me, "Donna's interest in sex is because of you, so that makes it my responsibility because I'm in charge of EVERY aspect of your sex-life, haha." "Fortunately that's true. You're doing a MUCH better job with it than I ever did!" That produced a little teasing about my past ability to pick up girls, but a great deal more complimenting about my current ability, provided I kept wearing the clothes Julia chooses for me. A little while later I commented, "You've heard the expression, 'Two wrongs don't make a right'?" Everyone confirmed they had, so I continued, "Tonight's pipeline date combined two rights and produced a wrong. Not just any old 'rights' either! They had pizza AND girls in sexy swimwear, the two MOST 'right' things in the world! But somehow they still managed to produce a 'wrong' date. Before this evening I would've sworn that was impossible. In one evening they've managed to destroy my faith in all that I hold holy: pizza AND bikinis." Ava declared, "The bitches! They deserve their red cards for doing that to you!" Carol, Julia and I all thought the pipeline girls deserved far more extreme punishment than just red cards. They'd committed a crime against humanity! Dismemberment was suggested, but I said, "They should be banned from every clothing store in the world. What worse punishment is there for a female?" Carol replied, "That's too cruel. It was just pizza and bikinis. Haha." We joked around like that some more, but I never recovered from the shock of learning my sister was so unhinged. ------- Chapter 223: Alexis Reveals Her Ass and My Being Rich Wednesday, May 18, 2005 Studying the new Calculus course (Calc' 252) went well, which was a considerable relief because of two worries I'd had: I'd feared college courses would get progressively harder, and Calc' 252 was the second course in a sequence, after Calc' 251. All four of my minds were now doing Calc' 252, including the two minds that had done Algebra instead of Calc' 251. Their frequently having to access the memories of #3 and #4 did slow them down quite a lot, but not NEARLY as slow as is normal when working through material someone should be clueless about. They were going at what seemed to be about 2/3rds the fully educated rate, which was fantastic. I had a feeling they'd get faster too, as memory sharing still seemed to be improving. [[It was, as the subconsciouses were still learning to share the memory indexes of their college studies with each other.]] Julia and I got to our first class early to make sure we didn't miss out on seeing Alexis arrive in her new outfit, although I'd personally rather see her leave. Julia and I had briefly discussed whether I'd look more modest not being there when Alexis told the class how rich I was, but we didn't think it'd make much difference, and we both wanted to see Alexis have her fun. Alexis arrived a few minutes later than she normally does, so most of the class were present. She was wearing a leather jacket long enough to cover her ass, and it was done up so people could only see the ordinary looking legs of her 'jeans' (or whatever the right name was for her pants, because they weren't made out of anything as cheap as denim). She walked to her desk, dropped her bag, casually undid her jacket, dropped it on her desk, then turned to walk to Julia and me. It took a couple of moments for the first few people to notice, and then the exclamations started. There were several, "Oh my God! Look at what Alexis is wearing." Which got everyone else looking at her, many of whom repeated the exclamation, especially the boys and the girls. The initial exclamations from males and females were much the same, but then they amusingly diverged. Guys followed up with, "Nice ASS!" or other comments of similar subtlety. Girls exclaimed, "WHAT are you wearing!" The gender divergence accelerated. After another couple of seconds, guys were still yelling, whistling, catcalling, and otherwise expressing their approval of Alexis' ass. But one of the girls exclaimed, "Oh my God! That's a CAVALLI! How on Earth did you get an original Roberto Cavalli, Alexis? It is an original isn't..." The rest of that girl's question was drowned out by the excited reaction of all the other girls to Alexis having "a CAVALLI!" "Do you like it?" asked Alexis, doing a twirl. They liked it, where "they" is every single person in the room, definitely including me - the top of Alexis' ass cheeks and crack looked DAMNED good, especially when she walked, and twirling was good too. After that things got a little chaotic. Alexis stood next to Julia and me as she was surrounded by admirers, of either her clothes or ass. Alexis ignored the comments from the guys, which was easy because all of them were standing behind her. She also ignored anyone saying, "How can you wear that to school", "You're going to get in trouble", or similar. She chose to respond to about the dozenth repetition of, "Where did you get that?" "I flew to Rodeo Drive for a little shopping last weekend." I totally disagreed with the "little", but kept my disagreement to myself. "Wow, you lucky devil." And many other similar comments, including, "How could you afford it? This is in his current season's range, so it won't have been on sale, or anything." "Mark bought it for me." My popularity with the males of the class rocketed up to an all-time record high, but Alexis' comment confused the girls. There were several questions along the lines of, "Why is Mark buying you clothes?", "How can he afford clothes like this?", "Did he go to LA with you?" Alexis said, "I've got some photos of our trip in my bag, if someone would fetch it for me?" Alexis was surrounded by too many people to get it herself. A couple of guys at the back of the crowd seized their chance to get onto Alexis' good side (her backside) by rushing to get her bag for her. Yesterday they wouldn't have given her the time of day. When people say, "Clothes maketh the man," the full expression must be "Clothes maketh the man act stupid." While the guys were fetching her bag, my proximity sense showed me that one of the guys (David) was about to go for a quick brush of his hand over the exposed top of Alexis' ass. Aikido has some EXCELLENT ways to grab hold of an attacker's hand, so I easily intercepted David's hand and twisted it so he yelled with the sudden pain and had to stand helplessly on his tiptoes to prevent more pain. David's sudden cry got everyone's attention. They all turned to see me with David at my mercy. I explained, "David was trying to feel your ass, Alexis." I gave her a wink, which most of the females saw but David didn't, as I asked her, "Do you want me to break his arm?" David didn't need to be reminded about how many arms I'd broken in the last fight in order to be scared; just the painful way I was holding his arm now was sufficient to get the message across. He knew it'd take only the slightest of twists to make all sorts of unpleasant things happen to it. He tried denying my accusation, "I wasn't going to ... OWW!" I'd twisted his hand just a little more. "Tsk, tsk, David. Lying isn't going to help you." To Alexis I said, "I think I should either break his hand, or maybe put my hand inside the back of your jeans myself, to stop other boys feeling you up. What do you think?" Alexis chuckled, "I don't know. I'm not wearing panties, so I'll only let you do that if you promise to take liberties, haha." Some of the guys groaned in frustration at my luck. "You drive a hard bargain, but I'll accept." I turned to David, keeping him in the hold while saying in a loud voice, "You just heard Alexis say I went to LA with her and bought her the clothes she's almost dressed in. I'm tempted to call you stupid for attempting to grope a girl who's someone I obviously care about when I'm standing right next to her. But if I said that, you might think it was okay to grope other girls. You DON'T think it's okay to grope ANY girls uninvited, do you, David?" I twisted his hand a little, to help him work out the answer. "OWW! No! No!" The only point to this exercise was to impress the girls. It wasn't going to have more than an extremely temporary effect on the guys, because when guys see sex 'on offer' their brains stop working. Unless they're already getting plenty of sex, but there aren't many schoolboys who think they're getting "plenty". Even I wouldn't mind a bit more! "Behave yourself then." I let David's hand go. He quickly backed away, checking out his wrist and elbow to make sure they still worked. We normally feel pain when we've injured ourselves, and the injury causes the pain to persist. Aikido can cause a GREAT deal of pain - easily enough to render the victim helpless - but totally without injury, so the instant the hold is released the pain completely goes away. Our minds aren't used to pain like that, so it's a bit confusing afterward. Alexis told me, "When you've finished playing with David, please start playing with me." She stuck her butt out toward me, in case I'd forgotten. "Seeing as you asked so nicely." I slid my hand in through the convenient hole in the back of her incomplete pants. Unfortunately they were way too tight, so I had to be content with guarding the jean's hole, rather than reaching for her another of her holes. Meanwhile the other two guys had already returned with Alexis' bag and she had the packet of photos ready in her hand. As she was opening the packet, before she saw the first photo, Alexis said, "This is me and Mark in front of the plane we used." She then pulled out the first photo and passed it to the girl in front of her. "This doesn't look like a normal plane?" Amid similar unanswered comments, as the photo was looked at by other girls ("girls", because Alexis had passed the photo forward), Alexis said, "This is what it looked like inside." She produced the next photo, taken by one of the pilots, which showed the seven of us sitting in our seats, with the bed clearly visible in the background. The chaos that'd been caused by Alexis' outfit had died down, but chaos's big brother came back now. The girls who saw the second photograph REALLY wanted to know how we got to travel in a plane like that. The sudden burst of excitement made everyone who hadn't seen that photo want to see it, so there was clamoring and questions flying in all directions. Alexis didn't help by saying, "We had some great fucks in that bed; it was awesome. We had two hotel rooms for the weekend. Here are some photos that show most of one of the rooms." Even in the photos, the suite shouted "luxury!" Which caused even more shouted questions from our classmates. The room was now getting VERY noisy. Out of desperation for answers, the questions were being yelled at all of us that'd gone on the trip. Julia set the tone by saying, "Ask Alexis; it's her story." Pat and Katelin said much the same thing. I varied it a bit, saying, "Don't ask me; I'm too busy trying to feel whether Alexis is wearing panties or not." The teacher called out loudly, "Everyone to your seats, the bell's already sounded." #1: Alexis said to me, "Uh oh. I can't walk back to my seat without showing him my ass." Alexis' seat is in the back row, a fact that was going to intensely frustrate the guys of the class shortly. In the good old days I could have given her my jacket to wear, but I don't wear jackets to school anymore. "Quickly, walk backward before the crowd disperses. I'll walk in front of you as if we're talking." I had to take my hand off her ass as teachers tend to object to that sort of thing, thinking it doesn't encourage learning. Personally I think it encourages a wonderful sense of exploration and discovery, and who knows what could be learned from that. This probably wasn't the time to raise the issue with the teacher though, so I just withdrew my hand and shielded Alexis as she quickly scuttled back to her seat and put her jacket on. Julia arrived with Alexis' bag, saying, "I couldn't get the photos back yet." Alexis replied, "I know you said you could get more done, but I'd still like them back." Julia said, "I'll get them back when everyone settles." When the teacher got the room quiet (which took a while), Julia put up her hand. "Yes, Julia?" "We were passing around some photos just before, sir, and there are five outstanding. Can whoever's got them quickly give them back please." "Come on people; hand them over," urged our teacher. One of the photo possessors was reluctant, saying, "We want to know the full story." Julia said, "You would've heard it already if David hadn't delayed things." While lots of the class were giving David dirty looks, Alexis announced, "I'll finish it after class, if you give me my photos back." Teach had a tough time for a while, as most of the people sitting near Alexis, Julia, Pat, Katelin or me tried to ask questions about the trip. But eventually things settled down and we got on with the lesson. As soon as the end-of-class bell sounded, the girls rushed toward one of us, mostly to Alexis or Julia and me. The boys weren't so frantic, mainly because Alexis had kept her jacket on all the time. Quite a few of the boys hung around behind Alexis though, because guys live in hope. The five of us who'd been on the trip got together in a group. I sat on a desk and Alexis sat on my lap, as I'd managed to convince her that was a good way of my protecting her ass. I put my hand under her jacket and onto her ass to resume the hunt for the missing panties, while Alexis continued her story. "That's a picture of the limo we drove around in." "You had a limo AS WELL!" | "Did you win a competition or something?" | and other comments that Alexis ignored. "These are pictures of us shopping." There were LOTS of photos of the girls shopping! Alexis quickly passed out several shots taken in front of the 'important' (excuse my sarcasm) stores, inside some of them (although some of the stores had taken exception to that), and quite a few shots of various girls holding up their purchases, either at shopping time, or back at the hotel when they'd been condensing the packaging so it'd fit in the plane's worryingly small - compared to the volume of purchases - cargo space. Looking at the shopping photos caused several of the girls in the audience to have orgasms (that might be an exaggeration; the key word being "might"). Orgasms or not, there was some SERIOUS envy going on. Most of the "Look At What I've Bought" photos were naturally featuring Julia, Carol and/or Ava. It didn't take long for a few of the audience to comment about how much those three had bought. Alexis said, "That's because Mark gave Julia ten grand to spend on Saturday, and Julia shared it with her two girlfriends. He also bought one outfit each for me, Pat and Katelin, but they were less than a grand each." #2: I waited for one of them to make an appropriate comment. "I wish my boyfriend would give me ten grand," was close enough for me to use. I responded to her, "You won't have long to wait. Julia told me the guy has to spring for a ten-grand shopping spree on every monthly anniversary. That's right, isn't it?" "Don't I wish!" | "Yep. Can I be your girlfriend, Mark?" | "Handsome and gullible; the PERFECT boyfriend!" | And MANY comments about money. Alexis used one of the money comments to say, "Mark doesn't have to worry about money; he's a fucking MILLIONAIRE! Remember Mark skipped school for a few days a couple of weeks ago? He went to LA and did some clever stuff with money, and earned himself SIX AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS! How cool is THAT!" A dozen heads swiveled to Julia, seeking urgent confirmation. "Six point seven million is what he earned, but he's already given away over three million of it - half to his family and half to mine." That wasn't strictly true, but it wasn't worth quibbling over just a million or two. "WHAT!" Followed by a DELUGE of questions. Julia held up her hand and motioned for quiet, then she responded to one of the questions, "Yeah, Savannah, he gave my family one and a half mil'. One million to my parents, three hundred thousand to me, and a hundred and fifty thousand to each of my two brothers." "But WHY?" exclaimed Savannah. "Because he likes my family. Mom cooks him lots of meals, and you know how important that is to Mark! Dad set up a fantastic study for Mark at our house, and he helps Mark organize all the special treatment he gets from OSU. Both my parents help Mark quite a lot. My brothers have done odds and ends for Mark too." -- "But the main reason he gave away three million was because it was spare money. He knew I'd like a new home - remember I asked him to look into that a few days ago? He figured that'd cost about three million to buy and furnish. A new car for himself, hiring the private jet and flying the six of us down to Rodeo Drive which cost Mark about $35,000 for the weekend, plus a few other bits and pieces adds up to about 3.5 million. He earned about three million more than he needed in LA, so he gave the excess away, half each to his family and mine. Ava's his girlfriend too, so he gave some to Ava's parents too. He'd only met them once before he earned his millions, so he's just paid for them to take a two-week vacation anywhere they want in the world." "Oh God!" from Savannah and pretty much everyone else. #1: [[If you doubt shopping-lust is the stronger: How many women have hidden their true feelings about having sex with a guy so he'd pay for her shopping? Versus how many women have hidden their true feelings for shopping to spend more time having sex with a guy? QED.]] We didn't talk about the Rodeo Drive trip any more now. Julia refused all the questions, merely saying, "We've got to go to our next class." EVERY girl in the audience thought this was WAY more important than going to class. Julia stressed, "I told you Mark is exceptional! He's the best at EVERYTHING he does, including making money. If you want to know more, come to the lunch meeting. Please give Alexis all her photos back now." #3: I'll abbreviate some of the day's events. Word spread through the school like wildfire, so that everywhere we went we were inundated, especially by girls begging to be my girlfriend, often promising me, "I'll do ANYTHING you want!" Some of them even promised Julia that they'd do whatever Mark wanted, or sometimes what Mark OR Julia wanted, which was an intriguing tactic. As they should've known, all those would-be girlfriends were told to join a pipeline group. Whereupon they'd immediately beg to be in the next intake. Julia had already told the lunchtime crowd that when an intake was about to start, the groups would be chosen at random. All the other questions were equally predictable ("How did you earn so much money?" etc.), as were the answers, so I'll not bother repeating them here, except for one question, "Why did you tell us you were rich? Especially the way you did, letting Alexis tell everyone? Wouldn't it have been better to keep it quiet?" (Okay, it was three questions.) I was stuck for how to answer in a way that didn't make me sound stupid or boastful, but Julia had it covered, "Mark's going to be buying a new car in the next few days. If he drives to school in an $80,000 car, people are going to notice! He's looking for a new house, which he'll be buying soon, which people will also hear about. Plus word is going to get out anyway. Every time Mark goes to the bank, the bank manager comes rushing out of his office to talk with him. Everyone in the line sees the special treatment he gets, so it's only a matter of time before news of that spreads. Or maybe one of our realtors gossips, or word gets out in some other way. He'd rather keep it secret, but Mark knows the secret wouldn't have lasted much longer, so he chose to be nice to Alexis. You've seen how much fun Mark and Alexis have with their morning kisses, so he wanted to give her the pleasure of breaking the news. He's a very nice guy!" #1: #4: Somewhat distressing was the palpable naked greed or naked lust on some of the girls' faces. My being a millionaire produced both facial expressions, sometimes at the same time, but I had no doubt that greed was the underlying cause of the lust. Those girls wanted to get hold of me so much it was HURTING them. Such strongly visible naked greed wasn't common (about 5-10% of the older high-school girls, fewer in the younger grades), but it was easy to tell many more felt it but were better at keeping their greed hidden while they were trying very hard to make friends with me. One of the reasons I was so sure was because of the sudden surge in interest in me, especially from many of the senior girls who'd previously ignored me (an example of which, involving a wheelbarrow, follows soon). Boys' reactions fell into three major categories: Disbelief. They refused to believe I was rich; calling it a lie, a pathetic attempt to make myself popular, etc. Pissed off. "He's rich TOO! It's NOT fair!" Friendship. Suddenly quite a few of the guys discovered that I was their favorite friend. They usually had trouble expressing it, because I was usually surrounded several layers deep by girls, but I got lots of waves and friendly shouts of, "Hi Mark" from various guys. Disbelief wasn't just expressed by guys. It came up often, even among many of the girls, especially the older ones. Although, compared to the guys, the girls were mostly far less scathing and more cautious about expressing their disbelief; presumably just in case I truly was rich. My usual response was to laugh at the disbeliever, and if the situation suited it, adding, "I couldn't care less whether you believe me or not. What possible difference does your opinion about it make to me?" The doubters were discredited over lunchtime. Across the entire high school, quite a few of the kids had parents that worked with Mom, Dad, Vanessa or Prof. The kids called their parents, who asked my or Julia's parents, who confirmed my LA money-market story. When word was passed back enough times, most of the doubters had to shut up. Our parents confirmed the story because they knew we'd be going public about my being rich. Vanessa and Prof actually wanted it, as part of my education about life. We hadn't thought of it getting back to them so quickly, but that didn't really matter. Nor did it matter that my giving my and Julia's parents a million dollars got back either. It caused a minor furor at each of their workplaces, but it changed nothing fundamental. It did give our parents some funny stories to tell about how their workmates and bosses reacted to the news. ^ Alexis' clothes were a big hit, and she took off her jacket every chance she got (i.e., whenever no teachers were around). There was a GREAT deal of talk about the clothes the girls had bought in LA. The girl-throng all agreed on how incredibly lucky the six girls I'd taken to Rodeo Drive had been. Not only did they have a millionaire boyfriend, but they had one who would happily give them money to buy REALLY expensive clothes. It didn't get any better than that! The trip participants were urged to wear some of their purchases to school. This would mean they'd be considerably overdressed for school - even Alexis' being underdressed counted as being overdressed because it was a CAVALLI - so naturally they reluctantly agreed while being simultaneously delighted. Girls LOVE having a good reason to be better dressed than anyone else. Alexis' photos got passed around in each class during the morning, and at the VERY large lunch gathering. She got tired of doing it by then, so put a representative selection of her photos on a notice board in one of the classrooms, with a sign above it reading, "What I did on the weekend, by Alexis Joseph." She checked it was okay with us first, including our approving which photos she'd display. We easily agreed. Alexis had left the photo I'd autographed for her at her home, as well as all the photos of the girls in their bikinis on the Sunday (somehow several such shots got into my camera). Photos of me in my Speedos were also removed (those photos had been the girls' demanded payment for the previous type of photo). I'd also taken some photos of Carol in her very sexy dress, but they were so sexy both because of the dress and because Carol had deliberately posed that way for me that I'd removed them from all but Julia's and Carol's sets before handing them out. Even with the most tempting photos removed, most of Alexis' photos went missing during the day. Julia had brought most of her set to school, in case it was needed, so Julia simply gave her set to Alexis at the end of the day, thanking Alexis for doing such a good job. ^ Lunchtime was a circus. The day was a little too wet to eat outside, so we told people we'd eat in the lunchroom. Our lunchroom didn't have a table NEARLY big enough for the people that wanted to sit by me; about two hundred of them. We totally disrupted the normal 'peaceful' atmosphere of the lunchroom. Our school lunchroom could hardly be described as "peaceful", but it was in comparison to the circus we inflicted on it. There were many amusing incidents. People were behaving so stupidly that sensible incidents were the exception. As Julia explained, "You're rich, generous and on the market. That you're smart, sexy and nice is icing on the cake. They're going to be falling all over themselves for a while. Then they'll get more calculating and deliberate." The incident I found particularly amusing involved an 11th grade A+ beauty called Adriana Richardson. She'd turned up to one of the first mass lunches that 11th graders had been invited to, where she'd heard Julia and other girls talking about how I had to be looked up to and treated as the superior person in the relationship. That hadn't fitted with her philosophy of male-female relationships at all, and she'd made a couple of scathing comments then flounced away. Somehow Adriana managed to get close enough to talk with me at lunchtime. She was extremely attentive, pleasant and totally convincing in her apparent interest in me. If it hadn't been for her previous comments, I would've believed her to be sincere. I think I'm pretty good at reading people, but my considerable talents could detect nothing amiss. She was SCARILY good at faking out guys! ("guys" plural, because she sure as hell didn't get this good without a lot of prior practice). I'd mostly reacted to the events of the day with amusement, rather than getting angry about the falseness, greed and stupidity of it, so I was often joking around. That had quickly taught me that having several million dollars in the bank made my jokes EVEN funnier (as hard to believe as that is!). Adriana laughed happily at yet another of my jokes, and I thought to myself, #2: I told Adriana, "Wheelbarrow." #2: #4: Adriana asked, "What do you mean?" I explained, "I was making a joke." "Oh, haha." Adriana laughed convincingly. #4: #2: #1: #4: #1: At lunchtime, Carol and Ava both reported that news of my being a millionaire and of giving away three million had been HUGE news in their classes. God knows how word had spread to middle school even before lunchtime, but I've long suspected that girls have a secret way of transmitting juicy gossip. Since her appointment as my Liaison, Ava had been encouraging her girlfriends to approach me, telling them how incredible I was. To Ava's frustration, they hadn't really bought it to the extent Ava thought they should, although Ava hadn't been NEARLY as frustrated as Julia had been at girls not 'getting' me. Some of Ava's friends had come to some of the lunches before, but had never shown much enthusiasm for chasing me, so had been squeezed out by the much more enthusiastic 10th graders. Today's news changed their opinion of me considerably! ALL of Ava friends now wanted to meet me, plus many of Ava's non-friends. Ava brought several 11th grade girls to the lunch, introducing me to the ones I hadn't been formally introduced to before. I sometimes sat in on their classes and they'd never been motivated to introduce themselves to me, let alone be excited over it, but apparently the situation had changed. It's amazing how quickly girls can change their attitude to a guy, even when his personality hasn't changed in the slightest. Carol was sitting next to me at lunch, as always, and was able to tell me privately, amid the noise generated by my two hundred 'friends' around us, that she'd been unable to resist mentioning that I'd given her $300,000, and asked if I minded. "It's fine by me. The only problem is likely to be people chasing after you for money." "Yeah, I'm VERY popular now! It's not a problem though. Being a lezzie gives me an easy way to get rid of boys, and I know which girls are my friends already. The main thing is that there are even more girls interested in you now..." "Funnily enough the same thing seems to be happening in high school too." "So I see! I know you said you didn't want pipeline groups from middle school, but some of them are very eager to try that." "The trouble is that 14-year old girls can't go out on the type of dates I like, and they CERTAINLY can't stay overnight with a boy. Everything would have to be done behind their parents' backs all the time, which would be a pain and could lead to major trouble. You can tell them I'm not going to be deciding on my final girlfriend for months, so they should be patient while I think about their situation. Okay?" "I'll tell them. They don't have a choice, so they'll have to live with it." Carol leaned even closer and whispered to me, "Donna and I got together with Claire and Diana after first class, and told them about your interest in them and your plan. They're both very happy and excited. Donna gave Claire her toy, and she couldn't wait to make herself ready for you. I'm sure she's busted it by now. Diana can't believe you're interested in her, especially after she heard you're rich. She's overjoyed about you." "I'd better be careful I don't hurt her. I'll talk with you about that later." It was too difficult to talk now, but it was something I definitely should keep in mind. A large chunk of my motivation was purely sexual, which risked me being unkind. I also felt sorry that Mrs. Norris was - I thought - slowly crushing Diana's spirit when it came to having a healthy, fun attitude to boys, and would presumably crush Claire's spirit soon too, when she got a bit older. Their having a good relationship with me would go a long way to countering their mother's 'evil' influence, provided I had a good relationship with them. It wasn't possible for them to be my full-time girlfriends, so I had to make sure I managed their expectations well. Group 1B was rather funny. The news of their date being a disaster had started spreading as soon as Julia had updated the website. They'd received phone calls from their friends, who'd called other girls, etc. Their loudly expressed position was that I'd been horribly unfair, and even the yellow-carded girls didn't disagree much with that. Many derogatory comments about my selfishness and arrogance were made and repeated about me during those phone calls, and during the early morning at school. The high-school-wide consensus was that I'd treated Group 1B very poorly. Then news of my being a millionaire hit the school. That changed EVERYTHING! Now I was ABSOLUTELY entitled to choose girls on any basis I wanted (you would've thought I should've always been able to decide who I liked or disliked, but apparently people hadn't thought of it before). Because I was a millionaire, OF COURSE I could choose whomever I wanted. Suddenly everyone remembered all the comments Julia had made about me not being immaturely motivated by sex, and the general female population's previous sympathetic response to Group 1B's unfair treatment turned around to, "It's your own stupid fault." Or maybe it was simply that no girl wanted to side with Group 1B, which necessarily meant against me, in case I heard about it. Am I being too cynical? I made sure to loudly mention several times, and to tell Julia to mention too, that I thoroughly enjoyed both sex and pretty girls in bikinis, but it had to be AS WELL as getting to know the girls, not INSTEAD of. Every girl at school took my explanation as definitive proof that I was neither selfish nor arrogant - although I might still be cynical. Group 1B complained that it'd been extremely unfair of me not to tell them I was a millionaire. They insisted, "We would have made a MUCH better date for you if we'd known the truth." That was easily countered, "I'm glad you didn't know then. I want to get to know the pipeline girls for who they really are, not when they're behaving differently just because I'm rich," I couldn't resist tacking on, "as if that made ANY difference!" Savannah amused me too. In the afternoon she approached me to say, "Mark, I've been trying to be your girlfriend for weeks, but you've always been too busy. Now with all those other girls knowing you're rich and making fools of themselves chasing after you, you're going to be even busier. You know I'm not motivated by your money because I was showing you how interested I was weeks ago. Remember how impressed you and Julia were by my listening and understanding what was being said about you? I showed that by taking off my bra at the pizza house after bowling." #1: #3: #4: #3: #4: We discussed it some more internally, then answered her, "Savannah, I don't have any concerns with what you really think of me. And I'm perfectly happy with what I think of you. It seems to me that there's still a problem though. It's in what you think of yourself. Of course you're beautiful and sexy, but I find that girls that know they're as sexy as you are tend to be manipulative and selfish, and that turns me off. There are plenty of girls who're nearly as sexy as you, and who're far more obedient to my wishes..." My saying that I found Savannah exceptionally sexy was pure manipulation. In truth there were quite a few girls sexier than Savannah (I'd give her about B+, or maybe an A- on a good day), but I knew she believed she was sexy, so she'd accept my statement happily. I'd emphasized it to give her hope that she had a very real chance at me. Hope is a very powerful manipulation tool, because if someone has enough hope, they'll manipulate themselves (Julia had told me that during one of her explanations. She enjoys teaching me what she's doing). " ... I don't need 'obedience' per se, because I'm not a bossy person. I'm sure you've noticed that I'm happy to let Julia make 90% of the decisions for me. The key fact about Julia is that she knows I'm very smart, so if I want to do something another way, Julia will obey me without question. I don't want to be in a relationship with a girl who believes she knows better than me. I'm very smart, so when I want something done my way it's extremely unlikely that I'm wrong about it. My earning so much money is pretty good proof of how smart I am. Unfortunately, I can't imagine your being any good at being obedient to me, Savannah. I don't think you can willingly take a backseat to any guy." "Yes I can! I agree that you're very smart, and you're right about me not believing most boys are worth my respect, but I respect you HIGHLY! You're FAR better than other boys. If you were my boyfriend, listening to you and doing what you want would be very easy for me. I'd NATURALLY do whatever you want, because I respect you so much. I noticed in the photos that all the clothes they bought in LA weren't very sexy, which I didn't think was a very good way of looking after a man as wonderful as you. If you took me to Rodeo Drive, I'd buy sexy clothes for you that'd make you very, very happy. That's how thoughtful I'd be for you! I know you come first." "Hmm. Maybe I didn't realize how differently you'd treat me compared to the way you treat other guys..." "I would! I know you're special. You'd see how well I'd treat you if you were my boyfriend." #3: #1: I said, "Unfortunately I can't make you my girlfriend just like that. Now that the pipeline process has started, my favoring you like that would cause a hundred girls to be very upset with both of us. Probably three hundred, now that all those silly girls are throwing themselves at me because I'm rich. We can still use this time to good effect though, because it'll be a perfect opportunity for you to convince me that you do respect me, are obedient to me, and aren't after me because of my money. All of those are true, aren't they?" "Totally. Your money's got nothing to do with it. It's so obvious that none of those things apply to me so we might as well start dating right away." "I'm glad you're so confident, but I'd prefer to go slower. I don't want three hundred girls to be angry with both of us, and I need to reassure myself that your motives are purely because you like and respect me so much, and that you've got the respectful sort of personality I enjoy." "But it's wasting time. You know I like you for who you are. I proved that weeks ago at the pizza house. Think of all the fun we could be having! We'd look great together, because we're both tall, slim, good looking and with great senses of style. I could get some new clothes that matched the styles you wear, and we'd look incredible together..." I'd seen Savannah naked at the hot tub party, and she looked good naked; quite similar to Ava actually, if Ava got herself one heck of a suntan. I would be very happy to see Savannah naked again (OBVIOUSLY!), yet her fantasy was for her and me to dress sexily and be seen by other people. I've said it before - and I'll no doubt say it again - girls' minds work in very strange ways. In Savannah's case, in a way so egotistical that it never occurred to her that I wouldn't enjoy what she was proposing. "The problem isn't how sexy you are. There's no argument about that. The problem is that I've twice told you the way I want to proceed, and twice you've disagreed with me. And that was IMMEDIATELY after you said you would respect my opinions and do things the way I wanted. It's starting to look very much like you don't respect my opinions and preferences at all. I am, as you said, very busy these days, so I don't have time to play games with you." #4: #1: Savannah rallied and tried to save the situation, "Don't worry about THAT! I'm used to boys being a lot louder and bossier, so I didn't realize you meant it so strongly. I thought you were just making conversation. It won't take me long to get used to your style. Tell me whatever you want, and I'll do it. I'll do ANYTHING you want. I'm VERY good! And very adventurous too. You'll have a great time with me, I promise!" Before Savannah could get more explicit and sordid - both wonderful things in the right circumstances, but not now - I said, "I've decided what's going to happen with us. This is my DECISION; not a debate. You either agree or you walk away. I don't have time to waste these days, and I'm HIGHLY doubtful about your ability to put my preferences ahead of your own, so I'm going to test you for however long I need to be reassured that your claims are true. My testing you has started already, so if you misbehave from this moment on, it'll almost certainly mean that my skepticism will be confirmed. My first test is a simple instruction: tomorrow you will come to school wearing a blouse that buttons up the front and you won't wear a bra. Do you understand your instructions?" "That's simple. I dress that way some days anyway. I'll do what you ask..." "Savannah, I am not interest in conversation. My ONLY question is 'Do you understand?' and the only answer I want is 'Yes' or 'No'. It's a TEST. If you don't do it, then you fail, and that's the end of your last chance with me. But if you do as I told you, then you pass THAT test, then I will continue to test you until I am satisfied that your claims to be a good girlfriend for me are true. So, do you understand your instructions for what to wear tomorrow?" "Yes. Umm, can I ask some questions about other things?" "If you're quick. I prefer not to waste any more time on you until you prove yourself suitable for me." "Ahh. I guess the best way of saying it is that I've never heard you talk like that before, and it's scary that you say you'll be telling me to do things. What sort of things are you thinking of?" "You're overvaluing your importance to me considerably. I haven't bothered giving ANY thought to what the tests will be." That was a lie as I'd already had several enjoyably indecent ideas. "Why should I bother planning them when I figure there's a high chance you won't be able to stop yourself arguing with me about something, or making some other mistake that causes me to give up on you. The ONLY thing I've done is decide to test you. Obviously the tests will be things that I like, because I've got no interest in finding out whether you'll do things I dislike. I'm testing your ability to put my preferences ahead of yours, so they'll need to be things I like more than you do, and maybe even things you won't like, but being nasty to you isn't my motivation. That's not my style at all, and if you ever suggest it is, then I'll know you have an opinion of me that's too low for you to be my girlfriend." Savannah was looking a little doubtful, so I brought out the big guns, "I've got millions of dollars Savannah, and I've got my choice of girlfriends, so it's perfectly reasonable for me to be very fussy about exactly the sort of girl I want. It's very important to me to make sure I don't get one who's motivated by money, because hundreds of millions of dollars is very tempting to some people." "Hundreds! What do you mean 'hundreds'?" "It took me a couple of days to get into the swing of it, but then I was earning about 2.5 million per day. I worked until the end of Friday, because that was an obvious time to stop and I had enough for what I wanted to buy and to give a good chunk to my and Julia's families. But obviously I could have kept working if I wanted to. If I bothered to keep doing it I could earn about fifty million a month, although I've got no need for such silly amounts of money; I'm only fifteen, for goodness sake. But it's nice to know I can do that if I need to. By the way, you should keep that to yourself, because some people go a little crazy over money." #4: #1: Savannah wasn't having an orgasm (that's just my dirty mind combined with what I like to think of as my sense of humor, although unenlightened people have given it different names). Savannah might not have been climaxing, but she was still intensely affected; she grabbed my arm with both hands and held on grimly while the excitement of her being so close to that much potential money overwhelmed her. I didn't want to acknowledge her strong reaction to my claimed earning power, as I'd told her about it ostensibly because I trusted her not to be interested in my money, so I chatted aimlessly to give her time to recover, saying, "That's why I didn't bother going to work until Tuesday. You may remember that I came to school that Monday, but missed Tuesday to Friday. I knew four days would be ample time for me to earn all I needed plus enough extra to give nice gifts to a few people." Savannah's grip was relaxing as she regained control, so I was spared having to invent more time-wasting prattle. I had a couple of ideas for what to do with Savannah over the next couple of tests. Tomorrow's test (buttoned blouse and no bra, in case you've forgotten) was so I could undo some buttons and put my hand inside to fondle her breast. I hadn't decided when to do this, or whether to do it in private or in front of other people, but I had no doubt I'd think of something. Probably several somethings, as I tend to get inspired by breasts. Another possibility, which I could combine with whatever else I did, was to play a mind-game with Savannah by doing the same thing with Julia (after all, I've got two hands), but showing a clear preference for Julia's breast over Savannah's. Julia having very small breasts, that should teach Miss I-Think-I'm-So-Sexy Savannah a nice lesson in humility. To put some numbers on those breasts, because I like numbers and breasts, and it's not often I get to combine them: Savannah is about 20% taller than Julia. Assuming that scales in the other two spatial dimensions, that means that if Savannah's breasts were proportionately the same size as Julia's, then they'd still be 1.2^3 =1.7 times as massive. Nearly twice as much breast just from a 20% increase in height! Which might explain my preference for tall girls. But Savannah's breasts are proportionally larger than Julia's. I'd guess by a factor of 2, which means Savannah probably had something like 1.7 x 2 = 3.4 times as much breast volume, so my preferring Julia's breasts over Savannah's would send Savannah a very clear message, and hopefully mess with her head nicely. (It's so nice when I can use math to think about breasts!) My possible idea for the next day was to tell Savannah, "Come with me. I need you for sex." I'd take her to a girls' bathroom where Lily would be waiting for me. I'd tell Savannah, "Guard the door while I fuck Lily." I'd give Lily another one-minute job, then we'd leave. Hopefully Lily would have the same expression as she did after the previous quickie, so Savannah would see an extremely happy, proud Lily. I could have some fun playing mind-games with Savannah after that. The first idea I had was to say to her, "Look how happy Lily is. I LOVE finding out what girls get the most happiness from, and then giving it to them. Lily loves quick sex, Julia loves shopping for expensive clothes. If you pass all my tests and become my girlfriend Savannah, it'll be fun to give you whatever makes you the happiest." For an ego- and money-hungry girl like Savannah, an extraordinarily popular boyfriend who could earn $2.5 million per day and who LOVED to be generous, would be her idea of Heaven. To be fair to Savannah (something I didn't intend to do much of), I don't think she's money-hungry as such. I think it was simply that she thought she deserved the best. It just so happens that the best of anything tends to be very expensive, so a generous millionaire boyfriend was a perfect way of her getting what she deserved. Plus it made me amazingly popular with other girls, so Savannah's ego cried out for the status of being my girlfriend ahead of hundreds of them. All she had to do was pass a few tests... I said, "Sorry, I was prattling on. I do that sometimes. Did I mention to you that you should probably not tell other people that I can earn two million per day? I probably shouldn't have told you, but you did show your interest in me at the pizza house, as you said, so I'm not really worried about your being after me for my money. I'm much more worried about your putting your preferences ahead of mine the way you've done so often." Savannah assured me - with GREAT sincerity - that she'd NEVER do that again! #4: #1: #3: #4: #1: #3: #4: #1: #3: | #4: Having thought that other people might think I could earn $2 million per day, I warned my girls not to mention the possibility of it, as that'd make turning down the begging requests much harder. Nearly all the kids seemed to have assumed that my riches were a one-time deal, presumably because I'd obviously still be doing it if it was an ongoing business. Those times when the question of my earning more millions was raised, there were also a dozen other questions being yelled at me at the same time, so I could simply ignore the troublesome questions. The few times I had answered it, I'd just said something like, "What do you think?" using a heavy sarcastic tone to imply they were being silly. As touched on above, there were several begging requests throughout the day. The most common approach was a joking "If you're giving away money, Mark, I'd love some." Often that was a joke, but it often wasn't, especially when it didn't fit into the flow of the current conversation. Some of the requests were considerably more direct, such as, "Mark, my parents are REALLY having a hard time with money. Dad got laid off a while ago, and Mom's sick. I'm hoping you can lend us some..." I'd expected to have people begging for money from right back when we first talked about me winning millions, and knew I had to say "No" to everyone or I'd be inundated and drained dry. It was easier than I'd expected for two reasons. First, I was already worrying about running out of money. I certainly wasn't desperate - not if I was about to buy an $80,000 car! - but I was very conscious that my supply was limited and that there was NO WAY I was going to be allowed back into Binion's to get more. Second, the way Julia had worded the mathematics of her explanation was that I'd earned about 6.7 million, needed 3 million for a house, had given away over 3 million, and I had some miscellaneous expenses, so mathematically there was nothing left to give. When I was asked, my usual answer was, "I don't have any spare money. The first thing I did when I got back was to work out exactly what I needed then I gave away the rest. Everything I've got left is already spoken for." For some of the supplicants it wasn't as simple as that. Most were sure I had some spare money; some wanted me to earn more - preferably donating to them first and then earning more to replenish my own funds. Others requested I try to get some money back from the people I'd given it to, or get them to lend it to the supplicant. There were other suggestions, but they all got the same result: nada. The first day's begging wasn't too bad, but it was going to happen often enough to be a pain. ------- Chapter 224: Advanced Aikido Class Wednesday, May 18, 2005 (Continued) Leaving school was almost a feeling of déjà vu, as there was a crowd waiting for me in the parking lot, mostly of middle-school girls. We were spotted and mobbed by the hordette, asking, "Is it true?", "Are you really rich?", "Are you really a millionaire?" Etc. They let Julia and me through to the car and my sisters. Thank goodness my mobs have all been made of people smaller than me; hordes would be terrifying if I was Julia's size compared to them. I positioned Julia, my sisters and myself so our backs were to the hood of the car, and the mob was in a semicircle on the grass in front of where I'd parked. That way they weren't standing in the parking lot, as they were generally too pretty to be road kill. I motioned for silence, then addressed them, "I've heard lots of you calling out, 'Is it true?' There's been so much noise I missed the rest, but I assume you're asking me to confirm I have the best sisters and girlfriend in the world?" It's very hard to put your arms around someone when they're holding the arms in question, so I settled for smiling at each of the my girls. From the hordette, "No! Is it true you're RICH?" "I think that wonderful sisters and a fantastic girlfriend are worth more than money, But in answer to your question, yes I am. I hope you still like me anyway?" They did still like me. After their expressions of admiration they all started shouting out money-related questions at me. I held up my hands for quiet again. "I don't have much time, so I'll quickly answer some of your questions..." I trotted out my usual cover story answers. It took less than five minutes, especially because this audience didn't want detailed answers. I was also amused to notice that their questions had different priorities than those of high-schoolers. This crowd were mainly interested in what I was going to spend the money on, and in my giving so much money to Carol. I rather embarrassingly had to face questions about not giving any money to Donna: I blamed Mom. -- I finished with, "I don't want to be rude, but meeting in the parking lot is no good so I'm not going to encourage it by hanging around. I appreciate that you think today is special because today is the day you heard about my being rich, but today's not special for me. It's the same as yesterday and the day before, etc. It's nice to see you, but I have several things I have to do before 5pm, so I'm going now. Goodbye!" My passengers and I started getting into the car. Diana and Claire broke out of the crowd to rush up to me. Diana rushed to say, "We want to thank you very much Mark. For you know what. We can't believe you're interested..." I crouched down to their level, interrupting, "Believe it. I think you're both sexy." Being up-front about that was a good idea for many reasons, including that I wasn't going to beat about the bush getting sex from them, and I wanted them to know that it can be honest, healthy fun (not so honest that they'd tell their parents or Mackenzie though!) "There are many sexy girls in school, but I like you two so much because I like your personalities. You're both lovely girls whose company I enjoy. We can talk more next time, but I have to go now. Bye." #3: #1: #2: #1: #3: #1: There was only one topic of conversation on the way home: how everyone at school had reacted to my news. Carol, Donna and Julia all had stories to tell, and not enough time to tell them in. There had been an unexpected difference between the reactions of the high- and middle-schools. I've already described the high-school reactions. The middle-school kids believed they had no chance of becoming important to me - even the Ducklings and Carol's friends had no real hope of that - so their responses were impersonal. There was no point in them being greedy, for example, because they had no hope of extracting any money from me. For the same reason, lust (as a possible reaction of middle-school girls) or being pissed off because now I'd get even more girls (a possible reaction of middle-school boys) were quite rare. Mostly there was admiration and liking, especially in Carol's grade. A lot of the middle-school kids weren't affected much by an older boy having millions of dollars, but they totally understood that I'd given Carol $300,000 of her own. Carol was now RICH because her wonderful brother had given her a very large amount of his money. That made me the best brother in the Universe! By the way, Carol had sat Donna down for a serious talk about why Carol got money but Donna did not. Donna would have preferred to be given $300,000 too, but she was reasonably okay with it. [Obviously this autobiography would be unreasonably long if I included even summaries of conversations between important third parties. Also obviously, many of my own conversations are omitted, but I will mention one example of a type of omission because it becomes quite important later: Carol and I are spending MANY hours talking together (and with Julia and recently Ava) about our hopes, dreams and aspirations, as well as likes, dislikes, reasons behind our reactions to events, etc., etc. We are getting to know each other FAR better than EVER before, especially because our talk is so personal.] When we got close to home we saw several cars parked in front of it, and half a dozen girls hanging around on our front lawn. "God, now they're staking out our home!" I stopped the car as soon as I saw them. They'd been eagerly awaiting the arrival of my money (in the form of me), so they'd been looking up the street. Seeing our car, they waved excitedly and started running toward us. "Do you want to come car shopping with us, Carol? Donna?" Carol started getting out of the car, saying, "We can handle this. Come on, Donna." #1: #4: I confidently locked my door, suggesting to Julia she do the same. I used NP to lock the back doors as the girls closed them. No one was close enough to see, and it'd look like I used power locks anyway. Then put the car in reverse and backed up the street far enough to be able to do a quick turn in someone's driveway, then I made a clean getaway. Julia commented, "One of my ideas was for you to show your bank statement around school, so they could see the $16 million of deposits. I think I was right when I decided they'd be impressed enough without it." "Yeah, I think they're impressed MORE than enough." "For once in your life, you'd better drive over the speed limit. You're going so slow they might catch us." We got to visit the various car lots without incident, even though we had to do more driving around this afternoon as the ones we wanted to see were scattered around town. We had the same problem as yesterday with sometimes not being taken seriously, but it didn't matter much yet. We still managed to eliminate some of the cars on Julia's list, and I started gaining some understanding of what I wanted in a new car, which was a very good thing to happen since I was going to be buying a new car whether I understood or not. Some of the factors that concerned me were somewhat unexpected. As one silly, but still real example, I found out that my ass was fussy about temperature. Most of the cars that I was allowed to sit in had heated seats, which was 'cool' (in one sense), but there was a problem. Many of the heater controls had only two or three positions, either on/off or high/low/off. "On" and "High" were too hot for my ass, and "Low" in those cars that had it wasn't noticeable. Neither was "Off", in case you need to have that mentioned. I could've overridden my body's natural feelings by using my subconscious control, but why should I be reminded of a design fault in my car every time I took a drive on a cold day or at night? There were other things, like the latest Jaguar had rear view mirrors that I thought were obviously too small and would therefore have unacceptably large blind areas. Given how far we had to drive to find a Jaguar dealership, that was damned annoying. How on Earth could people produce an upmarket car that suffered from such an easily remedied and potentially dangerous fault? #4: After car scouting, we returned to Julia's place. That'd been my intention even before seeing my home staked out. I called Carol to see how she managed with the idiots. "It was easy. I told them you were very pissed off, and you'll be red-carding anyone who hangs around our home from now on. They REALLY don't want that to happen, so they ran away, haha." "Well done. I'm constantly amazed by how much confidence and ability you're developing." "So you constantly keep saying. It's nice of you, but it was nothing this time. Donna and I have been using a similar threat to keep our friends from coming here uninvited. It's even easier with high-school girls because of the red cards." "I'm still impressed by you. Have I told you recently how much I love you?" "Lots of guys are trying to get very friendly with me recently. You're not just after me for my money are you?" "Of course NOT! I resent that insinuation. I'm only interested in you for your cooking skills." I would've said "body", but this was over the phone, which our 'benevolent' Government could be recording. After Carol's laugh, Julia wanted to talk with her about girly stuff so I didn't really listen, and then we called Ava to talk with her. Ava had some funny stories about her classmates' silly overreactions to my news, as well as a bit of news about her parents. They were dithering over their vacation. The earliest they could go was May 28, a Saturday ten days away, but the trouble with that was that they were concerned their not getting back until just before Ava's exams might disrupt her studying (they were going to be away for two weeks). Waiting until after finals meant traveling during summer vacation that they'd rather not do, especially because they'd rather be available to spend more time with Ava those days. After the summer vacation was so far away that their health might have declined too far to allow them to travel enjoyably. Julia got Ava to put her parents on the line. "You're going on May 28." Julia had a firm opinion and good arguments to back it up. Her top reason was that Ava would be staying with Julia while they were away, and Julia theatrically moaned, "Do you have ANY IDEA how much studying my parents make me do before finals! This year it's going to be even worse than usual because I've been spending so much time with Mark instead of doing schoolwork," which was a well-intentioned lie. Julia had resigned from many clubs, committees, etc., to devote herself to me. The net effect on her schoolwork time wouldn't have been significant. "If you're worried, tell Mom or Dad how many hours you want Ava to study, but I promise you they'll almost certainly make us do double what you think is a reasonable amount. They're slave-drivers of the worst type." Ava's parents were convinced, even though Ava begged them not to go on vacation at all. Dinner was fun, even with just Vanessa and Prof being there (The Boys were both at their girlfriends'). They had some good stories about what had happened when their coworkers found out I'd given them a million dollars. Prof added, "I even had the Dean call me about you just before I came home. He's very impressed by your day trading abilities. We talked about your impressive studying progress too. He's feeling very happy about investing in your education. Maureen also told me that she's available for marriage any time you are. She's already married to a nice guy, but said she didn't mind trading her current husband in for a rich stud muffin." (Maureen is the head secretary of the Math Department. A hard-case, 40-year old woman.) I couldn't think of anything to say, but Vanessa suggested, "Tell her Mark says he'll need to take her for a spin first." Prof chucked, "Will do." Julia and I also talked about some of our experiences today. Vanessa had a few questions for us, but nothing difficult, just about how we'd managed beggars, the increased attention from girls, how guys had reacted, etc. Easily answered questions. I dropped Julia at my place on the way to Aikido, but early so I could talk with Mom and Dad for a while. They told some of their funny stories, adding how impressed everyone at their workplaces were with me. I didn't get any proposals of marriage from their workmates though, which was a bit of a pity because from the occasional times I've met some of them, there are a couple of very good looking ladies working in Mom's sales department. On average, Dad's lawnmower assembly coworkers aren't quite so attractive, or as feminine. I arrived at the dojo in plenty of time, eager to see what an advanced Aikido class was like. There was another class in its final couple of minutes. I sat on the side while Sensei finished his talk, they did their final bowing, and then everyone got up to leave, get changed, or whatever. Sensei spent a few minutes talking to various students from that class, then wandered over to me. After the usual greetings Sensei said, "We will spend half the class doing the basic forms that you know, then some multiple-attacker training because I cannot show you that in our Monday sessions. You will see that the basic forms are done with considerably more movement than you are used to, but I will demonstrate them all first and I am sure you will adapt without difficulty. I will also rotate your partners often, so you get experience training with different people. Is it all right with you if I introduce you by your first name and say you are a private pupil of mine?" "That's fine, thanks for asking. One point though, won't the class be annoyed to spend half their time doing the basic forms again just for me?" "Not at all. They are called 'basic forms' not 'beginner forms'. They are fundamental to Aikido, so we train on them frequently at every level." Sensei left me to talk with other students. I spotted new arrivals, who were pretty obviously coming for the advanced class. They were fit, healthy, mostly in their 20s with a scattering of older students, and moved quite well. Not as well as Sensei and me, but still somewhat better than most people (moving gracefully isn't an obvious giveaway, but is noticeable if looked for, especially when the people are semi-conscious of how they're moving, since they'd just arrived in the dojo for a class). Plus there was the small extra hint that they were wearing black belts! Most of them were wearing hakama too (black pants that are worn over top of the white gi pants), so their 'blackness' contrasted strongly with my 'whiteness'. My white belt (which means I'd never been graded, so a raw beginner of only a few weeks experience) caused them to ignore me. They obviously knew each other well, and got into their own conversations easily. When the previous class had cleared the room, the members of the advanced class started warming themselves up in very much the same way I'd seen the beginner classes do, only a great deal smoother. Sensei motioned for me to join in, which I did. They were too busy to talk with me, but I could see some curiosity on their faces. Surprisingly little though. I would've thought a new member of the class would've caused much more interest, as the existing members had presumably trained together for years. A new guy wearing a white belt had to be a very unusual event, but they accepted my presence with little reaction. After warming up, Sensei called the class to order, which means all the students sit on the long edge of the mat facing Sensei sitting in the middle. Sensei indicated I should sit at the right hand end. We did the bowing thing (it's a show of respect between teacher and students, not a sign of subservience, and definitely not of any religious significance). Sensei said, "You will have seen that we have a new member this evening. Mark is a pupil I tutor privately, consequently he misses out on some of the benefits of training in a group, so he will occasionally be joining this class. I will partner him with as many of you as I can during the class, and I urge each of you to pay attention during the time you have with him. You might learn some things." One of the class asked, "I didn't know you did private tutoring, Sensei?" "Normally I do not, but Mark's situation is unusual. You will pair up to do the basic forms shortly, but first I want Mark to see each of them quickly." Sensei called up two of his most advanced students (I could tell that by what followed), and got them to go quickly through the first nine techniques I'd learned. "Quickly" being the operative word - they flew through them (literally at times). It was a pleasure to watch, and VERY different than the training I'd seen or done. In the beginners' classes I'd seen, and how I train with Sensei, a technique starts with the attacker and defender standing facing each other. The defender will extend an arm and the attacker will grasp the wrist. To exaggerate slightly, the defender will then collect himself, and when he is ready, start the technique, so it's somewhat wooden. I would never have thought of using that adjective before, as Aikido is graceful, but "wooden" seemed very appropriate when I saw how the advanced students performed the same techniques. They did everything on the move - the attacker rushing into the attack while the defender moved away, although with one hand extended so the technique could proceed. More often than not the defender would start using the technique on the attacker even before the attacker had touched the defender's wrist, let alone actually grasped it. The rest of the technique flowed even more than the beginning did, with the attacker swept in large circles, spun around, sent flying, or whatever the technique being performed required; those movements being FAR more than what happened in the static versions I'd learned. And the moment one technique was over, the defender would let go and retreat a few paces so the attacker could leap to his feet and rush into the next attack. When they'd finished the nine techniques, which I'd swear took less than a minute in total, Sensei thanked them and they returned to sit with the rest of the class. Then, "You will pair up and start with Ikkyo. Every three or four minutes I will call out for you to change to the next technique. Mark will move from pair to pair, making his group a triple. He will attack each of you once first, then defend against each of your attacks once, before he moves to the next pair so he can experience as many different partners as possible. In the interests of time please keep the techniques flowing quickly. Okay, begin!" The last statement got everyone jumping to their feet, quickly choosing someone to pair with, and spreading out around the mat. One thing that was different from the beginner classes, was that these guys (actually about a third were female) needed a LOT more room. Fortunately, and probably essentially, the class size was much smaller. There was no sign of any annoyance at their having to do the basic techniques, or at the apparent favoritism I was being given either. The students happily leaped to their feet and rushed to comply with Sensei's instructions. The pair that formed closest to me asked me to join them with nothing but friendly curiosity in their expressions, but Sensei arrived next to me then and indicated for them to start without me. Sensei asked me, "All right?" "Daunting. There's a lot more movement than I'm used to." "Yes. I am throwing you in the deep end, but I am sure you will adapt. You grasp principles very quickly, and I am sure you will find the movement is easier and more natural than what you are used to." Sensei walked me toward the closest pair, waited until they'd finished the technique, then said loud enough for the pair and me to hear, "Attack Michael for an Ikkyo, Mark." It was a mixed gender pair, so there was no doubt which was Michael. Michael held out an arm and started backing away. Nothing else for it, I rushed forward, reaching out to grab Michael's wrist. I want to write, "Next thing I knew I was flying through the air," because it sure felt like that. There were two problems with that statement though. First Ikkyo is an immobilization technique, so I ended up being pinned to the mat rather than being sent flying. Second, the "next thing I knew" was wrong. The technique was performed about three times faster than I'm used to, but it was slow enough that I was still able to follow some of what happened. I was certainly not able to stop it happening though! Michael easily had me spinning around, off balance and then pinned on the mat. It felt very different than all the times Sensei had done the technique on me. When Sensei does techniques with me, he moves my body by using physical force. It's force applied in the direction of least resistance - so I have very little chance to prevent it working - but it's still force. Michael's technique had used considerably less force than I'm used to; instead he used momentum to do most of the work. Most of his force had been used to guide my movements rather than create them. It was a substantial difference in technique. But I had virtually no time to think about it. In seconds Michael had me pinned to the mat and was applying the Ikkyo hold, which is rather painful. I immediately tapped the mat with my free hand, which is how aikidoka indicate "Enough!" Michael let go and backed away. I jumped to my feet to see the second member of the pair starting to back away from me with her hand extended. Without even a moment to collect my wits I rushed to attack her, resulting in my receiving very much the same experience, although with a much reduced element of surprise. I tapped the mat, got to my feet, to see Michael rushing at me. Sheesh! I backed away, extending my closest hand toward him while desperately trying to remember how to do to them what they'd done to me. Michael ended up on the mat in the desired position, but mainly because he'd cooperated with my clumsy attempts to put him there. The core technique was the same as I'd been taught, but it was done so differently that I was terrible at it. One of the consequences was that I applied force in somewhat of the wrong direction, causing Michael much more pain than should've been the case. I wanted to apologize to him, but the moment I let him go and straightened up, the girl charged me for her turn. I was somewhat less bad, but definitely still bad. While she was getting up I got a chance to say, "Sorry. I've never trained with this much movement before. I wasn't any good and..." Sensei said, "You were fine Mark. On to the next pair please. Follow me." Michael and his unnamed partner immediately resumed their training, leaving me to follow in Sensei's wake, and to repeat the process with another two victims of my inexperience. This time I paid extremely careful attention to how they applied the technique to me. Now that I was over the surprise and knew roughly how it went, it was much easier for me to notice important details. I rapidly got better, and after training with the third pair Sensei directed me to move to the fourth pair by myself, while he moved away to watch other students. After another minute or two, Sensei called for a change in technique. I was just arriving at a new pair (not a coincidence, as that's when all of Sensei's following calls to change technique came). I had to repeat my learning curve all over again, starting from painfully clumsy. Fortunately for my victims, I was starting to get used to doing things with so much movement, so I was less bad with every new technique. There were still plenty of technique-specific changes for me to learn, but being the attacker before the defender gave me a couple of examples before I had to try for myself. During the fourth technique one of the students called out, "Edith's here, Sensei." The students all moved silently to the side of the mat to sit down, so I did so too. Sensei said, "Hello, dear." Edith (an old lady, and presumably Sensei's wife) advanced around the side of the mat, saying to Sensei. "I thought I'd come to watch Mark train. Is that all right?" "You are most welcome. Mark, come and let me introduce you to my wife; everyone else back to your training, thank you." During the introduction, Edith commented, "I am curious to see the student who has impressed Nigel so much." Which was what I guessed this was about. I said, "You're not going to see anything impressive now. Sensei has me doing things that I've never done before and I'm terribly clumsy at them." Sensei explained, "Mark has achieved more progress in the past fifteen minutes than other students would in two or three years. Most of these students have ten or more years of experience, so Mark thinks he is doing poorly. We had better get back to our training, dear." "Of course. Nice to meet you, Mark." Having to go through the learning curve for each of the high movement versions of the techniques took all of my attention. Plus I had to adapt to different opponents (different body sizes, ways of moving, joint flexibility, strength, degrees of cooperation, etc.), so I never gave Mrs. Sensei another thought. I deliberately worded the preceding to mean that I needed more than all of my attention - because I did! There was so much new stuff that I was missing large parts of it, although I'm sure Sensei would still insist he was happy with what I was learning. After going through the nine basic techniques, Sensei got most of us to sit along the edge of the mat, except for one of the students who sat in the middle of the mat and half a dozen others forming a circle around him. The half dozen then took rapid turns, attacking the still-sitting central guy one after the other, and often two at a time. The 'victim' would sometimes duck-walk to change his position or orientation, but mostly he relied on the fact that to attack him the attackers leaned forward, making it relatively easy to remove the rest of their balance and to throw them (kicking is not part of this training scenario). I was very impressed by it, until Sensei said it was my turn in the middle! I couldn't help myself saying, "But Sensei, I don't know any techniques for that." "It is intended to exercise and test your grasp of the principles of Aikido. You are to improvise appropriately." It's not possible to refuse the sensei, so I replaced the previous 'victim' with what I was sure was going to be a real victim. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. My proximity sense certainly helped, and my very high level of physical coordination, etc., but the main reason was that the attacks weren't honest. Most of the 'attackers' went into an attack already planning how they'd roll away, or otherwise exit it. They weren't anywhere near to being real attacks. After a couple of minutes Sensei made an encouraging comment. I held up my hands in "Halt" positions on both sides of me (that's one of the good things about Aikido. Even in brief experience with other students I knew they'd stop. We are training and learning, not trying to score cheap tricks). When I was sure all the attackers had seen my signal, I said, "To tell the truth, Sensei, I don't think this is proving much. Most of the would-be attackers are putting at least 80% of their attention into their rolling harmlessly away after their attack misses. A lot of the time I'd just need to move away and they'd still take a dive and roll out." "That is true, but I can still see that you are moving appropriately: not meeting force with force, leading them in directions which would unbalance them further, keeping yourself stable and in control, et cetera. It is still a useful exercise, even though it is not a realistic one. I have seen all I need of this now, so we will change. If you would pair up with Simon please, and go through the basic forms again with him in that corner. The rest of you please..." Sensei described what he wanted them to do; for a change, something for their benefit rather than mine. Simon was a youngish black belt - in his mid-20s probably, and about my height, which meant he would be usefully different from Sensei to train with. Unfortunately I immediately found out that he was also a total pain in the ass. From the moment we arrived at our designated corner he was obnoxiously macho. I'd trained with him briefly twice in the first half of the lesson, but those had been very quick - "on the fly" being an accurate description - so there'd been no personal interaction. Now we were paired he was quietly making almost continual taunts: "Think being Sensei's private student makes you special, do you?", "I don't see anything great about you; you're not any good at this.", "That was a pathetic move! You can't even do Ikkyo half decent." He was also being as physically aggressive as he could, within the constraints of appearing to do the techniques. When he got a chance to grip me, he gripped HARD. When he was applying a painful hold, he caused more pain that necessary, and was noticeably slow to relax the hold after I tapped the mat. From a distance no one would be able to see or hear anything wrong, but from where I was standing it was damned annoying. I looked around for Sensei several times, but he was always busy and too far away. All I achieved was to inspire more taunts: "Is the little boy scared?", "Why don't you go running for Mommy? Haha." While waiting to get Sensei's attention I thought through the situation. I decided to put up with Simon's crap, for a few reasons: There was just over ten minutes of lesson left, which would hopefully mean only five minutes with Simon if Sensei stopped to give a talk, as he did at the end of the beginner classes, and I had a feeling he did for all classes. I could put up with this crap for five or ten minutes. I was learning more about the techniques. Simon was applying them very strongly on me, which meant he was providing excellent demonstrations; and he was extremely reluctant to cooperate with me when it was my turn to do the techniques, which meant I had to do them almost faultlessly or he'd taunt me with my failure to control his body properly. I had never seen a student request a change of partner at Aikido. Admittedly I'd only seen three group lessons, counting this one, but the culture of them appeared to be very friendly, helpful and sharing. Rejecting someone seemed wrong. It was only words and quite a lot of extra pain, so not worth making a scene about. You get a strange attitude to pain at Aikido; its coming and going so quickly makes it unimportant. There are holds which cause so much pain that the attacker instantly drops to the floor, with no possibility of his standing up to it; yet a pair training together will happily repeat that technique over and over again, with not even a slight hesitation. There's not the slightest fear of the pain, even though it's excruciating. I've heard aikidoka say, "A little bit of pain never hurt anyone." It's a joke as well as a truth. Simon found frequent reasons to abuse me for mistakes, and would use them as justification to painfully demonstrate the technique again. As soon as I got reasonably good with a technique, he'd change to another one, starting the abuse again. Sensei approached us a couple of minutes before the end of class (there was no talk at the end of this class, apparently), asking, "How is it going, Mark?" I hoped Simon would appreciate my answer, "I'm learning a lot. Simon's an unforgiving teacher, but I'm learning heaps from him." Simon said, "He is too. He learns very fast, and I don't have to tell him more than once for most of his mistakes. I wish I was even half as quick at picking things up as he is. He has NO sign of a bad temper. I did my best to get him riled up, but he never responded aggressively." "Thank you, Simon." I asked Sensei, "It was a test, obviously?" "Yes. I will explain it to you after class. Can you stay for a few minutes?" "Sure. No problem." Simon offered his hand to shake, saying, "No hard feelings I hope?" I shook Simon's hand happily, for the first time, he didn't grip me painfully, "Not if Sensei wanted you to be like that." Ending the lesson was routine, although speechless. As soon as the last bow was made, Sensei said, "Mark, may I have a word please?" "Of course." It suited me nicely as it kept me out of the way of the other students while they were leaving, in case they wanted to ask me questions about my Aikido background. Sensei and I walked to the far side of the mats, where an abashed Sensei said, "I apologize for asking Simon to goad you like that. You have been involved in so many fights that I was becoming concerned, and my not witnessing your interactions with other students led me to employ that offensive ruse. I have never done anything like that to a student before, and it leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I apologize for doing so with you." "It's fine, Sensei. It wasn't a big deal. I think it was quite smart of you, and Simon's scathing comments inspired me to make very sure I was doing the techniques as best I could. I'm just glad I passed; I'd have hated to lose our training sessions." "That was not likely to happen. It would be foolish of me to make my opinion of you depend on a single incident, especially one which was designed to push you in one direction. It was good that you did not respond aggressively, but I would have continued teaching you even if you had, albeit with some modifications. -- "Changing the subject to something far more pleasant, I am extremely happy about the new technique you taught me on Monday. Have you given any more thought to writing an article about it?" "I haven't thought about the article as such, but I have solved the problem that I said I wanted to solve before we wrote it. I couldn't understand why I could only do it within a radius of my center, while you could do it within a distance from any part of your body. I found out that I had a silly preconception that was strongly affecting my ability. I've fixed that, so my limit now has the same structure as yours. I'm pretty sure that will apply to everyone who reads the article too, so that's what we'll write. Now that problem is out of the way, how about I type everything I can think of that might be relevant, as a very rough, unstructured first draft. I'll give it to you, and you can edit it however you think best, ask me for clarifications, add whatever you want, etc. You know what the Aikido world wants better than I do, and English is my worst subject at school, so it'd definitely be best if you were the one to knock it into its final shape." "Very good. It will be wonderful to spread that knowledge. I am very excited to see what becomes of it. When do you think you will have something for me?" "I'll type it up tomorrow morning before breakfast. I don't really want to use email because I've heard that's pretty insecure. How about I put the Word document on a memory stick and give it to you? Do you know how to use those?" "Yes. As eager as I am, there is no need to be in such a rush that you do it before breakfast." "It's no problem, Sensei. I'm a good typist and I'll just be typing the thoughts I had at the time and some of our conversations about it. It won't take me long. If I had to edit it into a decent structure it'd take me far longer, so I'm happy that I can dump all that onto you. I have one important question though: what are we going to call this technique? 'External Ki Projection' sounds clumsy." Not as clumsy as my full name for it, "External Intention-Ki Projection". I'd dropped the "Intention" because I didn't want Sensei to ask whether I knew of other forms of ki. Sensei said, "That name sounds all right to me, but I do not think it matters much because it is likely the Japanese will assign their own term. In your notes call it that or just EKP, and we will change it later if we think of something we would prefer. I would like to talk more, but I see other students have some questions. Give me a call when you have your document ready and I will come to collect it from you." "Okay. Thanks for the interesting lesson tonight." He was already walking toward the other students. I talked briefly to Edith (Mrs. Sensei) on the way out, but nothing of any consequence. She said I was very impressive. I said I'd been the worst student here, but she said she knew I'd been learning Aikido for just a month, to which I had no counter. Ava had arrived at Julia's a few minutes before I did. I joined her in chatting to Vanessa and Prof for a few minutes, then Ava whispered to me, "Can we start our quality time now? I'm very horny." Apparently Vanessa has good hearing, because she laughingly sent us upstairs. Sex is always fun, but sex with Ava is especially good fun. She's got buckets of enthusiasm, and loves to express it verbally, physically and repeatedly. We had a very enjoyable twosome, especially because we'd gotten to know each other a lot better since our previous time alone together, and that created some nice emotions. Afterward we spent quite a while talking, as Ava had lots of things to talk with me about, especially expressing her appreciation for everything that was happening in her life. It was nearly 1am when I suggested, "You don't have to tell me every single thing that's on your mind tonight, or to thank me any more. There's plenty of time for that, starting at breakfast just a few hours from now. It's getting late, so we should go to sleep." Not only would Ava not get enough sleep tonight, but I'd told Sensei I'd type my notes in the morning, which would be doubtful unless we went to sleep soon. "Okay," Ava agreed. "But I don't think I've thanked you enough yet." "You thank me in plenty of ways. Just seeing your happiness is one of the best. There's no need for more now, so goodnight, sweetie." "Goodnight, Mark." We cuddled and went to sleep. ------- To keep the chronology of this biography roughly straight, I'll mention some things that occurred at the Anderson household during this evening and night. The girls that had been hanging outside my home weren't the only such nuisances. A few more dropped in from time to time during the afternoon and evening. They were all chased away by the threat of a red card. Plus there were many phone calls for me, until my family got sick of them and took the phone off the hook yet again. I've not given my home phone number to many people. For several years (until recently) very few people wanted it, and recently far too many people wanted it. I didn't get my cellphone until very recently, and have given that number to almost no one outside the two families, only people like Sensei. Carol wasn't very social until recently either, although more than I was, especially with her own gender. Donna was in lots of sports clubs, so plenty of people had her/our landline number. But Carol's and Donna's friends weren't the ones likely to chase after me because I was rich; that being the presumed motivation for the sudden surge of phone calls for me. The calls were mostly coming from high-school sounding girls, but some similarly aged guys too. There were more than enough people calling our landline to be a real nuisance. If our number hadn't gotten circulated somehow, then the sixty seven Andersons in the Corvallis phonebook would be getting mightily pissed off by callers working their way through the phonebook asking, "Is Mark there please?" As I mentioned, Ava and I stayed awake quite late. My family didn't get as much sleep as normal either, starting with Donna. In the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, Donna was shaken awake. "Whaa?" asked a sleep-fogged Donna. In the dark, a girl's voice desperately demanded, "Where's Mark? I can't find Mark?" "What! Who are you?" asked Donna, now fully awake but confused. "I HAVE TO talk with Mark, but I can't find him in any of the rooms. Where is he?" Donna had been woken from a deep sleep in the middle of the night in her own bedroom, by a total stranger desperately demanding her brother. Once Donna recovered from the bizarreness of it all, she reacted in her normal, direct manner - she grabbed the girl in a bear hug and started screaming at the top of her lungs "Mom! Dad! Help! Come here quick! Help! Mom! Dad!" The top of Donna's lungs produces an impressive amount of noise. Seconds later Dad and Mom rushed into Donna's room, followed a little later by Julia and Carol; who'd sensibly paused to put T-shirts on and let Dad go first. Dad flicked on the lights to reveal a school-aged girl, which immediately reduced the tension but compensated by increasing everyone's annoyance. It didn't take long to coerce her story out of her. She was Natalie Figueroa, a 9th grader who'd been in my class last year. Apparently, according to her, she'd always been in love with me, and had decided tonight was the night to declare her love. She'd climbed up a drainpipe and slithered into the - we thought - impossibly small top window we normally leave open to ventilate the bathroom. She concluded her story with, "Is Mark here? I have to talk with him." Mom thought Natalie didn't have to talk with me at all. The only "have to talk with" was Mom talking to Natalie's parents. Mom demanded, "What's your parents' phone number?" "Oh no! You can't call them. They wouldn't understand. I just want to talk with Mark. Is he here?" "If you don't give me your phone number I'm going to call the police, and then they can call your parents." After more pressure, and through Natalie's wailing and blubbering, her home phone number was finally extracted and the call placed. Dad went to close the window, and took a flashlight outside to check for any damage, finding none. Apparently "love had lifted her up," or maybe it'd been "the wind beneath her wings." Natalie's parents arrived, and seemed like perfectly good, highly mortified and apologetic people. After threatening them with the police if Natalie was seen on our property again, they were allowed to take their wayward, lovelorn daughter home, crying and protesting, "But I just wanted to talk with Mark." My family and Julia went back to bed, chuckling over how silly Natalie had been and looking forward to telling me about it in the morning. Mom and Dad giving thanks that we'd be moving into a more secure home soon. Dad made a mental note to check that the new home's downpipes were all located well away from any windows, and all windows had security catches on them. ------- Chapter 225: Kidnapped Thursday, May 19, 2005 I woke, instantly knowing something was very badly wrong. I had a SPLITTING headache, I was lying on my side on the hard floor of a vehicle driving over a rough road, I had a gag in my mouth, there was a heavy weight lying over my legs, a hood over my head, my arms and legs were bound, and my naked body was completely covered by what felt like a tarpaulin. I turned my headache off with my subconscious control, then centered myself. Proximity showed me that the weight on my legs was an unconscious Prof, and that there was no one else in range. The obvious connection between Prof and me to justify what was happening now was our millions. Probably not the money itself, because nearly everyone had been told that it was my money, so they'd only need to snatch me. That they'd grabbed Prof as well implied it was how we'd made the money that interested them: either the roulette truth or the LA cover story could be the motive. There were other quite different possibilities, but I thought they were much less likely. Some of the sillier ideas that occurred to me - such as that the Norrises had found out what I intended to do to their younger daughters - were laughable, not that I felt like laughing right now. That Binion's were getting revenge was far more likely. My arms were tied together at the wrists and behind my back. Both my arms and legs were tied extremely tightly. There was no slack, but I hopefully tried to break the bindings. I achieved nothing, and soon gave up on that idea. I was sure I'd want to pop the baddies' eyeballs at the very first opportunity, so I desperately wanted to get my hood off, or at the least make a hole in it big enough to see out of. I created NP-fingertips near my head and started feeling the hood. It felt like it was made of canvas. More feeling around, and I could tell that it was about twice the size of my head, so very roomy, but I could feel that it was not loose around my neck. It was tied mostly shut. Not tightly, as that would have already suffocated me. There was easily an inch or two of slack around my neck. Every time one of the bumps bounced my head around I could hear the sound of my hood rubbing against the tarpaulin that covered my body, so I could safely use NP on the hood without worrying about the kidnappers seeing anything. I tried using NP to pull the hood straight off the top of my head, but the neck of the hood was too narrow. How was the neck held closed? I felt for it, and discovered a buckle arrangement. Not a buckle with a prong in the middle. Rather one of those buckles that relies on friction and little teeth on the buckle to stop the strap from sliding backward. I could easily imagine how quick they could be to put on a victim - drop it over his head and pull the strap almost tight; it'd take barely a second. Getting it off wasn't going to be nearly as quick though. If the strap had been very short, say half an inch or less, then it would have been firm enough that I could've pushed back on the end of it to make it slide back into the buckle; but it was far too long for that. The hood had been pulled closed around my neck, lengthening the strap by several inches in addition to whatever it had been initially. Pushing back on the end of the strap would just cause the length of it to flop around uselessly; I had to grasp the strap near the buckle and push it from there. That made a big and unfortunate difference because I can't just push a strap with NP, because my NP-fingertips would simply slide along the strap. I need to pinch the strap tightly inward, and then push with new fingertips sideways against the pinching fingertips. Simplistically that halves the number of fingertips that can be pushing, because the pushing force can't be more than the pinching force, otherwise the pinching fingers would slide along the strap. That's simplistic because it depended on how much friction the strap had, but because I had to push at ninety degrees to it, I'd be maximizing the chance of slippage, so I'd need to pinch strongly. My maximum unbuckling force was going to be reduced by the force required to pinch, and a total of just over fourteen pounds isn't all that much force to start with, and that's assuming I was able to hold Active Center so I could use all four minds. I've been training for that, and getting better at it, depending on the level of distraction. The bouncing vehicle was a serious distraction, but I could recenter myself and try again after each distraction, as often as necessary. The bouncing van (I thought it was probably a van) was a major problem in another respect. The road was rough, and every time the van bounced all my NP-fingertips lost their positions, as individual fingertips had very little maximum pressure, so were easily pushed by the small chaos caused by a bounce or me sliding back and forth on the floor. Not having sight of what I was doing meant relocating all the fingertips by touch, which took time, often more time than I had before the van bounced again. Several bounces in a row was fucking frustrating! I tried for several minutes, but completely failed to get the strap to slide any distance at all backward into the buckle. My meager force couldn't overcome the friction caused by the buckle and its teeth. I also tried the alternative strategy of pushing the strap away from the teeth, then pulling the strap backward from inside the buckle, but I couldn't even begin to budge it that way either. My NP was far too weak and the fingertips too large to get good grips around fiddly objects like the buckle and strap. I had to give up on undoing the buckle. I had felt tiny breezes on my chin from time to time, so I investigated the cause of those. I found that the hood had small air holes just below chin level. I tried ripping them wider, but couldn't do that either because the hood was made out of a material that was too strong. I couldn't try to chew the hood either, because of the gag. I tried hard, but I couldn't think of any other ideas for getting the hood off. I checked my wrist and ankle bindings, finding out that they were the same sort of straps that held the hood closed. Presumably the baddies had whacked me in the head (that's what it'd felt like before I'd canceled the headache), put prepared loops over my hands and feet and pulled them tight. Ditto with the hood. It would've taken next to no time. Thinking about that made me realize that I'd been sleeping next to Ava, and I had a massive wave of fear over what had happened to her. That paused me for a few seconds, but there wasn't anything I could do about it now beyond deciding that if I got a chance to attack the baddies, then I was going to make sure that I REALLY made them suffer for this. While I had been trying to get rid of my hood, the van had braked sharply, causing Prof and me to start sliding forward. Our slides had been suddenly arrested, letting me know that my ankle binding was tied to the side of the van. I checked that out next, and it was another strap looped through the tie around my ankles, and also through a metal loop attached to the van's floor. I felt around what parts of the vehicle that NP could reach, and confirmed that it was definitely a van. I checked Prof, and he was bound and hooded identically, except he didn't have his feet tied together, for the obvious reason that he didn't have "feet", only "a foot", as his artificial limb wasn't attached to his leg. Nor was he tied to the side of the van, which was presumably why he was lying partly on top of me. I quickly checked to see if any of his bindings were loose, but they weren't. I spent a couple of minutes trying to undo his hand bindings, but without success. I could think of several things to do. The trouble was I wasn't sure whether I should do any of them. I could: Use NP to try to open the rear door of the van. This might be useful if I heard another car behind us. If I got the doors open I'd pull the tarp off us, so anyone following us would see Prof and me. But it was very dangerous because the movements of the van caused Prof and me to frequently slide into the doors. That happened so often that I feared that my opening the doors would be quite quickly followed by our sliding out! Not only would the fall be very dangerous, but Prof was unconscious so not able to get off the road, and I had my feet tied to the van, so I risked sliding out and being dragged along the road on my head! That would very quickly be fatal, especially on such a bumpy road. Try to wake Prof. I wasn't sure whether that'd help. If he spoke, or even moaned, the baddies might investigate, realize I was awake, and knock me out again. Bend my legs to pull my hands down to my ankles. I could probably use my real hands to undo the strap that held my ankles together, which would also free me from the ringbolt in the van's floor. (A ringbolt is like a very huge sewing needle. In this case, a steel shaft through the floor of the van, with a nut on the underside to hold it in place, and with a large loop at the top suitable for passing a strap through.) Assuming my legs were freed, then what could I do: The ideal next step was to get my hands in front of me by pushing my ass back through the gap in my arms and pulling my hands forward over my feet. Then I should be able to use my real fingers to undo the buckle on my hood, pull it off, and undo the gag, then use my teeth and NP to free my hands. I tried the most worrisome step, and as I feared, my wrists were bound so tightly that my forearms were held close together, and I couldn't get my ass through what little gap remained. With my feet loose, but none of the other restraints removed, our situation was not improved. There was no possible way I could run away, let alone get Prof away as well. The road was rough, which implied the area was remote, so chances were against there being a crowd of helpful spectators. If we tried to run away, I was sure to trip over something, run into trees or other obstacles, etc., making it very easy for the baddies to either come get me, or simply shoot me dead (I had to assume that the baddies had guns. Don't they always?). With my feet untied from the ringbolt, I'd be able to slide farther forward in the van, possibly far enough to come within proximity range of the baddies. That gave me some possibilities. I could use NP to very carefully feel around. If I discovered a cellphone I might be able to dial 9-1-1. I wouldn't be able to hear the operator, but I could continue to press 9-1-1 which I guess the operator would hear and might be something people do who can't communicate normally. Hopefully the cops could find out the location of the cellphone (a wonderful feature in baddies' cellphones) and come to rescue us. Or maybe I could find a loose wire and disable the van, which would delay the baddies' plan, whatever it was, and might create an escape opportunity. With my ankles freed from the ringbolt I had more freedom of movement. I should be able to maneuver my back to Prof, and to get us both into a position where my hands could undo his hands, whereupon he'd undo mine, then we'd undo everything else. Prof needed to be awake for that, which he was showing no sign of. Prof's gag meant he had to be breathing through his nose, so I could pinch it closed and possibly wake him. Unfortunately he might spasm before getting fully awake, or after awaking might make movement or sounds to attract the attention of the baddies if they were able to see or hear into the back of the van. None of the options appealed to me enough to risk. I could too easily imagine that even with my legs free, I'd be unable to do anything useful because my arms were tied to close together. When the van stopped and the baddies came to get us out, my legs being free might caused them to react badly, or even just be more careful by deciding to leave my hood on. I decided to do nothing beyond pretending to be unconscious while concentrating for any information that might be helpful. I had three major reasons: Escaping from our current predicament was extremely problematic, even just for me to get away. Trying to get Prof away as well was so hard as to seem far too dangerous to attempt, and impossible to succeed with. His being unconscious was a problem, as was his being unable to run without his artificial leg. We were so well restrained even the first stage of an escape - getting untied - might not be possible. For all I knew, our attempting to get untied might be seen and immediately lead to our being knocked out again, shot, or who knows what. I'd REALLY like more information. Like how many baddies there were and why they were doing this. Maybe Vanessa and Ava might be in another van ahead or behind of us, in which case Prof and me escaping might lead to really bad consequences. Maybe even all my family and Julia were in vans too. Or maybe they were all dead, in which case running away from the baddies would be the last thing I wanted to do. Bursting their eyeballs would be the first of a succession of similar activities I'd prefer over escaping. It appeared they wanted Prof and me alive. They couldn't know of my eyeball popping and other abilities, so sooner or later I should (I hoped) to have an opportunity for a much better informed and less risky escape attempt. I wanted the baddies to think I was a helpless pussy, to maximize my chances for getting a good shot at their eyeballs. Something might happen that provided an opportunity, but until that happened, I'll just concentrated on trying to undo my hood's buckle enough to get it off my head. That improved our situation so much it was worth trying for, as it increased by my ability to gather information and attack them. I had worked fruitlessly on that for less than ten minutes, when the van slowed down, turned ninety degrees, and started driving slowly up a steep hill for what I guessed was about a hundred yards, then it proceeded on level ground for a few yards before stopping with the engine running. The passenger door opened and I felt and heard someone getting out. A few seconds later I heard the sound of a garage door opening. The van immediately drove forward a few yards, stopped and the engine was killed as the garage doors were closed again. #3: #2: We were bound to be questioned, which would allow us to learn a lot about the situation, and give me opportunities to do some eyeball bursting. I used NP to pull up the small gap at my hood's neck so I might get narrow glimpse of something. Seconds later the rear doors of the van opened and the tarp was pulled off us. I'd expected that and had the narrow gap held open. I could see very little, and 90% of that was my own chest. Most of the rest was the floor of the van, but I did manage to glimpse a large pair of thighs in jeans briefly, until he pulled Prof off me, which moved my body and ruined my little window's view. I didn't try to reopen it now, preferring to lay still in case playing possum gave me a useful opportunity. I listened carefully while Prof was carried into the house. I heard two sets of footsteps walk away, no voices, and no sound of anyone near me. I adjusted my position slightly and rearranged my hood's narrow gap again. Looking out the back doors of the van I could see a low quality garage door. It was not the sort of garage door I'd expect in a government or any other authority building. The rough road and garage door indicated this was a private enterprise, reducing the likelihood of some of my sillier conspiracy theory guesses about what this was, based on my fear that the Government had overheard someone in my two families talking about my abilities during a phone call. It took the two baddies about five minutes to come back, which was quite a long time. I'd taken a small risk of leaving myself in the position where I could look out of the gap. I saw the large legs appear again. I knew it was the same guy who'd lifted Prof because he'd stood within three feet of my feet then and was doing so now, letting me proximity sense him. Proximity showed him pulling something from his side and waving it near my feet. I felt a tug on my feet, and guessed he'd used a knife to cut the strap that tied me to the ringbolt. He put the thing back roughly where his hip would be, reached forward, grabbed my legs and pulled me down the van toward him. He grabbed me, easily hoisted me over his shoulder and walked in the same direction they'd taken Prof. I pretended to be unconscious. #4: #2: The other guy was walking ahead of me and my carrier, but I'd been close enough to him already to have got a proximity reading on him too, so I now had both guys' proximity 'color' memorized. If any more guys arrived I'd recognize them as additional people, even if the hoods stayed on. The guy carrying me was very big and very strong, and the leader was medium-sized. I caught a few glimpses of the ceiling or walls, and we were in a wooden building. It was something like a good-sized hunting cabin or a rough home. I was carried along a hallway. I used NP to feel the walls and ceiling I passed, but felt nothing other than an ordinary hallway. Then we went through a doorway and down a flight of stairs into what felt like a basement as the echoes were stronger. The brief glimpses I got confirmed it. I was carried across a concrete floored room, through another doorway, into a room where I was dumped onto a cold, metal chair. Other than the hood, I was bare-assed naked, so the nature of the chair was easily discerned. The medium-sized guy backed off and the big guy bent down and I heard the sound of a heavy chain being dragged from under my chair. #4: #2: The chain was inserted through the band holding my ankles together, and its entire length pulled through. Judging by the accumulated length of the big guy's arm movements, the chain was something like ten to fifteen feet long. I felt around, finding a large ring bolt set into the concrete floor directly under me, with one end of the chain already padlocked to it by a huge padlock. The big guy bent down and looped the chain around my foot band and reinserted the end through again, repeating the process of pulling its length all the way through. Medium Guy said, "Push his feet back and take out the slack." Big Guy grunted agreement then shortened the chain so my feet were held under the chair. There was no chance of me kicking anyone walking in front of me even if they were brushing my knees. Medium Guy tossed Big Guy a ring of keys, judging by the sound. Big Guy got the first key wrong, but the second worked. He unlocked the padlock, pulled my feet back a bit more then locked them in place. He tossed the keys back then pulled his knife out and cut the band around my wrists. #1: #All: I kept playing possum as one arm was placed on its armrest. He picked something up off the floor, then put a metal band over my arm. There was the rattle and click of a padlock closing, holding that arm in place. I used TK to confirm that a short metal tube was wrapped around the chair's metal armrest and my forearm, to lock them together. The armrest had a solid support pole near its end, so I wouldn't be able to free my arm by sliding it forward off the armrest. The same thing was done for my other arm, the keys temporarily tossed to the Big Guy again, the chain unlocked, and then threaded all around the chair's various beams, my legs, one arm and waist. Medium Guy said, "Tight." "It is." Big Guy pulled it tighter around my waist, around the last arm and armrest, around my legs again, then finally back to the ringbolt's padlock. #4: #1: Big Guy spoke, "We got 'em." "Yeah. I gotta take a piss and get some grub. We'll go to work on 'em after that." #1: #3: The two baddies walked out of the room, there was a click as the tiny amount of light leaking up into my hood ended, the door shut behind them, there were a couple of barely audible metallic scraps from behind the door, and then the footsteps faded out heading toward the stairs. I explored around me with TK. The floor was bare concrete. The ringbolt was securely driven into the floor. Fourteen pounds of pushing upward on the bolt predictably had no effect. It'd need at least a hundred times as much, if not a thousand. The chair and I were very well wrapped and secured. I was pretty sure I couldn't tip the chair over, not that I could think of a good reason for doing so. I'd seen TV heroes escape hundreds of times starting with tipping their chairs over, but it wasn't going to happen in reality. There was only one minor piece of good news - other than my still being alive, which definitely counted as "good" - the baddies had used a chain with excessively large and strong links. The large links meant that when Big Guy had been running the chain around the chair and he'd pulled to remove slack, he'd often partly failed because a link had hung up on the previous corner. I imagined they wanted me to be immobile, but I did have a small amount of movement. Some jiggling and TK pushing moved what slack there was so none of my circulation was cut off. I could move my feet backward about an inch. With the slack that created, I could move them from side to side about the same amount. That was all, and it was useless. My arms could 'jiggle' on the armrests, which I doubted would scare the baddies into phoning the cops to surrender. I was securely restrained and unless something changed, totally fucked. After using NP to thoroughly feel the chair, chain and what little of the bare concrete floor that was within my proximity range, I ran out of things to check. I thought to turn off my headache control to see if it was better yet, which immediately resulted in me deciding to turn it back on again. I felt around the back of my head with NP and found a couple of sizable impact lumps. They hurt when I poked them, but otherwise seemed fine. I tried grunting through the gag, "Prof?" quietly a few times, but got no response. I waited for the baddies to return, hoping they'd bring me a nice breakfast. The two baddies returned half an hour later. I could hear their voices before their footsteps, although not their words well enough through the door. They were presumably feeling more relaxed now. From where I was sitting, I couldn't think of any reason why they shouldn't be. They opened the door, flicked on the light, and I caught the tail end of a conversation about spending money on luxury items as they walked into the room. So, presumably, this was all about money, which was a little bit hopeful. Medium Guy (whom I'll call "Boss" from now on) said, "Take the hoods and gags off." Big Guy (hereafter "Goon") approached me and cut the strap of the hood, pulling it over my head and throwing it aside, then removing my gag and discarding it in the same general direction. I was still pretending to be unconscious, with my head resting on my chest. I had two hopes: that they might indiscreetly say something useful, or they'd look at me and say, "They haven't woken up yet. We'll go to work on them some other time." Goon moved away, in the direction I was facing, and I soon heard the sound of him removing another hood. In the middle of that I was suddenly hit in the face by a bucket load of cold water. I automatically jerked my head and spluttered, ruining my ability to act unconscious any longer. I added, "What? Where am I? What's going on?" while I looked up and around. Prof and I were facing each other about eight feet apart, both in effectively identical situations, differing by his having only one foot to attach to a chair leg, and he was luckily wearing PJs. There was still no sign of his prosthetic, so we'd have a problem if we ever got a chance to run for it. Boss ignored me, waiting to throw the rest of the bucket of water at Prof after Goon had stepped back from removing Prof's hood and gag. Prof was slower than me to wake up, needing several slaps from Goon. I looked around the room. I specifically searched for surveillance cameras, finding none, so I should be able to use my abilities if we had privacy. It was a VERY stark room, containing no furniture other than the two chairs we were chained to, no pictures on the walls, or anything else. It had a bare concrete floor and three bare concrete-block walls. The fourth wall was the one separating this room from the one that had the stairs in it. That wall was completely built but unfinished, in that I could see all of its studs. The side of the wall that was in the other room was covered in panels of some sort, probably drywall, but this side of it was exposed. If we did somehow get loose while the door was locked on us, it'd be easy to kick the panels off the wall or make holes in them, and crawl though the studs, although that'd be a noisy escape. There were no windows and only the one door through to the previous room, and I noticed that the light switch was actually a pull string suspended from the ceiling just this side of the doorway, with the light in the center of the room. The chairs we were in looked strongly constructed, which was probably irrelevant because even if they were made of matchwood, we were still very well chained to the bolt in the floor. Everything I saw about our restraints now confirmed what I'd discovered through NP-feel previously. The only new piece of information was that the tubes holding our arms to the armrests appeared to be from some sort of machinery unrelated to prisoner restraint, as the padlock holes were clearly recently drilled. A discovery that didn't help at all, as they still looked totally capable of doing the job. I caught Prof's eyes as he recovered, giving him a quick smile and shrug, hopefully conveying that I was fine but had no idea what was happening. That changed moments later when Boss said to Prof, "We want to know how to beat roulette. Tell us an' we'll let ya go, else you're in deep shit." Dozens of TV programs had been unanimous: "If you've seen their faces, they aren't going to let you go." Prof was silent. The baddies waited a few seconds, then Goon wandered over to me and broke the first of my fingers. ^ [I'll digress to explain who Boss and Goon are. Boss's real name is Dominic King. "Dom" to his friends, "Donkey" otherwise. I'll continue to call him "Boss" as that's was my name for him at the time. He isn't really a boss of anything, other than Goon now, being just a reasonably successful "robbery with violence" Vegas career criminal. He happened to be in the casino when he saw Prof's second win. He also heard Ted Binion's speech about Prof having won his previous big bet, and Boss didn't believe the two wins were legit. Boss very much wanted to know how it was done, as the idea of free money appealed to him greatly. He'd taken advantage of the commotion to snatch Prof's cellphone off his belt pouch, which had been an easy grab. He took it to a bathroom, copied as many of the names and numbers as he could into his phone, then destroyed and discarded Prof's phone in the trash can for used paper towels by the bathroom's washbasins. Boss saw that that 95% of Prof's phone numbers were in Corvallis, so Boss booked himself a flight to Corvallis to check out the situation there. His first problem was that there were no rental cars available, because of all the private investigators that Binion's had already sent to Corvallis. Getting a taxi driver to drive him around while he was planning a crime wasn't Boss's MO, so he caught a bus to Salem, and rented a car there, driving back to Corvallis. He was able to identify Prof's residence, and was not happy to see security guards around it, and even less happy when he noticed that other people were watching Prof's place (the PIs). He sniffed around, picking up odd pieces of information, including that Prof was a Professor of Mathematics at OSU, something that impressed Boss and confirmed that Prof must've known what he was doing. After a couple of fruitless days, the security guards and all the PIs had discouraged Boss so much that he called it quits, returning to Vegas. There it nagged at him, especially because EVERYONE in Vegas was talking about it, and how great it'd be to have $11 million, etc. That'd be considerably better for Boss than for me, because Boss wasn't particularly good at paying his taxes. He decided it was worth another scouting trip, and returned to Corvallis the following Monday, got himself a rental car easily, and was happy to discover a complete absence of security and other snoops. He hung around long enough to see Prof, recognizing him from the casino. He also bought a local paper to pass the time with, and read the front-page story about the scissors assault on, "Mark Anderson, who'd used his martial arts expertise to defeat his six alleged attackers, leaving four of them with broken arms." The photo of me looked familiar to Boss, and "Mark Anderson" was one of Prof's phone numbers, so Boss did some more snooping (that was one of his job skills: snooping around to choose good victims and good times to rob them or their homes). He soon got a good look at me, and remembered that I'd been in the casino. That was even more suspicious. Why would a 16-year old family friend (the newspaper kept reporting my age as sixteen) be standing right next to the wheel during the big win, if not to be an accomplice in the scam. Clearly Prof was the brains behind the operation, and was cleverly using an underage boy as an accomplice. Boss decided to snatch us both. He returned to Vegas, recruited his friend Tom White (a.k.a. "Goon"), returned to Corvallis in an indirect manner - no more flying in and out of the only airport even if using a false ID; Boss was a cautious guy. They spent a few days finding and renting a suitable house, getting the necessary equipment together, doing the recon, then waiting for the right time; mainly when Prof and I were asleep in the same house without too many other people around. Patience was another of Boss's job skills, and he was rewarded when Wednesday night/Thursday morning turned out to be almost perfect. Whereupon he got to exercise several more job skills: Opening the front door and disabling the alarm system. The latter being very simple if you don't care about wrecking it. Creeping through the house. They were pretty sure where the two targeted bedrooms were, having studied the pattern of lights going on and off in the evenings and mornings. Knocking me out while I slept as they didn't want to fight a martial arts expert, gagging and tying Ava to the bed, even though Goon wanted to bring her as well. Boss had refused. Then they repeated much the same process in Prof's and Vanessa's bedroom. Loading up the van and making the getaway was simple. The journey was uneventful, involving just one mid-trip stop to change the plates back to the legal ones, and to give me another crack on the head for good measure.] ^ Welcome back to my torture. I immediately canceled the pain of my broken finger, letting just a little pain return so it was easy for me to act realistically. When the baddies turned back to Prof to question him, I gave Prof smiles, and with my good hand, thumbs-up and then an okay sign. I also used NP to hold his lips shut as an unmistakable message. From the Boss's questions it was obvious that they were assuming that Prof was the brains of the operation. Prof never said a word, so after a few minutes wasted on him, they turned to me. From those questions, they were assuming I knew how we'd cheated the roulette wheel. The good news was that they didn't torture Prof, presumably figuring he was the more important of the two of us, and probably the more fragile. They just kept breaking more of my fingers. I copied Prof's never saying a word. I was surprised how little they cared about our lack of responses. Their attitude conveyed that they almost couldn't care whether we answered or not. Boss drawled, "We gonna play with you for a while. If you don't tell us how to beat roulette, we'll kill you. If you do tell us, we'll let you go. It's simple. I hope for your sake you know how to beat it, because telling us is ya only way outta here." There was no demand that we tell them right now and no excitement over what was happening; just that bored sounding explanation. I got the impression that if we didn't answer, they'd get bored with the whole thing, kill us, and wander off to find something else to do. It didn't even seem to matter to them whether there was a cheating method or not, because they'd decided to try this just on the chance, as a sort of "There's no reason why not" shot in the dark. After they'd broken three of my right hand's fingers I pretended to faint. Goon slapped me around to wake me up, but I had quite a strong preference for staying asleep. He reached for my wrist to feel my pulse, so I slowed it down considerably. That concerned him so he called Boss over, who checked. They decided they'd better give us a rest. They spent a couple of minutes threatening Prof, then retrieved the gags and hoods from the floor. Goon reapplied the gags but merely dropped the hoods on top of our heads, as his cutting the straps prevented them being closed again. It was nice to know they could make mistakes. As soon as their footsteps receded up the stairs, I used NP to pull the hood off my head, create a light blob so I could see, then pull the hood off Prof. (Prof had seen light blobs once before, when I'd demonstrated them by 'attacking' Dad with "Killers" and the "Immobilizer".) I didn't try to remove the gags because I'd felt how much force Goon had used to tie them on, and it was too much for me to remove easily. If I managed to work them off, I'd be unable to put them back on convincingly when the baddies returned. I used several small light blobs to letter-by-letter spell out, "ME OK. I TURN PAIN OFF." I changed the color when the words changed to save having to represent spaces. Prof was nodding along when he understood each letter, but he looked puzzled at the end of the message. I added, "CASINO ME NOT NERVOUS. CAN CONTROL BODY. NERVOUS AND PAIN EASY TURN OFF." Prof nodded that he understood. Hopefully that'd removed Prof's sense of urgency and worry over my being tortured. If I was feeling no pain we could now relax and take time to plan what we did. "U NEED WAY TO TALK. HOW?" Prof thought about it for a few seconds, then pointed his two pointing fingers up in the air and in toward each other at about thirty degrees. He held his thumbs so they pointed horizontally toward each other, and he tried to jerk his hand together. Being such a small, academic guy, Prof's wrists are thin, so they had quite a lot of room to move in the metal cuffs. He nodded toward both hands alternately to make sure I saw that there were two hands involved. It took me a couple of seconds, then I thought I had it. I created an "A?" with light blobs, and Prof nodded happily. He then closed both hands into fists, angled them in toward each other, with one raised high and the other dipping low. "B", which earned me another nod. "C" was the left hand laid flat and the right hand shaped like a "C". Prof nodded to just the right hand to indicate that only it was relevant, which effectively told me that the left hand laid flat meant it wasn't involved. "D" was the same a "C", except the left hand shaped a straight sidebar, again looking like the letter in question. The next sign confused me. It was the left hand flat, with the right hand having its thumb and main finger extended. I guessed "E?" which Prof confirmed, and we carried on through the alphabet. By the time we got to the end I had worked out the vowel system: E, I, O and U were 2 to 5 fingers extended on the right hand, the other letters were indicated by shaping the hand to look like the letter. After he showed me "Z" (two right fingers separated a little and pointing left, one left finger pointing right, creating a kind of zigzag image), Prof signaled "U, O, I and E" successively (5 fingers extended, 4, 3, and 2). Then he extended just the thumb. I guessed that Prof now wanted an easier and consistent "A". I created my guess, and Prof nodded. He then spelled out "YOU" and made a new shape with his hands. I spelled it out and created a new light blob symbol that looked like his hands, so he understood that was my shorthand for "YOU". Likewise for "ME", "ONE", "TWO" (the progression for larger numbers was obvious), "YES", "NO", "SPACE", "BIG MAN", "SMALL MAN", "?", "PERIOD", "COMMA" and "THE". Those agreed, we started communicating our thoughts. I tried to start apologizing, but Prof 'interrupted' by signaling "NO" emphatically. Then, "DROP IT." We agreed their plan was to kill us afterward, but we could never tell them how we did it because they'd either not believe us, or if we proved it by my flying something around the room, they'd know they could never safely use my ability, so they'd kill us anyway. Neither Prof nor I had any hope at all that they'd try to keep us alive to use my ability. Escorting me into a casino so I could use an invisible power was useless to them, as there were countless ways I could ruin their plan, such as by invisibly summoning help from the casino's security guards. They wanted to take possession of a roulette-beating machine that they could fully control, and anything other than that would get us both killed. We 'briefly' (although it took a long time) discussed a few things, such as there seemed to be only two of them, and the only weapons we'd seen were the knives they were carrying in sheaths on their belts, then we started discussing what we should do. We eventually decided on our plan: to get me loose from the chair by asking to use the toilet. Preferably they'd remove my chains, but so long as I was no longer attached to the chair, even with chains on I should be able to take the baddies down. I'd destroy their eyeballs and then have an enormous combat advantage over them. They'd be blind, in great pain and in shock; while I had proximity and the ability to use NP-taps on their shoulders to confuse them. The plan was for me to either knock them out or kill then - I knew which of those two was going to happen, and not just so they couldn't report my special abilities! - then I'd call the cops if I could find a phone, or release Prof and we'd use their van to drive to a phone. If we needed to stall for time, we decided to say we had a small machine hidden in a bank vault in LA that could move a roulette ball using a new type of ray. The key point was that they couldn't get into the vault without Prof. It was a pity we couldn't make the vault in my name so I'd have to be the one they released to take to LA, but that wasn't believable, and neither was the vault being in both our names. They obviously thought Prof was the boss, so it had to be in Prof's name. We'd continue to use my having a weak heart as I'd just done. I insisted I didn't care about getting a few broken bones, as it wasn't painful and I healed very quickly. We agreed that we couldn't think of a reliable way of finding out what had happened to Vanessa and Ava. We thought of making access to the bank vault require Prof and Vanessa at the same time, but they might decide that made the machine inaccessible to them because if Vanessa was alive there'd presumably be FBI all over the place very soon, and if she wasn't alive then using that story would cause us even more trouble. Either way they'd kill us and walk away from it. We discussed other issues, like where we thought we were, what time of day it was, what we thought of the two guys, etc., but none of those discussions were of much significance. During the discussion I rearranged Prof's chain's links to make his arms more comfortable, as I'd done to myself. We heard the baddies coming back so I NP'd our hoods back on and canceled the light blob. They strode back into the room. I noted that they weren't locking this room's door. Goon checked my pulse. I decided to make it about half-recovered, which was still a lot slower than healthy. "He's fine," declared the uncaring asshole, as he removed my hood and gag, then the same for Prof. "How many fingers he got left on that hand?" Boss asked Goon. Boss tended to stand to the side, against the wall, half-sitting on one of the exposed studs near the door, while Goon was the one who did the work. Goon looked down to check, "One and 'is thumb." Boss asked us, "Okay. I'll ask ya one more time before it gets serious." Now seemed like an excellent time, so I adopted a pained expression on my face then spoke, "I need to go to the bathroom." "Ain't no one stoppin' ya," answered Boss. "I mean to crap." "So crap. You're not getting outta that seat." He added an afterthought, "'Less ya tell us what we wanna know." With incredulity, "You want me to crap on the seat?" Kidnapping us and breaking my fingers was one thing, but not letting me go to the bathroom was too uncivilized for words. Not to mention it really fucked up our escape plan. "You can fill the room wit' shit for all I care. You're not movin' till I get what I want." -- To Goon, "Break 'is finger and thumb." Goon obeyed with his usual complete lack of hesitation. All five digits on my right hand were fucked now. I moaned and groaned even more than usual, reflecting my real feelings. The assholes didn't care. Boss repeated his demands and threats yet again, including, "From now on it gets serious," and questioning Prof about, "How can ya let the boy suffer? Just tell us how ya beat roulette." Prof remained silently staunch. Worried, but staunch. Boss told Goon, "Dealer's choice." Goon smiled happily, moved over to my left side, grabbed my hand and used both of his to separate my fingers so my middle finger was isolated. With the fingers of one of his hand wedged either side of my middle finger, Goon used his other hand to pull out his knife, and to press it against the top of my finger, already cutting the skin so blood was showing. "I want ya ring." I hopefully suggested, "It pulls off normally." "Where'd the fun be in that?" Boss looked at Prof, "You got anything to say?" Prof looked like he might have, so I lightly NP'd his lips closed, although I REALLY wished there was another alternative. Breaking my fingers hadn't worried me hardly at all. It was painless, and I could keep it that way for the two or three weeks until I was as good as new, presuming my bones heal at the same accelerated rate as the cut on my hand had. But cutting a finger off was a WHOLE different story! I was starting to feel sick about our situation, especially because I could imagine the sawing required to get a knife through the fingerbone. But I couldn't think of anything better we could do. We were trying to stall, but it probably wasn't even breakfast time yet so there was a chance the cops hadn't even been called yet, let alone were hot on our trail. But maybe the finger cutting thing was a bluff? Boss nodded at Goon, who chuckled as he leaned his weight onto his knife. It slid easily through my flesh, stopping when it reached my bone. Goon put more weight on it, and I felt my bone being pressed into the flat surface of the armrest. More and more weight, until a sudden cracking sound as the knife broke through the bone. Goon slid the knife left and right a little, to sever the remaining flesh, then he held up his prize for inspection, laughing. He cleaned his knife by wiping both its sides on my upper-arm, then put it back in its sheath. He used his freed hand to pull the ring off what used to be my finger (he was holding it now, which probably made it his finger). He pulled the ring off the bloody end, uncaring about blood. He threw the finger away, and then tried to put my (now his) ring on. He tried the same one I'd worn it on, but he's a big guy and I'm slim, so it didn't come close to fitting his fat finger. It wouldn't fit his ring finger either, but it did slide onto his little finger, but the tube was so long on that finger that it covered the middle knuckle, stopping the finger from bending. He tried making a fist, and was visibly pissed off that his little finger stuck out stupidly. "FUCKING ASSHOLE!" He pulled the ring of his finger and threw it across the room, then drew his knife again as he turned to face me. "TOM! Stop, you stupid fuck!" yelled the guy that I was REALLY happy was the boss. "Not yet. When we find out how they did it you can buy every fuckin' ring in Vegas. Don't fuck it up over one piece of shit." Tom the Goon quivered with rage. With proximity I could tell that he was truly vacillating over whether to plunge his knife into my heart or not. Boss kept yelling obscenities at him, which seemed to slowly help. It probably reminded him of the way his mommy brought him up. Boss sent Goon upstairs to cool off. Then Boss moved from his position near the doorway, recovered my severed finger, and tossed it onto the crotch of Prof's PJs saying, "That's the only food you're gettin' till you talk. Think about it." He picked up our gags and hoods, deliberately avoiding passing near our hands or feet as he reapplied them from behind us, then he left. We'd now seen both their faces and knew one of their first names. Their voluntarily letting us go was even less likely now, which made no difference at all to my estimation of the chance of that. As soon as Boss's footsteps receded I pulled off our hoods. "HOW R YOU?" Asked Prof. I forced a smile, "FINE. YOU NO FOOT LIFE HAPPY. FINGER TRIVIAL." Prof may have had a happy past life without his foot, but my finger being cut off so casually didn't bode well for either of us having much of a happy future. I'd given my stump a quick look when it'd first been created, and had wished really hard for the blood to stop, which it very quickly had. [[I thought it required my conscious will power, but it was actually all done subconsciously. In single-minded people, subconsciouses can dilate or contract the body's blood vessels in response to different stimuli. Having so much more control over my body, my subconsciouses could contract the blood vessels in just one part of my body.]] I looked at it more closely while I was sending the above message to Prof. It was a horrible sight, but for all that, a clean cut. I suspected Goon had more than a little experience at casual surgery, which all things considered, struck me as being bad news rather than good. I was a little worried that the baddies would notice that not much blood had come out of me, so I used some NP-fingertips to spread what there was around more. I was momentarily tempted to use NP to pick up my ring and hide it in the exposed studs, but that could lead to even more unpleasantness if they couldn't find it on the floor. Prof asked, "DO?" "YOU THINK THEY LET YOU OFF CHAIR FOR TOILET?" "PROBLY NOT. WHY?" "IF DO, I BLIND THEM. CAN'T LEAVE THEM LOOSE OR THEY ATTACK LATER. COULD YOU GET KNIFE KILL THEM, OR UPSTAIRS PHONE, OR?" "CAN TRY BUT I OLD, THEY BIG AND FAILURE BAD. MAYBE USE LA STORY?" We decided we had to tell them something, because I was being injured too rapidly compared to how long we thought it might take before rescue or escape might happen. There were two possibilities we were hoping for: The cops found us. At best we thought that'd take a long time, probably several days, as Boss seemed smart and careful. We had an opportunity. Ideally that'd be my being released from the chair for some reason. In both cases, the longer we could stall them the greater the chance of something good happening, but the required stalling time was probably going to be measured in days, not a few hours, so the current torture rate was way too fast. Plus I worried about Goon's lack of patience and whether they'd start to torture Prof, who couldn't turn off his pain. Unfortunately Prof wouldn't be able to get them to stop by telling them the truth, as that'd almost certainly lead to both of us being killed. Saying nothing or saying that there was no cheating method would also get us killed sooner or later, and judging by Goon's bloodthirsty impatience, it wouldn't be later. Desperately trying to think of ways of stopping Prof's being tortured gave me the idea of telling them that Prof had the telekinetic ability. He could pretend to float my ring around while I actually did it. But that was obviously stupid because even if they didn't kill us both immediately, they'd probably kill me as being surplus, and when Prof failed to perform next time, kill him. We had to stall for the cops or create our own escape opportunity. All we needed was for me to be free from the chair. After that we had a good chance. I was looking forward to fucking their eyes, using NP to steal one of their knives, then start exacting some revenge. It wouldn't be easy, but they'd be blinded and pain-ridden. Even if I was still wrapped in chain, I thought I had a good chance of winning. One idea we had was for Prof to fake a heart attack and for me to yell something like, "I know CPR! You have to let me save him because if he dies he'll take the secret with him." They might decide I was surplus, but as long as they let me out to save Prof first they wouldn't get the chance to do anything about it. There was a problem that one of them might know CPR. We decided to have Prof fish for that information by having a very minor episode first, as a way of raising the topic for discussion, and building belief for when he seemed to have a more serious attack later. Boss returned by himself half an hour after he'd left. He removed our hoods and gags, then told us some very scary stories about Tom, warning us that we'd better tell him what he wanted to know soon, or things would get very unpleasant, possibly terminally unpleasant, because Tom was difficult to control. At an appropriately scary moment Prof started pretending to have breathing difficulties. Prof seemed to master them in a few seconds, then he told Boss, "I'm an old man and you're deliberately making this as stressful as you can." "Nah, you are. Tell us how you do it and it's over." Prof sealed his lips. Boss looked at Prof for a few seconds, then said, "I know you're a smart guy and the kid's a fighter. I'm not taking any risks. You're both staying in the chairs. It don't matter what happens, you're staying put. If'n you have a heart attack then tough shit for you. If'n you piss Tom off and he carves you a new one, then tough shit for you. If you die, I set fire to the place and go home. Makes no shit'n difference to me. Tell me what I want 'n you go free. Don't tell me, 'n you never leave them chairs. You gonna tell me now?" Prof said, "It's not that simple. I need time to think about it." "You got the rest of your life. Mightn't be long though, so don't fuck around. We'll be back ina hour." The gags and hoods were put on yet again, and Boss left. Prof and I agreed that it was extremely unlikely that we'd be getting out of these chairs, so it was the police or nothing. My money was on "nothing", especially as Boss's goddamn caution would surely make it much harder for the cops to find us in anything like the timeframe that Boss was implying we had left. We had to tell them a time-wasting story. The LA story had previously seemed the best, as to do anything about it they had to take Prof to LA, which created all sorts of possibilities, but it'd be even better if we could think of a scenario that required them to take me somewhere, because the moment they unlocked me their eyeballs were toast. Actually, knowing Boss, they'd gag and hood me before unlocking the chains, but that wouldn't matter much because without repairing the hood, I can use NP to pull it off very quickly. The trouble was that it didn't make sense for Prof to give the wonderful roulette-beating machine to a 15-year old boy to bury somewhere in the woods that only the boy could find again, or any other such scenario that we could come up with that required me to be released. It had to be a very convincing scenario too, given Boss's comment about knowing I was a fighter. His knowing that indicated that he'd done his homework, which increased our worries. We kept working on our plan, but the returning footsteps happened when the LA story was still the favorite. ^ When Goon removed my hood he was standing in front of me holding a three-foot length of "2-by-4" (construction timber, nominally 2 inches wide by 4 inches deep, but actually 1.5" x 3.5". It's normally written "2x4", but I'll write "2-by-4" as that's how it's pronounced). He started swinging it back and forth like it was a baseball bat, "Time for some battin' practice, boy. Guess who's gonna be the ball?" He was within my proximity range, so I could tell he wasn't currently intending to whack me, but how long "currently" would last was a serious concern. He could easily smash whatever bones he hit with that, including my worryingly ball-shaped skull. After Goon had enjoyed scaring me, he removed my gag. Then he walked over to Prof and removed his hood and gag. Boss told Prof, "Tell me what I want or battin' practice starts." #4: #2: Goon moved toward me, looking forward to sport. Why can't the national pastime be playing Scrabble rather than physical activities that so easily appeal to violent assholes? Prof said, "Okay, I'll tell you." He spun them a very good yarn about exciting different molecules at different frequencies, like microwave ovens are tuned to work on the resonating frequency of water (the baddies looked blank at that, so Prof said, "Like magnets work with iron but not aluminum." They'd nodded.) He told them, "I've invented a machine that can be tuned to excite the molecules of roulette balls, because they're made of a solid piece of the same substance, and therefore the molecules all have the same resonating frequency. By vibrating the molecules on the right axis I'm able to influence its angular momentum..." He threw in enough big sounding words to make it sound complex and plausible. One thing Prof emphasized was that it needed a great deal of practice to get good at, which I thought was an excellent way of encouraging them not to kill us. On second thought, it was hard to think of a way of encouraging them not to kill us that wouldn't be excellent. "Where's the machine?" "When I came back from Las Vegas I went via Los Angeles and put it in the safety deposit box I keep there." "Which only you can get at, right?" "That's how they run the place, yes." "Then you're dead. I told ya, you ain't getting' outta those chairs." Goon asked Boss, "We're not gonna get it?" Boss said, "As soon as we asked for his box the Feds would be all over our fucking asses. It's a fuckin' lie anyway. Go do some battin' on the boy." "Asshole!" declared Goon, walking back to me again, taking some practice swings with the length of wood. Prof called, "It's at home, in the garage." "That's better. Where exactly?" "It's in two pieces. The Central Processing Unit is a circuit board hidden inside a toaster in a box of junk in the back of the garage. The Transmitter is in a cellphone inside a plastic bag, hidden in a can of paint under the workbench. You need both parts for it to work." Prof gave reasonably detailed, but not exact descriptions of where to look, saying, "I don't know EXACTLY. I never expected to be telling anyone else to get them. I could lay my hands on them right away, but I can't remember whether it's the third or fourth box of junk, or what color paint it is." Boss repeatedly demanded that Prof confirm he was telling the truth, including getting his knife out and digging its point into parts of Prof. Nothing as nasty as severing my finger, but still painful for Prof. Prof bravely stuck to his story. Finally Boss said, "We'll check it out. If ya lying, ya dead. Given 'em a taste Tom." Tom chuckled as he hefted his 'bat', readying it to swing at my left knee. He was just close enough for me to pick that up in proximity. Prof called, "I TOLD YOU WHERE IT IS! STOP! YOU DON'T NEED TO DO THIS!" Boss said nothing, and Tom swung mightily. Getting my knee totally crushed would be MAJOR bad news, so I frantically used the brand new External Ki Projection technique to deflect Goon's aim downward as much as I possibly could, hoping the end of the timber would drop at least two or three inches. I would've preferred to deflect it upward, because it would slide along my thigh until it hit the upright support bar of the armrest. That wouldn't injure me at all, which was the problem. Goon would get angry, and would attack again, quite possibly in a frenzy. Better to deflect it down and take the hit on the top of my lower-leg. It'd almost certainly break, but at least that'd be a clean break and would fully heal in a few weeks, unlike a totally smashed knee. I bent my leg under the chair as far as it would go (barely another inch), in a doubtless vain but irresistible attempt to minimize the injury by reducing the angle of impact. My EKP did succeed in deflecting Goon's ki. Not by much, but the length of the 'bat' magnified the effect, so the far end of the 2-by-4 smashed into my leg just below the knee. I couldn't see what happened, but by the sound and feeling it was bad. I had pain already turned off, but I could still feel that my upper-leg was pushed back into my hip, and that the timber did not slide down my leg. I turned on some of the known pain of my broken fingers to inspire my mostly acted screams. Goon pulled the 2-by-4 back for another swing, saying, "FUCK! I missed. I was aimin' for his knee." I screamed my pain louder, hoping that Boss was true to his word about only giving us a "taste". Boss said, "Hold it! You can practice all ya want when we come back, if it ain't there." Goon looked like he hoped it wasn't. Boss said to Prof, "If it ain't there, Tom's gonna pound you both to shit then we gonna torch this place with you in it. Last chance. You stickin' to ya story?" "Yes. They're where I said," insisted Prof. "They'd better be, or you're fucked." We were gagged and hooded again. Boss said, "We might be awhile. Don't go anywhere." Goon laughed. I heard the sound of the 2-by-4 falling on the concrete floor, then Boss saying, "Bring the wood. Leave nothin' useful." Goon picked it up, and they left the room together. ------- Chapter 226: Without Boss and Goon Thursday, May 19 to Saturday, May 21, 2005 First a brief report on events in Corvallis. Thursday morning Julia had called my cellphone to tell me what to wear to school. When I didn't answer her call to my cell, Julia called her home's landline. When no one answered that she successively called her parents' and Ava's cellphones, alerting my family with her increasingly frantic concerns while the phones were ringing unanswered. Thus the discovery process started thirty minutes earlier than it would have from my failing to pick up everybody for school. Mom stayed with Carol and Donna at a neighbor's place while Dad drove like a maniac to the Williams', with Julia calling the police from the car. Dad and Julia arrived before the cops. Dad made Julia stay in the car while he went inside using Julia's key. The first thing he saw was the broken security system. He rushed back to Julia, told her to report that to 9-1-1, then went back inside. He found an exhausted Ava bound to the bed in Julia's room. She'd been struggling to escape for hours. He released her while she told him what little she knew, then he found an identically bound Vanessa. Then the cops started arriving. ------- I removed our hoods as soon as Boss's and Goon's footsteps had faded away, hopefully for a few days. And while I was hoping for things, I hoped the cops would be the next people we saw, preferably closely followed by a pizza delivery guy, because I was getting hungry. The baddies would probably be away for quite a while, so I was tempted to try removing the gags too. I thought I had a good chance of getting them off if I tugged for long enough, but I decided not to because I wouldn't be able to put them back on convincingly. If the baddies returned before we got a lucky break, they'd be angry at us because of the fake story, and the extra annoyance and suspicion caused by very loose gags might make a fatal difference. I'd leaned forward to inspect the damage to my left leg. It was very visibly smashed, with the skin torn and the end of my fractured bone sticking out sickeningly. I controlled my nausea long enough to forcefully imagine that the blood flow was stopping around the torn area. I looked away, with no intention of ever looking again. That urgent job done, Prof and I signaled back and forth. The story he'd told the baddies was one he hadn't mentioned to me before. There were some boxes of junk in the back of his garage, one of which contained an old toaster; and there were old cans of paint too, so the baddies had stuff to keep them busy, hopefully long enough to either get caught (surely there'd be cops around) or somehow lead the cops to us. The chance of someone else finding us (say the local city's regular Basement Safety Inspector) wasn't looking too hopeful, given Boss's lack of concern at leaving us here. The thought of some member of the public being upstairs made me think about removing my gag so I could yell for help, but I figured I could tap on the wooden ceiling beams quite loudly with my ring, which should resound even better than my voice would. Despite Boss's saying, "Leave nothing useful," they'd left the possibly useful ring. [[Boss had expected to have to go on recovery trip(s), and had always intended to take Goon with him. This house was chosen for its being a good place to leave us unattended. For example, we couldn't hear anyone at the front door and neither could they hear any noises we might make; the door at the top of the stairs was locked to discourage any casual visitor coming down, and the landlord was not a local. Boss didn't want a third partner, and leaving Goon with us was a bad idea, as Boss wanted us to be alive when he returned. He expected any recovery trip(s) to have less than a 50/50 chance of being successful, as in his experience people often lie under torture, sometimes needing several motivation sessions to provide the correct combination for the safe, or whatever. The house was a good enough place to leave us alone, and a few days without food and water would add very nicely to our torture. The property had quite a long driveway, at the road end of which he'd tied a thin string across it. Any vehicle turning into the driveway would break the string. A rag was attached near one end of it, so when they returned and drove past at the normal speed, a quick glance at whether the rag was raised or lying limp against the tree trunk would reveal whether the string was broken or not.]] ^ We had a long, boring wait, which was WAY better than being tortured! The more waiting the better, because it increased our chance of being found by someone. Even at our letter-by-letter rate, we communicated a lot, including Prof's agreeing with the gags staying on. We tried to plan responses to every possible future scenario, from someone walking around upstairs through to the baddies returning after failing to get into the garage, or discovering we'd lied, or kidnapping more people, etc. Prof had located the imaginary machine inside the garage rather than the house itself especially to minimize the danger to the rest of his family. He hoped the chosen location would stall the baddies as it'd be difficult for them to get at, and it might lead to their being caught, as there should be cops around. There was a great deal of personal communication between us. When you're facing death you have a need for that, even when you're trying to pretend that you're not worried. We weren't facing death directly, as Goon would almost certainly remove our hoods before starting to kill us, whereupon his eyeballs would be history. It was immediately after that, that things got very tricky. We tried to plan for that event too. We loved the slow, uneventful passing of time, except for the issues of excretion, exercise, food, water and even boredom. I NP'd my severed finger up to my face so I could look at it closely (blame boredom). Despite all my talk with Sensei about how easy it was to visualize fingers in external locations, seeing my finger disconnected from my hand was an EXTREMELY weird and uncomfortable experience, but somehow fascinating. I don't recommend it though. I returned it to the floor, placing it under Prof's chair so he wouldn't have to look at it. We both had to piss. Fortunately I could use NP to aim our cocks so we stayed dry, except for a few drops which soon dried. Somewhat more than a few drops in Prof's case, rather graphically teaching me that old guys can't piss as well as young ones. Opening Prof's PJs and holding his cock was an unnatural act, but he told me not to be silly, a letter at a time. I managed to avoid the need to have a crap, but Prof couldn't, so he spent most of the time sitting in his own shit. Sitting in the bare metal chairs for hour after hour caused ever-increasing discomfort, especially for Prof. We wished we could get up and walk around (for a variety of reasons), but the best we could do was flex our muscles, do very small squats, and make other small movements. It was a major pain in the ass. We knew that people could survive weeks without food, so we weren't worried about that no matter how uncomfortable it was going to be. Going hungry wasn't going to be fun, but it was our firm favorite over more torture, so the longer the baddies were away, the happier we'd be. Although after a day, I was hoping that the pizza delivery guy would arrive first, closely followed by the police, but otherwise we put up with it. Water is what we started missing the most. We'd both heard that people can go for much longer without food than water, but we didn't know what the timeframes were. In our ignorance, we'd assumed water wouldn't be a big deal. I'm used to being hungry several times a day, but I'm rarely conscious of thirst except after strenuous exercise or work, neither of which applied now. Our not being concerned about liquids lasted, we guessed, about a day (I'd taken my watch off before having sex with Ava. Just as well, or Goon might have severed my wrist to claim it). After that day, our thirst became something we were increasingly conscious of. A lot of time passed, whether rapidly or slowly we had no way of knowing. It certainly passed unpleasantly, with thirst, hunger and discomfort becoming acute. ^ We heard what was recognizably Boss's and Goon's footsteps descending the stairs after what we thought was about three days. I muttered "Frgh" (it would have been "Fuck" without the gag), created a light blob, turned the room's light off (we'd been using it rather than a light blob), put our hoods back on, then canceled the light blob. [[It was only two days. We'd been kidnapped very early Thursday morning and they'd left on their mission to get the machine from Prof's garage later that day. The baddies had arrived in Corvallis early Thursday evening, spent Thursday night studying what was going on and giving time for the commotion to diminish. They'd broken into the garage in the wee small hours of Saturday morning, had loaded up their van with the boxes of junk and all the paint cans, and had then driven to a safe location to search through them. Finding neither of the two parts, they'd returned to our prison, arriving about dawn on Saturday. During the trip back Boss had told Goon what to do on arrival. They were going to play their version of "Good Cop / Bad Cop", which in their case was "Bad Criminal / Bad and Murderously Psychotic Criminal" (Goon taking the latter role, as he had a natural affinity for it). When Boss gave the word, Goon was going to go psycho with the length of timber, pretending to lose control, but 'only' breaking my arms and legs repeatedly until Boss called him off, hopefully after Prof or I coughed up the desired information.]] Their footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs in the other room, crossed the room, there was a small thump on the wall beside the door, then the door opened and they walked into the room, accompanied by the sound of Goon menacingly slapping the piece of 2-by-4 into his palm. Goon stopped that long enough to remove our hoods and gags, then resumed acting menacing. He was good at it. Both guys were looking highly pissed off and ready to take it out on us. Boss spent a couple of minutes ranting and raving about how "Fuckin' angry I am at your fuckin stupidity," etc. Before they'd left a few days ago, Boss had promised terrible consequences if Prof's story was a lie. It had been a lie, and now Boss was enjoying describing what Goon was going to do to me. "Terrible consequences" was an accurate description. They were far too terrible to be allowed to happen. Prof and I had discussed this scenario, and we couldn't let them carry out their threats because if I was injured much more than I was now, I wouldn't be able to get us out of here even if they released me from the chains - and it looked very much as if they were about to injure me MUCH more! There were two of us here, which they would think was one more than they needed to learn the secret of our roulette win. It was obvious that they were going to beat me severely to pressure Prof into telling the secret, and if that didn't work, the next obvious escalation was to kill me horribly in front of Prof, threatening to do the same to him if he didn't cough up. [[Boss certainly didn't look it, but he wasn't actually upset. In the course of his career, he'd many times had to coerce information out of people. In Vegas, people sometimes acquire large sums of cash that they physically hide rather than deposit in a bank, to avoid having to pay tax on it, have their spouse know about it, or for many other reasons. Boss preyed on such people. That was partly why he'd been in the casino when Prof and I had been: he'd been prowling for big winners, that being one of his standard scouting methods. He rather enjoyed the information-extraction game, and was smart enough to see its big picture. Goon was more of an immediate gratification kind of guy, but Boss had spent a good portion of the return trip getting Goon into the right mindset. He wanted Goon to smash me up, but not to lose control and kill me. That would be the slow and very deliberate next stage, if we didn't talk or if the next retrieval trip didn't produce the goods. Boss's current ranting to us was partly to work on our psychology, and partly to give him time to check to make sure we were awake and aware enough to get the full benefit out of what was to follow. It'd be no good beating us for information if we were too weak or dehydrated to think or talk.]] Boss decided we were both fit enough to provide him with the information he wanted, so he said, "I wouldn't want ya to think I'd break my word, so practice baseball all ya want Tom, just like I promised, haha. Smash the stupid fucker to a pulp, haha." Goon chuckled homicidally, hefting his bat and advancing toward me, doing an excellent job of showing delight at being able to unleash all his viciousness. Boss leaned against the wall, folded his arms, and waited for the screaming to start. I saw Prof nod, which I TOTALLY agreed with, so I started arranging for the screaming to start. I got all my minds to actively center, as having a four-mind poke, rather than a three-mind one, might make all the difference between bursting an eyeball or not, with "not" being a very bad outcome. So all four of my minds tried VERY hard to keep a very calm, centered state of mind. If we all lost center, the NP-points would cancel, which would be very inconvenient if we only had a narrow window of opportunity. We created four minimum-sized fingertips, one behind the other with the front one shaped to be as sharp as its mind could make it, forming a disappointingly blunt NP-spear aimed at Goon's right eye. NP-fingertips have no mass, and therefore no momentum (momentum equals mass times velocity), so there's no point in "taking a run" at the target. We simply created the 'spear' ahead of Goon, moved it immediately in front of his right eyeball, crossed our metaphorical fingers (most of our real ones no longer working) then had all the fingertips push straight forward with their maximum thrust - 14.1 pounds of force plus whatever tiny improvement we'd made from all our tedious practice pushing against walls and the ground. Goon screamed, dropped his 'bat', and flung his head back as his hands reached for his face. The speed of his reaction was too damned fast for me to spear his remaining eye. Goon was screaming and spinning around wildly, so I'd probably get a look at his remaining eye soon, but I better check what Boss was doing first. The asshole was running out of the room! He usually stands near the doorway and well away from us, but I never expected him to run away from two bound guys, especially when he'd seen that we hadn't moved a muscle. The only thing I could think to do was ankle-tap him, hoping to trip him before he got away, then get his eyeballs when he was looking around to see what the fuck was going on. I tripped him, and he fell forward, but he was so close to the doorway that he easily caught himself on the doorframe, regained his footing and shot out of the room, never looking back. I heard Prof yell, "TOM! Behind you!" I looked at Tom, as he spun around to look in my general direction. Mentally thanking Prof, I destroyed Goon's remaining eyeball, causing his screams to reach an even greater volume. I put #2 back on duty, to be sure I'd be centered if something surprising, and therefore distracting, happened. #1: #3: #4: I caught a peripheral flicker of movement in the doorway. It was Boss, crouching around the doorframe with a pistol in his hand, aimed toward me. That massively discouraged me from poking him in the eye. Boss looked to be cautious and in control, so there was no need for me to do anything immediately. I was debating how to get him to point his gun elsewhere, and to keep it pointing that way while I destroyed both his eyes, when Prof yelled, "DON'T SHOOT! Tom's hemorrhaged. Bad temper. Blood pressure. Call 9-1-1." Prof was talking in short sentences because our mouths were so dry that talking was difficult. Especially for him, by the sound of his voice. "Yeah, right!" Goon responded to Prof's statements by calling out, "I can't fuckin' see! My eyes hurt like fuck." In a self-pitying tone, "I'm blind, Dom. My face's wet. Somethin' fuckin' bad happened." Dom didn't react to our hearing his name. He said, "Stay there. I'm comin'." Boss cautiously edged into the room, gun at the ready. He circled wide around me, keeping his eyes on both of us. He got to the piece of wood, picked it up, and used it to reach under my chair from behind to prod the chains, to make sure they were securely padlocked to the ringbolt. I was naked with the chain wrapped around my waist and both forearms, so it was pretty obvious that I wasn't going anywhere. He repeated the exercise with Prof, then moved to the far side of Tom. Putting the wood down beside him, but retaining his hold on the gun in one hand, he used his free hand to start trying to get Tom to remove his hands from his face. #1: #4: #2: #1: #2: While we were discussing possible distractions, we looked at Prof, who saw me looking and signaled, "GET GUN" to me. I nodded back. Boss got Goon to move his hands away, giving Boss a horrible shock. Goon heard Boss's reaction, "What happened? What can you see?" Before Boss could answer, I half-strength poked Goon in both eye sockets at the same time, using two minds on each. Goon screamed again, his hands flying to his eye, and his body thrashing around. Boss gave us a quick glance, saw we were no threat, and carefully put his gun down on the floor, pointing it diagonally at the wall. It was to his right, on the side farthest from us. Then he bent forward to check his friend. I could see the gun, which removed one of my major fears. Boss's care in how he angled it presumably meant the safety was off, which had been another of my worries. I've never fired a gun, but I know they have some sort of safety switch; I just didn't know where or how, and I didn't want to have to fly the gun back to me so I could fiddle around working out how to change it. I might not have the luxury of that much time. I had a major choice to make over how many of Boss's eyes to pop before trying to take the gun. I could try to do both his eyes first, but that might give him time to grab for the gun. Or I could try to sneak the gun away first, which would be great, if it was successful. Or I could do one eye and then go for the gun as a midway option. Boss was kneeling on the other side of Goon, which meant he was more or less facing me. One issue was in which direction to move the gun. If I moved it behind him, I might get it clean away without him seeing it, especially if it was fairly light, but if he chased after it, he'd be looking away from me making his eyes safe. Alternatively, if I moved the gun toward me to keep his eyes in sight if he chased after it, then he'd see it moving. Getting the gun was the most important, because that gave me two ways of attacking him, and left him with no ways of attacking us in the time I'd give him. A lot depended on the weight of the gun. It could be too heavy to lift with NP, permitting Boss to retain it. That implied blinding him was the best idea, except that if he was blind but still had the gun, he could still kill, quite easily once he settled down enough to think. I was too scared to try to weigh the gun by using NP on it now, because if it made even one scratching sound on the concrete Boss might pick it up. Prof called out to Boss, "How bad?" Boss ignored Prof, continue to try to calm down Goon. That wasn't going to be easy because Goon was pretty freaked out. I decided on what I was going to do, including hoping like hell that the gun wasn't too heavy to NP away. Or, at the VERY worst, that it wasn't so heavy that I couldn't roll it along the floor while I screamed my head off to cover the sound of its movement. I had a choice of two suitable objects for the first action I needed to do, either my ring, or the finger it'd came off. Given Boss's position, the ring was the most out of sight, so I lifted it all the way to just below the ceiling, then flew it so it was at ceiling height and just behind directly over his head. I was collecting myself to get ready to poke Boss's right eye when Prof called again, "I know medicine. We do deal for my help." "Shut the fuck up!" I didn't want Boss to get so angered by Prof's distraction that he grabbed the gun and shot us both, so I was about to poke his eye, when I had a cute little idea. There was no time to think about it so I created the NP effect of feet walking heavily (for NP) across that part of Goon's ankle that I could see. Boss was kneeling next to Goon's head, on the side of Goon away from us. Conveniently Goon's feet extended to the Boss's left, roughly toward us and away from the gun. Goon immediate jerked both feet up, yelling, "Somethin's on my leg." Boss had been looking at Prof, so Goon's leg had been in Boss's field of view. Boss hadn't seen anything move, so he knew nothing important was happening. At most a spider, and certainly nothing requiring the gun. I NP'd some more heavy footsteps on Goons shin again. "Get it off!" demanded Goon, reaching his own hands down. Boss leaned forward to see what all the fuss was about. I canceled the NP that was holding up the ring, so it started falling. I formed the eyeball popping spear, taking a couple of tenths of a second to let the ring get closer, then I rammed the spear into Boss's right eye. Boss screamed and jerked back, his hands flying to his face. My first three minds created multiple NP-points under the gun while #4 created a flash of a vaguely human-sized stack of dark red light blobs right beside Boss's left side moving rapidly behind him. #4 canceled the blobs, then created an NP-point which poked Boss on the left of his neck at about the same time as the ring fell in front of his face (I'd intended for the ring to confuse him by landing heavily on his head, but it'd missed because Boss had leaned farther back than I'd expected). Hoping that Boss would think he was in combat with some guy who was to his left and already on top of him, I yelled, "CUT DOM'S THROAT!" That should keep him occupied for a while. #4 had performed the human-shaped blob movement and the neck tap very quickly, so it could join in with the task of moving the gun, as I'd thought #4's services might be essential if the gun was heavy. I'd previously decided to start by sending the gun straight up. There were three reasons: It was the easiest for me, as I didn't need to play around allocating fingertips between lifting and pushing. Every NP-point of the three minds went into lifting, and they just, 'went for it'! It was the quickest way for me to get it out of Boss's reach. A kneeling guy could leap after it if I sent it sideways, maybe extending his grabbing range to six feet or so horizontally. But he couldn't leap that far upward. By the time Boss got to his feet, I would've accelerated the gun even farther away (acceleration causes distance covered to rapidly increase). I expected Boss to make a lunge for the gun shortly. When he did I was going to let the gun fall while I poked his remaining eyeball. Blindness, gravity and pain would almost certainly cause his lunge to miss, especially because immediately after the eyeball popped I'd start max-accelerating the gun sideways away from him, letting it fall and curve away from where he last saw it. Events unfolded somewhat differently than I'd expected. By the time #4 was ready to join in helping move the gun, it was already accelerating upward GLORIOUSLY, because the gun was WAY lighter than I'd thought it'd be. It weighed slightly less than one mind could lift, so three minds were able to accelerate it upward at about 2 g's. In the quarter second we'd had so far, we'd lifted the gun TWO FEET! That may not sound like much, but it's HUGE! You won't appreciate the significance of that as well as I do, not having had my enormous experience with accelerating things around with NP, but two feet in the first quarter second means another six feet in the next quarter second, making eight feet in total. The gun would reach the ceiling in less time than it'd take Boss to even start to react, let alone manage to achieve anything useful. Since Prof's and my lives were at stake, getting the gun two feet up in the first quarter second was an abso-fucking-lutely marvelous surprise. Colliding with the ceiling might fire the gun randomly, so every mind changed position to start pushing the gun toward me at 4 g's, letting gravity slow its rise, by which time it'd be three times higher than it was now, i.e., 6 feet. (I'd accelerated it upward at 2 g; it'd decelerate at 1 g, so it would rise a further twice as much as its current two feet before it started falling). Six feet high was well out of Boss's vertical reach. Not only would the gun be six feet high after another half a second, but at a 4 g sideways acceleration it'd be 4 feet away horizontally and already heading my way far faster than Boss could get after it. (With all the practice I've had, these calculations are intuitive, just like for you when you catch a ball. When I use NP, or when you catch a ball, neither of us does physics calculations; but I'm putting numbers in this text so you can visualize the situation. In reality I simply knew that two feet in the first quarter second meant I OWNED this gun!) Two seconds later Boss - in pain and massively surprised - was just finishing his predictable sequence of actions. He'd floundered around for his attacker, found nothing; lunged for the gun, found more nothing; looked frantically around the area for it, realized it was well and truly gone; then look at us as he was leaping to his feet, trying to understand what was happening. I had the gun hovering about five feet away from me so I wouldn't get any gunpowder on me when it fired, and it was on the same side of me as Boss was, so if he lunged for the gun, he wouldn't be coming near to Prof or me. I wanted to know whether the gun would fire, to check whether the safety was on and whether it had any bullets in it. I greatly feared it wasn't loaded because of its lightness. If it was loaded, I wanted to fire to get Boss's attention and his surrender as I had a REALLY important job for him: unlocking our chains! The choice of what to fire at was easy, since I wanted Goon dead. He was too big, too violent, too stupid, and totally surplus to requirements. Plus I wasn't going to leave any witnesses alive anyway, not after their experiencing bursting eyeballs and one of them seeing an impossibly flying gun. All of my objectives were neatly achieved by my pointing the gun at Goon and pulling the trigger. I was smart enough to realize that pulling the trigger would affect the gun's orientation, so I pulled it by slowly increasing the pushing force on the trigger, while increasing the compensating force on the barrel to hold it on target. I didn't expect my aim to be wonderful, as the gun was to my side, so I was simply aiming at the middle of Goon. I didn't mind if it took a few shots to kill him later, just so long as I found out that the gun worked and Goon was incapacitated now. The good news what that I was very pleasantly informed of the gun's containing bullets by its firing one of them. I was pretty sure Goon felt otherwise, judging by his scream. The bad news was that recoil sent the gun spinning out of my NP-grip. Catching rapidly spinning objects is damned near impossible with NP, as it needs stable holds, so the gun was falling out of control. Boss saw his chance and sprinted for the gun. I'd already decided that if Boss did anything threatening then my first priority was to destroy his last remaining eye. Luckily - because I hadn't thought of it in advance - I'd put the gun on the side of me that when Boss ran for it, his sole remaining eye was on the side of his face that I could see. A quarter of a second later, he wasn't capable of doing any seeing of his own. Boss screamed, but then he heard the clatter of the gun hitting the concrete floor and he dived for the sound. With the gun no longer spinning I had a stable surface I could push against, so I put everything I had into lifting it straight up. At 3 g's of upward acceleration, 0.1 seconds had it 6 inches above the floor. Another 0.1 seconds had it 2 feet up. He dived to where he thought the gun was, but by the time his hands got there, the gun was several feet away. Now it truly was mine, as neither Boss nor Goon had a hope in hell of getting it off me, short of me dropping it in their lap. "STOP DOM! I've got the gun. You've LOST!..." I was intending to tell him, "Sit down and do what I said from now on, after which I'll let Tom and you go free." My version of "go free" being EXACTLY the same as the version he'd promised us. But I never got that far. Boss screamed in frustration and leaped off the floor, charging toward the sound of my voice, arms outstretched to find me. He was too close to make ankle-tapping worthwhile. Tapping his shoulder or making a distracting noise - by sliding the piece of wood along the floor, for example - wasn't going to work. His anger was too obviously focused on me. I didn't have the gun well oriented yet as I was still getting it under control after accelerating it off the floor. Boss would be on top of me by the time the gun was ready, and I wasn't going to shoot it in the general direction of Boss, because that'd also be the general direction of me. I didn't have the time to fly the gun to my or Prof's hand so we could aim it by looking along the barrel. So I NP'd one of Boss's eye sockets. He screamed again, but kept charging me. Prof shouted, "SURRENDER AND YOU'LL LIVE." Boss kept charging toward me, hands still outstretched at my shoulder level. I couldn't move my arms, legs or hips, but I could lean forward and sideways away from him, in the hope of staying out of his grasp when he first reached me. He'd still run into the chair, but with luck I'd be able to slam my head into his and knock him out, or maybe my left hand would be able to get a grip on his clothes and hold him still long enough for me to disable him with carefully aimed shots in his thighs. It didn't work out any of the ways I'd thought of. When he got close to me, he slowed and started waving his arms from side to side at my shoulder height. #3: I couldn't move my body enough to avoid one of his arms. It made contact, he gave a cry, and both his hands went for my neck. I tucked my chin hard into my chest to protect my throat as best I could, and concentrated on bringing the gun to my right hand. I couldn't use NP to hold the gun when I fired it because the first shot might not take him out and the gun might bounce badly when it hit the floor, possibly rolling out of my sight, or into his grasp. Even if it fell in a good position, it would still take a few seconds to get it back into position for another shot, during which Boss might poke MY eyes out (I kept expecting him to do that), or Goon might get up and join in, or Boss might knock me out with a punch, or who knows what else. This wasn't a situation to fuck around with. Fortunately Boss had no way of seeing the gun floating into my right hand, so he kept trying to strangle me as I caught the gun. I angled it up toward the middle of his chest and pulled the trigger. He grunted, his grip slackened momentarily, then he tightened it again. I moved my point of aim slightly - the last place hadn't worked - and fired again. He grunted again. I'd hit something serious this time, because a large amount of blood poured out of him and onto my left arm. He tried hard to squeeze my neck again, but his strength very rapidly drained out of him. I thought conserving bullets would be a good idea, as Boss seemed done for already. He hung on, trying to hold himself up. About five seconds after the last shot, I could sense his intentions dimming, then his legs failed him and he slid down the side of my chair to fall into a crumbled heap beside me. "Well done, Mark!" praised Prof. "Is he dead?" Prof was able to talk better because previously the gag had held his mouth open, drying it out. A few minutes of his mouth being closed had allowed it to slowly moisten, even though we were both very thirsty so short of internal water. It would be very tedious for me to insert every slurred word and every pause while we moistened our mouths to permit further speech, so I'll write the following as if we spoke normally. You should be aware that we could talk, but it was a struggle. "He will be in a few seconds. He's just about gone. There! He's dead now." "Tom might be too. I've been watching you mostly, but I haven't seen him move recently." "Fuck! How are we going to get out of the chains?" "At least we're alive to try. That's a lot better than it was looking like a few minutes ago. Now we can take our time. Maybe a neighbor heard the shots and the police are on the way as we speak." "I doubt there are any neighbors. First thing is to try to find out whether Tom's dead. I can't tell for sure from here, but he does seem very still." "Yes, and from this angle I can see some blood coming out from underneath his back. I think he's dead." I found my ring, NP'd it to me, then accelerated it as fast as I could straight at Goon's head. He didn't react to the surprising hit. He was REALLY good at playing dead. I felt for a pulse on the wrist that I could see. Nothing. I tilted his head up a little, so I could see his face better, then I pinched his nose and lips shut and watched. Nothing was happening. After a couple of minutes I took my fingertips off his face, and used all my force to tilt his head up as high as I could get it. Then I dropped it. "He's got to be dead. That wasn't my head, and I still winced when it hit the concrete. There's no pulse either." "You can even detect a pulse with your ability?" "Can't say I've ever tried until now. Let's see if I can feel yours. Raise your hand a little and turn it to face me if you can," I created an NP-point on the inside of his wrist. I felt around a bit until I felt a pulse. "You'll be glad to know that you're alive." "I SURE am! It's good to be able to talk normally too. Keep the gun handy Mark, in case Tom is merely unconscious, but I think it's just you and me now. How do you feel about having shot those guys? Some people would feel upset and need some time to recover." "I wish they'd stand up so I could shoot them again. They were going to kill us both, and I'd be dead already if I hadn't stopped them. Plus I bet they've murdered other people before. I'm more upset over losing my finger than shooting them, and I don't really care about my finger so you can tell how little I care about them. I've been on the receiving end of violence from bullies for years and I just don't have any compassion for them anymore, especially not bullies this bad. When we get out of here, I'm only going to be celebrating. Speaking of which, we need to find the keys to all these locks. At least to one of the big padlocks under us, so we can get upstairs to look for a phone." Prof said, "Before we do anything, let's do some planning. We've got a good chance of getting out now, but we don't want to land in more trouble. I'm mostly thinking of your ability, but we also have to be careful not to get arrested for committing any crime. Your fingerprints are on that gun now..." "Yeah, I was conscious of that too. I tried to avoid it, but it was better than being strangled. I'm planning to wipe the fingerprints off it. I can use one of the gags to do that whenever I want." "That's good. There will be dozens of police going over this place after we contact them, so we should be careful what we do, especially in your case. Don't put your footsteps all over the ceiling, for example." "Don't I wish!, but I get what you mean. The only sign of my abilities is the popped eyeballs. That doesn't tie back to me the way my footprints on the ceiling would, but I'd rather avoid having to do something like that. If anything like this ever happens to me again, and the baddies all get their eyeballs popped, people are going to become extremely suspicious, especially if I was locked in an immovable chair at the time." Prof said, "We should be able to take things nice and slowly from now on, so let's think twice before doing once. How do we explain the fight and our winning it? If we find the keys and unlock ourselves, how would we explain that to the police?" "Ahh, maybe we can say the fight occurred after they unlocked us to go to the bathroom?" "Let's not worry about that yet. We need to know the complete list of facts we need to explain before it's worth trying to create a story. Let's start by inventorying the obvious things first. It might be useful to know how many bullets are left in the gun. Do you know how to do that Mark?" "Not a clue. Let's have a look." I started studying the gun. Prof said, "First of all find the safety and..." Prof talked me through the process, also warning me to be damned careful what I touched with my fingertips. It'd be awfully difficult to explain how my fingerprints got onto the bullets inside the magazine, for example. I picked up one of the gags, opening it and laying it over my left hand, so I could hold the gun with it. I was amazed when I counted the number of bullets remaining, "Good grief! There are fourteen more bullets to go. You could fight a small war with one of these things." I noticed that the gun didn't feel like metal either, which explained its surprising lack of weight. While I was reassembling the gun Prof said, "I can't see their usual knife sheathes." "I noticed that too. I was going to test whether Tom was awake by dropping one of the knifes point first onto him." "That's a pity," said Prof. "Knives might have been useful for us." [[Just before going into the room Boss had gotten rid of both of their knives, as he'd been worried about Tom's acting homicidal getting a little too realistic, especially because Tom rather enjoyed using knives on people.]] A knife would've been immediately useful because I had a great deal of trouble turning out their pockets. A very sharp knife - as I knew from personal experience that Goon's was - would've enabled me to slit their pockets open. Instead it was very slow work. They were both wearing jeans with fairly tight pockets. Not as tight as the jeans Julia makes me wear - which I am looking forward to wearing again soon - but still tight enough to be a real pain. I started with Boss, mainly because he was the Boss and more likely to have interesting stuff, such as the keys. I was VERY interested in them! He'd be the easier of the two to pickpocket, as being right beside me made it much easier for me to see what I was doing, and I could even create NP-points inside his pockets' airspaces. By patting the outside of his pockets I found one that seemed to contain keys AND a cellphone. We'd have a choice between calling the cops OR letting ourselves out and driving away! The keys came out first, and none of them looked like small padlock keys. I tried them all on the two padlocks on my arms, but none fit. The padlock under Prof's chair was easier to try than mine, but both those locks failed with every key too. His arm locks also failed. Prof had a good look at the keys, saying, "These are house keys and two vehicle keys." "Yeah, that's what I thought, but I'm still going to try them all again." All I achieved was to waste a few minutes. The cellphone came out next. It was turned off. I turned it on using NP to avoid leaving fingerprints, and received a "No Service" message. "Damn, there's no service. I wonder whether I can get through to 9-1-1 anyway." "Stop! Don't dial it. It might cause problems with our explanation, so don't try it yet. I don't believe it'll get through if there's no signal, and your trying to call 9-1-1 will be recorded in the phone's registry. How's the battery charge?" "Three-quarters full. By the way, it's breakfast time. Sunday I guess. Let me see if I can find the date anywhere." I played around for a few seconds, then found it. "Hey, according to the phone it's the 21st, which is a Saturday. That doesn't seem right. I wonder if the phone's been set wrong." "If Tom's got a phone we'll compare the dates. Can you go through that phone's messages and phone numbers looking for anything useful?" "Okay." There were no messages stored. I scrolled through the phonebook, hoping to find something like "Corvallis Home Renters." It didn't take me long to get to "Anderson". "Hey Prof, there's lots of Andersons in here: 'Carol', 'Felicity M', 'Felicity W', 'Home', 'Mark', 'Steven M' and 'Steven W'. All of us are in here except Donna." Prof said, "That's the same naming convention I use. Check..." We checked several other names. Many of the names Prof suggested hit, and almost all of them with exactly the same text Prof used. There were a few errors, but they appeared to be typos. Prof said, "I think he got hold of the cellphone I lost in Vegas. Check the name of the private investigator I used in Vegas and..." Prof gave me a couple more, none of which were found. "I got those numbers after I lost my phone. This is too unprofessional to be Binion's doing directly, so I think these two guys were ordinary crooks. One of them stole or found my cellphone and tracked us down from that. Binion's might've given it to them, but I doubt it. It looks like I owe you an apology for getting you into this." "{Raspberry}. Those dead guys are the ones that got us into this. I've got plenty of bullets, so I'm tempted to shoot them a few more times to teach them a lesson, haha. I'll go back to looking through the whole list to see if there's anything useful in it." A few minutes later, "Nothing leaps out. There are three different Toms in here but no Doms." There were also several restaurants listed, but it was kinder not to even joke about food and water to Prof. "Leave it turned on and where you can see if it gets a signal. If it does, try dialing 9-1-1. If you get through try to tell them how we got here and as much information about here as you can, but don't tell them how it is you're able to call. We'll make up something later. Hold the phone away from your mouth so it sounds distant too, as if it might've been in your hand." "I'll just find the menu option for sending its own number when it dials out, in case Dom had that turned off and it helps to have it on." He had, so I turned it on. That pocket of Boss's jeans was now empty, so I worked on the next one. It took quite a while to get his wallet out, for a reason that was soon visible: it was full of money; something like $2,000. Easily enough to pay for a house call from a locksmith, should we manage to contact one. I told Prof, "His name was Dominic King, but you can call him 'Asshole' if you like, as I'll know who you mean. He's from Las Vegas." There was nothing else of interest in his wallet, so on to the round container I'd felt deeper in the same pocket. That was easily pushed out, and was a roll of money with a $100 on the outside. If they were all hundreds, I guessed $10,000 to $15,000 worth, which I'd happily swap for a particular key right now. A comb, a handkerchief, and a packet of mints. Prof and I VERY happily had one each; our first food in far too long! A couple of minutes later I decided that Prof could have all the mints from now on. I'd fake having mine. That was Boss cleaned out. We turned our attention to Goon, now hoping that he had the keys. After all, he had been the one who'd chained and locked us up in the first place. Emptying Goon's pockets was a great deal harder as the slob had been eating too much recently (something I had NO sympathy with!), and his being outside my proximity range meant I couldn't fly my NP-points into his pockets, because half a second later they ceased to exist. I had to roll him back and forth as much as I could, to try to create slack in his pockets while repeatedly trying to push the object toward the pocket's mouth from the outside. Progress was tiny, if there was any at all. I used Boss's nice, fat wallet to help me. Rolling Goon's body over slightly then wedging the wallet between the floor and Goon to create slack as his body sunk down and the wallet pushed his fat upper-thigh around toward his crotch. I was going to use my ring as a spacer at the top of the pocket, then changed to use Boss's comb. I flew the ring back to me and put it on the traditional ring finger. It was dinged from when Goon had thrown it against the wall, but it was nice to have it back anyway. Prof cautioned me, "It's easy to see that the ring was worn on the finger you've lost. It might be more believable to leave it lying on the floor. When we're rescued, you can ask the rescuers to pass it to you." True, so I sent it back to the floor. I went back to the SLOW job of working on Goon's pockets. Admittedly I had nothing better to do, but it was still incredibly annoying. My frustration inspired me to suggest something obviously stupid, "How about I remove Dom's shirt and pants and tear them into strips, tie them to make a lasso, and fly it over Tom's foot, so I can maybe drag him closer to me. This would be a hell of a lot easier if I could get his pocket within three feet of me." "How would we explain Dom's shirt and pants being ripped and tied into a rope? If we're locked up it's impossible for us to do that. If we're not locked up, why would we? It looks very strange, which I'd prefer to avoid." "Damn. Back to the painful process then." Later, "How about I line the gun up with the corner of his pocket, and shoot the seam away so I've got some more slack?" "That's not as bad as the lasso idea, but the police forensics will see where the bullet hits the wall, and will be able to work out that it was fired while Tom was lying down. Possibly they'll be able to tell the wound it might make was made after Tom was already dead. How would we explain why someone did that to a corpse?" "Argh!" "Could you undo his fly? At least the zip?" "D'OH! GOOD IDEA! I might not be able to do it back up again. If we're discovered still locked up the police might think that's weird." "You could probably pull it part way up. Hopefully they'd assume it went down in the fight." Conveniently, the fly flap was open to my side, so I could see the zip. I'd been looking at it all the time that I'd been struggling with his pockets, I just hadn't thought of it. I guess I have a mental block about unzipping other men's pants. Unzipping him would increase the pressure on the top button, so I tried to unbutton it first. There was far too much pressure on it from the fat, food-eating, bastard's stomach! I had to work at it for a few minutes to get his zip down, but I got it done. His pockets were now looser, so I started making useful progress on the "Pushing Things Out Of His Pockets" project. He had a key ring which I'd been very patiently (well, not really) trying to slide up. Now I finally managed to get the metal loop visible, and seconds later I had them flying toward me. They looked like a couple of house keys and a car key. I spent several minutes trying all the padlocks, and they failed. FUCK! Back to Goon's pockets again. Push the next item up, rock his hips back and forth, push up again, etc. The next item was a pair of knuckle dusters (a.k.a. "brass knuckles"). Just what every self-respecting Goon should carry in their pockets, but useless to us. His cellphone was next. It also had no service, and had nothing of any interest in its memory. It confirmed the date as the 21st. "This phone says the date is the 21st too. It feels a lot longer than two day, but I guess that makes it official." "It seemed longer to me too," agreed Prof. Then I got his wallet out, which gave us Tom White's full name and much less money than Boss's. And a condom, which was the least of my appetites at the moment. That was it for his front pockets. Getting at his rear pockets was going to be a problem because it required rolling him over. Boss had slumped in a heap inside my proximity range, but Goon was flat on his back and out of range, a much different situation. I came up with a really good idea. The beam of wood that ex-Goon had been intending to beat me to death with weighed far less than I expected, only about three or four pounds when I tested it by using various amounts of NP force, so I could fly it around easily. I used it as a lever, first to lever up one of Goon's knees, using Boss's wallet wedged under Goon's the upper-thigh to hold it in place until I repositioned the timber to lever the knee higher. Soon I had the knee high enough that I could put the timber under the knee, with the end on top of the other leg. Lifting the far end of the lever twisted Goon's hips a little, just enough for me to use one fingertip to rub over his back pocket. I felt carefully, and it felt empty. There was certainly no key ring of the necessary size (when I'd been first brought down here, I'd heard Boss pass Goon a ring of keys. They'd rattled consistent with at least four keys). I let Goon slump back. I pulled the bent leg straight easily as gravity did most of the work, and then I repeated the process of bending his other knee up. It was quite a lot trickier, as some of it was out of my line of sight, but I got it done eventually. Then I levered Goon's body into another twist. I couldn't see his back pocket on that side, but I had half a second before the fingertips canceled, so they could swoop around his hip then rub his ass for that long. Doing this often enough convinced me that there was nothing in that back pocket either. As I was putting the timber and wallet back into more sensible positions I said, "Sorry Prof, he hasn't got the keys, or any food either. The fat bastard probably ate it all." "Maybe they're wearing the keys around their necks?" "I didn't hear any rattling when they moved, but I can easily check." I could easily pat the corpses down, and there was no sign of anything like that. While checking Boss's legs and ankles I noticed that he was wearing shoes with laces. Goon too. It'd be relatively easy to take the laces out if I needed them, which might be useful for something. "None of them have got anything hidden about their body that I can detect. I've patted them down pretty thoroughly, especially Dom. I haven't done Tom's back, but I'm sure I would have noticed any key-like sounds. By the way, they're both wearing lace up shoes. I can get the laces out quite easily if we ever need them. Just in case you think of a good use for them." "Good thinking. I agree with you about our not hearing any key sounds. I can think of two things we can do yet. One is to wait for either of the cellphones to get service. Sometimes that can improve at night, or it might fluctuate with the wind, or something random like that. If you keep an eye on them you might see the bars move. We can try calling out and sending text messages too, just in case they get through somehow. We need to give some thought to what our stories will be, and to compose our messages accordingly. The other idea is try to destroy one of padlocks under our seats by shooting at it. I don't know whether that's possible, but it might be worth a try if we can't think of anything less dangerous. Our asses are only inches away. If we think a bullet can penetrate one of those big, tough padlocks, it's going to zip right through the thin metal of these chairs." "Ouch! That's not a pleasant thought. It'd be a pity to be victorious over the baddies, only to shoot ourselves." "Yeah, that'd be a pity." Waiting for the cellphones to get a signal sounded like a better idea, so we passed the time discussing what we should tell people under different scenarios, such as: The cops, from their own efforts, manage to find us as we are now. We call for help while still restrained in our prison chairs. We somehow got out of the chairs and call for help. We did some preparation. I wiped my fingerprints off the gun and cellphones, tried to rub all the gunpowder off me, put the various items back where they'd look more natural, etc. If someone came wandering down the stairs we wanted to look like VERY happy, helpless victims, rather than someone who'd killed two people in HIGHLY mysterious circumstances. I didn't wipe Dom's blood off me because it might be hard to explain how blood got all over the gag, and even worse, it'd probably leave a mess on me that looked like someone had tried to clean me up. That would be suspicious and very hard to explain. Our basic story was going to be that there had been three baddies. We never saw the third because he stayed out of the room on the rare occasions our hoods were removed. He did come into the room when we were hooded though, and he talked like he was more educated. He referred to living in Vegas. We cooked up several more points about him, that Prof and I could be convincingly consistent about. According to our story, sometime - we couldn't tell when - screaming had suddenly erupted. There'd been a fight with some shooting. We couldn't give details because we were too out of it after being tortured, starved, sleep deprived, etc. The third guy had left, after doing whatever explained our situation: If the police found us as is, he'd left us as is. If we called for help from chairs, he'd given us the cellphones. If we get out of chairs and call for help; he'd released us, or perhaps came back to release us a few days later if the corpses are old by the time we get out. Unfortunately, our getting out was looking unlikely now, with our not having keys to any of the padlocks. We spent a long time sorting out as many details as we could, including having a big discussion about the four busted eyeballs. I preferred to do some head wrecking with either the 2-by-4 or gun, but Prof said, "The cops will know it was done after their deaths, which would be extremely strange and suspicious. There's no eye fluid on anyone's fingers here, so they'll have to assume the third partner did it. It might even help them believe in him." Once we had our story straight I tried calling 9-1-1 on one phone. It failed to connect so I tried the other one, getting the same worrying result. Then I tried calling Mom from each phone, with the same result. We composed a text message to Mom, then hit send. I NP'd the phone out of this room and into the next, getting it as close to the door at the top of the stairs as I could, in case it could pick up some signal there. I couldn't actually see the stairs from where I was sitting, and Prof was even worse positioned, but I knew roughly where they were. I could fly a cellphone in the right direction to the limit of my vision, holding it as high as possible to maximize its chance of getting a signal. I brought it back after five minutes, to give Mom time to make the requested reply. The phone said "Message Not Sent." I repeated the process with the other phone, in case it had a better transmitter. Apparently not, because it also reported that my message hadn't been sent. We spent the rest of Saturday (if the phones were right) talking about anything that crossed out minds, alternating naps so someone was awake to watch the cellphone statuses, and occasionally trying 9-1-1 and sending the text messages. We typed in a whole lot of new ones, giving as much information as we could. If we got service, we wanted as much information to get out as quickly as possible. ------- Chapter 227: One Way Out Sunday, May 22 to Monday, May 23, 2005 Prof and I were starting to get worried. The atmosphere was tenser, and we were much more serious about doing everything we could to try to get ourselves out of there. Rather than assuming that the best transmission point was as close to the stair's door as I could get, we tried transmitting text messages from every part of the room in case one corner had a thinner wall, or something else helpful. We even tried transmitting with the cellphone next to the electric light in case the electric wires somehow acted as a supplementary antenna helping the cellphone's transmitter. We did that with both cellphones and with the light on and off. No messages got out. Prof and I debated whether we should set a cellphone to transmit a text message, then have me 'throw' it toward where I thought the doorway at the top of the stairs was. Hopefully it land on the stairs high enough to get a signal, or I might even be lucky enough to get it through the doorway and therefore above ground, which might make a huge difference. We decided not to because we'd almost certainly never see that phone again since wherever it fell it'd be out of my sight, and we were already having to conserve battery power with two phones because we were frequently trying to send messages or connect calls. Another reason was that Boss had been a cautious guy - he'd nearly always stood near our open door during our interrogations, and he always closed our door deliberately when he left - so we believed it was extremely unlikely that he'd left the door at the top of the stairs open while he was torturing prisoners downstairs. We thought that even if I was accurate, all that I'd achieve would be to throw the phone into the door, where it would bounce back and fall to its doom on the concrete floor at the base of the stairs. We tested that hypothesis with Goon's knuckle dusters, which we heard hit wood (probably the door, we guessed) followed by the unmistakable sound of it clanging its way down a few stairs until it seemed to have fallen over the side, as there was a longer pause before a much louder clang, and then nothing. The dusters never reappeared in my sight, so they were lost to us. We were strict that one of us had to be awake at all times, to watch the signal strength bars on the phones. We had no idea of the weather outside, and it was always possible that a freak weather pattern might cause signal from the next valley to leak over, or something like that. We decided against shooting the padlocks. We did one experiment where I aimed the gun at a piece of chain, in the direction that took the bullet into the next room. I put the piece of timber immediately over the chain to hopefully catch the ricochet if it came back at me. With considerable trepidation I NP'd the trigger. I lived through the experience totally unscathed, as did the link of chain the bullet hit. I tried accelerating the 2-by-4 along the floor and into Prof's padlock over and over again, hoping to push the catch open. It did nothing other than mess up the end of the wood. I used a gag to clean up all the bits of wood from the area and scattered them around the place in a hopefully innocuous pattern. I tried all the keys we had several more times, in case I'd messed up the first, second or third times. We tried smashing a hole in the ceiling near me with the abused piece of 2-by-4, with the hope that I could NP a cellphone up into the next level and get a signal there, but the ceiling was far too strong. It sounded so solid that we discarded the idea of shooting all the remaining bullets into a small area to help the 2-by-4 bashing. Every now and then I'd ram the 2-by-4 into the ceiling a few times, just in case someone was in the immediate area. I did that frequently, because I didn't have anything better to do. The rest of our ideas were even less successful. ^ Sunday was our fourth day of captivity, and of no water. Being chained to chairs we'd not been exerting ourselves, and the temperature was low so we weren't sweating at all, but four days was distressingly too long to go without water - our bodies started letting us know that things were starting to go wrong. Both of us had been experiencing headaches since a day or so ago. I had turned my headache off the better to keep a clear head, but Prof had to suffer his. He winced with increasing frequency when he was struck with particularly painful throbs. I turned mine back on occasionally, to get a feel for how bad Prof was feeling. The headache was BAD, and getting worse. We had also informed each other that our faces were starting to look different as the fluid loss progressed. They'd started changing quite a while earlier, but neither of us had mentioned it before, not wanting to depress each other. Our lips were very much smaller than normal, our noses shrunken, and neither of us could blink as our eye sockets were pulled so tight and recessed into our skulls. Prof was the first of us to experience functional difficulties, with they and him getting steadily worse during the day. He became clumsier and mentally slower, the latter being especially obvious when he was trying to type messages or numbers into one of the cellphones. After the second time a phone slipped through his fingers and fell toward the floor (I caught it both times), My second cellphone catch had occurred after Prof had unsuccessfully tried to call 9-1-1, as we did from time to time. I happened to glance at the screen after I retrieved it, and noticed he'd dialed 9-9-1 and hadn't hit the button to dial the call yet. He'd made two mistakes in only four buttons, and had probably imagined hearing the usual sounds of the call not going through. After that, I kept the phones to myself. They appeared to be our only faint hope, but they could smash if they hit the concrete floor badly. In addition, we'd both put messages into the phones that we wanted to be retrieved if we weren't found in time, which was looking all too likely now. Speaking was difficult for both of us because our mouths were so dry, but we could make ourselves understood if we made the effort. Prof started having periods in which he was oblivious and mumbling unintelligibly. On another occasion, shortly after I'd given him another mint and his mouth was a little lubricated, he thought I was Vanessa and he clearly told me he knew he was going to die and how much he loved me. He spent five minutes thanking me for his life with me, while I sobbed tearlessly. Other times he was his usual, lucid self. During one conversation we talked openly - between coughs, rasping breaths and pauses to try to lubricate our mouths - about the trouble we were in. Prof added, "Don't give up. I not. Go long as possible. Hope. Sure huge effort at home. Could find us any time. Hang on long you can." "I'm SO SORRY. I've let you down. Put you in terrible danger. If only I didn't kill both..." "Mark. Two murderers try kill you. You naked, hands leg hurt. Chained. You save us. You incredible man. I very proud known you..." #3: #4: " ... Keys not in room. Dom say 'leave nothing useful'. If you leave one alive for keys. He escape, kill us. No one do better than you. You gain days. Good days. I make peace. Leave messages. Spend time you. Have hope." We didn't have any conversations that long again; Prof couldn't physically or mentally participate for that long. I was starting to have increasingly long and serious lapses too. There were conversations that Prof and I chose not to have. He wanted no recriminations or "If only" regrets, so I kept those conversations within my head. Prof set the tone that we weren't going to have unpleasant conversations. We didn't have much time left, and even though our bodies were getting increasingly sick and painful Prof wanted our time to be as mentally peaceful and, in a way, as enjoyable as possible. Prof never said, "I'm an old man, so I don't really mind dying," nor anything else so pessimistic. I knew he was probably more upset about my dying than his, as he considered me to be far more important than himself, but he didn't comment on that either. Another topic we didn't touch was what the people we were leaving behind would experience. Without Prof's example, I would've been a maudlin mess over thoughts like those. Julia was the one that sent shivers up my spine. She was losing her father and what I'd call her husband, except I'm so much the center of her life that "husband" doesn't capture her feelings nearly strongly enough. And when she learns - as she probably will - that it happened because Prof and I went to Vegas to earn a lot of money, she'll blame herself for pushing us into it. It's horrific to imagine what that'll do to her. Prof didn't talk of his symptoms. He pretended they were not important, even though they were getting extreme. His headaches were getting intolerably bad, his breathing was speeding up alarmingly, and at times he struggled not to throw up, not that there was anything at all to throw. His lips had totally vanished, as if they'd been cut off, and mine felt the same. His nose had shrunk to less than half its normal size, and his eyeballs were recessed so far back that they looked like black pits. His face, and surely mine too, looked like something out of a horror movie; like a long-dead zombie risen from the grave, except that Prof and I were heading toward it. If dehydration was having such an horrific effect on our faces, what damage was it doing inside our body? We didn't discuss that, but it was impossible not to think of it - when we were capable of thinking, because that was going downhill too. Despite all his symptoms, when Prof could, he smiled at me. I started experiencing the same mental symptoms as Prof, probably about half a day behind him. On one occasion I was flying one of the cellphones into the other room to get it near the stairs, when I turned around to ask Prof to get me a class of milk. I turned back to the cellphone just in time to stop it from crashing out of sight. I decided from then on to move the cellphones by sliding them slowly along at floor level, only raising vertically when they were near the door, but even that got difficult for me as my ability to concentrate on long tasks failed. More than once I noticed a cellphone on the floor and didn't know whether I was in the middle of bringing it back or was still sending it to the other room. I increasingly caught myself mumbling, usually to myself because Prof was sleeping more often than not. Sometimes I was talking to other people, usually Julia, Carol, Mom and/or Dad. Julia was very often in my thoughts, I thought because of my being with Prof now. Although I feared Prof wasn't going to be with me for much longer. Sometimes I was talking to people like my second grade teacher, or a fat ginger-headed boy who used to beat me up every Wednesday, or a woman who rebuked me for peeing behind a tree when I was four. Prof croaked, "MARK!" "MARK!" "MARK!" "Huh?" "Mark!" "Yes?" "Put ring on." It took a second to sink in. I sat up. "Yes. Thank you. Prof. On wedding finger. I love your family, Prof." "We. Love you. Mark." It took me a couple of seconds to see it, which scared me because it shouldn't have taken that long. I fetched it to me as fast as I could, letting my body provide the deceleration because I was having trouble managing the flying process. I floated it up to my left hand and put it on. I held up my left hand with the fingers spread, saying, "On third finger, Prof. No second. No third. {Giggle}." Prof had passed out, so he missed my lunacy. Sleeping sounded good, so I made sure someone had put the cat out (which was silly because we don't have a cat, but if we did, I think it'd be better if the cat put me out, haha), then I went to sleep too. I woke fifteen minutes later with the OBVIOUS solution for how to escape from a dungeon. All I had to do was what Julia had so often told me to do: google it! I reached for the keyboard. It took me several seconds to give up looking for my study computer, even though it'd been right in front of me a minute ago. I was very angry at Boss for not bringing my computer. While I was awake I checked the cellphones. They had the usual "No Service", but the time seemed wrong, as it was a three or four hours later than I thought. I looked at Prof. He was sleeping, if you could call it that. His breathing was very irregular and rapid; his arms, legs and head were jerking in spasms; and his face was horrific to look at, especially with the grimaces of pain passing almost continuously across it. I formed an NP-fingertip and used it to feel for his pulse. When his arm was still for long enough, I could feel that his pulse was racing. I stroked his forehead, the way I like Mom to stroke mine when I'm sick, hoping it'd calm him. #1: #3: #4: #2: #1: #4: #3: | #3: #4: | #4: #4: #1: #1: #4: #4: #3: #3: #4: #3: #3: #2: < Why the difference? Your Prof looks about twelve hours healthier than ours, which is quite a big difference over four and a bit days.> #1: #4: #3: #3: #1: #2: #1: #1, #2, #2, #3, #3, #4, #4: #1: #3: #3: #3: #1: #2: #3: #3: #1: #1: #3: #4: #1: #2: #3: #3: #1: #1: #1: #2: #4: #2: #3: #1: #2: #1: #3: #1: #2: #3: #4: #1: #3: #3: #4: #1: #All: (The previous paragraph is just a short way of writing that everyone - except for the previous speaker - said much the same thing. Writing multiple, near identical repeats is too tedious. We often did quickly send "Agreed" as it was our version of "Roger" or "10 - 4".) #3: #4 : I yelled as best I could with my mouth being so totally dry, "PROF! I LOVE YOU." I wanted to say so much more, but speaking verbally was terribly difficult and slow. I wanted to thank him, wanted to tell him how much I appreciated everything he'd done for me since I'd met him, and especially over the last few days. I wanted to, but couldn't even end with a "Goodbye," because alerting him to my dying would hurt him very much. Time forced me to stop far short of what I needed to say. Prof had stopped twitching at the call of his name, but that was his only reaction. His eyes didn't open, he didn't smile, he didn't answer. I knew how distracting my deliriums had been, so I doubted I'd gotten through to him. Chances are he wouldn't have been able to understand my rasping croaks anyway. We can talk very fast internally by now, but we'd talked a lot so that had used up a large chunk of our déjà vu time. It'd taken several seconds to say our inadequate goodbye to Prof, and we certainly didn't have time to try to find out whether he'd heard us or not. We turned our head away from Prof as we stopped our heart. #1: ------- Part 10: My Third Merge, to 8 Minds ------- Chapter 228: I'll Get You Out Prof, I Promise Monday, May 23, 2005 (Continued) Dying wasn't painful, as it wasn't a heart attack in the usual sense. Our body demanded oxygen, and filling our lungs didn't appease that demand, so that was very unpleasant. It didn't last for long though, as our brain had already been on its last legs. We quickly died, it happened during déjà vu so the other Mark knew it, and he commanded his heart to start pumping again, please. It did so. #1: #3: #8: #2: #7: #2: I centered. We were immediately struck by how our body felt: like every cell of our body was vibrating a little. It was a WEAK sensation, but it was VERY attention getting because it was so incredibly weird. #4: #5: Obviously it was impossible that our impression was literally true, because to feel all our cells vibrating we'd have to have tactile nerves next to all of them, which was obviously very silly as it takes thousands(?)/millions(?) of cells to make a single nerve. We decided that there was something going on that our brain didn't know how to interpret, so it was giving a misleading sensation. It was probably something to do with our getting energy from the Universe, in the way we did when we could run up to our optimal speed without fatigue. We hoped that was the case, because we would welcome more energy. After so many days of not having any food, we felt drained and limp the whole time. It hadn't been an urgent problem before as we'd been chained to a chair, so not doing any physical exertion, but we REALLY hoped to be able to discover a way out of this place now, which might need some physical activity. #1: We turned our head to look for the heaviest object in the room to test our NP on. This was the first time we'd moved our newly-eight-minded body since centering, and the movement's intention ki was immediately apparent. And BOY did we ever sense it! Proximity was FAR more detailed than it'd been before. Previously arms and hands had no detail at all, as if someone had painted a body using one single stroke with a very thick brush to represent the arm and hand. After some very quick intended movements, we learned that we could now sometimes differentiate fingers! Even our missing finger, as our brain could still intend to move it, not being used to its absence yet. If we hadn't previously discovered EKP, seeing ki flow from the end of where our missing finger would have been might have led to the discovery anyway. The increased resolution was cool. I noticed that I could also distinguish my gender, but only just, and only when I thought about moving my 'gender'. [[I have sometimes used a pixel metaphor in this biography, but only in comments from the future-me. It was not something that had occurred to the current me yet because I'd not discovered centering and the proximity sense until I'd had four minds. This was my very first experience with a different level of proximity ability. In the metaphor, one mind gave the equivalent to a 1-pixel (maybe 2-pixel) black-and-white 'picture'. Two minds gave a 10-pixel gray-scale picture, and four minds gave 100-pixels in color. The new eight-mind version was 1,000 pixels of rich color. Color is part of the metaphor, not how proximity seemed to me, so "rich color" is just meant to convey the nuance that there was some added 'depth' to the sense that I didn't understand yet.]] We formed an NP-fingertip beside the heaviest object in the room, Goon, and started trying to push his shoulder up. #6: #1: #3: #4: #5 to #8 quickly agreed who would do that by using private messages - which did work as normal - and #8 created a new fingertip. #4: #1, #3: We hadn't known who owned NP-fingertips when we first discovered NP (or TK, as it was back then), but we'd gained ownership knowledge after a few days, although we could only guess how we knew that information, as fingertips are invisible in normal sight and appeared identical in proximity. Our guess was that we weren't sensing each other's NP-points or blobs, or even our own, but were reading each others' mental images of what we were doing, and that also came with ownership information because we subconsciously knew which mind supplied the images. We'd gotten used to knowing the owner, even though being able to sense ki-effects outside our proximity range was strangely inconsistent with there being a proximity range. We were rather upset to lose the ownership information now, because it had made coordination easier. In the situation we were in now, we didn't want ANY of our abilities to get harder to use, in case it made a life-or-death difference in the wrong direction. [[Our guess about how we sensed each other's ki-effects was more wrong than right, and the proximity inconsistency was because we didn't understand what that was either. Fortunately we didn't need to understand what was happening in order for our increased number of subconsciouses to get coordinated again. The loss of ki-effect ownership information corrected itself about half an hour from now. We didn't notice it, but at the same time as the subconsciouses made the connections necessary to share ki-effect ownership information, they also made memory sharing between 3A and 3B possible. The subconsciouses already knew how to share information, they just needed to make a few new connections between the incumbent and newly arrived minds.]] #5: #3: #1: #7: #1: #1 started pushing up on Goon's shoulder. #1: #3: #3 started doing so. #4: #1: #1 moved his NP-point to above our thigh, and started pushing down lightly, then slowly increasing the force. After a few seconds, #1: #6: #1: #6: #7: #3: #1: #1 formed two pairs on NP-fingertips, one pair at each end of the beam, as that's our usual way of lifting something. #7: We all saw the answer emerge. The previous limit of four appeared simultaneously, then: pop, pop, pop, pop. After a brief pause, #1: #6: #1: The wood shot up to the ceiling, making a loud thump, and another one when #1 let it hit the ground. #1: We struggled for a couple of seconds until, #8: #1: #4: #1: #8: #8 created eight NP-points, and used one of them to push down hard on my thigh, then canceled one of them and repeated the thigh push, then canceled another one, etc. We all felt the pressure get higher each time. #1 then accelerated the wood upward using four of his eight fingertips. It still accelerated rapidly. #1: #3: #1: Three of eight NP-fingertips accelerated the wood. Two of eight barely moved it. #1: #5: #6: #8: #4: #6: #3: #6: #4: #8: #1: #8: <"Terminal Dehydration", I guess. I'm glad to hear you guys have the same lifestyle as us. It's mostly obvious now that I think about it, because we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Boss and Goon seeing us win at Vegas, but for future reference, we should remember to ask the potential merge-mates whether they are rich and have dozens of girls available.> #4: #8: #6: #3: #3 created an NP-point in front of us. We tend to create them with about a one-inch diameter unless there's a reason otherwise, as that's a good size for holding something, pushing, etc. If we need a different size, they can be shrunk or expanded virtually instantly. He shrank it as far as it'd go, then expanded it. #3: #5: 3A: #5: #1: #All: #1: #6: #1: #6: #8: [[There was no way we could see any pattern in the dimensional differences, especially because there'd been chains of causes and effects preceding the changes that we'd noticed. For example, the reason "One Glass" got their glass of water was because Boss brought one down from the kitchen on his return from looting Prof's garage. The reason he did that was because a couple of years ago he'd been in a situation where the victim hadn't been able to talk properly and it'd lost him some money. Dom King back in the "No Water" dimension had managed to get the money anyway because the victim hadn't hidden it as well. That victim behaved differently than in this dimension because... (you get the idea: the causal chain goes back). The chain of causes and effects makes seeing the original deviations impossible, so seeing the pattern in those deviations is even more impossible. Plus, the initial deviations are mostly semi-random. "Semi" for two reasons. First there aren't an infinite number of w-dimensions, so there is a natural limiting function (whereas truly random would be unbounded). Second, "probabilistic" is a better word than random, with some of the influences on the probabilities following natural laws that you're not aware of. They constrain the range and frequency of different outcomes. As previously mentioned, Mom and Dad's firstborn was a male in 95% of the dimensions, not the 50% full randomness would have resulted in.]] #1: We experimented for a couple of minutes. We discovered that we had more control over the NP shape than previously, but FAR short of what a lock-pick would require. #1: We soon discovered that the maximum diameter of a light blob had doubled to twelve feet. The maximum light output from a single blob seemed to be four times what it had been previously, which was curiously not the eight times expected from doubling a blob's diameter. Walking from shade into sunlight can easily be a factor of a thousand change in the amount of light being seen, so the fourfold blob output increase was no big deal. Whereas each mind's being able to NP four times more forcefully was a BIG DEAL! Thinking of our abilities as weapons made us reexamine the idea of blinding someone with a light blob, but they were still pretty much useless for blinding someone. Distracting them would work, but weren't bright enough to temporarily blind someone, assuming my vision was normal, which it had been before. The problem was that the light radiated from blobs evenly in all directions, without a super-bright point source like a filament. There was no reflector sending all the light in one direction either. Reducing the size of the blob in an attempt to make it brighter only had limited success, as at a certain point the maximum output reduced too. [[I was assuming that was because only a limited amount of light could be excited from the molecules within the light blob. That was wrong, because the light wasn't being created from molecules, but was being tapped directly into existence inside the blob. There were energy gradient issues, but they were mostly my preconception, so were artificial until the sizes got much smaller than I thought. Another reason I didn't appreciate for why light blobs were ineffective blinders, was that the human eye is AMAZINGLY tolerant to ranges of light intensity.]] If we said that a mind's previous output was equivalent to the light output of 16 lightbulbs (that's a guess, but as merging involves multiples of 2, I'll choose that as an appropriate, roughly correct number), then one mind could now output 64 bulbs' worth. We were in a large room, about fifteen feet long by eight feet wide, so one of my minds could light it very well now. If one mind created more than one blob, the maximum output scaled down, exactly as it did for the force from NP-fingertips. Two blobs each had a maximum of 32 bulbs' worth. If one of those two blobs was set at "very dim", the other blob's maximum was still 32. In other words, the maximums added up to 64, not the current output. I could produce 8 minds by 64 bulbs = 512 bulbs' worth of light throughout the room. I didn't see how it would help, unfortunately. Heat also went up by what felt like a factor of 4 per mind. One heat blob - from a mind not creating any other blobs or NP-points - used to produce heat the equivalent of somewhat less than one lightbulb (call it three-quarters of a bulb's worth). So one blob could now output as much heat as three bulbs. With all 8 minds I could make as much heat as 24 bulbs. That's about as much heat as a small electric bar heater. It'd be pointless trying to warm the entire room, but I could create eight 4-foot diameter blobs and superimpose them all over Prof, and that'd warm him nicely. Prof was suffering discomfort from the cold. The room itself was cold, he was lightly dressed, and he'd had no food for four days now to generate body heat with. #6: #3: #6: #1: #3: #1: That was simply a matter of doing External Ki Projection and seeing how far away from us we could see the ki projection extend. We learned two things: Our proximity range was now six feet, and we radiated four times as much ki as before. #3: #6: #1: #5: #7: #1: #5: #6: #8: #7: We took a couple of minutes for personal thoughts. We'd all been watching Prof a great deal. The 3A'ers were looking because they'd learned from the déjà vu how bad Prof was going to get in a few hours, and how real and unpleasant his death was becoming. The 3B'ers with very different and mixed emotions. Partly to remind us of our loss in 3B-land (with morbid fascination, the way your tongue keeps returning to the gap of a missing tooth), partly because we'd given up on our Prof in order to help this one. There were a whole bunch of pretty mixed up and intense emotions involved. Prof had been mostly out of it. He'd roused and mumbled when the 2-by-4 had hit the ceiling, but had then dropped back asleep, although it was much more of a disturbed unconsciousness than a real sleep. After a couple of minutes, #5: #All: #5: #All: #1: #3: #7: Goon weighed a great deal more than 110 pounds, but it was still easy to roll him partly over, put the 2-by-4 under him and lever him over even more. When he was about sixty degrees from his original position we had easy sight of his topmost back pocket. With so much force and being able to make quarter inch fingertips, the best strategy now would be to create a small fingertip and push it inside his pocket to feel around. We could now 'zoom around' inside his pocket, to feel if anything was in there. We'd only have half a second before each fingertip would cancel, but we could do it over and over again until we'd searched the whole pocket. Half a second later we discovered something useful: the fingertip didn't cancel. We stopped and waited. It canceled after two seconds. We did another one in front of us, moving it into the other room and waiting. Two seconds later it canceled. Excellent! Not in the sense that it was a way out of our current predicament, but it'd be very nice if we did live. The half-second limit is VERY short as there's not much that can be done in that time, whereas two seconds is MUCH longer. The main benefit would be that we could look away from whatever we were NP'ing, have a good look at something else, then turn back to the NP'ing. In half a second that's a frantic rush; in two seconds we could take our time. Wanting to look away briefly happens so often that the improvement to a two-second limit was very welcome. Plus there are sometimes situations like this one, where I am doing something useful which happens to go out of sight. Now I'd be able to get more done. We got busy with our pocket searching. The first pocket was quickly determined to be empty, so we double- and triple-checked it because our lives were at stake! It was definitely empty. We let him flop onto his back again, we jacked up his other hip and searched that pocket sight-unseen, by feel from the top of his hip. It was likewise empty. When he was on his back we re-searched his front pockets, finding a nickel we'd missed the first time. We had no use for the coins in the wallets, so another one gained us nothing. We searched the rest of his body; under his shirt, patting down his jeans very well, helped by our NP-'points' now being up to four inches in diameter and capable of being bent into somewhat of a concave curve. I even took off his shoes, flew them over to me, visually and NP-searched them, flew them back and put them back on him, doing up the laces afterward. I pulled his fly up properly too. I re-searched Boss very thoroughly, including the shoe thing, just in case he'd hidden a padlock key in his shoe. Unlikely, but very worth checking! No padlock keys, or anything else useful. #7 : #4: #7: #4: #7: #4: #8: #4: #5: #8: #1: #3: #4: #5: #6: In an anguished tone of mind, #5: The rest of 3B were also horrified that they'd let Prof and themselves die so needlessly, and there was an emotional discussion about it, a lot of it was 3A reassuring 3B. Even though it was a pointless discussion, as it was far too late to do anything about it, some of the points that came up are worth mentioning: 3A: 3A: 3A: 3A: There was more like that, and it was - for the most part - reassuring. Everyone in 3B still felt as shitty as hell for having missed a chance to keep us alive back there. One very important point did emerge from the reassurances was that we all agreed that we were underestimating the degradation in our mental abilities: intelligence, concentration, problem solving skills, and even the ability to resist falling asleep. The VERY clear lesson was NOT to wait until we thought things were bad before we started doing last resort things, because by then we would almost certainly not be capable of performing them. We would have a serious talk with Prof soon, including about cannibalism. If he tried to put that decision off until things were more serious, we'd make a big deal about how our going downhill made every task so much harder that we had to start it far sooner than we'd believe was necessary. One of the things that the 3B guys were kicking themselves for was that they fell asleep for several hours, not waking until just before the déjà vu. In that time their Prof had gone downhill so far that even if we'd discovered how to create water, it could well have been too late to help him. We did NOT want to fall asleep in this dimension and to wake up to find this Prof was beyond our ability to help. That was a SCARY possibility, especially because we couldn't control our falling asleep. Although this body was one drink of water better off, it had already started having sudden naps. Some of those wasted hours we couldn't afford to lose now. Reassurances and related lessons absorbed, we returned to the delightful possibility of creating water out of thin air. We tried to imagine wetness in our mouth, we tried to imagine it was raining, we tried to create a puddle on the floor, we tried to imagine a palm full of water, we tried to teleport water out of the kitchen sink or pipes (somewhere above us) to down here, we tried to teleport water from the Williams' hot tub (not that we knew where it was in relation to us, but at least we knew what it looked like), and several other even sillier ideas. None of them worked. We also tried to summon Hs and Os separately, hoping some of them would get into threesomes, but there was no sign of water or any mental feeling of ki activity happening. We eventually gave it up. #5: #1: [[There are several fairly obvious smarter ideas that we could've had, but we truly weren't thinking well. The obvious one here is to set only one of the alarms for 11:30, and the other one for 15 minutes ahead of now, and every 15 minutes, reset it ahead another 15, so that if we did fall asleep, it had a good chance of waking us almost immediately. We simply never thought of it. Dehydration has substantial and pernicious effects. There were several other good ideas that we could have implemented, both before and after our merge, which never occurred to us (but maybe to you?). Just as drunks underestimate their mental impairment, so do people who've had the opposite of too much to drink.]] #3: #7: #1: #4: #5: #1: I couldn't see the stairs themselves through the open door. I could see a segment of that room's floor and part of what I'll call the north wall (that's got a 25% chance of being correct). The stairs ran down the west wall. The door at the top of the stairs was on the north wall, its side effectively attached to the west wall. So, from the north wall that I could see, if I used NP-fingertips to feel vertically upward until I hit the ceiling, then went farther away from us along the wall toward the west, I'd eventually hit the northwest corner. Coming back east a foot then sliding down should slide straight onto the door, or through the doorway if it was open. That's as far as I planned for now. It was time to put that much into action. I zipped an NP-point through our doorway and to the far wall. Sliding the point up the north wall to the ceiling was easy. Because I was feeling my way and I didn't know the shape of the room, hitting the ceiling was a surprise. I knew there'd be a ceiling sooner or later, but exactly where was a surprise. I didn't bother trying to hurry my reactions to new information, as I had an infinite supply of NP-fingertips. I simply canceled the current explorer and started a new one. The second NP-point I ran up the north wall to the ceiling much faster, then I ran it west. I moved them quickly as I only had two unsighted seconds per attempt, and also because I was quite eager to get home as soon as possible. The two-second limit expired, but I repeated the process even faster with the next fingertip, and the one after that. I felt that one hit the west wall, which was excellent. It canceled and I started a fresh one. This is when things start deviating from the plan. The plan was to VERY rapidly go up to the ceiling then west, not even bothering to feel the north wall as the fingertip zoomed west until it hit that wall. Then explore back a foot and down to find the doorframe. What happened in practice was that the NP-point wouldn't zoom west as fast as I wanted. I'd never known an empty NP-fingertip to have a speed limit before; only when the air resistance got too strong for their pushing force, which was a limit magnitudes above the top speeds I was obtaining now. I knew fingertips hadn't slowed down as a result of the merge, because I'd been moving them around at full speed from where I was to the other room's north wall. The problem only started when I was trying to move them fast when they were out of sight. I did some experiments. In the room I was in now I could zoom an NP-point at the usual high speed when I was watching it. When I zoomed it behind me, so it was out of sight, it slowed down, but was still much faster than it'd been in the next room. I could zip it up that room's north wall to the ceiling very fast, but when going west the maximum speed was slower. Not only that, but the maximum speed reduced even along that one wall. I concluded that the maximum speed was affected with how well I knew the area it was traveling in. If I didn't know it at all, I had to feel my way slowly; if I knew it perfectly because I was looking at it, the NP-point could zoom. Which gave this plan a HUGE problem. To reconnoiter the kitchen we needed to send NP-points along unknown walls, around unknown corners, onto unknown countertops, etc. The cumulative effects of all those unknowns was going to reduce the NP-fingers to a crawl, so their two second limit would be up long before they got anything useful done. It was worth persisting with. At least I wanted to find out whether the door at the top of the stairs was open or closed. If it was open I might be able to get a cellphone up there, wait a minute for it to connect, then send a fingertip to hit the "Send Message" button. I went through quite a few NP-fingertips getting to the west wall, back a bit, then down to a small lip, then over that to the door. Each trip increased my familiarity with the other room, and allowed slightly greater speeds, so I got slightly farther. I eventually learned that the stair's door was closed. I set about trying to find out where and what sort of door handle it had. My maximum speed along the north wall to the west one continued to get slightly faster after quite a few more repeated journeys, but the increase in speed was minor, and was less than I'd achieved before. Since reaching the door, I'd only managed to increase my fingertips speed about 10%, which wasn't enough to find the handle. I tried firing as many fingertips down that wall as fast as I could send them. With seven minds and eight fingertips per mind, that was a LOT of trips. The maximum speed slowly increased for another minute or so, then it stopped improving, still without my doing any more than barely reaching the door. Another trick I tried was to station other NP-points along the journey, as 'signposts'. For example, I found where the "hit the west wall and back one foot" location was, and I put an NP-point there. The next NP-fingertip could go along the north wall until it reached that signpost, and then it could go down to the door frame, saving the time to go to the west wall then back a foot. Obviously the signpost NP only had a two-second life too, so I had to send it out far enough ahead of the 'traveling NP' for the 'signpost NP' to be in positions for the 'Traveler', but not so far ahead that it hit the two-second limit before the 'Traveler' arrived. Setting up signposts for the ceiling, the point above the doorframe, the door itself, getting them all in position at the staggered times for the Traveler to make another attempt to find the door handle was - to put it mildly - a pain in the ass! And that technique was clearly going to be impossible if we got through the doorway. When the signpost idea had seemed unworkable, I'd thought of trying to shortcut all the wall following. If I could put an NP-signpost on the doorframe, could I fly a new NP-Traveler directly from where I was to the doorway out of this room, then in a straight line directly to the signpost NP? The answer was yes, but even slower than along the wall. I believed because it was flying through space that I had even less understanding of. I knew it was empty space, but I wasn't familiar with the location. I tried to improve that. Repeated diagonal flights through the next room helped, as did feeling out the dimensions of the whole room. The better I could visualize the room, the faster the NP-points could move, but no matter how much remote reconnaissance I did, NP-points traveling through an unseen room had a seriously reduced top speed. Finding a phone somewhere down a hallway and in another room was clearly going to be impossible. Even wrapping a cellphone in a gag, sliding it along the floor to the base of the steps, then up each step - all to avoid the risk of dropping it onto concrete from a height - was going to be an extremely slow process. And once I got it as far as the doorway, I wasn't sure I'd be able to lift it anywhere. I had serious doubts that I'd be able to open the door, but at least I'd eventually be able to get the cellphone to the top step beside the door. From there it might pick up a signal through the wooden door. Even finding and hitting the "Send" button was going to be a problem, because it was going to take 1.9 seconds just to reach the phone, and then maybe 0.2 seconds to find the right button (those times are a guess, but you can see the problem I was anticipating). It was CERTAINLY a pain in the ass, but it was even more certainly worth trying, so I started the project. Many VERY frustrating, almost totally non-productive minutes later, I had the cellphone at the base of the stairs, but was having great trouble getting it to 'climb' the stairs. The phone being so far away from me and diagonally across an unsighted room, it was taking almost the full two seconds to get the fingertips to the phone, let alone get them under it to lift it up the first step. After several minutes of that frustration, #6: #2: #6: (The previous sentence was subsequently nominated for Understatement of the Week.) #5: #1: #8: #3: ------- Chapter 229: the Eyes Have It Monday, May 23, 2005 (Continued) We left the cellphone where it was to discuss this new idea. #2: #6: #2: #8: #1: #6: #2: #5: #6: (My minds understand that "white blob" means three superimposed red, green and blue blobs.) #1: #6: #8: #1: #6: #6 created the light blob. Eye-sized, yellow and about as bright as the light bulb overhead, that way it could see whether it needed its own light source or needed another source. He closed our eyes, then... Suddenly we were all seeing ourself. And an instant later, ourself with a new expression on our face. Not of happiness, as you might've expected, but horror at how bad our dehydration made us look. It was such a shock we lost center, and our horror and excitement meant it took us several seconds to calm down and get back on the job. We braced ourselves for the sight of our face, and recreated the sight. Speaking about the physics of the process, it was very much the same as a normal view. It was full color rather than just yellow. There was more yellow than usual because of the yellow the blob was giving off, but our ordinary eyes would have seen more yellow too because of that. The perspective was ordinary, i.e., was not a spherical view, and there was no wide-angle lens distortion. It looked very ordinary, just like looking in a mirror. Then the scene panned rapidly around to the doorway, stopped to look at it for a half second, then the view panned upward to look at the ceiling. Just for a brief moment of stability before it tilted down to look at Boss's body. #6: #1: #6: ^ [[Human visual processing in the brain is very much a "divide and conquer" process, to a truly bizarre degree. Whatever you are looking at is sort of projected onto a movie screen, except that the movie screen is actually a whole stack of screens. Each screen only shows a particular aspect of the image. One screen shows ONLY horizontal lines, another screen shows only vertical lines, another diagonal lines, another only circles (not ovals), etc. The brain ends up with a stack of transparent sheets, each containing no, or a single very rudimentary, component. For example, looking straight on at a friend, the sheet that records straight vertical lines might have a small line segment for the line of the center of his nose, and that's all. All of those sheets have to be individually processed, analyzed and compared to achieve anything, e.g., to recognize someone, the person's expression, state of health, etc. (It is my STRONG belief that there is an extra screen that captures the shape of breasts, and that this screen has a prehistoric genetic mutation, carried by the Y-chromosome, that causes it to output too much amperage, making anything it registers very attention getting.) #6 said he was expecting a spherical perspective, but he was also looking at our face, expecting to see that. He was totally familiar with what our face looked like with normal vision, but he had only a very rough idea of how it would look if distorted by a wide-angle view. With two different expectations, the stronger one dominated. The image of our face was sent to our visual processing screens, and naturally an "ordinary looking" image resulted, as it was using the ordinary process. By the way, we all saw the resultant image (not just #6) because we all have accesses to our senses, same as we all feel what NP-fingertips touch, we all smell with our nose, etc. Sensory input is sent to our brain where it's processed, and is available for every mind to access.]] ^ #6: < ... The good news is that this is immediately usable. So far I haven't tried to move the blob. All I've done is think about looking in different directions. I haven't tried using it with our eyes open either. I'll try that first because it's an easy test.> #All: (or words to the effect). We'd gotten a superimposed image, for the second or so #6 let it last, which included a single particularly confusing sideways pan with the light blob's 'eye'. #1: #5: #8: #4: #8: #6: [[As is fairly obvious, our sense of balance uses visual cues, so superimposed images can create a giddy, disorienting sensation - especially if they're tilting differently because we're very sensitive to tilts. It's very different from listening to two conversations.]] A second later, after a couple of lurches of movement, #6: #2: #6: The blob flew straight to the doorway, too fast for human movement, especially my movement at the moment. There it paused to give us a chance to look at the room. Across it was the stairs going up the opposite wall, with the door at the top closed. It was quite a dark room, and one of my other minds (#5) reacted by helpfully creating a bright yellow light blob in the doorway. That helped for a second, until #5 realized that he might be able to see with it, which created a superimposition of two simultaneous sight sources. Almost immediately #5 canceled the light blob. #5: A second later that was achieved, and #6 could carry on with his exploring. We'd already seen that the cellphone/gag bundle was sitting at the base of the stairs. Now #6 moved our vision quickly across the room to the cellphone, then turned to look up the stairs. #1: The blob zoomed up the stairs. A little bit disorienting, but only a little. Years of watching special effects on TV might have acclimatized me to movements like that. There was no lock on the inside, just a push-down-then-pull door handle. #2: Pause, then, #2: #6: #1: #2: #1: <#6, can you look back at the doorway so the NP can go faster please. I don't know the room well enough yet.> #6: We ALL saw it - just to the right of the doorway into our room there were three nails sticking out of the wall. Dangling from one of the nails was a ring of keys! With a pistol on one of the others and their belts and knife sheaths on the floor below the nails, but who gives a fuck about those! [[Dom was a careful guy. He'd put the nails there himself, to hang the keys and the two guns on before entering our room. With those items kept out of our reach, there was no way we could get away. The next worse item we could grab would be a knife. With our hands held the way they were, it was almost impossible for us to thrust with a knife. One slice of a thigh was all we could have achieved before our target stepped away, or was dragged away by his partner.]] #1: #6 moved the light blob closer, by heading straight for the keys. Just as well he wasn't walking in our real body, because he walked right off the side of the stairs, as safety rails don't stop light blobs. #1 reshaped his NP so it was slightly concave at the top and quite wide, slid it under the top of the ring and lifted it off the nail and brought it to our body. #8: #1: #8: [We did the suggested test only a few minutes later, once the more urgent matters were dealt with. We sent a blob around to where the hooks are, let it have a very good look around in all directions, then successfully created an NP-point at the hooks. Considering all the recent developments, it's starting to look like the cookies in Vanessa's kitchen are in more danger than Prof and me.] A couple of seconds later I canceled the light blob, opening my real eyes to look at a very beautiful key ring floating in front of my face. It contained six keys, two noticeably larger than the other small ones. A few more seconds after that and I had the first of my hands' padlocks undone. After four days being locked motionless and with every finger broken, I couldn't use that hand, so I used NP to continue to unlock padlocks, doing my other hand next. It was a bit awkward, but I was pretty highly motivated. #5: #1: We couldn't bend over to look at the padlock because our waist was still chained. So we closed our eyes and used a light blob to look at the padlock while we unlocked it. Useful things, light blobs! The key went in. It was hard to turn, but with 110 pounds of force available, a few more fingertips putting force on either side of the key and others to hold the padlock stationary, we got the job done. When the lock opened, we didn't even start removing the chain. We just sat there thinking. #5: #7: #5: #2: #7: We thought about it for a few minutes. We weren't in a condition to go anywhere if we could possibly avoid it, so I was going to call 9-1-1 on the house phone, presuming it had one. That'd bring the cops to us. The cellphones had to be destroyed and lost because I couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be some trace of our having used them. It had taken us probably thousands of operations to get the cellphone to the base of the stairs, but fetching it back was almost mindlessly easy. It was a pity, but I went through all the messages we'd stored on both phones and deleted them all, making sure I didn't read any of Prof's. I deleted every phone number, the call registries, and everything else that I could find to delete. I wiped them very, very thoroughly, then wrapped them in one of the gags to take upstairs for disposal. There was some tidying up to do in the room, like putting the crap back in each baddies' pockets and simple stuff like that. With the force I had now, that didn't take long. What to do with the gun was a bit of a question mark, but I came up with a reasonable plan for that, I hoped. Getting upstairs was now the problem. I hadn't weighed myself for quite a while, but I guessed I normally weighed about 170 pounds. Presumably I'd lost some recently, but it wouldn't have been 60 pounds, so NP couldn't do all the work. I was too weak to use the 2-by-4 as a crutch and hop upstairs. The thought crossed my mind, but was instantly dismissed as being impossible for me. Not to mention that my body had been immobile for four days, so wouldn't be capable of any athletics for a fair while. I can make 64 NP-points, each 4 inches in diameter. That was so many that it gave me some useful options. I created an NP-'rug', 4 NP-platters wide, overlapping slightly so the nominal 16" width reduced to about 12". I made the rug 10 NP-platters long, positioned to produce a 5-foot long by 1-foot wide rug, using up 40 NP-points. That left 24 unused, which was more than I needed, so I put 8 more into the rug, about where my center of gravity would be. I was using 6 minds' worth of NP, so I'd be lifting 6/8th's of 110 pounds, whatever that was? 70-something pounds probably. That was good enough, I thought. Happy with the design of the rug, I broke it up for now, using the NP-fingertips to help me untie myself from the chair. The chains rattled a great deal, so I kept my eye on Prof. If he didn't wake, I'd be waking him shortly myself. The noise did wake Prof, and he opened his eyes to a very marvelous sight: me unwrapping the chain from around my chair's frame. It took him a second, and then he got it. He had no lips, but the hole of his mouth beamed. He was a VERY happy, gaunt-faced, sunken-eyed, sick, old man. Prof struggled to find the moisture to get his mouth workable. I thought I could anticipate his comment, and I doubted he could get his mouth to work to say anything because my mouth seemed incapable of speech. I used light blobs to signal, "WE FREE. I CALL 9-1-1, THEN LOCK MYSELF AGAIN. WAIT FOR COPS. SAME PLAN BEFORE, BUT YOU KNOW NOTHING, TOO SICK. LEAVE TO ME. I THOUGHT GET YOU DRINK, BUT BETTER WAIT COPS. OKAY?" Prof signaled back, "Yes. Thank you." "THANK YOU. TALK LATER. I CALL NOW." "How walk?" "WATCH." I finished extracting myself from the chair, and slid myself forward in the chair using NP to push me and to care for my smashed leg. I lowered myself to the floor using a lot of NP and my elbows on the chair to make sure I settled down slowly. Once sitting on the floor, I swiveled away from the chair so I could lay myself flat on my back, still using NP to care for my broken leg. The pain was turned off, but I wanted it to work properly in the future. I created the rug again, and used the spare NP to help me roll over onto it. I was now lying face down with every part of my body from my upper-chest down to my feet lying on a rug of NP-'platters' - the 4" wide, somewhat misnamed "fingertips". I summoned the gun and cellphones and lay them on the rug next to my waist. I gave Prof a little wave, and a "BACK SOON." I used NP to raise the lower part of my body a couple of inches, with my elbows supporting the rest of my weight. It was quite a lot of weight, but I could do it. I elbow-walked my way out of the room, with my lower-body 'flying' REALLY slowly after me. It would've been a cakewalk had I been healthy, but I was a LONG way from that. I had to stop for a rest a couple of times before I got to the stairs, and getting up them was a VERY arduous trial, especially because the physical work was increased by my having to use a few NP-points to stop me sliding backward off the rug. I hoped the cops wouldn't come too quickly after I called them, because I'd have trouble getting back to my seat in time. During a rest halfway up the stairs I realized I could elevate my lower-body and legs so they were horizontal, giving me back the NP-points I was using to stop my sliding. At the door I stopped and moved the gun to be on the step in front of me, so I could grab it quickly if I needed to. Being so close to dying before, and so close to living now, I had a HUGE fear of the unknown. I NP-opened the door and sent a very dim light blob to have a look around. I started searching the house for anyone else and a landline phone. Plan B was to use a cellphone if one of them got a signal, or Plan C was to drive us to get help if they didn't. Thank goodness I could probably carry Prof entirely with NP if I needed to. Fortunately Plan A was looking good, as I found a landline phone. Then I used a light blob to search the rest of the house out of fear that there might be someone in here. I did NOT want to fail now! I learned a little thing about light blob movements. Back when NP-points weren't moving well because I didn't know the area well, there'd been a loss of tactile feedback which I'd assumed was because I was moving them too fast and they weren't touching the wall well. What had actually been happening was that their entire performance was degrading. With the light blob, when I lost track of where it was exactly, its performance dropped too, including my losing vision quality, which was easily seen for what it was. If it moved too fast so I lost track of exactly where it was, the vision degradation got worse, and then when I became slightly less sure where it was, the blob self-canceled. I created another one, and searched slower, keeping better track of how all the rooms fitted together. That helped considerably. A more carefully moved blob sent to the same location experienced no static, which confirmed my guess that the degradation hadn't been caused by distance. I searched the whole house, finding no one else. Not even a dead body or any signs of violence, which I'd suspected I might find if the assholes downstairs had killed the owner. No longer being so worried about the unknown, I tried to use all eight minds to help carry my body to the phone, lightening the load on my elbows. Unfortunately our ability to concentrate on remaining centered while being active was so pathetic as to be non-existent, so I lost center once on the way to the phone, resulting in my body suddenly falling to the floor. Thank God I'd turned off the pain from my broken leg. I recentered and used seven minds to carry most of myself. I NP'd the phone's handset down to the floor. It had dial-tone, which was all I wanted to know for now. I hung it back up, then elbow-walked to a nearby window that was partly open. I sent the blob out through the glass and up to have a good look around for me. I had some light blobs cancel out on me because I moved them too far too fast, but they were easily replaced. The outside was pretty much as I'd thought: we were on the side of a hill, surrounded by trees, looking down into a valley with a river and more trees. It was quite pretty, but I couldn't wait to leave. I removed the batteries and SIM cards from the cellphones. That was easier said than done with my having only 80% of one good hand. I created a basin of several NP-points, and using one hand against the other forearm, broke the SIMs in half over the basin, to catch any stray shreds that fell. I kept the big pieces, but flew the basin outside and dumped any scraps. There were plenty of big trees nearby, so I used a blob to locate a good cranny near the top of one of them, made sure the blob had a very good look around so it knew where it was, then I flew one of the half-SIMs up to the cranny and wedged it in good and hard. I repeated that three more times into different trees. The phones and batteries were easier to get rid of because they were nice and heavy. I 'threw' them as far as I could in four different directions. 100 pounds of thrust on a 1 pound item (I guess), generated a LOT of acceleration! By the time the NP-fingertips canceled on me, the phone parts were MOVING! I threw the gun into the trees close beside the road out of here, but a fair way from the house. I expected this crime scene to get a lot of attention, so the gun might eventually be found. Or not. It didn't matter too much, but it was better not to leave guns lying around. It was far enough from the house that very obviously neither Prof nor I could have thrown it there, but a missing third partner driving away in a car easily could have. Then I went to make the call. I didn't know the number of any water delivery companies, so I'd dial 9-1-1. I NP'd the receiver down to floor level. I didn't want to talk, so I wrapped the surplus gag over the mouthpiece to deaden any little grunt I might accidentally make. I NP-dialed 9-1-1. When it was answered and the person listening, I dialed 9-1-1 again. She heard the buttons, and they obviously had a procedure for something like this. "Press 1 for no, 2 for yes. Do you understand me?" "2" "Are you in danger?" My immediately reaction was to answer "22222", but I remembered a comment from Prof when we'd talked about using the buttons to convey the message. He'd told me not to overdo any of my answers because another person calling this in for us wouldn't do that. I answered, "2" "Can you talk?" "1" "Is anyone injured?" "22" "Umm, are you saying two people are injured?" "2" "Are guns involved?" "2" I would have said hydrogen bombs were involved if it'd get a faster response. "How many assailants are there?" A difficult question to answer. There were two corpses, but I don't think they really counted. I decided to send "I don't know", in the form of "Yes and no", so I pressed "12" "TWELVE!" I hurriedly pressed "1". This was probably a remote location so they'd have few cops. I didn't want them to wait until they could take on twelve armed guys before they came! "Umm. Do you know how many assailants there are?" "1" "Do you know if there is more than one?" "1" I figured that was enough so I removed the gag and let the phone fall on the floor, so it thumped a couple of times. Then I NP'd the hang-up button and returned the phone to the cradle. Then I elbow-ran for the stairs. I debated how to get downstairs in a hurry. I'd just about decided to simply push myself forward, letting my elbows absorb all the damage, when, #4: #6: So I waddled onto and down the stairs. I left the door open behind me to encourage inspection by any passing policemen. It was slow, although not as slow as going up had been. I only lost center once, automatically arresting my slide with my hands, thankful that my ability to suppress pain wasn't a ki ability. At the bottom of the stairs, I paused to catch my breath. After a minute I was still panting very rapidly and not feeling like I was getting enough air. Resting wasn't helping. I was beyond exhaustion, but still had one and half rooms to cross and I was seriously worried about the cops arriving before I got chained up again. The aftermath would be SO much easier to deal with if I was an obviously helpless victim! [[It wouldn't have been too bad to be loose as I could've been released by the third guy, but I didn't think of that. Quite a lot of my thinking was poor.]] I forced myself to resume the journey, cursing that NP wasn't twice as powerful, because then it'd be fun to return to my chair. #4: #8: After another half a room I had an idea, #1: I did that, cursing that I hadn't thought of it before. The rest of the slow trip was abrasion free. I arrived at my chair VERY out of breath and with our heart going so fast that "racing" is an understatement. I was UTTERLY exhausted from crossing one and a half rooms. It was hard to believe that I'd run the world's fastest marathon not long ago. I got the mat to tip me onto my ass next to the chair. I was too winded to get onto the chair, so I rested, looking up at Prof for the first time since I returned to the room. Prof signaled, "Call?" I nodded, breathing hard. It took me two or three minutes until I was ready to try for the chair. My right elbow on the seat, my left hand grasping the armrest, and my one good leg ready to push me up. I heaved and NP-lifted myself up into the chair. I made it! "MARK! MARK!" Called Prof, waking me up. He was grunting more than calling my name, as he had almost no speaking ability left. Reattaching the chains was thankfully entirely an NP process, otherwise I never could've done it. There was more slack than there should've been, but that would have to do. I clicked the big padlock home, then the two smaller padlocks. I flew the key ring to one of the pegs in the other room, with the help of a friendly light blob. Then I slumped. Thank CHRIST that was over with! I'd had NO IDEA how weak my body was. "MARK! MARK!" "Huh?" Having got my attention, Prof signaled, "Blindfolds." #4: That was easily done, as they were very light and I was reasonably okay mentally. It was my body that was as weak as a cat. I tried to look around the room to see if I'd forgotten anything, but the hood stopped me. I lifted it and looked around. Everything seemed okay. I saw the gag and thought to wipe my elbows to get any concrete dust off them. I threw the gag away, dropped the hood, and breathed a sigh of relief. A very quick sigh, because I was still panting to get my breath. I settled down to wait for the cops. A few minutes later, #4: #5: #2: ^ "SIR! Wake up! Are you all right?" "Mmpg." The young, ashen-faced cop took that as a "Yes" and rushed over to pull Prof's hood off and repeat his question. Prof's mouth was even drier than mine, but it made a noise of some sort. "Are you Archibald Williams?" There'd been a great deal of publicity about our kidnapping, so the cop remembered us. Our faces were horribly distorted, but other things matched up. Prof just looked vacantly at the cop. "Archibald Williams?" Prof just looked dazed. The cop rushed over to me. "Mark Anderson?" I thought it'd be a good idea to exaggerate my mental incompetence, so I said, "No. Me." He was confused, but gave it up to quickly check the two corpses. I croaked, "Water." He came back to me, "I'll get it right after I call in." He tried using his radio, then muttered, "No signal. I'll go upstairs." "No signal, {giggle}. No signal, {giggle}." He returned with water, and fed it to us very carefully. It was the best thing I have EVER had! It wasn't ANYWHERE near as much as Prof and I wanted, but the cop refused to get more. He was waiting with us until his reinforcements arrived. He'd seen the keys hanging outside the room, hanging next to a gun (cops tend to notice guns), but he wouldn't let us out. He wanted the medical people and his bosses to take responsibility for that. He was a young cop, and more than a little flustered by this scene. I said very little to him, but I wanted the cops to get the mindset right from the beginning that there'd been three baddies, so I made sure this cop saw me looking at the two bodies, then I asked, "Where third one?" That got him excited, so he rushed off gun in hand to the search the house again. The wonderful cop returned with more water. When that was gone, I was strongly tempted to ask him where the fourth baddie was. I noticed that I wasn't centered, and we put #1 on duty. It took a question from him to remind me that I was supposed to be feeling pain. I pretended to be delusional, then I slowly and fearfully let more and more pain get through, until I was feeling as much as I could handle. I couldn't tell how much more was being suppressed, but I strongly suspected that I didn't want to know. Especially with my feeling pain now, it would be very easy for me to ramble enough to make sure the cops knew I was going to be a terrible witness to what had happened here. After something like fifteen minutes I heard a siren arriving, the first of several. Some of the new arrivals recognized us and I was able to confirm it, which ended the identity question. We were questioned as the chains were carefully removed. The cops soon learning that they couldn't get any useful information out of us. A couple of junior cops kept watch on us, to make sure we didn't fall out of our chairs, until the medical guys arrived. They quickly had us loaded onto stretchers and injected with intravenous drips. Just as we were about to be carried away when I remembered something important. "MY RING! Where's my ring? I want my ring." "What?" "My wedding ring! In the corner, umm, I think. Was on the finger Goon cut off. That's why he cut off. He wanted ring." "We'll find it later. Don't worry." "No! I WANT ring! Is important." "You have to go to the hospital. We'll find it, don't worry." It's hard to insist on staying when they can pick up your stretcher and carry you away. Another one of my minds started us giggling, which I thought was a wonderfully inconsistent last impression to leave these cops with. No doubt they'd be puzzled about some of the stuff here, but they shouldn't be expecting much in the way of sensible explanations from Prof or me. It was VERY nice to surrender to the tiredness without worrying about anything. ------- Chapter 230: Recovery and Discovering a Loss Tuesday, May 24 to Wednesday May 25, 2005 I woke up in a hospital, but passed out again almost immediately, something that happened several times. In the brief periods of lucidity I could feel myself getting better. My first awakenings were caused by particularly vivid delusions, but they diminished in frequency and weirdness. Along with my minds, my body felt better each time too, but still unbelievably weak. I'd fall asleep almost immediately after waking, even though I didn't want to. For my first day in the hospital - not that I had any idea of the duration - I was almost entirely out of it. The basic treatment for dehydration is simple, but it took a while for my body to absorb the new water and salt, and to get it where it was needed, which was everywhere. While I was unconscious, my broken leg and fingers were treated. Too much time had passed for my amputated finger to be reattached, so they just treated the stump. Organ damage was a real possibility for many of my organs, so the hospital had to be right on top of that, with the first of many tests being performed as I slept. As I hydrated, my risk reduced considerably, so I was moved out of Intensive Care after twelve hours. Prof wasn't moved out for another twenty four hours after me because he'd been considerably sicker. Eventually my blood and cerebral fluids hydrated sufficiently that I could emerge properly from unconsciousness. I was surrounded by various machines going "beep", "ping", "tick", or whatever else they felt was appropriate at the time. I had wires and tubes running into and around me, which immediately made me worry about any devices that might be measuring anything about my mental functions. I was pretty sure that eight minds' worth of mentation wouldn't appear natural. Lying still, I couldn't feel anything attached to my skull, so that was a good first result. I couldn't move my arms to feel my head manually, and I was reluctant to use NP to feel around in case summoning NP caused a mental-monitoring machine to register something. I wasn't centered either, and I was doing the bare minimum of internal talking out of the same fear. I rubbed my head on the pillow, turned it to each side to repeat the rubbing, feeling nothing suspicious. I was pretty sure turning my head from side to side would've let me feel anything attached to my forehead, so that was probably free of any attachments. That left the top of my head. Taking a risk, and ready to cancel it if any sirens went off, I centered and created an NP-fingertip. No sirens, so I quickly felt all over my head. I couldn't feel anything. I was wondering whether there might be any measuring devices that could work from a distance of inches or even feet away, and how I could feel around for those, when I remembered the wonderful new function of light blobs. I hadn't gotten around to testing whether a zero radiance light blob could still see, but now seemed like a very good time to find out. I created one in front of my face, confirmed I couldn't see it with my own eyes, then I closed my eyes and tried to look at myself out of it. It worked, and I looked a lot better than I had last time I'd looked at myself. My eyes, nose, lips and skin had looked appalling last time, but they were far better now. I opened my real eyes to recheck that the blob wasn't visible. Two super-imposed images were very awkward to deal with, but they were both stationary so I was able to confirm the blob was still invisible. I closed my eyes again and used the blob to look around my head, which was free of attachments. I looked around the room. I was in a private room, surrounded by lots of equipment, none of which appeared to be focused on my head. Good. I relaxed, which caused me to fall asleep again. Next time I woke I used a "Sight Blob" (which is what I named a light blob with zero luminescence being used as a remote eyeball) to check around me again. All was as before. It'd be very nice to talk with someone, but the button to "Summon Attention" was out of my reach in my currently position, and I didn't think using NP would be a good idea, so I struggled to sit up so I could reach it. That set off several loud "Beeps", "Wheedles" and other such sounds. A nurse rushed in, saw I was awake, told me, "Don't move. I'll get a doctor." I took her "Don't move" as permission to slide gratefully back in the bed, as trying to sit up had been damned hard work. The nurse returned with a doctor almost immediately, the doctor asking me, "How are you feeling?" "Way better than last time I checked." "Say ahhh." "How's Prof Williams?" "Let's check you first. Say ahhh." "Ahhh. How's Prof Williams?" "How many fingers am I holding up?" "One more than if I was asking you the same question. How's Prof Williams?" I had to threaten to go on strike to find out that Prof was, "As well as can be expected." I got the sense that Prof was alive, but I couldn't get any other information. The doctor seemed happy with me, ordering the nurse to do a huge list of tests while he was charting them. I recognized some of the words, and was pretty sure that the only part of my body he'd not ordered a test for was my toes. The nurse left, quickly returning with so many empty vials that filling them would require more liquid than I thought I had in my body. As an interesting aside, I learned that it was even easier to determine the gender of females in proximity (this female anyway), as the 'image' of her body when she was intending to move her torso, or was moving it, included her breasts. That might be useful if a girl tries to fool me by wearing falsies, or - perish the thought! - a guy pretending to be a girl tries to flirt with me. A couple of FBI guys came in next with a long list of questions. [Every time I woke up over the next few days there was an FBI agent or two with a long list of questions.] Prof and I had previously agreed on our story. To paraphrase, it was: "We were abducted, woke up where you found us. We were kept chained up the whole time, and blindfolded and gagged nearly the whole time, only having them removed while we were interrogated. I only saw Boss and Goon at such times, although I heard a third guy sometimes. We were questioned and they tortured me to put pressure on Prof. After two or three days - it was hard to tell how long - there was some sort of fight when we'd been blindfolded, but I don't know what about." As a hint about the eyeball poking I would say, "The first I knew of the fight was when there were some incredibly loud screams; I think even louder than my screams when they were torturing me. Then there was some shooting, more screams, and then it went quiet for several days, until we were rescued." Prof and I had agreed on a lot of other minor details, and we could probably talk for hours about the experience, but right now I didn't even want to talk for one minute. I was much more interested in finding out what the cops knew first, so I could make sure that nothing I said contradicted it. I recounted the bare minimum of the story, making myself appear visibly more tired as I answered their questions. I recounted our story very much as described just above, not even stating what we were being tortured for. Most of the agents' questions were about the third man, which was convenient for me. I told them the bad news, "The guy I thought was the big boss was deliberately VERY careful. He was determined not to make any mistakes, including that he never let us get a look at him. He would ask from the next room whether the blindfolds were on before he came into our room. He always left the room before our hoods were removed for questioning. That's what I think happened. What does Prof say? Have you asked him? How is he?" Unfortunately they only wanted to talk with me about my story. When I pressed them about how Prof was, they helpfully told me, "You'll have to ask the doctor." I told them that the baddies hadn't used names, adding, "Except during the fight, then they kept yelling 'Tom'. Everyone seemed to be called Tom, which is silly. I was probably hallucinating that, because I sure had heaps of wild dreams." Tom and Dom being so similar, I thought this was a cute addition. I described the voices and mannerisms of the three guys. I described Boss's and Goon's voices and mannerisms accurately, and the "Big Boss" as being quieter, speaking noticeably better, and not so involved in my torture (which was true). Then I said, "I'm getting very tired. I want to see my family now." "Just one more question. Do you remember anyone being with you just before you were rescued?" "No." "Are you sure?" The FBI needs to include mathematical tests in its recruitment process. I couldn't imagine how agents who couldn't count to one were going to find the Third Man. I dropped my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, amusing myself with thoughts of their arresting the First Man over and over again. They got the hint and left. A minute later Mom came in. A six-foot proximity sense (measured from my toes in this case) gave me notice of her arrival. It was interesting that I recognized Mom instantly. The 'picture' was a lot more detailed and richer than the pre-merge version, but somehow the substantial increase in detail didn't confuse her identity. Mom came in and rushed over to kiss me, hold my hand and look all slobbery the way females do. "They've only given me a minute, darling. How are you?" "Pretty weak, but a hundred times better than I was and getting better all the time. How's Prof?" A small frown from Mom, "He's still unconscious. He's improving rapidly, but he's much older than you so it's going to take him longer to recover. The doctors wouldn't let anyone else in to see you yet; only me until you're stronger, but everyone sends their love." "I'm sure my recovery won't take long, Mom. Even the very brief wake ups I had before felt better and better. Where and when am I, by the way?" "We're in Seattle. They flew you straight here from where you were found. It's Tuesday afternoon and you were unconscious for over 24 hours. You were very sick and incredibly lucky they found you when they did." With FBI guys possibly outside the room - which I just realized I could check for with a sight blob - and quite possibly with a microphone to the nurses' station to help them monitor my condition, it wasn't time to go into any details about my rescue. I made light of it by saying, "Yeah. It was getting damned boring just having one old geezer to talk with. Actually I shouldn't say that. Prof was awesome the whole time. Beyond awesome. I always thought he was a great guy, but after this my respect for him has gone through the roof. I hope I can talk with him soon, I can't wait to tell him how much I appreciate how well he handled everything." A nurse came in, standing to the side to watch us. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I needed to check. I asked Mom, "Why do the cops think we were kidnapped?" Mom gave me a BIG frown. That was answer enough, but Mom made it official by stating, "Something to do with your winning so much in Las Vegas. When you're better we're going to have a SERIOUS talk about that. You know my opinion of gambling, and this has certainly proved me right." I didn't think now was a good time to tell Mom that I hadn't been gambling. It was bad news that Mom knew about Vegas, but good news that the cops knew because it was easier for Prof's and my cover story if we could tell as much of the truth as possible, including all the details about why we had been captured. I'd been hopeful that the Vegas trip might've stayed secret - in which case we'd just say that the kidnappers were after our millions - but I'd known that hope was probably forlorn as the families were going to tell the cops everything that might help. I thought my abilities would have been kept secret, especially because divulging them wouldn't have been believed. The cops thinking we were a bunch of crazies might have hindered their search for Prof and me, plus I knew that the parents (four in 3B-land, two here) were very serious about wanting my special abilities to remain private - they'd several times warned me to be very careful about privacy whenever I used them. I wasn't going to ask Mom about my abilities being known while a nurse was in the room, and wouldn't have asked anyway because the room might be monitored. When I got a chance to do so very safely, I would check that my abilities were still secret. I also wanted to ask Vanessa or Julia what had happened about my fake ID, but that could wait too. "Is Prof nearby?" "He's a couple of rooms over," said Mom, looking to my left. "Good. I'm looking forward to visiting him when I'm disconnected from all these machines." "That won't be for a while, darling. There are lots of tests they have to do to make sure everything's recovering properly. What happened to you was very serious." "I think I'll recover faster than they expect. Speaking of tests, I don't want any tests of my head. That's a complete no-go area, okay?" "Ahh, they might have to Mark. They told me there's a possibility of brain damage." "Let me check." I closed my eyes for half a second, reopened them, then said, "My brain says it's not damaged. It also resents the implication that anyone thinks it might be, and it says they're pooh-pooh heads. Hang on, I'm getting another message." I did the eye closing-opening thing again, then, "My brain's friend, the stomach, would like to know when the next mealtime is? It's hungry, and would particularly like roast chicken." The nurse smiled as she said, "You're not on solids yet, and it's time to let Mark get back to sleep, Mrs. Anderson." Mom complied readily, rising off her seat. I'd seen what my face looked like, and it was still pretty bad, which I guess made me "pretty unpretty." "I meant what I said about my head, Mom. Make sure they know about it, and put your foot down about it too." Mom looked hesitant, so I added, "I don't want them trying to fix anything that looks unusual." Mom didn't know what went on inside my head, but she knew it wasn't normal. The idea of anyone trying to 'fix' her son's brain was a scary thought, and she got the message. "Okay, I'll tell them." "Good. Make sure you tell them loudly and that they listen to you, otherwise I'll throw a huge hissy fit." Not to mention that I'd fuck their machine. A sight blob and 110 pounds of force being applied to a quarter inch circle should be able to disable it somehow. The nurse was ushering Mom out, so I just got a last, "We'll come back as soon as they let us." If Mom used the collective "We" then presumably the others were nearby. I closed my eyes, created a sight blob, and followed Mom with it. I could tell that I was going to enjoy having the sight blob ability. Mom walked out of my room, down a hallway, turned down another short hallway, and then into the ward's waiting room. The blob's vision had started degrading late in the journey, but it was still easily good enough to see that Dad, Julia and Vanessa were there, as well as one of the FBI guys. My loved ones leaped to their feet and gathered around Mom. I tried forming an NP, but it was either too far away or Mom's cornering had disoriented me enough (whichever of those factors had sufficiently disoriented me), so I canceled the sight blob, created an NP-fingertip and another sight blob near me, then sent the two of them over the same route. They were going at full-speed this time, a value that dropped the farther they went, and especially after they turned a corner. The total distance was about sixty yards, with three corners involved, and by the end the two ki-effects were down to two or three times faster than someone could run. That was still pretty fast, but NOWHERE near as fast as they had been going when they left my room. I watched Mom being grilled by the smiley-faced loved ones. I was smiling more too. The blob's vision was a little better too, thanks to the repeated trip. I waited until no one was looking at Julia, and then I stroked her cheek. Julia jumped in surprise, looking around wildly. The others looked at her curiously, while Julia looked around the room in puzzlement. She knew from dozens of experiences with me that my NP was restricted to line of sight. I'd moaned about not being able to steal Vanessa's cookies, and other restrictions, many times. Not seeing me anywhere, Julia turned back to the others, with a look of confusion on her face. She put her hand to her face, feeling where I'd stroked her cheek. I moved the NP to the inside of her wrist and pushed her hand away gently, then stroked her cheek again. Her eyes went wide at the implications of that. Just so there was no doubt it was me, I lightly rubbed the front of one of her breasts. Julia smiled broadly, saying something short to the others. I guessed it was something like "Mark's okay." I watched for a few more seconds, wondering whether I could discover a way of eavesdropping, and then my body decided that it would much rather go to sleep. When I woke next time, the first thing I did was create a sight blob and go searching for Prof. He was exactly where Mom had said: a couple of rooms away from mine. He looked miles better than when I'd last seen him, his eyes having moved back into their normal positions and his skin looking normal. He even had some lips now. He looked like he was sleeping, and I thought I'd stroke his cheek to make sure. I tried creating an NP-fingertip beside his head, but it didn't work, so I created one in my room. I tried sending it to Prof's room without a guide blob (it's like a guide dog, but doesn't shed hair), but when I thought the fingertip was entering his doorway, it hit an obstruction instead. It was good that my subconscious was much better at tracking ki-effect positions, otherwise the fingertip would have long since canceled with this much inaccuracy in its positioning. I felt along the wall going away from me farther, which I guessed was the correct direction, until I felt a doorway. I entered that room and headed toward the sight blob. The image I work with is quite similar to a radar that only shows ki effects, so I knew the NP was in the right room because it moved too close to the sight blob to be in another room. Once my NP was in the area of the room that the sight blob was looking at, I could order it to go to Prof's cheek (absolute positioning, rather than "move forward" or the like, which are relative positioning). I stroked his cheek but got no response from him. I noticed his chart at the end of the bed, and zoomed down for a look at it. I understood virtually nothing, so I gave that up and went in search of my loved ones. I sent the blob and NP to the waiting room. They were all there, wearing different clothes I noticed, so I must have been out of it for quite a while. There was a cop-looking guy, so I placed my NP-fingertip across Julia's lips. That got her attention. I put my NP on her back, and pushed her forward. It was too weak to push her off the chair (a single mind has a maximum of fourteen pounds if it was exactly four times my previous maximum of 3.5 pounds), but it successfully conveyed the message I wanted. Julia started getting up and I shushed her lips again to be doubly sure. Julia got to her feet, stretched casually, said a few words then wandered out. As soon as she was out of the room her pace picked up considerably. She knew the way to my room exactly, and very soon walked into it. I canceled the blobs and opened my eyes. "Hello, darling. I was just thinking it'd be nice to see you again." "How?" was all she asked, wisely. "I'm feeling great. I'm very much IMPROVED." She already knew as much, seeing me lying in bed here after being NP'd in the waiting room a few seconds ago, but it was still great to have it confirmed, "Wow! That's fantastic. How are you feeling?" "Pretty good. My mind's been clear for a while. The physical injuries were just breaks, so they're..." "Apart from your finger being cut off!" "Yeah, but that's no big deal either. That and the breaks will heal quickly. What annoys me is that Goon - that's what I called him because I didn't know their names - Goon cut off my hole finger, 'h', 'o', 'l', 'e' - without the 'w'." I smiled at her while I waited until she put it together. It took her a couple of seconds, then she giggled, adding, "I knew they'd cut one off, but not which one. What a pity they chose my favorite finger, haha." I said, "Yeah. The bastard wanted my ring. Do you know if..." #2: #8: #2: [[I found out later that in some dimensions, Oregon allows marriage at seventeen with parental consent. If I'd know that at this time, I would've envied those Marks, even though there were still the bigamy and brother-sister problems. Although, as it turned out, I got around one of those problems in early 2006.]] #8: #1: #8: #1: #5: #1: #5: #1: Julia had noticed that I'd stopped talking, so she started. I let her do so while we kept talking internally. #6: #1: #5, #6, #8: Followed by three panicky questions, all to the effect of #1: #5, #6, #8: #8: #6: #3: #8 privately to #5 and #6: #5 privately to #8 and #6: #8: #1, #2, #3, #4: #8: #3: #8: The memories had been relayed at high speed, but Julia had finished asking, "What ring, darling?" and was waiting with increasing impatience over how long it was taking me to answer. I answered, "Oh, that'll be another hallucination then. The last day or so Prof and I were getting some real doozies. I know my memory of the giant purple caterpillar having a line-dancing competition with itself was probably imaginary, haha, but I had a vivid memory of Goon cutting off my finger to take a ring you'd given me. You might catch me making a few mistakes like that because those hallucinations were incredibly vivid. More vivid than ordinary memories, so they've kind of burned their way into my head. Some were pure fantasy, like the dancing caterpillars; some were perfectly reasonable, like you having given me a friendship ring to wear on that finger; and some were half and half. I've got a clear memory of being extremely annoyed because the assholes didn't bring my study computer when they kidnapped me, because that stopped me googling how to escape dungeons, the way you tell me to google things. It was a very weird experience, Julia." Julia gave me a suspicious look. #1: #5: #1: #5: #6: #2: Julia was just starting to answer when a passing nurse looked in and saw Julia. That was the end of that! The nurse rushed in and ejected Julia. My saying, "It's okay, she's my fiancée," made no difference whatsoever. As she was being pushed out the door, Julia called back over her shoulder, "I'll tell the others you're awake. Bye, darling." "Bye, my love." I added, "Nurse. I have to go to the bathroom." "That's GREAT news. I'll get a bedpan for you and tell the Doctor." She was smiling happily, so apparently it truly was, "great news." #1: #6: That business attended to, celebrated by being noted on my chart, and the pan carried away ceremoniously, we got down to other items of business. #4: #6: #1: #2: <#3, #4 and I agree too.> #5: [[This would be an appropriate point to make a small confession. I now understand how minds work so can say that I honestly did have very strong emotions for Carol, but one of the reasons I had those feelings so strongly was that I created them for myself as a self-justification for having improper feelings for my sister. They were true feelings in that I felt them, but they weren't true in that I created them for myself. I would call them dishonest, except that everybody creates their own emotions all the time - that's what emotions are - so I'm not going to beat myself up about it. You'd be amazed, and probably quite disappointed, if you knew how artificial and self-deceptive the human emotion creation process is. As an example for each gender: Females do fall into honest love with rich guys easier than poor guys; and guys do often honestly like females a great deal more before they first get the female into bed, after which they very often honestly lose most of that interest. Human emotions are VERY much under the control of many subconscious influences.]] #6: #4: #5: #3: #5: #1: #8: #6: #8: #1: #5: #8: #5: #All: #5: We brought #7 up to date, astonishing him with the absence of Carol in our love-life, and with the eight-subjects-at-a-time studying method. #7: #4: #8: It only took us a few seconds of our quick internal conversation to identify the reason: 3A's Carol had decided her swimsuit was too tight to get into the hot tub with Julia and 3A-me (in future, I'll just write "me" unless the distinction is important), and Carol had begged off. Thus Julia hadn't seen how horny I was for Carol. It was only a week or so later that Julia started pushing me into playing around with other girls, and I soon got too busy to spend much time with Carol. I started getting plenty of sex too, so my horniness diminished, making it easy for me to ignore the inappropriate and wrong feelings I'd guiltily had for Carol ever since she'd physically matured. Her role in my life in this dimension was the same as this Donna's: they were both superb sisters, and we had great sibling relationships. Mom was very proud of us, an opinion that was going to have its rug pulled from underneath it soon, hopefully to be replaced by a mattress. I was very nice to both sisters, but in recent weeks Julia, Ava, other girls, and college studying, had been keeping me too busy to spend much time with my sisters. They were definitely on the sidelines of my life. I was on the sidelines of their lives too, although my popularity with girls at school, including Carol's and Donna's friends, was intruding into my sisters' lives daily. I wasn't doing anything sexual with Donna or Carol in this dimension. As far as 3A knew, neither sister was interested in sex. #8: It also turned out that I wasn't doing anything sexual with any middle-school girls. There were no Donna's Ducklings or Carol's version of the same in any form. They had girlfriends who were interested in me because of Julia's efforts to create my reputation and because both of my sisters only had good things to say about me, but nothing was being done with any middle-school girl. Donna and Carol were not part of my sex-life in any way at all. Occasionally they even reduced the amount of sex I had, by using up my time when I was being a Good Brother by doing things such as goofing around with Donna or helping Carol with her homework. #8: <{Groan}. No Claire and Diana! I was REALLY looking forward to playing with those two.> #1: #8: #1: #8: <{Some quick images of the tricks}. We did them to entertain Claire and Diana, so it's not surprising you didn't do them. We'll have to do something about getting Donna's Ducklings up and going, and Carol's version too, although we'll probably have to wait until Carol is fully seduced because we don't want to risk messing that up. It's so sad to think of all those beautiful, sexy girls going to waste. Plus they're TOTALLY eager to do whatever we want. No strings attached, no possessiveness, just total hero worship. They're THRILLED that we want to take sexual advantage of them, which is a huge turn-on.> We found out that not having Carol as a wife had a compensation, as we were $300,000 richer than in 3B's dimension. But 3B knew which of the two we valued the most. We also found out that the Emergency Funds were organized a little differently here. The Williamses fund was the same as in 3B-land, but Mom and Dad didn't know how special I was here so talking to them about an Emergency Fund hadn't made any sense, as they knew of no reason why I might ever have to flee the country. The Williamses were going to set up four $500,000 accounts in overseas banks, all in my and the Williamses names, with the intent of transferring two of them across to the Andersons whenever I revealed my special abilities to them. #7: #1: <{Groan}. We were already worried about running out of money. There goes another $300 thou', just like that.> #7: #7 sent the vows we'd used in 3B-land: Mark, Lord, I offer you three life-long Vows and a Gift: First, I Vow to Serve. I offer my life in servitude to you. Your goals, needs and desires are forever paramount over mine. I will expend my life serving you to the best of my ability. Second, I Vow to Obey. I will always obey your every order, voiced or anticipated, to the best of my ability. Third, I Vow to Protect. I will protect you from all ill and harm, to the best of my ability. If the situation requires it, I will joyously sacrifice my life to protect yours. Fourth, I offer you the Gift of my Love. Love cannot be vowed, as it may be denied and can be lost. Regardless, I offer it to you. #2: #7: #8: #1: #6: #3: #6: #3: #6: #3: #8: #3: #6, #7, #8: #6: #3: #6: #3: #7: It turned out that we'd all been too busy thinking about seducing Carol (we'd had LOTS of thoughts about that though!). No one had any brilliant ideas about the eyeball subject, so we decided just to give it a try and see what happened. We shut our eyes and each of the active minds formed a sight blob. That was when things got REALLY messy! Seven different overlapping views of the room were bad enough, but they were horrifically worse when we all tried to move our blobs. By instant, unspoken, nauseous agreement, we all canceled our blobs. #1: We were interrupted by an FBI guy walking in. He'd heard I was awake and had some questions for me. I answered them for a few minutes. It was easy to keep to my story. Prof and I had agreed on several details which we could give when asked the right questions, for example, Prof had made up a partial conversation that we could claim to have overheard, that made it seem the baddies all lived in Vegas. I was quite looking forward to Boss's friends getting hassled by the Feds looking for the third man. Other times I deliberately gave extreme answers, such as when I was asked, "Do you remember anyone walking around the room just before you were rescued?" They'd asked me something similar before ("Did I remember anyone being with me?", to which I'd said "No"), but to make a point this time I said, "Yes. I remember LOTS of people walking around the room during the last while. I saw my parents many times, my girlfriend, some giant purple caterpillars were having a line-dancing competition. I think Jessica Alba gave me a blowjob, or it might have been Marge Simpson - I'm confused about that because they seemed to change back and forth. Stop frowning, I'm answering you honestly. I distinctly remember all of those things and dozens more. Obviously I know those particular ones didn't happen, but there were heaps of hallucinations that included sound and which might have been real. I remember asking Prof to get me a glass of milk and being annoyed when he refused. Was that real or not? I've got no idea. The honest answer to your question is 'Yes, ' but I wouldn't put a lot of faith in it if I were you." He asked me more questions, to which I usually answered, "I don't know" or "Maybe." I wasn't even too concerned about contradicting myself if I was asked question that made me change my story in some way, as I had the excuse, "They started torturing me almost immediately after we arrived, so I was in a lot of pain. Whether my answer came from reality or from a delusion I can't say." I knew I was causing them to waste time chasing down the phantom third man, but I didn't care. I could claim it was their fault for not finding me first, or invent some other excuse, but the true cause was simply that my sense of self-preservation had shot up through the roof. There was no viable alternative anyway, as I wasn't going to tell the cops that I'd killed the two baddies while I was securely chained to a chair with the keys in another room. After a while I told the FBI guy that I was feeling tired. My body very convincingly proved the point by falling asleep. I would've ordered myself to sleep if necessary, but my body beat me to it. My first action on waking was to check on Prof. Vanessa was sitting by his bed, holding his hand, but Prof wasn't awake. Vanessa looked worried, which gave me a bad feeling. I was tempted to get Vanessa's attention the way I had Julia's, but there was no hurry so maybe I should check the area first. The waiting room was empty of my loved ones, just another young cop plus some strangers. I went looking for a computer and found that it was 8:30pm Tuesday evening. Nothing else suggested itself to me, so I sent a sight blob and NP-fingertip to Vanessa. I double-tapped her on the back of the hand she was holding Prof with, then immediately laid my NP-point over her lips as she suddenly sat up in surprise. I'd never touched Vanessa with my NP before, but she knew I could pick up things and fly them around so it didn't take her long to work out it was me. Besides, I was the only person she knew who could do the impossible, and I happened to be just a couple of rooms away. She settled down, in a wide-eyed way. I put my NP on Vanessa's back, just above the chair, and pushed gently. She got the hint, and didn't even need any further prompting to come to my room, giving Prof a last look as she left his room. "Hi Vanessa. I'm glad you popped in." "How are you?" "I'm fine. I gather Prof isn't bouncing back so quickly though?" "No, he's having a hard time. Several of his organs have sustained damage and aren't able to return to full function. They're generally improving, but the doctors have to keep a very close eye on him because so many aren't working properly. It sounds like he's going to be here for quite a long time. He has woken up briefly a couple of times, and they tell me he was coherent, so thank God for that." [[Without water many of our organs and systems have major problems. Blood, for example, gets thicker so it doesn't flow as well. That means the brain doesn't receive enough oxygen, which causes hallucinations and then brain damage. Impeded blood flow means all the body's cells and organs stop receiving the nutrients they need. We were being starved, so there were precious few nutrients anyway. The cells' and organs' waste products aren't being removed either, inhibiting their function and in some cases leading to poisonous effects as some waste products are poisonous in high enough concentrations. Other organs need water to function, kidneys being an obvious example. Without a supply of water, kidneys cannot remove waste products from the blood, causing it to remain 'polluted', further reducing its ability to collect waste products from around the body. Cell starvation, cell poisoning, and drying out caused damage throughout Prof's body, so it was entirely possible for one or more of his organs to fail at any time.]] "He's an AMAZINGLY tough guy! I've always had a high opinion of Prof, but that opinion has risen dramatically because of the last few days. All through our imprisonment he was totally staunch. And one thing I want to tell you is that he's certainly got everything to live for. You know our brains got a little fuddled during that experience, right?" "Yes, that was explained to us." "Well, at one stage Prof thought I was you, and he spent several minutes talking to me as if I was you; thanking me for his life with you and telling me how much he loved you. I've never heard anything so heart-rending. I don't feel comfortable repeating what he said, but there's no doubt at all about how much he loves you. I was blown away by the strength of his feelings, and I'm sure they're going to give him enormous motivation to pull through." It'd been the other Prof who'd said those words to me, and he'd thought he was dying which would've made him more maudlin, but regardless of those points I'd still wanted to say what I had. Apart from anything else, it had been part of my tribute to the Prof who had died, as he must have if this Prof was only just managing to hang on in a hospital. I suspected Vanessa's description of Prof's condition was optimistic, in which case 3B's Prof wouldn't have survived even if rescuers had burst into the room seconds after I'd died. I gave Vanessa a few seconds to blink back her tears, then I said, "When I'm fit enough to get out of this bed, which I'm pretty sure won't take long, I want you to arrange for me to spend as much time as possible with Prof. My every waking hour would be perfect. I think I can help him, Vanessa." Vanessa caught my hint, suddenly looking at me with hope in her widened eyes. I spoke first, "Yes. Not a lot, but even a little would be good. We can talk about it later, but I'd like to be able to spend time with him as soon as possible. If we could get my bed moved into his room, that'd be even better." "I'll see what I can do." "Don't take no for an answer." I made a mental note to ask for a medical textbook, so when the doctors say that Prof is having trouble with his spleen (or whatever), I'd know where to direct my ki. I could now project a HUGE amount of ki [[that had increased from sixteen to sixty four times the human norm]], and if my four-minded ki had helped cuts heal 10 to 20% faster, then Prof was going to get twenty hours of eight-minded ki per day, or however long the hospital would let us spend together. I tried to radiate ki into Prof from my current position. I couldn't detect any ki reaching him, whether I sent it directly from me through the intervening walls, or from an imagined finger near him. I couldn't create NP-points or blobs in that room, so I didn't believe I could project external ki either, which is even more restricted in range as it must be created within six feet of me, whereas I can create a blob a hundred feet from me if I know the creation area well and am observing it at the time. I tried creating a sight blob to watch over him while I radiated EKP from an imaginary fingertip, but it had no discernible effect. I even tried to create a succession of sight blobs so I could see the whole route from my room into Prof's, but the superimposition just confused me. I decided I needed to be near him to help. I'd been almost certain that'd be the case, but it'd been worth checking. [[Intention ki is 'personal', whereas NP-points and blobs uses ki tapped directly from the Universe at that point.]] While doing the above experiments, I was also chatting to Vanessa. She told me Mom and Julia were getting some dinner, which made me salivate. I was VERY tempted to get Vanessa to help convince the hospital to put me onto solids as fast as possible, and as much as possible, but I figured I'd survive on liquids until we found out about me sharing a room with Prof. Making too many requests at once wouldn't help achieve any of them, and Prof was by far the most important. Vanessa said my sisters were staying with family friends in Corvallis, while she, Mom, Dad and Julia were in a hotel nearby. She also confirmed my belief that I was mending well, "The doctors have told us they're very pleased with how fast your condition is improving. It's good to see you're doing so well, but I'd better go back to Prof before I get chased out of here." "Would you please tell the nurse I need a bedpan. She gets very happy when she hears that." This nurse wasn't as happy as the first one had been about my ability to pee into a pan. Apparently taking away my used bedpans was rapidly becoming something not worth celebrating. I spent a while playing around with multiple sight blobs. Even avoiding any movement by creating them right in front of what I wanted each of them to read didn't work. With two sight blobs I could decipher the text of each if I worked at it carefully, but three blobs reading three sources of text created a superimposed image that was so painfully messed up that deciphering it was agonizingly slow. I would've have been far better off to use one sight blob and cycle it around the three sources. Three sight blobs wasn't quite impossible to use, but it might as well have been as it was totally impractical. More than three was effectively impossible. I was sure that even using different colored fonts on each screen of my study computer wouldn't have made studying seven subjects at once possible. I couldn't read seven screens at once, so I tried to think of a trick whereby I could read them one at a time. One approach would be to have seven sight blobs in front of their screens, but to have six of them 'shut' their eye, let one look at its screen briefly, it'd shut its eye, then the next eye would open, etc. I can turn on and turn off the sight from sight blobs just by wanting to, so it was a theoretically possible approach. Using the wall of my room as my test, it worked, after a fashion, but it was painfully slow and seemed impractical. We could easily imagine that studying would be very difficult, as each mind would have to memorize a screen image that it didn't yet understand, then work on it until its turn to look came around again, whereupon it'd have to change from "trying to understand mode" to "memorization mode". Swapping between the two ways of thinking would be very distracting for each mind, not to mention the third task of keeping track of when to open and shut its eye. The only way we could imagine this scheme working was if we could rotate the eyes' glimpses fast enough to get into a rhythm and with some sort of persistence of vision effect going. We tried to do that, but gave up when seven very rapidly flickering images just produced chaos. What we needed to do was turn off the mind at the same time as its eye was closed, turning it back on only when its eye was open, so it only saw its own image. Visually that would work, if we could do it, but it seemed impractical in every other respect. We stopped to have a rest, and fell asleep. ------- Chapter 231: The Long Haul; Part One Thursday, May 26 to Sunday, June 12, 2005 I woke up feeling GOOD. It had been far too long since that had happened. I sent a sight blob to check a computer for the date and time: Thursday at 1am. I checked on Prof. The light was dim, but I could see that he appeared okay. His face had filled out and he looked his normal self. Hoping I wouldn't find them at this ridiculous time, I checked the waiting room. No loved ones, but yet another cop. When I'd cut my hand, my non-kiatsu healing rate had been three times faster than the girls. Things seem to double with merging, so I presumably heal six times faster now. I'd been in the hospital about 2.5 days, so the equivalent of 15 days. [[The answer was roughly correct, although the logic wasn't. My previous threefold increase in healing rate was mostly due to increased subconscious control over my body, plus a little from non-deliberate ki-effects. Diminishing returns had been reached, so the latest merge's doubling of my subconscious control and fourfold increase in ki had increased my threefold healing rate to about a fourfold rate, so 2.5 days of my healing would have taken Carol or Julia about 10 days. They were young and healthy, so they were quicker healers than the average person. My 2.5 days of healing was worth about 15 days for an average person.]] I pushed myself up in the bed, using my hands to test if my physical strength had improved from its previous pathetic level. I was a little bit clumsy because of the various bandages, splints, intravenous tubes, etc., but I wasn't weak. I'd been pretty sure I wouldn't be. I used one of my finger splints to poke the button to summon the nurse. When she saw me sitting up, she rushed over saying, "You shouldn't be sitting up!" then proceeded to try to pull me down. "Hold it! I didn't call you in here to wrestle with you. I would like to talk with a doctor. Would you get one for me please?" "Once you're lying down properly." I'd already confirmed that my strength had largely returned so it wasn't worth the argument. I allowed her to correct my position. She left the room and I followed her with a sight blob. She went back to her desk and did nothing in the way of "doctor fetching". My initial reaction was to sit up and push the button again, but maybe she knew a doctor was going to be walking past in a minute or two. It'd be best not cause trouble as I'd need cooperation from the hospital to spend as much time with Prof as I wanted. I decided to kill time by going back to working on the problem of how to increase my study rate to seven screens' worth. Unfortunately I didn't kill hardly any time at all, because a likely answer was immediately obvious to me, thanks to my non-time-wasting subconsciouses. I closed my eyes and created one sight blob positioned so it was looking at the wall behind me, the one with my various medical displays on it. I had my seven minds each take an eighth of the total area, and concentrated on reading only what was in their area. Some of them had nothing to read, but that didn't matter, as it was obvious from those that did that this worked. Had there been eight different computer screens in front of me, we could have read them all without any of the superimposition, flickering, or other silly problems we'd had last time. It was very easy for each mind to concentrate on their area alone, and it'd be even easier if they were discrete computer screens, because there'd be no doubt where the borders were. The only problem I could imagine was that some of the text could be too small on the left- and right-most screens. One solution that might work was to make the sight blob MUCH bigger, to be the width of what I wanted to read, probably four screens wide by two high. I'd always made sight blobs eye-sized so far, but I doubted very much that was a requirement, and I similarly doubted that it was only that size that filled my vision in the natural seeming way that it did, as the physics of the two processes were so different. I expanded the sight blob, curious to learn what would happen. The immediate result was that the room got a GREAT deal brighter. I opened my eyes in surprise, and saw that the room hadn't changed at all. It only took a moment to realize that the larger the sight blob, the more light it could collect. The room was only dimly lit, so the boost provided by a large sight blob made reading even easier. The apparent change in the room's brightness had caused me to stop expanding the sight blob only partway to the final size I'd intended, so I resumed that now. The room continued to seem brighter, but a long way short of glaringly so. My minds that were tasked with reading text on the left and right ends of the blob reported that it was getting easier to read as the blob expanded sideways. The center of the blob was also getting very close to its wall. I was curious about what would happen when it contacted. I'd assumed that the 'seeing' was being done - God knows how - by the nearest outside surface of the sight blob, just like it's the outside surface of NP that 'touches'. In a real eyeball it's the concave inside of the back of the eyeball that does the 'seeing', but that was because the front part was needed for the lens and cornea to focus the light. That wasn't the case with a sight blob, as blobs are partially transparent (when not zero luminescence) and it's obvious that they're not bending the light that passes through them. I didn't know what was the case, but it wasn't that. Thus I was curious to see what I'd see, when the seeing surface of a sight blob reached matter. As it happened, I was the first matter reached, as I was directly under the expanding blob, and closer than the wall it was looking at. Looking down as the blob entered me what I saw was nothing: the area in contact with matter went black. I was curious to know what I'd see if I ordered the blob to start radiating light, but a four-foot diameter blob radiating yellow light in the middle of my room at night might attract rather more curiosity than I wanted, so I saved that experiment for later. Having the bottom of the light blob overlap with my matter didn't matter, as it was easy to keep reading the wall while ignoring the region of blackness on the bottom of the blob. What did become a problem was that as the sphere expanded toward the width I wanted, it also expanded forward, and some of my minds reported that they were starting to have trouble reading their assigned material. Pleasingly, it wasn't the minds that were getting too close to the wall that were having trouble, but the minds on the ends. Through a process I didn't understand but very much appreciated, the field of vision of the blob was constrained to the same angle as my eyes normally saw [[because my subconscious got the blob to send me only what I wanted]]. That gave the light blob a field of view of 160 degrees left to right, and a slightly smaller value vertically. As the blob expanded wider and closer to the wall, the amount of wall it could see remained roughly constant, and the sides of the blob were several times farther from the wall than the middle of the blob. That resulted in the near views being magnified several times in comparison to the far views. Having the whole image fit within my brain's normal field of vision meant left and right images shrunk. The closer the nearest point of the blob approached the wall, the greater the disparity of magnifications across the sphere, to the extent that the minds reading the left and right areas of the wall were having trouble because their text was becoming too small. Moving the entire blob back from the wall would greatly reduce the magnification ratios between the middle and ends of the blob, but it would reduce the size of everything. The text was already too small for some of the minds, so moving the blob backward was no good. The solution was to change the shape of the blob so it wasn't a sphere. I had more control over the shape now than I'd had with four minds. It still wasn't a great deal of control, but I could make one axis half the radius of another, so I 'sucked in the stomach' of the blob, while letting its sides and height extend unrestrained. With the blob as wide as I wanted, and its front flattened, all of my minds could easily read the text in their designated areas. I was sure that I'd easily be able to read eight computer screens. [[I lucked out with this working so easily. The human eye physically sees very little at any one instant, especially when it comes to seeing color. Obviously you think everything you can see is in color, rather than just the middle couple of degrees, so something tricky is going on. What happens is the eyeball is rapidly flicking around (it's not a regular sweep like in a TV, instead mostly depending on where in your field of view the biggest breasts are). The net result is that the 'screen' inside your brain eventually gets sent a full image, or subconsciously pretends it has. It lies to your conscious mind that it's seeing everything in color at the same time. In a nutshell, the 'screen' is FAR bigger, by several orders of magnitude, than what color image is projected onto it at any one time. I was getting the image of the whole wall sent to my brain's internal screen, where it was processed as if it was a normal image.]] I wanted to be able to study from eight computer screens at a time, with them laid out in a grid four screens wide and two high. I knew 30" screens were 2560 x 1600 pixels, which gave them a width of 16". With the edges, call it 1.5 feet. Four screens across would be six feet. Blobs can now be up to twelve feet in diameter, so six feet was easily within my capabilities. The screens would also total about 52 inches high; call it 4.5 feet. A ratio of 4.5 : 6 was within my blob-reshaping ability, so I could roughly match my blob to the shape of my planned, eight-panel study computer, especially if the outside four screens were mounted to angle inward slightly, although not as much as an ordinary human would prefer as I'd reduce the 'stomach' of my blob. I was very happy that I'd be able to please and excite Prof so much. #1: #6: #1: #8: #1: #7: #2: #6: [[In this dimension, the Dell 30" panels were introduced at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2006, held in mid-January, about eight months after the current time. In the previous dimension they were introduced at CES 2005. I was curious enough to investigate why. It was because Dell had been in a legal dispute with the company that manufactured the screens, and the dispute lasted longer in one dimension than the other. I'd been hoping it was something interesting like the dimensions' sciences being out of step.]] I was very sure that I'd be able to read eight computer screens at one time, but I made a mental note to test it more thoroughly during the day. When the ward is busier, there'll be a couple more computers in operation in the ward's central desk. I'd check I was right by placing the sight blob appropriately and assigning a mind to read each screen. I was so confident the test would work that I wouldn't have bothered had it been any bother, but I was lying in bed with nothing else to do and it was almost literally effortless. [The new (up to) eight-screen reading system passed the test "with flying colors", exactly as I'd expected.] I shrank the big blob back to eye size, moved it under the blankets and deep into my chest. I started turning the light output up, curious if I could see anything? Nope; pitch black. I started radiating more and more yellow light, and I started seeing a yellow/red blur, but no discernible detail. I zeroed the luminescence, moved it inside one of the machines in my room, and slowly turned up the light. I could see circuitry and casing clearly. The box was easily within six feet of me, so the range reduction effect of its having a metal casing didn't stop me from easily creating a small NP-point inside it, and lightly touching a circuit board to confirm I could. If they try to put my head inside an MRI machine, I hope they don't cost much to repair! It was FANTASTIC that I'd be able to study seven subjects at once, and possibly eight if I could hold center while studying. That'd be difficult, as my minds tend to put all their attention on their studies, but it'd be well worth trying to do if only for its Active Centering practicing value. That could make a life-or-death difference, as it had when I'd burst a few eyeballs recently, and it could have been critical if the asshole's gun had been made of metal. I was somewhat disappointed at the way reading multiple screens had been achieved. I'd had this idea of me walking around for the rest of my life with a sight blob hovering over my head looking behind me for danger or large-breasted girls. (I visualized the overwatch blob floating above me rather than having it mounted on the back of my head as I thought higher would give a better view down low-cut tops, and maybe for danger too.) Because I hadn't solved the superimposition problem, the overwatch blob idea wouldn't work unless I closed my eyes for the rest of my life, in which case I wouldn't see breasts, danger, or anything else in front of me. The solution of dividing my visual image into areas of responsibility did give me an idea though. I closed my right eye, and created a sight blob looking at the monitors above me, then I tried to project its image onto JUST that area of my sight that was currently black from my right eye being closed. The sight blob's image projected over my total 'screen', resulting in a great deal of superimposition, other than at the very outside edge of my right eye's view, where the left eye's input didn't reach. It wasn't really progress; or if it was, I needed a great deal more of it. Ideally I'd like to be able to divide my internal screen into whatever number of pieces I wanted at the time. One large screen, the way it normally is, or more screens as required. If I had an overwatch sight blob going permanently, then I'd need to divide my screen into two. The left side (say) would have the complete vision of both my biological eyes squeezed into it, while the right side would be used for the overwatch blob. It'd be as if I was wearing glasses with an LCD screen in front of each eye and cameras on my head. My left eye would show the image looking forward. The full image too, not as if one eye was closed, as my two eyes would still be delivering binocular vision. The right eye's LCD would be showing the view to my rear, as I'm sure you've already worked out. Ideally, if I started up more sight blobs, my vision would segment as required. If I had vision divided into four, I'd have one mind concentrate on the top left quadrant as that'd contain what our two normal eyes were seeing. The top right quadrant could be the vision of blob on overwatch, which would be supervised by one of my minds. The two lower quadrants would be for the two minds who were having sight blobs do whatever it was they wanted done. That was the ideal situation, and probably more than I'd ever need. I'd very happily settle for being able to keep my real eyes open when I was using just one sight blob, because closing them every time was certainly going to become a real nuisance once my body wasn't immovably tied down (since discovering sight blobs I've been perpetually tied down to something: a chair, a stretcher, and now a bed). Having any sort of overwatch, or making use of sight blobs during ordinary activities, required that I learn how to use a sight blob with my real eyes open. Overcoming the superimposition or strobing problems seemed impossible (I'd call them "blind alleys" except the problem was that I was seeing too much), but squeezing my vision sideways seemed like it might be a possible solution. I had a choice between squeezing horizontally ('pushing' in from the left or right) or vertically (from the top or bottom). Horizontally seemed the most natural because we're used to closing one and having our field of view reduce horizontally. Hopefully that meant it'd be the easiest orientation to get going. I arbitrarily decided that when I had both normal vision and a sight blob going, I'd use the left side of my brain's 'screen' for the blob, with the right side for my eyes' vision. I rolled my head on my pillow until my left eye was obscured but my right eye was open and looking normally. I created a sight blob and tried to send its information to just my left eye's half of my brain's screen. There's a great deal of visual field overlap between my two real eyes as they don't project their images onto their own rigidly defined half of my brain's screen, but there are some left and right offsets for each eye, which I hoped made it biologically and psychologically the easiest approach. [[It would've been better for me to squeeze my sight vertically, so the bottom half of my vision was what my real eyes were seeing, and the top half what my sight blob was seeing. For normal activities, height is not an important dimension (which is why evolution has put our eyes side by side, rather than mounting them vertically, to make estimating the horizontal positions of objects more accurate). Plus we're mostly interested in things that occur in the fairly narrow band between waist and head heights (this is especially true for boys), nearly always ignoring what's going on at foot level or above our heads. Squeezing vertically would have compacted the less useful dimension of information, rather than the most useful, and it would have enabled many of my almost-hardwired binocular instincts to operate as is, because the left/right spatial information would've remained accurate. Ideally, although it's asking a lot, I could have created more 'room' by severely vertically compacting the below-waist and above-head regions, leaving the waist-to-head band uncompacted, so everything in that important area would have looked normal.]] I worked at it for an hour or so without making any progress. Whatever the sight blob saw was projected across the entire width of my internal screen, and because humans have vision which is so binocular, whatever eye was open had its vision displayed over nearly the full width of the screen too, causing superimposition over 90% of my combined visual image. I tried a different approach: I turned my head so I was looking up with both eyes open. I created a sight blob exactly where my left eye was, closed my left eye, and pretended the blob WAS my left eye, including when it started flying forward and turning around. I even imagined it as the eyeball itself floating around, with the optic nerve attached. Maybe the intellectual crutch would help? As it happened, no it didn't. The superimposition problem persisted. The next stage was to try to get the two eyes, or even either eye would be good, to compress its vision sideways. I had a feeling that was going to be very difficult to achieve, so I put it off for now to return to the topic of something else I was trying to achieve. The nurse and I had agreed over an hour ago that I'd lay down and she'd call a doctor, and one of us hadn't kept her side of the deal, so it was time to remind her. I sat myself up in bed again, then pressed the "Call Nurse" button again. I watched her sigh, put down her trashy romance novel, and come to my room, where she exclaimed, "What are you doing sitting up! I told you to lie down." "No. What you said was that if I lay down you'd call a doctor for me. I've been lying down for the last hour and a half waiting for you to keep your word. Judging by the sounds of the pages turning and your sighs, your trashy romance novel is more important than your sense of honor." She'd been sitting close enough to make my hearing her possibly believable, provided she sighed very loudly. #1: After some silly blustering - stuff about the doctors not wanting to be disturbed at night, they were too busy, etc., she agreed to call the doctor if I settled down again "Okay. I'll keep my word again." I lay down, she left, and I watched her as she returned to her desk and placed a call. I couldn't hear what she said, but it seemed likely to be summoning a doctor for me. I reminded myself to check into "Sound Blobs" at some stage, although they seemed very unlikely to me. Every type of blob that I had used electromagnetic energy, which sound wasn't, so I was pretty sure blobs couldn't work as microphones or speakers, depriving me of the ability to really freak Julia out. A few minutes later a doctor and the nurse arrived, saving me from calling the nurse again and threatening her with my hitting the "Code Blue" button. I told the doctor, "As soon as possible - certainly by noon today - I want to be spending all my time with Professor Williams..." The doctor had no patience with her patient. She interrupted, "No, you're far too sick. It'll be a week or two before there's any possibility of your getting out of bed. You've had a very traumatic experience, and it's going to take your body quite a while to recover." They turned from me, with the nurse starting to say "Sorry" to the doctor. I strongly demanded, "EXCUSE ME. I am well aware that I've had a very traumatic experience. That's one of the things that you can't help noticing about being tortured to death. To finish what I was trying to say before you interrupted me. I said I would like to be with Prof BY NOON, not that I was insisting on going there immediately. Noon is so the hospital has time to run whatever tests you need to confirm that I'm healthy enough to at least have my bed moved into Prof's room, or to let me go there in a wheelchair. And before you raise the objection you're obviously about to, one thing I know about my body that you don't, is that it heals extremely quickly. I feel great and I believe I am healthy enough to get out of bed now, but I'm not asking for that. I'm merely asking you to run tests to confirm my health. That's not asking for the impossible is it?" The nurse objected, "The lab only does urgent work at night so it's not fully staffed until daytime." "So take all the samples now and put them in the line at the lab so they'll be done first thing when the extra staff arrive. Is there anything wrong with that? If it costs extra money I'll gladly pay for it out of my pocket. Prof and I were being tortured for our money, so I can easily afford whatever it costs." The doctor conceded, "All right, I'll order some tests. We need to take several of them soon anyway." "Thank you. But don't order 'some tests'; order damned near all of them. I don't want to wait until 10 or 11, only to be told the hospital can't make a decision because it needs to run some more tests. I'm positive that the doctor on duty before noon won't believe how healthy I am, and he or she will want to waste time dithering. I want to be with Prof as soon as possible, so please make sure you order every conceivable test, except anything to do with brain damage. I'm staying away from that." If she'd asked me about my last comment, I had a story ready about seeing some documentaries about how it was all guesswork medicine with no ability to fix anything that was wrong anyway, so it was pointless. It wasn't a great excuse; just the best I could think of. The doctor ordered some tests. I queried whether they were sufficient and she assured me they were. [Of course they weren't; what doctor is going to listen to a 15-year old boy? Certainly neither the one at night nor the one responsible for the decision before noon.] I spent the rest of the early hours of the morning working on various things: Sound Blobs. I achieved nothing. [[For good reason, as they weren't within my capabilities. Some interesting things were, but not sound blobs. It was a pity someone hadn't left an instruction manual lying around, because I would've been able to start using some pretty cool abilities, and saved a lot of time on experiments and practicing (I had spent innumerable tedious hours using NP to push against walls and the ground to strengthen it).]] Simultaneous sight sources, either two sight blobs at the same time, or one blob with one or more eyes. I didn't make any progress with squeezing the images so they didn't overlap, but as a result of all my squeeze attempts I did get a bit better at concentrating on one of the two superimposed images. That wasn't my preferred solution, because it would never scale to three or more images, and it needed a lot of continuous concentration to keep track of which of the two images a mind was following. If that mind got distracted while the scene changed, he wouldn't know what to look at when his attention returned. The quick fix was to shut the other eye or blob briefly, so he could fix on the image he was interested in again. We also had to do that if the mind following the blob called another mind to look at something. The new mind needed a quick blackout from the other source to get oriented on the image it wanted to look at. Testing the range of my remote abilities. I explored the hospital, seeing how far away I could send sight blobs and NP-points. I quickly found that they had the same range, presuming both tests were done with the same knowledge of an area, so I concentrated on sight blobs as they were much easier to navigate with and gained far more knowledge of an area as they moved. The first few times I'd used sight blobs, they'd quickly degraded with distance, but that degradation rapidly reduced with practice, and then the improvement leveled off. The maximum range was highly variable. I could go far farther along a straight corridor than I could vertically. Three hundred feet was about my maximum range in the hospital, provided I minimized the number of corners involved, and that was after I'd spent quite a while getting familiar with the entire area. At the far end of my range the vision was so degraded as to be almost useless. It gets bad not by each pixel getting dimmer, but by pixels being displaced from where they should be, or going missing entirely. It does get dimmer, but that's a secondary effect caused by less pixels getting through. Kiatsu. I'd not used ki to heal myself earlier because I'd kept falling asleep. My body was no longer tired, but I didn't want to use kiatsu on my broken bones because they'd be healing far faster than normal anyway (If I knew how, it'd probably be best to slow them down!). I could use kiatsu on my internal organs. It was clear from the doctors' and nurses' comments that my organs were progressing very nicely already, but helping them along seemed like a good idea. The Aikido books had said that healing was accelerated just by projecting ki into the injured area. Neither the injured person nor the ki supplier (the same person in my case) needed to understand what was happening internally. So when I had nothing better to do, I poured ki into parts of my chest, with no idea whether I was 'hitting' anything useful or not. [[The books about kiatsu refer to it as a "life force". In fact it's just an energy that interacts well with our consciousnesses (because ki is one half of the Consciousness-Ki duality) and with matter when given some direction to do so. I could joke with a comment like, "Fortunately, ki energy doesn't interact with our bodies the way electrical energy does!", but the reality is that life has evolved while being permanently surrounded by ki. That's been happening ever since life started as single-celled organisms, so ki's suiting life isn't a benevolent accident, but a natural consequence of evolution. By pouring ki into an area, it energizes all the cells inside the beam. Not like heating them up would make them vibrate faster, but energizing them to perform their functions better and faster. If there was an injury in the area, many of those cells would be repairing it, so energizing them got the repair work done faster. It also improved blood flow and whatever other functions were being performed inside the beam, so everything worked better. In a nutshell, kiatsu improves the body's own natural functions.]] One thing that pleased me was that I stayed awake. I was "bright eyed and bushy tailed," as Mom would say. My body didn't suddenly decide it needed a nap, I concentrated on my various mental tasks for hours, and everything seemed to be back to 100%. More accurately, the broken bones and missing finger making me about 95% physically fine, which was more than compensated for by my being mentally either 200% compared to a week ago, or 800% compared to other people. From time to time I'd been checking the waiting room, but Dad surprised me by being delivered to my room by a nurse between my spot checks. He was very happy to quickly see how good I was feeling. We had a great chat. A quick one because the others wanted to see me too and the rule was still one visitor at a time. Dad mentioned that the story had been ALL OVER the media, and everyone in town knew that Prof had won the money in Binion's. That would've damaged my reputation at school as I'd claimed I'd earned it in LA, but I can't say that was anywhere near the top of my concerns. #1: #4: #1: #6: #8: Dad also asked me, "Did you really want to keep your finger?" "Huh? You mean the one that was cut off?" "Yeah. Your rescuers said you wanted to keep it, so we've been holding on to it for you. It's in a jar of preservative hidden in the back of the closet, because it's freaky to look at." #1: #All: #4: I said, "I certainly don't want it. Is there anyone at your work you want to give the finger to?" Dad took me literally for two or three seconds, and was puzzled by why I thought someone at his work would want my preserved finger, but he finally got it (I think his sense of humor had probably gone missing the last few days). He finally smiled, "Haha. I get it. Yeah, at times that'd be very useful. You really don't want it?" "Not at all. I waved goodbye to it days ago." "Great. You know, I think I will take it to work to do what you said." [He did too! It became the unofficial "Fuck-up Award" at the factory. Whenever anyone fucked up stupidly enough, the consensus of other workers called for the idiot to be given "The Finger". He or she was awarded it at lunchtime, had to endure a retelling of their act of stupidity, and had to keep "The Finger" above their locker, or on their desk if they were junior management, until the next person fucked up badly enough to have it reassigned. Senior management was exempt from getting The Finger because it was widely believed that they fucked up all the time. They agreed with the use of my finger though, thinking a severed finger would be a very good safety reminder for people working with metal-cutting and -stamping machinery. After a few minutes, a much happier Dad was replaced by Mom. After Mom the nurse decided I was too tired for more visitors, so I convinced him I wasn't too tired by making enough ruckus that he let me see Julia and Vanessa to shut me up. After the visits all my loved ones started making the noises I'd asked them to, to convince the hospital to shift my bed into Prof's room. ------- I'll shift to a faster time scale and jump around a bit for the rest of this chapter, starting with the most important topic: Prof. The hospital didn't believe I could be healthy so quickly, so they wanted to keep me connected up to all the machines in my room. I and my loved ones persisted in making a BIG deal out of getting me able to see Prof. Vanessa and Julia were particularly vociferous, as I was able to tell them that I could help Prof. This Mom and Dad weren't aware of how special I was, and I couldn't tell them in the middle of a hospital with FBI agents or cops hanging around. Just before noon, the day after the one I'd been hoping for, they finally decided I was well enough to be allowed out of my bed, but they wouldn't let me disturb Prof by staying his room. I was given a wheelchair, so I used it to go straight to Prof's room where I started projecting ki into his organs that Vanessa had told me the doctors were most concerned about, including his brain, which somehow felt invasive to project ki into. It only takes one mind to project all eight minds' worth of ki, so we took turns doing it, and could keep it up for hour after hour, effectively chaining me to another chair, but in a good cause this time. I sat very quietly, reading books so the staff had no cause to think I was tiring Prof and kick me out. Especially over the next several days, when Prof's need was highest because he was sickest, I was determined to put every waking hour into helping him. I was in his room almost 24 hours a day, so much so that the staff started getting antsy about my not getting enough sleep. When I denied that I needed more sleep, they said, "You're disturbing Mr. Williams." They were using that claim as a way of manipulating me, but calling them on it wouldn't help. I had to get sneakier because the nurses could get my access to Prof restricted. I started returning to my room just before the change of shift happened, where I'd go to bed and sleep for about forty five minutes. By the time I awoke the new staff were in place. I'd emerge from my room, stretch like I'd just awoken from deep sleep, go to the nurses' station to ask if there'd been any changes in Prof's condition recently, then wheel myself to Prof's room for another 7.5 hours of kiatsu for him. Every shift thought I was sleeping on the previous shift, and I was able to spend a lot of time helping Prof. It only took a few days before I noticed that the doctors seemed to think Prof's recovery rate had jumped up nicely (I'm REALLY good at spying on doctors now), which I took as confirmation that my kiatsu was working. [[It was. I was able to increase the healing rate of the areas receiving my ki about 30% during the times they were receiving it. Not a huge difference, but when an organ was teetering on the edge of recovering or failing, that 30% made a VERY useful difference.]] Prof was a couple of days behind me in recovering enough to wake up for some conversations. He was perfectly lucid, but fell asleep quickly. Over the next few days his endurance steadily improved, so we were soon having some good conversations. I was reasonably sure we were safe to quietly talk about secret stuff, but "reasonably sure" wasn't nearly good enough, so we said very little of that nature. One thing Prof did insist on asking almost as soon as he could speak. He whispered to me very quietly, "You got us out?" I gave him a nod. Prof gave me a VERY heartfelt, "Thank you VERY much." "I could give you a hundred reasons why that's the wrong way around, but we'll have those conversations some other time. I've got a little something to show you that I think you'll like." I had a small piece of paper prepared for the right moment. I pulled it out, showing Prof the side that had two small rectangles drawn side by side on it. I said, "My study computer." Prof nodded I turned the paper over to show him the side with eight small rectangles, arranged four across and two high, "This is the new version. It'll be installed before we get back." He quickly understood what I was implying - his brain wasn't damaged - but couldn't help quietly exclaiming, "EIGHT! Eight, Mark?" "To be honest, seven is easy, but I'm having a little trouble with the eighth. That one might take me a while. I hope you'll forgive me for exaggerating?" Said with a big smile on my face. He thought about it for a few seconds, then said, "You're talking about maintaining full speed and remembering everything, aren't you?" "Full speed, so two goes to at least seven. Make sure you get better quickly, because I'd hate for you to miss out on all the fun." "I cannot BEGIN to imagine how. The implications are incredible." I could see he was having a lot of fun thinking about them. I stayed in Seattle while Prof slowly got better. Actually I didn't so much stay in Seattle, as in Prof's room. I even got a little work desk set up for me, so I could catch up on my studies and to relieve the boredom. Carol brought all my schoolwork up on one of her weekend visits. The hospital eventually discharged me, so I had to move into Vanessa's hotel room; Mom, Dad and Julia spending most of the long haul of Prof's recovery back in Corvallis. Moving out of my hospital room and into a hotel room didn't make much difference to anything, as I spent no more than three hours a day in the hotel, not even washing there as that was much easier in the wheelchair-friendly facilities in the hospital (with my hands so damaged, crutches weren't offered). Just before each shift change, I'd leave Prof's room to go get a quick meal in the hospital's food area and have a quick nap in a waiting room somewhere. Then I'd go back to the ward and tell the fresh faces something to the effect, "Here I am again, ready for today's visit. How's he been since yesterday?" Prof was finally sent home on Friday, June 17, the last day of exam week [I'd gone back to Corvallis the previous weekend so I could take my exams]. All of his organs were operating acceptably enough for him to be discharged, but they'd been weakened to various degrees. He was warned to be vigilant for anything that might be a symptom. Since every one of his organs had been affected, the definition of "anything that might be a symptom" covered a VERY wide range. Prof and Vanessa weren't as depressed about that as you might expect, as I'd told them that I'd almost certainly be able to help with his health. We'd all noticed that organs Vanessa told me the doctors were worried about tended to improve nicely over the next week or two. Even when Prof was well out of danger, and it was only a matter of waiting for his organs to slowly recover to acceptable levels, whichever organ was lagging behind seemed to get a second wind soon after it was mentioned to me. That gave Prof, Vanessa and Julia confidence in his ability to recover well, and an additional reason to be impressed by me. ------- Speaking of me, and restarting back at the time when the hospital had let me out of my bed. The first thing I should mention is that the 3B guys often had periods of quite bad depression, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively, depending on what triggered it. Imagining what our loved ones might have been going through in 3B-land was tough, and in some respects seeing things working out well in this dimension made our depressions even worse. Having all eight of us together helped a great deal though, as it's hard to stay depressed when you're 'surrounded' by understanding friends, but you should be aware that the 3B guys often had periods where they tuned out to wallow in their depressions, and that these spells took many weeks to diminish in frequency and effect. One of the doctors suggested that I might want to seek counseling after my traumatic experience. I was VERY sure I didn't want that at all! Besides, I already had a very balanced personality; four new minds had joined the four that'd already been in residence, which sounded pretty balanced to me. Counseling was not required for something else either. On TV the goodies are always remorseful and sometimes even physically sick after killing a baddie, especially their first time for killing someone. Not us! We regretted killing Boss and Goon ONLY because it stopped us killing them again much slower and more painfully. They not only deserved everything they got, but a great deal more and worse. I thought it wouldn't be helpful to explain my feelings to a therapist. ^ The hospital took two more days to put me on solids (FAR too long, in my opinion). I'd expected to want to eat a horse, but I couldn't manage anything like that much. They told me my stomach would've shrunk and it'd take time to return to normal, which is what happened. My first crap, like my first pee, was cause for a minor celebration. The nurse missed out on the thrill of carrying my filled bedpan away, as I was able to take myself to the bathroom by then. It took a couple of weeks for two of my needs - sleep and food - to settle down enough for me to be sure of their new levels. I abused my sleeping pattern for the first week I was mobile so I could spend as much time as I could with the still very sick Prof. After that week, I still slept for an hour across two shift changes, and then for as long as I wanted across the third shift change. That gave some confusing results so I experimented and found that I only needed 2.5 hours of sleep per day now. My need for food was only a little bit more than it had been before the kidnapping, not the large increase I'd expected. I'd previously calculated that every additional mind needed an additional 8% more food to fuel it, so my food intake should have increased from 1.25 times normal to 1.56 times normal. Instead it only inched up. I had no idea why, but I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. It saved Mom and Vanessa from buying EVEN bigger plates and a considerable amount of extra groceries per week, and I saved me the nuisance of having to eat so much. I joke about my eating, but it's already a nuisance. Not having to eat as much as I'd expected post-merge was a relief. [[The reduction in the number of hours of sleep required was for the same reason as the previous reduction to four hours: better physiological and mental control reduced the need for sleep. The +8% food per additional mind calculation left out a factor which I'll save for another day.]] On the topic of my biology, a slow, long-term change to my body accelerated considerably after my recent merge, my appendix scar fading away entirely during my stay in the hospital. ^ I scouted around the hospital by wheelchair and sight blob until I found an admin office with several busy computer screens. I successfully tested that my minds could focus on just one screen out of the several in view, then I called Robert and told him what I wanted, or as I learned us computer-savvy guys apparently say, "I specked it" [[at the time, that's what I thought the word was]]. Robert exclaimed, "What! The panels alone are going to cost you several grand. With the video cards and who knows what else you'll need to make this work, the bill could come to ten or fifteen grand!" "Yeah, but it'll be great for impressing chicks with, haha. Plus it'll make your father very happy." "I don't understand why you want EIGHT panels just to read lectures. It's going to occupy so much wall space you'll wear out your neck muscles trying to read them all. Why not just have four lectures open on each on the two panels you've got now?" "Because I want to be able to see all eight lectures at the same time, and control them independently. I know that seems very weird to you, but I want to work that way and I can afford it..." I went on to speck the rest of what I wanted, including suggesting that he hire Logan to do it for us. Logan was the OSU employee who'd set up my existing system. He'd sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, and that system had worked faultlessly. This was all going to be done at my expense, not OSU's, but I thought we could hire Logan for a little after-hours work. Logan thought I was crazy and the job was cool. "Cool" must beat "crazy", because he was eager to do it. He suggested an easy solution to the controlling problem. I didn't want eight keyboards on the table, just to do Page Up, Scroll Up, Scroll Down and Page Down for each lecture. He said it'd be easy to control all eight screens from a single keyboard, and it didn't have to be one of the normal keyboards. Apparently there are all sorts of specialist keyboards available that are programmable. He'd choose one that had the keys arranged orthogonally and in at least eight columns, one for each screen. Because I wouldn't be using a mouse scroll wheel for each of the eight screens, he suggested at least six buttons for each screen: Page Up, Fractional Up, Scroll Up, and the same triplet for the "Down" buttons. "Page Up" (or down), would replace the currently displayed page with the previous (or next) one. "Fractional" would be configurable for whatever fraction of a screen I found worked best; I opted for 25% initially. And "Scroll" would also be configurable, initially set at 5% of the window. That suited me perfectly. Each mind could have one NP-fingertip on its column of buttons, and with a little bit of practice it'd be able to control the screen almost thoughtlessly. ^ Dad and Mom hadn't been able to avoid visiting Dad's parents a couple of times, as they lived only a few miles away. Mom had told them that I was too sick to receive visitors yet, putting off that annoying day, but inevitably my paternal grandparents would soon come visiting me in the hospital. They would be irresistibly drawn. They're extremely conscious of money, so much so that nearly every conversation with them mentions it. Over the years, whenever I've heard them reminiscing with Dad about relatives or friends of the family, it's a CONSTANT stream of, "She's very successful, she's got a very high paying job," or, "He's doing very well, he owns five houses," or, "They're doing great, they just spent six weeks touring Europe," etc. They seem to talk only about people who're "doing very well", and it's always immediately followed by a financial proof of what "doing very well" means. After hearing thousands of repetitions of that formula, it's pretty obvious they believe money is the only possible measure of success, and people who don't measure up that way aren't worth talking about or to. Until VERY recently, when I gave them their million-dollar check, Dad and Mom have not been "successful" under Dad's parents' definition of that term. Twenty years of being on the receiving end of such comments have pissed Mom and Dad off. The comments had even annoyed me, and I'm just a kid who has never cared much about money, so they've REALLY pissed off Mom and Dad. Consequently Dad's parents and extended family aren't well thought of in our family. Mom and Dad had therefore kept our "success" secret from them, and were still refusing to answer financial questions from them. The official story was that Prof had won $11.1 million in Vegas, and I was just his daughter's boyfriend who'd watched Prof play and had gotten kidnapped as a result. In other words, all the money was Prof's. That was the "official" story. The press had been all over our kidnapping, and plenty of people had told them about my saying I was rich, about my giving my parents a million dollars, and my giving Prof and Vanessa a million too. That'd confused the press, so they'd demanded to know everything about our money: where it was, whose name it was in, why, etc. People close to me had refused to answer, but plenty of other people flapped their mouths about my apparently being rich, perhaps even richer than Prof, which got the media excited as there had to be an interesting story behind that. They'd become annoyingly demanding, pissing off everyone in my two families. From my paternal grandparents' point of view, I was very closely associated with a small fortune, and seemed to have a large chunk of it myself, although how much and why wasn't clear. I was stuck in a hospital only a few miles away from them, so they wanted to visit me. I was getting better, so would have to receive them soon. I had no trouble imagining them being a pain in my ass day after day. When Mom warned me that my grandparents were likely to visit tomorrow, I asked her, "What have you already told them about our money?" Mom chose to answer, "That we didn't know ANYTHING, not even that you and Prof had been to a casino. Something you DELIBERATELY made sure of!" Ignoring Mom's dig, I eventually got her to explain better what the public and my grandparents' understanding of the financial situation was. I pointed out, "We don't want to have to put up with their crap every day, so how about we do this..." I explained my plan, which Mom and Dad both enthusiastically agreed to. On her next talk with my grandparents, Mom told them that they must NOT talk with me about money, " ... because that's what he was tortured about. Asking poor Mark about money will remind him about being tortured again, cause him terrible anguish and set his psychological recovery back badly." My grandparents promised they'd not mention money. We were sure they'd be incapable of keeping their promise. I wanted to have a bet with Dad about which of his parents would mention it first, but I thought it best not to mention betting in front of Mom. We even clued the nurses in to our plan, so they wouldn't be alarmed when I pulled my little act. Fifteen minutes after my grandparents arrived, my grandmother couldn't resist eagerly asking me, "We couldn't tell from the articles how much of the eleven million is yours, Mark?" I made my face go white, I adopted the best version of a terrified expression I could act, held my arm up in front of my face and started shrieking, "NOOO! Don't kill me! I don't want to die!" We had several seconds of very funny chaos. One of the nurses came running, loudly demanding that everyone clear the room. Dad had already grabbed his mother and was frog-marching her out of the ward, and Mom was forcefully pushing my grandfather out as well. Mom did her best to look panicked and anguished, while trying hard to suppress her laughter. Mom and Dad returned a few minutes later, and we all had a good laugh about it. That'd been the most fun we'd ever had from one of my grandparents' visits. Mom called them twenty minutes later and angrily told them off for the psychological harm and pain they'd caused "Poor Mark", especially after promising that they wouldn't do it. Adding, "The hospital has banned you both from visiting Mark. They'll call security if you try to see him again. Mark will demand you leave too. He has to, for his own protection, because you're incapable of keeping your promise not to remind him of his torture. He's only a fifteen-year old boy! How could you be so cruel?" They apologized, promised not to make that mistake again, said they'd learned their lesson, that they wouldn't do it on their next visit, etc., but Mom wouldn't let them come back, saying, "You've already broken your promise once so I'd be stupid to trust you promising the same thing again. Mark's psychological health is FAR more important than your sticking your nose into something which is none of your business." Mom also had the argument, "It's not up to me anyway. When I told the doctors that you'd broken your word not to mention money, they decided that you're an uncontrollable danger to their patient, and that you're not allowed on the ward again." Mom and Dad thought this was an EXCELLENT development, with Mom particularly enjoying her idea that - "for Mark's future psychological health" - our home would have to become a "No Money-Talk Zone". Whenever Dad's parents came visiting our home in the future, something they were bound to want to do after we moved into the mansion, they'd be warned that they must not say a SINGLE word about money or they'd be ejected from the premises. Fortunately, we didn't have any other family in Seattle, as my grandparents had moved here after all their children had left home. Mom and Dad were getting a substantially increased volume of calls from several of his relatives (perhaps not entirely unrelated to our possibly having millions of dollars), and Dad happily started using the same tactic on them, as a way of refusing to talk about money. Most of Dad's relatives - but thankfully not Dad - are also excessively money conscious, and would become a pain if not repulsed. ------- Chapter 232: The Long Haul; Part Two Thursday, May 26 to Sunday, June 12, 2005 (Continued) I told Julia that Carol was going to be a much bigger part of our lives than before. My being Julia's Lord was less of an issue in this dimension, as it'd been the wedding ceremony that'd formalized it in 3B-land. Here I was more of her "lord" (lowercase). Julia still recognized that I was TELLING her about Carol, not inviting a discussion about it. "Oh. In what ways?" "I'm tempted to say you'll enjoy it more if you don't know, but you'll easily see it coming. Nothing much is going to happen until I get back to Corvallis and I'd rather wait until we're there before talking about it. In the meantime I want you and Ava to start spending time with Carol. Have lunch with her and her friends in middle school some days, invite her to come to high school for lunch with you sometimes. She'll be worried about not being dressed well enough for that, so please take her shopping for a few outfits she can wear with pride first. I'll reimburse you for that afterward. I know you, so please do NOT go overboard on that, as those clothes are going to be discarded in a few months when Carol's personality starts changing. For now just get her some outfits she feels confident in. What did you do with your old cellphone after Lily gave you the new one?" "I didn't get around to doing anything with it. I guess you want me to give it to Carol?" I'd been tempted to ask/tell Julia to give her new Hong Kong phone to Carol, leaving Julia to revert to her old one. I like to think that Julia was realizing that something important was happening, and that she would go along with that request, but I decided it was too much, too soon, especially for Carol. Julia's old phone was easily good enough to make my point, without overdoing it. So I agreed, "Yes please. With the charger and manual obviously. Would you ask The Boys to bring it when they come," (today was Friday. The Boys, Carol and some others were coming up to see us tomorrow). "And please get a SIM card for her later today or tomorrow morning so she can start using it right away." "Sure. I'm looking forward to finding out what this is about?" "It's about me having an insight into the sort of person that Carol can blossom into, with the encouragement that we're going to give her. It's VERY important to me that we do this, and it'll work out very well for you and Ava too." Julia looked mystified. She certainly wasn't going to argue with me about a member of my own family, but she very much likes to know what's going on, and so she asked me more questions about it. I put her off, quite authoritatively too, which made her even more curious. She asked a few more questions that I also wouldn't answer. It'd be good training for her, for when I become an uppercase Lord. On Saturday morning, Andrew, Robert, Ava, Carol and Donna came up to Seattle, bringing Julia's old cellphone as well as some stuff for me (my cellphone, some clothes, schoolwork, watch, etc.). I hadn't been discharged from the hospital yet, so I still had my room, allowing my family plus Ava to gather there, Prof's family gathering in his. I'd asked Julia to join us for a few minutes as soon as she could. When she came in, I got all of their attentions, then started my little speech, "When I was imprisoned I had all sorts of thoughts. Some were so silly they'd be embarrassing to mention now, and others were very important, like it'd be a terrible pity not to be rescued when there are still so many roast chickens yet to be eaten. But I had a couple of realizations that were even more important than roast chicken and pizza added together, so you know they must be serious. One of them is something I'll talk with Mom and Dad about when we all get home, the other is about you, Carol." "Me? But I haven't done anything?" "I'm talking about something that I failed to do. I hadn't appreciated your value NEARLY as highly as I should. I'm going to stop making that mistake, and from now on make much more time for you. I'm deeply ashamed now that I didn't include you in the trip we took to LA, especially because there'd been an empty seat. I know you understand that was a trip for my girlfriends, but from now on my girlfriends aren't more important than you. Anything like that in the future is going to have me inviting you first, and then if there are any spare seats, I'll invite other girls." "You don't want me to hang around when you've got so many high-school girls who want to be your girlfriends. I'd just get in the way." Mom's and Dad's expressions seemed to be something like benign tolerance. They were probably assuming that my traumatic experience had affected me in some way that made me temporarily sentimental toward Carol. They were going to find out that "temporary" wasn't going to be the case at all, and "sentimental" wasn't going to be the behavior of mine that'd get their attention the most. Not as much as some of my ki abilities were going to though, as I was going to give them a demonstration they'd never forget when I got home. Carol was genuinely puzzled by why I'd want to waste time with her when I could spend time with - in her mind - beautiful, sophisticated, much-more-important, high-school girls. That was how this Carol thought about Julia and Ava. Using the knowledge I had of 3B's Carol, there were a large number of things I could have said to this one that would have amazed her with how well I understood her. For example, I could tell her, "I know why you like pirate movies so much, and I also know that soon a man you'll love, and who'll loves you, is going to hold you down and take you. You'll be his for the rest of your life, and completely under his control. If he commands you to stand up in the middle of class and strip naked, you'll have to do it." That'd push several of Carol's hot buttons, and certainly distract her from her worrying about "getting in my way." I'd have to whisper that, of course, but even then Mom and Dad wouldn't mistake the sexual flush that'd hit Carol's face. I certainly wasn't going to say anything like that yet, especially as I didn't want to alert Mom and Dad to the sexual nature of Carol's and my imminent relationship, so I simply said, "You won't be getting in the way. I've had a lot of time for thinking over the last few days and I'm very confident that we're both going to be happy with the changes in our relationship. I don't know how long it'll be before Prof and I return to Corvallis, but if I haven't convinced you I'm right within a month of my return, I'll eat my hat. Julia's got a present for you now." Julia volleyed the credit right back at me, by opening the bag she'd brought in with her and passing her old cellphone to Carol, saying, "Mark asked me to give you my old cellphone. The charger and manual are in the bag. It's all set up ready to use, and there are several phone numbers already stored in it. Your number is in there too, under 'Carol'. There you go," said Julia, handing over the bag. "But I can't afford a cellphone. I don't..." I interrupted, "What sort of gift would it be if you had to pay for it? Besides, I didn't ask Julia to give it to you for your benefit, but for mine. I want to be able to call you up and talk with you every evening, no matter where you are." "But I'm mostly at home in the evenings. You can call me there." "And have to abide by Mom's draconian time limit - no thanks! Besides, you'll need privacy so you can tell me all the juicy gossip. And before you try to tell me that you don't have any gossip, that's going to change too. You'll be spending more time with Julia and Ava, coming up to high school to have lunch with them sometimes, or they'll come down to middle school to have lunch with you and your friends, and we'll be doing things together outside of school too. Obviously you'll need some new clothes for that, so Julia's going to take you shopping for some impressive new clothes. I am correct in thinking that teenage girls like cellphones and shopping for new clothes, aren't I? That hasn't changed while I've been locked up, has it?" It was evident from the look on Carol's face that it hadn't changed. She wanted to be very happy, but she was too busy being doubtful about it. She didn't understand why I should suddenly start spending money on her. In this dimension, as 3B's previous one, there'd not been time for any big spending sprees, but there'd been some talking about it among the family. As a good brother, I'd joked with my sisters that the quality of their birthday and Christmas presents would rise dramatically, and other similar comments. The key point being that I'd treated my two sisters equally. Singling Carol out now puzzled her, especially as Carol was sure she hadn't done anything to deserve my sudden attention. She was just one of my little sisters, and I was far too busy and successful to want to waste my time on her. "Take my word for it, Carol, there are going to be some big changes in your life soon, and you're going to be FAR happier because of them. For the next few weeks Prof is my number one priority, but when Prof and I get back home, you're going to become the number one most important thing for me. I'm even going to encourage you to do to me what girlfriends are always doing to their boyfriends." The obvious meaning REALLY confused her. I gave her a couple of seconds, then explained, "In my experience, girlfriends are always ordering their boyfriends around. That's certainly what Julia mostly does to me. SURELY an innocent girl like you didn't think anything NAUGHTY, did you Carol? Tsk, tsk." I was tempted to joke about putting her over my knees and spanking her bottom for having such thoughts. Carol would like that, especially if I included a comment about lifting her long skirt so I could spank her on her panties. She'd be delightfully embarrassed by the threat, let alone the action, but it was way too soon to be making comments like that in front of Mom and Dad. Even too soon for Carol, I realized, as she needed some initial sexual feelings for me for that to work. I controlled my impatience (plus Julia was already on my lap), making do with, "Sorry Carol, but I couldn't resist teasing you. In a few weeks, you, Julia and Ava are going to be ganging up on me mercilessly, and this is about the only chance I'll have to get in a few little teases of my own." That pretty much finished that conversation. I didn't have to ask Carol whether she wanted to be involved in this. She looked up to high-school girls in general, and very much to Julia in particular. She was thrilled to be the center of attention, although embarrassed by it (ordinary embarrassment, not sexual). ^ [To leap ahead, I called Carol every day. Initially only for short conversations because I didn't want to leave Prof for long. When Prof was well enough that my conversations with Carol wouldn't disturb him unhealthily, I talked to her while I stayed in his room. Our conversations got longer and more animated as Carol came to believe that I really did want to talk with her, and it wasn't an imposition on my more valuable time. I enjoyed our talks, as it was great fun to hear her coming out of her shell and being excited about the things she was doing with Julia and Ava. Plus talking to her relieved the boredom of sitting with Prof for up to 21 hours a day, especially because he slept a lot. From the conversations he overheard Prof soon realized something was up. He accepted my telling him, "It's one of the things we'll be talking about when we get home." This dimension's Julia - being exactly as smart as the Julia you've read about - had managed to discover that I enjoy seeing girls get it on together. As a result, she and Ava had gotten together for me, and to their surprise they'd found they quite enjoyed it. It was no surprise to 3B to learn this, as I don't think it's possible not to enjoy having sex with Ava, nor for Ava not to enjoy sex, even if it's with a girl. Despite Julia still discovering her bisexuality in this dimension, group sex wasn't as common here as it had been back in 3B-land. A threesome had been 3A's record until the Saturday night in LA when everyone - Me, Julia, Ava, Alexis, Katelin, Pat - had piled onto the bed. We hadn't booked a second room in 3A-land, so that orgy easily happened. Group sex was distressingly less common here than in 3B-land, but it was still common enough to spur Julia to ask me during one of our phone conversations about Carol, "Are you heading toward Ava and me seducing Carol?" "That isn't the purpose, but strongly avoiding it wouldn't be good either. Keep building your friendships and her confidence, and don't do anything that might make her think she's being used for sex. But it'd be good for you and Ava to have an open, healthy attitude to sex around Carol, and if she initiates something then use your judgment. We're in this for the long term, so there's no hurry for sex. Being nice to her is more important than anything else."] ^ "I haven't forgotten you, Donna. It seems to me that the best way of making you happy is to get your horse as soon as possible. Have you been talking to the girls at school who've got horses, about where to get them, how to look after them, and all those sorts of things?" The ensuing conversation made Donna happy, heading off any chance of sisterly jealousy. It led to discussion about when we'd be buying the new house. Everyone had been far too distracted to do anything about it during Prof's and my absence, so the main effect of the conversation was to get Mom thinking about it again. Everyone appreciated that better security would be a very good thing to have. Judging from her silence on the matter, the obvious need for more security was greater than any urge Mom felt to refuse to move into a mansion bought with our ill gotten gains. The architect had finished the work Mom and Vanessa had asked him to do, so the ball was in the moms' court. Vanessa was staying in Seattle until Prof was better, which meant that when Mom, Dad and Julia returned home tomorrow it'd be up to Mom and Julia to get the mansion purchase moving forward. Mom was very concerned to have that responsibility without Vanessa; Julia looked delighted. I added, "While I remember, I'd like a place with a good-sized swimming pool please. I know I said I wasn't fussy about that originally, but I've changed my mind. Is that okay?" I hadn't had the motivation to make this request in this dimension before, but now that 3B had supplied imagined images of Donna's Ducklings and Carol's Whatevers in tiny bikinis around the pool, I wanted that pool! Julia answered, "It should be no problem. Most of the places we're interested in have a pool. If the place we buy doesn't have one, we should be able to get one built at the same time as the rest of the renovations are being done." [Mom and Julia did fine. They were able to decide on the shortlist, revisit them, find out the extra information they needed, etc. (when the occupants could move out was the item that most interested me). They frequently talked to Vanessa by phone or when they visited the hospital. By the time we came home they'd decided on the short-shortlist (four properties), had the architect give more accurate time and cost estimates for the renovations, and were ready to start negotiating with whichever one they had chosen. To save time, they weren't even pretending that I had a say in the choice, so I knew nothing about which house they preferred.] Not immediately following the pool conversation, because I didn't want Mom and Dad to think they were so connected, I asked, "Carol and Donna, I imagine my reputation at school has taken a dive because we were caught out lying about my millions in Los Angeles, but I guess that doesn't matter much to the girls in your classes. Do they still get all silly about me?" [I was generally pretty good at avoiding it, but from time to time one of my minds would say "we" when he should have said "I"; this was one such occasion, not that it mattered because it was ambiguous. I just want you to be aware that it sometimes happens. It was slightly more likely these days, because we often thought of ourselves as 3A or 3B, which accentuated our "we-ness".] From my 3B experiences with the two middle-school groups, I'd seen that my having money wasn't something that mattered much to them. I expected that how I - or Prof, as was now widely believed - had earned the money wouldn't matter to them, so they'd be just as interested in me as before. My sisters' subsequent descriptions of the current attitude toward me taught me that I was about half-right. They didn't care about the source of my money, but they were influenced by many high-school girls' loss of interest in me. That made me seem less desirable, which made me less desirable. From what Carol and Donna said, there was still enough interest, so I said, "I have an idea for you two to be in charge of a type of informal club, for girls in your grades who're interested in me. One group would be called "Donna's Ducklings", because they'll be little, cute, hang around in a group, and make cheerful little noises, just like ducklings. You'd be like the mother duck, Donna. You'd be in charge of them, letting them follow you to visit me, making them behave properly, choosing who you allow into the group, etc. It'd be the same at your grade too Carol, except I can't think of such a good name for your group. The best I can come up with is "Carol's Cuties" or "Carol's Chicks", which aren't as good names as "Donna's Ducklings". I discussed what I wanted the groups to be like, de-emphasizing the sexual aspects almost entirely, as this Mom wasn't ready for that. I stressed that they'd be in a group and with one of my sisters the whole time. If I got back to school before the year ended I'd sometimes come down to middle school to have lunch with them (I hoped the mob scenes wouldn't recur), or they'd come to high school. During summer we'd have group get-togethers somewhere or other, or the group could visit us at our home. All good, clean, honest fun. Dad chuckled at the idea, but Mom was clearly cool about it. I told her, "I have an ulterior motive Mom, and it's not the one you're thinking of. I'll tell you about it later." For my benefit, later when Mom and Dad were in Prof's room I made sure that Carol and Donna knew I was interested in good looking girls only, and naughty behavior would be highly encouraged. I didn't forget to mention that Diana and Claire Norris should be included. I gave Carol the choice of name, and she chose "Carol's Cuties". For Mom's benefit (and also everyone else's), later when my sisters were absent I emphasized to Mom that I wanted to help develop my sisters' leadership skills and make them more popular at school. I stressed, "Especially for Carol. She needs to have her confidence improved, and you're going to be amazed at the difference in her when you see her blossoming." Mom looked at me strangely, adding her eyebrow thing. I simplified the truth enormously, "It's funny the things I thought about during my imprisonment, and some of the thoughts were much more intense than normal. I had some very deep insights into Carol's character, and a few about Donna's too, although not so much in her case. I have their best interests at heart, and you know I won't hurt them. There are some changes coming that you don't expect, but they're very good ones, especially if you judge them by the happiness they bring your children." Mom kept looking at me strangely. The 3B guys made a mental note to refer to Carol, Donna and me as "us", not as "your children". That'd been caused because 3B were having a little trouble identifying with Mom as our 'real' Mom. She looked the same, but the situation was different enough that 3B was very aware that she wasn't the same mom, therefore "us" hadn't naturally rolled out of the 3B-controlled mouth. I added, "I'll explain things fully when Prof and I get back to Corvallis. It's too complicated to explain here." I left out - wisely I thought - the delicate issue of Carol and me having babies together. It'd probably be best to wait until Mom was blown away by my ki abilities. Even later, Julia talked to me about my standing in high-school society. Some high-school girls were positively scathing about me now, especially those eliminated from a pipeline group. Quite a few were still interested though, as indicated by Ava's bringing up a monster-sized, many-times-signed "Get Well" card. My favorite second-tier girls - Alexis, Pat, Lily and Katelin - hadn't changed their opinion of me, and neither had a good number of the other 10th graders, as they knew me personally. 3A had never been as popular in school as 3B because of the absence of the "I Love My Sister Carol" speeches, and from that lower level, my reputation had taken hits since the news of Prof's casino win broke. It'd only taken a moderate hit in the 10th grade, but major hits in the 11th and 12th grades (even I had to admit that the 12th didn't matter, as the school year was nearly over). My reputation in the 9th grade wasn't affected much, but it'd never been high there anyway. There was plenty of variation among girls in each grade, but those are reasonable accurate descriptions of the general sentiments. ------- There were a lot of other conversations and other minor topics not worth quoting in full. To briefly comment on them: One was about my watch. We hadn't bothered thinking about our watch, so the 3B guys were very surprised to see it when it was delivered to me. It was weirdly identical to the watch in the 3B dimension, including that its color matched the Lordship/wedding ring that didn't exist in this dimension. The 3A guys had admired the color when Lily had given it to them, but hadn't known that it was special in any way so didn't grill Lily about why she'd chosen it. It did complement the cellphone Lily had bought (which, in this dimension, we wore on our left), but we didn't think that was a strong enough reason for Lily to have chosen this exact color of watch. I asked Julia, "I like the color of my watch. Did Lily explain to you exactly why she chose this color?" Julia made a couple of guesses, but she had no real idea. I made a mental note to ask Lily about it when I saw her after our exams. I wasn't going to see her before then because I'd asked Julia to tell all the girls at school that "Visitors are restricted to the two immediate families," (we kept quiet about Ava's visits). I didn't want to bother with the school scene yet, didn't want to be distracted from giving Prof as much kiatsu as I could, and didn't want to distract the girls from their pre-exam studies for the whole day it'd take them to get from Corvallis to Seattle and back). [[I didn't see Lily for a very long time, and by then I knew why the watch was the same color. Its color wasn't important in itself, but it was a very good example of what I came to call the "Puddle of Water Effect". If you put a measured amount of water in a hole in the ground, it will form a puddle. If you drain it, then refill it with the same amount of new water, the new puddle will look the same as the old one. That's not because the two amounts of water cooperated, copied or communicated with each other in any way, but because they both obeyed the same natural laws. There are some physical laws that operate across the W-Dimension to produce similar effects in many of them. Had I known them, I could have used them for a very indirect way of sending information across many of the w-dimensions, which would've been very interesting. But by the time I understood those laws, I had no need for indirect communication.]] ^ The doctors had told Mom and Dad that my recovery was going very well and I'd be discharged shortly. Mom and Dad were surprised by my insistence on staying with Prof for as long as he took to recover, but it was easy to give them an emotional reason. Several times my parents made comments like, "It was lucky someone saved your ass by calling the police," (that particular comment was from Dad when Mom was out of the room). I didn't attempt to claim any credit for our escape, always agreeing by saying something like, "I'll say!" I'll correct their misunderstanding when we get home, and show them enough of my ki abilities to blow them out of their socks, and to eventually get permission for me to get Carol out of her panties. Prof, Vanessa and Julia knew I had killed the baddies, and that I'd somehow got out of the chains to call the cops, but we hadn't discussed it beyond the couple of cryptic questions Vanessa and Julia had asked to have their suspicions confirmed. I'd let the Williamses know that I'd be having a big discussion with my parents when we got home, and for the Williamses to say nothing themselves yet. ^ It was nice to talk with Ava, but nothing of that conversation was particularly noteworthy. I thought of giving kiatsu to her parents, especially because I had four times as much ki as I had pre-merge. I decided not to even try, for several reasons: Mostly because I didn't think I could help. I'd been able to help Prof's recovery by little amounts by spending nearly 24 hours per day pouring ki into him. Ava's parents' diseases were both FAR nastier than Prof's situation, and there were two of them to split my efforts over, so I doubted I could make any useful difference. All I was doing was speeding Prof's getting better anyway. Turning around two cancer cases that were so bad that the doctors had been shaking their heads months ago was obviously outside the range of the slight boosts I could give. I thought that if I spent weeks with them, I might be able to draw out their lives by a day or two. Effectively losing weeks of their and my lives while we did kiatsu in order to add a couple of days to the duration of theirs made no sense. A great deal of my motivation to help Prof came from my feeling responsible for his being kidnapped, and in return for how wonderfully he'd treated me during the kidnappings. Especially in 3B-land, but it would've been the same in 3A-land. It's harsh, but neither of those applied to Katie or Carson. And it would've been extremely difficult to explain to everybody, including Katie and Carson, why I had to be with them for as many hours per day as possible. How could I spend time with them when they were at work? Or when they were sleeping? They might let me spend an hour a day with them, but that was pointless. [[At the cellular level, there's nothing 'wrong' about cancer. They're just cells going about what they 'think' their business is. Kiatsu stimulates a body's processes, so it would have stimulated the cancers too. As their cancers were already more powerful than their bodies' defenses, stimulating both would have sickened them even faster. I had a suspicion of that at this time, but it was too vague to specify it as a reason.]] ^ Prof had a couple of visitors who were his personal friends, so not part of my life. They were representatives for the others who'd wanted to come, but had been told that Prof was still too sick to receive more than the bare minimum of visitors. They could see I was healthy enough, so they were eager to get details of our adventure from me. I refused, saying, "I'm sure the papers have been full of all the gory details. Any details beyond those are getting personal and I won't answer those, especially not on Prof's behalf. You'll have to ask him yourself when he's better. Not to mention that the LAST thing I want to do is relive that experience." ^ My strong lack of desire to relive the experience takes me straight to the next topic: the hospital had been keeping the media away while we were too sick, but I was now well enough to face them. You know what media interviews are like (or if you don't, you're lucky). My favorite question was, "Were you happy to be rescued?" Even for reporters, that one was truly a waste of oxygen. (The previous sentence is ambiguous because "that one" could be referring to the question or the questioner. Both meanings are intended.) I remembered my media training so I bit my tongue. Instead I repeated my stock answer for the sixtieth time, "I don't remember it. Like I said before, I was unconscious." I was hoping to win the award for "The World's Most Boring Interview." In one respect I quite enjoyed it, as it was fun to see how dreadfully boring I could possibly be. It's a very effective strategy against the media, and there are lots of enjoyable tactics. I umm'ed and ahh'ed more often than I said real words. I repeated myself, put large pauses into my answers, or outright forget what the question was mid-answer. They'd have to edit the tape like crazy to make a coherent answer, but another of my tactics was to move my body a great deal, so an edited tape would show my head jumping around unacceptably. I was hoping that the people back at the network would take one look at the tape and throw it in the trash as unusable. By the time Prof recovered enough to face the press, the story was ancient history, so the press didn't want to interview him. I claimed some of the credit for that, for being so dreadfully dull during my interview. ^ I slowly became aware of a developing personal fault of mine: I became even more verbose; far too much so. I'd been verbose before my previous merge, but not as excessively as I became now. Previously, of my four minds: one would be on duty, one concentrating on the conversation, and the other two were usually observing whatever else was going on. If it was a particularly interesting conversation, the two spare minds would often get involved in it and would make additional comments, making me more verbose. Now rather than two spare minds I had six of them, and there was almost never anything else going on in the boring hospital room, so all seven active minds tended to participate in whatever conversation was happening. That got silly, and we had to learn to discipline ourselves better. That was helped by our continuing to get more adept at our internal conversations, especially in getting faster and developing shortcut ways of sending information. That meant we could often prepare what we were about to speak before we started speaking it, rather than each mind verbally adding points as it thought of them. I have only very occasionally quoted some of those internal "What will we say?" planning sessions because I give the answer when I quote my verbal conversation, but you should be aware that my having eight minds resulted in some changes to how I functioned internally. ------- I practiced my new ki skills over the next few weeks, but not often because I was too busy projecting ki into Prof nearly all the time. I got a little better with managing a sight blob and normal sight simultaneously, but it was still very distracting and required considerable concentration. A permanent overwatch sight blob was not going to happen, which meant I had to sadly give up my little hope of having one while playing soccer. Having eyes in the back of my head would have been useful during a game. I didn't need to get better at soccer, but I was still disappointed. Having two sight blobs active while my eyes were shut was very similar to having one blob with my eyes open. It was doable, but required so much effort that it was impractical. Having three sources of sight going at once was unusable. One idea I had was to have two sight blobs going producing different monochromatic output. They'd still superimpose, but it'd be easier to distinguish the images. The idea had a little merit, but I dismissed it. I wanted a proper solution to the problem, not a tiny improvement at the expense of having to keep my eyes shut. I also tried to see in the infrared. As a very deliberate way of creating a blob that I was sure was using infrared, I created an emitting light blob then changed its frequency to be redder and then more so, until just after I could no longer see it but could feel it giving out heat. Then I used it as a sight blob. I could see with it all right, but only perfectly ordinary, visible light. Looking at humans, I couldn't see any of the hot spots that infrared is supposed to see. I gave it up as being outside my abilities. [[This is yet another example of my preconceptions limiting my abilities. I had forgotten that when I see infrared displayed on TV, I'm not actually seeing infrared itself, but with those frequencies mapped to the visible spectrum. It would've been quite easy for me to do a frequency shift, but I gave up too quickly. I did eventually start using infrared sensing properly, but it took me so long that I missed many opportunities to use such an ability usefully.]] I tried to achieve Sound Blobs a few times, but never with any success. I never even tried Smell Blobs and Taste Blobs. Of my five classical senses, only sight, touch and hearing seemed useful. I could get two out of those three, which was pretty good. My proximity sense was an order of magnitude more detailed than it had been previously. One of the wonderful things about proximity is that it doesn't require any effort to make it work better, as it had improved the instant we centered after the merge. It was puzzling in one respect, as it showed people as sometimes having an additional tinge of 'color' (as a metaphor). Only a few people had tinges, and I initially had no idea what they meant, if anything. Over time I noticed that the different colored tinges correlated to the subjects' emotions. They had to be feeling an emotion very strongly for it to show up in proximity, but strong emotions are not uncommon in hospitals, especially grief, happiness, anger, love, despair and some others. Also boredom and acceptance would be common too, but passive emotions didn't seem to register in my new proximity sense. (I've also used color as the metaphor for how I can identify individuals with my proximity sense. Distinguishing people and emotions didn't overlap because I wasn't really seeing colors. I use that metaphor because sight is the only sense we've got that gives clear, 3D information. If we were literate bats, I might have used sonar pings as one of the metaphors.) Love was a particularly interesting one for me. Vanessa visited Prof every day, so I saw it in her many times, and in him when he was awake. It didn't show up all the time, or even most of the time. Something had to happen to invoke the mood, but that happened often enough for me to see it several times, especially when Prof was at his sickest. I saw it in Mom and Dad, between them and toward us kids - I could usually tell who the tinge was for from what event had triggered the emotion. I didn't see it in Carol for me yet, but I was looking forward to the day when I did. I did see it in me for Carol, no doubt because of 3B's influence because I didn't see it in myself for Donna, and 3A had thought of both sisters equally until 3B moved in. I saw it in Julia many times, for me and for her parents, especially for Prof because of the circumstances. Ava had it for me sometimes too, when something triggered her to feel it strongly enough. I was surprised by Ava's feelings being that strong, but I believed it because I was automatically assuming that proximity was infallible. I didn't see it in Ava for Julia, but I didn't consider that important as the circumstances didn't encourage it as much as it encouraged Ava to feel love for me. I'd seen - with my eyes - plenty of evidence in recent weeks of how much Ava felt for Julia, and it was heaps. As you know from my earlier logic lesson to Julia: "The absence of proof isn't proof of the absence." It took a lot of emotion to register in my proximity. I also practiced my External Ki Projection a little. I had four times as much ki now, and I wanted to confirm that EKP worked four times as well. Nurses worked around me often enough that it was easy for me to deflect their grabs at whatever they were grabbing for. Having a six-foot range made that much easier. The EKP tests all went as I thought they would, confirming that my deflection ability had improved from "very, very weak", to "very weak". Not that I was complaining, as it had saved my kneecap. [[Actually my ki was NOW about 4.4 times greater than my ORIGINAL four-minded amount, because of the projection practice my on-duty minds have been doing. Sensei had taken thirty years to gain +200%, but I was gaining about +5% of my unconscious amount per month. I'd had about one month's training before and after my latest merge, which increased my consciously projected ki by about 10% over what eight minds produced unconsciously.]] The most important ki ability I wanted to develop was something to stop another baddie sneaking up on me while I was sleeping. I could easily shut my eyes and create an overwatch sight blob, but the problem was that it canceled when I went to sleep, although I only knew that from it not being there when I woke up. Being centered is not a natural state of mind, so it requires concentration to keep it happening. It's REALLY hard to maintain concentration while sleeping. I practiced many times, by ordering my body to take five minute naps, but I never succeeded in having any ki-effect still functioning when I woke up. So the only possibility seemed to be to have my minds and body take turns to sleep, so there'd be at least one mind awake at all times. Unfortunately, I couldn't make that work, not in any combination of what was awake and what asleep. Sleep was an "all or nothing" event for my minds and body. I ended up concluding that guarding myself while most of us slept wasn't possible. It was a pity, but in one respect I was somewhat thankful. I'd heard that lack of sleep can make people delusional. I'd recently experienced what it was like to be delusional, and I hadn't liked it at all, so I was very happy to avoid any chance of it happening again. ^ I rapidly recovered my health, so was soon unable to use my "I'm too tired to continue" excuse on the cops, leaving me with no way to avoid having some long talks with them. It also wouldn't be good to appear other than enthusiastic to help them catch the Third Bad Man. Fortunately I still had my "I was unconscious or delusional" excuse. They never found the Third Man, or any firm evidence that he existed. For example, the realtor who'd rented the house identified Dom only. No one associated with the kidnapping could tie a third person to it. There was compelling evidence that he must've existed as someone had poked out Boss's and Goon's eyeballs and had shot them, but that was indirect, unhelpful evidence. Boss and Goon had left plenty of fingerprints around the house, but no one else had. (There had been several containers of gasoline stored in the garage that had Goon's fingerprints on them, which the building's owner said hadn't been there before. Boss had apparently intended burning the house down after killing us, regardless that it was on the side of a wooded valley.) There was also forensic evidence that was puzzling. Blood in funny places, for example. Boss had bled all over my left side, and when I'd gone for my crawl upstairs a couple of days later I'd left flakes of it along my trail. The cops were puzzled and frustrated, but at the end of the day the victims had been rescued and two-thirds of the culprits were dead. They decided the third guy was probably the least evil of the three, as it'd probably been him who'd come back a couple of days later to check on us and call 9-1-1, which made his getting away somewhat less annoying (not that the cops like letting anyone get away with kidnapping and torture). The eyeball poking certainly made Mr. Third seem considerably less than a nice guy, but it was impossible to get a clue about him so the search had to be dropped. One hypothesis popular with the police and media was that the Third Man was a VERY professional 'fixer' employed by Binion's. Clearly he must've been very professional, as he left none of his fingerprints or other evidence behind. The theory was that Binion's had set the whole thing up as a way of finding out how we'd cheated them. A fight had broken out between Mr. Third and the other two, which he'd won (he was GOOD!). The Feds tried hard to find the missing guy by starting at Binion's end. Binion's had received official attention as soon as the kidnapping was reported, but pursuing the "Third Man" lead caused even more attention. That investigation caused Binion's a great deal of grief and bad publicity, especially when the "PI Invasion of Corvallis" was uncovered and publicized. That Binion's had moved Heaven and Earth to investigate Prof Williams and hunt down Mark Anderson, and we'd been kidnapped a few days after letting down our guard, was extremely suspicious. Clearly Binion's were not good losers, and their reputation suffered enormously. Every gambler who hoped to win millions avoided Binion's like the plague. Given how many gamblers that was, no one was surprised when Binion's business nose-dived, making it even less likely for anyone to go there. They ended up filing for bankruptcy several months later. Our taking $11.1 million off them hadn't helped either. I guess you could say that, "Prof and I broke the bank in Vegas." On the topic of roulette cheating, after I became well enough to talk, pretty much every cop I talked to wanted to know - they often claimed their investigation required it - whether Prof and I had a way of beating roulette. It would've been fun to be sarcastic, but I figured I shouldn't piss off the cops. No doubt I'll get plenty of opportunities to reply to that question sarcastically when I get back to Corvallis. We stuck to our story: the two families wanted a million dollars to buy a new home big enough for both families. That plus the proceeds from selling our two existing homes would've given us enough, so that excuse stacked up. We had $100,000 to risk: my 'free' $45,000 from the school, a bit more from Mom and Dad, then matched by Prof and Vanessa. Prof had invented a complicated betting scheme, but to our surprise we'd won on the first spin. The second win was obviously pure luck because Ted Binion chose the wheel and numbers. The cops never suspected Prof or me of any involvement in the death of Boss and Goon. There was plenty of evidence proving we hadn't, for example, the trajectory of the bullet that killed Goon was easily plotted to have originated from a location several feet away from where both Prof and I were starving to death because we were securely chained to the ringbolts in the floor. They sometimes tried pressuring us to cough up some more details, because that's what cops do, but it never got them anything other than a few more stories about our delusions. I had quite a lot of fun making up delusions, although I had to be careful not to get carried away so much I made them suspicious. While I was in the hospital, I was very cautious with what I said to the Williamses about my abilities. After the weeks passed, I relaxed from "very cautious" down to "cautious", but I still refused any significant conversation. I knew that talking about my abilities wouldn't be a quick chat, so starting it risked our being overheard by one of the many people wandering around the hospital, including my parents. It was better to put those conversations off until we got home. I quickly lost concern about being overheard or bugged by the cops, as they lost interest in us after a week or so. The case would probably be open for years because of their inability to find the Third Man, but no one would be doing anything about it. The victims were back and getting better, most of the perpetrators were dead, and the leads were drying up. I was amused when I was told about Natalie Figueroa, the 9th grade girl who'd woken Donna the night of the kidnapping to ask where I was. She got a great deal more than she'd had in mind when she'd climbed in our bathroom window. Instead of a pleasant time with the boy she 'loved', she ended up suspected of being the advanced scout for a kidnapping plot, so she and her family were grilled by the FBI. Which was preferable over her finding me in bed with Carol! (That had only been possible in 3B-land, sadly.) ^ Back in the bad old days of my having only one mind, déjà vu had occurred about every two years. Once I had two minds, there'd been two déjà vu experiences, seven months and eight months after the preceding occurrence. With four minds I'd had déjà vu's after six and seven weeks. Each merge seemed to quarter the previous time between déjà vu's, which meant they should now occur about every 1.5 weeks. I was ready when the next one occurred thirteen days after my merge. Unlike any of my earlier experiences with déjà vu, this time it occurred when both Marks were already centered, which immediately answered the question about whether being centered and déjà vu were compatible. It also immediately created an EXCITING new question. When déjà vu started we'd been projecting ki into Prof, so it was immediately obvious to everyone that we were now projecting four times as much ki as before, plus Prof's image in our Proximity sense was suddenly far more detailed than it'd been before. That created the question, "Have all our ki abilities increased?" Which was immediately followed by the exciting question, "Can we fly now?" If our ki abilities had increased in the same way as they did from the last merge, each mind should be able to create a force four times more than before, which would now be 25.6 kg (56.4 lb) per mind; plus some training bonus that I still hadn't gotten around to quantifying, but knew was small. So three minds' worth of lift should be almost exactly what I weighed, and four minds should easily be able to lift me. I braced my palms on the arms of my wheelchair (as did the other Mark), and pretended to push my body upward with my arms. I created three NP-points under my ass and upper-legs, then pushed up with three minds' worth of maximum push. I could feel by the load on my arms that I weighed almost nothing now, probably not much more than the weight of the cast on my leg. A fourth mind created a point and pushed up a little. Our body started rising slowly, while we were flexing our arm muscles and trying to look as if we were doing something strenuous. Having proved that we could fly, we had to let ourselves sink back into the chair. #3: #1: #7: #1: #8: #All: #3: We quickly confirmed that the maximum and minimum sizes of our NP-points had both improved by a factor of two, that we went from eight to sixteen points per mind, and that heat blobs gave out more heat. We didn't want to see how bright our light blobs could get, as that'd draw attention. We tried creating a sight blob with our eyes open to see if overwatch would be possible, but the superimposition was just as bad as it had been before. The sight blob's vision was just as good as before, so no factor of ten improvement as was the case with our proximity sense. We returned to considering proximity. Prof appeared in EVEN more detail than we'd been seeing for the last week or so, and FAR more than the months before that. For example, we could clearly see his breathing action. There was a qualitative difference too. I'd seen a Simpsons episode where Homer had fallen into a 3D world, changing him from a 2D cartoon into a 3D one. That's similar to how Prof's 'image' had changed in proximity. It was 'deeper' somehow. Proximity isn't sight, so there was no way we could tell 'at a glance' what this extra 'depth' meant. We tossed around some quick ideas, but none were greeted with immediate acceptance, so we gave up on it. The clock was ticking and we were unlikely to solve the problem in the time we had until the déjà vu ended. We tried to work out why we were able to do our ki abilities as if we'd merged already when we had zero intention of doing so. The Marks on both ends of this déjà vu link had been levitating at the same time, so it wasn't as if we borrowed their power and then they borrowed ours. If they had merged with us, then we'd expect to have stronger ki abilities, but their body would have zero of them, partially balancing the situation - only "partially" because some of our abilities improved by more than a factor of two. The "partial" issue wasn't the main one at the moment, because that was to do with how merges increase abilities so oddly. At the moment we were trying to work out how both Marks had increased abilities without merging, as that seemed 'wrong'. We discussed it for a few seconds, but didn't come up with a plausible sounding explanation. [[It's quite simple. During déjà vu we had our eight minds in our head, plus copies of the eight visitors' minds, making sixteen minds in our head. That naturally gave us sixteen minds' worth of ki ability, just as if we'd merged. In their head, there were ANOTHER sixteen minds: their eight originals plus our eight minds as resonating copies, giving them increased ki abilities too. We both had more ki because we both had more minds. We thought our eight minds were talking to his eight minds across the W-Dimension, but our conversations were both local, hiding the fact that the minds had been duplicated. Even the term "merging" implies there's some sort of "crossing over", which is misleading. Or, at least, has the timing wrong, because the mind copies are made earlier.]] In the remaining time, we discussed our lives. They'd had very similar experiences to us, with their 3A having had one drink of water, and their 3B not. [[Many other dimensions' Marks and Profs had been taken prisoner just as we had, had killed their captors, and had faced the same imminent death as we had. As it happened, Boss had given a glass of water to Mark and Prof in about half the dimensions in which he had captured 'us'. Unfortunately, when all the various Marks had déjà vu'd (that usually happens about the same time across the W-Dimension), half of the Marks linked to Marks in exactly the same situation as them. Specifically, they'd both had half a glass of water, or they'd both had no water. The Mark's who'd had no water nearly all chose to merge, and nearly all of them were too mentally and physically weak to find a way out in time, and had died. The Marks who'd had half a glass - thinking they were stronger than they really were - often chose not to merge, because they didn't want to abandon their Prof or to cause their loved ones grief. None of them found a way out or were rescued, and they died too. The Bosses and Goons had caused a great deal of grief.]] In both their dimensions they had Carol as a 'wife', and they were amused that we didn't. They agreed it'd be very easy to seduce her with what we knew. After comparing notes it appeared that their 3A and 3B dimensions were similar to our 3B, with our 3A (the one I was in now) being the odd one out. The déjà vu stopped after slightly more than a minute, returning all our ki abilities to their eight-mind levels. We resumed projecting ki at Prof while we discussed the déjà vu, but nothing of significance was decided on. We eventually returned to reading our textbook. We had another déjà vu 9.5 days later. We were centered and had more people around us, so were able to discover that our proximity range became twelve feet. What experiments we could do confirmed our previous déjà vu experiences. Nothing more was usefully learned about our ki abilities. When we compared lives, they had different differences than ours, which confirmed our impression from the previous déjà vu. They reported that in the déjà vu they'd had back when they had four minds, they'd talked to a mind where one of the Mark's came from a family where my youngest sister (Donna), was a boy called Richard. That Mark had shared the larger bedroom with Richard, while Carol had 'my' smaller bedroom to herself. That there were differences was confirmed by the more frequent déjà vu's, which also involved more minds than before, so we gained a lot more information and a growing list of odd differences that various Marks had discovered. That confirmed what we already thought about the W-Dimension, which was good to know but not helpful as we had no control over any of it. We continued to have déjà vu's on average about twelve days apart. All the Marks were happy and enjoying their lives, with none of them having any intention of committing suicide ever again. ------- Chapter 233: Going Back to Corvallis Sunday, June 12, 2005 I'd intended to stay with Prof until he was discharged, but I got pushed into going home a week before then. No one wanted me to miss my exams, and Prof was doing so much better that I didn't have a strong reason to stay. Exams started on Monday, June 13, so I agreed to leave on the Sunday the 12th. [[While I think to mention it, the academic year's start and stop dates varied across dimensions too, with the dates of the dimensions already discussed herein being unusual. I googled for an explanation of why the dates had been chosen, and the consensus was that no one knew. It was an unexplained tradition that everyone more or less stuck to.]] We'd been rescued on May 23, so I'd had almost three weeks of healing. I was pretty sure my right hand's fingers and my leg bone were healed already, but I kept quiet about that and didn't ask the hospital to X-ray them. That'd leave permanent records, which might not be a good idea. I'd been told the breaks would take longer than normal to heal because I'd been starved and they'd been left broken for a few days. The doctors had clearly seen how broken my bones were, and they probably had a clear idea of how long they should take to heal, which would be the best part of two months, according to what we'd been told. It was a nuisance, but I could get by. The dressing on my left hand's "hole finger" had been removed already, showing a well-healed stump, so that allowed me to use my left hand for writing my exams. It was slightly awkward to hold a pen without having a middle finger, but adapting to that was easy. My leg's and right hand's dressings were more of a nuisance, but I'd leave them on for longer so my healing rate would appear more normal. I'd only be taking exams all of next week anyway, so didn't need much mobility. Vanessa was temporarily living in Seattle, but everyone else drove up on the Saturday of my last weekend, Carol traveling with her new friend Julia in the back of Andrew's car. Ava's parents had gotten home from their two-week vacation this morning, so Ava was catching up with them and studying for her first exam tomorrow. Carol's affection toward me was increasing substantially from weekend to weekend, and she arrived on Saturday dressed in what was obviously one of her new purchases and with her hair cut differently. After seeing Carol enter the room and pose self-consciously waiting for my comment, I told Julia, "What a pity Carol couldn't come, but it's very nice that you've brought me such a beautiful girl as a substitute." Turning to Carol I asked, "What's your name, beautiful new girl?" You get the idea, and I'm sure you can predict the tone of my follow-on compliments and their happy reception. We were soon sitting around Prof's room, with Carol in my arms and on my lap, which wasn't that easy with my being in a wheelchair and with one leg in a cast for most of its length. As another example of the sort of things I was saying to Carol these days, after a while on my lap, Carol said, "I suppose I'd better give Julia a turn." She started working her way forward to get off, the wheelchair's armrests made getting off sideways too difficult. I pulled her back, saying, "You get first dibs on being with me, Carol. You can stay until you feel you've had enough lap time. Julia knows how important you are to me, and this is how things are going to be in the future, so she'll wait." Carol had a low opinion of her value, and she couldn't believe that someone as smart, successful and sought after as me would want to - as she put it - "waste your time with me." It'd taken a couple of weeks of daily phone calls and lots of talk during the weekends to convince Carol that I did value her so highly. When she did start accepting that I truly valued her it affected her very deeply, and the happiness it gave her was obvious to everyone. Julia and Ava were also spending a lot of time with Carol, encouraging her to open up, building her confidence, etc. I talked daily to Julia and Ava too, urging them on, so Carol was having a VERY good time recently. On the drive back to Corvallis with Mom and Dad, my cast meant only one person could sit in the backseat with me. Carol was determined that it be her, and I wasn't going to argue. Donna got bumped into Andrew's car, and I spent the four-hour drive with an arm around Carol's waist, her arm around mine, and our heads close together talking quietly. In various ways I told her how much I loved her, how fantastic her life was going to become, how happy she was going to be, how confident and self-assured she was going to become, and every other nice thing I could think of without mentioning sex. Every time Carol asked me a question or made a comment, I tried to turn it into another reinforcing message. Like when Carol questioned that she could ever be self-assured, I told her, "From now on everyone is going to see that you are my number one girl. It'll start with your being in charge of Carol's Cuties, but it'll expand from there. That's going to make people respect and listen to you. They'll do what you say, and you'll gain confidence from it." "But I can't be your number one girl. What about Julia, Ava, the Liaisons and all the other girls? They all come before me." "Like heck they do! The Liaisons and the other girls don't come within miles of you. You leave them in your dust! Ava's very nice and good to have around, but she's well below you in my affections. Only Julia is close. She's very close, but if I had to choose one of you to spend the rest of my life with, I wouldn't hesitate to choose you." "But she's your girlfriend! And she's wonderful and clever and beautiful and, umm, sexy with you too. I can't do ANY of those things!" "Carol, you are already EVERY one of those things, apart from the last one, which is unimportant compared to how fantastic you are at everything else. You're my number one, and your arguing with it is pointless because you're not going to change my mind about loving you. One thing that is changing though, is one of our plans for the new mansion. No longer is the main house going to contain the four parents, you and Donna; with the 'Mark Wing' containing Julia, me and sometimes Ava. You'll be staying with Julia and me." "Me! I couldn't do that. Julia wants you to have lots of girls visiting you, and her and you do things together a lot too. I'd be in the way all the time..." "You can't be in the way. You're my number one girl, so all the other girls could be in the way, but never you. Fortunately I don't have to make a choice between you and Julia, because I intend to have both of you in my life. You, Julia and I are going to be living together very soon, and starting from right now our three lives are going to be totally wrapped around each other." "But I'm just a little girl. I don't know how to do anything..." "Carol, the ONLY thing that matters is that we love each other. You, Julia and I are going to build a fantastically loving and happy three-way relationship. Your doubts are completely unnecessary, because you're a wonderfully loving and caring person. Julia and I are lucky to have your love..." I'm sure you get the general theme by now; I kept reinforcing my compliments. I'd say Carol 'swallowed it hook, line and sinker', but that'd imply I was insincere, which was the total opposite of how I felt. Carol could tell I was deadly serious too, and it melted her heart. She was somewhat lonely and she very much enjoyed being in a caring relationship with a guy who wasn't obviously after her body, especially with someone she respected. Respect is very important to Carol, which is probably Mom's 'fault' - if it's a fault - because Mom makes a big deal about that to the girls and me. Obviously it hasn't had much affect on me, because every teenage boy knows that tits are more important. Whatever the reasons, Carol was feeling some emotions strongly with me, and with Julia and Ava too, and they were enough to have Carol on the verge of tears sometimes. Although I was totally sincere, I can't claim to be totally honest. Much of the praise I gave Carol was something she hadn't earned yet. I was praising the Carol that 3B had lost, rather than this one, but I never doubted that my praises would become true. This Carol behaved exactly as I expected her to, except that she was even emotionally hungrier than the other Carol had been at the time of her seduction. I'd figured that was because this Carol had gotten to know Julia much better by now; had seen me and Julia in a successful, loving relationship for three months; and had been impressed by the many good changes to my character that Julia had pushed me into developing. Last, and I'm sure of considerable effect, Carol had seen that I was extremely popular with the girls at school. Julia had convinced me that it had a powerful psychological effect on other girls. When it comes to something as basic as perceived desirability, at least 90% of a girl's opinion is taken from the group's opinion. Guys also suffer from the same group-think syndrome, as convincingly proved by Paris Hilton's manufactured popularity sustaining itself. Carol was an easy seduction. She was so hungry for the emotional aspects that I wasn't so much pulling her in the direction I wanted her to go, as giving her a slight push and then jogging after her to keep up. That's an exaggeration, as it had taken a few weeks to work on her, but comparing the Carol of now to that of a month ago makes that description seem reasonable. Physically I hadn't done anything beyond hugging her and kissing her on the cheek, but knowing her sexual buttons as well as I did, I didn't think physical seduction was going to be much of a problem, unless I stupidly rushed it. Holding myself back was my main problem. I REALLY wanted to slide my hand up to Carol's breast, or whisper something very sexual to her, or use NP to rub between her legs (after giving her the right verbal preparation, so she wouldn't freak out). Unfortunately, it was too early for any of that. Mom and Dad sitting in the front seat had an inhibiting effect too, especially later in the trip when Mom was looking back at us more often, clearly wondering what was going on in the backseat. The expressions on Carol's face certainly let Mom know something was "going on". 3A had been a good, loving brother to Carol and Donna before 3B's arrival, and had often been affectionate with them, but not to the extent that I was with Carol now. Not long before we got to Corvallis, Mom asked, "What are you two up to back there?" Mom was looking mostly at me, as it was pretty obvious who she thought was responsible for whatever it was that was going on. I answered, "Have we got time to stop at the Williams' for a talk? I'd prefer to have it in Julia's soundproof room because I've got some huge secrets to tell you." "Why not tell us now?" "Because it'll cause Dad to drive off the road in shock. I'd much rather wait until we were in a stationary room." Mom and Dad exchanged glances, then Mom said, "Okay. We've got a lot of questions for you too." I knew that. They'd asked several questions in the hospital and I'd put them off. They wanted to know why Prof and I had been so confident that our so-called business would be profitable, through to why the Williamses had had such a strange attitude to my spending all my time with Prof in the hospital, with several other questions in between. I'd previously let Mom and Dad know that there was more to the story of our imprisonment than what Prof and I had told the cops, so the upcoming talk would include that. For the last few weeks, I'd been putting Mom and Dad off until later. It was about time "later" became "soon". I'd use answering the question about winning at roulette as the introduction to my demonstration. I'd rejected starting by telling them I'd killed the two baddies. It would certainly get their attention in a dramatic way, and Dad might react favorably to it, but I doubted Mom would. And I'd also rejected repeating the Killer and Immobilizer light blob attacks on this Dad, because they'd scared my other Dad so much I'd felt sorry for him. I said, "I want Julia there too. I'll call her to find out how far behind us they are." It was a pretty safe bet they were somewhere behind us, as the Williamses are all cautious drivers. There'd been repeated stories in the news over the last several months about the Government spying on us, including tapping our phone calls, so the Williamses and I speak circumspectly on the phone about my abilities. Having been questioned by the FBI several times a few weeks ago was a good reminder to be careful, so I just told Julia, "I'm planning to stop off at your room on the way home to have a talk with Mom and Dad. I want you there too. How long until you get home?" "About twenty minutes. I'm looking forward to this; I've got some questions too." They were about ten minutes behind us. "I'm sure you do. I've been amazed by your patience. See you soon." I didn't have my front door key to the Williams' house with me as no one had thought I'd need my key ring, so it'd been left in Julia's room. We killed time by stopping for some milk and bread, then parking in front of the Williams' to wait. Mom turned around to ask me, "Are you going to explain why you've been so affectionate with Carol recently?" "Yes, but not today. Before you can understand why I've changed my relationship with Carol you need to understand some other things about me, which is what I'm about to tell you. Getting your head around those is going to take you several days at least, by which time Prof and Vanessa should be back. Which works out well because I want to include them in the discussion about Carol's and my relationship. I can see you want to ask more questions, but it'd be best to wait until we're inside. Aren't you the one who's always saying that, 'Patience is a virtue'?" "Yes, but I'm referring to your patience, not mine. Your experience has changed you in ways I wouldn't have expected. I would have thought you'd be less self-assured, not more. And your sudden affection for Carol is a mystery too. Why just Carol and not Donna as well?" "Patience, Mom. I'm not trying to keep things from you, it's just that I want to explain everything in the way I think best." Five minutes later Julia and her brothers arrived. I extracted myself from the car with considerably less than my usual gracefulness, and hobbled inside on my newly issued crutch. I was pretty sure my leg was already healed so I could have walked on it, but I preferred not to let the general public see me do that so soon, so hobbling was required for a few days. Inside I asked, "Robert or Andrew, can one of you look after Donna for half an hour or so please? I need to have a confidential talk with everyone else in Julia's room." "I will," agreed Robert. "We can play 8-ball or..." "Aww," disagreed Donna. "I want to know what you're talking about." "Come here Donna," I said, patting my lap. When she was in position I asked, "You like knowing secrets?" "Sure. They're always the most interesting stuff." "Let me show you something." I moved her left hand to the chair's armrest, clamped it there with my comparatively good hand, then with my right hand quickly pulled one of her fingers back to the point of causing her quite a lot of pain. "OWW! Stop it! That hurts!" I released her finger. "That HURT!" she accused. "Why'd you do that?" Mom clearly thought I was out of line too. It'd happened too fast for her to react, but she clearly wasn't pleased with me, and the expression on her face said I'd better have a damned good answer. I held my right hand up in front of Donna's face. "They did that to every finger on this hand. Not just pulled it back a little bit like I did to you, but pulled it back ALL the way, until the bones broke. Do you want me to show you what that feels like?" I moved my right hand toward her fingers again, which caused Donna to IMMEDIATELY snatch her hand back. I relaxed my grip to let her get it away. Then she tried to get off my lap, but I held her down while I said, "Listen to me, Donna. When they broke my fingers, each of them hurt FAR worse than what I just did to you. The first finger made me SCREAM my head off. Not just yell a quick 'Oww' like you did, but REALLY scream. It was excruciatingly painful! More painful than ANYTHING you have ever felt before." I gave Donna a moment to think about that, then continued, "And then they reached down, grabbed another one of my fingers, and did the same thing to it. And then they grabbed a third finger, and deliberately broke that too. I'm a tough guy, but the pain was so terrible that I passed out. They threw a bucket of water in my face to wake me up, and then they broke the last two fingers..." "That's enough, Mark!" demanded Mom. "WHY ON EARTH are you talking to your sister like that? You'll give her nightmares." "Because Prof and I were kidnapped and tortured so we would reveal the same secret that I'm about to tell you upstairs and that Donna is asking to be told." That rocked Mom and the others. -- It kept Mom quiet long enough for me to say, "A secret that's so important that some people were tortured and killed over it. Those men were going to kill me in front of Prof to force him to reveal the secret, and then they would've killed Prof too. They were SECONDS away from killing me when someone killed them. This isn't some fun, schoolyard type of secret; this is life or death. Those two men died because of it. If our rescue had arrived a day later, Prof and I would've been dead. This is the secret that Donna complained about not being told, because she thought it'd be 'fun' and 'interesting'." -- Turning to Donna I said, "If I told you this secret, and you told someone else, it's very likely that men with guns would break into our house one night, kill everyone in our family that got in their way, grab me and take me away. You'd never see me again, presuming you weren't one of the people they killed while they..." "MARK! Are you INSANE! There is ABSOLUTELY no need to be so graphic. If you don't want to Donna to know, just tell her so and make her wait with Robert. This is a terrible way to treat anybody, let alone your little sister. It's completely unlike you to be so cruel, but it stops now. Apologize to Donna." #7: #1: #7: "You're right that it's unlike me to be so cruel, which should've made you realize that I have a good reason for it. There are some pieces of information you're not aware of. First, if the issue was purely whether or not I let Donna hear this secret, then it would be easy to insist she stays with Robert. Unfortunately, it's not a simple as that. Over the next several weeks Donna is going to learn other secrets because things will be happening in our home. She will see them and hear them and may even be nosey enough to try to find out more about them, and there's nothing that can stop that, other than either Donna or I permanently leaving home so she doesn't see them. And in case you think moving out of home is an overreaction, let me remind you that two people have already been violently killed. It's hard to overreact when murder is an already proven possibility. -- "Second, I know for a fact that Donna is poor at keeping secrets. I'm not just talking about her blabbing about my marathon run either. Donna is a lovely person, but careful thoughtfulness isn't a trait you associate with her. When Donna is being told she can't have something that she wants, she gets so impatient and focused on her desire that she loses the presence of mind to keep track of what she's saying, and she'll open her mouth and blab secrets if she thinks they can provide her with a reason to get what she wants. She's so intent on her desire that she forgets they're secrets, and she forgets to check who else is listening. It's typical immature self-centeredness and she'll outgrow it, but it's REALLY scary when it comes to life-or-death secrets." I was referring to Donna's thoughtlessly blabbing in front of Ava that Carol and I had a secret. That hadn't happened in this dimension for the obvious reason that Carol and I didn't have a secret - yet! It was somewhat unfair of me to blame this Donna for the other Donna's mistake, but I believed it was more likely than not that this Donna would have the same problem. You'll also have noticed that I mentioned Donna's blabbing about my marathon run. In this dimension I'd still done the marathon as a way of testing Ava's trustworthiness, in preparation for letting her know about NP mostly, as I use them a great deal in the bedroom and it'd be a disappointing nuisance to stop doing so for the years Ava would probably be living with us. Donna had come along on my run just as earlier in this autobiography, and she'd blabbed the same too. From this point on in my autobiography, I'll generally not point out such cross-dimensional differences and similarities, unless doing so is essential. If my not pointing them out occasionally confuses you, then you'll have a small taste of how I felt at such times. I continued, "Third, in a month or two Donna is almost certainly going to be desperately eager to participate in at least one of the secrets. She'll be busting a gut to join in, and will think it's extremely unfair that she's not allowed to, because Carol will be. The only reason she'll be excluded is because she's proved herself to be untrustworthy with secrets. So the faster she learns that the correct attitude to secrets is not that they're fun, then the sooner she'll be able to participate in things she'll enjoy much more. -- "If I had simply insisted she stayed with Robert while we go upstairs, Donna would learn nothing from the experience. She HAS to learn. Not only to help prevent more kidnappings and murders, possibly of some of us, but also so she can join in more fully with the fun things that are going to be happening in the near future. I was not being thoughtlessly cruel to her; I was deliberately choosing to make a strong impact so she'd have something to think about. Donna's request to be included in the discussion because secrets are 'the most interesting stuff' proves she still has an immature attitude about them. We're buying a whole new house and are probably going to be spending tens of thousands of dollars upgrading its security because we're correctly worried about security. But the biggest security problem we've got is Donna's thinking secrets are fun. Personally, Mom, I think giving Donna a few educational nightmares is an EXCELLENT alternative to the whole family being murdered." -- My counterattack's manner and content had surprised Mom so much she was still silent, which wasn't an opportunity to be missed, so I added an additional thought, "You didn't know any of those reasons, but I will point out that you said there was 'absolutely no need for me to be so graphic', that I was 'treating Donna terribly', and you ordered me to apologize to her. You made your judgment and decided what I should be doing without bothering to ask me for my reasons. Our future is going to become increasingly unusual shortly, and your knee-jerk reactions are going to be wrong far too often. I can't say that I'll always be right about whatever I'm doing in the future, but you certainly shouldn't automatically assume I'm doing something wrong just because it doesn't seem right to you at first glance. Donna and you both need to learn to be more thoughtful before you open your mouths." I stopped talking, leaving the room in shocked silence for a long couple of seconds. In this dimension I'd never 'attacked' Mom like this before. I'd stood up for myself a couple of times, such as after the Eaton family's attack, but I'd never gone on the offensive like this. Then several people started talking at once. Mom's was the only comment that mattered now. She didn't look TOO pissed off at being reprimanded by me, but clearly not pleased about it either. Mom asked, "How can you know those things?" I got the impression that I'd better have a good answer. "The expression that your life flashes before your eyes when you're facing death is silly, but it's amazing how believing you're going to die focuses your attention on your loved ones. Plus the lack of water causes delusions, and for a while before the delusions got too bad I was still able to think about reality more creatively than normal. Sort of half-delusional and half-real, but still very insightful. I had four days of captivity and three weeks in Seattle to think about things. Those effects combined with my already having a very unusual brain produced some amazing insights. Let me give you another example Mom. You yelled, 'Are you insane' at me just before. Do you yell that accusation against people you work with?" "No, of course not. I might say it occasionally, but I'd never 'yell the accusation' the way you're implying." "I'm fairly confident that not only do you yell it at work, but you do it often enough to piss off the people you work with and to hold back your career. I suggest you ask your workmates about it on Monday, and be prepared for a shock. Obviously I don't directly know about your behavior at work, but I have been thinking about the changes that are going to be occurring around our home, and I realized your 'Are you insane' accusation is too much of a habit for you not to do it at work. -- "If you were raising ordinary kids in an ordinary lifestyle, then your instant judgments would probably be right often enough to be fine, but our situation is not typical. Your leaping to the decision to tell me to stop scaring Donna would be perfectly fine in an ordinary family, but I don't want our lives dependent on a girl who likes to stick her nose into our life-or-death secrets because she thinks they're the equivalent of schoolyard gossip. I know you don't know what the secrets are yet, but you do know there have been kidnappings, murders, and millions of dollars involved, and you know I wouldn't be scaring Donna unless I believed I had a good reason. Your knee-jerk reactions aren't going to cut it anymore. You have to lift your game and learn to be more thoughtful." I was being dramatic and heavy-handed for several reasons. Donna truly did need to be more mature about our secrets for the reasons I'd given Mom, but there were also other reasons for my making a big issue out of Donna's immaturity. Donna had often been a pain in the ass back in the other dimension, frequently needing us to spend ages explaining things to her, calming her upsets, etc. I'd gotten tired of that nonsense at that time, and half of me very much wanted to avoid going through it all over again. Second, a more trustworthy Donna would be fun to do sexy things with. When she sees Carol and me become lovers, and sees the Ducklings and Cuties getting sexy with me, then Donna's almost certainly going to want to play those games too. I would enjoy that if - and ONLY if - this Donna behaved more maturely than the other one. Another reason I'd been dramatic was that the seriousness would carry over into my demonstration upstairs. I wanted that to go very, very well, so when Mom and Dad bought into the genetic hypothesis bullshit it'd more easily lead to the conclusion that it was essential for the human race that Carol and I have babies together. Sexually speaking, this dimension was lagging seriously behind my previous one. Most importantly, this Mom hadn't seen me have nearly as much sex as in my earlier dimension. I'd done nothing with Carol or Donna, there'd been no Ducklings or Cuties, and even the high-school girls had been less enthusiastic about me because I'd never had a reason to make my "I Love My Sister Carol" speeches. Mom knew Julia was pushing me into playing around with other high-school girls, and using the pipeline system to do it, but Mom thought it was a bad idea. Julia's arranging it and Vanessa supporting it left Mom unable to insist it should be stopped. As it stood now, even without our being siblings, Mom would be horrified at the idea of Carol getting involved with a guy who was "playing around behind his girlfriend's back with half the girls in high school," as Mom would doubtless describe it. Mom didn't have grounds to stop me participating in the pipeline scheme, but she certainly had grounds to stop Carol 'participating' with me. Not only had Mom not been properly trained into accepting my having lots of sex, she was also totally untrained when it came to Carol having ANY, as Carol was a total virgin here, never having had sex with me, Julia, Ava or anyone else. This Mom needed LOTS of training, and this was a very good place to start. If I utterly destroyed Mom's opposition to the way I was managing Donna, Mom should be more cautious about disagreeing with me in the future, hopefully including my 'management' of Carol. Mom didn't really admit defeat or apologize. She just said, "I think we'd better find out what this secret of yours is. Then we'll have a better idea why you're being so fierce with Donna." "I agree. Let's go upstairs. Donna, you'll be staying down here." Donna shook her head, saying, "Don't worry. I don't want to come with you now. You're too scary." "Don't think I'm being a total spoilsport. Once you convince me you understand secrets are a serious responsibility, I'll let you get involved in some. You'll have a HUGE amount of fun. Maybe even more fun than having a horse; that's how good it's going to be." Assuming Mom and Dad agreed! "What's better than a horse?" asked Donna, not able to see how that was possible. "It won't be as much fun for you if I spoil the surprise. It'll be obvious to you in a few weeks, so don't sweat about it now. Robert, I'm guessing we'll be upstairs at least half an hour, and maybe longer." "No problem. Donna and I will find something to do." "And me too," added Carol. "I don't think I want to know your secret, Mark." #4: I said, "Carol, I want you to know. At the risk of Mom thinking I'm being overly dramatic again, I want my life to be in your hands." That surprised everybody, especially Carol. I added, "That's not nearly as impressive as it sounds. I know you're very good at keeping secrets so my life is safe in your hands. There are also at least three very strong reasons why you should know, so I'm going to have to pull rank as your big brother and insist you come as well." I said the last with a smile on my face so she knew I meant it in a good way. #7: #4: #7: "What reasons?" asked Carol. "Unfortunately I have to be mysterious again. I will tell all of you what the reasons are, but only after you've got your heads around what I'm going to tell you shortly. Come with us, Carol, I promise you won't regret it." My promise was good enough for Carol, so Mom, Dad, Julia, Carol and I headed upstairs. On the way out I gave The Boys a quick, "I'm sorry to exclude you two from all this." "Don't be. Mom and Dad have already warned us away from being nosey. We're curious, but we understand it isn't a game." "Thanks." ------- Chapter 234: Look Mom, No Hands! Sunday, June 12, 2005 (Continued) Upstairs Mom foolishly said, "I hope this is good, with all the buildup you've given it." "What do you think Julia, will this be good?" "Will it ever! They're going to be VERY surprised." #7: When we'd been planning what to do in this demonstration, the 3B guys had sent 3A half a dozen memory images of what 3B had done to their Dad, so 3A knew what #7 was proposing now. We'd rejected doing it to this dad because it'd been too scary, but maybe that was what Mom needed. #3: "You don't have a weak heart, do you Mom?" Mom suspiciously answered, "No. Why?" "Because the next few minutes are going to be very, very scary for you. How's your heart, Dad?" "Fine. What are you going to do?" "You'll see. Sit on the bed Dad. Carol sit on Dad's lap please with Julia next to you. Mom, put this hairbrush in your pocket and we'll pretend it's a gun because you're playing the role of one of the baddies. I'll sit on this chair as if I was chained to it, because this demonstration is about what happened inside the basement while Prof and I were prisoners." #6: #3: #7: "I've changed my mind about something. I was intending to show you how scary I could be. That's why I had Carol pin Dad to the bed, to make it harder for him to interfere. But I'm not comfortable scaring you that much, so I'm going to do this in a straightforward way." Mom looked puzzled, "How could you scare anyone? I thought you were chained to the chair and blindfolded the whole time?" "You're right about the chains. It was our being chained down the whole time that caused all the problems. Escape would have been easy if one of us had been unchained for just a few seconds, but the bastards wouldn't unchain us no matter what. Not even to take us to the bathroom, which was downright uncivilized." Dad said, "I can see that you had a chance to fight them if you were unchained, but how could escape be easy if Prof was the one they unchained?" "Not by fighting them, that's for sure; not a little, old, one-legged man like Prof. We weren't going to fight, not when I could do something much easier." Assuming the hairbrush weighed no more than 0.2 kg (less than half a pound), my 50 kg of maximum force gave over 250 g's of acceleration. Allowing Mom an extremely fast reaction time of one-fifth of a second, the hairbrush could have been hundreds of feet away before she even started grabbing for it, so Mom had NO chance of stopping my taking possession of it. I had to pull it up a few inches to get it out of her waistband before I could zoom it away, but that took next to no time. I had the brush well away from Mom long before she started reacting. She stopped trying to grab it when she saw she was staring down the barrel of a deadly, hovering hairbrush, then I said, "Bang, bang. You're dead, Mom. That was easy, wasn't it?" I was cheating - or as I prefer to think of it, "simplifying considerably for the parents' sake" - by pretending I'd taken the baddies down by using their gun right from the start, and by using my new and GREATLY improved NP force. I've found that it's generally better to simplify things with parents, to avoid the problems caused by their fully understanding something. Mom was the first to find her voice. With eyes wide and staring at the floating brush, Mom asked, "How are you doing that?" "You really should be lying on the floor pretending to be dead, but I'll let you off. It's floating because I want it to. I can move things around with my mind. Look at Julia's dressing table, or vanity table, or whatever they're called." Everyone looked at the Whatever-They're-Called Table. There's an enormous amount of junk on a girl's WTC- table, and it all floated up and across the room en masse, looking like a very impressive fleet. "WOW! That's incredible," said Carol. "Here, try this perfume Carol." I sent one bottle over to her, hovering it beside one of her wrists, held it firmly, and sprayed her once. Dad was caught in the spray too, but he'd survive. If he made a fuss, I'd shoot him with the hairbrush. Julia was smiling proudly, but looking a little worried at seeing so much of her important stuff floating in the air, so I floated everything back to the vanity table (that somehow seems the best name for it). While I was doing that I said, "It should be pretty obvious how Prof and I won at roulette." "But HOW?" asked Mom. Mom wasn't asking just about roulette. I answered, "With my mind. It's almost impossible to explain to people how your mind works. If I threw a ball at you, could you explain how your brain worked out the trajectory of the ball, how it decided the best place to intercept it, which muscles in your arms and hands to move to get them in the right position, etc. You don't have a clue how you do that, and you could never explain it to anyone else. All I can say is that I have an EXTREMELY unusual and powerful mind, and it can do amazing things. For example, it can do this." I created several different colored and sized light blobs, and had them fly around the room, not doing anything fancy with them, and not calling any of them "Killer". They were still pretty impressive, and pretty pretty. I kept them at a low level, so no one could see them in the window. I made a mental note to close the drapes shortly. Carol said, "Wow" again. Mom and Dad wanted to know what they were. "They're just pure light. When Prof and I were gagged I used these to talk with Prof." I demonstrated by spelling "Hi" with sixteen blobs, which was the previous maximum that Julia knew about. I wanted to keep most of my upgraded abilities as a surprise for her. Julia knew my study system now had eight screens, and that I'd NP'd her in the hospital waiting room, but not much more than that, and certainly not that I could fly her around now. -- I added, "They'll look better with the room dark." I canceled the "H", pulled the drapes closed using NP, then recreated the "H". I waved my hand through the blobs, causing my family a small surprise, but only a small one as they hadn't had time to get worried about them, especially without the "Killer" introduction. "Relax. They're just light. You can't feel them and they don't do anything to you." I broke up the greeting message, sending one of the blobs to be in front of Dad, Carol and Julia on the bed, and another one in front of Mom still standing in the middle of the room. "Julia will show you they're harmless." Before the others had a chance to get very concerned, Julia put her hand into the blob in front of her, moving her hand around inside it. After a few seconds, Julia invited everyone else, "Try it." They weren't eager. Mom and Carol wisely let Dad be the first volunteer. Despite the example provided by Julia, Dad cautiously extended a hand, edging the tip of a single finger into the blob. He paused to concentrate on the sensation. Feeling none he pushed his hand in a little farther. Paused again, then said, "I can't feel anything." "There's nothing to feel. It's just light. It's exactly the same as if I turned the room's electric lights on. You wouldn't be scared of that light would you? Light is light; it's the same thing no matter where it comes from." I stopped myself saying something about it just being a specific frequency of electromagnetic radiation, because I doubted Dad would find the word "radiation" reassuring. -- While Dad, Mom and Carol were exploring the light blob in front of them, I continued, "I call these things 'Light Blobs'. They're totally a creation of my mind and under my complete control. I can change their color," I created a new one in front of me, and moved it through the visible spectrum; "brightness," I altered that, but not making my example blob any brighter than Julia had seen before; "their size, position, how fast they move (all with relevant demonstrations), "and whether they exist or don't exist. They're generally not much use, although they did make it much easier for Prof and me to communicate when we were gagged. When I wake up early in the morning and get out of bed to go studying, I use a dim one to light my way rather than turning on the room's light and disturbing Julia and/or Ava." I threw in the "Julia and/or Ava" comment to add a little reinforcement to Mom's training, but I think she was too distracted to notice. -- "I call my ability to float things around 'NP', which is short for 'Nipple Power'. That's a joking compliment to Ava. Whenever she's in this room and I want to turn the room's lights on or off, I squeeze one of her nipples." I held out my left hand's thumb and forefinger, pretending to squeeze a nipple repeatedly, at the same time as I turned the room's lights on, off and back on again, leaving them on as the drapes were closed and I wanted to cancel all the light blobs soon. I was amused to see that Carol found comments about squeezing Ava's nipples funny. I'd have to think of something good for Carol's soon-to-be-discovered-as-magical nipples to do too. -- "I teased Ava about her having magic nipples. She was VERY confused for a while, but now she knows I do it somehow. I renamed my ability Nipple Power in her honor, and so if we accidentally use the words in public no one will have a clue what we're talking about. So far Ava only knows that I can turn the light switch on and off, but she's proving herself to be very trustworthy so I'll slowly increase how much she knows. She's going to end up living with us in the mansion, so she'll see me doing all sorts of weird things. Have you seen light blobs enough, so I can show you the next ability?" In 3B-land, I'd gotten carried away one evening in bed and had used NP to squeeze Ava's nipples. Carol had been in bed with us and I'd made jokes about Carol's magic ears. None of that had happened here; this Ava only knew that her nipples turned this room's lights on and off. "You can do MORE!" exclaimed a punch-drunk Mom. "These things are IMPOSSIBLE! People can't do this stuff. How can you be doing it?" "These abilities might be impossible for other people, but they're quite easy for me. I can't answer your 'How' question though. You don't have the concepts or vocabulary. I know that's frustrating, but I can't help it. There's also no real point in explaining it to you, as I know you can't do it yourself. This sounds weird, but I can kind of 'see' how strong people's minds are in the way that these abilities need, and your mind doesn't have what it takes." #8: "When people get into adulthood I can see that these abilities are impossible for them, Mom. That doesn't mean every kid can do them; it just means I can tell that every adult I've seen can't. I can't tell about the kids because their brains are more flexible, but obviously there aren't many kids like me, or probably ANY kids like me." "That's for damned sure!" agreed Dad. "But what use is this stuff?" "Using them is difficult because I have to keep them secret, but I can give you a few examples. First, I made eleven million dollars using NP on roulette. If I never did anything with NP ever again, that's a pretty good benefit just there. Knowing what a sports fan you are Dad, there are a lot of sports that I'd absolutely destroy. You saw how I could carry things using it, so I could carry a basketball to the hoop from anywhere on the court. I could score three-pointers all day long if I wanted to, although I'd have to make it look good to avoid being detected. I could also upset the opposition in games, so in football my opponents' long passes could all go badly off target, ideally toward one of my teammates so we could get lots of interceptions. You know I can bowl 300, you've seen how good I am at soccer, and there are probably dozens of different sports that I could be the world's number one at. I've no interest in doing that, but I could if I wanted. -- "And a third area that NP is really good at is one that I demonstrated to you guys earlier, but I'm pretty sure you were too distracted to notice. I'm very, very good at defending myself. I was chained to a chair so I couldn't move my arms or legs more than an inch, but when two experienced criminal men tried to kill me, they were the ones who ended up dead." I could tell when Mom got it - her face turned white. Mom double-checked her horrific conclusion, "YOU killed them?" "I'm afraid so. They were about to kill me, so I didn't have a choice." "But that's TERRIBLE!" "It was terrible that they left me no choice, but it was their fault for creating an us-or-them situation." Mom still looked horrified. Not that I'd expected her to say, "That's all right then," but some easing of her initial reaction would have been good. Meanwhile Julia had decided she was long overdue for some cuddling, so she was leaving her assigned place on the bed and making for my lap Julia gushed, "Well done, darling. You're my hero! You never cease to impress me." Julia stopped talking to kiss me, which gave Mom the chance to say, "Are you INSANE! He killed two men! That's a terrible thing to do!" I could see Julia deciding how to answer Mom. After a short pause, she pulled back from my face, waved a finger in front of my eyes like a first grade teacher, admonishing me sternly, "Your mother's right. How dare you kill two men. Next time anyone is about to murder you, I want you to sit there and let them. And don't worry if they're also going to murder my father or anyone else in our families. After all, we wouldn't want to upset your mother's delicate sensibilities. It'd be much better if you let them murder as many people as they want." Mom protested, "That's not what I meant..." Julia hadn't chosen a good tactic as Mom doesn't take kindly to being made fun of, so I quickly interrupted, "What would YOU have done in my situation, Mom? You're chained down and unable to move, and the bad guys are about to kill you and Prof. The only way to stop them is to kill them first." "I wouldn't have gotten into that situation in the first place. If you hadn't gambled it never would have happened." No one was impressed by Mom's answers. Even Carol rolled her eyes at it. With considerable sarcasm, Julia said, "Gee, I would've thought the people most responsible for Mark and Dad being kidnapped were the kidnappers. But I'm obviously wrong because Felicity insists it's all Mark's fault." Fortunately Dad finally stepped in, "Fely, Mark asked you what you would do in that situation. Why don't you answer his question rather than talking about some other situation." Mom didn't appreciate Dad's comment either, but she wasn't going to abuse him for it. Suspecting Mom hadn't listened to the question properly, I reminded her, "If you were about to be murdered, would you kill the murderers to defend yourself and Prof?" Mom didn't like either of the two possible answers, so she made up a third, "I'd negotiate with them. There must be a better alternative to people murdering each other." #5: #2: #8: #5: #8: #1: #2: #6: #1: I clunked the cast on my right hand against the cast on my leg a few times, while holding up my left hand with the fingers pointing upward and spread a little, drawing attention to the missing finger by its glaring absence. "These injuries are the results of my 'negotiating' with them, Mom. THIS is the way they negotiated! Prof and I spread the negotiations out over two days by my absorbing punishment like this. I would've let them let carry on breaking my bones and cutting parts off me for days longer, but THEY decided negotiations were finished. How many times do I have to tell you that 'THEY WERE ABOUT TO MURDER ME'? What part of that sentence don't you understand?" Even before I finished speaking I could see that they all got it. Julia was the first to speak, exclaiming, "You LET THEM do those things to you?" Dad, Mom and Carol echoed Julia moments later. "I could've attacked them any time from the moment they first revived me on Thursday morning. I was willing to take their torture while being 'only' tortured was an option and there was a chance to be rescued or get away somehow, but when they were seconds away from killing me I HAD TO make a decision. So I will ask you YET AGAIN, Mom. And this time please do me the courtesy of actually LISTENING to what I'm saying rather than assuming I'm a stupid little boy who doesn't know what he's talking about." With a droning voice deliberately making a point out of my repeating myself yet again, I recited, "If you were about to be murdered after being tortured for several days, would you kill the murderers to defend yourself and Prof?" Mom hesitated to answer. I gave her a couple of seconds, then said, "Bang, bang, you're dead. That was a scarily immature display, Mom. You denied reality, refused to listen to what I was saying, reacted emotionally rather than giving the situation any thought whatsoever, and when faced with a decision you refused to make it in time. You did EVERYTHING wrong." Dad said, "You're being unfair, Mark. You didn't give your mother time to recover from the shocks you've given us." "I don't think more time would result in Mom making better decisions, because she wouldn't spend it thinking. I spent a fair while downstairs explaining that Mom should not yell 'Are you insane!' at people. It's a very simple issue, so Mom had plenty of time to absorb it, yet after I pointed out that I'd had to kill the kidnappers, Mom yelled, 'Are you insane!' to Julia." To Mom I asked, "Why did you yell 'Are you insane!' to Julia when she praised me for saving her father and myself, Mom?" "Ahh. She was praising you for killing two men. I didn't think that was right, but now I understand that you had no choice. So Julia, I'm sorry I yelled at you." Julia answered, "That's okay. I know you were shocked." I said, "I don't like to say it, but it's not okay. Julia heard me say that they were about to kill me and I had no choice. She understood the situation perfectly and praised me. You heard me say the same words, but you didn't understand anything at all. As soon as you heard me say I'd killed two guys, you immediately leaped to an emotional reaction, opened your mouth and spouted insulting garbage at Julia; without bothering to do any thinking whatsoever. Like I was telling Dad, more thinking time wouldn't help you, because you don't bother thinking. That makes you a serious liability in any unusual situation. And with me involved, damned near every situation is going to be unusual. I don't want to think of you as being a liability, Mom, but until you get your act together that's what you are. There are some very serious decisions coming up very soon for you and Dad, and I'm very worried that you're going to screw them up." "Like what?" asked Mom. "There's a decision right in front of you now. Currently the cops are running around trying to find the third man that I said shot the other two in an argument. Now you know that guy doesn't exist. Are you going to let the cops continue to waste their time, or are you going to tell them that I did it?" "It was self-defense," Mom pointed out. "It certainly was! They were about to start beating me to death with a length of 2-by-4 because that was more fun than simply shooting me." It was great seeing Carol's reaction to statements like that. She was itching to come over to me, but Julia's already occupying my lap left Carol frustrated about not being able to comfort me, although I was fine and it was her that needed the comforting. "You should tell them then," said Mom. "They'll know it was self-defense. Those men had long criminal records, and you were obviously the victim, so I'm sure you wouldn't get in any trouble." I asked, "What do you think, Julia: should Mom tell the cops I killed the baddies in self-defense?" I removed the NP-fingertip I'd used to prompt Julia to keep her lips shut, allowing her to say, "Good God no! That'd be a DISASTER! We'd have to flee the country and go into hiding for the rest of our lives. Felicity, you've got to THINK!..." I took over. "Mom, ordinarily I'd agree with being truthful with the cops, but you've got to stop thinking you're living in an ordinary family. The cops are the LAST people you should be honest with about me. How did I get the gun off the baddies Mom?" "Oh," as Mom remembered. "How long would it take before one of the cops realized that the President is surrounded by security guys carrying guns, and if I could take a gun off a kidnapper and kill two of them, then I'd easily be able to take a gun off a Secret Service agent and kill the President. Look at me, Mom." -- I floated the hairbrush up again, pointing it toward her head, saying, "I could walk right through all the metal detectors and other security systems they've got around the President because I'd later be using their own weapons against them. As you can see, no one can tell that I'm doing anything strange even when I'm right in the middle of doing it. As soon as the cops realized how dangerous I am, my life would be over. Maybe they wouldn't kill me outright, but I'd never be free again. I imagine they'd probably keep me locked up in case they wanted to use me. To get rid of the leaders of any countries that were being inconvenient for America, for example. And the obvious way to force me to behave myself would be hold my entire family hostage, so all of our lives would be ruined. So Mom, do you still think it's a good idea to be honest with the cops?" Julia already understood that scenarios like that were possible, but Mom, Dad and Carol had no previous idea. By the looks on their white faces, they had a very clear idea now. -- I didn't wait for their obvious answer, instead continuing with, "The thing that worries me about you, is that you don't think before opening your mouth to very loudly announce the first emotional response that occurs to you. If we were standing alongside cops when something happened, it's scarily possible that you'd unthinkingly cause a disaster. All your emotional responses are based on years of thinking that we're a perfectly ordinary family, but we're the complete opposite of that now. And not only could your thoughtlessness destroy our family, but it'd also stop me achieving whatever it is that I might achieve in my life. I've got no idea what that'll be, but Prof and Vanessa talk about it being on par with curing cancer. You work in the medical field, so how'd you like to be single-handedly responsible for hundreds of thousands of people dying needlessly because of one of your thoughtless emotional reactions?" Mom objected to that. "That's laying it on FAR too thick. I got your point without the melodrama. I do understand what you're saying, and I'll do my best to be more thoughtful in the future." "Good. Thanks. I'm sorry I laid it on so thick, but I'd much rather make the point too strongly than not make it strongly enough. I've still got a couple more topics to mention. The first is a way I can signal you. I do these with Julia quite often, and signaling was extremely useful with Prof when we were prisoners too. One tap means 'no', two taps mean 'yes'." I tapped each of them on the top of the head once, paused momentarily, then twice more. "You can touch us!" exclaimed Mom. "Yes. This is what I jokingly call 'Nipple Power'; 'NP' in short or in polite company. I think of it as mental fingertips. I use them to carry things, pull drapes, flick light switches and whatever else fingertips can do, such as touching people. The one or two taps," I repeated them, "is what I'll do if I need to tell you 'no' or 'yes' without anyone knowing. Don't forget which way around they are because I won't be able to remind you at the time. 'No' is the smaller word, so it has the smallest number of taps. I'll try to tap you on the top of the head so you know what it's for, but in case you're wearing a crash helmet or there's some other problem, I might do it somewhere else on your bodies. Another signal I use with Julia a lot is to put pressure against her lips to ask her to be quiet. -- I demonstrated that on all of them. "I use that mostly when I'm teasing someone and don't want Julia to spoil it, but it might be useful in an emergency too. Obviously, if you're talking to a cop, Mom, and I do that to you, it'd be a REALLY good idea to stop whatever you're saying. If I can, I'll try to take over the conversation, and you should have a VERY hard think about what you're saying. At the risk of annoying you, this is something you need to take seriously. Once you get on your high horse about something, you're not good at listening to other people's opinions, and I can very easily imagine you deliberately ignoring my NP-fingertips against your lips because you're so sure you're right. Can you PLEASE not do that!" -- I quickly carried on before Mom could take offense, "I can use the NP-fingertips for all sorts of things. For example, if I grab your hand and pull it," accompanied by my showing all of them. "That will mean walk in the direction I'm pulling you. Or I might push your head around if I want you to look in another direction, or any number of other things. I'm sure you get the idea by now." Carol exclaimed, "I CAN'T believe you can do this stuff Mark! It's magic, or a miracle or something..." "If I needed a part-time job, I could do very well as a magician. Of course I'd need a pretty assistant that I could saw in half. You wouldn't mind me practicing on you, would you, Carol?" "I'd like to lose some weight, but not that way! But I'm more worried about ME getting YOU in trouble. You shouldn't have shown me this stuff. I could say something wrong and get you into serious trouble." "I'm not worried about your making a mistake like that. You're not a chatterbox or a gossip, you don't try to boast or show off, and you're a cautious, loyal person. I'm not going to tell Donna because she could get too excited and blurt it out. Mom's a worry because she gets so wrapped up in pronouncing judgment on our actions that she forgets to think. And Dad's safely quiet in family situations. -- "By the way Dad, you need to start speaking up more about me. Leaving the parenting to Mom is fine when she knows more about it than you do, but this is completely new to both of you, so your opinions are just as valid as hers. And when it comes to violence and defending other people, you're the parent that should be leading the discussion." "You're right. I should have said already that I'm very proud of you for how you handled those guys. I can't believe you sat through two days of torture. If I'd been in your shoes, I would have attacked them immediately." "I was naked all the time, so no shoes, but I know what you mean." I said that because I wanted to start slowly ramping up the sexual tension between Carol and me, and getting her thinking about me being naked was a good start. I watched her face carefully to see how much sexual interest I could see, but she had none. This was either a very bad sign, or the situation I was talking about was too scary and horrible for her to feel interested in sex. I was praying for the latter possibility (I hoped God answered prayers for incest. He'd been in favor of it back in the Old Testament days, and an all-wise being should never need to change his mind). -- "Carol, back to answering your worry about giving me away. You're cautious enough, and so caring and loyal that I don't have any fear of you making a mistake. Plus I also have some positive reasons for wanting you to know. I'll tell you about those sometime soon, but not yet. I said a few minutes ago that I had two remaining issues. The first was the secret signals, and the second is something I want to show you in my and Julia's study. Lead the way please, Mom." With some extra encouragement I got them to stop asking me more questions and to get moving. We trouped around to the study. Julia had shown me some photos of it on her cellphone, but I was busting a gut to see the real thing. "Wow!" said everyone, including me. Eight 24" panels are VERY impressive! As had been the check I'd written to Robert to reimburse him for the expense of it all. I also noticed that the study was laid out differently in 3A-land than 3B had expected. This study had the room's original double bed pushed into one corner of the room, with my desk along the opposite wall. There was no desk for Carol, but Julia's little work desk was still on the wall segment to my left, beside the doorway. I knew from 3A and Julia, that Julia had left Ava and me alone in her bedroom the night before the kidnapping, for us to have "quality time" together as had been the case in 3B-land. But rather than sleeping with Carol as in 3B-land, this Julia had slept in the study. I hadn't thought about it enough to realize that she obviously wouldn't have slept in the single bed from Carol's room, because in this dimension Carol's room would still have the two single beds in it. Only for another couple of weeks though, I hoped. I was itching to try my new computer system out, but it was nearly dinnertime so I just said, "Mom, you weren't wrong when you accused me of being melodramatic over my 'curing cancer' claim, but I want you to have an appreciation of what I might be able to achieve. With this system I can study eight college courses simultaneously. Rather than four years to do a degree, I can do all the reading in six months. For undergraduate degrees reading is apparently mostly what's required, so Prof and Vanessa think that I'll be able to complete two college degrees before I graduate high school. We're currently thinking of the BS in Math that I'm already doing, plus a Bachelor in Business Administration. Apparently I can do something called 'cross-crediting', where I can do a course once and count it toward both degrees, especially what they call their Baccalaureate Core Course courses. The result of cross-crediting is that I'll get two degrees out of about one and a half degrees' worth of work." Julia hadn't been involved in those discussions, mainly because I wanted to use the new computer system for a while first, to make sure I could do what I'd just told Mom. I was 95% sure I could or I wouldn't have forked out all the money to set this up, and it seemed like a good time to impress Mom, Dad, and last but not least, Carol. Plus it was fun surprising Julia. Julia squealed, then launched herself at my face, smothering it with kisses. Julia had a magic ability too: she could kiss and gush at the same time. "Oh my God! You're INCREDIBLE! Your future is going to be so AWESOME! I can't believe I'm going to be part of this." I was amused by how important Julia thought education was. Carol moved next to me. She didn't say anything, she just wanted to be close. That was fine with me, and I'd recovered my precarious balance after Julia's leaping at me, so I put an arm around Carol to hug her. Mom had something to say though. Frowning with confusion, she asked, "How can having eight screens be such a big deal?" "I can read eight sources of information simultaneously Mom, whether it's eight books, eight computer screens, or whatever. If I had only one or two screens I wouldn't be able to see enough of each lecture to be able to read them easily. With eight screens I don't have any space restrictions, so my mind can do its thing at full speed." I could see Mom didn't understand, so I took the opportunity to rub her incomprehension in, hopefully leading to her appreciating my uniqueness even more (translation: hopefully increasing my chance of getting permission to have sex with her daughter). "I can read eight times more than other people. It's a very simple statement, so why are you looking blank?" Mom said, "You don't mean you can read eight times FASTER do you? Because that wouldn't need eight screens." "I don't mean that, no. As far as I know my reading speed is probably only a little faster than average. That's not the issue anyway, as I have to read slowly and carefully to make sure I understand the new material. I simply mean that I can do that on eight screens at the same time." Mom still didn't get it, which was great, because when she finally did, it'd make a bigger impact on her. I could see that Dad and Carol didn't get it either, but that didn't worry me; Mom was the one I had to convince to hand over her daughter. Julia had understood how I could read two simultaneously, so she'd understood the concept of what I was talking about, although my not having grown six new eyeballs doubtless had her confused. I used NP to block Julia's lips again, so she wasn't giving any part of the game away. I decided that a practical demonstration would be the most impressive, so I said, "I can't explain it any simpler Mom, so I'll have to give you a practical demonstration. Hang on while I work out how to get this system going." Julia said, "Logan left instructions. They're on that piece of paper under the special keyboard." He'd done a good job. The "Scrolling Keyboard" (for the lack of a better name) had the 8 columns and 6 rows of buttons I'd be using clearly labeled, and the instruction sheet told me everything else I needed to know, which was very little at this stage. The necessary software loaded itself automatically when the computers were turned on, and the Scrolling Keyboard's buttons would control the scrolling within the window on the appropriate panel if I had exactly one window on that panel. There was other stuff, but none of it mattered now. According to Logan's instructions, I should be able to turn the computers on, put lectures on each panel, and use the Scrolling Keyboard immediately. [It was a membrane keyboard; the type of keyboard you often see in places where people have dirty or wet hands, like in grocery stores. The top of the keyboard was a single sheet of thin rubber (or something similar) with little dimples where the keys were. When Logan had first started talking to me about keyboards, out of security caution I'd asked him if there was a type where using the keys wouldn't make noise or move visibly. I would've used a normal one if that was the only choice, but he'd easily found what I wanted.] I fired everything up, saving time by loading eight different Calculus 251 lectures, as Calculus had some complicated looking formulas in it which should impress Mom. While I was doing that I was deciding how realistic to make this demonstration. I could easily fake it by having the eight windows open and hitting the scrolling buttons for each window semi-randomly. It'd give the appearance of me reading. Or I could do it for real. Julia and Carol were going to be told of my real abilities, but I worried about Mom and Dad being uncomfortable knowing that I could send invisible eyeballs around the house. I decided on a good, mid-point solution. While I was testing that the Scrolling Keyboard worked for every panel, I said, "I'm going to do this on just seven screens now. I'm pretty sure I can do seven easily, but the eighth is going to take a little practice for me to get good at. Also, don't be surprised when the screens scroll by themselves. I'm going to be using NP - that's the thing that I tapped the top of your heads with - to control the scrolling because it's quicker and easier for me. Plus it leaves my hands free for more important things." I pointed to the cookie jar. Its lid floated up, I reached in with a couple more NP-fingertips, and in the two seconds I had before they canceled, I was easily able to tactilely locate a cookie and extract it. I flew it to my hand, then took a bite out of it, saying, "Cookies are MUCH more important than controlling a computer!" I floated the jar around the room, with the lid floating beside it to look more impressive, inviting, "Does anyone else want a cookie?" Carol and Julia chuckled easily, and took me up on my offer of Vanessa's cookies. Dad and Mom mostly just looked rattled, especially Mom. This was a little too weird for them to accept so quickly. Dad took a cookie though. I put the lid back on the jar and floated it back to the shelf. I rearranged my minds. #1 to #7 were going to operate screens 1 to 7, while #8 was centered and was operating the eye, not that it'd need much "operating" once it was in position; just a tiny amount of concentration to keep it going. #8 centered himself, but stayed active. We were taking a risk that he might get distracted and lose center, but we were pretty sure he could do this as his was an extremely passive job. All he had to do was maintain the eyeball. If he did get distracted, it'd take only a fraction of a second to get back into operation again. #1 to #7 created one NP-fingertip each, using them to do a little scrolling to get the feel of it, and to let my audience get over the surprise of the screens moving without apparent cause. I scratched my forehead with a finger, using the fake itch to cover my closing my eyes while #8 created the sight blob in the shape and position he knew we'd need it. Each of #1 to #7 confirmed they could read their screens. I reopened my eyes, then told everyone, "I'm about to start reading. I'm going to be reading each screen just as any one of you would if you were doing this course. I'll read it slowly and carefully, making sure I understand the material before scrolling down. I'll be doing that on seven screens simultaneously, so it'll look like seven different students were operating one screen each. You'll probably notice that screens which have complicated looking stuff on them take me longer, while emptier screens scroll down quicker. Here I go." I turned around to face the screens. That was unnecessary, but I wanted to do it for a reason that'll be clear shortly. I closed my eyes, and started doing exactly what I'd said I'd do. I'd already studied this course, so I was faking the "making sure I understand the material before scrolling down" part, but it was easy to pretend that I was learning it for the first time. Mom and Dad were standing behind me, but Julia and Carol were standing to my left, far enough forward to see my face. I kept my demonstration going for several seconds, before Julia asked, "Ahh, Mark, why are your eyes closed?" One mind stopped reading to get our mouth to say, "Because normal sight is too limited for when I'm trying to read seven screens at once." My answer was perfectly simple and accurate, but for some reason it seemed to confuse everyone. "Are your eyes really closed?" from Mom. | "{Giggle}", from Carol. | Stunned silence from Dad, rather than his normal placid silence. | "Are you serious?" from Julia. And then it got more chaotic as the females all erupted in yet more questions for me. I opened my eyes, turned to face them, saying, "How can a guy study with all this chatter going on?" "Can you really see with your eyes closed?" asked Julia, ignoring my question entirely. I've noticed that females do that quite a lot. I take that as further proof that they don't actually live in the same world as the rest of us, as their world doesn't seem to contain questions they're not interested in answering. "Physical eyeballs can't read seven or eight screens at once. They move too slowly, have to refocus because of the different distances, and whatever else eyeballs do. They were holding me back from studying as fast as my brain could handle, so I invented another way of seeing." That explanation didn't clarify the situation any more than my earlier one had. Mom and Dad hadn't seen that my eyes had been closed, so they were the most doubtful. Julia really wanted to believe, and was on the point of leaping for joy, but couldn't quite let herself go. Carol was midway between Julia and my parents. I said, "It's easy to prove. I'll face the screens again. Julia can take off her blouse and hold it over my eyes. Carol can scroll whatever screen she wants, or even navigate to an entirely different website, and I'll read out what it says on the screen. How does that sound?" Julia said, "Apart from my taking off my blouse, it sounds perfect..." "Aww, that was the best bit. How about Carol stands behind me and covers my eyes while spoilsport Julia navigates around on the screens, and I'll give everyone a running commentary?" We set that up, with Carol holding a pillow from the bed wrapped around the front of my face. Julia googled "sight" and opened up several of the links. I gave a running commentary of what she was typing, what the various windows said, etc. It was easier than reading seven screens at once because Julia could only have one screen active at a time. I was very convincing. It was no surprise at all that Julia was the first person to be persuaded. She announced her belief - and ended the demonstration - by jumping into my lap, squealing, kissing and gushing again. Including saying, "I CAN'T believe you can keep doing these INCREDIBLE things!" Which she was only saying because she DID believe I could do them (please refer to my several earlier comments about what is humorously and misleadingly referred to as "female logic"). The ensuing conversation was fairly chaotic, and contained many repetitious assurances from me that I wasn't joking, really could see without my eyes, wasn't faking them out in some way, didn't have the computers rigged, etc. One of the things I said was, "It's nothing to do with computers, Mom. It's just perfectly ordinary eyesight without my eyes. If you secretly wrote something on a piece of paper, sat on the bed and held it up while I was facing you with my eyes covered, I'd be able to read it just as if my eyes were uncovered." I was deliberately misleading everyone into thinking it operated exactly as if my eyes were open, specifically including that I had to be facing the right way, and that there was no hint of any ability to roam my mental eyeballs around. "HOW?" was a question that was repeated several times too. "My brain is powerful enough to suck the visual information directly into it, bypassing my slow, flesh-and-blood eyeballs. It's extremely tricky and I still haven't solved a couple of minor problems - which is why I can only do seven screens most of the time, and eight only sometimes. You're going to be getting sick of hearing this, but there's no way you can understand how I do it. NP and light blobs are easy compared to this, and they're still totally impossible for you." Of particular interest to me was Carol's reaction. She was "beside herself." I've heard that expression many times and always thought it sounded silly, but it seemed a perfect description for Carol now. She was totally blown away by me, didn't know whether she was coming or going, wanted to leap for joy, but couldn't overcome her stunned amazement enough to move, and half a dozen other conflicting emotions. I opened my arms, inviting her to come to a hug. She was on the verge of tears, and welcomed my offer of comfort. She stumbled forward, and I pulled her onto my lap, holding her tightly, saying, "I've always thought that little sisters should treat their big brothers with more respect, but I'm guessing I'm not running short of respect in your eyes, am I?" Respect is REALLY important to Carol. It's her most important hot button when it comes to being attracted to someone. I can't say I understand it fully, or even half-fully as Carol is a female after all, but I had enough experience with 3B's Carol to appreciate its importance to her. Part of it is Mom's teaching, as I mentioned earlier, but it's also to do with Carol having a low opinion of her own worth while being wise enough to value the worth of others. It caused her problems, because if she found someone worthy of her respect and friendship, then she thought that person (male or female) wouldn't want to have someone as useless as her as their friend, consequently she didn't make many serious friendships. In reality Carol made a superb friend, as she was very loyal and caring. Carol opened her mouth to say something, but her tears beat her to it. She erupted wetly, buried her face into the side of my neck, and blubbered something about me being a "miracle" and a "super-{blub}-man." Assuming the "{blub}" had been unintentional, I said, "I'll admit I can do some impressive things, but leaping tall building isn't one of them. What are the other things superman was supposed to do? Run faster than a bullet and use his X-ray vision to see what color panties girls are wearing? Unfortunately I can't do any of those things, not even look at girls' underwear. All I can do is boring things like fetch cookies and take a WHOLE year to get ONLY two degrees." Carol was starting to intersperse her sobs with some giggles. I kept my arms around her, using NP to pull my hanky out of my pocket. I jiggled it in the air in front of Carol's face. When she saw it, I NP'd it against her cheek and wiped the tears off. I slightly moved my hands around her waist to emphasize that I wasn't using my hands on the hanky. I also had an internal debate about whether to let my cock get hard, so Carol would feel it and know I desired her. We REALLY wanted to progress things in that direction, but we decided not to, mainly because we felt the only way we could lose Carol would be going too fast. Better safe than very, very sorry. I kept comforting Carol while I told everyone, "In my opinion you all got excited over the wrong thing. Seeing things with my eyes shut isn't that big a deal as all it does is let me see 'faster', because I can move my mental attention around much faster than my squishy, physical eyeballs. What I consider FAR more important is that my brain can simultaneously read, think about, and understand eight different sources of information at the same time. I can lay out my notes for every school subject on my bedroom floor and read them all at the same time. In just one hour it'd be the same as anyone else getting home from school and studying until midnight." Julia had already grasped that point from my talking about getting two degrees next year, but the others had missed it, and then they'd been distracted by the "Eyes Shut" trick. I knew it'd seriously impress Mom and Carol (Carol's main activity in this dimension is schoolwork). "{Gasp}," from Carol. "At the same time! And remember them all?" "Remember them, think about them, understand them. It's exactly the same as your reading eight different books one after another for an hour each, except that I can do them all at the same time." Mom asked, "How can you think about eight different things at once? Surely that's impossible." "Not for me. If you'll excuse what sounds like terrible egotism, there are quite a few things I can do that are impossible for everyone else. Donna told you I ran faster than the world record for the marathon, you've heard I can bowl 300 whenever I want, you know I clean up at 8-ball, and you've seen me play soccer. I'm more than just very good at physical activities, I'm as Ava would say, 'super human' at them. As exceptional as I am physically, I am FAR more exceptional mentally. All the things that I've shown you here - NP, light blobs, seeing with my eyes shut, reading eight different things at the same time - they're all mental abilities. Mentally I am even more 'super human'. Remember back in the bedroom Mom, you accused me of being melodramatic about finding the cure for cancer. I don't know what I'll achieve in my life, but I've got a feeling it's going to include some pretty spectacular accomplishments, don't you agree?" Julia and Carol DEFINITELY knew what they thought, and they launched into praising me. Mom and Dad were so overwhelmed they didn't know what to say. I had certainly achieved my objective of making them realize I wasn't an ordinary guy. Now all I had to do was convince them that the usual rules didn't apply to me. Not now though; I'll wait until I've enlisted Prof's and Vanessa's help with that. Mom and Dad both had some questions. Top of the list was, "How on Earth can you do these things?" I answered, "We'll put off that discussion for a week or two, so you can get your heads around what you've already learned. Besides it's nearly dinnertime and I'm dying to have some non-hospital food." Even with dinner at stake, it wasn't easy to get Mom and Dad moving. They were so stunned they couldn't move, and when they could move something, it was invariably their mouths to ask more questions. I refused to provide any more explanation, but I couldn't resist doing the following. I said, "Before we leave, remember Dad asked me what use my abilities are. There are two uses for my NP - invisible fingertips - that I want to show Carol." Without taking my hands from around her waist, I used NP to control a mouse, which is annoyingly difficult. I opened a Word document, floated a book off the shelf of manuals, got Carol to open it at a random page as a source to copy from, then I gave a HIGH-speed typing demonstration. I floated the book away back to its shelf while I waited for the surprise and amazement to die down. Then I said, "I know you like typing up your schoolwork, Carol. In the future I'll do your typing for you if I'm around and you've got a draft of it. You can pay me in cookies." She wasn't quite capable of laughing at my cookie joke, still being somewhat shell-shocked by everything. She wasn't comfortable with my being her secretary either, saying, "I'm not going to waste your time on my homework. I should be helping you because you're so much more important than I am." "Good girl!" from Julia. "That's exactly how I feel too, and exactly how people should feel about Mark. [It was hardly surprising Carol had expressed that sentiment and that Julia agreed with it, given that Julia had been spending so much time with Carol recently. Julia didn't know what I planned for Carol, but she hadn't hesitated to make sure Carol understood how important Julia thought I was, and to teach Carol the correct attitude to me.] Julia was still speaking, "He's incredible isn't he? There are so many..." I interrupted, "Julia, you're holding up my DINNER! How about we head home and you can tell Carol how incredible I am over dinner? The second use of NP that I was going to show Carol can wait for a little while, so let's go." Without moving a muscle I shut down the computers. It wasn't easy, but after refusing any more questions from Mom and Dad, and insisting that the conversation was over, they finally allowed me to push them toward the door. It was easy to arrange for Mom, Dad and Julia to precede Carol and me out of the room. On the way out I created a hand-sized NP and rubbed Carol's cheek with it. Carol looked at me and I smiled back at her, moving the NP to her shoulder. When she resumed her journey I slid the NP down her back quickly and used it to rub her ass. Carol's head spun around to look at me. I was doing the most hammed up, overacted, innocent look that I could. My head was looking up at the ceiling, swiveling around as if the ceiling was fascinating. I was whistling quietly as if I didn't have a care in the world, and my two hands were twiddling their thumbs. That one of my thumbs was bound by a plaster cast made my one-handed thumb twiddling look particularly silly. I gave Carol a second to take in my act, then I looked at her to say, "I told you it had another PRACTICAL use." I moved the NP against her ass again, rubbing it back and forth a couple of times, then withdrew it, looking closely at her face to make sure she remained cool about my taking liberties. Carol's look was one of adoration, which I thought was an excellent base to build our relationship on. Carol said, "What you can do is absolutely incredible. You're a miracle..." "Don't get religious on me please. That's a can of worms I don't want to go anywhere near. I'm just your loving brother who has developed some extraordinary abilities. But I'm still a perfectly ordinary boy underneath everything else, which is why I enjoyed the last NP demonstration I gave you. We'd better catch up or we'll miss dinner, which would be a tragedy." Carol started walking again. I was in a hurry for her to know that I was sexually attracted to her, but I managed to resist the temptation to do anything more. She'd learn that soon enough, and I didn't want to disrupt her life too much until after her exams. ------- Chapter 235: Home at Last Sunday, June 12, 2005 (Continued) Just as we were about to leave the Williams', I had the idea that I might be able to drive my car by using NP on the pedals, presuming I could push the seat back far enough for my rigid left leg to fit inside the car. Driving myself would be much more convenient than have Mom or Dad ferry me around or using taxis. I said, "Julia, where are my keys please? I'd like to see if I can drive my car." "They're in my room. I'll get them." Even before Julia could move Mom said, "You can't drive with your leg like that. It wouldn't be safe." "Mom, please explain why you think you're a better judge of what I'm capable of than I am?" My point hit home, Mom looking embarrassed as she realized her mistake. I rubbed it in, "And while you're at it, please explain why you insultingly assumed I was too stupid to know what was safe or not safe?" "Sorry Mark. I didn't stop to think again. That's a harder habit to break than I thought." Mom looked chastised enough, so I said, "At least you didn't yell 'Are you insane!' at me, so that's an improvement. Any sentence of yours that contains 'Mark you can't', is a sentence you need to reconsider. Your advice is very welcome, and it would be perfectly fine for you to politely ask whether I've considered a factor you think I might have forgotten, but strident declarations of what I can't do are offensive and will often be wrong. In short, you need to start treating me with some respect." "Yes. I'm sorry, Mark. I hadn't realized I was doing that so much." "To be fair, it's only recently that your approach has become wrong. Before a few months ago your opinions were right far more often than they were wrong." Julia got my keys. We went outside to my car and I found I was able to push the seat far enough back to get in. I easily had enough NP force to work the pedals now, which meant it was just a matter of coordination. I was superb at that, so I knew this would work. I practiced a few times with the car stationary, and it was easy. I pronounced myself capable of driving. Carol and Julia immediately started getting in my car. Mom looked uncomfortable, but had been criticized too much recently to make an issue out of it, so she and Dad went to their car. Donna dithered over the choice of car, choosing to go with Mom and Dad, clearly indicating that she thought she had a better chance of finding out from them why everyone had looked so weird when they came downstairs, and why I'd gotten away with telling Mom off so strongly. Donna would learn nothing though, as there was NO WAY Mom and Dad were going to tell Donna what had happened upstairs! I started the car and drove off, some of my minds concentrating on that process to make sure I didn't screw it up, as that'd very badly damage my credibility with Mom. I had some spare minds to talk with the girls, which I used to interrupt the gushing they were already doing. I said, "Excuse me for interrupting your praising me, but I've a few things to say." They quieted down, like good soon-to-be-wives should. (I really do have miraculous abilities" I got two excited girls to quiet down immediately.) In the unnatural silence, I said, "I noticed that Julia automatically got in the front seat and Carol automatically in the back. From now on I'd like you two to share me equally please. Taking turns to sit in the front, for example." "Really?" they both asked; Carol in disbelief, Julia with curiosity. "Carol, as soon as your exams are over, your life is going to start changing hugely for the better. Julia, Carol's going to become the most important girl in both of our lives. We've been undervaluing her very badly, but not for any longer." Julia asked, "Something VERY special must've happened to you?" "Yes. I'll tell you BOTH all about it when we have time later. I hope you both caught my emphasis on 'both'. From now on the three of us do as much as we can together, including everything to do with all my special abilities. For example, some of what I said in the bedroom and study wasn't fully true. I simplified it to make it easier to deal with Mom and Dad. I'll tell BOTH of you the full truth the first chance the three of us get." I wouldn't be telling either of them the full truth, of course. No word about déjà vu, multiple dimensions, or even multiple minds would ever cross my lips, but I'd tell them as much as I could. Carol said, "I don't understand. Why would you want to waste your time with me? I'm just your little sister; I don't know anything. You and Julia are..." I interrupted her running down of herself, "Carol, sweetie. I know what I'm doing. In case you haven't noticed, I'm quite smart these days. I have several very good and very strong reasons for valuing you as highly as I do. I know you don't understand yet, but you will in two or three months." "Can you see the future now?" asked Julia. "Haha. No. I wish I could, but unfortunately nothing like that at all. You asked me whether something special happened while I was a prisoner. I guess I can quickly summarize by saying that two special things happened. One was that I improved my special abilities, like studying eight subjects at once with my eyes shut. The second was simply that I got some insights into the present - that's the PRESENT, not the future. I realized some things I hadn't realized before. My most important insight was that when Carol gains self-confidence and blossoms, she's going to become a fantastically wonderful, loving, caring, happy, enjoyable friend. Carol thinks she has a low worth, but the truth is that she has so much worth that I want to spend as much time with her as I can. The 'Mark Wing' of whatever mansion we buy has to have a second bedroom for Carol, because I want her to live as close to us as we can get. You need to make sure of that when you're planning our new mansion, Julia." By the time we bought the mansion, I was determined that the three of us would already be 'married', so we won't need the second bedroom for the reason I was implying now. We'll need it for other purposes though, so I wasn't causing any needless disruption. There'll be 'outsiders' visiting our home (such as Carol's Cuties), so we'll want to camouflage Carol's relationship with Julia and me by her appearing to have her own room. We'll also want another bed so we can easily have "Quality Times" in various combinations. "But Mark," protested Carol, "I'm just a..." "Carol!" I mock-sternly exclaimed. "You've already seen me tell Mom off for questioning my judgment, so I'm not going to hesitate to tell you off for the same thing. One more attempt by you to disagree with my highly intelligent and accurate understanding of your wonderful personality will cause me to pull the car over and to put you over my knee to spank your bare bottom until it's bright red. And I don't care if I have to do that on the side of the street with everybody who drives past seeing your glowing bottom. Do I make myself clear?" My command was very clear, but Carol was confused. She hadn't expected me to talk like that, or for her to react in the way she did to my talking like that. Her sexual reaction wasn't a strong one, but it was noticeable to me because I was looking so intently for it. I smiled very happily to myself, as this was the first time I'd created a sexual response in Carol. She was now officially on the slippery slope leading straight to my bed. As a small digression, proximity was continuing to pick up strong emotions in people. Unfortunately the emotions had to be VERY strong. Carol's small surge of sexual arousal, for example, had been well below the detection level. During my ability demonstrations I had detected emotions in proximity, but they'd been glaringly obvious visually. Detecting emotions in proximity was essentially useless so far, as it'd only told me what I could already see. Julia also thought my comment to Carol was strange. She would've thought Carol's reaction was interesting, but she'd missed it because Carol was sitting directly behind Julia. I said, "I've just thought of a good way of making the point about how important Carol is to me. Julia, you know how INCREDIBLY important you've been to my life: I was an unassertive wimp until you turned me around and started pushing me to achieve things. You've had a HUGELY positive effect on my life, and you'll continue to do so for many more years. I sincerely hope for the rest of our lives." Julia interrupted to gush a sweet nothing back at me. I used the interruption to rearrange which minds were doing what, as my "rest of our lives" comment had caused all of 3B to choke up. That wasn't ideal when two of them were driving the car. #1 resumed, "As much as I love you Julia, when you and Carol are sharing me in the future, and the two of you are unsure whether it's your or Carol's turn for something good with me, then I want you to err in Carol's favor. Does that make you appreciate how important she is to me?" "Wow." said Julia. "That's VERY important!" I was very pleased to see that Julia was secure in our relationship and hadn't taken offense at my promoting Carol. I knew 3B's Julia had been cool with being in second place to Carol, and I'd tried hard to word my announcing that here in such a way that it was all about raising Carol, with no hint of lowering Julia, but it was still a relief to see that Julia seemed okay with it. "I can't possibly be as important as Julia. I'm only your sister, and I can't..." "Hang on a mo' please Carol. I need to find somewhere to park where the passing cars will get a good view." "Umm. What do you mean?" "I told you what would happen if you tried to put yourself down again, and I wouldn't want you to think I wasn't a man of my word." Carol asked nervously, "You wouldn't really do that, would you?" "I would enjoy doing it, Carol. Not as much as you'd enjoy it, but I'd still have a good time." "What do you mean? I wouldn't enjoy being exposed in public like that." "Carol, my love, I want to give you two very serious pieces of advice. The first is a repetition. I ask you again not to belittle yourself. I know you truly believe you're not worth much, but I know for a fact that you're wrong. You haven't had a chance to show it yet, or to see it in yourself, but you truly are a wonderful person. In two or three months you'll be starting to appreciate that. I know you far better than you think I do, and in some cases better than you know yourself. You know I am unbelievably intelligent, so you should not doubt it when I tell you that I am certain about something. I'm going to be making some major changes in my life so I can spend a great deal of time with you from now on, which I wouldn't be doing if I wasn't sure of myself. Inside your beautiful body is a beautiful person who is about to start showing herself. -- "My second serious piece of advice, is that you shouldn't even think about trying to mislead me. Like I just said, I know you very, very well, and there's almost no chance of your being able to trick me. I'm going to catch you out nearly every time, and I'd much rather not have any dishonesty or deceit in our relationship. I know for a fact that you would very much enjoy having me spank your bare bottom in public. If you try to deny it I'll pull you out of bed very early one morning, take you to one of your classrooms at school, push all the desks together, and tie you on your back and naked on the top of them, so all your classmates will see you when..." "OH GOD! You know!" I knew, and had gotten a little carried away. Donna's impatience might be a family trait I share. NOW I could definitely detect Carol's emotion in proximity. I didn't have enough samples to know what her 'color' meant, but I memorized it, and tentatively ascribed it to embarrassment possibly including sexual arousal. I doubted there was much sexual arousal involved though, especially not enough to register in proximity, because what I'd just done to Carol was pretty much pure embarrassment. I'd simply blurted out an important secret of hers, rather than used it to create a fantasy image for her. I couldn't be sure that the 'color' didn't include arousal though, as I hadn't been near anyone experiencing strong sexual arousal since my rescue three weeks ago. That was something I was planning to correct with Julia later this evening; not purely out of scientific inquiry either. Carol was having trouble recovering from my exposing what she considered her shameful secret. Some of the emotions flitting across her face weren't good ones to see, so I quickly spoke up to start making her feel better, "Carol, I love you very much, and when the wonderful personality that is inside you starts blossoming shortly, Julia is going to love you too. Not only is your secret safe with us, but in a few weeks I promise that you'll be happy that we know it. -- "I know you find that hard to believe now, but it's true. Between three people who love each other - which is what is going to happen with the three of us - there shouldn't be any fears about us hurting each other. I'll never hurt Julia, and I'll never hurt you. Julia will never hurt you either. You know Julia well enough already to know she's a very bossy girl. Oops - I meant to say she's a very KIND girl. Somehow that "bossy" just slipped out. I've got no idea why." That helped a little, as did neither Julia nor I teasing Carol about her secret. -- I tried another approach. "Julia has taught me many things about love over the last few months. There's one lesson she keeps teaching me over and over again. Sometimes I REALLY wish she'd stop teaching it to me, but she never seems to stop. It seems like she teaches it to me several times a week. I don't know whether you've noticed, but Julia has been making me wear absolutely ridiculous clothes to school for the last several weeks. Clothes I wouldn't want to be seen dead in, let alone have to walk around school wearing. Mind you, when I say 'wearing', half the time they're failing to cover me in very embarrassing ways - which I SINCERELY hope you haven't noticed!" (okay, so Carol's and my relationship wasn't starting with perfect honesty, since I SINCERELY hoped she HAD noticed). -- "Those silly clothes are just one example of the many, many times that Julia has asked me to do something that was very embarrassing for me. The lesson that I keep getting taught by her is that it's okay to trust someone who loves you. Julia too often asks me to do something that embarrasses the hell out of me, and I far too often agree. Her motivation isn't to embarrass or hurt me in any way; she's doing it because she knows it's a good thing for me. Unfortunately she's always right, so she keeps doing it. I wish she'd find ways to do things that were good for me that I'd enjoy doing, but for some reason embarrassment seems to be involved more often than not. I'm rambling too much, but I want you to understand that one of the aspects of being in love is the willingness to put yourself into the other person's hands, because you can trust them to act out of generous love, not out of malice. -- "I apologize for embarrassing you, Carol, but I did it out of love. I want you to understand how well I know you, and why you shouldn't try to be dishonest to me. You did try to insist that you wouldn't like to be spanked in public, and I easily know you well enough to be certain that you would actually find that very arousing and pleasurable. You were lying, and I proved that I knew you were lying. We're nearly home now. Should I stop here so you can recover more, or are you okay to get home?" "I'm okay. I don't understand how you knew that about me? I've never told anybody anything about those feelings, not even Mom or Donna." 3B's Carol had told me, of course. She'd admitted early in our marriage that being "tied naked over the school desks" was one of her sillier, but most arousing fantasies. I answered this Carol, "I have spent many years living with you, so I've noticed many things about you. A lot of those things I didn't understand at the time, but I remembered them, and they helped me understand you during all the thinking I've been doing recently about my life and the key people in it. It'd take me too long to explain all the things I noticed that led to me working out that fantasy of yours, but I can quickly tell you that one of the major clues was Peter Pan." "Oh." "I don't understand?" asked Julia. I said, "I could easily explain, but I think it'd be better if Carol gets the practice at opening herself to you, Julia. The two of you are going to be spending a lot of time together for many years, so learning to be open and honest with each other would be very good." Julia looked at me with a puzzled look on her face. "You've changed a great deal, Mark. Before you were kidnapped you hardly ever planned a few days ahead, but now you tell us what's going to be happening years from now. I'm looking forward to having some long discussions with you." "That'd be great, right after we've caught up on all the sex we've been missing out on. I'm REALLY horny!" "Good, because so am I! An early night tonight?" "Early, vigorous, and often." Julia corrected me, "We'd better not be too vigorous. We'll need to be careful of your broken bones." I corrected her correction, "That won't be difficult, because I don't have any. I'm pretty sure my leg and hand are fully healed already. I'm only keeping my casts on because the hospital would get all excited if they knew. I heal several times faster than ordinary people. Remember the hand cutting experiment." #2: #7: I added, "Sorry, I just remembered that I never got around to telling you about that. A week or so before the kidnapping I deliberately gave myself a little cut and kept track of how fast it healed. It wasn't exactly a rigorous scientific experiment, but I estimated that my body heals between three and six times faster than other people's. Probably closer to six times I think. I'll have had the casts on three weeks by tomorrow, so that's the equivalent of between nine and eighteen weeks, and probably on the high end. Three or four months is more time than breaks need to heal, so I should be fully healed by now, which means vigorous sex is strongly encouraged." Both girls didn't know what to say for a couple of seconds (with my marathon run, that gives me two world records). Then Julia said, "You heal five times faster TOO! Is there anything you CAN'T do?" Carol made a sort of groan, that sounded like she agreed with Julia. "Haha. There's plenty I can't do. Leap tall buildings in a single bound, running faster than a bullet or seeing what color panties girls are wearing..." #4: #3: #5: #8: #5: #8: " ... There are an infinite number of things that could be doable, of which I can do maybe a dozen, so I'm falling somewhat short. Maybe I need to practice harder?" We were pulling up outside home, so I said, "Carol, do you want to explain the Peter Pan thing before we go in? I'm not forcing you, but I think your being open with Julia is a very good idea." "I'll tell her," said Carol, not particularly enthusiastically. "There's no reason not to tell, now you've described my fantasy. It's just that I like pirate movies, Julia, and Peter Pan is the one that's on TV the most often. I get excited thinking about them tying me to the mast where everyone can see me. There are parts of that movie which are close to what I like to imagine..." "I know what you mean," agreed Julia. "I'm so small it's very easy for me to imagine any forceful man doing whatever he wanted with me. That's a great sex fantasy sometimes." Carol excitedly exclaimed, "You have fantasies like that too?" "Sure. Every woman does sometimes. It's perfectly natural, and very enjoyable too. I love having sexy fantasies. I've got one where a gorgeous, bare-chested guy gallops up on a huge white horse. He swings down and grabs hold of me as he gallops past, pulling me onto the horse so I'm lying helplessly face down across the horse in front of him. He holds me down with a hand on my back and there's nothing I can do. I'm completely helpless as he gallops away with me..." Julia went on with her make-Carol-feel-good, invented twaddle. I knew Julia didn't have fantasies like that. Not even as a Pirate Queen, which would've been much more Julia's style. Julia had LOTS of romantic fantasies. I'd made the mistake of laughing during a particularly silly description, which stopped her telling me about any more of them, but I knew she used to have dozens of them, inspired by all the romance books she used to read. According to Julia, all her fantasies revolve around me now. I believe her too. I am truly the center of her world. Julia's tactic worked to perfection, Carol was relieved and as happy as a clam (which are apparently very happy shellfish). Julia finished her sexed up version of what I guessed was one of her old fantasies, then said, "You never have to be ashamed of your fantasies, Carol; you're allowed to think whatever you like that makes you happy. You don't have to be worried about me knowing them either. I don't understand how or why Mark's so definite about our future, but he's so amazing that I'm not going to doubt it. He says we're going to be very close friends, so that's the way I'll treat everything that happens between us. I don't make fun of close friends, so I won't make fun of you. Not that I would in any event, you're too nice to be treated that way." Which was a good place to end the conversation. I started the awkward job of maneuvering myself out of the car, giving the girls the hint. Carol spent a few seconds hugging Julia from behind and thanking her for being so wonderful, then they got out of the car too, and were still ready before I was. As we walked inside, Carol commented, "This has been the strangest day of my life. I've found out my brother is super human, and you've got wonderful sounding plans for me that you've never even asked me about. Normally you apologize for daring to ask me for even a small favor, but now you're simply telling me how things are going to be in my life. Everything you've said sounds fantastic, but it's also very weird." Julia agreed, "I feel the same way, which makes it unanimous. Mark, you're weird! Fantastic, amazing, incredible, extraordinary, and weird." "Thank you. I'm glad to know my way of keeping my two favorites on their toes is working so well." Carol asked, "I don't understand why I'm one of your favorites. You've got dozens of girls who'd love to be your girlfriend, so why should you waste your time on your sister?" "Because I love you, which makes the time I spend with you the exact opposite of a waste. I know you don't understand, but you will in time. Write that question in your diary three months from today's date, and I bet you'll have a good laugh at it when that day comes around. While I remember, please don't write anything secret in your diary. If I have any more enemies like the last two, I doubt they'd respect the privacy of your diary, Carol." "I understand. What you said in Julia's room scared me into being careful." "Good, thanks. It's what's in our hearts that matters, not what's written on paper." Once we were inside, Mom said, "I'm too frazzled to cook dinner tonight Mark. Do you mind if we get pizzas on your first evening back?" "I never mind pizzas at any time." After I'd gotten sick of the food sold in the hospital (guess how long that'd taken), I'd often ordered pizza. I'd been looking forward to a home cooked meal, but pizzas truly were good at any time. That's part of the magic of pizza. Once the pizza ordering was done with, Mom said, "I've got a hundred questions flying around in my head..." "Me too," echoed Dad. "I can spare a little time, but exams start tomorrow morning so we need to study. We can have a quick session in the girls' room while Donna waits for the pizza in the living room, if you like?" They - other than Donna - liked, so we did that. I pointedly told Carol, "You and Julia have to be included. I want you to know everything that's going on." Donna was frustrated at being excluded again, but she was told the parental equivalent of "tough cheese." I'd chosen to have the discussion in the girls' room because it was at the far end of the house, and Donna had no reason to be anywhere near it. The door into Mom and Dad's bedroom is too close to the kitchen and living room, so Donna could loiter in the area with a prepared excuse if we opened the door and saw her there. Inside the girls' room, I leaned against the inside of the door, to detect Donna in proximity if she tried to creep close. There were several detailed questions from Mom which all got variations on, "I can't tell you. Not that I refuse to, it's just that I can't. The right words don't exist..." In other words, I refused to answer the questions. One of Mom's questions was, "Could you train blind people to see without their eyes?" "That's a very nice question, but unfortunately there's not a snowball's chance in Hell. Their brains would have to be as powerful as mine before I could begin to teach them. How many blind people have IQs of 226 or so? According to Prof there's no one else alive today who has an IQ that high, and if there was, chances are low that they'd be blind." Dad had several questions too, which surprised me. His were generally big picture stuff, like, "How did you get all these abilities?" "Some I deliberately tried to invent and found I could, and some I discovered by accident, but I'm guessing you're actually asking about my having any abilities at all, aren't you?" "Yeah. How can you do things which are impossible?" "I don't know the answer to that. I have some theories and some feelings, but I have almost no knowledge at all. I can use a set of scales to measure how hard my NP can push, and measure my other abilities in other ways, but that knowledge doesn't explain anything. I'm pretty sure no one else has ever been able to do what I can. -- "You often hear people claiming to have paranormal powers, but they're always very vague about it, they have trouble reproducing them on demand, are put off by so-called negative vibes from skeptics, etc. All of which makes their claims sound like a pack of lies to me. I can do my stuff whenever I want," I temporarily created a few light blobs to prove the point. "I've never heard of anyone like me, so I'm guessing they don't exist. They're certainly not turning up to explain things to me, so I can't pass anything on to you. -- "When Prof gets back, we'll have a discussion about why I might have these abilities. Prof's much more knowledgeable about science than the rest of us, so he might have some good points." Not to mention the real reason I wanted him and Vanessa involved: to give the genetic hypothesis much more credibility with my parents. "How did you learn each of the abilities?" "Trial and error mostly. Without anyone to tell me about things, my only way of learning is to try stuff. I put a HUGE amount of HIGHLY motivated effort into trying to create water out of thin air when Prof and I were dying from thirst, but I failed completely. Yet the morning I had the idea of creating light out of thin air, it only took a few moments for me to do it. I'm operating completely in the dark on this stuff, taking wild guesses about what to try and how to try it. Learning how to read seven or eight computer screens took me a LONG time, for example. I wish someone would give me an instruction manual for how to do everything that's possible for me, because that'd make everything a great deal simpler, but I think I'm the first person who can do this so there's no such manual." Mom asked, "Why tell us now? From what I guess, you've had these powers for a while, and Prof and Vanessa knew some of it already, but you were keeping it a secret from us?" "I guess there are two halves to that question: why I didn't tell you before, and why I'm telling you now. I was keeping it a secret from EVERYONE before. If you'll excuse the expression, it's REALLY serious shit, and not the sort of thing to be bandied around willy-nilly. I told Prof and Vanessa about NP and light blobs as a necessary part of convincing them that the roulette scheme would work. -- "Julia knows about my abilities because she's responsible for my discovering them. She's the one that pushed me into making the most of myself. My 'most' is turning out to be a great deal more than we both expected," I got some laughs for that. "I wouldn't have done nearly so well without her help, and I totally trust her discretion, so telling her was definitely the right thing to do." -- I held up my hand, saying, "Excuse me." I turned around and yelled at the door, "Go away, Donna." There was a short pause, then Donna yelled back, "The pizza's not here yet." "That's not even close to a good excuse. Go watch some TV." Donna stomped away. I resumed answering Mom's question. "Lastly, Ava knows a very, very small amount. She knows I can run a marathon faster than the world record, and she knows that when I squeeze her nipples the lights in Julia's room conveniently turn on or off." Carol smiled at the mention of magic nipples again, so I definitely had to think of something VERY good for her nipples to do, in addition to being nipples. -- "Ava's going to end up living with us in the mansion when her parents get too sick, so I'm starting to test her ability to keep secrets in very small, cautious steps. She's been perfect, and I'm not far away from being comfortable with trusting her totally." -- Julia looked surprised, so I added to her, "Yeah. I'll still do it in steps, but I'm not worried about her messing up. It might seem strange to you, Mom, that Ava got some knowledge before you and Dad did, but that was only because I needed time to test Ava before we moved into the mansion. I always intended to tell you before we moved in, but I didn't need to test you in advance, so Ava got a small jump on you. Everyone who lives in the mansion is going to know, with the exception of Donna unfortunately, because she's so useless with secrets. I'd really like to tell her too, but the very first test I gave her was her keeping the marathon run secret, and she didn't even last five seconds before blabbing that out of childish petulance. Unfortunately she's going to see some secrets anyway, so I hope she behaves herself." Julia said, "We'll have some talks with her. Your secrets are so important that all of us should make time to work on Donna. I'll get everyone in my family to talk with her too. She'll get the message." "Good, thanks. I don't know that she'd actually cause trouble, but she'll certainly be a pain in the ass. At the moment she's just curious, but later on she'll know enough to want to be involved. It'll be like we owned a horse but wouldn't let her ride it, so she's going to get very frustrated. It'd be nice to nip that in the bud." #5: #8: #3: I turned back to Mom, "I was intending to tell you about my abilities sooner or later, but the kidnapping experience made me all too aware of my mortality, so I decided to tell you everything sooner. As well as it being nice to tell you the full truth, there are also practical reasons why my parents should know about my special nature. Most of those reasons I'll save for a later conversation, but I will mention one little reason. I'm pretty sure the amount of activity going on inside my brain is considerably more than normal, so if my head was put inside an MRI-type machine, the doctors would probably get very excited. Then they'd want to run more tests, which would lead to even more tests and experiments. Before you'd know it, I'd be their favorite guinea pig. Now that you guys know about that risk, you can stop the doctors doing the first MRI on me." "I wondered why you've been so insistent on that," said Mom. "It didn't make sense to me that you should be so averse to them just because you had a high IQ." "You're right that it's not purely because of my IQ. I'm pretty sure I eat so much because I need it to fuel all the processing that's going on in my brain. I remember reading somewhere that the brain uses about 20% of the body's energy, so if I'm eating about 40% more than a normal person, that implies my brain's doing three times as much processing. It must be doing a lot more if I can consciously read seven or eight computer screens at one time. Three times more processing must surely show up in an MRI." "It certainly would," said Mom. "Fortunately it's easy to stop doctors scanning your head: just tell them you have some metal in your head from a childhood accident." "Does metal block MRIs?" "It probably does," answered Mom, "but that's not the reason my excuse works. MRIs have huge magnets in them. They'd rip any metal straight out of you at high speed, causing all sorts of horrible problems to your head and to their machine. As soon as they hear 'metal in' they won't let you anywhere near their very expensive machine." "That's a good excuse to know." "Be careful when you use it. I couldn't use it in Seattle because there was too much chance they'd already X-rayed your head and would've known that I was lying. -- "I have another question: why stay at high school? You could jump straight from 11th grade to college next year." "Mostly because I want to stay. Julia is teaching me a huge amount about people, social interaction stuff, and things like that. She also seems to have a knack for getting me into situations where I need to develop new abilities. If I went to college full time, I'd just study academic stuff, without learning anything else. I need to learn what Julia is teaching me, because I effectively only started learning it about three months ago and I've got a lot of ground to make up. There's also no real advantage in leaving school. Prof and I believe I can finish the two degrees next year just in my early morning study sessions and with a bare minimum of visits to OSU. If I left school I could probably complete three degrees next year, but we both think that much academic work without social development would be wrong. By the way, Prof is sure I can complete the two degrees, but I'm not so sure. I keep worrying that the third and fourth year courses are going to get so hard that they'll slow me down..." "{Raspberry}," from Julia, her propensity for them unfortunately not being a dimensional difference. " ... Make that Prof AND JULIA think I can complete the degrees in one year. I'm not making any promises though. I think Julia will agree that the social reasons for me staying at school are important, aren't they Julia?" "Yes. Very important. Mark learns very quickly, but he's still got big holes in his social skills. One more year under my expert guidance and busybody pushing him around will work wonders. I'll take full credit for his improvements, of course." "There you go, Mom. There are all sorts of very, very important reasons for me to keep going to school next year." At the same time as I said the last sentence I used NP to stroke Carol's cheek, and to tap her nose in rhythm with my saying "very, very important reasons". Her smile showed that she got my message that she was an important reason. Mom commented, "It's not like you to be so definite about what's going to happen in the future. Have you got an ability that lets you see the future?" "Julia asked me the same question. Unfortunately I don't have any such ability. I still have to worry about Donna blabbing my secrets, or I'd love to save time by telling you which house to buy for what price, or God knows what sort of career I'm going to have, and many other things. The career question has Prof and me scratching our heads when it comes to what degrees I should do. You're right that I'm much more definite, but it's because I understand the present better than I did before. There's something very creative about being chained to a chair for four days and starved to death. Maybe that's why saints and mystics go on fasts and meditate for several days. Having the creative delusions, and then a few very quiet weeks afterward to carefully think through them was very helpful. My having a superb memory helped a lot too. I don't want to be a spoilsport, but the girls have lost a lot of study time this weekend, and they really should crack their books. Are there any urgent questions?" There weren't really, so we ended the meeting. I didn't have any studying to do. I'll read the final lectures for the college courses I'll be taking exams for - just Algebra and Calculus 251- when I go back to the Williams' later tonight. I'd already totally caught up on all my schoolwork during the nearly three weeks of 20-hour days that I'd sat alongside Prof's bed. Exams were going to be a piece of cake for me this year: I'd have eight minds working on them. Imagine how easy it'd be to take an exam with seven friends helping you, friends with whom you could communicate words and pictures almost instantly. My memory has been getting steadily better for the last few months, to the extent that each of my minds can now memorize stuff with very little effort and virtually faultlessly. Plus forgetting something requires that all eight of my minds forget it, which is unlikely to the power of eight, so damned near impossible. I'd reread all my class notes from the beginning of the year and large chunks of my textbooks, all of which was now memorized, without my needing to make any notes. Most of the times in the exams I'll probably be using two teams of four minds (#'s 1, 2, 5 and 6 in one team, 3, 4, 7 and 8 in the other, in case there were dimensional differences in the class material), and leapfrog through the exams. I had no doubt that I was going to absolutely cream them! Except for vague subjects like English, where being 'right' still means having the same opinion as the teacher. But even English wouldn't be hard with eight minds suggesting twaddle to write. I wouldn't get anything like 100%, but passing would still be easy, and that was all I cared about for the vague subjects. I'm going to take all the exams at OSU. Prof had arranged that for me with OSU's President (he's titled "President" in this dimension, not "Dean". This OSU has "Deans" but they're in charge of each individual college such as Business, Science, etc., and they report to the President. The dimensions seem to vary without any apparent logic). He'd been very sympathetic and willing to help. OSU was going to provide a room and supervisor for the two college exams and all my high-school ones. I'd be held incommunicado in that room each day, and take the school exams on the same days as the other kids at school would, to avoid leaks in either direction. With two school grades plus the two college exams I'd be having a busy week, but that didn't worry me because they'd all be easy. Prof and I had arranged this as an easy way to avoid the ruckus that my returning to school would cause. I didn't want to face all that crap, nor did I want to disrupt the exams for my friends there, such as Alexis and Lily. I had nothing better to do, so when the girls started getting ready to study I announced my availability to help them in any way. They all thought that was a good idea, so we set things up so all three of them studied in the girls' room, with their taking turns to visit me in my room. It was so sad that the rooms were the "Girls' Room" and "My Room". The sooner that was changed the better. With both her parents being educationalists, there was no chance of Julia not being already fully prepared for her exams. Carol spends too much time on her schoolwork all year, so she probably didn't need to do much cramming. She had been cramming though, because that was Carol. And Donna was prepared as much as a 6th grader needs to be. So when each of the girls came into my room for 'study help', what they really wanted to do was gossip. In a nutshell, all three of them wanted to know what was going on. Donna came in first, almost immediately after I'd got into my room. She gave a sad little request to know "What's going on, and why are you so friendly with Carol now?" I pulled Donna onto my lap, gave her a cuddle, and attempted to ease her upset without actually telling her anything. There were two major themes: As Carol and Donna get older, their lives would get more and more different. I told her, "You're getting a horse but Carol is not; Carol's becoming good friends with Julia but you've got other friends; Carol likes shopping for clothes" (baggy, unflattering ones) "but you'd rather do sports. You don't want to do all the same things as Carol because you're becoming different people as you grow up. You get on much better with Dad than you do with Mom because you like doing sports things with him. Carol likes being with Mom more than Dad because they're both inside types of people. I don't spend much time with Mom or Dad, but I like being with Carol for affectionate things, and being with you for goofing off at sports things. We're all different and becoming more different all the time. Our uncles and aunts are all very different from Mom and Dad, so you know it's natural for brothers and sisters to change. I don't get upset and complain when you spend time with Dad because I'm happy to see both of you have a good time together. So you shouldn't get upset and complain when Carol and I have a good time together. You should be happy that we're happy. And the usual "Secrets are dangerous" theme. (I'm not going to make you read that yet again!). I did include a couple of little reminders that her attitude wasn't mature: She'd deliberately broken her promise to keep my marathon run secret just because she was annoyed (Donna wouldn't understand the word "petulance", even though she was good at doing it), and her being so nosey proved she didn't know that secrets were a responsibility. I used Robert and Andrew as examples of how careful people avoid learning secrets even though they were curious about them. Donna wasn't exactly convinced, but she appreciated receiving one-on-one attention until we were called to dinner. ------- Chapter 236: Talks With My Fiancées; Part One Sunday, June 12, 2005 (Continued) After dinner it was Carol's turn to visit me for 'studying'. I patted my lap, and was very pleased to see that she was happy to climb on. I hadn't expected her to be anything other than happy, as the attention I'd been paying to Carol over the last three weeks had produced a Carol who thoroughly enjoyed my company, attention and compliments. Carol asked, "I don't understand what's going on. Why are you being so affectionate to me these days, and treating me like I'm important, and being so definite that I'm going to be close to you and Julia, and lots of other things like that?" "I've certainly changed the way I behave toward you a great deal, so it's no wonder you find it confusing, sweetie. I've thought about it long and hard for many days, and it comes down to two reasons. I'm not sure which of those two is the most important, but I think it might be the bottom one." "The 'bottom one'? What do you mean?" "Your bottom. You've got a REALLY nice ass!" Carol's brain went blank for a second, refusing to accept what it'd heard. I'd never indulged in sexual banter with my sisters before (not counting some very stupid comments more than two years ago, which at our ages was effectively forever ago), and it took a second for Carol to get over the total unexpectedness of it. Then she exclaimed, "WHAT!" and started laughing. I talked over her laughter, "Okay, okay. Maybe it MIGHT be your personality - that's what I call the 'top reason' - but you've still got hell of a nice bottom reason." Carol giggled, then accused, "Now you're just being silly!" I looked puzzled while saying, "I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I really do like your personality." "{Giggle}. I meant you were being silly about my bottom! You knew what I meant." In a somewhat serious tone, "Yes I did, darling. I know you're having trouble believing it, but you've got a truly wonderful personality inside of you. I'm going to help your bring it out. It won't take long, as it just needs a little love and caring, and I've got HUGE amounts of those for you. In just a few weeks you'll be blossoming into a wonderfully happy, confident, lovely person. When school restarts you'll quickly become one of the most popular and well-liked girls in your grade. Lots of people are going to like you very much, with me being lucky enough to be right at the top of the list." I'd like to say she looked hopeful but skeptical, but the vast majority of Carol's reaction was disbelief, although she had a very small amount of hope, as anyone would when being tempted with popularity. -- It was time for me to pull rank, "Carol. I'm being deadly serious now, so please listen. Okay?" "Yes." "Thanks. In the car I gave you two pieces of advice: don't belittle yourself and don't try to deceive me. Both of those are actually only short-term pieces of advice. The belittling thing is temporary because in a few weeks you'll start to value yourself more highly and accurately. Trying to deceive me isn't something you'll do much. It's not in your nature to be deceptive, and I'll catch you out every time anyway, so you'll quickly stop bothering to try..." "Yes, I'm sorry about that. I wasn't really trying to lie to you personally, just trying to protect my secret." "You don't have to explain yourself to me. You'd be AMAZED at how well I know you already! And how much I love you already. In many ways I know you better than you know yourself, but that's not the issue now. Let's cancel the two pieces of advice I gave you in the car, because they're only temporarily useful. I'm going to give you two new pieces of advice, and these two will last you for the rest of your life. Are you listening carefully, because I'm deadly serious about these?" "I'm listening." "For the rest of our lives together Carol, which will be a VERY long time," the 3B guys especially hoped so; none of us wanted to leave another Carol behind, "when I INSIST that I know something, then it would be pretty damned silly and annoying of you to disbelieve me. I'm deliberately being insulting because I want what I'm saying to get your attention. I am ENORMOUSLY smarter than you. There are many things you can do better than I can, but sheer brainpower isn't one of them..." "I can't do ANYTHING better than you! You're a miracle. You can do..." "Shush. There ARE many things you can do better than me. You are FAR better at giving love than I am, and you're FAR better at being selflessly caring than I am. You're better at both of those things than me or anyone else I know. Both of those are wonderful parts of your personality, and major reasons why I love you so much. Plus - of course - the 'Bottom Reason'." I patted her ass with my hand a couple of times, in case she'd forgotten. And then I took my hand away, regretfully. -- "So, counting your ass, there are at least three ways in which you're better than me. My point is that your brainpower isn't one of them. You've seen me screaming through school. You've seen Prof and Vanessa get extremely excited about my screaming though college degrees. You know my IQ score. I showed you just an hour or so ago that I can study seven or eight different subjects simultaneously. How many people do you know who are smart enough to invent a way of seeing that doesn't use their real eyes? And I showed you in the car that I am smart enough to work out one of your most private secrets. So when I INSIST I know something, you'd be pretty damned silly to argue with me, wouldn't you?" "Umm, yes. I'm sorry Mark. It's just..." "Stop Carol! I know your excuses, and I'm not interested in them. Especially because they're wrong. You ARE a wonderful person. I know you don't think you are, but I INSIST that I'm right. When I told you that in just a few weeks you'll be blossoming into a wonderfully happy, confident, lovely, popular and well-liked person, I wasn't giving you my opinion, or something that I hoped would happen, I was stating a FACT! Your arguing with it is just as silly as your arguing with 1+1=2. Actually even sillier, because in a few weeks you're going to be so overflowing with happiness that you'll be bursting into tears of joy because you can't find the words to express how happy you are. Your resisting that happening to you is a great deal sillier than arguing about a mathematical truth. To put it in a nutshell, when I INSIST something is true, you should not only stop arguing with me about it, you should BELIEVE it yourself. Have I made myself clear?" "Yes Mark. This is very confusing for me. You've never talked to me like this before." "I've never been in a situation where I'm so sure I'm right, and so motivated to do something about it. I'm trying to change your life so you'll become so happy you'll feel like you're bursting with joy, but you're trying to make it harder for me. That's extremely frustrating for me, because I very, very much want you to be happy." Carol swiveled on my lap so she could look me straight in the eyes. Her arms around my neck, she asked me intently, "You really do love me, don't you?" "You've got NO IDEA! I love you and Donna as my sisters. That's been especially great for the last year or so, and I'm sure it'll be great into the future. But there's something else: During my imprisonment I realized what personality would blossom from within you once you were in a secure, loving relationship with people who convinced you by their love how highly they valued you. I saw the Carol-you-will-become, and I fell head over heels in love with her. That's why I'm so affectionate with you, why I'm in such a hurry for you to change, and why I get so frustrated when you keep insisting you're worthless. You're going to make both of us very, very happy, and I'm busting a gut to help you make it happen." "What do you mean, 'head over heels'? Like with a girlfriend?" It mostly meant that I was getting carried away. My plan had been to go slow, where "slow" was supposed to be more than a week, not within the second hour of arriving home. There were several problems that had created my being tempted into going so fast: Carol hadn't shown any real resistance to any of my escalating sweet-talk since my rescue three weeks ago, either in person on the weekends, or on the phone every evening. She'd basked in all of my compliments during this afternoon's four-hour drive down from Seattle, welcoming my attention without the slightest hint of rejecting anything other than statements about her worth, which weren't a relationship rejection. I hadn't had a chance to do any deliberate seduction during my ability demonstrations, but Carol had been blown away by them, and "awesome impressiveness" is seductive in itself. I'm sitting in my chair in front of my bedroom's little study desk, in exactly the same position 3B had physically seduced Carol last time. My seating had been unintentional, but it was very stimulating to have Carol sitting on my lap with my arms around her again. Especially with her looking at me right now waiting for the answer to her girlfriend question, with her happy - and dare I believe - hopeful expression. Last, and perhaps not least, I hadn't had sex for three weeks, preferring to spend as much time as I could with Prof. It's REALLY scary to hear doctors say, "His kidneys aren't doing well." Discontinuing my kiatsu to sneak off to have sex with Julia was NEVER going to happen at the expense of Prof's struggling kidneys. I answered Carol, "Good heavens no! Not like a girlfriend." I can't say Carol looked crushed, because she hadn't had enough hope in the first place. My "head over heels" comment had only been a few seconds ago, and she hadn't had time to do anything more than begin to react to it emotionally, and that reaction would have been held back by her not understanding it because of my being her brother. But I could tell that she'd liked my saying I was head over heels in love with her, and she'd been disappointed by my withdrawing it. I gave her the second half of my zig, and then I did the zag, "Girlfriends come and go Carol. You're FAR, FAR more important to me than just a girlfriend. I'm head over heels in love with you for the rest of my life." Carol's eyes went WIDE. She stared at me in disbelief. She does a lot of that. I saw a flicker of suspicion cross her face, so I countered it with, "I'm not pulling your leg, darling; I'm serious..." "You mean like a..." her voice dropped to a breathless whisper, "a wife?" I declared happily, "At least!" "But there isn't anything more than a wife." "What a pity. I guess we'll have to settle for your being my wife then." "But we CAN'T! You're my brother! Brothers and sisters can't do that." "We can in our hearts. I agree that there are problems, but I'm the guy who got a driver's license at fifteen, can see with his eyes shut, can read seven or eight computer screens at once, can apparently finish two college degrees in one year while he's still at school, and can make invisible fingertips and glowing spheres of light out of thin air." I demonstrated the last two, holding a bright ball in one hand while I NP-stroked her cheek. I was worried about my going too fast with her, so I wanted to remind Carol to be impressed by me. "I specialize in doing the impossible, such as being impossibly lucky in having a sister as wonderful as you." VERY cheesy, but she liked it. "I don't understand. It doesn't make sense that you can want me when you've got Julia and Ava and ... What about JULIA! She loves you! She's going to be..." I hushed her by putting an NP-fingertip over her lips. NP is a GREAT ability, just for this one use alone. Although I quite like that it's also good for winning $11 million and taking guns off baddies. "Remember, I said in the car just before we got home that you and Julia would be very good friends in the future. I've spent a LONG time thinking about this, so all the problems you could think of I've already got solutions to. None of that is important now. The only important thing is whether you love me and want to be something very similar to my wife, or whether you'd prefer to date the boys in your classes and have one of them as your boyfriend the way other girls do?" That last bit was a sneaky thing for me to say. 3B's Carol had told me that she thought her grade's "mating rituals" (my words) were "pathetic, annoying and immature" (her words). She hadn't wanted any part of them, and was repeatedly bothered by boys who couldn't resist making plays for her, obviously because of her breasts. A significant part of her opinion was actually self-justification for her hiding from social-life, but that didn't matter to me now. Rather than my asking her "Do you want to be my wife?", to which a "No" answer might not seem too bad, I'd asked, "Do you want to be my wife or have a boyfriend from your class?" Hopefully the unappealing alternative would push her in the wifely direction. Carol declared, "YOU! I will never, EVER meet anyone as wonderful as you. You're the most incredible guy EVER! You're nice to me and Donna ALL the time. You can do miracles, like a superman or Jesus Christ or..." #5: #3: #5: I said, "That's good to know, Carol. That you agree, I mean. I'm not so happy that you think I'm a Christian deity. Judging by the book they put out, they've got a pretty screwed up attitude to sex." "Oh my god, sex! Ahh, Mark, are you going to have sex with me?" I hadn't done ANY sexual seduction with this Carol. Last time I'd spent a few days getting her hugely wound up, but this time my mouth had raced way ahead of the schedule. Even though Carol had said "Yes" to my sort-of-proposal, it was a pity to have missed out on the physical seduction. My knowledge of her hot buttons had let me fantasize up some excellent ways to torment her into a sexual frenzy. I'd have to see if I could use most of them anyway, as they were too good to waste. The look of Carol's face wasn't one of unabashed lust, or anything so one-sidedly positive. She was mostly nervous, but she was also waiting with bated breath and a look of tense anticipation. The way she'd asked her question was a good sign too, as she was telling me that it was my choice. Plus the other Carol had enjoyed sex, so I felt safe in saying, "We're going to go at it like bunnies. You're going to have FAR more sex than you've ever had before!" I chuckled to myself at the expressions on her face. It took her a couple of seconds to decide which emotions won, and then what to say, "Umm, Mark. I've never had any sex before." "I know, sweetie. This is one area where I know how to give you very, very good times. I'm very good at sex, and I know your body well enough to give you sensations better than you've ever had before." Carol said, "Yeah. I've, umm, heard stories about you being very good. Some of the girls in my class want you to be their first, I just never expected that to happen to me." Which reminded me to make a mental note to ask Julia whether there was a way of making Carol's first time less painful for her. 3B's Carol had had the "Hurtful Hymen from Hell." She'd put on a brave face - it being our wedding night - but it'd been very painful for her. Carol added, "What do you mean about knowing my body? How can you know that? You haven't even seen my body since I was about four years old." "I'll give you a demonstration later, darling. Don't worry about it now; I need to tell you some things, okay?" "Sure. I don't know anything except that I'm happy and I don't understand why you'd want to be with me." Carol snuggled happily deeper into my lap and arms, ready to listen to me. I resisted getting distracted by telling her yet again that I wanted her because she was a valuable person, etc. Instead I said, "First, I have to apologize for making somewhat of a chaotic mess out of this discussion. I started thinking about this while I was still chained to the kidnappers' chair, and I'd worked out a good plan for what to say, when to say it, etc., but the very first time I got you in my arms in private, and it all came gushing out chaotically." Carol giggled happily at my rambling compliment, then she asked, "How come I can't feel your - you know - under me?" I knew what "you know" was. I didn't know why Carol was thinking about it, as it wasn't the topic of conversation, but I was very pleased that she was. In 3B-land, I hadn't had any problems over Julia's discovery of my control over my cock, but I'd still greatly feared that she'd one day realize I hadn't "loved her so much it'd ruined me for other girls". 3A-Julia hadn't discovered I had those cock-abilities, as that'd happened after the Hot Tub Party and had needed Carol's presence to make it happen, so I was VERY happy that I didn't have that fear in this dimension. I would very happily continue to keep my cock control secret, so I answered, "I'm trying very, very hard to be a good brother and not let my body react how it wants to. I didn't think you'd appreciate your brother's cock sticking you in the ass. Would you like me to let it behave naturally? Which would be rock hard, in case you have any doubts about that." [3B had amazed 3A when they'd demonstrated the go-hard and go-cum cock tricks in the shower in Seattle a few days after we got mobile.] "I do have doubts. I can't believe you want to have sex like bunnies with me, {giggle}." #8: #5: #8: Carol wiggled on my lap, saying, "Oh! I can feel it. Good. I didn't believe you could desire me." I smiled while I asked, "What part of, 'I want us to fuck like bunnies, ' didn't you understand?" "{Giggle}. Maybe I'd understand it better if you showed me?" #8: "Carol, I'd LOVE to have sex with you now, but we're not going to do that until you've got a VERY clear idea of exactly what sort of relationship I'm offering to have with you for the rest of our lives. It can't be the same as a traditional marriage for several reasons, and it has some major differences from what you're probably imagining it'll be. It wouldn't be right of me to have sex with you, and for you to find out later that you don't want to be in the sort of relationship that I'm insisting on." "{Raspberry}. {Giggle}, I heard Julia do that to you just before, and you deserve another one. I appreciate you're trying to be nice to me, but you're being silly too. I'll be in any relationship you want. As long as it's got you in it, I'm happy." "You haven't heard ANY of the details, Carol. There are some strange..." "I TRUST you! You wouldn't take advantage of me, which you just proved by refusing sex with me." #1: Carol wiggled her ass again, then asked, "Can I see it? I've never seen one up close before." I nearly said, "What about Gerald's?", but it would have been difficult to explain how I knew about that. He's a cousin of ours that 3B's Carol had played "I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours" with, at a family get-together about three years ago. She'd been ten, he eleven, and they'd both been awkward and fumbling. They'd gotten as far as touching each other, but then got too scared and had stopped. I'd learned this from a "What Were Your Earlier Sexual Experiences" conversation in 3B-land. It'd been a very short conversation for all three of us. Instead I said, "If we start doing things like that, I won't be able to stop myself from going further..." #6: " ... which probably isn't a good idea with Mom and Dad at home." Carol's expression changed totally at that reminder. "MOM AND DAD! Mom's going to hit the roof BIG TIME over you and me becoming, you know." "Bunnies?" Carol nodded, looking VERY worried. "Carol, I told you only a couple of minutes ago not to worry about any problems because I've had weeks to think of solutions to them. What's the chance I forgot to think of a solution to Mom and Dad?" "But there's NO WAY they're going to..." I put my physical hand over Carol's mouth, holding it there while I told her, "I told you there will be some differences between our future and an ordinary marriage. One important difference is that our relationship won't be one of equality like marriages normally are. I will be the boss, and you will follow my orders. My very first order is for you to stop worrying about the problem. Will you obey me, or do I need to start looking for a better behaved wife?" I was smiling so she knew I was joking, but Carol's head was nodding vigorously even before I'd finished the last sentence. I took my hand slowly away, as if ready to quickly put it back. "I didn't order you just to stop talking about problems; I ordered you to stop worrying about them. No more worries. Okay?" "I understand, Mark. I have to follow your orders. Julia's been telling me what it's like to be your girlfriend, I just never expected it to apply to me." "What sort of things has Julia been telling you?" "HEAPS of things. I was going to high school every day to have lunch with her and Ava, we did things after school; shopping or just hanging out and talking. Julia REALLY likes shopping, especially now you've given her so much money. She's very nice to me. She bought me a lovely powder-blue cashmere cardigan. It's got pearl buttons and..." #6: "Excuse me, Carol. As fascinated as I am with your shopping triumphs, let's try to keep to the slightly more important issue of the structure of the relationship we'll be in for the rest of our lives..." "Oh yeah, {giggle}. I guess that might be more important, haha." "I think so, assuming the sweater didn't come with a matching skirt. You understand that I'll be the boss and that I can give you orders?" "That's fine. You know a lot more about everything than I do." "Carol, that's already not true, and is going to become less and less true over the years. I'm talking about our entire lives, so there'll be plenty of things you'll learn more about than I will. We may be together, but we're going to have very different careers, experiences, etc., so we'll obviously learn different things." I almost used motherhood as an example, but it was too early to bring that issue up. It wasn't a strict requirement anyway, although it was something that appealed to me greatly. What I did find interesting was my change in attitude to Carol's obeying me. Previously, in both dimensions, my being someone to be obeyed had mostly been something Julia had insisted on. I hadn't objected to it (see if you can work out why?), but I'd never thought of it as a necessity, and I'd almost never acted commandingly. My attitude was different now. My NP and other powers had been subtle before (fourteen pounds of maximum force was hardly going to shake the world!). But now I had REAL power; 113 pounds was far more than a "subtle" force, especially when applied to a quarter inch area. I was pretty sure that I could punch holes into people's stomachs, for example. Being able to study eight subjects at once was the greatest boost to my expectations for my future. That was going to have a HUGE impact, especially with my superb^8 memory. I knew I was going to cream the exams this year, and would be able to do that every year from now on. Even when the college work got very tricky, having eight minds to work on problems should enable me to get a lot further than my natural intelligence would justify. I was starting to believe that I should be a boss, at least about things I was confident about. Julia would be proud! I still had HEAPS of stuff to learn from her yet, but it was good to feel a little pride in myself. "Sorry Mark. It's hard to get used to thinking about years from now. You're very serious aren't you? You really do want us to be together forever?" "Yes. I am totally serious, and I do want us to be together forever. Ideally even longer, haha. But it has to be on my terms." Which I'd quickly back down from if Carol proved reluctant. "I have to be the boss, and you have to obey my orders VERY thoroughly. Not just if you agree with them, but obey me totally." "Sure. I've agreed to that already. I'm happy to do whatever you want." "I'm worried you're not taking it seriously enough, because you seem to be agreeing too quickly." "Julia and Ava have told me about it, and I know Ava's promised to obey you too. You don't order them to do much, but they've told me some of the things so I know what you're talking about. I'm comfortable trusting you because you're never mean to people, and most of the things Julia and Ava told me about were fun." "Hopefully it will be fun most of the time, but that's not the main reason why obeying me is necessary. What if we were in a life-or-death situation, maybe with more kidnappers coming after me. Would you carry out an order of mine that was seriously dangerous to you, or would you prefer to run away or hide under the bed? Or less dramatic things like after I graduate school next year, I'll be leaving Corvallis to go to a much better university somewhere else. I'll be ordering you to come with me. That means leaving Mom, Dad, Donna and everyone else behind. Are you willing to obey an order like that? -- "And don't be too sure about my never being mean. In the last few weeks I've been thinking about ordering Julia to climb onto the roof of her house and to jump off as a test of her obedience to me." But really as a way of showing her that I can make her fly. It'd only briefly crossed my mind before being rejected as being too mean (exactly as Carol knew I couldn't be), but it was a good way of scaring Carol about how serious the obedience issue was. Carol was horrified by my last example, as Julia's house is far too high to jump off of without serious injury. Carol was so horrified that I realized I'd overdone it. [[This was typical of me at this time. I'd empathize too much with the other person, and put far too much effort into getting them to understand EVERYTHING. If they sounded 'too cooperative' - what a stupid concept - I'd stress the bad parts! I'd totally lose sight of why I was talking to them in the first place. Talking Carol out of our relationship was NOT my goal! I'll also point out that because of my confidence in our three-way relationship because of 3B's experiences, and because of my never having been confident about people issues before, I managed the conversation very poorly. I was too bossy, talked about the wrong things and too much, etc. Very fortunately, it didn't matter much to Carol what I said.]] I quickly added, "Don't worry, I decided against it. I realized it was a silly idea. I was overreacting to the danger Prof had been in. After I killed the kidnappers, it took me two and half days to figure out a way of escaping. If it'd taken me another six hours Prof might've been too sick to recover, so he very nearly died just because he was part of my life. I feared something like that might happen again, and I had a momentary idea about only letting super-loyal people near me. It was a stupid idea that only lasted a fraction of a second. I only mentioned it because I wanted to scare you a little. Being with me will make you very happy, but it's possible that there might be scary times too. You should be aware of that before you make your decision." Carol asked, "All you're doing is saying, 'In good times and in bad.' Julia and Ava have told me about lots of the good times they've had with you, and I already knew there'd been bad times too. Everyone had a terrible time while you and Prof were missing, and Ava heard one of the guys say he wanted to take her as well, so he could rape her. You're not telling me anything I don't already know. Provided you don't want me to do silly things like leap off the roofs of houses, I'm perfectly happy with my decision." [Ava and I had talked about her scare. Goon had wanted to include Ava in the kidnapping, but Boss had told him, "Don't be so fuckin' stupid. We take the two I saw, and that's all. You'll be drowning in bitches soon, so why risk fucking it up now?" Ava's fright over her being kidnapped hadn't lasted more than a few seconds, and thankfully she wasn't the sort of girl to get all messed up about it. Which was just as well, because the implications of what would have happened to her - rape and then murder - were very bad.] I was momentarily tempted to argue with Carol about her proviso, but realized I was being silly again. "Okay, no silly leaping off roofs then. I will definitely be ordering you to do things though. Not just 'make like a bunny' either..." "Haha. I'm very curious to find out what that's like. Julia and Ava have been filling my head with all sorts of stories about how good sex with you is." #3: #6: I deliberately stressed the first word, "WE'LL make your first time a good one, and every time after that too." "Ahh. What do you mean 'We'?" "Julia and me. Your first time with me will also be your first time with Julia. You, Julia and I are going to be forming a three-way relationship, including having sex with each other in every combination possible. And with Ava too, but that'll take a week or so longer." "Ahh, Mark. I know Julia and Ava do those sorts of things, but I'm not attracted to girls that way." "I've got two comments. The first is that it doesn't matter whether you like it or not. I'll be ordering you to do it, so you won't have any choice." I paused to see what her reaction would be. "Ohh." Carol thought about it for several seconds, then unconfidently said, "I'll try Mark. Julia's a nice girl, but I've never wanted to do that before." "Good girl! My second comment is that you will very quickly find that you enjoy it very much. Before long you'll be happily getting together with Julia or Ava when I'm busy elsewhere." "With Ava too?" I nodded. Carol gave that another little thought, then repeated, "I'll try." "I think you misunderstood what my second comment meant. I'm saying that I KNOW you will enjoy it. After a couple of weeks you'll be happily asking Julia or Ava if you can sleep with them. Not out of any obedience to me or any external reason like that; you'll be doing it because you genuinely enjoy it. I told you a little while ago that I know how your body will respond to sex. That includes how it'll respond to sex with Julia and Ava. You'll enjoy it very much, mainly because you'll like being with those girls personally. You won't want to have sex with lots of girls, but you'll be very happy to have it with Julia and Ava." "How can you POSSIBLY know that? You can't be reading my mind because I don't think like that. Can you make me enjoy it, whether I want to our not?" "Those are smart guesses. You're right that I'm not reading your mind, but you're wrong about your second guess. Even if I could, I'd be very uncomfortable manipulating your mind in any way. Maybe if there was some sort of emergency I would, but not just for recreational sex..." #8: " ... You've seen most of my abilities, and I'll show you all the others as soon as I get a chance. You and Julia are going to know everything about my abilities because you're both going to be my wives, and I should be open and honest with my wives." #4: "We're BOTH going to be your wives?" "Informally only, unfortunately. I doubt it'll ever be possible to do it formally and legally, although I wish that'd be the case. In case you wonder about it, I won't be marrying Julia formally then letting you join in. That'd create an unfair difference between the two of you. I want to treat the you and Julia as close to equally as I can, and if there's any inequality, it'll be in your favor." I had my fingers crossed that some time in the future I might be so rich that I could bribe a country to legally marry us. Another possibility, although I didn't expect to be trying to bring it about, was that if I was ever able to marry only one girl, and it could be a sister, then that's what I'd probably do. I'd want to, and Julia would probably be okay with it. But none of these were worth complicating this conversation with. "Wow. You've got some amazing ideas, Mark. I like that idea very much! I'd LOVE to be one of your wives with Julia." "You caught me by surprise with that. How come you're so enthusiastic about our threesome all of a sudden?" "I haven't got ANY IDEA how to be your wife! I'm clueless! I can't even cook anything. The ONLY wife thing that I can do is sew buttons back on, but I know you can do that too. I'll feel much better if Julia can help me learn what I need to." "Haha. You're very sweet, but you're worrying needlessly. There's nothing to it. Once you've learned how to cook roast chicken you'll know everything that needs to be known. Plus I doubt Julia knows as much as you already know, because she was always too busy with her clubs and societies and things. You'll do just fine. Mom and Vanessa will help you learn what little..." "Oh gosh! What will Mom and Vanessa say when they know about your strange marriage idea?" "They'll be fine. That's my responsibility; you don't worry about things like that. I'm sure that when we have the ceremony - which I'm hoping will be in about three weeks - they'll both be crying like females do at weddings." "THREE WEEKS! We're going to be married in JUST three weeks? I never thought it'd be that soon." "Something like that. As soon as I talk the parents into it and get everything I need for the ceremony. I want to get this done as quickly as possible. Apart from anything else, I'd like to get to the 'making like bunnies' part as quickly as possible." "Haha." Then with a sly smile on her face, "We could do that earlier, you know? We don't have to wait until the wedding, especially as it's not going to be a real wedding, is it?" "Unfortunately, it's not. It'll just be for our two families to witness your commitments. It'll be special and meaningful, but it won't have any legality and no one outside our two families will know about it." -- With a smile on my face, I teased, "About your idea of our having sex earlier. First, shame on you! I'm appalled that you would try to lure your brother into having pre-marital sex with his sister. That's just IMMORAL! A good girl would wait until she's married to her brother before jumping his bones." "I wouldn't want to be an immoral sister, would I? Actually, yes I would! Haha. Do we really have to wait?" "Yes. We're going to have the wedding ceremony almost immediately after the parents are convinced that our being lovers is a good idea. If we start making love before then there'd be too much risk of them catching us, which could horribly mess up everything, including making them forbid our marriage. Second, you're going to be making some wedding vows to me. They're important, but they're very unusual, so you need to understand what they mean before you commit to them. Julia will teach you, but it's going to take you a few days to get your head around them." That had been one of the weaknesses of the way the original wedding had gone down. This time I wanted Carol to understand what she was agreeing to, rather than being dropped into it. Carol asked, "You already know what the wedding vows will be?" "Yes. I've got them ready, except for one part which isn't as good as I want yet. It's not one of the promises you'll be making, so it's not important that you understand it in advance. I'll be telling Julia what the vows are after our exams are finished, and she can teach you what you're letting yourself in for." "Boy! You HAVE given this a lot of thought! I guess there wasn't much chance you'd have forgotten about Mom and Dad. It's a good thing I said yes, isn't it? I'd hate to have wasted all the thought you've put into this." "Not to mention breaking my heart. At the risk of being thought unromantic, I'm going to change the subject very shortly, but first I'm going to give you the sort of kiss a guy should give his fiancée when she gives him a 'Yes'." "Oh my." I twisted her around into a more convenient position, then gave her the best kiss I POSSIBLY could - putting two dimensions and eight minds' worth of love into it. Plus three weeks of horniness and some tongue. I pulled back after a minute, to look at a VERY flustered Carol. Her breasts were heaving (that immediately catches my eye every time), and her face was red and dazed. "Oh my!" I said nothing, merely smiling while I gave her some time to recover. After a few seconds Carol said, "I've NEVER been kissed like that! I've hardly ever been kissed before, but never like that. I'm sorry I wouldn't have been very good. I've..." "You don't need to apologize for that. If you were foolish and inattentive about something important - let's say like burning a roast chicken dinner you were cooking me - THEN an apology would definitely be required, but not for being inexperienced at kissing. You don't think I mind that I'm the only man you'll ever have, do you?" "Oh my. I never thought of that. This is not easy to get used to. What about..." Carol shut her mouth, and looked guilty. "What about what?" "It doesn't matter." "Did you think about babies?" The reaction on her face answered my question, so I added, "I was thinking we'd keep going until we had one of each, and then we'd think about whether we wanted any more. How does that sound to you?" "But we can't! We're brother and sister, so the babies could have problems." "I've researched that. Mom's and Dad's ancestries are completely separate going back several hundred years, so there's a really good and healthy complementary mix of genes in us. Our babies would be the first generation of inbreeding after that, and there's very little chance of anything going wrong genetically. The chance is so low that it's lower than all the usual risks with pregnancy, which will be small for you anyway, because you'll be young and healthy at the time. A lot of women have babies in their late 30s and 40s these days, and that's FAR riskier than what we'll be doing. I'm looking forward to having children with you; you'll be a wonderfully loving mother." "Are you sure it's safe?" Unless the laws of biology were different in this dimension, which I couldn't imagine was the case. "I'm VERY sure. I wouldn't put you through something like that unless I was sure. There is a risk, but 35-year old women who become pregnant are taking more risk than we will be. Society spreads rumors of how terrible it is for relatives to have babies, but there are many other mammal species that inbreed more often than not because they live in small groups. The fear you've got is morally motivated misinformation and is just plain wrong. It's not worth the paper it's not even written on. -- "If you're worried, I suggest you google it. If you research it in humans you'll come across all sorts of very biased rants and raves so it can be hard to find useful science, but it's in there. There are also heaps of scientific articles on breeding various other mammal species, especially in useful animals like cows, sheep, horses and other livestock species. I can give you some addresses to get you started if you like?" "I'll take your word for it. You're the scientist of the family. Haha, I just realized that's even truer than before: of OUR family; you and me I mean." "I got it. I'll correct you slightly though. Our family will be you, me and Julia. We'll be in a three-way marriage." "Oh yeah, I forgot. It's hard to get used to." I wasn't going to make it any harder by mentioning there could be more wives in the future. That'll come up later, once Carol's got used to what she's been told already. "I understand that whenever you think of 'marriage', you think of one man and one woman. But you'll get used to our structure in time. Once you've lived it for a while you'll be amazed at how well it's going to work. You'll even think other people are stupid to only have two people in a marriage." I could see that I'd lost Carol's attention halfway through my comment. I found out why when she asked, "Will our children be miracle people like you?" This was a question I had to answer VERY carefully for several reasons, including because Carol looked like she had a worry, which I suspected I knew. "Carol, first and foremost, I am not marrying you because I want to use you to have 'Special Children'. If it turned out that there was a problem with either of us so we couldn't have children, I'd still stay very happily married with you for the rest of our lives. We'll be having children BECAUSE we are married, we're NOT getting married so we can have children. I'm head over heels in love with you, and that's all the justification I need. Okay?" "Yes thank you. I was worried about that." "So I saw. For a few seconds there you looked like you weren't eager to be Mrs. Bunny, so I knew something bad had to be on your mind." Carol was smiling again, so we were on for the Mrs. Bunny thing again. I continued, "I haven't actually answered your question yet, about whether our children will be special. I'm going to answer it in stages. First, it's VERY important that Mom, Dad, Prof and Vanessa think that our babies might be special, because that's why they're going to allow you and me to become lovers. 90% of my motivation for demonstrating my abilities to today was so I can have a conversation with Mom, Dad, Vanessa and Prof soon after Prof comes home. During that conversation I'll make sure they decide that my special abilities are probably genetic, and that you might have the same abilities as either a dominant or recessive trait - you know what dominant and recessive genes are, don't you?" "Show up or don't show up." "That's right. I want them to believe my abilities are genetic, so obviously I have the gene - or genes - as a dominant, and that'll mean that you and Donna might have it as a dominant or a recessive. They'll think that if you and I have children, they could be as fantastic, or even more so, than I am. Babies like that could change the entire future of the human race into something incredibly better. Compared to how huge the potential benefit for the entire human race is, allowing us to have sex together is a tiny, tiny issue, so they should easily agree to that. Ideally they should even try to push us into having sex, which would suit us VERY nicely, haha. I'm pretty sure Prof and Vanessa will be very eager for us to have children, so that's why I want them involved. I'm sorry to ruin the amazement I can see you're feeling, but what I just said is almost certainly not true." Carol hadn't been sure whether the possibility of Super Kids was wonderful or not, so she wasn't sure how to react to my last point. I pressed on regardless, because I couldn't stop here. "I don't KNOW why I'm special. I have some guesses and some theories, but they're almost certainly impossible to prove or disprove, so they're not much use. But my strong feeling is that the cause isn't genetic because there are just too many powerful things that I can do for that to be the cause. I won't be 100% lying to the four parents, because I don't know for a fact that the genetic theory is wrong, but I'll be telling them I believe the reason is very probably genetic, which you might as well call lying. -- "I believe I'm the only human who has ever had these abilities, and that when I grow old and die, there'll be no one else who has them, no matter how many children we have. That's very sad in many ways, but it does have one silver lining for you. I have no 'practical' reason to prefer you over the hundreds of other girls who might want to marry me. Probably thousands of girls if we counted all the gold-diggers. There's only one reason that I want to marry you: because I love you." Carol liked that point, and she turned to face me so she could better express her happiness. During her hugs and gushing appreciation I was amused to proximity sense her planning to steal a kiss from me. I couldn't think of a better tactic than staying quiet and letting her do it. It took her several seconds to summon the courage to act, but it was worth waiting for. It was actually good timing, because I wanted to have a bit of fun with Carol just before we finished. I didn't touch her sexually, but I let her get herself steamed up, which she managed fine, just from the kissing. ------- Chapter 237: Talks With My Fiancées; Part Two Sunday, June 12, 2005 (Continued) I disengaged my lips, saying, "I never intended to tell you any of this until after your exams were finished." Carol smiled happily at that, knowing it meant I hadn't been able to resist her. That she hadn't resisted me was great, but I was worried about her screwing up her exams because I distracted her so badly. I thought of a little trick that might help. "I told you I'll be going to a top-ranked university after next year, and obviously I'll be taking my wives with me. That means you and Julia will have to relocate to a new school. I shall be extremely disappointed if I get accepted into a really good university, but I can't go there because the closest school won't accept you because your last couple of years' exam results weren't good enough. In other words, we're not going to have any more distracting discussions until after your last exam. It's important you do well, and I'll be very disappointed if you don't. You need to hit the books, and hit them with a clear, focused, undistracted mind. Okay?" I had no idea how getting into a new school was done, or whether exam results would be an issue then, but it sounded good. "Yes, darling. {Giggle}, it's so weird to call you that." "Yes, bunny." "Haha." "I have a few last points to tidy up, bunny. First, I need to check that you're okay with my plan for tricking our parents. I want us to be lovers, and the..." "Letting you exaggerate to Mom and Dad doesn't worry me, if that's what it takes for us to be together. You did say you couldn't be sure it wasn't genetic, so you might be telling the truth. I've also realized that we're going to have to be very careful about everyone else." "Yeah, that's a problem. I've got some plans that can reduce the risk, but we'll still need to be careful. Our mansion is being chosen for privacy, so that works well for you and me. Also, soon after school starts next year, you're going to be coming out as a lesbian." "Huh! My husband is telling me to be a lesbian? That's weird." "We'll be telling everyone that Julia is my girlfriend AND your girlfriend. Remember that I've said that you and Julia will be very happy to be lovers by then, so you won't have to act attracted to Julia. We'll tell everyone that you and I are sharing Julia, and that'll be the excuse for the three of us to be together all the time. And being a lesbian rather than bisexual, you can't be interested in me." "Haha. Good idea. You REALLY have thought of all sorts of things." "It's been what I've thought about more than everything else for the last three weeks. One amusing consequence of your coming out as a lesbian is that it SHOULD keep you safe from other boys, but the bizarre thing is that it'll actually make other boys chase you harder for a while. Sorry about that, but it won't be for long and I'm confident you'll handle it well. It's worth it, to make our relationship safer." Having Carol come out at the beginning of school rather than some time during the summer would maximize the hassles she got from other guys. She'll handle those very easily, because she'll have far more self-confidence by then, but they'll give me an excuse to make my, "I Love My Sister Carol" speech in this dimension. Having all the girls in my new grade's classes blown away by my wonderfulness was an excellent way to get the school year off to a good start. In case you're wondering, I've got several justifications for planning the seduction of more girls in the middle of proposing marriage to my sister (I'm not nearly as immoral as that sentence makes me seem - honest!). The main one is that I truly appreciated how much I had been learning from my playing around with other girls. It was making me a much better person, which had to be better for Carol in the long run. Second, Julia wouldn't let me stop! And after Julia had spent some time talking to Carol, I was sure Carol wouldn't let me stop either. You may recall that it was during 3B's honeymoon that my wives first suggested that I should play around, so I was continuing a tradition here. Third, it'd be fun! There are other reasons, but those will do for now. I continued, "Just in case the genetic theory is correct, I'll be keeping a close eye on you and Donna. Donna I'm not so worried about because if it's genetic, it probably got turned on as part of the changes of late adolescence, which Donna's barely started. I'll give you a couple of little tests you should do every week or so: a little juggling and trying to read two books at the same time. They'll only take you a few seconds per week to try, and Mom's seeing you do them will help keep her thinking the way I want." With amazement, "You thought of this earlier too?" "Weeks ago." I remembered the mistake Julia and I had made with Ava - claiming I was infallibly smart - and it made me backpedal somewhat. I added, "I can see you're impressed, but please don't think I'm always perfectly right about everything. I've spent a long time thinking about how to make it possible for us to be together, and I am very smart, but I'm not infallible. I ordered you to stop worrying about it before because you were getting upset about all the problems, but I don't want you to assume I never make mistakes. Have faith in me, but ask me about it if you think of something that looks like a problem. Okay?" "Okay. I don't think I'll find any problems before you do. I am VERY impressed by how smart you are." "You'll see me make plenty of mistakes. Back to my point about the genetic theory. I'll keep an eye on you and Donna, and obviously when you're a mom we'll both be hoping that our kids develop special abilities, but I don't have any real hope of that. But if you're seven months pregnant and you hear a yelling from inside you saying, 'I'm bored. Can someone push a computer up here for me to play with?', then it'd be good to let me know." "Haha. I SURE will! Just as soon as I finish telling him off for not saying please." Carol paused briefly, got a little gleam in her eye, then added, "If we had special kids, do you think they could..." "Quite possibly." "You didn't wait for my question! Do you know what I was going to say?" "As soon as we started talking about our having special children, I've been waiting for you to think of them flying like Peter Pan..." "Haha. You're right! That's EXACTLY what I was going to ask. You're VERY smart!" "That was an easy one, bunny. I know you've watched the movie many times, we were talking about children, and flying would be SO cool! By the way, what do you weigh?" "Huh. Umm, about 130 pounds, I think. Why?" #1: "I'll save the answer for a few weeks. I've got two more things I want to do before sending you back to your studies, but before those, can I have another kiss please?" It turned out that I could. We'd been talking so long since the last kiss that Carol had lost her arousal. The second of the two things I was going to do to her needed her to be aroused for it to work. Between this steamy kiss, and the next thing I was going to do to her, she should easily be aroused enough. Carol enjoyed this kiss even more, probably because she was surer of my feelings for her. I stopped her before she got too steamy, telling her, "You've seen cop shows on TV where they get a guy to spread his arms and legs and lean against a car so they can search him. I want you to do that against that wall." It wasn't exactly what she'd been expecting. "Huh? Why?" "I'll tell you while you're doing it." I gently pushed her, giving her an unmistakable hint. Carol started doing as I wanted, so I told her, "Remember I originally said I had two reasons for loving you, the 'top reason' and the 'bottom reason'. We've done lots of talking about the top reason, and I haven't checked out the bottom reason at all." "{Giggle}. Are you going to do something naughty?" asked Carol hopefully. "Wait and see." The wall I'd indicated meant Carol's ass was facing me (if asses can be said to face). She was wearing a skirt, I wanted to see her ass and I had 64 NP-fingertips at my command. You probably don't need me to tell you what happened next. It didn't take Carol long to work out what was happening: she felt her skirt move and looked down quickly to confirm it. Then she looked back at me. I was still sitting in my chair, smiling at her. I said, "I order you to keep your hands where they are until I tell you otherwise." Her skirt was long, which would've meant raising it to head height when it was pulled up, but with so many fingertips it was very easy for me to fold it in on itself as I raised it. Carol made a little "Ohh" groan as she felt her skirt rise above her ass. And again a few seconds later as it kept being raised. I made a mental note that Carol needed a lot of new clothes, including sexier panties. Although, to be fair, she probably hadn't expected this to happen when she'd come into my room. I was reasonably sure Julia wouldn't mind taking Carol shopping again. I went fairly slowly to build her mood better, but it still didn't take long to have her skirt pulled so high that it was entirely above its own waistband. It was even pulling upward on the waistband, so Carol could feel that she was totally exposed. It was rolled up enough so no part of it was higher than her armpits, so her face was completely clear. That way there'd be no way she could hide from our sight. Holding her skirt in place, I used several more pairs of fingertips to grip the top of her panties and slowly peel them down. "OHH." "You don't expect me to marry a girl without checking her bottom reason, do you?" Carol tried to turn around enough to talk with me easily, but I quickly stopped that, "Hands on the wall!" A few seconds later, "Lift your right foot, bunny." "Ohh." Then she did so. "Left foot now please." I flew her panties to the side, then up to her eye level. "You won't be needing these for a while," as I slowly flew them back to me, her eyes tracking them all the way. I picked them out of the air, and put them in one of my pockets. I looked at Carol's ass for a few seconds, then said, "Nice ass, bunny." I scratched my forehead to cover my closing my eyes. I created a sight blob and quickly sent it through the wall (they're good that way) and into the girls' room, checking that Julia was in there, and that Mom and Dad were not. I was fortunate that my room and the girls' rooms are on opposite sides of the hallway, as the intervening wall and door reduced my maximum range considerably. [[It's not relevant here, but I'll take the opportunity to remind you that this range penalty was entirely a creation of my own expectations.]] I shouted, "JULIA, WOULD YOU COME HERE PLEASE?" "Oh no," from Carol, as she started dropping her hands. I immediately commanded, although not so loudly as my shout for Julia, "Hands on the wall!" Carol's hands flew back to the wall. Her obedience was great to see. We heard the sounds of Julia coming. I confirmed it was Julia by closing my eyes momentarily for a very quick sight blob check. Carol was nervous, and showed it by shifting her weight from one foot to the other, so I increased her embarrassment by commenting, "Moving like that makes your ass look great!" Which immediately froze her. Julia opened the door, said "Ye..." then she saw Carol; and in particular, Carol's naked ass. That shut Julia up. Julia did a double-take, then turned to me for an explanation. I had only just opened my mouth to speak, when Julia remembered something. She turned around and started closing the door. I quickly said, "Leave it open. I don't care how many people see Carol." "{Groan}," from Carol. Julia left it where it was, turning to look at me again. I said, fairly quietly, "I think it's important that people getting married should have their bottoms approved first, so would you please check Carol's bottom out thoroughly." Julia was confused, but she didn't hesitate to go along with my request. She moved behind Carol's behind, bending down to look at it. Carol was blushing delightfully, and was starting to move from foot to foot nervously again. Julia looked back to ask me, "Just visually, or by touch too?" "By all means by touch. It's important that you're fully happy with her bottom." I repeated "bottom" to make sure Julia understood that this game was only about Carol's bottom, and not to wander into nearby territory. Julia started feeling Carol's bottom, looking at me for approval as she was doing so, which I gave by nodding and smiling. Carol expressed her opinion by groaning and flushing some more. While Carol was distracted, I used NP to push the door closed quietly. The last thing I wanted was anyone else seeing what was happening, or listening to the conversation we'd be having soon. I let Julia feel around for about thirty very embarrassing (for Carol) seconds, then asked, "What do you think, Julia? Is Carol's ass acceptable?" I supplied the answer by was of a very enthusiastic thumbs-up sign and a huge smile on my face. Julia enthused, "It's a WONDERFUL ass. Far better than merely 'acceptable'." "That's good news, isn't it, Carol?" Carol didn't answer, so I suggested, "If Julia's opinion isn't enough, maybe we should walk Carol down the street and ask all our neighbors." "{Groan}. Julia's opinion is enough. Oh God." "That's good to know. Put your hands on your head and walk toward me, bunny." Carol put her hands on her head all right, but partway through turning around to face me she realized she had a problem, and she froze. "Ahh, Mark?" "Yes, bunny?" "My skirt's still up in the air." "I'm aware of that, bunny." "But you'll see me." "I imagine that'd be very embarrassing for you?" "Yes it would. Can I..." "No you can't. I don't mind at all if you're embarrassed, bunny. Turn to face me and walk here please." "{Groan}." A very red faced Carol reluctantly turned to face me. I looked straight at her pussy as she slowly walked toward me. When she'd seen that I'd had a good look at her, I looked up to her face, then said, "You'll have to shave that hair off, because Julia, Ava and I are going to be spending a lot of time licking that lovely pussy of yours." A statement that would have answered some of Julia's questions, and created a whole lot more. I gave Carol a couple of seconds to enjoy the graphic nature of that embarrassment, then added, "Do you know how to shave that hair, or should I call around all the girls I know to ask them to come over to help you?" Carol was starting to breathe heavier now, so it was going great. She found the breath to answer, "I think I can do it." "Maybe my soccer team would all like to watch. You could do it on the front lawn one afternoon." "{GROAN}." "Come here, bunny. Sit on my chair." I got up to make room for her. Panting - not heavily, but definitely noticeably - Carol did as I'd asked. "No, don't close your legs, bunny. Open them wide so anyone walking in the door will get a very good view of your pussy. Wider. Wider. That's a good bunny. You do have a VERY beautiful pussy, my darling little bunny. It's so beautiful I'll have to think of some good ways to let other people get glimpses of it." "Oh God! You wouldn't really make me do that, would you?" "Julia, do you know where Carol can buy some extremely short miniskirts? So short that people will get glimpses of her lovely pussy when she's not wearing panties?" I NP-tapped Julia twice on the top of her head. "Yes. I know just the place. If she buys them a couple of sizes too small she won't be able to sit down without showing everything." "That's VERY good to know. I'll have to think about us all going there one day soon, and having Carol parade around pantiless in smaller and smaller sizes, until I'm happy with the view. -- "Why are you letting so much of your pussy juice run out of your pussy and all over my chair, bunny?" Carol looked down and saw that it was true. "Oh God!" "OPEN your legs, bunny. I didn't give you permission to close them. Good. I didn't give you permission to drip pussy juice all over my chair either. Look at how much is coming out of you! That's more like 'spraying' than 'dripping'. My whole room is going to smell of your pussy juice now. I'm going to need a bucket to clean up the mess you're making. Why are you flooding so much, bunny? Do you normally leak so badly wherever you go?" Panting and flushing heavily, Carol said, "It's you. You're doing it to me." "I haven't touched you! Not even once. The mess you're making in my room is ENTIRELY because you have no self-control. What sort of girl goes around leaving puddles of her pussy juice in her brother's bedroom?" Carol was well over the minimum level of arousal I needed for my last trick. I said, "Julia, would you stand beside Carol's left shoulder please." I moved to Carol's right shoulder. -- "Bunny, remember I told you at the beginning of our conversation that I know your body well enough to give you sensations better than you've ever had before, and I said I'd give you a demonstration later to prove it?" "You have! You have! I can't believe how good that was. You knew exactly what to say to me..." "Sweetie, that was just a mental warm-up to get you in the mood. I'm just about to start the demonstration now. First I want you to lower your hands and hold your dress yourself. I suggest you keep it up, because it'll get wet if it falls between your legs. During this demonstration I order you to sit as still and quietly as you can. That's a good bunny." To Julia I said, "Julia, you and I are going to lick, suck, and toward the end, nip on Carol's earlobes. Try not to touch her body anywhere else. Are you ready?" I bent over so my mouth was beside Carol's right ear. Julia looked amused as she followed my lead. A puzzled Carol asked, "Earlobes? What about my earlobes?" The answer to Carol's question (not that I was going to answer her verbally) is that her earlobes are a very sensitive erogenous zone. I'd discovered this by accident when kissing my way around 3B's Carol's neck during sex. Provided Carol was turned on already, then her earlobes were more sensitive than her clit, and she has TWO earlobes! Whenever Julia and I had double-teamed Carol's earlobes in 3B-land, she'd gone off like a rocket. Her lobes were actually too sensitive. She couldn't handle their being sucked for long because they got so intense it was painful for her. That seems a bizarre result from somewhere as mundane as earlobes, but that's what happened. In this case I didn't expect it to take long. Carol was already very aroused, and Julia and I would be taking Carol over the top as fast as we could. Amusingly, 3B's Carol had had no idea that her lobes were erogenous, not until I'd discovered it, and by the look of puzzlement on this Carol's face, she obviously had no idea either. She was about to find out. I reminded Julia, "Lick, suck and later nip. Ready? Go." I started, closely followed by Julia. Almost immediately, "Oh!" from Carol. -- "Oh dear." -- Closely followed by, "OH! Oh my God!" -- Carol's breathing RAPIDLY accelerated. After a dozen breaths she was panting very heavily, then, "{Gasp}. {Groan}. Mark! You have to stop. Stop!" Being the considerate, caring, loving brother that I am, I clamped my hand over her mouth to shut her up and hold her head still, and I doubled my efforts, and started adding in some nips and clamping her lobe with my teeth and pulling. "MMMPPFF!" Which I assumed meant, "More please." Carol was moaning, groaning and frequently repeating what I thought sounded vaguely like "More please." Very soon I had to move my plastered arm across her body to hold her two arms down, as she was trying to use them to push our heads away. I used a considerable amount of strength to hold her head still with my gagging hand, but the rest of Carol's body was free to start jerking and thrashing around in the chair. I lifted my leg over the top of her and sat on her lap, pinning her down without missing a single suck or bite. The weight of my body accentuated Carol's helplessness, arousing her still further. Carol's legs shot out rigid in front of her, she arched backward as far as my weight allowed, and she screamed "ARRGGMMMPF!" into my hand. I hoped Mom and Dad had the TV on loudly! I pulled my head back from Carol's ear. Julia was watching me and she did the same thing. I would have stopped Julia immediately anyway, as continuing would be too painful for Carol. I wanted to get clear of Carol in case Mom or Dad came to investigate. The look on Carol's face and smell of pussy juice would still be dead giveaways, but at least I wouldn't be straddling her lap. I kept my gagging hand in place while I climbed off Carol, in case there was another scream. I flicked her skirt down too, never mind its getting wet. Mom getting a full-on beaver shot when she opened the door would be whatever the stage beyond "dead giveaway" was. Carol seemed more interested in breathing than screaming again, so I let go of her mouth and quickly hobbled the couple of steps to my bed, sitting on it while trying to look as innocent as possible for anyone coming to investigate the noises. Julia walked around Carol to sit beside me. She laughingly said, "I'm REALLY looking forward to our next talk." "Oh? I can't think of much that's worth talking about. Can you?" "Haha. Yeah, one or two things. I'm a little curious about Carol getting married, and with our licking her pussy a lot." "Just the usual brother-sister stuff then?" "I think it might be UNUSUAL brother-sister stuff." "You're probably right; I guess there are a few things I should fill you in on. I've got a little bit of bad news for you, but it's swamped by a huge amount of good news." Carol had recovered enough to talk now, so I asked her, "How are you feeling, Carol?" Carol exclaimed, "HOW DID YOU DO THAT TO ME! I've NEVER felt anything like that before!" "'How did we do it?' Didn't you notice? Do you want us to do it again?" I started standing up. I'd hardly moved before Carol was yelling in panic, "No! No! Not again. Please, it'd kill me." I sat down again. I said, "I promised you a demonstration of how well I knew your body. You had no idea you could have an orgasm from your earlobes, but I did, which I think proves my point pretty well. It's also a very good proof that my knowledge of you isn't based on reading your mind, because obviously that information wasn't in your mind." I very much wanted to reassure the girls that I couldn't read their minds. The amount of knowledge and certainty I was showing these days was bound to make them both repeatedly suspect that, and I feared they'd strongly resent the invasiveness and loss of privacy. I knew how much it'd upset me if anyone could read my mind - ignoring the issue of my having eight of them - and I didn't want them to suffer the same upset. I continued, "There wasn't any important reason to give you that demonstration. It was just to give you a taste of the pleasure that you're going to be having in your life when your exams are over." "But how did you know what that'd do to me? Other girls aren't like that, are they?" "In my experience quite a few girls like having their earlobes sucked during sex, but you are easily the most sensitive girl I know of. With you, your lobes are a very strong erogenous zone. You know what 'erogenous zone' means, don't you?" "I do NOW! That was VERY intense. It was almost more than I could stand. I think it WAS more than I could stand, but you didn't give me any choice. You haven't said how you knew that about me?" "I can't really explain that, sweetie. It's going to be one of the many little things you don't know about me, like how I make light blobs and things like that. You have to clean up and get back to your studies shortly, but I want you to be here when I give Julia the big picture, so I'll do that now. -- I turned to a very curious looking Julia. "The little bit of bad news is that the huge white wedding you've been planning your entire life isn't going to happen. I'm sorry to take that away from you, but the great news is that the three of us are hopefully going to be having a private wedding ceremony in about three weeks' time in your parents' living room and in front of both of our families. You, Carol and I are going to be living in a VERY loving and happy three-way marriage. Obviously not a legal one, but we'll be having our commitment ceremony in front of both of our families and it'll have great meaning for us. -- "As much as possible, we'll be living as a threesome for the rest of our lives. In the mansion we'll all sleep together, although there'll be another bedroom which will ostensibly be Carol's, but that'll just be for appearance's sake and so any two of us can sleep together to have 'Quality Time' sessions to help nurture our individual relationships. We'll be spending much of our time together during summer and at school. Carol will be coming out as a lesbian to make it easier for the three of us to be affectionately together so often in public. When I go away to a university after next year, both of you will come with me. And other things like that, but you should have the idea by now. -- "Emotionally this is going to work out superbly. Carol's going to be loved, valued and feel secure. She's going to blossom into a wonderfully caring, loving and confident young woman. -- "There'll be several benefits for you, Julia. Both you and Carol are going to know all my secrets, so you'll have someone you can share everything with, rather than being my only helper the way you are now. I know that you worry about the security of our relationship because there are so many other girls interested in me. That worry is going to disappear soon because Carol is going to become very, very attached to you. Even if some new girl comes along and somehow manages to do a number on my head to push you out of my life, there's no way she's going to be able to get my sister out of my life. And there's no way Carol is going to let any new girl push you out of our three-way marriage. Carol would kick up such a storm that I'd be brought back to reality. Carol's going to be the glue that's going to convince you that we'll remain bound together. She's going to provide the security you worry about. I know you put a brave face on that now, but you'll feel a weight lifted from your heart once you see that starting to come true. -- "Unfortunately, only the two of you benefit from this new arrangement. I'm going to suffer from having two girls teasing me, blowing raspberries at me, and talking about clothes shopping all day long. My life is going to turn into a living nightmare, but that's a price I'm willing to pay to make two girls I love so much happy. I hope you both appreciate the sacrifice I'll be making?" Julia was still too busy thinking about what I was saying to appreciate my joke, but I got some chuckles from Carol. Julia joked, "Who are you, and what have you done with Mark?" I didn't think she wasn't seriously suspecting anything like that. She just didn't know what to say, so she was expressing her confusion while she came to grips with the abrupt disappearance of the tentative, non-planning Mark she used to know. I answered, "I tried to find someone silly enough to willingly take on the amount of teasing you two are going to be inflicting on me, but everyone I asked ran away. I'm afraid I'm still the same old, long-suffering Mark." Apparently my suffering didn't concern Julia. She asked, "You're talking as if you know the future, and you've never been so confident that you understand emotional issues before. Something VERY major happened to you?" "Yes, but I can't tell you what it was or is. I can tell you some things that it's not. I am not seeing the future in any special way at all. Everything I know, I know from the present or from memories of the past. Unfortunately the future's uncertain. I've yet to convince our parents to allow our three-way marriage to happen, and the possibility that I might fail is a huge worry because the three of us will be fantastic together. -- "Another thing I'm not doing is reading anyone's mind in any way. Thank goodness! I shudder to think of the effects on my nice, orderly, logical mind if I could read female minds. How I have the insights that I have doesn't really matter, as it's only temporary. I gained them during my kidnapping, and they're rapidly going to become out of date. I'll soon be back to the same old, tentative Mark, to whom anything involving females is an impenetrable mystery." "Did you die and go to Heaven then get sent back?" asked my deranged sister. "Carol, sweetie, you should stop thinking about religious crap. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with me. Apart from anything else, I somehow doubt your idea of God is in favor of what I intend to do to my sister." [[I'm strongly in favor of it though, and I outvote the Christian god because there's one of me and zero of Him, which makes it REALLY hard for him to put his hand up. On the subject of sins, I believe suicide is supposed to be a Christian sin too, and my minds have done that from zero to three times each, so me and their god really wouldn't get on too well. And don't even start me on their attitude to rubbers! That the Catholic Church insists that a husband and wife must not use condoms even when one of them is HIV positive or has any other infectious sexual disease, or the wife should not get pregnant because it might kill her, is a crime against humanity, a stupidity of epic proportions, AND a total refusal to accept the reality of what people are and what they need. Why the hell they think a god worthy of respect would insist on that boggles my mind; it sounds much more like the work of the Devil.]] While Carol reacted with a little flush, I added, "My wives will know far more about me than anyone else, but there are limits to what it's worth trying to explain to you. Can you imagine what a fruitless waste of time it'd be for me to try to explain how I see with my eyes shut?" I gave them a second to appreciate how impossible that sounded, then I continued, "By all means ask me questions, but if I say I can't tell you, then just let it drop. Okay?" "Sorry Mark," apologized Carol. "Talking about God and Heaven was silly, wasn't it?" "Don't worry about it, sweetie. Girls are always silly for several days after they have an orgasm." Julia laughed, "Haha. Wisecracks like that prove you can't be seeing the future." Then Julia whacked me on my shoulder. "I'm getting my teases in while I can, before the two of you start ganging up on me. Ava too, when she's with us. I'm going to be a poor, helpless victim most of the time." Julia asked, "How does Ava fit into your plan?" "I can't give you a definite answer about her. The only special insight I have about her is only a small one: that she's more likely to be trustworthy than we thought before. I'm not stating that with any certainty; it's just a stronger feeling than I had before. I'm also pretty sure she doesn't have any hang-ups about the brother/sister thing, which avoids a pain-in-the-ass problem. The three of us will be spending a great deal of time together from now on, and often with Ava too. That'd mean we'd have to send Carol out of the room every time things got sexy, which wouldn't be fair to her and would disappoint the rest of us too. So my plan is that Carol's going to become lovers with Ava too..." -- Carol reacted with a worried, nervous look, so I 'reassured her', "Don't worry, Carol. I'll be telling Ava how to seduce you, so she'll have you dripping wet and begging for it in no time." I was planting a seed now, to make it easier for Ava later. -- But now Carol looked EVEN more worried and nervous, so I added, "Remember I told you before that in a few weeks you'll be bursting with joy. You're going to be happier than you've ever been in your life. You can trust me to look after you, even if you don't understand what I'm doing." "I guess so. It's just that I've never had sex with anyone before, and now you're saying I'm going to be having it with three of you, including GIRLS. I'm not even interested in girls! Today's been the WEIRDEST day ever! First you show everyone your miracles, then ask me to marry you, then it's marrying you AND Julia! And then what you did with my ears; which I don't understand how you could know. And now it's me and Ava as well!" Carol was starting to get herself into a bit of a tizzy. I realized she had plenty of justification for it too. I said, "It's been an amazing day for you, Carol. You've found out that your brother can perform miracles, although I prefer to think of them as 'special abilities'. You've found out I love you so much I want to marry you. And not just because you've got such a fantastic ass either!..." #3: " ... And have I mentioned all the clothes shopping you'll have to do now?" "Shopping?" asked Carol, with an, I'm-VERY-interested-please-tell-me more, look on her face. "Sure. Now that you're engaged and will be hanging out with Julia and me all the time, you're going to need totally new clothes. And I mean TOTALLY! From top to toe, underwear to outerwear. Makeup, accessories and whatever else you think is important. Fortunately you'll easily be able to afford it, because I give all my serious girlfriends $300,000. That's what I gave Julia, so that's what I'll give you too." "Three hundred thousand! Oh my God! Are you really going to give me that?" "If we were married we'd be sharing the money among the three of us, but the law doesn't allow us to marry. The best I can do is give you $300,000, from which the sucking IRS will take a third. $200,000 should be enough for a complete set of new clothes, for at least a few seasons anyway. My main worry is that you'll need someone to help you shop. IF ONLY there was someone who could help you buy new clothes! That's a REALLY tricky problem. Maybe Prof would be a good choice, because he's a very stylish dresser..." Julia swatted me on the arm AND poked her tongue out at me, so I must've been exceptionally bad this time. "Don't listen to the idiot, Carol. I'll look after you." -- Then Julia turned to the idiot to ask me, "Do you really want her to replace all her existing clothes?" "Carol's going to be gaining a lot of self-confidence soon, and better clothes will help her. Do to her much the same as you did to me, only please don't make her look like an escapee from a homosexual porn fashion contest. Get her clothes she can be proud of herself in, as well as being what I'd like to see her wearing. I like pretty and sexy, but definitely not slutty for Carol. Don't do what I was saying before about making her wear a too-short miniskirt. That was a verbal tease, not something to be done in reality..." Carol interrupted, "Phew. I'm glad to hear that. I didn't think you'd embarrass me in public, but you've changed so much I wasn't sure." Probably best to let her calm down rather than tell her that I will be doing exactly that. I said, "I care for you very much, Carol. I wouldn't treat you badly." -- I turned back to Julia, "Carol will also need a very classy dress for top quality restaurants and the like. I have a specific design in mind that I'll tell you about privately. If you can't find such a dress in the stores we'll get it custom-made. She'll also need a top quality cellphone to match her new image. When you see Lily at school, please ask her if she's going back to Hong Kong some time this summer because I'd like her to get Carol's new phone there if possible. -- "I suggest not buying too many new clothes initially, as Carol's personality will be changing significantly. You can plan this now, and maybe buy one or two pieces, but I don't want Carol to show too many noticeable changes of behavior until after the parents are convinced to allow our three-way marriage, hopefully within about a week of your father's return. I'm not going to give Carol the money until then either, because parents can get contrary if they think their decisions are being taken for granted. That's all straightforward, isn't it?" "I understand what you want. I'd still like to know who you are and what you've done with Mark, but other than that I'm clear." "You've been urging me to be more assertive, so this shouldn't confuse you. On the subject of confusion, poor Carol was saying a few minutes ago that today has been almost too much for her. I did get badly carried away, sweetie. I was in the middle of describing my plan for Ava, which was needless because we won't be doing anything about Ava for at least three or four weeks. So I'm sorry for getting carried away and overloading you." I hobbled over to Carol, giving her a hug while I said, "I know Julia's probably got about a thousand questions, so it might be a good time for Julia and me to head back to her place. You should spend a few minutes cleaning up first, so Mom doesn't smell that wonderful smelling pussy juice of yours. I'm really looking forward to tasting it directly from the source after exams are finished." "Really?" asked Carol. "I don't think we should go there right now, sweetie. You'll have to wait until I think the time is right, and then I'll show you how much I mean it. Now stand up, give me a quick kiss, then get cleaned up." Carol tried for a long kiss, but I was happily expecting that. I gave her panties back, reminded her "Remember, we have to behave just like we usually do. Brother and sister stuff only. Whatever you do, don't let anyone know you're hoping to become Mrs. Anderson." Then I gently pushed her chuckling out of the room. ------- Chapter 238: Talks With My Fiancées; Part Three Sunday, June 12, 2005 (Continued) The first of Julia's questions started even before I'd pulled a T-shirt out of my drawer to mop the chair with. Julia had many questions, and more kept occurring to her, so our question and answer session spanned several hours. There were a few temporary interruptions - for our leaving my home and going to hers, while we had sex in her bed (I learned to proximity sense some new emotions), while she did some studying, and while I had a chatty phone conversation with Ava - but otherwise Julia bombarded me with questions. Even during having sex, although my greatly improved NP-anal probe rendered her incapable of speech for a while; after which she had some questions about what I'd just done to her. Some of Julia's questions had been those I'd refused to answer in Seattle, such has how I'd touched her in the waiting room when I was out of sight and my insisting on staying next to Prof so I could help heal him, and there were many others about my relationship with Carol, my apparent change in personality, how I knew so much about things I shouldn't (e.g., Carol's earlobes), why I was divulging my secrets to my parents after keeping them in the dark so long, and then even more questions about my plans for our future three-way relationship - Julia was VERY interested in that! Julia had seen and heard enough to know that there'd been some major developments in my life, so her first questions were to get a handle on the big picture. She had apparently already decided that the answer to several of her questions was that I wanted to have babies with special abilities with Carol. Julia was so determined on that answer that I had to repeat my denial of it several times. She had a fallback theory that I knew Carol was about to start developing the same abilities and I wanted to keep her very close, which I also denied. My only possible answer to most of her questions was that I'd had some very deep insights while I was prisoner. I admitted that they were "special insights", related to my special abilities in some way, but I refused to explain further. One of my comments was, "It's not worth making a big deal about it, Julia. It's true that I've gained some very useful insights, and that I've got some very clear ideas about what I want to do now, but in two months or so all my insights will be out of date and I'll be operating in the dark just as much as normal." Some of Julia's questions were easily handled, such as, "Do you know the next lottery numbers, or what house we'll be buying?" "I have absolutely no special knowledge of the future Julia, none whatsoever! Everything I know is from understanding people's current personalities and extrapolating them into the future in exactly the same way you do when you think about someone, except that I gave it a GREAT deal of uninterrupted thought, I was semi-delusional for a while which gave me some creative ideas, and I have an unusual brain anyway. My unusual brain helped a great deal, in ways I can't explain, but certainly not in any future-seeing way. Everything I know about the future, I know by extrapolating from the past and present. I couldn't tell you any independent facts about tomorrow, such as lottery numbers, but I can extrapolate some of Donna's behavior out several months, for example." "What will Donna be doing?" "Presuming I'm successful at convincing Mom and Dad to let Carol and me become lovers, then Donna will become interested in having sex with me too. In some ways I'd like to give her what she wants, because she's a good girl and it'd be nice to give her something that she'd enjoy and appreciate so much. The trouble is she'd turn into a bit of a sex maniac toward me. It'd mostly be a pain, because she's too emotionally immature. There'd be tantrums and other childish crap. It'd be a lot more trouble than it's worth for everyone, including Donna. And it'll be very worrying too, because Donna thinks secrets are fun, as you saw earlier. -- "I'm going to try to draw a very firm line with her, between things I do with my sisters, and things I do with my girlfriends or wives, and hopefully she'll understand that some of the things I do with Carol won't apply to her. But if I can't hold that line, I'm going to have to spend months very slowly letting her get more and more sexual, hoping she matures enough during it. I've got no idea when she'll reach her menarche, but I hope it's soon. The faster she matures, the easier and safer life will be." Julia didn't appear at all impressed by my use of "menarche". Oh well, back to impressing her with my magical powers. Julia asked, "Do you want to have babies with Donna?" "Having babies is not causing any of my actions, not even with Carol. Wanting them eventually with Carol is the result of my feelings for her, not the cause of them. Your continuing to think I'm using Carol that way is starting to get a little insulting and annoying." Julia apologized and that was the end of that theory of hers. I did add one point, "I don't know when Carol and I will start having babies. Initially she'll want to have them early, even before she's eighteen, but I think that as she gains self-confidence she'll start to value herself more highly than just being able to provide babies, and having them will be less urgent." Julia wanted more examples about the insights that I'd had about people, in particular Julia VERY much wanted to know about any insights I'd had about her. I was VERY embarrassed, because the only things I could think of to say about Julia was that she'd very soon be getting along superbly with Carol, and that Carol would help Julia's security in our marriage - which were really the same point, but I was desperate. There was nothing else about 3B's Julia that was usable here, which would make this Julia think that I had very insultingly not bothered to do any insightful thinking about her - ouch! I was totally unable to come up with any impressive new insights on the spur of the moment, so I tried the best other idea I could think of: "The way my special insight worked depended on how wrong I was. That's obvious, because you can't have insights if you already have a clear vision of the person. So I had most of my insights about Carol because I was way off base with her. I had quite a few about my parents, some about Donna and Ava, and almost none about you. That's a wonderful confirmation that my thoughts about how fantastic you are were right on target. The only insights I could have had about you would have needed to be negative ones anyway, because there's no way my opinion of you could be lifted even higher. You'll be glad to know that I didn't have any such negative insights. You truly are as wonderful as I think you are." #7: #4: I got a couple of suspicious looks, but Julia couldn't find a way to criticize my logic. I acted VERY happy that there were no more insights, and I thought I got away with it. When I asked Julia what she thought about loving Carol, Julia answered, "It's impossible to dislike Carol because she's very inoffensive and obliging, but loving her is something else again. Are you sure I'll love her, rather than just like her a lot?" "Oh yes. And she'll love you too, although that's easier to see because she respects you so much already. You'll develop a very good relationship. It's a chicken and egg thing though. We need to keep improving her confidence and building her up before the reason for doing so will become clear. I know from all my phone calls with her that it's working well. I bet you've noticed a change in her over the last three weeks?" "Definitely. She's much more outgoing now. I enjoy her company, so doing what you want won't be any hardship." You shouldn't get the impression from this discussion that there was ever a possibility of Julia refusing anything I wanted. She would question and even argue to gain understanding, but she wouldn't ever refuse anything I wanted. That'd become the case only two or three weeks into our relationship, and since then her opinion of my worth had rocketed up. Julia would even obey my unspoken requests. That's why she was pushing me to date other girls, and that's how Carol and Julia's sexual relationship had started in 3B-land. 3B-Julia's initial friendship with Carol had been entirely because she saw from the too-small swimsuit incident that I fancied Carol a great deal, and Julia had made it happen for me, in the course of which she got very fond of Carol. To be somewhat brutally honest, Julia also got sexy with Carol as a way of making sure she (Julia) was not excluded from any aspect of my life, but fortunately Julia did develop honest feelings for Carol. [[It was great for me that 3B had been able to tell 3A how wonderful their Carol would become, because 3A would have missed out on Carol otherwise. Without the merge, even if 3A saw Carol in a too-small swimsuit tomorrow, 3A had too much sexual experience and self-control to give their attraction away. And, quite frankly, 3A wouldn't have felt nearly as much attraction. Quite a lot of 3B's initial reaction had been immature lust, rather than having any real merit. 3A wouldn't feel that anywhere near enough to make them fixate on Carol's body the way 3B had.]] Julia was also eager to learn about my 'new and improved' abilities. That topic was one that was much less likely to get Julia angry at me, so I was happy to have the chance to explain some of it. I started telling her the story, "I killed the baddies on the Saturday..." "{Giggle}." "Why on Earth do you think killing people is funny?" "Not that. I think it's funny that you refer to them as 'baddies'. It's such a silly name." "I agree, but it's convenient. Saying, 'The guys who kidnapped Prof and me' is too longwinded. 'Baddies' is how I think of everyone who attacks or mistreats me, from idiot boys at school who try to pick a fight with me, through to multiple murderers. But in case you think it's too immature, I'll change it for you: "After I killed the pooh-pooh heads on Saturday, Prof and I had a MAJOR problem, we were chained to the chairs and floor with no idea where the keys were, and no access to food or water. We'd been waiting for them to let one of us go to the bathroom before I killed them, so we could free whoever was still locked up. Unfortunately they refused to let either of us out of our chairs for any reason, and when they decided to kill me I had to kill them first. Prof and I were locked into those chairs for another two and a half days before I found a way out by improving some of my special abilities and inventing a new one." Julia looked very eager and interested. I carried on, but not with any eagerness of my own. I knew Julia was going to get all excited and gleeful over my new powers, while I felt HORRIBLE that gaining them had been achieved by leaving 3B's families in grief. I'd known this conversation was going to occur, and repeat with Prof and Vanessa when they got home, and I'd tried to think of a good way to convey the "deep personal cost" associated with my new abilities, but I'd completely failed to come up with a good way of explaining it. I couldn't say anything like, "Imagine that the only way I'd gotten my new abilities was as if the Williamses and Andersons had to bear the grief of Prof and me dying," because Julia would think I was losing my marbles. Every way of trying to explain it was bad either because it completely failed to explain the magnitude of the cost that had been paid, or it did explain it, but in a way that was far too close to giving away that there are multiple dimensions. Several times in the previous weeks I'd tried to think of a good way of conveying my feelings to Julia, but I'd failed and had decided there was no way to convince Julia that there'd been any cost. She was going to get excited about my new abilities, and I was going to have to put up with her glee. The best I could do was to downplay my improvements. I explained, "I've got one new ability, and some of my previous ones have gotten somewhat better. You felt my improved NP in your asshole." This conversation was occurring after we'd had sex. I'd been horny after playing my sex-game with Carol, so having sex with Julia had happened immediately after arriving at her place. She'd been more interested in talking, but my picking her up and throwing her on the bed had resolved that difference of opinion. "My NP is a little stronger than before, although I haven't got around to measuring how much yet. I can make my light and heat blobs brighter and warmer than before, and I can make a few more of them. And I'm sure my kiatsu is quite a lot better. 'Kiatsu' is Japanese for ki healing. It's a part of Aikido, but it's something that I can do at a very special level of ability. I haven't measured it, but I'm guessing that while I'm doing it on someone they're healing somewhere between 20 to 40% faster. That's why I stayed with your father, so I could give him kiatsu all the time." "I thought you said you healed five times faster?" "That's what I guess my personal healing rate is. That's got nothing to do with the kiatsu; that's just my body doing its thing. Kiatsu is a mental power that I can deliberately use on anyone. If I used it on myself, I'd heal about 6.5 times faster than other people; the 5 times faster my body heals plus the 30% extra from kiatsu. I'm sure I would've died without Prof, so spending a couple of weeks giving him kiatsu was the least I could do." In a weird way, it was also a way of thanking the Prof that had died; or maybe apologizing to him, or making good, or something. I'm not sure, but helping this Prof was a kind of tribute to the other one. "Dad says you saved his life..." "AFTER I got him kidnapped in the first place! He never would have even gone to Vegas if it hadn't been for me..." "The way I remember it," interrupted Julia, "was that you suggested you could win $50,000. I'm the one who got greedy and made it millions of dollars. You and Dad wouldn't have been kidnapped if you'd won only $50,000." Which, tragically, would be one of the many things 3B's Julia would be beating herself up for. I ended this topic, "You're right. So the next time we have sex, you're getting it in the asshole as punishment. That'll teach you not to make me a multimillionaire." "Now I want to make you a billionaire!" "If that happens, you're going to need a LOT of lubricant! Changing the subject back to my abilities, I'd pretty much finished telling you about the improvements to my existing abilities, so I'll tell you about my new ability. To set the scene, Prof and I were chained to the chairs and floor, and were dehydrating to death, so it'd be a REALLY good idea if I could find the keys! -- "I'd used NP to search the bodies of both pooh-pooh heads, and neither had the keys. They might have been anywhere in the house, or possibly even thrown away. I used my NP-fingertips to search for them by feel, or better still, for a telephone to dial 9-1-1 on. As you know, fingertips cancel after being out of sight for half a second. I got it up to two seconds, but I hit a major problem. I didn't know that fingertips slow down and get less sensitive when I can't see them. They slowed down so much that I couldn't get them into the upstairs part of the house, let alone search it. We were up pooh-pooh creek without a paddle, unless I thought of something else. -- "One of the nice things about NP-fingertips is that I can feel things with them." I demonstrated by forming a couple of fingertips and twiddling one of my favorite things. "I had the idea that if NP-fingertips can send sensory touch information back to me somehow, maybe light blobs could send sensory light information back too. In other words, I could see through them. To cut a long story short, I figured out a way of doing exactly that." -- I created a yellow light blob beside us, sent it across the room, then held it motionless. "I can look through the light blob back at us. Wave to me." I waved to the blob, giving Julia the idea. After a brief pause, she waved, while asking me, "You can see us from all the way over there? Like it's a video camera?" "That's a good way of putting it, yes. I have to close my eyes to make it practical, otherwise I see two superimposed images. Superimposition is a pain with two images, and impossible with three or more. Which is a pity because it'd be a very nice safety measure if I could have a sight blob floating above my head and looking behind me all the time." Julia exclaimed, "But it'd freak everyone out?" "Haha, yeah. Sorry, I forgot to explain one very weird fact. I said I'd have a 'SIGHT Blob' floating over me. A sight blob is what I call a blob dedicated to my seeing and nothing else. It doesn't have to be, but I use a light blob with its brightness turned to zero, so it's invisible. No one could detect it if I had a SIGHT blob floating over my head all the time. Unfortunately, I'd have to walk around with my eyes closed, which would be rather inconvenient." I'd been steadily dimming the light blob while I was finishing the explanation. It was now invisible, and I said, "You can't see the blob, but it's still there. If we could be bothered I could close my eyes and get you to write notes to it, which I could read out, but I'll assume you believe me." Julia laughed, saying, "That's a safe assumption." "I do like it when pretty, naked girls trust my every word. When I first started using light blobs to see through, I kept them shining light. Later on I tried them dimmer and dimmer, and they kept working, all the way down to invisible, which I think is REALLY weird. Invisible things shouldn't be able to 'see' anything, because the light passes straight through them. THAT'S what 'invisible' means! Seeing with them should be completely impossible, so there's something going on that I don't understand." [[Not only is it possible for a sight blob to detect light, it's actually easy. As previously explained, every 'pixel' of the Universe is made up of three components: Matter-Energy, Space-Time and Consciousness-Ki. When a photon reaches the sensing surface of a sight blob ("sensing surface" was fiction of my preconceptions because of the two dimensional way human eyes and brains process sight. There's no reason the entire volume of a sight blob couldn't detect light), the Consciousness-Ki of the sight blob can easily interact with that of the passing photon: "Hi, what are you?", "I'm part of a photon of green light", "Thanks. I'll see you later", "Not if I see you first." I'm pulling your leg with the dialogue, because Consciousness-Ki has no mind, although I do suspect the Universe has an absurd sense of humor, as how else could you explain the existence of men's G-string swimsuits?]] "Haha. I don't understand ANY of this, but there are so many impossible things you can do, what's one more?" "I would like to understand as much as I can. There are rules about how all this stuff works. The more I understand, the more I'll be able to do..." "You're right. It's just taking me a little while to get over the impossibility of it all. I guess 'Sight Blobs' meant you could search for the keys?" "Yes, although that turned out to be much easier than I thought it'd be, as I almost immediately saw that the keys were hanging on a hook in the next room. It'd taken me two and half days to discover sight blobs, and less than a minute later I was unlocking myself." "My hero!" Heroes have to be rewarded (I think it's in their job contracts), so there wasn't any intelligible conversation for a while. While I think to mention it, it's now FAR easier for me to carry things with my improved NP, mainly because the maximum force is nearly 113 pounds, or 99 if I keep one mind on duty (this assumes the fourfold improvement in NP force per mind, and is ignoring the training bonus. I really should weigh them soon; not right now though). Most of the things I want to carry weigh very little - except me, dammit! - so I've now got huge accelerations available. That means I don't have to fiddle around getting the item to move in exactly the right direction or worry about decelerating too soon or too late. I can NP things to exactly where I want very quickly and easily, correcting any navigation errors in moments. Small objects are so easy to move around now that my using "float" to describe the action rather than "carry" is starting to become true. I can also change the shape of NP-fingertips more flexibly than I could before, including making a four-inch wide concave bowl. One of those can lift fourteen pounds unassisted, which makes carrying small items around very easy. I'm very experienced at carrying things between pinching fingertips, but a single bowl is simpler and more elegant. [As an off-topic digression: what English word has its first two letters mean a man, its first three letters mean a woman, its first four letters mean a great man, all but its last letter is a path to destruction and death, and the entire word means a great woman? I've been using most of it recently, so it shouldn't take you long to solve. I'll give the answer at the end of the chapter.] When Julia finished rewarding her hero, I finished explaining the other properties of sight blobs: Unlike what Julia already knew about my abilities, sight blobs could be sent out of my line of sight because they gave me a new line of sight, with all that implied for where I could use all of my abilities: I'd been able to NP her in the hospital's waiting room because I was using a sight blob to see her. Their maximum range was five hundred feet, but that reduced if I didn't know the area well, if it was laid out in a complex way, or if there was solid matter between me and the location (such as walls or the floors of a multi-story building). Near the current maximum range, the vision quality degraded quite quickly, until the blob self-canceled. I could use them to read the eight screens at once, by making a sight blob of roughly the same size and shape as the wall of screens. "WOW! That's INCREDIBLE. Five hundred feet is a LONG way." "That requires ideal circumstances: outside on a sunny day with a clear line of sight all the way. Inside a building, the walls, doors, and corners all reduce the range considerably. Sight blobs can move vertically too, but passing through solid floors reduces my range even faster. In the hospital I could only go up or down three or four levels." To my surprise, Julia asked for more details about how I could read eight screens and study eight subjects at once. I'd expected her to ask me about that sooner or later, but I was amazed it was her very next question. I'd expected her to mention the obvious use of sight blobs: to perv on girls. But she never mentioned it. Girls think WEIRD! "I just make one giant sight blob, like a giant eyeball. It's big enough so that it can look straight ahead at all eight screens. That way I get one clear image in my brain, which completely does away with the need to slowly move my real eyeballs back and forth." "But how on Earth can you think about eight subjects at once?" I waved my hand dismissively, "That's no big deal. I've been able to read two books or two screens for ages, and I probably would've been able to do more if I'd known about sight blobs earlier. I don't think that's anything miraculous. I wouldn't include it in my list of 'special' abilities. It's just because I've got a very smart brain. By the way, I haven't quite reached eight subjects yet." If the environment was distracting, such as in class, then I'd 'lose' two minds: one to be on duty, and the other to maintain the sight blob and monitor the environment, respond to anyone talking to us, etc. That'd leave six minds for reading. It takes only one of my minds to be centered to enable my ki abilities to work, exactly as for every other aikidoka, so if I had all of my minds active and trying to maintain center, then all eight would have to lose center for our abilities to fail. But in our training for active centering, we have only one mind try to hold center. That way, when it loses concentration we immediately know it, making it easier to know what went wrong, and easier to improve. We'll probably continue with that approach when we're trying to study with eight minds reading, which will mean we lose center more often since it'll be quite easy for one mind to get too interested in what it's studying, especially with something as interesting as math. Julia dismissed my attempted distraction of my not reaching eight screens, with, "You'll do it. You can do anything." Which could safely be classified as an exaggeration, and not a small one either. [[Only a small one now.]] Julia added, "Why don't you get another row of screens, so you can do twelve subjects at once?" "My brain can't handle more than eight." I'd been hoping to avoid this issue, but here it was anyway. "Why not try to increase it again? Being able to study even more subjects would be very useful. Light blobs, sight blobs and some of your other things don't have much practical use, but increasing your studying rate another 50% would mean you could do another degree next year." Julia was seriously excited over the prospect. I knew I could order her to drop it, but I also knew she'd get frustrated by my not improving my studying rate. I tried a halfway answer, hoping it'd be enough. "I need to explain the difference between potential ability, and actual ability. To give you a silly metaphor, if I was already good at playing the piano, and then I grew a third arm overnight, that wouldn't instantly make me a 50% better player. I'd have to work out how to take advantage of it, practice using it, etc. Potential ability is the maximum anyone can achieve, actual ability is how much they do achieve. Do you understand?" "Sure. Anybody can train at a sport and improve themselves, but some people have more potential than others. I have very little potential as a basketball player, for example." "Yes, good example. When it comes to thinking of different things at the same time, eight is my potential. My actual ability is somewhere between 6 and 7.5 depending on how much distraction is going on. I will try to increase my actual ability to eight because you're right that as many as possible would be useful, but eight is my maximum potential. I cannot increase that any further, no matter how hard I tried." "You know that for a fact?" "There's no doubt whatsoever. I'd love to be able to read more screens at one time, because I could either do another degree, or do the same two degrees in less time and have more sex with my wives." "Haha. I guess that would be a good incentive. I guess I'll have to be satisfied with your 'only' doing two degrees next year." "Yeah. Sorry about that. I'm only human after all." "You're getting so amazing that's becoming hard to be sure about." "I never knew you were interested in science fiction. My opinion of you just rose even higher, haha. I'm positive I'm human, but that still leaves the deluded possibility, as in the Matrix." "The movie? I never saw that." "My opinion of you just dropped back again. Don't worry about my Matrix point. I'm sure I'm human. You could ask Mom where I was sixteen years ago. That'd be pretty good proof. If you want, I'll give you a sample of my sperm - in a test tube I mean - so you can send it to a lab specifically to be tested for what species I am." "Nah. It's all right. I don't really believe in aliens anyway." "Oops. My opinion of you just dropped again. How can you not believe in aliens? The Universe is billions of light-years across. That's so huge there MUST be aliens." "I think all the talk about UFOs and flying saucers is stupid." "I agree with you, but that doesn't disprove aliens. It just means none of them buzz around the Earth in flying saucers." "I'm sorry I mentioned them now," confessed Julia. "Let's get back to talking about something interesting, like what all your plans are. I need to know all of them so I can make plans to help you." "Not because you're nosey?" "Haha. Okay, maybe that too." I was glad my half-answer about why I couldn't read more than eight screens had worked, although via a route that'd caused Julia to reveal inexplicable attitudes and disappoint me slightly (hehe). I guess she must have spent too long thinking about clothes, and not long enough wrapping her head around the awesome magnitude of the Universe. [[Julia is eating her words about aliens now. Well, she's not, but only because she's far too busy talking about all the other new things I've just showed her. But she should be eating her words, especially because I showed her some truly bizarre aliens, i.e., species that don't have clothing stores.]] I described my main plan for how to get the parents to bless our three-way informal marriage, and the spin-off plans. Julia was happily engrossed for quite a while, suggesting additions and improvements. I asked her, "What can you tell me about your parents' beliefs about the source of my abilities, and their attitude to my having babies with Carol?" Julia answered, "I don't know what they'd think of you and Carol having babies. They do believe the most likely explanation is that you've got a mutation, and they've wondered whether Carol or Donna might have it. Dad's got a VERY high opinion of what you might be able to achieve in your life - and that was back when you were reading only two screens at a time - so if anyone approves of your incestuous plans, it'll probably be him. Mom and Dad are both fairly casual about sex, thinking that society overreacts to it very foolishly. Their main concern will probably be about your safety if society finds out about your incest rather than their thinking there's anything wrong with the act itself." I moved onto my plan for getting Ava to bring lesbian Carol and me together, which amused Julia. I even said, "I'm going to save Carol's coming out publicly until just after school starts, and she'll do it in some VERY public fashion, like getting carried away passionately kissing you or Ava in the lunchroom. Ideally you, but it could be made to work with Ava if you don't feel comfortable with that by then, which I'm sure you will be. Lots of guys from all the grades will try hitting on Carol after that. And on you too, but I think Carol will get the most hassles because she's younger, more vulnerable, has big tits and most of the guys that know you know that you're my girlfriend. By next year Carol will have gained a lot of confidence, but I'll tell her to act weak and defenseless for the first couple of days of her coming out, so she'll seem overwhelmed. I've been mentally preparing a little speech I intend to give in several classes in defense of Carol. I think of it as my, 'I Love My Sister Carol' speech. I think it'll get the year off to a good start with the girls in my classes. It goes like this..." I gave a recitation of my speech, ending with, "How do you think that'll go down?" Julia wiped her eyes, then said, "Oh my God! I can't believe how wonderful you are. This year hasn't even finished, and you already know how to get all the girls in next year's classes wanting to have your babies." I smiled at that amusing cross-dimensional similarity. "There isn't going to be a dry-eyed girl in the class! You'll have them eating out of your hands. I'm speechless..." Despite being speechless, she somehow managed to keep on raving though (I can only perform small miracles, not big ones). One of Julia's follow-on comments was, "I don't think I have anything more to teach you." I corrected her, "Now you're talking SILLY! I have a HUGE amount to learn about girls. I know that for a fact, because they're constantly confusing the hell out of me. The plan wasn't that impressive. Carol has to come out very publicly because we need everyone to think she's a lesbian. It was very easy to predict how the guys at school will react. I didn't want to start the year with my beating up guys who hassled my sister too much, so I tried the opposite approach: love instead of violence. The speech almost wrote itself because I'm only saying what I truly feel, so I can't claim to have been highly intelligent in creating it." "Mark, before your kidnapping you hardly ever planned a day ahead, and now you're planning how to make the next school year successful three months ahead. That's a major improvement in your character." I was amused by Julia's idea of what made a school year successful. I would've thought it was good grades, but apparently Julia has other ideas. "In that case I've got bad news for you, because my character hasn't changed at all. I just had a lot of time on my hands in mind-altering circumstances. If you think I'm going to be that clever in the future you're going to be sadly disappointed. If you don't keep a close eye on me and keep leading me by the hand on this stuff, then I'm going to screw-up." "I doubt it, but it just so happens that I don't mind keeping an eye on you anyway." We joked around with that for a while. The next thing of substance I said was, "I'd like to practice with sight blobs much more. It's very limiting only being able to use one at a time and with my eyes shut. That's the sort of limitation I might be able to improve on, but if so it's proving to be extremely slow going. I want to buy myself a pair of wraparound mirrored sunglasses so I can close my eyes without people knowing." As expected, Julia said she'd help me choose the right glasses. I hadn't bought a pair already because they were too much of a fashion statement, and therefore Julia would be upset if I acted without her 'input' - i.e., her taking over. Another topic was an issue to do with Carol that I'd been too scared to bring up directly: "Just to prove I'm the same old, tentative Mark, I've got an uncertainty about Carol that I never thought of until I was talking to her in my room, so I've got no special insights about what to do. I'm worried about telling her that even after I'm married to you two, I want to continue to play around with other girls. Believe it or not, a large part of my motivation is that I can honestly see how much I'm learning from it, otherwise I'd be happy to give it up." "Aww, aren't you sweet. I agree you should keep dating other girls. You only had three weeks of it, so you've only just started. Carol wouldn't dream of opposing your wishes, but we don't want to upset her needlessly. It's probably gentlest coming from me, so I'll take care of it, okay?" "Thanks. She was so overwhelmed today I didn't want to bring it up. It's even more complicated than just by playing around, because it's possible we might be gaining more wives in the future. They'd have to be very, very special though." "Wow. That's..." Julia gave it some more thought, then lamely continued, "That's going to take some getting used to. How many wives are you thinking of?" "It doesn't work that way. It'll just be the two of you forever unless we meet someone special enough. She'll have to be truly amazing though, because she'll have to fit into our life without jealousy or competitiveness. I've got REALLY high standards for this, Julia, so it might never happen. Ava's not included, for example, even though I know how wonderfully she's going to fit in with Carol, you and me. The plan for Ava is that she becomes independent and leaves us in a few years, which is the opposite of what we want to happen with a wife. The next wife might be one year away, ten years away or maybe never; we'll just have to wait and see." "I understand what you're saying. This could be a VERY strange lifestyle, Mark, and potentially dangerous if word of it gets out, especially about Carol being involved." "I know. But look on the bright side, we might get enough wives for two soccer teams. Wouldn't that be great? Haha." After a very little chuckle, indicating that Julia didn't think that would be a great as I did, Julia asked, "I guess you're not thinking of there being any more husbands?" "You got that right! Except you used the wrong word. I'm not going to be your husband; I'm going to be your 'Lord'. Not in the 'Our Lord in Heaven' religious sense; but in the Big Boss sense, like King or Baron. I've no doubt you'll keep bossing me around and telling me what to do; you'll just be doing it to your Lord rather than your boyfriend." "You're talking about your wives formally acknowledging that you're superior to us, aren't you?" "Yes. That's what it's for." "I didn't think you accepted that. You've always looked uncomfortable whenever I've made a big deal about it." "I'm accepting it more now. I certainly don't think I'm infallible about everything - that'd be a recipe for disaster because there's a HUGE amount I'm ignorant of - but studying eight subjects at once means a great deal. I may slow down and struggle during the third and fourth years, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to work my way through them now..." "Ha! You'll breeze through them like you do everything else." "That from a girl who has never done a third-year college course. Thank you for your enthusiastic support though. My studying speed and my improved special abilities have convinced me that there might be something to your treating me as special. There's something else too. Before you pushed me into dating other girls, I was always fearful of beautiful girls, especially older beautiful girls. I thought they were way above me, that they understood life because they seemed to move through it so successfully, and all those sorts of thoughts. Now I laugh at those ideas. A lot of beautiful girls aren't even average people, and average isn't a high standard either. It sounds arrogant, but I'm starting to look down on a lot of people for all the stupidity they do, which would worry me if it wasn't for there being several people around me that I respect so highly, like you and your parents. My parents in their own ways too, although they're not as impressive as yours." Julia felt compelled to give me some hugs, kisses and some sweet nothings. Only a couple of her comments are worth mentioning. She said, "Don't worry about looking down on the people you know. They're nearly all schoolkids and it just means you're out-maturing them. I wouldn't be surprised if you got tired of the school scene partway through the year." And also, "I'll talk with Carol tomorrow afternoon about your continuing to date other girls and your ideas for our marriage. I'm sure she'll be fine." "Thanks. The last thing I can think of asking you about is what's the attitude to me among all the girls now? The girls in general, the pipeline girls, through to girls like Lily and Alexis?" "Most of the general girls are too busy worrying about their exams. They know you've recovered, but you're 'out of sight; out of mind.' After the exams are over there should still be enough interested in you to get some pipeline groups going, although there'll be quite a few losses because the excitement has died off. I've got plenty of phone numbers of girls who said they were interested in you before, so we'll arrange some sort of party to welcome you back and generate some excitement. There should be a much lower dropout rate with the 10th grade girls because their interest in you is based on their knowing you personally. Your favorites like Lily, Alexis and Pat are still as eager as ever. They ask about you every day and want to know the latest news. They'll want to see you now that you're back. Do you want me to put that off until after exams?" "Whatever you think is best. My only worry is disrupting their study time, but a quick meal one evening would be fine. See how interested they are and let me know. It's getting late, so shall we go to sleep now?" "Yeah, we should. Except you've given me so much to think about that I don't know if I can relax enough." "All of it can wait. I was just bringing you up to date, not asking you to do anything. Do you want me to get you up early so you can do some last minute cramming?" "Yes please. At five." Julia still looked too excited to sleep, so to distract her onto something that definitely required none of her attention, I said, "By the way, I'm down to needing only two and a half hours of sleep a night now. That's an extra one and a half hours times nearly times screens, is ten or eleven extra man-hours of reading time per morning." "More than other people do all day! You're unbelievable. It's scary to think what you might be doing a few years from now. I'm glad you're going to be opening up to our parents more because it's a huge worry being responsible for your social education." "Don't forget you're responsible for my fashion education too. Judging by how seriously you take it, it's obviously the single most important aspect of my entire life. And now you've also got the heavy responsibility of bringing a second fashion-challenged Anderson up to your high standard. I doubt you're going to be able to handle the total burden any longer. Maybe we should give all the less important issues - everything else in my life except my clothing - to Ava, to free you up to concentrate on the critically important fashion issue?" "Haha. You're right, I do feel sorry for myself being responsible for so many important things. It's a good thing you and Carol are good looking, otherwise I'd have to work even harder on the fashion issue, and I don't know if I could manage that as well as all the less important duties." "I'm appalled that you're not giving my fashion image your full effort. Taking it easy just because I'm so gorgeous is a lazy and totally unacceptable attitude. I've got a good mind to do something indecent to you." "Again! Have mercy, kind sir." "Sorry. You've committed a crime by undervaluing fashion, and mercy isn't allowed in cases as serious as that. Here comes your punishment." I congratulated myself for so cleverly combining the only two ways I know to distract girls: sex and fashion (not necessarily in that order). After a quick, but thoroughly enjoyable distraction, we lay back to cuddle for a while, as I like to cuddle after sex. It seems very rude to boink the girl, roll over, and order myself to go to sleep. We chatted for a minute or two, and then Julia SUDDENLY sat up, shrieking, "OH MY GOD! I've got a wedding in three weeks! I'm NEVER going to get everything done in time. There's..." "Relax Julia. I've got it covered." " ... hundreds of things to plan. We have to get DRESSES! How on Earth are we going to get the dresses in time? Then there are the flowers and rings. I'll have to pick the music. What about food? We'll have to get one of The Boys to be the photographer. How will we decorate the room? Then there's your suit..." Julia was getting VERY worked up. I knew 3B's Julia that she'd spent years thinking about her wedding. All she'd lacked was a groom, but I'd gained the distinct impression that he was merely something that got tacked on later, rather than his being anywhere near the top of the list of "Important Things That Needed To Be Planned In Meticulous Detail". Mentioning fashion wasn't going to distract her this time, as it was at the top of the list of things that she was freaking out about. Sex didn't have a hope in hell of distracting her from HAVING A WEDDING TO PLAN! I'm good at sex, but I'm not THAT good. I thought of using NP to fly her around the room, but I was hoping to save that as a surprise, and it'd be such a pity to lose it for just a short-lived distraction - it would be short-lived, as flying around couldn't complete with HAVING A WEDDING TO PLAN! I couldn't create water out of thin air, which saved her from getting a bucket load of it dumped on her. I had no choice except to be brutal. I grabbed her head and turned her to face me. I demanded, "Listen to me, Julia." As expected, it didn't work. I could easily see that she wasn't even aware that I'd moved her head, let alone had actually listened to me. I pinched her ass HARD! "OUCH! What did you do that for?" "Because I have REPEATEDLY asked you to listen to me." Not strictly true, but she wouldn't know. "Are you listening to me now, or do I have to pinch your ass again?" "I'm listening." Then I did the brutal thing - the ass pinch wasn't it; that was just to get her attention so I could deliver the vicious blow that was to follow - I told her, "You are NOT organizing the wedding. Your job is to be one of the brides and that's all. You do not have a single decision to make. So go to sleep; you've got an exam tomorrow." Fat chance of her meekly going to sleep. "I don't understand? What do you mean? Mom's in Seattle and Carol's too young, so it has to be me." I knew that even if her Mom had been back home and Carol had been ten years older, Julia would still want to be the one organizing it. Nonetheless, I firmly stuck to my guns, "No, it does not have to be you. I know exactly what I want and that's what we're going to do." "YOU are going to do it! What do you know about planning a wedding?" #8: #5: #4: #5: #4: #1: "Julia, I've ALREADY planned the wedding. It's ALL planned! All I have to do is get the flowers, buy the rings and that sort of stuff. I know exactly what I want, so that'll be easy." "Guys NEVER plan weddings, Mark; it's ALWAYS the women who do it. There are dozens of details. DOZENS! You can't possibly know everything that needs to be done." "Have you heard of the concept of taking responsibility for your actions?" "Of course. What's that got to do with anything?" "You need to calm down, Julia, because you're verging on being rude to me. When you said, 'What's that got to do with anything', that was not polite. I am taking responsibility for our wedding. I wouldn't do that unless I was confident that I could do a good job. I know how important your wedding is to you, and you know that I know that, so you should give me credit for being smart and caring enough not to deliberately screw-up a very important day in OUR lives." That point hit home very nicely. "Oh..." I kept on preaching, wanting to hit some more points home, "I do not appreciate your automatic assumption that I am uncaring and that I haven't got a clue what I'm talking about. I'll repeat what I said before, because you obviously weren't bothering to listen to me. I have ALREADY planned the wedding. It makes no sense whatsoever for you to plan something that's already planned, because how can we possibly have two different plans for the same event? Unless you think you can freely ignore decisions and plans that I've spent a great deal of time working on?" "I'm sorry, Mark. I didn't mean to be rude, but I don't understand how you could have planned a wedding..." "The traditional response to not understanding something is to ask for an explanation. That's not what you did, is it?" "No, I insisted you were wrong. I'm very sorry I did that. It's just that my wedding is very important to me." It was time to be nice to her, but I couldn't resist saying, "Apparently more important than respecting the guy involved, which doesn't seem right to me." Julia tried to apologize again, but I carried on, "I've been thoughtless a hundred times more often than you have, so I'll get off my high horse now. Shall we spend time in recriminations and apologies, or would you rather hear some details of your wedding?" "Can I apologize one more time, and then hear all the details?" "You're not going to hear ALL the details. You're going to hear ONE detail now, and nothing else until I give you the full description after your exams have finished." I could see Julia was about to protest, so I quickly added, "Or maybe I won't tell you anything until the ceremony. There's no need for you to know in advance anyway, as that'd imply you didn't trust me. Trust is very important in a marriage, so you do trust me don't you?" "How can you not let me plan my own marriage?" "Because I know what I want and I know that you'll love it. I was about to say, 'I get to organize it because I asked you first, ' but I realized I never did ask you properly, which I apologize for. I'd better correct that now." -- I was naked and awkward because the cast prevented me bending one of my knees, but I did my best to get into the traditional pose, although I wasn't sure how traditional being naked was. Seeing as my proposal was going to be improper anyway, I might as well make it even more so by requesting, "Julia Williams, will you marry Carol Anderson and me in a secret wedding ceremony of my own design?" "Argh, you meanie. Yes I will. And now I'm stuck, aren't I?" "Yep. I'm sorry it wasn't romantic, but at least it was nicely effective from my point of view." While I clambered back under the covers, I said, "There are a couple of minor things you'll have to get involved with before the ceremony - measuring your and Carol's fingers so the rings are the right sizes, for example." The other issue was sorting out their dresses, but I wasn't stupid enough to mention that nightmare of an issue now. I continued, "But the issue I..." "I presume you mean choosing the rings too?" "No. You'll be wearing what I give you. The rings you'll be getting are included in my plan, so you have no say about them." I quite enjoyed being so definite. It was WONDERFUL that I knew she'd approve of everything in the wedding, given that she'd already approved it in 3B-land. [[As you can see, I was still woefully naïve about girls. What was the chance that this Julia's ideal wedding plan might have been influenced by our having millions of dollars in this dimension?]] "Why on Earth did you pick now of all times to become so damned assertive! It's TERRIBLE timing!" "Gee, I almost feel sorry for you. Do you want to hear the detail, or should we go to sleep?" Sleep was clearly the last thing on Julia's mind, so I continued, "There's one detail of the ceremony that I don't have worked out to my satisfaction yet, so I want to run it past you. It's to do with the vows." Actually, 90% of the reason I was about to tell her the vows was because I knew she'd be impressed by them. She should be, as someone extraordinarily identical to her had written them. That'd calm her down by giving her faith that I could plan a good ceremony. "You've written the vows as well?" "Yes. In my head anyway; I haven't put them on paper yet." "For both of us? Sorry, I mean for all three of us?" "I've written the vows you and Carol will be making to me, but I won't be making any vows myself. All I'll be doing is accepting yours." "Huh? Are you saying something else instead of vows?" "No. This 'wedding' - as we're calling it - is you and Carol pledging yourself to me, and my accepting your pledges. I'm the Lord, so it's not appropriate for me to be bound by any vows to you." "Wow. That's an interesting thing to do. I had no idea you thought that strongly enough to build it into the ceremony. You've always been uncomfortable when I've talked like that before." "I've had some insights. I know you understand that the ceremony will be for you and Carol to make your commitments to me, and not me committing to you in any formal way, but Carol won't understand that. I would like you to explain that to her please. Carol has to understand before she makes her vows, assuming she agrees. If she doesn't, I'll decide what to do about it. Do you understand the one-way direction of this ceremony, and why?" "Yeah. That's going to be a VERY powerful statement to make in a formal ceremony in front of our families! That's not a time for playing around. You're very serious about this, aren't you?" "I'm treating it totally seriously; as if it were our wedding. What I have been calling your 'vows' is actually in four parts. The last line needs some more work yet, but you and Carol will say the following," I slowly recited, "Mark, Lord, I offer you three lifelong Vows and a Gift. First, I Vow to Serve. I offer my life in servitude to you. Your goals, needs and desires are forever paramount over mine. I will expend my life serving you to the best of my ability. Second, I Vow to Obey. I will always obey your every order, voiced or anticipated, to the best of my ability. Third, I Vow to Protect. I will protect you from all ill and harm, to the best of my ability. If the situation requires it, I will joyously sacrifice my life to protect yours. Fourth, I offer you the Gift of my Love. Love cannot be vowed, as it may be denied, and can be lost. Regardless, I offer it to you." I'd been watching Julia's expression during my recitation, and had seen wonder, stunned amazement, and then excitement and happiness toward the end. She loved it! "Oh my God Mark! I CAN'T BELIEVE you wrote those vows! They're PERFECT! You've taken everything I've thought and felt, and you've..." Then Julia suddenly broke into several seconds of rolling-around-on-the-bed, belly-hurting laughter. #6: #2: Julia finally managed to pause her hilarity long enough to comment, "You REALLY had me going. I was totally fooled." "Ahh, Julia, why do you think the vows are so funny?" "I'm not laughing at the vows, darling. Or I should say, 'My Lord'. You've blown me away with them. No matter how long I worked on them, there's no way I could produce a set of vows that was as good as what you've written. They capture my thoughts and feelings perfectly. I even agree with the last part as is. The reason I laughed was because I realized you'd fooled me so completely a couple of hours ago. When you were telling me what special insights you'd had, you gave me a terribly lame excuse for not having any insights about me. You had me totally believing that you hadn't thought about me, and then those vows proved that you'd seen all the way into my soul." #1: "And a very nice soul it is too. Now that I've had my fun, I hope you're feeling some confidence that the ceremony might actually be somewhat better than you feared?" "It's starting to sound truly amazing. I'm ashamed to say that I underestimated you very badly and I apologize unreservedly for that. You're planning something very special, and I'm honored to be involved. If the rest of the ceremony is up to that standard, it's going to be the most incredible day of Carol's and my lives." #7: #1: "I'll type those vows up for you when I get up to study. I'm still not happy with the last part yet, so they won't necessarily be the final version, but I'd like you to explain them to Carol please. I think you'd do that better than I would, because you and she can talk as equals, and her seeing that you agree with them will make it easier for her to agree. You understand what I mean?" "Sure. It'll be a pleasure." That saved me from having to sell it to my sister, which would have been very embarrassing. "There's more than a week until we can talk with the parents, and I'd like you not to cause her any major upsets in the middle of her exams..." "More likely 'major excitements'. I've spent a lot of time talking to Carol about you, so I know how to handle her." Julia wasn't really relaxed enough to sleep yet, but she was far happier and calmer than she'd been five minutes ago. I decided it was time for her to calm herself down from now, so I told her, "Goodnight sweetheart, I'm going to sleep now." Julia would have preferred to keep talking about her wedding - probably nonstop until the wedding - but I lay down and reinforcing my decision with, "Time for sleep, Julia. Your parents wouldn't be happy with you losing essential sleep just before your exam, especially not to discuss something that you've got no say over. Go to sleep please." "You're a VERY unusual man, Mark." "It's starting to look that way." I pulled her into a nice snuggle, said, "Goodnight," then went to sleep. ------- [What English word has its first two letters mean a man, its first three letters mean a woman, its first four letters mean a great man, all but its last letter is a path to destruction and death, and the entire word means a great woman? "Heroine".] ------- Chapter 239: Exam Week's Monday Monday, June 13, 2005 I woke up two and a half hours later and got out of bed, missing the inconvenience of having to climb over a girl. I wouldn't be sleeping with Carol until our parents gave their consent, and Ava would presumably be sleeping at her home during exam week. It was going to feel unpleasantly strange sleeping with either Julia or no one, especially the latter option. When I wake up between two girls, I now have a way of getting out of bed that doesn't involve any clambering, provided Julia was one of the girls: I could lift Julia up with NP and slide myself underneath her. I didn't think it'd work very well because the covers would prevent her getting high enough, and it'd probably wake her too, but it was amusing to think about. I couldn't help thinking that it was a pity my NP wasn't twice as forceful, then I would've been easily able to fly myself out of bed in a VERY cool way. I walked downstairs for breakfast on my unexciting - compared to flying - feet, with due regard to the upgraded security system I'd been shown yesterday evening. With Vanessa's absence the fridge was nearly empty, but it could cope with a breakfast. I'd talked to Sensei a couple of times from Seattle. He could've written his own article on External Ki Projection because he knew everything that needed to be included so other people could learn it, but he felt it was proper to wait for my contribution. I'd told him I'd type up the delayed notes when I got back home, so that was the first thing I did when I got back to the study. I was a simple job, being just a raw dump of most of my thoughts and rationalizations, with a little care required to make sure it only talked about ki abilities equivalent to Sensei's. It took about twenty minutes, my typing speed fortunately not affected by having had all the fingers of one hand broken and in a cast, and my not having a finger poised to type an "e", "d" or "c". When I'd finished it, I put it on a memory stick to give to Sensei. Doing the composition and typing had been easy, so while I'd been working on it most of my minds had been working on the wedding vows. There'd been several things we'd thought of and discarded. For example, we noticed there was no phrase about making the vows "in the presence of friends and family." There wasn't a reference to the other girl either, even though 3B's Julia knew there'd be two girls participating in the ceremony. I presumed the vows were intended by the authoring Julia to be a private commitment between a girl and me. 3A's Julia should prefer it that way too, so that's the way I left the existing vows, but I thought it was sufficiently important to add a fourth vow: "Fourth, I Vow to care for and love all of your wives and children to the best of my ability." I'd thought about including more actions, such "support", or "nurture", but decided that "care for and love" was sufficient as everything else should flow from those. Ideally "love" alone should be sufficient, but future new wives might need months to become "in love" with the existing wives - even Julia probably wouldn't be loving Carol in time for the ceremony - but they could "care and love" without being "in love". I wasn't trying to enforce love (a pointless attempt, if ever there was one), but to make clear that a multiplicity of wives was possible so committing to me wasn't a purely one-on-one thing, and that each wife had to do her honest best for everyone else. The new vow belonged in fourth place, as Julia would disagree strongly if I tried to promote it up the list. The second change I did was to remove everything to do with "The Gift of Love", so my plan for the formal part of our ceremony now had just the four vows and nothing else. When the EKP notes were finished, I typed the vows and printed a copy to give to Julia. Then, with considerable anticipation, I took full advantage of my very, very expensive study system. My first OSU exam was Calculus 251, so I started with that. On screen #1 I put the first lecture, with subsequent screens starting successive eighths of the total number of lectures through, rounding up slightly all the way so #8 would have fewer lectures than the others because he would be encountering some new material. We made #7 responsible for both being on active duty and maintaining the sight blob, as his reviewing had the most recent material so should take the least mental effort. Then we started reading though all the lectures to make sure we had everything down cold. We were very impressed by the total amount of work we could power through, even though half of us missed not having the usefully larger 30" Dell screens. Before we'd upgraded this system, we'd googled to see if the Dell 30s existed in this dimension, but they didn't, so we'd just have to get used to the 24" screens. We were pleasantly surprised that #7 didn't lose center even once in the half-hour shift he had. Then active duty was assigned to #6 for half an hour (he had a failure), then #5, etc. We were keeping center more easily than we'd thought we would, presumably because the material was very familiar and well understood. We rotated the half-hourly active duty through all our minds, skipping #8 as he was thinking harder than the rest of us. We had five losses of center by the time we had to go wake up Julia, which was a very pleasing average rate of just over one per hour. By the time we'd finished studying, we'd totally finished Calculus and were getting into Algebra. When Julia and I returned to the study, I gave her the vows' page. I explained, "Here are the vows. I won't bother explaining the rationales behind them and the wordings, such as leaving out 'in the presence of friends and family'. You're very smart about things like this, so I'm sure you'll work out most of my reasons easily. -- "I've removed 'The Gift' because I want this document to just be the vows themselves. I'm perfectly happy with you and Carol making a personal statement at the time you make the vows, but it should be personal and not dictated to you by being on this page. If you want to make a statement, I suggest you cooperate to write one you can both recite together, because I want to emphasize your equality and I don't want to risk one of you feeling inferior because she thinks the other girl made a better statement. Having said that, please let Carol do most of the work developing your 'joint' statement if you do one. You can influence it, but please let her think it was mostly her work, because allowing her to contribute to the formal ceremony that way will go a long way toward convincing her that she's a full member of the marriage." Julia was very happy with my ideas and impressed by me. I was impressed by me too, as I'd gotten rid of the tricky problem of having to compose The Gift by delegating it, and I'd done so in a way that made the delegate happy to have the new job. When 3B's Julia had written "The Gift", it had been her personal statement, but as I was supplying the script this time it truly was better to leave that off, and to let Julia and Carol compose their own. I'm not a genius, but occasionally I do something that seems very smart, from my decidedly average perspective. Julia wanted to get to her studying, so we didn't discuss the vows any further. I got back into Algebra, continuing to read it between Julia's occasionally asking me questions about tricky bits in those subjects of hers that I could help her with. By breakfast time, I'd reread about half the Algebra lectures, so I'd easily knock it off tomorrow morning, in plenty of time for its exam on Thursday. Ava had been driving Julia and my sisters to and from school recently. She turned up a few minutes early to catch up with me, and to pass on her parents' appreciation for my paying for their vacation (I'd mailed a check from Seattle). At times like that I could never resist worrying about what had happened in 3B-land: had Katie and Carson gone on their vacation or not? [[In most w-dimensions similar to 3B's, they had, usually after a delay of a couple of weeks. Mom and Dad had insisted on it, and on paying for it, as "It'd been Mark's wish that you go." There were variations - in some dimensions I didn't know the Wests, for example - but it was very rare for the parents not to insist on the West's trip, especially as it'd been Vanessa's idea in the first place.]] I convoyed with Ava to my home to wish everyone "Good luck." While there I also reminded Mom, "Don't forget to ask at your work whether you say 'Are you insane' annoyingly often." I wanted her to do that not only for the benefit it'd bring her, but because it'd also increase my credibility. My being able to make pretty lights didn't automatically entitle me to make serious life-affecting decisions about Carol. If this Mom gets the same feedback as 3B's Mom did, it should enhance her opinion of me in ways that'd be helpful. Mom and Dad had thought of some more questions to ask me about my abilities. I put them off with, "We'll have a big discussion with Prof and Vanessa soon after they get back. It'd be better to save your questions for then, otherwise I'm going to be answering everything twice, and trotting back and forth with anyone's additional thoughts." My real reason was because I wanted a nice, long, impressive discussion with the four adults about my abilities, before we got to the "I want to have sex with Carol" part. After some last hugs with my sisters, they headed off to school with Ava, while I headed to OSU via a bakery to stock up with a day's supply of food. It's pretty damned easy to do exams when you've got eight minds on the job, all of which have effectively memorized all my notes and decent chunks of the textbooks. If the question had a right answer, then I almost certainly knew it. If the question was deliberately tricky, one of my minds was almost guaranteed to spot the trick. Even if the question was one of those 'creative' ones, I nearly always had too many ideas to be able to write about all of them, as each of the eight minds had ideas, plus a lot of extra ideas were created when we internally discussed the first ones. I mostly leapfrogged rapidly through the exams, except when held up by long answers that my pen was frantically writing for. My pen almost never stopped writing during all the exams because my minds always had answers ready. I had 11th grade English in the afternoon, which caused me to scratch my head a few times. My 'favorite' question (using the word with the maximum possible sarcasm) was: "'Beauty without Truth is of little social relevance.' Discuss for 30%." What the fuck can you do with that! Especially when the 30% mark indicates it's worth nearly an hour's work. I resisted the temptation to answer, "Questions without Precision are of no educational relevance." Instead I made up some crap, because it was pretty obvious that they wanted crap; it was English after all. I had no choice but to make up crap, because it seems to me that the only things that have "social relevance" in mainstream America are money, sex and religion. Politics is a subset of money, and I have suspicions about religion not being as distinct from the other two as it should be. None of which have anything to do with truth, let alone "Truth", whatever the hell the capitalization means! After the last exam, I drove to the jewelry store that 3B's Julia had one day casually pointed out as being the place she'd bought the rings. I told the guy there what I wanted. It was easier and less expensive than I imagined, but I'd been right in thinking that it'd take him a few days, so I ordered the rings now. Even if the parents refused, I'd need the rings sooner or later. Later might be when Carol turned eighteen, but it would come. I left my watch with him so he could get a female to match the colors EXACTLY, and he lent me a set of sizing rings so I could get Julia's and Carol's ring finger sizes. Then I drove to the dojo to give Sensei the memory stick with the EKP document on it. He wasn't in a class, so after the usual "How are your injuries?" and the like, he was able to load it onto his office computer and give me the stick back. He was impressed by how much I'd typed, which I dismissed as unimportant. Then he started talking about my checking the changes he'd make, so I interrupted him, "Don't bother getting me to check it, Sensei. Write whatever you want and then submit it. You understand the technique and you know what needs to be said and how to say it; whereas I've never read an Aikido magazine. Just get an extra copy of the magazine it gets printed in please, so I can give it to my mother. Mothers get all proud about things like that." He verbally checked some of the things he was intending to put in the article, and they were all perfectly fine with me. I added, "You've been teaching Aikido for decades, and you certainly know how to present the information far better than I do. All I did was have the idea first, which doesn't make me suitable for writing the article. You understand the technique and its implications better than I do, so just write whatever you think best. -- "One thing: it would amuse me if you titled the article 'Student's Ki Distribution' and gave the author's name as 'A Student'." "I will do whatever you wish, but why those?" I explained my joke to him, but he didn't see any humor in it. He's English. I told him I hoped to have the casts off on Friday, so I'd be back at training the following Monday, and I'd send him a text message to let him know as soon as I did. I definitely didn't want the casts to stay on once we were officially on summer vacation, and I was very sure I'd be fully healed by Friday, so I was going to ask Dad to cut them off. The main uncertainty about that happening was whether Mom would refuse to let Dad do it. It was too soon to let the hospital X-ray me as they'd see that I'd healed too rapidly, so it was either Dad on Friday or another couple of weeks of hobbling around. Because Sensei was teaching me the physical forms starting from the very beginning of the syllabus, we'd been doing them in very physical ways. That'd made it difficult for him to realize how strong my ki was. When we resumed training, I'll have about twenty times more ki than him, and we'll be training more like the advanced class - using less physical effort and more ki - so he'll be getting a substantial surprise. As he'd know anyway, I told him, "I haven't been able to do much else for the last three weeks, so I've been doing a lot of ki training. I think you'll find that my ki is noticeably stronger when we resume training." Sensei's eyebrows rose with the surprise. He was a reserved English gentleman, so that was the equivalent of his running around yelling "Yahoo!" He said, "Your ki was already exceptionally strong, so our next class should be interesting." Raw power isn't the only issue. The first few times I do a technique, I can't use my ki even as efficiently as Sensei's much weaker ki, because he's had decades of practice in using it as well as possible. But my being able to 'see' my and his ki means I can VERY quickly copy him, and then learn how to improve on what he does, usually by being more precise, as that's difficult for him without being able to sense his ki's effects. After a few practices with each technique, I'll be more powerful AND more efficient than Sensei; and he'll be surprised and impressed. There'd been a text message from Julia on my phone when I'd finished my last exam, telling me that Alexis, Lily and Pat would like to have a quick dinner with me tonight, with Ava and Carol invited too, so I headed home to give myself plenty of time to wash. I wasn't supposed to get the casts wet, but with my left leg and right hand in casts it was tricky to wash. It was a pity I couldn't ask Carol or even Donna to help me, but I wouldn't want Mom or Dad to come home to that. I found Carol and Donna studying in their room. I asked them, "How did your exams go?" They both made "Fine" noises. Carol was much more interested in eagerly asking, "I had a talk with Julia afterward. Can we talk about that in your room, so we don't disturb Donna?" "Sure." I didn't have to worry about Carol's opinion of the vows, as excited happiness was all over her face. As soon as we were in my room Carol pushed the door shut and put her arms around me, in a big and apparently never-ending hug. It was unusually demonstrative of her, but perfectly fine with me. Still holding her I asked, "I take it that you approve of the vows?" Carol answered, "I'm AMAZED by them. They're so extreme I'd think they were a joke, only I know you and Julia are totally serious. Mom's going to freak when she hears them, especially the part about my sacrificing my life to protect yours." "Yeah, I know. I find that quite funny in one way. If we accused Mom of being sexist she'd get very indignant about denying it. If we had a ceremony in which I promised to sacrifice my life to protect yours or Julia's, Mom wouldn't think twice about it because that's what a guy is supposed to do, but making the girls promise that about me is going to rattle her cage. More important than Mom, are YOU willing to make vows like that?" "I'll make ANY vows you want. Julia told me off for not taking them seriously enough, but I'll agree to anything to be able to live with you and Julia. She thinks I'm agreeing too quickly, but I don't care." Nor, I must admit, did I. The current situation was mostly irrelevant anyway. My reasons were dishonest because it was the future Carol rather than the current one that I wanted as my wife. Carol's reasons were dishonest because whatever she thought her reasons were, they were mostly that she was reveling in the attention from me and Julia, and mostly because she respected us so much. In a couple of months she'd be strong enough not to crave respect. Only then would she and I start having honest reasons for being married, and her vows would start being true. On the topic of that dishonesty, Mom's and Dad's consents (fingers crossed) would be based on a dishonest belief about genetics, so there wasn't much Truthful "social relevance" in the Anderson household! "Good girl. Is there a real reason you lured me into being alone with you, or is hugging a good enough reason?" "Hugging is pretty good, but mostly I just wanted to tell you how happy I am. I can't understand why you want me when you can have so many better girls from ... Oww!" (I'd smacked her on the ass). I said, "How dare you insult my good taste by implying I've chosen an inferior girl! You really do want to be put over my knees and spanked, don't you?" "{Giggle}. That'd be fun. Shall we do that?" "Yes, but not until after the exams. Try these sizing rings on your ring finger." I passed them over. "Why?" "Either because I'm going to buy you a wedding ring or a jet propelled elephant. Can you guess which?" "Haha. What sort of ring?" "Hopefully one the right size." I got her to find what that was, then I said, "Let's get you back to your studies before your mood gets too non-academic." "Aww, spoilsport." "Don't worry. You'll soon be having so much 'sport' you'll be walking funny." I probably shouldn't have said that, as it wasn't exactly going to help keep her mind on her studies. "Oh." Carol was struggling to find what else to say, but I solved her problem by pushing her out of the room. I pushed her all the way into her room so I could say, "Donna, I've got a few minutes spare. Do you want to goof around for a little while?" Mostly I asked because I was already feeling guilty that I'd be spending much more time with Carol than Donna in the future. Plus Donna can't study for long without needing to get up and burn some energy off. "{Giggle}, how can you goof off with a broken leg?" "I bet I can still beat the pants off you at basketball, even though I'll have a crutch." #7: She readily agreed to a game of basketball, under the usual rules she and I play with. I added, "Loser has to wash the winner's car." "I don't have a car." "Doesn't matter, because you're gonna lose anyway. No way a sissy girl like you can beat even a poor, crippled brother." Donna loves being competitive, and a couple of taunts always raises her excitement level. Donna's not the sharpest axe in the woodpile. When she was about to shoot, I stood under the hoop and poked my crutch up through the middle of it. "Argh! Not fair!" "You did agree that I could use my crutch. Do you want to wash my car now, or should we play baseball for a while instead?" That would be a better way of getting her to run around than basketball, as I could hit some balls without having to move around much. She knew I was joking about the car wash, but she played safe by throwing the basketball away, declaring, "Okay, but the bet's off now." We got the baseball gear and I gave her a great deal of fun catching my high hits. She was AMAZED that I could hit the ball so far virtually straight up. Having 99 pounds of NP force can REALLY make a baseball move! I 'hit' them very, very high; so high that Donna found catching them seriously nerve-racking. It also gave her plenty of exercise running back and forth around the yard trying to guess where the ball was going to land, especially because I gave them slight nudges on the way down ("Must be windy up there"). Donna thought it was great fun. She'd burned off enough energy after twenty minutes, so we headed back inside so I could wash. In their room, Donna raved to Carol, "You WOULDN'T BELIEVE how high Mark can hit a baseball. He didn't even swing the bat hard, but the ball went so high I couldn't see it. I mean REALLY, REALLY high! It was REALLY scary trying to catch them!" When I got a chance I said, "Carol, I forgot to ask you before, but Julia told you that we're going out for a quick dinner with the Liaison girls, didn't she?" "Yes, but how come I'm invited?" No doubt she'd asked the same question of Julia, and no doubt Julia had told her why. Reassurance needs frequent applications, so I said, "We always make the most beautiful person pay, but those girls keep voting for me. This time there'll be no doubt that you should pay." A confusing compliment, but the best I could quickly think of saying in front of Donna. "I'm not beautiful." "In my opinion you are, and I've spent YEARS looking at beautiful girls. There's no point in our debating it, because it'll be decided by vote shortly. I just wanted to make sure you knew you were coming. I'll leave you to your studies until then." I left them to their studies. In Carol's case that didn't mean the relatively unimportant exam. It meant studying her closet to decide what to wear to dinner. By the time I got out of the bathroom, Mom and Dad were home. Mom sheepishly confessed, "You were right, Mark. Everyone confirmed that I yell, 'Are you insane' or something similar far too often. It was rather embarrassing how happy they were to be able to tell me about it. It's obviously been something that's been annoying them for too long. How did you know I did that at work?" "I've seen you do it often and thoughtlessly, so it was obviously a habit. I would have been surprised if you didn't do it at work. You're going to try to break the habit now?" "Definitely. It was insulting and annoying everyone." "I hope another of your expressions is incorrect then." "Oh?" "The one about not being able to teach old dogs new tricks." That cured her sheepishness very successfully, and earned me a swat on the bottom. I added, "Would it help if I gave you lots of practice controlling yourself by doing lots of insane things from now on?" "Just carry on doing what you normally do, and that'll be practice enough. How were your exams today?" "Fine. I'm not going to have problems with any of these exams. Although there was a 30% question in the 11th grade English exam: 'Discuss Beauty without Truth is of little social relevance.' What sort of question is that!" "Hmm, that's very imaginative. You could have written some interesting points about that." I could only assume that Mom's ancestry unrealistically distorts her view of English. Changing the subject to something that had relevance in the real world, I said, "You know Carol and I are going out for dinner tonight?" "Yeah, Carol told me. It's nice of you to take Carol with you." Mom was digging, so I pretended to be thick. "No problem. She gets along very well with Julia and Ava." Mom asked, "You never did get around to explaining why you and Carol have been so close recently?" "My memory is good enough to remember that it was only yesterday I said I'd give you a week to get your head around the implications of the special stuff I showed you. I know you haven't done that yet, or there'd be certain types of unobvious questions that you'd be asking me." #4: #7: #3: #7: It turned out that none of 3A used it, and neither had most of 3B until #7 (as he's called now) had brought it to their attention. #'s 5, 6 and 8 had picked it up when they'd each merged with #7. An unimportant little dimensional difference that no one had bothered to comment on until now. ^ [Because it contrasts nicely with the trivial "buggered" difference, I'll mention a couple more profound things we discovered soon, in our near-future déjà vu's (they were occurring every 1.5 weeks, on average). We had a déjà vu with a Mark that only had four minds. In his dimension they hadn't played roulette in Binion's. They'd never heard of that name, and were still actively looking for a way to get rich. We strongly suggested they avoid Binion's and roulette, but in case they were stupid enough to try, we gave them the kidnappers' names, the approximate address 3B had died in, and suggested they install some hidden security in the two homes so they'd be woken up if anyone broke in. Then we wished them luck, before the link broke. We'd never yet met the same minds again twice, so we'd probably never know what happened. [["Probably" turned out to be not a very accurate guess. We did meet them again, and their dimension's Binion's had turned into a Harrah's that didn't accept big bets.]] A few déjà vu's later, we linked with a Mark who'd heard a story from one his earlier links, who'd heard it through one of his yet earlier, etc., of a third merge in which the "No Glass" Mark had died so quickly after stopping his heart that the merge happened before the receiving Mark had stopped his heart. In other words, merging almost certainly didn't require the receiving Mark to be in the process of dying, as that Mark had been a day or more away from death, which we doubted very much would count. This knowledge was interesting, but we hoped it would be of use to us ONLY if another Mark wanted to merge into our life, because sure as shit, we didn't want to leave again!] ^ Mom gave up on her fishing expedition. I went to my room to muck around for a while to kill time until Ava and Julia arrived. I got a bit bored, and decided this would be a good time to approach Dad about something - while I hoped Mom was still feeling impressed by my predicting her insane work misbehavior - so I wandered out to find him. They were already having dinner (just Mom, Dad and Donna). It felt wrong not to join in, so I got to eat their leftovers before they were technically classifiable as such. Mom, bless her, always cooks more than is immediately needed these days. Hobbling around was a nuisance, so I asked, "Dad, would you be able to get a tool from work that could cut my casts off on Friday afternoon please?" "What!" jumped in Mom. "It's best to leave that to the doctors, Mark." Donna's presence meant I didn't want to say "The doctors would be suspicious about my healing supernaturally fast." Instead I asked, "Would you like to apologize now or on Friday, Mom?" Mom's brain finally caught up to her mouth, "Ahh, I might have spoken too quickly again. Do you know that your bones have healed?" "I believe so. And if they haven't, then I'll be making a fool of myself and it'll be my responsibility. You need to start letting me take responsibility for my decisions, especially about issues that I know a great deal more about than you do, like my own body." "I understand, it's just taking me some time to get used to it." "I'll give you till Friday." That was an easy joke to end the argument with. I turned to Dad, "The whole thing's moot if you can't get something to cut the casts off?" "The one on your hand will be easy; I could do that with my own tin snips. It'd be best if I borrowed something from work for your leg though. It'd be easier to get permission if we do it on a week night?" "Thursday evening will be fine. Thanks Dad." Mom looked uncomfortable at my moving it forward a day, and clearly wanted to say something. I looked at her, daring her to comment. Mom saved herself another argument by giving up on it. Dad said, "I'll ask the boss tomorrow." "Thanks." Ava and Julia arrived. Carol came out of her room to tell them she couldn't decide what to wear. Apparently she had, "nothing to wear." She must shop at the same place as Julia, because she's often got exactly the same thing. Eventually - by which I mean after a truly annoyingly long time - Carol led the other girls out of her bedroom, looking at me concerned for my approval of her dress. She was taking our very casual dinner far too seriously; I guess because she was thinking of it as "our first date." Which reminded me that I hadn't told Julia about the sexy top-quality dress I wanted this Carol to have. I made a mental note to do that. I said, "You look lovely, Carol. One of the things that puzzles me about girls - and there are many - is why the more beautiful the girl is, the longer it takes her to 'make herself beautiful'. That's logically totally backward. I guess we're going to have to get used to long delays for you, given how beautiful you are." That was enough to cheer Carol up and get us moving. It would have been seriously counterproductive to tell her off for inconsiderately holding up several people's dinner for such a silly reason, but I was glad I knew she'd outgrow it soon or I would've been tempted. We went in Ava's car, to reduce the chance of my having any hassle with the cops over my driving with a cast on one leg. In the car I had the idea of telling Carol to remove her panties, to give her an embarrassingly good time. Unfortunately I couldn't think of a way of wording it that wasn't too sexual for Ava to overhear, and I couldn't whisper to Carol as I was in the front and she in the back behind Ava. Oh well, next time maybe. Ava dropped us off outside the restaurant in consideration of my apparent semi-disabled condition. Hobbling was enough of a nuisance that I didn't disagree with her. I couldn't exactly slide in surreptitiously, so the other girls spotted us very quickly. Alexis, Lily and Pat were waiting for us - which I hoped Carol took notice of - and happily rushed over to help me get to their table, making the journey harder but more enjoyable. I started introducing Carol to the others, but I was quickly informed that they'd already met her several times because Carol had been having lunch with Julia. The dinnertime conversation was mostly very predictable: inquiries after my health, shock and dismay at how the baddies had mistreated me, questions about what had happened, etc. I enjoyed telling them my, "They cut off my hole finger" joke again, although it's the sort of joke that needs to be explained (which seems to be the case with a lot of my jokes, which makes me sorry for everyone else). Once explained, especially to Lily, it got some laughs from the girls. Julia reassured them that she'd personally and thoroughly checked that nothing else important had been cut off. The couple next to us overheard part of our conversation and realized who I was. They thought that was very exciting, so they stood up to come to our table to ask questions of their own. I was particularly unimpressed by, "Did the old guy really win all those millions of dollars from roulette?" I told him, "Will you please leave us alone." The man reiterated his question, "No, really, did he win those millions?" The woman chipped in with, "Did the police ever find the guys?" I tried again, less politely, "Go away. We don't want to talk with you." They didn't get the hint, although what I'd said could hardly be called a hint. To make it worse, Julia was looking at me with amusement, no doubt seeing this as an "educational experience." I decided to that rather than getting aggressive with them, it'd be more fun to have fun (that wasn't hard to work out). I answered, "He certainly did win those millions, and FAR more. I think he's up to about $300 million or so now." "What! It only said a few million on the news?" "From the ONE visit to the ONE casino that the kidnappers saw him at. He'd been going all over Vegas. He's got a team of people down there now, going from casino to casino winning tens of millions every day. He's worked out a way to beat roulette, and the casinos can't stop him because he keeps hiring different people to put the bets down for him." "Wow. I didn't think roulette could be beaten?" "He's got $300 million, so what do you think? It's actually quite easy once you know how." "It is! Ahh, how does he do it?" "I shouldn't really say this, but what the heck; it's not going to last more than another couple of days anyway. Everything's computer-controlled these days: slot machines, roulette wheels, and all sorts of things. The law says the wheels have to be random, or else the casinos would pick the number that has the least bet on it, which wouldn't be fair. The old guy worked out how the machine chooses the number. You just need a stopwatch to time exactly how many seconds the ball was out of the pocket during the previous spin, then you add that number to the number the ball hit last time, and then keep taking away 38 until you get a valid number. So if the total was 400, if you take 38 off ten times you end up with 20, which is a valid number. Put a bet on 20 and you'll win. In another couple of days the casinos will realize they need to close all their roulette tables and rebuild the machinery inside them. The old guy's hoping to hit half a billion dollars before then, although I don't think he'll make it in time. But even $400 million isn't bad for a few weeks work, is it?" "That doesn't sound right. How can the casinos control where the ball lands? It bounces around all over the place." "I've got no idea. I don't even know whether the old guy knows. But computers are incredibly powerful these days, so I'm sure making a little ball bounce around the way they want can't be hard." "But if there's a system like that, someone would have leaked it already. They couldn't keep something like that secret." "Of course not. Everything I just told you is a complete load of crap. I can't believe how stupid and gullible you are. Haha." I laughed, with Julia and then the other girls joining in. Some of them not quite sure why, but I smiled encouragement at them. Mrs. Stick-Her-Unwanted-Nose-In glared at me, saying, "Why would you be so rude?" "You thought it was acceptable to annoy us for your entertainment, so I annoyed you for our entertainment. And I wasn't so rude that I came to your table and interrupted your dinner to do it either, so that makes me far less obnoxious than you are. Now that you've entertained us all with your stupidity, why don't you go back to your table before I call for the manager." "How dare you..." In a very loud voice that the whole restaurant could hear, I called out across the room, "WOULD THE MANAGER PLEASE COME HERE TO STOP THESE VERY STUPID AND ANNOYING PEOPLE FROM RUINING OUR MEAL." The very stupid and annoying people didn't enjoy EVERYBODY in the restaurant turning to stare at them. They were standing beside our table so they were obviously at fault and stood out very prominently. They quickly scuttled back to their table, waiting until they were safely sitting down before taking the time to send dirty glares my way. While they were scuttling, I told my table, "I'm thinking that on the way out I should apologize for calling them gullible, and tell them I'll pay their bill. I won't, of course, so when they walk out they'll get another reminder of how gullible they are. What do you think?" My table started laughing, the sight of which further pissed off the glaring Mr. and Mrs. Gullible, which was half the reason I'd said it. Pat and Lily just laughed without comment. Alexis, and to my surprise Carol, urged me to do it. Julia said, "If the timing works out badly they might walk out for free because all the staff were too busy to notice them leaving. You don't want the restaurant owner to be out of pocket." Speaking of him, he or the manager approached out table, asking, "Is there a problem here?" "Thank you for coming. Yes there was trouble. That couple over there," I pointed at them, which they saw as they were looking at us, presumably having seen the manager approach our table, "who're complete strangers to us, came to our table, interrupted our meal, and started talking about some trashy subject that none of us had any interest in discussing. We asked them to leave several times, but they refused until I yelled for you. I'm sorry I yelled, but I've got a broken leg so it's very difficult for me to walk. We'd appreciate it if you asked them not to deliberately intrude on our dinner yet again." "I'll talk with them." The manager walked the few feet to the table of guilty looking, stupid, gullible, annoying people. He spoke to them, Mr. Annoying spoke back angrily but too quietly for me to hear, the manager said a few more words then walked back to wherever he came from. Mrs. Annoying glared at me again, while Mr. Annoying lifted a glass of wine to his lips, maybe needing a drink after the harrowing experience of being told off. I had an evil idea, which are my personal favorites. I was a little slow to do it to him, so I waited until I saw Mrs. Gullible reach for her glass. Only white wine unfortunately, but it'd do. I looked away, reaching up to scratch my forehead to obscure my closing my eyes. I created a sight blob where it could see my victims clearly, and an NP-fingertip. When her glass was a couple of inches away from her mouth I moved the fingertip to the glass's top rim and pushed it downward. A substantial proportion of the wine immediately poured onto her neck and down the front of her blouse. I'd overdone the push, as apparently it doesn't take much of a tilt to produce a lot of spill. In the ensuing scramble to dry her front, somehow Mr. Annoying's glass got knocked over so it spilled onto his crotch. I canceled my special effects and turned to look at the chaos with my own eyes, as was everyone else on my table. I joined in with their laughter, which was probably rude of us, and therefore perfectly fair and reasonable. Lily clapped her hands together in happiness, saying, "Very funny, Mark." #3: #5: Alexis asked, "What do you mean, Lily?" #1: #2: Lily answered, "Mark do magic. Like at my home." Everyone looked at me. God knows what they were thinking, but they were worryingly not laughing at Lily's ridiculous comment. I shrugged, saying, "Not me. I wasn't even looking at them when it happened." I'd looked away so the Annoyings wouldn't suspect me, even ridiculously, and get riled enough to cause a scene. That gave me a very good excuse to use now. I added, "I'd be curious how you think I achieved that, especially with a broken leg and hand?" "Magic!" Lily unhesitatingly declared. "It's nice you've got so much confidence in me, but I think you might have overrated me just a little bit this time." Alexis and Pat had lost interest in the topic, but Lily's confidence in her silly magic belief never wavered. It wasn't possible to prove that I couldn't do magic, so I let it drop. Lily was in a funny mood already, even before my magic trick. She was very, very happy; laughing and giggling at the slightest excuse, smiling broadly all the time, and generally acting quite unlike her normal self. Call me egotistical (you'll have to, because no one else will), but I'd initially thought it was happiness over seeing me alive and comparatively healthy, but I'd soon seen that her happiness wasn't about my return. Who in their right mind is happy at the start of Exam Week? Sometimes I don't understand girls. Our conversation returned to the non-magical, Julia telling me, "Your point about their using you for entertainment was a good one. I hadn't thought about it in that way before." "I agree it was a cute line, but I don't think it's particularly accurate. People seem to think they've got an inarguable right to barge into my life just because I'm a little bit famous, totally without regard for my feelings and despite my loudly telling them to go away. People don't treat normal entertainment like that. They'll form orderly lines to buy tickets, leave if the venue staff says it's full, and generally behave sanely. But somehow it's okay to be obnoxious to another person just because he's been in the news, even if he didn't want to be. It looks like our visitors are about to leave." Our neighbors had dried themselves somewhat, and were in the process of leaving their table. That'd been what I'd mostly been after, as I hadn't wanted to sit through their glares during our meal. I resisted the temptation to yell something after them ("Nice to talk with you," or "You look like you've pissed your pants"). It'd probably be best to say nothing. They left without incident. During the rest of our meal we discussed today's and tomorrow's exams, then something much more appealing: our plans for summer. Julia told me, "Lily's going back to Hong Kong right after exams. She'll find a good cellphone for Carol and send it back." I remembered the model number of the phone that Carol had gotten in 3B, so I said, "Lily, I know what model number and - more importantly - what color to get. The next time a waitress comes past I'll borrow a pen to write it down. That'll make it easier for you." "Thank you." "Ahh, Mark," said Julia. "We should get her a phone that suits a girl. It'd be better if Lily chooses it." "SURELY you're not implying that I don't understand female fashion, are you?" My attempt to control Julia through shame totally failed. She said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply it; I wanted to be explicit. You have many wonderful skills, but understanding fashion isn't one of them." Thereby confirming by long-held suspicion that girls' dedication to fashion is greater than their sense of shame. "Let me make two predictions. First, I'm going to write the model number and color down and give it to Lily. You can google it when you get home and I'm confident that you'll agree with my choice, whereupon I expect some appropriately humble apologies, preferably involving sex. My second prediction is based on my extensive knowledge of female fashion trends, which Julia will be forced to confirm I have in an hour or so. This summer the fashion will be for girls to wear extremely short miniskirts and tops with very low-cut necklines. You should all make sure you have plenty of outfits like that, and that you wear them whenever you come to visit me." My important clothing prediction wasn't taken seriously. The cellphone prediction would soon prove itself, but I was sad the clothing one was dismissed. Not long before we left, I was wondering about Lily. She had me puzzled; by which I mean she had me even MORE puzzled than normal. She was still in a very happy mood for no reason that I could see, and she hadn't once offered her services to me; not even to wash my car! I wouldn't dream of calling her for a quickie at 1am during exam week, but she didn't even say her version of "Normal service will resume shortly." It was as if her serving me had never happened. I knew Chinese took education very seriously, but I'd thought she'd taken serving me very seriously too. In front of the other girls I sneaked up on the issue, asking Lily, "When are you going to Hong Kong?" "Saturday." "This Saturday? The day after exams finish?" "Yes." "Why so quick?" "Father and Mother want." "Oh. How long will you be away?" "Don't know. Father and Mother say." I decided not to ask my sex-slave about serving me again until after she returned from Hong Kong. During the meal, I'd kept Carol well supplied with drinks so she'd had to go to the bathroom at some stage. When that had happened, I'd briefed the other girls with what I wanted. It was time for my little plan to be acted out. I stood saying, "I'll go pay the bill." Pat said, "Hang on, Mark. This time you've got some competition. I nominate Carol as the most beautiful person here today. Who votes for Carol?" Everyone immediately put their hands up, except for the flustered Carol. I said, "Looks like you're paying, Carol. I'll lend you the money if you don't have enough." "Umm, thanks. But why did everyone vote for me? Was that just to get out of paying themselves?" "They always vote for me, so they never pay themselves anyway..." Julia preempted my next sentence, "We voted for you because you're the most beautiful person here. It was very simple." "But I'm not! All of you are..." Julia declared, "Who votes Carol is the most beautiful?" Everyone put their hands up again, except for the blushing Carol. I passed her some money, saying, "Go pay the bill, beautiful." When Carol was out of earshot, I said, "That worked well. Thanks everyone." "It was very sweet of you," said Pat. "We were happy to help." We walked or hobbled out, as appropriate, going in various directions at the front door. Lily gave me an unusually demonstrative hug, happily saying, "Thank you very much." She'd said it with far too much emphasis and happiness for it to be about the cheap meal I'd paid for, so I asked (if in doubt about what a girl means - not an infrequent occurrence - ask. If you're lucky, you might understand the answer), "Thank me for what Lily?" Lily gave me a particularly happy smile, declaring, "Everything!" She gave me another squeeze, let go, waved to everyone happily, and then skipped off still happily, but somewhat confusingly. After saying goodbye and good luck to everyone else, the four of us walked to Ava's car. Carol said, "I can't believe they voted for me. They were all..." I interrupted, "Hands up if you can believe they voted for Carol." "{Giggle}," from Carol. Then, "But they..." I interrupted again, "You might as well leave your hands up everyone. We'll look silly walking along with our hands in the air, but at least it'll stop Carol coming out with more of her silly protests. When you got dressed, did you look in the mirror, Carol?" "I'm not beautiful. Not compared..." "Carol, what do you think your chance is of convincing me that you're not beautiful? And while you're thinking about that, we're going to put our hands down to stop people looking at us like we're weirdoes." Carol made one more attempt, but I told her, "Give it up. I know you're beautiful and everyone else agreed with me. You might as well be arguing that Julia is taller than Ava. You're denying an obvious reality, so no one's going to believe you, and neither should you." That took care of that. Carol had made more drama out of it than I'd expected, but I don't expect girls to do what I expect, so I wasn't surprised. I am concerned about that sentence making sense though. Ava dropped us all off at my home then she drove straight to her place to get back to her studies. Before we went inside I said, "Carol, you spent a lot of time worrying about your clothing before dinner. In case you think that dinner counted as our first date, it did not. When our first date happens you will know it. It'll be just the three of us, and we'll be concentrating on our relationship. It won't be with a bunch of other people who are mostly interested in catching up with me. And you'll be dressed up VERY specially for it, but with any luck that won't be something you need to worry about because I'll try to buy the dress for you tomorrow afternoon." It had occurred to me that I knew what the design was and what store 3B's Julia had bought it from. I could get Carol's dress size from the clothes in her closet, so there was no reason I couldn't try to buy it myself. "You?" asked two surprised girls. I suspect surprise wasn't the only emotion they were feeling either. Also concern, amusement, skepticism and others. "Yes me, the guy you have so much faith in. I don't know whether I'll see something I'll like, but if I do, I'll buy it for you. I want you to have at least one VERY fancy, high-quality dress for very special occasions." Julia impressed me with her diplomacy, "You know how much I enjoy shopping, so please let me come with you?" I couldn't resist saying, "It's not worth bothering you, Julia. It'll only take me a couple of minutes to pop into a store and choose a dress. You know I like to shop quickly." I enjoyed watching both girls wince. To make it even better, this Julia had never had a reason to point out that particular store to me, so she had no idea I knew about it, or that she'd bought the dress she wore to our first date from it. I could almost see both girls decide, "Oh well, we'll hang it at the back of the closet and forget about it." We left Carol at home, then I drove Julia back to her place. On the way Julia asked me, "Are you serious about buying Carol a special occasion dress?" "I'm serious about trying to, although I don't know whether I'll see one that I like. I'm not going to buy just any old dress. It's going to be pretty expensive and one that she's going to be wearing to several special events, so it'll be part of her important memories." Julia is going to regret that she ever told me how much fun psychological torture is. She tried a different approach, "Wouldn't you be more comfortable having me available to give you a girl's point of view?" "No thanks. I'm perfectly capable of giving a few dresses a quick look and deciding whether I think any of them would suit Carol. How hard can it be to buy one dress?" "Do you even know what size Carol is?" "Sure. The top of her head comes to about here on me," using one hand to indicate Carol's height, which even I knew wasn't the dimension that dress sizes measure. "I'll manage fine, Julia; I know what I'm doing." Julia winced again. One of my minds couldn't resist adding, "You've trained me well." I wish I knew whether the dress was in stock, because then I could've pushed myself WAY out on a limb. With some highly excessive preparation, my delivering a dress they both loved would REALLY twist their minds. Not being sure about that, I let the subject drop without managing to get in any more good digs. In our study, I got Julia to find out her ring size. She had several questions, but I just said, "The three of us can't wear traditional engagement and wedding rings because they'd cause too much curiosity and questions, so I'm getting non-traditional rings. Yours and Carol's are the same, mine is different, and that's all I'm saying." Julia ignored my last statement, asking me several more questions. To her considerable frustration she found out nothing more. Julia started studying, while I googled the phone that I'd asked Lily to buy. When I found a good picture in the right color I said, "Julia, when you're free, have a look at the phone I suggested for Carol." For something as important as that, Julia was free immediately. She looked, then with some amazement declared, "That's a NICE looking phone." "Of course. It's for Carol, so it has to be good looking." Actually, that statement applies regardless of who the female recipient is, because - as far as I can tell - that's how they all value phones. "That's the color I suggested too." "Good choice. What are the phone's dimensions?" "You take over. I need to go to the little boys' room." I went very quickly, and returned via Julia's bedroom where I quickly called Mom's cellphone to get Carol's dress size. Mom didn't make too much fuss about telling me; just asking a couple of questions that I gave vague answers to. When I got back to the study Julia was on the phone. She told me, "I've emailed the web address to Carol. She's loading it now. You know that it's very embarrassing for a multimillionaire to have a dialup connection in his home." "I'll try to remember that when I order the connection for the mansion." "HA! Hang on. Carol can see the top part of the phone. She likes the color so far." To exaggerate somewhat, we got a pixel by pixel evolving opinion from Carol. After further discussions about the phone's size, what styles of clothes the phone's style would match, and other essential issues, Carol and Julia pronounced themselves very impressed by my choice. Julia asked, "Have you checked to see whether it has that bad software downloading feature Dad warned us about?" "Yes, and it doesn't. That's why I gave that model to Lily, because I am all-seeing, all-knowing and all-wise. Not often, I must admit, but every year or two I get something right." Julia passed her cellphone to me, and I received Carol's thanks and compliments for my taste. "You're welcome. It's nice to know someone appreciates my fashion sense. You may find this hard to believe, and maybe even shocking, but in the car on the way here Julia tried to talk me out of buying your special occasion dress. How unsupportive and lacking in confidence in me was that?" Carol VERY begrudgingly mumbled, "Umm, I guess so." Knowing Julia hadn't heard what Carol had said, I 'answered' Carol with, "You're absolutely right, Carol; I SHOULD choose all of Julia's clothes from now on, after all she's been choosing my ... oof." (Julia just punched me playfully in the stomach). I bravely continued, "I don't think she liked your advice, Carol. I'll put the little bully on, hang on." Julia said, "Yes, he's insane, but we're stuck with him. We're never going to get a decent boyfriend so close to summer because all the good ones are snatched up already. Perhaps he might be tolerable if we don't let him speak?" After some more almost totally undeserved ragging on me, we all got back to our studies. Playing, "Make Donna Run Around To Catch The REALLY High Baseball" had made me curious about escape velocity, so I googled that first. Escape velocity at ground level on Earth was given as 11.2 km/s (11,200 meters per second, or 25,000 miles per hour - pretty damned fast!). The baseball had weighed so little and my NP force is so great these days that I never got an accurate idea of its weight. It would've weighed considerably less than half a kilogram, which was a good enough estimate for what I was doing now. I had an NP force of about 50 kg, so could give the ball at least 100 g's of acceleration (which is close enough to 1,000 m/s/s). Using v=u+at, with 11200=0+1000t, then t=11.2 seconds. So I would have to thrust the baseball for 11.2 seconds to reach escape velocity. After 11.2 seconds of thrust the ball would be at an altitude of s=(u+v)0.5t = (0+11200) x 0.5 x 11.2 = 62,720 (63 kilometers or nearly 40 miles). Given that my maximum thrusting range was 500 feet, Donna wasn't going to lose her ball by having it escape the Earth. She wouldn't anyway, as all this was assuming no air resistance. Obviously there'd be an enormous amount of that, and there'd be no way my paltry 50 kg of push could ever get the baseball up to anything like 25,000 miles per hour. I was just enjoying doing the physics of it, and I didn't know the physics of wind resistance yet, so this was all I could do. In a few hours I'd have finished all my studying, my girls would all be busy, and I'd be bored, so I was just playing around for the sake of it. I obviously wasn't in danger of not getting Donna's baseball back, but I wondered what 500 feet (150 meters) of maximum acceleration would do to it. Using v^2=u^2+2as = 0^2+2 x 1000 x 150 = 300,000. So v=300,000^0.5 = 550 m/s (about 1,200 miles per hour). At 1,200 mph straight up by 500 feet, the ball would be pretty damned high when it slowed to zero and started falling. I wondered how high, but I got tired of ignoring air resistance as it was making everything so unrealistic. It was just as well it existed though, or Donna's ball would be going over 1,200 mph when she tried to catch it! I closed the spreadsheet I'd been using, and got on with my studying, finishing the last of my college reviewing before we went to bed. ------- Chapter 240: The Rest of Exam Week Tuesday, June 14 to Friday, June 17, 2005 I'd reached the end of my college Algebra the previous evening, and for the lack of anything better to do, had resumed studying Calculus 252 with six minds, and had started "General Physics with Calculus" (Physics 211) with one mind. I carried on with those this morning. With my reading seven screens now, I could have read enough of Calc 252 to enable me to take its exam. Counting from when I'd first started my college studies, it'd taken me four weeks to finish Algebra and Calc 251. That meant four weeks per course per screen. I'd improved that speed in several ways since the beginning, plus sleeping 1.5 hours less per morning would help too, so I figured I could sustain a rate of about three weeks per course per screen. With my allocating six minds to work on Calc 252's independent chunks, it'd take me just over half a week to finish ("just over" because the independent chunks weren't evenly sized). I could have taken the exam but Prof had advised against it as the lecturer knew I'd barely started it before our kidnapping. That would look a little strange, and there was no need to do so as I could easily take the exam next academic year. My preference for my future studying is to study seven courses at once (or eight, if I can manage that), with one mind per course, starting at the beginning of each and working sequentially through it. That'd be much simpler to manage than juggling independent chunks of widely variable sizes, and it'd save having to get the lecturers to identify the chunks too, especially because some courses may not have them. Thus every three weeks I'd be starting seven or eight new courses. The start dates would be ragged, but that wouldn't matter. Prof had recently arranged for my computer account to have access to every course in the Math faculty, rather than just the ones I was formally enrolled in. Theoretically I could've started studying seven courses right now, except for one problem: Calculus 252 was a prerequisite course which was needed for several later courses. That's why I was concentrating six minds on it now, both to get past it quickly, and because those minds didn't have anything else they could do. There weren't many such prerequisites so it wasn't a significant problem, and it'd be much less of one when I was enrolled in the Business Administration degree because I'd only be trying to do four courses in each degree at the same time, and I'd be able to allocate any 'blocked' minds to the other degree until the blocking prerequisite was completed. I practiced Active Centering, but the new and interesting material caused me to lose center about every ten or fifteen minutes, which was annoyingly often. I could have gotten all of my minds to Actively Center, which would've reduced the frequency of sight blob cancellations, but I thought the annoyance worthwhile to help train each of my minds into improving their active centering skill. All of my minds doing Active Centering at the same time is much effective than it might seem, as follows: One mind was losing center every ten to fifteen minutes (call it ten minutes, or 600 seconds), and it took him less than a second to get it back, so the odds of him being out of center is about 1-in-1000. If we all Active Centered, the chance of us all being out of center is NOT (1/1000)^8, which would take so long our Sun would blow up first. The problem is that if one mind lost center, he wouldn't know he had, because if he's distracted from maintaining center then he's also distracted from noticing that he's not centered. It might be several minutes before he realizes that he's been distracted. It was much better for us to train ourselves individually. I stopped studying about 3am, so I could again try to find a solution to the superimposition problem. I played around with that for half an hour, achieving exactly zero progress at handling superimposition. Which forced me back to the idea of trying to 'display' the two images side by side in my brain. That required the image from my eyes to be moved sideways, with the image from the sight blob moved sideways the other way, to occupy the other half of my brain's internal 'screen'. After another half an hour I'd achieved exactly twice as much progress as for the previous attempt, in that both sideways compactions had achieved zero progress. I stopped to try to think of a better approach. I realized that my two eyes should theoretically produce two images that superimposed. They obviously don't, so there must be a brain mechanism that merges the two images together. I got momentarily excited, until I realized that whatever the brain did to solve that problem almost certainly did so using the fact that the eyes were in the same fixed positions all the time, which would make combining the two images together very simple. That mechanism wouldn't provide a solution for eyesight and a free-moving, nausea-producing, sight blob. It did give me the idea of permanently stationing a sight blob in a fixed location, and living through the chaos until my brain got used to it. Ideally the blob would be looking backward, if only so I wouldn't get 'accidentally' hit by any more footballs thrown by asshole jocks. The non-overlapping fields of view of my eyes and the backward sight blob would produce the maximum possible chaos, but I remembered seeing somewhere that some birds had fields of views for their eyes which were much more to either side than for humans, giving 360 degree vision with almost no overlap. If a bird's brain could handle that, my brain should be able to. [[Predators (e.g., cats, hawks, and in evolutionarily terms, humans) have narrower fields of view to get plenty of binocular overlap, the better to catch their prey. Prey animals (e.g., horses and herbivorous birds) have wide fields of view because they'd very much prefer to get warning of a predator's attack. A few of the prey animals that spend most of their life with their head down (e.g., probing mud with their bills) even have their eyes slightly more to the rear of their head than the front. Having their eyes to either side, and with little or no overlap, most prey animals can control their eyeballs independently, much as I could now, although I only had 160 degrees of vision because of my eyes being recessed into my skull.]] I created a sight blob at the very back of my skull, looking straight back. Whoa! What a mess! I got up and walked around very cautiously. It only took a few seconds for me to give up on this idea. Birds that had 360-degree vision can't have the two images superimpose the way mine was now. They must have a 'screen' in their brain with the left and right sides being for each eye, with almost no overlap in the middle, if any; whereas I have almost a 100% overlap and superimposition. It was bad news to try to work with. What I needed was a larger 'screen' in my head. I heard somewhere that the visual processing area of human brains was quite large, so I'd have to grow a sizable lump on my skull to accommodate all the extra brain matter, which wouldn't be an attractive look! I decided that being able to see backward wasn't worth destroying my sex-life. If I wouldn't (more likely couldn't) grow an extra visual processing center, then I needed to compact more information onto the existing one, which took me back to today's square one. I shut my eyes and created two sight blobs, to see if I could compact one sight mechanism (just blobs) easier than two (a blob and an eye or two). I created the blobs where my eyes were, just a fraction forward so their front surfaces weren't buried. It created an image in my brain that was no different from that of my real eyes, which surprised me, as I'd expected two overlapping superimposed images. I wondered whether that meant the input from the light blobs was being sent to my optic nerves in some way, so the brain thought it was coming from the eyeballs in the usual way. I can block pain, which travels down nerves, so maybe I could block sight from my real eyes by blocking the optic nerve. That'd let me see nothing with them, even when they were open, so I wouldn't have to worry about people seeing me shut my eyes when I used a sight blob. I canceled the sight blobs and reopened my real eyes. Then I simply ordered them to see nothing, in the same way as I simply ordered myself not to feel pain. Everything went black, which immediately made me realize that I should've thought about the danger of not being able to turn them back on again. I ordered them back on, and was quite pleased that they did! I went blind again, then created a sight blob. Proximity told me that it created all right, but I couldn't see anything with it. I ordered one of my real eyes to see again, which gave me both the eye's and the blob's vision. I couldn't use the "Go Blind" command to keep my eyes open while using a sight blob because it made the sight blobs blind too, but this experiment had provided me with a little more information about how this stuff worked. I couldn't think of a use for it, but it still felt good to learn anything about this stuff. I had the idea of checking whether a sight blob could have a wider field of view than my eyes did. I knew of no reason why a sight blob couldn't see in every direction at once (admittedly, I didn't know how they saw at all). My immediate thought was that seeing in a sphere would be impossibly confusing, and that too many things would become too small to see clearly because all the extra field of view would cause a great deal of compaction. But then I realized that we probably see nearly half a sphere already. A field of vision that was 180 degrees left to right, and top to bottom, would be half a sphere. We can't quite see 180 degrees horizontally and even less than that vertically, but the total field of view is easily more than a third of a sphere, so call it about 40% of a sphere. A compaction of 2.5-to-1 didn't seem like it would be too hard to get used to, provided I wasn't trying to identify something in the distance, which I usually wasn't. If I created a sight blob slightly larger than my head, with my head in the middle of it, then I should be able to see in every direction at once from a familiar perspective. I was safely sitting down, so I gave it a go. I shut my eyes and created the sight blob. It worked fine. The strangest thing about it was that it didn't seem strange. A very wide-angle lens on a camera produces a very weird and unrealistic looking image. This didn't have that extreme distortion, so it looked far more realistic. If I hadn't known the shape of the room I'd almost believe I was using my normal eyes in a room larger than this one (the door appeared smaller, which implied it was farther away, making the room seem larger). There were a few problems though, like my knees and feet looking too far away; my shoulders angling forward sharply on both sides, and my seeing four walls. I got up and walked around. That was WEIRD! I turned my body 180 degrees according to my body, but my sight rotated only half as far. When I walked toward walls they 'came at me' nearly three times as fast as my instincts told me they should, which was scary and disorienting. It was not a comfortable experience, and I could easily imagine that it'd be very awkward in a moving, crowded environment like school. I had NO hope of playing soccer this way. However, I could imagine getting used to it. It would take at least several hours, and maybe even a few days, before I could operate comfortably, but I could imagine it happening. That was an improvement over superimposed images, because I didn't think I'd ever be able to function comfortably with them. It definitely took some getting used to, because when I turned to walk back to my chair, I didn't turn enough. I'd seen the chair to my hard left; what appeared to be about 75 degrees left, but was actually almost directly behind me. I turned my body 75 degrees, but the chair wasn't where it instinctively should have been. I canceled the blob and opened my eyes, walking to the chair normally. That'd been a digression, as I'd been intending to find a way of handling two simultaneous sources of sight. It was interesting, but I had no intention of doing anything about it. 360-degree vision was cool, but the adaptation period would be a bitch, everything appearing smaller would be a nuisance, and having to walk around in mirrored sunglasses all the time would be unfriendly and pretentious. While I'm digressing, here's another one about absolute or relative positioning. Most of the time when I'm using my special ki-effects, I'm positioning them absolutely, in other words, not relative to my body. For example, when I am flying an item with NP, if I step forward all my NP-points don't 'step forward' with me, leaving the item to crash to the floor. Or if I'm flicking off a light switch with NP while I'm walking, I don't have to think about correcting for my walking speed. I simply send the fingertip to the light switch. But when I was walking around with a sight blob on my head, the sight blob stayed in fixed position relative to me, so constantly changed its absolute position. Neither absolute nor relative positioning required any conscious effort from me, not even to choose which one to use. The ki-effects automatically use whichever location system is most convenient, which is very helpful of them! [[Our subconsciouses have both positioning routines very well developed. You can direct your hand to pick up something from a table as you walk past (absolute positioning of your hand) just as automatically and thoughtlessly as you can unbutton your shirt as you walk around (relative positioning of your hand). My subconsciouses knew how I wanted the ki-effects to behave, so they moved them appropriately. If I'd been a dentist, I also would've been able to use mirrored positioning too, as my brain would've developed those routines through so much dentistry practice.]] I got back to my intended experiment, closing my eyes and creating two sight blobs where my eyes were. That gave me normal-seeming sight. Then I moved the blobs, which immediately looked decidedly un-normal and very disconcerting. I spent some time trying to get that to work comfortably. The main problem was that my brain insisted on 'projecting' the two images onto the same 'screen' with a great deal of overlap, even when they were looking in totally different directions. I'd never had that trouble when independently controlling my eyes to look hard left and hard right, but I was sure having it now. [[Independently controlling my eyeballs didn't change my field of view at all, it just meant that I was closely observing two different parts of it. What I was now finding disconcerting about the light blobs was that I had two fields of view that were changing independently, including moving differently.]] I tried various things for quite a while: Trying to send all the input to just the non-overlapped left and right edges, even though that'd cause terrible compaction. Or having the two sight blobs somehow send their image to the non-overlapping left and right sides of a third sight blob, which then sent its picture to my brain. I couldn't get anything to work practically, so I eventually gave up and went back to studying. I'd learned a little bit, but had made no useful progress. Two sight sources still caused superimposition, which required an impractical level of concentration to work with even when the images were still. Moving one or both sight blobs made it even worse. What I wanted was something that resembled having two TVs side by side, so I could see both pictures clearly and easily. Instead what I had was like one movie screen with two projectors shining different pictures onto it, one slightly offset to the left and the other to the right, so with a 90% overlap in the middle. [[The problem was that the eyes/brain connection is too hard-wired; it's largely done in hardware rather than software, so I couldn't consciously control it. Not only hard-wired, but in a VERY complex way. It's nowhere near as simple as each eyeball pixel is sent to a fixed location on the brain's screen. Instead a great deal of pre-processing is done long before the image reaches the screen. The color channels are separated out, brightness and shape information is coded separately, etc. All sorts of multi-channel interrelated information is sent to the screen. Plus the contents of the screen are also constantly modified by our subconscious expectations, memories, hopes, etc. Trying to change all that was NOT going to happen from thirty minutes of thinking about it!]] ^ The exams were all good subjects today, so they went better. I did have one minor problem in the college Calculus exam - one of the questions wasn't solvable with what I'd read. I wrote a note in my answer book, "This question is not solvable using the material from the online lectures," then left some blank space. I had plenty of spare time at the end of the exam, so I went back and had a go at it. I knew most of what I needed, and was able to work out what I thought the likely method was. I described my guesses, so even if I was wrong I might get some partial credit. [It turned out that I'd guessed right.] I had three exams today, so no time to go to the stores afterward to find Carol's dress. I did the next day though (I'll skip the intervening 24 hours, as nothing of consequence happened, including more failures to improve the usefulness of sight blobs). On Wednesday afternoon, I returned the jeweler's sizing rings, telling him the girls' ring sizes. He returned my watch, telling me that he had the proportions of the gold mix worked out so the color of the cold gold would exactly match my watch face. "You got a female to check that?" "Two of them, after you made such a point of it." The rings would be ready the middle of next week. The dress store was my next call. It'd been two months since Julia and Carol had bought that dress in 3B-land. That fact combined with all my knowledge of the female fashion industry left me with no idea what the situation might be now. I was hopeful though. If you'd seen Carol in that dress, you'd be hopeful too. I started looking around the store for it, but was soon approached by a saleslady asking if I needed help. I guess not many 15-year old boys buy cocktail dresses, or if they do, they always need help. I said, "A couple of months ago I believe you had a black dress that was backless and almost frontless too. It had two straps that tied around the neck and expanded going down the front with silver threads in them..." I gave a little more of the description until she remembered it. "Ahh yes. Unfortunately we don't have it in stock anymore." #8: #7: We all agreed that it was VERY disappointing. The saleslady tried to get me interested in the classy dresses that they did have, but there was NO WAY I was going to make a decision like that! I knew why I liked 3B's Carol's dress, but I was sure there'd been dozens of other factors the two girls had carefully considered before they'd bought it. If I bought another revealing dress I'd probably get laughed at because everything else was wrong. I refused to even look at her suggestions, instead turning to leave the store. The saleslady called, "If I phoned around I might be able to track one down. If you're certain you want to buy it, I could do that for you?" I'd stopped, turned to face her, and was no doubt smiling happily, if not lasciviously, so my answer was obvious. But just in case she was blind, I said, "Yes please." I told her Carol's size and she started calling around some of the other stores in the chain, finding a store that had it on her fourth call. I had to pay a courier charge, but I would have happily paid a hundred of them. She also told me the price for the dress, and I was MIGHTY glad I wasn't paying for a hundred of those! I promised to pick it up Friday afternoon, making a mental note that I needed to do something about increasing my credit card's limit. I had time to go to the bank to withdraw the necessary cash. The bank manager saw me, giving me a disdainful look. I guess being the publicized sidekick of a gambler involved in criminal activity, even as a victim, hadn't done my reputation any good. It probably wasn't a good idea to ask him about raising my card's credit limit. I'd ask Mom to do something about that. [She later got it raised to $2,000, based on their incomes, their having just under $1 million in the bank (they'd paid off their mortgage) and their guaranteeing my debt. Which avoided my having to write "Schoolboy and Professional Gambler" under "Occupation" on the application form.] I'd spent a couple of nights at Julia's, so I had to spend a few nights at home, as this Mom wasn't trained into being as permissive as the last one. Not yet anyway. So I'd be sleeping in my little, single, lonely bed for a few nights. That I slept for only 2.5 hours didn't make any difference; I still went to sleep and woke up alone, and that's what mattered. I goofed around with Donna for a while again, and spent some time helping both girls with their reviewing. Prof called to see how my latest OSU exam had gone. "Aced it no worries Prof. This may sound arrogant, but exams are a total non-issue for me now. Provided there's a right answer - which in some subjects is a vague concept - and provided it was mentioned in the lecture notes, then I'll know it. There was one question in today's exam that wasn't covered by the online notes. I think I worked out how to answer it, but I had to guess." "That's one of the risks of your studying the way you do. Students should attend lectures, with the online notes supplementing that, so the lecturers' digressions often don't get recorded. If you only had one such problem, that's not too bad." I didn't say, "It might stop me getting 100% though." That was too arrogant, I thought, even though I was hoping for it. Math exams don't have much writing in them, so my single writing hand wasn't a limiting factor. By having two teams of four minds playing leapfrog, each team had three hours to answer 1.5 hours' worth of exam questions, and it had four minds to do them with. I'd be VERY surprised if I made any mistakes at all, especially because we'd had time to finish the exam, then review all the answers with the teams swapped. Prof said, "Vanessa and I should be coming home Friday." "That's great! You must be sick of that place by now." "You can say that again! It'll be nearly four weeks. I enjoy reading, but I've done enough of that to last me for a while. Speaking of reading, how's that new computer system of yours working out?" "Excellently! I'm screaming through Calc 252. I'll have that finished by the time you get home..." Prof couldn't help interrupting in surprise, "Even in the middle of exams?" "You saw me catch up on all my schoolwork in the hospital. I only had to finish off the two college courses and that didn't take long. I'm glad I've got the new courses to read, or I'd be getting very bored because everyone I'd normally socialize with is busy doing the usual last minute study. I showed my computer system in use to Mom, Dad and Carol. They were blown away..." "I bet they were. I'm looking forward to seeing that myself. They must have had some questions about that?" "Yes, especially as I showed them a couple of other things that you and Vanessa already know about. I'm hoping to have a meeting of the four parents soon after you come back, to discuss the situation." "I think that's a very good idea. I'm looking forward to that too." "I'll have a talk with you and Vanessa about it when you get back, and then we'll set it up." My pre-meeting talk with Prof and Vanessa was to make sure they'd support the Genetic Hypothesis explanation of my abilities. Julia had already told me they favored that explanation, but I wanted to make sure they'd speak up in support of it. I was seriously tempted to get Carol to visit my room just before bedtime, as I'd done while seducing her in 3B-land, but it wouldn't be good to get her so worked up she couldn't sleep. I'd do that after her exams had finished. ^ Thursday evening Dad removed my casts. We did it in the garage so the mess of the crumbling plaster wouldn't matter. Mom hovered nervously, worrying about Dad cutting off even more pieces of my anatomy. I was tempted to tease Mom by suggesting Dad remove my leg cast with his hand-held circular saw, but Mom wouldn't appreciate it. My hand cast was removed first. I flexed my fingers several times without any problem. None of them fell off, which was good. I said, "They all seem to be working fine. Wait a minute; I think there's something wrong. Oh dear, they're no good for doing chores anymore." Dad laughed, but Mom wasn't amused. Dad asked, "Take your leg cast off?" "Yes please. The sooner the better." Dad grabbed the big metal cutters he'd brought home from work, and he went to work. (You gotta love the English language sometimes. I'll tell you when, because it hasn't happened yet. As I've mocked "work", Dad's being about to separate me from my cast reminds me of "cleave". How could we have a language so illogical that a word - "cleave" - can have two meanings that are direct opposites of each other: "attach" and "separate"?) As had been the case with my Biff-broken arm, my leg muscles hadn't atrophied at all, so it looked ready to use. I was considerably more nervous about testing my leg than I had been my fingers, as that bone breaking again would be a much uglier event. I bent the knee back and forth a few times, and nothing went wrong. It hadn't been the knee that'd been broken, but I wanted to make sure that the lower-leg didn't wave loosely in the breeze. I used my fingers to carefully feel along the bone concerned. I couldn't feel where the break had been. Just like my arm break that I'd gotten from Biff#3, there was no lump of bone like there should be where a broken bone heals. I didn't know why, but my broken bones seemed to heal without that lump. Even without the expected lump, the bone did feel encouragingly solid and secure, even when I pushed it hard. I put the foot on the ground and slowly transferred my weight to it. Nothing snapped, which I considered good news. I was surprised how nervous I was. At times like this you really wish you had an X-ray machine at home, because I would have much preferred to KNOW that the bones were fully healed, rather than just think they were. I successfully got all of my weight onto that foot. I wasn't brave enough to hop up and down on it, but walking was something I had to try. That also went well. "There's no pain or any other signs of trouble. I think I'm up to chasing after pretty girls again." Carol was inside the house, otherwise I wouldn't have said that. I hadn't gotten around to finding out whether she and Julia had covered that topic yet. I had been thinking about going for a run when I got the cast off, probably taking Donna along with me. I hadn't done any exercise at all for a month and I felt a little stir crazy from going without. I was pretty sure my body didn't need exercise anymore, but I still wanted to get out and do something physical. I was also eager to find out what my optimal running speed was now. My body felt more energetic, so I was hoping for a significant improvement. I'd like to be able to run faster, especially as I couldn't fly, dammit! But now that the cast was off, I was too scared to try running. I'd wait until next week before I tested my leg by pounding my entire body weight on it repeatedly at high speed. It was REALLY disconcerting not actually knowing whether my leg was fully healed or not. I was supposed to text Sensei to tell him whether I'd be training on Monday, but I decided to wait another day before doing that. When Mom gained enough confidence to stop fussing, she passed my crutch to Dad, saying, "Put this in storage somewhere please Steven, for the next time Mark gets himself injured." I would have taken exception to that, but I had to admit that I'd been getting in quite a few scrapes recently. I didn't expect to need it though, as I was now vastly more capable of defending myself than before. A 112 pound NP-fingertip through an eyeball and into the brain, followed by an NP-blending for the rest of the two seconds before it canceled, would be a very effective defense - if anyone was foolish enough to deserve that much "defense". I regretted - yet again - that I couldn't fly, because another defense would be to pick up my assailant. Holding a guy just one inch off the ground would be all it'd take to render every non-gun physical attack impotent. Accelerating him 501 feet upward would work very well too. Unfortunately, I thought it unlikely that any future assailants would weigh less than 112 pounds. I thanked Dad for his help, then headed into the house to show the girls that I was castless, and to have a decent shower; not at the same time, unfortunately. ^ Friday was last day of exams (yippee!). Most of them had been so easy that doing them had been tedious more than anything else. Even the soft subjects' exams had been far easier than in previous years because of all the in-built help I had now. ------- Chapter 241: Prof Is Welcomed Back to Corvallis Friday, June 17, 2005 (Continued) After the last exam (yippee again), I headed to the store to pick up Carol's new dress. I'd been worrying that the saleslady might've remembered the wrong dress, or there might've be a dimensional difference, or some other problem, but I was very happy to see that it was exactly as I remembered; which meant it was the exact same, because I remembered it VERY well! I got the nice saleslady to remove all the tags so it was ready to wear, then she wrapped it up for me and I very happily paid for it. I'd been internally debating how best to unveil Carol's dress. Obviously as soon as possible, but otherwise how? It needed a special occasion, and the most appropriate one was our having our first threesome date. I even decided to make it a dinner back at the same restaurant where I'd first seen Carol wearing this dress, as that seemed appropriate too. Even better, as there'd be no Cindy with us this time. Prof and Vanessa were driving back this afternoon, arriving sometime after 5pm. That meant there'd be no opportunity for the date before they arrived, and not this evening either as Julia definitely wouldn't appreciate my taking her out on a date within minutes of her parents returning. Which left a problem about where to store the dress until the date. Carol had to get dressed in one of the two houses, which meant that some parents might see it, and they're going to notice that there's a noticeable lack of front. Prof and Vanessa were obviously the safest parents, so I'd store the dress in their house, and try to have a conversation with them as soon as I could after they returned, to feel them out on "The Carol Situation". Mom and Carol had done the cooking for an informal "Welcome Back" dinner at the Williams'. I'd encouraged Carol to help as she needed to learn more about cooking; it was only fifteen months until we'd be leaving Corvallis, and somehow I couldn't imagine Julia doing much cooking in our life. [[It turns out that I'll be doing a lot of the 'cooking' now, which is a very unexpected development.]] The dinner is just for our two families, with the rest of Prof's would-be visitors requested to visit on the weekend. Given the publicity about his Binion's win, Prof is going to have a busy weekend with well-wishers, the curious, and the money-hungry; and I'm going to stay well away from the place to avoid being sucked into any of it. Upon his arrival, it was great to see Prof getting around normally, rather than walking around a hospital in his robe. Prof appeared to be fully healthy. I knew his organ functions still weren't 100%, and often well below that value, but they were all performing well enough for him to have a bounce in his step and smile on his face. It was VERY good to see! In return, he said it was good to see me without my casts. One of the first things Prof wanted to do was see me use my new computer system. Vanessa seconded that motion, so most of us went upstairs, Donna and The Boys excluded again because I was going to do my eyes-shut thing again. The wall my desk faced seemed almost totally covered in panels, so the initial sight of it impressed them. I'd been cautious about what I'd said back in the hospital, so Prof and Vanessa knew I could read seven or eight screens at once, but not how. I minimized the existing windows so I wouldn't lose my place on all of them, opening up eight more browser windows into which I put random Algebra lectures. I showed them how the special keyboard worked, initially using my fingers so they could see what I was doing, and then with NP. Then I got them to stand to either side of me as I started reading all eight screens at once. As had been the case with Julia, the first few seconds had them making "I'm impressed"-type sounds, as all the screens scrolled down at different rates. Then Vanessa looked at me, closely followed by her asking, "Why are your eyes closed, Mark?" "Because it's easier for me to read eight screens if I close my physical eyes. They're too slow for this kind of work." They had some follow-up questions. Julia laughed at her parents' growing amazement, as I repeated the explanation I'd given my parents. As I'd done with Mom and Dad, I let Prof and Vanessa get the idea that my mental sight was anchored in my head like real eyes were. There was no real point in them knowing the full details, and I worried about the potential loss of privacy making them uncomfortable. Plus Mom and Dad were in the room, so I couldn't come out with a different story now. [[Prof and Vanessa wouldn't have feared for the loss of privacy, as they believed that I was a moral boy, even though I was boinking their daughter and several other girls. Dad wouldn't have cared much, except on Mom's behalf. Mom would've been uncomfortable.]] I was pleased that Carol didn't let the cat out of the bag (or "eyeballs out of the sockets"). She looked a little uncomfortable when she knew I was deliberately misleading the parents, but she didn't comment. Back after I'd finished my first demonstration to my parents I'd realized that there was a flaw in my explanation about how my new sight worked, as it didn't explain how I saw where the kidnappers' keys were hanging. I deliberately didn't raise that example of my new sight in action during this demonstration. None of the parents had yet asked for the details of my escape. The most I'd said to them so far was that I'd gotten us out by improving my abilities, so if they asked for more details, I'll say I used the improved two seconds cancellation limit on NP-fingertips to feel around, and had found the keys by touch. If they ever caught me out on my 'simplification' about how my new sight worked, I'd use the excuse that I wanted to save them from worrying about their privacy. That even had the advantage of being true. There were a few little differences between my demonstration to my parents and to Prof and Vanessa. The latter pair took my word that I could read with my eyes shut, not needing me to prove it. Vanessa only needed a couple of minutes before she said, "What a pity you can't teach that to blind people." To be fair to my parents, Prof and Vanessa had known I had special abilities for several weeks, compared to my parents not having any prior warning at all. Prof didn't take long to ask, "If you can learn from all eight screens at the same time, does that mean you can consciously think about eight different things at once?" That was getting scarily close to the fundamental truth about how my minds worked, but it would be very hard to explain how I learned stuff without that being the case. I certainly couldn't say I simply saw it and absorbed it somehow, because that wasn't "learning". So I admitted, "Yeah. I've been working hard at getting in touch with my feminine side, because I've heard women say they're much better at multitasking than men. Eight's my limit, so does that make me as good as a woman?" Vanessa said, "You're getting close. Keep trying." Prof said, "I'm trying to imagine what it's like to have eight distinct, conscious lines of thought going at once. Is it like there are eight of you in your head?" I'd thought this question might come up ever since I showed Prof the piece of paper with eight screens drawn on it, but there was no possibility of me not upgrading the computer, and no possibility of keeping it secret when I did, so I had an answer prepared. I'd even realized I should keep it short, to avoid my tendency to be verbose when I'm lying about something serious. "No. They would have eight different memories, which wouldn't be practical when two prerequisite courses are needed to study a third. I can't say I understand what goes on in my head, but I think it's just slightly better than what everyone else can do. Everyone's brain can think of several things at once, such as talk with someone, recognize more people approaching, worry about having enough food in the house for Mark's dinner, keep track of the time, admire Julia's latest new dress, etc. I think my IQ allows me to be slightly more conscious of all the different things I'm thinking about. I'm pretty sure other people have no hope of doing this," I held up my hand and created a light blob in it, "but I wouldn't be surprised if some people could learn to read two or more screens at once. It just needs an increased awareness of something we're already doing." [[In most w-dimensions, there's currently only one single-minded human who can read from two books simultaneously with excellent comprehension, and he's a "Rainman" type of savant, so has a very rare brain. The skill isn't as easy as I made it out to be.]] My answer didn't enlighten anyone, but it did kill off the idea of my having eight minds. It pretty much ended my demonstration too, so we headed downstairs for dinner. While that was being laid out, I quickly took Donna to my study to show it to her. The Boys had seen it before so they didn't need to come, but I didn't want Donna to feel too badly excluded. I did explain that some of the things I'd said to the parents were the same secrets I'd scared her about when I'd talked to Mom in Dad in Julia's bedroom. Donna was reasonably okay; not great, but okay. I was happy enough with that. Dinner was meant to be a casual, low-key event, but it was a very happy one because everyone was so happy to have Prof back, all the kids were happy that exams were over, and all the parents and some of the girls were happy that I was so impressive. It was a very enjoyable dinner right up to the time that Prof couldn't resist making a little speech praising me. In the presence of Donna he was careful with what he said, which made this the first time I was glad Donna's immaturity stopped our speaking openly, but it was still something I very much could have done without. Comments about how I'd saved his life immediately reminded me that I had NOT saved the life of 3B's Prof. It is EXTREMELY uncomfortable receiving praise for something that you failed terribly at, causing deaths and enormous grief and misery to loved ones. I had previously decided that it was impossible for me to explain my feelings at times like this, so 3A took over while 3B retreated internally. When I had my turn, I (a member of 3A) replied, "Being rescued seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm regretting that our rescuers removed Prof's gag. I will say a few words in reply though. From the four days we spent chained facing each other, I saw what style of nightwear Prof prefers. I don't know how I could respect a man who wears pajamas with little pictures of space rockets all over them, but somehow I do." (Prof being so short, he wears boys' pajamas to bed. It's one of the ongoing jokes in his family, as they all keep their eyes open for silly sleepwear to buy for him.) -- "I can't imagine anyone getting us through that ordeal as well as Prof did. Obviously any female would've snapped from being unable to go shopping for four days and not having a cellphone to gossip on, but even among guys, Prof was exceptional. He kept his head the whole time and he carefully planned what we should do. I'm sure he saved our lives." I truly WAS sure of it. If I'd had to make all the decisions (say because Prof had been unconscious), I would have killed the baddies earlier, depriving us of that essential drink of water. Without that we both would have been in serious trouble by the time of the déjà vu. I almost certainly wouldn't have been able to think clearly enough to discover sight blobs and to get hold of the keys, so we would have died where we were. If I had eventually managed to get the keys, Prof would most likely have died anyway, if not in the basement then in the hospital when several of his organs failed. -- I continued, "But what made the biggest impact on me was toward the end when we'd both lost hope of getting out. Prof's attitude was loving and thankful, when all I wanted to do was rant and rave over the unfairness of it all. The last day was horrific but also beautiful in a very weird way, because of you, Prof. I'll never forget the wonderful way you rose above your despair, and you'll be serving me as a goal for the sort of man I want to grow into for the rest of my life." -- Prof tried to respond to my response, but I cut him off with, "No, no; you've had your turn already. And don't go getting big headed either, because you're certainly not perfect, especially your sense of timing. How could you start a speech of appreciation to a guy before he's had his second helping of dessert? That's just cruel, especially with Donna's eyeing it the way she is. I declare speeches over with and dessert resumed." Several more people had things to say. In fact, more people gave speeches than didn't, proving that my list of special abilities did not include making my declarations stick. I consoled myself by fairly sharing the remaining dessert with Donna; I got two-thirds of it. A much more enjoyable topic - than being the subject of speeches I mean, not desserts; there are very few more enjoyable subjects than desserts - was a talk about the mansion-buying situation. Mom and Julia, with Vanessa helping at the end of a phone, had already decided on the short-shortlist of four properties. The architect had already provided a rough report about what renovations each property would need to have done to meet our requirements, with time and cost estimates for the jobs. That'd been finished about a week ago. It was time to pick one! That was women's work, of course, so it'd been held up until Vanessa returned to Corvallis. Mom had brought the four sets of information up to Seattle and had gone through it with Vanessa and Julia. They were pretty sure which property they were going to choose, but they wanted one last visit to all four before they finalized their choice, and then Vanessa would act as our Negotiation Agent. One of Vanessa's areas of interest is "The Ethics of Business Negotiations", so she knew a thing or two about negotiating. More good news was that Vanessa had plenty of time available as the academic year was over. She and Prof would be going into OSU to catch up on some of the work they'd missed, but it wasn't going to be even close to full time so mansion buying should progress quickly. The women wouldn't tell us which of the properties was their favorite. We had to "wait and see" some more. Hopefully we'd be waiting and seeing quickly though, as their final inspections were being done on Sunday. With two families moving into the same house - or three really, as accommodation was needed for Julia, Carol, Ava and me as another 'family' - the decision about which house to buy was far too complex to even pretend that the men had any ability to contribute usefully. The women were 100% serious about that! They'd pick their favorite property and Vanessa would negotiate on my behalf - I was the one who'd be writing the check, although I was underage so my parents would be countersigning the contract. When the negotiation was finished, and the contract signed, including a clause that the sale would be conditional on my approving the property, THEN the men would be allowed to inspect it. If I approved, then the sale would move forward. I told Vanessa, "There's no chance at all that I'd ever be so silly as to disagree with you, Mom and Julia over what house to buy, so the last point's unnecessary." "It's useful as a negotiation ploy. You'll see it happen at the time." "Okay." That was the end of that topic, so I raised an issue while everyone from the two families was here, "Prof and Vanessa, how do you want to answer people who're going to be asking us about how we earned the money? The LA cover story is dead, so what do we say to replace it?" This had been discussed more than once in small groups, but this was a very good time to get the final decision, where everyone could hear it, and with the deluge of visitors and socialization about to start. Prof explained, "The only two ways we could've won on the second spin, when Ted Binion picked the numbers, was by luck or by cheating. If we tried to claim we knew what we were doing, people are going think we're either liars or cheats, neither of which we want. We have to say we went to Vegas and got lucky. When people ask us why we lied about making the money in LA, we can say it was to try to avoid the attention of criminals who didn't believe it was luck and who wanted to steal our secret method. People can hardly accuse us of being unrealistic about that. You can tell them we should've lied better than we did. -- "Most of the money is in your name because so much of the capital was yours. You can honestly say that you put up considerably more than any other person, if you consider than Vanessa and I each put up $25,000. You've already been telling people you earned $6.7 million, so now just say that's what your share of $11.1 million is. If people ask how much money you put in, or where you got your investment from, or any other questions like that, just tell them it's none of their business." "So the cover story is basically NO cover story. That's good." Mom was listening, so it was a good idea to sound like the truth was a good thing. "Some people are going to be annoyed that we fooled them with the LA story." "I don't think it matters much if some of your classmates or other students get angry at you, especially because it'll be three months before you see most of them again. The only person in your life that I can think of whose anger might matter, is your principal. He's got some power over you, but he's already got his bosses looking over his shoulder so I doubt he'll cause trouble. If he does, we'll worry about it at the time." Not long after we'd been rescued, I'd had the idea of telling all the kids from school that we'd put the money in my name to protect Prof, so I could keep him safe by serving as the bait instead. That noble idea had appealed to me, but Prof's honest approach was cleaner and probably better in the long run, even though it wouldn't make me look good in anyone's eyes. #5: #1: "Simple works for me. Are you going to have any troubles because people know you gambled?" "Nothing of any significance. Everyone I work with knows me well enough not to put too much weight on it. There's also the fact that if you get $6.7 million of the winnings, which is fractionally over 60%, then Vanessa and I presumably put up only 40% of the money. Everyone knows we started with $100,000, so they'll think Vanessa and I put up less than $40,000. That's not an outrageous gamble for a one-time shot. If some people insist on looking down their noses at me, I'll cheer myself up by contemplating what Vanessa and I can do with the million dollars you gave us. There's no real problem." Several times throughout the dinner, I'd seen Prof smile to himself. At the end of dinner he provided the explanation, "I can't stop thinking about how fast you can study now, Mark. I used to be very impressed when your computer had two screens, but you've blown that out of the water now. With your intelligence and learning rate, it's incredible to think what you might achieve." #6: Prof's statement got Julia and Vanessa raving on the same topic. Fortunately it didn't last long, because Julia said, "We'd better make sure Mark's study in the new house is private. Anyone seeing him study is going to be far too intrigued. We'll need highly reflective glass and very good drapes..." That got them going on something far more fascinating than me: renovating and decorating the new house. Which gave me a chance to slip out to my car and get Carol's new dress. I took it upstairs and put it inside Vanessa's bedroom. When I returned to the dining room, Julia asked, "You were gone a long time?" It was clearly a question, which made it all the more enjoyable for me to say, "Yes. I was doing some preparations for something that you will highly approve of, but which - I'm very sorry to say - I cannot tell you about. You'll enjoy it more if you don't know in advance." It was worth the price of the dress just to be able to say that. Plus it was worth at least twice the price of the dress to see how humbled the girls are going to be by my choosing a dress as good as they could choose themselves. Not to mention that the dress is worth ten times the price of the dress for how much I love the sight of Carol in it, so I was doing VERY well out of this. After I had smiled evilly at Julia's frustration for long enough, I put on a formal voice and requested, "Vanessa, may I have a private word with you please about something that I wish to keep secret from Julia?" "Argh!" (That was from Julia, not Vanessa.) Vanessa answered back equally formally, "Certainly Mark. I would be happy to help you keep a secret from Julia." "Thank you, Vanessa. Can we adjourn to your bedroom for a few minutes please? It is quite a big secret and it needs a considerable amount of conversation in order to maximize its impact on Julia." Vanessa and I left the room, while almost everyone chuckled behind us. In her room, I showed Vanessa the dress, explaining as I did so, "It's for Carol, not Julia. However the tease is still aimed at Julia. I told her that I was going to buy Carol a special occasion dress. Julia expressed a somewhat impolite degree of skepticism about my ability to do so. I know that dress is very sexy and therefore very much to a boy's taste, but I have very good reason to believe that both Julia and Carol will like it very much. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing Julia eat humble pie when she's forced to take back her less than subtle insinuations." Actually Julia hadn't been as bad as I was telling Vanessa, but she had been about my planning the wedding, so I was using this as partial revenge for both. Of course I knew that I'd be completely hopeless at dress buying or wedding planning normally, but I wasn't going to let that spoil my fun this time. Vanessa carefully said, "This is a very beautiful dress, but not the sort of dress I would expect a boy to buy for his sister. Plus I'm surprised that you felt comfortable buying a dress for anyone." "Yes, I'm sure you are. Although I would hazard a guess that you might not be quite as surprised as you should be, if Mom has called you in the last few days to ask you whether you know anything about what's going on between Carol and me?" Vanessa smiled and nodded her head in confirmation at my guess. I continued, "There are some changes happening. From my accelerated studying ability through to changes in Carol's relationships with Julia, Ava and me. I'll be having a talk about that and some other things with you, Prof, Julia and Carol in a few days, once you're settled back in and have got the time. Then we'll have a larger discussion a few days later by adding my parents. There's no time to get into any of that now..." #8: #4: #8: " ... What I want your help for Vanessa is first to hide the dress. Julia regularly goes through all my closets so I've got nowhere safe to hide it, not even my underwear drawer, which should be sacrosanct. Second, probably after our first conversation - early next week, hopefully - I'd like you to get Julia dressed in the dress she wore on her first date with me. I'm sure you know the one I mean?" "Yes." "Then I want you to stand both girls in front of the mirrors in Julia's room, get Carol to strip down to her panties, blindfold both girls, then put that dress on Carol. That's why I particularly need your help, so you can dress Carol for me. Once she's decent, call me into the room so I can see their expressions when the blindfolds are removed and they see Carol's new dress in the mirrors." "Haha. There's going to be some interesting expressions on their faces. Carol's going to look spectacular in that dress. Are you sure she's going to be comfortable wearing it?" "I'm sure she's going to ENJOY wearing it. That's not quite answering the question you asked me, but we'll discuss the difference another day. I'll mention one more point. When Carol wears that dress her hair should be up, she should have a silver necklace and matching shoes. My plan is that we have the first of the meetings I mentioned, after which we play dress-up as I just described. Sometime in the next few days Julia has to buy those accessories for Carol. She'll enjoy it of course, but I'll tease her by telling her it's her punishment for scoffing at my understanding of female fashion. Hopefully one day in or near next weekend we'll have the second meeting with my parents, and after that Julia, Carol and I go out for a celebratory dinner, with the girls wearing their two special occasion dresses." "I'm looking forward to hear what it is you're intending to celebrate?" "Yes, I imagine you are. I can think of two or three things you could easily guess it to be, but I'll wait for our first meeting before I tell you which it is. I'm guessing this weekend will be a bit chaotic for you, but if you and Prof can find a couple of quiet hours for the first meeting early next week, I'd appreciate that." "I'm looking forward to it," said Vanessa, looking very sincere. Which was great, because chances are that she had an accurate suspicion about what I wanted. The Andersons left fairly early, so the Williamses could catch up with each other properly. Carol and Donna both volunteered themselves to return home in my car. Donna rushed ahead and was waiting beside the front passenger's door for me to get in and unlock it, relegating Carol to the backseat. This Donna had been trained that if I was with Julia, then Julia got the front seat, but as far as Donna knew, she and Carol were equivalent, except that Carol was slower. I could see that Carol was disappointed, so I gave her a shrug to let her know that I was too. It'd probably be best not to make an issue out of it now. It'd be easier after Donna sees the wedding. On the way back, Carol said, "I was just thinking about how excited Vanessa and Prof are about how you study, Mark. They treat it as very important, and they should know. You're going to have an amazing life, aren't you?" I thought of a nice thing to say, "With your help, I will Carol." "Ha! I'LL have an amazing life with YOUR help, but you'll have an amazing life regardless of me." I was caught completely flatfooted by the surprisingly logical zinger, and was still trying to think of a comeback when Donna asked, "If Mom and Vanessa are about to choose which house to buy, does that mean I'll get my horse soon, Mark?" I gave Donna the VERY bad news about buying houses, "Unfortunately buying houses is REALLY slow, Donna. Once the mothers choose a house, they've then got to negotiate. There's a lot of money involved, so that won't go quickly. You know how long it takes Julia to buy a new dress, so can you imagine what buying a new house is like! Then we have to wait for the people who're living in the house to move out, and then we have to get all the renovations done, and THEN we can move in. Everyone's going as fast as they can, but it takes a LONG time, sweetie." Donna was very disappointed. Carol and I empathized with her. I did some tidying up at home. I packed all my schoolwork for the previous year (Julia had cleaned out my locker) into a box that was stuck in a corner of the garage, doubtless never to be opened again as I had it memorized eight times over. I would've thrown it away but Mom insisted that I might need to refer back to it next year. It wasn't worth the argument. Back inside, I mostly goofed around with Donna. We made paper airplanes with a spare school pad, and threw them around the living room. Donna was AMAZED at how well some of them flew. Everyone else in the family got a chuckle out of Donna's happiness, once they'd realized what I was doing. I'd started it purely to give Donna a good time, but it was also a good way of showing Mom that I was both incredibly miraculous and very nice to my sisters. ------- Part 11: Summer is for Spending Time With Girls ------- Chapter 242: The First Saturday of Summer Vacation Saturday, June 18, 2005 Two and a half hours of sleep is a ridiculously short period. If I go to bed at 10pm, then it's only half past midnight when I wake up. The night's barely started and I've already finished all my sleeping. I decided to go for a run. Ever since my last merge my body had felt more energized. Not dramatically so, but it was noticeable and I was very curious about it. Now that my casts were off, and my leg seemed unlikely to break in half again (I'd take my cellphone with me just in case it did), I wanted to find out if my optimal running speed had changed. I dressed in some running gear then headed out. If my optimal speed has changed, I wouldn't be able to determine its exact value because I didn't have a measured distance to use, but I knew what my previous optimal speed felt like, so I'd be able to roughly estimate how much faster any improvement was. I ran for a while at my previous optimal speed, to make sure nothing had happened that was even weirder than my being able to run a marathon in sub-world-record time without getting fatigued. That was fine, so I sped up about 10% After a while of no fatigue, I sped up again. Then again. Then again... I started having trouble speeding up any further, and not because I was getting tired. ^ [[Sustainable running speed for short and medium distances is not limited by available energy. Long-distance runners use orders of magnitude more energy than a sprinter who runs himself into apparent exhaustion in ten seconds. Sustainable running speed for less than 20-odd miles (when "the wall" becomes an issue) is limited by getting enough oxygen to the muscle cells so they can burn the sugars stored there to extract energy from them, and by getting the waste products from the chemical 'burning' process (such as lactate) away from the cells. With insufficient oxygen or waste removal, apparent exhaustion occurs because more energy cannot be obtained until those two limits are removed. Living cells interact with ki, which is why ki is called a "life-force". Normal humans and other animals, having only one mind, receive only a minor supply of ki, which means the ki's interaction with the cells is also minor. That's not the cells' fault. Back when I had four minds, my optimal rate was determined by the speed of my body's normal physically sustainable jogging rate (i.e., how fast my body could supply oxygen to the muscles and remove their waste products), plus the additional speed gained from the supply of Universe-sourced energy. If I ran faster than my optimal speed, the energy had to come from my body, which consumed oxygen and accumulated waste products faster than my body could transport them, so fatigue built up. If I slowed to below the optimal rate, then my body's systems caught up and the fatigue drained away. My previous optimal running speed was determined by the amount of sustainable energy I got from two sources: my body and the Universe. By coincidence, they each provided roughly equal amounts. My running was previously powered half by my body and half by ki transformed into cellular energy. I now had twice as many minds and could produce four times as much ki as before, so the second factor was now four times better, so my cellular energy supply went up from (0.5 + 0.5) to (0.5 + 2.0), so from 1.0 to 2.5, a factor of 2.5. My previous optimal rate of 15.45 seconds per 100 meters was - as far as energy supply was concerned - now 2.5 times faster, so 6.18 seconds per 100 meters. Energy supply was no longer the limiting factor; instead I was now mechanically limited, so could run at my maximum possible sprinting speed for as long as I wanted.]] ^ I spent the last part of my experiment sprinting as fast as I possibly could. I kept it up for fifteen minutes with no sign of fatigue, being amazed at the improvement. I'd been hoping to be able to run noticeably faster, say 5 or 10%; but endless full-tilt sprinting was amazing. I'd been worrying about someone seeing me run so fast for so long, so I'd been running an erratic course rather than repeated laps around my home's block, and I'd also been looking around in case some curious person was following me in their car. There'd been no sign of problems, but after fifteen minutes I didn't see that any risk was worthwhile, so I slowed down and jogged for home. #1: #5: #6: #3: #4: #3: #5: #2: #6: #1: #2: We left Mom a note outside her bedroom door: Gone studying at Williams' as usual. Prof and Vanessa want me to do two degrees so don't want to lose the time because of the 'No driving on Friday or Saturday nights' rule, especially with our going to England soon. We should discuss the No Driving rule, so I know if I have to stay at Williams' those evenings. I'll call you after breakfast. Love, Mark I figured that'd guilt her into forgetting about the rule. By the way, the family trip to England was definitely on, the date yet to be determined as Mom was still arranging it with her parents. I was glad Prof and Vanessa were back in town for several reasons, one of which was that I wanted them to get some things organized for me at OSU. I'd finished Calculus 252 before the exams had finished, so I was now studying: Calc 253 and 254. They could be studied together, as 252 was the only prerequisite to both of them. Physics 211, which is fun. Math 341 (Linear Algebra). This is a second year course, so OSU's numbering system seems a little messed up. I was surprised the Math department had gotten confused between two and three. The main problem was that I was studying only four courses because I had to complete these before I could do any of the others. That meant I had to allocate seven minds across four courses, so three minds were starting in the middle somewhere. That was inefficient because they kept hitting stuff that the first mind on that course hadn't gotten to yet. What I wanted was to be able to access the BCC and Business courses. That'd give me plenty of independent choice, so I'd easily be able to find seven courses to do. After some incredibly productive studying - having eight screens more than compensated for the problems - I spent some time working on simultaneous sight blobs again (simultaneous with either another sight blob or my eyes). That was something I REALLY wanted to be able to do, but as usual, I failed to achieve any progress. So far the only things I'd been able to do with sight blobs were: Find some keys with them, which had been a MIGHTY good thing to do! Have roughly normal vision through one if I closed my eyes, which was great for looking at eight computer screens at once, or for getting a close look at something farther away. Have a 360-degree vision blob with my eyes closed. It was quite easy to do, but misleading, or very misleading if anything moved, or VERY misleading if I moved. Horribly confuse myself with superimposition if I had my eyes open or tried multiple sight blobs. It was great being able to send my vision hither and yon, but they had many annoying restrictions, especially in having to have my eyes shut to use them. After failing to make any progress with sight blobs, I spent a couple of minutes trying to think of a way of making a "Sound Blob". I could think of three possible avenues: Making what was literally a "Sound Blob", a remote ear that could send me what it heard. Using a sight blob at the remote location to see the air vibrations caused by sound, and somehow translate that into whatever the sounds were. Using an NP-fingertip at the remote location to detect the sound waves, by vibrating as a microphone does. I knew NP-fingertips were subject to wind resistance, so a zero force, max-sized, ultra-thin NP-fingertip should vibrate back and forth. Being massless, the "ultra-thin" was only necessary because fingertips had some internal flex resistance. A quick google (Julia would be proud) taught me that humans hear sounds in a range from 20 to 20,000 hertz. I certainly wouldn't be able to see or feel thousands of vibrations per second, let alone reproduce them with another NP-fingertip near my ear. That pretty much sums up the situation: sound blobs seemed to be far beyond my capabilities. I got nowhere. Julia came in while I was busy getting nowhere, which was a good place to stop, especially because we had a busy day car shopping ahead of us. At breakfast, I talked to Prof and Vanessa about getting access to the Business and BCC courses online. Prof said he'd get it done through OSU's President. Prof also explained a little problem, "The lectures you'll be reading were all for last year's courses. In the coming academic year the lecturers might make some changes, especially if a course gets a new lecturer. Obviously the exams at the end of the year will be based on the latest lectures, not the ones that are online now. Probably something like 90% of the learning would be the same though, so it'll still be worth your while studying the ones you are, but you'll have to review the new lectures as they came out. Which reminds me that I'd better make sure you get access to where the old lectures get archived, because they'll be taken down soon." "I don't mind doing it the way you described. It's the understanding time rather than the reading time that makes doing the lectures so slow. It'd be quick to read a new lecture that has 90% of the same material." Vanessa added, "We need to have a meeting with the Dean to discuss how to schedule your exams because waiting until the end of the year and then having you take something like sixty or seventy exams doesn't seem practical to me." [[Vanessa said "President" as that's the title used in this w-dimension for the top dog of a university, but I'll substitute "Dean" in this document from now on later on the actual President - of the country - features prominently in my autobiography. Having two Presidents being referred to would be confusing.]] -- "There are also potential problems with the BCC and Business courses. Math courses might be almost unchanged from year to year, but subjects like Marketing will change much more, possibly substantially. I think we should talk with the Dean, then for him to ask the lecturers for the first and second years' courses to stick with last year's material as much as possible. By the time you get to the third year courses it'll be far enough into the academic year that you should be able to cut over to the current year's lecture notes. What do you think, Mark?" This was a good opportunity to raise something I'd been thinking about. The second year college courses I'd started were looking to be no harder than the first year courses. In fact, they even seemed easier so far, which was weird. As part of convincing me to do two degrees, Prof had insisted I wouldn't have serious troubles with third and fourth year courses. I hadn't really believed him then, but I was starting to now. He'd also said my doing two degrees wouldn't freak people out too badly - not like my NP would - because super-genius was just more of an existing human ability. I'd have to tell people I only slept for three hours a night to explain how I had time to read so much, but there wasn't anything superhuman about that either, as quite a few people needed considerably less than eight hours of sleep per night. Next year at school, I'd only need one mind to listen to the teacher (actually, about one-third of a mind, because school teachers are so slow and repetitive), so the other seven minds were going to be bored stiff if I didn't think of something else to occupy them with. I could work on my college courses during school hours, but that'd result in my finishing all the reading well before the school year had finished. I said, "Let me expand on your question somewhat. I've been averaging about three weeks per course per screen just working during my early morning sessions. You said 'sixty or seventy exams'; seventy is an easy number to work with because I use seven screens. Seventy courses for seven screens means ten course per screen. At three weeks each, that's thirty weeks to do them all. Call it roughly half a year to finish both degrees. Prof's said I'll need to go into OSU for various reasons, such as Physics 211 requiring lab work and the BCC running course will require that I show them I know how to run, etc., but all of those visits will be during the day so won't intrude on my early morning sessions, so the half-year calculation stands. -- "I won't need to eat into that time to catch up with my schoolwork because I'm expecting that to be boringly easy. It was fairly easy back when I could only read two things at a time, but next year I'm going to be able to read seven and I'll only being doing one grade at school, so I'm going to get very bored if all I do is schoolwork. I'd like to do some of my OSU studying at school. I can have one eye on the teacher, and six eyes - as it were - reading OSU material. Carrying my computer system and six of those big screens back and forth to school every day isn't exactly practical. Even buying another such system for my use at school doesn't work because we change classrooms every period. I've thought of printing out OSU's lecture notes to take to school, but six piles of notes are impractical too." -- "If I don't do any college studying at school, I'll still finish the first two years of the two degrees by the time summer is over. You said that by the time I'd be ready to start the third year courses I'll be able to use the current year's online notes, but it's not going to work that way if I'm ready for the third year shortly after OSU reopens. If I can study OSU material at school somehow, then I could double the speed I'm getting through college courses, so I'd finish both degrees about two months into the year. In short, I've been wondering whether I should do three degrees next year." -- "I probably can't wait until I've finished the first two before I start the third, because looking at the way the BS is structured, it's often hard to find seven courses that I can do at one time. Presumably other degrees might be like that too, so it'd be better if I could do all three degrees at the same time, so I can get the maximum use out of my multiple-screen studying method." I had more to say about wanting to overcome the problem of how to do OSU work at school, but I had to stop because Julia looked like she was about to wet herself with frustration if I didn't let her speak. So I shut up, creating a momentary silence which Julia very enthusiastically and noisily filled. She was VERY happy with my news, and gushed about how incredible ... yadda, yadda. When Vanessa could get a word in, she said, "I think it should be easy to get your school to build a small glass-walled office in the back of a classroom for you. A six-screen computer system could be set up in it and the teachers would come to your room rather than you go to them. It's been a long time since I watched school lessons being taught, but I imagine that's doable?" "Ahh. It's not normally done that way, but I guess it could most of the time. The teachers have resources in their rooms so they can grab what they need during a lesson, but they don't do that often and they could often anticipate the need and bring it with them to my classes. The obvious exception is science labs. I'll have to go to them of course, but that's not a big deal. Would school really spring for the cost of setting up an office just for me? It'd be pretty damned expensive with all that computer gear." Vanessa said, "Between the school, the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education, OSU, your parents and us, I'm sure the money could be located, especially if we wait a couple of months before we ask them, and you've got the number of courses finished that you indicated. What did you say? 'Three weeks per screen per course? That'd be seven courses every three weeks, right?" "Yes. So twenty one courses in two months, more or less, depending how much time we spend in England." "That's roughly double what most college students do in a year, so that'll get everyone's attention." Prof said, "I've been thinking about your not wanting to finish the first two degrees before you start the third. It seems to me you should be able to do the first two years' courses of the BS and BBA," (BBA is Bachelor Business Administration) "and then starting a third degree. You could prioritize its courses so it caught up with the other two by the final exams. I'd prefer to see that you can keep up with the workload and pass the first two years' exams comfortably before trying for a third. Plus how long it takes you to do the first two half-degrees will enable us to easily work out whether a third degree is achievable by the end of the academic year." "That's fine, but I thought I'd have to wait until the end of the year to take the exams?" "You might have to, but at the least we could get the lecturers to give you some tests to confirm that you've learned the material. That's all we really need to know. We should do that regardless of whether you start a third degree or not. You'll know whether you understand the material, but OSU would like confirmation of that because it'll need to do a lot of additional work to handle you." Vanessa added, "I'm worried about burnout. You're talking about a prodigious amount of work, Mark. I thought two degrees was in danger of being excessive, but surely three must be?" "Actually, it's far easier than you think. My studying more than one subject at a time is essentially the same as everyone else thinking of multiple things at once; like this conversation, keeping track of the time, planning what you want to do today, and huge numbers of other things that everyone does simultaneously. I can direct those extra thought processes at a computer screen and study with them, but I'm really only doing the same amount of thinking I'd normally be doing. Maybe it's a little more focused and intense, but it's not even twice as much effort as normal, let alone seven times. It's just aimed at more productive subjects. I'm more worried about getting bored than getting tired. Provided I enjoy the courses it'll be fun rather than work." Andrew said, "If you take all your exams at the end of the year, you'll have something like a hundred of them. Doing three, 3-hour exams each day will take thirty four days. That's nearly two months if you take the weekends off. That wouldn't be practical, would it?" "I could probably do six exams a day. That halves it to seventeen days, so three weeks, more or less." Andrew exclaimed, "You could do six exams a day, day after day for seventeen days! If I tried that, I'd end up in a padded room." "It's easy for me. My memory has gotten so good that I'm not bothering to take notes anymore. I'm memorizing the lectures as I'm reading them, so I won't have to do any reviewing before the exams. And doing the exams themselves is much less of a worry when you know you've got the whole subject memorized." Prof said, "I must admit to being very curious about your two college results. They'll be a good indication." "Yeah, I'm curious too." Robert said, "What bugs me is how it can be physically or mentally possible for you to study from seven computer screens simultaneously. Leaving mentally to one side because I'll never understand your intellectual ability, how is it physically possible to read seven screens with two eyes?" Prof and Vanessa looked at me to answer, so I said, "All the screens are in my field of view, so I just have to be able to concentrate on them individually, which makes it mainly a mental process. If you could think of seven different subjects consciously at the same time you'd probably find it quite easy too." "I doubt it, but I'll take your word that you do." I said, "That reminds me that if we can get that little office built, it'll need to have wooden sides and only glass to the front, otherwise my classmates are going to see me studying six screens at once, and that's going to cause too much talk. I'd rather keep that as low key as possible." #1: #3: Julia asked, "You haven't said what you want your third degree to be?" "Ideally another BS but in Physics. Can someone do two BS degrees in different subjects, Prof?" "It's unusual, but it happens sometimes and is perfectly valid. Physics would be a good choice for you." Back in Seattle, when we'd first talked about my doing a second degree, I hadn't pushed Physics as a possible choice. But since then I'd gained motivation from my failed experiments in getting multiple sight and sound blobs working. Not only because I'd like to reverse those two failures, but also because they highlighted that I had very little understanding of my abilities, and it'd probably be a good idea if I did something about that. Since I'd gotten back home from the hospital, I'd confirmed that I could study seven subjects at once and cream exams, which gave me the confidence to suggest a third degree now. I could see Prof understood why a Physics degree suited me, but I don't think Julia had worked it out. The Boys had no idea since they didn't know I had any special abilities. The only weird things they knew about me were that I: had independent control of my eyeballs, had a bizarrely high and flexible intelligence, had cost them some money by learning 8-ball astonishingly fast, and could run a marathon faster than the world record - none of which explained an interest in Physics. Julia said, "You're already doing a science degree, so wouldn't it be better to get some balance by doing a BA or maybe Law? There are many Arts courses that could be of use to you, including several of Mom's." "And I might do some of them, because every degree allows or requires a few extra courses outside of its main subject. Or I presume OSU would let me audit them if I wanted to, or Vanessa could simply bring the notes home for me to read. I want to do Physics. It's my second favorite subject close behind Math and I'm interested in several areas of physics." I used a couple of NP-fingertips to squeeze her nose, to remind her of my abilities. "Oh. Okay." Julia agreed, as it's hard to argue with a nose squeeze. "I'm trying to imagine what you're going to be doing in five years," said Andrew. "I haven't got a hope of guessing that, but I'm sure it's going to be something very impressive." "That's for sure!" agreed Julia. "I don't even know where he's going to go after he graduates. THREE degrees! That's amazing. A normal person would be thirty by the time they'd done that, but he'll only be sixteen." Prof corrected, "With cross-crediting, especially in the two BS degrees, it's more likely to be nine or ten years work, Julia, not twelve." "Twenty eight then. Even though you've watered down my story, that's still very impressive. The kids at school were very impressed by Mark doing two or three college courses. Two or three degrees is going to blow their little minds." Vanessa said, "I doubt they'd grasp it, Julia. But if they did, it'd most likely frighten them off. You might want to stick to your current story that he's doing a BS in Math. That's enough. You're not going to gain anything by adding more, and you could cause trouble." "You're right, Mom." The rest of our breakfast conversation was less insane. I phoned Mom when it was over. She told me I needed to work on making my attempts to manipulate people more subtle, but she agreed with my note, so the "No Driving on Friday and Saturday Nights" rule was officially canceled, after Mom warned me to be careful of drunk drivers, because that's what moms do. Prof and Vanessa were going to have a busy day with visitors, so I wanted to escape in case I got roped into "What's it like to be tortured?" and "What's it like to think you're about to die?" conversations. They'd remind 3B of the horrible disaster that'd happened in their dimension, so we very much didn't want to sit through polite conversations about it. Julia grabbed her car notes and we made an early departure. During the drive home, where we'd kill the hour or so until the car lots opened, I abided by my decision to tell Julia everything that I could, so mentioned that my marathon time was now about half an hour faster. "WHAT! Did you say 'half an hour'? As in thirty minutes?" "Yep. That's getting reasonably impressive, isn't it?" "Weren't you already fifteen minutes under the world record?" "Something like that, yeah." "So now you're forty five minutes under?" "Thereabouts. I went for a run this morning, before I came to your place. I didn't have a measured distance so I only estimated my speed, but I should be able to do a marathon in about one hour fifteen minutes or so." Julia just shook her head. She was amazed and thrilled by my doing 50% more degrees next year, but reducing the world marathon record by another 25% didn't mean much to her. Nor to me either, come to that. We chatted with my family for a while. Donna had her running club, Carol was doing something with some of her friends from school. Mom and I briefly discussed my studying, confirming that it was okay for me to drive back and forth any time, provided I assured her I'd keep my eyes open for drunks who would otherwise try to ram into my car. I told her that I might do a third degree next year, but we wouldn't decide on that for a few months. It was too uncertain to catch Mom's attention, especially as she was more than a little focused on and excited about choosing our new home tomorrow. Dad was spending the weekend on odd jobs to get our house ready for sale. Apparently having a million dollars in Mom and Dad's bank account didn't free Dad from having to work his way through a long list of home-handyman jobs: re-hanging a door that didn't close properly, fixing a power outlet that'd stopped working, LOTS of painting, etc. He booked me in for helping him most of Sunday, so apparently having over four million dollars in my account didn't exempt me either. Speaking of money, on our way to go car shopping, we went via an ATM to get a printout of my account balance. We wanted a much better level of service today, especially for test drives. Julia had suggested showing them my account balance might noticeably change their attitudes to us. I was still dressed like a male porn star though, because Julia wanted them to misbehave first, so we could use it against them later. Julia even had her hair in pigtails. She was so short and slim she looked like she was twelve. I was already feeling pity for any salespeople who treated her that way. We started by spending some time finding the right sunglasses for me. I wanted a pair that was dark enough for me to close my eyes without anyone being able to tell, in case I wanted to use a sight blob. If I could get a computer system set up for me in a school classroom then I'd need the glasses at school, but there were bound to be occasions before then. On my very next visit to the Aquatic Center, for example. Checking out the women's changing room was absolutely obligatory. We didn't need #8 (the pre-merge #4) to point that out, because we all thought it. Apparently buying sunglasses isn't easy. All I wanted was a very dark pair that covered my eyes as completely as possible. That eliminated the vast majority of the possible choices, so it should have been easy to pick among the comparatively few remaining models; you'd think, wouldn't you? Fortunately Julia found an acceptable pair in the third store we visited. She wasn't very happy with it, because my requirements prevented me from being as stylish as she wanted me to be, but she had to accept that my requirements were actually REQUIRED, as opposed to how cellphones or cars were chosen. By the way, stylish sunglasses cost an absolutely ridiculous amount of money! Especially because Julia wouldn't let me look in Kmart for a pair, even though I was pretty sure they'd have them for one hundredth of the price I paid! Car shopping was more fun. Julia enjoyed letting the salesmen dig themselves into a nice hole (it was mostly men that mistreated us), whereupon she'd track down their boss and bawl him out for the rude, condescending, arrogant, appalling service his staff gave us, telling me to show them the bank statement I just happened to have in my wallet. We got dramatically improved service after that, although Julia told them it was extremely unlikely we'd want to do business with such an unfriendly, poorly run company, especially because their car had several aspects to it that we didn't like, and if the salespeople were this obnoxious, the mechanics had to be even worse. Their asking price was far too high too. I started enjoying the game almost as much as Julia, to the extent that I was disappointed whenever we got a salesperson who was cooperative right from the start. There were also a few lots that didn't have their top of the line model in stock, Corvallis being too small. There was no Lexus dealership in town, for example. The Toyota dealer became a lot more cooperative after we bawled out their sales manager and showed him the bank statement I fortunately had with me. Apparently Lexus cars are made by Toyota - something I hadn't known, but Julia did. She was well prepared. To my surprise, I was rarely recognized as the "Kidnap Boy", and the few times I was, it was only after I'd shown them my bank statement. I think it was my porn star clothes that had them fooled, because no schoolboy in his right mind would dress this way. We got a mid-morning call from Carol, "We're starting to get phone calls from some of the girls from school wanting to catch up with you. What do you want us to say?" "I'm going to be busy all weekend, so just take names and numbers I think, thanks. No doubt Julia will want to plan something, so we'll get back to them early next week." Then I remembered about managing expectations, so I added, "Carol, cross out that 'early next week' part. Just thank them for calling, say we're busy, and that we'll get back to them when we can. Okay?" Car shopping with Julia was far more enjoyable than clothes shopping. My doing three-point turns in a luxury car were far less demeaning than my giving twirls. After we'd finished our first pass through all the car lots in Corvallis that we wanted to visit, we went back to Julia's where she made me google for the contact details of the car models we (i.e., she) were interested in that weren't available in Corvallis. The several companies we called to ask them to arrange a demonstration for us in Corvallis weren't very cooperative, much preferring for us to come up to Portland. It was less than an hour and a half's drive away, so we decided to do that on Monday. Julia and I were vaguely discussing the various things we wanted to do over summer, so Julia could enjoy making more detailed plans about them, when Prof found us. "My Department Head just called. He's got the results of your two exams. Would you like to know them or wait until they're put online on Wednesday?" Julia answered for me, telling her father what he was expecting. I nodded, rather than committing suicide by teasing Julia. "You got 100% in both courses." "WHEE!" declared Julia, giving me several celebratory kisses. While enjoying myself, I couldn't help think that if school rewarded high grades with kisses from sexy girls, they'd get much more effort out of their students. For a fraction of what the school presumably spends on encouraging its students, it could hire a team of gorgeous hookers who 'rewarded' male students in accordance with their final grades. The female students could be motivated by clothing vouchers. After a few kisses Julia said, "You're not surprised?" "No, I knew you'd kiss me." It was safe to tease her now. "With your GRADES!" "Oh, those! No, not really. I kind of expected that." "Why didn't you say anything?" "And look silly if I made a mistake in some of the questions. No thanks. Besides my hopes counted for nothing." Prof said, "Even knowing the subject inside out, it's difficult to avoid making any mistakes in six hours of exams, so congratulations." "Thanks." That's all I said. My eight-screen study computer had already caused too many conversations that were edging close to my having multiple minds, so I wasn't going to explain that mistakes were very unlikely. Most of the time I had four minds working on answering each question, then four different minds reviewed the answers. That pretty much guaranteed there wouldn't be any mistakes. "It's a very good indication of your capabilities for your future studies. It's only two courses, but it's a very good start. Vanessa's very happy, and the Dean will be too when he finds out." "Good. Especially about Vanessa, because I want to keep the cook happy." I wasn't eating here today though, as Prof was still getting visitors. Julia and I would be sneaking out to escape to my home shortly. At home I told my family about my two 100% results. Mom and Dad congratulated me. Carol wanted to give me a kiss (or kisses), but I had to keep that tame. It was too early to do much of that in front of our parents. Donna being the Donna she was in this dimension - her sexual fuse not lit yet - gave me a congratulatory punch on the arm. Her Karate was coming along well, but fortunately it was just a polite punch. My school results were still a week or so away. Amusingly, they were the results that Mom was most interested in, whereas Prof and Vanessa didn't care much about them, compared to my college results. That was a good example of how the two sets of parents had different perspectives; one long term that accept the reality of my uniqueness, the other short still bogged down by normal expectations. Over dinner Carol mentioned, "Some of my friends from school are meeting here at 1pm tomorrow, and then we're going to the Aquatic Center. Some of them are CUTIES Mark, so you might want to be shirtless and sweaty when they arrive." #4: Mom laughed, then added, "It sounds like you're trying to lead Mark astray, Carol. Right in front of Julia too." "Good girl," praised Julia. "See if you can get them to change into their swimsuits while they're here and show themselves to Mark." "You really don't mind?" asked Mom, rather foolishly in my opinion. Or perhaps "foolishly" is unfair, as she just hasn't been trained properly yet. 3A haven't been pulling their weight in this dimension (except that they provided the body, which I guess is all of the weight). Julia answered, "If I didn't mind, I would've merely said something noncommittal. I ENCOURAGED Carol because I positively approve. I won't be here when they come, but if I was, I would encourage them too. I set up the pipeline system to make it easier for Mark to have dates with more girls, and I think it's excellent that Carol is helping." I could see Mom frowning, ready to make a negative comment of some sort. I remembered that REALLY bad argument we'd had in 3B-land when Carol had offered to shoot herself to resolve this problem with Mom. I was about to speak up to say something to defuse the situation, when it occurred to me that it might be better to let that happen, because it taught Mom a very good lesson, and it ended up making Carol very happy too. Plus it even got Dad to start giving his opinions more in family disputes. And then I wondered whether it would happen. In 3B-land, Carol, Julia and I had already been married and then Julia created the pipeline scheme, whereas in this dimension the pipeline scheme was before the marriage, which hadn't even happened yet. Those changes created a lot of doubt. Further thought scared me even more, because if I did what had worked best in 3B-land, which was to let Mom get very upset, then it was too easy to imagine her forbidding the marriage. It was probably best to defuse the situation rather than risk letting Mom blow up badly. I said, "Mom, do you believe that Julia's creating the pipeline system, or Carol's wanting her cute friends to see me, is because I'm arrogantly or selfishly demanding that they do those things for me?" Mom hesitated, not being eager to answer what was obviously a loaded question. Clearly no one thought I was arrogant or selfishly demanding, both of those behaviors being about as far away from my personality as it's possible to get. Mom's hesitation was enough of an answer, so I continued, "If I was misbehaving in those ways, you'd have every right to take me to task for it. Otherwise what you're doing is imposing your views on how relationships should operate onto Julia's and my relationship. Imposing your views on someone else's relationship isn't moral. Giving advice if it's asked for would be fine, but going much beyond that is morally wrong. Second, Julia and I will be leaving Corvallis in just over a year, so your stopping us now won't have any effect in the long run. Even if you think we're wrong, it'd be smarter of you let us make a mistake under your nose so you can be on hand to help fix things up afterward and make sure we learn the right lessons. Third, your believing you're right won't convince Julia, Prof, Vanessa, me or Carol that you are. All that'll happen is that we won't be impressed by your not seeing the big picture. Lastly and very importantly, you're a very good mom most of the time, but it's clearly poor mothering for you to project onto our relationship your fear that Dad will have an affair with another woman." That little bombshell pretty much blew Carol's Cuties off the dinnertime conversation list. Dad laughed at the idea until he saw Mom's face, and he stopped laughing. After a little back and forth between them, aided by some more sharp prods from me, such as my insisting that Mom had been worrying about it their entire marriage, they decided they needed privacy. They went to their bedroom for a talk, which was okay with me because it meant less competition for seconds. It'd probably be good for them to talk about their relationship too. When the kids had privacy, Carol said, "Wow. You blew Mom away with that. How on Earth did you know she'd been so worried about that?" "A number of reasons. One of them was how unhappy she was about the pipeline scheme. Mom's normally pretty permissive, tolerant, and rational after she's had time to think about something, but she was repeatedly unhappy about the pipeline, so there had to be another reason. It was obvious as soon as I started thinking about what the other reason could be, because all the Anderson men are unbelievably sexy, haha." I was surprised by how surprised Julia was with my joke. She started going on about my amazing new attitude, etc. Rather than having to sit through that, I interrupted, "Carol, you know Dad was a something like the school Casanova when he met Mom, and he had to convince her to take his interest seriously. His backsliding must have been something Mom worried about, especially because he likes to flirt around with the ladies when they're at social events. He only means it in fun, but it may not have been a good idea. They should have discussed it years ago." "Dad hasn't had an affair though, has he?" asked Carol me with concern. "You shouldn't ask me that way, as if you think I know for certain. All I have is an opinion based on a guess, same as I guessed Mom's reason. I don't think he has. I've never seen any indication of it, including not in his expression a minute ago, so I doubt it very much. Pass the meatloaf please?" Mom and Dad came back in only ten minutes. Dad jokingly complimented me, "We're very impressed that you spotted how silly your mother was being, Mark." I'd been very impressed by how smart 3B's Vanessa had been to spot the same thing, although that was after Vanessa had seen Mom accept our three-way pseudo-marriage. I couldn't give credit where it was due, and I didn't want to take it for myself either, as that'd raise their expectation for how smart I'll be in the future. I was bound to fall short of that expectation, especially if it involved my being smart about a female. I couldn't resist deflecting it with a joke, "Come on, Dad! How hard can it be to see through a female's act? Females are very simple and easily understood creatures. It's not as if they're any good at deceiving guys, is it? Haha. -- "Okay, I'll admit it more like a lucky guess. Some of Mom's behavior made it a pretty easy guess though. Mom's immediate reaction to something is often emotional, but after a while she always thinks about things rationally. She was still being continually emotional about the pipeline system so there had to be a reason. I'm aware that Julia doesn't feel as secure and comfortable as she should in our relationship, so it wasn't hard to imagine that Mom had the same concern about the Anderson males' suaveness with females." In the ensuing discussion I made sure to get the chance to make one point clear to Mom. I asked, "Julia, would you feel more secure about the long-term future of our relationship, with or without the pipeline system?" Julia answered, "With it, of course. That's why we're having it." "Mom; Julia and her parents think that the best way for me to learn is by doing. Your resisting the pipeline scheme has the same unsettling effect on Julia, as Julia and her parents introducing women Dad's age to him would have on you. How about we make a deal? We'll support your decision about how many girls you want Dad to date, if you support Julia's decision about how many girls she wants me to date." Mom was not in an argumentative mood, so she accepted my statement. Not with any conviction though. It wasn't easy, but I resisted putting it any more strongly than that. I didn't, for example, push Mom into having to make a decision by telling her that I was going to screw several new girls in my bedroom over the summer. It'd probably be best not to say any such thing with the "I want to marry Julia and Carol" conversation hopefully coming up in a few days. While I was doing the dishes, Vanessa phoned me to say, "Prof and I have kept this evening after 8pm free. We can have that interesting conversation you alluded to, if you wish?" "Hang on. I'll check with Mom." Letting Vanessa overhear what I was saying, I said to Mom, "How'd you like to have the evening to yourselves? I've got some stuff I need to do at the Williams', so Julia and I will go back shortly. I could take Carol and Donna with me to give you and Dad an undisturbed evening and morning to discuss your relationship. I want to study in the morning, so Julia and I will sleep in that room, leaving Julia's room for Carol and Donna." Both girls were eager but Mom looked hesitant, so I gave her my phone for her to sort it out with Vanessa. Carol needed to be involved with the marriage conversation with Mom and Dad, but it wasn't essential to have her participate in this pre-meeting discussion with Prof and Vanessa, as I could easily bring her up to speed later. But I had no doubt she'd enthusiastically agree with what I wanted, and it'd be nice if Vanessa and Prof saw that. There was the entirely predictable, "Are you sure it's no trouble?" from Mom, and the even more predictable, unheard assurances from Vanessa, especially as I knew she wanted to have that talk. Mom hung up then gave permission. Dad reminded me, "We've got a full day's chores ahead of us tomorrow, so please come back fairly early, about 8 or so." "Okay Dad." There'd been a stack of messages for me when I'd arrived home. I'd been saving them for after dinner, so looked through them now. Alexis, Katelin and Pat had called. No call from Lily though. She had my cellphone number and could have called me before going back to Hong Kong, but she hadn't. There were calls from half a dozen other girls, but no one of any consequence to me. I was amused that none of the calls were from high-status girls such as Savannah. Doubtless they were happy at my decline in status. I called all the girls back, quickly telling them that I was busy for a few days because I was in the middle of buying a new house. They all thought it was very exciting that I was busy for that reason, so naturally (because they were girls) they all had several questions. Such as about what sort of house I was looking for, or, "I thought the newspaper said Julia's father won the money from the casino?", inquiries after my health, etc. Knowing about the peer influence status thing with girls, I said, "I have HEAPS of girls to call, so I don't have time to answer all your questions individually. I'll get some of you together in groups one day soon and answer your questions then. I'm just calling now to say I got your message and I'll get back to you in a few days." On the way to Julia's place I said, "Donna, from now on I want you to always sit in the seat behind me if the car's full please. I need to be able to see Julia and Carol easily, which I can't do if one of them is sitting behind me." The main reason was so that I could NP their lips closed if either of them seemed about to divulge a secret. "That's their fault for not getting to the car before me." Most of the rest of the trip was spent explaining to Donna that mature people didn't behave that way. We didn't have a lot of success, as I didn't have any leverage over this Donna since she wasn't after my body. That was generally a good thing, as 3B's Donna had several times been a nuisance. Unfortunately, 3B then became very depressed by thoughts of what Donna and the others in 3B-land were going through. 3A took over the driving and conversation. Donna's position in the car was controllable in the future by not unlocking the front passenger's door until she'd given up that position to Carol or Julia, so Donna could be forced to learn. At the Williams', we left Donna in the Guys' Room while Vanessa, Prof, Julia, Carol and I had our talk in Julia's room. It's not worth repeating it in full as it was pretty obvious. In summary: I told them that my nearly dying during the kidnapping made me very aware of my mortality. As the most likely explanation for my abilities was genetic mutation, we should act on that assumption. I'd heard there were places that could store sperm and other samples, so we should get samples from all of my family once Mom and Dad were up to speed, and especially my sperm. If my abilities passed onto all of my children, then the sperm could be used on hundreds or even thousands of potential mothers, but I had trouble believing that my extreme abilities could be 'reproduced' that easily. Our chance of producing special children would be maximized if Carol and I got together. That might even produce children who were more special than me if we both had the mutation. Vanessa checked what Carol thought of that. Carol blushingly made it clear that she was willing to get started immediately, both because of how special I was, and also because she loved me. I assured Vanessa and Prof that I wasn't intent on starting immediately. I even described my theory that Carol was so eager to start now because she lacked the self-confidence to value her contribution to the relationship, but in a few months she'd better understand how wonderful a person she is. Julia's answer to her being asked what she thought of it was less definite, but mostly because it would've been very difficult to be as definite as Carol had been. This Julia hadn't done anything to bring Carol and me together, as Carol hadn't come into the hot tub in her dimension-affecting too-tight swimsuit. Bringing Carol and me together now was all my doing, so Julia wasn't as enthusiastic about it as she would have been about one of her own plans. Nonetheless, Julia was very supportive, mainly because she trusted me when I said it was a good idea. In other words, it was blind trust, which was good, but not as convincing as I would've liked. [[3B's Julia had never told me all of her reasons for bringing Carol into our relationship, so I wasn't able to tell them to 3A's Julia, leaving her less motivated.]] I explained how Carol's inclusion would provide Julia with more security in her relationship with me, because of Carol's developing feelings for Julia. As an example of how well through I'd thought this, Julia made me repeat my planned "I Love My Sister Carol" speech, for when Carol came out at the start of the next school year. It certainly impressed Vanessa and Prof, and highly amused Carol. It did cause Vanessa to ask me, "So you're still going to date other girls?" My answer was, "None of the reasons for doing so have changed. In fact, they're even more important now. Neither Julia nor Carol is going to attempt to manipulate me in the ways that girls attempt to fool guys, so I'm not going to learn that stuff from them. It's even more important to me that I learn about girls now, because there are two relationships that are very important to me at stake. Plus, I'm learning a huge amount about girls and people in general from the whole process, from seeing how Julia manipulates and manages the other girls, through to having my self-confidence improved." Julia told her mom about my revelation at dinner that my mom had been harboring long-term fears about my dad maybe having an affair one day. That sidetracked the discussion for a while, but Julia used it to make the point that I was learning very quickly. In the course of the explanations, I'd described parts of the three-way marriage I wanted. I finished off that explanation, then said to Prof and Vanessa, "You're both smart enough to easily understand the importance of the potentially very, very big picture. I think you understand that the big picture will overcome the negative issue of there being incest involved, and the unfortunate consequence that Julia's not going to get her big, white wedding." Which immediately caused Julia to exclaim, "Mark's planning the wedding! MARK! He's not letting me do ANYTHING! He's even written the vows. Tell Mom the vows Mark." Whereupon Julia recited them word-perfect herself. Vanessa led quite a long discussion about my change in attitude. A month ago I resisted taking responsibility for anything, but now I'd written vows that had the girls promising to sacrifice themselves for me if necessary, and I was foreseeing consequences months ahead and I was making plans for how to get the best results from them, such as Carol's change in self-esteem and my speeches in class about her in three months. I answered, "Yes, I have changed. Facing death was part of that. The improvement in my abilities was important too, as some of my abilities are so excessive now that I have to accept that they're going to have a major impact on my life and my achievements. Another reason I've changed so much is Prof. It's much harder to explain, but when we were in trouble I wanted to wallow in self-pity, regret, and all that sort of crap. I guess the best way to say it is that Prof was a superb example of manhood, and he made me see that I was behaving like a child." I was mostly complimenting 3B's Prof, but that was perfectly acceptable to me, especially as 3A's Prof had still been superb and the two Profs were indistinguishable anyway. I eventually got to the point of the whole discussion, that I would like Vanessa's and Prof's help when we repeated it with my parents, "As Mom and Dad won't see the big picture as clearly." I might've been understating my parents' likely reaction somewhat. Before Prof and Vanessa agreed to do that, they spent a considerable amount of time grilling me. Also grilling Julia and Carol to a lesser extent, to make sure they understood what I was proposing, and how their lives would be affected by it. There were quite a few very penetrating questions from Vanessa. I had to convince them that my motivation wasn't simple lust, describe what I'd do to make sure Carol got at least as much out of our relationship as the benefit I received from her, including my listing what benefits I expected from her. Things like it being the personality that Carol would develop into that I'd mostly love came out, which required more explanation. It was very personal, especially as I was answering in front of Julia and Carol. For example, one of the benefits to Carol was providing her with safety for her subservience and embarrassment sexual kink. Explaining that caused Carol considerable embarrassment (of the non-sexual kind), even though I tried to keep the explanation as short as I could, which wasn't easy under Vanessa's grilling. In 3B-land, Julia had originally scared me a great deal by how vulnerable Carol was because of her subservience. In the weeks following our marriage, I'd learned that Carol had much more awareness and choice over being subservient than I'd thought, those thoughts given to me by Julia. I was reasonably sure that 3B's Julia had overstated the risk, possibly by mistake, or possibly not. I didn't overstate it here though, as there was far too much chance of Vanessa seeing through any such exaggeration, probably immediately. All things considered, I had surprisingly little trouble coming up with good answers to virtually all of Vanessa's questions. 3B knew how well the three-way marriage had worked, and its affects on the three of us, so that provided me with all the ammunition I needed to provide very good answers to almost everything. Carol's living in "The Mark Wing" had been mentioned, as had Carol and Julia coming with me when I started at a university in a year's time. Strictly speaking, the latter wasn't essential. We would give up on that idea if it looked too likely to expose our relationship, but I very much wanted it to happen and I knew Julia and Carol would soon hate for us to be split up. Splitting us up would be WRONG, although I was well aware that most people would consider our being together as wrong. Vanessa and Prof said they'd think about it for a couple of days, then get back to us. Seeing my disappointment, Vanessa gave me another lecture about responsibility. They WERE NOT going to rush their decision, as this was too important and there wasn't any urgency. I had to apologize. The last point before they left the room, was Vanessa asking, "Is it safe to leave the three of you alone until we give you our decision?" I quickly reassured them that I very much wanted Carol to be a virgin on her wedding night, but that wasn't enough reassurance for Vanessa. She didn't want any sex-play involving Carol until she and Prof had made their decision. We had to promise to behave, which was a bummer. Vanessa said, "Take five minutes, then come down to spend the evening with Donna." Julia and Carol spent those five minutes telling me how impressed they were by how well I'd stood up to Vanessa and Prof, and how well I'd argued my case, my silly final impatience notwithstanding. Then we went downstairs and spent the rest of the evening with Donna, interrupting it only to have a phone conversation with Ava. Donna needed some attention after being left alone so long, so we spent quite a while talking about her plans for Donna's Ducklings as Carol's Cuties' imminent visit had inspired Donna. My sisters slept in Julia's bed; Julia and I in the study bed. Julia borrowed one of those airline blindfold things from Vanessa, so Julia would be able to sleep through my turning the lights on after only 2.5 hours' sleep. ------- Chapter 243: Carol's Cuties; I Mismanage Them Sunday, June 19, 2005 I woke, got dressed, and went downstairs for a breakfast. I'd only slept for 2.5 hours, but my last meal was several hours ago, plus my body expects a breakfast after it wakes up and I wouldn't want to disappoint it. Back in my study, the first thing I did was quietly move the scrolling keyboard off the desk to put it on the floor behind one of the computers, where it couldn't easily be seen by anyone in the room, and certainly not by anyone peeking in from the doorway. It only took a couple of minutes to get completely used to its new location, after which my minds didn't have to think about how to move their fingers to do whatever scrolling they wanted. I had another incredibly productive study session, until Julia woke up, jumped out of bed, and onto my lap. She babbled excitedly about how fantastic everything was, especially today being the day the women got to choose which mansion 'we' are going to buy. I'll be the only person writing a check, but apparently that was an inconsequential technicality. It was difficult to find a neat ending point with seven screens and one Julia, so we went to wake up my sisters. One at a time, starting with Carol. We quietly walked up to Carol, then making sure I kept aware of Donna being asleep in my proximity sense, we woke Carol with kisses. It was quite weird, as 3A got excited seeing Julia kiss Carol, especially as Julia was naked. Carol had one of her big nighties on though, unfortunately. 3B told 3A: Carol was happy to be woken this way, even kissing Julia back, which caused 3A to get even more excited, and 3B to send them, Julia said sweet things like, "Good morning my lovely wife-to-be. Mark says we're going to have a wonderful life together." Carol agreed, "Yeah, I know. I was amazed by what he was telling Vanessa last night. I can't wait. I hope Mom and Dad agree." There was more like that, including Julia expressing her excitement at looking at the short-shortlisted four properties today, and choosing which one to go for. After a couple more minutes, I interrupted Julia to say, "Good morning, Donna." Donna played possum. She was facing away from me, and #8 couldn't resist announcing, "I'd better put some clothes on before Donna sees me naked." Julia and Carol were momentarily confused by my saying that while I was wearing my usual studying clothes (tracksuit pants, T-shirt and tracksuit top). Their confusion was answered when Donna immediately spun around, saying, "Good mor ... Oh." She looked disappointed. I'd been surprised by how enthusiastic Donna had been to see me naked, so that served as a warning to me to make sure I didn't do anything to encourage her totally improper feelings. Meanwhile I sternly told her, "That'll teach you to play possum trying to eavesdrop on what we were saying." "I wasn't playing possum. I just woke up." "Tsk, tsk," I said, sounding just like Mom. "You should know better than to lie to me, Donna." Apparently not, because she lied to me again, "I wasn't lying. I just woke up." It wasn't worth having a battle over it, so I just said, "I'll get a headstart on breakfast while you get dressed." I gave Carol and Julia an NP-brush on the cheek, then left the room. Vanessa and Prof were in the kitchen. Vanessa told me, "Prof and I discussed last night's topic in bed. We agree with what you want to do, and we suggest that we should be the first ones to talk with your parents about it." (Last evening, we'd discussed breaking it to Mom and Dad in a big meeting.) "Thank you very much, and I absolutely agree with your talking about it with them first. That's great." I would've been very surprised if they hadn't agreed. They'd been in favor in 3B-land, they hadn't reacted negatively during last evening's conversation, and my abilities were even greater now, especially the one they valued the most: my studying ability. I was sure that Carol and me having babies had already occurred to them, and that they were probably happy that I'd raised it - not that they'd shown ANY such happiness in the grilling they'd given us yesterday! I was very happy to have them talk with Mom and Dad first. When the girls came down, Vanessa repeated her statement about agreeing "to last night's topic" and talking to our mom and dad first. Julia and Carol were both highly appreciative, which made Donna highly curious. She wasn't too happy about not being told. When it came time to leave, Donna ran for the front seat again. Julia wasn't coming with us, preferring to come with Vanessa when they collected Mom in half an hour or so, no doubt so she could dig for more information about her parents' thoughts on the Carol proposal, so Donna wasn't going against the wording of my previous decision. Nonetheless, she would've done better to quietly get into the backseat. It was probably better to wait until after the wedding before making an issue out of it. Carol's excitement at Vanessa's and Prof's agreement had died down since the start of breakfast, but she was still clearly VERY happy. So it was probably just as well that she wasn't sitting next to me, because I could easily imagine her holding my hand, talking too much to me, or my running NP-fingertips over parts of her body which wouldn't have done anything to diminish her excitement. Given that we were about to face Mom, Carol's being highly excited would've made Mom too curious. I spent most of the trip quietly thinking, and I had a cunning idea about how to control Donna. It meant showing and explaining light blobs to Andrew and Robert, but I was pretty comfortable with that. I'd talk with Julia and Vanessa about that the next time I had a chance. It was definitely not a topic for a phone call, given our Government's predilection for spying on its citizens. One of the good things about Donna being so good at rushing, is that she rushes away too. As soon as I parked, she was out of the car and running inside, giving me time to warn Carol not to look too happy in front of Mom and Dad in case they asked why. Inside Carol reported to Mom, and I reported to Dad. Dad is not one to waste valuable time on pointless chitchat, so we were soon at work on Mom and Dad's list of handyman tasks, plus the usual weekend chores. Donna escaped to go play with some of her friends - how come that for all of my life, life has seemed easier for people younger and older than me? Vanessa and Julia arrived soon after we started. They didn't waste time chitchatting now, as they were in a hurry to find something to spend a few million dollars on. Hopefully less than $2.5 million, or the balance would be coming out of Julia's money. I forgot to remind them of that before they left, but I would after they returned. [I did too. Julia said she certainly hadn't forgotten. My laying down the law had made a strong impression on her.] I used to be so uncoordinated that I was almost a danger to myself and others, but these days I'm very coordinated, quite strong, don't get tired, and I quickly understand whatever it is that Dad wants me to do, so I'm much more useful. We made very good progress all morning, until Carol called us in for lunch. The first of Carol's Cuties arrived early, toward the end of lunch. She was cutely flustered to meet me, which I quietly enjoyed. She'd ostensibly come to spend time with Carol, but she hung around the table looking at me. Carol had finished her lunch, but Cutie#1 was in no hurry to leave the room. I thought of sitting Carol on my lap and cuddling her. I knew Carol's friends would think I was wonderful for being so nice to my sister (whereas guys would immediately think "SEX!" because that's what guys do). The Cuties not thinking like that made it a good way to impress the panties off them. There was only one Cutie here though, so I should save that tactic for later. Which made me worry about whether I'd get a chance to do it later, as the girls would probably go to Carol's room, especially if they wanted to get changed into their swimsuits to show me. I certainly hadn't forgotten that possibility, but I worried whether Carol had. That gave me another idea: that I should be in Carol's room with her on my lap with most of the girls, and when they were ready to start putting on their swimsuits, Carol should invite me to stay and watch. I'd be a gentleman, saying something like, "Thank you Carol. All of your friends are very pretty and I'm sure most boys would love to receive that invitation, but I will leave the room because some of the girls may not be comfortable with my seeing them get changed. I'll wait in my room until you're all ready to call me." I could ham that up with all sorts of extra crap. I'd learned from Julia that the easiest way to get girls to throw themselves at me was to pretend to be above such motivations. Then I wondered about how the girls were going to get from here to the pool. Presumably some would arrive on bikes, and some get dropped off by their parents. Should I offer my services as taxi driver (specializing in bikini-clad girls) or not? If I did, that might cause them all to arrive without transport in the future. Having twenty-odd girls all needing transport would be a pain, especially if it was eating into time when I'd rather be doing something else, as opposed to chores like I had now. I suspected that I should've thought about all this before, and discussed it with Carol too. It was a bit awkward now, especially with Cutie#2 riding up the drive on her bike. I made two mental notes: When an event is worth planning, it'd be a really good idea to do so before it starts. Events which included several cute girls who might put on their bikinis for me are top of the list for being worth planning. I consoled myself with the thought that these girls were interested in me, so I'd have other opportunities in the future, which WOULD be better planned. When the second girl had joined us inside, Dad suggested, "Mark, you and Carol should sit in the living room to entertain Carol's friends. I'll send them through as they arrive." A suggestion met with obvious enthusiasm from Carol and her two early Cuties. I guess Dad knew that doing chores with him couldn't compete with pretty girls, not even if he put a bikini on. Dad's suggestion was welcome, other than the important point that I hadn't finished my lunch yet. I'd also been thinking about the worry that in the future visits all the girls might not have any transport if I provided a taxi service today. Those points made me ask, "Carol, I was expecting your friends to arrive at 1pm. Wasn't that the time you told me?" Carol answered, "Yes. Lauren and Bailey are early." "I thought so. In that case please take Lauren and Bailey into the living room. I'll join you at 1pm. I don't want to encourage girls to arrive early, otherwise they'll start coming earlier and earlier. I've got to finish my lunch and help with the chores I promised." I felt uncomfortable being even slightly mean to the two Cuties. I'd several times seen Julia be a merciless tyrant over punctuality, but even saying as little as I had made me want to apologize. Carol and the Cuties tried to apologize to me, which I dismissed with, "I haven't made an issue about punctuality before so there's no problem. Go on to the living room, and I'll join you at one o'clock." Dad looked at me curiously. If he'd been Mom he would have raised his eyebrow, but guys can't carry that off. I explained to him, "The girls that'll be coming today are doing so because they're Carol's friends and they want to meet me. Some of them will bike here, others will get dropped off. If I offered to take all the girls that didn't have bikes to the pool, then next time Carol invited them here none of them would come by bike. Similarly with socializing with them now. If I reward their arriving early with something they want - time with me - then they'll arrive even earlier in the future, which will be increasingly disruptive. And before you look any more impressed, I'm quoting Julia almost word for word. She's made a big deal about this issue with the Liaisons and other girls. I'll grab another sandwich then make a start on the lawn mowing until one o'clock." Dad said, "I'm impressed, even if you learned it from Julia. I'm also surprised to hear you sound arrogant." "Yes, I know it comes across that way, but it's because it's hard to talk about other people liking me without seeming arrogant about it. I don't think it's going to my head. I'm sure Carol would let me know if I went too far, because I can't imagine her liking me if I behaved that way. Here comes another one. I'll take my sandwich out the back way. I'll start mowing the lawn, okay?" "Sure. You'll need to fill the tank before you start." I left out the back, leaving Dad to direct Cutie#3 to the living room. I'd been thinking about whether I should take off my T-shirt to mow the lawn, then accidentally leave it off when I came back inside, but after Dad's "arrogant" comment, I decided I'd better leave it on. I started the mowing at the backyard to avoid arriving Cuties, amusing myself with the thought that I could do the whole lawn while I sat in a chair, thanks to my eightfold increase in NP force. Actually, it was somewhat more than eightfold now, as each on-duty mind had been diligently practicing the conscious projection of ki and pushing walls for a couple of days short of a full month now (that's assuming the weeks of Kiatsu for Prof counted, which I was almost certain it did because it was the same thing, simply projecting ki). Despite the jump in my amount of ki caused by the merge, I could see that the amount I was projecting was slowly increasing, and presumably my NP force was too, although I'd need accurate scales to measure that, probably when school restarted. ^ [I'll mention something now that I should really wait several months before giving you the outcome of. It was so dreadfully tedious at the time, and so disappointing when I realized the situation, that I can't bring myself to keep writing about it. I'm talking about my strengthening NP. Before my most recent merge, my NP force had increased from 14.1 to 14.2 pounds in two weeks. Encouraged by that small gain, I've been diligently trying to strengthen it by pushing against walls or the ground almost every waking hour, which I have a LOT of. I was still doing that now, and continued to do it for several more months. After school restarted three months from now, I weighed my NP force on the very accurate scales in a science lab, and the force had increased nicely (something like 25% after allowing for the likely eightfold effect of the merge). I regularly re-weighed it thereafter, to track the improvement rate. After a few more months, we noticed that the rate at which our NP force was increasing (5% of the base amount per month) was very much the same as the increase in the amount of ki we projected, as best we could judge that with our proximity sense. (The 14.1 to 14.2 pounds increase in two weeks is well below 2.5%, but I'll explain that shortly.) Pushing the walls and ground continuously is a VERY boring, tedious process. It's highly repetitive, isn't fun and unfortunately requires conscious attention to make it happen. In contrast, the other thing we were constantly practicing - consciously projecting ki out of our body - was actually enjoyable as it helped the on-duty mind meditate. Seeing them both increase by the same amount, and knowing that they were both ki-effects, made us wonder whether one of them was dependent on the other. So we weighed our NP then totally stopped pushing against walls and the ground. Two weeks later we weighed our NP again. It'd increased by the equivalent of 5% per month. For the next two weeks we pushed against walls religiously, but did not practice projecting ki from our body. At the end of that period we weighed our NP and it hadn't increased at all. So we'd spend MONTHS pushing with our NP-points for almost our every waking hour, for absolutely no benefit. Our NP force was getting stronger only because we had more ki, as a result of our projection practicing. (The 14.1 to 14.2 pounds increase in two weeks was less than 2.5% because the projection practice started about a week after the NP practice.) We threw up our hands in disgust, kicked ourselves, moaned about ALL the unnecessary drudgery, and then carried on with our life without doing any wall-pushing. Our ki and NP force both continued to improve by 5% per month. Disappointingly, over this time our proximity range also never increased through practice. It'd increased by overcoming the expectation that it was centered on our center, and the merge had doubled it, but there was no incremental improvement from practicing with it. Why some things improved and some didn't was a mystery. Not for the first time, I wished these abilities had come with an instruction manual.] ^ [A much more exciting aspect of the amount of NP force I had, was the possibility of my being able to fly. I weighed about 170 pounds. My untrained ki projection gave me a seven-mind maximum of 98 pounds of force. Ideally I only wanted to use seven minds as using all eight meant active centering, which wasn't reliable. If I lost center, I'd lose altitude at a rate that wouldn't be to my liking. Hopefully I could recenter and 'catch' myself, but "hopefully" in such circumstances isn't a good word to rely on. So I'll stick with a seven-mind example. Increasing my existing force (98 pounds) to the force I'd need to lift myself (170 pounds) is a 75% increase just to be able to make myself weightless, which would take 15 months' training at +5% per month. (The +5% isn't compounding, it's of the base amount, so the same poundage increase every month.) Just being weightless is useless, as I'd need additional force to accelerate myself in some direction or other, rather than being blown around by the breeze. Choosing 0.1 g as my minimum acceptable acceleration would require an NP force of 170 x 1.1 = 187 pounds. I'd need to increase my NP force by 187 / 98 = 1.9. In other words, it'd require a 90% increase in NP force, which would take 18 months. An acceleration of 0.1 g is 1 m/s/s. In other words, in every second I'd gain about 2 miles per hour, which is pretty pathetic! Using v = u + at, after a minute (60 seconds) I'd have a speed of 0 + 1 x 60 = 60 m/s, which is about 135 mph. That may sound impressive, but unfortunately that's using every shred of NP force to lift and propel me, with none left over to use as a windshield. Lying horizontally on a rug of NP-points so I'd be flying headfirst would still produce a lot of wind resistance. A skydiver dropping vertically can get up to about 300 mph under a 1 g acceleration before reaching terminal velocity due to wind resistance. My acceleration would be 0.1 g, so one-tenth as much. My terminal velocity would therefore be squareroot(1/10) x 300 mph, or about 95 mph. Call it 80 mph to allow for non-ideal conditions, such as my pockets acting as little parachutes. Nice, but hardly Superman territory, especially because turning corners would be a LONG, SLOW process. Plus my acceleration would look pathetic to any observer. For example, in the first ten seconds I'd cover only fifty yards. I could cover that distance in half the time running - so I should take running starts to fly, sprinting and then leaping forward into the air, making sure I got an NP-rug under me in time! The fifty yards in ten seconds result is even more of a problem when coming in for a landing. Imagine I'm flying back to my house (at night, for an obvious reason). I cruise along at my 80 mph top speed on line to my home. It takes me a little less than a minute to slow down to a stop, because wind resistance helps, by which time I've covered about five miles. In other words, I have to start decelerating about five miles from home. There is NO chance of me aiming and timing that perfectly to stop above my home's backyard, even if there'd been no wind. With wind, I could end up hundreds of feet away from my destination. Assuming I was only a hundred yards off target, it'd take me ten seconds to accelerate toward home, then I'd have to decelerate, taking me another ten seconds. That's an awful amount of 'hanging around', giving plenty of time for people to notice me, take photographs, go inside to get a shotgun, or whatever. Once I'm in position, landing is also difficult. I have to fly high enough not to be seen, but descending from a few hundred feet up will be long, slow, easily observed process. If I rushed it, chances are I'd break another damned leg! I'd really consider 0.25 g to be a minimum practical acceleration. My 98 pound force would have to increase to 212, or about 120%, which would take 24 months to train up to. Truly impressive accelerations need about 1 g, which would take 170 x 2/98 = 3.5, so a 250% increase, taking 50 months. So we're talking a few years before I can fly effectively. On the other hand, in a few years - I'll be able to FLY! All of this assumes I can continue to improve my NP force by 5% per month. Sensei has gained about 200% over thirty years, but for all I knew the first 50% (say) is easy, with the next 150% taking far longer.] ^ I turned off the lawnmower just before 1pm, then went inside to check on 'my' Cuties. Dad was in the kitchen. He told me, "I'll finish replacing the washer then do something outside." "Thanks, but I have no intention of doing much. I'm going to talk a bit, and I suspect the girls will want to show off their swimsuits, which I'm quite looking forward to. You could stay inside if you want." "That might embarrass them, so I'll do a fade." "Thanks." I wandered through to the living room. There were a dozen Cuties in there, chatting away noisily until I walked into the room. I was pleased to see that I was INSTANTLY the center of their attention, even though I still had my shirt on. Carol immediately leaped to her feet to make the introductions. Most of them I knew already; some when they'd visited Carol sometime in the last two or three years, but most from 3B-land. It's worth pointing out that the names I remembered from two or three years ago were retrievable because my memory had improved wonderfully since my last merge, and I already knew that it allowed me to retrieve stuff from several years ago, even from well before my first merge. I said to Carol (but actually to everyone), "I already know most of your names." I immediately greeted each of the girls I knew the names of; delighting and surprising most of them. By all their responses, it was obvious that Carol's criteria for this group included girls who were very interested in me, in other than the intellectual sense. When we got to Diana Norris, I said, "Ahh, and here's a girl I like very much. Hello Diana. I'm very glad to see that you've come today." "ME! Why do you like me very much. We've barely talked." ^ [I'd been surprised when Mackenzie won the Mark Anderson Pop Quiz in 3B-land, and 3B was even more surprised to learn that she'd also won it in 3A-land. Here there'd been no Donna's Ducklings or what we were now calling Carol's Cuties, so 3A's Mackenzie must've had access to less information about me through her younger sisters, as this dimension's Carol and Donna hadn't been deliberately 'selling' me. I thought 3A's Mackenzie had 'still' won the quiz for two reasons. First, her being somewhat mentally unbalanced about me probably meant she'd learned more about me than I would've thought likely. Before our first date her mental state hadn't been noticeable, or probably as bad, but it had still motivated her to seek out and remember information about me. Second, I could only assume that 3A's Carol and Donna had still often talked about me with their girlfriends. The present company proved there was a lot of interest in me among middle-school girls, which had to have come mostly from the nice reputation my sisters gave me. Mackenzie would've known that Diana and Claire were learning things about me from my sisters, so she would've picked her sisters' brains, the knowledge gained contributing to her winning the quiz. 3A-Diana's and -Claire's interest in me was noticeably less 'romantic' than in 3B-land. When I'd visited Mackenzie's home in this dimension, Diana and Claire had been less excited than in 3B-land. Diana hadn't come out of her room without underwear and in her 'sexiest' nightie, I hadn't done my magic tricks for them, or phoned the family after Mackenzie's red-carding at school. That carding had been kinder, as it had none of the "No I won't have sex with you" stuff in it, as that'd been part of my plan to make her sisters more accessible. Because Diana and Claire hadn't been so enthusiastic about me at their home, I hadn't singled them out for 'special treatment' in the following days, so I hadn't fingered their pussies. That was a cross-dimensional error that needed correcting as a matter of considerable priority, but it was also a situation I had to be cautious about, as they might not appreciate me sticking my finger into their pussies! Girls tend to be fussy about things like that, so I had to dip my toes in the water to find out whether I'd be allowed to dip my fingers in their juices.] ^ "That's true, Diana, but I still know that you're a VERY nice girl. I didn't learn that from Mackenzie, because she was too jealous even of her own sisters to say nice things about you. But I do know it for sure. I'm too busy to come with you today, but I'll make sure I have chances to in the future, and then I'm going to spend time with you. Both you and Claire are very nice. Please make sure you tell her that I said that, won't you?" "Ahh, okay. Carol, did you tell Mark nice things about me?" "No more than I did for anyone else," answered Carol diplomatically, as we'd virtually never discussed any of her friends. I said, "Don't worry about it, Diana, it's not important now. Carol, we should finish the introductions." After that was done I said, "I've got a few things to say to all of you, so how about we all sit down while I talk. I'll sit in the middle of the sofa. Diana will you sit beside me please? You all heard me praise Diana, but there's one other girl here who I think is an absolutely WONDERFUL girl." I used NP to close Carol's lips, as I sat on the sofa. "She's beautiful, caring, loving, and nice in many other ways. She's easily the nicest girl in ALL of middle school AND high school. Come and sit on my lap..." I paused to build the tension, happy to see that several of the girls were looking eager, nervous, or otherwise revealing interest in me. Then I gave the name I'm sure you've already seen coming, " ... Carol! Haha." I patted my lap, as Carol came over and placed herself on it. The other girls laughed, several of them commenting, "Do you truly like her that much?", or "Carol says you're always very nice to her", or similar. That gave me the chance to say, "Every word I said is true. I've got the best sister in the world." Carol and I complimented each other while the girls found themselves seats, Diana beside me, after I encouraged her some more. When they were settled, I said, "When I was complimenting Diana and Carol, I saw some of you frowning with jealousy. I don't have time to get to know you one at a time, so I have to meet you in a group. This group would be unhappy and unenjoyable if there's any jealousy in it, so please don't do that. Wanting everyone to be happy is important to me, so if I see jealousy in the future I'll ask Carol not to invite the jealous girls to any more activities involving me. -- "Some of you may know that I red-carded Mackenzie Norris after one date because she got jealous. She didn't like me smiling at or being friendly with girls that'd been my friends long before my first date with her, which makes jealousy an unhappy and stupid emotion. -- "When I complimented Diana, I wasn't saying she was better than all the rest of you. I don't know the rest of you! All I know is that I like Diana and Claire. Maybe all of you are as nice as Diana, which would be wonderful. But I won't think you're nice at all if you're jealous. I'd like as many of you to be as nice as possible, so we'll all enjoy doing things together, and so I've got the best chance of finding a great girlfriend from among you. You're only a year younger than me, which is great in many ways, but not if you're a jealous person. -- "Now, I need someone to help me test that my message has gotten through. I need to do something that should create jealousy. Hmm, I know. Diana, may I please kiss you to make sure the other girls can control their jealousy?" Diana didn't believe me. "You want to kiss ME?" "Yes please. With your permission?" Diana was hesitant. Mainly because she wasn't a confident person, I thought. To save time, I put my arm around her and slowly leaned forward to kiss her. She hesitated initially, and then suddenly decided it was a good idea and her head rapidly closed the distance. While we were kissing, I turned her head so I could look at the other girls, as checking for jealousy was my ostensible reason for this kiss. I was mainly doing it to break the ice for sexual contact, especially with Diana, but driving home the no-jealousy lesson was also a good idea because I'd mostly be interacting with them in a group. I was pleased that the other girls weren't frowning, which was wise of them as they knew I was looking for such reactions. I was especially pleased when I noticed one girl, called Zoe, who seemed positively happy that I was kissing Diana. I kept it up for a moderately long time to give all the watching girls long enough to appreciate that I was studying their reactions. And also because I was quite enjoying myself with Diana. It wasn't a highly passionate kiss, but it was still very pleasant. Diana clearly thought so too, which was also very pleasing. When I'd pulled my mouth back, I said to Diana, "Tell Claire she's got the same kiss coming to her too, first chance I get. I'm going to treat you and Claire the same for everything." "She'll love that!" declared Diana. Just as in 3B-land, the younger sister had been the more definite and outspoken about her interest in me, so Diana knew that Claire would welcome the news about the kiss that was coming her way. I resisted the temptation to tease her about what she might have to let me do to her because Claire had already let me. I was pretty sure Claire would let me do quite a lot with her, and presumably Diana would know that too, but I didn't want to get too sexual in front of all the other girls. Especially because I intended to get VERY sexual with the younger Norrises, and I didn't want them grilled by the rest of the Cuties. I changed the subject by saying, "Zoe, is Diana a particularly good friend of yours?" Zoe answered, "Yes. How did you know?" "Because you were very happy to see me kissing her. That was an EXCELLENT reaction, and I'm very impressed by your generosity of spirit. That rockets you upward in my opinion." I nearly gave them an example to prove that I valued unselfishness, by saying I shared my girlfriend with Carol, but realized I was in the wrong dimension to use that as a point. Instead I said, "I have a couple of minor points to mention, both about how people in a group have to be considerate. Punctuality is one thing. Obviously arriving late can be an annoying nuisance. I haven't asked yet, but are there some of your friends who aren't here yet, Carol?" Carol answered, "Yes. Christina, Summer, Hailey and Nadia should be here." "When they do arrive, they'll have missed out on everything I've said, which is annoying. I came in here exactly on time, because punctuality is important to me, and I certainly don't have the time to repeat myself for the latecomers. Although I wouldn't mind kissing Diana again for them, haha." Diana blushed cutely (how else?). -- "Arriving early can be a nuisance too, because it can disrupt whatever else is going on. I sincerely appreciate that some of you like me, and want to visit here so you can meet me, but please don't come early to any of our future meetings. Five or ten minutes early is perfect, that way you can guarantee not to be late. But fifteen minutes or more early, is too early. I consider it similar to jealousy in some ways, because anyone who arrives early is trying to get more than the rest of the group. It's selfish, so please don't do it. -- "Similarly, did everyone ride their bikes here, or did some of you get a lift from someone? Put up your hand if you got a lift?" Four hands went up, fortunately not including Diana's, because I didn't want to be mean to her at all. "Carol, have you told everyone that I have my license so I can drive them to the pool?" "Yes. That's okay, isn't it?" "It's perfectly fine. I'm not at all worried about what you do, Carol. What I'm worried about is that if I drive the four who didn't come by bike to the pool, then next time we meet nearly all of you might not come by bike, hoping to get a ride with me. That'd make me have to drive back and forth several times, which would become annoying because I often have other things to do. I'm going to discourage that by doing the following. I'm going to drive Carol, Diana, Zoe, and someone else I haven't decided on yet, to the pool. The four girls who didn't come by bike can ride the bikes of the girls in my car. That should discourage any of you from deliberately leaving your bikes at home next time. "But I don't have a bike!" protested one of the girls who'd raised her hand. "You know how to ride a bike though, don't you?" "Ahh, yeah. That's not what I meant though. I meant it's unfair to punish me because I don't have a bike. Also, how am I going to get home afterward, because I can't ride someone else's bike home?" #5: "You're not being punished. No one is being punished. Getting a car ride with me is a reward. I'm taking Carol because she's my sister and I love her, and I never get enough chances to reward her for being so lovely. Diana's included because I know that I like her. Zoe is included because she showed she has a generous spirit. The fourth girl will probably be chosen because she looks the prettiest in her swimsuit." I said the last criterion as a good way to get the girls to show me their bodies, and to let them know I liked sexy girls, although I was too cautious to actually say the word "sexiest", using "prettiest" instead. "Actually, if any of the missing four girls arrive before we leave, they will be slightly punished by automatically being excluded from a car ride." I paused, but none of the girls queried my criterion for the fourth girl. If they'd been older, one of them would have spoken up, but their silence meant I had to do all the work myself. I said, "I deliberately said the last passenger will be picked based on how good she looks in a swimsuit for two reasons. Obviously they're not hugely important reasons, because I'm picking my sister first, Diana second even though I'm sure her mother wouldn't let her wear a sexy swimsuit." I could see Diana look worried about that, so I added, "You don't have to worry about it, Diana. I've ALREADY picked you as a passenger, so your swimsuit doesn't matter. I've picked you because I LIKE you, not anything as superficial as how little fabric there is in your suit." That cheered her up. -- "Zoe was picked for her attitude. The rest of you I don't know, so I don't know any way of picking between you. In case some of you don't know this, let me explain something to you: I'm a boy, and boys like sexy girls. Are there any of you who didn't know that?" I got a few weak chuckles, mostly from Carol though. Never mind. "Being a boy, I like looking at pretty girls, and I want to encourage you to look pretty around me. Later on I'll get to know your personalities better, but at the moment I don't know you well enough for that." #3: #6: #5: #1: I said, "I'm sorry girls. I've just realized that I'm being far too preachy and tedious. I'm too worn out by having to take two grades' worth of exams plus some college exams too. I haven't had a chance to rest because I'm still studying hard for college. I got up very early this morning and did several hours of studying, so I REALLY need to relax because I think I've lost my sense of humor and sense of fun. I'll shut up. You choose for yourselves who the fourth passenger in my car will be. I'll get back to my chores with Dad. Let me know when you're ready to go." I gave Carol a little push up. She stood, turned to face me and asked, "Are you okay?" "Just worn out I think. I'll be fine once I get into the summer mood." Carol said, "We won't be long, so just wait in the kitchen. You'll be able to find something to occupy yourself with in your favorite room of the house, won't you?" "Haha. Yeah, I'll find something to eat." ------- Chapter 244: Carol's Cuties; Carol Manages Them Wonderfully Well Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued) I made myself a comfort sandwich while I tried to work out what I'd done wrong. I remembered Julia previously telling me off for talking too long. Girls who're already eating out of my palm don't need to be led in tiny steps, which had been what I'd done. Knowing where I'd gone wrong didn't tell me what I should've done though. I couldn't have bluntly told them not to be jealous, not to be early or late, and not to rely on me driving them around. Just saying those things quickly wouldn't have gotten the message across, because people can follow instructions far better if they understand the reasons for them. I'll definitely ask Julia her advice, but I couldn't call her now as she was doing something far more important. My problem would take too long to explain and it'd be hard for Julia to discuss it without other people overhearing. It was a pity that seducing girls was so tricky. After a few minutes I started hearing laughter come out of the living room, which relieved me that I hadn't ruined the day for them. The laughter got louder and more giggly for a minute or so, and then Carol opened the door to call out over the sounds of the other girls giggling, "Can you come back in please, Mark?" "Dad's talking to the driver of a car who's dropping off two more girls now." "While we're waiting for them will you get the ball of string and a pair of scissors please?" I got those, while Carol went to the linen cupboard to collect a pile of towels. The two new girls came inside and Carol quickly told me their names. Then she directed us into the living room. Carol put the towels down on the coffee table, then told me, "We decided you needed cheering up, so we were going to let you choose the fourth passenger in your car based on how much you like her breasts. Unfortunately there's a fairness problem, because some of them have more conservative swimsuits than the others. We thought it'd be fairer if they were all topless. What do you think? Would that be the fairest way of doing it?" I had to wait for the flurry of self-conscious giggling to die down, then I said, "When Mom and Dad told me to be fair, I had NO IDEA fairness could be so wonderful! I think that's an EXCELLENT idea. After all, we wouldn't want a girl with a particularly revealing swimsuit to have an unfair advantage, would we?" "No indeed," agreed my wonderful sister. "We're going to tie towels together and hold them up at head height so the girls can stand behind them without your seeing their faces. They'll wear towels around their waists so you won't recognize their clothes. I told them that Julia and Ava being your girlfriends proves you're too smart just to pick the biggest pair." I quickly reinforced Carol's snow job. "Absolutely. Quality is more important than quantity. Anyone with half a brain knows that." Which pretty much excluded every male. "We now have six girls who need a lift to the pool. I can do that in two trips, and it means I need to pick three girls out of the lineup." "Yep. Wait in the kitchen, and I'll call out loudly when we're ready." I left the room quickly because I'm a very cooperative person; while the two latest arrivals, Summer and Nadia, were urgently asking Carol for details about everyone showing me their breasts. There's an idea I've had in mind ever since the girls started arriving that I haven't bothered to mention yet. Unless you, my reader, have completely forgotten what 15-year old boys are like, I'm sure the same idea has occurred to you. My idea had been based on the hope that the girls would model their swimsuits for me, which would require those of them not wearing the suits under their clothes would have to get changed into them. That would be an EXCELLENT time for me to start practicing my special ki abilities, starting with a sight blob. Carol had derailed my swimsuit modeling hope - I'd express my forgiveness to her later - but I still felt a sudden urge to practice my new ability. I closed my eyes, created a sight blob, and sent it through the wall into the living room. Carol had laid out several towels horizontally side by side, and had cut short lengths of string. Various girls were in the process of tying adjacent towel corners together. Longer lengths of string were attached to the outside corners of the first and last towels. One end was placed on a bookshelf we have on the far wall of the living room, with several books put on top of it and wedged in tightly against the bottom of the shelf above, so the string was firmly held. Carol held the other end and walked the length of the living room, holding it up fairly high, so it resembled a clothesline of towels. All the girls stood behind it so Carol could see that it worked okay. Then I saw Carol say something, and all the girls reacted by starting to undress. At times like this I really wish I'd been able to find a way of making simultaneous sight blobs work, because it would've been great to allocate every girl her own sight blob. Unfortunately, I had to make do with only one, so I was very busy zooming it around the room to give me the best possible sights. They'd all brought their own towels, so those of them who were wearing short skirts or shorts could immediately wrap their towels around their waists. Happily several of them were wearing clothes that were too long to fit under a towel, so they stripped down to their swimsuit bottoms or panties. I thoroughly approved of the sexiness of every pair of panties I saw, so I had a great time watching them until they put their towels on. They were also removing their tops. Even though I'd be looking at their breasts in the lineup shortly, I still had a wonderful time watching them now, especially because there was lots of bending and turning as they folded up their clothes and piled them up neatly. This was one of the few times that I've been glad that girls are so fussy about their clothes. When most of them were correctly dressed (in my opinion topless is VERY correct) Carol raised the clothesline and the girls started lining up behind it. Carol hadn't undressed, which was both sensible and sad. Another sad aspect was the swimsuits I'd seen. Most of them were far too conservative for my taste, with the others being ordinary. I definitely had to buy a good stock of sexy bikinis for the mansion. They realized that the clothesline dipped in the middle, so the shorter girls moved to the center, with the taller girls to either end. They all put their hands on their heads, which did very nice things to the shape of their breasts, then I heard Carol yell out, "COME IN, MARK." Closely followed by lots of giggling. I canceled the sight blob and opened my eyes to see another late arrival biking into our driveway. I opened the living room door a fraction; just enough to say through it without seeing anyone, "Another girl's arriving, Carol. I'll wait a few seconds for her, and bring her in with me." "Okay," agreed Carol, while a couple of the other girls joked about the surprise she was about to get. I left the living room door open a couple of inches so what I said to the new girl could be heard by the others. I opened the front door, asking her, "Christina or Hailey?" "Hi Mark. I'm Christina. I'm sorry I'm late. Are the others all here?" "All but Hailey are here. They're all in the living room and we're about to do something VERY important and serious." I was deliberately standing so I was facing the living room door, so my "VERY important and serious" generated a large amount of giggling, confusing Christina. I wasn't going to waste important breast-judging time explaining to her, so I just said, "Follow me," as I walked into the living room. I exclaimed, "Oh my gosh. I think I've died and gone to Heaven. What a BEAUTIFUL sight!" Rarely have I ever spoken more sincerely! "Oh my God!" exclaimed Christina. "What's going on?" I answered, "Christina. You were late and I've got FAR, FAR more important things to do than waste valuable judging time explaining things to you. Sit in that chair over there and be quiet while I get on with my very difficult, but oh so delightful, duty." I earned some giggles, during which Christina repeated, "But what's going on?" "Christina, please SIT and be quiet. You're fifteen minutes late. If you'd come on time you'd know what's happening." "It's not my fault. Mom made me finish my lunch before..." "Grrr! What part of 'be quiet' don't you understand?" "But it's not..." From behind several of the towels came a variety of yelled instructions for Christina to shut up and sit down. Christina wisely shut up. She should've done that already, as well as removing her top, but sadly she wasn't that smart. She started walking to the chair I'd pointed her to, when there was a knock on the front door. I groaned, "Oh God. Here we go again." I was about to go answer it, when one of my minds had a better idea. I said, "Christina, YOU answer the door. If it's Hailey, I want the two of you to wait for us at the kitchen table. Let me know if it's someone else, but if it's Hailey do NOT come back in here until you're called." I pushed her out of the room, closing the door loudly behind her. I turned back to the breasts, doing my best to get back into a happy mood. It didn't take long. I also called the mind off duty, figuring that he'd like to be able to enjoy this. We made him do Active Duty, which would be a good test of his ability to concentrate on remaining centered while HIGHLY distracted. Carol's end of the clothesline was closest to me, so I started at that end, walking so I was standing in front of the first pair. Looking down the line I could see that an improvement could be made, so I announced, "Nearly all of you should take about half a step forward, so the towel is against your face. That way what I'm judging will stick out very nicely." While they were all shuffling forward, which definitely had very nice effects on my view, I heard Christina yell through the door, "IT'S HAILEY." Everyone, especially me, ignored her. I had a small puzzle about something, so I took a moment to say, "Carol, I'm guessing that your friends feel more comfortable being anonymously hidden behind the towel, so I won't mention anyone's name when I'm looking at them." I could see from Carol's expression that I was right. I also heard an exclamation of "WHAT!" from the other room. Presumably Christina had just told Hailey what was happening in here. I continued, "Diana and Zoe don't need to be in this competition, as they've already earned rides in my car, but I guess you wanted all the girls to be treated equally?" Carol answered, "Yes. If everyone else is showing you their breasts, Diana and Zoe should too." "I ABSOLUTELY agree. I'm VERY happy with that because I'm particularly looking forward to seeing Diana. I like her, and it's always far better to look at a body when you like the person it belongs too. When I get down the line to you, Diana, I will talk with you briefly." There was a quiet, "oh," from Diana, which immediately caused some "Shh's" from several of the other girls. Not that Diana's making a sound gave her position away to me, as I'd seen them line up with my sight blob, and I'd recognize her with proximity anyway, as 3A and 3B people had the identical unique proximity 'signatures'. Probably identical fingerprints and DNA too. [[Their proximity readings could be different if their life experiences were different enough, but the only time I'd noticed that was Prof's proximity reading changing a little as a result of his kidnapping and near death. That single sample wasn't enough for me to understand the process.]] I said, "Okay, I'll start my judging of the three pairs of breasts I'd like to take in my car to the pool." I was amused to be looking down the line to see several of them stick out their chests more. I was facing away from Carol, so I quickly shut my eyes and sent a sight blob down the line, so I made sure I knew who every breast belonged to. Then I slowly, studiously, and VERY enjoyably started making my way down the line, namelessly complimenting each girl's breasts. In part so the girls could hear that things were moving along, otherwise it'd be boring for them. Also because girls should be complimented for showing me their breasts. Hopefully word would get around about how much I enjoy it, so more girls will do it. Plus saying nice things to each girl would make her like me more, which is a highly desirable situation with good looking girls who're willing to show me their breasts. By this point in my autobiography, you should have gotten the idea that I'm rather partial to girls' breasts. They are very, very beautiful and wonderful creations. God made all sorts of screw-ups designing people, but he DEFINITELY got breasts right! There were thirteen girls participating in the lineup, so twenty six bare breasts to look at, every single one of which (not that they come in ones), I'd already seen were lovely. I was going to thoroughly enjoyed studying each of them. Carol had invited only good looking girls, so I was having a GREAT time! I was on my third pair when I heard the living room door creak open slowly, followed by a shocked inhalation of breath. I looked behind me, to see two faces looking through the small gap they'd created. I would have preferred to ignore Christina and Hailey, but I wanted to make sure all of these girls clearly got the message that being late was BAD. I put on an annoyed expression (that was easy), and marched straight toward the living room door. The two heads retreated out of sight. I grabbed the handle, opened the door, and half-yelled at the two of them, "I specifically told you to sit at the table. Are you both so stupid that you can't tell when 1 o'clock is, don't know what 'sitting' means, and don't know what a table is? SIT at the TABLE and stay there until you are called." I slammed the door closed to prevent any excuses. I walked back to Carol, saying, "Carol, in the future I think we'll lock the front door ten minutes after the start time. Anyone who arrives after that can turn around and go home again. I strongly dislike inconsiderate people, especially when they're repeatedly inconsiderate." Carol answered, "Okay. I'll tell the other Cuties who couldn't come here today too." Which answered my low-key wondering about whether it was okay to refer to them as "Cuties"? "Thanks. This is their very first time for meeting me, and you'd think they'd be trying to make a good impression. If they so uncaringly and selfishly make a dozen people wait nearly half an hour for them on the first meeting, and then to keep causing disruptions, then they're no good as potential girlfriends." "Do you want me to kick them out of the Cuties?" "I'm VERY tempted to agree to that, but that'd probably be unfair. They should already know better than be so inconsiderate to everyone here, but I'll give them a little bit of slack THIS time. Let's forget about them." I put on an overly dramatic voice to say, "NOW I have to start ALL OVER AGAIN! It's such a hardship having to look at all these lovely breasts again, haha." I restarted the terribly onerous hardship. That word reminding me to do another go-soft. I enjoyed myself for breast after breast. I continued to compliment every girl's breasts in some way, having no trouble whatsoever to find something nice to say to each of them: "Wow, your nipples point upward very sexily. I love that so much more than nipples that point down," (I already knew none of these girls pointed down); "What a wonderful pink color your nipples are. They're very pretty"; "Hmm, the underside of your breasts look VERY lickable. I love licking the underside to turn a girl on." Etc. When I got to Diana I said, "Ahh. I thought you would have, but I'm very pleased to see how pretty your breasts are, Diana." "Ohh! You know it's me?" "Yes indeed." "How do you know?" "I won't say now, but I'll mention something when I announce who the three extra passengers are." I raised my hand and placed a couple of fingers against the center of Diana's chest, a few inches below her neck. Diana jerked in surprise, but then stood still, remaining in contact with my fingers. That was a good sign, so I slid my fingers down and onto one of her breasts. Near the nipple I moved my fingers so they slid around the outside of her breast, then under it. I cupped its weight, then lightly brushed the top of her nipple with my thumb. #3 (the mind that was on Active Centering duty), lost center. We could all instantly tell that as our proximity sense failed. He got internally booed, then told to go on Inactive Duty. Diana was near the end, so he wouldn't be missing much. I could see the top of Diana's chest turn pink from her blush, and she groaned a little, but made no sign of rejection. I said, "Good girl, Diana." I slowly pulled my hand back, letting my fingertips slide along her underside and then out of contact. I moved to the next girl, resuming my verbal-only interactions. After I carefully inspected the last girl I walked back toward Carol, talking as I walked, "Carol, I've seen everyone now, and I've made my three choices." I was enjoying my last looks at each breast as I walked past it, except for Diana, where I once again brushed my hand over her breasts. She accepted my caress, which promised to be very bad news for her hymen. In case you're wondering, these are the four criteria I used to choose the girls: First, I only chose girls who'd biked here, as I wanted to reward that behavior, especially as I'd have to make two trips to ferry the six girls to the pool. It'd take only five minutes each way, but that still added up to twenty minutes, plus probably another twenty minutes to pick them up afterward. Second, I excluded Diana and Zoe as they'd already been chosen to be passengers. Third, breast size was a criterion. I divided the girls into three groups - those with small, medium and large breasts. I chose one girl from each group, in order to confuse the girls about my immaturity. The last criterion was simply the best looking breasts within each size category. I continued, "Shall I announce the three girls by going down the line and touching them lightly, seeing as how I'm not meant to know their names?" Carol answered, "That'd be a good way." I was standing in front of Carol now, and I didn't want her to feel left out, so I created a couple of NP-fingertips and lightly rubbed the outside of her breasts. She smiled at me happily, which promised to be very bad news for her hymen. I announced to the room, "I'll walk down the line, stopping in front of the three girls I've chosen. I'll say what I think their name is, then wait a second. Even if I get the name wrong, the girl will know I'm talking about her because I'll be standing right in front of her. After that second's pause I'll touch the girl lightly on the side of her breast to indicate my choice. If you're one of the girls I stop in front of and you don't want me to touch you so intimately, just take a small step back and I'll touch you on the belly instead. Okay, here we go." I walked to the first girl, said her name, waited a second during which she jerked a little in surprise but didn't move backward, so then I stroked the outside of her breast briefly. She giggled, then told the girls that I was touching her breast. No one said anything negative, and some of them said positive things like, "Lucky you." Personally I thought I was the lucky one, but I wasn't going to argue. Besides, I had my hand full. I repeated that twice more down the line, with neither of the later girls stepping back. By the time I'd correctly named the third girl, several of them were stating, "You know our names!" or, "We didn't think you'd be able to recognize us like this." I just said, "I'll go to the kitchen so you can all get dressed. We can talk after that." Christina and Hailey were sitting exactly where I'd told them to sit. They jumped up and started apologizing, but I immediately cut them off, "I don't care about your reasons. Go into the living room and talk with the others." I checked out the contents of the fridge, as an easy and enjoyable way of ignoring them. Our dining room is effectively the same room as the kitchen as there's no wall between them, so the two girls could see my ass pointing at them. That was a sufficient hint for them to go to the living room. I waited to be called back in. After five minutes there was still no call, and I was getting worried about how much time I was spending not helping Dad. I created a sight blob to look in the living room. All of the girls were decent again, but they hadn't yet packed up the clothesline, being too busy talking. There were a lot of moving mouths, with almost no other movement happening. I noticed that Christina's and Hailey's mouths were particularly active, so I guessed they were asking lots of questions to catch up. So I went outside and relieved Dad on the lawnmower. I yelled at him that I'd probably have to take some of the girls to the pool, but to leave the lawns for me to finish after I'd played taxi. Ten minutes later the girls came looking for me. I turned off the mower while they gathered around me, and one of them filled the silence with, "We thought you'd be inside?" "I waited several minutes, easily long enough for you all to get dressed, but when no one came to get me I presumed you were busy talking to each other. We're selling our house soon, so Dad and I have got a LONG list of chores to do. I felt guilty sitting around in the kitchen while Dad was outside working by himself, so I came out to help him. Carol should have already told you that I'm VERY busy. I'm not like other schoolkids who can sit around doing nothing all summer. We've got to get our house ready for sale, I intend to finish half of my college degree by the time summer ends, I'm busy in Portland all day tomorrow, and lots of other things. Are you ready to go to the Aquatic Center now?" "We want to talk with you first. About how you knew our names and other stuff." "That was fifteen minutes ago. I could've spent it talking to you, but you chose to spend it explaining everything to the latecomers. That's the trouble with people coming late: they waste time which would be better used for other things." "But I didn't mean to be late," objected Hailey. "It was my mother's fault for making me do something before I left home." "I bet the moment you went into the living room you started asking questions about what had been happening. Answering your questions distracted EVERYONE for fifteen minutes. It was your choice to ask questions; not your mother's. You could've waited until you were at the pool to catch up, but you chose to waste my and everyone else's time here. Those fifteen minutes are gone now, and Dad will be unhappy with me if I waste too much time not working on the chores. I don't want to waste even more time explaining the obvious to you. Let me know when the first car load is ready to be taken to the pool, meanwhile I'll carry on mowing the lawn. Stand back everyone." I restarted the mower (thanks to all of Dad's tinkering, it's easy to restart), and shooed them out of the way so I could resume work. A lawnmower kills conversation even better than an ass sticking out of a fridge, so they were forced to head back inside. Carol tried to apologize, but I yelled in her ear, "It's fine. I'm training them." I'd been unfair, as they'd only wasted five minutes of my time, but they wouldn't think of that. I'd seen that my point about Hailey's questions, and no doubt Christina's too, had scored a direct hit with several of the girls, so they'd learned a good lesson. There were plenty of Carol's Cuties, and I had no problem red-carding half of them if that's what it took to whip the remaining half into the right frame of mind. A few minutes later they came out carrying their bags. Carol came toward me, dangling my car keys from her hand. I turned off the mower and walked to meet her. Carol told me quietly, "Sorry about wasting your time. I got wrapped up in the conversation too." "Don't worry about it, sweetie. It only wasted a couple of my minutes because I came out here and got back to work. I'm very happy to have it as a good lesson to the Cuties. I expect it'll take a few meetings before the good ones of them learn how to behave. Besides, your passenger-choosing method was wonderful. I owe you BIG thanks for that, especially after I did so poorly at the beginning. I take it that you're ready to go?" That half the girls were getting their bikes ready, including the girls who were going by car passing their bikes over to the others, was a good clue. "Yeah. Can we put all the bags in the trunk please?" "Sure. You start doing that; I'll tell Dad what's happening." The first carload of girls was the three I'd picked from behind the clothesline. The first problem was they all wanted to sit in the front seat, so they stood beside the door arguing about it. That got old very fast. I thought of different ways I could react to it, such refusing to take them at all, or going back to the lawnmower and starting it again. Those things were too dramatic and would probably end up wasting even more time, so I pointed to one of the girls, "You're arguing the least, so you get in the front. The other two in the back. Put your seatbelts on." As soon as they were settled I said, "All three of you have got some things to learn about how to have a good relationship. Good boyfriends and girlfriends try to please each other. You each wanted to sit in the front for your own pleasure, and were wasting my time so you could argue about it. You were DISPLEASING me for your own selfish reasons; the exact opposite of how a good relationship works. -- "Just because you've got nice breasts won't help you in the slightest if you keep behaving selfishly; I'm far too mature to consider pretty breasts more important than the quality of a girl's personality." To my surprise, the last statement is becoming true. Thanks to my increasing experience, I'm staring to realize that breasts are only equally as important as personality. Of course, there are two breasts, so in total they're still well out in front. They spent half the short trip apologizing. After which I said to the girl sitting next to me, "I see you and the others trying to sneakily look at my missing finger sometimes. You don't have to feel guilty about looking. I don't want to talk about how it happened, but I have to get used to people looking at it because it looks so weird. Please tell the others not to worry about looking at it. Besides, I think it's a perfectly fair swap that you can look at my missing finger and I can look at your lovely breasts." That cheered them up, and the last couple of minutes were spent gushing over that event, including how was I able to name each of them when they were hidden behind towels. I lied, "Because of my genius I'm able to concentrate far better than other people, including being able to concentrate on my senses. I could tell by the sounds of your breathing, your lovely smells, and even little clues in the ways you stood and held your bodies." I dropped them off, then returned to pick up Carol, Diana and Zoe. Before they got into the car, I said, "In case you're wondering Diana and Zoe, Carol goes in the front seat. My sister always goes before any other girl in my affections." Diana and Zoe thought that was wonderful. It's weird how females think. I'd just told them that they were second rate to me, and as a result they now liked me even more. During our drive to the pool, Diana wanted to know how I'd recognized her in the lineup, and did I really like her that much, and how did I recognize the other girls, and did I REALLY like her. I chuckled to myself over her cute attitude; she definitely belonged in the Cuties! The same attitude could've been annoying in other girls, but not in a pretty girl who was so sexually available, and with a younger sister who was even more eager. They had been in 3B-land, so hopefully would be here too. I answered, "Yes, I do like you. I know you don't know why, but it's still true. Remember how I told you that everything I do with you I'll also do with Claire and vice versa?" I wouldn't have said this in front of all the other girls, because I didn't want them to know that I might play games with Diana and Claire. If I red-carded any of the others, I didn't want them getting angry and ratting the Norris girls out to their parents. Saying it in front of Zoe seemed safe though. I'd seen that Zoe and Diana were good friends, and Zoe seemed like a nice, sensible girl, so unlikely to be red-carded. "Yes?" asked Diana. "That means Claire will have to do exactly the same as you did in the lineup. Stand topless while I inspect her closely and gently touch her." "Did Mark touch you?" asked Zoe, with an amusing expression of wonder. "Yes he did," admitted Diana proudly. "But only a little." "How come you didn't touch me Mark?" asked Zoe. "Everyone else who got a car ride you touched." "That's true Zoe. As beautiful as you are, I won't touch any girl unless I know she'd welcome it. The three girls I picked all had a chance to step back to stop me. I already knew Diana wanted me to, so it was safe for me to touch her. But I didn't know about you Zoe, so I only looked." "How did you know?" asked Diana. | "You can touch me if you want Mark. I trust you," naively offered Zoe, causing me to revise my previous opinion that she was "nice and sensible." She was now "nice and delightful." "Thank you for your trust, Zoe. Diana, I can't tell you how I know about you. I don't know from Mackenzie or Carol; it's something I found out some other way. But I'm very happy that I know you like me so much, because that makes me enjoy being with you. The same applies to Claire too. I STRONGLY suggest you don't talk with Mackenzie about my liking you and Claire, because Mackenzie will complain to your parents, and you know how restrictive and negative your mother is about anything to do with sex." "How do you know that?" asked Diana. "I understand your parents better than you think. And I certainly know they wouldn't approve of what you and I have already done together, and they sure wouldn't agree with the other things I want to do with you and Claire." "You want to do MORE! Like what?" "Wait and see, sweetie. You'll enjoy it though. Claire will enjoy it even more too, because she'll be even more enthusiastic than you are." "How do you know that?" "Stop asking me how I know things, Diana. I'm not going to answer that question." "Oh. Okay. Umm, you're right that Claire likes you. She's going to be very excited when I tell her that you're going to look at her and touch her breast. You know that her breasts haven't grown much yet, don't you?" "It's not about breasts," I lied. "It's about attitude. I like you and Claire because you're both good fun, outgoing, easy to get on with, and cooperate with each other well. You've both got good, healthy attitudes about sexual things, and know that it can be enjoyable fun with the right person." "Me too!" insisted Zoe, metaphorically closing her eyes and throwing herself at me again. Isn't trust a wonderful thing, especially when combined with naiveté and nice breasts? "That's good to know Zoe. I don't know when we'll be able to meet again, but I'll try to plan something and I'll get Carol to call you. Carol, you've got the phone numbers for all the Cuties, haven't you?" "Yes. There are more Cuties than came today. I only invited half of them. There are even more who want to join the Cuties, but I haven't let them yet because too many at once would be a nuisance." "That's good thinking. Probably what will happen after another date or two is that I'll name several girls who I no longer want to be in the Cuties. Julia and I call that being red-carded. If Christina and Hailey arrive late again, for example, I'll red-card them. When I do that you can give their places to other girls." "You might red-card us?" asked Diana with concern. "You know what 'red card' means?" "Yes. Carol's told us some about the pipeline. I didn't know we were a pipeline group though." "Carol's Cuties are not a pipeline group. The idea of the pipeline is to get rid of as many girls as fast as possible. I don't want to do that with the Cuties. I'll only red-card girls in your group who annoy me, because I obviously won't want to keep seeing them. I doubt that'd happen to you or Zoe because I like both of you so far. The biggest risk of your being red-carded would be if you boasted to the other girls that I liked you the most, or that I might see you and Claire separately, maybe with Zoe too. If you did that, one of the other girls could get jealous and might tell her or your parents. If they stopped you seeing me or visiting Carol, that'd be the same as being red-carded, and I'd have to ask Carol to fill your places with one of the other girls who's waiting. So you'd better make sure you keep very quiet about me preferring you." Diana and Zoe repeatedly insisted they'd keep their mouths shut. We were arriving at the Aquatic Center, so I said, "Carol, I don't know what I'll be doing when you finish swimming, so I can't guarantee to be able to pick you up." "That's okay. They've met you now, so they can all go home from here." I stopped by the first three girls, unloaded all the bags out of the trunk, gave Carol a goodbye hug, wished her, "Have a good time," and then drove off, tooting at the bike group as I passed them. Back at home I finished mowing the lawn, then reported to Dad for the next chore. I also told him about Carol's new, breast-based method for letting me choose who rode in my car. He laughed at the thought, then handed me a shovel. ------- Chapter 245: Mansion Shopping Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued) Mom, Vanessa and Julia arrived back at 4pm. Vanessa told Dad and me, "I've got plenty of pictures in my camera of the four properties we looked at today. We're going to go to Mark's study, load the pictures onto his computer, and use his large screens to display them while we discuss our choices. I'll pick up some Chinese takeout for dinner on the way home, to give you time to clean up before you come over. How does that sound?" Apart from the sad fact that Chinese don't make pizza - it's otherwise a wonderful culture though - it sounded perfect to me. Dad was also eager, so Vanessa and Julia headed off to gather dinner. Dad and I tidied up while Mom inspected the results of our day's work. I sent a text message to Carol, "Everyone at Julia's house for dinner and talk about mansion. I'll try to save u some Chinese." [I didn't get an answer from her for nearly an hour, and then it was, "I'll come soon."] Mom called the mother of the girl Donna was visiting. The girls were running around somewhere, and that woman said Donna could have dinner with them. We took two vehicles to Julia's because I'd probably stay overnight. I invited Mom to come in my car so she could see I was a good driver. Prof had advised me to do that, but I'd never got around to it before now, ironically just after Mom had canceled her driving restriction. Displaying Vanessa's pictures on eight 24" screens was VERY impressive, even though most of the photos were landscape oriented. Everyone commented on how great my computer system was (it should be too, for the size of the check I'd written!). I was more interested in the pictures than what they were displayed on, especially because the houses looked GORGEOUS! My excitement didn't last long, as the discussion about the pictures was BORING! It was repeated four times over (once for each property), and with many comparisons between Property A and Property B. It was made even worse because Vanessa was keeping quiet about the women's preferred choice until the end. I'll save you the four-times repeated tedious descriptions of construction materials, where the sun rose in the morning and set at night, soil drainage, and SO MUCH MORE that was of no interest whatsoever to me. I'll just describe the key aspects of the preferred property, which is the place that we ended up buying. Corvallis is built immediately to the west of the north-flowing Willamette River - an important river, as the Willamette Valley contains most of Oregon's population. Nearly all the houses in Corvallis, our school, OSU, etc., are in a two mile by two mile roughly square area immediately to the west of the river, but not our preferred property. It is located about 3.5 miles southeast of the main bridges that cross the Willamette River into town, making the house about 4.5 miles from the geographic center of Corvallis. The property is on SE Peoria Road, the same road as the driveway I'd buried the $100 Binion's chip under, although that'd been at the other end of the road. It was the closest of the four shortlisted properties to town, which I hoped would make it easier for Donna's Ducklings and Carol's Cuties to visit. I considered the easy supply of young, teenage girls to be an important criterion when buying a multimillion dollar home. Strangely, none of the adults had mentioned that yet, proving that women aren't perfect at buying a new home for a teenage boy. The property was flat, as was all the land around the property, including all the way to town. That made easy biking for teenage girls, but gave poor views, other than of the hills immediately north and west of Corvallis. The properly was 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares), making it the smallest of our four shortlisted properties. It was about 250 yards deep (exactly in the north-south direction) by 110 yards wide, and completely level other than a twelve-foot high, flat-topped, artificial mound that the house had been built on. The mound was located about 175 yards back from the road, midway between the two side boundaries. A Google Earth image of Corvallis, viewed from above SE Peoria Road, looking northwest into town. The thick yellow lines are highways, with SE Peoria Road additionally shown in the lower right. The thin yellow lines are the legal city limits, the outer areas of which are generally not yet built on. What will soon become the new Anderson Home has its property outlined in red in the bottom right corner. OSU (Oregon State University), Dimple Hill and Chip Ross Park are locations important to my ascendancy, the hill and park featuring later in my autobiography. The Preamble contains a chapter and image list. The house was built on the back (southern) side of the mound, and slightly displaced to the east, with swimming and spa pools built into the front and west side of the mound, sufficiently west that the house shaded them only in the mornings. The house was a large rectangular prism, running east-west, so the long sides faced north to the road or south to the sun. It had three levels: The top level was mostly bedrooms and bathrooms. There weren't enough bedrooms for all of us, but the solution to that is described below. It had only one full master bedroom but was easily renovated to make a second suite to accommodate both sets of parents. Ground level (by which I mean level with the top of the mound) had the kitchen, dining, living room and a sizable office. Julia joked that her mom had instantly declared, "Prof and I have first dibs on that!" Under ground (inside the mound) was a large basement which contained a "Guys' Room" and a garage capable of holding four cars. The garage was entered by driving around the east side of the mound and in from the rear. The house was 5,300 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 4.5 bathrooms. Every time I'd heard of half a bathroom I'd always thought it sounded silly. My face must have given me away, because Vanessa explained, "Upstairs has a master bedroom with an en-suite, so that's the first bathroom. There's another large bedroom with an en-suite they're calling a second master bedroom, but that's claiming too much for it. We'd knock down a wall into the next bedroom and make a full master bedroom, en-suite and walk-in closet for your parents. So that's the second bathroom and three of the advertised bedrooms accounted for. There are two other normal-sized bedrooms upstairs, with a normal bathroom between them accessed off the hallway, all three of those rooms on the north side. There's a full bathroom on the ground floor, making four. And there's half a bathroom just inside from the garage, also accessible off the games room. It's got just a toilet, washbasin and shower. That's intended for when people have been working outside and they're too grubby to walk through the house." "Thanks Vanessa." The house was the least luxurious of the four, but FAR more luxurious than my existing home, and even noticeably better than the Williams'. It lacked a lot of the "mod cons" expected in an almost $3 million dollar house - most of which, I must confess, I didn't understand. Why would we need a "Butler's Pantry" when we wouldn't be having a Butler? And even if we did, why would he need his own pantry? I was amused by one of its features though: an elevator from the garage, up to the ground and top floors. I'd never known anyone who had an elevator in their home. The male owner was a very enthusiastic "boutique winemaker", another phrase that confused me, as I thought boutiques sold trendy and horribly overpriced clothes. I heard many dozens of terms that confused me during this discussion, so I'll stop mentioning them. About half the land was planted in vines, and he had his own little winery in a separate building on the site and several casks in storage in a cellar built into the mound (which was probably another reason for the mound). The storage room was earmarked for conversion to Dad's workshop, as it was next to the garages and had a doorway large enough to drive a car into. The female owner ran a "Bed and Breakfast" type business. Several years ago they'd had two single-level modular homes trucked in and installed near the front of their property. They were both the same and quite small, each with one large bedroom with a king-size bed, a second bedroom with one double bed and a three-high stack of bunk-beds, exactly 1.0 bathrooms, a living room, a small combined kitchen-and-dining room, and an even smaller laundry. They were each about two-thirds the square footage of my current home, which is somewhat small itself. The property had been on the market for nearly a year because the sellers were asking too much for it: $2.9 million. Its being quite a large properly for one so close to town, and having two income-generating businesses with their assets, were the sellers' justifications for the high price. Unfortunately for the sellers, people looking to spend $2.9 million on a home were rarely looking to have to operate two businesses on the property, and were looking for more luxury and upmarket features than this house provided. Also unfortunately for the sellers, Mrs. Seller was getting too infirm to be unable to look after such a big property and three houses, so they were increasingly eager to sell so they could move somewhere much smaller and easier to maintain. Our plan for the property, I was told, was to move the two modular houses so that one of them was on the west side of the mound. It'd be placed so it ran east-west (same as the mansion), with the front of the modular house level with the front of the mansion. There'd be about a twenty-foot gap between the two buildings. To help you visualize the layout, imagine your keyboard is the mound, looking north to the road. The mansion covers the area from the "N" to "/" keys. The first modular house will be put where the left "Shift" to "X" keys are. The swimming pool is "W" to "R", the spa pool is "Y". That's not very accurate or to scale (e.g., the mound is more oval than the keyboard is, and the mansion is wider than the modular houses), but it should give you an idea of the relative positions. The second modular home would be placed in line with and to the west of the first modular home, putting it on the ground beside the mound. It wouldn't be exactly in line, as the west-most end of it would be pulled south a bit, so it'd be angled outward to face 10 or 11 o'clock. This was because the mound wasn't large enough for both modular houses, and it'd take too much time to enlarge the mound for it, so the building had to be placed at ground level. If it faced directly north like the other two buildings, it'd have a twelve-foot high earthen wall (the west side of the mound) badly obscuring its view. By turning it away slightly, its outlook improved considerably. The two modular homes would be about twenty feet apart horizontally (maybe a little more, the architect was yet to decide), and necessarily twelve feet apart vertically. That gap was going to be fully enclosed, joining the two modular homes together. The room that'd be created by enclosing that gap would contain the staircase between the two modular homes, the new front door, and new back doors. The lower modular house was going to be left very much as it was, even including the furnishings as the sellers didn't want to take them when they left; they'd only take the furniture from the mansion. The only suggestion the parents had for changing the lower house was perhaps fitting a fireplace, but they were lukewarm over that idea. The top modular home was going to be gutted and re-fitted out. The stair's top landing, which would be in the northwest corner of the top modular home, would have three doors off it: One, turning left at the top of the stairs, would lead outside the front of the house onto a path that'd lead the short distance to the pool. Straight ahead from the stairs, the door would lead to the master bedroom, which would be a HUGE bedroom taking the entire length and the front half of the house (apart from the small landing). Julia had plans to do something very special with the master bedroom, decoratively speaking. I had plans to do something very enjoyable IN it, with as many girls as I could lure therein, that being my idea of how best to decorate my bedroom. Turning right at the top of the stairs would go into an ordinary-sized second bedroom. Mom and Dad thought of it as the "spare bedroom", as they still thought Carol and Donna would be living in the mansion. When they were convinced to let Carol live with me, that room would be publicly called "Carol's Bedroom", not that she'd use it. Looking at the top modular home from the road, the small front corner on the right (the house's NW corner) would be the stair's top landing, with the entire rest of the front half of the house being the master bedroom. The back half of the house would have three rooms in it. The back right corner (SW) would be Carol's bedroom, the back center would be the master bedroom's very large walk-in closet, and the back left corner (SE) would be the master bedroom's en-suite bathroom, with a shower large enough for several friends, Julia promised, because we enjoyed having fun squeezed into sharing her house's shower. Essentially, that modular home was going to be turned into "Mark's Master Bedroom," which sounded great to the Mark it was named after. In a moment when the adults were talking noisily (there were plenty of such moments) Julia quietly told me that there'd deliberately be only one obvious door into the second bedroom, the one from the landing. So if someone came up the stairs and knocked on my bedroom door, there'd be no obvious way "for anyone" (Julia then whispered "Carol" very quietly) to get back to the other bedroom. Julia had the idea of having a secret door between the two bedrooms, or maybe between the second bedroom and the walk-in closet. That way Carol could get back and forth without any visitors to the property knowing. There was an uncertainty over our study. One option was to have it at the far end of the master bedroom. That'd work fine, provided I didn't want a very big study, because that'd block access to the en-suite. Another option was to build it inside the other modular house, probably by converting one of the bedrooms. The third option was to build it inside the "Staircase Room" - the room we'd be creating to connect the two modular homes. Once it was explained to me, I realized the Staircase Room was going to be a substantial room, about twenty to twenty five feet long, and similarly wide. How long the room would be was the result of how far apart the two modular homes would be placed. The architect needed to do some more work before he could decide on that, especially in getting accurate ground levels for that area. The pitch of the stairs was relevant too, as we didn't want the stairs to be steep. The width of the Staircase Room was also flexible, as it would extend south to protrude past the southern walls of the two modular houses. This was so it could provide covered access to "Mark's Garages" and "The Tunnel" (which I'll explain shortly). It'd also have a backdoor to the outside. Assuming the Staircase Room was about twenty feet by twenty feet (which was reasonably likely, and if otherwise it'd probably be larger), then it'd be a very big room, easily large enough to contain a study. Or we could build a couple more bedrooms in there, or if we threw caution to the winds, even a wine cellar, for when I bought a bottle of wine. After some thought and discussion, I easily preferred using it for our study. The existing front and back doors into both modular homes would be removed. The main entrance into "Mark's House" or "Mark's Wing" - as the collective construction was inconsistently called - would be the front door into the Staircase Room. Less grand entrances would be the back door into the Staircase Room, the door from the stair's top landing to the front of the mound near the pool (the only entrance to the top modular home),, and the living room in the lower half of my house could have ranch-sliders onto a deck, if we built one. The front door into the Staircase Room would be on the west side of its front wall. Coming inside and then: Walking straight in a couple more yards then turning right, would take you into the lower modular house through its original front door. Turning left immediately inside the front door would take you up the stairs. They'd be against the front wall of the Staircase Room, and lead up to "Mark's Master Bedroom" (a.k.a. "The Den of Iniquitous Delights"). Going straight ahead would take you across the Staircase Room and out one of the three rear exits, to the outside, the garage or tunnel. Assuming the stairs to be four feet wide allowed for a study which was sixteen feet front to back, and potentially up to seventeen feet wide if we accepted having only a hallway from the front door through to the back doors. Assuming that 30" screens get invented by someone soon, my computer screens will occupy a wall area about 6 feet wide by 4.5 feet high, so 27 square feet. If I set up facing the mansion, that wall would be nearly twenty feet tall: its normal eight feet plus twelve feet for the mound, unless we chose to have a lower ceiling on it (the ROOF would slope down at the rate twelve feet vertically over twenty feet horizontally, but the CEILING could match the roof, or have a uniform 8-foot height, or something in between). I liked the idea of an angled ceiling, so assuming 17 feet of usable height (above the desk) by 16 feet of usable width, gave 272 square feet, ten times more than the 27 square foot area I'd need when I upgraded to the first 30" screens that come out. In other words, I could merge three more times and still fit enough screens on the wall for all of my minds to study (sixty four of them!). I had no intention of merging even once more, so only running into space problems after four more merges was not much of a worry. #1: Carol, Julia and Ava would want space to study too. If I faced the mansion with Carol beside me, we'd have sixteen feet north to south, which was plenty. With Julia and Ava behind us facing the other way, the room would need to be about twelve feet east to west, which left at least eight feet of width free for the 'hallway' through to the back, which sounded ample to me. I explained my design to everyone, and they were all happy with it. Where being "happy with it" didn't stop them immediately suggesting many changes. All they really needed me to do was tell them the size of my study, and they'd do the rest. All of their suggestions (those I understood anyway) sounded good to me, and none of them seemed to mess up my studying process, so I was happy. One major source of discussion was the front foyer to the Staircase Room; the women wanted to make that spectacular, because "first impressions count." Potentially we could do some fancy building in the Staircase Room (such as building another couple of bedrooms above my study, if we gave that a normal-height ceiling), but the adults preferred not to. We had no need for those improvements, they'd take more time and so delay our occupancy, they'd be more expensive, and all that work would be wasted if we ever wanted to separate the two modular homes again. Building just the one room, our study, inside the Staircase Room was easy and best. I should explain the proposed location of my house's garages and the tunnel. The mound was a slightly oval-shaped rectangle, with its long axis running east-west. The top modular home would on the west side and back half of the mound. It wouldn't be all the way back though, so there'd be some of the mound behind it. We were going to excavate all the south-west corner of the mound, under and behind where my Master Bedroom would be placed, as well as cut a very large ditch the rest of the way across the mound to the mansion. Under the Master Bedroom would be placed a series of nine-foot diameter concrete pipes, laid all the way to the mansion, angling up slightly to meet its basement at the exterior wall of the Guys' Room, where a doorway would be cut. This would create a quick and easy tunnel. Immediately south of the pipeline would be built a large concrete block room, capable of holding five or so cars parked side by side. It'd be much the same size, shape and orientation as the top modular house, only dug into the mound at ground level, twelve feet lower and a few feet behind, the modular house. The tunnel and garage would be re-buried, with the top modular home then placed on top and slight in front of the pipeline (there'd be about five feet of overlap, but that's not important). That had been pretty much how the Mansion's garages had been built, so we'd be copying that. It was easy and it kept the garages out of sight. Because they'd be buried, there'd be no need to decorate their exterior walls with fancy bricks or whatever, so the whole process would actually be relatively cheap. Looking at the mound from the south would show a bizarrely large number of garage doors, but the mound was built near the southern boundary so we didn't use that area (it'd mostly be for Donna's horse). Farther to the south were just farmers' fields, so no one else would care either. There was already a driveway that ran down the east side of the property and around to the southern side of the mound. We'd extend it to continue farther around the back of the mound to my garages on the west side of the rear of the mound. The main house had a visitors' parking area northeast of the mound, with a path from it that led up to the mound and into the house's front door. We'd create a parking area behind my garages for my visitors. I mentally added a large bike rack to my image of that area. I was astonished by the tunnel idea, but apparently it'd be surprisingly easy. The mound was artificial, so easy to dig. A large chunk of it was going to be removed to make room for the garages, so digging some more wasn't even a small deal, let alone a big one. Concrete pipes were easily obtained, and fitting them with floor, wall and ceiling panels to make a hallway inside the pipe would be easy too, as the panels could be prefabricated offsite and quickly secured into place once the pipes were laid. The tunnel wouldn't be luxurious, but it'd be okay. It'd be well insulated by the mound, so temperature wouldn't be a problem. The spaces outside the wall panels but inside the pipe would be very convenient for running water pipes and electric cables to my house too. The idea of the tunnel was mostly a matter of convenience for getting back and forth between the two buildings on wet days, but it might also be useful for security and safety reasons. Right from when they'd first started looking at properties, Vanessa and Mom hadn't wanted me to have a totally detached dwelling, because the security issues worried them. They could've built a covered walkway (effectively a hallway) from the end of my bedroom to the mansion, but the buried tunnel was actually quicker, easier and cheaper, mainly because there'd be no pressure to decorate it. Having it underground also made the top of the mound visually cleaner and easier to walk around. For security reasons, the doors at either end would be made unobvious, which is what had given Julia the idea of having a secret door between my master bedroom and Carol's bedroom. That was why the Staircase Room would protrude a few feet out of the back of the house, so the first few feet of the mound-side wall could be a secret door into the tunnel, then a normal door into the garage. Julia had also suggested a trapdoor from the Master Bedroom's walk-in closet down into the tunnel, but everyone else, including me when I heard of it, thought that was too melodramatic. If I was awake enough to drop through a trapdoor and run into the mansion, then I was awake enough to defend myself. Between 50 kg of NP force (through eyeballs and into brains if necessary), my Aikido skills, and light blobs for illumination at night if necessary, I could now defend myself EXTREMELY well. Another point in favor of this house was that the Corvallis Police Station was just on the other side of the bridges into town, so if we called the cops in an emergency, it'd take them less than two minutes to arrive, once they'd finished their donuts - after my experiences with them, I don't have a particularly high opinion of individual cops. The existence of the tunnel wouldn't be highly secret, as it'd have to be included in the building permit plans and plenty of workmen would see it being laid, but it could be useful against people like the two who'd kidnapped Prof and me. On which subject, the new property and its buildings were going to be FAR better secured than our existing homes. The Williamses were determined not to have another kidnapping, and I was inclined to agree with them. They mentioned some things, such an alarm system that'd scream when it was disabled rather than go quiet like their last one had. They also liked the idea of an easily visible decoy alarm system, with the real one hidden behind a pop-out panel. Mostly they said they'd research it over the next several weeks and then hire some expert advice, as it'd take that long for the sale to go through. There were many obvious things we'd be doing, like my house having good soundproofing and toughened, mirrored glass, superb drapes that prevented any inward views at night (as mirrored glass doesn't work so well at night when the room is well lit), with motion sensors around the houses tied into the alarms, unlike the two cheap ones that Prof had installed outside Julia's bedroom. The idea of having secret doors at the ends of the tunnel had been news to Dad, but he got quite excited thinking about the fun of doing it. Dad's handy with his hands (being "handy" with your feet would be very confusing, although better than being feety with your hands), so he was capable of making clever doors and doing simple wiring. He suggested getting the builders to create the doorways, "Then after they leave, I can make and hide the doors. I could even make door catches which worked on DC, off a constantly recharging sealed battery, so a power failure wouldn't matter. Each door could even have two or more switches in series. One hidden under the carpet maybe, so you'd have to stand on exactly the right place, then press another switch. Both would have to be activated at the same time for the door to open." The modular houses themselves were nothing special, but they were well furnished. I was warned that I wouldn't be living in luxury, but that didn't worry me. The study could be decorated as luxuriously as I wanted, which wasn't much as I was mainly going to be staring at screens with my eyes shut. Julia was already showing great enthusiasm for decorating the master bedroom excessively. I would make damn sure there was no pink involved! Other than studying or being in my bedroom, most of my time would be spent inside the mansion, for meals, as an excellent example. On the topic of food, earlier in the conversation Dad had quipped that the parents should live in the modular houses and I should live in the mansion, seeing as I was paying for it. That idea was so stupid I laughed, and then pointed out, "It's EXTREMELY important that the cooks live very close to the best kitchen." The modular houses' kitchens were barely large enough to deserve that name. Landscaping came up because more than half the property needed work. The grapevines had to be removed, and the ground at least sown with grass, planted in gardens, or whatever else the women wanted. Vanessa likes gardening, so she'd have a five acre, almost empty canvas to play with. To my surprise, I discovered that my lack of interest in the landscaping topic wasn't total, when Vanessa mentioned, "We don't really want to look out of the kitchen window to see a never-ending series of sexual escapades going on around the pool. We have to keep the pool visible from the house for safety reasons, but we'll landscape an area next to the pool so it'll still get the sun but you'll have privacy behind it. Okay Mark?" "Sounds great, thanks. Are you going to be so helpful as to provide the girls for me as well, or do I have to find them for myself? Haha." It's hard to tease Vanessa. She responded, "The pipeline system was my idea and my daughter's implementing it for you, so I think we're doing most of your 'dirty work' for you already. You'll have to do the rest yourself." "Haha. You got me on that." The second landscaping idea that caught my attention was also from Vanessa. She said, "We could build a very nice water feature for the front of your lower house, Mark. A waterfall over rocks down the side of the mound, into a nice water garden at the bottom. You could put another spa pool down there too, for privacy from the rest of the family." Every now and then, usually in the doctor's or dentist's waiting rooms, my eye has been attracted by pretty pictures of gardens with water in them. Often Japanese, for some reason. Some of them I have liked very much, and I don't exactly study that subject so there's bound to be FAR more good stuff than what I've seen. I said, "That sounds like a great idea, Vanessa." I tried to talk about it, but Vanessa said, "Those sorts of things we'd work on after we move in, so let's not worry about them now." Then Vanessa and Mom started talking about the many problems with the property. It had MANY problems! I won't list them all here, because they were never ending, were tedious AND depressing. I'll quickly mention a few though, starting with the orientation of the house and property apparently being very poor. It would be reasonably accurate to say that House Orientation is a concept that has never come close to crossing my mind before. Vanessa saw my blank look and explained, "The house faces north to the road, but the sun is from the south, behind the house. The original architect muddled up the layout of the rooms and the property. It would've been better to move the house to the north of the mound and to have the pool on the south side of the house so it got the sun all day. The kitchen looks north, so it can see anyone arriving from the road, but that means it doesn't get any direct sunlight. Fortunately, the master bedrooms all get the morning sun very well, but that won't apply to your bedroom unless we turned your house around 180 degrees, which wouldn't fit the layout of the property. If this place had been on the north side of the road rather than the south, it would've been simple to lay out. Instead whoever sited the house and designed it made a number of fairly poor compromises. -- "I would've built the mound near the northwest corner and had the whole house oriented to look south over its property. The driveway would've entered the northeast corner where it does now and curved into the property so it could be observed from the kitchen in the southeast corner of the house. That way the house would have gotten the sun perfectly, and it would have faced all its own landscaping. That would've worked much better." I asked, "I presume you can't move the mansion the way you're intending to move the two small houses that are going to be mine?" "No, they're completely different. Modular homes are designed to be transported. They're built in factories then trucked to wherever the buyer wants them. Picking them up and moving them again is quite simple. The main house is built into the hill and three levels high, so it'd be a nightmare to move it. Even if we could, part of the problem is that the rooms are in the wrong places. If we turned the house around the way I said, the master bedrooms would then be on the wrong side. The only solution would be to build a new house from scratch, which isn't practical." Other problems the women listed included its having no view, mostly just the hills that are visible from everywhere in Corvallis. The view where I live now is a few feet of grass then a wooden fence, or across the road to look at the front of another house, over the top of which we can get glimpses of the tops of the hills. The new place was far better. I knew that because I'd seen the photos out of various windows, from beside the pool, where my bedroom would be, where my living room would be, etc. A LOT of etc., as they'd been very thorough with their photography. Vanessa had four of my screens doing slideshows of the four shortlisted properties, with the other four screens displaying static pictures of the preferred property. I must admit that a couple of the other houses did have much nicer views, but views don't matter as much to me as they obviously do to women. They went on and on about many things that I couldn't care less about. One issue that did matter to me was price. The sellers were asking $2.9 million. I wanted to pay between 2.0 and 2.5 million dollars, so 2.9 was WAY over. There was good news and bad news financially. The good news included: The would-be sellers had been asking that price for a year with no luck at all. Most realtors were no longer bothering to take clients to see it because it was overpriced. The sellers had become more desperate and we were the first serious interest they'd had for months, so they'd indicated that they were negotiable. If they'd not been, this property wouldn't be on our list. They were trying to sell the Bed and Breakfast and Vineyard 'businesses' as some sort of going concerns. The vineyard was worth nothing to us, so they could sell everything themselves and even take the buildings away. That'd recover some money for them. More importantly, by taking it out of the equation they had less justification for claiming their property was worth so much, making it easier to talk them down. Now that they'd seen that it might take years to sell at the current price, lost bank interest was an issue they were aware of. They were looking to buy a much smaller and cheaper house next, so they would have money left over to invest. They were losing up to $100,000 cash income per year. Compared to the other three properties, this one easily had the lowest renovation costs. The bad news: $2.9 million was a LONG way above what I wanted to pay. Having the modular houses saved a bundle on the renovations, but it would result in a greater furnishings cost (mostly in my bedroom wing) plus additional security costs (e.g., soundproofing most of the rooms). $2.9 million was a LONG way above what I wanted to pay. A LOOOONG way! I wasn't joking to the parents and Julia when I reiterated that point. At that price it was TOO expensive. I'd rather buy Plan B, whatever that was; no one had told me that yet. I hated the idea that it was too expensive, because the place was otherwise wonderful for me. Unlike the women, I didn't care that the marble doohickeys weren't imported from Italy (domestic doohickeys were perfectly fine for me, especially as our existing house didn't have any doohickeys at all, making do with a plastic thingamabob instead). In other words, while the women were very aware that the house itself wasn't up to the same quality standards as the other houses they'd seen, I thought many of their ideas about 'quality' were horrendously inflated bullshit marketing crap about nothing that made any real difference to anything at all (I kept that opinion to myself). Therefore I didn't really care that this house didn't have so much of it. There were two things that I REALLY loved. First, I loved the idea of having my own house alongside the mansion. The privacy was great for both sexual and ki ability reasons - connecting the two houses by a private tunnel was cool too! Second, this house could be occupied quicker than any of the others. The sellers were able to move out quickly, and the renovations wouldn't take long. Some of the alternate houses would take at least three months longer for us to get into. The time advantage this property had was one of the main reasons it got all the way to the top of the shortlist, despite its being overpriced. The mothers were aware that I might be in Corvallis for only another twelve to fifteen months, so waiting four or five months to move into a new place was painful (that's how long most of the alternatives would take). From my point of view, I VERY much wanted to spend some of the summer in the new house! Especially as it had a swimming pool and Vanessa was going to landscape us some privacy (landscaping is a wonderful activity). It came down to money, as I imagine buying houses often does. If we were willing to pay $2.9 million we could sign the contract this evening, but I was NOT willing to pay $2.9 million! My share of the Binion's money was exactly $7 million pre-tax ($6.7 million in 3B-land, because $300,000 was paid to Carol. That hadn't happened in 3A-land yet), or $4.667 million after tax. Less one of the emergency funds left me with $3.667 million. The LA trip had been very expensive, plus about $9,000 for Ava's parents' vacation. I'd gotten more than half of those total costs back from interest earned, as the Anderson emergency fund and the $2.333 million tax money were still in my account. I'd also saved money by being kidnapped and nearly tortured to death, as that'd meant I spent a month in Seattle away from Julia's spending habits. I had about $3.65 million left. Mentally subtracting $200,000 for Carol (after-tax), left me with $3.45 million. I'd vaguely planned/hoped on having $1.0 million left after buying the house, to pay for the renovations, furnishings, a new car, and everything else I'd need until I got a real job in God know how many years; but paying $2.9 million for the house left only $550,000 for everything else. I'd seen the gleam in the women's eyes when they'd repeatedly mentioned furnishing the house. Julia had been excited about that, which seriously worried me as Julia spends money like it's going out of style even when she's not excited. I had a very strong feeling that paying for the furnishings was going to HURT! If we paid the property's asking price, I could easily imagine that I'd totally run out of money. I was seriously regretting Prof and I not winning more from Binion's! If we'd started with $110,000 thousand and used the same betting rationalizations, we would've ended up with $13.3 million, and I'd be a lot less worried. I have absolutely no income of my own, and won't have for several years, so running out in a few months was bad news. I did NOT want to have to do another Binion's-type of scheme! The only alternative was to 'borrow' from the emergency funds or to tap the parents. I was reluctant to do either of those, because as long as I had access to money, I could imagine Julia draining it at a prodigious rate. Those sources of funds could be drained in weeks if Julia was in an uncontrolled furnishing frenzy. I spent some time thinking and worrying about the finances while the females babbled on at length about inconsequential stuff. I ended up thoroughly depressing myself. I didn't make Julia's day either, when I interrupted the engrossing discussion about pros and cons of various hot-water heating systems installed in the shortlisted houses, to announce what I'd decided, "Excuse me for a minute. I've been getting VERY worried about the finances for this. I've got $3.4 million in my account after taking out the tax money and emergency fund." Actually I had 3.65, but Carol's money would take it down to $3.45 million, which I rounded down to 3.4. "There's no way I know how to budget for the furnishings, so I've taken a stab at budgeting my future living costs and whatever's left will be for the house. -- "From now until I go away to a university, I'm going to assume I'll need $100,000. I'm going to put that in a separate account and use it for all my non-house related expenses, such as buying a car. If that money runs out before I go to a university, then I'll stop spending money. If I can't afford gas for the car, it'll sit idle and I'll go back to biking to school or OSU. I used to live on something like $10 per week, and don't see any reason why I can't go back to that. We're going to look at cars tomorrow. If Julia pushes me into buying a very expensive car, it'll almost certainly end up parked in the garage for most of the year because I'm NOT going to spend more than $100,000 between now and going to a university. Bear that in mind tomorrow, Julia, especially because it's the most expensive cars that we're going to see. -- "I'm going to guess that moving to a university and all the living costs from then on, for as many years as it takes before I start earning money regularly, is going to cost me a total of $500,000. I'm particularly concerned about providing safe and secure housing for us in whatever city we go to, so I'd rather over-estimate than under. I'll be transferring that money into yet another account where it won't be touched until I go to a university. -- "It goes without saying that I do NOT want to do another Binion's-type scheme. So there'll be no more money coming in, other than some interest which can accumulate in each account for whatever that account's for. Unless anyone has strong feelings that my $100,000 and $500,000 estimates are off badly, the remainder is $2.8 million. That's to buy a house, renovate and furnish it. As far as I'm concerned, the house money can be put into another account and the parents can take out whatever they need without wasting my time on it. -- "I do NOT want to go broke on a house I'll live in for only one year, when I've got several more years ahead of me before I can start earning a living. Does anyone see anything wrong with my way of trying to stop that happening?" Vanessa and Prof congratulated me for being so definite about it. Julia wasn't so congratulatory though, "$2.8 million isn't enough to buy the house you said you preferred, especially with the renovating and furnishing costs." I answered, "The expression that comes to my mind is, 'Tough shit!' I'm not going to live in a slightly nicer house in Corvallis for a few months if it costs so much that we end up living in an insecure house for several years in whatever city we move to next. Obviously you should find a cheaper house now." Poor Julia (an expression she would no doubt consider appropriate) didn't like the idea of having fierce limits on the spending. No doubt she was of the opinion that it was best to keep a large amount of money flexibly available, in case something REALLY good turned up and begged to be bought, a $2.9 million property in this case. Julia tried to weasel. Saying stuff about how negotiable these people were, that we could get them well below my figure of $2.8 million, once we were living in the house it'd be silly to buy cheap furnishings because we were a few thousand short, blah, blah. (Actually, the purchase price would have to be below $2.74 million, as the renovations for this place were estimated to be a comparatively cheap $60,000). Vanessa and Prof just sat there, looking at me. They even appeared not to be listening to Julia, so I could easily tell they were waiting on me to take command. I hate it when that happens. Julia's saying, " ... blah, blah, image is important, blah..." was the straw that well and truly broke my back. I interrupted, "WHAT CRAP! How much image am I going to have living out of trash bins for however many years I spend at a university because you spent all my money on this house? You're trying to spend ALL my money in the short term. That's stupid! I've allocated EVERY SINGLE PENNY of my money, planning to have absolutely none left when I finish studying, so arguing about it isn't creating any more. All you're doing is robbing the future to pay too much for the present. -- "I don't have the knowledge necessary for me to manage your decorating, and the women here are my only source of information about that stuff, so it makes much better sense for you to take responsibility for what happens. I've given you the total amount that I think is available. If you negotiate these people down to $2.7 million and then it costs more than the $40,000 that's left to furnish the place, then you will have screwed up. It's your screwup, not mine, so it'll be up to you to fix it. Especially because I don't give a flying fig about furnishings." Vanessa helped Julia feel bad by telling her, "How concerned and angry do you think Mark must be to talk to you like this, Julia?" Julia had been on the point of apologizing for being impractical before Vanessa's point, so she was doubly apologetic now. She launched into a heartfelt apology, blaming herself for getting carried away, for being inconsiderate, for not thinking of the future, etc. After a couple of minutes, Prof said, "We want you to learn the skills necessary to manage money. One of those skills is managing your partner's attitude to money. Like everybody else, Julia does some things well and some things badly. Her ability to conserve money is poor, and even worse when she's trying to make you look as good as possible. That's something you need to find a way of managing; ideally not by putting up with your worries until the issue comes to a head, and then blowing up." #5: "It's hard, Prof. I already put my foot down about Julia wanting to spend over 2.5. I thought she'd gotten that message very clearly, but this property is well over that." "So what are you going to do about it?" #5: I said, "A large part of the problem is because I don't have a clue about the cost of setting up a new home. I could repeat my insistence that we don't spent more than 2.5 buying the place, but I've got no idea whether that's leaving far too little or far too much for the furnishings. It's also ignoring the fact that this particular place has lower renovation costs than the others, which shouldn't be ignored because it all comes out of the same account. Even before the furnishings are bought, in fact." Mom said, "Furnishing a house doesn't have a right number. We could furnish this house for $10,000 by buying the cheapest quality trash furniture that we could find. The sort of fifteenth-hand, worn out stuff that goes into student apartments. Or we could furnish it for $10 million, or for every value in between." Vanessa added, "That's why no one has given you a value, Mark, or even an estimate. It's a value that's so wide open it doesn't make sense to choose the 'right' amount. It's much more a matter of what you can afford." I asked, "I don't want to pay more than $2.8 million in total, so if I insisted on not paying more than $2.5 million to buy the place, then there's the $60,000 estimate for renovations, which would leave $240,000 for furnishings. Maybe we could pay 2.6 for the house, if $140,000 for furnishing is enough?" Mom said, "Steven and I should get about $175,000 for our house. We should add that to the budget since the new house is still going to be in the family. We've got nearly all the million that you gave us, so we certainly don't need the money from the house sale." Prof disagreed, "I only half agree, Felicity. Mark has planned on spending all of his money by the time he finishes university. It's never a good idea to plan on spending everything, so he should withhold about $100,000. We were intending for him to bury some money in case he's ever locked out of his bank accounts, for example. If you tip your own money in, then it should replace Mark's money, not add to it. -- "Thinking about it, I'll go so far as to strongly suggest that Mark withholds $100,000. Whether that means $100,000 less is spent on furnishings or someone else makes up the difference, doesn't worry me. Like Mark, I don't understand furnishing costs. I would like to see him bury two or three bundles of $10,000 though. I know that's unusual, but Mark's sufficiently unusual himself that it'd be a good idea to do it. He should have a safe in the house with some cash in it too. Having cash makes many other things possible." Julia glumly said, "I was already intending to have a safe, but the way I was behaving there'd have been nothing left to put in it." Vanessa said, "Let's get real about a few things. First, we're not in danger of running out of money. Even if Mark runs out, there are the proceeds from the sale of the Anderson's existing house, the two $1 million gifts Mark gave each family, the $2 million emergency fund - which Prof and I would be against touching for anything other than an emergency - and there's considerable merit in Julia's money being added to the pot too. If Mark ran out we'd still finish furnishing the house, and we wouldn't let him live out of trash bins at his university. Mark's running out of money is not the real issue, but we do have to decide on which house to attempt to purchase and our budget for it, the budget for furnishings, and we need to teach Julia and Mark some more about managing money. -- "I suggest the following. Mark mentally subtracts the $100,000 and $500,000 amounts he talked about, plus an extra $100,000 safety-money that Prof talked about. That money is his, to be used over the next several years. That'll leave $2.7 million for the house. I'm going to call that $2.6 million because I'm sure there'll be additional renovation, landscaping and security costs we haven't included because they were common to all the homes we could buy. Taxes, insurances and other costs like that we'll ignore as they'll be the four parents' concern and partially offset by savings from the other properties. -- "I'll enter into negotiations for the Peoria Road property attempting to get the price reduced as low as possible. That process could easily last a few weeks because I'll be battling hard. How far under $2.6 million is how much money we have for furnishings. Once I have a final price, Mark will have to approve it, and so will Felicity and Julia. Either can veto the purchase if they don't think there's enough money left over for furnishings. 20% of the left over money will be allocated to Julia for Mark's house, with 80% allocated to Felicity for the main house. If either woman exceeds their budget, they'll pay the difference out of their own pocket. If they both approve of Mark's buying the house priced above $2.6 million, they'll have to make up that difference, 20% from Julia, 80% from Felicity, even before they start buying furnishings. -- "My 'out of their own pockets' threat is an empty one in Felicity's case, because she's doesn't need a lesson in frugality and I'm sure she's fully capable of deciding what her budget is and sticking to it. Or not, as I'm sure including some of her and Steven's own money wouldn't upset them, since she offered it before. I'm suggesting Felicity should be in charge of the house's furnishings not to teach her a lesson, but because it's an Anderson home, so she should get the pleasure of being in charge of the job. -- "My 'out of her pocket' threat is aimed squarely at my profligate daughter, who needs to learn how to operate on a budget. It IS likely to be too low, Julia, perhaps even zero if I can't negotiate them below $2.6 million. If the purchase went ahead at $2.6 million, you'd be furnishing Mark's house entirely at your own expense, which I have no objection to whatsoever. -- "As a last point, although Felicity is in charge of the main house, Prof and I will furnish our bedroom and study, to our design and at our expense so we can get them done exactly the way we want. Comments anyone?" Julia jumped in first, "PLEASE negotiate HARD, Mom! Try to get it for less than $1 million, haha. I understand what you're doing, but it's MEAN!" "I'm sure Felicity doesn't think it's mean. That you do is because you haven't learned the value of money yet." Mom wasn't looking happy though. She explained, "I'm not worried about the money so much, because Mark's given us more than enough. My major worry is your putting me in charge. I was assuming and hoping we'd work together on the furnishings. I CERTAINLY don't want to be in charge, because I wouldn't know what to do. I never expected to be in a position to move into a multimillion dollar house, so I've never kept aware of that end of the market." Vanessa answered, "I said you'd be in charge. That doesn't prevent you from asking advice from me or anyone else. People who're in charge SHOULD ask for advice. It just means you make the final decisions and sign the checks. I'm sure we'll have many hours of fun together. I'm looking forward to it." "Phew. In that case, so am I," agreed a much relieved Mom. That was pretty much the end of that conversation. I could stop worrying about going broke. Now I just had to worry about whether we could find a house we could afford and which wouldn't take six months to move into. Everyone jumped back into discussing the houses. It was mind-boggling how much detail they found to discuss. Mostly I tuned out because I was frazzled and uninterested. Julia wasn't. She was still sitting on my lap, but she was totally involved in the discussion. Some time later (it felt like a long time), I got a call from Carol, saying they'd finished and all the girls were heading home. She was making sure we were still at Julia's, asking, "You haven't finished talking yet, have you?" "I have, but I don't think anyone else has. It's safe to say that we'll still be here when you arrive." "Okay, see you soon." I did catch a bit more information about the renovations at this place. These were the jobs: Inside the mansion the second wannabe-master bedroom had to be merged with its neighboring bedroom, a decent closet built, and the en-suite improved. Mark's Master Bedroom had to be fitted out. Apparently almost completing gutting the inside of that house and refitting it was easier than I'd thought, because the construction of the modular house was, wait for it... , modular! That could be done where the building currently was, while the job below was being done. The SW corner of the mound had to be opened up, the tunnel laid, the garage built, and then covered again. Both construction jobs were very basic and quick. Vanessa had plans for using the excavated soil to make small hills around the flat property, to make it more interesting. The two modular houses moved into position, the Staircase Room built to link them, and to connect to the doors leading to the tunnel and garage. There were several security jobs. That list wasn't decided on yet, but it would include everything from moving any spouting downpipes that made it too easy for love-smitten girls or more threatening people to climb into windows, through to putting a wall around the entire property. This issue hadn't progressed much as they needed to have a property under contract before they could get expert advice about it. There'd probably be an assortment of odd jobs around the place (e.g., some painting, converting the large wine cellar into Dad's workshop, etc.) It made sense to do as many odd jobs as possible while the house was unfurnished. Most of the jobs were independent of each other, so they could be done simultaneously. The parents hoped to have several crews of workers plus the diggers for the mound all lined up outside on the road at the moment the sale went through. Someone would blow a whistle, then they'd all swarm onto the property and get to work on their various jobs. Of course it wouldn't happen like that, but the parents were going to try to push for as close to that ideal as they could get. Even once the contract "went unconditional" (which had to be explained to me), it'd still take the lawyers a minimum of a couple of weeks to move the necessary pieces of paper around (that was explained to me too. Buying a house is VERY tedious). There'd be a clause in the contract to allow us access to the property during that time, so the architect, surveyor, security people, etc., could get the information they needed to plan their work. When we legally owned the property, and someone "blew the whistle", hopefully they'd all be able to swing into action very quickly. The mansion itself would be habitable almost immediately, as soon as we moved beds, clothes, pots and pans into it. It'd be noisy and chaotic for a couple of weeks, but it'd be livable. The tentative plan was for Prof and Vanessa to stay in their existing home because they preferred to wait until they could relocate in an orderly manner, while the rest of us moved into the mansion asap. Mom and Dad would move into what would be Vanessa and Prof's master bedroom while Mom and Dad's was being enlarged. Julia and I could live in one of the mansion's ordinary bedrooms, or in the modular home that wasn't going to be altered, or even in Julia's current room if we wanted to stay here. Carol and Donna would live in the mansion's other ordinary bedroom(s). Dad, in particular, wanted to be on-site immediately, so he could supervise the workers. He even talked about working only half-days for a couple of weeks at his regular job, so he could better supervise the mansion jobs. Having a million dollars in the bank had clearly relaxed his work ethic. ------- Chapter 246: Mom Isn't Happy About Carol Showing Everyone Her Pussy Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued) Carol arrived in the study, having been let in by Robert. Julia immediately started showing Carol pictures of our preferred choice and explaining our plan. Before they got too engrossed, I interrupted loudly, "Excuse me everyone. I want to ask a quick question about my light blobs. Everyone who knows about them is here now, so this would be a good time. I'm thinking of showing them to Andrew and Robert. I'm still thinking about my reason, and I'm not ready to discuss it yet, but I thought I should ask if any of you knows of any reason why I shouldn't give them a demonstration?" "Why?" asked Julia with considerable interest. Several possible ways of answering crossed my minds. I chose, "Sometimes I don't think you listen to me, Julia." "Huh?" After a second's thought, "Ohh! You're not ready to discuss it yet. Sorry, I didn't listen AGAIN. I'm having trouble with that." "Yes. I think it's because you love being bossy and knowing everything that's going on. I could see you were very interested in my reason, so maybe when I'm ready to discuss it, I'll tell everyone EXCEPT you. That'd be a punishment that'd fit the crime nicely, wouldn't it?" "That's too cruel. Maybe you could just accept my apology? I truly AM sorry, Mark. I'm also VERY pleased that you're standing up to me. I don't suppose you'd believe me if I tried to claim my mistakes are part of a cunning plan to make you more self-assertive?" "Not likely. We'll discuss a suitable punishment in our room later. It may not be a cruel punishment, but it probably will be unusual. Back to The Boys. Does anyone have a reason not to tell them?" After a couple of minutes' conversation, everyone agreed that they trusted The Boys enough. Vanessa made a statement that summarized everyone's feeling, "Andrew and Robert are extremely trustworthy men. They know several things about you already which I'm sure they've kept quiet about. However, your light blobs aren't you doing something better than other people can do; they're something that no one else can do, so you should have a good reason before you show them." My reason was superficially a silly one, as it was to play a trick on Donna. There was some serious justification for the trick though. I said, "I'll keep thinking about my reason. If I decide it might be good enough, I'll talk about it with MOST OF YOU first," I pointedly stared at Julia during my stressed words. Despite my threat, I would include Julia in the conversation. It involved our three-way wedding ceremony, presuming that went ahead, so Julia should know what I was thinking of doing. I couldn't talk about it now because Mom and Dad didn't know there was going to be a wedding ceremony, but I could talk with Vanessa, Prof and Julia after the rest of my family left. The conversation got back to the topic of the four properties on our shortlist, partly to explain everything to Carol, but mostly because the adults and Julia wanted to talk real estate some more. God knows why, because we'd already decided what to do. If the sellers refused to lower their price enough, we'd have plenty of time to discuss Plan B then. If they did lower their price, all this conversation would be wasted. Obviously they were enjoying themselves, but I wasn't. I was tired of it, and I was a bit frazzled by the two confrontations with Julia, especially the first one. I hate arguing with her, and I hated even more that the money situation had become so pressured that I'd "blown up", as Prof had correctly pointed out. Listening to more real estate talk was stressing me out even more, so I was going to escape. I said, "Excuse me again, but I need a break from discussing real estate. I think I'll check out the leftovers, then have a soak in the hot tub." "I'll come with you," said Carol. "I've got a lot of things to tell you about the Cuties." "I thought you'd be interested in the house shopping?" "Not really. I don't really have a say in it." #6: "Not long before you arrived, Carol, we divided up who was in charge of furnishing different parts of the houses. Mom is responsible for most of the main house, Vanessa for just her bedroom and study, and Julia is in charge of my detached house. The person in charge can ask advice and get opinions from whomever she wants, but the final decision is hers. -- "You were right when you said you didn't have a say, so I'm changing that. In the main house there are two bedrooms which are for you and Donna. There's also a spare bedroom in the top modular house. You're now in charge of those three bedrooms. If we end up buying a different house than the one we're trying for, you'll still be in charge of its non-master bedrooms. The carpets, drapes, wallpapers, beds, bed linen, and everything else. Even things like the windows. If you don't think they're big enough, you can tell the builders to cut a bigger hole in the wall and get bigger windows put in." I'd heard Mom and Dad talking about doing that in their room, and maybe even building a small deck. "But I don't know ANYTHING about decorating!" "You'll have a few weeks to learn. I suggest you visit as many of your girlfriends' houses as you can. Look at all their bedrooms, talk with their mothers, take pictures, make notes, and learn as much as you can. I'm sure they'll be excited to help you learn. You can visit stores, read magazines and whatever else women do to learn that stuff." -- I asked the room at large, "Is ten grand per room a large enough budget?" Vanessa answered, "More than enough Mark. Half that would be ample." "I'll make it $20,000 for the three rooms then. I'll write you a check for $20,000. I want you to have the money in your account so you know it's real." Carol asked incredulously, "You're going to give me ANOTHER twenty thousand?" #7: "Haha. I haven't given you anything YET. This is to spend on furnishings for MY house. If you spend it on pretty dresses, then you're going to be sleeping on the floor for the next few years." #1: #7: #1: #2: #3: #2: "I've never thought about decorating anything before. I haven't got a clue what to do." "Getting advice isn't going to be a problem, sweetie; getting too much is going to be the main worry. Mom and Vanessa will let you know the types of things you need to think about and your girlfriends will go crazy wanting to help. Visit their homes like I said before, take them to visit our house after we've got access to it and ask them for ideas. I don't know much about girls, but one thing I'm sure of, is that you'll end up getting enough advice to furnish fifty bedrooms. Julia will help you too, but she'll be under STRICT orders not to get bossy. If I see her doing that, she'll end up decorating the mailbox and nothing else. Is that clear, JULIA?" "Yes Mark. I think you're WONDERFUL!" "Thanks mostly to you. I'll thank you for that properly later tonight; right after I finish punishing you for not listening. You're going to have a busy evening, haha. -- "Carol, I've given you three bedrooms to do. Three, so you can have some fun with different choices; and bedrooms only, so you don't have too much to learn. You'll have a blast, and your friends are going to be incredibly envious. Think about everything you've always wanted in your bedroom. Anything from more closet space through to your own bowling lane, haha. That last suggestion might be a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea: YOU choose what you want, because you're in charge. Okay?" "I don't think I'll do any good. I'll mess it up and you'll have ugly rooms in your house." "I'm sure that's not going to happen, sweetie. When you think you've got a design for a room, show it to Mom and Vanessa to get their opinions. Or if you're still worried, use some of the money to get advice from a professional decorator. The only way something ugly could happen would be if you had bad taste AND you refused to listen to other people's advice, NEITHER of which I can see happening. You won't make mistakes like that, so relax. I'm sure you'll have a good time with your project. It'll also keep you very busy for the next few weeks. -- "Mom, are there books about decorating in the library?" "Yes. Dozens of them." "There you go, sweetie. Tomorrow morning I suggest you go to the library and start boning up on the subject. If you happen to find a book that says guys' bedrooms shouldn't have ANYTHING pink in them, PLEASE show it to Julia. I'd be willing to pay $20,000 just for that, haha." "Oh boy. I'm really going to do this?" "Yes you are. The most important thing to remember is that you're in charge. Listen to other people, but then YOU decide what YOU want to be done." "Yes. It's going to be scary, but fun." "Good girl. Don't forget to include a big shoe rack in Donna's room, to hold all her running shoes, haha." Carol chuckled, then she asked Mom, "Please show me what you've got about my bedrooms." I interrupted, "Before you do that Carol, please go down to the kitchen, fix me a plate of Chinese leftovers and whatever you want for yourself, heat them then come back up to tell me they're ready. I want to talk about you to everyone else, and I don't want you hearing." "Oh." Carol and the aforementioned "everyone else" were all surprised. Then she said, "Okay," and left the room, closing the door behind her. I told everyone, "I've got two points to make. First, Carol doesn't value herself NEARLY highly enough. I don't know how good the end result of her decorating will be, but I don't particularly care. $20,000 is a cheap price to help her feel worthwhile. When she's asking any of you for decorating advice, how the rooms will look is less important than Carol's feelings about herself, so please answer her accordingly. Encourage her and build her confidence. That especially applies to you, Julia. If it helps you concentrate, the real project ISN'T the bedrooms, but CAROL, okay?" "I understand. I'm very impressed by you." "Occasionally I know what I'm doing. Carol won't be long, so let me carry on. When I told you how much money I had available for the house, I already subtracted some money for Carol. In other words, that $20,000 won't come off your budgets. It'll actually help because there'll be three fewer rooms for you to worry about. I'm amused to see you look relieved, Julia. Well done on managing to hold that concern back earlier. -- "The second point I want to mention has nothing to do with buying a house. This is just a good time to do it. I said a few minutes ago that I was going to have a soak in the hot tub. I'll do that after Carol and I finish our meal downstairs. Carol has some gossip from the Cuties - her friends today - that she wants to tell me. Show her the pictures of the house to get her starting to think about her project, but don't keep her here for long. When she's seen enough, send her down to tell me her gossip. -- "Vanessa, before she leaves the room I want you to tell her a new 'Family Rule' that you have here. Whenever Carol uses your hot tub she must be naked. It doesn't matter who else is in the tub or in the house, Carol must be naked. Make sure you emphasize that the rule applies to Carol only; not to anyone else. Then send her down to join me in the hot tub. -- "I imagine you've got some questions, Mom?" I was surprised Mom hadn't interrupted with her questions "Haha. Yeah, you could say so. Why ON EARTH do you want to see your sister naked?" "That question's wrong in several ways. First, if I wanted to see Carol or Donna naked, all I'd have to do is ask them to show me. I'm pretty sure both of them trust me enough that they'd do it. If that'd been my motivation, I don't think I would have raised the issue surrounded by parents. Or maybe that should be 'surrounded by concerned parents', haha. This isn't about me at all. I want the fake Family Rule to apply whether or not I'm here. Carol will be visiting this house often enough without me that there'll be plenty of such occasions..." "Why would Carol come here without you?" "We should stick to one topic at a time, but to be brief, she'll be coming here for all sorts of reasons: to use my computers to read whatever she can find about decorating bedrooms, to look at the photos Vanessa has loaded down - or 'loaded up', I don't know which is the right direction - to spend time with Julia, and relevant to my main topic, so she can use the hot tub naked with people other than me, because I don't want it to be about me. Let me finish saying what I want to say, THEN you can ask questions, otherwise you'll waste time on irrelevancies. -- "When Carol and I finish eating I'll send her to this room to have a look at the bedrooms she's responsible for, and I'll tell her that I'm going to the hot tub. You keep her busy for at least ten minutes, while I run around the house and talk with whoever else is here, so they know what I want them to do. Then I'll go back to the tub. In case you're wondering, Mom, I WILL be wearing a swimsuit. My being clothed will accentuate Carol's nudity in her mind, which is what this is all about. -- "When you've shown Carol the photos, Vanessa will tell her the new rule, then send her to the hot tub room. Vanessa, tell Carol to strip when she gets to that room, and for her to put her clothes in one of the cubbyholes. Just before Carol gets into the tub I'll make up a reason for her to come back here, and I'll insist she does so naked. When she gets here, give her a printout of one of the photos and tell her to take it to Robert. Depending on whoever else is here, Robert will get her to do something else. Prof and Dad should go to Prof's study shortly, for example, so Carol can be sent to them for some reason. The reasons don't matter much, as Carol will know they're fake reasons. They just have to be vaguely plausible to make the game seemingly realistic. -- "Between all of us we should be able to keep her walking around the house naked for fifteen minutes or more, and so everyone sees her..." There was no way Mom could hold back any longer. She interrupted with, "What the BLUE BLAZES are you thinking! This is LUNACY! We're not going to do any such thing!" Mentally thanking Julia's lessons about zigzagging on people, I said, "I thought you loved Carol. Why are you being so inconsiderate and selfish toward her, Mom?" "Huh?" Mom tried to work out what I meant, but quickly gave up, to ask me instead, "What on Earth are you talking about?" I couldn't resist the opportunity to steal some of the wind from Mom's sails. "Remember I told you a few days ago that you were accusing 'Are you insane' too often at work, and how damaging it was?" "Ahh, yeah?" Mom didn't like the way the conversation just lurched. "You just yelled 'This is LUNACY' at me. And then immediately followed it by asking me what I was talking about. Wouldn't it have been politer of you to make sure you understood what was happening before yelling 'LUNACY' at me? You have a propensity to leap to a negative emotional reaction without thinking first. It's not a good behavior, and you need to control yourself better. Why couldn't you have said, 'I don't understand what you're doing, Mark. Obviously you'd never hurt or humiliate Carol because you care for her so much, so there must be a good reason for what you are suggesting.' Wouldn't that have been a better way of asking me, Mom?" -- I could see that point had been made, so I moved straight on to my main point, "When I'm suggesting something that seems crazy - and I'm perfectly happy to admit that getting Carol to walk around the house naked so everyone can see her does seem crazy - then there are two possible explanations. Either I've gone insane, or I have extremely good reasons for the extremely weird behavior I'm suggesting. I'd be insulted by your repeatedly assuming that I'm at fault, except I know you do it to other people too, such as all the people you've yelled 'Are you insane!' to at your work. Every time you make accusations like that, you're insulting your target. People don't like being insulted and treated like idiots, especially when they think they've got good reasons for what they're doing. You need to make more effort to find out if they have good reasons. And even if they're wrong, you need to be more polite about how you express that opinion." -- I should have finished with an amusing joke to lighten the mood, but I couldn't think of anything good in time (seven active minds, and they all let me down. It's hard to get good help). The best I could do was, "Don't make me punish you by putting Carol in charge of furnishing your bedroom too, haha." The laugh at the end was to try to emphasize the joke, but it didn't really work. Changing w-dimensions was mostly a tragedy, but it was also a nuisance too. I'd just started getting my mom properly trained in 3B-land, and now I had to start all over again here. 3A hadn't put hardly any effort into training this Mom because there'd been no sex going on around her, therefore no real need to push her into giving us a lot more slack. There'd been a few minor confrontations over the fights 3A had gotten into, but they were an after-the-event thing, rather than getting Mom into the right frame of mind in advance. Mom said, "You were right about my mistreating my coworkers, and you're right that I didn't give any thought to what your reasons might be. I just assumed you were wrong. You're getting very good at understanding people, especially with that revelation of yours yesterday, about me and Steven." "I can't agree that I'm very good at understand people. Occasionally I know something, but the rest of the time my stupidity about people scares me. Don't expect too much from me, because I'll certainly do a lot more stupid things yet. What I want is for you not to assume I'm insane or a lunatic, and not to assume I'm always right either. Discuss my reasons with me, and if I'm wrong, tell me why. -- "I've almost finished with what I want to do with Carol, so let me do that now. I was saying that we should be able to keep Carol trotting back and forth for fifteen minutes or more, and so everyone sees her. My last request is that when each of you see her, the way to treat her is NOT to ignore that she's naked, but to deliberately accentuate that she is. I want you all to embarrass her as much as you can, especially sexually. Ask her why her nipples are hard, look at her pussy and ask her why it's aroused. She'll almost certainly be very wet, so ask her why there's pussy juice running down her leg. -- "There shouldn't be any touching at all, but one of the things that'd work well is when Prof and Dad are in Prof's study, Prof should tell Carol to stand straight, put her hands on her head to lift her breasts, stick out her chest and stand with her legs apart. Then Prof should very slowly walk around her, inspecting her up and down. He and Dad should make comments back and forth about Carol's arousal, lack of shame, how plush her body is, etc. It's all about making her as sexually embarrassed as possible, and for quite a long time, at least fifteen minutes. Half an hour would be wonderful. -- "When you've finished with her send her back to me, because I've got a very nice ending planned for her. I'm going to tell her to go to Julia's room and masturbate herself, which she'll be absolutely busting to do by then. But I'll tell her that she has to ask your permission first, Mom. I want you to tell her 'Yes', but also to tell her that she needs to get Dad's permission. After she asks you Dad, can you please tell her that she needs to get Vanessa's permission too because it's her house. Vanessa should ask her whether she's asked Prof yet, which will send her back to his study again. When she returns Dad and Prof should tease her about being so quick. I'm sure they can make up some appropriate teases. Then Dad should send her to ask Julia, as it'll be Julia's room she's using. -- "Julia should pretend concern that Carol might make a mess of the bed by spraying pussy juice all over the place because she's too young to masturbate properly. Then the women can ask her questions about how she masturbates, ostensibly to make sure she knows what she's doing and that Julia's room won't be messed up too badly. Because you're trying to embarrass her, questions that require graphic and detailed answers would be best -- "I'm tempted to suggest that Julia should follow Carol back to her room to supervise that Carol does it properly. Probably the best thing to do is to threaten to do that, and see how Carol reacts. I'm guessing it'd work well, but you can decide that for yourselves at the time -- "My last comments are that some of you can change rooms a couple of times so she has to go looking for you, that'd be good. For example..." There was a knock on the door, followed by Carol saying, "It's just me..." I called back, "Come in, sweetie." Carol stuck her head in the door, to say, "Your food's ready, Mark." "Thanks Carol. I'll be down in a couple of minutes. For some reason this is taking a little longer than I expected. You must be hungry, so start without me." "Okay." After the door was closed behind her, I said, "I'll answer the obvious questions to save time. Obviously this is sexual, but that's just the front of it. The real reason is more important. I can see that Mom and Dad aren't aware of Carol's sexual, hot button. She gets very excited by sexual embarrassment, by being looked at when she's exposed, being ordered to do something sexual, or being held or tied down for sex. -- "Mom's busting a gut to ask how I know that - and God knows what sort of theories she's thought of - so I'd better explain. I know it in EXACTLY the same way I knew about your fears yesterday Mom, which does NOT involve me doing anything beyond being observant and listening." That was perfectly true: I'd listened to 3B's Julia telling me about Carol, and 3B's Vanessa telling me about Mom's fear of Dad's affairs. "I don't have time to explain my logic now, but I'm certain I'm right and I'm perfectly willing to explain it sometime later." I'll tell her much the same stuff as I'd told Carol in the car, about seeing Carol's reaction to Peter Pan, etc. "If we do what I've suggested there'll be a number of results: -- "Carol will get a tremendous sexual thrill. That's nice for her, but all the other results are more important than that. -- "She's ashamed of herself because of her kink, so this'll free her from that worry because we'll have shown her that we all know, understand and support her. And certainly not that we judge her badly because of it. -- "It'll teach her that she can trust everyone in the two families. That's important for all the usual reasons, but also for the extra reason that it gives Carol an environment where she will feel very safe and secure about practicing her kink in the future. That's why I said the new family rule is Carol always has to be naked in the tub. -- "I'll jump to the main reason. It's actually exactly the same reason as I put her in charge of decorating the three bedrooms. Carol currently undervalues herself badly. Much more than you know, Mom and Dad. For example, Carol doesn't really want to go to college. She spends so much time studying partly as a way of hiding, and partly because she doesn't think she has any real value. By everyone in this house spending fifteen to thirty minutes giving Carol a good time in the unusual way that she likes, she'll know she's valued. That, and her no longer having to be ashamed about her kink will make her feel a great deal better about herself. I'm pretty sure that her kink is related to her having low self-esteem. As she gains confidence her kink should fade. -- "I'll mention some words the Williamses consider important: 'I take responsibility for this.' I know what I'm doing, why, what results I want, how to get them, etc. I wouldn't treat Carol this way unless I was VERY sure. As an extra safety point, it is all of you here that'll be starting it by telling Carol that she has to be naked in the hot tub. If you don't like the way she reacts, then you can easily stop the whole thing and send Julia to tell me it's off. -- "If it goes ahead then Carol will finally end up back in the hot tub room, and she'll finally be able to climb into it with me. I'll talk with her about it, but I don't think much talk will be necessary. She'll know what's happened and she'll know why, so mostly she'll just thank me. I'll give her a hug and ask her for the gossip from her friends. -- "Normally when I've got food waiting for me I'd be running from the room, but maybe I'll hang around for questions this time. Who wants to go first?" Vanessa spoke so quickly she overlapped with my ending, "Congratulations on a very impressive presentation. I particularly admire that there are several opportunities to call it off if we don't like what's happening. You're taking a large personal risk divulging so much sexual knowledge of Carol. Your parents could very easily react negatively to that." "I can't say I really thought about the risk in advance. It was really just a continuation of my getting Carol to decorate the three rooms. I was thinking about how to improve her self-esteem when I realized that I'd be in the hot tub, that Carol would be coming to me, and that we were all here now. The idea popped into my head more or less complete. Once I was into the explanation I realized I might have spoken too soon - that maybe I should have softened Mom and Dad up first - but this obviously isn't about me getting my jollies from Carol. I'd not mistreat Carol that way, and even if I did, I'd be stupid to do so after telling everyone what I planned. I did think that I could offer to go sit in my car while this was going on, but the only thing I'm doing with Carol is sending her to see you guys. I wasn't conscious of it when I was talking to you, but I think it's better you guys do most of the interacting with her. She'll know it's my idea and it seems more appropriate that I just collect all the appreciation at the end, haha. -- "I just had a thought about how I would've reacted to this situation two or three months ago. It would have freaked me out big time, but now I just think it's a very good thing to do for Carol. She's not nearly as happy as she can be, and her lack of confidence is letting her down. I like the idea of those changing. That's my excuse for making my sister run around naked, and I'm sticking to it, haha." "That's what gets me too," said Mom. "Two months ago you were - shall I say - not particularly well informed about female sexuality. But now you're so confident and assertive you've got me convinced that you know what you're talking about. How could you have learned those things about Carol unless you've been playing around with her?" "You're leaping to the obvious. You should know by now that's not the way my mind works. Seriously, how do I know Carol doesn't really want to go to college? She announced her decision to go to college about three years ago, back when Carol and I weren't even friends, so she certainly never told me her motivation. I suggest you don't do it now, but if you sat Carol down and had a heart-to-heart talk with her about why she spends so much time studying, you'll find that it's more about what she's avoiding than what she wants to head toward. -- "I noticed you were careful about how you described my little bombshell yesterday, so I won't repeat it now, but how did I know about that? The only person who knew that was you, and you certainly never told me. You never told ANYONE, so I didn't overhear it. How I knew you yell 'Are you insane!" to people at your work is another example. I don't have to play around with Carol the way you suggested to understand parts of her personality. I know you don't understand how my mind works, and I'm sorry about that. Apart from the embarrassing parts of my mind which are busy being a typical teenage boy, it's a pity you don't understand it better, but you're going to have to get used to not knowing." I created red, green and blue light blobs, and made them spin slowly around each other between Mom and me. After everyone had recovered from their surprises, I continued, "There are many things my mind can do which there is no chance whatsoever of you comprehending, even if we both devoted years to trying to get you to understand. You have to stop worrying about 'How'. By all means ask once because there might be a perfectly simple explanation, but if there's not, then give it up. -- "You can still judge me by what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. My 'Why' is as I told you, mostly to build Carol's self-esteem, and also to make her unashamed about her sexual kink. You may think 'What' I am suggesting be done is inappropriate because Carol's too young, but she's certainly not too young to have those feelings. She's been having them for several years already. She'll continue to have them too, until - I believe - she has enough self-confidence that she's strong enough not to get off on being humiliated. You do understand that humiliation pushes her buttons because she likes to be shown to be inferior, don't you?" "Vaguely. What confuses me is how YOU know that?" "That's another 'How' question, Mom. I know you're confused, but going around in circles repeatedly asking me 'How?' isn't going to get you an answer you can understand, so accept that you're going to be confused about 'How' and move on. What I've suggested we all do is good for Carol. The question is whether you're going to do it or not?" "I'm not comfortable with Carol's getting involved in so much sexual display. She's too young to be doing anything sexual with other people." #4: I said, "Okay. I'll go have my snack with Carol. If she's not already on the way up, I'll tell Carol to come here so you can start her working on bedroom decorating. Either for our preferred house or whatever other one we end up with." I was getting Julia to let me up as I spoke, so I was now able to head for the door. Mom said, "What? Are you just dropping it now?" I stopped to answer. "Sure. I told you what I thought we should do and why. I explained the reasons and the benefits, and I even said I was willing to take responsibility for it. But you refused, which is certainly your choice and your responsibility. I think you're wrong, but it's not as if you absolutely had to make a decision about it now. If you don't do it today, maybe you'll see your mistake and we'll do it some other day. There's no urgency, as you've probably got three or four days before things come to a head." "What do you mean by that?" demanded Mom. Actually I didn't have anything definite in mind, especially because the last of my sentences had been added by a different mind than had been speaking for a while. He (#3, not that it mattered) quickly explained his thinking to us. I knew Vanessa and Prof were going to start working on my parents to get them to agree to Carol, Julia and me getting married. I had no doubt whatsoever that Vanessa could twist this conversation into any shape she wanted when it came time to justify her and Prof talking to Mom and Dad about the kids relationship. In other words, she'd use it as ammunition. Other than the three-way marriage conversation, there were bound to be other events coming up soon which could be used to justify #3's "coming to a head" comment. "I'm not going to tell you. There comes a time in every child's life when he simply has to let his parents make their own mistakes, so they'll learn from them, haha. You've made several mistakes, Mom. They're obvious, but you're refusing to see them. There's no point in my pointing out the obvious to you again because you'll simply refuse to accept it again. When things build up so much that they all come to a head, hopefully you'll learn some lessons. Not only you, but Dad too. He's also made mistakes during this discussion." "But I haven't said anything!" objected Dad. "Yes. That was one of your mistakes. Saying nothing doesn't help Mom make good decisions. This conversation was partly about your daughter's sex-life, which is mostly in Mom's camp, but I'm reasonably sure you have some knowledge about sex so you could've contributed your thoughts. Plus this conversation was also about trusting me, which you have an equal right to be involved in. There are other issues, but they all boil down to the fact that you should speak up more. I know you've successfully let Mom be the parent-in-charge for several years, and it's generally worked out pretty well, but Mom's out of her depth with me and with the changes that I'm causing. Mom is not good at thinking on her feet and making quick, rational decisions, which is also something you can help her with. -- "Having done a good job of un-reassuring you, I'm now going to check on Carol. We've kept her waiting too long, especially because I foolishly told her we were going to be talking about her. I didn't expect it to take so long, so if you're in danger of thinking I'm infallible, that little mistake indicates otherwise." I resumed leaving the room. Poor Julia was torn between wanting to come with me, and wanting to stay. Staying won, as she couldn't resist hearing the conversation that'd follow my departure. Carol was in the kitchen. She'd finished her meal and was just waiting for me. She was relieved to see me, but still concerned. She asked, "Is everything alright?" "Yes, they're fine, sweetie. They're even better than I expected, although in a different way than I expected. I tried to talk Mom into something. If I'd done it a week ago, Mom probably would've lost her cool and screamed at me. Instead she sat reasonably calmly through the whole explanation. She ended up refusing to agree or disagree, which is a considerable improvement over how she would have behaved a week ago. When Mom's forced to make a quick decision, she doesn't really think about it; she reacts emotionally or just gives 'the standard answer', whatever that is for the situation. The reason we were so much longer than I expected - and sorry about that - was because Mom kept asking questions. Asking questions is FAR better than Mom's usual knee-jerk emotional reaction. The good thing was that at the end I was able to completely pull the rug from under Mom's and Dad's feet, and then I blew them away. If I can mangle one more metaphor, I think I impressed the pants off them. I did all that in front of Vanessa, and I'm sure I gave Vanessa a huge amount of ammunition to even further get Mom heading in the direction we want. Things are working out very well, so I think I'll celebrate with some Chinese leftovers." My plate was still in the microwave, so Carol gave it another few seconds for me. To change the subject, in case someone came down for us, I asked her, "Have you had any thoughts about your bedroom decorating project?" She'd had several, so that kept her talking happily while I had my meal. As I was finishing, Carol asked me, "Do you want any more? Vanessa bought heaps." "No thanks, sweetie. I've already had dinner; that was just a snack and it was ample." Carol whipped away my plate and cutlery, and started washing it in the sink. I told her, "You're going to make a MARVELOUS wife." Carol smiled very happily. Sometimes coming to a new dimension works out well. I didn't feel it was wrong to praise her for doing housework. I knew she currently saw it as one of the few ways she could do things for me, and I also knew that it wouldn't last long. Back in 3B-land - where she'd begged to be allowed to be our serving girl - Carol had soon gotten so interested and confidently involved in whatever else we were doing that her being our serving girl mostly faded away. It would be good to see that happening to this Carol. But in the meantime, it was good to see her being so happy to contribute anything, even if only plate-heating and dishwashing. Then we went upstairs. I sent her to the study to discuss decorating, while I went into Julia's bedroom to get a swimsuit for the hot tub. I only had a choice of two swimsuits: one of the two Speedos (the other was at my house, and a different color than in 3B-land because Carol hadn't been involved in purchasing it); or a male thong swimsuit that Julia had 'bought for me' (ha!) in the swimsuit store in LA. I put on the non-'European' swimsuit, mighty glad that I lived in a decent country. The dimensional differences between 3A- and 3B-lands were definitely a mixed blessing. Without 3A-Carol at the swimsuit store in LA, none of the girls had bought the VERY sexy mesh swimsuits they'd done before. As sad as that was, it was more than compensated by the effect of Carol not being present during the last half of the Hot Tub Party, preventing Julia from discovering that I could do go-softs, go-hards and go-cums, and averting the terrifying possibility of her realizing that my cock had been soft for Annette Neumeyer for a reason other than my total love for Julia Williams. I sat in the hot tub thinking about various things (all at the same time, as usual), but mostly I was thinking about my recent conversation with Mom. Other than not raising the subject at all, which might've been the best idea, I thought I'd otherwise done very well. I couldn't think of any significant improvements to either the first half when I'd described my suggestion of what to do for Carol, or to the second half when I'd tried to justify my suggestion and myself. I'd certainly shaken Mom and Dad up, which was great, because they needed it. Without being shaken they might retain their existing belief that they knew best, which would definitely put a limit on some of my plans for Carol. Possibly on multitudes of Cuties and Ducklings too. About twenty or twenty five minutes after I'd sat in the hot tub, the door opened and a delightfully naked Carol walked in. By the look on her face, she was having a wonderfully embarrassing time. "Why are you walking around like a brazen hussy who doesn't care how many people see her breasts and pussy, Carol?" #8: <"Brazen hussy." You've got a potty mouth, haven't you?> #4: Carol looked at the floor in shame, telling it, "I have some messages for you: Everyone says you were right, Mom and Dad apologize for not trusting you and for not making decisions properly, and Vanessa says you are to play with me for at least five minutes and then you should send me back because they've got some jobs for me. Are you really going to play with me?" "I'm sorry, Carol. I didn't realize you were talking to me. I thought you were talking to your very aroused pussy because that's what you were staring at. Why is it so aroused? Have you been masturbating yourself like some sort of sex-crazy nymphomaniac?" "Umm, no. It's..." "Are you talking to your pussy or those big tits of yours? If you want to talk with me, you should look me in they eyes rather than constantly staring at your own sex organs. You really do have sex on the mind too much, bunny. I bet you're even thinking about it now, aren't you? By the way, your huge tits are going to get lots of attention if you keep flaunting yourself by walking around naked the way you are now. Don't you know Robert's in the house somewhere?" "Umm, yeah, I know. Vanessa said that was a risk I'd have to take, but if I met him I had to let him look at my body as much as he wanted." "With a body as good as yours, especially with your displaying it so flagrantly, I'm sure he'd take a long look at you. You're probably safe now that you're in this room." I gave Carol half a second to appreciate feeling safe, then I added, "I'm feeling hot, so please go to the kitchen and get me a glass of milk. For some reason, looking at you makes me thirsty for milk." "But Robert might be there! You wouldn't force me to go, would you?" I was pretty sure Vanessa was busy talking to Robert now, and it wasn't likely they were doing it in the kitchen, so I could use sending Carol there to keep her busy for the five minutes Vanessa wanted. I said, "If he is in the kitchen, I want you to show him how wet your pussy is, and ask him whether that much wetness is abnormal in his experience. I think we'd better get quite a few people's opinions of your pussy, because that much liquid can't be normal. Ordinary girls don't get so aroused, wet and - quite frankly - smelly, just by walking across a house to talk with their brother. You're obviously very perverted and sex-crazed. I'm going to have to start carrying more handkerchiefs, just to mop up all the mess you'll be leaving behind. -- "Now please run and get my drink. No! On second thought don't run. That'll cause your pussy juice to splash all over the hallway and kitchen. WALK slowly and carefully to the kitchen. If you meet Robert, ask him if he'd like a drink too, after he's finished checking out how wet your pussy is. Go on." "You're making me go?" "I'm THIRSTY. All this talk about your pussy juice is making me even thirstier. Go on, before you leave a puddle at your feet from all the juice running down your legs." Carol left the room fearfully. She returned with my glass of milk a couple of minutes later, looking even more aroused. Normally I'd thank someone for bringing me a drink. I tried something slightly different this time, "Did you wave your tits in front of anyone else?" "No, but people might've seen me through the kitchen window." "Yes. Imagine how embarrassing it'd be for Vanessa having to go over to them to explain why there was a sex-crazed naked girl walking around inside her house with no regard for all the people that might see her. Do you think it's fair that you're causing everyone else so much embarrassment by parading yourself around so shamelessly?" "Oh. I didn't think of that." "No, I can see you're FAR too busy thinking dirty thoughts. Do you think people want to walk around a corner of their own home and suddenly have your great big tits stuck into their face? I bet you never even thought about going to check whether Robert was thirsty and would like a drink?" "Oh no. You wouldn't make me do that, would you?" "Normally I would, but right now I'd rather you explained what happened when you went into the study, and how you ended up walking around so blatantly displayed? Before you start, open the door so we can get some fresh air in here. The whole room is starting to smell like your pussy juice. God knows how long it'll be before the Williamses will be able to use this room for polite company." Carol opened the door a little, so I told her, "ALL the way. We need LOTS of fresh air." "But someone might walk past and see." "If anyone does, I'm sure you'll apologize to them for being such a shameless sexual exhibitionist. Stand up on the deck with your legs wide apart, so I can look right up into your pussy." (The hot tub has a small deck around half of it, suitable for sitting drinks on. It's built three-quarters of the way up from the floor to the top of the tub, so when Carol stood on it her pussy was conveniently above my head height.) I looked up into her. In a sincere tone of voice, I said, "You have a VERY beautiful pussy, Carol." Carol's 'game face' disappeared, to be replaced by a look of hopefulness. "Really? You think it's pretty?" "I don't THINK it's pretty. I KNOW it's BEAUTIFUL. That's going to make Ava very happy." "Ava? Why?" "Because soon you and Ava will be playing public exhibitionism games together. When you're talking to a group of the Cuties, Ava will come up behind you, put her hand over your shoulder and into your blouse and bra. She will openly fondle your breast while you're in front of all the other girls. And sometimes you'll do the same sort of things to her. Maybe reaching up her skirt to rub her pussy while you're sitting beside each other, especially around the pool at home, once we move into the mansion. Ava likes playing sexually display games too, so the two of you will have as much fun together as you want." "Really! I thought I was the only one." "You're not, sweetie. It's actually quite common. Lots of girls get little thrills from it. You've got more interest in it than most girls, but people always have aspects that they've got more of or less of than other people. You differ from most other girls only by degree, not by anything so unusual you need to worry about being weird. For example, Ava wants to be caught having sex with me somewhere, ideally by my soccer team 'accidentally' catching us at it." [That's another dimensional difference. Without Carol's involvement in 3A-land, that fantasy of Ava's had never come up for discussion, so I didn't 'officially' know it about 3A's Ava. Most likely she had the same personality though, so it was a pretty safe bet. While I'm digressing, I'd deliberately not mentioned that Ava's exhibitionism generally isn't as strong as Carol's, as it really only happens when Ava is already turned on. I wanted Carol to feel less unusual. When it came time for Ava and Carol to start playing around I'd order Ava to exaggerate her normal behavior. It wouldn't be much of a stretch for Ava, and I'd explain why it was helping Carol feel good about herself, so I had no doubt Ava would cooperate.] "Wow, that's extreme." After a moment's thought, Carol looked around to check the coast was clear, then whispered to me, "So would I. Especially the having sex with you part. I've been thinking about that a lot recently." I whispered back, "Yes. I'm looking forward to our wedding night too. I don't think I'll invite my soccer team to it though, haha. Would you like to go back to our game while you tell me about what happened in the study, or would you prefer to sit on my lap?" "Lap please." "Okay. We'll have to be quick though, because the parents will be expecting you in a couple of minutes." "I think I've lost the mood. I'm very happy now." "Okay. Get in the tub for a couple of minutes anyway, if only to wash all that pussy juice off. You may not have been spraying it around the way I implied, but you were certainly enjoying yourself." "Haha. I'll say! You're very good at my game. Vanessa's pretty good too, but you're the best at it." As Carol settled onto my lap and I put my arms around her, she asked, "Shall I tell you how I got naked?" "Yes please. Fairly quickly would be best." "It was simple. We looked at the photos Vanessa had taken, then she and Mom gave me some quick advice about getting the rooms' measurements, making up cardboard models, and things like that. I felt much better about decorating those rooms now. Mom and Vanessa will make sure I do the right things, and that I don't forget anything. They're going to look at my final plan and the fabric samples to make sure I don't do something ugly. I get all the fun without having to worry about it. It should be a lot of fun so I'm looking forward to it. Thank you very much for doing that for me." #8: "You're welcome, sweetie. Let me remind you that they're all expecting you upstairs and they're probably expecting to carry on with the game. We should go up together to talk about the situation and to explain why the game's stopped. Then you've got some Cutie gossip for me, I believe, so we don't really have time to talk about decorating." "Okay. Vanessa said that you'd told them about me being excited by being exposed and embarrassed, and she asked me if it was true. I said it was. They asked me a few more questions. Things like for how long I'd had those feelings, what I'd done before and stuff like that. I've hardly done ANYTHING before because I've never felt safe enough. I've wanted to though, so I REALLY appreciate your letting me play my game. It's great to finally feel how much fun it is." "You're welcome, sweetie. That's what brothers are for, haha." "Haha. Yeah. Mom did ask me about that too; whether you'd done anything to me before. I gave her a REAL blasting for being so suspicious. I know you're not doing things 'to me'; except being nice to me. You're doing this FOR me. I made very sure Mom knew that. Which meant I had to tell her that you'd done it once before, when you and Julia embarrassed me in your room. I told her you didn't even see much because you did it all by speaking, and I said you never touched me. Earlobes don't count, do they?" "Haha. Of course not. People would be silly to count earlobes. They just dangle there doing nothing, so why bother counting them?" "Exactly, {giggle}. I SURE didn't want to tell Mom what effect you and Julia had on me! I hope you do it again though, it was the best I EVER had!" I whispered, "Imagine Julia and Ava licking an earlobe each, and me licking your pussy, all at the same time." "Oh!" Carol took a few seconds to imagine it. Then she added, "I think I'm going to like real sex." "Yeah, it's pretty good. Sometimes I think it's even better than decorating." "Haha. I bet you do. Where was I? Oh yeah. While Mom and I were talking, Vanessa was whispering to Prof, then he left. I didn't know why then, but he obviously went to talk with Robert, because after he returned, Vanessa told me to strip and then to go show myself to Robert. That's what got me so turned on before I came down here..." "Oh. I thought you hadn't been seen by Robert yet." "Yeah, I know I said that, but it was fun to pretend there was something more I had to be embarrassed about risking. It was just part of the game..." #8: #5: #6: [[3B's Julia had done it "for Mark's own good," so she considered it excused.]] " ... I had to be sent to Robert, because no one else was going to get me turned on, especially not in front of Mom and Dad. Vanessa, Prof and Julia teased me when I came back, which was good, but their teases wouldn't have worked at the beginning. Then they gave me the messages to tell you and they sent me down here." "How did Mom and Dad react? Mom's my biggest worry." "I think Mom will be okay. Vanessa was working on her. Vanessa's pretty good at straightening people out, I think." "You can say that again! I was hoping Vanessa would work on Mom after I left. I think I gave her plenty of ammunition to work with." "Yeah, they referred to what you'd said several times. Mom's been getting it from everyone. I got the impression you'd caught Mom out big time. I gave her a hard time over the wording of her question about what you'd done to me too. And Vanessa was working on her too. I don't think Mom's used to being on the receiving end of so much criticism, so it must be a bit of a shock for her. She was okay though. She knew she'd been wrong, and she did apologize to me, and gave me the message to apologize to you too." "Good. It's going to be hard work getting her to change so much that she'll consent to our three-way private wedding, but we're definitely moving her in the right direction." "I can't believe she'd ever agree to that. But I also couldn't believe it when she sat there silently while Vanessa told me to come down here for you to play with me for at least five minutes. I hope we get married as soon as possible, but I don't understand how you can make it possible at all. I'm glad I've only got easy things to do like decorating the bedrooms." Which made this a very good time to stop the conversation. I quickly said, "Let's get out, dry off and go back upstairs to let the parents know that your game has finished and to answer any questions they have. We can do the Cutie's gossip after that." "Okay." While we were drying, Carol said, "Thank you for everything Mark. You're making a big effort for me..." I interrupted, "Not when you compare it to the YEARS of benefit I expect us all - you, Julia and me - to get out of our relationship. It's a TINY effort compared to the benefit, especially as it doesn't count as an effort because I enjoy making you happy. I will expand on your point in one respect though. I asked the parents to play your game with you so you'd learn that it wasn't anything to be ashamed of, that everyone was willing to put time and effort into doing something that was a very personal gift for you, that the Williamses are all great people, and that this is a very safe place for you. With your permission, of course, I intend for us to play your game here again. It'd be VERY unfair not to allow Andrew a turn to see your beauty, wouldn't it?" "I know what you mean, but it'll depend on whether I get in that mood again. It's gone now, and I'm not going to show my body like that just to be fair to Andrew." "No, of course not. I suspect my comment was one of those silly, logical male comments that Julia is so often laughing at me for. Let's go upstairs." Wrapped in towels, we headed back to the study to report to our parents - as good children should - about our sexual game-playing. ------- Chapter 247: Mark's a Genius at Understanding Females Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued) When Carol and I arrived back in the study, the parents were talking about the mansion-buying AGAIN - was there no end to it? They stopped, letting me say, "Carol's game has finished. It served its purpose and Carol lost the mood when she and I started talking normally..." "Thank you VERY much for it," interrupted Carol. "I had a GREAT time. That was the first time I've been able to do that, and it was even better than I'd imagined. Especially thank you, Mark. You talked everyone into it." I reused my earlier joke, "Just part of being a good big brother, sweetie. It's a challenging job, but I enjoy seeing you so happy." -- To the parents I said, "We've come back up to let you know the game is finished and to see if you have any questions before Carol and I go back down to talk about her day with the Cuties?" Mom said, "I should have dozens of questions, but for the life of me I can't think of any that need to be asked. I must be in shock, because this development should be crying out for all sorts of reactions. What I do want to do is apologize for my failures as a mother..." "And mine as a father," added Dad. " ... We let you down by not trusting you and by refusing to make a decision..." "Mom, what part of your training to be a mother prepared you for a child like me? Of course you're going to make mistakes being a parent. I figure about one thousandth as many mistakes as I make being a child..." "It's hard to see you as a child anymore. Your maturity and knowledge is exceptional." "SOME things I do well, but some I do very badly, just like anyone else. My scheme to earn some easy money from a casino didn't work out quite so easy, did it?" #7: #1: Julia defended me from myself, "That was EVERYONE'S scheme. Dad, Mom and I all added to it. You wouldn't have done it without me pushing you." "I wouldn't have done almost anything without you pushing me, Julia. I can't take credit for the successes and blame you for the failures. Thank you for your defense, but my point is that I could've EASILY pulled the plug on that scheme had I judged it more intelligently. -- "To use an example that's much better. I was initially EXTREMELY doubtful that I could do third and fourth year college courses. Possibly not do them at all, let alone in the timeframe Prof and Vanessa were talking about. I was very embarrassed about OSU spending money on me, about Prof's getting excited about my potential, and things like that. Vanessa made the point that they didn't mind if I hit a limit to my math ability, just so long as I tried my best. As I understand parenting, trying your best also applies to moms. So don't beat yourself up about something you've hopefully already learned the lesson from, Mom. We'll find out whether you've absorbed the lesson the next time I do something incomprehensibly bizarre. Which I figure probably gives you until midday tomorrow, at my usual rate, haha. -- "That's another very good reason I should have some sympathy for you, Mom: keeping up with the changes I keep throwing at you is not easy." Dad said, "That's partly my fault though. I don't help Fely." "That's partially true, but Mom doesn't help you help her either. When there's some sort of mini-crisis occurring, and you do try to speak up, Mom usually blasts right over top of you after you've gotten barely half a dozen words out. You're both going to have to work on your contributing more." Julia giggled, then added, "Boy! You're getting GOOD! I don't know your parents well, but I could see you hit a bull's-eye with that. He's impressive, isn't he?" Julia wasn't exactly being tactful, but fortunately Mom and Dad didn't take exception to her statement. Which was actually an incorrect statement, since all I was doing was paraphrasing 3B's Vanessa from the huge argument we'd had with Mom over the pipeline scheme (the argument where Carol had asked for a gun to kill herself with). I deflected Julia's compliment, "Not really, Julia. It doesn't take much intelligence to see something when you've seen so many examples of it. -- "Changing the subject; if you don't need us, can Carol and I get back to the hot tub please? I'll use my genius to guess that you might be able to occupy yourselves talking about mansions, haha." Mom said, "We were thinking of going home. We shouldn't leave Donna with her friends for so long, and you've given Steven and me more things we need to talk about. For the second evening in a row, I might add. It's very challenging being your parents." "Even after I've relieved you of the responsibility for managing your daughters' sexual development? You sure you're not getting lazy, Mom?" "I SURE don't feel lazy. You keep pulling the rug from under me so totally that I'm busy trying to get my balance again. Something you said just concerned me though. Why did you say 'your daughters' rather than 'Carol'?" "I'll leave you to decide whether you've learned the 'Trust Mark' lesson well enough, when I tell you that I meant both of them. I wasn't particularly conscious of it, but I was including Donna too. When I asked about showing The Boys my light blobs, that was part of an idea I have to manage Donna's sexual development, so she's in my thoughts and got included in my comment." Mom stridently declared, "Mark! I'm STRONGLY of the opinion that Donna's FAR TOO YOUNG to have anything to do with sex! She's only 12-years old, for goodness sake!" "I am ALSO strongly of the opinion that Donna is far too young. I'm planning to delay her having sexual activity, not bring it forward. Your automatically assuming I was going to push her the wrong way makes it official, Mom: you have NOT learned to trust me. -- "The reason I want to use light blobs as part of my plan is because I can create an EXTREMELY POWERFUL impact on her with them, to hopefully use it to delay her from trying to have sex for several years. I wouldn't take the risk of showing light blobs to The Boys and Donna unless I was VERY concerned about Donna's wanting sex too early. -- "And by the way, Mom, you're currently MIS-managing Donna's sexual development. You're trying to manage it in the right direction, but you're doing it badly. You're trying to hide sex from her. For example, if Donna's watching TV and there's anything at or beyond heavy kissing on, you change the channel or send her from the room. I could give you plenty of other examples of what you're doing, but I'm sure you know. -- "Because she's the youngest of the family, so undeveloped and hasn't reached her menarche yet, you're treating her like a baby. She's not. She's been experimenting with sex with other girls for at least a year or two already. Nothing emotionally or physically serious, but there's been quite a lot of playing around. She's in lots of girls' sports teams, so has had plenty of opportunity for experimentation. -- "You need to stop hiding sex from her, and start talking to her about it sensibly. How's she going to learn the right attitudes to it, if you won't discuss it with her? And you need to do it SOON, because she's just starting to become interested in boys. You know only too well how aggressively direct and impatient Donna can be once she sets her mind on something. It would be far better for you to teach her the right attitudes in advance than to find yourself fighting blocking actions against Donna once she's determined to have sex. Donna has a VERY unsympathetic response to being blocked from something. I suggest you get Dad to help too. Donna will be impressed to have Dad talk with her about sex, especially because it's the guy side of things she's becoming interested in." Mom groaned, "Oh God, you've done it again." | Julia giggled. | Vanessa, Prof and Carol just looked very happy and proud. Carol added, unnecessarily as Mom had already accepted the truth of what I'd said, "Mark is totally right, Mom. Donna is starting to get interested in doing things with boys and you do avoid talking to her about sex. You were much better with me when I was that age." #8: Dad said, "I'm starting to think we should get up each morning and ask our fifteen-year old son what parenting we should do today." "Obviously Mom should cook roast chicken more often. Less important things I'll let you know as they occur to me. Seeing I'm on a roll that I'm never likely to equal again, I'll take advantage of it by making a small request. You can go home whenever you wish, but can Carol and I stay the night here please. Partly because Carol and I have that gossip session outstanding, which we'll both enjoy, but mainly because Carol needs to start spending a lot more time with Julia, including sleeping here. That's regardless of whether I'm here or not. If I am, I'll sleep in the study obviously. -- "Carol's successfully interacting with Julia and the other girls Carol will meet around Julia and me, Carol's management of the Cuties, the decorating idea, and other things I'll send her way, will give a huge boost to her self-confidence and happiness over the next few months. Of those, getting involved in Julia's and my social scene is the most important because it'll give Carol a much better idea of how she compares to 16-year old girls, because she currently thinks she's worthless compared to them." -- I looked at Carol, telling her, "You're going to be very, very happy in a few months, sweetie." I'd expected her to disagree, as 3B's Carol had been in denial about things like that at the start of her three-way relationship the Julia and me. This Carol had a different opinion though. She said, "Yes, I know. You're looking after me." This Carol didn't automatically hug my arm whenever we were in the same room like 3B's used to, and this Julia currently was, so Carol and I were standing apart. Not for long though, as I opened my spare arm to invite her in. Carol added, "I've already been much happier recently, but today's been incredible. YOU'RE incredible!" Then she started crying, because that's what girls do when they're very happy. The logic behind that escapes me. It's not as if girls don't know how to express themselves, because they're always expressing themselves about touchy-feeling stuff. I didn't have a hanky, but Carol had a towel, so she'd be fine. I didn't think the tears would last for long anyway. Poor Mom was looking pretty shell-shocked by now. (I've never seen anyone who has been shell-shocked, but I somehow knew they looked like Mom. Funny how that happens). I said, "I've got some good news and some bad news for you Mom. I'd ask you which wanted first, but I suspect I'd better start with the good news, as you look rather frazzled." (It's like "shell-shocked".) -- "I don't think I'm ever going to hit you with so many things at once again. I'd kind of accumulated a backlog over the last month, and they all came out now. From now on my bombshells should come individually. Some of them might be big, but at least there'll only be one issue to think about at a time. -- "My being so unusual is bound to keep throwing up extremely unusual changes, but many of them won't be your responsibility, so you won't have to make decisions about them. Like when Prof first got very excited when he worked out that I could do a bachelors degree in one year. Then early in our hospital stay I told him I could study even faster and he worked out I could do two degrees. And most recently I think I can actually do three. Those things are very exciting for Prof - and for Vanessa and Julia too, come to that - but they're not developments that you need to worry about. My frazzling people will often be spread around, plus I'm increasingly able to take responsibility for my own actions. -- "There is a little bad news to think about. You're still going to have to make unusual decisions in the future. Some of them will probably be extremely unusual, and you might only have a short while to think about them before a decision is needed. That means you'll have to get better at meeting decisions head-on and handling them well. I know Vanessa and Prof are both extremely disciplined when it comes to decision making. They're teaching me a great deal about how to make decisions better, and I'm sure they'll be happy to teach you too, if you ask them." I REALLY hoped Vanessa and Prof 'helped' Mom with her decision over whether to permit the three-way marriage. -- "That's enough speech-making from me. Can I assume that Carol and I are staying here tonight, so we can go back downstairs now please?" Mom probably looked even more frazzled than when I'd started trying to help unfrazzle her, so that hadn't worked too well. She did manage to say, "I don't think I could say no. There's so much going on I don't know what to think." "Good. Not saying no is an EXCELLENT attitude in a mother. Thanks, Mom. Don't worry, you'll soon catch up. -- "Come on Carol, let's get a T-shirt of mine for you to wear in the tub. It'd be terribly inappropriate for you to be naked with your brother." "Haha. Yeah, and I wouldn't want anyone else to see me either. I'm a VERY modest girl, haha." "Julia, do you want to join us in the tub?" "Yes please, but start without me. I'll be down in a few." Carol and I went to Julia's bedroom for a T-shirt, then down to the tub. ^ After Carol and I left, the parents and Julia had the following discussion. The first part of the discussion can be quickly summarized by the following from Julia, "Oh my God, he's AMAZING! A couple of months ago he was completely blind to problems until they were already smacking him in the face. When he had to make a plan to fix a problem, he had no idea which direction to go in and a total lack of confidence in going anywhere. He used to beg me to tell him what to do. Now he's thinking months or years ahead, seeing problems, inventing solutions, planning how to do them. Whatever his plan is for Donna that involves light blobs and The Boys, he thought of it all himself. Delaying Donna's getting into sex is hardly his responsibility either, so he could easily have passed the problem onto you, Felicity, but he's happy to plan something major because he cares for Donna. He still hasn't told us what the plan is; all he's done is check with us that it's okay to show blobs to The Boys. He PREFERS to think about it himself. A couple of months ago he was incapable of any of that. I don't want to be mean, Felicity or Steven, but he hit the target perfectly with every criticism of you. Plus he caught me not listening properly to him earlier too. Those weren't lucky guesses! It is SCARY how fast he's learning!" Everyone agreed with everything Julia had said. Mom especially agreed that it was scary. They discussed me and the issues I'd raised. Julia added another point a couple of minutes later, "Felicity, when you assumed Mark was intending to encourage Donna's having sex, you walked right into a thoughtless mistake. We heard Mark's explanation about why he wanted us to treat Carol the way he suggested. He'd obviously put a great deal of careful thought into understanding Carol, and in deciding how to handle her needs in a way that was best for Carol. He didn't once say anything about it being fun for him. He wouldn't be thoughtless, uncaring or selfish about Donna, but you were thoughtless about him. If there's one thing I've learned today, it's that when Mark speaks, it'd be a very good idea to THINK about what he's saying." Vanessa corrected, "And LISTEN to him, Julia. That's what you need to learn." Julia had left that out because she was busy concentrating on telling my mom not to block me from doing what I wanted to do (in effect). Julia was using this opportunity to prepare Mom for the discussion that was going to occur when the three-way marriage came up. "You're right. There are TWO things I've learned today: to listen and think carefully when Mark's talking. Especially because so many of the things he says sound bizarre at first. It'd be a very big mistake to react without thinking. -- "I probably shouldn't, but I can't resist adding something else. Mark told me about something he's intending to do when school starts again, and it totally blew me away. He's already got a speech written in his head that he's going to stand up and give in all his classes about a week or two into the school year. He recited it to me, and it's the most incredible speech I've ever heard. He's going to stand up and tell his classes how much he loves his sister Carol, and about her sexuality. I know that sounds weird, but believe me, it's going to be AWESOME! Every girl in the room is going to be bawling her eyes out, and the boys are going to be shamed into behaving properly toward Carol. Carol's status in high school is going to leap upward. The girl that inspired Mark's profoundly sentimental declaration of love is going to have enormous attention and respect. Every girl in school is going to know who Carol is, and is going to know that Carol's a wonderful person. -- "I'm sure you're wondering how Mark could possibly stand up and talk about Carol like that without it being a disaster for Carol. It's going to work wonderfully because he's only going to do it after he's prepared the ground. When school restarts he's going to do something first, then quite a few of the kids at school will react in a certain way, which he'll then use to do something else. THEN everything will be ready for him to give his speech. He's planned it several steps ahead, even all the way through to having his speech already written. You may be impressed by what Mark did for Carol today, but it's only the first of many steps! You heard him say that he thinks Carol's interest in sexual embarrassment will decrease as her self-esteem increases. He's got several steps and the most incredible speech I've ever heard already prepared for next year at school. He's thinking way ahead! -- "I just remembered that Mark started treating Carol very differently right after he and Dad escaped from the kidnappers. From the first moment he saw her in the hospital he was far more focused and loving with her. I'm sure what Mark did today started back then. -- "The time Carol told you about when Mark and I teased her in his bedroom, Mark was totally in control. He knew exactly what he was doing and why. He wasn't testing Carol, or checking to make sure that his thoughts about her sexuality were correct. He knew what he was doing. How many boys know so much about girls? Not only does he know, but he's perfectly happy planning out what's going to be happening to Carol's evolving sexuality several steps ahead. -- "I don't know what happened to Mark when he was kidnapped, but it was something MAJOR, because he's leaped so far ahead it's mind-boggling." Prof said, "I don't know what happened to him either. There was nothing to see, of course. We were locked in the chairs the whole time, so nothing physical happened. But clearly something very profound happened mentally. It's reasonable to expect facing death to change someone, but Mark's changes go far beyond any imaginable consequences of that." Prof pointed to my eight-screen computer system, explaining, "He could 'only' - ha-ha - read two screens at once before we were kidnapped. Now he can read eight with his eyes closed. That's the level of change he went through. I don't know where to start in attempting to describe that. To call him 'unique' is a ridiculous understatement. He's not a unique human; he's superhuman in a category all by himself. -- "It's going to be a mighty interesting experience being in Mark's life, as well as being an incredibly important job. We ALL need to be very careful with our decision-making; there's a lot more at stake than ordinary issues such as whether Donna starts experimenting with boys this year or next. The fate of the world isn't going to be affected by when Donna loses her virginity, but it's almost certainly going to be turned on its head by Mark." Mom glumly said, "We're not up to the task. Nothing..." Vanessa interrupted, "NO ONE is up to the task, Felicity. How many mothers have raised a superhuman before? You do the best you can VERY carefully, because there's a lot at stake. Being careful is the point I suspect Julia was heading for." "Yes, that's right. I was showing you all the thought and selfless care Mark has put into looking after Carol, so Felicity's not taking any care at all before responding to Mark's saying he'd been thinking about Donna's sexual development was very unfair to him. Two months ago I had to push Mark hard to get him moving. Now I'm not keeping up with him. I imagine Felicity thinks the same way?" "You can say that again!" agreed Mom unhappily. "It's a very uncomfortable feeling to be so inadequate." "There's no point in worrying about that," advised Vanessa. "A year ago you easily had all the motherhood bases covered. Two or three months ago Mark started maturing extremely rapidly, and now there are some things he's better at than we are. At the rate he's improving, there's no way even the World's Best Prepared Mother could keep up with him. He's going to leave us all behind, so don't worry about not being smarter than him. Instead concentrate on contributing as best you can. There's still a great deal he needs to be taught yet, and even if he somehow learns all of that, he's still going to need emotional support and love. He's in danger of having a very lonely life because no one else is going to be on his level..." "Oh dear, you're right." "Yes. It's going to be almost impossible for him to find someone he can open his heart to. The importance of Julia's role in his life is diminishing already, because of how fast he's learning. Julia very smartly worked out very early on that that'd happen, but it's still going to be a large blow to her ego when he's a much better leader than her." Julia commented, "I didn't realize that day was coming so quickly, until this conversation. Fortunately I've already worked out that when Mark gets so much better than me that his development is no longer my project, then I'll change to doing things FOR him, rather than TO him. He'll need loyal followers who can carry out his plans for him. He can't be everywhere at once, so that's what my role will become." [[Julia underestimated me greatly.]] Prof commented, "You're smart to have worked that out, but it'll still be interesting to see how your ego handles not being in charge anymore. There are going to be times when that's going to frustrate you, especially if Mark insists on doing things differently than you would." "Yeah, don't I know it! What scares me is that he's learning so fast I might not be able to help him in time. I thought we'd have several years before we got involved in big projects, which would give me plenty of time to learn to be a good helper for him. But it's going to take me two more years just to finish school and God knows what he'll be involved in by then. I won't have learned anything about the adult world, and he'll be world famous by then. I could easily get left behind." "Tsk, tsk, Julia," tsk'd Vanessa. "Regardless of how superhumanly smart and successful Mark becomes, you'll always be managing ordinary people. If you can't learn what you need on the job, then take a few years off to do an MBA or whatever other learning you need, then go back to working for Mark. He's already thinking months or years ahead for Donna and Carol, so he's not going to forget about you. At the most, all you have to do is tell him about your concern and have him think about it. By the time it starts mattering in a couple of years, Mark will probably have your entire career planned out. Put yourself in his hands and trust him, which is something you don't really have a choice about." "You're right. I'm not used to thinking like that." "No. That's your ego again. I'm looking forward to seeing Mark turn the tables on you. I'm sure Prof and I will be in for some educational experiences too. -- "Felicity and Steven, I have two pieces of advice for you. First for when you're faced with an action of Mark's, or a proposed action, such as his requesting we sexually tease Carol or his commenting that he had plans for Donna's sexual education. When anything like that comes up, I advise you not to pass judgment immediately, but to ask 'Why?' Maybe he's being a bonehead about something, or maybe he's thinking ten steps and five years ahead of you. In either event, there's no harm in taking a few seconds to ask why. Judging by his recent learning rate, I expect you'll find yourself agreeing with him far more often than not. -- "I'll go so far as saying that you should probably not refuse him anything unless you have found out what his reasons are, have thought through them carefully, and you know he's wrong. In which case you should teach him what he's got wrong, rather than simply refusing permission. In other words, if you EVER find yourself saying 'No' to Mark, then you should stop and have a very careful think about what you're doing, because it's quite possibly wrong for reasons you haven't thought of. I don't much mind if Mark makes the occasional mistake anyway. He'll learn better that way, and it wouldn't be the end of the world. Which I just realized is an amusingly appropriate expression, because maybe in ten years or so a mistake by Mark could be the literal end of the world. I think I'd MUCH rather he learned from his mistakes now. -- "My second piece of advice, is to worry much more about his emotional future than his actions. Even if you gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wants in the future, he's not going to turn into a spoiled, selfish brat. Today has brought two things home to me: Mark is learning and maturing far faster than his previous rate, which I was already impressed by, and his emotional future is correspondingly bleaker than I had realized. He's not just a better version of a human being, he's on an entirely different level. He's got no possibility whatsoever of finding a life-mate. It's not even worth him looking, because there isn't any such person..." "I assumed he'd marry Julia," objected Mom. "Despite the other girls Julia lets him play with, their relationship seems to work very well." Julia's objected, "EVERYTHING you just said is SO wrong I don't know where to start! I don't LET him play..." Vanessa cut Julia off, "Stop, Julia. You're too worked up; leave it to me." Julia subsided, letting Vanessa turn to Mom to say, "Your statement is factually incorrect, Felicity. Julia came to me for advice about how to push Mark into dating other girls. It was me that invented and named the pipeline scheme, so you're plain wrong. But that's not the main issue. -- "Julia wants to get angry with you for maligning her man. When Mark said he'd been thinking about Donna's sexual development, your immediate reaction proved that you didn't trust him, AND that you assumed he wouldn't care about what was best for Donna. Just now you accused him of being selfish, inconsiderate and greedy in the way he's treating Julia, by somehow getting her to 'let him play with other girls.' I also know that Julia has previously told you that Mark's dating other girls was her idea and the she wanted him to do it so he learned more about girls, so your statement that she lets Mark play around was calling her previous explanations to you lies. You're doing a very good job of insulting people right and left." "Damn right!" declared an insulted-looking Julia, in support of me, via her mother. "Felicity isn't as insulting as she seems to everyone, Julia. Her assumption that Mark somehow coerced you into letting him play around doesn't stand up to even a fraction of a second's thought. Nor does her assumption that Mark was intending to encourage Donna to have sex earlier than she should. A fraction of a second's thought tells anyone that he loves Donna and would NEVER do anything selfish at the expense of what was best for her. -- "Felicity, your unthinking assumptions imply you have beliefs about Mark's motivations and methods which are laughably inaccurate, so you can't be thinking about Mark at all. It's clear that your 'unthinking assumptions' are actually 'unthinking prejudices'. Your comments can't be about Mark, so they must be about you. You've got a problem with trusting men's ability to be sexually faithful, don't you?" [[Thereby proving that this Vanessa was as smart as 3B's. That wasn't as smart as I gave her credit for though, not in this case anyway, because Vanessa had received several other clues from Mom. The two moms often phoned each other - behind their children's backs, because mothers do that sort of thing - during which Mom had several times raised the issue of my faithfulness with Vanessa, such as when Ava had joined Julia and me.]] Dad interrupted to confirm Vanessa's guess, saying, "That's what Mark hit us with in the middle of dinner yesterday. Fely has been scared of ME playing around for years. I had a lot of girlfriends at school, before I chose Fely. I gave it all up for her, but she's been expecting me to backslide. It's been twenty two years and she's STILL expecting it, which is a silly overreaction. I had two years of being 'King of the Castle' at school, and twenty two years of being faithful, but Fely can't let her fear go." That took a lot of the wind out of Vanessa's sails, but she found more wind and still gave Mom a very hard time. In fact, Vanessa gave Mom an excessively hard time. A large part of Vanessa's motivation was to help with the NEXT argument they were going to have, over our three-way marriage and sexual relationship. Mom's reaction to that proposal was predictably going to be instantly and unthinkingly negative. Vanessa was setting things up so she could immediately remind Mom of how her several previous instantly, unthinkingly negative responses had all been shamefully wrong. By shaming Mom REALLY badly now, and linking to it at the next argument, Mom would have to pause, whereupon Vanessa and Prof could work on her. The next argument was also why Vanessa had been building up my "future emotional isolation and loneliness." She even managed to work in, "Felicity, you MUST be more emotionally supportive of Mark. He's going to be an extremely lonely man for most of his life, as there's never going to be anyone he's going to be able to emotionally connect with, other than his family." By the time Vanessa had finished with her, Mom was ashamed that she'd nearly destroyed the mental well-being of the man that humankind's development would be entirely dependent on for the next several millennia. That might be an exaggeration, but Vanessa was very convincing at the time. One of Vanessa's points was, "Julia's, Ava's and Mark's sexual relationship is working out very well for all of them, for reasons far more important than mere sexual pleasure. Their having sex helps build their friendship and intimacy considerably. There's no jealousy between them, and it's clearly going to be a very important relationship for Ava when her parents sicken and die. I think it's an excellent relationship, and I'm proud of all of them for managing it so well. Their relationship is proving that sex outside a monogamous relationship isn't automatically bad and wrong, Felicity. There could be many reasons for it to be the best choice. You need to let go your prejudice and fear. Or at the very least, stop imposing your insultingly negative prejudice onto Mark. A more undeserved target I cannot imagine!" Mom once again tried to say, "I was wrong, I'm sorry," but Vanessa didn't let the conversation stop there, as it'd stop her making her points. A few minutes later, to make sure Mom was under no misapprehension over who the winners of the discussion were, Julia said, "Good idea mentioning Ava, Mom. Carol and I are sleeping in my bed tonight, and I don't like the idea of Mark being alone, so I'll call Ava now to see if she wants to sleep with him tonight." Literally under Mom's nose, Julia called Ava and invited her around to have sex with me overnight. Ava accepted with alacrity, and would be there when Julia specified, in half an hour. Then to make sure Mom REALLY knew who'd won the discussion, Julia announced, "I can't call any more girls until I ask Mark how many girls he wants me to LET HIM PLAY WITH tonight. Maybe he'll want me to LET HIM have a quality one-on-one session with Ava, or maybe he'll want me to LET HIM have sex with as many girls as I can fit onto his bed." Vanessa explained, "I let Julia's rudeness go unchecked to make a point, Felicity. Julia is very forcefully outspoken when someone treads on her toes, as you did by insulting her man. If she didn't whole-heartedly agree with Mark's dating other girls, Julia is more than capable of letting him very clearly know what she thought about it. -- "When Mark first started dating other girls, he was as forceful as a limp dish rag. Mark would spend two hours apologizing if he thought he MIGHT have offended someone. Julia only had to look cross, and he would throw himself onto his knees to beg for her forgiveness. I literally cannot imagine a conversation in which the Mark of two months ago imposed his views on Julia against her will. I'm sure you can't imagine that either, because such a conversation was impossible. Mark does NOT treat girls selfishly." (Such a conversation wasn't impossible. Vanessa knew that if I TRULY wanted something strongly enough to insist on it, then Julia would comply. That's what my playing around with girls was!) [[It was more subtle than that. I never told Julia that I wanted to play around (I was too much of a wimp to do that). Plus it would've been extremely impolite for me to insist on that to Julia (I was a very polite wimp). Julia had assumed I wanted to play around, and she'd checked it with me. By the time Julia had decided that I was so special that I should get what I wanted, she'd already seen that I'd been easily able to dismiss all the girls who'd been coming on to me at school, thanks to Dad's and Mom's separate and very strong advice about how bad it was. Thus Julia was reasonably sure that I wasn't going to go crazy chasing after every pair of tits that passed in front of me, as most boys would've. If Julia hadn't seen me so easily reject those girls, then she deliberately wouldn't have noticed my interest in playing around.]] ^ While the parents and Julia were agreeing that I was an absolute genius at human relations - who could see "ten steps and five years ahead" in the ways in which girls thought and matured - I was walking back to the hot tub with Carol. I was particularly eager to get Carol's advice about how I'd screwed up the start of this afternoon's Cutie meeting so badly. I knew I'd messed it up, but I was too stupid to have a clue about how. Hopefully my 13-year old, moderately smart sister would set me right. We grabbed a spare T-shirt, some drinks and headed for the tub. I made Carol wear the T-shirt, explaining, "There won't be any hanky-panky while Mom and Dad ARE HERE." Carol picked up on my emphasis, asking me, "You mean we can after they go?" "Yes, bunny." "{Giggle}." When we were settled in the hot tub, with Carol on my lap and with her T-shirt very modestly pinned under her thighs, I quietly told her, "I might have misled you when I called you 'bunny' just before. We can enjoy some hanky-panky after Mom and Dad leave, but I'd like you to be a virgin on our wedding night, so Julia can hold you in her arms while I make love to you for the first time." "Oh boy, that sounds, umm, ... I'm not sure." "Good, I hope?" "If it's better than the two of you sucking on my earlobes that time, then it'll be VERY good, haha." "I hope it's considerably better than your earlobes, but that reminds me about something that's been worrying me a little. You've got a VERY tough hymen, and it's going to hurt like hell when you lose it. I wonder whether you'd prefer to get rid of it before our wedding so you can enjoy your wedding night more, or whether you think it more significant to have it all happen on the night?" Carol answered, "Mostly I want to know, HOW ON EARTH YOU KNOW HOW TOUGH MY HYMEN IS? That's one of the weirdest things I've ever heard." "Haha. I thought you might be curious about that. It's extremely easy for me to answer your question, sweetie; I know in exactly the same way as I knew about your earlobes." I sat there, smiling at her. "Which you never told me. You're not going to explain, are you?" "Sorry, no. The secret is too large a burden to inflict on anyone else, especially someone I care for so much." "A burden? How do you mean?" "It's a secret that I wish I never knew, because VERY bad things would happen if it got out. That's all I'm going to say about it. I just want you to know that I'm not refusing to explain my source of my knowledge about your hymen, and everything else that I'm not explaining, because of petty reasons. But because I HAVE TO keep it secret. It's a SERIOUS burden." "Oh. Is it about why you're so special?" "So, did Diana Norris say she liked me?" "Huh? Oh." Carol got my point, made the mental shift required, then continued, "Umm, yeah, Diana thinks you're dreamy. She LOVED your giving her special treatment. She doesn't know why though?" The question mark meant Carol was curious about that too. That I knew about Diana the same way I knew about Carol's hymen wasn't a good answer, so instead I said, "I indirectly learned some good things about Diana and Claire as a result of my date with Mackenzie." So indirectly it hadn't even been in the same dimension. As a result of 3B's date with Mackenzie, I'd let my fingers wander on her sisters, and had found Diana and Claire to be highly accessible, that being the start of the "good things" I'd just mentioned to Carol. -- "I probably learned more than they expect, but that doesn't matter. Just tell Diana that I liked how she behaved when I visited her home. And also that now I've seen how lovely her breasts are, I'm never going to let her get away, haha. Speaking of which, your way of picking passengers for my car was FANTASTIC! Thanks for that." "You're welcome. You looked like you needed cheering up." "Because I stupidly messed up whatever it was that I was trying to talk about at the beginning..." "I wondered why you were talking like that. What were you doing?" "To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure. I was trying to set some rules for how the Cuties should behave, because a large group of people can get very chaotic, but I did it very badly and ended up digging myself into a depressing hole that I didn't know how to get out of." "But you're a GENIUS with people! What you just did upstairs was AWESOME! You saw right through Mom better than..." "Don't get knowing a fact mixed up with being smart, sweetie." "Huh?" "Yeah, that was confusing. I'll give you an example. Let me tell you that 115 squared is one three two, twenty five. That's thirteen thousand, two hundred and twenty five. Can you remember 13,225 please?" "Ahh, okay." "Good. Now, what's 115 squared?" "13,225?" "Right. Now what's 114 squared?" "Ahh. Umm. I don't know. You didn't tell me that one." "But you're a genius. You answered what 115 squared was right away, and 114 is a lower number so it should be even easier for you. -- "You see what I mean when I said that knowing facts aren't the same as being a genius. You knew 115 squared as a fact, but working out 114 was too hard. I knew some facts about Mom, but I wasn't smart enough to work out how to talk with the Cuties properly, so I messed it up." "Oh, I see." "I have a confession too. I deliberately let Mom think I was a genius about people to make it easier for us to get permission to have the three-way marriage with Julia." "Oh boy. {Giggle}. That was sneaky." "Yeah. It's a pity I had to do it, but even with Vanessa and Prof on our side it's probably going to be very hard to get Mom's blessing. Once Mom sees how well our marriage works she'll be okay, but to get her that far will probably take..." "You KNOW our marriage will work, don't you? The way you know about my hymen and things like that." "Ahh, mostly yes Carol, but not in any way you'll ever be able to imagine. Not because I can predict the future, or anything like that. It's only 'mostly yes', because I don't even KNOW that we will get married. Mom and Dad could easily refuse that." I VERY nearly said "This Mom and Dad". It's HARD avoiding slips like that! "If we do get married, then I have VERY good reason to believe the three of us will work out superbly well. Especially for you; it's going to be the best thing that's happened in your life, which is great..." #3: #6: #3: #8: " ... Before we get too distracted, remember to decide whether you want to bust your hymen before your wedding day. It takes a few days for it to feel better." "I don't know, Mark. You're the expert on my hymen. There's a sentence I never expected to be saying to my brother, haha. You somehow know how much it's going to hurt me, so you decide." #4: #6: #1: #All: "Okay. I'll get back to you about that, sweetie. If you can't trust your brother to decide what's best for your hymen, who can you trust? The other subject I wanted your advice about was what I should've done with the Cuties rather than depress everybody with my silly talking?" "I don't know. Why didn't you just have fun with them rather than lecturing them?" "Umm, I kind of wanted to teach them not to make mistakes or be nuisances in the future." "Then why didn't you have fun until one of them did something wrong, and then tell her off so they all heard?" #1: #4: #All: "That's excellent advice. I'll be a genius and do exactly what you suggest next time." "It WAS pretty obvious, {giggle}." "Yeah, to anyone who understood anything about people, which I still trip up with more often than not. Speaking of things I didn't understand, how did you get them to show me their breasts? That's something I DEFINITELY want to learn how to do!" "I told them a little lie. You don't mind that I told a little lie to get lots of girls to show you their breasts, do you?" "Honey, girls' breasts are why lying was invented! You couldn't have lied for a better reason, haha." "{Giggle}. I thought you wouldn't mind. Umm, I'm a bit worried about telling you what I said to the Cuties. Can I please not tell you? It wasn't bad or insulting or anything." "I can't imagine you ever saying anything bad or insulting about me, sweetie. If you don't want to tell me, that's okay." [I was very curious, of course, but I'd meant what I'd said. I asked her a few weeks later though (I REALLY did want to know how to get girls to so willingly show me their breasts. I'm strongly in favor of the pursuit of knowledge). Carol had told the girls that my time as a prisoner had been terrifying. I'd thought I was going to die and I'd never see my family again, had been badly injured, and had only got home from the hospital just before the exams. "He's had a VERY stressful time, and he needs your understanding and forgiveness. Also, showing him your tits would cheer him up..." Carol had explained her idea and the idea of hiding behind the towels so it'd be anonymous. They'd easily agreed, especially because getting their sympathy wasn't hard after they'd all seen my missing finger. That'd been a constant and disturbing reminder of what I'd faced.] Having nothing else specific to talk about, we started gossiping in general. Talking about the individual girls, which ones I liked or disliked, and why. I'd had time to form positive and negative opinions about several of them, and I had no hesitation in telling Carol all about my opinions. I was particularly happy to answer the "and why" question at length. The pipeline system prevented me from giving those girls feedback because I wanted to end up with only a handful of girls (an accurate phrase) whose true personality matched what I enjoyed the most. Their having big tits would help too, but because the pipeline survivors would be interacting with me and my core group quite a lot, tit size was unusually unimportant. Whereas with the Ducklings and Cuties I wanted to keep them in a group. Teaching them how to collectively make me happy was perfectly fine with me. I deliberately ignored the potential problem from the Cuties being in high school next year, and therefore potential pipeline participants. I wanted to enjoy summer; I'd worry about that next year. I was into a fairly detailed explanation about the traits I was most looking for in the Cuties, when I realized that I would soon be talking about my sexual intentions for them. Maybe that wouldn't be a good thing to mention to my hopefully soon-to-be-wife, just on the off chance that she objected to my wanting to fuck a dozen or two of her classmates. I asked, "Ahh, sweetie, as further proof of my lack of genius, it just occurred to me that I had completely failed to check whether anything I was doing, intending to do, wished to do, or even dreamed about doing, was annoying you. Specifically whether my playing around with other girls was making you jealous or angry for any other reason? You're easily more important to me than all the Cuties put together, and I'm very sorry I stupidly didn't think to ask you about it before." In my defense, the other Carol had been fine with it, and it was kind of automatic to assume this Carol would be the same. It was rude not to ask though. Which, now that I thought of it, I hadn't done in 3B-land either. Presumably Julia took care of that issue, if it was ever an issue. "Haha Mark. I was wondering if you were going to ask me. Don't worry, I'll never get between you and other girls. Obviously not between you and Julia or Ava, because those relationships are very important to you. Julia's also made it VERY clear to me that you ARE going to date other girls. Not just 'date' them either; she's talking about sex all over the place. She explained all of that when she went through the vows. Thanks for asking, but I honestly don't feel possessive about you. I feel incredibly lucky that I'm allowed to join your other girls, especially Julia. Julia is FAR more important than I am, so I'd be silly..." -- I tried to interrupt, but Carol interrupted my interruption (how rude was that!) with, "I KNOW you said in the car that I was more important than Julia, but that's Silly Talk..." -- Damned if Carol didn't interrupt my next interruption AGAIN! "Don't interrupt to talk more silliness, Mark, haha. I'm perfectly happy being a distant second behind Julia, and if she thinks it's best that you play around, then I'm not going to argue with her. -- "I got the Cuties to show you their breasts and I know you want to get sexy with them, so I obviously don't mind. It's good for you to learn about girls for when you get older and they try to trick you, and it's fun for me to be in charge of the Cuties. I've never been in charge of people before, and it's a good feeling to have them so eager to listen to me, especially because Julia's giving me plenty of advice and I can ask her any questions I want. She's being very helpful." #1: #3: I agreed, "Yes, she's very good that way. You honestly don't mind if I have sex with other girls?" "{Raspberry}. {Giggle}. Julia says to do that to you whenever you say something particularly silly." #6: #8: #1: #8: #1: #8: I capitulated, "I will accept your raspberry in the spirit in which it was intended, which was mockingly insulting. But because I am a very forgiving person, I will let you continue to keep providing me with sexy girls to play with, especially if one of them is you." "One of them sure will be! Right at the head of the line. I am REALLY looking forward to that. Julia says you're very, very good. Actually she says it stronger than that. She says you're 'the best lover the world has ever had.' I've heard other people say how good sex is, so I'm getting very excited about what it must be like with the best." #3: #8: #1: #3: #8: #4: #6: "{Giggle}." (From Carol, as I hardly ever giggle.) It didn't take a genius to work out why she was giggling. Her saying, "I like it when you do that," and wiggling her hips was a good clue too. "Oops. A momentary loss of control there. I'd better make that go away, in case Mom and Dad come in." #8: #1: #8: [[As previously explained, my having multiple minds has caused me to develop the habit when speaking to other people of saying, "first", "second", "third", etc., when responding with a list of points. Doing it that way means the individual points don't have to be sensibly linked; they can just be spouted as each of my minds think of them. It's become such a habit with us that we even do it when a single mind is speaking internally, as just above. I have tidied up a lot of our grammar and expanded out the shortcuts we take in our internal conversations, but I've left some of our peculiarities in where they help you understand how having multiple minds has changed me.]] #8 asked, "Sweetie, how often do you and Julia talk on the phone?" "Not very often. We've been too busy with exams." #1: "How often is 'not very often'? How many times a day and for how long?" "Only a few. Two or three normally, I guess. We've had exams Mark, so we can't talk much." #1: "So how long PER DAY would that total?" "During the exams not even an hour. Or maybe some days over an hour, but not often. Before the exams we used to talk normally." #8: #1: #8: #3: #8: #6: #1: #3: #8 : I said, "Good. I'm glad you and Julia are exchanging lots of information about me. It'll help you both be equal as my wives." "Yeah, that's good, but we don't spend all our time talking about you." "Oh? What else do you talk about?" "Remember you said I have to buy some new clothes with a different look than I normally buy. That requires a GREAT deal of planning. Julia and I have spent hours on that. It's not easy, you know?" "I know. I'm sorry I'm putting you to so much trouble, but I appreciate the effort you're making. The couple of new outfits that I've seen you wear have been VERY nice." Actually they'd only been moderately nice. Carol still didn't have the confidence to wear the same style of clothes she'd worn in 3B-land, which was the style she should wear, given her superb figure. She'd get there though, hopefully pretty soon. "Thank you. Julia say's it's VERY important that your sister has the right image, otherwise I might reflect badly on you." "If anyone ever says you reflect badly on me, let me know who said it, and I'll punch their lights out! Let's get back to what else the Cuties said when you were at the Aquatic Center?" "Okay." Carol resumed telling me about the girls. ------- Chapter 248: Some Debriefing and Briefing Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued) Several minutes later, Julia and the four parents came into the hot tub room. Mom looked like she'd been on the receiving end of a VERY thorough telling off. With a very abashed expression, Mom confessed, "I'm very sorry, Mark. I've been treating you very unfairly. I'll try to do better in the future." "I should jolly well think so! Once a month or so is far too infrequently!" "Huh? What are you talking about?" "How often we have roast chicken. What else could be more worth apologizing for than how unfair you are about cooking roast chicken? By the way, Carol wants to learn how to cook it all by herself, so you'll have to have several teaching sessions soon." #7: #6: #7: #6: "I do?" asked Carol. "Absolutely. You're highly enthusiastic over the idea at becoming the world's best ever cook of roast chicken dinners with all the trimmings." "Haha. Okay, it's a deal. Mom, please teach me how to cook a roast chicken dinner." I corrected, "With all the trimmings, and soon!" Carol added to Mom, "With all the trimmings, and soon! I'm very impatient, apparently, haha." Mom agreed, "We can do that. But you know that's not what I meant, Mark. I want to apologize for allowing my fears of Steven having an affair to badly color my judgments of your actions. It was completely unfair of me, and I insulted you many times by doing so." I would have liked to joke away Mom's concern, but I was VERY conscious that Vanessa and Prof would soon be telling Mom that I wanted to have sex with Carol. Mom's judgment of my having sex was an issue she had to be encouraged to be as non-negative as possible about (I was too realistic to hope she'd be positive about it). I said, "I'm glad you're conscious of it. It's been very unpleasant for me to be on the receiving end of so many of your unfair judgments. Do you think you can really stop yourself leaping to your usual emotionally driven, knee-jerk, negative reactions?" "Ahh. I'll try my best." "I hope you'll listen to everyone here, when they point out that you're doing it again?" "I very much hope that I DON'T do it again. But if I do, I'll certainly listen if it's pointed out again." "Somehow I find it easier to imagine you yelling 'Are you insane!' to them when they try to get you to be rational. That's your usual response when you're asked to think about something you disagree with. You are REALLY going to have to bite your tongue, Mom, and that's not your usual style at all. You're going to find that very hard to do." I could see that Mom was feeling bad about her need to apologize, and bad that I wasn't accepting her apology in the usual polite manner. I'd rubbed it in enough. Probably more than enough, as she was almost certainly not going to remember my comments when she heard the marriage plan. We'd just have to wait and see, and cross our fingers that Vanessa and Prof could work their magic. I concluded, "I hope you get it right from now on. Are you guys heading home now?" "Yes," answered Dad. After the usual departure noises, and another apologetic comment from Mom, they left. Julia stayed in the hot tub room, stripping and getting into the tub too. Seeing one naked girl made me realize that one of those wasn't enough. I said, "Carol, were you told about the new Williams Family Rule that you have to be naked whenever you're in this hot tub?" "Ahh, yes. But you told me to wear this T-shirt?" "That's because of the other rule, 'What Mom and Dad don't know won't get me in trouble.' Now they've gone, that T-shirt should be gone too." "Won't Prof and Vanessa come back?" The other Carol had gotten used to that, and I'd made the mistake of not distinguishing Carols again. This Carol wasn't in game-playing mode, and she wasn't comfortable being naked in front of people generally, so I said, "You're right, of course. Sorry about that. Stay as you are until they come back. When they're here we'll ask them to knock first and wait if they come back again, to give you time to get dressed. And for them to tell Robert that too." Julia said, "Ava will be here in fifteen minutes. I invited her to stay the night with you because you'd be sleeping alone and I wanted to make a point with your mother. That's okay with you, isn't it?" #8: #1: #3: #1: #6: #8: #5: #1: #3: #8: #7: #6: <3B's Ava didn't care about brother-sister incest, regardless of who was involved. It wasn't that she was normally revolted and our love with Carol overcome that revulsion. So at the worst, this Ava simply shouldn't care.> #1: #3: We'd been thinking too long, because Julia added, "It's NOT okay? Why not?" "It's not that, Julia. I'm thinking about whether to tell Ava about Carol and me becoming lovers soon. We've been testing Ava with my marathon time to see if I can tell her 'The Big Two Secrets' - NP and blobs. Soon it's going to be 'The Big Three Secrets', and of the three of them, keeping Carol's and my relationship hidden from Ava is going to be the biggest pain. -- "That we're intending to commit to our own marriage we should probably keep from her, especially as it hasn't happened yet, but our being lovers is going to be very inconvenient, as it'd mean choosing whether to spend time with Carol or Ava, so we'd be excluding one of them more often than not. Then there's the fact that the four of us could have a great time together in bed, plus Carol and Ava can have fun in public." Julia looked surprised, so I explained, "When Ava's turned on she likes to do sexy things in public too. For Ava it's more the exciting thrill of being seen doing something sexual, rather than the embarrassment of being seen naked, but there's plenty of overlap in the two girls' attitudes to let them have fun together in public. For example, if Carol was talking to some girls when Ava came up behind her, put her hand into Carol's bra, and started fondling her, then both of them would enjoy that. Especially if they started kissing too." "Oh yeah," groaned Carol in agreement. "Done right, that'd be GREAT. I'd LOVE to do it in front of the Cuties." "Yeah. I'm thinking of ordering Ava to be your sex toy, so you can order her around sexually. If you and the Cuties are somewhere private, you could frig Ava's pussy in front of all them, for example. I can give you advice about what sort of games Ava would enjoy. You'd have to be careful of her feelings, because she needs to be in the right mood. She needs to know you'll be kind to her, and I'll make sure you understood what that means. I know you'd never deliberately mistreat her, so the two of you should have fun. -- "That's mostly off-topic, as they can do that regardless of Ava knowing about Carol and me, although life would be much easier and more fun if the four of us were completely open sexually. I think Ava is probably trustworthy about all three of The Big Secrets, but doing them one at a time makes good sense. I'm almost positive she couldn't care less about brother-sister incest, what with her being an only child and her general very positive attitude about sex being fun. -- "What I have in mind, is that when Ava arrives I'll have a private word with her, telling her that I'm thinking of adding Carol to the our existing threesome of Ava, Julia and me, but I obviously have to know that she'd approve before I did it. Other than incorrectly implying that I'd abide by Ava's refusal, it's otherwise the truth. If she's negative about it, it'd be easy to backpedal and reconsider what to do. What do you think?" "How do you know Ava's not worried about brother-sister incest?" asked Julia. "I just do. Sorry, but that's the best answer I can give. I'm 99% sure that she won't have a problem with it, and asking my intended question should remove even that small uncertainty." Carol asked, "You said 'The Big Three Secrets', but none of them..." "I know what you're going to ask Carol. Imagine we went for a walk somewhere, and we rounded a corner to see three large rocks, would you expect me to say there were three rocks, or four? I don't count the Earth as a rock. It kind of could be counted, but it's too big. I'm the same with my secrets. My Big Three Secrets are like those three rocks. You can work out the rest of my meaning yourself, because that's ALL I'm going to say on the subject. I'm EXTREMELY uncomfortable about it, so please drop it. In fact, I'll go further than that: I ORDER you to drop it. If I ever need to talk about it again, I'll raise the subject, otherwise you totally forget about it, okay?" Julia instantly and firmly said, "Yes, Mark." Carol said the same, "Yes, Mark. I'm sorry I mentioned..." Julia said, "Carol! You just mentioned it AGAIN! Obeying Mark's orders is a great deal more important than being polite, so SHUT UP!" That verbal slap in the face worked far better than my order did! Carol's face fell and her mouth slammed shut. After a second's loud silence, Julia added, "I deliberately overreacted to your apology, because I want you to learn that on the very rare occasions that Mark gives you an order, you don't think of ANYTHING other than obeying him. One day your instant and total obedience might be life-or-death important. Mark's already been in one of those situations and more could happen, especially when he becomes famous. There's a reason one of the vows is to sacrifice your life to save Mark's if necessary." Carol contritely begged, "I'm VERY sorry, Julia. I didn't think about what I was saying..." "I know, sweetie. I'm not really telling you off for what you did, because you didn't say much anyway. It was just too good an opportunity for me to miss, so I used it. I take protecting Mark VERY seriously now, and if that means picking on you unfairly to make you better at protecting him in the future, then I won't hesitate to be very rude to you. As lovely as you are, protecting Mark is more important to me than being polite to you. -- "The best advice I can give you, is when you hear Mark say 'I order you', then you COMPLETELY forget EVERYTHING else. Listen with your TOTAL concentration to what he's saying, and then do it. Wanting to apologize to Mark shouldn't even occur to you. If it does, then you're not concentrating fully on Mark's order. Please remember that when you hear Mark tell you, 'I order you', then you think of NOTHING else. Have you got that?" Julia has always been excessively dramatic about this stuff, but the kidnapping had ruined any chance I had to tell her that, so I sat quietly while she laid down the law with Carol. [[Julia was on a roll, having just laid down the law with Mom.]] "I understand, Julia. You're very good at explaining things. It should be easy to react to Mark's saying 'I order you' the way you say. I'll do much better in the future." "I'm sure you will. Mark, I don't think there's any problem with talking to Ava the way you suggested. If she's okay with you and Carol, then I'd expect she'd keep the secret fine. Your marathon secret means more to her than your having sex with one more girl. I was intending to ask you whether you wanted to invite any more girls around tonight. I know several of them want to catch up with you now that school's finished." "No more tonight, thanks. The four of us would be perfect. We can discuss what we do with the other girls when we're driving to Portland tomorrow." "Ahh, maybe we should cancel that. We were going to see cars that were too expensive to be available in Corvallis, and you made it very clear that I should control myself better. The Toyota salesman said he'd have the Lexus for us to see on Tuesday, so let's decide what car to buy after seeing that?" "Okay." "I should make a small confession too. When I was talking to your mother upstairs, I got a little carried away and I mentioned the speech you're going to give about Carol when school restarts. I didn't give any details, just that it was about Carol's sexuality and that it was the best speech I'd ever heard. I didn't even mention her becoming a lesbian. I used it as an example of how far ahead you're planning." "{Giggle}. I forgot I was going to become a lesbian. Hey, that's going to be good for playing with Ava." "Yes, my delightfully perverted sister. That's part of my plan. You, Julia and Ava will be publicly sexual. Kissing and fondling each other when no teacher will see. We want everyone to be sure you're a lesbian so they don't suspect you're hanging around with Julia and me because you want to be near me. -- "I'm sure you'll enjoy the plan, even though you'll have to become forgetful in one specific way. I'm assured that lesbians often forget to wear their panties to school. Or maybe they just take them off when they get together at lunchtime. Either way you're going to be feeling breezes in a place you're not used to. Probably we should make sure you get plenty of practice over summer, when the breezes will be warmer." "Haha. Really? You want me to 'forget' my panties?" "The word 'want' describes my feelings on the matter terribly inadequately, haha. Not just you either, Carol. If it's good enough for you - and it definitely is - then it's also good enough for Julia and Ava too. It'll make it very easy for all of us to have fun by flashing or feeling each other. Other than me not flashing obviously. For some reason if a girl flashes her pussy in public - like that stupid Hilton girl or Britney Spears - no one takes it seriously, but a guy gets in all sorts of very serious legal trouble if he flashes his cock in public." #8: #6: #7: #6: Julia and Carol were joking and giggling - mostly Carol as Julia's not much of a giggler - about 'forgetting' their panties, when there was a knock on the door, followed by Vanessa saying, "It's Prof and me." "Come in," replied Julia. Vanessa and Prof came in. Vanessa said, "Your parents have gone Mark. We've just come to check whether you have any questions about what we talked about with them, or has Julia explained everything already?" "I haven't explained anything, Mom. We were too busy talking about other things." #8: "I am curious, Vanessa?" Vanessa gave me a very quick summary, with Julia and Prof chipping in a few points (I won't give it here, as the detailed version has already been provided). At the end, Vanessa said, "I expect your parents will give their consent to your marriage idea. Their initial reaction will naturally be negative, but once we're past that, I'm fairly sure Prof and I will be able to convince them to support it." #7: #5: #7: I asked, "Isn't Mom and Dad knowing that I'm playing around with so many girls going to be a problem?" "Yes, of course." Which wasn't exactly the answer I'd been hoping for. "There are pros and cons for your and Carol relationship, but we think the pros are overwhelming. Prof and I truly believe it's a good idea, so we'll be trying our best." Which made me feel like a heel, because Prof's and Vanessa's entire justification rested on my deceitfully allowed belief that Carol's and my children had the best chance of being special. I felt a great deal more shamed by my deception in this dimension than I had in 3B-land. Not enough shame for me to pull the plug on it though; just enough for me to feel bad. "Ahh, good. Thanks. Do you know when you'll be talking to Mom and Dad about it?" "In a few days. We'll let your mother recover for a couple of days, then we'll invite them over for a casual dinner with just the four of us. We'll raise the subject of the long-term issues such as the good of humanity, and there being only one of you. It'd be ideal if they suggested your having children with Carol, but otherwise we will. If we raise that subject your parents aren't going to realize it's a put up job are they? You haven't hinted about that, so they'll connect us when the issue is raised?" "I don't think so. My joke a few minutes ago about Carol learning to cook roast chicken dinners shouldn't give anything away, but there's how loving I've been toward Carol recently. Especially because I've been treating her noticeably different than Donna. I insisted Carol be with my parents when I showed them my abilities, while I forcefully refused Donna's interest. Mom was getting very suspicious of that, although seeing my abilities has blown that issue out of her mind for the moment." Other than the obvious reason for wanting the four parents to have their meeting as soon as possible, there was another reason: I'd pretty much used up all the useful information that 3B had to impress this Mom and Dad. Right now they thought I was a genius with people, and I could use that to claim a great deal of credibility about how well our three-way marriage was going to be. I could claim, "Don't worry Mom, I KNOW Carol will be happy. I wouldn't do it otherwise," and Mom would believe me. If Vanessa and Prof delayed talking to my parents, Mom would see me being my usual idiot self about people, and I'd lose that credibility. Vanessa's answer that the conversation would be in a few days was very reassuring, as I could probably (fingers crossed) avoid looking like an idiot for a few days, if only by staying out of the way and saying as little as possible. Thinking about the credibility issue, and Mom seeing how I treated Carol differently, gave me an idea. I added, "One idea just occurred to me. First, I'm assuming that your discussion will just be among the four parents. You won't want any of us there, will you?" "That's correct. It'd be much easier to keep it impersonal if none of you are with us." "I guess we should be handy though, in case you need us for any reason. In which case, if you can't convince Mom and Dad yourselves, you could get me to join you, then ask me what I thought about the idea of my having babies with Carol or Donna. I could say something like, 'Of course. That's been obvious for months. It's not up to us though; it's up to Carol to think about it and decide whether she wants to do it or not. She's the one who's going to be carrying the babies and raising them. Naturally I have a say too, but what I think is obvious, because the good of humanity demands it. Mom and Dad don't really have a say because this issue will remain open for decades. Carol won't be asking for parental permission to get pregnant when she's thirty.' You get the idea: I'm trying to downplay everything to take the wind out of Mom's and Dad's sails. It should be easier to get them to agree to it being Carol's decision than mine, especially with Mom's recently uncovered prejudice. And it should be easier to get permission when the timeframe is so abstract." I was quite proud of myself (of one-eighth of myself anyway). Julia and Carol seemed impressed too. Vanessa wasn't though, "I doubt that'd work. It'd be unlikely that calling you into the discussion when it was still open would be a good idea. That'd make your mother adopt her authoritarian persona, which is the opposite of what we want. Plus, your parents aren't the type of people to agree to an abstract timeframe; they'll want to know when. Even if they did agree to it happening some undefined time in the future, the moment you and Carol start doing something about it, they're immediately going to reopen the whole discussion and they wouldn't consider themselves even slightly bound by a previous, 'one day it'd be okay' attitude. Another problem is that 'The Good of Humanity' isn't an issue that carries much weight with your parents. Not that they have anything against humanity; it's that they don't think about big pictures. This'll be decided much more on the level of what makes you and Carol happiest. Prof and I have to talk them into blessing your immediate three-party marriage. Anything less than that will come unstuck the moment you try to have your wedding." If I'd been thinking I understood people (which I hadn't been), then having what I thought had been a good idea so soundly demolished would have corrected my inflated self-opinion. I said, "Oh. Okay. In that case, Mom shouldn't think it's a put-up job, except perhaps from my being so loving toward Carol since our kidnapping." "That's no problem. I'll talk with Felicity on Tuesday to invite them to dinner, and I'll let you know what night that'll be, so you can make yourselves scarce." Julia and I agreed, but I couldn't help asking, "Umm, why isn't my being so obviously loving toward Carol a problem? Wouldn't that make Mom think I've had ulterior motives for the last month." Vanessa answered, "I'll explain it by saying you've fallen into non-familial love with Carol, and you've had ulterior motives for the last month." "Ahh, telling the truth! What a cunning idea. I must try to remember that trick. One problem though, won't it immediately get Mom onto high alert? And probably onto her high horse too. Mom's very good at preaching from a high horse." "Why would she bless a marriage between you and Carol if you didn't love each other?" Carol giggled, which made my defeat official. #4: I admitted it, "I'll shut up now. I am MIGHTY glad you're doing this for me, Vanessa..." "It'll be Prof and me. I'll take the emotional angle, Prof will take the logical angle and will speak when we need to calm things down." I had a VERY nice idea. I said, "You two are so incredibly helpful, that I just decided we should name our firstborn after you." I resisted the temptation to joke about a baby called Prof, or worse still, a girl called Archibald. Saying those would spoil the moment. I could see that Vanessa and Prof were both very affected by my statement. I added to it, "Seriously. You have both been extraordinarily supportive of me, in this and EVERY other thing I'm doing. Every time I turn around you're helping me with something new. Not just supporting me, but actively helping me. My life would be ENORMOUSLY poorer if not for your help. I should've asked Carol about that first, but I've no doubt that by the time we have need of a name, Carol will feel the same as me." Carol immediately backed me up, "I ALREADY know how much Vanessa and Prof have helped you. I haven't been here many times, but I can easily see how much they're helping your life. I agree already. I even think we should get started as soon as possible, haha." "Good girl," said Julia. I presumed about Carol's complimenting her parents. Even Julia had to think that Carol was too young for the other interpretation. Prof added, "Thank you for your compliment, Mark. I hope your firstborn is a girl though. Archibald would be a millstone around a boy's neck." Vanessa countered, "If the child is as special as Mark, it might become a very famous and popular name." "Likely after our time, unfortunately dear. Unless young Archibald makes a VERY quick impact." Which made me feel bad about deceiving them all over again. I went ahead and said the thing I'd thought of before Vanessa's last point, "Regardless of gender, I think our firstborn is going to have an unusual name. Either 'Archie Steven Anderson' or 'Vanessa Felicity Anderson'. You're allowed to have more than one middle name aren't you? Because we should put 'Julia' in there too." Julia said, "You should keep Carol busy, so you could save 'Julia' for the second daughter." "One Julia is about all I can handle for a while. So how about we save that name for our fourth or fifth daughter, Carol?" "I am going to be busy!" "Not just you. Julia will be your co-wife, so I'm sure she'll be only too happy to help you clean and feed a soccer team's worth of crying, pooping babies." "{Groan}," complained Julia. "What a thought! Imagine all those diapers!" Vanessa provided a reality check, "I doubt the oldest would still be in diapers. Ava's due here soon, isn't she?" "Yes. In about five minutes." "Knowing her, she'll be on time if not before, so is there anything else we need to discuss?" Julia answered, "One quick issue. We appreciate that you knocked on the door and waited before you came in. We were going to ask you to do that because Carol wouldn't feel comfortable with people walking in and out if she's naked, which is usually going to be the case from now on. Can we rig up a 'Please Knock' sign for the hallway door please?" "That's easy. I'll make something now." We all thanked her, just as the doorbell sounded. Vanessa asked, "Send her here?" Julia looked at me. I answered, "Yes thanks." Vanessa left, but Prof stayed long enough to comment, "I can't work out whether I'd be a granddad in-law, a grand uncle or just an old friend of the family. Your marriage confuses the usual labels." I answered, "Two better terms immediately spring to my mind. Both seem suitable descriptions of you, so I'll let you choose. 'Granddad out-law' or 'Granddad in-lawlessness'. Which do you think best describes you? Haha." "Good ones, Mark. I'm amused by the thought of Vanessa and me as outlaws. That's about as ridiculous as it's possible to get. She'll get a chuckle over that." #6: #8: Prof left, soon to be replaced by Ava. ------- Chapter 249: Carol's Sex Education Begins Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued) Ava greeted us, "Hi everyone! I didn't bring a suit..." "Did you bring your skin?" asked Julia. "I never leave home without it, haha." Ava stripped unselfconsciously, while commenting on my casts being off and asking how my leg and the broken and missing fingers were (or as I thought of them, my "here and not-here fingers"). By now "Giving Someone The Finger" was a well established joke at Dad's work. Dad had told me a couple of stories about it, so I explained the new use of my ex-finger, and started retelling everything Dad had told me. In the middle of the first story, Carol got up to give my lap to Ava, giving Ava a look at something she didn't like, "Aww, you're wearing a swimsuit." Ava hadn't been here five minutes, and already we had the perfect opportunity. I asked, "Wouldn't you have been upset if my sister was sitting on my lap while I was naked?" "Why? Oh, you mean how stupid some people get over sex. I could care less; I just wanted you to be naked." "You don't get upset at the idea of a brother and sister having sex?" "I've never understood why they don't. If one of Julia's brothers was really one of my brothers like we joked about before, I'm sure we would've done it sometimes. It seems unnatural not to if you're in the same house and love each other." Ava's answer was long enough for me to look at Julia and Carol. They were both smiling happily, showing no concern at all, so I said, "I'm glad that's your attitude, Ava, because Carol and I have been thinking about doing that. We haven't done anything about it yet, but we're thinking about it. How would you feel if we did have sex one day?" "Mostly confused about why you're asking me. You're the boss and you've never asked me about any other girl, so why Carol? I'm being a smart alec, because I know brothers and sisters aren't supposed to, but as far as I'm concerned there's nothing wrong with it. You and Carol like each other, so go for it if you want to. If I was Carol I'd have been jumping your bones for years by now." "If Carol and I did it, you'd keep it secret, like my other secrets?" "Sure. I think it's a silly thing for people to get upset about, but I know they do, so I'd keep quiet about it. It's no one else's fucking business what two people do in their own bedroom. Haha, 'not their fucking business', get it?" We all chuckled, to tell her we got it. Then Ava asked suspiciously, "So are you guys doing it already?" "No. It's exactly what I said, we're only thinking about it. The sexiest thing I've done with Carol so far is lick her earlobes." Ava exclaimed, "Earlobes! You don't know what you're missing, Carol. Mark is GREAT at sex. Forget your earlobes; get him between your legs. That's a million times better!" Carol exclaimed, "It better not be! Even twice as good would kill me." Ava looked puzzled, so Carol added, "I've got VERY sensitive earlobes. I never knew that before, but Mark sure did. I honestly couldn't handle anything twice as good as my earlobes." "Wow. I wish I had earlobes like that. Are they really that good, or have you never had good sex before?" Carol answered, "I've never had ANY sex before. I'm still a virgin and I've done almost no playing around." "Boy! Are you in for a surprise then! Mark is the BEST. He's the super-best! He's going to blow your mind. Just don't try to outlast him like I did. That was a painful mistake. Stop when you've had enough, or you'll regret it the next day. You're so lucky you're his sister, because it'll be easy ... Oh, I just thought about your parents. What do they think about you having sex?" I answered, "We haven't asked them yet. We're still thinking about it, but we'll probably ask them in a few days." "Oh boy. Good luck with that! If I can help somehow, please ask me. You should be allowed to do more than lick each other's earlobes if you want, haha. Oh, I just realized it's not so good being brothers and sisters. I used to sneak out to have sex, and mostly my parents never knew. But if you two start having sex, they're going to find out. Parents are far too good at spotting stuff you want to keep hidden, especially sex stuff." I laughed more than Ava's comment deserved, because 3B remembered how we thought we could keep our wedding and having sex hidden from Mom and Dad for months; even possibly until we moved away when I went to a university. Instead Mom and Dad had caught us even before we'd had sex once. I ignored the curious looks my excess laughter got me (they'd just assume it was my 'funny' sense of humor). As far as I was concerned, I was no longer concerned about Ava's attitude. I said to her, "You know, I've got a very beautiful, naked girl sitting on my lap, so maybe I shouldn't be wearing my swimsuit." Ava - the "beautiful, naked girl" in question - immediately leaped off my lap, turned around, reached down to grab my swimsuit and started pulling it off. I had a moment to protest, "Hey, I said, 'MAYBE'. Talk about giving yourself the benefit of the doubt." The end of my fake-protest was partly obscured by the sound of my wet swimsuit hitting the floor. "That's MUCH better," declared Ava, who then turned to Carol to ask, "Don't you think Mark's got a great body?" Carol answered, "I've never seen all of it. Not the good parts, {giggle}." "You haven't seen him naked!" exclaimed an appalled Ava. "No. I've been looking forward to it though." "Stand up, Mark!" demanded Ava, pulling me to my feet. Who then pointed as she announced, "This is a cock, Carol. You were aware of that much, right?" "Haha. Yeah, I had heard that's what boys kept between their legs." Ava grabbed the end of my knob with her fingertips and pulled it out a few extra inches to give Carol a better look, and clearly to tease me too. Ava lifted it up, moved it to the side, and generally thoroughly enjoyed herself tormenting me. Carol came closer, both girls sat on the seat to one side of me, and Ava used her highly effective grip on me to turn me around to face them (actually my face was several feet above what they were hunched over looking at, but you get the humiliating idea). Ava told Carol, "They're very silly looking things. They've got minds of their own too, but it's always a very stupid mind. It'd be better if girls could control them, because what happens now is that these silly little things control all the rest of the boy, especially their mouths. Total crap comes out of their mouths when they're horny..." "Tell me about it!" agreed Carol. "They're all over me at school, telling me stuff that's so stupid it's hard not to laugh, except that the same old stuff comes out of their mouths day after day..." "Umm, excuse me. I hate to interrupt your fun, but if you pull my wonderful appendage off, Ava, you're not going to be my or Julia's friend any longer. Please treat it with the respect it deserves - which is reverential worship. It should also be referred to in an awed and hushed voice." Ava said, "Normally when guys talk about their cocks it's best to ignore them. But in Mark's case, his cock really is awesome. The rest of him is pretty good too. Give us a twirl Mark, so Carol can see your butt." #4: #6: After several comments about my ass (which I'll save you from, as male asses shouldn't be commented on. It's against a Law of Nature), I was told ("told", not "requested") to turn around again. Then Ava renewed her grip on my cock, while she asked Carol, "Do you know how to suck a cock?" "I've never even seen one up close, let alone sucked one. I'd like to suck Mark's though." "{Giggle}," from Ava. Who added, "Gee, I wonder what Mark thinks of that idea. If only there was a way to tell, haha." I never got to finish Dad's funny "Give Someone The Finger" stories. Julia joined in, and the three girls committed a series of highly personal and indecent acts on my body. Not all of my body, just the same part over and over again. It was terrible (the "wonderful" type of "terrible"). Back when I'd been asking Ava questions to confirm her accepting attitude to sibling incest, I'd given a little thought to how to get the four of us into action in Julia's room. Simply ordering Ava to start having sex with Carol wouldn't have been a good way to do it. Ava would have obeyed, but it still wouldn't have been a good way. As it turned out, I never had to say a thing. After the girls had taken enough liberties with my body, Ava said, "I'm very horny. Can we go to your room please, Julia? It's been AGES since I've had sex with Mark!" "You poor thing," commiserated Julia. "I'd forgotten that. Mark, you should've said something rather than standing there enjoying yourself." I was about to protest. It was true that I had been enjoying myself, but I was trying to claim the moral high ground, if only because it was currently unoccupied. Then I realized that Julia was pulling my leg, or something. We got out of the tub and QUICKLY started drying ourselves, with every intention of leaving the moral high ground behind us as fast as possible. To dry herself the first thing Carol had to do was take her T-shirt off. I was very curious to see what Ava's reaction to Carol's body would be. Ava, Julia and I have had several threesomes, there were also a couple of mixed threesomes with other girls before the private jet trip to LA, and there was a very active orgy in the hotel suite there. In every case we'd all had sex with each other, rather than the girls each having sex with only me. (The sole exception was the first time we'd shared a bed with Katelin, because she'd only wanted to do "normal sex".) We were all about to go upstairs to have sex, so Ava had to know that she was about to have sex with Carol. Seeing Carol's body was therefore obviously a matter of great importance and interest. Or not, as it turned out. Ava didn't appear to be the slightest bit interested in what Carol's body was like, which was ridiculous. Sometimes I think girls are weird, but not caring about the body of a girl you're just about to have sex with was beyond weird. I'd say it was incomprehensible, but that's girls 90% of the time anyway, so it's not a good description. I'll write that it was, "far more incomprehensible than normal." That's not good English, but I don't think the English language is capable of accurately describing how girls think. We wrapped ourselves in towels and rapidly headed to Julia's room. Walking up the stairs, Ava said to me, "Carol, you're going to love having sex with..." I said "Shh" as I put my hand briefly over Ava's mouth. Quietly adding, "Not where anyone could hear." "Oh. I'm VERY sorry. I didn't..." "Don't get too upset about it. When guys get horny, at least they've got a little head to think for them. Horny girls don't have any brains working at all." Ava giggled, but couldn't come up with a comeback, proving my point. It was a slightly scary lesson though. Ava could give us away accidentally. Not just Ava, but any of us could do that. I'd even done it myself a few times too, such as mentioning Carol being the mother of my babies in front of Donna in 3B-land, and sometimes saying "we" when referring to myself. Arriving at Julia's bedroom resulted in four towels hitting the floor, and that scary lesson disappearing from my conscious thought. The little head took over, and it had only one thing on its mind, as usual. I must be getting arrogant, because I felt sorry for Ava going so long without having sex with me. She loudly and emphatically informed everyone that she considered that it'd been so long that it couldn't be allowed to go on for a moment longer. So the first thing I did was fly through the air as she threw me onto the bed, leaped on top of me, and made up for lost time in a thoroughly acceptable manner. In the hot tub my role had been to stand still while the girls had fun playing with me. Now my role was to lay still while Ava had fun with me. Ava could have easily found some other guy to lay still for her, but apparently no one can do it as well as me. I must be REALLY good at sex! Despite the distraction Ava was causing me, I was very eager to see what Carol was going to do, and who she was going to do it with. There was no bad answer to that, just different flavors of good. Julia directed Carol so the two of them got onto the bed on either side of me. They moved up on either side of me and into cuddle position, where they started TALKING! What is it with girls and talking? And it wasn't as if Julia was saying useful things, like the best angle to have the cock at, how the girl should slide back and forth so the skin around her pussy gets stretched and relaxed to stimulate the nerves, etc. - and there's a great deal of "etc." that could've been usefully discussed! No, nothing useful like that. Instead they talked back and forth across me, saying stuff like, "In a few weeks that could be you making love to Mark. Wouldn't it be wonderful to share yourself with him like that?" And Carol was responding with stuff like, "I can't wait to hold him in my arms. I love him very much." They spent several minutes discussing touchy-feeling stuff, without once mentioning anything to do with touching or feeling. I understand that emotional discussions are sometimes a good idea, but there's a time and a place for them. I have a simple rule of thumb, "When I can smell pussy juice, it's time for action, not talking." Having a girl bouncing up and down on my cock is also a good indicator, even though my thumb has nothing to do with it. As nice as their conversation was, I was happy when it EVENTUALLY started getting interesting. Julia commenting, "It looks like Ava's having a good time." By this time Ava was having a GREAT time! And you didn't have to look at Ava to find that out, as she was very happily expressing her feelings for all to hear. Carol answered, "{Giggle}, yeah. That looks even better than having your earlobes licked, haha." Julia asked, "Ava's got a nice body, doesn't she?" I listened eagerly, to Carol answering, "Yeah. I wish I was as fit as her." #8: "Speaking of fitness, isn't Mark's fitness amazing?" Julia put her hand on my belly, feeling my muscles as I was thrusting up into Ava. Even I have to admit that my belly does look amazing at such times (not that I spend much time admiring it, at such times). I'd done absolutely nothing to earn it, but I'm CUT now, and doing "Ass Lifts," or whatever the hell this exercise is called, shows my stomach muscles off to very good effect. So good that Carol copied Julia's action, also moving her hand to rub it over my belly. 3A was so eagerly looking forward to ANY action from Carol, that we had to do some pretty quick mini-go-softs to avoid the action coming to a premature end. Julia said, "Doesn't his cock look good going in and out of Ava like that? Have you been looking at that?" "{Giggle}, yeah. I've been trying to imagine what it'd feel like." #2: #4: #2: Julia sadly commented, "What a pity Mark doesn't shave his hair off. We'd have a much better view." #2: #7: #4: #3: "Yeah," agreed Carol. My least favorite sister then suggested, "Mark, how about we both shave our hair off, like Ava and Julia have?" "By all means you should shave yours off, sweetie, as all of us are going to be spending a lot of time licking your pussy." I didn't bother to pretend for Ava's sake that it wasn't going to happen. Apart from anything else, Ava was getting pretty close to her orgasm, so she was so turned on that anything sexual would push her buttons. In answer to the second half to Carol's suggestion, I started repeating the humorous - but very serious - reasons I'd given in 3B-land, "First, girls shave so guys can get at their 'bits', which are..." Ava STOPPED moving! Oh the tragedy! She asked, "Did you mean I'm going to be licking Carol's pussy too? Are we all going to be lovers together?" Have I mentioned that Ava had STOPPED! That needed to be resolved, and quickly! I said, "I love Carol a great deal, and I know she and Julia are becoming very close, so that's probably what's going to happen. I certainly don't want to treat Carol like one of my casual girls because she's far too important to me for that. That's why your attitude is important, Ava, as Carol will probably be around most of the time. You and Julia have been my core group, in the center of my life and my sex-life. How would you feel about Carol joining us to make that a foursome?" "It's not up to me. You're the boss about your girlfriends, not me." "You're right that I wouldn't ask you about my casual girlfriends, but it's important that my core group are very good friends, because we're going to be spending so much intimate time together. Not just intimate in bed, but in our whole lives. We need to talk with our parents first, but what I hope happens is that when we move into our new house, Carol, Julia and I will live in my master bedroom. When you come to stay, you'll be sleeping with the three of us. Hopefully in time Carol will be as important to you as Julia is. So your attitude is important to me." "That's fine with me. I already know Carol's nice from the time we spent together at school and shopping." #4: We all had the very clear idea that girls were very confusing, but no ideas beyond that. We were especially confused because we knew that girls are NOT casual about choosing their sexual partners, and ESPECIALLY not in a long-term relationship case like we were talking about now. I asked, "You do understand that we're talking about you and Carol having sex together, right?" "Sure," agreed Ava, casually and confusingly. "Julia's made me see that sex with girls can be fun. I enjoy it now, especially if you're involved too." Carol spoke. I'd been so focused on trying to clear up my confusion over Ava's reaction that I'd even forgotten about Carol. She said, "I can't believe how much my life is going to change. It's going to be amazing to be so close to all of you." Ava asked, "Can we stop talking please, Mark? I want to get back to sex." #4: "Go for it, sexy." "Good!" declared Ava, happy that I was no longer delaying her. [[Ava hadn't stopped to ask whether she was getting a new sexual partner. She'd stopped to ask something much more important to her: whether she was getting a new friendship partner. The answer was yes, which was fine with Ava. Ava had seen that Julia had been extremely supportive, encouraging and friendly toward Carol for the last month, since I'd asked Julia to do that. Carol's having "The Julia Williams Seal of Approval" was all the reassurance Ava needed, especially as Ava had also seen for herself that Carol was nice. In a nutshell, Ava had stopped sex to ask if she was getting an important new friendship, she was happily accepting of the answer, and then she wanted to get back to the fun of sex. Girls take relationships seriously.]] #6: #8: Happily not all the time though, as Julia encouraged Carol to resume rubbing my body and to start kissing me. Carol LEAPED at the opportunity (where "leaping" meant rolling herself hard up against me and leaning over me so she could kiss me, and as much of me, as possible). I spent several very enjoyable minutes alternating mouth kisses between Carol and Julia, with Carol being allowed to get considerably more than her fair share. The girl not attached to my mouth would kiss elsewhere, sometimes taking the time to explore my torso with her hands and mouth. Carol tried licking and sucking my earlobe for a few seconds, which felt strange but didn't have much affect. After several seconds Carol asked me, "It doesn't work on you?" "It's a little bit nice, but I'd rather you kissed me elsewhere." "What a pity. Although it was VERY intense; almost more than I could stand." Carol decided nothing more need be said, and put her mouth back to a better use. That proved that today was TRULY an exceptional event, because how often do girls think there's a better use for a mouth than talking? After another couple of minutes, Julia asked, "Are you ready for your next sexual experience, Carol?" Carol removed her lips from mine to happily exclaim, "Oh yes! What?" "Kissing me passionately," answered Julia. "Oh my! I've never kissed a girl for real before. Okay, I want to try it." "Good for you," encouraged Julia. I STRONGLY agreed. Julia leaned forward over me, Carol met her halfway, and I had a VERY good time watching them tentatively start kissing, and then both get more and more enthusiastic about it. A few seconds later Ava started giggling. It took a few seconds to penetrate my awareness (any of them), but then I realized what had happened. I had been doing frequent go-softs, but I'd gotten distracted. I didn't need to do them anymore. Ava hadn't climaxed yet. She'd been close and going for it, but I'd beaten her across the line. Fortunately Ava's had plenty of experience with me, so she knew normal service would resume very soon. Ava announced, "Mark must have REALLY liked you kissing, because he blew his load in me without even noticing. That's so funny. I've got a feeling that having Carol join in is going to work VERY well for Mark, haha." Julia and Carol had turned to look at Ava. They laughed WITH her, then turned to laugh AT me. That didn't worry me. I was literally surrounded by good looking naked girls, so very few things could worry me. Carol asked, "We really made you blow off, just by kissing?" To be accurate and honest, I would have blown off minutes ago if not for go-softs. All Carol and Julia had done was distract me. However, this was NOT the time for an explanation of how go-softs worked. I was sure it wasn't, because there was NEVER going to be a time for that! As implied by its not being included in my list of Big Three Secrets, the go-soft secret must be as important as the one that'd destroy human civilization across the entire W-Dimension. I diplomatically answered, "Damned right! By kissing, by being so sexy, and mostly by being girls that I love very much. That combination is IRRESISTIBLE!" #1: The girls did all the usual, "Aww, isn't he lovely"-type noises, which I accepted modestly. Then Ava requested, "I need to get Mark hard again so I can finish off and give someone else a turn." (The girls often treat me as a sex toy to be passed back and forth. It's GREAT!) "Can I try kissing Carol please, to see if that works?" A few little points of explanation are required: I could see that Ava was somewhat nervous about that question. Whether it was because she thought Carol might not want to, or she feared it wouldn't make me hard, or she worried about her being replaced by Carol in my core group, or whatever else, I couldn't tell. (Guessing what girls are thinking is hard enough, but guessing why girls are feeling whatever their emotions are is FAR harder. Even when they offer explanations, I almost never understand them, so it's pointless me trying to make uninformed guesses.) Carol immediately reacted happily to Ava's request. The several successes arising out of her kiss with Julia had given Carol's confidence a good boost. Julia was immediately happy too, especially by seeing how happy Carol was. I could've gotten hard a second after noticing that I'd gone soft. I hadn't though, as I don't usually do that. It's too unnatural and I'd prefer the girls not to think too much about how much control I have over my cock. I usually wait a minute or so, depending on the circumstances, especially the needs of the girl at the time. So immediately after I heard Ava's question and formed the impressions above, I issued a strong go-hard command. Carol was lying alongside my body, and she got up and turned around to kiss Ava. Before they were in position, Ava started giggling again, "He's getting hard already. Very fast too. I think Mark's got the hots for you, Carol." Carol declared, "Good! I was worried about that. He's never showed any interest in me before." Carol was ignoring the occasional nuisance I'd made of myself from when hormones first started messing with my head, well before my first merge. Fear of Mom and Dad, and Carol's strident anger, had kept those incidents VERY occasional. I'm a different person now, so nothing back then counted. Plus I REALLY wanted to forget all the stupid things I used to do. I said, "I'm in bed with the three girls who matter the most to me, they're naked, and things are getting wonderfully sexy. Without any doubt at all, having Carol here is a HUGE turn-on for me, but it's not as if I've EVER had any trouble getting hard with you, is it Ava? You're a very sexy girl too, and you're a wonderful lover. There's enough of my favorite sexual stimulation in this room for me to get hard fifty times over. Even though it's no longer necessary, I'm going to shut up now because I'd VERY MUCH like to see Carol and Ava kiss, please?" I'd gone hard early as an automatic reaction to stop Ava worrying as soon as possible. Maybe I should have delayed going hard to make it happen at the same time as the kiss, but there were plenty of other ways to show the kiss was turning me on. Both girls were happy to give me what I'd begged for, bless them. They started kissing, and I started groaning in enthusiastic support. I was hamming it up, but that was fine. They were only half listening anyway, as they were both enjoying their first kiss together. Carol's first kiss with Julia had started tentatively, but this kiss was a very different kettle of fish (it was so different, there was no kettle or fish). Carol had discovered from Julia that kissing girls was not something to be scared of. It was actually great, especially when she was as turned on as she was now. Kissing Ava was something Carol positively wanted to try. After fucking herself on my cock for the last ten or fifteen minutes, Ava was more than ready for any sex at all, especially if doing it well got me hard. Then I had an irresistible idea. I shouldn't really do it, but as I just said, it was "irresistible." I said, "Wow, that's SO HOT. Whatever you do, please do NOT touch each other's breasts. Don't do it! Please, please don't do it. Not the breasts; anything except the breasts..." I would've kept it up for however long it took, but this was when Ava giggled mid-kiss, and moved her hand to one of Carol's breasts. I added several more layers of ham onto my previous groans, GROANING very theatrically. I kept it going for several seconds, alternating {GROAN}'s with "Oh my God, that's so HOT's." I was thrilled to see Ava's hand rub all over Carol's breast while they kissed, and to see that Carol was REALLY enjoying herself. She was even starting to groan herself! As much as I wanted to, I couldn't stall for more than a few seconds. So after several VERY enjoyable seconds, I gave a particularly loud {GGRROOAANN!}, bucked my hips, then did a go-cum. Ava pulled her lips off Carol's (but, I was extremely pleased to note, Ava's hand just stopped moving, remaining holding Carol's breast). Ava asked me, "Did you just blow off AGAIN?" "I'll say! I told you not to touch breasts. It's all your fault for being so sexy." Ava laughed merrily, followed by the other girls. And then I came in for HEAPS of teasing, but that was fine. They were all very happy. Julia, I was sure, mainly over how well it was going. Ava asked, "How on Earth could you cum twice in one minute JUST from girls kissing?" "Don't forget the BREASTS! I would've managed to control myself if you hadn't done that. Your hand caressing Carol's wonderfully sexy breasts was more than I could possibly hold myself back from." "You really think my breasts are sexy?" asked Carol. Between school and walking around town, I'm sure that no less than 20,000 males (Corvallis has a population of 53,000) had let Carol know that they considered her breasts sexy, but she had to ask me for reassurance. In a serious, humorless tone of voice, I answered, "Hmm, that's an extremely difficult question to answer Carol." Her smile slipped. "To answer it honestly, I think I'm going to devote the next twenty years of my life to studying them VERY carefully. They've got to pass the hugely important "Pizza Test", for example." By now Carol was giggling again. Which caused her breasts to jiggle very nicely, so I decided that I'd meant twenty years PER breast. Carol asked me, "What's the Pizza Test?" "That's where I take the toppings off a pizza and spread them all over your breasts and then lick them off again. It's essential to see how two of my favorite things in life combine." "Haha. Do you really want to do that?" "Two of my FAVORITE THINGS, Carol!" "Haha. That sounds like fun. We should do that." I LOVE my sister! "I'll bring the pizza, you bring the breasts, okay?" "Haha. Okay, that'd probably work best." We'd done enough joking around now. Everyone was happy, and my going hard would be reasonably credible. I started a partial go-hard, just to make my cock long enough to stay inside Ava. I said, "Poor Ava still hasn't had a cum yet. I'll roll us over, Ava, so I can make sure I give you a good one." I held Ava's ass against my groin to make sure we remained joined, then flipped us. When Ava was lying on her back between Carol and Julia, I said, "Gee, if only there was something you three sexy, naked girls could do together that would somehow get me excited again." They quickly got the hint. Even the inexperienced Carol didn't have any trouble working out what I meant. Carol leaned over Ava to kiss her on the lips again, but Julia interrupted, "Carol, our very mature boyfriend has a thing about breasts, so let's suck on Ava's nipples while her hands play with our breasts. If that doesn't get Mark excited, nothing will." "Oh boy. I've never done that either." And then Carol said something which made me very, very happy. She said, "It's fun having so many people." That meant a long, happy future for Carol, Julia and me. #2: #3: #8: #2: #7: #2: #7: Julia and Carol did their best to be sexy, and wonder of wonders, my cock quickly got hard again. Ava happily complimented the other girls on being so sexy. Carol was very proud of her ability to get me hard enough to fuck another girl. Sometimes life can be rather weird, doubtless because it's got females in it. Ava had come off the boil, but it didn't take much to get her hot and bubbling again (I might be overcooking that metaphor). I gave her a good, old-fashioned, honest fucking. No premature cums from me this time. Carol and Julia played with Ava's breasts, sometimes kissed Ava, and sometimes kissed each other. When Julia judged Carol was ready, Julia, without comment, slid her hand down to Ava's clit and started playing with it, pretending it was nothing to do with Carol. Carol looked at it a few times, then eventually got so curious that she moved her head down to look from close range. Whereupon Julia started explaining what she was doing; not that much explanation was needed, as Carol already knew a thing or two about the subject. Soon Carol had taken over, and was rubbing Ava's nub by herself. I added a lesson too, "Let me tell you the most important thing to learn about giving your female lovers a great time, Carol: 'Every girl is different.' It's amazing how different they are. When you get close to your orgasm, you like to press harder and harder; even pinching and pulling your clit very hard right at the end. Ava isn't like that; she likes speed and lots of friction more than hard pressing. Julia is different in other ways, and all of you are different depending on how aroused you are and whether you've had sex more than once in the same session. Because girls are so complicated, confusing and inconsistent, keep yourself aware of how your lovers are reacting to what you're doing at each stage of their arousal, and you'll soon be a very good lover." Julia made a comment confirming that I did know what I was talking about, but mostly I was watching Carol. I'd had several seconds to plan what I'd said, and I'd deliberately been quite specific about what she liked. From the moment I'd described her process, I'd seen her wanting to ask me about it. But I'd deliberately put her first, and talked about Ava, Julia and my conclusion afterward, to give Carol time to think about it. I had something prepared to say either way, but Carol took my preferred route, deciding not to ask how I knew so much about her masturbation (being a virgin, she would've assumed I was talking about her masturbation). She might have suspected me of spying on her, but there were too many reasons not to. From my knowledge of her earlobes, to my reasonably well-established reputation as a fantastic lover with no need to be a spy, plus she trusted me and knew I was exceptional in miraculous ways. I could see the moment when she decided to give it up, and I immediately said, "Thank you, Carol. That was a good decision." Carol was naturally puzzled, so I explained/praised, "Of course you'd wonder how I knew that much about something so intimate about you, but you just saw you decide not to ask about it. You just demonstrated several wonderful things: that you listened to what I said before, that you're smart enough to think before talking something you're curious about, that you're trying to do as best you can in our relationship, that you trust me, and I'm sure I could think of some other virtues but you've got the idea by now. You proved that you're a wonderful person and will be a fantastic member of our relationship. -- "You can stop your worrying about being any good at sex, the way you are. You will contribute your full share to our foursome relationship both in and out of bed. I know - that's KNOW, Carol - that you will quickly become a very valued part of the four of us. Julia, Ava and I will VERY much enjoy your being with us. Soon Julia and Ava will be enjoying your company so much, that they'll be inviting you to stay with them overnight when I'm busy elsewhere. You're not the sort of person who wants sex with lots of different people, but with a few lovers that you have good emotions for, you'll become a VERY good lover, and FAR better than most girls. It's all about the emotions, and you're going to give all of us GREAT emotions about you, so the sex will be wonderfully successful." "But I'm so young and I've never done anything before." "Phooey!" (I was trying to be more polite than to blow a raspberry.) "If you meant you were too young physically, people would laugh that you think you're too young but Julia isn't. You're certainly not too young emotionally, because making love is about caring and giving, both of which you're exceptionally good at. I'll use Donna as an example, which is the only way I want to use her. She'd probably be too competitive or too focused on her own feelings to be good at sex. Even when she's the same age as you are now, I strongly doubt she'd be as good at making love as you. Donna might get good at sex when she's older, but her personality doesn't suit making love nearly as well as yours does. So your 'too young' comment is wrong regardless whether you mean physically or emotionally. -- "Your 'never done anything before' is true, but that's already becoming untrue. Julia was in your shoes - that's if you put some shoes on - until April Fools' Day. That was only two and a half months ago. If you insist that experience is more important than attitude, then I'm prepared to spend six hours a day making love to you over summer. That's just one of the many sacrifices I'm willing to suffer through in order to give you confidence in yourself. -- "Experience is overrated, sweetie. Ava's had half a dozen boyfriends before, yet you saw what she was like in the hot tub. She grabbed hold of my cock and was stretching it halfway across the room, twisting it around, waving it in the breeze, and otherwise thoroughly abusing my poor, helpless, defenseless, pleasure stick. It just wants to be friends with you, not be treated like a baseball bat. If treating guys that way is what experience has taught Ava, I'd prefer you to be like you are - a sweet, innocent, RESPECTFUL lover." The reassurance hadn't gone the way I wanted. I could see that it'd come across as too long-winded. I wasn't sure why or where it'd gone wrong, but it'd reached the point where it was best to drop it. Finishing Ava off properly (and finally) was a good distraction. Hopefully Carol would have taken some reassurance from my overly long speech though. I greatly accelerated the 'holding action' thrusts I'd been giving Ava while I'd been talking. I made sure my pelvis dramatically crashed into Ava's, making loud thwacking sounds as it hit, and causing Ava to make grunts as the air was knocked out of her. I told her, "Stop lying around doing nothing, lazy bones. Do you wanna get screwed, or what?" Ava responded happily, as she pretty much always does to sex. Julia and Carol joined in, and soon we were having a thoroughly enjoyable time. As Carol played with Ava's body, she was watching closely for the reactions I told her to watch for, which can't have been easy to discern with me pounding away. When Ava was very close, I slowed down to hold her at the edge, and I asked her, "So Ava, how much sex have you had in the last month?" "NONE! I need it NOW! Please don't stop." "I don't know..." "Argh!" "Julia told me that when you were living here, you and Julia had plenty of sex." "That was because we knew you were okay and coming back soon. We were eager for you. Please go faster; I need to cum. You've cum twice thanks to Carol, but I haven't had one yet." "Maybe for Carol's educational purposes, I should show Carol what Julia looks like when she's being screwed, because Carol's seen a lot of you already." "Argh, no! She needs to see me have an orgasm. That's the WHOLE POINT of the lesson. She needs to see that NOW!" "Hmm, that might be true. I do take Carol's sexual education very seriously." "Yes, yes. That's right. She needs to see another girl climax." "Good idea. Julia, could you please frig yourself so Carol can..." "NO!" disagreed Ava. "She needs to see ME climax." "You do climax very well." "YES I DO! I LOVE climaxing! Let me show her PLEASE. I've got a big one just about ready. Just a little more fucking." "Julia's climaxes are very spectacular and educational though." "ARGH! But mine is SO close. SUPER close. Just a few seconds." "Carol's already worried about being inexperienced. She really needs as much education as possible." "SO FUCK ME NOW! We REALLY need it!" "Maybe if you promised to give Carol five sex education lessons of her choice over summer?" "I PROMISE! Now PLEEZE finish me." "You hear that Carol? Ava's going to show you what it's like to have sex with another girl in front of my soccer team." I used NP to pinch Carol's lips together briefly, but she was too busy giggling to spoil my trick. "WHAT?" demanded Ava. The good thing about this tease was that this Ava had no idea that I knew about her sex-in-public kink. I'd learned that from 3B's Ava when we'd wanted to test her. We'd been married then, and it'd been more convenient to have Carol work on Ava, and the public sex thing had come up. In this dimension, Julia had done all the Ava testing, and public sex had never come up, it not being an interest of Julia's. I helpfully explained to Ava, "Carol's got some very strong urges to do sexy things in public, but she's never had someone to do them with before. Now she can have you naked on your back on a table, and be licking your pussy while my soccer team comes to visit me. You wouldn't mind my soccer team catching you naked while you were having sex with Carol, would you? "{Groan}." "Or maybe Carol would walk up to you in public, put her hand under your skirt, and frig you until you had an orgasm. That'd be very educational for her. Or maybe get you to stand behind her and rub her breasts while she was talking to some boys." "Oh GOD!" With those images in her brain, I accelerated my thrusts. I say "thrusts", but can 1.5 of anything be referred to using the plural? Because Ava almost immediately went off. Very spectacularly, and I thought, very educationally too. Carol seemed to find it inspirational, as she'd been inspired into fingering herself frantically. To help her, I said, "I'm going to love you all your life, my darling Carol." "Me too," contributed Julia. Adding, "Mark and you are going to have wonderful sex all the time. He's going to put his cock into you one day soon, and fuck you from then on, for the rest of your wonderful life with him. Mark's the most amazing, wonderful guy ever! He can give you more pleasure than any girl has ever had. He can do amazing things that no other man can do. MILLIONS of girls are going to wish they were you. People are going to respect you for how fantastic you must be to have Mark love you so much. Mark will love you all his life more than any other girl in the world, so you MUST be an extraordinary girl to have such an amazing guy..." While Julia was continuing her verbal encouragement, I did something more direct. I created four NP-fingertips, one each from four minds. I allocated two to each of Carol's breasts, rubbed them quickly from the base to the nipple, then started rhythmically squeezing, in time with her frigging. Carol was very aroused and going for it, so I was squeezing HARD. Before my last merge, my hardest squeeze was pretty pathetic, but that certainly wasn't the situation now. I had 6.4 kilograms per mind, so 12.8 kg (28.2 pounds) of combined force per nipple. If that doesn't seem like much to you, put one of your nipples on a table with a three gallon bucket of water on top of it. If you don't have a nipple that protrudes far enough for this experiment, see if you can find something else that is both sensitive and protrusive. Between the sex that Carol had seen and done, Julia's verbal encouragement, my miraculous nipple squeezing, and her own frantic frigging, it only took a few more seconds before Carol had herself a very nice orgasm. Two down, one to go. "By my count there's still one girl left who hasn't made a loud noise. That'd be the loudest noise maker of all. Are you ready?" I could see she was, otherwise I probably wouldn't have had the confidence to ask. "I'm VERY ready. This has been great. Carol loves you very much." ^ [[Julia tends to get carried away sometimes, and never more so than about me. For the last two months, Julia had been increasingly blown away by me, especially because I kept doing ever more impressive 'tricks'. Pulling the rug out from under Mom and Dad repeatedly an hour or two earlier being the latest examples. The Mark of a month ago wouldn't have dreamed of standing up to Mom, let alone been capable of running circles around her while pulling carpets out from under her. I was the center of Julia's life. NOTHING was more important to her than me; in many senses, not even her parents. If her parents moved to live in another city, Julia wouldn't even think of going with them. Her purpose in life was to help and support me. Every kid had parents, and her parents had two other children. There was only one Mark Anderson, and only one Julia Williams to be his main helper. In Julia's mind, we'd effectively initiated Carol into my core group this evening. It wasn't a full initiation, as she wasn't married to me yet, but it was close enough. Even if our parents objected, Carol was clearly mine. So there were now three girls who worshipped the ground I walked on, and otherwise treated me as Julia thought I should be treated. Three girls who would do EVERYTHING they could for me, even laying down their lives if necessary (they said, and Julia believed they meant). Julia was succeeding in her "The Most Important Thing To Ever Happen To Humanity" life-goal, so this was a VERY important and exciting evening for Julia. Power is an aphrodisiac to most people, and especially so for Julia. Having Carol join my core group was an important step forward on a road that should lead to awesome power and responsibility. So when I'd asked Julia if she was ready for sex, the dreams of the power that I would one day have were enough to ensure that Julia's answer was never in doubt. Forget about all the sex she'd seen and done this evening. That was small potatoes in its effect on Julia's hot buttons, compared to stepping closer toward global power. I left Prof and Vanessa out of the above explanation, just to make Julia's incremental emotional reaction to Carol's coming onboard easier to describe. Prof and Vanessa were by now completely convinced that I was superhuman, which had the effect of validating Julia's identical opinion, meaning her "getting carried away about me" had very little restraint on it. Light blobs and NP were impressively superhuman enough, but what got Prof and Vanessa the most excited was my educational accomplishments. If I was capable of completing three degrees per year, then I had the potential to change the path of humanity.]] ^ Julia leaped at me, and we were immediately going for it. When Carol revived enough, Julia pushed her to join in. Julia was more demanding than she should have been, wanting Carol to do sex acts beyond what I would've suggested. Carol didn't hesitate to obey, so she was soon licking where my cock was entering Julia's pussy, licking us both. [[Julia got carried away, wanting to bind Carol to the core group as much as possible.]] I watched Carol VERY carefully, but she never reacted negatively to any of Julia's pushes, so I let them carry on. Ava joined in too, but that didn't require any pushes from anyone. It only required that we caught Ava when she threw herself at us. Julia took an amusingly short time to have her orgasm. So fast that I didn't even have to do a go-soft, which hardly ever happens! It must have been an especially good one for Julia too, because she passed out and had quite a long nap afterward. When Julia revived, I was lying on my back, with Carol and Ava cuddled under each of my arms. Julia moved to lay next to Carol, until I said, "Please lie on Ava's side, Julia." "But Carol hasn't had a real orgasm yet; only one she gave herself." Julia moved closer to Carol, in anticipation of my agreeing with her, as usual. "Beside Ava, Julia." I deliberately didn't explain yet, curious to see how Julia would respond. It was quite a hard test, as Julia had been strongly focused on Carol all during the session. Julia vacillated for a second, then suggested a compromise, "I could snuggle in behind Carol?" I just answered, "Behind Ava." Julia complied, but she clearly didn't agree. She wasn't bad tempered, or anything like that. She just didn't agree. When Julia was snuggled in, I explained, "Carol and I have got our lives together. There are many things in life more important than sex, including that Carol not feel upset tomorrow because she regretted her actions, thought she'd been unfairly pressured, or anything along those lines..." "I'm sorry, Mark," apologized Julia. "Thank you, Julia. I'll continue though, because the explanation is mostly for Carol's benefit. There's no problem with Carol waking tomorrow and wishing she'd had more sex this evening, but her wishing she'd had less would make me very unhappy. Carol's happiness is more important than having sex. We'll take as long as she needs for that..." "{Giggle}," from Carol. Who then provided the translation for us: "That's not going to take long! Sex with the three of you is GREAT! I'm very happy, Mark." "I know you are. I've been watching carefully to make sure. I also know that sometimes people can get carried away enjoying themselves at the time, but regret it later. So, like I said before, I'd rather go slowly. You'll have a few days to think about it before we can do much again, and we'll see how you feel then." "Thank you." "You're welcome, darling. You're very important to me, so I enjoy being careful about you." -- To Julia I said, "That's why I didn't want you to come in behind Carol. I've made sure she's been on the outside all the time, so she could easily slide away if things got too much for her. If you were behind Carol, she might feel surrounded and uncomfortable. All of this is totally new to her and she's very young to be involved in four-person sex like this, so we should be extra cautious." Julia and Carol were very impressed, while Ava was "super-impressed." Carol was so impressed by my giving her plenty of room, that she immediately cuddled as close as she possibly could get to me. I find reversed logic works the best with girls. Not all the time, of course, as they often behave totally randomly and unpredictably, but you might as well still use reverse logic because it's no worse than a rational system. [The next paragraph is my favorite one in the whole autobiography. You should know my sense of humor well enough by now to take that as a warning.] I was impressed with myself too. The last time I'd seduced Carol for the first time, I hadn't understood hardly anything. I certainly hadn't been smart enough to be able to manage the process. I had every intention of never seducing Carol for the first time ever again, but I couldn't help but wonder that if I did, would I look back on the second first time, and think I'd been naively foolish to think I'd known what I was doing, which was how I now thought about how I'd thought during my first first time. After a few minutes of "Mark Appreciation" from my girls, I asked, "Ava, would you like to sleep with the girls in this bed, or with me in the study?" "Can't we all sleep in here?" "Not tonight unfortunately. It's too likely Mom will ask Carol about the sleeping arrangements. I want to be squeaky-clean for the next few days, until we ask Mom and Dad about Carol and me becoming lovers. That's why I didn't sexually touch Carol this evening, so she can honestly say 'Mark never touched me, ' if Mom hints about that issue too." "Wow, you were thinking ahead," admired Carol, happy to have a 'good' (which means "true but highly misleading") line she could use on Mom. Julia said, "You're getting very good, Mark." #7: #1: Nor had anyone else, but no one was surprised. I asked again, "If you sleep with me Ava, you might be disturbed when I get up to study my college courses. I think Vanessa's got one of those masks people cover their eyes with on planes." "Yes, she has," confirmed Julia, a little puzzled that I knew. "Hasn't college finished already?" asked Ava. "Yes. I'm studying for next year." "What! Boy, you're EAGER. The ink isn't even dry on our last exam, and you're studying already. I'm glad I'm lazier than you." "I enjoy it, which probably means you're saner than me too. Where do you want to sleep tonight?" "With you please. I've hardly been with you for a month. Exactly a month, because you were kidnapped on the 19th." "So it is. Not something I want to celebrate though. I'll get the mask if Vanessa's still up, and I'll have a quick shower, to give you a little time for some girl-talk before we separate." ------- Chapter 250: A Little Quality Time With Ava Sunday, June 19, 2005 (Continued) I wrapped myself in a towel off the floor, then went to find Vanessa. It was fairly late, so her bedroom was my first destination. Vanessa and Prof's bedroom door was closed but I could see that their light was on, so I knocked quietly. Prof called, "Come in." To make doubly sure it was safe, I said, "It's Mark." "Come in, Mark." I ended up staying for quite a while, discussing various topics. I wasn't worried about keeping the girls waiting, as I was pretty sure they'd find something to talk about. One of Vanessa's questions was how much sex Carol had just had, and Ava's involvement in it. I answered truthfully, describing Ava's complete lack of concern about sibling incest, and a summary of what had happened in the hot tub and Julia's room, including that I hadn't touched Carol sexually. I didn't mention that I'd used NP. They're invisible, so easy not to count. "You trust Ava that much?" "Yes. I'm very sure she's fine. She was telling the truth about not caring about Carol and me being related. She wasn't put off by it, and she wasn't the least bit turned on by it either. Carol might as well have been unrelated to me as far as Ava's emotions are concerned. And there's never been the slightest sign of her even looking tempted to tell anyone anything we've asked her not to. The only real risk is her accidentally letting it out, which is a mistake any of us could make." Talking about Carol's having sex reminded me about Carol's having sex, so I asked Vanessa what she thought about Carol busting her tough hymen a few days before the wedding night. They were naturally curious at my knowing about Carol's hymen, so I had to explain, "I can't explain how I know. It's kind of a special ability, but it's going to be useful for only a little while longer. It's not specific to hymens or Carol either. The things I said about Mom is information I got the same way. The story I've been saying was that I had some insights while I was imprisoned. That's kind of true, and kind of not true, but it's the closest I can come." "Because you're unable to describe it better, or you choose not to?" asked Prof. "Choose, unfortunately, as I'd prefer to be unable. You and Vanessa would be who I'd tell if I was going to tell anyone, but then you'd tell me off for telling you. It's knowledge I'm responsible for now, and I'd be extremely irresponsible to let it out. So should Carol bust her hymen in advance?" Prof and Vanessa were clearly tempted to pursue it. I smiled at them and shook my head, and they let it go. Vanessa said, "Unless busting Carol's hymen would ruin her wedding night for her, I suggest you leave it intact until her wedding night. Distract her as much as you can at the time, and do it quickly. From what Julia has told me, when two of you gang up on one girl, she's quickly overwhelmed by all the sensations. That'd be a good way of doing it with Carol." #7: #1: <3B's Vanessa had threesomes? Cool.> #2: #7: #2: #6: #2: [[Wrong. Neither 3B's nor 3A's Vanessas had ever had a threesome. In terms of quantity, they'd had quite boring sex-lives, not that either of them thought that about their sex-life. The dimensional difference was that 3B had been already in a sexual relationship with Carol, and thus overly conscious of multi-participant sex. 3B had foolishly seized Vanessa's very slightly ambiguous words - about the need to have quality one-on-one times between pairs of Julia, Ava and me - as justification for their one-track thoughts. 3A had heard the same words, but hadn't been silly enough to think that just because Vanessa understood how men and women would need to relate in a threesome, didn't mean that she had personal experience of it.]] Vanessa added, "Carol could take a couple of painkiller tablets before. Nothing strong; just whatever over-the-counter painkillers your family uses. That'd help her afterward, and make it easier for her to sleep." "Thanks. Having discussed Carol's sexual activity, it's Donna's turn. Or as I told Mom, Donna's non-turn. When Carol and I start having sex, presuming that happens, then Donna is going to get very eager to have sex with me too. In Donna's opinion, what's good enough for one sister is good enough for the other. Unfortunately, Donna's too emotionally immature for sex, and too immature for secrets. I can keep most of my special abilities hidden from her, but she's already getting interested in sex. And when Donna wants something, she isn't subtle about it, and doesn't take kindly to being frustrated. If Carol and I don't get Mom and Dad's blessing, then it won't be any more of a problem than with any other girl, and I could easily leave the handling of it to Mom. But if Carol and I do get married, then Donna's going to be coming to me for sex. So this is what I've thought of doing at the wedding ceremony..." I went on to describe my light blob plan, giving them a demonstration of it. Prof chuckled while Vanessa told me, "I can see only three problems: the risk in showing Andrew and Robert, what Donna's going to think when she finds out the truth, and the danger of Donna telling anyone about them. You did say she wasn't good at keeping secrets." "Yeah. The Boys I feel comfortable about, and I'm sure I don't need to praise your boys to you. -- "I'm hoping that in something like three years or so, when Donna's mature enough for sex, I'll sit her down and explain the deception. Hopefully she'll understand the reason for it, and I should have quite a lot of credibility in her eyes by then. Also Carol and I would've spent at least a year living away from home, so Donna should've got away from the mindset that she can have whatever Carol has. -- "Your last concern is a worry. I've got an idea that should make her extremely cautious about ever lying to me..." I described that. "That should scare her enough, and then there's the rather confusing thing that girls don't seem to be interested in science fiction. That's clearly one of their failings, but it makes it less likely for Donna to blab." "It comes down to your judgment, Mark. You know - in a way we don't understand - how difficult Donna's going to be about sex in the future." "I can see you've both got a little gleam in your eyes over the 'in the future' comment. To get that out of your head, let me assure you that I can't tell the future in any way whatsoever. Carol also suggested I could read minds; or I'd died, gone to Heaven, and then been sent back with extra information. For God knows what reason, haha. All of those are so far away from truth that they're not even on the same planet. Anything involving other planets and aliens is also so far away it's not on the same planet either. -- "I've never heard anyone ever suggest my situation, whereas those ideas are so common they're on TV every week. If you ever guess what my situation is, I'll never eat roast chicken again, that's how confident I am that it'll never occur to you. My advice - and my request really - is that you stop thinking about it." "Okay," agreed Prof. "I can't stop myself thinking about it sometimes - because whatever it is, it's an incredible secret - but we'll accept that it's your call." Vanessa nodded her agreement. "Thanks. I like my idea for reining Donna in, or I wouldn't have mentioned it. So unless something happens that changes my mind, that's what we'll probably do during the ceremony." Prof joked, "So you don't know next week's lottery numbers. Darn, that would've been useful." "You can say that again! I'd LOVE to have a few more million. That's not being too greedy, is it? Haha." We chatted about a few other bits and pieces, but nothing of any significance. I did mention that my studies were flying along nicely, because they both appreciated good news on that topic. Vanessa gave me the mask, then I went to have my shower. When I returned to the bedroom, the girls were cuddling under the covers, with Carol 'trapped' in the middle, although Carol was obviously very happy with the situation. They were talking rather than having sex, but had it been sex with Carol in the middle, that would've been okay, as it would've happened with awareness that Carol might want to 'escape'. I held up the mask, saying, "Mission accomplished. I've just realized I haven't got a clue what we're doing tomorrow now that our trip to Portland's been canceled. What's the plan, Julia?" "No plans. It's summer, so I'm on vacation." "Haha. Like I believe you could resist making plans for three months." "Let's see what the weather's like in the morning, and think about it then." "Gosh, you MUST be on vacation. Seeing as we don't have anything specific tomorrow, do you want to stay awake to talk for longer?" "I haven't caught up on my sleep since exams," said Ava. "Me neither," agreed Carol. "Sleep sounds good to me too," from Julia, which made it unanimous. Ava got out of bed, saying, "I'll have a quick shower and meet you in the study, Mark?" "Sure." Ava grabbed one of the towels off the floor and left the room. I moved to get my sweats to wear when I got up to study, but, #1: #4: #1: #7: #1: #7: #5: I changed direction to kiss Carol and Julia goodnight. That caused Carol to start a conversation about how wonderful her life was now, which we were still discussing when Ava stuck her head in to say, "I thought you'd STILL be talking, Mark. Boys never stop. Can't you see Carol and Julia are in bed trying to get to sleep? {Giggle}." Julia got out of bed, saying, "We should have a quick wash too. That'll force Mark to stop talking to us." I complained bitterly about all the injustices in my life. I got zero sympathy, so I left the room. In the study, #1 wanted us to move the scrolling keyboard back up to the desk. #3: #1: #3: #7: #1: I told Ava, "I've got to take a minute to move the special keyboard before the morning." "Okay." Most of us were disappointed she didn't ask why, because we would've liked to hear #1's answer. We had to crawl under the desk, unplug a couple of cables, lift the box onto the desk, put it on the desk where #1 wanted (not where it used to be, for no obvious reason), drop the cables down and reconnect them. The computers were still fired up with lectures open, so a quick test was easy. It also failed, as hitting the buttons did nothing. We checked the cables at the back of the box, then crawled around under the desk again to check those cables. Everything seemed okay, but another test failed. It'd succeeded when we moved it last time, but this time it failed. Damned computers. We messed around for a couple of minutes, until one of us had the idea of restarting the machines. Half the time when something screws-up on the computer, restarting it seems to fix it somehow. So I closed all the windows, restarted the machines, waited until they'd gone through the slow process, finally opened up the browser again on one screen, tested its button and was very happy that it worked fine. I opened up all the lectures again and found my places in each of them, using the buttons to make sure they worked. Quite a few minutes longer than I'd expected, I was finally ready to get into bed with the sexy, naked girl who was waiting for me. [Windows had gotten confused by my temporarily unplugging the special keyboard, and it had to be rebooted to get itself untangled. Isn't Windows a wonderful operating system? (Hint: it diminished my sex-life.)] #4: #1: #4: #1: When I was finally snuggled in with Ava, she wanted to talk about quite a few things: How nice Carol was. How nice I was to Carol, especially by making so sure she was comfortable with the sex. Ava again promised to keep our sibling-sex secret. "Keeping your secrets is easy. I don't have any interest in telling anyone." She asked if it was okay for her to look at where my finger had been cut off, which was fine with me. I'd rather forget about the whole incident, but that wasn't going to be possible because people were curious about the missing finger, and even more than curious if they knew it'd been cut off by a baddie. She thanked me again for her parents' trip, telling me how much they'd enjoyed it and repeating a few stories from it. After my experience at facing Prof's and my deaths - especially in 3B-land, which had been truly horrible for us - I could faintly imagine some of the issues Katie and Carson were having to deal with, and I was very happy that they'd managed to get that quality time together. Her parents were teaching her a variety of stuff about life, from how to change the washer in a faucet, to be a better cook, manage adult sums of money, and plenty of other things. They'd chosen a couple of family friends to be the trustees for Ava's inheritance, had told them about their cancers, and were getting the trust organized. Ava's mentioning their cancers spurred me to temporarily ignore my considerable reluctance to open that subject. I asked about her parents' health. The effects of their illnesses weren't visible yet, but Katie was booked into the hospital for a week in a couple of weeks' time, for some heavier chemo than she'd had before. That'd help for a while, although it'd knock Katie around badly and she's likely to lose her hair from it. That sobered our mood. I told her about some of my thoughts and experiences from when Prof and I appeared to be about to die. Not so much about my dying, because that wasn't relevant to Ava's experience with her parents, but I told her how I felt about losing Prof, how much I cried over it, how angry it made me, and things like that. She appreciated that I understood so well. I told her, "You're going to need to do a lot of crying. Whenever you need to be held like this, let me know. Crying helped me a lot, even though I couldn't make tears. By the way, you don't know her well enough yet, but you should find that Carol will be a very good comfort for you too. Better than me probably. She's very good at being quietly caring. That's why she's turning into a lesbian." As intended, that confused and distracted Ava, so I entertained her with some stories about what was going to happen at the beginning of the next school year. I recited my speech for her, giving her a sneak preview as she'd be in some of my classes when I gave it for real. Ava was blown away by it, and laughed at how suckered everyone was going to be. "It's fun doing the unusual things Julia and you make happen. Carol too, oh!" The "oh!" was the next topic of conversation, because Ava had just remembered something. She asked, "Did you mean what you said about Carol liking to be caught having sex in public?" I explained enough of Carol's kink for Ava to understand it was similar, but not the same as hers. That I understood hers puzzled her, but she had to get used to being puzzled by me. I told her "Not only did I mean what I said, but you promised Carol five lessons of her choosing. I'll make sure Carol collects on all five of them in interesting ways, but I'll make sure she understands you well enough that they'll be enjoyable for both of you. Carol wouldn't enjoy doing anything you were unhappy about anyway." Ava was happily eager. We'd spent over an hour talking (so much for #1's guess that we'd be asleep within five minutes. Girls are notoriously tricky to predict), and this was a good point to end it. I suggested, "How about we go to sleep now, Ava? With any luck, you should have some very enjoyable dreams." "Haha. Yeah, that'd be good. You're very nice to try to give me dirty dreams, haha." "I'll give you a dirty 'Good Morning' when you wake up too." "In here? Just you and me?" Ava had a hopeful look on her face, so my answer was never in doubt. "I'd like to spend some quality time with you. We all need to pair up sometimes, to develop the best feelings in our relationships. You had two weeks living with Julia, so I'm going to be greedy, and demand some of your private time now. I hope you'll forgive me for being so selfish and inconsiderate toward the others." "{Giggle}. I know you're teasing me. I'd better get to sleep, so we've got more time in the morning." "I like the dirty way you think. Pleasant dreams, sweetie." "Thank you. Goodnight, Mark. Umm..." Ava hesitated, so I prompted, "Yes?" "I'm not sure whether I should say." I was pretty sure I knew what she wanted to say, so I encouraged, "If it's what I think, then you should say it." "Oh. I love you, Mark." "Thank you, darling. I'm happy to hear it." I'd been hoping to avoid it, but Ava sadly asked, "But you don't love me?" "I'm still getting used to loving Julia and now my life with Carol is changing dramatically. Carol is SUPER important to me, Ava. I love her a great deal already as a sister and a friend. We're right in the middle of adding 'lover' to that, so it's a pretty intense time for me. My heart's working overtime already. I don't think I've got the ability to love anyone else at the moment, because there's too much going on. I think you're in the same situation. You should be concentrating your love on your parents as much as you can. For your and their sakes, please don't let me distract you from that, because you'll regret it if you do. -- "I'm not pushing you away; not even the slightest bit. We're holding each other in bed now, because this is what I want. Tomorrow morning I'm going to very selfishly make love to you all by myself, because that's what I want too. We're going to be in each other's lives for years yet, so you certainly don't have to worry about losing me. -- "Remember that Julia and I made an important commitment to you; to help you become happily and strongly independent. I'm not going to push you away, because that'd be forcing you in one direction. I'm not going to hold you to me either, because that's forcing you the other way. I promised to help you become independent, which means it'll be YOUR choice when you leave me. If you want to be in my life for years, that'd be very nice. If you want to go off and do something else for a while - maybe Forest Ranger College - then that's fine too. You'll always know where we are, and you'll always be welcome. Okay, sweetie?" "Yes. I'm sorry I said it." I hugged her tight, saying, "You'd be the only one who is sorry then, because I enjoyed it. I'd have to be crazy not to value and appreciate your love. I wanted you as a very special girlfriend ahead of hundreds of other girls for good reasons, and everything you've done since has increased my opinion of you. When we buy our big, new house, you're the only other person that we've ever thought of inviting to live with us. You don't think I'd invite my soccer team around to catch any old girl having sex with my sister, do you? I've got VERY high standards for things like that!" Ava chuckled a little, and I could get away with dropping the subject. Reassuring girls can be damned hard work sometimes. I said, "First of all, let's see if your magic nipples can turn off the lights in this room. Have you got your mask ready so I don't disturb you in the morning?" "Yeah. I'll put it on now." Ava did so, holding it on her forehead while she offered her nipple to me. I squeezed it, and we discovered that the light in this room was subject to the awesome power of Ava's nipples too. "{Giggle}." She lowered her mask, and we snuggled down. I'd been intending to tease her with a joke about what Carol's nipples might do if they were magic. I'd had a good idea for that, and was quite looking forward to doing it (it was going to be VERY impressive! Julia wouldn't quite hit the roof, but she'd get close to it), but I decided not to raise the subject now. Ava seemed relaxed and finishing with a mention of Carol might make her jealous. She'd never shown any before, but she might feel some deep inside. Instead I hugged her nicely, kissed her, then said, "Thank you very much for being in my life, Ava." "Thank you for letting me love you, Mark." "That's a very smart thing to say. I'm very happy that you love me, and I'm honored by the gift you're giving me. I bet heaps of boys wish they were in your arms and heart, the way I am now." "Haha. Not NEARLY as many as girls who wish they were me." What I'd said seemed to make her happy, so I quit while I was ahead, risking only a quick, "Goodnight." "Goodnight, Mark." ------- Chapter 251: I Invent Lazy Studying Monday, June 20, 2005 I woke two and a half hours later, with Ava still cuddled in my arms. I had barely started extracting myself when, #1: #3: #1: #6: #1: #3: #4: #3: #1: #All: #1: #3: #1: #8: The bed was shoved into the corner of the room to make space for the study desks. I was lying on the outside of the bed so I could get out easily, and I was hugging Ava so facing the wrong way, none of which mattered. Facing the wrong way to hug Ava made it even cooler. #1 closed our eyes, created a sight blob immediately above our body and looking toward the screens. The room was almost pitch black, as Vanessa has put VERY good drapes in her and Julia's bedroom for security reasons. That made finding the light switch tricky. It would've taken only a thought to make the sight blob radiate some light, as sight blobs are just light blobs dialed down to have zero emissions. Instead #1 tried something he'd been intending anyway, as we already knew this worked. He increased the size of the sight blob from the size we tend to create them at, about half the size of a head, to the normal study size of about six feet across. (There's no reason we create them at the size we do, other than it seems to be the size we think of when we're not really thinking, maybe from playing with balls that size as a young kid). The much larger sight blob immediately 'pulled in' FAR more light. #3: #3: #7: #2: #7: #All: I corrected myself, "I've just changed my mind. I'll drive you to Julia's place when we leave here. I've got something important I want you to do for me there. I'll explain later." "You want me to do something important?" "Yes. Don't worry about it for now Carol. I know you can easily do it." "Okay, if you say so. Does that mean I can't enter the RPS competition?" "Haha. I'm afraid so, sweetie. Hopefully you'll be my bunny in private soon though." "Yeah. I hope that too. Seeing so many girls have the hots for you has gotten me hot too." "Not to mention how much you've enjoyed displaying yourself in that bikini." "Ahh, you know me well. I didn't think people would be able to tell that." "I do know you very well. I liked watching you even BEFORE you bought that bikini." I leaned forward to whisper VERY quietly, "I love you VERY much, my wife-to-be." A few of the girls sitting near us saw Carol's reaction, but Carol noticed they had, so told them, "You've got NO IDEA how nice it is to have Mark as a brother." "I wish he was my brother," said one of them. "He could help me with my biology homework, haha." I could use that to make a point, "Ahh, I don't want to be a party pooper, but that humor is cutting a bit close to one of my sensitivities. I like to look out for my little sisters, and it's important to me that they feel safe with me." Carol backed me up by blowing, "{Raspberry}, haha. Let them make their jokes, Mark. It'd never cross my mind in a million years that I wasn't safe with you." Then Julia announced, "I want to talk with all the girls over by the fence," Julia pointed. "GIRLS and Mark only. Will the other guys please look after our gear for a few minutes." I added, "Savannah, you look after the gear too." Savannah wasn't pleased, but she knew her usual tactics wouldn't work on me and she didn't have any other tactics, so she had to do as I'd said or be red-carded. Julia announced, "Everyone else over to the fence please." Julia started walking. Carol told me, "I'd better stay here too." I agreed, "Probably a good idea." As we walked with to the fence, several girls asked Julia or me, "What's this about?" Julia answered, "Wait and see." | I answered, "We don't want to explain this several times, so please be patient for a few more seconds." (You're two million words into my autobiography, so you probably don't need me to tell you that I have a slight tendency toward being verbose.) Julia stood between Ava and me, us with our backs to the fence with the other girls in a semi-circle facing us. Julia announced, "Gather around closely everyone, because this isn't for anyone else to hear about." Those are the best things, so they gathered around very obediently. Julia added, "Don't let any strangers get close enough to hear." Something that was impossible for Julia to tell when she was surrounded by a close group of much taller people. I offered, "Do you want to sit on my shoulders, Julia?" "Yes please." In one fluid motion I easily swung her up and over my head. I earned several, "Wow, you're strong"-type comments. "It was very easy. When Julia gets into speech-making mode, she's full of hot air." My stated reason wasn't the full explanation for why it was so easy; I'd used a lot of NP too. My full NP force is 51.2 kg. I was Inactively Centered, so 7/8ths of that is 44.8 kg. I'd been practicing my ki projection virtually nonstop for two months now, and had increased my ability to consciously tap ki by about 10% (not that I'd measured it yet), making 49.3 kg, or 109 pounds. Julia weighed about 70 pounds, so I could've flown her up entirely by NP if I hadn't cared about the resulting riot. Instead I'd gripped Julia's waist with both hands, put about 25 pounds of upward pushing NP force under each of my forearms, and had lifted her up and over. Julia started whacking me around the top of the head, causing me to realize that insulting someone sitting on your shoulders isn't a good idea. I made a mental note to be less stupid in the future. When she judged me sufficiently chastised, Julia turned her attention to our audience, first saying, "Boy, everyone looks different from this angle. You should carry me around like this more often, Mark." "Yes, dear." After the chuckles, Julia addressed our audience's upturned faces, "Mark and I will be leaving at 4:15..." "Aww," from many girls. Julia quelled their follow-on comments, then said, "Mark's got an appointment at 6, which will leave him just over an hour for nonstop, passionate wild-bunny fucking." #1: <"Bunny"? That's the second time Julia has used it in the last few minutes. I suspect Carol's been talking to Julia, because that's not a term Julia normally uses.> #3: After the giggles and comments that were entirely inappropriate to have come out of young girls' mouths, Julia continued, "Seeing so many sexy girls in their swimsuits has made Mark 'frisky'." The girls' next comments rendered their previous ones tame by comparison. "As you've heard, Mark is AWESOME in bed. When he's feeling frisky, he's far more than one or two girls can keep up with. So Ava and I need help. Would any..." "I WILL!" | "PICK ME!" | "I WANT TO!" And then the slow starters joined in, so there was a considerable period of bedlam. I could feel Julia laughing, but I couldn't hear her over the chaos. Julia eventually managed the wave the girls down to a much reduced volume, so she could continue, "We're going to have a Rock, Paper, Scissors competition to pick..." Julia got drowned out again. After several seconds' delay, " ... A Rock, Paper, Scissors competition to pick ONE of you..." Two and half dozen girls can be very noisy when they're excited. Personally I blamed my bright yellow Speedos, and made a mental note to suggest to Julia that I never wear them again. Julia managed to explain the rules, in between interruptions. I was surprised at how tolerant of the interruptions Julia was being. Either she truly did feel like she was on vacation, so was much more relaxed about her plans; or she simply enjoyed sitting on my shoulders. [She later told me she enjoyed seeing how excited they were. So much for my ability to guess why girls behave the way they do.] The rules were, to summarize: "Hot, nonstop, fucking. Virgins are not wanted," which elicited several groans, "but virgins can enter if they're willing to immediately go to the bathroom to bust their hymen after winning, so they'd be ready for hot, hard sex an hour later," which got a mixed reaction, some happy relief, some indecisive, some disappointed. -- "All the entrants will pair up and play a best-of-three match of RPS..." A girl who didn't know how to ply interrupted, and some others seconded her. Julia said they'd be taught before the competition, then, "The losers will leave the circle, the remaining entrants will pair up and compete again. Until there's only one winner left." The rest was pretty obvious, so I'll skip it. There were questions (there are ALWAYS questions, even in straightforward bunny sex situations): There was the usual 'time of the month' question, which I'll skip saying anything further about (shudder). Other girls wanted to know whether not joining the competition would count against them if they wanted to date Mark later? Julia answered, "Of course not. This is just wild sex, nothing to do with your long-term suitability as a girlfriend." #8: Pipeline 1A wanted to know whether they could enter? "Sure. This is just sex. It's nothing to do with having a relationship with Mark." #8: "Ahh, will the winner be having sex with you and Ava in the bed too?" Julia is less verbose than me, saying only, "Yes. Next question?" "Ahh, will we have to have sex with other girls?" Julia answered, "It's an hour of WILD SEX; it's not like it's choreographed in advance. But you don't HAVE TO do anything. If you don't like what's happening, get up and leave." There was even a question about transport arrangements, for God's sake. In my next life I think I want to be a bunny, as they never have this much trouble. The next question was even sillier, "How rough will Mark be?" Julia answered it by announcing, "Everyone that wants to enter the competition, move ten feet along the fence that way." Julia got her horsy to let her down while the willing entrants relocated as directed. Upon her arrival on terra firma, a couple of girls told Julia, "We're not sure." "Then don't enter. Seriously. Once we get into bed, it's going to be full-on, flat-out sex. If you're not confident now, you won't be ready for that." Julia walked to the entrants, asking them, "Does anyone need a reminder on how to play the game?" Several said they did, probably out of nervousness. Hardly surprising, considering what was at stake, haha. Julia gave them a quick explanation of the rules, got a couple of other girls to play a game so they could see the process, then got the learners to have a couple of games with each other. Meanwhile I was studying the entrants. To my amusement, Anna - who only a couple of hours ago had thanked me for not taking her virginity - had entered. I resisted the temptation to ask her why, because I've recently come to the conclusion that girls do things like that because they're deliberately choosing to be inconsistent. No other explanation is possible. Linda was one of the entrants too, which confused me. She'd never made any effort whatsoever to prove herself good girlfriend material - other than wearing a low cut top to bowling, but Julia had pushed her to do that - but she'd volunteered for this competition and the one at the hot tub party about guessing how long it'd taken me to learn 8-ball. She'd also put my cock inside her for the 90-second fucks in the hot tub. If she wanted to have sex with me, and seemed to want to be my girlfriend (she had come here, after all), why didn't she actually try? Nearly all of our conversations were the ones I initiated. Just to confuse me, Linda was behaving consistently incomprehensible. There was some dithering around the edges during the RPS lessons. A couple of girls drifted over to join, then one of them got cold feet and started leaving. Her friend urgently talked to her. I didn't want either of them to win, because they'd probably be even worse in bed, so I walked up to them, to say, "Alana and Paris, I'm telling you that you can't enter." Alana looked relieved, but Paris wanted to know, "Why not?" "Because neither of you really wants to. If one of you won, you wouldn't enjoy it much, and you would've stopped one of the very enthusiastic girls from winning. In group events like this, it's important to consider everybody rather than just your own wishes. That's why I'm not simply picking out the third girl myself, but am letting whoever wants to compete in a fair way. That makes this day more exciting for everyone. I'd appreciate it if you looked at how enthusiastic some of the others are. You don't really want to beat them to something you can't make up your minds about, do you?" "You don't mind?" "Don't mind what?" "That we're not enthusiastic to have sex with you." "Ahh! I see what you've done. You've made a mistake that many girls make. It's a good thing you're talking to me about this, because boys understand this aspect of life VERY well. This may surprise many of you, but there's more to life than sex. If you're confused about that, just ask any boy, because we all understand how unimportant sex is." I'd spoken loudly and had quite a few listeners, all of whom laughed at me. Some of them even made derogatory comments about boys, which I would've gotten offended at, had they not been true. When I could, I told Alana and Paris, "I may only be a boy, but I know that selflessness and generosity is much more important in a girlfriend than how eager she is for sex. You can sit out without worrying about upsetting me." "Okay, thanks. You're not like other boys." "I thought these Speedos would have made it all too obvious that I'm very much the same?" "Oh no! It makes it obvious that you're VERY different. You've got an incredible body." Which wasn't the way I meant my Speedo joke, but it wasn't worth arguing about. I turned my attention to Julia. She'd started organizing the entrants. There were nineteen of them, which was a pleasingly high proportion of the available girls, especially after subtracting the girls who'd been foolishly having their periods now, presumably something approaching 20% of them, from what I understood of that process. Julia had just finished explaining that the girls would pair up, with the odd girl 'competing' against Ava. Ava wouldn't be eliminated, but her opponent needed to win to stay in. Julia announced, "We'll have a couple of practice best-of-three matches, to be fair by making sure everyone knows how to play." That noticeably relaxed the competitors. There was some mistiming initially, but they got that corrected, and the second match was accomplished smoothly. "Right!" declared Julia. "Now we do it for real. Everyone get ready, decide what you're going to choose. Okay, on the count of three. One; two; THREE!" There were plenty of groans, some laughter and expressions of relief. Those pairs that'd gotten a tie had to go again until they got a winner for the first game, but that took only a few seconds. Julia gave them a few seconds, then got the second game under way. Immediately after the showdown, cutting across all the zero-two losers' groans, one of the competitors (Rylee) called, "Julia! Erin changed hers after seeing mine." "I did NOT!" denied Erin. Julia asked loudly, "Did anyone see their game? Mark?" "No. I never thought to worry about cheating. I'll watch carefully from now on though." Julia talked to Rylee and Erin. Rylee had won the first game, and she claimed she'd won the second game too, and thus the match, but that Erin had changed her choice to make it one game each. Erin looked shifty, and I thought was probably guilty as charged, but it was a thin thread to hang guilt on. I said, "Julia, a quiet word please, to discuss what we do." Julia came over to me. I whispered, "I guess Erin cheated, but it's not clear. How about we get them to do the third round. If Rylee wins it doesn't matter. If Erin wins I think we should do something. Maybe disqualify her and reinstate Rylee? Or maybe make them have another match because we're not sure?" "Okay. Watch carefully please, in case there's any more trouble." "Absolutely. Girls are crazy, aren't they?" "You don't expect me to agree with that do you?" "You'd be crazy to." Julia was too busy thinking about her management job to pick up on the subtle elegance of my joke (you'd be surprised how often that happens). Julia turned to the crowd, "Mark and I have agreed to let Erin and Rylee play the last game before we decide what else to do. If Rylee wins the accusation won't matter, which would be easier on everyone." Julia got the third game underway, for the ten competitors who were still active. Julia and I were standing at opposite ends of the line of pairs, very pointedly looking for any cheating. Fortunately Rylee won it, which was a considerable relief to me. The girl competing with Ava had won 2-0, so there were ten competitors in the second match. Anna had been eliminated, so she appeared to be fated not to lose her virginity to me. Carina had been knocked out too, which was a bummer. Alexis was eliminated in the second match, causing her to say, "DAMN! I'm HORNY!" which got a lot of echoes. Kaiya got eliminated too, which saddened me. She'd had an excellent attitude during Pipeline Date 1A#1, and I'd been hoping to put her attitude through a bedroom workout. There were five competitors in the third match, so one of them (Autumn) got paired with Ava. Autumn said, "Umm, is it fair for me to play Ava? She might play differently." #2: #4: #8: Julia said, "Is anyone willing to swap with Autumn?" Linda agreed, "I will. It's only a luck game." #4: #3: Linda and Autumn changed places. Autumn was now clearly worrying that she'd made a fool of herself. I could've stopped her worrying about that, but it was probably best not to. In the third match, both Autumn and Linda were eliminated, which was sad for Linda. Ava apologized to her, but Linda waved it off. I knew she was a smart girl, she just didn't have enough (or any) initiative when it came to making an effort to impress me. Which made me realize how bizarre that thought was. A few months ago I would've run around like a chicken with its head cut off if a pretty girl showed the slightest interest in me. Now I knew Linda was interested in having sex with me, and I could barely bother to have an opinion about her. There were only two girls left, neither of whom had any special meaning to me: one was recently ex-9th grader, the other a virtual stranger, a same-aged cousin of one of the ex-10th graders. The cousins had been at the pools by coincidence, and had asked to join us. I had no problems with how either of the final two contestants looked, mainly because putting a girl in a bikini immediately elevates my opinion of her beauty. I know I am going to be taking the winner's bikini off once we get into Julia's room, so how she looks now shouldn't be relevant, but that's not how any of my minds work. The 9th grader won the first game, the stranger the second, with the cliff-hanger game going to the 9th grader. There was much yelling of congratulations, as well as many, "Darn, I wish I'd won", "You lucky girl," and many more. The winner's (Leanna) reaction was mostly a stunned, "Oh boy." Her classmate friend that she'd come with (Gina) was more unhesitatingly excited than Leanna. Several of the losers came to talk with me, telling me how disappointed they were at losing, and how much they'd wished they'd won. Abigale lamented, "GOD, I wish I'd won! Every time I look at you, I feel my guts tightening up..." I told her, "That's the most romantic thing I've EVER heard!" The listeners and Abigale laughed at my joke. Everybody had been laughing at my jokes today. I don't think it's possible for me to have gotten any funnier, so the likely explanation is that my bright yellow Speedos had the girls on the verge of laughter all the time. Kaiya said, "It's not 'romance' that Abigale's feeling. She's got it bad for you." The rest of the conversation degenerated into a bunch of degenerates boasting about how badly they wanted some good, hard degeneration with me. They weren't subtle or the least bit ladylike, but they wanted to fuck me, so I forgave them. #1: #2: #8: #6: #3: #1: #2: #7: #8: #7: #8: #7: <'Fraid so. Anyway, Savannah is like our Adriana with training wheels on. Our soccer team won't consider Savannah a waste of time if we somehow get her to go that far.> Julia called out to me, through the degenerate conversation, "Mark, let's get back to Carol and our gear." "Good idea." I hadn't been facing that way, but when I turned and started walking, I soon noticed that Carol had two boys sitting on either side of her. One of them was talking to her, while the other was staring at her tits, which I thought was quite clever, provided they took turns talking. One of the girls with me commented, "Looks like Carol's got herself a couple of boyfriends." "Not if I have anything to do with it. My little sister is too young for boyfriends for at least another ten years." "Haha. I think that'll be hard to enforce, especially with her looking so sexy." "Sisters do NOT look sexy! Maybe beautiful, but never sexy." We arrived during the chuckles. The boys noticed the sudden influx of dozens of laughing, bikini-clad teenage girls (boys are good at noticing things like that). They were distracted by so many distractions - that's what distractions do - and didn't waste time looking at me, not until I stood right in front of Carol to ask her, "Is everything okay?" "Fine thanks, darling," which caused several of the listening girls to laugh. "They were telling me that either of them would be a better boyfriend than whomever I had now." In a louder voice, Carol called out, "What do you think, everyone; would they be a better boyfriend than Mark?" Everybody told the two boys that they would not be better than me, in an amusing variety of ways, some of which were embarrassingly explicit. Girls can be very inventive at a time like this, especially when they were trying to either flatter or embarrass me (each of their comments had both effects, so it was difficult for me to discern their motives). The two boys stood. One of them started slinking away, but the other was more courageous, stating, "They can't all be your girlfriends." "(a) Yes they can, and (b), even if they weren't, you were hitting on my number one girlfriend. It's time for you to leave now." He thought so too, his decision aided by all the laughter being directed at him. I asked Carol, "Are you all right, sweetie?" "Sure. All they were doing was staring at my tits. Boys are pathetic. I'm glad I don't have a boyfriend." #5: One of the others asked, "Why don't you have a boyfriend?" "Like I just said: they're pathetic. They're always being pains." The girls standing all around me agreed that boys were pains. Someone eventually remembered that I was a boy, and made an "Except Mark, of course," statement. It'd taken far too long, especially considering I was wearing bright yellow Speedos. I'd made my "Carol is my number one girlfriend" statement hoping I'd get a chance to say that my sister was more important to me than any girlfriend ever could be, but no one gave me the chance. They all started settling down and getting on with their own conversations. Or, in several cases, were practicing RPS. Julia, Leanna and Gina came over. Julia told me, "Leanna and Gina were dropped off by Gina's mother, and have to call when they're ready to be picked up. She wouldn't like it if they split up, so I suggest Gina come to my place too. She can wait in the games room or hot tub for the hour or so. Is that okay with you?" "I've got a better idea: she can help Carol in the kitchen. Gina, do you know anything about cooking?" "I'm Italian." #4: #6: #3: #6: "That's good to know, Gina. While I'm upstairs taking care of one appetite with Leanna, I'm going to unashamedly use you to help my sister take care of another one. I need a dinner right after I finish upstairs, because I've got something else on from 6 to 9. Is that okay with you please?" "No problem. I like cooking." #4: Carol looked worried, so I tried to reduce it by saying, "Don't worry, Carol. I'll explain on the way to Julia's. It's no big deal." It was a big deal, because my dinner was at stake, but there was no need to worry Carol. Gina asked Julia what sort of ingredients she had at home, and the conversation got very kitcheny and female, so I tuned out. Seeing I was free, Savannah wanted to talk with me. I had a feeling I knew what about. "Yes, Savannah?" "Why didn't you let me enter the competition?" "Two reasons. First, because I don't want to have sex with you. Second, because you've got too much advantage over the other girls already, so it'd be unfair to let you enter their competition too." #5: #6: #7: Savannah asked, "Why don't you want to have sex with me?" #8: #1: "Pull the crotch of your swimsuit to the side. I want to finger your pussy." "WHAT! There are people all around us. You can't do things like that here." I looked up, located her, then called, "Abigale!" Abigale spun around to look at me, "Yes?" "Can you come here please?" She certainly could! She rushed over, eagerly asking "Yes?" again. "Pull the crotch of your swimsuit to the side please; I want to finger your pussy." "OH BOY!" Her crotch was pulled to the side before she got to the exclamation mark. Only then did she think about other people, and she moved to try to make herself as discreet as possible, while - and this is important - still keeping her pussy accessible to me. I leaned forward so my body would hide what was happening. I dropped one hand down and started lightly rubbing Abigale's lovely pussy, while asking, "Julia has your phone number, doesn't she?" "Yeah. Ohh. Aaa!" "I can't do enough here, Abigale, but I'll call you soon to arrange my rewarding you for your great attitude." "We're going to have A DATE?" Abigale asked, insanely excitedly. "Yes. I'll give you..." "WHEEE!" cried Abigale, as she launched herself at me, nearly snapping off my finger. Thank goodness proximity gave me warning, because I'm running out of hole fingers. I let Abigale enjoy the moment for several seconds. That, and I'd have needed to break her arms to get her to let go. I waited for the initial euphoria to wear off, while blaming the bright yellow Speedos. Obviously bright yellow is a color that shoots straight through to, and stimulates, the female cerebral cortex in its Insanity Area. It's right next to their brains' Shopping Area. In fact, they overlap. Abigale pulled back to check, "A date? Just you and me?" "I haven't had a chance to work out the details yet, probably because your hug was cutting off the blood supply to my brain." "Oh sorry," as Abigale let go my neck, looking concerned. "I was joking, sweetie. I think your sense of humor might be temporarily overwhelmed by another of those surge things..." "Oh yeah. Sorry." "No problem. I survived two homicidal killers, so I wasn't TOO worried about one over-excited girl..." #4 (Private message to 3A): #1: (Private message to 3A): " ... Go back to where you were sitting, and I'll call you soon, okay?" "Okay. When?" #3: "I need to check my day planner first. I'm sure you appreciate how busy I am." #4: #1: "Oh, of course. Sorry. Umm, thank you, Mark." "You're welcome. I like your attitude very much." "I think you're AMAZING!" #4: "Thank you Abigale. Why don't you go tell your friends your good fortune." "{Squeal}." And whoosh, she was gone. #2: #1: #4: #1: #2: #1: I turned to Savannah. "I didn't want you to enter the competition because I wanted the winner to be someone who was joyous to be with me; not a sour puss like you." "She's just being a slut!" "Didn't you show me your pussy in the same way a couple of hours ago? You know Abigale from school, and she's not a slut. If anything, she's on the conservative side. I picked her solely because her name is the first one in the alphabet," my criterion being a lie that I'd just thought of. "Do you want me to go through the whole alphabet and call all the other girls over? You'd look silly trying to claim there are thirty sluts here and you're the only virtuous girl among them. Another reason your comment was silly is that we both know that you're desperately eager to have sex with me." #6: "I AM NOT! How dare you say..." "Then why are you complaining about not being allowed to compete for an hour's hard fucking from me?" Poor Savannah (she was certainly poorer than she thought she deserved to be), mentally floundered about for a couple of seconds, desperately trying to think of a way of rescuing her self-esteem. Failing at that, she turned her back on me and stomped away. #8: #4: Savannah didn't stomp far (unfortunately). Sitting down with her back to me about ten feet away. She started waving her arms angrily and clearly expressing her pissed-off-edness to the girls in front of her. Once they understood what the topic was, they looked up at me in surprise. I circled my forefinger beside my temple (the "She's Crazy" sign). The girls laughed, causing Savannah to spin around to see why. I stopped the sign in time, instead she saw me getting up to walk toward her. A development which she'd clearly much rather have done without, her encounters with me not going too well for her recently. I stood over Savannah, filling her field of view with bright yellow. I said, "After that silliness, you're now 98% of the way to being red-carded. Two more little mistakes and I'll red card you, announce it widely and put it on the website, so you'll know there'll be no way I can take it back. How are your lessons in humility going today? Are you learning from them? Think about that when you've calmed down from being rejected. It's a race for which happens first: your being red-carded, or your realizing that your sex appeal doesn't work on me. Beauty isn't a weapon to be used to manipulate people, Savannah. Good luck on learning that before you make two more mistakes." I turned and walked away, without - I wish to emphasize - stomping. I didn't like to think what visual effect that'd have. #7: #3: #8: #1: #8: #1: ------- Chapter 256: The Aquatic Center; Several Conversations Monday, June 20, 2005 (Continued) The last few chapters have featured Savannah more than she deserved. Despite all the words I've written about her, I really only spent a few minutes talking to her. I spent longer talking to some of the other individual girls, but they were generally straightforward and honest, so needed little comment here. They'd come here to meet me, were happy to be in my company, and were perfectly happy to make no pretense about it. The sight of my body in its unfortunately choice of swimwear had knocked any idea of subtlety out of their minds. I actually had several very enjoyable (i.e., non-Savannah) conversations. Following are several of them: ^ I chatted with Carina for a while, initially about what she'd told her parents. I'd asked about that because her mother had known about Julia's being my girlfriend. Carina had told them pretty much everything, especially about Julia, the pipeline, and a GREAT deal of very nice stuff about me. Her parents had made sure Carina knew she was playing out of her league, and not to get her heart broken. Carina sincerely asked me, "Please don't break my heart, Mark." That was tricky to respond to, especially as I was mostly playing with all these girls. The best I could say was, "I won't lead you on, or lie to you. Your maturity reminds me of something else too. I'm doing my best to treat everyone with the respect they deserve. Some don't deserve much, quite frankly. While some, such as you, deserve a great deal. I'll try not to break your heart, but the only safe way to guarantee that is to avoid each other, which I don't think either of us wants." "You want to keep seeing me?" I couldn't see this conversation going anywhere good, so I said, "You're getting into fishing territory now. For fairness reasons I can't give personal feedback to girls in an active pipeline group. But the fact that you're still active says something about what I think of you. I won't say any more than that." And then I thought of something more to say (which happens so often you'd think I'd learn not to say the previous sentence). Some of my minds had been thinking about how nice Carina's parents were, and one of them had an idea, so I added, "Your mother suggested dinner at your place. I have nothing against people cooking me nice dinners, and your parents seem very nice, so maybe we can do that..." "Good! I'll tell Mom." "Hang on. There are some rules. First, that everyone from your pipeline group has to come or it won't happen, which means it'll have to be at least two weeks away to allow Esther and Aaliyah to get back. It's outside the normal rules for the pipeline system, so it'll only happen if EVERYONE from your group agrees that it should. I want you to have a secret ballot so any girl can blackball it without any pressure on her. -- "Second, it won't count as a pipeline date, so I won't be eliminating anyone afterward. Third, I'll invite some extra people. Likely Julia, my parents, maybe Julia's parents. Carol too probably, and maybe my younger sister Donna if the rest of my family is coming. I don't want it to be focused on me all evening, okay?" "Sure. That sounds good." "It's quite a few people. It might be better to go to an informal restaurant..." "I'll ask Mom. That's okay, isn't it?" "Yeah, that's fine. Obviously if we go to a restaurant we'll pay our way." "I'll call Mom and let you know." "There's no hurry. You've got to find out whether everyone in your group agrees first, and I want that done in a way that they can anonymously blackball it if they fear it might give you an advantage. Don't bother your mother until you know it's going to happen." "Okay." Carina went away to talk with her fellow pipeline group members. Fifteen minutes later she returned, asking, "How does Saturday, July 9 sound?" "It sounds wonderful. What for though?" "For dinner at my place?" "You need to have a secret ballot with the rest of your group and talk with your mother first." "I have. We didn't need a secret ballot. I understand why you mentioned that, but we're all eager. Esther and Aaliyah have been looking at your photos for the last half an hour, so 'black' are the last 'balls' they're thinking of, haha. You can call them if you like, and everyone else is here so you can easily ask them." I looked at the rest of the group. They were hanging back, but eagerly watching the conversation. By the looks on their faces, there wasn't much doubt of what they thought. Nonetheless I could still make myself look good. I led Carina over to the rest of Group 1A, asking them, "You're all happy that we have a dinner party at Carina's home?" I received a chorus of enthusiastic agreements. "At the next pipeline date we have, four of you will be eliminated. That's a sad fact of the way it has to work. If Carina isn't eliminated, have you thought about how jealous or angry you might be because she might've got an unfair advantage." Another chorus telling me that they didn't worry about that, trusted me, etc. "I can see you all seem enthusiastic..." another chorus, " ... Nonetheless, it is VERY important to me that I be as fair and moral as I possibly can. I want each of you to privately whisper in my ear sometime during today, saying either 'white ball' if you AGREE to the dinner party, or 'black ball' if you wish to VETO it. Black means VETO, okay?" "Yes. We got it." "Friendships are more important than a dinner party. I can see you all get on pretty well together, and I don't want to upset things between you by agreeing to anything that could cause a rift. You need to be careful of that too." "It's just a dinner party." | "We want to spend more time with you." | "We're not worried." | Etc. "Okay. I still want you to whisper in my ear though. Carina, I need to check with Mom before I can agree to July 9." "Can you call her now please?" asked a very eager Carina, with five other girls looking just as eager. It was clearly pointless to mention that it was three weeks away, because that'd be using logic on excited girls, which is the second most stupid thing a guy can do. It might save your life, so I'll tell you that the most stupid thing a guy can do is to use logic on angry girls. That's REALLY stupid AND dangerous! "Okay, give me a few minutes." Unsurprisingly, I wasn't carrying my cellphone inside my Speedos, as I could've done inside a decent pair of board shorts, so I went to my bag to fetch it. First I checked with Carol. "Carol, remember when Carina's mom dropped her off, she suggested a dinner party at her place?" "Yeah." "That looks like it'll happen now, and they've suggested the Saturday before your birthday. I'd like to do something special for that, but I can't plan anything until I find out how Mom and Dad are going to react to you-know-what. They might ground me for life, or God knows what else, so I can't plan anything yet. But do you mind if we book the Saturday for the Durham's dinner party, presuming I'm still alive then?" "That's fine. We can do something for me anytime. There's no school, so on the 12th would be fine, or the next weekend. Go to the dinner Mark; don't worry about me." "You'll be coming to the dinner too. You're pretty much going to be coming to everything in my life from now on." Carol had a moment; a frustrating one unfortunately, as she couldn't express herself fully in public. She threw her arms around my neck to give me a hug and to whisper, "I love you," in my ear. "Me too, sweetie." Mostly to disengage Carol, I continued with, "I'd better call Mom to check July 9 is good with her, because I want Mom and Dad to come too. It'll be good for Mom to see me get along well with parents of other girls I'm dating, because Mom's too quick to assume nasty jealousy. Carina's parents would be particularly good for Mom to meet." "Good idea." I called Mom at her work, giving her a brief summary of the event, then asking her whether July 9 would be okay, especially that it wouldn't clash with any July 4 stuff that Mom might have in mind. Mom responded by ignoring my question to ask a succession of her own. Apparently my brief summary had been too brief and way too summary. I don't know why Mom couldn't have been satisfied with my, "The parents of a girl I'm dating want to have a dinner party for us." I did my best to explain briefly. The briefly part failed again, especially after Mom knew it was a pipeline girl's parents, and the rest of her pipeline group would be there too. #8: I eventually had to say, "Mom, I ONLY want to know that July 9 doesn't clash with anything you've got planned. I've got three weeks to explain all the relationship politics to you." I resisted joking that it might take that long. Mom asked, "What about Carol's birthday?" "I've already asked her. She's happy to celebrate that on the 12th or the following weekend." "The 9th should be okay then. I'd like to understand better what to expect from the girl's parents, but we can talk about that when you get home. Will there be other parents there?" #4: I rolled my eyes at Carol, while I told Mom, "I don't know. I guess that'll depend on whether Mrs. Durham invites them. I'll let you get back to work, Mom. Sorry to take so much of your time, bye." Carol started chuckling the moment I hung up. "Yeah. Anyone would think we were trying to solve world hunger, or something. I'll tell Carina it looks like it's all on." Carol came with me. I told Carina, "There don't appear to be any clashes, so July 9 is looking okay so far. I've got something big happening in a few days which might upset it, but I'll let you know if it does." "Like what?" asked Carina. It was probably best not to say that my parents might either ground me for life or kill me, when they found out that I wanted to marry my sister, including having sex and eventually babies with her. So I went with, "Family stuff. It doesn't matter for now." "We saw Carol get very happy when you were talking before?" fished May (one of the 1A group). I was debating whether to mention Carol's birthday, when Carol mentioned it by saying, "It's my birthday a few days later. Mark was checking I didn't want to do something on the 9th. He's VERY considerate." "We can easily change the date if you want?" offered Carina. "Please do NOT do that, Carina! Then I'd have to call Mom to explain all over again. Mom's the sort of person who likes to know what's going on, why, with whom, how often, what their shoe sizes are, what they had for breakfast, etc. She was especially concerned to understand the situation because the dinner party is with the parents of a girl I'm 'dating' - sort of - who's obviously not Julia. The 9th is PERFECTLY fine for the moment, okay?" "But you said you might have some 'family stuff' that'd change it, right?" checked Carina. "Yeah. That's a separate issue. I should be able to let you know about that by the end of the week." "So probably the 9th, but we won't know for sure until the end of the week?" "Yeah, that's probably right." #4: #3: #4: #7: To change the subject, I said, "Remember you each have to whisper in my ear before the dinner is officially on." "We can do that now," Victoria suggested. "If you stand a few yards away and we'll take turns whispering to you." I moved as requested, and they did exactly that. I particularly enjoyed Kaiya's 'whispering'. She bent over my ear, putting her tits into contact with my shoulders, then rubbed them back and forth. After several rubs, I said, "I thought you were going to whisper in my ear?" "You've got your way of whispering; I've got mine. Mine's more fun, haha. I've forgotten the ball colors. What was the color that includes my sucking on your cock?" I'd heard the term "blue balls" before. I was tempted to invent a joke about it, but I doubted Kaiya would know the expression, and I had no idea how to explain what it meant. #5: #1: Chuckling in response to Kaiya's and my own internal jokes, I replied, "Sorry, but I can't think of a good joke to make about that. There are others waiting, so I'll be boring. White is in favor of the dinner; black vetoes it. What's your vote?" After a couple more breast rubs, and a giggle, I got told, "White." When all the present 1A members had told me "White," Kaiya came back, leaned over, and started rubbing her tits on my shoulder again. After several enjoyable seconds of rubbing, and no sign of a whisper, I asked, "Did you want to change your vote?" "No. I wanted to rub my breasts on you." "Haha. Would I have any credibility at all if I tried to tell you off?" I'd intended it as a joke, but Kaiya answered, "You might. None of us can understand why you haven't got hard even once. There are sexy girls all around you, hanging on your every word. Some of the sluttier ones have even rubbed their tits on you and offered to suck your cock, if you can believe that! We didn't think any boy could stay soft. We were wondering if you take drugs to make your body so fantastic, and they affect your, you know?" #1: #8: #7: #5: The best we could come up with was, "My blood and urine were tested for drugs when I won the 10k running race, and those tests all came back clean. I sleep at Julia's place as often as not, sometimes not going home for several days in a row. There's nowhere at Julia's where I have the privacy to hide anything. Not even my underwear drawer is sacrosanct, for God's sake. I doubt I've got privacy at home either, because moms are damned good at sticking their noses into everything. Also, I have no interest whatsoever in having a sports career. I hate jocks and all they stand for, which is pretty much only themselves. I have no motive, no opportunity, and no means either, because I don't know the first thing about getting drugs. That destroys every one of the three things the police need for a case against someone. -- "I just realized that I should've mentioned that I spent a month in a hospital with the FBI and cops all over the place, plus doctors running literally thousands of tests on damned near every function my body performs, because dehydration can badly damage every single organ. Yet everybody's been telling me I look better now than before I was kidnapped. I couldn't have taken a cough drop without the doctors knowing about it. Prof wasn't even allowed any coffee for weeks, because the stimulating effect of coffee would've upset some of their tracking of his organ functions, that's how precise they were being. -- "If you or any of the others want to be treated like pieces of meat rather than with some respect, feel free to parade back and forth in front of guys who can't control themselves. If your self-worths are so shallow that you need a cock to get hard to feel good about yourselves, then you're not the sort of company I want. I'm going to talk with Julia now." I got up and stomped off. It was a safe bet that Kaiya wasn't going to be admiring my ass, especially as she was running alongside me to beg my forgiveness. I let her beg two or three times, then I interrupted her to say, "I know you're no worse than all the others, Kaiya. I'm sick of this topic and I'm in a bad mood from being widely believed to be a criminal, so leave me alone for a while. You can spend the time telling the others to shut up or leave." #1: #5: I stomped over to Julia. She was sitting with another bunch of girls, and I wanted to make sure this issue got buried. Julia and some of the others saw me coming. I must be very good at stomping, or maybe it was the expression on my face, because even before I'd sat down, Julia asked, "What's the matter?" "Stupid, nasty-minded, know-it-all, girls is the matter. Apparently a lot of them think I'm on illegal drugs just because my body looks good and I'm too much of a gentleman to get hard whenever they walk past. They take out their pathetic insecurities over their attractiveness by trying to rip me down by spreading bad rumors." There were too many people watching me carefully for me to wink at Julia, so during my diatribe I'd been lightly rubbing her nipples through her swimsuit, mostly to let her know that I was fine. [[If you can't guess the rest of my reasons, you need to go back to the start of my autobiography and read it again, keeping your eyes open for small, subtle clues such as, "I love breasts!"]] I was also amused to see how uncomfortable the "stupid, nasty-minded and know-it-all girls" around us were. "The idiots!" declared Julia. "I hope you red-carded them all?" "I was VERY tempted to. If for no other reason than their being so incredibly inconsiderate and rude. How could they gossip about my doing illegal activities when I'm walking around among them? Why on Earth would they make the effort to come to the Aquatic Center to see me, only to participate in nasty gossip like that? What do they think they're trying to achieve?" "Who cares? If any girl thinks you're that stupid and a criminal, red card her. Don't bother wasting your time trying to understand where her head is at. There are hundreds more girls lining up to be with you; hopefully less self-destructive ones." "You're right. I think I'll go have a swim to cool off. I'll go inside to use the diving boards, so don't worry if you don't see me for a while. I want to get away from everyone." "Good idea." As I was getting up, Carol came rushing over, asking, "Are you all right?" "I'm fine thanks, Carol." "Kaiya said you were REALLY angry?" "Yeah I was. Still am actually. I hate it when people who're feeling insecure about themselves try to feel better by ripping someone else down. It's selfish, nasty and inexcusable." Julia said, "Go have your swim, Mark. I'll bang their heads together for them." "I don't think most of them would notice. They obviously don't use their heads much if they think I'm stupid enough to get into drugs. Please don't be hard on Kaiya. Obviously she was guilty of the same stupidity, but at least she was honest enough to talk with me about it face to face rather than gossiping cowardly behind my back. I probably should've blown up at the others, rather than Kaiya." #6: #3: Julia said, "I'll tell them off collectively, and I'll make sure Kaiya knows you're blaming her the same as everyone else, but she's getting credit for being up-front about it. Okay?" "Perfect. Thanks Julia." Carol asked, "Do you want me to come with you?" "Thanks, but no thanks, Carol. It'd be better if you stayed here to tell these morons that they're morons. Anyway, how could I possibly get any new girls to flirt with me if I was with someone as beautiful as you?" I walked away. No stomping though, because they didn't deserve to see that. After making a complete fool of myself 'diving' (described below), I returned to our area. I was greeted by a VERY apologetic bunch of girls. All of them approached me in a group, Kaiya nervously to the front. The few guys were sitting to the side, looking amused and unconcerned. Kaiya said, "Julia says I should speak for everyone again, and that you won't mind that?" "If you're speaking for everyone, I'd be silly to hold it against you, especially if Julia pushed you forward. I know it's very hard to say no to Julia." "Okay, thanks. Umm, WE want to apologize for being small-minded and mean about you." "And for contributing to the rumor that I engage in criminal activities?" "Ahh, yeah. For that too." "Do I also need to make it clear that I don't set fire to cats, burglarize houses or murder old ladies?" "No," several of them reassured me. "The only naughty activity I'm into is underage sex, but I'm rapidly losing interest in that." "Please don't!" pleaded Julia. "I might make one or two exceptions." I pointed at Kaiya, then said, "When I finally let you suck me, you'd better be VERY good!" "You're gonna let me?" Kaiya looked relieved, but not quite sure of it. No one else looked much relieved either. "Provided all the drugs I take let me get hard." There was some very weak laughter, but not much, so I added, "Anyone who doesn't laugh at that joke will be red-carded." They all laughed. Weakly, but at least all of them were contributing this time. When I'd been swimming, I'd known that I'd probably have to say something to relieve the party-killing mood I'd likely return to. I'd invented my comment about Kaiya sucking me off, confidently expecting it to be greeted with laughter, after which everything would be okay again. So I'd been badly disappointed when that joke had barely made a dent in the tense mood. The next two jokes had helped a little, but not nearly enough. The mood was still unhappy, and I couldn't think of anything else to say that might help. Everything I thought of seemed more likely make matters worse. I was flummoxed, still trying to work out a joke that'd clear the air, when Julia commanded, "Mark, please stand immediately in front of Kaiya." When Julia talks in her dictatorial tone, the "please" is potentially misleading. I did as directed. -- Julia announced, "Everyone gather in a tight circle around Mark and Kaiya." #8: #4: Julia amended her previous instruction, "Ahh, not you, Carol. You'd better turn to face the other way." "Why?" asked Carol, whom I'm sure wasn't as naive as she seemed. "Some things a sister shouldn't see." "Yuck!" declared Carol, while every non-sister was strained to get a better position to see whatever the yucky thing was that a sister shouldn't see. I'm not including the few boys in "every non-sister", of course. They weren't participating in this, and had they tried to, they would've been told "NO!" a great deal more emphatically than Carol had been. Julia was standing beside Kaiya, who hadn't realized her central role yet. Julia told her, "Kneel and pull Mark's Speedos down, Kaiya." #3: #5: #1: "He's still soft," complained Kaiya. Julia beat me to the answer, "You haven't done anything yet, silly. Mark's not going to get hard just because he knows there's a blowjob coming." That surprised several of the more knowledgeable audience members. I made mental notes of all their names. -- Julia threatened, "If you don't start soon, Kaiya, I'll..." Anything more would've been redundant. We told #2 to stop with the go-softs. 'Lo and behold (in this case, more like "blown and behold"), I rose to the occasion. Most of the girls were visibly relieved. Either that or they were too busy commenting on various anatomical details. I couldn't make up my mind whether to be pissed off that so many of them hadn't believed my and Julia's denials and reassurances, or happy that so many of them wanted my cock to work fine. I enjoyed it for a few seconds, then pulled back and restored my Speedos, which caused a several complaints from the degenerate Peeping Tomesses around me, and especially from Kaiya. I announced, "I don't enjoy being treated as a piece of meat. Which is why I don't treat any of you that way. Plus I've made the point Julia wanted you to see. I'm not in the mood for anything more after the way I've been treated, so your cheap thrill is over." Suitable chastised - not a word I normally want any part of being applying to pretty, swimsuit-clad girls - they all started apologizing to me. "I don't want to spend the rest of the afternoon hearing a succession of individual apologies. That'd depress me even worse. You should all spend some time thinking about how immature and nasty you were being. To close this, everyone repeat after me, 'WE APOLOGIZE FOR BEING... ' Come on, repeat after me." I raised my arms like a conductor, and I prompted, "WE APOLOGIZE FOR BEING..." I waved my arms, and they raggedly repeated my prompt. I supplied the next line, "SMALL-MINDED GOSSIPS WHO PROMISE..." I paused and conducted; they repeated. "NOT TO DO IT AGAIN ON PENALTY OF..." Pause; conduct; echo. "BEING BANNED FROM..." Pause; conduct; echo. "CLOTHES SHOPPING FOR THREE MONTHS." I paused and conducted, but they didn't echo. Instead they laughed and mutinied. They felt the punishment should fit the crime, and they hadn't committed mass murder. Some of them were willing to agree to being banned for one day, but others argued that was still excessive. The mood was mostly repaired. They each threw their individual apologies at me, but it only took a few seconds, and I was able to turn some of them into jokes, which further helped the mood. For example, one girl commented, "I'm sorry I was so immature Mark. You're much more mature than us." To which I'd answered, "That's because I'm a boy. You've got to realize that boys are far more mature than girls..." The rest got drowned out and the mood got lifted. Things easily returned most of the way to normal after that. The subsequent individual attempts to apologize I quickly waved off, and they soon got the message to let it drop entirely. ^ I spent some time talking to Linda Hogan, trying to find whatever it was in her that'd made her one of Julia's best friends. Linda was certainly a smart girl, which a best friend of Julia's would probably have to be; present company excepted as I failed both criterion for membership in the "smart girl" category. Linda was pleasant to talk with, especially as she often made thoughtful statements. Even thought-provoking, sometimes. One that I thought might have explained her lack of pushing herself forward, was that she made several comments along the lines of, "Julia is so lucky to have you as her boyfriend." I'd heard girls say that hundreds of times, especially after my "I Love Carol" speeches in 3B-land, but Linda seemed to give it an extra nuance somehow. Those comments, combined with Linda's lack of effort toward trying to promote herself, caused me to say, "You say 'Julia has me as her boyfriend' in a way that sounds like it's set in cement. I AM looking for another girlfriend, you know? That's why so many girls are here now. I would have thought that's why you've come too, but apparently not?" Linda answered, "You and Julia aren't going to break up. That's easy to see from how much attention you give to each other. I don't know why you're encouraging other girls to chase you, but I don't think it's good for the girls." Which was mostly true, but not entirely. I answered, "Ava would disagree strongly with that." "Yes, but she seems happy to play by your rules." "Maybe that's because they're good rules?" "Good for Ava maybe; not good for most of these girls though." #5: #1: "So why do you come to these events?" "Curiosity mostly, I guess. I have trouble believing that a boy like you was sitting in our classes nearly all year, and no one noticed until Julia." "So you come to these events because you're a curious sightseer?" "Yeah. It's interesting to watch everyone, especially you and Julia." "Would you come to the next event if it was in my backyard and everyone was naked?" "You want to see me naked? Why? There are plenty of other's for you to look at." "The purpose of my question was to measure your motivation. I'm trying to understand you." "Why? I'm not throwing myself at you." #2: #1: I answered, "I'd like to improve my understanding of people. Especially females, because they're the ones I understand the least. I could joke that it's the girls who AREN'T throwing themselves at me that I need to understand the most, because I must be doing something wrong, {chuckle}, but that'd be facile. I'm asking because I'm curious. You're an especially smart girl, so I expect your reasons might be more interesting than most." "So you do value smart girls?" #7: "No. I date Julia because she's so voluptuous." #7: #1: "Haha. I'll reword my question. Other than Julia - who you clearly appreciate for being intelligent - do you value intelligence in your playthings?" #7: #4: I answered, "Yes I do." "Ahh, so you admit they're your playthings." "That's not what I admitted, and you're smart enough to know it. And even if I had admitted that, in a sense Julia and I are YOUR playthings, as you've admitted that you enjoy watching what we do. Is there a moral difference between playing with someone visually and playing with them physically, especially when everyone has volunteered for their roles?" I'll skip the rest of it. We dueled for ten minutes or so, without arriving at a conclusion. It was the sort of conversation that didn't need a conclusion, as it was fun in itself. I never found out whether she'd come to a naked-in-my-backyard event, but neither did I particularly care, as there were plenty of dumb playthings who would. "Dumb" might more accurately be called "self-deceived" or "hopeful" in the cases of most of the playthings, but apparently not in Linda's. Whether she was smart not to have any hope of a relationship with me, or she was merely being passively waiting for a strong indication of interest from me, or she thought it was unhealthy for her to participate, I couldn't tell. I wouldn't get a straight answer if I bothered to ask. The conversation made me aware that the pipeline scheme wasn't going to appeal to many types of girls, including the intelligently non-self-deluded ones. I was missing out not spending time with some of those, although God knows when I'd have time to. Not that it mattered these days, but when I'd first started dating Julia I'd often wondered how on Earth she saw anything worth dating in me. Intelligent, passive Linda had been one of Julia's best friends. Julia had given my intelligence as an important reason for her wanting to date me, but perhaps my passivity had been a key factor too. Julia loved leading, so it made sense that she'd prefer people who'd follow her. She'd never mentioned my passivity as a reason for dating me, but she had mentioned Carol's passivity as an attractive trait early in that relationship. If my guess was right, it was an insulting reason for Julia to date me, but my dearth of complimentary reasons meant I wasn't the tiniest bit motivated to complain. ^ I caught up with the latest in Katelin's life. She told me how envious her mother was from seeing the photos of our trip to LA, a comment she hadn't had time to pass on before my kidnapping. The males of her family were somewhat subdued these days, as they'd had time to realize that it'd been their aggressiveness that'd gotten them into trouble. Old habits and attitudes die hard though, so they were still far from decent human beings, other than Wayne, who was sensibly keeping himself distant from the other boys. ^ After the RPS competition, I spent more time talking to the two ex-9th graders, Leanna and Gina. I'd had both of them in my class a couple of years ago, but I hardly knew them at all, something that should be remedied if one of them was going to do such an important thing for me: help Carol cook dinner, while I fucked the other one. Being the suave, cautious guy that I am, I asked Leanna, "You're not virgin, are you Leanna?" "Julia already asked me. No, I'm not. I've done it a few times before, but never with other girls too. I barely know Julia or Ava, so that's going to be very strange." "You barely know me, really." Leanna ignored my point, instead going with, "I WISH I DID! You're incredible..." followed by the usual gushing, plus repeated statements of regret that we hadn't gotten together two years ago. Gina excitedly added her agreements. Gina was actually the better looking of the two. I would complain that life was unfair, making me go to bed with the lesser-looker, except that it wasn't, as Gina was also the better cook (I presumed, she being Italian after all), so having her in the kitchen while I had Leanna in the bedroom made perfect sense to me. I didn't learn anything particularly important from talking to them. Certainly nothing as important as Gina being Italian. One amusing point was Leanna telling me that her parents had split up a few years ago, and she lived most of the time with her father in Corvallis rather than her mother in LA, because her parents thought Corvallis would be a much healthier environment. Less sex, and other things that young girls shouldn't do. They obviously hadn't allowed for the corrupting effects of my bright yellow Speedos. My wearing them certainly made me feel corrupted. Mind you, I also felt corrupted when Kaiya pulled them down, so maybe I'm easily corrupted. ^ Last, and decidedly of least interest to me, the boys that ended up joining us. A couple of them were brothers of girls who'd joined my group, and a couple were boyfriends. The brothers were pretty good guys. One was older and the other younger than the sisters they were with, and both of them got along well with their sibling. They teased their sisters about being so interested in me, which was perfectly fine as brothers should tease their sisters every chance they get. Learning how to do that is an essential survival technique for when a boy gets a girlfriend. The sister with the older brother even entered the RPS competition. He teased her (it was obligatory), but didn't try to stop her or look bent out of shape over it. The other, younger brother clearly acted as a frustrating brake on his sister. She confirmed that to me later, assuring me that she had definitely wanted to enter. Or, as I liked to think of it, she wanted me to fuck her. Her brother was younger, so he wouldn't have had any authority over her, but he did have a tongue to tell their parents about it. She begged me to call her next time we did something like this, so she could come without her spoilsport brother (well, not "sport" exactly). I said, "I can't call every girl individually, or I'd spend so much time calling that I wouldn't have time to go anywhere. Keep your eye on the website. That's what it's for." #7: The older brother spent some time talking to me, very envious of my situation, asking me about my exercise regime, and lots of questions about my sex-life. I ducked most of the latter questions, but tried a new lie out for the exercise question. I told him, "I have an EXTREMELY demanding personal trainer. She puts a lot of effort into telling me what to do, and I put a lot of effort into doing it." He accepted it easily, going on to ask me about what sports I played. We didn't discuss that long, partly because he wasn't interested in soccer, not compared to going back to chatting to all the pretty girls around us. The two boyfriends weren't nearly as happy as the brothers. Their girlfriends had gotten them to join us to be near some girls they claimed to be friends with. The boys had naturally and enthusiastically agreed, because what guy wouldn't want to sit in a group of thirty swimsuit-clad girls, especially when the only other guy was, judging by his bright yellow Speedos, obviously gay. It hadn't taken them long to realize that their girlfriends weren't as "their" as they'd previously thought. They'd both tried to get their girlfriend to relocate elsewhere in the Aquatic Center, but unsuccessfully. They stuck to their girlfriends like glue, especially if I was anywhere close. If one of the girls got up to walk anywhere, the boyfriend was right beside her, ideally with his arm possessively around her shoulders. It was a little embarrassing for them to follow their girlfriends to the bathroom, but that was a price they were willing to pay. When one of the guys needed to go to the bathroom, they kept an eye on each other's girl, to make sure she didn't talk with me. She did, of course; that was the whole point of being in my group. The girls could get away with talking to me from time to time, by telling their boyfriends something like, "Don't be silly; of course I don't want to be Mark's girlfriend. But I can talk with him. He's a friend of friends of mine, so I'm not going to be rude to him just because you're so insecure." Neither girl entered the RPS competition though. Probably because they thought 1-in-20 odds weren't good enough to risk the certainty of pissing off their boyfriends even further. Telling their boyfriends, "He's a friend of my friends, so of course I can try to fuck him," wasn't going to work too well. Both boys gave me heaps of dirty looks, which I didn't bother doing anything about. They weren't wearing bikinis, so I didn't waste time talking to them. And had they been wearing bikinis, I DEFINITELY wouldn't have talked to them. ------- Chapter 257: The Aquatic Center; I Make a Splash Monday, June 20, 2005 (Continued) I've written many words to describe events at the swimming pools, but nothing about what some people would consider the raison d'être of the Aquatic Center: swimming. My visit was much more about bikinis, but I did do some swimming, so I'll mention that briefly now. Even before we'd arrived at the Center, it'd occurred to me that there might be pretty girls wearing bikinis here, and therefore I should try to impress the bikini bottoms off them. I had thought of two ways of helping making that possible. The first was based on the fact that I can swim. Until a year or so ago, my complete lack of athletic prowess made that statement rather surprising. However it happened, swimming was one of the very few physical activities I could do reasonably well. It occurred to me that my being able to swim at all, plus NP-assistance, could make me an EXTREMELY good swimmer. It seemed to me that the physics of swimming the freestyle stroke boiled down to quite a simple concept. The swimmer reached forward, 'grabbed hold' of some water, and pulled himself forward against it with, I guessed, about 50 pounds of force. That wasn't the same as being pushed by a 50 pound force. There had to be large inefficiencies in the process, such as water spilling sideways out of the swimmer's hand. I remembered how little force was required to move forward when pulling against a solid object, like a lane rope or a ladder, so I guessed that pulling back with 50 pounds probably didn't produce even 10 pounds of propelling force. Assuming 10 pounds, then adding a 100-pound NP-push should make a HUGE difference to my top speed. I wouldn't go 11 times faster because of the 'wind resistance' (water in this case). Assuming a square function, then I'd go about 3.3 times faster. If I concentrated my body's effort on looking stylish rather than speed, then I might end up going only 2.5 to 3 times as fast as my normal swimming speed. That should be enough to look pretty impressive. I would be able to swim very fast underwater too, which would be great for those games where you sneak up underneath a girl, especially because I would be able to use a sight blob to navigate with, moving it above and below the water as needed. My other idea for how to look impressive was when diving off a diving board, especially the three meter one. My NP isn't strong enough to let me fly, but it's easily strong enough to ensure my being wonderfully vertical when I fall toward the water. All I'll have to do is stiffen my body and NP-push my ankles so they're vertically above my head as gravity does its thing. With those two ideas in mind, when a bunch of the girls decided to jump into a pool, I eagerly joined them, looking forward to showing off my swimming prowess as the first step in my "Impress the Bikini Bottoms Off Them" plan. I jumped into the pool and discovered a small but important technical problem: I sank like a stone. It wasn't an indecisive, bob around on the surface then slowly slide under, sort of sinking either. It was more the "float like a brick" type of sinking. I wasn't in danger, as the bottom was close enough that I could bounce up from it. Even if the pool had been bottomless and my hands tied, I could've created NP-points in my mouth and had them push upward. So no danger, but plenty of surprise. Even after getting to the surface and taking and holding the deepest breath I could - and I have a VERY large chest - I still sank like a well-oxygenated stone. I made a mental note to weigh myself at the next opportunity, even knowing that it wasn't about weight (as fat people float better), but density. ^ [I thought I weighed about 175 pounds, so I got a horrible surprise to see that I weighed 200! It made no sense to me, because I wasn't noticeably larger than before, just having muscles that bulged a bit more. [[I didn't know about my bones being thicker, that being hard to tell from the outside. Human bodies are more-or-less neutrally buoyant, depending mostly on the extra displacement caused by the expansion of the chest, most easily achieved by expanding the lungs to take a breath. It only needs the chest to expand enough to displace two or three pounds of water to make a body float well (that's how close to being neutrally buoyant humans are). Bone has twice the density of water, so my having roughly 20 additional pounds of bone meant negative 10 pounds of net buoyancy. Maybe negative 11 pounds, if the increased muscle mass was included. That's easily enough to make a body sink like a stone.]] I didn't know whether my mass gain was still happening. Given how much I'd gained, over the time since I'd last been weighed, if it continued at the same rate I'd weigh 560 pounds in a year's time! That'd surely be causing serious problems, even if I was physically the same size as now. And how on Earth could my body weigh more than it should? I had images of my increased muscles being made of adamantium, but they felt normal. If I kept putting on weight, but not size, then in a couple of years I'd have to have an average density more than lead! I made a mental note to weigh myself frequently, in case I kept getting heavier. I had no idea what to do about it, but I was very concerned and I wanted to know. My untrained seven-mind ki force was 98 pounds. I ideally wanted to have at least a 0.25g acceleration available for any sort of practical flying, or the wind could blow me off course or so high that the air was too thin to breath, so my current weight of 200 pounds meant I'd need 250 pounds of NP. That's 2.55 times more than I had, or plus 155%. I was gaining about 5% per month, so achieving that much force would take 31 months. I'd previously calculated 24 months, so practical flying was going to take 7 months longer. Bummer! Given my new conscious and subconscious desire to have my normal weight back, I immediately started losing weight, stabilizing at 180 pounds.] ^ The pools were busy, especially the fun pool, but there was room in the lap pool for me to do my testing. I used one mind's NP to hold me up, which was easily enough because swimming also generates lift, so that left six minds to push with. I soon discovered that my armpits rotated too much during swimming, so I had to push against a private region on my body, but otherwise it was a highly successful experiment. Once I got my new technique working properly, I swam VERY fast. So fast that I had to dial back on how much force I used, to avoid getting too much attention. I didn't want someone who knew swimming to time me beating any world records, so I used my full force only for short bursts, such as when chasing one of the girls in my group, which I did as often as I could because catching them was fun. We played tag quite often, with suitable rule adjustments because I was otherwise WAY too fast. My group was very impressed by my swimming speed. I didn't notice any bikini bottoms being impressed off them though. ^ Probably my favorite pool game was "Girl Tossing". A girl would stand beside me in about four feet of water. I'd crouch down and offer her the palm of my hand to sit on, with the fingers bent back like waiters do when carrying trays above their shoulders. This made for a very good launch platform, and for a pleasant ass grope. I'd use my other hand to hold her arm for stability during the launch. The launch itself was my thrusting up with my legs and arm, shot-putting the girl high in the air. Most of the girls weighed about a hundred pounds, more or less, so with my arm strength plus an additional a hundred pounds of NP force pushing up on the back of my hand, the girls got a screamingly high flight. Especially Julia; we both loved sending her flying. She loves me being powerful. I didn't NP the girls directly, and DEFINITELY not after they'd been launched. I wanted to look strong, not suspicious by literally sending the girls flying. My projectiles were having a great time, with heaps of screams and laughter. Two spectators weren't happy though: the two boyfriends whenever their girlfriends had turns. I always gave their asses a couple of extra squeezes (the girlfriends' asses, I mean), to reward them for their not letting their boyfriends push them around. Other guys' girlfriends should be freely allowed to play around with me. All the spectacular, noisy fun we were having had two noteworthy effects. The first was that some other random guys at the pools emulated me. Whether it was at their girlfriends' request, or maybe just to show that they were strong guys too (which they were), didn't really matter, because they very quickly stopped when their results were clearly pathetic compared to mine. Their inadequacy embarrassed them, but caused girls to be even more impressed by me, especially because I was 'firing away' nonstop, launching a girl every fifteen to twenty seconds. So getting through my group once took about ten minutes, plus a few extra seconds, for me to pretend to be bashful whenever it was Carol's turn. The second effect was that we got heaps of attention. Having so many of 'my' girls lining up to take their turn to be groped then vigorously discarded, made it seem that I was taking anyone, so several strangers joined the line. There were two types of wannabe cannonballs: older girls who were more interested in me than in being thrown, and youngsters of both genders who were only interested in being thrown. Older girls I flirted with, squeezing their asses if they seemed the sort to appreciate that, which most were, then threw them away. Soon I had a group of them standing around, admiring my physique and talking to me. I kept up the cannonade though, and prioritized talking with the cannonballs over the strangers. Younger kids I refused to play with. There were many dozens of them, quite a few of whom were spoiled brats who were damned hard to get to leave. I knew that the moment I threw one kid, I'd be swarmed with a plague of them, ruining my mutually enjoyable fun with teenage girls. It'd also raise the possibility of some parent getting upset that I'd touched Little Suzy's or Little Johnny's bottom. Getting accused of being some sort of sexual pervert was the last thing I needed, as my ability to deny it would be severely compromised by my wearing bright yellow Speedos. We played "Girl Tossing" three times that afternoon, in the big pool inside and the fun pool outside. It was a good way of flirting with dozens of other girls. I'd had very little experience at successful flirting until recently, and never on this scale or with swimsuit-clad girls, so I very much enjoyed being the much admired center of this frivolity. The girls enjoyed themselves too; partly from the thrill of being thrown though the air, partly from the thrill of experiencing my strength (it seemed to them), and also because they had fun flirting with me. Touching their bottoms was also a good way to break the physical contact ice, making subsequent contacts much easier. Even Savannah dropped her superior act long enough to have fun. ^ So I was feeling happily confident when I went to find out how superb I could be at diving off the high board. I deliberately went during the "Do you take drugs" pseudo-argument, because that'd let me iron out any wrinkles in my diving technique before any of my crowd saw me. The plan was to start with the most simple of dives: "bounce up then fall down headfirst" (that's probably not the technical term for it). Once my head was facing downward, I'd shut my eyes and create a sight blob to my right, using it to judge whether I was perfectly vertical. I'd use NP to push my ankles as necessary. Everything worked perfectly right up to the time that I tried to do something clever, and then it all went horribly wrong. The first part of the dive was easy, but when I shut my eyes and created the sight blob to look at myself from the side, my brain instinctively decided that it was horribly disoriented while being head down and falling, so obviously the best thing to do was to panic and wave my arms and legs around wildly. I didn't have time to get myself back under control before I crashed painfully into the water. #4: #1: #5: #4: #8: We did those much less entertainingly. ^ One pool activity was VERY enjoyable: cuddling in the warmest pool. It was cooler than the Williams' hot tub, but who cares about temperature when you've got a couple dozen very willing cuddling partners. Not counting the two girls who had boyfriends; they were "willing", but they weren't "cuddling partners". Their boyfriends prevented them from coming with us when Julia suggested, "Let's all go cuddle with Mark in the warm pool." Each of the girls would've been happy to spend at least thirty minutes playing hanky-panky on my lap. Multiplied by nearly thirty, that wasn't going to be practical. Even three minutes each was still way too long. My first thought had been to enforce a one minute per girl rotation, very similar to the hot tub party at the Williams', but on the way to the pool I decided I'd try something different. We got some strange looks from the other users of the pool when one guy and a couple dozen of girlfriend-acting girls descended on them, but they were "Envious Heterosexual" looks, rather than "Look At That Homo In The Bright Yellow Speedos" looks, so were much more welcome. When we were sitting in the pool, I arranged to sit with Carol on my lap. When the others were settled around us, I quietly said, "We don't have time for each of you to spend long on my lap. We've got about thirty minutes, until 3:45," I nodded to the clock on the wall, to make sure they all saw it. "I don't want to do strict one minute rotations because they make it seem like an onerous duty. Instead I'm going to start with the girls I like the most and work my way through to those of you I don't know as well, until I get at 3:45. Starting with Carol." I turned to Carol, commenting, "I've noticed that you've got a GREAT deal of attention from guys today. Knowing guys the way I do, I've got a sneaky suspicion it might be because of your lack of swimsuit. You're doing well in the face of all their idiotic comments. You can't be used to getting so many of those, because you've never dressed like this before?" "Are you kidding! Guys are always making stupid statements..." and away she went, not missing the opportunity to make some statements that'd reinforce her impending lesbianism. I hadn't had much doubt that Carol would respond well, especially after I'd dropped the key word ("idiotic"). In 3B-land, she'd been the first to use that theme to explain her lack of interest in boys, and she'd subsequently told me that she'd used it because it was an easy exaggeration. They weren't all the "pathetic idiots" she'd claimed, but she thought they all had insufficient clues about how to make a good relationship with a girl. After about three minutes, some of the other girls started looking a little uncomfortable at the, they considered, waste of time. A couple of minutes later, by which time Carol and I had moved onto another topic, and several of the girls were looking at the clock repeatedly, especially the girls who correctly presumed they were down the end of my list. Thirty seconds later, one of the tail-end girls broke. "Ahh, Mark. Have you forgotten about the time?" "No. More importantly, I haven't forgotten how important my sister is to me either. Carol has only ever worn clothes with at least fifty times more fabric in them than what she's worn today. It's obviously her right to decide how she dresses, but I worried that today hadn't been easy for her. We were sitting here quietly, so it was a good time to check how she was feeling. -- "As it turns out, today has been easy for her, because all it's done is confirm her opinion that guys are idiots, but it was still important for me to check. I take my responsibility as her big brother seriously. It's more important to me than fooling around with other girls. I don't mean that as an insult to any of you, but as a compliment to Carol. When Mom sees what little of Carol's swimsuit there is to see, she's bound to ask me how Carol managed today, and I'd like to be able to answer correctly and confidently." All the girls looked sufficiently chastised and impressed by now, so I could end it. #1: #All: I said, "Carol, as you appear to be surviving the boys' leers and droolings okay, let's have the rest of this conversation when we talk with Mom and Dad later?" I was nodding and smiling, so Carol had no trouble agreeing, "Sure." I was helping Carol off my lap while indicating that Julia was next, when one of the girls asked, "You'd talk at home with your parents and Mark about your wearing a revealing swimsuit, Carol?" I could have indicated the correct answer in other ways, but it was good to practice this, so I NP-tapped Carol on the top of the head twice. I saw her eyes flick up, her thinking about what two taps meant, then her working out how to say 'Yes' in this context. It wasn't exactly a slick operation, so I made a mental note to practice it more. Carol answered, "Sure. It's like what Mark said. He's a VERY good big brother to me. And to Donna too." Carol looked at me for approval. I smiled at Carol and just said, "With my sisters, that's easy." I could've said more, something about bringing Carol on all my public group dates perhaps, but I'd done enough. There'd been two objectives, and both had been well achieved already. The first was letting all the girls here know that I had a very good, safe relationship with Carol, and in our family generally. If they thought good things about me and Carol, they wouldn't think bad things about me and Carol. The second objective was to show the girls that they could happily have sex with me because I was so mature and trustworthy. In case you can't see how I did that, let me explain. I had deliberately let Carol sit on my lap for much longer than her 'fair share', at a time when I could've been playing sexy games with the other girls. That sacrifice would've convinced the girls how moral and mature I must be. In reality it was a tiny cost to pay for the effect of making so many girls so much more willing to have sex with me, while (and this is the truly bizarre point) they'd be confident that I was too mature and caring to be taking advantage of them. Girls are so used to boys being so focused on getting as much sex as they can as quickly as they can, that my seeming not to be after sex was a clever trick to get me more sex. Julia was now on my lap. She's somewhat shy about doing sexy things in public. Even though the mass of bodies surrounding us kept us private from strangers, there were still too many girls in our group for Julia to be comfortable with sexy stuff, so we just cuddled and chatted. Julia isn't the least bit shy about scheming in public though. She used her cuddling time to praise me for being such a good big brother for Carol and Donna, then asking the girls around us how many of them had a brother who'd prefer to care for his sister than get sexy with easy girls (Julia got some amusing responses to her "easy" description). I'm sure I don't have to tell you how many girls had such an unbelievable brother. It was a pity they didn't believe themselves when they described my attitude as "unbelievable". After some serious cuddling, Julia gave up her seat to Ava. Ava whispered to me, "It's so much fun to see you and Julia fool everyone. You're a good team." #4: #6: #2: #6: #2: Maybe I had to be cautious about tricking Ava, but that didn't apply to teasing her. "In an hour you're going to be in bed having sex with YET ANOTHER person, Ava. How many people have you had sex with since you met me? I never realized you were so 'friendly' - cough, cough - when I first met you, haha." There was no danger of Ava taking that as a criticism; I was smiling, laughing, and her additional partners had all been Julia's and my creations. Ava protested, "I'm being framed!" "That's for people who didn't actually do the dirty deed. I've seen you do it; usually with a big smile on your face." "Oh yeah. I should've said, 'I've been led astray!' How could I not obey a guy who looks so good in Speedos. Haha, I like the look on your face, Mark." "Are you sure you're looking at my face?" You get the idea: we were just joking around. After Ava was Alexis, Pat then Katelin. I treated them all similarly, in that I was very sexy with them. Alexis started it; she sat on my lap and asked the question that was so often on the top of her mind, "When can we fuck again?" I raised her hopes by immediately lowering her bikini bottoms. I lowered them all the way, pulling them off and passing them to Julia, asking, "Please hold onto these for a while, Julia." "Certainly. Let me know if you ever want me to give them back." Julia got some laughs for that. Alexis laughed too, apparently not caring. Probably, like Ava, she knew me too well by now. Being surrounded by so many bodies gave us a lot of privacy. I wasn't going to make FULL use of it, but I'd still make a lot. Probably more than I should, but that wouldn't be my fault, it'd be the girls, for making me so horny. Alexis started reaching for my Speedos. I restrained her, "Sorry Alexis, I don't have a rubber. I can do this though," as I started fingering her. I was NOT going to have sex with Alexis without a rubber! She gets around FAR too much for that. I didn't know Alexis' body's responses very well. The quick fuck during the Hot Tub Party and the orgy in LA hadn't given me time to learn her body, but I did my vigorous best. I did know that Alexis liked vigorous. It turned out that Alexis wasn't shy, had spent all afternoon watching me walk around in my bright yellow Speedos, and was very much in the mood to enjoy some good, hard, finger-fucking. I let her yank down my Speedos (they're not exactly useful protection) so she could play with my cock at the same time, something the girls around us appreciated; and I appreciated their appreciating, as that boded well for my cock's future. I didn't let Alexis get me off, but she sure let me get her off. It took a few minutes, but she had an impressive looking orgasm. How it looked was important, as a good part of this was for Savannah's 'benefit', in getting her used to public sex. Plus Alexis' benefit obviously, not to mention that I quite enjoyed myself too. When I pulled my lips off Alexis', where I'd put them to muffle her, she said, "Fuck! That was great. You haven't cum though." I answered, "You expect me to cum just from being played with in a pool? What sort of slut do think I am? Please ignore my pornographic Speedos when you answer that." "Haha." Alexis got off, recovering her swimsuit bottom from Julia (I'd used NP to indicate Julia should give them back). With each of Pat and Katelin, I was less demonstratively sexual, but mostly by being quieter about how sexual we were. Our hands roamed each other's bodies, including my exposing their breasts and sucking their nipples. In Pat's case, joking with her afterward about how cautious I'd been with her breasts last time we'd gotten into a hot pool together. Neither they nor I had an orgasm, as they weren't the types of girls who'd be comfortable doing that in public, and I didn't think I should cum into a public pool. After Katelin's turn on my lap had finished, I pulled up my Speedos - not that doing so made me much less obscene - then said loud enough for all my group's girls to hear, but hopefully no one else, "The turns are in descending order of importance to me. Obviously Carol first, and now I've finished all my lovers who're here today. I'm uncertain where to place Savannah." Savannah's attention jumped up. She'd placed herself in the inner-ring of girls, so was close to me, and more than happy to jump onto my lap, to be the #1 non-lover. I continued, "On one hand she's got absolutely no idea how to contribute to a good relationship. In her opinion, a good relationship is when the boy is nonstop giving and generous toward her, while she struts around looking beautiful. On the other hand, she does have considerable potential so maybe she should go next." #3: #1: #8: #3: Savannah interpreted my "maybe she should go next" statement to mean that she WAS going next (such is her arrogance). She moved to occupy my lap, but I held up my hand to stop her. I explained, "Many of the others of you have potential too, so I realize it wouldn't be fair to advantage Savannah for that. You'll have to wait your turn based on your CURRENT value Savannah. I'll take the Pipeline Group girls next, in alphabetical order of first names." #4: #5: So the next six lap-sitters were to be: Carina, Clara, Jessica, Kaiya, May and Victoria. Carina got onto my lap, moved her hand halfway to my cock, then asked, "Can I touch your... ?" "This may surprise you, Carina, but I'd rather you didn't. Alexis, Pat, Katelin and I are lovers, so physical intimacy is already part of our relationships. With you and the girls that will follow you, that's getting into new territory. You don't want to go too fast with physical stuff, because it can get in the way of getting to know each other properly, which is much more important for good relationships." #4: #8: #7: #8: #1: #All: I added, "I couldn't help noticing that most of your hands took liberties while we were playing around in the pools, and I must admit mine did too. We're in a pool now, so some liberties would be fine, but only on top of swimsuits, okay?" They agreed that was okay, especially because there wasn't any need for pretense, like there had been when we'd been playing tag, "Girl Tossing", or other games/excuses. Carina's hand descended to my dick, rubbing it from outside. I was very hard, because I'd stopped the go-softs when Alexis had started jacking me, and it would've been insulting to restart them with any girl after Alexis, although I was debating going soft with Savannah (as I said, "it'd be insulting"). If it was okay for Carina to rub my cock, and it was, then it was certainly okay for me to rub her pussy. I moved my hand that way. Being the very helpful girl she is, she opened her legs wider for me. I enjoyed rubbing her pussy through her swimsuit, using my other hand to play with her nipples through her bikini top. Carina isn't well endowed (no girl is perfect, unfortunately, although I'm still searching diligently), but I still very much enjoyed our groping session, especially when she got so turned on that she slumped against my chest and surrendered herself to the sensations I was giving her. She forgot to rub me, but I somehow still managed to have a good time. I didn't even try to make her cum, mainly because I wanted to treat all six Group 1A members equally, and time was far too short to be sure of getting any of them off, let alone all of them. Plus it was a safe bet that most of the girls here would be more publicly inhibited than Alexis. So I stroked Carina enough to give her an enjoyable time, but not a spectacular one. In both our opinions, ending it far too soon. Clara and Jessica got the same treatments. Both of them (and nearly all subsequent girls) being considerably more interested in groping and being groped than in conversation with me. I would comment on the lack of maturity that demonstrated, but I'm too busy groping and being groped. When Kaiya's turn came, she quickly presented her idea, "Mark, I've already sucked your cock, so that's part of our relationship and we can touch each other under our suits. Right?" "Maybe to keep equality in your group, I should touch you even less until everyone else has caught up to you? Or maybe we could stick to the on-top-of-clothes rule? Which would you prefer?" "Haha. You can't blame a girl for trying." "I'm happy that you did. If I ever get so mature that I don't enjoy girls wanting my body, then someone please shoot me." Which resulted in several jokes and complimentary comments. After the last of the Group 1A girls, Victoria, I announced, "Now I've got an extremely difficult moral dilemma. I want the next two girls to be Leanna and Gina. Leanna because she's very soon going to be one of my lovers, Gina because she's going to be cooking my dinner tonight. Who goes first? I've got a HUGE problem deciding which activity is the most important to me." #8: After the laughs, I resolved my dilemma by getting both girls to sit on my legs at the same time. I was going to do that for all the remaining girls, in order to let them all have a turn before my time limit. I could extend that limit a few minutes, but not many because I knew leaving the Aquatic Center wouldn't be a fast process, and I wanted time for some good sex before Aikido - boy, did I EVER! While I was still getting the girls settled, and when I had my arms around the backs of both of them, Proximity showed me that Gina had the idea of putting her hand inside my swimsuit. Both girls were leaning against a shoulder of mine, trapping my arms around their backs, so I couldn't easily stop her without pushing her off me. I waited to see if Gina was going to act on her idea, which she almost immediately started doing. As soon as her hand moved, I said, "GINA! Don't." Her hand paused, as she looked at me guiltily. I added, "You know what I agreed to, so don't try for anything more." "I wasn't doing anything." "You were about to though, and don't even think about denying it. I saw the intention all over your face, just as I see the guilt now." "But it's not fair. Leanna gets to do everything with you, and I get nothing." "Leanna won the competition fair and square. But most importantly, if you told a boy to keep his hands away from you, but he suddenly stuck them inside your panties and on your cunt, you'd scream bloody murder. You could tell your parents and that boy would be in SERIOUS trouble. That's what you were about to do to me." I could see Gina got it. "I'm SORRY! I never thought..." "I know. You don't need to beat yourself up about it. I know you're not used to boys telling you to stop, and my bright yellow Speedos send the wrong message. You're also nowhere near the first girl to make that mistake. I find it amazing, but almost every girl makes the same mistake once things get a little sexy. It never occurs to them that the boy means it when he says there's a limit. If you spend time with me, you'll find out that I do things differently than most guys. I've got my own set of morals that I stick to quite firmly." #8: #2: #8: #1: #8: #2: #8: #2: #8: Gina asked, "You don't mind?" "I'm not impressed, but I don't really mind. It was hardly the end of the world, and you did stop when I told you to. The lesson is that you need to listen to me when I tell you things; and it appears you've learned that lesson." "Oh yes. I won't grab you uninvited again." #4: "Good. Each of you give me a final kiss and a goodbye rub, then it's the turn of the next pair." When those actions were performed to our satisfaction, and Leanna and Gina had gotten off, I announced, "I don't want to show favoritism among those of you I don't know well enough to judge fairly. We'll divide you into two groups: those that came because they saw my website, and those that were here anyway. The website group first, in pairs, and in alphabetic order on their first name." I worked my way through that list, although it was damned enjoyable "work". I received lots of kisses, chest and cock rubs. I don't know why, but most of the girls rubbed my chest. Rubbing their own made much more sense to me. I wasn't able to molest them as well as I wanted - and delightfully, as well as most of them wanted - because there were two of them. Once they were settled and stable on my legs, I'd remove one hand from around the back of one girl, using it to feel up the other. Then I'd mirror my actions on the other side. I got half as long with each girl, but it was difficult to complain about it. I was amused that when the list got up to "S", Savannah did as I'd expected: tried to include herself in the next pair. I stopped her, "Hang on Savannah. You told us that you came here with friends; not because of the website. So you're in the last group." The only thing she could say was, "Oh yeah, I forgot." I finished off the website girls, then started on the last group. Nothing out of the ordinary happened (if you can call molesting two dozen girls in a row "ordinary"). There weren't many girls in the last group, especially as the two girls with boyfriends were being kept away, so Savannah was one of the last. I'd deliberately chosen to sequence on the girls' first names rather than their last, because that put Savannah into the penultimate pair. Otherwise her surname of Glass would've put her earlier. Having her near the end gave me the choice of running out of time before I got to her. I decided to let her have some lap-time though, mostly because I didn't want to discourage her too much. I liked Julia's zigzag torture method. In Savannah's case her greed was driving her forward, and my very mixed signals were the zigzags. Hopefully she'd become so confused she'd end up asking me what she should be doing. When Savannah and her partner-in-molestation (Tina) climbed onto my legs, I started talking and playing with Tina, while both girls helped themselves to my body. At the halfway point I intended to start talking to Savannah, but continue to molest Tina. When time ran out, I wouldn't have touched Savannah at all, which would definitely do a number on her head. Savannah improved on my plan considerably, by commandeering my cock for herself, covering it with her hand and rubbing it with the clear intent of getting me to cum. To her dismay it slowly got progressively softer, down to about 'half mast'. She was quite upset, and put even more effort into rubbing me even more effectively. It felt very nice, but she couldn't compete with go-softs. After about a couple of minutes (I was giving them extra time), Savannah asked, "Are you tired, Mark?" "Not at all. I'm quite fit and healthy. Are you asking because my cock's gone soft while you were rubbing it?" Most of the other girls hadn't known that was happening, so my question got their attention. "Ahh, yeah." "Maybe you missed this point in Sex Ed, so let me explain. When a guy thinks a girl is sexy, his cock gets hard. When he thinks she's not sexy, his cock goes soft. Can you remember that?" From time to time I can't resist being facetious. Savannah didn't appreciate the other girls all giggling in appreciation of my cruel sense of humor. Before Savannah could work out what to say, I said, "Tina, please rub my cock for me." I moved Savannah's hand out of the way for Tina because I like to be helpful (when I'm not too busy being facetious). Tina giggled, then moved her hand to comply. My cock very quickly got hard, encouraging her. Tina very happily let the other girls know of her success. While Tina was happily performing her task, I explained to Savannah, "I've told you several times that I don't like your superior attitude. You've got the potential to be very sexy, but you are so wrapped up in yourself that you're not pleasant company. Why did you arrogantly think the explanation for my going soft must be that I was tired? Why couldn't the reason have been you? -- "The only guys who're interested in you are guys who're willing to ignore your personality so they can take advantage of your body. There are plenty of guys like that, but I'm not the sort of guy who takes advantage of girls that way. That's probably why I don't need to, because there are plenty of girls who're willing to give themselves to me as a freely offered and appreciated gift. With you, affection and sex aren't an enjoyable part of a healthy relationship; they're an ego-trip, a power-game, bait for you to get what you want, and whatever other one-sided motives cross your mind. -- "You've made a big mistake thinking the number of guys chasing you indicates you're better than other girls. You know the guys who chase you are all assholes, so why do you take pride from their sniffing after you? If you were smart, you'd be insulted by assholes thinking they could fool you into having sex with them, because that's all they're interested in, and you know it. The way to get a good boyfriend isn't to dangle sex like bait and use it to manipulate a boy, but to find a guy you like and trust, and to be trustworthy yourself. Sex will be something that both of you will naturally want to do as a way of giving each other pleasure. Look at Tina. She's very happy that she's made me hard, and I'm very happy that she's happy. There's no power-trip or manipulation involved, just honest-to-goodness happiness. When was the last time you were truly happy with a boy, Savannah? I bet boy after boy has made you unhappy and dissatisfied. One day you'll wake up to the fact that the reason is because you're chasing the wrong boys for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. In other words, you're doing everything wrong. If you want to have a happy life, you need to spend some time having a serious look at your values. -- I turned to Tina, saying, "You're very good with your hands, sweetie. Whoever you've been practicing on is a VERY lucky boy!" "{Giggle}. I'm not very good. You've probably had hundreds of girls better than me?" The question mark (a.k.a. "fishing pole") was easy to hear. So I reassured her by answering, "I don't need to say anything to reassure you Tina. Your hand is holding the proof. You felt how quickly I got hard." "{Giggle}. I haven't done it much before." "THANK GOODNESS! I would've made a mess in the pool if you'd been ANY better! In fact, I think you have to stop, or I'll do exactly that." I lifted Tina's moderately talented hand away. I hadn't lied though. She could've easily gotten me off, even with an only moderately talented hand. She was good looking, in a bikini, sitting on my lap, and letting me rub her body. I was three-quarters of the way to blowing off even before her hand touched me. Just like I had been with every other girl. I turned to Savannah, "You can see the evidence for yourself, because of these ridiculous Speedos. You know I've had a great deal of experience with girls, and that I've got a very mature and healthy attitude to relationships. You KNOW I don't use girls. Every lover I've ever had would be overjoyed to spend more time with me. But I bet the guys you date can't claim that about their ex-lovers. I bet ALL of their ex-girlfriends hate their guts. You're using the wrong bait on the wrong guys. Think about that, especially as you know I'm telling you the truth. You've felt the proof that I don't get aroused by you, so I'm obviously not trying to use you for sex." -- Expanding my voice, I announced, "I'm sorry I've talked so much. What I said wasn't really aimed just at Savannah. I treat girls the way I do because I believe it's the best way. I also think the way most boys treat girls is very wrong, so this topic is one that bugs me. I wish I could get guys to listen to me and to grow up, but every time I try to explain how to be mature to them, they think I'm being weak and pathetic, and they try to beat me up. Guys won't listen, so I kind of got carried away explaining my thoughts to you, although I've easily seen that most of you have already got very good attitudes to guys and sex." #8: #5: #4: #1: Tina had already gotten off, but Savannah was still sitting on my leg, so I started easing her off. Savannah protested, "But you haven't felt me up yet!" #4: I was saved having to answer by all the other girls laughing at Savannah. She quickly realized she'd made a fool of herself, and started getting off. I worried that she'd been zagged too low, so I did an upward zig. I grabbed her around her waist and pulled her shoulder tightly against my chest. I theatrically moaned, "{Sigh}. The things I have to do to make girls happy!" I reached up and slid my hand into one of her bikini cups, saying, "Mmm, nice breast, Savannah." She had trouble deciding how to react; from righteous indignation to joy covered a wide range. After a few seconds she decided on, "I didn't think you liked me?" #3: #4: I answered, "I've never said you don't have a nice body. Your body is sexy, but YOU are not. Not until you find a nice guy and show him that you trust him. I don't want to repeat myself, and the last two girls have been waiting a long time, so we'll end it now. I've had my evil way with your body, the way you wanted. Time to get up now, and Julia will text you tomorrow." "Why?" "To let you know what type of car I've bought, of course. I told you before that you'd get a ride." (That was one of the little carrots I'd encouraged Savannah with.) "Ahh, yeah. I forgot. Why won't you text me?" "You've already had way too much of my time to be fair to the other girls, and I don't like being unfair, so I'll leave you to work that out for yourself. It's not hard." I started easing her off my leg, and she was too confused to fight it. #1: #5: #1: #5: #8: One of the last two girls was excited by my wonderful maturity, and wanted to praise me for my wonderful understanding of relationships. She blathered on about my being so much better than other boys. I wasn't really listening, as I was too busy rubbing the other girl's swimsuit-covered pussy and breasts. The talker made a comment about my "not using girls". Because my speech to Savannah had already been so long-winded, I'd left out one side point, and now I had a good chance to use it. I jumped in with, "To be honest, I have to confess that I was using Savannah. I spent so much time talking to her partly for her benefit, but mostly for someone else's." I had their interest, especially Savannah's. She's extremely interested in conversations that include her name; but to be fair, that applies to everyone. -- "It's VERY important to me that Carol understands those points..." I was going to say more, but so many of the listeners felt the need to compliment me that they drowned me out. Carol was sitting next to Ava, who was next to Julia, who was next to me. In other words, well away from all the sex that'd been going on. She hadn't been paying much attention to all the crap that'd been going on, but when she heard her name mentioned in many of the girls' comments she asked "What'd I miss?" Several girls explained what a wonderfully caring brother she had, and why. That'd been the extent of my plan, just another little reminder to everyone that I certainly wasn't the sort of brother who'd take advantage of his little sister sexually. Carol got some extra value out of it though. Once the girls had explained enough for Carol to understand that I was worried about her choosing the right types of boys to have relationships with (with other girls having variations in their explanations about what I'd meant), Carol cut the explanation off with, "Mark, you don't have to worry about any of that. I don't want a boyfriend. It doesn't matter how much they're impressed by my new swimsuit; it isn't going to happen. To stop you worrying in the future, I promise you I won't date a boy until I talk with you about it first. Okay?" #1: "Thanks Carol. That's a weight off my mind. I've got a list of 460 reasons to reject boys, so I'll make sure I keep it up to date for when you're ready for our talk." That was just me acting my Protective Big Brother role. It led to several laughs and jokes from the girls around us, including one comment, "I bet you'd be the ONLY boy that'd be good enough Egg." I quickly said, "Oops. Make that 461 reasons. 'Not a brother' just got added. I was assuming that was obvious, but better safe than dreadfully embarrassed." After the group joked around a bit, plus telling Carol she was so lucky to have me as her brother, Savannah came in with, "Was what you told me really for Carol?" "Savannah, you considerably underestimate my intelligence and caring. Every word I said applied to you. You should seriously think about what I said. At the same time, every word was something I wanted Carol to hear and understand. The fact that I was smart enough to word my speech so it had relevance to both of you doesn't diminish its importance to you. You repeatedly underestimate me because you keep thinking that the tricks you use so successfully on dumb and immature boys will work on me. I'm not immature, and I'm certainly not dumb, not if I'm going to finish my first college degree before I graduate high school." That provided a short distraction, and then it was time to leave the hot pool and walk back to our gear. ------- Chapter 258: Satisfying Two Appetites Monday, June 20, 2005 (Continued) Not long before we left, one of the girls asked, "When can we do this again, Mark?" Obviously she wasn't one of my regulars, or she would've asked Julia. I threw caution to the wind by taking a shot at answering it myself, "I'm busy tomorrow, because that's when I'm hoping to buy my new car." Actually it was Julia who was doing the hoping. I was too conflicted to "hope" to buy a new car. I liked the cars we'd been testing, but I didn't like the idea of spending at least $50,000 on a car. Julia had no such conflict. She seemed to be positively looking forward to it. -- "I don't know how many of you have bought houses before, but that takes a lot of work too. And we're on vacation, so planning ahead is too hard. We don't have any other recreational activities planned yet, so I suggest you keep an eye on the website. If we do anything we're happy to have other people come to, we'll mention it there." "When would be the best time to check it?" Julia answered for me, "Mark isn't on a schedule. He could post something anytime during the day or night. Maybe something will get several weeks notice, maybe it'll appear on the site as we walk out the door. It's up to you to check it as often as you want." One of the girls was even foolish enough to ask to be texted when something new was put on the site. Many of the other girls sat up, obviously very happy with that idea. Julia answered, "You've got to be joking! We don't have time to send out dozens or hundreds of texts every time..." "You can automate it, Julia. The computer can have a list of cellphone numbers and can send them all the same message whenever you want." #6: Julia wasn't impressed by the idea, "No way. That'd take me too long to manage. That website isn't for YOUR benefit, it's for Mark's, so you'll have to check it yourselves." Which pretty much killed that conversation. On the topic of my website, most of the random, girl members of the public that'd flirted with me today, I'd flirted back with, but I hadn't given them my phone number or taken theirs. I was VERY reluctant to hand out mine because I could too easily imagine that becoming a nightmare. I'd lucked into having a number that had been kept private for long enough for me to learn that keeping it that way was a good idea. I hadn't taken theirs because I knew I'd never get around to doing anything about them. I had - more accurately, Julia had - a pile of phone numbers from freshman and senior girls, as well as occasional girls like Pretty Emily (the girl I'd chatted with to kill time with in the swimwear store), and we'd done nothing useful with them. Adding to the pile was pointless. I'd just told those flirters who had particularly small bikinis over particularly large chests about my website's address and password, telling them to check it for other places I'd be in the future. They'd thought I was strange, and no doubt they'd think I was even stranger when they read what the site contained, but some of them might turn up again. After the first couple of times I'd given out my website, I talked to Julia about it. She agreed to do a document for such girls, and another to announce that the pipeline scheme was back in business. Over summer vacation girls had a choice of getting together in a group of sixteen, contacting Julia when they were ready, and in due course starting their journey through the pipeline system; or they could remain totally casual. Pipeline girls were guaranteed to have dates with me, which would get closer and closer to one-on-one dates, but they risked getting eliminated along the way. Casual girls could come to publicized group dates whenever they noticed and wanted, but they'd always be one of a crowd. Those two types of dates, plus my being able to call up individual girls, should result in a fun-filled summer for me. The website would contain a notice that carded girls should not turn up to casual dates. If they did, they'd be ignored by everybody, and we'd tell the other girls to ignore them too. It hadn't happened today, but it was obviously what had to be done. My last conversation of note before we left was with Savannah. When I'd first assigned her to Carol I'd intended to have a talk with her before we went home, but during the afternoon I'd changed my mind and had decided to ignore her as a way of making her feel even more insecure. She needed it, as she was far too secure about her sex appeal. As departure time grew nearer, I could see Savannah become very aware of my lack of interest in her, and how much competition she had, and her behavior improved. She started acting willing and helpful, rather than slowly obedient as she'd been most of the day, and she kept looking at me to see if I'd noticed. As she was pretending to be willing, I pretended not to notice. I started the slow process of saying my goodbyes, talking briefly to most of the girls individually. To Savannah I made a compliment about how her white bikini suited her, and joked about her having to do a lot more swimming practice before she could beat me in a race (she'd tried, and had been soundly beaten). Then I'd moved on to talk with the next girl. Almost every girl got a kiss, but they varied from tonsil suckers with Alexis, Pat and Katelin, through to light kisses on the cheek for the two girls with boyfriends, who were sour about even that. Most girls got a hug and a kiss on the lips, but not scorcher. Savannah didn't get a kiss though. When I should've stepped forward to hug and kiss her, I moved to the next girl instead. After several seconds, Savannah had to interrupt, "Ahh, Mark. What about me?" "What about you?" "You know. Me doing what Carol wanted all day. I've proved myself." "I'll ask Carol about that when I've got nothing better to do." "Ahh, can't you ask her now. That way we could plan something for the two of us." "Savannah, I'm trying to say goodbye to everyone so I can go to Julia's and make love with Julia, Ava and Leanna. You don't honestly think I'd rather stand around talking to you than doing that, do you? It's exactly that overblown opinion of yourself that makes you NOT worth talking to. Every time you behave like this, you're convincing me that you can't live up to your potential. You are NOT the most important thing in my life. I've got to make some serious decisions tonight about my $3 million mansion. I suppose you think I should rush multimillion dollar decisions so I can spend time thinking about you?" "Ahh, no. It's okay; I'll wait." "There was never any doubt that you were going to wait, because I wasn't going to decide until I was ready. The only question was whether you'd learned what you needed to be an important part of my life, and it's obvious that you haven't." Savannah looked too depressed, which worried me, because she might give up before my soccer team had a chance to fuck her, so I added, "I'll probably be in contact in a couple of days, presuming you still want a ride in whatever new car I buy?" "Oh YES! I'd LOVE that!" exclaimed a very relieved potential fuck-toy. "Good. Obviously that depends on what Carol says about you first, but one of us will get back to you sooner or later." "Oh." Actually, there was one more very important conversation just before we left: Gina asked if we could stop on the way home and get some ingredients for my dinner. You know my attitude to the importance of good nutrition ("just so long as it's often and plentiful"), so you won't be surprised by the tone of my answer, "Absolutely. Dinner is the MOST IMPORTANT meal of the day." "I thought that was breakfast?" asked Gina. "Yes, that's right. Breakfast is ALSO the most important meal of the day. It's right up there with lunch and dinner." Gina was confused by the amount of laughter I got, until Victoria (from Group 1A) helpfully, although incorrectly, explained, "Mark does a lot of exercise to look like that, so he needs BIG meals." "Oh, of course! {Giggle}, I was silly. Do you need any special foods, Mark, or are there things I should avoid?" "Thanks for asking, but my only need is for a LOT of food. About twice as much as most guys my age would eat." I only needed about 40% more, but I wanted leftovers because Gina is Italian. "I've got three hours of training this evening, so I'll only have a light meal before that, and take some with me." Thinking about her making a lot of food made me think of something, so I asked, "Do you enjoy cooking, Gina?" "Sure, it's good fun." "You can refuse this if you like, but how do you feel about cooking a meal for Julia's family, so her mother can have an easy evening when she comes home?" "No problem. If I'm cooking for you, I might as well cook for more. How many?" I looked at Julia, to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong. Julia seemed happy, so I asked her, "About eight people, counting me as two?" "Sounds about right," agreed Julia. "Is that all right, Gina?" "Sure. No problem." I pulled out my wallet and gave her some money, until she protested, "This is too much Mark." "I don't think you understand: dinner is the MOST important meal of the day, haha." #1: I added, "I'm overdoing that joke, Gina. I don't want you to feel pressured about making a special meal. Cook whatever you like. My only need is for a good quantity of food; I'm easy to please quality-wise. In fact I'm usually so hungry that everything tastes delicious." "I don't feel pressured; I like cooking..." #8: #2: " ... Do you like Italian food?" "Yes, and Italian girls too." Julia added, "Mark's idea of Heaven is a pretty girl cooking him a big meal." #8: #5: #2: #6: I said, "Let me give you another $20, Gina. I want to make absolutely sure you buy enough food for everyone. You can give the change to Carol. She's saving up to buy the rest of her swimsuit." #6: #4: #All: <{Raspberry}.> In the parking lot, I asked Ava to take Gina and Leanna in her car, via the stores for Gina to get whatever she wanted. I wanted just Julia and Carol in my car because I wanted to talk with them about some family stuff, and it also gave me time to swing via my home to "pick up something I need for later." I was referring to my gi for Aikido. I called it "something" because I preferred not to tell people I was studying a martial art, in case they thought I liked fighting. It'd also give Leanna a chance to calm down, as she'd been getting VERY excited about having wild sex shortly, not helped by some of the other girls winding her up; especially Alexis, who seems to like winding up helpless victims. It entertains everyone, but can sometimes be a little on the cruel side for the victim. As the soon-to-be-supplanted car was getting underway, Carol and Julia started having a little rave about how much fun they'd had, and how successful the afternoon had been. I'd enjoyed myself too, and had also thought it'd gone very well as a group date, so I joined their little rave for a couple of minutes. Then I cut them short to mention something that it'd be dangerous to forget. I warned, "Carol, you'd better not let Mom or Dad see your wonderful new bikini until after the marriage situation is resolved. They might get all suspicious about us." "You mean they might suspect I want to tempt you into having sex with me. Oh no, what a terrible idea, haha. Don't worry, I wasn't going to show it to them yet." "Good. I'm VERY worried about getting their agreement for our relationship. By the way, if you bought your bikini to tempt me into sex, then that was a TOTALLY unnecessary expenditure. If I was any more tempted, I wouldn't be safe to drive." "I'm glad to hear it. Actually, I'm not sure why I chose a suit like that one. Partly to make you happy, but other reasons too." #5: I said, "I could happily spend an hour discussing your wonderful bikini," Carol and Julia laughed at my ridiculousness for a few seconds, which I thought was very unfair of them because they often spend HOURS talking about clothes, "but there's something else even MORE important to discuss, as amazing as that seems. It's my intention, assuming Mom and Dad consent to your being Julia's and my wife, that you start preparing for that role. One of the ways is for you to be the cook for my Monday evening dinners. When Gina was first at a loose end when she had to wait for Leanna to finish with me, I was intending for you to cook my dinner this evening with Gina helping you. By the sounds of it, she's a good cook, so I thought it'd be better for her to be the head cook and for you to learn from her. Ideally you should be able to reproduce her meal by yourself some other night, especially if it's a good one. I like Italian food, because it's very filling... We discussed it for a while, Carol being pessimistic and worried, exactly as she'd been in 3B-land. I had more things to talk about, so I just said, "Carol, the mothers will help you, depending on which house you're cooking in. But more reassuring than that, is remember how I knew about your earlobes? I also KNOW you will do this well. Your worrying about your managing those meals is as unnecessary as your worrying that you weren't INCREDIBLY sexy and beautiful in that GORGEOUS bikini you bought." "{Giggle}. You really liked it that much?" #3: #2: #8: I answered Carol's fishing expedition, "It was EXTREMELY cruel of you to parade around in front of me all afternoon. There should be a law against tormenting brothers like that." "It was even WORSE for me, seeing you in that little suit..." "Thanks for telling me that, Carol. I hate the idea of tormenting you, so out of concern for your peace of mind, I'll wear a pair of my big board shorts from now on." Carol and Julia both laughed at my threat, telling me that I no longer had any pairs of board shorts. "We tidied your closet," explained Carol, laughing. "They weren't in my closet; they were in my drawers." "We tidied those too. Mom said we had to get rid of any trash we didn't want to move into the new house. There were piles of trash in your room, haha." #3: #6: #8: #7: #2: I decided to play with my girls' heads. I kept a very sincere looking expression on my face, while I said, "Thank you. I'm glad you're being so thoughtful and considerate toward me." My unexpected reaction caused them both to look at me VERY suspiciously. Suspicion was the least they should feel, but probably the most punishment that I could inflict, what with them having no shame. -- "That subject being taken care of so well, I have another point to discuss. It'll take longer to discuss than this ride will take, but at least we can make a start, and you can think about it while I'm at Aikido so we can resume it when I return. Several instances of it came up during the conversations I had with girls this afternoon. Quite a few of those conversations were good ones: very sincere, showing their true personalities and thoughts, etc. Carina probably produced the best example of the point I have in mind. She's talked to her parents about me quite a lot. About you too Julia." "I know; she told me." "Okay. Her parents told her she's got her sights set too high to think she can win me, and they warned her not to get her heart broken when she falls short. She asked me VERY sincerely, not to break her heart. Linda also made some..." "I don't need any more examples; I'm sure I understand what type of comments they all were. Why did Carina ask you not to break her heart?" "Ahh. I don't know how you do it, but all of a sudden the obvious answer seems naïve and silly. I was going to say, 'Because she didn't want her heart broken, ' but no doubt that's wrong for some mysterious reason?" "If she was truly worried about having her heart broken, she'd red card herself. She said it to increase her chances of being successful with you, by appealing to your best instincts. She was tugging on your heartstrings. -- "Alexis tugs on your cock. You like her because she's no-strings-attached sexual fun. Savannah is incompetent at tugging on anything and she tries to attach as many strings as she can to her own sex appeal..." "I know what you mean about Savannah. When you said that my idea of Heaven was a pretty girl cooking me a big meal, Savannah suddenly took notice. I expect a dinner invitation from her soon, now that you've given her the idea. She had no idea of any Plan B until she heard you suggest one." "That sounds like her. My main point is that all of the girls were doing their best to increase their chances with you. Some were doing it by flirting. Actually ALL of them were doing it by flirting. I take credit for that, because you looked so good in those bright yellow Speedos..." "I don't know what I'd do without you Julia. Although retaining my dignity would be good." "It's more important to be successful. Other than flirting, they all tried whatever else they could think of. Carina can be complimented for doing it well, judging by her comment's effect on you, but it doesn't necessarily mean that she's automatically a wonderful girl that you should go out of your way to protect. She might be a wonderful girl, or she might simply have been smart enough to use an approach that worked well with you - like Dakota's tears did - or she might've just gotten lucky. You're reading far too much into a few comments by a few girls when they were doing their best to improve their chances with you. I heard you make several caring comments to Savannah. Should I think you've fallen in love with her?" "Haha. Okay, that's a VERY convincing point! My opinion of Savannah is even lower now than it was this morning, which wasn't easy for her to achieve. I'm only using her to practice..." "You don't need to explain. You can use her for whatever you want. That applies to any girl as far as I'm concerned, but it ESPECIALLY applies to Savannah. Let's stick to the main point. Every girl was trying to manipulate you today. Not necessarily to your disadvantage or with selfish intent, but it was manipulation. They had plenty of time to think about it, because you were usually busy with someone else. If you're talking to someone, and they say something that dramatically changes your view of them to the better, you need to ask yourself whether that comment might've been honest or a deliberate trick. You usually won't be able to tell, so you need to suspend judgment until you get more evidence." "You're absolutely right. I just forgot to be suspicious, which was particularly stupid of me." "You're a trusting guy, especially if the person you're talking to seems nice. I know you don't trust girls like Savannah, but you should be more careful about girls that seem nice. You're a sucker for nice, and girls are a great deal trickier than you're giving them credit for. There are nice girls around. There's a very nice one sitting next to you now," (Carol), "but there are even more girls who know how to behave nicely when it suits them." "Tricky things, people." "Very. Hopefully you'll learn to be the trickiest." Carol said, "At the speed Mark's learning, that's not going to take long. I was AMAZED at how well you did today, Mark. You used to be a mess when any of my friends talked to you, even one-on-one at home. You did okay with the Cuties yesterday, but you were fantastic today. You didn't get flustered, and you had them jumping through hoops for you. I couldn't believe how much sexual stuff you got away with, and they were THANKING you for it. You're so good at getting sex from girls, I don't think I'll even try to resist you, haha." After we'd laughed at Carol's joke, I asked, "Carol could see that I was tricking the girls. Ava said the same thing to me. I'm wondering whether my tricks are too obvious?" "You weren't tricking anybody," answered Julia. "You were letting them trick themselves. Except for your deliberate manipulation of Savannah. Most of them won't want to stop fooling themselves for as long as they have hope. Some will give up - maybe even a lot will give up - but there are plenty more. If you're worried about them seeing the light, the best thing would be to addle them even more by putting your cute butt into an even smaller swimsuit. What..." "STOP right there! I am NOT putting my butt - regardless of how cute you claim it is - into an even smaller swimsuit. I'd spend the whole afternoon scared to move in case all the homosexuals saw me..." Both Carol and Julia started laughing. "I'm SERIOUS! I'm not..." LOUDER laughter from my considerably-less-than-loyal supporters. Fortunately we arrived at home after only a few seconds of it. As I pulled up, Carol said something very, VERY BAD! "I'll come in with you. I need a change of clothes." "Carol, I'm VERY HORNY. I've been looking at sexy girls in bikinis ALL day! I want to run in, grab my gi, then run out because I'm desperate to have sex. But if you go inside to look for a change of clothes, it'll take so long we won't get out of here before Aikido starts..." Julia interrupted, "Don't be silly, Mark. Carol will be quick, and I'll come in to help." "{Groan}." I ran inside, hoping to convey a desperate sense of urgency. It took me only a few seconds to get inside and grab what I needed. I met the girls coming in as I was going out, Julia was saying, "But if you get the blue top, then you'll have to change..." "You'd BETTER be winding me up! I'll wait VERY IMPATIENTLY in the car." I started the car, backed into our driveway, got out and opened the two car doors, then started pacing back and forth. After a truly remarkably short time - twenty eight minutes short of the thirty I'd expected - they walked out of the front door, Julia saying, "I still think you should bring the denim skirt ... Hi Mark. Are you waiting for us?" "GRRR!" I got into the car, put my seatbelt on, and as this was an emergency, started the engine even before the girls were in the car. Fortunately for them, they didn't fool around, getting straight into the car and doing up their seatbelts. Whereupon I put the car into gear and rapidly accelerated out of our driveway and down the street, very quickly reaching all the way up to the speed limit. Julia taunted, "I told you we wouldn't be long. I don't know what you were worried about." "I was worried about you taking even a quarter of the usual time it takes! Thank you for accomplishing a major miracle." "Girls are very efficient. That's why we're so good at multitasking. Who was it that said the conversation about Carina's comment would take hours?" "Argh! Will you stop being right; it's VERY annoying." On the way to her place, Julia said, "Carol, when you're in the kitchen with Gina and Mom arrives, introduce her to Gina, then casually tell her that Mark's in my room having sex with me, Ava and Gina's friend. If you do it very casually, it'll make a big impression on Gina. Word will get around that there are no parental hassles in having sex with Mark." "Okay. That'll be fun." As it turned out, Vanessa was already at home. Ava, Leanna and Gina hadn't arrived yet. Julia took Vanessa aside quickly explained what was going to be going on in her bedroom and in the kitchen when the other girls arrived. I was amused by Julia asking permission for what we intended in the kitchen, but assuming no permission was required for the bedroom mini-orgy. Vanessa was fine with both, especially the kitchen. "I'm always happy to have an evening off. It doesn't tread on any toes if I hang around to see if Gina's recipe is interesting?" Julia answered, "That's perfectly fine. The only goals we have are that enough food gets cooked for everyone, and that Carol starts to learn how to cook for us. Has anything happened on getting permission for our marriage yet?" "No," answered Vanessa. "I'll make a time for that with Felicity soon. Thursday or Friday evening, depending on what their plans are. I've started the property negotiations..." "Goody!" I said, demonstrating yet again how mature I am. " ... The one that matters the most is the Peoria Road property. I contacted the agent and told her the sellers need to come back to us with a real price. The market has no interest in it at 2.9 and neither do we. Now we wait for them to respond." "You don't know how long that'll take?" "It's mostly out of our control, Mark. In real estate purchases there are usually several back-and-forth stages, as each offer and counteroffer is considered. Neither side should show impatience because it signals weakness. In this case the sellers should act quickly though, because they know we're in negotiation with other properties." Julia asked, "We are?" "Yes. All four on our shortlist. If our preferred property falls through, we don't want to waste time starting cold, and it also puts a lot of pressure on the sellers. All the realtors have been told I'm a negotiation agent acting on behalf of my client, who'll be choosing between the signed up properties when his other commitments give him time to inspect them, probably in a couple of weeks or so." I asked, "Doesn't signing up for a property mean we have to buy it?" "Not if it's a conditional contract. All the contracts will have a clause inserted that they're conditional on my client's inspection and approval. I've already sent a copy of that clause to each of the agents. They hate working like this, but that works to our advantage too." Ava's car arrived, so we had to stop the conversation. ^ [Later Vanessa had a chance to explain. The agents hated doing business our way because all three of them (one agent represented two of the properties) had to do the full amount of work (or double the amount), but only one of them would get a commission. Vanessa had rather cheekily called all four sellers and explained that their agent could do a substandard job out of laziness or lack of confidence that their property would sell. She'd told each seller that she'd let them know every time she did something with their agent, such as giving him a new counteroffer, so they could keep track of their agent's performance. They should also let Vanessa know when they did something that was to go the other way. The main reason for this was so Vanessa (pretending to be an impartial, independent agent) could build relationships with the sellers, to be exploited when the pressure came on at the end of the negotiation process. It was also possible, although very unlikely in the time frame involved, that an agent might do such a bad job that the sellers could cancel their contract with him/her, letting us do a private sale. Saving the cost of the agent's commission could be used to reduce the purchase price. It put time and financial pressure on the sellers. If their property wasn't under contract at a competitive price when the mysterious client (I was unnamed, only described as "an important man") decided to inspect, then they'd miss out. It also gave us two negotiation cycles. Vanessa could beat them down as much as she could, then I would inspect and find that none of the properties were value for money. Whereupon Vanessa could make an unconditional offer (ideally on the Peoria Road property, if that was still in the running), at something like $100,000 less than before. That it was an unconditional cash purchase that could go ahead immediately should encourage them to accept the lower price. This is more or less what happened over the next couple of weeks, so I won't give daily progress reports.] ^ Ava, Leanna and Gina came inside. Leanna looked particularly uncomfortable at the sight of Vanessa. Julia helped by appending on to the end of the introductions, "Mom; Mark, Ava, Leanna and I are going to be having sex in my room for the next hour. Mark's very horny from having several dozen girls flirt with him all afternoon, and he'll be going for it flat out, so please take messages for me if anyone calls." "Sure. Sounds like you're in for a good time, Leanna." "Ahh, yeah." Because she'd find it even more embarrassing, I grabbed Leanna and threw her over one of my shoulders, saying, "Stop standing around talking to my girlfriend's mother, Leanna. I want to take you upstairs for some good, hard sex." "What about your change?" asked Gina. "I've got my hands full Gina. Give it to Carol please." I grabbed my gi and bag of snack bars, then walked away, leaving Julia and Ava to follow behind. Ava warned, "You're going to get it now, Leanna, haha." Leanna would indeed get it, repeatedly, as Julia's prediction that I'd "go for it flat out" was going to prove very accurate. I was VERY horny! I threw Leanna on the bed, quickly stripped myself and then her, letting her get some good looks at my body and hard cock while I was at it, to start her mood heading in the right direction. Then I dived between her legs. Her first, and pretty much last, coherent words were, "Ahh, no one has ever ... Oh!" Between my actions, and Julia and Ava going for it together next to her, Leanna was soon wet enough. I picked her up, rotated her around so her head was at the foot of the bed, then dropped her back on the bed again. I needed to change ends to get a rubber out of a drawer, and that was an impressive way of doing it. I quickly put one on, then started a no-nonsense missionary fuck. Missionary is one of my favorite positions (my other favorites are all the other positions), especially because it gives reasonable access to the girl's clit and breasts, while allowing her to see my body pounding into her. I hammered, diddled and caressed, getting her to her first orgasm as fast as I could. As soon as she'd finished screaming, I flipped her over and started fucking her doggy style. This is one of my favorite positions, as it's easy to diddle the girl while holding her up. She was already addled enough that I could easily keep my other hand behind me while I used NP on her asshole, just a small amount of penetration to titillate her further (although "titillation" seems a rather inappropriate word to use about that area. Maybe I should've said, "to tickle her fancy"). As soon as Leanna's second orgasm hit her, I changed to Julia. Thanks to Ava's good work, Julia was more than ready. I removed the rubber then went straight in. By the time Leanna was noticing what was going on, Julia was halfway to her climax and I was pounding away to get her there as fast as possible. Leanna had been lying on her side watching me in action, and she said something like "Wow" when Julia went off, although I couldn't tell for sure because Julia's climaxes drown out everything. I pulled out of Julia, reapplied the rubber, moved a couple of knee-steps to the side, lifted Leanna's upper-leg, put one arm under her hips to raise her to the right height, then inserted myself. "Again?" asked a shocked Leanna. I answered non-verbally, repeatedly and vigorously. Ava was next, then Leanna again, then Julia, then Leanna again, etc., as fast as I could go. During the second half Julia had decided that Leanna was okay with girl on girl action, because Julia and Ava started working on her. From then on, the three girls basically had sex together while I fucked one or other of them, except that Leanna was so overwhelmed she couldn't pull her weight, or lick her weight either. At the end of my last fuck with Leanna, I let myself cum, then I discarded the rubber and fucked Julia again, letting myself cum once more. It felt MIGHTY good to get rid of some of the afternoon's built up pressure. Now that I'd finished fucking the three girls, I had a very difficult moral dilemma. It was obviously very important that as many Italian girls as possible know how incredibly impressive I am, so I was tempted to have a very quick shower, dress in my gi, wrap Leanna in a towel, then carry her downstairs. That way Gina could see how utterly fucked out Leanna was, so she'd hopefully spread the word among her Italian girlfriends/cousins/sisters that Mark Anderson should be pursued and tempted with every possible inducement (i.e., sex and food). Unfortunately, it seemed too mean to take Leanna downstairs, as she needed a while to recover. An alternative was for me to send Gina upstairs to 'help' Leanna. But that would be a terrible thing to do if the cooking was at a delicate stage. I couldn't think of a good way of achieving my goals of a good dinner and Gina seeing Leanna in her current state. #7: #2: #1: I told Julia and whoever else wanted to listen, "I need to get ready. I'll have a quick shower then head downstairs. You don't mind that I leave you here?" Julia waved me away, "Go ahead, Mark. We'll stay here in case Leanna wants any more sex." "{Groan}. Please tell me, {groan}, you're joking?" "Haha. Yeah. We'll help you shower when you're ready to move. So what did you think of your time with Mark?" "I can't move! Is he always like that?" "He's usually much better, but he didn't have enough time today. You'd have been much more impressed if we'd had several hours." Meanwhile I'd put my snack bars away: a few in a bedside drawer, the rest of the large bag of them into the back of my closet. I put on my robe, grabbed my gi and some casual clothes (I'd realized it probably wouldn't be a good idea to eat messy Italian food in my pure white gi), and headed out the door. On the way out, I said, "Thanks girls. That took the edge off nicely. Rest up Julia and Ava, because I'm looking forward to having a longer session when I get back." "{Groan}," from Leanna, in empathy for the other girls. Ava said, "Super! I'll go home for dinner, but can I come back to sleep here tonight please?" I unfortunately didn't have to juggle Carol or Ava in this dimension (it was "fortunate" that there was no juggling required to have sex, but "terribly unfortunate" that there was no having sex with Carol, those two adding up to "unfortunately"), so I could easily say, "Sure. That'd be great. I'll be fully rested by then." Julia said, "Have your shower. You don't want to miss your dinner." Never a truer word has ever been uttered, so I was outta there. I could hear the laughter coming from the kitchen while I was still walking down the stairs. I stood in the doorway, adopted a stern expression (not easy, given the wonderful aromas), interrupting them to say, "Excuse me. I'm concerned about the excessive laughter. My dinner is a serious matter; not to be taken casually or joked about." Gina said, "We've finished your dinner. We're cooking something else now." #4: Carol said, "We're having a lot of fun. Gina's showing us some of her mother's tricks." "That's great. In my experience, there's no one trickier than mothers. I don't want to be rude, but I have to leave soon. Could I have the first installment of my dinner now please?" Vanessa said, "You know where everything is, Carol. You get it ready for Mark." "Okay." While Carol was busy on her very important task, Gina asked, "Did you have a good time with Leanna?" "Absolutely. She's nice, pretty and she would've gone along with whatever I wanted, so how could any guy not have a great time! Leanna had a great time too. Several great times, so she's pretty shattered at the moment." "Several? Even with three girls?" "She was excited before we started, so it didn't take long to get her in the mood. If you're not doing anything essential at the moment, you can pop upstairs to ask her yourself. Turn left at the top of the stairs and look for a door with a sign on it." "Won't they be coming down soon?" "Leanna won't, not unless someone carries her. She can barely move at the moment. I don't think she's used to having sex with someone as fit as me." "Wow. This I've gotta see. Vanessa, can you keep stirring the pots?" "Sure. Go check on your friend." I was almost sorry that Gina wasn't in the room when I had my first mouthful of dinner, because I wanted to kiss her in appreciation. The food didn't look like anything special, just pasta and small pieces of meat mixed together, but the sauce was VERY delicious. Vanessa and Carol agreed with me. And in reply to my urgent inquiry, they confirmed that they had the recipe. Carol even said, "With the right ingredients, it's quite easy. I'll make it at home one night to show Mom." "EXCELLENT idea. Please let me know when, and I'll make sure I'm there." We chatted while I finished my small dinner, although not as small as it should've been, because I had seconds. There was heaps of it, because the Williamses were having it for dinner too. I asked, "Why are you cooking something else then? NOT that there's ANYTHING wrong with doing more cooking, especially if it tastes as good as what I just had." Vanessa answered, "We'd finished the first dish and Gina said we had enough ingredients for her to show us another one." Carol added, "And she thought you might like something different when you came back." "What a LOVELY girl!" Vanessa had just gotten Carol to make me up a couple of plastic containers to take to Aikido, when Gina returned. She clearly wanted to comment on Leanna's state, but that wasn't as important as my praising her food, so I jumped in first with several, very enthusiastic praises. I finished with, "You learned that recipe from your Mother, right?" "Yeah. She's a good cook." "She certainly is. Now listen very carefully because this is important. I want you to go home this evening and start picking your mother's brains. Learn every single recipe she's got, make copies of all her cookbooks, and then give me a call. We'll get married the next day." Gina wouldn't take that seriously, but it certainly wasn't the type of joke I'd use on Leanna. More often than not girls get very strange after they've had a good fucking. They fall in love and get all mushy. It wears off fairly quickly, but if I was a gambler, I'd put good money on Leanna's saying "I love you" if I went upstairs now. #5: Gina laughed, "I don't think I'm brave enough for that. Leanna said it was like having sex with a tornado." "She's very confused if she thought that was a blowjob, haha." We joked around for a few more minutes, talking about food and sex; topics close to my heart, both emotionally and anatomically. I could see the subject was on her mind, I was certainly happy to have it come up, and I didn't want her to have the wrong idea, so I said, "Gina, remember before the RPS competition that Julia said the winner got an hour's 'wild, passionate, bunny sex' with me? So that's what I gave Leanna. If the deal had been an hour's soft, gentle lovemaking, that's what I would've done instead. Leanna's overwhelmed now, but what I did gave her the best long-term memories. You don't have to be scared of me. If you and I had sex, I'd be as vigorous or gentle as you wished. I've got the impression that you've been thinking about asking for that?" "Umm, yeah, but you're right that I was scared. I don't think I should ask you though. My parents would kill me if they found out I'd had sex." "But you entered the RPS competition?" "Yeah, I got too excited. All the other girls were doing it, and you looked very good in those Speedos." "Okay. Just so long as you're no longer scared of me. I'd better get going. Thanks for the wonderful cooking. Are you okay to wait for Leanna to get moving, or would you prefer me to drop you home now?" "I'll wait, thanks." So I gave her a goodbye kiss, and then a thank-you-for-the-food kiss (it's like a goodbye kiss, but even more appreciative). I got Carol to accompany me out to the car, so I could make sure she understood that my marrying Gina joke was a joke. Carol laughed at me, which is what I'd expected. Better safe and laughed at, than sorry. Then I thought to ask her, "How are you getting home? Do you want me to give you a lift now?" Carol shook her head, "I want to stay to taste what we're cooking. There are plenty of people who can take me home. Don't worry about it." Aikido was particularly good. Sensei took me through the basic forms in the static way he'd first taught them to me, then we did them in the very fluid way the advanced class did. That was a lot more fun, and better Aikido too. It didn't take Sensei long to comment, "Your ki is very strong." Sensei, and everyone else as far as I know, can't sense ki well enough to measure it directly, or get even a vague idea about it directly. He can only judge its strength by its effects, which are much more apparent when we do techniques on the move. "I believe so, Sensei. I did a lot of ki practice when I was stuck in the hospital, including a great deal of kiatsu on Prof. That's the guy who was kidnapped with me." "Do you think your kiatsu was effective?" "I'm sure it was. Nothing dramatic, but he was pretty sick, so every little bit helped." I decided against telling Sensei that I'd taken a stab (pun intended) at quantifying the increased healing rate back in 3B-land, when I'd sliced my, Julia's and Carol's hands. I knew people get weird about healing, so it might be best not to tell him that I thought my kiatsu increased healing rates about 30%. We resumed training, transitioning all the static forms I'd learned into their fluid versions. Fluid training had a lot more variation, as Sensei could attack me from different directions and at different speeds, so I had to learn to adapt the technique to suit the circumstances. At our break, Sensei gave me a copy of the draft for the article 'we' (actually he) had written about External Ki Projection, telling me, "I will submit it to the better magazines when you have reviewed it." I almost told him that whatever he'd written was okay with me, but there was no harm in my reading it, so I did that while we were eating the food I'd brought. He enjoyed the food too; another compliment for Gina. I don't think I'm a particularly fast reader, so to save time I started one eyeball at the top of the page, and the other halfway down, so each had to read only half a page before I could move onto the next page. It was safe as Sensei could see only one of my eyes. It was a bit disjointed, but I understood the material well enough that I didn't have any real trouble. I got to the end, then told Sensei, "This is VERY well written. Like I told you before, English is my worst subject at school. I couldn't write anything decent if my life depended on it, but I can recognize that this is excellent. It lays everything out very clearly and logically. I can't think of a single word I'd dare suggest you change. My only comment is that it seems very long for an article. You've covered a great deal of ground." (From the invention of the idea through to issues senseis should be aware of when teaching it and suggestions for new types of techniques.) "Yes it is. Because you want it to be submitted anonymously, it is easier to send it all in one submission..." "How are you going to guarantee anonymity?" "I am going to put all the submissions to the various magazines into one parcel and send it to my son in London. He will mail them in their individual envelopes from there. I have used English rather than American spelling, to reinforce that origin." "I didn't even notice that. It's only 'color' and words like 'organize' that they spell wrong, isn't it?" "Haha. No, there are many more of their own words that the English choose to spell incorrectly. Leaving your linguistic patriotism to one side, I agree that what we have written is too long to be a single article. Some magazines may choose to increase the size of their issue to encompass it, others may choose to split it over multiple issues, or maybe to condense it, as they see fit. I am unconcerned, as I am sure it will quickly appear in its entirety on many online sites, and will rapidly become widely known through word-of-mouth. Because it is a discrete and simple concept, it should spread easily. -- "In case you wonder, because of your request for anonymity I am not teaching it to anyone yet; not even to you. I will pretend to learn about it when I read about it." "That's great. Thanks." "You are happy to submit the article as is?" "More than happy. I think you've done an excellent job. When school restarts I'm going to be tempted to bring you my English homework, haha." "Last chance to have your name attached to it?" "No thanks. I'm not the least bit tempted. I'd rather not submit it at all than have my name on it." Sensei broached the subject of my kidnapping. He, like everybody else, was curious about it. He's a very nice guy, so I answered more patiently. Not necessarily more informatively about some aspects though. As he's a nice guy, he stopped his questions when he saw that I preferred not to talk about it. We got back to our training. ------- Chapter 259: A Girl Accuses Me of Using Her for Sex (Oh, the Injustice!) Monday, June 20, 2005 (Continued) I'd called Mom before Aikido to tell her, "I'll be staying the night at the Williams' as I want to show Julia something first thing in the morning." I headed to Julia's after Aikido. As I walked toward the front door, I was amused to see a multitude of female heads through the kitchen window. Julia met me at the door, laughingly telling me the explanation. Soon after I'd left for Aikido, Vanessa had called my mom to say they had too much food, and they needed help to eat it. So my family had come over for dinner. Gina and Leanna had checked with their parents then stayed for dinner too. Last and not least - in terms of girth and importance - Gina's Mom had come over about an hour ago. She'd intended just to collect Gina and Leanna, but she was still holding forth in Vanessa's kitchen, waving a large spoon around and giving more cooking lessons to a very appreciative audience. I was introduced to Majella as Julia's very hungry and ravenous boyfriend. Which was an EXCELLENT introduction, because Majella appeared to consider it a personal challenge. I rushed upstairs to get changed into something suitable for eating in. Clearly a great deal of eating was coming my way, as I'd noticed that the stove was covered with steaming pots, which was a WONDERFUL thing to see and smell! On my return to Heaven, I quickly let Majella know that her previous audience hadn't come close to showing her what "appreciative" really meant. My joining the men - wherever they were - never occurred to even one of my minds. In truth, much of my enjoyment came from the mood. The women were laughing, joking and having a good time. As the only male in the room, I was singled out for special treatment, and was 'forced' to taste everything. Sometimes repeatedly, when I cunningly said I wasn't sure what I thought. Mostly they were cooking sauces, so Vanessa and Mom could divide them up and keep them in their fridges or freezers until needed. There was some bulky food though, what Gina had been making when I'd left, so that was mostly what I ate. It didn't take Majella long to notice that Leanna's attitude to me was not what it should have been toward someone else's boyfriend. Leanna was doing her best to hide it, but not nearly well enough (I'm pretty sure all mothers go to advanced secret classes to learn how to spot things like that). The best thing was to explain right away. Not with the truth, obviously, but with a cover story explained loudly so everyone would know how to act. I said, "Ahh, I see you're just like my mother Majella; not much gets past you. Leanna and I used to be in 8th grade together, and there was some chemistry between us back then..." #4: " ... We were both at the Aquatic Center this afternoon. Unfortunately Julia makes me wear the most ridiculous pair of bright yellow Speedos, and I think the glare off them has temporarily addled Leanna..." To my surprise, Vanessa interrupted with, "Felicity, when was the last time you had a good look at Mark's body?" Mom answered, "Umm. I guess a couple of months ago when he was doing sit-ups for Julia in our living room. He was only wearing a pair of underwear then." #1: #7: #5: Vanessa said, "Strip down to your underwear please, Mark." Julia giggled first, which gave everyone else permission to do likewise. A permission I ignored. Even my previous favorite mother, Majella, was laughing at my reaction. When I got a chance, I asked, "Ahh. Why Vanessa? Not that I don't thank you for the opportunity to strip in front of a room full of women." "So we can see your body. Especially your mother. Julia tells me your physique has improved noticeably recently." "I could show Mom in another room." #3: #4: #8 : #4: I added, "Besides, I've been training for the last three hours, so I'm very smelly. That'd be a bad thing to unleash in a kitchen." "I know you don't sweat much when you exercise." Addressing the room, Vanessa asked, "Who does NOT think Mark should strip down to his underwear?" #4: Julia helped (her mother, not me), by pointing out, "You've been parading around in front of hundreds of people in your Speedos all afternoon. This is no different. Come on." #5: #1: "Can't I at least leave my pants on?" #5: Julia answered my plea with the expected amount of shame and sympathy, "Of course not! They're covering the best area, {giggle}." "{Sigh}. I wonder how old you have to be to sign up to be a monk. I like the idea of living in a building with high walls to keep females out." Julia reached up and started pulling down the zip of my tracksuit jacket. Accepting the inevitable, I did as 'requested' (using the word facetiously and forlornly). I pulled my T-shirt off, Julia helpfully took it from me (i.e., snatched it from my hands), and Majella exclaimed, "Mamma Mia!" It was such a cliché that I laughed. I realized it was also a good way of stalling, so I asked her, "Do Italians really say that? I thought it was mostly a joke." Julia added, "You haven't seen anything yet, Majella. Wait until you see him in just his underwear. Come on Mark." Julia held out her hand impatiently. It wasn't worth trying to resist. It never had been, right from when I'd first tried to resist. Females can be literally merciless. I pulled down my tracksuit pants very carefully, making sure that my underwear didn't budge. #8: Even Mom was impressed by my physique. Vanessa got me to do sit-ups in the middle of the kitchen floor, while the females gathered around and leered at me, making comments I'd rather not have heard, including Majella exclaiming, "Gina! Stop looking at him there!" "YOU stop looking there too. I saw you!" Julia defended her new acquaintance - she hadn't defended anyone recently so she had defensiveness to spare - "Mark's been wearing a swimsuit smaller than those underwear all afternoon, Majella. Hundreds of girls have been staring at him 'there' for hours. Looking doesn't do any harm, and Mark's not the type of guy to act on their interest. You can see how modest he is." "How can he be modest with a body like that?" Then Vanessa got me to turn over and do push-ups. They were better, because I didn't have to look at anyone. I thought 'there' would be safely out of sight, but they simply changed the body part under discussion, and started commenting on my ass. They went back to discussing my body. A minute into the discussion, Julia agreed, "Yes, he's VERY strong. In the pools, he was throwing us higher into the air than any other guys could to their girlfriends, and some of those guys were big, strong, college guys." Majella asked, "Did he throw you too, Gina?" Gina answered loudly, "Did he ever! He sent me flying. And before you ask, I'm STILL a virgin! There's nothing wrong with having fun in the pools." "With a boy looking like THAT there is!" declared Majella forcefully. "Get real!" exclaimed Gina. "There'd be five hundred girls ahead of me in the line..." "GINA! Your father would be..." "I'd have four babies of my own before I got to the head of Mark's line. Why would he waste time on me when he can have any girl he wants. Get real!" It was actually quite funny, as there was lots of noise but no heat. I couldn't work out a safe way of joking about Gina's cooking being what I fancied the most, as I could either offend Gina or worry Majella, so I tried a different approach. A few exchanges later, I managed to inject, "I don't want to cause family trouble. I should get dressed." To my surprise, Vanessa agreed. I didn't argue with her this time, grabbing clothes and getting dressed as fast as I could. Soon after I was dressed, my brain started working properly and I thought of a good line. I said, "Majella, I'm not going to 'ruin' the daughter of the BEST COOK IN CORVALLIS!" (She'd recently told Gina off for "ruining herself.") "I need you to teach my and Julia's mothers all of your wonderful recipes so I've got the energy to ruin every OTHER mother's daughter!" Ruining other daughters was apparently perfectly okay with Majella, who must've forgotten about Leanna, as she called me "Sweet." Or maybe that was because I'd complimented her cooking. Mom changed the subject even more effectively, by saying, "While I remember to mention it, Mark, we fly home to see my family on July 7 for three weeks." "That's sooner than I thought. We'll have Carol's birthday in England then, and maybe Donna's too?" (Donna's is on August 1.) "Not quite for Donna's. We get back on the 27th..." Mom spent a couple of minutes detailing boring stuff about the trip. Where we'd go, who'd we see, etc. One word caught Julia's attention (she was coming with us). She very carefully checked that she'd heard correctly, "Paris?" Mom answered, "I thought it made sense to spend a few days in France while we were in the area." "VERY good sense," agreed Julia. "Try this, Mark," offered Majella, making me nearly as happy as Julia. Cooking became the main focus again. Majella explained what needed to be done to finish each of the remaining works in progress; Carol faithfully writing everything down. I reluctantly distracted myself from the important activities going on around me to send Carina a text message about my trip dates, apologizing for having to cancel the dinner with her parents. I added that I'd call her tomorrow. [Which I did, at an opportune moment. Just to apologize again. She understood, especially when I mentioned Paris.] I got a chance to ask Vanessa, "Won't our going to England delay the house purchase?" "No. We'll get a limited power of attorney done before you go, so Prof and I can sign the contracts on behalf of you and your parents. Your absence won't be a problem. I'll even use it to our advantage. I'll tell the agents when you're leaving the country, and that you'll be doing the inspections a couple of days before. If they don't have their client's best offers on paper by then, they'll miss out. I doubt the deal will be done before you leave, so I'll use your lack of availability as additional leverage." [The powers of attorney were done before we left, enabling Prof and Vanessa to sign the property contracts for us, and to make three payments out of my bank account: for the house deposit, and to send two $500,000 transfers to two emergency fund accounts that my family would set up while we were overseas, one in England and one in Switzerland. Julia would set up two similar accounts for her family, with me as signatory for them as well. The money to fund those was already in Prof and Vanessa's account, so they could send it under their own control.] Leanna maneuvered herself next to me for a quiet talk. Wanting to distract her from getting too mushy, I quietly greeted her with, "How's the RPS champion?" She'd probably been hoping to be greeted as "the love of my life," so "the RPS champion" was somewhat disappointing. I followed up with the start of a small manipulation, "One of the things about me that girls like is that I'm so mature, right?" "Ahh, yeah." "Which includes my valuing girls for who they really are, rather than just their bodies. Because you won the RPS competition, I know you better than many of the others, but don't make the mistake that most boys do, in thinking that what we did before is important. Personalities are important, and we've barely started getting to know each other. Now, what is it that you wanted to talk about?" "Umm. I wanted to thank you. For... , before." "You're welcome. It was good fun, wasn't it?" "It was a TORNADO!" "Next time I'll pretend to be an earthquake." "When will I see you again?" "I don't know. I just found out that I'm going to be in England in a couple of weeks. I don't know you as a person yet, and until that happens we'll meet as part of groups. Keep your eye on the website, and feel free to..." Leanna angrily accused, "You USED me for SEX!" "No I didn't, Leanna. If you think about..." Leanna yelled, "I HATE YOU!" then she turned and stormed from the room. #5: #7: #1: #7: #2: Vanessa said, "Felicity, you take it." nodding toward the stomped-through doorway. "Me!" exclaimed Mom in surprise. "I don't know the girl or what it was about." "I'll talk with her," volunteered Gina, starting to move that way. "Leave it to Felicity, Gina. It's time for her to start pulling her weight." #1: #4: #5: Mom said, "Okay, I'll go. We'll have a talk about your comment later, Vanessa." Vanessa answered, "Sure, after you've talked to Mark." "Why would I talk with Mark?" #4: "Because he made a mistake in how he rejected the girl, and it's your job to help your son learn from his mistakes." "Ahh, I see. You're right. Unnecessarily sharp, but right." "That was just the tip of the iceberg. The reason you didn't act immediately is because you've let yourself slip out of active involvement in Mark's life. THAT'S what we'll talk about after you've explained Mark's mistake to him." #1: #2: #4: #8: Mom headed for the doorway, asking, "Where will she be?" I answered, "I heard her go upstairs, so she'd probably be in Julia's room, or maybe the bathroom." Leanna and I had been standing closest to the doorway, so my hearing her wasn't anything special (my hearing isn't outstanding in any way). I thought to do a quick sight blob to check, but my guesses were probably good ones. If she was elsewhere, I shouldn't know it. Mom headed upstairs. The room was silent, so I filled the gap with, "I'm sorry about that. I'm still trying to understand how girls think. It'll probably take me another week or two." My ever supportive Julia (by "ever", I mean other than when she's embarrassing me) laughed at my joke. Some of the others joined in, but Majella asked me, "What's going on between you and Leanna?" #3: I answered, "Not as much as she wanted. Or 'thought she wanted' might be a better description, because she doesn't really know me. Leanna just got a little over-emotional seeing me today. It was probably something to do with it being the start of summer and seeing me in the ridiculous swimsuit Julia makes me wear. Vanessa was right when she guessed I'd rejected her. I tried to do it politely, but I obviously made a mess of it." "She'll be fine, Mark," reassured Vanessa. "It's good for youngsters to have silly crushes; it's the first step in learning how to have good relationships." Gina asked Vanessa, "Can I go talk with her please?" "It'll be best to wait until she's apologized to Mark. She'll need reassurance after that." #8: #6: #1: Vanessa got the females back into cooking mode, which is a particularly good mode, and that occupied them very usefully until Leanna and Mom returned. Leanna approached me, bashfully in front of everyone telling me, "I'm sorry I yelled at you, Mark. And I'm sorry I got angry that you wouldn't be my boyfriend. I treated you badly." "You weren't really treating me badly, Leanna; you were actually complimenting me. Yelling 'I hate you' isn't the best way to compliment a boy, but I know it happened because you liked me. So you don't need to apologize to me. I need to apologize to you though. I spoke so badly I got you upset, which was stupid of me, so I apologize for treating you so poorly. Julia also needs to apologize to you, for making me wear those ridiculous bright yellow Speedos. I knew they'd cause psychological trauma on poor, defenseless, innocent young girls. As far as I'm concerned, EVERYTHING is Julia's fault. To make sure it never happens again, I'll throw my Speedos in the trash and never..." "You're not angry with me?" "Not even the tiniest bit. I don't know you very well, but you seem like a nice girl. You weren't trying to be nasty or cruel to me; you just didn't know how to express yourself. I didn't express myself well with you, and you didn't express yourself well with me. It's not our fault that we're young and inexperienced. We'll get better as we get older. Tomorrow our verbal mistakes will mean nothing. Next time you see me at the pools, or anywhere else, you're very welcome to come over to talk. If I see you first, I'll come over to talk with you. I like getting to know nice people." "You think I'm nice?" "We're holding everyone up, which isn't polite or a good idea when they're cooking. You can fish for compliments after I get to know you better." "Oh. Okay. You're right. I'm sorry." "Me too. Now how about you and Gina go back upstairs for a gossip session while the women finish the cooking and I get back to the important job of taste testing." Gina didn't give Leanna a choice, grabbing her arm and dragging her away. Mom said, "We should have our talk now, Mark." #3: Vanessa said, "Let's finish up with Majella first, Felicity." Turning to Majella, Vanessa said, "I think we should start wrapping this up, Majella. That'll give Leanna a few minutes to get herself together." "Si. To be that age again. Poor girl." Majella gave each pot a final tasting, added a little more spice to one of them, talking the whole time about important cooking-related issues. Then she started tidying up, but Vanessa quickly put a stop to that, saying, "Leave that to us. You've done wonderfully already. Mark, would you fetch Gina and Leanna please. They're leaving now." "Okay." I shot off, before Mom could query whether it was wise to let me be alone with two vulnerable girls ever again. I knocked on Julia's closed door loudly. They both yelled out so I entered, shutting the door behind me. "I've been sent to fetch you because Majella's about to leave. Are you okay, Leanna?" "I'm okay. I made a fool out of myself though. Everyone must think I'm a stupid, little girl." "We've only got a few seconds. Do you want to spend it talking or giving each other a goodbye kiss?" "Why do you want to kiss me?" #3: #5: "I'm sorry, Leanna, I've expressed myself badly AGAIN! I wanted you to know that there are no hard feelings or anything else like that between us. Not as far as I'm concerned." "I think I should just go home." "That's PERFECTLY fine. Whatever you wish. I'll leave you to come down when you're ready." I ran away, before I messed up again. #1: When I got downstairs, I told the women, "They shouldn't be long." They were just behind me, appearing at the top of the stairs as I finished speaking. They descended, while I moved to the side, to stay well out of their way. Leanna said, "I'm sorry everyone. It's just been too much for me." #5: #1: During their departure I hung back, well away from Leanna, something she showed no interest in changing. I thanked Majella from a distance, and otherwise kept a very low profile. ------- Chapter 260: Mom Gets Led by the Nose Monday, June 20, 2005 (Continued) When Majella, Gina and Leanna were gone, Vanessa suggested, "Clean up, then coffees," so we all returned to the kitchen. Vanessa divided up what dishes were ready, leaving two pots cooking for longer, then we all started cleaning up. It didn't take us long, especially with my helping so eagerly, in a pathetic attempt to look good for Mom. Conversation was entirely food related, which I'd normally think was great, but just made waiting for the axe to drop even worse. As we were finishing up, Mom interrupted my industrious bench wiping by tersely saying, "Come into the living room, Mark." #1: We put down the cloth and moved to follow Mom. To our surprise, so did Carol. To Mom's surprise too, causing her to say, "Just Mark, Carol." "No, I'm coming too," insisted Carol. Mom's surprise level rocketed upward. "Oh, why?" "To defend Mark. I saw everything and he won't stick up for himself." "I hope you did NOT see everything! He had sex with that girl, Julia and Ava, all at the same time." #1: Fortunately Carol just said, "I didn't see THAT, but I saw everything else, including how excited Leanna was to have sex with him. It's not Mark's fault she got silly afterward. He gave her EXACTLY what she wanted." "She wasn't ready for a wild foursome. She's only fifteen, for God's sake!" Vanessa asked, "Carol, did Leanna know she was going to be part of a foursome?" Julia answered, "I told everyone..." Vanessa interrupted, "I asked Carol, Julia. See if you can sit out this entire conversation, unless specifically asked a question. It'll do you good." Julia wasn't fazed by that, "Haha. You know how to frustrate me. Okay." #5: Vanessa prompted, "Carol?" "She knew. Julia announced it before the competition." "What sort of competition?" "Rock, Paper, Scissors. The girls paired up and eliminated each other until only Leanna was left." "Did Mark put any pressure on Leanna to enter?" "He didn't talk with her before the competition at all. He was busy talking two other girls OUT of entering. He made a very funny joke out of it, and made sure everyone heard him, so they knew it was okay not to enter if they didn't want to. Mark's a GOOD PERSON!" #4: #1: #8: #1, #2, #3, #4: #8: Vanessa summarized, "So Julia announced the girls were competing to have a foursome, Mark discouraged girls from entering if they were unsure, Leanna entered and played well enough to win, not that there's much skill in it. She remained excited at the prospect until we saw her giggling on the way upstairs to the bedroom with Mark, Julia and Ava. Is that a good summary, Carol?" "It's exactly right." "On what we've heard so far, the fault seems to be almost entirely Leanna's. What do you think, Felicity?" Mom answered, "I think I'm being led by the nose again. I'll admit that I didn't know all of that before." "Clearly the girl was feeling angry at Mark, so it would have been foolish to rely on her version of events, wouldn't it, Felicity?" Julia put up her hand, waving it at Vanessa. "Yes Julia?" "Leanna wasn't a virgin. Her conversation with us implied she'd had sex at least a few times before." "Good point, thank you. So Felicity, the girl was sexually active thus knew what she was competing for. Can you think of anything significant that Mark should be reprimanded for thus far?" "I certainly don't approve of his casual attitude to having sex. There's no romance whatsoever in having a competition to pick whom he goes to bed with. That the THREE of them go to bed with!" "Mark's handsome, built like a Greek god, smart and rich. Women are going to be throwing themselves at him in droves all his life. He's going to get as much sex as he wants. I expect that many of the women who'll be chasing him won't have romance on their minds either. The sooner he learns to lose interest in meaningless sex, the better, wouldn't you say?" #8: #2: Mom answered, "I'd much rather he learned that when he's older." Vanessa said, "I think the best time for children to learn something important about life is as soon as possible after they're mature enough to understand most of it, with the learning process taking them the rest of the way to full comprehension. I believe Mark is easily mature enough already..." #8: " ... If he's ready to learn a lesson about life, wouldn't it be doing him a disservice to delay it?" "Yes, dammit. You're very good at this." "It's what I've been doing for a living most of my life. You're in among the trees so you can't see the forest, whereas I'm new on the scene so don't have any preconceptions. I'm also trained to see the big picture on ethical issues, and Julia and I have spent many hours talking about Mark's sex-life, so I'm coming into this topic already having thought about it a great deal. Even better than that, I've already been in your shoes, as it was Julia who convinced me to reverse my initial opinion that Mark should be monogamous. -- "I'm not saying that Mark is blameless. Leanna's anger was a good indication that he made a mistake with her, but the mistake wasn't what you were going to take him to task on. Leanna was the best person to judge her suitability for entering that competition, but she overestimated her maturity. That's not an uncommon failing of teenagers, and probably why they learn so rapidly during those years. I'm quite sure she'll wake up tomorrow and realize how foolish she was, that Mark was blameless, and that she did it to herself. Which makes me think of another aspect of this: what is Leanna going to think of this incident twenty years from now, Felicity?" "Very little, I imagine. She'll probably prefer to forget it, as she'll feel embarrassed about it." Vanessa disagreed, "I think it'll be one of her greatest memories and one of the highlights of her life." Vanessa then looked at Mom, waiting for Mom to get it After a couple of seconds, Mom admitted, "Why?" "Mark will be world famous. Possibly even the MOST world-famous person. With his potential, he could exceed Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Bill Gates and Elvis Presley combined. You should NEVER forget that. I don't, and even if I did, Julia would quickly remind me. It's Mark's potential importance that drives me to confront you about him the way I do. I'd never be so rude toward any other woman about her son, but Mark's future outweighs politeness. -- "Let's concentrate on Leanna and Mark. In twenty years this evening will be one of the highlights of her life. Right now she's confused, tomorrow she'll be feeling foolish, and would normally feel embarrassed. Not in this case though, because her girlfriends will all want to know what it was like to have sex with Mark. Mark is already thought of highly enough in Leanna's circle that the attention and envy she'll be receiving tomorrow will quickly cheer her up. In a couple of days she'll be plotting ways to get back into Mark's bed. In short, the hour Leanna spent in his bed will likely bring her greater happiness throughout her life than any other hour of it, so I don't think Mark should be raked over the coals for harming her life in any way. So what's left to reprimand Mark for, Felicity?" "Ahh. Nothing major. I still think he was taking advantage of the girl, and I don't approve of Carol seeing so much casual sexual behavior. Having that competition in front of Carol was a..." Carol exclaimed, "It's GREAT for me to see these things, Mom! I'm learning a HUGE amount by watching all of this and listening to these discussions. How much am I going to learn by going to the movies with a boy and having him try to feel me up? I'm getting to see how dozens of girls handle sex, what they do well, what they mess up. I'm learning from all their mistakes and from your talking about their mistakes, rather than making mistakes myself. Unless you'd prefer me to make my own mistakes?" Carol should've resisted getting smart at the end, because Mom doesn't appreciate being got smart at, "Yes I would, in about ten years time. You've got no need to learn about sex yet. Thirteen is WAY too young." Vanessa reined Mom in, "Felicity, Carol is talking about UNDERSTANDING sex, not doing it. Thirteen is not 'way too young' to start understanding sex. I'd condemn the parents who isolated their daughter from all sex education until that age, but that's clearly not what you and Steven have done. Carol is sensible and mature well beyond her years, no doubt largely because of your parenting. She's hasn't been giggling like the proverbial schoolgirl, or asking silly questions, or showing other immature behaviors. She's been listening carefully and, I'm sure, understanding a great deal. -- "Let me contrast two of your parental attitudes, both to do with Mark. I'm sure that you and I would both agree that fifteen years of age is far too young for a boy to have control of millions of dollars, yet we have both trusted Mark with that. We've seen him struggle with it sometimes, and we've seen him get angry over the troubles it gives him. I know his bank manager annoyed him, and I wasn't the least surprised when Julia pushed him too far. He's struggling and he's making mistakes, and you don't appear to have any inclination to rake him over the coals for those mistakes. -- "I'm sure that you and I would also agree that fifteen years of age is far too young for a boy to have so much sex, yet we are both trusting him with that. You trusted him to have Julia as his girlfriend, and were helpful when it came to their having a physical relationship. But as soon as their sexual horizons expanded beyond a monogamous relationship, you've reacted by wanting to rake him over the coals for every mistake you think he's made, before you've taken to time to ascertain the facts of the situation. -- "It's arguable which is the more important to learn about, sex or money, but it's inarguable that both are extremely important. It's ESSENTIAL that Mark learns about both, he IS doing an excellent job of learning about them, and he's naturally making a few mistakes along the way, that being an inevitable part of learning. Of the two, Julia and I are amazed by how fast he's learning about sex. Not just the physical act, but the minefield of issues that surrounds it. Let me remind you that he spotted your sexual insecurity about Steven. That speaks volumes about Mark's depth of understanding. Steven hadn't spotted it in twenty years of intimate married life, yet Mark worked it out in the absence of any knowledge of your intimate life and from knowing virtually nothing about sexual relationships three months ago. That speed of learning is truly wondrous. -- "You should have great confidence in his sexual maturity, yet your only frequent reaction is to rake him over the coals every time you think he might've stumbled, even in cases like Leanna's where it's clear that the girl is almost entirely at fault. You don't blink when Mark stumbles over a financial issue, but you greatly overreact to sexual issues. What's worse, each time you leap to your negative conclusions, you're reinforcing your opinion that Mark is a bad person who mistreats girls for his own sexual pleasure, which will make you even quicker to jump to the same conclusion the next time Mark looks sideways at a girl. That's how prejudices reinforce themselves. -- "There are two things that I know are true: Mark IS going to have sex with many more girls, and when you make the mistake of reprimanding him, he's going to take your abuse knowing you are wrong. He won't stand up for himself, but if he's smart enough to see your insecurity about Steven, he's certainly smart enough to judge his own actions. Unless you confront your prejudice, it's going damage your relationship with him. I suggest it already has, because he's already hiding his sexual activities from you, because he knows you'll react incorrectly to them. -- "This is the point in the conversation where I'd normally end my lecture and let you apologize to Mark. I can see that's what you're about to do, but I'm going to suggest something different this time. Last night we had a very similar conversation when you repeatedly leaped to the wrong conclusions when Mark hit us with Carol's sexual kink and his worrying about Donna's sexual development. After your mistakes last night, you apologized to Mark and said you'd try harder in the future. I watched your behavior during Leanna's upset, and I didn't see you try at all. It never occurred to you that the girl might've been the architect of her own upset, or that you should gather more information before judging, and it especially never occurred to you to trust Mark, which was the main failure that you apologized so profusely for last night." #1: #3: #6: #8: Vanessa continued, "I'm going to mention a couple more conversation points, and then tell you what I recommend you do instead of repeating another daily apology to Mark. In Ethics it can be very helpful to swap the positions around. For example, if in 2002 Iraq had created false intelligence and had used it to get the UN to sanction their invading the USA in EXACTLY the way we did them, including - I'm hypothesizing - with an overwhelming and successful military force, then what would we be asking the rest of the world to do now? That's a question that makes many of my students react with anger. It's possible to create two scenarios which are ethically equal but mirror images, to which people react very differently. It's a good way to expose their prejudices or other emotional issues. You made the same mistake two evenings in a row, even though you admitted your fault and apologized after the first occurrence. Let's turn that around and imagine Mark did something very bad last night, was caught and apologized for it, and then repeated exactly the same mistake just now. You'd throw the book at him for breaking his promise not to repeat that mistake, so why aren't you throwing the book at yourself for doing the same thing? You should be holding yourself to a higher standard of behavior than that of a 15-year old boy, yet you are condemning Mark FAR harsher than you are condemning yourself. Why are you being so unfair to him? Please answer." Mom had no trouble suggesting it was because of her insecurity over Dad, but Vanessa asked for more. They went around the issue for a couple of minutes, with Mom not adding anything of any substance. After which Vanessa said, "It's because the INSTANT you suspect Mark has committed a sexual impropriety, you do two things. Yes, you get angry as you admitted, but you also immediately consider him to be worthless. As 'just another cheating male.' You don't stop to think, ask questions, try to understand reasons, or take any other sensible steps, because why bother to make any effort at all when he's worthless in your eyes. If Carol had treated a boy the same way you thought Mark had treated that girl, you'd be very concerned about her and you'd sit down to have a serious conversation with her about her behavior. But with Mark all you were interested in doing was unleashing a tirade on him. Your reaction is gender-specific, and it's clearly because that insecurity that Mark identified is still raging out of control, and is based on an irrational prejudice about male sexual behaviors." Mom barely got started on an apologetic agreement, when Vanessa shut her down. Vanessa let Mom's agreement stand, but the apology got dismissed. "Last night you apologized several times for the same thing, Felicity. I'm sure you wouldn't accept apologies in the event of repeated transgressions by your children, so they're not sufficient from you either. Your core issue is a prejudice against men's sexual behavior. Mark is going to continue to be sexually active, so your irrational response is going to be triggered many more times. I'm at a loss how to fix your gender-wide prejudice, but maybe I can change your understanding of Mark's value, so you won't consider him 'just another worthless male' again. Another tool we use in Ethics is a simplified scenario. Let's imagine my family is fishing from a small boat and a bad storm comes up and capsizes the boat..." #5: #1: #8: " ... and knocks everyone out except Prof. We're stupidly not wearing lifejackets, so we're all going to drown except Prof and ONE other person that he can hold up. He can't hold two, only one. Who should he choose to save? In our culture the answer's obviously Julia, as she's the youngest and female. Similarly if Prof was knocked out but some else in my family was awake. We'd all rescue Julia as that's how Americans value people in must-choose situations like that. -- "Now imagine your family is in the boat instead. A storm comes up and the boat capsizes, knocking out everyone except you. Who do you save Felicity?" Mom said nothing, just shifting uncomfortable. Vanessa pressed, "I want you to answer, Felicity." "That's definitely not an answer I want to give in front of two of my children. That's guaranteed to upset at least one of them..." "I'm sure it won't upset either of them. I could talk about the need for them to know that life-or-death decisions are sometimes forced on people, and other related points, but those aren't relevant in this case. Your answer isn't going to affect them in any of the ways you're worrying about." #5: #6: #1: <3A doesn't have a clue what you're talking about?> #6: #1: #8: I said, "I think Mom's been beaten up enough from this conversation, Vanessa, and her naming her choice isn't necessary to achieve your main objective, especially not once we all get into the bigger boat. I'd rather you went easy on her please?" "You know where I'm going with this?" "Sure. It's simple to project your scenario to its logical conclusion, especially because there was no real need for you to use your family in the first scenario unless you were going to resurrect them for fairly obvious third scenario." "Julia hasn't used the 'Capsized Boat' scenario with you before?" #8: I answered, "No. Julia prefers to use 'Clothes Shopping' scenarios, and then carrying them out for real." Julia chuckled at that. Vanessa said, "I'm VERY impressed, Mark. That's extremely quick thinking." "It's logical thinking. That's easy. If you asked me to tell you what clothes Julia's going to wear tomorrow, I'd be all at sea." I got some more laughs for that. Not from Mom though, as she was too busy being confused, which is exactly what I wanted. If she was confused and she knew I wasn't, then I must be smarter than her, which obviously and logically led straight to the inescapable conclusion that I should be allowed to marry Carol (hopefully). #5: I said, "Mom's confused, Vanessa. She's not used to seeing the big picture, so she thinks we're talking about the detail issue of who to pick." I turned to Mom, "Mom, Vanessa and I know you'd pick either Carol or Donna, and we're pretty sure which of those two as well. But for the main point that Vanessa is going to make it doesn't matter which. Let's just say that visibility is so bad that you'd keep searching, going past Dad and me, until you found the first of the two girls, and you'd rescue whichever one that was. Are you comfortable with that as your answer?" "Not really, no. I'm not comfortable with the casual way you dismissed yourself and Steven. That..." "You have to choose ONE person, Mom. You're getting stuck on details again. OF COURSE I don't want Dad to die, but he sees his role in life to be creating his kids' lives. He'd be pretty upset with you if you rescued him rather than one of his kids." Vanessa added, "Mark has very impressively leaped ahead several steps, Felicity. Don't take his speed of thought to mean he's a cold-hearted brute. Mark would've taken your abuse about what you thought was his mistreatment of Leanna, even though he knew you were wrong, because he'd rather not hurt your feelings by defending himself. He's not cold-hearted. I'll move on because this is taking too long. -- "If Felicity is the one who is awake, she'll rescue Carol or Donna. If Steven was the sole conscious person, we can assume he'd make the same decision as Felicity. Carol, do you know who you'd save if you were the one who was awake?" Carol rather too obviously enjoyed saying, "Of course. I don't even have to think about it." Vanessa asked, "Who?" "Mark obviously. It's a no-brainer, because of his big brain, haha." "That's right. Felicity; you and Steven should..." I interrupted, "Skip that point, Vanessa. Go straight to the bigger boat. It's kinder on Mom and it probably works better too, because it's making the point without pushing her to change her mind." "OHH, I get it!" announced Julia. Adding, "Wow Mark. You worked it out way back at the beginning, AND you didn't know about Mom's boat scenario before. You're VERY impressive." Julia grabbed my arm in her usual style, while adding more compliments. To my pleasure, Carol mirrored Julia with my other arm. Grabbing my arm, holding it against her heart (and you know what else), and retaining it there while she added her compliments too. #5: #8: Mom asked, "How come I'm the only one who doesn't know what you're talking about?" "You're not the only one, Mom; Carol doesn't know either. But in her case, she doesn't need to know the logic because she already agrees with the answer. Vanessa, you'd better take us all out fishing again." Vanessa chuckled, "Okay. It is better coming from me..." I nodded along, to show off my understanding, never mind how I'd gotten it. " ... Felicity, as Mark suggested, now imagine both our families get into a bigger boat and go out fishing again. There's yet another storm, the boat's capsized and everybody is knocked out except Prof. Who does he save?" Mom didn't have any trouble answering, "Julia." Julia looked like she might giggle, so I NP'd her lips shut. Vanessa said, "No, not Julia. Try again?" I said, "Think of the big picture, Mom. What's the point Vanessa is trying to steer you toward?" It took Mom less time than I expected, only a couple of seconds before the lightbulb lit up. She looked at Vanessa and checked, "Mark?" "Yes, Mark. Everyone in my family would rescue Mark instead of Julia. Mainly because if we rescued Julia she'd never forgive us for it." "DAMN RIGHT!" declared Julia. "I'd be EXTREMELY angry at whichever one of you hypothetical morons did that." Vanessa answered, "Haha. Seeing as you're insulting your hypothetical mother, I'll let you get away with that one. Felicity, if everyone in my family would choose Mark over our Julia, who do we think you and Steven should save?" "This isn't a tit-for-tat situation. You're saying we should save Mark too, not Julia?" "Absolutely. Mark every time. I'm trying to get you to realize how important Mark is. Yes, he is one of your three children, but he's not 'one of three'. Mark is an incredible valuable, UNIQUE phenomenon. I've told you that before, but it's not sinking in, so maybe a sinking boat might help you, haha. -- "The 'Capsized Boat' scenario was purely hypothetical, but Prof and Mark have already been in a life-or-death situation together. Prof was willing to lay down his life if he'd been able to get Mark free..." #5: I (#1, because 3B weren't going to participate for a while) begged, "Vanessa, PLEASE stop. I'm sorry, but I can't handle that." 3B's reactions must have been visible on our face, because everybody became instantly sympathetic, Vanessa also apologizing as well, saying, "I'm sorry Mark. Had I known it affected you so deeply I wouldn't have mentioned it." I (#1 again), "It hits me where it hurts, and you caught me by surprise. I need some fresh air; I'll go outside for a couple of minutes." Julia and Carol were attached to me, and they both offered to come with me. "I appreciate your offers, but I literally only need a minute or two to compose myself. It'll be easier if I'm alone. Please let me go." What's the chance that in my moment of emotional need, my two girls would let me go? They LIVE for stuff like that. I suspect they'd even stop shopping if they saw me in such need. It wasn't worth the battle, so I led them outside for some fresh air. I truly only wanted a few seconds alone to compose myself, and having the girls with me making the comments they did, made my settling down considerably slower; but they were doing their best and for good reasons so I accepted them without making a scene. [[The Mark of this autobiography jokes many times about how impossible it is for him, or any male, to understand females. If it's any consolation to my male readers, the reverse applies too: females also don't understand males. When females are upset, they need to share it. When males are upset, the last thing they want is to be with other people who are insisting on talking about it. Julia and Carol had no understanding of that. They saw I was very upset, and they very much wanted to help me, so in their ignorance of the male psyche, they did exactly the wrong thing.]] Presumably we could've ordered our symptoms to go away, as we had for nervousness several times, but none of us wanted to do that, not even any of 3A. There's a sort of perverse need to feel grief, even though it's a horrible feeling. It was important to 3B that they mourned their Prof properly, which turning off the physical reactions would've cheapened. 3A could very easily empathize with 3B, so they didn't interfere with 3B's reactions. The fresh air did clear my head. 3A handled the interaction with the girls, while 3B ignored them totally, not even listening to the words they were saying. In a short time, 3B was over the shock, and were fine. ^ Inside, after I'd left the kitchen, Vanessa had said, "Let me quickly finish my points so we don't have to talk about this when Mark comes back. -- "Felicity, the purpose of the 'Capsized Boat' scenario was to let you know how highly my family value Mark. I want you to understand as deeply as you can that Mark is INCREDIBLY valuable. So much so that in a real life-or-death situation, Prof and I would choose to let all of our family die so we can save your son. He CANNOT be judged as equivalent to other people. So who cares if Mark had mercilessly taken advantage of Leanna? Compared to Mark, she's unimportant. Not just slightly unimportant, but vanishingly so. If my whole family would lay down their lives to protect Mark, then some girl getting tricked into having sex - assuming your interpretation of what had been done to her was true - is hardly something that'd concern me. Especially because we know that she would've enjoyed it. -- "To put it in an overly dramatic fashion, if I walked in on Mark raping a girl, I'd ask him why he was doing it. If he provided a reason that showed that he was getting any useful benefit out of the experience, then his being vastly more important than any girl would make me accept his actions regardless of the harm being done to the girl. I'd even hold the girl down for him. -- "There are two possible solutions to your problem. Either absorb the fact that Mark is incredibly important and change the way you judge his sexual actions, or stop judging his sexual actions. Let Mark do anything and everything he wants sexually. You don't have any say over what clothes he wears these days, so choose to also have no say over what sex he has. I see you look uncomfortable, so let me put it this way. From what I've observed the last couple of days, Mark is a capable of managing his sex-life maturely and you are not. You're a DISASTER at it. You're so bad at it, you should keep your mouth shut until you've learned how to control it better. Have I put that forcefully enough, or should I take my gloves off and give it to you straight?" "You're being very sharp and merciless..." "I didn't jump on you last night. You'd tear into any of your kids if they repeated a serious mistake the very next afternoon after promising not to do it again, so I'm treating you the same way. Mark is too important for me to go soft on you. I SHOULD go even harder. As I see it, you have three options. First, continue to make wrong judgments about Mark's sexual activities and suffer the consequences of that. Second, delegate those judgments to someone else. I'd recommend Steven or even Mark himself. Whenever a sexual situation arises in which you feel the need to express any judgment at all, pass it onto your delegate and walk away. Third, substantially improve the quality of your judgments. I've never seen anyone get rid of a twenty-year prejudice easily, and indications are you won't, but maybe Mark being so incredible will help you achieve that in his case. Fortunately this isn't a life-or-death choice. Mark will passively go along with your decision. Perhaps keeping his sex-life hidden from you, which would make him a typical teenager in that respect, if no other. My suggestion is that rather than simply apologizing to Mark, which proved ineffective last time, this time you repeat my points to Steven, then jointly with Steven and Mark you decide what to do. You may prefer another process. You should bear in mind that you've been wrong about Mark's sexual activities ever since Julia got so sore she had to take time off school..." ^ My emotional supporters and I returned to the kitchen, which caused an abrupt termination of the discussion. In the kitchen, Julia and Carol reattached themselves to my arms, so it looked like that was going to become a standard behavior. Mom and Vanessa asked how I was. "I'm all right now, thanks. It was mostly because it took me by surprise. Some parts of our ordeal don't faze me much, like people asking about my missing finger. But at the other extreme is the thought of Prof dying for me. For a while back there, I'd thought his dying was inevitable. Mine too probably, but Prof was sicker than me and I could see him going downhill. That was the most horrible part of the whole experience for me, so it was a shock to me when Vanessa mentioned it so unexpectedly." "I'm sorry I did, Mark. I was deliberately being dramatic to make a strong point with Felicity, and I failed to take your feelings into consideration." "I hadn't warned you even though I knew I felt that way, so the fault is mostly mine. Let's not worry about it anymore. I interrupted something when I arrived?" "I was just about to tell your mother that she can practice different decision-making processes on a minor issue like sex, before a serious issue comes along." Mom couldn't help questioning that, "Minor! How can you call it a minor issue after the dressing down you've given me?" Even having just come back into the room, I could see that Vanessa had deliberately set Mom up for that. "The issue is minor, but you are not. You're a very important person because you're Mark's mother, so you get the full treatment from me. It's unfortunate, and no fun for either of us, but Mark's importance requires it. -- "To explain. The sex issue is minor because Mark will most likely leave Corvallis in a year, and he'll then have all the sexual freedom he wants for the rest of his life, so this issue is a short-term one. It's not even a major issue in the interim, because Mark will be continuing to have sex with an increasing number of girls. Neither he, Julia nor Ava want him to stop. So the issue is really only how much of it you see. There will be many issues more important than how much sex Mark hides from his mother for the next year. -- "You'll continue to have a profound effect on Mark for the rest of his life. You continued to listen to me, even though I got very rough on you a couple of times..." "That's because I knew you were right. Yet again, dammit! I'm going to have to get used to that, aren't I?" "It's not as bad as that. I'll pick my battles, and they'll only be about Mark. We're not going to have battles over other aspects of living together, because Prof and I will defer to you in the running of the Anderson home. The reason we're moving in with you is because we believe we can influence Mark's life to the better in some areas. That means we have to speak up, or else be ineffectual. -- "Over time, we'll recognize each other's areas of expertise better, by which time Mark will be making most of his own decisions anyway, which won't leave us much to battle about. There aren't likely to be many issues that'll be as head to head as this one. You and I had much the same attitudes when we were discussing Mark and Julia's first date and the beginning of their relationship. Our differences were minor enough not to be worth raising. It's only since what you regard as Mark's lack of faithfulness has come up that you've got your panties in a twist over anything related to Mark and sex. If we can untwist those..." I interrupted, "Here you go again, Vanessa. You keep bringing up subjects that are forcing me to leave the room. PLEASE do NOT discuss my mother's panties in my hearing!" "Haha. Okay Mark. As you requested, I'll remove your mother's panties and..." "Now you're tormenting me. How about you use something safer like the red rag to a bull metaphor. It's so much less psychologically traumatic. Can I change the subject briefly please? Is Ava coming over tonight?" "In about ten minutes," answered Julia. "She wanted to wait until her parents went to bed." "Thanks. In that case can I make some quick points now please?" I got sufficient nods, so I proceeded, "When you first married Dad, Mom, how would you've felt if either your or his mother stuck their noses into your sex-life? Other than the inconvenient facts that I'm a minor and not actually married to Julia, that's my situation. That sounds facetious, but it's not meant to be. We're in a serious relationship, and if she asked me to stop seeing other girls I'd stop immediately. -- "Many people live together for years without getting married, so the piece of paper isn't what controls sexual loyalty. That I'm chronologically fifteen isn't significant either, as I'm sure I'm mentally, physically and emotionally more developed than most 18-year olds. I'm doing many things years ahead of schedule, from my car license through to finishing two or three degrees at sixteen. People can get married at 18, so being married is within the age range I function at. That makes Julia having control over my sexual activity, rather than my mother, reasonable. -- "There's another reason it goes to Julia: she is FAR more practical and helpful about it. The last two good pieces of sex advice I got from you were more than two event-filled months ago. You did an excellent job of teaching me not to say "Eww" about pussy juice, and both you and Dad very clearly told me not to play around on Julia. That was extremely important advice back then, because Julia was having major insecurity problems at that time, which she seems to have recovered well from, haha. -- "Today I made a mistake with Leanna. I didn't need to be hauled off to the living room to be yelled at about things that weren't issues. I know what the mistake was. All you had to do was ask me what I'd done wrong, and I would've told you. You wouldn't have asked though, because you would've been too busy yelling stuff that wouldn't have taught me anything. My mistake was simple: some girls think they've fallen in love with me after having sex. It's not real and it fades very quickly, but it's very emotional for them at the time. Leanna was starting to do that when I got back from Aikido, so I tried to talk her out of it to save her the emotional rollercoaster. I made a mess of it, resulting in the anger and drama that you saw. What I wanted was advice about what I'd said wrong and what I should've said. I frequently ask Julia that sort of question and she always gives me very good advice. I've learned an ENORMOUS amount from Julia. If I'd asked you, you'd have jumped onto your high horse and ranted that I shouldn't be having sex with girls that age, etc., etc. I won't repeat Vanessa's counter-arguments, but I will say that all Leanna did was yell 'I hate you' and stomp out of the room. How many hundreds of times has Donna done that? You usually roll your eyes and have a cup of coffee until Donna calms down. Just because Leanna's hissy fit involved me and sex, you scaled up your reaction enormously beyond what the incident justified. -- "In three months I'm going to be making big waves at OSU, and without doubt there are going to be women in their twenties chasing me. Right now they'd eat me for breakfast. There are girls Ava's age that scare me, let alone college or university women. Julia is as driven and focused about my emotional development as Prof is about my educational. Julia is deliberately arranging a variety of girls for me to interact with. Every type of teenager now," (Donna is nearly thirteen, so I'll slightly stretch the definition of teenagers), "up to women in their twenties once I start going to OSU. Vanessa's point about learning about life when you're ready is a very good one. I'm not ready to interact with women with my mental age, because they'd be able to manipulate me too easily. So we're deliberately starting at the young end because less than three months ago I had no experience at all, and I need to learn from simple girls before I can stand up to sophisticated ones. I can learn very quickly, but I need experience and helpful, supportive conversations; not being yelled at from a high horse by someone who is seeing her own prejudice rather than her son." #2: #6: #1: #8: Mom started gushing her apologies. There were several versions of, "I'm sorry," as well promises to do better, and other such. Mom also mentioned, "I'm sorry, Mark. I've been letting you down badly..." I thought of a good response to that, so I jumped in with, "Mom, you haven't been letting me down. In case you haven't noticed, I'm doing VERY well these days. I was at the pools today with thirty swimsuit-clad girls who were all over me. I was REALLY suffering, but mainly because I didn't have enough hands, haha. You're not letting me down; only yourself. Your prejudice hasn't even worried Dad, because he never noticed it. So don't beat yourself up about it..." The doorbell rang. Carol said, "I'll get it," and started moving. Julia insisted, "Let me. This is about your mother so you should hear it." I said, "Let Julia go, Carol. My next joke is about Julia, so it'd be better if she was out of the room." Julia looked at me suspiciously. I looked back innocently, so she looked even more suspiciously. #8: #1: Julia asked, "Shall I bring Ava in here or send her upstairs?" I answered, "Upstairs please." "Okay." A couple of seconds later I added, "Walk faster please, Julia." "Darn! Tell me later please, Carol?" "Only if Mark says I can." "Darn. The Andersons are ganging up on me." Julia left the room, so I resumed, "I was suggesting you not beat yourself up, Mom. Julia LOVES managing all the other girls for me. She loves it so much, I suspect she enjoys it more than I do. Even if you were as good as Julia at analyzing and explaining all the twists and turns of what goes on - which I can't see how you possibly could be because you're so busy and Julia lives for this stuff - then I'd still have to let Julia keep guiding me through the minefield that is female relationships. Julia would cry for weeks if I deprived her of her greatest pleasure in life." "What's that about my greatest pleasure?" asked Julia, quietly returning to the room. "That was very quick, Julia. Didn't you stop to talk with Ava?" "I told her I was needed. What's happening to my greatest pleasure?" "It's been talked about." Quickly, before Julia could joke around any more, I said, "I'm happy, Mom. Your prejudice and your fear is mainly your problem, although I do think it's unfair when the son inherits the father's sin and the father never even did it. But I've noticed that when it comes to females, life is often unfair." "Hey! Is that a dig at me?" inquired Julia. "I meant it's unfair to females that there's only one of me." "Haha. Can you imagine how hard it'd be to train two of you?" "You poor thing. Imagine all the managing you'd be forced to do." While Julia smiled at that thought, I asked, "Can I leave you to it now please? I'd like to at least give the men a quick 'Hello' before I go to bed?" "They're not here," explained Vanessa. "When the women invaded they fled to a colleague's of Prof's to have a guys' night. I think we've finished giving Felicity a hard time. Unless you've got any questions about that topic, Felicity? Mom answered, "I've got more than enough to think about. It occurs to me that I can afford to go to a professional about this." I asked, "A shrink?" Mom nodded, so I suggested, "Make sure you find out about your psychological aberration of not cooking roast chicken dinners often enough." Just as I was about to leave, Vanessa asked, "One quick question, please Mark. When was the last time you were naturally sick? By a disease rather than caused by someone else, such as the kidnappers." "You're asking about my body's health?" "Yes. You look very healthy, to understate the case. I'm wondering if that includes more than physique." "I think it does. I've been wondering that too, so I've been conscious of it recently. This calendar year so far, I haven't had anything at all, not even the sniffles. I didn't pay attention during 2004. I seem to remember that I had a winter cold briefly the winter before last, but that's the sort of memory which is very easy to get mixed up across years. My memory isn't perfect enough to be sure because I wasn't paying attention to that issue back then. You're really asking about the future, and I'm starting to think that I might not get sick again." [My most recent merge (my third) was only a month ago. My second had been on February 22, 2005, after which I had definitely been in tiptop condition the whole time. My first merge had been on November 19, 2003. It wasn't until my second merge that my body had started changing noticeably, and that'd quickly been VERY noticeable. I had the feeling that it took four minds to make my body's structure jump through hoops, probably including disease defense too.] Mom, Julia and Carol all expressed surprise or confusion. Mom asked, "You mean not sick EVER?" "I can only guess. I know that my body feels extraordinarily healthy. It actually feels good from second to second. I know I haven't had any natural health problems for a year or more, and I know that my body is very capable. Running very fast marathons, for example. So perhaps it's very capable against germs too. Now you know as much as me. Maybe I can shrug off something as terrible as cancer, or maybe a cold can still get me. We won't know until I catch something." "Would you please let us know if you feel sick at any time?" asked Vanessa. "Sure. I'm kind of waiting for it myself." "Thanks." "What does it mean?" asked Julia. Vanessa answered, "There's no way of telling. Maybe Mark is no more disease resistant than any other fit person, or maybe he is. Maybe he's a little better off, or a great deal better off. Maybe he'll get sick next week, or maybe not for ten years or a hundred years." "What about a thousand years?" asked Julia, surprising Carol and Mom, neither of whom read enough science fiction. "There's no telling. Mark's body might repair itself well enough to never die, or maybe there might be one organ that can't repair itself, and that suddenly fails when he's a fit, healthy 130-year old." "Wow," said Julia. I thought otherwise, "I don't think so, Julia. I've had this in the back of my mind for some time, and I simply can't believe my body will last a miraculous period of time. I don't know what human life expectancy will be 75 years from now, say. Maybe there'll be some breakthroughs that make everyone live an extra hundred years. But ignoring outside changes like that, I can't believe my body is capable of miraculous changes. It simply doesn't feel that special. -- "Put it this way. I can run a marathon in about three-quarters of the world record, so maybe I'll live four thirds longer than anyone else. That's certainly too simplistic because running is quite a simple operation while staying alive a long time requires God knows how many parts of the body to keep working properly. I think I've just got a VERY healthy, fit body that might be able to last an extra 10 or 20%. Or maybe I'll catch a really nasty disease earlier than that. Being very healthy helps, but it's no guarantee of avoiding every disease that comes along." #8: #3: "It's frustrating not knowing," complained Julia. #2: #3: "No one knows," said Vanessa. I caught a glimpse of Vanessa rolling her eyes to warn Julia off the topic. I pretended not to see it. Julia did see it, so she changed the subject, "We've kept Ava waiting too long. Goodnight Mom and Felicity. Goodnight Carol. It was great having you with us today..." "I LOVED it! I had the BEST time! Thank you SO much for inviting me..." Carol gushed some more, I said my goodbyes, then Julia and I went upstairs to have Ava complain to us, "I haven't had sex for HOURS!" Before joining in I grabbed several snack bars out of the bag I had in the closet, opened them, then left them on bedside table. Julia looked a question at me, so I explained, "For when I'm studying. I'll explain later, because I haven't had sex for HOURS!" Having Ava here meant I'd have to be careful how I teased Julia tomorrow morning, but the compensations more than made up for that. ^ Vanessa's getting me to show off my body in the kitchen and raising the health issue had been to prepare Mom for the marriage conversation. After I'd left the room, Vanessa had asked Carol to make coffees for them, and had taken Mom into the living room for a quick, private chat. In the living room, Vanessa had said, "Mark's being stronger after a month of no exercise in Seattle, and his possibly never getting sick, make me realize we've been remiss in not thinking about his long-term issues." "Like what?" asked Mom. "One thought I had was maybe we should buy some antiques and put them in storage. They might be worth a great deal of money in two hundred years. Another thought I have is that it's going to be horrible for him to live so long that he'll see his wife and all his children die before him..." "Oh no. That's terrible." "On second thought, that's not likely to happen. He's learning so fast that soon everyone else is going to be too far beneath him. Their intellect and understanding will be childish compared to his, so he won't be able to emotionally bond with them. He could love someone who was as a child to him, and that person could love him back, but without their understanding him, he's going to be very lonely. -- "It's not just an emotional problem either, but also a practical one. His wife would know about his special abilities, and would have his life in the palm of her hand. That'd make for a very dangerous situation since 50% of marriages end in divorce. Maybe more so for his marriage, as it's bound to have unusual stresses in it. Where's he going to find a woman he can trust that much? Especially one he knows isn't motivated by his looks or money, because those motivations won't hold a marriage together. Many women might get angry as they get older but Mark remains physically perfect. It's a short step from anger to vindictiveness." "What about Julia? Mark could marry her." "She's already refusing to be his full-time girlfriend, so being his wife isn't going to happen. That's truer now than when Julia first decided that, because Mark keeps getting more impressive. Julia considers Mark to be a new species, a 'Superhuman' rather than a 'Human', and that their being married would be an anchor around his neck. There's an even more serious problem than Mark's life being lonely: his not having any superhuman children. A new and vastly superior species with only one member isn't good for humanity. We want as many of them as possible. Carol will be back shortly and we should discuss these issues with Prof and Steven. Shall we reconvene Wednesday evening? Dinner at your place? We'll send the kids somewhere else so we can have a good talk." ------- Chapter 261: The Car that Best Projects the Right Image for Me is Chosen Tuesday, June 21, 2005 I woke after the usual 2.5 hours, had a snack bar, shut my eyes again, created a sight blob, sent it through to the study, where seven of my minds created a fingertip each for the scrolling keyboard, and we started studying. Other than a couple of snack breaks, that's how we spent the morning. It was a very successful test, especially because we didn't hit a gap in our knowledge that we had to google, so we didn't need to do any extensive mouse work. One of my minds had to look in one of the textbooks for a couple of minutes, which was a little disruptive, but the rest of us concentrated on eating a couple of snacks with our eyes shut and chatting among ourselves about how it was going. I was hoping for Julia, but it was Ava who woke first. She whispered, "Oh, hi Mark. I thought you'd be studying?" "I decided to stay in bed this morning. There are more beautiful, naked girls in this room." "More beautiful, naked guys too." "Exactly the right number of them. I haven't asked you what your plans for summer are?" "Mostly spend time with Mom and Dad. Mom's got a course of chemo in a couple of weeks, so I want to help her as much as possible during that and until she gets her strength back." "That's about the time my family and Julia are going to England to visit Mom's family..." We quietly talked about that, her parents, and that Leanna hated me. Julia woke during Ava's chuckling. Julia stretched, saying, "Mmm. This is nice. I never get to wake up next to you." Julia scooted over to hug my back, asking, "Did you come back or be lazy?" I looked over my shoulder, saying, "Neither." I used NP to hold Julia's lips together briefly. That was politer to Ava than saying "I'll tell you later," to Julia. I'd get a chance to explain to Julia sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner. Julia frowned briefly, then her eyes widened, looking at me in amazement. Then she said, "Ava, would you go to the kitchen to get us some juice please?" "Okay." Ava got out of bed, then asked, "Are we playing a game, or can I wear a robe?" "A robe's fine. Grab Mark's." "Okay, thanks." As soon as Ava was out of the room, I started snoring. If half a snore can be called "snoring" because Julia jabbed me in the ribs, chucking and demanding, "Spill it!" I pointed out, "Don't you think you're misusing Ava's obedience just because you're nosey?" "I do not. There is no higher purpose than satisfying my curiosity. You can start doing that right now." "It's simple; I studied from here." After an impressively short think, Julia asked, "You mean on the computers, with a sight blob, right?" "Yep. I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to think of it, but it works pretty well from here. It's slightly inconvenient, but not too much." "That's awesome, and SO LAZY! Haha. Are you going to do that from now on?" "Yeah. That's why I bought so many snack bars." "Ahh! Of course. It's going to be nice to wake up next to you from now on." "When I come from home, I think I'll go to the study as normal. I'll be up and dressed already, and it's slightly easier for me to study that way. Once we're living in the mansion you'll wake up next to me every morning, provided I can do it from there. That'll be something we need to check. Our bed might have to go at the end of the bedroom closest to the study rather than the other end..." "I thought your range was five hundred feet?" "The MAXIMUM distance a sight blob can work at is five hundred feet, but that's under ideal circumstances such as having no walls in the way and my knowing exactly where the sight blob is by seeing the location with my own eyes first. Walls dramatically reduce my maximum range. Whatever my range is under the circumstances, say one hundred feet, then the last 20% or so - from over eighty feet away in that case - has degraded vision, like a TV picture with lots of static. It'd be impossible to study that way. -- "There'll be two walls and a change in elevation between our mansion's bedroom and the study, so we should make them thin walls, and before you get heavily into decorating our bedroom it'd be wise to do some testing as soon as the walls are built." "Okay." [We subsequently did that, and I had no problem.] I cautioned, "By the way, I've deliberately let the parents think that my 'seeing with my eyes shut' works from my eyeballs. They've got no idea it can move around or that there's such a thing as 'sight blobs'. I think they'd be uncomfortable at the possible loss of privacy if they knew I could spy on them, so let's keep my studying from bed secret. Only you and Carol know, okay?" "Sure. What about Ava when she starts sleeping with us often?" "I'll cross that bridge when that cute chicken hatches. Until then she can think I'm being lazy, which is half-true." "You did more studying last night than I do in a month! That's NOT lazy, that's incredible..." followed by more praise. Ava arrived back shortly after that, interrupting Julia's further embarrassing me. We found an enjoyable way to celebrate my being in bed. During which there was a knock on our door. After some scrambling to get under the covers, Julia called, "ENTER." Prof and Vanessa came in to tell us they were heading into work, Vanessa adding, "We're booked to have dinner with your parents at your house tomorrow, Mark. To have the important discussion." "Oh boy. I couldn't wait before, but now I'm nervous. I hope it goes well." "We'll do our best. We'll talk with you later. Have a good day, bye." We got up not long after that, as Julia and I had to go spend a lot of my money on four wheels and an engine. Mid-morning we went to the Toyota dealership as they'd had some Lexus "demonstrators" (I've even learned some of the lingo) delivered that morning, for us and two other potential customers. There were two models that Julia had decided we were interested in: the SC430, a hard-top convertible sports car; and the GS430, a very nice sedan. When we got to the lot, and tried them, we thought they were EXTREMELY nice cars. The following makes no sense, but they both felt perfect to drive, even though they both felt quite different: the SC430 being much firmer, the GS430 more luxurious. I'd test driven some Mercedes and thought their sedans felt like wallowing whales, while their sports cars felt hard and uncomfortable, although amazingly powerful. The Lexuses were both luxury cars, the SC430 having sporty appeal too, but despite their being different, both models seemed to hit the bulls-eye as far as I was concerned. I liked them both VERY much. So much so that they both jumped to the top of our shortlist. I couldn't decide which of the two I liked the most, but the GS430 was $10,000 cheaper and also more practical, as the SC430's two back seats weren't full seats, so were somewhat uncomfortable for their occupants, and weren't suitable for long trips. So I bought the SC430. Julia liked it more, as it had lots of style. Apparently style is important. The purchase didn't happen nearly as fast as the previous paragraph implies. As soon as Julia knew that I liked the Lexuses very much, she got me to pretend to be uninterested while she acted bored to ask questions about color choices and other seemingly tedious details. Then she told the salesman, "Thanks. We've got to go to another lot now." He, of course, much preferred that we didn't go to any more lots. He and another junior helper did their best to get us to stay, or at least indicate how interested we were. Julia answered, "They're okay, but they don't stand out, especially not at the prices you're asking." Whereupon the salesman started extolling the cars' virtues as justification for their prices, while hinting that he might be able to drop the prices just a little, "although they're already exceptionally good value for money, blah, blah..." "You sound exactly the same as every other salesman describing every other make of car. We'll look at the others and get back to you if either of your cars makes the shortlist." We left. Julia told me to head back to her place. "Why?" "So we can research colors online." "I thought the color of the one we tried was very good." "Bright red isn't right for you; it's too loud and insecure. Bright red sports cars are for wannabes: young guys who want to be cool, or middle-aged men who're trying to recapture their youth. We'll find something better for you." I was sure "we" would. My second pair of Speedos is bright red, and I briefly wondered whether Julia was being inconsistent. I was even so silly as to think about asking her to explain the Speedos, but decided that I REALLY didn't want to know. We found quite a few pictures online, enabling Julia to choose a shortlist of interior and exterior colors (both were selectable). Then she called the Portland lot to ask what color combinations they had in stock. They didn't have many, but they had enough for Julia to decide that we were going to Portland next. So we got in our trusty Honda Civic and drove north for 1.5 hours. On the way, Julia called Vanessa for negotiation advice. I could only hear Julia's side, which wasn't very informative, but Julia seemed happy. At the Lexus dealership in Portland, we spent fifteen minutes refusing their help while we casually examined the color choices. We agreed - by which I mean that Julia stated and I agreed - that a silver exterior and light tan interior "projected the most appropriate image for me." That was good, because I was very worried about projecting an inappropriate image. Can you imagine how bad that'd be? We stood at the edge of the Portland lot while Julia called the Corvallis dealership, getting the appropriate salesman, telling him "We're at another lot now. What's your best cash price for a new SC430?" Strangely enough he didn't want to answer Julia's question. He much preferred to find out from her how "best" his best price needed to be. It was quite amusing listening to Julia put the worst possible light on it, and to put the pressure on too, "You're taking too long to answer a simple question. The lot we're at now didn't take as long as you to discount their list price usefully. Obviously you don't really want the sale. Talk with your boss and call me back within five minutes. If you can't be competitive, we might as well buy from where we are." When Julia had hung up, I asked, "Why don't we buy from here, or at least negotiate with them?" "Dad said it'd be best to buy from the lot that's going to be servicing it. We'll get their best price then see if this place can beat it." After some more back and forth, Julia got a reduced price out of them. It wasn't much of a reduction, only $1100, and Julia let them know that it was pathetic. They wanted her to come back to their lot to discuss it face to face, although why that affected their "best price" wasn't obvious to me. Julia answered, "Give me a couple of hours, and I'll drive there in Mark's brand new car, because your unwillingness to negotiate means you're going to miss out." "Well MAYBE we could drop another $500, but you have to remember that Lexus cars come with the best service and warranty..." "I've heard that ten times already. So your price is still well over $60,000. That's all we needed to know..." "It's only a few hundred over. Are you saying that getting it under $60,000 is what it'll take for you to buy the SC430?" "No. I'm saying that if you don't get it under $60,000, then we won't buy from you. Fortunately, as you said, it's only a few hundred over, so that'll be easy for you. I've got a call coming in from the other lot we visited. I'll hang up. Call me back if you've got a better price in the next few minutes." Julia hung up, filled me in on what the salesman had said (I've included it above), then told me, "This is fun! I can see why Mom likes this game. Let's head home." "We're not going to talk with the salesmen here?" "Not today." "So we're not going to be buying a car today?" "We'll tell them we'll sleep on it overnight. That's what Mom recommended. They want to push us forward as fast as possible, so taking it slowly disrupts their game plan." In the car, Julia's phone rang. She checked the call was from the only salesman we were dealing with, then let it ring until voicemail picked it up. Ten minutes later she checked her messages. "He wants me to call him back." She did so, then told him, "We're driving to the third lot. There are three cars on our shortlist, and number three just surprised us with a good offer. We're going to their lot to talk about it now." "No, that wouldn't be safe. I just told you that we're driving. Neither of the other lots are being sexist, so just tell me what you called for ten minutes ago?" He told her. "$59,950. It's a good thing we're not in a hurry, because two hours to drop $2,000 is hardly impressive. For a firm that says they give excellent service, you're very slow. -- "If the lot we're on the way to now retain their lead, then we'll probably buy from them shortly. If you want to stay in the game, you're going to have to drop to at least $58,000." I could hear his pain even over the tiny speaker. "Yes, I did tell you that under $60,000 would be competitive, but they've dropped their price since then." "No, I won't tell you who they are." "$59,500? I said you'd have to go to fifty EIGHT to keep us interested." "$59,250. That's a BIG improvement, haha." "It's not my problem if your manager won't let you go any lower. If he's such an unreasonable person we'd be better off buying our car from another lot. Thanks for the half-hearted reduction, but I have to go now because we've arrived and their salesman has spotted us. Bye." We carried on driving. Five minutes later Julia's phone rang again, but she ignored it. Shortly after that she got a text message. She told me, "They're down to $58,950. Three grand off their starting price. It's like getting blood out of a stone, except more fun. I get the feeling they're not going to come down much more." "What do we do for the rest of the day?" "Call Mom first, to see what she says." Julia did that. After which she told me, "Mom's advice is a more detailed version of what she told me before. We ignore them for forty five minutes then I'll call them to say, 'We're going home, we'll sleep on it overnight then visit the three lots in alphabetic order for fifteen minutes each tomorrow morning to get everyone's final offer, then we'll drive to the best lot and buy their car.' After we get Toyota's best offer we'll leave their lot, call Lexus in Portland to ask if they can do a deal for whatever Toyota's price less $1,000 is. -- "If they won't, then we'll buy from Toyota. But if Portland can, then there must be some fat left in it, so we'll try to negotiate Toyota down some more, playing Portland and Toyota off against each other as much as we can." "Good. And much as I don't like the idea of spending sixty grand on a car, it'll be good to get it over with. It drags on." "Yeah, but it's worth spending a day to save three or four grand. Besides, we can spend the day together and you can learn some things. Next time we have something we need to negotiate, you can do it." "If that includes phoning Vanessa for detailed instructions, then I might be able to. Changing the subject, I've spent the last few evenings at your place, so I should spend the next couple at home. I don't want to risk Mom getting in a bad mood with me at this critical time." "Okay. I've got heaps of things to talk with Carol about, so do you think it'd be okay for her to sleepover at my place tonight?" "I guess so, but we'll have to ask Mom. What have you got to talk with Carol about?" "HEAPS of stuff! We could spend hours talking about what happened at the pools yesterday, and there's plenty of wife stuff too." [I haven't mentioned it, but Julia got quite a few calls during the day, from Leanna to apologize, and from other girls who'd been at the Aquatic Center yesterday. As far as I could tell they gushed back and forth for long periods but didn't transfer any actual information, i.e., it was typical girl-talk. I could easily imagine Julia and Carol spending hours talking about it in the same manner.] I said, "That's good. How about you have dinner at our place, then I take you and maybe Carol to your place afterward. It'll have to be soon after dinner, because you've got so much to talk about." I must've overdone the facetiousness, because Julia gave me a suspicious look. I concentrated on the road and looking innocent. I think she half-believed me (the "concentrating on the road" half). Fortunately she just said, "Okay, that'll be good. I'll let Mom know." The Toyota salesman called back about 4:30. He tried to do some fishing by telling Julia that the SC430 was about to be sent back to where it'd come from, "But we can hold it for a day if Mark is interested?" Julia told him, "Even if you drop your price far enough for Mark to buy one of your cars, he wouldn't dream of buying one that color. It'd be completely inappropriate. You didn't do yourself any favors showing us such a garish color." #6: It was nearly 5pm by the time we got home. Donna wasn't there. Nothing unusual about that. During any vacation, Donna is usually off playing with one or more of her friends. She's in so many sports teams that she's got a multitude of friends to tear around with. Carol was at home though. The darling was printing off recipes from the internet. The internet is a WONDERFUL thing! There's stuff on it about the best three things in the world: Cooking, Mathematics and Sex. I wondered briefly which order those three should go in, and I decided it's impossible to prioritize them because they're actually all number 1's for three different categories: Physical, Intellectual and Emotional. Which I guess that means my Spiritual needs are going unfilled. Oh well, I'll just have to make do with more of the other three. After I'd finished effusively praising Carol, Julia got a chance to say, "If it's okay with your mom, do you want to sleepover at my place tonight?" "With Mark too?" asked Carol hopefully. #8: Julia answered, "Mark thinks he has to stay at home for a couple of nights, because he's spent the last couple at my place, so it'll just be a girls night." "That's good too," said Carol happily. "I've got heaps of things I want to talk with you about. I heard Linda tell Pat that she thought Katelin was..." And off they went. I wouldn't have minded so much, except that Carol stopped her cooking research. Talk about a mixed up sense of priorities! I told the girls I'd have a shower and do some cleaning up, but I don't think they heard the Center Of Their Universe. Mom and Donna were home by the time I returned to the kitchen. Mom told me, "It's fine to take Carol to Julia's after dinner. Your father and I want to talk with you about a few things, so that'd work out nicely." Dinner was full of conversation. Mom told us about her plans for our trip to England and France [Switzerland wasn't planned yet. Mom and Dad weren't really up to speed with the Emergency Fund concept. They'd get that message in a few more days]. Julia managed to get in a quick summary of our car shopping. Dad didn't recognize what a Lexus SC430 was (nor did Mom, but she didn't care), so Julia quickly got some of the brochures she had to show Dad. He whistled in appreciation, saying, "That's a sexy car." Everyone else thought so too, especially when they were looking at the pictures of it when it had the roof retracted. Julia was pleased, so that must've been the image she wanted me to project. I was amused that she never asked anyone for their opinion of 'our' color choices. She simply told them, "We're getting it in silver with light tan leatherwork." If it'd been me in charge (silly idea, I know), I would've been worriedly checking and double-checking with everyone that they approved of my choices. I asked Dad, "When are you and Mom going to upgrade your cars?" "There's no hurry for that; they're both running fine so far. I'd love to borrow yours sometimes though?" "Seems only fair and reasonable. Julia is keeping her Civic, so we're not going to be short of cars. You can borrow mine whenever you want, provided Julia doesn't have me booked for something that driving the Civic to would cause irreparable damage to my image." Julia also mentioned, "Leanna called us this afternoon, very apologetic over her behavior last night. She particularly wanted me to pass her apologies on to you Felicity, for all the trouble she caused. She's ashamed of herself now, and promised to be much better behaved 'the next time.' She's being hopeful about that, but at least she's fine now." Donna talked about her day, which made me feel a bit guilty about not spending much time with her recently; not that she'd been at home much. She'd also very generously done her best to give me enough money to buy a car with, so I thought of an appropriate offer, "Donna, I hope to buy my new car tomorrow, but they might not have our color choice in stock so I don't know when I'll actually get hold of it. Whenever that is, I want you to be the first family member I take for a drive..." "Really! Cool. Where'll we go?" "Just for a test drive. Out onto the highway so we can go fast with the roof down, through town so maybe some of your friends will see you. Wherever you want. You gave me a lot of money to buy a car with. Just because I'm going to waste it buying a horse doesn't mean you shouldn't be the first member of my family I take for a drive. In case I can get it quickly, do you know where you'll be tomorrow?" "Swimming practice early in the morning, but I don't know about after that." I asked, "Does anyone know how long it'll take me to get the car if we buy it tomorrow mid-morning?" No one did, my family not having had a lot of experience at buying brand new cars. We guessed it'd be the afternoon at the earliest as it presumably had to be delivered from Portland, and maybe even a day or two later. I ended up writing my cellphone number down and giving it to Donna, telling her to let me know a number I could reach her on every time she moved after mid-morning. "That's presuming you want to come for the first ride?" "Do I EVER! That's CHOICE!" "Good. Also please make sure none of your friends find out my cellphone number. If you have to use someone else's cellphone to call me, tell them you're calling Mom so they won't be interested, okay? I don't want anyone to find out in case they spread it around and I start getting dozens of calls a day." "Okay." I REALLY appreciated having an unknown number. I could too easily imagine how many silly calls I would've gotten from Leanna, as just the latest example. Those sorts of calls would be a pain in the ass. They'd drag on for hours, full of all sorts of emotional crap that I'd have to be polite about. There weren't enough hours in the day, not even my 21.5-hour days, for me to waste them that way. Mom had been happy to have Carol go to Julia's, because she and Dad had been talking about the issues Vanessa had raised last evening, and they wanted to talk with me about them. So on my return home after delivering Julia and Carol to Julia's place, Mom asked for me to have a talk with them in their bedroom, leaving Donna in front of the TV. Mom started by asking, "What're your thoughts about marriage?" #1: #4: Mom hadn't told me what the conversation was going to be about, which is a tactic I generally disapprove of. I need to know Mom's agenda, so I know what version of the truth to tell her. So I gave a deliberately unhelpful answer, "I'm glad you and Dad are married and I think you should remain that way." Dad chuckled, while Mom tried again with, "I meant for you. What are your thoughts about your getting married?" "I think I should dress nicely and carry several handkerchiefs. You're approaching this conversation the wrong way, Mom. You're fishing for information from me so you can judge it. That's means you don't consider me as having even an equal say in how my life goes, not even on the subject of my own marriage. You haven't been showing me much trust recently, have you? If you wish to know something, tell me what it is." #1: "You're right again. Sorry, Mark. When I was talking to Vanessa yesterday, she said she doubted you'd ever get married. Is she right?" Fortunately 3B had experience in this area. In 3B-land, Mom and Dad had been talked into consenting to the marriage (just), but Mom had backslid a few times after the marriage, especially after the pipeline system had started, so I'd had some practice setting her straight. I'd been over this ground with her, so I knew what my arguments were. I also knew pretty well what Vanessa and Prof's position was, so I just had to say enough to reinforce the Williams' case, without saying so much that Mom got angry now. I answered, "There are several obvious reasons why I'll never walk down the aisle with a bride, so in that sense Vanessa's right." "What do you mean 'in that sense'? What other sense is there?" "I meant traditionally. Other countries have different marriage laws and even in America the marriage laws change from time to time. Not that it's relevant to me, but same-sex marriages are becoming legal in some states now. I'm not going to get married in the traditional sense, because that's bad for everyone, but maybe a workable solution will become possible one day." "I don't understand. A workable solution to what?" "I've heard some people say that the main purpose of a marriage is to produce children. So let's look at it from that angle. How many children should I have, Mom?" "You're saying that your being so special means you should have lots of children." I had to be careful here. I wanted to claim that I was the most important human ever, but I knew that eight IQs of 105 weren't likely to produce anything dramatic. My ability to study quickly and share memories gave me some help, but I didn't expect to make much difference to mankind (although I was working hard on affecting quite a few of girl-kind). I wanted to talk Mom and Dad into consenting to my three-way marriage now, but not to feel angry about being deceived later, especially when my children didn't develop any of my abilities. I had a plan for that: In about ten years or so I'd tell Mom and Dad that I was researching the source of my abilities. After a year or two of apparently hard work, I'd eventually 'discover' that my abilities weren't genetic. I'd make up some plausible sounding crap to explain them, but that's not important. The important things were that Mom and Dad wouldn't feel deceived, and that Carol, Julia and I would be inseparable by then. "It's one factor. With my intellectual abilities I have a good chance of dramatically improving mankind's future. If I have several special children, then mankind could benefit even more. We don't know what the chance of my children being special is, but I have to think that it's quite low. If it's only 1% say, I should have two or three hundred children. That's probably a few too many for one woman to produce, don't you think?" "So you want to have more than one wife?" The expression on Mom's face was highly doubtful. Not angry, comical or treating it like an absurdity, but still not encouraging. "What I want isn't really the issue; it's a responsibility thing. My descendants might improve mankind, so I'd better make sure I have 'enough' of them, however many that is. -- "I'm too unusual to live the usual life of getting married, having 2.3 kids, living in a house with a white picket fence, and working 9 to 5. Those things aren't going to happen to me. Not only should I have more than 2.3 children, but a traditional marriage wouldn't work. The gap between my wife and myself would be too extreme. She'd never be able to keep up with me, so she'd feel inadequate and lonely. I wouldn't want to inflict that on anyone I cared for. -- "It doesn't make sense for you to be questioning who and how many people I should have with me on my path through life, when you don't yet appreciate what my path will be. It's only a week and half ago that I showed you my special abilities, and you haven't got your head around them yet. It's obvious from your leaping to the wrong moralistic conclusions about Donna and Leanna the last couple of evenings that you're still treating me like a typical 15-year old boy." "Who's Leanna?" asked Dad. I let Mom answer, which she did pretty well, including a truthful description of her leaping to the wrong conclusion. I resumed, "I knew about your fear of Dad's having an affair. Do you understand the implications of my being able to do things like that?" "How on Earth can I understand the implications when I've got no idea how you could've known that!" "That's not a good answer. Even if you don't know how, the fact that I did it still implies that I should be treated as considerably more capable than a typical 15-year old." I won't repeat most of the rest of the conversation. I generally followed the above formula: Mom would raise an issue (she was on a bit of a fishing expedition, so she had several topics in mind), I'd answer with something that'd support what Vanessa and Prof were going to tell her tomorrow evening, and then I'd spread bullshit around to avoid saying anything more. It wasn't Mom's favorite way to have a conversation - that'd be the style where she gets all her questions answered - but by now she was getting used to not having the upper-hand in discussions about me, so I didn't have too much trouble ducking her questions and then smothering them in bullshit. By the end of the discussion, I thought that Mom and Dad were both somewhat prepared for the points the Williamses would be making, and Mom and Dad were more than a little confused about what to think. Julia had taught me that confusing people you want to manipulate is a good technique. I'd confused Mom and Dad pretty well, so hopefully Vanessa and Prof could un-confuse them in the right direction. The conversation ended this way. Mom turned to Dad, asking him, "What do you think?" Dad shrugged, saying, "Mark doesn't want to tell us what he's going to be doing, so I think there's a doozie coming our way. If he screws-up, he's going to be in a whole lot of trouble over it." Dad had been looking at me when he answered Mom, so I knew he'd seen through me pretty well. Mom asked suspiciously, "Are you going to be doing something you know we wouldn't approve of? Like another casino stunt?" 3B's initial reaction was very angry. Fortunately 3A clamped our mouth shut. #2: #4: #1: I said, "OF COURSE there's a doozie coming your way. Followed by another doozie, then a REALLY big doozie, then several more to get you ready for when the mega-doozies start arriving. That's what being my parents is going to involve from now on. I gave you a million dollars recently; that was a doozie. I'm about to spend $3 million on a house for us to live in; that's another doozie. The main reason we're moving is because my privacy and security are serious concerns; which is another doozie. We're going to be sharing a house with another family, which will be a doozie of an adaptation to make. I'm going to graduate high school with two or three bachelor's degrees and have companies and universities from all over the world chasing after me; that's another doozie. -- "There's going to be no end to the doozies coming at you, and you're going to be hit with situations that no parents have ever faced before. You're going to have to make decisions about many of them, which - quite frankly - you're not doing a good job of getting ready for. Dad, you're still far too quiet in parenting situations, and Mom, you STILL can't resist making thoughtless moralistic judgments. Not to mention cheap shots. What the hell was the point of your saying 'Like another casino stunt'? Prof and I went through physical and emotional AGONY because of that, but you couldn't resist opening your mouth to take a cheap shot, could you? Do you really think your reminder served a useful purpose? Prof and Vanessa spent ages researching doing it, and they thought it was a good idea. Are you going to hit them with cheap shots too? I'm sure they'd appreciate your rubbing their nose in the fact that Prof nearly died. -- "I have POWER, Mom; I can and have killed people just by using my mind. Dad thinks Bush is a very bad president, so maybe I should assassinate him? I'm sure many people think America would be better off without him. With my power and situation, moral questions are going to come up all the time. So what're you going to do next time one does? Leap onto your high horse and start a tirade before you've got even half the facts or given the big picture any thought at all?" "I'm sorry, Mark. I'll..." "Which makes tonight the third evening in a row that you've apologized for a thoughtless, moralistic knee-jerk reaction. Dad was right that I don't want to discuss major moral issues with you yet. That's because you don't know how to 'discuss'. You don't get all the facts, think about them, OR discuss them rationally. You might want to bear in mind that other people have opinions too. If you want them to respect your opinions, you should show theirs some respect, by listening and thinking about them." I was overreacting to Mom's little, cheap shot, but I wanted her to learn to withhold her judgments, because none of her recent ones had been good for me, and I somehow doubted her initial reaction to the three-way marriage would be good one either. -- "Fortunately there aren't any big decisions due for a while, which gives you chances to practice on the small ones first. Dad, from now on whenever ANY moral situation develops, you need to help Mom stop her knees jerking. Sit on her, if necessary. Please make sure Mom's got all the facts and is actually thinking about them. I can almost guarantee that any issue involving me is NOT going to be straightforward and simple, so Mom's initial reactions are going to keep being wrong until she learns to behave responsibly. Okay?" They both agreed it was okay. Both recognized that they were "letting the team down" (Dad's words). They apologized and promised to do better. Hopefully they'd remember their promises during their discussion with Vanessa and Prof tomorrow evening. I'd blasted Mom enough, and Mom and Dad should probably have a talk together, so I went to play with Donna for a while. It was quite strange how the marriage had gotten parental permission in 3B-land compared to here. I'd wanted no involvement the first time, mainly because I felt totally inadequate with people issues. But here I wanted to be involved so much I wanted to be in charge of large parts of it. Of course my confidence in being in charge of the wedding ceremony was only possible because I knew 3B's Julia and Vanessa had designed it, but it was still a big step forward for me. Another difference was that even after 3B's marriage, 3B hadn't worried about my parents being upset twenty years later about my kids not having my abilities, but I did care here. I didn't have the exact solution worked out, but I felt better knowing I'd be able to prevent their getting upset. Donna had an important question for me too, "If you're buying a car tomorrow, does that mean we can get my horse soon too?" "We don't have anywhere to keep one yet. I can park my car on the street, but we can't do that with a horse." I was pretty sure that was the case, as I'd never seen them tied up beside the street, not even when there was a grass margin. I made a mental note that I'd probably have to do some research about buying horses sometime soon. Presumably I'd need to buy a saddle and a brush for their coat too, because I'd seen people on TV brush horses down after a ride. "Can't we keep it in the backyard for a while?" asked Donna reasonably. "You'll have to ask Mom that Donna." "Oh," said Donna in disappointment, obviously knowing how Mom would answer. I guess she'd been hoping that I'd say yes, that we'd buy a horse, put it in the backyard, and Mom wouldn't notice. That topic sadly finished, Donna asked, "When I go for a ride in you car, can we take some of my friends?" "Sure. It's your ride, so you can do whatever you want." "Choice! It looks REALLY fast. How fast can you make it go?" "All the way up to the speed limit." "I bet it can go MILES faster than that!" "I bet it won't though. Do you want to have an accident like Prof's, where you lose half a leg?" "That'd be TERRIBLE! I wouldn't be able to run, or ANYTHING!" "It'd be bad all right, so we're not going to risk it." Also because it wasn't worth the risk of Prof finding out I'd sped. Then Donna had some questions about how fast I could swim. Carol had told her that I left everyone for dead, so Donna offered, "Do you want me to enter you into a swimming race?" "I hope you're not thinking of betting on me?" "Umm. No. Mom would get angry if she knew about that." "And if you suddenly had a lot of money of your own, what's the chance Mom would find out about it?" My would-be partner in crime had a brainwave, "You could hold it for me!" "So you want me to get in trouble too! Moms ALWAYS find out about stuff like that. They're damned hard to fool. It doesn't matter anyway, because I don't want to enter any swimming races. No more races for me." "But it's FUN winning races!" insisted my highly competitive sister. "Not for me, sweetie." It took another minute or so, but I finally convinced Donna that - as silly as it seemed - I didn't want to enter races even when I knew I could win them. Then we got on to a topic of considerably more interest to me: Donna's Ducklings. They wanted to see me and I wanted to see parts of them, so clearly something needed to be arranged. The more of them that I saw, the better (by now you should know which of the two possible meanings I was thinking), so something involving swimsuits was definitely on the agenda. Not at the Aquatic Center, as that didn't have any privacy. That was essential, so I could do interesting things with 12-year old girls without being seen by lots of people who'd be thinking I was a pervert that needed to be reported to as many troublemakers as possible. Donna and I discussed some possibilities, but I left it undecided for now. I wanted to see what happened with tomorrow evening's marriage discussion first. It'd be pointless arranging something if Mom cut my balls off. Otherwise Donna and I just goofed around until Mom and Dad emerged from their room. It took them a while, and they looked apologetic again. They felt they were the ones in the wrong now, because I wasn't doing anything relevant. But when the three-way marriage came up, I could easily imagine what they'd think of their guilt compared to mine. They again apologized and promised to do better, and they certainly looked sincere about it, but I'd have to wait and see. Hopefully they'd be "doing better" in about 24 hours. I spent some time on the phone with Ava, and then Julia and Carol. It almost seemed silly to spend half an hour saying goodnight to Julia and Carol when I'm going to be getting up in just two and a half hours to drive to where they are, but that's what we do. Part of being a good boyfriend is being illogical. It makes girls happy though, which is probably not a coincidence. ------- Chapter 262: I Nearly Get Arrested Buying My New Car Wednesday, June 22, 2005 I had my pre-breakfast at home, then drove to the Williams'. I physically went to the study, but used a large sight blob (large, to collect enough light to see with) to check on Julia and Carol. They were lying close together in bed. Their wearing nightwear ruined my fantasy of their getting hot and sweaty with each other before they'd slept, but I guess my life can't be like some cheap porn story all the time. Studying was enjoyable, as usual, especially the Physics course. It was dealing with electromagnetism, optics and wave motion. I still couldn't get sound blobs or dual sight sources working, so learning about stuff in those areas was good. With luck, I'd eventually find something that'd get me past those two roadblocks. I studied right through the time I expected the girls to come in. Fifteen minutes past Julia's normal time to interrupt me, I sent a sight blob to check. They were still asleep, so I carried on studying. They eventually turned up forty minutes later than normal. Both still wearing nightwear, unfortunately. Hopefully my life will get back on track soon. I scooted my chair back, and they climbed onto a leg each. "You slept late this morning?" "We didn't get to sleep for a long time; we had a lot to talk about," Julia explained. It was too early in the day to get in trouble, so I played safe by changing the subject by asking, "I hope your parents do a good job on Mom and Dad this evening." We discussed that, which meant mostly agreeing with each other when we all wished the same thing, until I suggested that it was breakfast time. Car buying was the big event of the morning. Julia and I visited the Toyota lot just before 10am, located our salesman and Julia told him, "You have fifteen minutes to improve on your $58,950 offer, so we can make our choice between the three cars we're considering." He assured us that his offer was already the best one, "because Lexus cars are the best, with great safety features and the best blah, blah..." After thirteen minutes of his "blah, blah'ing," and fishing about what we thought of our other choices, we started walking off his lot, with him trailing after us. On the edge, Julia told him, "This is your last chance. Are you going to improve on your offer today?" It turned out that he wasn't. He couldn't just say that, so we had to put up with some more salesmanship, but we left the lot with the price still at $58,950. "That's a pity," I said, as soon as we were driving away. "It doesn't really matter," said Julia. "If he'd dropped any more, it would've only have been another hundred or two. Why don't you call the Portland dealership to see if they'll take $57,950 for a cash deal today?" I agreed. We parked down the street and Julia called them on her phone and passed it to me. I got a salesman, then repeated what Julia had said, "I want to buy a Lexus SC430. Will you take $57,950 for a cash deal today?" "Possibly," he encouraged. "We can discuss that when you come to the lot. Have you driven one before?" After all the salesmanship I'd been on the receiving end of since we'd started looking at cars, even I knew better than get suckered into responding to either of those points. I said, "Just answer the question please. Will you do a deal for $57,950?" It wasn't as easy as that. After refusing to answer some more of his irrelevant questions, and repeating my original question another couple of times, he said he'd call us back. He did so after fifteen minutes, asking me, "Are you trading anything in?" "No. Will you take $57,950?" "We've got an SC430 demonstrator available for $51,995. Would that interest you?" That confused me, but I soon found out that they occasionally sell the cars they use for their test drives. It was nearly a year old and had done 15,000 miles. I let him know what Julia would doubtless think of that idea. It was probably the one we'd driven yesterday, so it was both used by a whole bunch of people and a totally inappropriate color. It eventually turned out that they wouldn't do a deal for $57,950, "but if you come to the lot, we should be able to work out a deal close to that." After I hung up on him, Julia directed, "Back to Toyota." "Oh boy. It's a LOT of money to pay for a car." "Not nearly as much as I was originally intending to spend." #4: I said, "Are you sure we have to buy a car? This one's running very well." Julia answered with The Look - it's one of the compulsory subjects in their secret classes - which killed the conversation, and nearly me too. #6: #1: #6: "{Sigh}. Okay Julia, let's do it." The salesman was happy to see us, and he couldn't wait to tell us that, "I knew you'd be back. It's a wonderful car with the best blah, blah..." So we started all the paperwork, while we listened to more blah, blah. The only thing I wanted to hear was the answer to my asking, "When will we have it?" "Provided one of your parents comes in to co-sign the contract in the next couple of hours, you'll get your car tomorrow afternoon. It needs to be prepped and delivered. We'll give you a call when it's ready for you." (They'd explained to me that my being under 18 meant I couldn't legally sign a contract by myself. They didn't seem to have a problem with me giving them a check for nearly sixty grand though.) There was a seemingly endless amount of stuff that had to be gone through. Paperwork to be filled out, registration forms, instructions on getting it serviced, yet another description of the warranty Lexus provides. A secretary came and went a couple of times with paperwork stuff, the dealership boss came in to congratulate us for deciding to purchase such a wonderful car, "especially because Lexus have the best blah, blah..." I had to sign something else, I had to call Dad again to discuss how to get it insured (which Dad had warned me might be tricky, because of my age, so we'd have to do some calling around this afternoon in case getting it insured was difficult), I had to listen to more blah, blah. There was a lot of messing around. Toward the end of which I heard the secretary's voice from somewhere behind me stridently declare, "There he is!" Her tone caught everyone's attention. We looked up to see two cops walking into the office, with the secretary standing behind them. The front cop and I recognized each other. He said, "Ahh, Mr. Anderson..." The secretary loved the cop's recognition, crowing, "I knew it!" " ... We've been called because this lady thinks you've got a fake driver's license." She'd taken it away during the paperwork storm. I'd been about to mention my age to her, but had been distracted by the dealership manager telling me "Blah, blah." #2: #1: #3: I said, "It's legit. You can check it no problems and..." #3: #6: [My age had been mentioned in post-date conversation with the Norrises here too, so the license annoyance had also repeated. One of the reasons we hadn't done anything with Claire and Diana at the end of our date with Mackenzie was because their parents got nasty over my license. We'd left right after we'd gotten it back following our successful call to the cops to report Mr. Norris's refusal to return it.] So I changed what I'd been about to say to, " ... it's already been checked by another policeman about six weeks ago." "We'll run it," said Cop#1. "Where is it?" He looked at me. I looked at the secretary. Cop #2 held out his hand to her. She looked less triumphant than she had a few seconds ago, as she placed the pieces of my license into the cop's hand. "WHAT!" I yelled. "You cut up my license!" "It's a fake!" insisted the secretary. "They don't give licenses to 14-year olds." Cop#1 looked at me for an explanation, Cop#2 being too busy doing a jigsaw. It was too much of a pain to explain, so I just said, "Run it. You'll see." Cop#2 had the four pieces arranged in the palm of one of his hands. He called back to the station, asking for it to be checked, stressing the issue date and my birthday. It took a couple of minutes before we all heard the answer come back, "It's in the system. It's a special issue." That raised the noise level in the small office considerably. The secretary started wailing her excuses, "They don't give licenses to 14-year olds", "How was I to know?", etc. The salesman and the dealership's boss, who'd came back when he'd seen the cops arrive, started apologizing to me. Cop#2 poured the pieces of my license into my hand, and I spent the time swearing to myself about having to face Roy Smith again. I asked Cop#2, "I don't suppose I can tape it together and keep using it?" "Nope. You gotta go to the DMV and get it replaced." "Good grief!" I glared at the secretary, "STUPID woman!" "It was an accident," the stupid woman claimed. Dripping with sarcasm, I replied, "You 'accidentally' put my license between the blades of a pair of scissors, 'accidentally' closed them, caught the two pieces, held them together, turned them ninety degrees then 'accidentally' cut them in half again. What a load of CRAP! You deliberately destroyed my private property and now I have to go back to the damned DMV to get it replaced." Julia was the only one here who'd appreciate what I'd gone through to get my license, but the lines at the DMV are a well-known complaint, so everyone would have some idea of how pissed off I was. Thinking about the pain-in-the-ass DMV gave me two ideas (at the same time, that's what happens with me sometimes). One of them I had to do first, to see how bad the situation was. I pulled out my cellphone and called Roy Damned Smith. I remembered his direct number. Having a superb memory is great. I said, "It's Mark Anderson here Mr. Smith. I got an underage license from you a couple of months ago. Do you remember?" He answered, "Of course. What do you want?" "I'm buying a car and a stupid woman at the dealership cut my license into quarters believing it to be a fake. Will there be any special problems in getting it replaced? What do I do?" "Fill out the 'Lost or Destroyed License' form, and you'll be issued a replacement. There's a $24.95 fee." "I don't need to take another test or anything like that?" "No. Goodbye." He hung up before I could ask whether I could get two or three spares in case met any more stupid, accident-prone people. The cops started leaving, but I said, "Hang on a second, please officers." -- I turned to the secretary to carry out the second idea I'd had. I said, "The DMV has a $25 fee. I want you to get it out of your wallet and bring it to me, along with your license and a pair of scissors." "You can't make me. It was an accident." I said, "Have you ever heard of the concept of taking responsibility for your actions? You deliberately destroyed my private property, so doing the same to yours seems highly appropriate." She still didn't want to, but the dealership's boss growled at her, so she scurried away to comply. That let me stop worrying whether the cops would back me up. They'd been looking on with slightly amused interest, but not otherwise helping at all. They certainly hadn't arrested her for destruction of private property. While Self-Righteous Stupid Scissors Secretary was scurrying, the salesman and boss repeated another apology or two, then tried to get back to business. Julia told them, "Wait. We're not doing anything yet." #3: #6: She returned, reluctantly offering the money, card and scissors. I picked out just the money, telling her, "Cut your own license. That'll be a better lesson for you." She looked around for support from anyone, getting none whatsoever. Less than none from her pissed off boss. She reluctantly cut her license into quarters, and then her boss told her to get lost for a while. The cops started leaving again. I stopped them again, to ask them, "How do I get to the DMV? Can I drive with my license cut up like that?" Cop#1 asked, "Are you going straight there after finishing here?" I looked at Julia, who said, "It'll waste the whole afternoon, but we don't have any choice." Cop#1 said, "That'll be okay. I'll tell my Sergeant what happened. If you get pulled over today tell the officer to talk with the Sergeant." "Thanks." "No problem." The cops left. The boss and salesman apologized again, then started sorting through the paperwork to make sure everything was on track. Which it soon wasn't, as Julia reached out, grabbed my check and ripped it into quarters (there's a lot of that going on), telling me, "I don't want you to buy this car. It'd cause me horrible emotions every time I looked at it. It'd remind me of your being accused of being a criminal. We should buy one of the others." She gave me a wink while saying it. I used NP to tap her on the head twice (it was a good chance to practice that), while I said, "I was thinking the same thing." "There's no need for that," assured the boss. "Her mistake had nothing to do with the dealership or what a wonderful car the SC430 is..." Julia cut him off, "If Mark had been a wanted criminal, you would've loved to stand in front of a TV camera to sing the praises of your company for helping catch him." I added, "In any event, I get a bad feeling whenever I think about driving that car now. It's going to be a constant reminder of my humiliation." Fifteen minutes later, we had agreed on the value of my humiliation: it was worth the unimpressive amount of $450. In other words, we bought the SC430 for $58,500. The paperwork was amended, finished, and we left, refusing their handshakes because I was humiliated by how little my humiliation was worth; I'd thought it should have been worth at least a thousand. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon standing in a line at the DMV, which gave us plenty of time to text news of the car purchase to the four parents, Carol and Ava, including that we'd be physically getting it tomorrow afternoon (Dad had quickly visited Toyota to co-sign the contract). There was no sign of the Stupid Secretary at the DMV. Just as well, as I was in a bad mood from all the time we were wasting in the line. When I got to the head of the line, I asked the guy behind the counter, "Can I get two or three spare licenses, in case a similar accident happens again?" He laughed scornfully at me. I felt humiliated, but apparently that's not something the DMV cares about because I didn't get any discount off the cost of my single replacement license. Mom called me because my OSU and school exam results both came out in the afternoon. My two OSU courses were as Prof had already told me, both 100%. I also had several 100% results from school (both grades' Math and Physics, plus a couple of others), with the other subjects all getting VERY high results, even both grades' English, not that it mattered. I'd seriously creamed both sets of exams, making Mom VERY impressed. Parents tend to think things like that are important, so it was good to keep them happy as it might make it easier for me to get permission to marry my sister, that being about the only possible benefit I could think of from my getting high scores in English. Carol got her usual very good results. She's reasonably smart, and until recently she has spent a great deal of time on schoolwork. Donna's results were mediocre, but at her grade no one really cared, although Mom didn't let Donna know that. We did some ringing around, learning that Julia got her usual exceptionally good results. She's a very bright girl, and it's impossible to imagine her and her family not ensuring she did very well at school. Ava's results were pretty good too. She'd made the 'mistake' of living with the Williamses while her parents were away on their vacation, so she'd ended up doing considerably more and better studying than was normal for her. Because Vanessa and Prof would be having dinner with my parents at my home, we'd be having ours at Julia's, so we drove there after finishing at the DMV. I called Dad's insurance company to arrange my car's insurance. My age came up early. Dad had warned me that the insurance companies might have a MAJOR problem with my age, to the extent that they might refuse to insure me at all, or charge a ridiculous amount, but I lucked out. The lady I talked to asked, "There are still five months until you're sixteen. Did you get a good deal on the car that you bought it so early?" #3: "Yes. Also because the price will be rising soon." Several of the car lots had used that line as an excuse not to negotiate much. Toyota hadn't made a big deal about that, but the price was bound to rise sooner or later. -- "I need to insure it so my parents can drive it," Dad had reminded me of that, "and so I can drive it when I have my license. Otherwise it's going to be parked. Can you do that?" "Yes. You do realize that if you drive it before you get your license that it won't be covered?" "Does 'covered' mean 'insured'?" "Yes. If you're in an accident before you get your license, then your car's not insured." "Mom and Dad have made that VERY clear. I promise that all the drivers will be licensed." I eventually got the quote. Ouch! I wish I'd been more humiliated at Toyota. Dad had warned me about insurance costs for teenage boys, so it wasn't a horrible surprise; just horrible. I could've bought sexy Australian bikinis for ALL of Carol's Cuties for less than the cost of a year's car insurance, and I know which would've given me the most pleasure. [When the contract arrived, I checked it carefully to make sure that it didn't exclude under 16-year olds. It was worded very conveniently, only excluding unlicensed drivers and charging a premium for drivers under 25.] Vanessa was working in her garden. It hadn't been touched for the month she'd been in Seattle, so it needed a lot of work, and we were roped into helping. That's something that happens at home too, and it's always puzzled me. Vanessa happily describes gardening as her hobby, and hobbies are what people do for their own personal enjoyment, so it's not logical to want help with it. Surely gardeners would enjoy their hobby more if they did all of it themselves? I'd hardly get someone to read half of a science fiction book for me (not that I have much time for reading sf these days), and certainly not to finish off having sex with a girl for me! I'd once pointed out to Mom how illogical her request that I help her in her garden was, one of the results of which was that when Vanessa asked, "Please help me in the garden?" I replied, "Of course." So that's how we spent the rest of the day, even after Vanessa went inside to start cooking our dinner. I was perfectly happy for her to leave her hobby to us while she did the cooking. Logic has its place, as does dinner (in my stomach), and the former should never be allowed to interfere with the latter. ------- Chapter 263: Seeking Parental Permission to Marry Wednesday, June 22, 2005 (Continued) At dinnertime, Prof drove to my home in his car, with me following in my trusty Honda to pick up my sisters to take them back to Julia's for our dinner. I had Vanessa and Julia with me so Vanessa could give me her last minute thoughts on what Carol and I might have to say when we had to talk with Mom and Dad about the marriage. At my place, I talked to Mom and Dad about the car purchase and doing my best to appear at ease and unconcerned so they wouldn't get any forewarning of the doozie that was coming their way shortly. Doing some go-relaxes helped with that. I very much didn't want them to suspect my involvement when Vanessa and Prof started the conversation, because they'd react badly if they thought they were being railroaded. When we left my place, Donna rushed out and got into the front passenger seat the quickest. I let her have what I hoped was one of her last rides in that seat. It was easy for Julia to get Donna to help her with something in the kitchen, while I had a quick chat with Carol to bring her up to date with everything Vanessa had told me. Carol's role for when we had to discuss our marriage with Mom and Dad was small and simple, mainly just to say she loved me, loved the idea of having a three-way marriage with Julia and me, and loved the idea of having children with me one day. There was additional stuff about the responsibility of raising possibly special children and being aware that there may be risks from being in my life. Carol already knew all that, but there was no harm in reinforcing it. Vanessa's additional thoughts had included a few points about questions that Mom and Dad were unlikely to ask, but that it'd be wise to prepare for just in case, which I passed on to Carol. I was reasonably confident that Mom and Dad would agree, because they'd done so quite easily in 3B-land and my abilities were a great deal more impressive now. I even ate dinner quickly to make sure I finished it before we got the phone call that they'd agreed. But time passed, and even after dinner was long gone, there was no call. We were killing time watching a DVD in the Guys' Room, waiting for some news from the parents. Even Donna - not the most sensitive of people watchers - had asked, "Why are you all acting so weird?" I answered, "Mom, Dad, Vanessa and Prof are having an important discussion. We're waiting to hear from them." "What about?" "It'd probably be best to wait to hear from them first. Sorry." We waited and worried some more. My phone finally rang at 9:05pm. Vanessa said, "It's still undecided. Your parents want to talk with the three of you. Can you come now please?" "Absolutely! There's no one else here now, so we'll have to bring Donna." "That'll be fine." "What can you tell me about the situation?" "As I said before, it's undecided. We'll talk when you get here." Vanessa hung up. I told the girls, "All I know is that it's undecided and they want to talk with us." Donna asked, "Can we see the rest of the movie first?" "Sorry, sweetie. What's at home is too important. It'll have to wait for another day." Julia and Carol tried to find out more from me, but there was nothing I could add. When we arrived at home, I walked inside with considerable nervousness. I was too scared to hold Carol's hand, and too scared to hold Julia's in case it made my not holding Carol's look bad. On the other hand, holding no one's hand looked bad too. Mom didn't bite my head off when we got inside, or chase after my gonads with a knife, or react in many of the other negative ways I could easily imagine. Nor did she welcome me with open arms and congratulate me for wanting to boink my sister. Judging by Mom's and Dad's reactions, they were as Vanessa had said: undecided. Mom instructed Donna to amuse herself in her bedroom while the rest of us moved to the living room. For once in her life Donna was smart enough not to ask questions. When the rest of us were settled, Mom started with, "Vanessa and Prof tell us that you want to pretend to be married to Carol and Julia, Mark?" #1: #5: I answered, "That's essentially correct, although I wouldn't have worded it that way." "How would you've worded it?" "That the three of us wanted to make the same emotional commitment to each other that traditionally married couples do." "Then why are the vows you've invented so one-sided?" #1: "The Vows were written to reflect how the girls already think of me, not to create something that doesn't already exist. Have you ever seen me treat Carol or Julia selfishly since I started changing?" "You have sex with other girls. That's VERY selfish." "I'd give it up in a second if that's what it took to get your blessing, even though rejection's the last thing Ava needs. But I don't think I'm being selfish. That means no one else is benefiting, but Carol and Julia are, because I was useless at boy-girl relationships before, and now I'm getting much better." Carol backed me up, "He's FAR better, Mom. It was amazing to see how confident and friendly he was at the pools. Not long ago he was tongue-tied around girls." Julia had something to say too, "Felicity, you heard the description of how Leanna got into my bed with Mark. The competition was MY idea and MY doing. EVERY girl Mark has slept with has been my idea. He could've had sex with dozens or even hundreds of girls by now, but he hasn't asked a SINGLE one; I'm the one that keeps pushing girls at him. There's no way that can be called behaving selfishly. I WANT him to do what he's doing, and so does Carol." "That's right!" agreed Carol. Prof contributed, "Mark has to learn the true value of the various temptations, Felicity. Whether money, sex, having power over people, the arrogance of genius or the arrogance of being superhuman. You're not going to protect him from those by being cautious now. Nor are you protecting Carol, because their lives are going to be intertwined for many years. It's better they learn now when there is much less at stake, including having four years to prove their relationship works before children are considered." Dad said, "You don't really think Mark's motivated by sex, do you Fely?..." #3: " ... If they're after sex, they'd do it behind our backs." The conversation went on and on. Mom wasn't happy, even though when Vanessa asked Mom to list her objections, none of them were dramatic. Merely things like, "They could get in trouble if it got out," or the even less impressive, "It's not right." Fundamentally, Mom was just VERY uncomfortable. Chances were that Mom's specific objections had already been destroyed by Vanessa and Prof, so Mom was left with only vague 'reasons'. The "Big Picture" didn't work on Mom. She wasn't too interested in the "Long-Term Picture" either. It was simply "wrong" for Carol and me to be having sex together, let alone intending to have babies. One of the ideas I'd had before this discussion was to fly Julia around the room. I'd even made sure the living room drapes were fully closed before we sat down. That would've impressed the heck out of nearly everyone, and Julia and Carol would've both LOVED it (for very different reasons), but special effects weren't going to do the job with Mom. Her objections were moral, so the only special effect that might've helped would be my putting a halo around my head. Unfortunately Mom knew me too well to fall for that. [A week ago Carol had told me she weighed 130 pounds. I'd weighed my NP on the inaccurate household scales, and knew that I was roughly one month away from having an 8-mind maximum lift of 130 pounds. I'd need more than 130 pounds to actually do anything with Carol, so I was probably about three or four months away from being able to 'Peter Pan' her. I doubted it'd be a surprise to her though, because I expected to yield to the temptation to demonstrate the effect with 70-pound Julia before Carol could be flown. I already had well over half a g of acceleration available for Julia, which would allow some impressive swooping.] Mom held her ground in the face of everyone else's disagreeing with her. There's nothing cowardly about Mom, unfortunately. We kept things VERY polite, even though we skated close to the edge a few times, such as when Mom accused me, "You've been seducing Carol ever since your rescue, haven't you?" "I realized many things during the kidnapping. Your fear about Dad having an affair, or Carol's stated intention of going to college really being an avoidance tactic. I composed the first three vows at that time too; not for me, but for Julia and Carol. They could spend all summer working on drafting vows, and not be able to create anything that better reflected THEIR feelings for me than what I wrote. -- "Our three-way marriage will be superb. I know that for a fact. Carol will blossom with Julia and me. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't know that. Your using the word 'seducing' sounds selfish, but Julia's and my motivations aren't selfish. I realized how fantastic it'd be for everyone, and that's what I've been working toward." During the discussion, Vanessa made sure we understood that Mom was trying to make the best decision she could, so we shouldn't get angry with her for any reason (such as, for instance, out of our damned frustration). "What about marrying Donna?" was one of Mom's questions. I wasn't in the best of moods, so I had to reject the first couple of replies that occurred to me. Instead I said, "I can't imagine why Julia or Carol would want to marry Donna, or why Donna would want to marry them." "What about you?" "I just answered that question, Mom. My opinion is first and foremost what's good for my spouses. That's the same criterion Julia and I have for adding Carol, and why one of the first things I did was explain to Carol why she was good for Julia." Unfortunately, there was no reason why we had to decide this quickly, other than my previously mentioned frustration. After an hour's conversation, the parents decided to call it a night. Prof suggested, "We'll think about it for a while and resume some other time." #8: #6: #8: #1: Carol started complaining, and looked about to get very upset. I hastened to reassure her, "It's all right, sweetie. Mom's reluctance doesn't stop anything important. We live in the same house so we'll see each other every day. You'll still come to every fun thing that Julia and I do, like we did at the Aquatic Center. We can do almost everything we'd do if Mom agreed, except no hanky-panky. Well maybe a little bit of hanky, but definitely no panky. Not until Mom stops unfairly projecting her lack of trust onto our relationship." "But I want to be able to sleep with you at night, the way Julia does. I'd love to be able to do that, even without any panky, {giggle}." #6: "Ahh, so you've already had the idea of Donna and me swapping rooms, have you?" I could tell by the look on Carol's face that she had, so I carried right on with, "I was wondering how long that'd take you." -- To Mom I 'explained' (translation: showed off), "Carol wants us to buy a double bed for her room, which would become our room. I thought a better idea would be - with Vanessa's approval - to use the double bed from my study at the Williams', put one of our singles in the study and the other in storage in the Williams' basement. That way there's still a spare bed in the study and if we haven't moved into the mansion before school restarts, there's enough room in the study for a desk to the right of mine, for Carol to use when she wants to study with Julia and me." "Good idea," agreed Julia. I didn't know which part she was referring to, but I didn't want to discuss that because I was hoping someone would make a comment about how smart I was. Mom said, "You're getting WAY ahead of yourself." Then she turned to Vanessa and Prof, and they started making their departure. Apparently no one thought I was smart, including not me. Not only had my showing off fallen flat, but I'd been deliberately harsh when I'd said, "Not until Mom stops unfairly projecting her lack of trust onto our relationship," because I wanted Mom to object. I had a couple of points ready to refute her with, copied from what 3B's Vanessa had said during the big pipeline argument when Carol had offered to shoot herself, but my going on about the beds had lost that moment too. So my ability to handle females was definitely improving, because a few months ago I would have screwed things up far worse than that. Everyone seemed worried about the Anderson family atmosphere becoming strained from the conflict, particularly between Mom and me. I was worried about that too, so I casually said, "I'm not worried about it. I'll behave toward Carol tomorrow the same way I behaved toward her yesterday. We already treat each other with love, and that won't change. Mom's only delaying our having a ceremony to celebrate it and our making love physically. If I can live three hundred years, I shouldn't have too much trouble out-waiting Mom." It was an illogical thing to say, but that didn't really matter. I wanted to remind Mom how special I was, and especially to make her think about time. What I most wanted to do was threaten her with the fact that we'd be able to do whatever we wanted once Carol was eighteen, but that was too antagonistic to say outright. So hopefully Mom would think of it herself. Not to mention that I damned well didn't want to wait four years. Not even a year, because I wanted to take Carol with me when I went to a university. Waiting wouldn't be too bad. Provided Mom didn't go insanely over the top by separating Carol and me, we'd still be able to have all the emotional parts of the relationship we'd had in 3B-land. Julia and I would be able to build up Carol's confidence by getting her involved in everything we did, including helping manage other girls, such as Savannah. Carol would quickly learn that she was smarter than most of them. That and seeing how much Julia and I valued her would start her blossoming, which I'd make sure Mom saw. After the Williamses left, Mom and Dad sat Carol and me down to talk about how we were to behave. They were worried that our not getting what we wanted might've caused bad feelings, and they also didn't want us doing anything sexual together. I interrupted early, saying with an air of COMPLETE confidence and happiness, "You don't have to worry. I know it's only a matter of time before you accept it, Mom, so I'm perfectly happy to wait patiently. Carol will definitely be a virgin on her wedding night; I want that as much as you do." #8: #3: #8: Mom wasn't swept away by my confidence so much that she blessed the marriage, but she noted how happy I was. Being the genius I was, I could tell that by Mom asking, "You seem surprisingly happy?" "Sure. Everything's going fine. You don't think I expected you to agree immediately, do you? It'll just take you a while to understand how good our three-way marriage will be, and how Carol and Julia will be correct to trust me with their hearts and lives." I resisted making a comment about Mom's lack of trust. That was in danger of being mentioned too many times. A side benefit of my being so confident was that it also reassured Carol. She asked me, "Is it really going to work out okay?" "I'm so confident it will, that my main concern is about your getting plenty of practice at cooking roast chicken dinners. Don't worry about it, Carol. Mom will see it's the right decision soon. It's been rather intense, so let's call it a night?" ^ [I'm jumping ahead a little, but over the next couple of weeks we worked on getting Mom's permission for our three-way marriage. The Williamses, Carol and I did that in a number of ways: Mostly by building, and being seen to build, Carol's confidence and happiness by getting her to arrange things with the Cuties, seeing how transparent Savannah and other girls were, having her participate in outings like the previous Aquatic Center one, encouraging her decorating project for the mansion, and ALWAYS making Carol a central figure in whatever happened. Making it clear to Mom that Julia and I were committed to Carol. Mom saw that I (or usually, we) went out with other girls, but that Carol laughed about it. Subsequent to those group dates I had several "Please explain girls to me" conversations with Mom, asking her to explain specific examples of female behavior that I'd recently encountered, to show her that I was doing it to learn. I also showed her how much I was learning, as I surprised Mom with how perceptive many of my comments were. We even got Mom to participate in a couple of the group events so she could see me in action and talk with me about them afterward. Making it clear to Mom that Carol was committed to me, regardless of Mom letting the ceremony happen or not. The most amusing tactic being Carol's telling Mom that she was going to be coming out as a lesbian when school restarted because she had no interest in dating any boys. Julia made very sure Mom understood how much free sex there was available for me, but that I wasn't going for it. Mom even saw me turn down some unsubtle offers. "They had nothing to teach me, Mom," I explained after the rejected girls had left. [I made sure to thank those girls later for cooperating with my plan, by giving them the very best screws that I could, that being the previously agreed upon payment for their help with my plan.] Vanessa and Prof continued to work on Mom. I didn't see much of it but I knew it was going on. They were concentrating on the "For The Good Of Humanity" angle, leaving it mostly up to us kids to cover "For The Good Of Carol". At an appropriate time, Carol made it clear to Mom that Mom's only control was over when the ceremony took place, and that control only lasted until Carol's eighteenth birthday. Once Mom was impressed by Carol's growing confidence, Carol let Mom see that Carol and Julia were getting increasingly sexy together, and later with Ava too. The girls had started earlier, but it was better to delay Mom's seeing that. Carol regularly did the two tests I'd devised for her developing the same special abilities as me: trying to juggle and read two books at the same time. A quicker version of the second test was to get someone to hold up a finger on each hand in front of Carol and to move them separately to see if Carol could make one eyeball track each. Carol got Mom or Dad to do that sometimes. Speaking of Ava, she knew Carol and I were waiting for Mom's permission to become lovers. When we were sure Ava wouldn't feel upset at being excluded, we even told her about our plan for having an informal wedding and a three-way marriage. Ava thought it was a wonderful idea, and was very excited and happy for us. Donna too, because we'd also told her, and she was totally in favor of it. We used Donna's enthusiasm to put even more pressure on Mom. And speaking of the wedding, I remembered Prof's advice to tell Julia about the trip to LA in advance, so I explained all my wedding plans to Julia and Carol, letting them take over. That way I got the kudos and they still got the fun. I also got rid of the worry of screwing it up, so everyone was happy. We all worked on Mom during the two weeks before our trip to England, and we kids worked on her during the trip too. During the trip, the clothes Julia had packed for me attracted a lot of attention from girls we randomly encountered. Mom saw me reject the girls over and over again. I told her, "There's nothing I can learn from them Mom, not in the short time we have here." I got a type of revenge on Julia for making me pack my porn clothes, by also taking Carol's still-secret special occasion dress. I'd previously bought accessories for it: a silver necklace and silver hairpins, and with Carol's curious cooperation, appropriate shoes. At an appropriate time during our trip I got Julia to put on her black dress, Carol to put on her accessories, then I blindfolded both girls while I put Carol's dress on her. Then I removed the blindfolds. I'd been a little nervous, but both girls loved Carol's dress, and I got major brownie points for it. They couldn't believe I'd bought such a dress so soon after I'd come back from Seattle. I explained, "I bought it for the same reason Carol bought her new bikini; it was time for Carol to start coming out of her shell. I hoped to give it to you earlier, but Mom's delaying things." That problem came close to going away when Carol took off her coat in the restaurant, as Mom nearly had a heart attack. Carol handled the attention she got very well though, impressing Mom.] ------- Chapter 264: Getting My New Car Thursday, June 23, 2005 When we got the call to come get my new car, I said, "We'll need to get a taxi there, otherwise how will we get the Honda back?" "We'll tell the car lot to lend us someone to drive it back. You just spent $60,000 with them." "Ahh, yeah. Good point." As I'd promised, after driving Julia home, Donna was the first Anderson family member to get a ride. She was with some friends, so they got rides too. They all loved it, especially when I "put the lid down," as cool people like me call retracting the hardtop. Although the word "lid" might be cool only in my imagination, my claim to coolness did have some basis in reality: Opening the roof requires pushing a button. The button needs to be held continuously while the lid is retracting, which takes about twenty five seconds. There's no engineering reason why pushing the button once couldn't do the job, rather than making the driver hold the damned thing for half a minute. That's just annoying. I'd much rather get into the car, start the lid retracting, get my sunglasses on, put my seatbelt on, etc., rather than have all those things stalled because I have to be a statue for twenty five seconds. I guess the reason for the deliberate inconvenience is so if someone puts their baby on the top of the roof, gets inside the car, and then accidentally presses the lid retraction button, the ex-parents of the pancake-baby won't sue Lexus for a billion dollars for making a baby-flattening car. Not having a baby, or being stupid enough to put one on the roof before folding it into the trunk, I just use NP to hold the button while I do everything else I want. If I didn't have that ability, the FIRST thing I would've done when buying one of these cars is get that stupid switch fixed. Savannah was the next passenger. I told Julia my plan for fooling Savannah into thinking that we did a lot of group sex, so she'd end up being used as party entertainment by my soccer team. Julia thought that was a good plan, because it'd be good for me to get practice at manipulating people. I was glad Julia agreed, because my idea for the first step along that path required Julia to go topless. I'd arranged to meet Savannah at a rendezvous point away from her home. Julia and I were parked out of sight waiting for Savannah to arrive (we were out of Savannah's sight, but she wasn't out of mine, as I had a sight blob a hundred feet up in the air looking for her). When Savannah was in position, I drove as close as I could without being seen, then Julia took her top off. Once Julia was ready, I lowered the lid. With the top half of the car missing Julia was totally exposed to anyone who got close, so I quickly drove around the corner to Savannah. When Savannah got out of her car and looked down into ours as we arrived, she got a heck of a surprise, "JULIA! Everyone can see you!" "That's part of the fun, haha. Mostly it's for Mark. He's got a very generous, open attitude toward sexy fun. He's much better than most guys." While Julia was putting her shirt back on, Savannah wandered around the outside of the car, admiring it. I demonstrated the lid-going-up, then lid-going-down process. It's actually amazingly cool, regardless of the stupid button design. [Many times in the future I'd park somewhere in town, putting the lid up before I left the car (again using NP to hold the STUPID button). People would stop and admire the motion of the lid's movements and ask me to put it down so they could watch it again. If they had big tits I'd agree, and sometimes if they were simply nice and friendly. By the time they'd seen the full cycle, more people would have arrived and often asked to see it again. Sometimes it took me a while to leave my car.] Julia climbed into the backseat, leaving Savannah to get into the front. Savannah asked, "I don't want to be topless." I'd been expecting her to say something like that, and I knew what to say, "Of course not. You know very well that Julia and I never push anybody into doing anything sexual that they're uncomfortable with. It's not as if you're my girlfriend. You're just a girl from school." -- I carried right on with a much more enthusiastic voice, "It's a GREAT car, isn't it?..." I blathered on about the car (maybe I could get a job as a car salesman), making sure I casually mentioned that it cost "only $60-odd thousand." I almost felt sorry for Savannah, which is a polite way of stating that I currently didn't feel sorry for her at all. From this conversation, from the Aquatic Center, and from school, I'd never treated Savannah in the way she felt she deserved. In other words, had never devoted myself to chasing after her. She thought we were an almost perfect match because I had bundles of money, a fantastic new car, and although it's embarrassing to admit it, I was also very good looking. The only thing that stopped us being a perfect match - in Savannah's opinion - was that I wasn't devoting my life to running around after her. Normally she'd turn up her nose and walk away from any boy not worshipping her properly, but she wanted the ego trip and lifestyle she could get from me. In the course of conversation, Savannah said, "It's a styly car. So much more distinctive than all the BMWs and Mercedes you see." Julia agreed, "It's gorgeous all right. Exactly the type of car that Mark should have. Enjoy it while you can. Mark will be too busy to spend any time with you once school and OSU restarts." That didn't please Savannah, and neither did my refusing her request to have a turn driving it. A couple of minutes later we were motoring along one of the country roads, near where I'd run my marathon with Ava and Donna, when Savannah offered, "I'll take off my top if you put the roof up, Mark." #4: #5: #8: "You've got reasonably nice breasts, Savannah, as breasts go, but they're simply not that important. It's a nice day so I'd rather have the roof down and the sun shining on us. Besides, you're misinterpreting why Julia was topless before. We were showing my car to one of my soccer teammates and his girlfriend. For fun both the girls took their tops off. That's why I value Julia so much: because she values friendship and helps create a great atmosphere with my friends. It was for fun, not sex. People get too hung up on sex. Guys chasing it all the time, and girls using it to manipulate guys. I don't agree with manipulating people at any time, especially because friendship's FAR more important than sex. Julia and Ava are superb at friendship AND sex, which is why I like them so much. With your personality and beauty, you could be very good at both, but only if you stop having agendas. I'd be very interested in you if you could focus on spreading happiness around me, rather than trying to dangle bait in front of me, as you just tried." "What do you mean? I wasn't trying anything." "When Julia told you I wouldn't have much time for you next school year, you decided to motivate me by trying to use your sexiness as bait. You'd have been..." "No I didn't, Mark. I was just having fun." "That's good. Either way I'm sure you understand my point. If you ever think to yourself that you'll do something sexy to motivate me, then that won't work, but if it's for fun, then that's great. Before we picked you up the four of us were having a lot of fun joking around, but that spontaneity has been killed now. I'll arrange a group of my usual friends to go to a swimming spot sometime soon and we'll invite you along. You'll see what I mean." ------- Chapter 265: Introducing What We Did for My Soccer Team; Part One Monday, June 27, 2005 This chapter has jumped ahead four days. Not much happened over summer that was relevant to my ascendancy, so day-by-day reporting isn't needed. ^ A couple of days after Savannah's test ride in my new car, I invited my soccer team to Julia's, excluding the guys who'd just graduated, had serious girlfriends, were virgins, or were too immature for what I had in mind. That left five of them. That many because they didn't actually have to be mature, just be able to fake it for a few hours. They were: Max, Logan (not to be confused with OSU's helpful computer guy of the same name), Jason, Tristan and Peter. Also in attendance were Julia, Carol, Ava, Alexis and Pat. They'd all agreed to participate, after I'd given them a lengthy explanation of what I was planning and why. I'd lured my teammates here without explaining what it was for, merely hinting that they'd be glad they came. Between my criterion of "non-virgins only," and telling them not to come if they already had a girlfriend who they couldn't risk making jealous, they couldn't get here fast enough. They all arrived early and excited, putting my judgments of their maturites into doubt. They were momentarily distracted by the sight of my new car parked in front of the Williams', so I took two loads of my teammates on short demo drives. [A couple of By The Ways: First, shortly after seeing my car, I remembered that an SC430 with exactly the same interior and exterior coloring is featured at the beginning of the Terminator 3 movie. It gets hijacked and blown up soon into the movie, which I'm rather hoping doesn't happen to mine. Second, I'd made a special trip over to Alexis' house the day after getting my new car, to give her a test run in it. That seemed only fair, considering it was more-or-less named after her. She'd loved the car, and had suggested the name similarity meant I should give it to her. I replied that the only thing I was likely to give her was a spanking for suggesting that. So we did that instead. Only a token amount though, because we were concentrating on having experimental sex: finding out how many ways we could have sex in and on my new car. As it turned out, the car's looks impressed the panties off girls, but it was too small to be any practical use after that. We were forced to improvise.] We gathered in the Guys' Room where I did the introductions, then explained to my teammates, "I've got a terrible problem: too many girls are chasing after me. This is when you all express your sympathy for me." After the sympathetic boos died down, I continued, "Some of the girls I like very much, the ones here being my special favorites. Many others I don't know well enough to have much opinion about, and the remainder are the girls that don't suit me. Most that I don't like I simply tell to stay away from me, but there's a subset of them that are VERY selfish, deceitful and beautiful. They're lying their asses off to get their grubby hands on my money, so I don't mind lying back to them. Even though they're beautiful, they don't have anything I want because I've got enough wonderful lovers already. But you guys don't have enough lovers, do you?" They agreed that they did not have enough lovers. Their agreements were very loud and repetitive, to make sure I understood the situation clearly. My teammates had a feeling about where this was heading, and they were quite willing to admit anything at all to get what they hoped they were going to get. Guys will do anything for sex, including throwing away our self-respect. It's usually the very first thing we cast aside. "Some of those girls have told me they'll do anything I want, but they're bullshitting. If I asked them to have sex with any of you, they'd slap my face and refuse. So I can't give them to you, but we can try to trick them into it." "Which girls are you talking about?" "There are several. The girls that tend to be the most dishonest and greedy are the beautiful ones, because they think they deserve the best and they consider themselves so far above everybody else that the normal rules - like honesty and decency - don't apply to them. Forget the girls who were seniors last year. There were plenty of those Queen Bitches, but they're not likely to want to hang around with schoolboys now. If I stumble on one who volunteers for it, she'll be included, but I'm not going to waste time contacting any of them. Possible ex-11th graders are Adriana Richardson..." "ADRIANA! Christ, she's HOT! No way are we gonna get a shot at her. She wouldn't be seen dead anywhere near us." "You're underestimating her greed. Have you heard my funny, new joke: Wheelbarrow?" "Huh?" I explained Adriana's laughing at that 'joke', concluding with, "She's VERY good at fooling guys. The last couple of times I talked to her, I would've sworn she was sincerely interested in me, rather than my money..." "I thought it was Julia's father who won the money?" "The short answer is that two-thirds of the money is mine. Do you want to talk about my money, or your having sex with girls like Adriana?" "Mmm. Difficult choice. My having sex with Adriana please, haha." "Don't get too focused on Adriana. For all I know she might've gone away for the summer. I was trying to list all the girls who're possibilities and you jumped on the first name. Hold your hormones in check while I tell you the other girls I've got in mind." Of the five teammates who were here, two were recent ex-11th graders, two ex-10th and one ex-9th (Max, Logan, Jason, Tristan and Peter respectively). I'd been intending to name the girls in grade order as well - not that it was necessary, as every boy knows the names of every beautiful girl in school - and I got back to that now. Naturally they couldn't hold their hormones in check, so I was interrupted several more times. I eventually got the list done, to their considerable pleasure. All the girls I'd named were at least B+'ers, with Adriana easily an A+. Obviously soccer players deserve the best, so I'd picked the best-looking bitches. There was plenty of choice, as the most greedy and dishonestly manipulative girls are nearly all on the A-list. Those were the girls who'd had YEARS of constant success at egotistically manipulating guys. They were so used to treating guys with contempt that they'd never given a moment's thought to how they should have approached me. They'd stuck to their very thoroughly tried-and-true method (more accurately, "tried-and-false but nonetheless invariably successful method"). In doing so, they had volunteered themselves for some counter-manipulation. My plan for the Target Girls had one major theme: they'd learn that the fastest way to get me to like them was to be friendly to my friends, and they'd also learn that my favorite girls were all very sexually active among my group of male friends, which we'd achieve almost entirely by smoke, mirrors and outright lies. The obvious implication being that if a Target Girl wanted to be one of my favorites, she should also be sexual with my teammates. I started by explaining, "I can't tell any of the 'Target Girls' - as I'm calling them - to have sex with any of you. We can't even hint at that, or they'll smell a rat and you'll never get anything from them. We have to trick them into thinking it's THEIR idea that they should have sex with you. With the cooperation of these five wonderful girls, we're going to set up a big con job that the Target Girls will be suckered into. We're going to PRETEND that because you guys are my best friends, my special girls feel free to enjoy being very sexual with you. That's PRETEND! These girls are going FAR beyond the call of duty to help me get revenge on the girls who're trying to fuck me over. These girls are MINE, so if any of you make a nuisance of yourself with any of them, you'll be kicked in the ass and out of this group. I don't want ANY sexual crap from you guys toward my favorite girls. That's what the Target Girls are for. Okay?" The main reason my girls were going along with this wasn't to get revenge on the Target Girls. Except for Alexis, who had a nasty streak in her, the others didn't care much about that. They were doing it because I'd asked them to. I had several reasons for wanting to do this plan: I should start spending more time with guys, improve my relationships with them, understand them better, have some of them on my 'side' next school-year, etc. I was reasonably sure that getting some of my male friends fucked by the school's A-list beauty queens would be a good start. For the experience in learning how to out-manipulate experienced manipulators. The irony of using the Targets' weapon of choice (sex) against them was irresistible. I quite like irony, and sex is good too. Being slightly evil has a fascination that I had no interest in resisting this time, not when the victims of it had been at least that evil themselves, and for several years. My teammates promised they wouldn't dream of hitting on any of my girls. They were lying of course, as guys will hit on anything, but they'd heard my message. They also included several questions about my plan with their reassurances. They must've been eager, I guess. I carried on, "We're going have a practice session over the next couple of hours, so you'll be able to carry off the act I want. You guys have to learn how to act cool about sex. Don't chase it, and ESPECIALLY don't even hint about wanting it from the Target Girls. As far as they're concerned, you get all the sex you want from these girls. 'My Girls' - as I'm calling them to separate from the 'Target Girls' - and I will do the talking to get the Targets into the frame of mind where they come to you and ask for sex. You guys just have to be cool about bodies and sex. Can you do that?" "Sure, no problem," they all insisted. Not particularly convincingly, as they were all visibly over-excited by the prospect of "bodies and sex." I gave Carol the nod, and she pulled her one-piece dress off. She was left wearing her wonderfully indecent, tiny, see-through Australian bikini (it'd arrived by now). Carol twisted and turned, to show herself off as best as possible. With Carol's body and that bikini, "best as possible" was fucking fantastic! For reasons I totally sympathized with, the guys made COMPLETE donkeys out of themselves, braying a succession of very stupid comments. They were stunned, gobsmacked, and very immaturely excited, just like I'd been the first time I'd seen Carol in that bikini. Carol was having fun, so she added "leaning forward" to her "twist and turn" repertoire, which did nothing toward helping the guys get their act together. Carol had volunteered for this little job because she had the largest breasts and sexiest bikini of these five girls. Pat was the only competition Carol had in the breast department, Julia, Ava and Alexis being slim. Pat could've borrowed Carol's bikini, but Carol was happy to do it. She'd happily admitted that she'd get a kick out of it. I was happy that Carol was so confident, as this was only a few days after the Aquatic Center group date, so Julia and I had only just begun on the process of encouraging Carol's self-confidence; not that she'd ever lacked confidence about how boys would respond to her body. [As a VERY important digression, when the Australian bikinis had arrived, I liked them so much that I ordered a couple dozen more, in a variety of sizes, colors, and in the two see-through fabrics they came in. The additional ones hadn't arrived yet, but they will in plenty of time for when we finally get the mansion.] I loudly called, to get my teammates very distracted attention, "You guys aren't being cool, like you promised to be. You're too busy being PATHETIC!" Jason defended himself, "I don't care; your sister's HOT! I think I'm in love, haha." The others were equally uncool. It took a couple of minutes to get the guys calmed down enough to have any hope of an intelligent conversation with them. I said, "We planned that little stunt to demonstrate how NOT to behave. It's funny how we knew you guys would react so pathetically. If you react ANYTHING like that in front of the Targets, you'll ruin not just your chance, but the other guys' chances too. That doesn't worry me, because I'll just red card the Target Girls and they won't bother me again, but it's going to hugely piss the rest of you off if one of you screws everything up by acting like an immature, little sex-crazed idiot. Do you think you can ACT like you're NOT 'immature little sex-crazed idiots'? Because if you can't, you might as well go home now rather than ruining it for all the other guys." Each of them VERY sincerely insisted that there was no need for him to go home now; that he could act mature, if he wanted to. "Let me point out that there are six guys counting me, and five girls. There's one too many guys. We're looking for an excuse to eliminate one guy, and it's NOT going to be me. Behaving immaturely will ruin the whole plan for all the other guys, so that's the rule from now on. If one of you behaves immaturely over this, you won't be allowed to participate anymore. Got it?" "Yes," x 5, plus an assortment of very sincere assurances. "Most of you are barely looking elsewhere, but everyone look at Carol now." A request they were happy to comply with, whereupon Ava undid the back of Carol's top then pulled it off, while Julia pulled Carol's butt-floss bottoms down. In a couple of seconds Carol was gloriously stark naked. "Wow!" involuntarily from one of the guys. Ava dropped Carol's top of the floor, to free up her hands to reach around both of Carol's sides to cup the undersides of Carol's breasts. "{Groan}," from another of the sincerely promised-to-be-mature guys. Ava's twiddled Carol's nipples while Julia reached up to run a fingertip over the lips of Carol's shaved-bare pussy. The guys' promises to be mature were shattered. They lost every shred of anything that vaguely related to maturity. Their eyes were bugging out and their mouths were gaping open. I refused to look at any other parts of their anatomies. I loudly asked, "Which guy reacted the worst, girls?" It took the guys a second or two, and then they realized they'd been trapped. They said "Oh no!" or similar, and they all looked guilty and VERY worried. The girls had a quick huddle (Ava and Carol had a headstart in that activity), to pick the loser, then Julia announced, "Peter was the worst." "{Groan}," from a sick looking Peter. "That wasn't fair! No one could resist that. You can't blame..." I interrupted, "You were the WORST, Peter. All five of you were pathetic, but you were the worst. You don't have an excuse for that. I'll give you a choice though: either go home or strip naked now." "Huh? You want me to strip. Why?" "Because you were the most immature idiot, and that has a penalty. If you want to be part of this plan, strip; otherwise go home." "But..." The rest of the guys shouted down Peter's objection, yelling "Don't be such a pussy," and other helpful suggestions. Peter wasn't happy to strip, although he hadn't seemed to have any moral objections to the process when it was being done to Carol. He had no real choice now, so he started doing so. Carol started putting her dress back on, causing the guys to moan. I said, "Listen to me SERIOUSLY guys. You promised to behave maturely and then broke your promises when Carol showed off her bikini. Then you promised again, but broke them again when she stripped. Now you're STILL moaning like idiots when Carol covers up. Once or maybe twice is understandable, but that's all the chances you're getting. Any more immature reactions are going to get the perpetrators kicked out. I can't make my plan work unless you've got enough brains to not look like complete dickheads. From this second on, regardless of what happens, you must act maturely or you'll be sent home. Got it?" They sincerely re-promised me, yet again. Peter was naked now, so I told him, "Peter, walk back in forth in front of the girls, so they can get a good look at you." "Ahh, why?" "So I can see if you or any of the others behaves immaturely. I'm kind of hoping you all do, because I'm getting tired of this." With that reminder about what was at stake, Peter paraded back and forth in front of the girls. They tried to get a reaction out of him or the other guys by verbally teasing Peter, but no one responded. Although Peter did "respond" when Alexis reached out and started fondling his cock. He also stopped, looked at me, and asked, "Ahh, umm, I don't know what to do?" Alexis answered, "Don't worry, I do, haha," as she started jacking his cock. We hadn't planned this activity - Alexis had risen to the occasion, so to speak - but we did plan to get everyone naked, and this was a good time for me to say, "Strip guys," to the rest of them. They couldn't get their clothes off fast enough! They stripped in record time, then leaped forward eager to have their cocks played with too. A couple of them were particularly visibly eager, if you take my drift. I turned to the girls, gave them a wink, then said, "I think they're too pathetic. They couldn't pretend to be mature if their lives depended on it. Should we send them all home?" The guys protested, denied they'd been immature, wanted to know what I was talking about, etc. I said, "You all thought you were going to get a hand-job, and you stripped like all your Christmases had come at once. You threw you clothes all over the place in your haste, and Logan and Tristan are hard, for God's sake. If Adriana was here now, how cool about sex would she think any of you are?" They knew the shameful answer to that question, but they still tried to defend themselves. "We didn't know it was part of the test," was the one of the many weak excuses that I responded to. "A minute ago I told you, 'From this second on, regardless of what happens, you must act maturely or you'll be sent home.' You couldn't last one minute, so the Target Girls are going to see through you so quickly it's not worth trying my plan. I can't believe how pathetic you guys are." Actually I could easily believe it, as I'd been exactly the same only a few months ago. "I think it's hopeless. What do you think, Julia?" Julia answered, "They confirm everything I've always thought about boys when sex is the topic. Their brains stop working and they can't control themselves. Your plan requires them to think, so I think your plan is doomed to failure. You might as well call it off." Alexis, who'd stopped playing with Peter's peter, added, "It's normally good that they're so stupid and easily led by sex, but not this time." The guys were protesting, insisting they hadn't known I'd been serious before but they knew it now, promising to try much harder, etc. Guys will say anything to get sex. To get it with girls like Adriana and Savannah, there's no limit to what crap guys will spout. For some reason, being unable to think apparently doesn't stop our mouths from spouting endless justifications for having sex. Julia suggested, "Why don't you do this with some of the guys in your college lectures? They'd be more sensible than these dummies." "That's a good idea. Especially because the girls would be a much more interested in college guys." "{Groan}." | "I promise we can do it! We know what you want now." | Etc. "I don't believe you can. Every one of you is too pathetic. One of you is bound to give it away long before it's had a chance to work." "No we won't! We've got it now. PLEASE give us another chance. PLEEZE." (Have I mentioned that guys are pathetic about sex?) "Okay. ONE more chance. Not even that; HALF a chance..." "THANK YOU," x 5, followed by more meaningless, although very sincere, promises and reassurances. "I mean it when I say HALF a chance. Even the hint of acting uncool about sex will get you sent home. I'm tired of trying to help you guys when you can't be bothered to think before you open your mouths to ruin any hope I have of the plan working." I got them each of them to sequentially and individually promise they'd act maturely from now on, and to confirm that they understood that even just one more small mistake would mean it'd be all over for the idiot that opened his mouth. Once they last of them had done that, I carried on with, "I really am tired of this. The girls and I are doing it for your benefit, because you're friends of mine, but you're your own worst enemies. What's the point of trying to help you if you keep sabotaging what we're trying to do?" They felt compelled to repeat their meaningless reassurances. "I'm not interested in your reassurances; you've broken your promises too many times for them to have any value now. I'm only going to judge you by your maturity and coolness, and I have no tolerance for any more plan-ruining behavior. -- "Apart from my sister Carol, I could be upstairs in Julia's bedroom with the other girls now, naked and having a fivesome. The five of us have had sex together before, and it's great because all the girls get off with each other as well as with me, so we have a REALLY wild time..." Max broke first, saying, "Christ! You lucky bastard..." "Bye Max." "Huh? Oh no, I didn't mean it that way. I was just saying you were lucky..." I knew an easy way to cut off the argument. I asked, "Girls, put your hand up if you think Max's comment would've seemed immature and uncool to Adriana?" It was really an unfair question, as Adriana thinks anyone who's not a multi-millionaire star quarterback is uncool. I put my hand up, and used NP to push Carol's and Julia's hands up too, so there was no mistaking my intention. The guys had had enough chances, and I remembered Vanessa's comments to Julia about eliminating girls was the only way to get the survivors to take it seriously. Carol and Julia raised their hands, Julia adding, "Not only what he said, but the expression on his face was pathetic too. Adriana would've laughed at him." Pat and Alexis followed our lead, putting their hands up too, signaling the demise of Max's hopes for his sex-life. Max wasn't taking it lying down. He protested repeatedly, "I didn't know that was a test. You didn't tell us you'd restarted the tests. It's a fact; you ARE lucky. You can't blame me for stating a fact..." "Get dressed and go home Max." "It's not fair! You were deliberately trying to trap us..." "OF COURSE I was. Don't you think Adriana and the other girls are going to try to find out the true story before she offers to have sex with all of you? She's INCREDIBLY tricky; and you just convinced me that you haven't got a hope in hell of outwitting her. You'd ruin it for everyone if you stayed in the group, so please leave. I STRONGLY suggest you keep our plan secret too, or everyone on the team will be extremely pissed off with your spoiling it for them." "I don't want to go. I know I can do it for real, when Adriana and the other girls are around. This isn't real..." "You PROMISED several times to behave maturely HERE. I'm not interested in arguing. Either you leave now, or the girls and I will go upstairs and lock ourselves in Julia's bedroom. I'm sure we'll find something more enjoyable to do than bang our heads against a brick wall down here. Take responsibility for your actions - YOU screwed up. Stop with the excuses, wish the other guys good luck, and be a man by leaving without making a major drama out of it." It took another couple of minutes, but Max eventually and dejectedly got dressed and left. Max had left as a very unhappy guy, so I told the others, "Presuming the plan is still on when you've finished here today, I suggest you get hold of Max and cheer him up somehow, otherwise he might leak the plan. I'll leave that to you guys, because this is mainly for your benefit. I can get sex from the Target Girls much easier than going to all this trouble, so you guys can do whatever running around is needed. Okay?" "Yeah, we'll talk with him." "Good. I mentioned at the beginning that there was one too many guys. The only reason I said that was to pressure you into behaving sensibly, to see if it was possible. Now the numbers are equal, don't think you're safe. I have absolutely nothing against there being more girls than guys, and the plan doesn't call for us to be paired up anyway. The WHOLE idea of the plan is that the girls seem to be friendly with ALL of you, because that's what we want the Target Girls to do. In other words, don't relax. One more half-a-screw-up from any of you, and you'll be joining Max. If I end up having to fuck all the Target Girls myself because none of you are sensible enough to control yourself, then I'm not going to be too upset about it. At least I gave you guys a chance." "We understand. Thanks, Mark." "I'll stop deliberately testing you now to get on with preparing for the plan, but the girls and I are still watching you carefully. If any of us see you behave foolishly, we'll blow the whistle on you. That's going to be the case for months probably, because you're not going to get A-list girls to ask you for sex unless you come across a hell of a lot better than you've been behaving for the last few minutes. If you don't think you're up to it, you can walk away at any time..." #4: " ... The first group date we'll have with any of the Target Girls will be to a quiet swimming spot somewhere. I'm going to scout some locations tomorrow, because we want quite a lot of privacy. -- "There'll be all of us, some of the Target Girls, and several other girls for camouflage, otherwise the Targets would get suspicious. My Girls will be wearing bikinis like the one you briefly saw Carol wear, or they'll be topless. They'll also be equally friendly and sexual to all of you. When they want suntan lotion, they'll ask one or two of you to rub it on them. They'll lie on their front, you rub the lotion on everywhere, including their butt. You don't make a big deal about it; just do it as if you've done it dozens of times before. Then they'll roll over and you do their front, even their breasts and nipples if they ask you to. -- "Two key points. First, you guys have to be casual and treat all the girls equally. While you're rubbing lotion on one of them, chat with one of the others, or to one of the guys, to give the impression that rubbing the girl's body doesn't have any significance to you. Second, none of you initiate anything the girls haven't already given you permission to do. If Alexis lets you rub lotion into her breasts, that doesn't mean Pat will. That especially applies to Carol. She's going to be with us quite often, and she's going to be relaxed about the sexual activity, but she's not going to be a participant in most of it. Obviously she's too young, and there's another reason which doesn't matter for now. -- "When the other people see all of us being so casual about sex, they're going to ask questions. When a non-Target can hear your answer, say 'We're just friends; they're Mark's girlfriends, not ours.' But if only Target Girls can hear you, say things like, 'A gentleman doesn't talk, ' or, 'We prefer to keep things quiet, ' or, 'Ask the girls; it's up to them how much they want to be known.' Those are answers that say nothing, but imply there's more. The Targets will be very turned off if you're boastful, and they'll be very impressed if you're discreet and respectful. They don't see much of that from the guys at school, and they're not going to have sex with guys they consider beneath them unless they know the guys will keep quiet about it afterward. -- "My Girls will let the Targets know that they are MY girls, but because you guys are my best friends, I'm very happy to have My Girls give you a good time whenever the girls want. NOT when YOU want; the girls are the bosses. It's a fun, casual thing, and none of you are allowed to get possessive or ask the girls out on dates, or anything like that. The girls are MINE, but they're having fun with you and making you happy because you're my friends, and I like to see my friends happy. -- "The girls will let the Targets know that I REALLY like girls who're friendly with my best friends. The Targets wouldn't believe that coming from you or me, but they'll believe it coming from these girls, so you owe them big time! They're willing to let some other girls think they're sleeping with you, which doesn't help their reputations at all, so make sure you give them a huge amount of appreciation and respect. And do NOT run around boasting about it to anyone else. If you do that, you'll be kicked out of this group and these girls will spread the rumor all over school that you're useless at sex. -- "Never forget that the Target Girls are chasing me. Even if this plan works and they start wanting to make themselves look good in my eyes by getting sexy with my friends, don't for a second think they're interested in you. They'll be USING you to get to me. That's why I'm happy to encourage them to offer themselves to you. They get out-tricked, and you guys get a good time. For God's sake don't fall in love with them, or anything stupid like that. I see you thinking that I'm talking nonsense, but believe me, some of these girls are SUPERB at playing mind-games with guys. If Adriana thought that having one of you fall in love with her improved her chances with me, then you'd be worshipping the ground she walks on within a week. These girls can be DEADLY. Don't forget it. -- "On the other hand, we'll be inviting other girls along to these group dates, and they'll see you acting maturely and sensibly with My Girls. They might be impressed, and you might get a girlfriend out of it. Provided they're not trying to get to me through you, then my advice is to grab them if you can, then drop out of this group while the new relationship lasts. A good girlfriend is worth a thousand times more than an Adriana-type fucking her way to me through you..." #8: " ... If I convinced the Target Girls that the way to make me like them was to run around a field waving a butterfly net, that's what they'd do. Or if I was into music, they would be too, etc. That I'm making the supposed key to my friendship being sexual with you guys doesn't mean you'll have any value at all in their eyes. You're just a means to an end. So you should be able to see that you shouldn't do anything. You guys are just a 'Thing', so the more passive you are, the more in control and comfortable the Targets will feel. If you behave like guys normally do around those girls, then they'll treat you like ordinary guys they consider socially beneath them, which means you'll get nothing from them. -- "While I remember, I said that you shouldn't initiate anything with My Girls that they haven't already given you consent for. I'm assuming that doesn't apply the other way around. We're all assuming that the girls can do anything they want with you, and you'll eat it up with a big smile on your faces. Like if Alexis gets a sudden urge to grab your cock and give you a hand-job. Let me remind you that you MUST be sensible and mature, when I ask you whether any of you object to being treated that way?" With painful deliberateness, they maturely let me know that such behavior was acceptable to them. "I somehow didn't think you'd complain. What guy is EVER going to complain about being immorally groped like that!" My Girls chuckled at my reference to the Hot Tub Party. -- "Don't try to impress the Target Girls, especially when they start being friendly to you. Play it VERY cool. So cool you can barely express any interest in them at all. When My Girls show off their tiny bikinis or go topless, the Target Girls will feel overdressed. If they take their tops off too, for goodness sake don't even notice. And NEVER try to push a Target Girl into doing anything. We won't be pressuring them at all. If they ask me whether I want them to take their tops off, I'll insist I couldn't care less either way. That extends all the way to their asking you for sex, if you get that lucky. You're supposed to be already getting heaps of sex from My Girls, excluding Carol, so you shouldn't be in any hurry. If one of them asks you for sex, play it cool. Say something like, 'I think Mark wants to play mini-golf at that time. Can we do it some other evening instead?' If you make them come to you, and chase you, you'll get far more out of them than if you grab them on the first chance you get. -- "Another thing we could do is when one of you is on his first date with one of the Target Girls, have Pat call you up. You'd cut out of the date halfway through to go see Pat. That'd encourage the Target to try even harder. The Targets aren't used to guys not chasing them, so it'll do a huge number on their heads. It'll be very convincing, and it'll keep them trying hard for weeks or months longer than they would otherwise. -- "That's the plan in general. The main tactic is that we have to convince the Targets that My Girls are having sex with all of you. That means we have to be tricky, because My Girls are NOT going to have sex with you..." Alexis interrupted, "If we can give them hand-jobs, why can't we fuck them?" "You're right, Alexis. I was making an assumption without thinking about it. I know Julia, Carol and Ava won't, but you and Pat are free to live your life however you want. From what you've told me before, you 'live your life' quite freely." "Especially after being around you. I get very horny and need to have it scratched. You don't mind do you?" "I think I'd mind more if you held yourself back because of me. I like you the way you are about sex, so it'd be stupid of me to object to you being the way you are about sex." "Good. You told us yesterday that you want to have at least a couple of dates a week with the Target Girls. If I'm around you at swimming holes and all this is going on, I'm going to get horny. Fucking these guys in front of the bitches would help bring them down, so I'm cool with that." "It'd certainly help the plan's story look convincing, all right." Alexis faced the very happy looking guys, "Don't think you're going to get me easy. I like Mark's nasty plan, so I'm going to be a reward for you. After a few dates with the bitches I'm going to jump the bones of whoever of you is doing the best job. Or maybe I'll grab the best two at the same time, because I like being double-teamed..." I interrupted to say, "Jason, do you want to ask the question that's on your mind?" Jason looked at me, thought about it, then said, "Ahh, no. I don't think so." "Just as well. I would've instantly kicked you out if you had." To the other guys, I explained, "Jason was looking at Pat, and I'm pretty sure he was wondering if she was going to make the same offer as Alexis. That would've been immature and uncool, plus his asking that would've gone against what I said earlier about the girls being in charge and these are MY girls who you keep your hands off. I told you not to ask them for dates, so asking Pat if she'd be offering you sex would be totally unacceptable. You do NOT put ANY pressure on any of these girls to do ANYTHING for you. They're doing you guys a huge favor by participating in this. There's nothing in it for them, and they're absolutely essential for the plan to work, so you should bend over backward to avoid even the hint of treating them with disrespect. If one of My Girls tells me that she feels even the slightest bit uncomfortable with one of you, then he's instantly out of the group. I'm not even going to ask him about it. I'm totally on the girls' side, so you'd better make sure you're totally on their side too." "Sorry," offered Jason. "I've never been in a situation like this before, so it's easy to make mistakes." "Yes it is. And if you make one, you'll be kicked out. I'm not going to let My Girls be mistreated even a little bit. -- "Moving right along. I was saying that fooling the Targets into believing My Girls are having sex with all of you is going to take some trickery. Even with Alexis' help it's still going to need trickery. A lot of the convincing will come from our attitudes. If you all behave casually about each other's bodies, that'll send a very good message. There'll be some physical contact too, such as rubbing lotion on each other, but it'll be TOTALLY up to My Girls to decide on that. That's important not only because you'll be kicked out of the group if you misbehave, but also because we'll make sure the Targets know that the girls are in charge. They'll be more likely to join in with all the sex they think is going on if they see that you guys are obedient to the girls. The Target Girls love being in control, so they'll like that setup. -- "There'll also be what appears to be real sex happening. Let me show you one way." I got Julia to sit on my lap, then the two of us pretended that I was finger-fucking her. Julia was making all appropriate noises and facial expressions, while my hand sawed back and forth. The only problem was that my finger was clearly rubbing over Julia's upper-thigh, and not on her pussy at all. I said to the guys, "Imagine we were at the beach and we had a towel spread over Julia's lap, ostensibly to keep us private from other people on the beach. The Target Girls would be fooled. This is one of the things you guys can do with any of My Girls if they ask you to frig them. Remember that you don't ask them; they ask you. And they do NOT mean that you should frig them for real; they mean pretend. You NEVER do anything for real when they verbally ask you for it. If they want reality, they'll grab your hand and move it to where they want. Any questions so far?" They were a little slow getting started, but they were soon firing questions at me. After five minutes I said, "Hold the questions for a moment. The agenda for this afternoon is to get you guys used to seeing the girls' bodies. They're going to strip down to their bikini bottoms, then we're going to talk, play 8-ball, get into the hot tub, and generally just hang around together for a couple of hours. That way when you see their bodies at a beach, you're not going to behave like dorks. That's unless you guys insist you're not dorks, in which case the girls can remain fully dressed. How do you want to play it?" Logan smiled while he said, "All things considered, and for the good of the plan, it'd be best to prepare as fully as possible." "Haha. Very maturely put, Logan. Okay, the girls will strip down to their bikini bottoms. Remember you're still being tested, so don't make fools of yourselves." The girls had their bikini bottoms on already, so it was only a matter of removing everything else. Except for Carol, as her bikini was lying on the floor. On her own initiative, she pulled off her dress, turned to face away from the guys, then bent over to pick up her bikini. The 'poor' boys got an eyeful, but they knew they had to look away. They all looked AWAY, very pointedly. I could see the pain it cost them to do so. When all the girls were correctly un-attired, it was terribly obvious that the guys were totally immature. They all had their heads rigidly turned 180 degrees from the girls, and were scared of facing any other way. I said, "I know you guys are trying to act maturely, but looking away in such a fixated fashion is just as immature as looking at the girls. It's more polite to look away, but it's still immature. The girls have been looking at your bodies for the last ten minutes. You all started by covering yourselves with your hands, but most of you relaxed because the girls weren't making an issue out of it. You need to learn how to not make an issue out of their bodies too. You can't get used to looking at their bodies unless you actually look at their bodies, so for the next ten minutes or so, the maturity testing is suspended. I want you to look at them, walk around them, look them up and down. Do as much looking as you want. No touching, but look for all you're worth. You can even make stupid comments, if you feel the urge." "You're not going to kick us out?" "I wouldn't lie to you like that. You need to be able to look at the girls naturally, so start now." They were willing to be convinced, so they cautiously turned and started looking. The girls cooperated by spreading out and doing twirls, laughing at the expressions on the guys' faces. The guys were scared. They'd glance at a girl, then nervously look at me to see if I was about to tell them off. I kept encouraging them, so after a minute or so they lost their nerves and started having a great time. And then they stopped having a great time, because they all got hard-ons that they became very self-conscious about. Julia said, "We knew you'd get hard. It'd be insulting if you didn't. Ignore them and they'll go away. That's why we're doing this; so you can get past that stage." A minute later Jason asked me, "You don't mind if we make stupid comments?" "It'd probably be best to get them out of your system now." "Yeah, good point. I've got a couple saved up. First, you're a LUCKY BASTARD! I'd kill to have all these girls as my lovers. My mind boggles over what that must be like." The other guys kept silent, still a little worried that I'd blow up at Jason. I just said, "I'm used to it, but every now and then it hits me and my mind boggles again too. I totally agree that I'm a lucky bastard. HUGELY lucky!" Peter, the youngest guy, excitedly asked, "You really have sex with all of them at the same time?" "We all have sex TOGETHER, yes. Not just me having it with them, but them with each other too. Except not with Carol, obviously." Peter had a sudden look of panic on his face, and he gushed a fervent reassurance at me, "I didn't mean that you and Carol did anything..." I interrupted, "Relax Peter. I get tired of saying 'except Carol' all the time too. I'm certainly not going to keep it up for all the sex conversations we'll probably be having over the next few months, so don't worry about it. Let's just take it as a given that 'except Carol' applies to all those types of comments. If any of you think I'm having sex with Carol, feel free to end your life to save me the bother of ruining it for you. That threat to one side, now would probably be a good time to tell you guys that the main reason Carol isn't going to be participating in pretending to have sex with you isn't because of her age or her being my sister, but because she's a lesbian. That's still a secret, so keep it to yourselves. She's still fairly new to her feelings, so she hasn't come out yet, but chances are she will in a few months. She obviously can't pretend to being having sex with you guys and then come out as a lesbian. I didn't mention it before, but there'll be some girl-on-girl sex going on during these Target Girl dates too; to help build the sexual atmosphere that we want to suck the Target Girls into. Carol will be participating in that, but nothing to do with any guys. Obviously EVERYTHING that you're seeing and hearing here is secret. If you blab or boast about any of this, you'll live to regret it. At the least I'd shut down this whole plan, so the other guys would hate your guts. My Girls would also do their best to make sure you never got a date for the rest of your life, and I'd beat the living crap out of you on a daily basis." "Yeah, yeah. We hear you. None of us would be that stupid." "It might be harder than you think to avoid being stupid. If the plan works well, it could last until school restarts, and a lot of the other kids could see that there are some very interesting things going on. You'd be asked lots of questions from guys and girls. You'd be pressured to tell, but the moment you do, it's all over." "Boy! It'd be amazing if it lasted that long. How on Earth would we behave at school if those girls were coming on to us regularly? They normally wouldn't come with fifty feet of us." "I'm not going to worry about it that far ahead. The plan might never get rolling because one of you might mess it up or the Target Girls might not want to play. I'm assuming these girls are seriously greedy for my money, and that they'll chase hard for it. I'm also assuming that they've used sex as a tool for so long that it's lost a lot of its value to them, so if they think having sex with you guys is their idea and they're in control of it, then they won't have any compunction about it. With some of them, one or more of those assumptions won't be accurate, so I'm sure that some of the girls on my list won't play our game. Maybe none of them will, but it's worth giving it a shot to find out. Maybe only one or two will fall for my trap, or maybe most of them will. But even if they start playing, I can't guess how long it'll last, because there are so many ways it might come to an end. There's so much uncertainty that I'm not going to worry about what happens when school restarts three months from now. Especially because I'm partly thinking that even if the plan works, it might be best to shut it down before school restarts..." "Aww. Do you have to?" "All I said was that, 'it MIGHT be best'. Satisfying your greed doesn't come close to equaling my concern about My Girls' reputations. I can pull the plug on this in five minutes, by red-carding the Target Girls. I'll wait and see how it works out over the next two or three months, and then end it if that seems best to me. If nothing else, you guys had better do your damnedest to protect My Girls' reputations. Your future sex-lives depend on your being smart about that." Jason said, "That reminds me of the second stupid comment I was going to make. Pat's been in most of my classes for years. I've often looked at her and thought how beautiful she was. Now I'm looking at you almost naked, Pat, and I can't believe how gorgeous your body is. I keep thinking, 'If only the other guys could see me now.' It's a stupid thought, but it keeps happening." I said, "Yeah. Guys feel compelled to boast. You'd better be able to resist it, because if you tell even one other guy, you know it's going to fly through the school. I'll kill this entire game the instant any other guy comes up to me and asks to join in, which you know they'll all try to do the moment they hear about it. You HAVE to keep your mouths shut for this to work." "I know. It's a temptation, but what you're offering is a hell of a lot more tempting." "There's one consolation boasting-wise. When the 'Target Game' - that's what I call it - is over, there's no reason you can't boast about any of the Target Girls you had sex with. I'm not the least bit worried about their reputations..." That caused some laughter, especially from the guys and Alexis. " ... DON'T do it during the Target Game though. Remember that you have to be discreet, mature about sex, etc. None of the targets will touch any of you unless they're totally confident that you'll keep it quiet, because they'll consider being connected with you to be bad news for their reputation." There was plenty to talk about, and the conversation carried on. After about fifteen minutes the atmosphere was close enough to the level of naturalness that we wanted. I gave it another five minutes, then said, "Have you guys noticed how relaxed and natural you've become? I know my reminding you now has made you self-conscious again, but for the last ten minutes or so you were very good." Logan agreed, "You're right. I never thought I'd be able to get used to it, but when you spoke I was waving my arms around to make a point. I'd forgotten all about keeping myself covered." The other guys agreed too. The girls were never an issue. They'd gotten over looking at the guys' bodies very quickly. It was hardly surprising that the guys had taken much longer, given that girls' bodies are FANTASTICALLY better to look at than guys'. Male emotional maturity might've had something to do with the very different settling-down times too. I said, "I'll restart the maturity testing now. If any of you make any stupid comments or actions, you'll be kicked out. But you haven't looked like doing that for a while, so I don't expect any problems." Alexis asked, "How come you're not naked, Mark?" "YEAH!" agreed all my loyal girls. "We'd prefer he didn't," said Tristan. "He makes me feel inadequate every time." Julia added, "Wait till you see him now. His body's even better than it was the last time you would've seen him." "I thought you'd been laid up in the hospital with a broken leg?" asked Jason. "Get ya gear off!" demanded Alexis, which the other girls enthusiastically endorsed, they not being required to act maturely. Julia moved to help me undress. She's in charge of what I wear, so I guess that makes her think she's in charge of taking it off again. She had no shortage of helpers, all female or there would've been MAJOR trouble, so it didn't take long for me to be got naked. The girls stood back to give my teammates a view of me, causing them to groan. Logan adding a moaning, "What girl is gonna want us after seeing you!" I answered, "Girls who've been told I won't touch them until I like them more, and that the best way to get me to like them more is to be friendly to my best friends. The more they want me, the more likely they'll be to use you to get to me. The Game wouldn't work if I was poor and ugly; especially not poor." "I guess so," agreed Logan, "but how did you build your muscles up so much with a broken leg, and all the exam cramming you must've been doing?" "The hospital had a very good physiotherapy room. I'd prefer to change the subject back to your having sex with beautiful A-list girls, but we can keep talking about my naked body if you like?" "Haha. Okay, you've convinced us. Sex with girls it is." I said, "Imagine we've been somewhere during the day with some of the Target Girls, then we come back here afterward, go into the hot tub room, then strip naked and get into the hot tub like we've done it a hundred times before. Because My Girls aren't hesitating to get naked and no one's making an issue out of it, the Targets will feel silly to hesitate. Peer pressure is a wonderful thing. That's another of the tricks we can use, once My Girls are comfortable enough with you guys and the Game. They won't get naked with you before then, other than Carol's momentary test. -- "The Target Girls' greed, their thinking that I'll like them much more if they're friendly to you, peer pressure, and your being totally cool gentlemen, are the keys to this plan." ------- Chapter 266: Introducing What We Did for My Soccer Team; Part Two Monday, June 27, 2005 (Continued) We kept chatting about aspects of the Target Game, to give the guys plenty of time to get used to seeing My Girls topless. Hopefully enough so they wouldn't react typically when the Targets also started stripping. One of the other issues that came up turned out exactly as I'd expected. I pointed out that under my plan, the guys wouldn't get to choose which of the Target Girls they had sex with. It was up to the Targets to choose the guys. Amusingly, the guys were perfectly fine with that. I pointed out that they could always refuse an individual girl, and they all laughed - maturely - at my joke. Another slightly amusing thing that happened was that after the others had been playing 8-ball for a while, the guys accused me of being a chicken for sitting out. They were surprised when the girls all laughed at them. I said, "There's no point in my playing. The game's too easy for me." Logan, who I'd already seen was quite a good player, suggested, "How about we have a competition to find the best player, and then I play you, haha." "That'd be unfair. How about me versus the four of you in a best-of-three-games match. You all have one turn each, and then I have one turn, so your team will have a four-to-one advantage. You put up a $10 each, I'll put up $40, and to make it fair I'll play my shots with my eyes shut." "What! There's no way you could win like that. You might as well give us your money." "Shall we make it four $100s and $400 then?" "You really mean it?" "Sure. Why not? I'm sure you guys can afford $100 each can't you?" While I was talking I was also grabbing a cue from the rack and leaning over the table ready to take a shot. I said, "I'll shut my eyes when my cue is pulled back and hold them shut until after I've stood up after the shot, like this." I demonstrated what I meant, which was really me practicing to make sure I could do it. I lined up a shot, pulled the cue back, shut my eyes, then created a sight blob where my sighting eye was. I was playing a right-handed shot, so I put the sight blob at my right eye, as I use whatever eye is closest to the cue. I didn't have depth perception with only one sight blob, but I'd already planned out the shot using my real eyes so all I needed to do was hit the cue ball as intended. I thought that'd work okay. Because I was a smart-ass, I was intending to miss. The ball that I was apparently trying to pot was actually aimed to hit the cushion a couple of inches to the left of the pocket. I took the shot with my eyes shut, stood up, opened my eyes, and watched the number 6 ball hit the cushion exactly where I'd wanted. I didn't even need to nudge it with NP. "Oops," I said. The guys looked at me VERY suspiciously. Jason asked, "Did you miss deliberately?" "How could a blind guy AIM to miss? How could I aim at all? Name your stakes gentlemen; I can go up to $4 million." The guys had a terrible time trying to decide on the bet. There was even talk of making the stake $1,000 each, but there was also talk of keeping it to $10. They really wanted to take as much money off me as possible, because this sounded like an easy gift; but they were deeply suspicious, because this sounded like a TOO easy gift. It was too good to be true, so there had to be a trick. "How do we know you'll keep your eyes shut?" "That's why I said I'd stand up before I open them. But if it makes it easier for you, I'll also turn my head away while making the shot. I'll show you what I mean." I played another practice shot to make sure that twisting my head didn't throw my aim off. I made no attempt to sink a ball, merely to hit one at the far end of the table exactly square on. I did it so casually that it looked like a random shot, but I was pleased to see that it hit exactly where I intended. The conflict between greed and caution tormented the guys for another couple of minutes, during which we had a couple of rule discussions about things like what would happen if one of their players made a foul shot. Eventually they decided to go for $100 each. They didn't all have $100 on them (actually they had NOTHING on them, but you know what I mean), but they did have $400 in total. I made them pony it all up, so some of them owed the others. That way I could give $80 each to each of the girls, telling them, "When I win, you get to keep this in appreciation for your help in the Target Game." "Cool," said Alexis. | "Thanks," said Pat. | "What a pity they didn't bet a thousand," complained Ava. | Carol just giggled, while Julia smiled confidently. All of which did nothing to reassure the guys. Tristan asked me, "What about your $400? Shouldn't you get it out too?" "There's no possibility of me losing so I can't be bothered. I'll let you guys decide what order we play in, but my advice is that you should make me go last." "Or maybe we should make you break," suggested Logan. Alexis, who'd seen what happened when I broke during the pizza & hot tub group date, laughed happily, adding, "Please do. I'll get your money faster that way." Then she laughed again, to rub it in even further. The poor boys looked worried, especially because all of my girls didn't look the least bit worried. The boys (a.k.a. "the suckers") had a conference to decide on their shooting order. They decided to take my advice that I shoot last, and for them to go in skill order, starting with their least skilled. I was also amused by Logan's asking, "Can we change the order we shoot in whenever it's our turn?" I answered, "Sure," while my girls laughed again. To his team, Logan said, "Let's stick to the worst-to-best order to start with, and see how the game goes. I'll be better at making shots that box Mark in for his turn." The game would be over by the time they saw "how it goes". Trying to box me in didn't worry me either. I'd already thought of that, and could guarantee that the boxing would fail because I'd use NP to make sure that the balls didn't stop where they intended. To cut a long story short, their second and fourth players managed to sink one ball each. The shots had been so easy it would've looked ridiculous for my NP to stop them going down. Just before it was my turn, Julia loudly asked, "What are you going to spend your money on, Carol?" "I don't know. I was thinking that it should be something for Mark, but why should he get paid for something that's only going to take him a few seconds? Haha." Alexis told the guys, "You might as well put your cues away now, haha." When the guys had enjoyed the girls' laughter for long enough, I said, "I'm ready to take the first of my eight shots. Does someone want to stand near me to ensure my eyes are firmly shut?" The guys definitely wanted that done. By now they were VERY worried about their money. Or, as the girls doubtless thought of it by now, "the girls' money." I made my first shot. "His eyes were shut," confirmed Tristan. My target ball dropped into a pocket. "Uh oh," worried Peter. The remaining seven shots were equally easy, or from my teammates' point of view, increasingly depressing. The only slight problem I had was that the time it took me to stand up and open my real eyes made it a LITTLE bit tricky to adjust the movements of all the other balls. For example, when I was breaking up a clump of balls and wanted my balls from it to roll toward and stop in front of various pockets, plus the cue ball to stop at the right place. Changing from a sight blob to my eyes caused a momentary change of perspective, which was a SMALL distraction. But it was very quick, and with seven minds each able to influence a ball, it wasn't anywhere near enough of a problem to matter. The girls started celebrating, and the guys moaning, even before the black dropped. There's no point in describing the second game. When that black, and their last shreds of hope, sunk, I politely inquired, "Do you want a rematch to give the girls any more of your money?" "No! How can you shoot with your eyes shut?" "I'm very coordinated. I did this for two reasons. First to do a little bit of macho posturing to remind you that none of you come close to me physically. You've seen how well I play soccer, you know I won the 10k run against national-level competition, you just saw that I could be a professional 8-ball player with my eyes shut, and you know what happened to all the idiots that tried to attack me in the school bathroom. These girls are MY girls, so do yourselves the favor of not trying to compete with me. All you'll achieve is to make fools of yourselves and annoy the girls. I know guys can too easily fall for girls who're simply being nice to them. When My Girls are being publicly nice to you this summer, don't take it personally. They're doing it for me. -- "The second reason I happily took your money was because you owe My Girls an enormous amount of appreciation for what they're going to be doing for you this summer. Now you've given them $80 each as a sign of your appreciation. Look on the bright side: if you'd spent $100 on a date with a girl who walked around almost naked for you, you'd be very happy; so you've already gotten value for your money today." "I was hoping to get value for YOUR money!" "Thems the breaks. I know how to cheer you up though. You've got used to being around the girls without acting like immature idiots, so now it's time to get used to touching them. Shall we pretend you're rubbing suntan lotion on them?" "Oh boy!" exclaimed Peter. Then he realized that he might've just got himself kicked out. With a panic stricken face, "OH NO! I didn't mean..." I waved him down. "Relax Pete. You've been great for the last half an hour, and it'd be too mean to kick you out right after you donated $100. Don't make another mistake though, because I will kick you out without a refund. -- "To emphasize that you don't have ANY say over the girls, you aren't going to be picking who you practice lotion rubbing with. They'll do the picking. Alexis, in honor of your very noble offer to help our cause by having sex in front of the Targets, you can have first choice." Alexis said, "I'll take Peter. He's cute and I liked playing with his cock before." Peter got even cuter when he blushed. Then he ruined his cuteness - as far as I was concerned - by getting hard. Apparently my opinion differed from Alexis', judging by her laughing and saying, "Yummy." I learned that it was possible for a guy to remain erect while his face turned bright red. The luminescence of his reaction made me suspicious about something, especially considering he was the youngest of my teammates; much the same age as me, and I knew how much sex I'd had until a few months ago. I asked, "Pete, when I invited you here, I did specify non-virgins only. How much experience have you had?" "Ahh, I'm not a virgin. Not 'technically', but I haven't had very many girlfriends yet." Which we all knew really meant that he'd managed to briefly fool around with one girl once. I said, "Pete, if a girl like Savannah takes you to bed, she's going to instantly know you haven't been having sex with any of My Girls. That'd ruin the whole plan." Alexis offered, "I think he's cute, so I could give him a couple of spins. Would that make it all right?" It was clearly "ALL RIGHT!" by Peter, who was nodding so rapidly I was worried about his head falling off. Pathetic really, but you know what guys are like. I answered, "It depends on whether Pete can act cool enough afterward. He doesn't have to be an expert, but if a Target Girl suggests sex and he looks like he does now, that'd blow everything." "I'll take care of him," stated Alexis confidently. Adding to Peter, "Don't you get stupid on me. This is just for sex. You're not gonna be my boyfriend or anything." #1: #4: #5: #8: Peter was fervently insisting that the thought of Alexis as his girlfriend would never, ever cross his mind. Perhaps somewhat undiplomatic, but guys don't think too well when sex is almost within our grasp, especially technically-not-quite-virgin guys. When Peter paused to take a much-needed breath, Pat said, "Jason said nice things before about how he thought that I was beautiful." Jason looked VERY happy, until Pat finished, "So I DON'T want Jason to practice on me." "Good thinking," commended Julia. To the guys she added, "This isn't about our starting relationships; it's about working together on Mark's plan to get the Target Girls to come on to you. Pat is smart to make that point. I'll take Jason." I don't know whether you've noticed this about me yet, but I don't have a high opinion of guys' ability to be sensible about sexual matters. So I wasn't surprised to see that Jason reacted by looking disappointed. I saw that Julia noticed it too. I politely asked him, "Are you tired of living, Jason, that you'd look disappointed when my number one girlfriend offered to let you rub her body?" "Ahh. No. I didn't mean it like that..." "How exactly did you mean that Julia disappointed you?" "Ahh..." Julia gave Jason a second or two to get nowhere, then she said, "What we're doing now is preparing for when you meet the Targets. We're just practice dummies for you. Stop thinking about us and concentrate on the Targets. That's why they're called Targets; because they're what you should be aiming for." I added, "I'll never have the chance to call Julia a dummy again, so I can't resist agreeing with her self-description. Julia has it right when she says My Girls are your practice dummies. That's definitely how you should think of them. It shouldn't matter at all who you practice with. Which means that my suggesting that the girls pick the guys probably wasn't the smartest, because that makes it personal. I'll do the picking: Alexis and Pete; Julia and Jason; Ava and Tristan; Pat and Logan. Girls, spread out and lie on the carpet. Guys rub their bodies as if you're putting lotion on. Think of them as practice dummies, so I do NOT want to see any hard-ons! That's true at any time, but especially now. We want the Targets to see that you're so used to these girls' bodies that something as trivial as rubbing lotion on doesn't turn you on." A couple of minutes later a very polite Jason asked, "Umm. I don't know whether to touch Julia's butt?" I answered, "When we're with the Targets, you'll rub lotion on My Girls' butts like you've rubbed their butts a hundred times before, but it's smart to ask now. When I planned today with the girls, they agreed to be rubbed there. DON'T fondle them though! The image we're going for is that you're so familiar with these bodies that they mean little to you. Treat their butts the same as any other part of their body. -- "If one of the Target Girls asks you to rub lotion on her, then rub her much the same as you are now: politely and without any sexual connotation. But when you get to her butt, skip over it entirely. Don't even ask whether she wants lotion put on it. The image is that you guys are getting so much sex already that you couldn't care less about rubbing some other girl's butt. -- "If she asks you why you didn't, say something about not touching girls' private parts unless specifically invited. The Target will feel safe with you, be impressed that you're a gentleman, and pissed off that you're not chasing after her the way every other boy is. If you guys get good enough that you can rub lotion all over Targets' bodies without getting a hard-on and without showing any interest in her body, then that'll do a very good number on their heads. When they realize that the only way to make me like them enough is to join in with all the sexual activity they think is going on, they'll feel very in control and safe about it. The less sexual interest you show in the Targets, the more sex you'll get from them. That's how girls work; their logic is totally backward." Carol whacked me on the arm. The other girls booed me, and told Carol to hit me again. Once I'd apologized sufficiently, I had to point out one 'small' problem (sorry, Pete), "Pete, you look like you're enjoying yourself entirely too much." "I can't help it. I keep thinking about Alexis having sex with me." "That's why I specifically asked for experienced guys, so they wouldn't have a bee in their bonnet about sex. We might need a bonnet to cover that thing up if you can't learn to control it better." Pete asked the other guys, "How are the rest of you staying soft?" Logan answered, "It's NOT easy! I'm concentrating on the unsexiest thing I can think of." "Like what?" "I don't want to say. It's too embarrassing. Pick your own 'Worst Embarrassing Moment', or imagine if you have sex with Alexis and she laughs her head off about how terrible you are at it." That did it nicely: poor Peter's peter petered out. After several seconds worrying about it, he had to ask, "You wouldn't do that, would you, Alexis?" "You're a virgin for fuck's sake! How could you be any good? I won't do anything like that if you do what you're told and behave yourself. Just make sure you don't fall in love with me or any crap like that." "I won't! Ahh, technically I'm not a virgin." #3: Alexis had a good answer, "Good. That means you won't need me." "Ahh. Umm, I wouldn't mind if we still..." I interrupted, "Give it up, Pete, you're not fooling anyone. Alexis is gonna rock your world, eat you alive, and blow any technical definitions out the window. And you're going to be pathetically grateful to her, aren't you? Say 'Yes Mark' and 'Thank you Alexis.'" "Umm. Okay. Yes Mark, and thank you Alexis." "That's better," said Alexis. "Do what you're told and you might survive the night, haha." "Keep rubbing guys. I think it'd be a good idea to swap around in a couple of minutes, and we'll keep swapping until you've all had a turn on everyone. That'd be the best way to depersonalize it. Pat, I'll hold a pool cue when Jason is rubbing you. If I see him start to get too interested, I'll whack him in the nuts with it. Will that be reassurance enough?" "I just wanted him to know I won't be anyone's girlfriend, but your idea sounds good too, haha." Jason didn't think it was a laughing matter. With a worried expression he said, "I'll behave myself, but I can't control my cock. How about if it gets hard, I'll walk away? Would that be all right?" Pat suggested, "It'd be quicker for Mark to hit it with a pool cue." Jason looked decidedly uncomfortable. I said, "I'll make Pat your last practice dummy, so hopefully you'll be better able to control yourself by then. The sight of me standing over you with a pool cue 'cocked' should keep you from feeling frisky." "You wouldn't really hit me, would you?" "Pat's one of my lovers and she's already warned you not to, so how do you think I'd react to a guy thinking unwanted sexual thoughts about her?" "Oh." It turned out that when it came time for Jason to rub Pat's back, he had no trouble remaining soft. Either touching Pat's body was a lot less sexy than he'd imagined, or maybe it was my standing over him holding a pool cue threateningly that did the trick. He zipped over Pat's butt considerably faster than he should have. Of all My Girls, it was Pat who'd most surprised me by agreeing to participate in this, and was clearly the most nervous about it, so I didn't make Jason go back to work on her butt for the length of time he should have. [I wasn't even going to ask Pat to participate in any of this, except that Julia pushed me into it, saying there was no reason not to ask her. I'd been very surprised when she'd agreed. I'd asked her why, and Pat had explained, "I'm doing it for you, and to be around you over the summer. Also because I miss the fun I had with Lily. If anything gets back to my parents about my having sex with your friends, I'll deny it. That'll be the honest truth, because I won't be having sex with them. My reputation at school doesn't worry me too much, because people are going to find out this was a big trick against the stuck-up girls. All the girls I like will thank me for helping cut those girls down to size." I'd thanked Pat again, and made a mental note to make sure I treated her well in the future, because she truly was worried about it.] During the guys rubbing the four girls' backs, there'd been a few signs of excitement, but the pool cue was an excellent device for getting rid of pesky erections. I extended the cue right toward the offending member, threatening to poke it. It always retreated pretty damned quickly. When the last rotation finished, I said, "I won't get you to do the girls' fronts. I think everyone's done more than enough for the first day's practice and it'd probably be a good idea to give the guys a couple of days to absorb all they've been told. Especially to get themselves into the mindset that they should be aiming at the Targets, and should only be thinking about My Girls as practice dummies that they should treat with enormous respect, appreciation, and totally non-sexually. One way that might help, is to think of My Girls as guys. When you're rubbing lotion on their body, pretend it's a guy's body." "That'd kill it for me!" declared Tristan. The other guys echoed him, as they should've. Alexis said, "I hope they don't think that too well, because you want us to play around with them, like when I was jacking my pet virgin." Pete looked about to object to that description, so I beat him to it, "Don't even think about objecting, Pete. You ARE her pet virgin. Alexis knows a million times more than you do about having sex, so you'd be crazy not to do exactly what she says when she gets you alone. She's a great lover, so you're very lucky to have her teach you." Alexis batted her eyelids at me, telling me mushily, "You say the sweetest things." "You deserve it. You're much more than being just 'a damned good fuck, ' because you've got such a natural, happy attitude to it. If Pete learned from any of the Target Bitches, he'd end up with a pretty screwed up opinion of what good sex is, but not from you." "Don't worry. When I finish with him, everything else he's got will be screwed, but not his opinion, haha. I'm looking forward to having my own little pet who'll do whatever I want. 'Pete the Pet', get it? Haha. -- To Pete, Alexis said, "You'd better rest up tonight and tomorrow Pet, because you're gonna have a wicked night tomorrow night." "Tomorrow? {Gulp}. Oh boy." "Shh. Don't talk. You need to rest your tongue. You're gonna spend at least a couple of hours learning the fine points of cunt licking, so the only talking I want you to do tomorrow is to buy a box of rubbers. Come over after dinner, and you'll be staying the night because we'll be at it for hours and you won't be able to walk by the time I've finished with you." "Oh boy." I said, "I'm guessing that in a couple of days your virginity won't be defined by a technicality, Pete." Have I mentioned that guys are pathetic about sex? Because the other guys were all looking pathetically envious, almost as if they thought they should have a turn with Alexis too. I guess they'd forgotten my advice to imagine My Girls were guys. Guys shouldn't be allowed out in mixed company, because they only embarrass themselves. The easiest way of taking care of the problem was to point it out, and then send the guys home to think about it. That took several minutes to achieve, as they had to get dressed and they had some questions. For example, the guys were quite eager to know when the next meeting would be. I suggested, "Pete will be shattered Wednesday morning, so how about Thursday morning at 10am for a couple of hours? That'll keep the afternoon free. Can everyone make it?" The guys instantly said that they could. The girls took the time to actually think about it first, and then confirmed they could all make it. While we were getting dressed, I asked, "Logan, would you drop Carol home please?" "Sure, if I can borrow your car to do it with." "Fat chance! You'll have to make do with your own wheels." "It was worth a try. How come you aren't taking her home?" Alexis answered, "As soon as you've gone we're going to Julia's room. You're not the only ones getting sex out of this. Ours will be a hell of a lot better than yours too." I said, "If the plan works, they'll get a huge kick out of having sex with those girls, Alexis. Don't diminish their enjoyment just because they're too young and inexperienced to have learned about meaningless sex." I was both joking with Julia and Carol, who knew I didn't believe in that "meaningless sex" bullshit, and impressing the other girls. Alexis and Ava didn't matter in this respect, but I wanted Pat to know I valued her, even if it wasn't a particularly honest compliment. No way was I too 'mature' (ha!) to enjoy meaningless sex with A-list beauties. I was looking forward to having sex with the Targets myself, to rocking their worlds with my sexual prowess, and then to telling them that they weren't good at it so I'd rather stick to my current lovers. Ending with, "I suggest you practice with my friends some more. If they tell me you've improved, I might give you another try." Being evil can be a lot of fun, I hope. Not that I was really "evil", as such. I was going to do all of this without promising the Targets anything, so I certainly wasn't going to be breaking any promises. I could be considered slightly evil in only three ways: For making the Targets believe my teammates and My Girls had sex together. What the Targets chose to do with that misinformation was entirely up to them, but it was really none of their business so they shouldn't do anything. It was their problem if their greed and Standard Operating Procedure predictably led them into trying to manipulate me, through my friends, with sex. It was their decision and action, so their responsibility. My teammates would enjoy the consequences though. I could hardly be accused of being very evil by not pointing out to them in advance that they had no chance of fooling me into throwing large gobs of money at them. I guess I was partly evil though, given that I was going to THOROUGHLY enjoy playing the Target Game. It'd be more fun than sex, especially as I'd make sure it included plenty of that too. Most of the Target Girls were cold-blooded, money- and ego-driven, selfish, lying bitches (on their good days; worse than that most of the time), so I didn't have any sympathy for them. They deserved a great deal more comeuppance than I'd ever be able to give them. The guys wanted to talk more, but we'd spent the best part of a couple of hours talking already, and I could think of better things to do now. So could the girls, so the guys got pushed out pretty quickly. [Before the guys had arrived, I'd told Carol that I'd get the oldest of them, as the likely best driver, to drive her home afterward. I was curious to see if he'd hit on her, or what else he might say. Carol later reported that Logan mostly talked about how envious he was that I was in bed with four girls at once. When he'd asked Carol what she thought of that, Carol had said, "It sounds like fun. When I'm comfortable with my orientation, I think I'll ask Mark if I can borrow them one night so I can find out what it's like." Which did NOTHING to cool Logan down, but he sensibly didn't act on it with Carol, so he stayed in the Target Game and uninjured.] Julia, Ava, Pat, Alexis and I headed upstairs, where I several times demonstrated my sincere verbal and physical appreciation to My Girls, especially to Alexis and Pat. I gave those two a considerable amount of attention. Pat would get in trouble with her parents if the plan's fake story got back to them, and possibly even if the true story did. We'd all back up her denials about having sex, and we'd do everything we could to get her out of trouble, such as getting my and Julia's parents to visit her parents to reassure them that Pat hadn't had sex with any of my teammates (because guys like using technicalities, I'll point out that "my teammates" technically doesn't include me). I hadn't had a chance to tell Pat about my plan to back her up with her parents, so I mentioned it during our time in bed (with four girls in the bed, there was quite a lot of talking). Pat was visibly relieved, showing me that she was worried about her parents, so I gave her some more appreciation. The other girls, seeing me focus on Pat, joined in to help me appreciate her. With four on one, it didn't take long before Pat got so much appreciation she needed to rest for a while. I was very happy about how well the girls I was in bed with fitted into my life. Alexis was, quite frankly, a rough, tough girl. God knows how many sexual partners she's had, because I doubt Alexis knows. I've never asked her, and I don't want to. I'd almost certainly disapprove of some of the aspects of her life, so I prefer not to know. I do know that I very much approved of her honest approach to her life though. Sex was the main thing that kept me wanting to see her, which was perfectly fine because it was also the main thing that kept her wanting to see me. There was no pretense about either of our motivations. They were the same, mutually enjoyable, and fair. Emotionally Alexis also appreciated that I liked and valued her personality, which pretty much automatically meant Julia did too, such was Julia's devotion to me. Ava was also honest about enjoying sex, but unlike Alexis, Ava was a serial monogamist who had only one boyfriend at a time. The fact that she was currently in bed with four other people was somewhat of a departure from her previous behavior, but it was something she was pushed into. I can't excuse her behavior - NOT that it needs an excuse! - by saying that she still has only one boyfriend, because that's only technically true (it's a day for technicalities). Julia is almost as much Ava's traditional 'boyfriend' as I am. Obviously Julia's a girl, but other than that important technicality, she does a pretty good job being the emotional and sexual equivalent of a good boyfriend for Ava, certainly a better job than a real boyfriend would, as Julia visits Ava's home quite often, spending a lot of time talking to Ava and her parents, and usually staying the night (that happens on quite a few of the nights I stay at my home). That occurs much more often in 3A-land than it did in 3B-land. Here, including before my latest merge, it was common for my morning studies to be interrupted by Julia and Ava arriving together, having come here to have breakfast with me. It happens more often than attributable to my 3A-Mom's lack of permissiveness guilting me into spending more nights at home. I've never bothered trying to work out why the two dimensions differed in this respect. There's no obvious explanation for it, although it's presumably something resulting from this Carol's delay in joining Julia's and my relationship. [[Wrong. When Julia was a little girl, she had a pet dog that was killed by a car driving up their driveway. In 3B-land it was killed instantly, but in 3A-land the impact was slightly different and the dog lived long enough to die in Julia's arms, giving her a different attitude to death. This Julia feels the impending deaths of Ava's parents more deeply, and is doing more to help. There are a surprisingly large number of dimensional differences between any two dimensions; far more than I ever discovered 'from within'. In case you wonder how the Universe could synchronize between two dissimilar dimensions, the answer is that it doesn't synchronize the differences. The 3A and 3B dimensions will be synchronized for the VAST majority of their billion-light-year spans, but on nights when 3A-Julia and 3B-Julia were in different places, then it's almost impossible for them to have déjà vu's; only if they were somehow in very similar mental states (déjà vu was likely when they were asleep, but that's off-point). When 3A-Julia was at Ava's overnight and either of the girls got a déjà vu, it'd be with a Julia or Ava in another dimension where Julia's dog had also died slowly, so in yet another dimension of the 3A type.]] Ava was OUR girlfriend, in the possessive sense that Julia and I were both Ava's bosses in the relationship. That'd been what she'd been looking for in the first place, and was even more true now because she looked up to us so much; in my case, mostly because of my special ability tricks rather than my being a particularly good boyfriend. Without Julia's help, I wouldn't have had a successful relationship with Ava. [[I'm selling myself short, as I commonly did at this time. Without Julia's help, and presuming the relationship with Ava did somehow start, I would still have been very nice to her. I would've been weak early on in my relationship, but by now I would've learned quite a lot, just as I had learned quickly in the early days of my relationship with Julia.]] That Ava was ours, kind of meant that she was still being monogamous, just with the two of us. In other words, Ava was still loyal. She likes sex as much as Alexis, but it wouldn't have occurred to her to "Take Peter for a spin." Pat was a very different girl. For a start - and it's a very good place to start - she easily had the best female body in the bed (Carol being elsewhere). The other bedmates were all slim and small-figured; that's 'unfortunately' just the way it'd worked out for me (I can't really complain). Pat was probably as good looking as Julia if you were looking at their faces, but not too many teenage boys spend much time looking at faces. Not in Pat's case anyway, when there's so much more to look at. Despite her physical superiority, Pat seemed not to have had any luck with boyfriends. I hadn't talked to her much about it, but it seemed that she'd gone out with a few older, confident boys, who'd all been selfish and pretty much useless for her. Julia and I weren't pushing Pat around. I would give you mostly the right impression by saying that we were treating Pat as equals. Julia doesn't treat anyone as my equal, nor do I treat anyone as Julia's, but we'd never pushed Pat around, so she felt more equal than she was used to. Pat was enjoying having choices in a relationship, contributing what and when she wanted, etc. She enjoyed the freedom, which had been a large part of why she and Lily had gotten along so well, as neither of them had pressured the other. I think she was somewhat of a weak girl, who let the guys she'd dated push her around too much. They'd enjoyed it but she hadn't. Lastly, and leastly in no sense other than physical: Julia. It's hard to describe Julia because she's so extreme. She 'discovered' me and devotes herself totally to me, a decision she believes justified beyond all shadow of a doubt. My increasing abilities and her parents' thinking that I'm superhuman have convinced Julia that there's nothing more important in her life than helping me. Especially if she's helping me in a direction that she thinks I should go in. The Target Game, for example, met with her strong approval because I started it on my own initiative (Julia was VERY happy about that), and because it involved me managing a large and diverse group of people: the Target Girls of course, but also my teammates, My Girls, and other girls we'll use for camouflage. Julia thought it'd be an excellent learning experience for me, so she was more than happy to pretend to be having sex with my teammates, which was something she'd normally NEVER contemplate agreeing to (just pretending, I mean. Actually having sex with them was far beyond "NEVER"). [In the very first private chance Julia had with me after my teammates left, Julia raved over how wonderfully I'd managed everything during the meeting. She had heaps of examples of how much I'd improved, such as my ejecting Max. The Old Mark never could've done something like that. Julia had some criticism too, especially over how much talking I did. She thinks I take too much care, causing me to explain things in tiny steps. I must admit that my natural verbosity - greatly exaggerated by not solely due to my having multiple minds - and wanting to be careful with people can make for some painfully long discussions. I'm getting less painful at it though. Julia can be long-winded herself, but she's far more effective than I am, and covers much more territory.] So I was in bed with four girls: one who'd devoted her life to me (Julia), another who wanted my help with her life (Ava), another who didn't want me imposing myself on her life (Pat), and Alexis was here just for the fun of it. The two amazing things were: That we all enjoyed this. By which I mean the girls, as there's nothing whatsoever amazing about my enjoying it. And that I actually understood some of it. With four girls involved, the smart money should be on me turning it into a complete fiasco, but that doesn't seem to be happening. [[Looking back, this was one of the important times in my emotional development. Nothing happened that hadn't physically happened before, but I was starting to accept that I had reasons to have confidence in myself, because: (1) These girls genuinely enjoyed being in my life, to the extent that I could ask them for quite extreme favors. (2) The meeting with my teammates had gone well. (3) I was confident about playing my role in the Target Game. (Not in the success of it, as that was very dependent on how greedy and immoral the Targets were, and my teammates' ability to pretend to be mature boys.) Even with increased confidence, I still screwed up plenty of times in the future, often making a fool of myself, but at least I was gaining the confidence to try things myself, without Julia pushing me into them.]] ------- Chapter 267: Lily's Plan Monday, June 27, 2005 (Continued) Our sex session was interrupted by my cellphone receiving a text message. Unlike the phone Dad originally bought for me, the one I have now is state of the art, including being able to assign different ring- and text-tones to different people. I recognized the tone for Carol, and stopped what I was doing to read it in case she was having trouble with Logan. Nothing like that, fortunately for Logan. Carol was just letting us know that when she'd gotten home, there'd been a courier package for her, containing the cellphone I'd asked Lily to buy for Carol in Hong Kong. Carol LOVED it, texting that I'd chosen the perfect one for her. Carol hadn't had time to charge the battery yet, let alone use any of the phone's features, but - being a girl - she could tell it was perfect just by looking at it. Girls are very clever that way. I passed on the news to Julia, which caused Pat to say, "Lily's very vague about when she's coming back. She says she has to stay for family reasons and doesn't know for how long. She won't tell me what the reasons are. She sounds strange." Julia said, "Family's very important to Chinese. Much more than for Americans." True, but I had better things to be doing than comparing cultures, so that was the end of our discussion about Lily. ^ [[Now is a good time to explain about Lily, even though I didn't discover most of the following until a couple of minutes ago, when my writing of my autobiography got up to introducing Lily and I did some research on her. It doesn't really have any direct bearing on my ascendancy, but it's interesting enough to explain. We later emailed Lily a "Thank you" for Carol's cellphone, getting back not much more than "You welcome." We tried exchanging emails with Lily, but her replies were slow and so terse as to be almost non-existent. Pat had Lily's number in Hong Kong, but Lily was equally uninformative on the phone. We didn't think it was a big deal until just before school was about to restart, and Lily still hadn't returned to Corvallis. Pat called her, and was told that she'd probably be staying in Hong Kong rather than coming back to school. The only reason given was "family." Lily never returned to Corvallis. After a few months she stopped replying to our emails and clearly didn't want to talk with us on the phone, so she was out of our lives. I had more than enough distractions going on in my life, so Lily's absence barely registered. Occasionally I'd have the amusing thought that I REALLY didn't understand Chinese girls, because I could've sworn that serving me was very important to her. Judging by the complete absence of contact, or even a significant farewell, I'd apparently misunderstood the situation. As it happened, I'd also misunderstood the magnitude of my misunderstanding. Lily and her family were, like the vast majority of Hongkongese, Buddhists. Buddhism is not a religion in anything close to the strict sense of that word, in that there's no divine being who is prayed to, who created the World, will intervene on behalf of supplicants, will absolve or punish sins, etc. Instead of an externally judgmental "God On High", Buddhism is a "bottom up" path to self-improvement. Buddhists consequently believe that there are some human individuals who are more "self-improved" than others. It is entirely reasonable to most Buddhists that the most highly improved of such people would have attained powers and abilities well beyond those of normal people. The acquisition of special powers is a common aspect of many religions because it's a very common and strong human yearning and fantasy. Christianity, for example, maintains that its saints acquire the ability to perform miracles through their devotion to their religion. In fact, being able to perform miracles is an essential prerequisite for sainthood. People routinely bend their religion to fit their personal desires (fundamentally, that's all that religion is an accumulation of). For example, 25% of Americans who identify themselves as Christians say they also believe in reincarnation, even though it's a heresy that directly contradicts damned near every core aspect of Christian theology. Wish fulfillment is a powerful source of self-delusion, especially for religious people (who are, by definition, deluded to start with - I'm stating a simple fact; not being sarcastic). Buddhism is not a closed set of beliefs, so the existence of vastly superior humans is easily included and is widely accepted in Buddhist communities, which includes Hong Kong. Lily had decided that I was one such "superior human", mainly because of my intelligence, which is a big deal for ambitious Asians. There were also my physical abilities (playing soccer, my 10k running win, how fit I looked, bowling 300, etc.) Those were less important, but the fact that I was superbly gifted mentally and physically amazed Lily, as most extremely gifted people are gifted in one or the other direction, and almost never in both. Sixteen-year old Americans tend to live in the present, but Lily looked ahead. She had some understanding that my abilities were more profound than showed up in the artificial world of school. It gave her an idea that she talked to her parents about. They were fairly open to Lily's request, as there was no real reason why not, and Lily had some very good reasons why. Before granting permission, they had to check me out, watching my soccer game in Salem being the first step. After that impressive display, they pretty much agreed with Lily. They knew that Lily had no chance of getting and keeping me permanently. At best she had a 'window of opportunity' - or the equivalent Chinese expression - of a few months, and then I'd move beyond her reach (status was another concept the American girls who chased me never thought of. The only "reaches" they thought of were geographic, or my being surrounded by too much female competition). Lily's parents agreed with her that the most she could hope to achieve was to get pregnant by me. The Chengs never intended to use Lily's pregnancy to coerce me in any way, either into marriage or to give them money (credit to them for that). They didn't even want me to know about it (debit to them for that), because they wanted the child raised to be solely a Cheng. Their only goal was for me to get Lily with child, which their extended family would raise in Hong Kong. Adding a markedly superior human to the family tree was irresistible to them, as they believed my descendants would be very special. Chinese believe family to be far more important than Westerners do. Westerners know that about Chinese, but underestimate its effects, thinking the Chinese attitude is just more of the same feelings that Westerners have. That's not the case. Ancestor worship is a very big deal to many Chinese, which means that the living Mr. and Mrs. Cheng had a serious responsibility to their descendants, extending hundreds of years into the future. If I was the superior type of person Lily claimed I was, then her parents would feel great pride in adding my blood-line to their family tree. There's an inconsistency here. I was superior because I was SELF-improved, so my superiority shouldn't have been able to be passed on genetically. The short explanation is that you shouldn't expect people's religious beliefs to be self-consistent. The Chengs DID believe I was special, and they DID believe I would have special children. That their motivations were deluded didn't alter their desire to act on them. There's nothing particularly Chinese or Buddhist about being self-deluded. For example, millions of words have been written about the possible descendants of Jesus Christ. If Jesus' DNA was somehow discovered, there'd be a frenzy of DNA testing all over the world, to discover his 'best' descendants - as if that mattered at all (they'd most likely be Islamic Arabs, which amuses me). Lily wasn't immediately given the go-ahead. That was going to wait until after the dinner party. Her parents insisted on getting a better personal understanding of me first, including the little martial arts test they planned with Lily's cousin Tony. That wasn't important; just an opportunity not to be missed. I deprived Mr. Cheng of the chance to see something godlike by my hiding behind him, to his considerable annoyance. A week before the dinner party, I did my "Hide the Hair" trick in the hot tub during the Liaison Meeting. My performing magic blew Lily away. It made her lose her self-control, and to gush about her offer to serve me. Lily's being honored to serve me was a load of crap; she just wanted lots of unprotected sex with me. She and her parents had invented that fake explanation. Lily's gushing her offer in the hot tub was getting ahead of herself, but when she rushed home to tell her parents that I could do magic, they got equally excited. They'd previously thought I was a very special human, but my ability to do magic upgraded their opinion of me substantially, as only VERY special people can do real magic. They had no doubt it was real. The Chengs decided I was a demigod, or at least a semi-demigod, not that they thought in those terms, as Chinese have some weird - to Europeans - ideas of what makes a god. Repeating my trick during the dinner party at Lily's home several days later confirmed my semi-demi-deified status. Lily's returning to Hong Kong immediately after the dinner party was for her and her mother to visit a fertility clinic, to get Lily's chance of conceiving increased. Not that the Chengs ever considered going to one, but American clinics wouldn't have touched a 16-year old girl. More likely they'd have called a social welfare organization or six after they learned that Lily lived in a state with an 18-years old age of consent. An American clinic would also have been far too slow. In Hong Kong it's easy to get to the head of a line. For a start, the Chinese don't believe in waiting patiently in lines, and they do believe in "money talks." The Chengs were in a hurry, and they had money, so everyone else got bumped down. As far as Chinese are concerned, money is for making life easier, the pun being very appropriate in this case. Lily had found out I was comfortable having unprotected sex with Julia and Ava because they were on the pill, so that's what she pretended to do. Other contraceptive forms could've allowed us to start having sex immediately after returning from her doctors visit, but they would've gained her only two days, and they might not have been so acceptable to me. She never took the pills, of course, instead discarding one a day so she could show me the packet to 'prove' she was taking them. You may remember that Lily got cautious when talking to Mom about Lily's having sex with me. Lily was reluctant to tell Mom she was going on the pill, in case it made Mom think about my going without rubbers. Lily didn't want to risk Mom ordering me to keep using them. As it turned out, Mom was even less suspicious of Lily than I was, which was hardly at all. To Lily and her family's delighted surprise, she got pregnant very quickly. Her fertility treatments hadn't had time to kick in yet, but my sperm are REALLY healthy! Mom had been roughly right when she'd told me that I wouldn't be more likely to get a girl pregnant because I had 20% more non-defective sperm (bad English, but that's how it was explained to Mom). What she hadn't known was that my non-defective sperm were significantly healthier than other guys' non-defective sperm. My legs can win 10k running races against national-level competition, and if there were national-level sperm swimming races, my little fellas would win those too. My sperm are DAMNED good swimmers! Sperm race to reach the egg, but it's not a race against each other, as genetically it wouldn't much matter which sperm won if the female had only one male lover during the previous 24 hours or so (humans have middling-sized testicles for a primate because that sort of competition is only of middling significance for humans). The race that sperm are in is primarily against the hostile environment. Inside a woman is a DEADLY environment for sperm: it's so acidic that it starts killing them from the moment they leave the nice, warm, safe male environment, there are all sorts of obstacles and perils along the way, until the very end where the egg is coated with sperm-killing agents. The 'race' to the egg is metaphorically through a poison-gassed, acid-swamped, sniper-lined, booby-trapped, maze of an obstacle course. (We really shouldn't be so eager to squirt the poor little fellows into such danger.) The average human ejaculation contains about 250 million sperm, of which only 200 to 300 reach an ovulated egg. In my case that number was somewhat different. For a start, I had 20% more non-defective sperm, so for that reason 240 to 360 would reach their target, Mom being roughly right that this reason doesn't make much difference. Considerably more significant is that my sperm swam faster, which meant that several more percent of them reach their goal before the vaginal environment destroyed them. Several more percent of 250 million is a LOT of sperm! Somewhere between 5,000,240 and 15,000,360 of my sperm reached their target. Lily's poor egg never stood a chance! Lily got pregnant the day she started 'serving me', on Friday May 13 (that's not an unlucky number or day for Chinese). She discovered her condition soon after Prof and I were rescued from the kidnappers' basement. It was another three weeks until I got home from the hospital, by which time Lily's pregnancy was progressing nicely. She was nearly two months pregnant by the time exams were finished, so she was onto a plane and off to Hong Kong the moment she put her pen down, with no intention of ever returning to Corvallis; not unless she miscarried and needed a second shot of the good stuff. By the way, the Chengs were ECSTATIC when they saw the newspaper and TV stories about the kidnapping. From them they learned that I'd been with Prof when he'd won $11.1 million playing roulette. The Chengs had no doubt whatsoever that Prof had won because of my magic, which made me also a "Du Shen" (God of Gambling). Gambling is VERY important to Chinese, in ways that Westerners don't comprehend. The easiest explanation I can give you is by way of analogy. A Westerner who was favored by God would be expected to be able to perform healing miracles. Healing is the Western preeminent miracle; the one that proves the person is truly blessed. Demonstrating any of the other common fantasy powers, such as mind reading, telekinesis, flying, predicting the future, etc., would be impressive, but wouldn't be taken as indicative of being "blessed". Many people would take them as proof of evil. For Chinese, the preeminent sign of favor from the gods is good luck, and nothing demonstrates that better than winning a great deal of money gambling; plus it also makes you rich as well, so it's a WONDERFUL way to be favored! If anything, the Chinese reaction to a Du Shen would be even better than Westerners' reactions to a miraculous healer. In China, a Du Shen would be accorded considerably more respect and inundated with far less crap than a reliably miraculous healer would in America. In the Chengs' eyes, I kept getting more and more godlike, so they were very happy people. The previous two paragraphs are referring to 3A-land, where Prof and I survived (actually to the many 3A-lands, as the W-Dimension is BIG). The kidnapping publicity was different in the 3B-lands, but not in ways that materially changed the Chengs' opinions of me. They were sure I'd won the $11.1 million for Prof, and we'd obviously been killed for it. It was sad that I was dead, but that happens to everyone sooner or later. They knew I was special, but no one is so special that they can avoid THAT fate! Lily was already pregnant with my child, so their plan proceeded. I would live on through my descendants, and the various 3B-Chengs were as equally joyous about that as the 3A-Chengs. The 3B-Chengs may have been equally joyous about my being a Du Shen, but they were a great deal more surprised than the 3A-Chengs when I later proved how very special I became by summoning them to a meeting to discuss my son's future with them, but that's getting too far ahead.]] ^ Back to the current time. A small point, but worth a quick mention. Pat wasn't staying the night, so after our sex session finished we had showers and took her home. Pat wanted us to meet her parents. Julia and me especially, but she wouldn't tell her parents that. We all went, so Pat could let her parents know who she'd be spending a lot of the summer vacation with. Amusingly, we had to take the old Honda, as my new car couldn't carry more than four people. Such is the price of choosing cars for style rather than practicality, although I must admit that I'd much rather drive the Lexus. I behaved as Julia's dedicated boyfriend, with our arms around each other, etc. The other girls (Ava and Alexis) just being part of "the gang". Once Pat's parents knew I was "The Mark Anderson", I was the center of their attention. They, like everyone else in Corvallis, had been gripped by the publicity over Prof's and my kidnapping, the $11.1 million roulette win, subsequent rescue and search for the mysterious Third Man. They were very eager to talk about it. They tried to be polite about it, but their strong interest was obvious. So I spent a couple of minutes setting the scene with as much horror as possible, exaggerating the blood spraying around from my severed fingertip and smashed leg, the pain of having my fingers broken, the threats from the kidnappers and the certainty of death. I asked them to imagine what it was like to be in excruciating pain, to be tortured even more, and to be absolutely certain you were going to be murdered shortly, without ever seeing your family again. And then I asked them how eager they'd be to talk about it. They got the hint, so that was the deathly end of that topic. They were frustrated, but relieving their frustration wasn't my purpose in life. Relieving Pat's sexual frustration I was happy to do, but I drew the line there. I mentioned this incident because it illustrates a type of event that occurred several times over the next few months: girls wanted me to meet their parents. And unfortunately, those parents often wanted to talk about the kidnapping. A few months ago, no girl would be seen dead talking to me, but now they wanted me to meet their parents. It's amazing what difference having Julia in my life has made. I got good at killing the kidnapping subject quickly, and meeting parents was otherwise no hardship. Some of them were even nice people (the Durhams from Pipeline Group 1A, for example). Mom has brought me up to be very polite, and I was always too wimpy to be otherwise, so her training stuck. Consequently I made good impressions on parents. That can't be attributed to my wealth, because most of the parents assumed the $11 million was Prof's. Even if their daughter had told them otherwise, they didn't believe it. If they asked me, which they often did as there was public confusion over the money, I politely told them it was none of their business. Not that I really minded people knowing - Julia and I were telling plenty of girls and guys - but it was our choice who we told. Everyone else should stick their noses somewhere else. There was another aspect of the "Meeting The Parents" thing which struck me after a while: how superficial it was. All of the parents assumed I was a typical schoolboy, giving my conversations with them a sense of unreality. For example, they'd ask me whether I wanted to go to college and what I wanted to study. I'd usually say something like, "My main interests are Math and Physics, so I'll probably study something along those lines." I knew that the mental image they were forming from my answer was nothing like what my life would be, but there wasn't any point in my trying to make the conversations more accurate. If I told them that I was likely to finish two or three degrees by the time I finished school, that'd lead to all sorts of other questions which I could spend hours explaining, and they'd still not be able to understand my life. [The more I studied, the greater my confidence that I could complete at least two degrees; the third would mostly depend on how much the third and fourth year courses would slow me down, which I wouldn't find out for a while.] ------- Chapter 268: Scouting for a Private Swimming Spot Tuesday, June 28, 2005 (and some afterward) Julia, Carol, Ava and I were going to scout along the local rivers, assorted tributaries, and west to the coast if need be, to find one or more swimming locations where we could have Target Game dates. We needed somewhere very private for all the sexual activity I hoped would take place when the invitees feel safe enough to copy the apparent actions of My Girls and teammates. I made a tactical blunder when Julia asked me, "Shall I pack our sexiest swimwear?" I answered, "Absolutely! We won't be stopping anywhere that's not private, so definitely bring them." That doesn't sound like a tactical blunder, but when we finally found a suitable location and were about to get changed into our swimwear, I found out to my horror that: When Julia had asked about "our" sexiest swimwear, she'd deliberately included my male G-string posing-pouch travesty of a swimsuit. Damned technicalities! The girls all insisted that if it was good enough for them to wear G-string bottoms (and it was), then it was good enough for me too (which it very definitely was not). They insisted, "It's private. There's no one else here." I tried to weasel out of it (actually I tried to avoid weaseling into it, but you know what I mean), but the girls clearly had their hearts set on my butt. I didn't have much choice, other than to grin and bare it. I made DAMNED sure there was no one around. I'd already done that before suggesting that the girls get changed, but there was a great deal more at stake now. I shut my eyes behind my sunglasses and sent a sight blob carefully all around the area and back along the only path. Sight blobs move so fast that it only took me a few seconds to check that the area was clear, so I checked twice - once for each butt cheek I'd be waving in the breeze. We all got changed, and I did my best to ignore the discomforting and entirely unnatural sensations of the wind blowing on my bare ass and having a thong running up my crack. There's a better and much more easily accessed swimming area near the parking area, to its south. We were to the north. There's a good walking track that goes north from the cars, but it misses where we were by a hundred feet. To get to this spot requires some scrambling along a difficult, barely noticeable track, so we were fairly private. Nonetheless, I made a mental note to check the path every few minutes for anyone coming. I wanted to know in time to get un-obscene. For the first half an hour we were all cautious, especially me, but there was no sign of anyone else so we started relaxing. We warmed up enough to decide to have a swim. I'd had an idea some time ago for a trick to play on Julia. I'd thought of going for a private swim somewhere (here qualified) and using NP to stop Julia walking IN the water, to hold her up so she walked ON it by making invisible stepping stones under each of her feet, holding her at water level. At first thought, I should've had enough NP force to do that, but I'd quickly realized it wouldn't work. With all eight minds I currently had about 120 pounds of force, according to the household scales. Julia weighed about 70 pounds - and her bikini sure didn't add much! - so I could easily hold her up with a plate under each foot. The trouble was that when Julia walked her weight constantly shifted from one foot to the other, plus her feet were also pushing backward to propel her forward. I didn't have enough force to be able to handle those constantly changing weights and vectors. Maybe with a great deal of practice I could do it, but I knew I wouldn't be able to do it properly without that practice. If I'd tried it, Julia would have had a few seconds of very unsteady and erratic walking, before she'd freak out, try to run, and everything would turn into a mess. She could easily fall over and be hurt, so I'd decided against doing that trick. I was half hoping we'd find a very private swimming hole with a rope swing. Julia would get a very big surprise when she let go the rope and instead of falling into the water, she flew like Peter Pan around the area. Ava would get a very big surprise too, which was why I was only half hoping to find such a swing, since I'd have to ask Ava to leave before I did that trick. [We did find some rope swings today, but there were always other people around.] I'd had another idea for how to surprise Julia. It was appealing, but Ava was a part of it as it was an extension of my joke about her magic nipples, and I wasn't ready to trust Ava that much yet. Maybe in a few months. I'd keep my eyes open for a good opportunity to show Julia she could fly, but if nothing sufficiently cool offered itself, I'd wait until I trusted Ava enough. So we had a normal swim. No walking on water, Peter Pan flying, or anything else out of the ordinary. After our swim, things got considerably out of the ordinary for Carol. She decided to experiment with an activity I'd told her was going to become an important part of her life. She was inspired by the outdoor setting, the privacy, and - I like to think - the Australian bikinis, although that's hard to be sure about because girls react weirdly to very sexy sights. Carol started getting sexy with Julia and Ava. It was WONDERFUL to see this Carol initiate and enjoy doing this. It was also wonderful just to watch her doing it. As a responsible brother should, I closely supervised my sister getting into new territories, especially that territory down there. I supervised that a little too intently, because I heard the sudden sound of several guys hooting obscene comments about the girls' actions. I looked up to see three college-aged guys watching us from the path's exit onto the 'beach'. (Oregon's coast isn't great for sunbathing as it's a little too far north and gets too much wind in summer. Fortunately there are many good swimming spots on the rivers or lakes, quite a few of the spots have 'beaches' of sand or soft grass. I'll use "beach" hereafter to mostly mean riverside locations.) The girls scrambled to cover themselves, while I started a much-needed go-soft. The guys were something like thirty yards away, but they were rapidly heading our way while making several more comments about how they could give the girls what they really needed, and other crap like that. As soon as I decently could - a very difficult call given how little I was wearing - I got to my feet and moved to block the guys' access to my girls. One of them yelled, "Get lost fag! We'll give them the fucking they need." "Yeah," agreed another one of them, presumably majoring in Math judging by his, "Three hotties and a fag. That's one fag too many. Fuck off gay boy. We'll take care of the girls." There were only two questions: How much these guys were going to force me to hurt them, and undignified I was going to look confronting them in nothing more than a lurid posing pouch. I interposed myself between the girls and the advancing assholes (making sure they didn't see mine). Despite my discretion, they kept up a continual stream of gay taunts, with the occasional comment about how well they - being real men - were going to take care of the girls. Behind my back I heard Carol and Ava both make "Oh no"-type comments. Not Julia though, she just laughed and told the others, "This'll be fun. You haven't seen Mark fight before. They don't have a chance." Julia raised her voice to call out to me, "DARLING, if they try to stop us leaving, can you knock them out for me please?" The way Julia had stressed "darling" made me think she may not want us to use our names out loud, so I answered back, "Certainly, darling." The girls were rapidly getting our gear together, but they wouldn't be ready to leave by the time the 'real men' arrived in front of me. The guys had to walk in single file, with the guy in front presumably being the most 'real' of them, as he was the biggest (asshole). I was standing at a small choke point, where the path had the river on one side of it and some waist-high blackberry bramble on the other. The guys could have gotten around me wading out into the water, but that was apparently beneath the dignity of 'real men' because they showed every intention of plowing straight through the queer. When the front guy got within six feet of me, proximity showing me that he intended to walk straight into me, using his larger body mass to push me out of the way, so I had something like 110 pounds of NP-pushing against my back at the moment of impact. He might as well have walked into a wall. My immovability surprised him, but he dug his feet in and stated pushing. He was significantly heavier than I appeared to be, but there was no way he could overcome my body's physical bracing and NP support by pushing our chests against each other [[I also still had very solid bones at this time]]. To have any chance of pushing me away, he'd have to bend down and push against my waist, which would put my posing pouch in his face. Neither of us wanted that. I didn't want to attack him first, so while he was making his second, sustained push against my chest, I politely asked him, "Do you like rubbing your body against fags?" I was hoping he'd take a swing at me, but proximity showed that he decided to grab me with his hands instead. That wouldn't have been good, so I suddenly stepped backward. I used NP to act like a big obstacle immediately in front of his rear foot, preventing it from moving forward. Because we were on uneven ground and it was out of his sight, it wouldn't seem suspiciously magical to him. As a result, his upper-body moved forward, its support did not, and he toppled forward. I moved farther back and he fell forward onto his hands. During his fall I taunted, "You dirty pervert, lunging for my cock like that. No way am I gonna let you suck my cock." He came back up growling and with his fists swinging. I moved to let one of his punches glance off one of my shoulders. I jumped back a couple of steps, telling him, "You hit me! Stop before I have to defend myself." In retrospect that was quite gay, but that was NOT my intention! He'd suffered far too much indignity to stop now, and I'd just admitted to being a pathetic wimp (in male-speak) so he came straight at me. My six-foot proximity range told me everything I needed to know about how he was going to move, which made it trivially easy for me to duck his attack, hold his near arm down with one of mine while my other delivered a hard punch to the side of his head. His lights went out and he dropped like a stone. #3: The next two were coming straight at me. In the interests of scientific repeatability, I quickly knocked out Real Man #2 in exactly the same way as Real Man #1. Real Man #3 started trying to brake his charge at me, but there was no point in letting him get away, so I stepped forward and knocked him out the same way. #4: Carol and Ava rushed to me, to see if I was okay. I laughingly reassured them that their concern was completely unnecessary. Julia got me to dress while - to my surprise - she, Ava and Carol started stripping the three idiots. Maybe they wanted to see what "real men" looked like. It didn't take me long to throw my clothes on, although I really should have taken the time to remove my thong first because it felt unnatural all over again under my shorts. Julia instructed me to take help with the guys, as their weight was making it difficult for the girls. We ended up stripping them of EVERYTHING, even taking their watches. We left them with nothing, not even their dignity, because we used a usefully shaped small hollow in the ground and a few rocks to hold them in position as we arranged them in a loving heap: one of them lying on top of another, but swapped around so they were 69'ing with each other's cocks in their mouths, while the third was placed kissing the lower guy with a finger stuck into the asshole of the guy on top. It was a very touching scene (literally). Unfortunately none of their phones had a camera, so the scene couldn't be recorded for posterity. We put everything of theirs into their bags and took them with us when we made our way back to the parking area. There were only half a dozen cars there, so it wasn't going to take long to find which of their three key rings had a key that opened a car. The key that worked was one of those remote activation ones, so it took almost no time at all. Making sure not to leave our fingerprints on anything, we opened the trunk, dropped all their gear inside, locked the car, threw the keys inside the trunk and then closed it. Our actions didn't look the least bit suspicious, even if there'd been anyone around to see us. We'd briefly discussed phoning the cops to report three gay boys having sex in public, but we'd thought it was too risky, so we simply got in my car and drove off, to continue our scouting for somewhere suitable for the Target Game. The guys had been well knocked out, but they'd probably wake up before someone discovered them. Even if they missed the indignity of being found, they were still going to be very embarrassed by the tableau we'd left them in and they'd have some difficulty getting home again. Not to mention the shame they'd feel by being so easily put down by a fag in a posing pouch. ^ [[Real Asshole #1 woke up first, about ten minutes after we'd left. Being the biggest guy, we'd put him on the bottom of the 69, so he was very surprised to discover one of his friends was in lip-to-lip contact with him and that he had his other friend's cock in his mouth, and that his friend was returning the favor. He'd pushed his friends violently away from him, which unfortunately removed the asshole-probing finger, so they never discovered that artistic nuance. He woke the others, never telling them a word about the position they'd been in. Real Asshole #3 told them that he'd seen me knock out #1 & #2, which explained their situation. They searched around for their gear, quickly deciding that we'd robbed them. Now all they had to do was get help. They crept toward the public area, hid behind some vegetation, waited for someone to come within earshot, and called for help. They said they'd been stripped and robbed, and asked for a cellphone so they could call for help. They got a phone, and also an audience, as the story spread. They were very vague on how the incident had occurred, and didn't want the police called as they could see their car hadn't been taken, which only made the audience more interested and suspicious. They had a very uncomfortable time until their summoned friend arrived with clothes they could wear. Asshole #2 and #3 stayed behind to guard the car in case we returned, while #1 and his friend drove to #1's home to get his spare car key. They returned to the parking lot and drove everyone home. They discovered their gear in the trunk after they got home, which was a pity because I'd hoped they'd go to all the trouble of getting new keys, credit cards, etc. The only smart thing they did all that day was not call the cops, but hopefully they'd be smart enough in the future to run the other way when confronted by a fag in a G-string posing pouch. On second thought, it'd probably be unwise to turn your back on such a guy. Backing away quickly would probably be best.]] ^ We spent the rest of the day checking out locations some distance from the one above, finding a couple of suitable ones. In the late afternoon, we did another piece of Target Game preparation: we cruised through town in my new car. It's a very distinctive car, and with the lid down is very attention getting. Corvallis is a small place, so we saw plenty of people from our school. Over the next few days we found several reasons to be in town, such as my parking outside the movie theater while Julia went in to buy some tickets, deliberately at a time when a popular chick-movie was letting out, giving plenty of girls a chance to see me sitting in the car outside. While I was doing something very similar to that one day, Chloe Moon came around the corner, and we caught each other's eyes at the same time. She stumbled a bit, and looked to be about to approach me to speak in what looked like a non-angry way. Unfortunately, she was with her mother, who quickly dragged her away. I kind of hoped Chloe would call - not that I really wanted phone calls from insane girls - but she never did. She'd been dressed even more conservatively than she had at school, so things looked sad for her. [[Even sadder a few weeks later, when she had her breast-reduction surgery.]] Within a few days, all my girls were getting an increased number of phone calls from other girls, many of whom mentioned that they'd seen or heard that Mark was back in town, inquiring about my health, and not infrequently mentioning my new car, especially as it was an easy entrée into a conversation about the $11 million. My Girls had a list of the Targets, so when one of them called it was a simple matter to tell her that "Mark and a group of his friends are going swimming in a few days. Do you want to join us?" Only a minority of the Targets made contact, but we did get a few of them that way. Only a few though, as most of the Targets considered themselves superior, so it was beneath their considerable dignity to do anything that might be misconstrued as chasing me, even if they were greedy and would've loved to go steady with my money. We did other things too, like call around the ex-11th grade (next year's seniors) phone numbers we had, putting out the word to whomever wanted to turn up to some afternoon activity. The ostensible reason was that I just wanted to get to know the people whose classes I'd be in next year, but really it was because most of the Targets were in that group (bitchiness at school is positively correlated with age, peaking sharply with senior girls). Targets like Adriana and Savannah I called directly as they'd already professed their sincere interest in me. Other Targets turned up to the first event because we spread word of mouth about it very widely. It was easy to make a bit of time to sweet talk each of the Targets to get their phone numbers so we could individually invite them along to later events. Too many people turned up to the first event, but that was fine as subsequent events were by invitation. They were much more private and considerably sexier. By the time we left on our trip to Europe, the Target Game had started well. None of my teammates had gotten even a single touch of a Target Girl yet, but the Targets were convinced that my mates were getting plenty from My Girls. There were a few aspects of the Game that surprised me: How gullible the Targets were. Once My Girls confirmed that they were having sex with my teammates, the Targets swallowed our cover story without the slightest sign of suspicion. It never occurred to them that girls would lie to other girls about something like that. That was inexplicably naïve of the Targets since they treated other girls like scum most of the time. Carol was considerably more publicly sexual than I'd expected; noticeably more than 3B's Carol had been - and believe me, I noticed! Not just with Ava either, as it'd started in 3B-land. Carol had fun mostly with Ava, Julia and Savannah (I had a little sub-game going with Savannah that involved Carol), but also with several other girls. The explanation wasn't complex: Carol was horny being around so much sex, but frustrated by not having full sex with me, so it came out in other ways. Speaking of "coming out", Carol's coming out as a lesbian when school restarted was certainly not going to be a big surprise; not among the female population anyway. Hopefully it still would be among the guys, so I could give my "I Love My Sister Carol" speech. Not that I needed to anymore, as I was rich now. That was clearly an even more effective female attractant than being wonderful, loving and sensitive. Certainly measured by the quantity of girls it attracted, but I held out hopes that "Loving Carol" speech would attract a better quality of girl. I quite enjoyed myself getting to know quite a few of the non-Targets. We invited other girls to these dates - otherwise it was too likely that the Targets would correctly suspect our motives - and some of those other girls were good company. That worked out well because I didn't want to spend much time with the Targets. Both because I genuinely didn't want to, and because it helped our plan to make them work for the privilege of getting closer to me. I came in for quite a lot of attention from all the girls, because of how good my body undeservedly looked in a swimsuit (a decent one, if Speedos can be called decent); how awesomely good I was at swimming above and underwater, playing "Girl Tossing", and whatever other physical activities I did to impress the Targets; and doubtless because of my money too. My car was a constant reminder of that. I like to think that some of their attraction to me was because I'm a nice guy, but discerning what motivates girls isn't easy. You might've noticed that yourself. There were some extra guys around sometimes, other than my four teammates and me, but not many, and not always. We didn't specifically exclude guys, especially not at the beginning when we were trying to get the ball rolling, but we didn't invite them either. Some girls brought their boyfriends, or even their brothers in a couple of cases (I liked those girls for doing that), but guys were in the considerable minority, and we kept my plan's activities very low key when they were close enough to see or hear. Getting a ride in my car, and especially a lift in it to or from wherever the group date was to be, became a big deal (My Girls mostly went in Ava's car, to free up my car's seats). It became a status symbol or a measure of acceptance and success for the girl. So naturally none of the Target Girls got one of the valuable seats. They got test rides along with everybody else, just to make them envious, but otherwise they missed out. They needed to try harder. We had fun working on the Targets, inventing several ways to string them along. For example, if we met the Targets on a Thursday, we'd rave about how much fun we'd had Wednesday. When asked by a Target how come she hadn't been invited yesterday (usually more subtle than that, but that's what her fishing meant) one of us (usually Julia) would say, "It was for the core group only. Mark, his best friends, and the girls who're sexually involved. There was a lot of sex, and you're not part of that." Sometimes the Target would imply that she might possibly be persuaded into being sexual with Mark, to which Julia would laugh loudly, and say, "Yeah, you and a million other girls! Tell me something I don't know already, haha. He's got plenty of choice, but I don't think you've done anything to impress him yet. Walking around in a skimpy bikini isn't going to impress him." Skimpy bikinis were another thing that went extremely well. The Targets were girls who considered themselves to be the most gorgeous girls at school, so they didn't like to be shown up by My Girls. The Targets were quickly forced to obtain stunning bikinis of their own. That was another reason not many other boys were invited beyond the first few Target dates, as they made such fools of themselves that the girls didn't want them around while they were trying to impress me by wearing tiny bikinis, or by going topless, like My Girls did at the drop of a hat. Once the bikinis got scandalous, the girls stopped inviting their male friends. The few girls who were slow to adopt the new policy were pressured by the other girls. They all wanted to be able to flirt with me, so having other guys along was a hindrance - except for my teammates, who behaved very unusually for guys, as they seemed to not even notice that any of the girls had breasts, whether they were covered or not. My teammates certainly didn't hinder any of the Targets from flirting with me. My teammates managed to avoid giving the game away when all the flesh started coming out. They'd had three practice sessions by then, and Peter had been taken for a couple of spins, and then made to watch Alexis bouncing up and down on my cock while she told him that I was a far better lover than he was, which did a good job of knocking his silly emotions out of his head. At the beach that we had the first mass uncovering at, my teammates all had one of My Girls near them, to keep them from behaving like gormless dorks. After half an hour or so to get used to the sight of so much flesh, my teammates no longer needed close supervision and frequent surreptitious pokes to remind them to behave maturely. (If they were no longer "gormless dorks", would that make them "gormed dorks"? Somehow that sounds just as insulting.) Julia, and increasingly Carol as she gained confidence, also had a lot of fun teasing the Targets over our trip to Europe. They boasted shamelessly, "How wonderful Mark is to pay for his whole family and me [Julia] to fly to Europe. He's paying for EVERYTHING, including a side trip to go shopping in Paris! He's a very generous guy, for a multimillionaire. Most of them are stingy, but not Mark. Did you know he rented a private luxury jet and flew a bunch of us down to Rodeo Drive for a shopping trip?" The question was unnecessary, as pretty much every girl in Corvallis had heard about that trip by now (there truly wasn't any need for me to make my "I Love Carol" speech at school next year). The Targets had CERTAINLY heard about it, as it was one of the main things that'd motivated them into becoming Targets, although they didn't think about it in quite that way. ------- My dating life got busy: There were the Target Game's group dates themselves. There hadn't been many of them, but we were trying to maintain an average of two to three such dates per week. The interest I got from the other girls on them, which could've generated as many dates as I wanted. The pipeline scheme restarted when more groups of sixteen girls formed and put themselves forward, although there weren't as many such groups as there'd been originally. Groups 2A and 2B were selected and started the process. Groups 3A and 3B were chosen just before we went to England, but their first dates wouldn't be until after we returned. Pipeline Group 1A was still alive, although temporarily on hold, waiting for the two out-of-town girls' return. Carol's Cuties and Donna's Ducklings were giggly and eager (and giggly some more). Diana and Claire Norris were especially eager, my fingers confirmed. Last, but really first, My Girls had priority for my time. Especially Carol and Julia, to help build our three-way relationship. Ava too, as she needed cheering up as I learned that her parents were no longer able to hide the effects of their illnesses from her. Plus Pat deserved appreciation for helping with the Target Game, and it would have been rude to exclude Alexis, who was always a pleasure to be around anyway, and not just to be rude with. So I had quite a lot of fun in the three weeks before we went to Europe. Actually I had a TRUCKLOAD of fun! Julia's bedroom got a lot of action, although I notched up fewer new girls than you might imagine. I fell into the practice of categorizing non-core girls into three general groups: girls I didn't want anything to do with (the sizable majority, for all sorts of reasons), girls I'd like to get to know better (the minority), and quite a few that were okay to have meaningless sex with but weren't much good for anything else. Logically speaking there were also the countless girls who didn't want anything to do with me, but they're irrelevant. There's nothing wrong with meaningless sex, of course. It's one of my favorite types of sex, being right up there with meaningful sex, so I'd occasionally ask a girl if she wanted to go bed with me. That was a nervous, new experience for me the first couple of times I offered it, because before then Julia had pushed all the new girls into my bed for me. I wanted to be honest with them, so I'd usually say something like, "Just for sex, you understand. I'm not trying to start a lifelong relationship." A few girls reluctantly turned me down, presumably because they either didn't want sex or did want a lifelong relationship. Being turned down didn't worry me at all because there were plenty of other choices. Nor did I hold it against the girl, as I simply carried on doing what I had been previously doing with her, which was nothing. A couple new girls per week found themselves in Julia's room, having the best sex of their lives. Although I have nothing whatsoever against meaningless sex, I do have something against hurried sex, so most of those sessions were at least a couple of hours long. The girls had GREAT times, which made them devoted to me (that was a bit of a pain, requiring repeated, "Don't try to call me; I'll call you"-type statements). The stories about the sessions added to my reputation nicely. I enjoyed myself during those sessions - as you do - but only one of the girls was good enough in bed to justify an invitation to a second visit, and that had to wait until we got back from Europe. It surprised me how poor most girls are as lovers, being of the "Lay Back And Spread Their Legs" school of lovemaking (although the only "making" they were doing was "themselves available"). I could pick them up and move them into different positions, but they initiated very little themselves. They made the right noises at the right times, and that was about it. That was still good, but it wasn't nearly as good as being in bed with a girl who wanted to GIVE me fun, rather than just let me take it. My appreciation for Ava and Alexis increased. [Mind you, the passive ones were better than the occasional girl who was determined to prove that she was the best I'd ever have. I had a few of those over the entire summer. They were so busy overacting and showing off that the physiological processes involved in stimulating my arousal toward a climax never got a chance to develop properly; always being cut short while the girl moved into an even more athletically impressive position, or did something else distracting like having obviously fake orgasms.] The last three Target Game dates before our European trip were with a much reduced group of girls, the Targets and some others that we didn't mind seeing what was happening; partly because they were semi-Targets themselves, or they'd actually been brought into the plan and were delighted with the idea of the Target Bitches making fools of themselves. Those dates involved sex, as we had a pretty good idea of which outdoor locations gave us enough privacy by then, and we had enough girls to keep lookouts too, or at least to surround us so any stranger wouldn't be able to see through the crowd. Julia would have some sort of competition, which would ostensibly be fair, but I'd actually cheat to make sure the girl I wanted got picked, which was never a Target Girl. The first time I closed my eyes and played Rock, Paper, Scissors with all the girls, proximity giving me enough of an advantage to win our best-of-seven matches. For the second sexual date, the girls who wanted to enter the competition put their bikini tops into a bag, it was mixed up and I pulled one out blindfolded (using a sight blob to get the one I wanted). The third time I used NP to control random coin tosses (the girls choosing whether to be a Head or a Tail before each toss, the losers being eliminated). Once the fair winner was honestly chosen, I gave all the girls a "How Good I Am At Sex" demonstration. The winner and I would strip (Julia insisted that my cute butt would make the spectator girls swoon for me. It was hard for me to argue, because I was always facing the wrong way to see the effects). I'd go to work on the lucky winner's body, learning how to arouse it as I went. Since my last merge, I'm even better at that, partly because my proximity sense is more detailed, and because I'm getting experience of more and more girls, all of which I'm getting physiology lessons from about what works or doesn't work, and when. After I'd gotten the winning girl off two or three times with foreplay, someone would put a rubber on me, and I'd go to town fucking the girl. Fucking her over and over again, until she called "Enough." Or "Uncle", if that did it for her. The main reason for this exhibition was because Julia LOVED to show off my superiority over other guys. She loved rubbing the other girls' noses in that (although it was my nose that did the most rubbing). We also did it because: I rather enjoy fucking girls. It added to my reputation as a superb lover. The audience had no hesitation in saying I was better than any boyfriend they'd ever heard of, let alone had. I ALWAYS stopped the INSTANT the girl asked me to, which added to my reputation as a nice guy. It intimidated my soccer teammates, which would help them not get any ideas about trying to get closer to any of My Girls. It also sexed-up the Target Game's dates considerably, which was exactly the direction we wanted the Target Girls to go in. Alexis helped by openly fucking Peter on the second occasion, and by fucking Logan and Jason simultaneously on the third. Julia and Ava helped by taking Tristan out of sight for a fuck too. That's what they told everyone they were doing, but in reality the two girls 69'd each other while Tristan was on lookout, where "out" was the operative part of that word. Every time he started turning around to looked in, I saw it in the sight blob I had hovering over the scene to keep an eye on Tristan and to make sure no one else tried to sneak up for a look. I'd use NP to tap a warning on Julia's head. After she'd bawled Tristan out three times for barely starting to turn his head, he gave up for several minutes, trying only once more when he presumably thought the girls too involved to notice. No doubt he was impressed by Julia's powers of observation. He'd have been even more impressed if he'd seen where Julia's face was at the time. After Julia produced a very real scream, Ava gave Tristan a quick hand-job, and then they returned to the group with appropriate expressions on their faces; and not just expressions in the girls' cases. Carol helped sex-up the dates too, by kissing and fondling another girl or two. Bisexuality was something I wanted to encourage (there's a surprise!), so I appreciated Carol's help. I couldn't look at it while I was appreciating it, unfortunately, so sight blobs had to be used during the good parts. My very dark, wrap-around sunglasses were proving to be very useful. ------- Chapter 269: About Cuties and Ducklings, Especially Diana and Claire Norris Late-June to Early-July, 2005 I didn't screw any of the Cuties or Ducklings before we went to Europe, although I easily could have. I was really saving that until we had the privacy of the mansion. We did get each group to arrange a mass get together which I just coincidentally happened to be in the area of. I stopped to talk with my sister and her friends, and much flirting ensued. Our clothes remained on, although we did play a few fondling games when we could be sure that no one was looking. I told both groups, "I'm negotiating to buy a new house shortly. If I get the one I want, it'll actually have two houses on it, one for the parents, and one for me, Julia, Carol and also Ava when she wants to visit. We'll have plenty of privacy and we'll be able to do everything we want. You'll be one of the very first groups I'll invite." With the Ducklings, Donna added, "Yeah, and I'll have my horse too, so you can tell your parents you're coming over to play with that." Donna was looking at me more than the girls as she subtly - for Donna - made sure I hadn't forgotten about her horse. I did arrange two special dates with the two lovely, accessible Norris sisters. Both worked the same way: Diana and Claire rode their bikes to the Aquatic Center, locked them in the bike rack, walked to where I was waiting in my car, got into it, and we drove somewhere quiet. Amusingly, immediately after I'd bought my car, Julia had bought me two large picnic blankets and a packet of rubbers for it, so I was well equipped to take the Norris girls for a remote 'picnic', except that we had no food. Never mind, I'd find something to eat. The first time I had Ava with me, mostly to act as a lookout as I didn't want to get caught doing indecent things to someone as young as Claire (I wanted to do the indecent things; I just didn't want to get caught). Ava could also be a steadying influence if the girls were jittery. It turned out that the Norris girls weren't jittery at all; they were too busy being excited and eager. We had about three hours, less about half an hour for traveling back and forth, and we used all the rest of the time for having sex. That actually started during the traveling time, as I sat Diana in the front seat so I could feel her up while I was driving. Claire got the same treatment on the return trip, as I'm a strong believer in treating girls fairly. I treated myself fairly too, sharing the concentrate-on-driving duty evenly across my minds. I'd found a very good location while scouting for the Target Game. It was near the river, but recessed into the forest about a hundred yards (there's a great deal of forest in Oregon). It was a little, accessible hollow that I'd found by sending a sight blob around the area when I'd been scouting. Sight blobs make fantastic scouts as they can search an area thousands of times faster than searching on foot. I don't even have to worry about steering them around tree trunks. Sight blobs are SO useful! There was no path to my chosen spot so no one was likely to come our way, but it only took a few minutes to make our way through the trees to it because I'd scouted a route through the brambles and poison oak. Once inside the hollow, no one could see us from more than a few yards away, and even the sounds of our voices would be muffled. It was an ideal little love-nest, and even shaped like one. I started with Ava on lookout, and with me just kissing and fingering the girls under their clothes, but they took to it like highly enthusiastic ducks to water, so I quickly got carried away. I wanted full-on threesomes with these two girls, so they clearly had to learn to enjoy being bi. I'd planned to do that by sitting us in a triangle (Ava on watch initially, so not included), and encouraging three-way kisses and each of us having one hand naturally exploring the other two. Both sisters were so incredibly happy and eager that it only took a few minutes before I motioned for Ava to join in. I didn't give the sisters any chance to refuse Ava's joining us; I simply opened one arm to let Ava slot in, and then Ava and I started kissing the other girls and each other, our hands roaming all over everyone else's bodies. Neither Claire nor Diana looked like demurring. They were uncertain what to do, but they knew they wanted to do whatever I wanted them to do. It was all new to them, but they wouldn't have dreamed of saying "No" to me. Which, to be honest, was a large part of my attraction for them. Other girls may insist they'd do anything I wanted, but I knew there was a hook inside their bait. With Claire and Diana, there was no hook, and no strings attached either. They were overjoyed to give themselves to me, which worked for me. It worked so well that I soon decided that our clothes were in the way. I started stripping Claire, nodding to Ava to do the same to Diana. Both sisters cooperated fully and delightfully. It was obvious to me that they were both very conscious of their bodies, and were sure they weren't developed enough for me, so I showered them with praise about how beautiful and sexy they both were. Which wasn't hard to do, as they were. Diana was easily developed enough to make any boy happy, that requiring not much more than a handful of breast. Claire had only been developing for few months. She was probably past the nubbin stage, based on my highly uneducated opinion that her breasts looked more like small breasts than nubbins. She was certainly young, but it was her attitude that turned me on more than her body, and she had more than enough good attitude to make up for her body being so little developed yet. In any event, my compliments kept coming, so the girls quickly felt reassured. It was obvious I thought they were sexy, because I was thoroughly enjoying looking at, kissing and caressing their bodies. If there's one time a guy is ever sincere, it would be when he's showering appreciation onto a girl's naked body. I got them to undress me, which they thought was as good as Christmas and their birthdays combined. It also uncovered further proof that I considered them sexy. I asked Ava to undress herself and then to join back in. So we were soon all naked, in a huddle, and swapping a lot of kisses and caresses. We did some more warming up (actually, hotting up, as three girls pussies were very wet by now, and I was rock hard). Then Ava and I gave the girls lessons on the male body, getting them to explore all of mine. They loved rubbing their hands over my bizarrely impressive body. I quite liked it too, so that worked out well. That culminated in a practical lesson about how to suck my cock. Both girls were individually successful at making me cum, drinking the result in both cases. Actually I'd helped them with go-cum commands, because it's important to encourage new talent. They were pretty good though, mainly because I was so damned horny already. They didn't think much of the taste, but Ava and I assured them they'd get used to it quickly. I had no idea whether that was true - and NO intention of finding out - but it seemed like a good thing to say. I suspect I'm not the first guy to have ever used that line. We started doing three-on-ones, with all four of us taking turns being the "one". We did Ava first, to show Diana and Claire how it was done. Then it was Diana's turn, because Claire was the most outgoing, and had almost no hesitation touching her sister. Diana was older and more inhibited, although her inhibitions were being blown out of her today. After Diana had a wonderful orgasm, ably helped by an enthusiastic Claire, it was Claire's turn in the middle. Ava and I rolled Claire on her back and started on her, getting Diana to join in once she'd recovered enough. Diana was a little reluctant initially, but less so as Claire encouraged her. I helped Diana get into the spirit of it too, by placing one of my hands on her ass and using rubbing her pussy. The more Diana did to Claire, the more I did to Diana. The correlation soon became obvious to her, and that ended her reluctance. I spent some time on the receiving end too, making that more interesting by having Ava mount me, slowly so the girls could see everything happening. They were so wide-eyed at seeing my cock slide into Ava that I nearly laughed. Fortunately Ava was doing a good job of distracting me. After some up and down bouncing, I changed our position so I was fucking Ava doggy style, with both sisters lying underneath us, licking my cock and Ava's pussy while we were fucking. I gave Ava a full-on fucking, stopping my mini-go-softs just before Ava's orgasm so we both came at the same time. Then I got the girls to clean Ava's pussy and my cock. They happily carried out their instructions. Their next boyfriend after me was going to be EXTREMELY happy at how well trained they were. I got the two sisters to 69 each other, while I moved to the rear of the girl on top; Claire, as it happened. I pretended to doggy fuck her, running my cock forward and back over the front of her pussy. Claire asked with a VERY hopeful voice, "Are you going to fuck me now?" There was no doubt at all that she wanted me to, but I said, "Sadly not today. Although you are both so sexy it's almost impossible for me to resist..." "I want you to. I REALLY want you to be my first. PLEEZE?" "I will be your first, Claire, but not today. I'll explain why soon, but for now just enjoy what I'm doing, and see if you can make Diana cum again." "Okay." She lowered her head to get it back to work on her sister's pussy. I hadn't intended to do this much, so I hadn't come prepared with anything to wash my fingers with, so I only used NP on Claire's asshole. Julia and Carol had told me that they felt enough like fingers to make it acceptable, especially because I was pretty sure Claire hadn't felt the real things up there before. The new development didn't go uncommented upon. Claire removed her mouth from where it should have been, to say, "He's touching my asshole!" I said, "Not only touching. I'm also doing this." I pushed the small NP-fingertip against her asshole with increasing force, until it popped in. "Ohh!" I resumed my cock sliding, timing my NP-fingertip thrusts to have the same rhythm, distracting Claire by saying, "You've got a very sexy body, Claire. I'm enjoying being with you and Diana." "I've never heard of putting things in girls' bottoms before. I thought just homo men did that?" "EVERYONE does it," I reassured. "It feels good for the boy and girl, so I do it sometimes to my other lovers. Not as often as into their pussy, because that feels the best, but sometimes we like to do it. You'll get used to it. It's all part of having good sex, like everything else Ava and I are teaching you." Ava said, "I like it when Mark fingers or fucks me in my ass. Mark is VERY good at sex, so let him do whatever he wants." "I will. I've just never heard of it before for a girl." #8: "What does it feel like?" asked Diana. That was easy to answer. I said, "You'll find out for yourself in a few minutes, Diana." "Good. I want you to do everything to me." Just because it sounded good, I said, "I'll do everything I know you'll enjoy. Sex should be a lot of fun for BOTH people." "It is! It is! I'm having the BEST time! This is FANTASTIC. Thank you very, very much. We're so lucky that you like us..." "Shh, sweetie. More sex now while we can. We'll talk later. Let's see how quickly we can make Diana cum, Claire." "Okay Mark." Ava was working on Diana too, kissing her, sucking her nipples, and fingering her clit. Once we stopped talking, it didn't take long to get Diana off again. Then we rolled the girls over, and we repeated the same action. Diana also begged me to fuck her when she felt my cock sliding against her pussy. She got the same "We'll talk later" answer. I gave her the asshole NP-finger-fucking too, to which she said, "Ohh, that feels funny." After a couple more thrusts, Diana added, "I love you, Mark. You can do anything you want with me." "I love you too, Mark," from Claire, determined not to be outdone. "That's good girls." And it certainly was. I ran out of new things to show the girls, so we did some of my favorites again. Actually what I mostly did was get them off. I enjoyed going down on them and giving them orgasm after orgasm. I stopped fifteen minutes before we had to leave, in order to have some quality cuddling, winding down, and talking time. I lay on my back, with a naked sister under each arm. Life is very good these days. Claire and Diana thought so too. They'd retained their virginities, but their sexual experiences had been CONSIDERABLY broadened, and they'd loved every second of it. I had several things to talk about. Things like not running around at home telling everyone how much they loved me. To distract them from the present, and to get them thinking of the long term, I described 3B's hymen destroying plan, slightly modified to fit the current circumstances. I told them that if they still wanted to see me, then next time I'd bring them here, we'd bust Claire's hymen and let it heal while I was away in Europe. Just before I got back - which would definitely make me seem innocent if the parents ever find a reason to suspect me - Diana should do the splits at home, having her fake hymen-busting accident then. I suggested that we come back to this spot in a week or so, to give them time to calm down and think about their feelings for me, before they committed to busting their hymens. The delay was actually to give me time to find out whether they can keep the secret. If I get an irate phone call from their parents, I'd much rather it be only for foreplay than anything hymen destroying. They both insisted they didn't have to think about their feelings. They loved me already, and were willing to bust their hymens right now, if I wanted them to. I had to repeat why spreading them out over time was important, which boiled down to, "Your mother would kill you and kill me if she suspected anything. You have to tell your mother that you've had accidents, or the next time you go to the gynecologist your mother will hit the roof. It's far too suspicious for you both to have accidents at the same time, so we have to spread them out like I described. Don't you want to be able to see me lots of times over the next year or so? Because if you want that, you have to make sure your mother NEVER gets suspicious that you're having sex with anyone. Or to be suspicious about me even a little bit, or she'll forbid you coming to my home." There was more like that, and they eventually accepted it wasn't going to happen now. They certainly had no trouble grasping how bad it'd be for their mother to find out. The only other significant point I made was, "Sometimes the two of you are competitive with each other. If one of you says she loves me, the other repeats it with an even stronger voice, and other things like that. I want you to know that there is NO competition between the two of you. You are sisters, and being sisters is more important than any boyfriend. I will ALWAYS treat you equally. Claire's hymen will be busted first, and heal first, but I'm not going to have sex with her before Diana. When you're both ready, I'll have sex with both of you at the same time. On the drive up here, Diana was in the front seat, so Claire will have it on the way back. The next time we have a date, Claire will be in the front seat first, then Diana on the way back. -- "It makes no sense to me that you two compete, because for me both of you are together in my mind, and that's the way I want you. I would MUCH rather you said, 'We love you', than 'I love you'. Saying 'we' is much friendlier and more cooperative, and it makes me like you more. Being competitive makes me like you less, because competition is a way of fighting, and I don't want you to fight over me. If you do, I'll stop seeing both of you." "Oh no. Please don't do that!" "Just remember that I'm seeing BOTH of you. Another good reason for telling you not to be competitive is because I don't want you to argue with each other at home about anything to do with me. Maybe you'd get into an argument about who loves me the most, or who wants to have sex with me the most, or who should go first, or anything like that. I don't care about ANY of those things, because the two of you are always together in my mind. The danger is that someone might overhear your argument. If Mackenzie or your parents hear anything, you'll never be with me again. So I STRONGLY suggest that you don't have ANY arguments about me, okay?" They assured me they wouldn't. I had plenty of memories of Carol and Donna having childish arguments over something or other that had blown up and gone out of control. Not recently, so hopefully the similarly-aged Claire and Diana are old enough not to behave that way too, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. Hence the reminder, and my having my fingers crossed for the next week or so. We dressed and left the love-nest, stopping at the river to wet the girls' swimsuits, their hair, and dampen their towels. On the drive back I lightly played with Claire, just to keep her happy. Also to keep me happy too. She'd have plenty of time to calm down by the time they biked home from the Aquatic Center. I also suggested they not get carried away having sex with each other at home, now that they knew how much fun it was. Diana said, "I only want to do it with you, Mark..." "Yeah, you're the best," agreed Claire. I said, "Good. That's perfect then." As that'd minimize the chance of their being caught by anyone. I dropped Claire and Diana off where I'd picked them up from, around the corner from the Center so they wouldn't be seen getting into or out of my car. Before the 'date', Ava had assured me she was okay with my getting sexy with girls that young, but we'd gotten considerably more sexy than I'd planned, so I asked her about it as we drove away. She laughed at me, adding, "You're the boss, and it was fun. I'll come next time too, if you want." "Thanks. It's a couple of hours until your parents get home, so how about we go to Julia's bedroom so I can thank you properly?" "That would be good, but can we go to my bedroom instead? I'd like Mom and Dad to see me with you more often..." "Say no more! You're absolutely right." I ended up staying for dinner. Just me with Ava; no Julia or Carol this time, which was actually a good idea. We behaved like ordinary boyfriend and girlfriend, and her parents clearly enjoyed seeing it. Crossing my fingers must've worked, because there were no irate phone calls from the Norris parents saying, "Your son should be castrated for what he's done to our poor, innocent daughters." Claire and Diana were in frequent contact with Donna and Carol, and reported no parental or elder-sister suspicions. (We were building up the friendships with my sisters so the Norris girls had a reason to visit the mansion quite often, once we got it.) We had our second date ten days after the first, and this time Carol wanted to come instead of Ava. It was one thing to encourage Claire and Diana to have sister sex, but something entirely different for them to see Carol and me doing that. Even though I though the younger Norris girls were very nice, I didn't want to trust them with that secret. They might blurt it out accidentally, they might get pissed off with me for some reason, or their parents might get suspicious and grill it (among other things) out of them. Carol and I were already having a blast having a great deal of virginity-retaining sex together, so it was easy to imagine her and me getting carried away with the Norris's. Carol assured me she'd concentrate her misbehavior on Diana and Claire. Because of the way my minds work (especially #8's), I had to ask, "How come you're so eager to have sex with Diana and Claire? Have you got a thing about sisters, and maybe doing it with Donna?" 3B's Carol had been disinclined to do anything with Donna, other than a few little things like getting Donna to lick my cum off her chest, which had mostly been about getting Donna turned on to me. But this Carol was spreading her sexual net considerably wider than 3B's had, so maybe it included Donna. Carol answered, "Not Donna, no. I don't have those feelings for her. I like Diana, and I liked what Ava told me about how eager Diana and Claire are. It'll be the first time I'll be with someone who has less experience than me, and I'm looking forward to getting them to do whatever I want." "I can certainly understand that; it's quite a thrill. Okay, I'll take you. We'll make sure they know you're a lesbian and that you've still got your hymen. That's pretty good proof that we don't have sex." "Yeah, dammit. I can't wait until Mom gives in. No way do I want to wait until I'm eighteen until we can do it properly." "That'd be a bummer all right." Carol laughed at that, because 'bummer' was what we did a lot of. It was the closest we could come to making love properly. The Norris girls weren't surprised to see Carol when they ran up to the car, they jumped in, chatting about how excited they were to be with me again. I was quite excited myself. It's so much more fun to play with honest girls. The Target Girls - that I'd been spending a fair bit of time working on - are NEVER honest. Even the simplest issues get wrapped in their status and ego game playing. No way could they come out and say, "I like you, Mark. Let's have some no-strings-attached sex." Not because they had anything against the sex half of that statement, as they continually used sex as very deliberate bait, leverage and payment. It was the being honest and unselfish giving aspects they couldn't cope with. Most of the ride, Diana and Claire talked to Carol about Carol's sex-life. They'd had no idea that Carol was a lesbian, and were amazed by the stories Carol told them about things she'd done over the last few weeks. Carol's basic theme was, "Mark's so sexy, that the girls around him get very excited and turned on, so lots of sex happens. I love joining in with that. You're very lucky that he likes you so much." They agreed with everything Carol said. They're wonderful girls. At one point, Diana said, "It's going to be strange doing things with you, Carol." Carol's answer was wonderful (she'd been spending time listening to Julia work on other girls), "Mark's got hundreds of girls interested in him. They hang around him all the time, hoping to be his girlfriend. It'd be selfish of him to spend time with only one girl and ignore all the others. That's why he puts so much effort into making sure that all his best female friends get on very well together, including enjoying going on shopping trips to Rodeo Drive together, having sex together, and everything else. If you and Claire are good company for Mark, you'll end up having wonderful sex with other girls quite often." "His girlfriends were SO lucky to go to Rodeo Drive. I'd LOVE to go, but Mom would never let us do anything like that." "Moms can be big spoilsports, can't they?" "I'll say! Our mom's mad about everything to do with sex. She says it's wrong before marriage, but she doesn't know how wonderful Mark is." "He sure is. You're very lucky that he likes you so much." "We know! We can't believe he wants us. It's so wonderful..." They went on like that for the whole trip. Once we got to my little love-nest, Carol made the two girls stand facing each other a few feet apart, and to remain stationary while Carol and I took indecent liberties with their bodies. We spent about twenty minutes playing with them, slowly removing individual pieces of their clothing and continually tormenting them into becoming more and more aroused; all while not allowing them move a muscle the whole time. Carol ran it, and she was wonderfully strict. I'd never seen her like that before, and I enjoyed it a great deal. After twenty minutes, Carol told the girls, "Mark and I are going to play with your pussies until you cum. Whoever stays on her feet the longest will get to play with Mark next; whoever falls first will pair up with me. I know you want Mark, so try your hardest to outlast your sister." We'd been tormenting the girls before that, building their arousal, then moving to another part of their body or swapping to the other girl for a while. Neither of them had come close to having an orgasm, but they were very ready for one now. They were going to have trouble resisting. Carol and I went to work on them. They were standing close enough together than we could easily reach both of them at the same time or could lick one pussy then the other, so they both got heaps of stimulation. Within a couple of minutes they were both quivering. Carol was teasing them with, "DON'T CUM! The winner gets Mark next. Stay strong." While her hands were rubbing both their pussies. They did their best, but the game only lasted another couple of minutes. Diana was the first to lose control, hit by a massive orgasm that caused her to fall to the blanket, rolling around in spasms for several seconds. As soon as Diana started falling, Claire's strangled voice struggled to ask, "I win?" "Yes..." "AHHH!" as Claire let her orgasm go, falling to join her big sister on the blanket. Carol and I had to wait for a while, so we used the time to undress. I congratulated her on being so confident and doing so well. Carol's eyes were sparkling and she had a big smile on her face, so I wasn't the least surprised when she said, "I'm having a GREAT time. This is so much fun! Now I get to order Diana around while you play with Claire." "That works for me." It was also, I thought, what worked best for Carol. I suspected that she'd deliberately tried harder to make Diana cum first, because Carol wanted to play sexual power-games with her classmate. "I won?" Claire asked me again, when she'd recovered enough to find her voice. "Yes indeed. Well done, my little darling. What would you like to do with me for your prize?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Claire instantly declared, "I want to have sex with you!" "Sorry, sweetie, but we're going to stick to my hymen plan. Choose something else?" "I don't know. I don't know much about sex stuff. Can you choose for me?" #6: I was very horny by now, so I decided to reward her by letting her give me a blowjob. Rather than asking for that directly, as I know girls like a bit of touchy-feely romance, I told Claire, "How about you rub your hands all over my body as much as you want, and end up by seeing if you can make me cum with your hands and mouth like you did so well at last time." "Neat!" as she grabbed for my cock, and went to town on it. #6: #1: #4: Meanwhile Carol had lain down and had ordered Diana to get her face into Carol's pussy. Carol was giving highly detailed and explicit instructions, which Diana was doing her embarrassed best to follow. Everyone was having a great time. I can't add "especially Carol and me," because Claire and Diana were blown away. If anything, they were probably enjoying themselves the most. It's nice to be able to bring so much pleasure to others. It's quite nice to bring it to myself too. I gave Claire lots of encouragement (you definitely want to encourage girls to give you good blowjobs). Carol quickly picked up on that, and started encouraging and praising Diana too. Both girls were very eager to please and responded well to encouragement. At times like this, when my active participation wasn't needed, I'd shut my eyes for a few seconds to send a sight blob around the area. There was never anyone, but I kept doing it frequently to avoid a repeat of the stupid incident that'd happened on our first scouting trip. The sight blob was also useful for getting a very close look at what Diana was doing to Carol. It was sexier to watch that than look down at Claire, so I just lay there with my eyes shut, watching Diana going down on Carol while I enjoyed the sensations Claire was giving me. Life is full of simple pleasures. Claire was doing me pretty well. With a few extra "go faster's" she soon had my balls tingling (she's a lovely girl). I gave her some heartfelt effusive praise, told her to go even faster, and to "get ready to swallow, because you're doing such a fantastic job." Claire had me about 90% of the way there, but she was a bit awkward still, so rather than risk it dragging on unsuccessfully I warned her, "I'm about to cum!" then I issued the appropriate command. She kept my cock in her mouth for all my spurts, not letting a drop out, which pretty much destroyed my "buckets" claim. She waited a couple of seconds to make sure there'd be no more twitches, swallowed, then smiled up at me happily. "You're VERY good at that," I praised her. "That was wonderful." "Am I really?" "Absolutely. You made me cum, and that's what it's all about." "It took me a long time though." "Every second of which I enjoyed, so why would doing it faster be better? That was great. You're very good at following my directions, and that makes you a very good lover." Carol was still using Diana, so I added to Claire, "Now you roll over, so I can return the favor." "You don't have to do that. I like to do things for you." "I like to make my lovers happy, Claire, and I want to do that for you." "Am I really your lover?" "Let me prove it to you." I rolled her onto her back and dived between her legs. Pretty soon she wasn't capable of asking any more silly questions. Carol was enjoying her tongue- and mind-games with Diana. After Diana had gotten Carol off a couple of times, Carol lay her compliant victim on her back, then mounted her in something close to the missionary position, so Carol could fuck their pussies and clits against each other. That was a new experience for Diana, as Ava hadn't gotten around to it last time, and one that soon met with her LOUD approval. I checked the area with another sight blob. After Diana climaxed, Carol lay beside her, hugging and whispering to her. I could tell from Diana's blushes and expressions that whatever Carol was saying was very interesting. [It was too, especially for my soccer teammates. I asked Carol about it later, and it's described below.] Carol's and Diana's fucking style gave me the idea of doing something similar to Claire. I lay on my back, with my cock flat on my belly. I got Claire to climb on me cowboy style, and to slide herself back and forth on my cock's underside, although it was topmost now, while I played with her breasts. She loved it, especially when I got her to lean forward to put her clit into better contact. It also allowed us to exchange kisses, which was something that really lit her fuse, as girls aren't able to keep sex and romance separate the way guys can - so much for their claim to be good at multitasking - so Claire got very mushy and turned on by the kisses. The position was great for stimulating her, but merely pleasant for me. The thing that I enjoyed the most was feeling how much pussy juice she was leaking. Because Claire's not very developed yet, I enjoyed feeling how fully functional her pussy was. It made me more comfortable about her youth. Because of the kissing, after Claire got herself to climax against my cock, she predictably collapsed forward into a tight hug with me, gushing how much she loved me, how wonderful I was to her, etc. I would've felt horrendously uncomfortable a few months ago, but I've gotten used to girls declaring their love after they orgasm, so it's only mildly uncomfortable now. There's obviously some sort of evolved connection in female brains that causes so many of them feel compelled to make that declaration after they cum. I just held her in my arms saying, "There, there." When Claire had her breath and wits back, I told her, "I like you very much too, Claire. You're a very good girl, with a lovely personality and great attitude. I'm very glad we know each other." "Don't you..." I silenced her with a kiss. Then I said, "Shh, sweetie. Good relationships take time. Don't spoil our friendship by trying to rush too fast." #8: #1: Diana had seen the way Claire had slid herself back and forth on my cock, and Diana wanted to do it too, so that was the next thing I did. Mid-cowboy, I could see Diana studying the situation, and by the expression on her face, she was thinking that with just a little 'accident', she might be able to get my cock into her. Proximity confirmed that, as she was thinking about the inside of her pussy, imagining my cock sliding up into her abdomen. So I repeated almost the same words, "Diana, sweetie, I know what you're thinking of, and it's too soon for that. Don't spoil things by trying to go too fast. We'll do it after I get back from Europe, okay?" "I was thinking it might slip inside; accidentally like." "I know you were planning how to make that accident happen. The most important reason why I like you and Claire is because you're so open and honest. Please don't change that, as it'd damage our friendship very badly. There's no way you can trick me about anything to do with sex, sweetie; I know FAR more about it than you do." "I'm sorry. I'll be good." #7: "Good girl. Lean forward so I can give you a kiss." I helped by pulling forward on her nipples, as my hands happened to be in the area. After Diana had climaxed, had professed her love of me, and had recovered from the physical and emotional intensity of it all, I said, "I think it's time for Claire to lose her hymen. So it'll have time to settle down before we leave." By "settle down" I really meant "stop bleeding", but I don't like to even think about that, let alone say it out loud. "Oh boy!" exclaimed Claire, visibly excited about the huge leap into womanhood she was about to take, probably while lying on her back. "Are you sure you want to do this Claire?" I felt I had to ask, even though the answer was obvious. "God YES! I can't wait until we're having sex. I've been dreaming about having sex with you..." "Me too!" insisted Diana. "I want it so much I can feel the ache in me..." Before they could get too competitive over who wanted me to take advantage of them the most, I interrupted with, "Who do you want to do it Claire: me, Carol or Diana?" "You! I want you; you're the one I love. Umm, instead of using your finger, can you PLEASE do it for real?" (The previous date we'd discussed my doing the deed with a finger.) "You mean with my cock?" "Please. I REALLY want you to take it properly. It means a lot to me." Diana was nodding her head in eager agreement, clearly wanting to lose hers the same way. I ended up caving in. I knew it was emotionally important to girls, and doing it with a finger would hardly create a memory they'd be proud of for the rest of their lives. I did make one thing clear though, "You know that one of the strongest reasons why I don't want to date Mackenzie is because she was jealous and competitive about you two liking me. I STRONGLY dislike sisters being competitive with each other, and I very much appreciate that you can share so well. But I will lose a great deal of interest in you if I ever hear you boasting that you had sex with me before Diana did. I'm NOT going to have real sex with you now; I'm just going to do the bare minimum to do the job. It won't count as making love, okay?" Even if I busted their hymens by finger, there'd still be one of them that I'd end up putting my cock into first, so I couldn't really avoid this issue. It's a pity I didn't have two cocks. [[And it's just as well I didn't wish for that too strongly, or my body might've grown another one.]] I was also tempted to flip a coin to choose which girl to do now, except that it suited our plan best if Claire went first. It was more believable that she'd had the hymen-busting accident than Diana, as Claire was easily the more athletically active of the two. After the expected reassurances, we got down to business. I'd come fully prepared, with everything from a couple of old towels, wet wipes, a rubber to use over my hymen busting finger (now cock), and even a packet of panty liners as the result of a suggestion from Carol, in case the bleeding continued for a while. I thank God that I'm a guy. We lay Claire down, Diana and Carol provided considerable distraction at the north end while I played around at the south end for a while, getting Claire turned on and more lubricated. And then I quickly did the deed, before she had much chance to tense up. It was rather anticlimactic, so to speak. I broke through, holding that position for Claire to recover, during the waiting period she told me she loved me, thanked me, etc. She recovered quickly, so after a minute of mushy gushing, I was free to move again. I gave her a couple of slow ins and outs, to make sure her hymen was well and truly taken care of, and then I withdrew and started cleaning up. Carol decided my "slow ins and outs" might not have been sufficient, and bent down to inspect the situation closely, finding it necessary to spend over a minute finishing the job with her finger, not even using the rubber I'd bought. Yeech! I couldn't even look at her doing it, so I don't know how she could. [Carol explained to me later that busting a hymen the way I did only does a partial job because the missionary position doesn't destroy that part of the hymen toward the rear (literally). Every gynecologist would recognize the pattern of hymen tearing as consistent with sex. Julia had googled it and shown the article, including its before and after pictures, to Carol. It's good to have girlfriends who look after my interests so well, although I'd prefer they not tell me about the gory details.] The mushiness was apparently over with, because Claire announced, "That was EASY! I don't know what all the fuss was about. I could have sex right now. We can do it now, can't we Mark? We don't have to wait all those weeks." "We don't have to, but we are. I'm not going to favor one of you over the other, so you'll have to wait until you're both ready." "But that's AGES away!" "Yes it is, and you should feel ashamed of yourself for trying to get several weeks ahead of your sister." That must've been the right approach, because it killed Claire's attempt to change my plan. We spent the last fifteen minutes lying around talking. I'd planned that as "settling down" time, but Claire barely bled at all. There were still some things to talk about because I wouldn't get a chance to talk with them again before we went on vacation, and they were due to pull the scam a few days before I got back. I checked that they still thought they were up to lying to their mother. Were they ever! Now they'd had a taste of sex, they were champing at the bit to get more of it. They had zero compunction about lying to their mother, especially as she'd clearly been lying to them about how evil sex was. #2: Carol ordered Diana to sit in the back with her for the trip home, and the two of them made out most of the way. Diana was quite flustered by the time we arrived at the drop-off point, especially after Carol told her, "I'll try to arrange another time with you before we go to see Mom's family. You, me, Ava and maybe a few other girls. You've got a lot to learn before you'll be good enough for Mark." "Oh. Umm, will Mark be there?" "No. You're my lover now as well as Mark's. After we've finished having sex we can talk about all the work I want you to do on the other Cuties while I'm away, to help get them ready for Mark. You want to make Mark happy and like you, don't you?" "Oh yes!" #3: When Carol and I were driving away, I asked her, "You were very commanding over Diana. That's not like you normally?" "I had an idea after I saw how cooperative she was. I told Diana she was now your AND my lover, that I'd be having sex with her again, and that she and I would be seducing all the Cuties and Ducklings for you, including teaching them how to have sex with girls the way you like. I told her that Julia was your number one girlfriend because of how unselfishly sharing she was, but Julia was too old to deal with the Cuties and Ducklings, so Diana and I are going to do that for you. That'd make her very popular with you, and she'll be having more sex than she ever dreamed of. You don't do enough with the Cuties and Ducklings. It's such a waste because they're desperately eager to spend time with you. You don't mind if I play sex-games with them the way you are with the Target Girls, do you?" #2: #6: "Ahh, so that's what you were whispering to Diana about. I don't mind for myself, but I'm a bit worried that a lot of those girls are in your classes. If something goes wrong and they get angry with you, you could have a very unpleasant time at school." "Don't worry, I've learned from you. I'm going to trick them into offering sex the way you're doing with the Target Girls. That's why I want Diana's help, so they'll see Diana being sexy with me and getting special attention from you. It'll be easy to get them to think about coming on to me as a way of getting your attention. If I turn the Cuties and Ducklings into sex groups, you'll only have to snap your fingers and they'll jump into bed with you. There won't be any of the immature silliness that puts you off so much." "I'm a little confused about something. Are you doing this so you can have sex with them, or so I can?" "You, of course. I'm very happy just being with you, Julia and Ava. If I never have any more lovers, I'd be perfectly content. Sex with anyone else doesn't mean anything. Julia gets girls for you, and I want to do that too. I'm enjoying the Target Game, and I know I'll enjoy manipulating the Cuties and Ducklings. Julia's right about people being so easy to trick into doing what you want them to do, especially with you as bait. It's a lot of fun." #8: #2: "I don't need you to find more girls for me to have sex with, Carol. There are already too many of them for me. But if you'll enjoy yourself, then you can do whatever you want with them." "Thanks. But there's no such thing as 'too many', Mark. That just means you can pick the best ones. I know what you like to do in bed, and you can show Diana. Then she and I can try the other girls and tell you which ones you'll enjoy the most." "That's wonderfully logical, but I don't know that how good they are with you and Diana will translate to how good they are with me. Having sex with girls is very different than with guys." "I still think I can do a good job for you, but if you want you could get your soccer team to try them out for you." #2: #3: #2: "That's an interesting idea. What exactly did you mean?" "I don't know. You implied that only guys could judge girls for you, so I suggested guys. I don't think you're right about that, by the way. You, Julia and I all think Ava is great in bed. It's about attitude, not plumbing, haha." "I think you're right. I spoke thoughtlessly when I dismissed your and Diana finding the best girls for me. Sorry about that. I'm kind of glad I did reject it though, because your idea about using my team is interesting. I want to find ways to get guys on my side, and providing them with a succession of free fucks would do that pretty well." "I don't think it'll be that good, because not many girls will want to have sex with other guys to get to you. Look at all the work you're having to do to trick the Target Girls into it." "You're partly right, but the Target Game is mostly about the fun of tricking them, rather than just for sex. If the Targets volunteered up front to have sex with my friends, that'd be no fun. -- "The idea I had was to copy the pipeline system. The pipeline is to find girls I enjoy dating. We have practice dates, and how good the girls are at dating determines whether to eliminate or keep them. We could rename the existing pipeline the 'Dating Pipeline', and start up a new one called the 'Sex Pipeline'. The girls who volunteer for it would have sex with the guys that I'd choose to be my helpers. They'd rate the girls, and the girls that got high enough ratings would be guaranteed a sex session with me. I'd have to make sure the guys knew what I liked, but I could compare their scores for the girls with my scores for them, and the worst correlating guy would be sacked from the job. That'd HUGELY encourage them to rate according to my tastes. -- "Girls can join either or both pipelines, or none; it's totally up to them. I don't think many would sign up for the sex one, but some might, if they were desperate or greedy enough. Or maybe girls that like having sex and don't make a big deal about it, like Alexis. Girls that got carded out of the Dating Pipeline might try the Sex one too." "Boy, that's CLEVER!" praised Carol. "I know some of the Cuties would be seriously tempted to try that route, if that was the only way to get close to you." "And perhaps some of the Ducklings too. If we create that pipeline, we'd better put an age restriction on it. I certainly don't want middle-school girls in it." "Some of the girls would lie, and your teammates aren't going to try too hard to find out exactly how old a pretty 14-year old is." "True. I'm not going to do anything about it before we go to Europe, and maybe not even before school restarts, so let's think about it for a while. It'll be interesting to get Julia's opinion too. I somehow think that I don't need to ask my teammates' opinions, haha." "You'd better not mention it until Mom agrees to our wedding either. She wouldn't like it." "VERY good point! That's FAR more important." We'd arrived at Julia's house now, so we stopped the conversation while I took Carol upstairs to give her some serious appreciation for her help with Claire and Diana. It's nice that My Girls do so much for me, because expressing appreciation is a great deal of fun. It's also nice that Mom and Dad have to go to work every day, as it stops them knowing what we do during the day. I thought about the Sex Pipeline idea for a while, and the next time Carol and I were alone with Julia, I described it to her. I added, "I've thought about some of the pros and cons for it. Obviously there'd have to be a beauty standard, but the guys are free to reject any girl they don't want to have sex with, so she'd get a zero score..." Julia corrected, "Don't make it zero, make it maybe four out of ten. If a girl gets rejected by one of your friends but good scores from the others she could still qualify." "Good point. Math proves itself useful, yet again, haha. I was thinking about the pros. Whichever guys I give this job to are going to be hugely in my debt. If I wasn't rich, I could sell places on that team for a lot of money..." Julia interrupted, "If you weren't rich, there wouldn't be many girls willing to screw their way into your bed." "Yeah, I was going to say that too. You were right about how much difference being rich makes to a lot of girls. My main point is that I think the biggest benefit of the Sex Pipeline is that the guys are going to be seriously thankful. If I had a system of firing the worst correlating guy every month, and replacing him with someone new, even guys who aren't on the team are going to be VERY nice to me." Carol giggled at the thought of it, adding, "You'll never have to lift a finger again. They'll be falling all over themselves to suck up to you." "Yeah. Until the last month of school anyway. But until then it should make most of the guys very careful about pissing me off. It'd be a much better way to go than my breaking their arms every time any of them attacked me. The police are going to get upset if I keep doing that next year. -- "Other than keeping the guys on their best behaviors toward me, the next major benefit is good sex for me. It'll be meaningless sex, so it'll be ideal for whenever I get the urge and my favorite girls are unavailable for any reason. One thing I've learned from the Dating Pipelines is that it's a pain be bound to scheduled dates. So I'd do the Sex dates in a different way. I'd have a list of all the girls currently waiting for their prize, and when I want one, I'll call the girl who had the highest score. If she couldn't make it, I'd just call the next girl, etc. Any that couldn't make it would lose half a point say, which might drop them below the cut-off level, so they'd never be called again." "Good idea. You can do more than just get sex from the girls too. Use them for whatever else you want," suggested Julia, betraying her gender. "If you had to drive to Portland for some reason but we couldn't go with you, it'd be boring to go by yourself, so call the next girl on your list, tell her what you want, and give her the choice of joining you. Some of them may prefer something like that to sex, or you could do both. Most of them will just want to spend time with you, so it won't matter what you do with them, just that they get some one-on-one time. And it'd be good for you, because it'd be handy to have a group of girls you can use for whatever reasons you want." "I thought most of them would enter the Sex Pipeline because they wanted sex with me?" "Some maybe, especially if they thought they could win you over with how good they are at it, but most of them would consider sex the price of being with you rather than the prize. They'd be happy to spend their time talking to you. It is the SEX Pipeline, so you should offer sex and tell them you want sex, but if you wanted them for something else, that would likely be fine with most of them." #5: #7: "That's a good idea, Julia. I have noticed that - on RARE occasions - girls do have uses beyond the sexual." -- After Julia and Carol finished punishing me, I continued, "Well-behaved boys and plentiful meaningless sex were the two advantages I thought of. Plus what Julia said, about the girls being potentially useful in all the myriad of other ways girls are useful. The main disadvantages were first one that Carol pointed out, that Mom would be very unimpressed, and second that we'd look like complete idiots if we set this up, publicized it, and only one or two skanks wanted to try it." "I wouldn't worry too much about the number of entries. We wouldn't start it until we'd asked around to find out if enough girls would be interested, and even then we'd start it very informally to see if it works. That way its failure wouldn't do any harm. It'd be best to do that after school starts. People will see your car, you should have your mansion by then, I'll make sure you have very high quality clothes to wear to school every day, and I'm sure I'll think of other ways of emphasizing your importance." "Okay. We'll shelve it until I have suitable clothes." ------- Chapter 270: About Two More Girls: Savannah and Abigale Late-June to Early-July, 2005 Of the Target Girls, Savannah was a somewhat special case as she'd been the one that'd spurred me to start the Target Game, was the one that I had the easiest access to, and some relationship momentum with, so I had some extra plans for her. Soon after the Aquatic Center visit, and before the first Target Game date a few days later, I had a talk with Carol about what I wanted to do with Savannah. Carol laughed and said she'd help. She also expressed a fair amount of concern about her ability to fool Savannah. Because I've been following topic threads recently, rather than keeping to a strict chronology, you know that Carol did fine. Other than Carol's forming the Cuties which had been friendship-based rather than involving manipulation, and when I thrust Savannah on Carol at the Aquatic Center when Carol hadn't had time to worry about it, Carol hadn't had much experience at playing mind-games on people. Nor had this Carol seen Julia in action much yet, so Carol felt inexperienced and unsure. She was better than her low opinion of her skill though, as proved by how well she'd done planting the seeds of her imminent lesbianism at the Aquatic Center. I gave her plenty of reassurance, and coached her on the simple role I had for her. I think all girls are born tricky, so I wasn't at all surprised when Carol easily handled the job. During the first Target Game date, Savannah tried to work her magic on me. As soon as she started, I exclaimed, "Savannah! Oh yes, there was something I meant to do about you. What was it?" Savannah looked puzzled, having no idea what I was talking about. I acted puzzled for a few seconds, then suddenly exclaimed, "Ahh, I remember now!" I turned and called, "CAROL." When Carol arrived, I asked her, "Remember that at the Aquatic Center I asked you to test Savannah's humility?" "Yes, I remember." "I forgot to ask you what you thought about it?" "You want me to tell you in front of her?" "If she's humble, she'll easily be able to handle the praise. If she's not humble, it'd be good for her to hear your criticism." "You're very smart about people, Mark! I'm sure you know already, but Savannah ISN'T humble. When I asked her to do little things she had to swallow her anger, because she considered them beneath her. She must like you a great deal, to have swallowed so much anger, but a humble person wouldn't have felt the anger in the first place." I was about to ask Savannah what she thought, but she jumped in before I had a chance, "I did EVERYTHING Carol asked me to do! I ran back and forth to the store, rubbed lotion on her back, carried your bags, and lots of..." "RELAX Savannah! You're underestimating me again. First, I know that Carol made several mistakes..." "I did?" asked Carol, as called for by my zigzaggy script. "Sure. For instance, that Savannah swallowed her anger wasn't because she likes me so much, but because she has ambitious hopes for herself. Your errors don't matter. You called it as you saw it, which is exactly what I wanted you to do. I understand the way you think well enough that what you said tells me what you saw, and I can form my own opinions from that. It's the same with Savannah. When she speaks, I understand what she's saying, but more importantly I understand the real motivation behind it. -- "You need to know two things, Savannah: your games don't work on me, and you could become a person I'd like to have as a special friend. You're only wasting my time the way you are now, so I guess it depends on how much you want to be a big part of my life. My life is going to contain all sorts of amazing things. I've already got powerful people doing things for me, like getting me my license when I was fourteen. How many teenage boys rent private jets to fly his friends to Rodeo Drive for shopping trips? And wait till you see the new $3 million house I'm buying! Are you willing to do what it takes to have a life full of power and money?" #3: #1: "Like what?" Savannah asked suspiciously. "Haha. It's so funny seeing the suspicion on your face. You can't honestly suspect that I could be bothered trying to trick you into anything sexual! I've got a fantastic sex-life already, so I don't need to trick you into anything. I'm happy to admit that you've got a sexy body, and that if you had the right sexual attitude you'd be great fun in bed. I'm also positive that if we went to bed, it'd be you that got the most out of it. I'm VERY good at sex. I'd rock your world far beyond anything you've ever experienced before. -- "Your suspicions are needless. I have no intention of having you in my bed until I'm convinced that you've got the right attitude, and especially the right sexual attitude. Sex is fantastic when the participants are wholly motivated with how much pleasure they can give, rather than being wrapped up in themselves. I don't know where my life is going to take me - Rodeo Drive a month or so ago, London and Paris soon, and who knows where after that - but if you want to have a front row seat next to me, you're going to have to stop being so suspicious, and start proving to me that you've got the attitudes that I look for." I didn't actually promise her a "front row seat next to me"; I just said what she had to do if she wanted one. Maybe somewhat deceptive (okay, definitely deceptive), but those were the rules she brought to the game. I was jiggling my bait (money), just like she was jiggling her bait (sex). She'd had a great deal of practice jiggling her bait, while I was very new at bait jiggling, but I had the most power because Savannah was far greedier for my bait than I was for hers. If I never had sex with Savannah, I wouldn't be too worried about it. But if Savannah saw my money receding out of her reach, she'd probably cry with frustration. That disparity made a HUGE difference, giving me a chance to actually succeed at this. She asked me, "What attitudes?" "Like I said before, some humility and being more giving sexually, rather than treating sex like it's bait you can use to control people. Between people who are friends, sex is fun and a gift, not a means of manipulation. Can you be more humble and sexually giving, or don't you want to have a big part of my life?" "What do you mean 'sexually giving'? Didn't you just say you didn't want to have sex with me?" "I said I don't want to have sex with you UNTIL you have the right attitude. If you get that attitude, I'll be having more sex with you than you dreamed your body could handle. When I say I want you to be 'sexually giving' I'm not talking about the physical act. I'm sure you can perform the physical act of sex without any problem. It's the emotional issue that I'm talking about. You really are too focused on sex; it's not nearly as important as you think it is. -- "Anyway, we've talked too long already because there are so many others here that I should spend time talking to. I'm far too busy to spend time with you to measure your improving attitude, so if you want a big part of my life we'd have to get someone else to do that for me. Not a guy obviously, because you won't be able to stop thinking he's after sex." I pretended to suddenly have an idea, "Ahh!" (that's me having the idea). I turned to Carol, "Carol, seeing as how you've already started measuring Savannah at the Aquatic Center, do you mind if I ask you to keep doing that please?" Carol answered, "I'll do anything you want. You're my favorite brother." "Speaking as your sole brother, I thank you for your compliment. Savannah has the potential to be a very important person in my life, so this is important. Before she can join me, she needs to convince you that she can be more humble, and that she can treat sex as a giving, generous activity rather than as a way of manipulating people. That's important too, because I would like to have a great deal of sex with her once she has the right attitude." I was emphasizing that, because it was Savannah's number one weapon (her only weapon, actually). She'd feel much more secure and confident in her ability to manipulate me if she knew we were going to be sexual, especially as it seemed as I was already half under her sexual spell. "I understand," agreed Carol. Adding, "Savannah hasn't said she wants to do this yet?" We both looked at Savannah, waiting for her answer. "I'm not sure what you're talking about? What will you want me to do?" I answered, "The short answer is whatever Carol asks you to do. I'm aware that sounds scary, but remember that Carol is a sweet girl and she knows you could easily become an important person in my life, so she's not going to mistreat you. A better way of thinking about it is that Carol will be HELPING you get ready to be my girlfriend." "Why can't we just start dating, like couples normally do?" "Because as you are right now, you aren't the sort of girl that I want to date. I know you have the potential to be very much more suitable for me than you are now, but you aren't that person yet. If I started dating you now, you'd never make the effort to change, plus I wouldn't enjoy your company. If you let Carol help you for a while, you'll soon be a significant part of my life." "But what will Carol be making me do?" "Whatever she thinks is best. You're a VERY suspicious person, Savannah. No wonder you're so selfish. You don't trust anyone, do you? How can you POSSIBLY mistrust Carol? She's got no reason whatsoever to mistreat you in any way, and she knows you could be important to me, so she's going to be NICE to you, for goodness sake. I'm tired of wasting time going around in circles with you. Do what Carol says, or don't do what Carol says. It's your choice. I'm going for a swim, bye." I left Savannah asking Carol questions. Carol didn't take that for long, soon joining me in the water. We couldn't talk, because I was busy playing "Toss the Girl". With 120 pounds of boost-assist, I was SERIOUSLY good at throwing girls into the air. Quite a few of the girls here hadn't been with us at the Aquatic Center, so I was showing off for their benefit, which was really for my four teammates' benefit, which would eventually be for my benefit too, so everyone was benefiting. That's the sort of wonderful guy I am. Plus I got to feel lots of pretty girls' asses too. Back at the Aquatic Center, I'd gotten Carol to test Savannah's humility. I'd gotten smarter now, and had worked sexual attitude into the issue, giving Carol the opening she needed to do sexual things with Savannah. Carol started very slow and easy, as I'd told Carol to take her time because we had all summer. Savannah was difficult to work with. She strongly disliked being made to do tasks that were beneath her, and unsurprisingly, most activities were located south of the line of Savannah's over-inflated dignity. She also balked at most sexual activity too. She'd rub suntan lotion onto Carol's back, but made a fuss about rubbing it on her front. Carol soon discovered a good response at such times, "Fine. I'll do it myself. Go back to your towel and don't bother me again." Being sent away obviously wasn't doing anything to get Savannah closer to me, so she'd swallow her complaints and get on with whatever Carol had asked for in the first place. Carol didn't make much progress with Savannah initially. That didn't really matter, as it wasn't inconveniencing Carol much; taking only a few minutes a couple of times per date. Amusingly, it became much easier when I jiggled Savannah's bait (sex), rather than mine (money). Savannah was blown away by how good I was when I demonstrated my sexual prowess on the lucky winner of the Rock, Paper, Scissors game during the first of the three very sexually explicit Target Game dates. I gave that girl half a dozen orgasms in about twenty five minutes (I did describe her as the "lucky winner"), and I clearly could've kept giving them to her for much longer, something that Ava, Pat, Alexis and Julia all confirmed, saying that I often screwed them nonstop for four or five hours, giving all of them as many orgasms as they could handle. Savannah WANTED that! She deserved the best, and she'd just seen - right in front of her eyes - that I was absolutely the best! Or maybe her sudden surge in motivation was caused by the sight of my cute butt repeatedly clenching. Nah, on second thought it was more likely because all the other girls had seen that I was the best, so Savannah's ego wanted me. Following that revelation, Savannah decided to be totally cooperative with Carol. It was clearly an act, but that was fine because Carol and I were acting too. Savannah was happy to spread Carol's towel, dry her when she came out of the water, give her a pedicure, and several other minor tasks; all the way up to sitting between Carol's legs, leaning back on Carol, and allowing Carol to take prolonged, open liberties. Which I encouraged. Not at the time they were doing them, because that would appear as if I was interested in sex, but sometime later I'd approach Savannah and give her very big smile and hearty congratulations for doing so well. "Carol's been telling me very good things about your progress, Savannah. Keep it up." Naturally Savannah wanted to start dating me immediately, but my answer was, "Like I told you initially, that'll be when Carol tells me she's convinced you have the right attitudes. So far she's just told me that you've suddenly started making very good progress. It's a pity you didn't start earlier, because I would've gotten Julia and Carol to help me buy you some very special dresses from Paris, but it's too early in our relationship for me to do that this trip and we're leaving in a few days. Maybe next time. Julia and Carol have said they'd like to go to Milan on the next trip, so maybe we could get you some things from there. Or maybe you could come with us. I'll wait and see what Carol thinks of your attitude." Carol subsequent reports on Savannah were about her having a much-improved attitude. I made sure to have several laughter-filled discussions with Carol about how silly Savannah was. I was very pleased to see Carol's attitude. I remembered how very nervous 3B's Carol had been the first couple of times she'd been invited to meet high-school girls with Julia and me [this Carol had been nervous too but that'd been while I was in the hospital in Seattle so I hadn't seen it], so a self-possessed girl like Savannah could've been very intimidating. It was a good indication of Carol's progress that she didn't find Savannah the least bit intimidating; Carol's opinion of Savannah was pretty much the opposite of Savannah's opinion of Savannah. I should also mention that Savannah tried to invite me to dinner at her place one evening, as I'd expected. It was easily turned down with, "I will accept, but only for when Carol is convinced that you're the right sort of girl for me. Hopefully that'll be soon, especially because how good you are at putting on dinners might affect your chances of living with me in one of my mansions." I doubted that cooking was one of Savannah's few skills, but my soccer team would be happy to order pizza while waiting for their turn to screw Savannah. ^ Back to the lucky winner of the Target date's Rock, Paper, Scissors game. As it turned out, by my deliberate intent, that'd been Abigale. She was the girl who'd helped me shame Savannah at the Aquatic Center. She had come running when I'd called her over, had been delighted to pull her bikini crotch to the side to show me her pussy, and then even more delighted when I'd fingered her. Her willingness had provided me with great ammunition to use against Savannah. For that and other reasons Abigale deserved some of my appreciation. I'd promised her some at the Aquatic Center, and the RPS game was a good opportunity for me to deliver it. Before the sexed-up Target date, I called Abigale. After identifying myself and exchanging the usual pleasantries, I moved on to an unusual pleasantry, "Abigale, you were so wonderful toward me at the Aquatic Center - so friendly and cooperative, and I especially liked how sexy you looked when your 'surge of lust' hit you - that I'm calling to ask you whether you'd like to have another surge of lust, and to have it fully satisfied?" "You mean..." in a breathless, hopeful whisper, "sex?" "Yes. I'd..." "OH GOD YES! I'd LOVE to! When? Can I come now? I can, if you want." #1: "Not right now, no. Let me describe what I've got in mind. First, you do NOT have to agree with it, because the setting is unusual. If you don't want to do it, that's no problem whatsoever. I can easily get someone else, and I won't hold it against you. You were very good at the pools, and I'm definitely going to make some time for you when I can, it's just that this idea is the very first chance I have to give you some appreciation..." "I'll do it. Whatever it is, I'll do it." "Haha. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but let me explain what it is first." Abigale had been invited to most of the earlier Target Girl dates because she was obviously very excited over me, so she camouflaged the dates' true purpose while also helping to create a good atmosphere. I explained to her, "There's going to be another one of those group dates like the one at the swimming hole that you came to last week. There aren't going to be so many people at the next one - probably about two dozen in total - and it's going to be much sexier than the other ones. Remember at the Aquatic Center there was a Rock, Paper, Scissors competition that Leanna won?" "Yeah. I was SO disappointed that I didn't win!" "We're going to have another competition like that, on the next group date, and I'm going to have sex with the winner immediately, in front of whoever's there that wants to watch. It'll be in a private spot so no strangers will see us, but everyone in our group that wants to will be able to watch..." "I'll be there! Where and when is it?" I told her the details, adding, "Ava will pick you up, to make sure you can get there." "I'll be ready an hour early! Thank you VERY much for inviting me, Mark. I REALLY hope I win this time." "I'm going to make sure you do. That's why I'm making sure you're comfortable having sex in front of the others." "How can you make sure I win?" "We're doing it a little different than last time. Rather than the girls competing with each other, what we're going to do is have me sort of compete with ALL the girls at the same time. I'll have a best-of-seven match against all the girls, at the end of which half the girls will be eliminated; the ones with the lowest score out of seven. Then we'll have another match, etc., until there's only one girl left. I'll make sure that's you." "We're going to cheat, somehow?" "No, I'm just going to pick whatever thing doesn't eliminate you each time. Eventually you'll be the only girl left." "I don't understand. How can you know what I'll be picking?" "It's easy for me, sweetie. Remember that I'm very, very smart. It's easy for me to play RPS. I'm probably the world's best player." "Oh. Wow, you're amazing." #5: #1: #8: #1: #2: #8: I explained, "When we play, just choose whatever shape you want in plenty of time, and make sure that's the one you play. Don't change your mind at the last second, because that'd confuse me." "I won't. Will you really be able to guess what shape I'll be choosing every time?" I'd already done a little test with Julia, so I knew my proximity sense had enough resolution. "Yes. It's actually quite easy. Girls are very predictable because they're constantly using 95% of their brains to think about clothes shopping." "Haha. I don't think I'll be thinking about that. I'll be too excited about winning time with you." "You haven't specifically said that you're okay with the idea of having sex in front of the others. You don't have to if you don't want to, but it is the only chance we'll have before I go to Europe. I'll make time for you after we come back, if you'd prefer privacy?" "I'd prefer it, but I want to have sex with you VERY much. Every time I see you I get the feeling so strong I can hardly stand it. I can't wait till Thursday!" "Good. I'm looking forward to it too. Just one more thing to tell you. I'm going to give you a VERY good time, and as many orgasms as you can handle. I'm going to keep making love to you over and over again, until you tell me to stop. The moment you tell me to stop, I'll stop, and I won't restart. So don't say 'Stop' unless you mean it, okay?" "Wow. Julia and the others say you can do it a LOT!" "As much as you can handle, sweetie. It's up to you." "I don't think I'll be able to handle much. I'm not used to it. I'm sorry." I already knew Abigale didn't have a hymen, so she presumably had some experience. Without that impediment to make her sore to diminish her enjoyment, all I needed her to do was be very happy, which didn't seem likely to be a problem for her. "There's no need to apologize, sweetie. I am definitely going to enjoy being with you, so don't worry about that. My only concern is to make sure you're happy with everything." "Happy and very excited. I've been dreaming about being with you. REALLY dreaming! I have naughty dreams about you sometimes. That's okay, isn't it? You don't mind?" "It's great. I certainly don't mind. You can have as many naughty dreams about me as you want." "I wish I could sleep with you for real. That'd be much better." I liked her attitude, and obviously her body or this conversation wouldn't be happening, so I told her, "Maybe after I come back we can arrange for you to spend the night with me." "I'd LOVE that Mark, but my parents would never allow it." "If they'd allow you to sleepover with Julia, maybe you could do that one night. I'd just happen to be in the bed at the same time." "I've NEVER done anything like that Mark. I know you and Julia do it with other girls, but I've never done that. I'm just an ordinary girl; not someone like Julia or Ava." "You may be an INEXPERIENCED girl, but you certainly aren't ORDINARY. I wouldn't want you to win the competition on Thursday if you were ordinary." "I never thought of that! You really like me?" Several reassurances later, I managed to end the call. Because I was trying to impress Mom with my pursuit of knowledge about females, I made a mental note to follow up on a thought I'd had during the conversation with Abigale. I thought I knew the answer, but it offered me yet another chance to suck up to Mom. At the next opportune moment, I asked Mom, "I was talking to a girl on the phone yesterday, and she told me she'd had romantic dreams about me recently. Assuming she was telling the truth about having the dreams, would her having them be proof that her interest in me wasn't because of my money?" "Not at all," answered Mom, as I'd been reasonably sure she would. Mom went on to explain how it worked with females: "Once a girl decides on 'The Guy', regardless of what her reasons are - financial or otherwise - then she starts to feel all the emotions that she should for the man she's convinced is her Mr. Right. She even wants to feel all those emotions, to help justify her own decision. She's not necessarily as cold hearted as that seems, because many women value security highly, and a wealthy man offers that. It makes women feels safe and warm, and it's not a large stretch from there to feeling romantic about the guy." There was more, during which I listened intently, asked intelligent questions, and otherwise pretended to be solely motivated by the pursuit of knowledge, as opposed to breasts and pussy. This was just one of the many little ploys we employed on Mom. ------- Chapter 271: About Three More Girls: Gina, Leanna and Ava Late-June to Early-July, 2005 (Continued) One of the miscellaneous dates I did have time for, was with Gina, my favorite Italian girl. She was the only one I knew, but she was definitely my favorite for two very important reasons: she was happy to cook, and she was good at it. Leanna was included in the date, making it just the three of us. Leanna had calmed down since her foolish tantrum, and she'd apologized very sincerely to me. Normally I wouldn't have dated her again, but I wanted to date Gina. They didn't necessarily have to come as a matched pair, but there was a good reason for it in this case. While there are many wonderful aspects to Italian culture (off the top of my head: the girls are happy to cook and they're good at it), they have a terribly old-fashioned idea that their girls should be virgins on their wedding day. When I first rang to suggest a date, Gina had quickly warned me that it was important to her that she retained her virginity (it truly is VERY hard to find the perfect girl!). So I invited both girls: Gina because I enjoyed her company the most, and Leanna to fuck. I wanted to give Gina a good time orally, but she was reluctant to enjoy even that. (Italian culture has a great deal to answer for, although the answers can wait until they've finished cooking.) I did manage to corrupt her though, by getting her to sit beside the bed while I had my evil way with Leanna. The rhythmic clenching of my cute butt worked its dark magic again, and Gina became sufficiently excited to join us on the bed. She was very concerned that I not "spoil her", and it was obviously very important to her that I didn't. I gave her a truly sincere and convincing promise to respect her boundaries, and then I gave her several jolly, virginity-retaining good times. She'd been sensibly keeping guys well away from that area, so she'd never experienced so much "jolly" before. I 'jollied' her so well, that she started hinting that she wouldn't mind if I made love to her. I knew far better than to do that - no way did I want to upset such a good cook! - so I spanked her bottom for being a naughty girl, and then kissed it better, although many of my kisses missed the spanked area. It didn't seem to matter though, as she was soon jolly again. When I'd worn them out, I lay in bed with both girls tucked under my arms to chat with them. I wanted to make sure Leanna didn't suffer a relapse of her childish temper-tantrum silliness, and I thought it'd be a good idea for Gina to calm all the way down before she went home, as I imagined her family might be excessively suspicious of sexual impropriety. When she'd calmed down sufficiently, Gina was VERY, VERY thankful that I hadn't taken her up on her hints. "You can trust me, Gina. I understood how important it is to you, and sex isn't so important to me that I'd do something that bad to you, even in the heat of passion. Which, with someone as nice as you, is PLENTY heated!" "{Giggle}. Really?" "Absolutely. If you weren't so nice, I wouldn't have cared so much about what happened to you afterward. In addition to my thinking you're nice, you learned some other things. First, in the heat of passion, YOU lost sight of what was important to you. Second, I can't claim to be any sort of expert about how other guys behave when they're having sex, but I strongly suspect that most of them wouldn't have been able to resist your invitation. Those two points combine rather badly for you if you want to remain a virgin until your wedding day. You've learned something about yourself that is important for you to remember. Third, you've learned is that you can trust me. It was a risky way of learning it, but you're lucky you picked me to lose your inhibitions with. With any guy other than me, your virginity would be gone by now, rather than just been very well licked." "Haha. You're right. You saved my life. It would have been a huge disaster if you'd done what I wanted." "If I saved your life, does that mean I own you now. Is it Italians who do that, or maybe Eskimos?" I was angling to get her to feel obligated to me. I was very aware that when we moved into our mansion, Julia, Carol and I will be living in a separate house with its own kitchen. We'll usually have our meals with the parents, but it might be a very good idea to have a good cook come to visit sometimes. In a year or so we'll be moving to my new university (presuming Mom agrees about Carol by then, and she damned well better, or there'd be a very big and bad family battle). Wherever we move to, we'll have to do our own cooking, which means mostly Carol will. The sooner and better she learns, the happier I'll be. Gina would be a perfect teacher. (If anyone ever accuses me of using girls just for sex, they're WRONG, because I'm also very eager to use them for cooking.) "I'm sorry to say that it's not Italians. You shouldn't try telling Papa that you own me, or I'll have to save your life, haha." "Thanks for the warning. Does that mean we're equal now, so I'll have to invite you into my bed again to get you back into my debt?" "Am I REALLY safe with you? Because I won't come back if I'm not." #3: "Yes, you really are. I will never, ever hurt a girl who cooks as well as you do." "Haha. You sounded so sincere when you said that." "For a very good reason! I can get dozens of girls to have sex with me, but as far as I know, none of them cook as well as you. I'm making a joke out of it, but part of what I just said is important. Most guys don't think they get enough sex. Pretty much every guy wants more, so whenever a guy gets a chance for sex, he goes for it. If you'd got too excited and made the hints you did to any other guy, he would've taken your virginity. The reason you're safe with me is because I do get enough sex. I get as much as I want. I would like to have sex with you, of course, because I like you, but I don't want it so much that I'll go against your true wishes. I guess the easiest way of saying it," (because one of my minds thought of a better way), "is that I like you more than I like sex; whereas most guys like sex more than they like and care about the girl." "You're right," agreed Leanna. "That's what all the guys I've known have been like. They push and push for more and more sex, because THEY want it, not caring about what I want. They're very selfish." "I don't intend to be mean to you, Leanna, but let me remind you that after the first time we had sex, you wanted more, and you were very upset when I put you off." "Oh yeah. I was selfish. I hate that boys are so pushy, and I did the same thing..." "Some very smart people I know say it's okay to make a mistake once, provided you learn from it and don't make it again. I obviously didn't hold your first mistake against you, or you wouldn't be in my arms now. But if you repeat that mistake, then you will be as bad as the boys you complain bitterly about." "I won't. I'm so embarrassed about what a fool I made out of myself, especially now that I see that I was being the same as boys are. I won't make that mistake again. Thanks for giving me a second chance." "You're welcome, sweetie. You're a good girl at heart." EVERY girl likes to hear you think she's "good at heart". They eat that stuff up. For some reason it's FAR better to compliment that organ than say she's got great tits. To be somewhat more serious, I congratulated myself for doing a good job at stopping Leanna causing another scene. From now on she should let me fuck her whenever I want, without making a 'selfish' fuss about it. On the other hand, I'd like to do without Leanna if I could get Gina trained enough. Gina was the nicer one, had more personality, was better looking, and there was something else that I like about her that I've temporarily forgotten. It'll come to me soon (probably around mealtime). That Gina seems to trust me with her body now is a very good start, but the trouble is that she wasn't into any bi stuff. She and Leanna hadn't touched each other at all. I hoped that wasn't an aspect of Italian culture, or I'd be in serious danger of having a bad overall opinion of Italians. I didn't want to go on a date with just Gina, because the sex would have to be frustratingly incomplete, as I truly wouldn't "spoil her". So dates with Gina would have to include someone like Ava or Pat as well. #4: #6: There was no harm in planting the seed now, so I said, "Gina, I'm lucky enough to have quite a few female friends, and I know several of them have very successful romantic relationships with other girls. Quite frankly, girls often seem to be happier in relationships with other girls than with most guys. Because your virginity is so important to you, and because guys are TERRIBLY unlikely to care about your remaining intact, especially when you're so turned on you stop caring about it, you might want to give some thought to finding yourself a good girlfriend and avoiding guys for a while." "I don't think so. I'm not interested in having sex with girls." "You've spent too much time with guys. I talked about your starting a relationship and you immediately rejected it on sexual grounds. With guys involved, relationships are focused on sex, because that's what they push for all the time. But between two girls it doesn't happen that way. Girls are too empathetic and caring to push the other girl into sex if she doesn't want it. If they both like each other, and are both comfortable, then they can sometimes add sex to their friendship, but it's never the reason for the relationship. It's not even an important part of it; it's merely something they do to express their friendship. -- "I don't want to sound boastful, but I'm pretty good at understanding the female psyche, and I've several times introduced two girls to each other and seen them develop very good friendships. I raised this topic as a suggested way of helping you retain your virginity, so it's appropriate to talk about sex, even though sex isn't the main reason girls have relationships. In some cases the girls I introduced became sexual, and in some cases not. Interestingly, several of the relationships that did become happily sexual were with girls who'd never had sex with girls before, and at the start of relationship spoke like you did about not being the slightest bit interested in it. -- "You know what a genius I am, and you've seen the huge number of girls that enjoy my company. And only a few minutes ago I proved how 'awesome' - your word - I am at arousing you sexually. I wouldn't be that good unless I understood a lot about female psychology, because with females good sex requires good emotions. So I speak with quite a lot of expert confidence when I say two things: First, I have a good friend who's one year ahead of you at school, who I think you might get on very well with. I need to get to know you better to be sure of that, but that's my initial impression. Second, I'm pretty sure that with the right girl, and if your relationship with her was working well, then you'd find that you enjoyed adding the sexual aspect. You've got the right sort of generous, giving personality, you're trusting - which is risky with guys but important in a good relationship - and you've got a pretty good attitude to sex generally. I'm confident that you could have a successful sexual relationship with a girl," most of m confidence came from her not running out of the room in appalled revulsion. "My only real uncertainty is over who would be the ideal girl for you." "I thought you were talking about me and Leanna." "Oh no. Not at all. I obviously like Leanna, and I'm sure you're good friends, but I can't see you and her making that sort of relationship work successfully. Because of the way you've been brought up, in a family where parental authority is strong and respected," I was taking some guesses here, based on her wanting to remain a virgin, "you should be in a relationship with a girl you can look up to and respect, but she has to be kind and caring, not the sort of girl who'd use her authority over you for anything selfish. Sort of like the perfect older sister. I know people don't have sex with sisters, but it's more important to get the relationship right than it is to worry about minor issues like sex. That'd take care of itself anyway, if the relationship works well. That's the sort of thing I have in mind. What do you think?" I asked that question because I could see Gina looked impressed. "You're a VERY strange boy! I never expected to be lying naked in bed with a boy who was trying to set me up with a girl. Are you trying to get rid of me?" "Haha. No, not at all. In fact, the girl I have in mind for you is a good friend of mine, so if you two became friends I'd end up seeing more of you." Gina definitely looked interested in that particular consequence. Which she obviously would've, or she wouldn't be in my bed now, so I should've used that point earlier. I could build it up even more now though, so I added, "She's actually one of my favorite lovers, so if she and you were together, not only would I see you more often, but that'd quite often be in my bed. If that's what you wanted, of course." Considering Gina's reaction to what I'd done to her over the last ninety minutes, there wasn't much doubt she'd love to be seen more often in my bed (actually Julia's bed, but I wasn't going to quibble at a time like this). She was visibly eager, but also uncertain, asking, "She's your lover, AND she likes girls?" "Sure. Just like you're my lover - up to where you've drawn the line about that - and you'll like girls too. I know the playing around with girls that you've done in the past didn't do anything much for you, but that was because you weren't in the right type of relationship. What I have in mind would be different." "How can you POSSIBLY know what I've done before?" "I obviously don't know the details, but those don't matter. To someone as smart as me about girls, it wasn't hard to discern the effect those experiences have had on you." I hadn't even bothered thinking about it. I'd merely used some vague wording that could mean anything. I'd learned that most girls did a bit of playing around when they hit puberty. Whatever it had been, "Didn't do much for you," and, "Weren't the right type of relationship" would apply reasonably well to pretty much every girl. -- I added, "Forget the stuff you've done in the past. I'm talking about introducing you to a girl who is a very nice person, and is an experienced bisexual lover, but she's very definitely not any sort of slut the way that sounds. She's actually quite conservative in many ways, otherwise I wouldn't predict you'd respect her. She's not demanding either, so she's not going to boss you around. I think you could have a good friendship with her." "I've NEVER met anyone like you before! EVERYTHING you do is amazing, and you genuinely care about me being happy." "You're a nice girl, Gina, so it's very easy to care for you. But I've actually got several reasons for doing so," (because my minds had thought of several impressive sounding pieces of BS). "I can appreciate how difficult it must be for you to retain your virginity. You're an outgoing, passionate, generous girl, and you'd naturally want to make as much love as possible..." "Not until I was with you just before. I've never gone so far before." "I didn't make myself clear. I was thinking about your future, not your past. I can't do anything about your past, but I can try to make your future easier on you. I respect you for trying to keep yourself virginal until your wedding day..." "More likely trying to stop Mom from killing me and Dad from killing the boy, haha." "Thanks for the warning! Keeping yourself virginal and Corvallis's homicide rate down are both worthwhile goals that I'm happy to help you with. Another reason is that in some ways I can't help thinking of you like you were my sister. I did say 'SOME WAYS' - obviously not every way, considering how much I enjoyed giving you orgasms with my tongue and fingers." "Haha. Yeah, or YOUR parents would kill you!" "Right after my sisters did, yes. The reason you're like my sisters is because I feel very protective of them, and somehow I feel protective about you too. I'm not sure how that happened. Something to do with your virginity obviously, but I've not had that feeling with other virgins before, so I'm not sure why with you. I don't really care though, as it's a good feeling and I'm quite happy just to enjoy it. Another reason to introduce you to the other girl is because I think you'd be good for her. She's a good friend of mine, so I'd like to see her become happier. There are other reasons, but those are the main ones." "No wonder you're a genius at school. You're thinking all the time!" Which didn't really make sense, but she was a good cook so I forgave her. "What about me?" asked Leanna, who'd been left out of the conversation for too long. "In what way do you mean?" "Do you think I should have sex with another girl?" #4: #3: #1: #3: I told her, "It depends on the person you'd be with, Leanna. It always depends on that. Relationships are more important than sex. Don't tell any boys that I said that though, or they'll kick me out of all their clubs." "You're too smart to be a boy. Are you sure you're not a girl? Haha." "OH THE SHAME! I spend HOURS trying my poor, little best to impress you with my masculinity, and it was instantly forgettable. I feel so sad I think I'll have to paint my nails bright red to cheer myself up." "{Giggle}." We joked around for a couple of minutes. I did address Leanna's question by telling her, "I was thinking about my friend for Gina because they'd suit each other. I'll keep my eyes open for another girl for you Leanna, now that I know you're interested in that sort of relationship." "I'm not really. I was just curious." She obviously wasn't interested at all, and nor was I in connecting her up, so that little problem was over with. Gina asked, "Who's the girl you think should be my girlfriend?" "It's too early for me to tell you. I know her pretty well, but I don't know you well enough yet. I don't want to introduce you unless I'm confident it'll work, or that would disappoint both of you. How about after we come back from Europe, you come over one evening and we have another cooking session like last time, except I'll be around so I'll get to see you interacting with the others?" "That'd be fun. You're being very smart again, aren't you?" #1: #5: "How do you mean?" "I'm very happy and relaxed in a kitchen, so I won't be nervous about your watching me, and you'll see me at my best. You're a very kind person." "Not a bad guess, but you didn't get all the reason. I try to look for win-win possibilities. You're right about what you said, plus I get to eat more of your marvelous food..." #8: #All: " ... which is also a reason definitely not to be forgotten. But you missed the most important reason. What I'm most interested in is how you get on with females, so I chose the cooking session as a good way of seeing you relating to females." "WOW! You're VERY smart! You must get tired doing all that thinking." "Yes indeed. Which is why food is so important to me. I did mention you'll all be cooking food for me, didn't I? I'd hate for you to forget that reason. That's VERY important!" "Haha. I like being with you. You're a VERY nice person. I wish I could marry you." #5: "Thank you, Gina. That's a VERY big compliment; the biggest there is. I somehow don't think my life is going to have me marrying a local girl and settling down in Corvallis, though." "I wish I could marry you too," pitched in Leanna, even more hopefully than Gina. "TWO wives! D'oh, what a dummy I am! I should've thought of that AGES ago. I could marry an Italian cook, a Chinese cook, a Texan cook because I like steaks, a French cook for all their fancy foods. Am I allowed to have seven wives? Because that'd give me a whole week of interesting dinners." Both girls laughed quite a lot, even though I was only half joking. The date ended well, with me promising to get Julia to call Gina when we got back, to arrange a cooking session. I managed to avoid the issue of whether Leanna would be invited, and I managed to avoid Leanna getting upset about not having another date agreed to. Both girls now appreciated that I was out of their league, but they were still happy to get whatever crumbs I provided them. That was fair, because I was happy to get whatever six-course meals Gina provided me. In the grand scheme of things, this date wasn't significant. Things didn't even work out with Gina and Pat. Once school restarted, things didn't even work out with Gina and me because her parents were too controlling, making it very difficult to get bed-time with her. The Anderson and Williams females did learn some new recipes though, so that was great. I've described this date as an example of my progress in managing girls, of their attitudes toward me, and of the sorts of things I did with girls. I had quite a few dates over the summer that were, effectively, much the same as this one. The details were different, but in the larger sense they were much the same. ------- Last in my sequence of discussions about girls, but not least, some notes about Ava. We hadn't spent much time with Ava back when school had been going. Ava had lived with the Williamses while her parents were on their trip, so Julia got to know her better during that time, but I'd been in Seattle for all of that. Now that exams were over, we were spending a LOT of time with Ava, most of almost every day, especially the weekdays because her parents still worked. We enjoyed having her with us. For a start, there was no reason not to like having her around, because she was totally cooperative. She went along with everything we wanted, participated in all our plans, was genuinely happy to do everything we asked of her, etc. She appreciated being with us, and it's very hard to dislike someone when they fit in so easily and happily. Because Julia had gotten Ava involved in helping with many of Julia's plans, right from the very beginning of our relationship with her, by now Ava had learned how Julia worked. I was starting to make plans of my own now, but pretty much everything I'd learned about planning and manipulating I'd learned from Julia, so Ava had no difficulty working with me on my plans either, such as the Target Game. Ava had sometimes been hard work at the beginning, but she no longer tried to impress us, and no longer needed to ask why about every single thing we wanted her to do. She clearly wasn't as smart as Julia and me, but she didn't need to be. None of the things we got her to do were complicated. She'd successfully participated in enough schemes by now that she was confident in her own abilities, and carried out her 'tasks' without any fuss (they were really too much fun to be called tasks, but you know what I mean). That describes one direction of the commitment between Ava and us. The other direction was Julia's and my commitment to support Ava. Julia definitely took that commitment very seriously, and increasingly Carol was getting involved too, just because she wanted to. I tried to do my part, but quite frankly, I was terrified of what was going to happen, and I was totally unable to imagine how I could be any use to Ava when her parents got very sick. Katie was starting a course of chemotherapy a couple of days before we flew to England, and I shamefully felt a sense of relief that I wasn't going to be around when it was happening, as apparently it was going to be a heavy one. I was worried that Julia and Carol wouldn't be around either, but everyone assured me that Ava would be okay this time, and the rest of the Williamses would pick up the slack for the three weeks we were away. Other than my being terrified, our relationship with Ava was working out very well. It was almost unthinkable that she'd divulge any of my secrets, as she was so obviously loyal to us and made no attempt to find out anything about my abilities. She seemed to have no curiosity about them at all. Even about non-secret things, if Julia or I told her that we wanted to drop a subject, Ava let it go completely. She spent most of her evenings at her place, sometimes with one or more of us there too. Although she spent most of her days with us, she did a number of other things too. Ava had quite a few of her own friends - girls from her school classes or from the Athletic Club mostly - with whom she spent time doing things. There were quite a few guys in her social circle, but she had zero romantic interest in any of them. She'd come and go from our company to spend time with her friends, but mostly she'd stay with us. Julia and I came first, especially if she was helping us 'work' on something. Ava liked her friends, but we were important to her. She was good company, and we enjoyed being with her. On those times that I wanted Ava to not be with us (say I wanted to be alone with Julia and Carol to discuss marriage stuff), then it only required a simple word and Ava would leave without complaint. She wouldn't dream of arguing with us, just like she wouldn't dream of arguing with her parents. Different reasons, but they reinforced each other, to make Ava very docile with her parents and us. ------- The various Aikido magazines had different publication dates, but the External Ki Projection articles started coming out during this time. Actually it was the same article repeated several times, but often with some different commentaries by the magazine publishers. According to Sensei, the new technique caused quite a ruckus. Not that I saw any sign of ruckus, as I trained with Sensei only during this time, and news of EKP never reached the general population; except in Japan and Korea apparently, where Sensei said it made the national newspapers. EKP was quickly confirmed as a real phenomenon, even before the articles were printed, as the people in charge of the magazine were all aikidoka who tested it out themselves. I hadn't anticipated it, but the technique was quickly picked up by many other martial arts too. Not that my failure to do so mattered, but I should've thought of that. Everybody projects ki whenever they consciously or subconsciously intend to do something physical, and while they're doing it too (the intention still being active), so it made sense that ki would've been incorporated into many martial arts. That the articles were anonymous created a mystery which stimulated much debate over the following months, but it got nowhere and eventually faded away. What 'faded in', was a fairly substantial change to the Aikido syllabus. New techniques were now possible, and old techniques could be improved. That had very little effect on what new students learned because their ki was weak. But from about halfway to black belt and onward, there were quite a few technique changes made to incorporate the new concept. There were two important new aspects: EKP was easily demonstrated. A member of the public or a new student could reach to grasp the hand of an experienced aikidoka, and could have his hand mysteriously deflected. This gave ki a great deal of credibility, and resulted in increased interest and retention rate in Aikido and other ki-using martial arts. Provided the grabber was consistent, EKP provided a usefully accurate way of comparing the ki of several defenders, so it provided a good way for senseis to compare students and measure their progress over time. Now that ki was more easily measured, things easier for the teachers and students alike. The effects of my EKP idea would take several years to manifest fully. It wouldn't revolutionize the world, or even the Aikido world, but it'd be a very positive contribution. ------- Chapter 272: Family Trip to Europe Tuesday, July 5 to Wednesday, July 27, 2005 There were two areas I was REALLY hoping for progress in before we left to go to England: Mom's consenting to our three-way marriage, and the mansion purchase. Mom stuck to her guns (not a shotgun unfortunately; a reference to the "shotgun wedding" euphemism. Carol's getting pregnant wasn't a tactic we would use). Mom was staunchly and frustratingly withholding her decision; which, in effect, was the same as saying no, except Carol and I had to stay on our best behavior in the hope that Mom might eventually decide to say yes. We all kept working on Mom, and she kept refusing to say yes or no. She was a pain in the ass, literally in Carol's case, as she was becoming tired of getting it there. Once or twice a month in that location as a novelty in the right mood is okay, but it loses its novelty value when it's all you can do. It's not as good for the girl, which means it wasn't as good for me either. By the time we flew out to England, Mom hadn't budged an inch. The best news I got before our trip was Vanessa FINALLY telling us that it was time for me to inspect the properties she was negotiating for. "YAY!" I said. "Not so fast, Mark. We're not at the right stage for your visits yet, but it'd be best to do them now rather than waiting four weeks." "Argh! Yes Vanessa. I know it's not your fault, but it feels like I'm hitting my head against a brick wall. There's certainly no visible progress. "That's the nature of the process." The visits to each property were amusing, as the agents and sellers had no idea that the "important buyer" that Vanessa was acting as the negotiating agent for was so young, even with my having the casino disguise on. I drove up in my fancy Lexus with Vanessa beside me, with me dressed appropriately, as judged by Julia. That meant very upmarket, as apparently the "Homo Porn Star" look was the wrong image for real estate buying. I was introduced as "Mr. Anderson," and I was escorted around the property by Vanessa and the realtor, with Vanessa calling me "Sir" throughout the visit. Vanessa had coached me on how to act and what to say, for example, "Is this house representative of the quality of houses in this town?" "In this price range, yes sir," Vanessa answered. "They aren't the same quality as at home." "No. Sorry about that, sir, but the market is much smaller here." "Pity." I acted cool and disappointed about all the properties we visited, even though they were GORGEOUS! I wanted to throw money at the owners and move in right away, for any of them. I thought they were all wonderful, even though Vanessa had already explained the defects they each had. For example, at the first place I had to ask, "Where's the wine cellar?" because it didn't have one; at the second I had to say, "A THREE car garage! Where will my people park their cars?", etc. Vanessa explained the renovations that each required, which I would be disappointed about, saying something like, "You couldn't find a house that had the features I requested?" "No sir, not in this market." "Maybe the next town will be better." "I don't know sir; I'm not representing you there." I thoroughly enjoyed looking at all the places, and especially the Peoria Road one, as it was at the top of our shortlist. I could easily imagine how it'd look when all the renovations were done, and it'd be superb to live in. I thought that about all the places. They made where we lived now look sick. We left each of the prospective sellers with a strong sense of disappointment, while I drove away from each of their properties raving to Vanessa about how fantastic it was. Nothing more was visibly achieved by the time we flew out to England, on July 7. ------- I won't say much about our time in Europe, just the following summary. Getting there was an ugly experience. I've heard Economy Class in aircraft referred to as "Cattle Class", but I'm sure cattle would've been better treated, starting from the moment we arrived at the airport. The sooner I could fly myself, the better. I knew that was a silly thought, but the experience of international air travel out of America made me have many silly, pissed off, thoughts. We spent nearly two weeks in England visiting with Mom's relatives. They're a good bunch of people, although I'd never call them a "bunch" if they could hear me; they're far too English to appreciate that. I'd always thought Mom's Englishness stood out, but she seemed positively American when surrounded by her relatives. They weren't Toffee Noses (God knows what that expression literally means), but they certainly spoke funny and maintained a certain stiff formality much of the time. That stereotype didn't describe most of the English people we met, but it did fit Mom's relatives. I was amused that Mom hadn't mentioned ANY of my exploits to her family. They didn't know I was a millionaire, that I'd been kidnapped, or that we were in the very long process of buying a mansion (eventually, one day, if we were lucky). All they knew was that I was doing very well at school and sports, that I was doing "some college courses," and that the family was doing "quite well financially," Mom implied from investments. My missing finger was described by Mom as being the result of "a STUPIDLY childish mistake." I teased Mom about her secretiveness, and she defended herself with, "Tease me if you want, but I'd sound delusional if I tried to explain you to anyone else. You're the one who made an issue out of being careful on the phone, so I thought you'd appreciate my being discreet about your accomplishments, especially on INTERNATIONAL calls," those being the ones that our government was admitting to recording. Mom's explanation pretty much ruined my ability to tease her. We spent most of our time with Mom's parents, but there were quite a few of the family scattered around, so we did some traveling around southern England to catch up with various uncles, aunts and cousins. I had some pretty cousins, even a couple very pretty ones, but Mom would've strongly disapproved of my getting any more incestuous than I was already, so I was a good boy. Donna had a very good time with one nearby cousin though, because she had several horses. Donna thought the idea of having several horses was an excellent one, and she suggested that we should do the same thing. I let Mom handle that one. It didn't take her long. We all got along well with our "rellies" (apparently that's slang-English for "relatives". I'm not sure of the spelling, but the English don't know how to spell properly anyway, so it probably doesn't matter). Julia got along particularly well with them, as she knew how to fit into their style. They thought she was a "Dahling". Carol turned fourteen a few days after we arrived. They put on a nice party for her, with some of her similarly-aged cousins inviting some of their similarly-aged friends, which I quite enjoyed. I didn't do anything more than flirt, but that's a lot of fun. It wasn't as good a party as we could've had at home, with Carol's friends around her, but it was okay. It took her one step closer to eighteen, which I was starting to worry might be how long we had to wait for the marriage, because Mom certainly wasn't being cooperative. Most of my special abilities almost went rusty from lack of use, although I did have one bit of fun with them. I was with Donna at the "relly's" who had the horses, while Julia, Carol and Mom were shopping in London (I'd loudly, insistently and repeatedly begged off). I was offered a horse to ride too. I hadn't been on a horse for years, and then only briefly, so I was cautious about accepting one, but the cousin was the same age as Donna and pretty, so I agreed. Once I was onboard the thing, and had walked for a few yards, I realized that my ki abilities would be very useful. I did a bit of experimenting to make sure my ideas worked, which they did, so I asked, "Jennifer, why do I have to put my feet in these little metal holding things?" "They're stirrups. To keep you from falling off." I leaned forward somewhat theatrically, put on a silly voice, and asked my horse, "I say Old Chap, you wouldn't let me fall off, would you?" My horse shook his head from side to side (as a result of the NP I used). Jennifer laughed, saying, "You're on a mare, Mark." "A mere what?" I was deliberately pretending to have even less knowledge about horses. Not that I knew much, but I did know what "mare" meant. "Pardon?" That took a few seconds to untangle "Sorry, Old Girl. No harm done, say what! Spiffing." -- To Jennifer, I asked, "What about these strings we pull? Surely that's very rude. I thought you English were polite, so why don't you just ask the horsie to go the way you want it to?" "Haha. You've got very silly ideas. You have to use reins to control a horse." I dropped the reins, leaning forward to tell my horse, "I'll tell you what, Old Girl, I'll be polite to you and you be polite to me. Won't that be jolly good?" My horse nodded her agreement. I leaned way back in my saddle, putting my hands behind my head as if I was sunning myself on a beach. I also lifted my feet out of the stirrups and put them on the doubtless confused horse's neck. I now looked VERY relaxed, totally unable to control my horse, and about to fall off any second (my feet provided some stability, but most of it was from my NP holding me on the center on the horse's back). The saddle made this quite an uncomfortable position but that didn't matter; I was having too much fun playing to my audience. "I say Old Girl. Let's go walkies out the usual way." Jennifer had already indicated which direction we'd be riding in, so I used NP to pull my horse's bit forward. That caused the horse to think "forward", and I reinforced its Intention Ki with plenty of my own. Horses have about a fifth as much ki as humans (I'm assuming the horse isn't a highly trained aikidoka, which seems a fair assumption as I can't see Sensei letting a horse crap all over our mats, especially because we do hundreds of forward rolls on them), so it was very easy for me to swamp its ki with mine. Between EKP and pulling the bit forward, I could control it easily. As we walked out of the stables area, I said, "I say, Old Girl. I'd jolly well appreciate it if you turned left after you went through that spiffing little gate just ahead." To Jennifer's and Donna's amazement, I stayed on my horse, and it knew exactly where to go. "Are you hungry, Old Girl? There's a jolly delicious looking clump of grass over to the left." My horse looked at it, then shook its head. "Okay, jolly good. Let me know if you want to stop for a spot of morning tea later." My horse nodded. Jennifer and Donna were riding behind me, laughing, calling me crazy, and no doubt waiting for me to fall off. So I turned around to face backward so I could talk with them. "Jolly good fun this horse riding lark, isn't it?" "You're supposed to face FORWARD! Haha." "Why? The horse knows where she's going. I'd be worried if the horse was facing the wrong way, but it doesn't matter which way I face." "You'll fall off and hurt yourself." "Phooey!" I said hopefully. I was a bit worried about what was going to happen when we started going faster. I knew horses bounce their riders around a lot when they shift into second gear (that was pretty much when my previous horse riding experience had ended). I called back over my shoulder, "Let me know if you need me to turn around, Old Girl. Otherwise just keep up the good work. Jolly good." "You're crazy!" "I hope you're talking to me, rather than my horse. I don't want you to hurt her feelings." "Haha. YOU are crazy." As well as being crazy, I was also trying to work out whether I dared to keep up this silly game while I tried trotting. Would roughly 110 pounds of NP force be enough to keep me on a trotting horse's back when I was facing backward? I thought it was questionable. I wasn't too worried about falling off. A little worried, but not "too". I had faith in my athleticism, plus Aikido had given me a lot of practice at being thrown through the air (it's amazing how far my little English Sensei could throw me). I was more worried about making a fool of myself, as that'd ruin my joke. It'd be best to get as much of the joke done as soon as possible, so I suddenly leaned back toward my horse's head, saying, "What's that, Old Girl?" A couple of seconds later I added, "Hang on, I'll check for you." -- To Donna and Jennifer I said, "Excuse me girls. My horse wants me to do something for her." While they were laughing at me, I turned around on my saddle again, knelt on it, then carefully stood up on the saddle. It was a little tricky to do, but 110 pounds of NP can provide a very good midair handhold, as I didn't need to put anything like my full weight on it to stand. I was still using EKP to maintain the horse's intention to walk forward, and proximity would give me warning if it was about to try any monkey business, which I should be able to swamp out of existence by pouring a huge amount of ki through my EKP. Standing totally upright on the saddle, using some NP to keep me balanced, I raised one hand to shield my eyes from the sun (I was being theatrical, as there's hardly ever any sun in England). I looked around, then pointed off to the right, saying, "I think there's a good spot off to the right Old Girl. At about 2 o'clock. You can tell the time, can't you?" My horse turned and walked in the two o'clock direction. I turned back to the girls, asking them, "I like riding this way because I get a much better view. By the way, my horse is a little embarrassed about it, but she thinks she needs to go to the toilet, so I asked her to head for those trees over there. Is that all right?" The girls were too busy laughing to decide which piece of lunacy to discuss first. While the horse was walking, it was fairly easy for me to stand on the saddle. It'd be tricky normally, but NP could push me back into balance whenever I needed. I gave a little thought to whether I could remain standing if the horse trotted. I decided not, even with using NP to hold my feet in contact with the saddle, so I had to get down. I learned forward a little, saying, "What's that Old Girl?" A second later, "I'll ask." -- I turned around so I was now standing on the saddle and facing backward, looking at the girls who were looking at the lunatic. I said, "My horse would like to know if she's allowed to go faster? She's a very polite horse. I like her." "Haha. Horses CAN'T TALK! You're CRAZY, Mark." Jennifer asked Donna, "Is he always liked this?" "Never this silly. Stop standing on the horse like that, Mark. If you make me laugh any more, I'll fall off." "You should learn to ride properly, like me." "Haha, haha. Stop it!" It was time I got down, so I crouched to take my weight on my arms, then let my legs down the side of the horse. I was now sitting, but still facing backward, so I asked, "Happy now?" "You're facing the wrong way!" "Oh. I wondered where the Old Girl's head went." I swiveled around to face forward, adding, "There it is." We were clear of the stable area, and into an open field, so it was presumably time to press the accelerator. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered how bad the bouncing had been from trotting, so I decided that I'd better not play the fool when we started that. I'd sit properly, and if it turned out to be easy, then I could add increments of foolishness. I dropped my legs down the side of the horse, put my feet in the stirrups (NP helping with that), then I called back over my shoulder, "Jennifer, what's the word for the next fastest speed?" "I'm too scared to tell you. Are you sitting in the saddle properly? Got your feet in the stirrups?" "I'll have you know that I'm a VERY good rider! Last time I must've stayed on for at least FORTY whole seconds. That's pretty impressive!" Apparently Jennifer wasn't all that impressed, because she trotted up beside me to check I was okay. She looked me over, asked, "Is your other foot in the stirrup?" "Yep. But only because I want to stop them banging against my horse. It's very rude to have these things flopping around you know. How would you like it if you had things like stirrups waving around and hitting you in your very nice chest all the time?" Jennifer just blushed, not sure how to answer her crazy cousin's crazy compliment. She was at that age when she was new to her new body (you know what I mean) and very easy to tease about it. I held my feet away from my horse's sides, saying, "Don't worry, Old Girl, I won't hit you with the nasty stirrups or my feet. I don't know what the word is, but please go faster when you're ready?" "Hold the reins Mark!" shouted Jennifer, too late as I'd just used a couple of NP-points to 'kick' the horse where you normally kick them to make them go faster. Old Girl, or whatever her real name is, leaped into a trot. A few bone-crushing seconds later, #3: "HOLD THE REINS!" Jennifer caught up to me, telling me again to hold the reins again. "Why?" "So you can tell the horse where to go." "That's easy. Old Girl, please go left." Which she did. "Okay, straight ahead please." "Now turn right please." Jennifer caught up, asking me, "How do you get her to do what you want?" "I find with females that it's a very good idea to say 'please'. Like if I said to you, 'Jennifer please kiss me.' That'd work, wouldn't it?" Mom wasn't with us today. While Jennifer was thinking how to answer that, I NP-kicked my horse into third gear. It took off, leaving Jennifer behind. The new gait was MUCH better. Whoever invented trotting deserves to be spanked. No, cancel that, as he'd obviously enjoy it. I looked around for Donna. She was fine, galloping to catch up to me. She was much more than "fine". She had a BIG smile on her face, and I realized that galloping on the back of a horse was what Donna was born to do. With me, that was to tease pretty girls. To each their own. Donna went flying past, turned around, came flying back, circled behind me, and then flying past on the other side. Her horse was much faster than mine. Jennifer galloped up beside me and dropped into formation. It took her several seconds to summon up the courage to speak. (That was okay. I was in no hurry, as there's something about pretty girls bouncing up and down on a horse that I quite enjoy looking at.) "Ahh, Mark. What you said before about..." "Shhh, Jennifer. Not where," I made theatrical, repeated pointing motions at my horse's head, "can hear you. I think she galloped away because she was jealous. I don't think she wants me to K- I - S - S you." Poor Jennifer had never been in competition with a horse for a guy's affections before, and didn't quite know how to handle it. I made it worse by saying, "I think the trouble is that she thinks you're prettier than she is." My horse did a 90-degree turn and galloped away from Jennifer. I yelled over my shoulder, "SEE WHAT I MEAN." We spent some time riding around the "farm" (that's what they called it, although it wasn't like a farm back home). I didn't do any more foolish riding tricks. Galloping was almost smooth enough to tempt me to stand on the saddle, but if I'd fallen off the ground-impact-speed would've been scarily high. The only trick I did was to never use the reins, instead using EKP or NP to steer the horse. Donna and Jennifer saw that I wasn't a good rider (I didn't "sit in the saddle" as well as an experienced rider), but they were amazed that my horse would always go wherever I wanted. Actually the girls were amazed and confused, because horses don't normally understand sentences like, "Please catch up to my sister." I played the "My Horse Is Jealous" game a few more times. Nothing dramatic, just little continuations of the same theme, just enough to compliment Jennifer and keep her confused. Donna had a GREAT time, and I enjoyed seeing her with such a big smile permanently displayed. All you could see under her helmet's rim was one, big expression of joy. I had a good trick prepared for when we finished our ride. After we'd dismounted I left my horse loose then I walked over to Jennifer. I stood beside her then called to my horse, "Please come here, my lovely horse." My horse looked up at me (at the sound of my voice), then walked toward me (NP pulling in its reins, by the mouth so there wasn't any slack to make the pull visible). I got it to stop just in front of me and Jennifer, where I asked it, "You know you're a horse, don't you?" It nodded. "Am I a horse?" It shook its head. "I'm a human being, aren't I?" It nodded slowly. "But you want to be my girlfriend, don't you?" It rapidly nodded several times. "I'm sorry. You're a very nice horse, but horses have to have horse boyfriends and girlfriends, and humans have to have human boyfriends and girlfriends. You understand that, don't you?" My horse nodded sadly. Heartbroken, I guess. "Good girl. Give me a kiss, then go back to the post until we unsaddle you." It came forward and nuzzled me briefly, turned to look at the incredulous Jennifer, gave her a nuzzle too, then walked back the post I'd called her from. (They'd given me a very docile horse, because I was such an inexperienced rider.) Jennifer was blown away, "WOW! That's AMAZING! I never knew horses were so smart. I've NEVER seen anything like that..." Donna cracked up, laughing so much it must've hurt. She couldn't talk, but it was obvious she knew it'd all been a trick. Donna can't have had any idea how I'd done it, but she knew I was very clever, and she knew my sense of humor and flirting style. Donna's laughter was a very effective clue for Jennifer. She looked at me with growing suspicion. I said to her, "I must confess that I enjoy teasing pretty girls, Jennifer. The prettier they are, the more I enjoy teasing them. That was a VERY, VERY big tease, wasn't it?" "It was a trick? Belle wasn't jealous of me?" I nodded. "It was a very big trick, Jennifer. Because you're a VERY pretty girl." That gave her a difficult choice over which direction to go in, but she had to ask, "But Belle UNDERSTOOD you! She did what you wanted and answered all your questions. She even kissed me to say sorry! There's no way you could make her do that." Donna explained, "Mark's VERY smart. He's a huge genius and can do ANYTHING!" Not the most useful of explanations, but it made up for it in loyalty. I tried to be slightly more useful. Not truthful, just apparently useful. I held up my two hands facing each other, fingers flat on top, thumbs underneath, and I made them have a conversation with each other, putting on two different fake voices. Left hand: "What do you think of Jennifer?" (i.e., the left hand was opening and closing its 'mouth', while the right hand was stationary as if listening, and I was doing a very poor attempt at ventriloquism.) Right hand: "I think she's very pretty. I hope she kisses our mouth soon." Left hand: "Yeah, that'd be VERY nice. She's got lovely lips." Right hand: "I'd LOVE to hold her right hand. Do you think I could ask her if I could do that?" Left hand: "I'd be too scared to, but you're braver than me, so I think you should try. Don't tell her I said to. If she gets angry with you, I don't want her to be angry with me too." Right hand: "Okay. Here goes." My right hand swiveled to face Jennifer, then started 'talking' again, "Jennifer. Would you PLEASE let me hold your right hand? Just for a little while. I'll be gentle." Jennifer was chuckling. She still hadn't recovered from her amazement over my intelligent conversation with Belle, but the hand thing had her very amused. Donna was still laughing happily too. Jennifer looked shy, but she extended her right hand. I took it in my right, holding it gently. Left hand: "What's it like? What's it like?" Right hand (I barely opened my lips, mumbling to sound like I had my mouth full): "I can't talk. I'm busy." Left hand: "Oh yeah. Sorry. I'll ask you tonight, after the head goes to sleep." "{Giggle}," from Jennifer. Left hand (facing my face): "Mark, do you think I could touch Jennifer?" Mark (in my normal voice): "Sure. Her left hand isn't doing anything." Jennifer started raising her left hand, but stopped when my Left Hand spoke again: "Ahh, I don't want to touch her left hand. I want to touch her somewhere else." Mark: "Where?" Left hand: "It's too embarrassing to say out loud. Can I whisper it to you?" Mark: "Sure." My left hand moved up to my ear (my left one, because the left pieces of my anatomy tend to stick together). I opened and closed my left hand a few times, making unintelligible, very quiet muttering sounds with my mouth. After a couple of seconds of whispering, 'Mark' (my head talking naturally) suddenly exclaimed at 'Left hand': "WHAT! How dare you suggest that. Jennifer is a NICE girl!" Left hand: "I'm sorry, but I REALLY wanted to." Mark: "You should be ASHAMED of yourself. I'm going to wash your mouth out with soap and send you to bed without any dinner tonight." "Haha," from Jennifer and Donna. Mark continued: "You're a dirty, dirty hand. You don't see your brother behaving like that. Look at him." (Left hand looked at Right.) "He's treating Jennifer's body with respect and maturity, the way you should. Who've you been hanging around with that you learned to think about girls bodies in such a sexy way?" I had deliberately not said something like, "that disgusting way". I wanted to see if Jennifer was interested. I couldn't do anything about it as there was too much chance of that getting back to Mom. I couldn't afford that, not with our three-way marriage STILL not happening. The good news was that Jennifer immediately looked interested. It was useless news, but still felt good to know. Left hand: "I'm sorry. Last night when you were asleep, I slid under our pajama bottoms and played with co..." Mark: "DON'T SAY IT! How many times have I told you to stay away from THAT! It's got a one-track, very filthy mind..." "Haha," from both the girls again, much louder than last time. For girls their age, they were getting far too much amusement out of the latest turn of this saga. It was a great pity I couldn't take advantage of Jennifer's obvious willingness to be taken advantage of. I'd more than made my point now, so I looked up to Belle, asking her, "Belle, are you thirsty?" She nodded her head, so I said, "Sorry we've been talking so long. Help yourself to a drink from the trough, and we'll unsaddle you shortly." Belle walked over to the trough. She even drank from it, which had been a pretty safe bet considering how much running around she'd done before. Jennifer's eyes were round again, the hand game forgotten. "HOW do you do that? Are you like Doctor Doolittle?" "It's a trick, sweetie. Just like the conversation my hands were having." I was still holding her right hand, so I squeezed it, in case she'd forgotten what hands were. It was also nice to be holding her hand, and I enjoyed reminding her of it. -- "It's more complicated than the hand conversation, but it's still a trick. I can prove it, if you want?" She was confused, but I could see she wanted an explanation. Donna too. So I called out, "Belle!" Belle looked up at me (it required NP this time, as she must've been thirsty). "When I talk with you, it's a trick isn't it?" Belle nodded a couple of times, then went back to drinking. I turned to Jennifer, "There you go, even Belle agrees it's a trick." Poor Jennifer was far too frazzled to have a hope of untangling the logical problems with my 'proof', so she just said, "Argh!" then added, "PLEASE tell me. It's going to drive me crazy if I don't know." "Why don't you ask Belle?" "Argh!" plus a smack on my shoulder. With her left hand, as her right was busy. "Jennifer, I've had a great deal of fun this morning. I've enjoyed riding, I've enjoyed seeing how happy Donna has been, because she really LOVES riding horses. And I've enjoyed your company very much, especially flirting with you. You're a lovely girl and a lot of fun to be with. But as great as this morning has been, we're both going to be terribly frustrated about one part of it. I would LOVE to take you somewhere private, have us take each other's clothes off, and do some wonderful things together, but that's not going to happen. And you would love me to tell you how I tricked you, but that's not going to happen either. -- "Sometimes in life it can be best NOT to do something, even if you want it very much. I will think about you many times in the future, wondering how wonderful it would've been to be in a bedroom with you; and you'll think of me, wondering how I got Belle to cooperate. I think my frustration will be far greater than yours, because you're far more important than a trick with a simple animal like a horse. You're a very lovely, very nice, very enjoyable, and VERY sexy girl. I'm often going to regret, and often think about, what it would've been like to hold you in my arms and kiss you all over your body. And to have you kiss me all over mine." For a while it'd looked like she might have a tantrum over not being told how my trick worked, but the flow of sexual imagery I'd conjured up diverted her nicely. She was curious about the horse, but getting more curious about something else. Jennifer said, somewhat huskily, because she was very new to these feelings, "The tack room's empty. We could go there?" "We could, yes. And I'm sure we'd have a fantastic time. But I'm leaving England in a few days, we live on opposite sides of the world, and will probably never see each other again - or not for several years anyway. As wonderful as the tack room sounds," whatever that is, "you're too nice a person for me to take advantage of you. We'll both have much stronger, nicer and more cherished memories if we don't give in to our desires. Well, maybe a VERY good kiss after we've taken care of the horses, but I want you to remember me as someone who genuinely liked you, rather than wanted to use you in any way. You're so pretty that you've probably got far too many boys like that chasing you already. I'd much rather you remembered your cousin Mark as a man who very much wanted to be alone with you, and could've done so, but chose not to because he liked you so much that not touching you was the most loving choice." #8: #6: #1: #2: #6: I put my arms around her, holding her tightly for a few seconds. Then I said, "I'm very glad I met you, Jennifer. You've given me some wonderful memories. And now I think we'd better get busy taking care of the horses, before I lose control of myself." "{Sigh}. I suppose you're right. I wished you lived near here. Why do you have to live all the way over in America?" "I was just thinking EXACTLY the same, except wishing you lived near my home. That must be one reason why we get on so well, because we think the same." #8: #6: #5: #6: #1: We managed to make our departure without any significant trouble or tears. She asked me one more time how the trick had been done, but it was very half-hearted, and she didn't expect an answer. I just gave her a hug, a nice kiss, and another layer of animal excrement. Jennifer was a nice girl, just too young and closely related (Mom would think) for me, and certainly too young to have created the lovelorn feelings in me that I exaggeratedly claimed. They did the job very well on her though, and I left her with very nice feelings that she could dwell on for as long as she wanted. We'd been picked up by Granddad, and in the car on the way back Donna whispered, "Boy, you're GOOD! You had her panting for you. If you do that to the Ducklings, they're going to explode." "I'd better dial it back then. I don't want a room full of exploded Ducklings. That sounds very messy." "It'd be messy AND smelly. So how did you get Belle to do what you wanted?" "I said please." "Argh. No really, how did you do it." I hammed up a repeat of what I'd told Jennifer, "I LOVE you, Donna. I'd die without you. Oh, if only you lived near where I lived." "I live in the SAME house, silly." "Oh yeah. I guess I won't have to die without you then." "In case you die, you should tell me how you got Belle to do what you wanted?" "Okay. What I did was... {Gurgle}," as I pretended to die. Whereupon Donna beat me to death. We were out for the rest of the day, but in the evening the phone rang, and I was told, "It's Jennifer for you, Mark." "Ahh, I'll take it in the other room." We were leaving to go to France in three days and Jennifer was very worried that she wouldn't see me again. I spent fifteen minutes placating her into accepting that our feelings for each other would never be able to progress beyond being fond memories. Plus I had the very useful excuse that we were first cousins so doing anything about our feelings would be wrong. A couple of days later Mom told me, "You certainly made a big impact on Jennifer. Her family have been hearing 'Mark this' and 'Mark that' nonstop since you left. It's driving them up the wall. The poor girl's got a severe case of puppy love." Mom didn't seem too upset, so I said, "Yeah, I know. English girls are very easy. I guess that's how Dad got you." Then I ran. It was a joke of course, it being a family legend how hard Mom had made Dad work to win her. Mom was laughing as she chased me down the hall. She cornered me in the kitchen because I'd got tempted by all the food. While I was putting together a snack, I said, "I overdid it with Jennifer, but it made her happy. I did some purely entertaining things during the morning, but I made them too impressive and too amusing, so at the end she was determined to get an explanation out of me. She was getting seriously upset at my not telling her, so I distracted her with some mushy stuff. I didn't take advantage of her at all. Donna was with us the whole time and can confirm that. I just gave her some sweet talk. She should have some very nice memories of me, and hopefully a good image of how guys can be noble rather than diving straight for her panties like they normally do. It might help her be a little more discriminating in the future." "Right now she couldn't get any more discriminating. She thinks you're her knight in shining armor, who can apparently talk with his horse?" "Haha. Yeah, that was one of the entertaining things I did. I kept a running gag going about talking to my horse, it wanting to be my girlfriend, and it being jealous of Jennifer. It was a trick, of course, in case you think I can really talk with horses." "I did wonder. You certainly have Jennifer fooled, from what her parents are saying." "Smoke and mirrors, Mom. Jennifer's okay, isn't she? She's not upset?" I knew from what Mom had already said that Jennifer was fine; I was just diverting the conversation onto safer ground. "She's fine. It's the rest of her family that are getting sick of hearing about how wonderful you are." "Naturally you told them that I am wonderful, and they should believe every word Jennifer says." "The last thing they need to hear is any more of your praises. Jennifer wants to come here so she can spend the day with you tomorrow. How do you feel about that?" "Ahh. A little bit uncomfortable. We've got a busy day tomorrow, and having Jennifer clinging to my arm is going to be somewhat inconvenient. Not to mention, how's she going to react to Julia being on the other arm?" "You didn't tell her that you already had a girlfriend?" "Ahh, no. That never came up. My poor horse was already jealous of Jennifer, so I didn't want to talk about yet another girlfriend in front of it." "Haha. Your justifications are getting very imaginative. I'll tell Elizabeth," (Jennifer's mother) "that Jennifer's love will have to go unrequited." "That'd be best. Thanks Mom. She's a nice girl, but there's nothing I could do in the few hours we'd have that'd help her, and there's too much danger she'd try to get physical. That wouldn't be a good idea inside the family, I wouldn't learn anything from it, and it wouldn't be fair or good for her. She's got good memories of me now, so let's leave it like that." The next day we went to London to do some tourist things: seeing the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, and that sort of stuff. One of the places we went to had a lot of pigeons, and remembering how I'd controlled Belle, I tried using NP and EKP on some of the pigeons. Being birdbrains, they were VERY easy to control. Even if I used NP to bring them gently closer (which pissed them off), they very quickly forgot about it when I used EKP to reinforce their desire to sit still. I couldn't detect their tiny ki, but I didn't worry about that; I just swamped whatever their intentions were with how I wanted them to sit down. I got three of them to sit on my extended arm, saw that they were easy to control, and then transferred them over to Donna's arm so she could hand-feed them. Donna thought that was a great deal of fun. Everyone just assumed the pigeons were used to people and friendly, so I didn't have to tell the Square full of people that our love would have to go unrequited. We went to France the next day. Mom's family had a shared vacation place: an old, stone villa in a village more-or-less in the center of France. We used it as a base to do some sightseeing from, plus the odd shopping trip to Paris. Mostly for female clothes, as it turned out. France is very nice, apart from all the French people. They didn't react well to the sound of American accents, making it very obvious that Americans are not well thought of. Before we'd left home, we'd changed our original plans so we'd have our last couple of days in Switzerland. As we'd done in London, we opened up a couple of bank accounts in Zurich, one for each family, with me having access to all four accounts. Julia acted for her family initially, with the necessary documents (signing authorities for the rest of the Williamses) being couriered to Corvallis and back. From Corvallis, Prof did the four $500,000 transfers. It was straightforward and boring. And forget any of the cloak and dagger, secret Swiss bank account stuff you might've heard. Apparently the world doesn't work that way these days. Prof's accountant had explained before we left that not only did the authorities have easy access to all the banking records, even for numbered Swiss bank accounts, but American tax returns had to list overseas accounts, their balances and interest earned. It was perjury not to list them. I always thought perjury was lying in court, but apparently not telling the IRS about your own money is perjury too. The four accounts we opened were formally in the parents' names, so would be on their tax returns, but any one of my parents, Carol or me could withdraw from the two Anderson accounts; with the Williams' accounts needing any one of Prof, Vanessa, The Boys, Julia or me. It'd been amusing to insist that Carol was one of the signatories to the Anderson accounts, "After all, Mom, Carol's going to be my wife one of these days." Otherwise we played tourist in Switzerland, discovering that Americans weren't well thought of there either. In Europe, you encounter people from dozens of different countries. They're constantly moving back and forth around the continent, sometimes even living in one country and daily commuting to another for work, which I thought sounded bizarre. In any event, it was clear that Europeans, from all over Europe, were disgusted by America's War on Terror, response to Global Warming, and pretty much everything in between. I was way too young to vote, had less than zero interest in politics (for a start, I've NEVER seen a sexy politician), and I totally ignored politics at home; but I was amazed at how seriously it was taken in Europe. I guess having so many countries jammed up against each other meant Europeans had to be much more politically aware. Although obviously not more politically tolerant. To Jennifer's great regret, and the rest of her family's relief, we flew home from Zurich, arriving back on July 27. ------- Chapter 273: Fooling Mrs. Norris (Diana's and Claire's Mother) Thursday, July 28 to Thursday, September 1, 2005 Back at home, there was a great deal of catching up required. For example, Katie West had been laid low by her treatment, but had bounced back (that's what it was supposed to do), and now seemed fine. She wasn't fine, as the chemotherapy had only been a delaying action, but she looked better if you ignored that she was wearing a wig. Carson was also booked in for something similar soon. We'd talked to Ava every day while we'd been away, but it was good to see the situation face to face. Claire and Diana Norris also reported in. They'd pulled the hymen stunt a couple of days before we'd returned, and they'd had an enormous amount of fun. They'd bawled their eyes out about going to Hell because they weren't virgins anymore. Claire's loss had ostensibly been a couple of months previously, but once Diana had started wailing about the peril her immortal soul was in, Claire had joined in. It'd taken their mother a great deal of effort to calm the girls down, and to get them to understand that they were still virgins even without their hymens, so they wouldn't be going to Hell. That was good, because I had plans for them here on Earth. I had told them to act stupidly religious (a redundant phrase, if ever there was one), because that'd reassure their parents that the girls had every intention of being good; that being somewhat the opposite of what they really intended. One VERY welcome development that'd occurred while we were away was that Vanessa had FINALLY gotten the Peoria Road property signed up. Exactly $2.5 million, right on the top limit of what I wanted to pay, but it was a good saving from the 2.9 they'd been asking for. If I could save $400,000 a few more times, I'd have enough money for a girls' shopping trip to Milan. The other piece of good news, property-wise, was that the sellers wanted to move out quickly. We wanted to move in even more quickly, so things were finally moving rapidly. Vanessa had the various workers doing their various jobs already: measuring whatever they needed to measure, drawing up plans, getting building permits, etc. Closing date was three weeks after the date of signing, so it'd be all ours 4pm, August 9; actually "all mine", but I'll never make an issue out of that with the cooks. August 10 was when the renovations would be starting. Mostly moving and rebuilding my detached house(s), creating my parents' master bedroom suite, laying the additional length of driveway, digging the tunnel and extra parking spaces into the mound, and bulldozing the grapevines. Most of the renovation jobs could be done simultaneously, so Vanessa already had half the builders, electricians, plumbers, roofers, etc., in the Greater Corvallis Area lined up for the 10th. We'd be able to move in about two weeks later, so Occupancy Date would be about August 23. There'd still be a lot of work needed, where the grapevines had been bulldozed out would still be bare earth, for example, but those were things that didn't delay our occupancy. Which takes us to the furnishing and decorating job. That had the females in a COMPLETE tizzy, including Carol. I soon learned to run away and hide every time I heard "furn..." or "dec...", and you can imagine how often that was! To be anatomically correct, Donna is a female too, and she was only in a tizzy over the furnishings if I count her horse as a "furnishing". If so, then Donna was possibly even worse than the other females. Theoretically there was no hurry for Donna to get her horse, as she could get it any time after we moved in, but Donna has never put much store in theories. As far as she was concerned, we owned the house from August 10, which meant we owned the grass from August 10, which meant that August 10 was when she wanted her horse. Which gave her just two weeks from after our plane's wheels touched down, so she was in a complete tizzy. To my surprise, I learned that getting a horse was not a simple matter, and I ended up spending a lot of time learning some of what needed to be learned, and helping Donna with it. Starting from scratch the way I was, and Donna not being much ahead of me, it was actually quite a major project, but it was a good thing to do with Donna. I managed to convince her that getting her horse on August 10 was a bad idea. It'd be in a field with bulldozers, diggers, big trucks and a crane for the pipes, and even a helicopter as it was better to move the modular houses with a heavy-lift helicopter than by truck, mainly because one of the houses had to be placed on top of the mound and there was no vehicle access up there. There'd be a huge amount of noise and dozens of men, so the poor horse would get very panicky and upset. Donna could see that, so August 23 became Mansion Occupancy and Horse Possession Date. It didn't take Donna long to work out that we could buy her horse before then, but keep it where it was until August 23, so she could ride it whenever she wanted. That's what we ended up doing, Patch becoming a much-loved (by Donna) member of the family on August 15. Donna dropped swimming and joined a riding club (she was very good at swimming, but was at the stage that to progress in it she would have to train for a ridiculous number of hours per day). I even rode Patch myself sometimes, he (a gelded "he"; remind me never to reincarnate as a horse) was apparently as smart as Belle, because he always did what I asked. Donna was very impressed. By the way, you would NOT BELIEVE how expensive it is to keep a horse! I know I didn't. It was Donna's 13th birthday on August 1. We had a fairly typical young girls' birthday party at our existing home. Better than our usual standard because Mom and Dad had more money to spend these days, by about a million dollars, not that they were willing to spend that much on Donna's party. Quite a few of the girls were Ducklings (but not all, and not all of the Ducklings were invited). I was in attendance and pretty much the main entertainment. Not just in the flirting sense either, as I did some juggling and magic tricks. Nothing too impressive, and I later explained how I'd done a few of my tricks, faking them out with the prior preparations I'd made, very much like 3B's magic tricks for the Norrises. Some of the girls tried to move beyond the flirting level. The main complaint I had was with their timing: while Mom was in attendance was NOT a good idea. I made sure Mom saw that I was on my best behavior. Otherwise it was a successful party, and Donna was very happy. ^ Having caught up with the catching up stuff, my dating-life resumed at full speed, much boosted by Julia's, Carol's and Ava's boasting about their Parisian dresses (Ava is included in that list because Julia and Carol naturally brought back several clothing gifts for her). The girls took along their best new outfits to one of the Target Game dates, showing them off proudly, and talking about "When Mark took us to Paris", and "When Mark took us to London," etc. That I'd bought a $2.5 million property didn't take long to get worked into the conversation either, "Although it's going to cost Mark well over three million by the time he pays for the extensive renovations and decorating he wants done. He's got very high standards, as you can tell by the way he dresses." I was wearing my bright yellow Speedos at the time, so the girls could certainly tell something about my standards. Julia mentioned the address and described the house. Hardly any of them knew it, but I'm sure many of them made a side-trip at the first opportunity, to have a look at it from the road. So between the Parisian fashions and my "well over three million dollar home," the Target Girls were VERY motivated. Toplessness became more common than not on the Target Dates, and there was even a considerable amount of nudity, the Target Girls being at the forefront of that progression (good for them!). Not coincidentally, nearly all the Target Dates were at quiet river swimming holes or occasionally on sheltered beaches, so they suited our being unsuited, even if the water was sometimes so cold that any swim longer than a quick dip required a wetsuit. Included in the nudity was yours truly. I surprised myself by not being too self-conscious about being pushed into that. It was a hell of a lot better than wearing the ridiculous G-string swimsuit, and I knew I looked very good naked. If I had any doubt about that, the girls' reactions would've set me right. I even got a "killer tan" ALL over my body. It quickly became so good, so even, and with such complete coverage (even in the creases behind my knees, for example, not to mention other sheltered places that I won't mention), that I suspected it was the result of my body's adaptability. I've always thought that dark tans look sexy, and amazingly quickly I had a superb one. My body can do things like that. I don't shave, for example. Dad frequently moans about the nuisance of having to shave every day. It's one of his pet peeves, I think because he'd prefer to get lazy and only shave sometimes, but Mom doesn't let him. I'm pretty sure I've subconsciously absorbed that shaving is a pain, so I don't grow any whiskers. I'd started growing a few wisps before my second merge, but they've all gone now, which is not what happens with guys when they go through adolescence. The toplessness and nudity of these dates did cause me one little moral dilemma. On one of the earlier dates there were several topless girls around me and one of my frequent sight blob checks showed me that there was a party of people coming our way. Did I say nothing, which would result in the girls being surprised, embarrassed and reluctant to go topless in the future (i.e., it'd be a disaster); or did I get them to cover up? I had no believable reason to tell them to put their tops back on. Inventing some fake reason probably wasn't useful because the same situation was likely to repeat itself, and they'd eventually work out that I came out with peculiar "everyone cover up" reasons just before strangers arrived. I decided to announce, "Attention everyone! There are some people coming, so those of you who want to be modest should cover up." Everyone looked around, but there were no strangers in sight, so everyone was confused. Everyone except for Julia, Carol and Ava. Julia and Carol knew about my sight blobs, and Ava couldn't have cared less how I knew. It wasn't as if I'd just received a phone call, and I was lying on my towel in the middle of a bunch of people, none of whom had a clue that anyone was coming. That there was no explanation for my knowing just made it another Mark-ism as far as Ava was concerned. Other than for my girls, the confusion caused slow reactions. Most of the topless girls covered themselves, maybe only holding their top in place; but a few of them just looked around, saw nothing, and didn't bother. Half a minute later the strangers arrived, causing a small flurry of activity, and then several questions, which I shrugged off. The first time was with three teenage couples who moved on to the far end of the area, and we pretty much ignored each other; some of my group even going topless again after a while. But other occurrences were more intrusive, as groups of guys behave appallingly when they encounter a group with many 'spare' girls in it. The main point is that I always gave my group something like a minute's warning, which mystified them and prompted more questions. I explained, "It's easy. I'm VERY observant, and I pay attention to the environment. There are several small clues that people are coming. Birds fly differently, insect noises change, things like that. If you pay attention you'll see what I mean." It added to my prestige. I suspected not as much as my being a multi-millionaire who took his girlfriends on expensive shopping trips to European fashion capitals, but it helped a little and allayed their curiosity. My four soccer teammates still weren't "getting any", but they certainly weren't complaining. They were having a GREAT time! They'd never seen so much top-quality female flesh, let alone got to rub suntan lotion on it. The lotion rubbing had started with my girls, but it'd slowly spread, so several girls now asked them to provide that service, especially because I SUBTLY encouraged it. I never explicitly praised it, but girls that favored my teammates got more of my attention later. I never raised the topic of how they treated my friends, but after a while they made the correlation. I even denied it when they asked, saying something like, "I didn't notice. I only came to talk with you because I think you're a nice girl. Were you talking to one of my friends before? That's good of you, thanks." Most of the girls who responded to that weren't Target Girls, as those girls tend to be too self-absorbed to pick up on what other people are doing if it doesn't involve them, but that didn't diminish my teammates' happiness at all because they didn't care which girls' bodies they rubbed lotion on. My teammates played their role pretty well, managing to convey a cool, mature attitude. They weren't perfect, as sometimes the temptations got too strong and their control slipped, but they did well enough to avoid messing up the plan. Several of the girls even told me something like, "Your friends are nice guys. They don't act like most guys do when they see a girl's body." To which I'd say something like, "They're very mature; that's how they got to be my friends." Or if I was talking to a Target Girl, I'd say something like, "They're soccer players." For some reason I usually had to explain that further, but the idea was to make the Target Girls think that soccer players were all good guys, so it'd be okay to be fucked by all of them as party entertainment. So the Game plan was rolling along nicely, especially in my mates' opinions, because quite a few girls were happy to talk with them, even sitting topless or naked beside them and talk, which must've been a hell of a strain on the guys. I was surprised nothing burst. My teammates had initially been reluctant to follow my lead to go naked. My body intimidated them, plus it would've been very difficult of them to hide their erections. I never got inappropriate erections of course, as I was FAR too mature, apparently. Early on in the Target Game's dates, it'd been all too obvious (literally) that my teammates weren't going to be able to stop all of their erections. They did pretty well, but there's a limit to how much control guys have got (and it's a pathetically low limit). Julia and I had been quite up-front about the problem, making sure all the girls and my mates heard when we several times made the point, "Don't worry about your erection, Logan. We all know you're too mature to act inappropriately toward anyone here, so we don't care about your subconscious reaction." After some more reassurances, my mates eventually started going naked too, and their erections were generally ignored. Although Alexis did like to say, "That looks too good to go to waste. Come here so I can play with it." It usually suddenly went away a few minutes later. Alexis was enjoying herself. ^ With some good hysterics over being ashamed, and with assurances that they were physically fine, Claire and Diana managed to put their mother off taking them to their gyno for a checkup. The longer they could delay, the less chance there was of their doctor finding anything to be suspicious about. A week later there'd been no hint of any parental problem, Diana was fully healed, and both girls were frantically eager to do the dirty deed with me. I was quite looking forward to it myself, and it wouldn't have been polite to keep such nice girls waiting. I'm nothing if not polite (for example, I'm not moral). So the Norris sisters and I had a wonderful, long session in Julia's bedroom. I ROCKED their cute, little worlds! They'd never experienced anything like what I did to them, and got them to do to each other. The girls would 69 each other while I fucked one of them, or one would sit on my cock while the other sat on my face and they made out together while I watched with a sight blob. Or we concentrated two-on-one to get the one off until she begged for mercy, and then we swapped 'victim'. Or I just plain, old fashioned fucked them, as that worked pretty well too. After three hours they were shattered, and utterly, utterly blissed. They'd been perfect; TOTALLY obedient, eager, and damned sexy. Their faces even looked similar, so seeing them go to town on each other while I fucked them was a major turn-on for me. Which explains how they got to be so shattered, as I'd been inspired. We lay in bed together for well over an hour, resting and talking. The resting part didn't work too well, as I got inspired a couple more times, but I made them short, quick, expressions of inspiration. They'd been blown away by the whole experience. The two sessions in the forest love-nest hadn't prepared them for how much pleasure they'd received today. Their cute, little brains had melted. To describe them as "putty in my hands" implies they'd had a little bit of resistance, which certainly wasn't the case; they'd EAGERLY done whatever I wanted. I had to get over the "I love you" hurdle, that being something they both gushed with every fiber of their being. I'd long since learned that protestations of love were a normal reaction to the emotions girls experienced after good sex, and were especially common with girls who'd had little prior experience [and, I came to learn with more experience, an upbringing that had programmed them to equate giving a guy sex as a commitment to be quickly followed by attempts to make the commitment mutual. Mrs. Norris had certainly given her girls PLENTY of that programming, except she'd insisted the guys' commitment had to come first]. With these two having had no real sex before, and having just had three hours of full-on, brain-melting sex, I'd have been amazed if they hadn't sworn they loved me. I wasn't too worried about it, as I had so much control over them that it'll be quite easy to wean them off me. Carol was having a sex session with Diana in three days time. Carol had asked me to tell Diana that, and I'd already passed the pseudo-request on, to Diana's wide-eyed amazement and acceptance. The next session I have with them will probably include Carol or Ava, or maybe Carol and Ava. I remember that Savannah had a thing about Carol and me being siblings, so maybe Savannah might enjoy having these sisters with me. That wouldn't be for a while yet, but that's the sort of direction I'm heading in. I might possibly go so far as to offer the delightful Norris daughters sex with carefully chosen other guys, but that'd be totally under Claire's and Diana's control. Their having control over their sex-life beyond Carol and me was VERY important to me. I'll be making SURE that they understand that. I'll build up their independence, their experience and knowledge, and let them decide. It won't be hard to give them confidence, dilute my own involvement, and eventually they'll decide to start making their own decisions. By then they'll understand exactly what they're dealing with, which is a far better approach than their parents are taking. More fun too. In all seriousness, their parents had a soul-crushing approach to sex 'education' (joke!). It'd screwed up Mackenzie, and had half-screwed up Diana until her hormones and I had swept her parents' programming away. I was determined that Claire and Diana not only have a good time (and me too), but they also gain a very good understanding of sex. For example, I'd probably explain what the Target Game was, and let them see it in operation. At its core, that was all about the Target Bitches' sexual manipulation being turned back around on them, so it'd be a very good lesson for the Norris girls to learn from. That was my plan. The plan was barely a week into its execution when it took a highly amusing deviation. It'll take a while to explain, so get yourself a coffee. Carol had her own agenda for Diana: to use her to help Carol play games with the Cuties and Ducklings. That was something I was very happy to see happen, regardless that the object of the game was to make those two groups even more sexually accessible for me. I wanted Carol to gain self-confidence, and using the two young groups for that was an excellent idea. As per 3B-Prof's suggestion that I find my own project, this would be Carol's project for exactly the same reason and benefits. It should help Diana gain confidence too, because Carol wasn't the sort of person to "use" someone else in a bad way. Before doing that, Carol needed to spend time with Diana. Initially in a couple of one-on-one sex sessions, mostly to make sure Diana would follow Carol's instructions. Later Carol would get Diana to play roles for Carol's plans in the same way as Ava played roles in Julia's and my plans. To give Diana an excuse to use with her parents to explain why she was spending so much time with Carol, Julia suggested to Carol that she pretended to ask Diana for help in decorating the three bedrooms that I'd assigned her: the two non-master bedrooms in the Main House and the second bedroom in "Mark's Wing", as everyone was insisting on calling it. Carol had already gotten several decorating books out of the Library. One evening she turned up at Diana's house with a bag full of the books, ready to pretend to study them together. Diana introduced Carol to her mother just as "My friend, Carol", without bothering to give a surname, told her mother they were working on a project together, then retired to Diana's bedroom. A while later, Mrs. Norris stuck her nose in the door to find out what they were up to. Carol launched into the explanation we'd prepared, saying that I had just bought a $3 million house and that I'd given Carol a $20,000 budget and the project of decorating three of the bedrooms to help build her self-confidence. Carol said she'd been discussing it with several of her friends, and had visited several of their homes to see their bedrooms. Carol had liked some of the ideas Diana had suggested, so now Diana was working with Carol on the project, adding, "Is that okay, Mrs. Norris? It's going to make Diana pretty busy over the next few weeks. Claire can come along sometimes too, if you'd prefer them to stay together during the day." [By the way, I'd teasingly queried Julia's describing my house as a $3 million one. Julia had pointed out, "They were asking $2.9 million for it and the renovations are estimated at $60,000, so it's 2.96 million. There's nothing wrong in rounding 2.96 to 3 to make it easier to say." It had sounded almost reasonable to me.] With Mrs. Norris, the intent was just to create an impressive sounding excuse for Diana to spend plenty of time with Carol, so they could prepare for and start working on the Cuties and Ducklings. Getting Claire to come along sometimes was a little bonus, which we could use on those times when I wanted to have sex with both of them. It wasn't the absence of Diana and Claire that Mrs. Norris picked up on though. She eagerly asked, "You're Carol ANDERSON? Mark Anderson is your brother? The boy who was in the news a few months ago for being kidnapped?" "Yeah. He's my brother. He's letting me decorate three of the bedrooms, and I'd very much like Diana to help me. Is that okay with you?" "I thought that Mark was just watching. How can he afford to buy such an expensive house?" I'd suggested an explanation slightly different than Prof's, for use when we might want to impress someone. Carol used that now, "Mark's a mathematical genius, and he designed the betting system Prof used for the first bet, with the second obviously being luck, so two-thirds of the money is his." [Not that it mattered to this discussion, but if anyone asked for more details, my betting system was highly complex and took hours to arrive at a single prediction. Prof and I had left Corvallis first thing in the morning, but had to wait until mid-afternoon for the first chance to bet. It was an impractical system because it would produce a very low hourly rate now that no casino was taking large roulette bets anymore, especially not Binion's, which was widely known to be in financial difficulty. Thus even if the few people we told this bullshit to spread it around wider, no one should want to kidnap me for my system.] Mrs. Norris left the room, absentmindedly never answering Carol's questions. Having made her point, Carol waited a while - she and Diana did actually discuss the decorating, as it was a real project - then called me to come pick her up. She packed up the books and went to wait in the kitchen. Seeing Carol, Mrs. Norris had some more questions. Carol was showing her the plans for the house (the architect had scanned in the Main House's plans, had modified them for Mom and Dad's master bedroom, and had added "Mark's Wing"), when Carol mentioned that I was coming to pick her up in a couple of minutes. Mrs. Norris exclaimed, "Mark's coming HERE?" "Just to pick me up." "MACKENZIE! Mark's coming here NOW!" yelled Mrs. Norris, rushing into the living room, and confusing the heck out of Carol and Diana. Moments later Mackenzie came flying out of the living room and running down to her room, closely followed by her mother, yelling at her to hurry. Five minutes later, a breathless and VERY much better dressed and made-up Mackenzie rushed into the kitchen, worriedly asking, "Is he still coming?", while her mother was trailing behind, still brushing Mackenzie's hair. By now Carol had added the clues together and had easily arrived at an answer of "= Pathetically Money Hungry Idiots", but she restrained her answer to, "Yes." There'd been no cunning plan behind my picking up Carol; I'd just been the most convenient person to do so. It could easily have been Ava, Mom or Dad, but it just happened to be me (I was her fiancé, after all). It wasn't ideal, as I was worried about Claire and Diana showing the magnitude of their feelings for me to their parents, so I wasn't going to go inside, merely 'buzz' Carol's cellphone when I arrived outside. Carol had already told Diana and Claire to stay inside, and why. They were sad, but they understood that seeing me for a few seconds wasn't worth the risk. No one else in the house knew that I was just going to wait outside. During the wait, Carol repeated her question to Mrs. Norris, "Is it okay for Diana to help me on my decorating project?" Mrs. Norris was barely listening, too busy doing her own scheming, "Yes, yes. Of course." "Claire can come sometimes too?" "That's fine." "Can I come to what?" asked Claire, who'd just come into the kitchen, to see what all the commotion was about. A couple of minutes later Carol's phone trilled once. Carol looked at it, saw it was from me, then said, "Mark's here. Bye," and started leaving the house. Needless to say, that didn't suit the previously arrived at "Pathetically Money Hungry Idiots." They panicked and flustered, doing a remarkably good impression of chickens with their heads cut off. "Wait! Wait! Isn't Mark coming inside?" "No. He's waiting in his car. Bye." Mackenzie and Mrs. Norris rushed after Carol, leaving Diana and Claire to laugh their heads off (weak necks must be a family failing). I was sitting in my car, when I looked out to see Carol being frantically chased by Mackenzie and Mrs. Norris. My first fear was that my dalliances with her younger daughters had been discovered, but I realized that Mrs. Norris didn't look angry. There was no sign of a gun-toting Mr. Norris either, so that was good. Carol was smiling, and Mackenzie was... , actually I wasn't sure what Mackenzie was, because she had a strange expression on her face. It didn't appear likely to be related to "You just fucked my little sisters," so I relaxed somewhat. Carol arrived at the passenger's door, which was already unlocked and opened a few inches to make it easier for her. NP is useful in dozens of little ways, especially if you're lazy and it's nighttime so no one can see. Mrs. Norris and Mackenzie arrived at my door, and OOZED sucking-up at me. They clearly wanted to talk, so I hit the button to lower my window, that being the least I could do. "How are you, Mark? We haven't seen you for a long time?" "I'm fine thank you. How are you enjoying your summer vacation, Mackenzie?" "Fine. Ahh, no! It's very boring. I wish I had something to do." Carol was inside the car by now, which easily gave her enough privacy to lean over and whisper in my ear, "They're after your money." I'd pretty much arrived at that conclusion myself, as I'd seen OOZE several times recently. I could easily have driven away, but this was an opportunity not to be missed. Not for Mackenzie of course, I wasn't the least bit tempted to add her to the threesome I was having with her sisters. Well, to be honest, I was tempted, but it just wasn't practical. Sooner or later (and my money was on "very sooner"), Mackenzie would piss me off. I didn't want her knowing ANYTHING. #7: #4: #7: #1: #8: #7: [A little reminder for my readers: In 3A-land my first and only date with Mackenzie had ended right after I got my license back from her father. No magic tricks, no flirting with her sisters, no "No I won't have sex with you Mackenzie" classroom scene in school, and no phone to her parents to pretend to be protecting my sisters by asking about Mackenzie's sisters' morals.] I needed to say something so I stalled for time saying, "You should find yourself a boyfriend, Mackenzie. Summer vacation is an ideal opportunity to spend a lot of time with someone so you can get to know each other." Meanwhile my other six active minds were busy working out how to turn Mackenzie's silliness to our advantage. I couldn't see it, because it was behind Mackenzie's back, but proximity showed me that Mrs. Norris was frantically nudging her daughter. Mackenzie summoned the courage, or had it nudged into her, to say, "Ahh, Mark. I've been thinking about that. My father messed things up for us after our first date, but that was ages ago and he knows he was wrong..." Mrs. Norris jumped in with, "He was saying just the other day how sorry he was about that." Then she nudged Mackenzie's back again. Mackenzie continued, "Ahh. So maybe we could go out again. Wherever you want; it's up to you." #3: #8: #1: (With mock righteous indignation), #8: #1: #8: #1: #8 told us, and we liked it, so we consented to his using the mouth. (Normally I don't bother writing my mental exchanges in that level of detail, but that's usually how we decide what to say or do when there's any degree of importance involved.) I said, "You'll go on whatever sort of date I want?" "Yes, of course," agreed Mackenzie, encouraged by her mother's nudges. "So you'd agree to go to a topless beach, where the girls sunbathe just wearing bikini bottoms and no tops?" "Ahh..." Mackenzie was rather hesitant over that idea. Her mom paused only briefly, then resumed the nudging. So Mackenzie added, "Ahh. Yes. If that's what you want." Mackenzie was going to have bruises on her back when this conversation was over. That wouldn't be a good look at a topless beach. Not that it mattered to me, because... "That's the difference between you and me, Mackenzie. I live my life according to very strict moral standards, and I wouldn't dream of compromising them to impress someone else. Your morals are too 'flexible' for you to be suitable as my girlfriend. I don't want another date with you. Goodbye." I hit the "Up" button for my window, started my car, and drove off. My last glance in my rear view mirror showed me mother and daughter arguing in the street. At times like this I really wish I had a sound blob, because I'd love to park around the corner and send sight and sound blobs back to check out the argument. It'd be VERY funny. Carol was laughing already. She laughed most of the way home, teasing me about being supposedly so moral. She loved me anyway, so that was all right. At the beginning of this section, a couple of thousand words ago, I said there was highly amusing deviation in my plan for the good Norris girls. I haven't gotten to it yet. It happened the next morning. Carol got a call from Diana just after breakfast, asking, "Carol, Mom wants me to ask you if you'll help me and Claire with some clothes shopping today?" "Sure, that'd be fun." Clearly there's nothing out of the ordinary in one girl asking another girl to go clothes shopping. As best I can tell, half the female population asks the other half to do that on alternate days. Girls go shopping at the drop of a hat. or even if they hear a rumor that next season's fashions are going to include dropped hats. Carol didn't ask why Mrs. Norris wanted Carol's help, or why Diana and Claire needed new clothes, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about Carol's instant acceptance either. Girls don't need reasons to go clothes shopping (if there's ever one fundamental truth that's found to be consistent across every dimension of the entire Universe, that'd be it). I discovered the "highly amusing deviation" to my plan when I picked them up after their shopping had finished at 4pm. I immediately noticed that Diana and Claire were both looking very pretty, in nicely low-cut tops (all low-cut tops are "nicely low cut", but you know what I mean). NONE of the Norris girls wear low-cut tops! They're a good Christian family, and therefore modest dressers. They're not nearly as insane about their modesty as Chloe Moon had been, but they still take it seriously. That's assuming that 3A's Norrises are the same as in 3B-land, because it was there that I hit against the parents' moral attitudes. The very small sexual content of my magic tricks, even just saying "bra and panties" to the mother, had resulted in pursed lips and disapproving looks. I had NEVER seen any Norris female in a top that showed cleavage before (Claire barely had enough breast to be able to create cleavage, but she was working hard on it). I had no doubt that Mrs. Norris would disapprove of their tops, except I had a funny feeling that she wouldn't. I decided to do some subtle fishing, "NICE tops girls! You both look good enough to eat." "{Giggle}," from Claire. | Diana said, "{Giggle}. Carol said you'd like them." "I bet you didn't need Carol to tell you that! You know that I'm going to love anything that shows your delightful figures..." "{Giggle}," x 2. " ... Let's get your bags in the car and you can tell me all about it while we're driving. Now I've got a TERRIBLE problem. Which one of you should sit in the front? Because I want to look down both your tops." "{Giggle}," x 2. In the car, Diana explained the situation, between laughs. Last evening her mother had been annoyed that Mackenzie had failed to restart her extremely brief relationship with me. She could hardly blame Mackenzie for it either, as she'd put the words into Mackenzie's mouth. At the same time, Mrs. Norris was also VERY impressed by me. I was extremely rich, obviously highly moral, and I was even very nice to my sister by giving her $20,000 to decorate with. Which also implied that I was generous, another good trait in a potential son-in-law. So all things considered, Mrs. Norris walked back into her house a very frustrated woman. Where she saw Diana and Claire still in the kitchen. Diana being Carol's very good friend, who was helping her decorate my $3 million house, and who'd doubtless be meeting me many times, and who was only a year younger than me, something Mrs. Norris was very well aware of thanks to the driver's license saga. That surely meant Diana was a better prospect for a girlfriend than Mackenzie, because guys don't normally go out with girls older than them. Even better, Diana was a very good girl (her mother knew), so Mark would probably like her. Mrs. Norris was right about that, although her reasoning wasn't exactly on target. Mrs. Norris had no idea about the magnitude of my success with girls these wonderful days. In 3B-land, Mackenzie had tried to throw that fact into her parents' faces as an accusation against me. They hadn't believed it there, but the accusation hadn't even occurred in 3A-land. As far as this Mrs. Norris knew, I was a good boy, as very recently demonstrated. Mackenzie hadn't told her parents otherwise, or she would've gotten in trouble for dating me in the first place. So Mrs. Norris asked, "Diana, do you think Mark likes you?" During our first forest love-nest date, when I'd explained my hymen busting plan to the girls, I'd talked about related issues, including what the girls should tell their parents if my attitudes to them [the girls] came up. I'd taken the easy way out, simply copying what 3B had done. Diana answered, "He treats me and Claire very nicely. He says we remind him of his sisters. You wouldn't believe how nice he is to his sisters! He's the best brother I've EVER heard of. Carol and Donna can't stop raving about how nice he is to them. He thinks I'm like Carol and Claire's like Donna, so he's very protective of us." "Protective?" asked Mrs. Norris, surprised by the unexpected description (that I'd told Diana to use in this situation). "Yes. He's VERY protective. I remember just over a year ago when Carol's was getting hassled by some boys in our class. Mark came down from high school and Mr. Johnson let him speak at the beginning of class. Mark told the boys off, 'specially Ed Miller. Remember him? He was annoying Carol too. Mark told the boys off REALLY good, and they didn't dare hassle her after that. He was very nice to Carol, and was sorry that he'd embarrassed her by speaking up in class, but he was so upset that she was getting hassled that he had to do something. I WISH I had a brother like him!" Diana's example was her own invention as I hadn't suggested it. Her last wish was doubtless very sincere too, after all, she was already sexually active with a sister, so why not a brother as well? Mrs. Norris liked to hear how wonderful I was, but "protective" wasn't exactly the ideal basis of the relationship she had in mind for Diana and me. She asked, "Do you think Mark would like you to be his girlfriend?" "MOM!" objected Mackenzie. "Diana can't be his girlfriend!" "Why not?" countered Mrs. Norris. "She's a year younger than him, which is perfect. He likes good girls, and Diana is very well behaved. If he thinks Diana's like his sister Carol, then he must like Diana already." "But Mark's got far too many girlfriends already. Diana wouldn't be safe with him. He..." "What are you TALKING ABOUT?" "Mark has lots of girlfriends. He plays around a LOT, Mom. He wouldn't be..." "I don't believe that for a second. We just heard him say that he didn't want you because you'd take your top off..." "That was YOUR idea! I didn't want to agree..." "Whose idea it was doesn't matter. He didn't want it. He's obviously a good boy, and you're obviously jealous over your sister." "I am NOT jealous! I'm trying to PROTECT Diana. Mark will try to have sex with her..." "He will NOT!" interrupted Mrs. Norris, in the way self-proclaimed moral people always interrupt others. They're so sure of themselves they have no interest in listening to anyone else's different, and therefore obviously wrong, opinions. She should be an English teacher. Diana, who was thrilled by her mother's wanting her to be my girlfriend, was thoroughly enjoying this discussion. I'd told her what to say in the event of my liking her came up, and now was an appropriate moment, so she backed up her favorite mother with, "Mark thinks I'm just like Carol, Mom. He even treats me like his sister. He's the same with Claire too. No way would he touch us. He's the NICEST boy I know! He's WONDERFUL!" Diana was getting a little carried away. Fortunately her mother was so sure of herself that she wasn't paying attention. She'd already dismissed Mackenzie's jealousy-inspired silliness, and was now worrying about how to overcome my treating Diana as my sister. That was a worrisome issue (how little Mrs. Norris knew!). "Yeah. What Diana said!" agreed Claire. "Do you think you could make him aware you're not like his sister?" asked Mrs. Norris "MOM! You can't be serious," protest Mackenzie again. "Mark's a terrible choice for Diana. He's..." "I won't hear another bad word out of your mouth, Mackenzie. Mark's obviously a good boy, and you're obviously jealous. Go to your room and think about your selfishness." "You don't know what you're doing..." "GO TO YOUR ROOM, YOUNG LADY!" "FINE! Don't say I didn't warn you when Diana comes home pregnant." Mentioning the dreaded "P"-word caused Mrs. Norris to ERUPT! She started screaming at her daughter, who screamed back, while Diana and Claire had major difficulties restraining their laughter. After Mackenzie had stomped off, and Mrs. Norris had regained her composure, she turned to Diana to ask again, "Do you think you'll be able to make Mark think of you as a possible girlfriend?" "He just thinks I'm like his little sister. He's VERY nice to his sisters, and he's not like Mackenzie said. He's NEVER looked at me badly, like other boys do." "I'm sure you're right. I'll speak to Mackenzie later. The problem is how to make him think that you might be a good girlfriend for him. I think you'd be perfect, but we need to get Mark to think that." "How Mom?" "Can you flirt with him a little?" "I've never flirted before. You said it was bad." "I meant with most boys. It's okay with boys as good as Mark." "I'll try, but I don't think I'll be very good at it. It'll probably take Mark a long time before he notices. Maybe all summer." Diana was dreaming how wonderful summer could be if she was encouraged to spend all of it flirting with me. "Maybe you could ask Carol to tell him you like him." Diana knew what her mother meant, but that idea took far too little time; the "all summer" idea was far better. So Diana said, "He already knows I like him. He likes me too. That's what I said about him treating me like his little sister." "I meant that you like him like a girlfriend does, not like a sister." "Oh no. I couldn't do that! What'd happen if he didn't like me like that? Mark's not like what Mackenzie said. If I said that, he wouldn't want to be around me. It's too sudden, Mom. It'd be better that I tried to flirt with him, but I'd have to do it very slowly so I didn't scare him off." "That could take too long, darling. You've got to act quickly before some other girl snaps him up. Other girls can play dirty when they get greedy. Do you know if he has a girlfriend already?" Diana knew the only possible answer to that, "I know he hasn't. I talk with Carol a lot, and she's told me that he doesn't. He's very fussy, not like what Mackenzie said." "Good. But we'd better not waste time. He's going to be helpless if some slut gets her claws into him." "I don't think Mark would have anything to do with someone like that." "Trust me, Diana, boys ALWAYS fall for sluts. They can't help themselves. Maybe that's what we have to do." "What Mom?" asked Diana, having to work hard to hide her eagerness to be my slut. "If you undo some buttons on your tops, and let him see you a little, he'll realize you're not the same as his sister. Boys notice things like that very quickly." If you've read this far through my autobiography, you'll have learned enough about how girls think to see the same thing Diana saw: her mother had just given her THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY! Diana DIDN'T DARE waste a second, in case it slipped from her grasp. She IMMEDIATELY went straight for the main prize, "But Mom, I don't have any suitable clothes. You'll have to give me some money so I can buy some." "That's a good idea. Not too many..." "Of course not," said Diana, honestly intending to purchase exactly the right number of new clothes. "It's tricky. You don't want to get clothes that are too slutty, because we know Mark doesn't like girls like that; but you need clothes that'll still attract his attentions. Do you think Carol knows what sort of clothes Mark likes girls to wear?" "I'm POSITIVE she does. Mark and Carol spend a lot of time together; they're like best friends. I can easily ask Carol to help me, and she'll know exactly what I should get. Oh boy, this is fantastic!" Her mother's sudden look warned Diana that she might have said too much, so Diana quickly added, "Mark is a VERY good boy, Mom. I know that because I've seen him with Carol and Donna, and he's always been very nice to me and Claire. I've never wanted a boyfriend before, but you're right about Mark. You're very smart." "What about me?" asked Claire. "Can I get some new clothes for Mark too?" "Of course not," refused Mrs. Norris instantly. "They're just to help Diana attract Mark's attention. You don't need to do that." "Aww. It's not fair. I like Mark too..." Diana could see disaster looming. She couldn't really blame Claire for it either because giving one sister carte blanche to go shopping, but excluding the other, is intolerable. No girl could be expected to keep quiet under circumstances as extreme as that. Plus there was also the factor that both girls were equally my lover, but that's relatively insignificant. I made a big deal out of treating both girls equally often enough that it easily gave Diana an idea about what to say, "Mom, what Claire said isn't so dumb. Mark makes a big deal out of togetherness. He's very close to both of his sisters, and they are to each other too. He's often said that he likes that Claire and I are so often together. That's one of the ways we remind him of his sisters. If I start wearing new and different types of clothes, but Claire doesn't, Mark might think we're being separate, which wouldn't be good. Or maybe he might think I'm trying to trick him, and that wouldn't be good either. I think it's important that Claire gets some new clothes too, that way Mark will keep having good thoughts about both of us." And then Diana said something that made it stunningly clear how much she loved me. Getting her mother to agree to keep pushing her toward me was so important that Diana made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure her mother's idea was acted on. It had to hurt, but she managed to find the willpower to force herself to volunteer, "I'll spend less on myself, so we can buy some new clothes for Claire too." "Goody!" enthused Claire. Mrs. Norris's memory of what it was like to be a teenager was badly obscured by years of thinking morally (moral people tend to deny their own realities), but she hadn't forgotten about the most important issue, so she appreciated the magnitude of Diana's concession. She just didn't believe it, so had to check, "You'll buy less for yourself so you can buy some clothes for Claire?" "Yeah. I think that's what will work with Mark best. Treating people fairly is important to him, so if he saw me in new clothes and Claire in old ones, he wouldn't feel good about us." "He'd just be seeing you though wouldn't he Diana? You wouldn't want Claire with you when you're seeing Mark." "Oh no!" as Claire's tantrum threatened. Diana urged, "Shut up, Claire." -- To her mother, Diana quickly and loudly added (so Claire would pay attention), "Claire HAS to come, Mom. You don't know Mark the way I do. He likes seeing me and Claire together, and he wouldn't like it if I started coming without her. Donna would keep asking where Claire was too. If Mark thinks I'm only coming because I want to be his girlfriend and I'm dumping Claire at home, he won't like me anymore." "You might be right..." "I AM right. Also, you won't have to worry about me and Mark doing things that only married people should, because Claire will be with me. Mark wouldn't do things like that, but Claire should make you feel safer." "That's true." Then the discussion moved on to the REALLY important issue: how many new outfits the two girls needed. Diana's recounting continued into the discussion of how many new outfits she needed, but I urgently cut her off by saying, "This is FANTASTIC! Well done you two. I'm VERY impressed that you tricked your mother so well. I'm very impressed by the clothes you bought too, judging by the two samples I'm looking at now." Which was probably a tactical mistake, because the last thing you want to do is encourage girls to talk about clothes. However I actually enjoyed what followed (today truly was a lucky day). Diana said, "Claire and I talked about it for ages last night. We decided we had to get clothes that could be very sexy for you, but we could adjust to be less sexy when we were at home, because Mom wouldn't like us to look sexy. So all the clothes we bought are adjustable. Well, not quite all of them. There was a dress that had a..." "Please don't spoil the surprise for me. I'll see it when you wear it." "Oh, okay. It's a very nice dress though. You like it, don't you Carol?" #1: #5: Carol agreed with Diana, "It's a wonderful dress. I really like the way the two colors layer on..." "Cough, cough. Oh, I'm sorry. Was I interrupting?" "Haha. Sorry Mark. Diana, we'll talk about that dress later when Mark's not around. Boys like looking at clothes but not talking about them. I don't know why they're so illogical, but they are. Go on with your main story." Carol gave me a smile just to reinforce that she liked to pull my leg. "Okay. What was I talking about?" I helpfully answered, "How most of your clothes are adjustable for more or less sexiness." "Oh yeah. You've got a good memory." "Yes I do." "Like the top I've got on now. I can pull it up and do up the buttons." She did as she said. I said, "Aww. That's NOWHERE near as attractive as it was before." "That's for when I'm at home. When I'm with you I'll wear it the other way." "In that case, let me point out that you're with me now." "Haha. I get the hint. I'll put it back." "Good girl. No wonder I like you so much." A couple of seconds later and all was well with the world again. I'll tell you something that's extremely difficult to do when you're looking at a girl in a low-cut top - to actually look at the TOP. It took me nearly a minute to notice something. "Diana, I just noticed the top has another button you haven't undone yet?" "That's needed to hold it up, or it'll fall down." "Oh no! That'd be TERRIBLE. I can't imagine what a DISASTER that'd be. How could I possibly survive the shock of seeing something as appalling and scary as that..." "Haha. You're very funny. Would you like me to undo the button, even though the top might fall down?" "I think I'd like you to undo it BECAUSE it might fall down. In fact, if it doesn't fall down, the next thing I'm going to ask is for you to push it down." "But I'll look silly sitting in my bra with the top around my waist." "Why don't we try it and see? Personally I think you'll look sexy, and I'll have a great deal of fun imagining what you'd look like if the top fell down one day when you weren't wearing a bra. Before you do that, where are we driving to? Back to your home or somewhere else?" Carol said, "We rushed to finish the shopping early so we'd have time to go somewhere else for a while. We've got an hour until the stores shut and their parents will expect them home." Which really wasn't long enough to do anything (where "anything" means "have wild sex"). The girls would need to be showered, calmed down and completely dry before I took them home, which didn't leave enough time. It was a pity they hadn't rushed their shopping a bit more, and left us three or four hours to play in, but I was being foolish to think that sex with the guy they were head over heels in love with was worth sacrificing that much shopping time. I said, "With the time we've got, the best thing to do would be to talk for a while. I'd enjoy that." That was far from ideal, but they had cut their shopping short by an hour, and that's the sort of sacrifice that should be appreciated for what they thought it was worth. "Can we see your new house please, Mark? Carol's told us all about it." "Once we own it you'll visit many times, but the best I can do today is to show you from the road. We can't go inside the property yet because the existing owners are still there. Is that good enough for you?" "That'd be great, thanks. I'm very excited about it." I had no idea why Diana should be excited about it, but excited was perfect, so I wasn't going to jeopardize it by asking. "Me too!" added Claire from the backseat. I had even less idea why Claire should be excited. If she was anything like Donna, she couldn't care less about anything except the horse. Which gave me the idea to ask, "Have you heard that Donna's getting a horse, Claire?" "YES! I LOVE horses. Donna said I can come over whenever I want to ride her horse, so I'll be able to have sex with you a lot too. I can't wait until you move into your new house. It's going to be fantastic!" There were several problems with that explanation. For some of them, I decided that the best thing to do would be to say nothing about it for now, but to have a talk with Donna at the first opportunity. Dozens of horse-crazy girls turning up "whenever they wanted" to ride Donna's horse might not work out too well. Carol wasn't so circumspect. She laughed briefly, then explained, "You won't be able to come over whenever you want, Claire. Horses can be dangerous, so you'll need to have supervision every time. Mark likes you a great deal, so I'm sure you'll get heaps of invites. If you fall off and the horse stood on you, you'd want someone there to make it get off, wouldn't you?" I got distracted at that point, because Diana's top fell down, leaving her sitting in her bra. I praised and encouraged her, making sure to mention, "I like that top! Any top that can fall down is a VERY good top in my opinion, especially on a girl as pretty as you. Now I can have a nice dream imagining that top falling down one day when you're not wearing a bra." "Do you want me to take it off now?" "An EXCELLENT suggestion Diana, but I think there's too much chance of someone seeing us today. We'll definitely do that some other day though. And thank you for your offer. You're a wonderful girlfriend." "I'll do it too," insisted Claire. "Only I don't have so much to show you." "Claire, you know I spend exactly equal time with you as Diana. You're equal in my eyes." I'll skip quoting the rest of the reassuring. Conversations like this are why I would've preferred the girls finished shopping a couple of hours earlier, so we would be too busy to talk, but such is life. I showed them the house from the road. Looking down the drive gave quite a good view of it, so that was good. I quickly described the various changes we were going to make, and they got interested enough to ask lots of questions. Apparently the female monopoly on house buying is a genetic imperative that starts quite early. After that we drove somewhere quiet, parked and talked. Mostly we talked about the amusing mistake their mother was making, and how we were going to use it. I liked Diana's idea that I would be slow to notice. For our going-slow strategy to work, their mother had to be given some hope, so after I dropped them off, they would tell their mother that I said they looked pretty. On their birthdays, I could buy them a little gift, and maybe even include a birthday card with a single "x" after my signature if I was getting really wild. Things like that. We didn't want to show Mrs. Norris too much, so we decided that when I drop them off, I'll have Carol beside me on the front seat, with the Norris girls sitting in the rear. That seemed safer, and the girls could tell their mother it was because I got along with my sisters so well. If Mrs. Norris learned that I had a girlfriend, it'd almost certainly be Julia that was named. We hoped that didn't happen, but if it did, I told the girls to say that Julia had started as my girlfriend, but was now Carol's girlfriend because Carol had recently become a lesbian. Carol wanted to keep her orientation quiet, so Julia hung around me to have an excuse to be with Carol. Julia's not being my real girlfriend anymore meant that I was looking for a new girlfriend to replace her, but I was so moral that I was taking it very carefully. That wasn't an ideal story, as the Norrises would probably worry about Carol's sexual depravity - somehow I felt sure they didn't approve of lesbianism - but it wasn't actually my depravity (I wasn't likely to succumb to lesbianism, although it did have much to recommend it), and we thought their greed would triumph over what they thought were their morals. We discussed a few other things, until I ran out of ideas. That actually improved the conversation, because Carol started discussing some of the ideas she had for making the Cuties and Ducklings more sexually active. That conversation was great fun to listen to. I recognized Julia's hand in many of Carol's ideas, but that was fine, as it was going to be Carol who'd be carrying them out, and I could already see that she was confidently looking forward to it. When it was time to take the girls home, we moved Carol to the front seat and the Norris girls adjusted their clothing so they were only slightly sexy. Boring in my eyes, but probably on the edge of acceptability for their mother. At their house, Carol and I got out (the SC430 is a two-door car, so we had to get out to let backseat passengers out), and we helped to unload their bags. We were piling them up when Mrs. Norris came out and invited us in for a drink. I politely but firmly declined. Hopefully she'd get the idea that I disapproved of Mackenzie. It certainly didn't apply to the younger sisters, because I was openly friendly to them when I wished them goodbye. ------- Chapter 274: Two Important Meetings: With OSU and Mom Thursday, July 28 to Saturday, August 13, 2005 (Continued) I had some important meetings at OSU on August 10 and 11. I'd lost three weeks of studying time during our trip to Europe, but by mid-August I'd done about five weeks' worth over summer. I'd completed quite a few courses, as my studying speed had increased to about two weeks per course per screen. The increase was partly from studying for more hours because I needed less sleep, partly because I didn't lose as many nights to 'social activities' as I had while at school, and partly because not only were the second-year courses not slowing me down, but I was actually doing them somewhat faster than the first year courses, as I was into the swing of college studying by now. None of the courses had been completed formally because I couldn't do any of the required lab work and I wasn't allowed to take the old exams. I'd have to wait until OSU restarted before those could be taken care of. But before OSU could prepare for my studies next year, it needed to confirm that I really was doing as well as Prof claimed. That rate of learning was, not to put too fine a point on it, unbelievable. The Dean got several of the lecturers for the courses I'd said I'd finished studying to come in at staggered intervals on the 10th. I spent an hour with each of them, being examined verbally and/or with written questions they'd prepared. Whatever suited them, as it was only informal. With eight minds and near perfect memory, I aced them. By the end of the day, the Dean knew that I'd mastered one-sixth each of two degrees in just over one month's studying. The next day Prof, Mom and I had a meeting with the Dean about what OSU was going to do for me. The short version was, "Whatever I wanted." The Dean was very excited to have me at OSU. He had considerable trouble believing I could've learned that much material, but I'd been examined one-on-one by several lecturers the previous day, and they'd all reported that I had their subject down pat, so he had to believe it. They'd carefully checked for cheating, and it just wasn't a possibility under the circumstances of my testing. Prof had recommended against telling the Dean that I could read seven or eight screens at once, and as far as the Dean knew, I was still using the two-screen system OSU had paid for. We encourage his belief in my learning rate by telling him that I only needed three or four hours of sleep per night, and that I read EXTREMELY rapidly and with almost perfect comprehension. Those being far easier to believe than what I really did. For my coming academic year's studies, there were several types of problems that had to be solved: Exams couldn't wait until the end of the academic year. I'd have something like a totally impractical 110 of them, depending on the amount of cross-crediting that could be done. Plus I shouldn't really be studying later courses before I'd taken the exams for their prerequisites. Exams would have to be written for me as I went. Every month or two I'd have to spend a few days doing exams. That didn't worry me as I wouldn't have to study for them, but it meant a great deal of extra work for OSU. Quite a few of the courses I'd be doing required that I physically attend OSU. Several of them required lab work (in the Physics degree mostly), some were discussion-driven at times (especially the Business courses), and there were the BCC courses (such as "Lifetime Fitness: Running") where I sometimes had to prove I could do something (e.g., run in circles). The Business degree was especially troublesome, as it had several group projects. The group nature of those projects was important, because business people have to learn to work in teams and to manage people. These were real problems for me because - for any specific course - those "physical attendance required" workloads were spread throughout the courses' normal timetables, in the worst case over the entire academic year, while I'd be finishing each course in two weeks. By the time OSU restarted, I'd have finished reading the online lectures for about three dozen courses. We wanted those to be formally completed as quickly as possible, which meant lots of urgent exam writing for those lecturers. It had to be done urgently too, because a month later I'd be ready for another dozen exams. There was also a great deal of bureaucracy involved, none of which I gave two hoots about, especially because the Dean was the boss bureaucrat. There were quite a few criteria that I was bound by and which the Dean couldn't overrule, but he could get OSU to do whatever was required to make sure they were met in ways that were convenient for me. It was going to be a great deal of extra work for the lecturers, all 70 or 80 of them! But the Dean insisted that most of them would be excited at being able to boast of having taught Mark Anderson. If any of the lecturers proved to be unhelpful, I'd only have to mention it to the Department Head, who'd quickly fix the problem. I expressed my concern about my ability to do the hard courses at the end of each degree, whether I could do them at all, or at anything like my current rate. Neither Prof nor the Dean cared about my concern. They cared about it so little they barely listened to my comment, so I repeated it. The Dean waved it away with, "They're only undergraduate courses, Mark," (we're on a first name basis). "They're just book learning, which you've demonstrated considerable ability at, but if you do have problems, slow down to whatever rate works for you. We can cater to your going slower; it's keeping up with you that we have to make sure we can do. Let us know if you need to slow down, and we'll discuss its effects then." Essentially, everything that I needed would be done for me, as efficiently as OSU could do it, even if they had to bend more than a few normal procedures. There was one aspect that Prof and I had badly underestimated: the amount of time I'd have to spend at OSU. Math - being the excellent, knowledge-based subject that it is - suits online learning very well. That's not as true for Physics, as various courses require a minimum number of hours of lab work, and especially not true for Business Studies, which has a lot of group work. I was going to be spending a lot more time at OSU than I'd previously thought; probably even more time than I'd be spending at high school. It was hard to complain about that, college being considerably more important than school, but it was a pity. Given a choice of doing lab work at OSU, or being with Julia, Carol and Ava at school, I know where I'd rather be. It did mean that reproducing my multi-screen computer system at school would probably not be worthwhile anymore, as most of the time I'd be spending at school would be spent catching up with the school stuff that I'd missed recently. I was happy to drop the computer system idea, as I'd been imagining it causing envy, teacher's pet ridicule, theft and vandalism (it wouldn't be "causing" vandalism - that'd be the assholes' fault - but you know what I mean). Plus the teachers might've gotten upset with me for making them come to my room, rather than the usual reverse of that. [When school restarted, I ended up just taking a good laptop with wifi access to school, so I could read one lecture or do online research, as the Business degree needed a lot of research.] A few days after the above meeting with the Dean, on August 15, I had a short meeting with him again, plus the three DHs of: Physics, Business Studies and Math, the latter I'd already met ("DH" means "Department Head". Math and Physics were just departments, while Business was actually classified as a distinct college, but I'll call all of them DH's for convenience. For Business, take "DH" to mean "Da Head of da college", if you like). A few other interested people were invited too. It was just a casual meet-each-other meeting. The Dean had thought it was a good idea for them to meet the guy who'd be causing them so much extra work. I spent half the meeting apologizing for the extra work I was causing them; they spent half of it expressing incredulity at my genius and presumed ability to do three degrees in one year. It was rather embarrassing, but they seemed very positive about fast-tracking my courses for me. After the meeting I collected Donna and we went to buy her horse, which was a lot more fun than a boring meeting. ------- Skipping back a couple of days, to August 13, which was about three weeks after we'd returned home from Europe. Mom called a family-plus-Julia conference, to discuss our three-way marriage proposal. Mom revealed that her insecurity about male faithfulness came from her father having an affair when Mom was a young teenager. He'd been caught, promised not to do it again, then he did it again with the same woman, got caught again, and Mom's parents' marriage had gone through a terrible time that almost destroyed the family. That's why Mom's mother had insisted the family leave England, to get far away from "That Woman". Grandfather had found a job in Corvallis, a place That Woman would have no excuse to come to, so the family had moved here for several years, until That Woman had died in an automobile accident. Her father's infidelity and the resultant mess had affected teenage-Mom badly. That had been why it'd taken the too popular teenage-Dad so long to convince teenage-Mom to date him initially, and why Mom had been so fearful ever since. All of which was news to Dad, who couldn't make up his mind between being supportive of Mom for divulging it now, or being pissed off that she'd kept it secret for their entire relationship, or laughing at her for being so silly. We all understood that it explained why Mom had been trying to protect Carol from marrying too popular and FAR too sexually active me. Our situation was quite different from Mom's parents' though. That I was a superhuman wasn't particularly significant in Mom's eyes, because Mom was identifying with Carol. But what was confusing Mom was that Carol and Julia enjoyed taking an active role in my 'affairs', and that Carol was blossoming from being in a three-way relationship with Julia and me; even if only a half-consummated and not yet ceremonially vowed three-way relationship. Ava's inclusion confused Mom even more. Mom liked Ava and thought our supporting her through her parents' approaching deaths was wonderful, but Ava's having sex with me seemed wrong, so Mom thought Carol should get upset about it. Except that now Carol was happily having sex with Ava too. Because Mom and Dad knew about Carol's kink, Carol was quite open with Mom about some of the naughty things that she and Ava did in front of other people, usually the Cuties. Nothing heavy, but still quite a few things which Carol clearly very much enjoyed doing. Most importantly, Carol and Ava got along very well as friends. There was heaps of good friendship, and no jealousy whatsoever, between Julia, Carol and Ava. No jealousy from me either, when the girls got together without me; not that Mom spent any time worrying about me being jealous. The Closing Date for our new house arrived and the sale went through without a hitch on August 9, and the women had started getting frantically busy even before that. (Strangely, the guys had very little to do, other than work on our existing house to get it ready for sale, which was really a separate project.) Carol, Julia and Ava had worked together very well during that frantic period. Some of my lovers or would-be lovers had parents who were in jobs useful for someone moving into a new house. The girl whose father owned a kitchen store, for example. Quite a few of the girls enthusiastically volunteered their parents' help, discounts, or other special treatment. The amusing thing was that it was usually Julia or Carol that brought the girls' offers to Mom's and Vanessa's attention (I didn't know more than a fraction of the thousands of things the moms were working on). Some of those parents turned out to be quite useful to us. Given the load the women were under, Mom greatly appreciated having useful help. Mom knew, because Julia explicitly told her, that we'd only received that help because I was 'unfaithful'. Despite my "sleeping with half the girls in Corvallis" (guess whose words those were), our three-way almost-marriage was working very well. We were doing all the things married couples should do: caring for each other, supporting each other, had heaps of open and honest communication, made plenty of time for each other, enjoyed being together, etc. Mom not only couldn't fault our relationship, she was even forced to admit that it was working very well. Apart from all the extramarital sex that is, but everyone else thought that was great, leaving Mom as the only person who thought it was a problem. It was difficult for Mom to justify calling it a "problem" since she couldn't point to a single negative consequence, other than silly things like "Other people won't respect Mark for sleeping around so much", or, "It might be a problem later." The usual risk of my running off with the other girl was laughingly dismissed with, "If she's any good, she can join us; if she's not any good, Mark won't leave us." Plus there'd been several "other girls" already (e.g., Ava), who weren't exactly proving themselves to be a terrible threat to our marriage. Nor could Mom claim that she had to protect Carol because Carol didn't have the understanding to protect herself. After two months of our being engaged, Carol had a good idea of how the marriage would function. We even argued that Carol had even more understanding than Mom of our unusual relationship. Mom was trying to protect Carol from being hurt, but Carol was thoroughly enjoying and benefiting from the very thing that Mom was trying to protect her from. Carol wanted more of it! Mom's protection was unwanted, ineffective and most importantly, was clearly reducing Carol's enjoyment of our relationship. Carol wanted to consider herself vow-bound to me, and as part of a matrimonial relationship with Julia and me. Carol also felt excluded because she couldn't physically join with me in the way that Julia and Ava did. Mom was holding Carol back from benefiting from a commitment she wanted to make, and Carol was increasingly complaining about the hurt and harm Mom was causing her. Mom was forced to take that complaint seriously, because she could see that Carol truly was missing out on some of the benefits of our good relationship, and was getting angrier about it. Understanding that she was hurting and harming Carol was one of the major points that swung the balance. Another point was that Mom could see that everyone else was losing respect for her. Not in any major sense, but everyone - in both families - knew that Mom was wrong, and the longer Mom waited, the more wrong she was. Her only effective defense was that it was illegal for Carol and me to have sex. If the four of us went to bed together and we all had intercourse with each other - we intended to sleep together in the mansion so that was going to happen regularly - of the twelve A-initiates-intercourse-with-B possibilities, ten of them weren't crimes at all, but two of them (Carol having sex with me, me having sex with her) were the VERY scary Class A felony crimes of rape in the first degree. In three months, when I turned sixteen, it would be legal for Carol to have sex with me, but still rape in the first degree for me to have it with her. The law was an ass. Speaking of "ass", the sex we were having now, and had been having for the last couple of months, was equally as illegal as intercourse, which made it difficult for Mom to use the law as a reason to block our fully consummating our three-way relationship. Carol had already let Mom know what our sexual activities were, and Carol had been very definite that it was going to continue. Because it was such a serious crime, we'd been very careful to be very discreet about it, which Mom knew. She also knew that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to prove that we were raping each other, especially after we moved into our even more secure mansion. The stupid law didn't come close to countering all the other positive points we had. For those reasons, for several minor ones I haven't bothered listing, and after the DOZENS of conversations we'd had about it, Mom finally gave her consent. There was GREAT happiness around the room! We wanted our wedding as soon as possible, choosing the next Saturday, August 20, with a honeymoon from August 22 to September 1. The frantic task of getting ready to furnish and move into a new home, now had "Have A Wedding" thrown into the middle of it. ------- Chapter 275: Our Marriage and Honeymoon Sunday, August 14 to Thursday, September 1, 2005 "Moving In Day" for the mansion - when all the renovations were scheduled to be completed - was promised to be August 23, the day after we'd fly out on our honeymoon. We weren't going to miss the work though. The Main House's renovations had very little effect on our moving in process, as they were restricted to one master bedroom and the basement wall, which were isolated jobs and quickly finished. [As it turned out, my wing's completion was a few days late. It hardly mattered though. It wasn't ready before we flew out, so we left it unfurnished, waiting for our return.] Even though the two families wouldn't be relocating until August 23rd (including Patch, but excluding The Boys, so the number of legs remained constant), Mom kept me busy right up to the wedding. Our old house needed a lot of work. We obviously weren't going to move any of our old, low-quality furniture into the mansion. Maybe one chair might make it into Dad's workshop, but that'd be all. Mom and Dad decided to rent our old house out fully furnished. Just for a while, to see how that worked out. I think they were reluctant to sell it until they'd accepted that the mansion was real, which would probably take a few months. The change in plan for the old house meant Dad and I could stop getting the house ready for sale, but had to start getting it ready for renting (the list of jobs didn't change much), so that kept us busy. Because The Boys were staying at the Williams' existing home, and because if our two families had problems living under the same roof, it'd be Prof and Vanessa who moved out, nearly all the Williams' furniture also stayed in their existing home. So the mansion needed new EVERYTHING! I transferred a whole lot of money out of my account - half into Mom's, half into Vanessa's - and then I asked not to be told how much they were spending, "Because it's sure to hurt." Also because I suspected they'd overspend and end up using some of their own money. I was enough of a genius not to argue with moms about how they could furnish their own home, so I gave them the money and left them to it. As busy as I felt I was, the women were far busier, especially the moms. I felt sorry for them, but we kept the wedding on schedule. We'd waited far too long for it to let mere sympathy get in the way. Speaking of giving people money, Mom and Dad significantly increased Donna's allowance. All the rest of us had money to burn, and were burning through it, so the parents felt sorry for Donna. They told her that her increased allowance was coming out of the money I'd given them, so I got some of the kudos for it. Despite it being a very substantial increase in percentage terms and extremely welcome by Donna, it was small potatoes in comparison to the other spending that was going on at this time. Julia had naturally made several changes to 'my' plan for the wedding (actually 3B-Julia's and -Vanessa's plan). Julia likes organizing things, so there was no way she could resist the fun of reorganizing something as important as our wedding. She had thought it meaningful and appropriate not to change any of the wifely vows I'd written, so they remained unaltered. My not having any vows was retained for the same reasons. The rings that I'd long since picked up from the jeweler's were also kept unchanged, but pretty much everything else was reorganized. Changes included: The parents 'gave away' their daughters (Julia, Carol and I all wanted to make that point to Mom). The subservient nature of the ceremony was diluted by my requesting the removal of the uncertainty over whether I'd accept the vows or not, and by there being more love and friendship material added. By now the three of us were very good friends, so there was plenty to inspire Julia's creativity. Ava attended. The venue was not the Williams' living room, but our new mansion's living room, as the Main House's renovations were finished in time, and had been on a different level anyway. There was one other major change, which is the only part I'll describe in detail: adding the light blob trick I'd thought of for Donna. As I'd expected, Donna's learning about some of the sex that was going on, her seeing Carol and me being very affectionate, and knowing that we exchanged considerably more than "affection" in private, made Donna think it was time she had sex with me too. I'd not encouraged her, had not bought her a vibrator, and had not performed any "nubbin inspections" except when Donna had deliberately let me see them, her seduction strategy having her usual level of subtlety. Nor had I invited her along to anything like 3B's hot tub party with the two dozen girls. Despite all those omissions, Donna's hormones had convinced her that what Carol got, Donna should also get - Donna's hormones being as competitive as the rest of her. Donna had even busted her own cherry to make it easy for me to have sex with her. Donna didn't have a romantic bone in her body, but she a large number of "I Want Mark To Fuck Me" bones. In much the same way as it had in 3B-land, Donna's quest for sex was becoming a nuisance to Julia, Carol and me, and a concern to Mom and Dad. Even Donna's getting her horse hadn't distracted her enough, so I'd described my rather nasty plan to Mom and Dad, who okayed it. Before the wedding, I showed my light blob ability to Andrew and Robert, and separately to Ava. The Boys were VERY impressed, and impressive in how fast they understood some of the implications. Robert asked, "Can you do electromagnetic frequencies beyond visible light?" "I can do infrared, but I'm too scared to try any other frequencies. I can't see them, so I've got no way of knowing what I'm doing, or what the effects are. I know some of those frequencies are dangerous, so I'm leaving them well alone. It's not as if I have a practical use for radiating X-rays, cosmic radiation, or whatever." Andrew asked, "Mom and Dad know you can do this?" "Yes. And that I'm showing you." "No wonder they're so excited about you. I've never heard of anybody doing this, so what does it make you, Mark?" "Human, in case you think otherwise. Julia calls me superhuman, which is excessive but probably the least misleading term. It's hard to know what to call me, because we don't know the reason. A genetic mutation is the favored theory. That's why your parents are so happy with Carol and me becoming lovers." [The Boys were already aware of the theory that I was a genetic mutation, and of the forthcoming wedding and its ostensible purpose: so Carol and I could have children later. The only thing The Boys didn't know was the extent of my abilities. They mainly knew of just my extraordinary genius and marathon running ability, although they certainly suspected much more, from Prof's roulette win, for example.] "What else can you do?" "You know I won the 10k running race. I'm not up to Superman's outrunning bullets, but I do have the endurance to do extraordinarily well in long-distance runs. Also to do well in the bedroom, which I believe Julia might've mentioned once or twice. I can't leap buildings of any height, and I wouldn't get changed in a telephone booth either, mainly because Julia doesn't let me get changed unless she's there to approve of my clothing choice, which would probably exclude my wearing underwear on the outside. Being smart is probably the most important consequence of my presumed mutation. It's what your parents are the most excited by. Making balls of pretty light looks impressive, but its only real use is to very occasionally do something tricky. Like when Prof and I were kidnapped and gagged, I could spell out words to him," I gave them a quick demo. "And it allows me to play a trick on Donna..." I went on to describe the trick I had in mind for the wedding ceremony. When I showed my light blobs to Ava, I made a joke about them, telling her I'd just realized she had magic toes. I showed her what I meant. Depending on which toes I squeezed, different colored blobs seemed to shoot out of them. I could control their movement too, by wiggling her toes as if they were joysticks. Ava knew it was entirely my doing of course, and was amusingly impressed. Unlike The Boys, Ava's only questions were out of fun. She happily accepted my miraculous abilities, without trying to dig for more information. Ava had plenty of curiosity about other things, but it disappeared when it hit a Mark-ism. She was proving to be VERY trustworthy. Ava also found my idea for tricking Donna very amusing. She liked it, because Donna was sometimes a pain for Ava too. Everyone thought Donna was too young for sex, both chronologically and emotionally. Just before the wedding ceremony began, Mom told Donna, "You might see some unusual things happening during the ceremony. I want you to ignore them. Pretend they're not happening." "Like what?" asked Donna. "You'll see." The living room was decorated with lots of flower and candles. There were also several bright, yellow light blobs in positions along the walls to either side, and among the flowers in the open-faced alcove we were using as a kind of altar area. They were stationary and looked like nice lights. When she came into the room, Donna looked at them curiously, but only briefly, dismissing them as being of no consequence compared to the distraction the wedding provided. Shortly after the formal part of the ceremony was over, all the light blobs suddenly left their positions and flew in graceful arcs to hover in an empty area to the side of the alcove, surprising the heck out of Donna. Mom and Dad were ready, and calmed Donna with hugs and saying, "It's okay. Ignore them." Everyone was smiling, happy and unconcerned, so Donna was very confused. The blobs were spinning in a circle, to summon a medium-blue blob (Donna's favorite color). It started as a small dot in the center of the rotating circle, growing rapidly until it reached four feet in diameter. The little yellow blobs all suddenly flew to form a semi-circle above and behind Julia, Carol and me, while the large blue blob sedately drifted just above floor level toward us, stopping in front of me. The three of us went down on one knee, while I said, "Welcome. You do us much honor." Meanwhile Mom and Dad where shushing Donna, telling her, "Quiet Donna. You're being terribly impolite." "But what are they?" "Shush!" A small dark-blue light blob flew quickly out of the big one, and partly into my forehead, causing Donna to exclaim in shock, and Mom to shush her again. Everyone was smiling happily, so poor Donna was bewildered about how to act. She clearly wanted to run around in circles and scream in the evolutionarily unjustifiable way that females do, but no one else was. The little blue blob paused for a second, then flew back into the bigger one, then back into me, whereupon I said, "You're very welcome. Your coming makes this day even more special for us." The little blob flew back to the big one, then back to me again. I said, "Thank you. May I introduce you to our families?" The Messenger Blob shuttled back to the Boss Blob, then back to me. I waited a second, then got to my feet, my wives following my lead a moment later. We approached the Williamses first, who'd all gone down on one knee. The Boss Blob stopping in front of Prof and Vanessa Prof said, "Welcome to our home. We are honored you made the time to visit us." A Messenger Blob flew from the Boss to my forehead again. I put on a slightly deeper voice when I translated, saying, "No problem. I was in the same galaxy anyway." Prof chuckled. In genuine humor actually, as we hadn't scripted this down to the word-by-word level. That'd been a little spontaneous joke (of mine, in case you're as confused as Donna about the blobs). Vanessa said, "May I introduce our sons, Andrew and Robert." Both boys bowed their head as the Boss Blob drifted sideways to be in front of them. The Messenger Blob shuttled back the Boss Blob then me again. I translated, "I am pleased to meet the new brothers of Mark." Boss Blob started drifting over to my family, prompting Mom and Dad to go down on their knees, pulling a stunned Donna with them. Mom said, "Thank you for coming to our childrens' wedding." The Messenger Blob flew back and forth again, then I translated, "I would not have missed it. Mark is a special man, who deserves more roast chicken dinners." Several red blobs fountained straight up out of Boss Blob, disappearing when they reached the ceiling. I laughed, then added, "Okay, I might have added that last bit myself. You can't blame a guy for trying." The Messenger Blob shuttled again, then I said, "It's not my fault you can't eat our food." The Boss Blob moved to be in front of a wide-eyed Donna. Mom said, "This is our youngest child, Donna Anderson." Dad told Donna, "Bow your head, sweetie," giving her head a small push with his hand. Donna did so. The Messenger Blob shuttled. I answered, "Donna turned thirteen at the beginning of the month. That's nineteen of our days ago." The Messenger Blob did its back-and-forth-to-me thing again. I said, "We think she's too young for sex, but if you want to examine her like you did Carol, Julia and me, I'm sure that'd be fine. That's okay with you isn't it, Mom and Dad?" "Sure," agreed Dad. | "That'd be a good idea," agreed Mom. "Huh? What's going on?" worried Donna. Mom reassured her, "It's fine, Donna. The rest of us have done this before. Stand up." Mom and Dad stood up, gently pulling Donna with them. I said, "It's totally fine, Donna. I'll show you." I turned to the Boss Blob, and politely asked it, "Do it to me first please, so my little sister sees there's nothing to worry about." The Boss Blob cooperated with me, ejecting a small yellow blob which flew to me and three-quarters entered my chest, moved slowly down to my groin, paused; then exited, flew up to my head, entering from the top right (as that seemed the least threatening to me, as it was out of my sight), and three-quarters inserted itself there as well. While it was in me, I said, "The only thing you'll feel is a little bit of warmth, Donna." "But what is it?" "They're balls of light, sweetie. That's all; I promise. I know they seem strange to you, but I've seen them hundreds of times." The yellow blob flew across the floor, stopping in front of Donna at an unthreatening knee level. Mom told the Boss Blob, "Go ahead." The yellow blob rose up to Donna's chest level, Donna tensed, but Mom and Dad had her well in hand, and with their hands behind Donna's back to stop her retreating. Before Donna could get any more worried, the yellow blob moved quickly forward into one of her nubbins (lucky blob!). As it had done with me, it was three-quarters into her body, with only a quarter of the blob visible to show where it was. Unlike me (because I hadn't bothered), with Donna I had a moderately warm heat blob overlapping with the light blob, causing Donna to say, "It feels hot!" I corrected her, "Just warm, Donna. It's quite comfortable isn't it? It'd be nice to have one on your hands and feet on cold days." While I'd been talking to distract Donna, the yellow blob had moved across Donna's chest to her other nubbin, and was now heading south. Donna bent over to watch it arrive at her groin. It paused there for a couple of seconds, then left her body, flew up to head height, then into the top of her head from the top right again. Donna tried to move her head away, but she didn't try very hard, and light blobs are hard to avoid. After a couple of seconds in Donna's head, the yellow blob made a beeline for the Boss Blob. A couple of seconds later the Messenger Blob brought me the information. I put on my translator's voice to say, "Physically the girl - Donna Anderson - is maturing sexually, but hasn't reached her menarche yet. She has been masturbating very often recently too..." "Oh!" exclaimed a shocked and embarrassed Donna. Everyone including The Boys already knew that (especially Robert), as Donna had been quite forthright about it recently. Hearing it stated in this manner was still embarrassing for her though. " ... She has had quite a lot of sexual experience with several girls in her sports teams..." "Ahh..." " ... but - as you people say - 'nothing heavy'." I mentioned a few more sexual details that I'd learned about 3B's Donna, or from this Carol telling tales on her little sister, so the accuracy of the Boss Blob's knowledge greatly impressed, scared and convinced Donna. "She wants to have intercourse with Mark. Physically she is capable of sex, but emotionally she is far from ready. She is too impatient, impulsive and competitive, with little understanding of the thoughtfulness and compromises inherent in a partnership relationship. She is a good and nice girl, but having a sexual relationship at her current level of emotional maturity would have a negative effect on her future personality, so she should not do it. If you wish, I will examine her again in one of your years to see if she is emotionally mature enough then?" Several times in the previous month Donna had argued loudly with Mom about her being ready for sex (Donna's being ready I mean, not Mom. The latter isn't up for discussion). Judging from Donna's silence now, empty balls of light commanded more respect than mothers. I reverted to my normal voice to say to the Boss Blob, "That's very nice of you, but we couldn't possibly put you to so much trouble." The Messenger Blob zipped back into my head. I waited a second, then said, "Thank you," to the Boss. -- To everyone else I said, "They have to go now. Say your goodbyes." Everyone but Donna immediately chorused "Goodbyes" and "Thank yous". Donna added a late, confused mumble. All the light blobs quickly shrank, and in a couple of seconds they'd disappeared. Mom said, "I didn't know you've been doing sexual things in your sports teams, Donna?" Donna had more interesting things to talk about, "How did it know? And what was it? Did it read my mind?" Donna had more questions, but Mom told her, "Mark knows about it, but we don't talk about it, Donna." "What was it. Mark?" I answered, "Mom just said we don't talk about it. And remember it said your being so 'impatient, impulsive and competitive' was proof that you weren't ready for sex. That's what you're being now. It's not absolutely essential that you have to know the answer right now, so I suggest you think about it for a day for two before you decide whether to keep asking impulsive questions." Before Donna had a chance to react, Andrew said, "I'm like Donna. I've got plenty of questions too." "Me too," agreed Robert. "What was it? Where did you meet it? Can it only talk with Mark? And dozens more, but you say we're not allowed to ask questions?" Vanessa answered, "Sorry, no questions. Not even any discussion. That'd be a bad idea." "Yeah, I understand. It's very frustrating though," opined Andrew. "VERY!" agreed Robert. "What about you, Donna? I bet I'm more curious than you are?" Robert walked over to Donna, and distracted her by a short competition about who was the most curious, followed by his saying, "Mark's an amazing boy to be involved in things like that. You're very lucky to be his sister. How many of your girlfriends at school have got a brother who has bought them a horse?" Patch was still an exciting novelty for Donna, and Julia was starting to say something formal about Carol and Mark having babies in the future, and no one seemed to care about the weird light creatures, so Donna was now sufficiently confused and distracted, permitting the ceremony to carry on. Normally the four parents wouldn't have agreed to running such a dishonest scam on Donna, but her impatient demands to be allowed to have sex, ideally with me, were getting increasingly worrisome. She was building toward some sort of trouble, such as her screwing boys from school to 'prove' her readiness, after which she'd be even more demanding. I'd also mentioned the possibility of Donna's frustration leading to her thoughtlessly blabbing a secret during an argument, or maybe even her trying to petulantly blackmail us into allowing her to have sex. So we decided to go through with the "Wonderful Mind Reading Aliens That Know Donna's Not Yet Ready For Sex" plan. We'd even bought a cheap party lighting effect - a projector which had a rotating filter containing different colored pieces of cellophane - so we could project brightly colored circles onto a wall. In the event Donna mentioned her experience to anyone, and they came to check, we could show them the projector and tell them we'll put a lock on the alcohol cabinet to keep Donna out of it, because she must've gotten drunk during a party. One good aspect of the scam was that it wouldn't be exposed if Donna ever saw another light blob, as she'd simply think it was another alien. There was one particularly bad aspect though: that one day we'd presumably have to tell Donna the truth, including that we'd lied to her. No hurry for that though; in about twenty or thirty years sounded about right to me. I'd told my fiancées that I wanted a honeymoon. I'd had the usual reasons - maybe doubly so - plus the additional reason that having one would make our informal marriage seem more real. That was important, because it'd be too easy to think of it as not real. We didn't want to repeat the sorts of things we'd done on our just completed European trip. The girls had particularly enjoyed themselves in Europe - it has good clothing stores - so I got to pick where our honeymoon would be. I'd picked a place called Ko Phi Phi, a resort island off the coast of Thailand. My main reasons for picking it were: It was a gorgeous island with fantastic, crystal clear waters and coral, perfect to learn scuba diving in, which I've always wanted to do. The three of us could share a room without the brother-sister issue causing problems. We'd effectively missed three weeks of summer doing family and city things in Europe, so a week and a half on a small, tropical island was good compensation. The bikinis we'd ordered online from Australia weren't worn out yet. The big tsunami had devastated Ko Phi Phi nine months earlier, but the travel agent assured us it was one of the most quickly rebuilt areas in Thailand, which Julia confirmed with some googling, so that was no problem for us. The wedding was on Saturday afternoon, so Carol's "Hymen From Hell" was history (again) by Saturday evening. Our wedding night was physically very similar to 3B's wedding night, so I won't describe it again, other than to say that it was considerably more emotional because of how long we'd had to argue and wait for it. The day after the wedding, Sunday, August 21, was Julia's seventeenth birthday, for which we just had a fancy dinner out with our two families and the Wests. There was too much going on to do any more than that. On Monday morning I transferred $300,000 into Carol's account, "So you've got enough money to buy lots of very small clothes whenever you get the urge," and we flew to Thailand in the afternoon. Ko Phi Phi is a tiny island (it felt like being in a different world after the few hours we'd spent in crowded, bustling Bangkok), the other tourists and locals were all friendly, and there was a very positive atmosphere from all the rebuilding. The island is only a few minutes' walk wide and at most a few feet above sea level, so the tsunami had literally swept over the entire island, and had killed many hundreds of people. We heard some horrendous stories, but were amazed by the enthusiastic go-forward attitude everyone had. We had a GREAT time on the island. Scuba diving was great fun, especially because I could easily create NP-points inside my air bubbles (I can't create them in water), then use the suitably reshaped points to herd distant fish closer. Once they were close enough, EKP easily made them 'willing' to hover for as long as we wanted to look at them. Without NP, I would've worried about sharks - even though we'd been told not to - but a 110-pound eyeball poke would be a very effective shark deterrent, so my worries were greatly reduced. The girls didn't want to learn scuba diving, but they usually came out with me and snorkeled on the surface. The water was so clear they could see nearly as much as I could, and the more interesting fishes got encouraged to pose for the girls. To my surprise, I picked up the Thai language easily, especially phrases I was highly motivated to learn, like, "May I have more of this delicious food please?" I'd been bottom of my Spanish class a few years ago [the class had laughed at me whenever the teacher had called upon me to butcher some Spanish words], so either Thai is far easier to learn than Spanish, or my brain has improved in that area too. Also great was the lying around in the sun, the "a-roi" food (Thai for "delicious"), and spending a week and a half totally focused on each other. By the time we got home, Carol was thoroughly convinced that she was a valued and accepted part of a marriage. ------- Chapter 276: Touring the Mansion Friday, September 2, 2005 It was a thrill getting home and seeing how much had been done while we'd been away on our honeymoon. Ava had come to meet us too, and everyone was eager to give us the grand tour. [I found out later that Ava had been roped into doing a great deal of work. Not because she had been needed, but because it'd be good for her to learn what was involved in setting up a household. That had been one of the things she'd felt insecure about before the beginning of our relationship, and she felt much less so now. She was proud of many of the things she'd done, and eagerly pointed them out to us.] The Main House looked great! The moms and Ava insisted there was a huge amount to do yet, but I couldn't see where. So they started listing all the stuff that was missing, "That wall needs a picture on it; we need a rug over there; we don't like the drapes in this room and want to change them; this living room suite is the spare one out of your Upper-House's living room, we're still waiting on the suite for this room;..." They had a LONG list. Every time they mentioned something, I could see they were right, but the place still looked very good to me. It was a LOT better than our old place. I asked, "How long until you think it's finished?" Mom explained, "It doesn't work like that. It might take us months to find a picture we're happy with for the upstairs landing, or maybe we'll stumble across it tomorrow. We've got lots of things on order, like the living room suite. Most of them will be arriving over the next week or two, and they'll help a great deal. It's good having two women involved too, because we can get a lot more done, especially because Vanessa is only part time at OSU. But there are still a thousand and one minor details: we don't have enough toilet brushes, the security system needs to be upgraded, we haven't touched the landscaping yet, although we do have a landscape architect giving us some ideas..." There was more talk - much, much more - but it was all women-stuff so it didn't really worry me. The kitchen could produce meals, my large plate and bowl were in the cupboard, and we had beds, so I was happy. I'll comment on a few parts though. The two master bedroom suites were both superb. Not only did they have their own en-suites and walk-in closets, but even a little sitting area with a sofa and coffee table that looked out the large windows. The master bedrooms seemed to be at least half the size of the house we'd moved out of, and oozed luxury (I thought). I teased Mom and Dad about it, and they very happily accepted my teasing, obviously as pleased as punch with their new room. It was a VAST improvement over what they'd moved out of. The two normal-sized bedrooms weren't furnished properly yet. That was Carol's project, and she'd been too busy lying on a beach during the day, and at night having me make sure yet again that her virginity was truly gone. They were temporarily fitted with the perfectly functional, but soon to be replaced, furniture that'd been removed from the Upper-Half of Mark's Wing. The ground level (kitchen, dining room, etc.) was in full use already, and worked fine. Maybe they'd be replacing the living room suite and changing one room's drapes, but that hardly worried me. I did notice that Vanessa and Prof's study was even better looking than in their previous house, and that'd been very good. The thing that amused me the most was that both their computers now had two decent-sized screens. I teased them, and they freely admitted to having been envious of mine, so they'd upgraded theirs. "We should've upgraded the screens years ago. They're much easier to work with." I got a surprise when they showed me the basement garage, "Whose are these two cars?" "Fely's and mine," answered Dad. "I got them last week." "Good for you, Dad." (They'd picked us up from the airport in Prof's car, deliberately to keep the surprise for now, I realized.) We talked cars for a couple of minutes, because I actually knew something about buying cars now. Dad hadn't done anything as frivolous as buying brand new cars. They were three years old, low mileage, good, solid, family cars. Exactly the sort of cars I would've expected Dad to get. Dad gestured to the workshop saying, "But let me show you the vehicle that I'm the most proud of." "Let me guess, you've got yourself a new riding lawnmower?" "Yep. It's a REAL beauty. It's in my workshop." "I bet you enjoy saying that." "Haha. Yeah I do." When I saw Dad's new pride and joy, I could see why. "Wow. You only needed to buy one new car. This is a heck of a machine." "Yeah. The boss gave me a REAL sweet deal. He almost gave it to me. He's worried I'm going to leave now that my son's made me rich, so he's sucking up to me. I can't think of a better way of doing it." "So how does it run?" We talked riding mowers for a couple of minutes. I knew something about those too, from overhearing a countless number of Dad's conversations about them. The Games Room was very much the same as at the Williams' house, except with a bigger TV. Then we got to walk through the tunnel. That was a buzz. The doorway into the tunnel wasn't finished - that was one of Dad's jobs, once the excitement over his new lawnmower wears off in a month or two - but the tunnel itself was completed. It was like walking down a hallway, except the floor was very slightly bouncy. It wasn't at all fancy, but it made up for that in the coolness of being a tunnel. I wasn't interested in the Lower Half of my house. That was unchanged from when we'd bought it (actually there'd been window tinting, improved security locks, new drapes, etc., but nothing fundamental). What I was eager to see was the Upper-Half, so we entered the Staircase Room that joined the two halves together, and I headed straight for the stairs. "Don't you want to look at your study?" asked Mom. Something about Mom's voice alerted me. I looked at her suspiciously (it's always a good idea to be suspicious of mothers). She was busy trying to look unconcerned. I said, "I was under the impression that it'd be empty, but somehow I suspect otherwise. I think I'd better have a look." "{Giggle}," from Ava, which set Donna off too. My suspicions had been confirmed. What should have been an empty study was anything but, in a SUPERB way. My computers and screens had been moved here, even though I thought the plan was to leave them at the Williams' until I returned. The rest of the room shouted, "REALLY rich man's fantastically luxurious study." Dark wood, gold trims and leather stuff all over the place. Really nice cupboards, and REALLY nice desks (it was a four-person study, although I had much more space than the other three). Julia's computer was set up too, without - I was very happy to see - its frilly pink dust covers. That helped the room considerably. There was a great deal of shelf space, 99% of which was empty; I'd need it for all my textbooks next academic year. There were expensive leather chairs, a very nice carpet, and a sitting area on the wall next to the stairs, with a four-seater leather sofa running parallel to the stairs, and a couple of two-seater sofas ("love seats") bracketing the coffee table that matched the slate on the floor outside the room. I noticed that the lighting was very well done, and then I noticed the pièce de résistance, a small shelf with three cookie jars on it; the jars even matching the room's décor. I exclaimed, "Cookies!" Which caused an outbreak of laughter. Followed by several minutes of very happy conversation while I tried out my chair, the desk drawers, and each of the cookie jars. "Wow. You guys put some serious effort into this. No wonder you didn't have time to finish furnishing the Main House." "Seeing as how our being here is all thanks to you, it's the least we could do..." "It's not 'ALL' thanks to me. I couldn't have earned enough money to pay for those cookie jars without other people's help, especially Prof's. It was a highly cooperative effort. I'm getting chocked up, I think I need another cookie." They had several more things to tell me about my study, "The pictures are from a gallery in town, and you can easily change them if you wish." There were two masculine pictures of wooden sailing ships in heavy weather, one of them VERY big and impressive, because it was on the wall that went up to the Upper-Half. "The internet got connected a couple of days ago, so you're online now. Give the chair a good test soon, because sometimes what can work for one person can feel uncomfortable for someone else..." and more. They'd put a LOT of thought and effort into this room. When we eventually got upstairs to my master bedroom, it was somewhat anticlimactic, after the superb study. Upstairs wasn't furnished, but the rooms were all built. There were only four: my huge master bedroom, a big en-suite, a VERY big walk-in closet, and the second double bedroom. It was difficult for me to visualize what my master bedroom would look like furnished because it was more than four times longer than it was wide, and how the furniture was laid out would make a big difference. I didn't have a clue what Julia was planning, or even if she had started planning yet. I'd previously done some tests to confirm that my sight blob would have the range to allow me to stay in bed and use the study, which it easily would from anywhere in my bedroom, so there were no constraints on where Julia put the bed. Now that we were back from our honeymoon, I expected her to give this room top priority. The en-suite was the same quality as the one off Mom and Dad's bedroom, which was superb. It was large, and it'd be easy to have six or seven people in the shower (that'd been something we'd specified). I was surprised to see that the toilet was in its own little room (en-en-suite? off-en-suite? off-and-en-suite?) The walk-in closet was large enough to hold a party in. Thank God Julia is so small, because if she was normal-sized her closet would've scaled up to be bigger than the house it was in. Dad demonstrated the "secret door". There was a mirror in the closet that, when the hidden latch was pressed, could be swung into what would publicly be called "Carol's bedroom". On that room's side was another mirror, larger than the doorway so it blocked light getting through the edges. Playing with the secret door let me see "Carol's Bedroom". It was just an ordinary double bedroom. There was already a queen-sized bed in it, which gave us several choices about where to sleep: Carol's Bedroom, the big bedroom in the Lower Half, or the spare bedroom in the Main House. Mom said, "We assumed you'd sleep in the Lower Half for a while, so we've put all your clothes and other thing down there. There isn't enough closet space, but we've done our best. That'll keep the Upper-Half empty and easy to furnish. While I think to mention it, I'm surprised how many bikinis you own, Mark. Do you wear them often?" #1: "Ahh, they're for any girls who visit and want a swim, but didn't bring their own swimsuit." "That's very considerate of you," said Mom, with amused sarcasm, so she'd obviously looked through the bikinis (pun intended). "Just thinking ahead, Mom. It pays to be prepared." ^ [On the topic of "secret", there was a safe built into my wing. Dad showed it to me later, away from Donna and Ava (just to play safe about the safe). Julia had wanted me to have one, and I'd seen no reason why not. So far the only thing I could think of to keep in it was Ava's tastefully nude photographs, but you never know what the future might bring. Hopefully more tastefully nude photographs. Household safes are often encased in the concrete that makes up the house's foundations, making them impossible to remove without some heavy pneumatic drilling. That wasn't possible in this house because it didn't have suitable foundations. Instead the bottom several steps of the staircase were solid concrete, encasing the safe, which faced into my study. It was behind a panel, which was behind the four-seater sofa in the little seating area. Julia and I had argued a little over how the panel was to be secured. We had invented three levels of choice: Have it easy to operate, so anyone could open the panel to get access to the front of the safe. As per the cliché of hiding the safe behind a picture that swings open. Have it tricky to open. For example, secured by an electric switch that required a button to be pressed. The button could be hidden, or maybe up in the far corner of the 20-foot high ceiling, where it'd be very hard for anyone to find and access, but I could press it with NP easily. Have the panel virtually impossible for anyone other than me to open. An easy way of doing that would be to have deadbolts on the inside of the panel. It'd be like locking the keys inside your car, only much worse. I could create NP-points behind the panel to push the deadbolts back, to release the panel, but no one else could. If the panel was made of heavy steel, with a normal wall surface on top as disguise, and it was deadbolted into the concrete, it'd require a major piece of demolition for anyone to get it to open. Julia wanted option 3. I thought that would be a nuisance, because it was more likely that she'd be using the safe than me. She loves her schemes and they might involve written secrets, whereas my only real secrets are to do with my abilities, which I can't ever imagine writing down. Julia reminded me of my fake driver's license, which I had to concede, although it'd be easy to hide that somewhere around the property, or destroy it, as I doubted I'd be going into any more casinos. I wanted the panel to be secured at level 2 at the most, or even just level 1. After all, the safe still required the combination to open it. Julia was effectively trying to put the safe inside another safe, which only I could open. I thought one level of safe was enough. Julia suggested we have two safes, one which only I could open, and the other could be a level 1 or 2 for her. I thought that was excessive, especially considering that I was going to be moving out of this house in a year and currently didn't have anything important to put in even one safe. I understood Julia's motivation. She thinks I'm the most important human being ever, and is therefore eager to have my secrets as secure as possible. My approach is not to write my secrets down. We hadn't resolved the issue before we went on our honeymoon, so the panel hiding the safe was current at level 1. As far as I was concerned, it could stay there unless I got a piece of paper that had me shit-scared about my security, in which case we'd get a 3 built. Or maybe a level 4 if I was REALLY scared.] ^ There were two other parts of My Wing that I was eager to check out. The first was something that followed up on Vanessa's idea of putting a Japanese water garden in front of My Wing's Lower Half, coming off the side of the mound. I'd requested a hot tub in that area. I was conscious that I wanted a private area to entertain guests of the young, female persuasion. In my bedroom, obviously, but not all girls can be taken straight to my bedroom immediately upon their arrival. Some of them actually require flirting with first. It's a terrible way to run the world, and it's clearly something I'd change if I ever become Emperor of the Earth, but it's what I currently have to work with. The swimming and spa pools on the top of the mound are overlooked by half the rooms in the Main House, so aren't private. Vanessa planned to landscape the pool area near My Wing to give us some privacy, but that hadn't been done yet. A small hot tub in front of My Wing's Lower Half, built into the corner formed by the front of the Staircase Room and the vertical side of the mound, and covered with a small roof, would be very private. Heck, you could even have sex in it, should the flirting go particularly well. It would be the perfect place to bring small groups of Cuties or Ducklings. Except that a quick glance outside the front door showed that it wasn't there yet. Damn! When a guy comes back from his honeymoon, his mother and mother-in-law should've made the necessary arrangements to facilitate his continual boinking of more girls. The time they'd spent discussing changing the drapes in one of the Main House's rooms could have been put to much better use. Oh well. "I see you haven't had a chance to change the front of my wing to match the Main House yet." "No, that's a long way down the list." "No problem. I was just curious to see what it looks like from the front. What do the garages look like? I presume that's where my car is now?" "We'll show you." That'd been the other area I was curious about. The garage was very basic. One BIG, concrete room, accessed with three double-width, automatic garage doors, so it had parking for six cars. My car, Julia's Honda, and then Ava's car, were parked in it, counting from the most convenient location to the least. I was amused that Julia's car had a more favored location than Ava's. Julia has been working toward getting her license, but she hasn't been in any hurry. At her current rate it'll take her several more months. That might be a nuisance if we need her to have an unrestricted license wherever we move to for my university, so she can take Carol to school. I'd ask her to hurry up getting it, except that there are too many other things for her to do, like furnish our bedroom or get my private hot tub installed. There was a GREAT deal more conversation about the house - was there ever! - quite a lot about our honeymoon, and not a small amount from Donna about Patch, but I won't record those conversations here as I'm keeping my autobiography short. ^ School and OSU would be restarting on September 26, so there wasn't even a whole month of summer vacation left, and still so much I wanted to do. Clearly the school year needed to be reduced and the gap between periods widened. Both could be easily achieved if the teachers stopped repeating every small point half a dozen times. That was something else for my Emperor of the Earth To Do List. [[In most dimensions the schools in Corvallis restart during the first week in September. Oh the horror! Most dimensional differences are minor, but occasionally there's something like this.]] I asked the moms, "Will I be able to have a party here before summer vacation ends?" "The later the better," answered Mom. Julia suggested, "Have it on the last Saturday Mark. That way everyone will still be buzzing about it when school restarts." Julia's political machinations lined up with the moms wanting longer to get the house into shape, even though it already looked great to me. It also gave me longer to work on the Target Game. Months ago I'd had an image of a small party for my soccer team and several very cooperative girls, but I had a sneaking feeling that Julia's idea of "everyone will still be buzzing" did pretty much mean "everyone". The moms were working too hard to inflict two parties on them, so one big party seemed more likely. My teammates were unlikely to miss out, as the Target Game had been unfolding nicely. I haven't mentioned it, but if the Target Game worked so well that my four teammates started getting sex from the Targets, then it should be fairly easy to get sex for the rest of my team too. I'd just have to make sure I was very friendly with them when some Targets were watching. The Targets should get the idea to spread themselves wider, specifically their legs. I could see that Mom looked daunted by the idea of getting ready for a party with only 3.5 weeks of prior notice. I commented, "The house already looks good enough. They're just my young friends, not critics from House & Garden." (I'd been exposed to all sorts of mind-altering literature since the mansion purchase moved into high gear; things no guy should ever have to look at.) "Heck, half of them will be guys who'll be too busy looking at the girls to notice how well the drapes match the carpet in one room." That didn't reassure Mom at all, so Julia added, "It'll be a pool party, Felicity, so there'll only be a few quick guided-tours. Everyone will know you've just moved in, so you've got nothing to worry about." "I guess that'll be okay." I'd noticed that Vanessa was letting Mom answer the majority of questions about the house. I'd soon realized that Vanessa was doing it deliberately. It was very nice that she was letting Mom feel in charge, but I worried that Vanessa might not be feeling as comfortable here as she had been in her own house. [I asked her about it later. After thanking me for my concern, she answered, "There's a small element of truth in what you're worrying about, but it'll be more than compensated for by being more involved in your life. That's why we're here, after all. Your mother and I are aware of the potential problems, so we've divided up the authorities. Felicity has the interior and I've got the exterior, provided I leave enough grass for Patch to live on, and for Steven to have an excuse to ride around on his new toy, haha. Once things settle down, Felicity and I will be doing week-on/week-off for the housework and cooking. Having weeks off is a very good compensation for having to share authority occasionally. We'll be flexible about such things, but whoever's on her week-off should defer to the other. Not about parental matters, just the day-to-day running of the household. You and the girls will have to make sure your wing is managed properly too, because Felicity and I will be leaving that to you. You'll discover that your bed's sheets no longer get magically cleaned and replaced. There's a washing machine and dryer in your wing's Lower Half."] ------- Chapter 277: Living in the Mansion Saturday, September 3 to Sunday, September 25, 2005 The days that followed were hard on the females, and obviously had been on the moms during the time we'd been away too. There was a GREAT deal to be done (I was told, as I wasn't actually involved in much of it and didn't see much happening). Julia and Carol both got frantic over their respective areas of responsibility, with Mom and Vanessa having even more to worry about. One good thing was that my Lower Half was fully furnished (my WING'S Lower Half, I mean. My anatomy was unfurnished and happy to remain that way). So my girls didn't have to worry about crockery, placemats, laundry powder, and God knows how many other pieces of minutiae. They even had spare minutiae from the Upper-Half, some of which had been put in the Lower Half (we were well supplied with toilet paper now), or moved to the Main House (it didn't have enough toilet brushes, to continue the fascinating toilet focus). The Anderson's and Williams' old homes were keeping all their furniture and minutiae, so the Main House needed everything, from beds down to toilet brushes. The moms clearly wanted upmarket stuff - even toilet brushes - for the mansion. They appeared worried and stressed about everything they needed to buy, but I strongly suspected they were enjoying themselves, judging by their animated conversations, most of which they seemed to think were very exciting, even when about inane items. One topic that initially got a lot of my attention was the planning for my new bed. Getting it was a sizable project in itself, as it and the bedclothes were made especially for us. Julia wanted it to be impressively BIG, to convey the right image about me. I thought she was overdoing it, but I could think of a few uses for a large bed so I didn't try to curtail her excess. The dinnerware was another item that had the moms in a major tizzy. If you thought choosing what mansion to buy was hard, you should've seen the drama involved in choosing the dinnerware! How it could possibly be more traumatic to buy a dinnerware than the entire house it went in, was something that I never understood. Mothers can be excessively irrational at times, even for females. It had to be a big dinnerware, as there were five people living in the Main House (the four parents and Donna), plus the four of us in My Wing (including Ava, who would often stay overnight). The Boys and their girlfriends visited frequently, so the dinnerware had to cater to at least thirteen people. Plus, I soon learned, they expected to have some large dinner parties. "So," I told them, "just find a set you like and buy three or four of them." After that I left mother-stuff up to the mothers, rather than make apparently silly suggestions. Don't ask me why it was silly; I never got that straight. I just know that choosing the set was a major drama for the mothers. Meanwhile we used the two sets taken out of My Wing. They did the job perfectly well, in my unexpressed opinion. Multiply the dinnerware drama by a few hundred to get an idea of what sort of state the females other than Donna were in. Donna was too busy having a great time with Patch to be concerned about anything else. I wisely said nothing about my outdoor hot tub, or about anything else that I thought essential, as I was well aware that that my idea of essential didn't even show up as a distant blip on the females' radars. Left to themselves, they'd be happier, I wouldn't get in trouble, and everything would eventually be done to their satisfaction, which would certainly include my satisfaction. If I had any doubt about that, I only had to look at my study. Progress was slow, but it was sure and damned good, especially in my master bedroom. Julia went to town decorating our bedroom. She "went to town" many times, and when Corvallis didn't have good enough stuff, she went to bigger towns to look at what they had. But eventually it all started coming together. The bed arrived pretty quickly, with half a dozen spare sets of sheets, so we started sleeping in that room. We were premature doing that, because Julia hadn't even decided on the carpet for our bedroom yet, but she was tired of walking back and forth from the Lower Half to the master bedroom's closet (first day home, Julia had hung all her clothes in that closet). The bed, by the way, was RIDICULOUS! It was as wide as two king-sized beds! The room was very long, so there was no trouble fitting the bed in, but its being twice as wide as it was long looked bizarre. Damned near my whole soccer team could've slept in it; which was NEVER going to happen! Me and six or seven girls was a much better idea. It was so large it was an embarrassment. Julia, Carol and Ava (especially Julia) thought it was an entirely appropriate, clear statement of their pride in my prowess. I must admit that I was very much looking forward to trying it out at its full capacity, but it was still embarrassing. The parents and Donna all got a good laugh out of it. [Speaking of Donna and matters sexual, I should mention that the "Wonderful Mind Reading Aliens That Know Donna's Not Yet Ready For Sex" plan was working very well. Donna raised the topic of her having sex with me a few times, but we all had absolute confidence in the Boss Blob's statement that it would be bad for Donna. Even Donna had to admit that it (whatever it was) had known highly personal stuff about her sex-life, so it was hard to argue that it hadn't known what it was talking about. Donna tried a few times to find out what the full story was, but we totally refused to say even one word about it, except whenever she raised her having sex. That rapidly became rare, as Donna had been convinced by the alien, although she hoped it would let her have sex after it checked her when she turned fourteen. I somehow doubted it, unless Donna's emotional maturity improved quickly. I'd be leaving Corvallis about then, so hopefully that'd be removing her temptation for a few years, ideally four of them.] Carol's work on her three assigned bedrooms progressed nicely. She had buckets of advice from the mothers and Julia, plus Carol visited the homes of damned near every girl that went to our school. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but Julia thought it was an excellent way of helping Carol, and an excellent way of getting word of my new mansion spread around. As a result, we were visited by literally dozens of girls, who'd all told Carol, "I can't give you the best advice until I've seen the rooms." When that'd first started happening, I'd assumed the girls were using that as an excuse to meet me for some flirting and maybe hanky-panky, but most of the girls brought their mothers with them and were clearly far more excited about seeing all around our new homes and discussing Carol's project than meeting a mere boy. My huge bed was repeatedly embarrassing. Obviously "Carol's Bedroom" was set up to look as if she occupied it, so our visitors thought it was just Julia and me that slept in the aircraft carrier-sized bed. The bed was so big and Julia so small that I could lose her in it, so many of the visiting mothers thought we were strange. Julia sometimes explaining that "Mark is very athletic" didn't really help. Having two families living in the same house was considered strange too, and there were some funny looks at that. One thing that helped with that was that Prof and Vanessa were a whole generation older than my parents, so we explained it as a pseudo-grandparent thing. The mansion was mine (everyone was told that), so my parents obviously would live here. Our story was that Prof and Vanessa were doing so for a year or so, before they moved back to their own home, to keep an eye on their 17-year old daughter, and because they liked treating me as their grandson and getting to know me better, considering I might be their son-in-law one day. That was accepted by the mothers pretty well, although it required us to dilute that story with their daughters as soon as we could. We definitely didn't want them to think I was out of their reach. I very much enjoyed living in our new place. I slept with Julia and Carol every night (that alone was FANTASTIC!), and sometimes Ava too. The four of us thought our new sleeping arrangement was fantastic. Mom and Vanessa were scheduled to cook alternate weeks, but that turned out to be very flexible. If one of them had been particularly busy, the other would take over, or they often cooked together. Mom wanting to improve her cooking skills was one of the reasons, but mainly because the mothers enjoyed chatting, and they might as well do that in the kitchen while they were preparing dinner. What had been somewhat boring drudgery for them became a social activity and enjoyable for them. So the Andersons got to enjoy a higher quality of daily food than we were used to, so another of my appetites was being well catered to. There was a lot of work around the property, which kept Dad and me very busy. The Boys were often roped in too, especially when Vanessa started getting the garden into shape. It was amusing to see how much the two mothers' styles differed. With my mom, if something needed doing, she, Dad or I would do it. Vanessa was far more likely to hire someone. As Vanessa explained, "We're older, we can afford it, and neither Prof nor I have ever been handy." The Andersons' do-it-ourselves attitude had been necessary for many years when money had been tight, but that reason no longer applied and everyone wanted the work to get done much faster than we could do it ourselves, so Mom eventually got used to hiring people. Dad did make the secret doors at either end of the tunnel himself, mostly because he thought it was fun. The doors were 'invisible' (i.e., didn't appear to be doors), and were secured by the equivalent to what I called level 2 when talking about the safe's accessibility. The doors opened easily from within the tunnel, as the unlocking button was on the door handles. But from the outside of the tunnel, getting access to it required the pressing of a button hidden near the doorways, giving about five seconds to open the door before the electronic locks reactivated. In the Main House's basement, the rack that held the pool cues was moved to be beside the doorway, and the button built into the underside of one of the rack's brackets. It was at waist height, so easy to press but out of sight unless someone was crawling on the floor. Dad even put three fake buttons on the equivalent place on the other side of the bracket and on the top bracket. Pressing the button only produced a soft click as the lock was disengaged. The door itself didn't move until it was pushed, so it was unlikely the door would be discovered even if the button was pressed by accident. Dad did a similar thing at the other end. There was a wide hallway if you turned left just before going out the back door, the hallway going down the southern wall of my study. At the right side of the far end of the hallway was a door that led into the underground garage, with the left side being the secret door that accessed the tunnel. Having a blank wall there would've have looked funny, so there were some clips holding a few raincoats. It was a natural place for people coming in from the garage to hang them. One of the clip's screws was really the button. Dad had cut off the head of a screw and glued it to the top of the button, so it looked like any other screw. Pressing it unlocked the door, and further pushing opened it. Both tunnel doors were self-closing with padded doorstops to be quiet, and the lights were the outdoor motion-sensor type, so came on whenever anyone entered the tunnel. It was a good setup, but not a perfect one. Visitors who were at the wrong place at the wrong time would see the secret doors being used. In the Main House, they'd have to be in the games room to see, but in my wing they'd get a look just by being inside our back door or having come in from the garage. The most obvious problem was that there was no way that anyone inside the tunnel could tell if the Main House's games room or my wing's hallway were occupied before pushing the secret door open from the inside. Dad had the idea of putting motion sensors in those two rooms, with an indicator light just inside the tunnel. Or if we were REALLY worried, a CCTV (Closed Circuit TV) system, so we could see who was on the other side of the doors. We weren't too worried though, as the times we used the tunnel - first thing in the morning to go to breakfast and at night - there usually weren't any strangers around. Everyone was under orders to keep quiet about the tunnel, with only Donna worrying us as she wanted to show it to her girlfriends. It wouldn't have been the end of the world, but we preferred to keep it quiet. In case you wonder about Ava, she knew all about the tunnel. The only thing she didn't know about was the safe because that might be used to hold Big Three Secrets stuff. Speaking of Ava, during the day she was at our place more often than not. She was heavily involved in the furnishing work, and very helpful too. The cooperative attitude she had to Julia and me applied to our parents too, so they thought she was great. Ava was great in every other way too, so toward the end of summer I had a little idea. Julia and Carol totally approved - I got some nice kisses for it - so I went back to the jeweler's I'd gotten our wedding rings from and got him to make another one which was about half as red as ours were. Ava had been to the wedding, knew what the red symbolized (blood, to represent our life, as in lifelong commitment), and she'd appreciate the half-red nature of her ring. We didn't make a formal big deal out of giving it to her, but we did spend several minutes telling her how much we appreciated her and how happy we were to have her in our lives. It was a very nice moment, so the hankies I'd packed my pockets with got used. Ava was the only girl with a half-red ring, and she greatly appreciated our making her special importance to us so clear. Ava picked the restaurant for dinner, and we concentrated on giving her lots of attention all evening, until she fell asleep with a smile on her face. About two weeks before school restarted, the mothers decided that the house was well enough furnished that they wouldn't be shamed by anyone seeing it, so they started inviting people around (previously people had mostly invited themselves). We started having a few dinner parties. Most of them were for the parents' friends, and they usually invited half the guests each, so they'd mix and mingle. This house could handle large dinner parties, once the agonizing decision over the dinnerware was made, so twenty to thirty people for dinner wasn't uncommon, roughly ten each of the Andersons' invitees, the Williams' invitees and the usual residents. I quickly got tired of being asked about roulette and being tortured, so my girls and I sometimes had dinner in My Wing. Unlike Julia, the four parents didn't make an issue over whose name the property was in. It was referred to as "The Andersons'" in conversation, with Prof and Vanessa saying they were long-term guests. There wasn't much point in all their friends knowing the house was in my name, because I didn't interact with those people. I probably never would, because I'd be going away to a university and God knows where after that. If the Binion's incident came up - which it always did - a short mention was made of Prof's original cover story that it was all luck. One of the mid-week dinner parties we had was for a bunch of Ava's friends. Mostly girls, but she'd invited some guys and most of the girls brought dates. It was in the Main House because my wing's kitchen and dining room couldn't handle much more than the four of us who lived in my wing. Afterward we moved outside and had a nice couple of hours hanging around the pool and spa pool. More than half the attendees would be in my classes too damned soon (not their fault; it was the school's for restarting too quickly), so I made sure I was on my best behavior, circulated well, acted like a good host, etc., all to make a good impression. That I owned this place made a good impression to start with, as did the size of my bed, teenagers tending to have different opinions about sexual matters than girls' mothers. When I returned after having changed into my bright yellow Speedos, that made a strong impression too, few of this group having seen my body before. By the end of the evening, some of the boyfriends were looking decidedly worried whenever 'their' girlfriends talked to me, which they very often did. Ava's graphic description of the good use I put the big bed to had seemed amusing at the time the grand tour had taken them to my bedroom, but by the end of the evening the guys had quite a different opinion of that. Julia's having several times loudly mentioned that she actively encouraged me to do whatever I wanted with other girls didn't provide much reassurance to the guys either. Ava had boasted that she lived here and slept with Julia and me "half the time" (actually about a third). As the evening progressed, so did the amount of envy Ava received. As did how often that envy was acted on, as I received several expressions of interest. I was a semi-good boy, doing no more than telling them that I was interested in their interest, but now wasn't the time to act on it. "We'll have opportunities all year long, so best to be cautious while your boyfriend is here." Or if they hadn't come with a boyfriend, "I have to keep circulating. People would notice if you and I disappeared for a few hours." I hadn't decided what to do about the soon-to-be-senior girls. Theoretically, any that were interested in me should create a pipeline group, but I'm not rigid about theory when a particular girl is easily capable of making me rigid, as several of these girls were. But whatever I was going to do, I wasn't going to do it tonight; not right under the guys' noses to spoil Ava's dinner party. I actually spent quite a high proportion of the time chatting with the guys, even going so far as to hang out in the games room with them for a while. We'd apparently bought the full-sized pool table from the previous owners, so the guys got a horrible surprise when one of them challenged me. The slow learners took two more games, and then I let them play among themselves, that way they actually got to use the cues they were holding. Hanging with the guys was enjoyable, as quite a few of them were happily open and friendly with me. Half the guys had no reason not to be. A couple didn't have girlfriends, and half the others were totally confident that their girlfriends wouldn't stray. Amusingly, most of the secure guys were wrong. Judging from their girlfriends' quiet comments to me, secure guys' girlfriend's actually had a lower loyalty rate than insecure guys'. I wasn't sure what the explanation was, as I couldn't decide between secure guys made for bad boyfriends because they didn't try hard enough, or they felt secure because they had particularly tricky girlfriends. I couldn't tell which was more likely, but researching it might be fun. The "half the guys were happy comment" was before I changed into my Speedos and we got into the pool. The proportion of happy guys dropped noticeably when I started playing "Toss the Girl" with their eager-to-be-tossed girlfriends. One of them grumbled about me being a showoff, which gave me an easy opportunity to do exactly that. I replied, "I'm NOT showing off. Do I look like I'm exerting myself to my limits? I'm not panting, my arms aren't getting tired, or anything like that. If I was showing off, I'd be trying my hardest to impress everyone, but I'm not doing that at all. Julia, can I borrow you please?" "Borrow wouldn't be my choice of what you did to me, but I'll try it for a while." "I'm going to toss you again. It's going to be quite a lot higher than before, so be careful you don't do a belly flop when you come back down." Julia instantly replied, "Okay." Either she's physically brave, or the idea of my looking even better in front of all the other girls was irresistible. If it wasn't for its getting dark reducing my maximum range, I could've thrown her five hundred feet into the air. Unfortunately, by the time she got down again, the rotation of the Earth would've moved the swimming pool away, which would be very bad for her. (It was also bad science, but let's not worry about that.) More realistically I couldn't apply much NP boost to her after the launch, because Julia's accelerating upward after she'd left my hand would look very unnatural. I also didn't want Julia to know about the strength of my NP yet, so even a half-second boost on her ass immediately after my hand let go didn't appeal to me. I decided just to do an ordinary "Girl Toss", but to do it better than usual. I figured that with my arm and leg muscles involved, I could physically boost somewhat over a hundred pounds. I would use Active Centering so I could have eight minds' worth of NP-pushing on the back of my hand. I'd had about four months of consciously practicing ki projection by this time, so my 5% monthly improvement now gave me a total of about 135 pounds of force, so something like 250 pounds with my physical and mental forces combined. Julia weighed 70 pounds, even in her second most sexy bikini, so I had about 3.5 g's worth of force, for about 2.5 g's of upward acceleration. If I had about 1 meter of boosting distance (from a crouch until I was standing with my hand over my head), then 1 meter at 2.5 g's should take 2.5 meters at -1 g to decelerate down to a zero vertical velocity. She'd leave my hand about a meter above the water, so would apogee at 3.5 meters above the pool's surface. Eleven feet would easily look impressive enough. It was about four or five feet higher than I normally threw her, and would clearly show that I hadn't been showing off before. Eleven feet was so high that I'd have to make sure I didn't throw her out of the pool. It was unlikely my angle would be that far off, but I'd immediately go back to Inactive Duty after tossing her, and be ready to use NP to correct her trajectory if necessary. To cut a long story short (and high), it worked pretty much as I'd planned, including that Julia came back down into the pool. She even screamed impressively, but I was sure she would've whether or not she was frightened as it made me seem more impressive. As intended, everyone was very impressed by how high I'd tossed Julia. Even before Julia surfaced, I loudly asked the original grumbler, "Still think I was showing off before?" I couldn't tell whether he answered or not, over clamor of the many, "Me next!" Julia came up, barely taking time to draw a breath before telling everyone how high and scary that'd been. I refused to throw the other girls that high. For a start they weighed too much, but being the genius I am, I was too smart to give that as a reason. Instead I said, "I'm sorry, but I had to work VERY hard to throw Julia that high. If I did that a few more times my muscles would get wobbly, and one of you might come down on the edge of the pool." They winced at the thought of that, and the clamor quickly died. Giving Julia the chance to make a point of her own, "There's no need for Mark to show off; he's already the most incredible guy any of you have ever met. He's smart, rich, nice, strong, good looking and awesome in bed, so what'd be the point of his showing off?" For some reason, that didn't reassure the guys at all. It didn't reassure the girls either, as they were experiencing quite different emotions. The water games resumed, starting with some more Girl Tossing. I wouldn't throw them high, but I would rub their ass, which some of them clearly wanted, judging by the way their ass rubbed my hand. Then we played whatever it's called when a girl sits on a guy's shoulders, and you try to knock the other pair over. There were several guys here, so quite a few teams could play. Julia had amusingly and ambiguously stated, "I want other girls to climb on top of Mark," so I was partnered with a variety of girls. Me and whoever was on my shoulders always won. Seven-eighths of 135 pounds of NP support, plus my natural athleticism and proximity sense meant that no other team had a chance. No other four teams had a chance either, when four of them tried to gang up on me. I was so good at this game, whatever it's called, that Julia was very happy. I was also easily the fastest swimmer, on top or under the water. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was by far the best at everything. It was a terrible evening for the other guys' fragile egos. Best of all, I was very polite and considerate to everyone, while being especially attentive to Julia and Ava. All the girls ate that up, and it gave the guys nothing to complain about. It's illogical, but if you set it up right, the nicer you are to Girl A (at the expense of spending time talking to Girl B), the more Girl B wants you. I don't understand how they think, but I'm learning to work with it. Most of the girls were reconsidering their choice of boyfriend. Most of the guys didn't know that, because their girlfriends hid it from them, but the girls weren't hiding it from me, most of them making very sure that I was fully aware of it. A few of the smarter ones even made sure Julia was aware of it. Those girls I was doubly impressed by, not only for their smarts, but their potential to fit into Julia's and my lifestyle. Last, and not important in the grand scheme of things but too amusing not to mention, the guys hadn't done themselves any favors at the start of the pool fun when the late-arriving Carol had reached the pool and removed the towel she'd wrapped around herself, to reveal pretty much everything. The naughty girl had put on her Australian bikini. The water level in the pool rose an inch as every guy's instant erection displaced some additional water. (Not so much "bad science", as highly exaggerated. Or, if it wasn't exaggerated, then I had some serious competition.) Carol's cavorting around the pool constantly caught the guys' eyes. And if there's one thing girls are good at (besides clothes shopping), it's knowing when their boyfriend's eyes are looking at another girl's tits. A lot of the girls had decided that if their boyfriends' thoughts were straying, then there was nothing wrong with a preemptive counter-stray. Ava had a GREAT evening. Her girl-friends knew Ava could give them easy access to me simply by inviting them around again, so they were very nice to Ava. Carol had a ball too. Most of the guys were under severe scrutiny so couldn't do anything about Carol's teasing (after every one of her Tosses, she stood up to correct her misplaced bikini top, something the guys couldn't tear their eyes away from). A couple of the guys had - very wisely as it turned out - not come with a girlfriend, so they had no such constraint on their interest in Carol. I was quite surprised when Carol didn't shut them down. She accepted their interest, riding on their shoulders during that Whatever-The-Game-Is-Called game. I know they must've enjoyed themselves, because when Carol took a turn on my shoulders, I enjoyed myself. Her bare bottom felt great, and her tiny bikini bottom was sufficiently see-through that it was possible to imagine her bare pussy rubbing against the back of my neck. Thank goodness for go-softs, or everyone would've seen very clear evidence of non-sisterly thoughts (damned yellow Speedos!). Which reminds me of another couple of things I beat the other guys at: I had far too many minds being careful for my eyes to stray, and I never got an embarrassing hard-on. These guys were old enough not to get a hard-on whenever there was a breast within fifty feet, but they still got a few of them. Not me though. As Julia said, "Mark's FAR too mature and experienced to have childish reactions." It's amazing how life-enhancing go-softs have been. After everyone had gone home, I asked Carol, "How come you let Sam and Chance flirt with you?" "I liked them." "Haha. That's such an obvious reason it never occurred to me. I was trying to work out what the trick was. I must be spending too much time around Julia. OUCH! Including when I make silly statements like that!" It occurred to me to ask Carol how far she was willing to let her flirting go, and then it occurred to me that doing so would make me look weak, pathetic and untrusting. We were married so I should trust her. And then it occurred to me that by not showing any concern, she might think I didn't care and get upset with me. And then it occurred to me that I don't understand girls at all, because I didn't have a clue whether I should say anything or not. I decided it was better to look pathetic and caring than the opposite, so I said, "At the risk of seeming pathetic, I want to ask how far you'd let their flirting go? I know I should trust you, but I'm completely new to experiencing jealousy, and I don't know how to handle it yet. I'm sorry if I offend you." "You big dummy!..." #3: " ... They weren't going to get ANYWHERE with me. All they got were some giggles, and some looks at me, which everyone else got too. How on Earth can you think I could desire any other guy when I'm married to you? You're so much better than any other guy that you make them all look pathetic. I wore that bikini for MY pleasure, not theirs. I like being looked at if it's safe and no one can do anything about it. Plus I thought it'd help..." "It sure did!" agreed Ava. "The guys made fools of themselves, and now my friends like Mark even more. It was very clever of you." Julia also praised Carol, then Ava praised Julia, so everything seemed fine. I hadn't caused a disaster. I was very reassured about Carol's motives, but I knew that even trusting Carol, I'd still feel funny if it happened again. Having experienced it that way around, I couldn't understand how my girls could be not only accepting about my playing around, but enthusiastic about it. I kept my mouth shut. ^ In describing living in the mansion, what should've gone right at the top of the chapter - in Donna's opinion - was Patch. On second thought, Donna would demand a whole chapter devoted solely to Patch. Donna thought Patch was the best thing that'd ever happened to her. I was surprised how well Donna responded to Patch, and I don't just mean she had a lot of fun with him. She did an excellent job of learning what she needed to learn even before we bought him, and in looking after him once he was officially the most important member of the family. I shouldn't have been surprised, I guess, because Donna has always applied herself to activities that she has gotten interested in. There was just so much to learn about horses, and so much to do to look after them, so seeing Donna take it on and do a good job at it was an impressive surprise. We were all impressed by her dedication, and my fear that she'd prove to be an irresponsible owner soon became an embarrassing memory. Donna became very active in the riding club, even more so than her athletic club. Speaking of her activities, she was still doing Karate on Thursday nights, was enjoying it and progressing well. Being athletic and aggressive, she and Karate suited each other. It was just as well the class was at a time when it was getting too dark to ride Patch, or it might've been dropped. Patch was a good horse; the people who'd had him before us having trained him well. Their girl had grown too old for him, and her interests had changed. I'd blame boys, but I am one, and there's nothing wrong with one more young girl becoming interested in my kind. Patch was particularly well behaved for me, as I could control him with my mind. It's weird to write that, but he was a fairly compliant horse, without a strong willpower of his own, so NP and EKP worked very well on him. It's a pity pretty girls aren't so easy to control, but unlike Patch, they'd speak up VERY LOUDLY if invisible things pushed them around. There were some old fruit trees down the back of our property, so I'd sometimes stand on Patch's back to pick the fruit off the top of the trees. Patch made for a wonderful ladder, because he'd move to the next spot whenever I wanted. Donna was amazed by how well I could control Patch, even though I restricted myself in what I did with him. No intelligent conversations like I'd done with Belle, only things a horse could be expected to obey. He always came when I called, for example. There'd been a few times he hadn't wanted to, but a hundred pounds of NP force applied to the right spot can hurry up a horse very effectively (in case you were wondering, I pinched his ass, then when he started running, pushed his head to point toward me). A few repeats of that, and he truly did start coming when I called. It was just as well that Patch was good to me, because Donna was continually coming to me to ask me to buy something or other for him. In fact, usually "something AND other." You would NOT BELIEVE how expensive a grass-eating, water-drinking animal can be! Many of Donna's friends came to visit Patch. Mom and Dad had VERY strict rules about that. How strict Donna found out the first time she was caught letting her friends ride him without adult supervision. Patch was moved to a farm Mom had lined up for the eventuality (she'd asked at the riding club). They put Patch up for a week, and Donna didn't know where he was. BOY, did that have an impact on Donna! She was a distraught mess. After a day she was the most contrite, apologetic, begging-for-forgiveness, promise-making girl you've ever seen. Mom said, "We told you a week, and a week it'll be. Next time it'll be two weeks." There wasn't a next time. If only other pretty girls were so easy to control. One of the things that particularly amused me during the visits from Donna's friends, was the dilemma many of them felt when forced to choose between being with Patch or being with me. Quite a few of them were visibly torn by having to make the decision. It was very cute. ^ To summarize our "Living in the Mansion" experience: it was GREAT. We were VERY happy. ------- Chapter 278: Life Outside the Mansion Friday, September 2 to Sunday, September 25, 2005 (Continued) The Target Game resumed, much to my four teammates' relief. Their begging had been pathetic. Even with Mom slowly learning to hire people to do things, we were all kept pretty busy with mansion stuff, especially Julia and Carol as they had decorating decisions to make that seemed to be of life-or-death importance. So we didn't have time to have as many Target dates as before, and we couldn't let them last all day. On the resumed Target dates, in virtually the first minute of it, Julia explained to the girls, "Sorry we've been away for the last couple of weeks. Mark decided he'd like to learn scuba diving, so we flew to what I think is the best scuba diving island anywhere in the world. A very upmarket, very small tropical island off the coast of Thailand. It was an UNBELIEVABLE place! Absolutely GORGEOUS. Just Mark, me and Carol. He brought Carol with us to keep me company when he was diving. He's wonderfully considerate about things like that, even though it cost him a lot more money. It's GREAT having a millionaire boyfriend. He suddenly decides he wants to do something fantastic, and next thing we know, we're halfway around the world, living in total luxury, eating fantastic food, and on the most incredible beach and water you've ever seen. {Sigh}, it's a tough life, but someone's got to do it." The listeners clearly thought that the someone should be them, especially after they saw the photos. Girls like Savannah and Adriana thought it very, very hard. They deserved it, because they were such superior people. Julia continued, "Oh, I just remembered. Thinking about Mark's money reminded me about Mark's new mansion. Are any of you interested in hearing about that?" It turned out that some of them were interested. "It's looking FANTASTIC! There's still a huge amount of work to do, but it's coming along wonderfully." I'll skip the next five years (it seemed). It was VERY tedious, although all the girls were riveted to Julia's every word. -- "Mark's going to throw a pool party on the last Saturday afternoon before school starts. Did I mention it has a large, heated swimming pool? And a spa pool next to it, like you'd expect of the top quality house Mark would buy. Most of the furnishing will be done by then, although the landscaping would've only just started. There's a great deal of landscaping to do, because it's a six-acre property. -- "Anyway, those of you who get an invite will be able to see everything. Mark hasn't decided who to invite yet, but I know it'll just be his closest friends and their dates. His soccer team obviously, plus three or four of his favorite girls. Ava, Alexis and Pat probably. That group will become his main social circle because once school and college start he won't have time to socialize with so many of you anymore." It was very funny to watch. Initially everyone had assumed they'd be invited, and you could see the curiosity and eagerness on their faces. When Julia had said, "those of you who get an invite," that'd scared some of them, but not badly. "His closest friends and their dates" hadn't had any effect since they were all invited on these dates, so presumably would be invited to my mansion too. It was the "three or four of his favorite girls," and then Julia's naming three of those places, that'd REALLY hurt. The other girls didn't even know if there'd be a fourth girl invited, so they weren't sure whether they could even grasp at that faint hope. Julia's closing threat about my social circle freezing had been very scary and had made getting an invite to see my mansion of critical importance, if they wanted the lifestyle being in my life represented, which they greatly did. What they all did a second later, was remember "his closest friends and their dates," plus "his soccer team obviously." By this stage of the Target Game, the girls knew that I put a lot of store on my friendships with my soccer team and that I very much appreciated any of the girls who were nice to my teammates - that preference of mine had been repeatedly reinforced - and they knew these four guys were polite, easily controlled, and didn't have girlfriends. The girls faces all turned toward my four teammates, like the barrels of two dozen tanks all turning to face the same target. (They were slightly confused over who the Targets really were, but we certainly weren't going to tell them. Not yet anyway.) The date started going very well for my teammates. Of course, the girls didn't behave correctly to start with. They assumed they were in competition with each other for the appallingly low number of soccer teammates I invited to these dates. Julia gave them some time, to let them try, get out-tried, try harder, get worked up, and for the first couple of verbal conflicts to erupt. Then Julia laughed loudly, getting their attention so they all heard, "Haha. I've just realized what you're doing. You think you can convince one of these guys to choose you as their date so you can see Mark's new mansion..." Several girls insisted that wasn't the case. They had to stop kissing my teammates asses to make themselves heard, but they insisted anyway. I'm mixing metaphor and reality. Let's just say that no one was fooled, least of all their competitors. Julia ignored the silly interruptions, " ... These guys are too mature and experienced to fall for that ploy. They get all the sex they want already, so that bait isn't going to work either. But mostly - and this is so obvious I can't believe none of you thought of it - they don't want a girlfriend! A girlfriend would get in the way of their current lifestyle. They like girls who're friendly with all of them far too much to want a single girlfriend. Chances are they'll invite no one, or maybe Alexis, Pat, Ava and me, just as a joke. -- "None of you are part of our lifestyle, but you should know that trying to get one of the boys to be your boyfriend isn't going to happen even if you offered him endless sex, so please stop competing with each other. All you're doing is creating an unfriendly atmosphere. If any of them invite anyone, it'll be a girl who is genuinely friendly and good company. If there is a girl like that, chances are all four of them would ask her, because that's the way they are, so your competitiveness is working against you. Which do you think does the better job inside duvets: goose down or the new synthetic filler?" Once they'd recovered from the shock of the abrupt change of topic, I was astonished how many of them had an opinion on the goose down versus synthetic filler debate. Apparently goose down was much better. The chemists who invented the new synthetic need to go back to their test-tubes (just in case any of them are reading this). (And while I'm at it, if any of my readers work for Microsoft, then (a) Shame on you! (b) Fix Windows so people can put two mouses on one computer please. Don't make me add it to my Emperor of the World To Do List; it's silly enough already.) The smarter girls - generally not the Targets - worked out that being friendly and noncompetitive was the best way to win the competition. The other girls soon realized this dirty trick and copied it, so most of them were soon competing with each other over who could be the friendliest and most noncompetitive. The rest of the date, and subsequent dates, went very well for my teammates. And for me too, as the Targets realized that their chances of winning were increased if I was included in the non-competition. ^ I've just leaped over a few dates, so I'll mention something that happened between them. I'd be at home, minding my own business, and one of the Target Girls would arrive and tell me, "I was just passing and thought I'd pop in." In other words, most of these girls tried to weasel their way into seeing my house the easy way. Needless to say, that had to be stopped. I requested my extended family not to let anyone into the Main House or My Wing if they didn't know they were permitted access, and that especially applied to good looking girls. That was a strange reversal of my usual attitude, proving that life can sometimes have some very unexpected twists and turns in it. When I was at home, I intercepted the girls and personally refused entry. We had an easy excuse, "It's in the middle of extensive renovations and redecorating. It's a complete mess and possibly even dangerous, so we're not letting anyone in. If you get an invitation to the house-warming party, you'll see it then." Often they asked to walk around the outside and look in the windows, but that was easily countered with, "I just said it's a mess. I'm very busy trying to un-mess part of it, which you're holding me up from, so let me escort you back to your car." ^ I had considered the sexual activities of the last few Target Game dates before our honeymoon to be over the top. To my surprise, the Targets, plus a few other girls that got swept up in the hysteria, soon non-competed themselves into activities that totally eclipsed the pre-honeymoon dates. The next few Target Game dates became increasingly over the top, underneath, side by side, both ends at once, orgies. My teammates can't have been maintaining their fitness over summer, because they got worn out. One of them also had to borrow some money from me because he'd used up all his savings and didn't have enough left to buy all the rubbers he needed. I gave him some of my rubbers. I was going through them fairly steadily myself, but they'd last until OSU started and I could visit my friendly supplier. Ignoring the people who'd been in on the Target Game plan from day one - me, My Girls, and my four teammates - there were about a dozen and a half other girls who came on the post-honeymoon Target Game dates. Eight of them were Targets. We'd started with eighteen of them originally, and could've had more because there was no shortage of bitchy candidates [especially as our school had an aggressive culture]. The number of active Targets had dropped to eight either because they'd chosen to drop out, or we'd chosen to drop them out. The other girls that came on these dates were down to about ten now, although it varied from date to date. These are the girls who had originally been invited as camouflage. There'd been quite a few of them at the beginning, and their number had also decreased over time. The Targets had never suspected they were being set up, so using other girls as camouflage had worked well. Many of the camouflage girls were girls that I wanted to spend time with, such as Abigail, and over the first several Target Game dates I got to know them better. As the dates got increasingly sexy, there were some girls I didn't want to get sucked into behaving the way we wanted the Targets to behave. To keep them safe, some I eased off the invite list, others - that Julia and I trusted - we sounded out on their attitude to the Bitches. If they had the right attitude, they were let in on some of the Target Game's plan. Some of them proved to be very helpful, by pretending to have sex with my teammates, or even easier for them, pretending they'd had sex with one or more of them "yesterday" (i.e., at some other time). The Targets hadn't started having sex with my teammates because they hadn't had any motive to do so, but as soon as they learned that they had to compete for an invite to my home, which equaled staying in my social circle (Julia made sure that point was very clear), the Target Girls were very quick to think of sex. The 'fact' (cough, cough) that the other girls had apparently recently started having sex with my teammates made it even easier for the Targets to do so. Peer pressure is a wonderful thing. The camouflage girls who hadn't been told about the plan, were repeatedly invited on these dates because we wanted to keep the numbers fairly high to make the Targets compete harder, and because they helped maintain the sexy tone. We couldn't invite new girls because they'd be shocked at the amount of sex that went on, which could damage the atmosphere. The camouflage girls that we hadn't let in on the plan, or hadn't uninvited, were girls we felt no desire to protect. If they chose to behave sexually, none of us were going to stop them. That wasn't such an obvious no-brainer as it seems, as sooner or later the truth of these dates was going to be revealed, and that would socially hurt the girls that'd fallen for it, so we only chose to let girls we didn't like participate. Some of them started acting as we wanted the Targets to act (we called them "Semi-Targets"). None of us objected to that, especially not my teammates. It worked out well, because where the Semi-Targets led, the Targets quickly tried to get ahead of them. When the post-honeymoon dates started getting orgy-ish, not all of the girls had wanted to join in. Naturally all of us pretended to be very mature and unconcerned. We reassured them, "You know us; we'd NEVER pressure you into doing anything you're uncomfortable about. And, quite frankly, we don't care whether you have sex with everyone, anyone or no one at all. Sex like this is fun between friends, but not fun if you don't want it. It doesn't matter whether you join in or not as there's plenty of sex going on anyway, so your absence wouldn't make any difference, blah, blah..." (you know how it goes). There were several girls that didn't participate in the open orgy (the camouflage girls who were now in on the plan for example, although some of them were happy to have sex with me, and/or pretend to have sex with the other guys, and sometimes with other girls too). We were fine with that. Enough of the girls were having sex, and the number was likely to keep increasing. We had more than enough participants to consider the Game a success. Certainly my four teammates considered it a FANTASTIC success, even if 'only' half the girls were having sex with them. By the end of these dates, the guys couldn't have got a hard-on if their lives depended on it. They were DRAINED. Savannah and Adriana were still active Targets. I'd done my best to ensure that by encouraging them. I wanted Savannah to stay in just because she and I had metaphorically banged heads a few times, and I would enjoy finally beating her at something similar to her own game. I wanted Adriana to stay in because she was one of the top Bitches, would no doubt be a Queen Bitch when she was a senior shortly, and because she'd been so good at fooling me. She'd played me for a fool, and I wanted revenge for that. It was easy keeping Savannah in the group. She was hooked by my encouragement, and by Carol's sub-game which was meant to give Savannah preferential access to me, once she proved herself with Carol. Savannah truly did sometimes get special treatment, like her very early ride in my new car. That sort of thing encouraged her to believe she had a hope with me. Adriana was also easy to lead on, by my pretending to fall for her tricks. She saw that she was having more success with me than the other girls were. It was relatively easy to arrange for all of the Target Girls to get the impression that I favored them over the others, and I made sure I did a particularly good job of that with Adriana. Both Adriana and Savannah easily became sexual; they were actually eager to. The trouble was that they both thought they deserved the best, so it was me that they wanted to have sex with, not my teammates. Anyone other than the best was obviously beneath these girls' dignities. I couldn't have sex with girls who weren't having sex with my teammates, because then every girl would come running for me. So I turned Savannah and Adriana down flat. "No thanks. I'm not horny, I had sex with Julia and Ava just before we came here." I told the other girls who came directly to me the same thing too. Later I must've gotten into the mood, because I called out to one of the girls currently impaled on a teammate's cock, "Willow, when you've finished with Logan, would you like a go with me?" Apparently she must've been just on the point of finishing with Logan, because she was at my side in seconds. Of course Savannah, Adriana and others lined up hopefully, but I told them, "I just want Willow thanks. I've decided that I like her attitude." A while later I exclaimed, "Bailey! Are you lining up for your fourth soccer player? What a girl! You know, I play soccer too. Will I do?" It was beneath their dignities, but eventually even Savannah and Adriana got the idea. With some of the girls, those that I particularly didn't like, when I'd finished having sex with them I'd say something like (to quote from an example with Savannah), "Thanks for the rare honor, Savannah." "What do you mean?" "Your having sex with me. It's pretty obvious that you haven't had sex very much before, so you've done me quite a compliment." "Why do you say that?" "I'm sure you've had plenty of other choices. That you chose me is a compliment to me." "No. I mean why do you say I haven't had much sex before?" "Oh that. Just because you were obviously inexperienced. You don't know what guys like and don't move well. If you'd had much experience you'd have been better at it. It's a pity actually, because I was looking forward to having sex with you quite often, but I think I'd rather wait until you're better. Try to get my teammates to give you pointers, and I'll try to remember to ask them how much you've improved." I couldn't say the same stuff to each girl that I disliked, so I had to vary it, but there were only three and a half of these girls (the last one wasn't too bad), so it wasn't hard to find four variations on the theme. It was hard to stop laughing at the expressions on their faces though. I was prepared to suggest it, but the girls very cleverly worked out two things for themselves. First, that a dozen girls all wanting a turn on each guy didn't work too well as the poor guys got too tired (although it was hard to be sympathetic). The obvious solution was to see the guys outside of these dates. I encouraged it, and very soon my teammates were swapping phone numbers frantically (while still trying very hard to appear mature). The second idea was first mentioned by Kelly, one of the Semi-Targets (they were often quicker than the Targets). Kelly had the idea that there are more than five people on a soccer team, so maybe the other team members were my friends too, even though they didn't come to these dates. She asked me about that quietly, hoping no one else heard. I replied in a fairly normal tone (there was a lot of other noise going on, so I couldn't whisper or she wouldn't hear me), "They certainly are my friends. Just as much as these guys are. The only reason they don't come on these dates is because they've got girlfriends. Whether they're serious girlfriends or only short-term ones I don't know, but they and their dates will all be invited to my house-warming party. It'd be perfectly fine if one of them invited you as his date. Do you want their names and numbers?" "Yes please." "Now that I think of it, Max would be a good first choice. I think he broke up with his girlfriend recently. I should call him to ask if he's definitely free or is still trying to get back together with her." -- I looked up at Julia, yelling loudly at her, "JULIA, can I borrow your phone please? I want to give Kelly my phone so she can copy the phone numbers of the other guys on my team, but I want to call Max as well." Almost every female head had swiveled around to look at me. Not quite all of them, but only because two were too busy, although one of those two seemed very good at splitting her attention during a fuck. Kelly groaned. I cheered her up a little though. As my reward for her being the first to raise this possibility, after I called Max to check that he didn't mind helping out his teammates who couldn't keep up with the amount of sex they were being offered, I specifically recommended Kelly to him, then passed Julia's phone to her so they could make a date. I made sure to praise her loudly and clearly for including my other teammates. Kelly made a date with Max for later that afternoon. I got the attention of all the girls, including the one that wasn't a good multi-tasker, "Kelly had the very good idea of contacting the rest of my soccer team. That was very smart and VERY considerate, so I'm very impressed by her. Other than the guys that've graduated now, and aren't considered on the team anymore, all the others will be invited to my house-warming party, and it was great that Kelly thought to call them. The only reason they don't come on these dates is because when these dates started they had girlfriends, because soccer players are VERY cool guys..." "And you're the coolest." | "Yeah, they're great. I'm glad I know so many soccer players." " ... I don't know how many of them still do, so what I'll do is call each of them now, and if he's agreeable to having sex with any of you, I'll give all of you his number to put into your phones. I can give you Max's now, because I just finished checking with him and he's got a date with Kelly already." I recited Max's number, with the Targets and Semi-Targets faithfully recording it. Then I phoned each of my remaining team members. All the calls went much the same. "I've got several very nice girls who enjoy being friendly with my best friends. Because you're in my soccer team, that includes you. These are very nice girls, and VERY friendly girls, and several of them want to call my teammates for dates and sex..." I usually had to pause there, to let whoever I was talking to express his disbelief. And after I'd assured him it was true, I had to pause while he recovered from the shock. After which I said, "I'm mostly calling to see whether you have a girlfriend or not. If you have a girlfriend, you should opt out of this. If I give out your number, you're going to have about a dozen girls calling you at all hours for dates and sex, and that's the sort of thing that most girlfriends tend to notice. Do you want me to give out your number?" Then I usually had to say, "Yes, I am serious. I don't have time to play twenty questions with you. Do you want lots of lovely girls calling you for dates and sex?" That was usually followed by, "Yes, they ARE lovely. I won't mention names in case you don't want to participate, but I promise you - on my honor as a soccer player - that they're all VERY lovely." More often than not, because soccer players are cool guys, the guy I was talking to had a girlfriend and wanted to know if we could somehow make this work on the quiet (I said they were "cool", not "moral" or "smart"). The answer to that line of inquiry was, "There are a dozen girls who're going go be chasing ten players. They're not going to remember any individual player's requests about when or when not to call. It's going to be random chaos. If you've got a girlfriend now, she'll be gone in two days if I give out your number. Is she a good enough girlfriend that you prefer to keep her over having sex with a dozen hot girls?" Let's just say that I ended up giving the girls quite a few numbers. I should've been embarrassed to be a guy, but I definitely didn't want to be the alternative because then I'd have to date guys. Guys are the PITS, and so lacking in loyalty. Only one guy, Chris, remained staunch. [The smarter guys agreed to have their number given out, then waited to see if they got phone calls before breaking up with their girlfriends. When they got the calls, and ESPECIALLY when the girls said who they were - remember they were all A-listers or very close to it - then their girlfriends very quickly became ancient and forgotten history.] Even though I'd talked out loud as if it was a fact, I still got called on it, and had to do a little bit of fancy footwork to justify why the other team members should all be given sex from all the girls, rather than one girl finding one guy and being his girlfriend. It was relatively easy. I had a couple of minor points, but the killer point was, "By all means try to hook up with one guy if you want. He can invite whoever he wants as his girlfriend, so you might succeed. You'll have to be a VERY good girlfriend though, because the rest of the girls here are still going to be calling him frequently offering sex. There's no reason for them not to, because the friendlier they are to all my teammates, the better their chance of being invited." Not even Adriana thought she could beat all the others. She knew they were all bitch-sluts who'd do anything, the cows! I had one other MAJOR problem: making sure the girls remained convinced that getting invited to my house-warming party was important enough for them to have sex with a soccer team. Being soccer players, the guys were cool, but they weren't quite that cool. The Targets needed encouragement. At the moment the Targets were all carried away (nearly all of us were naked, there'd been a lot of sex going on, this had built up in small steps, and there was a lot of peer pressure and competitiveness going on), but when they got home and relaxed, their feet were likely to cool down, possibly all the way to cold. Over the rest of the date, and in the following dates, I often mentioned various loads of bullshit. Everything from "When our vacation ends, I'm going to be at college FAR more often than at school, and when there, I'll be frantically trying to catch up with all the schoolwork I've missed. I won't have time to get to know new people at school. Those of you whom I'm getting along well with when school starts are probably going to be the only friends I have time for all year. If Julia and I decide to go to Milan and Rome, then those are the girls we'll probably take with us. That's if you're interested in foreign clothes. I assume most of you would prefer to stick to American clothes." I laughed to myself at the total absence of national loyalty. If these girls were in charge of foreign policy, our army would be pulled out of Iraq and used to invade Paris, Milan and Rome. Another line I used was, "You've seen how I keep inviting the same girls to these dates but the numbers are dropping. That's what I tend to do. If you get invited to one function and you fit in well, then you'll be invited to the next. But if you miss out, you'll probably escape my mind the next time we're listing who we want to invite." Another idea was, "I don't want to invite too many people, but I want a friendly atmosphere, so I'll ask my teammates who they think should be invited." What criterion my teammates would use didn't need to be thought about. The girls had an immediate intuitive understanding about that (girls are very intuitive creatures; it compensates for their being so illogical). I had a few other ideas I haven't bothered listing here, plus Julia and some of the other girls contributed reasons they thought of. Julia was especially good, as she knew how to hit girls' hot buttons and had spent much time thinking about how to motivate girls sexually. For example, it was amazing how the girls reacted to the idea of having tens of thousands of dollars and carte blanche to furnish each room. It actually physically aroused them, which was just weird. Julia spent a long time talking about all the furnishing and decorating work that was going on, which kept the girls simmering very nicely. (I learned that apparently "furnishing" and "decorating" aren't the same thing. I wasn't sufficiently interested to find out why.) The best thing Julia said was, "You know what a genius Mark is. He's going to be finishing his college degree before he graduates high school. At the age of sixteen too, that's how smart he is. The people at OSU are wetting their pants over having Mark as a student. It's amazing how excited they are. When Mark graduates school next year, the best universities from all over the world are going to be BEGGING him to come to them. So in a year's time, Mark's going to be moving to a major city, having to buy and decorate another mansion, and starting a new life there. -- "I'll still have another year of school to go and will be a bit young to live apart from my parents, so I'll probably be stuck in Corvallis. Ava could go with Mark, but she's not really a take-charge type of girl. Mark needs a girl who can take charge of everything: finding his new mansion, decorating it, entertaining all the important people he'll be meeting, managing the money he'll be earning, keeping him company on the overseas vacations he likes going on, and those sorts of things." The girls connected the remaining dots VERY easily. They LOVED having power over guys, and although they hadn't tried it before, they were pretty sure they'd love having power over a multi-millionaire guy even more. Julia added, "That's only nine months, because finding the right mansion and all the rest takes time, so whoever does it will have to start right after graduation. Mark's going to be extremely busy finishing his college degree when OSU restarts, so the next couple of weeks will be the best chance for socializing he'll have. Knowing him, in the other mid-term breaks he'll want to fly overseas somewhere or other. As rich as he is, why should he hang around Corvallis, especially when he can take his best friends with him." Over the next few days we found out that we'd done an okay job. Four or five girls were reasonably active, to the delight of my full set of teammates (except Chris). Other than the loyal Chris, none of the others had a girlfriend by the end of the third day, just several fuck-mates. I called those girls, to encourage them to continue to have sex with my soccer team. I didn't use those words, but they got the clear message that their actions were making me happy. At the next Target Game date, four days later, it was easy for all of my plotters and me to show the five girls considerable favoritism. The rest of my team came too. I'd told them to initially be affectionate only with the four or five girls they knew, and ignore the others, but to expand that circle only after new girls proved their friendliness by having sex with at least two soccer players. Most of the girls who were being largely ignored decided that being ignored (and the threat it implied) was worse than having sex with a few more guys, so that's what they did. Just above I should've written, "the rest of my team came too, minus one very sorry guy." The team had let Chris know what he was missing out on, telling him lurid, graphic, rapturous stories. Chris was still loyal to his girlfriend, which must've been REALLY hurting. I hoped his girlfriend knew he was making the ultimate sacrifice for her. After the next Target Game date finished, there was again some backsliding, but the following date helped boost that up again. That cycle repeated every half a week (we managed about two Target Game dates per week), and generally trended upward. The amount of eroticism was erratic though, because females are not consistent creatures. The guys were totally consistent; they fucked every girl, every opportunity, all the way up to the house-warming party. And because of how consistent guys are, I'm sure they'd like to continue fucking beautiful girls right through the house-warming party and out the other side. The girls weren't consistent like that. A couple of them dropped out. Another couple of them fucked virtually all the guys, and THEN dropped out, which made no sense at all, so I should have expected it. One of the first dropouts wanted to drop back in again. There was no reason why not, provided she made up for lost time proving herself before the invitations went out. Fortunately we had enough girls playing the game: six of the Targets and three of the Semi-Targets. Not that it mattered a great deal, but Savannah and Adriana were still going like troupers. Reluctant troupers - although they tried to keep their reluctance hidden - but at least they were participating. To help educate them, I took each of them to bed for a one-on-one session. I wouldn't let them into My Wing, as that was part of the bait to motivate them to open their legs so widely. We couldn't use my old home as it was being rented out by then and the tenants probably wouldn't have appreciated two strangers coming inside and having wild sex. Or maybe they would've, in which case I wouldn't. Julia's room in her old home was the obvious choice, but it felt awkward to intrude on The Boys and their girlfriends (both girlfriends had moved in, no doubt fearing their guys would starve to death and never do the laundry). I solved the problem by offering Savannah and Adriana a personal, one-on-one, high quality sex session with yours truly, provided they arranged the venue. Adriana must've had her parents well trained, and Savannah got a motel room. I gave both girls the absolute best sex I could. Which meant I didn't worry about my pleasure, only theirs. I gave them a LOT of pleasure. And then I rolled them over and gave them even more. Repeatedly. By the time they absolutely begged me stop, they knew they'd been fucked like they'd never been fucked before, and better than any other guy could possibly fuck them, even if he got help from a whole soccer team. They'd had more orgasms than they could've counted. I wouldn't have been surprised if they got more from me in the one session than from every other guy they'd ever had added together, as they tended to date football players. They'd both been too wiped out for conversation, so I waved a cheery "Goodbye," and jogged energetically out of their rooms. When they'd finally recovered, and had the energy to lift a finger, they phoned me. Their particular praises didn't matter; the key point was my saying, "In all seriousness Savannah," (or Adriana), "I was surprised at how little I enjoyed myself. It was awkward having sex at the swimming hole, but I thought you'd be better in a bed. But you weren't very good. If there's one thing I know a great deal about, it's how to have good sex, and I could tell you don't know how to do that. I thought you would've had more experience, or is it that you haven't learned to give pleasure because you've been a selfish lover?" To be fair to them (what a strange concept), they hadn't had a chance to show any expertise with me. I'd dived between their legs, and a few minutes later their orgasms had started. From then on I'd made sure they'd remained helplessly on the receiving end of my end. I wasn't interested in their answers, which probably had very little to do with reality anyway. I was just taking their egos down a couple of notches. I particularly enjoyed saying, "Yes, I'm serious. I wouldn't play games with you." That was somewhat untrue, considering this was all part of the "Target GAME". Game playing was the main point. I also enjoyed, "Have you been asking my teammates to point out ways in which you could improve? You should do that. If you're consistently poor in bed, people will start assuming you're selfish and they'll stop wanting to have you around." To tell the truth, I didn't know how good Savannah and Adriana were. The sessions had been too energetically one-sided for me to find that out. One aspect of bedding them turned out to be interesting: seeing their personalities react to the experience in quite different ways. Savannah maintained her air of superiority around school mostly by maintaining an air of superiority. In other words, it was just pretence with no depth to it. Once I'd stripped her naked and given her a few orgasms, she didn't have any poise left. Without her air of superiority, she was just a nice body. Not even a great body; merely a nice one. It was really just a darker version of Ava's, but no way could Ava have carried off the superior act that Savannah did, even though Ava's body was the equal of Savannah's. Blacks being only about 1% of the population in Corvallis gave Savannah the sense of difference she needed to make her act work. Or maybe she would've been the same even if she'd been White. I didn't care enough to wonder about it. Adriana was different. She was gorgeous both in face and figure, and very secure in her knowledge of her superiority. Her act never slipped because it wasn't an act; she truly believed she was a superior human being, thereby ensuring she was an inferior one. Of the two of them, you might think that I should've retained interest in Savannah more than Adriana, because Savannah was the least dishonest. But that didn't matter to me, as I had no interest in either of their personalities. Both were far beneath anything I'd consider acceptable as a friend. The only interests I had in them were to screw their bodies, which Adriana's body won hands down; and screw with their heads, which Adriana also won hands down. She was so egotistical that she deserved it more, and more people at school would appreciate it. ^ The Target Game was a great deal of fun, although it was fairly expensive, as I provided the VERY top quality picnic catering for my core girls, myself, and my four teammates, to create even more envy in the Target Girls' little hearts. It also took a significant amount of our time, but we managed to fit in other activities, such as the Pipeline Dates. We had a dinner party at the Durham's house after we returned from Europe, attended by all eight of the current members of Pipeline Group 1A. It was a lot of fun, as Carina's parents are hard cases and good people. As best I could tell, they're also damned good parents, judging by Carina's attitude to sex. She was knowledgeable and humorously open about it, while also being happy to be a virgin (all teenage girls are virgins by choice, as they get endless opportunities not to be. Most of their opportunities might be from losers, but they're still opportunities). Carina had long since come clean to her parents about what the pipeline system was. I don't know how they'd reacted then, but they'd certainly had a lot of intelligent questions about it during the dinner party. Their questions had pressured me to provide good answers, and I truly mean "good answers", the Durham's attitude made me want to give the best, most honest answers I could, even in front of the entire audience. It was like the tough sessions I sometimes have with Prof or Vanessa - when they're pointing out a mistake I'd just made and are extracting the lesson from me - but a lot less traumatic. The Durhams (Kirsten and Justin) had been asking on their daughter's behalf. They'd known their daughter was very interested in me, and that something very strange was going on, so they'd asked intelligent questions to help them understand it. They hadn't been the least bit fazed when Carina had sat on my lap or semi-joked about my being her first lover. Nor had they gotten upset when the other girls had sat in my lap. I'd complimented them on it. They'd turned it around and complimented me, " ... because it's your attitude to the girls that makes your behavior acceptable." They hadn't even gotten upset when it came out that when the pipeline group got small enough, having sex with me would be one of the activities their daughter would be required to do in order to avoid elimination. Rather than being upset, they'd started a very lively conversation about sex, spending nearly as much time asking Carina questions as me, even though my answers were often very peculiar ones (any question about my sex-life pretty much had to receive a peculiar answer). I'll quote one conversation, to give you an idea of the tone and honesty that prevailed. Mr. Durham asked, "If you're so extraordinarily good at sex," (Julia had answered some of their questions too), "wouldn't your having sex with Carina and then breaking up with her mean she'd be dissatisfied with lovemaking for the rest of her life?" I knew the answer to that, because Julia had told me, "When I discovered how good I was at sex and Julia started pushing me into having it with other girls, I worried about the same thing" (and for quite a while after that, but the exact timing didn't matter), "so I asked Julia the same question." I could've teased Justin for being 'such a male' with the following point, but that wasn't this evening's tone. I continued, "She told me that's not the way it works with females. From me they do get probably the best physical sex they'll ever experience, but that's not in the same league as 'lovemaking'. Once they find a guy they love, that emotion will easily trump my athleticism. -- "You don't have to worry about my spoiling Carina's future relationship with her Mr. Right. The only possible result is that after experiencing me, girls might lose interest in meaningless sex. I don't think that's much of an issue though, because most girls are too mature to have much interest in that anyway. Certainly Carina's far too mature. -- "If I ever need more money, I've been thinking of offering a service to all the parents of good looking girls in Corvallis who're worried about their daughters being too interested in meaningless sex. For an entirely reasonable rate - say $99.95 - I'd have one of my patented counseling sessions with their daughter. Particularly good looking girls might require several sessions, but I'm sure I could provide a reasonable discount structure. What do you think?" "Sign me up!" declared Kaiya (the not-shy girl who'd given me a mini-blowjob at the Aquatic Center). "From everything I've heard, I'd pay that much to find out what it's like." It was an interesting and enjoyable evening, and a highly successful one in a very important respect. I'd taken a risk and had gotten Mom and Dad invited. The dinner party happened soon after we returned from Europe, when Mom hadn't yet given her consent to our three-way marriage. I'd taken a gamble that the Durham's conversation would help our case rather than hurt it. The dinner party didn't go the usual way of having the parents and kids separate to have their own conversations. The Durhams wanted to learn about me, so we stayed in one room and had a very large discussion, which Mom heard all of. Without wanting to insult Mom - who has many wonderful traits - the Durhams were the opposite of Mom in their approach. Rather than a knee-jerk reaction to their virgin daughter's dating a guy who was sleeping with "half the girls in Corvallis" (to quote Mom), they listened to their daughter, thought about it, asked intelligent questions, listened to the answers, etc. What was particularly good was that the Durhams drew a far better conversation out of me than Mom ever had on the marriage proposal (the two topics were similar enough that I knew Mom would make the comparison; which is why I'd gotten my parents invited), and the Durhams very deliberately and intelligently decided to approve of Carina's continual involvement in the pipeline process. A decision that Mom would NEVER have opted for had she been in their shoes. The Durhams were fully aware that Carina was probably going to get hurt, as she was competing against a large number of other girls, and it wasn't clear that there was ever going to be a winner, as I was obviously staying with Julia. Their attitude summarized to, "It might hurt Carina, but it'll be a good experience for her too." Seeing the Durhams in action was a good experience for Mom, and I'm sure it helped her decide to consent to our marriage. Which meant that Mom's seeing two parents decide to let their daughter date me had helped Mom decide to let me marry two other girls. It's weird how things work sometimes. The Durhams' dinner party also marked the resumption of the pipeline dates. It was a good indication of the Durhams' parenting skills that after the long conversations they had about it, Carina was permitted to stay in the pipeline. I'm also sure that had they asked her to pull out, she would have. As should be pretty obvious, by this time Carina was at the top of my list when it came to the 1A girls, and she was better than most other girls I knew too. Her parents' attitude to the pipeline system wouldn't have mattered much if Carina was going to be eliminated soon, but that seemed unlikely. Pipeline Groups 2A and 2B also became active. I had too many other things going on, so I slowed the pipeline system down considerably, having only one pipeline date per week (so three weeks between dates for each group): 2A, 2B, 1A, then repeat. There were eight weeks of summer left when the pipeline restarted, but I lost a couple to my honeymoon and being busy with house moving and furnishing, leaving time for two dates per group. They were down to three, four and two members respectively at the end of summer, when I merged the three groups, making 2C with nine good quality members. Carina and Victoria were the two survivors in 1A. I'd surprised myself in retaining Victoria. I hadn't thought much of her initially. She'd come to the Pizza & Hot Tub Party way back in the very early days of my group dating, and had been okay then, but only okay. At date 1A#1 she'd also been okay, and at the Aquatic Center she'd maintained her consistent impression. But she'd picked up steam after that; dates 1A#2 and 1A#3 both going well for her. They'd had to, for me to prefer her over Kaiya and May. Especially Kaiya; she was highly sexual and fun about it, which is a damned good attitude for a girl to have. Unfortunately, it also appeared to be the only attitude Kaiya had. If she had to pick one attitude, that was clearly the best possible choice, but her not having much else going for her eventually worked against her. I still had hopes for her though, so I told her, "Remember yellow cards only last to the beginning of the next school year, which is only a couple of weeks away. I hope you'll join another group." She'd looked too depressed, which made me sad too. We hadn't had it yet, but after date 2C#1 there'd be only four of them left, and I'd be telling them that our next date was to be sexual. That'd give Carina and her parents time to discuss it. ^ I won't describe the 2A and 2B groups in any detail, but I will make some general comments. On average, slightly over half the initial members of each group were complete wastes of space as far as I was concerned. They were so bad that I thought most guys would reject them just as quickly as I did, assuming the same circumstances (i.e., there were other girls to choose. I had to assume that because very few guys will reject a good looking girl if she's his only choice). So the first elimination round was very easy. The second round, from eight down to four girls, was somewhat tougher. There were usually one or two girls who were still relatively easy elimination choices, but that left two or three that I had to think carefully about and were sorry to eliminate. The third round, from four down to two (which had only happened to Group 1A so far), was a nightmare. In a group of sixteen girls, there were usually between three and five that I liked a lot. I was predisposed to like them because all the girls in a group were interested in me. There's nothing like having a girl positive about you to make you feel positive about her. They were good looking too. That's not as shallow as it seems, because good looking girls have had more experience with guys, so have usually learned to be better at boy-girl relationships. That's unless they're VERY good looking, in which case they can get horribly arrogant. By the third elimination round I'd gotten to know the girls quite well - especially as 1A had spent time with me at the Aquatic Center and at the Durham's dinner party - so I could too easily sympathize with the girls I hurt by rejecting them. The third elimination in 1A had been painful, and I knew the first elimination in 2C (the merged group) when I would have to get rid of five girls that I liked a lot, was going to be even worse. ------- Chapter 279: Cuties and Ducklings Go Browsing While I Go Exploring Friday, September 2 to Sunday, September 25, 2005 (Continued) The Cuties and Ducklings were worth their weight in goose down. (You should've seen what the cost of the duvet for my big bed was! It had to be custom-made, as apparently duvets that big have serious problems with the dreaded "Feather Compaction", so they end up being very expensively divided into internal mini-duvets. Either that or the store saw us as rich idiots and ripped us off.) There were a number of factors that combined wonderfully when it came to the Cuties and Ducklings: Most importantly, my sisters. The Cuties and Ducklings wouldn't have worked even one-tenth as well without my sisters' wonderful help. Patch earned his not-inconsiderable keep by providing the visitors with a wonderful parental justification, as well as genuinely motivating the girls to visit. For some girls - those that thought they had no chance with me - Patch provided even more motivation than I did, relegating flirting with me to the status of a bonus for their visits. To a lesser extent, the swimming pool provided a justification for visiting us too. It made up for the "lesser" by providing an excellent reason for the girls to remove most of their clothes; something Patch completely failed to achieve, no matter how many apples I promised him. My Wing, with all the privacy it afforded. The Cuties and Ducklings were at the ages (thirteen to fifteen mostly) where they very easily fell into crushes, were inexperienced and very easily swayed by peer pressure. The older of those girls were starting to develop some strength of character, but they were still fairly easy to manage. The younger girls were so easy that using the word "manage" misleadingly implies that some effort was required. Diana and Claire were also very helpful; especially Diana, because Carol got her involved in sexing up both groups. To continue my analytical approach, there were three types of Cutie-Duckling visits (I'll combine their names, as after a few dates I combined the groups themselves): An event centered on me. I'd tell Carol and/or Donna I was free on a particular day, and we'd arrange the Cuties and/or Ducklings to come over and 'play', according to whatever plan I had for the day. An event centered on Carol. These were the sessions where she trained the groups into being more sexual. They were very much like the previous type of date, except I wasn't involved. Carol had no trouble getting the Cutie-Ducklings into a lot of sexual behavior, especially with Diana and Claire being very willing helpers. None of the other girls knew the two Norris girls were effectively moles working for us. Casual pop-ins. It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that there was a Cutie or Duckling around more often than not. If any of them had a quarter of a chance, or their parents took their eyes off them for a while, they'd scoot over. Often to see Patch rather than me (he provided me with a surprising amount of competition, for a gelding). I ended up having to get Donna a cheap cellphone to make managing her burgeoning social life easier. That fact that it helped my sex-life was an excellent additional reason. I tended to avoid spending much time with the casual pop-ins, or else we would've been swarmed by them, especially because 13-year old girls are extremely good at swarming; that being one of the reasons they were called "Ducklings". Although I must admit that when they'd popped in to visit Patch, I often couldn't resist using Patch to play the fool in front of them. Because Patch's movement intentions were so easily swamped by my EKP and he took direction from NP so well, I had fantastic control over him, so we could do some pretty good tricks, such as my doing a handstand on his back while he galloped past the very impressed girls (NP could hold me up easily). Patch and I had a little comedy act too, where he'd gallop under a branch that overhung the back of our property. I had to be standing up in the stirrups to do it, but I'd pretend to get hung up on the branch and knocked out of the saddle, while Patch quickly turned around and came back, so when I dropped on him I'd be facing the wrong way. Then I'd ham up something silly, similar to what I'd done with Cousin Jennifer. It was pretty easy to make the girls giggle (that and swarming were what they did best). The events centered on me were a different matter. Once we got back from our honeymoon, and were living in our new home, the Cutie-Duckling seduction moved into top gear. As I'd promised them, both groups were soon invited over, given the guided tour, shown important places like the pool and my bedroom, and introduced to Patch (I quickly learned to do that as the last stop on the tour, or some girls would be reluctant to leave him). I'd flirt with the girls outrageously, especially with Diana and Claire. I'd take physical liberties with them, and they'd thank and praise me for being so wonderful. Then they'd sigh, and suggest that another girl should have a turn with me. They already knew which girls were already panting for me, so they'd something like, "You should play with Kim next. She REALLY likes you." Kim would blush with embarrassment, and temporarily hate Diana, but I had a very effective way of fixing that. I'd enthusiastically take Kim into my arms and repeat on Kim the liberties I'd taken on Diana, all while Diana was saying, "Isn't he wonderful? Doesn't it feel great? I loved it so much. You're so lucky, Kim." Seducing the Cutie-Ducklings was very easy: My being rich didn't have much direct effect on the Ducklings, although it did excessively influence some of the Cuties. What I used my money for was more important. Buying Patch was the ultimate example, but even something as simple as ordering a bunch of pizzas went down well (I thought so too). None of their brothers would buy pizzas for a large bunch of their sister's friends. Taking them for rides in my car with the lid down worked well too, although it wasn't suitable for large groups. It was good for an ice-cream run though. Carol, Donna, Diana and Claire knew what each of the girls felt about me. That was especially useful to know about the ones hottest to do sexual things. Peer pressure could be used to quickly get momentum happening in the right direction (that being the sexual direction, in case you were in any doubt). Peer pressure worked especially well on the Ducklings. My sisters sung my praises. That carried a lot of weight with all the girls, so it made a big difference. I was always very nice to my sisters. For example, when I was riding Patch one day, I asked him, "Patch, please pick the most beautiful girl for me to kiss." Patch walked forward and 'chose' Donna. I told him, "That's my SISTER! I can't kiss my SISTER! Pick another beautiful girl." He walked down the line again, then insisted on Donna. The girls knew I was steering Patch with my knees (they guessed), so they knew I was just complimenting Donna in a humorous way. By the way, Donna was being surprisingly mature and undemanding over my doing sexy things with her friends but not with her. I made sure to frequently praise Donna for her maturity, ending something like, "You-Know-What is going to be very impressed on your next birthday." Donna greatly hoped so. She clearly felt the desire, which meant she truly was doing well not to act on it. As useful as Patch was, the pool was even better. The Cutie-Ducklings loved playing "Toss the Girl". They were generally fairly small girls, most weighing slightly less than my NP force, so I could toss them pretty high. I loved feeling their asses (and other flirtations), so we were all happy. There was a delightful amount of pool flirtations during each group's first visit, but only flirtations. After my first session with each group, Carol started sexing up their attitudes. We (me mostly, but my girls are VERY cooperative) wanted to turn the Cuties and Ducklings into sex groups, rather than "Girls Who Giggle Uselessly Whenever They See Mark" groups. The Cuties' and Ducklings' second mansion dates were so similar that I'll just describe the Cuties' date in detail. When it was time to get into the pool, Carol took off her dress to reveal her Australian bikini. Talk about making an impact! Especially as Carol had always dressed conservatively at school. The Australian bikini was NOT conservative. (If we really want to support our soldiers in Iraq, we should let them invade Australia. They'll enjoy themselves a hell of a lot more there.) Once the girls had gotten over their shock (pretended shock in the well-prepared Diana's case), Diana yelled, "CAROL! Where did you get that! I've GOT TO get one. I want to wear one for Mark." "Me too!" yelled some of the other girls. "Ahh, me too," added the rest, because peer pressure is a truly wonderful thing. Carol answered, "I told Mark what I wanted and he got it for me over the internet. After we've had our swim, we should go to Mark's study and order bikinis for all of you too." Diana and some of the girls were immediately enthusiastic, but others voiced the most predictable worry: "My parents would KILL me if they saw that!" Apparently there must be quite a few homicidal parents in Corvallis, because most girls agreed with that. No way should parents be allowed to kill their sexy daughters. Football-playing sons I'd be willing to encourage them to kill, but never sexy girls. You've got to draw a line somewhere. "No problem," Carol said helpfully. "You can buy them using Mark's computer, have them delivered here, and leave them here for whenever you come. Your parents will never know." That reassured them. I guess it's nice to know that your parents aren't going to kill you. Then there was the second predictable problem: "I don't have any money," stated one girl, others realizing they were in the same terrible situation. Personally I think it's appalling that parents would let their daughters get so poor that they couldn't afford to buy something so essential. "That should be easy," Carol said helpfully (Carol is very helpful in such situations). "What's the use of my having a rich brother if he won't do little favors for my friends? Mark, would you PLEASE buy bikinis like this for my friends that can't afford it?" "Hmm, let me think about that. On the one hand, I'll see a dozen very beautiful and nice girls in sexy bikinis. On the other hand ... Hmm, I can't think of an 'on the other hand'. I guess that means I'll be happy to do it." That was greeted with much celebration. It's nice that I could make so many girls happy. There were a couple of girls who said, "I'm not sure whether I could wear something like that. It's very revealing. People can see EVERYTHING. You know it's see-through, don't you Carol? That people can see your, umm, you know, down there?" Carol answered, "I love that it's see-through. I'll only wear it when I'm with people that I trust. I don't have a boyfriend, but if I did, I'd get very excited about being able to show him my body so well. You're very lucky that you'll be able to enjoy showing yourself to Mark." I knew that once the other girls started wearing them, the wimps would also want to (it's that wonderful peer pressure thing again. It's amazingly versatile and useful). So I said, "It seems most of you want them, so I'll order a few spares for the rest of you, in case you change your mind later." That took care of that. Several girls worried that they'd look no good, especially Ducklings that didn't have much figure yet. Regardless of who was speaking, that was just SILLY TALK! Part of the magic of bikinis is that they make any girl look good. Obviously not fat, 50-year old women, or even fat 15-year old girls, but there were none of either of those here today. There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever that every girl in the Cutie-Duckling collective would look cock-hardeningly awesome. I managed to convincingly convey my opinion on the matter. There was a lot more conversation about Carol's bikini. She'd taken it on our honeymoon, so the girls could easily see that Carol's tan was amazingly wide spread, especially as Carol had gone topless on Ko Phi Phi's beaches more often than not, which led to quite a long conversation. It all added to the wonderful progress we were making. Later, after our swim, it was time for the excited girls to order their new bikinis; Carol and Diana having revved up the subject again. I got their attention, then said, "Girls, I'm worried about one thing. Distressingly, teenagers can be too easily swayed by peer pressure, and it's very important to me that none of you get pushed into buying a bikini that you'd feel uncomfortable in. Nor should you let how gorgeous and wonderful I'd think you'd look influence you either. If you don't want to be as sexy as Carol, that's entirely your choice. So I insist that only one of you at a time comes into my study to choose her bikini, so the other girls can't look over her shoulder and push her into the wrong decision. I care for you all too much to let any of you be pushed around like that." "Isn't my brother the best?" asked Carol. They agreed I was the best. That was good to know. I'm not one to rest on my laurels, so I added, "Thank you. I think you're all wonderful too. I just had another idea. It doesn't seem fair that I pay for some of your bikinis but not the others'. So I think the fairest thing is if I pay for all of them. Is that okay?" It left them with more money to buy other clothes with, so of course it was okay. We all moved into my living room. Carol got drinks and snacks (I make sure our kitchen is VERY well stocked with such things), while I said, "Diana, you were the first to ask for a new bikini so let's order your one first." "Goody. I know what I want." "What's that?" "The TINIEST one you can find! I want to be VERY sexy for you, Mark. I think you're wonderful and I want you to see all of my body whenever you want." "That's very nice of you, but you don't have to do that if you don't want to. I enjoy being with you regardless of what you wear." "I WANT TO! I'm only a little girl and I can't make you feel as good as you make me feel, so I want you to look at my body as much as you want. And you can touch it too, if you want. You can do anything you want to me, even have sex if you want. I want to do EVERYTHING with you. I WISH you'd touch me. Sometimes I wish that so much that I can't sleep..." Diana had probably laid it on thick enough by now, as a delightfully large proportion of our audience were clearly in agreement, with many of them echoing the same opinion. I hadn't given Diana an exact script as getting her to remember it and deliver it believably would've been asking too much of her. Instead, I'd given her the main ideas and was letting her own motivation provide all the impetus. It'd be best not to let her speak too long though, in case she wandered clumsily. So I interrupted, "I didn't know you felt so strongly. I think you're a lovely person and a sexy girl as well. But I don't want to take advantage of your feelings too much, so how about I touch you just a bit while you're looking at what bikini you want to buy." "That would be WONDERFUL! Thank you. You can touch me a LOT if you want." "Just a little I think, sweetie. I'll give you time to get used to your feelings and to see if you change your mind. I'm not the sort of guy who'd take advantage of a girl unless she was REALLY sure." "I'm ALREADY sure! I want you so much I dream about it sometimes and I think about you every day. And I, umm, play with myself a lot thinking about you." We were totally improvising now, but it was going well. Diana did have strong feelings for me and she was using them very well in this little act. I played along, "You don't need to be embarrassed about that, sweetie. Sex is a perfectly natural and enjoyable activity, especially when the two people are willingly sharing it with each other as friends, not like a lot of the guys do when they selfishly push girls too far." "You'd NEVER do that! You're too wonderful..." "Don't be too sure about that. You're a very nice girl, and I might get carried away touching you when we're in the study." "I'd LOVE you to. I want you to do EVERYTHING with me." "Maybe later we can do more, if you still want to, but at the beginning I want to start slowly. I don't want you to ever regret doing anything with me. That you're happy is more important to me than sex. That goes for the rest of you too. You never have to worry about me pushing you too far. I don't want you to push each other into buying bikinis you're not comfortable with, and I'd hate to push you too far sexually. I'll try to be very careful with you, but please make sure you always speak up right away if you feel uncomfortable, or if you're worried about being pushed too fast. Your happiness is the most important thing, okay?" Their happiness truly was important, because if they weren't happy they might complain to their parents, and then I'd be made VERY unhappy. I let them gush reassurances at me for a while. It was very enjoyable watching their eagerness and listening to them repeat many of the things Diana had said. I doubt very much that any of them would've had the gumption to say what Diana had said, but once she'd said it, most of them had no trouble enthusiastically agreeing with it, especially because most of the others were saying the same thing at the same time. I don't know about you, but I'm starting to think peer pressure is wonderful. I interrupted, that being the only way of getting a chance to speak, "Thank you very much for all your wonderful compliments. It makes me feel very good. Every single one of you is an exceptionally nice girl, and I'm honored that you want to do things like that with me. I'm a VERY lucky guy. But as much fun as it would certainly be, I won't let you go so fast. We'll take it slowly, so I'm sure that I'm not taking advantage of any of you. Even though I might have trouble getting to sleep thinking about how wonderful it'd be. Come on, Diana, let's find a new bikini for you." I put my arm around her shoulders and steered her toward my study. As soon as the study door was closed behind us, I gave her a VERY appreciative kiss, holding her ass tight and rubbing her groin against my hard cock, that being a very good way of showing my appreciation. When we came up for air, Diana was glazed with lust (admittedly she was easy to glaze). She said, "I WISH we could have sex now. I want it very badly now." "When we were kissing, you might've noticed how much I wanted it?" "{Giggle}. I got you very excited." "You did indeed. Because you're so sexy of course, but also because of how well you did talking in front of the other girls." "{Giggle}. That was funny. I like doing things like that with you and Carol. I hope you ask me to do more of them." "I'm sure we will. You're very good." Role-playing like that is something nearly every female is good at. That's why it's SO much better to have them on your side, because they can be hellishly tricky creatures otherwise. If Adriana hadn't made the mistake of denigrating me and walking away from the group lunch just before I got rich, I wouldn't have a clue how fake she is. Bikini shopping with the girls individually had the disadvantage of possibly taking a long time if I dillydallied with each. Obviously I was still going to do it, because the advantages were overwhelming, but I had to move it along fairly quickly. I sat in my chair and got Diana to sit in my lap. I put one my hands on the mouse and the other hand on the pussy. By the way, I'd asked Carol to tell the girls in both groups to ALWAYS wear dresses when they visited me. Never jeans or shorts. To save time, I'd already bookmarked the main bikini stores on my main computer (the one with the most software), and just the wonderful Australian store on the secondary computer. I started with the secondary computer, fired up Mozilla Firefox (Andrew had put me onto it recently, as being safer and better than Internet Explorer. I was starting to learn some stuff about computers), opened the Australian store, navigated down to the correct bikini section because they had a lot of bikini sections that were of no interest to me, then created three duplicate windows which I moved to the other panels. In each I called up a different design's picture, two made of mesh fabric, two of sheer, all of which I already had plenty of in the box I had stored in the garage. Four LARGE pictures of sexy girls in tiny bikinis made Diana say, "Wow. Your computer is amazing. I've never seen one like this before." I had two computers, but that didn't matter. "I use it a great deal, and it helps me to have such a good setup." I actually spend very little time in my study, but my sight blob spends about six hours per night here so I'll count my statement as true, if only for the novelty value. I changed hands. Right hand from mouse to pussy, left hand from pussy to the primary computer's mouse. On the primary computer, I called up four different stores, the Australian one again, and three others, calling up a sample on each site, including another sample on my favorite store's. "Which bikini do you want?" "The tiniest one. You told me to say that, but it's true. I want to be very sexy for you. I'd go naked if I could." "We will have days when the girls and I will be naked, but not yet..." "Wow. That'll be amazing. All of us naked, even you?" "Yep. But we'll start with bikinis for all of you though. I don't want to go too fast in case one of the girls get scared and complains to her mother or father." "She'd have to be crazy. You're such a wonderful boy. I don't think any of them would tell on you. I think they all love you already." "Better safe than sorry. We should pick a bikini, because once we've done that I can concentrate of giving your pussy a good time." "Oh goody. You pick one Mark. Pick QUICKLY, {giggle}." "That one there in blue," as I pointed to one of the first ones I'd displayed. "Good." Diana arched her head around and we started kissing while I starting frigging her properly. Diana is VERY easy to get off, so a couple of minutes later I was cuddling her and saying nice things while she recovered. I think her hair-trigger is emotional rather than physiological. I don't think lack of experience is relevant. If anything, Diana is getting-off faster as she's accumulating experience, and she has accumulated quite a lot by now. She's made out with maybe a dozen girls, and has had full-on sex with me, Carol, Ava and even Julia, in all sorts of combinations. I wrote "even Julia" because I don't put her into such situations often now. Julia will truly do ANYTHING I want her to, and even enjoy doing it for me, but if she's got a free choice she prefers sex with just her spouses and/or Ava. I know Julia and Ava play around when Julia stays at Ava's house overnight, but that's as wide as Julia's own desires take her. Unlike the early days, there's rarely any pressure on Julia to do more, as there are enough other girls who are happier to do interesting new people for me, or often for themselves once I set it up. When Diana was ready, I asked her, "You remember what to say when you go back?" "Yes. I got the tiniest bikini we could find. It's about the same size as Carol's, which is a pity because I wanted much smaller. Also I sat in your lap and begged you to put your finger on my cunny, but for a long time you refused because you were too nice. I kept begging and you finally agreed and you were so good I had a 'gasm. Right?" "Right on. You're a wonderful girl." "I wish I was older." We'd had this conversation several times before. She wanted to have a chance of marrying me. The first couple of iterations I'd pointed out that if she'd been older her mother would've turned her into another Mackenzie, and other equally useless comments. Now I said, "If we're making wishes, can I wish for ten of you exactly like you are now, or is that being far too selfish? Maybe I could wish one of you was older, because someone would need to do all the cooking. With ten of you, I'm going to need a LOT of food to keep me going!" That, and a few more complimentary nonsense statements, had her cheered up and amused enough to trot back to the living room, deliver her lines, then send the next girl in. The next girl rushed in eagerly. Eager victims are my favorite type. She immediately started climbing onto my lap, so I exclaimed with apparent surprise, "You want to sit in my lap!" "Diana said she sat in your lap so that's what I want." She was on by now, so apparently she did want it. She wanted something else, because she spread her legs, saying, "She said you played with her cunny and I REALLY want that too please. Please don't make me beg. I've been dreaming about this FOREVER! I can't stop thinking about your touching me. PLEEZE!" "Well, if you're so sure." "I am! I am! Please put your hand ... AHHHH!" A couple of seconds later, "And rub me too! Don't just do nothing." "Are you positive. I don't want to take advantage of you unfairly." "I want everything Diana had, and more. Can I rub you too please. I REALLY want to touch you, Mark. Boys like that, don't they?" "They do, but it's definitely too soon for that, sweetie. Maybe one day if you're a good girl, but not yet. I will touch you the way you want though, while you decide what bikini you want." Her heart wasn't really in bikini shopping, as all her attention was on what my hand was doing, so I had to get her off first. #2: #5: Once her insane priority was assuaged (and I certainly prefer assuaging over shopping), it was easy to steer her into picking a swimsuit I had in stock, and I sent her to get girl number three. I'd timed the previous visit, and it'd taken about five minutes. It was hard to imagine how I could speed things up significantly, but with a dozen girls that multiplies out to an hour, meaning that every girl will spend 55 minutes boringly waiting. It'd be even more boring for Carol, because she wouldn't get a turn. The next girl wasted even more time, by "wasting no time". She came into the study, closed the door, pulled her dress off and dropped her panties. She'd had no bra on, so she stood naked in front of me to ask, "Please have sex with me, Mark?" Convincing her that it was too soon for that took three minutes. It might've been quicker to fuck her, but it truly was too early for that. I wanted the girls to have time to rat me out for small transgressions before I trusted them with the biggest transgression. I tried to rush the rest of her visit, but she wasn't a rushable girl. With some girls, if you try to rush them, they go even slower. The rush makes them get uncertain and doubtful, so they want to know why you're rushing, what they're missing out on, what the alternatives are, what the other girls did, and damned near every other question they can think of. It was nearly ten minutes before she put her clothes back on and went to get the next girl. I was determined to try my best to make up for lost time. Things weren't looking good when the next girl walked into the room naked. (By "things weren't looking good," I ONLY mean for my schedule. In every other sense having a good looking girl walk naked into the room is "looking GOOD!") She climbed up onto my lap and snuggled in happily, saying, "Wow, all these screens look amazing." While that was true, it wasn't the sort of statement I expected from a girl who'd been so eager to be fucked that she'd stripped in advance to save time. Her climbing onto my fully dressed lap was confusing too. If something a girl is doing is confusing you, one possible response is to ask her about it. You're risking getting further confused, but sometimes you're forced to ask because there aren't any other obvious solutions. So I asked, "Sweetie, I'm just a little confused about why you're walking around my house naked?" "{Giggle}. You're so funny, Mark. We were starting to do some sexy things in the other room." She pointed to the screens, "Are these the bikinis the other girls chose?" #7: "The four screens on the right are all from the same store. It's easily the best one we've found so far and it's where Carol got her bikini from, so I'm keeping their main products displayed all the time. We can look at their other products and at other stores on the four screens on the left, but so far all the girls have chosen one of the styles on the right, in whatever color they wanted." "They're very small." "This from the girl who's walking around naked." "Haha. Yeah, I forgot about that." #4: She turned out to be a pleasure to do business with. She quickly decided what she wanted (one of the small bikinis was fine; she obviously didn't have much in the way of modesty), then she asked, "The others said you played with them. Would you like to do that with me?" "A much more important question is whether you want me to?" "I wouldn't have asked otherwise." "You're right. I was being too cute in what I said, but my point is still true. What you want is important, and I'd much rather you tell me what that was. That way there's no risk of me doing too much or pushing you too far." "You're not like other boys. I've been sitting on your lap naked, and you haven't tried to touch me." I'd had one hand around her waist the whole time, but I knew what she meant. "Of course not! I know other boys behave that way, but it's not my style. I think part of the reason is my sisters have done a good job of teaching me to value them as people, so it's easy to think of their friends the same way." "I wish I was your sister." #8: "Oh, what a pity. I was hoping you wanted me to play with your pussy." I moved my hand there, to let her know I was ready right now. "What. Oh yeah, haha. That would be a problem. Maybe it's..." "I don't want to be rude, but we shouldn't keep the others waiting too long. We don't have time for both, so pussy rub or talk? It's your choice." "That's easy. Rub my pussy please." There was no more talking for a while. Actually, not for quite a while, because she took longer than average. That was partly my fault, because as soon as she'd relaxed back into my arms, I'd kept my hand working, but closed my eyes and sent a sight blob through to the living room. What I saw immediately stopped me worrying about the girls getting bored. Carol was clearly in charge of something, but I wasn't sure what. Most of the girls were naked and two of them were sitting together, kissing, and their hands were caressing each other's bodies. After a couple of seconds I noticed that it was very casual. There didn't seem to be any heat, and some of the girls were only occasionally looking at it. I watched for a while, but everyone kept doing the same things. There was talking, but I'd made zero progress on getting a sound blob to work (or multiple sight blobs. I still tried working on both problems from time to time, but both were pointless, with sound blobs being the most pointless. Probably also the least pointmost). I couldn't work out why the girls' group sex session wasn't getting more involved, and after a while I became aware that too much time was passing, so I canceled the sight blob and got to work properly on the job at hand. The remaining girls were all much the same. Each girl that returned to the living room obviously told the others what I'd done, because a standard behavior was quickly established: to come in naked, climb onto my lap, and get felt up. A couple of the girls were reluctant to get naked and be touched so intimately, and I made it very clear that it was perfectly okay with me just to cuddle. I truly didn't want any of the girls here to have a conscience attack and tell their mother. One of the cautious girls lost most of her caution during her lap time, and asked for the full treatment, but I only gave her half of it, keeping my finger well outside of her pussy and not getting her off. I had the easy explanation, "I don't think you're ready for that yet, and I refuse to push you too far. Like I've told you all several times, that's not my style, blah, blah," (you know how it goes, although this would be the first time I've actually used it to get LESS sex). Important progress was achieved though, as I touched all the girls intimately, and they felt comfortable with it. Most of them already wanted more, with a couple of them wanting not only "more", but "everything". I hit considerably more trouble with the shopping half of the activity. I'd made a stupid mistake. So stupid I was kicking myself, because it was the sort of mistake only a complete ignoramus (about females) would make, and I'd known better for ages: girls do not like wearing the same clothes as each other. Once I found the best (i.e., sexiest) bikini, it'd seemed obvious to me that I should buy enough for every girl plus a few spares. So that'd been what I'd done, and now I was trying to get every Cutie to choose from the same limited selection, but girls don't think that way. I didn't want the later girls to avoid the swimsuits the earlier ones had bought, because every other choice was less sexy. I had to do some fast talking. Fortunately the combination of their adulation of me and my frigging their pussies (that had to be VERY distracting, I imagine) enabled me to push them in the direction I wanted. Plus I made up some crap about wanting them to look similar because I didn't want to have any favorites. I promised them that their bikinis would all be here the next time they came, which they would be, and the girls went home, all of us having had a wonderful day. Admittedly I hadn't gotten any real sex of my own, but I get a kick out of managing girls in a group like this. The Ducklings date went much the same, still using Diana for most of it as she was more reliable than Claire, but Claire chipped in with several helpful comments too. ^ Let me tell you an amusing little aftermath event. I had to sort out the bikini 'orders' for each girl. Getting them out of the box they'd been shipped in was easy, because of the helpful way they'd been packed. Laying out the bikinis for each girl on the table made me realize that a dozen girls getting dressed and undressed into these little pieces of bikini was going to result in tangles, accidentally swapped pieces, probably lost pieces, arguments over who owned what, and generally a very non-erotic atmosphere. There needed to be a very simple storage system. I was looking at the dozen bikinis laid out on the table (just for the Cuties, as this was before the Ducklings visit), scratching my head wondering what to do with them next. If I did the wrong thing, I risked causing confusion later. Julia asked me, "Why are you looking so puzzled?" "Right now I know who's the owner for each of these, but the moment they get mixed up it's going to get chaotic. We need a storage system. The girls have to be able to find them easily when they arrive, so they'll have to be individually stored and named. They need to be easy to put away afterward, even if damp, because hanging them on a line to dry would confuse who owns what. And however they're stored needs to be in a way that doesn't get them all tangled or risk their name tags coming off. They're too small and there are too many of them to sew nametags onto them, so I'm trying to think of something else that'd work." "Put them in named Ziploc bags." "More likely than not they'll be put away damp, which will..." "Punch lots of small holes in the bottom half of the bags so air can circulate. Dad's got a paper-punch in his office which should work." #4: #5: #1: [[Remember the day Vanessa brought my casino disguise around? I'd made a fool out of myself by letting her catch me seizing on a negative assumption about myself. She'd told me off for it, and told me not to do it again. I'd just done it again. Yes, Julia had solved the problem much faster than I had, but it was a single incident that proved nothing in isolation. It was a negative incident though, and it reinforced my having a low opinion of myself. If I'd solved another problem in a fraction of a second, I wouldn't have believed I was a genius. I WAS getting better, but I still made the same mistakes from time to time. Not nearly as often, or as bad, thank goodness (and the Williamses).]] ^ A couple of little loose ends before I carry on: First, my sight blob into the living room had shown the girls practicing some sex stuff to pass the time. I'd been confused by their being so casual and uncaring. It's emotion that drives girls' desire to have sex (with guys, it's the desire for sex that usually drives our emotions), so playing around to kill time didn't have any emotional importance to the girls. Second, I mentioned that my working on sound blobs and multiple sight blobs was getting nowhere. That was true, but I was getting better in one small corner of that. I was getting very fast at using a single sight blob. I could close my eyes for barely longer than a slow blink to check a nearby area. I could also change areas very quickly if I needed to. When I'd first started using sight blobs, I'd moved them around at walking pace, which is how fast my real eyes normally move. But with practice I was starting to fly them around "blindingly fast", to use an inappropriate phrase. Also, as I was getting familiar with my new living area, I was increasingly able to create sight blobs where I wanted them, rather than near me and sending them to the desired location. Moving to our new home had set that process back, but it was improving again. One of the disadvantages of living in our mansion (pretty much the only disadvantage actually, as everything else was fantastic) was that it was so big. If Mom wanted to talk with Dad, for example, it could take ten minutes for her to find him, even after she had an intercom installed in his workshop (also to the Main House's kitchen, My Wing's bedroom and living room too. It was wireless, so we could put units wherever we wanted, although the underground workshop's unit needed to be near the door to get reception). Despite the intercoms, I got plenty of practice using sight blobs around the place to find people. I tried to keep my help low key, but it didn't take long for the parents to realize that I was very good at finding people. I'd be in the kitchen checking out the fridge (they need checking quite often, or food could go off, which is a heinous crime). Mom would ask me, "Where's your dad?" I'd turn around as if unconsciously looking (or hide my head in the fridge, or anything else so Mom couldn't see my eyes). Often a sight blob a hundred feet above the house would find Dad, or a quick check inside his workshop in case he was doing something noisy enough to have drowned out the intercom, then a more detailed search (NEVER of their bedroom or the bathroom. Some things are not meant to be known). Then I'd say, "I think he mentioned something about moving Patch's electric fence, so he's probably down the back of the property." My excuses for knowing where people were worked for a while, until Mom asked Dad, "Did you tell Mark you were going to move Patch's fence?" or whatever the actual conversation they'd had was. Eventually Mom asked me, "You've got a special way of finding people, haven't you?" "Ahh, yeah, but I don't want to talk about it." Thereafter, whenever anyone was looking for anyone else, finding me was nearly as good. Soon everyone learned to use me that way, even Donna, when she saw everyone else asking me, "Where's [whomever]?" I refused to tell them how I did it, so they didn't learn about sight blobs. By their wording - things like, "Can you feel where Steven is?" - they seemed to think it was a feeling. That was fine with me, as their location being 'felt' wouldn't be taken as an invasion of their privacy. They also discovered that I couldn't always find someone (they'd left the property, were in the bathroom, or were in a very weird place I didn't think to search, e.g., Dad checking underneath one of the cars). I'd just shrug and say, "I don't know." It became an established part of our life. Another similar development was letting visitors in the front gate. People would drive or bike up to the front gate, then buzz to be let in. The security was nice to have, but answering the buzzer was a pain, so I ended up doing that most of the time. We got buzzer repeaters mounted inside My Wing and also on the top of the Main House for when I was outside, to let me know whenever someone pressed the call box by our front gate. I used a sight blob to check out who it was, and then a sight blob in the kitchen so I could use NP to press the button that opened the gate. Or if I didn't recognize the person, I'd use NP to squeeze one of the parents on the left ear. That meant "Someone I don't know is at the gate." Squeezing them on their right ear meant, "You're wanted on the phone." One squeeze for landline, two for their cellphone. This procedure became very useful once Cuties and Ducklings started hanging around the pool in Australian bikinis. When a parent arrived to pick them up, they had time to get decent and I had time to get lost. That saved many potentially embarrassing situations, such as being embarrassingly arrested for having underage sex with an irate mother's precious, innocent daughter. My abilities were useful in all sorts of little ways. We tried to keep Patch as far from the house as possible, grass supply permitting, as flies are attracted to horse crap, and horses crap a lot. Flies had a VERY short life expectancy when I saw them. Two invisible NP-plates and {squish}. Canceling the plates dropped every piece of the resultant mess to the ground. Similarly inside the house for flies, and half-similarly for spiders ("EEK! Mark come QUICK! There's a SPIDER!"). Flies got crushed, spiders didn't, and both NP-plates/boxes got flown outside then canceled. It was a good thing that when Julia had explained the Vow to Protect to Carol, she'd used the scenario of masked intruders carrying guns breaking into our house, because if she'd used masked intruders carrying spiders the marriage might not have taken place. After I'd assured myself that no one could see into our place with the drapes drawn, NP had dozens of little uses around the home. The company that had fitted new drapes throughout My Wing had thought we were weird. Every window had drapes that extended well above, below and to either side of the glass; and where they were in two halves, they were on two tracks that overlapped by several inches in the middle. All the drapes were driven by electric motors, and were centrally wired so pressing one button could close them on every window in entire wing. That was also on a timer, so it happened every evening before we would turn the lights on inside. The privacy coatings on the windows were the best money could buy, but we'd played it safe with the drapes too. A last point on sound blobs. I'd gotten so frustrated at my inability to get anything to work, that I looked into learning how to read lips. Rather than eavesdropping on a remote conversation, maybe I could use a sight blob to read the lips of the participants instead. I learned that it would take a great deal of work and even if I was fully trained, I'd understand surprisingly little. I'd gotten the impression from TV and movies that lip reading was very effective, but apparently it's quite poor. It certainly wasn't worth all the work of learning it for the very limited benefit. I cursed the Universe for being so uncooperative, and went back to being frustrated at my inability to get sound blobs working. ^ Back to finishing off the Cutie-Duckling thread. There were only three and a half weeks between returning after our honeymoon and school's restarting, so there was only time for one more Cutie-Duckling date, "To celebrate their bikinis arriving." I made it both groups combined. I'd steered their purchasing decisions so well that I hadn't needed to order anything. It'd been fairly easy as I'd done the Ducklings second, and they'd been particularly easy to steer toward the bikinis that I had left unallocated. I'd thought about getting my sisters to tell their friends that they needed to shave or at least be cut very short, but I decided that making an issue out of that in advance was too dangerous. It might lead to some of them getting cold feet (the bikinis certainly weren't going to keep their feet warm), and possibly their being discovered doing it at home. If necessary, and I hoped it would be, I'd offer a 'hedge clipping service' to any girls that needed it. It was EXTREMELY important that the girls not get cold feet over wearing such tiny and revealing bikinis - that would be a TERRIBLE setback in the "Cutie-Duckling Corruption Plan" - so I pulled out all the stops, getting Julia, Carol, Donna, Ava, Pat and Alexis to help. They were all 'dressed' (not really the right word) in their choices of what I still had in stock. It's good having an impatient sister sometimes, as I didn't even have to ask Donna. She'd been begging to be given one. She wanted one for herself, but the reason she used to manipulate me was, "I can help you like Carol does if I have one, Mark." I also got Diana and Claire to arrive five minutes early, so they were among the very first girls to get into their bikinis. Their enthusiasm, the 'Big Girls' wearing them, and my encouragement, helped sway the rest of the arrivals. I could see that my encouragement was particularly effective, which certainly encouraged my plans for the Cutie-Ducklings. When planning for the "bikini arrival celebration", I'd had a moral dilemma; specifically over how immoral I should get. One of my possible approaches was to take the moral high ground, by pretending not to notice the girls' bodies at all. Taking the moral high ground can certainly be a very effective trick, but I didn't think it'd be the right tactic to use this time. I'd asked Carol and Julia about it when we were cuddling in bed one evening, and they agreed I should show highly enthusiastic appreciation of the girls' sexiness. Carol had said, "They all know you have a lot of sex with your real girlfriends, and that you'll naturally have it with them. Pretending not to be interested in it is the wrong thing to do." Julia added, "You need to weed out the girls who won't be as sexual as you like. You can't keep treating them all with kid gloves because of a few cautious girls. Get rid of the cautious ones so you can speed up with the others." "Very good advice. Thanks." Unfortunately, the rest of their advice wasn't equally good. After I'd told my wives, "I want to pull out all the stops to convince the Cutie-Ducklings," Julia had seized the opportunity to say, "Good, you should wear your G-string swimsuit. That'd be very appropriate, seeing as how they're wearing G-strings too." I encouraged the arriving girls to get changed straight into their new bikinis - provided in Ziploc bags, each with the owner's name clearly written with a waterproof pen - by not only showing my butt, but also showing a considerable amount of physical appreciation to girls who'd already done as I'd asked. I loudly praised them for how sexy they looked, for their confidence and courage, and for their willingness to please me. I took them into my arms, kissed them passionately and felt them up extensively, while still singing their praises. I even included sucking their nipples through the tiny tops among my methods of showing appreciation. They should've slapped my face for the liberties my hands and mouth were taking. Instead they giggled and lapped it up, so both of us were lapping something. Some of them even groped me back. I could hardly stop them in the ridiculous swimsuit I was wearing. Just hugging me put their hands in contact with a part of my anatomy which should've been kept covered whenever out in public. Even with so much wonderful peer pressure, some of the girls were visibly reluctant. "Not out here. Everyone can see!" and excuses like that. I made a mental note of who they were, for future elimination purposes. I didn't want to eliminate any of them yet. I'd wait until school restarted and some routine had been established. By then I'd have a better idea of what I had time to do, and how many I had available to do it with. We had a very sexy time. To start with, quite a few girls had needed a trim, so I got to lick quite a few pussies. I know the second doesn't automatically follow the first, but you shouldn't be surprised that it often did, especially when the girl involved visibly and aromatically enjoyed having my hands in that area. Then we jumped in the pool where, acting on her own initiative, Alexis pulled my ridiculous swimsuit down. Proximity had shown me that she was going to do it, and I could've easily stopped her, but letting her proceed was a good idea. If it got a bad reaction, I could claim innocence. (It'd been a while since I'd had a chance to claim that.) As it turned out, my manhood was apparently very exciting, irresistible and humorous, judging by the various reactions it elicited. Even the girls who'd been reluctant to wear the revealing bikinis unashamedly perved at my body. (People shouldn't be allowed to have double-standards, except that it's obviously correct that only females should wear G-string swimsuits. Male G-strings shouldn't even exist, let alone be bought for me to wear.) The giggling response was somewhat silly, but the "irresistible" response more than compensated for that. Before long there was a line of girls lined up to have kissing-and-groping sessions with me. I made sure that they all knew they didn't have to participate if they didn't want to, but they all ended up doing so. The atmosphere was a lot sexier than their bikini shopping visit, so if I thought they were willing, my fingers explored them a lot more thoroughly. That seemed only fair, considering how much exploring they were doing to me. Several of the girls were virgins; much more often than not with the Ducklings, and still very distressingly often with the Cuties. Telling them all to have accidents like Diana had might be too risky. I didn't know how many gynecologists there were in Corvallis, but I didn't want to risk them noticing an epidemic of hymen-destroying accidents. I decided to do nothing about it now, but to discuss it with my loyal advisors later. Donna was a little naughty. She stood in the line to kiss and grope me. Quite likely the Ducklings already knew that Donna fancied me, as I couldn't imagine her keeping quiet about that when they'd been having a "Mark makes me hot" conversation (or however 13-year old girls talk about that. Judging by 3B's Donna's conversation, I wouldn't have been surprised if they were even more explicit). "Hello Donna. I'm surprised to see you at the head of the line of girls who want to kiss me?" "I think the Ducklings should all do the same stuff together, and I'm a Duckling. That's why I'm wearing one of these bikinis." "So you think you don't really have a choice?" "That's right! I HAVE to do it." I raised my voice to ask them all, "How many of you think Donna has to have her turn in the line too?" Even most of the Cuties voted in Donna's favor. There was a very large number of perverts here today, which both amused and pleased me. Including for the real reason that it was good that having my sisters around during events such as this didn't upset the Cutie-Ducklings. "Normally I wouldn't dream of doing anything with a girl that she wasn't happy about, and that applies HUGELY more so to my sisters than anyone else, because it'd be terrible to be in a family where your brother did things you didn't want. All of you with brothers would agree with that, wouldn't you?" There was enough agreement to make my point, then I continued, "You and I are like that Donna, but the other way around. I think you're a lovely person, and I'd really enjoy a cuddle and talk with you, but doing more than that would make me uncomfortable. You wouldn't want me to be uncomfortable, would you?" My comfort wasn't something that worried Donna a great deal; her focus was very much on achieving what she wanted. I couldn't really blame her for ignoring my discomfort, as it was a fiction. I wouldn't have felt any discomfort from the actual act of getting sexy with her. My problem was with all the drama that'd follow: her begging for more, the upsets when she didn't get as much access to me as she wanted, etc. So much of that had occurred in 3B-land that I wasn't even tempted here. It was easy to arrive at a compromise. This Donna had never gotten anything sexual from me, so not getting any this time didn't upset her, as she surely didn't expect to succeed. I started by pulling up my swimsuit, which if anything made me feel even more obscene, but it'd keep Donna's hands off my important part. Then we cuddled and talked for even longer than the other girls had each spent with me. It's easy to get Donna into a conversation ("How's Patch doing at the riding club?"), so the time passed quickly and enjoyably, just not as enjoyably as Donna would've wished. Donna was fine, and the other girls were all impressed by how nice I was with my sisters - Carol had claimed the next turn, "While you've still got your pants on." The next girl had to pull my swimsuit down, but she was up to the task, and we resumed the Kissing and Groping sessions. Playing "Toss The Girl" with girls in G-string bikini bottoms is perfect, and not just because of the ass-feeling opportunities. One of the many wonderful characteristics of the Australian bikinis is that they're not good at staying on, so the canon balls' tops were nearly always knocked aside by the impact of reentering the water, and several of them were delightfully slow to make the entirely unnecessary corrective adjustments. My appreciation for which led one of them to decide that her top was too much trouble. That was her stated excuse anyway, and it sounded good to me. I should've discovered peer pressure years ago, because it worked its magic yet again, with toplessness quickly becoming the norm. Right up there with peer pressure, is one-upmanship. Or in this case, downgirlship. The bikini bottoms were so small and see-through that some of the girls thought they might as well take them off. Peer pressure took care of the rest. When the number of pieces of clothing in the pool started reducing rapidly, I did my usual crap about, "None of you have to participate if you feel uncomfortable..." I was even sterner than usual, because I wanted to make it as unlikely as possible that a stupid girl would feel the need to confess to her parents, and so I could say that I'd tried very hard to talk them out of it. But my sternly worded concern for their emotional welfare, only led to their being even less concerned about their physical welfare (female illogic can be made to produce wonderful results). Some of the girls, especially Ducklings, needed reassuring that I thought their partially developed bodies were sexy. I was happy to provide that reassurance. With regard to my previously stated opinion that, "Playing Toss The Girl with girls in G-string bikini bottoms is perfect" - I might've spoken too soon: playing it with naked girls is FAR better! Not tossing naked girls away is pretty damned good too. We had a very sexual, very good time (which is probably a redundancy). ------- Chapter 280: The Department of Horrendous Stupidity Friday, September 2 to Sunday, September 25, 2005 (Continued) I announced that we didn't have time for another group Cutie-Duckling date before school restarted. Although I had a lot of other things going on, such as the Target Game's coming to a head, there would've been time for another Cutie-Duckling group date if I'd wanted one, but I delayed it while I waited to see if there was any fallout from the last group grope. At the speed the Cutie-Ducklings were running ahead of my plans, the next date could well cross the point of no return, so some caution was definitely a good idea. [One thing that took quite a chunk of my time was my water garden. Vanessa had pointed out that there was no reason I couldn't take charge of landscaping the front of my own house, as that'd get the job done much faster than waiting for her, because she had so many other things to do. I'd hire a professional of course, but I first needed to do some research on water gardens so I could be a good client. I did some online research, and also visited several gardens and talked to quite a few people. It caught my interest because I could see that it was possible to do something that looked very special, so I spent a lot of time on it, often driving quite long ways to visit good examples of the art.] I remembered to ask my loyal advisors' for their advice about the "So Many Virgins" Cutie-Duckling problem. Carol reassured me, "They all say they willing to have sex with you." "I'm not so much worried about their willingness, as what happens when their mothers discover that they're not virgins anymore." We discussed it for a few minutes, but we couldn't think of a good en masse solution. Not having another group Cutie-Duckling date didn't stop individual Cutie-Ducklings dropping in as often as Carol or Donna would let them. Sometimes I wasn't at home, which was usually fine with the girls because Patch always was when he and Donna weren't at Riding Club meetings. Sometimes I was in but busy. I tried to spend some time with them though, because they usually got into their Australian bikinis if I was around. I got feedback from the casual visitors themselves, from Carol and Donna (who checked up on all of their friends), and from Diana and Claire (who also contacted all the others, theoretically providing more reliable feedback because their working for me wasn't known). All the feedback was the same: the Cutie-Ducklings were having a great time, thought I was the best guy they'd ever met, all had crushes on me, would do anything I wanted, etc. A few of them might get nervous at the point of a major decision, but as far as talking about their feelings was concerned, they were giggly-head over spread-open-heels in love with me. The casual visitors were the ones most eager to see me again, which didn't necessarily mean they were the best ones for me to get very sexy with. They might just have been the most 'in love', and girls can react weirdly to emotions sometimes, if not usually. I thought it was the girls who immediately put their new bikinis on and flaunted themselves to me who were the ones who should be invited into my bed. So I did take several of them there. The virgins didn't get more than a damned good licking, but that was enough to blow their inexperienced little minds. The non-virgins tempted and begged me so much that I yielded to it, after short, half-hearted, protestations of concern and reluctance (from me, not them). I would've yielded to temptation much more often except that my first yieldings led to a problem: the girls started calling Carol every day (sometimes Donna, but all but one of them were Cuties). Some of them even called several times a day. They were dropping in too frequently, and otherwise making nuisances of themselves. Some kind but very stern talking was required. There were enough of them and they were appearing so often that I got to try several different approaches, and I made the happy discovery that the best way do dealing with them was to put them over my knee and spank their bottoms painfully. It worked even better than talking to them rationally. That addressing their bottoms worked better than addressing their minds amused me, but there was no doubt that it stopped their annoying behavior. I think because it made them believe they'd been behaving childishly, but whatever the psychology, I used it to good effect several times. I decided not to start any more problems, so that's how the Cutie-Ducklings reached the end of summer vacation. Diana and Claire were more than mere Cutie-Ducklings, so I saw them apart from the others. They continued to visit quite often, usually to see me but not always. When I wished to invite them over, I would get one of my sisters to call them to offer, "Do you and Claire want to come over for a ride at 10 o'clock tomorrow?" When the invitation to ride didn't mention Patch's name, that was our code for the ride not being on Patch. They were cute, obedient, helpful, thankful, and a lot of fun sexually. It was also great to see how happy they were. They were SO happy these days that I was worried about their parents getting suspicious, but they said they'd told their parents how much they loved visiting "Carol, Donna and Patch." Which reminds me of three other things they were: smart, discreet and tricky. Mackenzie had won the Mark Quiz in part because she was an intelligent girl, and that ran in the family. Diana and Claire were smart enough to keep everything discreet, even when they were arguing with Mackenzie or their parents about something or other. Although our cover story is that they remind me of my sisters, thank goodness they didn't remind me of Donna's shortsighted impatience. Mackenzie knew I had sex with lots of girls. As far as she knew not anyone as young as Diana, let alone Claire, but that didn't mean Mackenzie thought her sisters were safe, especially as Diana's body was certainly mature enough and she was only a year younger than me. Mackenzie did suspect me of misbehaving, but fortunately Diana was very good at looking innocent, exclaiming, "Mark would NEVER do anything like that. I'm Carol's friend and he'd never risk upsetting Carol's friendship with me. He's a perfect gentleman! He never touched you on the date you had with him and you're much better looking than I am. I'm just a little girl compared to Mark." Mackenzie's suspicions were allayed. Their delight in being tricky was mostly because they were pissed off with their mother for lying about how wonderful sex was; both the physical act and the cuddling and talking afterward. Their mother had lied to them, so they had no compunction about lying straight back at her. Mackenzie provided a wonderful example of how their life would've gone had they continued down the path their mother wanted them on. They were gaining a lot of confidence, and were confident that they wanted their life to go exactly the way it was. That was important to me, because I wanted them to be strong enough to ignore their mother's brainwashing until they were old enough to take command of their own sex-lives. That way I wouldn't feel I'd taken one-sided advantage of them. I didn't mind having uncaring quickies with some girls, but I was seeing Diana and Claire repeatedly and they were very nice girls, so I wanted to be good for them. I made sure we spent quite a lot of time talking after sex. [[My personality was improving in some ways, although I realized this way of thinking about myself only when typing about Diana and Claire. A year or two ago I'd been far too sensitive to people's hurt, including my own. That sensitivity did more to determine my behavior than anything else. These days my actions were much more determined by the opposite of hurt: happiness. Diana and Claire were extraordinarily happy, so I enjoyed their company a great deal and wanted good things to happen to them. Most of the girls that stayed in my life were those that first showed me their happiness, as Alexis had. Carol's happiness was the greatest both in its degree and in its effect on me. Julia was also extremely happy with how everything was working out, although her happiness didn't glow out of her the way Carol's did because Julia's was a little too self-satisfied. Ava had joined us through a mistake of Julia's and mine, but she'd developed into a wonderful and valued part of my life because she was happy. Pat was sort of in the middle for being semi-happy when with me. Girls like Savannah could never share simple happiness with a guy unless they got what they wanted first, thereby guaranteeing that they wouldn't get it from me. My year-ago personality had been too one-dimensional when driven by hurt, and I could have been equally one-dimensional when driven by hurt's opposite, but other aspects were emerging. Just as Carol was growing and changing, so was I. My changes weren't all wonderful, like Carol's, as arrogance had already started creeping into some of my thoughts. At this time, I didn't think I had much of an ego, but you might have noticed several examples of arrogance in recent chapters. It was a natural development given all the success, praise and flattery I was getting.]] Carol lost interest in being sexual with Diana after the Cutie-Ducklings started throwing themselves at me, partly because there was no game for Carol to play anymore, and partly because Carol didn't take long to grow through her interest in her games with Diana. That didn't upset Diana at all, as sex with Carol had never been important. They were still good friends, especially because they both knew that I liked them both very much. Sometimes when I was lying in bed chatting to Diana and Claire, Carol would join us, as she enjoyed contributing to and learning from the conversations. Julia too sometimes. Mostly, I suspected, to keep an eye on what I was doing. Obviously not out of jealousy; more likely because she wanted to watch my progress. Julia spoke less than was natural for her, so I was fairly sure she was observing deliberately. That was very fine with me. If I was doing something wrong, or even just poorly, I'd like Julia to tell me. I even asked her to, but she said I was doing fine. She added one comment that took me by surprise, "You're making a big effort to give Diana and Claire confidence. A few months ago you had none of your own, and now you're giving it out. You learn very quickly." "I hadn't realized that before. When we first started going out and you kept telling me to get more confidence, I didn't understand what you meant. At best I thought confidence would be an act I could put on to cover my insecurities. Other people could breeze through life, but I never expected I'd be able to. Yet now I can sometimes breeze through entire days without feeling insecure. That's a big change for me." "You've strengthened a great deal, even though you still depreciate yourself too much." We got into another mutual admiration session. Julia enjoys expressing herself about the wonder of me, and she especially enjoys me telling her what a wonderful effect she's having on my life. She knows she is, and she takes a lot of well-earned pride from it. ^ Because it was the start of a new career for me, I'll tell you more about my water garden. My Wing was made into one long building that straddled the edge of the mound. The mound is twelve feet high and that edge was held near vertical by a retaining wall. (The mound's slope was near vertical on both sides and around the back, but far gentler on the front, which could be walked up quite easily. There were wide steps on the east side of the front, which led down to the visitor parking area and the drive, and another set of steps off the front of the mound just to the east of the easternmost end of the swimming pool. There was also a stairway on the rear of the mound, straight out from the back door. It ran down the edge of the wall of the mound, toward the east, rather than extend perpendicular like the front stairways did.) The exterior front of My Wing's Staircase Room, and the retaining wall on the west side of the mound, made for a very large corner. That was accentuated by the Staircase Room's exterior wall being almost featureless, as the front door was on the far west side of that room. The landscape architect that I got to design the water garden did a number of things that I thought were very clever. The end result was: The area was themed as if a mountainside was descending into forested foothills and then to a plain. In miniature obviously, but the theme was obvious. The area extended about 90 feet forward from the Staircase Room, all the way along the west edge of the mound, to its front edge. It was also about 25 feet wide, that being roughly the length of the Staircase Room. All the material that'd been excavated from the mound for my tunnel and garage had been dumped in the unused southwest corner of the property, as Vanessa had plans to use it to relieve the boredom of a totally flat property. My architect 'stole' nearly all of it to raise the ground level for the entire landscaped area. It was piled about six feet high at the corner between the mound wall and My Wing (i.e., was half the height of the mound). From that corner heading the 20' directly west to the front door, it sloped steadily down to zero (the original ground level). From the original high-point corner, it also sloped down to zero over the 90' north. On this base were placed many more discrete piles of earth. They were of randomized, natural-looking heights, but with a strong trend of having mountainous looking hillocks and rocks on the west side of the garden, and progressively smaller, gentler hills and rocks on the east side. Similarly, ground cover and low bushes were planted in the western areas, with increasingly taller and wilder looking trees toward the 'mountainous' east, but careful that none of them exceeded the height of the top of the mound, because apparently that would've given a bad 'line'. A path was laid north out of My Wing's front door, over a few deliberately placed little lumps and snaking just a little, to give the illusion of its 'skirting the foothills'. Once it got far enough north to pass the landscaped area, it turned right and headed across the front of the mound, joining the path that started at the bottom of the steps in front of the pool. Just outside the front door was a path that turned hard right and led 'into the mountains', up to my private hot tub. The tub was located next to the mound's wall, in a 'canyon' between two large, upstanding, craggy-looking boulders. A natural looking wooden roof and well-placed plants and rocks made it resemble a natural rock pool. The path to the hot tub had a branch that led north, running the entire 90-foot length of the landscaped area. For the inside of a residential property, it was an adventurous path, with many ups, downs and sudden turns to get around trees and rocks. It wasn't "wild", but you wouldn't want to try to walk it with your eyes shut (I could, but you shouldn't). It was "wild" enough to be fun. Lastly, the original idea for the whole area: water. A natural looking rock pool was built at the top of the mound. Water was pumped into it from a hidden pipe, the pool overflowing to form an impressive waterfall off the side of the mound; impressiveness achieved mostly by carefully choosing the shape of the rocks it flowed over, as the volume of water was actually quite low. Because the landscaped area was very 'lumpy', there were many hollows for the water to collect in, starting at the base of the waterfall before spilling over that basin's lowest side and flowing along a natural looking streambed into the next hollow, etc. Obviously the water's path was carefully designed and fake, or the water would've soaked away into the soil. After overflowing the basin under the waterfall, the stream ran toward and alongside the path to the hot tub, then turned to meander north, going all the way to the end of the landscaped area before disappearing under a rock, to be pumped back to the top of the waterfall again. The walking path north crossed and re-crossed the stream four times. An artist painted a landscape picture on the outside wall of the Staircase Room. By placing plants near the wall, reproducing them in the painting, and by painting with the right perspective, the painting merged with and continued the "Untamed, Mountainous Wilderness" theme, giving the 'garden' an impressively convincing visual infinity. You were never truly fooled, but visitors were always amazed by how very well it worked. Apparently the mound's wall constrained the viewing angles, enabling the artist to control the perspective. And by making the mound's wall dark in the landscaped 'mountains' near my house, the darkness could be continued into the painting, which performed some sort of framing trick on human eyesight. However it worked, it produced countless, "Wow! That's COOL!"-type comments (from my visitors anyway. The parents' visitors tended to talk differently). I'd intended a, "Small, Formal Japanese Water Garden." Instead I'd got an, "Untamed, Mountainous Wilderness," but I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process and the end result, that enjoyment being why I'd gotten so carried away. It was NOT a cheap exercise! I haven't mentioned it much so far this autobiography, but I enjoy walking in natural forests very much. There are many great nature trails around Corvallis - in fact, around Oregon - and my family walked them quite often. I especially enjoy being alone in the forest, with nothing but nature all around me. For me, it's a very nice feeling, provided it's a nice day. My new garden was too open to be a convincing forest, but sitting near the stream would give me the right sounds, smells, and - if I looked in the right direction - sights too. It wasn't totally convincing, but easily good enough to be an evocative reminder. My little front garden turned into a MUCH larger project than I'd expected, which is one of the reasons why I was busy in the last couple of weeks of summer, and for several weeks thereafter. I had a lot of fun with it, but one particular source of fun is too amusing not to mention. About a week before the end of summer, I happened to remember that the Norris home was surrounded by a substantial garden. Mackenzie's being interested in orchids strengthened my suspicion that Mrs. Norris might be an enthusiastic gardener, which I confirmed by asking her daughters after we next finished having sex (no matter how much I was enjoying my project, talking about gardening does NOT come before having sex with two eagerly cooperative, pretty sisters). I got Diana to ask her mother whether she was free to give me some gardening advice. Diana called me to say that her mother was delighted to be of service. I'd been sure she would. She was still actively encouraging Diana's SLOWLY - but reportedly successful - developing friendship with me. I wanted to keep Mrs. Norris's nose out of my real bedroom because the size of the bed would cause problems. So when she came over to inspect the area I was pretending to want advice on, I made sure she knew that I had only a few minutes to spare for her, "As I have to rush off to do something important." I managed to keep her focused on the garden. I'd insisted on picking her up, to control her presence on my property, and impress her with my car, although its image was a bit too flashy for Diana's ideal boyfriend. We talked gardening as I drove her home, me describing what I wanted to do, some of my ideas, etc. I'd done quite a lot of research already, so I could talk impressively (I remember EVERYTHING that I pay attention to). Somehow I failed to mention that I'd employed a very good landscape architect. We (the architect and I) hadn't come up with the "Untamed, Mountainous Wilderness" theme when I was doing this with Mrs. Norris, but that didn't matter. I popped in to see Mrs. Norris about once a week. Never for long, but for long enough for her to see that I liked Diana and treated her with total respect. I oozed 'gentleman'. (Remember that in 3A-land I'd not done the magic tricks for the Norris's, so Diana had never sat on my lap, and I'd never mentioned a single sexy word in the family's presence, not even the highly inappropriate "bra and panties".) I was civil to Mackenzie, but I made sure it was obvious that I was not comfortable around her. And I treated Claire like she was a tomboy friend of my younger sister's by picking her up and swinging her around, and similar sorts of things. I made sure to act like Diana was clearly my favorite, something I expressed in very non-sexual ways. If Diana opened her mouth to say something, she had my immediate attention; and when I said goodbye, it was always Diana that I named last. I clearly liked Diana a lot, and at my apparent current rate it'd take me about three years to think of holding her hand, and another two before I did the deed. (Obviously I'd warned both girls in advance that I'd be acting so focused on Diana, so Claire wouldn't feel jealous and say something she shouldn't.) That'd been the sum total of my plan, merely to give Mrs. Norris hope about Diana and me, and to show her that I clearly didn't want the company of a morally too-flexible girl who would willingly reveal her bare breasts. As it turned out, the landscaping project got larger and larger (it required heavy earthmoving equipment, a crane to lift the boulders, a LOT of workmen, etc.) I had to admit to her, "I'll obviously need to hire professionals soon, such as a surveyor to take all the levels to make sure the water flows the way I want. I don't know enough about individual plant species either, so I'll need to hire someone who can choose the plants and trees that'll produce the effect I'm going for." She was amazed at the scope of what I was designing, that a mere 15-year old boy could take on a project so large with so much confidence, and afford to pay for it. She'd given up asking, "What do your mother and father think of it?" because I always had answers that clearly indicated that it was entirely MY project. After all, it was on my property. By the way, I never talked about any of the Williamses with Mrs. Norris, and had warned Claire and Diana not to. I don't know whether Mrs. Norris knew they lived in the house with us. I'd also said nothing about them during the abbreviated guided tour I'd given her. It was hard to imagine that it hadn't come up with someone during her first visit to the mansion, but she obviously didn't know that I slept with Julia. Hopefully, she didn't even know that Julia existed; or if she'd seen Julia, hopefully she'd assumed her to be a friend of Donna's, as Julia is much smaller than Donna (although always much better dressed). I had my story ready, "Yes, Julia WAS my girlfriend, but now she's my sister's girlfriend. A rather surprising way for me to lose my girlfriend, but I'm extremely happy to see Carol blossom in her new relationship. Carol means a great deal to me." Mrs. Norris never gave me any trouble. Either she was too ignorant (in the literal, non-pejorative sense), or she was too greedy (in the very pejorative sense). Diana reported that my quick visits always left her mother very impressed by me, and resulted in her having conversations with Diana to encourage her to advance her relationship with me. Diana never had any trouble with those, as we'd discussed the delicate art of mother-management several times. ------- A week before the end of summer vacation, on September 19, Mom, Dad, Vanessa, Prof, Julia, Carol and I all had a bad day; separately and simultaneously. I knew nothing about the others' experiences at the time, so I'll just detail mine. I was up in Portland. I'd come up first thing in the morning to visit several places with water and/or Japanese gardens that my landscape architect had recommended I have a look at. Some of them were private gardens, but he'd already called the owners to ask their permission for me to visit, so I was spending the morning working my way through the list of addresses he'd given me. I was talking to one owner, a nice lady, when two big men in suits appeared out of nowhere. We were in the middle of her garden, on her private property and they walked around some bushes and into sight only a few yards away. As soon as I saw them, one of them flashed a badge at me, too far away and too fast for me to see, saying, "Mark Anderson. Department of Homeland Security. We'd like a word with you please?" [I learned that the question mark shouldn't have been appended to that sentence. And while you're mentally removing appendages, you should probably take the "please" off too. The "like" hadn't been particularly accurate either, and "word" turned out to be a massive understatement. All things considered, his statement had been somewhat misleading.] Quite a few things flew through my mind. Multiplied by my having quite a few minds, the next few seconds were mentally very busy. They could be telling the truth, or they could be Binion's minions, or more kidnappers. I even thought they might be footballers, but that was silly; I was just trying to think who my enemies might be, and "footballers" came to mind. No other source of trouble seemed likely enough to bother thinking about - Aikido bosses pissed off about the EKP article? Nope, can't see it. So they were DHS or baddies; a distinction I hoped was a distinction, but I had some worries about that. The nice lady I'd been talking to said, "Oh dear" and backed away from me, so she wasn't going to be much use, not that her getting me out of this had been at the top of my list of likely outcomes. Having established that they might be baddies, or might not, I then had to decide what to do about it, ideally during the three or four seconds it'd take them to get to me. Violence and/or running away were obviously silly right now (maybe later though). It was better to let them get within six feet of me so I could start reading their intentions. That'd give me so much more information that I'd actually be safer that way, provided they weren't zero feet away from me. When they walked into my proximity range, I was very relieved to sense nothing worrying. They were intending to walk up to me. One to my front, one to my right side, which were the directions they were already walking in. There was nothing physical to worry about so far. When they were about four feet away, I said, "Stop! Show me your badges." By the time I'd finished, one of them was standing right in my face, and the other was standing immediately beside my right side (they hadn't stopped). I hadn't reacted, and proximity had showed me that their intention never changed, and so far neither of them was intending to do anything. The guy to my right was prepared to grab my right arm, but his intention was 'on hold', so to speak. He was merely planning it, rather than about to execute it (the 'quality' of the ki he was radiating indicated the difference). "Show me your badges please?" The one beside me had no change to his intention; not even a moment's intention to take out his badge. It seemed that he was concentrating on his job of pinning me if I tried anything. The one in front of me showed me his badge again. Just seeing one badge would be fine. They'd both be legit, or both not. My plan was to get an ID number (or "DHS Employee Number", or whatever the badge called it), then call the Corvallis cop station to see if they could confirm it was legit. If I introduced myself as "Mark Anderson, the guy who was kidnapped and nearly murdered," they'd remember me all right, and should be cooperative when I told them two big guys claiming to be from DHS were physically intimidating me, which they were, as both were big guys and well inside my comfort zone. I reached for the displayed badge, and he pulled it back. "I need to see your ID#, or whatever it's called." "So look already." Not having any real choice, I took his well-articulated advice. Spotting it, and easily memorizing it. I reached for my phone, barely starting to move before the guy on the right responded by grabbing for my arm (my cellphone is on my right side. If it'd been on my left, the colors of my ring and watch face would somehow cause girls not to like me anymore). I froze, but his grab continued coming toward me. His intention was clearly to grab me now. He was no longer thinking about it; he was doing it. I REALLY didn't want to be grabbed, so I took a step backward (not running, just stepping), while telling the guy in front of me (not that I had much choice about who to talk with, as that guy was IN my face), "I just want to call to confirm your badge number's legit." I also used EKP on the grabber, so his hands passed in front on my arm as I slid back. It'd seem like a reasonably natural mistake to him, and it'd take him a couple of seconds to recover from it, which would be ample time for my perfectly sensible request to convince him to stop grabbing for me. "No calls," said my conversation partner, flicking his badge closed while reaching for my left arm with his spare arm. The other guy had now missed his first grab, seen his surprising mistake, and was starting a new grab. #4: #All: Moments later, both my arms very well held and I was being pushed toward the street. I looked over my shoulder at the nice, worried lady, to ask her, "Mrs. Woods, would you please call Mr. Adams," (Moses Adams, my landscape architect. A hell of a name), "and tell..." Both cops (DHS guys are cops aren't they? I don't know squat about the DHS. That's assuming they are really from the DHS, which I'd like to assume because the alternatives aren't good) jerked my arms to shut me up. The In-My-Face cop (or agent, or whatever they are) called back to the garden's owner, "NO CALLS!" "No sir," agreed the lady. "I just..." "SHUDDUP." #2: #5: #2: #7: #8: Dragging away was all that was happening. Their intentions were just to keep doing what they were doing, marching me to the street. #2: #8: #7: #2: "What're you intending to do?" "Ask you some questions." "What about?" "Shut up." #8: #1: #2: #1: #All: I was taken to their car, handcuffed and frisked. My wallet, cellphone and keys were removed, which left me with my hanky, in case I wanted to cry. When I saw that they had guns, I nearly did. I did ask, "Where are we going?" Which received the expected non-reply. I was put into the back, they got into the front, and they started driving. They also 'called it in'. I wasn't sure what 'it' was, because they used code numbers, not even mentioning my name. It added an air of legitimacy though, which was welcome. #2: We decided to keep waiting and seeing. Trying to send a text message was tempting, but we decided not to. It'd be too much of a mystery if they were tapping my phone or if the cop got suspicious and checked my phone's display partway through my writing the message. The "see" part of "wait and see" turned out well, as I saw us drive into a police station. I was taken out of the car and into an interview room. A tape recorder was produced and turned on. The date, time, location (the Portland police station), my name and their two badge numbers were stated, which I memorized in case they were ever useful. Then my interview began. WITHOUT, I will point out, their offering to let me call a lawyer, my parents, or anything else. They simply started asking me questions. Cop#1, "How did you win the money from Binion's?" #3: #1: #4: #8: #7: #8: #All: #7: #4: #7: #1: #4: #8: "Define 'you'?" "What?" "Your question is ambiguous. You need to be more precise if you want accurate answers." "Answer the question." "I'll take a stab at it then, but this could be inaccurate: Playing roulette." #4: #All: "How did you pick the winning numbers." "We only picked one winning number, for the first game. I'm not sure how it was picked. Someone's birthday I think, but that's just a guess." #1: #3: "How did you know the ball was going to land on that number?" "We obviously didn't. The long list of numbers we had to bet on were chosen days ahead of our going to Binion's for the first times in our lives." I'll skip over the next hour of questions. They were all about winning the money, and they went around and around getting nowhere, not unlike a roulette wheel, including being about as intelligent. If you've ever been questioned by cops - as I have several times by now - you'll know how intellectually painful they are (both the cops and their questions). Questions like: "Who told you to bet on those numbers?", "Who was your contact in Vegas?", "Why did you open an account in Vegas?", "Who did you report to in Vegas?", "Who told you to go to Vegas?", "Why didn't you bet on different numbers?" They didn't seem to understand that Ted Binion had picked the second bet, but I kept telling them he had. Maybe they'd grasp that complicated nuance after they'd played back the tape a few times. Then there were several questions about where the money had come from that we'd used to gamble with. Those were easy to answer, even on the first repetition. Then we moved onto the more complicated area of what we did with the money after we won it. Judging by the number of repetitions, they were extremely unhappy or curious (it was hard to tell which) about why we'd circled the money around. I lost track of the number of times I said, "We didn't want anyone working for the Corvallis bank to know we'd won in Vegas, so we circled the money to disguise the amount, otherwise $11.1 million would've been recognized." "Why did you transfer $[x] on date [y] to bank [z]?" "It was part of circling the money around." "Why did you do that?" "To disguise the total." "Why did you disguise the total?" It was very painful. And then they'd ask me about the second circling transaction, and the whole thing would happen again. In between the tedious questions there were occasionally even more stupid questions, like, "Who's your contact in the banks?" I happily gave them my bank manager's name and phone number, sorry that I didn't know his home address. They had my bank statements, and they took me through every individual transaction, usually several times, such as, "Why did you write a check to your parents for $1,005,000?" I was tempted by several facetious answers, but I'd had plenty of practice at biting them back, so I said, "To thank them for giving birth to me." "Who are they going to give the money to?" "I believe they've paid off their mortgage. Beyond that I've got no idea. It's their money, not mine." "Who told you to give them that money?" "My conscience?" "Who is that?" "It's part of me." Sometime later, "Why did you want a private plane?" "To fly some friends to LA for shopping and a concert." "Where did you learn to fly?" "I don't know how to fly." "Have you ever had any flying lessons?" "No." "Why did you rent a plane then?" "To fly some friends to LA for shopping and a concert." "Why did you fly that route?" "The pilot chose it." "Who told you to fly that route?" "No one." "Was it your idea to fly that route?" "No, it was the pilot's." "What did you want to see on that route?", "What timing information did you record?", "What altitude did you fly at?, "Who chose the altitude you flew at?" There were all sorts of STUPID plane questions. They clearly had a thing about planes. "Why did you withdraw so much cash?" "I was taking some friends shopping and my new credit card had a limit that was too low, so I needed cash." "Why didn't you get the card's limit raised?" "There wasn't enough time before the trip." "Who told you to take the trip then?" "No one. It was just when I wanted to do it." "Why didn't you delay the trip?" "I had no reason to." "Who did you give the cash to?" "Half the salespeople on Rodeo Drive." "Where on Rodeo Drive did you meet your contact?" "I had no contact." "Then why did you take so much cash there?" "To spend in stores?" "Who told you which stores to spend it in?" "No one. We were shopping. You see something you like; you buy it." "Why didn't you use a credit card?" Eventually we moved on to the next transaction. Explaining buying the house was ESPECIALLY tedious, so you can imagine how bad it was. "Why that property?", "Who told you to buy that property?", "Why did you want to buy another property?", "Why haven't your parents sold your old property?", etc. Apparently the idea of buying a really nice mansion and living in it because it was really nice never crossed their mind (I've used "mind" singular, because I think they only had half a brain each, and even that is rounding up). None of the questions they were asking were even intelligent, let alone difficult to answer or incriminating. It was just a very longwinded and tedious waste of time. Unfortunately, it was going to get a quite a lot trickier when it came time to explain the transfers to the Emergency Funds (from my account, two $500,000 transactions. The other two came out of Prof's account). So a couple of transactions ahead of that, I stated firmly, "I want to talk with my parents now." "What did you do with the $300 you withdrew?" "No. I want to talk with my parents. I'm a 15-year old minor and I want to talk with my parents." "You're not leaving here until you answer all our questions. What did you do with the $300 you withdrew?" "I want to call my lawyer." "You don't get a lawyer. What did you do with the $300 you withdrew?" "I want to talk with my parents or a lawyer." "You won't be talking to anyone until we've finished talking to you. What did you do with the $300 you withdrew?" #2: #4: #6: #4: So we resumed answering their stupidly pointless questions. Before the Emergency Fund transactions came up, I insisted on going to the bathroom. "Why do you want to go to the bathroom?" We played 200 Questions (it seemed like) about that, and then I was escorted there. As soon as I had some privacy, I shut my eyes and sent a sight blob searching around the station looking for my families or anything else interesting, but found nothing. I'd had plenty of time to think as the interrogation wasn't exactly intellectually demanding, but the absence of information to think about wasn't helping. Back in the interview room, the questions resumed. Eventually he got to, "Why did you send $500,000 to the HSBC in London?" "I don't know." I got asked a LOT of questions about that transaction, and the one following it. They REALLY wanted to know what the money was going to be used for, or who it was going to be given to, why Prof had power of attorney over my account, etc. "I don't know. I'm just a minor." It took a LONG time but we eventually moved on. A bizarrely long time, considering all I was doing was saying, "I don't know." You'd think that after the 50th repetition they'd have spotted the underlying theme. They had a MAJOR interest in my trip to Thailand. "Who did you meet?", "Who was your contact?", "What training did you receive?" I nearly got the last question wrong because saying "No one" or "Nothing" types of answers was a VERY well entrenched habit by now. But in time I realized the answer was, "PADI scuba diving. That's why I went there." "Why did you want to learn to dive?" "To look at all the pretty fishes." "Who told you to learn to dive?" "It was my idea." "Where do you intend to dive?" "Wherever I'm on vacation and they have lots of pretty fishes." We ended up going through our Thailand vacation on damned near a minute-by-minute basis, and that's not much of an exaggeration about the time we were in Bangkok. They wanted to know all our movements, and everyone we talked to, from the moment we arrived at the airport. But we FINALLY got to the end of my list of bank transactions. Then they started asking me political questions, "What do your think of America's invasion of Iraq?", "Who do you want to win the next election?", "What political party do you support?", "What party do your parents support?" There was a LOT more. They pretty much all got the same answer though, "I don't know. I have ZERO interest in politics." Often I did know. I was rapidly deciding that I hated Bush, for example. But by now it was obvious that these two proud examples of the Department of Homeland Security were hard at work defending America from terrorism. Seriously! That's what they thought they were doing. It was enough to make you cry. Did they think asking 15-year old boy from Smalltown, Oregon, "What terrorism training have you had?" was going to uncover an international terrorist conspiracy? They'd have been more productive if they'd spent the time picking their noses. They seemed like total morons. They asked me yet another question about my attitude to something to do with Iraq, and I answered, "I don't know. I have ZERO interest in politics and I don't even know any Buddhists." "They're Muslims. What do you think of..." I'd been trying to make an ironic point that I knew ZERO about the conflict (although to be honest, I was pretty sure that our soldiers would have preferred to invade Australia, especially if they were landed on the beaches), but he hadn't seen my point at all. He simply corrected me then repeated his question. If these are the quality of people we have defending our country, then it's probably sensible of them to fear 15-year old boys, because even some of the 15-year old footballers I know could run intellectual circles around these two. The political questions continued for a while longer, then they moved into the religious area. "I don't know. I have ZERO interest in religion." After twenty minutes of religious questions, Cop#1 started asking me about my money again. The same questions he'd already asked at least five times. It was all I could do to stop myself expressing my opinion. I did make a mental note that I needed to invent a new way of defending myself, because blending the brains of DHS cops would probably make them more intelligent; less intelligent not being possible. After twenty minutes of random money questions, Moron#1 suddenly said, "Thank you for your cooperation. You can go now." "WHAT!" I couldn't help myself. I did manage to stop myself saying anything more though. Believe me!, there was PLENTY more that I REALLY wanted to say. Moron#2 pulled my stuff out of his pocket and put it on the table. Moron#1 said, "You can go now." I would've been a moron to argue, so I grabbed my gear and left. Moron#2 silently escorting me to the outside door. #3: Standing outside at 6pm, I turned my cellphone back on. I hadn't seen anyone turn it off, but maybe the goon holding it had done that during one of my bathroom breaks, perhaps after going through it, assuming he could read. All things considered, it was a pathetic interrogation by the Department of Horrendous Stupidity. There'd been no questions about my martial arts training. That'd worried me, because learning a martial art isn't far away from learning to be martial. My fights had been widely reported in the local paper, so would've been trivially easy to learn about. There'd been nothing about my being at OSU either. Aren't university students supposed to be radical troublemakers? I've heard that about the past, but I'm unsure whether it still applies these days, as I have zero interest in politics. I had the strong impression that it was money that'd triggered this session. Probably our transferring our emergency funds overseas, which was ironic, as those funds were intended to make our lives safer in the event of an emergency, not to cause one. They'd clearly been very interested in our going to Thailand, and in the chartered flight to LA, but otherwise it was just one big fishing expedition. I strongly suspected their interview technique was deliberately designed to be so horrendously annoying that when it finally ended so suddenly, your typical undercover jihadist would be unable to stop himself from exclaiming, "Praise Allah!", thereby falling for the DHS's cunning plan. My phone connected and I had a bunch of missed calls. The top one was from Carol and recently, so I called her right away. I learned that Mom, Dad, Vanessa, Prof, Julia and Carol had all been scooped up by the DHS at the same time as I had, at 11am. I thought it was remarkable that the DHS had that many agents who could tell the time, especially involving a big number like eleven. Prof and Dad hadn't emerged yet, but everyone else had, and there was now much celebration at the other end that I had. Carol's quite a smart girl, she said to me, "It was terrible, Mark. I couldn't stop crying the whole time," thereby telling me what her tactic had been. "Julia was with me, and she started crying too. We were both very upset." "I can imagine. Neither of you could handle something like that." Speaking like this made it obvious that we needed to have our house and cars checked for bugs again. [I found out later that the two girls had been together when swooped on. They'd been quickly separated, but not before Carol's bursting into sustained tears had given Julia the idea of doing the same. Carol's tears had been deliberate, although close enough to how she felt to be very easy to summon, and she was VERY proud of herself.] Carol put me on with Mom, who told me that she and Vanessa had been asked the same sort of questions as each other, which turned out to be very much the same as mine. Mom continued with, "There's no word from Steven or Prof yet, but they've been releasing people individually so there's no telling when they'll get out. Vanessa has talked to a lawyer, and there's nothing useful that we can do. They only need to say we were suspected of involvement in terrorism-related activities, and they've immediately got the power to do what they've done. If Steven or Prof don't emerge after a few days, we can start to make some waves, but we'd still be virtually powerless. There have been cases of people who've lost months of their lives because they had a name that was spelled similarly to someone who was a suspected terrorist..." It was probably best not to let Mom get wound up into an anti-government tirade, no matter how justified it was, so I said, "I'm still in Portland. I've got to find a taxi, get a ride to my car, then head home. I'll call you later, okay?" "Okay. I'll call you if we hear from Steven or Prof." "Please do." It wasn't hard to find a taxi. On the way to my car I checked through the missed calls and text messages on my phone, but they didn't add to my knowledge. There was no message from Dad or Prof, for example. My car was where I'd left it, so I gave Mom a quick call to tell her I was heading home, then did so. Just over an hour later, when I was close to home, my phone rang. It was Mom telling me that Prof had just got out. Which gave me the idea to ask her, "How come you're not hanging around the police station waiting for them?" "Because we don't know where they are because we were all interviewed in different places." "Okay. I'm about ten minutes away." "See you soon. Steven too, hopefully." "Yeah." On the way home, I thought about diverting to the Corvallis Police Station and sight blob searching it for Dad, but there wasn't anything I could do with the information even if I found him. He'd likely be let out soon anyway. I arrived home. It was great to see them, but it was hard to celebrate when Dad was still missing, we couldn't speak freely for fear of bugs (everyone was paranoid), plus The Boys and their girlfriends were here. I wanted to say, "They have to let Dad out soon; he doesn't know anything." But that'd imply that there was something for him to know. I also wanted to ask the three parents how they'd explained the four $500,000 transfers, but I didn't want the baddies (or should I call them "dummies"?) to overhear that discussion. We could discuss what we'd experienced in detail though. We'd all experienced the same thing, more or less, and my theory was the same as everyone else's. It'd been a fishing expedition, probably spurred by our sending $2 million of strangely acquired money overseas. It seemed bizarre that such an innocuous activity - sending our own money to our own, non-secret, overseas bank accounts - had caused such a massive overreaction, but it certainly seemed that way. Interrogating a 14-year old girl seemed INSANE. It seemed far worse than interrogating me for some reason. I couldn't decide whether I was being sexist, age-ist, or protective. From the questions they'd asked her, it appeared that they were assuming Carol was a potential witness rather than a protagonist, for example, she was asked, "Who did your brother talk with in Bangkok?" They'd never asked me who my sister had talked to. I suspect our ages were almost irrelevant. Carol had gone to Europe and Thailand, so she was included. Everyone who was included was asked much the same questions, regardless of their age. It seemed to be a well-established routine for the DHS, which I guess would be a third scary thought: how many people have they done it to, that it's so routine? Donna hadn't known a thing. She'd ridden Patch to a girlfriend's place, a girl from the riding club who also had her own horse and a much larger property. They'd spent the day with their horses then Donna had called home. When no one answered, Donna just decided that it was okay for her to keep playing with her friend. Carol had been released soon after, and had called Donna home NOW! Carol had also called Andrew, which had given The Boys a hell of a scare because they'd had no clue that anything was happening. They'd rushed around to talk with Carol directly, and were still wondering what to do when Julia had been released. The callousness of it all was another thing that struck us. They simply couldn't care less about any of us. Julia and The Boys had a lawyer working on it, who'd been getting nowhere, when Mom and Vanessa had been released in rapid succession, with my release roughly an hour after theirs, and Prof's another hour or so after mine. Now we just had to wait for Dad. The hours were hard to wait through, but there wasn't any choice. Vanessa and Mom had tried calling the police station earlier, and had hit a very thick brick wall, which would neither confirm nor deny anything. Dad got released slightly after midnight. His own fault, he said when he called us, as he'd lost his temper. It wasn't his fault of course; it was the fault of the assholes who think it's okay to treat people the way they had us. Dad was at the police station, so we went to get him. On the short ride home, Dad explained that their questions about his political beliefs had been the final straw, and he'd answered them very truthfully and emphatically. They hadn't appreciated that, and had treated Dad as if he was a dangerous subversive. (A sleeper agent cunningly placed in a low position in the highly strategic lawnmower industry, ready to bring the country to its knees. Well, not actually "bring it to its knees." His sabotage would allow the grass to grow up to the country's knees, which would look similar.) In a couple of minutes, Dad was home and the drama was over. That was the consensus: that it was over. We'd triggered red flags that we might be financing terrorists, DHS had stupidly and massively overreacted, in a way that firmly established them as being huge assholes. They'd gotten nothing from any of us. I'd have to think twice about how to spell "terrorist" (maybe three times; English not being my best subject), and the rest of the household didn't even know any Buddhists (I made sure to say that joke out loud and to explain how my two cops had been too stupid to get it, while temporarily hoping we were bugged). By now they should've realized they'd pissed away a whole day's work for fourteen agents. They'd been barking up a non-existent tree. Everybody was relaxing. The one thing that we were worried about anyone finding out about - my abilities - the baddies hadn't gotten even a sniff of. How we won at roulette was the only question they asked that had any relevance, and that was far more plausibly explained by luck than anything superhuman. Or terrorist-related, come to that. Binion's and the FBI had been all over those two wins and they hadn't discovered anything wrong, so the DHS certainly weren't going to get anywhere. I had no doubt whatsoever about which of those three groups was the least capable. Obviously I'd lay low with my abilities. I'd been thinking all summer about showing Julia and Carol that they could fly (I now had roughly 140 pounds of force with all my minds). I'd given myself a relaxed deadline of until school was about to restart to find a funny way of doing it, or I'd just come out and show them. All things considered, I decided it'd probably be a good idea not to start flying the girls around for a while. Seeing flying girls would get the DHS too excited about the risk of my crashing one of them into the White House. Prof said, "I'll get the same company we used last time to come again as soon as possible," which made people relax even more. I knew from last time what a huge pain in the ass it'd been to be constantly worrying about bugs. Prof also neatly slid into conversation, "One of the parts that I hated the most was when I told them we'd moved the money off-shore to geographically diversify some investments. Even though we haven't gotten around to investing any of it, they still attacked my loyalty. Since when does being a prudent investor mean you're disloyal? If people weren't prudent, their money would be wasted and the economy would suffer badly. The repatriation of profits earned from foreign investments greatly helps our balance of payments." I nodded happily, Prof seeing that his little message had gotten through. Now I knew how to explain why we'd sent the money overseas. Dad's grumbling, "What a stupid fishing expedition," as we were about to head off to bed, pretty much summed up what we all thought. Julia offered to let Carol sleep next to her if she was too scared to sleep alone. Carol honestly appreciated the offer. That she did so was another thing to hold against the DHS. The next day our lawyer reported that it was pointless for him to try to find out anything about why we'd been mistreated the way we had, because, he quoted, "'The intelligence gathering methods the DHS employ to identify likely terrorists are secret.' Ask me again in fifty years, when your files might have been unsealed." We got the house, cars and the personal items we'd had with us swept for bugs. The same computer guy was impressed by the upgrade my system had gone through. No bugs were found, and there were no other DHS incidents. They'd disappeared as if they were a bad dream, although they were actually an incompetent reality. Life returned to normal, except with far fewer objects flying around the house, or light blobs to light my way out of bed when I went to study in the early mornings. I played safe with those for a long time. The girls resumed school soon, unaware that they could fly. ------- Chapter 281: My House-Warming Party Saturday, September 24, 2005 All too soon - because it was nearly the end of the summer vacation - the time came to send out the invites for my house-warming party. I'd intended the invites to be nothing more than casual phone calls; Julia wanted to send out real invitations. Guess which approach we took? [On the topic of alternative approaches, I'd also been thinking of a nice, casual pool party. Julia had considerably more upmarket plans. Guess which approach we took for that too? I'll give you a hint: we ended up with a large tent, live musicians on one side; DJ on the other, fancy catering, and - something I'd never heard of at a party - a 'bedroom tent'. It had half a dozen bedrooms in it, divided by canvas partitions, and was pitched discreetly around the corner of the mound. Even Patch was fancied up for the party, with several colored ribbons in his mane. It was a good thing he'd been gelded, or he would've died from the shame.] It turned out that all the 'friendly' girls from the Target Game got invites; I don't know why they'd been worried. All my soccer teammates were invited, of course (if you want to have a cool party, invite soccer players. Trust me on this as I know what I'm talking about, being a soccer player myself). Several of Ava's, Julia's, Carol's and Donna's friends were invited too, including Diana and Claire. They needed new dresses, but their mother was reasonably happy with that, as Diana was reporting slow but significant success in her 'seduction' of me (without using such a scandalous word). Andrew, Robert, and their girls came too. My invitees included all my usual friends, such as Alexis, Pat, Katelin (she asked if she could bring her brother Wayne, which was fine with me), Gina (my favorite Italian cook), several of the girls in active pipeline groups that I was getting to like (I'll mention what was happening with the pipeline when I finish this thread), and even a few guys I got along reasonably well with to partially correct the gender imbalance. Not to 'correct' it too much though, and certainly not all the way to equal. There were too many people for me to have long conversations with any of them, but flirting is quick and fun. What mattered the most in ensuring my flirting success was that my wealth had a big impact. The women (including Julia, Carol and Ava in that group) had made great strides with the decorating and/or furnishing. They'd even replaced the worrisome drapes in one of the Main House's rooms, and I'm sure you can imagine how relieved I was by that. I didn't participate in most of the guided Grand Tours, but the impact was unmistakable. That I owned all of this, and that I had my own wing with total privacy where I slept with whomever I wanted, was greatly envied. My palace of a bedroom sent a very clear message about me being the 'king' of this little 5.7 acre kingdom. My study blew people away too, even though the eight screens confused the heck out of everybody. A few people expressed doubt I owned the property. That was easily answered, "Ask my parents, or go to the county records department and look at the property title yourself. It might even be online, for all I know." I also scored major brownie points for buying Patch for Donna. It was weird that something that had so few zeroes in its price tag (compared to the property) was treated so significantly, but it was. It apparently proved that I was a nice guy, and there's nothing better than a nice, rich, and possibly available guy. I'll just mention a few little incidents. One that came up very early was that Chris, the sole soccer teammate who was loyal to his girlfriend, arrived with her. It didn't take long for some of the other girls to work out that when we cool soccer players congregated and talked soccer together, then the face they didn't recognize was probably a soccer player too. Julia and I had naturally made sure that the Target Girls were highly aware of how important it was to keep being friendly, even once they'd gotten their invitation to the party, because it was all about their maintaining their position in my social circle (i.e., giving them opportunities to get their hooks into me). That was especially easy after they'd been on the guided tour of my first mansion. So several of the girls started being friendly to Chris. They did it right in front of his girlfriend, so he came running to me to ask me to get them to stop. "Why don't you tell them yourself?" It turned out that Lucy (his girlfriend), had no idea of the sacrifice Chris was making for her - the idiot! He didn't want to say anything in front of her. God knows why. Most of the Targets (and the Semi-Targets; the girls that'd been suckered into joining the activity) were where they should be, hanging around my teammates, so it was easy to go back to the group and tell all the girls, "Excuse me, girls - not you Lucy - but Chris is out of bounds. He's not participating in any of the sex; he's staying loyal to Lucy." I'd been a little less discreet than Chris had been hoping for. He'd barely begun to wince when Lucy asked, "Sex? What sex?" I helpfully explained, "All these girls know how cool soccer players are, so they've been having sex with the team most of the summer. It's just been a friendship thing; no fixed partners. They've been swapping around in a very friendly fashion. Right at the beginning Chris..." "THESE girls?" interrupted Lucy, in disbelief. Which I took as a slur on soccer players. Clearly A-list girls' rightful place is underneath soccer players, so Lucy's astonishment was uncalled for. "Yes. They like soccer players. In fact, they like them a LOT, which is great. As I was saying, right at the beginning Chris made it clear to me that he valued his relationship with you far higher than all the free sex these beautiful girls would've offered him, so I never invited him to any of the team outings we went on, didn't give out his phone number, etc. You can be extraordinarily proud of him. There are very few guys - in existence, EVER - who'd happily turn down as much sex as they wanted from any and all of these beautiful girls because he valued his girlfriend so much. Yet that's what Chris has been staunchly doing most of summer. He hasn't even been tempted, so he must think amazingly highly of you, Lucy." At this stage Lucy should've melted into Chris's arms, but I can't believe how disbelieving girls are. The first thing she did was ask the other girls, "Is that true? You've been having sex with the team, and you would've with Chris?" I made sure the Target Girls could see that I was listening intently to their answers. Even though it was embarrassing for them to mention it to an outsider, they put on a brave face and 'happily' admitted it, emphasizing how much they enjoyed being friendly with soccer players. I smiled rewardingly. At this stage Lucy should've melted into Chris's arms, but you know what girls are like. She asked, "You're ALL having sex with the WHOLE team? YOU?" The Targets nodded and smiled, doing their best to look proud and happy. At this stage you should expect no better than what Lucy next said, "But you could've had any guys you wanted?" "We like being friendly with soccer players. They're a fun bunch, much better than the guys I normally date." Lucy shook her head in disbelief. I wasn't sure whether that reduced or raised my opinion of her, as there was justification both ways. Lucy FINALLY turned to Chris, "You've been turning down sex with these girls?" Chris nodded, obviously worrying that he wasn't going to survive this. "But I don't even give you any." Thereby confirming my opinion that Chris is an idiot, especially because he just shrugged and looked helpless. He was missing the perfect opportunity to impress the panties off Lucy, which was something he badly needed to do. Guys can be complete morons sometimes. Lucy hugged her man at last, just saying "Wow." #5: I spoke up again, "So as I was saying, ladies," (sometimes I like being facetious with myself. I've got quite a large internal audience, and they appreciate my refined sense of humor), "Chris is out of bounds. I'm very impressed by how friendly MOST of you are, but it wouldn't be friendly to hassle Chris, okay?" They were happy not to have to have sex with yet another friend of mine, even though Chris was their sort of guy (an idiot; the Target Girls normally dating football jocks). Their happiness at having one less guy to fuck was mitigated by my carefully stating, "how friendly MOST of you are," but that was me just keeping them simultaneously on their toes and backs. I added, "Lucy, there's a tent set up around the far side of the mound that has several bedrooms in it. I know the other girls will be taking quite a few of my friends to it at various times during the party. You might want to think about rewarding Chris for his admirable devotion to you." She certainly should do that, but that was Chris's problem. Mostly I just wanted to remind the Targets what was expected of them. By now my teammates had enjoyed a considerable amount of sex with them, which in no way diminished their interest in getting more. One of the Semi-Targets smartly said, "Good idea, Mark. Who wants to go with me now?" Thereby demonstrating her friendliness right under my nose. Three of the guys simultaneously agreed. No doubt they'd been hornily anticipating this party. Then they looked worried about their all volunteering at once. That was resolved by the other 'ladies' volunteering. Not that they were competing at all, but they were annoyed by one of the other girls showing them up, so they quickly extended their own offers. I soon had to say, "The tent's only got six bedrooms, so you'll have to double up or wait." They assured me they were friendly enough to work something out, and they led my happy teammates away. I wasn't the least bit surprised when Lucy declared, "I don't believe it!" That was easily answered. I told her, "Wait ten minutes then go check out the tent. I'm sure the girls will let you join in if you want; they often double-team the guys." Chris looked sick at the reminder. "Reminder", as he already knew all about it. The team had been keeping him fully informed, the bastards. Lucy didn't take up my offer. Nor did she leave Chris's side for the rest of the evening. If there was one trustworthy guy here today (that was probably about the right number), it was Chris, but that didn't stop Lucy sticking to him like glue. She was happy with him though, so the idiot was happy back. [They broke up six months later, both still virgins, and one fully aware that he was also an idiot.] I knew my party was a success when I noticed four guys I recognized as football players talking to some of the girls. Football players wouldn't be seen dead at an uncool party (according to them). Although also according to them, their mere presence made any party instantly cool. Those two assertions were logically incompatible, but we're talking about football players here, so you have to lower your intellectual judgment standards a LONG way. I was pretty sure I hadn't invited any football players, and I was equally sure I didn't want them here. I was seriously tempted to kick them out by myself. There being four of them versus one of me would doubtless lead to their refusing, and then I'd insist, they'd refuse again, and then I'd REALLY insist, which I'd greatly enjoy. Their so clearly being in the wrong to be here in the first place, and it being my home, gave me heaps of justification. Unfortunately it'd upset the party too much if things got unpleasant - for the jocks, I mean; it'd be pleasant for me. I got a few guys to come with me, including Robert Williams, as the only authority figure who'd been readily available. We walked up to the asshats, and I very much enjoyed saying, "You weren't invited. Leave." It's best to speak in small sentences when you talk with footballers. "We're not doing anything." "That's the problem; you should be leaving. Right now." "We were only talking. There's nothing wrong with that." I took a step back, pulled out my cellphone, pretended to dial a number, held it up to my ear, waited a couple of seconds, then said, "My name is Mark Anderson. I'm hosting a party and have four gatecrashers who've repeatedly refused to leave. Their names are..." By the time I got to the second name, they were running rapidly - but coolly, because they had an image to maintain - for the front gate. Just as well, as I only knew two of their names. I lowered the phone mid-conversation, commenting to the guys around me, "That was easy." "A fake call?" asked Robert. "Yeah. I couldn't be bothered doing a real one. They weren't worth the cost of a call either." We joked around for a couple of minutes, especially with the girls the jocks had been trying to flirt with. I had to admire the numbskulls' brilliant strategy: come onto my multimillion dollar mansion's grounds and flirt with girls who had their eyes set on me. No wonder they were in the football team. One of the security things we'd done was have a substantial front gate fitted, but we'd left it open because of the number of people coming. I went inside to press the button to close it. The call box outside the gate triggered a small CCTV inside the house, but we also had a remote control for it, so I pocketed that so I could let any non-footballers in. The footballers should have come a couple of hours later, because that's when the collective seemed to decide that it was time for some swimming. The invitation Julia had sent out had mentioned "Pool party" and "bring swimsuits", so many people had come prepared. Most prepared of all, were the Target Girls. They had a highly commendable idea of the style of bikinis I liked to see pretty girls barely in. This paragraph alone guaranteed that my party was an instant success with all the guys, except for Chris, because Lucy dragged him away from the pool when she saw how little apparel there was to see. I joyously wore my bright yellow Speedos (the only alternative I'd been offered was 'my' G-string). Carol's and my other girls' Australian bikinis stayed in their drawers, but none of the guys had any complaints about what my girls did wear. The pool is quite large. I don't know why two old people had needed such a big pool, but it was more than fine with me. There were a lot of bodies, so we need a lot of room for pool games. It was much the same as the last pool party, so I won't describe it again. There weren't any grumbling guys complaining that my Girl Tossing was showing off this time, but there was Andrew telling me, "I'm amazed at how high you can throw Julia. I know she's little, but that's impressive." "That's NOTHING!" insisted my ammunition. "He's not even trying hard. You should see how high he can throw me when he puts some effort into it." Whereupon Julia made me demonstrate exactly that, which impressed everybody. A couple of the stronger looking guys were curious enough to try to copy me. Julia lent them her body (it was in a good cause: making me look good), and their pathetic results did indeed make me look VERY good. As did the On-The-Shoulders Game, and everything else we did. About 4:30pm, I got everyone to dress for a while, as the parents of the younger girls were coming to pick them up around 5:00 (the invitation had specified that). There was about an hour of parents arriving, getting guided tours (if they hadn't gotten one at the beginning, or sometimes even if they had), picking up Little Suzy (or whomever), then leaving. After which people could dress or undress as they wished. The party lasted a long time, far into the evening. When it got dark, quite a few of the girls lost the tops to their bikinis. That they'd waited until it was dark to show their body was yet another example of female logic, something I completely failed to complain about at the time. The evening developed a very sexy atmosphere for several reasons: My four parents were keeping a very low profile. The behavior of the Targets with my soccer team, something I strongly encouraged them to do - the Targets I mean; my teammates' need for encouragement was minimal. My lack of concern when some of the other girls flirted openly, Alexis for example. The considerable effect caused by having teenagers in swimwear. Competitiveness and/or peer pressure. Couples who were together, such as Chris and Lucy (except they're not a good example of why things got racy). The reasons accumulated to produce a very enjoyable evening. There was a serious amount of surreptitious, not so surreptitious, and then downright open sexual behavior. The Target Girls helped considerably, because one of them had realized that all the guys I'd invited were my friends, and that it might be a very good idea to let me see her being friendly to even more of my friends. I agreed totally with her that it was a VERY good idea. The guy involved thought so too. I made sure to give that Target Girl a thumbs-up and a big smile, to let her know I'd noticed and was pleased. And so the other Target Girls would notice, which they did. I enthusiastically praised, "I've been thinking about throwing a weeklong party in Hawaii. I'd DEFINITELY invite you to that." The Target Girls were so easy to encourage it was almost embarrassing. As we had been doing all during the Target Game, My Girls were pretending to have sex with my teammates - with Alexis going above and beyond, repeatedly - and were still doing so this party, especially early on to set the desired atmosphere. Being My Girls, they could use the beds inside my home, so the Targets couldn't find out that it was only pretense. Given what we'd got up to during the Target Dates, and what My Girls were seemingly already doing - although discreetly - at this somewhat more public event, the Targets never looked to be in danger of keeping their legs closed. Whenever I was circulating and I had a chance to talk with one of them without the others hearing, I'd say something like, "Adriana," (or whomever; they were all the same), "I'm EXTREMELY pleased how wonderfully you're treating my friends today. I'm amazed at how well you match my ideal girl, especially with your being so beautiful, friendly and nice. You've got a good heart too. You're easily as good as my two serious girlfriends, if not better. You and I are DEFINITELY going to spend some quality time together soon." I also praised them if they were involved in an activity that I thought was particularly praiseworthy. They ate it up. One bit of fun I had was with sight blobs. Large sight blobs see very well at night because they collected more light, and I used them to check around the property from time to time, especially in remote corners. It gave me some interesting sights. Nothing involving Chris obviously, but virtually every other guy had a VERY good evening. I'm excluding The Boys from that. They retreated into the house with the rest of the adults. With the younger girls having been picked up by this time, there were only twice as many girls as guys, so some of the guys had a doubly good time, or sometimes the girls cut out the middleman and took matters into their own hands. Julia and I have always encouraged female bisexual behavior (I don't have to explain the reasons to you, do I?), and there was often a fair bit of it around us, but this evening delighted me. Particularly active was Diana Norris, who I saw being sexual with a succession of different girls during the party. I presumed that was something Carol encouraged her into. Or maybe not, because Diana's sexual horizons had expanded massively the last few weeks so she could well have had enough confidence to do it herself. ^ I should explain Diana's presence so late in the party. In a piece of irresponsible parenting, Mrs. Norris had agreed to let Diana stay with Carol overnight. Diana had told her mother that she was getting along very well with me, and she wanted to stay overnight so she could be around me as much as possible, including helping clean up tomorrow morning. She'd assured her mother that "You don't have to worry about Mark touching me the wrong way. Mark would never do that with any girl, and especially not a girl like me that he treats protectively. He's very correct in how he treats me. I just want him to see that I'm considerate and helpful. Carol has already said I can sleep with her, which will be fun." Diana was right that I wouldn't touch her in the "wrong way"; I do it the "correct way" every time. And she certainly would have fun sleeping with Carol, so Diana was almost totally telling the truth. Mrs. Norris had thought it was a good idea, especially after I gave her the guided tour. She was particularly impressed that I personally gave her the tour, but I assured her, "I'm only too happy to show you around Mrs. Norris. You ARE Diana's mother, after all. She's a lovely girl." It also let me arrange for an interruption very near the end of the tour, so she didn't see my real bedroom. She somehow got the idea that the very ordinary looking bedroom in the Lower Half was mine. Claire was naturally very upset to know that she'd be taken home and Diana would be allowed to stay. That was easily fixed, "Claire, sweetie, how do I treat you and Diana?" They both knew the answer to that because they'd heard it dozens of times: "Equally." "Exactly right. So whatever Diana and I do after you leave, I will make sure you and I do the same things as soon as we can. You KNOW I will always treat you equally, so you don't need to get upset. You didn't even need to ask about it, because you can always trust me to treat you fairly." "Oh yeah. Sorry. I forgot." "How could you forget how I feel about you? I should put you over my knee and spank your bare bottom for that." "Eek. There are too many people here!" "And I'm sure they'd like to see your bare bottom. It's very pretty." She was fine for the rest of the party, and even went home with her mother without making a scene. ^ The sight blob checks didn't show me anything TOO bad. For example, nothing like Carol flirting excessively with any guy. Once things got mostly sexual, Carol tended to stick pretty closely to Julia and Ava. I wasn't checking up on her; I was checking places and happened to see her. My mistrust was honestly gone; it had just needed to be expressed once for me to understand how silly I was. I would still feel funny if she flirted slightly with other guys though. I did see some stuff that might prove useful once school restarted though. Unexpected pairings of people mostly, included one VERY unexpected pairing - both of them being guys. Thank God neither of them was on my soccer team, or showering would've felt uncomfortable. On second thought, I was pretty sure all of my soccer team were exclusively and exhaustedly hetero, except Chris who was just stupidly hetero. The bedroom tent was where people should've gone for sex. That'd been made clear to everyone. It even had a few packets of rubbers beside every bed as one of my jobs to help prepare for the party had been to go to Student Health Services at OSU to buy them. Vanessa had told me they stayed open even during the breaks (I'd gotten a male salesperson, who fortunately hadn't extended me the same offer as his predecessor). Nonetheless, I sight blob checked the Main House's and My Wing's bedrooms quite often, to make sure they weren't being used by anyone that shouldn't be. Every now and then I'd discover a couple in one of our bedrooms, usually my bedroom because of its temptingly degenerate bed. People have NO morals! Usually I went to kick them out myself, but once each I got Julia and Carol to do it, using NP to steer them in the right direction. They understood what to do when they got to the bedroom, and I thought it was good training for them to get used to my using NP to guide them in that way. You never know, one day it might be more important than kicking a couple of rutting teenagers off a bed. I was zooming my sight blob toward the Upper-Half to check my bedroom again, when I caught sight of Carly (one of the three Semi-Targets here) furtively entering the exterior door to the Upper-Half of My Wing. She was looking over her shoulder as she slipped inside. She was by herself, which was even more curious, so my sight blob followed her. She went into my bedroom and started searching through the bedside drawers, found my wallet, counted out $80 from it (I zoomed in to make sure), slipping the notes into her dress's pocket. I had several hundred dollars in my wallet, because we'd been shopping like idiots the last few weeks, and I'd gotten into the habit of carrying a fair amount of cash. I guess Carly had decided that $80 wouldn't be missed. #1: #8: #3: #8: #All: We discussed and agreed on a plan, while we watched Carly leave the building and rejoin the party. I had a little preparation to do. I went inside the Main House and got a cassette out of the VCR and stuck a blank label on it. I wandered back to my bedroom where I got my and Julia's wallets out of our bedside tables and took them to my study. I got a pen then wrote neatly on the cassette label, "Sep 24, 2005, 18:37. Carly PENNINGTON, Theft $80 MA's wallet, MA's bedroom. Cameras MB1-1 & MB1-2. Copy 2 of 3." I also wrote the stolen money's serial numbers on a piece of notepaper, sliding that into the cassette's case. I put the wallets and cassette in the safe. I needed to wait a while before confronting Carly. Forty five minutes later I borrowed Julia, told her what had happened and what I was planning. She rubbed her hands together with glee, which easily preempted my question about whether she approved. Julia's only caution was, "Make sure you never have an incriminating conversation with Carly in the future, in case she records it for counter-blackmail. You've got a lot more to lose than she has." "Good point. I'll remember that." We removed the cassette from the safe, also grabbing a piece of paper and a pen, taking them to my bedroom and putting them in my bedside drawer. I did a quick sight blob search to locate Carly, then Julia and I headed in that direction. When we were close, Julia took my arm in her usual fashion, and we walked tangentially toward Carly, Julia thanking me for making the time to have sex with her, but suggesting I should entertain my guests rather than her. "There's no reason I can't have my favorite girl as well, but you're right I should. Umm, who should I ask?" I looked around, unsure of who to bless with my invitation. Several girls had heard me, and they weren't so unsure. Some weren't brave enough to outright ask, but some were. Which forced the shy ones to speak up, in case they missed out. Nearly an hour had gone past since Carly's theft, so she was no longer feeling nervous about it, and she was one of the volunteers, not that a Plan B would've been hard to make work. "Carly, I haven't spent much time with you recently. That was a silly mistake of mine. Let's fix that now, shall we?" She was accepting even before I'd finished asking. No doubt hoping to get close to the rich boy who stupidly leaves wallets full of money lying around. I took her hand, on the same side as the pocket she'd put the money in, so she wouldn't try to ditch it if she got suspicious or scared. I'd see that coming in proximity and would easily be able to stop her. I started walking with her toward the door into the Upper-Half of My Wing, and I felt her tense up when she realized where we were going. Carly worriedly asked, "Where are we going?" "To my bedroom of course. Where else would I take a girl for sex? You don't expect me to use the bedroom tent do you? Haha." That seemed reasonable, I seemed relaxed, and trying to get me to change destination would have been silly, so Carly went along with me. She was somewhat nervous though, so I gossiped away aimlessly, about the party and what some people had been doing. By the time we arrived in my room, she was relaxed, believing that this was a perfectly innocent invitation for sex, without any ulterior motive. I took her in my arms and gave her a passionate kiss, which removed the last vestiges of worry. She melted into my arms and we spent an enjoyable thirty seconds kissing. I pulled back, to say, "Sadly I can't do that as long as I want, because I do need to get back to the party soon. Let's get undressed." I reached down to grab the hem of her dress, and pulled it up over her head. I threw it on the side of the bed behind her, using NP to quickly feel the inside of the pocket I'd arranged to fall on top. There was money in it; presumably mine. I finished stripping her off, then picked her up and placed her in the middle of the bed. On a bed the size of mine, that put her a fair distance from her clothes. I was still clothed when I sat on the bed beside her, between her and her clothes, reached into the bedside table and pulled out the cassette. I also pressed the last button I needed to press on my phone to start it recording our speech. I held the cassette in my lap, in a way that prevented her seeing the label. She saw it, and was puzzled. I asked, "You know Prof and I were kidnapped by guys that broke into Williams' house when I was sleeping there, right?" "Ahh. Yeah. Why?" "And you know I'm a multi-millionaire, so you should've expected that when we were setting up this place, we put in an EXCEPTIONALLY good security system. Imagine my feelings when I was called to the security room and asked to watch this tape. Read the label." I gave her the tape, the label facing her. Her skin turned white; her expression showing shock and anguish. "OH NO!" I took the tape from her nerveless hands, extracted the notepaper, showed it to her. "According to the camera, these are the serial numbers of the notes you took and put in your right pocket. Let's see if the money's still in your pocket and if the numbers match." I reached for her dress, while also paying attention to her in proximity. I expected her try to grab her dress of me, or maybe even to bolt for it even though she was naked, but she did nothing. She'd collapsed in on herself and was starting to sob. I'd learned from Dakota not to fall for that. "I'm going to pull the money out of your right pocket very carefully, so the cameras can record the proof that it was in there." I pulled out the money, looked at the serial numbers, and announced, "Perfect match. I'll give the cameras a few seconds to make sure the serial numbers are recorded. Do you want to check they match the handwritten list of numbers?" "I'm SORRY, Mark. I didn't mean to. I NEED the money, and you've got so much. I only took a little bit. You wouldn't have missed it..." "Tell it to the judge. Because you..." "OH NOOOO! {SOB}, {SOB}." I gave her a little time to experience the pain of getting caught, then over her sobbing loudly said, "Because you opened the external door, that means you committed 'Breaking and Entering' and 'Burglary', plus 'Theft' of course, so you'll be convicted of three serious crimes. That's pretty much the end of your life. You'll go to prison, be expelled from school, never graduate, never get anything better than the worst jobs around..." I had to stop because the noise level got too loud again. I didn't know whether my guesses about her crimes were accurate or not, but it appeared she believed me, so that was fine. I spent a minute listening to her impassioned pleas, promises NEVER to do it again, telling me I wouldn't miss it, and everything else she could think of, none of which changed my mind. I knew she'd put herself into the Semi-Target role because she hungered for my money. I'd seen her reactions to the money conversations many times during the Target Game's dates, as my being rich seemed to come up quite often during them. In a consistent pursuit of that money, she'd deliberately and guiltily sneaked into my room to search and pilfer it. I had no doubt that this was her basic personality; not an accidental, momentary weakness, or a matter of essential need. She was a money-hungry thief. A very, very upset one. When she said, "$80 isn't ANYTHING to you!" for the fourth time, I responded, "I'm sure your parents and the judge will take that into consideration." That set her off again. My gathering up my stuff and starting to get off the bed threw her pleadings into high gear. After a repeat of the comment I wanted from her, I turned to say, "It's no good you offering to do anything for me, because there's nothing I want from you. I've got dozens of girls who'll do whatever I want, none of whom are criminals. You can't seriously have thought that I was going to let you off in return for your doing 'anything', when I've already got girls lined up begging to have sex with me?" "{Sob}, {Sob}." "What's your home number so I can call your parents?" "{SOB}, {SOB}. PLEASE DON'T. Not my parents." "That's silly. If I don't call them, the police will anyway." "ARRR. OH NO. Please not that! I'll NEVER do it again. I'll be good, I PROMISE..." "Can you name a SINGLE reason why I shouldn't call the police and your parents?" "I'll NEVER do it again!..." "So you'll never get in trouble AGAIN then. But you did do it ONCE, so you're going to get in trouble once. That's how it works. You screwed up your entire life just for a measly $80. What an idiot!" "It was an ACCIDENT. I didn't..." "Don't talk crap! You were looking guiltily over your left shoulder as you slid into the outside door. That's on videotape too. You wouldn't believe how good the security system in this house is! You knew exactly what you were intending to do even before you got inside, which the police and judge will clearly see. It was a premeditated act of thievery. Claiming it was an accident is as stupid as everything else you've done." "{SOB}, {SOB}." #6: #3: I used NP to turn off my cellphone's recording function, as I had more than enough confession from her now. Then said, "I can only think of one thing you can do which would be any use to me." "What? I'll do ANYTHING Mark. Ask me for anything. I'll give you money if you want." "Stupid girl! I don't want your money; I've got plenty of my own. And didn't you tell me a minute ago that you stole my money because you didn't have enough of your own? I'm starting to think you're too stupid to be any use at all. Maybe I should call the police after all." "PLEASE NO, MARK! I'll do whatever you want! I will. Tell me what you want me to do." "It's no good trying to move your body sexily. I have no interest in having sex with you." Her body was moving with her sobs, not sexually, but it made for an easy way for me to say what followed. "I can get all the sex I want from better girls than you, but that's not true of my male friends. So for the next full year - until September 24 next year - your ass is mine to use however I want. When I tell you to fuck another guy, you will. You'll do it as well as you can, or I'll give one of the copies of this tape to the police. Do you agree, or will I call the police and your parents now?" "What? You want me to have sex with your friends?" "No. What I want to do is call the police. All I have to do is hand over the tape and sign a statement, and I'll never have to think about you again, because you'll be expelled, in jail, and out of my life forever. You said you'd do anything to avoid ruining your entire life, so I'm finding out whether that's true, or you're a liar as well as a thief." "You're blackmailing me!" "I'm offering you a choice. Let's be clear about one thing: YOU are a criminal, and now you're trying to complain that I'M not treating YOU fairly! Give me a break! You didn't treat me fairly when you stole money from my wallet, so what piece of stupid logic makes you think I should show you any consideration at all? -- "It's ONLY sex for God's sake. I've seen you have sex a dozen times in the last couple of weeks. You have a choice between remaining free but having sex with a few extra guys over the next year, or going to jail where the hardened criminals you'll be in jail with will probably fuck your cunt with broomsticks and their fists. What's your choice?" #4: #8: #6: #8: #6: #8: #3: #8: Klepto Carly asked, "{Sniff}. What would I have to do?" "In short, obey me for 365 days. Fuck who I want, when I want. To make you feel better, there won't be many of them. I'm not doing this to get revenge on you, but to occasionally reward my friends. That's not going to happen very often. Compared to how often I've seen you have sex in the last few weeks, you'll barely notice it, just like you say I wouldn't have noticed my $80 going missing. -- "However, if you agree, then the first thing you're going to do is move to the bedroom downstairs, and I'll go outside and find a couple of guys to send to you. I'll only send one at a time, but I will be sending two of them. I'll review the security tapes, and if you don't fuck them properly, or if you refuse to fuck them at all, then I'll call the police. I'm not going to fuck around with you. Either you stick to the deal to the best of your ability, or you go to jail. -- "I've wasted enough time on you now. I could've called the cops and handed over the tape in less time than this. Are you going to remain free and do your honest best to be the best little reward I can occasionally give my friends for the next year, or are you flushing your entire life down the toilet? "It was only $80! You can't make me your sex-slave for a whole year just for $80. That's not fair!" It wasn't worth arguing with her, so I said, "Let's hope the judge agrees with you." I picked up my phone and started making my second fake call of the party. Carly is obviously a stupid girl, but she's still much smarter than footballers, because she stopped me almost immediately, "Okay. Okay. I don't have choice. You're a very bad person..." "Shut the fuck up! I am NOT going to spend the next year listening to your CRAP! You deliberately sneaked into my home, searched it, and stole money from me. You VIOLATED my brand new home that I used to have wonderful feelings about living in, but which you've now ruined. I am EXTREMELY pissed off with you, and extremely angry, and have ZERO tolerance to your crap." #4: #8: #1: #8: I carried on, "The last guys at school who pissed me off got their arms broken and then sent to jail. Katelin's family attacked me and they got knocked out and sent to jail. I am perfectly happy to send fuck-ups to jail, and right now you're ONE word away from pissing me off so much I'll do that to you. -- "You should be THANKING me, for Christ's sake! You offered to do 'anything', and I told you something that was EASY for you. You even do it for fun, and now you're making a fucking misery out of it. You've got NO IDEA what misery your whole life will turn into if I call the cops. For God's sake, pull your head out of your ass and use it to think with. If you'd done that earlier, you wouldn't have gotten yourself into this mess, but if you don't start doing it soon, the mess will last your entire life. -- "I'll repeat myself one LAST time. Either you COOPERATE with me for the next year over your being an occasional sexual gift to my friends, or your life turns to shit starting five minutes from now, because that's how long it'll take the cops to get here and put handcuffs on you." I could see that reality had finally sunk in, so all I had to do was add, "What's it going to be?" "I'll do it. I still..." "STOP! I have ZERO interest in your opinions. Why on EARTH would you think I give a fuck about your opinions? And if you make the SLIGHTEST of complaints, I'll call the cops, because I've had a belly full of you. From now on you smile and say 'Yes Mark'. If I arrange a date for you, and you try to tell me you're too busy, I'll call the cops and we'll see whether they can pull you away from whatever it is that's making you so busy. In other words, you treat me as if I had the same power over your life as the cops will have if I drop a dime on your ass. The ONLY answer I EVER want to hear from you is 'Yes Mark.' Is that clear? "Ahh..." "Say 'Yes Mark', or learn how to take broomsticks shoved violently up your cunt." "Yes Mark." "About damned time! Now grab your clothes and go to the bedroom downstairs. You'll probably have about ten minutes to get your happy face on before the first guy arrives. The security system in this place can read serial numbers off money, so I'll easily tell if you're not trying hard enough, and I'll ask the guy afterward too. If you don't do a good job, I won't even bother talking to you about it. I'll simply call the cops, so the first thing you'll know is when you hear the siren. So I suggest you try DAMNED hard to impress the guys. I'll send two, because I want to make sure you understand your position. If I wanted to, I could get on the phone and get dozens of guys here to fuck you nonstop for days, but I have no interest in that. I'll only send two, because I'm genuinely not doing this to punish you. If you cooperate, you won't have any trouble doing this, if you don't cooperate, your entire life is going to turn into a shit load of trouble. I'll get the audio recording of this conversation emailed to my phone so I can play it for you, so you'll know we've also got your confession on tape. Now grab your clothes and get downstairs." My newly acquired sexual gift said nothing, but slid herself down the bed to get off. Just as Carly's feet were hitting the floor, the closet door started opening, surprising the heck out of me (I almost felt violated). Carly spun to look at it too, as Julia emerged. #3: Carly said, "Julia..." Carly seemed about to complain over what I'd done, but her complaint got badly derailed when Julia interrupted, "SHUT UP, BITCH! I heard every word, and I'm spitting angry at you. One word from you and I'LL call the police. I can't believe how stupid and selfish you are! Mark was excited and happy about moving into his new home, and I was excited and happy about decorating it for him, and now we'll never feel comfortable in here again. What you've done is unforgivable. -- "You're lucky Mark dealt with you rather than me, because I'd be ramming every broomstick I could find up your cunt. If you do or say ONE thing that is in any way damaging to Mark, I'll call the cops myself. I know where the security tapes are kept too, and even if I didn't, I'd still stand up in court and lie my head off to get you back for the hurt you've done my man. You know how devoted I am to Mark, so if you even look like you might cause trouble, I'll be coming for you. Our two words against your one will be the least of your troubles. Now get out of here before I lose my temper and start slapping you silly." Carly grabbed her clothes and rushed out of the room. I was pleased to hear her running downstairs rather than out the top level's door that we'd come in. She didn't re-close the door behind her, but a little NP took care of that, in a way that made it look natural. Julia was climbing onto the bed, so I'd rather stay here. When the door was closed I asked, "You were in the closet the whole time?" "Of course. I wasn't going to let you do something dangerous alone. Having that secret door has proved itself useful already." "Yeah, except I nearly had a heart attack when the closet door started opening. Do you really feel this room has been violated?" "By that stupid, little trollop! Ha! I think this room is GREAT, especially the secret door, haha. I'm sure you don't care either. You were just pushing her buttons weren't you?" "Yep. Shall we go find a couple of guys to push her buttons with their cocks?" "Only after I get a chance to tell you how proud I am of you. You handled her VERY well. I'm amazed at how fast you've learned to take command of situations and people. It's not quite six months since you started, and I can't think of anything you could've said better. I'm surprised you didn't get her to write the deal though?" "I decided against it. At best it helps us get some more sex out of her; at worst it could be used as evidence against us. It wasn't worth it. I'll erase my phone's recording shortly too. I noticed you just said 'how fast I've LEARNED'. You've always said 'LEARNING' before. I'm sure you didn't mean to imply I've learned everything, but I recognize it as a compliment, which I thank you for." "You deserve it. I didn't plan to say it, but its being an unconscious compliment has just as much value..." The complimenting session lasted a few more minutes, before we left the room. We went downstairs first, to make sure the ass we owned was where it should be, and to apply one more little trick. I said, "I've got the audio file now. Listen to this." I played the recording on my phone through to the point when Carly said she needed the money. "Do you want to hear it again before I delete the file from my phone? No. We've got copies of course," I said, as I deleted the file. "I OWN your ass now, Carly. Lucky for you, it's me that owns it. Any other guy would make you do all sorts of terrible things, but I've got so many nice girls in my life that I won't waste time on you." Our pet ass looked decidedly unhappy, so Julia yelled at it, "Stop being so stupid! If you go around breaking into people's homes and stealing from them, you've got to expect to be caught sometimes. You behaved like a moron, you got caught, and Mark's cutting you a hell of a lot more slack than I'd have given you. -- "The only thing you're good at is fucking guys, so now you get to do it a few more times to keep yourself from going to jail and getting a criminal record. You'd better pull yourself together, get undressed again and tidy yourself up, because if you don't keep up your end of the deal and the guys complain about you, then you'll be totally useless to Mark and he'll get you out of his life by dropping a dime on your ass. Same thing if you cause us any problems at school or anywhere else. If you do ANYTHING that annoys either of us, we'll turn over the evidence we have against you to the police, and that'll be the end of your life." Our pet promised, "I'm sorry. I'll do..." "Spare me!" interrupted Julia. "I'm not interested in your promises. You're dishonest so they're worthless. You were willing to throw your life away for $80, so even you think you're worthless. Personally, I don't think you're even worth spit, not after you hurt Mark. By the way, after your second fuck I want you to change the sheets on that bed and put them in the wash..." Julia gave the necessary directions, ending with, "Let's go, Mark." When we were outside, Julia said, "I had trouble not laughing in the closet when you threatened to 'drop a dime on her ass.' You've got some weird expressions, but that one was fun to copy. You know you're not going to get a full year's use out of her? More likely a month or two, before she becomes more trouble than she's worth." "Yeah, I know. Girls backsliding is something you've shown me many examples of. I'll try to get some good use out of her quickly. Speaking of which, I'll need to ask around to find a couple of guys who want her. I don't want to use my soccer team because they've had her before. I want new guys. Can you put the tape away for me please. Rip the label off and burn it in case she calls the cops on us and they search the garbage. The tape goes back in the machine in the Main House's living room, please. I'll record over my phone's memory a couple of times soon, to make sure that's truly gone too." "Okay. It's a lot of fun being in your life. There's always something interesting happening." "There wasn't until I met you." We kept the mutual admiration society going until our paths parted. See if you can guess how long it took me to find a couple of guys willing to fuck Carly? I'll give you some hints: (1) Teenage boys, (2) Carly is quite good looking, (3) Free sex. I gave them some bullshit about my not thinking she was worth my time, but she'd offered to prove she's a good lover by taking on two guys of my choice. I asked them to tell me afterward whether they enjoyed her. I didn't have much doubt that they would (see (1), (2) and (3) above). After the second guy finished, Julia went to talk with Carly, just to lay down a few more rules, including that she had to come out and behave normally. About the time that Carly emerged was when the atmosphere started getting sexy. Rather than a few quiet corners having some making out, now half the party was. Carly wasn't in the mood, so she stayed in a well-lit area, where there wasn't any serious making out going on. An hour later I noticed that there was one guy who wasn't having much luck, even with the favorable two-to-one gender ratio. He was like I was six months ago: so inept with girls that he was his own worst enemy. So I tracked Carly down and told her what I wanted her to do to cheer the guy up (I take my host responsibilities seriously). Carly started saying, "I thought you said two..." "I ALSO said if you complained I'd call the cops, that I'd set you up WHENEVER I wanted, and that I owned your ass. I just asked you to be nice to him for a couple of hours and to give him a fuck before he leaves. I doubt it'll last more than a couple of minutes, so it'll hardly be onerous for you. But if that's your attitude, I'll get Julia to make the call; she'll enjoy that very much." "I'll do it! Where is he?" "Listen to me VERY carefully, Carly. Julia put her heart and soul into decorating my house for me; not to mention something like $50,000. Your fucking stupidity and greed has ruined that for her and me, and I hate you for it. HATE YOU! I'm VERY tempted to call the cops, because I'd love to see you punished for what you've done to Julia and me. I have ZERO tolerance for any more crap from you. If you EVER start to complain again, I'm going to thoroughly enjoy seeing the look on your face as the cops put you in handcuffs in front of everyone and take you away. The ONLY words I ever want to hear you say from now on are 'Yes Mark'. Do you understand that, moron?" "Yes." "He was standing by the food table. If he's moved, find him yourself, because if you're not on his lap and he's not smiling from ear to ear in five minutes, then in ten minutes you'll be in handcuffs and this party will have REALLY created something to gossip about at school next week. Not that school would ever worry you again." ^ I could write a great deal more about the party. Even whole chapters about just the sex that occurred, as it got pretty wild toward the end. Actually it didn't really have an end as far as I was concerned, as quite a few girls and I ended up in my bed. And by "quite a few", I should've written, "a delightfully HUGE number", because the bed was overflowing with naked female flesh. Julia definitely should've bought a bigger bed. The party was a wild success, with "wild" being the operative word. I'm getting ahead of myself a little here, but the easiest way of describing how successful it was is to talk about school. My house-warming party was confirmed as being a success by its being a huge and scandalous topic at school. Some of the stories that emerged (i.e., were spread by Julia and her helpers) blew our fellow students' little minds. For example, to our male classmates, Julia made a big deal about how even with the bedroom tent being so heavily used, there were still dozens of used condoms all around the property. Imagining all that freely available action got her male listeners worked up. Even guys who were known not to be any good with girls (which was most of them), were swaggering around telling whoever wanted to listen about all the screws they'd gotten (even if they'd gotten only one, because guys will be guys). The guys who hadn't been invited were so envious it caused them physical pain. That several footballers had tried to crash it, but had run away from a fake call was also a source of envy too. Apparently any party which can make footballers look like idiots (which surely must be every party?) is instantly a cool one, which the guys wished they'd been at, to absorb some of the coolness themselves. Some of the freely available pussy would've been good too. To excite our female classmates, Julia gossiped. Who did what with whom, what they told someone else about it afterward, and who that person then told, and how it got back to whoever, what relationships had started because of it ... You know how it goes, which is mostly "endlessly"; but apparently it's riveting stuff because Julia's every word was hung on. Apparently - Julia assured me - a great deal of very gossip-worthy stuff had happened at the party. She offered to tell me some of it, but desisted when I threatened to rupture my eardrums. Another thing that turned the school's gossip circuit into a frenzy, in addition to scandalous stories about the party, was scandalous behavior at school. It was ASTONISHING how friendly several of the school's A-list beauties were with the soccer team ("The SOCCER team! And not just 'friendly', but like, REAL friendly. What is Adriana thinking!"). Each of those A-list girls weren't friendly with just one soccer player at a time, but with ALL of them. It badly upset the clearly understood status hierarchy at school, causing massive confusion among the people for whom the status hierarchy was terribly important: mostly the rest of the A-list, the football team, the wannabes, and the suck-ups. If just one A-lister had behaved that way, the rest would've immediately used it as a pretext to tear her to pieces for being a slut (the process has a strong resemblance to a wounded shark being ripped to shreds by the rest of its school. The commonality of the word "school" being highly appropriate). But with half a dozen A-listers involved, and a few others as well (not My Girls; we stopped that when school started), the result was confusion rather than bloodshed. I only know a couple of things about psychological torture (to zig and to zag), but it's enough for me to work out that if you REALLY want to torture status-conscious kids, then a very good way to do it is to apparently give some unexpected people unexpectedly high status, but don't let anyone else know why. It drives the status-conscious people seriously CRAZY with frustration. They think it's absolutely essential that they know everybody's status and why, so they know what their position is, and how they should behave toward everybody else. Without that knowledge, they might accidentally be friendly with people who're actually beneath them (something that could be used by their more knowledgeable rivals to laugh at them behind their backs), or maybe they'd make the mistake of not sucking up to the newly important people as much as they should, so wouldn't gain the essential coolness-by-association status boost, letting their more knowledgeable rivals get ahead. It's absolutely astonishing how profoundly upsetting it is for insecure people not to know where they stand and what is going on in the social hierarchy. Those girls NEED to know that (nearly always girls, as they're the ones that social networks matter to the most). To make it far worse, the status-conscious girls had a major problem trying to find out why the status rules had changed so much: having to ask about that implied the girls were out of the status loop, which was a fate worse than death. And to make it even MORE difficult in this case, the Target Girls were NOT going to explain what they were doing, mainly because it was demeaning, and also because they didn't want more rivals. So they put on brave faces and pretended they knew important status stuff that no one else did, which is pretty much how all schoolkids' status games work, as none of them has any real power. ------- Chapter 282: End of Summer Vacation; Miscellaneous Tidy Up Sunday, September 25, 2005 There's a bunch of small points I'll take care of here. ------- I'd had eleven déjà vu's in the 125 days since my last merge, which was starting to be a statistically useful number. That meant an average of eleven or twelve days between déjà vu's. When they occurred didn't seem to be totally random. I'd never had two close together, for example, which a truly random frequency would've given sometimes. They appeared to have a normal distribution, as they most often occurred within nine to fourteen days of the previous déjà vu, with earlier or later than that being unusual. Other Mark Andersons that we déjà vu'd with reported the same thing, including with all the other Mark Andersons they'd previously linked to (who reported the same with all the other... ). In other words, I had a substantial amount of data, and it seemed consistent everywhere our déjà vu recursions could reach. The data wasn't even close to being independent though, as the other Mark Andersons' previous déjà vu's had usually been at the same dates and times, or very close to them, as ours. Not always though, just to confuse the situation. We guessed - but it was only a guess - that was because we most often linked with 'near' parallel dimensions, and their similarities to ours included déjà vu timings. The timing of successive déjà vu's didn't seem to depend on whether the first one was early or late. If one déjà vu was 'late', the next would arrive after the usual nine to fourteen days, rather than with a shorter gap because of the first one's lateness, not like buses arriving at a bus stop. The déjà vu's lasted quite a long time, on average just over a minute. One Mark we linked to told us that during his previous déjà vu, he and his partner had performed an experiment where the two ends of the link deliberately did very different actions soon after the link started. The link canceled much quicker than normal, which is what we would've guessed would happen, because déjà vu's somehow feel 'fragile'. We repeated that experiment a few seconds later, getting the same result. The durations of our recent déjà vu's were a reasonably consistent 1.1 minutes, but they did vary somewhat. We wouldn't want to bet our life on their lasting even 90% of that length, as we'd nearly done when the last merge had happened. If we'd been slower to order 3B's body to die, the link might have terminated before we'd had a chance to transfer. [[As previously explained, there's no "transfer" at the moment of death. It feels that way though, and it makes no practical difference yet. If we'd been late to die, we would've lost the opportunity to merge, regardless of our understanding being wrong.]] As far as we could tell, while we were in a déjà vu our abilities increased the same as if we'd merged. They increased by fixed amounts too, not erratically like the timings of déjà vu occurrences. Our maximum NP force always seemed to increase by exactly a factor of four per mind, our proximity range always increased by a factor of two, the number of fingertips we could create always doubled, etc. There might be undiscovered new abilities that would become possible because of a merge, but discovering those in the average of 1.1 minutes we had wasn't possible. There was one qualitative difference we could detect in the time we had: proximity gave much better quality information. We could sense much smaller resolutions, so we could 'see' people breathing and swallowing, for example. If we ever get a déjà vu while sitting on a toilet, we'll probably be able to see the muscles at the other end working too. We could also sense people's emotions much more easily when we were in a déjà vu, including our own emotions. When I was outside of déjà vu, people have to be feeling an emotion so strongly that my emotion-sensing ability very rarely encountered such people, and when it did, the emotion was usually already obvious on their face or from the situation. During déjà vu, that threshold dropped considerably, so we got emotional feedback more often than not. That was confusing, because people are often experiencing three or four different emotions at the same time. If we ever merged again, it was going to take us a quite while to learn to read the new information. Lastly, and most excitingly in terms of our non-déjà vu'd ki abilities, by the time school restarted we'd been practicing consciously projecting ki for five months, so we'd achieved about a 25% improvement over the unconscious amount. Our eight-mind maximum force had increased from 51.2 kg (113 pounds) to 64 kg (141 pounds). I was looking forward to the situation a couple of years from now, when I'd easily be able to fly myself around. ("Easily" in just the physics sense. In other respects it wouldn't be so easy, as it'd have to be only at night, I'd have to wear a mask and dark clothes, and be EXTREMELY careful.) If we merged today - NOT going to happen! - my 16-mind maximum unconscious ki would be 410 kg. Plus the 25% "Training Bonus" made it 512 kg (1,130 pounds). Enough to fly Carol, Julia and me together, and still have over 1 g acceleration available. The physics of it was very practical, although there were even more important practical reasons not to do it, like being shot down by the Air Force, or even more dangerous, it putting Rodeo Drive within easy reach. ------- The Department of Horrendous Stupidity incident scared me into action in a couple of respects. As a result of the kidnapping, I'd made a mental note to get my Last Will and Testament organized, but hadn't done so. Not that I expected to die, but with DHS's very stupid people carrying guns around, you never know what could happen, so I got my Will taken care of. Nothing fancy, just simple thirds of the net value of whatever I had to Mom and Dad, Carol, and Julia, with a variation depending on whether Carol or Julia were 'with child' to any degree. I also followed up on Prof's suggestion that I bury some money for emergencies, although I waited a couple of weeks to make sure the DHS had truly gone before I withdrew the money. I had three sets of three nesting airtight boxes and multiple layers of waterproof wrappings. I probably overdid protecting the money, but the thought of $30,000 of my money being eaten by worms or rotting worried me. Plus if I wanted it, then I'd REALLY want it, so overdoing protecting it was fine with me. One was buried several hundred yards down our road, farther away from town. The idea being that if I was chased out of home for some reason, I'd have somewhere nearby where I'd be able to stock up with money. The second I buried close to the "love-nest" where I'd taken Diana and Claire. I wanted a spot that was away from everything, but wouldn't take long to get to, and that spot had suggested itself for sentimental reasons. The third I buried outside of Portland. If I was truly on the lam and needing to move too fast to stop to dig up the first two caches, I wanted one cache far enough away that I should be able to lose my pursuers and get ahead of them enough to have time for some digging. I put a fourth $10,000 bundle in my safe at home, but that didn't seem to count as "money gone" as much as burying it in the ground did. My poor bank account didn't have a good summer, what with our honeymoon, my very excessive landscaping project, my giving the mothers the money for the furnishing and decorating, and my burying $30,000 in the ground. I remembered how important having money had been when I was on the lam from Binion's PIs, so I knew I'd bless Prof for his suggestion if I was in trouble again, but I still winced at how fast my money was going. I made a mental note to keep my mind open for ideas on how to make more money. They say, "It takes money to make money," but from my experience the previous expression is a contraction of: "It takes money to make it necessary to make more money." ------- At the very end of summer, when Julia's decorating work was mostly complete, I politely suggested that she increase the pace at which she was preparing for getting her license, making the point, "If all goes well, next year the three of us will be moving to a new city, and you and Carol will be going to a new school. If you're on a restricted license you won't be able to take Carol to school with you, because she's not legally your family member. That'd be a nuisance." Julia agreed. She'd already passed the Knowledge Test to get her Permit. What she needed to be doing now was clocking up practical experience. That required a co-driver who was at least 21, so I couldn't help her with that. Living with four parents has its uses though, so Julia made more time for it, and was often able to find someone to go with her on her practice drives. Dad like helping out with stuff like that, so it was usually him. Speaking of cars, I reminded Donna that married couples (Mom and Dad, Prof and Vanessa, Me and my wives), liked to sit in the front of the car together. I asked her nicely to sit behind me when I was driving so I could see my wives. I had thought of an additional argument too, adding, "After all, you choose who rides your vehicle - Patch - and in what order. I just want to do the same in my vehicle." Put that way, Donna had to agree, and did so without any drama. She liked that Carol and I were together and that our relationship was bringing us so much happiness. ------- At the end of the previous school year, I'd thought I wouldn't rejoin the school's soccer team. The games were far too easy, and I distorted them too much for every other player. As a result of the Target Game's success, my teammates worshipped the ground I walked on, and would've been shattered and distraught if I'd abandoned them. Winning every game they played, no matter how distorted, was a price they were willing to pay to remain close to the guy that sent so much A-list pussy their way. I could certainly understand their desires. Most of them (ten out of ten, plus our reserve and the seven hundred more reserves we could have had) would never get that close to any prime-grade pussy ever again, let alone have so much of it chase them. So - much to their relief - I let them BEG me into agreeing to rejoin the team. ------- College studying had flown along very nicely, and I'd been promised a whole lot of exams soon. Something to look forward to! I'd accomplished about eight weeks of studying over summer, as I'd been overseas nearly five weeks of the vacation. Two weeks per course per screen for eight weeks meant each screen should've theoretically finished four courses. Multiplied by seven screens (active centering didn't work well), that gave a theoretical answer of twenty eight courses. In practice I'd finished twenty four. Either I'd been slacking, or the gap between theory and practice is larger in practice than in theory. I had to do some lab work for some Physics courses, and some lecturers might require me to read some new material before taking an exam, but I was essentially ready to take twenty four exams. The Dean had asked them not to create any new notes for me to read, but in a couple cases it was best that they did so, when last year's material was out of date or even wrong (unlikely in Math, Physics courses that talked about cutting edge theories could have that happen, although not often in undergrad courses). With something like 110 courses required to complete my degrees, there'd be an average of thirteen exams per month, or three per week. Thank goodness I understand and remember the material on the first pass so I don't have to study for exams. I still worried about being able to do that with third and fourth year courses, or their being so hard they slowed me down a great deal. I had the thought that slow wouldn't be bad, because staying an extra year in Corvallis appealed to me a great deal, and it would mean Julia would graduate here without the need to change schools for her senior year. I was momentarily - very momentarily - tempted to deliberately go slow, until I thought of how Julia would react if she found out that I was deliberately being less impressive. ------- I was getting a lot of use out of sight blobs, and I REALLY wanted to be able to operate with two simultaneous vision sources, but I couldn't make it work no matter what and how much I tried. It was trivially easy to create two sight blobs, or leave my eyes open when I created one, but managing the superimposition that resulted had me stumped. I couldn't find a way of making it work, or discover another way that gave good vision without superimposition. Trying to get sound blobs working was even less successful. Multiple sight sources was impractical, but sound blobs was nonexistent. I never made even the slightest forward progress with them. The Physics course whose lectures I'd read with such hope had taught me a great deal about the processes I was failing at, but it didn't give me any useful ideas. My biology simply seemed too limited. I had to continue to close my eyes whenever I wanted to use a sight blob; distance communication between Julia, Carol and me was restricted to a one way NP touching process; and I'd be going to school with no warning system for jocks throwing footballs at the back of my head. There was an emotional compensation for the last point. I was pretty sure none of the jocks had as many notches on his bedpost as I did. As we went to sleep on our final night of freedom, #8 proudly reported that we'd fucked thirty three different girls now, not even counting the five 90-second fucks in the hot tub at the end of the "Bowling, Pizza and Hot Tub" date. It'd been a great summer, and our life was rolling along VERY nicely. The Physics course didn't teach me anything useful about the processes I was failing at, but it did teach me something about a process that I was succeeding at, but shouldn't have been: heat blobs. I had thought infrared was heat. I was aware that it was a heat transfer via radiation, as distinct from convection and conduction, but blobs were all about radiating, so that distinction didn't matter. It turned out that "Infrared = Heat" is a common misconception. It was certainly common with all of my minds. Infrared is simply a wavelength of light, so it contains energy. Other wavelengths of light contain energy too, and there's no functional difference between any of those colors. Their ability to impart heat is dependent on whether whatever object they strike can readily absorb that wavelength. It happens that, at the temperatures that humans live in, most objects (including our bodies) radiate energy in the infrared frequency band, and can fairly easily absorb energy in those frequencies too, which feels like heat to us. They're properties of the objects, not something that makes Infrared light equal Heat. In short, my infrared-tuned heat blobs were too effective at imparting heat. I decided it had to be another expectation issue. When I had discovered blobs, my misconception about the importance of infrared light had caused me to expect heat to only come from blobs when they were tuned to the infrared frequency, so that's what had happened. Whatever was happening, it was working, and I saw no benefit in making heat and light blobs closer to each other in function, so I left them working the way they did. ------- Part 12: Studying and Studied ------- Chapter 283: A New Academic Year: Full-Time OSU, 12th Grade, My Poor Car Monday, September 26 to the end of 2005 Things are always messy at the beginning of a new school year, although much was done to make it easier for me. The Dean of OSU's watchword regarding me seemed to be "efficiency". He'd arranged (or more likely, arranged for one of his secretaries to arrange) many ways to make things flow easier for me. As a few examples: Unknown to me, the Dean, the Corvallis Board of Education and the Principal of my school had been talking about me behind my back, something the Dean had initiated. They were determined that I was going be given every opportunity to perform to the limit of my intellectual abilities. The Principal was made to understand that problems at school wouldn't be treated with much patience. Unlike most students, I didn't have to fight my way around the college bookshop to collect my textbooks, not that I could've carried more than a tiny fraction of them. They were gathered for me. And if in doubt whether I'd be doing a specific course or not, the textbook was gathered anyway, rather than risk me going without. Some courses had multiple textbooks, so there were over two hundred of them! It took several people quite a while to collect them, transport them to my home, and shelve them in good order in my study. On the first day of college, I was met by a Physics Department guide who took me everywhere I needed to go. I was shown the lecture halls, labs, resource rooms (computers, libraries) that I might use and how to use them. I was introduced to everyone relevant to my studies, with - I was amused to note - the Physics Department secretaries being right at the top of the "Essential People To Meet" list. The secretaries knew about me. If anything needed to be done, they were either going to be the ones doing it, or would be making sure the process of getting it done worked efficiently. Bureaucracy barely came near me; sometimes I had to sign completed forms, but that was about it. After I knew my way around the Physics Department, I was handed off to a Business Studies guide, and the process was repeated. School wasn't organized for my convenience nearly so well (to be fair, my future marketing value for my school was negligible), but things were made easier. I didn't have to worry about any of my elective classes being full, both Math and Physics were waived provided I did well with them at College, and a little study area was set up for me in the library; not large enough or private enough for a bed, unfortunately. [A month later I wanted to start using an internet-accessing laptop at school, piggybacking off the school's wifi.] I'd known what I would be facing at school, so it was straightforward other than the considerable amount of social confusion caused by soccer players possibly being cool. At OSU, I'd been vaguely hoping that only the staff would know about me. I'd have preferred to go unnoticed by the other students, much as had happened with the two courses I'd done last year. I'd thought that would've been fairly easy, because I'd so rarely be in their classes. But the way I was escorted around, introduced, and the reactions of the lecturers, all conspired to draw attention to me. Julia would've been happy to see it, and I wasn't frightened by it, but I would've preferred for it not to happen. I had a momentary thought that I should've asked the Dean for anonymity or a low-key approach, but I realized that was never possible. With nearly a hundred lecturers having to do a great deal of extra work for me, all the office staff, Heads of Department, and doubtless many others having to know about me in order to make it possible for me to study so fast, word wasn't so much "certain to get out," as already out. I did my best to deflect the students' curiosity as I didn't want to get socially involved at OSU. There was plenty of that in school, and it included Julia, Carol and Ava, which was perfect in many ways. I was ready for the exams in twenty four courses. Most were Math, some Physics, and a few Business. Several Math exams went ahead almost immediately, as it'd been easy for those lecturers to build new exams for me, cobbled together from previous years' courses, with changes to the values of variables to require different answers. About half the Physics courses that I'd finished reading required some lab work, so the first few weeks of the academic year had me very busy at OSU, doing exams, lab work, then more exams. Just the exams took over sixty hours. Fortunately, the lab work was all one-on-one, usually with a teacher's assistant, so I got through it pretty fast. School classes were just the same old, slow-paced routine, so missing even whole days of classes didn't matter much. With the slow pace and my doing only three-quarters of a grade (no Math or Physics) made catching up fairly easy. Obviously all my teachers were very helpful, and I had a designated note-taker and a backup in every class, usually Ava or one of my soccer teammates. It was not humanly possible for anyone to be more helpful than my teammates were. I slaughtered OSU's exams right from the get go. I'd never had any doubt about that. I knew that I knew the material, and exam nerves were never a concern. It was good that it only took a few days before my supporters, especially Prof, stopped worrying about having their necks extended so far for me. It was in the Business faculty that I had the most interaction with the other students, as it required a lot of group work. So many of its courses required so much group work that it was quite a pain. It was ironic that Business was the least efficient degree for me, given how businesses are always going on about the need to be efficient. For Math and Physics my usual approach would be as it'd been over summer, I'd start reading their courses on a screen each, and about two weeks later I'd have finished them. Normally I'd take the exams almost immediately, presuming the lecturer had written it already, and that any lab work was up to date, which it should be as I could usually fit it in during the two weeks the course took. That process didn't work with many of the Business courses because most of them required group work, usually having three or four "projects" (in school we called them "assignments") over the course of the course, of course (ok, I'll admit the "of course" was unnecessary, but I couldn't resist it. Why on Earth does English have the same word with different meanings? You don't get mathematicians giving different values to the same numeral! That'd be crazy). In some cases the lecturers agreed to let me do some of the group projects by myself, but for most of the projects it was important for me to do them as part of my study group because that's how they taught leadership and other people-dependent business skills, or simply because the projects were far too large to be done by one person. Because I had to do the projects with other students, I had to wait for the class to get to that point, so the obvious solution was for me to do the courses in real-time. In itself that was fine, because there were PLENTY of other courses I could read while waiting for a course to progress toward its next group project. But I couldn't wait until the end of the year to finish the first year courses, because I needed the knowledge to do the second, third and fourth year courses. So I was back to Plan A with the Business courses. I'd study each of them as fast as I could by reading all of last year's notes, then I'd put the course on hold, waiting for their next group project. During that time I'd occasionally check for any new material the lecturer had added into this year's online notes. They tended to do that quite often in the BBA because they like to use current business news. Only after each course's final group project was finished would I take its exam. Very unlike Math, the final grade for Business courses was often something like 50% exam, 50% project work, so doing the projects well was important. I'd be doing later years' courses before I'd taken the exams for half of the earlier years' courses, but there wasn't much choice. The Head of the Business College stopped worrying about that after she got the result of my first three Business exams (I'd studied three suitable Business courses over summer). As a result of issues like lab work and group projects, Math was the degree most suitable for studying from last year's notes, less so for Physics, and much less so for Business, so that was going to be the order I did the degrees in. It was far too messy to be a purely sequential process, but I'd be completing more Math courses earlier, and Business courses later. Then there were the BCC courses. They were much more of a nuisance. Public Speaking and Interpersonal Communication, for example, didn't exactly lend themselves to purely online study. I'd also hoped that Lifetime Fitness for Health and Lifetime Fitness: Running would be credited to me when they saw my body and learned about my 10k running race win, but no such luck. Apparently they actually wanted the students to learn stuff, rather than just flex their muscles or run a few circles. I must admit that if they'd given me college credits just because I'd previously demonstrated an ability to run in circles quickly, I wouldn't have been able to resist making some sarcastic comments. All in all, OSU kept me very busy for the first month, as it took me about three weeks to do the lab work and take the exams for the courses I'd studied over summer, by which time I had half a dozen more courses ready to be examined, and by the time I'd finished those exams, I had another half a dozen (it felt like Achilles and the Tortoise). It took me a full month to catch the Tortoise - to clear the entire backlog and be as current as possible. Thereafter, every couple of weeks I'd spend a couple of days at OSU taking exams, and I probably had to spend at least one full day a week there doing labwork. ^ For each Business course I was in that had group work, (pretty much all of them now that I'd done the three that didn't need it over summer), I had to be put in a study group, usually of four to six people. However it was that students were normally allocated to study groups wasn't what happened for me. In the interests of my efficiency, the Head of the Business College turned up at the very beginning of the first lecture for a first year's course (she did the same for the first scheduled second-year course too). She gave the lecturer a list of course names to write on the board, which were the first (or second) year courses that I was doing that had group projects. The DH (stands for "Department Head", but I'm including the Business College head in the acronym) introduced herself. She impressed on the students how unusual it was for her to come to such a class, then said, "Normally you're placed in study groups randomly. This year we'll be doing that after one special study group is chosen. Membership in it has two criteria: you must be enrolled in all the courses written on the board, and you must be EXTREMELY efficient, meaning NEVER late to meetings, ALWAYS fulfill your obligations on or ahead of time, hardworking, producing good quality work, etc. Membership in this study group will require that you maintain that efficiency all year and in all your courses, because you'll remain in this group in all your courses, not just this one. -- "I'll be choosing four of you, to join a fifth person who is not here today. He is a very special student, a prodigy who is taking on a very heavy workload. His time is too valuable to be wasted by tardy study group members, so being in his group will be a considerable commitment for you. Working with him will also likely be an experience of a lifetime. Those of you who meet the criteria and wish to be considered, come to the front." Both times the DH did this, there were class members who objected to the implied elitism (or favoritism, or whatever -ism they thought it was). The DH wasn't interested, "If you don't like it, don't volunteer. If others want to, that's their choice." The first criterion (being in the listed classes) was met by almost everyone, as there's very little choice in the BBA's first and second years. Mostly it eliminated part-time students, of which there are quite a few in the BBA. The second criterion was considerably more effective at limiting the field. Having just finished three months of laid-back vacation, most of the students didn't want to contemplate taking on what sounded like hard work in every course for the rest of the year. Quite a few were willing to though. The DH got them to line up at the front of the class, then went down the line rejecting most of them. She refused to state her criteria, except in one guy's case. He'd arrived to class while the DH had been talking, so demonstrably failed the "NEVER late" criterion, something the DH used to drill the point home even stronger. Her unvoiced criterion was tidiness: scruffy looking students were rejected as an indication of the wrong personality type. Then she went down the remaining line, asking the students for their names to look up the summary of their academic record she had with her. She picked a set (for each year) of four extremely smart, willing to work hard, tidy (and therefore mostly female), study group members for me. The DH then said, "By the end of the lecture, pick one of you to serve as your go between with Mark. That person is to collect all your contact details, identify his- or herself, and state what lunchtimes this week all of you will be available to meet Mark. Give it to your lecturer to email to him. Do you have any questions?" "WHO is he?" "He'll introduce himself to you at the first lunchtime meeting." Things like the above didn't make it easy for me to keep a low profile. When I did meet my study groups one day, between exams, I tried to be low key, just saying that I was working on three degrees simultaneously, not telling them that I was doing them any faster than normal. That impressed them more than enough. One of them later remembered my name being associated with the Binion's Casino Kidnapping Case. A quick google found them a photo of me, which confirmed that I was he. So that got added to my reputation, together with my age. After the first study group meeting at my house (it was more efficient for them to come to me), my being rich and having the most extreme home computer system they'd ever seen got added to my reputation. As did God knows what sort of impression after Julia seized upon the opportunity to impress my college friends, by 'coincidentally' (cough, cough), having several of my girlfriends there at the time, all of whom introduced themselves one after the other as "one of Mark's girlfriends," although Alexis specified "lovers". My study group's reactions gave Julia the opportunity to explain how wonderful I was. By the time my study group had met me a few times, had seen how much and how quickly I could work, and had gossiped about me with the rest of the class, they were all fascinated by me. I was the instant center of everyone's attention the moment I walked in the door to participate in my first group presentation, they being a common part of the BBA. My keeping quiet about my trying to complete the three degrees in one year didn't stay unknown by the masses for long, as the lecturer said, "Ahh, Mr. Anderson. Good to finally see you. I've been saving something I wanted to say to everyone until you were here. Every year I get countless requests for extensions because the students claim to be too busy working on assignments for other courses. If Mr. Anderson can manage his workload, the rest of you don't have a leg to stand on. Put up your hand if you're doing fifteen or more courses this year." About twelve is normal, but quite a few hands went up. "Mr. Anderson, your hand isn't up." "Ahh, if this is going the way I expect, my arm would get too tired." "I'll put my hand up as your proxy then." He put it up, then addressed the class again, "Put your hand down if you're not doing at least eighteen courses this year." Most hands dropped, leaving just a few still up, which caused several expressions of amazement, sympathy, and "Thank God I'm not." The lecturer's hand remained held high. He raised the bar, "At least twenty courses?" Every hand except his came down. He waved it to make sure I was embarrassed as much as possible. "At least thirty courses." He waved his hand high in the air. "At least forty courses." Wave. "At least fifty courses." Wave. By now the students were looking at me with a wide variety of expressions on their faces, mainly: disbelief and you're-a-freak. The lecturer asked, "How many courses are you doing this year, Mark?" "Um, it seems like all of them, I think," hoping to get away with being vague. "I'm told it'll be 120." The class thought that was an interesting number, and several of them were unable to stop themselves from commenting on it. There were three opinions held throughout the class: I was a freak, this was a bizarrely stupid joke, or this wasn't even a joke because it was too ridiculous. One of my study group accused, "You said you're doing three degrees, but you never said in one year." "I was trying to keep that low key. That's not working very well." To one of the, "No one can do that many courses" comments, I answered, "I've JUST started. Ask me again in a couple of months." That wouldn't avoid the problem entirely, as I'd still be doing projects for this year's courses, but it'd defuse the situation now and let them settle down. "No wonder Ms. Cartwright," (the Business DH), "told us you were special." That reminder convinced some of the adherents to the "Bizarrely Stupid Joke" and "It's Impossible" camps to take the "He's A Freak" position. "You can't possibly handle that many hours of lectures in a week." "That's why you haven't seen me in your lectures. Not enough hours in the day, and the lecturers are too embarrassing. I read the online notes and the textbooks. That's faster than..." "That'll be why you've got such a crazy computer system!" realized one of my study group. It went on for a few minutes. The lecturer tried to have the last word, telling the class, "You should all be too ashamed to ask me for extensions this year." "Oh my God! How many projects do you have to do?" "Never mind that," corrected someone else. "Think of all the EXAMS! How'd you like to do over a hundred exams at the end of the year? It'd take WEEKS! More than a month. I'd go insane if..." the rest was drowned out by the class again. We eventually got the chance to give our presentation. By the time this happened, I'd read all of last year's online notes for the first year's Business courses, and a good chunk of the second year's notes too, so I had enough knowledge to do a pretty good job of my presentation, which further increased their opinion of me. My plan to keep a low profile at OSU wasn't going well. ------- Back at school, things were going well enough, even though my OSU summer backlog meant I was rarely there: only two days in the first week, and one day per week for the next three. Even one day per week at school was easily enough academically. In all seriousness, a fifty-minute long class might only have five or ten minutes of real learning in it. The rest is repetition, discipline, checking on student comprehension, etc. I could easily lay out two sets of notes on my desk and read through them quickly while keeping one mind listening to the teacher, in case he/she said something useful. Unless the teacher was being particularly interesting, in an hour's class I could usually catch up on a week's material for two other subjects. I could've laid out four sets of notes on my desk, put my sunglasses on, and used a sight blob to read them, but turning four sets of pages would look too weird. I could do that in my little library study area though, whenever I normally would've gone to Math or Physics. After the first month I'd formally finished all the courses I'd read over summer, so things became easier. Other than two days of exams every two weeks, and usually one day of labwork per week, my visits to OSU were usually just for an hour or two, and there weren't many of those either, just for a presentation or a BCC course. This is when I bought the laptop, to get more use out of my class time at school. Academically, school was surprisingly dull. It hadn't been challenging last year, and it was noticeably less challenging now. [[I was doing less than half the workload, but this was also a consequence of one of the subtler effects of my third merging, although I wasn't aware of that yet.]] Fortunately, school was more interesting socially. That's where My Girls were, plus the rest of school knew me, so more fun things happened, especially because Julia wanted them to. One event was Carol's coming out as a lesbian. That had a few variations from its earlier 3B-land version: It happened when Carol got carried away in the lunchroom with Ava. We used Ava because I was in her grade, thus my first speeches would be given to my classmates. Quite a few girls and a few soccer players said, "I knew it!", which meant that there was virtually no doubt that Carol really was a lesbian. OF COURSE boys still turned into idiots, and they hassled Ava as badly as they had hassled Julia in 3B-land. Ava played her not-able-to-defend-herself role well, and I got to make my "I Love My Sister Carol" speech in my classes. It went over very well, making large numbers of girls cry and look as if they'd like to have my babies. Carol was in high school now. That meant large numbers of her male classmates saw or heard about it, so they REALLY got the hots for Carol! That naturally meant she was severely hassled, so I got to make my speech in some of Carol's classes too. Many 9th grade girls very much wanted to become mothers by me. The next day Carol was observed kissing Julia on the lips and rubbing her ass, so I got to make my speech in some of Julia's 11th grade classes too. I could've significantly increased the population of Corvallis if I'd wanted to. My plan - which had originally been 3B's Carol's and Julia's plan but I got all the credit for it here - worked superbly. ^ Another "social" event at school involved my new car. First some background. Many girls didn't know what to think of the soccer team being so popular, especially sexually popular, with several of the A-listers. The uncertain girls reacted in a variety of ways, some of them quite weird. As a not particularly extreme example, one girl had a serious meltdown in the middle of class when another girl flirted with a soccer team member. The first girl leaped to her feet and launched into five-minute angry tirade DEMANDING to know what was going on, because she couldn't find out from anyone. She seriously freaked out and the teacher had to summon help, the girl had to get counseling, etc. She truly couldn't handle the uncertainty of the status situation. There were quite a few other students who were nearly as bad. Their not understanding the status system made them horribly unsettled, and many of them couldn't handle the insecurity or uncertainty. Very NOT confused about how to react were the traditional leaders of the male hierarchy: the football jocks. They knew EXACTLY how to act, and it was "pissed off!" The soccer players weren't playing status games, challenging for recognition, trying to displace the footballers, or any of that crap - they were too busy scoring. The football jocks still had a lock on the well-established and understood status positions, but I'm sure you have no trouble imagining that the jocks weren't pleased. Unlike the girl who lost it described above, the jocks weren't upset because they didn't understand what was going on, as jocks don't understand much about anything anyway, so lack of understanding was something they were very used to. Possibly their anger was because they knew their popularity was based on nothing, so they were insecure about it; but that required a depth of insight which was hard to imagine any jock having. They're generally the sort of guy who doesn't question that he's a high-school god. More likely, their anger was simply that several of 'their' A-list girls were fucking soccer players, which was WRONG. The girls were still free to fuck football jocks, and some of them probably were because their morals were appallingly loose, but that wasn't the issue: the jocks didn't like sharing ANY of their girls. That an A-lister would go out with and fuck soccer players was a slap on the face of every jock. It didn't take a rocket scientist - of which there were very few among the jocks - to work out that I was the cause of this social disequilibrium; or as they would've put it, "It's that fucking Anderson's fault." In other words, school still had the same old crap. There was the usual attempted jostling in the hallways, but my six-foot proximity sense made that impossible. It also made it very easy for me to move away just when the jock was committed to putting his weight onto me, often causing him to stumble embarrassingly. Or if I was feeling aggressive, I'd let the jock crash his shoulder into mine, but I'd have over a hundred pounds of NP force behind my shoulder, so it was me that pushed straight through him, often sending the jock spinning. Some feet-obstructing NP-points resulted in him ending up on his ass or face. The first significant successful jock revenge wasn't violence against my person, but against my car. Its paintwork was badly gouged all the way down the length of one side, probably by someone using a key and digging in hard with it. After I'd recovered from my anger, Julia and I made a plan for what to do about it, easily getting the Principal's agreement for it. I outwardly didn't react at school, merely changing to Julia's Honda while my car was getting repainted. The plan had cheered me up so much I'd had fun teasing Julia about whether I should get my car repainted to match my watch, ring and cellphone. Julia thought that was "excessive", which surprised me considerably, because I'd had no idea that she believed that anything related to fashion could be "excessive". When I resumed driving my car to school, I had hired a guy to pretend to be a gardener working near the parking lot. What he was really doing was babysitting the three video cameras he had hidden up two fenced-off trees. Two cameras were zoomed in on either side of my car, with a third camera set for a wider-angle shot to show everyone around my car. I had to park in one of three suitable spots to allow that, but they were off to the side and I got there early. The three cameras had their clocks synchronized and were run from a power cord on a long extension lead from the nearest school building, so they could run all day if necessary, only requiring the 'gardener' to rewind the tapes from time to time. The 'gardener' had some electric appliances plugged in (electric hedge clippers and a radio) to explain the extension cord, and he messed around pretending to be gardening. He was positioned away from the path everyone walked on, so no one noticed him. I would've employed him for a week or two if nothing happened, but my car got attacked again on the very first day it was back. The gardener didn't personally see it happen, but he spotted the damage when he moved to check my car after the first class started. It was easy for him to find the attack on the tape of the camera that recorded that side of the car, which gave him the time that the hand had committed the deed. On the wide-angle camera, that time clearly showed the culprit and his two laughing wingmen. He sent me a text message, pulling me out of class. I went to him, reviewed the two tapes, thanked him and paid him off. I took the tapes home and copied three segments onto a video cassette: Several seconds from the wide-angle camera before the attack, just to set the scene by showing the parking lot in general. The zoomed-in shot of the hand coming into frame, scraping the key along the side of my car, then exiting the frame. That lasted about fifteen seconds. The wide-angle shot starting thirty seconds before the attack and lasting about a minute. I made a copy of it for safekeeping (which, appropriately enough, I kept in my safe), then I took the originals and the highlights tapes to my friendly, local police station. I showed it to them and explained what I wanted to do, telling them that the Principal had already approved. The police were very willing to cooperate, because if this wasn't "nipped in the bud" - an expression I was embarrassed to have accidentally used - it was very likely that the jocks would physically attack me next, which would lead to a great deal more work for the police. I managed to prevent myself from saying "and the hospital too," although I thought it. First period the next day all the high-school students were summoned to the school hall, where the Principal asked them if anyone wanted to report a crime. There was a surprising large number of worried faces, especially because of the four cops blocking the exit. Predictably no one spoke up. The Principal gave it a foolishly hopeful full minute, then played the highlights tape that I'd made for him, commentating, "This is yesterday's security camera footage of the student parking lot. Notice this car here," pointing to mine, "belonging to Mark Anderson." I'd asked the Principal not to say anything about the cameras being mine. It'd be good if all the kids believed the parking lot was under surveillance, so all the cars would be safer in the future, including mine. The tape cut to the zoomed in shot, the Principal explained, "The operator zoomed into the side of Mark Anderson's car." A couple of seconds later, a hand holding an extended key appeared, running it along the side of my car, leaving a clearly visible gouge behind it. "Notice the time of the crime," instructed the Principal. When the wide-angle shot appeared, he added, "Starting a few seconds before the crime." The commitment of which was soon clearly visible, as was the laughing, we're-so-cool attitude of the easily identified jocks. Who, when every person in the hall turned to stare at them, were neither laughing nor thinking they were "so cool" after all. The Principal thundered their names, demanding they get to their feet. He made a dramatic production out of informing them they were expelled. One henchman shouted his innocence; the other less-than-faithful follower quickly echoing him, both loudly blaming Mark (the chief perpetrator's name was Mark. Surprising really, because Marks are normally very honest people). Unfortunately for the henchmen, the tape clearly showed their enjoyment in being accessories to the crime, plus they hadn't spoken up when the Principal had extended his kind invitation for anyone to report a crime. The cops had their turn to create a dramatic production out of reading the idiots their rights, handcuffing them, and leading them away. One cop stayed behind to join the Principal on the stage for a strongly worded lecture to the students. Just the usual stuff, which would be as effective as usual, so totally not. Expecting jocks to think, let alone about something as mentally challenging as the future consequences of their actions, was asking too much. They were probably smart enough not to gouge my car again, but generalizing from that one example was an impossible mental and hormonal challenge. Despite my using its deterrence value to convince the Principal and cops to follow my plan, I had no expectation of that succeeding to any significant degree. The goals of my plan were simply to make my car safe, to permanently rid the school of three more jocks, and to hopefully get reimbursed for the cost of getting my car repaired twice [which I did; Dishonest Mark's parents not having much choice about ponying up the not inconsiderable amount of money, in a vain attempt to make their son look good in court. "Vain" because his obvious enjoyment while committing the crime was a difficult negative image to overcome]. The crime was a minor one, especially for the henchmen, but there was no possibility of the Principal letting any of them back to school, so the football team's year was off to a bad start. With the players and coach they'd lost last year, and with this year's start, they weren't going to be winning too many games. Possibly none at all, because the Principal had promised that one more "such incident" by a member of the football team would result in its being disbanded for the rest of the year. That might've been an effective threat, except that the Principal had actually said, "such incident," which was stupid of him. I'm sure whatever the jocks did in the future, it wouldn't be getting caught gouging the paint off my car. It'd be something different. The only real trouble I had with this incident was controlling Julia. When I'd shown her the video the previous evening, she'd REALLY wanted to spend most of the next day telling EVERYBODY, "It'd be 'terrible' (cough, cough) if something happened to [Dishonest] Mark's car while he's with the police. Especially now that the video cameras have been removed." I managed to convince her not to. The idiots would be punished enough and I wanted to get my repair costs reimbursed, which would probably not happen if his car was trashed. Plus I didn't want any of my friends to get in trouble and it'd also reflect badly on me. I'd prefer to stay on the moral high ground ready for the next, not-quite-such incident. The hallway jostling reduced noticeably, but I knew that wouldn't last, as Jocks have short memories. Their heads are overfilled with their egos, so there's no room left for memories or intelligence. ------- Chapter 284: Pirate Party, Motivating Soccer Players Monday, September 26 to the end of 2005 (Continued) The usual jock-related crap didn't occupy much of our time, as there were too many other fun things to do. Carol and I had both enjoyed "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" (I'm pretty sure for different reasons, although we both agreed that we liked Johnny Depp), so I booked out one of the local movie theaters on Nov 7, the day "Dead Man's Chest" came out. Me, Carol, and a hundred of our closest friends saw the movie, then got buses back to my home for a pirate-themed party. "Getting carried away" must be an infectious disease, because I seem to have caught it from Julia. It turns out that if you want to have a pirate-themed party, and you want to throw a LOT of money at it, then there's virtually no limit to how spectacular you can make it. I didn't build a replica pirate ship (although we had a couple of large models floating in the pool), or do any of the other crazy ideas that were suggested, but I did hire some local actors to be very swashbuckling waiters, hired several people from the Corvallis Folkdancers club who could do pirate-era dances and were willing to teach the party-goers the moves that night, had the catering company study the first movie to come up with some appropriate looking food (some of which you had to close your eyes to eat), had a gangplank built over the swimming pool, and had plenty of pirate props (barrels, ropes, nets, fake-cutlasses, etc.) spread around the place. The stories about my house-warming party guaranteed that every guy at school was desperately eager to be invited. Some of the more pathetic jocks - imagine that group! - even tried to wheedle invitations out of me. If I'd wanted to create a rift in the jock camp, I might've used that to my advantage, but associating with ANY jocks was beneath me, so all they got was laughed at. Plenty of girls were eager to come to the party too. Julia had not so much leaked as loudly broadcast details about what it'd be like. She didn't seem too concerned about the factual accuracy of some of her details either, especially what it was costing me, so she made it sound very impressive. Julia also informed everyone that a costume was obligatory. "I suggest you don't rely on the local costume rental store because its suitable stock is already taken, and OSU's drama class costumes are mostly gone too." ^ To my considerable surprise the Target Game was sort of still going, so the Target Girls would be coming too. I wasn't putting much effort into the Game, using the excuse that I was too busy, but the Target Girls and several self-appointed Semi-Targets were still willing to play it. The whole purpose of the Game, and why I'd invented it right at the beginning, was to humiliate the Targets, but I hadn't done that. It would've disappointed my teammates terribly to lose all the free pussy they were getting if I'd pulled the plug and publicly explained the Game, so I'd let it keep going. From time to time, usually when Carol and Julia were spending the night at Ava's, I'd let one of the Targets take me to my bed, to generously give her a chance to prove how much her sexual skills had improved. I'd let her fuck me as good as she could until she started flagging, then I'd flip her over and go to town on her ass, and in that general area. Giving these girls an inferiority complex normally wasn't possible, but I could do it to them in bed, and I rather enjoyed doing so (just in case you were in any doubt about that). It was amusing to fuck them so much that night and the next morning that they walked funny at school, that being a good reminder of their inadequacy. I'd leave them with a consoling thought, "Who'd have thought that half-your-size Julia would be so much better than you in bed. With my money I deserve the best, and there's no doubt that Julia and Ava are considerably better than you. How come you never learned how to give guys good sex in all the years you've been active?" The only real problem I had with the Target Game was in making sure the girls who were in the know kept quiet. They were eagerly anticipating the denouement, and they wanted it to happen sooner rather than later. I had the ultimate control because if they leaked the real story I could ruin their fun by denying it, but that was a negative approach to the problem. I came up with a much better idea: I told my teammates, "You have until the end of the calendar year to get as much fucking as you can, and I suggest, to also find yourselves a good girlfriend. That should be easy because more girls are giving you attention now that some A-listers are interested in you. Find yourself a good girlfriend, tell her you're giving up sex with all the other girls for her, and do so, because from January 1st on NONE of you are allowed to have sex with any of the Targets. The Semi-Targets you can if you really want to, but not the Targets. -- "You've had a huge amount of fun, but now it's time for the girls who've helped you so much to have their fun. From when school restarts in January, you and I are going to reject sex with all the Targets, and it's going to become widely known that none of us think they're worth having sex with. You don't want to cross the girls that helped you by reneging on this because they could very easily convince every girl in school that the only way you got any sex was because they tricked the Target Girls for you. They could ensure that no girl came near you for the rest of your school life, so do the decent thing by letting My Girls and the other helpers have their fun." My teammates thought this coming January was too soon, but the next one would be okay. They got a laugh out of me, but not an extension. They sorrowfully agreed with the coming January. I pointed out that I wasn't asking for their agreement, just warning them what was going to happen. I added, "After the Targets have suffered through the humiliation of all the rejections, and that's become old news, then we'll reveal the full story behind the Target Game,. The bitches will get two rounds of humiliation because the girls who have helped us have kept it up for far longer than I first told them. You guys better behave yourself from January 1st on, because it would be very easy for any of My Girls to tell stories about you which would turn you into a laughing stock if you ruin their fun. Behave yourselves and you'll be school legends." They thought the latter option sounded best. When I told The Girls In The Know what the new plan was, they VERY happily agreed with it. The school's social structure was going to have some major upheavals soon. ^ If you're going to have a costume party, take my advice and set it in an era when females wore very low cut tops (I might truly be a genius!). From my, and every other guy's perspective, the party was a great success. Thanks, in part, to Klepto Carly (or maybe that should've been "Thanks to part of Klepto Carly," although that does raise the question of whether a hole can be called a part). She'd become more trouble than she was worth recently, so I promised to release her if she did a VERY good job at the party. "A final burst of activity, and it'll all be over, Carly. If the guys I send you to tonight all tell me they had fun with you, then I'll destroy all the evidence." To my relief, the girls enjoyed the party too (other than Carly, who had a VERY hard night, several times). I don't really understand females, so I hadn't been confident they would enjoy it; except I was pretty sure Carol wouldn't (hehe). The party was two days before my birthday, but I made sure she and her friends knew it was thrown for Carol. Making her even more happy was when several of the most masculine looking actor guys and I swooped on Carol. We yelled pirate expressions while we picked her up, carried her to "the mast" (a prop mast that'd been spiked to the ground. It was only eight feet tall, but looked like the bottom of a real mast), then I roped her to it with some very thick ropes wrapped around and around her body. I 'tormented' her by pretending that I was going to sail my ship out to sea, then let my pirate crew ravish her mercilessly. My crew shouting supporting taunts. I'd been tempted to do more, for example, threaten to blindfold her and let several of my crew take turns feeling her up while they taunted her. Or perhaps to truly blindfold her and then have Julia or Ava silently do the touching with the guys standing close and just providing the taunts. But I didn't want Carol to get too sexually aroused because it'd probably embarrass her afterward. Even harder to resist was rubbing her erogenous zones with NP, as getting her off while she was roped to the mast would've been a lot of fun at the time. I just taunted her with my cutlass for a while, poking her with it through the ropes, threatening to cut all her clothes off her, and that sort of thing. I let her out after a few minutes. I noticed she and Ava almost immediately disappeared, returning half an hour later. I think the girl invitees enjoyed the theatricality of it. The waiters really got into their roles, swashing their buckles very flamboyantly, and the dancers did a very good job of entertaining everyone too. I think it succeeded with the girls because it was kind of like a large-scale game with dressed up dolls. One idea I'd had that tempted me, but I couldn't work out a way to do it safely, was to blindfold Carol and get her to walk the plank. Once she got to its end, I'd use NP to keep her walking forward on air. After a few feet I'd get her to stop and I'd use a little NP to push her blindfold off, getting her to look down. Obviously I'd wait until everyone went home, but even then I was too scared to do it. The pool area was too exposed. Even with all the lights off, I couldn't risk someone seeing her. Plus it wasn't physically safe either. I had about 150 pounds of NP force in November (I'd measured my force accurately by now, confirming my informal measurements). 150 pounds wasn't enough to guarantee that Carol could walk securely; I might make her fall and hit her head on the plank. I did have the idea of hiring a boat for real, sailing or motoring out into the ocean where no one could see us, then getting Carol to walk the plank, but that wouldn't have been nearly as good as doing it on this pirate-themed night. Six months had gone past since my last merge, and I still hadn't revealed how much stronger my NP was now. My initial reluctance had been because I was grieving over how I'd got to be so much stronger, but that had lost most of its pain now. Being able to make Julia or Carol fly was so spectacular that I was waiting for an equally spectacular way of revealing it to them. It had to be a secure situation as well, but no spectacular AND secure occasion came up. I would've long since told them if their knowing mattered, but it was such an impractical ability that it was unusable, so they weren't really missing out by not knowing. The only benefit from my being able to fly them, was the thrill of demonstrating it, so I kept waiting for that spectacular and secure opportunity to arise. If it took much longer, I'd be able to do it by showing them I had a way of getting myself into and out of bed that didn't require clambering over them. After the big pirate party, I wasn't interested in having a big party for my birthday. A small celebration was much better, although the girls didn't have anything to wear and had to make a special shopping trip to Salem for a day. ------- Aikido was going great. I was enjoying it, learning heaps of new techniques and how to do the existing ones even better, and was increasingly often training with the advanced class. There were some negative aspects though. First, it seemed very likely that I'd never find anyone like me through Aikido. When I'd started it, I'd hoped that the similarity of movement that Donna had spotted might lead me to other merged people. That hope had been encouraged when I learned their movement was because their art was ki-based, the same as I'd quickly learned my special abilities were. But I'd become pretty sure there weren't multi-minded people involved in Aikido because there wasn't enough understanding filtering down. Sensei knew almost nothing about what I called Proximity, for example. What top-level aikidoka had achieved with only one mind was impressive, but it was still extremely limited. Another related negative aspect was that I didn't expect to learn much more about ki from Aikido. Maybe I might come across little things (like EKP), but nothing as profound as proximity, NP and blobs (which I didn't learn through Aikido, but are examples of "profound"). I was sure my ki abilities were already well beyond any other aikidoka's, even the top masters. If I learned any more such abilities, it'd likely be because I discovered them myself, rather than a sensei teaching them to me. Having said that, if I was going to discover a new ki ability, it might be through Aikido, just because it dealt with ki so often. The last negative aspect was a small nuisance I'd created for myself. Sensei began openly teaching EKP and its effects on techniques to his advanced students, including me. More than anything else we'd done together, my EKP showed him how incredibly strong my ki was. He'd been using EKP to measure the ki strength of his other students, most of them having ki strength that ranged from 1.3 to 1.8 times the single-minded, untrained, human norm (my terminology, not his). He was used to students deflecting his slowly reaching hand fractions of an inch, but I could deflect it several inches. I did reduce the extent of my EKP success during those deliberate tests, but we did so much training together that he still learned how powerful my ki was. Before my third merge I'd had 16 times more ki than most people, not that I'd known the exact value at the time. Each merge increased my ki by a factor of four, so I now had 64 times as much as a normal human, plus 30% or so from my training, so now more than 80 times as much as a normal person. Sensei had roughly 3 times as much, so my EKP obliterated his. The discovery of EKP had raised interest in ki throughout the Aikido world, including in Sensei's advanced class. They were doing much more ki work than before, were more interested in it, conscious of it, etc., and Sensei would've loved to have me demonstrate the strength of my ki to that class. I declined. I even told him that when I used EKP techniques in that class, I'd throttle back so I wouldn't stand out too much. My secretiveness considerably disappointed him, especially because he couldn't see any reason for it. In Aikido, everyone helps each other ALL the time. Your partner(s) and you are constantly trying to improve each other's techniques. Plus Sensei himself is teaching, which is a giving process. My refusal to help Sensei teach ki was a GLARING breach of Aikido etiquette. The best I could do was to say, "I told you right at the beginning that I want to keep my advanced abilities very low key. I have my reasons for wanting that, and they're good ones, but they're not ones that I can explain." It caused a bit of a strain on our relationship, but Sensei had to accept that it was my decision. ------- When the soccer games restarted, I wanted my team to play properly rather than rely on me, so I sat out the first half, letting our reserve play in my stead. That way both teams would have a normal game for at least that long. If we were ahead at the end of the first half, I'd keep sitting out, not going on unless we got behind, and then I'd only play until we were tied again. My being prepared to let my team tie pressured them to perform. If we were behind at the end of the first half, I'd go on and play until we were ahead by the same amount we'd been behind at the half, plus one. My assumption being that if our opponents had taken the first half to get two goals up on us (for example), then after I'd taken however long it'd taken to get us three goals up, my team should reasonably be able to finish the game one or two up. If they didn't, it was their own fault. I also warned my team not to deliberately lose the first half by a big margin, so I'd give them big margin + 1. "If I think you're slacking off, then I'll slack off too. I might decide to sit out the whole game." My team liked playing, so they did their best. That wasn't all that good without me playing (they'd probably have finished the year about three-quarters of the way down the league), but my help gave them a good chance of never losing a game. They lived in fear of ties, because they trigger a penalty shoot-off to decide the winner, which was a 50/50 proposition. My team didn't like those odds at all, as they wanted to win the league this year. So much for my thinking they played non-competitively! Knowing they could win changed their attitude, but I made them work for it. News of my soccer ability must have gotten around, because one of my games was watched by a scout and a coach for the OSU Beavers Soccer team. They were more than a little confused by my sitting out all but a few minutes of the game, but they liked what little they saw. When they approached me after the game, my answers confused them even more. I listened to them, and even got them to visit us at home one evening to make their pitch to me in front of my parents, because it was faintly possible that we might have been able to work out a win-win deal. But it turned out not to be possible. I would have enjoyed playing some games with their team, but all the stuff that had to come with it was too much of a disincentive. Getting a soccer scholarship certainly wasn't an inducement. They wouldn't let me play for fun without the hassle and inconvenience, so I declined their offer. Even Dad knew it wasn't really for me. A few games into the year, I decided to have a bit of fun with my team before an opportune home game. I was standing outside our changing room when my team started arriving. I wouldn't let them in, saying, "There are some girls in there. They'll be out soon." When everyone was here (including our coach, but he was okay), I called out to the girls, "We have to come in soon, girls." Carol called back, "Hang on!" A minute later, Carol and Ava walked out, hair disheveled, faces wet, and still putting their clothes back on (so giving my team too-short flashes of interesting skin). My team expressed some curiosity about what activity Carol and Ava had been up to. I satisfied my team's curiosity by telling them, "They were having sex. That's why I was guarding the door. You might've heard something around school about Carol's being a lesbian. We got here early and the girls got horny, so they went inside and I guarded the entrance so you wouldn't go in and embarrass yourselves." Embarrassing themselves was the LEAST of their concerns, so "least" it hadn't occurred to any of them. Being blocked from getting into their changing rooms was a TERRIBLE thing! Four of them had seen a lot of sex on the Target Game dates, and the rest of them had done very well when that game had opened up, but: a) No schoolboy ever thinks he's seen enough sex, and b) There hadn't been much full-on girl-on-girl sex; which is the BEST sex for guys to watch, and c) The guys had a thing for Carol, as she was voluptuous, unattainable and a lesbian. So the very experienced four teammates would've LOVED to have seen Carol and Ava going at it hot and heavy. You can probably work out for yourselves what the rest of the team thought. Carol started her portion of the script, "Ava, I think Mark's team is disappointed they didn't see us 69'ing each other. I know Mark enjoys playing with his team, so maybe we should thank them by letting them watch us next time?" There were several masculine expressions of agreement with that idea. Ava answered, "I don't know. I think Mark carries this team. It wouldn't be fair to reward them when they let Mark do all the work." Carol's script had an answer to that. She had to wait until my team finished dismissing my contribution, then she said, "How about Mark sits out all of this game so we can see how good the rest of the team plays? If they win we could put on a show for them." "Good idea," agreed Ava and several other people. "Even better, for every goal they win by, we'll take off one more piece of clothing each, so four goals would have us naked?" "That's a good idea too," agreed Carol, in the presence of several highly motivated soccer players. "And our sex show will last for one minute per goal they win by." "Sounds like fun," opined Ava. No one disagreed with her, so she must've been right. I said, "No cheating, guys. If I see you trying to talk the opposition into throwing the game, I'll tell the girls to call it off. Good luck on the field." They didn't need luck; they had buckets of wildly excited testosterone. I did see one of my teammates talk with one of the opposition early in the game. My teammate was heading for the goal, getting ready to shoot, with the opposition's goalie coming out to stop him. My teammate screamed, "GET OUT OF THE WAY!" gesticulating wildly. The vehemence of the scream surprised the goalie so much that my teammate got a chance for a clear shot, scoring from it. He turned back to the goalie, "Thanks. You've got no idea how important our winning this game is." It didn't take long for the goalie to learn how important it was, he only had to look at my team. They played like they were possessed (that'd be the testosterone again). I have NEVER seen them so motivated! It was very impressive, and quite amusing. Our opposition wasn't very good - I would've postponed the girls' game otherwise as the girls wanted to do their show - and my team were playing better and harder than they'd ever played before. The opposition soon became horribly intimidated by the fierceness of my normally nice, noncompetitive, friendly teammates, allowing the perverts to win 6-0. A victory they celebrated wildly, while also lamenting that it hadn't been by a larger margin. The opposition limped off the field, thanking God they'd survived the ordeal. My team came rushing over to surround the three of us. I inquired casually, "Are you guys free to come to my place at lunchtime tomorrow? You bring the pizza, I'll arrange the pussy." Poor Coach forced himself to decline, everyone else accepting with wild enthusiasm. I reminded them, "Don't forget the pizza. That's important." The next day, we laid a blanket on the grass near the pool, put a mattress on top of it, then I lined up all the guys on the tiles by the pool and told them, "You're not allowed on the grass. You can walk back and forth on the tiles to get the views you want, but if you walk onto the grass, Julia and I will throw the cover over the girls." (We had a large sheet ready.) -- "I also INSIST that you don't jack yourselves off. SERIOUSLY guys, it's bad enough that my sister is involved in this without my seeing any of you jacking off at the sight of her. I have to look at you to make sure you're behaving, and I do NOT want to look at any of you doing that. Cocks stay in pants, and hands stay out of pants, or I'll throw the sheet over the girls." The guys were facing the Main House, so I added, "Vanessa is at home. I want to spare that nice, old lady from accidentally looking out the window and seeing a dozen naked guys jacking off. She's too nice and old to have to suffer a shock like that." The guys agreed, because guys will agree to anything to see two hot girls making out. Julia and I raised the sheet to let Carol and Ava remove their Australian bikinis, worn to tease the guys in advance. Ava positioned herself on the bottom, Carol on top, because Carol had heard somewhere that guys like looking at breasts, and she thought they might like seeing hers dangle down. Ava asked, "Can we get warmed up before you drop the sheet please, Mark?" "Sure." So the team had to listen to a few minutes of sex noises. I hope it tortured them. The bastards deserved it because none of them had thought to bring pizza. Fortunately I had the number of our favorite pizza delivery place memorized. When the girls announced they were ready, Julia and I dropped the sheet, and the guys dropped their jaws - Carol and Ava weren't fooling around; they were naked, in a 69, and going for it (each other's it). They were actually being more modest than might seem the case. They were about twelve feet away from the guys, so could only be seen from the side. Their tits and Carol's ass could be clearly seen, but that was about all (their knees could be seen too, as well as their shoulders, feet, etc., but NO ONE was looking at those). Their mouths were preserving each other's modesty, which has got to be the most misleading euphemism anywhere in my biography. Ava's raised legs hid her pussy from side-on views; Carol's legs hiding hers too. When the guys moved sideways to try to get a better view, they had to go so far sideways that they couldn't see much. They should've brought binoculars and pizza. Even without actually seeing anything, the guys had a great time. Carol and Ava were having sex right in front of them, and it was highly arousing. Sometimes I had to yell, "HANDS OFF COCKS, or the sheet comes up!" Or sometimes, "GET BACK ON THE TILES!" I counted down the time remaining, "Five minutes to go." "Four minutes." "Three minutes." Etc. Which let the girls pace themselves. Carol and Ava got louder and louder as they got more and more aroused, and as the time got shorter and shorter. All too soon, I was saying, "thirty seconds, fifteen seconds, ten seconds, five." Carol and Ava were panting and groaning loudly, clearly on the point of orgasm, when Julia and I threw the sheet over them. The guys' groans being particularly heartfelt after Carol and Ava yelled their orgasms from under the sheet. (That'd been Julia's idea. Have I mentioned that Julia knows about psychological torture?) The orgasms were real, as the girls had loved the exhibitionism of it [they thanked me very energetically later that evening]. One of my loyal teammates sarcastically commented, "Thanks a LOT! Couldn't you have waited another few seconds." I answered, "First, you should've scored seven goals yesterday. Second, you expect charity from me when NONE of you brought pizza! And most important, none of you brought PIZZA! Into the pool. Go on, jump in, you know the deal." After the show was over, they had to jump into the pool to cool off and so the girls could retire without getting hassled. I growled at them some more, and eventually the more sensible of them (i.e., the slightly less sex-addled of them) started pushing the others into the pool. The girls wrapped themselves in the sheet and went to get dressed. By the time Carol and Ava returned fully dressed, the guys had mostly cooled off. Being guys, they still tried to chat-up the girls though, which quickly got laughed down, Carol telling them, "I'm a lesbian, dummy," and Ava saying, "Don't make me laugh, there's NO WAY you can compete with Mark." Once their foolish hopes were eliminated, they started behaving semi-sensibly. The experience they'd gained over summer helped a great deal with that. They thanked and complimented the girls. I suggested that the best way of their showing appreciation to the girls was to order them some pizza, but I got laughed down. I ended up having to order it myself. I made them pay though, out of principle because I'm a very principled guy. ------- December 5 was Ava's eighteenth birthday. It truly did represent when she became an adult, as it was looking far too likely to be the last birthday she'd have parents for. There'd been little in the way of good news for Katie or Carson during their illnesses. They and their doctors had fought back, and had won more breathing space than they'd initially expected, but it was temporary. The amount of treatment required to kill their cancers off entirely would be fatal, so all the doctors could do was slow them down. The doctors didn't hold out any real hope. They said, "We'll try, and maybe a new drug will come along that makes all the difference," but that just meant that none of the existing treatments were expected to succeed. The cancers they had were too rarely recovered from. Ava's eighteenth birthday gave us (my two families) a chance to show our commitment to Ava, for Ava's and her parents' benefits. Especially her parents, because they had to be worrying about Ava's future a great deal. It wasn't a happy birthday party, not in the haha-fun sense, but it was the sort of birthday party we were all happy that we'd had. We'd each given speeches reconfirming our commitment to Ava, and we'd all cried (Prof, Dad and I had come fully prepared, pockets bulging with hankies). Katie and Carson were very appreciative. It'd taken them some time to get used to the strange situation their daughter had gotten herself into, but they were slowly relaxing about it, and even starting to believe that it might be the best thing for Ava. Our tearful efforts on Ava's birthday helped with that a great deal. They'd visited our new home several times and were very impressed by everything, with the possible exception of my bed. Most of all they were impressed by how well we got along together. Ava was truly gaining two whole families' worth of close support; the words and tears on her birthday proved that. Times like this, which fortunately weren't frequent, were particularly hard on the 3B half of me, because they couldn't help thinking about what was happening back in 3B-land. We liked to think that the two families would still be supporting Ava, but God knows what affect my and Prof's demises had had on our families, even on whether they were still friends, let alone able to support Ava. Thinking those thoughts was unavoidable, but pointless, as we were totally cut off from 3B-land now and would never know anything about them. ------- By the end of the 2005, my life was ticking along nicely. I'd done most of the third year's Math courses. They were noticeably harder, but one of the OBVIOUS consequences of that was that the lecturers went slower and more carefully (d'oh!). I felt stupid, because I'd needlessly feared being stupid. Silly me! Third year courses still took the usual two weeks to read through. I hadn't tackled any fourth year courses yet, but I was starting to believe they might not be a problem. I'd completed, including taking the exams, about 70% of the courses in my BS in Math, about 50% of the BS in Physics' courses, and about 20% of the BBA's courses. The last could have been 40%, but half of the courses had their exams held up awaiting my completion of their group projects. I'd also completed a third of the miscellaneous BCC Core Courses. I'd gotten almost perfect results in Math and Physics exams, and merely very good ones in Business as that required lots of writing and was more subjective; correct business decisions often being a judgment call. Other than having eight minds to suggest exam answers, the major advantage I had in the Business exams was that by the time I'd taken the first year's exams I'd read well into the second year's courses, so I knew more business theory than most of the other students. ------- Chapter 285: The Department of Horribly Suspicious People Strikes Again Sunday, January 1 to Monday, January 23, 2006 OSU had been shut down for a month over Christmas, and when it restarted on January 9, I was ready to take the exams for another dozen courses. After completing one of those exams, I turned my phone back on and received a message to call Prof immediately. He told me, "The Department of Homeland Security asked for your transcript at the office this morning. Come to my office and we'll talk about it." In his office, Prof told me that the secretary that took their request passed it on to Maureen, who called Prof to ask what to do. OSU policy is that transcripts aren't given out willy-nilly, so their request had been refused (in my opinion you couldn't get much more willy, let alone nilly, than the DHS). There was certainly no good reason for Prof to cooperate with them, not after the last fiasco. Prof called the Physics and Business offices to warn them. Physics had already been approached and had refused; Business soon called back to say they'd just been asked and had refused. Prof had also called the school, to find out if anyone had been asking about me, Julia or Carol there, but no one had. Mom, Dad and Vanessa hadn't had anything happen either; the DHS hadn't crossed their minds for weeks. Prof and I spent some time trying to work out what was going on, and what to do about it. It wasn't as if we intended for my transcript to be secret, as copies of it would be sent to every university that I might want to go to after graduation. But it was worrying that the DHS was still sniffing around, and that they might be sniffing after me only, although there might be other 'sniffing' going on that we knew nothing about. The one new incident wasn't enough to extrapolate from. We couldn't think of anything significant to do, just a bunch of small ideas: "Be careful, Mark," instructed Prof. So if an ideal opportunity finally appeared to show my girls that they could fly, I'd let it go past. Watching what we said would be a good idea too. Prof made sure I had his lawyer's phone number in my phone and memorized. I'd start keeping my wallet well stocked with cash, "Just in case." I'd take a couple of thousand out of what I had in the safe. I had another exam to get to, and we couldn't think of any reason why not, so that's what I did, looking over my shoulder the whole way. I didn't see anything worrying. We discussed it over dinner at home. Nothing else had happened, and no one had anything more useful than "Let's all be careful." Prof had already called his lawyer and asked him if he could find out anything. He said he'd get people onto it. He was a local Corvallis lawyer, so personally useless against the DHS, but he had lawyer contacts that had dealt with the DHS before. They'd almost certainly fail, but at least their asking around might put the DHS on notice not to do anything stupid - we weren't exactly filled with confidence about that possibility. ^ Nothing happened for a week, then on Thursday January 19, the DHS swooped. They arrived at each of the three departmental offices armed with search warrants, and commenced extracting my transcripts and everything else each department had on me, which was a substantial amount, as there'd been a great deal of internal emailing about me. I was on the phone discussing this with Prof when we all got a text message informing us that our home was being broken into (we'd set up our very expensive security system to notify our phones). Prof suggested I find somewhere to lose myself for an hour or so, while he checked out what was happening. I found out later that he called the cops to report his house was being broken into. The security company should've sent someone to investigate too. He had quick calls with Vanessa and Mom (Dad being hard to reach on the factory floor), and they agreed that Prof and one of The Boys should go home to check out what was happening. Andrew was available, so he and Prof headed off to check. I'd had the idea of driving to about a mile from home then using a sight blob sent up to three hundred feet or so to check what could be seen of the activity at home. Unfortunately it was raining, so that idea was useless. I wasn't sure whether I should go to my car, which was very distinctive so easy to spot, or stay away from it, in which case how would I move quickly if I needed to. I also didn't want to turn my cellphone off to avoid being triangulated, because I wanted to be able to receive calls. Hiding among a large crowd was probably best, so I went to a building in OSU which had several exits, put myself in a central location, pretended to have my head down in a book while I used a sight blob to check out the entrances for any potential trouble coming my way. On the way home, Prof got a call from our security company to inform him that our home was being searched by a large group of DHS agents exercising a warrant. Prof called his lawyer, who said he'd come to our home. Prof and Andrew arrived home shortly after that, and got imperiously ordered to stay out of the way. The lawyer arrived and inspected the warrant. It was to search and seize anything that might be used in, or contain evidence of, terrorism or terrorism financing related activities. There were no arrest warrants. The DHS was just still fishing for information. The search took a fair while, during which our panic calmed down but our anger rose: Early on we got a call from school saying they'd been visited too, for all their records on me, Julia, Carol and Donna. It was good to know that the DHS was serious about the threat to national security that 13- and 14-year old girls represented. They took every computer system out of our home. Not just the computers, but the entire SYSTEMS! All of my 30" screens went (I'd upgraded to the VERY first 30" screens that were available. They were only a few days old). They took everyone else's screens (my hand-me-down 24s), all our printers, Vanessa's scanner, the keyboards, mice, the internet box-things and even the mousepads! Why the fuck take the screens, except to be deliberate assholes? They found my safe and demanded the combination. The lawyer said we had to provide it, so Prof called me for it. Goodbye to eight grand for God knows how long. It also contained Ava's nude photos and her letter (they took those too, because they were so obviously subversive). There was nothing else in the safe. They easily found Prof's safe (he had one bolted to the floor in his bedroom closet, same as he'd had at his previous home). It contained his gun (legal), and my fake ID (not so legal). Prof looked very guilty when he confessed that to us later, but our lawyer downplayed it to a surprising degree, saying, "Unless a false ID is used in the commission of a crime, fraud for example, then it's usually not prosecuted. It's in his real name, just with his birthdate changed, so it's even less serious." They trashed the place: drawers emptied, beds stripped, book cases pulled from the walls, etc. It wasn't expensive damage; 'only' about a thousand dollars worth, but they'd made a god-awful mess. They'd taken Vanessa's digital camera, but The Boys went home to get theirs to document the damage before we started tidying up. Tidying up took a LONG time. There was nothing else we could do. Vanessa tried to find out when we'd get our computers back, or just the screens, but the few people she managed to get connected to refused to say anything about anything. Apparently they didn't care that we had to make a decision whether to spend something like $40,000 to replace everything. Our lawyer said, "If you don't get it back within a couple of weeks, then it'll probably take several months or years. We could petition the court, but that would take months and cost as much as the items, which would probably be destructively searched before being returned." So we decided to wait for a couple of weeks to see what happened. When he heard about it, the Dean was great. He was appalled that our openly sending our own money to Europe and my having a diving vacation in a Thai resort had resulted in so much abuse. He replaced Prof's, Vanessa's and my home computer systems. We downgraded my setup considerably, not telling him about my confiscated laptop or that my desktop computer had had eight 30" screens. My new system was a single computer running two 24" screens. That slowed my studying down dramatically, but I wasn't doing ANYTHING impressive until this crap was over with. The Dean also tried to use his political connections to find out what was happening. He was a very big wig in Corvallis (OSU is hugely important to the town), but he was a very small wig when compared to the DHS, and he got nowhere. We were hugely inconvenienced and annoyed, but not really worried. Sooner or later the Department of Half-witted Simpletons would decide we had absolutely no connection to terrorism. None of us could possibly be linked to that. The only subverting of the American way of life I'd done was in importing a large number of Australian bikinis, which didn't exactly put me in the same camp as the Muslim fundamentalists. I've never understood why those fundamentalists insist their nation's females wear chador instead of Australian bikinis. Religious people are crazy. When I'm Emperor of the World, the wearing of Australian bikinis - in any one of the seven real colors - will be strongly encouraged (for suitably shaped girls, obviously). The only real questions were how long it'd take the Half-wits to give up, and what sort of trouble the fake ID would cause us. Our lawyer's opinion of the latter was, "Not much." We talked and behaved as if every room in our home was bugged, which it easily could've been. So I forgot I had NP and blobs; Carol slept in "Carol's Bedroom", often with Julia or Ava to keep her company; I ordered my body to sleep for six hours per night then woke to walk to my study to do normal studying (OSU wouldn't notice my dramatic slowdown for a week or two but then I'd have to tell them). There were no more games with Diana and Claire Norris, or fun of almost every other kind. It was a huge pain in the ass. ^ On the following Monday, January 23, I parked in the OSU parking lot I use, got out, and had only walked a few step when I was suddenly surrounded by DHS agents. After identifying themselves, they told me they wanted to ask me some questions, handcuffed me, put me into an SUV that drove up, and off we went. I had a goon on either side of me, and I was handcuffed, but that was the extent of their security. They hadn't removed my cellphone from my belt, so I used NP to speed-dial Prof's number - he'd seemed to be the best choice as he was the closest thing we had to a leader with this DHS mess. I used a forearm to cover my phone so no one could see that it was making a call, bowing my head and closing my eyes to allow me to create a sight blob to watch my phone's screen so I'd know when Prof answered. When that happened, I looked up and asked out loud, "Where is the DHS taking me now?" I didn't get an answer, so I added, "Rather than handcuffing me every few weeks, why doesn't the DHS ask questions civilly? We've got nothing to hide." I was thinking about what to say next, when all the agents gave a little twitch. One of the guys next to me reached down, pulled my arms away, grabbed my phone off my belt, and disconnected the call. He gave me a dirty look, then passed my phone to the front passenger. #6: #2: #3: #2: #8: #6: #3: #6: #2: #3: #7: #6: #2: We moaned to ourselves until, #2: #3: "Where are we going?" "Sit still and shut up." #3: #2: Several times during the trip north I sent a sight blob to check all the cars around us, to see if anyone else in my families was being similarly asked to help the DHS with their inquiries, but I never saw anyone I knew. I was surprised we didn't stop in Salem, that being the state capital. We drove all the way north to Portland. #6: #7: [#7 should've taken the bet as #6's description was very wrong, although I did have to provide my own transportation home: a sled.] We drove into a built up commercial area of Portland, then turned into an underground garage for a high-rise building that had no signs on it that I could see. They had to pause at the garage's entrance to swipe a card to be let in, so I did a very quick sight blob check of all four sides of the building, seeing no signs. I saw the main pedestrian entrance, so I sent the sight blob into it, where I spotted a sign above a security desk saying "Department of Homeland Security." I knew that was a lie, because this was the Department of Harebrained Screwups. I was taken into an elevator and up to an interview room on the fifth floor, patted down, had my pockets emptied, watch taken, and was parked on a chair still with my handcuffs on, watched over by a silent goon - he looked like a goon, walked like a goon, talked like a goon (i.e., didn't), so "Goon" he was. That suited me. I bowed my head, shut my eyes, and used a sight blob to check out the area. It was about 10am, and the place looked just like an ordinary business office; not that I've been in many, but I've seen them on TV. There were several other spartan interview rooms in the center of the floor, all of which were empty. Otherwise there was an open-plan area where people worked in cubicles, and a series of offices around the outside of the floor. I quickly checked on all the floors above and below mine that I could reach, sight blobs losing range quickly when going through thick concrete floors/ceilings [[I assumed]], seeing very much the same layouts, although only some of the floors had interview rooms. I didn't see anyone else from my families. I returned the sight blob to my level and started snooping, reading people's computer screens and whatever papers they had open, trying to find anything about what was happening to me. Unsuccessfully, but I did get dozens of snapshots of the sorts of things that DHS office workers work on. It was scarily impressive, until I wondered what crap my file contained, probably 'impressive' stuff like, "Suspected of terrorist training for underwater demolitions attacks." I was still snooping when I heard my room's door open, so I canceled the blob and looked up to see a new guy walking in. He wasn't wearing a cheap jacket or a shoulder holster, just a shirt and tie, so he was presumably a boss type. Hopefully he had brain cells in the plural. Another interrogation began. It was quickly apparent that whoever the boss was, he had considerably more than two brain cells. The last time I'd been interrogated, the interrogator had treated it as dull routine. He'd even given the impression of not really listening to my answers. But this guy was alert and thinking. Ordinary that would've pleased me, because it should've meant he'd be smart enough to realize how stupid the "Mark Anderson is a Terrorist" theory was. Unfortunately that's not how this interrogation unfolded. Boss (for the lack of a better name; "Asshole" being insufficiently distinctive) was VERY interested in me. The last interrogation had been about what I'd done, but this was about me. For example, he spent fifteen minutes asking me why I was studying Physics. "Because I like it" was apparently an inadequate answer. "Who asked you to take it?" [The previous interview had asked this question dozens of times. This time there were a couple of repetitions early on and then it was never asked again.] "No one. I chose it because I like it." "Why do you like it?" "I don't know; I just do. Why does anyone like anything?" "What aspects of it appeal to you?" That sort of question isn't easy to answer. Even if Prof had asked me, I would've had to stop to think before speaking. Add a layer of justified paranoia on top of that, and it definitely required thought. Part of the true answer was that I thought it might help me use my abilities better, but obviously that couldn't be said. "That's hard to put into words. I guess I like understanding how the Universe works, its natural laws, and things like that. Probably what drives anyone who likes science, I guess." "So you disagree with the religious approach?" "Approach to what?" "Understanding the Universe." "I've not noticed that religious people pursue understanding of the universe. They're interested in people, rather than external science." "There are religious scientists." "I'm sure there are. Just as there are non-religious scientists." "Physicists and Christians have different explanations for the formation of the Earth." #4: "Yes they do." "Which explanation do you think is correct?" "The scientific explanation seems more logical to me." "Someone as smart as you must think Christians are stupid for believing the biblical explanation." "Why must I?" "Don't you?" "I don't think it's as simple as that. I wasn't around to observe the formation of the Earth, so I have to take the scientific explanation on faith. Christians take their explanation on faith too. They seem happy with their choice; I'm happy with my choice." "What if your choices came into conflict, as happens with the Intelligent Design debate?" "Then I'd probably react the same way I do about the Intelligent Design debate, and largely ignore it." "Why do you ignore it?" "Because it's unimportant to me. I'm only a 16-year old kid; I don't care whether kids are taught Intelligent Design alongside Evolution or not." "You don't care that Christians are trying to gain control of the school curriculum?" "I'm not aware that they're trying to control the entire curriculum; merely one small aspect of it in one subject." "But if they're wrong, they shouldn't be allowed to control any of the curriculum." "That's not for me to decide, which is why I ignore the issue." "Wouldn't you get angry if 25% of everything you had to study was religious theory?" "Personally, I'd probably choose to study something else if that was the case." "You'd let hundreds of thousands of kids waste their time studying religious trash. You come across as a very selfish boy." "If hundreds of thousands of kids were wasting their time studying religious trash - or any scientific trash, or literary trash, or any other trash - I wouldn't be in a position to change that. I thought selfishness was when someone takes more than their fair share. I cannot see that in the situation you presented, that I'm taking anything, let alone more than my fair share." "Would you describe yourself as tolerant of religious viewpoints?" "That would depend on what you're viewing. Things don't become automatically exempt from disagreement just because they're religious." "Such as?" "As I understand it, the Aztecs used to raid their neighbors, take prisoners, and then cut their hearts out of their living bodies during religious ceremonies. I'm not tolerant to the religious belief that human sacrifice is acceptable. But I am tolerant of the religious belief that people shouldn't steal. Like I said, it all depends on what you're viewing." That's probably enough quoting to give you the flavor of the interrogation/debate. It took us fifteen more minutes of circling before he moved off the issue of why I was studying Physics. Then he started on what I hoped to learn from Physics (what use it was, what I wanted to use it for, what effect it'd have on my life, etc.) Then he asked why I was studying Business, a topic we spent another half an hour on. Then he asked me why I was studying Math, fortunately only spending fifteen minutes in total on that. Then I had to explain why I was doing Physics, Math and Business, rather than some other combination of subjects. By the time we'd finished why I'd chosen the degrees I had, it was well-established that this was going to be a VERY slow interrogation, and one which seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with my presumably suspected links to terrorists. The first interrogation had repeatedly asked me who my controller was, contact was, and other obvious paranoid fantasies, but this guy seemed to be shaping up to be the most thorough Careers Guidance Counselor I'd ever heard of. I guess that if I kept studying Physics and Math, and specialized in the right directions over the next twenty years, then I might gain some knowledge about how to build an atomic bomb, so there was some faint terrorism threat to my educational choices. But I was surprised by the degree of disconnection from terrorism of his next line of questioning: "How many girlfriends do you have?" "WHAT! How on Earth does securing our homeland depend in any way on how many girlfriends I've got?" "Answer the question." "It's absurd and nothing to do with your business." "My business is whatever I want my business to be. You're in my custody, and you'll stay in it until you've answered all my questions. How many girlfriends do you have?" #4: #6: "I thought your job is uncovering terrorists and keeping America safe, but if it helps, I've got one main girlfriend." "Who?" "Julia Williams." "What about Ava West?" "What about her?" "Don't get smart. You know what I mean." "My previous answer stands." "What previous answer?" "I've got one main girlfriend, which is Julia Williams." "What about Ava West?" "She's not really a girlfriend, which I thought my saying I had one main girlfriend implied pretty obviously." "Do you have sex with her?" "Keeping America safe from terrorists depends on whether I have sex with Ava?" "Your EVER getting out of here depends on your answering my questions. Do you have sex with Ava West?" "This is ABSURD! It's lunchtime, I'm hungry, and I'm sick of your stupidly invasive questions. I'm a 16-year old kid for Christ's sake. I've got NOTHING to do with terrorists or terrorism, and I'm not meant to have sex for another two years." Boss stood up, and while walking toward the door, said to Goon, "Put him in a cell until tomorrow. Wait until I send help." #1: #All: I called after him, "Okay. If it's so important to you, yes, Ava and I sometimes have sex." Boss kept walking. "Wait! I answered your question already." By which time he was out of the room, shutting the door behind him. A few seconds later, two more of the guys who'd fetched me from OSU entered the room. Two of them took my arms, and they escorted me into an elevator. We went down. We exited into an elevator lobby with two doors off it: straight ahead and on the left wall. We turned left. Because one of the goons had been leading me and had obscured my view, I didn't realize that the door had a security keypad until it was being used. Next time I'll have a sight blob ready to watch what the access code is. I did see the last two digits and that the goon using it had swiped his badge through it. Through that door took us into a corridor that only went about ten feet before another strong door blocked the way. One of the agents pressed a button beside the door then looked up at the camera above the door. A buzzer sounded and we pushed through the door into the next room. There was a guy sitting at a desk on the right side of an otherwise empty, small room. There were three solid metal doors close together off the left wall, and three more off the wall straight ahead of us, the right wall being blank, and the wall we'd entered from only having the door we'd just used. "Number one," the guard said. I was marched to the first door on the left, one of my escorts putting his hand on the handle. There was an audible from the door. I looked around quickly to see the prison guard withdrawing his finger from a row of five buttons mounted on his desk. Why five wasn't obvious to me, as there appeared to be six cells, plus the seventh door we'd come in. The cell door was opened, my handcuffs were removed and I was pushed in, the door closing behind me with a loud click. The 'room' was barely that. The most bizarre feature was its height: the same as the top of the door. I walk though doorways never worrying about hitting my head, but being in a room that height made me want to shrink down to avoid hitting my head. The room was about eight feet deep by five feet wide and empty except for a bedpan on the floor at the far end, a roll of toilet paper beside it, and a wooden bed on the floor. Literally a "wooden bed on the floor"; it looked like a wooden door lying on the floor. No mattress, sheets or blanket. The ONLY things in the room were the bedpan, toilet paper, the wooden plank, and me. There was a lightbulb recessed into the ceiling behind a thick sheet of unbreakable looking glass. The door had a peephole at eye level and a slot at ankle level, presumably to deliver food. I hope I'd made it in time for lunchtime, because I was hungry. I took stock. I had all my clothes on. It being winter that meant quite a lot of clothing, so I was comfortable temperature-wise. I was wearing the comfortable boots I'd gotten from Lily so no laces, but I still had my belt. (Movies of guys in jail always seem to make a big deal about laces and belts, so they were almost the first thing I thought of). My pockets were empty. A sight blob saw that all the other cells were identical and empty, except the last cell going clockwise, which wasn't a cell at all. It had the same type of door, but inside was a toilet, sink and very small kitchen. Hardly sanitary to have a toilet in the same small room as a kitchen, but there it was. Clearly the Department of Half-baked Shitheads saved money by making low rooms, putting toilets with kitchens, and employing assholes. Given that these guys all had their heads up their asses, it didn't really matter that their toilet was in the kitchen, except that my food would probably come from there. Soon would be good. The guard's desk had a screen that showed the other side of the door in, with a button under it, presumably to open that door. The video stayed constantly on the access door, rather than cycling through any of the cells. The five buttons for the cells were mounted on the other side of his desk. He was sitting in his chair, feet up, reading a detective book. Which meant he wasn't making my lunch, damn it! There was also a phone on his desk, with lots of extra buttons, presumably for outside lines, extensions or whatever. It looked complicated but I doubted I'd be using it. There were no security cameras around, the nearest being on the other side of the door in. The desk had three drawers in it, which I checked out. I had to make the sight blob small, and to have it radiate some yellow light when it was inside a drawer, but only a little. The biggest drawer had several detective books in it. The middle one had piles of paper, the top piece was a memo about the Staff Christmas Party (the assholes should be out catching terrorists!). The top drawer had a set of seven keys (there were keyholes on the outside of all the doors, but not on the insides), packs of cigarettes, matches, a dirty ashtray, and some snack food. No cellphone though. The guard didn't have one on him either, but I'd keep my eyes open (so to speak) for one. I didn't have any immediately plans to text anyone, but I might want to soon. Never mind, there'd be plenty of cellphones upstairs. Obviously I was going to be here for a while, presuming the boss asshole had been telling the truth about letting me cool my heels until tomorrow. I could easily fuck up the prison guard's eyes and brain, and push the buttons to get me out of this cell and through the first door out. The second door, and then what to do at the elevator foyer, were unknowns, but they were irrelevant because busting out of here violently was the last thing I wanted to do. It was nice to know I might be able to do it, but it was literally the last option. I just had to wait until the idiots decided that the Free World wasn't under threat from me. I checked out the last door before the elevator foyer. It'd required a card swipe and password to get in from the other side, but from this direction it seemed easier. There was a button on the wall beside the door handle, which presumably unlocked it from the inside. I could've tested it by using NP to push the button then push the door, but I wasn't willing to do that now in case it alerted someone. The button did mean that I probably didn't need to worry about learning the password and stealing a swipe card. I could even use the button if I was coming the other way, although I doubted I'd want to break INTO the jail. In the elevator foyer, opposite the elevators, there was a slightly wide but otherwise ordinary door. Sending a sight blob through it showed an underground parking garage. Presumably a lower level than I'd come in at, because the elevator foyer had been different when I'd been waiting for the elevator on my arrival at this building. I should've used a sight blob to check which button on the elevator my escorts had pressed, but I didn't think of that until now. A quick check inside the elevator shaft showed me that the elevator car was out of sight, somewhere above, and that the shaft didn't go down any farther, so I was on the lowest level. A little more sight blob searching around gave me a fairly complete picture. What the DHS had done was make themselves a little prison by walling off one corner of the bottom level of the underground parking garage. The walls were thick and the cells weren't adjacent to the garage's wall, so loud shouting wouldn't be heard in the garage. Even if it was heard, I doubt the hearer would want, or be able, to help. I checked out several of the cars, curious to see if any had their keys in them, but none did. Some of them were well equipped though, with radios, in-car computer consoles, and trunks containing bulletproof vests and a variety of weapons. I did have the idea of using one of the in-car computers to look up my name, but they were all turned off now and using them - assuming I could - would surely leave a record somewhere. Because I was damned angry, I thought about some of the possibilities the weapons provided. For example, let's say Mr. Boss Asshole REALLY pissed me off. I could keep my eyes open until I found out what level he parked on, probably the top level, as I guessed that where boss types would park. I could easily steal a shotgun from a car on that level by popping the trunk with the driver's button, flying the shotgun and ammo out, then closing the trunk again. I could hide it near the door to the elevator, or even inside boss asshole's car, if I knew which one was his. When he next appeared, bang! Alternatively, I could steal every gun I could find and all their ammo, and have a HUGE gunfight inside the garage, say when many of them were arriving for work. There were only two ways into a level, the elevator and the ramp, so it wouldn't be hard for me to seal a level off and kill everyone on it. They'd have nothing to shoot back at, so no way of winning, and there was nowhere they could hide that I couldn't find them. It'd be a massacre, and a huge mystery afterward. If I REALLY needed to rock the boat, that'd do it nicely (well, not "nicely", but I was in a very bad mood, so I enjoyed thinking about it). If I was being kept here illegally for a long time, that'd be a tempting possibility, as the massacre's investigators would probably find me and want to know who I was. Fantasizing finished for the moment, I zoomed the sight blob around the garage until I found the ramp up, noticing that as I'd thought, there was no ramp down. Up the ramp was another garage level, and then another above that. My sight blob's vision was noticeably degraded, but I could see the ramp up to daylight. I checked that out, and it did lead up to the street. There wasn't any access control from this side, so it presumably rose automatically if a car drove up to it. If I had to use the last ditch choice of breaking out and hijacking a car, I could presumably drive it outside easily, unless I set off an alarm that locked the place down. It was lunchtime, so I watched the garage's exit for a while. It only took a few minutes for a car to drive up to the gate. It opened automatically. There might be a security guard watching a video camera of the exit, but I hadn't seen a camera, although that was possibly because my vision was so degraded. I knew from my experiments in the Seattle Hospital that sight blobs could go up or down three or four floors before their sight degraded into uselessness. Any horizontal movement reduced the vertical range, and vice versa. Being on the bottom of three levels of garage was one more than I'd initially guessed, which was a bummer. I would be able to look around the building's ground level floor a little, but there were presumably very few people working on that level. The real work would be done on the levels above. I might be able to get appalling bad vision of the very next level up, but almost no horizontal movement without the blob's vision becoming useless, and if I sent it any farther, then it'd cancel on me. I started checking out the ground floor. My vision was poor, heading toward bad if I moved the sight blob horizontally very far, but I was lucky in being nearly directly under the building's front entrance, as I was near the elevator. There were two things I particularly wanted to do: find out the address, then locate a cellphone to text the address to someone. I had Prof's lawyer's cellphone number memorized, which seemed like the perfect choice as it shouldn't be tapped while everyone's phone in my families could be. I didn't have enough sight blob range to send it outside to look for street signs, but finding the address was easy as there was plenty of paperwork around the front desk: DHS letterhead, delivery dockets, mail, and visitors arriving holding the business card of the person they were presumably coming to visit. Cellphones were ubiquitous, but it was a matter of finding one that was stationary long enough for me to type and send a text message on it. The security guards (cops, agents or whatever they were) manning the front desk were the obvious candidates. One of them had a phone in a pouch, that I could 'pick-pouch' easily. I slowly worked it out of the pouch, without its owner reacting. When it was far enough out, I pulled it the remaining distance then flew it down to the floor as if it was falling, and then had it appear to bounce under the desk. I left the phone there while I watched the guards for a several seconds, but they hadn't noticed anything. I zoomed down to the phone, held it firmly, then typed, "Mark Anderson at DHS [the street address] Portland. In jail cell 1 of 5 bottom parking garage level near elevator. W&A families ph's almost certain tapped. Never ph this ph; is temp stolen." I sent it to the lawyer. While it was sending, I zoomed up to make sure the guards weren't searching for the phone. Nope. I went back to the phone, checking to see if it kept a copy of the message or the number I'd sent it to (my old phone hadn't saved sent messages, but my new one did). This phone didn't, so if the guard checked, he should find nothing. Maybe the lawyer's number on the guard's next cellphone bill, but I couldn't do anything about that. I was tempted to send the lawyer another message describing what had happened and that I'd probably be here at least another day, but I didn't think it'd help as I doubted he could get me out, or even get confirmation that the DHS had me. I hadn't sent the first message to help, as what little I knew about our anti-terrorist laws were that the DHS was allowed to hold onto someone for a few days if they wanted (I was presuming the DHS would claim I was a "possible terrorist", a definition that could be applied to everybody, particularly if they'd had dealings with the DHS assholes before). I just wanted to let the families know where I was, that their phones were very risky, and that I was okay. The lawyer might be confused, but my families would know the message was from me. My stomach wanted me to order a pizza or two, but that had certain practical difficulties so I gave up on it. I kept an eye on the phone, ready to hang up the instant it rang if the lawyer stupidly called back, but nothing happened. After ten minutes I zoomed up to check where the guards were, then slid the phone out to where it would look natural for it to be if it'd fallen out of the owner's pouch. Back in my cell, I checked the guard was still engrossed in his book, then took off my belt and used the buckle's edge to scratch "Mark Anderson, 1/23/06" on the edge of the bed facing away from the front door. No reason why not, and it might be useful to leave a trail. That done, I put my belt back on, then tried not to think about food. That didn't work too well, and I couldn't think of any reason why not, so I knelt down by the slot in the bottom of the door - where the sound had a better chance of being heard - and loudly asked, "Excuse me. Can you hear me?" "Yeah." "Ahh. I haven't eaten for a long time and I'm very hungry. I wonder if I could please have some lunch please?" "Okay." #3: #5: I heard the very nice man - he had no future in this organization - get to his feet. I remembered what had happened last time I was imprisoned, so I added an extra request, "A glass of water too, please?" "Okay." #8: #1: #2: #8: He was removing the cellophane from some cheese slices, unwrapping four in total before putting the rest of the package back in the fridge. He opened the microwave and pulled out a plate holding four pieces of bread. He made two sandwiches with two slices of cheese on each, which impressed me to a ridiculous degree. He could've more easily given us just one slice per sandwich. He'd been unnecessarily generous, so we decided not to stick any NP-fingertips through this guy's eyeballs. They were very simple sandwiches, not even any butter, but I was appreciative in direct proportion to my hunger. Speaking of that important topic, I hadn't worked out a way of smuggling any more food to me. There'd been several packages of cheese in the fridge, as well as a partly used bottle of milk, some peanut butter and a few other spreads. One of the cheese packages was the best candidate for theft, as one of them shouldn't be missed. The tricky part was getting it to me unobserved. The fridge also had a freezer compartment in the bottom. I couldn't open that while the guard was in the room, but I sent a sight blob inside and radiated some light. It was a small compartment, and from what I could see without rearranging anything, filled with frozen bags of bread. My personal guard had finished making the sandwiches and was now filling a plastic cup with water from the faucet. Presumably he was about to bring my meal to me. I definitely didn't want to risk him seeing flying cheese, so I decided just to observe his routine this time, as I should have another chance at dinnertime. I'd only do steal something if it seemed very easy. He picked up the plate of sandwiches with one hand and the drink with the other, then walked out of the room, kicking the door shut behind him. I noticed that he didn't turn around to close the door, so a flying package of cheese could've followed him; ideally sitting out of sight until the door was nearly closed, then darting out. He walked over to my door, placed the plate and cup on the floor then opened the cover of the peephole. I was sitting on the bed with my head down and eyes shut. He spoke loud enough for me to hear (it didn't need shouting, as the doors weren't particularly soundproof), "Stand at the back of the room facing the wall with your hands on it at head height. Stay there." I canceled the blob so I could do what he'd instructed, then restarted it to watch him. He knelt and opened the lower panel, looked through it to make sure I hadn't moved, then inserted the plate and cup through it and onto the floor inside my cell. He closed the panel, and stood up saying, "All yours." "Thanks very much. I appreciate it." He wandered back to his desk, while I wandered somewhat faster to my lunch. It disappeared very quickly, but half a lunch and a drink was FAR better than no lunch at all. Its disappearing so quickly gave me an idea, so I yelled, "I'm putting the plate and cup back by the slot now." As I hoped, he responded, saying, "That was fast." "I was VERY hungry. I don't suppose..." "Nope. You get what you get, and that's all. No more talking, and move to the back of your cell until I get the dishes." He extracted them, took them to the kitchen and dropped them in the sink. As I was thinking about food and my sight blob was in the area anyway, I gave the kitchen a good search. In one cupboard there were more plastic plates, bowls and cups. Other cupboards contained quite a few packages or cans of food. All of it long-lasting and easy to make in the microwave (e.g., macaroni & cheese, cans of baked beans). There was an electric kettle on the bench, with the makings for coffee and tea nearby. A drawer held plastic forks, spoons and a can opener. There were no real knifes, metal pots, or anything else vaguely weapon-like that you'd find in a normal kitchen, although there were some cleaning products in the cupboard under the sink. I hadn't heard the sound of the kitchen door locking, so I suspected it wasn't locked. I could easily open the fridge door and extract a package of cheese. I could possible inch the room's door open and sneak the cheese out, as the guard was facing toward the CCTV screen. That was on the left side of his desk, while the kitchen was to his right, so watching the screen turned his back to the kitchen and any flying cheese. I could probably fly the package at a six-inch height up behind him, then around the bottom of his desk to be on my side of it. The next two actions were considerably trickier though. First, when the cheese broke cover to get across the room to my door. He was usually leaning back in his chair reading his book, which obscured his sight of most of the floor nicely - I put a sight blob where his head was to check that - but there was still a danger of him suddenly sitting up. He was almost facing my door, so he'd instantly see the package if he raised his head enough. The major problem was getting the cheese through the slot in my door. It made a metal-on-metal noise when it slid open, totally giving the game away. Standard procedure seemed to be leaving the slot closed except when doing a delivery or retrieval, which was preventing my pilferage. Even if he was sitting on the toilet, the sound of the slot opening would almost certainly be audible. I'd have to keep my eye on him and hope he left the 'prison' for some reason. [He made himself coffee quite often, and used the toilet equally frequently, but I never had an acceptable chance to try anything. He never left the area.] Thinking about flying food into my room made me realize it'd be a very good idea to make absolutely sure there were no hidden cameras in my cell, so I used a sight blob to searched it VERY carefully, especially in the obvious places (the corners of the ceiling, center of the ceiling, center of the rear wall, etc.). I didn't find anything. I even sent the sight blob into the walls to search for cavities, but the cells were solid. There was solid earth below my cell, and several feet above it was another parking garage level, with no suspicious cabling leading down to my cell. Horizontally, there was nothing useful in any direction, and no sign of hidden video cables. It wasn't my top priority, but I didn't find a storage room with eight 30" screens in it either. I was tempted to try to get my jailer into conversation, but there wasn't anything I could think of that I could learn from him, as he wouldn't know what I wanted to know: what was going to happen to me, and what was happening to my families. It'd be best if I didn't annoy him, because he was in charge of my food. I spent the next several hours rapidly alternating between looking around upstairs to see if I could discover anything interesting, and checking to see if my guard had left the room, striking out in both cases. The most exciting event of the entire afternoon was when I peed into the bedpan. I watched a lot of people leaving at the end of their day's work, learning nothing useful. I didn't see Mr. Boss Asshole, so didn't identify his car. Dinner was macaroni and cheese, accompanied by my choice of beverage: tea, coffee or water. I had water, that being my major decision for the afternoon. My jailer's relief arrived just before 6pm (I didn't have a watch, but plenty of other people did). Changing shift didn't take long, "An easy guy in one. 'Night." "See ya." I hadn't noticed any paperwork involved in keeping me prisoner, which wasn't a happy thought. I had a sight blob following his departure. Pressing the button beside the CCTV screen unlocked the first door for a few seconds. The second door just required pressing the button beside it. The door into the parking garage didn't have any security on it, but I knew that already from watching other people leave. His car was parked some distance from the elevator, which presumably made him junior. It had no fancy equipment or a gun in the trunk. He seemed to be just an Average Joe. I had to pee again after dinner, and it was starting to smell a bit, so I asked the new guy, "My pee is starting to smell. Can I ask you to empty it for me please?" "Put it by the door and stand with your hands on the rear wall." The building was mostly emptied out by now so there was very little to see, and I was at least one level too far down to have visual access to any of the areas of the building where the real work (such as it was) was done. The cavalry didn't come charging over the hill to rescue me from my incarceration either, so my text message seemed not to have had any effect. Other than the excitement of getting rid of my pee, my evening was otherwise uneventful. The new guard had the same taste in literature as the previous one: trashy detective novels. I knew they were trashy because I sometimes got bored enough to read over his shoulder for a while. My cell's light never went off, but I ordered myself to sleep for couple of hours anyway. ------- Chapter 286: The Interrogation Gets Personal Tuesday, January 24, 2006 My original prison guard arrived back just before 6am, the twelve-hour shifts confirming my opinion that I didn't want to work for the DHS. The handover was even quicker. "No change." "Thanks." Apparently they take their job seriously in the DHS, because quite a few of them started arriving soon after 7am. The average leaving time the previous night had been about 7pm, so America may be in the hands of moronic assholes, but at least they're dedicated moronic assholes. That made me feel so much better. My watching the arrivals was interrupted by my guard yelling out, "You awake?" I took a wild guess that he was talking to me, so I called back, "Yeah." "You want breakfast?" "DO I EVER! I usually eat twice as much as I've been getting here." I usually eat even more than that, but I hoped that he'd be more likely to give me more if I didn't seem greedy. "Water or coffee?" "Water please." I watched him make my breakfast: four slices of frozen bread thawed in the microwave and four slices of cheese to make two sandwiches, and a cup of water. The same as yesterday's lunch, and not nearly as much as I wanted. The last three meals had been about a quarter of what I would've eaten at home. I hadn't been doing anything physical, but I was pretty sure most of my energy went to power my brain's activities which hadn't reduced at all - maybe even increased if constant sight blobbing used additional energy - so I was damned hungry. When I'd finished my breakfast, I said, "Excuse me, but I'm still SERIOUSLY hungry. Could I have some more please?" "No. Everyone gets the same." #3: I spent the morning watching what I could see on the ground floor. I could reach one more floor above that but my vision was so degraded that it took a major effort to read anything, and I had so little horizontal movement available that there wasn't much available to even attempt to read. Other than reconfirming the address from a delivery guy bringing a birthday cake, I learned nothing remotely useful, nor had a chance to steal any food. It was a pity I couldn't create a "Mouth Blob", because the birthday cake looked very tempting. Or slightly more sensibly, I could've eaten the food in the kitchen. Hopefully the guard would blame the previous shift's guard. Mid-morning, I heard a buzzer outside my cell and quickly moved the sight blob to watch. Three goons had arrived. I watched the procedure, but it was exactly as I'd expected. I did learn for certain which was the button that unlocked my cell, but otherwise learned nothing, and neither could I think of a safe way of stealing food during their arrival. I was handcuffed and taken back to the same interview room. I had to wait for the boss asshole to arrive, so I had some time to close my eyes and snoop around the place. I couldn't find anything featuring "Anderson" or "Williams", but I did find the boss asshole sitting in a large, corner office. I quickly scanned the room, looking for anything useful. There were some folders on his desk, but they were labeled with names I didn't recognize. His computer screen didn't show anything useful either, but it was running software that looked like it might display useful information if I typed my name in. I couldn't do it now, but I could as soon as the boss asshole was walking for the door. The question was whether I should do it? Speaking of "boss asshole", he was wearing an ID tag around his neck, so I could see that his name was Robert Moran. I tried hard, but I couldn't make an appropriate joke out of "Robert". [[I was surprised to learn from a small number of Marks that in their dimensions the DHS doesn't have agents of its own. Instead it's purely an umbrella organization, directly employing only bureaucrats. All the agents work for the sub-agencies: Customs (previously under the Treasury), Coast Guard (previously under Transportation), Citizenship and Immigration Service (previously under Justice), etc. My lives were considerably different in those dimensions because their DHSs had never had a job opening that had appealed to Moran. I was curious about why a few dimensions had such toothless Homeland Securities, and the best correlation is that in most of those dimensions, their United Airlines Flights 93 - the fourth of the 9/11 hijacked planes - didn't crash into their Capitols (the formal "seat of government"; where the congress meets). The passengers had counterattacked the hijackers and the planes had crashed short of their targets. In the dimensions where all four planes hit their targets, the DHS was formed with greater manpower and powers.]] He wasn't in any hurry to leave his office, so I had a good snoop around it. There was a three-drawer filing cabinet that looked worthy of investigation, so I sent the blob into it, instructing it to radiate some light so I could see. I started with the top drawer (my surname being Anderson), but judging from the tags I could read on the top of every hanger, it contained very miscellaneous crap ("Leave Requests", "Firearm Proficiency Reports", etc.) The second drawer's first tag was "Acevedo", then "Adams, Isaiah & Joseph", "Allah" (which made me curious), then "Anderson, Mark" (Allah would have to wait). If the drawer had been mostly empty, I thought I could've slid the hanger open several inches and flicked through my file; but the drawer was packed. There was no way to read my file while it was inside the cabinet. I did notice that my file was one of the thinnest. Not "thin", as the bulge it made indicated probably a hundred or more pages of paper, but even at that size it was thinner than nearly all of the other files. I also noticed that I was the only Anderson to have a file. All things considered, that was a worry. I didn't want the rest of my family involved in whatever this was, but if they were then I'd know that the DHS was truly barking up the wrong tree. Unfortunately, I did have secrets. Moran had a coat stand holding his jacket and a shoulder holster, but I could only fantasize about shooting him with his own gun and then extracting my file from the cabinet to read it. Just as well for him that his gun didn't have a silencer fitted to it, because then my fantasy would've been harder to resist. (I was just joking with myself as I wasn't going to shoot anyone. Even if doing so would get me out of this mess - which it wouldn't - I wasn't going to become a murderer just to save myself another day or two of crap.) I was tempted to flick his gun's safety off, but couldn't guarantee that any accidental discharge wouldn't hurt someone else or injure him too much. Shooting his own balls and cock off would've been ideal, but that was too hard to arrange an accident for, especially as his belly would be in the way. The rest of the drawer's alphabetic filings went through to "Justice", which was one of the thinnest folders (honestly! I assumed it was a surname, but I did enjoy the irony). The bottom drawer of the cabinet started with "Keller" and went through to the end of the alphabet. There was no "Williams" file. Its absence meant that following our money seemed even less likely to be the explanation for this, making it seem even more likely to be about me. After another ten minutes of my fruitless searching, Moran got up and headed out his office door, unfortunately without feeling the need to refresh his memory by re-reading my file. While I'd been waiting for him, I'd decided not to use his computer or pull my file out of his cabinet. There was too much chance of those activities leading to suspicion and trouble. I might take the risk if I was still here in another couple of days, but not yet. I got some good news and some bad news as Moran walked to the interview room - he pocketed his ID tag. I thought that implied something bad might happen, but also implied I'd get out to talk about it. It was probably good news overall, I hoped. He sat himself down facing me, asking, "Do you have sex with Ava West?" "Yes." "Why didn't you count her as your girlfriend?" "Because I don't think of her that way." "How do you think of her?" "She's a nice girl, but she's primarily a lover. Julia is my girlfriend." "What does Julia think of your having sex with Ava West?" #4: #7: "She knows Ava is my lover and accepts it." "Why?" "Why does she know Ava's my lover, or why does she accept it?" "The last one." "She thinks I should get more experience so I'm not tempted by other girls later in our relationship, when things will be more serious." "Why is she so obliging?" #3: "That's her personality, I guess. You don't seriously expect me to question her attitude, do you?" "Did she behave in the same way toward her previous boyfriends?" "I believe I'm her first." "Why did she choose you?" "Probably for my tolerance of absurd, time-wasting questions." Moran looked up at the goon, instructing, "No meals for Mr. Anderson for the rest of the day." The goon nodded. #6: "Why did she choose you?" "Because I said something nice about her in front of other kids at school." "What did you say?" "That she pushed my buttons." "Very smooth. How many lovers do you have?" "It depends on how you define lover." "Do you want to eat tomorrow?" #6: "I'm not being facetious. You asked me how many lovers do I HAVE - present tense. Right this instant I have zero. How far back do you want me to go before deciding whether someone is my lover or not? And what activities justify inclusion? If a neighborhood girl pulled on my pee-pee when I was four, does that make her a lover? If I had intercourse with a girl a year ago but I've never seen her since then, does she get counted? Like I said, it depends on how you define lover." "How many females have you ever had intercourse with?" #8: #1: #All: #2: #5: #All: "I don't objectify girls by thinking them as notches on my bedpost, but I guess the answer is nine." "Who was the first?" "Julia Williams." "When was that?" "April Fools' Day last year." #5: "Who was next?" "I think that was Ava West." "When?" "Mid to late April. I can't be sure of the exact date." #3: #1: #3: "Who was next?" "Alexis I think. A week or so later." "Alexis who?" "Joseph." "Who was next and when?" I gave him the Target Girls' names and approximate dates, a couple of which I swapped around, and some of others were wrong by a few days. "Why the large gap after Alexis Joseph?" I shrugged, "Busy, I guess. That's just the way it worked out. It's not like my life revolves around sex." We spent until lunchtime discussing my sex-life. Why on Earth ANYONE would want to waste two hours learning about my sex-life was beyond me, especially the guy with the biggest office on this floor. Surely he had more important things to do? Lunchtime consisted of Moran stepping out of the room for a minute, talking to someone, and then he returned and resumed the discussion. Several minutes later the person he'd talked to delivered Moran's lunch. Moran ate it in front of me, while continuing his questions. After lunchtime, the topic changed to my athleticism. For examples: What sports I played ("Soccer only"), how long I'd played it ("A couple of years"), how well I played ("Pretty good"). That resulted in tomorrow's breakfast being canceled, and I was forced to admit, "I'm probably the team's best player". We spent fifteen minutes discussing the training I'd done for my winning the 10k running race. I tried to be as vague as possible, but I had to admit that I hadn't done much. By now I was VERY worried about tomorrow's lunch. He then asked about the fights of mine that'd made the papers, and we spent AGES dissecting those. That led to Aikido, and we spent ages discussing that too. I made no mention of ki, talking only about the physical and spiritual aspects of it. I did recite the "Wild Stallion" parable to emphasize that Aikido was a passive, defensive un-martial art, to make myself seem non-threatening. [[Telling Moran the parable turned out to be a bad idea, although it probably just made him more determined to do what he would've done anyway.]] Moran left to go have his dinner, leaving me guarded by yet another goon (they'd rotated a few times during the day). It was just me and the goon in the room, so I asked him, "Do you have any idea how long this is going to last for?" "SHUT the fuck up!" I was surprised at how vehement he was, but it wasn't something I could argue about. [[By now, Moran had given his staff and the jail guards EXTREMELY strongly worded instructions not to get into conversation with me, and not to let me talk unnecessarily.]] Not having too many other things to do, I thought some snooping was definitely called for. I sent a sight blob down to Moran's room, arriving just ahead of him. With any luck he was going to access my file and start making notes in it. Phoning in a pizza order for me would fall within the category of "with any luck" too. Instead he logged off his computer, locked his filing cabinet with a key he was carrying on his key-ring, grabbed his gun and jacket and left, presumably to get some dinner. Damn! #5: We searched around for anyone doing that, finding nothing. There were plenty of people still at work, but they were all working on other things. Having failed to find any information about me, I decided I might as well pass the time snooping in general. I noticed one person who had a screen that was displaying software that looked the same as I'd seen in Moran's office. Maybe I could type my name in to read what the DHS thought they were doing, so I could say whatever needed to be said to counter their worries. There were a few problems: The computer's current user would freak out, anyone walking past his workstation might see the computer working itself, I worried about setting off an alarm in case this computer didn't have security access to my file, and I worried about leaving a security trail of some sort. I had the idea of trying the other offices rather than the open-plan area. The owners of those offices presumably had the highest clearances, and no passersby could see the offices' computer screens. Moran's canceling my meals strongly implied I'd be here at least another day, and he hadn't actually asked ANY question that were remotely related to terrorism yet, so God knows how much longer this was going to take. At the current rate, it'd be a week or more! Half the offices were occupied (denigrate the DHS if you wish - I certainly will - but they do work long hours). The empty offices all had their computers turned off. Damn. #4: #5: We revisited the empty offices again, pressing the shift key on each keyboard. On the third attempt, the screen came to life. It was still logged in! Chances were that the owner had stepped out for dinner, but I couldn't rely on that, and I didn't know how long ago he'd left. I'd be able to read the screen and see anyone coming in the door if I positioned the sight blob correctly, which would give me only a couple of seconds to get out of my file. That was cutting it scarily close, not to mention that the screensaver wouldn't be reactivated, so this was definitely a risky proposition. On the other hand, my multiple-day interrogation was starting to look like a scary situation too, so I decided to go for it. The screen was currently displaying the wrong sort of software, but I'd seen lots of people working on screens around the office now, and I'd deliberately watched to learn how they navigated their software. I could even leave the current display as it was by opening a new window for my work, so I wouldn't have the problem of getting back to this one when I'd finished. I opened a new window, then navigated to the point where I could call up someone's file. A couple of seconds later I had a choice of typing in "Allah", "Anderson, Mark" or "Justice". I went with the middle choice. I hit the "Enter" key then sent the sight blob out of the room momentarily, to check if there was any visible reaction. #5: The information was very well structured, with a contents page, hotlinks, search and filtering facilities, and all the other modern tricks. I already knew what I wanted to do. I filtered the file to show only notes entered by "Moran". That brought up a couple dozen notes, which I quickly started reading through. The fuckwit thought I was intending to finance terrorism! #4: #8: #1: #2: I searched through the file some more, finding some clues. For example, they had the details of our four overseas accounts, including the list of signatories for each. Some other agent had made a note that I was the only person with access to all four, and that it didn't seem to make sense for me to have access to the Williams' accounts. He'd suggested that splitting the accounts across two families might be "for obfuscation purposes." I was impressed by his vocabulary, but not his grip on sanity if he thought I was a terrorist financier. Especially as the money was still sitting in the accounts, so it hadn't financed anybody. Another agent had commented that we were installing excessive security measures in our new home, implying we had some nefarious reason. Apparently he'd forgotten that we were kidnapped out of an earlier home. The tunnel came in for several special comments, because of the "tactical flexibility it provided in a firefight", "unwillingness to have their movements observed", and other such stupid comments. The tone was very much that good people don't need to use tunnels. Tunnels are sneaky things that only bad people would lower themselves to use; apparently forgetting that the White House is linked to tunnels (or given the way my respect for authority is going south, perhaps not forgetting). The file was full of putting the worst possible interpretation on any given fact, and ignoring the perfectly valid counter-arguments. For example, one of the file's authors found it very suspicious that I was taking private martial arts lessons and asked why was I in such a hurry to learn how to fight? He ignored the fact that Aikido was a purely defensive art, that I'd only ever fought in self-defense, and had never been charged with assault. It was a big file, and there were plenty of facts, so more than enough opportunities to make scarily suspicious statements. They had a great time suggesting why I'd suddenly needed to learn how to scuba dive, suggesting that I wanted to both finance and execute a terrorist attack, especially because, "That would be consistent with subject's violent approach to solving problems." You get the idea: if I changed my usual morning routine by adding a banana to my breakfast, they would've spun that into a terrorist plot. The ONLY good news from the file was that it seemed that no one else in my families was suspected of being a criminal, a terrorist financier, a terrorist scientist, a terrorist saboteur or a terrorist mastermind (take your pick, all were suggested for me in various places). But maybe I was the focus only because this was my file? I clicked a hotlink to Julia's file. A quick read showed she was guilty only of associating with me, and suspected of nothing else. I linked to Dad's file. Likewise, guilty by association, although his anti-Government feelings (which were commented on as being anti-American) were extensively recorded. I checked Prof's file. It was much more voluminous than Dad's, but also quickly clear that Prof wasn't really suspected of anything himself, merely of supporting me and being my accomplice in the "probable Binion's Horseshoe Casino scam" Or "probable money laundering incident", according to other notes. I closed Julia's, Dad's and Prof's files. I looked through the Contents Page of mine for anything that indicated what they intended to do in the future. I found a "Recommended Actions" section that should be interesting and helpful. I clicked it, and found it was neither interesting nor helpful. It contained lots of low-level, detailed item, such as "Interview Aikido Sensei", "Contact Thai police to ascertain whether subject observed talking to known terrorists/criminals", etc. The higher level stuff was vaguely worded and useless, such as "Interview to ascertain intentions, beliefs and personality type." I felt sure that his post-interview notes would be full of comments about my dangerous personality type. I'd pushed my luck long enough already, so I exited my window, leaving the machine looking exactly like I'd found it, except for the screensaver. The only way of making that kick in was to leave the computer alone, so that's what I did, hoping the screen blanked before the owner returned. One mind snooped around, while my other minds discussed the situation. Neither approach yielded anything useful. One thing we realized was that it was only the chronologically later notes that were so nasty. Before two or three weeks ago, the notes were fairly passive. The change in tone hadn't happened instantly, not as if a sudden piece of horrendous evidence had been found, as there'd been no such piece mentioned in the file. The tone had changed over the course of a week, for no apparent reason. [[His staff had seen which way their boss - Moran - was leaning, and had slanted their language to look good in his eyes. Human greed is the usual motivation for this, but the behavior is especially prevalent in organizations that are politicized (internal politics, not national, although they overlapped considerably in this case). In such organizations, people seek success and advancement not by doing their job well (i.e. pursuing the organization's stated goals), but by playing to the internal politics. When internal politics control the promotion and other reward mechanisms to a greater degree than the real work, then the real work suffers greatly. An organization which is allowed to distance itself from the positive and negative consequences of its actions, especially including being held accountability for them, is inviting being severely corrupted by the politicization process, which leads to the widespread abuse of power, and eventually to endemic corruption. Any organization that fights hard to avoid accountability is already well down that path.]] ^ [[It's time for some explanation for what Agent Robert Moran was thinking. When his underlings had routinely investigated the four $500,000 overseas transfers, their report got bumped up to Robert Moran because of the strangeness of our winning $11 million playing roulette. Moran asked for the routine paper-trail investigation to continue, which it did, in the usual routine fashion. In due course, my internet logs attracted someone's interest, and they were brought to Moran's attention. The volume, level and timings of the OSU material that I was reading was extraordinary for a high-school boy. He got them to look at me a bit harder, and found too many interesting things. Moran thought there was something going on, and he was curious about it. He had power, no compunction about using it, and very little accountability, so he decided to get his curiosity satisfied. He wrote "Might be intending to become a multimillion dollar terrorist financier" in my file to cover his ass, then ordered his team to dig into Mark Anderson deeper. As he learned more, what had seemed interesting progressed to freaky. He started suspecting that I had a very special mind, which worried him (anything suspicious people don't understand causes them even more suspicion, and then fear). Too much about me couldn't be explained. He disliked not knowing the explanation for things, especially things that appeared powerful, as paranoids hate the idea of something powerful running around uncontrolled. He grew into the suspicion that because my mind was so freaky, that it might have some sort of mind control power. That had MAJOR Homeland Security implications! What a fuckwit, my "mind control power" was Julia! She was the one that made it all happen. He hadn't put a word of his suspicions on paper, because that would've destroyed his career, but he was personally very concerned. After obtaining and reviewing my OSU records, including the emails that'd flown back and forth in that organization about me, he easily decided to bring me in for questioning. He'd been interested in my sex-life because sex was what a teenage boy would most likely use mind control powers for. From my school records it was pretty obvious when something had happened to my mind just before I'd jumped a grade in January 2004, and all the other stuff I told him roughly confirmed it: I didn't start playing soccer until after I'd advanced a grade, and was now an unbelievably good player (he had a report on that). I didn't start having sex until over a year after jumping a grade, and then I quickly got three lovers, including an unbelievably accepting girlfriend (perhaps it had taken me a year to learn to control girls for sex?). Prof's winning $11.1 million at roulette in my company for both games was a flashing red sign. And it was highly suspicious that my three kidnappers had gotten into a violent argument and one of them had killed the other two then fled himself, never to be seen again. That incident had also given Moran the idea of starving me, as he thought my previous experience with starvation would make it a very effective method of coercing cooperation. The "Wild Stallion" parable was suspicious too. He knew enough about martial arts to know there are many practitioners who have stupid wish-fulfillment fantasies, so my story didn't make him interested in Aikido itself. But he thought it was very significant that I chose to talk about someone exerting a mental influence on a wild animal. [[I'd have had trouble controlling a WILD stallion at this point of my life. I could control Patch because he was docile and well trained. Despite the horse coincidence, I didn't have mind control. Using NP on Patch (e.g., to pull his reins) is physical and obviously not mind control. EKP doesn't really affect someone's mind; not in the way that "mind control" is thought of. If Sensei grabbed for my wrist and I deflected his hand sideways, his conscious mind never changed. The whole time he wanted to grab me, and thought he was doing so. EKP doesn't really push his hand away because EKP has no physical component. What it does is misdirect his own ki, which in turn feeds back to a VERY low level of his subconscious. He thinks he's firing his muscles to move his hand in a certain direction, but his subconscious's intention is 'bent' a little, so it sends slightly the wrong nerve impulses. A good analogy is when you reach under water to pick something up. You often miss the grab because the surface of the water bends the light. EKP is like putting a 'bending' surface in the way of the person's intentions. That fact that the 'bend' is achieved by subtly misdirecting the person's low level subconscious intentions doesn't qualify it for what Moran was thinking of as "mind control".]] Moran judged that whatever mind control ability I had, it was weak and slow, as I wouldn't have let the kidnappers torture me for several days, and I obviously would've ordered them to unlock Prof and me before killing each other, but my having any degree of mind control was extremely worrying for the future security of America, especially if I got better at it. He wasn't TOO worried about himself, mainly because of his "weak and slow" belief, although he had let his staff deal with me the first few times. Nor was he worried about me escaping, or creating some other drama. He thought that my ability needed to get people to play off each other. My getting the kidnappers to have a three-way fight was very risky because bullets had been fired. If I'd been able to, I would've waited until only one of them was with me, then made him unlock us and give Prof and me guns. He'd also learned enough about my sex-life to know it was, shall I say, "cooperative." When they were around me, girls got sexy TOGETHER, just like the kidnappers had gotten violent together. So my prison guards were ordered to change shifts quickly and with minimal conversation, and when I was guarded by a goon, there was only one of them in the room and another outside the door, and they didn't talk. All of which Moran told his staff was an interrogation technique. That Moran did not think I was safe and should be released, implied that his measures were working, because if I could, I'd be making him think I was safe. To the contrary, he thought I was decidedly unsafe, especially since I'd suddenly started having sex with a lot more girls late in the summer vacation. That hinted that I was getting more powerful, which if left unchecked meant I might become VERY dangerous in the future. What a paranoid fuckwit!]] ^ Moran returned from his dinner and the interrogation resumed. "How are you able to read so much information so quickly?" "What are you referring to?" "The lectures you read on OSU's website." "I'm intelligent, so it doesn't take me long to understand new material." I managed to fight off the temptation to comment on his intelligence. My hunger now, and imagining what it'd be like by tomorrow's lunchtime, restrained me. "Why did your computer have eight screens?" #4: "I like to study different subjects to keep me fresh and alert. Like some people read one book before they start another, but other people like to have several books on the go. It's just a style thing." [[I didn't know it at the time, but the internet logs he had only gave him the times when I loaded the entirety of each lecture into my browser. They didn't give him the times of the individual PageUp/PageDown commands, or my simultaneous studying would've been obvious, and I would've come across as even more freaky.]] "When did you become intelligent?" #3: "It's not as simple as that. People are born with some intelligence, which improves as they get older. Eight-year olds are more intelligent than four-year olds, and 16-year olds even more so. It's a fairly linear process. In most people that improvement levels off during adolescence, but in my case it didn't level off; it simply carried on rising. One of my teachers told me that happens sometimes. It's not usual, but it's certainly not rare. I'm reasonably sure I have leveled off now, but I was lucky enough to get to a high IQ before that happened. So, in answer to your question, I didn't 'become intelligent' at a particular time. Like all youngsters, my intelligence improved as I got older; it just improved for longer and higher." I'd read that IQ scores are calculated by dividing the test's raw score by the person's chronological age (penalizing older people), but only up to the age of fifteen, which clearly implied that people's intelligence (not their quotient, but their raw intelligence) rises until that age. "According to your school records, your intelligence jumped suddenly." "I was average initially. When I continued to get smarter after most of my classmates leveled off, I didn't want to come across as a smart-ass because bullying has been extremely bad at our school, so I hid the increasing difference. I was happy enough being an unnoticed average student. After a year or so I got too bored with that and decided to start doing my best. So it looked like a sudden improvement rather than the steady, natural one it was." "There's nothing natural about halfway completing three degrees in three months." "First, in SIX months, because I was studying all summer. Second, the strongest man in the world might seem unnatural because there's no one as strong as him. Ditto for me and studying. I'm much smarter than average students, but it's just more of what everyone else can do. More of the same isn't unnatural, it's just more of the same natural process." It carried on for several more hours. It was ALL about me: A lot more about my intelligence and studying. How Prof and I had won at roulette. How the kidnappers had treated us, how their relationship had broken down, and about the fight itself. By the time we'd covered that list, it was midnight, and Moran ordered me taken back to my cell. I asked, "How long is it going to take for you to decide I'm not a terrorist?" He pointedly ignored my question, carrying on walking out of the room. A couple more guys arrived shortly, and I was escorted downstairs again. I'd done my best to appear natural, unthreatening, and I never mentioned religion or politics, but I couldn't tell how well it'd worked, if at all. The asshole wasn't giving anything away, not even how suspicious he was. He could be on the point of letting me go, or about to lock me up forever, or somewhere in between; I just couldn't tell. [[Because of the paranoid fantasy Moran had constructed, I couldn't win. If I failed to convince Moran that I was safe, then I'd stay locked up. If I succeeded in convincing him that I was safe, then he'd think I'd influenced his mind, making me VERY unsafe, and getting me even more locked up. His paranoia guaranteed my staying locked up. Or to put it another way, he thought, "Better safe than sorry." His version of being safe had zero downside for him, because he worked for the DHS, and they fucked people over with impunity. Actually, that's somewhat unfair to the DHS, as morally speaking they weren't any worse than several other Government's agencies, who also fucked people over with impunity.]] During my being escorted back to my cell, I tried hard to think of a way of stealing food and smuggling it into the room with me, thereby getting around the problem of the slot making noise when it was opened, but I couldn't think of a way of doing safely. There'd be too many guys around, and one of them could spot the flying food. I couldn't think of a way of doing it after I was in my cell either, not without making too much noise. The slot couldn't be manually opened from my side, so it making a sliding noise would be extremely suspicious. I could've conserved energy by ordering myself to sleep, but I didn't want to miss learning anything important. I was confused about three things in particular: My file had been full of the terrorist threats that I posed, yet the last interrogations had ignored terrorism and focused on my mental and physical accomplishments and abilities. Not my 'special' abilities, just my publicly known ones. What level of danger I was in. For all I knew, he might let me go soon. Surely he wouldn't keep someone locked up just for being intelligent and a fast runner. Whether a lawyer could get me out, and if he could, how long it'd take. I suspected it wouldn't be easy or quick, but I hadn't even been arrested, let alone found guilty of a crime. None of the stuff Moran had grilled me about would result in me being convicted of anything. There was one thing I wasn't the least confused about, busting out of here would cause a VERY big mess. I wouldn't even think about doing that unless the situation was really fucked up. [[Had I known the true situation, the best action I could've taken now would've been to shoot Moran with his own gun and then plant it in his dead hand. When my file was reviewed by his replacement, he would've said, "Why the hell do we have Anderson on ice? Moran lost the plot, the crazy fuck. Cut Anderson loose." (Maybe not the middle sentence, but I like to think so.)]] I wasn't going to bust out, but I could definitely try to help our lawyer bust in. It was time for another text message. It was trickier because the ground level security guards were different, and none of them had an easily obtainable cellphone, but after waiting a while, someone suitable entered the building. His cellphone 'fell' off his belt as he walked past the security desk, 'rolling' under it. I composed: "Mark Anderson interrogated 14 hrs today by Robert Moran, DHS ID#," [the number I'd memorized off the ID tag he'd been wearing around his neck when he was in his office, the same number as his notes in my file were marked with]. "No food/water 24 hrs. In same cell now. Probably LONG stay. DNCB (do not call back, ph temp, stolen)." After sending it to the lawyer, I cleared the evidence it'd left behind, then moved the phone to where it'd be easily found, as I thought that was better than trying to permanently hide it. I couldn't keep doing this at the security desk, but there were easy alternatives, such as taking a cellphone off someone in the parking garage, or using one when I was being interrogated next time, although I'd have to concentrate hard to overcome the superimposition confusion. I had thought of stealing a phone from someone upstairs and trying to get it under my thick jacket so I could smuggle it into my cell. The trouble was that my little jail is silent (no TV or radio, no talking, etc.) so I certainly couldn't talk on the phone. Plus there might not be any signal down here, and even worse, the trouble there'd be if it was found in my possession. They'd quickly learn whose phone it was, and they'd be VERY curious about how I'd gotten hold of it. I didn't have most of those concerns about food though. If I could find some food upstairs next time, I'd be seriously tempted to steal it by sliding it under my jacket as I passed a desk. Another food option was to raid the cars in the garage. Some of them probably had snack bars or similar in them. I couldn't get that food into my cell, but I could hide it near the door between the elevator and garage. The next time I was removed from my cell, I could slip the food into the bare foyer, and have it sit on the floor behind the door we'd open to get into the foyer. When we walked into the foyer the food would be behind us. Two guys hold my arms and one walks ahead, so I should have a chance to have the food fly up the back of my leg and under my jacket. It'd be tricky, but starving wasn't high on my list of favorite activities. I'd tried it once, and I didn't like it. I did have one additional idea that might be useful, to text the lawyer that I was being interrogated daily on level five, and to suggest that he might be able to get a photo of me through the windows if he needed to prove I was in this building. I didn't want to 'borrow' another cellphone so soon. If they got suspicious (and they're very suspicious people) they could easily get a list of the latest numbers called or texted by the newly found misplaced phones. That could get ugly. If I needed to borrow another phone in the future, I'd add my level five idea to the next message. There was so little happening that I got bored, and the idea of sleeping to conserve my energy seemed like the best choice. I set my internal alarm to 5:45am. ------- Chapter 287: Handed Over Wednesday, January 25 to Friday, January 27, 2006 The guard's shift changed at 6am again, just as tersely as the time before. Most importantly, with no mention that I wasn't to be fed breakfast. I crossed my fingers. The time for breakfast came and went. I moved around so he'd hear that I was awake, but I got no response. What was worse, I also got no breakfast. I gave it half an hour, then asked, "Excuse me, is there any breakfast or just a drink of water this morning?" "No. No talking." #7: #1: #3: Meanwhile the aforementioned prick of an asshole was having a busy morning. Moran was dividing my file up into digestible chunks chosen to lead a reader to the same theory that Moran had about me, but without his having to say it out loud, or even worse, in writing. ^ [[Some background information for you. In the course of his long, distinguished career serving the American people, Moran had made many contacts and friends. One of the latter was Kyler Wright, another fairly senior manager from the same unaccountable agency they'd both worked at a few years ago. When the DHS had been created, it'd had to hire a huge number of people quickly, as a result of which its hiring procedures hadn't been very good. Nor had they been good or even poor - they'd been bad. The DHS had been a mess right from the start. "Start as you mean to go on," Mom would say, although the DHS had started bad and then gone downhill. That's what happens when you have too many bad managers. Kyler Wright differed from Moran in having a scientific bent. No particular expertise, but he liked to think otherwise. He got himself employed in a too-senior position in the Sciences & Technology Directorate of the DHS, their research arm. The DHS as a whole was created with no clear vision of what it was meant to do, and with even less vision about how it was meant to do it. It was formed as a direct consequence of 9/11, "To protect the territory of the United States from terrorism." Unfortunately for the DHS, the War On Terrorism was more a political justification than a trillion-dollar reality, and to what extent it was real, even that was distorted at the whim of changing political objectives. Politics is not known for its long-term consistency, or even its short-term consistency, so the research directorate of a politically created and directed agency has got a serious problem because it takes a long time to bring new "Sciences & Technology" through the R&D process. Consequently the leaders of that directorate need to be very clear-sighted, intelligent people, and to receive high quality input from the senior management in the other directorates they're tasked to anticipate the needs of and support. That's what the Sciences & Tech Directorate needed, but it certainly wasn't what it got. As a result, DHS's S&T Directorate was one of the worst run directorates in the entire DHS. Being that bad took a major effort, as the DHS was one of the worst run departments in the entire government. How much effort it takes to be one of the worst departments in a government like the American one, I'll leave you to have your own opinion about. I will insist though, that the previous two levels are NOT matters of opinion, but of verifiable fact. Studies have confirmed S&T's and DHS's positions at the bottom of their relevant barrels. The Sciences & Tech Directorate didn't know what it should be doing, or even what it actually was doing. And even if it had known, it wouldn't have been able to do it properly. It wasn't in danger of going off course, because it'd never had a clear course, or an effective captain (leadership). Without clear direction from the top, less senior management found their own things to do. Often with good intentions, or to look busy, to pursue pet interests, or for other reasons. Senior management had too much unaccountable autonomy. Further down the ladder, people were even less accountable and competent, so the situation was often even worse.]] ^ Moran called Wright, and after the usual exchanges told him, "I've got an unusual file that suits your area of expertise much more than mine. It's unusual and requires an open-minded approach, so I'm going to send it to you in pieces. Read the first part then call me back if you're interested in receiving more." The first chunk started with a one-page biographical summary of me (name, age, etc.), then included my OSU transcripts, several of OSU's internal emails about me, and the result of my IQ test from school. Wright quickly called back, amazed at my genius. Moran agreed it was amazing, although he personally didn't believe it. My having super-intelligence in addition to my mind control powers was too unlikely. Much more likely was that I'd simply used my mind control to make all my teachers and examiners give me top grades. The next chunk was made up of extracts about Archibald Williams and my $11.1 million roulette win, the subsequent kidnapping, and how it'd ended (Moran had written, "Archibald Williams is Anderson's girlfriend's father"; a definition that reinforced my being the focus and making no mention of Prof being a prof). Wright called back confused. "The roulette win is amazing, but where are you going with this?" "You'll see." The next chunk was about my physical prowess, including sound bites from my interrogation: My 10k running race win and my admitting I hadn't trained all that much. Quotes about my fighting expertise from the police notes about the Eaton Family Attack and the School Urinal Attack incidents, and my talking about only recently starting to learn Aikido at the time of those events. Quotes from the agent that'd watched me playing soccer, and my talking about joining the team a couple of years ago. Wright called back, "He's a physical AND mental prodigy?" "There's more. I'll send the next extracts." The last chunk was made up of a timeline: "Average student at school," (school records were attached in support), "until Jan 2004. IQ test and leap in grades indicate an overnight leap from average to extreme genius." "April 1, 2005. Loses virginity," (appropriate extract from my interrogation attached). "Mid April, added a second lover," (another extract from my interrogation). "Late April, added a third lover," (another extract, plus a fourth extract of my explaining Julia's tolerance to my having other lovers, and a fifth extract from when he'd made me admit that the girls and I sometimes had sex all together). Then successive points for each of the six girls that got rapidly added during the last few weeks of summer, with appropriate verbal commentary, including about our sometimes all going out together. The email also described that I had an unrestricted driver's license, obtained by the Dean of OSU and the Mayor going to bat for me, and quite a few more emails (e.g., from the Corvallis and Oregon Boards of Education to my school), all of which talked about providing me with "every assistance" or other such highly cooperative language. Some of the Boards' instructions to my school's Principal - after the bullying background was removed - appeared unbelievably over the top about their willingness to help me. They were effectively ordering the Principal to do whatever I wanted. Wright said, "This boy is living THE life! He's got everything: money, girls, wild sex, he's an athlete and a genius, and people are falling all over themselves to help him." "'Falling over' is an appropriate expression. Dominic King and Tom White," (the kidnappers) "fell over too. Possibly also to help Anderson. His winning $11 million was very helpful too." "What're you saying?" "I'm not saying anything. I'm waiting for you to say it; science is your area. Anderson is currently in my custody, but I don't want him around me any longer. I want him out of here." "What've you got him for?" "The file says it's because he might be intending to finance terrorism." "Is there any proof of that?" "There are indications that he might be intending to." "I see. He's too young to work for us?" "You know that's not what this is about. The boy is phenomenally physically and mentally gifted. I want you to think about how gifted he might be, whether his gift is becoming more powerful, and whether he's a threat that needs to be countered. I'll send you the whole file. I'm not equipped to deal with him, but he needs to be dealt with. Get back to me before the end of the day." ^ I spent the day sitting on my ass, going nowhere. I did have an idea for how to get some food though. I searched through the cupboards looking for suitably thin food, but only the cheese qualified. That was okay, as there was plenty of it, and it was reasonably good food. Being made from milk, I assumed it had a high water content too, which was something I was worried about. I checked that the guard was still engrossed in his book (I repeated this every few seconds during the following, but I'll not bother mentioning it again). I opened the fridge and NP'd out a package of cheese, flying it into the least likely to be used cupboard. I removed the individual slices from the package, then the cellophane from each of the slices. That left me with a pile of packaging to get rid of. I didn't want to put it in the room's trash can because the extra wrappings might be noticed, so I stashed the discarded packaging down the back of the fridge. I repeated the process with two more packages, giving me thirty six slices of cheese. When this was over, it'd probably take me a while before I wanted to eat cheese again. It took a bit of pushing, but I managed to put a small amount of pee into my bedpan. I carried it to my door, put it down, then called, "Would you empty my bedpan please?" "Move to the back." While the guard was getting up and moving to my door, I moved the stack of naked cheese slices out of the cupboard and down beside the kitchen's doorway. The noise the guard made sliding my door's slot open covered the sound of the kitchen door opening a couple of inches. The kitchen was behind the guard, and they keep their eyes glued to the peephole or slot when doing a delivery or pick up, so I was easily able to fly the cheese into cover behind his desk. When he picked up the bedpan, I said, "There's not much because I'm suffering from dehydration, but it's very smelly." He didn't seem to care, carrying it to the toilet as normal. I didn't try to transfer the cheese while he was in the toilet because they just tip the pan, flush and return, taking barely a few seconds. I'd try the tricky part of my plan on his return trip. Just as he was about to start sliding my door's panel closed after putting the pan into my cell, I distracted him by turning and quickly walking toward the door, saying, "Thanks for..." He called, "Stay back!" while rushing to close the panel, not noticing that some invisible NP-fingertips blocked it from closing all the way. I froze in place, apologetically saying "Oh, sorry." He stood up and walked back to his desk. I picked up the pan, banging it against the door while I said, "Sorry about that." The rattle and my voice covering my sliding the panel open the little bit more I needed. As he walked around the left of his desk, the cheese flew around the right. Then I just had to wait for him to settle down into his chair and put his feet up on his desk. That lowered his head enough that his desk hid the cheese's intended flight path. I confirmed that with a sight blob just above his head. I moved the sight blob to where I could see the flight path and the guard, moved myself to sit just inside my door, then sent one slice of vertically hanging cheese flying across the room to my door. The gap in the slot was wide enough for a single piece of cheese to slip through. As soon as a corner was inside my cell, I grabbed it, then sent the fingertips back for the next piece. I repeated that thirty five more times as fast as I could. I soon had a very nice pile of food in my lap. And soon after that I didn't. I'd been tempted to save a few to add to the sandwiches I'd hopefully be getting for lunch, but it wasn't worth the risk. It was better to destroy the evidence. I watched the guard making my lunch of cheese sandwiches. I was looking forward to the bread. The cheese I'd stolen hadn't come from the half-used package. Instead I'd stolen from one of the other packages in the back of the fridge, and he didn't notice anything wrong. But I think he noticed that the panel wasn't fully closed when he was about to open it again. (I'd thought about closing it, but was scared of the noise it'd make.) He closed it firmly after delivering lunch, and again after removing my dishes. I spent ALL day in my cell. I was reasonably sure that there was some sort of time limit on how long the DHS could keep me under wraps like this, although I didn't know what it was as I'd heard too many different numbers in the news, applicable in different circumstances. Somewhere between two days and two weeks I thought, although I thought the longer values only applied to enemy combatants caught overseas. Moran didn't seem to be worried about that though, as he'd effectively wasted the third day. Speaking of "waste", the cheese went through me pretty fast. I had to use my bedpan for a runny crap. I felt even more dirty afterward; I could REALLY do with a shower. #1: #3: I can't say I enjoyed doing so, but I watched the guard while he cleaned the pan. He had disposable gloves and cleaning products in the kitchen, and he did a good job. I DEFINITELY didn't want to work for the DHS (it's a shitty organization). It took him a few minutes, so if I needed to get him out of the room for a while having a crap would be a good tactic, provided I had anything to crap. Dinner was a small can of baked beans on two pieces of bread, and a cup of water. I was still very hungry, but I didn't feel threatened enough to try pulling my cheese smuggling stunt again. Holding the slot open wouldn't work often, and repeatedly reducing the supply of cheese would be noticed too, so I'd wait another day or two before I did it again. ^ Wright and Moran had another conversation in the early evening. It's not worth repeating in full. Wright did some fishing, "Why did you single out the roulette win? Do you believe he or they cheated in some way? How?" Moran was noncommittal, "There's no evidence for my team to investigate, but it screams significance. You've got to wonder how he did it if Binion's and the Fibbies couldn't find anything." Wright asked, "How do you think he did it?" "I don't know. I'd like to find out, but I haven't pressed him on it. He says it was luck, and that the second bet had no other possible explanation, but I'd bet my pension the fix was in. He needs to be tested properly. I wouldn't know what to look for or how to find it; that's why I called you. Do you have any ideas how he did it?" After some more back and forth, Wright finally raised the possibility of my mind being capable of things normal people's minds couldn't do, then the conversation proceeded much smoother, including Moran's stating, "If he has such abilities, they're currently weak. I had my people minimize their conversations with him and each other, and didn't leave him in a group. There is some indication that his persuasiveness works best when he can play one person off against another." The conversation ended with Wright saying, "I'm going to need time to get my people onboard or they'll think I'm crazy. If that goes well, we'll pick him up some time Friday." "Make it Thursday night or very early Friday; I want low visibility on the transfer. And don't be late; I want him gone before the weekend. I'm not comfortable having him here." "Yeah, I can understand that." "You've got computer techs at your end who can get rid of all trace of the emails I sent you?" "Of course. I'll get them onto it, and the phone records too." ^ The rest of Thursday was a boring time for me. Boredom was better than being interrogated, especially because it gave Moran no opportunity to cancel any more of my meals. I was VERY eager to get as many meals as I could. They were so small that I was perpetually hungry. One cheery thought was that I was sure I could survive far better and longer on half rations than on none at all. I decided not to steal any more food as my need wasn't high enough. Nor did I send another text message, as there was nothing new. There were some very minor discoveries or changes, such as: I found out that my guards arrived at work several minutes before the shift change, going straight up to level five (they pressed that button on the elevator). A few minutes later they'd arrive back down here to take over. That would presumably be how the newly arrived guard had known not to feed me breakfast. The guard started getting a call every couple of hours, which he usually said, "Fine" to. [[Moran was worried about the guard being in my presence for so long. He couldn't ramp up security as much as he wanted without it possibly coming back to bite him later, as he was going to pretend to lose interest in me shortly. Upgrading security would conflict with that, so he trusted in my ability to control minds being weak (which it was; VERY weak).]] Moran himself popped in a couple of times, just to eyeball the place and me to make sure everything was truly fine. He never talked to me and ignored my questions to him. I was unable to see anything in all my sight blob searching that gave me any clue why nothing was happening or what was intended for me. My guess was that Moran was having the facts from my last interrogation confirmed before bothering to have another one. In which case, I just had to keep sitting on my ass. The facts would check out pretty well. Not perfectly, as I'd had sex with thirty six girls by now, but my being the only guy on the planet to understate the number of his conquests was hardly justification for keeping me locked up indefinitely. Sooner or later, and it definitely SHOULD be sooner, they'd let me go. Late Thursday night, Moran came into the jail, telling the guard and me that he was letting me go. It was difficult for me to bite back the many bitter comments I wanted to make, and it was doubtless best to wait until I was free before I started swearing and ranting. I was removed from the cell, handcuffed again, then Moran took my wallet, cellphone, etc., out of his jacket pocket and put them into one of mine. I caught a quick look at my wallet, and it looked as full of money as it'd been before (about $2,500 worth), so DHS agents are apparently hardworking and honest moronic assholes. He took my arm and steered me to the elevator, up to the ground level, then out the front door. He pushed my arm to direct me down the street. It was very dark and quiet, the streets virtually empty of traffic. I was puzzled why he hadn't simply let me go at the front door, but I wasn't going to risk saying anything unless he took me back inside. We walked several dozen yards down the street, and were approaching a parked SUV, when four guys got out of it and stood waiting for us to arrive. #6: #1: #7: #3: My walking speed slowed. Moran's grip on my arm changed. I expected him to push me to move faster, but instead he pulled me to a stop about ten yards short of the waiting group. He moved behind me and started removing my handcuffs. That was the good news. The bad news was that the three waiting goons spread out left and right a couple of yards. The center goon pulled out a pair of cuffs, and the flanking two put their hands on the butts of their guns, looking at me intently. I asked, "Who are you guys?" "DHS," said the little guy, who was visible in the gap between two of the goons. "Show me some ID." "Shut up!" demanded Moran, stopping the little guy who'd already started complying. The aborted showing of ID wasn't proof, but it was an indication that they were DHS. That plus the dark SUV, their suits, body types, their having handcuffs and guns, and the situation, all added up to their almost certainly being DHS. What was more of a mystery was what the hell was going on. The new group was standing ten yards away from me, and Moran had removed my handcuffs and was about to push me in their direction. He wasn't going to push hard enough to propel me thirty feet, so I'd easily be able to stop myself reaching the new goons. Admittedly two of them were on the verge of drawing their weapons and it'd be very difficult for a person to get away in these circumstances, but it was still an extremely weird way to pass me onto someone else. I was also confused why Moran had said back in the jail that he was "letting me go", because that wasn't what was happening. As his ki had indicated, Moran gave me a moderate push on my back. I didn't resist it, so it sent me a couple of steps away. I stopped and asked the new group, "Wh... ," "Shut the fuck up!" demanded the goon with the handcuffs. "Come here NOW!" That wouldn't have been my choice. I wanted to pull out my cellphone and order a taxi, but I couldn't see them letting that happen. The four new guys were all highly alert and tense, acting as if this was a dangerous situation, so Moran's releasing me and walking away casually made no sense. My certainty that they wouldn't wait patiently until a taxi came for me increased even further when the middle goon told the one to his left, "Shoot him in the thigh." The left goon started drawing his weapon. I could think of several choices: Start a small war. Actually a big war, as every cop and DHS agent in America would be after my ass. It'd turn into whatever the level above "clusterfuck" was. Run away without attacking them. I wouldn't get far. Stay where I was while I asked them to explain what was going on and what was going to happen to me. Even when they hadn't been about to shoot me, every DHS agent I have ever met has had in common a total unwillingness to answer my questions. I'd be better off running, if only to put them to the bother of shooting a moving target. Advance toward them the way they clearly wanted me to. The first two options weren't options at all. I very much wanted the version of the third option where they answered all my questions before I had to decide whether to put myself back in their hands, but I knew there was no possibility of them answering me, and there was a real possibility of their shooting me if I didn't walk forward. #3: #8: #All: I walked forward, wishing I knew what the fuck was going on with this strange handover, and everything else too. The potential thigh-shooter returned his gun to his holster as I advanced, but kept his hand on it. All of them stayed alert and cautious, looking like they expected trouble. When I was within range of the central guy, he grabbed me, spun me around and pushed me against the SUV, then cuffed me. The contents of my pockets were removed again, the SUVs rear door opened and I was ordered, "Get in the car." "Whe ... oof." I'd proximity sensed the gut-punch coming, so the "oof" was mostly theatrics. It hadn't been a hard punch, merely the DHS's version of insisting that I keep quiet. They appeared unwilling to participate in polite conversation. We mounted up without any talking. The head goon drove, the non-agent looking guy took the front passenger seat and two other goons sat to either side of me. We drove until we reached a small airport. I'd have preferred to get onto the highway heading south, but maybe they were going to fly me home. Nothing they were doing made sense, so it was damned hard to predict what it meant. We drove up to a private jet, quite similar in size to the one I'd rented for the Rodeo Drive trip, where I'd be very happy to go now. I was taken up the stairs and into the plane. All of us went, leaving the SUV on the edge of the tarmac, which made me momentarily curious about what would happen to it after we left. That wasn't my biggest concern though. [[Funnily enough, my families ended up owning it, but that's a long story (this one, as it happens).]] The inside of the plane wasn't as luxurious as the one I'd rented. This one had no bed and the seats were smaller. I was sat down in the fourth row, window seat, and buckled in. Goons sat around me. The pilot finished pulling up the stairs and closing the door, then he headed to the cockpit. That gave me an idea, so I bowed my head, closed my eyes and sent a sight blob into the cockpit. I easily found what I was looking for: a clipboard containing a flight plan. It was from Portland to Washington D.C. I wanted to go eighty miles south, but apparently the plane was going over two thousand miles east. I was sure that if I tried to speak, all I'd get out would be another "oof", I was handcuffed, belted into an airline seat and surrounded by armed goons. So it looked like I was going to Washington D.C., probably to the DHS's head office, I guessed. If I was right about that, it seemed I hadn't done a very good job of convincing Moran of my innocence, although I was starting to fear that "innocence" might not be the issue anymore. It was possible that the flight plan didn't apply to the flight we were about to make, so I mentally crossed my fingers and waited to see what happened when we took off. If we were flying to Corvallis, it'd barely be worthwhile raising the plane's wheels after takeoff before they'd have to be lowered again for landing, so I'd soon find out. I could send a sight blob outside the plane too; that'd give a very good view (the window covers were all down, so my real eyes had no direct view). I was wondering how my sight blob would be able to tell which direction the plane was flying in, especially with it being late at night, when I realized that it was a pretty safe bet that the cockpit would have a compass. I waited until we'd taken off and had turned into what seemed to be our long-term heading, then I pretended to try to sleep. We were heading east. One of the ideas that crossed my mind was leaping out of the plane. I weighed about 180 pounds and my eight-mind maximum NP force was just over 160 pounds. With my clothes I'd be about 25 pounds too heavy. I had a big surface area if I spread out flat, so chances are my terminal velocity wouldn't be very high. On the other hand, belly flopping into the ground at even just 20 or 30 mph didn't sound like fun. In another three months my maximum force would be 180 pounds, and I might've been tempted to blind everyone including the pilot and leap out. With any luck they'd think my body had been destroyed in the crash. I knew there were far too many major problems with that idea, but it was impossible not to think about it for a few seconds. I'll just have to wait and see what happened. Another thought that occurred was to use my NP to crash the plane on landing bad enough that several of us would have to be hospitalized. Hopefully my identity would get out and I might be rescued. I was almost hopeful about that idea, because I could immediately think of several ways that I could cause a crash, but then I realized that the Government's ability to control the emergency services was too high, so word of my identity was very unlikely to leak. And even if I somehow did get released, the DHS could pick me up again whenever they wanted. I was curious to try, so I sent a sight blob outside the plane. We were flying at 415 knots. I didn't know the knot-to-mph conversation factor, but I'd heard somewhere that the number was somewhat higher in miles per hour. It didn't really matter, so call it 450 mph. The sight blob in formation with the plane, just outside my window, flying through the air at something like 450 mph, and it might as well have been inside the plane for all the effect I could feel. If that didn't prove sight blobs had no wind resistance, nothing did. I was tempted to create an NP-fingertip out there, but I already knew it'd be instantly blown backward. I was pretty sure nothing bad would happen, but I'd rather not risk it, especially since I needed to keep my wits about me. It did give me the idea of creating some sort of malfunction to force the plane to land, but that didn't gain me anything because I wasn't looking for an escape opportunity. I had to let this play out until: (1) They eventually pull their heads out of their asses and let me go, or (2) They are forced to let me go, or (3) They try to do something so bad that my escaping and being on the run for the rest of my life was actually the better choice. Surely the first two possibilities had to be FAR more likely than the third. One thing I did do was search everyone in the plane by sight blob. The Little Guy, who appeared to be the boss, although he was hardly authoritative, had the name of Kyler Wright. He was sitting in the front row working on papers out of his briefcase. I learned that he was a boss in a DHS science development place, which was VERY bad news! Judging by the wide range of projects that he had paperwork for, he was a big boss. There were reports on human biometrics sensors, explosives sniffers, and a satellite communications device which bizarrely came with a battery that could be removed and tossed to explode like a grenade! That sounded stupid for several reasons, but what did I know. I got the captain's and copilot's names, as well as the registration number for the plane, for my next text message to the family lawyer. The goons' names were harder to discover, but I got a couple of them because they'd left their wallets in their jackets, which they'd hung up in a small closet. One of the wallets contained a very official looking DHS swipe card, and I was tempted to filch it by flying it into my clothes as I walked past the closet, but I didn't know how well I'd be searched when I arrived. It'd be best if they didn't find out how impossibly good I was at stealing things. Halfway through the flight I pretended to wake up, then quickly said before I was jabbed in the stomach, "I gotta pee." They let me, but they were so cautious about it you'd think my cock was a deadly weapon. I didn't really have to go. I'd asked because I wanted to get into the bathroom to drink my fill of water as I have a fear of being dehydrated to death. It's not a nice way to go, and it's scarily fast. Filling up with water also might help diminish the very strong hunger pangs I had. They made me do my business with the door open so one of them could guard me, redoubling my lack of interest in working for the DHS. I wondered if the goon's wife would ask him what he did at work today. I forced myself to pee, zipped up, then turned to the sink and started the faucet running, hoping to get some drinks under cover of washing my hands and face. It wasn't to be; the goon pulled me out. "I haven't washed..." "Shut up!" #4: I was re-handcuffed, marched back to my seat and strapped in. I pretended to sleep for the rest of the trip. Shortly after the descent started, a goon woke me up and put one of those masks on me that people use on planes to help them sleep. Since he thought he'd woken me up to put it on, I guessed it was intended as a blindfold. As usual, that was good news and bad news (bad they had things they didn't want me to see, good that I'd probably get a chance to tell someone what I saw). It was completely ineffectual of course, so the DHS were maintaining their usual standard. I made a mental note to walk scared and clumsy, like a newly blinded person would. The night was clear enough that my external sight blob showed Washington D.C. under us as we came in to land. When the door opened, it was COLD. Thank goodness I'd been well dressed when I'd been asked to help the DHS with their inquiries. They virtually carried me down the stairs; I was blind and handcuffed, so pretending to be scared to take even small steps, let alone walk down tricky stairs. Another of the ubiquitous black SUVs was waiting for us. We piled in (in my case, I was piled in), and drove off. My blindfold was still on, but I studied the route anyway. Washington D.C. in winter is the PITS! Only idiots would want to live in this climate, or maybe I was angry and biased. [[Far fewer people are living there at the time I'm writing this, as you'll read later.]] We drove to another DHS building, its signage declaring it to be: "Department of Homeland Security. Sciences & Technology Directorate". I couldn't work out why "Sciences" was plural but "Technology" singular, which pleased me since I NEVER want to think like a DHS person! "Science & Technology" was easily better than what they were using because it was much easier to say and its meaning was better. Or - and I know I'm being very radical here - perhaps "Research & Development" might've fit the bill? Nah, not nearly pretentious enough. I was pulled out of the SUV, guided inside the building, into an elevator, up two levels to a floor labeled, "Human Factors Division", one of several Divisions I'd seen named on the directory board on the ground floor. I was led down a hallway of offices to the far end, into a small office, though its rear door, and into another office. That was my final destination, as there were no other doors and it'd clearly been recently set up to be an impromptu jail cell. It had sheets of wood nailed over the external and internal windows, and smaller squares over the power outlets. There were marks on the carpet where a desk and several other pieces of furniture had recently been removed. There was an airbed on the floor with a pillow, sheets and blankets beside it. And the biggest giveaway of all, a metal rail bolted to the wall opposite the door, with a heavy chain attached to it. I was moved near the rail, made to stand still while one of the goons wrapped the chain around my ankle a couple of times, padlocked it in place, handing the key to Kyler Wright, who put it in his pocket. I'd memorized what the key looked like so I'd know it when I saw it again, and I'd make DAMNED sure I followed Wright when he left the room, to find out where the key went. I'd learned that lesson. I was in what must have been an important person's office, because it was in a corner with two walls of exterior view, if not for the ad hoc window coverings, and he'd had what I guessed was a private secretary/receptionist in the previous room. A quick sight blob check showed me that there were several normally furnished offices around this one. One of the amateur jailers removed my blindfold. I blinked and appeared confused, asking, "Where am I?" They'd be upset if they were aware that I already knew the address. I'd been watching street signs on the way, the street number had been written on the building's exterior sign, and I'd already seen letterhead that confirmed it. "No talking!" demanded Wright. "That's an important rule. You will ONLY talk to answer questions. You'll be punished if you talk at any other time." I couldn't imagine Wright being an effective jailer, but withholding food would be easy for anyone to do. In the rapid sight blob scouting I'd done while walking here, I'd spotted the staff bathroom and kitchen, in separate rooms for a nice change. There was no bedpan in my room, so I'd presumably be escorted back and forth to the real thing. That was half the floor away, which wasn't very secure of them, not that I intended to escape unless things turned dramatically for the worse; I'm just commenting on their amateurishness. I made my stomach rumble loudly. They looked maybe ashamed or sympathetic (something like that anyway), so I took a risk by saying, "No food LONG time." The in-flight meal service had been less than I'd wished. Wright told one of the goons, "Check the kitchen." "Where is it?" #3: #4: The building didn't have a basement, but that was beside the point. Wright nearly answered, then looked at me suspiciously, clearly not wanting me to know where the kitchen was. God knows why - amateurs! He said, "Never mind. I'll do it." #6: #7: "I miss my mother and father VERY much. When will you let me go home?" Wright looked a LITTLE bit ashamed, but not enough to stop him saying, "NO TALKING! Sit down and shut up." I did as ordered, regretting that I hadn't asked for water first. Soon things were settled down for the long haul. All but one of the goons had left, the last goon had locked the door to my room with the sliding bolt they'd screwed to the outside, and planted himself in the private secretary's chair in the next room. The key-carrying Wright had walked to the kitchen and was making me a pot of instant noodles, which happily meant plenty of water and no cheese. Wright came back, the goon took the noodles and plastic fork from him, looked through a hole they'd drilled in the door, unlocked it and walked into the room. He kept his eye on me as he put the food on the floor out of my current reach, but where the chain would let me get to. I could cover about half the room, making it safe for people to come in and out. I waited until he backed off then quickly got the food and started eating it head down, so I could immediately restart the sight blob to keep an eye on my key. Wright waited until the goon had locked the door, then gave him the key, waved goodbye and left the room. The goon threw the key in the desk's top drawer, then started looking through the drawers himself, presumably to find something to occupy himself with. Getting out of here would be comparatively easy. Ignoring the noise issue - which meant assuming I knock out the guard - I could unlock the door with NP and fly the padlock key to me. I could either pull the wood off the windows and smash my way out, using a rope made of sheets and blankets to let myself down. Or even easier, walk out the front door, as there were no security guards in the building. Our SUV had been waved through security at the front gate, but that was all. [There were roving security patrols too, which I noticed later, but with my sight blobs I'd have no trouble dodging them.] This building was in a complex of other buildings, all of which were surrounded by a high wall. Getting over the wall could be tricky, but with NP's help I could probably pole vault it, or distract the front gate's guards so I could slip out, or sneak into the trunk of a departing car, or something. There were plenty of possibilities should I need make a break for it. This level was empty of people, just me and the goon, so if I knocked him out and chained him up one evening, then I'd probably have nearly twelve hours headstart. That's assuming this place operates like a normal office. My presence might change their normal routine, but guessing about that was too hard because I didn't know what they thought they were doing with me. Dropping the escape thoughts, we could live here comfortably. The kitchen had packages of cookies, instant noodles, soup, milk and water, all of which should be easy to smuggle into my room. I'd fly whatever I wanted somewhere handy, so when I went to the bathroom - the guard presumably leaving my door unlocked behind us - I'd fly the stuff into my room as we walked down the hallway, hiding it under the blankets. It'd be a little tricky to walk and have a sight blob operating elsewhere, but it'd only be for a few seconds of straight-line walking. Alternatively, with only one guard it wouldn't be hard to get the food to fly under my clothes as we walked. Because the kitchen was open to everyone, I should be able to steal a lot of food without anyone worrying about it. Flying food around made me worry about security cameras, so that was the next thing I checked for. Oops, there was one in my room, behind an air-conditioning vent in the opposite wall. It had a microphone too, for what that was worth. I followed the cables, and it was connected to a PC in the next room. Presumably that meant any number of people could be watching me now. Bugger! I could easily disable it, but I should save that for if I needed to escape. It also meant my headstart probably wouldn't even be twelve minutes, unless I dressed the goon in my jacket and put him unconscious in my bed. That might fool the viewers when video camera reception came back on, although there were still problems. I'd worry about them later. I didn't find any other cameras, but I did find a dozen people including Wright and one of the missing goons gathered around a computer monitor in an open-plan area at the far end of the floor. They were watching me. I actually felt a momentary temptation to wave at them, until I realized it was stupid, pointless and self-destructive. They were talking among themselves, and I cursed my inability to listen remotely. A sound blob would be VERY useful! When we'd entered this floor, I'd very quickly run a sight blob all through it, and there'd been no one here then. Not even any lights on, like there were at the far end now. (I'd been blindfolded and guided, so using the sight blob when I was walking meant I didn't even have to pretend to be blind to fool my guides/captors). They'd deliberately given me the impression that I was being left alone, as I would expect so early in the morning, so they were more subtle than I'd initially given them credit for. Just as well I hadn't flown anything around. Now that I knew I had an audience, it'd be a good idea to play to it, so I started crying. With the control I have over my body, suppressing nervousness for example, I wasn't at all surprised to find that I could order my body to cry very convincingly. Two-thirds of the audience were women, and I could see that my crying clearly affected several of them. I made sure I memorized which were the most affected, and which weren't. #4: #3: My ability to multitask so well meant I had no trouble continuing to cry pathetically while using another mind to carry out a diligent search. Two minutes later I was typing in another text message, "Mark Anderson at DHS, Sciences & Tech, Human Factors Div, [the address], Washington DC. Level 3, SE corner. Kyler Wright, ID#[his ID#] in charge. Arrived 15 min ago. Flown by pilots" [their names], "in plane" [its tail number] "DNCB-do not call back." My first phone had permitted messages up to 160 characters only, which it indicated by counting down from 160 as each character was entered. The phone of mine that Wright was holding for me counted down from 320. This phone counted up, but seemed to have no limit, so I'd kept typing in more stuff. Before I hit "Send", I stopped to think of what else I could add. I was annoyed by not getting any feedback, so I added, "My NEXT msg will permit you TBII (TEXT back if IMMEDIATE. If <1 min your ph get my msg). THEN answer how many msgs you get from me? Msgs useful? Something from MA family prove contact & trust (careful they bugged)? When can get MA out? MA the only prisoner? Other news?" I specified that he should answer NEXT time because I didn't expect him to be awake at this hour, and even if he was, he'd need time to prepare an answer. This place had poor security, so I should easily be able to send him another message at a better time, and he should be ready to answer immediately. I was also careful not to reveal that I was the message author in case the baddies got a copy of the messages somehow. I sent it to the lawyer. It'd been a long message and I was a little worried, but it seemed to send fine. I checked to make sure the audience was still watching me cry. They were, and there was no one heading to this office, so next I checked the phone's history. It showed that my long message had been broken down and sent in multiples of 160 characters, so that was one less worry. I cleared everything that needed clearing. I held the phone for another minute to make sure the lawyer didn't try to call or message back. He didn't, so I returned the phone to its original position. I resumed searching the rest of the floor for cameras, finding none. I decided not to touch any of the computers yet. I'd collect passwords by watching people when they arrived at work and logged in; presuming they used passwords. I'd spend the day watching the computers being used so I was familiar with their system, and then I'd probably do my own research. It looked like I'd be here for some time, so I wasn't in a hurry. I had a look at the other floors. From the information board by the elevators downstairs, some Divisions had more than one floor, but they each had at least one to themselves. The Divisions were (in decreasing order of interest to me): "Explosives", "Chemical/Biological", "Command, Control & Interoperability", "Borders & Maritime Security", "Human Factors", and "Infrastructure & Geophysical". Plus the top floor was labeled for "Directors", but it was several levels too high for me to snoop around. I was particularly looking forward to snooping around the Explosives Division floor, but I quickly found that no one in this building, on the floors that I could see into, did any real work as it was all administrative. That meant I wouldn't get my NP-hands on any explosives. Pity, as they would've made for a hell of a good distraction, and been fun too. I'd cried long enough now, so I lay on my bed, threw some blankets over me, and pretended to try to get to sleep, sobbing only occasionally. I was hoping my audience would start working, and I'd get to see the passwords of the people most interested in me. Instead they sat around talking, making me curse my lack of sound blobs again. That remained the case until other people started arriving from about 6:30am onward, causing my audience to log out of the PC they were using then relocate to a meeting room. One of them grabbed a marker pen and started writing on the white board. The heading was, "MIND CONTROL IDEAS". #3: #4: #8: I discussed plans for busting out for a while, including whether or not I should kill everyone, anyone or no one. There were pros and cons in each case. My planning got derailed when it became apparent from their writing ideas for how to verify it, that they suspected I controlled other people. #1: #5: #3: Three good things happened: They listed all their ideas. It became apparent that they weren't sure whether we had the ability or not, because their notes talked about determining that. But if we did have it, they were sure it was weak, because the experiments they were suggesting were all pretty subtle. Their ideas were all about giving me an incentive to get someone to do something. The person controlling my food was the most obvious path, but there were other ideas, for example to give me the idea that the person who controlled the food would listen to someone else, and then to see whether I tried to influence that person. My freedom was another possible reward. Not total freedom, but small relaxations of my confinement (I would certainly welcome getting access to a shower). Similarly with luxury items (e.g., TV and being allocated time to watch it). I was actually very impressed by their having no trouble inventing several very clever games, including some very subtle trading games, where influencing my trading partner would show up. There was a LOT of talk and notes about creating a second prisoner, because then they could do some very clever things. I was surprised how seriously they were taking that. Who on Earth would be so devoted to their job that they'd agree to be chained to it for what was starting to look like several weeks? One of the issues that became clear was that they expected that I might have more power when I was with more people at the same time. That seemed backward to me, as surely more people would spread my supposed power thinner, but they invented ways to test for that too (e.g., they'd get people to rate my handsomeness after visiting with me in groups of 2, 4, 8). They wrote, "Double blind, need many volunteers" alongside that. They seemed to think that'd be no trouble, which I thought was weird. They were illegally imprisoning a 16-year old boy, so surely they'd be cautious about getting "many volunteers" to visit me, but apparently not. ^ [[As it happened, they did maintain some caution by keeping the number of people who knew about me to a reasonable minimum, but it would've been easy for them to get hundreds of volunteers from the buildings around theirs, and with very little risk. Human Factors was known for performing psychological experiments, so setting up a fake prison and getting people to talk with the prisoner wouldn't have caused any suspicion at all. Let me quote one description of what the Human Factors Division does: "Plies the social and behavioral sciences to improve detection, analysis, and understanding of threats posed by individuals, groups, and radical movements; to support the preparedness, response and recovery of communities impacted by catastrophic events; and to advance national security by integrating human factors into homeland security technologies." They could easily tell volunteers meeting me that I was part of an experiment. That they asked the subjects to rate my handsomeness afterward would confirm that it was a psychological experiment (which it would be, just not the one the volunteers would think). It wouldn't matter what I told the people who visited me - even if I ranted and raved about been taken prisoner - as they'd all assume I was an actor playing a role for the experiment. I didn't know this stuff at the time, but it does provide a good example of the type of thinking that was going on in the meeting room. I can't resist mentioning this: To repeat an extract from the above quote: "understand threats posed by individuals, groups, and radical movements." What are the "radical movements" referred to? Not people, because people are already completely encompassed by the preceding "individuals and groups". What non-people radical movements could be considered a threat? The only possibility I can think of is radical bowel movements. If the DHS is so interested in radical bowel movements, no wonder it hires so many assholes and builds toilets inside kitchens.]] ^ The meeting broke up after another hour. The contents of the white board were emailed to Wright, which was a cool piece of technology. I wished the teachers' notes at school could be emailed to everyone in the class as it'd save a lot of frantic scribbling. Then it was wiped clean. The guard came to join the one in the front office. One woman went to the office next to mine, the one the camera's cables ran into. Another to the office where I'd found the phone to text my lawyer. Wright went into the elevator and up to the top floor, and to my surprise, everyone else left the building together, walking toward one of the others. #5: #All: ------- Chapter 288: Life in the S&T Office Friday, January 27 to Saturday, February 4, 2006 We played games for the next several days. They designed the games, discussed and executed them; while I played my game of not letting them know I was playing games with their games. Sight blobs are WONDERFUL things, especially when helped by their having lax security, because I was able to keep up with their plans via their computer system. I resisted the temptation to email anything to anyone (for example, my entire DHS file to Maureen in the Math office at OSU, to my lawyer, or to a newspaper). It would leave a trail that I had no way of getting rid of. The finger would be pointed at the person whose password I used, but it was still too much of a worry, especially as I didn't think it'd help and things weren't that urgent now. For example, when they brought strange people in to talk with me, I played my game by telling them I was a prisoner, that I missed my family, etc. I did that even though I knew it was useless, because by the time I met strangers, I'd read enough of the scientists' notes to understand that whatever I said would be thought as part of the scenario. The only tactic I could think of get past that was to beg the strangers to call my parents and give them the phone number, and hope one of them did so. I tried that once, but got yelled down and physically stopped by the guard before I got even close to giving the full message. I was threatened with all sorts of dire consequences if I tried to pull that again. Those threats were delivered in front of the strangers; that's how confident they were that this would be seen as an experiment rather than something real. I was formally a "Special Project", with a completely bogus description that explained my being in a fake prison inside their building. Most of the people on this floor didn't even know I existed; the two guards in the front office were to keep them out as much as me in. They knew some sort of "Special Project" had taken over the offices, and they had no interest because there were always a lot of special projects going on. [[With the top leadership not setting clear directions, people worked on all sorts of stuff, a lot of which was silly, especially the "Special Projects" because that name just meant they didn't fit within an existing, authorized, project.]] The people working on me had their main jobs they worked on most of the time, with working on me being a whenever-they-could-fit-it-in activity. There was usually at least one or two of them around doing something or other with me because the scientists' routines were pretty loose. In addition to the games they played on me to try to uncover my mind control powers, there was also a never ending stream of normal psychological stuff: IQ tests, personality tests, and dozens of tests I had no idea what they were because they had names which gave me no clue. I suspected most of them had been named after the psychologists who'd invented them. In the most part I played those very straight. For the IQ test, for example, I knew they had my college transcripts so there was no point in using only one mind to take it. The only distortions I did were those that I thought would make me seem nicer and more worthy of being released (which didn't work). I also talked as much as I could ("PLEASE let me go home!"). That also achieved nothing, because if it had affected someone, they would have assumed it was mind control. The only noteworthy event during the first week was my texting my lawyer two evenings after my first Washington text. It took that long for me to get access to a cellphone for long enough at a time he'd be awake. I set the phone to vibrate only, then sent, "Mark Anderson unmoved. Subject of constant psychological experimentation. DHS file stresses terrorism risk but is fake excuse. Plan MA stay >2 wks. TBII, DNCB." I got an answer in twenty seconds: #msgs? 4 times Useful? Very Proof? Ava happy NP helping MA out? Hard/unknown/time MA only? Yes Other? Fighting 4 MA. Moran deny see MA. Keeping ur msgs secret unless u okay tell Stay strong. The answers were all much as I'd expected, except I hadn't had any specific expectation for the proof. I thought Julia's choice (I was sure it was hers), was an excellent one. It was even good if the DHS intercepted the message because they'd assume someone with the initials of NP was helping me. It was too risky to get into a back and forth exchange, so I just cleared everything, waited for a while to make sure no more messages were being sent, then put the phone back into ringing mode and left it. It looked like I was going to living here for quite a while. Fortunately, they were looking after me better than the DHS in Portland had. One of them brought me takeout for dinner every evening, I got a kind of shower: a large basin of water, soap and a washcloth placed in the bathroom for me to strip and wash myself with. I got another change of clothes too, and we rotated them every two or three days. Julia would be horrified by that inhumane treatment. Because of the camera on me, I couldn't steal any food. I might've gotten away with a few cookies as I walked past the kitchen, but these people were too smart to take risks with. Fortunately, they saw that I was eating everything, and the food portions trended larger, subject to what was happening in any food manipulation games. The meals were still significantly less than I wanted, so I was hungry all the time. I VERY much didn't want to tell them I had a strange metabolism, because that would immediately make them want to know why, and might start them on all sorts of biological testing. That had no possibility of helping me. I'd arrived here on a Friday morning, and things ticked along reasonably well until the following Friday (Feb 3) evening's dinner. The person delivering it stopped outside my door, put the dish down on the desk, took a small syringe out of his pocket, and injected both the dumplings with whatever was in the syringe. He capped and pocketed the syringe, then delivered my food to me. As if that wasn't scary enough, he was taking considerable care with the syringe, treating it as dangerous. I'd not read ANYTHING in any of the files about putting a drug into my food. I knew my way around the place very well by now, so I pretended to have a sneezing fit (I can fake sneezes easily) while I quickly found a usable screen, logged in and checked my file. It took about thirty seconds to confirm there was nothing in my file about this. I did a very quick search around the floor, and no one was watching the live feed of what I was doing (I wouldn't expect anyone to be at this time). That didn't mean people weren't doing it elsewhere though. I was stumped about what to do. What sort of drug was it? A sedative to put me to sleep? Why? Were they going to do experiments on my body while I was unconscious? How dangerous would they be? I had zero ability to defend myself while asleep, so that scared the hell out of me as I was, after all, being held by evil people. A 'drug' in the recreational sense? If I got high, God knows what I might do. Light blobs and objects flying all around the room would be terminally bad news. Poison? There'd been no hint in the files that my time was up. They still had several experiments in progress and had started a new one this morning. But maybe Wright had decided without telling anyone; my BBA studies had discussed the propensity of some bosses to make decisions without telling their staff. One of the first thoughts I had was that it might be yet another game. They pretty much had to play games to find proof that I had mind control power. There was no way of knowing though, and the food was in front of me right now. I couldn't think of a single drug that I'd be willing to take that they'd be likely to give me, but I could think of several I very definitely didn't want to take. That was a worry. I always eat everything they give me. I even eat it quickly and with relish to encourage them to give me more, so my not eating all of it now would be an extremely unlikely coincidence. Pretending to eat it and somehow NP'ing it out of my mouth would be tricky too. To date, I've always faced the camera when eating simply because it's most comfortable to sit on the floor and lean against the wall, so to turn around to eat facing the wall now would be very weird. Plus I had nowhere to hide the food after removing it from my mouth. Perhaps I could tuck it under a blanket, but if they found it there, it'd be difficult to explain how and why it'd gotten there. Plus if I did pretend to eat, how fast and what symptoms should I fake? Falling asleep, getting high, or dying in convulsive fits. The best possibility seemed to be to find an excuse not to eat it. I could have an emotional meltdown: crying and calling for my mommy and daddy. Or maybe I could get violently angry and throw my food across the room. I could pretend to be sick, even throwing up on demand (easy for me). What I finally decided to do was pretend to taste something unpleasant in the food. I knew some people had better senses of taste than others, so hopefully they'd think I had a particularly good one. I ate about a quarter of my meal with my usual speed and enthusiasm, then cut off a piece of a dumpling while I chewed the previous mouthful. As I was swallowing that, I was lifting my fork with the piece of dumpling. I opened my mouth and was just about put it in, when I stalled. I pulled it back then sniffed it suspiciously, making an expression consistent with "Yuck; I don't want to eat this." I looked around, as if searching for somewhere to put it. Not finding anywhere, I put it in a corner of the takeout tray, moving other food out of the way. I forked up the rest of that dumpling, smelled it, and found it just as bad; so that got put in the corner too. Then I lifted the uncut dumpling, smelled it, but appeared unsure. I lowered it to the tray, cut it in half, raised it again, and it evidently smelled much worse now. It joined the other dumpling in the corner. I smelled the fork tines, appeared worried, so finished the rest of the meal just using the plastic knife, smelling each portion before putting it in my mouth. I called out to the guards. When one opened the door I said, "If anyone else got food from that place, warn them the dumplings smell funny." He'd watched the injection being done, but he made no comment now, just taking my tray away. Now I had to decide what to do. If the syringe had contained poison, I needed to bust out of here asap. If it contained a teenager's drug of choice, then it was probably just another experiment. That'd be fine if they dropped it, but a worry if they kept trying. If it was a sedative so they could do something while I was asleep, they could find some other way of achieving that. How bad that was depended on what they were going to do with me. The trouble was that busting out of here would completely and utterly fuck up my entire life, for however short that turned out to be. I'd never be able to go home ever again, never be able to get a degree or a good job, and would always be living in fear of being discovered. Money was also an issue, as I'd foolishly buried money only in Oregon, rather than across the entire country. Actually, I wasn't too worried about money, as I can be a VERY good thief if I need to be. It'd take time and be somewhat of a risk, but it wasn't a major problem. I could probably live well as a professional thief, ideally stealing from bad people rather than Joe & Jane Public. I decided to wait and see. I wasn't in imminent danger. They had to pull back the bolt on my door before entering, so I'd get a second's warning. If the bolt opened and a sight blob showed five guys out there with guns drawn, then I was pretty sure I could handle them, especially because I could sit close enough to the door that I'd sense their intentions as soon as they opened the door. Chances are they'd want to take me somewhere else to do the deed anyway. Bottom line: I was worried, but whatever the danger was, it wasn't bad enough or imminent enough to force me to start the clusterfuck that an escape would cause. With my paranoia maxing out, I sight blob searched everywhere I could reach, looking for anyone reacting to my not eating the drugs, but I found nothing. I rechecked my file, again finding nothing useful. There were no groups of goons heading to this building, or no anything else. As far as I could tell, no one cared. Too late, I thought to wonder what the guard had done with my trash. I checked the trash can in the kitchen and couldn't see my container. Time passed without reaction. I calmed down, but continued studying the various escape options. I very frequently rechecked my guards and the floor I was on (which took about 5 seconds every thirty), but otherwise I studied the external guards' procedures, how cars moved around the place, where to get car keys from, etc. Making plans for how to get out of the complex if I was being actively pursued, or if I was able to be sneaky (the latter was far less dramatic). My powers gave me a very large number of possible actions, some of which would leave the DHS scratching their heads with puzzlement at my mysterious disappearance, others would leave bullet-riddled bodies all over the place. ^ [[What was the story with the drug? If I had consumed it, it would've made me sweat for about an hour. The drug was chosen for its effects being harmless and hard to fake, and also for its being colorless, odorless and tasteless (oops). After several days of trying to trick me into revealing my mind control ability, the scientists had gotten nowhere. There were two possible explanations: I had no mind control ability, or my mind was sneaker than they thought. They tested the latter possibility by doing some indirect tests, where the people around me thought the a test would unfold in a certain way and lead to a certain range of results, but other people (who stayed far away from me) manipulated the test procedures, making it a test within a test. Tests which several people around me knew about always failed, but tests that were not widely communicated (including being kept out of my file notes) got random results. A too simplistic metaphor would be as if the people near me held out a deck of cards and asked me to choose one, while they thought my picking a diamond would confirm I had mind control, while people far away thought clubs meant mind control. I was choosing everything but diamonds, so clubs came up a third of the time. As I said, "too simplistic", as the tests they were doing on me weren't dependent on random chance, but it should give you the idea. It was quite easy for them to create another layer of subtlety, which I failed to respond to. That led them to fear that I had the ability to read minds, and to moan, "No wonder we haven't been able to trick him into revealing a mind control power!" The "Injection Idea" (actually the drug just had to be taken orally, the syringe was just theater) had been conceived by a scientist who stayed away from me. He filled the syringe and gave it to the food deliverer, misleading him into thinking that the drug was dangerous, telling him, "Whatever you do, don't accidentally inject yourself or even get any of the liquid on your skin. That'd be very bad." The point of the game was to see whether I could read the mind or sense the emotions of the food deliverer. Maximizing the chance of that was why he'd been told to inject the food right outside my cell, rather than some distance away. After that experiment, the S&T people had four types of evidence about me: The results of all the earlier test games they'd run on me, all of which made me seem totally normal, but none of which were believed now. The recent subtle tests, which produced very significant proof that I was aware of their unsubtle games. Most recently, my refusal to eat the dumplings, that being the first time in the week I'd been here that I hadn't eaten every single crumb on my plate. A great deal of general psychological data about me (the IQ tests, etc.), some of which was pretty freaky, and therefore scary. Friday evening, Wright and some of the other senior scientists had a meeting in another building - well away from me! - to discuss what to do. They decided that I was too much for them to handle. They didn't have access to any medical research equipment, their areas of expertise weren't useful enough, they weren't set up to handle a prisoner, and they didn't have good security. They didn't feel physically threatened by me because despite the stories about my fighting skill, which had worried them initially, I'd been a complete pussy the whole time. But they did feel mentally threatened by me, and very uncomfortable about what might be happening inside their own minds, so they readily agreed that I needed to be researched much better than I was being now, and that I should be sent elsewhere for other people to do it. Wright had an additional issue. Moran had promised that there'd be no way of connecting me to Wright. But somehow a bunch of unpatriotic troublemakers (my families) had recently gotten hold of Moran's name and were making lots of noise about Moran coming clean about what had happened to me. The scary thing was that they were very definite that Moran was the person responsible, and they shouldn't have been able to know that. Moran had ordered me picked up from OSU's parking lot in a way that left no one knowing who had me. As far as my families should know, I'd simply disappeared. Because of the search warrants executed by the DHS a while ago, the DHS were an obvious possibility, but the Portland office simply refused to confirm or deny anything, stating, "We do not comment on individual investigations." Whatever they were asked, that was their response. It was also easy for Moran to get a couple of lowly agents to talk in a bar one evening, 'accidentally' being overheard by a reporter, about their theory that I'd been kidnapped for my roulette knowledge, probably by the missing Third Guy from my and Prof's previous kidnapping. That muddied the waters, and made it harder for anyone to bring a lot of pressure to bear on the DHS. Moran had even half-planned planting some false evidence that pointed to such a kidnapping, although he was reluctant to act on his plan as that would be illegal, while everything else he'd done was legal if I was suspected of involvement in terrorism. Moran had a large dossier with reports from several DHS agents that said as much, so Moran's ass was covered. Another way Moran had protected himself was by releasing me on the street just inside an area in the visual field of video surveillance from the DHS building. The tape showed him releasing me and walking off, while I'd hesitated then walked out of the frame, apparently under my own volition. Moran had told Wright how to approach the building and park to avoid appearing on the video. Moran would have preferred that the Portland DHS and especially his own name had never came up in connection to my disappearance, but it all too noisily had now. My parents had kept my texted knowledge secret for several days while waiting for my release, and then while pursuing legal steps, but after too long of getting nowhere, they'd decided to go public with the contents of my first text, that I'd been held in the first cell under the DHS's Portland office, with Robert Moran in charge. My family said that a friend of the family had been sent the information anonymously, they believed from an agent within the DHS who had a guilty conscience over the mistreatment of an innocent minor. The press had started hounding the DHS and Moran. Moran had assumed that in my absence, the 'mental influence' I'd used to make people cooperate with me would have faded. But now the press were reporting that the Dean of OSU was extolling how incredibly important I was, that I "could very easily become the greatest scientist the world has seen in over a hundred years", and that I was "a national asset of paramount importance", etc. The Oregon Board of Education and Mayor of Corvallis were singing similar praises, and the story had quickly gone national. He was very surprised and concerned by the magnitude of the clamor that resulted, and had been forced to admit that he'd had me in custody, but insisted that he'd already released me. His staff backed him up, as they believed Moran had released me. So did his bosses, because Moran showed them the videotape of my release. Moran was sticking to that story. It was, after all, true, as he had released me. When asked where I was now, his position was, "Maybe he was kidnapped by the Third Man again, or maybe our information that he was getting involved in financing terrorism is correct, and he's decided to go undercover with some terrorists. He was fine when I left him." Moran came in for some criticism for releasing a young boy into a city so late at night, which was an accusation that Moran welcomed, because he then released several extracts from the police records of my fights with the Eatons and in the bathroom at school, which immediately gave the public the impression that I was far from being the paragon of humanity that the press had previously been stating. A few careful leaks of some of the more salacious details of my sex-life to a couple of reporters got them onto the track of my sex-life, and the pressure starting easing on the DHS as the public perception of me changed. Clearly the American people weren't going to support anyone who had that much sex. Moran discreetly warned Wright to be careful in case the press became too intrusive, or the FBI started investigating my possible re-kidnapping, or something else inconvenient. Moran had acted within the law (within some defensible stretching of it anyway), but Wright's position was much more precarious. Having his role publicly exposed was NOT what Wright had signed up for, as that was the sort of thing that could ruin his career! If there's one thing the DHS knows how to do well (which is about the right number), it's to fight to maintain its unaccountability. The troublemakers hadn't gotten anywhere, and likely wouldn't, but Wright thought getting rid of me was an excellent idea, especially given the results of the very recent "Dumpling Test". So Wright was more than happy to agree with his staff's suggestion to send me somewhere else asap. Fortunately, from Wright's point of view, it was easy to do. There's a great deal of interagency communication between the DHS, CIA, FBI and other TLAs (Three Letter Agencies). Of all the DHS directorates, interagency communication is particularly common for Sciences & Technology, so Wright had dozens of possible contacts to choose from. The CIA seemed best. Not only were they among the most secretive, but they were used to dealing with bad people, so would be able to handle me. It was also where he and Moran had worked until they'd seen the opportunities the newly formed DHS offered them. Wright maintained regular contact with many of the CIA's senior level science managers. There was no shortage of them, so it was only a matter of Wright deciding which of them was the most paranoid, and calling him.]] ^ My Saturday morning's breakfast milk was laced with a quick-acting sedative. I had a few seconds' panicky realization that I'd been drugged, but I couldn't even get to my feet, let alone escape. A few seconds later my lights went out. ------- Chapter 289: Starting Life in a Truly Scary Lab Saturday, February 4 to Monday, February 6, 2006 There was good and bad news. The bad news was that I woke up feeling like shit, was naked, strapped immovably to a hospital bed, and was connected to all sorts of instrumentation. That was especially true of my head: some sort of flexible cap was strapped to my now bald skull, with metal pieces pressing against my skin in many places. The good news was that I woke up. I was in what appeared to be in a small, single-person hospital room, with several beeping and pinging machines on the wall beside and behind me. There were some strong hints that this wasn't a normal hospital room though: There was a large mirror running the length of one wall, EXACTLY like you see in ALL the cop shows. The door out of the room had no handle, only some sort of security sensor and keypad on the frame beside it. There were no: windows, TV, pictures, flowers, or anything else to cheer up a recovering patient. There was a camera mounted on the ceiling aimed down at me. I was SO strapped to the bed, it was ridiculous. I could barely wiggle a finger. This much strapping wasn't to stop a patient falling off the bed during his sleep, but to stop me attacking anyone with anything more than a viciously wiggled finger. It was not a pleasant first impression. #3: #1: #7: #3: #6: We had an intravenous drip going in, and a tube stuck into the end of our cock. #3: The rest of us went quiet, just 'sitting and watching'. When proximity came on, it confirmed that there was no one within six feet of me, something I hadn't been positive of before as a quiet person could've been sitting somewhere out of sight. Still could be, but it was less likely now, as there probably wasn't much of the room outside of my range, although I couldn't tell how far the room extended beyond the top of my head as I couldn't turn it to look behind me. It was strapped down and held immovable in what felt like a hard pillow with a hole in the middle. My head was too restrained for me to look back at the machines behind me, but I could see them in the mirror. At first glance they appeared to be turned off, but they were making noises, so I was puzzled. On further inspection of the mirror, I realized that the machines were operating normally, except that their displays were turned off. With all the machines attached to me, the baddies must know that I'd woken up, but no one appeared. That gave me plenty of time to look at what parts of the room I could see. The door looked like it needed a fingerprint. It probably wasn't an eyeball scanner since the device was at waist height. There was also a numeric keypad, which didn't worry me much because sight blobs would allow me to steal any number of passwords. The fingerprint was the tricky one. Maybe I could cut someone's finger off and use a heat blob to keep it warm (if the panel checked it was alive by detecting heat). I should've paid more attention during the Mission Impossible movies. After fifteen minutes, there was a click from the ceiling, then a male voice said, "State your name." I gasped, "Water." I didn't really need water, but in my experience it's a good idea to get as much water as possible when imprisoned. Also, I hated the idea of being questioned this way; I wanted to see someone. Obviously they wouldn't help me, but having the human contact still felt a whole lot better. I found out that "contact" was the last thing I needed, especially of the "hole" variety, because my cock was hit with an electric shock. Just for a second, and it wasn't a big shock, but it was a HELL of a surprise. The Voice gave me a couple of seconds to recover, then said, "Just so you know, it's adjustable," then he hit me with a shock that hurt twice as much for twice as long. "State your name." "Mark Steven Anderson." I very rarely bother with my middle name, but I was feeling VERY cooperative. "Address?" "I have NO idea!" #2: #1: #5: #1: #6: #1: #6: #1: "HOME address?" I told him. I soon found out that we weren't playing "Twenty Questions". We easily passed twenty, and even passed two hundred. It was question after question after question. Because I'd read my DHS file, I recognized that he was working his way through it. It was as if someone had highlighted every fact in the file, and he was checking them all off. His only care seemed to be that my verbal answers agreed with the file. For example, when he asked, "How much training did you do before the 10k race?" my deliberately testing answer of "A moderate amount" made him persist on the topic, until I'd confirmed that "moderate" meant "some, but not all that much," that being very close to what the file said. I was careful not to use the same words all the time, but very close wording was fine most of the time because people tend to use the same expressions. My file had a comment that I'd initially been reluctant to talk about my sex-life, so when we got to my having sex with Ava, instead of answering his question, I said, "Who are you? Where am I?..." I had some more questions, but they were cut off by electricity blasting into my cock again. I was ready for it, so it wasn't too bad, but it was still VERY definitely NOT fun! (I doubt you needed me to make the last point, but just in case some weird people are reading this.) While still being zapped, I created a sight blob and sent it straight through the mirror. The electricity must have been scrambling my brain, because I had a momentary thought that the blob might bounce off the mirror, which was so silly I almost laughed (blobs aren't themselves light, and even if they were, light must get through the glass or people in the OBSERVATION room wouldn't observe anything). The blob went straight through without any problem. As expected, there was a viewing room on the other side, just like in the cop shows. Surprisingly there was no one in it. Its lights were off, but there was plenty of light coming in from my room. I shot the sight blob straight through that room's door. I'd expected a hallway, as per the cop shows, but there was a large room. No people, but four desks, computers, and other stuff, including several medical pinging and beeping machines (I couldn't hear them, but I recognized the look of them and the information they displayed: "BP", "HR bpm", etc.) They were displaying live medical information, almost certainly mine, I assumed. I seemed healthy. There was a screen displaying what looked like an EEG, and the most recent couple of inches were a scrambled mess. It was nice to have that confirmed. It was settling down though. I noticed the time; it was 21:18. I had a very good idea, but it looked like I needed to wait another couple of seconds before I could do it. I'd send the sight blob back later. The room had three doors: to the viewing room that the blob had just come from, to my room, and one on the opposite wall. I sent the sight blob out the last one, finding a hallway this time. Through the door on the other side of the hallway was dark. I greatly increased the sight blob's size, enabling me to see a boring, unoccupied office. It zoomed left, parallel to the hallway, into another unoccupied office. I hadn't seen a single person yet, which was starting to seem weird. After a couple more empty offices, I crossed the hallway to be on the same side of it as my body, entering a room that was a clone of the big one outside my room. Its machinery was all turned off. It also had a viewing room and another 'hospital' room, cloning 'my' three rooms, except with one less person in them. I returned the sight blob to the EEG display outside my room. It seemed to have 'settled down', although that was a hard call as EEG readouts bounce around. I watched it for a second to make sure, then canceled the blob. I waited five seconds, then created a new sight blob and sent it to look at the EEG display. There was a very small spike at the time I'd created the sight blob. The spike was so small it almost failed to escape from the main line (call it a two or three pixel spike). There was no up or down spike at the place where the last sight blob had been canceled. And - MOST importantly - other than the tiny spike, the motion of the plotting line seemed the same whether or not I had a sight blob active. That was VERY good to know, because I wanted to do a great deal of sight blobbing. While still looking at the EEG display, we deliberately started a conversation with all of my minds, except the one that was centered and the one that was answering my interrogator's questions. The EEG got more active; not much, but enough to be a little worrying. I got the other minds to think hard (do math puzzles) and the EEG got very busy. I quickly stopped them. That was bad news. Not so much because my doing a lot of heavy thinking showed up, but because even the level of non-puzzle thinking that I normally do was probably producing an EEG trace considerably higher than a normal person's. Over the speaker I heard a new voice say, "Som..." {click}, as the microphone was turned off. My guess was that someone else was monitoring my EEG, and they'd said, "Something just happened," or similar. That would've made me scared and cautious, except that I already was. I wanted to do one more test though, and it was probably better to do it now when erratic EEGs might be put down to the effects of the sedative, panic at my situation, or delayed reactions to the electric shocks. I uncentered, waited five seconds, recentered, waited another five seconds, then created a sight blob and went to have a look. There was a noticeable difference between the centered and uncentered areas of the display. I can't easily describe the difference because the waveforms were too complex, but it only required an instant's look to see that they were different. That wasn't good. That meant my EEG was looking noticeably different from normal people's just from my being centered. Whether or not operating a sight blob had an effect didn't matter now, because I had to be centered to have a sight blob in the first place. I had to make a choice about being permanently centered, permanently uncentered, or mixing it up. Remaining permanently centered was the obvious best choice, because I was very definitely in major danger, much more so than at my last ad hoc prison. I told the rest of my minds to stop trying to be internally quiet. I needed all the help I could get, and my EEG results were doubtless already so weird that a little more weirdness wouldn't matter. The game of "Twenty - going on Two Thousand - Questions" resumed, but that just required one of my minds. One stayed on centering duty, and the rest of us worried a lot. Further thought, over the next several minutes, led me to a number of conclusions. First, that from the EEG and recent history with the DHS, this was probably a ramped-up study of my alleged mind control powers. Second, that although my having mind control was bizarre nonsense, my situation certainly wasn't nonsense. This was a SERIOUS operation, and whoever the bosses were, they weren't playing around like the last bunch had been. I could only imagine three ways I was going to get out of here: Whoever was holding me decided to release me. What was being done to me had to be illegal as hell (kidnapping, experimenting on an unwilling minor, electric shocks to my cock, drugging me), so even if they decided I had no mind control powers, I feared they'd not release me voluntarily. Given the other interesting things about my body, such as the unusual EEG outputs it produced, the chance of their releasing me had to be very low indeed. From Portland, to Washington D.C., to wherever I was now, the previous bosses had been utterly amoral, and my cock and the rest of me had a feeling that whoever the boss was now, he was probably the worst of all. The family lawyer exerted enough pressure to get me out. EVERYTHING I'd heard about the War On Terror (which was the excuse my file was full of) made me believe that once you were 'captured' by the Government, you were fucked. If you were guilty they kept you locked up because you were evil, or if you were innocent they kept you locked up because releasing you would make them look bad. It was obvious that many of the people sent to Gitmo were either innocent, or were guilty of only small things, but they'd lost - and some were still losing - YEARS of their lives without being convicted of anything. Compared to me, they were lucky! My plight wasn't going to get a thousandth of the attention of the Gitmo prisoners', despite my families' best efforts. Not that it really mattered, as I'd never noticed that media attention had ever got any alleged terrorist released, so that avenue was probably closed too. [[Actually, the Dean's involvement added great credibility to my importance, resulting in a surprising and still growing amount of media attention to my disappearance. The amount certainly surprised Moran, as he'd expected little, and had even thought that the people I'd mentally controlled would get angry with me after I was removed for a few days, as my influence wore off.]] I escape. I wanted to think that keeping my special nature secret as much as possible increased my chance of getting out under the first two possibilities, either through my captors deciding I wasn't worth keeping, or it'd give my family more time in which to force my release. As highly doubtful as those possibilities were looking now, they were still worth hoping for. The longer nothing happened - especially not my making a dramatic escape - the better for those two chances. However, "Get Out Of Here" Option #3 seemed the only one that had a decent chance of success. One major problem - that had existed from the moment the DHS had picked me up - was that escaping would destroy my chance of having a life with my loved ones. I'd have to be on the lam for the rest of my life, especially if my escape left evidence or witnesses to my having special abilities. I didn't need to try to make a run for it immediately, but doing so eventually seemed the most likely outcome, because the longer I took to escape, the more they would learn about me, which would reduce their willingness to let me go. That was good in one respect, as their apparently wanting to research me meant I had some time to work with. Escaping would ruin my life so badly that it was an option of last resort, even at the cost of staying here longer and letting them run experiments on me. I had wanted to keep my differences secret so I wouldn't be captured like this, but now that I was, it didn't really matter if they got fascinating results from dozens of different tests. I would choose to stay here for years if doing so still gave me a chance of resuming my life with my loved ones. But there was the issue that if they found out enough about me, they might tighten their security in ways that made it even harder for me to escape, but I didn't think it likely that they'd find out that sort of information for a long time, as it was very hard to imagine how they could test for my NP and sight blob abilities. Nor was I too worried about being experimented on, or even tortured, because I could turn the pain way down and I'd "been there, done that", so it had less fear for me now. Just so long as the torture didn't damage my body so much that it became impossible for me to escape. Surely that level of damage was unlikely. VERY unfortunately, there was one consideration that outweighed EVERY other issue: among all the weird shit they could learn about me, there was the BIG, civilization-destroying secret. Everything else they could learn from studying me would never lead them to that. They could analyze my body down to the atomic level, and "The Big Secret" would still never occur to them. But sooner or later it would come out, probably by their using a truth drug or something else that removed my inhibitions and judgment. The Big Secret could NEVER be divulged, and it ESPECIALLY couldn't be divulged to the criminal, power-mad, asshole members of the Government's secret services (presuming those are the hands I'm in now, or that the results were being reported to them in the event they'd sent me overseas to be worked on, as there's been several reports of the Government doing). If they learned about merging, they would abuse that knowledge horrendously. Imagine patriotic DHS-type assholes after they'd merged enough times to be super-assassins, able to fly anywhere in the world under their own power, able to kill anybody (even inside buildings and surrounded by bodyguards) without leaving any evidence behind, able to be super-spies using sight blobs to dig up dirt on all their opponents to use it to publicly destroy them, etc. They were power-mad already, but with the powers of a few merges, it wasn't hard to imagine a group of them taking over the world. The key determinant of how fast I had to act, was how long it'd be before they used a drug on me that removed my don't-tell inhibition over the Big Secret. One minor hope I had was that those drugs can't be very good, or they'd be commonly used. Criminal trials would work FAR faster and more accurately if such drugs were reliable and safe. Or after a conviction, a prisoner could voluntarily ask for such a drug as a way of clearing his name. Not to mention using it in job interviews, marriage counseling sessions, and with used-car salesmen. There had to be serious problems with those drugs, so I guessed the current baddies wouldn't be quick to use them on me, especially because it was my mind they were presumably interested in, so hopefully they'd be slow to risk having drugs screw it up. I probably had some breathing room, but "probably" is not a very reassuring word when the consequences of getting it wrong include trillions(?) of deaths and the collapses or power-mad abuses of God knows how many Earths' civilizations. If I wasn't ready to try to escape by the time they came at me with a syringe and a tape recorder, then I'd have to choose "Get Out Of Here" Option #4, order my body to self-destruct in the most thorough way(s) possible (I was in a hospital type set up, so just stopping my heart probably wouldn't be enough). All things considered, I'd better quickly find a way to escape. I didn't have to use it right away, not while I could hold out hope of being rescued or released, but I had to be ready to escape if they came at me with a marijuana cigarette or something else that threatened to destroy human civilization. Researching an escape meant I'd be using my special abilities and thinking more, which theoretically reduced the chance of their letting me go, but I was pretty sure the chance of that was "fuck all" already. Planning my escape had to take priority over staying low key, as the boat had almost certainly already sailed on that strategy. [Amusingly, it took several hours for one of my minds to think of "Get Out Of Here" Option #5: coming clean by telling my 'owners' what I could do and offering to work for them. It took me considerably less than several hours to reject the idea.] I thought of another experiment I wanted to perform: I sent the sight blob to look at the EEG display, then I created an NP-fingertip. It created a tiny spike, just like creating the sight blob did. Then I created two NP-fingertips at the same time, which produced a spike slightly larger than before. I made two mental notes: keep my creations active rather than canceling and recreating them later, and create them individually. The EEG display moved fast, so I wouldn't have to wait long between creations so they didn't accumulate; about a quarter of a second would be fine. I tried creating an NP in front of the sight blob, in case the creation distance, especially when outside my proximity range, changed the spike size, but it seemed not to. It was time to do a great deal more sight blob searching. I nearly canceled the NP-fingertips out of the habit of thousands of repetitions, but remembered my mental note just in time. As I had a sight blob and NP-point already in my "Anteroom" [I learned that name soon], I might as well search it. I was particularly interested in finding three things: people, video cameras, logged on computers. A careful search of my anteroom found no cameras, so it was safe to try the computers. They were turned on, but the screens were blank. I pressed the shift key on the first. The screen lit up, but the last user had logged out. That was the case on the other computer too. Placed beside each keyboard was a small box, not much larger than a pack of cigarettes. It was cabled to the computer, and had a slot in front suitable for taking a credit card, or - I feared - a security card. I checked out the desk drawers and the cupboards in the room. They contained lots of medical stuff, including syringes and several vials of different drugs, which was very worrying. I looked at the labels, recognizing some of the names, such as "Adrenaline" and a couple of painkillers. There were some names I didn't know, which I'd google as soon as I got computer access. That would be essential knowledge if I saw someone fill a syringe then come at me with it. There were boxes of rubber gloves, requisition forms, and all sorts of other general crap, none of it specific to me. Nothing had an address on it. I did find several labels and forms that indicated that this was "Isolation Suite 9-1". ["Isolation Anteroom 9-1" was the name for the specific room the sight blob was in.] My anteroom search finished, I looked farther afield. The office across the hallway was the next target. The computer was powered off. Checking the drawers showed me the office was unoccupied, but there was a small internal phone list in the top drawer. It only had a couple of dozen entries, giving job title, room number and extension. They were mostly medically oriented, from "Orderlies" and "Nurses" up to "Medical COO". The extension number written on the phone in this room was not included in the list. There'd been two phones in my anteroom, and they were both listed, with their 'job titles' being "IAR 9-1: A" and "IAR 9-1: B". I hoped that "IAR" stood for "Imminent Automatic Release". I continued searching. The whole floor was medical and vacant. There were three suites like mine, with "Isolation Suite 9-1", "... 9-2" or "... 9-3" on their hallway doors. There was also a much more traditional hospital ward with a dozen beds in it. There was no other person to be seen, but there was ample evidence that other people had been in the area recently, such as a half-empty coffee cup, a jacket hung behind a door, etc. There was all the usual stuff you expect if this had been a working facility, from trash in the trash bins through to potted plants growing in people's offices. I didn't try reading any of the paper trash, as I didn't want to move any stuff around until I'd searched for cameras. I'd seen one in a hallway already, but I wasn't taking the time for a proper search for them yet. I was just getting a quick overview now. I found an elevator bay at the other end of the floor, with a sign labeling this as "Level 9". I searched for but did not find any emergency stairs (I considered my situation an emergency, and I'd been looking forward to taking the stairs out of here). I thought it was illegal to have high-rise buildings without emergency stairs, in case of fire. I searched carefully around both elevator areas (I found two in total), and didn't find any stairways, or see any notices about them. I'd keep my eye open for them, but I was starting to suspect they didn't exist. [I confirmed later that they didn't, and that the elevators were rated for use in a fire, with sealed, pressurized shafts, were heat insulated and had their own air supplies. As you'll learn soon, the last thing this place wanted was stairwells openly connecting every level of the building.] I found the Medical COO's office, judging by its size, plushness and extension number. There was a box of business cards in the top drawer, giving me his name, confirming his job title, and the address only as "Level 9, Eclipse Building." He worked for the, "Eclipse Project." The phone number had an area code that wasn't one that I recognized, and I was pretty sure I knew them all because I'd made an effort a while ago to study a map which showed the locations of every area code. They weren't being helpful. Seeing "Level 9" made me think of outside the box, especially because I'd not seen any windows, so I sent the sight blob in a straight line through some walls until it found the outside. The absence of windows was soon explained, as the total blackness beyond the last wall was a strong indication that this was underground. I created a new sight blob and sent it rapidly straight up. As I feared, I was getting nothing but quick glimpses of floor after floor of this building, until the sight blob self-canceled. I was too deep to see the surface - fuck! My sight blobs wouldn't have the range to find the surface. That was a MAJOR pain, as I wouldn't be able to plan my escape fully. I couldn't search outside the box, so I got back to searching inside it. This place seemed to take security very seriously. The door into my bedroom (so to speak) required security access to get both in and out, which seemed excessive. In each of the two longest hallways, there was a solid door halfway down its length which also had a fingerprint(?) and numeric keypad control. It was a good thing sight blobs could pass through walls. There were security panels next to the two elevators' calling buttons. I wasn't sure why. It seemed silly to use a password to call for an elevator, because it only took one person to call for it, then twenty people could get in. After finishing my quick scan of his floor, I went up one level and started checking that out. I learned it was called "Level 8", consistent with my being underground. It had some offices, but was mostly labs. Not nice, fun labs like in the Physics Building at OSU; these were chemical and biological labs, and there were some scary looking safety measures around the place: two-layers thick totally sealed off glass rooms with airlock accesses within an otherwise open-plan area, rubber suits, little boxes with gloves to handle dangerous things, and many, many warning labels stuck all over the place. If these guys wanted to inject me with something, they'd have many state of the art choices. I wanted to go back to the Sciences & Tech building; their strange pluralization was less worrying than this place. I finally found some people: half a dozen scientist types were working on something in one of their labs. One of them was putting a vial in a fridge, letting me see that the fridge contained many vials. I resisted knocking them all onto the floor. Maybe after I'd confirmed that their air conditioning didn't also feed into my bedroom. Their security tags were all "Eclipse Project," which was both unhelpful, and after seeing the type of work they were doing, a little ominous sounding. The next level up was level 7. It had a couple of dozen people working on it. It was another series of labs, very similar to level 8. Level 6 was yet more labs, and about the limit of my range. I could get a messy glimpse of level 5 immediately above me, and from what I could see, it was yet more labs. Time to go down. Level 10 was mostly medical, but different than my level because it was veterinary. There were several animals in cages in an open area, with others in "Isolation Rooms", according to what it said on the doors. Level 11 was the zoo. Mostly chimps, pigs and rats, but some rabbits, dogs and cats too. There were thousands of animals. It was a worry that they needed so many. It was a pity I thought they'd release me when Hell froze over, because if it'd been when pigs flew, I could arrange that. Level 12 was the utility level. Including a very large furnace. Having a furnace twelve levels underground seemed weird to me, so I stopped to glance at the instructions posted beside it. They included a table for the maximum number of each species that could be incinerated at a time. To my relief, humans weren't listed. I had enough range to go down one more level, but there wasn't one. Probably a good idea, because you wouldn't want to have any bad luck in a building that did the stuff that seemed to be going on in this one. [[Which was why the senior management of it was the most carefully paranoid of all of Kyler Wright's contacts.]] It crossed my mind that they might want to use me as a human guinea pig, but that seemed very unlikely. They could use anyone for that, so why choose someone who might have mind control. Much more likely was my being moved here for more mind control experiments, this place having very secure medical facilities. If they were going to do any tests on me, it seemed likely that they'd all be done on this level. I didn't know what was on levels 4 and above, but I guessed this operation would need several levels of offices, as every Government place I'd been to had needed LOTS of paper pushers. There could be multiple above-ground levels, so I couldn't be certain that levels 4 to ground were offices, but it seemed most likely. And even more likely was that all the human medical equipment would be together. I would've loved to get a ride up to a higher level, so I could send sight blobs all the way to the surface, but I suspected level 9 was going to be my home for a while, and hopefully never level 12. I decided to start searching level 9 for cameras, in case I got chances to steal stuff (truth serum antidote and a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card were top of my list). I had a camera observing me and restricting what I could do under it, but finding out how much freedom I had to move and fly stuff around outside of this room would be essential. I didn't find a staff lunchroom, which was a disappointment. Stealing food would be harder if there was no food left lying around. Presumably there was a staff cafeteria somewhere over my head. I didn't find an MRI machine either, but I suspected that didn't really matter now. During my search the questioner said, "That's enough for now." {Click}. He'd stopped before finishing my file, and not at a place that made any sense. I wasn't going to argue though. I carried on searching. Ten minutes later I came across an unusual sight, a nurse (judging by the uniform) standing still in the hallway, about twenty feet from the elevators, facing down the hallway toward my room. While I was looking at her, she took one step forward, then stopped. #7: #4: #1: #8: Nurses' uniforms are easy for me to search. Her security tag was uninformative, as usual. She had a syringe in one of her pockets, but it was empty and the plunger was pushed in all the way. There were drugs in my anteroom, but they were the same as the other two anterooms, so I suspected none of them were exotic or state of the art. We'd keep an eye on her though. That wouldn't be hard at the speed she was walking, as she'd only taken one step toward us so far. She took another step, then stopped. #1: #6: #8: It got boring watching the strange woman, so we went back to searching the level for cameras, checking back every ten seconds or so in case she made a run for the drug cabinet. Sight blobs move VERY fast, so zipping back and forth wasn't a problem. I pretty much finished searching this level before she got to my anteroom, finding cameras only in the other two Isolation Suites' bedrooms, covering the elevator lobbies, and a couple at the far end of the two hallways, sited to give a good view all the way down them. Having the cameras in the three bedrooms gave me an idea, and I quickly checked the animals' Isolations Rooms, and they had cameras in their ceilings too. That would explain why the anterooms had a cabinet with several of those biohazard suits in it. Fairly lightweight suits, but a good indication that the bedrooms were for people that they had no intention of kissing better. How secure the bedroom doors were made more sense now too. It took the nurse over five minutes to get into my anteroom, maintaining her pace of ten seconds per step the whole time. She'd passed through one of the mid-hallway security doors, which had required her thumb print and a 6-digit password, which I got. The outside doors into anterooms weren't security accessed, only into and out the bedrooms. The nurse entered the anteroom one painfully slow step at a time. She headed straight toward for the door to my bedroom (straight, but very, very slow). Most importantly, she did not head toward the drug cabinet. After a few more steps, I noticed something, #1: The nurse's attention spiked as she took each step and for the next second or so, and then she relaxed. Eight seconds later the cycle repeated. #5: #8: #5: #1: #All: #6: #1: She used the same password on the security access to my bedroom, then pulled the door open, standing still in the doorway. I pretended to be surprised, taking a moment to recover from the surprise, then I launched into, "Who are you? Where am I? Why are you keeping me prisoner? I want to go home to my family." "Be quiet! If you talk they'll shock you after I leave." #5: "But WHY am I here? I'm just a KID, for God's sake! I'm NEVER going to give my money to terrorists. I don't know any of them and couldn't care less what happens in other countries..." "BE QUIET! You're NOT ALLOWED to talk." She took one more step forward. "I just spent an hour answering the ceiling's stupid questions, so obviously I AM allowed. You don't have any right to keep me here! I've never done ANYTHING illegal. I DEMAND to talk with my parents!" The ceiling speaker came back on, the questioner's voice yelling, "SHUT UP, Anderson! You will speak when spoken to, and you'll do what any of the staff tell you to do." "You're not my parents! You can't order me around." The questioner said, "You'll do what we say or we won't feed you!" #5: #6: #1: #All: There were another couple of exchanges. I imagine you've probably heard kids arguing before, so you should know how it went. I finished with, "You're bad people, and one day you're going to get in big trouble for treating me like this." (I was speaking to emphasize my young age in a hope that it'd get me some sympathy. So far there had been no sign that the tactic was working.) The nurse continued to take ten-second pauses between her steps, and it seemed natural for me to break my silence to ask, "Why are you walking so funny?" "QUIET!" from her. | "SHUT UP!" from the speaker grill. #5: [[That was one of their favorite theories, passed on from DHS's S&T people. The microphone signal from my room was passed through a computer system that filtered and distorted the signal before playing it, retaining the original for analysis purposes.]] The nurse eventually got close enough to me to extract the syringe from her pocket and to take a blood sample from my arm. She looked scared, and I doubted it was because I could've viciously wiggled a finger. She'd taken the sample without touching me flesh-to-flesh. After capping and pocketing the syringe, I could see her listen to her earpiece, then nervously extend a finger to touch my arm. She held it for a few seconds, apparently received more instructions from her boss, then broke contact with visible relief. She took one step back, waited ten seconds, then another, etc. Once she was into the hallway, she suddenly started walking quickly for the elevators. As soon as the nurse started walking normally, the speaker came on, "This is to teach you to shut up when told to, and to do what you're told." #4: I dialed my pain reception way down, and acted appropriately when the shock tingled my cock. The hallway door needed the same password again. Calling for the elevator did NOT require using the security panel, so I was puzzled about its purpose. [[The facility had levels of alert that could be switched to as required. Restricted elevator access wasn't part of the current security status, but it quickly would've been had I gotten out of my room.]] ^ Work returned to normal on my floor, but almost everyone was kept away from me. My anteroom and observation room were never used, the offices on the other side of the hallway were kept vacant and there were small barriers placed in the hallway twenty feet in either direction from my anteroom's door, with a security guard stationed between the two barriers to remind people to walk the long way around. It was possible to step over the hallway barriers, which is what the people who came to see me did. There was one such person per shift, all female and seemingly expendable nurses. Nearly all of my enforced conversations were via the speaker and microphone process. [After a couple of days, their experimental schedule ramped up and considerably more people visited my room.] Initially the nurses hand-fed me my meals, but after a couple of days I was released from the bed. I wasn't allowed out of the room, nor was I allowed to take off my sensor cap, touch any of the equipment, or anything else that looked the least bit suspicious. If I got even close to breaking any of those rules, the speaker INSTANTLY came to life and told me off. The watchers were on the ball the WHOLE time, and certainly not killing time reading trashy detective stories. [After several more days, some of their experimental machinery got too large to fit in my bedroom, so the tests took place in my anteroom. Later, on very rare occasions, across the floor to a much larger, open area. They were always extremely careful of their security whenever I was out of my room.] Being released from the bed meant having my cock disconnected from the electric wire, which was a relief. The pain was a non-issue, but long-term damage would've disappointed Julia and Carol - although, in all honesty, I had trouble maintaining the hope that the state of my cock would matter to my two wives ever again. Without the shock treatment, food became their preferred method of control, which was a serious problem for me. Even when they thought they were giving me full rations, it was actually only two-thirds of what I needed, so I was slowly starving. [[My body adapted somewhat, but it took several days to do so, and was only a minor help.]] I was generally a good boy, to keep my food supply coming and because there was almost nothing 'naughty' that was worth doing. Through my sight blob searches, I learned quite a lot about this facility. It was a chemical and biological weapons research lab. Its official name was "The Eclipse Project" for a reason I never discovered. They weren't working on one major project, but all sorts of unrelated scary stuff. Fortunately not including truth drugs, from what I could see. Almost entirely biochem weapons, mostly developing and improving their own designs, but some detecting, analyzing and countering work, as well as some weird ideas for side projects such as a spray that'd 'eat' explosives, rendering them harmless. It was almost certainly a CIA operation, as I managed to get glances of CIA documents fairly often, usually when someone was carrying them around. I was surprised at the CIA's involvement because I would've thought biochem weapons development was an Army job, and weren't the CIA prohibited from being active inside the USA? Or maybe I wasn't in the US any longer. On the other hand, what the hell do I know about how the government runs ultra-top-secret, illegal, weapons development projects. Maybe the CIA was running it because the CIA doesn't run things like this. Their security was SERIOUSLY good though. Two aspects of which really screwed me: I never saw a cellphone. Everyone used landline phones, and some of them had pagers or earpieces. Computer access was controlled in three ways: Password (I learned plenty of those, and they were all good ones too, nothing like "password1"), computer access card (everyone had one, to go into the small device's slot before the computer would function), and a third method I discovered the hard way (below). Getting computer access was a very high priority for me, and I was frequently searching for someone who'd left their computer access card in its slot. That especially applied to the Medical COO, as I presumed he had full access to my file. I was often reading over his shoulder, with my fingers crossed that he'd have to rush out of the room without his card. I got a chance on the second day when he stepped out to go to the bathroom. As soon as he was out of his office I started using his computer. I pressed one key on his keyboard and sirens went off. Observing the ensuing bedlam taught me that the doorways in this place had sensors in them, and the security tags that everyone carried around had something in them that allowed them to be tracked (I saw the Medical COO and some techie guys waving his badge through his doorway to test it was working properly). The computer system evidently refused to be used by someone who wasn't in the same room, even if their computer access card was still in the slot. That was a mistake the Medical COO wouldn't be making again, as I saw him get given that message by the techie. I presumed the apparent false alarm was written off to a glitch of some sort. I did manage to read chunks of my file by reading over people's shoulders. It was all about "MC", by which they meant "Mind Control". I thought they were Mega-Crazy. They were taking it very seriously though, especially because of my unprecedented EEG readings. No one had ever produced readings like mine before (that's what "unprecedented" means, but I want to want to emphasize that these scientists were seriously interested in my brain). A sight blob examination of the skullcap showed me that it'd be easy to take off, as it was a mesh version of those swimming caps that old women sometimes wear, except this one was more securely held in place with a strap under my chin. By the look of it, I could just undo that strap's dome and pull the cap and all its electrodes off, but I had no doubt how the baddies would react to that: I'd be punished severely and a new cap would be locked onto my head. They took my EEG readings far too seriously to stand for any crap from me about it, not that they ever stood for any crap from me about anything else anyway. Having my head permanently clamped into something might badly reduce my chance of escape, so I was a good boy, never showing any inclination to remove the cap. I found plenty of hardcopy paperwork to read: everything from evacuation procedures - there was a BIG folder for that because there was some scary shit in this place - through to pharmacological literature which told me what the drugs in the cabinet outside my room were for. Nothing too scary: three different sedatives, painkillers, adrenaline, etc. Just drugs that any patient might need quickly. I found several people's wallets and was able to rifle though them when I had enough privacy. Most of their licenses gave their addresses as Fort Dodge, Iowa. ^ On the third day of captivity in this place, I had a déjà vu. The other me was in the same situation, and was as disappointed as I was that we didn't have an answer for each other's predicament. We'd both been hoping for and worried about déjà vu arriving. Hoping because it might help us escape, worried about something that we checked immediately: we both sent a sight blob to look at our EEG displays, which confirmed that they'd changed a great deal compared with a second ago. We'd already learned from the scientists that'd started experimenting on us that they were amazed by our EEG readings, and now they'd changed even more. In both dimensions, {Click}, "What are you doing?" "Solving differential equations to amuse myself. Normally I'd masturbate, but with you watching I have to amuse myself in my head." {Click}. Both of us were in identical situations, and neither of us had a good idea how to get out, both were very hungry, pissed off, worried, etc. You know the situation, so I'm sure you can imagine our emotions. None of our minds wanted to merge. Our situation wasn't ANYWHERE near desperate enough for that. Plus there were three other factors: If we merged, we'd need even more food. We wouldn't get it, so we'd be even hungrier. That would presumably start to have seriously negative effects on our health. Déjà vu's are occurring every week and a half these days, so we'll get other chances somewhat frequently. Not as frequently as we'd like if things turned to shit, but not too bad. Ever since we'd first been picked up by the DHS, things had happened reasonably slowly. We did NOT want to have our EEG double permanently. That'd get far too much attention. (It'd only double in 4A-land of course. In 4B-land it'd drop to zero, as would our interest in what the CIA did to our body). We tried finding out if our being in déjà vu gave us some useful new powers. Teleportation would've been good, for example. Neither ourselves nor a small piece of the video camera teleported. Nor did our sight blob suddenly gain more range to let us see all the way to the surface. Everything was unhelpfully consistent with the other déjà vu's we'd had since our last merge. We fruitlessly discussed ideas for getting out, until the link ended. ------- Chapter 290: Staying in the Truly Scary Lab Tuesday, February 7 to Friday, February 10, 2006 There were really only two things going on: They were trying to find out everything about me while I tried to stop that happening. I was planning my escape. The first activity was a game in one respect, because the individual pieces of information had no value in the big picture. It was worth my while delaying the forward march of science as much as possible because the more they learned about me, the less inclined they'd be to let me go. For example, if they discovered that my body's healing rate was at least three times faster than normal (I hadn't re-measured it since my last merge) and that I'd not had even a cold for the last two years, then they'd almost certainly get very excited and never let me go. They might also start doing experiments on me that'd make it even harder for me to escape, such as breaking one of my legs to see how fast it healed. With some tests I could easily get away with hiding my abilities, such as physical skills tests. Other tests I had no control over at all, such as blood tests. Some were just puzzling, like their making me look at a bright strobe light, with the frequency changing every two minutes, for a total of over half an hour. Or getting me to breathe so deeply that I hyperventilated, or do various IQ tasks with my eyes open or shut. The tests took place in my room whenever possible, so I had a people passing in and out very frequently. If the equipment was too bulky for my fairly small isolation room, the tests were done in my anteroom. As one example, a simple treadmill/ECG/breathing mask setup. The sort of thing any serious sports facility could have, but which was presumably obtained especially to test my physiology when running. Only very rarely was I taken out of my Isolation Suite, and that was only when the equipment involved was too large to fit through the somewhat wider than normal doorways this place used everywhere except for office doors. I lived in hope that they'd have to take me to the surface to put me into a particularly huge machine, but that never happened. I was only ever taken across my level to the far bank of elevators. One of its cars was particularly large, being used for transporting the animals and large pieces of equipment. The experiment would be set up ready for me near the elevators, I'd be subjected to whatever it was that they wanted to do to me, and then escorted back to my room. The level was always depopulated for my trip, other than my escorts. My skullcap stayed on and my EEG machine followed me. I was very well restrained at these times, which wasn't particularly disappointing as it wasn't getting free on this level that had me stumped, but getting up to the ground level and away from there. Some tests were problems, such as an IQ test. I had to answer it using only one mind, or eight minds' worth of heavy thinking would've sent the EEG readings through the roof. After they scored the test, I got abused and had my food ration cut in half for the next 24 hours. I was given another test to do, but I had to stick to using only one mind. Going hungry was better than getting them excited about the huge amount of brain activity I could generate when all my minds were thinking hard. I INSISTED to them that I was doing the tests to the best of my ability, and it should've looked like that in the EEG, but I was VERY hungry for the next two days. Luckily they shelved the IQ tests for the moment. My attention was caught by one statement made during their abuse of me: the abuser mentioned that the IQ scores I was getting were around 147. #1: #5: #8: #5: #8: #5: #8: #5: #2: [[Memory is only partially held in the brain, but it's the brain's part of the process that suffers from poor performance (it's the weak link), so improving it improved the entire memory process.]] Their testing was becoming a major problem: It was relentless. They had a very hands-on approach, unlike the game-playing S&T crowd. For example, on the fourth day the electrode was reattached to my cock, a toy roulette wheel was put in front of me, and I was shocked whenever the ball fell in the wrong pocket. I was strongly of the opinion that roulette wheels should be numbered all the way up to "2" and no further. Their tests were getting results. Not the roulette one obviously, but too many of the others were. I was EXTRAORDINARILY healthy, off the charts in many of their measures, from muscle reaction times (relatively unimportant) through to neuron firing times (much more worrying because I REALLY didn't want them interested in my brain). My over-their-shoulders reading was showing me that they were getting FAR too excited about many of my results. They were suggesting more and more experiments they wanted to run on me. Some of them were long-duration experiments, which was both good news and bad news as I had to be alive for them, but I had to be unreleased for them too. Their mounting excitement meant the chance of their releasing me had to be getting lower all the time. Presuming there was a chance, but I had a feeling it was already at "two-thirds of fuck all" and dropping. One of the tests they subjected me to was psychiatric. I spent a very long day being interviewed by a psychiatrist. Naturally I told him all about my situation and asked him to contact the authorities, my parents, the press, and even the President, but he wasn't interested. Nor would he answer any of my questions. I managed to read the summary of his report a couple of days later: "Subject harbors deep-seated resentment against the American way of life and Government", "If released, Subject will most likely feel justified in attempting to exact 'revenge' for his perceived mistreatments", "Subject is extraordinarily intelligent and capable, so represents a considerable threat", etc. In other words, he justified their throwing away the key to my cell. [[The highly respected, outside expert psychiatrist was contracted by the CIA to consult on dangerous people, the CIA paying very well for his services. Thus it suited him to emphasis how dangerous such people were, to make his services seem more important and to encourage them to hire him more often. On their side, the CIA wanted the justifications and ass-covering he provided, so it was a mutually supportive, happy relationship; just not so good for the subjects.]] Another thing that scared me was how easy it would be for them to render me totally helpless, either with drugs in my food or while I slept. I kept my sleep to an absolute minimum, by tossing and turning for hours as if trying to sleep. When asked about it, I blamed my fear and suggested they release me and I'd give them a call to let them know how my sleeping pattern improved. They thought not. I did have to sleep for some of the time, which made me feel very vulnerable. I'd hate to wake up one morning to find out they'd injected truth serum into my arm and it was too late for me to stop it working, or some other terrible scenario like that. Of the three ways I could get out of here (they choose to release me, family lawyer forces my release, or I escape), their choosing to release me voluntarily had surely virtually disappeared as an option. That also meant that they'd fight much harder to prevent the family lawyer succeeding. It wasn't hard for me to decide who was going to win a battle between a family lawyer and a highly motivated CIA. So I was down to only one way out of here: escaping. Unfortunately, my escape planning was going badly. I had several types of possible plans: The Rush. Out of my room, up to the ground level, and away as fast as I could. The Sneak. Somehow get out without their knowing I was on the move. Fight my way out, possibly using hostages. A Multi-Stage approach. Maybe rush out of my room, hide somewhere, sneak to the top then fight out. This option was mostly because I couldn't imagine any of the other options getting me all the way out in one go. The Rush was the most obvious approach. It's what I would've used in Portland or Washington DC, with every expectation of a fairly easy success at either place. Not here though. I could get out of my room easily enough, while the nurse was entering or leaving for example, but that would instantly set off alarms. The camera covered the room, so the watchers would see me leave it. It'd also be noticed because I'd have to remove the EEG sensor cap. I knew they watched that closely, and would certainly have alarms set to go off if it gave off an unusual, or no, signal. If I just ran for it, I wouldn't even make it out of my anteroom before the place was in lockdown. I could easily disable my room's camera before I ran, in a way that had me looking innocent at the time, but I was certain they'd react to that very quickly. That they were always watching me intently meant they wouldn't abide with losing video. The hallways and elevator areas were covered by other video cameras, and there was a guard in the hallway too, so I'd have to do some disabling as I went. I was sure that would have the place in lockdown long before I got into an elevator. I'd read their "Lockdown Procedures Manual", so I knew this place had a hair-trigger lockdown system. That the lockdowns were for responding to contamination disasters didn't stop them being extremely effective in keeping me down here. A lockdown doomed me for several reasons, including that every floor would be immediately hermetically sealed and have its air supply turned off until specifically turned back on. I had to be out of the building by the time the alarms went off, or the baddies could pump sleeping gas or something else debilitating into my level's vents, and then they'd come for me while I was helpless. To avoid their reacting to my escape, I had to totally hide that I was escaping. That meant I had to do something like create a building-wide power failure. That put the place into lockdown too, but I could disable the emergency power at the same time, which might create opportunities. Both power supplies were vulnerable to me because they had important components within my range, mostly on level 12. I doubted the sabotage I could do would disable the entire building, but I could disable just about everything in more than half the building, which should be enough to cover the start of my escape. It wasn't nearly as easy as disabling the power and waltzing out of here. There were no staircases out, only the two elevator banks. Riding up in an elevator was too unlikely to work whether or not the power was on. Never mind the reception I might get at the top, the elevators might not move at all if the building didn't 'recognize' who was in the elevator. Even if I got one to move, if it was stopped between floors, it'd instantly become another prison for me. In the movies, people climb up and down the elevator cables, which was almost certainly the best way for me to go (as it was probably the only way), because I could easily climb up the elevator cables. NP could hold almost all of my weight, and my arm muscles would have me almost flying up the cable. There were three elevator cars in each bank, and it'd be a real bummer if all three of them were positioned to block my path to freedom, so I'd have to check the elevator positions before I knocked the nurse out as she was going through my doorway. I could use NP to press one of the elevator's buttons on a floor below mine to make sure it descended below my level. The doors into the elevator shaft were a worry because they were strong, very well built, and there were more of them than normal: Each elevator car had its own set of two doors that met in the middle, as is usual on elevators. They were stronger and closed more securely than normal, but that didn't worry me because if I was trying to break into the shaft itself, I'd do so where there was no car in the way. Almost none of my possible plans had me breaking into or out of the elevator cars themselves. Each lobby had three pairs of doors to cover the three empty holes into the shaft when no car was there, as is always the case. Like the car doors, they were engineered for a bioweapon lab, so strong and hermetically sealed when shut. As an additional safety measure, each lobby had a huge sliding door that could seal off the elevator lobby in the case of an emergency. They were positioned only a couple of inches on the lobby side of the previously described doors and kept retracted, only to be used in the case of an emergency. I'd not seen them in use yet, only seen their tracks on the floor and ceiling, and read about them in the Lockdown Procedures Manual, but I had no doubt that they'd be damned hard to open. Even the ordinary lobby doors were extremely strong, and these had to be worse. Each lobby would be sealed by only the one giant door, which would slide all the way across the three elevator entrances and then into a recessed holding area on the other side, so there'd be no join for me to work my physical fingertips into, the way there is with the other types of elevator doors, which are all pairs that meet in the middle. I'd done a test when the lobby doors on level 10 were closing, using ALL my NP force (less the very small amount I lost for having a sight blob active) to try to stop one of them from closing. It had fairly easily pushed my fingertips back. If I couldn't even stop one closing, getting an already closed one to open would be far beyond the ability of my NP force. I MIGHT be able to open them with my muscles and NP combined, but that was doubtful because getting a grip would be virtually impossible. I might be able to fly something between the doors on my level to stop them from closing, although I was very reluctant to fly things around in front of a video camera. Presuming I somehow kept them open, or my physical strength and NP combined could force the gap open enough for me to get through to the cable, then I'd easily be able to climb to the top, but what then? Those doors were out of my range so I'd be unable to stop them closing. They'd surely be impossible for me to open while dangling from a cable. Plus there was a double set, so I'd have to open the second set while the first set was trying to close on me. Opening the top level's lobby doors from inside the shaft when I was dangling from a cable (there was virtually no ledge to stand on), wasn't believably possible. Then there was the major problem of what I'd be facing presuming I did manage to open the shaft's doors at ground level. I had NO idea what was up there, except that whatever it was would most likely be taking security as seriously as the rest of this place. Probably more so, considering it was their front door. I would've preferred to go up one more level, bust a window and leap out. I'd seen diagrams of this place that showed that there were three above-ground levels, but all the elevators only went as far as "Ground". I had no idea why they didn't go any higher. [[The above-ground levels were the public cover story, a very large veterinary pharmaceutical R&D lab and business. There were very good reasons not to have the top-secret biochem lab's elevators opening into areas accessible to the public. The lab's elevators exited at the ground level inside of secured, private rooms, nowhere near the cover business's own elevators.]] If I could get up to level 3 or above, then I could scout the rest of the way, but I didn't want to have to stop to scout and problem solve in the middle of an escape; I wanted a clear run out. Ideally I wanted my nice captors to transfer me up to level 1 or 2 for a while, but I couldn't think of any way of getting that to happen. I'd seen diagrams that told me that the levels I'd been unable to scout were the computer center, cafeteria (both on level 4) and mostly offices (levels 1, 2 and 3), none of which gave me any ideas for how to get sent to them. The only idea I had was to ask to see the big boss and hope I'd be sent to him rather than him come down to me, both of which I gave a zero chance of happening because they'd hardly let me meet the big boss when they were worried about me having mind control powers. The Rush plan was okay for getting out of my room and to the elevators. I could think of two or three ways of doing that safely and without being observed. From there on it wasn't a plan at all. I didn't know if I could open the elevator doors at my level or the top of the shaft, I didn't know what I'd be facing if I did open the doors at the top, didn't know how to get out of the building, and didn't know what to do once I did. There was also the worry that the guys who'd designed the security for this place were obviously experts, so I wouldn't be surprised if things went horribly wrong at some point because of some unforeseen reason. I'd actually be surprised if they didn't. The second type of escape plan was "The Sneak". The first trick I thought of was to slow my heart down, make my skin cold (if I could), and to otherwise pretend to be dead. I wasn't sure how to fool the EEG, but I didn't bother thinking about it because the "Pretend to be Dead" plan suffered from the problem that even if they believed it, they weren't going to take my body up to the ground level. I'd get autopsied and then incinerated. They were already so fascinated by my body that they'd be rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of being able to cut it open to study it. Playing dead wouldn't get me out. At best it might be a way to get me out of my room, where I could then leap to my feet and escape in some other way, with maybe a few seconds of additional time if I wasn't as closely monitored as I am in this room. That was hardly a confidence-inspiring plan. The only other sneak idea I had was to breakout of my room and hide somewhere, such as in an AC (air conditioning) duct. That might give me enough time to crawl down to level 12 (where all the ducts led), get in a duct that went up to level 1, do some careful scouting, then escape in some way. But there weren't enough places to hide, especially because it probably had to be on this level since the elevators would be automatically disabled. They'd find me quickly, and then I'd be locked into my room even more securely than I was now. In addition, the AC system in this place was extremely secure, with large numbers of filters, sensing equipment, etc., fitted inside it. Those would inhibit my movements terribly, and my having to smash open all the filtering systems as I crawled through the ducts would doubtless set off alarms that would tell them exactly where I was and the direction I was going in. Fighting my way out was the third type of possible escape. Maybe I could take the Medical COO hostage. One option was to hope the nurse was in my room at the same time as the COO was about to use an elevator. Maybe I could trip him badly with NP, bang his head and leave him stunned in the elevator door so it wouldn't close. I'd knock the nurse out, use her thumb to open my bedroom's door before the person watching my security video reacted to disable the door. I could've held the anteroom door very slightly open when she'd entered, so that couldn't be locked on me by the camera watcher. I'd be able to reach the COO okay, but by then the elevator would be in lockdown, and I wasn't going to be climbing any elevator cables with the COO on my back. I might be able to threaten the COO's life in return for them letting me out, but I somehow didn't think these people put a high value of human life. That they were developing biological and toxic agents that could depopulate entire cities was a bit of a clue. Fighting might work as a last resort, say if I managed to Rush to the ground floor, and then needed to fight my way out the front door (making that a Multi-Stage escape), but I couldn't think of a way of making it work if it started down here. There were some more subtle possibilities, for example, stealing a sample of some nasty stuff from one of the labs and spreading it around the building (actually quite easy, as I could use NP to fly a few drops at a time, which no one would see). When large numbers of people started dying horribly (or whatever the effect was) I wouldn't be evacuated, because their procedures for problems like that call for lockdown, not evac; but I might get an escape opportunity at some point during the chaos or subsequent decontamination. I'd have to be very careful in my choice of "nasty stuff", because most of it was FAR too nasty. You wouldn't want to be within a hundred miles of it (seriously!), let alone in the same underground building. One problem was that the descriptions I could read about the contents of the vials were written in heavy scientific language, and contained many words and even entire paragraphs that I didn't understand. A file might refer to a particular biological agent, but there could be a dozen variants in different vials in one or more labs. Choosing the wrong variant might be a very bad oops. The ideal outcome for me was for every single person in this underground building to drop dead, with the exception of yours truly, and then for me to be able to walk around freely. But even in that ideal circumstance, I wasn't confident of being able to get out. This place took "Seal and Lockdown" SERIOUSLY. The elevator shaft had to be a serious concern to an architect designing a biochem warfare lab, so it was bound to be over-engineered with safety features. I knew the doors were damned strong, and that the shaft was over-pressured so air leakage would be out of the shaft rather than into it, but there could easily be more measures. For example, the shaft could have a sprinkler system that sprayed a fine mist guaranteed to kill any biological organisms that got into it. Speaking as a biological organism myself, that'd be very annoying. Then there's the issue of what the security people on the ground level would be doing. That was bad enough to think about anyway, but there was the additional worry that this building seemed to be in a place called Fort Dodge. I was happy with the "Dodge" part - I wanted to do some dodging of my own - but the "Fort" part was worrying. Was "Fort Dodge" a quaint little town named after a cavalry troop that'd fought off the Indians hundreds of years ago, or was "Fort Dodge" a modern day army fort, like I knew Fort Knox was. Busting out of this building to find I was in the middle of the 101st Airborne Division would be a bummer. Although seemingly run by the CIA, this was a WARFARE lab, so having it under or near an army base made very good sense. I was NOT going to be able to fight my way through large numbers of straight-shooting soldiers. I could probably disable a few of them, but it wouldn't take long for one of them to disable me. Nor long for them to send helicopters after my ass even if I did get out of the immediate area. I tried to find out casual information from the nurses, the guys at the other end of the speaker grill, or others that came to experiment on me, hoping to be able to extract something useful from them, but they were VERY strict about minimizing conversation. They were virtually on red alert whenever anyone was in my room, and if me or anyone else said one word out of place the speaker barked out a reprimand. I tried sweet-talking the speaker guy when the nurse was gone, but he wasn't having any of it. I confirmed my suspicion that there were other people in his room who were listening to us by saying something very funny and hearing several laughs, so I wasn't going to get anything useful out of the speaker guy. Another thing I couldn't do was find the other end of the speaker grill. I had hopes that when it came time for me to try to escape, I could disable their watching me in a way that wouldn't make them press the alarm button, such as by having the power cable drop out of the back of the screen, and when they tried to reinsert it, the screen would somehow be knocked to the floor in a way that shattered it. That'd give me a window (so to speak) to start my escape in. I tried to trace the cables running from the camera or speaker grill, but they got impossibly merged. Keeping the floors hermetically sealed from each other resulted in cabling that was impossible to follow. I searched for that room the slow way, by searching every room in my range, but I never found them. They were on the higher levels or perhaps even in a different building entirely, although I doubted the latter. The best plan I came up with was what I called my "Hope I Can Slip Out During The Chaos" plan. I'd find some nasty stuff that wouldn't last long and spread it around to get it to infect or poison (depending on what it was that I used) quite a few people, hopefully excluding me. I'd also start a fire and fuck up some of the machinery on level 12, especially the backup electricity supplies for when I fucked up the fuse boxes on each level. In the pitch black, hopefully no one would be able to see me get out of my room or move around my level (I'd use a very large sight blob to see with, having it radiate a tiny amount of light if necessary). I'd steal someone's clothes and their security tag, ideally from someone who looked somewhat like me, then hope that in the resulting chaos either I'd get a chance to make my way to the ground level, or the rescuers would take me up there. Once at ground level, I'd hope I could get past the no doubt highly agitated security, hope I could get out of the building, and then hope I could get away from the area. It was a very hopeful plan. Getting out of my room was problematic because if I spread chaos, my door would be locked and the nurse wouldn't come. I'd have to bust my way out of my bedroom and anteroom. I'd have some time, the camera would be off, and I'd have the heavy equipment and my bed to throw around or turn into tools, but getting out was still very iffy. The glass in the wall to the observation room was very thick (I'd measured it with an NP-fingertip from both sides), so almost certainly unbreakable. I might be able to dig my way through the strong looking wall under the glass, or to disassemble the door lock and open the door. Or I might not. My escape bid might be halted even before it started if I couldn't get out of my room. Once hopefully out of my room, I wouldn't have any trouble moving around my current level. I could easily get some clothes, steal an ID, and put a hazmat ("hazardous materials") suit on top. There are a lot of hazmat suits around, including some light ones in my anteroom. In all the chaos, I could avoid the surviving people on this level until rescue arrived, but I was sure that no matter how much chaos there was down here, there wouldn't be any chaos up top. I could imagine them being VERY organized and extremely careful about letting people leave the facility. There are so many things that could go wrong with my plan up top, especially because I had absolutely no idea what was up there. I MIGHT be able to bluff my way past them all, but far more likely (virtually certain) is that they'd want to shove me into quarantine to make sure I wasn't going to spread city-destroying diseases. As just one little example, if they forced us to strip to go into decon showers, my shaved head and freaky physique would get immediate attention, leading to nothing but trouble. I would have to start fighting if they told me to strip, which would be a no-win situation if there was anything like the amount of security I expected. I gave the "Hope I Can Slip Out During The Chaos" plan about a 5% chance of success, and I couldn't help thinking that was probably being optimistic. The security experts had probably built containment measures into this place that I didn't know about, and it'd only take one of them to stop me. And this was my BEST plan! Actually, I did have higher percentage ideas for getting out, but they showed my abilities. For example, I could hold the whole facility hostage by smuggling vials of nasty stuff onto every level in my range, then declaring myself and showing I could smash them by smashing other things on several levels, and not giving the vials back unless they let me go. That MIGHT get me out (maybe a 10% chance, because all these scientists had to be very valuable), but it would certainly get my entire family fucked over and I'd be the most hunted man in the world forever, which probably wouldn't be long. Whatever I did to escape, it HAD to be done without showing my abilities. Even a brief glimpse of something weird had far too much chance of being attributed to me, because I was in here for mind powers after all. The authorities would be going through this place with a fine-toothed comb afterward, and I'm sure those paranoid fuckers would ask themselves, "Did Mark Anderson slip out during the disaster, or did he cause the disaster so he could slip out?" My going missing during the chaos would be suspicious enough without eyewitness or video camera evidence of weird shit happening. I had a number of reasons not to attempt my 5% "Hope I Can Slip Out During The Chaos" plan (possibly "yet", or possibly "at all"): I might get killed during it in any one of several possible ways: From releasing the dangerous stuff inside the building, some of the containment measures might be lethal to me (e.g., a spray in the elevator shaft), or I might get shot when I got to the ground level. And there were almost certainly other lethal problems I didn't know about. My situation wasn't desperate enough yet. It was getting there, but not yet. If I delayed, I might have a better idea, learn some important new information, or a miracle might happen (e.g., the family lawyer might get me out, or the President might decide he didn't need the CIA anymore and order it disbanded). The thought had occurred of waiting to breakout during my next déjà vu, when my NP power would be increased eightfold, but I felt certain that the link would be lost if we started doing exciting things. While still trying hard to think of a better idea, I started preparing for my plan: I stole small sums of money from wallets on several different levels. That was quite easy as several of the staff left their wallets in their jackets hanging up, or purses by their desks. It was also easy to hide it behind substantial of pieces of equipment in the rooms because my NP fingertips can be small enough to carry money deep into gaps too small for people to reach into normally. Finding the best ID donor on each of the three shifts. I'd make sure he didn't report my taking his ID by giving him some of the nasty stuff. There were many potential donors as most of the people were men, and most of them young. Older than me, but not too badly so. Studying up on the various biological or chemical agents I could use, where to get them, how to use them, etc. In case I wanted to set a very large fire, I also researched something gentle to use on the animals first. The people got no such consideration because I'd read what they were working on, and had seen what their products did to the animals. Even I had heard that America had signed an international treaty to not work on biochem weapons - developing them was one of the things we'd harshly condemned Saddam Hussein for and it'd been discussed many times on TV - so the scientists certainly knew their work was illegal. Yet here they were developing HORRIFIC weapons, and doing their best to 'improve' them to be even more horrific. And when they made progress, they celebrated it! Let's see them celebrate one of their developments getting loose among them. Working out which machines on level 12 to screw-up and how. Many other minor issues, far too numerous to mention. I wanted to know EVERYTHING that could affect any one of the many escape possibilities I had thought of, even if they were only partial ideas. It was relatively easy to access the computers in the labs to read up on the 'products' of this place, because they were often left on and logged in. I never tried to access my file on those computers though, instead reading that mostly over the shoulders of scientists who were reading or adding to it. None of the computers I found were connected to the internet, so I couldn't send emails from them. ------- Chapter 291: Planning to Get Out of the Truly Scary Lab Saturday, February 11 to Friday, February 17, 2006 On the seventh day of my Fort Dodge imprisonment, I woke with a new skullcap on. It had roughly ten times as many electrodes, about two or three hundred now. They weren't patches glued to my skin, but short needles that poked into the bone of my skull - I REALLY hoped not all the way through to my brain! I was REALLY pissed off! This got me angrier than anything they'd done before, even more than electrocuting my cock. That'd been part of a coercion game that I understood. The new skullcap, including drugging me to fit it, was very different. They weren't treating me as a human being but as one of their experimental animals, and I'd seen how those always ended up. After anger, my next emotion was fear. What was this new cap capable of? I could still think, my minds could still talk to each other, and I'd already tried a sight blob so my special abilities seemed okay, but maybe the baddies could stop me with the flick of a switch. Would the next upgrade allow them to remotely control me? I was SERIOUSLY fucked if they could stop my special abilities, either now or after the next upgrade. And what was worse, human civilization was potentially seriously fucked too. But there was exactly zero I could say about the new cap. There was no point in my complaining, and less than no point in making threats to rip it off - that still appeared possible - because I knew they'd reattach it in a way that made it impossible to remove - they treat their animals with total disregard. Out of fear I gave the new cap a very close inspection. As best I could tell, the very thin electrode needles were also very short, only just long enough to penetrate my skin, the thin layer of flesh and to reach my skull. A quick sight blob check elsewhere in the facility told me the date and time, and nowhere near enough time had passed for them to have drilled this number of tiny holes through my skull. My fear eased a little, but only because the situation wasn't YET as bad as I first thought. The "yet" was still very worrying. With ten times as many electrodes as the previous version, it naturally had ten times as many wires running down the back of my head. They were bound together like a ponytail, which then plugged into a new machine. The cable was heavy and was going to be a pain in the neck to live with. With so many electrodes, and presumably with them getting better reception by being into my skull rather than on my skin, they'd be learning even more about my brain's working. They must've liked what they already had learned to upgrade the equipment like this, so what would they be getting now? I had to keep using sight blobs and NP-points because I'd never get out of here otherwise. Both those actions would doubtless show up on the new equipment even better than the old, further increasing my fear. I'd already created a sight blob to check out the new skullcap, and now I sent it into the anteroom to check the display. It was off. The anteroom wasn't monitored by a camera, so I took a small risk by using NP to turn the display on. It showed nothing. The cabling looked fine, so I guessed the new machine wasn't sending its data to this room. I turned the display off again, annoyed that I wouldn't know how much better their information was, not that I could do anything about it. I felt an itchy spot behind my ear and moved my hand to scratch it. {Click}. "Don't scratch that!" "Why not? It's itchy." "You might pull the plug out." #3: "What sort of plug?" "An ordinary plug. Like a cork." "Why on Earth would I have a cork in my head?" "To block the hole. Don't pull it out or your cerebral fluid will drain out." "WHAT! Why the FUCK do I have a hole in my head?" "Just leave it alone, or else!" {Click}. I sent the sight blob to have a look, lifting the skullcap so it could see clearly. That got me a torrent of abuse and orders to leave it alone from the speaker, which I ignored. Under the skullcap there was a half-inch square Band-Aid stuck to my recently re-shaved skull, located just behind my left ear and up a bit. In the middle of the Band-Aid was a small bulge. I grasped the corner of the Band-Aid, yelling, "Tell me what the hell you've done, or I'll pull this crap off to find out for myself." {Click}. "Leave it alone or you'll lose your next meal." #6: #All: I ripped the Band-Aid off, holding it in my hand in case I had to hurriedly put it back on (I hadn't liked the sound of "your cerebral fluid will drain out"). My sight blob damn well did show a cork stuck in my skull. It looked like it was made of white plastic rather than cork, but it was doing the same job. I couldn't see clearly, but there was a circular hole in my skin that clearly went a great deal deeper than my skin. The fuckers had drilled a sizeable hole in my skull! My anger at having the skullcap fitted faded into insignificance compared to this! There was a great deal of yelling back and forth, during which he stated - as if it justified their actions - "We took a brain sample." #8: #5: #1: #2: Looking through my own cerebral fluid had only short-range visibility but was surprisingly easy, and very weird. I could see the lumps on the outside of my own brain! I found the hole, and had the strange experience of looking up it from the inside. It was empty, and there was nothing embedded in my brain beneath the hole. There was a very small hole in my brain matter where - if they were telling the truth - the probe would've penetrated to get its sample. Alternatively where they could've deposited something. I sent the sight blob slowly down the 'borehole' into my brain, all the way to the end, which was about half an inch in. I couldn't see any details, just a gray blur (apparently it's called "gray matter" for good reason), but a piece of technology should show up when the sight blob started overlapping it. I found nothing. The borehole was probably clean. If they'd dropped anything small into the cerebral fluid, it could've washed anywhere around my brain, so I spent a couple of minutes searching the inside of my skull. It gave me time for my hot anger to turn into cold anger. I didn't find anything, including no indication that any of the many electrode needles penetrated my skull. Apparently the fuckers had just done what they'd said: taken a sample of my brain. I sat there, not saying anything. Not even saying much to each other. We were too angry for conversation. The nurse arrived and applied a fresh Band-Aid. I caught her eye and told her, "You are very, very bad people." If this was a James Bond movie, she'd be a gorgeous nurse who'd feel instant remorse, would fall in love with me, would help me escape, and we'd make love in some fantastic location while M was telling me to come back to work. What's the chance that someone working in a biochem weapons' development lab is capable of feeling remorse? This plain looking nurse certainly didn't. Her only emotion seemed to be annoyance at having to come put another Band-Aid on me. She performed the task efficiently, gave me a dirty look as a warning to leave it alone, then left. #1: #3: #7: #1: #8: #1: #5: #1: #5: #8: #5: #3: #5: #All: #5: #7: #5: #15: #14: #25: #2: #29: #All: I headed toward the bad people, pausing sometimes to let the sight blob scout well ahead. I probably could've scouted ahead while coasting along, but that risked becoming unstable because, as you might remember, I can only run one sight blob at a time. Instability had been such an unpleasant and scary experience that I was happy to be excessively cautious. We weren't flying fast, not even fast enough to make it worthwhile creating an NP-windshield, but we didn't have far to go. From a distance we could see that things had changed quite a lot since we'd flown out. There was: A large helicopter parked in a field a few hundred yards down the road from the facility. A large, unlogoed truck and trailer unit parked outside. [When I got close enough and my sight blob peeked inside, I saw it was a mobile lab.] Large lights were illuminating the area in front of the building. The building's lights were on too. There were quite a few guys walking around in hazmat suits, several of them with devices which I guessed were testing for nasty stuff. An illuminated windsock was mounted on top of the wall near the front. Nearly every unsuited person was upwind of the ground level building and was frequently glancing at the windsock. I was tempted to rotate it 180 degrees for a minute then let it go again, just to watch them all scurry, but I resisted the impulse. I did relocate myself to be somewhat more upwind though. Around the back of the building, there were some people in the office I'd escaped from, which meant my way through to the winch room had probably been discovered by now, and maybe even the ransacked "offsite storage" vault. That must've given them some serious heart palpitations. There were also many cops around; a great deal more than a town this size should have. There were too many people in the area for me to get close enough to send the sight blob inside the building, which I partly regretted as I would've liked to see how frantic they were. I settled down behind a row of trees in a field well away from anybody, and sent the sight blob into the big crowd to check it out thoroughly. I'd thought I might have to walk into the crowd and ask to have Seth Byrd (or Armani Phillips) pointed out to me, saying I had a message for him. That was a large part of the reason why I'd wanted to steal ID, in case I was challenged. As it turned out, most of the people were conveniently wearing their security tags, including my targets. It was very clear that Byrd was important, because he had other people buzzing around him. Phillips was significantly less important, but he'd had my stuff and a file on me, so he'd be history soon. People came to Byrd, whereas Phillips went back and forth between other people, so it was Phillips I snatched first. About ten minutes after I'd taken up position, Phillips walked through the gate to talk with someone outside on the road. Quite a few people were gathered there, presumably because they felt safer gathering farther away from the building. Having seen how nasty the underground stuff was, I thought gathering in the same STATE was foolhardy. At an opportune moment, when he was on the fringe of the crowd, I grabbed Phillips' body and marched him like he was a puppet. I had NP-hands controlling his legs, holding his arms down, holding him upright, and pushing him along from behind. I'd also punched him in the gut then sealed his mouth and nose, so he was unable to get a breath, let alone scream. I marched him rapidly toward the nearest darkness. It must've been a terrifying experience for him, which brought a smile to my face. As soon as he was in the darkness, I accelerated him up to a running pace. I steered him for a spot I could safely hide him in, then I twisted his head around far too much, dropping his corpse into the ditch. I'd thought about interrogating him, or just teasing him, but there wasn't any point and that sort of thing never seems to work out well for James Bond's enemies. I'll pick up his body when I leave. He had a nice coat too, so that'd be partial compensation for the $2,500 he'd taken from me, plus my wonderful, color-coordinated watch and ring. I waited for an opportunity with Byrd. That wasn't going to be nearly as easy as he was surrounded by people the whole time. A big helicopter full of soldiers arrived, and they started setting up a serious perimeter around the entire building. The helicopter left, but returned with another load of soldiers only a few minutes later. I realized it was shuttling them in from the airport, so a transporter plane must've arrived. The soldiers all had gas masks on their belts, ready to put on in case of an emergency. That was a joke. If the nasty stuff got out, gas masks would result in the soldiers dying from fifty horrible causes at once rather than fifty five. Most of the biochem agents were designed to be absorbed through the skin, and the few that couldn't were still engineered to pass through most gas mask filters. I was starting to worry about being pushed so far back by the expanding perimeter that I wouldn't be able to get Byrd tonight. I had a Plan B (to see if I could find his home easily - if it was in the phonebook say - stake it out, and get him on his returning to it) and a Plan C (give up for now, go to DC, but check in again on my way back to Portland), but I much preferred to get him now if I could. The less chance he had to mention my name to anyone, and give them any orders about me or my family, the better. I got my chance when he got an important phone call. He needed privacy, so he went to sit in his car while he had the conversation. That gave me time to find a pistol in a nearby trunk. The first one I found looked too small, so I looked until I found a bigger one. I checked it was loaded and the safety was off, popped the trunk, removed the gun, closed the trunk, then sneaked it to under Byrd's car. His car's doors were unlocked, so I only had to wait until he was engrossed in the conversation and looking the wrong way. I opened the passenger door, flew the gun in, closing the door behind it. He got a hell of a surprise when he turned to see who was interrupting him, and then he was in Hell itself. One shot in the middle of the forehead was all it took. Unlike my first kidnapping, there was no chance of this gun spinning out of my NP-grip, so a moment later I had it placed in Byrd's hand. I stayed long enough to make sure he was truly dead, then circled around to get my new jacket from Phillips. Circling was a bit of a pain, as it had to be a wide, low circle because some of the soldiers had night-vision goggles. I walked quite a lot of it, including when crossing the road. I made marionette-Phillips rise to his feet before I got close, just to see if anyone reacted. No one did, so Phillips and I walked our separate paths away from the scene, our courses converging after a few hundred yards. We stopped, seemed to talk for a few seconds, I took his jacket off him and put it on, then we flew up into the air together. I was doing that just in case this area was under satellite observation by now; an idea that'd occurred to me when I saw how much was going on. If so, they'd probably think there was a team of supermen, including the three guys that'd provided the escape distraction by firing from the wall, and had then disappeared without a trace, except for the weapons that had fallen to the ground in funny places. A team of supermen would imply that the individual Mark Anderson was irrelevant. Phillips and I accelerated away on a long, slow climb out. I had no idea what compass direction we were going in, but that didn't really matter. I got us up to about 150 mph, judging by our going two to three times faster than the cars I saw. I had my face inside a conical NP-plate to keep the wind off my eyes. It wasn't airtight, so I could breathe easily, so it made a very good substitute for a helmet or ski goggles. A heat blob provided significantly improved comfort too, although I would've preferred a good set of windproof clothes because the heat blob didn't have time to warm up the air I kept flying through. We cruised along at about 500 feet AGL (Above Ground Level), getting some distance behind us. After half an hour of passing over farmers' fields, I started looking for a suitable spot to get rid of the body (he wasn't good company). We kept flying, and I kept looking, but Iowa is BORING from the perspective of offering interesting places to bury bodies. We flew on and on, steering well clear of groups of lights and anything that faintly resembled a cloud. I tried to make sure I wasn't heading in a big, embarrassing circle. That was unlikely, but I was meandering a fair amount so it was a danger. I tried to navigate using the most-distant sets of lights I could see, while zigzagging around the nearer ones. I would obtain a compass one day soon, but would not go high-tech and get a handheld GPS. It'd be marvelously useful, but it'd also leave a record of all my travels and if anyone got suspicious, it'd lead them straight to me. [[In my technological nescience - an appropriate word in this context; it means "ignorance", being the opposite of omniscience - I was assuming that GPS units transmit their location like cellphones do, except probably much more accurately. I know better now, but the Mark I was then didn't question his assumption.]] After two hours, the only patches of wilderness I'd seen had been barely a few yards across. I saw some small lakes, but I had nothing to weigh the body down with, and even with weights I've heard that bodies have a habit of floating to the surface inconveniently. I preferred Phillips to disappear without a trace, never to be seen again, as that'd throw suspicion onto him rather than me. Then I saw an area of road that was having repair work done on it (during the day I mean), and decided that'd do well enough. It was a country road so there wasn't much traffic, and I'd noticed an area of ground that'd been torn up by the road workers' machinery. We landed in some bushes nearby. I transferred his watch and all the money in his wallet to mine, except for the coins because I didn't want to carry unnecessary metal. I searched through his pockets, piling everything personal to one side, including his wallet and a ring off his finger. I stripped his shirt off too, laying it out flat for later. I cleared an area, piled up some wood in it, put his personal stuff on top, then started a good fire. I left that burning while I started digging a grave in the torn up area. I can dig FAST, as I use two square NP-plates coming together at an angle through the dirt to scoop up the earth and carry it away. With up to hundreds of scooping pairs working continuously, the earth was flying out of the trench (literally). I dug down about fifteen feet - having to use stronger shovels, but that wasn't a problem - then floated Phillips into the trench, where I squashed him to a pulp starting with his head and fingertips. By the time I finished squeezing, the only identifying evidence left behind was DNA. No one had driven past, but it wouldn't have mattered much if they had. I would've stopped digging and hidden while they passed. They weren't going to react to seeing a pile of earth beside an area of road repairs. Filling in the hole took less than a minute, then I patted it down very forcefully and raked the surface around the entire area so it all looked equally messed up. I floated back to the fire. It was still burning, so I applied thirty heat blobs to hurry it up. Ten minutes later, I smothered the fire by pressing it down hard with NP-plates. They don't let air pass through, so the fire quickly extinguished. I scooped up all the remaining crap (the coins, melted plastic, and whatever else had partially survived), and dumped it on the flat shirt, which I tied into a bundle. I took it with me when I lifted off. I looked for a small lake, flew the bundle down to it, and dropped it in. Now it was time to head to Washington DC. ------- Chapter 296: Tidying Up Monday, February 20, 2006 I rose high enough to find a large collection of lights, then headed that way, dropping down to 450 feet when I got close so I could use a sight blob to read the signs. I was in St. Paul, Minnesota. I didn't know where Fort Dodge was within Iowa, but I knew Minnesota was north of Iowa, so I'd been going north rather than east to Washington DC, or south toward warmth. I found a large, open gas station close enough to town that someone walking in wouldn't be noteworthy, landed myself in a dark area nearby, then walked the remaining distance. They sold hot food, so I got enough "for my family," plus a lot of drinks and snack bars for later, a hat that better covered my bald, blood-spotted skull than the one I had, and a national map. I asked the attendant, "What's the best way onto the interstate east?" He gave me directions to I-94. I listened attentively, but I had all the answer I needed in the first second, when he'd pointed. I wandered down the road, thoroughly enjoying my hot meal. Down the road a bit, I cut into a field to get away from the lights, sat on an NP-seat, rose to 500 feet, then flew in the direction the attendant had pointed. It didn't take me long to find I-94, I turned right - which should be east if I'd been flying north - and followed the interstate while continuing to eat and drink. I'd had two weeks of too-short rations and no food at all for the last several hours, so the food was very welcome. I made sure to put the trash in my pocket rather than 'throw it out the window'; I was on a mission to do some tidying up, so littering would've been inappropriate. When I'd eaten enough, I slowed to a hover, relative to whatever direction the wind was blowing in. I had to be careful not to take my eyes off the interstate for too long because it'd be easy to lose it or get turned around by the wind. Going to a camping store to buy a compass is definitely on the list for DC. I had about a thousand miles to go and it was about 4:30am now. I had to speed up a great deal, or take an extra day. I'd very much like to catch Wright on his way to work in a few hours. Hopefully that'd be before he heard anything about Fort Dodge, so there'd be less chance of him changing his behavior or mentioning my name to anyone. Going 400 mph with me sitting in a chair would require a very big windshield as I'd need to protect my whole body. I could do that, but it'd have a lot of wind resistance and might get buffeted quite a lot. I was very eager to avoid buffeting, because I could imagine that easily leading to the dreaded instability. I decided to try the flying rug approach, similar to what I'd used to fly through the wrecked doors during my escape. Compared to my first attempt at making a flying rug at the end of the casino kidnapping (there's far too fucking much kidnapping going on!) this rug would be much better. For a start, I can make NP shapes perfectly square now. I made a solid rug extending forward from the seat I was sitting on, allowing me to easily slide forward off my seat and lay flat on the rug, facing forward. I was navigating using a big sight blob so I could've flown facing backward, but that seemed wrong. A nice, flat flying rug should allow me to go fast in a stable manner, and of all the "manners" I know, "stable" is my favorite. I could angle a windshield diagonally up over my head, and even curl up the sides and back of the rug to hold me snuggly in place. I decided to call it my "Flying Sled". I created the Flying Sled in front of my NP-chair. I was so used to sitting that getting off the chair and lying down on my stomach felt weird (try it 500 feet in the air yourself; it does feel weird, especially when lying on invisible plates). I got into position, and it felt like it'd work nicely. It was actually quite comfortable, so I hoped I wouldn't fall asleep. I tucked the food bag into a 'glove compartment', a box made of NP placed just behind the angled windshield and to my left a little, where it wouldn't intrude on my sight whenever I opened my eyes. I left the map open at the right place, putting it on the rug right under my face, with an NP-plate on top of it to hold it safe from the wind. Now I could navigate while I flew. I was set, so I canceled my chair, oriented myself on the interstate again, made sure the horizon was perfectly stable, then started accelerating by pushing against the rear of the sled rather than on my feet. My body didn't slide backward because my feet were already held by the curved-up rear of the sled. The sled worked REALLY well, being far smoother and faster than the chair. I'd accelerated myself with just one mind at a fifth of its full power, so at 0.3 g. That sounds weak, but without wind resistance it would've taken only ten seconds to get up to the same speed as the cars under me. Wind resistance soon became a significant issue. The first thing wind resistance taught me was to put a copy of the windshield on the downward side of the sled, because wind pressure against the top one kept forcing the sled's nose down. I could compensate, but the compensation changed as the speed changed, so it was easier just to reproduce the upward windshield on the bottom so they canceled out at every speed. I could've made the bottom one bigger, so it provided some lift, but I didn't want to. I had far more force than I needed, so getting a little extra lift was pointless, especially because the amount of lift changed with the speed. I just wanted a simple setup that I could operate with as little thought as possible, and what I had now gave it to me. The NP-plates of the rug itself continually pushed up with a never-changing amount of force to cancel my weight, all the NP-plates of the sled stayed in formation (easy, see below), and the acceleration had to be applied evenly to the back of the sled, which was also easy. It was a great setup, requiring almost no thought to maintain. [Flying all the NP-'blocks' in formation was easy. Hold both your hands out in front of you with just your index fingers extended, so they're about 2 inches apart. Now write your name rapidly in the air, trying to move both fingers in perfect synchronization with each other. Their relative distances will wobble around, sometimes 2" apart, sometimes 1" or 3". Now repeat the exercise with the two fingers pressing against each other. It's easy to keep them locked together AND moving in random directions with almost perfect synchronization. Same for NP-plates flying in formation when they're pressed up against each other, especially with thirty two minds on the job.] Wind resistance was increasing, so a 30 kg push was increasingly being countered by the wind's pushing back. To maintain a 0.3 g acceleration, I had to push harder and harder. The pushing mind maxed out its pushing power and the sled increased its speed to about 120 mph (about double the speed of the cars beneath me). That was very good, because in my flying chair it'd taken three minds max-pushing to get me up to that speed. A second mind pushing got me up to about three times the speed of the cars. I practiced turning, and it was as easy as I'd guessed, merely needing me to push harder on the outside corner of the sled (so left rear corner if I wanted to turn right), or less hard on the inside of the turn (both worked fine). Climbing or descending was by changing the upward force from the carpet. If I increased it, I rose, but unlike an airplane, I remained level the whole time. I could tilt up if I wanted, but there was no need to, not even to look where I was going because the sight blob did that for me. It took 4 minds to get me up to 4 times the speed of the cars; 8 minds to get me up to 5.5 times faster. I was experiencing an uncomfortable amount of wind blowing on my body, so I halted the acceleration progression while I experimented with reducing turbulence by altering the design of my Flying Sled. I extended the windshield farther over my head (and underneath too, to ensure lift was unaffected), but that didn't help much. Nor did making a complete nose-cone. What made me happy was widening the nose of the sled out to the left and right, tapering it down to either side, somewhat like a hammerhead shark (it would've looked very cool, if it hadn't been invisible). I could've built a completely enclosed canopy (with a small gap at the back so I didn't suffocate), but having some fresh air blowing in made flying more fun, especially as I had a nice heat blob going. Once the wind buffeting was reduced to a comfortable level, I got back to accelerating. Sixteen minds got me up to eight times faster than the cars beneath me. Call it 500 mph (my Flying Sled was woefully unequipped with instrumentation). [I later timed myself between two locations on my map that were connected by a straight road, and 500 mph was about right; slightly over actually.] Theoretically, 24 pushing minds would've gotten me up to about 600 mph, but I was happy enough with 500. The bumpiness of the ride had started increasing. It wasn't bad, but I had a feeling that it would be if I kept pushing the speed upward. I was also worried what would happen if I lost center for any reason. All my NP-points would instantly cancel and I'd suddenly be tumbling through the air. The faster I was going, the more dangerous that'd be, and I thought 500 mph was more than enough. I haven't accidentally lost center for a very long time, but better safe than sorry in this circumstance. If I want to get involved in something potentially distracting while flying, I'll remove a few minds from the 'engine' first (quartering the number of minds would halve my speed and quarter the air's 'impact' on my body if I lost center). I was driven away from the interstate by rain clouds. I was NOT going to fly through rain at 500 mph and lose orientation. I could VERY easily have unintentionally tilted downward slightly, so sixteen minds would be powering me headfirst into the ground at over 500 mph. No thank you! Another thing I wasn't going to do was try to fly over the top of the clouds. I'd heard somewhere that above 10,000 feet people start to need an oxygen supply or they get drunk-like or even pass out. Flying at 10,000 feet at 500 mph with nothing but my mind to keep me safe had to be the worst possible time to impair my brain functions by getting drunk. Not going through rain or over it meant going around it. I wasn't too worried about deviating from the interstate because I could easily fly over towns and catch their names. It was a clumsy way of navigating, but it'd work. I did experiment with flying higher, up to what I guess was about 5,000 feet. It worked fine. It was cold but a heat blob took care of that. Another one heated my food when I wanted another snack; useful things, heat blobs. I preferred to fly at about 400 feet because I could read the names on signs to identify towns as I flew over them, so my high-altitude experiment didn't last long. By the way, "reading the names on signs" isn't as easy as it seems, and was something I had to very cautiously experiment and practice with. The problem is that I have to fly with my eyes shut to get the much better visibility that a large sight blob gives me. So if I lower the blob to read street signs, then I'm flying blind. Flying blind is VERY scary, as a gust of wind might destabilize me, and I HATE the idea of being destabilized! I didn't so much "lower the sight blob to read the street signs" as zip it down and back up again, for a succession of VERY quick glimpses until one of them caught sight of a useful sign. A couple of hours later, I arrived at Washington DC. It was good timing because I needed a comfort stop. I'd eaten and drunk too much during my trip, and my Flying Sled is also woefully unequipped for passenger comfort. I quickly dropped down in the dark, behind the back wall of another gas station. A few meters above ground level I tilted the sled so I came down standing up. One good thing about Magic Flying Sleds, is that there are no parking problems, although I was forced to leave the bag of food on the ground. I walked around to the front the station, disposed of my trash, bought a street map and used their convenient convenience. I read the map while walking back to my landing spot. I knew the address of the DHS's S&T office and where I was now, so it was easy to plan the final leg. I checked that no one was watching, then recreated the Magic Sled so it was standing on its end right in front of me. I put the bag of food back in the glove compartment and the map layered on the floor, then I made like Superman, leaping into the air. I'd leaped slightly forward of vertical so I bumped into the sled, which was rising up to catch my feet. The sled accelerated upward and tilted slightly forward to make it easy for me to remain in place. An acceleration of 1.5 g was enough, as in 1 second I was 7.5 meters up, above the nearby buildings and outside of any light shining from their windows. My opinion of how cool I was got raised several notches. I flew at 400 feet AGL to the DHS's S&T office, hovering nearby while I carefully checked that there were no cameras on the rooftop, or on the tops of the other S&T buildings. Some of them had a lots of equipment on top (satellite dishes and various types of antennas), but no cameras that I could see. My face was deliberately placed in the center of the map, so totally hidden from below, but I didn't want them to know that anyone could fly. The way looked clear, so I moved closer to get good enough visibility to read. I knew Wright had his office on the top floor because I'd seen him punch that button on the elevator many times, so I sight blob searched that floor until I found his office. That was easy as it was one of the best and his name was in the "To:" area of most of the paperwork. He wasn't in yet (my watch said 6:45am but it was 7:45am here because of the time zone change). I went through his paper files (inside his desk, filing cabinets and safe) looking for anything about me, but I found nothing. That saved me the bother of covering his smoke sensor with an NP-bowl and having a fire. I didn't want to use his computer because that would cause suspicions later, but there were plenty of other computers around and I knew that S&T's security was poor, so I didn't expect the trouble that using the CIA's Medical COO's computer had caused. I logged in with a senior researcher's password and looked up my file. It wasn't there, which I presumed meant that Wright had gotten rid of it. That was excellent, because it meant I didn't need to coerce any cooperation from him. This was going to be quick and easy. I logged out. I flew myself away from the compound, found a suitably dark and obscured spot, checked no one was watching it, then dropped quickly to the ground. I walked briskly to a location closer to the front gate of the compound, but out of sight of it. I sat myself quietly in a corner, head down and hopefully looking completely uninteresting, although anyone who approached would be surprised how warm it was in my area. Not that anyone could approach unexpectedly, as I'd proximity sense them twenty four feet away (I was very pleased by that sense's range being so useful now). I sent a sight blob to check the DHS. First I confirmed Wright's car hadn't arrived yet (I'd spied that out when they had me prisoner), then I stationed the sight blob outside the front gate waiting for him to arrive. There hadn't been a day planner in his office, so I didn't know whether he was coming to work today, but I'd find out in the next hour or so. Every few seconds I zipped the sight blob to above me to check no one was approaching me, and then I zipped it back to the DHS. That took less than half a second so I missed nothing. I saw him arrive just after 8:00 local time, so I'd cut my arrival very close. I was happy to see there was no one else in the car with him, so I could do this the easy way. I let him enter the compound and then I took control of his car. I pushed his feet back against his seat and his hands down by his side. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, unfastened his seatbelt and locked the doors. I steered his car for the corner of a building a good distance away, pushing the car from behind to help it accelerate (not hard enough to be freaky or leave indents in the metalwork, just enough to build a very impressive speed). He couldn't know, but I had nearly all my spare hands holding the front of the steering wheel tightly, to prevent the airbag deploying properly. There was absolutely nothing he could do about it, so the driver's side of his car impacted right on the corner of the building at high speed, causing him massive injuries. I pinched his nose closed and tightly sealed his mouth with an appropriately shaped, wide NP-fingertip. Another of my fingertips felt for a pulse. He had one, but it wasn't doing well. I didn't want to break his neck deliberately in case the similarity with the computer geeks at the CIA lab was noticed. Setting fire to his car might make people think about the mysterious fires in the lab too, so I just kept the suffocation going. He'd lost all his breath in the impact, so the lack of air was immediately causing him trouble. He was so injured he wasn't capable of fighting for a breath, not that he could've fought me anyway. After my first kidnapping I'd learned the "3/3/3 Rule": "You can survive for 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food." (It's only roughly correct.) Wright didn't even make it to one minute before his pulse stopped. A crowd had gathered around his car and were already trying to come to his aid, but I'd been holding the car doors shut to ensure no one could get in even if the locks had been damaged by the crash. Someone eventually smashed a window and unlocked the doors, but even then they couldn't be opened (the frame of the car must've twisted to clamp the doors, or something). One would-be rescuer climbed up onto what was left of the car's hood, cleared out the windshield and wanted to pull my victim out that way, but other spectators argued him out of doing it. People kept trying to open the doors, but it wasn't until the EMTs arrived and cut the doors off that they could get his body out. He'd been dead for fifteen minutes by then. The EMTs had done very well getting there so quickly in rush-hour DC winter traffic, but not nearly fast enough. I got up, moved to the main street I was sitting near, which wasn't the street the DHS entrance was on, and started trying to hail a cab to take me to a good hiking store. This was all the tidying up I was going to do in DC. The only choices were to do Wright only, or to do everyone who could conceivably know about me; there was no useful middle ground. Just taking down the S&T building I'd stayed in, and the people in it, wouldn't achieve much because that was just admin. Most of the people who'd worked on me while I was their guest had been based in other buildings. I didn't think I had a chance of taking everybody in the entire complex down, destroying the buildings, the computer disks and wherever their computer backups were. As this was Washington, there'd be Army, Air Force and God knows who else all over my ass before I could get all that done. The Fort Dodge lab had conveniently been inside a secret hole in the ground in the middle of Iowa, so no one could see that I was wrecking it or respond quickly. Neither was the case for the DHS's buildings. I'd just hope that Wright's apparent suicide didn't cause anyone to get suspicious about Mark Anderson. They shouldn't, as there wasn't anything to link them, especially because whoever investigated Wright's death shouldn't know about my being a guest of the Super Top Secret, destroyed CIA lab halfway across the country. ^ Getting a cab was a pain, but flying through a heavily populated area during daylight hours would have caused considerably more pain, so I had no choice. I eventually found myself in a good hiking store. The Magic Flying Sled worked so well that I no longer needed to buy a set of motorcycle leathers, but I still needed a moderate-sized backpack to carry stuff in, and I DEFINITELY wanted a compass. If there were easily portable version of the other instruments that planes had, that would be very good too, especially if there was one that could tell you what to do when your plane was unstably spinning all over the sky. I picked out a pack that was as big as I could carry around during the day without looking too much like I'd just emerged from the wilderness. That took most of my money, but I presumed that compasses were cheap. I was happy to buy something cheap until I got to Portland, where I could "Kill two birds with one stone", so to speak: tidy up Moran and dig up the $10,000 I had hidden just north of the city. One of my concerns about buying flight-related equipment was anyone finding out about it. People do NOT carry altimeters around! It turns out that they do. When I asked about compasses, and mentioned that I wanted something that I could carry around all the time for convenience, the salesman showed me their display of watches that had compasses in them. Some of them had altimeters too! "Why do people need altimeters in their watches?" He was a salesman, so I got the enthusiastic, gushing version, but basically they're for people who scientifically fitness train at altitude and for snow-skiers and -boarders. Buying a new watch was an excellent idea because: They had AWESOME features (below). I had to buy a new watch soon anyway, because the one I had might be able to be linked to the CIA lab. (The ID I was carrying was certainly dangerous. I'd stolen the wallet of my vague lookalike from the lab, in case I needed some form of ID out in the world. I'd dump it as soon as I arranged a new ID.) I could wear a watch and no one was going to query it the way they'd query my carrying an altimeter. It'd be immediately "to hand" if I needed it in midair. The store didn't have a big range in stock, but it had plenty of brochures. There were several watches that would be fantastic for me because they contained the functions of: Compass. Very useful for flying around at night. Altitude, from roughly 5,000 feet below to 25,000 feet above sea level; the models varied, all suiting my needs because I had no intention of flying outside of the lower or higher limits. Rate of change of altitude, so I'd know if I was going down; a VERY, VERY useful feature if I accidentally hit fog or rain. Altitude alarm. If I got below the setting, an alarm would sound, another WONDERFUL feature. Barometer, which might let me know if I was heading into a storm. Water resistant. I was almost willing to fly into rain with one of these things. They told the time too. They couldn't help me in an unstable spin - I hadn't expected anything could - but they did damned near everything else. I COULDN'T WAIT to buy one of these! I had to though, as they cost several hundred dollars and cheapskate Phillips hadn't had enough money in his wallet (they really should pay CIA bosses more, especially considering how dangerous the job is). No way could I use the credit card I'd stolen from inside the lab, so I'd have to wait until I got my cash from Portland. I bought a cheap, plastic compass now, disappointing the salesman. He was even less impressed when I asked his help in locating the nearest Kmart store. I wanted a change of casual clothes, dry socks, ski mask (what Mom calls a balaclava), etc. I was willing to take the risk of shopping for clothes at a Kmart store when Julia was over two thousand miles away. I changed into my new, dark clothes (chosen to be suitable for night flying), bought a book, sat in a food court, and prepared to spend the day killing time and planning what happened from now. It felt good to start to relax. I even restarted continually radiating ki out of the top of my head, the EEG had put me off doing that practice previously. I had four major decisions to make: Whether to merge again. Where to get a new ID as a short, ten-fingered Black boy. Whether or not to tell anyone in my two families that I was alive and free; and if so, who and how. Whether and how to take care of Moran. Now that I was free, the merging decision totally depended on my body being adaptable enough that I could stay free. I'd had my "ten-fingered, short, Black guy" idea on the 11th, had started trying to start change my body immediately, but neither finger had changed at all in six days of eight minds' worth of wishing. I'd merged to sixteen minds on the 17th, and in just over two days, I'd managed to grow a pimple on the finger stump. Now with thirty two minds, in about twelve hours my body had managed to increase the pimple-sized lump into a wart-sized lump. That was a dramatic increase in the growth rate. If it continued for the next couple of months, I'd either have my finger back, or a world record wart. My skin color had responded better, even with only eight minds. The finger I wanted to shorten was still not reacting, so my ability to reduce my body's height was questionable. It looked like the two most important of the three changes might work, so I'd not do another merge until they'd had time to prove themselves. With déjà vu's due every seventeen hours, I could easily wait and see. I had what I thought was a very good idea for becoming a new person, but it'd take at least a month to work, and probably longer. During much of that process, I'd be unable to visit Corvallis, so I'd be out of my families' lives anyway. That was a good reason for not telling anyone I was free, but the strongest reason to keep my freedom quiet was the risk of the CIA or DHS snooping around Corvallis. It'd be best if my loved ones were still convincingly committed to finding me. It was cruel to make them wait a month or more, but jeopardizing a whole life - or even all of our lives - for the sake of making such a short time slightly easier wasn't a smart tradeoff. Another thought I couldn't help having was that in three-quarters of the dimensions I'd been in before the DHS grabbed me, my families would be searching for me without end. In this dimension, they only had to wait a few weeks or months. It wasn't a good justification, but it did make me feel somewhat better about their wait. Which left the question of Moran. I didn't want to suicide him. That would make a chain of too many suicides, after Big Byrd's shooting himself and Wright's car accident. That was especially true because they'd suspected me of mind control, although by the end of my time with the CIA, its scientists had lost interest in that. I wanted Moran to die with plenty of evidence that someone else had done it. Ideally I would've liked Moran to be shot down in a gunfight with a criminal, but that was hard to arrange on short notice. If I'd been willing to spend several days in town to find the right criminal, I could've hijacked Moran in his car - as I'd done with Wright - and driven Moran to wherever the criminal was. I could forcibly control them both to get them shooting at each other, and to make sure Moran lost. I didn't want to take several days to do this though, as the sooner Moran ceased to exist, the better. I couldn't get a random person convicted of murdering a DHS agent, or kill them as part of that fight, so that scenario was a no-go. I decided that I'd stake out the DHS office tomorrow, follow Moran home, where he'd apparently surprise a burglar. In the ensuing struggle, the burglar would wrest Moran's gun off him, shoot him with it, then make his hurried escape. It'd all be done from a safe distance with NP, of course. If Moran had family, I'd knock them out first, then Moran would have a fight with an invisible opponent, which I'd make sure produced plenty of fighting bruises on Moran's face and body, as well as some good household damage from where he got pushed over. I'd open some drawers, scatter stuff around, leave the TV halfway to the front door, etc., as if a burglar had been caught mid-job. It'd be "just one of those things." By the way, sitting in a food court meant I was surrounded by many people. Sensing all their bodies working was VERY peculiar, but one aspect of it amazed me: something like 15 to 20% of the non-old women that came within 24 feet of me had breast implants! I would've been surprised by 5%, so I was astonished at nearly 20%. It was sad that so many women felt they needed to, but it was logically amusing too. The more women who get implants, the larger the average-sized breast would appear to be, which would motivate even more women to have it done, etc. America could become a spectacular place in a few years. Or at least DC, if being a fake was a behavior specific to DC. Other than noticing fake breasts, I spent quite a while improving my understanding of the emotional information I could sense now. It was tricky because I often didn't know what the person was feeling. A couple having an argument made it easier for me to determine what their 'colors' meant, but someone sitting by himself or herself was harder to understand. I can tell which emotions are being felt strongly (their 'colors' are 'bright'), and those people are more likely to show their emotions physically, so I concentrated on them, spending quite a while working out which colors meant which emotions. I was helped by the same color meaning the same thing for everyone, but I was hindered by people not actually experiencing emotions in the same ways of each other. There are differences across the genders, older people react differently to younger, and individuals vary too. Nonetheless, I kept myself occupied and I did make progress. I had another déjà vu during the day, more or less on time, seventeen-ish hours after the merge. I wasn't sure what would happen if one came when I slept, or even if one could come then, but getting them every seventeen hours would soon give me some information about that question. [Over the next several weeks, I accumulated enough statistical data to learn that if a déjà vu was timed to come while I slept, then I either didn't notice it or it didn't come. I could tell that it wasn't delayed until I woke up. When I guessed I'd missed a déjà vu because I'd been asleep, then my next déjà vu was an average of seventeen hours later, implying that they do occur when people are asleep. [[The Universe needs to synchronize dimensions and doesn't care whether we're awake to sense it happening. It synchronizes rocks too, and they're hardly ever awake.]] The other event that affected the time between déjà vu's was when I had one with a Mark with fewer minds. This was rare, but it did happen. Interestingly, they happened after an average delay increase proportional to how many times fewer minds he had. The latter piece of knowledge gave me a small clue about the déjà vu process, but nothing that would've been helpful to me at this time.] In my current déjà vu, the first thing I noticed was that my proximity range doubled to 48 feet and the information it conveyed was like increasing a microscope's magnification by a factor of ten, giving me FAR more biological information than I wanted, such as watching people's stomachs digest their lunch, seeing how full their bowels were, and other delightful stuff. I could read ki more subtly. For example, I could sense lots of the guys 'checking out' the women because that's where their attentions were focused. I was surprised by how much of the reverse there was too, although usually FAR more subtly done. There was a great deal of same-sex 'checking out' too, especially women to women, but I proximity showed me that it was mostly non-sexual. I guessed it was mostly the women being interest in other women's fashion. Where my reading their emotions let me know it was same-sex and sexual, I enjoyed watching half of those events, especially when the participants noticed each other. I also noticed that proximity was showing me many lines and small lumps of ki where there were no people. (Remember that proximity is like a type of radar. Very detailed now, but the metaphor is still useful. I was getting radar signals from places my eyes told me there were no people.) That people-less ki was a different 'color' than any other I'd ever sensed. It didn't take me long to work out that the new ki color correlated to where electricity was flowing or being used. Only mains power; not cellphones, digital watches or any other consumers of small amounts of electricity. Proximity had only ever identified ki before, and I'd thought ki was a living force, so either ki was more than I thought, or proximity was now picking up more than ki. My maximum force during the déjà vu would be forty four tons! That was something my link partner and I decided not to put to the test. Ditto for not testing how hot heat blobs would be now. I chatted with the other 32-minded Mark - we were both amazed that the Universe allowed such a bizarre situation to happen! He was in Washington DC too, waiting for nightfall to do the same thing as me, after having also escaped the CIA lab. He had the same plans and ideas for future actions as I did, so discussing them wasn't much help to either of us. We discussed the past and discovered some minor cross-dimensional differences. He was surprised that our school had soccer games all year, for example, as his - in all thirty two of his original dimensions - had short seasons for several different sports throughout the year. How could someone get good at a sport with only a couple of months to play it in? And rather than fifty-minute classes with ten minutes between them, they had forty-minute classes with five minutes between them. God knows how the school expected them to have a meaningful social-life, or how their Julia had managed to execute some of her trickier plans, with only five minutes to talk between classes. That was barely enough time to walk between some of the classrooms we had used. He asked us whether we had any good ideas about how to recover from an unstable flight situation. In the mutual commiseration that followed, we learned that he'd had one idea that we hadn't: creating an absolute positioned sight blob to watch our body, to get a better understanding of how it was spinning than our eyes could give us. To explain that to you better: we knew we could create sight blobs positioned relative to our body, or independent of it. For example, if I was walking down a hallway at school, I could have a sight blob positioned over my head, and it'd stay there no matter how I moved, even if someone managed to push me unexpectedly. Or I could send the sight blob to search a classroom as I walked down the hallway (presumably while struggling to manage the superimposition). While searching the classroom, the sight blob wouldn't keep pace with my walking because its position was now defined relative to the room, so independent of me. In neither case did I have to make any mental effort, not even to think about which choice to make, as it happened automatically. [[As mentioned before, our subconscious has both routines down cold. Picking up something off a table as you walk past, or unbuttoning your shirt as you walk, require no conscious choice about whether to absolutely or relatively position your hands.]] The other Mark's idea was to create a sight blob twenty feet away in a position independent of us. We'd continue falling, but the blob should stay where it was created. A little reorientation would get it lined up on the horizon in the 'upright' manner we're used to, and then it could look down at us. If we fell too far, we could order the sight blob to zoom closer. It could see how our body was tumbling, which should make it easier for us to know where and how to push to cancel out the tumbling. It could also give us a good idea of how fast we were falling. It was quite similar to the situation when we'd first tried to high dive at the Aquatic Center. That'd been a panicky disaster, but if we'd had tens of seconds to work on it, we probably could have gotten it right. It was a reasonable idea, one we'd both been too freaked out to think of during our first experience of flying instability. It wouldn't help us if we were in a cloud or fog, but it might help if visibility was good. Or maybe it wouldn't help? We'd have to test it, which was a test neither of us was eager to carry out. We talked about many other subjects, but nothing of importance came out of it. Déjà vu finally cut out after two and half minutes, which was an astonishingly long time. I wondered whether that would be the normal duration now. [Yes, as confirmed roughly seventeen hours later, and repeatedly thereafter.] Near sunset, I gave my book away to an intelligent looking young man (good literature should be shared freely), bought some extra food for the trip, then went walking, looking for a place that'd be dark soon and where no one would be able to see me take off during the slow first second. I also kept a worried eye on the weather, because if it started snowing I'd have to catch a bus west until the weather improved. The weather stayed suitable for flight operations though. DC gets dark quickly in winter, so I didn't have to wait long before I could pull down my ski mask - I'll wear it every flight from now on, in case someone sees me - and did my "Superman Taking Off" impression. Total time for checking-in, luggage handling, seat allocation, security screening, boarding and taxiing for takeoff: about two seconds - somewhat more efficient than the commercial airlines. I was soon streaking westward; heading at about 280 degrees according to my compass, which was mounted under my face next to the map. I could track my progress on the map, and the miles ticked over very nicely. It was going to take about five hours. The fifteen hours of darkness at this time of year gave me plenty of spare time, so I decided to divert to Corvallis to check up on my families - try making that decision mid-flight on a commercial airline! It was a good flight, despite the several diversions required to avoid rain, one of which was required a large detour. The flight home ended up taking me over six hours. I did the whole trip without needing to land. I did need to take a piss once, but I just slowed to a near hover, stood up and pissed downwind over the side, hoping there was a DHS or CIA agent beneath me. It also let me stretch my legs. Magic Flying Sleds aren't all that comfortable. They're heated and I can easily move my body around, even roll over if I want, but they're hard and occasionally bumpy, although that's quite rare. If a flight ever does get too bumpy, I can use NP to clamp myself against the sled, although that would get tiresome after a while. I was worried about baddies spying on my home, so I stood up before I arrived to cut down on my cross-sectional area when they looked up. I passed over home at about 1,000 feet, surely making me impossible to see (I hoped). I hovered, using a MAX-sized sight blob (48 feet!) to look down for anything untoward around the house. It might as well have been daylight, so it was easy for me to look around. From 1,000 feet I couldn't see anything suspicious, so I started slowly lowering myself down to 300 feet, keeping my big eye searching the whole time. There was no sign of baddies, so I was soon low enough to check on everyone. I'd arrived at about 11pm DC-time, which is 8pm Corvallis-time, so everyone was still up. I was very relieved to see all four parents, Carol, Donna and Julia. They looked okay; it appeared to be just an average night at home for them, as best I could judge. I could so easily have prodded someone (Julia say), then pinched her lips together, but there was no way I could show my still-white face in Corvallis. Nor could I call them on the phone because it or the room might be bugged. I also needed them to keep being convincingly concerned about my absence, so all things considered, letting anyone know I was back wasn't a good idea, just a very tempting one. I regretfully left them, to head north to Portland. I had plenty of time, so I dug up my Portland cache, taking all $10,000 out. I reburied the empty box, then took to the sky again. I found myself a cheap-looking restaurant, stashed my backpack high in a nearby tree, then landed out of sight and walked to the restaurant. I had a good meal. I could tell I'd caught up on my eating by now, as my hunger was satisfied before I was half done even though I hadn't eaten much recently (I'd been engrossed by the in-flight movie. Nah, joking. Magic Flying Sled Airlines has terrible in-flight service and entertainment. Talk about a "budget airline"!). I made myself finish my meal since I was going to be sitting on Moran's ass all day tomorrow and wouldn't have time to get a meal. I ordered a takeout meal for tomorrow's lunch, then went to the bathroom to have a dump. I hadn't wanted to do that at 400 feet over Middle America, although I should keep a roll of toilet paper in my pack just in case I get inconveniently caught short. I checked the restaurant's phone book. There was no "Moran, Robert", but there were two "Moran, R.'s", one with an address given. I left the restaurant, walked into the darkness, did my very cool Superman takeoff, retrieved my backpack, then went in search of a gas station. I purchased a street map, located the address of "Moran R." and paid it a visit at 400 feet. It was a female's house, whom I soon learned was called Ruth. There was no man in residence, only a couple of kids. There were pictures displayed showing who I presumed was the father, who wasn't the asshole I was after. I headed into town, landing on the top of the highest building near to DHS's, sitting myself in a spot where the taller buildings farther away wouldn't see me behind some protuberances. I found Moran's office and snooped around it looking for any stuff about me, or anything that had his home address. I found a paper file labeled with my name, containing only a few pieces of paper, all dated after he'd handed me over to Wright. According to this file, Moran was claiming he took me outside and let me go, and he had no idea where I'd gone after that. He suggested my disappearing so effectively indicated that I probably did have terrorist contacts, so he was recommending that my bank accounts should be frozen, including the four overseas accounts. What a prick! That suggestion had been rejected. The overseas accounts weren't in my name, so those banks would be unlikely to cooperate unless the DHS could show better cause than they had. My local accounts didn't have much money in them anymore, so there wasn't much point freezing them. The DHS had decided that keeping a watch on them was deemed a better idea. They were obviously acting out the scenario that they didn't know what had happened to me, thereby wasting even more resources because of Moran's fucking stupid "Terrorist" claim. I was so pissed off with the prick that I decided that I REALLY wanted to track him down now, before he caused even more trouble. I couldn't find his home address in this office, but it'd be somewhere. There weren't many people working in the building, but the ones that were, were nearly all doing computer work. It was only a matter of time before one of them got up to go to the bathroom, get coffee, or whatever. The system was different than the DHS system used in Washington DC, but I'd seen it in use enough to have a reasonable idea of what to do. I poked around a little while finding the right program, and then it only took a few seconds to get Moran's address. It even gave his occupation, so I knew I had the right guy. I cleared my inquiry off the screen, got out my local map, put my backpack on, and went to Moran's to let him know my opinion of what had been done to me. I hovered over his building. He and a couple of other obvious DHS types were watching football on TV. Football! He deserved to die. I killed time by searching the house. Moran was a bachelor, which made things easy. No files about me or anything else interesting. So it was just a matter of waiting. The interminable game finally finished. The guys chewed the fat for another a couple of beers before they left. Apparently DHS agents don't worry about DUI; not these ones anyway. ("DUI" is colloquially "Driving while Under the Influence". In Oregon it's formally "DUII" for "Driving while Under the Influence of Intoxicants", a serious traffic violation.) I let Moran go to bed, gave him about five minutes to get comfortable, then I smashed his front door open. He came running out of his bedroom carrying his gun and we proceeded to have a very violent, one-sided fight. My fist-sized NP-fingers beat him over and over again, pushed him into walls, over furniture, etc., making sure I only used no more than the strength of a strong man. Moran fired several times, but none of the bullets came within three hundred feet of me. When he'd empited his gun, I took the gun out of his hand and beat his head in with the butt. I thought "Beaten to death with his own gun" was about right for this paragon of a DHS agent. The whole thing was over very quickly. It'd been a totally one-sided fight, so it didn't have any reason to take long. I left the gun in the mush of his caved-in head, canceled my NP-points, and flew south. ------- Chapter 297: Obtaining My New Identity Monday, February 20 to Friday, March 31, 2006 I was heading for Los Angeles. This is where the ten-fingered, possibly short, Black guy I was going to become currently lived. I don't know who he is yet, but I will in a few days. I resisted going via Corvallis, instead following the coast south at about 2,000 feet for the two hours it took. For someone who doesn't have a car, I get a lot of use out of gas stations. Money lasts a lot longer without a car too. When I'd been on the lam from Binion's investigators, my money had quickly drained away, but this time I could cross the country on a couple of snack bars. Outside of LA, I got a local street map, opened it and asked the attendant, "My mother warned me to stay away from South Central. Where's that exactly?" I found a hotel that advertised "Cash Only" on its sign and which had a secure landing place nearby. I landed, checked in, heated up and ate half my takeout meal, then went outside to start my scouting. I cruised around South Central at 400 feet AGL: learning the geography, building exteriors, and about the gangs, such as where groups of guys hung around, how they reacted to strangers, etc. Even though I was flying low over a populated area and there was plenty of light at ground level, some of which leaked up to my level, I was confident of my invisibility. The light at ground level ruined everybody's night-vision, and I was wearing black clothes with a black ski mask and standing upright to minimize my cross-sectional area and making it hard to recognize as a person. I was particularly interested in Black guys in their late teens, or maybe early-20s, a demographic that was very well represented on the streets. I saw many groups that looked suitable for my needs. I studied them until it got too late and they started going indoors. I wanted to keep a very low profile this trip, but if I ever need some quick cash, this is where I'll come to get it. I spotted a dozen drug houses on my first evening, and they'd be very easy for me to rob. I could take their drugs too, flying out to sea and scattering them from 5,000 feet. Hitting a half a dozen places in rapid succession would result in some amusing aftereffects for some of the 'victims'. I flew back to my hotel, happy that I seemed to have plenty of choice. I spent the next few days doing four things: More scouting. I wanted a gang of about a dozen guys that'd grab at an easy criminal opportunity, but weren't too hardened. Not the young members anyway; I'd be happy if the older members were bad guys. They had to be hanging around the right urban landscape, near a dead-end alley, ideally a "blind" one, with no windows looking into it. There also had to be somewhere else nearby where I could covertly land. Pushing my body to change itself. Turning my skin black was easy; I guess because it knows how to produce melanin (that's what turns white skin brown when it tans, or makes Blacks black). For the moment, I was 'tanning' only on areas covered by clothes. My regenerating finger continued its growth. Proximity, especially when in a déjà vu, showed me that the new fingerbone was well under way, growing about four or five millimeters per day, so 'zooming' down the long bone. It looked like it wasn't starting as a baby-sized finger and then expanding later (as happens with everyone else), but growing a correctly sized one immediately. It had taken my finger-shortening experiment a while to get started, but that test finger was finally showing signs of shrinking. I had been reasonably sure it would eventually - because my body's changes over the years had included a lot of bone shape changes - but it was still great to see. I didn't want to wait a year or two for my disguise to be perfect. I left LA for a couple of days to do some nighttime searching around Oregon's wilderness areas, until I found what I was looking for. A little bit of remodeling and tidying up made it suit me very nicely. With all the above falling into place, I started buying the equipment I needed: one of those wonderful compass/altimeter watches (I got the most plastic one, to avoid it reflecting radar because I'd be wearing it on every flight I made. It functioned wonderfully!), a short length of VERY strong chain with a matching padlock, some stakes (one VERY strong), a large supply of pens and paper, lots of snack bars, bottles of water, a small tent, hammock, and other camping gear. I didn't rush the execution of my plan, preferring to take it slow and do a good job. That was especially important in my selection of targets, so I spent a lot of nights scouting for the best group of guys that I could find. Three nights before D-Day, I transferred all my purchases to the 'campsite', found and captured my own "goon" - everyone seems to have them so I wanted one too, for the usual reason - chaining him (his gender was something I noticed only by proximity) near the campsite. ^ [[My recent mentions of Blacks prompts me to mention why there are Blacks and Whites - those are good names for them, because that's why they exist. The human race's mammalian ancestors were widespread, but it was in Africa that their intelligence successfully emerged. Living outdoors, excessive sunlight was a killer that struck the fair-skinned people much more than the melanin-protected dark-skinned folk. Kinky hair was important too, because straight hair lets sunlight reach skulls much easier. The result was the evolutionary success of the Black phenotype and failure of the White. When humans spread to less strongly illuminated climes, their Black bodies received less ultraviolet radiation, thus they created less Vitamin D and many of them developed Osteomalacia (adult rickets). That was particularly fatal for pregnant women trying to give birth. Lighter skinned, less curly haired Blacks had a significant evolutionary advantage in the non-equatorial environments, and it didn't take many generations for Whites to emerge in those locations. Blacks and Whites were superior in their own environments. Assuming dimensions in which I choose not to intervene, then if the ozone layer gets seriously depleted and human civilization collapses because it can't adapt to the new conditions, then Blacks will take over the world. That sounds fair, because Whites had the last turn.]] ^ Back in LA, I observed my target group closely for a couple more nights, then at 9pm on March 1st, my target group couldn't believe their good luck: God knows how he'd gotten there, but walking down the opposite side of the street was a White guy, wearing a backpack and a shiny, new money belt, dressed in smart clothes, holding a map open in front of him and clearly lost. To make it even better, he was even walking toward the mouth of the local blind alley. Once they'd recovered from their surprise at Christmas arriving early, the gang didn't stop to say a word; they rushed across the street before some other gang saw me. [I referred to them as "my target", but they were merely a potential target group until this moment. I would have lost all interest in them if they'd sat on their asses and done nothing as I walked past. I would have identified a second potential target group and tried again with them, and if necessary, a third, etc. This group's enthusiastic response, and what they did over the next few seconds, very effectively upgraded their status from "potential target" to "target". I'd had little doubt that would happen - hence my always calling them my "target" - but I want you to know that the choice was theirs.] I seemed to see them for the first time, and get scared. I ran into the blind alley. I was pursued by happy laughter and my targets. They probably should've been suspicious at my folding up the map and putting it back in my pocket as I ran. They blocked the entrance, pulled out their knives, and advanced while I backed up against the rear wall. "Giv'us ya money, motherfucker!" They repeated that in a variety of very macho ways. I politely inquired, "Do you think using violence to get what you want is acceptable?" "Drop the fuckin' pack, or we'll slice ya." "I'll take that as a 'Yes' then." I quickly checked the few windows that looked into the alley with a sight blob, to make sure they were still barricaded, closed or empty of observers, as they had been five minutes ago. They were, so I pulled my ski mask down while I flipped the gang's plan around. I needed to leave some bodies behind, and the four oldest were the best choices. They weren't suitable ID providers for me, being too old, too hardened, and quite possibly wanted for crimes. Plus it'd be good to strip the younger guys of their leadership right from the start. So the seven younger guys all got simultaneous, very forceful punches in their unready guts, dropping them to the ground in breathless surprise. The four oldest-looking guys got punches too, also so they couldn't call out to attract attention. But rather than collapsing to the ground, they stayed upright and started stabbing each other in a frenzy of violence. All my doing, of course. I was holding them up, holding their hands around their knife handles, and pushing their knives into each other. After a few quick stabs back and forth, I gave the four of them fatal wounds, in the heart twice, sliced one throat, and up into the brain from the back of the last guy's head. It'd been extremely quick - almost as quick as you could say "stab, slash, slice" - because there was no defense, no jockeying for position, etc. I wanted it over with as quickly as possible. Three of them were dead already, but the guy with the slit throat was taking a while. I didn't want to take the risk of him surviving long enough to talk, so I lifted his head a few inches, then smashed it down hard enough to ruin his day. [[I felt so justified in killing these guys that I did it without remorse. They'd attacked me first, eleven-to-one with knives and guns. I know they didn't actually get their guns out or lay a hand on me, but they certainly would have if I'd resisted, which I had the right to do. If I'd resisted, they would have stabbed or shot me, probably to death rather than leaving me able to call the cops. I imagined they'd have killed me even if I cooperated, as I'd seen all their faces and this was right in the middle of their home territory so the cops would quickly identify and find them. I'd spent half my life on the receiving end of violence, over and over again from the same relatively few bullies who also attacked other weaklings, so I had less than no sympathy for bullies. These guys chose to use overwhelming and deadly force to steal what they wanted from me; so I applied their rules back at them.]] The four corpses had received their injuries too quickly to have a chance of making noticeable noise, but the seven younger guys were starting to get their breaths back now. Three minds NP-grabbed each of them, around their upper-arms and tight enough around their throats to make it hard for them to take a breath and make noise. Another of my minds grabbed all their knives. Usually off the ground, but out of their hands in a couple of cases. I reformed my sled, stepped onto it, and we all shot up into the air. We tilted over, zoomed up, and then headed for the ocean, me flying about twelve feet above the seven of them, with them lined up side by side. I could proximity sense what they were doing, which was mostly freaking out, trying to scream (I'd only partially relaxed my grips on their throats) and wetting themselves; all of which I ignored. My handholds on each of their arms stopped them reaching into their own pockets to prevent them grabbing a gun, in case any of them had one. I patted them all down thoroughly while we flew, finding more knives, two pistols, wallets, keys, watches, several rings and necklaces, and other assorted crap. We were over the water now. I kept their wallets and keys (making sure to remember who they'd come from), and dropped everything else. Then I ripped the clothes off them, dropping those too. Me and my seven possible ID donors turned inland, heading for my prepared campsite. I flew high, at 5,000 feet according to my wonderful new watch, but at only half the speed I normally go because I didn't have enough minds to push such a large group any faster than that. My captives quickly got VERY cold, and then too cold (proximity showed me their bodies failing to cope), so I put a heat blob over them. I didn't give them anywhere near as much heat as they would've liked, so when we landed in their new home four hours later, they were incapable of doing anything more than slumping to the ground. Their new home was a big hole in the ground in a wild part of southern Oregon. I'd removed everything from the hole (branches, leaves, etc.) and had dug around in it somewhat, to make a flatter floor (it'd been a crevice originally). It was about thirty feet deep, so there was no way they could get out, not unless six of them could stand on each other's shoulders. It was empty of any useful tools, leaving digging by hand as their only choice. Most of the crevice was made of rock, but even if it had been earth, digging out by hand would take many days. Their home was quite small, so there wasn't room for me to live in it as well (a pity, because that meant I had to chain my goon up nearby. I would've preferred to have him occupy the middle of a larger crevice, but nearby would still work). I turned on the battery powered florescent lantern I had suspended from a stake hammered into the wall high over their heads. I stood on an NP-plate, hovering about twelve feet above their floor, while I steadily dialed up the heat blob I had around them. They revived after a couple of minutes and were soon having to scramble away from the heat. I picked them up, turned them upside-down, and shook them, just in case I didn't have their full attention. Having gained their attention, I stopped the shaking then started the first of our many conversations, "Pretty cool, eh? Three months ago I couldn't do any of this shit, but look at me now. Which one of you would like to be able to do this stuff?" They had no macho crap left - in most cases, no crap at all left - but they were still shocked stupid, so the conversation didn't progress smoothly, not even after I turned them the right way up and put them down. It took a while, but I managed to convey the following points: I had acquired my incredible mental powers three months ago. I wanted ONE lieutenant who I'd teach how to do what I could do, but at half my strength. Every day or two I'd pick the most useless one of them and he'd be killed, just like the TV show "Survivor", except that I'd be providing even more reality than Reality TV does, which admittedly is almost none. Eventually all but one of them would be killed. That was certain and there was nothing they could do to prevent it. The last Survivor would either be taught my powers, or if I didn't like how he behaved, he'd be killed too and I'd try again with another group. I told them that they were my second group, as no one in the first had behaved the way I wanted. They had to be obedient and truthful. Fucking me around would be the same as committing suicide. I ignored their questions, flicked the light off and rose out of the crevice. I hovered beside the hole at the top, out of their sight but where I could listen to them, watching them with a sight blob. Their conversation was a chaotic, rambling mess, but I didn't really care what they were saying. I was just studying them to get to know their personalities. I was probably going to become one of these people, unless they were all no good for that purpose, in which case I'd try my luck with another group later. I needed to pick the best one of them, and then be capable of pretending to be him, so I allocated three minds to watch each individual closely, the rest of us getting the big picture. It took quite a while, but eventually they settled down enough for one of them to suggest they had to kill me. The conversation got so quiet that I couldn't hear anything, so I went to bed in the hammock I'd tied out of sight, high up a nearby tree. I had a good sleeping bag and waterproof cover over the hammock, they had nothing at all, so they were going to have a very unpleasant few hours. I had a tent pitched near the crevice area that I'd prefer to sleep in, but I wasn't going to risk sleeping at ground level until my prisoners were sufficiently cowed. I woke up every half-hour to do a quick sight blob check that they hadn't thought of some miraculous way out of their hole, but they were well-behaved, helpless prisoners. I didn't need much sleep, but I had nothing else to do so I took a succession of 30-minute naps until I awoke to find the sun was already up. I checked my prisoners. They were huddled together for warmth and looking very pathetic. Quite different from how they'd looked when they had me cornered in the alley. I pissed off my goon by NP-prodding him several times. He was going to get some work soon and I wanted him to be in the right mood. I got out of my nice, warm sleeping bag. It was a brisk morning, so I put a heat blob over me while I floated to one of the bags of food I had suspended from the branches around me (there are enough bears in these parts that you have to put your food in trees. Bears are a nuisance for people in the woods because they'll eat anything). I put a couple of snack bars in my pocket, was eating from one of them with one hand while my other hand held a bottle of water. Thus apparently unable to defend myself, I dropped silently down into the middle of the crevice, stopping twelve feet above their floor level again, positioning myself horizontally so the most-distant one of them was just within twenty four feet of me. It was still dark in the hole, so I flicked on the lantern and yelled, "Wakey, wakey." (Okay, I'll admit it wasn't the most awe-inspiring part of my act. It was the start of the day and it just came out.) Their cunning plan was surprisingly sophisticated, considering how little they had to work with. It took them a little while to wake up and get their heads clear, but then one of them sidled to the side (that being pretty much what sidling does), one got me into conversation with questions, three of them put their hands behind their backs and onto the rocks they must've dug out of the wall in the dark, and a couple moved so they were nearly under me. All seven of them were poised to leap into action and were mentally rehearsing those actions, so I was not at all surprised when the sidler suddenly yelled "HEY!" and waved his hands. The three rock throwers immediately threw their rocks at my head, as one of the two guys that were close to me cupped his hands so his partner could leap into them and be boosted up to grab me. I calmly took a drink of water while the rocks seemed to bounce off midair (I'd used NP to push strongly against each rock). The leaping assailant didn't get high enough to reach me, so his hands never banged against the underside of the wide plate of NP-squares I had just below my feet. Maybe they'd been hoping that the rocks would've caused me to lower myself or start to fall. I gave them a couple of seconds to recover and appreciate their plan's total failure. I floated the stones off the ground and toward the three throwers, offering, "Do you want to try again?" "Ahh..." "Go on. I insist. Have a free shot; get it out of your system." One of them hesitated, but the other two were quick to try again, which shamed the third into trying too. The three rocks bounced off my 'shield' again, falling to the ground. "In case you haven't worked it out yet, you didn't trap me in the alley; I lured you into chasing me into it. I can fly like Superman, so why would I be walking around with a street map looking lost? I wasn't the least bit worried about being in an alley with guys armed with guns because even bullets bounce off me these days. Your silly little plan of throwing rocks at me had no hope of success." I let them appreciate how silly they were to throw rocks at a guy that bullets couldn't touch, then I added, "Last night I warned you not to fuck around with me and that I'd be killing you one at a time. So it's time for the first elimination." I rose up in the air, all of them following after me whether they wanted to or not (mostly "not"). I got us all to hover in a group above the hole. I addressed them, "Just like the TV program, I will eliminate you one by one. The person who's eliminated will be killed unless he can win a fight. With all the guns and knives you carried, you obviously like fighting, so you've got a fair chance. It's one against one; and even Black against Black, so it's a great deal fairer than what you thought you were doing in the alley against me. Let's go have our first fight." A few days ago, I'd found a large, male, black bear south of here, picking a relatively skinny one, which indicated that he wasn't ready to hibernate. I'd driven a large stake into the ground in a clearing under a rock overhang, and had chained the bear to it on a short chain. He was hungry, thirsty and very pissed off. Not noisy though - that's a Hollywood myth - so he hadn't attracted anyone's attention. We were in a remote area, so it was unlikely there'd be anyone hiking around up here, but I played safe by taking my prisoners to my 'goon' by threading them through the forest rather than going up and over the intervening trees. My prisoners grabbed hold of tree branches to stop me flying them, but I yanked on them with greatly increased force, scraping their hands raw so they soon quickly learned not to do that. My 'goon' was only fifty yards away, so it didn't take us long to get there. I hovered us just inside the clearing, but out of reach of the bear, telling my small - and about to become smaller - gang, "One of you is going to fight my little pet. If you lose, you'll be dead. If you can kill the bear, I'll let you rejoin the group." I was interrupted by protestations. That was easily fixed: I punched them all in the stomach. They were dangling by their arms at the time, which tightened their chests, so it was very hard for them to get their breaths back. While they were trying to breathe again, I explained, "I don't give a flying fuck what your opinions are. I'm in charge here and we're playing this game by my rules. You would've laughed at me if I'd said, 'You can't do this!' in the alley; and I'm laughing at you for saying it here. One of you IS fighting my bear shortly. And in another day or two, it'll happen again. Then again and again, until there's only one of you left alive. -- "The first fighter will be whoever it was that first suggested you try to attack me this morning. Which one of you was that?" I knew who it was, and knew that I didn't want to take his identity as he was too fat. I'd brought him along to help educate the others into being cooperative. They staunchly refused to even glance in his direction. "Well, who is it?" No answer. "Anyone going to tell me?" Nope, no one was. "You really are VERY stupid people. Don't you think I already know who it is?" I threw that guy at the bear. Black bears are unaggressive, but this one had been riled for days, plus I'd been poking him for the last five minutes, pulling his hair, tweaking his nose, etc. Now a guy flew though the air and landed on top of the bear, which was the last straw! The gang member was immediately dismembered; it was a VERY short fight. Bloody though, making a VERY strong impact on the surviving six. I was holding their wrists with NP so they were dangling below their stretched arms, facing the spectacle. In that position it was hard for them to turn away or to stop looking, that level of violence having a sick fascination. I let my prisoners watch until the bear settled down to his feeding, then I took them back to their crevice, dropping them on the floor. "Think of it this way. ALL of you are going to die, one by one, because there's no way in the world that you can stop me. Even if you had your guns you still couldn't touch me. You're insects that I can swat whenever I want. I can fly you up to 10,000 feet and let you fall, or I can make you so hot you burst into flames," I had several very hot heat blobs approach them, forcing them up against the wall to avoid getting burned. "I can squeeze your head so hard it pops open." I canceled the heat blobs and formed fingertips to squeeze their skulls hard enough to be scary. "I can kill all of you as easy as thought and none of you can put a scratch on me. And, as I said, I AM going to kill you. However, there's a chance that ONE of you - just one - might survive. If he's the sort of person that I want as a lieutenant, then I'll train him to be a superman half as strong as I am. -- "Whenever any of you make a pathetic attempt to attack me, my opinion of you goes down. Whenever you make a pathetic attempt to hang on to a tree branch when I'm taking you somewhere, my opinion of you goes down. Whenever you fail to answer my questions - like whose idea it was to attack me - my opinion of you goes down. Every day or two, the person I have the lowest opinion of will get to demonstrate how much fun uneven fights are. -- "If the last of you still seems useless to me, then I'll kill him too then get some fresh volunteers. Sooner or later I'll find someone who realizes that I am the BOSS, that my word is the LAW, and that he should bust his hump to do whatever I want. In return for which he'll get to be a superman. If you prefer to be eaten by a bear rather than be a superman, feel free to keep acting like morons." I floated up out of the crevice and back to my bear. I didn't want him to overeat, so I moved the bear away from the mess he'd made, scooped up all of the big pieces and took them back to the crevice, dumping them at one end, "Just to keep you reminded of what will happen to you if you don't stop fucking around. You'll either learn to do EXACTLY what I want, or you'll end up in that pile." I left them alone for a few hours, spending the time lying in my hammock reading a book. I'd brought heaps of them up with me, expecting to have a lot of time to kill. At lunchtime I grabbed a snack bar for myself. I put six more snack bars and a bottle of water in an NP-dish that I kept out of sight as I descended into the crevice. I left their rations outside, where I could get them quickly and impressively. Another advantage of having a 24-foot proximity range was that I could keep the food in an NP-dish without it canceling on me, even though it was out of sight. I floated twelve feet above them, eating my food and asking, "Have you decided to be cooperative and truthful, or do you want to keep feeding the bear?" They weren't too eager on feeding the bear. It was a nice bear, and no doubt deserved to be fed, but they preferred it was given nuts rather than niggers. (I can say that now, because I'm intending to become one; nigger I mean, not nut.) "Okay, let's see how sensible you are. Line up side by side and go down the line stating your names, addresses and ages." They did that all right, one by one down the line. "What are your favorite colors?" "Why dya wanna know dat?" I gave him an exasperated look, then said, "First, I want you to answer one after the other going down the line and it's not your turn. Second, I am your BOSS, with the power of life and death over you. You DO NOT ask me questions; I ask you. You've now got less chance of being a superman than any of your friends, and more chance of being a bear's lunch. What are your favorite colors?" I got six answers in rapid, orderly succession. "Who was your favorite teacher at school and why?" I asked a whole bunch of seemingly random questions. I had several reasons for doing so: to get them used to answering my questions, to confuse them about what was going on so they wouldn't know in which direction to lie (so hopefully they wouldn't), to learn lots of trivia about their lives, and - when I judge the time right to ask them - to hide the important questions among the others so they'd be more likely to answer them truthfully. For example, I wanted to know whether any of them had outstanding arrest warrants. I didn't want to become someone who would be immediately arrested when I turned up. I deliberately asked questions that they'd be reluctant to answer, so I could catch them being reluctant. Such as, "How many girls or women have you had sex with?" ALL guys lie about that. When they looked reluctant, I said, "You've got two choices. Tell me the truth and your friends won't be impressed by you," I thought I was safe in assuming they'd previously lied in the upward direction, "or lie to make yourself more impressive to your friends. At most, one of you is going to survive this. If you lie to me, that'll guarantee your death, so I don't think that trying to impress your friends is a good strategy." [[Based on my now-extensive knowledge of human beings, whenever a guy answers the question, "How many lovers have you had?" the truth is probably a third of what he says. When a female answers, the truth is probably three times her answer. Males and females look at life in VERY different ways.]] Another of my questions was, "What was the last crime you committed?" There was some hesitancy over that, so I told them, "You've got NO IDEA what I'm looking for, and I'm deliberately asking all sorts of questions I've got no interest in to make sure you can't work it out. If you thought I wanted you to be aggressive, you'd lie to make yourself seem more aggressive. If you thought I wanted you to be less aggressive, you'd lie that way. You're never going to work out what I want, so my advice is to tell the truth. If I think you're lying, then you're going to be ripped to pieces and end up lying in the corner like your friend." They still had trouble answering, amusingly because they'd been breaking so many laws for so long and so often, carrying pistols and knives, or buying and selling drugs, for examples. I ended up having to be more specific in my question. We played Twenty Questions for a lot more than twenty questions. I expected them to ask for food, but they seemed to be too scared to. I wanted the strong enough to give me good answers so after three hours I ended it by saying, "No more questions for now. I'll get you some food and water." A second later the NP-dish containing the six snack bars and the water floated in. They were too eager for the food to take the time to be impressed by my fetching it so quickly. A couple of days later we had another Black Man versus Black Bear bout. After that the survivors were VERY cooperative. I'd prepared a cover story (below), but I never needed it; they were already as cooperative as they could possibly be. And after the third bout, they were wetting their pants (not that they had any) in their eagerness to help me learn as much about them as I wanted. There was a theoretic possibility that one (or more) of them might have tried to maximize his (their) chance of surviving by killing one or two of his competitors, but they were all seemed too intimidated to even think of that. [Unused cover story: "A guy in Poland discovered how to make psychic abilities REALLY work - BIG TIME! He's going to become Emperor of the World shortly. He's trained people to be half as powerful as him, enough of them for a King of every country in the world. They can run their countries however they want, but they have to do what the Emperor wants. The Kings are half-training Princes for areas of their country. I'm the Prince for California. I'm looking for people to be Barons for different parts of California. You guys are candidates for running LA for me. When there are enough Barons in place around the world, we'll be taking control of the whole planet." The idea of this story was to provide the carrot to encourage them to cooperate, but seeing the bear kill their friends provided such a powerful incentive that the carrot wasn't needed. A couple of times they asked about my training them, but I quickly answered, "I'll explain when there's one of you left; not before." Their acceptance of that meant telling them the cover story was never necessary.] The last four guys were given pads and pens, and told to write VERY detailed accounts of aspects of their lives. All about their parents (names, ages, jobs, where they met, about their other relationships, etc.) Half of them only had one parent now, but it still worked the same. Ditto for their siblings, their school history, work history, etc. For the first few days their English Composition skills were appalling. They couldn't write to save themselves, although they tried. And it was even worse when I tried to read their handwriting. I had to get them to read what they'd written, and they had trouble with that too. Fortunately, after a few days of ten hours of writing practice a day, they got better at it. Especially after the number of them was whittled down to three. Well, not exactly "whittled", as there was no whittling involved. There was no bear either. He'd done enough and I was feeling sorry for keeping him so long, so I'd let him go after the third elimination. The fourth elimination I did myself, pulling the guy apart in five directions. My audience were as cooperative as they could possibly be already, so I faked it a lot, breaking the guy's neck early on. That also stopped him shouting too, which was safer for me. I did it inside the crevice, and after doing a careful sight blob search to make sure there was no one anywhere near us, which was something I did quite often. ^ About this time, things started getting a little weird inside my head - make that, "even weirder". It started as a feeling that my brain was 'bigger', and there were 'echoes' of stuff going on that I didn't have a handle on. It seemed to be something vaguely like several voices or new thoughts in my head, but voices/thoughts I couldn't hear properly or comprehend. It wasn't obviously a bad thing like a headache obviously is, but it was a weird sensation IN MY BRAIN, so definitely worrying. My first thought, maybe even hope, was that I was getting telepathy, but it didn't seem to correlate with what the remaining guys were thinking, or whether they were thinking at me. It wasn't the sort of thing I could go to a doctor about, and I couldn't leave my prisoners alone for long, so I had to put up with it. It got worse over the next few days, as if I was hearing many echoes at the same time rather than just a few. And then I started gaining slow understanding of the echoes. What had happened was that in integrating my much more powerful abilities, my subconsciouses had gotten 'frightened' with how much power they had (it's not fully correct to speak of the subconsciouses as having their own emotions in such a clear-cut way, but it's close enough for this). They 'decided' (again not really the right word for what happened) that the conscious minds should be in charge of some of the subconscious processes. Not the essential ones like maintaining our heartbeat, as being distracted from doing that would be bad. Not the mundane ones like how to catch a ball either, but several of the special ones. What it boiled down to was that my conscious minds got given more understanding and control of my special abilities. It took several weeks for most of the various aspects to become reasonably clear and consciously usable. I wasn't so much learning new things, as having what my subconscious already knew passed 'upward'. It wasn't nearly as straightforward as learning a new fact, as the subconsciouses were in charge of "doing things", so it was a process they were making me aware of. Learning new processes isn't easy, especially because the subconscious and conscious parts of minds work very differently. Subconsciouses have almost zero understanding of what they're doing; they learn mostly by very crude trial and error. So my conscious minds were receiving new information about what was happening and how to control it, but they were having to work out the underlying principles and develop more conscious ways of performing the tasks. Or sometimes it was better to find conscious ways of directing the subconsciouses to do the tasks, depending on the tasks. It was several complicated and confusing things happening at the same time, so it took a long time to make sense of it all and learn to work with the new information. The above few paragraphs don't adequately convey the strangeness and complexity of the experience. You'd think it should be easy to explain how my mind worked to your mind, but the language for it doesn't exist. It was VERY weird, but it had some benefits. As one example, if I hadn't already consciously learned from Sensei about my proximity sense's range being from the nearest part of my body, rather than my center, then I would've learned it over the following weeks. I even learned why. My proximity sense's range is measured from my 'sense of self'. Proximity is a purely mental ability, which I would've thought should've meant its range is measured from the brain, but apparently the mind is more integrated with the entire self than we believe. Or if it's not actually integrated, then it thinks it is (I can't work out whether that actually makes a difference or not, or if it even means anything). [[The above description of how proximity works isn't accurate. I thought it was at the time, but my subconsciouses had large gaps in their understanding too. Less than my conscious minds though, as my subconsciouses interacted more with my special abilities so had more information about them.]] Another thing that I learned was nonsense, was my belief that intervening solid objects reduced the range of my ki-effects. My range was 500 feet even if there was 450 feet of solid rock between the blob and me. (Actually, my maximum range was 518 feet because of my increased proximity range, but I'll simplify that to 500 feet as it's increasingly fuzzy for the last 50 feet or so anyway). My subconsciouses still had to know where the blob was, and at long range the vision quality degraded - those limitations hadn't changed - but they couldn't care less about what was in between. It'd been my conscious minds that'd assumed intervening matter hampered the ability, and my subconsciouses had never questioned that assumption because they tend to be dumb and obedient about prejudices. I only learned this once I got conscious understanding of what the subconsciouses did to control my ki-effects. I eventually noticed that what they were doing had nothing to do with any intervening matter. By way of analogy, when I catch a ball, the subconscious processes involved in performing the catch couldn't care less if it's a Tuesday. Learning that single, simple fact - that intervening matter didn't matter - meant I could have EASILY scouted the entire CIA lab from my bedroom/cell. There were eight levels above me (say ten feet each to make it easy), so the top level was only eighty feet above me, and the top of the above-ground building was within 150 feet of me vertically, easily within my range. Had I been able to scout and plan my entire escape from my bed, I quite likely would've broken out after only one merge. Once free, I might have been able to slowly disguise myself without needing another merge. I would've been kicking myself very severely over hurting another set of my families unnecessarily, except I didn't know whether the disguise would have happened even if I'd waited months for it. I consoled myself with the thought that growing a pimple wasn't proof that I could have grown it into a full finger. Another benefit to my new understanding is that my proximity sense will always have a 24-foot radius now, even through doors and walls. If the CIA or DHS start skulking around, I might be able to detect them even if they're hiding behind something. [[I'll mention that the subconsciouses were like my consciouses in that they were still making many incorrect assumptions. None of those came to light in the above process because the assumptions were being made both consciously and subconsciously, so there was no discrepancy to draw attention to them. As an extreme example, we neither consciously nor subconsciously understood the fundamental structure of the Universe. For example, the concept of "distance" is something both my conscious and subconscious minds have a very firm assumption about, based on our three dimensional, limited view of the Universe. There is, effectively, no such thing as "distance". Or alternatively, it's possible to define a set of circumstances that will make a "distance" be pretty much whatever you want it to be. Every level of my mind was massively ignorant about the Universe, which forced the making of many grossly erroneous assumptions. In many ways, humanity's understanding of the Universe isn't much better than a dog's understanding of it.]] Once my subconsciouses got into the swing of things when it came to passing the buck upward, they did it even more, the lazy buggers! More fairly (and if you can't be fair to your subconsciouses, who can you be fair to), when they knew the conscious minds were very interested in something, they tended to provide them with access to a greater level of detail than would have normally been the case. I was doing a great deal of body altering, for example. It was very important to me that it worked and that it worked as fast as possible - I wanted to go home! - so my subconsciouses let my consciouses see more of what was going on; something that tied in well with the amount of medical information my proximity sense was giving me. I couldn't get my body to lay down new bone any faster (that was constrained by chemical reaction times), but I could consciously direct where to lay it down. That was quite an improvement because a great deal of what the subconscious does is trial and error (as per my earlier story about growing new facial nerves and test-firing them), and the errors can waste a lot of time. By the time I was ready to start changing my facial features and voice box, I was able to direct those operations consciously, resulting in them being done much faster than they would've been just from subconscious desire to look and sound like someone else. [Some of these subconscious-to-conscious transitions took a long time; days, weeks and even many months when they were complicated and involved a lot of experimentation to find a good balance between the two levels. One of the specific transitions was a biggie, both in terms of its importance to me and in how long it took. It involved sight blobs, and took so long it'd be premature of me to describe it yet, because it was months away from being useful. I'll describe it later.] ^ When we were down to just three surviving ex-gang members, I had a pretty good idea who the final pick was going to be, but I had more checking and learning to do yet. The "learning" doesn't need much explanation, as I had to learn as much as possible about my final pick, so I could assume his life believably and without being caught by stupid mistakes. "Checking" involved a bunch of different things. For one example, I'd picked a group of guys who didn't look like heavy drug users, but I wanted to make sure none of them went into serious cold turkey after a few days. I wasn't worried about drugs damaging my pick's body, as I wasn't taking over a body, only creating a visual copy of it. But I was worried about what he might've done under the influence of drugs, and what sort of trouble that'd leave hanging over my head. Fortunately, the last three guys were only recreational users and had managed to avoid having drugs screw-up their lives significantly. Other aspects of body damage were relevant too. I wouldn't want to pretend to be a guy who was HIV positive, for example. When I returned to civilization without HIV, there'd be difficult questions. And speaking of cold turkeys, I should mention that once the spirit had been beaten out of these guys, I gave them a couple of cheap blankets and the waterproof cover I'd had over my hammock. I didn't need it now as I'd moved into the tent, and it was too cold at nights not to let them have some cover. During the day I kept them naked, both for its psychological effect and so I could totally memorize their bodies, how they moved, their mannerisms, etc. My body's ability to change itself was working very well. My missing finger was now only half-missing. I'd had my other fingers crossed when the regeneration had reached the first knuckle. It'd worryingly stalled for a couple of days, and then the new bone started appearing. The knuckle took another three days, and now it was zooming (0.2 inch or 5 mm per day) down the next long stretch. I'd turned a lot of my torso black, to confirm that I could. It was quick, taking less than a week, so I was relaxed about it. My prisoners never saw any of my black skin, so even with the other changes my body was making, they never suspected what I was intending to do. They never got good looks at me since I was usually hovering well over them. I used a sight blob to study them as much as I wanted, from every angle. By the way, the rumor about Black guys being 'more impressive' than Whites doesn't seem to be generally true. Not when they're naked at a fairly high altitude in winter anyway. One little thing had worked out fairly well. My hair was growing out from its roots with the color and curliness properties I'd been hoping for, and I was growing a racially appropriate beard and mustache now too. I was wearing my ski mask as a hat most of the time, so they didn't see my hair, just my beard from below. My height was reducing, but that was happening much slower, taking about two weeks to lose an inch. I was measuring myself against a conveniently vertical rock. I'd originally backed up against a tree, but one of my minds reminded me that trees grow. Probably not by much during winter, but what was "not much" for a tree might still be very significant for me. [[I must have been asleep in class the day we were taught that trees gain height only at their tips.]] The three current survivors were all shorter than me; by one, two and five inches. It was the shortest of them who was on top of my list for being my final choice, even though my choosing him would delay my returning to civilization. The whole plan was going better than I'd first expected though, especially as it looked like I wasn't going to need to restart with another group. I was also normalizing my build, losing my extremely wide shoulders, letting my waist out and sacrificing my very cute butt. I hadn't chosen my final form yet, but none of them had cute butts. I had intended to whittle them down one by one, but that process stalled when there were three left. There was no need to reduce the number as they couldn't have been more cooperative than they were, and all three were possible choices. None were high quality choices, but they were all workable ones. I was learning more about each of them by keeping the three of them alive. Like I'd done on some of my pipeline dates, especially the first date for each intake, I got them to have a debate with each other. For example, for and against my using my power to snatch them the way I had. None of them remembered me saying, "Do you think using violence to get what you want is acceptable?", but I reminded them and then told them to debate it. One of my criteria was for a guy who was reasonably intelligent, so the debate helped me determine that. It also let me listen to how they talked in a different setting, as they forgot about their current reality once they got into the debates, especially if they were about something they enjoyed, like sports or girls. I stayed at the campsite for all of March except for one quick foray: I'd originally planned for two to three weeks and with fewer mouths to feed, so I had to resupply one evening. I also needed to buy some stuff for my next cover story, so I killed two birds with one stone. My prisoners had no idea that I'd left, and by now they were so docile that it was okay to leave them alone for a while. There was no way they could cause trouble. Even ripping the blankets into a rope wouldn't have gotten them out, and I'd been scarily clear about what would happen to them if they tried any shit like that. Each of them thought that he had a 33% chance of not only surviving, but gaining my abilities, so they didn't want to take any risks. I accomplished my shopping trip without any problem. One of my high-flying sight blobs would occasionally spot other people, but none of them came close enough to find us. I'd picked a place off any natural trails, in an extremely difficult-to-traverse wide valley between two ridges. Any hikers would walk along the ridges, not in our area. It was the non-hikers I worried about - the group of guys I saw backpacking in supplies in preparation for setting up a marijuana crop. They were well off the usual trails, just like I was. I'd been ready to gut-punch then gag any of my guys if anyone else came near us, but it never happened. We never had a fire, so there were no signs of our presence from afar. People would have to stumble on us to find us. That wasn't likely at this time of year. When I finally made my choice, I killed all of them quickly in their sleep, crushing their skulls so fast they didn't have time to blink. I crushed their fingertips too. I removed the cash from the six surplus wallets put it into the one I'd be keeping. The surplus ones, plus the one I'd stolen from the CIA lab, were opened and placed on top of some small branches I piled up on the floor of the crevice, which I set alight. Once that was burning well, I added everything else burnable, such as the blankets and the plastic tarp that'd been in the crevice, my tent, hammock and sleeping bag, and all the other burnable trash. I used sheets of NP-plates to divide the column of smoke into several smaller columns, and I fanned the smoke to make it spread even more, to make it harder to spot. Even if spotted, the fires will very shortly be buried so deep that they'll never be found by anyone who finally gets here. Once the fire had finished, which took very little time with multiple heat blobs adding to the effort, I totally filled the crevice with earth, branches, a couple of dead trees, more dirt, rocks, etc. The graves were buried so deep and it'd take such a major effort to dig down that far that no animal or person will ever find them. I packed up all the non-burnable trash, and made sure the area had no sign of our presence. They'd been in the crevice 99% of the time, and I'd floated almost everywhere, so there was very little sign we'd been here. When it looked pristine, I left. I flew south while starting the process to blacken my face and make other such changes, working on them consciously so they'd happen as fast as possible. About a hundred miles from my campsite, I found a narrow crack in a rock formation, crushed and buried the florescent lantern, spare keys, and everything else in it. Then I continued south ------- Chapter 298: The New Me Rejoins Society Saturday, April 1 to Tuesday, April 25, 2006 I was now a white-faced version of Ronald Fisher, also known as "Bomber" to those friends he/I had left, because he'd thought it made him sound macho and cool. I was nineteen years old - one of my important criteria was for him to be old enough to legally ignore his parents - and a high-school graduate. The latter had surprised me, but he'd insisted that his parents had the paper to prove it. Judging by the widespread ignorance the gang members had demonstrated in their many conversations with me, their schools hadn't so much educated as baby-sat their students. As soon as I was black enough, I needed to get a couple of tattoos. Nothing major, just around my upper-arms. I'd wear long-sleeved shirts until the tattoos had aged enough to look correct. I don't like tats, and my family doesn't either, but they seemed to be obligatory for LA thugs. Fortunately there had been a huge number of small gangs for me to pick from, so I'd selected a group of guys that weren't as covered in tats as many of them were. Once I'd picked a group, the choice had been a lot more limited. Ronald Fisher didn't have anything about him that made him particularly useful for me, other than his being a legal adult, short, ten-fingered, Black guy. He'd just been the least bad choice. As I had thought likely, the police had his fingerprints on file, so I'd had to use the ink pad I'd bought to take his fingerprints and mine, compare them side by side, then try to get mine to change to match his. They had changed - which was very helpful of my body - and to my eyes they now looked the same as Ron's, but I much preferred not to put them to the test with a computerized matching system. I couldn't do anything about our DNA's being different. I knew the Fort Dodge scientists had taken my DNA profile, so I couldn't allow the CIA, or probably any authorities, to test my new body's DNA. That worried me quite a lot, because in addition to the risk of the authorities testing everyone associated with my families in their hunt for the missing Mark Anderson, it wasn't hard to imagine that in the future DNA testing might be very common; perhaps even required as part of getting a job for its medical insurance. I'd have to avoid crossing that bridge whenever I got near it, probably by all of us emigrating to a different country. Ron had some minor convictions, but the police didn't want him now and weren't likely to want him in the future for anything they knew about. He worked as a mechanic at a mostly legit place, a job I was largely ignorant of so I'd have to do some cramming on the subject. A pity his job wasn't something I knew a little about, such as landscaping, but I guess there's not much call for that in ghettos. He didn't play sports, being too small. He didn't do much of anything except hang out with his loser friends, which just ensured that his life drifted downward. He had a girlfriend, who would have had another boyfriend within a week or two of his disappearance. She wasn't particularly good looking; she just wasn't particular. He had two parents living at home, which was statistically unlikely according to the sample I had taken. Also at his home were a younger sister and an even younger brother, and that's about all the biography that matters because he (i.e., me) was leaving it behind. ^ I spent the next couple of weeks living rough around northern California and the very southern part of Oregon, living in the cheap sleeping bag I'd bought on my resupply run to a town but have never taken out of is packaging to avoid getting anyone else's DNA on it. The receipt for which was in my wallet so I could prove where and when I'd bought it. When my face was black enough to pass for Ron Fisher, I showed it in some small towns, picking up a little casual work for a few dollars or a meal, always talking enough and mentioning my name so some of the people would remember me. I was similarly chatty when I hitchhiked from small town to small town. I was establishing my presence in the area while my body finished making its changes - especially losing height - as well as taking the time to practice "being myself". I wanted to have that down cold before I returned to LA. Mid-April was six weeks after the snatch. I'd lost three inches to 5' 8", leaving just two more inches to go (to wherever it is they go). Ron had been overweight, but I was only slightly so now, "'Cause of da rough livin'," I'd say if asked. I didn't want to be fat, and not being so would help excuse any difference in the way I walked. It was time for the next stage. I phoned the criminal lawyer I'd selected back when I was scouting LA, making an appointment for the afternoon in a couple of days' time. I hitched to LA, arriving in the right morning and heading to his office. I told his secretary I was four hours early because hitching is unpredictable. Talking like Ronald Fisher used to, I asked whether her boss could see me early. He couldn't, so I had to kill some time. No problem. I found an internet café and started reading newspaper issues going back in time over the last couple of months. I didn't notice any headlines about Top Secret CIA Biochem Weapon Labs burning (farther) down, but the Portland paper mentioned the tragic burglary-gone-wrong of a respected, senior DHS agent. Amazingly, he had the same name as that asshole Robert Moran. I had killed Moran and Wright in an attempt to cut the connection between me specifically and the "Mark Anderson" the CIA knew about - perhaps without knowing where I'd come from after I'd destroyed so much of their data - as there must be tens of thousands of "Mark Andersons" in America. Unfortunately the article about Moran's death included: "Moran was possibly implicated in the unexplained disappearance of Mark Anderson, 16, of Corvallis. An extremely gifted student who according to the Dean of the Oregon State University, 'Is the greatest genius our country has ever produced, and his disappearance is a national tragedy'..." Clearly Moran's role in my disappearance had already been reported on. Perhaps I should have checked the newspaper stories before killing Wright and Moran. Nonetheless, I didn't regret killing them. They had sent me to my death, and perhaps many other innocent people before me too. I located several other related stories, and read about my family's public battle to get me back. The battle had been HUGE; far bigger than I'd imagined. They'd got senators and high-powered lawyers involved, there'd been public demonstrations and the media had made a VERY big deal out of it: there were big, well-placed, strong-languaged stories in the country's major newspapers. One comment I quite liked was my parents quoted as saying, "A year ago Mark and Professor Williams were kidnapped by three thugs who held them chained up in a basement to force them to hand over their $11 million roulette win. Two of the three thugs we killed and the third escaped, leaving Mark and Prof to almost die. In the year since then, instead of finding the Third Man, the authorities have been wasting their time concocting a ridiculous theory that Mark is a terrorist and kidnapping him themselves." There was more ridicule directed at the authorities, but what amused me about the quote was that unbeknown to them, the authorities had indeed captured the mystery "Third Man". It was fascinating to read but the desperate quotes from my family made me very uncomfortable and sorry for them. I had to skip over some of the quotes as they were too emotional for me. They REALLY made me want to contact my loved ones to assure them that I was alive, but I knew I couldn't risk that. I was in a major life-or-death struggle with a very expensively hurt CIA, and if they had even an inkling that I was still alive, they'd do ANYTHING to get me back. My loved ones would have to keep on suffering until it was safe for me to contact them in my new persona. While reading, I'd had the thought that maybe I could've been freed just by waiting for the pressure to mount high enough, but I'd quickly dismissed the idea. It looked like the DHS might have been forced to release me had I still been in their control, but they'd passed me on to the CIA too quickly for that. The DHS were sticking to their story that they'd let me go, even though there was widespread disbelief of it. There was no mention of the CIA in any of articles, so there'd been no pressure on that organization to release me. It was impossible to imagine that they would have ever let me go; not after what they'd done to me, where I'd been, the faces I'd seen, and the journalistic investigation that would follow my shouting out my story. If the pressure on the Government itself had got so high that something had to be done to ease it, I could only imagine that my dead body would be found somewhere in circumstances that put the blame on me, such as in an Afghani terrorist training camp. My ego was very gratified by the magnitude of the noise being created about me. It was truly very impressive, but it was ultimately useless. My family's efforts made lots of noise but achieved nothing. (I've written "my family's efforts" as if it was just my parents who were campaigning for my return. I knew it would have been "my families' efforts" as the Williamses would have been heavily involved, but that wasn't apparent from the press articles since my parents were fronting all of those. There was one amusing exception to that: Julia had arranged a very photogenic protest by a bevy of very attractively dressed high-school beauties protesting outside the Portland DHS. I admired the tactic and how successful it'd obviously been at getting the media's attention, because it got some BIG articles with plenty of pictures, even one of me. Unfortunately, by then I'd already been transferred to DC [My parents had been slow to start their campaign because they'd assumed the DHS would release me, as they had the previous time. My parents had also initially been reluctant to cause suspicion by reacting too strongly to my disappearance, or to reveal that they knew the DHS had taken me to Portland and then DC since that information had come from my publicly inexplicable text messages]. I will mention a few facts about their search, the first being that the DHS is a bunch of ass-covering assholes. Nearly all of their statements were either empty - they'd initially been: "We don't comment about ongoing investigations" - or when they were later forced to say something, they outright lied about releasing me. My parents had eventually been forced to go public with the contents of my first text message - not the source, just the information, attributing it to an anonymous "concerned citizen". Whereupon the DHS added mud slinging to their list of responses, by releasing personal details about me that were carefully chosen to paint me in a bad light in order to convince the public not to support my parents' campaign. The first definitive statement from the DHS had been Moran's statement that he'd released me in Portland, and that he personally thought that I'd gone underground with the aid of the terrorist network I'd contacted in Thailand. He'd asked the public to call the DHS if I was spotted, because "We'd like to ask him some questions about his 'possible'," said with a sneer, "terrorist connections." My family had ended up having to release the contents of my text message that provided details of my transfer to the S&T office, again giving the explanation that they'd received it anonymously. The media had confirmed that the captain and copilot I'd named existed, as did the plane with the registration number I'd given, and it had flown from DC to Portland and back on the given date. For quite a while no one was available for comment, the DHS at both ends of the country having gone into full-on, stone-walling, "We Don't Even Know How To Spell Mark"-mode. When the senatorial-led pressure had gotten great enough, the DHS had finally admitted that I'd been transferred to the S&T building and that they'd had me in custody for a week, but had then released me. That hadn't been believed as it was the same line that Moran had used in Portland, and that was now known to be a lie. It was only a couple of days later that I'd killed Wright and Moran, and after their deaths the DHS had started using them as the scapegoats, saying that Wright's personal records revealed that I been collected on February 4, but that his papers did not say by whom.It was a truly absurd situation, but the DHS's line was simply, "There is no paperwork about Mark Anderson's release. We know someone came to get him, and that he left our office in good health, but we don't know who took him or where he is now. Our responsibility for him ended when he left our premises on February 4." My killing Wright made it easy for the DHS to pass the buck, without even saying whom they'd passed it to. That didn't make me regret killing Wright or Moran. I had already escaped (of course, or I couldn't have killed them), so whether or not they were alive to answer questions made no difference to my whereabouts or ability to live my life. Even if Wright had pointed the finger directly at the CIA at Fort Dodge, I couldn't turn up and say, "Yoo hoo, here I am. I'm alive now." The CIA would be all over my ass wanting VERY much to know how I'd gotten out when everyone else had been killed. I did NOT want to be asked that question! There was some stuff about why the S&T office had held me: "Because of Mark Anderson's genius, Moran had sent him to Wright for more appropriate testing, which had involved IQ and similar types of tests." They were just spouting inoffensive, bland crap. In none of the articles was there any mention of my being suspected of having mind control powers. The senior DHS bosses would know about that, but they weren't saying. No doubt because they could imagine the public ridicule the DHS would receive, and then the shit they'd be in. Their only comment was a consistent, "Wright's failure to properly document the release of Mr. Anderson means we do not know what happened to Mr. Anderson after he left our premises. If we could help, we would, but we've had no involvement since February 4." The investigation had hit a brick wall. No one was able to prove that the S&T office knew where I'd gone or who had me, especially because Wright had deliberately kept that very close to his chest, knowing my likely final fate and that my parents were already making trouble for the Portland office. The DHS bosses were officially "very sorry", and they knew their agency would be sued for their illegal actions, but they simply said that all of their staff had followed the orders of Moran or Wright, both of whom were dead now, otherwise they would've been facing severe internal reviews and criminal prosecutions for their misconducts. [[It was true that Moran and Wright had got the DHS into this mess by acting both illegally and against agency policy and practice, thus the DHS itself could have been more forthcoming because it wasn't really their collective fault. But as is usual with such government agencies, totally denying responsibility automatically took precedence over being forthcoming. To do otherwise would have been in direct contravention to agency policy and practice.]] Reading the articles had made me imagine how much frustration my parents must be feeling. I'd thought about sending my family's lawyer a text message again, equivalent to those I'd sent previously, and saying that it was the CIA who had picked me up from the DHS, and they'd transferred me to their secret biochem weapons facility in Fort Dodge, Iowa. That would enable my parents to start making some progress again, but I quickly realized that it was a stupid idea, as it wasn't going to get me back into my parents' arms any sooner. It was also far too risky as, at the times each of the text messages had been sent, I was probably the only person who knew I'd been in those four locations (counting the Portland-to-DC plane as a "location"). If the CIA learned that of the text message I'd just contemplated sending to our lawyer, then they'd suspect that I was still alive, which would be VERY bad. One of the reasons I'd destroyed all the computer records at Fort Dodge was the hope that the CIA might not know who I was anymore. There'd be surviving off-shift staff who knew about "Mark Anderson", but it's a very common name so maybe they wouldn't know which "Mark Anderson". I now knew that I'd been stupidly naïve. Between the many press stories about my genius and the timings of my disappearance, the CIA scientists had probably eaten their morning cereal while reading about my parents' search for me, fully aware that I was the same boy they were experimenting on. Hopefully the CIA would conclude that I'd died in the disaster, although the limited oxygen supply inside the place might've put the fire out before many bodies were totally destroyed. Hopefully the ones I'd thrown down the shafts would have been, so my missing body would be just one of more than two dozen. #14: #4: #All: #15: I arrived at the lawyer's office on time, and started telling him my cover story. He quickly interrupted me because he preferred to discuss money, so I gave him $200 to start with. My cover story was that the group of guys I hung with had gone crazy one evening six weeks ago, attacking each other with knives. I'd run for my life. I told him that I'd been getting more and more pissed off with the drugs and violence of my life for the last year or more, and that the knife fight pushed me to get out of the city to take some time to think. I'd always liked watching nature programs on TV, so I went north and lived in the woods and around small towns while I thought about things. I'd decided that it was possible to live more comfortably in the wilderness than in LA, and there was nothing holding me at home, so I was leaving it forever. I'd come back to tidy things up. I wanted him to help me deal with the police because I didn't want them hounding me wherever I went. I also didn't want to deal with my family because they'd let their kids down by not moving somewhere decent years ago. I wanted the lawyer to let them know I was alive, and to deal with any crap they caused. In truth, I did want the lawyer to do exactly what I'd described, plus I figured he was also a good test for how believable my cover story was. If I couldn't convince someone that I was paying to work for me, then my cover story was in trouble. There was nothing fantastic about my story - I hadn't, for example, claimed I'd spent the last six weeks as Jessica Alba's love-slave - but it was still very unusual. Young ghetto Blacks don't go roughing it in the woods. He was prepared to proceed with my story though, especially after I gave him another $200. I gave him more details, especially insisting how eager I was to avoid being arrested for anything. I was worried about my fingerprints not matching, even though they looked like they'd pass. Once he understood what I wanted, my lawyer contacted the cops. They were VERY interested in knowing what had happened in the alley. They had four dead bodies and seven missing ones. The corpses were closed cases as forensics proved that they'd killed each other, but the seven missing person's cases were a mystery the cops wanted to clean up. My lawyer told the cop that his client (me), had run out of the alley as soon as the fighting had started and hadn't looked back, but they were welcome to make an appointment to come to his office to interview me as a witness for the short part of the fight that I'd seen, if they wished. They did wish, so we arranged a meeting the next morning. I bought some decent clothes after leaving his office. Nothing flashy; just nice, casual Kmart clothes. Something to give them the impression that I wasn't a typical street thug anymore, especially as I wasn't wearing any ostentatious bling. I had a WONDERFUL shower and shave, then under the cover of darkness, hid almost all of my money in a remote spot an hour's flight north, because I didn't want to have nearly $10,000 cash on me if the cops arrested me during the interview. I also flew to above the Fisher residence and had a very thorough snoop through it. The next day, the two cops were as distrustful as cops always are. They even had a copy of my mug shots with them, which they eyeballed to make sure I was me. They asked to see my ID too. My lawyer's explanation yesterday must've made them suspicious that I was a ringer. I had a very simple story: "We were hangin' when dey all ran for da alley. I followed and dey was havin' a knife fight. I was sick of all da crap already, so I split. I don' know nottin' else." There was the usual cop bullshit, but my lawyer knew how that game was played and stopped them being excessive. "What about the white guy?" one of the cops asked. "What white guy?" "The one in the alley." "I didn't see no whitey. I left when I saw da fightin'." "Why did you leave?" (Cops have VERY short memories.) We played the usual game of ask and ask-again for ten minutes, then I said, "I don' have 'nuf money to pay fer my lawya to listen to yous asking da same stuff. I kin write down da names I 'member for who I hitched wit' or casual worked fer. If'n yous REALLY want, I kin show you places where I camped, but I saw nuttin' in da alley; just da knife fight fer a second or two." Cops have very short memories (I'm repeating that in case you're a cop), so my warning about not being able to afford them repeating themselves didn't hold them for long; they REALLY wanted to know where the six missing guys were. "I don' know, an' I don' care. I'm leavin' and never comin' back. If'n yous find 'em, don' bother telling me." "Don't you care that your friends could be in trouble?" "Friens dat knife each other ain't friens. Yous say four dead? If da rest ain't dead already, den dey will be in a few years, probly after dey knock some bitches up. Makes no diff'rnce to me. I ain't NEVER comin' back to dis shit hole." We went around several more times. When it got too tedious, I added another comment, "I'm gonna go north, find a nice town, and stay der. If'n yous give me ya card, when I find a town I'll go see da cops and tell em to call ya to say where I'm at. You kin send me any questions ya want, but I don' know nuttin, exceptin' I want outta all dis crap. Der's good people and better life up north, so dat's where I's goin'. I wanna get a good job, learn to speak proper, meet a nice girl, and stay away from drugs, guns and hos." Eventually even my lawyer lost patience - and he was being paid by the hour! - "Are you charging my client, or is he free to go?" They didn't want to stop, but they didn't actually have anything to charge me with. The murders had been open-and-shut cases. Charging me with six missing persons cases was difficult without any proof that something illegal had happened and that I'd been involved in it. I can't have made all six of them disappear from an alley all by myself and there was no circumstantial evidence that I had, so to arrest me for that would have been silly. So they just asked me some more of the same questions, got me to write down some names so they could check I'd been drifting around, made some final threats, including threatening me with dire consequences if I didn't report in to the police as I'd OFFERED to do, then they left. Which just left Ronald Fisher's family to take care of. I couldn't talk with them because there was too much chance they'd see through my act, plus I was still two inches too tall. I'd told my lawyer that my family were assholes that I didn't want to have anything to do with. I gave him another $100 to deal with them: To send my keys back to them (I didn't want to write the address on an envelope because my handwriting would be different. I'd practiced his signature and writing style, but it was only his signature that I had any faith in my ability to reproduce fairly well). To tell them officially that all my stuff at home was theirs now. According to the original Ron Fisher, there'd been very little money in his account. I wasn't going to touch it in case doing so could be used against me if this deception ever came to light (without the body what could they charge me with? Theft was probably the most serious, so I wouldn't touch his money). I could've given it to the Fisher family, but that required going to the bank and signing forms, which I didn't want to do either. I didn't mention it. No doubt the lawyer assumed I'd use my own money. I told him I'd let him know where I was settled, but not to pass that information on to my family. All I wanted from them was my birth certificate so I could apply for a passport, to be sent to me via him. He could answer my family's questions until the $100 ran out, and after that any time he spent dealing with them was on his dime. In case you're wondering, there was no point trying to hide from the authorities where I'd be. I needed to get a job, pay tax, etc., so they'd know my location. If the Fisher family hired a PI to find me, he'd easily succeed. If I saw them, I'd turn my back and walk away. By then I'd be the right height, and if they'd heard me speaking differently, it would have the excuse that I was deliberately speaking better, as I'd made sure to mention in front of the cops and lawyer. My lawyer wished me "Good luck" as I left his office. I replied, "I'd need luck if'n I stayed here, not to leave." He nodded understandingly. ^ I hitchhiked north. By the time I got a ride, it was about three hours away from getting dark, so I told the driver I was heading for a place about three hours' drive away. That worked for him. So three hours later I'd reached a point about one-third of the way to where I'd dropped my money off after only an hour's flight last night. Flying is definitely the way to go, especially considering the itinerary I had planned for this evening: north for about 200 miles to pick up my money, a little north of east for 1,700 miles to check out Fort Dodge, west 1,800 miles to check home, then south 800 miles to where I'd just got out of the truck. Total distance: 4,500 miles. I could save some time by not picking up my money until the final leg, but I had almost nothing in my wallet now and I don't like being cashless. It was only a total of nine or ten hours of flying, so I had plenty of time. After my ride ended, I didn't take off until I'd had a VERY careful look around the area. I didn't expect the LA cops to have tailed me, but I was feeling very paranoid, especially about what could be happening if the CIA was hunting me. I was so worried I didn't even feel like doing a Superman takeoff; I just stepped onto the nearly vertical Flying Sled and took off. I picked up my money, then headed to Fort Dodge. I was less fearful of clouds and rain, but I still went over the top of them if that was less than 10,000 feet, or around them otherwise. It lengthened the trip, but that was okay. It was the night of April 19 that I arrived back at Fort Dodge, exactly two months since I'd escaped. I'd spent two weeks scouting LA, one month camping with my prisoners, and two more weeks working on the physical transformations. I didn't want to fly over the lab in case they had God knows what sort of defenses set up now, so about ten miles away from the lab's location I used a max-sized sight blob to very carefully scout the ground below me. It appeared safe to land, so I did so. I carefully scouted the next dash (ground level only, either flying a few inches above the ground if I was in a valley or hidden by trees, or running if I crossed a skyline or was in the open). I made a dash, scouted, made another dash, scouted, etc. Eventually I peeked over the top of a small hillock to see the walls that surrounded the lab's above-ground building. I sent a sight blob up for a higher inspection, which showed me that there was NO above-ground building anymore! My first fear was the fire I'd set had spread up the two final shafts to ignite the top building, and perhaps to kill thousands of townsfolk with nasty biochem weapons, but I quickly saw that wasn't the case. There was no sign of fire damage and the building had been neatly removed. They'd done it deliberately. There was a lot of activity inside the walls. The whole area was lit up and there were heaps of people doing things, some in hazmat suits. I was too far away to see well enough, so I got back to my scout-dash-scout process. I was eventually close enough to see that they had the two top level elevators working, with airlocks and decontamination rooms on the top of each. A lot of the returning workers were moving slowly and carefully, so this was obviously a scary place. I wasn't interested in what they were doing though, I wanted to see what the place looked like inside, to get an idea of the chance of the CIA knowing that my body was absent rather than one of many which was unaccounted for. I worked my way forward until I was within four hundred feet of the exterior wall, then very happily used my recent realization that intervening matter didn't matter. I sent a sight blob down the closest elevator shaft, down to what had been level 1 of the underground lab. I got some bad news and some good news. The bad news was that my putting my Student Card under Phillips's bookcase had been a wasted effort as level 1 had been UTTERLY incinerated. The good news was that they'd have trouble discovering that my body was missing. They had lights rigged up to illuminate the interior, and it was a WONDERFUL sight (for me). Large chunks of the building had collapsed. Not all of it, but easily enough that there'd be dozens of missing bodies; even more than the number I'd tossed down the elevator shafts. ^ [[What had happened was largely because of the diesel fire. Diesel doesn't burst into flame the way gasoline does, so burning it doesn't seem impressive, but burning diesel actually releases 15% more heat than gasoline - it's heavier, so denser, so there's more to burn per gallon. Gasoline burns a little hotter than diesel, but the difference is minor, especially because combustion temperature wasn't the issue; heat was. The lab was built in a big, concrete-lined hole in the ground, which meant that it was very well thermally insulated, virtually stopping heat loss. The diesel fire kept pouring out more and more heat, which had nowhere to go except up the two elevator shafts. The top of those shafts accumulated a huge amount of heat, which spread through the top few levels of the building, which is why those levels had incinerated so completely. They'd gotten so hot that EVERYTHING had dried out and burst into flame, including bodies. There's a lot of fat in human bodies, and they burn extremely well in high-heat conditions. The shafts were areas of comparative structural weakness, and as the top levels had gotten hotter and hotter, the metalwork around the shafts expanded, weakened and shifted, which stressed and cracked the concrete, eventually causing a collapse. The weight of the collapsed material on the almost-as-hot floor one level down stressed that even further, so it collapsed, doubly stressing the floor below, etc. The process had similarities to the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks in how it was the fires rather than the impacts that caused the structural weakening and collapses. One major difference with Fort Dodge was that each of the lab's floors were attached to the exterior wall of the hole; high-rise buildings obviously not having anything external holding them up. Because the fire's heat rose up the elevator shafts, the areas around those shafts collapsed. The other two corners of each floor of the complex remained structurally unaffected because they were still strongly attached to the exterior walls. Imagine a multi-level square where the northeast and southwest corners have collapsed all the way down. Not just straight down either, because as the collapse progressed downward, the increasing amount of material destroyed increasingly large areas of the floors below, so the final result was that the floor areas that remained intact resembled an upside-down pyramid, with appropriate modification because the collapsing had originated in only two of the four top corners. The bottom level hadn't collapsed to a sharp point either, but it had been getting that way by the time the twelfth floor was reached. Somewhat over two-thirds of the total floor area survived, which meant roughly half the bodies because all of those in the top levels had flash burned even if they hadn't been caught up in the collapses. Conveniently, when the shafts had collapsed, they'd taken all the peeled elevator doors with them, so that evidence of what had happened was removed. The computer center had been near a shaft, so that'd been taken down too. No doubt the CIA was still puzzled by many aspects - such as that all the hallway doors were off their hinges, that none of the discovered bodies was wearing their hazmat headgear, that none of the fire suppression systems seemed to have worked, and doubtless other aspects too - but the more extreme examples of my abilities were no longer visible. Sadly, the fires had run out of oxygen, but the fact that the heat had accumulated rather than escaped was the factor that had resulted in the lab's destruction. By the way, the large metal plates on the top of level 1 had sealed off the lab perfectly and had never been threatened. When the hole had been dug for the lab's construction, it was first lined with a very thick concrete shell. After the lab's construction was finished, another very thick steel and concrete slab was put over the top of level 1, except with two holes for the topmost elevator shafts. That 'lid' was over-engineered excessively, designed to remain in place even if the interior building completely collapsed. This was important because it was the best defense to stop nasties getting into open air in the event of a major disaster. If the lid had collapsed, all the earth above it would've fallen into the hole, created a huge open pit full of city-destroying biochem weapons.]] ^ The destruction of the lab was a wonderful sight for me, but it must've been a nightmare for the workers. The elevators down from the ground level stopped in midair where their level 1 lobbies used to be. Lengthening the cables wouldn't have helped because it was midair all the way to the mess at bottom. They'd built substantial gangplanks from the nearest still-standing parts of level 1 out to each elevator, and ladders from level 1 to level 2, etc., but it must have been a scary as hell to work in. Working on that thought, I decided to wreck the gangplank I could see the easiest. That would make them even more cautious, slowing down their work even further. I waited for people to clear the area since I had no way of knowing how evil these people were. Some probably did work with biochem weapons, but some could've been rescue workers, so I wasn't going to injure any of them. While waiting for the gangplank area and underneath it to be clear, I had a better idea. I also waited until that elevator was empty, and then applied a considerable amount of downward force on it, to cause that elevator cage to suddenly start falling. I also stopped the safeties arresting it, so it was in unbraked downward accelerated fall. I made sure it moved sideways enough to impact on the end of the gangplank, smashing that to pieces. The elevator car and pieces of gangplank fell all the way to the bottom of the pit (I'd pushed hard on the car to make sure the cable disconnected from the drum at the end of its length). That would definitely give the workers a very bad scare and should slow them down very nicely. It was a pity doing it to both elevators wouldn't be a believable coincidence. Thinking about being as destructive as possible gave me an even better idea, but the timing of it was tricky and I couldn't do it now. Hopefully one day soon though. Before I'd arrived, I'd been thinking about trying to find a clipboard or computer that had a list of identified corpses, to see how many weren't yet identified, but finding such a list wasn't worth the risk of getting closer and exposing myself, especially to the security patrols. I'd seen that there was tons of rubble in the bottom of the two shafts, so there'd be dozens of bodies unaccounted for yet, which was all I needed to know. With all the animals there'd been in this place, with the chaos caused by the collapse, and with the VERY nasty stuff there had been stored throughout much of the building, I couldn't see that they'd ever be able to definitely state that my body hadn't been inside the building. My room had been too far away from the elevator shafts to be caught up in the collapse, but the fire had gutted this place so well that there it seemed reasonable to me that my body's absence shouldn't be significant. With any luck, that'd be true of dozens of the others too, and I'd just be one of many unaccounted-for victims. Feeling VERY much better, I retraced my careful scout-dash-scout until I was far enough away to take to the sky. Next stop Corvallis, just to pass over and check on my families. There was no sign of any bad men hanging around home, so I moved closer and checked my families out. Carol and Julia were snuggled up together in bed, which made me long to join them, for several reasons. Mom and Dad were snuggled too, which created SOME of the same emotions in me, as it would have been nice to give them a reassuring hug. I decided not to. Apart from anything else, they might not have been very reassured by the experience of being woken in the middle of the night by a Black guy hugging them in their bed. I was tempted to find and read the information they had about the hunt for me, which I was pretty sure would be in Prof's and Vanessa's study, but I had no idea whether their office or computer was bugged so it'd be better to let it wait. I checked the rest of the house, and everyone was accounted for and looked fine, so I headed south to roughly where the truck had dropped me off. If the LA cops checked on my trip, I wanted them to see a nice, believable progression of me looking for somewhere to live, rather than see me making a beeline for Corvallis. I'd make sure I asked around in a few towns to make it seem that I was looking for my new home, even though I was pretty sure I'd choose Corvallis. I hitched as far as Grants Pass the next day, which is inside Oregon's southern border, and about the limit of where I'd told the LA cops I'd gotten to before. It's a nice town, but it's not Corvallis. I checked it out by wandering around, talking to shopkeepers and others, and generally making sure some people would remember me, and then I moved on. I repeated this process going north, one town at a time. I had about two hundred miles and four or five towns to go, depending on your definition of "town". I got a couple of towns done per day, and each night I popped north to check on things at home. Until - FINALLY - on Sunday April 23 I got dropped off where I-5 meets westbound highway 34, leaving me with a flat ten-mile walk into town. I arrived in my home town mid-afternoon. I should add that I continued to experience déjà vu's VERY frequently, averaging every seventeen hours. The experience was very much as it'd been in the DC cafeteria. I even linked to a Mark who hadn't realized that intervening matter didn't matter for any of our ki-effects (he was obviously a dummy). He was very pleased to know about it, and cursed that he hadn't known before the DHS first picked us up, as that could've made a big difference. One Of Them: One Of Us: Another minor déjà vu incident was having one while flying at night. That was a little tricky as my normal cruising speed had me pushing my sled along with sixteen maximum-pushing-force minds. Their maximum force suddenly jumped by a factor of four [[the Universe's 'cooperativeness' in supplying energy follows a square law. The Universe's Consciousness is highly susceptible to minds, because minds and the Universe are intertwined in ways not worth getting into yet]]. As soon as the déjà vu started, and I noticed my flying sled speeding up, I dialed back the pushing power. Otherwise my cruising speed of 500 mph would've increased toward 1,000 mph (air resistance increases on a square law with velocity), which would've taken me to the sound barrier at 760 mph, where I was sure the ride would get very bumpy and potentially very unstable. Being unstable at 760 mph did NOT appeal to me! Fortunately, dialing back on my pushing force is easy to do and is without risk of instability. With déjà vu's occurring so frequently, I'd had a very useful idea about how to make the CIA's search of their partial ruin even harder. I had been waiting until I hadn't had a déjà vu for fifteen hours and it was dark but before midnight. When this situation finally arose, I took to the sky and headed for Fort Dodge. Unfortunately I got the déjà vu before the three hour flight ended, which sent me back to where I'd started, to wait for another night. I knew it wouldn't take long. There's a 25% chance of the fifteen hour criterion coming due during the 6pm to midnight time window I wanted, and about a 60% chance of not having a déjà vu within fifteen hours of the previous one, so a net 15% chance. Call it 1 in 7. With déjà vu's averaging every seventeen hours, the situation should arise again in 17 x 7=119 hours, or 5 nights. There's also about a 20% chance of the déjà vu arriving while I was in transit, as had happened the first time, or too soon after I arrived to put the plan into effect. A 20% chance of having to abort was pretty low, so I'd been unlucky the first time. Hopefully that wouldn't happen on the next chance. Now that I had arrived in Corvallis, I had to resist the temptation to create an immediate encounter with my families, or to go to the cops to tell them my cover story and that I'd chosen to stay in this place. Instead I got myself a camping spot in a corner of an RV camping ground and killed time. The RV camp owners had been worried about me getting cold in my little tent. I assured them that I had a very good sleeping bag, not to mention heat blobs, which I didn't mention. Sunday night, I flew around all the neighbors of what used to legally be my mansion, checking to see if they had been taken over by the baddies and had any surveillance gear aimed at my house. They were all innocent of such subterfuge. A CAREFUL examination of the surrounding area showed nothing suspicious (no stationary cars, hidden people, boxes of electronics, antennas, etc.) The only loiterer was Patch. I landed behind some trees near home, and then started going over the house inch by inch looking for bugs. It was slow work and I couldn't do the whole house, but didn't think I needed to. Prof and Vanessa's study, the kitchen/dining room, my study and my bedroom seemed the most likely places for bugs to be planted. Perhaps the parents' bedrooms, but I didn't want to search those while they were in them. I searched inch by inch over the walls, and then inside the walls, over and inside all the furniture, inside electronic equipment, inside the floors and ceilings, and even carefully made sure the insects I spotted were actually insects: I squashed them then looked at the remains, as that was quickest. Doing it quickly was important as there are a LOT of insects to be found in a house when you search carefully with an undetectable sight blob. I ran out of nighttime before I'd finished, but I'd gotten most of the target rooms done and hadn't found anything bad. I didn't understand the inside workings of electronics well enough to identify every component I saw, but I was reasonably sure none of them was an independent, added-later, bit. None of them had aerials either. There were a couple of things that I was slightly suspicious about, but I could get the parents to buy new ones and throw the old away. I couldn't be sure of the phones or computers because they can be spied upon remotely, but there wasn't anything I could do about that. The next day, I started wandering around town, pretending to get to know it. I wandered through OSU in the morning, bought an "Automotive Mechanics for Dummies" book from the bookshop, then sat near Prof's office while I pretended to read it. (I'm a lot more comfortable closing my eyes in public now that I have a 24-foot proximity range. I can't tell if someone is looking at me or talking about me, but to do anything physical they will almost certainly come within my range, alerting me). I checked Prof's small office for bugs, finding none. I relocated to near Vanessa's office, did the same there, getting the same result. I got to our high school before lunchtime so I could study Julia's and Carol's classes to see if there were any students or adults I didn't recognize who were paying my girls too much attention. I found nothing untoward. While I was in the area, I gave Donna's class a quick look too, although I wasn't so worried about her situation. I mainly looked because the DHS had been so insanely paranoid they might actually think Donna was significant. I saw nothing suspicious in any class, or when I watched Carol and Julia during lunchtime. No one I didn't recognize appeared to be watching them too much, their schoolbags didn't contain any tiny electronics, there wasn't anyone in a neighboring house or school building pointing a parabolic microphone at them, etc. Not quite two months were left in the school year. I should have nearly finished my three degrees by now and have universities from around the world falling all over themselves to sign me up. Instead I'd lost three whole months since being snatched by Moran's crew, lost my entire original life, and was a long way from getting this life on to any sort of track at all. And when I did, it wasn't going to be anywhere near as good a life as Mark Anderson's would have been. The FUCKERS who did this to me REALLY pissed me off! Plus there was another reason I was particularly angry with them right now: I'd just seen Ava and she was looking bad. I was reminded that her parents had to be VERY sick, or even worse, by now. I couldn't offer her any support at all, which added to my anger considerably. In the afternoon I wandered around town some more, passing close enough to Mom's work to reassure myself that it seemed clear of bugs too. By the end of the day, I'd established that if my families were under direct surveillance then it was ridiculously subtle. I'd also created evidence that I was interested in this town, by talking to several store owners about life in town, finding out about renting accommodation, talking to the RV park's owners about what Corvallis was like, etc. On Monday night I flew first to Ava's house and did some quick snooping. Neither of her parents were in residence. There were plenty of "Get Well" cards on display, but no "Condolence" cards, thank God. I guessed Katie and Carson were in a hospital. Probably not Corvallis's I thought, as it was too small to treat bad cancer cases. #18: #12: We believed kiatsu made the body work better, which would unfortunately include making the cancer work better. We'd experiment and hope that we were wrong. I flew to my place and saw that Ava was with Julia and Carol. My wives were sitting on either side of Ava and focused on her. I felt horrible about it, but I had to leave them to it. I headed north to Portland to check out the DHS office again. I waited until someone left their computer unattended then tried to access my file to see what the latest information was, and especially to see what the sources of their latest information were. Access to my file was restricted, the screen informing me that I wasn't "Authorized for access". I looked around the big offices hoping to find either a bigwig that was still at work, a computer still logged on, or a sticky label that had an obvious password written on it. No such luck, unfortunately. I didn't want to wait for a bigwig to arrive because that'd keep me stuck on a rooftop in Portland all day, which would be difficult to explain if I was spotted, and might later be correlated with its being so close to the DHS office at a time when their computer system accessed Mark Anderson's file. Plus it'd be difficult to explain to the LA cops where I'd gone for the day if they got excessively nosey. I didn't need to carry around the just under $10,000 I had with me, so I reburied all but $500 of it back in my north-of-Portland cache, then headed home to my little tent. Tuesday morning, I walked to the area of town where there were several car mechanics' businesses, sat nearby and spied on them all. When none of them were working on anything interesting, I read the book I'd bought. It wasn't actually called "Automotive Mechanics for Dummies", but that's the sort of book it was. Unfortunately I can't run a sight blob and read with my real eyes at the same time (damned superimposition!), so I read much less than I would've liked. I was working on a solution to the superimposition problem. It'd become possible when my subconsciouses had started doing some partial integrating with my consciouses, but it was a VERY slow process. At lunchtime I followed some of the mechanics to where they went for to have lunch. They drove so were much faster than me, but it wasn't far so a high sight blob could keep them in sight. Some of them bought food for and immediately returned to their workshop, but some sat around and talked. I sat nearby and listened. Partly that was so I could learn how to sound like them, partly to get a feel for which garages might be the best to work for, and also to do what I did after lunch was over and they'd all left: I approached the place's owner and asked her (talking much more in my Mark style, as gangster-speak was motherfuckingly inappropriate), "Excuse me, ma'am. My name's Ronald Fisher. I'm new to town and thinking of getting a job as a mechanic here. I see several of them eat here. Can I please ask you which garage you'd take your car to if it needed work?" "I'm too busy to talk." "Give me your cloth and I'll clean all the tables out here for you. Mop the floor, wash dishes or whatever else you want. When I've saved you half an hour's work, could you please spend five minutes talking to me?" Turned out she could talk with me while we worked, so it was a good deal for her. This is an example of the sort of thing I was doing around town: deliberately creating strong memories of Ronald Fisher's being serious about searching for a good town, then finding a good job in it. In the future there might be some suspicion about my arrival in Corvallis, and I wanted some people to remember it clearly. Helping me find a good job was incidental, as I didn't care much about working for the best place, or even the worst place. I just needed a job to justify my staying in this town and to make me look respectable until I could merge my life with my families' lives. In the afternoon I went back to my spying position. Even without a sound blob, I was learning a great deal about how to be a mechanic. Seeing what they did, how they did it, and what they wrote on the customers' worksheets afterward was very educational. Having the book handy was great too, because I could quickly look up as yet unread parts of it when the mechanics were doing something that puzzled me. I decided that it was too risky to approach my family without checking my DHS file in Portland, so at 5pm I packed up my tent at the RV park, telling the owners, "I want to check another couple of towns, but I like Corvallis so I might be back." I wandered out of town until it was dark enough make like Superman. I dropped down in a remote location well short of Portland to stash most of my gear and to change into nicer clothes, although I kept my ski mask on until after I'd landed and walked clear of my landing area. The Portland office of the DHS was close to a park. I could sit on a bench under a tree, pretend to read my automotive book, and be close enough to read whatever I wanted in the State Director's office. When he arrived, I memorized his username and password, then waited for him to step out of his room. He soon went to a nearby meeting room, so he'd probably be a while. He'd logged out when he'd left. I logged in with my fingers crossed that the DHS didn't have the same doorway scanners as the CIA's secret lab had. Apparently not, judging by the logging in being successful and no one rushing into the room in panic. Then it was just a matter of calling up my file and reading. I soon learned that my family's going public over the DHS's taking of me must've pushed the DHS into damage control mode, because my file was 'sanitized'. Material that I knew used to be in it was now missing, making the file much smaller. There was a clear order not to surveil me or anyone to do with me. It was worded to make clear that the DHS had no interest whatsoever in being involved, it being too intent on covering its ass. Access to the file was ordered to be restricted to senior management. All references to mind control had been removed (Moran had never written about that, but the S&T people had written about it at length). [[Strangely, in some dimensions the CIA had also got excited and very worried about my possibly having mind control powers, but not in any of the dimensions any of this autobiography's Marks current minds experienced. Those strangely excited CIA's had kept their Marks drugged and/or used computer-controlled electroshock to inhibit 'my' unusual brain functions - so you can imagine how often those versions of me had my brains scrambled. They were unable to escape.]] Many identifying details were removed. Sections that used to read, for example, "Subject apprehended by agents [followed by a list of agents names and ID numbers]" now read "Subject apprehended." Anyone reading my file now would see that the DHS had been initially very concerned about the $2 million that'd been transferred overseas. My name being the only name in common to all four accounts had started their interest in me. Then they'd seen that I was involved in training suitable for a terrorist (a martial art and scuba), and I'd visited Thailand, where there was "some indication Subject might have had contact with known extremist sympathizers." No dates, places or names for those suspected meetings were provided, nor any reports from any Thai law enforcement agency. My college transcripts were included, with comments that someone of my intelligence could become a highly capable and effective terrorist, especially given my interest in physics. My transfer to the S&T people was spun to be no more than a matter of improved efficiency, the file clearly implying that it was of no special consequence. The date that I'd been transferred to the CIA just had an entry of, "Subject no longer of interest." There was no mention of "CIA" or whether I'd been released, merely the final "no longer of interest" paragraph. The DHS seemed to be making no effort whatsoever to find out what had happened to me. Reading deeply between the lines, I got the impression the DHS thought, "Thank God that's the CIA's problem." The DHS's only concern was to avoid being held responsible for their actions, something I confirmed with my next inquiries. Because I'd been apprehensive - right from when I'd first been apprehended - I had deliberately memorized the names and ID numbers of the participants, including those who'd been mentioned in the previously unsanitized version of my file that I'd read (for example, the guys who'd driven me from Corvallis to Portland). I started calling up their records. Their files contained what they'd been doing (e.g., "Apprehended subject at Oregon State University parking lot, Corvallis. Drove to DHS Portland. Subject delivered to downstairs cell."), but my name was never mentioned anywhere. I was always "subject", even where there was no context to give that any meaning. Anyone searching for "Mark Anderson" in the DHS database would find almost nothing, and what they did find was highly sanitized. All the individual guys' files that I checked showed them as having been recently transferred to other cities or having gone on vacation or away to training courses. The DHS was determined to cover its ass. I also looked up Robert Moran, reading up on his murder investigation. It was deemed credible that he'd been beaten in a fight - Moran had been getting on in years and had been desk-bound most of the time - but it was not believed that he'd fired off a whole clip and missed every time. The DHS hierarchy believed Moran had been killed with his own gun, which had then been shot off in a deliberate attempt to make Moran look incompetent. The question they were asking asked was, "Who stood to benefit from making Moran out to be incompetent?" That Wright (Moran's file had a link to Wright's) had also died in a way that drew attention and disrepute onto the DHS, made the DHS management suspect that "person or persons are playing dirty," (words to that effect were in a 'parent' file to both individual files, which contained DHS's carefully worded conjectures about the overall situation). They kept saying "person or persons", which I originally feared meant me, but I became pretty sure that they were referring to the CIA; they just couldn't say that in a document the CIA might be able to access [[or senators, the press, or someone leaking it]]. There was even some conjecture that whatever had happened to me after the S&T Directorate had decided that I was "no longer of interest" must've been something very important to lead to the two apparent assassinations. There was also a moan about the failure of whoever had taken me from the DHS to come forward and provide a credible explanation about what had happened to me. (None of this mentioned me by name, so it wouldn't be included if the DHS was forced to hand over documents related to me, even though it was.) Anyone reading this file knowing about the CIA's involvement with me would easily understand that the DHS were very unhappy with the poor level of inter-agency cooperation. There was no discussion about it in the file, but if the DHS truly believed that the CIA had killed Wright and Moran, then surely the DHS must have been tempted to reveal the CIA's involvement. Or perhaps opening that Pandora's box was too risky. Presuming they were following their own orders, it was good to know the DHS were no longer doing any surveillance of my families. There was no guarantee they wouldn't resume their phone taps at some time, but I thought it was unlikely. Their whole strategy was obviously to make like a turtle: pull their legs and head back into their shell and wait for the trouble to pass. They appeared to desperately want to minimize their dealings with my family, so would hate to get caught continuing any surveillance of them. I had no idea what the CIA's strategy was. Judging by what the DHS was saying, the CIA wasn't admitting they knew anything about anybody, but the CIA could be acting very different internally. They had a major disaster in Fort Dodge that was doubtless being investigated very vigorously. That would surely spill over into an investigation of Mark Anderson, along with every other person involved in the lab in any way. If I had to be investigated, being one of a thousand general suspects was a lot better than being America's most wanted man. It'd been over two months since the lab's destruction, so hopefully the CIA investigation into Mark Anderson would've finished by now. The total disappearance of Armani Phillips had hopefully been the focus of most of their attention. I logged out of the State Director's computer then settled down to read my book for a minute or so, long enough that my leaving the area wouldn't correlate precisely with my file being accessed on the Director's computer. I had NO idea how they could possibly correlate that with a Black guy getting up and walking away from his riverside seat, but I was paranoid. I wandered a fair distance away from the DHS office, so if Ronald Fisher was ever investigated by the DHS there'd be less chance of a DHS agent seeing me near their Portland office, especially if they come to the river to eat their own lunches. I bought some food and killed time reading more of the mechanics book. Because my memory is so good these days I can read technical material faster than I used to be able to, but not nearly as fast as I can read fiction so it was taking me a long time to work my way through it all. The several hours of uninterrupted reading was useful for me. When it got dark, I found a secluded takeoff spot, and blasted off (I'd had Mexican food for lunch). Portland to Corvallis is only eighty miles, so even with the stop to retrieve my gear it didn't take me long to be walking back into the RV park's office, telling them, "I'm back. I like Corvallis best so I'll start looking for a job tomorrow." That night I completed the inch-by-inch checking of the most likely mansion rooms for bugs. I found none, but was still glad to have made the effort. Only needing 1.5 hours sleep per night left me with plenty of spare time and I didn't even mind when it started raining, as it was easy for me to make an umbrella when I had a thousand NP-points available, each of which can make a 14" x 14" square. ------- Chapter 299: I Get a Job and Do Some Interior Redecorating Wednesday, April 26 to Sunday, April 30, 2006 Wednesday morning, I spruced myself up in the camping ground's communal facilities, "wasted five minutes of my life shaving" (to quote Dad), then went job hunting. It was important I get a job because if I hung around in Corvallis without one, any future investigators might be suspicious that I had another reason. Having a job would also look good for the cops when I talk to them, because it'd be good for them to have no reason to arrest me. It was not important that my job be a high paying one, or even average paying. Living in a one-person tent in a back corner of an RV park didn't cost much, and I needed next to no food, only 10% of normal - and for what it's worth, "normal" had also reduced as I'm now in a smaller, less muscular body. So when I approached the mechanic garages, I offered to work for free for the first couple of weeks, half wages for the next couple, then full wages thereafter if the boss still wanted me. I didn't expect to be a mechanic that long, but it was good to memorably sound as if I did. I had a couple more unusual additions: That I finished work at lunchtime during the first two weeks because I wanted to go to the library and start improving my schooling. That's what I told people, but you'll read about my main reason soon. I suggested that I be teamed with an experienced mechanic to help him, because my previous boss had been a bad teacher and my knowledge was patchy. I started with what I thought was the best garage, tried to grease the boss up (an appropriate expression) by telling him I thought his was the best run, cleanest garage. I made my pitch, got turned down, so moved to my second choice. That boss actually asked some questions about me - mostly stuff I could easily answer from what I'd learned from the real Ronald Fisher - before rejecting me. The fourth place (of five) accepted me. I suspected he just wanted to 'steal' two weeks of free labor from me and had no intention of keeping me on once he had to start paying. That was fine with me, as I hoped to have a job with the Anderson-Williams collective by then, or failing that, I'd get to know the mechanics from the other garages during the lunchtimes, to try to impress them enough to be reconsidered by their bosses if I needed another job after two or four weeks. My new boss put me to work right away, lending me a pair of overalls and assigning me to work with one of his other guys. Thanks to helping Dad service the family cars from time to time, I knew which end of most common tools to hold, and a few other practical matters. I'd also spent a day watching mechanics at work and had picked up a fair amount from that, plus I had one big book's worth of memorized practical advice. My knowledge was therefore highly erratic. I knew quite a lot about some things, but nothing at all about quite a few things, including some of the automatically assumed basics. I knew that would be the case, so I was up-front with the guy I worked with, blaming the guy who ran the only other garage I'd worked at for the few months since I'd left school. My supervisor was surprised by some of the REALLY basic things I didn't know, but I was an obedient, enthusiastic, helpful, quick-to-learn worker. At lunchtime, I went to the mechanics' local lunch place. Some of the mechanics from the other garages had seen me talking to their bosses, and the food joint's owner recognized me too. She even remembered my name, which made me happy. The story about how I'd asked her opinion came out during the minute I was the center of attention, which was fine with me. The more people who knew I was serious about getting a job, the happier I was. I was also open about my payment scheme (no wages for the first two weeks, half next two, then normal). My fellow mechanics thought I was crazy, but I explained, "No one knows me in this town, so I needed to do something to get in the door. If I live in Corvallis all my life, what does missing a couple of weeks wages matter?" "Archie could be screwing you." Archie being my new boss and the guy who was probably screwing me. "Sure he could, but after two weeks, BB," (the guy I was teamed up with. His name was Bruce Burton, and my first lesson had been not to call him Bruce), "will know how good I am and can be a reference for me. That'll be a lot better than my walking off the street as a complete stranger." Some of them were impressed, but most of them thought I was crazy working for nothing. After lunch all the mechanics went back to their garages, but I stayed to borrow a pen and some paper and wrote down my current residential address, with the owners' names and the phone number of the RV park, the details for the garage I was now working in, including the hours. I put a comment, "Afternoons, location unknown. Am hoping to do something educational." The woman asked why I wanted her phone number, so I told her, "I saw a murder a couple of months ago and the LA cops - I'm from LA originally - want to keep track of where I am. I'd promised them that I'd pass on my contact details on to the local cops when I found somewhere to settle, so I'll do that this afternoon." She looked a little fearful, something I suspected my blackness had a significant role in, so I added, "I was a WITNESS, and the cops know who did it. It was two months ago, so old news and the cops wouldn't be letting me travel around if they were worried, so you shouldn't be. Or are you just trying to make me feel guilty for worrying you, so I'll volunteer to wipe your tables again?" She relaxed. I wanted to get my story spread, so I added, "Too much violence is why I left LA. I want to find somewhere nice and quiet to live, like Corvallis. To find a nice girl to marry and live happily ever after. I don't suppose you've got a daughter who can cook as well as you, do you?" She said she didn't, so I had to stick to my original plan of seducing Carol. I first went to buy a pair of overalls for myself, then to the police station, telling the first cop I met, "I witnessed a murder in LA, and da LA cops wanna know my contact details. Who do I talk with 'bout doin' dat?" I was putting on about half the LA accent. I wasn't doing that at work because I'd feared it'd stop me getting a job, but I thought it was a better idea with the cops. The accent was going to fade quickly, so it'd soon cease to be an issue. I was passed off to someone. I gave him the card of the cops in LA, the paper I'd written with my contact details on it. I'd used block letters rather than handwriting to avoid the risk of a handwriting analysis concluding I was an imposter, and I was grasping the paper on top of NP-fingers so I wouldn't leave any fingerprints. I explained to him that I'd started drifting into a small gang in the months since I'd left school, I hadn't liked it, and when they'd gotten violent with each other that'd driven me to leave LA. "Da LA cops said dat after I left, four of dem kilt each udder, and six are still missin'. I don' know nuttin' 'bout dat, but dey wanted my number so's dey could ask me more questions I don' know nuttin' 'bout. I said I'd give it to da cops wherever I settled. I gotta job now. I wanna find somewhere ta live and night classes or sumding. And learn to speak betta too, so I don' soun' like trash." I was polite - never once calling him a "motherfucking pig" - and sincere, so he eventually stopped showing so much suspicion. He called LA while I was there, not getting through to the person so he left a voicemail message identifying himself, me, and reading out the information on the note I'd given him. I got the LA cop's card back, "In case I need it agin'." I also promised to come back when I had my afternoons organized or if my details changed. The cop asked, "Why not call them yourself instead of coming here?" "I don' have much money so it's cheaper on your dime, haha. Also, I'm from a gang in LA so I though you guys might wanna know 'bout me being in town. I got nuttin' to hide and want ya to know it. I like dis town and der being so many smart people my age. I'm smarter dan I showed before, so maybe if'n I work hard I can get to go to college here." Obviously I couldn't do anything that would make me look like Mark Anderson, so going to college was probably never going to happen, but that Corvallis was a university town made it unique among the towns I'd checked out so it was an ideal excuse for me choosing to settle here. After finishing with the cops, I spent the rest of the afternoon joining the library, taking out a few books - half on automotive repair, half on school subjects, thereby creating a nice little evidence trail of my studiousness - and getting information on various evening classes. I had an early dinner in town, then returned to my tent early. I stopped in at the RV park's office, showing them the library books and asking them if I could keep all but two of them in their office rather than my tent, for safety, and also to make even more people aware of my commitment to be a good citizen. I'd gotten books out on the real Ron Fisher's worst school subjects because the image I was going for was someone trying to make good on his deficiencies. As much as I wanted to, it would've looked too suspicious to any later investigators if I'd made contact with my family immediately after I'd arrived in town, so I waited impatiently. I worked in the mornings, rapidly proving myself to be a very helpful and useful employee, who was well worth the money I wasn't being paid. In the afternoons, I wandered around town as if exploring, but in reality so my planned encounter with my family would seem natural. I also made a few comments about looking for a girlfriend. I kept an eye on my families at night, but nothing of note happened. Ava spent a lot of time with them, which was good because she looked like she needed it. I should've been in several of her classes at school and been available to talk with her every day, so every time I saw how sad she looked I felt even more anger toward the fucking DHS and CIA. On Friday I decided to recheck the Portland DHS to see if anything had changed in my file. I didn't want to log in as the State Director when he was out of the building, as I feared that could set off alarms, so I shot up there as soon as I could on Friday evening, hoping he'd still be at work. He was, so I sat on a nearby rooftop waiting for him to leave. As soon as he'd logged out and locked his office behind him, I logged back in and quickly checked my file. I could sort the file's entries in date order, so it only took a couple of seconds to find that that nothing at all had been added, indicating that the DHS was in total-turtle-mode. I resisted the impulse to jam the Director's elevator between floors and burn the place to the ground. Instead I logged out then flew home. That wasn't nearly so satisfying, but was probably better. ^ On the way home the "Fifteen Hours Since The Last Déjà Vu" criterion was reached, and it was early evening, so the "Evening But Before Midnight" criterion was met too. I crossed my fingers and diverted to Fort Dodge and hoped to get there in time. This time I arrived without the next déjà vu happening. I sneaked up to the lab as fast as I could, cutting corners more than I had last time. They hadn't had any wide security then, and I didn't think it likely they'd have placed new security after all this time. It was VERY important that the CIA not be able to determine that my body wasn't in the lab, so cutting a few safe-seeming corners was justified. I had to get closer than last time because I needed to be able to see inside the whole building. That made the last couple of dashes particularly scary, but it was okay once I was in position because I could worm myself under some bushes and stay totally hidden. I didn't need to stick my head up to see anything to carry out my plan. Déjà vu's are inconvenient about not giving several minutes' advance warning of their arrival, so I had to assume it could come at any time. I immediately sent a sight blob into the ruin. It was very much as I'd left it, and still with only one elevator going, which made me smile. I noticed that there were no bodies visible on any of the floors I checked out. Not that I expected there to be, but thinking about the bodies had been irresistible. They'd all been removed, and presumably easily identified. Most importantly though, the bottom level was still a total mess. They hadn't even started clearing that, so there'd still be dozens of bodies buried down there. I started using the 5.5 tons of force I had to agitate the floor that had the most people on it. Agitating many tons of concrete floor was easier than it might seem. I positioned all my NP-fingertips on the broken edge of the floor, in the corner where one elevator shaft had been, then pushed in the direction of the other elevator shaft, relaxed, pushed, relaxed, pushed, etc. The floor was being laterally held by the left and right sides only, so it was a little bit free to swing forward and backward. I started with pushes that were weak because I didn't want to trigger a collapse with so many people still in the pit. I gradually increased my force until the floor swayed enough for the workers to notice. Make that "NOTICE", because they reacted very quickly: in a few seconds the ones of that floor were rushing up the ladders to get to level one, to take the sole elevator out of there. I encouraged them by knocking some loose pieces of concrete so they fell into the pit (that'd been my Plan B if the floor hadn't swayed enough). I imagine that made some very scary sounds. I kept the shaking going, and it only took a few seconds before a general recall was issued. Everybody started climbing up the stairs as quickly as they could. It took a few elevator loads, but soon the pit was empty. When it was, I tried my hardest to get floors to collapse, but 5.5 tons of force wasn't enough. I could make the floors wobble a little, and a couple of chunks of concrete even broke off and fell, but I wasn't achieving anything useful, except to keep people out. I kept the place wobbling while I waited. There was only about a 20% to 30% chance of the déjà vu arriving during the next four hours, by which time I'd have to decide whether to abort or not. If I waited long enough the déjà vu would eventually arrive, but so would sunrise. If I waited more than about four hours, it'd be increasingly unlikely that I could get back to Corvallis before daylight, especially if I got diverted by rain, which was a common occurrence at this time of year. If I waited about eight hours, I'd be in daylight where I was, and unable to leave at all without too much risk of being seen. Tomorrow was Saturday, so I didn't have to go to work, which was handy for me although the CIA might think otherwise. There was a greater than 50% chance of the déjà vu arriving before daylight, so it was worth crossing my fingers for and continuing to shake the lab's floors. There must have been sound or movement sensors in the place somewhere, because no one came down to check whether the shaking had stopped, which it hadn't. I didn't know how natural or suspicious long-term shaking was, but I did know how suspicious it would be if they found out that mine was the only missing body. Déjà vu arrived about an hour and a half before sunrise was due (I'd looked up sunrise/sunset information up in an internet café when I'd started flying around; memorizing the table for different latitudes and months. It'd been easy as the website had displayed everything in one simple graphic). Worryingly, the me on the other end of the déjà vu link wasn't hiding outside the CIA lab; he was 1800 miles away double-checking the mansion for bugs. His last déjà vu had only been seven hours ago, and he was still waiting for the chance to do what I was doing now. Being in different situations did happen occasionally, and having different déjà vu timings did happen sometimes too, but both were very unusual. It didn't SEEM to shorten the déjà vu time unless we deliberately behaved very differently while we were linked, but we had very little data to go on so we weren't going to risk it. I immediately started using the 44 tons of force I now had to do some interior redecorating, starting with rearranging the lab's level 11 floor. I'd chosen the lowest floor (ignoring the level 12 floor, as I didn't have enough force to make that sway noticeably) because the downward-expanding nature of the initial collapse had made surviving area of the lower floors smaller, they were the most damaged, and they were bearing the most weight. As I got a good rhythm going, I could see the pillars bending back and forth with the penduluming floor, and soon the pendulum was swinging far enough (only inches, but far enough nonetheless) that the concrete pillars were starting to crack and have pieces fall off, each time surely weakening them. A minute or so later, I was surprised when the room I was watching suddenly dropped, almost immediately followed by the floors above falling through the same space. My body could feel the ground shaking. I zipped the light blob up to the top of the pit to get a good view. [[I was pushing the level 11 floor, but silly me should've been looking at the pillars BENEATH the floor (on level 12) rather than those on level 11. Level 12 was much higher as it'd contained some very large machinery, which meant its pillars were longer and more vulnerable to lateral stress. It'd also gotten much hotter during the fire, weakening its pillars more, so it was a level 12 pillar that snapped first. That put more load onto its neighboring pillars, causing them to fracture, resulting in a very rapid propagation of pillar failures. Vertical support pillars do no good at all if the bottom part of the pillar is removed (climb a tree and use a chainsaw to cut the trunk below you, if you need to see that to believe it), so all the floors in the building bowed downward in the center, fracturing into many pieces and collapsing.]] The initial collapse (when I'd escaped) had been in two of the corners, leaving the center of the complex and the two other corners standing. This collapse was in the center, so I had the great pleasure of watching pretty much everything that'd survived the first collapse fall into the pit. There was a small amount of each floor left attached in the two corners that hadn't had elevators, but so little that it made no difference. More than 95% of the lab was now a large pile of rubble at the bottom of the VERY large, empty pit. There was no way they could get heavy machinery into the pit, and even getting workers down to the rubble was going to be a problem. The workers would have to manually cut hundreds of tons of steel and concrete into manageable pieces, and carry it out piece by piece, just to get down to where the bodies that fell down the collapsing elevator shafts would be. That'd take them MANY months, if not years, because every piece of rubble would have to be decontaminated. By that time, identifying the bodies would be even harder especially because the decontamination process would surely destroy much of the biological forensic evidence. The other Mark said, Not long after that, the déjà vu cut out. I was backing out from under the bushes I'd hidden in when I had another little idea. When I'd escaped, I'd worried that the fires would expire too soon from lack of oxygen. I'd seen that they hadn't done so "too soon", but maybe they had still expired. In which case there might be a great deal of unburned diesel still down there. The authorities would definitely make sure no air got out of the huge hole, and one of the ways of ensuring that was to over-pressurize the airlocks so they forced air into the pit every time they cycled. After two and a half months there should be enough oxygen in the cavern to support another fire. I created a large sight blob again, had it radiate a tiny amount of light so I could see with it, sent it to the top of the rubble, and then had it descended going from gap to gap, looking for the floor. When I found it, I also found diesel. I lit some more fires around the bottom level. I doubted they'd burn as well as the first time, and the corpses had been burned once already, but the fires certainly wouldn't help the CIA. I patted myself on the back for a job well done, finished easing out from under the bushes, and made some low level dashes to get far enough away for a low level climb out. The approaching dawn forced me to land about four hundred miles west of Fort Dodge, but I picked a pretty spot and enjoyed the view for the eleven hours I had to lay low. It wasn't until Saturday evening that I got back to my tent, but I considered the time very well spent. [[It worked out well. The initial fire, set when I'd escaped, had made the top few levels so hot that the corpses on those levels had totally dried out and had then burst into flames. With so much environmental heat, virtually every cell of those corpses had burned. Then there had been the initial collapse, which had taken quite a few bodies with it, adding to those I'd tossed down the shafts during my escape. The collapses had taken the nurse's foot that I'd left on my level, but that didn't really matter. The top levels' bodies which had burned and then been caught in the collapse, had ended up as nothing more than smoky smears and a goodly number of those assholes were never identified. The corpses on lower levels that'd been part of the initial collapse were found many months later, and there was usually enough of them left to get DNA samples from, but not always. The two fires had made identification harder, as had the presence of many chemicals in the lab that were great at destroying human tissue (e.g., acids). The atmosphere in the ruin had been toxic and deadly for months, ruining much of the forensic evidence. Even though many bodies were recovered before I'd collapsed the place for the final time, there were people who'd been in the building whose traces were never discovered. Enough of them that my being on that list wasn't a source of particular suspicion, just the usual level of suspicion that all investigators have toward everybody.]] Sunday, I finally made my choice between the many fantasies and half-plans I had for making contact with my family. So Sunday night I spent hiding in the trees outside the mansion's exterior wall, using a sight blob to go over Dad's workshop inch by inch looking for bugs, including paying close attention to the radio intercom. I couldn't see anything suspicious about the intercom, but I noted where its power switch was (I earlier described it as "wireless". I meant that the units used radio waves to communicate rather than wires. They still used wires to get power.) ------- Chapter 300: I Get a Girlfriend Monday, May 1, 2006 Monday mid-afternoon saw me walking along the long, flat Corvallis-Lebanon Highway, toward Corvallis, on the side of the road that Julia, Carol and Donna rode their bikes on to get home from school. Julia had gotten her license six and a half months ago so had been legally allowed to drive Carol and Donna to school for the last two weeks. Before I'd been taken by the DHS, I'd learned why Julia had not been as eager to get her license as other 16-year olds, and why I'd had to push her to get it: she had poor time-and-distance judgment, which made her scared of driving. I wasn't surprised to see them biking today, since the bike ride to school was very easy and the weather was nice. I expected them to ride every day that it wasn't raining. That was convenient for me, but I could easily have adapted my plan to Julia's car if I'd needed to. Seeing them come toward me, and while they were still a couple of hundred yards away, I first memorized my planned footsteps for the next several yards, to make sure I wasn't in danger of walking into traffic. To look natural, I kept walking while I had my eyes shut so I could use a sight blob to see the back wheel of Carol's bike (I WISH I could leave my eyes open when I used sight blobs! Hopefully one day soon). I lightly squeezed the rim of her wheel between two opposing fingertips, braking it in the same way as bike brakes work. Carol's bike started slowing down, so she pushed her pedals a little harder. I applied more braking, making Carol try even harder. Carol had to call to Julia to stop, while Carol got off her bike to check what the problem was, giving me a chance to open my eyes and walk normally, something I was very thankful to do as walking alongside a busy highway with your eyes shut is scary, even when you can proximity sense people 24 feet away. Donna isn't the sort of girl to worry about what's behind her, so she passed me unaware that the other two girls had stopped. That made things a little easier for me, but wasn't essential to my plan. I continued to walk toward "My Girls" - who weren't aware of that designation yet - while Carol tried to see what the problem was. She'd felt that it was the rear wheel, something that she confirmed when she lifted that end of the bike off the ground and tried to spin the wheel (I was invisibly NP-braking it again). Carol was puzzled why the wheel wasn't revolving freely. Playing with the brakes didn't help, and neither did remounting and trying to ride again. Julia couldn't see anything wrong either. By the time I was getting close both girls were frustrated by their inability to identify the problem. I called ahead, "Are you having trouble with your brakes? I'm a mechanic, so maybe I can help?" I was dressed quite nicely and doing my best to seem like a nice, trustworthy, young man. Julia hesitated, but Carol wanted the damned bike fixed so she immediately answered, "Yes please. The rear wheel won't spin, but the brakes are open so I don't understand." I stood non-threateningly on the other side of the bike from the girls and said, "Let me have a look." I picked up the rear end, tried to spin the wheel, and it didn't move. "Hmm, you're right." I bent down to look at the brakes, poking them with my hand, saying, "They're open. There doesn't appear to be any mechanical reason for your problem." "Exactly!" agreed Carol. "It's very strange." "I'll hold the rear end up while you ring the bell please." "Huh? Why?" "I have a theory. Just try it, and we'll quickly see if I'm right." They were both giving me funny looks, but Carol reached forward and rang the bell. I spun the rear wheel, and it spun very nicely. Carol exclaimed, "How did you do that?" "It was destiny." "Huh?" "I realize that sounds strange. Before I explain, first let me introduce myself. My name is Ronald Fisher; Ron to my friends. You'll be calling me Ron, because not only are we going to be friends, we're going to get married." Carol thought not! "What! I DON'T think so! Thanks for your help, but we've got to get going." Julia clearly agreed that the marriage wasn't going to happen; both girls looked a little worried about the mad guy and were eager to leave. I took a step back to be less threatening to them, saying, "Allow me to prove it." I used NP to hold Carol's lips together. Her eyes FLEW OPEN! With my eye that Carol could see but Julia couldn't, I gave Carol a heavy wink, then motioned that eyeball toward Julia while still looking at Carol with the other eye. Carol knew that I - Mark Anderson - had independent eyeball control. I used more NP to lightly stroke Carol's cheek, seeing the hope blossom on her face. So there was no doubt, I also NP-stroked the two front-most points of her blouse. That took only a couple of seconds, but long enough for Julia to start worrying why Carol wasn't leaving quickly. I winked at Carol again, held her lips together noticeably firmer, and used several more NP-points to push back and down on her shoulders to let her know to stay where she was. She was still too confused to react, but I wanted to hold her back from publicly showing me more affection than normal to a stranger who'd just mended her bike. I said to Carol, "Now that you know my name, there are just two more things you need to know about me before we get married: I'm VERY greedy and VERY lazy. I want TWO wives, but I can't be bothered searching around. Would your little friend be any good as my second wife?" I gave Carol two NP-taps on the top of her head, as well as another wink and a big smile. I relaxed my grip on her lips, hoping she'd play along with my tease; my intended bell-and-destiny joke having fallen apart as I'd been too emotional to word it properly. Carol could only breathlessly and very disbelievingly ask, "Mark?" Julia had started looking strange when the two wives issue came up, but not half as strange as she looked after Carol asked that question. I answered, "You need to get used to calling me Ron, but you're right. It's a pretty good disguise, isn't it? It's REALLY good to be back, girls. I've missed you both VERY much." Carol tried to launch herself at me, but I had PLENTY of force to hold her firmly rooted to where she was, even quickly pushing her arms back down. Julia hadn't had the benefit of feeling my NP, so she was confused by Carol's leaping to the conclusion that I could be Mark, and by my confirming it. Looking past Julia, I could see Donna heading back to see what the problem was, so it'd be easier to make this go quickly. I said, "Yes, I'm Mark. I was forced to disguise myself. Donna's coming back and I don't want to discuss this in public. Let's push Carol's bike back as if it had a problem. That'll give me an excuse to keep walking with you." -- I repeated the lip-closing, cheek-rubbing and nipple-tweaking reminders on Julia, and then had to also use NP to hold her down so she didn't rush at me. I added, "PLEASE do NOT make a scene in public. I've had to kill over two hundred people to get back, and I don't want your reactions to make anyone suspicious about who I am." That sobered my girls VERY effectively. -- While they were pausing, I reiterated, "Please remember that I'm just Ron Fisher who's helping you push your bike home. Don't even tell Donna yet. Let's just walk along normally. We'll talk when we get home." I picked up the rear wheel of Carol's bike a couple of inches and started walking it forward, as if the rear brakes had jammed. That can happen on bikes if you don't oil the brake cable for a long time, so any watching CIA agents wouldn't be suspicious. I used NP to hold the brake pads closed on the wheel, so it looked even more authentic. I gave the girls a push with NP, to get them moving, adding, "Come on, darlings. You can do this. I'm just a very good looking Black guy who's helping you get home..." "Not as good looking as you used to be," corrected Julia. "I'll look better in my bright yellow Speedos with this skin, even if my butt isn't so cute anymore. Shh, here comes Donna." I pushed them again, and they started moving. Donna braked to a halt in front of us, to say, "What happened? Who are you?" I answered, "I'm Ron Fisher. The brakes have jammed so I'm helping your pretty sister get it home." "My sister doesn't want a boyfriend," stated Donna with certainty. "But she does need a hand getting her bike home, so that's what I'm doing. I noticed the way you were riding when you went past me. I bet you've got a horse, don't you?" "Yeah? How did you know?" "The way you sat on the bike and moved your legs. I've ridden a few times before myself. What sort of horse have you got? You can tell me while we walk. Carol, I'll hold up the back and push; will you steer please?" We walked, making conversation about Patch and other getting-to-know-you topics. Carol and Julia both grabbing chances to quietly whisper to me, "Is it REALLY you?" I lightly NP-patted their asses; I'll grab any excuse to grab those. As we approached the property's front gate, I asked, "Does your father have a workshop where we can take the bike so I can fix it for you?" Donna was first to answer, stating, "Dad can fix it later." Carol said, "It's all right, Donna. We're letting him in." "But Mom said we shouldn't let strangers in." "It's okay this time," reassured Julia. Donna didn't think so, and she was even less impressed when Julia opened Dad's workshop door - I immediately used NP to turn off the power supply to the intercom - and Carol and Julia went inside it with me. Donna's being less-than-impressed turned into amazement when both girls dropped their bikes, double checked, "It's REALLY you?" then leaped into my arms at my nod. Both girls hesitated to kiss me though, so I broke the impasse by kissing Carol myself. After a couple of second Carol pulled back to say, "You kiss the same, although your lips are bigger." "What's going on?" demanded Donna, from outside the workshop. "My turn," decided Julia, putting her lips where her mouth was. (In case you're confused, it's a play on "why don't you put your money where your mouth is.") Julia had her sample, then declared, "You pass the kissing test." Carol had reconsidered her previous opinion that I passed her kissing test, and thought it needed to be re-tested. Donna REALLY thought someone should explain, "RIGHT NOW!" I told her, "Come inside, Donna, and I'll explain it to you." I'd spent some time thinking about whether to keep Donna in the dark about who I was, because of her proven history of being thoughtless about secrets. It seemed safer to keep her unaware, but I'd decided that I had to tell her. There were three main reasons: First, she has a history of blabbing too much, but that happens when she wants something for herself, which didn't apply this time. Second, when we did eventually tell her, she'd be extremely pissed off that we kept it from her. Third, Donna was going to be amazed at how fast Ron moved into her family's life, and into Carol and Julia's bed. That could cause her to think badly about Carol and Julia, to ask lots of questions, to snoop around, and who knows what else. It could end up more dangerous in the long run, especially if she felt bitter that she was left out of the loop. I really didn't have much choice except to tell her, scary as it was. "I don't know who you are." "Carol and Julia do though, and they obviously trust me. So come inside and I'll tell you." "Tell me now." Both Julia and Carol urged Donna to come inside. Donna hesitated, so Carol went to get her, pulling her in from the doorway. I requested, "Turns the lights on and shut the door please, Carol." I could've done both with NP easily, but I was using that as little as possible when it would produce visible effects. I was standing next to Dad's pride and joy, so I sat on one of the wheels, lowering me and making me less threatening to Donna. I said, "Donna, remember how Mark's body looked pathetic a couple of years ago, but three months ago it looked awesome. All your Ducklings thought he looked wonderful, didn't they?" Very hesitantly, and from several yards away, "Yeah?" "But Mark never exercised, apart from going on a couple of runs with you. So how did his body improve so much?" "I don't know," answered Donna, half the time looking at Carol for an explanation for why this complete stranger was talking about Mark. Donna got no answer from her sister because Carol and Julia were focused on me. I told her, "It was because Mark was such a genius that his mind was powerful enough to tell his body to get fitter and stronger." Donna didn't know what to think of that, so she just shrugged. I continued, "It turns out that being fitter and stronger aren't the only changes I can make. Given a few weeks, I can change my height, skin color and even hair type. I know I don't look it, Donna, but I'm your brother Mark." I'd been worried whether my hair would grow out Negroid or Caucasian. I could've gone for the shaved-head look if necessary, but it was wonderfully consistent with my apparent race. Donna was extremely skeptical about that, even when Carol and Julia backed me up, so I offered, "Ask me any questions you want, that only Mark would know the answers to. You too, Carol and Julia. It's especially important that you two don't have any doubts." Julia started with, "What's your favorite meal?" "Boy, I haven't had that for a LONG time: 'Roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings and lots of gravy.' Yummy. I don't suppose there's any leftovers in the fridge now, is there?" "'Fraid not. No one has wanted to have that dinner since you disappeared." "I didn't disappear, I was kidnapped by the DHS and CIA, but let's not get into that now. More questions to prove who I am first." Carol asked, "What happened to your finger?" I held up my left hand with the newly regenerated finger extended. "The original one was cut off by the illegal kidnappers - as opposed to the legal kidnappers. A guy I nicknamed 'Goon' cut it off to..." #3: #10: [[To avoid confusing you, most of my subsequent references to 3A, 3B, 3A-land, etc., will be to those that you have already read about. The consequences of all the 4B and 5B minds having different 3A- and 3B-lands will be omitted as you understand those issues well enough by now.]] #3: All The New Guys: #3: " ... make a point. I've spent the last month or so getting it to grow again because if Ron came back with the same finger missing, it'd be too coincidental not to be suspicious." I was expecting the girls to ask me the obvious questions about what would happen if my hand was cut off, or my leg, or my head, but they showed no interest in those fascinating, logical extensions; asking about family history stuff instead. Carol and Julia accepted me quickly, other than making the occasional comments about it being so weird and hard to get used to. Things like Carol saying, "When I kiss you, I feel like I'm cheating on you, because you don't look like you." Donna increasingly called me Mark, or doing the equivalent. For example, after about twenty minutes, Donna tried, "What were those things that came to your wedding?" (The "your wedding" being another sign of acceptance.) I replied, "Mom told you not to talk about that. Has she changed her mind while I was away?" Donna thought about it for a while, but decided she wouldn't be able to get away with it, so she regretfully admitted, "No." "Just because my body has changed shape doesn't mean Mom's orders can be ignored. Am I correct in thinking that all of you believe I'm Mark now?" "Yes," immediately from Carol and Julia. They better believe it, because they were sitting on my legs with my arms around them in our usual, much missed, fashion. "I 'spose so," unconvincingly admitted Donna. I asked, "Who's the smartest between you and Patch, Donna?" I knew her riding club stressed this issue, otherwise the horse wouldn't get trained properly. "Me of course. Why?" "I bet you $5 that Patch recognizes me right away; much faster than you did." "Mom said I'm not allowed to bet." "Ha! Chicken." To them all I said, "I've gone to an ENORMOUS amount of trouble and it's taken me many weeks to change my body this much, so I could risk coming back to you again. I'm sure the CIA is very curious about Mark Anderson and they could be tapping our phones, bugging our house, and things like that. It's VERY important that none of you EVER call me Mark. I'm Ron Fisher, a guy who helped Carol with a bike problem and who will soon become a close family friend. -- "The CIA believes Mark is dead, and that's the way it must remain forever. If they overhear any of you talking and learn Mark is Ron, then they'll recapture me and kill me with their experiments. Last time, even before they knew how special I was, they strapped me to a table, drilled a hole in my skull and were pulling chunks of my brain out to look at." "Eww, GROSS!" declared Donna, as I knew she would. That story would have much more impact on Donna than my general requests to be cautions. "It's MUCH worse than that, Donna. If I hadn't escaped, they would've taken all my brain. I'd be dead by now. And when they ran out of my brain, they might've become curious to compare it to YOUR brain, so they'd kidnap you, open your head and take your brain out. They are VERY bad people. You HAVE to keep who I am TOP SECRET!" [I didn't mention earlier, but I certainly didn't forget to repair the hole in my skull when I was changing my body. Proximity works in all directions, so I was constantly 'seeing' the hole in my skull, and I STRONGLY wanted to repair it. It quickly sealed at the inside end of the hole, allowing me to take the plug out so the outside end could seal.] "I will, Mark." "WRONG! From now on, I am NOT Mark. Call me Ron. It shouldn't be hard to remember; you've only got to look at me. Say 'Yes Ron, ' Donna." "Yes Ron. {Giggle}, this is WEIRD!" Carol asked, "What about Mom and Dad. You're going to tell them, aren't you?" "Absolutely. And Prof and Vanessa too. Everyone in this house, including Patch. I've been back in Corvallis for a week but I didn't contact you before because I was VERY carefully searching all around this house. All the grounds, the neighbors places close to ours, I spent several hours looking through this room last night to make sure it was okay to talk here today. -- "I'll leave shortly because a guy you just met on the road shouldn't stay so long. You can't call Mom and Dad to tell them to rush home. That'd be an unnatural reaction to meeting Ron Fisher. But when our parents get home, tell them you've invited a guy who helped with your bike to dinner. I'll come back at 6 o'clock. As soon as we can, we'll come down here and I'll tell them who I really am. -- "But until then, you don't say ANYTHING. Don't even look happier than normal, and the word 'Mark' NEVER crosses your lips. If you say I'm back just once, then we could have DHS and CIA agents charging in from all directions. They wouldn't hesitate to kill every one of you to get hold of me. -- "Donna, do you want to see Mom and Dad be shot full of bullets and die in front of your eyes?" I treated that as a rhetorical question, giving her a second to understand what I'd said, then continued, "You MUST NEVER call me Mark, tell anyone Mark's back, or ANYTHING like that. I am Ron Fisher. You haven't seen Mark for three months and you're very worried about him. Say 'Yes Ron, ' Donna." "Would they really shoot Mom and Dad?" "And you, Carol and Julia. They wouldn't think twice about it. They'd probably prefer it, so there'd be no one left alive to ask them hard questions. They're VERY bad people. They kidnapped me, drilled a hole in my head and pulled some of my brain out. They weren't going to release me after doing that. They've got so much power they don't care about the law and they do whatever they want. If Mom or Dad got in their way, they wouldn't even blink before shooting them. So it's VERY important you call me Ron and treat me like you've never met me before. We'll be safe if you do that. Okay?" "I should be able to. You don't look ANYTHING like you used to." "Good. All of you should try to say 'Ron' in every sentence you say to me, to get into the habit of saying it." "Okay Ron," agreed Julia. "What's your plan for now on, Ron?" "Meet our parents at dinner and bring them down here to explain. Then over the next few weeks, Ron will get friendlier and friendlier with all of you. I've got a job as a mechanic, but only in the mornings so I can start doing some unskilled landscaping work around this house in the afternoons. I saw that Vanessa still has a lot to do, so that could keep me busy and around the place for a long time. -- "Then as we seem to become friendlier, I thought that I could start to woo Carol. Meet her after school with flowers and things like that. It wouldn't be believable that you would get a new boyfriend so soon, Julia, and that'd look too much like I was stepping into Mark's shoes, so I'll chase Carol. A while after that I'll get sick of living in a tent and start to look for a room to rent somewhere. It just so happens that there's a spare bedroom in the main house here so I'll take that, but after a while I'll move to Mark's Wing. I'll be Carol's new live-in boyfriend, but because Carol's a backsliding lesbian, she'll retain her relationship with Julia, so the three of us will end up together again. -- "What I do with my life after that I haven't worried about yet. Obviously I can't go back to studying at OSU, or playing soccer, or any of the other things that Mark stood out at. What I'll do is a long-term decision that there's no hurry to make. Ron Fisher is nineteen so legally allowed to leave home. He was a mechanic in his previous job, and I know enough to be able to keep doing that..." Julia interrupted, "You're talking as if Ron Fisher was a real person; not a fake ID?" "A fake would be far too easy for the CIA to see through. The short explanation is that I walked through an LA ghetto in the late evening a couple of months ago. Ron Fisher and some other guys chased me into an alley and tried to rob me. I killed them and hid their bodies, changing mine to look like Ron Fisher's so I could use his ID." Carol couldn't help herself, "Oh no!" "Yeah. It's serious stuff. The CIA would LOVE to get their hands on me, so I have to be extremely careful. When Ron Fisher attacked me I actually took him prisoner and spent a month asking him all about his life. He was a petty criminal in LA, with some minor convictions for stealing, assault and drug possession, starting from when he was a minor. I would've preferred to become someone squeaky clean, but I had to kill the guy at the end so I chose a guy who was well on the road to becoming bad news. Maybe in a few years we might find someone more suitable for me to change into, but I like that Ron Fisher is about as opposite from Mark Anderson as it's possible to be." "You can say that again!" agreed Carol. "People are going to be amazed when you become my boyfriend. That's going to be funny." "Yeah, I'm looking forward to it myself. I'm already telling everyone that I got sick of all the violence and crime in LA, and that I've come north looking for a nice, safe town to settle down in. I've turned over a new leaf, and I like the look of Corvallis. That'll be especially true now that I've met such a lovely girl when her bike had trouble. It should fit together quite nicely. Changing the subject, how are Ava and her parents?" Julia answered, "Oh, not good. Katie and Carson are in the hospital in Salem. They're still getting treatments, trying to hang on until Ava graduates. Carson seems safe to make it that long. He's allowed to go home between treatments if he wants to, but he's staying with Katie. She's not going to come out again, unless she wants to die at home or in a hospice. She's not talking about that until Ava's exams are finished. Katie's done better than the doctors expected, so they're saying she's got a reasonable chance of lasting until graduation. We're planning to set up a webcam and broadcast graduation live to a big screen in their room, hopefully." "I'll never forgive the assholes that made me miss being around to help Ava. I'm seriously tempted to reveal myself to Ava right away. I'll think about that between now and dinner, and we'll talk about it then. It'd be best to make sure Ava's not at the dinner tonight, Julia, or is that too cruel?" "It's okay. She doesn't come here every dinner. I'll tell her we've got a family friend coming." "I don't want to, but we've already spent too long in here in case anyone is watching, so let's stop now. I'll walk out wiping my hands with a rag as if I'd been working on Carol's bike. I'll need to borrow it actually, so I can get to my tent and back here in time for dinner, but that'll look like I was taking it for a test ride." "Okay," agreed Carol. Donna insisted, "Before you go, I want to see if Patch recognizes you." "What, no $5 bet? Okay, I'll do it on the cheap. When we get outside, you MUST all behave as if I'm Ron Fisher. No farewell tears or kisses, no calling me Mark, no asking questions that you don't want the CIA to overhear. I'm just a guy you met on the road a few minutes ago. Okay?" They agreed. We walked out of the workshop with me wiping my hands with a rag and Carol wheeling her bike. I told her, "Give it a test ride to see how it goes now, Carol." Carol rode around for half a minute, then declared, "You've fixed it. Thank you so much." "Always happy to help a pretty girl. Donna, didn't you say you wanted me to meet your horse? What's its name again?" "HIS name is Patch. Over here." For Donna's benefit, I used NP and EKP to make sure Patch seemed to recognize me. Nothing dramatic, he just came when I called and we hugged faces. To avoid the risk of Donna saying "recognize" I talked during Patch's approach, calling him a friendly horse, making time-wasting comments like, "I think he likes me because I'm closest to his color. I hope he doesn't think I'm a female horse." "He's gelded, silly. And he's VERY smart; he rec..." "I've got to be going. Oops, sorry Donna. I didn't mean to stand on your foot. Sorry, I'm clumsy sometimes. Thanks for the dinner invite, Carol and Julia. I'll be back at six. Is that when you want me to come?" "Make it 6:15," suggested Julia, into the act of not appearing eager. "Okay. Thanks. This'll be the second time I've been invited to have dinner with someone since I've been here. Corvallis is a friendly town. I think I'm going to like it here." [The owners of the RV park had taken pity on me one wet evening, inviting me to share their dinner.] I gave Carol's and Julia's lips a last NP-squeeze to remind them not to talk about me after I left, hoping they'd control Donna, then I rode off on Carol's bike. I left my tent and started riding back to 'my home', pausing when close enough to sight blob the workshop to make sure there was no sign of bugs having been hurriedly installed. It looked identical to when I'd left it. I also quickly checked my favorite room of the main house, and saw that dinner preparations were well in hand, and everything seemed natural. My families weren't hostage to thirty CIA agents lying in ambush for me, and there wasn't a "Welcome Home Mark" banner over the front door. I'd arrived just before dinner. Going straight to the workshop wouldn't look natural, so we sat down to eat first. Dinner was amusing. I could tell that even before I'd arrived the parents had picked up from the girls that something odd was going on, but they had no idea what, so they asked me lots of questions trying to find out. I stayed in my persona, telling them the truth about my (well, Ron's) life in LA. I was totally open and honest (sort of), telling them about my convictions, the knife fight, and other low-points of my life. It was quite convenient for me, as it'd save me having to explain that side of things in the workshop. Even with my being politely spoken and with 75% of my tribal dialect removed, the parents were clearly confused about why the girls had invited me to dinner. Not learning why from me, they tried asking the girls in oblique ways, constrained by wanting to avoid being too impolite direct in front of me. The girls pretended not to understand; Carol and Julia were enjoying playing the act even more than me. Donna had trouble maintaining her poise sometimes, but Carol and Julia were sitting on either side of Donna, so she got her legs kicked or pinched several times (that information courtesy of my wonderfully large proximity sense). Julia and Carol both tried to press seconds on me, dismayed that I'd eaten less than Julia, but I said, "No thanks. I don' eat much dese days. I was too big in LA, but walkin' everywhere is fixin' dat." Just as dinner finished, and before the parents could decide whether to offer coffee (to be polite) or bid me goodbye (so they could grill the girls), I commented, "I saw da big mower in da workshop. Ya know ya not looking after it too good. I kin show ya what ya need to do." Dad was about to express the offense he'd just taken, when Julia got in first with, "Yeah, let's go! Come on everyone." "Huh?" in various forms, from all the parents. Carol and Donna both jumped to their feet, saying, "Come on." Four very mystified parents allowed themselves to be pushed out the backdoor, down the stairs off the mound, and around to my dad's private area (there's no internal access between it and the house). He even had a calendar of bikini-clad beauties hanging in it, that's how much it was his private sanctum. I was pleased that no one had their cellphone with them. I'd be very nervous to be talking about my secrets with Government infiltrated microphones possibly with us. When Julia finished closing the workshop door I faced Mom and Dad, and imaginatively said, "Hello, Mom and Dad." Mom and Dad were pretty sure they'd only had three kids, and the two giggling females were accounted for. While it was true that their son was missing, the last time they'd seen him he hadn't been a full-cast Negro. I helpfully added, "Pretty good disguise, isn't it? Hi Vanessa and Prof. I'm MIGHTY glad to be back!" I gave the four of them a couple of NP-taps on the head, to help establish my bona fides. "But you don't look ANYTHING like Mark," protested Mom, for some reason having trouble accepting that I was her son. "I couldn't risk the DHS or CIA seeing me, so I had to go to extreme measures to hide my true identity. I created a great deal of very expensive and deadly mayhem to cover my escape from their clutches. If they knew I was still alive, they'd go berserk." Prof said, "We have to confirm your identity before we can trust you. Even with the," Prof touched the top of his head. "Sure. The girls went through the same thing. Ask as many questions as you want. Before we start, I'm virtually positive that this room isn't being bugged. Some of the other rooms I'm REASONABLY sure about - the two studies, the Main kitchen/dining room and my bedroom - but the other rooms I haven't checked yet, and I'd be very scared about the phones or computers. I know the DHS has stopped all their surveillance, but I can't find out about the CIA and it's them that I'm the most worried about. We can talk freely in here now, but all our lives are very seriously at risk so I STRONGLY suggest no talking outside this room and after this meeting, including not among yourselves after I leave. If the CIA learns about me being back and looking like this, I truly believe that all our lives would be over. So ask your identity-verifying questions, and then I'll recount my adventures and plans." Prof and Vanessa were quick to start firing questions at me. Mom and Dad were slower, asked a couple of questions, and then lost focus to ask what I'd been doing. I insisted, "We don't have much time down here before it'll start seeming suspicious, so stick to questions that confirm my identity. When that's established, then I'll give you a quick summary of my adventures and my ideas for the future." With Prof and Vanessa leading the way, my parents got into the swing of things. Soon all of them were firing dozens of quick questions at me. The girls joined in too, so my mouth was going flat out to provide the answers, which made it very convincing as I had no time for thought. Prof and Vanessa got sneaky too, asking me questions that sounded reasonable but weren't, such as Prof's asking me, "Who was backing us up when we were in Vegas?" ("No one."), or Vanessa asking, "Who was the girl you had sex with before Julia?" ("Julia was my first"). Mom asked, "How many witnesses to your wedding were there?" ("Excluding my two wives and me, eight bipeds and several floaters. Maybe seven and three-quarters bipeds, allowing for Prof.") The questions and answers were flying so fast that it took less than ten minutes before Vanessa interrupted to declare, "I'm satisfied he's Mark." The other adults agreed, the girls already being convinced, as indicated by Julia and Carol hugging my arms, just like the old days. I said, "Good. To summarize my adventures: Robert Moran ordered the DHS agents to pick me up because he was curious about me. He thought I was achieving too much, and it made him suspicious. He wrote stuff in my file about my possibly intending to finance terrorists, but he was lying to justify his abusing his power to satisfy his curiosity. -- "They kept me in a small jail they had beside the underground parking garage, asking me lots of questions and giving me less than a third of the food and water I needed. Moran - the idiot - decided that I might be capable of controlling people's minds, so he arranged to pass me on to Kyler Wright of the Sciences and Technology Directorate of the DHS in Washington, DC. Wright's group played verbal mind-games and various psychological tricks on me, trying to prove I had mind control powers. -- "I spent about a week with them, then woke up one morning in a different place. They'd drugged and transported me to a CIA Biological and Chemical Weapons Development Lab they had in a top-secret underground location just outside of the town of Fort Dodge, Iowa. It was a SERIOUSLY nasty place. They were making toxins that could kill cities full of people, or diseases that could wipe out many millions. Developing that stuff is internationally illegal," I'd checked that fact when I'd been waiting to see my LA lawyer, "but the CIA had hundreds of people working flat out in a twelve-level, very expensive complex. It was exactly the sort of place you see in the movies. -- "They had me for two weeks, doing increasingly horrible experiments on me, such as drilling a hole in my skull and extracting part of my brain. They took their security VERY seriously and there was no way I could get a message to you. Sorry about that. I couldn't get good access to their computer systems, but I did manage to read enough of my file to think that they were deliberately driving me to try to use my mind control powers. They had a funny security set up with a nurse that came into my room unsupervised, except by a remote camera. I think they were expecting me to 'take her over', which was never going to happen. -- "Unfortunately, all the experiments they were doing on me were starting to produce interesting results. The most annoying was that they had me permanently wired to an EEG - electroencephalograph - machine, so they could monitor my brain waves continuously. My brain waves are a lot different than normal people's, so they were very excited about that. My body was also off the charts when it came to being healthy in all sorts of ways, which had their biologists very excited. It was clear they weren't going to let me out. The CIA was too interested in me and they'd done lots of stuff that must've been so massively illegal that they couldn't let it ever become public, so they weren't going to let me go either because they lose interest in me or from outside pressure. Plus the experiments they were doing on me were rapidly heading toward the sort that I wouldn't recover from. -- "Outside help wasn't going to get me out, so I got myself out. I created a MASSIVE disaster for them. I destroyed the entire complex, so it's now just a pile of highly contaminated burning rubble in the bottom of a great, big empty hole." Mom's mind couldn't grasp it, "What do you mean, 'destroyed'?" "The way the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, I did that inside the CIA underground lab. Every floor collapsed to the..." "But there were thousands of fatalities from the Twin Towers..." "And over two hundred inside the CIA's lab. Their deaths covered my escape, and with any luck the disaster was so large that the CIA will stop developing biochem weapons." "You KILLED two hundred people!" "No Mom; I killed two hundred monsters. I read thousands of pages describing the experiments they were doing and what they were trying to achieve. Not to mention seeing their experiments on animals, although I quickly learned not to look at those." "Animals?" asked Donna. "'Fraid so, sweetie. They were doing horrible things to hundreds of animals. Mom, with respect, you haven't got a clue what was going on in that place, so it's impossible for you to judge my actions. As far as I'm concerned, I killed two hundred mass murderers; some of whom were holding me against my will, performing medical experiments on me, and were definitely intending to murder me. It was my decision and my doing, and I'm more than okay with it." "Serve them right for seizing you," said Dad, "but how could you cause so much destruction?" [Dad's use of "seizing" seemed strange to me, but I later learned that they'd all been involved in extensive legal discussions. The DHS's taking of me had been an illegal "search and seizure", in breach of the Fourth Amendment. If Moran had employed the increasingly commonly used pretext of the "material witness" provision of the Patriot Act they could have legally held me incommunicado virtually forever, subject only to public pressure, as they'd recently done with Brandon Mayfield. Mayfield had been released after two weeks only because the Spanish police were involved and they'd repeatedly expressed doubts about Mayfield's guilt to the US law enforcement agencies starting even before he'd been arrested, but had had their doubts ignored, so had gone public about his probable innocence; forcing the US Government to reveal that they had Mayfield, where they were hiding him, under what false name and why they had him (they'd never told even his family any of that information). The subsequent lawsuit uncovered that several US Government agents' had lied in their sworn testimonies about the false evidence used to hold him. His case had been similar to mine, except that I had nobody equivalent to the Spanish police to go public about the evidence being used to hold me being false, so I could have legally stayed totally 'lost' for far longer.] [[Moran hadn't used the material witness provision because he would have had to justify them to his bosses, but his only real motivation was his suspicion of my mind-control powers. Moran preferred to keep as quiet as possible about me, so not even his bosses knew about me until the public stink started. When that did, Moran just showed his bosses that my file was full of very suspicious indications of my interest in financing and/or participating in terrorist activities.]] I gave all the adults, Carol and Julia a little NP-prod to remind them of it, then explained, "A little push in the right place at the right time can have big effects. A small nudge on the steering wheel of your car could do nothing or could cause a disaster, it's just a matter of choosing the right place and timing. -- "Let me get back to what I did; we can discuss justifications and mechanisms some other time. I escaped from the underground lab in a way that I hoped would make them think it was an external raid by persons unknown. They should think my body is buried in the bottom of the pit along with many others', and hopefully they'll never discover otherwise. There's a hell of a mess in that place, and it should take them years to clean it up, and I hope there'll be a lot of people who are never accounted for. -- "I knew I could never show my face anywhere again, so I either left America to go live by myself in some backwater country never seeing or communicating with any of you for the rest of my life, or I changed my face as much as possible. You can see which way I went. If the CIA ever rechecks you guys, which I expect they will, and I'm in your lives, then they'll check me too. If I had a fake ID, it'd be immediately uncovered, so I needed a real person's ID. So I walked through a high crime area of LA until a dozen gang guys chased me into an alley and attacked me with knives and guns. I took care of them, took one of them captive, and spent a month learning about his life and making myself look like him. Then I pretended to be him went back to LA and did what I told you over dinner: told everyone I was sick of all the violence and that I was leaving LA to find a nice, quiet place to settle down, which just happened to be Corvallis. I got myself a job, spent the last week doing my best to make sure you're not under surveillance, and then arranged an innocent looking way to get into your lives. And here we are. Any questions before I describe my plans?" "Only stunned disbelief," announced Prof. "You make it sound so easy." "It wasn't, but there's no point in making an issue out of how scared I was at various times." "Your finger looks real?" asked Vanessa. "It is; I regenerated it. My body's very adaptable, as you can tell by looking at me. It was absolutely essential I fixed my finger since it would've been too suspicious for me to have the same missing finger as Mark. And to answer the obvious questions, I think I could do larger pieces, but definitely not if my head was cut off." "What a pity I couldn't do that forty-odd years ago," said Prof. "Yeah, it's a helpful ability. I'll briefly describe my plans. First, as far as everyone is concerned, Mark Anderson is still missing, you're all very upset about it and you'll keep doing whatever it is that you would do to get him back. I'm Ron Fisher, a complete stranger before today. Over the next few weeks I'll get increasingly friendly with you. I've got a job as a mechanic in the mornings so Vanessa can hire me to do unskilled landscaping work around the property in the afternoons. That'll make my becoming friendly look natural. Then I'll start to woo Carol: meet her after school with flowers and public things like that. Julia is still waiting for Mark, but Carol is available. I'll have to work hard to overcome her lesbianism, but I'm up for the challenge. At an appropriate time, I'll get tired of living in a tent and start to look for a room to rent somewhere. You'll offer me the spare room in the Main House, which I'll take. Eventually Carol and I will be getting along so well that she'll manage to convince me to move into Mark's Wing. Because Carol's a backsliding lesbian, she'll retain her relationship with Julia, so the three of us will drift together. It'll take a while before we make that public, but if a CIA bug picks up that we're friendly in private, it won't seem too bad. -- "What I do with my life after that, I haven't worried about yet; I'm just happy to have a life back with you guys. I can't go back to studying at OSU, or playing soccer, or any of the other things that Mark stood out at. For the next several weeks I'm happy enough to be a part-time mechanic, part-time wheelbarrow-pusher around this garden, while my life merges with yours. My claimed background and goals justify me joining with you quickly, so that should work out well enough. Beyond that I haven't got a clue what to do. That's the sort of guidance parents are better at." "You seem to be doing very well without us," said Dad. "Get used to calling me Ron when you speak to me, just like I practiced by calling you Steven during dinner." "I get it. It's very weird being your parent, RON." Prof added, "I hope none of Julia's future boyfriends cause as much trouble as that Mark guy did." "Haha. Thanks very much, Prof. Nice to know what you thought of the previous version of me. That's pretty much my news finished. What have you guys been up to?" Mom answered, "Trying to move Heaven and Earth to find out where you were. Where MARK was. Or IS. This is very confusing." I clarified, "Mark is lying dead and buried at the bottom of a pit that a secret CIA lab collapsed in. You don't know that yet, but the sooner you do the better. Where are you at for finding Mark?" Vanessa said, "The DHS in Washington DC had to admit that they had Mark after we went public with the flight details and Wright's name, but they say that someone else took him/you, but they don't know who took you or where you are now. They're trying to wash their hands of the whole affair. We didn't know the CIA got hold of Mark - keeping the two of you separate is going to take some getting used to. You know that Wright and Moran died?" "Yeah, that was my doing. Sorry Mom, but they 'disappeared' me and then did their best to cover up the evidence of it. I was trying to hide the linkages to make it harder for the CIA to backtrack me if I'd managed to destroy all their records about me except my name, but I found out later that you'd already gone public with the flight's details..." "How were you able to text that information to our lawyer, Mar ... Ron?" asked Dad. "It was easy, but I'll explain some other time, Steven. We should go back upstairs shortly, before the CIA get suspicious. We're going to have to assume the CIA is listening to us permanently because we'll never know. Even if we got the house swept, they could plant new bugs the next day. Mark is going to have to die in all your lives, and Ron be a completely different person." Julia complained, "That's going to mean it'll be weeks before you can live with Carol and me." "I'm afraid so. Moving quickly would be too suspicious. In about three weekends it should be okay for Carol and me to go on a little trip for the weekend provided you come with us as a chaperon, and we should be able to snatch some time together every now and then, but it'll have to be away from the house so we'll know there won't be any bugs listening in. You'll have to leave your phones behind too, which is suspicious in itself. It's a pain, but unfortunately these assholes are deadly so caution is definitely the way to go. -- "Before we go up, I've got one important topic: Ava. I'd REALLY like to divulge myself to her, but she spends so much time here that if the CIA is monitoring you guys, they're pretty likely to have checked her out too. Ron Fisher shouldn't know Ava West exists, so I shouldn't turn up on her doorstep if the CIA has her house bugged. The question is whether they're watching her or not." "We don't know, Ron," said Prof. "We didn't know the CIA was involved until a few minutes ago." Julia suggested, "There's no need to act right away, Mark. Argh! RON. Even with you looking so different, that's hard to get used to. I'm going to have to recite 'Ron' to myself all evening to try to get it to stick. Back to Ava: If you're working on the gardens for Mom in the afternoons, Ron, then you'll naturally meet Ava soon anyway. We can tell Ron about Ava's parents then. It may look premature, but it won't be too bad. After that, you'll have reason to be sympathetic toward her." "Okay. We'll do it that way. I presume she's continued to keep all my secrets?" "Absolutely," answer Julia with confidence. "I'm sure you can trust her with your new identity. It'll make her feel much better to know you're back, and she needs some of that." "Good. I'm thinking of doing that in a VERY surprising way. I just had a thought: Steven, when we leave this room, I can close the door in a way that'll tell me if anyone has opened it again. I'll do that shortly, so everyone stay out of this room after we leave. If you want to get in, wait until I'm here so I can reset the warning sign. That way we'll know that this room is bug free so we can have meetings in here when we need to." "How do you know it's bug free now?" asked Prof. "The quick version is that I eyeballed it very, very painstakingly. It took me several hours because I have to be very sure. I'll tell you exactly how some other time. We'll walk out of here with Vanessa telling me about the various landscaping jobs that I can do in the afternoons. I take it you can think of some, Vanessa?" "I can think of many, Ron. I can keep you busy for months." Prof said, "Before we go, it strikes me that one way to get the CIA off our back might be a lawsuit. Our lawyer is livid about what's happened to Mark, but our problem is lack of evidence. From some of your offhanded comments about reading their files on you, I've a feeling you can get access to the proof we need?" "I was reading my DHS file just last Friday. I should easily be able to get it, unless they've changed their security, and there should be no reason for that. If you lend me a video camera, I'll be able to film every page of the file through his office window, and/or I can try emailing it. I don't know whether their system will let a file be emailed, but it might be worth a try..." "What if you get caught?" worried Mom. "Almost impossible, Felicity. I'm an extremely good spy. I already know the Portland DHS's big boss's username and password and I've used them to read my file. I'm not worried about getting caught. What I don't know about is the CIA's file. The DHS file never mentions the CIA, so to sue them we'll need their file on me, and I'm not sure where to go to get that. I'll need to do some snooping. Relax Felicity, you'd be amazed if you knew how good at snooping I am now. One look at my current disguise should tell you how cautious I am. And believe me when I say that I have NO wish to be recaptured by those assholes! I wouldn't agree to snoop if I was worried about it." Prof said, "Don't do any snooping until I've checked with our lawyer tomorrow that getting hold of the DHS or CIA files isn't going to get us in big trouble." "We should be able to say it was sent to us anonymously, shouldn't we? And don't discuss it over your phone Prof. Phone taps are far too likely. I don't even want to have a conversation near a phone, let alone talk over one." "Okay." After a final "Remember to call me Ron," we left the workshop. I had to remind myself not to call Mom and Dad those names. I'd had no trouble saying "Steven" and "Felicity" over dinner, but now they knew I was Mark, it was suddenly much harder to avoid "Mom" and "Dad". It's weird how the brain works sometimes - for guys, I mean. For females, it's ALWAYS weird how their brains work. When the door was closed, I formed a large sight blob in the room, radiating a tiny amount of light so I could see. Then I floated one of Dad's tools down to the floor and leaned it against the back of the door. I adjusted its position so it was exactly lined up with some easily memorized marks on the floor and door. If anyone opened the door, the tool would fall. They'd be unable to know its original position, and be unable to put it back there even if they did, not unless they closed the door then stayed in the workshop. We walked back upstairs with Vanessa describing the MANY jobs she needed me to do. Once we'd gotten inside, I gave Julia a couple of taps on the head to alert her, then I said, "I could start tomorrow except'n I don' have transport. I'll need to find a cheap bike first." The original Ron Fisher had a car (everyone in LA has a car), but I'd told the LA lawyer to give it to my family to avoid them ever being able to accuse me of theft. Julia suggested, "You can borrow Mark's, Ron." I asked, "Who's Mark?" I hadn't come up in the dinnertime conversation, as the parents had been too busy trying to find out about me. "My boyfriend. He's away at the moment, so you can borrow his bike to get here. Take it with you when you go tonight, Ron." "Thanks." Vanessa spent the next few minutes giving me specific instructions on what she wanted done. She was quite serious about it; I'd created a monster by volunteering to do gardening work. On the bright side, I was going to be paid to work on my own garden. The pay rate, hours of work and a few other minor matters were agreed, like one of the adults or The Boys - who they were was explained - meeting me at the front gate each afternoon to let me into the property and the workshop to get the tools I'd need, "For the first week or so, until you've proved yourself." The gate and workshop were both accessible by a combination, but the CIA would think it suspicious if I was given full access too quickly. I deliberately chatted for a while, asking questions that emphasized that I wasn't Mark, such as my asking Donna what her hobbies were, how good she was at them, etc. We all participated in that, keeping it up for about half an hour. Then it was time for me to leave. I collected the bike I was borrowing from myself, thanked everyone, told them I'd see them tomorrow afternoon, then rode back to my tent. That evening I flew to Salem (less than thirty miles, as the crow or SuperRon flies), found the hospital, then hovered over it until I found Katie and Carson. Last time I'd seen Katie, she'd looked fine and had been more than a little plump. Neither applied now; she was visibly sick and gaunt. Carson didn't look too bad, but Katie did. I couldn't help fantasizing over my curing them, but I didn't think I could. My finger regeneration and other body changes had been done by my subconsciouses having so much control over my body's normal process; they'd ganged up on it, thirty two-to-one. That I could do that to myself was of no benefit to Ava's parents, but I did have some faint ideas to give some hope to my fantasy: If I got close enough, then I'd be able to sense a great deal of what was going on inside their bodies with proximity, which might help in some way. I might be able to do a little bit of surgery, either by creating NP-points within their bodies - which would require an airspace, because I couldn't create them inside liquid, let alone inside flesh - or possibly by killing the bad cells with small, hot heat blobs; although when they're small the amount of heat they can radiate reduces. If not using heat, then perhaps some other frequency of radiation, because I could presumably tune my blobs to other electromagnetic frequencies. My kiatsu was presumably very powerful, as the amount of ki I had now was AWESOME, well over 1,000 times more than a normal person. I hadn't tested my kiatsu since three merges ago, when it boosted healing by 15%. Doubling 15% three times was 120%, but I'd also trained my conscious ki to be 60% greater, so maybe my kiatsu was 192% more effective now. Or over 1,500% if kiatsu increased by a factor of four each merge, as the amount of ki did. Healing even three times faster than normal might help Katie and Carson, let alone sixteen times faster. None of these ideas implied an instant cure. If they helped at all, the help would be slow. I had to be within twenty four feet of my patients to use those abilities and I couldn't be seen visiting Ava's parents when I wasn't supposed to know who she was yet, and I certainly couldn't be seen hovering outside their window to get close enough, so I flew back to my tent. I'd revisit them again as soon as I could after I was introduced to Ava. ------- Chapter 301: Garden Laborer by Day; Snooper by Night Tuesday, May 2 to Wednesday, May 3, 2006 Prof made an appointment to visit his lawyer in the afternoon. Prof got them to take a stroll out of the office while he asked, "The Concerned Citizen who sent you the text messages about Mark has contacted us. He might be able to send us a copy of the DHS file on Mark, and perhaps even the CIA file. According to him, the CIA has Mark now, but that's all he knows at the moment. What's our legal position if someone sends us files like that?" The lawyer was worried not only about the legal ramification of receiving classified documents, but the illegal ramifications as well. Wright and Moran had both been killed; seemingly in unrelated ways, but the coincidence wasn't believable. He advised, "It would be much better if the files are sent to several different media organizations. They're interested in the case enough already that they should react favorably. Once the files are in the public domain they won't be able to be suppressed, you can use them, and it should generate a much faster response than going through the courts. My main concerns would be, first, in making sure your hands are clean. You can't be seen to have encouraged the 'Concerned Citizen' in any way, especially not financially. Second, what might happen to Mark when the files become public?" "It's three and a half months since he was taken, so we have to assume he's not going to be released unless we rattle some cages." The lawyer had to agree with that. Prof had thought that the DHS's computer system may not let emails be sent to news organizations, so back at OSU he described enough of the situation to Andrew to be able to ask about how to do what they wanted while keeping their hands looking clean. Andrew answered, "No problem. I can create an innocuous email address and have it auto-forward whatever it receives to a list of other addresses. Give me the addresses you want to receive the information and I'll set it up on a computer that hundreds of students have got access to. They'll know it came from OSU, but that shouldn't be too bad." Prof didn't have the list of final destination email addresses yet, so he told Andrew he'd get back to him. ^ I reported to work outside the gates of my own home, and was met by Vanessa, who let me in and gave me even more instructions about what needed doing. (Corvallis being so small, it's easy for Vanessa to pop back and forth from work like this, provided she wasn't giving a lecture.) In among the conversation, she managed to drop enough double-meaning hints that everything had been good at their end after I'd left last evening, and how excited everyone was at having me around (then after a little pause) "to work on the garden." When Julia, Carol and Donna arrived from school, they wanted hang around me, but I had to shoo them away after a little while. Late in the afternoon, Julia came out to invite me to dinner. I was reluctant to do that too often so soon, but Julia insisted, saying, "My very good friend Ava West is coming and I want you to meet her. She's very sad at the moment and needs cheering up. She doesn't have a boyfriend, so maybe you'll be interested. Can I whisper something to you about her?" "Okay." I had to bend over a lot less than used to be necessary for that. Being five inches shorter was VERY noticeable when I was around my two families as they all seemed so much taller than I remembered. Julia cupped her hands over my ear, to whisper, "At school, I ordered Ava to follow your orders. She's very puzzled because we haven't done anything like that since you... , since Mark disappeared." I stood up, saying, "I'm looking for a girlfriend, but I need to meet her first." Because I was doing gardening work, I had excuses to go back and forth to Dad's workshop, especially when people needed to talk with me (we invented a few simple signals to indicate that). For example, when he came home Prof told me what his lawyer and Andrew had said, and told me that my snooping job was on once Andrew was ready. I modified the plan a little, getting Prof to obtain detailed instructions from Andrew for how to do what he'd said, but I'd do in another city instead because that'd be far better than setting it up at OSU. My paranoia was very justified because they'd already got me once, and would doubtless be out to get me again if they knew I still lived. When Ava arrived, she was VERY curious about me. No matter how hard she looked, or what questions she asked, Julia's order made no sense. Even less than no sense because I had a criminal record, had only just arrived in town, lived in a tiny tent, didn't have a car, and I was even wearing some of Dad's old clothes (after my afternoon's work and a shower) which looked ridiculous on me. Presumably Julia had told Ava not to ask about it, because that was the only explanation for Ava's being silent about the issue when she was obviously so curious. Toward the end of the dinner, I asked Ava for her address. She looked at Julia, who nodded encouragement, so Ava told me the street, but not the number. "What number, Ava?" Ava looked at Julia again, who nodded again, so Ava reluctantly divulged it. She was living alone, the house was often empty when Ava was visiting her parents in Salem or was at my home, and I'd already admitted to having a criminal record, so Ava's reluctance was very understandable. I said nothing else, and the conversation moved on to other topics, often Katie's and Carson's illnesses and how Ava was managing. I announced my imminent departure (not using those words) fairly early, mainly because I didn't want to look too entrenched yet if the CIA was watching. "I'll change into my dirty clothes to ride home in." "But it's raining," protested Carol. "Someone can give you a ride." "No need. My tent don' have a washin' machine, so's ridin' in the rain's a good way to wash." "But it's COLD outside." "I'm don' mind, Carol. Thanks." Mom said, "You should leave some clothes to work in here. We could wash them for you." "I don' have dat many clothes, Felicity." I looked at Julia when I added, "Maybe on Saturday I'll go to Kmart ta see what dey have on special. Maybe I could get three or four sets of someting." Poor Julia was in PAIN, and there was nothing she could say. The CIA was lucky Julia didn't have my powers, because she would've delighted in exacting revenge for the agony they were causing her. I was stuck in my tent until the rain stopped, which wasn't until after 10pm; too late for visiting Ava. I hadn't been given the list of media email addresses yet, so hadn't set up the auto-forwarding system, but some pre-snoop snooping on the CIA might be useful. I changed into my black flying clothes, wore my ski mask as a hat, and went for a walk to find a good takeoff place. I varied them randomly among the many good possibilities in the area in case someone got suspicious about me, and I always used a very big sight blob to search around first. Someone might be hiding behind a fence or bush, invisible from the direction I was coming, but a sight blob zipping around overhead that could see as if it was daylight would find them. While I remember to mention it, I was still refusing to fly in fog, clouds and rain. Sooner or later I was going to have to fly into them, especially if it was raining at the place I wanted to land. So far that hadn't happened, but it was only a matter of time. I figure the more experience I have with flying in general, the more comfortable I'll be when I have to do it in tricky weather. I found a good spot, took off, and cruised over Ava's place just in case she was up. She was, still dressed and crying, so it was definitely time to cheer her up. I landed in a sheltered backyard a few houses away, rolled up my ski mask to make it into a non-threatening hat, then strolled to her house. I knocked. When she called, "Who is it?" I nearly said, "It's Mark." That's a hard habit to break. I answered, "It's Ron Fisher, Ava." "What do you want?" "To cheer you up. Open the door, Ava. Julia gave you all the reassurance you should need at school today." "I don't know you." "You're about to start getting to know me though. Please don't make me use the 'O' word, sweetie." Ava opened the door cautiously. It took some doing, but I finally managed to convince her to come for a walk with me, leaving her cellphone behind, and taking just her house key off its ring as I was trying to avoid flying metal around the skies as much as I could. We walked along the road, three feet apart, me with my hands in my pockets to be as non-threatening as possible. I was shorter than Ava, but I outweighed her and it was late at night, so she wasn't relaxed. Partly to reassure Ava, partly to occupy the time until we reached a suitable takeoff area, I talked quietly while we walked, "I know how much Julia cares for you, and that she certainly wouldn't have talked about me at school the way she did unless she knew I wouldn't abuse your trust. I know you've described yourself in the past as being too gullible, but that description doesn't apply to Julia. If she's told you to trust me, then she has good reason for it." One of the good things about Corvallis, in addition to the large proportion of bi-friendly girls - which MIGHT one day matter to me again - is that it has lots of trees and bushes, so it didn't take long for us to reach a suitable place. I stepped onto a property that had several tall trees with room between them for us to take off in. Ava hesitated to follow me, so I said quietly, "Remember the very first conversation you had with Julia, when she wanted your permission to read your letter and look at your photos. She got annoyed by how hesitant and untrusting you were. This is another situation like that." As I'd intended, Ava was surprised and impressed that I knew about that. "You didn't know Julia then, but she turned out to be one of the most important people in your life. You don't know me, but I'm going to turn out to be one of the most important people in your life too. Julia knows that and I'm about to prove it to you. I promise that you'll be very, very happy in less than five minutes." With a little more encouragement, I got Ava to follow me among the trees. The last couple of steps I took were onto a very large base-plate for my Magic Flying Sled. I turned to face Ava with my sled's body behind me, so if it took off and tilted as it normally does, I'd be lying on my back. Ava's last step had put her onto the NP-plates too, although she hadn't noticed that as they can be one-sixteenth of an inch thick, so they just felt like hard ground. I said, "Before I do anything else, I have to close my eyes for two or three seconds. Just wait where you are please." I shut my eyes and used a sight blob to scan around the area. There weren't any CIA agents wearing night-vision goggles hiding behind bushes, so we were fine. -- "Something very strange is about to happen and I don't want you to scream in surprise. I can think of a very good way of stopping that happening. Do you trust Julia enough to obey me when I order you to give me a long kiss?" "I trust Julia, but I don't know you enough to want to kiss you." I probably hadn't been smart to make it about kissing, so I said, "Fair enough. I'll leave out the kissing, and just tell you that something very unusual is about to happen, and I order you not to yell out in surprise. Can you obey that order?" "What's going to happen?" I cheated. Ava was shifting her weight from one foot to the other, so I took advantage of it to blast off with a 2 g acceleration, almost immediately followed by tilting the sled so it was going up at about 75 degrees. The sudden extra weight and changing 'floor' angle caught Ava by surprise. I relaxed the upward thrust to barely any at all, let her fall into my arms, then held her tight while I resumed the 2 g upward acceleration. It took Ava a couple of seconds to collect her wits enough to react to her lying on a strange guy who was holding her. She understood that, and wasn't comfortable with it, so that got reacted to ahead of the other weird feelings. Ava started pushing herself off me. There was no danger of her stepping back enough to fall off, as the sled was already fully walled - making it more of a flying silo than a flying sled - but I didn't want her to feel constrained and panic. We were high enough now that I didn't have to worry about anyone hearing us, so I said, "I'm Mark Anderson, Ava. How are you, my love." "Huh?" "Your Nipple Power is now a lot more powerful than it used to be. Look down." It took Ava another second to recover from the shock of a Black guy calling himself my name, and then the reference to the secret "Nipple Power", before she could process "look down". Then she got another big surprise. I'd eased back on the acceleration as we rose, but we were already three hundred feet up and still rising. Again before Ava could react, I said, "This is your Nipple Power flying us." I used a couple of fingers to rub one her breasts through her coat. Not much sensation would've gotten through, but enough to give her the idea. "I REALLY am Mark, sweetie. Some bad men captured me and I had to change my looks. Julia knows I'm Mark, that's why she ordered you to obey me." "But you're BLACK!" And as an afterthought, "And we're FLYING!" "Yeah, cool huh? Flying I mean; being Black is a pain. I'd much rather have my real body back, but the damned CIA are stopping me doing that." "Are you really Mark? You're not pulling my leg?" "How many people do you know have Nipple Power, that Julia would trust to give you orders, and that can do super-strange stuff? To get away from the bad men who kidnapped me, I had to learn how to change what I looked like and to fly. That's why it took me three months to get home. It's not easy to learn to fly! You should try it sometime." I let her appreciate my sense of humor for a second - she had a lot of sadness in her life and it was good to do what I could to relieve it - then I said, "How many people know this?" as I started reciting the letter she'd sent me asking to be my girlfriend. Then I told her about my marathon run, and a couple of other things only Mark would know. "Now you can ask me whatever questions you want." Instead she threw her arms around me and started crying. #17: #29: #1: #10: I'd expected... [[I'll digress for a moment. More than ever before in my writing, "I'd expected" is a misleading statement. There are thirty two of us, so we probably expect all sorts of things most of the time. When I write something like that, I'm usually referring to the average or majority of all of our opinions. Or maybe only some of us will be thinking what I'm writing but it serves the autobiography better to use their minority idea. Sometimes I've got a single mind in mind (so to speak), and if so usually - but not always - it's the mind that this autobiography started with (who is now called #6 after the merge in the Casino Kidnappers' basement). This digression doesn't really matter much; I just thought I'd mention it. (When I wrote, "I just thought I'd mention it", that was about just the one of me who is currently writing this autobiography. Explaining "who" that author is would confuse you much more than the previous explanation, so you'll have to wait a while to read about that happening.)]] ... I'd expected Ava to repeat what everyone else I'd come back to had done: ask about my 'adventure', so I felt a total heel when Ava sobbed, "Mom and Dad are dying!" My heart went out to her so much that our NP control lurched a little, which gave me a brief scare. It was so brief Ava didn't notice, but I sure did. Fortunately, although it takes conscious thought to create and use NP, maintaining NP effects where they are is a virtually thoughtless activity now. My subconsciouses take care of it, like they keep the heart beating, and other regular activities. It also takes them thirty two seconds to self-cancel if I get distracted, so that's a very nice safety feature for my Flying Sleds. "I'm SO SORRY I haven't been here for you, Ava. I feel terrible about that. I went to Salem last night to see you parents." "Mom's very sick." "Yeah, I saw. Julia told me your mom's trying hard to see your graduation." "She's trying, but she's already having a lot of pain. I hope she..." Ava burst into tears again. I spent a long time cuddling and comforting Ava at 1,500 feet, being blown away from town. It took several minutes before Ava calmed down enough to notice that she was standing in midair. She suddenly stiffened, grabbed hold of me tighter, saying, "Oh!" "It's all right, sweetie. You're perfectly safe up here with me. Don't try coming up here by yourself though." "{Giggle}. You're amazing. I've never heard of anyone ... HEY! Can you cure Mom and Dad?" It'd be too cruel to offer any hope when I was pretty sure I couldn't. If I told her there was a 10% chance I could, Ava would feel even more horrible when I couldn't. Better to say I couldn't now, and if I somehow could, that'd make her happy later. "Sorry Ava. I wish I could, but I can't do everything." "Could you learn how, like you learned to fly?" "Sorry again, sweetie." I was going to explain the flying was just NP-pushing harder, and pushing couldn't cure her parents, but Ava's hope had crashed as soon as she heard the "sorry". There was no need to provide an explanation. I just said, "I wish I could help them Ava; I REALLY do." "Can you sleep with me tonight please, Mark? I don't want to be alone." #2: #23: #20: #8: #23: #9: I answered, "I'd love to. I've missed you very much. I need to..." "THANK YOU! It's wonderful that you're back now, even if you look so different." "Which is my next point. Remember at dinner no one called me Mark? They called me Ron and pretended not to know me well." "Oh yeah. Were they tricking me?" "NO WAY! I don't think anyone would play tricks on you these days. I know you're preoccupied, but you might've noticed that I've been missing for the last three months?" I smiled to show her I was joking, then carried on, "I was kidnapped AGAIN! I've really got to stop letting people doing that to me. The Department of Homeland Security and the CIA have had me locked up and were doing medical experiments on me. They even drilled a hole in my skull and took some of my brain out." "Oh no!" "Oh yes, the assholes. Fortunately, the part of my brain that likes being with lovely girls was left intact," I gave Ava a squeeze. "If the CIA find out that I'm still alive, they'll be UNBELIEVABLY angry. To escape from their secret lab, I had to kill lots of very bad people..." "Oh no!" "Yeah, I'm afraid so. I was locked in a secret, underground laboratory where hundreds of VERY BAD people made diseases that could kill millions of people. I had to kill some of them to get out, and then I set a fire to burn down the lab they were making their horrible diseases in. Mom and Dad, Julia, Carol, and the Williamses know what I did, and they're okay with it because the people I killed were very evil people doing very evil things. But if the CIA learns that I wasn't burned up in the fire, then they'll make me the most hunted man in America. I destroyed a very expensive, top-secret laboratory, and I killed lots of their evil scientists, so the CIA would be screaming in anger. That's why I had to change how I look. I AM Ron Fisher now, just like I described at dinner. As far as everyone in Corvallis is concerned, Mark Anderson is still missing. We think our house might be bugged by the CIA, so everyone is being very careful to call me Ron. When we land, you have to do the same thing. You've done wonderfully well at keeping all my secrets so far, but now you've got a FAR bigger secret to keep. Can you remember that I'm Ron Fisher and never call me Mark?" "Oh boy! I thought I had troubles, but you've got super-problems. Hey! You're a super-man now! You can fly, just like Superman. That's so cool." "It certainly is. That's how I got away from the evil men. I don't want to give you a hard time, Ava, but I REALLY need you to take me seriously. The DHS and CIA are criminals and they do illegal things, including kidnapping and killing innocent people. All of my and Julia's family would be in serious danger if anyone learns that I'm Mark. You have to promise to keep who I am secret." "I promise." "Say 'I promise RON!' Try to get into the habit of calling me Ron as soon as you can." "Okay. I promise RON. You're NEVER going to be Mark again?" "I can't, sweetie. It's even worse than that, because I can't be a genius again, can't play soccer, can't do any of the things that Mark used to do that made him stand out. If I do, the CIA will suspect I'm the same person. Then all they'd need to do is get one of my hairs or a blood sample, and they'd discover that I'm Mark. Then they'd do more experiments on me to discover how I can look like a Black guy." "That sucks! You're not going to stay a mechanic and gardener all your life are you? That'd be such a waste! You ARE still smart, aren't you? You're Ron on the outside and the same Mark underneath, right?" "Exactly right. I really am Mark, just with my skin color changed and a few other things." "But you're much shorter too! How could you do that?" "My body is very adaptable. It takes several weeks or months, but it can slowly change, including getting shorter. Also it can grow new fingers." I held up my left hand, with the middle finger extended. "That's amazing! {Giggle}, but not very polite. Hey! If you're not Mark anymore, that means you can be Carol's boyfriend properly now." "Yep. That's the ONLY part of this whole mess that's good. I could even marry her if I wanted, but I wouldn't do that to Julia. The marriage that Carol, Julia and I had - that you came to - that still applies. Just because I've got a good suntan doesn't mean that marriage has become invalid." "Much more than a suntan. What about your money, car, house and all those things?" "I'm legally and publicly Ron Fisher, so none of those have got anything to do with me. Eventually Mark Anderson will be declared legally dead and then his Last Will and Testament will go into effect. Mom, Dad, Carol and Julia will get his money, with a little for you and Donna." "That's terrible! You've got NOTHING!" "It's not totally bad. It means I can go back to shopping for my clothes at Kmart..." "Oh you POOR THING! That's TERRIBLE. You used to have such good clothes too. They're going to go to waste! What a pity you can't wear them." "I couldn't wear them anyway. I've gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid looking like Mark, so I wouldn't wear his clothes even if I was the same height." "I was thinking of color, but height and shape too, yeah. Sorry, but you're nowhere near as sexy as Mark was." "No need to apologize. I chose to look the way I do. Staying alive is more important than looking good. We should go down soon so you can get some sleep, but if you've got any more questions, now is the time to ask them. Once we've landed, I don't want you to ask me ANYTHING about Mark or my abilities. Don't suddenly ask me how fast I can fly, or anything like that. The CIA probably isn't bugging your house, but it's very important that you get into the habit of treating me as Ron." "How fast can you fly?" "About five hundred miles per hour." "Wow. You could go to Hawaii for the weekend." "I'd be worried about trying to find a small island in a big ocean, but I can do Southern California, Miami, or other easy-to-find places. I've been thinking about taking you, Carol and Julia somewhere nice for a weekend." "I don't want to leave Mom and Dad." "Of course. We're going to be friends for many years, so there'll be plenty of chances for a trip whenever you want to." There was a practical problem too. Carrying four of us would reduce my top speed. Not because of the weight; that'd barely require one more mind to hold us up. The extra weight would also reduce our acceleration, but it only takes seconds to get up to top speed anyway. The major effect of carrying more people was from needing a bigger sled. That'd increase wind resistance significantly, and that would limit my top speed the most. I repeated, "Do you have any more questions?" "You REALLY can't help Mom and Dad?" "If I could help them, I would. I would LOVE to be able to save them for you if I could, especially because I feel so guilty about not being here for you the last few months." "That wasn't your fault, Mark. It was..." "Call me Ron, Ava." "Oh yeah. Sorry. I'm surprised how hard that is to remember. You look so different, but talking to you again is just like it used to be. Except we're way up in the air." "Yeah, it's tricky to remember. Try to say Ron in every sentence. Like you normally say someone's name sometimes, but say it far more often." "Okay Ron. Like that, Ron?" "Perfect. I've got a request for you. When you next go to visit your parents, can I come with you please? I'll be going as Ron, and I don't think I should tell them who I really am. I just want to see them while I can." "Sure. I'll be going tomorrow after school. Do you want me to pick you up?" "Remember to say 'Ron'." "Oh yeah. Do you want me to pick you up, RON?" "Yes please. I'll be working in Vanessa's garden, so pick me up from her place, please." "It sucks that it's not your place anymore, Ron." "It sucks big time. The CIA has a lot to answer for. The CIA, the DHS, and especially their bosses for giving them power to kidnap kids without having to take responsibility for it." ^ [[To try to be fair to the DHS and CIA (not something I'll be doing often), I had bad luck getting Moran as the guy in charge of the initial investigation into the financial activities of my two families. It was his paranoid mind-control fantasy that started the ball rolling so far downhill. When Moran wanted to pass me on, if he'd chosen a random DHS boss, I probably would've been okay, but Moran deliberately chose Wright, and pushed Wright's buttons to put him in a frame of mind that considered me a threat. Then Wright deliberately chose the worst person he knew: Phillips. That chain doesn't prove that everyone in the DHS and CIA are evil, criminal, child abductors. On the other hand, there were many S&T and CIA people who knew I was innocent of any terrorist intent, and that I was being held and experimented on against my will, and none of them did anything to help me, so I'm going to stick to my initial belief that the DHS and CIA are organizations that commit evil acts, even if not everyone in them is evil. There have been innumerable psychological experiments done that prove that people are extremely easy to corrupt by authority figures, pressure from their peers, of even just by expectations. See the "Milgram Experiment" and the "Stanford Prison Experiment". Julia would recommend googling them.]] ^ Just before we descended, I told Ava, "No one else knows I can fly. I'm waiting to surprise Julia and Carol, so please don't mention it to them." "Oh boy. They're in for an AMAZING surprise. I won't tell them, Ron. Umm, can I kiss you please?" "Best idea I've heard all day." A minute later, Ava declared, "You ARE Mark!" #11: #7: Ava and I landed soon after that. I walked her back to her house and we went to bed. Ava did make the mistake of saying, "You're bigger," but I NP'd her lips together before she could make more references to my previous body shape. I said, "You're pretty," and she realized she should say no more. It was true that I was slightly bigger. I thought it was because this body was copied from a 19-year old guy's, so was a little more mature. Ava and I didn't have sex. It didn't seem appropriate, no doubt because of that maturity thing that people keep warning me happens when you get older. We did a lot of cuddling though, and a few more tears. It was good for Ava, which made me happy. When she woke in the morning, Ava decided it was definitely time for sex, which made me very happy (maturity is overrated). I enjoyed the act itself as always with Ava, but I was pleased mostly because it was great to see Ava feeling good enough to want sex. I did have to be stay constantly ready to stop her saying something Mark-related. "Your being Black is strange" caught me once, but other than that, it was FANTASTIC. Ava and I both made up for lost time. We didn't have as long as we wanted, but by the time we finished Ava had no doubts that I was Mark. [[In case you're wondering, my body still had endless endurance, as that's the result of my energy needs being supplied by the Universe. My new body was just as good, if not better, at pushing girls' hot buttons especially because of my greatly improved proximity sense. My body was otherwise capable of just as much as my old body had been. I had less muscular strength now, but that was often compensated for by my having even better subconscious control of my body, although merge-by-merge improvements in that area had reached diminishing returns. The last merge probably increased that control by only 5 or 10%, not by double.]] A little later, on the way to my mechanics job, I went to my tent to get changed. I told the RV park's owners, "I met a nice girl last night and stayed with her overnight, so don't worry if my tent is empty some nights." "You're a fast worker," they said somewhat disapprovingly, as the owners were fairly old years and attitude. Their disapproval didn't matter much, but it was still worth fixing it if I could, "It wasn't like that. I said she was a 'NICE' girl. She's an only child and both her parents are very sick in the hospital, so she's very sad, alone, and wanted company. She's a very good friend of the family where I have my gardening job, so I wouldn't take advantage of her. I want to make a good name for myself in this town, not do the sort of things that guys do in LA." At the morning job, I told my fellow mechanics, "Corvallis is a GREAT town. Already I met three girls I like. One has a boyfriend, but two are very sweet. They're beautiful and easy to talk with. In LA they'd be stuck-up bitches, but here they're nice." I just wanted any possible future investigators to think that I was eager to find a girlfriend as soon as I could, as that'd make Carol becoming my girlfriend seem less suspicious. Wednesday after school let out, Julia, Carol and Donna got home first, greeting me with a "Hi Ron," from all of them. Then Julia added, "Ava was in a very good mood today. The best I've seen her in for a long time. She said you're going with her to see her parents soon. Carol and I want to come too. Is that okay?" "Sure. Is she coming to get us soon?" "As soon as she's changed." "I'll get cleaned up." Ava arrived a few minutes later. She was uncertain how to greet me, but I solved that by giving her a hug, a kiss on the cheek, and a, "Good to see you again, Ava." I'd lightly stressed her name, but probably unnecessarily as Ava was quick to answer, "You too, Ron." In a quieter voice, "Ahh, I wasn't sure what to say about you staying last night?" "Not the sort of thing you should proudly tell the whole town, but I'm sure your best friends understand that you needed company." "Okay. Good. I had an idea that you could live in my house instead of your tent?" "It would certainly be nicer, thanks, but I don't think your parents would approve of a guy you've only just met moving in." Not to mention that it would make it harder for me to pretend to pursue Carol and to justify my moving into the mansion. Katie and Carson were in the same room, and puzzled by a stranger they'd never heard of before coming with the girls, but they accepted Carol saying, "Family friend," and I sat at the back and let them interact with the girls. My proximity sense isn't detailed enough for me to be able to sense the cancer cells individually. [[There are approximately 1E14 cells in a human body. Proximity currently had a resolution that gave me about 1E5 'pixels' of information about a person, so each 'pixel' represented 1E9 (a billion) cells. That's not really true because I wasn't sensing the physical cells but their ki (sort of), but it'll give you an idea of the scale.]] My proximity sense would be incredible for playing soccer, but it's not at the right scale for cellular work. Judging from what I've heard in the past, and what I could sense now, cancer cells aren't much different from normal cells. They certainly didn't pulsate with a malevolent reddish-purple color in my proximity sense, or anything else silly like that. They didn't stand out in any way at all. They showed up only by distorting what should've been in the area, by interrupting normal blood flow or squeezing an organ sideways, for examples. The distortions gave me ideas where some of Katie's and Carson's larger tumors were, although doubtless there were a lot of smaller cancer areas that I had no sense of. My sense obviously wasn't up to the job of being a miraculously effective tool for fighting cancer. I'd learned from my little experiment with cutting Carol's, Julia's and my hands three merges ago that my kiatsu had a usefully positive effect. Helping Prof recover from the damage caused to his body by the casino-related kidnapping had confirmed that. Since then, with Ava parents in mind, I'd kept my eyes open for information about healing and cancer. I'd learned that cancer cells are mostly normal cells that are overactive and out-of-control. In some respects, it's more accurate to think of them as being too healthy. When I'd returned to Corvallis and learned that Ava's parents were still alive but very sick, I done some kiatsu experiments on myself to determine whether it cured illnesses, or as I feared just energized cells. The latter seemed the most likely as ki appeared to be a form of energy. My experiments - such as applying kiatsu to selected fingernails - confirmed my theory that the kiatsu stimulated normal cell functions. Cancer IS the body going wrong, so energizing it would just make the cancer develop faster. Using kiatsu on the cancer seemed wrong, but maybe I could use it to stimulate just the immune system. I'd thought that was a good idea until I'd googled it and learned that the immune system truly deserves to be called a "system". It involves many discrete parts of the body (e.g., bone marrow, the spleen, the thymus), parts that are less discrete (e.g., lymph nodes, of which there are five to six hundred in a person), and the actual immune system's hunting cells themselves (which are literally throughout the entire body). I could project kiatsu through Katie's or Carson's spleen (say), but that would be increasing the effectiveness of just one part of the system without increasing the ability of any other part of it, so it wouldn't help much, if at all. It wasn't just a matter of making the immune system more active either, because the immune system's tumor-killing cells still had to recognize what they should be fighting. I'd hoped that getting close enough to Katie and Carson to sense them with my much improved proximity might show me something that would help me help them, but no such luck. The best I could do with kiatsu would be to direct it to help organs of theirs that weren't doing their job properly. Even if I knew which of their organs needed it the most, an hour or so of increased functionality wasn't going to do anything toward stopping the cancers killing them. My proximity sense being so unhelpful meant my other possible approach - doing surgery on them - wasn't looking doable either. I'd had images of my physically grabbing something like a tonsil-shaped tumor protruding into their lungs and squeezing it to death, but that was now obviously a silly idea, as their cancers were in many places within their bodies. I couldn't have NP-points inside matter, but blobs can pass through bodies easily, so the other possibility I had was surgery by radiation, such as heat. I could create a small, zero-emission heat blob, move it into a cancerous area, then turn up the heat. What I ideally wanted was to be able to create a zero-emission heat blob only a few hundred cells in size, position it in a tumor, then turn the heat to maximum then back to cool almost instantly. If it was hot enough the cells around it would be flash-fried, but it'd be hot for such a short period of time that it'd give off very little heat in total, so beyond a thousand or so cells, there'd be no noticeable effect or sensation. I'd wait a second for the heat to dissipate, then move the heat blob a millimeter and flash that neighborhood. Something like that might work. But a blob that small couldn't heat up the local cells fast enough to cook them, as the heat would spread into the surrounding body. If I made the blob big enough to pump out enough heat to quickly fry the local cells, it'd be so large that lots of healthy tissue would be killed too. I excused myself from the room and went hunting for a doctor. "Excuse me, doctor. I'm friends of Katie and Carson West, and I just had an idea that seems smart to me. Couldn't cancer tumors be killed by flash heating very small areas of them at a time?" "Not by heating them to kill the cells no, as that'd also kill too many healthy cells. Raising the temperature of cancerous areas to about 111 degrees can make chemotherapy more efficacious though. There are several trials underway for that which are showing promise." "Would any of those help the Wests?" "Sadly, no." "What about exposing their cancer tumors to other types of radiation? Like injecting a small piece of radioactive material into the middle of a tumor?" That being the example closest to what one of my blobs could do. "That method is used to treat some cancers, but only when they're very localized and in areas where affecting the non-cancerous cells wouldn't be too deleterious. Radiation treatments have to be very finely targeted to miss as much of the healthy tissue as possible, and the Wests' cancers are too wide spread to permit that." #25: #26: I went back to the Wests' room and exuded sympathy; that being the limit of my usefulness. I couldn't help wondering whether the doctor had understood what my heat question really meant. I could see the size of the Wests' largest tumors and I did an experiment several inches away from me where I created a heat blob about a quarter of the diameter of the largest tumor and I had it radiate its maximum amount of heat. By itself it was insufficient, but by superimposing multiple heat blobs they got damned hot, enough to quickly kill cells inside them, I thought. I made a mental note to google the issue at my next opportunity. [Which I did. Heating probes had already been tried in a few trials and found not to work. The articles didn't describe why the approach failed in any way that I could understand, but they did describe the technology and it would have had exactly the same effect as my heat blobs would have, so my last hope was eliminated.] ^ I was pretty sure that I could get a copy of my DHS file as soon as Prof told me what email addresses he wanted it sent to [he gave me the list, and Andrews instructions, the next afternoon]. I had three possible methods in mind: I was planning to take a video camera to Portland to film the file through the State Director's office window as I paged through it. I'd also take a memory stick with me, and after filming the file, I'd try get it into his office and transfer the file to it, if his computer had a USB socket. I'd try emailing the file. We just needed one of those to work, and I was pretty sure that at least the filming would. The DHS's information being stolen might make the CIA bury or delete their version of my file, so I wanted to hit both agencies one after the other. Ideally the CIA first, because their file would be the most important, and because I imagined the DHS would be much slower and less effective at responding to the CIA's file being stolen than the other way around. So far I knew nothing about accessing my CIA file, except that the CIA had much better computer security, therefore it was probably going to take some serious snooping before I was in a position to steal it. Right after dinner, I booked myself on the next available Magic Flying Sled flight heading to Fort Dodge. I'd timed enough of my trip segments now to know my cruising speed was 510 mph, and the distance to Fort Dodge was 1450 miles, so about 3 hours flight time, depending on how much zigzagging I had to do to avoid clouds, fog and rain. Rapid City, South Dakota wasn't too far off my flight path so I chose it to set up the email redirections that Andrew had given me the instruction for. I used a random computer to find out where the nearest "Water Board" offices were, their address, and how to get there. It was easy to find, and finding a functional computer was even easier. It only took a couple of minutes to enter all the email addresses Prof had given me. No doubt the DHS - and the CIA too hopefully - are going to be extremely pissed off about their documents leaking. I was happy that my diversion would muddy the waters. I proceeded on to Fort Dodge. Previously I'd always landed behind the back of the site, so I would be as far as possible away from the people when I crept closer, as they tended to congregate not far inside the road entrance. This time it was people and their computers that I wanted to see, so I landed on the road entrance's side, although across the road and several fields away. I did my usual very cautious approach, using a sight blob to scout all around the area ahead of me, dash to the next cover, scout again, dash again. To my surprise, there was no wide security perimeter and the bushes on the edges of the farmers' fields would've allowed me to creep right up to the opposite side of the roadway, not that I needed to get that close. It was two and a half months since my breakout, so I guess the immediate reaction had long since settled down. There was heaps of security on the other side of the road, including a new wall built alongside the road, so anyone entering had to pass through two gateways, which were offset from each other so there was no view through. Guards patrolled around the outside of the walls as well as manning the gates. Inside the area there were the same prefabricated buildings as I'd seen last time. They were two airlocks, decontamination rooms, storage rooms, pumps, a large generator (I didn't know why, as the place had power from the road), a cafeteria, bathroom, etc. It also had what I was most interested in: an office. It was an easy building to identify, as it was the one of only two buildings with the satellite dish on top, the other being a recreation room with satellite TV. There were just two guys working in the office, even though the room was laid out for half a dozen people. It had computers, telephones, a fax machine (outdated technology, I would have thought), filing cabinets, a couple of CCTV screens showing a sequence of images of the work going on in the pit and all the usual office paraphernalia. The pit work looked interesting, but I wanted to search the office first. I couldn't use any of the computers unless the two office workers both left the room, which I thought was unlikely. I read what their two screens were showing now, but it was boring stuff immediately related to the logistics of the pit work. Most of the paperwork around the office was headed "Project Eclipse", but there were several with "Central Intelligence Agency", unfortunately without a street address. I had my eyes open (except they were closed) for a non-Fort Dodge street address, hoping it'd be that of the project's head office, most likely in Washington DC I thought - my closed eyes were on alert for any "Washington". I was very much looking forward to snooping through their head office. I found what I needed when I located a safe. Filing cabinets are a pain because every time I've wanted to read what they've contained, the paperwork has always been jammed together, but that wasn't the case in the safe as there was plenty of empty air above the paperwork. Most of the documents were about top-secret biochem issues, and none of them were about me, but it was good to see a consistent Washington DC address on most of them, especially because it wasn't Langley. I REALLY didn't want to try to sneak around that place! I was nearly finished my search of the office when my proximity sense detected something noteworthy (I'd been ignoring the wildlife moving around me). I zipped the sight blob back to be above me and much larger. I saw that a couple of soldiers were leading a dog across the last field before the road. I was hidden at the far edge of that field, so the dog wasn't going to cross my path. Not that I could care less about that, because my EKP could totally swamp the dog's meager amount of ki. I played safe by using EKP to keep the dog walking forward, and the guards and it were soon out of my 24-foot range (EKP cut off then). I watched while they kept walking parallel to the road, then crossed it to take a wide loop around the outside of the wall. That had been a nice, safe way of my learning that there was at least one mobile patrol. I searched for others, finding none. I got back to finishing my search of the office, not finding anything else useful. There didn't seem to be anything else worth doing at the surface, so I lowered the sight blob into the pit. #21: There were two guys moving rubble using powered exoskeletons. Other guys were using cutters and drills to break the pieces up, but it was the exoskeletons that caught my attention. They were definitely impressive and cool. They weren't big ones (not like in the first Alien or third Matrix movies). They 'only' made the guys operating them look about twice as bulky as before, but they were very good at picking up and carrying pieces of concrete far larger than an unassisted human could manage. I'd thought they'd have to lift all the rubble out of the pit, decontaminating each piece as it emerged, and then truck it away somewhere, but they weren't doing that. Instead they were piling up all the rubble in one corner of the pit. Presumably when they had most of the floor clear, had recovered the bodies and done whatever else they wanted, they'd then move the rubble to the opposite corner and check to see what they'd missed under the first pile. Whether they'd remove the rubble, decontaminating it and the pit afterward, or just seal the whole mess up and forget about it, I couldn't tell. The latter was the most irresponsible, so that's what I guessed was most likely. All the workers were wearing the same type of hazmat suits I'd seen them wear last time: very thick, industrial strength versions. I hoped these guys were being paid a fortune, because there'd been terrifyingly nasty shit in the lab, and a single tear in their suit could expose them to dozens of types of very nasty death. Working among rubble, the chance of getting a tear was obviously something they worried about, because they were all moving VERY cautiously. The longer their job took, the happier I'd be, so it was time for some more sabotage. I waited until one of the exoskeletons was walking past an ordinary worker, then when its outside leg was moving forward, I pushed it way too far forward. It swiveled around toward the other worker, it's arm knocking him aside. The robot's leg kept swinging up and around, destabilizing the machine so it fell onto its side, its operator frantically trying to control it. Even on the ground, I kept the apparently faulty leg jerking, until the operator killed the machine's power. The ordinary workers checked their punched workmate, while making sure they stayed well clear of both exoskeletons. Work halted while everyone stood around talking (I could see that through their faceplates). I zoomed the sight blob up to the office, and one of them was talking into the radio, while the other was on the phone to someone else. I went back to watching in the pit to see if I needed to do anything else, but after another minute the workers started leaving, everyone staying clear of the other, still functioning, exoskeleton. One of the workers had to stop to help the operator get out of the dead machine, then they both rejoined the other workers. The functioning exoskeleton guy standing to one side while everyone else was moving around. The elevator descended all the way to the pit's floor (they must've extended the cable), all the workers except for the still active exoskeleton guy got on. When the elevator started up, the remaining guy picked up the dead exoskeleton and carried it to be ready for the elevator's return. A few minutes later they were all on the surface and going through the decontamination process, including the exoskeletons. Work was over for a while. I located the roving dog patrol. It wasn't near enough to concern me, so I backed out from under my bush then made my careful departure. ------- Chapter 302: Hollywood Makes Better Exoskeletons Thursday, May 4 to Friday, May 5, 2006 I'd been on the job as a mechanic's helper for a week now, and was getting pretty good at it. You wouldn't want me to repair your car unsupervised, but BB was increasingly often giving me a job, telling me what to do, and leaving me to it. It was a pity for the boss that I didn't intend to hang around for long; Vanessa's garden needed me more and being a gardener paid better. The fringe benefits were better too, as the company of grease covered mechanics couldn't really compete with that of my girls. Thursday afternoon the weather looked like it might hold off, so I asked Julia and Carol if they'd be free to take a walk with me if I returned to their home after I'd had dinner in my tent. "Aren't you staying for dinner?" "No. I don't want to do that too often. I'll make myself something simple in the camp ground's kitchen. If it's not raining I'll come back after dinner. If it is raining I won't turn up, okay?" "You've GOT to get a phone, Ron," insisted Julia. "You can't live a civilized life without one." "There's no hurry for that. I need some regular income first." I arrived back early that evening to take the Carol and Julia for the walk, telling them, "You won't need your phones and keys, so please leave them behind." "But what if someone calls?" asked Julia, with concern. "I'm sure they'll be able to call back, if they're civilized." Julia managed to put her phone down and walk away from it. We strolled down the road heading away from town, with me forcing our talk to be about inconsequential topics. There are plenty of large fields and trees down that way, so it wouldn't take long to reach a row of thick, tall trees. Before I led them off the road, I said, "Stand still a little while please." I shut my eyes and created a large sight blob, sending it up a hundred feet and zooming around the area to look for any possible surveillance. While it was doing that, Julia asked me, "What are you doing?" Having thirty spare minds, it's easy for me to talk at the same time. I just can't leave my eyes open because of the visual superimposition that causes. I answered, "I'm just checking something. I'll tell you more in a couple of minutes." I didn't want to spoil their surprise. "How are Ava's grades at school?" "She's getting by. The teachers are being as flexible as they can." It doesn't take long to scan an area from hundred feet up when you can see as if it was daylight and can move your eyeball as fast as you want. Because we'd been walking, any CIA guys spying on us would likely have to be mobile and they wouldn't expect me to be able to see at night. (I mention these issues not because there was anything special about this particular takeoff. This was my thinking and procedure every time; I'm just giving you an example of it.) There was no sign of any baddies, so I said, 'I'm going to show you something special. Follow me." I led the girls through a gap in the trees so we'd be out of sight of the road, just to be even safer. "What?" asked Julia, always eager to know everything. I suddenly remembered a line I hadn't used in far too long. It was irresistible, "You'll enjoy it much more if you don't know in advance." It wasn't Julia's favorite line (to hear), but she didn't have much choice. Once we were behind the trees, I got them to stand on either side of me, I bent down, put an arm around them just under their asses, saying, "Put your hands around my neck and jump up so your legs are around my waist, so I can carry you both." They liked the sound of that, so it was quickly accomplished. I formed a couple of NP-'fingertips' (not really a good term by now, but you know what a mean) to push up against the arm I had under each girl's ass. When we took off they'd get heavier and I wanted them to feel securely held. I created an NP-floor that was 4' x 4', stepped onto it, then added walls and a flat top. I wasn't worried about wind resistance for the takeoff, but I did want to shelter them from too much wind. "See the houses with their lights on through the trees over there?" They stopped looking at me to look at the houses I'd nodded at, telling me, "Yeah?" "Watch them." We took off with about 1.5 g's of upward acceleration. They suddenly weighed 2.5 times as much as normal, so they definitely felt it, and their legs slid down off my hips, but I had plenty of NP force under my arm so I held them securely. A second later we were twenty five feet in the air and accelerating rapidly upward. They could see the house lights dropping beneath us, as well as the lights of town coming into view. "YOU CAN FLY!" screamed Julia; her loud screaming making me happy I'd put us in a windproof/airtight box. "My NP is a LOT more powerful now. Easily strong enough to lift us." I kept us rising while Julia and Carol yelled several versions of, "You're INCREDIBLE!" and other praises. I leveled off at what I thought was 2,000 feet. I had used a sight blob to read my wonderful watch under Carol's ass, but discovered that it didn't work too well in an airtight box. I said, "You've felt what NP-fingertips feel like. I can now make them four times larger than before, so I've created a box for us to fly in. Reach out with your hands so you can feel the sides. They're about a foot away from you." They'd tightened their grips around my neck CONSIDERABLY once they realized they were going up, so I expected them to be hesitant to let go my neck. But they both must've had a lot of faith in me because they both relaxed their grips immediately and stretched out a hand to touch the sides. When they'd felt the walls, I said, "There's also a roof to keep the wind out, and a floor that I'm standing on. I'm going to keep hold of you, and I'm going to slowly crouch until your legs touch it." When they'd made contact, I added, "Put your weight on the floor, so you're standing next to me." They were much more cautious about that, their hands returning to grip my neck tightly before they begun to try to stand up. Slowly they did so. They found it hard to have faith in an invisible floor when they were 2,000 feet in the air, but they got it eventually; Carol being the first one to nervously take her hands from around my neck, to stand totally separated from me. "Wow!" Carol nervously exclaimed. "This is the weirdest thing you've ever done." "I've always wanted to be able to pickup pretty girls. Now I've picked you 2,000 feet up." "We're 2,000 feet up?" "Thereabouts. When I fly by myself my usual cruising speed is just over five hundred miles per hour. With three of us the speed will be slower, but I'm not sure how much. We've got a lot to talk about so we'll be up here for a while, so how about I time the trip to San Francisco and back while we talk. Is that okay with you?" Julia joked, "I don't know how we could refuse! We're not going to get out and walk home, haha." I explained how important wind resistance was to my flying speed, the Magic Flying Sled shape, and how I'd create a larger version for the three of us. "It'll have quite high sides and I'll run NP-straps across your waists and upper-thighs to restrain you, so you will be safe. You don't have to worry about falling out because I'll enclose the sled enough to stop that being possible. The straps are just to stop you bouncing around uncomfortably if we hit any turbulence, although sleds give a smoother flight than I've experienced in big planes." When I fly alone my NP-plates are positioned relative to me, so they stay with me if I bounce up or down, but passengers could bounce up and down off the sled's floor. I wasn't worried about them falling out because I'd have the sled mostly enclosed so we could talk easily, but I was worried about them having an uncomfortable ride. One good thing was that turbulence was much less of a problem for my Magic Flying Sled than it was for a plane. If a plane hits an updraft or downdraft, it can be bounced up or down to a scary degree because the large, flat wings offer a perfect surface for the drafts to push against, and planes also need airflow to stay up. My sled was tiny and had no wings, so gusts of wind (from any direction) and sudden air pressure changes had far less effect, but they still had enough for me to create 'straps' of NP running across our thighs and waists. Julia and Carol assured me VERY EMPHATICALLY that they'd lay VERY still. "Don't let the sled's invisibility and not being able to feel the roof worry you. You're not in danger of being tossed out. We'll probably spend hours flying around from now on, so getting comfortable with it would be good. You'll get tired of lying in the same position, so you'll need to move around, roll onto your back, or whatever. Especially if you need to go to the non-existent bathroom. When I need to go, I slow down to about 5 mph, stand up and piss downwind. It's going to be amusing to watch you do that. Anyone need to go now?" Julia half-joked, "I thought I was going to when we first started going up, but I'm okay now." "I'm okay too," echoed Carol. "Peeing over the side is so crude." "I could create an NP-cup for you to pee in, or an NP-bedpan, whichever you prefer. It'll still end up being tossed over the side when you've finished." "I hope no one's looking up." "They might see a very nice pussy if they do. Getting back to creating the sled, please walk so your stomach is against this wall." I leaned against a wall, got the two girls to lean against it to either side of me, then I tilted the box over so we were lying flat. I canceled the panels I didn't need, then created the larger sled. I got them to feel its shape so they knew what they were in. I could've created light blobs in a way to reasonably well represent the shape of the sled, but that'd make us visible so was a very bad idea. I pulled the map out from my pocket, laid it on the floor of the sled and covered it with another NP-plate. I took a compass bearing and the time, "Here we go." I oriented the sled in the right direction then started accelerating it. I put a nice heat blob over us too. "It's warm all of a sudden," commented Carol. "Here at Magic Flying Sled Airlines we take passenger comfort seriously, except for not providing bathrooms, meals, drinks, in-flight movies or reading lights." "No cellphones either," complained Julia. "No. Sorry about that, but I don't want to carry metal if I can avoid it in case it shows up on radar, and the cellphone company would have records of your phone moving from area to area very rapidly. If we did that often enough they might get suspicious, or if someone else got suspicious about us, that'd be a big giveaway that something weird was going on. By the way, I fly with my eyes shut most of the time because I can see much better that way. I hope that won't make you nervous." When I fly by myself, I only need to push with sixteen minds to get up to the cruising speed I prefer. On this flight, I kept adding minds to the 'engine' until the sooner of either my running out of minds, or the turbulence started bothering me. It was minds I ran out of first, stopping when I had twenty seven pushing; losing one mind on duty and four for the sled. I didn't need four minds to cancel our weight, but to construct all the panels the sled needed. It's 470 miles in a direct line from Corvallis to San Francisco (I'd bought a little tape measure ruler to use on my map's scale to give me straight line distances), and it took only a few minutes longer than 1.5 hours, so the speed worked out to be a little less than 300 mph. ^ [[The sled had 1.5 times as much frontal area as the one I used for myself, as my one-man sled was larger than it needed to be (I had more than enough force available, so there wasn't any reason not to make it comfortable, and it's not as if I had to make any effort at all to push with thousands of pounds of thrust). Drag was related to square of the frontal area, so with the same pushing force the three-person sled being 1.5 times larger meant it had 1/1.5^2 as much velocity, so 510 mph/1.5^2 = 227 mph. Drag was also related to the square of the velocity, so if I pushed with 27 minds rather than 16, then the velocity rose by the SquareRoot{27/16}, or 1.3, making 227 x 1.3 = 295 mph. When I was by myself, I could've increased my 510 mph cruising speed in two ways: Pushing with 29 minds. 510 mph x SquareRoot{29/16} = 686 mph. Making the sled smaller. If I reduced it to 2/3rds my usual sled size and pushed with 29 minds, then my top speed would be 686 mph x (3/2)^2 = 1,543 mph, which is almost exactly Mach two. Even ignoring the physical risk of going through the sound barrier, I hadn't wanted to create a record of sonic booms into and out of Corvallis, so my flying faster than Mach one wasn't going to happen. (There were no airbases anywhere near Corvallis to excuse sonic booms; thank goodness, because having the military flying all over the area would've made it MUCH riskier for me to do so.) Even more than 500 mph hadn't appealed to me because I was scared of turbulence and losing stability. I hadn't wanted a sudden gust of strong wind to make my sled spin out of control. One taste of having to recover from an unstable spin had definitely been one taste too many. By the way, when a mind 'pushed' the sled, there was no effort required, except for a tiny amount of concentration. Ordering an NP-fingertip to push is much the same as ordering a person to push something for me: I tell them what to do, and they do it. With NP I have to keep aware of it, and continually want it to keep pushing, but that had long since become a subconscious habit. It was astonishing how easy it was after so much practice and having such an unbelievable amount of force.]] ^ We admired the Golden Gate Bridge from a safe height and distance. I couldn't help thinking about doing a loop under and over it, but as cool as that would've been it wasn't worth the risk, so admired the view some more then turned and headed for home. We talked nonstop on both legs of the trip; especially me, catching them up with everything I'd been through, right through to my taking Ava for a flight already, my last visit to Fort Dodge, and some of my short-term plans (I didn't have any medium- or long-term plans). The one question that I had to duck was Julia's asking me, "How did you increase your powers so much?" I'd learned the best way of answering that by now: "Sorry, that's a secret from everyone, even from you two." It wasn't worth trying to convey that there'd been a personal cost, because I could never explain it well enough for them to understand, not without actually giving away the secret. I hadn't for a moment forgotten the cost though. In three out of the four dimensions that my minds had come from, my families would never see me again. That was better than four out of four, but it was still 100% wrong. That I'd survived in this dimension was random luck; not because this CIA and DHS were any less evil than those in the other dimensions. I couldn't do anything to those dimensions' agencies, but this dimension's had to be taught the error of their ways. [[If you feel my killing over two hundred people during my escape was excessive, think about my anger that three-quarters of my families would never see me again. Second, quite a few of the lab inhabitants had participated in various experiments on me, with never a sympathetic look. They were participating in the long-term kidnapping, torture and murder of a child, which would be a death-sentence crime if the Government ever took them to court, not that it ever would. The lab workers who didn't have anything to do with me were still working on developing illegal biochem weapons of truly appalling effectiveness. They can't claim any moral justification because they weren't doing so for defensive purposes: I'd seen how excited and happy the staff became over minor advances in lethality, and how much they disliked an advance in a defensive measure. They DISLIKED finding ways of stopping their deadly weapons! By reading a lot of their paperwork, I'd learned that the purpose of the much smaller defensive team was to uncover problems which were then fed back to the weapon developers to fix. It'd been obvious what the priority and purpose of the facility was. Nor was there any moral justification in their providing a deterrence for other nations, as the CIA's work was being kept secret. Everyone in the lab was a heinous criminal, because it IS against American law to work on biochem weapons. Because the Government was employing them to do so, someone other than the Government had to enforce the law. I'd had no compunction in enforcing death penalties on people who were building weapons to kill hundreds of millions of people in terrible agony.]] Another of Julia's questions got a regretful answer too, "Sorry, as much as I'd like to, having sex up here would probably make me lose the concentration I need to hold us up. In a few weeks, when it's more natural for you to spend time with Ron Fisher, we'll start doing some serious making up for lost time." [I did try flying sex much later with Julia. I had some of my minds tasked with concentrating on keep us floating safely, while my other minds and body had sex with Julia. It was good - of course! - but worrying, so I'd rather have sex in a bedroom. When we knew we weren't being surveilled by anyone, we later tried sex floating above the bed so I didn't have to worry about falling. It was a lot of fun because we could try out some very unusual, NP-assisted positions. Julia especially loved it because she gets excited by 'naked displays' of my power. After much experimentation - including with Carol and Ava because I'm a strong believer in being experimentally rigorous - we all generally preferred to have "Terrestrial Sex", but "Floating Sex" was still fun and did make some things possible that weren't otherwise, so we kept it in our repertoire.] The girls also told me what they'd been up to. Agonizing over my disappearance mostly. Both their lives revolved around me, especially Julia's, so my absence had left a big hole, although supporting Ava had become increasingly important recently. Otherwise there was gossip from school. There's always gossip from school, but my no longer attending it made its gossip irrelevant to my life. School seemed so small and divorced from all the crap that my reality contained that I thought it was silly to care about it. Apparently there'd been a HUGE social upheaval when the Target Game had been revealed, for example, but I cut my girls off when they started trying to excitedly tell me all about the consequences as I simply didn't care anymore. I did ask about Alexis, Pat, the two nice Norris sisters, and a few others, but my girls' answers all boiled down to, "They're missing you, but they're getting along fine." Diana and Claire were particularly upset, but that was mainly because of their tender ages. When we were a couple of thousand feet above home, I said in a perfectly normal-sounding voice, "I want to go back to Fort Dodge again tonight. Do you want me to land you in the field we started from, or shall I drop you off here?" Once they'd laughed at that horrible thought, they chose the less fatal of the two options. After carefully scouting the area, I landed with them. I could've gone down to 450 feet or so, then lowered them the rest of the way, thereby saving me the risk of another takeoff, but it was very unlikely risk so I descended all the way with them. I gave them a kiss goodbye, told them I'd keep an eye on them from above until they got inside. They wished me "Good luck" and "Be careful," then I took off again. I watched them walk home and inside - anyone who'd tried to hassle them would've gotten a HUGE surprise! - then I headed for Fort Dodge again. I made sure I located the dog patrol before I descended below eight hundred feet this time. They were on the other side of the road, but were going to be crossing to the side I'd be landing on soon, so I waited fifteen minutes. I wanted to land and be creeping toward the road when their backs were to me, to make sure they didn't get any glimpses of movement. As I got lower, I also checked wind direction to confirm my scent wouldn't blow toward the dog. A few minutes later, I was in the same hiding spot that I'd used last night. A sight blob search of the occupied office and other ground level buildings showed nothing new of interest, and no opportunity for me to access any interesting information, so I sent the blob down. It was work-as-normal in the pit again, with both exoskeletons in operation. Not for long though. They were trying to clear about two-thirds of the floor area, the rubble they were removing being piled up on the remaining third. They had to carry it up a walkway built up the side of the pile of rubble to drop it in the far corner. I waited until the other exoskeleton - deliberately not the one I'd unbalanced last time - had dropped its slab on the pile and was most of the way down the walkway when I made the same leg as I'd pushed on the other machine move too far forward. The exoskeleton was turned sideways, had no balance left at all on its remaining leg, and it fell down the ramp. Falling the extra distance caused by being on a downward slope is scary at the best of times, but it did give the operator time to reflexively break his fall with the lowermost robotic hand. The exoskeleton landed heavily (it probably weighed three or four hundred pounds, so it was always going to land heavily), then rolled the rest of the short way down the ramp. The guy was tightly attached inside the metal frame, so he was only badly shook up and VERY scared. I'm sure he realized that if his exoskeleton had malfunctioned at the top of the walkway, it'd have rolled off the walkway and down the rubble. Pieces of concrete and steel reinforcing rods were sticking up in all sorts of directions, so rolling down the pile would've punctured the hazmat suit several times and made a bloody mess out of the operator. I wished I could hear the radio traffic, because by the looks of their faces it would've been very entertaining. The workers were even more cautious about the exoskeletons now. They pulled the shaken guy out of his frame, checked his suit carefully, then they all headed for the cleared corner where the elevator would come down. The car came down, the shaken guy and several of the other workmen got onboard, and then nothing happened. Probably because I was holding the cage down with 5.5 tons of force. I've got thirty two seconds of "blink time" now, so I kept holding the car down while I took a leisurely look inside. The elevator was insisting that it was "Overloaded", something the workmen weren't happy about. It didn't have doors on it anymore, presumably removed because it didn't have a floor to mate up to, or however it is that elevator doors operate. It had a safety bar across the doorway though, which one of the guys lifted it so he could step out. That made no difference, so another one got out, and then another one. As the fourth guy was leaving, with one foot in the elevator and one out, I canceled my NP-points. The elevator jumped up, tipping the guy forward. His workmates caught him, but I imagined that I could hear the swearing from across the road. On the next load, the elevator was even lazier. On the third, EVEN more lazy, only taking four guys. While that was going up, I quickly checked the office. There were three guys in it now, all on phones: two yelling with the last guy more subdued; talking to the boss I guessed. The next elevator load would only lift three guys. The car was big, easily capable of holding twenty or thirty people. I couldn't read the capacity sign because the writing was too small and it was covered in dust, but it was certainly way more than three. To make matters worse, when the car did start going up, I made it stagger a couple of times before rising smoothly. The guys waiting looked up at the elevator nervously, and edged back from the 'elevator lobby' (a cleared area of floor). I had a few ideas about what to do. One was to keep reducing the elevator's lifting power until it wouldn't lift even one exoskeleton. They'd have to abandon them down here. I had the idea of finding some acid and carrying a few drops at a time in an NP-basin, to sprinkle it on one of the skeleton's hydraulic hoses. That would be invisible to any cameras. It depended on me finding a bottle containing something destructive somewhere in the rubble. It didn't have to be an intact bottle, so long as it had some liquid in the bottom on it. I started searching for it now. There was a huge amount of crap buried among the rubble: pieces of electronics, chairs, cabinets, etc. I found several small, stoppered vials that were intact, but I didn't think that the stuff they contained wouldn't eat through hydraulic hoses. Lungs, yes; rubber hoses, no. I couldn't find what I wanted, so I decided to go to Plan B. I checked my memory that there was a fuse box next to the winch. There was, so that was fine. When the next load of three workmen was in midair, I created several small heat blobs inside the fuse box, superimposed on the fuse, turning up their heat until the fuse did what the old style of fuse was designed to do: melt. They were using modern circuit breakers, but I figured overheating would still seem reasonable, especially if the circuit breaker was destroyed in the process so they wouldn't be able to tell that it hadn't been faulty. Without electricity the winch couldn't hold up the elevator car, so it started dropping. It only fell a couple of feet before the safeties arrested it (they're very much the same design as the inertia reel in car safety belts: purely mechanical forces activate the safeties, for exactly this circumstance). The elevator was now suspended in midair, and - I was sure - there was a great deal of yelling going on. Their first elevator had plummeted down the pit during one of my previous visits, and now their last elevator had plummeted a couple of feet before suddenly stopping in midair. Between faulty elevators, rogue exoskeletons, and the fact that some sort of disaster had caused this mess in the first place, I imagine the workers were not very happy about the CIA's safety record. A nice, long wait - for someone to fix the fusebox's fuse and the surrounding burned area - would make them feel even worse. I knew there were plenty of oxygen cylinders on the surface which could easily be lowered to the guys in the elevator car and on the floor of the pit so they'd all be fine, just very worried and pissed off. I thought that was enough trouble caused for one night, so checked on the location of the dog patrol, then backed out of my hole and left. On the way home I wondered what to do to them next, if anything. I didn't want to keep causing problems at roughly the same time every night, but I didn't want to spend all day in the area either. There'd be much more chance of my being spotted, and if that happened my method of escape was bound to raise a few eyebrows. It didn't look like I was going to be able to use the computers here, and reading over the boss's shoulder was unlikely to coincide with him carefully reviewing something of interest to me. Washington DC was probably the best place to go to next, to check out Eclipse's office there. It was a 2,400-mile straight-line trip from my home, so five or six hours depending on the weather. I could get there and back in a single night, but I doubted I'd discover anything useful the short time that would allow. The boss's computer wasn't going to be left turned on and logged in, and I doubted I'd find paper files about me in the offices of a boss of something as big as Eclipse had previously been. Another thing that worried me quite a lot was the CIA's computer security. I feared I wouldn't be able to keep reviewing my file the way I'd been able to do at the DHS so far. I might only get one chance at it, so I'd better come fully prepared. I dug up some of my cash on the way home to my tent, ready for tomorrow evening. As soon as it was dark enough on Friday evening, I flew to San Francisco. I paid cash for the smallest video camera I could find that had a good low-light capability, as well as three memory cards for it, one each for the DHS, the CIA, and one to practice with. I left the camera charging in the store while I did the rest of my shopping. I bought a couple of USB memory sticks, then several differently colored plastic bags and some rubber bands. The idea with these was to put the camera in a bag that was closest to the color of the building, so anyone looking up would be less likely to see it. With the DHS, I could do the filming at night as the boss's office was high enough that no one would see the camera. But the CIA's computer security probably required that I did the filming while that boss was in the building, or possibly even in the room (I wasn't sure how I'd manage that covertly, but it might be a possibility), so that meant my filming might only be doable during the day. A video camera hovering in midair outside the window of a CIA building during daylight needed all the camouflage it could get. That's assuming the boss's office wasn't twenty levels underground. I was just being prepared in case I got the chance. After my shopping was complete, I picked up my video camera, wandered into a dark looking area until I found a suitable takeoff spot - one day someone else is going to try to mug me - then flew around about three hundred feet above the height of some the local office buildings until I found someone still working on a computer. I'd already spent a couple of minutes flicking through the camera's manual, so I was immediately able to test it out. I could get an image of the computer screen good enough to read it, especially after I knocked the woman's coffee over so she had to mess around for a couple of minutes cleaning it up, giving me an unobstructed view of her screen. Operating the camera in a plastic bag was no problem because I created a sight blob inside the bag to look through the viewfinder. What I had some trouble with was holding the camera steady. There was quite a lot of wind blowing around the building, and it buffeted the camera. I ended up having a choice between holding the camera hard against the window, making the camera visible to the occupant but allowing me to frame the shot tightly and steadily on the computer screen; or holding the camera several feet back from the window, in which case the image wobbled and couldn't be tightly framed on the screen. Before I started filming the DHS's file, I would have to pick up the computer screen and turn it around so its display could be seen. I'd much prefer the film to show the screen only, without even a glimpse of the office, so no one would know how it was shot to avoid them thinking about how the screen had got turned around. I could tightly frame the shot at the Portland DHS because I could hold the camera against the window, but that may not be the case with the CIA. I'd have to wait and see about that. My experiment finished, I set course for DC, changing the camera's memory card as I started my trip across the country, destroying the one I'd practiced with and scattering the pieces. It was a pity Magic Flying Sled Airlines didn't give Frequent Flier Points. I'll complain about that the next time a hostess walks past, although I don't really expect that to help because I know the flight crew are very sympathetic with the management. ------- Chapter 303: The Painters' Union has a Leak Problem Saturday, May 6, 2006 One of the advantages I hoped a small video camera had was in not appearing on radar, as I didn't want the Air Force to think San Francisco had fired a missile across the country at Washington DC. Its being detected would be particularly possible when I neared my destination, because the address I'd obtained for the Eclipse Project was VERY close to the White House. I kept my sight blob looking all around for trouble and I flew fairly low - about five hundred feet above the ground - so I could get out of the sky quickly if it became overly crowded with SAMs (Surface to Air Missiles) or fighter aircraft eager to get into a dogfight with my video camera. That was in a black bag bravely flying close to ground level to reduce the chance of it appearing on radar. By the way, my flying "five hundred feet above the ground" was mostly by my own estimate since my watch measured height above sea level by the change in atmospheric pressure. Flying through different kinds of weather across undulating country made it give incorrect values for the height above the ground. That didn't worry me. The compass and rate-of-change-of-altitude were the two instruments I wanted the most, and they did the job I needed wonderfully. I wasn't flying through bad weather, so there was no risk that my watch's altitude reading being wrong would cause me to fly into a mountain. I didn't want to fly anywhere near the White House because that would certainly have the best defenses available, including highly trained snipers with night-vision scopes, so I landed several blocks west of it and walked to my destination with my head down the whole time. The previous afternoon I'd visited the well-stocked Kmart to buy a big coat, gloves, scarf and a hat that covered most of my head (ears, neck, etc.). With those plus my ski mask on and looking down, I was able to walk around DC with no worries about being later recognized from the very many surveillance cameras aimed at the streets and sidewalks. Such a full disguise would become suspicious in daylight because the temperature wouldn't justify it, but I intended to be long gone by then. The building I wanted was the "International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Building" (IUPAT), only two blocks west from the White House itself, so one block to the west of the Old Executive Office Building. The distance from the center of the trade union building to the Oval Office was an eighth of a mile, which was ridiculously close for something as mundane as a trade union building when all the other buildings around the White House were things like the FBI head office, the World Bank head office, several prestigious museums and art galleries. I approached from farther to the west to avoid the White House. Rawlins Park was immediately southwest of the IUPAT building. It was a tiny park shoehorned onto a plot of land that was probably too small for anything else, but it let me pretend to shelter under some trees. Washington was well planted with trees and would even be pretty in daylight - not as pretty as Corvallis, but still much more than I'd expected - which was handy for me as the trees provided good cover. I started sight blob searching the building for its big offices, and the big offices for things associated with killing millions of people. Everything I found was more related to how to make sure millions of people's homes were painted by unionized painters. More accurately, several different companies had offices here, but they all appeared innocuous. The IUPAT building (actually a complex of six buildings on the block) was far too large for me to reach all of it from where I was sheltering. The complex was six hundred feet from corner to corner and I was sitting two hundred feet away from the nearest part of it, so much of it was outside my range. To be able to search all of it, I walked along New York Ave, stopping a couple of times to scan new parts of the building as they came within useful range. I discovered that a substantial area of a subsidiary building on the block's northeast corner was set up as an emergency hospital, as indicated by the "Emergency Hospital" sign and lots of unused beds and equipment. The Hospital area was surprisingly well guarded by security guards, so either they had an EXTREMELY bad problem with people breaking in to steal drugs, or there was something else going on. I found an "Eclipse Medical Office" sign, which confirmed my second hypothesis. Access to the Eclipse area was guarded, which didn't slow my sight blob down at all. Inside the secured area looked like a small business: a couple of partitioned offices and half a dozen desks in an open-plan area. It wasn't large enough, and definitely not secure enough considering it was on the ground level and had windows, so I searched around. Against a wall of the open-plan area was a large cupboard labeled "Office Supplies". Through those doors was a small elevator foyer. The shaft went down, so my video camera and memory stick were almost certainly not going to be of use. It'd have to be email or nothing. I moved closer to get a better quality view. The first floor down was an underground parking garage, a surprisingly small one. Beneath that were only two levels of offices. They were empty of people (hardly surprising in the wee small hours of Saturday morning). There were security access controls at the top level (inside the stationery cupboard's doors) to call the single elevator, another access control inside the elevator, and again to get into and out of the three subterranean elevator foyers. There were surveillance cameras on all the access routes, in the elevator, and the hallways. Looking around the parking level, I saw that it was divided in half. It required a card to get into it from the street, then another security control to get through to the half where the elevator foyer was. I wasn't going to touch a computer after what had happened in the CIA lab, so I made do with searching the offices for paperwork. As usual, I started with the largest office (status symbols make my snooping job SO much easier), and quickly confirmed that I had the right place when I looked inside the boss's safe. It contained several biochem warfare-related folders. Nothing Mark Anderson-related though. I didn't find anything useful among his paperwork, but did find plenty of large scale, amusing stuff. The lab's destruction was causing huge problems, but that wasn't ANYWHERE near the worst of it. The major problem was that the culprits had conducted an unbelievably murderous and effective raid deep inside American territory, had escaped without a trace, with all the disk drives of data, and presumably with as many samples as they'd wanted to take. The hunt for the enemy agents was international and massive. The Chinese Government seemed to be the leading suspect, but there was a very long list of possible suspects. Particularly amusing was seeing several of America's allies on the list, Israel being prominently positioned close to the top. The CIA and feds were shit-scared of the unknown assailants now having all that information and the samples. There were many documents discussing what to do if this-or-that biochem agent was released here-or-there by various groups, with or without various possible pre- or post-release demands. The Government was in a panic about the massive casualties and political fallout that would result. It was very amusing. Hopefully the Government would know better than to work on such things in the future, although I wouldn't hold my breath for that. I'd destroyed the live data and immediate duplicates, but I found paperwork that told me that there had been another data repository somewhere farther off site, which had been updated weekly. I couldn't tell from the references to it whether it held any information about me, but the Eclipse bosses had largely reconstructed what the lab had been working on and where they'd been with it from that backup data plus reports from the surviving off-shift workers. I particularly enjoyed the irony of it being the CIA - the agency whose job it is to see foreign intelligence operations coming - that had been completely blindsided by an operation against its own facility. Reading between the lines, they appeared to be very angry and terribly embarrassed by that. Certainly the memos from the President hadn't pulled any punches when describing the CIA's incompetence. Suspecting that it might be useful to do so, or at least amusing to repeat them to my families, I memorized those memos. The paperwork in the biggest office exhausted, I searched others. In one of the middle-level manager's offices I was unsurprised to find a large amount of paperwork dealing with transferring most of the surviving staff to their new workplaces. There wasn't another place they could be moved into en masse, so they were being scattered around various other institutions. This administrative function had apparently always been active, for when staff were transferred around, but it'd become far busier right after my escape. There was paperwork dealing with all sorts of mundane details: selling their Fort Dodge houses, finding temporary accommodation wherever they were moving to, and schooling for their kids (I couldn't understand why people would want to bring weapons as evil as these into the same world they were having kids in. On the other hand, being evil means being selfish, by definition). What I thought was interesting was that the new arrangements were all temporary, no matter where in American the person was being sent. That implied a new facility was being planned. There'd been nothing about it in the boss's office though. [[Because the CIA wasn't involved, not after their last monumental fuck up.]] I found "Anderson, Mark Steven, civilian, child, male" among documents dealing with the identification of remains. No remains had been identified as mine yet, but that was also the case for five dozen other people, about 30% of the total who'd been in the building at the time and a pleasingly large number. My being missing certainly wouldn't stand out unless they managed to check off a lot more boxes on that list, something that had to be unlikely after this long, I thought. There was a column headed, "How to be matched" which had an entry of "DNA" next to my name (and most others). I'd already known that the CIA had my DNA profile as my sight blob had seen that in my file when I'd read it over the lab scientists' shoulders. I would've preferred otherwise, but there'd been a huge number of different samples taken from me, so they had a surfeit of my cells to analyze. Some of the paperwork was interesting, but none of it was a big deal. Even if it had been, I couldn't get any of it out as I wasn't willing to fly it to a fax machine, so I decided I should go for a walk rather than hang around the building suspiciously. I wanted to make sure I caught the passwords of anyone logging in, so I'd arrive back around 6am. The Fort Dodge lab's penetration, burglary, and destruction had been such a disaster that I expected several of the Eclipse head office staff would have to come to work on a Saturday. I returned to the IUPAT building from the southeast at 6am, walking through the grounds around the Eisenhower Building. I sat in the northwest corner under the last couple of trees and sent a sight blob into the Emergency Hospital, down the shaft, and to the boss's office. It was empty, as were the other offices. No one was at work yet. The boss's office was over three hundred feet away from me, with some of the other offices even farther away. The range was causing a small amount of visual degradation. Only a small amount, but I needed to be able to catch passwords as they were typed in and I didn't expect to get many chances at it, so I decided to relocate somewhere closer. I walked north, until I was at the bottom of the wheelchair access to the Old Executive Office Building. That put me directly across the six-lane 17th St NW from where the Eclipse office was. Their placement within the building made them about 175 feet horizontally away from me, and not enough feet vertically to matter, so my vision was perfect at this range. I searched the offices quickly to make sure they were still empty. They were, so I settled down and did my best to look inconspicuous while I kept a sight blob in the elevator car, waiting for anyone to arrive. They started pouring in at about 7am. There weren't that many of them, as government bureaucracies go, but their culture of early-bird diligence couldn't be faulted. Although of all the people I'd like to be diligent, my first pick wouldn't be those in charge of developing biochem weapons capable of killing millions of people. My sight blob had to rush around to make sure I could grab as many usernames and passwords as possible, especially those of the senior bosses. At times like this, I really wished that I could successfully operate multiple sight blobs. Everyone's procedure was much the same: Arrive, drop bags/briefcases, grab a cup of coffee freshly made by the extra-early secretaries, log into their computer, check for emails, then do whatever the emails prompted. Which in Ernesto Elliott's case (the big boss, a CIA Associate Director), included getting up and going to talk with the guy in the next office. This was too good an opportunity for me to let pass, so I crossed my newly grown finger (choosing to use it because it hadn't had its luck used up yet) and started using EE's computer. I nudged the mouse, then quickly looked into the next office to see if people were reacting to sirens going off. No reaction, so presumably no sirens. I zipped the sight blob back to EE's computer and opened a new window. I checked for reactions to a siren again, seeing the same delightfully indifference. Back on the computer, I did a search for "Anderson, Mark". Several matches listed, but "Subject File" was on the top of the list with the most occurrences of the text I'd searched for. I clicked it, and quickly saw from the table of contents that I'd hit the mother lode: all the DHS information, my transfer to Eclipse's lab at Fort Dodge, and the results of all the experiments that'd been performed on me in Fort Dodge. I had the mouse pointer hovering over the big red "X" (the "Close" button), ready to click it the moment I saw EE reappear in the doorway. I moved the mouse away briefly only when I needed to navigate with it, then immediately moved it back to the "X". I expected to have to close this file at any moment, so I didn't want to waste time reading now. Just like Microsoft's Word program, the CIA software's File menu had a Send To submenu, which listed an impressive number of high-tech options, one of which was "Email". That sounded good to me, so I clicked it. The screen displayed, "Nothing Selected." I groaned, clicked the "OK" button to clear the message, then found the "Select" menu. Under that were several options, including "Current File", which I chose. I would've liked to leave out some of the experimentation notes, but I didn't want to take the time to find out how or to read them to find out which to omit. Then back to "Send To > Email". I typed in the random jumble of letters I'd chosen for the email address (ljesjtc321@gmail.com) when I'd set it up at the Water Board's office, plus, "URGENT" for the subject line. I hit "Send." The screen told me, "Address not on Authorized List", offering buttons for "Cancel", "Add to List", and "Request Authorization Number". I was getting panicky now, because if the big boss came back into the room it'd probably take me too long to clear everything before he saw something was happening. I hit "Add to List". "Adding ljesjtc321@gmail.com to Authorized Email List for Elliott, Ernesto. Enter Authorization Number:" #11: (There was no "Go Back" option.) It took two minutes of frantic searching to find a program under the email system that was called, "Create Authorization Numbers". I selected it quickly. "Authorization Number's recipient?" I typed in "Elliott, Ernesto". "To Authorize email address?" I entered "ljesjtc321@gmail.com". "Authorizer's username and password?" I typed in EE's username and password. "Invalid: Not recognized as superior to recipient." #4: #16: #4: The guy EE was talking to now was Zachary Cole, so we changed the recipient on the screen to "Cole, Zachary", had to reenter 'our' (i.e., EE's) username and password, which produced, "Accepted. Authorization Number: 2006/454sbhyQW8643Q82. Email Authorization Number to recipient, Yes/No?" I selected "No" because I did not need Zachary Cole to get an email from EE while EE was standing right in front of him. I repeated the process for the half dozen occupants of the offices around EE's for which I had login details. Every Authorization Number was sixteen random characters, which would have been a bastard to memorize except that thirty two minds gave me a big advantage. I could allocate four or five minds to each code, so they only had to remember one code, and they focused on remembering just the first or last eight characters. Then I canceled out of the email-sending part of the program, and spent my time skipping through my file (with the mouse point poised over the "X"). I wasn't reading it; merely skimming to see what was in it. Which was EVERYTHING: All the DHS records, before AND after they were sanitized, for both the Portland and DC's S&T offices. What Wright had emailed Phillips when he'd called to unload me on the CIA, and Phillip's notes of their conversations. How I'd been transported. For the trip to Fort Dodge, S&T had drugged me and the CIA had picked me up. For that transfer, there were details right down to the plane number, flight takeoff and landing times, and accompanying agents. What room of the lab I'd been put in (I already knew that, I've mentioned it only to illustrate that the file was painstaking about every little step). MANY detailed experimental notes, up until four days before my breakout. The details ceased then, replaced by recollections, presumably because the hard data ended as at the time of their last truly off-site backup, and the last notes were added by interviewing the staff that'd dealt with me after the lab's disaster. My alleged mind control was discussed repeatedly in the S&T information, and was also discussed a great deal early in the CIA testing, but the CIA's scientists had quickly lost interest in the mind control fantasy as there was absolutely no evidence of it. The closest thing to proof was my very abnormally high brain activity, which proved something, but there was no telling what. Instead the CIA's scientists had become increasingly excited by many of the other results they'd been getting, about 5% of which I was able to glean a small amount of meaning from, because they were so impenetrably scientific. For example, from the scoop of my brain matter they'd taken, they'd learned that my brain "averages 244 voltage-gated sodium channels in unmyelinated axons." I don't know about you, but I'm impressed. No wonder I'd been so successful with girls before my abduction; it hadn't been my sense of humor after all. I was pleased to see that the mind control theory had been dismissed. Both because when this went public, it'd make the DHS look even stupider, and because without believing it, the CIA should be less likely to look for magical explanations for the disaster or for someone with magical abilities around my family. I had no idea what 95% of the scientific mumbo-jumbo meant, but the file seemed to be a wonderful thing to go public with. I got to the end of my skimming, decided not to read any part of it in depth, so exited out of my stuff entirely, leaving the computer exactly as EE had left it. It was only a matter of waiting for one of the other office occupants to take a walk. As it turned out, it was Zachary Cole in the next office, as he and EE went to talk with a third person. Using Zachary Cole's computer, I searched for "Anderson, Mark", crossed my new finger (it was doing a good job supplying luck so far), then clicked on "Subject File". The file opened and a quick look outside showed no sign of sirens going off. I selected the "Current File", then "Send To > Email", typed in "ljesjtc321@gmail.com" and "URGENT" for the subject line, then hit "Send". The screen told me, "Address not on Authorized List", again offering buttons for "Cancel", "Add to List", and "Request Authorization Number". #19: #13: I hit "Add to List". "Adding ljesjtc321@gmail.com to Authorized Email List for Cole, Zachary. Enter Authorization Number:" I VERY carefully typed, "2006/454sbhyQW8643Q82". Every mind that'd memorized it agreed it was correct, so I hit the "Enter" key. "Email sent." #1: #4: #15: #All: We closed my file, and did a new search on "Eclipse purpose". A very large number of documents appeared. The first one I opened talked about the purpose of using a chemical I'd never heard of instead of another chemical I'd never heard of. The author seemed to like the word "purpose", because he used it over and over again. It must have been his Word of the Day. The fifth document was an internal memo that described enough of the project's purpose to be okay for what I was looking for. I'd been hoping to find something like a Mission Statement, but what I had was descriptive enough so I emailed it. Now that ljesjtc321@gmail.com was on the Authorized List, I didn't have that problem. Instead I got, "Emailing documents classified Top Secret or greater requires direct authorization. Superior's username and password?" So I typed in EE's details, and the email was easily sent. Next I searched for "million deaths". That produced a LONG list of files too. I opened the first half a dozen, located "million deaths" in each of them, emailing the document which had the largest number. EE kindly providing his direct authorization yet again. I'd had two ideas while working on the previous email, the first was to search for "billion deaths". It simply hadn't occurred to me the first time, being too horrific to think of. It scored quite a few hits. I opened the first, found the reference, and it was in a section that talked about it being a real possibility, so I emailed that too. My second idea was to search for "million deaths America". Again there were several choices. I found a document that was an analysis of the millions of Americans that'd be killed if the lab was breached catastrophically, so I emailed that one as well. #31: (The ljesjtc321@gmail.com mailbox was configured to automatically forward all emails it received to a list of recipients, all of which were news organizations or high profile political bloggers.) #24: #2: <"Eclipse budget".> Several documents appeared, but they all contained text like, "We should budget for increasing the number of centrifuges..." There were no top level budgets showing what the whole thing cost to setup or run. We tried, "Eclipse construction cost". No documents appeared. "Eclipse repair cost". Getting "No documents found" again. #8: #15: We tried, "human experimentation", getting poor results, so we changed that to "human trial", getting far more hits. Before we could do anything about it, #32 saw Zachary Cole about to reenter his office (#32 had been assigned the job of concentrating on what he could see through the doorway, 'seeing' being mostly an issue of paying attention. Usefully, sight blobs don't need to be focused at the right distance the way flesh-and-blood eyeballs do, so we can see near and far details at the same time). We hit the big, red "X". There was now nothing to show for our actions, other than the audit trail that send the emails would've left. Hopefully by the time the CIA acted on those, it'd be far too late. #29: #12: #1: #All: I got up and started walking briskly south toward the Constitution Gardens. There are plenty of large trees in that park and it's only half a mile away. #12: #23: ("PR" means "Public Relations", a euphemism for "spreading good-smelling bullshit".) #31: #12: Not much more than ten minutes later I was in the depths of the Constitution Gardens, standing among a grove of mature trees after having dismantled, crushed and spread my camera around as I didn't want to risk taking it with me. I kept only the small plate with the serial number on it, which I'd get rid of later. There were a surprising number of people in the Gardens, but they were mostly joggers and on the main paths. I made sure no one was in the trees near me, or in the wider area with a camera pointed skyward, then I did a high-g takeoff. I've always liked trees, and have another reason for doing so now: mature trees do a wonderful job of obscuring the narrow band of vertical space that I would otherwise be seen in during my takeoffs. The park was well lit, but by the time I cleared the treetops I was above the downward pointing lights, so in darkness. The trees also give me room to accelerate in, so by the time I'm above them I'm going very fast, so a spectator would get almost no time to react to whatever faint blur of movement they noticed, so they shouldn't be able to tell what it was. Because there were people around and I'd just done a very naughty thing to the CIA, I used a 5 g takeoff. By the time I cleared the top of the trees, I was going 70 mph. There was no way someone could get a camera on me, especially as I was accelerating far faster than people are used to tracking. After a couple of seconds of heavy acceleration I cut my thrust down to 1.5 g until I reached 1,000 feet, then I eliminated it entirely - only pushing horizontally now - so wind resistance would slow my ascent. I leveled off at three thousand feet at sped westward. Having a big head from the ego boost of carrying out a wonderfully successful operation must be a buoyancy neutral effect, because the sled needed the usual amount of upward push to balance my weight. It'd been surprisingly easy, even with the Authorization process. People don't have my capabilities in mind when they design their security systems, so I wasn't surprised I'd succeeded, although I was surprised about how quick it'd been. My main fear now was that the CIA had some sort of time delay on emails leaving their premises, so they could be blocked. I didn't think that was likely, but I was leaving my well-proven finger crossed. I was flying west not too much slower than the Earth rotated. At my usual cruising speed it'd take me five hours to get home, but I'd gain back three hours from the time zones. The difficulty was that I'd taken off not long before sunrise so I was going to get forced down soon. I had several choices: Fly west until forced down by the sunrise, then stay out of sight until the next evening. The trouble with that is that it'd take me another whole day to get the DHS file. If the CIA emails were intercepted so they didn't get out and the Government was warned, then another day might move the DHS files out of my reach, leaving me with nothing. Fly to Fort Dodge. That was only nine hundred miles and I could probably make it before it got too light. I only needed to get into the general area to see if a dozen news choppers had started circling the place, which would be a great indication that poor Mr. Cole's emails had gotten through. That media presence in Fort Dodge would happen even before the media went public, because they'd need to confirm the information first. Fly at top speed to Portland to steal the DHS file. Both versions of it were included in my CIA file, but I couldn't be sure that any of my CIA emails had gotten out. The DHS's computer system being less secure offered me another shot at getting the information to the media, and what was left of tonight might be my only chance of doing so before the attempted breaches of the CIA's system became known and the DHS warned to tighten their security on my file. Fly at top speed to Corvallis. My not being at home might be suspicious when the leaks got investigated, or perhaps later if something else made someone suspicious about my involvement. If I went anywhere other than straight home now, then I wouldn't be in Corvallis for all of Saturday. It'd also be good to warn my families that I'd sent the emails earlier than expected, although they'd soon figure that out when their phones started melting from all the news media calls. There was too much at stake not to do a good job, so cruising west was eliminated. Going to Fort Dodge was too - although it gained me information, it didn't give me time to do anything with it. Flying home was about a future uncertainty, whereas I knew I definitely needed to get my file out into the public. If the CIA emails were blocked, I MUST get the DHS file out as quickly as possible, ideally before any of the DHS staff arrived at work. #29: #18: #1: #25: #18: After a little more discussion, we decided to put the pedal to the metal and go flat out for Portland. We increased our altitude to 5,000 feet, that way if we got unstable we'd have longer to recover. We could go faster at that altitude because the air pressure is lower so there's less wind resistance. We guessed the speed of sound would be faster too, so the turbulence caused by getting close to it wouldn't kick in until a higher speed. [[Wrong. The speed of sound is 6% slower at 5,000 feet under normal conditions. Drag is 14% less, so I got the first part right. At 10,000 feet, had I gone that high, the speed of sound would be 13% less, drag 26% less, substantially different than at sea level.]] The best way for me to go faster was probably to decrease the frontal area of my sled, as that should reduce the risk of turbulence too. I did that, and as my speed increased the wind inside the sled got increasingly rough. It wasn't violent, but I was very worried about the buffeting causing instability. I ended up having to almost fully enclose myself. I pushed the sled as fast as I dared, which wasn't as fast as Mach one. I couldn't clock my speed because I was too high to identify towns, but from the changes to my sled and its propulsion, I was probably going at something like 700 mph. It wasn't fun, as I got bounced around more and I had to concentrate very intensely on my stability. I was constantly making adjustments to keep myself flat and level, fearful that if they got out of line too much, I'd start tumbling crazily through the air. I was pretty sure that would be a VERY bad thing. Even if my NP-plates remained in place, the centrifugal force could cause me major troubles, such as limbs breaking and unconsciousness, in which case my ability to hold my NP concentration would be lost, and REALLY bad things would start to happen. Despite going as fast as I dared risk - I even overtook a large plane from below - sunrise kept catching up to me. At 5,000 ft I was high enough to get plenty of warning of it sneaking up behind me, and I was able to reduce my height to stay in the Earth's shadow for longer, but I was being forced down even before I reached the Cascades (The Cascade Mountain Range. It runs north-south from northern California, up the middle of Oregon to southern British Colombia. The Willamette Valley is to the Range's west). I wasn't going to make Portland in time. I diverted to the lights of a major city, the better to hitchhike from, landing in what turned out to be Idaho Falls. A quick check of my map showed me that I'd come down about 540 air miles short of Portland, and what looked to be about 700 road miles. I was only one state short, but it'd take so long to get to Portland by car or truck that I'd be too late to do anything useful there. I'd spend the day here, wait until tonight, then fly. I removed my ski mask as it was too suspicious looking, then strolled into town. I was close enough to Corvallis to have hitched here overnight, so I wasn't too concerned about the unlikely event of my being spotted here. Whether or not my CIA emails got out, the shit was going to hit the fan. The first email being my file would mean the CIA would be suspecting my families, so I wanted to warn them. I couldn't call them in case their phones were tapped because my voice would give me away. Given some time I could change the shape of my voice box and mouth (I had when I'd made my current voice sound closer to Ron Fisher's), but that would take too long. I didn't even want to text them in case that got them in trouble. Being charged with treason or espionage wouldn't be fun. I decided to send the lawyer a text message, as I had before. I'd not thought to ask anyone during our quick conversations in Dad's workshop, but no one had mentioned anything about the lawyer getting in trouble for receiving those messages, so I'd risk his skin by sending him one more. I didn't want to borrow a phone from an adult in case they could later describe me, so I'd wander into the center of town until I could either borrow a phone from a kid, or buy a prepaid phone when the stores opened. A kid fell for: "Hey dude, can I borrow ya phone to text my girlfriend? My battery's dead." I took the phone out of his hand by holding it squeezed by the middle of my thumb and forefinger, then dropped it into my palm. I pretended to press buttons with my thumb, but used NP-fingertips instead, leaving no fingerprints behind. I texted my 'girlfriend' a very unromantic message, "Concerned Citizen here. I tried email Mrk Andson docs to media earlier this morn. Pls alert clients. DNCB." I deliberately misspelt my name in case the CIA or NSA had software to catch text messages that contained my name. I waited until I saw it'd been sent, then carefully passed the phone back. "Thanks dude, Susan woulda given me lotsa grief." It would probably be a good idea for me to get out of town in case the CIA came charging over the hill; or less dramatically, if they drove the young 'dude' around hoping he'd be able to point me out. So I walked toward the main highway west to start hitching. I got a lift to Boise, then wandered around to find a lunch bar with a TV going. Inside I heard, "In breaking news, we have received an unconfirmed report today that the Central Intelligence Agency is actively involved in developing biological weapons in a secret laboratory in Fort Dodge, Iowa..." #8: #31: " ... The information CNN has received clearly describes the weaponization of biological agents capable of killing possibly BILLIONS of people. Up to one in three of the world's population. One document states that if an accidental leak occurred at the lab, up to thirty million Americans could be killed. -- "All air traffic in the Fort Dodge area has been grounded and a 'No-Fly Zone' declared by the Federal Aviation Administration. Road traffic is being detoured around most of the town. The FAA, CIA and Bush Administration have all refused to comment. -- "If the documents are true, America will be in breach of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention which specifically prohibits the development of biological and toxin weapons which have 'no justification for protective or other peaceful purposes.'" [[Actually, the Convention says, " ... no justification for PROPHYLACTIC, protective or other peaceful purposes," but you can't say "prophylactic" on TV because it makes too many people angry, even though it just means "medically preventive or protective". It's best to leave it out and just talk about less inflammatory issues, such as the killing of up to thirty million Americans by horrible diseases. Unfortunately that joke is all too real. AIDS has already killed half a million Americans and the Bush administration still refuses to encourage the use of prophylactic condoms, even though they're an incredibly inexpensive and highly effective protective measure. It's better to let millions of people catch AIDS than risk the unthinkable horror of encouraging people to put little balloons on their cocks.]] -- "In 2001, the Bush administration refused to ratify an internationally binding verification protocol intended to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention, stating that, 'It did not suit the national interests of the United States. We cross to Doctor Larson from Johns Hopkins..." #11: #16: #25: I hitched closer to home, but it was slow going and I wasn't even as far as Portland before it got dark (I wasn't going TO Portland; it's just that the main highway goes to Portland then south to Corvallis). I got my driver to let me out when it started getting dark, I wandered off the road, then finished the rest of the trip under my own power (although it wasn't really "my" power, as it was personally effortless). What would've taken at least two hours by car, plus whatever time it would've taken me to get another ride south from Portland, took less than a quarter of an hour by Magic Flying Sled. That's a shameless plug, in case I ever start selling tickets. The lack of amenities is just a startup problem that our PR Department wants to assure you is more than compensated for by our friendly staff and generous luggage allowance. ------- Chapter 304: For a Woman, There is Something Worse than a Ladder in Her Stocking Saturday, May 6, 2006 (Continued) I overflew home at a safely high altitude. As I'd hoped, there was a media circus besieging our gate, and several extra cars parked inside (lawyers, cops, CIA?). Watching closely to make sure no cameras pointed skyward, I descended enough to see that all of my extended family were inside. They were watching TV and talking a lot to a few suit-wearing men that I didn't recognize. My families didn't appear to be under any duress and Ron Fisher had no business getting involved, so I flew back to my tent. Not directly, of course, I landed somewhere safe nearby and walked the remaining distance (I'll assume you understand that process from now on). I got changed into different clothes, bundled up the ones I'd worn on the trip, even the ski mask, then flew them to a remote location and burned them. The video camera had already been disposed of, but the other purchases and spare cash I nested inside several of the colored plastic bags to keep them safe, then hid them. On the way back to my tent, I overflew Ava's house to check whether she was at home. She was, so I dropped in. I knocked on the door and yelled, "It's Ron Fisher here Ava." (I always clearly announce myself these days, in case whomever I'm meeting says, "Hi Mark.") Ava opened the door and urged me in, saying "Isn't it AMAZING!" "Isn't what amazing?" "The news about Mark. Don't you know?" "You mean Julia's boyfriend? I've never met him. He's away somewhere, isn't he?" It took Ava several seconds to work out how to word the news, and how to force her voice into sounding sorrowful, "They found out this morning that Mark was kidnapped by Homeland Security and the CIA. They were doing medical experiments on him, and it looks like they killed him." "The GOVERNMENT killed him! That's terrible. I hope they get in a huge amount of trouble for that." "Will they EVER! You should hear Julia; the Government's in BIG trouble!" I wanted to go somewhere we could talk freely, so I asked, "Good. I haven't had dinner yet. Do you want to go into town and get something with me?" "I was just about to start cooking. I can easily make more for you." "Let's go into town." I used NP to push Ava toward the door a little, just to give her the message. "Okay." In her car, I killed time by asking riveting questions like, "You're in the 12th grade, right?" We sat in the cheap restaurant I'd chosen, and I paid particular attention to my proximity sense. Having a 24-foot range radius is fantastic; I could cover nearly all the restaurant, certainly including anyone within earshot of us. If they were trying to eavesdrop their attention on us would've shown up, as well as their lack of attention elsewhere, but there was no one like that. I told Ava, "I know about the emails the media got. What I don't know is what's been happening as a result of them?" "Julia called me twice. I think she's worried about you, but she couldn't say anything." "I'm sure she is. Tell me the general situation and if it sounds okay you can call her for an update, including casually mentioning you're having dinner with me." "Okay. From what Julia said, no one from the Government is saying anything, but the media are all over it and everyone thinks it's true. It's been on the TV all day. Haven't you seen it?" "Only for a few minutes at lunchtime. I've been hitchhiking around Oregon to get to know my new state." I gave Ava a wink so she'd know that was my cover story. I had thought of asking the guy whose car I'd been in whether I could listen to the radio rather than his bluegrass CDs, but in case the CIA found him later, I didn't want them to know I was interested in the news. "There are two stories: about how bad the CIA and Government are to be making the terrible diseases, and also about you. You're not the main story; they only mention you sometimes." Ava looked apologetic about that, which I thought was quite funny. "Of course MARK isn't the main story. Remember the story is about Mark Anderson. He's nothing to do with me." "Oops, sorry. Umm, Felicity and Steven have been on TV to ask the Government to give Mark back or come clean. Big lawyers have been on, saying taking Mark was VERY unconstitutional. A lot of people are very angry. It sounds like the Government is in BIG trouble." Ava described some more of what she'd heard, and nothing she said provided any reason why she shouldn't call Julia for an update and mention I was with her. I don't know what could've made me worry about that, but I wanted to play VERY safe. I got Ava to make the call. After Julia heard what Ava said, Julia insisted that Ava come over, adding, "You can bring your date with you." I had my ear to the phone too, so responded, "Julia. It's Ron here. We'll eat first then come. Will the gate be blocked by lots of people?" "Yeah, but I'll tell the cops to let Ava and her date through. See you soon Ava and Ron." I was hungry. I need very little, but my stomach was empty and I had a feeling things would be too chaotic at the mansion to rely on them feeding me, plus rushing to the mansion might seem suspicious. Relatedly, my lack of appetite was somewhat of a joke around the mansion. The first few times I (as Ron) ate with them, they assumed I was either on a cruel diet, or I was eating so little to look as different from Mark as possible. Since then I'd eaten about as much as Julia. That looked like a diet, and any less would've made me seem freaky to any CIA watchers. In reality I was overeating by a factor of five, but my body got rid of it without my getting fat. Mom couldn't resist making the occasional joke, such as, "You'd be cheap to keep." After our quick meal, Ava drove us to the mansion. The shoulders of Peoria Road were overflowing with media vans and cars, and we saw four cops - a significant proportion of the Corvallis Police Department - performing circus management. When we turned into the driveway the press pack rushed the car, demanding to know who we were, what we thought of Mark's death, and other equally sensitive questions. Julia buzzed us in while the two cops fiercely guarded the closing gates to stop the braying hounds of hackdom following us into the property. In the mansion were all of the two families, including The Boys, Sophia and Ashley (The Boys already knew my real identity; their girls did not), plus the lawyer I kept texting - not that he knew they were from me - and his two partners. Surprisingly few visitors, I thought. Our arrival interrupted the conversation. I expressed hope that Mark might still be alive, they said they were sure he wasn't, so Ava and I gave our sympathy, especially to my bereaved parents and sisters. Julia and Carol came to sit next to Ava and me, a low tone of conversation returned to the room, as people half-talked and half-watched TV for the latest developments. Dad had control of the remote and frequently changed channels to pick up any new information. The emails had contained a VERY large amount of very specific information, so there was plenty for the networks to chase down. It was a huge story so the networks had allocated large teams to it, and twelve hours had passed since the emails had been received, so results were flying back in. The networks were able to keep up a near constant flow of confirmations about various facts, including confirming each other's confirmations. Unlike what I'd heard at lunch, none of the news anchors were saying, "If the documents are true." There was now unanimous belief, along with unanimously anger, ESPECIALLY from the ordinary residents of Fort Dodge. I lost count of how many repetitious, fearful-person-in-the-street interviews I saw over the next few hours. I was surprised how placid things were around the living room. Of course they knew that Mark wasn't really dead (he was, in fact, drinking a cup of coffee only a few feet away), but I'd expected the act of pretending to respond to Mark's death to be chaotic, for the lawyers to be banging on the table with outrage, etc. Instead most of the conversation was casually about the latest TV development. I commented, "There's a riot outside, but you guys are relaxed?" Prof explained, "Not relaxed; 'cold rage' would describe our moods now. We've had months to get used to their refusal to give Mark back. The email makes it clear that the DHS and CIA never had any intention of giving him back. When we went public about Homeland Security's taking Mark, their only concern was covering up the evidence. They'll pay for that, but it's too soon to do anything about it yet. We're waiting for the facts to be acknowledged by the Government, then for people to appreciate how special Mark was, and then we'll act. If we act too soon, people will think we're crazy." "Why, what're you intending to do?" "We don't want to say, because we suspect the DHS or CIA might have planted bugs in our house. We've asked a company to come tomorrow to remove any bugs." "Wow. Bugs in ya own home! What a pain that'd be. They're assholes." No one argued with me. Some time later, when my interest wouldn't seem too eager, I asked, "Prof, from what you said before, you have the emails too? Could I have a look?" I got quick, funny looks from nearly everyone, but Prof also said, "We do. One of the networks emailed them to me when we said we didn't have a copy. Julia, can you show Ron to my study please. You remember what folder they're in?" "I want to see it again," said Carol, wanting to come with us. "I want to see it too," added Ava. I spent the next hour reading through my file, with Ava and Carol on my lap and Julia sitting close, so they could see the screen too, and perhaps so they could get a cuddle. The file was so large it would've taken a lot longer than an hour to read, except that the vast majority of it was incomprehensible scientific gobbledygook that I skipped through. Julia and Carol can't have read it in as much detail as we were doing now, because they several times exclaimed, "They did THAT!", "Eww!", or angrier comments. The CIA had obviously never expected the file to be made public, because it was full of very detailed, explicit and highly incriminating notes. They were, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. I'd told my mommy on them, and the rest of the country too, and they were going to get it now. Vanessa came in partway through, to check her emails. The two house lines plus everyone's cellphones dropped back to a service if unanswered after five rings, the service took a message, and if it wasn't from a reporter, emailed it to Vanessa. She printed out a few of the emails, taking them back to the living room. When we rejoined the rest of the families, I made the comments my role required: "The Govenmint sucks!", and other equally impressive summaries. We discussed several of the points mentioned in the file, but it was mostly role-playing so it got boring after a while, and we got back to watching TV. CNN was giving it almost nonstop coverage. The time of day was convenient for their coverage to include an increasing proportion of international material, mostly the reactions of other governments. The spokespeople for foreign governments were mostly saying, "If it is true that America is developing biological weapons of the nature that you have described, then..." followed by SCATHING comments. If there was one thing that everybody agreed on, it was that biological weapons were (to use the perfect cliché) to be avoided like the plague. Many comments were made about how only a madman would unleash a weapon that killed millions of innocent children and spread randomly. What that made someone who authorized the development of such weapons depended on the country the spokesperson was from. The English government expressed considerable disappointment in President Bush's lapse of judgment. The Iranian government ordered an immediate resumption and acceleration of its nuclear development program, "as a necessary and urgent self-defense against Evil Incarnate Bush and Great Satan America." I don't need much sleep, but I do need some. I hadn't gotten any last night, nothing significant was going to happen until tomorrow, and I thought it was a good idea to be casual about the issue, so it was only 8:45pm when I asked Ava to take me home, meaning to my pathetic little tent. In the car I asked Ava, "I don' have a TV in my tent. Kin I visit you tomorrow to see what happens?" "Sure." A second later Ava realized a better idea, "Or we could go to Julia's and Carol's again?" "If you think they wouldn't mind?" "I'm sure they wouldn't." After I had a good, long sleep, all of an hour and three-quarters, I thought I should check on the mansion's security. I put some dark clothes on, regretted that I no longer had my ski mask, made a mental note to buy another one, then made the short flight. (I'd burned the mask and my clothes in case they'd picked up pollen unique to the DC area, or something else incriminating like that. I didn't know what; I was just being careful.) From a distance I could see that several news-crews were still parked on the shoulder outside the gates. Perhaps sleeping in their vans, or perhaps waiting with low-light cameras ready to film anything interesting. I didn't want that to include me flying over, especially without my ski mask, so I decided to approach from the rear of the property. I did a very wide loop south of the mansion, a couple of miles away from it to make sure I was invisible and because the reporters' cameras would have zoom lenses. There's a field immediately south of our property. It's about two hundred yards wide and has a double line of trees along its southern edge (farthest from our home), which would make an excellent landing area because there were no houses nearby. I was a couple of miles south, heading north and descending for that tree line. I had my sight blob at about three-quarters of its maximum size to give me the equivalent of daylight vision to make sure the area around my landing spot was clear. During my landing area check, I glanced north to the mansion and spotted a guy on a ladder looking over our southern wall. My sight blob was about three hundred feet ahead of me and lower, so I had to get closer myself before I could send it to 'eyeball' the guy properly. He was facing away from me and unmoving, so I continued my descent, putting the sight blob back on searching my landing area with occasional glances at the spy to make sure I didn't lose track of him. By the time I'd landed in the tree line two hundred yards behind him, I'd seen that he was standing on a ladder directly behind the mansion (so about the middle of our property's southern wall), his elbows resting on the top of the wall, while he was aiming a parabolic microphone at the parents' bedrooms, sometimes moving it from one room to the other. When I'd first seen him, my immediate thought was that if he was CIA, then I was going to ruin his day VERY badly. But by the time I landed, I'd rethought that. An agent mysteriously disappearing when staking out my families would only make the CIA even more suspicious and determined about us. They might think that if we could get rid of CIA agents without a trace, then we might be doing other mischief too. One idea I had was to use NP to knock him off his ladder in a way that seemed accidental, such when he was shifting his balance. I could make him fall outside the wall, and the parabolic microphone fall on the inside. Except that when my sight blob got closer, I saw that the mic was cabled to headphones he was wearing and to a large tape recorder he was wearing at waist level, secured by a strap over his shoulders. Not only wouldn't the mic fall on the other side of the wall from him, but I didn't want that tape getting away in case it contained something interesting. He was so focused on his job that I feared it did. If the tape contained something REALLY interesting, then I didn't want him to get away either. I crossed the field to get closer to him, floating along crouched low, staying a couple of inches above the ground to avoid leaving footprints. I kept a close eye on him, to be ready to freeze in case he turned around. I was quick and silent, so was soon hiding behind a tree within twenty four feet of him, where my proximity sense could take over the duty of monitoring his behavior. I used my sight blob to search around for a nice, solid piece of tree branch. A baseball bat would've been ideal, but I found the natural equivalent. I floated it into position and waited. A few minutes later one of his feet must have got sore, because he shifted his weight on the ladder. I quickly tipped it sideways. Down he went. I bashed his head with the NP-wielded tree branch just before he hit the ground. Proximity confirmed he was out for the count. Probably a count to a big number, because I'd hit him pretty hard. I could've NP-punched him on the head directly, but NP-fingertips have no mass of their own. Much of their 'punch' comes from rapidly accelerating the target's head sideways, so his brain gets hit by the inside of his skull. A tree branch was better in this case, as I wanted to leave an impact injury as if he'd hit his head when he landed. I was just about to move toward him when I heard a female voice to my distant right call out, "Dallas! Are you all right?" I sent a sight blob to check, and young woman was hurrying from the southeastern corner of the wall toward us. #26: #13: #26: #All: While waiting for her to arrive, I used a sight blob to check for anyone else anywhere along our wall or in the general area. There was no one else. When she bent over to check on Dallas, I batted her head too. Their IDs were as Portland-based reporters, which proved nothing. I used NP to remove the headphones from Dallas's head and held them near, but not touching, one of my own ears. I rewound the tape to its beginning and started listening to it. It started with Vanessa and Prof arriving in their bedroom; Dallas's turning the recorder on presumably triggered by the bedroom light being turned on. I felt uncomfortable listening to Prof and Vanessa's bedroom conversation, but there was actually nothing to be embarrassed about as they said nothing private. It was just an ordinary conversation that they could've had in the living room. After ten minutes of conversation or going-to-bed-sounds from the Williams parents' bedroom, the mic suddenly transitioned to my parents, who - it was soon apparent - had just arrived in their bedroom. Again they had nothing significant to say. The most dangerous statement of the first few minutes was Dad saying, "I can't believe how much impact Mark's having on the world," which was hardly a big deal. Thereafter the mic swapped back and forth between the bedrooms whenever there was a pause in the current conversation. Both sets of parents talked for quite a while, but they were good at not saying too much. They gave nothing away, including not that I was alive or Ron. The only worrying aspect of the tape was that my parents came across as being too unconcerned about their son's death. I'd destroy the tape and warn them about that tomorrow. I briefly checked the other tapes in his bag, but it was quickly obvious that none of them had been used for this eavesdropping. Which left the question of what to do with these two possibly-reporter, possibly-not-reporter snoops. They were still unconscious as I'd hit them hard. They'd been violating our privacy at a dangerous time, and I tend to react strongly when people deliberately 'attack' me or mine. (You might've noticed that about me by now. If they want to start trouble, that's what they'll get. Years of being a victim made my being able to defend myself a pleasure. [[Perhaps too much pleasure, but it's hard to care about responding with the correct degree of morality to the actions of people who're deliberately acting with a complete absence of it]].) Still using NP, I scrolled through their two phones' list of phone numbers, simultaneously as my physical eyes can read two sources at once. I was trying to get an impression about whether they were CIA or reporters. Reporters, it seemed. They were certainly based in Portland ("Dentist", "School", etc., all had Portland numbers), there were no CIA-related names, and both of them had entries that seemed appropriate to their professions (electronic, camera and sound businesses for him; beauty parlors, clothes stores and an acting school for her). I could've simply left with all the sound equipment and tapes, but I wanted to deter them more than that would achieve. Chances are they'd think they got in the way of the CIA's retrieving their bugs, because I'd make sure the reporters found out that the house had been booked to be swept for bugs tomorrow. For maximum deterrence value, and to make this event less likely to be reported, I stripped both of them stark naked, all the way down to removing their watches and her rings (they'd regret their snooping). Grace started waking up while I was stripping her, so I batted her head again. Comparative morality is a tricky thing, so I made a mental note to make time to think about it one day when I wasn't so busy. I tore their pants in half to make four pieces of 'rope'. I put Grace's legs through adjacent holes on either side of a ladder rung, then tied her ankles VERY tightly together. I tied her wrists behind her back, and also to the same rung that was between her legs, so the rung was now forced up against her cunt. She was a pretty woman, so I took a moment to admire the sight of her, then I tied Dallas in the same manner, but without the visual admiration. Grace was about one-third of the way in from one end of the ladder - which I'd extended to be as long as possible - and Dallas a third in from the other end, so when they stood up the ladder would be horizontal and protruding out to either side of them. That these reporters carried a ladder around with them was another reason I enjoyed not being kind to them. The area had low trees along the wall line - we'd gotten the neighbor's permission to cut down the tall ones so no one could climb over our wall - and it had uneven ground with lots of roots and holes. The two intrepid reporters would have considerable difficulty getting back to their cars in the dark, plus no way of doing anything when they got there, except verbally calling for help at the cost of a GREAT deal of embarrassment. I particularly congratulated myself for ensuring that the guy wouldn't be able to gallantly volunteer to go for help by himself. I moved them so they were sitting tidily, leaning back against the wall, taking a moment to admire the sight at one end of the ladder again. She did have very nice breasts, even if they were artificially enhanced. I turned off their cellphones, taking them and EVERYTHING else of theirs: car keys, wallet/purse, watches, remaining clothes and especially the sound gear. I flew off at a very low altitude to avoid possible radar detection. About a mile away I found a suitable hole in the ground for a little fire. I piled their clothes in it, then crushed every tape cassette (much larger than the old music cassettes), spilling the tape loosely over the clothes, adding the sound gear's bag but not the gear itself. I took all the paper money out of their wallets and put it in my pocket. If I burned it the economic consequence would be a gift to the Federal Government, which I didn't think deserved a gift from me. I scattered the remaining contents of their wallets loosely on top of the pile, added the electronic cables, then set the whole lot alight. I kept the thirty one max-heat blobs going, using NP to stir up the fire (NP-fingertips don't get hot, burned or painful; they're wonderfully useful things). When the fire burned down, which didn't take long with the boost I was providing, I buried the remnants, scattered leaves and grass on top. Then I picked up the electronics gear and flew to the river, found a deep part, crushed and dropped the recorder in, then another deep area for the mike, and other miscellaneous places for their car keys, phones, watches, rings and other unburnable stuff. I'd thought about keeping the sound gear, but flying around with significant lumps of metal was too risky. Being caught with it wouldn't be good either; look at what happened to the last people! All that taken care of, I went back to what I'd come for: checking over the mansion's security. I checked all the grounds, inside the two houses, garages, tunnel and workshop. Everything was as it should be. If the CIA did have bugs in the house, then they'd know that it was going to be swept for bugs shortly and they might return to recover what gear they could. There wasn't much chance of that, but I decided to stay nearby until not long before dawn anyway. I was quite looking forward to seeing the intrepid reporters deal with their predicament (if being naked, almost immobile, and having a ladder rung tied into your crotch isn't a "predicament", I don't know what is). Grace awoke not long after I completed my security sweep (I must've been too gentle with her). I was hiding too far away to hear, but the sight was very amusing. She was a smart woman, and there was enough faint light for her to quickly grasp her predicament, and by the look on her face, strongly disapprove of it. She spent several minutes trying to free herself, but failed to make any progress as I'd pulled the knots together VERY strongly. Given that I can exert 5.5 tons of force, I can tie VERY tight knots. Grace eventually had no choice but to try to wake Dallas. I saw her shouting at him without getting a response. She added rocking the ladder back and forth to her wakeup actions, even though doing so made one part of her anatomy very uncomfortable. It took several minutes for her to rouse Dallas. Their conversation didn't look friendly, which pleased me as that hopefully meant they wouldn't cooperate to snoop on my families again. After a couple of minutes, when Dallas got used to the situation, he started spending far too much time looking at Grace, in her opinion. They both spent several minutes attempting to get out of their bonds, except when Dallas got distracted looking at Grace's struggling body. Which, when Grace caught him, would lose them more time while she gave him a piece of her mind, which clearly wasn't the piece of her that he wanted. They failed to free themselves, although Dallas got plenty of free looks, so after more argument they climbed to their feet and started trying to walk. It was a disaster for them. They could only take tiny steps, less than an inch at a time. Maybe Grace's arms were shorter than her torso, or maybe she was just more sensitive, because she HATED walking. But as bad as walking was, falling over was far worse. If one of them walked faster or slower than the other - something that the very irregular terrain made inevitable - the rigid ladder meant Grace was either pushed or pulled off balance. Dallas was a lot larger than her, so it was always her that was pushed off balance. She had almost zero ability to recover her balance as her feet were tied hard up against each other, so she only had to be a few degrees off vertical before she fell. She fell a LOT. When she went down, she took Dallas down with her, often at very awkward angles. If it hadn't happened so often, I would've been tempted to push on the ladder myself, but there was no need as they spent far more time off their feet than on them; the former category including falling, cursing, crying, and struggling upright again. It really was VERY entertaining. I regretted not keeping the sound gear to listen to them. I'd placed them with their backs to the wall, just because I thought it looked "professional" for when they woke up, and it implied more than one person had dealt with them. Their backs to the wall meant their fronts were to the trees, which meant their next escape plan took them well over an hour to get into position for, because of their tiny movement rate and frequent falls. Plus time lost for Grace to have crying sessions. I almost felt sorry for her, although Dallas and I both enjoyed watching Grace's chest sobbing. (Which once again makes me question sobbing's evolutionary value. If a saber-toothed tiger is attacking, the last thing the female should want is for any nearby men to stop to admire her heaving chest.) During the very frequent pauses while they regained their feet, yelled at each other, or cried/admired, I used the sight blob to search the greater area. I wouldn't want a saber tooth tiger or the CIA to sneak up on me because I was distracted by a sobbing chest. The currently very un-intrepid reporters maneuvered themselves through a gap in the line of trees, along it slowly, falling down many times, until they found what looked like a suitable branch. Dallas backed up to it and tried to use it to unpick the knot around his hands. It was a stupid idea and he never had a chance, especially because if it'd started working, I would've pulled the knot tighter. He stopped several times, but Grace kept yelling at him, so he resumed trying. Eventually he gave up for the final time. Grace yelled some more, and they moved sideways so she could try. If you think "they moved sideways" sounds easy, think again. You try moving sideways when your ankles are tied tightly together, you're on uneven ground, and you've got a ladder rung wedged up your cunt. Whenever one of them edged onto a piece of uneven or soft ground, so they slid one way or another, then they both went down. Or sometimes the ground required a step too high for one of them to make, so they had to walk forward or back a foot or two to get around it. They actually made more progress by falling than by walking, although falling clearly caused them both a great deal of discomfort. Not all the time for Dallas, but when it hurt him, it REALLY hurt! When Grace was finally in position to try unpicking her knot, she tried for much longer than Dallas had, but finally had to admit failure, which led to even more spectacular chest heaving, although it was very dirty from all of her nosedives ("nipple dives"?). They'd been moving east, which was the only way around our property as we have some neighbors to the west, which have fences of some sort around their properties. To the east is an open field all the way to the road. The farmer grows crops in it so it wouldn't be like a walk in the park for the reporters. The misery they would've caused me and my families had they gotten something private on tape would've been magnitudes greater than the misery they were experiencing now, so I wasn't the least bit sorry that it was working out to be much more of a punishment than I'd imagined. I had to relocate a couple of times to stay within a few hundred feet of them. My sight blobs can't go beyond five hundred feet from me and the mansion's property is six hundred feet long. I could position my sight blob three hundred feet from me and see them even if they were a thousand feet away, but I preferred to be close enough to help in case one of them fell face first into a deep puddle, or something similar. When I moved I always checked for CIA assholes, then I moved by standing on an NP-plate and flying myself at walking pace just above the ground level. I didn't want to leave any footprints behind in case this scene was later carefully examined. It took the two reporters nearly five hours and many dozens of falls to reach the edge of the road. #8: #21: #All: They were all locked. There were only half a dozen vehicles there, five vans and one car. Nearly all the reporters had left late in the evening yesterday, leaving only half a dozen soloists or teams behind, the others presumably trading off the chance of an early morning scoop for the comfort of a motel room. I had no doubt all the reporters would be back; probably even more of them, because the story was only going to grow over the next few days. (I was stimulating the country's economy very well: the Fort Dodge office supply business, the Corvallis motel/hotel business. I truly enjoyed it.) The dirty, exhausted, distraught pair hobbled closer to the parking area. There was only one unoccupied van, which was presumably theirs, but that wasn't the one they approached. They edged the end of the ladder toward the closest vehicle and used it to knock on the van's window a few times. The door opened, pushing on the end of the ladder and knocking them onto their asses again. The guy that got out was greeted by a VERY strange sight! One that required him to reach into his van and grab his flashlight. After a quick review of the scene, he gave three parts of the scene a much more thorough review. The two captive reporters were too exhausted to move; they just lay there begging to be untied (I'm guessing that's what they were saying. It seems the most likely topic of conversation). Not taking his eyes off the well-lit ladder-straddling pussy, the hoped-for rescuer called back into his van, rousing his partner. While the second guy was getting out of the van, his elbow must've twice bumped the horn, because the sound of it going off shattered the quiet night. Mysterious really, because he was exiting the rear of the van at the time. Thinking something noteworthy must be happening, the other reporters boiled out of their vans and car. To discover that, yes indeed, something noteworthy WAS happening. They immediately decided that it was both noteworthy and picture-worthy, returning to their vehicles to quickly fetch a very professional array of still and video cameras. No notebooks though, so I might have been wrong about it being noteworthy. The knots I'd tied were extremely tight, so undoing them was very difficult, especially when everyone was standing three or four feet in the front of the victims with hands busy with an impressive array of cameras. Dallas wasn't too upset, maybe because he wasn't being photographed much, but poor Grace was bawling her eyes out. She must've been a remarkably well hydrated woman at the start of the evening, because she'd produced copious amounts of tears during the last five hours. If she wasn't careful, she'd wash the dirt off her front, giving the camera operators even better shots. #17: After the initial flurry of excited photography, two of the guys grabbed either end of the ladder and hoisted the captives to their feet. This clearly upset one of the captives considerably, but the opening up of new points of view proved to be very inspirational for the photographers. Some of them zoomed right in close to better record the violation that the ladder rung was committing on Grace. I couldn't understand why she was so upset, since surely she of all people was aware that public has a right to know! Not to mention that she'd participated in the violation of my four parents' privacy, so she presumably considered violating privacy to be an acceptable journalistic technique. Probably about the time he was running low on film, or maybe he was just smarter, one guy bent down behind Grace to untie her feet. He got nowhere, perhaps because he wasn't looking at what he was doing. Another couple of guys tried to help from the front of Grace's feet, having the same lack of success, for the same reason. No one was helping Dallas - everyone was too busy working on the knots, or supervising the working on the knots, at the other end of the ladder. I had to admire how long the guys tried to untie Grace's feet. From what I could see, the original guys must've gotten tired because they let the other guys have turns too. When they'd all tried long enough to decide it couldn't be done, one of them fetched a knife. He bent down, cut Grace's feet free, and then looked up, perhaps hoping to see Grace's smile. Grace kept her legs together, so the knife wielder eventually got to his feet and walked around behind her, cutting her hands free. The moment she was cut free, and the ladder dropped between her legs, Grace leaped over it, staggering and nearly falling because her legs were so stiff (there was a lot of that going around). She managed to recover, then hobbled on her sore legs for her van. Running from locked door to locked door got her nothing, so she went to another van and helped herself to a blanket from it. She wrapped up in it, holding it tightly closed in front of her. Which is when she noticed her rings were missing. She looked at her bare fingers in disbelief, then collapsed in a sobbing, blanket-covered heap on the ground. Meanwhile the other guys had cut Dallas free, and were standing around chatting to him, some of them fetching him a blanket, spare clothes and coffee. One of the guys went to offer Grace a coffee, which she was too distraught to accept, even though she had a bucket worth of hydration to recover. Fifteen minutes later half the crowd and Dallas grabbed flashlights and started heading toward where I was hiding. They were presumably on the way to search for all the missing stuff, but I was in their path so I had to move. It was not long to dawn, so it was a good time for me to cautiously make my way back to my tent. All things considered, it'd been a thoroughly enjoyable night's activity, especially for the ladder. ------- Chapter 305: Working on Dual Sight Blobs Sunday, May 7 to Wednesday, May 31, 2006 I rode my bike around to Ava's fairly early. I didn't want to disturb her if she was sleeping, so I stopped a street away to send a sight blob to check on her. I did need to stop, as riding my bike was not a good time to shut my eyes or to experiment with my inability to handle superimposed sight. Ava was snoozing, so I ended up spending half an hour riding around town before a check showed her to be out of bed. She was in the shower, so I let her know I was in the area (you can imagine for yourself how I did that), let myself into the house - unlocking doors from the inside is SO easy - then joined her in the shower. We did the dirty deed and washed ourselves clean at the same time. Then we decided to do them separately because that's even more fun. After we'd changed the sheets, had another shower and breakfast, it was 10:30. I hadn't wanted to appear too eager to visit the mansion, and I hadn't been too eager to stop what I was doing with Ava either, especially because she needed some happiness in her life. Ava called Julia, who said it was fine for us to come over. While we drove through a press pack that was triple yesterday's peak size, I tried to spot Grace, Dallas or their van. There was no sign of them, which made me smile. No doubt I wasn't the only one smiling about their adventure; it'd be a journalistic legend by now. Prof's debuggers were all over the place, and had found nothing so far. [Finding more nothing all day long.] I got Prof to bring the debuggers' boss to the noisy living room. I waited at the far end, away from everyone else. Prof introduced me, then I asked the boss to confirm, "Are you REALLY sure this room is clean, even against CIA-level bugs?" "We're sure. Most of our work is commercial, but we've uncovered bugs planted by government agencies many times before. Detecting electronic devices is intrinsically easier than hiding them." "Okay. Do the press outside know what your team is doing in here?" The debuggers' vehicle was unmarked, so the press probably didn't know. "Not from us, they don't." "In that case, on your way out please stop to tell them who you are and that no bugs were found." Prof looked interested, so I explained, "There was a little excitement among the press last night, and I want them to think it was probably caused by the CIA coming to retrieve their bugs in advance of these guys arriving. Is that okay with you?" "What was the excitement?" asked Prof, more out of curiosity than any doubt that it was okay to blame the CIA for anything. "A couple of the press were standing on a ladder behind the south wall and using a parabolic microphone to listen to what was being said in the two master bedrooms. They were interrupted and lost all their gear. I'm sure every press-person out there knows about it by now, so it'd be good if they thought it was the CIA's doing." To the debuggers' boss, I said, "If you could mention that your visit was booked a few days ago and imply that there were bugs until recently, that'd work very nicely." "There's no indication of that, but I can imply something similar, if Prof agrees?" "Fine by me," agreed Prof. ^ I later gave the four parents more details, apologizing for having listened to the recording, saying, "I had to know what the guy heard before I decided what to do with him. It was lucky for him and his loved ones that none of you said anything you shouldn't." I waited until I saw that they all understood the implication of that, then continued, "My only worry was that none of you sounded sufficiently worried. You were lighthearted, which would've come across as strange. Please sound more sober for a while." Prof added, "We should turn our radios on while we're talking too." "That'd be good too. On a lighthearted note, let me tell you what happened to the snoops..." I gave them a short, but nonetheless very explicit description. "Oh dear," said Mom, confused whether to be sympathetic or amused. Dad was neither confused nor sympathetic. He was regretful that he hadn't been there to see it though. Mom was sufficiently amused not to take umbrage at that. Prof and Vanessa were also amused, but concerned that I might've brought suspicion down on us. I answered, "Possibly, but I had to listen to that tape and I had to keep the two of them on ice until I had listened to it. Once I knew they hadn't heard anything that screwed us, I didn't want to kill them, so I had to choose how to let them go. What I did seemed to be the work of at least two people and seemed very professional, because they never had a clue anyone was near them. Stealing every single thing they had on them was better than my just stealing their sound gear and tapes, because doing that might've indicated that you guys were behind the theft and that you had something you feared being heard. And it also slowed them down for hours, which might imply that whoever did it needed them out of the way for hours. Someone inside our families didn't need any time, so that implies outsiders did it. What I did was so embarrassing that I don't think it'll be reported on the news or to the police, which they probably would have done if I'd just robbed them and left them to wake up. I can't keep doing that sort of thing, so you need to hire some security to patrol the walls. The media circus is even bigger now, so they're likely to act even more crazy and intrusive." Dad acted on that immediately, looking up the number for and calling the same company that'd done a good job of guarding our two houses after our casino win. Dad requesting, "Starting as soon as you can get here, please." I also told the story to Julia and Carol, who weren't the least bit sympathetic. I described the mistake the parents had made by being too lighthearted, what would've had to happen had any of the parents made an even bigger mistake, and cautioned the girls to mind what they said even after the debuggers had gone. On the topic of speaking cautiously, people did occasionally call me Mark by mistake. We covered it up by occasionally calling Andrew or Robert "Mark", or "Ron", or each other's names. Similarly Donna sometimes got called "Carol", vice versa, and other combination of mistaken names. We tried not to overdo it suspiciously. Otherwise it was a fairly uneventful day. TV made for interesting watching as many more facts had been confirmed by now, including many that the Government had been trying to keep unconfirmed. Blood was in the water, and the press sharks were going for the kill. With the ship so clearly sinking, people were leaking information in self-righteous self-defense. Bush (to use the name Dad uses when he's trying to restrain himself), had yet to make an appearance. A spokesperson had promised the President would make a statement, "Probably tomorrow afternoon. It is the weekend, you know?" Pretty much every other government in the world had managed to make a statement or three, regardless of it being the weekend. CNN played that for laughs (very unusually for CNN), by having their talking-head call their reporter in London to confirm it was the weekend over there too, then shake his head in dismay that the English government was able to respond to an American crisis on a weekend, but the American government could not. ------- For the next couple of weeks, my life was uncomplicated. Interesting, but uncomplicated. There were really only four things happening: My job as a mechanic reached its two-week point in the middle of the week and I declined to continue the trial, deciding instead to work full-time in Vanessa's garden. The boss was unhappy, demanding that I work out my notice. Once I got over the surprise, I told him, "Take it out of my pay," and walked out. For the purposes of maintaining my cover, I'd already gotten a good reference from BB, so the boss didn't matter. He was only trying it on anyway. Toward the end of the two weeks, I started publicly trying to seduce Carol. VERY publicly, including meeting her outside school every day with flowers taken from her own home's garden and made into bouquets for me by Vanessa. Everyone was being very helpful, including giving me time off work. "Dodge-Gate" became a major international and national disgrace. An international disgrace because America had breached what should've been a sacrosanct treaty and had put the whole world at risk by creating uncontrollable weapons of mass destruction. A national disgrace because tens of millions of American lives had knowingly been put at risk from an accident. The fact that a catastrophic accident HAD occurred - destroying the lab and presumably hundreds of millions of dollars of investment - hadn't engendered confidence in the ability of the Government to avoid accidents. (When the media had started chasing down the emails I'd leaked, they'd been delighted to find that the Fort Dodge lab had very recently suffered some kind of major disaster. The Government wasn't saying what or how.) I continued to spend a lot of hours working on the subconscious/conscious integration of something that might eventually get me to the point where I can operate a sight blob while my eyes are open, or two sight blobs when my eyes are closed. I'll discuss each of these in more detail below. ------- I'll assume you're not particularly interested in Vanessa's gardening plan, so I'll skip going into any details about my job. I will mention one initially very scary point. An occupational hazard to being a garden laborer is getting scratched and bleeding. The first time that happened, the cut was a surprise as sudden cuts always are, but FAR more surprising was when my blood came out GRAY! It had a pinkish tinge, but was a LONG way from being red. Other than the shocking change of color, it behaved much like ordinary blood. It was a little runnier than normal, but that was the least of my concerns! The fact that I wasn't already dead through a "blood malfunction"(!) was good news, and I did feel perfectly healthy - which for me means VERY healthy - but nonetheless, my blood was GRAY! The cut stopped bleeding very quickly, leaving me nothing to do but scratch my head, make a mental note not to let doctors get a blood sample from me EVER again, then get back to work. ^ [[I did correctly guess the reason for my blood's color. All of my body's energy needs were now being supplied by the Universe, so my cells needed very little oxygen delivered to them. It wasn't as simple as my body no longer producing red blood cells because that would've had other affects, such as my blood losing a very unhealthy proportion of its volume and viscosity. Quite a few changes had been made, which had taken several weeks. Bodies contain a huge number of biofeedback mechanisms that can subconsciously or chemically adapt to handle many strange circumstances, especially to do with processing oxygen, as the demand for and supply of that can be highly variable. It's important that our bodies handle oxygen correctly since it's both essential to our life and poisonous to it. It wasn't just my blood that'd changed. The blood production process obviously changed too, producing far fewer red cells. To keep the blood volume up, my body produced more infection-fighting white cells, more repair-making stem cells, and other useful components. The other end of the process changed too: at the cellular level there was a greatly reduced delivery of oxygen and the need to remove of carbon dioxide, and an almost total elimination of the need to recharge ATP molecules (think of them as the cells' internal batteries). Recharging ATP is a phenomenally major cellular activity, as every day a body recharges a total of half of its body weight in ATP molecules, so its now being unnecessary for me greatly reduced my intracellular activity. Several other intracellular changes occurred too, either as a result of the new energy delivery system, or as second-level effects. Some of the cells' activities are hard-coded and unable to adapt, but many of them are driven by cycles that contained feedback loops, so when their activity levels reduced, other intra- and inter-cellular activities became more effective. Repairing DNA is a good example. The DNA in each cell is damaged about ten thousand times a day, so cells put a lot of effort into repairing their DNA. It's an important job, so my cells being able to perform it much more efficiently - as their other workloads had reduced dramatically - was a long-term good thing for me.]] ^ My gardening cut healed very quickly, which made me curious about what my healing rate compared to other people was now. I didn't inflict my scientific curiosity on Julia and Carol this time, experimenting only on myself. It took a couple of days, but I learned that my body now naturally healed about 12 times faster than what I estimated ordinary people did. Three merges ago it'd healed 3 times faster, so if my healing rate had doubled each time it should've been 24 times faster now, but I guess limiting factors were slowing down the doubling process. [[That logic was mostly wrong. From 3 times faster three merges ago, my natural healing rate after the subsequent merges was respectively: 4 times, 6 times and now 12 times faster, mostly determined by how much of my blood volume could be occupied by stem cells, which was determined by the amount of my energy I could get from the Universe instead of from food. However, I was right that twelve times faster was about the top end of my body's natural healing speed.]] I was continually radiating ki as part of my training to increase my conscious ki tapping, so it'd been easy to redirect that to one of two similar cuts. Kiatsu seemed to double my healing rate while it was being supplied, which would give me a healing rate 24 times faster than normal people. Presuming the kiatsu healing bonus fully applied to broken bones, a broken arm that might take other people two months (60 days) to heal, I could heal in 2.5 days. Not as good as Hollywood's special effects, but still pretty damned miraculous as far as I was concerned. Plus my body could also regenerate fingers, grow shorter or taller, change color, change the type of hair it grew, etc. Those abilities might turn out to be far more important to me in the long term than faster healing, because if I live an extraordinarily long time it will almost certainly be better for me to change identities several times than persist with one identity. Another experiment I did get my girls to help me with was repeating my hot tub test for how long I could hold my breath underwater. My result had been quite ordinary last time, but I had a suspicion that it wouldn't be now, and that the girls would enjoy it. I sat on the bottom for one minute, two, three, four, five, ... No discomfit at all. I even got bored, but fortunately there were a couple of interesting things to play with, which also entertained the girls. I came up after fifteen minutes just because there didn't seem to be any point to staying down there any longer. The girls were even more amazed when I told them, "I suspect I could've stayed down there all night. I don't think I need to breathe any longer." They thought I was very impressive in a weird sort of way, but I insisted I was just very weird in an impressive way. They suggested that the lack of oxygen had damaged my sense of humor. I didn't want to do a longer test because I was worried that something might go wrong. I was pretty sure I didn't need oxygen as part of the energy supply process, but maybe human bodies need oxygen, nitrogen or one of the other components of air for another reason, without which bad things would happen. I googled "lungs" to see if they had any function beyond getting oxygen into the body and the consequent carbon dioxide out of it. They do have half a dozen other functions, but they would all continue to work fine regardless of whether I was breathing or not. As best I could tell from my rudimentary research, it appeared that I could hold my breath forever or until I wanted to talk. Despite my casual research's findings, being able to hold my breath for long periods wasn't sufficiently useful for me to take the risk of suddenly dying or suffering more subtle damage. Breathing was too much of a habit and it required conscious effort not to breathe. It was merely interesting to confirm that my body was getting all its energy from the Universe, rather than from food. ------- My seduction of Carol was considerably more fun. If you'll forgive my lack of modesty for the moment, I must be an even smoother operator than I thought, because it was going extraordinarily well, although I must admit to having a great deal of difficulty separating Carol from Julia and Ava. Never mind, I'll just have to take the good with the good and the other good. When I greeted Carol outside school on one of the first days, a group of her classmates yelled, "She's a lesbian, dummy!" It being a facetious comment meant that this dimension's Mark had been unable to resist making it part of his "I Love Carol" speech too. I used the comeback I'd thought of in advance. I loudly replied, "Have I bitten off more than I can lick?", which earned me quite a few laughs. Carol requested that I not bite anything off, Julia offered to give me lessons, and everyone else was very amused and impressed by my wit and confidence. To everyone at school's surprise, Carol started telling people she was interested in me, running to hug me when I greeted her after school, kissing me, etc. (although not much of that "etc." was in public). Seeing her interest in me, many of her 'friends' said, "But he's Black and a boy." Talking to a lesbian, those pejoratives should have been presented the other way around, presuming my Blackness had to be mentioned at all. How often they were said as quoted was sad. That I was poor was often mentioned too. Carol's answer was, "He makes me happy, and Ava says he's good in bed." The first time Carol added the last point caused shock, as intended. Carol added, "I saw how wonderful Ava and Julia were when they shared Mark, so I know guys can be shared and I know Ava's very good at it. Ava's already my lover, so if Ron and I get along well, I'll want to share him with Ava. We'll have a threesome just like Mark, Julia and Ava used to." [I imagine I'm not spoiling the surprise by telling you that that's what ended up happening. That it was really a foursome with Julia was something we kept publicly hidden because she was Mark's girlfriend, and we later started downplaying Ava's involvement too, making it seem a normal relationship between Carol and me, to avoid my lifestyle resembling Mark's too much.] While the public perception was that I was slowly wooing Carol, things were very different in private. The evening the debuggers declared the Main House and Mark's Wing free of bugs, the four of us went to Mark's big bed and fucked like rabbits who'd missed each other very, very much. The girls took my new body in their stride (to be more accurate, they took it where each of their strides joined). As soon as the media storm abated, I officially moved into the spare bedroom in the mansion and made very good use of the tunnel. A couple of weeks after that, I moved my stuff into Mark's bedroom. Amusingly, what had been initially publicly designated as "Carol's Bedroom", now became publicly re-designated as "Julia's Bedroom". As had been the case with Carol, the public designation had zero correlation to how it was really used, which was almost never. Once I was back to living in my own home, I still didn't resume studying. I appeared to sleep eight hours per night, just like my bedmates. I had decided never to go online to OSU again, as that'd be asking for trouble, but I would've liked to be able to lay in bed with successive sets of seven of my many textbooks open on my study desk with me remotely flicking through them as I read. Unfortunately I was too fearful of the CIA to do 'magical' things like that, so I was keeping all of those abilities well hidden. I did take advantage of my control over my sleep to do it in thirty minute multiples. I'd wake, use a sight blob to check the property and houses for intruders, then order myself back to sleep. ------- I'll mention the sight blob practice I was doing, before describing the much larger Dodge-Gate topic. Back when I'd been deep in the woods with my LA gangster prisoners, my subconsciouses had started showing my conscious minds some of the things they [the subconsciouses] were doing. Initially that'd just involved some of my ki abilities, but once I'd gotten over the confusion and had understood what was happening, I'd been consciously motivated to expand the initial group. One new area I've already mentioned was my having conscious control over the laying down of new bone material. It was more of a prioritization process than precise control, but it worked well enough to speed up my body re-shaping, including growing my missing finger back again. My having the sight blob ability was fantastic. It had literally been a lifesaver when I had been chained up with Prof and when locked in the CIA's lab, but having to close my eyes to use one was often a pain in the ass. I'd LOVE to be able to use even ONE sight blob at the same time as my eyes were open. Considering I could create 32^2 (= 1,024) sight blobs, wanting to have just one going at the same time as my eyes wasn't asking too much, was it? I was VERY conscious of the desire to overcome the superimposition problem, so my subconscious minds let me know that there was a second area of my brain that processed sight input (I mentioned it much earlier in this autobiography, about blind people catching things thrown at them). It had previously been a purely subconscious center that I'd never had any conscious inkling that I possessed. I was very surprised and happy when my subconsciouses made me consciously aware of it. That was only the beginning of a long process. It took me a confusing couple of weeks to get used to being consciously aware of having two 'screens' in my head, especially because what they showed was very different. They showed the same scene - they had to as the input was coming from the same eyes at the same time, the signal being split and sent to both sight centers simultaneously - but they saw it quite differently. To give a simple (although incorrect) example, color is seen by the eye, converted into electrical signals, and sent into the brain for thinking about. The image is 'reassembled' aspect-by-aspect by the brain, in a process extremely dissimilar to my movie theatre screen metaphor because that implies the entire picture remains intact when it's 'projected'. The subconscious visual processing center could produce very different looking images just by not having some of the re-assembly routines, such as not being able to re-assemble some of the colors. It had color (I used that as an easy example, because you're familiar with the effects of adding or subtracting color from pictures), but it lacked other functions. For examples: it couldn't recognize faces, it couldn't be used to anticipate visual situations more than about a second ahead, it couldn't see circles properly, and it was poor at virtually everything more than a dozen yards away (it could see things in the distance, just not process them well). Driving a car with it would've been a disaster. On the other hand, it was VERY good for judging widths (better than my conscious visual processing center), and EXTREMELY good at judging relative velocities of nearby objects. In other words, it might as well have been alien! It'd be an exaggeration to say it was like seeing the world in two entirely different ways at the same time, but that would've been easier that what I was going through now. It was half the same and half freakily different, which was very weird to deal with. However, it did offer the wonderful possibility being able to handle a sight blob for me. [[A little clarification. I've called them the conscious and subconscious visual processing centers. That refers only to my previous level of awareness about them, not to how they were and still are used. For example, there are countless ways in which the subconscious influences, and is influenced by, the conscious visual processing center. For example, if you expect to see someone, you often misidentify people as the expected person. Or sports teams that wear black uniforms get more penalties than teams with light colored uniforms, because in western societies the referees/umpires subconsciously associate black with bad. For ease of reference, I'm going to refer to the processing center that I've been consciously aware of all my life as "Visual Processing Center A" (or some reduction of that), and the previously only subconsciously accessible center as "Center B".]] I knew I needed Center A for everyday use, to recognize faces for example, but maybe I could use Center B for sight blobs? I certainly hoped so! Back when I'd first started playing with sight blobs, I'd learned how to have my eyes open but stop any information being sent into my brain. As if I'd opened a switch in the wire that ran from my eyes to my visual processing centers. [[There are actually two such 'wires', one for each eye (the Optic Nerves), but it's easier to write the following as if they merge into a single wire, otherwise the English gets clumsy because it only has one level of pluralization.]] There isn't any such switch in the wire. What I'd done is turn off the preliminary processing that occurs behind each eye, so they had nothing to send further along the "seeing" process. I didn't know how, but I knew that sight blob information was somehow injected into the wire. The wire must split to go to the two visual processing centers, so I thought I should be able to move the point of injection to after the split, so the sight blob's information went only to Visual Center B. It took me only a couple of hours to learn to move the injection point to the right place, so I was suddenly getting the superimposition only in B; or if I closed my eyes, only seeing anything with B. It was a necessary first step, even though it was totally unworkable as is. Because I wasn't used to consciously processing B's information yet, superimposition in B was even MORE confusing than superimposition in A would've been. That didn't matter, because the immediate next step was to control the inputs to the two Visual Centers properly, to ensure B got the sight blob's information only, and A got my eyes only. In effect, to open a switch in the wire that led to B, after it'd split from the wire that led to A. There was no such switch; it was a solid, uninterrupted, nerve pathway (actually two, one for each eye, but I'm ignoring that in this explanation). To use a computer metaphor, brains are more like hardware than they are like software, and that's particularly true about things like nerve pathways, but it's not totally true. It'd be more accurate to call them "firmware", because they do have a degree of adaptability. People who've suffered physical brain damage, sometimes even very extensive damage, can learn to overcome the damage; "learn" meaning that the firmware changes. Our bodies already have the facility to do that, so my 'wishing for it' made it happen for me. It took a few days and a lot of hours of practice, but my brain finally grew the desired switches. This was while I was guarding my gangster prisoners, so I had many uninterrupted hours of practice at night while they were sleeping. Now I could finally have my eyes open and Visual Center A was operating based on their information; while I had a sight blob operating and sending its information to Visual Center B. Center B was strange, but I thought it was only a matter of getting used to it. YIPPEE! Five seconds later I tripped on a tree root and fell on my face. It turns out that people REALLY need Visual Center B in order to perform physical tasks, like walking around, picking things up, etc. I could now use a sight blob with my eyes open, but only if I wasn't doing anything that involved movement, spatial judgment, or physical coordination of any sort. And it wasn't ideal sight-blobbing either, because Visual Center B didn't see things 'right'. So I'd achieved getting two sight sources working simultaneously, but neither of them working well. At most, my "Yippee!" had to be reduced to a "Yip!" and even that's being charitable. Some more experimenting let me learn that Visual Center B was best at things that a primate would need when swinging from branch to branch through a forest. [[That's what it'd evolved for. Walking on the ground is slow, but things happen fast when swinging through the trees; too fast for conscious processing.]] Visual Center A was best at more cerebral tasks, like recognizing faces, analyzing things in the distance, etc. So in some respects the sight blob information should've gone to A, with normal sight to B. The trouble was the B was far too rudimentary. Its many deficiencies made it obviously impractical to use as the sole source of visual processing when moving my body around. Because I was consciously used to A, I hadn't realized that A's unobvious deficiencies made it unsuitable as the sole source of visual processing for moving my body around too. I had to send my eyes' input to both A and B, which meant it'd superimpose with any sight blob input. The "Yip!" got canceled and replaced with "BUGGER!" After some thought, I decided that my brain should be (fingers crossed) flexible enough to adapt. I embarked on a LONG, shin-bruising program of coercing my brain to change. As often as possible, I opened the switch so B stopped getting any information from my eyes, forcing A to do everything. Initially, I did that only when I had no tasks at all (like when I was lying in bed), or only very simple tasks (like walking in a straight line with nothing in the way). I took it slowly and carefully, but I still had frequent mishaps, especially when I needed to react to something unexpected. I also did a great deal of sight blobbing, hoping that Visual Center B would improve its deficiencies too. I was pinning my strategy on two - what I hoped were - facts: my brain was very adaptable (brains are, it's called "neuroplasticity", mine is especially so); and if my brain had routines for doing things based on the information it got from Center A, then it should be able to duplicate those routines around B, and vice versa. Every time I banged my shin because B was turned off, it should reinforce my brain's desire to build better spatial processing around A. Every time a sight blob looked at a person (e.g., my prisoners), and was annoyingly unable to recognize them, that should reinforce my brain's desire to build functions like that around B. Most of the time I needed to perform at full function - I'd needed to recognize my prisoners, for example, because I was intending to become one of them - but I practiced with the annoyingly limited functionality as often as I could, hoping to force my brain to adapt enough so that both Visual Centers became independently useful. It took weeks, but I did finally start to 'see' some progress. [[If any of my readers can't imagine how it could be possible for the two Visual Centers to be so different, I recommend "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales", by Oliver Sacks. A collection of short stories about people with neurological problems not too dissimilar to what I've been discussing. The title story is about a man who honestly perceived and believed his wife to be a hat, as his wife-recognition circuit had got connected to what he knew about hats. Sadly, the book never discusses their sex-life, but it's otherwise a very interesting read. What we see, and believe about what we see, is much more an artifact of how the brain works than most people's brains tell them (that's not really a joke).]] ------- Chapter 306: Ambushing Bush Sunday, May 7 to Wednesday, May 31, 2006 (Continued) Dodge-Gate merits having more of its details mentioned. President Bush's promised appearance on Monday afternoon boiled down to his saying, "The CIA has exceeded its authority by using their secret funding to get into areas of research that were prohibited by my administration. As God is my witness, I'm determined to stop the diversion of funds into areas of research that this administration unhesitatingly rejects blah, blah..." I'd read some of the memos he'd sent Ernesto Elliott, so I knew he was talking a big, smelly, crock of shit. On the other hand, what else could he have said? By Monday afternoon hundreds of the facts mentioned in my emails had been confirmed and none had been found to be false. The purpose of the recently destroyed Fort Dodge lab was now inarguable, so the entire issue came down to who was to blame for its existence. Bush could've put up his hand and said he knew about the lab, had approved its research, and thereby have taken responsibility for its illegal actions. Or he could've lied. There was no way he was ever going to admit he'd known - and therefore allowed - an illegal lab, especially not when its own documents talked about the risk of its killing tens of millions of registered voters and their children. Bush chose to make America look like an asshole of a nation to avoid his taking any responsibility at all for something that he was totally responsible for, and could've shut down at any time during his presidency. I knew Bush's denial meant he was an asshole. He was producing so much shit that he couldn't be anything else. Judging from my school-life, the world is full of assholes and I'd ordinarily do what I always did: avoid them. But this case was very different. Bush headed the Government that had kidnapped me and would've experimented me to death, and I'd heard over a dozen legal experts on various channels saying, "The DHS's and CIA's treatment of Mark Anderson was illegal." I couldn't pin my mistreatment on Bush, but I could prove he was lying about the illegal biochem lab, so I'd make sure some of that shit stuck to the asshole. It came down to a very simple issue to me: if the Government had their mistakes publicized, they'd be less likely to abuse their power in the future. If that'd happened more in the last few years, I might not have grieving families in three-quarters of my recent dimensions and be stuck doing gardening all day long instead of developing what could have turned out to be a fascinating scientific career. [[For years I'd tried to run away from assholes and bullies; sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. About a year ago I finally started standing up for myself when assholes and bullies came to me; always succeeding. This was the first time in my life I was proactively 'taking it to them', starting with the most powerful President in the world. It was an important decision for me.]] I asked Vanessa, "Can I borrow some blank paper from your office please?" "Help yourself, Ron." I reproduced by hand the three presidential memos that I'd read in EE's (Ernesto Elliott's) office, labeling them "Presidential Memo", giving the White House Document Numbers, To, From, Date and other header information, as well as all the text. I wrote on the bottom of each, "signed by George W. Bush." The most damning memo raked the Associate Director (EE) over the coals for allowing the destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, setting America's biological weapon development program back several years at the cost of hundreds of more millions, losing the lives of over two hundred valuable scientists and other staff, and especially for letting unknown enemy agents steal ALL the lab's bioweapon data and samples. Bush had ranted for two paragraphs about the international security consequences of the thefts, mentioning the "very real danger of the weapons being used against Americans." The closing paragraph was a collection of scathing comments about EE's incompetence. Bush had obviously been pissed off when he wrote it. The "enemy agents" aspect had never been mentioned on TV, as the Government had just said that there'd been an unspecified accident at Fort Dodge. That's partly why the "tens of millions of Americans could die in an accident" was scaring so many people. The media could see the "unspecified accident" was a big one, but if they'd known what the President (thought he) knew, the media would have been screaming even louder. I returned to the living room, saying, "Steven, Felicity, Prof, Vanessa, can I show you something over here please?" Julia considered herself invited too. She was the shortest, so I gave the pages to her to hold so the parents could read over her shoulders. The best one was on top, so it didn't take long for Dad to say, "FUCK! Did the..." I cut him off by NP'ing his lips together, giving Dad quite a surprise. He got the idea though: there were other people in the living room that we didn't want to know. I said, "I saw the original paper versions." "So he knows?" asked Mom. "Totally. Probably has for years." Prof asked, "Are all the details correct? The Document Number especially?" "Yes. They're perfect copies. I memorized them deliberately." Prof pointed to the "enemy agent" phrase, asking me, "You?" "Yeah. Smoke and mirrors. I think they still think that, but I can't be sure." "He was sure of it on February 21. Either way, there'd still be a great deal of impact from this. Show us the next one, Julia." Julia was busy hugging me in admiration of my ability to fuck the President, so she had to let me go to find out if I could fuck him in two different ways. I let them read the next two. They both postdated the first rant, and were less emotional in tone, but they were on the same theme and just confirmed some of the points in the first. Prof said, "I'm going to burn these now, okay?" There were no objections, so Prof threw them on the fire and stood over them until they were gone. Later that evening, when the visitors had all gone, Vanessa said, "You showed us those pages for a purpose, Ron?" "Yes. I don't think you'll ever be able to lay responsibility for what happened to Mark at his feet, but he shouldn't be allowed to lie his way out of everything." We discussed how they should be used. Vanessa had the best idea. We didn't know that the essential prerequisite for her plan would definitely happen, but the issue was big enough that we thought it would. We'd sit on the memos while we waited for it. Pressure built daily, and after only a couple of days it was announced that Bush would be interviewed about Dodge-Gate on TV. Not live, very unfortunately, but even a pre-recorded interview would probably be good enough for us. The network and interviewer chosen to get the interview had a slight tendency to support Bush's Republican Party, but not as fanatically as Fox. Presumably they were chosen to give the interview the appearance of fairness and legitimacy. We would've done the same thing regardless of the network chosen, but we were happy it was a relatively middle-of-the-road one. I flew the 1,500 miles to Oklahoma City, found a computer left on in the DMV that was within twenty four feet of the wall so I could type the easiest [I later practiced typing just as fast from outside my proximity range - touch-typing, to misuse that phrase], and I sent an email to the producer of the show which: Identified myself as the original sender of the Dodge-Gate emails to the media. I wasn't using the same email address as last time, as the CIA, DHS, and God knows who else would have their hooks into that email address by now, and would probably be intercepting all emails from it. But to make this email seem more authentic, but without specifying the exact address in case that triggered an interception, I wrote, "For those emails I used a semi-majestic countdown address." (It'd been ljesjtc321@gmail.com.) Stated I was using a 'borrowed' computer again. Provided my retyped reproductions of the three presidential memos to Ernesto Elliott. Ended with, "If you want your network to continue to receive newsworthy facts from me in the future, use the above information well in the presidential interview." One of the worst things about biological weapons - probably THE worst thing - is that they don't exempt Republicans. That's my tongue-in-cheek way of saying that even among Republicans, Bush's popularity was now at an all time low. Vanessa had predicted that even his own party would have to distance itself from him soon, otherwise they'd be dragged down too far with him. She also predicted that the TV networks would be even less loyal to Bush, or their viewer numbers would drop too much. They also couldn't ally themselves with a dead duck like Bush at the cost of cutting themselves off from the source of the biggest story in months (so implied my last bullet point), so they should use the information well. If not, we'd send it to everyone else and see what happened, which should still be spectacular. We gathered around the TV to watch the interview. It started with the usual soft-pedaling, easily answered fluff (probably more accurately called "soft-peddling"). Bush's position was that the CIA had exceeded their authority, and that it appeared to be the fault of two senior CIA managers. "I'd like to say more," he said sincerely, "but there's an ongoing investigation." There was lots of meaningless crap, such as Bush assuring the public that there was no risk whatsoever, "We have the situation under complete control and the cleanup is going wonderfully well," something I knew was the exact opposite of the truth, especially as there wasn't actually any "clean up", merely a search and recovery operation. Several minutes were wasted explaining how the CIA's budget and expenditure had been kept secret for many years by every administration, and the necessity for that, which in this circumstance excused Bush and all his senior staff from having any knowledge and responsibility. It was, he clearly explained, a terrible, internal CIA judgment error. The interviewer let Bush answer anyhow he liked, unchallenged until about three-quarters of the way through the interview time, when the interviewer asked, "So one or more Government employees took it upon themselves to put tens of millions of American lives at risk." "It's still early days in the investigation, but that appears to be the case." "Heads will roll, I imagine?" "They sure will." "Will the people responsible immediately lose their jobs? Will they have to apologize to the nation?" "We'll decide on that when all the facts are known." "How far up the chain of command do you think the abuse went?" "It's too early to say. We're still hard at work investigating that." "Maybe we can help," offered the interviewer, passing Bush a single page. The most incriminating of the three memos appeared on a large screen behind Bush for all the viewers to read. It was NOT made up to look like a real presidential memo, so there was no letterhead, signature, etc., but the To and From fields making it clear what it was. It was labeled with "Unverified" across the top, and the reference to "enemy agents" and the two paragraphs that ranted about the security implications of that were there, but were totally blacked out. We could see that there were paragraphs there, but not what they said. You had to admire Bush's facial control; he showed no reaction whatsoever. The interviewer stated, "Do you recall sending that memo to Ernesto Elliott, an Associate Director of the CIA and the man in charge of the Fort Dodge facility, on February 21, two days after what we can read was the lab's total destruction?" "I'd have to get someone to check the files on that." "That's the strongest language I've ever seen accusing someone of incompetence. Are so many people in your administration THAT incompetent that you honestly can't remember your using language that strong only two months ago?" A brief pause, during which Bush chose not to respond. "Or is it that you're incompetent yourself? Or is it that when you told the nation two minutes ago that the CIA exceeded its authority without your knowledge, that you were lying to us all? Are you, SIR, a bald-faced liar?" In a forced, controlled manner, Bush said, "I agreed to appear on your show for an honest exchange, not to be subjected to ambush journalism. This interview is over." Bush removed his mic, stood up and walked out. Once Bush was out of sight, the interviewer turned to the camera, stating, "Tonight I'm ashamed to be an American, and I wish to extend my apologies to the civilized nations of this world; a group that no longer includes this country. Our President broke an international treaty designed to prevent Hell on Earth, putting billions of innocent men, women and children at risk of appalling suffering. -- "At the other end of the scale, but equal proof of this administration's depravity, an innocent 16-year old boy was kidnapped off the streets by the sickly named 'Homeland Security' and subject to weeks of illegal medical experiments until dying while in the CIA's 'care'. Could America prove itself to be any LESS civilized than it has tonight? -- "We believe the document you saw on the big screen to be authentic, but we're still in the process of verifying it. It was sent to us by what appears to be the original source of the highly accurate Dodge-Gate documents, and you saw that President Bush did not deny its reality. If the document is authentic, then for the last twenty minutes President Bush was deliberately lying to all of you." That was the end of the pre-recorded segment of the show. There was a live commentary tacked on the end about how the Government had been fighting hard to prevent the show's broadcast ever since its being recorded in the afternoon, and how that network had been forced to redact some of the memo, "for national security reasons," the saying of which was stressed in a way that gave considerable weight to the memo's legitimacy. After we stopped celebrating the success of the am'Bush', we had to decide whether to send copies of the three memos to the other networks. [[It was a measure of the respect that the President was held in, that the network chose to use the memo as an ambush. Introducing the memos that way had been irresistibly Good TV, where "Good TV" means the network thought it was the best way to improve their ratings and therefore advertising revenue.]] There was a good reason not to spread the information, because the public would surely panic knowing that "unknown enemy agents" had so much bioweapon information and samples, especially because they'd already killed over two hundred people in their highly professional raid on the lab. "On the other hand," said Mom, "maybe the public needs to be panicked into action, to stop these abuses happening." Vanessa added, "It'll get out anyway, as dozens of people at the network must have seen the full version of the memo. I like the idea of disseminating them all quickly because it'll keep the networks on their toes if they know they can't sit on any information you send them." So the forestry department in Flagstaff, Arizona (only a 1,800-mile round trip) played their part in ensuring the public's right to know. Every major network plus the several bloggers that Prof had given me the email addresses for received all three memos. [By the way, I'd previously told my four parents that I could fly and would do so in order to spread out the locations from which I did such emailing. Unlike Ava, Julia and Carol, the parents didn't get taken on a flight until the media circus abated. To say they were impressed would be putting it mildly. I had some fun with it, telling Dad, "Imagine how good I could be at basketball now. I could fly back and forth over the heads of all the players." And to Mom, "Let me know whenever you want to visit Dad's parents in Seattle. I can have you there in less than twenty minutes, so you can go every day if you want."] I'd sent the memos to so many recipients that the White House was unable to muzzle them fast enough. The full, un-redacted versions quickly became public knowledge. That the lab's destruction had not been an accident as claimed, but the result of a raid by an enemy force, was soon confirmed. The CIA had already started searching the world extremely vigorously for the culprits, for any attempted sales or uses of the information, for purchases of necessary ingredients, etc. That search involved so many people that getting confirmation was relatively easy once the news organizations knew to look for it. The confirmations that Fort Dodge had been successfully raided by an unknown enemy caused a great deal of panic. Sales of gas masks skyrocketed, even though domestically available gas masks were useless against 99% of the stuff the lab had been designing. What would be the point in developing a bioweapon if publicly available gas masks could stop it? Even the best gas masks available wouldn't stop 90% of the stuff. Only full hazmat suits with a closed air supply provided protection, which weren't exactly something the public could obtain or wear 24/7. There were many VERY worried people and a GREAT deal of very heated rhetoric. That nearly three months had gone by and no one had released deadly plagues on America confused people, although the pessimists were sure it was because the terrorists were manufacturing large quantities of the diseases and the attack was going to happen any day now. One of the consequences I hadn't foreseen was that the nation's medical system was FLOODED by everybody who thought they had a symptom of anything. An amazingly large proportion of the population demonstrated hysterical stupidity by being sure they had "IT", resulting in long lines of noisily 'dying' people outside every doctor's clinic and hospital. The medical professionals had a couple of very bad weeks during the initial panic. Many people who needed to receive medical attention got either very rushed jobs or didn't get any attention at all, often with dire consequences. The medical community was BEGGING people to calm down, and the consequences of their not doing so were often reported, to encourage people to stop straining the system. That made me feel shitty. The international community's reactions to America's having developed bioweapon information and then having it stolen, thereby putting the whole world at risk, could be translated into American as, "Thanks a lot, you fucking assholes!" President Bush attempted to defend himself by claiming, "The program was for DEFENSE." "Then why does your memo abuse Ernesto Elliott for setting the bio-WEAPON development program back ten years? Nowhere in any of the information we've received is bio-DEFENSE mentioned." [[An oversight that was immediately corrected. All bio-weapon development programs were rendered politically correct and justifiable by being renamed to "Bio-Defense" programs. The use of the word "bioweapon" in official correspondence was a career-damaging mistake. (You didn't really think such research would stop, did you? America had enemies with state-of-the-art bioweapon information easily capable of killing tens of millions of people, so it was essential that America develop bio-defense measures easily capable of killing hundreds of millions.)]] [Vanessa's prediction about how the TV network would react to receiving the memos had been accurate, but she'd been considerably less accurate about what she thought would happen to Bush. As bizarre as it seems, in the months that followed Bush's being caught lying to everyone over such a heinous issue, the Republican Party just pretended that Bush didn't have any problems. They concentrated on showing the Democrats to be a bunch of two-faced incompetents, succeeding very well at that (the Democrats are politicians). It was just "business as usual" in Washington. No one was going to arrest Bush for his crime, he wasn't going to be re-elected anyway, and politicians certainly weren't going to impeach each other (that'd be a TERRIBLE precedent!), so my going public with the memos really made very little political difference, to my frustration.] ------- Chapter 307: Our Bio-Gate Strategy Sunday, May 7 to Wednesday, May 31, 2006 (Continued) In describing the results of Dodge-Gate, I put the events of the preceding chapters first because they were the most visible events, and because they were also the necessary first step in something my families were much more focused on: the presumed death of Mark Anderson. What I'll simply call the "Parents' Strategy" was mostly Vanessa's work, resulting from a great deal of thinking that she'd been doing. After she'd developed her basic idea, she'd discussed it with Prof and then my parents, and had gotten their agreements for it. The lawyers had agreed the strategy was legally feasible and had several tactical suggestions for how to implement the plan. My return and the leaking of the CIA file had been dramatic, but hadn't actually changed the direction Vanessa had already intended to go, other than making it much easier for her to go further than she'd previously thought possible. Once I'd turned up as Ron, Vanessa and the other parents had bounced their ideas of me and I'd wholeheartedly agreed with them. There were three initial stages to the strategy: To get the Fort Dodge disaster, and the DHS's and CIA's kidnapping of Mark Anderson, into the open and acknowledged as a fact. Start the process of building the "Mark Anderson Legend". Sue the Government. (Sovereign immunity doesn't provide the Government with total protection. Several types of lawsuits are permitted, such as for breach of contract, negligence, and breaching some constitutional rights. Pretty much all of my constitutional rights had been considerably more than breached.) Those were sequential steps, to be done one after the other. There were a couple of minor things going on throughout the entire process, such my family's publicly grieving and constantly asking for the CIA to "Come clean about what had happened to Mark, and to return him or even just his body so we can bury him decently." With so much media attention, the first stage didn't take long to achieve. My corner of the story was often bumped by the more important larger story, but the media craves human-interest angles, so I was often mentioned. Most importantly for the parents' strategy, the Government had been forced to admit that I'd been in the lab at the time of its destruction, and that I had been experimented on. They hadn't wanted to, but there were hundreds of media people chasing down the many named scientists who had described their experiments and results in my file. One of them had cracked under the pressure and went public saying he wanted everyone to know that he hadn't known I wasn't a volunteer. That started the flood of exactly equivalent comments from nearly all the other scientists and technicians. They were lying, but people do that when the entire world is pouring utter contempt and vitriolic accusations on them. The first stage having achieved the degree of success our strategy needed, we moved onto the second stage, which was going to be Julia's personal favorite. She'd loved boasting about me to the kids at school, and she'd soon be boasting about me to the whole world. Stage two started cerebrally, with my families commissioning urgent reports from MANY independent scientists into the results that were so well documented in my file. Thus far virtually none of it had been made public. The networks had it all, but it was scientific, and therefore Very Bad TV. The ostensible reason for my family to spread my experimental results around so widely was to get the experts to write reports on how special Mark was, to be used to pressure the CIA to return me or my body. The real reason was to create a wave of excitement across America about my value. All the information about me would've come out anyway (some scientists were already starting to make "He was amazing"-type comments), but it would've come out in bits and pieces spread over many weeks. The media has a SHORT attention span, so my families deliberately created the "wave" of scientific amazement. To exaggerate, we emailed my file to everyone in America who had a biology degree. It wasn't quite as much as that, but the number of recipients was definitely getting up there. For most of them, it took only one glance at the experimental results that were in their specialty for their interest to be hooked. For example, when an expert on EEGs saw my EEG data (many samples were attached to my file), his/her jaw dropped, and every other job ignored while my file was devoured. Same for nearly every other medical specialist for which there'd been a test on my body, from allergists through urologists. The omissions of dentists and gynecologists were more than compensated for by the WILD excitement of neurologists. The nephrological community was pissing themselves in excitement, endocrinologists were experiencing dopamine rushes, gastroenterologists were busting a gut to get hold of more information about me, etc. It'd been my family's ostensible intention to get the leading experts to write reports about my uniqueness and medical importance, and to use a collection of those reports to petition the court to order the CIA to return me or my body. My parents would claim that the uniqueness of my body made the CIA's failure to return it highly suspicious, because they'd doubtless want to keep experimenting on it, regardless of whether I was alive or dead. As it turned out, my parents just needed to sit back and watch. The sudden wave of excitement about the medical information in my file caused such a widespread clamor that it rose all the way up to the level of TV producers, who didn't understand a word of it but they knew something special was going on. When they asked for an explanation, in laymen terms, they couldn't believe their ears. They scrambled to produce a show to cash in on it, before some bastard beat them to it, as Good TV has to be First TV. Apparently truth has a use-by date. I'm not sure of the logic of that, but TV producers treat it as gospel so it must be how the world works. The various networks all came out with medical shows about me within a few days of each other. The shows were all much the same: a bunch of scientists would rave about bits of my body, struggling to explain the CIA's results in layman's terms. It boiled down to my body being REALLY healthy and well tuned, other than in a few areas that were FREAKILY abnormal, such as several of the neurological results, as well as some of my blood and cellular chemistry. [[My body needed 2.05 times as much energy as a normal human, most of which was needed to power my brain. I was also getting 60% of what a normal human needs supplied to me by the Universe, which was invisible to all the tests, but the 1.45 times extra energy usage wasn't spread evenly all over my body, so there were some very puzzling distortions in my blood and cellular chemistries.]] Bodies are - quite frankly - a TERRIBLE kludge of systems layered on other systems, intertwined with yet other systems, to cover up faults in other part-systems, etc. It's a miracle bodies can function at all. My body was just as haphazardly designed (by evolution's trial-and-error) as everybody else's, but that wasn't the issue. What mattered was how my body compared to other human bodies, and it compared REALLY well. Human bodies do an enormous amount of self-repair. In part because they get damaged so often (when you cut yourself, for example), but mostly because they're so badly designed that they're constantly wearing out and breaking down (at the microscopic level initially, but after several decades, at greater levels as the repair mechanisms themselves breakdown). So human self-repair mechanisms are amazingly good at their jobs, mine more so than anybody else's. EVERYTHING about my body was "more so than anybody else's," in large part because when you take a body that's already operating wonderfully, and then repair the hell out of it, you end up with a body that - to borrow one European-trained scientist's attempt to explain to laymen - "Is a Lamborghini in a world full of Trabants." The first network to produce a medical show about my results stole the initial limelight. Their show certainly conveyed how excited the scientists were, and how upset they were that the CIA couldn't or wouldn't give me back, because they would've LOVED to do some more tests on me - all VOLUNTARY, they adamantly insisted. The show failed to capture the viewing audience's imaginations though, other than a few particularly well-educated viewers. The second network's version of the same show fared no better. They both suffered from the problem that no matter how hard he tried, a guy raving about my pancreas couldn't get anyone excited, especially not the producer (as a group, TV producers aren't that interested in the pancreas; the liver being are a subject much closer to their hearts). It was the third network's production that hit the jackpot. The shows weren't broadcast live, as 95% of the material was so dull that the tapes had to be heavily edited to make a broadcastable show. During routine filming, the third network's interviewer was having a less-than-riveting conversation with another incomprehensible scientist, about my spleen this time. The professor was so excited about my spleen in specific, and lymphatic system in general, that he was having trouble sitting still. The interviewer was having trouble not falling asleep. Many minutes into a tediously detailed conversation, the professor said, "There is much more hematopoiesis than normal occurring in his bone marrow, producing considerably elevated levels of immune system cells and stem cell precursors." The interviewer droned for the umpteenth time, "Layman's terms, remember." "There would have been very few, if any, human diseases which could've affected Mr. Anderson; his body would've recovered from internal or external trauma much faster than other people's; and with that level of natural stem cell production, I doubt he would've experienced the normal, age-related degenerations." "Huh?" said the interviewer, sitting up suddenly. "You mean he wouldn't have gotten sick or old?" "He could have gotten infected, but his immune system was so active I believe he would've easily thrown off every disease he would've normally encountered. That's not only my opinion. The CIA's doctors had started testing that and there are excellent indications that Mr. Anderson's body had thrown off the diseases they'd exposed him to in a spectacular fashion." "What was that you said about age?" "We don't yet understanding the aging process well, but Mr. Anderson's level of stem cell production and better-than-perfect health of every part of his body that we have data on indicates that Mr. Anderson would've aged extraordinarily well, probably for a very long time." "For our viewers, please put that as simply as possible?" "Quite possibly Mr. Anderson would've lived for an exceptionally long time." "What! He wouldn't get sick; he wouldn't age. Are you saying he wouldn't have died? Not EVER?" "Possibly not from natural causes. My understanding is that the CIA permitted an unnatural cause, and they've even lost the body afterward. Their stupidity is an incalculable tragedy for medical science." "Mark Anderson would've been IMMORTAL? Is that what you're claiming?" "I'm not claiming it, it's merely a possibility. We don't know. The data we have is truly amazing and it's very tantalizing, but it's also frustratingly incomplete. Mr. Anderson's body functions were performed at levels we've never seen before and it's forced us to reexamine many of our widely accepted beliefs. Compared to him, ALL of us are unhealthy. People we thought were healthy now seem not to be. How we integrate that knowledge into our profession will be a matter of much debate..." "Excuse me Professor, but I'm having trouble believing how calm you are about Mark Anderson's possibly being immortal. That's the most incredible news I've ever heard." "Thanks to Homeland Security and the CIA, it's a moot point. I would be very excited if Mr. Anderson were still alive, but as it is we can only be bitterly disappointed at the lost opportunity." "What opportunity?" "To study Mr. Anderson's body of course. I'm a medical researcher; studying and learning is what we do. You're excited that Mr. Anderson might've been immortal. If Mr. Anderson was alive today, I'd be excited because we might be able to learn enough from him to make everyone immortal." "OH MY GOD!" "The CIA's stupidity has been an incalculable tragedy for medical science. I thought I'd already made that point?" The third network's program about my medical uniqueness was REALLY Good TV! (after a great deal of careful editing). Commonsense would argue otherwise, but my body had been healthy above their previous definitions of that, and it'd operated so well, so there truly were reasons to believe that I could've lived for an unusually long time. The more medically competent of the follow-up programs essentially agreed with the professor. Many of the others programs weren't competent in any sense, especially the religious ones; some of them weren't on the same planet as anything faintly resembling competent. It was hysterically funny how harebrained some of those programs were, and I apologize for insulting hares so unfairly. That the interviewer had used the word "immortal" led to all sorts of crap. The professor had made it clear that he was only talking about natural causes, but for a pathetically large proportion of people, the only word they comprehended was "immortal": There were Christians screaming that only God had the right to be immortal, so the lab should be buried in concrete to keep me from returning from the dead. Preferably concrete made with holy water, to be extra safe. Our home became the focal point of mentally incompetent religious people and we received quite a few death threats. My not staying dead after having been killed apparently meant God wanted the rest of my family murdered. There appeared to be tens of thousands of Christians doing everything they could to pressure the Government into throwing the lab doors open so I could triumphantly walk out. That so many people could be so wrapped up in their unrealistic religious beliefs was fucking scary. People like that shouldn't be allowed to make any decisions more important than whether they wanted fries with that. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the people in charge of containing the spill of thousands of lethal bioweapon vials weren't Christians. My family was hassled by all sorts of people, ranging from Incomprehensibly Stupid Idiots all the way through to TV Reporters, and even from people outside of that range. The national demand for garlic rose significantly (I kid you not!). It was just as well that so many people had gas masks. We hadn't expected a reputable scientist to make such an 'out there' statement so we were caught by surprise. Our security guards and the Corvallis police force had a couple of VERY busy nights. As did I, doing continuous sight-blob patrols. When I saw someone who appeared to be getting past our security, I used NP to wake Dad or Prof, and to point them in the direction of the intrusion. They'd call the cops and our guards (both were patrolling our property) and report, "I saw a movement in the southwest corner," and there'd be a rush to intercept the intruder. The height of our house providing us with a believable vantage point. By the second day we had searchlights on trailers placed around our property, fully illuminating every part of it all night, so our guards and the cops easily caught everyone after that, and Patch got very confused about when he should be sleeping. It was all too easy to imagine some fucked-in-the-head-lunatic killing Carol or Donna to have the thrill of watching her come back to life, no doubt while thinking that he couldn't be charged with murder if the corpse got up afterward. The girls got several days off school and then escorts for a few weeks. Trouble from would-be trespassers continued but diminished over the next week or so. The thing that puzzled me was that when they were caught trying to get into our property and asked what they'd intended to do, the answer was almost invariably, "I just wanted to see them, I guess." From what I heard, most of them were answering honestly: they truly were breaking into someone's private property without thinking about it, just because they were overcome by whatever stupid religious idea had lodged in their tiny brain. Mom and Dad had to go on TV to address the "Mark is an Immortal" issue (note the use of the present tense; that's the name of the issue because that's what the morons thought). Obviously the Genetic Theory, previously so well thought of in the Anderson and Williams circle, was now a dead duck. Mom, Carol and Donna were already getting more than enough letters proposing marriage without adding fuel to that fire. And in Mom's opinion, Dad was getting FAR too many proposals of a different, but not entirely unrelated, nature. So the official position was, "Three years ago our son was an ordinary boy. Average at school, and less than average athletically. He was clumsy, frequently injured himself, and did not heal any faster than anyone else. Two and a half years ago he changed, becoming a genius and physically coordinated over the period of a few weeks. We're sure that whatever caused Mark's change was specific to him, because no one else in the family is getting smarter, healthier, or better at healing." Julia and Carol had a good little script (although only Julia did the talking; Carol just provided the on-the-verge-of-tears look), "Carol and I saw Mark do an experiment on himself a few months ago. He used a sharp knife to cut his hands and we watched how fast he healed over the next days. He was three times faster than normal; that's all. He wasn't invulnerable like Superman. He didn't instantly heal like you sometimes see on silly TV shows or movies. Small cuts took him one week to fully heal rather than the three weeks it takes everyone else. That was impressive, but not miraculous." Shortly after Prof and I had escaped from the Casino Kidnappers, I'd started telling Julia and Carol about the hand cutting experiment, but 3A had interrupted to tell me that he hadn't done it in this dimension. I'd changed what I was about to say into a description of an experiment on myself, which is what Julia was talking about now, lying slightly when saying they'd watched it. -- "When Mark was kidnapped by the first set of criminals a year ago, they cut his finger off. In his CIA file it says his finger was still missing a year later. I expect that if people were able to grow fingers back, then Mark could've grown his back three times faster than other people, but people can't do that, so Mark couldn't either. The CIA is refusing to tell us what killed Mark, but whatever it was, it was far worse than a cut-off finger. Without exception, every person inside that lab died, and I'm sure Mark did too. He couldn't grow his finger back, so he CERTAINLY couldn't come back from being dead. That's wishful thinking at its most stupid. Stop calling him immortal. We wish he was, so he'd be at home with us now, but he wasn't. There is no cure for death; not for Mark, and not for anyone else." One consequence of the medical interest in me, was that some of the surviving CIA scientists who'd experimented on me decided it was a good time for them to leave the CIA's employ. Knowing over two hundred of their coworkers had been killed on the job, that it could have been them if not for lucky timing, and the attackers could possibly attack again, added up to a very good motivation to change jobs. Financial motivation was also provided by the networks being especially eager to employ them to add legitimacy to their planned docu-drama programs: "IMMORTAL MARK - The Story from the INSIDE!" I was hoping one of the networks would get Jessica Alba to play my love-interest nurse. The defecting scientists had correctly decided that the Government wouldn't sue them for breaching their non-disclosure agreements for talking about experimenting on me, when those experiments had been embarrassingly illegal and all the experiment results were in the public domain already. So they came clean on a lot of the minor details, mostly how things were done, what the room looked like, what my last few weeks of life had been like, etc. None of those things were matters of national security, but they were wonderful human-interest TV material, and wonderful material for our imminent lawsuit. One related point that's worth stressing is that EVERY scientist that talked about me was EXTREMELY angry that I was dead. They expressed it in many ways, and they expressed it VERY convincingly: Some showed not just anger, but real RAGE at my having been killed. Their faces turned red, their hands clenched, etc. One even said, "If the President walked into the room now, I wouldn't be able to control myself." [[Flushing his career down the crapper. The Government threatened to pull all funding from his institute unless he was fired for being a "security risk".]] Some came close to weeping in frustration. The less TV-Frenzied of them (but still in the top 10%, because the sensible 90% never got aired) unemotionally stated that my loss was the greatest setback medical science had ever experienced, that millions of lives could've been improved from the knowledge that could've been obtained from my body. When it comes to gathering material for a lawsuit, TV is a WONDERFUL medium! All the calm, sensible scientific commentaries about my body ended up on the cutting room floor, and the segments they aired allowed us to identify all the scientists that'd support our lawsuit's asking for a GREAT deal of money. I was sure that my body was nowhere near as wonderful as the TV shows made it seem, and that most of the biological commentary was either highly wishful dreaming or deliberate exaggeration from people who wanted to get on TV. But with no need to provide balanced commentary, no 'other side' to insist on balanced reporting, and no possibility of more tests being done to refute any of the claims, the partial results they had could be argued in all sorts of crazy ways. There was even the issue that, as a group, American scientists hated the Bush Administration, so they were delighted to have an opportunity to 'stick it to him' by talking up my scientific value. The networks had no constraint on their sensationalism, and they pushed it as far as they could. Within a couple of weeks we had a list of dozens of scientists who'd publicly made incredible claims about my body, and the "incalculable" loss to humanity caused by my untimely death - which we would nonetheless attempt to calculate, as part of our lawsuit. By the time the TV networks finished milking my body for all it was worth, the public thought the sun shone out of my biologically perfect ass, and that my death had been the greatest human tragedy since Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had broken up. The scientists claimed it was even more important than that, but the public knew the true value of science. Our original Stage Two plan had two more hot buttons in it: my genius and my sex appeal (the latter being Julia's enthusiastic contribution to the plan). That I was 'immortal' accidentally turned out to be the hottest button of all, but the other two still got pressed. My genius being a button that was being pressed at the same time as the immortality crap was developing. I haven't mentioned the neurological issue much above, other than to say it stood out as being freaky abnormal. That was Prof's button to press, and he pressed it hard. My DHS file, included in the CIA file that I'd leaked, contained my school IQ test result of 226. Enough people understood what IQ was to be seriously impressed by that, especially as there was only one other person alive who might have an IQ that high. (That surprised several of my minds. This dimension had a woman called Marilyn vos Savant; a 60-year old woman who'd scored 228 on a 1937 version of an IQ test she'd taken in 1956 when she was 10-years old. (Was your IQ high enough to process all those numbers on the first read?) My IQ test was a modern one, whereas hers had been virtually prehistoric, so mine was given much more credibility. She was undoubtedly a very smart woman (I googled her), but she'd not screamed through academia the way I'd been doing until so rudely and illegally interrupted. My file had some lower IQ scores in it, but those were dismissed as my deliberately getting low results because I was an involuntary prisoner. There were even notes in the file saying there was less mentation recorded by the EEG during my tests than otherwise, so I'd obviously been sabotaging them. Prof's job was to make the point that what I could've done with my brain - rather than what the world could've learned from my body - would've changed the world dramatically. Prof, OSU's Dean and several experts got that ball rolling by appearing on a couple of shows. The Dean started by explaining that I'd been ahead of schedule to complete three degrees in one year, and had showed my transcripts, which featured a large number of 100% exam results. Much was made of the dates of the exams, as they were so frequent that they amazed people. Prof referred to his idea of a popular hero, "It took Albert Einstein four years to complete his first degree. Mark would've aced three complete degrees in less than one year while still doing 12th grade, after having skipped two of his previous four school years. Mark was leaving Einstein IN HIS DUST!" The experts were wetting themselves over the EEG results, insisting that it was unbelievable and impossible for people to think as much as I did. The fact that I obviously did think that much - as proved by my OSU results - had them bewildered, very, very excited, and EXTREMELY angry that I was dead. The medical information being dished out to the public was, at best, facts carefully selected to create the wrong impression. It was wrapped up in wild conjecture and deliberately sensationalized because that's what TV producers do. The medical discussion about me was wildly exaggerated, except in the area of my brain; that wasn't exaggerated at all. My brain's activity truly was off the scale of what humans had ever seen before - and I'd only had eight minds back then; they should see my 32-mind mental activity now! EEGs are widely understood at least at a basic level, and there was universal agreement that my EEG results were mind-blowing. There was a great deal of frustration that the upgraded EEG machine had been so faulty, but the initial machine had produced amazing data. The hypothesis that I might've been able to control minds came up, but was easily discounted. Not only had the CIA file shown a loss of interest in that idea, but there was the obvious: "Then why did he let the Government kidnap and experiment on him illegally?" Prof had gotten the "What Mark Could Have Achieved" ball rolling, and the networks picked it up and ran with it. They descended on OSU, interviewing my lecturers, classmates and especially my Business degree's first and second year study groups because they knew me better than any of my other classmates. Prof's conclusion was, "You can tell Mark's interests from his choices for his first three degrees: Physics, Math and Business. Mark was very enthusiastic about science, space, and science fiction about space. I'm sure that if he'd not been illegally kidnapped by Homeland Security and the CIA, then Mark would've advanced physics light-years ahead of where it is now. He would've opened up the galaxy to humanity. -- "Bill Gates is the world's richest man, worth about $50 billion. Compared to Mark, Bill Gates is an under-achieving dullard. Mark would've reached out and owned PLANETS, taking humanity with him. This Administration's immorality and criminality has set humanity back centuries." By the time Prof finished, the world knew that the discoveries inspired by my body, and what my brain would've achieved for itself, would both have turned the world upside-down (that would've put the world back where it started, but you get the idea). One small button wasn't pressed: my Aikido sensei had contacted my family to ask whether he could divulge that the inventor of "External Ki Projection" had been Mark Anderson. Dad didn't give an immediate answer, preferring to talk to us about it first. We discussed it, but easily decided that we wanted my involvement with EKP kept quiet. The trouble with EKP is that it's a mental power. It happens to be one that anyone can do with a little training, but ignorance wouldn't stop people being freaked out by my having a mental power. It could be used by the Government to make people believe that the DHS and CIA might have been right to suspect me - even though they'd gone about it illegally - and it might also make the CIA suspect the truth: that I'd used mind powers to escape from their lab and destroy it to cover my tracks. EKP was so esoteric that revealing I'd invented it wouldn't help our legal battle against the Government, and it could do a great deal of harm. Dad phoned Sensei back and stressed that we wanted him to stick to his promise to keep my involvement secret. Dad could even explain, "The Government kidnapped and caused Mark's death because they stupidly thought he had mind control powers. If you tell the world he had a mind power, most people will get confused and it'd badly damage our chance to get justice." Sensei had plenty of experience with people not understanding the mental aspects of Aikido, so he easily understood Dad's point and agreed to keep quiet. I kicked myself for not having anticipated the possibility of Sensei assuming my death meant he was free to talk, so I was very thankful that he'd phoned us first. As the above few paragraphs show, we had to be careful about not giving the Government ammunition to use against us. That was a very real need. Because this is an autobiography, it naturally focuses on me (admittedly "me" is a moving target, dodging from dimension to dimension and becoming sort of 'diluted'). Because of that focus, the current chapters might be giving you the impression that the media was full of stories about me, but that's misleading. The Dodge-Gate controversy itself had a more prominent position, and even that was sometimes displaced by REALLY important news, such as when Britney Spears released a new video in which she didn't sing very well but did wear shockingly revealing clothing. It must have been a slow week or two though, because Dodge-Gate news persisted despite such competition, and the Government was continually under attack. It had to respond, and one of its responses was to attack me (as Mark) through the media. To be fair, we couldn't actually be sure the Government was behind the media attacks because everyone fronting them were private citizens representing a variety of non-governmental organizations, but it seemed such a well orchestrated campaign and it did serve to take some of the heat off the Government, so we believed ass-covering politicians to be responsible. One line of attack was several spokespeople suddenly appearing and making statements in support of the Government's capturing and experimenting on me. Apparently I was "a danger to the human race," according to some of them. To others I was no longer human and therefore didn't have any legal rights while America did have the right to protect itself from me. That group was particularly concerned that I was having sex with so many girls, because I might be trying to take over the world by out-breeding real humans. The religious representatives were particularly strident after my being an immortal was publicized. Only God had the right to be immortal, so I deserved everything I got. That's a summary of their justification. I couldn't really follow the logic of how the CIA's studying me, which surely increased the likelihood of more people gaining immortality, was excused by only God having the 'right' to be immortal. Perhaps I didn't listen closely enough to their rants - that's quite possible because I tended not to listen at all - or perhaps the ranters had an inability to think rationally. Both explanations might have some merit. More rationally - because it did have some degree of intelligence - some people claimed that the Government had done the right thing kidnapping and experimenting on me, " ... for the greater good. The medical advances that could have been obtained from understanding Mr. Anderson's body would have benefited millions of Americans, therefore the Government was morally required to do what it did." There were even 'arguments' along the lines of: "President Bush is a good man and I'm sure he had good reasons for doing what he did." It was surprising how many people needed no justification beyond that, and it was equally surprising - but personally more pleasing - how approximately the same number of people responded with automatic condemnation of everything Bush was associated with because they considered him a "bad man". An astonishing number of people clearly preferred not to think. I've worded my explanation of the apparent anti-Mark campaign quite facetiously even though the slurs against me were often expressed very eloquently and at times almost convincingly. Certainly a significant proportion of the general population seemed to be convinced. Since the subject of these accusations was something I'm extremely biased about, you'll understand my treating the comments less than respectfully. I can make fun of them here, but we couldn't ignore the threat they posed. We had to be very careful not to give the attackers - or whoever was behind them - more ammunition. That was one reason why I was kicking myself for not realizing the danger that Sensei might have created for us. And I do literally mean "danger". If enough idiots thought Mark was a very serious threat to the American Way Of Life, Mom and Apple Pie, then some such idiots might feel justified in attacking my parents and sisters. It was too easy to imagine the DHS arresting all of my family and experimenting on them to determine whether any of them had democracy-threatening mind control powers. It'd be impossible for my family to prove they didn't have such powers, so they'd be in deep shit. It's very hard to judge some things from TV. On this issue there appeared to be an equal number of people believing the Government had been right to kidnap and experiment on me, as believing they'd been wrong - but surely those numbers can't have been equal! TV producers create excitement by putting opposing views up against each other, but they usually don't tell you that one side has a hundred times more adherents than the other because that'd ruin the tension and entertainment value. That's a very worrying aspect when your family's lives are potentially in danger. I knew I wasn't a threat to the "American Way Of Life, Mom and Apple Pie" (perhaps I should exclude the latter, since I have participated in the destruction of quite a few apple pies in my time), so I knew all that crap to be crap. I won't bother writing much about it here, but you should be aware that it was something we all worried about, and it was yet one more reason to think very badly of our politicians. Attacking the victim is such an appalling strategy and the people who use it are evil assholes - and that's not just my bias over this issue talking. ------- Chapter 308: Our Bio-Gate Coup De Grâce: Going on Oprah Sunday, May 7 to Wednesday, May 31, 2006 (Continued) And then for the coup de grâce: the girls went on the Oprah Show. Once the public believed how amazing Mark Anderson had been, Julia had sent an idea for a show and some supporting material to Oprah, who'd leaped at the chance; or as Julia thought of it, "swallowed the bait". Julia, Carol, Donna, Ava, Alexis, Pat, Katelin and several other girls were flown to Chicago, where Oprah's show is recorded. None of the Target Girls went though, as Julia considered them too self-centered to do a good job of boosting me. [When the Target Girls discovered what they'd missed out on, they were LIVID and amazed that they'd not been included. After all, they were easily more beautiful than any of the girls who'd gone.] The introduction included Oprah saying, "My guests today are Mark Anderson's - the Immortal Boy's! - two sisters and some of his girlfriends. SOME of them!" The audience thought that this might be a good show. Julia sat in the seat closest to Oprah, then Carol, Donna, Ava, Alexis, Pat and Katelin; with a row of elevated seats behind the front row for the rest of the girls. Julia was the main spokesgirl and she ran the show, with occasional help from Oprah. [Julia, Carol, Vanessa and Mom had spent a couple of weeks preparing for this. They'd analyzed past Oprah shows: charted what the audiences had reacted to the best/worst, when Oprah let the guests have free rein and when not, what level of sexual explicitness worked best, studied Oprah's body language for cues for how the guests should behave, looked at timings, etc. Then the women had designed exactly how they wanted the show to go, and had prepared and rehearsed for it. This was Julia's big chance to let the world know how wonderful I was, and she was determined to do an exceptional job of it.] After the introductions, Julia started with, "You've heard of how fantastically Mark's body and brain operated, but you don't know much about him as a person. Let us show you some family pictures and tell you some VERY personal stories." It was definitely looking to be an excellent show, thought the audience. The structure of most of the show was very simple: Julia would display a picture or set of pictures on the big screen at the back of the stage, and then the girls would talk about it. An early example was several short video clips of me playing soccer that Julia had hunted down from around town, mostly from my teammates' families. The clips all showed me very impressively running circles around my opposition (not literal "circles", as that'd be a silly thing to do in soccer). They repeatedly showed me moving like a dream, weaving through multiple defenders to score. Julia pulled out a piece of paper to read the scores for my last few games, adding how many goals I'd personally scored. That spurred the planned conversation about my athleticism. Julia said, "About three weeks after I started dating Mark, I wanted to arrange a fun day one weekend for a group of my friends from school. I suggested an afternoon of bowling then pizza. Mark was very happy with the pizza part - he was VERY fond of pizza - but he looked uninterested in bowling. I asked him if he knew how to bowl, and he said he'd played half a dozen times, most recently about two years ago. I asked him why he was uninterested, and he told me there'd be no fun in it for him because it'd be too easy now. -- "One thing you need to know about Mark is that he was the most modest guy you'd ever meet. Some of us even called him 'Modest Mark' as a nickname. He was so self-effacing it used to annoy me sometimes, because I wanted to yell how wonderful he was from the rooftops. So when Mark told me it was too easy for him, that was a very unusual thing for him to say. I asked him what score he thought he'd get, and he apologetically said he'd get 300, because the game was too easy." That wasn't how it had happened. Julia was LYING! On Oprah! Oh, the TRAVESTY of it all! "Three hundred?" queried Oprah. "A perfect game?" "Yes. Mark NEVER boasted." Julia turned to 'her' girls, "Did any of you ever hear Mark make a single boast about himself?" "No," they all confirmed. Julia continued, "He wasn't boasting, just apologizing for it not being a fun game for him. I went ahead with it anyway because I wanted my girlfriends to see Mark bowl 300. Just like he said he would, Mark bowled a perfect game. Didn't he girls?" "Yes," they all chorused, expressed in a variety of ways, to avoid sounding like the chorus they were. Ava added, "And the next time too, Julia, when I asked him to show me." -- Ava turned to Oprah, "I couldn't make it that day, Oprah, so I missed seeing him bowl a 300 game. One lunchtime not long after, I was with Carol and Mark and I asked him if he'd show me a 300 game, so the three of us went to the alley and he bowled another one." Julia said, "I understand the perfect games bowling record is three in a row. Most of you won't believe me, but Mark could've bowled THIRTY perfect games in a row! You've heard what an intellectual genius he was at OSU and how fantastic his body worked internally. His body also worked fantastically externally. Physical activities which are very hard for other people were very easy for Mark, like bowling any number of 300-point games." Donna told her story about my missing out on spending quality time with my little sister, so I'd volunteered to go on morning runs with her, "Even though Mark's never liked running. He just wanted to goof around with me. He was so good at running I entered him in a national-level, ten kilometer, open men's road race. He won! Mark easily beat the state champion and the third fastest 10k runner in America, even though he only had two casual training runs with me." Julia had obtained video of the end of the race, showing me burning past the last guy I'd passed and then crossing the finish line, and that was played during Donna's story. When the girls had been planning this, Ava had suggested making a comment about how graceful I looked when I ran, but Julia had rejected it. Ron moved gracefully, so it wasn't a good thing to draw attention to. Ava said, "Look how fresh Mark is. He just beat some of the fastest guys in America and he's not even sweating or breathing hard. The sore losers accused Mark of cheating, so he had to give blood and urine, but he was cleared..." Alexis interrupted, "They just had to ask any of us. We coulda told them how AMAZING his endurance was!" Oprah picked up the insinuation, raising her eyebrow; surprising me, because I hadn't thought she was a mother. Julia replied to the eyebrow motion, "When I said all of us were Mark's 'girlfriends', I was using a euphemism. We can talk about that later, if you wish." It was obvious that the audience wished. A room full of middle-aged women had seen pictures of a very handsome boy, including home movies of him moving like a dream, and a dozen, pretty girls were on stage implying there was a story about him that was MUCH more interesting than sports. Julia said, "I'll save time by jumping to the point I'm trying to make. Just as Mark was an intellectual genius, he was equally a physical genius. He could bowl as many 300 games as he wanted even though he hadn't bowled for two years. He easily won a national-level 10k race after two fun-runs with his little sister. By the way, Mark was being modest only coming first; he could've easily beaten the world record for 10k. Ava and his sister Donna measured out a marathon course for him one afternoon and he ran it ten minutes under the world record." The next couple of minutes were spent with Oprah double-checking that Mark was REALLY capable of doing several physical feats that no one could do. All the girls insisting that Mark certainly could. Carol said something that we'd discussed the pros and cons for, and had decided to go ahead with. She said, "My brother was a miracle. A walking, breathing, miracle, until the Government killed him." Julia said, "It's true, Oprah. Mark was a miracle. I've got twin brothers ten years older than me. They grew up playing 8-ball against each other on a table we had at home, and they're VERY good at it. They challenged Mark to a game the first time he visited my family. They had to show him how to play because he'd never played it before. My father bet my brothers $10 each that Mark would beat them on his first best-of-three match. Andrew and Robert thought Dad was crazy, but Mark beat them easily. -- "I saw him play a few demonstration games in the nine months he was my boyfriend, and they were all the same: Mark NEVER needed more than one turn to win a game. If he broke, then his opponent never got a turn. Mark was the greatest athlete the world has ever had, as well as the greatest genius. He truly was a miracle. Maybe we should show the picture of him at the swimming pool? The last one in the list I gave your producer." This was Julia's "Big cannon" - the weapon she'd been intending to save for the end so it'd be the last thing seen, and therefore what would be best remembered. Julia had decided to display it now because she could see the audience was too skeptical. So a 40-foot high, very carefully chosen, highly flattering picture of me in my bright yellow Speedos appeared in front of an auditorium full of middle-aged, easily excited women. Julia and the other girls joked afterward that they could see the wave of lust sweep through the room, and smell the result a few minutes later. Julia had told the girls who'd been at the Aquatic Center to email their photos of me to her. Julia had picked the sexiest one to bring to Oprah. The Aquatic Center date had been right after the exams at the end of the previous school year, so less than two weeks after I'd been discharged from the Seattle Hospital. My body was the most muscled-up it'd ever been, I had suntan lotion and the damn bright yellow Speedos on, and the photo had caught me side-on to the afternoon sun, so the shadows accentuated my muscles very effectively. I even had a very nice smile on my face, although it took quite a while before any of the audience noticed that. It took the best part of a minute for the audience to quiet down. Then Oprah asked, "That has to be a fake?" All my girls assured Oprah it was real. Julia explained to Oprah, "All of us saw Mark naked many times, and there were dozens of girls at the Aquatic Center that day who were snapping pictures of Mark. Especially when his back was turned. I'm sure you can see why." In my experience, when seeing my body for the first time, almost every woman says, "I'd KILL for your waist," or, "Your waist is to DIE FOR!" Not Oprah though; mentioning death would have been an embarrassing faux pas even though it had no negative intent. Being a consummate professional, she said instead, "That's the best looking body I've ever seen on a man." Julia responded, "I know you're very knowledgeable about keeping fit and healthy, Oprah. Guess how many hours a week Mark spent exercising to look like that?" "ALL of them! He'd have to live in a gym to look like that." "He played soccer roughly every second week, and that was the only exercise he did, so about one hour per week, Oprah." Oprah and every member of her audience expressed their disbelief to Julia. Julia gave them a few seconds to have their say, then she said, "You've seen the doctors and professors raving about how incredibly well the insides of Mark's body worked. His body worked so well on the inside, that what you're looking at is his NATURAL SHAPE! He didn't need to exercise to look like that. It took a couple more minutes to stress that enough for the objections to die down, whereupon Julia said, "If the Government hadn't killed Mark, he would have learned how to make EVERYBODY look that good without exercise! All of us," Julia waved her hand to include Oprah and the audience, "could have been healthier than ever before in our lives and looked better than the world's most gorgeous supermodels." The predominately overweight and middle-aged audience were somewhat disappointed that they'd missed out on looking like gorgeous supermodels. There was some angry muttering and a few back and forth comments. Amusingly, increasing human beauty would just raise the bar on what it took to be a supermodel - assuming the improvement was made to virtually everyone, as Julia had implied. People would adapt to the new standards of beauty and that there had been an old one would have been forgotten. Increased health was the only real benefit of the two that Julia had mentioned, but the audience didn't value that as much. This wasn't the setting to get political, so after agreeing and sympathizing with the audience, Julia got the show back on track by saying, "We've got some more pictures and stories for you. Mark was superhumanly intelligent, superhumanly healthy and superhumanly athletic, but he was also superhumanly NICE. We'll tell you more about Mark the person." There was still two-thirds of the time left and there was much more to say. Julia got each of the girls to tell a personal story about Mark. Carol was first. Carol had a picture for her story: of her, Julia and me when we were going out on a fancy date, Carol wearing the extremely sexy special occasion dress that I'd bought her (in this dimension). Oprah immediately recognized the designer, which amused me. More important for Carol's story, everyone recognized how sexy she looked in it, the photo having been chosen to make that point. Carol said, "Thank you for your compliments. What will surprise you is that Mark bought me that dress. And I ASSURE you that the first thought you all had is very wrong. Mark also bought the necklace I was wearing, the pins in my hair, he told me how to wear my hair, and he told me what style of shoe I should wear with that dress too. By now some of you are probably thinking another wrong thought, but these are Mark's girlfriends around me. Mark was definitely not homosexual. Homosexuality is part of the reason why I'm wearing that dress though. From when I started maturing, I always wore clothes that completely covered my figure. Sacks, really. I was never comfortable exposing myself. As you can see from that photo, something in my life changed, haha. -- "Julia was that change. I met Julia when Mark started dating her, and I started developing feelings for her. Mark saw that my confusion about myself was starting to clear and that I was starting to gain confidence in myself. He bought me that dress when he knew I was emotionally ready to come out of my shell and be who I really was, and it was the perfect choice for me at that time of my life, giving me exactly the boost I needed. Mark encouraged me to come out as a lesbian at school, which was very good for me too, but it caused dozens of immature boys to make terrible nuisances of themselves by swarming all over me. Mark was a very modest, unassuming, quiet guy, but he got very upset when those boys started troubling me. He was also very gentle, so he'd never defend me by threatening to beat up the troublemakers the way boys normally do. He hated being the center of attention, but what he did was visit several classes around our high school making a speech..." Carol went on to describe my "I Love My Sister Carol" speech. Following on the heels of Carol's saying she came out as a lesbian, it created an absolutely perfect "Oprah Moment". Donna talked about her betting all her money on my 10k race, and giving the winnings to me to buy a car with, and my using it to buy a different form of transport for her. Brother-sister love was flowing all over the stage very poignantly. Ava talked about her initial approach to me and how that'd rapidly led to the support she was getting from my two families because her parents were both dying from cancer. She gave me 100% of the credit for all the support, which was totally undeserved praise. Ava showed genuine grief over the state of her parents' ill health, and it was another absolutely perfect Oprah Moment. Alexis (dressed in black jeans and T-shirt) was in the next seat. "I'm rough. I swear a lot, I run wild, I do whatever I want. I won't tell you WHAT I do, but it's stuff none of you'd want your daughters doing. So most of the kids at school think I'm trash and look down their noses at me, especially the 'In Crowd' girls. But I'm one of Mark's favorites - NOT because I'm easy." Alexis improvised, "Can you put the photo of Mark in his swimsuit back ... That was quick; thanks. Look at that photo. EVERY girl was easy for him. I was one of Mark's favorites because he didn't care about appearances, about the 'In Crowd', or any of that shit. He liked me because he liked me. There was no bullshit about Mark. He had the A-list girls panting after him, but he turned down having sex with them to be my friend. He was a VERY special human being." Pat was next. She'd already informed her parents that she'd been one of Mark's lovers and what she was going to say on this show, but her script had her start with, "Mom and Dad; if you're watching, please change channels for a minute..." "Haha. Like THAT'LL work!" joked Oprah. (Julia knew that a good Oprah show needed a sprinkling of jokes.) "It's worth a try." Pat started her story, "Julia mentioned we went bowling one weekend. Three days earlier Mark and I'd had sex for our first time together. I could spend HOURS telling you how AWESOME he was in bed," as a deliberate tease for the audience, "but the point I want to make is about him NOT doing sex. After bowling, we had lunch at a pizzeria and then we went back to Julia's place. There were two dozen of Julia's girlfriends from school, and Mark was the only guy. When we got to Julia's place, we went to her hot tub and all the girls stripped off and tried to convince Mark to strip too..." "Twenty four naked girls and Mark was the ONLY boy?" checked Oprah. "Yes." "Lucky boy!" Julia was quick to grab that opportunity, "No Oprah. Lucky GIRLS. Truly, I'm not joking. You haven't grasped how special Mark was yet. I know you've met some very special people in your life, but Mark was in a whole different league. If Mark had been allowed to live, a thousand years from now people would still be talking about him with AWE in their voices. I don't mean to disrespect any of your guests, but I can't imagine that being the case for any of them. -- "The girls knew how lucky they were to be with Mark. Even before that afternoon ended they were begging to extend it longer, and every day at school for the next few weeks they kept asking to do it again. But Mark declined to extend the afternoon because he'd made a commitment to do something with my father and he didn't want to let Dad down. Nor did Mark suggest we repeat the date. He didn't like all the fuss his bowling 300 caused and he didn't like having two dozen girls around him, regardless of their being naked. They were all focused on him, but he couldn't talk with that many at once so it wasn't socially successful. It was too much about sex and not enough about friendship, so Mark didn't enjoy it." Oprah half-joked, "Carol, are you SURE your brother wasn't a homosexual?" "Can I answer that one please, Julia?" asked Carina Durham, here with her parent's blessing. "Sure," agreed Julia. Julia had, of course, given the girls very clear instructions on what their attitude to sex-related questions would be. Carina said, "Mark was a Sex GOD! He was better at sex than he was at anything else, and he was the best in the world at all of those. That's not just my opinion. Every girl he slept with knows she got the best sex she'll ever have in her entire life from Mark. None of us have ANY doubts about that. He was AWESOME in bed." Oprah was visibly torn between several, demanding-to-be-asked, questions. She went with, "How many girls had Mark slept with?" Julia answered, "No one bothered to keep count, but I'd guess thirty or forty." "At SIXTEEN, he'd slept with thirty or forty girls?" "Yes. We've been very lucky girls. You're looking surprised, Oprah, so you STILL haven't grasped how special Mark was. We got the BEST sex of our lives from Mark and he got ordinary sex back from us. Do I look like a sex goddess? Haha. Mark gave us far more than we could possibly give him. Mark ALWAYS gave more than he got, with sex and everything else. That was the sort of guy he was. Every one of us was honored and lucky to be one of Mark's lovers." All the other non-sisters easily recognized the prearranged cue, and enthusiastically confirmed Julia's last sentence. Oprah and her audience were amazed by the girls' attitudes. Oprah had to ask, "Aren't ANY of you jealous?" Julia answered, "I was Mark's main girlfriend, so I've been asked that question many times. Obviously none of us are jealous, but your question is really WHY aren't we jealous..." "Yes. I'm VERY curious about that!" "Mark was a far greater person than any of us, so one unimportant girl trying to possess him would be ridiculously selfish. Women were throwing themselves at him wherever he went, Oprah, so it was better for me to be part of the process rather than trying to fight the inevitable. I didn't miss out because of it, because Mark was MORE THAN CAPABLE of keeping any number of women happy..." Recognizing another of their cues (this issue had also been easily predicted and prepared for), the girls laughed, or said, "You can say that again!", or, "I NEEDED help!", or several other simultaneous versions. The outbreak of laughter and humor among the girls caused Oprah to ask the predictable, "What do you mean?" Julia answered, "If you'll forgive me pulling your leg, Oprah: 'You STILL haven't grasped how special Mark was.' You've seen all the doctors and professors on TV raving about how amazing Mark's body was, haven't you?" "Yes?" "There's something you don't seem aware of, Oprah. I'm very surprised because I thought you were a very well-informed woman. Let me point out to you that a man's 'lovemaking equipment' is part of his body. Do you want me to pause while your producer researches that for you, or will you take my word for it?" "Haha. Now that you mention it, I do believe I remember that myself." "Good. Back to Mark. EVERY part of Mark's body was amazing, including his 'equipment'." Every eye in the studio looked at the picture of me in my Speedos, and then looked confused. Julia joked, "Don't tell me every woman here thinks size is important. 'It's not the size that matters, is how it's used.' Shame on you all for not knowing that, haha. Mark could make his 'equipment' hard, soft, cum or not cum whenever he wanted, including making it hard again immediately after he'd cum. He had perfect control over his lovemaking equipment, and his personality was one that meant he did whatever the girl he was with most wanted, the way she wanted, as often as she wanted, for as long as she wanted. And when she needed a rest, he moved over to the next girl, and gave her what she wanted. I've several times seen Mark in bed with up to six girls at a time, and it was ALWAYS the girls that asked him to stop when they'd had enough..." "Wow!" from a room full of VERY impressed, scandalized, jealous women. "He could fully satisfy six women at a time?" asked Oprah. "Could and did, every time, Oprah. You were asking why I wasn't jealous. Partly it was because when I shared Mark, I still got as much of him as I wanted. I had as much of his emotional love as I wanted, and as much of his physical love as my body could handle. I was a very happy girl, until the Government stole him from us all. Mark wasn't just a good lover, Oprah; he was a PERFECT lover. Every part of his body would do whatever the girl wanted AND he had superhuman endurance. He could make love nonstop for hours. Truly nonstop; no breathers or lying on his back to let the girl do the work. He could do ALL the work nonstop for hours. His body was incredible. When Carina described him as a sex god, that was not intended to be accurate in any religious sense, but it was PERFECTLY accurate physically. Like we said before, every girl who ever had sex with Mark knows he gave her the best sex she'll ever have in her entire life." "Wow. What an amazing experience it must've been knowing Mark?" "You've got NO IDEA, Oprah! Mark was the greatest genius America has ever had. You've seen his college transcripts. He aced fifty college exams in just three months. As my father says, 'Mark was leaving Einstein in his dust.' Mark was also the greatest athlete in American history. You saw him move when he played soccer, you saw him win the 10k race with ease, and you can see how superb his body is. Lastly, and most importantly to all of us here, Mark was also the nicest guy any of us have ever met. I'll let Pat finish her story." Pat told the story about how reluctant I'd been to touch her breast in the hot tub, making it seem it was because I was been extremely cautious not to offend her, even after having been lovers once already. The girls spun that into a sickening sweet story about how caring and sensitive I was, rather than the truth that I'd been socially inept with girls at the time. Katelin's story was about my challenge to her of improving her relationships with her brothers, so her family relationships would be as wonderful as mine were with my sisters. She made me seem like the world's best psychiatrist. She actually thought she was telling the truth, as she had no idea that I'd stumbled into it by accident when I'd been looking for a way of putting her off inquiring about my martial arts experience. She avoided all references to the fight that'd occurred, but did manage to mention that my challenge to her had taken place after she, Julia and Ava had spent the night with me. (Jokes and juicy bits had to be sprinkled throughout the show.) Carina Durham talked about the pipeline system, amazing the audience, especially that it'd been Julia's and her mother's idea. All the girls gave their prepared stories. Some were accompanied by relevant pictures, and when not, Julia had a slideshow of miscellaneous flattering shots going, including several of my cute butt (sigh). By the time the show was nearly over, the audience would've had my babies. [More generally, that idea was something I did not let Julia act on. She'd suggested the idea of offering my stored sperm to make thousands of little Marks, but I'd vetoed it. The mothers would be having 'my' babies for the wrong reason, especially because none of the babies would develop into anything other than a VERY normal kid. I had a feeling that Julia didn't quite believe that, but it was my sperm after all, so my decision.] Julia had a closing summary ready, "There are hundreds of pages of data from the CIA's experiments that are being analyzed by universities and medical research institutions all over the world, and you've seen that scientists, doctors and professors are in frenzies over Mark's body. International experts have already said that Mark's body operated far better than anyone they've ever seen, especially his brain. Neurologists have had their minds blown by Mark's brain, haha. -- "My friends and I knew Mark. We saw him doing miraculous things every day: the way he made love to us, the way he could power his way through three college degrees in a single year, and the phenomenal athleticism he brought to every physical activity that he did. The second time he rode Donna's horse Patch, for example, Mark had Patch gallop past us while Mark was doing a handstand on the saddle. He didn't do that to show off, but to entertain his sister Donna. Mark's parents told me that he'd ridden a horse maybe five or six times in his life before that. EVERYTHING Mark did, he did at an unbelievable level of ability. -- "Mark WAS too good to be true, Oprah, but he WAS true! That's why we say he was a miracle. There are hundreds of pages of scientific data, movies and pictures proving that Mark was the greatest human being ever. If he'd been left alive to fulfill his potential, he would've dramatically changed human civilization. You've heard us describe how exceptionally caring and sensitive Mark was. I have no doubt that whatever fields he would've chosen to work in, would've been to humanity's immense benefit. -- "But our Government killed him. His parents have lost their child, his sisters their loving brother, an extraordinary number of girls have lost the best boyfriend they'll ever have, and America has lost its greatest citizen." The rest of it was very 'Oprah' - tears, hugs, etc. It made for Great TV. ^ In political debate, logic has little effect (truth has long gone, so logic has no hope). Human drama is what captures the public's interest, and therefore the TV networks' and politicians' interests too. This is never more so than if the human drama includes some controversial sex issue, which is what my families had deliberately arranged by emphasizing my having sex with multiple 16- and 17-year old girls. A MAJOR debate erupted over that issue, with occasional comments about my kidnapping and murder. Even though some people wanted to hang me for despoiling innocent, young girls the way I had, Mark Anderson was safe from any such trouble. Society never blames the girls, so they didn't have anything to fear, especially because they all had parental support for going on the show. The girls loved twisting the media's tail by turning the gender stereotypes around. The way they played it, the girls had chased me, seduced me, ganged up on me, got the greatest benefit from me, etc. They got to tell lots of stories about me, some of which were even true. The press descended on Corvallis looking to interview girls who'd been my lovers. The Target Girls were VERY quickly discovered (they tended to hunt out the cameras, and the cameramen tended to hunt them out). Their beauty added to my reputation, as did the number of my lovers the press found. About a hundred of them, quite a few of whom I have no memory of, and I normally do remember the girls I've had sex with. I escaped most of the hassles, but my parents and sisters were driven crazy by people chasing them for 'deals' of various sorts, mostly film and book deals, but there were some more imaginative propositions. They all got flatly rejected because the last thing we wanted was someone digging around for information inside the families. There were even a couple of porn starlets who came to town specifically to admit to being my lovers, so they could plug their latest video, "Mandy, Minnie & Immortal, Immoral Mark." Look for it in all bad video stores. Mention my name and you'll get a funny look. You know you've hit the big time when you've got your own hastily-produced, alliteratively-titled, vaguely-lookalike-starring, porn movie. Because of the sexual aspect of my prior behavior, the sex industry was all over Corvallis like a rash. To her disgust, Carol was an especially favored target for their 'movie offers'. Mom and Dad got some hassling from social welfare people, but they easily got rid of them, "We're about to file a billion-dollar lawsuit against the Government employees who've been involved in attacking members of our family. How did you spell your name again?" A couple of the more persistent ones insisted on meeting my sisters, deeply concerned about Carol's and Donna's moral well-being in the as-reported-on-Oprah highly sexual Anderson home environment. Carol and Donna had fun ripping into the busybodies for not protecting Mark when he needed them, and Carol got to say, "I'm a lesbian, dummy!" and laugh at them. Donna was less subtle, getting angry at their offensive questions and practicing her Karate blows on them, like Mom and Dad had said she was allowed to, " ... once the questions insult Mark enough." Donna is strong, aggressive and had a year's Karate training by now, so she hurt them quite a lot. As Mom told the busybodies, "What did you expect? The Government kidnapped and murdered her much-loved brother, and then you're insensitive and stupid enough to ask her whether brother did bad things to her. We'll talk with her about her temper, but you've really only got yourselves to blame." We didn't want these sorts of busybodies anywhere near us. They could only cause trouble, so we gave them lots of encouragement not to come back. The press tried to talk with the Wests. Ava had been sitting in a prominent seat on Oprah's stage so she was obviously important. The press had heard that the Wests were dying of cancer, so they had to get the Wests' story before they inconveniently died. We'd warned the hospital in advance so the press got nowhere near Katie and Carson. The debate was great for keeping me in the news, for creating opportunities for lots more stories about me to be publicized, for humanizing my story, and for the politicians to see that the public was interested in me. As an additional benefit for my parents and the original photographer, they made very good money from selling the rights to my bright yellow Speedos picture to a company that sold posters. ------- Chapter 309: Valuing My Death Late-May to Thursday August 10, 2006 The publicity and excitement over my body having been successfully created, we moved on to stage three of the parents' strategy. Stage three was "Sue the Government", but it needed to done in phases. The first phase was to value Mark Anderson's life. There were three sources of income that 'we' - ostensibly Mom and Dad - had valued: Sports income. Income from being the world's smartest scientist. Income derived from medical research on my body. The first two categories were fairly easy to get valued. There are people in the business of valuing both of them, so it was only a matter of getting formal reports from them. How I looked in Speedos and my success with females made the first item's product endorsement component considerably larger than what I would've earned actually playing any sport. The third category was the biggie, swamping the first two into insignificance. By late-May we'd created a list of the scientists, doctors and professors who'd made the most exciting claims about my body, and we'd researched them - OSU's connections being particularly helpful - to eliminate those not reputable enough. Enlisting the chosen scientists' cooperation was easy, because they all wanted access to information outside of the CIA file. We told them that Mark Anderson's plan - had the Government not killed him - had been to complete his three degrees, which would've taken him another six months, then to set up a business based on his body. Scientists would've been allowed to research Mark's living body with his active cooperation, in return for Mark being 75% owner of all the results, including all the patents and products that emerged from the research. 75% was a steep price, but there'd be only one Mark and there'd be thousands of scientists who'd want to research him. The task was to value what that business would've been worth. There would have been two major revenue streams. The least valuable stream would derive from the types of activity that the researchers were doing now, poring over the results of individual experiments. No doubt being able to perform iterations of experiments on Mark would've produced a great deal of useful information which would've helped scientists learn what 'health' was, which could improve medicine in many ways. [[Ironically, health professionals know surprisingly little about health, as their job is to minimize ill-health. Those may seem equivalent, but they're actually quite different, causing very confused sets of priorities, a hash of conflicting policies, and a truly astonishing number of gross inefficiencies at the health-industry level and in society as a whole.]] The second business was based on finding out what had happened to turn Mark into a superhuman, reproducing it, and selling it to the world. That revenue stream could have resulted in the largest business the world has ever seen. My family more or less told the scientists the truth (actually "less"): "Two and a half years ago Mark had been an average intelligence, uncoordinated, acne-ridden, beanpole. Then something had happened to him that'd made him capable of being the world's best athlete in multiple sports, made him incredibly fit and good looking, had supercharged his immune system so he'd probably have lived at least three hundred years and perhaps much longer, and had boosted his IQ by 120 points." Valuing that aspect of the business came down to four estimations, the first three we wanted a large team of highly respected scientists, doctors and professors to decide on, and be willing to swear to in court: The chance that the cause of my transformation would've been discovered within 50 years. The chance that the cause would've been reproducible in other people (i.e., sellable) within 50 years. The chance that it wouldn't be discovered and patented by a competitor first. What people would pay for it. School records showed that my academic performance had risen virtually overnight (within a couple of weeks), giving considerable credence to the externally triggered hypothesis. My parents backed that up with strong statements about that having been Mark's belief too. [Partly because they wanted to minimize the scientific intrusions into their own lives. My family did have to participate in some tests though, to prove that they were normal, otherwise they'd have been hounded. They'd used those tests as the bait to get the research community to cooperate with our lawsuit's preparation. There were strict controls over the inconvenience and invasiveness of the experiments, which were set up at the local hospital or OSU, and were day-visit tests only.] For the first of the above four valuation factors, it didn't really matter whether the transformation was genetic or externally triggered, as both causes could be identified and patented. When asked to put a value on the first factor, quite a few of the scientist argued for 99% or 100%. That may seem high, but damned near every bio-oriented scientist and institution in the world would've been clamoring to work on the project, so Mark would've been able to pick a very large team of the best people. We were happy to be conservative, so we used a value of 80% for the first estimate. If the cause was found, then the resources that would've been put into reproducing it would've been overwhelming. Giving every human perfect health and a 120 point IQ boost would've been the world's #1 research goal. The only reason reproducing it might've failed was if it wasn't reproducible, for example, if my transformation had happened because God had blessed me (that was a commonly held public opinion. Fortunately even the religious scientists weren't stupid enough to give it any credence). The second estimate was given a conservative value of 90%. Competitors wouldn't have had access to my body or my active cooperation, so the third estimate was 95%. The fourth value was the key one. Individually, people would pay EVERYTHING they had for "The Mark Anderson Pill"; they'd even go into debt to finance buying it - most of the scientists had stated with utter sincerity that they would have. But we didn't want to get into calculations about individuals. That'd work, but it was too messy. Instead we decided to price it at the national level, as a percentage of each nation's current GDP per year for twenty years ("GDP" is Gross Domestic Product, the market value of all final goods and services produced in a country). Obviously there'd be legal issues to address, but we assumed they could be managed (perhaps by our hypothetical team of recently upgraded IQ 260+ lawyers). We commissioned a team of reputable economists to estimate what percentage of CURRENT GDP a country would pay, per year for twenty years, for "The Mark Anderson Pill", assuming it had the same effect as it had on me, and assuming it worked on just 20% of the population of a country. The "same effect" assumption was conservative because if researchers discovered what had accidentally transformed me, then they'd almost certainly find ways to improve its effect (+160 IQ? +200 IQ?). The "20% of the population" assumption was conservative too, because if the number of potential beneficiaries was initially restricted, researchers would find ways to widen it. The economists concluded that the value to a country was absurdly high. Even if my hypothetical company charged 100% of a nation's current GDP, having that many super-geniuses would, within several years, have raised a nation's GDP by far more than the total cost charged for the pill. Once the flood of technological innovations had doubled a country's GDP, the annual fee would essentially be free, and a few years later, all the earlier fees would have been earned back, making the whole thing cashflow positive for the country. It was hard to imagine how a government could survive saying no to giving its citizens near immortality and the quality of life my hypothetical pill would be offering. The economists decided a fair annual price for my pill would be around 100% of current GDP, and they were prepared to stand up in court and justify it, as the economics of it were actually quite simple. The world's GDP was currently US$48 trillion ($48,000,000,000,000), so the annual income of the main revenue stream to my business would have probably been 80% x 90% x 95% x $48 trillion, which is an annual income of $32.832 trillion. Operating costs would've been negligible, so the value of the business would've been twenty years of $32.832 trillion, which at an 8% discount factor, NPVed (Net Present Valued) down to $322.35 trillion. We were postulating that I would've owned only 75% of the business, so its value to me was 75% of $322.35 trillion, which is $241.7625 trillion. The law allows Federal employees to be sued for breaching the Fourth Amendment, as per, Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), where the U.S. Supreme Court found the "petitioner is entitled to recover money damages for any injuries he has suffered as a result of the agents' violation of the [Fourth] Amendment." The Anderson family filed suit against: Every DHS and CIA employee mentioned in the file. Their bosses for the next two levels up, because only negligence could've prevented them from knowing what their staffs were doing, and negligence is legally actionable. The DHS and CIA organizations because the file made it clear that they had not only condoned their employees' illegal behavior, but had actually ordered most of it as well as kept careful records of it. A $242 trillion lawsuit got the media's attention. The annual Federal budget is about $2 trillion, so losing the suit would cause a problem or two. It'd also make the Andersons nearly 5,000 times richer than Bill Gates, so the press loved it. There were ten DHS Portland defendants, two and a half dozen from DHS's S&T Directorate, and five dozen CIA defendants, so a hundred people in total who'd participated in my abduction or the experiments on me, plus the two agencies themselves. Thanks to some snooping by yours truly, the documentation accompanying our suit listed the current residential and employment addresses for all the defendants. More than half of them were currently working in what immediately became bottom-secret bio-'defense' establishments, which the press loved reporting on. Two groups of people didn't love that AT ALL: The sites' neighbors, who had been under the impression that the establishments hadn't been developing substances that would kill tens of millions of people if they leaked. There were HOWLS of very public protests, picketing and even barricades. Bio-defense labs, despite their new politically correct categorization, hadn't been demonstrating a good safety record lately, and members of the public were horrified when they found out they were living in the same neighborhood as another one. The Government, who was horrified that their bioweapon security had been blown WIDE open yet again. They couldn't accuse my family of espionage because there was a clear trail of emails showing that the information had been sent from various Government offices to the email address of a federal employee who was on vacation, and from there, to our large law firm the evening before the suit was filed. The international exposure of the US Government's STILL running MULTIPLE bioweapon labs ruined what credibility the Government had left (i.e., it made very little difference). Another reason the Government didn't like the suit was because it spelled out that Mark Anderson had intended to make everyone in the world perfectly healthy, immune from disease, have lifetimes measured in the hundreds of years, and give them an additional 120 IQ points, but the Government's causing his death had stopped that happening. The people who believed that crap - which thanks to all the sensational TV shows was very many people - were NOT happy with the Government. And there was an even worse reason why the Government didn't like the suit: they were guilty. We didn't have to prove the Government had killed Mark. We only had to prove Mark had suffered "injuries as a result of the DHS agents' violation of the Fourth Amendment." Mark had "suffered injuries" all right - he was dead! (so people believed). Was it "as a result" of the Government's actions? Mark would hardly have been in an underground, top-secret CIA lab otherwise. And the Government had already admitted their seizure of Mark Anderson had been in breach of his Fourth Amendment rights. Not to mention that there was no legal authority for his being handed over to the S&T Directorate and then the CIA for human experimentation. The Government had no defense whatsoever. There'd been much discussion in the press that when the Andersons sued, the Government would have to pay. Legal expert after legal expert had given exactly the same firmly expressed opinion. The only uncertainty was over the amount of damages we'd go for. The amount of the damages was the only issue the Government could argue. Unfortunately for the Government, a civil lawsuit only requires "the balance of probability", and the mathematics of those probabilities was pretty straightforward. Of the four factors, the last term - how much people would pay for 'The Mark Anderson Pill' (as we called it, to make it seem easily obtainable) - was virtually inarguable. Everybody would pay more than everything they had, and it was nonsense to try to claim otherwise. Countries would pay more than 100% of their GDP. That they couldn't afford to pay that much up-front just meant the Anderson family business would've had to give them "easy payment terms", spread over even more years. If that changed the NPV, it'd actually increase it because we'd charge a rate of interest higher than the NPV's discount rate. The penultimate term - the 95% estimate that no one would beat me to the discovery - was also a pretty safe number. Maybe it could be argued down to 90%, or even 80%, but those values made zero practical difference. The lawsuit was 120 times more than the Federal budget, and reducing it to 90 times made no difference whatsoever, because neither of those figures could be paid. The only two terms that could be reduced significantly were the first two. Specifically, that finding the cause of my transformation might be far harder than the at least 80% chance agreed on by the two dozen renowned biology experts we'd asked to estimate that value, and that commercializing the process might not be 90% doable. Science knows that what has already been found once by accident (as I'd apparently done) is usually very easy to reproduce, especially if damned near every scientist in the world is working on it, as would have been the case for this. Even if those two percentages got reduced to 8% and 9% (which was laughable) then the damages would still be $2.4 trillion, and still far more than could be paid. The Government had four choices: Stall. Drag the case through as many courts as slow as possible. Unfortunately for the Government, ours was a very easy suit to argue and every law firm in the country would rush to help us fight it (ESPECIALLY if they got a slice of the pie!). Stalling would just spread out and increase the pain, because everyone in the world knew the US Government was guilty. It was such a simple case that the Government would have difficulty finding ways to stall without being so obvious about abusing the legal process that the judge would lose patience. Change the law so it couldn't be sued. Trying to give itself permission to kidnap citizens - which is what we obviously would accuse it of doing - would've cause riots, and it wouldn't have gotten passed anyway. They could try other retroactive legislation, but every possibility stank too much or was clearly unconstitutional and would therefore be overturned. The Democrats would love the Republicans to try. Drastic solutions were unfeasible. The world's media spotlight was already on the case, so the Andersons suddenly disappearing wouldn't be a good idea. Plus our law firm had set things up so that even if my family disappeared, the case would still proceed. It'd get worse for the Government. Negotiate a settlement. The last option was the ONLY option and everyone knew it. The Government was taking major punishment over this, and they especially hated that their secret information was still being made public - who knew how far that might go! So it wanted the suit settled as quickly as possible. The Government's lawyers contacted our lawyers to start the negotiation. Our lawyers invited them to a meeting, lawyer to lawyer - except it was "lawyers to lawyers" because there were at least half a dozen of them on each side of the table. Apparently lawyers can only work in REALLY expensive packs. We'd already drawn up our shopping list. That'd been a GREAT deal of fun for all of us, and a topic of many enjoyable dinnertime conversations. Some families talk about what they did at school today; our families talked about what else to extort out of the Government. At the lawyers-to-lawyers meeting, our senior partner gave our list to the baddies' lawyers, telling them the brief rationalization for each point, then, "Our clients have instructed us that there will be no negotiation. Come back when you've signed it. The suit will proceed in the meanwhile." Our list of demands, with explanations provided, was as follows (I've paraphrased, to give you the core of each demand without the dozens of pages of legalese): (1) If Mark Anderson is found alive or dead, The Government is to exert its maximum effort to ensure his health then speedy return to his parents; or to leave him free to make his own way if he chooses. No member of The Family or any part of their bodies are to be subject to The Government's instigated or performed medical experiment; all records deriving from that to be destroyed upon request from any member of The Family. All records and samples The Government is holding concerning The Family's biology to be destroyed forthwith and no more sought (non-Government organizations, such as our local doctor and hospital, weren't affected by this contract). All DHS and CIA records of any nature about The Family are to be destroyed forthwith. The Government will not question or investigate any member of The Family for any activities prior to the date of execution of this Agreement. Regarding (1). Our lawyer's stated rationalization for this clause was to block any attempt of the Government to pursue any more illegal medical experimentation, with or without the transparent pretext of "suspected terrorist involvement". He told the Government's lead lawyer, "It is deliberately worded to be all-encompassing because your client has proved itself to be treacherous while our clients have proved themselves to be blameless." In reality, it was written to give us much greater freedom than the stated rationalization, for example, the first sub-clause ("If Mark Anderson is found alive or dead...") implied it referred to my body being found inside the underground lab's ruins, but the wording had no termination date. It meant that Mark Anderson could legally never be restrained against his will by The Government. Not legally anyway; the Government could act illegally of course, but it gave us what might be a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card if we could get a court to order my release on the grounds that the Government had breached this Agreement. (2) The yet-to-be-chartered Mark Anderson Foundation to be given $5 billion by The Government. Regarding (2). It was an INSANE amount of money. When Vanessa had first said that we were going to ask $5 billion for the Mark Anderson Foundation, I'd had to check, "You did say 'billion', with a 'b', and a SHIT LOAD of zeroes! Right?" Vanessa had answered, "Five billion has TWO shit loads of zeroes less than the full lawsuit. That's what they're trying to avoid. A few billion is a VERY cheap escape." The Mark Anderson Foundation (MAF) was Vanessa's RED-HOT button. MAF was publicly to be my legacy, but it was actually Vanessa's idea, dream and legacy. It would be chartered as soon as the cash was in our hands, but not before, in case its stated purpose upset the settlement. Its goal would be: "To encourage the exposure and prosecution of corruption and abuses of power involving employees of the American Government." Its method of operation would be threefold: To pay journalists who expose government corruption and abuse. Any journalist that does so, regardless of who he/she works for and whether already paid for the work, will be to ask MAF for a bonus, the value of which will depend on the magnitude of the misbehavior uncovered, but will be very nice. A reporter should be able to make a very good living doing nothing but the occasional exposé. We hope a very large number of them will, and that non-full-time investigative reporters will be more likely to chase down suitable stories if they know that MAF will give them a very nice bonus at the end. To prosecute/sue the offenders. Government employees who committed crimes in the course of their jobs, if targeted by MAF, will be hounded to ensure they are punished for their misdeeds and to serve as a disincentive for any others tempted toward corruption or abuse. To lobby Government for increasingly severe penalties for crimes committed by Government employees. We didn't expect much success in this area. Vanessa's thesis is that the American media has abandoned journalist integrity and serving the needs of the nation, in favor of pursuing corporate profits. And don't start me on the Government's ability to stop its own corruption and abuses of power! Having been on the receiving end of those, I have a very strong opinion on the topic. So we are going to make "Keeping the Government Honest" a very attractive career path for investigative journalists. MAF isn't going to do investigations itself, instead relying on market forces to create a large pool of journalists to do that. Whistleblowers will have to contact journalists, which MAF could facilitate (it'll suggest the journalists reimbursed their whistleblowers handsomely too. That'd be a good idea if a journalist wanted to make a career out of this). We have hopes that MAF will force substantial improvements in Government behavior. It was sick that such an organization is necessary, but it is. It is also a highly appropriate legacy for Mark Anderson to leave 'behind' (true in the sense "Mark Anderson" no longer exists, especially not in the three other dimensions that contributed minds to this one). The $5 billion value Vanessa had chosen had been calculated backward. Vanessa had figured that $100 million would be an ample annual budget (we are intending to pay a LOT of journalists VERY well). $3 billion in the bank would easily provide $100 million per year in interest, but Vanessa rounded the $3 billion up to $5 billion to play safe, on the assumption that it was a good idea to have an extra billion or two stashed away. I couldn't argue with that. (3) The following individuals are defined as "The Family": ANDERSON: Felicity, Steven, Mark, Carol and Donna. WILLIAMS: Vanessa, Archibald, Andrew, Robert and Julia. WEST, Ava. FISHER, Ronald. The Family is to be given a total of $120 million, to be distributed as The Family decides. Regarding (3). We had to talk Donna out of including Patch. (4a) Benton County to be given $360 million by The Government, provided the County agrees to credit every Benton County household equally, to a total of at least 75% of what the County received ($270 million). Regarding (4a). What our lawyers had written was more complicated than this because there were several local governments inside Benton County, such as the City of Corvallis, whose income was about 50% more than Benton County itself. We specified that the Government payment was to be allocated across all the local governments in proportion to their previous year's total property-tax income. (I'll repeatedly refer to "the council" as if there was only one local government and it was a council, just because that's easiest. Ditto for "councilor".) $360 million is the equivalent of $5,000 per person, or $12,000 per household. This demand is worded the way it is to force the County to refund most of the money because we want people to get most of it in their hands. By household was the easiest way to distribute it. (4b) Every property owner on SE Peoria Road to be given $50,000 by The Government. Regarding (4b). Corvallis is the seat of Benton County, contributing 70% of the County's population, but the road we live on now is not part of Corvallis or Benton County. It's over the river and in the neighboring county, so our road's residences wouldn't qualify for (4a), therefore they get their own sub-clause. (4a) and (4b) would to make us HEROES in our community. From now on any enemies of our families should get zero support from any locals, and if we want any help from our community's members, they should fall all over themselves to provide it, especially our near neighbors. (5) All members of The Family to have lifelong exemptions from having to file Income Tax Returns and paying Income Tax. Regarding (5). It exempts us from the hassle, inherent spying and expense of income taxes (I rued that it was too late to save us from paying tax on the roulette win). It could potentially work out to be a GREAT deal of money if we ever started a big business like Julia thought I was capable of. I particularly liked the rationalization our lawyer gave: "The Family have paid far too steep a price for being American citizens already. Their Government deliberately and treacherously betrayed them, so their token protest is to not pay any more toward your client's existence. That'd be adding insult to injury." Regarding (4) and (5). I'm proud to say that they'd started as an idea of mine. I'd remembered reading in History that tax exemptions had sometimes been granted to villages in medieval Europe as rewards for exceptional service (admittedly villages had only a few dozen people at that time). I'd originally intended to get tax exemption for everyone in (4) - that being our "village" - but our lawyers said it was too expensive and prohibitively messy to administer, so the tax exemption is just to apply to my loved ones, plus Andrew and Robert. Giving money to everyone in (4) was just a huge PR exercise that we were getting the Government to pay for. (6) All DHS, CIA, FBI, police, and all other Government agency surveillance of, investigation into, inquiries about, and interest in, any of The Family to cease forthwith and not to be resumed in the absence of unsought reasonable indication of criminal activity by them postdating the execution of this Agreement (i.e., no 'fishing expeditions'). The Family are granted immunity from prosecution for any and all crimes they may have committed on or before the execution of this Agreement. Regarding (3), (5) and (6). The wording of (3) is slightly strange (i.e., it didn't just say what we intend: "Pay the following twelve people $10 million each"). The reason was because of the identity problems between Ron Fisher and Mark Anderson. As (3) is worded, it could be referring to the Ron Fisher who is a dead body buried in the mountains, and we could've chosen not to give any of the money to that dead body or its heirs, so we couldn't later be accused by his family of stealing $10 million from them. Similarly, the tax exemption in (5) and investigative exemption/immunity in (6) applied to the real Ron Fisher and Mark Anderson, without us having to make clear which is which. Our lawyers hadn't known any of that, or why we'd insisted on the strange wording, but they'd gone along with it. Regarding (6). Our claimed excuse for including Ron Fisher and Ava West in The Family definition given in (3) - which gives them lifelong income tax exemption - is to avoid their being used by the Government as a way to get around (6). For example, so the Government can't plant bugs on Ava or Ron, ostensibly to listen to them but really to spy on the Andersons. Because Ava and Ron spend a lot of time in our house, my families are pretending to protect themselves by including Ava and Ron under the umbrella. In reality, Ava is included just because we like and have some responsibility for her, and Ron is included because that's almost the ENTIRE point of (6). Theoretically we shouldn't need to include Ron (only Mark), because I should be able to legally revert to my own body after this agreement was signed, but NO WAY are we that stupid! The Government commits MAJOR CRIMES against the Constitution, so breaking a simple contract would be chickenfeed to them. Even if the Government was trustworthy - ha! - I couldn't return for reasons other than legal, such as how dangerous the medical hysteria would be. (7) Every justifiable criminal charge (kidnapping, illegal human experimentation, willful endangerment of a minor, etc.) is to be levied against every individual named as defendants in our lawsuit, and they are to be speedily arrested and prosecuted mercilessly to the full extent of the law, as a matter of highest priority. No plea bargaining. In each individual's case, if the person is sentenced to less than fifteen years of incarceration, then $1 million per year, or part thereof, of shortfall is to be paid to Mark Anderson. The same payment if any of them are released from jail after less than fifteen full years. None of them to be permitted access to a computer or any scientific information while incarcerated. The Family, or their designated Inspector, to be kept informed on a timely basis of the locations of all Defendants for the next fifteen years, and to have the right to conduct spot inspections without warning. If The Family or their Inspector is not able to locate a Defendant to their satisfaction within fifteen minutes of their arrival at the entrance to the stated location of the Defendant, then The Government is immediately liable to The Family for $25 million, rising by $5 million per hour or part thereof, until the Defendant is brought into the presence of the Inspector. Regarding (7). When our lawyer first presented our proposed settlement agreement to the other side, he'd said, "I know that many of the Defendants are useful agents or scientists and your client would prefer to keep them working productively. My clients are ADAMANT that won't happen. If any of the Defendants flee the country, disappear, get off on a prosecutorial mistake, or in any other way escape long-term incarceration, then my clients will consider that you've abrogated this Agreement." This was to ensure the destruction of the work-lives of the people who'd cooperated with my illegal treatment, including just by their keeping silent. Vanessa hates that there's a culture that white collar criminals don't get prosecuted if they work for the Government. We've been so long used to politicians being corrupt, that their perceived 'license' to do so has spread throughout Government, so Vanessa is intending to start to teach people that they should resist that infection. Having been on the receiving end of governmental abuses of power, I am in total and enthusiastic agreement. (8) The President and the Directors of the CIA and DHS are to make a nationwide televised apology to the American people and the Andersons for the illegal actions of the CIA and DHS, during which the President is to offer to pay $100,000 out of his own pocket, plus $50,000 from each the two Directors, to the City of Corvallis for a memorial to Mark Anderson "so the city won't forget the treachery shown to its citizens by their Government and President." Regarding (8). My families had to show they were angry over Mark's presumed death. I wasn't really dead, but we were still very angry that I'd lost that life. I was now an unskilled laborer rather than riding an advanced educational career somewhere fantastic. Plus, I truly was dead in three-quarters of my previous dimensions. (9) The Plaintiffs to remove the DHS and CIA from the list of Defendants. The DHS and CIA to cooperate fully with the Plaintiff's suit against the remaining individual Defendants. Regarding (9). This is what we were 'giving' the Government in return for all the other terms. (10) Our lawyers to be paid $10 million by The Government. Regarding (10). Our bill won't be nearly that high, but no doubt we'll need lawyers in the future, so it'll be good to have a large credit with a big DC firm. That was it. There were several other ideas that I'd really wished we'd been able to include: Getting Ava's parents cured was right at the top of the list. Katie, especially, wouldn't last much longer. But their doctors had insisted that throwing more money at it wouldn't make any useful difference, not even if millions were thrown. Next on my list had been getting the stupid Government to increase spending on science. Prof and Vanessa had both said that without having control of what they spend it on, they were more likely than not to spend it on bad science, such as another bioweapon lab. Plus our demanding things like that would give us lots of bad press, as we'd be seen to be pushing our own political agendas. Changing a couple of Oregon's laws. Something like, "Oregon to be given a gift of $x million if it changes its age of sexual consent to sixteen and it removes all restrictions from its marriage laws, except requiring minimum ages of sixteen." That way I'd be able to marry Carol AND Julia, even if I was later discovered to be Carol's brother. To my regret, the parents said it had too many problems. The idea hadn't even survived long enough to be talked about with our lawyers. Silly me for thinking that people should be able to choose who they marry. There was also a GREAT deal of other legalese: References to "The Government" included its agencies, employees, contractors, subcontractors, people operating on its request or suggestion, etc. We had in mind the CIA's unbelievably immoral tactic of flying prisoners to other countries where they had no legal protections, for internment, interrogation, and it seemed likely, torture. About tax. The above values were all what would end up in people's hands, so post-tax where there could be any. About breaches. If the Government breached any term of the agreement, we can resume our lawsuit while the Government will continue to be bound by this Agreement. We won't have to return any money, and we can even sue them for additional losses caused by their breach. Unlike most negotiated settlements, our contract had no confidentially clause. I particularly like that the public will know that the President, DHS and CIA heads were forced to dip into their own pockets. There were an amazing number of pages for what is, I thought, a simple set of demands. God knows why anyone would want to be a lawyer. Or maybe it'd be the Devil who knew. Ignoring the value of our lifelong tax exemption, which is impossible to put a value on and isn't an out-of-pocket expense for the Government now, the total value of the above is almost exactly $5.5 billion; $5 billion for the Mark Anderson Foundation, $492 million for everything else combined. $5.5 billion is a great deal of money - seriously, it is! - so the Government's lawyers called back in a few days, wanting to negotiate. Our top lawyer invited them to visit again. When the pack of Government lawyers arrived, they were escorted into our law firm's biggest conference room, where our pack of well over twenty lawyers assembled. The baddies were surprised by how much they were outnumbered, but before that could be discussed our partner asked them, "You wanted to meet, so you start." The Government's head lawyer started his spiel. "Blah, blah... ," It didn't matter what he said, as you'll see shortly. For what it's worth, they wanted to reduce the endowment to the MAF, they had a real problem with the impracticality of the tax exemption 'request', and they had concerns about our immunities from prosecution for any previous crimes. Strangely, their client didn't seem equally concerned about its failure to prosecute any crimes already committed by its employees. Most of our twenty-odd lawyers were busy reading through files and making notes on legal pads, because they were working on other clients' work. They'd be able to double-bill this time. There are very few professional activities that are more satisfying to a lawyer than double-billing their time. They are: triple-billing their time, quadruple-billing it, etc. Our partner kept encouraging the other side's spiel. When the baddies ran down, our partner said, "I see. Pass me your copy of the proposed settlement agreement please." It was slid over, our partner looked at his watch, did some mental calculations, then amended the contract, changing the tenth demand from $10 million to $10,022,000. The contract was pushed back, our partner explaining, "My apologies, but my clients gave me VERY explicit instructions and they wouldn't be talked out of them. At our previous meeting, I was to tell you that my clients had instructed me that there wouldn't be any negotiation. If you tried to negotiate, I was to pack our largest conference room with as many of our lawyers as possible, listen to you for as long as you wanted to talk, increase the tenth demand by double the value of our combined bill-out rates for the duration of meeting, then tell you what I have just said. -- "In addition, I am instructed to recite the following to you." He opened a file, pulled out a paper to read from it, "'You can take your counteroffer and stick it up the President's ass, into the gap where his soul used to be.' They were very insistent that I use those exact words. Let me give you this page to make sure you can repeat it to your client accurately. -- "Now that I've completed my instructions, my advice is that you sign. My clients are justifiably very angry, don't need the money, and would derive a great deal of personal satisfaction from causing your client as much misery as possible. I suggest you don't ask for another negotiation meeting because I've been given some even more explicit instructions for that eventuality." What Vanessa had told our lawyer to do seemed childish and amateur. Its making us look like dumb, emotional newbies to the legal game would result in the other side's underestimating us during the rest of the negotiation. Our lawyer thought it was an interesting approach, although he was still undecided about whether it would be a smart one. ------- Chapter 310: Keeping an Eye on the Other Side Late-May to Thursday August 10, 2006 The Government's lawyers didn't rush away to get the just-modified agreement signed. It was never going to happen like that, Vanessa assured us. She would've been disappointed had that happened, as this was meant to be just the first round of several. She was hoping to get the Government dancing to our tune, and they weren't on the ropes enough for that yet. Despite Vanessa's saying she'd be very disappointed to get exactly what we had told our lawyers to demand, I wouldn't have been at all disappointed. I'd be too busy running around in circles and yelling "Yippee!" to be disappointed. Each of us got his or her own TEN MILLION dollars! That was worth at least one "Yippee!", and possibly even two. I could see that it would disappoint Vanessa though, so I asked her, "Why are you so sure they won't sign?" She had several good reasons (they're mentioned just below), and described some of her intended tactics. She achieved something I wouldn't have thought possible: she convinced me to be disappointed if the Government signed our $5.5 billion deal! Vanessa had assured us, "No one accepts first offers, especially not politicians who love to have the last say to prove how important they are, and not lawyers who're advising them and have to make themselves look smart. Any lawyer that recommended accepting our first offer would be ridiculed and would likely lose his client. They'll maneuver enough that they'll create an opportunity for us to tell them to submit a better offer." Another reason was that a ridiculously large number of people in the Federal Government had to review the agreement and render their opinions on it, point out problems with it, suggest changes to it, etc. That process had already started, but it was by no means complete. In the Federal Government, the review of even a ten-page document could very easily generate two or three hundred pages of suggested changes (that snippet of information had been provided by our lawyers). The last reason the Government wouldn't sign immediately was because there truly was a problem with the agreement. Even if it decided to sign, it couldn't, because the agreement required it to agree to things it couldn't provide. There weren't any more negotiation meetings, but there were legal discussions between their lawyers and ours about the implementation problems and details. It's amazing how many details a team of lawyers can think of when their firm is charging several thousand dollars an hour for their time. One problem was our blanket immunity to crimes up to the date the settlement agreement was signed. As the Government's lawyer said, "The Family could go on a crime rampage the day before signing. We should change the date to a couple of weeks ago." Our lawyer answered, "You're accusing them of having criminal intent. They're the innocent victims of months of egregious criminal activity carried out by the Government, while representatives of it stood in front of cameras and lied about the fate of their son. But I'll pass your comment on to my clients. I'm sure they won't be the least upset by your slur and it will help them reach an amicable settlement with your client." "Don't bother. It was merely a theoretical consideration." We didn't want to fix that immunity 'problem' because I was already going on somewhat of a "crime rampage": I was doing lots of snooping. Getting immunity for that seemed like a good idea, just in case it was ever pinned on me. Our tax-free status was by far the greatest problem, as Vanessa had planned for it to be. The Federal Government couldn't contract to provide that because it stepped on State and County toes. Potentially a large number of such toes, as individual members of The Family could be expected to reside in many different parts of the country during our lifetimes. There were laws all over the country that citizens had to file tax returns, and it'd require a massive amount of work and much time to modify them all. The other side suggested that the easiest fix would be for us to file and pay for our taxes normally, and then for the Federal Government to reimburse us. We inexplicably and unreasonably refused that simple solution, which caused the lawyers to clock up tens of thousands of dollars of additional billings trying to work out another practical solution. We'd refused partly because we liked the idea of not having to account to the Government, but mainly because Vanessa had a large trick up her sleeve. We let time pass while we continued to pressure the Government. Vanessa was particularly enjoying making sure the pressure mounted to high levels. She got us - excluding me - to give many interviews that sent shivers up the Government's spines (oops, I forgot that politicians don't have spines). Vanessa herself talked about how she'd handle things if we bankrupted the Federal Government. She'd done some good research, talked to many of the Political Studies people at OSU, etc., and had many very attractive sounding ideas. For example, "Look at the CIA. They pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a hole in the ground to develop illegal and immoral weapons, then they let some foreigners waltz in and steal everything. How hard can it be to keep foreign soldiers out of a hole in the ground in the middle of America? The CIA couldn't even catch them after they left and it STILL doesn't have a clue who the attackers were. The CIA couldn't even build a lab that wouldn't be a total write-off if someone started a fire in it. -- "I can't think of a single thing the CIA has done right since before the Bay of Pigs. It looks to me that if we halved the CIA's budget, they'd commit half as many illegal screwups and we could use the billions saved to do something useful about our health care system. That seems very appropriate seeing as how the CIA killed our chance of being as healthy as Mark Anderson was. No sane person would disagree that we'd be better off spending the CIA's budget on health care than using it to develop diseases that could uncontrollably kill hundreds of millions of innocent people." Dad had fun, saying in one interview (for an example of the tone he was using in his interviews), "I wish I knew who the guy was that killed Robert Moran. I'd like to shake his hand and thank him for taking out the garbage. It doesn't look like they're going to catch him though, I guess the DHS are too busy kidnapping teenage boys who've got X-ray vision, or whatever the DHS's crackpot fantasy is this week." Prof chose a nationwide show to say, "Let me take this opportunity to thank whoever it was that leaked the initial documents from the CIA and DHS. I hope you're listening, because everyone in my and the Anderson families would like to give you our heartfelt thanks. Because of you, we know what the criminals we call our Government were doing to Mark. It was too late to save him, but I urge you to use your access to this Government's secrets to expose as many of their criminal activities as you can." Causing another horrible chill to go down the politicians' spines. (Or maybe to go up; it's hard to tell the direction when the spines are nonexistent.) Mom pointed out, "The DHS showed their inability to hire good managers by putting Michael Brown in charge of FEMA for New Orleans. Portland is just about as far away from New Orleans as it's possible to get in America, and still the DHS managers are criminally incompetent. The senior management of Homeland Security are terrible. Same with the bosses at the CIA. When we win our lawsuit - as we're certain to because everyone knows the Government committed those crimes - then we'll have the power to bankrupt the Government, or allow it to continue with our having control over the purse strings. I think we should look closely at all the senior managers in these departments, and maybe let the Government have enough money to operate provided some VERY major management changes are made. I'll have to think about that. -- "Although one thing's for sure, 'Bushie, you're doing a heck of a job.' No wonder you were impressed by Brownie's disaster relief efforts Bushie; he was far better at his job than you are at yours. At least he didn't create Katrina, whereas you're creating disasters everywhere you turn. When we win our lawsuit, does anyone know whether we'd be able to force that lying scumbag to resign? Or maybe to force the Republicans not to contest any elections for the next few decades? There are a lot of possibilities, aren't there?" (The references to "Bushie" are a play on Bush's endorsement of "Brownie", a dated reference to the New Orleans Katrina debacle.) [[Mom had actually supported "Bushie" for his first term, so there wasn't really anything personal in her personal attacks. If a Democrat had been President, nothing would be significantly different. If a system is allowed to be corrupted, and there are gains to be had from doing so, then it'll be corrupted. "Bushie" was merely the current product of a corrupted system.]] From the Government's point of view, it was one thing to pay my family a whole lot of the taxpayers' money, but it was ENTIRELY another thing to let my family have ANY degree of power over the political process itself. GOD KNOWS what sort of disasters politically ignorant civilians could cause if they had that power! There was a huge amount of ammunition my families could use to embarrass the Government, plus everyone else was hammering it too. When John Bolton carried out his instructions by trying to verbally rail against Iran's nuclear program in the UN, rather than building support for America's pressuring Iran like his speech was meant to, he was laughed down and ridiculed because of the US's bioweapon programs. Iran was MORE POPULAR THAN AMERICA! IRAN! What was the world coming to? Bush's inner-circle couldn't care less about a few billion here or there, although they were genuinely horrified that we were demanding that Bush pay $100,000 of his own money. They knew he wouldn't use his own money of course, but it was the principle of the thing. The public's money wasn't an issue that mattered to the inner-circle, but they did very much care that their big plans were being held back, so they told their lawyers to get the settlement done. Didn't we realize how much oil Iran had, how inefficiently it was being extracted, and how much oil America would need it in the coming decades. Our lawyers were very experienced at the DC game, so they quickly picked up on the new sense of urgency. We'd asked them to keep us informed of any changes in the other side's attitude, so they passed that news on. One thing Vanessa knew for sure about negotiations (and she knew a LOT about them), was that when the other side wants to go fast, you should go slow. Vanessa had some slowdown excuses ready to choose from, but I'd recently found something that I thought might be ideal, based on what I understood about Vanessa's strategy. She agreed. ^ To explain how I'd made my discovery, I need to explain that the four parents and I had thought that I should do some snooping. We had a number of reasons for this: When you're negotiating with someone, it's quite useful to know what they're thinking. We wanted to put pressure on the Government to settle quickly. We wanted to divert the authorities away from thinking that the leaker of the Fort Dodge files and the defendants' new employment locations was closely connected to us. To achieve those goals, I was visiting DC roughly every second night, and sometimes staying the day. To keep up with the Government's thoughts on our negotiation, I snooped the offices of the external law firm they were using. I had their address, and easily saw that the roof of their building only had security on its door, so I hid myself among some air-conditioning vents, safe from anyone's observation and where I'd hear or proximity sense anyone coming in time to avoid them. There are a lot of street-level video cameras around central DC, so I preferred to work from above as it made approaching and leaving very easy. Our lawyers had supplied us with the names of all the lawyers on the other side acting on our matter, including describing each of their functions and relative importance, so finding their offices would be easy for me. I started with their lead partner's office. A careful check showed me that there were no cameras, motion sensors, alarms on any of the filing cabinets, or any active or passive security inside the partner's office. The law firm's security was even more wonderful than the DHS's. He had a fairly large office safe that I couldn't open, but that just meant I could read only one of its files at a time. Having only one sight blob, I started with the safe. I sent the sight blob into the safe with two more light blobs to give me white light, then I opened the top file and browsed through it. It wasn't about us, but I was in no hurry and was curious about what else these lawyers did that needed to be kept in a safe. When I'd finished skimming the first file, I rotated it to the bottom and read the new top file. It took about half an hour to rotate my way through everything in the safe. There were reams of paperwork in the office, and it was stored in cabinets that were trivially easy to open from the inside. I unlocked the first filing cabinet and pulled its top drawer open. I browsed through the drawer, pulling out any file that had an interesting looking index tab. I looked at the top page to see how old it was, and if current, I put it on the floor. When the floor had thirty one files open on it, I started reading them all simultaneously. I didn't understand most of it, but I wasn't interested in the details anyway, except about our negotiation. When I found that file, I read it avidly. From time to time I returned files back to their place in the cabinet and replaced them with new ones. The vast majority of the files weren't of immediate interest to me so I just skimmed them. Skimming and being able to read thirty one sources at a time meant it didn't take me long to read everything I wanted to read in the office. I'd picked up a good overview of the sort of work this guy did. I repeated the process in office after office until the early hours of the morning, when it was time for me to leave. I wasn't worried about anyone arriving while I had files spread all over an office's floor because they'd turn on the corridor lights first, which I'd easily be able to notice under the door. I was using a very large sight blob, so a light going on anywhere nearby would be like a flare going off (why do lights go "on" but flares go "off" when they're triggered to emit light?). I'd immediately start putting stuff away. In the unlikely event that the very first arriver came to the office I was snooping, he'd find it impossible to open the door until I was ready, which would only take a few seconds. At worst he'd think his door was sticking, which I could easily confirm by using NP to make it seem sticky when he tested it the next few times. Near the end of the second such DC visit, I'd read all the paperwork I wanted to, so I found a safe location to descend to street level several blocks away, then walked back to the area. I was naturally bundled up against the cold, which hid my face and body nicely. I picked up several computer passwords as people arrived at work, which I used on subsequent nights. After that, the easiest way of staying current was to use their computers. The lawyers themselves did very little computer work; their secretaries doing nearly all of that for them, so it was the secretaries' computers that were the best for me to use. There was no effective security on them - they had security, but it wasn't effective against me - so I had no trouble getting in and looking for recent inward and outward emails, as well as new word processing documents. I knew what "Matter Numbers" I was interested in, so finding their documents was a simple procedure. Or I could search for "Anderson" and look at recent documents. It was so easy I had plenty of time for miscellaneous snooping in that law firm, and after I'd exhausted it, in many other firms - which takes me to the second and third bullet points several paragraphs above. Prof had, through the media, urged the leaker to expose other Government secrets. He could've just asked me over breakfast, but through the media worked best. Prof's comment was a calculated one. We wanted to pressure the Government into rushing to settle our lawsuit quickly. We were apparently in no hurry, but we wanted them to be because they'd offer more and a quick settlement was safer for us. If the negotiation went on for many months, or if the lawsuit went on for years, there would be a danger that the Government might do something that uncovered my secret identity. Another risk to us, especially to me, was that the Government was no doubt trying very hard to find out how the earlier leaks had occurred. The leaks had looked like they'd been sent by individual Federal employees such as Zachary Cole, but that was pretty obviously not the case so a full investigation would be in progress. We wanted the Government to live in fear of having their secrets exposed so they'd rush the settlement in the hope of getting the leaks to stop. And as a bonus, my creating such leaks might encourage the Government to do fewer bad things, although we weren't too hopeful about that. On the other hand, we didn't want to give the investigators lots of incidents to investigate, as every such incident increased the risk of my method being discovered (which would freak them out!), or of me being physically spotted. If the latter happened, they might surround me before I realized it. I could almost certainly get away, but it would amaze them and it risked my leaving traces, such as a dropped eyelash. Obviously "Majestic Countdown" (as I had decided to call myself in the leaking role, as it was close to my randomly banged out first email address of ljesjtc321@gmail.com), couldn't keep leaking Anderson-related documents because that linked us too closely. The authorities would start to think the Andersons were involved in the espionage, and they might do something drastic about it. We wanted to deliberately annoy the Government to make them rush the settlement, but we didn't want to annoy them too much or in a way that made us look like we had too close a connection to the leaker. On the other hand, keeping ourselves in the public spotlight by annoying the Government was helping our safety. It was a difficult judgment call, hence my frequent trips to DC to snoop on our opponent's lawyers, to attempt to understand what they were thinking about our negotiation. We'd thought it might help to have Prof use an interview to thank the leaker and to encourage the guy to "expose as many of the Government's criminal activities as you can," as a way of scaring the Government while making it plausible that we weren't actively involved in creating the leaks. Prof's starting a public, one-sided dialogue with the leaker might also be something that we could use in the future, perhaps to redirect the leaker to other targets. Vanessa was particularly eager to start leaking Democrat secrets, because she wanted the public to be so disgusted with everything political that they started demanding the overhaul of the whole system, although it'd take a great deal more disgust before calls for that level of change would have enough traction. So, in all my snooping, I had my eyes open for suitable material. It turned out to be very easy to find dirty laundry in DC law offices' files. I only had to type in a computer search for documents containing "secret" and do a little reading. Even better were "criminal" (or "is a crime"), "bribe", "hide the evidence" (or "hid the evidence"), "avoid prosecution", etc. Combinations of those were even more excellent. Computers are very useful things. As per Prof's request, from time to time Majestic Countdown sent something juicy to the major networks and the bloggers Prof had identified. All the leaked documents were chosen to embarrass the Republican party, to motivate them to settle quickly. I didn't send many such documents, just enough to keep a Republican scandal in the news continuously. I resisted the temptation to leak some of the documents I'd seen in the Government lawyers' files. I wanted to, especially because they must be assholes if the Government had chosen to use them, but there was too much chance I'd need to snoop those offices again so it was better if I didn't give them a reason to upgrade their security. All the leaks came from other law firms' offices that I snooped. One night while keeping on top of what the other side was thinking about our negotiation, I thought to do a computer search in their lawyers' system for "Bush", "Anderson" and "$100,000". I found a document that described how Bush could obtain $100,000 from a donor and process it so it'd look like his personal payment for the Anderson Settlement. It didn't say anything about who the donor was or why the donor would give Bush $100,000, but it still seemed smelly to me. I memorized the details then carried on looking for other interesting documents. When Vanessa said, "The other side are suddenly interested in moving forward quickly, so we should look for a reason to slow down," I suggested using the email I'd found. I'd guessed that it might be embarrassing for the President in a way that Vanessa could use to slow down the negotiation, and she enthusiastically agreed. While I'm mentioning crisscrossing the country, I took advantage of passing nearby to drop into Fort Dodge on some of those trips, just to delay the recovery project. The longer some bodies remained buried under the rubble, the greater the chance of them never being identified. The best thing I did was to cause another one of the exoskeletons to malfunction. I never saw them again after that, which slowed the pit's recover work by at least a factor of three or four. On other visits of mine, one of their office hard disks had a head crash, a rack in the chemical storeroom (for decontaminating supplies, etc.) collapsed to cause a considerable mess, and the fuses for the elevator that I'd melted before melted again. A guy didn't notice that his cigarette dropped to the floor in the recreation room and it was amazing how fast the carpet and sofa caught fire. I'd hoped to cause a plausible major fire, but they were too quick to respond so I had to let them put it out or it would've appeared too freaky. I was starting to get worried about people getting suspicious of so many such events, so I changed my tactics. One night while the boss of the cleanup project was sleeping, his hotel room's door unlocked and his laptop, PDA, cellphone and briefcase floated out, his wallet remaining behind. The computers were encrypted and I hadn't seen him ever use them so I didn't know any of his passwords or encryption keys, so all I did was flick through his briefcase on the chance it had anything interesting (it didn't), then I crushed and buried everything. The CIA would think they had an ongoing security problem and should waste a lot of resources trying to track it down, hopefully making them less likely to allocate resources to investigating the families of everyone unaccounted for in the pit. ^ Upon getting Vanessa approval to my suggestion for what to leak, a few hours later a computer in a Los Angeles IRS office sent emails to all the major networks and several select bloggers: From: Majestic Countdown President Bush was caught lying about the Fort Dodge lab. Now he is intending to lie to everyone again. A term of the Anderson Settlement Contract is that President Bush publicly declares that he will pay $100,000 from his own pocket to the City of Corvallis for a memorial to apologize for governmental and presidential treachery toward its citizens. Directors of DHS and CIA to contribute $50,000 from their own pockets too. Purpose is to personally punish Bush & co-betrayers, not because Corvallis needs $200,000 for memorial, as another term of the Settlement is that government gives Benton County $360 million; county to refund at least 75% to residents. Five days ago Bush received the following advice from [the name of the lawyer and law firm] on how to use a $100,000 political donation to pay the above, while claiming it came from his pocket. [I retyped the surely illegal legal advice.] Presidents should learn to not lie, because I enjoy finding them out and exposing them. The last point was an attempt to give Majestic Countdown a motivation that was unrelated to the Andersons. There were several consequences: The law firm upgraded their physical security, including having guards patrol the premises at night and having their network monitored for activity. [[The access dates on the file had given too much away, and had given the partners a GREAT deal of concern when they saw all the other files which had modified access dates.]] Amusingly, I was still able to read the paper files in the firm's locked offices. The residents of Benton County thought the Andersons were WONDERFUL people. None of the terms of the proposed settlement agreement had been made public before, so the county's residents learning $360 million would probably be coming their way soon - everyone expected the Government to settle - was cause for great celebration. That the Andersons were giving a third of a billion dollars to the County when they could presumably direct the money to their own pockets created admiration and respect for our generosity all around America, as intended. Bush appeared on TV to assure everyone that he had no intention of following that unsolicited advice. Maybe his mother believed him, but no one else did. And probably not his mother either, given how many presidents she'd known personally. My four parents got to give several more interviews. The key one, led by Vanessa, is quoted below: "It was true that the Federal Government approached us to request a settlement for their many illegal actions, and we were in discussions with them about it, but it turns out that they were negotiating in bad faith and were already planning how to break the agreement. I for one don't believe that the leaked advice was unsolicited. The advice came from the law firm that our lawyers are in negotiation with, so the advice came from an insider, not from someone hoping to pick up some extra business. Lawyers are compulsive about charging someone for their time, and for only doing work that is chargeable. I can't imagine such a large firm doing free work for the Federal Government. I noticed that Majestic Countdown's email took pains to describe the situation accurately. I'm sure that had there been an email from President Bush back to that lawyer rejecting the immoral advice, Majestic Countdown would have mentioned it. -- "At this time, we've decided to put the settlement discussions on hold. We have an airtight case against the defendants and we no longer trust the Government to abide by the terms of a settlement agreement, so we think we should let the lawsuit proceed to a court-ordered resolution. We hope the President will be less likely to break a court order than a binding legal contract, although I must say that I'm not very hopeful about him being honest about anything. -- "We're appalled that the President - who has sworn to serve the people of this nation - was willing to re-expose the nation to a $242 trillion dollar debt in order to cheat on his agreement to pay a paltry $100,000. I think that speaks volumes about his fitness to serve. It also demonstrates his desire to use deception and lies to avoid taking responsibility for his actions or to abide by his commitments. -- "Lastly, this incident further justifies the case for the holders of high office to have their personal finances kept under daily scrutiny by independent auditors. Holders of high office are in positions of enormous trust and power, so it's essential that they be seen to be honest. If President Bush's accounts had been under independent scrutiny, he wouldn't have been tempted to jeopardize a settlement that was for the good of the nation in order to cheat on the contract for his personal financial gain." You can imagine the horror this point caused among the holders of high office. It would make them desperate to settle quickly, before Vanessa's appalling idea gained any momentum. The reporters had several more questions, such as "Would Benton County still receive the money if the case went to court?", or, "What were the other terms of the settlement agreement?" None of the questions had any noteworthy significance. Those that the parents were happy to discuss, they enjoyed revealing slowly over several days because we wanted to keep ourselves in the news. One of the details of the stalled settlement agreement that we cheerfully admitted was that our family had been asking for one-third of the amount we'd requested for Benton County. While $120 million tax-free is a very nice amount of money for a family to receive, it was NOWHERE near what people had been expecting us to demand. They were stunned that we would've settled for so little, and they were appalled that the President had screwed such a reasonable deal. The $5 billion for the Mark Anderson Foundation had to be mentioned. The parents refused to say what the specific goals of MAF would've been had the deal gone ahead, but they said it had been intended to be a legacy for Mark, it would've performed socially beneficial work, and we wouldn't have earned a dollar from it. Mom explained, "If the Government hadn't killed Mark, he would've changed humanity forever. We wanted his legacy to be something substantial and effective, so we asked for $5 billion for it. It's true that money would've come FROM the people, but it's also would've been spent FOR the people and to the benefit our society, which is far better than what the Government would've done with it. They'd dig a new hole in the ground, fill it with hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment, spent hundreds of million more to develop weapons no sane person wants to exist, and then they'd let the entire place burn to ashes. But that's irrelevant now, because the President's dishonesty ruined the negotiation. It's pointless to negotiate with someone when you know he intends to break his side of the deal. I feel sorry for every other country in the world who tries to deal with our country, because our leadership is so dishonest." On our next visit to Katie and Carson, we kids distracted Ava while Mom and Vanessa told Ava's parents "Don't worry about Ava's financial future. We're intending to give Ava maybe a million or so out of the settlement amount, as well as trying to ensure she'll never have to pay income tax for the rest of her life. After all, Mark was a big part of her life so the Government should pay her something." The reassurance wasn't concrete, but it did cheer up Ava's parents somewhat. ------- Chapter 311: Negotiating Upwards Late-May to Thursday August 10, 2006 (Continued) The inner-circle was getting very annoyed at their increasingly lame duck of a President. The moron couldn't even hide a tiny $100,000 transaction. The Canadian Prime Minister had just canceled a scheduled state visit, saying, "Sorry, I'm too busy." Letterman, Leno and the like were laughing it up. Snubbed by CANADA! The inner-circle was very displeased. How on Earth was Bush going to be able to talk the rest of the world into standing on the sidelines while America brought the benefits of democracy to Iran, including efficient oil production, when even Canada didn't want to listen to him? "For fuck's sake Dubya, stop fucking around with the Anderson fiasco. It's got nothing to do with anything, so buy them off so we can move on. As it is, it's going to take us weeks to dig you out of the hole your mouth made." ("Dubya" is one of George W. Bush's nicknames, being the way Texans pronounce "W". The name distinguishes him from Bush Senior.) So the Government's lead lawyer approached our lead lawyer, "To see what it'd take to get some forward momentum happening again?" Our lawyer responded, "I don't believe our clients are interested in 'forward momentum' at this stage. You can submit an offer if you like, but I doubt they'll bother reading it. We're concentrating on preparing for the case. I must say that I'm looking forward to that very much. I'm going to be the lead lawyer for the biggest award in legal history, one that'll bankrupt the Federal Government. That's going to be a bright spot in my career. If I were you, I'd make sure you get your bills paid before you go to trial, because your client might not have any money afterward, haha." The lawyer he was dealing with knew how the game was played, and correctly interpreted our lawyer's statement to mean, "Make an offer, but it better be a very good one, or else." Given the terrible pressure the Government's lawyers were under, they were forced to assemble several hardworking teams to suggest negotiation offer components, analyze their appeal to the Andersons, fine tune their values, check they were self-consistent, etc. As one example, the firm had dozens of lawyers who dealt with civil engineering matters, several of whom were grabbed and forced to work an all-nighter to come up with appropriate negotiation offers in their area of specialty. As just one of the themes in their one area, they pursued the idea that Mark's legacy seemed to be my family's biggest priority, which led to their suggesting: Getting the state government to change Corvallis's name to "Andersonville", "Markstown", other variations on that theme, or simply let us choose any name we wanted. Governments love to name things after people, as if that actually achieves anything. Because we lived on the other side of the river from the city, maybe building a fancy, new "Mark Anderson Bridge". I'd like to denigrate the Government by writing, "Corvallis didn't need a new bridge," but in fact, Corvallis does need a new bridge. The one leaving town going east is only a single-lane bridge, quite old, and often a bottleneck. It's overdue to be replaced with a two-lane version. I doubt the Government knew that though, so I still consider it denigrated. Because studying had been important to me, maybe a major, new "Mark Anderson Building" for OSU. One particularly imaginative lawyer (or, by the look of his mannerisms, probably a homo who was excessively inspired by my far-too-frequently shown Speedos photo) suggested a statue of me so high that its legs could span the Willamette River, so it'd look like the Colossus of Rhodes. I cringed (I was sitting on the top of the building and watching most of these discussions, reading their notes, etc. It's a useful tactic in a negotiation). The law firm was forced to put in over three hundred thousand dollars' worth of hard-worked, highly billable hours, but it was worth it. Tired after their night's work, the three lead lawyers were ready to present their ideas and recommendations to the President the next day. For assorted practical reasons, I wasn't sitting on top of the President's roof during that discussion, so we had no knowledge of what the President thought until our lawyers got the baddies' offer later that afternoon. Their new offer: Increased MAF's endowment from $5 to 7.5 billion. Increased Benton County's payment from $360 to 500 million. Increased SE Peoria Road property owners' payment from $50,000 to 75,000 each. Increased The Family's payment from $120 to 250 million. The President PROMISED (honest!) that the $100,000 would come from his own pocket, and suggested what looked like a good way of ensuring that it did. The rest of our proposed settlement agreement was agreed to, subject to finding a solution to the "No income tax" problem. Plus there was ALL SORTS of miscellaneous crap. Fortunately, they'd not suggested a Statue of Liberty-sized, Speedo-clad, river-straddling "Colossus of Corvallis", although the girls were very disappointed about that. Seeing my reaction to their complaint, Julia suggested fixing my objection by asking them to make it without the Speedos I objected to so much. Carol pointed out, "That'd make an EXCELLENT location to tie a rope swing to." I wasn't swayed. I'd already told my family many of the ideas I'd seen the Government's lawyers discuss, but they were funny all over again when we saw them being proposed in writing. The baddies hadn't known what to offer us, other than money, so they'd used a shotgun approach. 80% of their new suggestions I would've paid them NOT to do - anything with my name on it for a start - but some of the ideas appealed to other members of the families. Fortunately nothing embarrassing; just small useful things for the community. In the grand scheme of things they were irrelevant as we weren't going to accept the offer anyway. After some good laughs, usually at my expense, we put their offer away and went about our daily business (school for the kids, gardening work for me, embarrassing the Government for the parents). We didn't have to call our lawyers because we'd already told them how we'd respond to any offer. Early the next morning my parents got the helpful TV networks to film Mom and Dad saying, "We received another offer from the Government yesterday afternoon. We would've mentioned it earlier but we've been too busy laughing. We have serious doubts about the intelligence of the people in DC because important parts of their offer include their making promises to do things. They kidnapped and killed our son, the DHS repeatedly lied that they'd released Mark in Portland, the President lied about knowing about the Fort Dodge lab and he was lying about agreeing to pay the $100,000 out of his pocket, and unbelievably, they're STILL asking us to trust them! -- "We can't decide whether they really are that stupid, whether they're insulting us by thinking we're that stupid, or whether they've been dishonest and untrustworthy for so long that they've forgotten what honesty actually is. I've got news for you Mr. President, we do NOT trust you. You're a liar, and your administration is corrupt, abusive, dishonest, criminal and immoral. Even our 13-year old daughter laughed when she heard you were asking us to trust you. Maybe you're used to dealing with the other simpletons in DC, Mr. President, but you can't fool even a 13-year old girl here in Oregon." After that'd been played and replayed several times around the country - especially in Oregon - back in the DC inner-circle: "For God's sake, Dubya, we said to buy them off, not give them more ammunition to make you look stupid." Dubya was considerably less polite to his side's lawyers. The Government's head lawyer called our head lawyer, to ask, "From what I've heard, your clients weren't happy with our offer?" "You've heard more than I have. I've not talked to them since we forwarded your offer to them." "When do you expect to hear from them?" "Some time after the President proves he's trustworthy." "Is there an alternative way we could move forward?" "You could remove the need for trust." "What have you got in mind?" "The situation is simple: our clients don't trust the President will pay the $100,000 out of his pocket or that he'll deliver on their tax exemptions after the contract is signed, so they're not interested in signing. So I suggest the President gets busy on delivering on them. That will clear the trust issue and demonstrate some good faith." "BEFORE the contract is signed?" "Yes." "That's highly irregular." "Demonstrating good faith is 'highly irregular'? Don't bother answering, we both know the answer to that. The Government kidnapped and killed their son while lying about it the whole time, so I think it should be able to handle a small additional irregularity." "The Government didn't kill Mark Anderson. That was by unknowns." "I'll pass your comment on to my client. I doubt it'll get the settlement moving again, but maybe you understand the psychology of bereaved parents better than I do. By the way, everyone here is hoping you advance that piece of disingenuity in court." "You've made your point. The President can write out a check tomorrow for his payment, but..." "You'd better include the other two, AND submit a copy of the speech he'll give, AND hire independent auditors to confirm the money came from his personal account. You're underestimating the contempt and suspicion my clients have for the President." "I'll pass your suggestions on. As you know, we've still got the more serious problem of the tax exemption. Your clients have shot down every idea we've floated." "That's because you don't understand their psychology. They're ordinary, salt-of-the-earth people; not the politically astute types you're too used to dealing with. Your working for who they think of as the murdering bastards who killed their son predisposes them to distrust everything you suggest. The President's repeated lying hasn't done their perceptions of your suggestion any good either. From what they've told me, they automatically disbelieve anything that comes out of his camp. -- "I can think of one possible approach. I could suggest to my clients that I draft a law change that, when enacted, would give effect to what they want. That might get them interested in moving forward again. I warn you that I'd be doing it for my clients, so it'd be in their favor, and if it's passed into law with a single word changed they'd refuse to consider settlement. They don't trust your client an inch, and they don't need to because they'll triumph in court. Let me know whether your client agrees with my suggestion. -- "By the way, now that we have a court date, we'll be issuing a subpoena duces tecum for the President tomorrow over the extent of his prior knowledge about the DHS's and CIA's human experimentation programs. You're authorized to receive service on the President's behalf, aren't you?" "Yes." Later that day, our lawyer got the word from the other side to start working on the law change exempting us from having to file personal tax returns. He got hard to work on it, which is to say that he pulled the first version out of his filing cabinet and went over it again more carefully, now that it looked like it'd be used. The next day he had the subpoena delivered to the President's lawyers' then held a very well attended press conference to talk about it. "It was clear from his leaked memos that the President had prior knowledge about the Fort Dodge lab. We know that two independent agencies - the DHS and CIA - both had dozens of scientists performing experiments on Mark Anderson, so the inescapable conclusion is that authorization for the kidnapping and torturous experimenting on American children had been granted to them from the highest levels. We have today subpoenaed the President to appear at the July 12 date, together with all relevant documentation, to answer questions about that. He can hardly hide behind national security now that the practice of human kidnapping and experimentation has been exposed and Fort Dodge lab destroyed with all of its secrets stolen by an unknown, presumably foreign, power. -- "It's too late to save Mark Anderson, but I urge parents who have missing children to do everything they can to find out whether the DHS or CIA have kidnapped their children to experiment on them, possibly under the instructions of the President." Whether other missing children might've fallen into the kidnapping clutches of the DHS and CIA had already received a great deal of press. The DHS and CIA had denied it of course, but the DHS's several lies about releasing me destroyed the credibility of their denials, and the possibility of the CIA telling the truth had never occurred to anyone in the first place. Mentioning the "Missing Children" issue again now was such a good way of causing discomfort to the politicians and President that it was irresistible. The howls it'd again cause would filter upward. Reporters have previously loved asking the President whether he'd ordered the CIA and DHS to kidnap and experiment on American children, and no doubt they'd love doing it again if they were given half a chance. It made for Great TV. The President and the Directors of the DHS and CIA made their 'contribution' to Corvallis's coffers. The City of Corvallis loved the scandal, and rubbed its municipal hands together in anticipation of getting those hands on millions of additional dollars. The city councilors were still thinking $360 million as my family hadn't divulged any details of the latest offer. They knew we'd rejected the first and second offers, but they were still eagerly counting 360 million chickens before the eggs had been laid. My families were still embarrassing the Government terribly with their interviews. Dad was playing the pissed-off jokester, for example, "We've been beaming my family's well-known mind-control powers to DC, ordering the President to do something intelligent for a change. But either DC is out of our range or the President's intelligence is so low that even after we increase it he still seems stupid. Our daughter Donna's horse has learned to open its gate though, so it seems easier to increase the intelligence of dumb beasts than dumb Presidents." Mom was playing the concerned mom, Vanessa commenting on the Governments lack of ethics, Prof giving rational commentaries, and the girls providing many sympathy-getting, humanizing details about "Mark The Man". Even Patch had been on TV several times, although he'd rather have been fed some apricots (he had a strange favorite food). The press asked my families to respond to the three gifts to Corvallis and to the President's statement about his $100,000 contribution, but my families didn't say much about those, mostly along the lines of, "It was the least they could do considering the harm their departments did to our lives." During his after-work interview, Prof asked the reporters a little something we'd been saving for the right time, "The next time anyone from your networks is interviewing the head of the DHS, would you please ask him whether they're going to be pressing terrorism charges against Mark." The reporters laughed. Prof insisted, "I'm serious. On January 19 the DHS raided our home with a warrant authorizing them to remove equipment and papers that might prove Mark was a terrorist financier. They removed tens of thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment, all of our financial records, and many other items. It's been nearly six months and they've not returned any of it, nor pressed terrorism charges against Mark, nor told anyone what they're intending to do. I know Homeland Security is staffed by extremely incompetent people, but surely even they should've been able to decide whether or not to charge a dead boy with terrorism five months after they sent him to his death." Our stuff had been gathering dust in the DHS's storeroom. With the crap that'd exploded in their face because of their role in my presumed death, the DHS had gone into deny-and-hide mode, hoping everyone would focus on the CIA. The DHS were actively trying to forget we existed, so nothing was being done to advance their investigation into the Andersons and Williamses. After Moran's death, no one wanted to touch our file. The evening news had Prof's interview, with the networks' commentaries containing obvious ridicule for the DHS, sometimes not even between the lines. The late night chat shows had jokes about the DHS, like their being "hot on the trail of the Wright Brothers for conducting flights without DHS-approved lockable cabin doors. The DHS are expecting arrests any decade now." The head of the DHS called Prof that evening, promising to have our stuff returned early the next morning. We were actually somewhat impressed that he'd had the balls to do that, as no one else in authority had contacted us directly. Not that his doing so would stop our attacks on the DHS. His phone call was a drop in the ocean in comparison to the harm they'd done to us. Prof invited the networks to attend the DHS's returning of our stuff because he wanted the cameras to record him teasing the DHS people about why they'd had to seize mouse-pads and other stupid things like that. In the morning, in front of all the cameras, it didn't take Prof long to notice that the DHS had returned only five of my eight 30" screens. He asked the delivers' boss, "The DHS seized eight of those large screens. Why have you only returned five?" "Ahh. We couldn't find the others." Mathematicians enjoy sarcasm and facetiousness - those forms of humor must be indications of intelligence - so Prof had a GREAT time responding to that development, and the media had a great time reporting it. The DHS did return the cash I'd kept in my safe, as well as Ava's naked photographs and her letter. That was a relief because I'd been worried about having to tell her that her private stuff was missing. I could joke that the choice of loot implied the thief/thieves were computer nerds, but I've met computer nerds before and they would've kept Ava's photos too. We milked the DHS's screw-up for several days, demanding our original screens back, demanding an explanation for their disappearance, asking the DHS via the media, "How were you hoping to spot our son's spending millions of dollars financing terrorists when you can't even count to eight?" The event perfectly captured the public's opinion of the DHS, so it became an iconic fountainhead of jokes about the DHS's incompetence, e.g., a bunch of oblivious DHS agents being crept up on by several terrorists holding up a computer monitor each, pretending to hide behind them as if they were hiding behind a camouflage bush; or various jokes based on the DHS's inability to count to eight, such as Iraq having lots of WMDs but all hidden behind doors with combination locks that required too-difficult numbers, such as "8". [The DHS did catch the guy who'd stolen my screens. He'd stolen them one by one and sold them. Over the last year or so, he'd stolen quite a lot from the Evidence Room's inactive cases. As per Vanessa's advice, we played it very straight. The reporters were surprised we didn't milk it, but we explained, "Government departments should ALWAYS be sincerely congratulated for uncovering and prosecuting employee crimes. We want to encourage them to do so, and to thank them for acting responsibly about it. Ridiculing departments for exposing crime is foolish because it'd push them toward doing cover-ups, which is the last thing you want."] We'd replaced most of our needed equipment already (sadly Ron didn't need much), so we didn't have any use for the returned gear. We didn't trust the DHS not to have planted bugs. Surely that had to be extremely unlikely, but that was assuming the DHS wasn't stupid so we worried about it. It wasn't worth getting the gear checked over by experts so we wiped the disks then donated everything to charity, including the five 30" screens. We chose a charity that dealt with partially blind people, so they'd now be able to use REALLY BIG font sizes. We got the refund check from the DHS for the missing three screens made out to the charity too. Why should they miss out because the DHS were incompetent at keeping their Evidence Room secure? More accurately, we were in a PR campaign to show that we were the good guys and the Government was the bad guy. It was a very easy campaign. After three more embarrassing days, using the DHS and other sources of inspiration, the Government's lead lawyer called our lead lawyer again, to inquire "How's the draft for the new law coming along?" "I'm not writing the draft but the final version. As I told you last time, if you change what I write, my clients will suspect you've inserted something to make it ineffective. Even if I assured them otherwise, they're just going to believe that I've been outsmarted and they'll lose interest in settling. It's impossible for me to overstate how little they trust the Government. But to answer your question, I have done some work on it, but not much. The President screwed up paying Corvallis so badly that my clients are much more interested in preparing for their day in court than in settling." "What do you mean? He did exactly what they asked for." "What they asked for in the FIRST settlement proposal. Since then the President was caught concocting a scheme to cheat on the agreement by avoiding paying for it while still publicly claiming that he had. When you last called me, I told you I hadn't talked to my clients since they'd received your settlement counteroffer. I have now, and it's clear they hold the President in even more contempt than they did before. Every monetary amount in his counteroffer was an increase over the first's, all at the public's expense, except the President did not increase his personal contribution. They interpreted that as his refusing to take responsibility for his actions, and proof that he believes he can get caught planning to breach his agreement with them and carry on as if nothing has happened. Vanessa Williams lectures on ethics for goodness sake! How did the President think she was going to react to his refusal to accept he'd done anything wrong? All he did was provide them with even more reason to hate and distrust him, so they're even less interested in settling than before. Didn't you advise the President to increase the amount of his 'fine'?" "You know I can't discuss that. So where are we at for getting settlement?" "We've done some work on the tax exemption issue, but it's more of a theoretical exercise than anything else. In their eyes the President keeps slapping them in the face and proving how contemptible he is. His actions rendered the counteroffer ineffective, so they're more interested in inflicting punishment on him and his administration than letting everyone off the hook by settling. Rarely have I acted on a case where one side was sabotaging themselves so effectively." "So settlement's impossible?" "I didn't say that. Lying may be an expected part of the game in DC, but that's not the way my clients expect people to behave. My clients are very moral people, which is something the President's advisors should've taken into consideration. He was caught planning to cheat on the settlement contract, so he dug himself into a deep hole. Now he has to 'accept responsibility for his actions and make good' - to quote a comment of my clients - in order to get out of that hole." "How would you suggest?" "I don't know and I'm not going to ask my clients. They'd tell me that making good doesn't have any value if the person has to be told what to do. They take morality very seriously. The President has to make good in some way, and he has to submit another settlement offer because the previous one was nullified by the slap in the face he gave them at the same time. Then, maybe, my clients might be interested in replying to my emails about the tax exemption bill." Nothing in the poor President's political career had prepared him for doing something moral. He could stand in front of the cameras and look wonderfully moral while reading a carefully prepared (by someone else) speech off a teleprompter, but actually THINKING of something moral himself, that was asking too much. His lawyers obviously wouldn't be much use, and his inner-circle was even worse: they just told him "I thought we told you to take care of this ALREADY, Dubya. Stop fucking around." Fortunately for him, the President had access to a large number of advisors, some of whom hadn't been in DC so long that they'd forgotten what morality was. [[You may think I'm exaggerating facetiously, and you'd be partly right, but it's still distressing how close to the truth those jokes were ("were" - past tense - because I said those jokes at the time I'm writing about). Thinking morally is an approach to their professional life that simply didn't occur to them after so many years at those echelons of power.]] Being the generous guy he is, the President sent another personal check to Corvallis, for another $150,000. (By "being the generous guy he is," I meant that he did it, but it HURT.) The check's accompanying letter was very well written (i.e., by someone else). It explained, "On further thought, I realize that my first donation didn't adequately express the anguish and sorrow I feel over the blah, blah..." The President announced a drive to significantly upgrade the nation's Missing Person Register, to assist all those poor parents who were rightfully concerned over the welfare and whereabouts of their missing children. He very emphatically insisted that there was no need for it, but he also created a new function for the Department of Justice: to inspect federal buildings for people being held against their will. The inspectors would be given top secret security clearances and have the right to visit any federal building without notice. By implication, even CIA bio labs, but the President didn't make that explicit because he was busy pretending they didn't exist in an attempt to distance himself from that fiasco. Also, at long last, the FBI 'swooped': arresting all the individual defendants of our suit, charging them with kidnapping and other offenses. The President publicly explained the delay with, "The crimes they're charged with are so heinous that I wanted the FBI to have all the time it needed to do a perfect job. I don't want anyone to get off because of a lack of evidence, technicality or procedural mistake. I am very pleased to announce, that as of last night, the FBI are confident that, blah, blah." The Government also submitted a new settlement offer to my family: Increased MAF's endowment to $10 billion (up from 5 and 7.5). Increased Benton County's payment to $750 million (up from 360 and 500). Increased SE Peoria Road property owners' payment to $100,000 (up from 50,000 and 75,000). Increased The Family's payment to $400 million (up from 120 and 250). In addition, it offered to pay $25,000 to every property owner who lived in Linn County (the country we lived in) within five miles of the two bridges into Corvallis (the bridges are close enough together to be considered a single bridge for most purposes), accumulative with the SE Peoria Rd payment. It reconfirmed its agreement with the non-monetary provisions: caring for Mark Anderson if he is found and destroying all improper records of him, not to surveil The Family and to grant us immunity from prosecution for any previous crimes, and to criminally prosecute all the individual defendants. It added several more minor, non-Colossus of Corvallis shotgun offers. Every now and then my brain would go into "Massive Disbelief Mode", whenever I thought that a billion was a THOUSAND MILLION dollars! And the offer was now for over eleven of them. It was INSANE! The Government's latest offer was worth just under $11.2 billion. The "point 2" seemed irrelevant, but it was two HUNDRED MILLION, for God's sake! If we deposited $11.2 billion with our local, friendly bank manager, we'd earn $1.5 million day after day. No tax either, so we'd get to keep it all. How on Earth could anyone spend $1.5 million per day? Even females would be hard pressed to do that, other than on the days when a new season's range came out. I'd freaked out when Vanessa had first told me five billion (with a "b"!) for my foundation, and I'd had trouble believing the Government wouldn't laugh in our faces. Actually, I'd thought our own lawyer would laugh in our faces and our demand would have its spelling error corrected even before it got to the Government. But it was happening with the "b" still in there. Vanessa had been insane, our lawyers either insane or inattentive, and the Government was DEFINITELY insane. It had taken our insane first offer and had now doubled it. I'd thought that in negotiations the other side was supposed to talk you DOWN, but Vanessa was deliberately manipulating the Government into looking like a bunch of assholes who didn't care how much of the public's money it threw away (showing the public that is one of her goals, as will emerge later). "Think of it this way," suggested Prof, "it's the same as everyone in America giving us $38. The Feds annually take more than $6,000 from everyone, so it's a cheap deal for them." "You make it sound so reasonable." Intellectually speaking, over the years I'd many times heard of Government figures in the billions and even trillions, but I'd always ignored those figures because they meant nothing to me and the amounts were unimaginable. But now we were talking about BILLIONS of dollars coming to MY FAMILIES! It was insane. "In terms of the size of numbers they're used to dealing with, it is reasonable. It's not their money and they've got the easy excuse that they're forced to pay it because of other people's mistakes. We're a momentary irritant who they'll pay off then publicly pat themselves on their backs for bargaining us down to a fraction of a percent of our suit's claim. Five minutes after we settle, they'll have forgotten who we are." "I'll be reminding them," promised Vanessa. "Yes indeed, dear. That's going to be an unpleasant surprise for them." The Government's $400 million offer to The Family had included a comment that if the increase offended us in any way, it would be happy to donate the increase to any charities of our choice. We could do that ourselves (not that we needed the tax deductions), but the Government had wanted to pretend to appear moral, concerned, aware that money wasn't so important, avoid offending us, etc. They were being weasels. As it turned out, we had no objection to taking the money; $33.3 million each was pretty damned good. The Linn County offer was surprising, in that it was actually a good idea. Linn County is the county we live in, the Willamette River being the border between Benton County to the west and Linn to the east. On our behalf, our lawyers had previously said that our justification for paying Benton and Peoria Road residents was to compensate them for all the Government and media crap they'd had to put up with, as well as fear over their children being kidnapped and killed. In reality we wanted our neighbors to get money out of this settlement to make us look like unselfish good guys, so by implication the Government would be the bad guys. As a bonus, our being well thought of in our community might provide us with some protection and help in the future, especially as going away to a university wasn't in my future anymore. This sub-offer from the Government fit our goals perfectly so we'd accept it happily at the right time, unlike if they'd offered a river-straddling, open-legged, Speedo-clad (or -unclad) Colossus of Corvallis. Seeing the Government desperation doubled the frustration I'd felt when we first decided on our list of demands. It was a sin not to squeeze harder for additional concessions. The others felt the same way. Even Vanessa was surprised how desperate the Government was - my snooping on its lawyers' files confirming that impression because some of the emails from the Presidents office to the lawyers were very revealing - so we had another wish-list generation session. We wouldn't be telling the Government about it for a while, but it pays to be prepared. Donna had her wish-list already prepared, but Mom and Dad insisted that Patch didn't need a horsy-girlfriend. [[Actually, because horses are herd animals they're instinctively afraid of being separated from their herd. Being alone makes them easy targets for predators, so they feel more secure with company. But Patch had adapted to his life and he had horsy company often too, at the riding club or when Donna's friends and their horses visited back and forth.]] One idea of mine that my families did agree with, was that the Corvallis Police Department gets ALL their equipment replaced with brand new, top of the line gear. Everything from new pencil sharpeners through to new vehicles. With any luck, the police department should offer the Anderson and Williams families even more protection in the future, hopefully including warning us if the Feds started misbehaving again. Thinking of the police that way made us add Corvallis's other emergency services to the list of equipment upgrade beneficiaries - new fire trucks and ambulances all round! Plus pencil sharpeners and whatever else they wanted. Vanessa had an interesting idea: "I think I'll make the DHS give me the jet they used to fly Mark from Portland to DC. They used it to commit a crime, so it's going to be forfeited to a good cause: me! Haha." Prof said, "By all means take it from them, but also tell them to order you a brand new one of your interior design. You'll give them back their old one when the new one's delivered. It could come fitted with a bed, a work desk, and whatever else you want in it." "Great idea. Thanks very much." agreed Vanessa. In case you haven't realized yet, presuming the settlement goes ahead Vanessa is going to resign from OSU and devote herself to the Mark Anderson Foundation. She wants to get it up and going as fast as possible, so it can become an effective brake on the Government's immorality and illegality, i.e., a thorn in the Government's side and wherever else she can stick it. MAF will be established in Washington, DC, as that's where the action is (or more usually, "inaction"), so Vanessa will be doing a great deal of flying back and forth, hence her desire for her own jet and appreciation for Prof's upgrading it. Especially because Corvallis's own little municipal airport doesn't exactly have a convenient frequency of direct flights to and from DC, because it has none. Mom was thinking about joining MAF too. She wouldn't be as senior as Vanessa, but Mom thought that she might enjoy working with Vanessa more than her current sales support job. Prof and Dad were both very happy with their current jobs, although if MAF got so large that Vanessa was spending too much time in DC, Prof could probably transfer to one of the DC universities. Or if they refused him, he could buy one of them and then give himself a job, haha. Actually, none of us wanted to live in DC. Corvallis is a very nice town, MAF could certainly afford to employ EXCELLENT managers, and it'd only take five hours for Vanessa to commute door to door with her own jet. That's impractical for every day, but is okay for the occasional long day, overnight visits, or to have DC people come here for meetings, especially if she got a plane that people could do work in. Vanessa added, "If we're twisting the Government's arm to help MAF run, maybe we can get more. I won't mention it until after the tax exempt legislation is passed because we want to avoid signaling our interest in having a DC presence, but what do you think about including an office building in DC?" Prof said, "It'll make it easier for you to get started quickly, so I like it. Make it a BIG building so MAF can expand as much as it wants. MAF can sublease the area it doesn't need back to the Government on a month-by-month lease if you want the income, or just leave the building mostly empty as MAF expands to fill it. I like the idea of getting the DHS to pay for your plane's refueling at DC and Corvallis too." We discussed it some more, modifying our ideas somewhat, then Vanessa called our lawyer and gave him his new, very detailed, instructions. Vanessa hadn't explained some of our goals or reasons to him, but by now he understood enough of what we were doing and how we were doing it that he was amused and impressed by Vanessa's game. If she didn't want to work for MAF, she'd easily get a job as a negotiation consultant in DC, not that she'd need the money. That last comment about money reminds me to mention that all of us were going to get equal shares. There'd been some talk from the Williamses that the Andersons should get a greater share because Mark had been their son, and there'd been talk from the Andersons that the Williamses should get a greater share because my family would never have been able to screw so much money out of the Government without Vanessa's and Prof's help. None of us took those discussions very seriously, not even caring that The Boys would be getting equal shares. Apart from anything else, we had no idea what to spend so much money on. [[Behind the scenes, the four parents and The Boys had discussed it much more seriously than I'd been aware at the time. They'd reached an informal but nonetheless strongly held understanding that the vast majority of whatever we got would be mine, as it was my life that the Government had stolen from me, after subjecting me to weeks of terror. We'd all have a great deal of fun spending a lot of money, but the adults would retain most of their capital in case I ever needed it. That was the main reason why none of them cared about the shares seeming to be equal even though the justifications for being included were arguably not equal.]] My parents gave another interview ridiculing Bush's latest contribution to Corvallis. Mom was particularly scathing about Bush's inability to correctly value the price of his shame the first time, and wondering out loud, "If President Bush feels that it takes only $250,000 to appease his conscience for the kidnapping and murder of an innocent 16-year old boy, what would he do for $500,000 or a million?" Vanessa also pointed out that "President Bush hasn't done the obvious things like insist that when minors are in DHS or CIA custody, their parents must be informed where their children are at all times, that parents have the absolute right to visit or stay with their children, and any government employees who interfere with that right are committing a crime they can be prosecuted and jailed for. Also, the interstate transport of minors should be prohibited without prior written parental consent." Plus several other such suggestions, all of which made the President seem a heartless monster for not having raised them himself already. Dad commented, "There seem to be dozens or hundreds of government employees who're in positions where they have life-or-death power over citizens, but they're INSANE! They've got dangerous delusions about people having mind control powers and God knows what else. How can he allow federal employees to run around with guns when so many of them should be locked up in padded rooms? Is the President going to sit on his ass doing nothing until some DHS agent kills dozens of people in a shopping mall because he thinks they're possessed by aliens? Doesn't he care that the leaked file showed that so many federal employees badly need psychological help before their delusions get worse? -- "On the other hand, the ONLY reason I can think of to explain how that man got reelected is that HE'S got mind control powers. If there are any DHS or CIA agents listening, please kidnap the President and check him for mind control powers. I'd suggest drilling a hole in his head and removing a sample of his brain, but I'm not sure they make microscopes that can see things that small." When the Government's lead lawyer had been yelled at by his client enough, he called our lawyer to inquire, "How are things coming along?" Our lawyer answered, "I'm surprised you haven't heard. You should keep a TV tuned to CNN in your office because my clients are on it so often. My clients are wondering why the President hasn't taken any firm steps to stop other people's children from being kidnapped by agents of the Federal Government. I wouldn't have worded it the way Mr. Anderson did, but he has a good point in claiming that the mental health of DHS and CIA agents is so worryingly suspect that something should be done about that." "I'll talk with the President about it. Meanwhile, what did your clients think of our offer?" "They didn't say much about it. They told me that all the vehicles the Government used in their abduction and transportation of Mark should be forfeited to The Family, because they were used in the commission of a crime..." "Why are they bothering with trivia like that?" "They're sticklers for how things should be done. It's not as trivial as you think because you've forgotten the two planes the DHS and CIA used to transport Mark. They were used to commit a crime, so they'd be forfeit. My clients added that as the Government has a large enough vehicle budget to have vehicles available to commit crimes with, then it can afford to replace all the emergency vehicles in Corvallis. I'll send you the notes I took of the conversation, but I don't think it'll matter. They had those ideas a few days ago, before the latest developments. Now they're saying that it looks like the President is incapable of thinking morally so the necessary changes to the way Government operates probably won't happen until they've got control of the Federal budget." It wasn't easy, but thanks to years of high-pressure politics and countless legal crises, the President's lawyer was able to stop himself from saying, "Eek!" Shortly after that, the President went on TV to say, "We've been working hard on ensuring nothing like the Mark Anderson fiasco ever happens again. We've been designing important new moral and legal guidelines and practices for Federal agents. I'm pleased to announce that our work is bearing fruit. I will shortly be introducing a bill to Congress which will make clear this Administration's firmly held belief in the inalienable right of minors and their parents to blah, blah..." Our lawyer sent the Government a letter telling them that in the unlikely event that the settlement negotiation restarted, it'd contain new demands, "The DHS and CIA are to forfeit to The Family all the vehicles they used in Mark's abduction and transportation. As the Government is willing to pay the costs to fly back and forth across the country to commit crimes, the jet fuel, landing fees and maintenance costs of The Family's jet(s) are to be hereafter and in perpetuity billed directly to the Federal Government." Note that the wording didn't restrict us to specific jets. -- "Furthermore, the Police, Fire and Ambulance Emergency Services of Corvallis have six months to replace any or all of their existing vehicle fleets with new vehicles of equivalent or moderately better capabilities, also at the Federal Government's expense. The replaced vehicles to be retained by their present owners, to be disposed of or remain in use, as the Service chooses." He had included a suggestion that the Government submit a list of the vehicles that'd be forfeit, so they could be checked in advance of any settlement possibly being reached. ^ [The list was received a few days later: 1) DHS's SUV for Corvallis to DHS Portland. 2) DHS's SUV for DHS Portland to Portland Airport. 3) DHS's Jet for Portland Airport to Reagan National Airport. 4) DHS's SUV for Reagan National to S&T. 5) CIA's SUV for S&T to Reagan National. 6) CIA's Jet for Reagan National to Fort Dodge Airport. 7) CIA's SUV for Fort Dodge Airport to Fort Dodge Facility. Each vehicle was identified with its make, model, and tag or tail number. The list ended with a comment that law enforcement equipment such as the radios would have to be removed. I was amused by the irony in the term "law enforcement", but their requirement was reasonable and okay with us. I was also amused that every ground-based leg of my journey had used a different SUV and they hadn't tried to claim the same SUV had been used more than once. The Government must have too many of them. I remembered that the DHS's jet had been a medium jet outfitted to carry passengers without luxury, but I had no idea about the CIA's plane so I googled the model hopefully. It was just another medium jet, very similar to the DHS's (one was a Gulfstream, the other a Citation). We'd have to wait to see how the CIA's plane was fitted out to see if it was suitable for Vanessa (i.e., contained a bed. My fingers were crossed for that because not only would Vanessa need a place to relax on her long flights, but when she wasn't needing it, maybe some of my friends and I could take it for a flight. It didn't really matter to where.] ^ The politicians (plural, as it wasn't just the President, although he was "The Decision Maker"), and their lawyers (in-house and external), didn't know they were in a war. They thought this was an unimportant, sideline battle, purely over how much money it took to buy us off. They thought that as soon as we were bought off, we'd disappear without a trace. What they thought were the stupid yokels making a fuss about all sorts of muddle-headed peripheral issues, was actually us setting things up to ensure we got the key issues we wanted. It's hardly surprising that they failed to pick up on that, as there were a confusing number of peripheral issues and mixed messages flying around, as the five of us all (the four parents and collectively "the girls") were talking in five different ways about five different types of subject. They also didn't recognize Vanessa's significance, as they naturally assumed my parents would be the key players. Dad was playing "Humorous Dumb" and Mom was playing "Upset Mother", both of which were sometimes annoying but were never seen as a threat. Certainly neither stereotype needed thinking about, because they were both so easy to pigeonhole. Vanessa understood how politicians thought, but they had no idea how she did and they didn't even realize that how Vanessa thought mattered - all of which put them at a substantial disadvantage. They were also disadvantaged for being in a situation where all they could do was react to our moves, as they didn't know of any practical way they could pressure us. Doing something illegal wasn't practical, as we had too high a media presence and there were too many leak-causing Majestic Countdowns (one was too many). It'd be much cheaper and easier to pay us off, especially as it was all the DHS's and CIA's fault, not the Government itself, so paying us off wouldn't reflect badly on the politicians personally. It'd make the annoyance stop, and the sooner that happened, the better. "Stopping annoyances" was an important tactic in Vanessa's strategy. Vanessa was training the Government. She'd get one of us (not me, but anyone else) to raise a specific complaint, usually including a description of the desired solution, "It's appalling that the Government hasn't done [insert the issue of the day]." The Government had been a little slow to react initially, but holding up the settlement while we and the still-active Majestic Countdown continued to cause embarrassment had finally gotten the message across that the Government needed to fix whatever it was that we were complaining about. After several repetitions, we could say almost anything one day and the Government would leap to announce the solution the following day, usually claiming that they'd been working hard on it for some undefined time. Whereupon we'd drop the issue and the Government would pat itself on the back for successfully shutting down the rubes again. We also had control over the timing of developments. The court case started in a couple of months and was scheduled to last for eight weeks. We could've made it last several times longer if we'd wanted, as we'd identified hundreds of witnesses or participants by now, but eight weeks was enough. Most of the facts of the case were uncontestable, so it would mostly be a matter of our extracting highly embarrassing testimony from each witness. The hundred active participants (the defendants) would be our star witnesses. They should be witnesses for the other side, but most of them felt pissed off at the Government for setting the FBI onto them. After the crimes were thrashed over, there'd be the courtroom drama over my worth. Unfortunately for the Government, their own documents raved about me, and there was now a great deal of independent expert raving too. There were countless, "Results this high have never been recorded before. Subject is one of a kind." There were even some, "Subject is invaluable," and, "Subject is of incalculable value." The Government knew it was going to lose and that it was far better to negotiate a quick, known settlement than go through a long, drawn out crapshoot in the court, but it couldn't force the pace of settlement. It threw money at us, learned to dance to our tune, and otherwise waited for us to decide we'd gotten enough. We didn't actually want a HUGE amount of money. The value of what we would have gained out of the first settlement offer - ignoring what our community would have got - was just over $5.1 billion, that being enough money for us as we weren't greedy. That's partly facetious, but it's also true too. $5.1 billion WAS enough money. MAF could do a great deal with $5 billion, and $10 million for each of The Family was very nice, thank you very much. Once we had those minimums established, there were other things more important than money: Time. The court process would take a few years, although probably not as many as the other side would like as it would have considerable difficulty finding grounds for appeal. If we won an award of just 1% of what we are asking for - and it's hard to see how the math of my value could be made to drop that much - then we would bankrupt the Federal Government, which could bog us down in all sorts of legal and financial crap for years. It'd be very profitable crap, but still crap. Goodwill. If we won in court, we risked getting a lot of people angry with us: either for our being so rich by taking all their taxes; or, if we did get some degree of leverage over the Government, for not using it the way every individual member of the public thought we should use it. Legislative changes. There were two we were after. First, the tax exemption for The Family was nice and could be worth a very tidy amount of money in the long run. Second, a small but important little law that Vanessa had up her sleeve (you'll enjoy it more if I tell you later). And most importantly, our non-monetary demands, such as immunity from prosecution, the Government's contracting not to surveil us, etc. We wanted the Government out of our lives, because Ron/Mark was in our lives. If we could obtain the above non-monetary benefits AND get more money, then we'd be silly not to. Vanessa didn't want us to ASK for more, but she was deliberately manipulating the Government into offering it. I was personally very eager to get the money. Ron Fisher was currently dirt poor and I wanted to be rich again, even though I had no idea what we could spend so much money on. Under their latest offer, Julia, Carol and I would get a total of $100 million between us. Even with Julia thinking that Ron Fisher desperately needed to go clothes shopping, that'd still leave us with quite a lot of money. So Vanessa's plan had us reject each Government offer for a variety of non-monetary reasons - whatever good sounding, moralistic bullshit we'd arranged to be floating around at the time - then to tell the Government it needed to submit another offer. Naturally it would up the dollars each time. If it didn't, Vanessa would've easily used that to ridicule them into trying again, as we'd told our lawyer to when the President didn't up his individual offer. ------- Chapter 312: We Become Very Rich Late-May to Thursday August 10, 2006 (Continued) Once the Government was dancing to our tune nicely, our lawyer sent the other side the "Mark Anderson Memorial Bill" - the bill we wanted passed into law. It had two sections: "Citizens Betrayed by their Government". "Honest Government Employees". "Honest Government Employees" is easy to explain so I'll give it first. Once enacted, if someone is an employee of a State or Federal Government when they commit, are charged with, or are convicted of a crime, then the duration of their incarceration and value of their fine are to be increased by 50%. A mechanism was specified to make sure judges didn't under-sentence such people to offset the 50% increase. The stated purpose of the section was "The Government recognizes that its employees have greater than normal power over the lives of citizens, and therefore greater opportunity to do more harm, as they did to Mark Anderson. It is therefore necessary to discourage persons with criminal intent from seeking Government employment, and once so employed, to discourage all such persons from committing crimes." Our lawyers' solution to the tax exemption was imaginative. Tax law allows individuals to appoint agents to do their tax returns for them (usually accountants), but the individuals are still liable for any mistakes made in the returns, EVEN when the agent is an employee of the IRS! In other words, if the IRS does your tax return for you, and gets it wrong, then the IRS can penalize you for 'your' mistake, while their employee and organization itself have no liability at all! It turned out to be fairly easy to create a new legally recognized department within the IRS: the "Tax Exempt Citizens Department" (TECD), and to modify the law so that if the TECD made a mistake on a tax return they had completed on behalf of an individual, then the IRS employee who made the mistake and the IRS itself would continue not to be liable, AND the individual concerned would also not be liable. In other words, no one would be. I'd like to make a joke here about how easy it is for the Government to think of ways of being unaccountable, but the new law was written by our lawyers. Maybe they'd been in DC long enough to absorb the culture of the place. To describe it somewhat simplistically, the TECD would almost be a fictional department, in that it'd have no staff for 364 days of the year. On the remaining day, someone would be given the job of filling out tax returns for the list of "Citizens Betrayed by their Government" (the twelve members of "The Family"). He'd write zeroes everywhere, stamp the forms "Completed by the Tax Exempt Citizens Department of the Internal Revenue Service", then mail the returns to the citizens to sign and then file with the IRS as if they were normal returns. In reality it wouldn't be a one-day-a-year as described, but would work much the same as it does with accountants, so whenever we needed a personal IRS return of any nature done, we'd ask the TECD to do it for us - it just wouldn't take them very long. It was an inelegant process because we'd be filing returns that were known to be wrong, but it was the easiest solution we wanted. If all we'd wanted was tax exemption, there easier ways or the TECD-creating legislation could have stopped there, but Vanessa had other ideas. Vanessa wanted the "Citizens Betrayed by their Government List" to be expandable beyond the twelve members it'd be created with, so she could use it as something that could reliably and repeatedly bring the Government's abuses to the public's attention. It was VERY easy to imagine all sorts of people trying to get on "Don't Have To Pay Tax List" (say, for example, politicians), but according to the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill, to be added to the list required the person to: Have suffered an egregious and significant loss caused by illegal actions carried out by State or Federal Government employees abusing the powers of their positions, and To be an American citizen, and Had never worked for State or Federal Government, in either an elected or non-elected capacity (however, see note below), and The Membership Committee (initially the twelve foundation members) had to approve each addition. The Membership Committee could also remove members if they deem it appropriate. The number of non-foundation members on the list could not increase by more than 52 per calendar year (dual justification for the value of 52 were its roughly equaling either one person per week or per state, although those were really just cute and meaningless excuses for having a fairly high number). Note: The "No Government Employees" provision turned off on a state-by-state (or federal, counting that as a 'state') basis if either: Five years had passed with no one being added to the list as a result of abuses carried out by employees of that state (or federal), or After an initial period of five years to build up the statistical base, the state (or federal) with the fewest "Betrayed Citizens" would have its employees qualify to be included. In the case of a tie, the winning state would be the one with the greatest time since the last "Betrayal". Letting individual states have their employees qualify for possible tax exemption was ostensibly as a reward for them doing a much better job of restraining abuse than other states, but it was really just another inspiration for publicity Vanessa could create about good versus bad state governments. The Membership Committee was to determine their own meeting rules, succession process, etc. This was to be a CITIZENS committee, "of the people, by the people, for the people", to redress the harm already caused by the Government. The Membership Committee were to have the power of veto over any future amendments to the "Citizens Betrayed by their Government" law, to protect it from Government interference. To put it mildly, the Government's lawyers' eyebrows went up when they read the proposed bill. They passed it onto their client, whose eyebrows mimicked the first group's, while its collective mouths said, "Who the fuck do they think they are?" Our lawyer had included a paragraph in his cover letter pointing out that there was a routine bill about to return for its final reading, "so adding the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill as a rider to that would see it passed into law within a couple of days." A suggestion which drew another, "Who the FUCK do they think they are!" So the Government's lawyer called our lawyer to express, "We're surprised by the wide-ranging suggestions you sent us." "I'm surprised that you're surprised. Haven't you realized that the Andersons want to create an appropriate legacy for their son?" "I understood that the foundation was to be his legacy." "His parents thought Government employees should be discouraged from kidnapping and murdering other children, and if the Government did commit such egregious acts, those families should be exempt from having to fund the existence of that Government, the same as my clients will be. Those sound reasonable to me. My clients are very moral people, and they can easily feel for other people in similar situations to themselves." "That's what the courts are for. If someone has a grievance they can sue, as your clients are well aware." "As you are well aware, many people don't have the stomach for that, especially when they're distraught. Even if they can start it, that process usually takes years because the Government almost never admits liability and fights all the way. Under the Andersons' structure, the victims can be granted tax exemption immediately. If they later win a major settlement, the Membership Committee can revoke their membership if it deems someone else is more deserving or in need." The Government's lawyer had several other objections, all of which were easily countered. His final objection was, "But things aren't done that way." "They weren't before, but they will be soon. Either when your client passes that bill, or when my clients win their case and gain enough leverage over the Federal Government to force its passage, along with whatever else they've thought of during the years of legal battles. By then they'll be even more strongly motivated to make sweeping changes to ensure that the Federal Government takes responsibility for its actions. -- "You should know my clients well enough by now to know that if someone does something wrong, they'll be required to make good appropriately and to a greater extent than the harm they originally caused. That's why the settlement agreement now includes forfeiture of the vehicles used in the crimes, together with the additional penalties of making your client replace the emergency vehicles in Corvallis and pay for The Family's using their jets. If your client tries to avoid its responsibilities by fighting a pointless legal delaying action, then my clients are likely to develop a very imaginative list of ways the Government will have to make good." "I'll get back to you." The Government was, by then, even more firmly entrenched in its opinions. How DARE citizens want control over their taxes! That was a terrible precedent! (They'd forgotten about the American War of Independence.) Our lawyer received another call from the Government's lawyer, "My client isn't willing to submit the Mark Anderson Bill as is. If it was changed to..." "First, its name is the 'Mark Anderson MEMORIAL Bill'. Second, if you change a single comma it won't matter whether you enact it or not. I explained that to you very carefully several days ago. For obvious reasons, including the President's being caught intending to cheat on the settlement, my clients don't trust the Government so they won't trust any changes it makes. Settlement won't move forward unless you pass the bill as is." The Government wasn't going to pass my bill in its current form, or anything like it, so it sat on its ass doing nothing. There was no need to act quickly, and the politicians knew that problems often went away if they were ignored for long enough. That didn't apply to problems being caused by Vanessa. She gave the Government three weekdays to prove they were doing nothing, then my families publicly released the "Mark Anderson Memorial Bill". Vanessa is a senior lecturer in ethics, she cared very much about the bill, and she'd had plenty of time to prepare for going public about it - including many hours of discussing it with selected colleagues, refining her arguments down to very sharp, effective points - so she DESTROYED the Government's attempt to rationalize their refusal to pass the bill. Vanessa had been involved in many interviews over the last few months, and had made many points, but they'd nearly always been isolated, quick comments. Most had deliberately been sound-bite morsels. In the debate over the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill, Vanessa showed her true mettle for the first time, and she blasted the Government out of the water, making anyone who spoke up about the issue look like pathetic, whiny, irresponsible little brats. Every argument they tried to raise - or the reporter raised in anticipation - Vanessa shot down in flames with killer comebacks. Public opinion was, of course, highly in favor of the bill. Tax exemption for citizens who'd been horrendously abused by the Government was a VERY easy sell; and even the +50% on sentencing was salable. There was some reluctance about that, but as Vanessa said, "The only people it'll harm are criminals and it'll protect the rest of us by making government employees less likely to commit crimes." Vanessa had more to say: "We're FORCED to trust government employees. If you don't like your phone provider, you can change carriers. But you have no choice when it comes to the Government. If YOU are required to trust them, then THEY must be required to be trustworthy. That's commonsense. Otherwise they could pick your son off the street just because he's suspiciously smart. Or maybe your daughter because she's suspiciously pretty. Maybe she's so beautiful that our delusional Homeland Security people think she can't be human. That sounds like a stupid joke, but over a hundred people were told that Mark was suspected of having mind control powers, and not one of them blew the whistle on that insanity, so they're obviously highly paranoid delusional people. -- "If your sons and daughters are accosted by a member of the public, they can scream for the cops. But if they are taken by a cop, what can they do? Mark Anderson was raised to trust the police, and by extension, Homeland Security agents. When they asked him to get in their car, he went with them. Because he trusted them, they took him to his death. We MUST protect ourselves and our children from untrustworthy government employees. We're not being responsible parents if we don't do everything we can to ensure that government employees are the most honest people possible. -- "What horrifies me is that our Government is refusing to pass our bill because it wants to protect CRIMINALS! It doesn't care that there are hundreds of DHS and CIA people that turned a blind eye to kidnapping a child and performing horrendous medical experiments on him. No, the Government's only concern is getting its criminally guilty employees out of jail faster. -- "They say they'll have trouble getting enough staff if working for the Government exposes people to longer jail terms. My answer to that is 'Thank God!' The people who're put off working for the Government for that reason are EXACTLY the people we want to be put off. People who're worried about their committing a crime even before they start their jobs are FAR TOO dangerous to be let into positions where we're forced to trust them. I figure if the Government lost half its employees, but the remaining workers were all honest, then our country would be a much better place to live. Dishonest people cause far more trouble and misery than they're worth, so I say 'Good riddance to them!" The public responded very well to Vanessa's points. Vanessa also had fun when one politician was stupid enough to say, "Our prison system is already overcrowded and costing us too much. We can't afford to have prisoners stay even longer." "That's a remarkably short-sighted and naïve view, even for a politician. People commit crimes when they give in to the temptation of an opportunity. Being in a position of trust and power creates FAR more opportunities and temptations, so it results in more crimes. By scaring criminally minded people away from Government work, they'll be less tempted, there'll be LESS crime, therefore LESS pressure on the prison system. That's what 'disincentive' means. -- "If you're still confused, think about Robert Moran. If he hadn't worked for the Government, he wouldn't have wanted to kidnap Mark or been able to order other criminally minded Government employees to do it for him. That crime wouldn't have happened and there'd be one hundred fewer people heading for jail." Another of Vanessa's points was, "You say you're concerned about the increased money required to run the prison system. As a direct result of the Government letting the DHS and CIA behave criminally, the Andersons are now suing the Government for $242 trillion. You could DOUBLE the number of prisons in the entire country for the cost of that one lawsuit, and still have $241 trillion left over. But I forget; you're a politician. You don't care if a few years from now our sons and daughters are being kidnapped, stripped naked, experimented on and murdered, just so long as you can look good by keeping within your budget this year." The public loved the tax exemption idea, but there were still attempts to criticize it. A 'hard hitting journalist' (i.e., one that makes annoyingly aggressive accusations), annoyingly and aggressively accused Vanessa: "You and your so-called committee could take bribes to give people tax exemptions." "We COULD. We could also NOT take bribes. Did your comment have a point?" "What's to stop you selling tax exemptions to the highest bidder?" "My sense of morality, my desire not to let my family and friends down, my desire to perform a socially important function to the best of my ability, my desire to help people in need who've been betrayed by our government, my desire to leave an enduring legacy behind me when I die, my lack of interest in acquiring more money, my strong desire not to spend my final years in jail, my desire to shame the Government into lifting its standard of behavior so the lives of millions of Americans are improved. I can see you're not doing me the courtesy of listening to my answer, so I'll stop." "None of those reasons stop you taking bribes." "To the contrary, every one of those reasons stops me. Your sense of morality may not stop you selling yourself out because of your greed, but mine does. Do you want to keep playing posturing games about how important you must be because you're so unpleasant, or would you like me to answer the question you're too busy to ask?" "What question?" Vanessa recited: "'What safeguards will you be putting in place, Mrs. Williams, to ensure that the process of choosing members is fair and honest?' Is that the question you would've asked if you hadn't been too busy being insulting?" "So what'll the safeguards be?" "I'm glad you asked that question. It's the most intelligent thing you've said all interview." The cameraman chuckled. "The short answer is 'People like you.' Not too much like you I hope, but other members of the press and the public. All meetings of the Citizens Betrayed by their Government Committee will be open to the public, we'll have webcams streaming our meetings live for anyone in the world to watch, and all our minutes and other documentation will be available online. Applicants will have to agree that everything we have about them will be made public because we won't tolerate important decisions being made based on secret information. In particular, the meetings we hold to choose who to give tax exemptions to will be in public and our voting will be open so everyone can see our individual votes. -- "We have a large responsibility and we wish the public to see us carrying it out. We'll be doing our best to choose the most appropriate beneficiaries, but if people disagree with our processes or priorities, we'd like to hear about it so we can reexamine our approach. We want to accurately reflect our country's values. Making choices between people who've suffered greatly will be a heart-rending experience and it'll be difficult to maintain the right balance between emotional and rational perspectives, so having the media's and public's feedback will be appreciated. -- "We're not the Federal Government so we won't be having our discussions and votes in secret behind closed doors. We won't be ashamed of how we act or of our decisions. What we'll be doing will be important for our country, so we will be ensuring that everyone who wants to will be able to see it happening, including seeing that the process is fair and honest. Ensuring our transparency and accountability will cost us a considerable amount of our own money and time, and no doubt lead to our receiving abuse from people who disagree with us, but that's something we knew would be required when we decided to volunteer for this role. -- "As you saw from the copies of the bill that we passed out, the Membership Committee will be empowered to establish its own rules and procedures for its meetings. One of those procedures will be to invite guest members to help us reach our decisions. They will have access to all the information we have, will sit at the table and will have a full vote in the decisions. We're particularly looking forward to inviting some of our critics from time to time, to see how they enjoy being in one of the hot seats. We're also eager to invite others who might be better at the job than we are. Maybe we'll be able to learn from them, or maybe they'll take over from some of us, in which case we'd pay for their time out of our own pockets. -- "There are many other ideas we have for making this work as well as it deserves, but you have to remember that so far the Government is adamantly refusing to give up its right to force everyone to pay taxes, even though the fifty two people we're talking about each year will have had their rights trampled on by the Government. We're doing our best to talk the Government into recognizing that they have a moral obligation to make good to people they've wronged, but it's extremely difficult to talk the Government into behaving morally. Nearly all of the senior Government people do their utmost to avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes, which is unfortunately the essential first step in developing a sense of personal morality. It's looking like we'll have to wait until the appeals in our case have run their course, and we finish in the Supreme Court about three years from now. Then we'll have enough power over the Government to force it to enact the legislation we want." Vanessa's ideas amazed the reporters, resulting in many excited follow-up questions. Only one is worth commenting on, about the youth of some of the Committee's foundation members. Vanessa answered, "We hadn't forgotten that. When the youngsters think they're ready for it, they'll join us around the conference table. They'll participate in the discussions and will vote, but their votes won't be counted. All of their words and actions will be transparent and accountable, so the Committee and the public will be able to judge when the youngsters are ready to have their votes count. They'll be able to judge their own readiness too. -- "They'll be making important decisions, so they need to be prepared for the responsibility. In my daughter Julia's case, I wouldn't expect that to take long because I've often brought my work home and discussed ethical issues with her. She's better prepared for ethical debate than most of the students who graduate my classes. Donna clearly needs to mature for a few more years before she could be ready to participate. Other than the Government's stealing her brother, she thinks the greatest crime it's committing is not giving everybody their own pony, so it'd be best give her a few more years yet." Another point Vanessa made VERY explicit, "The Government has tried to get us to agree to an as yet unwritten set of modifications to the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill. We've told them in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that we trust them less than the distance my old, one-legged husband can throw the White House. The President has already been caught intending to cheat on the agreement, so we're sure that if they change the bill it'll be something dishonest. If they change a single word of it, then they'd better change the name of the bill too, because we'll dissociate ourselves from it. They KILLED Mark, so we're not going to let them twist his legacy to suit their political agendas. The bill is for the PEOPLE, not for the politicians." Most of the media and pretty much all of the public loved it. Commentators were immediately excited about the form of democracy it offered. Totally transparent and accountable "Citizens Committees" made up of people as impressive as Vanessa Williams sounded might solve many of the ills that plagued modern politics. The enthusiastic endorsements that opinion immediately received (everything is "immediate" in modern TV reportage; there's no time for thought) sent icy chills blasting up AND down politicians' backs. Up and down their fronts too, it was that serious! The second-to-last thing they needed was politically naïve civilians making important policy decisions. The LAST thing they needed was for transparent and accountable decision-making to catch on. That'd RUIN the way the politicians preferred to operate! Despite the chilly blasts, the Democrats loved the bill. They weren't going to have any real power for three years yet, which was too far away to worry about. Political opposition is all about making life hard for those in power, not worrying about the consequences of your actions. Vanessa had said the President was immorally refusing to take responsibility for his administration's actions, therefore the Democratic Party - "the MORAL party!" - would prove how moral they were by submitting the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill themselves. They dropped it unchanged into "the hopper" and moved urgency on it, thus starting the process to make it law. That left the Republicans with a tricky problem. Whether to smile sweetly and vote the bill speedily through the enactment process as if they'd always intended to, to delay it, modify it, or kill it. The problem was that for the first time they'd gotten sight of what Vanessa was intending to do in the future, and it wasn't to sit in the sun in Florida playing canasta. Vanessa & Co. were going to be creating recurring bad publicity for the Government. Four aspects decided the Republican's minds: Fighting the bill would be politically expensive. What Vanessa would be uncovering in the future would just be human drama domestic politics, and none of the inner-circle cared about that stuff. Some of the public would care, but the public could usually be pushed around or ignored, and they'd fall all over themselves with gratitude when the price of gasoline reduced (not too much though) after America gained control of large oil reserves and turned the taps on the correct amount. Whatever screw-ups Vanessa's group uncovered would be easy to spin. The Administration could effectively say, "Thank you VERY much for bringing this misbehavior by a junior nobody to our attention. We'll fire him and fix the problem right away." They could even do what they said - an unusual situation in politics - because it'd be occurring far enough from the Beltway not to touch anyone important (i.e., them). Vanessa's group would do their thing, someone of middling seniority would smile for a quick photo opp', thank them for providing such a wonderful service to the country, then appoint someone junior to fix the screwups while everybody important carried one with the real work. A day later, it'd be old news. Bush's inner-circle REALLY wanted to get their realpolitik back on track. The invasion of Iraq had been only their first major step of a grander plan to control the Middle East's oil production, but it'd become horribly bogged down. Now this nonsense over a single missing boy was causing a totally disproportionate loss of international credibility and influence. A period of stability was needed to rebuild Bush's and America's ability to manipulate the world's opinions in the desired directions. If passing the bill was what it took to get the settlement done, then so be it. They certainly didn't want the last three years of Bush's term to be full of our case's progress through the courts, with the international loss of prestige that'd cause. For the next step in Cheney's plan to succeed, America needed to be able to claim that its way of life ("Democracy! Yay, yay!") was better than Iran's. Better to get the scandals settled, and when Vanessa's little human dramas were uncovered, the Government could leap to fix them, claiming they demonstrated how wonderful democracy-in-action was. So the Republicans joined the Democrats in supporting the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill, and a few days later the tip of Vanessa's iceberg became law. The Mark Anderson Foundation would be able to publicize governmental corruption and abuses all year long, pushing for the offenders to be prosecuted with the +50% penalties and granting victims tax exemptions whenever a particularly bad case arose. And near the end of every calendar year, just in time for Christmas, there'd be a well-publicized allocation of any of the fifty two remaining annual exemptions, and stories comparing how the different states were ranked for how many of their citizens they'd abused into tax exemption status. With those legal powers, billions of dollars in its coffers, and Vanessa running it, MAF was going to become a significant force for good. As our bill was being enacted, the Government's lawyer called ours. As usual, to check how things were progressing. Our lawyer responded, "I'm constantly amazed at how good your client is at damaging its position. I took it upon myself to write the bill for you because my clients didn't trust your suggestions. Instead of your client's quickly enacting the bill exactly as written so it could gain credibility and goodwill in my clients' eyes, your client refused, annoying the Andersons even further. Now the Democrats have forced the issue so the bill's going to get passed anyway AND your client has lost credibility as well. How can your client be so expert at doing precisely the wrong thing time after time? -- "The one thing my client's most want is to have their son's body returned to them, and your client can't even do that. We're preparing the papers now for an application to the court ordering the CIA to return Mark's body to his grieving family. The family has waited too long for that, and further delay isn't credible. We'll be filing those tomorrow. -- "I feel sorry for you having to represent a client with so little commonsense, but it makes my job easy. I must say I'm looking forward to going to trial. There are so many witnesses who're eager to blame each other that it's going to be one of the easiest and most entertaining trials I'll have had. I'm thinking of asking for $758 trillion in punitive damages, except I don't know the word for what the grand total would be. Is a thousand trillion called a 'gazillion'? Haha." "Very funny. Your humor aside, when will your clients settle?" "Not before their son's bill becomes law and his body is returned to them. What'll happen then will depend on the depth of the hole your client will have dug itself. All it had to do was convince my clients of its sincere desire to take responsibility for its actions and to make good. Faking sincerity should've been easy, but it couldn't even do that." "The bill will take another couple of days to be enacted, but their son's body might be more difficult. As I understand it, his body was destroyed in the fire." "Neither they nor I believe that. We've heard from several sources that nearly all of the bodies were recovered from the disaster." (In an attempt to downplay the size of the Fort Dodge disaster, the Government had downplayed how many bodies were missing.) "It won't be difficult to explain to the judge that the fire's being in an airtight hole meant it quickly ran out of oxygen, before it had a chance to do much damage. It's much more credible that the CIA is still experimenting on Mark's body, or is hiding it to prevent the damage of the previous experiments being seen. Possibly Mark might even be alive, because there's no evidence that he died. We'll argue the issue in court, and it's hard to imagine that the judge won't be extremely sympathetic toward my clients." My family got an urgent hearing to get a court order for the CIA to return my body alive or dead (our lawyers said "preferably alive", but that would have been very surprising). It was a highly emotional hearing with the media in full attendance, so it was very bloody for the CIA; even bloodier because of the absence of a body. The CIA swore they'd been unable to find my body, so it must've been burned up, as some of the other bodies had been. Our lawyer had found some sworn testimony from the Government concerning the initial construction of the Fort Dodge Lab (some citizens had tried to block it, and a small court case had resulted). The Government had sworn, in court, that the purpose of the lab was considerably different than what everyone now knew its true purpose to have been. Then our lawyer played some TV clips from when my families had been looking for me. The first of those clips had Robert Moran as well as the head of the DHS office in Portland saying very sincerely, "We released Mark Anderson from custody in Portland on January 27. When we last saw him, he was walking down the street." That was followed by some clips of DHS bosses from Washington all saying that they'd I'd been collected by persons unknown from the S&T building on February 4." In other words, our lawyers produced a sequence of CIA and DHS lies. Some of them weren't sworn statements, but all the interviewees had earnestly insisted that they were telling the truth, in very much the same way as the CIA was now. Our lawyer summed up, "We know the Government routinely commits perjury about its Fort Dodge facility and lies about their having Mark Anderson, so their denials today are not accepted. We know they recovered nearly all the bodies from that facility, and we believe they included our client's son. You've seen from the CIA file that they considered Mark Anderson's body to be of 'incalculable value', so recovering his body would've been their top priority. He was in an airtight locked room off another airtight locked room in a floor that could be hermetically sealed, so it's very unlikely that the fire would have got to him before it ran out of oxygen. It's even more unlikely that the fire would have totally consumed his body so there's absolutely nothing left of it." The CIA had no credibility, and the learned judge ordered them to return my body within five days. Very embarrassing days they turned out to be too, with the media loudly supporting our calls for the CIA to abide by the judge's order. Majestic Countdown found something suitable to leak: the CIA had botched an operation inside a country that had a delicate relationship with the US. Bush had ordered the mess hidden, Majestic blew it wide open, creating even more pressure on the Government. After the five days were up, the CIA having failed to abide by the court order, our lawyers trotted back to court again. The CIA's lawyers swore black and blue that my body couldn't be found, but Judge Collins was openly disbelieving. Our lawyer told the judge he wanted access to all the bodies or partial bodies that'd been recovered from the lab, access to all the records about their causes of death, the search and recovery records, the right to take depositions from all the personnel involved in the recovery operation and subsequent handling of the bodies, access to all the architectural details of the lab, copies of all the pictures and films taken of it before and after the fire, and a very long list of other accesses. To date, the CIA had only publicly said that, "Just over two hundred fatalities occurred as a result of the lab's destruction." Because of the leaked presidential memos, the public knew the lab had been raided, but the causes of the staff's deaths had never been revealed, the obvious assumption that they'd died from gunshots or the fire had been allowed to stand uncorrected. The CIA very much didn't want to admit that everyone had died from a biochem weapon as that demonstrated that the raiders were willing to use the items they'd stolen, and the worldwide fear and condemnation that would result would damage America and the CIA greatly. In short, the CIA very much didn't want the truth about Fort Dodge to get out so they stridently objected to our lawyer's request, citing national security. Judge Collins had no hesitation ruling in our favor, believing the recovery operation for a fire that the whole world already knew about was hardly a matter of national security. He ordered the CIA to return my body within four days (the next Monday), or make everything and everyone available that our lawyers had listed. Immediately they got back their office, the CIA's lawyers got to work readying an application for an injunction and an appeal. Filing them bought the CIA more time, but also more condemnation as it made them seem even more evil. Meanwhile Dad was on camera saying, "They SAY they've lost our son's body, even though they had him locked in a hole in the ground. This administration has lost its marbles if it thinks we believe that. I know they're so incompetent they can lose three of my son's computer screens from a locked room, but how on Earth can they lose a body from a sealed tightly shut hole in the ground! There's one thing they deserve to lose: the next election. They will, because Bush's party couldn't find their own asses with both hands. They sure can't find their sense of decency, because they lost that years ago. It's been five months since the power-mad government that Bush created insanely kidnapped and killed our son, and Bush still hasn't found the decency to send us an apology. He's an asshole." Dad carried on abusing them for several minutes, sometimes forgetting the details of his script but that was okay because he just had to be abusive. He could do that all right. Dad was our appeal to the blue collar demographic and he was good at it. The Government had no choice but to take it in on the chin, as they could hardly publicly argue with my parents. Then there were Mom's weepy moans about the evil Government refusing to give their son back so the family could grieve properly. That played well too. So the Government's lawyer was instructed to call our lawyer again. "The best advice I can give you," suggested our lawyer to theirs, "is to submit another offer and make it good enough that they accept it quickly, before your client puts its foot in its mouth again. It better be a VERY good offer, because so far in this negotiation you've been going backward faster than I would've thought possible. Every time I turn on the TV, your client has committed another absurd mistake, doing something even more embarrassing and hurtful to my clients." "We're already offering a great deal of money: over $10 billion." "That's peanuts compared to how much Mark Anderson would've been worth in a few years, and you know it. Corpse snatching is distinct from breaching Mark's Fourth Amendment rights, so we'll be filing another suit for that if your client doesn't hand over Mark's body soon. We'll have no trouble convincing a judge that the balance of probabilities favors the CIA lying about having Mark's body so they can get the benefit of years of unconstrained research on it, and we'll easily get our medical experts to put a value on Mark's dead body of at least one ten thousandth of his live body, so $24 billion. So the damages for that new suit alone will exceed what you've offered thus far. -- "This case keeps getting easier and easier, thanks to your client's frequent gaffes. If it wants to settle this - which its actions lead me to doubt - then get it to return Mark's body, submit a very good offer, and then do nothing to sabotage itself while the Andersons are considering the offer." "They assure me they can't find his body. Even if it survived the two fires that occurred in the Fort Dodge lab, the body would've rotted by now." "My clients believe the Government recovered Mark's body on the first day, along with the other bodies. You know how excited the lab's scientists were about Mark's body, so they would've made locating and removing it higher priority than any other body. That'll be what we'll being arguing in court and we'll have several of the scientists from that lab that'll swear that's what the lab's bosses would have wanted. It's not credible that the CIA would let a body that valuable rot away month after month. You have no independently verifiable evidence that our claim did not happen, only the CIA's own documentation, which will be easily discredited." "They tell me the recovery process has proved to be considerably more troublesome than expected..." "My clients and I have seen the President on TV saying that the cleanup is going extremely well. I suggest that it wouldn't do your client's position any good to claim that the President was lying on national TV. There are so many lies from your side that I doubt the truth will ever come out, but that's not going to affect my clients' case because the balance of probabilities weighs heavily in their favor. -- "If the CIA doesn't hand over Mark's body, then your client better make a VERY attractive settlement offer, because my clients aren't going to like not getting their son's body back, especially because they believe they're being lied to again. Even Judge Collins thought the CIA's story wasn't credible." Note that our lawyer never asked for more money. He said to make it "more attractive." We'd NEVER asked for more money so far during the settlement process. The Government's lawyer knew ours wouldn't have offered that advice unless settlement was doable, which justified not increasing their offer much. On the other hand: The Government was getting slammed over and over again in the media. It was NEVER-ENDING. Early indications were that the court battle was going to be ugly; even more so than the Government had originally feared. It didn't have my body to give back, and another lawsuit over that would result in the public learning that all the deaths had been caused by the use of one of Fort Dodges own bioweapons. That would be EXTREMELY politically expensive domestically and internationally, and damage the CIA considerably. It still - and even more so by now - wanted all this to go away, especially if it could be made to stop before the CIA's legal delaying actions expired and it had to hand over far more information than it wanted to. So the Government submitted another offer, that: Increased MAF's endowment to $15 billion (up from 5, 7.5 and 10). Increased Benton County's payment to $1 billion (up from 360, 500 and 750 million). SE Peoria Road property owners' payments unchanged at $100,000 (up from 50,000 and 75,000). Payments to the Linn County property owners within five miles of the Corvallis bridges, also unchanged at $25,000. Increased The Family's payment to $1 billion (up from 120, 250 and 400 million). Reconfirmed the non-monetary provisions. Confirmed that the vehicles used by transport Mark would be given to The Family, paying our jets' operating costs as we'd specified, and they'd replace the emergency vehicles in Corvallis. There were several additional 'kissing our ass' charitable additions: programs or donations for this or that good cause - all agreeable from our point of view, but of no relevance to us. Our lawyer forwarded it to us, we read it, and were amazed by how much they were now offering The Family to buy us off. To think we'd gotten excited about the measly $7.4 million (after taxes) from Binion's! Speaking personally, I'd been bought off way back when I thought I'd get 'only' $10 million, so my current payment offer of $83.3 million was just bizarre. Actually, my share would be twice that amount, as I was Mark Anderson and Ron Fisher. I thought that was unfair to everyone else, but they outvoted me. Vanessa called our lawyer to tell him what to do. Our lawyer did nothing, as instructed, until the Government's lawyer called him the next afternoon for a progress report. Our lawyer explained, "It had the obvious effect." "What do you mean?" "Your client's offer didn't address their failure to return Mark Anderson's body to his parents. My clients are appalled that the Government expects them to toss their son's body into the deal as if it were a freebie. They took that as a slap in the face." "That was NOT the intention. His body hasn't been found yet, and the first item on the settlement list includes immediately returning it when it is." "Which my clients are convinced your client is lying about, in much the same way as the President was intending to lie about the term that applied to him personally. We believe the CIA has Mark Anderson's body, is experimenting on it as we speak, and will never admit to having it, so that term of the settlement agreement will never take effect. The CIA's denials have no credibility, so your existing settlement offer effectively means my clients are giving their son's body to the CIA to butcher however it wishes." "Increasing The Families' payment from four hundred mil' to a billion is intended to be recompense for the delay in returning the body, or not being able to find it, however that eventuates." "Your settlement offer MIGHT have settled the existing suit, but it doesn't even try to address the new one we'll be filing over Mark's body. Even in the unlikely event of the judge believing Mark's body was destroyed, Mark was in the CIA's care so they're guilty of an extensive list of child-welfare statutes and negligence causing death. I'm sure the judge is going to take cognizance of the CIA's caring for Mark Anderson by storing him in a laboratory filled with deadly biological agents, equipped with ineffective fire detection and prevention systems, and being an insufficiently guarded, highly attractive target for enemy combatants. -- "Then there's the course of action we have against the DHS and CIA for conducting human experiments on a non-consenting minor. We haven't filed that one yet, but we already have affidavits from some of the scientists involved, so it'll be another easy home run. That one's going to be a political nightmare for your client because every voter is going to imagine it happening to their child." That action was the piece of ammunition we'd been saving for this stage of the one-sided negotiation. As it turned out, the Government's latest offer failing to address specific recompense for their losing my body gave us a better sounding point of attack. -- "You should know by know that my clients believe people should own up to their failures. Your client's not explicitly addressing their culpability for their son's kidnapping and death, and making no attempt to make good for it, confirms my clients' opinions that the Government needs, 'to be grabbed by the throat and shaken until it screams.' Those were their words, about what they'll do after they win their case." Later that day our lawyer received some additional documents from the Government, one set of originals being overnight couriered to us. The next day we received the courier pack with the contrite-sounding letter from the Government stating - without prejudice, so the admission couldn't be used against them in court - that in addition to their offer to settle the existing lawsuit, they wish to separately and profusely apologize for their errors in caring for Mark and/or his body. The Government offered to settle all our outstanding grievances over their mistreatment of Mark Anderson and their failure to locate his body (in other words, they wanted to block every course of action my family could sue them for). They insisted that they took returning my body, if it was ever found, "as a sacred commitment, from which we'll never rest until every effort has been expended to, blah, blah... ," just meaningless crap, including several more equally meaningless apologies. The Government generously suggested the sum of $500 million, added to the previous offer to The Family of $1 billion, as settlement for all issues related to their mistreatment of me including failure to return my body, so the parts of the settlement agreement that were interesting to us became: MAF gets $15 billion, or as Vanessa thought about it, an annual operating budget of $500 million. She could REALLY make an impact with that! Benton County gets $1 billion (at least $25,000 to be paid out per household, leaving $250 million in the County's coffers). SE Peoria Road property owners get $100,000, cumulative with the next point. Linn County property owners within five miles of the Corvallis bridges get $25,000. The Family gets a total of $1.5 billion, which we'd split $125 million each for the 12 listed names (in a way that wouldn't give Ron Fisher's parents the legal right to claim any of it if he was found to be dead). The five SUVs and two jets would be given to The Family, the Government would pay our jets' operating costs as we'd specified, and they'd replace the emergency vehicles in Corvallis. Plus all the non-monetary provisions, such as: returning me to my family if I'm ever found, destruction of all Government held medical samples and records about us, destruction of all CIA and other agency records about us, freedom from investigation into past activities, freedom from future investigation unless there's reasonable prior evidence of our doing something criminal, and immunity for all crimes up to the date of execution of the settlement. The federal prosecutions of the named Defendants on our court case had already started, but it still needed to be included in the settlement agreement to ensure the final outcomes we wanted. Removed because they were already accomplished were our personal tax exemptions and the President's, CIA's, and DHS's bosses' gifts to Corvallis. At the beginning of this rather strange negotiation, Vanessa had told us, "We should be able to get them to at least double our opening offer." As it turned out, MAF and Benton County got triple, and although we personally got 12.5 times as much, the total cost to the Government rose by a factor of only 3.6 (including the various charity provisions), because our personal payment was a comparatively small potato. My share of that small potato felt HUGE to me! It was as if the Government simply didn't care how much money they threw away. All things considered, including the extra half billion they'd thrown our way, I declared myself reasonably satisfied with their current offer. The rest of The Family - actually just the Peoria Road residents - were inclined to agree with me. The Boys weren't part of the negotiation discussions. Their involvement was just in being beneficiaries, because there'd been no reason why not. Ava didn't even know she was one of those. She'd been surprised to find out she was one of the Tax Exempt people when the Mark Anderson Memorial Act had become public. Mom gave Ava a good explanation for her inclusion, mentioning things like it not costing us anything and we'd committed to look after her, but I liked my explanation better, "We included you in the list because the Government should pay for removing someone as incredibly wonderful, fantastic, cute-butted and humorous as Mark from your life." Ava had giggled. She'd stopped giggling when she remembered what she'd heard on TV about the work the committee would be doing. Vanessa had told her, "Being on the Committee will be voluntary work, and no one's going to be allowed to think about volunteering until they've finished college, so don't worry about it." Ava had more than enough to worry about with her parents' illnesses. Vanessa had done some research into her two "cherries on top": a private jet and a federal building in Washington, DC. She'd decided that she loved the idea of a private jet, but not either of the models we'd be getting from the settlement. Vanessa had considerably upgraded the type of plane she wanted, so she'd be buying a new one then selling our two freebies. A free federal building was even more of a non-starter, for several reasons: There was so much legal red tape involved with the Government's disposing of its buildings that it wasn't worth the hassle of trying to get one. It'd alert the Government to what we intended before the settlement agreement was signed, which might result in their pulling the plug. It'd cost less than $20 million for Vanessa to buy what she wanted. That was only two weeks' interest on MAF's $15 billion! She didn't want her building to be in the area most of the federal buildings were. She preferred near Dulles Airport, so she could commute easily. [A little trivia for you: Dulles Airport was originally going to be called Chantilly International, because it's in Chantilly, Virginia. But the song "Chantilly Lace" was very popular at the time and the lyrics were deemed too suggestive ("Make me feel real loose like a long-necked goose." Oh the horror! Think of the children!). Imagine the logo it could've had: a long-necked, lace-wearing goose coming in for a landing. The Government pulled the plug on the goose, and the airport was duly and dully named after John Foster Dulles, an aggressively anti-Communist United States Secretary of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and earlier one of the major players in the creation of the Great Depression of the 30s. Only a government could prefer "Dulles" over "Chantilly".] It would've been ideal for Vanessa to get a building near central DC and use the neighboring Reagan National Airport, but that airport had been virtually shut down to non-commercial flights since 9/11/2001 because it was close to the White House and the Government was scared of another air attack. Before 9/11 Reagan used to handle 40,000 general aviation and unscheduled flights annually; since 9/11, about 200 annually (little facts like this show how effective the 9/11 terrorist raids have been). The rules for aircraft using Reagan National Airport: Prohibit flights of more than 1,250 miles required landing somewhere within 1,250 miles of DC and then taking off again to complete the trip. In case you don't see how silly that is, let me spell it out: For Corvallis-to-Reagan National flights, and the return flights, Vanessa's plane would have to touchdown anywhere within 1,250 miles of DC, then apply thrust to immediately take off again to continue the trip. It didn't have to stop or open its door, only have its wheels touch tarmac anywhere within 1,250 miles of DC. The reason for this rule is to avoid overworking Reagan Airport by making it such a nuisance to use that long-haul plane owners prefer to land at the larger Dulles (you've got to admire a government that works "for the people" by deliberately creating nuisances for them). Preventing Reagan from being "overworked" continued to apply post-9/11. The flight had to be searched by the DHS on the inward leg. That could be done at Corvallis provided the doors weren't opened at the momentary touchdown referred to in the point above, but would be intrusive, a significant delay (especially if the Government started playing games with it), and an expense. An armed DHS air marshal had to be onboard both coming and going, which was something we had WAY less than zero enthusiasm for, especially as many of the Government employees would no doubt believe that MAF's future actions would be anti-government; when, in fact, they'd actually be pro-government by making it better through being more accountable and honest. It would be too dangerous for us to have an angry, gun-armed DHS idiot in the cockpit (the DHS division involved, the TSA, has already got the reputation as being particularly idiotic, even for the DHS). Vanessa would use Dulles Airport and MAF would get an office near it, so several miles away from the Government's buildings. Vanessa no longer had any requirement to modify the Government's current offer. None of the rest of us had ever had any need to, to put it mildly, as we would've been ecstatic to have had our first settlement offer accepted. With no need for any more special conditions, it was only a matter of whether we wanted to squeeze more money out of them. It was Vanessa's opinion that the Government's last jump had been so large out of desperation, and pushing harder might cause it to do something injurious to our health (unlikely), or simply decide to take its chances in court (more likely). If we kept pushing, we might get the offer increased, or get it canceled. We couldn't imagine what we'd do with the money we were being offered already, so taking a risk to get more was stupid. No one voted for "Stupid", everyone being far too busy voting for "Insanely Rich Right Now Please!" One of the things that Vanessa had insisted on when our lawyer got the first settlement proposal from the Government, was that every Government offer had to come in the form of a fully completed settlement agreement. It couldn't be a letter saying they agreed to add something to the agreement; it had to be the updated agreement itself. It also had to be signed by everyone that needed to sign it on the Government's side. Their lawyers had objected to that because that wasn't the way things were done. It was far too inconvenient to get the very important and busy Government bosses to sign documents that might, or might not, be accepted. They thought it was much better to get the details thrashed out first, and then the contract would be drawn up, signed by us, and then signed by them. Vanessa, through our lawyer, had set them straight. Not just as a way of driving home the point that we had the power in this negotiation, but also because when we decided it was time to sign, we didn't want to give them any chance to back out, delay, or play some other silly game. Our requirement had pissed them off, had inconveniently interrupted several of their meetings when one participant needed to sign the latest version, had required the contracts to go on several helicopter trips to chase signatories, etc., but not only hadn't we cared about any of that, we'd actually preferred reminding them that they were weak. Vanessa called our lead lawyer, asking him, "We're agreeable. Is there any reason we shouldn't sign them right now?" He suggested, "I'm having too much fun?" "Haha. Any more reasons?" "If you went the court route you'd likely get a great deal more. Potentially a very great deal more." "Perhaps, but too many things could go wrong. So far they haven't wanted to counterattack, but a long, drawn-out fight would be a very different situation. We're more than happy with what we've got in front of us." Our greatest risk was that in a serious battle, the Government would do a great deal of investigation and could find out that Mark Anderson is somehow now Ron Fisher. That'd cause MASSIVE problems, and we wouldn't have any criminal immunities either. Being given an $18.4 billion settlement was better. "Then sign with my congratulations." Vanessa turned to us, "He says to sign." "Oh boy," from all of us, in various ways. And then we started signing. Not me though - not as Ron and CERTAINLY not as Mark (hehe). I was a beneficiary of the agreement but not a party to it. I still managed to enjoy watching the others sign. On August 10, 2006, the Government came to owe us a number followed by an insane SHIT LOAD of zeroes. We spent the next half an hour trying to get over the nervous tension that goes with suddenly becoming billionaires. I hadn't known that happened, but take it from me that it does. There were lots of silly jokes (even from me!), lots of giggles, and a bottle of champagne got cracked although most of us don't like the stuff. When I'd started worrying about the Binion's money running out - which had been almost immediately - I'd made a mental note to try to find another source of funds. It turned out that all I had to do was let the Government kidnap, experiment on, then lose me. Easy really. I'll remember that for the next time I'm getting low on money. ------- Chapter 313: Meanwhile, Personal Stuff Late-May to Thursday August 10, 2006 (Continued) In this chapter, I'll write about a few miscellaneous topics that got missed during my discussing the progress of the negotiation. ------- The plan I'd formed back when I was in the CIA's custody - to get back into my families' lives by becoming a ten-fingered, short, Black guy - had worked as well as I'd hoped. The improvisation to destroy the CIA lab and leak some documents had worked pretty damned nicely too, giving us an $18.4 billion bonus. Only $1.5 billion for us personally, but as Mom is unlikely to ever say again, "Beggars can't be choosers." As a second bonus, we'd done an enormous amount of damage to the bioweapons industry and hopefully made it less likely for the DHS and CIA to abuse innocent people again. We'd done so well that we had to ask ourselves, "Is it possible for Mark Anderson to come back somehow?" There were various ways we could make that happen. My favorite was to wait six months or so then have Ron Fisher leave town. It'd take me a few weeks to turn my body back into Mark Anderson's, but that time delay would help make Ron's leaving appear unrelated. Then I'd arrange to have myself discovered in the CIA's possession in some corner of the world. One way would be for me to snoop around until I found a CIA jet being used for extraordinary renditions somewhere in Europe. I'd wait until it was flying nearly empty, then I'd make it crash, which I could very easily force to happen by flying next to it and doing some creative sabotage. I'd preferably have it crash in a country like France, where they are both civilized and highly distrusting of the American Government; those two traits perhaps being related. Everyone on the plane would die, but I'd be found injured but still alive in the wreckage. I'd recover physically, but wouldn't be able to provide any useful information about the terrible things the CIA had been doing to me for the last year, not even what country I'd been in. The world would leap to the obvious conclusion and the CIA's denials wouldn't be believed for a second. We could even sue them. A plan like that would work initially, but Mom, Prof and Vanessa were sure that there'd been far too much scientific excitement about me, which would lead to Big Trouble if I turned up again. Some scientists and their organizations wouldn't be able to resist trying to get hold of me again. Even if we hadn't leaked my CIA file, dozens of immoral CIA scientists (those survivors of the lab's destruction that had already 'played' with me) would want to play with me again. With the leaking of the file, that risk had been increased a hundred-fold, but it'd already been far too high. Leaking the file had actually been a lucky event, otherwise we might not have appreciated how eager the scientists would be to get hold of my body again, and we might've risked Mark Anderson's returning. I knew that the risk was even higher than Prof and Vanessa thought, because any tests done on my body after it was recovered from the plane crash - or however else I arranged to be discovered and rescued - would produce even weirder results, starting with the very first test they were likely to do: a blood test. The syringe would fill with gray blood, the scientists would be amazed, and the trouble would start. If that became public, people would get seriously freaked out. It was all too easy to believe that millions of easily inflamed ignorant people - of which this country has an astonishing number - would decide I was an alien that needed to be killed, and probably my family killed too, for good measure. Even if I could get my blood to return to normal, the CIA experiments had shown us that there were many dozens of ways my body was unusual, and I wouldn't be able to get everything to return to normal, especially not my brain's level of activity. I could dampen it a lot, but there were thirty two minds in my head now, so even if their level of conscious activity was somehow reduced significantly, the new level times thirty two would still be far too much mentation. There was no possibility of scientists not doing an EEG either; it'd probably be the second test they'd perform. I'd also get no practice shots at trying to fail any of their tests, so I'd certainly 'fail' - by passing too well - many of them. So we reaffirmed our previous decision - made early on in our building Mark up for the lawsuit - that Mark Anderson was never coming back. That meant Ron Fisher had to find a direction for his life. "There's no hurry for that," insisted Vanessa. "Wait until you've finished all the gardening jobs first." "If you continue to pay me a few million dollars every couple of months, I'll think about it." One of the objectives for the lawsuit had been to make Ron rich so I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life tied down to being a gardener or mechanic. My marrying Carol would've been a very good Plan B, but what we'd done was far better because it got Ron Fisher and Mark Anderson immunized from prosecution for past crimes, such as murdering Ron Fisher and the rest of his gang. The public justification for Ron's inclusion in the settlement would be easy (the public didn't know about the settlement yet). Mom and Dad would say, "Ron was working around our house every day and he was getting along well with one of our daughters, so we wanted him included in the deal to keep him from being bribed or targeted by the Government. It also reassures us that he's not chasing Carol for her money. All we personally wanted from the Government was $10 million for each of us. We're astonished and appalled how much money the Government kept throwing at us, but we never had any reason to take Ron off the list." [Which is what my parents did say after the settlement agreement was released.] In the weeks before we settled, we had several times discussed what I could do after the settlement - or court case, if it came to that. [By the way, we had the house swept for bugs frequently. We even rented some equipment from the LA debugging firm to make sure our underground rumpus room was permanently bug-free, that being where we held our top-secret conversations.] I wouldn't be able to openly show my genius, so I couldn't graduate three degrees from OSU, but I could still study their online material informally. Not until after the negotiation/case was over because we didn't want anyone in the Government to get suspicious about our internet usage as Moran had, investigate, and find that Mark was still alive, as that would ruin everything! First we wanted me to get immunity and we to get very, very rich, and then we'd find a way to let me study. With as much money as we'd have, many things should become possible. All four parents wanted me to get back to studying, and Prof even came up with a post-settlement plan for how to make that possible without putting the DHS on my ass again. What I'd do with the knowledge I'd acquire from studying wasn't clear, but education is good and it gave me something to do. One idea was to have me as a backroom guy. We'd have some sort of business or science company which I'd help run (Julia insisted I'd be the boss), but I'd be behind the scenes where very few people would be aware of my involvement. Julia would be the publicly acknowledged boss. I didn't think she'd have any problem acting bossy. Whatever my main activity in life would be, Vanessa was also eager for MAF to get the benefit of my wonderful snooping ability from time to time. If I helped MAF blow the lid off a major Government cover-up every few months, that would soon be scaring the shit out of State and Federal Governments. There was a risk to me in such activity, but it was low, especially if I did it infrequently and randomly. None of these issues needed to be decided on quickly, and it was definitely better for me to keep on being a below-the-radar gardener until we'd finished dealing with the Government, and until the post-settlement media frenzy had died down. I didn't mind carrying on gardening for a while as it was more enjoyable and challenging than I'd expected. Knowing Vanessa as I did, I should've expected that. Vanessa would give me a good description of what she wanted done in an area of the garden, and then I'd be in charge of making sure it happened. I had to research aspects of the job, get all the materials, do most of the work myself, hire whoever needed hiring, make sure everyone did what they should do, pay the bills afterward; Vanessa's signing the checks giving her the opportunity to review my management skills. The property did need a lot of work because so much of it had been in grapevines before, and Vanessa did have a lot of ideas about what she wanted, so it was a significant learning experience for me and fun to see the progress being made. The above was my situation as of settlement day, August 10. This chapter is about personal stuff during the two months of the settlement negotiations, so I'll back up and discuss some of the events during that period. ------- One VERY welcome development was the progress in forcing my brain to adapt so that Visual Processing Centers A and B both gained the functionality they were each missing and that I considered important. Ideally both of them would eventually gain every visual processing ability that either of them had now, but there were a few important functions that each visual center needed as quickly as possible, especially Center B since that was so primitive. Visual Processing Center A was the first to become as good as I wanted, and I became able to spend increasing proportions of the day with my eyes' vision going only to Center A. I wasn't stupid enough to drive a car with my vision working like that, and juggling pairs of socks was a comical way of demonstrating A's incompetence in some areas, but I was getting there for the usual everyday tasks. My shins were thankful. I was long past the point where seeing two different scenes - one in each visual center - disoriented me. You don't get disoriented when you're moving around a room with a TV showing a different scene (it'd been trickier than that, but that'll give you an idea). Center A's becoming useful most of the time meant I could rely on it keeping my body on course while I created a sight blob and used it for long periods of time to do other things, such as to supplement the guards patrolling inside our wall. That sped up Center B's adaptation nicely. My ability to recognize faces was messed up sometimes, but getting better. If I saw someone with Center A the first time, I couldn't recognize them in B, and vice versa, but successive sightings in the same center were recognizably the same person. That was a significant improvement in B because it hadn't been able to do facial recognition at all initially. I was getting closer to A and B being interchangeable, as indicated by the A and B images of a person getting noticeably more similar in appearance and how my brain reacted to the sights of them. ------- The end of the school year arrived very quickly. The important news was that Katie and Carson were still hanging on. Katie was doing better than expected, and if she kept hanging on so well, she might last as long as Carson. It looked likely that both of her parents were going to see Ava graduate. I spent a lot of time with Ava helping her study, leaving the other girls to do their own studying. Ava hadn't had a good year academically so she was feeling worried, and at times even downright panicky, about her exams. I tried to boost her confidence and help as much as I could, but I didn't have much effect. A week and a half out from her first exam, I was helping Ava study when she lost it again, crying and saying she wasn't going to pass and her Mom and Dad would be so disappointed. "Fuck it, Ava; we'll cheat to make sure you pass. We know you're smart enough to graduate and it's not your fault you can't study. You and I will do your exams together." "{Sniff}. What do you mean?" I didn't want to explain out loud because if we were bugged the baddies would hear enough to work out that I'd destroyed the lab and was Majestic Countdown too. So I grabbed a pen and Ava, and took us to bed. Under the bedclothes I concisely whispered my plan in her ear and moved her pen-holding hand with my NP to show her what I meant. I was going to hang around near enough to her exam rooms that I could supervise her with a sight blob. If she was making too many mistakes or was stuck I'd use NP to help her enough to make sure she easily passed. For short answers I could move her hand to write the whole answer directly. For longer answers, I'd push her hand to write some key words, and let her expand on them. We practiced a bit, and as soon as she got the idea to relax her arm when I took over, it was easy. Ava felt MUCH better. She knew I was INCREDIBLY good at passing exams, so she didn't have to worry anymore. I joked, "Make sure you don't wear a bra or panties when you take the exams. That way I'll have something to play with while you're answering the easy questions." I demonstrated what I had in my dirty mind, causing Ava to exclaim, "I won't be able to answer ANY questions if you do that to me!" "In that case you'd better pay me in advance for my services." Half an hour later, Ava was VERY relaxed and unworried. I lightly smacked her on the ass to get us moving to the shower, then back to studying. Without the pressure of failure, Ava's studying greatly improved. I later told my families (except Donna), very quietly and cryptically, that "When Ava's doing her exams, I'll be helping her pen..." I said nothing else, just using NP to move their hands slightly. They'd been worried about Ava's exam performance too, so they got the idea reasonably quickly. No one had any objection. I doubted very much that they could've gotten me to change my mind even if they had objected. Now I had to do a lot of studying myself, to make sure I knew all her subjects. I can read thirty one sources simultaneously now, so it didn't take me long. I laid all of Ava's notes and textbooks in many piles on the floor under the pool table in our games room, with blankets draped off the table to completely hide what I was doing in case of the very unlikely risk there was a camera bug in the room. Overnight, I did eight hours of reading, thirty sources at a time, totaling the equivalent of 240 hours (six working weeks) of nonstop reading. A couple of nights of that were all I needed. It wasn't an ideal way of studying, but it was easily good enough to ensure that Ava would pass. I prepared some sample questions for Ava: some easy, some hard; some short, some long. When Ava next came to study at our place, we went into separate rooms and we practiced our cheating method. It worked well, except that our handwriting differed so much. We solved that by when I tapped her on the back of her hand, she'd turn her answer book to the back page where I'd give my answer. She'd then rewrite it in the right place of her book. The last page would fill up with assorted notes, which she'd cross out heavily before handing her answers in at the end. It'd slow her down a little, but I didn't expect to have to help her much. At the start of exam week, I drove the girls to school and then parked somewhere nearby. I locked the doors, reclined the seat, pulled my cap over my eyes, and pretended to be asleep. Proximity would inform me if anyone came with twenty four feet (I know I keep mentioning that, but for some reason I find it REALLY cool). Even before the students had been let into the exam room, I used NP to let Ava know I was looking after her. She'd forgotten my instruction not to wear panties, but it was easy for me to pull them down a couple of inches. It cheered us both up. I also let her know I was with her as she walked into the exam room and sat down. There was no way she could fail, so she was smiling happily. I'd told Ava that I'd let her make some mistakes or skip some questions if she didn't know the answer, because her getting very high scores on every exam would be too suspicious. She understood that, so wasn't frazzled when she had some troubles during the exam. I helped from time to time, especially when it required only a brief effort. That was the case with all of her exams. I aimed to add about 15 to 20% to her result each time; a little less in the subjects she was good at, and a little more in the ones she struggled with. The school had promised to grade Ava's exams quickly so she could let her parents know asap. The day after her last exam, the high-school's Deputy Principal called with her results. Unsurprisingly she'd done fine, so she'd be graduating next week. Ava rushed to tell her parents the good news. The following week they watched her graduation via a webcast. Carol and Julia did well too, not that there'd ever been any doubt about those two. Donna did quite a lot better than her normally VERY average results. Living with the Williamses has that effect on students. On the topic of Ava and her parents, I should mention that not long after I'd taken Ava for her first ride on my Magic Flying Sled, she'd asked me about taking her parents for a flight and revealing who I was. Maybe I'd just fly her father, because her mother might be too sick to go outside. I could think of quite a few pros and cons, so the answer wasn't obvious to me and I'd suggested it needed a family conference (excluding Donna, as she didn't know I could fly). Ava had several reasons for suggesting it, her biggest reasons being her wanting to share her pride in me with her parents, and wanting to give her parents (excuse the expression) "an experience of a lifetime." My four parents weren't happy about the idea. The deciding point was Mom saying, "Apart from each other, the only thing your parents are thinking about now is whether you'll be all right, Ava. Telling them Mark's alive and in an extreme disguise because his life would be in terrible danger will cause them to worry greatly about your being in danger by being near him. They're not worried about Mark, or Julia, Carol, us, or anyone else; only you. Your safety is even more important than money or graduating, so it wouldn't be kind to give them that worry." Ava understood that. She was disappointed, but that was the end of that idea. Her parents would never know that Ron was Mark. ------- Just after lunchtime one day, I was working away in the garden as usual when there was some yelling from the front gate, which turned out to be the Fisher family. I recognized them from when I'd snooped their home, so recognition wasn't a worry. No part was a worry really, as enough time had gone past that my changes in speech and behavior could be excused. The Fishers were just a possible nuisance. I invited them in for coffee. I'd killed over two hundred bioweapon researchers and nearly a dozen thugs including the Fisher's son, but I wasn't rude enough to turn them away at the gate. Not the first time they turned up anyway. I spoke decently (no, "How ya doin', Niggas?"), so they queried me on that even before the gate had closed behind them. I'd modified my voice box to sound like their son (proximity was good enough that I could 'see' my voice box operating, so I'd been able to consciously direct changes to it until trial and error experimentation got me what I wanted), but there were still many differences between their son's speech and mine - words, grammar, rhythms, etc. I didn't care; I just told them, "I'm changing my speech as fast as I can so I sound proper. I wouldn't have gotten a job here if I spoke like before." The Fishers expressed lots of concern about my absence, how I was getting on, and what I was doing for a job. My answers were, respectively: "My message through the lawyer was not to worry about me", "Fine", and "Unskilled garden laborer." That was just during the walk down the drive. Once we got inside, they admired the house and wanted the tour. "Nope. It's not my house and the owners wouldn't like me showing strangers through it." "We're not strangers; we're ya fam'ly!" "You're strangers to the people who own this house." I started making coffees and a coke for the youngest. I'd stayed out of the media spotlight and I doubted the Fisher family were on friendly terms with Bush's legal team - who'd seen my name in the proposed settlement agreement - but somehow the Fishers had gotten wind of my whereabouts and they felt sufficiently motivated to come visiting. I asked, "How did you know I was here?" They didn't word it this way, but what had happened is they'd seen me in the background of some of the TV shots about the family that was going to be making $242 trillion dollars, and they'd phoned the local media. The media hadn't known anything about me (this was before the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill was publicized), but had suggested the Fishers call the local cops. That wasn't something the Fisher family would normally do, but they weren't normally in close proximity to hundreds of trillions of dollars either, so a change in behavior seemed justified. The cops knew I came from LA, so they'd confirmed my presence in town to 'my' parents. [I'd informally reported to the cop station five times in total, so they'd know who I was and how diligent I was about finding myself a new home, in case the DHS or CIA subsequently checked up on Ron Fisher having a realistic arrival in town.] The above paragraph's insinuation that the Fishers were motivated by money was deserved, because it didn't take long for that to come up as a topic. They tried to motivate my generosity by pulling on the family heartstrings, which didn't have much affect on me. From what Ron Fisher had told me, they weren't even likable, let alone lovable. They weren't particularly bad parents, but they certainly weren't good ones, and they weren't my ones. When their family love tactic didn't work, they tried family loyalty, then a guilt trip, then suggested that they were thinking about moving to Corvallis for the good of my brother and sister. "Do whatever you want. It's a free country." #22: "We can' afford ta move." "Then I guess you won't be moving." "You kin help us." "I've got $4 in my wallet. I doubt that'd be much help." I had more than $4, but I was too busy not being rude to not be dishonest. "Aren't ya gonna get somethin' from the rich people?" "My small paycheck at the end of the week." And so it continued. They'd outstayed their welcome even before the coffee was ready, so by the time they'd slowly drunk it, I was more than ready for them to leave. They didn't go easily, but they finally did leave. As soon as the gate had closed behind them, I stated, "Don't bother coming back. I left you for a reason, and I don't want you back in my life. You won't be let in again." They thought that was a terrible thing for their son to say, which it would have been. The only contact I was tempted to have with that family was to try to encourage the two kids to go to college, maybe by contributing $15,000 or $20,000 toward their fees. But doing that would almost certainly lead to more money requests, and they actually meant nothing more to me than the million other disadvantaged kids in LA. I felt guilty about killing their big brother, but my current behavior toward the family would be a considerably better role model for the younger kids than the real Ron Fisher would've been. The Fishers would most likely be back when news of my becoming rich became public knowledge. They'd been warned not to, but they would. Hopefully they wouldn't make too much of a scene when they were refused entry, and their 'fair share' of whatever money I got. I told the others about the Fisher family's visit over dinner, asking my current families not to have anything to do with my previous family in the future. ------- Another minor event - more accurately described as something that started as a major event, dropped right through minor, and was soon well on the way to becoming a non-event - was the public's attention to the issue of their being made immortal, healthy, and genius. The public should've been righteously angry about Mark Anderson's destruction, and I'm sure they would've been, if not for what Paris Hilton just did. (Maybe I'm being facetious a little too often. I promise to try to cut back.) The immortality issue faded away so fast it was bizarre. My four parents had expected it, but I hadn't really believed them. That a tit-less, witless tramp displaced my story was proof that the public BADLY needed another 120 IQ points. Even another 12 would've helped many of them a great deal. Scientists weren't so easily distracted, but they did slowly lose interest. In the first few weeks after we got the scientific community excited over the CIA's file, scientists had been ALL OVER my family, our school, the house and area we'd lived in at the time I'd gotten smart, and everywhere else that they thought might offer clues to my transformation. My parents and sisters were top of the list for the scientists' interest. The Andersons had to cooperate or the pressure would've built too high, so my family wasted a lot of time being test subjects for all sorts of esoteric theories. Every few days they'd go to the Corvallis Hospital for a few hours to take care of a stack of tests, then give the scientists time to digest the results and set up new experiments. My family did that to prove they were normal, so no weirdo or Government power-mad loony would be tempted to do something troublesome. The tests eventually did a very good job of convincing the scientists that my family was boringly normal, and there was no sign of any other scientific leads from anywhere in my environment, so even scientific curiosity tapered off. The faster everyone forgot that issue, the better. We had all the affidavits we needed for the court case, so that base was covered. We maintained the security around our house, but more to keep the media out than anything else. ------- All through the negotiation process, and especially when summer vacation started, many of Carol's and Donna's friends dropped in (or in the case of some of Donna's friends, trotted in). We were in the news as often as not, so my sisters' girlfriends would often visit. There wasn't anything nefarious in that; they were just being frequently reminded of us, so naturally thought to visit. Plus they enjoyed hanging around our pool. There were several things I particularly missed about being Mark: the intellectual challenges from studying, the sex-games with so many girls, the cunning mind-games Julia, Carol, Ava and I played with the other girls (the sex- and mind-games had often overlapped), and several of the friendships, such as with Alexis, Pat, the two lovely Norris sisters, Carina Durham, and others. Ron had to keep a low profile so I couldn't risk doing any of that. My sexual relationships with girls were restricted to Julia, Carol, and Ava. Donna was being treated so purely she might as well have been my sister. When other girls came around, I retained my purity. It felt noticeably different to interact with the visiting girls when I knew that nothing was going to happen. In some ways I quite enjoyed it because I could do or say whatever I wanted without worrying about relationship issues. There were several girls that I was particularly friendly to when they visited. Diana and Claire Norris, for example. When they came over, I was effusive in telling them that I'd heard WONDERFUL things about them, that they were lovely young women, etc. They were surprised by the strength of my comments, and perhaps initially suspicious of my motives, but I treated all the visiting girls with perfect respect. I honestly had zero intention of doing anything sexual with any of them. I didn't even 'check them out' when they were in their swimwear around the pool. It was impressive how fast the girls picked up that I could be trusted; they must have some sort of radar for that sort of thing. If we didn't settle with the Government the case would drag on for several years, during which the Government might do a great deal of investigation, so I had to be staunchly un-Mark-like. Mark had enjoyed orgies, but Ron didn't even notice that girls had bodies. Publicly, I was increasingly Carol's boyfriend, but even with Carol I didn't behave sexually. Carol would sit on my lap beside the pool, for example, and we'd only hug non-sexually. Partly it was habit as I'd never been sexual with Carol in public when I'd been Mark, and partly it was because Carol's and Ron's ages were nearly five years apart, which made our being sexual illegal, especially because of my race - which shouldn't make any difference, but we feared would. Ron's relationships with Ava and Julia were kept low key too, especially in Julia's case. There'd been a few early public comments from Carol about sharing me with Ava, but we'd backed off from those. Publicly, Ron was NOTHING like Mark. I missed all the fun Mark used to have, but being pure actually felt good sometimes. I had no doubt at all about which lifestyle I preferred, but it was good to experience how relaxed things could be for everyone when there was no sexual interest. Actually, the "no sexual interest" comment is misleading. I wasn't showing or even feeling much sexual interest, but there were other people around me, and some of them did. And, "No," Carol's girlfriends didn't all get the hots for me. They didn't even get the slightly warms. Because the girls weren't coming to flirt with Mark, quite a few of them brought their boyfriends with them, who sometimes brought their friends with them, who liked the look of the spare girls, and often the look of Carol too but that got them nowhere. There were often quite a few boys around, and quite a few girls in swimsuits, so there was plenty of "sexual interest" going on. During weekdays there were usually no parents either, which meant that it was my job as the oldest to keep the horny teenagers out of trouble and especially out of either of the two houses' bedrooms. I was very good at that, thanks to regular sight blob checks. I'd go inside - to "go to the bathroom", "get a drink", or whatever - catch the misbehaving couple making out, then send them outside again. They were rarely up to much, as girls that age shouldn't have full sex now that I can't risk participating. That made catching them less fun that it could've been. For the first few times I'd been hoping to catch them naked. Apart from the pleasure of seeing the girl naked, marching the boy outside naked would've embarrassed the hell out of most boys so they'd be much less likely to misbehave again. However, they never misbehaved that much. [[I was silly to think they would. The amount of sex that'd been going on around me as Mark had distorted my view of what teenagers normally do when they're misbehaving.]] When I caught them misbehaving, it was just a bit of making out in a private corner of the house. Catching re-offenders soon made it obvious that just kicking them outside didn't have a high enough deterrence value, but I learned that putting the guy to work in the garden for a while did. There was ALWAYS some gardening work to do, so much of it that I was usually too busy to spend much time with "the kids", as I called them from my lofty nineteen years of presumed age. The guys objected that I didn't have the right to boss them into doing gardening work, but I gave them a choice of "Half an hour's work, or I'll get Mrs. Anderson to call your parents to tell them you're not allowed back on this property because you were caught having sex in the living room." "But we were only kissing!" "I saw where you were trying to put your hand. Mrs. Anderson isn't going to give your parents a description; she's just going to say that she doesn't want you to visit here again. If you think your excuse is good enough then I'm sure it'll work fine on your parents. Or maybe you'd prefer to do half an hour's gardening?" I really was a boring fart, i.e., nothing like Mark. I never penalized the girls, of course, as they should be encouraged to behave sexually. I built it into a good joke, telling groups of guys when they arrived, "I've got a lot of gardening work to do today, so I hope some of you guys are feeling horny enough to volunteer." They got over their annoyance with me and tended to joke right back at me. My earlier, "there was no sexual interest" became misleading in another way. Some of the girls did eventually start to become sexually interested in me. Not strongly because it never got anywhere, and very few of them showed it because I was so obviously devoted to being Carol's boyfriend and behaved with nothing but polite respect toward every girl, including Carol, who got polite affection too. The reason I was sure some of them were starting to like me, was the same reason they were starting to like me: my proximity sense. I was getting emotional information from everyone within twenty four feet of me, and I'd became pretty good at interpreting and using it. Just as you will naturally change your behavior when the person you're talking to laughs, smiles, frowns, cries (or whatever), I learned to automatically do the same based on my proximity sense. In short, I was more "sensitive" than any other teenage boy has ever been. That's not saying much, so I'll add that I was also becoming more sensitive - to CURRENTLY felt emotions - than female adults, which IS saying a lot. You probably didn't know this, but teenage boys are often damned annoying nuisances to teenage girls, especially when the girls are wearing swimsuits. I think it's due to a lack of blood reaching the boys' brains, and what little does get there, is full of "Be A Macho Jerk" hormones. I drifted into becoming a peacemaker, warning off the guys who were being excessively annoying. Sometimes I could tell them quietly, but it was usually in front of the girl and several other kids. When boys are trying hard to be their seductive best, they don't appreciate some other guy interrupting them, so I received some quick-tempered responses. I just needed to take a few steps back and cool things down. A few times I was able to say something like, "Maria isn't enjoying your attentions, Nick. If I was you, I'd go talk with Kendra. She likes you. For goodness sake don't try to show off the way you were with Maria. Just relax and be attentive. Kendra likes you already, so you just have to let her know you like her, and she'll take care of the rest." Guys like almost any girl in a swimsuit, and they ESPECIALLY like her if she likes him, so matchmaking was easy. If there's one thing girls like second to clothes shopping, it's sensitive males. I think it's because of the novelty value. Over the weeks, I increasingly impressed the kids with my sensitivity (the girl kids anyway, as the boy kids barely noticed my sensitivity). My ability to keep things smooth, to cut off any developing unpleasantness (boy to girl, or any other combination), to matchmake, to protect kids that needed some sort of protection (such as a scared kid being coerced into riding Patch), to kick out a couple of kids who were upsetting others, etc. There were lots of opportunities and they were surprisingly easy to identify and manage. Kids don't exactly have a wide range of complex emotions when socializing around a pool in summer. I didn't make an issue out of my sensitivity, but after a few weeks Carol started receiving an increasing number of comments like: "You're very lucky to have a boyfriend like Ron," or, "No wonder you gave up being a lesbian for Ron; he's amazingly sensitive." I was getting more attention too. Most of it was because the girls liked me, but some of it had a tinge of interest, according to my proximity sense. It would've been so easy to build on that, but I did the reverse. I quickly, politely and firmly shut down any girl flirting with me, with something like, "Thank you for the compliment of your interest in me, but I'm TOTALLY happy being Carol's boyfriend and that's never going to change." They'd usually deny they'd been trying anything, then I'd apologize for misinterpreting their interest, which made them even more interested in flirting with me but frustrated about not being able to. We had girls of a variety of ages visiting, from Donna's friends up to Ava's. It was the younger girls who were particularly impressed by me. I suspected partly because the boys they compared me with were the least mature which made me look even better, and partly because my being Carol's boyfriend meant I was willing to date girls that young which made them hopeful. When Claire Norris finally built up the interest to flirt with me, she got a slightly different answer. Loud enough for several others to hear, including Diana (they tended to visit us together; trained that way, I guess), I told her, "I'm VERY happy with Carol as my girlfriend, Claire. But if I was tempted by anyone else, it'd be you or Diana. Of all of Carol's and Donna's friends, you two are the nicest." I had quite a lot of credibility when it came to judging people by now, so my declaring Diana and Claire the nicest was a powerful compliment, which the two of them loved receiving. I didn't let it go any further, my only intent being to build their self-confidence to help them resist their parents' puritanical influence. I resisted the obvious temptation to make a joke or comment that hinted at a threesome, as Ron had to be VERY different from Mark. That was particularly difficult when Alexis, Pat and some of Mark's other favorites visited. When they were around, I often went to do some gardening work. My girls (Julia, Carol, Donna and Ava) had quickly noticed my sensitivity. To Donna I just said I was getting better at reading people. To my wives, I cautiously gave a much fuller explanation. It was a considerable increase on what little they previously knew about my proximity sense. They were amazed by my new ability to 'see' emotions. To my surprise and relief, they weren't the least bit threatened by it. I'd been very worried that they'd feel that I was invading their privacy, but it seemed that they didn't care at all about that. I was so surprised that I took the risk of asking them about their lack of care. They answered, "Of course not! We TRUST you. It makes you an even better boyfriend so why should we complain?" They looked at me like I was silly for thinking they might worry about that. I knew that girls like to share their emotions, but I was surprised to learn that they REALLY like sharing them. Carol's fifteenth and Donna's fourteenth birthdays occurred a couple of weeks apart toward the end of the negotiation process (July 12 and August 1 respectively). One aspect of our situation that was difficult for everyone except me was that Mark had to be considered to have been recently killed, so the Andersons should all be grieving. They could easily manage to act upset whenever required to by TV cameras, or could "put on a brave face" to behave normally during the day, but birthday parties would've been too awkward. As we couldn't celebrate my sisters' birthdays normally, midway between them we went to Disneyland. No one knew the family there, so the girls could whoop it up. I did a bit of whooping myself. I could fly at 600 mph at 10,000 feet on an invisible piece of mental power, but rollercoasters still gave me a wonderfully enjoyable scare. ------- After we got back from Disneyland, a few days short of her birthday, Donna asked me quietly, "Will your friend be checking me on my birthday?" I hadn't forgotten it. It's difficult to forget anything with thirty two minds, especially with Donna making sure we'd remember. As is normally the case, it'd been a year since her last birthday, during which her barely started puberty had progressed rapidly and in all the right directions. It'd progressed loudly too, such as when she'd had her menarche. She'd made sure everybody in the house knew ALL about her first bleeding, whether they wanted to or not (that distinction divided us by gender). Donna had occasionally declared at breakfast, "I need some bigger bras, Mom," or give us less subtle clues that she was maturing (for Donna, yelling at the breakfast table was subtle). The unsubtle clues were increasingly enjoyable to look at. Donna's question came about two weeks before the end of the negotiation. We didn't know at the time how much longer it'd take, but we felt it would probably end soon. We STRONGLY preferred to settle instead of having a possibly dangerous court battle, and the offers we'd already received from the Government had been wonderful, so it was hard to imagine that the negotiation would last much longer. I answered her, "Maybe not exactly on your birthday, but soon after is likely. It's important that nothing funny happens for a while. What answer are you hoping for?" "That I can, of course. Why would I want not to have a choice?" "That's a smart answer. Do you have a particular boy in mind, or do you just want to have the choice in case you find one?" "Did you leave your brains behind when you got up this morning? Why do you think I keep showing you my tits whenever I say I need some new clothes?" With a teasing tone, I joked, "I just assumed you waved them around at everybody." I got a deserved whack on the arm for that. Proximity had shown me that, from time to time, Donna lusted after my less-than-previously-impressive body. I'd asked about what she wanted just to get an idea of how consciously aware of her feelings she was. "We're all getting less sex than we want these days, Donna. Hopefully we'll be able to relax and act more naturally soon. As soon as we can, I'll ask my friend to come." I didn't know how emotionally mature Donna was about sex now. All the sex-games Mark used to play had stopped, so for a long time I hadn't had many opportunities to judge Donna's attitude to that stuff. In some respects she still seemed like a young girl - such as being into Patch far more than any of the boys from school - but in other respects she was maturing very well. You only had to look at her to see that. She was managing the whole Ron deception, not making an issue about sex, and had done well in her school exams. There also hadn't been the petulant begging sessions of 3B-land, which I was very thankful for. That evening in bed, Carol, Julia and I discussed Donna's still wanting sex with me. Carol said, "Hardly surprising. She knows how good you are and she thinks you're a wonderful person. It mostly depends on what you and Mom think. Do you want to?" "If she just wanted to have sex a couple of times - like it was some sort of new goofing off game she wanted to try - that'd be okay with me, but what scares me is her getting emotional about it. She's a nice person but I don't want her as a girlfriend. So many girls have become all emotional and lovey-dovey after having sex with me, especially the inexperienced ones, that I worry about Donna doing that. Normally avoiding those girls for a while cures the problem, but I can hardly avoid Donna when we live together, and it'd be very tough to push her away." No one was surprised when Mom was decidedly cool on the idea. We were surprised when Dad expressed any view, let alone one opposite to Mom's. He spoke up to say, "I say let her if they want to. Compared to the other stuff we've got going on, a bit of sex is nothing. She's been good and very patient. For her, she's been VERY patient. The only thing that worries me is her having sex with other boys." Dad had been speaking up a lot more in recent months - the influence of Vanessa and Prof again - we just didn't expect it on such an obviously female topic (although why it should be "an obviously female topic" wasn't obvious to me. But I'm a male, so what do I know). I asked about what worried me the most, "What if Donna gets all lovey-dovey with me? Pushing her away would be hurtful." The consensus from the four parents about that was that it wouldn't do Donna any harm, and that she'd learn from the experience. It wasn't as if I was going to be cruel to her, and this would all be done inside the families so Donna would have lots of support. We discussed the issue some more, and we decided to leave it to my colorful alien friend, i.e., we concocted a cunning little plan. The next time I had a chance to, I told Donna, "I talked to my special friend about your birthday. It's going to come when I say the coast is clear. That should be less than a month..." "Yay!..." "Not so quick. It SHOULD be less than a month, but it MIGHT be longer, depending on the Government. It could be quite a long time, sweetie. We can't have my friend visit if the Government is still snooping on us. And then it depends on what my friend says. It might say you're not ready yet." "I am," insisted Donna. "I'm older than Carol was when she started, and I've got tits and everything." "The whole family is well aware that you have tits and everything. You haven't been very subtle about that." "{Giggle}. That's fun, even though it's only Dad, you and The Boys that get embarrassed." "How disappointing for you." ^ While I remember about Ron not acting anything like Mark, I'll mention a small point to illustrate that. I drive Julia's old Honda on the infrequent occasions when I need to drive anywhere, and she drives my wonderful Lexus sports car (Julia has her license now). We don't want people to see Ron driving around in Mark's car. It annoys me a little not to be able to drive my nice car, especially in summer when I would love to drop the top and cruise in the sunshine. Julia is the one that suffers the most from Ron having to be different from Mark. She thinks Ron DESPERATELY needs to be dressed properly! But even Julia had to admit - after taking a while to think about it carefully - that dressing properly wasn't worth risking my life for. When I get rich it'll be reasonable for me to take over driving the Lexus - we could even put it in my name - and modifying my behavior in other ways. Julia had teased, "It'd look too suspicious for you to drive such a classy car in your existing clothes, so you can have the Lexus back after we return from Rocky's." Julia was teasing, but deadly serious too. I WAS going to Rocky's, whether I wanted to or not (guess which?). With the excuse of all the outdoor work I was doing, my body was slowly getting better over these months. I often worked in shorts and without a shirt, deliberately so the press (there were often some camped outside because the parents often arranged press conferences) and others would see a steady, natural improvement in my body. The press paid particular attention to me after the Mark Anderson Memorial Bill was enacted with my non-memorial name on it. I ducked the press's clamor by repeating - you always have to repeat yourself with the press - "I'm just a gardener. You should talk with the bosses about that." I had a very strong aversion to looking like Mark by developing freakily wide shoulders and a freakily narrow waist, so those changes didn't happen, but I did lose my fat and I muscled-up nicely. By the end of the negotiation period my body was - according to Julia - crying out for new clothes. She even mentioned "Rocky's", which made me cry out, especially because they'd have to measure my inside leg again. As is so often is the case in life, events are often good news and bad news, so the $18.4 billion settlement contract was signed with the imminent threat of Rocky's hanging over my head and up between my legs. ------- Chapter 314: Organizing the Money Thursday, August 10 to Thursday, August 31, 2006 Vanessa called our lawyer back, to tell him we'd signed. He said, "Congratulations. I'll get the ball rolling here and I'll fly to Corvallis with the rest of the originals on the next available flight." "It'd be more convenient if you could fly direct on one of our new jets." "It's too early for that. Commercial flights will be fine. I'll see you tomorrow. I'll let you know my arrival time when I've got the bookings." Now that we knew how much we were getting, and what the current situation was, a lot of decisions needed to be quickly made. Checks would soon be made out to us, and it'd be much easier if we got who "us" was right the first time (e.g., would Donna's $125 million be made out to Donna, or a trust for Donna, or an Anderson family corporation or trust). The settlement agreement was full of "or their nominees" after our side's names, so it was time to nominate those recipients. At our law firm in DC a whole new team of lawyers was put on the job, with several accountants roped in. The $10 million payment they'd be getting from the Government was being consumed-in-advance impressively quickly. When I described the settlement agreement as saying, "MAF gets $15 billion", or, "The Family gets $1.5 billion"; it wasn't ANYWHERE near as simple as that. There were all sorts of legal issues involved, and some tax issues too. For example, in reality the brand new $50 million private jet was going to be Vanessa's, but who would it belong to on paper? It was going to be used mainly for MAF business, but also for family fun, some charity work, and lent out to friends, especially the Dean of OSU. He does a lot of traveling and he'd been VERY helpful to us since I'd been kidnapped by the DHS, so he'd be getting frequent private use of the jet. His peers are going to be VERY jealous when he travels to conferences in a large, private, luxury jet. We'd sell the DHS and CIA jets secondhand, which would recover nearly half of the $50 million. It wasn't right for Vanessa to pay roughly $25 million for a plane we'd all be using, but it couldn't be put into MAF's name either, because using it for non-MAF business could be questioned. It wouldn't be theft - as would be the case if many other trusts lent out their planes - because MAF was going to be chartered and financed in a way that allowed a great deal of financial flexibility between it and us, but ownership of the new jet still needed to be structured carefully. Even just our being given the five SUVs and two jets was complicated. When I said above that they were to be given to us, I was using the English language rather than lawyer-speak. The contract actually said that we or our nominee would buy them at their market value. In addition to the money I'd said the Government was going to pay us for the settlement, it was also going to give us or our nominee the total value of those seven vehicles, to be used to buy them. So we had to decide who our vehicle-buying nominee was (or nominees were), whether that/those nominee(s) should be given the money to pay for them directly from the Government, or via one of us, or another legal entity of ours, etc. We would be giving all the SUVs to charity (mostly for PR reasons, partly to avoid bugs), so we wanted the tax deduction for that to appear in the right place. It'd be a waste to have the SUVs given to any of us personally, because we wouldn't be paying tax and therefore had no use for a tax deduction. We'd nominate a yet-to-be-created profit-making corporation as recipient for the SUVs. We'd be setting up several legal entities: MAF itself, of course. A corporation for "The Family". A corporation to buy and own Vanessa's plane, employ the pilots, pay its other costs, rent it out (maybe for $1), claim the tax deductions for it, etc. It needed to be set up in a way that it could make a profit so it could get the benefit of the planes' depreciation and other costs, but it didn't want to make too much profit, because then it'd be paying too much tax. Trusts for the under-25s. The under-25s but over-18s would need parental consent to consume more than 5% of their capital in one year, the under 18s were even more restrained. Ron Fisher's money needed to be handled in a way that stopped his parents claiming it if Ron Fisher's death was ever discovered, or if I disappeared to change identities again, but which also let me - posing as Ron Fisher - control it. Mark Anderson was also getting $125 million (everyone insisted). So that needed to be parked somewhere in case he turned up (unlikely, but who knew what might happen decades from now), but also had to be accessible to the rest of us, in the much more likely case that he never turned up. Plus some of the above entities would be interrelated in various ways. And then there'd be God knows how many different legal entities required when we started doing things with our money, e.g., we'd probably have several different investment companies, any risky venture would be isolated to limit our financial exposure to its risks, etc. Then there was the publicity to think about. We'd been thinking about that the whole time, but now we knew the specifics so there were decisions to be made there. Vanessa had a great deal more to think about than the rest of us because she wanted to get MAF up and running - and sticking into the side of the Government - as fast as possible. She would never have a better chance to publicize MAF than when we announced our settling with the Government, which was going to be happening tomorrow. Vanessa and Prof stayed in the house to work on Vanessa's speeches. They called The Boys, asking them to get together with their girlfriends and come over later in the evening for some interesting family news. The Boys had known they were members of "The Family", but they hadn't been following the negotiation. The amount just signed for was considerably more than the last figure they'd heard, so they were in for a nice surprise. I copied the signed contracts several times, while Julia called Ava to check whether she was with her parents (she was), and to tell her, "We're on our way to see you and them with some good news. We'll tell you when we get there." With a copy of the agreement, Dad, Mom, Carol, Julia and I headed to see Katie and Carson. They were both very sick and we wanted them to know about Ava's now being financially secure - to the tune of $125 million worth of security - as quickly as possible. Dad came mostly because he was too hyped up to stay at home. Donna didn't really appreciate the significance of so much money, so she wasn't so worked up about it - I'm sure I didn't fully appreciate the significance either. Donna was happy to be left to play with Patch. Donna was a good enough rider now, and Mom and Dad trusted Patch enough that Donna was allowed to ride without close supervision, as were some of her girlfriends when their parents had provided us with written authorization. The short car trip to the hospital was a very noisy, excited one, and we were still giggly when we got to the Wests' room, so the three of them immediately knew something was up. I stood at the back as usual, Mom at the front. Ava was standing with Julia, Carol and me now, to greet us and to make room for my dad and mom near her parents. [I'd visited Katie and Carson several times with other people, or sometimes with just Ava. I always keep a low profile, and they knew me only as Ron Fisher, and always would; "always" being an extremely short period for them. They were somewhat confused by my becoming so friendly with everyone so quickly - including with Ava, who hugged me openly - but they had more important things to worry about than me. They'd privately asked Ava what the story was with me. She'd stuck to the Ron Fisher story, understanding that her parents would be very worried if they knew I was Mark. Andrew, Robert and Ava were still the only 'outsiders' (meaning people who didn't live in the mansion full time) who knew Ron was Mark.] Mom said, "We signed our settlement agreement with the Government a few minutes ago, and there are a few little clauses we want to show you." "Okay?" Carson replied, not understanding. Mom showed them the clause that said, to summarize it considerably, "The Family to receive $1,000,000,000 (ONE BILLION DOLLARS)." Carson and Katie started congratulating Mom and Dad, but Mom cut them off with, "There are two more clauses to show you yet. This is the second one." Mom turned to the second settlement agreement, for the Government losing my body (my being missing wasn't really the Government's fault, but after careful consideration I'd decided not to tell them that). Mom showed Katie and Carol, "The Family to receive $500,000,000 (FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS)." "You're getting one point five BILLION?" checked Carson, questioning the sanity of everyone involved in this. "Yes," answered Mom, confirming that everyone was insane. In our case, insane and rich. Mom added, "One more clause to show you: the definition of 'The Family'. The total is being split EVENLY among these people." While Mom was putting the contract in front of Katie and Carson again, Ava was asking us kids, "Did I hear Dad say 'BILLION'?" I agreed, "Yeah, it's insane. Look at your parents." I wanted Ava to see the looks on their faces when it hit them Ava's name was in the penultimate position, so it took a couple of seconds for her parents to get to it. Carson got there first because Katie was receiving quite a lot of painkillers and her faculties were slowed. He asked in surprise, "Ava?" "Yes," confirmed Mom. "Ava shares equally. We get $125 million each, including Ava, so you don't need to worry about her being able to support herself." Katie and Carson were having trouble grasping the concept. I thought that was probably because it was insane. Ava asked, "I don't understand. What's going on?" Julia beat me to providing the explanation, "Because of what they did to Mark, the Government has agreed to give us $125 million each, including you. For a recent high-school graduate, you're doing very well for yourself." Ava was too busy struggling with the insanity of the first half to catch Julia's ending joke. She checked, "They're going to give me money?" I confirmed, "An INSANE amount of money Ava. You're VERY rich now." "But I haven't done anything." Julia answered, "You were important to Mark and the Government took him out of your life, so they're paying you $125 million for that." Ava looked at me, to say, "But that's CRAZY! You're..." then Ava stopped, realizing she shouldn't say any more. I helped cover her stop by saying, "It certainly is crazy. When you have your Athletic Club races on Saturday mornings, you won't have to run so hard anymore. Just pay everyone else to go slower than you." She thought I was the crazy one. Apparently I didn't understand the point of running. That was probably true. If you want to get around a circle REALLY fast, why not just stay where you are? (Comments of that nature have no place in conversations about soccer. That's obviously totally different.) The next couple of minutes were spent convincing the Wests that it truly was real (or "really was true"; take your pick, English is a very flexible language). It wasn't easy to convince them, even after showing them that the contracts were fully signed. We didn't bother trying to convince them that it wasn't insane. "It's a done deal," said Mom. "They can't back out of it now. The checks will come through in about a week so we're quickly setting up trust funds for the kids and forming some corporations. Think about how you'd like Ava's money handled. It can be banked into a savings account like an ordinary check, put into a trust account, or any other legal entity that you want as the contracts specify 'or nominee'. Tell us what you want in a day or two and we'll add it to the pile of things our lawyers are doing for us. Here's our lawyers' card and you can call them to discuss anything you want, or you might want to deal with your own lawyer." They still had trouble believing it. Mom reassured, "It'll be all over the news by dinnertime tomorrow. We'll warn the hospital administrators about it on our way out to make sure they protect you from being disturbed. We'll leave a copy of the contracts with you so you can double-check that you're not dreaming, haha." We could tell when they started believing it because the Wests started protesting that it was too much, that we were too generous, that Ava shouldn't get the same as Mark's family, etc. We had a very easy counter to that, something Vanessa had made central to her strategy. Mom explained, "It's not us that's being generous. We decided at the beginning that Steven and I were perfectly happy with $10 million each. We could've asked for lesser amounts for everyone else - maybe $1 million for Ava - but we didn't want to try putting values on everyone's importance to Mark so we simply told the Government that we wanted the twelve of us to get $10 million each. Including Ava and Ron on that list didn't cost us anything; it just meant the Government would have to write a couple more checks. We never asked them to, but every time they gave us a new offer they increased the amount for us personally. It got all the way up to $125 million each before we signed. The Government is very generous with other people's money, but it's worked out rather well for Ava and us." "But that's crazy," pointed out Katie. Ava suddenly thought to ask, "Can we give it to the doctors to make Mom and Dad better?" Mom answered, "I'm afraid not, Ava. We asked the doctors months ago whether more money would help, but there are some things that money cannot buy." "Even a LOT of money, like $125 million?" "Sadly not. You can ask them yourself, but they're already doing everything they can." "It's all right, Ava," said Katie. "We accept it now." It was a good time for us to leave. ^ Our lawyer arrived about lunchtime the next day. I introduced myself as, "Ron Fisher, the world's highest paid gardener." "This has worked out remarkably well for you." "It certainly has! The Andersons are easily the best gardening clients I've had so far this year." He just shook his head in bemusement. [Later, when I was elsewhere, he queried the parents about my getting an equal share because there was no legal, moral or any other requirement for that. The only explanation he got was, "We have our reasons."] He checked that the first pair of agreements had been signed correctly, then got the other sets he'd brought with him signed. I'd always thought there were two copies of every contract, one copy for 'us', one copy for 'them', whoever 'us' and 'them' were. Apparently the Government likes paperwork, because there were five sets of our contracts. When they were all signed, he got all but one of the sets couriered back to his office, keeping one set with him in case the courier plane crashed (or whatever). The rest of the afternoon was spent with him and the parents in Prof and Vanessa's study, going through a lot of the paperwork that he'd brought with him or was being emailed to us during the day. Ideas about our corporate and trust structures, questions for us from the lawyers and accountants back in DC, formation documents to sign, etc. At 3:30pm he called the Government's lead lawyer, informing him, "I'm with the Andersons now. They've signed both settlement agreements. My office will get the documents tomorrow morning if you want to collect them on Saturday." Apparently that could wait until Monday. They spent half an hour discussing various practicalities. One that came up was the Government's lawyer saying, "I've been requested to suggest that it'd be easier for all concerned if the existing owners of the forfeited vehicles retain possession of them, in return for your clients keeping the market value payment that my client has already agreed to pay." "Hold while I check with my clients." The way the agreement read, the Government would give us the dollar amount of the vehicles' total market value and we'd use that money to buy the vehicles, which they'd deliver to the Corvallis airport. The Government's lawyer was suggesting we just keep the money and they keep the vehicles. That would be very convenient for all concerned, and Vanessa could easily arrange other ways of flying to DC until her new jet was delivered, but Vanessa immediately turned the alteration down. She wanted the PR value of getting the vehicles in front of the media's camera lenses. Vanessa had already contacted the airport and had penciled in a long-term rental of an empty hangar large enough to store the jet she was about to buy. She called the airport to confirm she'd need it permanently from now on. The hangar was large enough to store the SUVs and one jet, plus the other jet temporarily on a tie-down nearby. Once they were all delivered, Vanessa intended to get all seven vehicles lined up impressively, then hold a TV interview in front of them to describe how they'd been forfeited by the Government because they'd been used in the commission of a crime. She'd announce the charities the SUVs were being donated to, and that the jets were to be sold. It'd make for Good TV. Vanessa had emailed the major networks to inform them of an important press conference at 4pm today outside our front gate. So after our lawyer finished talking with his opposite number, the parents - but not the lawyer because including him wasn't the image Vanessa wanted - went out to face the press, carrying the many information packs I'd collated while they were working with the lawyer. From the bottom of the pile to the top, the information packs contained: A copy of the final agreements. A copy of our original settlement proposal. A short summary of the agreements, including a side-by-side comparison of the final and original values of each item. Vanessa's prepared press statement. The latter item: Gave a brief background to the case. Described what we'd asked for and why, including a fairly lengthy description of how MAF was intending to operate, what it intended to achieve, and a financial justification for our original request that its starting capital be $5 billion. Listed each of the moral mistakes the Government or President had made during the settlement process, and how when we'd asked them to correct or make good those mistakes, they'd came back with offers that'd included even more money, even though we'd NEVER asked for that. Concluded with a statement about what we intended to do with the extra money that the Government had thrown at us so needlessly. There were some appendices, for example, explaining how Ava had come into our life (to summarize): "Ava had been the first student at Mark's school smart enough to appreciate his uniqueness, had become his very good friend and second favorite girlfriend after Julia. When both of Ava's parents had been diagnosed with incurable cancers, the Andersons and Williams had made a commitment to her and her parents to support Ava financially and emotionally, so she'd naturally been included in the list of people to get $10 million." Ron Fisher got a brief appendix too, which excused my presence on the list by referring to my growing relationship with Carol, and talked about protecting The Family by protecting me from Government bugging and bribes. Dad and Prof handed out the information packs while Vanessa said, "We'll give you ten minutes to read them, then the interview will start." The first reporters to get a pack started yelling questions two seconds after glancing at the top sheet, causing the reporters who hadn't even got the pack yet to start yelling variations on the same questions, or whatever else crossed their minds. Reporters have small minds, so all sorts of crap can and does easily cross them. Vanessa and Mom ignored the clamor; Dad and Prof continued to hand out the information packs. Prof got jostled too much, so he dropped his pile on the ground and retreated to stand by the women, who were standing immediately in front of our gate's pedestrian entrance. The next nine minutes were spent with the reporters asking questions that went unanswered. Sometimes they'd open the information pack at a random page, read something, and receive sudden inspiration to yell a semi-related question, but mostly they just reworded each other's questions. When ten minutes had noisily passed, Vanessa held up her hands to indicate she wanted the reporters to quiet down. That obviously indicated the start of the interview, so they all started yelling more questions even louder. Vanessa dropped her hands and retreated a step, Dad and Prof moving in to block. The reporters yelled questions at the four parents and shoved microphones in their faces, which were ignored. They had a deadline to get on that evening's dinnertime news, while Vanessa & Co. appeared ready to wait all night if necessary, so a reasonable degree of order eventually descended. Vanessa stepped forward again, holding up her hands for silence, causing the more stupid of the reporters (i.e., all of them), to compete for who could yell the most questions the loudest. Vanessa stepped back again. It only took a couple of minutes for comparative calm to descend again. Vanessa stepped forward, holding up her hands for more silence, getting it this time. "I will take one question..." A reporter interrupted loudly, "What are you going to do with eighteen billion dollars?" The other reporters didn't want to be left out - from proving themselves to be rude idiots - so they yelled questions too, often the same ones as others had already yelled. Vanessa stepped back behind the men again. It took a while, but eventually Vanessa trained them to be quiet and listen to her. "I will take one question at a time from each of you in turn. Form an orderly line from left to right in front of me, and we'll start when you're ready." The concept of "orderly line" was obvious an incomprehensible one, so they needed to be trained about that too. Once that was eventually arranged, Vanessa pointed to the reporter on the far left and invited him to ask the first question. Reporters up and down the line started yelling questions, so apparently "one question at a time" was another incomprehensible concept. Vanessa was used to dealing with packs of unruly teenagers and reporters are similar in some ways (I apologize to any teenagers reading this), so she wasn't ruffled. I think she was enjoying herself. Time was on her side, and an orderly interview was eventually carried out, needing no more than half a dozen additional pauses. [I found out later that she didn't do it for her enjoyment. She'll be giving countless press interviews as part of her job with MAF so she wanted to get the press trained on how she liked to conduct them. It'd take a LOT of repetitions, and probably a few expulsions, but she'd eventually make the press aware of how they have to behave when in front of her.] The quality of questions ranged considerably: Some were good (e.g., "What will the Mark Anderson Foundation be doing with its surplus $10 billion?" That was answered with, "Deciding that will be one of the first jobs for the board, but the membership of that hasn't been decided yet."). Some questions were silly or repeats of what the parents had been asked several times before (e.g., "Why are there two families living in the same house?" Sometimes with, "Are you a cult?" added. The answer given was actually truthful, to do with recognizing Mark's uniqueness, wanting him to live somewhere more secure, where four parents could help him grow into all that he could be, " ... until the Government kidnapped and killed him.") Even with the very orderly process Vanessa insisted on, there was so much interesting material to cover that the press conference took quite a long time, but it was successful in terms of what we wanted to get across. That we'd originally asked for very little for ourselves, just $10 million - enough to live moderately comfortable but not profligate lives - and only a third of what we wanted our community to get (our $120 million compared with the community's 360). But after our initial request, the Government had unnecessarily kept offering more and more of the taxpayers' money to us, even though we just wanted them to behave morally. "They didn't seem to understand what 'morally' meant. Whenever we criticized their doing something immoral, they tried to buy us off with more money. We think that's a terrible way for our Government to behave." It was all very predictable, except for one amusing little point. Vanessa had me doing gardening work in the front part of the property while the conference was going on. When one of the reporters had read enough of the information pack to realize how much Ron Fisher was going to get (which took even the first of them a while), she asked Vanessa "Isn't that Ron Fisher working in your garden now?" Vanessa looked through our gate's bars to check, then answered, "Yes." By now the reporters knew better than to ask their own follow-up questions, but the reporter did anyway, "Why's he working when he's worth $125 million?" Vanessa simply pointed to the next reporter down the orderly line, who asked, "Why is Ron Fisher working when he's worth $125 million?" "The three best mannered of you will be invited back tomorrow afternoon to interview the youngsters, including Ron. You can ask him then." The remainder of the current interview was slightly better behaved, when they remembered Vanessa's carrot. This interview was on Friday afternoon, so it got a lot of airtime over the weekend. When the youngsters were interviewed on Saturday, my answer was, "I tol' them I'd work in their garden. Just because I'm rich don' mean I kin go 'gainst what I said; 'specially wit' they being so nice to me. 'Sides, Carol wouldn't like me if I did that." Another thing that came up again during the Youngsters' Interview, was my life history. I briefly explained my LA history, my decision to leave all of it behind me, and my journey north looking for a nice town to settle in, adding, "So far, Corvallis is workin' out pretty good fer me." Mostly I kept as low a profile as possible, several times saying, "I dunno; I'm just a gardener," especially in response to politically oriented questions. ^ To jump ahead just a little, probably the easiest little example of Vanessa in action during a press conference occurred a few days later, when all the SUVs and the two jets had been delivered to our rented hangar at Corvallis's airport. Vanessa got them lined up photogenically and held a conference in front of them. It did indeed make for Good TV. One thing Vanessa handled well was that she was up-front about the proceeds of the sale of the jets would be used to buy a more suitable jet for a business the Andersons and Williams were starting. A reporter queried, "The jets are worth millions compared to the SUVs being worth next to nothing, so aren't you keeping nearly everything for yourself?" The implication being that we were being greedy. Vanessa gave a very good mini-lecture about there being no one more suitable to benefit from a crime than its victims, giving several reasons: "The use of assets forfeited by criminals will provide moral and emotional strength to victims who too often feel that being a victim had somehow been their fault", "The victims will be empowered and the perpetrators rendered less capable of committing further crimes", "The act of forfeiture draws attention to the criminals and the crime", "The inconvenience of replacing the lost assets might make the criminal less likely to re-offend." Etc. Vanessa made the questioner look thoughtless, shallow and uncaring, and herself very smart, deep and concerned about victims everywhere. Then Vanessa talked about several of the charitable uses our new plane would be put to. Not just MAF, as several other charities would be offered opportunities to raffle off trips in it, and the charity could keep every dollar of the proceeds. That made us seem even better. Among the questions, because some networks love sensationalism, a male reporter asked Vanessa, "Are you suggesting that rapists should forfeit their 'equipment' to their victims?" "If he or she used a car or airplane in the commission of the crime, then yes, I think that would be an excellent change to our judicial system." "I meant their anatomical equipment?" "I'm primarily interested in empowering the victims of crimes, which your suggestion doesn't do. It's true that castration would provide a disincentive to other potential rapists, and that would protect society against that perpetrator repeating his offense, but those benefits are not specific to the victim. I also question whether the magnitude of the punishment fits the crime. Rapists also use their arms, legs, eyes and brains in their crimes, so how many of those should be removed? How should that judgment be made? And I don't want to imagine what you think the victim should do with forfeited body parts. Criminal punishments should also be applied equally across the genders, so your suggestion also has a problem with female rapists. -- "Amputating the perpetrator doesn't morally or emotionally strengthen the victim in any way. Quite the opposite, as the main motivation for your suggestion - revenge - has negative moral and emotional consequences. Therefore, in answer to your prurient question, 'No, I'm not suggesting rapists should forfeit their personal equipment to their victims. -- "Coincidentally, my husband is an amputee. Happily not in the area of male anatomy that seems to fascinate you so much." "I'm not..." Smiling with amusement, Vanessa interrupted him with, "If you insist. Next question please?" The reporter's attempted denial had probably been perfectly innocuous, but Vanessa had turned it into a sexual dig at him, which was obviously appropriate since he'd introduced prurience into the interview. Vanessa had decades of experience as a lecturer being asked tricky questions by students in ethics classes, so she had no trouble fielding facile questions from reporters, even though they knew next to nothing about ethics. She got her specific messages across very clearly, as well as gaining considerable credibility for herself as an honest, intelligent, caring person. Humorous too, as her leg-pulling answer to the rapist question was aired more often than any other segment. ^ The Government was quite upset. It'd planned to make an announcement about how its hard work had settled this shameful blot on the nation's record, and how the federal prosecutions of the people responsible for the terrible tragedy would continue until justice had been served. There would have been a lot of "blah, blah", but instead of that good-sounding crap, the Government had to respond to Vanessa's allegations. They strongly disagreed that they'd thrown away $13.5 billion of the taxpayers' dollars unnecessarily, but Vanessa made short work of that. She got our lawyer to release copies of the letters and emails he'd sent the Government's lead lawyer during the 'negotiation'. The letters were structured to have a paragraph complaining about a moral mistake of the Government's, then the next sentence or paragraph saying that the Government needed to make good for their mistake and submit another offer. (Vanessa had instructed our lawyer to use that structure, explaining what her tactic was so he'd be careful to get it right). Read with the benefit of hindsight and in awareness of the point that Vanessa was making, it was clear that the letters were asking for moral rather than financial improvements. The Government and their lawyers had predictably missed that point, which proved Vanessa's point about them using money to buy off morality. Vanessa's drove the nail into the coffin of the Government's defense, "We would have accepted five billion. We started the settlement process by submitting our proposed agreement to the Government. All they had to do was sign it and it would've been a done deal. Instead, every time we criticized their morals, they offered us billions more. They threw away $13.5 billion because they didn't understand that they were being asked to behave morally. It concerns me that the Government's solution to moral problems is to buy them off with billions of dollars, rather than doing something as simple and owning up and apologizing." This tactic was used not just to make the Government look bad - that's never hard to do - but to make it look amoral. Much of what Vanessa was intending to have MAF do would be publicizing the Government's immorality, so she was starting on that basis. She was hoping to build up so much moral pressure on the Government to stop treating people unfairly that it would have to be a great deal more careful about doing so. Another reason for her tactic had simply been to shift the blame for the insane agreement onto the Government. Although she hadn't known what the final figure would be, she'd known it would be billions, which could make many people extremely jealous, angry and possibly nasty to us. Now we could say, "We agree it's ridiculous. We just wanted $10 million each and we were very happy to give three times that total amount to our local community, but the Government kept throwing more money at us because they thought they could buy their way out of acting morally. You should ask them why they prefer to throw the taxpayers' money away rather than behave morally." ^ The Mark Anderson Foundation came in for a great deal of press attention. It'd just gained $15 billion, its stated goal was something that Vanessa had proved herself very effective at - embarrassing the Government - and doing so again would hopefully generate many wonderful scandals that the media could feed off, doing wonderful things for their ratings. (The media companies compete with each other, but they're also very aware that they compete with other forms of entertainment. They LOVE juicy news stories even if they all share in them equally.) There wasn't much Vanessa could add to her initial statements about MAF though. It was going to take months to set up and get running, somewhat longer than the reporters' attention spans. Vanessa was already getting MAF's startup under way. Our DC lawyers were helping her find a very capable executive secretary in DC, and Vanessa had found some of her own secretaries to help in Corvallis. They were needed immediately, because when you publicly get billions of dollars, tens of thousands of people want to get into your pockets, which creates a great deal of extra work. Unfortunately for Vanessa's secretaries, they weren't paid as well as her gardener. ------- Chapter 315: My Fake Parents Arrive and Ava's Parents Leave Monday, August 14 to Thursday, August 31, 2006 (Continued) Ava's parents are VERY conservative people. When we got a chance to visit them four days after our previous visit, they asked for a trust fund to be set up for Ava which paid out half its interest to her, retaining the other half for capital growth to roughly cancel out inflation. That'd give her an immediate cash budget of just over $3 million per year ($250,000 per month). #2: Ava was more than happy with the structure though. She'd be allowed to withdraw up to $10 million (inflation adjusted) when she turned 20, and every 5-year anniversary until she turned 50. No lump sum withdrawals after that, to guarantee Ava would always have a good income to live on, even if some gold-digger got his claws into her. On her death, the trust fund was to pass to her biological children equally, or to charity if there were no such children. The Wests asked if my four parents could be the trustees, and maybe Julia and Carol when they got old enough, which everyone happily agreed to. Katie and Carson didn't escape some teasing about how they'd worried about our being gold-diggers when we'd first met them, but they happily admitted that they'd been well and truly proved wrong about that. Katie pointing out, "There's no requirement in the contract for Ava to get an equal share." "Not in the contract, no," agreed Mom. "There's no doubt what Mark would've wanted though." "Yeah," I confirmed, "I heard Ava sent Mark some REALLY hot photos!" Ava was sitting on my lap hugging me at the time (puzzling her parents). She said, "Would you like some too?" "You're not going to want another $125 million for the next set are you? Because that'd knock me back to my last $7." "I wouldn't charge you that much. You'll need to keep some of your money for when Julia, Carol and I take you shopping for new clothes." "You mean I have to suffer the indignity of having girls play dress-up with me AND I have to pay for the clothes too? That hardly seems fair." #12: Carson asked, "Ron, what do you think of being given $125 million?" "I think it's insane but I'm not going to give it back." "You talk better with us than you did on TV?" "That was on purpose. I used to speak trashy in LA, so I put a little of it back on for TV. Vanessa wants me to sound that way publicly, and what Vanessa wants, Vanessa gets." I hadn't thought of a reason why Vanessa might want that, but I had confidence that one of my minds would make up something if Carson asked (that's often how I operate. It's great having so many minds). -- Worried that Carson might be beginning to suspect that I was Mark in disguise, even if subconsciously, I headed that off with, "I've tried to leave LA behind, but too many of my family and friends have been banging on Vanessa's gates the last couple of days. My mom and dad came up after the 'No Tax' thing was on the news, and now they're camped outside the gates again. They're unhappy I'm not giving them any of the money. They're threatening to badmouth me on TV, so you'll probably see them on the box soon." Talking about my family had quelled Carson's suspicions. He did ask, "You're not going to give your family ANY money?" "They'd spend it on booze and drugs. I thought of buying them a house away from LA, but they'd sell it and spend the money on booze and drugs. I've got a younger brother and sister that I might pay college for, but I'm waiting to see how they do at school first. My family is the reason I got so many convictions and why I left LA, so I'd rather give my money to people who'd use it better than piss it away. The only thing my parents gave me was a bad life, so now I'm making my own." It was true that Ron Fisher's family and some of his friends were outside our walls the last few days, amid the media throng, but I was exaggerating the "booze and drugs" story. Given a decent restart somewhere nice away from LA, I guessed that the Fishers might do okay, but that wasn't anything to do with me. They hadn't really done anything to deserve getting a dollar from me, other than let their son grow up to be a street gangster so he could chase me into an alley and pull a knife on me to 'volunteer' to be my disguise. Paying them for letting their son turn into a criminal didn't seem appropriate. Carson let it drop, instead talking to Mom and Julia about MAF. Katie and Carson were amazed by that, and talked about MAF until they were too tired, which didn't take long. On the topic of the Fishers, they spent three days trying to ask nicely for "Just a few million." They refused media interviews while they waited to see which way the wind blew, and how much money it blew. They had some young Black guys and a girl with them, none of whom I'd personally seen before. From what they yelled, they were my best friends and the love of my life, respectively. The ten guys Ron had usually hung with were dead so these new best friends must've been fairly peripheral to his life, and the girl was presumably the one that the real Ron Fisher had said would've gotten a new guy within a week of my taking Ron and the others out of town. When it was clear that I was ignoring my family, my best friends, and the love of my life, they played the closest to hardball they could arrange by going on TV to say very unpleasant things about me. They'd obviously put some thought into it, and they did a reasonably good job of besmirching my name and bewailing the ingratitude of youth (not that they used those precise words). I could've ignored the issue as it wasn't really any skin off my rather large nose, but it was easy to turn their accusations to our advantage. The media were clamoring (they do a lot of that) for me to rebut my parents' accusations. Apparently they thought it'd make Good TV. We agreed to it, but not as a confrontation with my family. They'd had their turn in front of the cameras, so I'd have my turn. The media stopped clamoring long enough to agree to our arrangement. We had a small conference inside our gate far enough for the Fisher family and hangers-on not to hear what was being said. I had Carol on my arm, Julia beside her, Mom and Vanessa on my other side. I told the cameras, "I'll tell you 'bout my life and you kin decide for yourself what you think of me not givin' my parents any money. I was born in LA and bought up with gangs all round..." I described the process of my growing up while my life was going down the toilet. I listed my convictions, when I started taking drugs, where in my room I used to hide my drugs, that my parents knew about them, and a few other bad parenting tidbits I'd gotten from the real Ron Fisher. Not many, just enough to set the scene. Then I briefly talked about my gang turning on each other, which I blamed on drugs, my leaving town for a few weeks to live in the wilderness to think about things. "I decided if I didn't do nothin', I'd die on the streets or in prison, so I went back to LA, got a lawyer, and told him I wanted to leave LA forever. He helped me deal with the cops so they wouldn't be lookin' for me, and deal with my family. I gave them my car, everythin' in my room, drugs and all. I got the lawyer to send them my keys and tell them all I wanted was my birth certificate, which they never sent, so I still ain't got it. I hitched out of LA with the clothes on my back and a little money in my wallet." I digressed momentarily to give the media the names of my LA lawyer and the cops I dealt with, "so's you kin check on what I said." I described my fictitious hunting for a nice town to settle in, how I'd liked the look of Corvallis, and liked that it had lots of smart people in it, had checked out a couple more towns but had then returned here. I told them I'd slept in a cheap sleeping bag and tiny tent in a corner of the RV park, naming it and the owners, adding, "They're nice people. They had me to dinner a couple of times because they felt sorry for me living so poorly." Then I told them about my searching for a job including the two weeks no pay, two weeks half-pay scheme of mine, but only working part time because I wanted to walk around town to get to know it and the people, get library books to read while it was still daylight because my tent didn't have a light, look into evening education classes for when I had some money to pay for them. I also mentioned that I frequently checked in with the Corvallis police station like I'd volunteered to do for the LA cops. I talked about my getting a job, naming the garage and the boss, adding that I worked with a guy called BB, "Don't call him Bruce. Bruce don' liked bein' called Bruce. If ya listning Bruce, I told 'em to call you BB, okay? -- "The job was good and the boss asked me to stay, but I'd been walking down the road near the bridge when Carol and Julia had trouble with Carol's bike comin' home from school. I tried to help her fix it, but it needed tools, so I helped her get it home then fixed it in her father's workshop. When Vanessa heard I only worked in the mornings she asked me to work in her garden in the afternoons. I needed money then because I had nearly nothin', so I accepted. -- "It was good work and they're good bosses so I worked out the rest of the two weeks at the garage like I said I would, then I left to work for Vanessa full time. I got to like them and they got to like me, so they offered me a spare room and home-cooked meals, which I was VERY happy to get after living in my tent fer so long. -- "I got to know Carol specially well, and now I'm trying to be good 'nuf to be her boyfriend. It's not easy, because Vanessa keeps me working very hard. She's a very tough boss and not very fair, because since I started she's only given me one pay raise." I paused to let them get the joke. It took them a while, because it wasn't a very good joke and I hadn't delivered it well. Deliberately so, because I didn't want to come over on TV as someone who was sharp-witted. I finished with, "Reporters have seen me workin' every day, even after the stupid Gov'mint gave me so much money. I'm tryin' to be a good person since I left LA. Vanessa asked me to work in her garden, so I am, like I said I would. If I thought givin' my parents money was the right thing to do, I'd do it. I don' know what I'm goin' to do with my money yet. Vanessa says I should take my time to think about it, and she's very smart so's I'm goin' to do that. So far the only thing I wanna buy is a wheelbarra that rolls easier, but if I do decide to give some of my money to people, I want it to be to good people who will do good things with it; not bad people who'll waste it on bad things, like I think my parents would. Vanessa is honest, so if I want to give some away, I think I'll give it to her to find the best people to give it to. She'd be better at that than I would. That's all I want to say. Sorry I didn't talk as smart as you're used to." I faded back in embarrassment, Carol and Julia escorting me back through the gate, leaving the scene to Vanessa and Mom. They added a few extra points about me turning over a new leaf even before I'd gotten to Corvallis, trying my honest best, keeping my word, etc. Mom had a nice line to deliver, "Some of you might have seen Oprah a few months ago when Carol mentioned that she was a lesbian. She's turned over a new leaf too. She's discovered that boys aren't so bad after all, because of Ron. He's very kind and gentle toward her. Toward all of us actually, but it's had the most effect on Carol. -- "Think about the criminal record he had in LA when he was living with his parents and under their guidance. His crimes were getting progressively worse, and I understand that several of the guys in Ron's old gang are dead now. That's the way his life was going. Since he left them, he's turning his life around purely by his own efforts. I understand Ron well enough to know that if he felt appreciation for his parents, he wouldn't hesitate to show it, but he honestly doesn't feel he owes them anything. If there is anything owed, they owe him an apology for being such bad parents for so many years." Vanessa added, "Ron spent several months living hand-to-mouth, sleeping in a cheap sleeping bag under the stars in winter. He didn't want to contact his parents then, and he doesn't want to contact them now. Ron runs himself down for not being smart, but he was smart enough to cut himself off from the destructive path his life was on, and he's smart enough to work hard on improving himself. Everyone in our two families quickly recognized that he was a man of good qualities who just needed the opportunity and support to improve himself. He wasn't getting that from his own family but he's earned it from us." Having used up the only weapon they had, the Fishers slinked away. (I didn't actually see it happen, but I like to think they slinked.) More importantly, the Anderson-Williams clan came out of it looking good, other than with some diehard bigots and other 'concerned citizens' who thought my parents were crazy to have left their beautiful daughter in the company of a recently ex-gang member of the Black variety. One good aspect of the way we'd spun it was that uneducated half of America (half? three-quarters?) who might've thought my families were too intellectual (despite Dad's blue collar approach), thought a lot more of us after hearing how we'd taken in Ron and were proud of his dating one of their daughters. The prettiest one too, come to that. [I never got 'my' birth certificate from the Fishers. I had to apply for a new one, and then a passport. I was a little nervous signing official forms, but nothing bad happened. After a few more weeks, I had my current signature on several forms of ID: an Oregon driver's license, a new credit card (with a REALLY good limit!), my passport, plus many assorted bank, trust and corporation documents.] The next time we visited the Wests was a couple of days later (Wednesday, August 16). We had all the documents for Ava's new trust, which we'd pushed to have prepared as quickly as possible because the hospital had warned us that Katie didn't have much longer. The smallest document was the most important one to show the Wests: the just-printed bank statement for Ava's trust account showing its balance to be $125 million. The money had come through earlier in the day. In a not unrelated development, our local bank manager was extraordinarily effusive recently, promising to provide a wonderful level of service, blah, blah. The trust's documents had already been reviewed and approved by the Wests' own lawyer - Mom had made sure he was involved in the process to maximize the Wests' peace of mind - so when Katie and Carson saw the account balance they knew that the money truly was Ava's, and she was financially secure for the rest of her life. There was a lot of crying. ^ Three nights later Ava got the call to come to the hospital because her mother was about to die. Ava was staying with us and we all went to the hospital with her. We visited with Katie briefly, then left the three Wests alone while we waited outside their room. Katie was conscious, and while thin and sickly, didn't seem much worse than she'd been last couple of times we'd seen her - but apparently hospitals can tell these things, because she didn't last another hour. It'd been expected for over a year, but that didn't seem to make it any less hard on everyone, especially Ava obviously. The Wests had everything organized, from the invite list for the funeral and side-by-side graves through to all their personal and financial matters being neatly arranged, so it was only a matter of following their instructions. We took care of those while Ava cried. Medically speaking, Carson shouldn't have attended Katie's funeral, but he knew what he wanted. We provided an ambulance and nurse to transport him there. After his wife's funeral, Carson was taken to his home and put to bed there. He had 24-hour care from nurses and Ava, until he died three days later, six days after Katie. He hadn't wanted to stay any longer. Other than to attend her father's funeral, Ava didn't leave her family's home for several days, hanging on to her memories of her parents, mourning them, looking through their mementos, etc. Sometimes she wished to be alone, but usually one or more of Julia, Carol or me were with her. Staying with Ava during this time was quite different than I'd expected. A year ago I'd dreaded being around while her parents were dying or recently dead, as I'd been sure I would feel terrible and be worse than useless, but it was actually very different than I'd expected. They'd died so suddenly that the period up to their deaths hadn't been nearly as terrible as I'd imagined. That seems like a silly statement because we had over a year's warning of their deaths, but it did truly feel like it'd happened suddenly. Afterward it was just a matter of talking when Ava wanted to talk, and holding her when she wanted to be held. There was nothing else to be done. To my surprise, I even enjoyed being able to provide her with comfort (I'm sure you understand that I didn't enjoy her need for the comfort). Family friends of the Wests and some of Ava's own friends visited daily. Most of them were good, especially the older women. They'd been in the situation before and knew what to do and say. They always brought food too, which was good as no one felt like cooking. I easily learned to tell from my proximity sense whether Ava wanted people or some individuals to be with her or not, so I appointed myself a kind of gatekeeper to control people's time with her. Some of them didn't appreciate it, but I didn't care whether they did or not, especially not the ones that appeared insincere to my sense (it's harder for me to 'read' strangers because people experience emotions differently, so I'm cautious until I get attuned to how they experience each emotion). Mom and Vanessa visited too, especially after a week or so when they considered it time for Ava to start moving forward. Ava wasn't in any hurry to do that. Even before she'd known about getting an insane amount of money, she'd deliberately made no plans for the next academic year, hadn't applied to Forest Ranger College (or however that career goes), or anything else. To put it too cutely, Ava had put her life on hold while her parents were still holding on to theirs. So she had nothing to rush off to do. When Ava was ready, she'd come to live with us. She already had quite a few of her clothes and assorted female paraphernalia installed in Mark's Wing, but she was reluctant to leave her family home. Ava didn't want to sever the connection by leaving the house, let alone selling it, but one of the wise 'aunts' (a close family friend) made a well-timed suggestion that Ava rent it to a family with a young girl so the house would have a happy, little girl in it again. That thought cheered Ava up considerably, and got her moving to make things start to happen. She even got Dad and me to make a rope swing off a branch of a suitable tree on her property, and she bought a slide and a couple of other playground toys for the backyard near the swing. We got a storage room quickly built for Ava in the far end of Mark's Wing's underground garage, where a sixth car would've parked. She and her parents had done a lot of tidying up before they'd been hospitalized for the last times, but it still took Ava a long while to box up everything she wanted to keep. There was a lot of it, and some boxes took her hours if they were for particularly poignant items. She inventoried and labeled the boxes very well as she intended to refer to them often. Eventually Ava had everything she wanted ready, from memorabilia of her parents' childhoods through to their final videotaped messages to her and the clothes they'd worn while recording them. She checked and re-checked the house to make sure she had absolutely everything she wanted, then told us she was ready. We got the movers to transfer the boxes and furniture Ava wanted to keep, either to her storage room or into Mark's Wing, as she wanted. Ava followed, moving permanently into Mark's Wing. The very useful older women friends did the rest of the tidying up for Ava, removing all the remaining personal items, such as her parents' clothes. Ava hadn't wanted to throw anything away herself; she was happier to give the place a last look, then walk away. Ava didn't need money, so didn't care whether anything was sold, kept by her parents' friends, donated to charity, or whatever. She let them sort that out for themselves. What had originally been publicly called "Carol's Bedroom", and was now publicly called "Julia's Bedroom" (but had never been either in reality), was now "Ava's Room". She set up a lot of her memorabilia of her parents in the room so she could visit it whenever she wanted. It was so crowded with memorabilia that it was effectively unlivable, which no one cared the slightest about. I remembered from back when buying a mansion had just been an idea, that Julia had surprised me by commenting that Ava would come to live with us. It had happened, but in a very different way than we'd imagined. Much, much sadder, but also better in respect that our feelings for Ava were deeper and more loving than we'd imagined fifteen months ago. Ava, Julia, Carol and I fit together well, so we'll be happy together. We'll be getting off to a good start too, because - I was told - all of us SERIOUSLY needed to do a GREAT DEAL of clothes shopping! We were worth $625 million (Julia was counting me as both Ron and Mark), and our clothes were very inappropriate. Fixing that would help cheer Ava up, it was vacation time, and none of us had anything better to do. Not that Julia's dragging us out shopping would have changed at all even if the Wests had never gotten sick, or if it hadn't been vacation time, or we had had anything we thought better to do. On the other hand, Ava did look interested in shopping, so my reluctance was doomed. Speaking of things feminine, Mom and Vanessa's way to get Ava moving included the moms getting serious about the girls learning how to keep house properly, and not just our house either. "Now that there are four of you, there's no need for Vanessa and me to do all the cooking and other household jobs. Vanessa's VERY busy these days, so the four of you can start doing domestic chores: cooking, vacuuming, laundry, grocery shopping, etc." #3: #21: #14: #12: I had a nice way of cheering Ava up too. I had an idea based on her liking the outdoors. I scouted some locations and did a dummy run of my idea just with myself one morning, to make sure it would work with Ava. It checked out, and the next morning had a good weather forecast, so an hour before sunrise I woke Ava up, holding her clothes out to her. "Whad time isit?" "Time to get up. You and I are going for a trip." "Where to?" asked Julia, always eager to know what's going on. "Ava can tell you about it when the two of us get back for breakfast." "It's cold," complained Ava, who was immediately covered in a VERY warm heat blob. She got the hint and got out of bed, so I reduced the blob's output. Julia informed me that I was better than under-floor heating, which was nice to know. (I had heard women describe men as flooring tiles: "Lay them properly the first time and they can be walked over for years." Apparently the tiles that I am come with under-floor heating.) I flew Ava up to a fantastically beautiful high point on Mount Washington in the Cascade Mountains. We sat with her held in my arms while we watched the sunrise. She's very fond of the outdoors, so it went over particularly well. "Wow, that's SO beautiful!" "It sure is. There are lots of peaks and other beautiful spots we can come to. With Julia and Carol too, if you wish. Maybe have our breakfasts up here, just as long as we can get home again while the Cascades are still keeping Corvallis in the shade." Early-morning breakfast trips to see sunrises from fantastically beautiful parts of the Cascades were a hit with the WHOLE clan (Donna excepted, unfortunately). It was my present to Ava, so she got first dibs each morning, and got to choose who she went with. There was no choice about having to take me, but I could drop her off then get out of her sight for a while if she wished. Ava sometimes liked to be alone, but usually chose to invite Julia and Carol. If the previous night the girls had decided that sleep was more important, the parents were often eager to take advantage of the opportunity. We had some marvelous mornings and some incredible, but necessarily fairly quick, breakfasts using a totally plastic picnic set. ------- Chapter 316: With the Pressure Off, We Start to Do Things Thursday, August 10 to Thursday, August 31, 2006 (Continued) Because I was following the thread about Ava's parents, I missed mentioning a few things. The first, second and third things that missed mentions, and missed being acted on, were all birthday related. Donna had been due a visit from an alien gynecologist/sex-therapist on her birthday; Ron's twentieth birthday had been on August 18 (I obviously had to celebrate Ron's birthdays from now on, not Mark's); and Julia's eighteenth birthday had been three days later, on August 21. Events had conspired to disrupt all of those. Donna's alien visit had been held up until the settlement. My and Julia's birthday celebrations had both been knocked out of consideration by Ava's parents' deaths. The hospital had warned us about Katie just before my birthday, but I hadn't been planning anything for my birthday anyway as there were too many other distractions. Katie had died the day before Julia's birthday, and there was never any possibility of a celebration after that. But life was about to be resumed. It was summer, we were INSANELY rich, and we were owed some parties. Something had to be done. I mentioned the need to Julia, who I knew was already thinking the same thing. She immediately seized on it, "That's a GREAT idea! Ron needs a coming out party, so we can..." "Ahh. Ron would rather not 'come out'. He's perfectly happy being heterosexual. Trust me on this; I know him VERY well." "NOT that sort of 'coming out'. I mean coming out TO SOCIETY." I knew what Julia meant, but it's sometimes fun to tease her. "Are any of society going to be homosexual? Because if they are, I'd rather 'stay in' than 'come out'." "I mean a party to celebrate your joining our family." "Oh that's different! I like joining your family, especially when I join it from above. Are we going to throw a party so people can see me joining you? Can I join Carol and Ava too please? White people have REALLY good parties!" Teasing Julia is good fun right up to the time when she realizes she's being teased. Fortunately she was in a very good mood, because she just yelled, "Get him, girls!" I got to practice my "joining the family", so party planning got put off for a while. When it did resume, it'd taken shape in Julia's head as a major event. It was going to take a lot of organizing, so I hid behind Ava. So close behind that some of me was even hiding inside her. Julia was going to need to talk with the parents, so the rest of us might as well get back to something that's even more fun than my coming out, like my repeatedly sliding back in. Vanessa told Julia, "We're too busy to have a big event like that for Ron. If you want a party, it'll have to be just a kids-only event." Poor Julia (speaking non-fiscally) got to work planning a BIG kids-only event. ^ Donna's alien visit was much easier to arrange as it merely required telling everyone over dinner, "I think it's safe for my friend to come to check on Donna's sexual maturity. How about we meet in the games room ten minutes before breakfast tomorrow morning?" Donna immediately demonstrated that she had been maturing, by worriedly asking the other girls to help her choose what to wear. They agreed, understanding that it was an important decision. God knows how they'd decide what to wear for an alien gynecologist, because I'm pretty sure that issue wouldn't have been discussed in any of their secret female classes. [Men really should pay more attention to these things. A few days ago I saw in the paper that a man ran into the reception area of a hospital, yelling, "My wife's having a baby in our car outside." What he really should have said was, "My wife - wearing a chartreuse skirt and white blouse - is having a baby in our car outside," because that would've saved the doctor from running outside, opening the car door, lifting the woman's skirt and putting his hand on her panties, and then realizing that he had the wrong woman. The correct one was in the next car.] During dinner, another worry occurred to Donna, "Umm, Ron, will your friend recognize you? Now that, you know?" "Yes it will, Donna. I'm more worried about its recognizing you. You've changed very much over the last year." "Really!" exclaimed a happily reassured Donna, who was quite proud of the 'growths' that she'd achieved during the last year. That night I spent a few hours very carefully searching the games room with a sight blob. "Sight blob" singular, unfortunately. Using thirty blobs would've been so much faster - damned superimposition! I wasn't yet at the stage where I could use two sight blobs simultaneously. I could shut my eyes and pipe the sight blobs' information to each of Visual Processing Centers A and B, but I feared missing a bug. Given what was going to happen, I especially looked for a small camera lens. I'd almost be tempted to leave a microphone behind if I found one, because what they'd hear would confuse the hell out them. The only weird thing in the room was the piece of electronics we were still hiring from the LA debugging company, which would've been an amusing place to hide a bug. The device logged a wide range of radio frequency transmissions, so it would've detected the transmissions of a bug planted inside it, nonetheless I made a mental note to move it out of the room before our little ceremony. The next morning, a well-dressed, hair-brushed, nervous Donna stood in the center of the room, while the rest of our little clan were spread out to either side of her. I told Donna, "It's on the way, so it shouldn't take long. Ahh, here it is." I had a bit of fun pretending to have a conversation with it about my change of appearance. Including my telling it, "It's a long story. It'd be easier if you read it straight from me." A messenger blob merged into my brain for a few seconds longer than normal, then zipped back to the Boss Blob. It thought about it for a few seconds, then another messenger zipped back briefly. I said, "Yes, it is a very primitive form of government." Which didn't really work as a joke because not enough of my families are into science fiction. Moving right along, I asked the Boss Blob, "Donna would like to know whether she's mature enough for sex yet?" Boss Blob moved in front of Donna, paused for a second, and then two pyramids of diminishing-sized light blobs rapidly grew out from its 'chest', in an exaggerated parody of growing breasts. I chuckled, adding, "Yes, Donna has grown since last time." Donna was too nervous to chuckle, but she was pleased that the alien had noticed her tits. Another messenger blob zipped to me. I translated, "Don't be nervous, Donna. It's about to check you." "Okay," said Donna nervously. Boss Blob ejected a very small blob that flew toward Donna, stopping in front of her right breast. It paused for half a second, then zipped across to be in front of her left breast, paused, and then increased in size by a factor three. I said, "You're MUCH bigger than last time Donna." "{Giggle}." The nice, warm, sight blob merged into Donna's breast. It spent a couple of seconds apparently checking that breast out, then moved across to the other one, then down to Donna's groin. Personally, I'd be extremely uncomfortable having an alien fly into my vagina, but Donna stood her ground well. It hadn't hurt last time, and everyone here now wasn't concerned. The inspecting blob reported to Big Boss, who sent a messenger blob to me. I translated, "It says you're very healthy Donna. For a human, pretty too. Time to check your thoughts and emotions now." An inspection blob left Boss Blob and moved toward Donna's feet. I called out, "We keep our brains at the other end, remember?" Another messenger blob came to me. I announced, "It wants to check Donna's feet because it can't believe we don't keep falling over. It told its friends that Donna likes running, and they think that's very strange so it wants to look at Donna's feet so it can tell its friends how they work. Isn't that amazing Donna - you're much more than a world-famous runner; you're a GALAXY-famous one." She wasn't very amused, but maybe she'd appreciate it more later, when she wasn't so nervous. After checking Donna's feet quickly (as the joke had fallen somewhat flatfooted), the inspection blob moved to Donna's head. It rummaged around in there for several seconds, then reported to Boss Blob. Boss Blob thought about it for a couple of seconds, then sent me a messenger blob. Everyone looked at me expectantly; very much so in Donna's case. I said, "I've got some good news and some bad news, Donna." "Oh no," from Donna, who must've been hoping for only good news. "It says you're too young to have a boyfriend yet, and CERTAINLY too young to be having sex with a boyfriend." "Oh," moaned a very dejected looking Donna. Another messenger blob came to me. I said, "It's asking why are you sad? It knows you don't really want a boyfriend. Isn't Patch better than a silly boy?" "Yeah, but I wanted to, you know, with you." Another messenger blob came to me. "It says it's sorry, but English sometimes confuses it. It says 'boyfriend' is a silly word because it means different things at different times. It wasn't counting me as someone who could be your boyfriend. I'm too special to count that way." "What does that mean?" Another messenger blob came to me. "It says that's mostly up to you. You're too young to have boyfriends because that can get very emotional and cause trouble. You've seen your girlfriends get very worked up about a boy who turned out to be too silly, haven't you?" That was a safe bet. "Yeah. But what's that got to do with me?" "I'm getting to that. It says you're not emotionally ready for a boyfriend, but you might be ready to try sex, if it was done in a way that was safe and not emotionally binding." "Huh?" "I know this sounds confusing, but it's important. Let me put it this way, if you and I had sex, would you fall in love with me, get all mushy and lovey-dovey, like some of the Ducklings and Cuties did with Mark?" "Of course not! I just want to have sex with you." Donna was convincingly definite about that. Even puzzled that I hadn't known it already. "It knows that, but it knows that girls can change their minds after having sex for the first time. Girls often think they've fallen in love, like some of the Ducklings and Cuties did." Another messenger blob came to me. I added, "It wants to know if you think you can treat it just like a new way of goofing off?" [[As an amusing aside, girls truly do often fall in love after having sex with a guy for the first time, whereas men often fall out of love and even out of interest after they score with a woman the first time. The genders often operate in different directions.]] "I just want to try it because everyone says it's fantastic with you and I love you. Not gushy love. You know what I mean." "Sure. And if it turns out to be great, are you going to want more?" "I just want to try it. Umm. I guess that if it's good, then I might want more, but I don't have to if you don't want me to?" "It thinks that you could have sex with me, PROVIDED you can treat it like another way of goofing off, not want to do it too often, not get mushy, and get your parents and my girlfriends to agree." Things had been sounding very good, right up to the mention of "parents". Donna's happy expression collapsed at that. It was time to let Mom take over, so I did a little departure scene for the blobs. I hadn't done it well. Not badly, in that all the points we'd wanted to achieve had been made, but clumsier than they should've been. I think because I hadn't spent enough time with Donna over the last year. I'd spent more than three months away from my family, and even when I'd returned, it'd been as Ron and always worried that my behavior was being observed. Donna had changed a lot over that time, and I hadn't seen it happening. Either that, or my clumsiness might've been because I wasn't all that eager about having sex with Donna (I was conflicted about that), or it might've just been that I'd been clumsy. Mom took over well though. She surprised Donna by saying, "Steven and I will let you, Donna, but there are some rules." To Donna's delighted surprise, the rules turned out to be much better than parental rules usually are: Only if it's okay with Ron, Carol, Julia and Ava first; only in Ron's bedroom; not with any other boy; keep it secret; and no more often than once a month. Donna wasn't the least worried about getting permission from us, so Mom was effectively giving Donna the green light (the other-colored lights having left through the ceiling). The look of delight on Donna's face was so quick it conveyed her lack of attention to the restrictions. Mom emphasized, "Carol, Julia and Ava get first dibs on Ron, Donna. They're his girlfriends and they go first. Even if you've got everyone's permission for you to have a turn one night, but Ava seems sad that night, Ron should cancel your fun so he can be with Ava. It'll be just like he's playing basketball with you: if one of his girlfriends needs him, he's going to stop goofing around with you to look after her. All right?" "I know. THANK YOU, Mom! I'll be good, I promise..." "Not so fast. When Ron's friend comes back next time, I'm going to ask it to tell me if you've ever broken any of the rules. If you do ANYTHING sexy with another boy, I'll find out about it. Even if you've just THOUGHT about it." It's hard to imagine that there could be anything worse in the world than a strict mother with access to a mind reading alien. Mom gave Donna a second to appreciate that she REALLY would have to behave this time, then Mom added, "Do you still want to do it, or would you rather keep your thoughts private from me for another year?" Even a person as impulsive as Donna knew that wasn't a question to be taken lightly. She thought about it for a couple of seconds, then smartly asked, "How long would I have to obey the rules? Just for a year, until my next birthday?" "Don't you wish!" answered Mom. "Until you're of legal age, four birthdays away. UNLESS you impress us so much with your maturity that we relax the rules earlier, but it'll take you a long time to convince us of that. We're going to be watching you VERY closely and having some serious talks with you after your first few times, AND I'll be asking Ron's friend the next time it comes. You're very lucky that Carol has been so mature and responsible that she's made this possible for you, but you're a very different person and we won't hesitate to cancel this privilege if you even look like you're thinking about misbehaving." There was never any doubt which way Donna would go, but Mom made her sweat over it first. Mothers are very good at that. Once Donna had made her choice and the necessary number of promises, we went up for breakfast. Only once a month was terribly infrequent. That's only twelve times a year, and years are a LONG time, especially if having sex is as much fun as Donna had heard it was. After discussing it with the other girls, Donna decided to bust her hymen (this Donna still had it) and wait a couple of days for it to heal, so she could enjoy the first session as much as possible. So three evenings later, an amusingly nervous Donna and I went to bed in the spare bed in the lower level of Mark's Wing. In some respects it was an ironic experience. My heart wasn't really in it, which diminished my enjoyment a lot; but Donna's putting her heart into it was what I most wanted her not to do. I wanted Donna to treat sex like the goofing around that we used to do, so just for fun, to enjoy spending time together, give each other a bit of attention, and especially in ways that don't intrude on the rest of our lives. [I wrote that "we used to" goof around because I'd done virtually none of it with Donna since I'd turned up as Ron. I couldn't risk playing sports outside with her when the baddies might be watching how I moved, and my deliberately being clumsy would've annoyed Donna. Now she was busting a gut (or a hymen) to try an indoor sport.] Our treating sex as a new goofing off activity was what I wanted Donna to think, but I couldn't think that way myself. I was too worried that Donna might turn into an immature nuisance the way she often had in 3B-land, and I was too aware of the parents looking over my shoulders, metaphorically speaking. Not only was I aware of my responsibility to Donna, but I was fully aware that the parents were aware of my responsibility too. It's funny how psychology works: if I'd seduced Donna in secret from the parents, that would've been exciting and nerve wracking, but taking her to bed with the full knowledge of the parents took nearly all the fun out of it. It's amazing how good parents are at ruining fun; they don't even have to be in the room at the time! Although my taking my responsibility seriously diminished my enjoyment, I hid that from Donna. She had a great time. Because my mood doesn't suit doing so, I won't write any details about our evening. Long story short: I still did my usual routine of going down on the girl first and taking the time to learn my way around her buttons, and then spent a long time pushing them. Donna had come to bed with a whole lot of questions and ideas for things she wanted to try, but they got blown out of the water for the first couple of hours. Only after we'd calmed down did she remember to start asking her questions, by which time she already knew quite a few of the answers. I actually enjoyed the cuddling and talking afterward more than the act itself. I enjoyed seeing her so happy, I enjoyed answering her questions in ways that I hoped would lead to more happiness in her future, especially if I could teach her not to get clingy about me and not to chase other guys for sex. Ideally Donna will just think sex is a great way to occasionally goof off with me, and she'll otherwise forget all about it. That hope of mine was off to a worrying start because Donna thought sex was FANTASTIC! She even said it was worth the long talk she'd have to have with Mom the next day - I'd have to have one of those too - which made me try even harder to dissuade her from 'goofing off' with anyone other than me. Feeling responsibility is such a damned nuisance it even forced me to say lots of things I knew Mom would approve of. ^ [Happily, Donna didn't get all mushy over me. She thought sex was GREAT!, but the idea of her being my girlfriend was silly. Besides, she was too busy with Patch to have a boyfriend. Each subsequent month, usually on the exact anniversary of the first time although sometimes events delayed it a little, Donna was eager for more. She had a list of new things she wanted to try, plus favorites to repeat. She treated it as great fun, and never got clingy about it. She didn't like the "once a month" restriction, but everything else was perfect. She maintained such a good attitude that I relaxed and started enjoying myself more and more. It even got to the stage that I was looking forward to our sessions. It was impossible not to, seeing how much enjoyment Donna was getting from them, and seeing that there were no negative consequences in the rest of her life. Donna did not turn into a too-frequent pain, or any sort of pain at all. She'd matured in the intervening year, which I guess was only to be expected considering how traumatic some of it had been, plus living with Vanessa, Prof and Julia had effects too. Bottom line: it worked out perfectly. We both had fun sex once a month, and Donna didn't seem to generalize how good it was with me to every other boy. Boys weren't on Donna's radar at all. She had two very clear priorities: First - because she'd matured - clothes were more important than life or death. I know that, because Donna VERY frequently said, "I wouldn't be seen DEAD in that, Mom." Usually in response to Mom holding up something Donna had worn a year ago. Donna used to indiscriminately wear any pair of shorts and a T-shirt, but no longer. How quickly they grow up! Second, Patch. We were all very happy that Donna's affections continued to be given to a gelding.] ^ Which takes me to the second thing Donna wanted to spend some of her money on (after clothes): another horse. "Company for Patch," Donna said. None of us had noticed that Patch was sad and lonely, but Donna assured us that he was. Our usual family excuse of, "We can't afford it," had lost quite a lot of its credibility recently. Dad had a valid objection though, "We don't have enough land to keep two horses, Donna." "Can we buy some from one of the neighbors?" Saying "No" wouldn't have been particularly accurate. Dad said, "You've got enough money to buy some land if you want to, and we'll let you use it for something as sensible as that." (Donna's money was in a trust that required Mom and Dad's consent for Donna to remove more than a very small amount.) "Is it important enough for you to spend your own money on it?" It was for a HORSE! Donna gave Dad an "Are you crazy!" look, but managed to restrict herself to just saying, "Of course." (She hadn't yet asked how much the land would cost, but it was for a HORSE!). We have a neighbor to our west whose house and property are very similar to our own. Paying a couple of million to give a horse grass to eat was somewhat excessive, even for "a HORSE!" To our south was a large farmer's field (about four times larger than our property), and to our east another but much smaller field (about two-thirds the size of our property). For what Donna wanted, the small field would be ideal. It was small for a farmer's field because it was on the inside corner of the road curving south, so it wasn't as efficient as the large rectangular fields. Both fields were planted with broccoli and were owned by the same farmer. We'd dealt with him when we first moved in, to get permission to cut down some of the bigger trees just outside our southern boundary. He'd been amenable then and he was even more so now, because everybody in town thought we were wonderful people (apart from the few haters - there's always some - that were ignorable). He didn't have a residence on Peoria Road, but he'd still scored $25,000 because he lived within five miles of the bridges. He agreed to sell to Donna - Mom and Dad had taken Donna with them, as it'd be one of those educational experience things for her - but he said that even with all the help we could give it, it'd still take several months for grass to establish itself well enough to carry a couple of horses. Donna wanted the horse NOW, if not before, while Mom and Dad worried about Donna's losing interest in horses entirely once she got into boys. That surely couldn't be too far away, considering how much she'd enjoyed sex with me. The farmer knew a thing or two about horses because his daughter had been like Donna about ten years ago. He suggested two horses could be kept on our existing property if we supplemented their feed for a few months until the new field was capable of carrying them. And he suggested the new field be rented rather than bought, so when Donna outgrew horses she could simply return the land to the farmer. Mom and Dad agreed with his first suggestion - Donna didn't give them much choice about that - but decided to buy the field rather than rent it. Maybe one day it might be a good idea to add it to our existing property, or it could be sold off on the open market. Most likely though, the way things were unfolding, was that we might have to build on it. An office if business took off, and/or a place for a permanent security force to live, if it looked like we'd need them permanently. We still had hired guards patrolling our property and we weren't in any hurry to get rid of them because they were being kept busy rejecting media and random strangers, some of whom were worryingly random and strange. Mom and Dad took care of the process of valuing the land and the crops that'd be plowed under - performing a social service, given my opinion of broccoli. Donna knew her trust fund was increasing by half a million dollars per month, so she didn't care how much the land cost; it was chickenfeed to her (and horsefeed to Patch). Donna concentrated her energies on finding a friend for Patch. Donna found several candidates that met her various criteria (well-trained, healthy, in the right age group, and other horsy issues). She had each of them spend a trial period with Patch to see how they got along. Donna watched very intently, to see 'who' Patch liked the most. It turned out to be a mare. Somewhat smaller than Patch and very bossy, but Patch seemed to like her. Donna didn't like the mare's existing name, so she changed it to Penelope (I'd been too chicken to suggest "Julia"). Mom and Dad put Donna in charge of paying all the bills for her new property, getting it ready to support horses, and all the costs of feeding and caring for Patch and Penelope. Oops, make that "Penelope and Patch" (Penelope always insists on going first). Donna was writing out some pretty big checks for a 14-year old. ------- I mentioned above that almost everybody in town loved us. It wasn't just in town, but Benton County and the comparatively few Linn County residents that lived within a five-mile half-circle of the bridges into Corvallis. Each Benton County residence got a credit of $25,000; more or less, depending on which local government's jurisdiction they resided in. In Linn County, they got exactly that amount, as they were being paid directly by the Federal Government. There'd be a very large number of Benton County refund checks going out shortly. We'd done it so the refund wasn't proportional to their property value, so everyone would get much the same amount, proportionally benefiting the poor and medium-income families the most. If the Mom and Dad of a couple of years ago had gotten an unexpected $25,000 check, they'd have burst from happiness, so it was just as well the emergency services were getting new ambulances. The Mayor of Corvallis and assorted other councilors from the various local governments had booked an en masse meeting with the Anderson parents - as it'd formally been Mom and Dad's lawsuit without any Williams legal involvement - to thank them. I begged the parents not to allow any stupid statues for me (as Mark), or other immodest displays, then happily avoided the meeting. Each of the local governments was required to pay out at least 75% of their money, so they could retain 25% for their own plans. The councilors were feeling very appreciative, and wanted to show it. Corvallis had received an additional $350,000; $250,000 from the President, $50,000 each from the DHS and CIA heads, but that was meant to used for some sort of "memorial to apologize for governmental and presidential treachery toward its citizens." [[The DHS and CIA bosses had their payments VERY quietly reimbursed by the Government as soon as the media attention diminished. The Government had apparently felt it was unreasonable to hold its employees financially accountable for their decisions. That was clearly a dangerous precedent, and was in no way comparable to the laws the Government had passed holding company directors personally accountable for their decisions.]] Fortunately, the parents were very insistent that they didn't want the "appreciations" to be about them, or even about Mark much. He could be mentioned, but they wanted the memorial to be a reminder of the evil that Government's could do if not supervised closely. They also didn't want it to be expensive; costing far less than $350,000. Vanessa suggested that they hold a nationwide contest asking people to submit designs for the memorial. Vanessa could write up a design brief, and also provide the prize: a free round trip anywhere in the world in her new jet for as many people as it'd hold, plus $10,000 cash. (Vanessa hadn't finalized her choice of jet yet, but she knew it was going to be a damned good one.) The Government would be paying for the gas too, which ironically meant they'd be paying most of the cost of a prize for someone creating the best anti-government memorial. Vanessa's idea would generate several waves of publicity, which suited her nicely. The mayor and councilors left happy. Particularly happy were the residents of SE Peoria Road, as each residential property owner got $125,000. If we'd chosen, we wouldn't have given them that much, but that'd been the way the Government's increasing offers had worked out and it hadn't been politic for us to interfere with it, especially not to reduce the payments. They, especially our immediate neighbor, had been significantly annoyed by the congestion on our road and the throng camping out on the verge, so some of the $125,000 was deserved. There were a FEW local residents who weren't happy with us - not many, but some: Those who'd sold their property a few days before the effective date on the settlement contract were annoyed that we hadn't announced in advance what we were doing. Those who lived 5.05 miles from the bridges were annoyed that we hadn't made it "within six miles". Those who lived on the non-SE section of Peoria Road. Those who lived inside the qualifying area, but who didn't own a residence. The first two groups were being illogical. If we'd announced the deal earlier, then people who'd sold just before that would've been pissed off; and if we'd made it 6 miles, then people who lived 6.05 miles from the bridges would be complaining. The lack of logic didn't diminish their complaints, but there weren't many of them. It was the last group that was the most numerous and annoying. They thought it was unfair that they'd been excluded. Some of them had what seemed to be emotionally effective cases, such as women who'd been Corvallis residents all their lives, but had recently kicked out their physically abusive husbands or informal partners (some of whom had left the area or were even in jail), but the husbands' and partners' names were still on the property titles, in some case, solely owning the property. If we'd made it "inhabitants", the women would've gotten the money. It would also have embroiled us in hundreds of disputes over who was, or was not, an inhabitant. Who owned property was far easier. Once that person or persons got the money, they could fight among themselves if they wanted to. There was no need for us to do anything about the whiners as they were drowned out by tens of thousands of very happy residential property owners. The disgruntled people had no legal leverage over us, including no right to sue, as the money was a gift and we had every right to specify whatever qualifying criteria we wanted for it. That was the advice of our lawyers, after we started receiving letters from other lawyers seeking money for their clients, none of whom got any not matter how sad their sob story, because that would've started a nightmare. ------- I mentioned Vanessa's jet above, so I'll explain more about that now. The SUVs were all given away during Vanessa's televised speech. Representatives of each of the charities were on scene, pulling a key out of hat to fairly choose which vehicle they got, and to make Good TV. They drove the cars away, leaving the two jets. Both jets were essentially the same: medium-sized and fitted out to carry passengers. Neither with a bed (boo!), desk, or any hint of luxury. What Vanessa wanted wouldn't have fitted into a medium jet anyway, so neither had any future with her. Vanessa immediately put the ex-CIA jet on the market and found herself two pilots for the ex-DHS plane. Actually, one of her secretaries did all the work until the final pilot selection because Vanessa was very busy these days and was delegating everything she could. I invited myself to sit in on Vanessa's final interviews with the potential pilots because my proximity sense would've picked up any reasonably strong emotions, possibly revealing something out of place. I got Vanessa to ask each of the candidates whether they'd ever worked for the CIA, DHS or similar federal agency, or whether they had any ulterior motives for applying for the job with us, and a few other similar questions, because I should have been able to spot if an interviewee was up to no good. None of the potential recruits rang any alarm bells. Reading someone I'd never met before isn't ideal, but it's good enough that I was reasonably reassured, and I told Vanessa so. She picked her pilots and they were kept busy flying Vanessa and her staff back and forth to DC, and providing trips to a variety of other people (up to twelve local women wanting a day visit to San Francisco, for example). The Government was paying nearly all the running costs, so there was no reason why not to have all these trips. We had to pay the pilots whether they flew or not, so they was kept busy. [So busy that Vanessa got a third one a while later when the plane turned out to be so useful that the pilots' need for sleep and time off was inconveniently restrictive.] Vanessa did a lot of research into the new jet she wanted to buy. I helped too, because I thought having a private jet was REALLY cool, especially if it had a bed. Plus Julia is often telling me to do more googling. After some initial research there were two jets that stood out as being perfect for Vanessa and me: the Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) and Airbus 319 Corporate Jet (A319CJ). They were about the right price, in the $50 to $60 million range not counting the fitout cost; had enough cabin area for everything Vanessa wanted plus about two dozen seats; and had ranges of about 6,600 miles, so to DC and back was easy. They could go anywhere in the world with one refueling stop. BBJs come in three sizes, with model names of BBJ, BBJ2 and BBJ3. They were Boeing 737-700, 800 and 900ER respectively, fitted out with a business interior and rebranded as "Boeing Business Jet". They're essentially the same plane, with BBJ2 and 3 being stretched versions, creating 807, 1004 and 1120 square feet of interior cabin space. Vanessa wanted the BBJ3 - nothing but the best for us - but it currently had a three-year waiting list and that was getting longer by the day. The 737-900ER was literally a brand new model, the first one having rolled out of the factory only a few days ago. It was a considerably better plane for airlines than the -800 because it could carry 21% more passengers. It was only eight feet longer (which is far less than 21%), but it had two more exit doors and that made a legally important difference. Commercial passenger-carrying planes had many regulations imposed on them, one being a "distance from nearest exit door" restriction, which the two extra doors helped with considerably. 21% more passengers with an almost unchanged operating cost meant the -900ER's order book would be full for years. It was far easier for us to get a BBJ2, especially because many of the airlines that had 737-800s on order wanted to change to -900s. Some of those orders were "firm", meaning about to start production and not allowed to be changed, even though the change was a relatively minor variant. But Boeing was happy to reallocate one of those planes to us so its airline customer could then order a new -900ER. Airbus wasn't nearly so flexible. To be fair, Boeing wouldn't have been flexible if it hadn't have been for the new model. If we'd wanted a BBJ3, Boeing would've inflexibly told us to take a number and wait three or four years. Because of the brand new desirability of the -900s, it'd only take us a couple of months for Boeing to manufacture our plane and deliver it with an empty cabin to our choice of business-jet-fitting-out company. Six weeks and several million dollars later, they'd deliver it to us. I wrote, "nothing but the best for us" in reference to the BBJ3, but it actually wasn't the best possible, but anything better was insane. It's possible to get any plane fitted out for business use, even a 747-400 if you want to spend over $300 million, as several people have. Vanessa's BBJ2 would cost in the mid-70 millions all told. All the Andersons (5, including Mark) and the Williamses (3) chipped in equally to fund the company that bought the plane, so it cost us less than $6 million each after the medium-sized Gulfstream and Citation jets were sold. The BBJ's cabin is 11' 7" (3.54 m) wide and 7' 3" (2.2 m) tall, which means it can be fitted out REALLY nicely. When I saw pictures of how other BBJ2s have been fitted out, I nearly got so excited I needed to change my shorts. They were SERIOUSLY sexy. In comparison, the jet we'd chartered to go to Rodeo Drive was not even good enough to be called pathetic. The BBJ's cabin being so wide meant that a hallway down one side of the plane left over eight feet of width for rooms, so they could be made large enough to be almost like a house's rooms. Vanessa wanted: Two equal bedrooms, with beds nearly queen size, with small closets and drawers for some changes of clothes to be kept in. Two unequal washrooms, one very nice, one smaller and more utilitarian. Both with showers. A good-sized office (for a plane), with two smallish desks and continual online access while in American airspace. A conference/dining area (i.e., chairs around a table) for ten people. A pretty good galley ("kitchen" to everyone else), capable of cooking fresh meals for the passengers, and enough storage space to keep a reasonable range of food on board. A living room; a cross between your living room at home and an ordinary aircraft cabin, but with MUCH better seats, entertainment systems, side tables, a small bar and VERY plush furnishings. The bedrooms, the good washroom and the office to have doors Vanessa could lock, for when we lent the plane to other people. The size of the living room would be whatever space was left over once the other rooms were planned. That turned out to be large enough for twenty seats. If we'd packed them in like "cattle class" on commercial airlines, we could've gotten more than fifty seats in, but we had no need for that many. The conference/dining room seats were "fully berthable" (could be used to hold people for takeoffs and landings), so our jet had a capacity of thirty passengers plus the two pilots (wouldn't want to leave them behind), which Vanessa considered ample. Performance wise, it had a maximum speed of Mach 0.82 but cruised at Mach 0.785 (a ground speed of 528 mph), a range of 6,600 miles, and ceiling of 41,000 feet. Corvallis Airport was JUST long enough for the takeoff distance with enough fuel onboard to fly Vanessa to DC, provided strong headwinds weren't expected. To take off with additional weight it'd have to use the much longer Eugene Airport. That was only a 30-mile drive south of our home, so not much of an inconvenience for the infrequent times the plane would be used heavily loaded. I was amused that Vanessa's $70 million jet had the same cruising speed as me, but the reason was the same: getting close to Mach one causes problems. Most small jets, and all medium and large ones, cruise at about the same speed. They have heaps of power (they need it for taking off), but the physics of flying much more than 500 mph are prohibitive, the fuel costs rising steeply because the air resistance increases faster than linearly as the air builds up in front of the plane. I did have an idea about the jet: to get Boeing to fit it with a small door in its very rear, so I could enter or exit while the plane was in flight. It seemed like a cool idea, but on second thought it was very impractical. It'd probably add months to Boeing's delivery time, it'd require the plane to descend from its cruising altitude for the door to be used, it might make the Government suspicious about why we had a door fitted there, and I couldn't actually think of a reason why I'd want to use it. It was still a cool idea, just an impractical one as well. Ava had an idea too. She overheard us talking about planes and saw some of the very sexy pictures of very sexy planes (probably because I was showing them to everyone I could. In case you can't tell, I think such planes are very sexy), and Ava got inspired enough to decide that she wanted to learn to fly. We all thought that was an excellent idea, especially because it was the first significant forward-moving decision she'd made since her parents had died. I asked if I could do it with her, which she readily agreed to once she got over the surprise of someone who could fly wanting to learn how to fly. I'd asked partly to keep her company, and partly because learning the theory of flying might help me with my Magic Sled trips, especially to avoid or recover from instability (I did have scares from time to time, if I got unbalanced or disoriented, or even just worried that I had). I'd asked to join Ava also because I found flight interesting. Once you can do something it's natural to want to understand it better. In a semi-related topic, after having given away so many SUVs we soon discovered that we had to buy one of our own because we were sometimes transporting so many people around. Being Corvallis's favorite citizens, the car dealership gave us a damned good price. ------- I mentioned a while ago that Prof had an idea for how I could study without the DHS or CIA coming down on my ass. There were really only two possibilities for how to achieve that: hide our accessing the information, or make accessing it non-suspicious. Prof didn't believe we could hide months of internet use from the DHS or CIA, as those guys loved snooping on people's internet usage. If they wanted to know what we were receiving, they'd have no trouble finding out, no matter how tricky we tried to be. So Prof's idea had been to build my study computer system again, and get Logan, OSU's helpful techie guy, to write a program to simulate my studying by browsing to randomly chosen OSU lectures, then scroll through them as I used to: mostly down, sometimes up, pausing for random times around the duration it'd usually taken me to read a screen. The program would be set to actively browse during the same hours as I used to study, and we'd see whether the DHS or CIA did anything about it. If the Government thought Mark was back at home because of the sudden resumption of that much OSU lecture browsing, they'd be wetting themselves with eagerness to get hold of me. They'd charge in to arrest me, to find themselves very empty handed, especially because I'd be staying with The Boys to avoid any risk of a DNA test. Prof would explain the software trick, even demonstrating it to them, and Logan would back Prof up. We'd explain that the whole thing had been a trap to see if the Government was breaking their settlement contract not to spy on us. They'd be a national laughing stock and disgrace, we'd be legally allowed to restart our $242 trillion lawsuit, and we'd keep running Logan's program every night until there'd been no reaction from the Government for a good period, whereupon it'd be safe for me to resume my studies even if only informally (I obviously wouldn't be taking any exams). The plan was even better than Prof thought because they parents didn't know the full capabilities of my sight blobs, so they didn't know that I could study from my bed. Thus if the Government did later swoop on my study room, they'd find it empty. We'd have to check it for bugs from time to time, but we could certainly afford that now. It'd be an easy trap to set up. The only worry was if the Government didn't react because then I wouldn't know whether I could start studying or not. I'd have to do lots of snooping to try to find out if anything was happening behind the scenes. I'd snoop on our ISP provider to see if our usage was being tracked in any special way, and I'd check out the DHS and CIA to see if there were any files on us. If so, then Majestic Countdown would have another leak to make. Getting access to the CIA might be tricky, but I'd look into it if necessary. We'd probably have to wait about a month to make sure I could resume studying again, which would be tedious but not important in the grand scheme of things. I was looking forward to studying again. I was spending the seven hours of night that I was awake doing a serious amount of Visual Center A and B work, but that was coming along so well that it almost wasn't necessary any longer. I wouldn't drive a car with Center B turned off yet, but soon I'd be able to do almost everything else with my eyesight going to Center A and an overwatch sight blob going to Center B. Finishing that major project would leave me getting bored for seven hours per night if I couldn't restart studying. Plus I had enjoyed studying and was eager to get back to it. Truly! Having a perfect memory, a high enough IQ that I understood the material quickly, and learning so much so quickly, made it very enjoyable, especially because it was mathematics, so obviously enjoyable. I'm looking forward to showing Prof, Vanessa and Julia a 32-screen setup too. They'll immediately understand that it meant TWELVE degrees' worth of courses per year. They'll freak! Prof hadn't gotten around to kicking his plan into action, so I reminded him of it one breakfast, and he agreed to get the ball rolling. He'd been thinking about it too because it'd be convenient to do it while our lawsuit was still active (we'd settled with the Federal Government, but we'd refused to settle with the hundred individuals involved). The suit's court hearing started in several weeks, giving us time set up the trap, and if the Government were stupid enough to fall for it fairly quickly, to re-add the DHS and CIA to the suit, conveniently saving us having to file a new one. Prof had said, "We'll get your study computer rebuilt," with "we" meaning "not you". I couldn't risk talking to Logan about it because that was too suspicious. I was the gardener, not Mark. Leaving it to Prof meant that it'll be eight screens initially, but that's fine because we wanted it to be the same as Mark had before. Once the way is clear, I'll get Robert to give Logan instructions to increase it to thirty two screens, so it'll be a nice surprise to the parents. He also suggested that my mom and dad should pay for the new computer gear out of one of Mark's accounts. If the Government knew about that transaction with a computer supply company, it'd make them even more curious and likely to fall for the trap. The only thing I had to do was document my prior pattern of use so Logan could simulate it well. I understood what was required because I've played around with random numbers and simulations often enough in Excel. I wrote that out during breakfast and gave it to Prof immediately. At that breakfast, Mom also announced that she'd like to leave her current job and work with Vanessa in MAF, "If Vanessa still wants me?" Vanessa thought it was an excellent idea. So far in this autobiography, Mom hasn't come across as being very smart, but that's not true. She IS smart, just not compared to Vanessa and Prof, and not when she's letting her emotions control her, which they often do when she's in "Mothering Mode." Whenever I interact with her, Mom is naturally in Mothering Mode. Mom doesn't adopt that mode with Vanessa, and Vanessa has a good opinion of Mom's capabilities. It was very appropriate to have Mom work in her son's foundation, and it was completely reasonable for Mom to be able to work there if she wanted to. Vanessa had only just ordered the plane and its cabin fit-out could've been changed to accommodate Mom, but the women decided the existing configuration worked fine. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if Vanessa had specified it with Mom in mind, especially given its having two desks in the office, although the plane would often be used to ferry other MAF people around and having a decent-sized office in it would be generally useful. Mom's work wasn't exactly surprised that a woman who'd recently gained $125 million would want to resign. Their policy is that sales staff who hand in their notice leave immediately. They weren't worried about Mom passing sales information on to any of their rivals, but Mom was happy to leave quickly and they didn't need her to stay, so Mom was soon the newest member of MAF. She wasn't the newest for long because MAF was employing a LOT of staff. Vanessa had big plans for it and the money to make them happen. Speaking of "handing in notice", we'd decided not to do anything toward Mark's being declared legally dead. We'll leave the issue open just in case Mark might be able to return one day, even decades from now. In the absence of a corpse against which a death certificate has been issued, it is mostly up to my family or some other interested party to petition the court to rule on a death. If no one forced the issue, I could stay legally alive forever, making me "immortal" in an unexpected and not particularly useful way. ^ And speaking of the Government, they very quickly forgot we existed. Except when we initiated it, "Mark Anderson" was never in the national news, and when a Republican was asked about us, he'd normally make a minimal reply; not quite, but almost a "Mark who?" The media presence around our property faded away. We kept the guards going because there were still curious and begging members of the public. I particularly admired the hopefulness of the guy holding up a sign saying he was offering himself for the job as our gardener. As Mark seemed to be falling out of everyone's awareness, I kept him out of my behavior too. Since Prof was going ahead with his "OSU Browsing Trap", I thought it'd be a good idea for me to look very boring. I did some summertime activities with my girls, but that was mostly only on the weekends. During the week I was still a gardener, to the frustration of the guy at our gate. With me being the only full-time worker, progress in the garden had been slow. It had been sure though, so the property was beginning to look pretty good. I was quite proud of myself. I was still active in one way. It would've been suspicious for Majestic Countdown to stop leaking documents the moment we settled with the Government, so we'd decided that I'd continue to provide that public service every few weeks, on an unpredictable, very irregular schedule. From time to irregular time, I'll go to a random city and spend a little while looking through state government offices, federal government local offices, or law firm files. Thanks to the wonderful invention of computerized search engines, locating embarrassing documents doesn't take long. It might take me two or three nights to find something really juicy, but it'll be worth the investment in time because I want Majestic Countdown to develop an extremely good reputation. To make sure he couldn't be accused of party favoritism, I added "Democrat" to my list of search terms. ^ Logan was happy to set up our system again, and he was very happy to write the simulator to try to trap the Government. The settlement agreement had been widely publicized and discussed, so he knew the Government wasn't supposed to be tracking our internet usage. He thought trying to catch them out was a "wicked idea". He told Prof that the program didn't need to do any of the PageUp/PageDown scrolling, as internet logs wouldn't know what was happening on the local machine. After Prof checked that the scrolling would be easy for Logan to do, Prof got him to include it in the program anyway, to make it as Mark-like as possible just in case we had to demonstrate it to someone. OSU's Dean also agreed. It'd all be done at our expense so the only thing he was agreeing to was for us to be given access to the online lectures. Prof could've arranged that without the Dean knowing, but considering that it might involve the authorities, it was best to get his consent in advance. The Dean was more than a little pissed off at the Government for killing the greatest college student America had ever had, and Prof told me that the Dean was more than happy to try to catch them still being assholes (Prof enjoyed telling me that the Dean's language and attitude was like that). It took Logan about a week and a half to get all the hardware and software ready, and he installed the system just before the end of the month. The mounting rack for the eight big screens was still attached to the wall, so it wasn't a difficult job. He also gave copies of his program to the Dean and to our lawyer, both of whom recorded the date they received it. It took Julia about the same time to plan my Coming Out To Society Party. The first, and most essential step, was to take me on a serious clothes-shopping trip. The second step was another clothes shopping trip to a different city. We had a jet, so that was easy. After the fourth step, Julia declared herself reasonably happy with my range of clothes. The fifth step was actually something to do with the party itself: Julia bought herself two very nice party dresses. The important details having been taken care of, all that was left was the relatively minor task of planning the party. It was going to be a BIG party about a week and a half away, so there wasn't a moment to lose. ------- Chapter 317: The OSU Browsing Trap is Sprung Friday, September 1 to Thursday, September 7, 2006 It seemed natural to wait to start the OSU browsing early Monday morning, on September 4, and continue it every morning thereafter. That seemed more orderly and work-like. Plus we wanted the Government's decision makers to be available to act quickly rather than their being away for the weekend. If the Government did act, the quicker the better, because it'd make the coincidence of the browsing starting just before they inquired about Mark Anderson harder for them to deny, and when they did, I'd hopefully be able to get Majestic Countdown to show them to be liars, or even easier but perhaps riskier, I might be able to find useful evidence in the car they drove to our place in. If so, I might be able to borrow it, photocopy it, then put it back. Or maybe just memorize it to have Majestic Countdown quote it in one of his email a few days later (Maj' had a LOT of credibility by now, so if he did that, he'd be believed). There were several things we did to prepare. My study got extremely thoroughly vacuumed, ideally to pick up all my stray hairs and any other discarded body parts. After as much of my DNA as possible had been removed, everyone else in the family spent time in the study, shaking out their clothes, brushing their hair, and generally spreading lots of hair strands around. Then the study door was closed and I stayed well away from it. We weren't expecting the baddies to search the study that thoroughly, but we might as well make it hard for them if we could. Prof called all the local reporters who would be suitable for breaking this story - all two of them as Corvallis isn't exactly a hive of intrepid journalistic activity. Most local stories are about as urgent as a city council meeting to discuss the merits of installing some parking meters outside the Public Library, but a couple of guys might have the gumption to jump out of bed and come running with a camera and plenty of film if Prof called them in the middle of the night. I had a cellphone now, picked up on one of our recent shopping trips, but I was reluctant to fly around with anything metal. The plan was that I'd use NP to alert the parents, and Prof would alert the press. I moved some of my stuff to The Boys' home. I'd be living there for the next week or so, to make sure I wasn't caught up in any Government swoop. It had the additional benefit of reinforcing our trick because Ron's moving out of the house might look like a good indication that Mark had just arrived back, if the Government were tracking our movements that closely. I'll hardly get a chance to miss having female company at night because I'll be spending every night on patrol over the mansion. While I remember, with all the drama over my being kidnapped and then the settlement negotiation, The Boys had decided to hang around Corvallis. They'd taken their time with their dissertations, doing a thorough job of them. They'd both finally completed their PhDs a few months ago and were now doctors, but they hadn't looked for jobs away from Corvallis yet. They were doing odd jobs (lecturing, some field work, etc.), mostly for OSU. They'd made $125 million each out of the settlement, so getting a real job wasn't a high priority for them. So far their little sister's choice of first boyfriend was working out pretty well for Andrew and Robert. The basic plan was that I'd be on airborne patrol every night, so I'd see the baddies congregate near the house (they'd be "baddies" no matter what agency they were with, and it'd be at night because that's when 'Mark' would apparently be studying). I'd see them before they came charging in the front gate, in time to alert the parents to call the press. We figured they'd probably swoop, rather than enter the premises politely, but we had a plan for "politely". If they buzzed at the front gate and politely asked to be let in, the parents would let them. Once in, everyone would chat away happily. If the polite baddies asked about Mark, the parents would take it as a bad joke. If they asked about the computer, Prof would explain the program that was running to trap them into coming. Meanwhile, I'd be snooping their cars hoping to find incriminating evidence that they'd been surveilling us. If I couldn't find that, I'd try to at least get what agency they were with and which office they operated out of, so I could snoop that place very thoroughly. If they were impolite, the plan would be much the same, just having to be done quicker. Our closed gate and guards wouldn't slow them down by much, as it seemed likely the Government had the technology to open a domestic gate if they wanted to, and our hired guards would doubtless back down from a warrant or a badge. I'd grip the parents' arms to signal my judgment about the degree of impoliteness that was heading their way. Light grips meant meet them at the front door and put the coffee on; hard grips meant head to the basement and hide in the tunnel (Mom and Dad would have to pause to collect Donna because I couldn't warn her with NP). My girls would move through the tunnel and join the parents, wherever they were (depending on the visitors' politeness level). If in doubt, the default plan was for everyone to head for the games room. When the baddies were on the property, I'd trigger our alarm, which would let loose with a loud siren, turn on the exterior lights to illuminate the entire property (we'd had big lights properly installed for security reasons), and set an alarm off at the Corvallis Police Station too. With lots of illumination and with quick arrival of reporters, neighbors and cops, there'd be plenty of witnesses to the baddies' presence. We'd also bought some Dictaphones like lawyers use. We had them hidden by the front door, in the games room, the kitchen, near the front door of Mark's Wing and in my study. I'd turn them on right after I'd triggered the alarm, so they'd capture whatever the visitors said near them, which might prove very useful, especially if they were impolite and lied about it afterward. In my study, I also installed a webcam on my machine, to capture the image of the baddies storming into the room. The media would love that picture, especially if the baddies had guns drawn and foolish expressions on their faces when they saw the room was unoccupied. I couldn't redirect the webcam's feed anywhere else, such as to The Boys computer, because the whole trap was based on our internet usage being monitored, so the file had to be saved locally. That meant that if the baddies seized the computer they could erase the file, but that could be used against them too. If nothing had happened after a week or two, then I'd stop my air patrols over the house, and instead use the nights to start snooping our ISP, the Portland DHS, and everywhere else I could think of, to see if any of those turned up anything. If there were any signs of our being surveilled, I'd probably do my Majestic Countdown thing and send those "signs" to the media, although I'd discuss it with the parents first as there'd be no hurry. As I'd done in Dad's workshop when I'd first arrived as Ron, I'd leave telltales so I'd know if anyone had sneaked in: carefully placed hairs (segments of Carol's blond, hard-to-spot hairs), dust in the computers' USB ports which would be dislodged if anyone plugged something in, memorizing where the mouses were placed on their mousepads, etc. My study deliberately had no windows so it'd be very hard to baddies to get access to it. We'd check for bugs periodically though, both by my searching for them visually and Prof contacting his debugging company to sweep the place. If there'd been no development after several weeks, and a careful search of my study didn't show any bugs then we'd conclude that the Government were abiding by the contract and I'd start studying. ^ Julia and I had dinner with The Boys, Ashley and Sophia on Sunday evening. There was no hurry to start my patrol because I hadn't started Logan's program yet, which meant Ashley and Sophia had time for lots of questions. Mostly addressed to me, because they'd already had opportunities to question Julia. I had a simple role to play, and I wasn't supposed to know much about what was going on, so I didn't have any difficulties. They thought it was amazing that a guy could so quickly go from being a "total loser" (my words), to being worth 125 million and 7 dollars. "It sure is! But I think Vanessa's trying to get the money's worth out of me. She keeps me too busy to think what to do wit' it; except Julia made me buy more clothes than I've ever had in my life." Ashley and Sophia knew no more than the general public did, with the sole exception of my staying here for the next week or so because Prof had something going on that required Ron to sleep elsewhere. The Boys had been told more, including that I'd be coming and going at odd hours. They'd put me in Julia's room, which amused me. It was almost like old times again, not that I'd missed the pink. Later that evening, after Julia had left and everyone had gone to bed, I got dressed in my black flying clothes then did a quick sight blob check of the two other occupied bedrooms (VERY quick, in case there was any action going on). All was quiet, so I quietly slipped downstairs. With NP supporting 99% of my weight and pushing gently from behind, I can sneak very quietly. I paused just inside the front door to check the area outside for any sign of surveillance. There was none that I could see, so I slipped out the door and starting jogging down the street. I got to a nicely treed area faster than anyone could've relocated to follow me, then I pulled my ski mask down, stood on the rear of a sled and took off. Starting in wide circles well away from my home, narrowing the radius as I saw that all was innocent, I was eventually directly over home. The study hadn't been touched since I'd last meticulously searched it for bugs, according to the little telltales I'd left. All was good, so I used NP to fire up Logan's program, watching as empty browser windows appeared on all the screens. The program would run by itself now: every night at a random time between 1am and 3am, the browser windows would access OSU lectures and start scrolling down and up through them, going on to the next one when the bottom was reached. All browsing would stop at about breakfast time. The process would automatically repeat night after night until stopped. When my attention returned to the outside world, there weren't agents running out from behind every bush, so I went into my usual patrol mode. I was at about eight hundred feet AGL, doing a wide circle about eight hundred feet outside the property's boundary. With a very large sight blob going, I was able to cover quite a wide area. Every fifth circuit or so, I'd zip up and down the roads around us for about a mile, to check there wasn't a dozen black SUVs parked together. The first night passed without incident. Meanwhile, way upstream in AT&T's network, their fiber optic cable split just after it entered one of their largest switch rooms; most of the light carrying on through AT&T's normal network, but some of it was channeled through the wall into the room next door. The room that none of AT&T's staff were allowed into, which was strange because this was taking place inside a building owned by AT&T. Only NSA employees were allowed into that room. The copied signals were reconstituted, the traffic was semantically analyzed, found to match source, destination and content data that someone in the NSA had added to the database of internet activities they were interested in, and another hit was recorded for this night's live review of all the internet traffic passing through this particular AT&T hub. [[There was no longer any need for the NSA to tap signals in the usual sense. They'd set things up with the major ISP carriers so that the NSA sees virtually everything live. Everything caught by NSA's semantic filters was stored, the rest was forgotten.]] ^ The next night - actually, early Tuesday morning - was similarly uneventful for me. A similar note was made inside NSA's operation within that AT&T office. Someone in the NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade picked up his phone and placed a call to someone in the CIA headquarters at Langley, confirming that it'd happened again, resulting in an eventful day for several people. ^ Early Wednesday morning was very different than the previous mornings. Even before I'd spiraled in close enough to be able to see inside my home, I spotted something more than a little suspicious: a camouflage-wearing guy hiding behind a low bush. Unfortunately for his covertness, that's a tactic that doesn't provide good cover from directly above when the observer can see as if it was daylight. The guy was north of our property, across the road from our gate and several yards into a thickly treed area in our northern neighbors' property. The confusing thing was that he was looking NORTH from behind a bush, toward that property's house, almost directly away from my home. In other words, he was spying on the wrong home. He was either a local burglar or he worked for the DHS. I dropped lower by a couple of hundred feet to get my sight blob closer, to see how well he was equipped. The answer was, "Too damned well!" Night-vision goggles and an earpiece cord leading to one ear. The guy looked young and fit too. As I understood it, there are two technological ways night-vision works: amplifying existing light, or looking for infrared. Looking for infrared scared me, because if he looked up he'd see a man-sized, shining heat source floating five hundred feet above his head. Whereas amplifying existing light might not see me because I was totally covered in black clothes, so if zero light bounced off me, it wouldn't matter how much it was amplified. I'd reflect some light, but it'd be very little, and it'd be far less than all the infrared heat I was radiating. I lowered myself and the blob enough to look into his goggles. Fortunately they were of the amplifying variety. I hoped he didn't look up, but if he did I had a reasonable chance of not standing out (cross fingers). It seemed a reasonable bet that he wouldn't need an earpiece unless he had someone else out with him tonight, so I started looking. I searched all around the property he was on, into the neighboring properties, and pretty much everywhere that gave a view of the house he was so intent on, but I couldn't find anyone else. #4: The house only contained people in their PJs, which I thought was taking camouflage clothing too far. Besides, I knew them all because neighbors are friendly in Corvallis, especially after you make them $125,000 richer. It was while I was returning my sight blob to my sole guy that I spotted a second guy. He was several yards past the first guy (coming from the house under observation), high in a tree, looking at my property though a BIG pair of binoculars. Now I understood! The guy on the ground was guarding the main observer's rear in case someone came out of the house whose property they were trespassing on. The location they were using suffered from being on someone's private property, but it offered very good cover and mature trees large enough to support a man's weight and high enough to see over our wall. Having wasted fifteen minutes checking around this house, I thought I'd better check around my own. I raised my height immediately, hoping that no observer on the other side of my property had gotten me in his field of view when I dropped down. I shouldn't think so, as the guys beneath me hadn't reacted, but it'd be best to get out of the way quickly. To the west of our house was a fully developed home and property, not dissimilar to ours except that their home wasn't on a mound and their garden was fully planted. Although the had quite a few trees, they were mostly ornamental and unusable as spying platforms. To our east was an empty field that Donna was busy growing grass on, so it was useless for the baddies. There was a row of smallish trees very near to our wall (they'd been a windbreak before we'd built the wall), which offered possibilities. I flew slowly south down the center of our property, with two sight blobs going, searching the east and west properties as I went, finding nothing of interest. My Visual Centers A and B were easily up to that task by now. South of our property was a farmer's field, with a heavier line of trees near our wall. I quickly found another pair of baddies among those trees. The observer had climbed a tree significantly taller than our wall, but far enough away from it that we hadn't needed to cut it down. His guard was at ground level looking around. I hadn't seen weapons on any of the four. They could've had pistols, but I wasn't worried about that. What I cared about was that they didn't have great big rifles with sniper scopes. The absence of rifles indicated they weren't intending to start something violent with my families, and they probably couldn't shoot me out of the air either, which was good to know. I hadn't thought to check the other observer carefully, but I did for this guy. I lost enough height to be able to determine that this guy was staring at the middle of Mark's Wing, about where my study was. The back door and the hallway that runs to the doors that lead to the garage and tunnel entrance have windows, so he could see those, but not into the study itself. He'd be just looking for movement, hoping to catch a glimpse of me as I went to get a snack or to the toilet, or something. Presuming they were both looking toward my study, then the two observation teams were about thirty degrees away from being in a direct line with each other. Because they were using such big binoculars I could get close to one team without descending into the other observer's field of view. I had no intention of getting close; it was just nice to know I could do so fairly safely if something made me want to. I flew up to about five hundred feet, moving horizontally so I was midway between the two teams but eastward, so about 45 degrees horizontally off their line of sight, and about 60 degrees upward. In this position I could observe both pairs, although the two guards were obscured by foliage. I watched them for five minutes, but neither moved. I started off using two sight blobs so I could watch them both simultaneously, but as the minutes went by and nothing happened, I dropped back to one blob alternating from one team to the other while I either: I had my eyes open because I had to be careful where my body was. There was some wind blowing and I didn't want to blindly drift into trouble. Used the second blob to search around the wider area, in case more baddies arrived, and to be doubly sure I hadn't missed anyone or anything, such as unmanned cameras, on my first search. Lots of nothing was happening. The two teams were virtually motionless, making them seem very well trained and professional, so almost certainly not DHS. I found no one and nothing else. I didn't forget to search inside our property. There aren't many places baddies could hide in it: behind or inside Penelope and Patch's storage shed, behind some piles of earth, among some bushes I'd planted, and in the wonderfully landscaped mountainous-looking area in front of the Lower Wing. Most of those locations are exposed to top-down view anyway, and all were very quickly searched and confirmed as empty of baddies. I searched inside homes as well, finding nothing unwelcome. Our security guards patrol around the walls on the inside, with three teams of two doing circuits next to the walls, and we have motion sensors connected to big lights closer in to the house, so the inside of the property was fairly inaccessible. I was pretty sure this was just the two observation teams, placed north and south of our home to make sure they could see as much as possible. I decided to go hunting for the observers' vehicle(s), to see if it/they contained anything interesting. This was my third night of patrolling, so I knew most of the vehicles the locals routinely parked outside overnight. There were three strange cars, none of which was a black SUV. Judging by the contents of two of them, they were obviously private vehicles. The third vehicle was pulled suspiciously far off the road, and suspicious neat and tidy. It was a Hertz rental, so maybe our settlement agreement had caused the Government to run low on SUVs. What I thought was their vehicle contained absolutely nothing of interest. No IDs, no written orders which happened to mention what organization these guys worked for. I had been particularly hopeful that I'd find something with a file number on it as that'd make it easy for me to locate the full file at their base, but there wasn't even any paper. Everything they had, they had with them, except for four pairs of dress shoes they'd left in the trunk. I went back to check on the two teams, making the effort to confirm that their rearguards were still with them (yep), that the observers were still mostly watching the front of my study (yep again, although they panned across both buildings from time to time, then returned to study the study). I confirmed my memory that they'd been wearing boots (yep). I'd hoped to find orders in their car that said, "Observe until the 4am attempted arrest of Mark Anderson," or something else that told me what was happening, but no such luck. Observation could change to action very quickly, so it would've been nice to get advanced information about that, but they hadn't left any sort of information in their car. Each team had a small backpack kept near the guard. It would've been very nice to steal one, but its flying away would've been noticed! Even if I used NP to make a noise near them, and took the bag while they were looking the wrong way, it'd only take a second for them to notice that it was missing. Its miraculous disappearance wouldn't be a good idea. I shrunk the sight blob and moved it into a bag, getting it to radiate a little bit of light. The bag was mostly empty, containing food, drink, trash, and replacement batteries. There was still no paperwork, unfortunately. I'd have to be patient. I checked the road from time to time, especially if I saw car lights in the distance which seemed to disappear unaccountably, but that never came to anything (there are enough turnoffs for that to happen innocently). The guard/observer roles alternated every hour, one team on the hour and the other on the half hour, and always carefully to minimize the lost observation time. The observers were lying on a thin mat placed on the branch, which would've reduced the discomfort considerably. They had food and drink in their bags, and the trash was kept. They appeared to be four very capable professionals. I was surprised when they didn't piss into a bottle. Apparently pissing into the woods was professionally acceptable. I could've gotten a sample from each of them (cupping a few drops with an NP-bowl, putting a lid on it, then flying it rapidly away), and I could even have fetched some bottles out of the house to store the samples in, but I had no hopes that we could get access to the DNA database of our country's professional spies, or whatever these guys were. Their clothes had no names or serial numbers on them, so the only ways I could think of getting information from them were: Violence. Knock them out and search them, like I had the two reporters. Surreptitious pilfering. Picking their pockets, somehow. Following them to wherever they went after they left here, which would be difficult if they waited until daylight. The first two weren't worth the risk. I didn't NEED the information, and I definitely didn't need for them and their bosses to think something very strange had happened, because that had also happened inside the CIA's lab. Following them if they left while it was still dark might be useful. I might be able to discover something when they get back to their car, or get to wherever they drive it. If there was going to be a raid on the house, I would've expected it sometime around 2 or 3am, but those times passed without incident. And time kept passing. Eventually it was getting worryingly close to daylight. I didn't want to be hovering five hundred feet over my house when that happened. At this time of year, it'd get daylight before Logan's program stopped studying, so I couldn't wait for that. I had to land soon, or leave. To be any good at spying on the spies, I'd have to land somewhere close, which risked me being spotted. If I was seen hiding near these guys, that would make them VERY interested in me; the last thing I wanted to happen. It didn't look like an arrest raid was going to happen tonight, so I could probably fly back to Julia's old house. I couldn't call to warn the parents because the phones could easily be tapped, but I had another method. I moved the sight blob into Mom and Dad's room, then used NP to wake them up gently. I held their lips closed and pushed them back onto the bed, because both of them tried to leap out of bed as that'd been the plan if I woke them. After holding them flat for a few seconds while they relaxed and woke properly, I raised the covers in the air slightly, as if one of them was doing it from underneath, then I pushed them down the bed. A bit more prodding and they got the idea, sliding under the covers for me. I moved their heads together, then did some light blob message writing. Even while floating in the air, I can make over nine hundred light blobs at a time, so I can make very small, easy to read letters. I wrote: "2 pairs professional watchers all night. Still there, 1 pair N, 1 pair S. Nearly daylight so I have to go soon. I guess they're looking for visual confirmation Mark is here, so nothing dramatic happening yet. As I come back to work I'll check to see if they still here. # of head taps = how many, circle rub = they gone. I tell Prof + Van now. Okay?" They thought for a few seconds, then whispered quietly to each other (I hoped it was "quietly". Without sound blobs - dammit - it's hard for me to tell). They could've written letters on their legs, or something, but Dad just gave me a thumbs-up sign. I checked the two observation teams hadn't moved, then repeated nearly all the message with Prof and Vanessa. Then I headed back to Julia's bedroom. ^ At the normal getting up time, or maybe just a few minutes early in the excitement of the situation, the four parents got up and had a little conference. Under the cover of a loud radio, Prof suggested, "Felicity, you carry a breakfast to Mark's study, immediately bringing back the girls for their breakfasts, then ten minutes later, go back for the empty bowl. Walk in the open so they see you. Use Mark's big bowl, in case they know about that. Dump the food in Mark's wastepaper basket and leave it there so we can point out later that it was a trick. If everyone agrees, we should do that quickly so they'll see it and it'll seem less suspicious while it's still dark." The other three parents liked it. Mom rushed downstairs, found my big bowl, filled it with dry cereal (it'd create less mess later), put a spoon in it, filled a glass with milk, then walked out the front door and along the top of the mound to the top door of Mark's Wing. There was a small hitch there, as all the exterior doors were locked, so Mom had to knock and call loud enough to get the girls moving. From the girls' point of view, this was a very unexpected development, and their immediate reaction was the fear something bad was happening. But Mom's voice was calling for them to hurry up opening the door for her, so Julia did. Mom gave Julia a big wink while saying, "Hurry up girls. Breakfast in the main house right now." Mom pushed into the house, taking the breakfast downstairs while Carol and Ava were asking Julia what was going on. "We have to get ready for breakfast QUICKLY. Oh dear; I haven't had time to think about what to wear today." While the girls were trying to respond to Mom's entirely unreasonable demand, Mom entered my study, tipped the plate of cereal into the wastepaper can, drank half the milk quickly, put the bowl and glass on my desk, wiped her mouth, then headed straight back upstairs. The girls couldn't have been expected to get dressed without understanding the nature of Mom's sudden urgency. If it was good news, then the girls could wear happy, bright clothes, but that'd be very inappropriate if Mom was panicking and needed calming down. In which case they should wear somber colors, but probably very nice cuts so Mom could be cheered up by the quality of their clothes. On the other hand, if trouble was about to start, then a whole different set of priorities would come into play. If the emergency was going to last a long time, then it'd be best to wear fabrics that breathed well, for personal hygiene reasons... Mom arrived while Ava and Carol were trying to get Julia to explain whether Mom had looked hurried or flustered. Because if Mom was hurried, then what they need to wear was... Mom arrived back in the bedroom, grabbed all three girls (mothers only have two hands, but it's a well-established fact that they can easily grab three uncooperative kids at a time), and pushed them out of the top door dressed as they already were, which was in carefully chosen PJ-like nightwear, suitable for being woken in the middle of the night by agents coming to arrest Mark. Thus the girls were dressed innocently, but still attractively, because it was important to make the agents realize they'd invaded people's privacy and also to fluster the male agents into making mistakes that might be useful later. At the same time, the clothes had to retain their modesty when the girls moved in unusual ways, like being thrown into a police van or having their hands cuffed behind them. That was particularly a problem for Carol, but she'd solved it by wearing a top that had ruffles ... You get the idea: Mom's telling them to get dressed quickly was a very unreasonable demand. It was summer, so the girls often walked back and forth along the top of the mound. Not when it was still dark though. It was chilly and Ava hadn't taken that into account when she'd chosen her nightwear. She made a mental note not to forget that criterion the next time she choose nightwear suitable for wearing when federal agents swoop to arrest her boyfriend. Inside the main house, Vanessa said, "Time for breakfast!" "But..." "No buts. We've got a busy day ahead of us." "We do?" The way or ways in which the day was going to be busy was important information, as it'd definitely affect their choices of clothes after breakfast. Mom went to get 'my' empty dishes a few minutes later. The girls could see that something was up and knew better than to ask about Mark's bowl being used. Besides, knowing about my bowl wouldn't help the girls with their next clothing choice. Girls are good at multitasking. They could enjoy that the parents were up to a scheme AND think about their first clothing choice for the day. (Every now and then, and often both of those, I can't resist being facetious about females' fashion fanaticism. I live with three girls, so get to hear far too many discussions about fashion. The above recounting of Mom's visit to my wing might not be strictly accurate, but every now and then I have to let some of the pressure out.) I arrived at the time I usually start work. I was sort of relieved that nothing had happened, but sort of disappointed that it hadn't. We want the swoop to occur when Ron is away, so soon after breakfast would've been a good time. When I arrived, I parked the Honda beside the gate and got out to check that the trunk contained whatever it contained (which it did). That was just an excuse to sight blob search the trees on the other side of the road. The guys had gone from the locations they'd been in last night, and from the general area. I got back into the car slowly, then opened the gate. I canceled the sight blob, reconnected Visual Processing Center B to my eyes, and drove into the property. When I parked the car around the back, I got out and walked up the drive. Walking on smooth ground doesn't need Center B, so I created another sight blob to check the trees near our southern wall. It's cool that I can be walking north while checking things to the south. It's very handy to have such a flexible eye in the back of my head. I found no spies of any sort. A few footprints in the soft dirt, but that was all. I sent the blob up high to look at where their rental car had been parked, and it was no longer there. I'd keep a sight blob going all day - not if I was using hedge clippers, as I wouldn't like to lose a finger - in case I saw something getting ready to happen, but I had a feeling that if anything was going to happen, it'd be tonight, when they were sure Mark was in his study. I signaled the parents that there were zero observers. They quietly told me about the breakfast bowl trick. It would've been nice to spare the girls the crap that was probably going to happen tonight by sending them somewhere else, but their absence might get someone suspicious, either before the swoop or after it. Both could cause trouble. After would be a particular pain, because we're trying to train the Government not to get suspicious about us. My absence shouldn't be too worrying because these aren't my families (the Government thinks), plus I wasn't here last night, so not being here tonight will seem usual. The day was an ordinary day, except for sense of anticipation. The Government agents were going to look like dicks when they charged in to arrest a random-number generator. I grabbed a celebratory pizza for dinner on the way back to my temporary home at the Williams' house. I could be accused of celebrating prematurely, but I like pizza. So did The Boys, unfortunately. ^ I got into the air as soon as it was dark enough, lifting up to about 6,000 feet and going past home so I could come back from the east at a much lower altitude. Northeast of our property was where their car had been last time, so most likely where any congregating raiding party would gather this time. To the west there's mostly just the main road to town and not many trees, so it didn't offer any good place to gather in a low key way. But to the east there are many more possibilities as there are more roads and a lot of trees. It was also somewhat easier for me to sneak up on any observers from that side because I wouldn't be passing over top of any other houses. There are several blocks of houses only a quarter of a mile to the northeast, but there aren't any to the east and southeast. There weren't any baddies in the area yet, not even their car. That was hardly surprising since there were still several hours before I normally started studying. I'd just finished thinking that, when a car pulled over in the same place the baddies had parked last night, and it looked like the same car. A few seconds later my sight blob was close enough to confirm it had the same license plate and the same four guys. They were wearing casual clothes when they got out of the car. They opened the trunk and pulled out some camouflage clothes. Two of them put theirs on top of their existing clothes and shoes got changed to boots while the other two kept watch, then they swapped roles. I noticed that they had pistols in shoulder holsters. They grabbed two bags out of the trunk, closed it, paired up, and set off cross-country in the direction of the two spots they'd been in last night. It wasn't even a quarter mile for the closest pair, and only the length of our property farther for the other pair, so it wouldn't take them long. I quickly checked the car, but it was as uninteresting as last time. I caught up with the two that were heading to the northern spot, following them from about eight hundred feet above and slightly behind. When they arrived at the same spot as last time, they checked around it to make sure it was clear, then they unpacked the pad to lay on, the big pair of binoculars for the main observer, the head-mounted night-vision goggles for the guard, and two new items they hadn't had last night: a radio that looked like the bricks the first cellphones had been, and a parabolic microphone. No rifles still, so that was good. One guy climbed the tree to the same observation spot, then the second guy passed the gear up, including the new radio and mic. The observer set up, inserted the new radio's earpiece in his ear that wasn't already occupied by his usual earplug, then he put the parabolic mic's headphones over both ears. His ears were so loaded it was funny. Two minutes later the humor had worn off and I was bored by their immobility. I flitted south to check on the other pair. They were very carefully checking that there was no one in the tree line, both with their pistols out, taking turns to cover each other as they leapfrogged their way down the tree line. They were most of the way to the western corner, presumably after having done the whole length. #24: The sight blob zipped back to that spot, and I quickly found it hidden under a nearby bush. I used NP to pull it out and start searching it quickly. There were no wallets, paperwork or private cellphones; just assorted food and water, plus the gear I'd already seen that the other pair had, including the new stuff. I had a wonderful opportunity, but I couldn't think of anything useful to do with it. I could easily steal some of or all of their gear, but how would that help? I could only think of ways it'd cause problems. I'd love to have the parabolic mic, but there was too much metal involved to fly around with it, and they'd be upset about it suddenly going missing. We wanted the swoop to go ahead, not to make the Government even more suspicious about something strange happening, so I put it all back where I'd gotten it from. Five minutes later, both observation teams were being boring, and they stuck to it hour after hour. I could see they sometimes cupped the mouthpieces of their big radios and talked quietly into them, but unfortunately I don't have a sound blob ability and there was no way I could get close enough to hear because the guy that was on guard duty was always vigilant. I wish someone would invent a purely plastic parabolic mic that I could steal. [[I later got much smarter about stealing things from the Government, and would've handled the last two nights MUCH better had I wised up faster, but I was new to this type of activity at this time.]] Just before midnight, the guard of the north team moved back to their car, and a minute later another car pulled up behind it. The guy who got out of the front passenger seat was obviously a boss judging by his wearing a dark suit and the deference his driver and the guard gave him. He had a black satchel with him and he used a small flashlight to help him extract a photo from it and he placed it on his car's hood. It was a close-up, top-down photo of our property, zoomed in so not much of the neighbors' land was included, maybe a hundred feet or so beyond our wall in all directions. It was a daylight shot, and I could see me, Penelope and Patch, so it was fairly recent. VERY recent - less than twelve hours old - when I noticed the date and time printed near the bottom. The boss and the north team's guard talked for a couple of minutes. Unfortunately their hand motions on the photo didn't give anything away, so I couldn't gain any understanding of what they intended. I wished I had a sound blob. Then the boss put the photo away, put the satchel under his arm, and the three of them headed toward the north lookout point. I searched the boss's car. It wasn't a rental, having a radio in it. The glove compartment was locked and too full of stuff for me to be able to read anything in it. It just looked like normal glove compartment crap. The driver's door side pocket had a parking garage access card with a big "CIA" on it, so that's what I assumed the guys were. The access card wasn't definitive proof, but I'll apologize for maligning them if I later find out they aren't CIA. The other stuff that I could see wasn't any use - I didn't need a street map of Oregon folded open at Corvallis. The trunk contained a couple of bulletproof vests and a rifle of some sort. I was momentarily tempted to fly one of the vests up to me now, but everyone I'd seen had nothing bigger than pistols. I didn't know much about firearms, but I somehow doubted a pistol had any chance of hitting a black target five hundred feet straight up in the middle of the night, even if the shooter had night-vision goggles. Which made me realize that the boss and his driver didn't have night-vision gear. They weren't going to see much until I turned our bright lights on, and not long after that they'd be seeing how stupid they were. The little meeting at the north lookout point was just starting. It only took a minute, and the body language was positive (nodding, etc.) The boss held up his hand and the observer passed down the big radio and earpiece. The boss put it in and talked on the radio for about fifteen seconds. Smiling, he passed the radio back up. #2: #16: Then a lot of nothing happened. The boss and his driver sat down in a sheltered place and looked like they were happy to wait forever. The observer went back to observing, and the guard to guarding. After ten minutes of watching nothing happen, I was getting puzzled. I'd presumed they'd called the raiding party in, and it seemed sensible that those guys would have been waiting somewhere nearby, but apparently not. It was 00:15, and 'Mark' wouldn't start studying until a random time between 1am and 3am. I'd initially assumed they'd decided to go in now, but maybe they were waiting for the internet access to start. I flitted south a bit to check on the southern team, but they were just as boring. (I was moving back and forth rather than sitting in the middle where I could see both because I didn't like the risk of someone looking up. I was a couple of hundred feet east of directly between them, so had to move closer to get good sight blob vision.) I even took time off to search up and down the road quickly in case there was a group gathering nearby, but I saw nothing significant. The body language of the two groups that I could see was that of waiting patiently, which implied that there was no one else nearby. I kept to my boring vigil over my home. About 01:15, I was checking the southern pair again, when I spotted movement in the middle of the large field to the south. I quickly saw that there was a LOT of movement. I flew south and could soon make out about three dozen guys in camouflage gear making their way slowly and cautiously northeast directly toward our southern wall. They were VERY well and scarily equipped: night-vision gear attached to their helmets, most with rifles, and a couple carrying machineguns, for Christ's sake! I'd be tempted to call that massive overkill, but my families' plan for fake-Mark's arrest hadn't envisaged any killing at all! What were they afraid of, that Prof would hit them with his plastic leg? I knew - and presumably they knew - that Prof had a pistol locked in his safe, but one guy with a pistol versus three dozen soldiers was absurd. Several of them were also carrying gym bags containing God knows what, but I doubted any of it was good. #1: #25: #21: [[Prof had been unable to call because the baddies had cut our telephone lines and had a cellphone jammer running, so no member of the public who happened to see the soldiers could call to warn us.]] The CIA boss's satchel was in the hands of his driver, so a little hard to rummage through. I was debating what to do about that, or whether to look for information elsewhere, when the body language of all the guys changed. The Army communications guy had said something, and they'd all become instantly alert and were looking up into the sky toward the south. If you'll forgive a slight digression: Normally you know when someone's looking at you because you see their eyes are pointing straight at you (that seems obvious). That's often not the case with me. My sight blob was down beside them, close to the CIA driver but pulled back so I could see everyone while I thought about how to get the satchel. The driver was standing to the group's west, so my sight blob was at ground level a few yards farther west of them. They were all looking south up into the sky, so my sight blob couldn't see any of their eyes, thus they didn't appear to be looking at me at all. But "me" isn't my sight blob; we're in two very different locations. I have to keep very good spatial orientation when I use ki-effects, otherwise they self-cancel. My proximity sense helps me a great deal because it shows where blobs and NP-points are even when they're beyond my 24-foot range, but I still have to be very aware of my surroundings and orientations. (Actually, I learned from when my subconsciouses started sharing their ki-effects management information that my proximity sense wasn't detecting my distant ki-effects. The subconsciouses just made it seem that way by injecting the remote effects' locations into my proximity image in a way that told me where the effects were. My subconsciouses were cheating, but it worked very well so I forgave them.) I've had an enormous amount of experience at keeping track of my effects relative to my body, so it's second nature now. If the baddies had all looked directly at the sight blob, I wouldn't have emotionally reacted at all (it'd taken quite a few accidental reactions until I'd learned not to react to that). But looking the way they were now, I instantly knew they were looking very close to my body, which scared the crap out of me. My immediate reaction was to zoom upward to get out of sight, but I'd barely started on that when I changed it to zooming sideways so I could keep the sight blob where it was. After a couple of seconds of very rapid sideways acceleration, none of the baddies were tracking their heads sideways or looking confused. They were still looking in the original direction, so I started decelerating. The observer lowered the binoculars, said something while pointing. I quickly aligned the sight blob behind his pointing. I couldn't see anything, so zoomed the sight blob about seven hundred feet along the line of sight. I caught glimpses of something in the sky much farther away. A couple of seconds later I was able to make out two helicopters heading toward my house at an altitude of a couple of hundred feet. They were blacked out, but their canopies were reflecting street and house lights. #5: #15: #30: #7: #9: #23: #29: #All: I zipped to the far side of our neighbors' house, landed behind it, then used several bushes they had growing to cover me while I ran to their front door area. It was a large, recessed and covered area, so a good place for me to pause while I considered whether I could safely sneak closer. As I knew all too well, hiding behind bushes is a joke for anyone looking down from above. That'd been amusing when I'd been using my sight blobs, but it was a pain in the ass when I was trying to hide from two fucking helicopters. [[They had FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared vision systems), so my trying to hide behind a bush from them certainly would've been a joke.]] I sent a sight blob up to check on the helicopters. They were farther away than I'd expected, maybe a quarter to half a mile although it's hard to judge distance in the sky, especially when you don't accurately know the size of the thing you're looking at (I didn't add "especially at night" to that description because it was effectively daytime for my big sight blob). They'd slowed somewhat, but I guessed they'd still be overhead in less than half a minute. I zoomed the blob toward them, for a closer look. #5: In the doorway of both helicopters was one of those multi-barrel machineguns that you see in war movies. The choppers had something different mounted on their other sides. On one chopper, two HUGE looking missiles, wider than I was [[Hellfires]]; on the other chopper, a round tube containing a dozen and half small rockets [[M260, with 19 x 2.75" rockets]]. Other than the two pilots, there were five guys sitting in the back of each small chopper. I couldn't see much detail, but they were dressed in black rather than as ordinary soldiers, and had ski masks pulled over their faces. #20: The helicopters slowed almost to a stop, still about a quarter mile out, and we saw what they intended. The guys in the back got to their feet, crouching in the small cabin, waddled to the doorways, attached ropes to buckle-things on their belts, then moved to stand on the helicopters' skids. #18: #24: #30: #18: #3: #All: #15: #1: #8: [[Not very good guessing. The choppers currently massed, with contents, about 1,300 kg (2,900 lb). They're very light machines.]] #25: #20: #All: #19: I stepped out of the covered alcove and shot up into the air. I didn't take time to check for observers, but it was a pretty safe bet that everyone's attention would be on the imminent assault. The pilots should be focused on their job too, rather than looking around the wider area. While I accelerated upward, I watched the two helicopters hit the brakes above their drop off points. (Choppers can transition from forward flight to a hover very quickly by doing a flare - pitching nose-up and reducing power. Done very aggressively, as these were, it can stop a chopper almost as effectively as flying into a wall.) The chopper that was over the Main House was about thirty feet higher than the other one, so I formed NP-fingertips on its skids and rear, pushed sharply on its right skid to point it at the other chopper, then max-pushed with everything I had that wasn't busy holding me up. The chopper must have been lighter than I expected, because it accelerated toward my target very quickly (at about 4.5 g's). The assault team was already standing on the skids ready to rappel down the moment the chopper was in position. They knew it was going to flare aggressively, so they were hanging on TIGHT (as you do, when you're standing on a thin piece of fast moving metal fifty feet above the ground). The sudden 4.5 g acceleration in an unexpected direction caught them completely by surprise. Their feet had no grip so were immediately swept off the skids. The five soldiers were now hanging on with their hands. 4.5 g's of acceleration plus the gear they were carrying (not much admittedly), meant about six guys' worth of weight. They were fit and strong, but no one can hang on under those circumstances. In only a moment, they'd all lost their grips. They'd only been seconds away from dropping off. Their ropes were ready and they were highly trained at this, so they grabbed their ropes and braked their falls (it's very easy). In less than a second they were all dangling beneath their rapidly accelerating chopper. It's not unknown for one of them to fall off prematurely; a sudden gust of wind can cause that. They just dangle in the breeze until the chopper is in the right position, then they do their usual descent - it just costs them some teasing and a round of drinks later. So their current situation was no big deal, although they did thank God they'd chosen to rappel down rather than fast-rope, as fast-roping is done without the guy being attached to the rope. That would've resulted in a 30-foot fall, which they very much didn't want! Speaking of highly trained people, the helicopter pilot was hard at work. The 160th SOAR chooses damned good pilots to start with, and then they get a great deal more training for extreme situations. From the moment his chopper started turning, he'd reacted to correct it (helicopter pilots have very quick and highly trained reactions as choppers are tricky things to fly; they're intrinsically unstable, and that's a VERY bad thing when flying!). The pilot's trouble was that the chopper wasn't behaving anything like it should. It was accelerating forward faster than he'd ever felt before, when all the controls were in positions where the chopper should have been decelerating. At best, he could only get a momentary correct response out of it. For example, when he lifted the collective to gain height, the chopper would barely start to rise, and then it'd resume its existing shallow dive (because I'd reacted to counter the lift by pushing down on the skids). He had just under four seconds to try things, and he tried several, but he never had a chance. Even if he'd turned the engine off the chopper would've continued to accelerate toward the other. The soldiers dangling underneath it - more like "flying behind it" because of the sideways acceleration - spent a second or two expecting the pilot to regain control. There wasn't anything obvious wrong (the engine sounded fine, there wasn't any smoke or fire, etc.), so they waited. Probably annoyed more than anything else. They were spinning around on the end of their ropes, which made it hard for them to get an understanding of what was happening, but after a couple of seconds they started realizing that their chopper was accelerating straight toward the other one, and not pulling out. Depending on the individual soldier, one or two seconds before the collision each of them started rappelling down his rope as fast as he could. Another problem they had was that they weren't rappelling "down". With 1 g of downward gravity and about 4 g's of sideways acceleration, the soldiers were rappelling horizontally backward much more than vertically downward. They were a long way down their lines but still about thirty feet above the ground when the collision occurred. Meanwhile, the other chopper had performed its flare normally. I'd exaggerated when I likened an aggressive flare to flying into a wall, as it does take a few seconds. Coincidentally, about the same number of seconds that it took for me to arrange the collision. The second chopper's pilot was concentrating on his aggressive flare. Both choppers had come in faster than they normally would have because of the house's alarm going off. No big deal, but it did mean the flare needed more concentration than normal to ensure the chopper ended in a hover exactly above where the Delta team wanted it. Precise, high-speed, hard-braking flares are tricky maneuvers, requiring a great deal of concentration, so the first person to see the other chopper's approach was one of the soldiers on the opposite skid. He yelled a warning and pointed through the cabin, alerting the pilot who gave a quick glance in that direction. If there's one thing pilots don't like, it's another plane coming straight at them. They VERY STRONGLY don't like that! (Or "another helicopter coming straight at them"; no one's picky about terminology at a time like that). He'd been just about to drop his team, but there was no time for that now. He had to clear the area and come back later for the drop. Unfortunately for him and his crew, he was a sitting duck where he was now, having just got rid of all his velocity in every direction. He was even nose up with low RPM's, which was the worst situation to be in. He did his best though, lifting the collective, pushing the cyclic forward, and twisting the throttle wide open; using the pedal to keep oriented to the north to clear the area at ninety degrees to the direction of the oncoming chopper. It took the best part of a whole second for the nose to drop and the chopper to start accelerating. Unfortunately something must've gone wrong, as it somehow reverted to a hover again. (My fault; sorry about that guys.) He had less than a second to the impact. The other chopper was coming down at an angle, so this pilot decided to try to drop under it. There'd be less distance to fall after the collision too. He zeroed his chopper's lift. I had other plans. I was going to use this chopper to ruin the CIA boss's day, so I had to make sure it could fly about two hundred yards north. I took some more of my minds off the charging chopper to use them to grab hold of the target chopper, at about the same time as the soldiers on its skids decided to get the fuck outta there. They jumped off the skids, rappelling down rapidly. Given what I intended to do, that wouldn't work out too well for them. I tilted the target chopper so it was tail down at about forty five degrees, then I started accelerating it upward and forward. It was already facing north, so that was convenient. I timed it so the charging chopper crashed into the downward angled tail of the target. The tail was immediately shredded. I assumed the blades of the charging chopper would be smashed too, but it didn't really matter as I could use NP to make sure it crashed into the ground if it wasn't damaged enough to do so naturally. I used all my NP to push the second chopper northward and upward. Particularly upward because I wanted the soldiers dangling from it to be incapacitated by long falls. Pushing this chopper was tricky. It had its throttle on full power so the absence of the tail caused the body of the chopper to start counter-rotating, which was a pain as it's hard for my NP to push on a rotating object. I didn't want to hold it so it didn't rotate because that was an impossibility. What I did do was push upward from underneath as the chopper rotated, which was an easy way for me to give it more elevation. Pushing north required me to give lots of quick pushes rather than any sort of sustained effort. That resulted in a jerky motion, which probably added realism. I continued to nudge - if you can call momentary 6 ton pushes a "nudge" - the tailless, spinning chopper higher and north, while watching with my eyes to see if the other one crashed. Presuming it was too badly damaged to fly, then it'd been going fast enough and had been high enough to easily clear the end of Mark's Wing, probably crashing about halfway between the end of my living room and our property's outer wall. I have a great deal of experience a judging flying speeds, falling distances and related topics, but my experience doesn't include things with rotor fragments still spinning and other such variations. #4: #23: Just to be safe, in case the soldiers had moved the guards for some reason, I zipped the sight blob across for a check, happy to see no one anywhere near that side of the property. That saved us from having to push the chopper so it crashed elsewhere. Speaking of which, I gave that hopefully crashing chopper another look, and my hope was coming true. The chopper was tilting over sideways, and falling on a roughly natural looking parabola. It was only a second away from impacting. The soldiers who'd been rappelling down from that chopper were going to have very hard impacts shortly. Their landings were going to be about the same as leaping off the top of a fire truck's four-story ladder while driving at 45 mph. Onto grass or flower beds in this case, but it was still going to be VERY painful for them, even with all the training they'd have had at falling safely. I expected lots of broken bones, so it'd be a perfect outcome as far as I was concerned. I did NOT want them in a condition where they could jump to their feet and resume their mission to assault my home and families. I turned my attention to the crippled chopper, helping it on its way for the next second. I heard the crash behind my sight blob, but ignored it to continue pushing the chopper north for another second. I had it moving north with a ground speed of about 20 mph now, it'd climbed to about 120 feet and had an upward velocity, so I could leave it for a second. I wasn't the only one to leave it, as by now all the rappelling soldiers had decided that falling 40 or 50 feet while going 10 or 15 mph (depending on when they let go) was better than staying on a tailless, spinning chopper that was accelerating horizontally and upward. I hoped they'd been injured but didn't have the time to check them now. I needed to check whether the two pilots of the crashed chopper were alive. The pilots had to die, for a couple of reasons: First, to stop the Government attacking my families again I needed a few deaths. Not many and preferably mostly CIA, but I needed some. Nothing grabs the public's attention as strongly as unnecessary deaths (except when some Hollywood slag forgets to put her panties on). Second, the pilots had to be included in the death toll because the last five seconds' flight of their chopper was too strange for them to live to talk about it. I regretted the pilots' fate, but I regretted the Government's attack on my families even more. When I turned the sight blob around, I could see wall-guarding soldiers near the impact site were in the process of jumping over the wall to help any survivors. Pieces of the chopper were still rolling along the ground, including the main cabin, so the soldiers weren't wasting any time. I'd better not either. I zipped my sight blob into the cabin as it was coming to a rest. The two pilots were still strapped securely to their seats, and because of their big helmets I couldn't tell whether they were alive or not. Probably they were, because there was no obvious signs of injury, but I didn't want to know. I found a piece of loose metal and stuck it into the heart of one of them, and twisted the other one's head too far. For what it's worth, neither of them reacted in any visible way, but that was probably because they were unconscious. It was easy to find the gas tank because it was the only part of the 'blister' that wasn't engine or cabin. I punched a hole from the cabin upward into the tank, watching the fuel flow into the cabin, then used heat blobs to set fire to it. It exploded. I was just about to move the sight blob back to the other chopper when the multi-barrel machinegun caught my attention. The cabin was on its side with the gun in the doorway on top. There were flames everywhere, but the gun appeared intact despite all the rolling because it was positioned inside the doorway, unlike the external missile pod which had been ripped off as the cabin had rolled along the ground. I had an idea that seemed a good one. The chopper's cabin was engulfed in flames so it was unlikely that any of the soldiers would see the gun move; or if they did, it wouldn't seem too unnatural. I pointed the gun at the west wall of the lower half of Mark's Wing. The kitchen and living room were on that end of my house, neither of which had anything of sentimental value in them. I momentarily checked the tunnel with a sight blob. It was pitch black, so I added a tiny about of light, just enough for my big blob to confirm everyone was there. I returned to the gun and pulled the trigger, with no idea whether it'd fire or not. It fired, and even from my height the sound of it was very cool. The sight was pretty amazing too, both from my real eyes and the sight blob. The sight blob was in the flames behind the machinegun so I could see to use it. There was so much light from the flames that I wasn't able to see my home's outside very well, but the tracer rounds still looked spectacular! #14: #18: I held the gun lightly to let the barrel wander around with the recoil, to make a bigger mess. I couldn't see the wall hardly at all through the flames or from above, but lots of bullet holes in the wall would look cool. I could imagine the news in the morning, Mom and Dad crying, "They MACHINE-GUNNED our home!" TV and the papers would no doubt be full of pictures of the bullet holes in the wall, which would be great for us. The Government will argue it was an equipment malfunction, but pictures of a machine-gunned wall would be a damn sight more convincing than Government excuses. I zipped my sight blob back to the now falling second chopper, and applied more NP-pushes to keep accelerating it, leaving my NP-fingertips still firing the gun. I intended to give it another few seconds before canceling the fingertips, to make a nice, big embarrassing mess. Unfortunately, I felt the machinegun stop firing almost immediately after my sight blob had moved away. It wouldn't have made nearly as much mess as I wanted, but it'd have to do. [[The minigun was electrically driven, which died because the chopper was - to use the mechanical knowledge I'd acquired during my automotive training - fucked.]] At an average ground speed of 30 mph, it'd take the still-'flying' chopper about 10 seconds to travel from above my house to our north wall, so not long. It was halfway there already, but I accelerated it some more anyway. I'd just stopped pushing, intending to let the chopper make its own wild descent for the next few seconds, when I noticed that the command group had moved to the front of our driveway. The chopper was going to pass fifty feet above and a hundred feet west of my targets. That was okay, as everyone knows helicopters fly funny, and that had to be even more true of tailless ones. As the chopper passed over the wall, my NP forced the chopper to roll onto its right side, turn east, then nosedive with considerable acceleration straight toward the command group. It took about two seconds for it to impact. For the first second the command group looked at it in disbelief, and you can probably guess what they did for the next second. Unfortunately for the CIA boss, his satchel holder, and the Army boss, they all tripped just as they started running. Maybe they'd spent too much time behind their desks, or maybe they'd made an enemy of the wrong guy. I might've let the satchel carrier get away if he'd dropped the satchel, but he tried to run while carrying it so he got added to the trip list. He was CIA (I was presuming), and had been involved in attacking my family, so I didn't worry about the decision much (zero would qualify as "not much"). When he tripped, the satchel went flying out of his hand and slid along the ground. And slid, and slid. When it'd slid far enough, I flew it up to me. Meanwhile, this chopper's crash had been much more brutal than the last one. It'd only been going a little faster, but the impact was much more vertical and onto concrete. The pilots were mashed enough to be clearly dead already. I set fire to the chopper, watching to see if the pilots reacted to the fire and ready to put them out of their misery if they did. They didn't. A few of the soldiers in the target area had gotten far enough away, but the Army communications guy had been clobbered by several pieces of flying metal and was fairly badly hurt. His radio had taken a hit too, which saved me the bother of sabotaging it from the inside. My three targets were buried under the burning chopper, so they were toast. I zipped the sight blob back to check on the guys who'd intended descending from the helicopters to assault us. They were scattered along the two flight paths and delightfully injured. The first group particularly, because they'd been twisting in the wind when they'd let go, so they'd had uncontrolled falls. The second group had fallen feet first so had landed better. A couple of them were on their feet and hobbling badly with their short rifles as crutches. That was fine, as they were hobbling to check on their teammates rather than assaulting my families. They were both heavily favoring one leg or foot, so Prof would have a fair chance against them now. Not even thirty seconds had passed since I started my intervention, and they'd been wonderfully effective seconds. Both assault teams appeared out of action, both helicopters were destroyed, the CIA and military bosses were toast, and most of the west and north walls were now unmanned as the soldiers were rushing to give aid. Our burglar alarm siren was still wailing, and the helicopter crashes and second or two of machinegun fire had added greatly to the noise, so lights were going on around the neighborhood. Our immediate neighbor was going to get a particularly good view when they used one of the abandoned ladders to look over our common boundary wall, with a burning helicopter and a couple of dozen soldiers running, limping or lying around only a few dozen yards into our property. The northern helicopter crash was half on our driveway, half on the road, so clearly visible to anyone in the area. Unfortunately, that was almost no one. The properties are large around us, and half of them are fields with no houses on them. There are only a couple of houses that might be able to see the roadside fire though the trees on their properties, such as the one the northern observation post was on the property of. The nearest large clump of houses is up a side road about 750 feet northeast of the northern crash site, but there are so many trees between our property and theirs that they'd see nothing. They might have heard the crashes, and they might see the glow in the sky from the two fires, but it'd be our near neighbors who'd get word out first. Now that I'd run out of helicopters to crash, and the only activity from the baddies was to rescue each other, I didn't know what to do next. The only idea I could think of was trying to start a firefight. Maybe take the rifle out of the back of the CIA boss's car and start shooting people. The two northern CIA observers for a start, or maybe shooting from the farmer's field south of our house at the soldiers manning the southern wall. Everyone was wearing flak jackets and I'd aim low to cause leg wounds. It would seem plausible that the local residents had risen up to defend the much-loved Andersons against a criminal attack by bad people in the middle of the night. If possible, I'd like to get hold of several weapons to make it seem like a pack of locals had taken exception to the Government's attack on us. There'd be lots of noise and confusion, hopefully stopping the baddies carrying out an assault on my home. Unfortunately the mythical local residents' staunch defense of their local community couldn't be expected to start thirty seconds after the first noise. I wouldn't be able to do anything along those lines for several minutes. I checked on my families. They were still in the now dark tunnel, sitting quietly and looking fearful. I didn't want to use light blobs to write messages as Donna would get curious about the light. I couldn't think of anything I could usefully convey anyway, with either light blob writing or NP-touches, so I left them to it. ^ I feel the need to explain my justifications for having committed murder. The previous times I'd killed - the CIA and DHS people and the LA gang - they'd been bad people; the Fort Dodge people being so monstrous it was hard to think of them as human. I'd had no trouble believing that the world was better off without my victims. Maybe a couple of the gang members might have straightened out in time, but maybe not, and without doubt that group's total contribution to society would have been overall negative. I hadn't gone looking for a gang to kidnap and kill for the direct good of society. That was a side-benefit, and ample reason for killing the Fort Dodge monsters, but not the real reason. My extreme measures, including murder, were because of the following justifications; they are what forced me to kill. There are several justifications. In descending order of importance: I posses a terrible secret. If I am captured again, I know my captors will find me too interesting to ever let go. Sooner or later I'd be induced to reveal the secret of déjà vu merging, which I have absolutely no doubt would destroy human civilization on every w-dimension. I know that at least a few trillion lives would be plunged into terrible misery, and perhaps millions of times more than that. I CANNOT allow myself to be captured! I either have to do everything within my power to avoid that, even including murder if it seems necessary, or I have to kill myself. The following reasons argue against suicide. To put it egotistically: I am special. Prof and Vanessa have many times told me that they expect great things to come from my life. I didn't believe them when they first started saying that, but it's very hard to argue with now, given my current abilities. I hope, and do honestly believe, that the good that I will do will outweigh the bad that's being forced on me. The people I have killed are putting themselves into harm's way by doing wrong. The DHS and CIA people kidnapped and experimented on me, the LA gang chased me into an alley to at least rob me and quite likely worse, and these people are participating in an insanely over-armed military assault on a private home. I know soldiers are allowed to refuse to carry out illegal orders, and I can't believe this assault is right, so they shouldn't be here. I greatly hope that their deaths serve as a deterrent against other similar attempts, as a lesson to the Government to leave us the fuck alone. If we'd just fled somewhere and hidden for a few days, that would have taught the Government very little. It is my sad expectation that only from people being killed will enough pressure be directed at the Government to stop this sort of crap from happening again. I'm no threat to anyone. The DHS didn't kidnap me because they truly suspected that I was a terrorist financier that they had to defend America from; Moran was just curious and abused his power and the law to satisfy his curiosity. There was no need for the CIA to experiment on me, but they abused their power and the law because they were curious. There's no need for the Army to invade my home, because it's not as if I'm invading America and the Army needs to defend our country from me. If everyone left me alone, no one would suffer from my presence, let alone be murdered for it. I fear that if I let the Government get close to us, including by my not being able to hold them back because I committed suicide, then my families' lives could be very much messed up, if not lost. The Government are too fucking nosey and too insane with power. My committing suicide is a viable way of preventing the unimaginably huge tragedy that the first point threatens, but I believe the other points justify my fighting back to the best of my ability. The soldiers participating in this attack may not have known that I am literally fighting for my life, but I am. They are soldiers participating in a military action, and some of them have been killed or injured for it, as predictably happens in situations where one side threatens the other with lethal force. I've got two other reasons. I'm not sure if they have merit, but they are influencing my actions: I don't want to die! Surely I have the right to fight to protect myself? And if our Government has somehow arranged the law so my defending myself against the Government is illegal, then I'm damned well still going to fight to protect myself. I'm angry! I've been put through horrendous things because of the Government's immoral and illegal actions. I'm sorry my anger is being taken out on the almost innocent soldiers, but they are acting as the Government's servants and are probably abusing the law to do so. I regret being forced to kill the soldiers that I did, but am also sorry I didn't have suitable reason or opportunity to get more CIA agents. There may well be honest and good CIA people, but from my experience every one of them that I've met has been an evil fucker that I enjoyed killing. Like I said, I'm angry. Whether or not you agree with my justifications, I have countless trillions of lives in my hands and the only options I can see are to commit suicide or fight back to the best of my ability. I have chosen to live, which means I must fight, and others have made the fight so serious that I've been driven to commit murder. ------- Chapter 319: The Trap Turns on Them Thursday, September 7, 2006 (Continued) The assault on my home had been derailed and there was no immediate sign of it restarting, giving me time. Time was good, because sooner or later other people would start arriving and that would prevent the assholes from using deadly force. I decided I needed to quickly read the contents of the satchel to find out how deadly the Government's plan for my families was. If the orders were deadly, I might have to do something extreme now. If the orders were passive, I could relax. I flew up a couple of thousand feet then used NP-plates to create a big room around myself to keep the wind out. I used NP to take the paperwork out of the satchel and spread it all over the floor so I could read many pages at once. I used NP so I wouldn't leave fingerprints. I'd been holding the satchel with NP for the same reason. Staples were a pain because I would have preferred not to rip the pages off in case the Government claimed a fake page had been inserted. Another pain was that many of the pages were handwritten, but even with those problems, it still only took me a couple of minutes to get a good enough picture of the situation. The CIA's anal compulsion to document everything had laid it all out well. I read about the CIA's request to the NSA to be alerted to internet activity between the Andersons and OSU's online lectures, the NSA spotting it and passing the information on, the planning for the two observation teams and their subsequent report, and the planning for this 'smash-and-grab'. There were four aspects about it that made me particularly happy: The CIA had ordered the internet surveillance in obvious breach of the settlement agreement. That had clearly stated, "surveillance not to be resumed in the absence of unsought reasonable indication of criminal activity postdating the execution of this Agreement." This operation had no deadly intent. Not immediately anyway (see the next point). Presuming Mark had been found, there were several pages of questions the CIA would then ask my families about pretty much everything under the sun. The procedures for those questions were going to embarrass the Government (e.g., "Isolate the children from the parents;" and my particular favorite: "The possibility that the subjects might have been mind controlled by Mark Anderson may require the application of extreme interrogative techniques to break any conditioning they are under.") Some of the contingency plans (for example, if we fought back, or if biological warfare agents were released) made for horrific reading, so were sure to embarrass the Government even further. I quickly stuffed everything back into the satchel. I'd been sneaking quick glances down to make sure nothing bad (or badder) was happening, but it wasn't. The machinegun tracers hadn't caused Mark's Wing to catch fire, and with their leadership down, none of the soldiers were initiating anything new. [[The Rangers were under orders not to advance onto the property, other than to take down our security guards, unless we fought back or some other unlikely contingencies it's not worth listing. The "stay out" order was overridden by the need to render aid to the crash victims, but other than that necessity, the Rangers kept to the spirit of the order.]] Then I saw something I was hoping to see, two sets of flashing police lights tearing down Peoria Road toward this clusterfuck. I quickly put the documents together and back in the satchel (with thirty two minds directing many individual NP-fingertips, "quickly" is VERY fast), canceled the NP-room and started dropping to an altitude of five hundred feet. I heard an explanation for why everyone had run away from the wrecks a minute ago, the machinegun ammunition was exploding in the fires. It sounded like there was a war going on. (When I want NP-plates to join, they join so well their edges merge. I never get drafts through my flying sled's base or windshield, and the wind-proof box I'd just canceled had been airtight, so soundproof as well.) [[The immediately preceding explanation for the NP-box being soundproof is a poor one. My excuse is that I had so much going on at the time that I didn't make the effort to think about it properly. I didn't think about it much thereafter either, because I'd already decided that airtight meant soundproof (during this autobiography I generally give my thinking at the time, even if it's wrong. You'll notice that my wrong thinking about this issue persists). The more thoughtful of you will have realized that just being airtight doesn't provide perfect insulation from sound. An airtight box made out of glass, for example, will certainly reduce the sound level therein, but loud sounds will still vibrate the glass, transmitting the sound to the box's occupant. I had heard nothing while I was in the box because it was both airtight and composed of a zero-mass forcefield (NP-points are a forcefield). Double-paned glass windows insulate sound much better than single-paned glass windows even if the single pane is as thick as the two panes combined, because the 'dead' space between the double panes decouples the vibration paths. When the 'dead' space is a perfect vacuum (which NP-points are, having no mass) the decoupling is perfect. The sound waves could not vibrate individual molecules in my box's surface because it didn't have molecules, so for sound to be transmitted the sound waves had to vibrate the entire surface of the box. The internal structural strength of each NP-square, plus the additional structural strength conferred by the panels being formed into a rigid box, was greater than the force exerted by the sound waves so the panels greatly resisted being vibrated, thereby providing almost perfect sound insulation.]] I watched as the cops braked to a halt when they saw a dozen highly armed soldiers in the road. The soldiers had nothing to fear from the cops - not militaristically or in any other sense as the soldiers believed they were doing a lawful, good deed - so a 1st Lieutenant and private jogged up the road to the nervous looking cops. Given the amount of apparent gunfire they could hear, from the erratic sound of machinegun rounds cooking-off, it was no wonder the cops were nervous. I couldn't hear their conversation, but it came out afterward that the soldiers had said their commanding officer was dead, and asked the cops to send for some ambulances to help out the Ranger's medicos, while they [the Rangers] got back to the job of surrounding the property so the terrorist couldn't get away. [[The CIA hadn't actually said the target of the operation was a terrorist, instead using phrases like, "highest priority acquisition." Everyone had heard "terrorist" though, just like they were meant to.]] "What terrorist? What property? Surely you can't be talking about the Andersons?" "We don't know their names. That place over there," said the soldier, pointing to our place. One of the cops got on their car's radio to call for EVERYBODY to come, telling them to bring help too. This was going to need a LOT more cops, fire trucks and ambulances. Another cop, not believing there was a terrorist hiding inside the Anderson residence, tried to get more information out of the soldiers. A discussion that was interrupted by one of the Hellfire missiles in the northern wreck EXPLODING, taking the second Hellfire with it, and everything else in the area too. The machinegun's rounds' cooking-off had kept everybody away from the wreck so no bad injuries resulted, just some small shrapnel wounds in the arms and legs of the soldiers who hadn't been behind hard cover, sore ears and a fair amount of material damage. Parts of helicopter were blasted in all directions, sending people diving for cover from the shower of metal. Our gate and much of the nearby wall was demolished, and a large crater was created in the middle of our driveway. The nearest trees were flattened and others farther away were stripped of their leaves. The CIA observer across and up the road a little was blown off his branch. He wasn't injured though, and immediately re-climbed his tree. Once the cops had emerged from wherever they'd thrown themselves, they radioed for MORE HELP! The local cops had not signed up for and weren't equipped to be at ground zero in a war. Speaking loudly because their ears weren't working well, the cop's questions about who the terrorist was resumed. All the soldiers knew was, "A white, youthful-looking male." The cop was puzzled, "There aren't any white youthful males living with the Andersons that I'm aware of. Only Steven Anderson who's nearly forty. Is that who you mean?" "We were told he'd look in his early-20s." "There's a Black guy that age: Ron Fisher. Mark would be sixteen, but the whole world would've heard if he was back at home." "Ron Fisher and Mark? Is that Mark Anderson's home? The guy that's been on the news so much because the CIA was experimenting on him?" "Yeah." "There's something fishy about this. This is a CIA operation. They asked the Deltas to do a high-risk extraction of a white, youthful-looking male. There are a couple of agents in an OP near here; let's go have a talk with them." That was pretty much the moment when the military clusterfuck turned into a public relations and legal clusterfuck. Two of the cops went with the two soldiers, the other car's cops staying at their car so they could call for even more help. When they found the agents, the senior cop asked, "What's the name of your target?" "We don't know what name he could be going under at the moment." "What's his birth name?" "I'm not able to answer that." "Get on your radio and ask," suggested the anticipating-being-righteously-pissed-off Lieutenant. "I can't do that without authorization from the Agent-In-Charge, who's dead." "Give me your radio," demanded the cop. "I can't do that either," replied the CIA agent. Three equally helpful answers later, the cop had had enough. The cops in Corvallis, like everyone else in the town, think the Andersons are wonderful people. After the recent publicity, pretty much everyone in the world knew the CIA was a criminal asshole agency which had already illegally and immorally attacked Mark Anderson once. And the cop didn't for a second believe there was a terrorist hiding inside the Anderson's residence. Apart from anything else, the DHS had already played the "Mark Anderson is financing terrorists" card and it'd been shown to be a transparent lie. It'd lost its ability to inspire any cooperation at all. The cop pulled out his gun, aimed it at the agents and told them, "You're under arrest." "Don't be stupid. We're in the middle of an important operation." The cop's partner and the two soldiers raised their weapons to back up the first cop. The Lieutenant got on his radio and called for reinforcements from his platoon. The two CIA agents were soon cuffed, frisked and under guard. Looking down from above, it made my day. The cop used the CIA agents' radio to identify himself to whomever was on the other end, and to ask questions, but that person wasn't at liberty to divulge secret information. The lieutenant was no longer anticipating being righteously pissed off; he was now all the way there. He believed the Rangers had been used by the CIA to continue their illegal dirty work, which had caused the death of the company's major as well as the four SOAR pilots; guys he knew because they often trained together. He got on his radio and told the Looey for the southern wall's platoon to detain the two CIA agents in the southern OP. "They're already leaving." "Stop them! This is Mark Anderson's home; the boy the CIA kidnapped and experimented on in Fort Dodge. This is nothing to do with terrorists - we've been used!" "We're on it!" A platoon of heavily armed and highly pissed off Rangers (their major had been killed) can be very effective at getting people to stop. The CIA head office radioed the transport chopper that was waiting to be called in, telling them to return to base. I didn't see the southern CIA agents being captured, as I was too busy watching the scene at the north end of our property. It was only about three minutes since the first cops had arrived, but pretty much every emergency vehicle in Corvallis was on Peoria Road now. Everyone in the neighborhood had been on the phone to 9-1-1, so the local authorities knew it was a major incident. The reports of the first cops to arrive had escalated the situation to whatever the category about four levels above "major incident" was. The newly arrived paramedics were being directed by the Rangers to where their two medics were working on the Deltas. All the Deltas had at least one broken bone, and some of them were considerably worse off than that. Nothing immediately life threatening, but fucked-up spines are very bad news. They had to be stretchered to ambulances for rides to the hospital, after being de-weaponed by the Rangers (hospitals tend to frown on patients having grenades hanging off their belts). The exploding Hellfires had solved the cooking-off problem for the northern wreck as there wasn't a northern wreck anymore; it'd been blasted apart and spread over a square mile of Linn County (seriously! There's a shit load of explosives in two Hellfires). Helicopters are jokingly referred to as "A collection of spare parts flying in loose formation" (Ava's and my fixed-wing flight-training friends often said that in reference to the helicopter training that was also done out of Corvallis's airfield). For the northern helicopter, the collection of spare parts was now VERY loose and its flying days were over. The front of the property was approachable now, which let the fire department get to work putting out the fires caused and spread by the explosion. It was the driest time of the year and there's a lot of vegetation in our general area, so dousing the fires quickly was important. The southern wreck was unapproachable because the machinegun's ammunition was still exploding (the internal pod that carried the LONG belt of ammo had burst open during the crash so there was ammo all over the place). A fire truck drove across the neighbor's property to park behind the wall near the fire, to spray water over the wall into the wreck. The neighbors have a nice but very orderly and fussy garden, so they were going to be pissed off by having a fire truck drive through half of it. A lot more police were arriving, mostly going for crowd control because the public were starting to arrive too. When the senior cop had been briefed, he and the sergeant who'd first arrived took it upon themselves to hurry down the drive to our house. That was my cue to contact my family. To be complete, I'll mention that the attitude of the Rangers had clearly changed considerably. Many of them now had their weapons over their shoulders or put away in the cases of the larger weapons. They weren't looking at our two homes with anything other than occasional curiosity. They'd effectively stood themselves down, but stayed to render aid and because they had no orders to do otherwise. They were probably curious to see what happened next. The Rangers near our security guards asked them to confirm that this was the Andersons, and whether Mark Anderson was at home. The security guards answered, although they weren't impressed by Military Intelligence. Our guards' answers were circulated. The Rangers weren't impressed by CIA honesty. I flew to about 350 feet above my home, then looked inside the tunnel. Everyone was present and accounted for. There was no way of communicating with them without Donna seeing it, so I moved my sight blob up into the space just above the ceiling panel, dialed the blob to emit the same shade of blue as the Boss Blob uses when he visits the family (I'll call it "medium-blue"; my apologies to any female readers), and had it descend into the tunnel. It instantly had all their attentions. I got it to eject lots of little yellow blobs, which is the color it normally uses to inspect Donna with. They moved to spell out "HELLO". It waited a second, then the yellow blobs rearranged themselves to say, "FRIENDS" (that required the Boss to eject a few more yellow blobs). Pause, then "OF MARK." I hadn't been able to tell whether my families had heard the crashes, gun fire or the explosion, but they'd certainly looked worried enough that I suspected they had. [They had. The tunnel's lower door let out next to my study, only fifty yards from where the machinegun's bullets were going off. They'd felt the Hellfires' explosion too, which had worried them even further because it'd been a BIG explosion.] My Boss Blob's appearance had immediately cheered everybody up, except for Donna who didn't know that it meant I was alive and nearby. My families were clearly still worried, but most of their worst fears no longer applied. "HE ASK ME", "TELL YOU", "IS OVER.", "IS OK." There were a few weak smiles. "SOLDIERS", "ATTACK", "STOPPED." "POLICE," "FIRE, AMBU", "HERE." "2 POLICE", "COMING", "TO FRONT", "DOOR SOON." "GUESS TO", "SEARCH", "FOR U." "U STAY HERE", "FOR NOW." "I LOOK MORE", "BACK SOON." The yellow blobs flew into the Boss Blob and canceled, then the Boss Blob flew into the ceiling of the tunnel. I moved the now-invisible sight blob away to check on developments for the minute I'd been busy. It takes about a minute to walk to the house from where the gate used to be (considerably less than a minute from where the biggest piece of the gate is now). One of the cops had a flashlight going, so my own eyes had seen that they were walking up the stairs from the driveway to the top of the mound. I took the time to have a look around at all the soldiers to make sure that they were still relaxed before I let anyone into the house. Once some people got in, more probably would, and my ability to control things would be lost. I flew my sight blob around the perimeter of our property, relieved to see that the Rangers were in the process of releasing one of the pairs of guards, and I loved seeing that the other CIA observation team were plastic cuffed and lying face down in the field with soldiers standing around them, with weapons aimed at the assholes. That was a marvelous indication. It was also great to see that there were no longer any soldiers aiming their weapons at my home with their fingers on the triggers. They were either helping the injured or standing in clumps talking. I had a look at the west wall of Mark's Wing. The machinegun had fired for only about a second, but there were DOZENS of holes in the wall. It was a far bigger mess than I'd hoped for back when I'd intended to shoot for two or three seconds. The machinegun I'd fired had been a seriously impressive weapon. [[4,000 rounds per minute. You don't want to be in front of one of them, especially if you're the size of a wall.]] There was a great deal of activity on the road in front of our place. The police were trying to keep the public back while most of the public were doing their best to get closer. Many of the kids were running around hunting for pieces of helicopter, and were trying to get past the cops to grab the pieces they could see inside the Keep Out zone. It was the sort of bedlam that I find very reassuring. The two cops were banging on the door trying to get someone to open it. I doubted my families could hear it from the middle of the tunnel. Our burglar alarm siren was still wailing too, although the machinegun bullets cooking-off had just stopped because of the water poured over the wall and onto that wreck. I wanted my families to be cowering in terror when they were discovered, to maximize the PR and lawsuit value - the former being much more important as it should stop the Government from attacking us again. That meant my families had to move into the games room because the cops would never find how to open the tunnel's secret door. I moved my sight blob back to the tunnel, pretending to be a Boss Blob alien while telling them my plan that they move to the games room. I included, "MARK HAS", "CIA FILE", "FOR ATTACK", "PROVES OSU", "AND CEREAL." "MARK SAY", "U PRETEND", "TERRIFIED", "IN GAME RM", "TO SUE", "THEIR ASS." I lit the way for everyone to relocate to the games room, where my parents started piling up sofas and chairs at the end of the room opposite the stairs, as a natural place for them to make their apparent final last stand. I left a radiating light blob next to them so they could see what they were doing, while I used my eyes and a sight blob to check what else was going on. The cops had given up waiting for their door knocking to be responded to, and were about to enter through one of our many shattered windows. They were just clearing the jagged shards out of it before stepping through. The soldiers, emergency workers and public were doing the same as they had been doing before; more so in the public's case. The two cops entered the house and started searching. The Police Chief had been in our home before - representatives of all the major beneficiaries to our settlement contract had visited to thank us - so he knew the layout of the place fairly well. When his yells weren't answered, he intelligently headed downstairs to our rumpus room. I alerted my family as the cops were about to come down the stairs. I couldn't hear a thing, but they enjoyed telling me afterward that the females were all bawling their eyes out begging not to be killed, Prof and Dad were standing valiantly, sheltering the girls and holding pool cues menacingly. None of them had any problem acting terrified as they just had to remember how they'd felt a few minutes earlier. Almost no acting was required though, because the only light was the single flashlight from across the long room, and the cops - having seen the armed force and mess outside - were only too willing to believe my families were terrified. The cops immediately went into Reassurance Mode, insisting that it was all over, that my families were safe, etc. It took a while, but they were eventually able to convince my families that they weren't about to be slaughtered. ^ There were really only three things that happened in the next half an hour that mattered. The first was the cops explained what had happened and that this had been because the CIA had thought Mark was here. The parents pretended to be incredulous for several seconds, until Mom exclaimed, "Ahh! It'll be the breakfast bowl!" "Pardon?" asked the cop, not quite seeing the connection between "the breakfast bowl" and World War III. [[Although there once was a war between two neighboring city states that started in part because of a bucket, which the victors proudly kept, such is human nature (google "war of oaken bucket").]] Mom explained, "The settlement agreement we signed with the Government to drop our lawsuit absolutely prohibited them from spying on us. We just wanted to be left alone after all the trouble they've caused. Yesterday morning I had the bright idea of checking to see if they were honest. I took a bowl of cereal to Mark's study and left it there. Ten minutes later I went back, emptied it into the study's trash bin, then brought the empty bowl back. They must've been spying on us and decided Mark was here, so they sent the Army to attack us." "What! All this for a bowl of cereal!" "Insane, isn't it?" While they'd been sitting in the tunnel, the parents had decided to use only the cereal explanation rather than Logan's program. It was simple and made the Government look REALLY stupid. No doubt the OSU lectures issue would come out sooner or later, but it was the first day's news coverage that mattered the most. ^ The second event of importance was several minutes later. When the cops felt the families were calm enough, the senior one said, "We don't have a search warrant, but it would be good if you allowed your house to be searched for Mark, so there's no doubt that he's not here." "Good idea," agreed all the parents. The head cop said, "We could do the search, but to avoid accusations that we might've been protecting you, it'd be better if a few of the soldiers accompanied us." The cop rushed on with reassurances about the soldiers being safe now, that they were angry at the CIA for being tricked, etc. Mom said, "That's fine. Not many of them and no guns. They don't need guns to search and I don't trust them." That might not have been part of Mom's "act terrified" role. "I'm sure that'll be fine." When the time came for the six selected Rangers to search the house, Mom met them at the door and saw their dirty boots. She told them to take them off. I imagine that was the first time in the history of the 75th Rangers that they stormed an objective without their guns and in their socks because the mother of the objective told them to. I was watching them search, as were some of the parents. When they got to the games room, I saw they knew about the tunnel and wanted Dad to open it. I used NP to move Dad's hand to the wrong place while I NP-pushed the button myself. The search for me turned up empty, of course, but it did find a SERIOUSLY shot-to-shit living room and kitchen at the end of my wing. I'd expected a few bullet holes on the outside wall, but there were far more bullet holes than I'd expected, and the bullets had penetrated straight through the wall and had made a VERY spectacular mess of the inside of my home. The bullet-ridden rooms and the crater in our driveway were going to make for GREAT TV. ^ The third interesting development was a short one. When Vanessa learned that the four CIA agents were being held by the Rangers, she told the cops, "Arrest them for something to keep them under lock and key. They lied to the Army to get them to launch an armed attack on an innocent family as part of some sort of CIA delusional vendetta. I can't imagine what the final charges will be, but they must be serious." The cop got onto his radio to get advice from his bosses on what to arrest the CIA agents for. ^ There were many minor events, like Donna running outside to check on Penelope and Patch, who were fine. The Rangers were amused, ashamed and angered by Donna's action, an unusual combination of emotions. They'd attacked an innocent, ordinary family, and could well have used overwhelming force to destroy them all. Not as important as Donna's horses' well-being (in Donna's opinion), the Army reconnected our phone and power, and turned off their cellphone jammer. When the public learned why their cellphones suddenly started working again, they were VERY irate at the Army. It was one thing to drop bombs on the Andersons (most of the public thought the crater in our driveway was caused by a bomb), but an entirely different thing to take away the public's God-given right to make cellphone calls. The media started arriving. First the local media, who wet themselves with excitement - it was the BEST day of their lives! Then droves more of them. I was driven away by more and more helicopters arriving. I hoped they are careful, because helicopters have been known to collide. My last act of the night was to fly over a couple of farmhouses until I located the ingredients I wanted. I made a couple of Molotov cocktails, wiping any fingerprints off the bottles with the rags first. I went back to the Army's southern parking area. All the Rangers had stood down after the search for Mark had come up empty, but had been told not to leave the area. The guards around the trucks had relaxed and weren't doing a good job of guarding, because someone could sneak within throwing range. No one did (I was three hundred feet up in the air at the time), but it was still important that someone could, otherwise what I did wouldn't have been plausible. The two Molotov's 'sneaked up' all by themselves, and when they were in a good position, I lit the fuses and 'threw' them at two trucks. I didn't actually throw them, in reality flying them in a parabola with NP, making them look convincing for when the soldiers caught sight of them. The bottles smashed on impact with each of the two trucks (what a surprise), and the fire spread very rapidly (another big surprise). I got driven out of the area by the media helicopters coming to investigate the fire. I flew to The Boys' home shortly after 4am, being extra careful in case the area was staked out by any of the media, but it wasn't. I landed nearby, took my ski mask off, held the satchel under my arm with its being fully contained with a thin NP-box to prevent my leaving evidence of myself on it, and I walked down the street to the house. The Boys and their girlfriends were up and came running to the door when they heard me let myself in. They started telling me about the attack, but I interrupted with, "Yeah, I know. Everything's fine. Andrew, can I have a talk with you in Julia's bedroom please?" "Ahh, sure." Sophia was curious, but I walked upstairs without answering her questions. Andrew followed. In the bedroom, I shut the door behind him then dropped the satchel on the bed. I said, "That satchel contains all the CIA's plans for the attack on our house. The CIA boss who was in charge of the attack had it with him but he died tonight when one of the helicopters crashed on top of him." I could see Andrew thinking about asking questions, but he decided to let it pass as I carried on. "I want to give it to Prof and Vanessa as soon as possible, preferably while there are cops around so it'll appear legitimate and so no one can claim it was a fake. I don't want to give it to him myself because I have to keep a very low profile. What I want is for you and Robert to drive there now. You'll have to walk a long way because the road's blocked. When you arrive in the house, tell everyone that someone on the road recognized you and gave it to you to deliver to your parents. The only tricky thing is you'll have to lie if cops or anyone asks you afterward who gave it to you. Say it was too chaotic, you didn't notice. Okay?" "Sure. I bet there's an interesting story behind how you got hold of it?" "I was in the right place at the right time." I started getting changed out of my black clothes into jeans and a white sweater, to look non-sneaky, while asking, "I'm surprised you haven't rushed to check on your family?" "Mom and Dad were very insistent that we stay. I think to wait for you, although they didn't mention you specifically. Probably worried about bugs, I guess." [Prof and Vanessa had been worried that I might need some sort of help when I got back to the house. Maybe someone to establish an alibi for me, or whatever. Plus there was no real need for The Boys to rush to the mansion, as everyone in my families were okay.] "How about you call them now and tell them the five of us want to come. Don't mention the satchel yet, of course." "Okay. I'll call them now." Andrew stood to leave the room. I added, "Get a coat for yourself that you can use to cover the satchel when you carry it, so people won't see you have it with you when you exit the car. You'll have to tell the others to forget they've ever seen it too." "Will do." Andrew left and I finished dressing. Then I held up the satchel with NP and moved a few heat blobs close to one side of it, until the leather started scorching. That'd make it look more like it'd been blown away from the scene by the explosion. That done I grabbed my keys, wallet and phone, then went downstairs. I handed Andrew the satchel, which the others all looked at with curiosity. I ignored them. I had no idea what The Boys would tell their girlfriends, but that was their problem. Sophia and Ashley seemed good people - Vanessa and Prof thought so too, which was enough of a recommendation for me - so they should be okay to trust with this minor secret. I took my car because I wanted to arrive several minutes after the others to avoid any connection with the satchel. When I FINALLY got through all the crowds and into my home, Prof was already photocopying the documents, while the Police Chief was reading the pages as they came off. I said, "I take a few days off and look at the trouble you git into wit'out me. Everyone's okay?" "Yeah, we're all good, thanks to a lucky helicopter malfunction. Wait until you read these documents; they'll amaze you." "What are they?" "The CIA's spying on us and then their plan to attack this house." "I thought it was the Army?" "The CIA put them up to it." "Bastards!" "Yeah," Prof and the Chief agreed. [Prof had asked the Police Chief to be with him when he opened the satchel and photocopied it. From my light blob messages in the tunnel, Prof knew what was in it and wanted to legitimize it. He also asked the Chief to keep its existence quiet for a day or so, to see if the CIA would hang itself first. Given the standing we had in our local community, and the standing the CIA did not have, the Chief had readily agreed.] "I better find Carol and the others." "They're in Mark's Wing, looking at the damage to the living room and kitchen." "The CIA damaged your house?" "The Army did, yes. It's a big mess. You'll see for yourself. Don't use the tunnel, there are too many people around." "Okay. I hope you nail the bastards to the wall." Prof and the cop both thought the bastards were going to be nailed very effectively to the wall. In my partly destroyed living room, after the girls had rushed to hug me, a very anguished Julia pointed to the riddled western wall and the bullet damage to the rest of the room, crying, "Look what they did to our home!" "The BASTARDS!" I condemned. ------- Chapter 320: The Second Settlement Thursday, September 7 (Continued) to Saturday, September 30, 2006 The initial media coverage was excited, uninformed reporting of what they could see, but it only took the reporters a few minutes to learn the essential facts. All the Rangers and cops knew the situation, and they hadn't been too concerned about protecting the CIA. Somewhat the reverse, actually. So from breakfast time on the east coast, and through the nation's breakfasts as each time zone got up, America learned that, "Early this morning, the CIA duped Delta Force and a company of the 75th Rangers into launching a deadly, unprovoked military assault on the family residence of Felicity and Steven Anderson, Vanessa and Archibald Williams, and their three daughters; claiming it was to capture a highly dangerous terrorist. It seems the CIA thought Mark Anderson was living with his family, and they tricked the Army into using deadly force to recapture him. -- "The assault was aborted when the two helicopters that the Delta Force soldiers were to hot-rope from collided, killing the four pilots and three people on the ground. The Delta team members onboard suffered extensive injuries but no fatalities from their falls. It's too soon to be sure, but it seems the CIA has committed an appalling act of deception and violence upon two families that have suffered so much already..." Pictures of the huge crater in our driveway and the wrecked wall and gate told a graphic tale of how much explosive power had been ready to be used against us, but the best pictures were of all the bullet damage inside my living room and kitchen. The bastards had strafed a private home, and would likely have killed anyone inside those rooms. The Anderson and Williams families had been cowering inoffensively in their rumpus room the whole time, so the strafing had been totally unprovoked! The network commentators were outraged that such a thing had happened. It was extremely biased, one-sided reporting. Yay! Not long after that, the parents and girls gave an interview playing up how TERRIFIED they'd been. Mom saying, "We KNEW we were going to die. There were dozens of soldiers all around our property, helicopters flying overhead, loud explosions and machinegun fire. We were praying our hearts out, bawling and telling ourselves how much we loved each other. It was the most terrible time of our lives. We knew soldiers were going to burst into the room any moment and spray us all with bullets. How can parents protect their children when the Government sends the Army to attack? We were helpless and terrified." Similar comments were made by everyone else in the families, firmly establishing that they'd been terrified and believed their lives were going to end in bloody violence. The reporters naturally asked, "Why would the CIA think Mark was living here?" "I can explain that," said Mom. "When we agreed to drop our lawsuit, one of the things the Government legally promised to do was to stop spying on us. They had to go away and leave us to get on with our lives and to recover from their kidnapping and killing Mark. Yesterday morning at breakfast time I had a sudden idea of testing them to see whether they were breaking their word by still spying on us. I took a bowl of dry cereal to Mark's old study and emptied it into the trash bin and left the bowl on his desk. Ten minutes later I went back to fetch the empty bowl. -- "I thought they might send us an angry letter demanding to know whether Mark was here, or maybe a couple of agents would knock on the door. Remember that if Mark was alive he'd have immunity under the contract they signed, so he couldn't be arrested for anything, not that he's ever committed a crime. I never expected the CIA would be so criminal as to charge in with half the Army to try to kidnap Mark AGAIN! It was just a bowl of cereal, for goodness sake!" The media laughed at the cereal story and howled about the second kidnapping attempt. It was a GREAT story. Dad said, "If the CIA honestly thought Mark was here, all they had to do was get some of the local cops to come and have a look, not do the criminal things they did. The Government can't stop themselves from being criminals. There are so many criminals in the Government it HAS to be the fault of the asshole in charge." The media also liked the burning trucks sub-story too. The fire made for Great TV: the four soldiers rushing around trying to save their trucks, failing, the fire engulfing both trucks, the burned-out wrecks afterward, and the meaning of it all: the firebombing was interpreted as a protest by the public against the Army's attack on the Andersons. That was a correct interpretation as far as I was concerned, but I'd done it for more than a mere protest. It proved "The Public" was on the side of the Andersons, to serve as a warning that "The American People" weren't going to stand for the Government's mistreatment of my families. The politicians should hopefully realize that they shouldn't mess with us because The Public wouldn't stand for it. My firebombing attack also meant that if there is ever another fiasco like this one, my stealing some guns and shooting the attackers might plausibly be seen as an act of The Public. Most of the TV commentaries about the trucks being burned were positive. The talking-heads all went "tsk, tsk" (or words to that effect) over the idea of people throwing fire bombs, but they also made comments like, "The Andersons are very popular in their community after having so generously included 80,000 of them in their lawsuit's settlement. The Anderson's original request was that their community be given three times as much as the Anderson's were asking for themselves, so it's little wonder that the public chose to express their outrage in this way. Shameful, but understandable." ^ The CIA was in deep shit and under pressure: The Ranger and Delta commanders were only too happy to say they'd been asked to do the illegal kidnapping job by the CIA. Four CIA observation team members were in custody, with their IDs clearly identifying them as CIA. They were saying "no comment" to everything, which wasn't doing anything to help the CIA's public relations image. Senior Democrat politicians, and some Republican ones (those with eyes to their long-term political survival), were baying for a full investigation into the CIA's practices and for heads to roll, not necessarily in that order. The media was having a field day castigating, ridiculing and abusing the CIA. As I had known it would, the seven deaths had considerably upped the stakes for the incident. No one could say, "Oh well, no harm done," then walk away. That the pilots had been innocent dupes added to the public outrage at the CIA. The file's talking about using extreme interrogative techniques on children didn't do the CIA any favors either. The White House was LIVID. Mom and Dad had quickly gone on TV to state that, "The Government breached the terms of our settlement agreement. That means they're put back on the list of defendants for our $242 trillion lawsuit. We will also be filing suit against the CIA for their arranging the military assault on our home and for attempted kidnapping. In addition, if Majestic Countdown is listening, would he or she please try to uncover more of the dishonest dealings of this Administration. They need to be taught a lesson about honesty and integrity." The Majestic Countdown appeal was broadcast over and over again by all the networks and picked up by all the papers. They wanted to make sure he got the message because he was VERY good for ratings and circulation. The appeal resulted in an immediately flurry of emails to the networks claiming to be from Majestic Countdown, the vast majority of which were obviously not because their tones were very different from the previous emails. Regardless of their source, a couple of the emails were interesting and did make for pretty reasonable TV later. We were new to the leak business, and didn't realize the need to set up an authentication code. We did realize it after the networks reported getting so many fakes. Mom and Dad's comment about the lawsuit restarting resulted in a panic among many Benton County residents, fearful that the settlement agreement's being "canceled" (they thought), meant they had to give their $25,000 back. Many of them were no longer in a position where they could do that. People being people, that worry persisted for many days despite reassurances that the money couldn't be claimed back. A lot of them who had previously been saving their money decided to spend it REALLY quickly instead, to play safe. The White House hated the idea of having the Federal Government put back on the list of defendants for our huge lawsuit, but the settlement agreement was clear that Mom and Dad had the right to do so if the Government breached any of the terms, so to stop itself from being roped back into the lawsuit, the Government had to claim it hadn't breached anything. There was no arguing with the reality of what had happened, and there was no arguing with the fact that the Army was an agent of the Government (using "agent" in the legal sense here, meaning "someone who acts for". The Army definitely acts for the Government. They're legally prohibited from acting for anyone else). But if the Government could prove that the Army had been duped into acting for someone not-the-Government, then it might be able to get a court to rule that there'd been no intentional breach, and therefore no legal breach. So the Government pressured the CIA to make the whole fiasco unofficial. That suited the CIA, because it'd been thinking of doing that anyway. Certainly no one wanted to take responsibility for it. In the afternoon, the CIA came out and said, "The operation was the result of one man's delusion. He was acting unofficially and on his own authority. It was not a CIA operation, but a misuse of CIA resources. If he hadn't been killed by the helicopter crashing on him, we'd be taking legal action against him." The parents waited long enough for a White House spokesperson to confirm that they were also blaming a solo renegade, then they sent copies of the satchel's file to all the usual media. Two facts killed the CIA's stupid excuse: The NSA had participated, so the Army, CIA and NSA were all involved. That was too many government organizations for it not to be a government operation. The file mentioned the active involvement of LOTS of CIA people, some of whom were at levels higher than the scapegoat (who'd already been scraped off our driveway). The top named guy was Associate Director for Military Support (AD/MS), who reports to the Director. Something that involved so many people and went all the way up to the second tier of management was NOT the work of a solo delusional. The CIA had assumed the file had been destroyed under the chopper by the fire and Hellfire explosion. They were horrified that it was perfectly intact. Prof had put a covering letter with the media release, saying, "A member of the public found it some distance away shortly after explosion at the front of our home, and handed it to us. We opened it in the presence of a senior member of the Corvallis police force about three hours after the military attack started. There was no time for anyone to invent the hundreds of verifiable details, so it is authentic." The CIA was VERY eager to get the file back as some of the handwritten pages were the originals and could be used to discover the otherwise unnamed identities of some senior authors, who were staring down the barrels of possible criminal convictions, a threat that Vanessa was trumpeting very loudly. One of her long-term tactics is to get criminal prosecutions taken against Government employees who break the law, and she wanted everyone to know it. Prosecuting government criminals was why the +50%-on-sentences law had been passed. The CIA tried to get an urgent court order for the file's return, but they just made fools of themselves. Prof had not released the file until the CIA had publicly declared that the operation was totally unofficial, therefore the file about the operation couldn't be an official secret. The judge said he would not rule on the return of the file until after the legality of the operation had been determined. If it was an illegal operation, its paperwork would not be protected. With a smile on his face, the judge ordered Prof to keep the original file safe until such time as the judge made his ruling. Prof happily agreed. Not only had the file ruined the CIA's stupid excuse, but it also very clearly stated that the NSA had been checking our internet activity and that the CIA had posted two surveillance teams to spy on us, both of which couldn't have been clearer breaches of the settlement agreement. There was no possibility of their claiming a crime was being investigated because the file made it very clear that the purpose of getting hold of Mark Anderson was to interrogate him about the Fort Dodge events. There was no mention of any crime, and anything to do with Fort Dodge can't have been considered my committing a crime because I'd been given immunity for all my past activities. The most the CIA could have legally done, had they accidentally stumbled on the fact that Mark was home, was send him a letter politely asking him if he'd tell them what he'd been up to. They'd overshot badly. It was now only a month to the $242 trillion lawsuit's court date. There was no chance of our losing it, as the Government had already admitted that Mark had been kidnapped in breach of his Fourth Amendment rights. The President had even publicly apologized for the errors in judgment of the DHS and CIA agents involved. The only issue with the trial was over the amount of damages. The Government (as represented by the CIA, NSA and Army) had just proved themselves yet again to be willing to commit crimes, and the Federal Government had proved itself willing to lie about it, so everyone expected the jury to not only have less than zero sympathy for the Government's position, but be positively eager to punish it as much as possible. By the way, the Army had committed crimes too. They were duped into them, but that was not a sufficient excuse. They had what is legally known as "a duty of care," and they'd failed to take sufficient care. They had, for example, taken the CIA's word that this situation was one where "time was of the essence", permitting arrest before a warrant was obtained, even though there'd been a whole day in which to obtain a warrant. We filed suit against the NSA and its sole named employee for breaching our Fourth Amendment rights (their monitoring our internet traffic was also protected by the very useful Fourth), but we hadn't yet decided whether to legally attack the Army. We should, as Vanessa's tactic was to punish every Government employee who broke the law. That why she'd formed the Mark Anderson Foundation, and her motivation certainly still applied when we were the victims. If enough Government-employed criminal were tried and convicted, or civilly sued for large enough sums, then other Government employees would think twice before breaking the law. Even if only 10% of Government employees could be made honest enough to whistle blow, then many more dishonest schemes would be uncovered, and more employees would be scared into being honest. If the 10% became 20%, that'd then become 40%, etc. There'd be an outbreak of morality, and it'd be that much harder for anyone to conspire to be dishonest. The whole honesty concept might snowball, hopefully rolling upward to where it was most needed. However, the parents were reluctant to file suit against the Army. It had been duped, whereas the CIA and NSA had willingly broken laws. The Army did generally try to be held reasonably accountable for its actions. It wasn't perfect - the Pat Tillman fratricide cover-up being a disgusting example of multilevel accountability failures within the 75th Rangers - but it mostly did try to do the right thing. Whereas the CIA, NSA, DHS and Federal Government all insisted on being unaccountable, both organizationally and personally, and they'd lie about it ten different ways from Sunday even in circumstances where everyone knew they were lying. They didn't care about being known as liars, just so long as they kept their power. The Army was, legally speaking, on thin ice because of the aid it'd provided the CIA. It is generally against the law for the military to act so unilaterally in a civil matter because of a law called the "Posse Comitatus Act". That prohibits the military from being used to enforce the law within America. However, there's also the "Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act", which obviously allows the exact opposite, but only in specific instances. Initially that was drug interdiction, but terrorism is such a popular catch-cry these days that it's been added to the list of acceptable causes. The trouble for the Army was that there had been no terrorists at our home and the Army hadn't taken sufficient care to make sure there were before proceeding with its assault. If its actions were found in court not to be covered by the Military Cooperation Act then the Army would go from "thin ice" to "deep shit". That we chose not to sue the Army saved it from that legal risk. Theoretically the Government itself could have, and even should have, pursued that legal point to its resolution, but that was never going to happen. The Government has recently been increasing the civil power of the armed forces, so certainly wasn't going to create a reason to restrain them. ^ [To jump ahead a little. The Army learned from their mistake - trusting the CIA - and they were willing to be held accountable for their assault on our home, so Vanessa ended up doing a deal with them. The Army publicly apologized for their illegal attack on our home, and Vanessa sentenced them to "Community Service". She, through the Mark Anderson Foundation, would call on them in cases she thought appropriate for Army help (the whole Army, not just the 75th Rangers, Deltas or 160th SOAR). It might be with transportation, maybe construction, maybe medical - whatever Vanessa called for. She would phone a contact person, tell him what she wanted, and he'd arrange to get it done pronto. The Army had attacked our home with one day's notice, so the rule was that they had to jump to do whatever Vanessa wanted within one day, unless she wasn't in a hurry or there were acceptable extenuating circumstances. When Vanessa decided they'd paid back "enough", she'd tell them their "sentence" had finished. "Enough" was Vanessa's opinion of the damage they'd caused to our home, the terror they'd caused everyone, and the forfeit value of all the vehicles used in the commission of their crime. Given that a Hercules C-130J is worth $66 million new, plus the much cheaper items of the two helicopters, the plane that'd flown the Deltas to Fort Lewis, and the trucks; Vanessa was going to be getting a LOT of service out of the Army. They knew that, and they agreed to it. Going to court would probably cost them more, and they thought Vanessa's idea was a worthwhile one. (The C-130J was actually a USAF plane used because the Rangers had a heavy load, but the plane's ownership was a distinction that made no difference; the Army accepted the extent of their responsibility.) The deal caused a significant amount of public amusement and got us some respect. For the Army too, because Vanessa praised, "The Rangers on the day, up to the Generals that I've dealt with since, all admitted doing wrong the moment it was clear that they had. -- "The Rangers quickly released the private guards we'd hired and helped to secure the CIA spies, including chasing down the two that were trying to run away rather than stay to take responsibility for their actions. None of the Rangers tried to run away. I bet it never occurred to them. Unlike the CIA, the Rangers aren't criminals. -- "The Generals apologized to me the moment they walked in the door. We've spent more time talking about how to prevent such things happening in the future than we have arguing over how they'll make good. They immediately accepted that they had an obligation to do so. -- "It's a pleasure to deal with people who're willing to admit their mistakes and take their lumps for the good of improving the organization they work for. They make a strong moral contrast to the CIA, NSA, DHS and the Bush Administration, who'll lie repeatedly to avoid being held accountable for their actions." Vanessa particularly liked her "community service" sentence as she'll be able to use it to generate good publicity every time she calls the Army in to help the victims of Government abuse.] ^ The CIA's file's disclosure brought the NSA's internet tracking to the public's attention. Previously the NSA's political overlords had admitted that it tracked international internet traffic, but they'd insisted that domestic emails were private. There'd been accusations to the contrary but there'd never been proof, and Bush had gone out of his way to make sure the NSA wouldn't be held accountable by passing laws to keep their activities secret even from Congress. Now there was proof. Only a little tidbit, but OSU to our home was less than five miles so hardly international, and there were clearly no terrorists involved at either end so the NSA had no excuse. That gave various pressure groups more ammunition to use against the NSA and Bush administration, but as far as we were concerned, it only had two effects: making it inarguable that the Government had breached the settlement agreement, and causing us to have to explain why there'd been so much internet traffic during those hours (the released file had details). Prof answered, "The Government has been continually dishonest with us, so none of us trust them. I'd noticed that it was Mark's phenomenal studying that got the DHS particularly interested in him, so I got one of the computer gurus at work to write a tiny little program that opens up a lecture, scrolls down it, then opens another lecture, etc. I started it running on a couple of spare computers we have at home just to see if the DHS would come and grab the computers like they did last time. They'd find the program and be very embarrassed, and we'd have proof that they were breaking the settlement agreement. I didn't realize the NSA was spying on us for the CIA, and that they'd get the Army to invade us. The agencies in our Government are so out of control it's very scary. How did they get so bad that the NSA, CIA and Army so habitually treat the law as if it doesn't matter?" There were some commentators, known Republican Party supporters, who accused us of deliberately entrapping the Government. It was a stupid and thoughtless of them (did I mention that they were Republican Party supporters?), because Prof had prepared for their obvious knee-jerk. He played it out longer, but to summarize the conversation, Prof asked, "You accuse me of entrapment. Define entrapment please?" Commentator, "It's when you trick someone into committing a crime." Prof, "What was my trick?" Commentator, "By running a program that opened up lots of lectures, deliberately making it look like Mark Anderson was on the computer." Prof, "But they had no way of knowing I was running that program unless they were ALREADY committing the crime of illegally monitoring our internet usage, which was also a breach of the settlement agreement they'd signed. How can you say I tricked them if the 'trick' came AFTER the crime? That's as stupid as a burglar trying to get out of being arrested by accusing the burglar alarm of entrapping him." It wasn't a brilliant comeback, requiring people to think, but it was good enough to dismiss the issue. Speaking somewhat about politics, I was doing a lot of reading recently. Mostly late at night on computer systems I had no business using. It was Mom's fault; she'd asked me to. Actually, she'd used the TV networks to ask Majestic Countdown to, but it comes to much the same thing. Majestic Countdown was busy. In my previous leaking forays I'd searched for several nights and emailed just the juiciest scandal, as best I could judge that, so I'd doubtless made mistakes. Then I'd wait for the scandal to die down before repeating the process. These days I was giving them multiple scandals. Three or four scandals one night, wait a few days, then repeat. With computer searches it's amazingly easy to find dirt (you wouldn't believe some of the stuff people leave on computers!). The time-consuming part is choosing what is the best dirt, but I mostly let the networks sort that out. By the way, the first email I sent had an explanatory note, "As requested by the embattled Anderson family, I will be sending multiple leaks. Quality will suffer, but hopefully quantity will compensate. To authenticate, each will be signed with 'Majestic Angel Countdown', then a word that will start with the letter that corresponds with the date, so the 26th of the month will have a word such as 'Zoo' or 'Zulu'. The 27th will restart at 'A', such as 'Alpha' or 'Ankle'." Most of that has an obvious purposes, but to explain the strangest part: I'd inserted the word "Angel" into my name because I'd had an idea for a mind-game. I might never play it, but if I did, it'd be more effective because of the "Angel" preparation. For the first couple of weeks I didn't even have to search for dirt because I already knew where it was: in the files I'd previously found that hadn't quite made the top spot back then. I revisited the same places I'd visited before. If I hadn't emailed anything from them last time, the files were nearly always still there. Places I'd emailed from already had generally tightened up their security, sometimes enough to stop me from getting the file I had in mind, but often not. As requested by Mom, I sent out only those scandalous files that embarrassed - sometimes criminally - the Republican Party or its prominent members. I deliberately sent seven such emails per week (it seemed neat and tidy to me), so in the first two weeks that was fourteen leaks. As it turned out, not all fourteen were considered scandal-worthy. I realized that my bad or poor choices might give away my lack of political acumen, but I couldn't do much about that. I wasn't going to immerse myself in political crap for months just to improve my success rate; I'd just send more emails if necessary. Sending more wasn't necessary. The scandals were coming too thick-and-fast already. From a pageboy who'd sought legal advice about a homosexual senator who was running a stable of little boys for his political friends, through to a timber company doing a backdoor deal to get concessions to fell more trees than they should've been allowed to - there was a log jam of scandals. But even if the TV networks didn't have time to explore them in depth, and the public didn't have time to get their heads around one before the next one started, they still created a HELL of a stink. As a result of my leaks, there were several criminal investigations underway, there were moral groups screaming their heads off (as only moral groups can), the Republicans were running for cover in all directions, while the Democrats were cackling with joy. And the President's lawyers were BEGGING our lawyer for us to settle for a second time. They were trying to maintain their cool, but it was obvious that they were desperate for another settlement. The begging had been going on for over a week, but we were in no hurry as it was good to make a point. We wanted the Government to live in FEAR of messing with us again: fear of the mysterious Majestic Countdown coming down on their asses in retaliation. After the first few scandals broke and the Government's lawyers had started begging, in their lawyerly way, we'd done some of our usual stalling tricks. One of those was to point out through our lawyer that we could hardly negotiate with a government that was still employing all the people named in the CIA file. {Bang}, they were history. Firing the CIA's Associate Director for Military Support made the news, but it was very predictable news. Then we pointed out that Corvallis hadn't received any financial apologies from the President or heads of the CIA or NSA, so obviously they weren't sincere about accepting responsibility for their actions. There wasn't even any debate over whether the President should pay $100,000 (the amount we'd first asked for last time) or $250,000 (the total amount he'd ended up paying). The Prez sent another check for $250,000, with $50,000 from the heads of the CIA and NSA. All three also sent letters to Corvallis, very sincerely apologizing for the failures of their underlings (who said politicians can't be sincere?). By the way, the intent behind the payments was to set some sort of precedent or expectation that the head of an organization was responsible for the deliberate, concerted, illegal actions of his organization. If that concept catches on enough to make the bosses cautious about doing anything illegal, that'll be good for the country. For the whole world actually, given that some of those illegalities are things like creating bioweapons that can wipe out a large proportion of all human life. The arrival of the checks sparked a deluge of excitement from everyone that owned a piece of the last settlement's qualifying earth, over another settlement being in the wind. (A clumsy sentence, but I managed to get all four of the Greek classical elements in there. Sometimes the silliest things amuse me, but you probably know that by now). I also got lots of amusement from the silliness of some of our community's reactions. As per Vanessa's instructions, our lead lawyer waited for the Government's lead lawyer to call, whereupon ours asked theirs, with apparent puzzlement, "Why did the President and directors send checks for those values?" "Because that's what your clients wanted last time." "Which proved to be inadequate at restraining your client." "You want MORE?" "Clearly the last settlement's provisions were inadequate." "What do you want? Double? Triple?" "If your wife and children were illegally attacked in their beds in the middle of the night by helicopter rocket gunships and a company of machinegun and mortar armed Rangers and Delta Force, by a Government that had already contractually promised to leave you alone, how much of an increase would you think was justified?" "I'll convey your point to my client." The Prez and his cronies decided that double was a reasonable increase, so they sent a repeat of their checks to Corvallis. (We're on nickname terms now. We sometimes call him "The Prez", and he always calls us names too.) The arrival of the duplicate checks tripled my amusement at our community's rich variety of silly responses. People who'd complained about missing out on their 'entitlement' last time were screaming for attention to avoid unfairly missing out this time (we had to employ even more guards), the local car lots were doing wonderful business, and property prices were going through the roof, rising considerably more than double the previous per-property payment. We could have taken the Government to court, as the court case against the hundred individual defendants was happening anyway and our lawyers had already done most of the work required to attack the 101st and 102nd defendants (the DHS and CIA), but it wasn't as if we actually needed any more money. Settling was better as it got the Government out of the way. The other defendants had fewer excuses they could try to pull - the Government could try to claim "For the good of the nation", "National security", and other crap - so our case would be much easier just against individuals. We ended up settling with the Federal Government for double what we had last time, plus several minor additions. The old provisions doubled were: MAF got another $30 billion, and Vanessa got the problem of what to do with far more money than MAF could ever conceivably use. Benton County got $2 billion. SE Peoria Road property owners got $200,000, cumulative with the next point. Linn County property owners within five miles of the Corvallis bridges got $50,000. The Family got a total of $3 billion ($250 million each). The non-Army vehicles used were forfeited (which was just one CIA car, out of principle). Logan, OSU's computer techo guy, got $100,000 (for writing his trick program for us. Not bad for a couple of hours work). Plus all the non-monetary provisions were repeated: destruction of all DHS, CIA, NSA, etc., records about us, freedom from investigation into past activities, freedom from future investigation unless there's reasonable prior evidence of our doing something criminal, and immunity for all crimes up to the date of execution of the settlement. The prosecution of every non-Army individual identified as having committed a crime (quite a few CIA people and the NSA employee). The Benton County payment wasn't to be paid out as before. Instead, there was to be a referendum for the preferred way of disbursing the money. We had three conditions: every recipient was to get the same amount, the recipients had to be eighteen or older, and at least 80% of the money had to be paid out. We would've required it to be all paid out but the city councils were probably better stewards of some people's money than the people themselves. It'd be best to let the councils remain awash with money so they wouldn't need to tax anyone for several years. Extra terms included payments to several other groups. They totaled only a few million, but they were worth far more in PR. House owners within 1 mile of us got an additional $25,000 for the danger they'd been exposed to. Our immediate neighbors, one to our immediate west, the other the northern neighbor whose tree had been used as an observation post, had narrowly escaped having two helicopters crash on them, so each they got a further $250,000 (totaling $525,000 for each of them since they also qualified for three of the points above). Every security guard that had worked a shift at our Peoria Road property got $50,000, with those who'd been working during the assault getting an additional $200,000. Every emergency worker that'd arrived on scene that night (which was pretty much every emergency worker in Corvallis plus a few teams from farther away) got $25,000, with the first four cops getting an additional $75,000. We'd have no trouble getting responses and cooperation from them in the future. The two Rangers who'd helped apprehend the first two CIA agents got $50,000 each. We had been told that there's a long-standing policy that military personnel are not allowed to accept gratuities, directing them instead to their service's Emergency Relief Fund. We ignored the policy and insisted that the Government did too. [The Rangers weren't as unconcerned about tradition as we were, upon receipt of their money they donated it to the Army's Relief Fund.] The families of the dead soldiers (the four pilots and the major) got $2,000,000 each. That was because I had a large chunk of responsibility for those deaths and because spouses and dependants of deceased military personnel aren't allowed to sue the Government for the deaths of their loved ones, no matter how blatantly illegal or negligent the acts were that caused those deaths. We deliberately did not include the families of the two dead CIA employees because we wanted every Government employee to know that if they committed crimes they could be hurting their families very badly. Mom was very definite about that when a reporter queried the omission. Other than the previous point, our insisting on these payments was mainly just a tactic, not that we minded spreading the Government's money around. We wanted the public to think that we were very good, generous, decent people. The way the public (don't) think, is that the nicer we appear to be, the worse the Government will seem, even when the facts of the situation don't change at all. It's stupid, but politics is about perceptions. The guards who'd been on duty especially didn't need to be paid from our settlement because they had major lawsuits of their own starting up, but leaving them out would have possibly damaged our image, so they were included. [They later settled, I understand for very large amounts because their lawyers were using the suit to force the CIA to divulge information that it didn't want divulged.] We'd decided that our existing home and property weren't nearly large enough. The Family would be worth $4.5 billion in total (not counting MAF because none of us counted it, although legally we could have used its money for ourselves, our lawyers having set it up that way). We needed MUCH better security than this place allowed, plus more office space, and Donna thought her horses had been very badly scared by all the explosions so they needed more company to feel safe. A couple more horses would probably be enough, she thought. We hadn't decided where to move to, but it wouldn't be into an urban location. Our new settlement made the Federal Government agree to provide the following (to summarize them): Wherever we move to's local airport to have its longest runway immediately extended to make it suitable for a Boeing Business Jet to do a maximum-weight takeoff, if it's not already long enough for that. Unoccupied land of our choice, up to an area of one square mile (640 acres), even if it was state or federal land. A high quality sealed road to our new house. The supply of utilities, including very high speed internet. The house itself to be VERY safe, to our specification, and constructed for us by the Army as quickly as possible. Regarding the first point. Our plane was coming fitted with the "short-field package" (improved control surfaces, some to allow better lift, which reduces takeoff and landing speeds, and some to provide better braking). Getting the Government to lengthen the runway would be useful for when we went on trips with full fuel and passenger loads. [I was getting interested in things aeronautic, so in case you are similarly interested, the effect of weight on taking off and landing distances is as follows. The gross weight of a plane directly affects its stall speed, a 10% increase in weight increasing the stall speed by 5%. Liftoff speed for any plane is about 15% above its stall speed, so an increase in weight will mean a higher liftoff speed. In addition, acceleration of the heavier plane is slower, so a longer takeoff distance will be required to reach that speed. As a rule of thumb, a 10% increase in takeoff weight increases the takeoff distance by about 20%. A BBJ at maximum takeoff weight weighs 75% more than when empty, so the takeoff distances increases 150% (not that an empty plane can takeoff, as it's got to have SOME fuel). Planes need about 25% less runway to land than takeoff, so our BBJ would have no trouble landing, but for the sake of completeness, landing a heavier plane requires a higher approach speed, again because of the increased stall speed, which means the plane will need a longer runway in which to land and decelerate. A 10% increase in landing weight increases the landing distance by 10%.] I wanted the twelve of us to have a "License to Kill", like 007 but made more palatable by restricting it to unwanted visitors inside our property. If I got that, I wouldn't have to pull my punches if there was a next time. Also nice would be some way of getting the Government to stop searching for Majestic Countdown because there was nothing surer than the Republican party putting a lot of pressure on the FBI to investigate the illegal, embarrassing computer penetrations. I didn't think they'd find him/me, but that'd be even surer if they weren't looking. Julia had the idea of forcing the President to erect a statue of our choice on the White House lawn easily within his view from the Oval Office, and then we'd get something done like a "Swastika of Shame", to represent the fascist nature of the current administration. It'd be 'in his face' every time he looked out the window. Those ideas, and several others, were rejected by the parental planning committee. We ended up signing the second settlement agreement, as described above, on September 29. That got the Federal Government removed from the $242 trillion dollar suit. We were still proceeding with our action against the CIA and NSA for their attempted kidnapping, surveilling of us without a warrant, etc. We were in no hurry to settle that because it wasn't worth much money anyway (Mark Anderson's so-called immortality had no relevance). We couldn't think of anything we wanted from them - money or otherwise - that would be better than the publicity we'd get by having the hearing. That we'd get some payment after that hearing was icing on the cake. I did think about asking for the CIA's latest bug finding equipment, but we would have been stupid to trust any gear they gave us. ------- Chapter 321: Obtaining Our Next Home Sunday, October 1 to Sunday, December 31, 2006 The Democrats were having so much fun seeing the massive trouble that Majestic Countdown was causing the Republicans that they didn't want the scandal-creating leaks to stop. The Federal Government's paying us $36.8 billion required an appropriations bill this time, giving the Democrats an easy opportunity to derail the settlement process. [[The previous $18.4 billion had been paid out of spare money the Government had lying around! It came from the CIA's black accounts. Public estimates of the CIA's annual budget range from $15 to $1,200 billion. They paid our $18.4 billion out of spare cash, so I suspect the $15 billion estimate was on the light side. The CIA didn't have another $36.8 billion spare though.]] The Democrats blocking the appropriation for our payment was publicly discussed, so it was reasonable for Majestic Countdown to hear about it. In response, he switched to leaking Democrat scandals. I'd discovered many of those but hadn't sent them because I was concentrating on the other assholes, so I revisited my previous discoveries and emailed them this time. (The venality of politicians apparently has little to do with their political affiliation; being in power only increases their opportunities for venality and the price tag they affix to it.) Swapping to the Democrats came at a good time, because it was getting harder to find dirt on the Republicans. I imagined that they were SCREAMING at each other and their lawyers to clean up their computer files. I'd started sending faxes increasingly often because most of the juicy computer files had been deleted. I'd even had to spend a day wandering around DC memorizing people's passwords and encryption keys, usually obtained by logging them out of their computers when they were away from their desks and watching them log back in on their return. File encryption was being widely adopted, although the initial enthusiasm for it diminished when Majestic Countdown somehow proved capable of decrypting protected files. The Democrats had been a little slow about protecting their files, but they got the idea VERY quickly when Majestic Countdown proved to be an equal opportunity leaker. Their easily accessible dirt rapidly reduced, but not as fast as their obstruction to the settlement process, which evaporated the morning my first seven Democrat leaks were sent. On the topic of snooping, just days before the attack on our home President Bush had publicly called for a significant law change that permitted the use of military force within the US against civilians in the event of "serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition ... the President determines" [to quote from the proposed bill]. Some very unusual reporters were able to remember what the President had said a few days earlier, and they grilled him on how he could possibly call for a law permitting military attacks against American civilians when what had happened to the Andersons so clearly showed what a disaster such a step could lead to. The President, like all politicians do when they are cornered, just answered with some empty, meaningless crap. Soon after, his bill was passed into law. The President now had the power to order to military to attack us, provided he deemed us to be an "or other condition" (I'd write "whatever the fuck that meant," except it clearly meant whatever the President wanted it to mean). Nixon hadn't got away with bugging his opponents, but Bush was now legally entitled to get our armed forces to attack with deadly force anyone he wanted them to, his only restraint being public opinion after the event. It wasn't a happy situation. Despite the Government's quiet legal maneuverings, the attack on our home had been in breach of our first settlement agreement, thus entitling us to rejoin the Government to our lawsuit. The implementation of the second settlement was reasonably straightforward (we had practiced), but a few things are worth mentioning: Various homeowners around us, our security guards, the emergency service guys, and the two Rangers who'd intelligently decided to point their guns at the CIA agents rather than us, all got their payments immediately, and thought we were wonderful people. As did Benton County, although the county residents had to wait an extra couple of weeks. Their $2 billion payment required a referendum which had to be planned and then carried out. It was worth about $30,000 per adult, so there were a lot of vested interests. For example, many property owners thought it should've been kept on a property ownership basis, as they would've gotten an average of $67,000. The voter participation rate for the referendum shattered the previous record, making it the highest in Benton County local government history. Amusingly, church attendance rose appreciably too. This was particularly amusing because Benton County has the lowest church attendance rate (25%) of all the counties in America. I'm not sure why attendance rose leading up to the referendum, but religious people are by definition irrational, so who can guess what they're 'thinking'. [[I was curious about this so I just researched it, finding out that although religious people may be irrational, the church bosses can be very rational indeed. Attendance hadn't risen. That false impression had been created by several articles in the local papers about Benton county and surrounding churches talking about their rapidly increasing attendances. The claims/lies had been made by those churches as part of their just-launched recruitment drives in an attempt to portray themselves as popular and thriving, and therefore a good choice for any potential new members. It was done with an eye to all the spare cash members would shortly have. Some church leaders are very 'astute' - if that's the right word.]] Unsurprisingly, the payout method that won the day was essentially "per person aged 18 years and over living in Benton County", which could've been a nightmare as every man and his very old dog would've claimed to be a Benton County resident. The councilors were smart enough that they worded the option that everyone voted for more specifically than just "Benton County resident". They included qualification criteria that the claimant had to provide. Naturally there were some court cases over it, but they were simple. Every adult getting $30,000 was a wonderful boost to the local economy. High-quality restaurants, for example, were booked out weeks in advance. People had to drive into neighboring counties to spend their money because the local businesses were swamped. Each of us got our $250 million immediately too, but it just got banked. Not even Julia had made a dent in the first $125 million payment yet, so the second payment made no practical difference. I got a very nice roast chicken dinner out of it though, so I was happy. My $250 million bonus inspired the Fishers to try again. If the 75th Rangers and Delta Force hadn't been able to bust their way in, the Fishers didn't have much chance. Our guards and the cops were providing EXCELLENT service these days. I subsequently took out a restraining order against the Fishers to further discourage them and to make it even easier to remove them if they came anywhere near me again. Tempting as it was, we couldn't treat Dad's family the same way. Several members of his family were appearing far more often than they used to before we were rich, especially his parents. Funny how being "successful" is so closely related to being popular. There weren't many advantages to being Ron rather than Mark, but one of them was being able to avoid socializing with Dad's family. In an amusing symmetry, the other main advantage was being able to socialize very closely indeed with another member of Dad's family: Carol. The CIA's car was given to charity, as usual. In the future, the CIA will probably rent from Hertz every time they conduct an operation against us. We'll be happy with that, because Hertz doesn't rent out helicopter gunships. ^ Then we had to decide where we were going to move to. We had a list of criteria: We wanted a LARGE property. Large enough to be able to have an exterior wall far away from the main house to give us more security, and so the staff accommodation - it looked like we'd need permanent staff - was distant from the families' dwellings. Donna had another reason but it's slipped my mind. I'm sure she'll remind me. On top of a hill so no one could easily spy on us. Our existing place had proved deficient in that respect. No nearby neighbors, partly for our security, partly for their safety. We wanted fantastic views and all the other things a billionaire family's property should have. We'd publicly admit the previous reasons, as this reason wouldn't be good PR. We'd made a big deal during the second settlement negotiation about how violated and imperiled we felt, and we'd gotten the Government to agree to drop everything and build us a very safe home at their expense and at top speed. But, in truth, the last criterion listed above was the main reason we wanted to move. We wanted a fantastic house, and we saw no reason why we couldn't use the Government to make sure we got it very rapidly rather than the one to three years it'd take doing it the usual way. Publicly we'd continue to push the "unsafe" button to justify what we wanted done, but no house was going to be safe from the Government. Our preference was to stay in Corvallis, or within commuting distance of it, as Prof and Dad wanted to keep their jobs, and it'd be good if Julia, Carol and Donna could keep going to the same school. Plus we like Corvallis, and thanks to the Government's uncaring negotiation style, Corvallis liked us. Most of the locations we had in mind for our new house had no existing road access, so the easiest way to check them out was by helicopter. We booked a large one, for the four parents, Julia and me. We weren't worried about having the four parents in a helicopter together. Unless the CIA planted enough explosives to kill us directly - which they could do to us at home - I could make sure we got down to the ground safely. I could fly us all the way around the world if I wanted to. It'd take about fifty hours, so it wouldn't have been too onerous. It'd be best not to surprise our pilot that much though, or the airforces of several countries. Ava came too, mostly because we had a spare seat and she'd never had a helicopter ride. We'd bought some large-scale topographical maps and we had fun checking out the various places we'd identified using our local knowledge and Google Earth, or that simply looked interesting while flying around. We spent four hours on it, keeping good notes of each location we liked the look of, and hovering just above them while rotating for 360 degrees to check out all the views - helicopters can be quite good when they're not being used to attack us. With the Federal Government committed to provide us with land and access to it, even if it was a national park, we had a lot of choice. There were practical constraints though. The middle of a national park wasn't suitable as the access road would've been too much of a desecration and the commute too long. We didn't want to be in the middle of a wilderness an hour or two's drive from Corvallis, even though there were some awesome locations in the Cascades. We still found many locations that we would be very happy getting. Their views weren't "Cascades-awesome", but they were still pretty damned good as far as we were concerned. There's lovely natural forest around much of Corvallis. There's even a lot of forest IN Corvallis, because if you look at the city itself from any of the nearby hills you see trees more than houses, which makes it a VERY pretty city. The mayor and several local Benton Country councilors had asked to come to thank us for our largess again. We'd delayed them with the excuse of getting our home repaired first. Then, to their surprise, we invited them to dinner. Our second settlement agreement had been made public, just like the first as we were deliberately acting opposite to how the Government does; they keep things secret, so we don't. Therefore all the provisions that dealt with our changing homes were public knowledge (the contract stipulated that the Government had to build our home no matter where in the world we moved). We'd been so hugely generous to our local community that they were very sad about our possibly leaving town. By now we'd given many interviews (not me obviously, but the parents and girls), during which Dad had said, "We HAVE TO move! Where we're living now is too unsafe for us and too dangerous for our neighbors. Either of those helicopters could've crashed onto private homes killing innocent people, and they were equipped with ROCKETS AND MISSILES, for Christ's sake! You saw what damage a single burst from their machinegun did to Mark's living room and kitchen. They even had MORTARS set up to lob shells in our general direction. -- "I have to protect my family. We've already lost Mark because of the Government and we don't want to lose our girls. So we have to move to a new home which is made FAR stronger than where we are now. And there's no way we can live next to neighbors because we'd never forgive ourselves if anyone was injured or killed because we were living next to them when the Government attacks us again." "Surely you don't expect another attack?" "They smashed the last settlement agreement, so why not this one? 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.' The Government has committed violence against my family twice now. I'm not stupid enough to trust their word anymore, because their word isn't worth shit. Everyone knows our Government is run by liars and criminals. You heard the DHS lie when they'd kidnapped Mark, and you heard the CIA and President deliberately lie when they said the Army's attacking us was because of one bad CIA employee. ALL they know how to do is break the law and lie about it. So we have to move away or innocent people could get killed. It's a huge pity because we like Corvallis, but the safety of my family and innocent people has to come first. The Government obviously doesn't care about killing its own people, because if Fort Dodge had a leak they would've killed tens of millions of us. Because they don't care, it's even more important that we plan for the Government doing another insanely violent attack." No one was willing to argue with Dad that he should trust the Government. On a related note, if the Government did attack again and killed us all, or if we all disappeared without trace for three months, then MAF would inherit from us, including gaining the right to sue the Government for our deaths. In addition, the most recent settlement agreement has a clause that the Government's breaching any condition would make them immediately liable for the greater of either double the most recent settlement (so a total of $73.6 billion) or whatever damages the court orders in our imminent $242 trillion suit. In other words, that lawsuit will continue to hang over their heads even after the case finishes. Despite what we were saying to the media, we didn't believe we'd be attacked again. All the advice we'd received was that no one in the Government's side had taken the first settlement agreement's "Leave us alone" clauses seriously. We'd signed the agreement and everyone from the President down had immediately forgotten about us. Now the President was desk-bangingly wild that no one had taken leaving us alone seriously. He'd written some VERY strong memos, and YELLED at various agency directors, to make sure they yelled down their chains of command. Majestic Countdown's leaks might have had something to do with that. When the Mayor of Corvallis and various assorted local politicians arrived, had finished their various "Thank yous", and while we were having pre-dinner drinks, Mom explained, "You know we're moving. We have three types of choices: somewhere near Corvallis so Prof and Steven can keep their existing jobs and we can continue to enjoy being part of this community..." The Mayor injected a comment about how wonderful Corvallis was going to be to live in, especially now that it had funds for so many community improvement programs and blah, blah. The sort of stuff that mayors are required to say. Mom resumed, "All good points, which is why staying in Corvallis is our preference. It's not as simple as that though. As I was saying, our three types of choices are: somewhere near Corvallis, or if we make the break from this town, then anywhere else in America, or leaving America entirely. I'm sure you appreciate that there are strong arguments for emigrating. If the CIA is willing to declare World War III on our neighborhood because of a bowl of cereal, then it's too dangerous for us here, and we can certainly afford to go anywhere else we want. -- "The pros and cons of our leaving the country aren't in your jurisdiction, so let's concentrate on what is. We can't live in Corvallis's urban area because there's too much chance of innocent people being killed if we're attacked again. But we could live somewhere in Benton. -- "We'd have to choose a location far enough away from neighbors so they aren't likely to be at risk, it needs to be on a large property because we want a wide perimeter and we're going to need a substantial, permanent live-in security force. We don't want them living in the same building as us, so we need enough land for several dwellings." We do need some guards, and having them living on the property makes sense, but they were only ever going to be useful against the usual threats rich people have to be protected from; our guards would never be able to protect us from the Government. We also want a large property so we could have a detached office to run our various business and trust operations from, but we mainly wanted it for the sheer luxury - we were stinking rich and wanted to enjoy it. -- "It also needs to be on the top of a hill to make it much harder for the evil CIA to spy on us, and for us to be approached unawares." And also so we got better views. -- "You know from our latest agreement that the Federal Government will be responsible for providing our property and running the road and utilities to it, so none of those is a concern. It's the public's reaction and zoning issues we want your opinions on. Here are the locations we've identified as being suitable for our needs." Mom showed them a couple of topo' maps. Not the original ones we'd marked several possible locations on, but a second set of maps that we'd marked only with our two favorites and a third one for pressure reasons. Mom added, "The two locations labeled 'A' and 'B' are our preferences. We've shown 'C' on the other map because it's in Benton County, even though it's so far from town that Prof and Steven would quit their jobs. If they do that, we could move anywhere else in the world that has universities and lawnmowers." I need to explain the geography of Corvallis a little. Imagine it's inside a square slightly larger than the city itself. The square's top left (NW) corner is the largest hill visible from town, inappropriately called "Dimple Hill". It is 1,491 feet above sea level. Central Corvallis is at roughly 240 feet above sea level, so Dimple stands about 1,250 feet above Corvallis (all subsequent heights will relative to central Corvallis). Running east from Dimple, along the top edge of the imaginary square, is a ridge that descends for 1.4 miles to a saddle about 390 feet high at its lowest point. 0.3 miles farther east is the top of another small hill, 600 feet high, on top of which is "Chip Ross Park". Another 0.3 miles east and the land is down to 200 feet high, and is level enough that it has roads and some houses. Farther east, for another 2.5 miles, is just more flat land, mostly used for farms. That completes the top edge of the square that defines Corvallis. The flat land continues farther east until it meets the river, but it's too far away from Corvallis to consider in this explanation (the river runs immediately alongside Corvallis in the middle of the city but then it turns sharply toward the east, so it takes a considerable distance for the northern edge of my imaginary square to meet the river). Dimple hill is the top left corner of Corvallis, Chip Ross Park is top slightly-left-of-center, and they are the first two hills of any significance north of Corvallis. Running south from the 1,250 feet high Dimple Hill is another ridge that descends 0.4 miles to a saddle at 730 feet, then rises 0.2 miles further south to an unnamed peak at 810 feet. 0.4 miles farther south, the height has dropped and the land is leveling off so roads and houses are starting to appear. Nowhere farther south appealed to us. There were three locations around Corvallis that had possibilities for us: Dimple Hill, Chip Ross Park, and the unnamed hill on the city's west side. The first two were both excellent locations, while the third was acceptable but not nearly as good. There were several reasons why the latter choice was a distant third, such as the property's east-west orientation rather than the preferred, sun-friendly north-south. But the main reason was its being too closely overlooked by Dimple Hill. Someone only needed to be about a third of a mile away to be able to look down on our hypothetical home on the unnamed peak. That may sound like a reasonable distance, but our property would extend at least a quarter of a mile in that direction, so they'd be able to sit one to two hundred yards away from our wall on the side of the steeply rising Dimple Hill and easily look down on us, and even listen to our conversations and yell their thoughts at us. During nice days there were always people climbing up and down Dimple Hill, so we'd be an object of curiosity for hundreds of passersby. This possibility could be made to work, but we much preferred the other two options so didn't mark this one on the maps we were showing the mayor and councilors. Chip Ross Park was lower than Dimple Hill, but observers had to be about a mile and a half away to get elevation on us, and that was far enough away that we didn't really care. The Government had things like Predator drones and satellites if it really wanted to observe us. We just wanted public privacy and to make it hard enough for the Government to spy on us so that if they did (say by satellite or high-altitude plane, as per the photo I'd seen the CIA boss use), there'd be more of an evidence trail for me to snoop and leak. Dimple Hill itself was also good. There was a taller hill 0.7 miles farther north from Dimple, but it was only taller by 75 feet so a decent-sized wall would block its view (the wall wouldn't have to be 75 feet tall as there were other geometric considerations, such as we'd build on the south side of the hill. A normal wall would work fine). Our location "A" was Chip Ross Park, "B" was Dimple Hill. Where we had marked "C" on the map we were showing the local politicians was a very picturesque location still in Benton County, but a long way south-west of Corvallis. The problem with both of our preferred locations was that the public loved them. They were heavily used by nature walkers, horse riders, mountain bikers, family picnickers, and pretty much everyone else as well. Plus they were looked at by everyone. They were highly prominent, highly valued, community resources. If a property developer had suggested building on them, he would've been lynched and then his car overturned and set alight for good measure, but my family had sent a great deal of money to Benton County residents, which we hoped would make a difference to their attitude to our building on either of those hills. Corvallis's mayor and councilors reacted to seeing our choices by sucking in their breaths with surprise and horror (in the local government sense, i.e., this could make them unpopular with the public), then they vacillated, unable to say anything useful. The councilor for our "C" choice responded differently. She was VERY enthusiastic about the possibility of our moving into her area. The location we'd marked wasn't as problematic as "A" and "B", and she promised that what problem there were would be easily dispensed with. It was a politician's promise, but it still put pressure on the Corvallis delegation, which is why we'd chosen that "C". Chip Ross Park is - this probably won't surprise you - a park, so it couldn't easily be sold for a residential property. Dimple Hill has a variety of owners. A large part of the slope closest to town is owned by a property development company who'd done nothing with it for several decades, probably they were waiting for town to encroach more. Another large part was owned by OSU who used it as a research forest. But most of it, including the peak, was protected from urban development. Acquiring the land was the Federal Government's problem, but there were zoning and other restrictions, such as a significant fire break requirement on Dimple Hill. So regardless of their being pressured, it wasn't in the power of any of the politicians here to consent to anything. We'd known that, of course. This was about their understanding the situation so that they could lead an informed public debate about the issue. Our message was basically a simple one: "If we can't get 'A' or 'B' then we'll have to move out of Corvallis. Anything else would be too unsafe for us and our neighbors. Please discuss it publicly, and let us know what the town thinks." They had lots of questions during the dinner, such as, "How much land do you want?" "The high point and much of the land round around it. We'd like a square mile to keep our family home safely back from the edge. Chip Ross is only one-fifth of a square mile so we'd need to square it off with the adjacent boundaries and extend it westward." "What access would the public have?" "None to our property, as that'll be walled off and have security guards much as this property does now. I'm sure you understand that necessity. On Dimple Hill, we'd create walkways around the edges of our property so we wouldn't block people walking past. If we bought Chip Ross Park, the trailhead to walk up the ridge to Dimple Hill would have to be moved so it started west of our property, probably from Northwest Honeysuckle Drive near where it meets Kinglet Place, the track going north-northwest across the saddle to pick up the trail near Dan's Trail Bridge." "What would your house look like? How well would it merge into the environment?" "As well as possible, of course. We'll be insisting on the best architects and landscape designers money can buy, especially because the Government has to pick up the tab. It'll look wonderful." The town's folk had a great deal to say about it: "The Andersons have given us tens of thousands of dollars each. I wouldn't have paid that much to keep those hills, so as far as I'm concerned, they can take their pick." "No one should be allowed to own those hills for themselves! They're the best thing about Corvallis! After the river and all the trees, I mean." "I love using those areas. I don't want to lose them." "We're not under any obligation to let them have those prime spots. They're rich enough to go somewhere else." "Plenty of other people have lost a family member, so why should they get special treatment?" "They shouldn't be allowed to blackmail us like this." (This was a common opinion, despite other people responding, "Idiot! Blackmail is when someone threatens to do something bad to you. They're not threatening to do anything TO YOU; they're just saying they'd leave town. People are allowed to leave town, you know?" To which the original person would usually reply, "It still seems like blackmail to me.") Not often discussed, but VERY often thought, "If the CIA attacks them again, I could get a LOT more money. It'd be a pity to miss out on that if they move away." Vanessa had already made public that she believed that if a punishment didn't work the first time, then increase it, and keep increasing it until it does work. Another attack on us could earn the Benton County residents as much as $100,000 per adult. Opinions have been bought for less. The very substantial OSU student population had a say. They'd missed out on the first payout because they didn't own residences in the County, but 99% of those of them that had voted on the referendum (which had been nearly all of them) had voted for the "per 18+ person living in Benton County" option. Getting that money out of the blue had made them extraordinarily happy, and often drunk and high (it is historically an agricultural college after all). Thankfulness plus the fact that few of them would live in Corvallis after they graduated, so didn't care about the hill, meant that they were a substantial force in our favor. I don't think my four parents had anticipated that effect from making the second settlement's Benton County gift subject to referendum, but it helped a great deal. Students make up 15% of the voting age population, and 90% of them were in favor of our being allowed to build on either of the hills. The public wanted to see drawings and plans of our proposed new house; some even said they wanted photos. It's scary to live in the same world with people who think photos of future events are possible. The public also called for Environment Impact Reports, Quality of Life Impact Statements (I had no idea such a thing existed), Reports about the current usage levels of the two hills, and many other studies; for both "A" and "B". Enough of the public's comments were positive that we could answer the request for reports with, "Sorry, but we don't have time to prepare all those reports. The CIA tricked the Army into attacking us only four weeks after the first settlement was signed, and we don't know how much time we have until the next attack. We only know that the DHS and CIA are criminal and insane organizations so we can't take the risk of wasting time. The reports you're asking for will take months to prepare and they'll just fuel more debate rather than deciding anything. We'll be long gone from Corvallis by then. Either you trust us to do a good job, or you don't. We haven't been selfish so far, have we?" Prof started inquiring about jobs in other universities. That took no time at all to get back to OSU, and then into the wider community, lighting a rocket under their asses as intended. People could see that Prof's job was the strongest link holding us to Corvallis. Kids changing schools is no big deal, Mom and Vanessa were busy on MAF so would probably favor moving closer to DC, and Dad's job could hardly be considered important. In truth, Dad didn't really care where he worked - not even whether he made lawnmowers or not - just so long as he got along well with his workmates and bosses, didn't have to push paper around, or worry. Factory work was ideal for Dad, but it could be any sort of factory. Prof's inquiries were primarily a tactic to pressure the community into deciding quickly. Both families had lived in Corvallis for decades and had a lifetime of friendships here, so moving away wasn't something we wanted to do. The councilors cooperated by taking the easy way out. In consultation with us, they drew up descriptions of "Option A" and "Option B" (our building our new home on top of our "A" and "B" locations), with maps showing where the boundaries would be as "Chip Ross Park" and "Dimple Hill" weren't accurate enough descriptions. We wrote comments about the effects on the public and we obtained artist's impressions of "what the houses COULD look like." If you've ever seen an artist's impression of a real estate development, you'll know they're deliberately distorted to look dramatically better than they ever will in reality. Now imagine the same artist doing a drawing without the constraint of having to draw a real house, other than some vague ideas we had. He drew the best looking, incredibly expensive houses he could imagine, and he had a good imagination. The information was distributed to every house in Benton County, stating that there'd be a referendum about it in a couple of weeks. The vote had to be Benton-wide because "A" and "B" were just north of the Corvallis city limits (overlapping with it, in the case of the Chip Ross Park), and many of the users of the two hills lived outside of Corvallis itself. The referendum questions were effectively: "Should the Andersons be permitted to own the Chip Ross Park and adjourning land, as specified; and have their new home built on it, as described separately?" "Should the Andersons be permitted to own the Dimple Hill and adjourning land, as specified; and have their new home built on it, as described separately?" The separate description referred to was, in general terms, a list of the sort of facilities a typical family home has, when the family is worth a billion dollars. We made no mention of a helicopter pad because people tend to get upset about those. Instead we said things like, "Probably four horses, because Donna loves horses," and other pro-family, cutesy things. People would vote on permitting our owning both locations, but it was clearly explained that we'd only get one of them. The referendum's being county-wide worked in our favor, because many Bentonians didn't personally care much about the specific hills, but did care about the Andersons staying in Benton in case they were profitably attacked again. That factor also played on the minds of most of the people who did use the hills. They loved the hills - they honestly did - but the hope of up to $100,000 per adult was a POWERFUL inducement to vote our way. The people shamefully and secretly hoped for another attack; after all, the CIA had attacked the Andersons twice now, so a third time had to be almost certain, didn't it? And maybe even a fourth! In the days leading up to the vote, the volume of negative comment diminished considerably. There were a few strident opponents, but the vast majority of people knew how they were going to vote, and they knew what their main reason was. They could have their family picnics somewhere else, as there are many dozens of beautiful spots around Corvallis. We'd publicly expressed our preference for Chip Ross Park, "Because the impact on the public will be less." Which was true, plus it was also the place we preferred. There wasn't the amazingly high voter participation there was last time, but it was still impressively high. Of the votes, 80% voted to allow us to own Chip Ross Park if we wanted it, 70% allowed Dimple Hill if we wanted it. Democracy had spoken. I couldn't help noticing that more greed meant more voter participation, which is the same thing as more democracy; which is an interesting cause and effect. According to the dirty laundry Majestic Countdown had been uncovering, our politicians are VERY democratic. Mom and Dad publicly and effusively thanked everyone for their support, adding, "We choose Chip Ross Park, because it's smaller, less intrusive, and the public's preferred option." We didn't even have to use our fallback plan. That'd been instead of our buying the land, we'd merely lease it for something like 70 years (which the Federal Government would pay for), after which the land and our buildings would freely revert to be Benton County property again. The parents didn't plan on being around in 70 years time, and they thought it doubtful that any of us kids would stay in Corvallis even ten years. We shouldn't need the money (surely?), so we could simply give the land back to the County. But democracy worked so well that on November 25, we got public permission to acquire title to 280 acres of the BEST real estate in Corvallis. The Park itself was 125.6 acres, but we'd placed our boundaries so they lined up neatly with all the already surveyed and titled properties north, east and south of us, and we'd extended our area along the ridge westward to include a useful amount of land, causing our new property to encompass 280 acres. Farther west from our property wasn't divided into salable lots; it was a large area of lovely forest and zoned, "Leave it alone!" Technically, we didn't have the "best real estate in Corvallis", but only because it's a few yards north of the City. Being out of the city doesn't mean we'll be in the boonies. From the edge of our driveway, it'll be exactly three miles directly south to the center of OSU, and less than three miles to school. OSU is slightly south of the center of the City, so most of Corvallis will be less than three miles from our new property. Those are shorter trips than from our current place. The only reason the hill was not included in the city limits was because it was far too scenic to be allowed to be built on. We would have preferred the hill to be wider, so our property's exteriors walls could be pushed farther out, but on the top of a fairly heavily treed hill was still vastly safer than where we were now, and we'd make sure we had plenty of other security measures. Amusingly, the owners of the several properties we'll be neighboring immediately received offers from people eager to live next to us. Apparently the prospect of helicopters crashing onto their roofs was less of a disincentive than the "double each time" financial windfalls our Peoria Road neighbors had enjoyed. The local governments involved - both Benton and Corvallis - started doing the work they needed to do: passing motions, changing the city plan, etc. One of those jobs was negotiating with the Federal Government over the land's purchase price. We'd warned the councilors not to get greedy over that, because if they delayed the process we'd go elsewhere and we'd make sure everyone knew why. Vanessa was busy with MAF (it'd just bought a $25 million office building in DC and she was getting it fitted out, equipped, staffed, etc.), so Mom got put in charge of our new home, much to Mom's considerably trepidation, even with Julia being so eager to help. One of the first jobs - started even before we got permission to acquire Chip Ross Park - had been to find the right architect(s) to use for our new home. Mom had been using the DHS jet even more than Vanessa, to visit architects in various cities, check out their suitability for the sort of home we were looking to have built, ensure their willingness to make ours a top priority job, inspect their showcase homes, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful owners of those homes; or if they were away, with their household managers. Mom learned a GREAT deal from that as many of the people she visited were happy to pass on some of the lessons they'd learned about being mega-rich. Things like needing X-ray and sniffer machines in the mailroom, through to the critical importance of deciding how many guests we'd be having for dinners. Apparently that had a dramatic effect on the design of the living areas, and couldn't be changed afterward. Some owners of the places Mom visited felt they'd gotten that wrong, and it annoyed them considerably now. People don't want to have meals in large, empty rooms, so as bizarre as it seems, some of the billionaire homes Mom visited had three or four kitchens partnered with three or four dining rooms; for family-sized cooking and dining, scaling up to mega-huge dinners. One solution to the latter need was to have a detached building containing just a huge dining room (for over two hundred people), a commercial kitchen, and very large bathrooms. Detaching it meant the home was allowed to remain looking like a home, rather than a convention center, and it made security much easier. One of the places Mom visited had four kitchen/dining room pairs, each about three times larger than the previous, which I thought was very weird. (That's four pairs just for the owning family; their live-in staff had their own facilities that aren't being counted.) Security was a big issue with us. Most wealthy families only had to worry about financially motivated attacks. Plus, in the case of stars, attacks from stalkers as well. But we also had to worry about the CIA or other Government-employed sociopaths, and we had to hide the strange things I can do. Fortunately we're living in a small community that thinks we're great, so our biggest local problem is people trying to get too friendly. There were several other things going on that'd help our security, like the Corvallis Police Department hiring several more officers. [They were flooded with applications, as they were now a VERY well funded, superbly equipped department.] We could give our home a great deal of security, and we had almost no constraints on how strong we could make it. The Government had attacked us with helicopter gunships equipped with rockets and missiles, and the best part of a company of Rangers, so we'd insisted that we obviously had to be protected from at least that level of assault. We were building our home on a hill, so it was easy for us to imagine it having several underground rooms: a garage, a panic room, and even a secret underground study for me. Plus tunnels connecting my detached home from the parents' home, because I loved the idea of the privacy that a detached home gave me. Privacy was something I was looking forward to having again. With the lawsuit being over and the Government scared off from surveilling us, I could get friskier with other girls. An underground panic room would be our only real defense from future Government attacks, because there was no way a livable house could be made strong enough to keep a military force out. Instead of building a home that looked like a collection of concrete bunkers, we were going to build a GORGEOUS home. It'd be strong, but its most important feature would be a state of the art security system to warn us when to hide in the panic room, where we hoped to outlast any attackers long enough for the cavalry to arrive, or for me to do my thing, if that was necessary. The Government has a great deal of expertise at securing buildings, and we were going to take advantage of much of it. We'd have a good chance of getting enough warning time, presuming the attack wasn't with a cruise missile or high altitude bomb. The security system would include a short-range, military grade radar, all the windows would be fitted with the random vibrators that ruined the ability of remote laser microphones to pick up speech, the house would be able to monitor itself for bugs and triangulate its sensors to report their position, the property's exterior walls would have sensors up the wazoo: seismic sensors sensitive enough to pick up footsteps through to infrared and ordinary video cameras (I pity any tagger who tried to spray-paint our wall). There'd be similar sensors inside our grounds, mainly for use at nighttime. Our response to detecting something untoward would be to hide very quickly. There'll be escape chutes from every major part of the house: all our bedrooms, the living room, and a few other rooms. We could open and leap into them in seconds. They'd lock behind us and function like the waterslides at the Aquatic Center, but with gentler endings. We'd slide down into a tunnel that led to our panic room, which we'd enter and lock behind us. It sounds dramatically silly - especially the glorified laundry chutes - but when money is no object and safety is, you don't mind being extravagant. Because of our fears and demands, the Government would be doing a great deal of tunneling and excavating for us. (I will describe the construction process later. I found it interesting, and if that happens, you get to read about it.) Now you might need to rewind your brain to avoid being confused, because when the next chapter starts we're still living on Peoria Road. I got a bit carried away describing the new home; sorry about that. ------- Chapter 322: Ron Reacquires a Previous Life's Hobby Monday, September 18 to Saturday, September 23, 2006 (Continued) Going back to just after the CIA-inspired military attack happened. I'm pretty sure I'm exaggerating - although it's hard to tell with Julia sometimes - that even more tragic than our home being attacked by the Army, was Julia's being forced to postpone my "Coming Out Party". Not so much because of the attack itself, which at most could be said to have lasted five minutes, but because of the aftermath to it. The property damage, the ravening pack of media camped outside our barricade, and the distractions, all conspired to keep my coming out in. We were far too publicly exposed to have anything like a sexy party around the pool, because the media and our now very vigilant guards would've noticed all the sex going on. It was either not have me come out, or Julia had to scale down her idea for the party. It was a very difficult and unpleasant decision for her, because Julia HATES scaling anything down. I wasn't sure she even knew how. She had to though, because she wanted me to get back to "playing around" as Mark used to: for my education and fun. They were the same reasons, which was hardly surprising since I was the same guy. Julia had been VERY impressed by how fast I'd learned and gained confidence when I was Mark, and she wanted to continue my education as Ron. I didn't object strongly (rubbing my hands together with glee and saying "Yippee" is not objecting strongly). Julia also thought I deserved to have fun. I'd had a terrible time as a prisoner, then had to escape so violently and go through all the trouble of becoming Ron, all while worrying about my families and being unable to contact them. I DEFINITELY deserved some good times, Julia claimed. I objected just as strongly to that. The attack had been on September 7, and as day after day went past with the media and other distractions making any sort of party impossible, Julia eventually crumbled under the frustration of my continually 'staying in', so she invited Mark's twelve favorite girls over for a dinner on Saturday, September 23: Alexis. Pat. Katelin; half out of charity in her case. Diana and Claire Norris. Zoe; a Carol's Cutie and very good friend of Diana's. She'd initially caught my attention by being happy to see Mark kiss Diana. I'd gotten involved with her too, and had a threesome and a foursome with her and one or both Norris girls. She was one of the few Cuties who knew that Mark liked Diana and Claire so much. Carina Durham and Victoria; both from Pipeline Group 1A. Four others from later pipeline groups. I'd had twenty six pipeline dates by the time the DHS kidnapped me. Groups 4A and 4B had just started and weren't represented at Julia's dinner party. These four girls were the survivors from 2A through to 3B, one from last year's grade 10, three from last year's grade 12 (last school year being when all these pipeline groups had started. School was about to restart its new academic year next week). When Julia had invited them to come, she'd said, "I've got some very good news for you personally, and some other news I think you should be very interested in. Make sure you come on Saturday. I think you should wear your blah, blah, with the blah and the blah." On hearing Julia's clothing recommendations, they responded with something like, "Who's the boy you want to impress?" "You'll find out on Saturday. We'll be having a spa party too, so DON'T bring a suit." By then, Mark's Wing had been 90% repaired from its strafing. The town's builders, electricians, merchants, etc., were falling all over themselves to give us good service. The second settlement's negotiation was public knowledge by now, and we would've gotten good service even without that, so the "falling all over themselves" was VERY sincere. Julia just had some nice restaurant food delivered in the afternoon, and we had an informal dinner in Mark's Wing living room. Every girl attended. That I was the only male in attendance didn't go unnoticed by the sexily dressed girls. Also noticed was Carol's, Ava's and Julia's treating me very affectionately, and Carol's not being the least bit surprised or upset about Ava's and Julia's actions. Girls are good at noticing that sort of thing. Julia didn't keep them waiting long before explaining, "What I'm going to say next sounds sad, but don't let it get you down. We - the Andersons and Williams - are taking it as a new beginning rather than an end. It's exactly eight months to the day since the DHS kidnapped Mark and our two families have decided that Mark isn't coming back. We're not going to forget him, and we're not going to get him legally declared dead, but we are going to start moving forward. -- "One of the things we're doing is guessing what we think Mark would like us to do in the event of his death. In effect, guessing what his Last Will and Testament would be. We've invited you - his favorite girlfriends - here to give you some good news. You know that Mark thought college was important, so we've decided that he would've liked his favorite girls to have the opportunity to go to college easily if they wanted to. So on your eighteenth and next three birthdays you'll be getting a check from Mark's account for $5,000. For college or whatever else you want to..." Julia was interrupted twelve times. It took a few minutes to reassure them into believing it, that it really was $20,000 for each of them, for all twelve of them, that it didn't matter whether they went to college or not. Julia dramatically gave the girls who were already eighteen their checks. Three of the girls were already nineteen - two going to college, one not - so they got $10,000 each. The checks certainly convinced everyone that it was for real. In case you're wondering, it was my way of making up for keeping them in the dark that Mark was still alive. It was only $240,000 in total, which was petty cash for Mark, especially considering that Mark wasn't around to spend his own money. Plus (at the time this was happening) the second settlement was well down the track and obviously going to happen. I could've easily afforded to give much more, but both sets of parents don't believe in giving people free rides because then people don't try hard or appreciate what they've been given. Once all the "Thank yous" and "Are you sures?" were over, Julia continued, "There are NO conditions. However, I want you to tell a little fib about a little condition, because I've got a little scheme I'm working on. I want you to tell your parents that it's conditional on your remaining good friends with us." "But we would anyway." "It's mostly for Diana's, Claire's and Zoe's benefits, so they'll find it easier to get permission to visit often. Maybe for you too Pat, or anyone else who thinks your parents might not approve your coming here often or staying long." Carina asked, "You want us all to say the money's conditional, or just who you named? Because I'd rather tell Mom and Dad the truth." "It's only to make it easier for the younger girls to visit, so it depends on whether word would get back to their parents. If your parents can keep the lack of condition a secret, then you can tell them if you like." "They're gonna want to know why?" "Mainly so Diana and Claire can visit and maybe stay overnight sometimes, but that needs more explanation..." "Yeah?" "That's the second thing we're doing that Mark would want us to do. Most of you know that Mark liked Diana and Claire a great deal, but he also spent time with them because he wanted to give them self-confidence and knowledge about sex and relationships so they could resist their parents' repressive attitude. Mackenzie got brainwashed into being negative about boys, and Mark didn't want that to happen to Diana and Claire. Mark would want them to continue to have good experiences with a boy, so that's why I want their parents to encourage them to come here." "What boy?" asked several of the girls, especially Diana and Claire. Victoria guessed, "Ron! You're talking about Ron aren't you?" "Got it in one, Victoria," agreed Julia. "Carol, Ava and I sleep with Ron every night now, and he's..." "I thought he was Carol's boyfriend? | "He's always been so quiet." | "I thought you loved Mark?" Julia said, "Think about Ron for a minute. He had the brains and courage to take a leap out of a concrete jungle into a totally different environment. He was only working for Mom a couple of weeks and he impressed her enough that she argued for cutting Ron in for a full share on the first settlement. Felicity and Steven could've split that 1.5 billion anyway they wanted, but they agreed to give Ron $125 million. How many people do you know that could impress my mom $125 million worth in two weeks? Even Mark would've had trouble impressing Mom that much. -- "Without even trying to - just by his character - he convinced Carol that maybe boys aren't so bad after all. Carol was very uninterested in guys, and is still uninterested in them, but Ron has impressed the pants off her, haha. First Ava and then me too started sleeping with him and Carol. Not just for sex, but for friendship. You've seen him around the pool with girls: he doesn't chase girls sexually because he values emotions more. He's VERY sensitive to emotions, so he makes a great boyfriend. He's an AMAZINGLY good lover too! He hasn't got Mark's superhuman endurance or physique, but..." Ava interrupted, on schedule, "I've had several guys. After knowing Mark, I'd rate Mark 10 out of 10, and every other guy a 1 or 2. But Ron's an 8. He's ALMOST as good as Mark, which I'd never have thought any other guy could be, but Ron is." Julia took over, "You've seen how sensitive Ron is. He keeps very quiet, but trust me that he's smarter and more sensitive than you've noticed. He's EXCELLENT boyfriend material. He'd have to be, to have changed Carol's attitude the way he did. Ava and I shared Mark very happily, so we know how good sharing can be when everyone values each other. Carol saw that happening with Mark so she knows it too. The three of us are very happy to share Ron. We WANT to share him because we know that works best. But we had a heck of a job talking Ron into that. He came to Corvallis determined to turn over a new leaf and to be a very good person, so it wasn't easy to convince him that having three or more girlfriends made him an even better person. But he's VERY sensitive, so he could tell we believed what we were saying. -- "Diana and Claire, you saw how fast Ron decided he liked you when you first met him. He's an excellent judge of character, and he likes you both very much. Ava, Carol and I think Ron would be even better for you than Mark was, which is a VERY strong recommendation. That's why we want your parents to think your college funds depend on your coming here often, so you can spend time with Ron. We're positive that you and Ron will enjoy yourselves very much." "But we hardly know him," objected Claire. "You know me though," countered Julia. "I helped you with Mark right from the beginning, gave you advice, let you spend time with him, and I spent a lot of time with Mark talking about what he thought about you and Diana. I know Ron will be very good for you." Carol got off my lap and said, "I've known Diana most of my life and I know Ron very well now too. I know Ron will be WONDERFUL for Diana and Claire. So come on you two, I'm dragging you up to bed with Ron. You know I've NEVER done anything nasty to you, Diana. You're my friend and this is the best thing for you." "But I don't want to have sex." "Who said you'd be having sex? You've seen him around the pool when there've been lots of girls in swimsuits. Has he ever looked like he wanted to make a grab for them? He's not like that. If he had been, I never would've stopped being a lesbian. I just want you and Claire to spend some quality time with Ron. Don't you trust me to be kind to you?" "Well yeah, but..." "No buts. Come on." Carol dragged Diana's hand and pulled her reluctantly to her feet, then out of the room, calling after her, "You come too, Claire. If there are two of you, Ron won't be able to turn into his usual, wild, sex-maniac-beast self. You can tickle him to make him stop. Come on Ron, you too." "I know. I'm waiting for Claire. I don't want her to feel pressured." "Go on, Claire," pressured Julia. "Yeah, go on," pressured Ava. "He's a wonderful guy and very kind." With Carol dragging Diana forward, and with Claire being pressured from behind by Julia, Ava and me (by standing waiting for her), the two Norris girls were coerced up the stairs and into the bedroom. "Take your clothes off," instructed Carol, to Diana. "Ahh, I don't..." "Are you silly enough to believe your parents that bodies are evil? Or do you think my boyfriend is evil? TRUST me, Diana; I wouldn't be getting you to do this unless I was VERY sure that you were safe. You've seen Ron around the pool; he doesn't leer at girls. Do what I say and you'll soon be very happy." "But I don't want sex." "You know how sensitive Ron is. If you don't want sex, he's going to know that and he's not going to try anything. He's a GREAT guy." "Then why do you want us to get undressed?" "Because this is about trust, not sex. You need to learn to trust Ron, because he's going to become important to you. Didn't you learn from Mark that some boys are trustworthy? Mark wasn't the only trustworthy boy in the whole world. Ron is even MORE trustworthy because he's so sensitive about people." (We were emphasizing my sensitivity to make me distinct from Mark, to make it less likely for any of the girls to suspect Ron is Mark.) Carol quickly stripped Diana. It wasn't a coincidence that Diana was wearing an outfit that was easy to remove, Carol having told her what to wear. I'd turned my back on them, stripped myself, then slid into bed with as much modesty as possible. Claire was easier to manage than Diana, so both girls were soon naked. I was lying on my back, looking in the other direction. Carol pushed them to get into bed on either side of me. "Move closer to him girls." Carol physically pushed Diana sideways on the bed, not giving her much choice. "You too, Claire. Ron, please put your arms around each of them. Thanks. I'm going leave all the doors open. If you think Ron is a scary, horrible monster then scream and we'll come running. But I can see you've got nothing to worry about." Carol pointed to my midsection's lack of a point. "Ron won't start anything; he's not like that. Have a good talk, bye." Carol left the room. As soon as Carol started going down the stairs, I said, "Carol confuses the heck out of me. I want to be a good boyfriend for her, but she's so strange so I need your advice. Was her brother really Ava's and Julia's boyfriend at the same time?" It took a little more prompting, but soon Claire was telling me about Mark, Diana joining in not long after. After five minutes of talking about Mark's relationships with Julia and Ava, the Norris girls had lost their self-consciousness and were talking away happily. It was easy to ask them why Mark was so popular, and very soon they were talking about why they loved Mark so much (they were both certain that they loved him). They had a lot of bottled up emotions so they were soon gushing flat out. Sometimes happy emotions, sometimes sad emotions, and sometimes tearful emotions, but I knew very well by now that girls like to cry from time to time. It even makes them feel good. I'd chosen a good topic, I was a good listener, and I didn't make a single sexual move. I kept the conversation going until they started running down about an hour later. After the hour or so, during a quiet moment, I said, "Thank you very much. You've given me a lot of good information to think about. We should rejoin the others, so I'll look away while you get dressed then follow after you've left the room." Which reminded them that they were naked; they'd forgotten. I'd like to claim it was because I was so good at this, but it was mostly because they were so focused on their important memories about Mark. They were confused, "You want to get up?" "You're feeling better and you've given me enough to think about. To understand Carol I have to understand Mark because he was so important to her. I don't think I could remember any more now, so this would be a good time to stop." "Carol was right, you weren't going to try anything." "Of course not! I like you both far too much for that. Normally I'd also say I liked Carol too much to play around behind her back, but it was hardly behind her back was it?" Claire stated, "I'll say! She MADE US take our clothes off." "Yeah, Carol's very smart. Because you've been naked with me, now you know you can trust me. I'm glad you do, because I think you're wonderful girls. I'm glad I'm getting to know you better." "Thank you for letting us talk about Mark. It's made me feel a lot better. We can't talk about him at home the way we want." "I'm glad I could help. I wonder if Carol knows any more nice, naked girls who need my help, haha." "But you forgot we were naked!" said Claire, thinking she'd spotted a logical flaw in my statement. "No I didn't. Guys don't forget things like that. Carol was smart for letting me prove I could be trusted. If I'd truly forgotten you were naked, then that wouldn't have proved I was trustworthy. It might have proved I was stupid though, haha. It was because I was aware of how lovely you are, and because I did nothing about it, that now you know I can be trusted." "Oh yeah. I didn't think of that. You really think we're lovely?" "Now you're fishing for compliments! It's nice that you want compliments from me, but I'm still struggling to get used to how Carol and her friends behave, so I'm going to take things cautiously. I'll just say that you know I like you. I liked you both very much the instant I met you." "Why?" asked Diana. "You didn't know us." "Some people have a good ear for music, but I have a kind of 'ear' for people's emotions. You have good emotions. On the other hand, you're TERRIBLE at getting dressed quickly. Remember that Julia, Carol and Ava want you to come visiting them more often in the future, so we'll have more time for talking then." Diana corrected me, "They want us to visit YOU. That's what Julia said this was all about." "Yeah, I know. That's going too fast for me though. All of you girls are used to sharing Mark, but I'm not used to sharing anyone. I'm trying to slow it down because I don't want to make a mistake and hurt you, or Carol, or anyone else. The others have GOT to be wondering what we're doing in here, and I'll feel better able to resist temptation if I'm with girls who've got their clothes on." That last comment was a little joke with myself, as I knew the other girls had sneaked out quietly and were sitting naked in the spa tub, talking about Ron and telling Mark stories. That'd been the plan. I'd been watching them with a sight blob the whole time, and it looked like it was going the way Julia planned. Diana said, "Okay. We'll get up now. Thank you, Ron. Carol's right that you're a wonderful guy." Diana gave my cheek a kiss. I made myself blush a little and sent some blood to the other end of my body too, even holding my cock upright with NP so it tented the blankets noticeably. After her kiss, Diana turned to leave the room, but caught sight of my self-advertisement, saying, "Oh!" Claire followed Diana's look, saying, "Wow. {Giggle}. That's a BIG one!" I pretended embarrassment, blushing some more and raising my knees to hide the offense. "I'm very sorry. I wasn't expecting you to kiss me, Diana." #14: #18: "You DO like us!" "Yes, I do." "But we're much younger than you?" "That doesn't seem to be affecting my feelings, does it?" "Can I have a look at it please?" asked Claire. "You're going too fast for me, Claire. I have to make SURE no one is going to get hurt before I let anything happen." "No one will get hurt. Carol WANTS us to have sex with you!" #3: #21: "You're not going to talk me into going faster than I'm comfortable with. Emotions are more important than sex, so I'm not going to do anything until I'm sure everyone's emotions are fine. PLEASE get dressed now, because this has gone too far for me already." "Can I kiss you too? Diana did, so I should have a turn too." "That seems fair, but I'm going to keep my knees bent." "Aww." "And DON'T make a grab for it the way you're planning." "Ahh, how did you know?" "Because I'm good at understanding people, especially pretty girls with sneaky looks on their faces. Give me a kiss... She did. "I meant on the CHEEK, naughty girl! Please get dressed and tell the others I'll be down in five minutes." I could've easily discouraged the girls by pointing out that they wouldn't like it if a guy was grabbing for them when they'd told him not to. I didn't say that though, because I didn't want them to stop wanting to grab me; I only wanted to pretend that I didn't want them to (you've got to use very convoluted tactics when you want to fool girls). The more eager and horny they were, the better. They got out of bed while I pointedly looked down at my chest with my forehead resting on my raised knees, so I wasn't seeing anything. Except with the sight blob I'd returned to the room for the expressed purpose of seeing everything. It'd been a long time since I'd last had sex with them and both girls had matured very nicely indeed. Diana had a headstart (well, not exactly a "head", but you know what I mean), but Claire was doing a very good job of catching up, or "catching out". Two lovely sisters who enjoyed having threesomes! Ron's life was finally getting back on track. That's not meant to be unfair to Carol, Julia and Ava, as I meant it in the sense that Ron was starting to reacquire Mark's hobbies. While I'm rambling, I'll mention that of the twelve (ex-?) girlfriends of Mark, we'd started with Diana and Claire because they'd be the most easily scared off by having another guy 'thrust on them'. If I'd started having sex with the easiest convinced girls (Alexis and one of the unnamed pipeline girls) most of the others would've distanced themselves from me, but by starting with the most skittish and pretending to be reluctant and cautious, none of the others would feel threatened or pursued. "You can look at me if you want," invited Claire. "And then it'd take me TEN minutes before I could rejoin the others without embarrassing myself. I think I should hide my eyes, thank you." "You're not like other boys," pointed out Diana. "I'd find it hard to have a lesbian girlfriend if I was." "Haha, yeah. Do you like Carol the most?" "I LOVE her the most, yes. I think she's wonderful. I was surprised how distrustful you two were when Carol dragged you up here. You can't know her very well if you think she was doing anything tricky or mean to you. She's not like that." They spent the rest of their dressing-time apologizing and assuring me how much they trusted Carol, saying they wouldn't make that mistake again, etc. We could use that to push the Norris girls around in the future, not that it looked like they'd need much pushing. Getting girls to have sex with you is so easy, you just need to have two or three other girls who sing your praises, and then to let the target girl(s) know that you like her/them very much, but you're too much of a gentleman to initiate anything. Before long you're having to fight them off. Happily, Mom has always insisted that I don't fight girls. Claire and Diana bid me goodbye, then left the room. At the base of the stairs they found the note Ava had left saying "Come to spa pool." They did as instructed finding all the other girls there (it's a big hot tub, exactly for situations such as this). They stripped off and jumped in with all the other naked girls, and spent the next ten minutes informing everyone else what had happened, not happened, and how caring, gentle, considerate, etc., I was. I waited until Claire and Diana weren't doing most of the talking, then got up, put a pair of longish shorts on, then walked down the stairs and up to the hot tub. "Hello. Oh! You're all topless." Ava stood up, to help illustrate her point, "We're all NAKED! You're overdressed, Ron." "I'm sure it's all of you that are underdressed." Claire stood up, twisting and turning to make sure I got a good look, "We're not UNDER-dressed, we're UN-dressed, haha." I dropped my head in apparent embarrassment. Julia demanded, "Get in. There's almost enough room if you take off those bulky shorts and some of us sit on your lap." My obvious reluctance caused giggles and laughter. I said, "I'm still having trouble accepting that Carol's okay with me sleeping with Ava and Julia, and now you're trying to get me to flirt with twelve more girls. How can I make sure everyone is feeling comfortable and happy if you keep adding so many so quickly?" Julia suggested, "Strip and get in so we can discuss it." "Okay. I'm reluctant, but I can see you're all comfortable. And in a few cases, far too eager." I pulled my shorts off, dropped them on top of the other clothes, then got in. Some of the girls moved to make room for me, while Pat asked Diana, "I thought you said he's shy?" I answered, "I'm not shy at all, especially after all the work I've done for Vanessa has toned my body." (Being un-shy is a little ploy to make me seem dissimilar from Mark.) "Diana probably thought I was shy because I was being so cautious, but that's my wanting to make sure everyone is happy before something develops. I have an important relationship with Carol, and now with Ava and Julia too, which I'm not going to upset just for sex. And I'm not going to have any more lovers until I know that the girls and I like each other enough, how those relationships will work, that they aren't going to upset anybody, and things like that." I was in the tub by now, with Carol and Julia sitting on my legs and we were hugging each other. Diana said, "You like Claire and me enough don't you?" "Yes I do, but I still want to be cautious. Think of it this way, a deaf man wouldn't be concerned about what noises he made, but a guy with very good musical hearing would be much more conscious of that. I don't know how, but I'm good at seeing people's emotions, so I'm cautious about doing things that might upset people. I've always thought that having more than one girlfriend caused nothing but trouble. Carol, Ava and Julia are teaching me that it can work very well, but I still want to be careful." Julia asked, "Would you be convinced we were fine with it, if Carol and Ava held the girl's legs open while I pushed your ass from behind to help you screw her?" "Haha. Subtle as usual, Julia. The three of you might be okay with it, but that doesn't sound like your helpless victim would be." Alexis said, "Julia and Ava have got me horny talking about how good you are, so I'll give you a go." "Thank you for your very romantic proposition, Alexis, but if I ever have another lover..." Julia correct me, as I somehow knew she would, "Not if; WHEN. Soon too." " ... If and when I have another lover, then I'd like it to be either Diana or Claire. They're VERY nice girls. Still young, but I like them very much. So one of them should go first." Carol suggested, "You don't have to choose between them. Take them both to bed at the same time." "But they're sisters?" I asked with a carefully puzzled, rather than any sort of negative or positive expression. A reaction that was greeted with laughter, including from Claire and Diana. Carol said, "They usually had threesomes with Mark, and foursomes with Mark and Zoe too. Or sometimes sex with Ava or me. We've ALL had sex together. You're worrying about it far too much. Once the girls find out how good you are, you're going to be buried in pussy." With apparent amazement, I exclaimed, "There must be something in Corvallis's water supply!" I got some laughter, joking agreements, and comments like, "It hasn't been the same since we lost Mark." When I could speak again, I said, "I had no idea it was possible for so many girls to be happy sharing a guy without getting jealous or upset in some way. I can see you're all happy that you did, and I like seeing happiness, but I still don't want to do anything about it unless it's with Claire or Diana first. Sorry - with Claire AND Diana - that's going to take some getting used to. You were all Mark's girlfriends or lovers, which says good things about you because I gather he had quite a lot of choice..." After the jokes and laughter died down, I continued, " ... But I like Diana and Claire the most, so I'll wait until they're ready." Diana said, "Carol's convinced me you're wonderful and..." "Sorry to interrupt, Diana, but we're not going to do anything today. Not with you or anyone else. There's obviously been a lot of sex-talk going on and I know people can get too excited and do things they regret afterward. Take your time to think about it, and if you or Claire still want to in a few weeks, then maybe it'll be all right then, provided Carol, Ava or Julia haven't changed their mind." I would've been very disappointed if it'd taken "a few weeks." Fortunately there was no way it'd take more than a few days. Claire asked, "Do you REALLY like us the most?" "Yes I do. You're the youngest girl here, aren't you Claire?" A worried looking Claire admitted, "Yeah. I'm a little bit younger than Carol." About a year younger, but that didn't matter. "Don't be nervous about your age. I only mentioned it to point out that it means you must be a very special girl to have Mark so interested in you." I'll stop quoting the conversation now. The rest of our talk was just me and my three girls working on the others in our fake no-pressure way, getting them so eager to have sex with me that they'd pressure themselves. For example, they all had turns sitting on my lap to get used to being in contact with me, starting with Claire and Diana. Most of them weren't all that interested in me, but I'd done well socially over summer so none of them were upset about contact with me. No one was allowed to misbehave, but it was only Claire that tried to. Alexis made a grab too, but with her it wasn't so much "misbehavior" as her normal personality. Hopefully the other girls would want to get sexual soon. If a few choose not to, that'd be fine too. I had to respect that Ron was, it seemed, a different person than Mark. I looked very different, had a different sounding voice, talked somewhat differently, seemed to have a different personality, and a diminished sense of humor (I'd had to change it, and it hadn't been possible to make myself any funnier), so naturally not all of Mark's old girlfriends would want to have sex with Ron. The seduction was low key enough that conversation often drifted onto other topics, their $20,000 being a favorite. Five of the girls would be seniors with Julia this coming year, so college was a year away for them. They all wanted to go (Mark and Julia tended to prefer smart girls). That was no surprise with girls like Carina, Victoria and Pat, but I was somewhat surprised about Alexis. She was sure of her desire though. It's easy to make the mistake of assuming Alexis wants a dissipate lifestyle - her dissipate lifestyle being a strong indication of that - but she's actually reasonably smart. She has an enormous amount of freedom for a teenager, which she takes excessive advantage of, but she still does her homework and meets most of her other obligations (only "most", as no teenager is going to meet all of them). My $20,000 offer made the biggest difference to Katelin, as I'd thought it would. That'd been a large part of why I'd included her. Katelin's family had suffered financially from their attack on me, from the lawyer bills and the assailants losing their jobs. The money was a big relief for her. There was a LOT of talk. Some of it was quite basic stuff, Julia getting each of the girls to describe themselves, their interests, etc. As Julia said, "Ron needs to get to know you, before he's going to agree to take any of you as his lover." When they appeared unconvinced by that reason, Julia laughed at them, "I told you before the pipeline system started how fantastic Mark was in bed, and none of you believed me. Now you're making the same mistake again. It's your loss, and it's more of Ron's time for the rest of us, so don't expect me to try very hard to convince you." Eventually the girls decided it was time to head back inside. I said, "Diana and Claire, can you stay a little longer so I can talk with you privately please?" They both happily agreed. The others got dressed then left us. The tub and most of the way to Mark's Wing's front door was very well sheltered by trees, but the front door itself was in the open. With a camera happy press-pack outside, walking back inside naked wasn't a good idea. When the others had gone, I collected Claire and Diana onto my legs, cuddling with them again, and was very pleased to see how comfortable they were with that. Then I just fed them some good sounding bullshit about how lovely they were and how I could tell they had great attitudes and big, caring hearts. I was just complimenting them and setting our 'new' relationship heading in the right direction ("I can see you'll be very unselfish lovers..."). I was mainly killing time. Inside, Julia was explaining something to the other girls, "You can tell how sensitive and kind Ron is by the amazing way he immediately knew to focus on Diana and Claire." "What do you mean?" "I bet I know what you mean," volunteered Carol. "Diana and Claire aren't his favorites for the reason everyone thinks. But they ARE his favorite because of the way HE thinks and feels." "Exactly right," complimented Julia (complimenting Carol's ability to follow the prearranged script). Some of the other girls commented that they hadn't understood what Carol had said. Julia kindly explained, "Ron likes them so much because they NEED to be liked. They're insecure. It's not their fault; it's because their parents and big sister are confusing them with bad information. Ron picked up on that very quickly. Mark tried to teach them to trust the right guys, but they could've assumed it was just Mark who was the only fantastic guy. Mark was so extreme that thinking he was unique was an easy mistake to make. After Claire and Diana get blown away by how nice Ron is, they'll know that as there are two guys that fantastic, there's bound to be more. They'll be much better at resisting their parents' message. Ron will be concentrating on them because he can change their lives so much for the better." Julia was laying it on thick - the Norris parents weren't quite THAT bad; Mackenzie was the main source of her own bad attitude - but Julia does tend to get carried away when she's promoting how wonderful I am, regardless of which "I am" I am. We'd had to do this to explain my focusing on the Norris girls. The other girls knew Claire and Diana weren't anything special (sexually compliant sisters not being an acceptable reason), so my preferring them needed an explanation. Julia finished off with, "Zoe, please don't tell them what I just said. Once they're Ron's lovers and you can see how happy they are, then you can tell them if you want to. There won't be any point to it though, because Ron does genuinely like them. It's just that he's so unselfish that his liking them is strongly influenced by his seeing that he can help them." "I understand," agreed Zoe. "I hope Ron can make Diana happy; she misses Mark very badly." One of the girls commented, "You're almost making him seem psychic, Julia." "He almost is. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly he picks up on people issues. He put Alyssa and Tony Montgomery together. None of us saw that, and we've known them for years. How could a guy - a GUY! - spot that ahead of us? You've all seen him do clever things with people. The cleverest has got to be getting Carol to fall in love with him..." Which made all the girls start gushing with Carol. Romance makes girls' brains go weird. It's a similar but sillier version of what seeing breasts does to guys' brains. Another comment that Julia managed to work in was, "We know Mark was incredible and unique, because there were dozens of scientists raving over his body and brain. Somehow Carol's found ANOTHER truly amazing guy. Ron's very different from Mark - different age, race, background and skills - and he's not as impressive as Mark was, but Ron's still very special. Not just slightly special like many people are at something they're good at. Ron is unbelievably, almost inhumanly, special. -- "In some ways Ron is very different than Mark. Mark never had the confidence to interpose himself between other people the way Ron does. And even with his genius, I don't think Mark had the skill to read people as well as Ron does. Obviously Ron's not nearly as much of a genius or as athletic as Mark was, but Ron is fairly smart and reasonably fit. He doesn't walk the same as Mark, but he's still very graceful in his own way. He's VERY good in bed too! Sometimes he feels just like Mark, especially when he's licking me. That freaked me out for quite a while, until I realized that Ron's sensitivity to people's emotions meant he's learned how girls most like to make love, so that's what he does. It feels the same as what Mark used to do because they both do it the best way." Julia was accentuating the differences between Ron and Mark, while explaining away the biggest remaining similarity of my lovemaking style. Obviously I didn't want to degrade that by changing it, so we'd invented the excuse Julia gave. ^ [We'd trained me to correct two other very noticeable similarities. I now walked differently because Julia had got me to change the shape of my feet. I now have 'built in' orthopedic inserts to change my gait. My kissing style has changed too. That just took lots of practice (actually not that much, but it was fun to practice so we overdid it). Especially in the sack, but in other ways too, girls are going to occasionally notice that I behave very Mark-like. One that'd come up weeks ago was that unless I'm taking care not to, I tend to speak like Mark: similar rhythms, grammar, figures of speech, etc. Despite my deeper voice making it less likely that visitors' brains would unconsciously recognized my speech, they did sometimes notice and comment on the similarities. I'd explained that away with, "I used to speak like this when I lived in LA..." I gave them a 30-second sample of motherfuckingly poor vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Followed by, "When I left home, the FIRST thing I wanted to do was speak better. I'm trying hard to copy from the people I talk with. I don't know whether you've noticed this or not, but Julia tends to do most of the talking, so I've mostly copied her speech. I leave out her feminine expressions and keep the ones that sound masculine, so I've picked up what Julia picked up from Mark. It could be worse: if I learned from Donna, I'd sound like a horse."] ^ Having made her point, Julia let the conversation drift. One of the girls said she didn't want to become my lover, and several other girls said they didn't want to either. Julia's answer was, "No one's making you. I wouldn't, and Ron would NEVER, push you to do something you didn't want to. Ron's even MORE cautious than Mark was, as unbelievable as that seems. You don't have to have sex with Ron, and your $5,000 checks aren't dependent on that in any way. I'll keep inviting you here, and you can come or not as you wish. -- "I'll make one point though - you're fools if you don't make the effort to get to know Ron so you have good feelings for him. That won't take long because he's a great guy. Then when you're ready, grab his hand and leap into bed with him. Then you'll discover that he's a GREAT guy, sexually and as a person. You're all sexually experienced and none of you think sex is something to be scared of. You don't have to worry about Ron's taking advantage of you, or chasing you afterward, or anything like that. It's good, safe sex; which the three of us can't recommend highly enough. -- "Ron, Carol, Ava and I sleep together every night; which in some ways is even better than it was with Mark. We could never sleep with Carol before, and Ava was only an irregular visitor. Now we're together every night, which is a fantastic way of living. Ron has done a great deal toward helping us recover from losing Mark. Ron's very good at things like that." "Count me in," volunteered Alexis eagerly. "If you say he's as good as Mark, then that's enough for me. When can I jump his bones?" "Ask him yourself when he comes in." "Good. That's okay with you, isn't it, Carol?" Carol smiled happily, "I love the idea of sharing him. He can read people so well I don't have to fear a selfish girl or a gold-digger getting her claws into him. I never imagined that I'd ever say this in my life, but I totally trust my boyfriend to have sex with other girls for only good reasons. Isn't that a weird thing for a lesbian to say?" They agreed that it was. Julia gave me the signal - putting her arm over the back of her seat as if relaxing - so I started wrapping it up with the lovely Norris nymphets. I finished my current point, then said, "That's all I wanted to say. Now I want to give you a good kiss then go inside. Youngest girl first, okay Claire?" "Okay." I'd known it would be okay. I'd been complimenting them for several minutes, and proximity was telling me the effect it was having on them, especially on Claire. I pulled her into a big kiss. I wanted to slide my finger into her pussy, like Mark had done on 'his' first time with them (I like symmetry, and pussies are nice too). It wasn't a sure thing yet though, so I just kissed and hugged. With Mark, the Norris girls had experienced many weeks of being in the company of their peers and an older sister who were raving about how wonderful Mark was. There is NO aphrodisiac more effective than peers lusting after the same guy. With Ron, they hadn't had much of that. Some, especially from Carol, but not enough. I actually had to seduce them with my personality rather than their lusting after me just because other girls were lusting after me, who were lusting after me because other girls were ... It's called a "virtuous circle", although the first word isn't entirely appropriate in this context. Maybe "positive feedback loop" might be less morally inaccurate, especially because it had made Mark positively happy. Because Claire had kissed me, and there hadn't been any monkey business, Diana was more agreeable to doing so too. When I finished with Diana, Claire giggled, then said, "The first time Mark kissed us, he put his fingers in us. Both at the same time!" #15: #16: "How could he get his fingers in your mouths if he was kissing you?" "Haha. Not in our MOUTHS. Somewhere else." "Eww yuk. Not in your nose?" "Haha, no..." "Ear?" "No. Farther down." "Armpit?" "No. You're a terrible guesser." "Oh! I get it. You mean belly button." "Haha. Farther down than that." "SURELY you don't mean... ?" "Yeah." "I'm sure very well behaved, young ladies - such as yourselves - slapped his face. Right?" "No, we let him. He was very sexy." "So let me get this right. Mark was kissing you like this..." I started kissing Claire again. I gave it a second, then pulled my mouth back just far enough to say, " ... and then his finger went like this..." I resumed kissing her while my finger started sliding up her thigh. Claire opened her legs and upped the passion of her kisses. I slid my finger faster. For the next twenty seconds I kissed and finger-fucked Claire, fifteen seconds of which she kissed me back and played with my cock. I knew there was a reason I like this girl, and this was it! After the twenty seconds (I hadn't wanted Diana to feel scared that too much was going to happen), I pulled my lips and finger back. I said to Claire, "And you say Mark did this to BOTH of you?" "Yeah. You should do it to Diana too." I turned to the much more reluctant sister, "Diana, may I please kiss you the way I just kissed Claire?" Claire added, "Feel his cock too, Diana. It's very nice." Turning to me, Claire said, "I want to have sex with you now. Can we have sex please?" I answered, "First things first. Diana, may I kiss you please?" Diana answered, "Will you stop if I ask you to?" "I will ALWAYS stop if you ask me to. I'll stop if you even look unsure. That's why I'm being so cautious and polite now. I don't want to do anything with you if you're not totally comfortable about it." "Do it!" demanded Claire. "I want to have sex with him to see if he's as good as Mark, like Julia says." #1: #12: #8: Diana said, "Okay. I'll try it." I could see she wasn't totally comfortable, but I'm not the sort of guy who feels constrained by the literal wording of his recent promises to pretty girls (is any guy?). I gently pulled Diana into a kiss, putting a hand on her knee and slowly sliding it up. Halfway to its destination, Diana's legs hesitantly parted. That was close enough to "totally comfortable" for me. I knew Diana's and Claire's bodies very well. Their last eight months' growth might've changed some reactions, but presumably nothing fundamental. Mark used to very often fuck one of them while fingering the other, while they were kissing and fondling each other (it was great to see sisters get on so well together), so I'd had lots of practice at fingering them to orgasm. I put that knowledge to good use with Diana. Slowly initially, but as she relaxed I increased my efforts. "Play with his cock," suggested Claire, who wasn't leaving much room for her sister's hand. Diana moved her left hand - her right one being around my neck - to my cock. Claire felt it arrive and pulled it onto better contact, and started moving it up and down, as if Diana needed to be shown what to do. Diana discovered her initiative, and started controlling her own hand. I added a thumb to my diddling. Diana started really getting into it, kissing me with much more enthusiasm and opening her legs wider. I inserted another finger. Thirty seconds later Diana was starting to breathe heavily. Her hand fell away from my cock and she moaned. "YES!" celebrated Claire; quietly, but with considerable enthusiasm. I'm even better at sex than I used to be. My proximity sense is something like a hundred times more detailed, so I can sense things happening inside her body that I had no idea about before (I'd learned about them from practicing on Carol, Julia and Ava). Plus I can sense emotions much better too, although that was increasingly just one big emotion from Diana. Via my sight blob, I could see that Julia was worried that I hadn't seen her signal. We hadn't practiced that, so she didn't know how good I was at keeping an eye on her. She kept making exaggerated arm movements behind her seat, so I NP-stroked her cheek, then lightly tapped her watch ten times. She smiled, so I hope she understood I needed ten minutes. She may not have realized the need to count the taps, but she'd have a rough idea. I used nearly all of that time on Diana; getting her very close and then holding her there. I was mouthing her nipples, using both my hands on her body, and changing what I was doing to give her variations in the building up process. It was a lot of fun for both of us; especially for her, I suspect. Claire was occupying herself by jacking me with both hands. I wasn't going to let her make me cum in the tub, but she didn't know that. Several times she thought about swinging one leg over mine and lowering herself onto my cock. Diana was blocking that, but Claire still thought about it often. I took it as a good sign. I was a little disappointed that she didn't move to be beside Diana to join in having sex with her. With Mark, Claire would've done that, but with Ron she never thought about it enough for it to show up as an intention to move. I knew the girls weren't really into each other or bisexual, but that didn't stop me wanting to see them do it. They're HOT SISTERS! Do I need to explain any more? I'll prompt them to resume that behavior when I go to bed with them. That's not as selfish as it seems. They enjoyed doing it for Mark because they enjoyed making him happy. Once they are hooked on me enough - something I had well in hand - I'll tell them how much I think I'll enjoy seeing them be sexy together. That and some very sincere appreciation when they do what I ask should be all it'll take. All good things must come to an end (there should be a law against that). On the infrequent occasions I'd had my mouth free, I'd quietly told Diana things like, "You're a very nice person, Diana", "I like you VERY much", "Mark was a genius to choose a girl as wonderful as you", etc. Julia had taught me the benefits of the right sort of talk during sex. A few seconds before the end, I asked her, "Do you want me to let you cum?" "OH YES! Please!" "Okay. Here it comes, beautiful Diana, my newest lover." "{Groan}." I kissed her as my hands finally gave her what she wanted. The moment Diana's orgasm finished, Claire demanded, "Me next! Me next!" I gave her a very strong frown, saying, "CLAIRE NORRIS! How dare you be so inconsiderate! Sit down and be quiet." "{Gulp}." She wasn't sure what she'd done wrong, but she'd never seen me react so parentally before. Her expression fell, and she immediately sat down, looking guilty about whatever it was she'd done wrong. While I was holding Diana, and stroking her hair with one hand, I explained to Claire, "You know Diana was worried about getting sexy with me. Now that we've done something so intimate, Diana needs to be held and comforted..." "I'm SORRY! I didn't mean to be selfish..." "I know you didn't, but you have to learn that good sex means caring for the person, or people, you're with. You have to think about them and put their needs ahead of yours. In the future, please remember that." "I will! I just got too excited..." "So I noticed. It's good you were excited, because sex IS good fun, but your sister's happiness and comfort is more important than your getting sex a few seconds faster. To punish you, I'm going to make you cum very quickly. You hurried your lovely sister, so I'm going to hurry your pleasure. Sit on the shelf and lean back with your legs open. Start playing with yourself and I'll lick you out when I've finished cuddling Sweet Diana." Diana said, "I'm okay now, thanks Ron." "Maybe, but I haven't finished cuddling you yet. I LIKE cuddling you!" Now that Claire was out of the way, I pulled Diana onto my lap properly, giving her a nice cuddle, some sweet kisses, and whispering a few sweet nothings, like, "I can easily tell why a girl as sweet as Carol likes you so much, Diana. You're very lovely. I'm very glad I've been lucky enough to meet you... ," etc. A couple of minutes of that was enough to convince Diana that I was a great guy to keep having sex with, so I said, "You look happy now. What was the next thing I was supposed to do? I seem to remember that there was something else, but I've forgotten what I was. Maybe we should go inside to ask Julia? She's usually very organized, so maybe she'll know what it is." "It's me!" Claire reminded. "You're teasing me," she fairly accused. "Yes I am. Diana, do I have your permission to lick your sister between her legs please?" "{Giggle}. No one has ever asked me that before..." "Aren't the boys in Corvallis polite?" "Haha. Not like you. Yes, you may lick my sister between her legs, haha." I gave Diana a last kiss and hug, then I held her up while I slid out from underneath her. I placed her on the seat then got out of the tub to move into position. I would've done Claire this way even without her little misbehavior. It'd be quicker and I was curious to see how her pussy had changed in eight months. Her breasts had certainly improved significantly, but what would her pussy be like? Breasts can easily "improve" just by getting bigger. Pussies are different though (I bet you knew that already). It'd changed noticeably. The lips were fuller, darker colored, and its orientation had changed slightly. She was hairier, but it wasn't thick. After the taste of the tub's water had been licked away, her pussy tasted slightly differently too. It worked just as well though, and just as quickly. Claire's fuse had been shorter than Diana's eight months ago, and it still was, especially because I was going straight for the main prize. She had a GREAT cum. After Claire had recovered, I waited until she was just about to open her mouth, then I cut her off with, "Not today, but tomorrow would be okay." "Huh?" "Weren't you going to ask when we can have full sex?" "How did you know?" "You don't think it was hard to tell, do you?" "Ahh, I guess not." With a much more excited voice, "So we can do it tomorrow?" "Today is too soon because I want you to think about it overnight to make sure you're truly happy with the idea. But if you're both willing to, then tomorrow will be fine. If Diana's not ready, then take as long as you need." "Can I come by myself if Diana's not ready?" asked Claire hopefully. "I'll explain something to you. I don't understand the girls that are here this evening. I don't understand how you could all be so happy sharing one guy. I don't like not understanding relationships because that makes it too easy to make a mistake and hurt someone I care for. Normally I wouldn't do anything until I was VERY sure of myself, which could take months. But Carol, Julia and Ava are so sure that what I'll do is assume that Mark truly was a genius and that he knew that you girls could have a successful relationship the way he set it up. I'm going to 'take his word for it'. You can come tomorrow, but only if you come the same way you would with Mark, which I know is together. I don't want to risk taking one of you at a time in case it causes jealousy or some other trouble. I won't know you well enough to judge that for myself for months. So if you want to have sex with me before then, it has to be together. Do you understand my reason?" "Yeah," agreed Claire, happy to agree to anything that meant sex was going to happen soon. "I understand too," confirmed Diana. "You're very thoughtful." "I have to be. There's so much new stuff happening to me that making a mistake and upsetting people scares me. I have another reason for wanting both of you to come together - the idea of having a threesome with two sisters as beautiful and lovely as you is VERY HOT! It gets me very, VERY excited..." "{Giggle}. Just like Mark. He loved seeing us kiss and stuff too." "No wonder people say he was a genius! Haha. I can't wait to see you do all the things you did when you were with Mark, which is why I've agreed to your coming tomorrow, even though it's much faster than I normally would do anything serious." "What time do you want us to come?" asked Diana. "First, ONLY come if you want to. If you change your mind overnight, that's okay with me. The most important thing is that you're happy. If you do want to come, soon after lunch would be good. That'd give us several hours before dinner, and hopefully you can call your parents and say you've been invited to dinner. When you go home tonight, tell your parents about your college money and needing to stay in the Andersons' good graces. That should make them happy about your visiting." "I'll say!" agreed Diana. "They wanted me to be friendly to Mark because he was rich, so they'll be very happy." "That wasn't very nice of them..." "It was GREAT! It made it much easier for us to visit Mark. Mom used to push us to visit him. Mark and Carol didn't care how silly Mom and Dad were." "Then I won't either. Call Carol about lunchtime tomorrow to confirm you're coming, and I'll do my best to make you happy." We got dressed and went inside. I apologized to everyone for taking so long. Diana's and Claire's much increased affection toward me was quickly noticed and joked about, but they didn't care, just hugging me tighter and telling everyone how wonderful I was. They only knew how wonderful my fingers and tongue were, but that was a good start. The rest of the evening was just social, with lots of girl-talk and very little sex-talk, so it was boring. It broke up fairly late, so Julia asked the girls to tell their parents not to call the Andersons about the $20,000 tonight, "But tomorrow morning after 8am will be okay." ------- Chapter 323: Daddy, Can I Suck Your Lollypop Pwease? Sunday, September 24, 2006 The Main House's phone rang at 7:31am the next morning. Mrs. Norris to talk with Mom to confirm that her daughters' story about their being given $20,000 each was true. My four parents knew all about the gifts, including the "remain friends" condition to keep the younger girls coming to visit us, and that the real reason for it included so I could have sex with them. Mom was surprisingly permissive about it. I doubt it was because Mom thought I needed some recreation after killing over two hundred people. I like to think that her permission was mostly because she trusted me not to hurt the girls, or it might've been the complete opposite: maybe she expected that I would hurt the girls and that was a lesson I needed to learn. I wouldn't have been surprised if Vanessa had been involved in helping Mom decide to cooperate. I didn't ask Mom why she'd agreed; that's Rule #1 of having parents. The issue was a bit messy, as I was no longer legally Mom's child. Obviously she still parented me, with no hesitation to assign me chores, to speak up if I did something she disagreed with, or to give praise if I got something right, but I'm talking "legally"; about how outsiders would see things. I was twenty years old, and as Dad had pointed out, "you're Black," so getting caught having underage sex was a lot more serious than it used to be, especially as it was likely that the Norris parents - being moralistic Christians - would get quite upset about my apparent race. Diana and Zoe were sixteen, Claire fourteen, and two other girls weren't eighteen for a few months yet. Of the three girls that were the biggest legal worry, Diana and Claire were especially well known by my family and had already proved their discretion. Zoe to a lesser extent, but still very acceptably. When Mrs. Norris called, Mom did what I wanted, including giving the suggested justification, "The condition to remain friends is mainly so we can keep an eye on all of the recipients. If any of them look like they're sliding into bad behaviors - drugs or such like - then giving them money wouldn't be a good idea. Now that they know they're getting a sizable amount of money, it'd be good if they visited my girls fairly often, so we know it's not going to their heads." "Of course they can visit. They're best friends with your girls." "Good. I'll make sure Carol and Donna invite them to sleepovers some nights, so I can talk with them too." "Whenever you want. They're VERY good girls. We've brought them up properly." "Yes, they seem to be as well-behaved as my girls." Mom hadn't been able to resist saying that truthful statement. Donna had only had the first of her monthly sessions with me so far, but she was already eagerly anticipating the next. Everyone knew how many days it was to October 4. Mom had a busy morning answering phone calls from doubtful, then very appreciative, parents. Mr. and Mrs. Norris delivered their daughters into our clutches shortly after lunch. I kept out of sight, letting Carol and Donna receive the girls. The Norris parents tried to worm their ways into my parents' good graces, but we were all getting good at cutting those efforts short. Dad got rid of them with, "We're just about to conclude another multi-billion dollar settlement with the Government. Sorry, but we don't have time to talk. I'm sure you understand." He joked about their expression after they'd left. When we got Diana and Claire to join us in Mark's Wing, we could see that their enthusiasm had subsided somewhat, especially Diana's, but with Carol, Donna, Julia, Ava and my working on them, the sofa soon became an inappropriate place for how hot and heavy we were getting. We moved up to the bedroom, with Carol coming along to provide Diana with a great deal of immoral support. Donna sneaked in too. She'd happily participated in encouraging Diana and Claire downstairs, and apparently she thought they still needed encouragement even once we were in the bedroom. We ended up having a fivesome, with two sets of two sisters, which was officially the hottest session I'd ever had. There wasn't any strong reason not to let Donna join in, and there were two good reasons to let her participate: To help get Claire and Diana going with each other. And because I was VERY eager to see Donna and Claire get it on together. I guess I must be a pervert or something (my money's on "pervert"). Donna and Carol didn't do anything together. Apparently that doesn't appeal to them, and I know it doesn't appeal to me (I must not be perverted enough) so I didn't encourage them in the slightest. Nor did I have full-on sex with Donna. She has to wait until her next turn ten days away. I did go down on her though, which she was very happy about. She was extremely eager to return the favor whenever my cock was available, which it rarely was. Other than Carol with Donna, every other combination of girl on girl happened, and I had wonderful full-on sex with Carol, Claire and Diana. Carol went first because, she insisted to me, "I have to show them how to do it. You're different than Mark." That was only partly true, which might explain why Carol didn't point out any differences. Either that or she'd gotten distracted. It was a GREAT session! One of the very best, because I got a HUGE kick out of seeing Donna in action with Claire and Diana. It was strange in one way: Donna with Carol together doesn't feel right to me, and Donna with me is good fun but not much more than that, but Donna with another girl was a MAJOR turn-on. It was almost enough to make me suspect guys are illogical about sex. We were at it for several hours, until Ava came to see if we wanted dinner. It was probably a good idea to stop. A shame, but still a good idea. I had to downplay my superhuman endurance. I could get away with more activity with Claire and Diana than with other girls because the Norris girls didn't know what other boys were like (we'd checked, and they hadn't played around with anyone else since Mark). I wouldn't be able to do that with more experienced girls though, and I shouldn't overdo it with these two. So we stopped for dinner, which gave them time to calm down before we dropped them home. They were very happy, and fully converted to their new boyfriend/lover. The next day, Diana got together with Zoe, told her how wonderful it'd been, and convinced Zoe to join in. Corrupting Zoe couldn't have been easier: she called up and asked for it. Alexis was next a couple of evenings later. I had to be a lot more careful to avoid being Mark-like with her, because Alexis was VERY experienced, some of it in ways I was scared to ask about. I started with some clumsiness, uncertainty and gentleness (not Alexis' usual style), and was pretty convincing. I made several comments about learning what she liked, as I quickly got better with her. By the end of the session I was able to treat Alexis the way she liked - although I was deliberately a little on the gentle side - and she believed she'd seen me learn from scratch how to do it. After that it was easy to have several of the girls visit at the same time, and to let things get sexy in front of them. I was very relaxed about it. As I said, "My main girlfriend Carol has convinced me that sharing is fine." We were also relaxed about the other girls choosing to join in or not. With Alexis' ringing endorsement (all the girls credited Alexis with knowing a thing or two about sex), plus the compliments from the three young girls and my live-in lovers, the uncommitted girls were convinced that I was VERY good in bed, even "Almost as good as Mark." It came down to whether they wanted REALLY good no-strings sex, or not. Girls are so strange that not all of them leaped at the chance. Pat signed up and lay back pretty quickly, Katelin climbed onboard a couple of days later, followed on their next visits by a couple of the 19-year old girls. It stalled a bit then, until Julia announced that there was going to be another flight to Rodeo Drive. That didn't start an immediate flurry of sex because all the girls were invited regardless of whether they were my lovers or not (we'd NEVER pressure girls to have sex with me! Julia and I are VERY moral about being seen doing things like that). But after a very exciting day's shopping on Rodeo Drive, the girls got carried away back in the HUGE, luxury hotel suite afterward, and one thing led to several more things, and soon every girl was converted over to becoming one of Ron's lovers. We ended up having a seventeen-some; the twelve invited girls plus Julia, Ava, Carol and Donna. Plus me of course; we wouldn't want to leave me out. It was a new record for me, so I should find out what a seventeen-some is called. Even with my not screwing Donna, there were too many of them for me to do good jobs with, without appearing too Mark-like. I gave Carol and Alexis a good screw first to get the ball rolling. Then I concentrated on doing a very good job of pleasuring the girls who were already my lovers. I screwed six girls into orgasms, cumming myself three times. After that I could only break the ice with the other girls with my mouth and fingers, "until I've rested enough," I claimed. Fortunately all the work I've been doing for Vanessa had made me very fit (another claim), so I was apparently able to recover quickly. The holdouts had gotten excited enough - clothes shopping followed by a superb tongue job will do that - that I managed to corrupt all of them. I had to go through the learning curve fakery with all the girls, plus my saying things like, "Ahh, I see you don't like that much. Let me try this. Good, that works much better." They all saw me learn from scratch with girl after girl, as if I'd never known their bodies before, so it was nothing like Mark being back, even if the final sex was up to his high standard. From that shopping trip onward, my life was much more like it had been back in the good old days. We weren't going to restart the pipeline system for me, but I didn't miss it. I'd found enough very nice girls through it that I didn't want to go through its tedious stages again. I didn't have any trouble finding new girls anyway, all I had to do was walk around in public; everyone in town knew I was worth $375 million (the Rodeo Drive trip just referred to had been after the second settlement. Just as well considering what it'd cost, even with free air travel). Not that I picked up many girls that way; I preferred to choose among the girls that I like that visited our home. ^ I did pickup a few girls in public (more accurately, let them pick me up), but I learned that random girls didn't compare well with any of my favorites, so I didn't bother very often. Don't get the idea that I gave up on other girls - that'd be silly! I still played around because novelty does have a value all of its own, and it can be exciting to seduce a girl for the first time. One pickup attempt that I did particularly enjoy was when Savannah Glass saw me in town one day. She tried very much the same trick she'd tried at the Aquatic Center, by pretending to casually meet us. She spotted us from a distance, then came RUSHING over but behind us so we wouldn't see her. She'd failed to allow for my 24-foot proximity sense and overwatch sight blob though. From just behind us, a little breathlessly, Savannah said, "Oh, Julia, is that you? How are you? And this must be Ron. You're even more handsome in person than you are on TV." Accompanied by her sexiest smile. Sometimes I really wish I could communicate with all the other Marks across all the parallel dimensions, so we could coordinate giving different responses in each to get the full value from opportunities such as this. Several delightful possibilities went through my more-than-several minds. I decided on one I thought would hit Savannah in very appropriate places. I looked her body up and down, slowly and deliberately. Savannah posed herself, smiling happily at my attention (treating a girl like she's a piece of meat isn't insulting when you're worth $375 million and the girl is like Savannah, which many of them are). I said, "You are EASILY da best lookin' Black girl in this town. Lookin' FINE Momma!..." #14: #12: " ... We'd look PERFECT together, 'xcept you dress so badly." "Huh? What do you mean? I've got good dress sense." "Maybe in this town, but not what I'm used ta. Where I come from, shorties who'd wanna wear my chain would dress like hos. Ya got an okay body for it, and I'm tempted to take ya shoppin', but it'd be a waste; ya got no style. Ya not showin' ANY skin! Ma LA friends would laugh at me for hangin wit' a country hick like you." #3: #12: #15: <"Ho" would be the most accurate.> #12: Savannah insisted, "These old clothes! I threw them on because I was just popping into town for a couple of minutes..." "Yeah, I kin' tell ya got no pride. I'll haveta git myself a real good looker from LA; a shorty dat knows how to show off her beauty, niggah style, not dressin' like some boring whitey-next-door. I bet ya got nuttin' in ya closet that makes ya look like a foxy ho?" "I DO! Most of my clothes are like that..." "Seein' as how ya only poppin' inta town for a couple of minutes, when ya get home, get inta ya hottest five outfits and send pictures of yaself to Julia's phone for me to look at. I'll 'xpect them in less'n two hour, or ya just hot air. Ya got Julia's number?" "Yes. Ahh, it might take me more than two hours. I'm busy with other things." "They more 'portant than provin' ya have what it takes ta be a player's main niggah girl?" "You're right. I'll do it! Ahh, my name's..." "Don't tell me. Ya just a waste of a good body till ya show me ya got style and I wouldn't be 'barrassed to be seen wit' ya on any of my foreign trips." "You won't be! I'll text you soon, Julia. Bye." Savannah took off, almost running. That's when I made a bad tactical mistake: I laughed quietly, declaring, "Haha. Good luck on her finding five hos outfits in this town in two hours. She's going to have a very frantic and frustrating time." "No she's not," corrected Julia. "Savannah will easily be able to put five outfits together for you from what she's got at home. She's got that powder-blue miniskirt that she can roll up, and if she matched it with spaghetti-strapped top she wore when..." My brain shut down, saving it from the next fifteen minutes of my girls dissecting what I was sure would be every outfit Savannah owned, deciding on its ho-ness factor, how she should wear it, and what she should wear it with, to achieve today's interesting clothing challenge. In a momentary lull in the conversation (which, as I said, took at least fifteen minutes to happen), I said, "I thought I'd been really clever with my idea of taking proud, money-hungry Savannah and making her run all over town for a frantic two hours shopping, spending her own money to buy clothes she'd have no pride in wearing. Especially because I know how much girls hate to shop within any sort of sensible time limit." "It was a good idea, Ron..." started Ava. Carol finishing, " ... but it's a pity every part of it was wrong, haha. You're a lot better than you used to be, darling, but you sometimes don't understand girls very well." (Carol enjoys calling me "darling" and other terms of endearment. She couldn't do that in public when I was Mark, so she's making up for lost time now. Julia and Ava are doing it more often too, probably unconsciously picking up on Carol's speech.) #23: I asked, "I know there's no hope of me ever doing better than the occasional lucky guess, but can you please explain why I was so wrong? WITHOUT detailed descriptions of any of her outfits please!" Julia answered, "It's easy. First, every girl's got clothes that can be adjusted to look slutty. Especially if it's only for a picture, because then she can pin things into the right position. -- "Second, she'll be thinking about what she's got and she might buy something to complete an outfit, but she'll know what to get and where to get it from so she won't be frantic about it. Savannah will obviously know what all the stores have in stock because that's important knowledge for any girl. She won't be spending much of her own money, or possibly none at all. -- "Lastly, she'll be very proud of how good she'll look. She wouldn't dress like a ho in public, but she'll still be proud of her looks. I'm afraid none of your plan will work the way you hoped." "Oh well. A missed opportunity then. I should've told her she was too skinny for me and to come back when she weighed twenty pounds more. Then I'd have rejected her." My girls were HORRIFIED that I could be so evil as to even think of that! They instantly sided with Savannah against me. Twenty pounds was WAY too cruel. Maybe five pounds would've been an acceptable punishment; but twenty was life-destroying for someone like Savannah. I was forced to resort to a very desperate ploy to divert them. I said, "The outfit Savannah was wearing the last time we saw her could be turned into a good hos outfit, couldn't it?" I couldn't remember what she'd be wearing, but I was sure the girls did. Julia took the bait, "Not the jeans obviously, but the top has possibilities if she was willing to take to it with a pair of scissors. Then she could..." I was off the hook. I just had to put up with another conversation about female clothing. Slutty clothes can be good to look at (I suspect you've noticed that yourself), but they're DREADFULLY dull to listen to a conversation about. About ninety minutes later, Julia received five VERY HOT pictures from Savannah! She'd outdone herself; mostly by doing a lot of undoing. It was a very effective combination. I'd seen her naked several times during the Target Game, but the pictures were better. I'd lied when I'd told Savannah that she had a good body, to build her up so my rejection would be even more effective. Savannah was actually too slim for my taste as I prefer girls with lovely, big breasts like Carol's; Julia's and Ava's personalities more than making up for their sad deficiencies in the breast department. But Savannah had neither large breasts nor a good personality. Most of Savannah's clothing accentuates her tallness, slimness and color, so I wasn't expecting much from her photos. Boy, was I wrong! Savannah SURE knew how to "undress to impress." "Wow! These are hot. I almost want to have sex with her again," I said, almost being honest. My girls laughed at me. Julia commenting, "If you DON'T want sex with her, you're going to have to duck, because she's throwing herself at you again." Ava accused me, "You're such a guy!" With perfectly acted sincerity, I answered, "Thank you. Savannah's gone all out, hasn't she?" "Not really," answered Julia. "She didn't have time to go all out. She's wearing the same makeup in all the shots, and it simply doesn't go with some of them. It would've been better if she'd..." The girls started talking makeup. That's even worse than talking about clothes. I know that doesn't seem possible, but trust me on this. I'd suggest you test my assertion by conducting an experiment, but I'm not that cruel. My girls needed to keep referring to the pictures to have the best possible makeup conversation, so I wasn't even able to distract myself with them. My sight blob could see them in Julia's hand okay, but the girls spent what seemed like five years with the same picture displayed while they ripped Savannah's makeup to shreds. Then Julia's phone rang. Julia looked at it, then told me, "It's Savannah. Do you want to answer it or me?" "I'd better do it, otherwise Savannah will get roped into a makeup conversation." Julia passed me the phone. I hit the button, saying "Yo!" "Ron, it's Savannah here." "Who?" "Savannah. I sent you the pictures a few minutes ago." "Oh, the boring girl! Yeah, we got 'em. You don' know much 'bout makeup, do you?" "What do you mean?" "I don't want a bitch that's gonna 'barrass me, but you..." I started telling her several things she'd done wrong with her makeup, which surprised the heck out of thirty one of me. #29: It's weird, but we don't actually know who's running parts of our body. It's whoever most wants to, and we can't tell who that is. [[This tells you something about our character. If we'd cared enough about who was running our body our subconsciouses would have easily found a way of letting us know, but we trusted each other so it didn't matter. We did develop a way of knowing who was controlling individual NP-points, but that was because we often had to carefully coordinate several minds' worth of points. We never had that much need with our body.]] #15: #1: #15: #16: #All: #15: #29: #15: I gave Savannah a few more makeup pointers, then said, "Your clothes weren't nothin' great neither. In da clubs, most of the bitches is lookin' better than you. What do ya wear when you go clubbin? Because you couldn' wear any of those outfits to a decent club." "Ahh, we don't have clubs like that in Corvallis." "Yeah, you're all hicks out here. If I took you to a big city anywhere, you'd 'barrass me. Ya got potential, but you ain't tryin' hard enuf." "That's why I called you," said Savannah with sudden enthusiasm. "Seeing you like me dressed like that, I thought you might like a photo of me naked?" "Send it if ya like, but I already don' think you good 'nuf for me." "Umm. I wanted to check you wouldn't send it to anyone else. I don't want..." "What! You tellin' me what I kin do! Who you think you are? Next you'd be tellin' me when we kin fuck or not. Stupid bitch." I hung up. Then I realized that I couldn't be bothered playing with her any more. I had some thoughts of using her like Lily had wanted to be used because calling Savannah for quick fucks whenever I felt like it would demean her, but she wasn't worth the bother. She'd certainly be high-maintenance compared to Lily, who'd required none at all, not even to say "Good bye" afterward. I passed the phone back to Julia, saying, "I can't be bothered playing with her any more. I think all that talk about clothing and makeup has warped my mind." "It doesn't work that way. You've got to have an extremely well-organized and structured mind to keep track of everything to do with clothing and makeup. If your mind was warped, you'd behave more like a typical boy, haha." Ava and Carol thought that was funny too. The phone rang. Julia looked at it, then offered it to me I waved it off, saying, "You answer it. Tell her she's too bossy to be a good bitch." Julia answered, "Hi Savannah. I gather you put your foot in your mouth again?" I couldn't hear what Savannah said. Julia replied, "He said you were too bossy to be a good 'bitch'. I think that means 'girlfriend'. Did you try to boss Ron around like you do every other guy?" "Send it if you like. I'm sure Ron doesn't care. I have to go, bye." A few seconds later a full-frontal of Savannah appeared. With her dark skin, not much was visible anyway. I said, "Yawn. Delete it as far as I'm concerned. She looks like Ava, except darker skinned and darker hearted. I know who I'd much rather look at and be with." That earned me three kisses. Julia pressed a few buttons on her phone, then said, "It's gone. Delete the slutty pictures too?" "Sure, even though they look better than her being naked, despite her eye shadow color being so inappropriate for three of the shots." Julia laughed, "Haha. I always thought you tuned out whenever we girls had our most interesting conversations. You surprised me with how much you got right about her makeup." "You can't have been as surprised and horrified as I was. It's not as if I'm ever going to put makeup on anyone, so God knows why I let that stuff seep into my valuable memory capacity. It must be more pernicious than I thought." While Julia was deleting Savannah's slutty pictures, Carol asked, "How come you've never asked us to dress slutty? We'd like to do that, wouldn't we?" Ava and Julia immediately agreed, Ava adding, "Yeah, that'd be fun!" Carol had offered that WAY back early in our 3B-land's relationship, just after Julia had first taken her shopping for a complete change of image. Back then I must've been feeling insecure about Carol, or something, because I'd been reluctant to do anything about it. These days I'd definitely enjoy it, but the problem was that there was no way Julia could dress slutty. Carol had the figure to do it fantastically, plus she gets a kick out of exposing herself under the right circumstances. Those comments apply at half-strength to Ava, plus I'd just seen that Savannah could make it work with her figure so Ava would be able to. But Julia would be shown up and could end up getting embarrassed about her deficiencies. I said, "Nah. I like the way you dress already. I'm VERY happy the way things are, thank you." Julia listened carefully to her Lord and Center Of Her Universe, then announced her decision, "Let's do it at home tomorrow night, and we'll see what Ron thinks when he sees us." Ava and Carol agreed happily. My opinion wasn't requested. Clearly I was unimportant, as I was only the reason they were doing it. "Better allow an extra day Julia," suggested Carol. "We'll need to go shopping." "Of course we will. Okay, the night after tomorrow." I asked, "If Savannah didn't need to go shopping for five outfits, why do you have to go shopping just to show me one each?" They looked at me like I was silly. That's what you get for being silly. It turned out that Julia NAILED the dirty, little schoolgirl look and act. She looked like a prepubescent girl half her real age, except she exuded sex with her very short skirt, bashful but jailbait expressions, lip licking, swaying ass, etc. Even calling me "Daddy" all the time and licking a lollypop. It was very clichéd and VERY effectively done. She would've gotten me arrested if we'd been in public. Ava and Carol made wonderful sluts too, and I made sure they knew that I thought so - Carol was HOT! - but it was Julia that stole the show. How does someone steal a show by showing nothing? Especially because I'm not attracted to girls as young as she was pretending to be. It made no sense. So much for my thinking Julia would prove to be an inadequate slut. Julia proved - yet again - how wrong I can be when it comes to girls. I don't know why I bother. Oops, yes I do! Ava declared, "Guys are SO predictable! We knew Julia would win." "I'm sorry, what did you say? I was too busy lusting after Julia." Who tilted her head down, her eyes looked up at me adoringly, and she asked, "Daddy, can I suck your lollypop pwease?" She did, and damned well too. The girls declared the evening's entertainment a great success and suggested we should do it more often. I was too busy lusting after Julia to agree. Fortunately they'd already proved that they didn't need my agreement. ^ [The irrational way I reacted to Julia's prepubescent slut act can only have been instinctual. It's a too common cliché for it to be anything else. I'm drawing from my future experiences, but I had so many sexual experiences, and some very strange ones, that I learned quite a lot about human sexual behaviors. I can't resist recounting some anecdotes about them. The basis of the first anecdote started emerging during this time, although it took me a few more months to see the pattern and get some understanding of it. The second and third anecdotes happened much later, but I've included them because they help make my point. The first anecdote is that we - my girls and I - kept finding girls' panties in our bed. We'd pull down the covers ready to retire, and we'd sometimes either see a pair of panties lying there, or have them fall on the floor at our feet. The first couple of times that happened, the girls asked each other whose panties they were, all of them answering, "Not mine." With several of us living in the one room we have to be tidy, so we don't leave our underwear lying around. We eventually worked out, and later confirmed it with the owners, that the panties had been left behind by whichever picked-up girl I'd had sex with earlier those days. Left-behind panties happened often enough that soon the sight of a new pair immediately caused us to joke about whoever the previous occupant of the bed had been. It wasn't a rare event: about 10% of the girls I bedded after I became rich left their panties behind, and that rose to over 20% after I became incredibly world famous (that happens later). As much as I wanted to believe that a significant proportion of the pretty girls walking around Corvallis didn't have panties on, I very much doubted it. That panties were being left behind wasn't attributable to random, accidental forgetting, and it occurred often enough that it wasn't the 'fault' of a few individual girls (the girls that didn't wear panties when they left, such as Alexis, usually hadn't been wearing them when they'd arrived). The explanation had to be something specific to the situation of the girls having been newly seduced into my bed, as that was the only time and place we found strange panties around the house. My girls had never heard of the practice before - it wasn't something that was taught in their secret classes - so they had to guess about the reason. Julia guessed it was to give me or them an excuse to make contact again, to keep the relationship going. That sounded very plausible when I first heard it, but I came to doubt it: It was always their panties they left behind; never anything else. Surely there were better pretexts for making another contact than panties, such as leaving behind wallets or cellphones. When I did contact the owners again, they didn't react as if they were happy that their cunning plan had worked. They seemed uncaring. They became happier if I chatted to them for a while, but remained very ambivalent about getting their panties back. Most of them even seemed disappointed that I wanted to return them. My girls and I enjoyed discussing the possible reasons for that particular reaction. I slowly developed a theory that maybe they were marking their territory, in the way that some animals leave scent signals. That sounds like a strange theory - strange enough that it would surely have to be a subconscious decision of the girls rather than a deliberate one - but it would explain why it was always panties that were left. If I bedded two random girls in a row, say by sleeping with one of them overnight and then picking up a second one the next afternoon, the second girl sometimes discovered the first girl's panties. The first couple of times that happened, I was very embarrassed and expected the discoverer to get very upset with me. Instead, almost every time it happened, proximity showed me that the discoverer's emotions actually 'pulled back'; she under-reacted. Those girls preferred not to talk about their discovery, or even to think about it. It was forgotten as quickly as possible. And I do mean "forgotten"; they weren't repressing anger or jealousy, they were actually dismissing the event from their minds. It happened so consistently and rapidly that it had to be instinctive reaction, which made me suspect that leaving the panties behind had been an instinctive action. About the only thing I decided for sure, at the time, was that girls are strange. The cause of the second anecdote took place much later. It started with one girl. I'd picked her up earlier in the day and had brought her home to have sex. We were lying in bed having a post-coital conversation, by which I mean that I was giving her one of my well-rehearsed little talks. Girls can often get too clingy after sex so it's usually a good idea to set them onto the right course before they've had time to get too far off course. I've got half a dozen different speeches, depending on how the girl had reacted thus far and whether I wanted to see her again. For example, an enthusiastic, fun lover will get a different speech than a girl who'd laid passively on her back and was now hanging onto my neck and sobbing emotionally about loving me forever. The current girl wasn't anything special in bed, just a beautiful member of a large crowd that I came into contact with from time to time, and I hadn't been paying much attention to her for all of our 'date', which had been nothing more than inviting her back for sex. I had other things on most of my minds, so only one mind had operated the body for the last few hours, including talking now. Mid-way through my talk, the girl interrupted me to say, "I know. You told me this last time." "Huh?" "I've been here before, you know? You'd forgotten, hadn't you?" She didn't need to ask, because she'd seen the confirmation in my reaction. I had forgotten! Or to be more accurate, I hadn't bothered to think about her enough to remember, which was hardly an excuse I could use now. I was in BIG trouble! She was about to justifiably EXPLODE that I'd forgotten that I'd fucked her before. Except not only did she not explode, but proximity showed me that she was suddenly happier. Not deliriously so, but any happiness at all was a huge surprise, a relief, and damned convincing proof that girls are strange. The last thing I wanted to do was risk asking her why she wasn't livid with anger, in case that made her realize that she should be livid with anger, so I said, "Sorry about that," then quickly abandoned my speech to change the subject to anything else. Apart from giving me a hint that I was probably sleeping with too many girls - a strange concept - the event did make me wonder about her reaction not being the one I'd expected. I guessed that she might have been pleased because there was a compliment in my picking her up twice out of all the choices that I had. I was very rich and famous at this time and she knew that I slept with many girls, so she probably even thought that it was natural for me to forget her. As an experiment, I deliberately repeated my mistake a few weeks later with a girl I had decided not to see for a third time, and she reacted the same way as the first girl had. Maybe my theory that the girls felt complimented was correct, but I felt my letting them believe that I had forgotten about them was too insulting so I didn't repeat the test again. I even made sure that I subsequently made the effort to check my memory every time I got into bed with a random girl. The third anecdote was a one-time event. My girls and I with several more of our friends were in New York for the weekend to catch a show and have a good time. Toward the end of the evening we encountered half a dozen young women who were full of high spirits and in party mode. Our groups joined to everyone's mutual enjoyment. One of the new women, Rachel, was particularly happy, full of laughter and very attractive looking, so she caught my interest. One thing quickly led to another, especially because Rachel's friends had immediately started pushing her at me, and she ended up coming back to our hotel room that night and having sex with me. My girls were in the bed with us, but Rachel's focus was on me. That's not ideal, but it's not exactly onerous either. In our post-coital conversation - after several very enthusiastic coitals - Rachel sighed and said, "Damn, now I've got to go home." She looked worn out, so I offered, "You can stay here the night if you wish. There's plenty of room in the bed and you can have breakfast with us." I like to be a gentleman and I was rich enough to be able to afford hotel breakfasts by then. "I'd love to, but I've got a very busy day tomorrow and have to get up early." "Oh, what for?" I was just making idle conversation, because it's polite to do that after fucking someone's brains out for the last couple of hours. "I'm getting married in the afternoon." "WHAT!" "{Giggle}. Yeah, I know." I had no idea what her "I know" referred to. It should have been "I know I should be ashamed of myself," but her giggle threw doubt on that expectation. I couldn't help myself, I HAD to ask, "How on Earth could you have sex with me just hours before you get married?" "Are you kidding! There's no way I'd not leap at the chance." My ability to understand female explanations hadn't improved much over the last few years, because her answer didn't tell me anything. But I have learned that when in doubt, ask a very specific question, so I asked, "Don't you love your husband?" They were so close to being married that I considered them husband and wife already. Not legally, but emotionally they should be FULLY committed to each other, stronger now than at any other time in their lives, past and perhaps even future. Rachel's cheating on him at this time was incomprehensible for me. Married women had flirted with or made passes at me before, but I'd always turned them down because I'd never been interested in 'free' sex with so many potentially bad strings attached, and those women had always seemed like damaged goods or bad people to me. Rachel hadn't seemed bad in any way previously; she'd been very happy and a lot of fun, so I was very curious to know how she could do such a terrible thing. [[I had an overly perfect perspective on marriage at the time, no doubt because Mom and Dad had a good one and because of hundreds of small messages I'd received, such as a comment from Mom about an infidelity development in a TV program we were watching. Those little messages had given me the impression that faithfulness in marriage was an ABSOLUTE requirement. And yes, I am aware of my behavior in my three-way marriage. My situation was so unusual it didn't impact on my unquestioned belief about how others should behave, and as that statement implies, people have different standards for their own behavior, and especially for their own misbehavior.]] Rachel answered, "He's a WONDERFUL man! I'm SO lucky!" I would've had my doubts about how lucky HE was, except that proximity showed me that she was feeling a sudden and large surge of love; from the context, obviously for him. Rachel was feeling some very good emotions and I didn't want to make her feel guilty by asking her more questions to find out why she wasn't feeling guilty, so I let the matter drop. After resting for a few minutes, Rachel got up and started cleaning herself and getting dressed. Just as she was about to leave, she thanked me VERY much. I wished her, "Congratulations, and I hope your marriage is very happy." My girls gave her their best wishes too. "It will be. He's a great guy and all my friends think he's wonderful too." Then she left. Leaving me thinking that females are strange. I rolled over and commented to my girls, "Boy! She was strange." "Oh, how?" asked Julia, with genuine puzzlement about why I thought that. "Having sex with me just hours before she's getting married." "There's nothing strange about that." The rest of my girls didn't hesitate to agree with Julia, Ava's answer being slightly more informative, "In a few hours she's going to be bragging about tonight with all her girlfriends. They're going to be so happy for her." I knew their answers weren't because they thought marriage was unimportant, but because they were highly biased about my importance. Even though we were in New York, on the opposite side of the country from Corvallis, the group of women had instantly recognized me when we'd first met. That had been the reason the hen party had so quickly made it their goal to get the bride-to-be into my bed, and why they'd kept us in the dark about her imminent marriage. My girls would praise me rather than inform me if I didn't word my next question well, so after some thought I asked, "Not talking about me in specific, but about 'high status males' in general, because I know that's one way you see me: do you think it's okay for a woman to cheat on her husband if the guy she's cheating with has high status?" My girls were DEFINITELY sure that ANY woman would be honored to be with me, but taking me out of the issue made their "Yes" answers much less definite. They went around in vague circles trying to explain why. They seemed to have trouble justifying their belief mainly because it was just so obvious to them that they'd never thought about it before, and hadn't ever worked out what the reasons were. As best I could make out, they thought it was so obvious and natural that it didn't need thinking about. It was very late, we were tired after a busy day, and I doubted that I was going to obtain a good understanding about the issue from them, so I let it drop and we went to sleep. After that event, I was reminded about Rachel's puzzling attitude whenever a married woman expressed interest in me, which was quite common: about 5 to 10% of the young, or sometimes not so young, married women expressed sexual interest in me when the circumstances were right. It was usually done in very low-key ways. In social settings, for example, the wife could be holding her husband's arm as they circulated, but upon seeing me she'd let herself fall half a step behind him so he couldn't see her, and she'd give me "the look": make eye contact and hold it for longer than ever happens innocently. The invitation having been made, the women would normally just leave it to me to choose whether to respond to them, only the most brazen ones doing any more after that when I failed to respond. I had previously assumed that these women were bad people for being willing to cheat on their husbands, but that assumption was doubtful now because Rachel hadn't seemed like a bad person; she had felt genuine and strong love for her fiancé and had been eagerly looking forward to her marriage with him. In addition to proving that girls are strange, I thought that these events uncovered some insights into our animal natures. We humans think we're very intelligent, evolved, rational creatures, but I came to understand that to be far less so than we like to believe. I was pretty sure that these anecdotes had their causes rooted in my being rich and famous, and the girls' and women's instinctive reactions to that. Girls had not left their panties in my bed early in my sexually active days, and the percentage of them that did so later increased along with my increasing wealth and fame. Girls being taken to bed discovering a prior girl's panties would NOT normally fail to react strongly, let alone dismiss the incident with what had to be instinctive rapidity. And how could a girl not get highly offended by my forgetting that I'd already fucked her? Talk about a deeply personal insult! But the two girls I forgot were pleased. That was so irrational the only explanation I could imagine was that it must be an instinctive reaction to my fame. You don't have to watch much TV to learn that most people behave very strangely around famous people, and that had certainly been confirmed by some of the stupid behaviors I witnessed after becoming famous myself. The Discovery Channel gave me what I thought was the answer to Rachel's - I thought - misbehavior. When biologists study various animal species, their sexual processes are included [the subject animals' I mean, not the biologists']. That's been the case for hundreds of years. One of the things you hear from time to time is that, "Bald eagles mate for life" (or storks, gibbon apes, or several other species). It's meant to be an "Aww, that's nice!" moment. In fact, it's nearly always wrong in the way it's meant, which is that they remain sexually faithful. For hundreds of years biologists didn't see the faithlessness, probably because their human morality biased their perceptions or records (there are many examples of animal researchers refusing to record homosexual acts as sex, calling it "displays of dominance" or ignoring it entirely). Since genetic testing has become so easy, biologists have been astonished by how diverse the parentage is of the offspring of many species who were long thought of as being paragons of faithfulness. Once biologists' eyes were opened to the possibility, it was easy to confirm and understand. Biologists can, for example, take a male from a bird species thought to be 'moral', use paint to dramatically improve the appearance of his plumage, then put him down among already pair-bonded females. An astonishingly large proportion of the females will be dramatically excited by the gorgeous looking stranger, and will eagerly entice him behind some bushes for a quick bit of hanky-panky. Some time later, the 'husband' returns to the nest to discover he's got one more egg to help raise. In short, when the females and males of a species see a genetically superior potential breeding partner, they will very often experience instinctive urges of the hanky-panky variety. For the good for the species, you understand. (You can try that justification on your wife or girlfriend if you like. Good luck.) With humans there's a lot of conscious interference with our instincts - Rachel wasn't trying to have a child with me, for example - but those instincts are still very strong. From the moment Rachel's five friends saw me, they all immediately knew that they were going to push Rachel into my bed. They didn't have to discuss it among themselves because they all felt that instinct (vicariously in that case, because of the social situation). Rachel needed some pushing from her friends, but only because she was resisting her instincts for social reasons. With her friends' obvious approval and encouragement, Rachel's resistance to her instincts ended. Rachel didn't feel shame afterward because she didn't feel as if she had done anything wrong. Her conscience could have created guilt had she been the sort of person to let it do so, but she wasn't. She had followed her instincts and had succeeded at mating with a superior male. She was proud of herself for bedding such a superior male. Another reason for her not to feel guilt was that I was no threat to her marriage because I would never see her again. That separateness was a core aspect of how all such females reacted, even if our lives weren't as separate as mine and Rachel's were. No matter what the circumstances were in their life - whether they were a Diana and Claire Norris who were playing around behind their parents' backs, or were a Rachel, or were a happily married 35-year old woman - once I was so rich and famous that they had no hope of snaring me in marriage, their desire for me was always seen as something totally separate from their real life. They could step out of their lives, have their session with me, then step back into their lives without showing even a ruffled feather. Their husbands/boyfriends/parents would never have a clue because the women had compartmentalized it. They might brag to their girlfriends, but no male would ever find out. In my experience, 5 to 10% of married women want to stray with me, and that's with me doing nothing whatsoever to encourage them. What the proportion would be if I tried to sweet talk them I'll leave for you to guess. I'll also leave it to you to determine how to adjust your opinion of the human animal. We truly are animals and we are very strongly influenced by our instincts, males being no better than females in that respect, and usually worse in sexual matters. Females tend to be very careful about who they mate with because getting pregnant is a huge issue for a woman, whereas guys are much more inclined to act on the spur of the moment, with little, if any, rational thought. By the way, there are VERY few species that are lifelong sexually faithful, and then usually for some extreme reason. For examples, an angelfish species where the male bites the ten-times larger female and adheres to her for the rest of his life, living off her blood. Or even more extreme, a deep-sea slug where the female swallows several males and they live inside her for the rest of their lives, excreting sperm from time to time. Then there's the sexual cannibalism practiced by many species of arachnids and insects before, during or after sex. Whether those males can be fairly described as being "lifelong sexually faithful" is a definitional issue. Sex brings out many instinctive behaviors. I find it quite interesting, and the research is fun too.] ------- Chapter 324: Miscellaneous: Majestic Countdown, Personal Dissatisfaction, BBJ2 Obtained Monday, September 25 to Thursday, November 30, 2006 School restarted on September 25, and at the end of that week, on September 29, the second settlement was signed. Majestic Countdown changed his snooping pattern. There were so many current scandals that there was little point in creating more, so I took a break from that job to snoop something else. I was worried about the investigation into the helicopter collision. If they'd been flying side by side, the accident might've been explained away by a sudden gust of wind (I guessed). But what had happened had taken several seconds to bring about, so people might be very suspicious. Fortunately, the northern crash site had been blown to smithereens by the Hellfires exploding. Much of the wreckage had been grabbed by kids too, and the Army's plea for them to return the pieces had met with a poor response, the Army not being well thought of at the time. Unfortunately, the southern crash hadn't similarly exploded. It'd burned really well, but that wouldn't have destroyed the black box (I presumed military helicopters carried black boxes. I didn't bother to google for that information as there was nothing I could do about it now). I found the address of the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), the organization that always investigates air accidents, and went snooping there. I couldn't find any record of the investigation, which eventually led me to suspect something. I redirected my snooping into a different area of the organization and soon confirmed that the NTSB doesn't investigate armed forces' air accidents, apparently the United States Army Safety Center does that. I couldn't get into the USASC's records as deeply as I wanted, but I was able to learn that they were extremely puzzled. The first pilot had flown correctly, but the aircraft hadn't responded the way it should have and they couldn't work out why. From what they could tell from the wreck, everything had been working correctly. They were also puzzled about the behavior of the second helicopter. After losing its tail, it shouldn't have been able to fly the way it did. They had almost no useful physical evidence for that mystery though. There were two good aspects. First, they were very puzzled rather than yelling that something freaky had happened. Second, I'd been worried that the first pilot's flying straight at the second helicopter might have been attributed to mind control, but the black box data removed that possibility. They had hard evidence that the helicopter had failed to respond correctly to the pilot's control movements, so the cause was definitely physical. They'd never find any evidence anywhere they were looking, so they'd stay puzzled. There didn't appear to be any danger in the current situation, so it was much better than I'd feared. After a couple of weeks of our being out of the media spotlight, the crowd around our house had died down of its own accord as those sorts of crowds have short attention spans. It was therefore relatively easy for me to go for a bike ride in the evening, hide my bike in a safe area, and Majestic Countdown took to the sky, to return to work at the state level. Randomly between every four to ten nights - so averaging once per week - I visited a random state capital and snooped around until I found some good dirt. Sometimes it took two visits to find something that I thought juicy enough to send, sometimes I found two or even three juicy scandals in the one night, as I wouldn't immediately send the first scandal I found. I had all night, so I took the time to have a good look around before sending anything and then rapidly clearing the area. Majestic Countdown was building quite a reputation for himself (or herself, no one had a clue who he/she was). There were stories on TV and the paper on the theme of, "Who is Majestic Countdown?" Lots of pure speculation as no one had any real information to go on. That didn't slow their speculations down much though. Most of the speculation was about the one piece of information they did have: the name I used. In reality it'd come from my initial email address (ljesjtc321@gmail.com), which had been a purely random collection of letters generated when I'd bashed keys thoughtlessly. It just happened to vaguely resemble "majestic". I'd ended the random name with "321", just to make the total name more unique. The media's guesses ranged from my trying to destroy the democratic system so I could install a monarchy, through to counting down to the release of the virus diseases stolen from Fort Dodge, as Majestic Countdown had started with that issue. Someone leaked that I'd added, "Angel" to the middle of my name as a unique identifier, thereby making it useless for that purpose, but fueling even more speculation, which was partly why I'd chosen "Angel". In my next email, I included a note saying, "Because my use of 'Angel' was leaked, I will use 'Michael' in its place in the future." I resisted the temptation to joke, "Shame on someone for leaking information," because I wanted to maintain a professional image, and also didn't want to give clues away about my personality. I had no doubt that there were many people highly pissed off about my leaking information, and that there'd be several investigating groups being pressured to track the culprit down. ------- School had restarted, keeping my school-aged friends and Prof busy. To briefly describe the situation: Mom was exceptionally busy in the early stages of planning our new home (as described earlier). Julia enjoyed helping with that, especially because it let her namedrop at school the next day. "Felicity and I flew down to see the home of [a succession of famous people's names] yesterday after school. It was gorgeous, and she was a lovely lady who let us..." A couple of weeks of that, and the girls at school were green with envy and increasingly eager to be part of Julia's lifestyle. You know how Julia works by now, so the girls getting closer to Julia somehow included getting closer to me too. They generally accepted that without much protest, as I was a nice guy. We did discover the occasional closet-bigot, but they were easily discarded or played mind-games with, depending mostly on whether the size of their bigotry exceeded that of their tits. Vanessa was as busy as she could possibly be with MAF. She was on the hunt for LOTS of good quality staff and a building to put them in, finally taking possession of a brand new $25 million building mid-November, fairly close to the main DC airport (Dulles). The building was really only worth $20 million, but she'd paid a $5 million premium to make the original owner - for whom the building had been constructed - willing to pass it over to MAF for a quick occupancy. It was large enough to provide office space for two hundred people and Vanessa wasn't going to sublease any part of it. It was ALL for MAF! I couldn't imagine how MAF could possibly use two hundred people, but apparently Vanessa could. MAF could certainly afford them, having $45 billion in the bank, making it nearly as rich with cash as Bill Gates was on paper. Dad got a lot of the overflow work when Mom was away or too busy, making him do more parenting that was usual for him. My girls got to practice their cooking skills when they wanted to, and we got to eat more pizzas when they didn't, so it was all good. Plus all the parents had a fair amount of work to prepare for the $242 trillion lawsuit, and also while it was being heard. Our lawyers did the vast majority of the work, but the important part of the case was the damages claim which had to involve Mom and Dad quite a lot, writing detailed affidavits about Mark, his progress and accomplishments, and appearing in court at appropriate stages to look suitably distraught in front of the jury. The parents also had to decide what to do with MAF's extra money. Vanessa had initially asked for $5 billion, that being more than enough for MAF's future needs. It'd never use the extra $40 billion (maybe just the extra $35 billion, to play safe), so that money would sit around forever, doing nothing other than collecting interest - an insane $140 million per month! (you can see why Vanessa didn't hesitate to pay an extra $5 million for a building). It wasn't an urgent task, but finding useful purposes for the money needed doing. We weren't interested in getting richer, but in putting what we already had to good use, so didn't have to worry about all the usual money-go-round games, such as the share market and other ways of increasing wealth. I left all that sort of stuff to the parents, so you won't read about it again. I'll just say that Vanessa found cautious ways of having it do good, mostly by supporting good causes with the interest while maintaining the capital. Everybody was busy, and sometimes exceptionally so, while I had nothing to do. Once we'd decided to move to a new house, the steam went out of my landscaping work and I wasn't sure what else to do during school hours. I finished off the already started landscaping jobs, and otherwise did some make-work projects and activities to distract me from the boredom: Exercising. I wanted to make my body stronger, fitter and - excuse the vanity - better looking. I could have that happen just by desiring the changes, but I needed people to see me exercising sometimes to give plausibility to the changes. I spent half an hour researching private islands, finding them to be surprisingly cheap. $10 million would get you a very nice one; $30 million a spectacular one. I had a silly idea of us fleeing America to our private island, but anything that was serious enough to make us run like that would follow us to wherever we went. The Government had boats! It seemed to me that if we fled America, it'd have to be to a country that would defend us. A tiny, unpopulated tropical island wouldn't be any good at that; we'd be better off staying in Corvallis. Flight training. Ava and I were going for our Private Pilot's License. We'd started together but I progressed faster than her. I'd held myself back to keep her company, but Ava is very pretty, VERY rich, and is a friendly girl. In a hobby/industry dominated by young males, she got PLENTY of company! I was more academically gifted, had much more practical flying experience - admittedly on a Magic Sled but some of it carried over - and I had a great deal more time available. Some days I did flight training all day, 'flying' through the program far faster than other students. I even bought a little two-seater Cessna 152 training plane so it'd always be available for Ava or me to use. In a similar vein, after a suggestion from Alexis, she and I had taken up skydiving (although you mostly take it down). I'd done it mostly to learn how to hold my body while free-falling. It only took a few jumps for me to become confident in free-fall, allowing me to lose my fear of instability during Magic Sled flights provided I was at least five hundred feet up because it took about that far for a tumbling body to get oriented belly downward and nicely stable. I could still get lost in clouds or could fly into the ground because I'd angled down without noticing it, but with a watch that told me my rate-of-change-of-altitude and sounded an alarm if I got too low, I'd have to be fairly silly to get into serious trouble. Skydiving was completely safe for me even if my chute failed to open so I had no nerves about it, but I was nervous when Alexis jumped, and when Ava joined in. I kept a close eye on all the girls' jumps, ready to intervene if necessary, but it never was. We did a couple of dozen jumps each, then decided it wasn't worth pursuing further. But mostly what I did during these weeks was to help the others out where I could. It was mostly boring and I felt disconnected from everyone else's lives for much of the time. Not being able to be myself - to do the things I wanted to do as well as I was capable of doing them, especially studying - made me feel disconnected from life. It was an unpleasant consequence of being Ron Fisher. My wishing to be Mark again gave me an idea for possibly how to make that happen. It was only a minor addition to an existing half-formed idea I'd had, but it had major consequences. I didn't bother disturbing anyone by bringing it up for discussion. Instead I just thought about it and did the research that would be required if it was to ever happen. If I carried out my vague idea, it would be very bad to do that research from home if our internet usage was being logged; say, for example, if the Government was untrustworthy. So Majestic Countdown upped the frequency of his trips to twice weekly, the extra trip for my research, ideally on several adjacent computers simultaneously. I was researching religions in general, and angels in specific. The vast majority of it was clearly a load of crap that'd been designed to manipulate gullible people, and my idea required that I be knowledgeable about it so I could manipulate gullible people. The material about angels was particularly funny, as it was so obviously the creation of hopeful imaginations. Often of painters, whose ideas had then been absorbed into the accepted dogma as if it was 'proven' church theology. I often had to stop to laugh at how stupid religious people are. (Spend a couple of hours googling angels, and you'll see what I mean.) ------- Mark's seventeenth birthday on November 9 had to pass visibly uncelebrated, but that night everyone made sure they were home for dinner and the mothers and Carol just happened to have cooked a roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings. A couple of weeks later Benton County voted to allow us to own the Chip Ross Park and nearby land, and it was only a couple of days after that we got the call saying Vanessa's new BBJ2 was ready to be picked up. Vanessa had already hired the two new pilots, as the Gulfstream's pilots (we'd quickly needed two of them) weren't rated for the BBJ, plus we were keeping the Gulfstream for Mom to use for another month or so. The two new pilots, Vanessa and I flew in the Gulfstream to the facility that'd done the fitting out for us. I'd asked to come along in case there was some sort of trouble on the new plane's flight, maybe if the Government had sabotaged it or it had serious, new-plane teething troubles. I didn't think that sort of problem was likely, but I was more than happy to go because I was busting a gut to see our new flying bed. If an emergency did happen, I'd have some difficult decisions to make. My maximum NP force was now up to 6,400 kg (14,000 lb). Easily enough to toss around a little helicopter, but not nearly strong enough to hold up a BBJ2. Depending on how heavily it was loaded, our plane would weigh 46,000 to 80,000 kg (51 to 88 tons). If the plane had problems, I could easily save Vanessa and myself by bailing out. Saving the pilots would be easy too, although it'd be a major security breach. Alternatively, depending on what went wrong with the plane, my paltry seven tons of force might be enough to allow it to land safely, saving us having to explain our absence from the wreck, although trying to land it could be risky. [In case you're interested: to keep a plane in straight and level flight requires a thrust equal to its weight divided by its Lift-to-Drag ratio. For big commercial jets like the BBJ at cruise speed, that ratio is about 15:1, thus keeping our BBJ2 aloft would require between 3.5 and 6 tons (depending on its weight) of push, so I could do it. I hope I never need to, especially not during the landing.] Worst case scenario planning aside, I was extremely eager to see 'our' new plane, despite the embarrassment of seeing my name in huge letters down the fuselage: "Mark Anderson Foundation". It had its own fold-down stairs (pretty much every decent-sized private plane does, as that's far more convenient than needing to wait for the airport to provide them), which I excitedly ran up ahead of Vanessa. The interior was GORGEOUS! Seriously, SERIOUSLY gorgeous. Taking any girl aboard would result in her panties immediately disappearing; something I hoped didn't apply to Vanessa. And it very conveniently had two beds, very useful things for when there are pantiless girls available for the taking. I LOVED our new plane (notice that I'm calling it "our" plane now, rather than Vanessa's). Our new plane was so gorgeous I was seriously tempted to get one for myself, with a much larger bedroom and a hot tub. Doing so would be stupid as I had almost no use for it - there being cheaper ways to remove girls' panties than spending about $70 million on a plane - but I REALLY wanted to get one! The fitout company's rep' spent a couple of hours showing us through the plane. From the front to the back: how to fold down the stairs, control the entertainment system, use the electronic door locks to the office and bedrooms, access the internet (the plane had a wireless router so any computer in the plane could get online), all the way back to showing us the kitchen's facilities and culminating in how to flush the toilets. Despite the mundane last item, I still was blown away by the plane. Vanessa was very happy too, for what that's worth. The plane's pilots had been on the whole tour with us (they didn't need to see the standard cockpit as the fitout company hadn't touched it), and they teased me about my boyish enthusiasm. They didn't dampen my spirits at all. I hope Vanessa wasn't intending to work too hard for a while, because I had plans for this plane, and up to twenty nine female guests at a time. When it was time to fly home, it was a pleasure to strap myself into a large, very comfortable, leather seat. They were far better than the ex-DHS jet's seats, and made a commercial airliner's seats seem like a torturous joke. The trip was uneventful, a pleasure, and because the outfitter's place was near the Boeing plant in Seattle, disappointingly short. I spent most of it fantasizing about the flights several girls and I could have in this plane, when Vanessa or Mom weren't inconveniently using it. Vanessa and I wandered around the cabin to try out it out while it was flying, mainly by sitting at the dining/conference table and the office desks while imagining what it'd be like to be using them for real. Vanessa pronounced herself VERY pleased. With the Gulfstream, she'd been juggling work on her lap while flying back and forth; but with this plane she'd be as productive as being in an office. It'd help her considerably, which unfortunately meant it'd be harder for me to borrow it from her. We called home fifteen minutes before we landed (we'd had the shielding around the flight deck and avionics bay upgraded so we could safely use cellphones on our own plane). It was after school, so Mom, Ava, Julia, Carol and Donna all came to have a look. I was curious to see what they'd think, because I remembered that none of the girls had been nearly as excited as Alexis' father and I had been about the first private jet I'd chartered; pathetic little thing that it was in comparison to our BBJ2. Vanessa's happiness with the plane was very much about the functionality of it, whereas my happiness was much more about its fucktionality (actually its coolness, but what else is coolness is for?). We landed, taxied to our hangar, and dropped the stairs down. Donna and Ava, followed by the more sedate visitors, ran up the stairs, and GUSHED over the plane. It met with everyone's approval. "Oh boy, the girls are going to LOVE this!" exclaimed Julia. I need to translate that, because it sounds like Julia had very much the same thought processes as me, and that's just silly! Although in this case there was a similarity, as both our thoughts involved getting undressed. Our wonderful new plane had a range of 6,600 miles. 6,600 x 4 > 24,900 (the circumference of the Earth), so our plane can reach anywhere in the world with a maximum of one refueling stop. Or to put it in the way Julia thought: it puts the girls within easy reach of every clothing store in the world. Way back in April 2005, when Julia had started promoting me to the girls at school, one of her utterly absurd tactics had been to say that I'd be flying girls to Paris, Rome and Milan to go clothes shopping. Now it was not only possible, but Julia was already asking her mother when she could borrow the family jet to do it! And even more absurdly, Vanessa was answering in the positive, saying, "It depends how long you're going to be away?" Julia had already done the math and knew that making the trip as short as possible would make it much easier to get Vanessa's consent. She'd asked me what the plane's speed was ("528 miles per hour"). She'd found out that Paris is 10 hour's flight away, so to arrive at 9am Paris-time (to allow a full day's shopping) would mean leaving Corvallis at 11pm the previous night Paris-time. Paris is 9 hours after our time, so that'd be 2pm Corvallis-time. A full day's shopping, say 10 hours in total, would mean a 30-hour total trip time. Leaving 2pm Corvallis-time, arriving back at 8pm the next night. That's leaving out Rome and Milan, which was a disaster that'd have to be corrected some other time. Or better yet, Vanessa could let them have the plane for an extra day, because it'd only take an hour to fly to Rome or Milan from Paris. When the pilots heard the conversation, they pointed out a couple of problems, "The plane doesn't have over-water safety equipment installed: rafts, flares, locator beacons for the rafts, medical equipment and supplies. They're required if you want to fly to Europe. Do you want us to get those for you?" "Yes," answered Julia without bothering to check with Vanessa. "Okay. You need to check on visa requirements, and we'd need to clear customs on both legs too. That means we'll need to land at an American international airport inbound. Somewhere on the east coast would be best, before we fly across country. That'll add a couple of hours to the trip time." The other pilot added, "We'd like some notice too, so we can bone up on the latest regs." "Start boning. Paris, Rome and Milan will be on the agenda soon, exactly when depending on my wonderful mother." Julia was very pleased to find out that as should be the case with civilized countries with extremely desirable clothing stores, neither France nor Italy required American citizens to have visas for trips lasting less than ninety days. ------- Chapter 325: Going to Paris Friday, December 1 to Sunday, December 31, 2006 (Continued) A few days later at school, Julia casually mentioned in class, "I'm thinking of popping over to Paris in the family jet the weekend after next for a day's shopping. Would anyone like to come?" Pretty much everyone in the class said they'd very much like to come. [The rest of the school had the same opinion when they heard about it, and most of the teachers wouldn't have minded either. Vanessa should have bought a MUCH bigger jet.] "We'll be leaving 2pm Friday, so that means skipping the last couple of periods." No one thought that was a problem. "We'll shop all day Saturday, then fly back in the evening, arriving home about 2am Sunday morning because quite a few of the stores seem to stay open until 7pm..." "Why can't we stay in Paris overnight?" asked one girl. "Because the good stores aren't open on Sunday," answered Julia. "But the tourist activities will be open, won't they? The Eiffel Tower, museums, art galleries." "I suppose so; I haven't checked. This is mainly a shopping trip. The Eiffel Tower isn't going anywhere so there's no urgency about that. The pilots need to have time to sleep after the trip before they can get back to work flying Mom to DC on Monday, but I'll check with her to see if she doesn't need the plane on Monday." Our classmates thought Julia should ring her mother IMMEDIATELY to find out. Vanessa didn't want to lose half of Monday, so the trip was as Julia first described. When she heard about it, Donna begged to be included, but much to her anguish was not allowed to go. "Too young," according to Mom. So Julia, Ava and Carol picked several of their best friends to definitely get seats, plus the parents wanted both of our female guards to go along for protection (we'd started employing our own guards; I'll write more about them later). The few extra seats were allocated by a 'random' draw we did at home, which amazingly produced no one we didn't like. Several runners-up were also chosen. Then the invitees parents had to give their consent in person, the likelihood of some refusing being why we had some runners-up. Everyone needed to have valid passports and be able to meet any French visa requirements if the person wasn't an American citizen, plus there were several rules that everyone had to agree to. The rules that mattered for the purposes of this autobiography were: Obey the instructions of Ron, Julia, Carol and Ava. No alcohol to be brought onto the plane or drunk on it. The plane will be stairs-up to depart "Paris - Le Bourget Airport" (it services bizjets, and is less than ten miles from central Paris), at 7pm local time Saturday evening. Anyone not onboard at that time WILL BE LEFT BEHIND! Our two female, VERY WILLING, guard/babysitters, Jill and Jan, were early-30s and late-20s respectively. Next oldest was me, apparently at twenty years of age. Ava and her friends were 19-ish, Julia and her friends 18-ish. For several of the parents, that wasn't enough adult supervision, and the last rule scared them too, so they refused permission, thereby incurring the lifelong hatred of their child. There were plenty of eager runners-up for the newly available seats though. Even with two guards to keep the girls safe, Mom and Dad still wanted me to go. Julia thought that was an excellent idea because she'd need "Le Bag Carrier." In return for which I'd have twenty hours in a plane with several beautiful girls and a bed. My decision to go was a no-brainer, by which I mean that it was decided by my small head. Of the 30 participants: 25 were girls: Julia, Carol, Ava, 2 guards and 20 invitees; 11 of Julia's and Ava's friends, just 3 of Carol's friends because they were only 16-years old so most couldn't get permission, plus 6 lucky 'random' draw winners. 5 were guys: me and 4 others; 'randomly' drawn to keep me company in Paris, and possibly for another purpose if they volunteered themselves for it (described below). There were a couple of amusing aspects to the departure. First, many of the parents drove their kids to Eugene; whose airfield we had to use because the Government had barely started lengthening the Corvallis runway. They could more easily have carpooled the kids for the 30-mile drive, but most of them came individually, obviously eager to see their kids off and to see the plane. It was one of the largest ever mass-skippings from our school, and the parents participated in it! The school knew about it - ALL of Corvallis knew about it - but the Principal had wisely decided not to try to delay it. Apparently he understood the magnitude of the disaster that'd be caused by delaying our departure for three hours. It'd be an irrecoverable and tragic loss of awesomely valuable shopping time, and he'd be lynched by two dozen homicidal teenage girls. The hundreds of other girls at school would've helped lynching the Principal too, out of principle. The second amusing aspect was Alexis' parents. Ben (Alexis' father) had thought the last plane was impressive, so the BBJ blew his mind. It blew everyone's mind, but I liked Ben (not that he knew that, because that was me as Mark), so when he was raving over one of the bedrooms, I said to him, "Maybe we can provide a trip for some of the parents somewhere. Do you want me to get a chick for you, or will you bring your own?" His 'chick' was sitting on the bed next to him. She answered for her husband, "Both! Let's make it a WICKED trip!" It wasn't difficult to see where Alexis got her attitude to sex from. [Christmas got in the way, but in mid-January 2007, thirty parents got a 50-hour trip to Paris. They had to provide their own chicks, but we gave them the combination to the spare bedroom, leaving a large pile of fresh sheets in it. Many of the husbands were VERY appreciative, and their wives took home their laundry, returning it to our house the next day or two. Vanessa's bedroom stayed locked because the thirty seats were easily comfortable enough to sleep in, for anyone that wanted sleep, and Vanessa understandably wants her bedroom kept private. She'll be spending a lot of time in the plane, so everyone understood that.] We departed on our Paris trip a little late because of all the parental guided tours of the plane, but Julia knew the plane could go faster than its cruising speed, so she wasn't panicking. Going faster used more fuel, which would be billed to the Government so we didn't care at all. We only had twenty hours in the air, so there wasn't a moment to lose (in my opinion). As soon as the "Fasten Seatbelts" signs extinguished, I grabbed Carol, Julia and Ava, dragging them into the spare bedroom to christen it, and by extension, the whole plane. I had an ulterior motive for doing this, and especially for doing it so quickly. For probably the first time in my life, sex wasn't my ulterior motive, but the prime one. My ulterior motive was non-sexual. Weird huh? My ulterior motive was to do with establishing our authority on these flights, for this and all future ones. It'd evolved from a concern of Vanessa's expressed over dinner a few evenings ago. Julia and I had enjoyed inventing an appropriate scheme. It was to keep Vanessa happy - the owner of a VERY sexy flying bed - so I had no hesitation whatsoever in making sure she got whatever she wanted. My girls had REALLY fiercely told their closest friends not to touch the alcohol that the plane had in the main cabin's bar or in the kitchen. I'd stressed that to Alexis and she'd promised not to. We hadn't made a big deal about it to the lucky-draw winners. They'd been told the "no alcohol" rule when they signed up for the trip (literally "signed", because the trip's rules were in writing), but it hadn't been stressed. They'd also heard it repeated a few times during the parents' inspection of the plane as the bar is clearly visible in the living room/main cabin. We just repeated something like, "We've already told you that we're not allowing alcohol and it says that on the form you signed." Right after we disappeared into the bedroom, my sight blob saw two of the guys made a beeline for the bar. We'd seated all the guys in the main cabin, while we, our two security guards and our closest friends were placed in the conference room so we wouldn't inhibit anyone who wanted the go for the alcohol. Under the circumstances - the absence of parents, the boys were excited, and there were lots of girls to impress - it'd been entirely predictable that at least one macho idiot would want to impress everyone else (he'd think) by being cool enough to get into our booze. The only uncertainty was how many of the others would join him. The two initial culprits pushed the others to partake, convincing the other boys easily. Almost every girl refused, fortunately including Alexis. I could see that she didn't hesitate to turn it down. I'd been worried about her, but she's no dummy, and she knows Julia well. Half an hour after I'd gone into the bedroom, I got redressed and walked into the living room, catching the four guys and one girl drinking. "Drinking alcohol I see." "Ahh, just a beer," said one of them, looking slightly guilty, but not too concerned. "That looks like a rum and coke?" I said to the girl with a glass which looked no different than all the glasses of coke other girls had. The girl defended herself with, "Ahh..." I picked it out of her hands and sniffed it. "I thought so." I recited the five reprobates' names, then asked the room, "Has anyone else been drinking alcohol?" Everyone shook their heads. I knew no one else had. Most of them had a soft drink, which we'd told them to help themselves to, with only the named five drinking alcohol. "Alexis, would you take the beers and this," the rum and coke, "and tip them down the kitchen sink please?" I ignored the culprits' comments while I moved forward and knocked on the cockpit door. When the copilot opened it, I asked him, "What's the most convenient airport we can land at to drop some passengers off?" "That'd be the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport." It was the most convenient because the pilots had already filed a flight plan to it, as per our instruction to land somewhere about an hour into the trip to Paris. We'd explained the reason to the pilots, who were delighted at the idea of discouraging teenagers from partying it up during flights. Their delight probably having something to do with the pilots' duties including cleaning the plane after each trip. "Please land there." "Okay." The copilot shut the door and got busy watching the autopilot take the plane to where it was already going. The five rule breakers got busy protesting, begging, getting angry, etc. Their arguments were, "We didn't know", "It's just a beer, for God's sake!", "It's not fair" and, "No one told us we'd be kicked off." My answer was, "You were repeatedly told that a rule for being on the flight was not drinking alcohol. You drank alcohol, therefore you won't be on the flight. That seems pretty straightforward to me." "We won't drink any more!" "I should hope not!" Julia came out wearing a robe to ask, "What's all the noise about?" Her appearance turned the ejectees anguish into relief. She'd be reasonable! One of previously very worried alcohol drinkers explained, "Ron threatened to kick us off the flight." Julia inquired innocently, "Has he asked the pilots to land first or is he going to push you out the door?" Julia has spent so much time with me that her sense of humor has improved. One of the others, apparently without a sense of humor because he resisted laughing in order to protest, "We just had a beer! It wasn't anything..." "You broke the 'no alcohol' rule?" interrupted Julia, with a hard look on her face. "Ahh, just one. It wasn't anything to get..." Julia asked me, "Did you ask the pilots to land somewhere, darling?" "Yeah. Minneapolis-Saint Paul is the easiest." "Good. Come back to bed please. It's not nearly as much fun without you." "You've talked me into it." "What!" from the re-anguished, soon-to-be ex-passengers. We walked back to the bedroom, ignoring the protests behind us. Also the knocks on our door and the pleadings shouted through it. If the bedrooms weren't soundproofed enough to keep their panicky shouts out, then Julia must have entertained them ten minutes ago. When the plane started its descent, we had to relocate to seats so we could "Fasten Seatbelts", which exposed us to more begging. The ejectees followed us into the conference room and wouldn't stop begging even after we insisted that they had to return to their seats and buckle up (our pilots had made sure that we understood that to be a serious regulation that was ALWAYS to be followed). The beggars persisted in living up to that title, refusing to return to their seats. I was debating whether to get our security guards to manhandle (womenhandle?) them out of the room, when the copilot arrived as part of his check that we were all buckled in properly. He was NOT pleased! "If you're not seated and belted in we'll have to abort our landing and go around again. All the other planes we delay will file a claim for the fuel they wasted, and it'll cost the persons responsible something like $20,000. Disobeying civil aviation regulations and the pilot of an aircraft are felonies, and Homeland Security is paranoid about passengers causing trouble, so you'll be arrested on landing. You'll get felony convictions, jail time, and will be put permanently on the No-Fly list so you'll never be allowed to fly on a commercial flight ever again. You've got thirty seconds to get into your seats properly, or I'll radio the tower that we've got trouble onboard and they'll have Homeland Security agents and police waiting for you." I had no idea whether any of that was true, but it was very convincing. The less-than-cool alcohol drinkers used a few seconds to beg again, then scuttled to their seats. They weren't eager to get off after we'd landed either, protesting, "How will we get home?" I answered, "It's a busy airport so I'm sure you'll think of something." With a bit of unsympathetic encouragement from the copilot and some hard stares from our guards, they were shepherded down the stairs, which were pulled up behind them and we got into the line to take off again. After we'd taken off, and the seat belt signs were extinguished, everyone had gathered in the main cabin, Julia told the survivors of the lack-of-IQ test, "It's our plane so we make the rules. They promised to abide by them and they broke their word. I suggest none of you are late getting back to the plane when we leave Paris, because guess how long it'll wait for you?" They got that message loud and clear! Julia asked the living room, "Ron should've rested up by now, so who wants to have him next?" "Me!" called Alexis, with her usual lack of hesitation "He's good enough to take care of two or three at a time, so anyone else?" offered my loyal pimp. A couple of my existing conquests volunteered, and we happily headed to the bedroom. There's no such thing as overdoing a christening. Julia called her mom to chat about the ejections. Vanessa said, "We know; we've been fielding their parents' calls. They're booked on a flight back to Salem leaving in a couple of hours. One of their parents told me it's going to cost them just under $300 each. She thought we should pay for it." "Haha. Good luck on them making that stick." "More or less what I said. It worked very much the way we thought. I feel sorry for poor Ron now though. The only boy on a plane of girls going to Paris. How will he cope? Haha." "Three at a time, Mom. That's how he's coping now." Shopping in a foreign language is even more boring than shopping in English, so I'll spare you any of the shopping details. I had a nice lunch though. It was a heck of a long way to fly for lunch, but I enjoyed the travel time. ^ The ejections were a setup, of course. We could've easily asked the pilots to lock the alcohol away before anyone got onboard; the bar's cupboards were fitted with locks for exactly that purpose. Or we could have sat our security guards next to it. The ejection trick was intended to achieve three main goals: When it comes to our plane, our rules are LAW. On this flight and all future ones. When it comes time for the very excited girls in Paris to return to the plane, they'd better get back on time. We REALLY didn't want to leave people behind there, but we also didn't want to establish a precedent that the plane would wait for any latecomers, because that'd guarantee there'd always be some, who'd get later and later. And the main reason what that it set a good standard of behavior for the plane. Vanessa was going to be spending a lot of time on it in the future, and she wanted it looked after by all the guests we'd be allowing to fly on it. There were a few minor advantages too, such as keeping our pilots happy, giving us a reputation as well behaved so parents would be more likely to consent to their kids' future trips, and as it was MAF's plane, adding to its reputation for morality, and therefore politicians' reputation for the opposite since MAF opposed them. None of the girls were late when it was time to depart Paris, although one taxi driver had stupidly gone to the wrong airport first, making his passengers frantic with worry that they'd be left in Paris, especially because they had more packages than they could carry. That our trick also got rid of every boy on the plane except me was a happy coincidence. Well, not exactly "coincidence", guys being the macho idiots they are when they're trying to impress girls - but it was certainly "happy". I was especially very happy on the return flight. The girls were in raptures from having been to Paris and were very much thinking about how to ensure they were included in the as yet unplanned Rome and Milan trips that Julia might've mentioned something about. So there was much sex going on, with me in the middle of it, when I wasn't on top of or under it. Julia encouraged girls to try me, and girls who did try me had said how great I was, so quite a few girls who normally wouldn't have had gotten carried away. I was somewhat ashamed of myself for taking advantage of them at such an emotionally vulnerable time, so I made sure they really enjoyed it. Some people thought we'd been unfairly tough, but we'd deliberately arranged it so we had the moral high ground. The culprits had been told that not drinking alcohol was a condition of being allowed on the flight, and they'd promised verbally and in writing not to. Plus we had the reason that, "We didn't want a bunch of drunken teenagers damaging the plane, or to arrive in Paris inebriated where they could've gotten into trouble just by passing out in the wrong area of town. We would've been stupid to let them keep drinking and they'd already proved that their word wasn't to be trusted, so the best thing to do was kick them out as quickly as possible to minimize their cost of getting home again. They got a $300 lesson on the importance of keeping their word. It was hardly the end of the world for them." It was the end of their chance of flying on our plane though. That was another thing we did that we made sure was publicized: anyone who was kicked off our plane would never get another flight on it. None of the ejectees had big tits, so that was fine with me. Because it costs us virtually nothing for the plane to fly somewhere - we had to pay for the pilots anyway and nearly everything else is charged to the Government - it'll be kept very busy. Sometimes with some of us onboard, but often entirely for others: quite a few Oregon charities were granted timeslots to raffle, there'd be trips for family friends, Vanessa's and Prof's OSU workmates (the Dean especially), our classmates, etc. Regardless of who was on the plane, we wanted them to abide by the rules. Word of the ejections quickly became widely known, especially because it made the local newspaper - Vanessa had called the reporter and given him a copy of the story she wanted him to run - so people learned that they'd need to behave themselves on our plane. We made sure that every passenger knew that the pilots could - and provably would - land the plane at the next airport to eject rule-breaking passengers. Vanessa's basic line was, "Commercial airlines have an obligation to their passengers because they've bought a ticket and have an implicit contract. Flying on our plane is very different. It's our private property and you're on it ENTIRELY at our discretion, just as if you were inside our home. We won't hesitate to ask any troublemakers to leave, just as you wouldn't hesitate to make people leave your home if they raided your liquor cabinet against your wishes." [It happened only once more, when a guy on the return of a charity flight got drunk on his own booze (we lock our own away on charity flights), got belligerent, and then got ejected. The nearest airport's security people were very cooperative about removing an unwanted passenger. That was written up in the local paper too.] ------- Chapter 326: Finishing the DHS & CIA Lawsuit, and Other Miscellany Friday, December 1 to Sunday, December 31, 2006 (Continued) Early December, the jury finished their deliberations in our $242 trillion civil lawsuit. The trial itself had gone very much as expected. The DHS had picked me up without a warrant - end of story! That was a breach of my Fourth Amendment rights. The DHS's claim that they had acted under the Patriot Act and so didn't need a warrant was a dead duck of an excuse, and had been openly laughed at when their lawyer advanced it in court. Although "terrorist" was mentioned early in my DHS file because of Moran's using it as a pretext, it wasn't mentioned in any of the S&T work (ALL of which was related to my possibly have mind-control powers), nor in the documentation covering my transfer from the DHS to the CIA, which made a mockery of the DHS's vain attempt to use that as an excuse. After talking to me, Moran hadn't bothered doing any of the following up he should have done (e.g., with the Thai police), and there'd been enough leaks from within the DHS that the whole world knew that Moran had ordered me picked up because he had an insane mind-control theory. Nor was the "T" word mentioned in any of the CIA's documentation, so the CIA employees - which were the majority of the defendants - had no defense to their breaching my Fourth Amendment rights either. The defendants were easily established as being guilty. The only real issue was over the amount of damages. There were two main arguments between our side and the baddies: the method to be used, and the numbers to plug into the chosen method. For example, the defense put up pretty graphs showing the expected lifetime earnings of a 16-year old boy, and tried to argue that was the method to use. We countered that by listing all the ways in which I wasn't an average 16-year old boy, for example, our lawyer had said, "The DHS and CIA don't kidnap and illegally experiment on 'average boys'. If that were the case, millions of us would have had holes drilled in our head and parts of our brains scooped out, which is what it would take for anyone to believe that the DHS and CIA thought Mark Anderson was 'average boy'." The defense had figures for how much money Einstein and other geniuses had made in their lifetimes. Our lawyers had figures for how much money business-oriented geniuses had made (I'd been doing a Business degree, so was clearly oriented that way). Those values were FAR higher, especially when geometrically extrapolated through to my IQ. As a simple example, Bill Gates is worth a million times more than the average person. His IQ is 60 points higher than average. Mark's IQ was 60 points higher than Bill's, so Mark would've been worth a million times more than Bill, so $56,000 trillion, comfortably higher than the $242 trillion we were asking for. Our lawyers brought in scientist after scientist who raved about the medical advances that would've been possible had Mark lived. The defense countered that our witnesses were speculating, but the first few scientists we brought in had already started achieving useful real results from the CIA data, so the "speculation" claim had the rug partly pulled from under it. There was a lot of speculation remaining, especially about how long I could have lived, but there was enough merit already established for my having extraordinary health that extra longevity was an easy sell to the jury. The formula we'd used in our suit was multiplying: The chance that the cause of my transformation would've been discovered within 50 years The chance that the cause would've been reproducible in other people (i.e., sellable) within 50 years. The chance it wouldn't be discovered and brought to market by a competitor first. What people would pay for it. The defense tried to water it down with some counter-arguments: "Scientists can't even find the cure to the common cold, nor major diseases like cancer or AIDS. There's almost no chance they could find the cause of something as dramatic as what the plaintiffs are claiming for Mr. Anderson." "What about the chance that manufacturing the drug would cost more than people could afford? We all know how prohibitively expensive many drugs are. Anything as wonderful as what the plaintiffs are claiming would certainly cost a fortune to manufacture, leaving almost no profit for Mr. Anderson." "Even if the complicated drug could be found, it might only work on one person in a million. If Mr. Anderson was the only person to have gone through the changes the plaintiffs had claimed, it must be a very rare person who can be affected. Etc. We had counter-counter-arguments: "Scientists have found the cures for MANY diseases," whereupon our lawyer read out a VERY long list. For some of them, he read how many people they used to kill, which had been horrific numbers. That made scientists seem VERY impressive people. "Mark Anderson transformed himself, so it can't have involved a very expensive manufacturing process. If he could stumble across it, it'd cost only pennies to manufacture in bulk." We tried to claim that I was a thoroughly normal boy before I transformed, so most people would be able use it. We lost points on this one though, as it seemed reasonable that post-adolescent people might be too old to change, and maybe it only worked on boys, and who know what other restrictions. We tried to counter that even if 10% of the population could be transformed, a country would still pay 100% of its GDP to have that happen. Etc. At the end, the jury accepted the use of our formula, and in their wisdom, they ascribed the following values to it: The chance that the cause of my transformation would've been discovered within 50 years: 20%. The chance that the cause would've been reproducible in other people (i.e., sellable) within 50 years: 50%. The chance it wouldn't be discovered and brought to market by a competitor first: 80%. What people would pay for it: 10% of GDP for 10 years (not the 20 years we claimed we'd sell it for), and they used 2% higher NPV discount factor too, although I doubted that any of them knew what NPV was, let alone the correct discount factor to use. The proportion of people that it would be useful for (a new term they included, at the defense's suggestion): 10%. Logically the penultimate term was what a country would pay for whatever proportion of its citizens were treatable, so it encompassed the last term, but the jury didn't seem to grasp that. The value calculated out to be $235,951,380,000 ($236 billion). From which they decided to subtract $20 billion of business running costs, for a net profit of $216 billion. Rather stupidly, they didn't then multiply the answer by 0.75 because my claimed business plan was for me to own only 75% of the patents and business. We'd mentioned that issue but hadn't given it any emphasis. The other side hadn't emphasized it either, probably because it made no real difference. With no one stressing it, the jury forgot to include it, making $216 billion the final value. It was less than one thousandth of what we'd asked for, and somewhat disappointing. I thought my ass was worth more than that, and I CERTAINLY thought possible human immortality or just freedom from disease was worth more than a company that sold computer software. But it was large enough for our purposes. Most importantly, the Government would HATE to have to pay it. By the terms of our second settlement agreement, they would be liable to pay us $216 billion should they breach any of its terms, so they should make damned sure they don't. The jury was also required to rule on the degree of culpability each defendant had. The DHS defendants were less responsible for my death than the scientists who experimented on me, than the managers in charge of the lab, etc. On the other hand, it was the DHS guys who first kidnapped me. The important factor was that any of those people could've blown the whistle and had a good chance of getting me released, thereby preventing my death, and allowing me to earn the $216 billion profit. The degrees of culpability ranged from 10% up to 50%, all of which were academic as none of the defendants had even 0.001%. That was the most important part of the trial over with. The Government wasn't a party to the case so couldn't appeal it. It could act behind some of the hundred defendants, trying to get them to appeal, but that was all. Our lawyers initiated bankruptcy proceedings against all the defendants and moved to have their assets immediately frozen. The defendants tried to fight the freezing, but lost that as preserving assets was clearly the correct holding action until the defendants appealed the $216 billion award. The court-appointed managers of the defendants' assets kept a very tight lid on how much they were allowed to spend (no clothes shopping, no restaurant meals, no luxuries of any sort at all), as their assets were effectively our assets until such time as they won a massive turnaround on appeal. As our lawyers predicted, the defendants' lawyers were unable to come up with a justification for an appeal. They delayed as long as they could, and then filed their appeal applications. The Court of Appeals considered and then rejected them, refusing to hear the case. The defendants' lawyers had tried to dress it up as much as possible, but there was no new evidence to reverse the defendants being found liable, no judicial misconduct or any other grounds for appeal, and the appeal court had no interest in wasting its time arguing over exactly how many billions of dollars each defendant wouldn't be able to pay. The Supreme Court would have been even less interested in taking the case than the Court of Appeal had been, so that was the end of their defense. The bankruptcy proceedings resumed, which usually resulted in their houses being sold from underneath them. Not having accommodation didn't matter because during the appeal period, all the defendants had been found guilty in the criminal prosecutions and were in jail for an average of a couple of decades. We got some negative publicity over it, but Vanessa's response was, "These people took money to commit terrible crimes. That's WRONG! The proceeds of crimes should be forfeit, regardless of how the money was spent, whether on expensive sports cars or family homes. They cut Mark open to experiment on him, so they literally have blood money on their hands. -- "There are doubtless other Government employees committing, or thinking of committing, crimes. If they love their families, this should encourage them to behave honestly. This action will serve as a strong disincentive, saving many innocent victims from undeserved misery. For those of you listening who are married to Government employees. Your spouses have more power to do harm than most private individuals, and therefore need to take more care and be more accountable. Talk with your spouses about their jobs, and about what has happened to the families of the DHS and CIA criminals. Do everything you can to ensure that your spouses don't commit crimes. Let's all try to make America safer and better. -- "In addition, every dollar that we receive from the ninety eight bankruptcies will be held in trust to be paid out to victims that the Mark Anderson Foundation identifies. You may think the families deserve to keep the money their criminal breadwinner earned for them, but the victims of other Government crimes deserve and need the money far more. Let me tell you about Mrs. Delaney: a single mother in Chicago whose home was condemned by a city employee who had a brother-in-law who owned several pieces of land around hers. She tried to get the alleged defects repaired, but no matter how much she spent, her house was never good enough. Her house was forced onto the market and bought for a pittance by the brother-in-law. The development went ahead and generated millions of dollars of profits. The city employee now lives in one of the best units, which has a value well above what he should've been able to afford. -- "Mrs. Delaney tried to take legal action against what was effectively an eviction from her own home, but the city fought her every step of the way and she ran out of money. The Mark Anderson Foundation is restarting and funding her suit against the development company, the city employee and the city itself. We've estimated what we think Mrs. Delaney is due. Rather than waiting for her lawsuit to come to a conclusion in a year or more, we're paying her that amount tomorrow out of the money we obtained from the criminals we bankrupted. You're invited to that presentation. When her suit is concluded, she has to repay the amount we advanced so it can be used to provide instant justice to the next victim of governmental abuse. If she's awarded more than what we've given her, she'll keep the gain; and if there's a shortfall, MAF will let her keep it, writing off the debt. -- "We have other cases we're working on which will be announced over the next few weeks. The important thing is that the money we obtained from the hundred criminals is being put to a good use to immediately ease the lives of INNOCENT victims, rather than criminals' families..." You get the idea. Note that Mrs. Delaney's problem was not a Federal or State government one, those being the original targets of MAF. Vanessa had so much more money available than she'd expected that she'd widened MAF's aim to include smaller forms of government. MAF's staff had been searching through the last few years' newspapers, looking for cases of government corruption or abuses of power, investigating them further (newspapers not being the best sources of factual information), and MAF was now ready to start pursuing several of them. The idea of "instant justice" was one that appealed strongly, certainly much more so than sympathy for the criminal Frankensteins' families, so we came out of it looking good. Another idea that appealed strongly was "instant money". Begging letters poured into MAF. Nearly all of them got sent the same letter back, telling them that MAF would only act on cases that'd been publicized in the media. It wasn't ideal in the short term, but the long-term need was for a LARGE pool of dedicated investigative journalists because they'd have a greater ability to keep Government honest than just MAF operating through the courts. MAF would pay the reporters to work, effectively as paid-on-results, private investigators. ------- There were lots of small things going on that I haven't made any reference to: We all got new cellphones that automatically encrypted their transmissions when talking to each other (not to other phones, obviously). We had no obvious need for them; it just seemed like a good idea. Dad and I got some firearms training, and Dad bought a handgun for "just in case". I drove up to Portland one night and took several weapons and boxes of ammo out of a gang house. Quite a lot of cash too, as it was available for the taking. None of them saw anything, so they'd have a nice little mystery on their hands. I floated it back to my car, then drove to a remote location. I got out of my car and flew at very low altitude to an even more remote location, then practiced using the weapons entirely with NP and a sight blob. Once I had that mastered well enough, I drove home, bagged the gear up, and hid it in the area. If my home is ever attacked again, I have weapons I can use that won't come back at us in any way. I was studying OSU courses four or five nights a week, and powering through the three degrees. No practical work, exams or anything like that; just the lecture notes and reading the textbooks I already had. I was still averaging a déjà vu every seventeen hours so I was interacting with a lot of Mark Andersons. Assuming no repeats and a low rate of missed events because I was asleep, I was 'meeting' about forty Mark Andersons (counting bodies, most of which had thirty two minds each) per month. I'll describe my déjà vu experiences in more detail below. By the end of 2006 my ability to use two visual sources was good enough to drive with either of them and I habitually had a sight blob on overwatch with one mind tasked to concentrate on it, move it around to check things, etc. Operating dual sight sources was a skill I was effectively perfect at now, although I would've liked to have more than two of them. That need wasn't just in case of emergencies, but because it's extraordinarily useful to be able to look anywhere within five hundred feet of yourself. Just around home I often wanted to have three or four sight blobs going at once. It would've been one more than that if I could ever get a sound blob going, because then I could watch and listen to anything good on TV or as many DVDs as I wanted to buy, no matter where I was around the property. It'd been twenty months since I started consciously practicing projecting ki, and I was now able to project twice as much as my untrained/unconscious amount. That meant I could make brighter and hotter blobs, and that my NP force was now up to 6,550 kg (14,500 lb). I'd made no progress with sound blobs or 3+ sight sources, and my other abilities, such as proximity's range and resolution, were unchanged. Andrew and Sophia announced their formal engagement, to be married in June. A couple of weeks later, Robert broke up with Ashley. I was told partly as a result of her pressuring him to marry her, and partly because he wanted to look for a real job away from Corvallis rather than treading water here. He was a geophysicist with particular interest in oceanography. OSU did a lot of oceanographic work, but it was time Robert got his feet wet out in the big, wide world. Andrew's field of study was forestry economics, which he could pursue from Corvallis. Not that either of them needed to work, which might've contributed to the marriage and/or the breakup. [Robert left in mid-February to work as a postdoctoral investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, sometimes on some of their ships or at various field sites. If he didn't like the job, he could always buy his own ocean and do whatever he wanted with it.] It's amazing what difference having a few hundred million dollars makes to Christmas. We had some good parties and great present exchanges. Also making a big difference was how much love there was inside the families. I remember how uncaring I'd been about my sisters just a few years ago, and these days are much more enjoyable for all of us. ^ Interacting via déjà vu with so many different Mark Andersons was surprisingly uninformative. [[For this Mark it was. The version of me that I chose to start this autobiography with, and to follow through his merges, wasn't chosen at random. He is representative of the Marks that were generally at the forefront of our development. To have focused on a Mark whose development stalled after two merges, for example, would have made for a truncated autobiography, which would've been a terrible thing.]] A few of the Marks had different lives (e.g., the Government had refused to settle and the court case had barely started because the Government was using every dirty trick and delaying action they could think of). Those sorts of things were interesting, but not useful. We didn't learn anything small and directly useful like, Of minor use were: I got enough statistical evidence to be sure that déjà vu occurred unnoticed during sleep. I got a suggestion to check out a particularly vigorous young woman in Donna's and Ava's running club. [She turned out to be as athletic off her feet as on them.] I gained the reassuring impression (although why it should "reassure" me, I wasn't sure) that there was a HUGE number of dimensions still out there. Most of the Marks I interacted with had lives VERY similar to mine; often identical as far as we could tell in the time available, but there were some "variant-dimension Marks" who had noticeably differently lives. Reassuringly, the "Variants" reported that most of THEIR contacts were on the same track as THEM, and that when they encountered variants, the twice-removed (from me) variant Marks reported that most of THEIR contacts were on the same track as them ... You get the idea. There seems to be a huge number of possibilities out there. Because all of us Marks were déjà vu'ing so much more often, we were collecting this sort of information far faster than before. None of the Marks I interacted with had merged more times than I had, but occasionally I'd déjà vu with some who'd merged fewer times than me (two or three fewer merges were the most common variations, if those Marks had never gone to Binion's, or not been kidnapped by the DHS). Those with two fewer merges than me now had 102 kg of NP force, so could JUST lift themselves and fly a little, provided the wind didn't blow them off track. The less merged Marks were EXTREMELY envious of my current level of NP force and what I could do with it. They got tastes of it during the déjà vu too, to whet their appetite. (Déjà vu'ing a 32-minded Mark with an 8-minded Mark produced 40 minds' worth of ki abilities, extrapolated as mathematically expected. The 8-minded Marks' NP force rose by a factor of 5^3 = 125, for example.) I did learn a tiny, new skill when I had a déjà vu while I was having sex. It would have been rude to stop being rude, especially considering the stage Ruth and I were at (Ruth was just a random, although better looking than average, girl. I was making up for all the months I'd had to behave myself as Ron). I orgasmed during déjà vu and my temporarily improved proximity sense let me 'see' more details than I'd seen before about my ejaculation process, including the valve that released sperm into the semen stream. After the déjà vu ended I noticed that I still had enough proximity resolution to detect that valve. Not enough to see what it did, but I could still see it. I did some googling and learned how that part of the male anatomy worked. When I next had some VERY private time, I practiced cumming while I consciously controlled that valve, and I quickly learned to keep it shut. I could now give myself a consciously controlled vasectomy. I explained it to my girls and gave Julia two small samples to take to school to look at in a microscope. One contained the result of a normal ejaculation so should show lots of little swimmers, to prove Julia could see them correctly; the other was from an ejaculation with my valve held closed, so should show none. I was smart enough to produce the 'impotent' sample first, as doing the 'potent' one first might've left some swimmers in my cock to get into the second shot. Julia reported back after school that it worked perfectly, so in all my future sex I'd keep that valve closed. I'd still continue to use condoms with random girls for disease prevention reasons, but now there was no way of my getting a girl pregnant if a condom failed, if one of my core girls forgot to take her pill, or if the pill didn't work properly. We had a good conversation about babies that night in bed. None of us had thought about them recently, but now the subject was raised, Carol and I realized that some of our previous reasons for being cautious had gone. Our initial eagerness had been easily negated by all the worries we'd had, but we realized now that those worries had largely disappeared, for two main reasons: self-confidence and money. Carol and I had both lacked self-confidence when we first considered having babies together, and that'd changed dramatically over the last couple of years. And we now had enough money to buy every resource we could possibly need to help us be good parents, giving us even more confidence. Ava hesitantly mentioned, "Maybe I could have babies too?" Julia replied first, "That'd be excellent, when the time's right for that. I think you need to find a direction for your life first, but it'd be great to have you and Carol being mothers at the same time. You could help each other, the kids could grow up together. It'd be wonderful!" Even more nervously, Ava asked, "Would you give me babies, Mark?" I wasn't sure what I thought about that, but I was damned sure what Julia, Carol and Ava wanted me to say. Ava's calling me "Mark" was an extremely unusual slip too, further alerting me to the seriousness of the issue. I had no choice but to take the plunge, so I answered, "That sounds wonderful. I think you'd be a wonderful mother and I'd be proud to be a father with you." I wanted to add, "After Carol, because I want her to be first," but it sounded too insulting. I wasn't sure exactly how or why, but I was sure that saying that would be hurtful. I also wanted to say, "Unless you find some other guy you'd prefer more," but I knew that was a weasel thing to say. Ava LOVED the three of us. Maybe a guy would capture her heart one day, but mentioning it now was pointless because she wasn't open to that possibility. Our original plan for Ava to find her own feet and move away didn't look like it'd happen any time soon, or possibly ever, especially judging by the looks Julia and Carol were giving me with their eyes, and their anxiousness in proximity. Ava was VERY happy with my answer, so she started crying. Carol and Julia thought I was wonderful for making Ava cry. Girls are weird. When I next had a chance to talk privately with Julia and Carol, I raised the subject again. They praised me for my answer to Ava, and were both determined that I stick to it. Carol said, "If Ava chooses to stay with us for the rest of her life, it'd be terribly cruel not to let her have babies, especially with how much she loves you. She'd be a great mom, and we'd all be supporting her. Any children she'd have with you would be very lucky to be brought into the world in such a loving family." Julia adding, "She might be thinking about them because she can't decide what else to do with her life, but if she still wants you as the father in a few more years, then you absolutely should." I confessed, "What worries me is that I might prefer Carol's children over Ava's. I'd feel terrible if..." Julia and Carol interrupted to assure me they didn't believe that was possible for me. Carol thanked me for being so loving toward her, and then called me an idiot for thinking I could be so selfish. Julia made the point, "It's years away. Don't worry about it now." Ava's tears in bed had made it awkward to ask then, but I asked now, "What about babies for you, Julia?" "Ha! I intend to be far too busy working for you. I want to help you give birth to your non-baby achievements. I'm sure they're going to be stupendously important and I'm VERY excited about being involved with those." That appeared to be the end of that issue. Back to the topic of what I learned from so many déjà vu's, I'll quote from one inter-dimensional conversation that does a reasonable job of reflecting the general usefulness of the déjà vu's. One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: All Of Us: After the déjà vu was over, and with Jessica Alba's body very much in mind, I worked on our possible new skill very diligently. I could easily have sex with Jessica Alba now if I wanted to misuse my abilities badly. I could pick her up with NP, strip her naked, and rape her. Or less violently, I could probably set up some sort of elaborate con using my abilities to convince her that I was someone truly amazing, so she'd throw herself at me. The latter option was amusing to think about, but ridiculously time consuming so I'd never do it. Giving her "Instant Lust" was in the rape category, as it was an unfair manipulation. But unlike rape, it was amusing to think about and we joked about it while we tried to develop our possible new ability. In all seriousness - ignoring the ridiculous fantasy - controlling people's emotions would've been an extremely good skill to have: the last three merges wouldn't have been necessary if I'd had that ability. I won't bother giving you a detailed account of the hours I spent working on it. I'll just say that I tried hard and achieved nothing. It joined the ranks of sound blobs and multiple sight blobs, in the group I call, "Things I'd LOVE To Be Able To Do, And Think I Should Be Able To Do, But Can't Work Out How To Do." I can sense other people's ki when they're intending to move, and can easily influence it. I can sense other people's emotions with the same sense I use to detect ki, so why can't I influence their emotions? It should be EASY! Instead it seemed impossible. ^ [[When someone decides to make a physical movement, e.g., decides to pick up a glass of water, the next stage is to plan the action. The subconscious has to imagine the movement so it can decide what muscles need to be activated, how vigorously, etc. When my ki pushes that person's ki out of alignment, it affects the subconscious planning process, causing it to give muscle activation results consistent to the new position of that person's ki. The important point is that my ki is influencing the other person's ki in the MIDDLE of a process. The Universe is built of Consciousness, so emotions do resonate (in effect, they broadcast, which is what permits me to read them in proximity), but emotions are the OUTPUT of someone's mind, not an INPUT. It's incorrect to think of an emotion as causing an action (e.g., a jock punching an opponent because he is angry). The action wasn't caused by the broadcasted emotion. Instead both the action and the emotion were the result of a root cause ("emotion" is how that root cause 'appears' in your consciousness). The root causes vary. Some are simple chemical reactions such as feeling good from having a nicely full stomach, others are learned or conditioned responses, such as getting excited about Christmas several days in advance because of the pleasure of previous Christmases. Others are even more lofty, such as performing a sizable and anonymous charitable act and feeling good about yourself. Whatever the root cause of a particular emotion is, while the same cause continues to apply, it is constantly regenerating that emotion. My changing an emotion that someone was broadcasting would have no effect on any of their subsequent thoughts or actions, and it'd be immediately replaced with the newly regenerated original emotion. As an analogy, consider if I was having an argument with someone and they yelled, "You're wrong!" at me. If I changed the sound waves in midair (not that I can do sound manipulation, dammit!), so the sound waves now said, "You're right", that obviously wouldn't make the person instantly agreeable with me. Even if they heard themselves agree with me, their mind would immediately reinforce its original conclusion. To change someone's emotions with a special ability - instead of giving them money or one of the other traditional methods - would require me to have access to the root causes of emotions. They were many, varied, and WAY beyond my ability to access and influence. While I'm commenting about things happening in brains, I'll digress to comment about my being able to handle multiple sight blobs. Roughly 30% of the volume of the human brain is used to process sight. My brain had necessarily increased in volume to expand the capabilities of the two visual processing centers, but not much of a physical expansion had been required as all I was doing was adding some - I'll misuse a term, but hope you'll understand - 'post-production functionality' to the two existing centers. To add entirely new processing centers would've required a considerable amount of expansion. Not quite 15% of a brain each, as first stages of sight processing wouldn't needed to be replicated, but 12% would be about right. I often wished I had the capability to run three sight blobs, and sometimes even wished for four. Wanting more than four was rare, so let's say I'd be happy to be able to process four inputs. All I'd need to do is increase the size of my brain by 25%! At first thought that seems obviously impossible, or if possible, would look grotesque. On second thought, it might not be too bad, as it's equivalent to only a 7.7% expansion in each of the three dimensions, which might not be noticeable. Unfortunately, the brain wouldn't expand evenly in all three dimensions. All the extra brain would be 'mounted' at the back of the existing brain, as that's where the functionality we're talking about already resides. New visual centers would need to be in that area to connect to the visual input circuitry, pre-production processing, etc. Had I been able to add two more sight blobs, it would've created a large bump on the back of my skull, which would've been very obvious and weird.]] ------- Chapter 327: Construction of Our Hilltop Home January 1 to late-February, 2007 I won't bother describing the back-and-forth architectural design process we went through for our new home. It was interesting, and Julia had one of the absolute BEST times of her life, but it's really only the final design that matters. Constructing our new home was cool though, so I'll describe that. The Army Engineers had been heavily involved in our new home right from the beginning of the design stage because they had a great deal of non-commercial knowledge that our architects needed, as the construction of the Main and Kids' Houses, the tunnels and the panic rooms were being done to a military-grade. Most of the design work was finished by the end of 2006. The Army doesn't take much of a Christmas and New Year's break, so the Army's construction program quickly swung into action. They would be doing nearly everything themselves. There wasn't much they couldn't do, from heavy jobs like operating the smaller drilling equipment and installing the main tunnel's blast door, through to the cabling and painting. Only a few specialist tasks were contracted out, such as managing the Tunnel Boring Machines and the interior design (we didn't want everything to be khaki). The attitude of the Army all the way up the chain of command, until that reached political levels, was that working on our house was part of their redemption for their attack on our current home. They wanted to do a damned good job of building our new place, and to be seen doing a damned good job, so everyone knew they weren't assholes like the CIA. Most of the US Army Engineers were in Iraq or Afghanistan, but there were still enough somewhere in America to be sent to work on our place. It was a project they enjoyed (it had to be better than working in Iraq or Afghanistan), and we made sure we showed them lots of appreciation by flying their loved ones back and forth regularly, upgrading their living quarters with stereos, TVs, DVD players, a large library of DVDs, getting them temporary memberships of anything they wanted membership of (a golf club through to an 8-ball parlor). It's great having staff working for you, because one of our staff was given the job of thinking of ideas to make the Army guys happy, Dad would okay whichever ones he liked the sound of, and the staff person had to make them happen. The parents thought of offering all the Army workers a week's accommodation in the finished Visitors' Quarters (a "V"-shaped block of ten units on the northwest slope of the main hill; it's described later), but rejected it for security reasons. Instead we gave each of them what was effectively a "$2,000 Gift Certificate" for an upmarket, nationwide and international hotel chain. The vouchers would be billed back to The Family when used, and would be far more useful to the soldiers than giving them free accommodation in Corvallis. According to Dad and the architect, the Army gave us superb service in quality and speed. The architect was particularly envious, wishing he had the Army Engineers working on all his jobs. Their quality was great, and their speed was even better. Unlike commercial construction firms who're trying to shave corners to increase profits, the Army Engineers didn't care about cost and it was a point of pride for them to do as good a job as they could for us. That slowed them down in some respects, but that was more than canceled out by the resources they threw at the job. If a particular task could've been done by three guys, the Army would allocate five and make sure at least two of them were experts at it. If a part was needed, they didn't just wait for the supplier to deliver it - a soldier went to get it, by Chinook (a medium-lift helicopter) if necessary. If grunt work was required, which it often was, then there was no shortage of fit grunts in the Army either. Security was something they took very seriously too - the CIA wasn't going to catch the Army out again. There were plenty of historic examples of impossible-to-detect surveillance systems being possible if the baddies could include them during a building's construction, so we and the Army did everything we could to ensure that didn't happen: Any stranger around the construction site that was spotted by a worker was quickly confronted (every worker was a soldier, and they didn't rely on or wait for our own Security). Raw materials and building components were checked carefully for being up to spec and not containing things they shouldn't contain. Even fellow workers who weren't recognized - a not infrequent occurrence, as specialist tasks needed people to be brought in from strange corners of the Army - were challenged and held until they could be cleared. The building site was treated as a secure area, and was patrolled day and night. We also had our own security staff by now too, also performing that job, so our new home's property was very secure. As my parents had requested and I would have done anyway, I did a great deal of sight blob checking, especially of guys who were working where no one else could see them. I didn't see anything suspicious: no guys looking around before slipping something out of a pocket and installing it behind a grill, no unusual packages installed behind wall linings, etc. I even searched through solid concrete to make sure it was as solid as it was supposed to be. I spent a considerable amount of time on this, partly because I didn't have much else to do during weekdays early in the construction period. Having experienced a single tunnel at Peoria Road, we had decided that we liked them. They are practical, keep the aesthetics very tidy, and offer great safety, so we are going to have several of them on this property. They'd be massively more expensive to install in this hill than in the Peoria Road mound, but that didn't worry us in the slightest. Before I can describe them - they are the coolest part of the construction - I need to describe the area we'll be building on, and in. A Google Earth image of our new property, taken facing north from over Corvallis. Our new property is the entire east-west distance pictured, north of the yellow city boundary line to just south of the pale white road at the top of the picture. The vertical dimension has been exaggerated by a factor of two to more clearly show the property's topography. The white writing and lines at the very bottom of the picture are the tips of Corvallis's northernmost streets. On a map, the property is a rectangular shape, running almost perfectly east-west about twice as far as its north-south width (roughly one mile E-W by half a mile N-S). The property straddles a ridgeline, so the north and south boundaries are at the base of the ridge, the center of the property being at a much higher elevation. Its major land features are as follows, starting at the eastern boundary and going west along the ridgeline: A short (in direction being faced, toward the west) steep bank. It's a long bank north-south, running most of the width of our property. This is the steep east face of the "Main Hill". The "Main Hill" (described more fully below), the top of which is somewhat "M"-shaped, is about 1,200 feet long east to west, and nearly that far north to south. The top is all in grass. The north face of the hill is a steep, rough, bush- and tree-covered slope dropping nearly 500 feet to the base of the hill at our northern boundary. The southern face is a much gentler slope 250 feet down to our southern boundary, mostly grass but with bands of trees. This hill is Chip Ross Park, and where our homes will be built, having a wonderful view south directly over Corvallis. The western side of the Main Hill is a moderate downward slope, running about 800 feet west and losing about 170 feet of altitude. It's mostly covered in trees with some light brush in places. A half-grass, half-tree plateau that's about 500 feet wide (in the east-west direction) at the north end, but narrows to nothing halfway to our southern boundary (so on the plan it looks like a south-pointing triangle). Another moderate downward slope, running 700 feet to the west and losing 150 feet of altitude. Mostly grass. A tree-covered plateau more consistently 500 feet wide all the way between the northern and southern boundaries. A Google Earth photo taken from the top of Chip Ross Park from the western side of the Main Hill. The Main and Kids' Houses will get views very similar to this as they will face south over Corvallis. It shows that our new property truly is "The best real estate in Corvallis." (Yes, there really is a city of 55,000 people down there; Corvallis is very pretty.) Note the nature of the trees inside our property and that Corvallis does have some other small hills in it; both of those aspects become important later in the story. We had extended the property boundary westward far enough to include the two plateaus mostly to create plenty of room for horses. The extension probably added over $5 million dollars' worth of land to our property, but no doubt Penelope considered that she was worth it. [We ended up keeping the horses only on the center plateau, not using the western-most one for the horses at all. Oops.] Looking from Corvallis, the top ridge of our new hill closely resembles a shape halfway between an "m" and an "M". It has three parallel legs sloping south and down toward town (like the bottom half of an "m") but a "V"-shaped northern end (like the top half of an "M"). The "V" on the top half of the "M" is fairly level, with the eastern leg being only fifty feet lower than the western, which is the highest point of our property. They're separated by about 1,200 feet horizontally, so the top ridge is virtually level. [When construction started, the area under the Main House's eastern side was raised to make the house level]. For those of you interested in such things, the cleft between the two legs forms a steep gully which runs down to the east-west road that's just north of our property. The descent is very steep, but that's the direction we consider "behind" where our house will be, so its steepness wasn't an issue. The three southern legs of the "m" drop moderately, the middle one losing height at the rate of 1 foot of height per 5 feet of horizontal distance; the western leg losing height slightly slower, the eastern leg losing it slightly faster. They all level off and flatten out about 250 feet below the hill's top, merging into a single open field. That continues to descend slowly for another 100 feet horizontally where it reaches our southern boundary. The descent to the east of the main hill is quite steep. It's a pity it isn't steeper, as a mega-church ("The Church of The Horsemen of Christ" - sheesh!) owns the land to our east and is finishing building a large lunatic asylum on it (i.e., spiritualist church). The current access to Chip Ross Park is off NW Lester Ave, a road that approaches our hill from the east, going straight past where the asylum is being built, then stopping in a gravel parking lot about halfway up the east side of our hill, before it gets steep. We're going to wall off that end of the road entirely because we want complete separation from those hundreds of people, and we certainly don't want our sole road access to be through all their traffic. Apart from the security issues of having hundreds of people milling around right beside our front gate, people shouldn't be allowed to drive if they make their life decisions based on the feedback they claim they get when they telepathically beseech a long-dead zombie. Come to that, they shouldn't be allowed to breed either. They claim it started with a virgin, so they should emulate her example. To complete the roading digression, our road access is going to be to the southwest. Even without the lunatics, that direction is the best as it connects to roads that run straight into the heart of Corvallis. Coming in our front gate, which will be very substantial, and after clearing security, our driveway will enter a tunnel into a garage under the center of the hill, with different elevators to take people up to whichever building they're going to. On top of the main hill, the western side of the "V", starting from the central point and running northwest, will have the living areas of the Main House: the kitchen, dining room, living room, etc. Outside, continuing northwest on the wide top ridge, there'll be a big pool and outside entertainment area for adult use. The house on the eastern side of the "V", connecting to the living area at ninety degrees, will have the parents' bedrooms, aligned to catch the morning sun (all old people - including my parents in that category for this - seem to like morning sun. It drives you out of bed earlier, so who'd want that?) Built tightly into the corner of the "V", suspended out over the steep gully and just below the floor level of the Main House so it doesn't block the almost-360-degree views from the entire Main House, will be the "Activity Level". That's going to contain a games room, a small dojo (mostly for Donna, although I hope that I might be able to resume my Aikido training one day), a theater, a relaxing room with a spa pool (for times when using the outdoor one would be unpleasant), an exercise room which will include a short, two lane lap pool with water jets at one end to remove the need to flip over. Under the Activity Level will be four self-contained little apartments for any live-in staff we might have in the future: cook(s), housekeeper(s), maybe a butler (we tease Mom with that idea). Three of the apartments will have a double bedroom, the fourth will have two. Each will have its own bathroom, small living room and kitchen. There'll be a shared laundry and a shared larger common living room for when they want to socialize. The Kids' House (formerly known as "Mark's Wing" in Peoria Road, but renamed in the absence of a Mark) will be separate, and built on the western-most leg of the "m". It's the highest of the three legs, but the Kids' House will be built far enough down it to avoid blocking the Main House's views. The Kids' House will be two levels with the same functions as the existing levels of Mark's Wing, although everything will be bigger and better, which is scary thought when it comes to the master bedroom. The bedrooms' level is the top one, and will be offset backward to fit the contour of the hill, so will have a deck on top of the living level. The slope of the property is reasonably gradual at this point (about 1-in-7), so the bedroom level would normally be recessed about fifty feet behind the living area, except that Julia got the bedroom area enlarged by adding more bedrooms and - no surprise - a closet big enough to need its own zip code. That 'pushed' the front wall of the bedroom level farther forward, reducing the size of the deck down to about twenty five feet. Then she got the living level widened considerably and lengthened somewhat. Apparently the architect didn't realize how important my image is. The bottom floor of the Kid's House is now larger than the floor above, which looks nicer than having them the same size. To the east of that "m"-leg is a small gully before the next leg begins. In the gully, slightly below the level of the living floor of the Kids' House, will be built a large swimming pool and a spa pool, as well as the whole area being terraced flat for entertaining. Up that gully from the spa pool, will run the beginning of the tunnel leading from the Kids' House up to the Main House's foyer. Speaking of which, the middle of the living area wing of the Main House (also sometimes called "Adults' House") is going to be a very large and spectacular entrance foyer. The front door will enter into it (as is usual with entrance foyers), and so will several other accesses: a staircase up from the Activity Level, the just-below-ground level tunnels from the Kids' House and the Office, and the elevator up from the Main House's underground parking lot. (Other elevators from the three-part underground garage - described below - will ascend directly into the Kids' House and the Office. And there'll also be a second stairway from the Activity Level to the bedroom wing of the Main House, so the parents can come and go easily). The eastern-most leg of the property's "m" will have the Office on it. It'll be downslope quite a long way, so it won't intrude on the view from any of the Main House's windows. The Office will also be connected to the Main House by a tunnel in its adjacent gully. The Office will be large enough for about a dozen people, some in offices, most in an open-plan area. It'll have its own little kitchen and other facilities. Managing our families' finances will require staff, plus whatever MAF work gets done from this end. Room for a dozen people, counting Vanessa and Mom, may be excessive initially, but probably not once things get rolling. The Office was deliberately designed to be easy to add on to, should that prove necessary, which it could well do. Even with our personal tax returns being very easy to fill out, a lot of staff are needed to manage our money and all the consequences of it. The Main House had two master bedroom suites. Mom and Dad's bedroom occupying all of the far end of the eastern leg of the "V", so they got views almost all the way around (from NW, clockwise around to S). Vanessa and Prof's bedroom was right at the beginning of the eastern leg of the "V", so they got the view from the NE around to the SW; not as many compass degrees as Mom and Dad, but visually more attractive areas so they were probably better off. Vanessa would also be planting a nice garden in front of her bedroom window, whereas Mom and Dad's views were more panoramic. The other side of the hallway that ran down the middle of the bedroom wing had in sequence: an ordinary bedroom, a bathroom, another ordinary bedroom - that one was Donna's - then another master bedroom suite for important guests or close friends. Its outlook wasn't as spectacular as the other master bedrooms, but was still very nice. In short, there were two spare bedrooms in the bedroom wing of the Main House, one of which was luxurious. There were also four staff bedrooms under the Activity Level, but staff and guests shouldn't be mixed up (I think that's in a millionaires' etiquette book somewhere), so they wouldn't be counted, not that we had any immediate plan to hire staff for inside the Main or Kids' Houses. There were two expansions the moms weren't sure how far to take: how much large-scale dining, and how much accommodating. Admittedly Mom mostly talked to the women of each mansion she'd visited, who might've been overly conscious of the cooking and entertaining issues, but it seemed to be a real issue. Several of the very rich families Mom had visited had complained about being constrained in that respect. The parents settled on having the Main House's dining room (and related kitchen and bathroom capacities) designed to handle full, sit-down meals for up to twenty five people. Inside the front gate, turning left as you come in, will be a fully self-contained, multi-bedroom house for the Staff Quarters - mostly for our live-in security force, but if any of our other staff (gardeners, maintenance, etc.) want to live in there, they're welcome to. The bedrooms will be soundproofed so the off-shift workers can sleep, although there will be repeaters for the alarm in the hallway outside the bedrooms, which will be loud enough to be heard by any sleepers in the event of an emergency. The Kids' House (Julia still tries to call it "Mark's Wing" sometimes, but publicly we stuck to the new name), had the master bedroom and four spares. One would be set up for Ava to display her parents' memorabilia, and one we'd use when we wanted to have quality time in various pair combinations, leaving the other two bedrooms as truly spare, spare bedrooms. [Regardless of who her partner was, Ava chose to have her quality times in her memorabilia bedroom because it made her feel good knowing her parents approved of us, and she hoped it somehow helped her parents sense how much she loved us and her life with us.] Julia had delusions of my grandeur, so she was making sure there were plenty of rooms for more girls to stay. Now that the settlement process appeared to be finished not just for the second time but presumably forever because the Government had got the message this time, Julia was encouraging me to start playing around as Mark had. I was inclined to cooperate, because that's the sort of guy I am. If we - the families as a whole - had guests staying overnight, putting them up in the Kids' House might not be deemed suitable. It wouldn't be a problem if it was The Boys and their girls, but if a delegation of Senators came to discuss MAF business, we'd be pushed to accommodate them properly. Ideally we wanted more accommodation, especially as anything we got built now would be paid for by the Government. That was a very significant consideration in build/not-build decisions. The parents didn't want strangers sleeping in the Main House, so adding another floor of bedrooms under or over the bedroom wing didn't appeal. It could be made to work architecturally, just not emotionally. Any more bedrooms had to be in a detached building. We certainly didn't want another building placed anywhere near the top part of the "m" because that'd ruin the wide-open views from the Main House. Anywhere farther down the "m" didn't appeal either because it would make it too 'crowded'. That's a very relative term, because the middle leg of the "m" was empty, and a building on it would've been four hundred feet away from the Kids' House. It could even have been hidden behind a stand of trees, so we wouldn't see that we were being 'crowded'. But we liked the natural openness of the hill and we wanted to retain it. Everywhere that we could've sited a guests' building to offer them great views, diminished our views. The building may not have blocked our views much, but it would've been in them, so would've intruded more than the parents wanted. To offer guest accommodation with good views - rather than "great views" - from locations that wouldn't intrude on us, meant building down near the security guards' house, or next to the horses, so not very satisfactory. Guests that were good friends we could put up in the spare rooms we had already, so they'd get great views. But guests that were of the "visiting Senators" ilk would have to do without fantastic views. We had no plans to build anything on the NW corner of the "M", so building extra accommodation twenty or thirty feet down the slope even farther NW from that corner would be out of our sight. It'd only get a view of forest, which would be boringly black at night and just a lot of green during the day, but that'd have to do. We wouldn't bother making a tunnel through to the main house either, but we'd landscape a beautiful walk and lovely trees around their area to make it very nice; just without a fantastic long-distance view. The architect came up with an upside-down "V"-shaped set of units. Walking down the path from the NW corner of the "M", took you inside to a foyer at the point of the "V". There you had three choices, proceed into the hallway that descended down the left leg, or the hallway down the right leg, or walk straight ahead through the foyer. The latter option took you into the open air again, into a formal garden which had a path that switchbacked down the hill between the increasingly separating hallways of each leg. The path crossed and re-crossed an artificial stream that meandered down too, from pond to pond, under the path's several bridges, around pretty meeting areas, etc. To the left if walking down the left leg's hallway, and to the right of the right leg, were stacked lovely little units, each with a bedroom, bathroom, small living room and tiny kitchen and bar. The bottom two units being bigger in all respects, including having two bedrooms. There'd be five units on either side, so twelve bedrooms in total. There'd be lots of trees and bushes planted around the units, so they'd mostly disappear from sight. The parents weren't interested in large-scale dining in a detached dining room, so I've now described all of the main architectural elements. There were lots of minor things I haven't mentioned: Two tennis courts on the plateau near the horses. A natural helicopter landing pad on the northwest corner of the "M". An isolated mailroom for inspecting and sorting our mail, placed to the right of the large, visitors' parking lot that's to the right of the main entrance, as you come in. All the landscaping that will need to be done. There's going to be a HUGE amount of that! Many paths that'll run around the property, with a few bridges that cross gullies. Even a 1,000-foot zip-line from near the helipad (not too near!) for Donna to get down to her horses quickly, or maybe just for fun. The Main and Kids' Houses were VERY strongly built; at least two orders of magnitude more so than ordinary houses. For example, the walls were thick concrete and contained steel plates and girders. Some of the interior walls were just as strong, to help shield the occupants in the case of internal explosions, from a Hellfire missile, for instance. One piece of landscaping that I'm definitely going to get done, is a stand of very tall trees close to the Kids' House (even if they have to be transplanted fully grown from elsewhere). Probably a couple dozen of them planted in a rough circle with a small clearing in the middle so if I need to, I can take off straight up and get up to a speed high enough to be no more than a flash in anyone's eyes, and preferably not noticed at all. Watching the tunnels being created was interesting. The roading the Government had to lay was minimal, as it took only a fifth of a mile of new road to get to where our driveway would start. Which we refused to allow being called "Mark Anderson Drive", asking for "Chip Ross Drive" instead for PR reasons. Chip Ross hadn't been anyone important, but we didn't want to look arrogant. Our driveway went a few dozen yards north-northeast onto our property, then into the tunnel to the underground parking garages. The parking areas were so extensive and were just large 'open' spaces that "underground parking lot" is almost a better term than "garage". To make the main tunnel, a six meter diameter TBM (Tunnel Boring Machine) was used, it being wide enough so the resultant hole could be used for "In" and "Out" car lanes plus a small walkway on the side. It bored 600 feet NNE into the hill, very slightly uphill of horizontal for drainage purposes, to end at a point 150 feet directly under the middle of the Main House. It effectively started at the lower left of the middle leg of the main hill's "m", then bored north and across that ridge, to arrive at the top right of it. The TBM was reversed out, then workers went to the end of the tunnel and considerably widened it using much smaller machines. The TBM was reinserted, moved to the end, turned ninety degrees in the space now available for that maneuver, then it drilled a westerly extension of the tunnel to directly under where the Kids' House would be. Then it was pulled back to the turning area, rotated 180 degrees to drill east to under where the Office would be, thereby making a T-intersection at the end of the entrance tunnel. (The angles I've given as 90 and 180 degrees were actually somewhat different, but those are easier for you to visualize than the precise values.) That TBM was finished with now. Workers went into the tunnels and carved out the larger spaces we wanted for the three parking lots and elevator lobbies, at the left and right ends of the "T" (110 feet under the Kids' House and 40 feet under the Office respectively) as well as at the central T-intersection area (150 feet under the Main House). About a hundred yards into the tunnel's entrance was carved the area for where the 'garage door' would be mounted. It'd be an EXTREMELY strong blast door that would slide sideways across the entire width of the tunnel. A battle tank wouldn't be able to get through it. It wouldn't be mounted until the floor was installed in the circular tunnel. We had many rooms cut into the side of the tunnel. Deep inside the hill were rooms for the emergency generator, our security center (which had either an impressive or scary armory, depending on whether you're male or female), and a VERY large storage room in the top middle of the left side of the "T". Just inside the entrance of the tunnel (outside of where the recessed garage door would be fitted) we had spaces carved out for several storage rooms (for gardening and other equipment), garages for the staff's cars, quad- and motor-bikes for our gardeners and security guards, electric carts for sedate motoring along our property's paths, and a large maintenance workshop that would delight Dad when it was completed. While those side rooms were being 'manually' dug ("manually", in comparison to a massively impressive six-meter TBM), a three-meter TBM was employed, entering the side of the hill above Penelope and Patch's plateau. It started southwest from where the Kids' House would be, drilling northeast and upward to pass under the Kids' House at a depth of fifty feet, continuing until it was about fifty feet short of being fifty feet directly under the bedrooms of the Main House. Excavated off the side of this tunnel were two rooms, one a couple of dozen yards short of the dead-end of the tunnel for what would become the Adults' Panic Room. The Kids' Panic Room was located slightly northeast from directly under the Kids' House. The Army didn't know it, but inside the Kids' Panic Room was going to be my Secret Study. Both panic rooms were to be divided into two rooms: the front and main room was like a living room, while the lockable back room was mostly to be a food, weapon and other storage room, although also the bathroom with a porta-potty (the rooms had no plumbing). In the second panic room's back room - behind the locked door - I would install my 32-screen computer system. I would only be studying in it by sight blob and NP - not with my physical body - so it'd be a wall covered with screens and almost nothing else. Not even a desk, chair or printer. The mouse could sit on a large mouse-pad on the floor. The open end of the "Panic Room Tunnel" (where the TBM went in, southwest of the Kids' House) was sealed with TWO extremely strong bank-vault doors, one several yards inside the other, to slow down anyone trying to get access to the tunnel. The exterior was disguised to hide that there was a door there at all, and the ground outside the entrance was excavated down several feet so people would need a ladder to reach the hidden door, making it that much harder to discover and investigate. The tunnel was 1,000 feet long, offering me the possibility of a "Takeoff Tube". I could open the doors from the inside, go to the far end of the tunnel, then accelerate toward the exit. At 4 g's, I'd be going 300 mph when I shot out the end (maybe I should only use 3 g's). By the time anyone could react, I'd be well clear. It would just be used for emergencies, as someone might see a flash of 'something', especially as it'd take me a while to curve my body upward. That's all the TBM boring described. There was also vertical drilling for the three elevator shafts and several small shafts for cabling. The elevator shafts were easy, even though they were for large elevator cars; especially the one for the Main House which was going to have two long sofas in it and still have room for twenty people to stand. A drilling machine like a very small oilrig was used to create the elevator shafts. It was small enough to be manhandled around. It drilled a six-inch diameter shaft through the material of our hill at an average rate of half a yard per minute, so less than two hours to reach from the Main House down to its parking lot. Then the drill was extracted, the rig moved a few inches, and the process repeated. That was done a few dozen times in an area of a few square yards, then small explosive charges were lowered to detonate near the bottom of the shafts. The Swiss Cheese rock shattered and fell to the parking lot's floor. The rubble was removed, and the next charges were exploded higher in the shaft. Repeat that a few times moving up the shaft, and soon it was empty. After a little manual tidying up, steel beams were lowered from a helicopter and set in place, followed by the elevator cars, and the rest of the elevator construction was ordinary. The drilling process was very much the same for the angled escape chutes down to our panic rooms' access tunnel. Multiple four inch boreholes were drilled at an angle suitable for us to slide down, the subsequent Swiss Cheese formation broken up and removed, then the shafts were leveled and the bottom smoothed and lined. Recessed handles would be mounted on the roof just inside the top of the shaft so we could pull ourselves into them easily. The entrances would be at floor level to make them easier for Prof and Vanessa to enter. Head or feet first would work fine. The slides had small bumps on their sides to make it relatively easy to climb back up the shafts again, as the only other exit was through the big, bank vault doors and down the ladder we'd keep just inside the entrance. Up the chutes would be easier, especially because I could NP everyone but Donna back up the shafts afterward. The last type of tunneling methodology was for the daily-use tunnels to the Main House from the Kids' House and Office. They were mostly in the gullies between the three ridges of the "m", and only required some ordinary digging through the topsoil and a little rock excavation on top of the hill. Concrete pipes were laid in the trenches and buried, then fitted out in much the same way as at Peoria Road, only better. Once all the tunnels and shafts were bored and the elevators installed, construction on the buildings themselves started. After the foundations were poured (very thick for the Main and Kids' Houses), prefabricated house panels were choppered in. Fortunately there are very few houses under the flight path, because Chinooks are very noisy beasts. The buildings literally 'flew together'. There were Engineers and workers ALL OVER the hill. Every job had large crews, and there were a lot of jobs: The Main House. Kids' House. Office. Staff Quarters. Visitors' Quarters. The two panic rooms (those were major jobs, as they had closed air supplies, power systems, CCTVs, telecoms, etc.). All the rooms inside the tunnel. The tunnels themselves. They had to have floors installed because a semicircular floor is not a practical shape to drive on, and then finished nicely, including with an electricity supply and battery powered emergency lights. There were a couple of jobs the Army and other contractors did too, as our unexpectedly taking ownership of previously public land required the relocating of a couple of public infrastructure components: a large water tank that was in the middle of our property was moved farther west to be on public land again, and the large power lines that ran east-west along a clear-cut line that traversed most of our property had to be moved to the other side of the road to the north of our land. Plus there were many small exterior jobs, including two sets of swimming and spa pools (one set for the adults, one set for the kids), paved paths around the property, driveways and parking areas, running the utilities, the sensor-packed exterior wall that ran around the entire property, stables and an attached storage room for up to ten horses, and a very strong front gate (strong enough that a truck couldn't crash through, and having spikes that could rise up from the road surface to impale any normal vehicle). Sadly, it was probably quite a while since the US Army concerned itself with horse accommodation. "Sadly" because Donna would like to think there was a chance that the next time the Army attacks us, they'll do so with cavalry so they'll forfeit their horses. Apparently Penelope and Patch would like some friends. Donna was actually being realistic about the stable's ten-horse capacity, as several of her friends had been quick to ask her if they could keep their horses on our huge block of land. Donna had possibly been even quicker to agree (I suspect she'd offered). Once the buildings were closed-in, there was still a great deal of interior work. All the usual plumbing, wiring, etc., and also some special jobs in the military-grade buildings. For example, one hell of a security system, from the radar and sensors all over the property, through to installing internal steel security doors which would slam shut to slow down any attackers in the buildings. The Main and Kids' Houses' entrance foyers (where their front doors, elevator shafts and surface level tunnels converged) could be sealed in steel at the sounding of the alarm. Between the Main House's living and bedroom wings, a steel door was fitted to block the hallway in an emergency. Similarly for the stairs between the two levels of the Kids' House. Several of the internal walls in both houses were awesomely strong to contain any blasts and to stop attackers going around any sealed hallways by blowing holes in the neighboring walls. Another feature was that several of the rooms in the Main and Kids' Houses, and the conference room in the Office, were equipped with Faraday cages. Each of those rooms was built with continuous metal plates in their floor, walls, ceiling and door(s). Pressing a button slid a metal panel between the panes of glass on all the room's windows, air conditioning ducts had a flexible section which was pinched shut by a sliding steel shutter, the metal-cored door(s) were locked against their metal frame(s) and a metal panel within each door descended to block the gap under them. Thus the entire room was contained within an almost unbroken metal box. There were necessarily some gaps in it, mostly for various wiring (electrical, telecom, intercom, security sensors, plus cables to antennas which cellphones could be plugged into, so they could be used if necessary), but all that cabling went down through one location in the floor of each room, and then through an "S"-bend inside a thick metal channel, so any radiation created inside the room couldn't radiate out. The cabling was monitored for signals, and a display panel in every room and the Security Center reported any signal activity. In the Kids' House, the master bedroom and our non-secret study were built inside Faraday cages. In the Main House, so were both master bedrooms (just the bedroom part, not the en suite bathrooms or closets), Prof and Vanessa's study, the dining room and the kitchen (which had gaps for plumbing too). Back in the good old days - before we had to worry about bugs - we used to have fascinating conversations in the kitchen or around the dining table, and it'll be nice to be able to get back to that. We'll have to remember to hit the button to make the room totally secure, but that'd be easy. We'd also been warned that wandering around the house while talking on a cellphone or cordless phone wouldn't work well. Walking into a Faraday cage-equipped room, even if it wasn't 'activated' (by which I mean the button pressed to close off the doors and windows), would usually cut off the phones' signals because so much metal was built into the walls. Each of those rooms had an area where cellphones could be connected to an external antenna so they could be used. It was a nuisance, but worth it for us because we greatly feared what bugs could overhear. Incidentally, the panic rooms were automatically almost perfectly bug proof because they were built of thick steel and buried deep in the hill. The cabling to them just had to be managed carefully and they were "as safe as houses" (only much more so, and even more than our houses). Actually, the term "bug proof" was misleading. Someone could plant a voice-activated tape recorder in a room, then collect it a few days later. However, each room had sensors that could detect even very small amounts of electrical activity and plot them on a 3D view of each room for Security to check from time to time. How frequently they did that would depend on the locations. There'd naturally be dozens of such sources in the kitchen, so they wouldn't get checked often (e.g., a source where the toaster was kept wouldn't excite much curiosity), but a new source under the desk in my study would be a very different matter. There were so many soldiers working on the hill that the public freaked out about the level of activity, assuming hordes of workers meant far more desecration of the environment than we'd led the public to believe, rather than exactly what we'd told them would be done very quickly. We'd already released accurate artist drawings of the final result, and explained how we were doing much of the construction underground to preserve the ecology and natural look of the hill as much as possible. We were doing it mostly for aesthetic and security reasons, rather than ecological, but the end result was much the same. It was amazing how fast the Army put our place together. The public was still in the process of getting itself worked into a frenzy when it became clear that the Army had already built exactly what we'd said would be built, so the nascent outrage fizzled. One of the time-gaining advantages of working with the Engineers was when they needed a piece of equipment that wasn't immediately available (maybe some special hinges), they'd build the things themselves! I saw that happen many times, sometimes onsite, or they'd email the specs to one of their workshops and a few hours later a chopper would arrive with the part. Similarly, if something they were about to use was found to be out of spec or broken, it was often quicker to get it fixed or remade than buy a new one. They made spares too. There was a large storage room alongside the main tunnel, halfway between the Kids' and Main Houses' parking lots. In it the Army placed all sorts of well-labeled spare parts. I'd be exaggerating to say there was enough stuff to build another house, but it sure looked like it. Ava's boxed-up memorabilia would end up in this room, almost lost among all the other stuff the Army left for us. The Army had enough people onsite that every building was worked on simultaneously, so it only took until the end of February for them to finish nearly all of their work. There were still some small jobs outstanding, for example, the property's alarm system couldn't be finalized and fully integrated until the major landscaping jobs were done. The Army would send someone back to train our staff in how to use the radar and the other sensor systems when we had staff to be trained. We had hired some of our staff, but not many. They would also help produce a manual for the actions they thought our security staff should take in response to various types of 'attacks', such as: a light plane buzzing our hill, two helicopter gunships coming our way, intruders rushing our gate with guns blazing, a stranger suddenly being discovered in the middle of the property, and about a thousand other scenarios. That was going to take a while to put together because the acceptable civilian responses were different than what the Army was allowed to do inside of military land, and they needed to work with the Corvallis Police and lawyers for a lot of it. I was curious to see the finished document. It'd be easy for the families to learn our responses to various scenarios, as we only had three possible responses to most situations: ignore, caution, or flee to the panic rooms. Our guards would have a hell of a lot more to learn. I'd also have considerably more responses, but they weren't going to be written into a manual! The construction finished, the Army effectively handed over the keys and drove or flew off. ------- Chapter 328: Individual Responsibilities for Preparing Our Hilltop Home January 1 to mid-March, 2007 Once the Army pulled out, everything fell onto our shoulders. Not Vanessa's, because her shoulders were already fully loaded, but the rest of us felt the shift of responsibility. We'd known it was coming of course, but when the Army left, EVERYTHING stopped unless we made it move, and that felt quite different. Mom had been frantic for months. Setting up a home at the "stinking rich" end of the market was something Mom had never been exposed to before, so she was starting from square one. There were a million things for her to learn and do. For example, Vanessa and Mom had gotten excessively worked up when they'd bought a dinner service for our current home. There was far more stress in that decision this time. I'm not sure why there was so much more, but there was. Mom showed all the signs of buckling under the pressure - such as developing a frantic air and short temper - but I thought she was actually enjoying herself, although I was never brave enough to risk saying that out loud. The reason I thought so was because of how Julia acted. I suggested to Julia that the obvious thing for us to do for the Kids' House was to take all the best things out of our existing home, "The dinner service, for example." Julia made it impolitely clear that my idea was a long way south of "no good", and that she and Carol would be picking out a new dinner service for us. Soon after that, Julia - who had appointed herself in charge of the entire Kids' House - also started showing signs of buckling under the pressure. Every female except Donna was stressing over issues which had easy solutions sitting at Peoria Road, such as a perfectly good dinner service which would go to waste if everyone bought new services. To me the answer still seemed obvious, although not as obvious as keeping my mouth shut. I had to believe the females enjoyed themselves, because there was no other reason for them to put themselves through it. Dad had seen the writing on the wall and was taking a long vacation from his work. Dad's area of responsibility was outside the house (he had the wrong genes for inside), so he'd had to hire the Head of Security, maintenance guys, various contractors, etc. Dad had never hired a Head of Security before, so he had some serious learning to do too. Being the Head of Security for a family that controls tens of billions of dollars is NOT a small job. [Dad had started on the security issue just before the second settlement was reached in late September. We'd decided we were going to move and would need our own security staff. Several of them were hired late last year, such as the two female guards that accompanied the girls to Paris. In our inexperience we'd made small messes out of this and several other issues, but they were coming right as we learned enough to correct our mistakes or we hired people who knew what to do.] Prof managed to miss most of the work simply because there wasn't enough outside work for two husbands. Apparently there were a million things for the females to decide on inside the houses, but only a few hundred for Dad outside. Prof acted as a sounding board for everyone else and was a source of good advice on how to plan and manage things. He may not have known much about the specific "things" that were being done, but he knew how to be systematic about them. Mom observed, "Ava, when you first approached us you said you wanted to learn how to set up a household. You're in charge of setting up the Staff and Visitors' Quarters." "Eek!" "You've got several girlfriends who I'm sure would love to help you. Probably only men will live in the Staff Quarters so you can be much more relaxed about the quality of that. Plus you can hire whomever you want to help you. Don't hand over responsibility though." Ava was regretting her decision to be unemployed, and therefore employable by Mom. No doubt spending money on furnishings would revive her spirits. The main part of the Staff Quarters had twenty four small bedrooms built into an underground level to minimize the visual impact of the house and for sound insulation purposes, as we expected about 75% of the occupants would be Security who'd be operating three shifts so would need quiet rooms to sleep in. The top floor, which was at ground level, had a big living room, games room, kitchen, laundry, gym/dojo, etc. It wouldn't be fancy living; not even average living really. The bedrooms were designed to fit a three-quarter-sized bed and a small set of drawers. They had a small closet and not much room for anything else. They were too small for two people to live in one room. A woman could visit and stay overnight with her boyfriend if she wished, but it'd take an unusually tolerant woman to live with him for long, not to mention having to put up with all the other male housemates, especially as there was just the one very large communal bathroom (the female guards lived off-site nearby). Attached to the far end of the Staff Quarters, on the end farthest from our gate, was a reduced-size mirror image of what I've described above. A mini-Staff Quarters, if you like. It was for the senior staff; mostly our Head of Security and Head Gardener. It had its own kitchen, living room, etc., and four large, double bedrooms with their own bathrooms. Our senior staff could easily be married and wouldn't want to live with a couple dozen young men; and neither would the men want their bosses living with them. There was a connecting door between the two independent buildings, but we imagined that it'd be infrequently used. What the Staff Quarters lacked in amenities, they made up for in being free. Most of our staff would be males from 20- to 30-years so they'd save a lot of money if they chose to live onsite rather than rent externally. The main conditions on their living in the Quarters were that the inhabitants were responsible for their own cooking, laundry, consumables, etc.; and in the event of an emergency, everyone was to respond appropriately, such as gardeners hiding from armed intruders, but helping with a fire. Carol was given responsibility for the live-in staff quarters inside the Main House (under the Activity Level). The parents had no intention of employing anyone to work in the Main House yet - if it happened, it'd be after I moved away - but the rooms still had to be furnished. Carol's job at Peoria Road had just been bedrooms, but the staff areas under the Activity Level were complete apartments so she had a great deal more to think about. However, that job wasn't as urgent as any other job, so Julia and Ava didn't hesitate to rope Carol into helping them. Carol very soon had heaps to do, and was roping her friends in to help her. All the females were having a great time (not that I'd say that out loud). Donna was automatically in charge of the horses. That was something she was already involved in as she'd participated in the design and construction of the stables. She was quite serious about it, even learning how to cold-shoe horses herself. I winced the first time I saw her hammering nails into Patch's feet, but he didn't seem to care, and he ought to know. Patch was a placid horse, but Penelope was a handful and gave Donna quite a lot of trouble by refusing to stand still with one foot lifted so Donna could shoe it. Donna lost her temper a few times, which was a very unwise thing for Penelope to cause when Donna had a hammer in her hand. Donna persisted through the anger and tears Penelope caused her, and eventually trained Penelope into cooperating. We all admired Donna's dedication. As you can tell, the parents were taking the 'educational' approach to setting up our new home, for themselves as well as us kids. We were doing nearly all of the decision-making ourselves, rather than passing that off to experts. We wouldn't be doing much of the actual work, but we'd still be taking responsibility for it. Unsurprisingly, landscaping was made my responsibility. That would've surprised me greatly a couple of years ago, but it'd been the way things had turned out recently. The family already had ideas for the areas around the Main House, some of the downslope looking toward town, the area between the "V" of the Visitors' Quarters, and down around the front entrance; but none of their ideas were set in concrete - apart from what was already set in concrete, as a few paths had already been laid. They were few and mainly near the front gate or northwest from the Main House and then down the ridge to Donna's Plateau. If I wanted to, I could have them ripped up if they interfered with my landscaping plans, so I had 280 acres of virtually clean slate to play with. My only other personal design experience - rather than following Vanessa's visions - had been the 0.01 acre I'd originally intended to be a small Japanese water garden, which had somehow changed into a five times larger Mountain Forest-themed garden, so I wasn't exactly well prepared. Fortunately, even though landscaping might be my responsibility, I'd be making damned sure the families agreed with me - or more likely for most of it, just didn't object to my ideas. My waiting until after the Engineers had decamped before listing the allocation of responsibilities wasn't meant to give the impression that that was when the responsibilities were handed out. They were usually assigned even before construction had started, so we'd all had a couple of months to get ready. In my case, that included hiring gardening staff. Once the major gardening work was complete, maybe in three years or so, we'd need far fewer gardeners to maintain it, but I was starting with about twenty staff because they had a LOT of work to do now. Most of them would be laborers whose job would last only a year or two, but they'd know that going in. The senior hires were very good gardeners of course, with the Head Gardener being an out-of-towner who'd come to work for us from having worked in other large, private gardens before. He knew what needed doing, and didn't hesitate to tell me. An essential part of my preparation was obtaining the equipment twenty gardeners would need. It was a HUGE pile of gear: wheelbarrows, rakes, shovels, wood-chippers, and a hundred other small items. Not to mention vehicles! I bought a large flatbed truck and rented a second one for the first couple of months of work, three tractors with a wide assortment of attachments, and several electric quad-bikes with wider wheelbases than normal as our property had some steep slopes and quads roll too easily, plus a dozen trailers for carting tools, soil, refuse, and other stuff around, including horse poop. The senior gardeners were delighted that we'd have several horses. The garden laborers might've had a different opinion though. The Head Gardener wanted a large nursery established IMMEDIATELY, starting thirty seconds after I'd hired him, to prepare plants for later transplanting elsewhere on the property. He even told me off for not hiring him twelve months before construction started so he could get things set up properly. That we hadn't owned the property until two months before construction started was apparently not an acceptable excuse. I should have known that years have four seasons and have planned accordingly. The nursery was built on the western side of the property, near Donna's Plateau (or as Penelope clearly thought of it, "Penelope's Plateau"). The nursery needed a substantial water supply, including for sprinkler systems, different types of buildings (environmentally controlled greenhouses down to simple shelters to keep most of the wind and frost off), large bins for soil, compost, fertilizers; multiple storage sheds, etc. You get the idea: just setting up to have a big garden was a MAJOR operation! Then there was actually doing the gardening. A great deal of landscape planning needed to be done. With 280 acres and several buildings, there were many different landscape projects. I've already mentioned a few of the jobs (the Japanese garden between the "V" of the Visitors' Quarters, for example), so I won't bother going through them again. I'll describe a couple of new ones though. Vanessa likes pretty flowers. Personally that's not my style, but that's irrelevant. With 280 acres, there's ample room for everybody to have anything they wanted, and I wouldn't have dreamed of saying no to Vanessa even if we only had a quarter of an acre. The front of the Main House, and especially down the eastern leg of the "m" (around the surface path down to the Office), was to be "pretty". When she has time, Vanessa will get out there and putter around in the garden herself. She was the HEAD Gardener, so she could do whatever she wanted. If he was smart, the Head Gardener would be a lot more circumspect talking with Vanessa than he was with me. Then there was the biggest landscaping job by far, both in terms of area and work. It was much more to my liking than "pretty flowers". When we'd first drawn lines on a map to indicate how much land we wanted, we'd extended our boundary west to include a large forested area we thought we'd clear for the horses, correctly suspecting we'd have more than two as Donna had long since signaled her desire for more. Soon after getting ownership of our new hilltop property we'd decided to keep the horses on the middle plateau, leaving all the forested area without a purpose. After further discussion we'd decided to make the west-most hundred acres of our property into a 'perfect' native forest with the best flora and fauna we could arrange, using the definition of "flora and fauna" that mean "a natural area of plant/animal-life". The area was mostly covered in trees already, but what we had in mind required a GREAT deal more than just leaving it alone. One thing Corvallis has an abundance of is people who're experts in exactly what we wanted to establish. I printed out some digital pictures I'd taken of the area and a Google Earth top-down picture of it, and drew a border around the area we had in mind: the entire lower plateau and the northern half of the slope up to and including Donna's Plateau. It'd be a rectangle 2,700 feet north-south, 2,200 feet east-west, but with the southeast quarter removed for the horses; making a total of just over hundred acres. The horses' current area would be pushed southeast six hundred feet, but clearing some bush and trees to make more grass for them was easy. Some of the nursery would have to be moved too, but that would be easy (for me I mean, as I'd just have to tell other people to do it. It's great having staff). I typed up a description of our plan then took it to OSU to show to the guy Prof had made an appointment for me to see. In a very short time I was having to fight off the enthusiastic and very useful advice that started flying my way. We wanted an interesting and diverse environment, so the lowest parts of the land (475 feet above sea level) would be planted with flora to look appropriate for that altitude and somewhat lower; the highest parts of the land (an exposed 725 feet ASL) we wanted planted appropriately and as if somewhat higher. In other words, we'd be stretching the vegetation species range. That meant there'd be huge amount of extraction and replacement required, because the land was currently covered in all sorts of vegetation that didn't fit that scheme. The land had two small watercourses in it already, rainfall permitting, but we'd sculpt the land further to get even more benefit out of the rain that fell in the catchment area, and to create a good-sized pond in the middle for wildlife (or as I thought of it, a great place for swimming with naked pretty girls, so I could have a wild life). We'd also create some narrow walking paths. They'd look like game trails because we wanted this area to be very natural. We'd create small caves and other helpful 'homes' for when we reintroduced more fauna. One of the reasons our OSU-based helpers were so enthusiastic was because the entire area would be walled around the exterior, with an internal fence to its east, to keep non-flying predators out of it. We'd have a lot of control over the area, including controlling public access, so we could make and maintain a very good environment. We weren't going to make the area freely available to the public, as it was part of our property after all, but it would be made available to OSU's scientists and enthusiastic nature photographers (very enthusiastic, if they saw naked girls cavorting in the pond). We'd be creating photographic hides as part of our landscaping. For example, the back of the artificial caves would have one-way glass installed and a crawlway in from the other side of the mound for a photographer to get his gear in and out. With facilities like that, den life could be studied. Several of OSU's departments were very interested in being involved, and they promised us a hundred or so students as unpaid labor, which was very nice of them. I knew many residents of Corvallis and surrounding areas would volunteer too, as it's the sort of project that people around here think is important. We'd need plenty of people too, because this was a BIG project, far beyond the capabilities of my twenty-strong gardening staff. We'd pay the considerable costs of course, and could easily pay labor costs too if necessary, but it was good that the community thought we were doing something useful and wanted to contribute. Our having so much money meant we could accelerate the transformation considerably. We could buy mature trees and transport them in rather than planting saplings and waiting a decade. For the hundreds of trees involved, we'd be paying a huge amount of money by doing it the fast way, but we had the money. Similarly, the area currently had very little exposed rock in it and all of that was in one corner, so it looked boring. I liked the idea of quickly (even if expensively) airlifting in a large number of BIG rocks to create a more diverse environment. They'd make the swimming hole prettier too. I'd had several months of small-scale experience managing people for Vanessa's little garden projects around our Peoria Road garden, so I wasn't totally unprepared for this type of project, but it was certainly loading me up with more and more planning work during the last few weeks of the Army's presence. During that time I'd also kept busy keeping an eye, via a sight blob, on the fitting-out work that the Army was doing inside our buildings, just to make sure nothing untoward was being installed (nothing was). Then when the Army left, my REAL work started! There was a lot of repair work required to fix up the land damage caused during construction. That was straightforward, requiring little more than me or the senior gardeners pointing laborers at the problem areas and telling them what to do. Getting the landscaping designs done had been time-consuming, but not nearly as much as getting them carried out. There was a huge amount of work involved in that, although less than I wanted in the case of the job at the top of my landscaping list. I wanted to install a copse of VERY tall trees near the Kids' House to hide my takeoffs and landings if I needed to make any from inside our property in an emergency. I wanted that in place as soon as possible. Unfortunately, "soon" was not "possible", as it was the wrong time of year to be transplanting adult trees as they'd probably die. Hopefully we wouldn't have any emergencies in the meanwhile. The design and construction of JUST the Visitors' Quarters' garden (which did actually turn out to be a Japanese Water Garden this time) was a decent-sized project in its own right. It was something like three or four times more complex than my "Mountain Forest" garden, and I knew how much time I'd spent on that. Fortunately, there were two major differences between setting up this home compared to our Peoria Road one: Last time I'd been worried about running out of money. This time we had money to burn. We knew we were out of our depths so we didn't hesitate to hire expertise. That was often expensive, which didn't matter at all. So I was able to hire a Japanese Water Garden specialist. I'd done plenty of online research, had visited some Japanese gardens, and had thought of many ideas (I can do a LOT of research and thinking), so had a list of many features I wanted and a good idea of how I wanted them. I had pretty good mental images of parts of the garden, and a good general image of all of it, I just didn't want to spend all the time planning all the small details. I found someone who had experience building such gardens and spent several hours telling him what my thoughts were, negotiating over some of them where he had different ideas, and then I let him manage that project while I just oversaw his work. About the only say I had inside the Kids' House was about my two computer systems. They had to be suitable for Ron as he was publicly known, and for the secret Ron. They also had to be as safe as possible from further NSA spying, as well as allowing the public system to be upgraded if my "Angel Vague Idea" ever allowed Mark to return (it's similar to "Angel Plan" but very unformed. It's described later). I'll be having two computer systems: My 32-screen computer in my secret study in the back of the Kids' Panic Room. We called it my "Downstairs Study" in case anyone overheard our referring to the suspicious sounding "Secret Study". My public computer in my non-secret study in the Kids' House. I'll call it the "Upstairs Study" herein to differentiate it from the other one, but in reality we called it "my study" so people wouldn't wonder if we had another one. The upstairs computer system will be relatively ordinary, just a couple of 30" screens running off a single PC, with a printer and whatever other devices seem useful. Obviously it'll be a high-spec system as I'm rich, but it won't be so extreme as to make anyone wonder about me. For my downstairs system, I'd been browsing as Majestic Countdown one night and found some companies that can install up to 64-screen systems running off what seems to be a single PC. There are back-end processors to drive the screens, but they're transparent to the user (i.e., I won't be able to tell they're there from the way the front-end computer works). I'll be using a single PC with a single keyboard and single mouse, which will seem to have 32 x 24" screens plugged into it. Unfortunately, they can only handle up to 24" screens, which will be slightly less pleasant to work with, but not much. Considering the INSANE amount of studying I was going to get done with thirty two screens, my being slowed down a little wasn't going to matter much. The PC will need to have a new "Scrolling Controller Keyboard", much larger than the one Logan programmed for Mark originally. The existing device has only half the number of keys the new system will need. 32 screens with 7 buttons per screen (Page Up, Fractional Up, Scroll Up, the same triplet for Down, and a button for Next Lecture), will need 224 buttons. I couldn't find a company that sold keyboards with more than 180 keys, so Logan will have to solve that problem. [It was easily solved; he got someone in the Electrical Engineering Department to build one: nine keys high (I only needed seven, but the two spare rows were in case I thought of something to use them for), and sixty four keys wide. When a key was pressed, it sent "Escape@" + Row# (0-8) + Column# (00-63). When Logan's software saw that string of text (even if I typed it manually on the usual keyboard), it scrolled the window on the appropriate screen (given by the Column#), up or down as indicated by whatever the Row# meant.] I'd realized early on that thirty two big screens plus the computer equipment to drive them was going to need quite a lot of electrical power, so I'd made sure Prof requested that the Army wire every room with circuits capable of carrying heavy loads, to disguise that I wanted one panic room to have a suspicious amount of power going to it. I didn't want to be asked questions about that, or to have that information stand out on the plans that'd be produced. We disguised it by making sure that both panic rooms were oversupplied with electrical capacity. Everyone in my families was still thinking there'd be eight screens in it, so they were going to get a very large surprise when I showed them that it had thirty two. The implications of that were going to blow their minds! That describes the basic hardware my systems will have, except for the issue of the internet connection. More specifically, how to reduce the risk of the NSA or any other baddies tracking how much study I was doing. I discussed that with Prof, and he came up with the following possible solutions: A secret internet connection. Unfortunately we didn't believe it was possible to keep that secret from our 'benevolent' Government. A secret connection directly to OSU. That was almost doable, with a line-of-sight, narrow-beam, microwave link. Unfortunately it'd be easy to track what we were doing inside of OSU itself. Continuing to run Logan's little program to disguise my usage. Periodic (daily or weekly) transfers of the ENTIRE collection of OSU lecture notes to my computer, so all my browsing would be local and impossible to log. The NSA (or whoever) would see the transfer, but they'd have no way of knowing what happened to it after that. I liked the last option, especially because it meant that the downstairs computer wouldn't need to be connected to the internet at all. Any browsing I needed to do could be done on the upstairs computer, which would naturally be connected to the internet. If the downstairs system wasn't connected, and as it was buried in a secure panic room, it'd be damned near impossible for anyone to find out that it even existed let alone what it was doing. The OSU lectures could be transferred in bulk from OSU to my upstairs computer, where they could be stored on an external hard disk that I could easily float downstairs. The trouble with that solution was that it required OSU's cooperation, and it was difficult to think of a reason why we should be allowed to do that as none of us had any reason to access any of OSU lectures, let alone take frequent copies of all of them. The Dean would agree, but it was a very strange request and it might cause people to talk. If Mark was publicly back, I'd want to hide that I was studying four times faster, so the last bullet point option would be perfect. No one would think it suspiciously strange for Mark to want to transfer the lectures across daily. But while I was still Ron, we decided on the third possible solution, running Logan's program except when I was studying. That meant the secret computer would have to be connected to the internet, which was a pity. If the "Angel Plan" was tried and it worked, I could change to the fourth solution, and my secret computer could be permanently disconnected from the internet. Speaking of college studies, at the current rate I'll finish reading all of the lecture notes for the three degrees I'd started as Mark about late-March - reading a combination of last year's and this year's lectures. I could've finished them a month earlier but I was treating them as my lowest priority. Anything else could bump them, from pre-dawn flights for breakfast on the top of the Cascades, through to security inspections of the construction work. Speaking of hiding things, the Kids' pool area was designed to be completely private. It'll be screened from ground level observation, even if the observers are on Dimple Hill or anywhere on our own property, unless they're virtually in the pool already. The parents know that I could do things that we don't want anyone else seeing, such as me using my special abilities or indulging in sexual antics with my sisters. It will be stressed to our staff that we all take our privacy extremely seriously (it would be too suspicious just to say that only I needed extreme privacy). The top level of our hill, upward from fifty yards below the Kids' House, will be out of bounds to our staff other than by prior permission or in a security emergency, in the latter case the sirens should be wailing already. Our security will have to give us warning before they intrude on us for any reason, and they won't even let visitors through the front gate without permission. Nor will visitors to the Adults' House be allowed to wander around unsupervised unless the kids are warned first. We want to be able to relax in our own home, so we'll make sure it's safe to do so. [Looking a long way ahead, there were a few cases of our young male staff - gardeners usually, as they were less disciplined - becoming curious about all the sexy girls having fun around the Kids' Pool, and wandering 'casually' closer to have a look. I very often had a sight blob on high overwatch with a mind tasked with concentrating on it, so none of the hopeful Peeping Toms managed to catch us misbehaving. Nor did they manage to keep their jobs, because intruding on our privacy was clearly spelled out in their employment contracts as cause for instant dismissal. Those examples did a good job of reducing such attempts.] ^ The vast majority of the residents moved into our new property almost immediately after the Army left, except us. The staff took up residence, while we kept living at Peoria Road. We'd had three office staff working for us in Corvallis for months. They'd been working out of their homes or shoehorned into Vanessa and Prof's study, which had been a pain in the ass for all involved, so they were very eager to move into the new property's Office. All the furnishings, equipment, supplies, etc., had been bought a couple of weeks ahead of the Army's finishing and had been stored in the big storeroom inside the main tunnel. When the Army moved out, some of my garden laborers were borrowed, the truck was loaded up with office furniture and driven along the tunnel to the Office elevator. Elevator loads of furniture, equipment and then supplies were sent up, to be unloaded and installed. The Office was functioning within a couple of hours. The office staff didn't live onsite so they weren't residents per se, but as far as they were concerned every aspect of our new place was fully operational now. They'd even bought a small dinner service for their little staff kitchen. Closely following the Office setup was the one for the Staff Quarters. We'd had security and gardening staff working for us for several weeks before the Army left. They'd many times mentioned that they were eager to move into the free Staff Quarters, so Ava had made getting it ready a priority. All the furniture would be ordinary stuff so it didn't need to get agonized over in the way certain other females were doing over every small thing in their areas of responsibility. Ava went to ordinary stores selling whatever she needed, pointed at a sturdy looking dinnerware (for example), and said, "I want five sets of those," then she moved onto the cutlery, taking an equally short time on that. She had barely broken stride. It didn't take much to make the Staff Quarters habitable: Beds, bed linen, plates, cutlery, pots and pans, an initial supply of toilet paper (they were responsible for their own consumables but it'd be best to start them off safely), and only a few other things. Ava bought them all and had them stored next to the office furniture. The essentials taken care of, Ava bought a lot of the non-essentials: rugs, two large vacuum cleaners, a pool table, a few good PCs for the staff to share for games and email, etc. There were dozens of items, but none of them were hard to think of or to buy. Some other things Ava left to the staff who'd be living in the Quarters to buy, simply giving them a budget for each item and letting them choose their own in town. Things like pictures for their walls, or a couple of hundred CDs for their communal stereo. The stereo itself too, because some guys are fussy about things like that. Everything was put in storage until the construction was finished. While the Office was being set up, off-duty security guards and the rest of my garden laborers loaded up the other truck and started transferring the Staff Quarter's stuff to it. It took them longer than for the Office because there were more truckloads involved, but it was still done in only a few hours. Everyone that wanted to slept in their new quarters that night. Within a couple of days, all the staff that were going to had moved into their Quarters, usually borrowing one of our trucks and a couple of their off-duty workmates to collect all their stuff from wherever they were moving out of. It was quick, easy and completed LONG before even a single dinner plate had been bought for either of our houses. We kept living in our Peoria Road home while Mom and Julia agonized over the, apparently, millions of absolutely essential decisions they had to make. ------- Part 14: My "Angel Plan" ------- Chapter 329: Archangel Michael Appears in Public Mid-March to Thursday, April 5, 2007 Mom and Julia had been far enough advanced in their decorating planning to be able to get the Army to paint the walls the likely final colors and lay the chosen carpets, and that's how the two houses were when the Army left. Getting the decorating designs to that stage in only two months was - I was clearly informed by the little person who did it for my new home - a miracle. It required having the house's major theme already decided, its overall look, the looks of individual rooms, etc. I expressed my amazement that Julia was able to do such an amazingly difficult job in only a little longer than it took for the entire complex of tunnels and houses to be built from scratch. My underlying point was perfectly valid, so the hits I received must've been for being stupid enough to mention it. Julia had made a big deal about having already made what she described as "all the major decisions", so if you're a guy you'll think that what was left could only be minor decisions. You'd be wrong of course (you'd be logical, if that's any consolation). I don't understand how, having made "all the major decisions", there could still be a million major decisions to go, all of which seemed to be even more major than any of the previous decisions, but that's apparently how females think. As far as I can tell, when decorating and furnishing a new home, there are about a million major decisions, all of which are worth more than my life would be worth if I poked fun at them. Given that I still haven't worked out what's the difference between "decorating" and "furnishing" - and I'm too smart to ask - I'd be foolish to criticize the process, wouldn't I? I'd assumed that since we'd had the plans for our new houses for two months before the Army left it to us, and that we'd been able to inspect them during construction as much as we'd wanted, that the women would have most things pre-ordered and the delivery trucks would be arriving at the front gate as the Army was driving out of it. Why couldn't the dinner plates, and so much more, have been purchased a month ago? I'd bought three tractors, several quad-bikes, truckloads of tools and the truck we fetched them in, God knows how much topsoil, and a huge quantity of other miscellaneous stuff. Meanwhile Ava had bought everything necessary to make a 24-bedroom Staff Quarters and a 4-bedroom Senior Staff Quarters fully habitable, and they were happily inhabited. But Mom and Julia had apparently bought nothing. If you detect a great degree of frustration in me, you'd be right. I'd had the original idea for my "Angel Plan" and it was time to start working on it seriously. It was a very high-risk plan with a huge amount of flexibility permitting it to include hundreds of small details, so it needed to be thought about and discussed a great deal over a few weeks. But too many of my advisors were so totally distracted that they'd barely give it any thought at all, presuming I could get their attention to discuss it in the first place. My plan's timing wasn't critical, but there were timing issues. It'd be best to do it during winter or early spring. Maybe I could start it as late as mid-spring if I accelerated the execution of plan, but starting after mid-spring would definitely be too late. After that, I'd have to wait until the next fall, losing me half a year. At the rate the women were getting the furnishing and/or decorating done, they'll still be immersed in those tasks NEXT winter! The seasonal timing was because I had to change my body substantially. My family could see my new body, but no one else could be allowed to. I would naturally be dressed enough in public during winter and spring that no one would think twice about my being fully covered, but come summer, my being overdressed would be noteworthy. Ron would be getting a great deal of attention at the end of the plan, and people noticing that Ron was overdressed would be so bad that it'd force me to delay the execution of my plan until the following year. When the Army had left in late-February, I'd hoped that we might be living in the place within two or three weeks, so by mid-March. Obviously there'd be more furnishing to be done, and possibly even some decorating, but I'd expected the pressure to have dropped enough that we'd be able to have some good quality planning discussions about my idea, in our highly secure, guaranteed-bug-free home. (It was "guaranteed" enough for me. I'd checked the Faraday caged rooms VERY thoroughly. The sheets of metal wrapped around them were unbroken except where they were each supposed to be. There were no wires running out of the rooms in funny places, only via the single floor access point. I'd followed all those wires into the room, and there were definitely no microphones or lenses attached to them. That left the possibility of someone hiding some sort of tape recorder in the room, but the sensors that picked up electrical activity were amazingly sensitive, designed to detect such bugs. I was happy to have life-at-stake discussions in such rooms.) It was now mid-March, and every indication was that moving into our new place wasn't going to be happening for several weeks - there was no indication of any movement at all - which wouldn't leave enough time for my plan to work before summer. So over dinner one evening, when everyone was present, I asked, "I need to know when we're moving into the new place?" As expected, overstressed Julia and Mom took my question the wrong way. With tones of voices that overdid letting me know that they didn't appreciate my question, they told me they were going as quickly as possible, that these things take time to do properly, and other crap. Ava had done most of the purchasing necessary to get the 24-bedroom Staff Quarters ready to be habitable in just two days, so clearly "as quickly as possible" was NOT what Mom and Julia were doing. Painstakingly agonizing over every single decision was far too much fun for them not to drag it out as long as possible. I said, "Let me repeat myself. I NEED to know when we're moving into the new place?" "Why?" asked Julia. "Because there is a VERY important issue in my life that's being held up by not being in that house yet." "What is it?" "I don't want to talk about it here. It's too large, complex and important to start discussing it here. I want to discuss it there." "We can go there after dinner," suggested Prof. "I meant to discuss it there AFTER we've moved in properly. My issue is large and complex so it's going to take several conversations and much thinking about. Our lives are distracted messes at the moment, so people won't be able to give it anywhere near their best attention. I need for us to be in the new place so we can talk freely, and I want the major decorating and furnishing over with so people can relax and take time to think about my issue rather than rushing around like stressed out chickens with their heads cut off all the time. Time is important to my issue, so as I said before, I NEED to know when you think we'll be living in the new place?" Julia and Mom tried to answer me, but the only thing they said that was true was, "It's impossible to say." I got to listen to them repeat, "We're going as quickly as possible" another couple of times, which certainly wasn't true. That could be achieved by getting a moving company to move everything from this place to the new one, but it was pointless telling them that; it'd only make them angry with me. So I did another pointless thing instead, I asked them, "Please go faster." I knew it wouldn't help at all. Women are unable to control themselves when they're in Mom and Julia's situation, especially with hundreds of millions of dollars available. "We'll try," promised Julia, saying the words without her brain being in any way involved in the process, including not listening to herself. There were a number of ways in which I was becoming increasingly unhappy with my life: Damned decorating! It was a severe pain WAY up the rectum. It was all the females could talk about, and it dominated EVERY family discussion. It quite often made me want to rip my hair out. I was getting near the end of the courses for the three degrees. When I got to the end, it'd mean absolutely nothing because I couldn't do anything with the knowledge. There were some interesting landscaping opportunities in our new place, but they were hardly keeping my thirty two minds busy. I'd been proud of the landscaping work I'd done at Peoria Road, but it was all for nothing as we'd be walking away from it eventually (although God knows when). That diminished my satisfaction in repeating the process elsewhere. I had absolutely no idea what my life was going to be like in the future. I couldn't think of a single ambition that Ron could risk getting involved in. He couldn't be intelligent or athletic, which didn't leave anything, let alone anything that appealed to me. Spending the rest of my life as a dissipate playboy didn't appeal either; I wanted to do that AS WELL, not to make it the sole focus of my life. And adding GREATLY to my dissatisfaction, was that I'd had an idea for how to get back to being Mark Anderson. Most of my loved ones had their heads spinning over the insanity of choosing what plates to buy, and other overwhelming decisions, so I saved them the bother of worrying about my future by acting on my plan myself. Somewhere along the way Julia was going to realize that her insanity had hurt me, and I was going to enjoy teaching her that lesson. Some months ago, I'd removed the excess fat from my body and given it some muscles, but hadn't taken either action far. I was still slightly bulkier than average and certainly not 'cut', to avoid reminding anyone of Mark. Now I ordered my body to rapidly become super-impressive in all the ways I wanted. Unfortunately excluding height. It would've been fantastic to make myself seven feet tall, but I had to pass as Ron during all of this so my height couldn't change. I gave Donna her next monthly session that night, two and a half weeks early. She didn't care what the reason was. The next day I called my casual lovers (Alexis, etc.), telling them, "I'm going to take a break from the strange, multi-girl sex that goes on around here so I can get in touch with my true feelings for Carol. I expect everything will return to normal in a few weeks, but I think it's important for me to do this." They thought I sounded wonderful, which increased their desire for me, because that's how girls think. Julia and Carol were quite surprised when some of those girls discussed my recent monogamy (that should really be "trigamy", but wasn't) with them at that terrible-waste-of-valuable-shopping-time called school. They made mental notes to ask me about my new attitude when they got home, but by then there were FAR too many distractions so it was quickly forgotten. School was the bane of Julia's existence these days. Without it she'd be able to fly to New York to check out the store that she heard sold fantastic pots and pans (or whatever), but school finished annoyingly late EVERY weekday. Her parents hadn't helped either, when they'd reacted the wrong way to Julia's suggesting that it'd be best if she skipped a few days of school. [By the way, our Chip Ross Park address was closer to a different high school. The Board of Education sent my parents a politely worded letter saying that Carol and Donna should change schools at the start of the next school year (Julia would have graduated by then). Mom discussed it with the girls, who said they'd rather keep going to their existing school, so Mom wrote back to the Board saying in effect, "No thanks," and that was the last we heard of it. Considerably more important was that our relocation resulted in us being much closer to the nearest pizza delivery place. I considered that to more than compensate for the extra distance my sisters would have to travel to school.] As part of the preparation for carrying out my plan, I'd researched "larynx" to learn more about how mine worked. I spent a fair while playing around with it and other parts of my vocal tract (oral cavity, nasal cavity, etc.), to find good ways of quickly changing my voice away from, and back to, the sound it produced now (as Ron, which was different from Mark). I learned how to make a significant difference in less than an hour. Several days later, in bed one evening, Ava noticed what changes my body had already achieved; Julia and Carol being far too busy talking about the thread weight of cotton in something or other. Julia and Carol sleep on one side of me these days, with Ava on the other. I'd gotten tired of Julia and Carol blathering back and forth across me, so those positions have been fixed for some time. Julia is the worst of the three and she's swept Carol up in the decorating frenzy. God knows why the weight of a thread of cotton is exciting, but apparently it is. Fortunately for me, Ava isn't insane. By now she'd completely finished the Staff Quarters - they'd stopped talking to her about small things that'd been forgotten - and was now working on the Visitors' Quarters. She was enjoying planning out the different decors of the ten units, but it hadn't consumed her the way it had Julia and Carol. There was no hurry for it, and Ava wasn't going to live in those rooms, so she was pacing herself sanely. I was cuddling Ava in bed when she checked, "Is your body changing?" I made light of it, just saying, "Yeah, it's getting somewhat stronger with all the work I'm doing." I didn't want to be more explicit than that, mostly for a lesson I was going to teach Julia and Carol, and partly because I wasn't 100% sure this bedroom was bug free. I almost hoped it was bugged, because the listeners would've been driven insane by all the decorating talk; unless they were female, in which case they were probably insane already, but they'd be driven even more insane with envy. A few evenings later, Ava and I were alone in bed together while Carol and Julia were away doing something highly non-productive, when Ava exclaimed, "You're BIGGER!" "Maybe you're smaller?" "Not THERE I'm not! How can..." I sealed Ava's lips with some NP and shook my head. I didn't really fear bugs that much; I just wanted to avoid the conversation. I got back to business. Ava decided to enjoy herself rather than look a gift horse in the mouth. Wisely, because inside a horse's mouth would be the last place I'd put the subject of our conversation. Over the next couple of weeks that part of me got larger and larger, until Ava whispered a very quiet complaint, "It's TOO big!" I whispered back, "Okay. I'll stop it there." "Can you make it smaller please?" "Not for a few weeks." "{Groan}." I could've rushed my preparations a little, to be ready to carry out my plan on April 1 to make it an April Fools' Day start. I thought about that, and was tempted, but decided it had too many negative connotations. I was playing a mind-game on the world, so I wanted them confused, but I didn't want to be written off as a prank. As it happened, one thing I did on April 1 was finish reading the online lectures for the three degrees. I understood all the lecture material, so I would be able to pass all their exams now. The fourth year Math and Physics courses weren't nearly as difficult as I'd been very fearful of. They'd definitely required extra mental effort, but hadn't been anything like the impenetrable brick walls I'd expected. The advanced Business courses weren't any harder than earlier in that degree; they just required a broader application of business knowledge. They were more detailed rather than more complex. I hadn't bothered with most of the BCC courses, so I'll read them over the next few nights rather than starting another degree or three. I want to see how my Angel Plan works out first. I waited until my muscles were just about perfect before I did the last preparation. There were only three major ways I had to prepare: Research religion and especially angels. That'd been completed during Majestic Countdown trips weeks ago. Transform my body. That was nearly completed. Make myself a costume. I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted. The main requirement was that it had to cover me ENTIRELY because I didn't want any DNA escaping or to let anyone catch a look at, or photo of, any part of Ron. I also wanted it to be very sexy, a little freaky, and look 'good' (meaning "not evil") although I'm fully aware that many Christians think looking sexy IS evil. I snooped some costume rental places in San Francisco to see how similar costumes were made and to get an idea of what they were made of. Then I snooped fabric warehouses until I found the right material. To my shame, I stole a roll of the fabric ("for the greater good," I told myself), using their computer system to record one roll as having been thrown away as faulty. It was a very large warehouse, so hopefully they'd never realize I was wearing their fabric when they saw me on TV. I needed scraps of some other colors and some velcro, but they were easy to find inside the waste bin of a clothing factory. I borrowed everything else I needed from home (scissors, needle, thread, glue, a tape measure and a few other miscellaneous items). I flew it all to a remote location which had a large, flat rock, where I tried to make my costume. You probably won't be surprised to learn that I haven't made many clothes before, so it was a process very accurately called "trial and error," in that there was the exactly same number of "trials" as "errors". In addition to being completely inexperienced, I was also forced to have extremely high standards, so I wasted several hours and a great deal of fabric - which was why I'd stolen a whole roll - before I discovered the right approach. A few more attempts, and I finally had what I wanted. The fabric was silver-colored, very stretchy and thin. I'll be totally naked under it, so it'll show every impressive contour of my body, including the VERY impressive 'contour' between my legs. The costume covered my body ENTIRELY. It had three pieces: Long pants, which started at my waist, looked utterly indecent around my groin (to think I'd considered my bright yellow Speedos embarrassing!), then had legs down to built-in booties, into which I'd glued the bases of a too-wide pair of flip-flops to disguise the shape of my feet in case someone tried to match Ron's footprints to the angel's. I'd try to remember to walk on NP-plates every step to further disguise my footprint and stop the thin fabric from ripping. Long-sleeved shirt, which terminated in mittens rather than gloves. The bottom of the shirt attached to the top of the pants with velcro all the way around, so I could bend without exposing any skin. Headpiece, which pulled completely over my head. It had a very long neck which went under the shirt (the headpiece went on first) to avoid any skin being seen. It had no eye holes, partly to be deliberately freaky, and partly for security reasons so no one could photograph my eyes and maybe use that to identify me later; they couldn't even see my eye or skin color. The fabric wasn't transparent, so I'd be using one or two sight blobs all the time. The headpiece had some pieces of firm rubber glued inside it to disguise the shape of parts of my head. My ears fitted inside two rubber rings which protruded farther than my ears did. Similarly for my lips, so I was effectively speaking into a very short, oval tube. I had a couple of rings around my forehead and an inch further up my skull, to lift the fabric away from skull so bumps on my head couldn't identify me. Under the two small triangles of rubber that my nose slotted between, was a small hole fitted with a piece of mesh to let air in. On the front - where Superman had his "S" - I'd sewn "A-man" in letters made from blue fabric, with the top of the "A" poking up through a rakishly tilted yellow halo. On the back I'd done the same, except spelled "A-men". The logo had three meanings: "Angelman", like "Superman" or "Spiderman". "A man", as in the sentence, "I am a man." "Amen", the end of a Christian prayer (or possibly even the ancient Egyptian god). The ambiguity was a little mind-game, adding to the whole thing being a mind-game. The costume was obviously a costume, so a little joke would help make it seem reasonable. I stood dressed in my outfit, using a sight blob to look at myself from all directions. The eyeless head looked weird, and the headpiece's rubber inserts resulted in very flat shapes where my ears and lips were, which looked strange, anonymous and perfect. My head looked artificial and non-human, like a cyborg's would, but the rest of my body looked excessively human, so it was a confusing image. I thought I looked pretty damned good, especially when I moved so the play of my muscles could be clearly seen. And my grossly enlarged cock stood out so prominently I wondered whether I should delay for a few days to give me time to shrink it. #23: #2: #25: I tidied up my sewing mess, burning the scraps, wrapped the remaining roll of material in plastic and buried it. I spent the rest of the night refining and practicing my two special visual effects: wings and a halo. With several hundred light blobs available, and with the much-increased control I had over their size and shape, I could produce some VERY impressive effects. The halo was easily done, made out of sixteen semicircular 'bars' of light joined to make a complete circle so I didn't need to rotate it. It looked like a continuous neon tube floating over my head, which was a wonderfully halo-looking image. With thirty two minds controlling aspects of the wings, they and their complex movements looked fantastic; far better than I'd done in the CIA lab's computer room. My wings emerge from my shoulder blades. Literally "emerge from", as light could be seen radiating through the suit. They have a leading edge of bright, solid light bars joining together in an aesthetic, non-aggressive curve, the bars thinning slightly toward the wings' ends. Projecting backward from the leading edge of each wing are half a dozen ribs. They start thinner and dimmer than the leading edge, and get progressively thinner and dimmer so they eventually disappear entirely about four feet behind the leading edge. In flight, small, bright light blobs will emerge from the leading edge and from the ribs, to shoot down the inter-rib gaps, getting progressively smaller so they disappear about a foot behind where the ribs disappear. Both the halo and the wings used yellow light blobs and looked awesome; literally, I hoped. By the time I was ready to launch my plan, Julia and Carol STILL hadn't noticed that my body had changed. I must confess (not to them though) that I'd been deliberately hiding it from them and had asked Ava to keep quiet about it too, to maximize my wives' guilt when they did finally notice. You'd think that our sleeping naked in the same bed every night would make keeping my body's changes hidden for three weeks difficult, but you'd be badly underestimating the attention-getting power of unlimited-budget, new-home decorating. Or furnishing, I wasn't sure which was the main culprit. In the mornings, Julia's mouth would open even before her eyes, so she could babble to Carol about something or other. In the nights, Julia's mouth would still be going after the lights were turned out, and - I was pretty sure - well after her brain had gone to sleep. I'd been sleeping with my back to my wives, leaving them to talk with each other while I talked to Ava. I could easily get out of the bed on Ava's side while Julia and Carol were engrossed, slipping on a robe I kept handy. Or the reverse sequence to get into bed. I timed my showers and dressing for when Julia and Carol were busy or elsewhere; and I tried to be in bed before my wives, or I waited for the room to be very dark before I entered. They know I can see perfectly well in the dark so no one bothers to turn on a light for me. The main reasons why it'd been so easy for me to hide my body from Julia and Carol were my proximity sense and sight blobs. I knew where the girls were and what they were intending to do. That made it impossible for them to catch me by surprise. Lastly and most appallingly, in bed Julia or Carol could've rolled over toward me and started getting sexual, but they were never in the mood. That's right, I hadn't had sex with them for three weeks! Thank goodness for Ava. I could joke that, "Decorating and furnishing have a GREAT deal to answer for," but the truth is that it is Julia that has a great deal to answer for. I was looking forward to her getting her comeuppance. ^ All my preparations complete, I told my families and the gardeners that I'd be out of town tomorrow. That was routine enough not to excite much curiosity, as Ron sometimes went on trips to research some aspect of landscaping, although that was sometimes a cover for Majestic Countdown spending a day in a city to watch people arrive at work to learn their security procedures and passwords. I also told Ava that there might be a weird thing on the news later today which might make the family want to talk about me, but she should keep them quiet because bugs were a danger. She should not mention anything about her knowing that my body had changed, and ESPECIALLY not that I had a big cock now. She couldn't understand what my cock had to do with the news, but she promised to be careful. Wednesday night, April 4, I took a bike and rode east, going several miles before hiding it and flying toward Los Angeles with all my prepared gear. I was wearing my A-man suit but with dark clothes on top of it. I was also carrying several airtight plastic bags, each containing changes of clothes and cash; plus a roll of sticky tape and a few other items. Halfway to LA, I descended to stash my wallet, watch and one of the changes of clothes. I missed not having my multi-function watch, but there were enough city lights in the distance and the coastline was obvious enough that I could easily navigate myself. I flew around LA hiding my bags of changes of clothes and cash in places where they might be useful if I needed to escape in a hurry, particularly from helicopters and planes trying to follow me. In case I was being pressured, I placed them in several places around the city where I wouldn't expect people to find them for many months, if ever, such as: Inside a hidden crack in the concrete inside a very large, multi-level parking building. I could fly in, get dressed, and walk out. Securely taped under a long stretch of elevated freeway. I could fly under the freeway, along its length to pick up the clothes, get dressed, then descend somewhere safe, then stroll out. Hidden inside a tree in a remote corner of a park. I'm not sure why I'd need a set here, but there was no reason why not. On the seabed not far offshore from the marina at Marina Del Rey (that sounds clumsy, but Marina Del Rey is the name of the town. It's wholly within the city of Los Angeles, but for some reason is a legally distinct community. Don't ask me why). The marina was recessed into the land and surrounded by houses and various businesses. It'd be easy to escape helicopter pursuit by diving underwater to my clothes, getting changed into them, swimming underwater into the Marina, ascending somewhere unobserved by anyone, then walking away. (If that doesn't seem easy, it will when you've read a little more.) Their placements meant I had changes of clothes in several compass directions around where I'd be appearing in LA, so there'd be something handy no matter what direction I end up fleeing in. All the emergency escape stashes placed, I flew back to where the Santa Monica Mountains meet the coast northwest of LA, before Malibu. I found an exact location not far offshore of an unpopulated area, which I could easily locate again because of the way the onshore geography lined up to triangulate to this spot, especially a large road sign that I was directly offshore from, so all I could see was the thin sliver of its edge. I created an airtight box around myself and pushed it to the sea bottom. It wanted to float, but several tons of NP force easily won that argument. I sent a sight blob straight up to check I was still lined up on my triangulation points. The current had pushed me during the descent, so I let my box rise slightly and pushed it until I was repositioned perfectly. Then I pressed down harder on the top of my box again, so it was firmly held against the bottom. I stripped down to my A-man suit, put my dark clothes and everything else I had left into an empty bag, squeezed the air out of it then sealed it. I dropped it on the floor of my box, then created most of a second floor six inches above the lower one, stepping onto it, then finished it off. There were now two airtight containers in my NP-construction, the slightly smaller big box I was standing in, and the six-inch tall box underneath it. I can't create NP-points in water, so I created a few more points inside the lower box then canceled the panels on one side of the lower floor, letting it flood with water. I used two fingertips to slide the bag of clothes out from under my box, holding it from floating away while I sight blob searched around for a rock, using other fingertips to retrieve it and place it on top of the bag to pin it to the seabed. I let my box rise to the surface in a controlled fashion, then raised myself just above the water level, canceled the box, then flew out to sea far enough so the water was about sixty feet deep; a sight blob sent to the bottom told me the depth easily because I know how far my ki-effects are away from me. I hovered, creating a narrow tube around myself. I made the tube about three times longer than me so it would hold quite a lot of air, then I sealed the top with a very pointy cap. I created several NP-points inside the tube and pushed down on the floor to sink myself fifty feet. I knew from my scuba diving experience that every ten meters of depth adds another atmosphere of pressure. Fifty feet would have just less than two atmospheres of additional pressure (three if I counted the pressure exerted by the air above the water, but the air in my 'submarine' canceled that out). If I created the maximum number of NP-plates, they'd each have fourteen pounds of maximum force (close enough to one atmosphere), so two atmospheres of water pushing inward would cause my submarine's walls to rupture. I'd thought of this problem in advance, and had thought of three solutions to it: Let the submarine shrink to a third of its original size, so the air inside would be at three atmospheres, resisting the water pressure. This was my least favorite solution because I didn't want to risk getting the bends on the way back up. Create the submarine with three layers of plates. Create the submarine with no more than 10 NP-plates per mind, rather than the maximum of thirty two. That way each plate would be three times as strong, so long as those minds didn't create anything else. The last option is what I'd chosen to do. Each plate was about 12" x 12", so with each mind making ten of them, it could make a one-foot high ring of plates around a three-foot diameter, silo-shaped submarine. Making it three times longer than I was meant eighteen minds for the cylinder, plus another couple of minds for a strong, pointy cap and the base. Unfortunately, I hadn't appreciated how many minds it took to push the cylinder down. It was too buoyant for the available force I had. I rose to the surface, adjusted the construction of my submarine so it was only twice as long as me. Each mind made fifteen panels, which constructed one and a half of the twelve levels required, so eight minds were required for the silo, plus a couple of minds for the cap and base. That'd allow me enough to make it sink and provide propulsion. I sank down to a depth of thirty feet, then used more NP-points pushing against one small area of the inside wall at the top of the tube to tilt it over so I was lying flat. NP-points pushing down on the front and back of the tube kept it level and at the right depth. I can tell my depth easily, simply by having a sight blob on the surface. I'd use it to steer with too, so it was a very useful 'periscope'. That accomplished, without a drop of water touching me, it was time for me to practice two important underwater skills. Underwater is my likely exit strategy after I've finished my angel appearance. I probably wasn't going to hang around LA being an angel until nighttime, and to get out during daylight would probably require getting the curious off my tail (my metaphorical tail, not the twelve-inch monster in my pants.) The first underwater skill I wanted to make sure I knew how to do well was snorkeling. I probably don't need to breathe, but I wasn't totally sure about that and I could be underwater for several hours. The last thing I wanted to do was pass out when I was thirty feet deep and under a crowd of planes and helicopters searching for me. I created a fifty-foot long thin tube in the air above me, sealed to make it airtight. I lowered it into the water, pushing it down until it contacted the side of my submarine. It was a little tricky to make a hole in an existing plate (I might've gotten wet!) but it was easy to create two half panels that were shaped to wrap around the base of the tube. I placed that combined plate directly under the plate the snorkel was contacting, making sure it sealed with its neighboring panels. Then I created a third plate under the one with the hole, blocking the hole. I canceled the outer plate. I pushed the snorkel down the fraction of an inch so it was bedded into the hole, then I canceled the third plate. I now had a tube open all the way to the surface. I checked my idea that I could force air down it easily. I created a plunger at the top and pushed it all the way down the tube until it was in my submarine. It 'bulldozed' fresh air down. I waited a second for the slight overpressure to equalize, then repeated the process. I was sure it worked fine, and that I could keep it up for as long as I needed; days if necessary. My NP-snorkel was invisible, not detectable by radar, and someone would have to be virtually on top of it to see the hole it was creating in the surface water. I'd have a sight blob up there keeping an eye on things so I'd know when it wasn't safe to snorkel. If I noticed that there was so much current that the snorkel was leaving a wake, I'd either let myself drift with the current, or do without a snorkel for a while. As I'd been pretty sure it would be, snorkeling was now officially a success, so it was time for my next and more useful underwater skill: high speed moving and maneuvering. When I'd placed my clothes cache outside the marina, it'd been a simple down-then-up operation, but this would be a different kettle of fish. I sealed the hole in my submarine's wall then canceled the snorkel. I won't bother describing it in detail as it was very similar to learning how to fly my Magic Sled, including that most of the same solutions worked, like putting small deflectors on the top of my submarine - at its front and back - so that when it was moving fast enough they acted to keep the submarine pressed down. At thirty feet down, I could get up to what I estimated to be 20 mph, which was fast enough for my needs. I did try rising to a depth of only ten feet and creating more NP-pushers with the minds that had been used to construct the walls at the previous depth. That got me up to about 25 mph but created a bow wave on the surface, so it wasn't practical. Maneuvering was a little ungainly, but it wasn't worth worrying about. I had one sight blob on the surface above me, and a max-sized sight blob about two seconds directly ahead of me (seventy feet ahead, at my top speed), which gave me warning of anything ahead of me. Two seconds was ample time. If I stopped pushing, the water was so dense that my submarine stopped on a dime. The first time I did that, my body slid forward and I hit my head. Thereafter I used NP to brace myself whenever I stopped pushing the submarine. I should've brought a book because I had time to kill. I did a little underwater sightseeing, but that was fairly boring so I settled on the bottom not far from the Santa Monica Pier and snooped around that area. Not much was happening there either, so I got bored with that. I remembered that when I'd been using Google Earth to check the area out, there'd been several notes about stars' homes along Pacific Coast Highway, either on the beach or very close to it. So I spent the rest of my waiting time moving north in about twenty feet of water, looking at very expensive homes. I saw many that I liked, and I enjoyed seeing how they were furnished (I honestly did enjoy that, so I must've been spending too long around Julia). Between admiring furniture and sewing my own clothes, I was starting to worry about myself, so to balance those feminine activities, I perved at any good looking girl I discovered. There were a LOT of them! Guys who live in those places do very well for themselves. There were some good looking female stars too. For a chick that's getting on in years, that Jennifer Aniston is still looking pretty good. From time to time I thought the air might be getting stale, so I'd pause to create a snorkel and replenish my air [[it would have been psychological as my body wasn't using up oxygen or exhaling carbon dioxide]]. During one such replenishment I thought of a better way to do it. Rather than using a plunger to bring air down to me, I made a new floor immediately above the floor I was standing on (I had to do a little jump to do that), then I used the new floor as a giant piston that went upward, pushing my stale air out of snorkel. By crouching I could get the floor 80% of the way to the ceiling, getting rid of 80% of the air in the submarine. Some of it was still in the snorkel, but a mini-piston pushed that out the top. Having syringed most of the air out, I lowered the false floor again to suck more air in. It changed approximately 80% of the air in only a few seconds, which was far better than the method I'd been using previously. In the absence of my testing that I had no long-term need to breathe - a test I was too cautious to perform - I was very happy with the new snorkeling method. I was up at Malibu when day broke. Lots of people were waking up, sometimes to have sex and sometimes just to have showers. I enjoyed myself, and deliberately checked out Jennifer Aniston again - "Bad angel!" I 'motored' back (I can't resist the silliness of using that word), heading for Venice Beach Pier, arriving under it at 9:45am according to the watches on a couple of the fishermen. It's a long, thin pier and there weren't many people on it. I moved inshore to be at about its midpoint, under an unoccupied section. I waited until the nearest people were looking the other way then I rose to the surface and flew up onto the pier in a way that made it look like I'd quickly clambered up in case anyone had caught a glimpse of my arrival. People who'd been on the pier for a while were surprised to see a silver-clad weirdo where there'd been no one a second ago. Make that "a silver clad, exhibitionist weirdo," because his cock was long enough to be used as a fishing pole. I was getting several funny looks. It would've been funny if I hadn't. I didn't hesitate, just strolled down the pier toward the beach, remembering to have an NP-plate attached under each foot like a small, thin pair of snowshoes. Before I reached the first couple of fishermen, one of them looked at me funnily, asking, "Where'd you come from?" I'd already practiced my speaking style back at home, using a Dictaphone so I could listen to the result (I'd burned the tape afterward). My voice box had been changed and I adopted a rhythm and an accent different than how I spoke at home. I answered, "That's a LONG, LONG story. I'd answer it, but you're about to get VERY distracted. I suggest you hold your rod harder; it's about to be your lucky day." "What d'ya mean?" "Hang on!" I'd known there'd be fishermen on the pier. There'd been some on this and Santa Monica Pier ever since I'd arrived in LA. On my underwater return run from Malibu, I'd looked for big fish, keeping the biggest one I found in a leaky NP-box. I was holding it under the pier now, ready for use. While I'd been talking to him, I'd slid a ring of NP-points down the fisherman's line to find his hook, which I now stuck firmly into the large, pissed off fish's mouth, not improving its mood any. I used NP to hold the guy's rod in place in its holder when I canceled the box the fish was in, letting it free. The rod bent over alarmingly, the reel screaming as the line ran out. The fisherman GRABBED his rod. I let my NP hold on it go and resumed my walk to the beach, telling him, "Good luck landing it." I meant it too; it was a big fish so he'll get a thrill out of landing it, if he manages to. Happy with my first trick of the day, I went looking for number two, leaving the two excited fishermen to their battle. I spotted a perfect number two after only a few more steps. A guy and his dog were near the base of the pier. He had it on a long rope, and was throwing a Frisbee for the young, enthusiastic Labrador to fetch. I kept walking, ignoring the funny looks my weird face or obscene pants received. I got a rude comment from one guy, which I ignored as well. I wondered what he'd think of his comment at the end of the day. I walked off the pier and turned south toward my next objective, which was only a few dozen yards away. When the guy next threw the Frisbee, I grabbed it between three pairs of NP-fingertips spread around its rim, rotating them rapidly to make it look like the Frisbee was still spinning naturally. That was actually quite simple because I had one of my sight blobs a few feet above the Frisbee looking straight down, so the mind in control of the fingertips could see exactly what he was doing. The fingertips on the underside would cancel in thirty two seconds, but it'd be inside my proximity range by then, which would prevent that happening. The Frisbee headed toward me, the Lab chasing it. The Frisbee arrived over my head, settling into a spinning position six inches above me. The Lab reached the end of its rope and was pulling against it to get to its toy. A few more steps took me to within proximity range of the Lab. I made a "down" motion with my hand and the excitable, energetic Lab sat peacefully, thanks to EKP and NP. The guy had shouted a warning when the Frisbee started heading toward me, alerting me to catch it. He'd been a little surprised when it turned toward me, but such things happen with Frisbees. He was a little worried when I didn't put my hand up to catch it, perhaps fearing that I was blind. At the last second he started a shout, but it cut off when the Frisbee settled into a halo position over my head. It only took a couple more seconds for me to reach the placidly sitting Lab. I bent down to pat his head, with the Frisbee tilting to stay in position above the top of my angled head. The dog got to his feet, and got up on his hind legs to put his front legs on me (well protected in NP. It would be a nuisance if his claws ripped my suit). The owner came running up, demanding, "How do you make the Frisbee hover like that?" I answered, "Things often do that with me. Don't worry about it." I bent enough that the Labrador could take possession of the vertical, but still rotating in place, Frisbee. As soon as it was in his mouth, I canceled the NP-fingertips holding it, and I made the dog wander a few feet away with it. The guy asked, "What's your suit meant to be? What's 'A-man'?" "It's mostly a joke I'm doing to amuse myself to keep life interesting. You have a nice dog." "Yeah, he's great. How did you get the Frisbee to do that?" "Magic." "Yeah, right!" "That's the best answer I have. Have a good one. Bye, dog." I waved at the dog, which stood up on its hind legs and waved one of its paws back at me, surprising its owner. The dog was surprised too, but it quickly forgot about it when I canceled the NP-points that were holding it up. I headed north. I couldn't think of anything small-scale to do with the Lifeguard Command Center, but I did think of a large-scale tactic that I'd save for later. I bypassed it for now, continuing toward the Muscle Beach area. I was getting lots of strange looks from everyone I encountered, but this is LA after all. Paddle Tennis didn't offer any opportunities that interested me, but I could see people using the weightlifting equipment and playing basketball just beyond them, both of which would be easy for me to use to good effect. I entered the weightlifting area, where my costume drew a lot of attention and jokes. Among the comments was one I could use, one guy's saying a fairly stupid, "Come here often do you?" I replied, "Not for a VERY long time. Last time I was down this way, no one was lifting little pieces of metal." "Oh yeah? How much can you bench Fancy Pants?" The correct answer was about 7.5 tons, but I said, "More than you, I'm sure." There were several scoffing comments, like, "Damned out-of-work actors. Ignore him." One particularly big, fat guy didn't ignore me, asking sneeringly, "Think you can lift more than me, runt?" I weighed about half of what he did, so normally there'd be no way. I said, "Sure..." Laughter cut off the rest of what I intended to say. Several of the crowd that bothered to notice me, wandered back to whatever they'd been doing before, because I was clearly an idiot. The big guy acted on his challenge, saving me the bother of encouraging him further. He loaded up a bar with weights, tightening his weightlifting belt, stood beside the bar, bent down to grasp it, summoned his will, then FORCED his body to stand upright. His arms stayed vertically downward, merely used to hold the bar as his legs and back forced his body up (that exercise is called a "Deadlift"). When he was standing straight upright, he paused for a couple of seconds, then slowly lowered the bar to the ground. He released it then glared at me aggressively. I told him, "I said I'd lift more than you, so shove a couple more pieces of metal on the ends and I'll show you how we do it where I come from." He must've been feeling confident, because he only put small additional weights on. When he stood back, I casually, asked, "That's all you want me to do? Lift that little weight the same way you did? Just stand up holding it then put it down again? No raising it over my head or anything? Doesn't seem much of an achievement, but if that's all you want." While I'd been stalling them with my talk, I'd used a steadily increasing amount of NP to push up on both ends of the bar until I felt it begin to respond, then I'd eased back a little. When I'd finished my little speech, I casually walked up to the bar, bent down and picked it up as if it weighed ten pounds, which is about what it weighed to me. I'd done it so quickly and casually that everyone had been caught by surprise, but seeing me standing there holding it was pretty convincing. After the initial, "What the FUCKs" and the like, I offered, "Shall I lift it over my head while I'm here?" I did so. "NO FUCKIN' WAY!" opined several spectators. "What's he lifting?" The big guy answered, "730 fucking pounds!" "Who the hell are you? Take your mask off!" #14: I'd done the lift with the crowd behind me, so now I rotated 180 degrees to face them, swinging the weights around with me. These guys knew to respect loaded bars, so 730 pounds of weights swinging in the air got them to scuttle backward VERY quickly. No one wanted that falling on them! I lowered the bar to my waist, then to the ground, standing back up behind it. The crowd approached toward me again, demanding to know who I was, for me to take off my mask, and a bunch of other questions. None of them were currently planning to pull my mask off but I felt sure some of them would soon, so I backed toward the fence behind me while tying to calm them down with hand motions. There's a blue fence around the lifting area, separating it from the street's sidewalk. It's only four or five feet high, so more of a psychological barrier than a real one, but it should do the job. I retreated in the face of the advancing crowd until the fence was only a few feet behind me, then I squatted briefly and seemed to jump backward, NP doing all the work. I sailed up and over the fence, landing on the sidewalk and taking all the muscle guys by surprise. I heard one of them yell, "He must have a machine inside his suit." Several of them thought that was plausible. I didn't know where they thought the machine was hidden inside this body-molding suit, but I didn't stay to argue the point. I ignored their comments and started walking north. My overwatch blob showed me that they were gathering at the fence, and that none of them were pursuing me. They were starting to talk with each other, some taking turns to personally test the weight of the bar I'd picked up, and other non-mask-ripping-off activities. The sidewalk immediately took me behind a small building and out of sight of the weightlifters. A few yards farther on were some guys playing basketball. I approached the side of the court, and was only watching for a minute before I had an opportunity to make the ball apparently bounce awkwardly off the hoop and head toward me. I picked it up, and from the side of mid-court, tossed the ball 55 feet in a long arc straight back into the hoop. My shot fell straight through the middle of the hoop, getting nothing but net and applause. [In case you're wondering, when I'm doing things like this I don't actually throw the ball. Throwing requires translating the mental desire into a physical arm movement, and there are many imprecisions involved in that process, even with a body was well coordinated as mine. It's much better to leave the whole process as a mental one by using NP the whole way. My hand looks like its throwing the ball, but it's really just going along for the ride for the first couple of feet.] "Great shot A-man! What's the costume for?" "Everything else was in the laundry." "You got time to play before you go wherever you're going in that?" "Sure. One thing I have in my life, is a lot of time. So, the A-men against the non-A-men?" "Aren't you the cocky one." "How nice of you to notice." "You a porn star on the way to a shoot?" "Some of the previous works I've appeared in have been accused of being morally corrupt, but I wouldn't call them pornography. Shall we play?" When my side's opponents were attacking, there was no way they could get past me. Whenever they tried, I anticipated their every move and took the ball off them. And once I had the ball, no matter where I was on the court or which way I was facing, I shot and scored, not even bothering to turn to face the hoop. By the time I'd scored half a dozen times, both teams had lost interest in the game and wanted to know who on Earth I was. "Call me Michael. Or Mike, if you prefer. Thanks for the game. You may find this hard to believe, but I've never played it before. I can see it'd be a fun game. Have a good one, bye." I walked off the court, ignoring their questions. I walked to the sidewalk, then started roller-skating north. I didn't have rollers or skates, but that was a mere technicality. I stood upright without moving my legs at all, with NP lifting me an inch off the ground. I looked like I was standing on an escalator as I slid along at a good skating speed an inch above the ground, going around pedestrians, passing slower skaters, being passed by faster ones, avoiding people coming the other way, etc. My standing still while moving looked weird, so I got several funny looks, even more than my costume usually generated. A skater caught up to me from behind, falling into formation to ask, "I can't see skates or an engine, so how can you be moving so easily?" "The power of living a good life." "No. Like, how do you do it?" "Seriously, it IS the power of living a good life. You'd be surprised how much difference that can make." I quickly accelerated away from him. He tried to speed up to catch me, but I used NP to make a group of people just in front of him move unexpectedly and he lost all his speed when he had to veer away to avoid crashing into them. By the time he'd recovered, I was out of sight. I'd turned left down a lane that connected to the one of the meandering paved walkways on the beach, and I was motoring toward the Santa Monica Pier. When I got to the Pier, I resumed normal walking. There were quite a few tourists around, which suited me nicely as many of them had cameras. I wandered around: Doing many good deeds: passing them things, distracting squabbling children, volunteering to take photographs for them, picking up things they'd 'accidentally' dropped (usually because of my EKP), picking up litter and throwing it in the next trash can I passed, etc. Just small things, but a good way of establishing my reputation. Getting my photo taken quite often, usually posing with tourists who assumed I was either some sort of Pier employee or promoting a new movie. Answering questions about who or what I was. I answered with variations of, "I'm 'A-man'. See my logo. That might make more sense to you later; I'm still thinking about how public to make my explanation." Receiving scorn from many people. They predictably strongly disapproved of my costume's sexual explicitness, many of them covering their children's eyes and hurrying them away before their precious little psyches were scarred for life. I was unfailingly polite to anyone who talked to me. Most of them merely walked off in a huff, but whenever one of them expressed an opinion, I'd say something like, "I'm sorry that you're so uncomfortable with the human body." Usually they'd accuse me of being deliberately shocking, to which I'd say, "Every part of this body is covered by the same fabric in the same way, neither emphasizing nor de-emphasizing any part. Your negativity is a comment about yourself rather than my outfit." I didn't convince any of them, but many people heard the conversations and my reasonable tone. That'd have an impact later. I did get some hard looks from some cops, but I was fully clothed so not legally indecent. They kept a pretty good eye on me as I wandered around though, making sure I didn't misbehave worse. After nearly an hour of doing small good deeds I decided I'd established my presence enough and it was time to scale the action up. I was near the seaward end of the pier, on the downwind side, when a young girl's hat blew off and over the side. "Oh no!" she complained, as it left her head and her snatch missed. (A fan of a couple of NP-plates waved just behind her head had given the illusion of wind, I'd pulled her hat off with NP-fingertips, and her snatch had missed thanks to EKP redirecting her hands.) By no coincidence at all, I was standing only a few feet away. I said, "I'll get your hat for you, Miss." Which was only fair, considering it was me that'd thrown it over the side. I leaped athletically over the waist-high railing, dropping to the ocean surface twenty feet below, landing on my feet as if the water was a solid substance (I had some NP-plates just under the surface). My solid landing took everyone by surprise, and their surprise grew into astonishment when I walked on the surface of the water toward the floating hat. I could've fetched the hat with NP easily, but where was the fun and self-promotion in that? This would make for MUCH better TV. I arrived at the hat. It hadn't gone far, mostly because I'd been using NP to make sure it didn't sink or drift too fast. I picked it up, then turned and walked back to the pier shaking the water off it as I went. It'd taken me about thirty seconds, but pandemonium was already starting to break out on the pier. [["Pandaemonium" comes from Milton's 1667 "Paradise Lost"; being his name for the capital of Hell, so not really an appropriate description, but that's the word I'd thought at the time.]] People were yelling, pointing, gathering, and best of all, photographing. There were a lot of tourists on the pier, and many of them had cameras. Where I'd jumped from was now full of people, so I jumped up the impossible distance to land and crouch on top of the railing near to the girl. I passed the hat to her mother as the girl was too busy hanging on to her father against the press of the crowd. People were reaching for me, so I jumped upward and backward, unfolded my wings then began flapping them as I to rose slowly for the photographers. It was daytime so I slowly turned up the brightness on the light blobs, and I thought I looked pretty cool. I angled somewhat inland - directly over and following the pier - partly to draw off the crowd that threatened to squash the family whose hat I'd recovered. At 100 feet ASL (Above Sea Level), I tilted into a thirty degree angle above horizontal, extended my wings even wider to give myself a wingspan of sixty feet, and slowly flapped my way inland. Judging by the reaction of crowd below, they thought I was VERY impressive. Whatever the state is after "pandemonium" was happening now. ------- Chapter 330: Archangel Michael with the Police, FBI and Lifeguards Thursday, April 5, 2007 (Continued) I was flying toward downtown LA's tallest skyscraper, the 1,017-foot Library Tower, intending to start a press conference on its helicopter pad. It was about fifteen miles from the pier to the CBD (Central Business District; a.k.a. downtown), and I was flying it at about eight hundred feet and 30 mph, to let people see me reasonably clearly and to give time for word to get out so I wouldn't have to hang around the CBD waiting for the news organizations to get their people aloft. It took a surprisingly short time for them to react, as I saw the first two helicopters coming my way only ten minutes after I'd taken flight. They were rapidly approaching from the same direction, and were both media choppers, something I checked by sending a sight blob a few hundred feet to my side to see their logos. I maintained my velocity as they approached. They buzzed around me at a distance of not much over a hundred feet, the cameraman filming me from various angles. I waved, and out of habit, pointlessly smiled. One of the pilots decided it was safe to edge closer, moving into formation fifty feet to my left, the other staying about hundred feet above and to my right. Both choppers had two people in them, a pilot and cameraman. I couldn't tell how excited they were, as they were both belted firmly into their seats, the cameraman's face was obscured by his camera and the pilot was busy concentrating on his job - concentration being a very good idea when there was another helicopter in the immediate vicinity plus whatever on Earth I was. A couple of minutes later another media chopper arrived, the first two staying carefully in their relative positions while the third buzzed around me. Shortly after that a police helicopter arrived, also giving me a look-over from all directions. I was watching to make sure none of the choppers collided, ready to intervene if I needed to, but they were all very careful. The police chopper settled into formation above and behind me, at a greater distance than the others. The four choppers and I flew in formation toward the Library Tower for another five minutes, when two more choppers arrived. One was another news chopper, four people onboard rather than the usual two. The other was a large FBI chopper containing several guys, the two in the open hatchway pointing rifles at me, which was decidedly unwelcoming and unacceptable of them. I sent a sight blob in for a closer look. Their riflemen's fingers were outside the trigger guards, but only just. I was internally debating what to do about this. There were many possible responses, so it was a lively debate. Then the FBI chopper's loudspeaker yelled, "THIS IS THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. YOU ARE ORDERED TO FOLLOW US." It turned and headed in a different direction. #6: #13: #11: I hadn't planned this day in detail because there were too many unknowns. I had quite a few ideas for little events, and several more intentions which needed the right opportunities to present themselves, but I knew I'd mostly have to wing it. One thing I did know for sure was that I wasn't going to let the Government order me around. I had to establish that fact right from the beginning, so I quickly decelerated to a stop, standing on my feet with my arms crossed and my wings folding against my back before they slowly faded into nothingness over a couple of seconds. I watched carefully for a potential accident as the other helicopters overshot me and then individually reacted. They were well behaved though, separating from each other before maneuvering to return to me. The FBI chopper returned too. I kept one sight blob focused on it, keeping an eye on the riflemen who were tracking me with their guns. They were well inside my maximum range, so if they put their fingers inside their trigger guards, something very unexpected would happen to them. It yelled at me, "YOU ARE ORDERED TO FOLLOW US." I ignored the order as it tried to lead me off again. Instead I waved my hand at my feet, and a dozen bright green light blobs appeared just beneath me, in the shape of rectangular strips about 4" wide and 36" long. I made a motion of moving my two hands apart, and the light blobs spread out horizontally until I was standing in the middle of a reasonably well defined 9-foot by 9-foot square. I turned to face the police helicopter, roughly to my west. I made another small motion with my hand to apparently cause two more collections of light-strips to appear on the western side of the square. One pile was two feet north of the center of the side of my existing square, the other pile two feet south of the center of the square's side. All but one light in each pile moved horizontally and perpendicularly away from the square's edge, leaving another light-strip behind after another three feet, create a 'path' (I hoped they realized) extending about thirty feet from the edge of the square I was apparently standing on. I made another vague hand motion and another collection of green lights-strips appeared at the end of the path. Some of them moved to define the outside of a large square, twice the size of the one I was standing on; the others to form a large "H" in the center of the square. I was using green light-strips to look nothing like a very important yellow sphere I'd be using in the future, if my Angel Plan progressed to its ultimate conclusion, although that was a LONG way ahead yet and very doubtful about whether it'd happen. The total 'floor area' defined by the three regions would've used up about 75% of my maximum number of NP-points if I'd made a floor out of NP-plates. Each mind can lift just over 200 kg now, which works out to be fourteen pounds per fingertip. There wouldn't be nearly enough fingertips in contact to hold up the weight of a helicopter, so I had to cheat. Very little of the floor area had NP-plates; only what I was standing on now. I'd create floor sections on demand, when a helicopter landed or when people were walking around. The police helicopter was about a hundred feet higher than me and an equal distance to my west. I pointed at the pilot with my right hand while I extended my left hand palm down at waist level. My right hand then opened up and 'came down for a landing' on the back of my stationary left hand. I paused for half a second, then pointed at the pilot again, then at the "H" of the landing pad, followed by an open handed offering of the landing place to him. I gave a small bow to indicate it was a polite request. I folded my arms and sat on an invisible seat I'd made for myself, leaning back with a casual body language while I waited for him. It took them about three minutes to decide, or get ordered, to 'land' (we were eight hundred feet above the ground, so "land" isn't the most accurate of terms). He didn't fully land either. He came in above the "H" and, keeping his revs up, he changed the pitch on his blades to decrease the helicopter's lift so it was descending very slowly. It dropped slowly onto the invisible platform. I didn't have to add many fingertips under it to support the meager weight the pilot was risking. I stood up and walked along the pathway to it, keeping my hands away from my side, palms up and open in a non-threatening "I come in peace" manner. The two policemen waited for me, the helicopter maintaining full revs and putting only a fraction of its weight on my landing pad. I was also keeping a VERY close eye (sight blob) on the FBI riflemen. So far their fingers were outside the trigger guards. The pilot had landed so his passenger was closest to me, which saved me having to walk around to him. I stopped about ten feet away. The high-revving engine was making far too much noise to permit talk and I didn't want to use light blobs to spell out words. I used a sight blob to look for a winch in the chopper, but it was a very small chopper and it didn't have one. It had a coil of rope though, which would work okay. I pointed at the helicopter just behind the cops' seats. Both cops turned to look back to see what I was indicating. I used NP to float the rope slowly up and out of the chopper. I used NP to pull several feet of one end free, then tied it to a strut near me, the closest cop watching with wide-eyed amazement. I flew the coil up to him, dropping it in his lap. I motioned for him to tie it around his waist, and then to get out of the chopper and walk along the walkway. I pointed at the engine and my ears, then shrugged to suggest helplessness. Then I knelt on the walkway, leaned out to the side, moving my outside hand up and down beyond the line of lights, showing him that there was nothing there. I did the same on the other side, then stood and jumped up and down three times where I was, to indicate it was safe. I motioned for him to walk down the path again, then I turned and walked back to my seat again. I was deliberately overdoing the politeness and consideration I was showing, hoping to convince the world what a polite, moral angel I was. I could see he was talking on the radio. After a few minutes, he started doing as I'd requested. I waited patiently, as he was understandably VERY thorough, including leaning out of the chopper to check the knot I'd tied. Dad and I had done enough outdoor activities that I'd learned how to tie a good range of knots, so he found my knot satisfactory. The FBI's chopper was also hovering nearby patiently, hands off triggers and loudspeaker microphones, waiting to see how this played out. The cop dropped the coil of rope next to the chopper, seeing it very reassuringly land on the invisible platform. Then he climbed out onto the skid. Hanging on firmly with both hands, he felt for the platform with his foot. Finding it, he slowly increased the weight on that foot, until it was bearing his full weight. With one foot still on the skid, he crouched down to feel the platform with one hand. (NP-plates have a smooth feel, and seem to be body temperature because they don't conduct heat.) He picked up the rope. Winding it around his arm close to where it tied to the helicopter, so if he fell there'd be very little slack involved. Still hanging on to the helicopter with both hands, he cautiously moved his second foot off the skid. He paused for a couple of seconds, then was ready for the REALLY scary part - letting go. He summoned his courage, his hands suddenly letting go the helicopter and grabbing for the rope to arrest his feared fall. Nothing happened. After a few more seconds of very reassuring "nothing happening", he turned to face me. I gave him a thumbs-up sign, which briefly brought a nervous smile to his face. I sympathized with him. I'm very comfortable with walking around on an invisible platform now, but I can easily remember how nervous I'd been the first few times I'd looked down between my feet to see several hundred feet of nothing. I had been nervous even knowing that I could fly, so he had to be very scared. He cautiously slid one foot forward, finding the platform consistently there, slowly transferred his weight to his forward foot, he repeated the process with his rear foot, letting the rope out as he progressed. When he got near to where the much narrower path started, he paused. If he could've looked any more nervous, I'm sure he would've. I motioned my hands apart, and the lights separated by another two feet, making the walkway six feet wide and bringing a smile to his face. He didn't really gain confidence, but he did manage to lose some nervousness as he made his way toward me. He was mostly concentrating on his steps and the rope, so I was the first to speak, calling out to him when he was still a dozen feet away, "Congratulations on overcoming your fear. If anyone can get a medal for walking fifty feet, it should be you." He managed to resist ROFL (Rolling On the Floor Laughing), instead nervously asking, "Who, or what, are you?" "Call me Mike. I'm an angel." "Like out of the Bible?" "The short answer is 'Yes', although that book doesn't describe us very well. It's been a long time since any of us have visited this planet, so that's hardly surprising. Would you like a seat, or would you prefer to remain standing?" "Ahh, standing thanks. Can I go back to the helicopter to report what you've told me?" "Let me add some things first. I asked you to land for a number of reasons, one of which was to ask you to pass on a request of mine. Politeness is very important to me so I do not appreciate having guns pointed at me or being rudely ordered to fly in a particular direction. Please inform the FBI in that helicopter that they should leave, and in the future they would be well advised to treat me with respect." "Ahh, I'll pass that on, but I don't think they'll do it." "They'll do it; it's only a matter of how much incentive I need to apply. I'm starting by asking them nicely. If they refuse, I'll ask them less nicely." -- I created flat NP-plate superimposed with a flat, blue light blob, just above floor level immediately in front of the cop, telling him, "If you stand on that, it'll take you back to your helicopter more quickly and easily. Or if you're still too nervous of me, you may walk back." "Ahh, I think I'll walk." I canceled my offered ride. "As you wish. Please come back after you've reported in." "Okay." He made his way back several times faster than he'd walked toward me, climbing onboard and putting his headset on. There was no point in watching him talking so I used that sight blob to check around me, while the other blob continued to keep a close eye on the FBI guys. The news choppers were still hovering nearby, most of them now in positions where they could get me and the police chopper in the frame at the same time. I'd been holding my position stationary above the ground to make life easier for the pilots, and there was now a sizable crowd gathering on the ground beneath us. I worried about one of the local homeowners going crazy with a rifle. I didn't have enough sight blobs to keep an eye on everything, or even half of everything, so my sight blobs were being overworked. I needed to reduce the number of potential problems so I decided to move the party up a few thousand feet. I waved at the news-choppers to get their attention (probably unnecessarily), then I pointed upward. I created and opened my wings, slowly flapping them as I started raising myself, the light blobs and the NP-plates, the police chopper with it. The pilot got a scare, reacting by quickly lifting off and 'escaping'. I let him go, continuing to raise everything at the same unhurried pace. It took me about a minute to get to what looked like 3,000 feet, on the way to my destination of 5,000 feet, when I heard a new sound and looked around to see a couple of Air Force fighters coming toward me. I was unhappy at this escalation, but logically speaking I shouldn't be too worried. I was a very small target, and I can dodge very quickly. If they fired on me, I could almost certainly intercept missiles with my NP, which meant they'd explode prematurely or be damaged by the collision and not to be able to fly properly. If the pilots shot at me with cannons or machineguns, I'd see the shooting a second or two before the bullets arrived at me. I could accelerate downward at 7 g, so be 35 meters away in one second, 140 meters in two seconds. I'd have to be damned unlucky to be hit. The trouble was that I had to keep my eye on the planes because I couldn't use sound as a warning. The bullets would be traveling so fast I might not get any sound warning at all. I watched the two fighters do a flyby to inspect me, the closest coming within five hundred feet of me. I was not pleased to see missiles hanging off their wings. Once they were past me, I used the fighter-watching sight blob to look around. Everything was as it should be. The media choppers were keeping pace with my easy climb, the police chopper was nearby, and the only other development was another large media chopper arriving. My other sight blob showed me that the FBI chopper was rising with me too. I needed to get the FBI to leave to free up that sight blob, so I stopped climbing. I closed and faded my wings, then pointed at the police chopper, indicating it should land on my pad again. It started doing so. I stopped watching it, so I could use that sight blob to check the fighters again. They had turned and were now coming back for a second pass. The scary thing about that was that they dived toward me first, so I was in perfect target position. They passed by on either side and underneath me, at half the distance they'd passed me by last time. Two hundred feet is a considerable distance in some contexts, but it's very uncomfortably close when fully armed fighters are screaming past. I had a few seconds before they could turn, so I checked around again. The police chopper was still cautiously landing, and had nearly done so. Hopefully it shouldn't take nearly so long for the cop to walk to me this time. I needed to allocate one sight blob to watching him walk because I had to create the panels for him to walk on. Everything else was fine. The fighters didn't do anything dramatic, instead climbing and adopting an orbiting formation, keeping an eye on me from a thousand feet higher. It was annoying having them around, but no big deal provided I could keep an eye on them frequently - a quick glance every second or two. The FBI riflemen were actually more of a threat because they were closer, just as lethal, and I imagined that it was more likely for a rifleman to pull a trigger than an Air Force pilot to strafe or missile me over LA, so the FBI was going to leave, whether they wanted to or not. I waited quietly, apart from the sounds of all the engines, until the cop returned. He was looking worried, I guessed about what to say as he appeared to be getting used to walking on nothing. To save time I said, "Let me guess: your report was received with a considerable amount of skepticism?" "Ahh, yeah. I told them what you..." I interrupted, "Don't worry about whether they believed you or not. The choice between belief and disbelief is one of the core purposes of freewill. Meanwhile let me use the annoying, little FBI people as an object lesson." I made sure to cover the triggers of the two rifles that were trained on me as I pulled them out of their owners' hands. Then I PUSHED every Fibbie back in his seat, including forcing his arms to his side. They were pinned helpless for the time it took for me to pull every weapon out of the chopper, including opening their jackets to pull their pistols out of their shoulder holsters. With one mind per weapon and another mind for each guy to hold him down, it didn't even take a second. All the guns accelerated extremely rapidly around the outside of the helicopter, to brake to a sudden halt in a large group of weapons all pointing straight through the window at the pilot's face. He panicked, throwing the helicopter into a violent evasion away from me. One of the guys in the open doorway facing me had taken off his restraints to get into position, and the helicopter's so suddenly moving away made him lose his balance. His arms windmilled, tempting me with the idea of pushing him out, so I could save his life and get good press for it. But his teammate grabbed him before I could react. A pity, because it would've made Great TV. I flew all the guns back toward the cop standing in front of me, making sure that none of the barrels were pointing at him, because it's rude to point guns at people. The first the TV crews or cop knew about what had happened was when the mass of guns flew into their sight. They'd not thought to look at the FBI chopper because I'd not faced toward it. When the cop jerked with surprise, I said, "I took all the guns out of the FBI helicopter. It scared them and they're fleeing now." I pointed at the rapidly retreating chopper. "I want to put these in the back of your helicopter for eventual return to the FBI, but your pilot might get scared if he sees them coming toward him, so please let him see you inspect each of them to make sure they're safe, and then follow when I float them to your chopper. It'd be a good idea to remove the magazines too." I'd placed the guns at his feet while I was talking. I made an invitation motion toward them, which got him moving. He knelt and started processing the weapons. Partway through the job, he looked up and asked, "Are you Archangel Michael?" "Mike to people who impress me, as you did walking here. The short answer is yes, because other humans have called me that in the past; but you humans have a very poor idea of what an angel is so my answer isn't really telling you anything." "You look human?" "I've been around since before this planet was a molten lump, billions of years ago. Humanity evolved only a few thousand years ago, so I'm certainly not human." "What are you then?" "I'm an angel." "You believe in evolution?" "In the same way you believe 1 + 1 = 2." "Oh. A lot of religious people don't believe in evolution." "That's because a lot of religious people have a lot of stupid ideas. People are attracted to religions for many reasons, but it's often weak-minded people hoping to find something to believe in. They succeed more often than they should." "You sound more like the Devil than an angel?" "That's another stupid idea. There's no external personification of evil." "Can I ask if there's a God?" "You can ask whatever you like. If there's no God, I've spent the last several billion years making a big fool out of myself by serving It." "'It'? God's an 'it'?" "No Earthly language has a word to describe what God is, so I had to use 'It'. Using 'he' or 'she' would've been even more misleading." When you're lying to people, you don't want to tell them everything they expect because that's too suspicious. By using "It" I was deliberately implying I had more knowledge of God than they did, even though I was sure we both had exactly the same amount of knowledge. "Most people say God's a he. That's what it says in the Bible." "Hardly surprising, considering the cultures the authors lived in." He'd finished processing all the guns, so I added, "Do you feel safe enough to carry the rifles, or do you need both hands free to grip your rope?" "I haven't been holding it for the last five minutes, so I guess I don't need it. I'm safe, aren't I?" "You're under my protection at the moment, so you're safer than you've ever been in your life. Unless I get distracted by a pretty woman walking past, in which case you'll have to look after yourself. I don't imagine there are too many of them walking around at 3,300 feet though." (That height from his helicopter's altimeter as it had let him off.) "You joke about sex?" "I joke about anything, but the mess you humans make out of sex is particularly inspirational. You go first with the rifles, and I'll send the magazines ahead of you and pistols to the side and pointing away from you, so it'll look safe. Let's go." I floated the magazines up and then they headed toward the police chopper at a slow walking speed. The pistols rose a couple of feet but waited for the cop to pick up the rifles; keeping station with him as he walked back to his ride. I followed in last place, telling him, "When you get back onboard, please let the press know that I'll be holding a Q&A session, if any of them are brave enough to walk around up here without a rope. Their chopper has to land and let them off, so others can land. I see the FBI chopper is coming back so I'll have a talk with them when they arrive, and then I'll give the press a few minutes to decide whether to join me or not." "You'd get volunteers more easily if you colored the floor the same as the little one you gave me the choice of earlier." "Where's the fun in that? I have more serious reasons too. You should be glad it's transparent because that's going to make the film of your walking around on it far more impressive. Your career might get a nice boost out of this." "I've been too busy worrying to think about that but the film will look amazing. I've never been religious. Should I be?" "It's up to you. Some people get benefit from it; some don't. God doesn't care whether you're religious or not; It only cares about humanity's morality." "So what about when people die? Do they go to Heaven or Hell?" "The short answer is that there are no such places; not the way you think of them. Listen to the interview and you should hear more." We were too close to the noisy police chopper for any more conversation. I sent the magazines into it, dropping them on the floor behind the seats. Then the pistols overtook the cop and I piled them on the floor too. I waited until he'd inserted the rifles and climbed back into the cabin before I untied the rope knot on the skid, floating the end of the rope up to him. He looked at it with amusement. I motioned for them to lift off, waving to them as they immediately did so. The FBI helicopter was hovering nearby again. When they'd returned, the first thing I'd done when they got within range was to use a sight blob to check to see if they had any guns, in case they'd had some stashed out of sight that I'd missed the first time and they'd come back angry. They didn't, so they seemed to have returned just to be nosey. The second thing I did was to search for a way to temporarily kill the engine. I had the sight blob search until it found the fuel line, not doing anything with it for the moment. Pinching it shut would cause the engine to run out of fuel but I didn't know how long that'd take. Probably a few seconds, but maybe a minute or more, depending on how quickly the engine burned through the fuel that was after the pinch-point. I preferred not to be holding two helicopters up at the same time so I waited until the cop chopper had taken off, then I pinched the FBI's chopper's fuel line. I formed several NP-points underneath the skids. They stayed in light contact to sense the engine vibrations dying and the apparent weight of the chopper increasing, ready to increase the NP force to hold the chopper steady. I created my wings, stretching them wide and flapping them to rise and turn toward the FBI. I flew slowly toward them, giving their engine plenty of time to cut out. It turned out that it didn't need "plenty of time"; a few seconds was all it took. The engine spluttered, and the pilot flew into action trying to get it restarted. The only other flying happening was their confidence flying out the window, as their engine died completely. The pilot must've said something, because they were all jerking their harnesses tight and grabbing hold of their seats with white-knuckle grips. The rotor was still spinning freely, so I applied some NP friction around the shaft to brake it faster while I flew toward them. They experienced a couple of moments of confusion over their not plummeting toward the Earth, but they quickly realized that was my doing and waited worriedly for my arrival, other than the pilot who continued to try to start the engine. He was going to have trouble doing that without any fuel reaching it. I approached straight at the front of the blister, pulling myself into a vertically oriented hover twenty feet away, my impressive wings flapping slowly. I drifted sideways, around toward the side the pilot was sitting on. The front-seat passenger yelled at me, "What have you done?" "I turned your engine off so we can have a nice, quiet talk. I have..." "I demand you turn it back on!" #30: #28: #30 : I repeated the pin-them-to-their-seats pushing. I unbuckled the loudmouth's harness and opened his door. Over his screamed objections, I clamped my NP grips onto his arms and legs and pulled him out of the chopper, around to the front, then raised him until his head was between two of the stationary blades. I relaxed my grip on the pilot, telling him, "I believe his last order was to start the engine. Hopefully it'll work this time." "DON'T START THE ENGINE! PUT ME BACK INSIDE! YOU CAN'T TREAT ME LIKE THIS!" I zoomed Loudmouth across and down to the square I'd been standing on when I'd been talking to the cop, holding him a couple of feet above it when I released all my NP grips on him, and let him drop onto the NP-plates. He was far too far away for his scream and subsequent yelling to have any effect. I kept an eye on him, but otherwise returned my attention to the guys in the chopper, asking, "Any more loudmouthed, arrogant, assholes in here?" They shook their heads quietly and wisely. They seemed well behaved, both visually and from my proximity sense, so I canceled the NP-fingertips I had holding them. I released the fuel line pinch too, glancing at it to make sure it had opened properly. I said, "If you continue to ignore my polite suggestions to leave, they will continue to get less polite. I'm assuming that Loudmouth is the one most responsible for your annoying me, so I'm going to take him a couple of hundred yards out to sea and drop him in it from twenty feet up. I'll let you restart your engine when I've finished talking, and it'd be a VERY good idea for you to return directly to your base and not appear in the sky anywhere near me again, because my next suggestion will be reinforced by something like dropping you into twenty feet of water from two hundred yards up. -- "The moral of the story is that I don't react well to being treated rudely. No one on this planet has any authority whatsoever over me - very much the opposite applies - so pointing guns at me, yelling orders at me through a loudspeaker and not leaving when I've told you to leave will not be tolerated. Nor will military aircraft rudely buzzing me. Pass that on to the Air Force, or the next time they do it they might find their engines stop working. Also let them and the press know that Dipstick is going for a dip next. Do you understand your instructions?" "WHAT ARE YOU?" "An angel, like the shirt implies. Archangel Michael NOT at your service. Do you understand your instructions?" The pilot said, "Our orders are to follow you. We have to request permission to return to base." "God outranks whoever gave you your orders. If you hang around, you're going to experience an act of God that you're not going to enjoy. Start your engine and go home." I left them to it, flying myself back to Loudmouth. Their engine cranked into life behind me and a few seconds later they rose from my NP-plates and headed back the way they'd come, allowing me to cancel those plates. Loudmouth was standing in the middle of the square, looking like he was about to give me a piece of his mind. I have plenty of minds already and I didn't want to listen to any of his arrogance, so I picked him up from fifty feet away. We headed for the beach ten miles away, with him held face down fifty feet below me. He had no idea where we were going or what was going to happen to him, so he was probably making a great deal of noise. What a pity I couldn't hear it. I'd accelerated at 1 g up to about 300 mph, so it took just over two minutes to arrive at the beach. The FBI chopper had long gone. I'd thought they'd probably shadow me from a mile or two away, but I guess they felt that having no weapons made their hanging around pointless. The police and news-choppers were chasing after me; the two jet fighters were easily maintaining station above me. I was a little worried that they'd intervene to stop my apparent abduction, but they didn't. I'd been descending gradually and was at five hundred feet as I deliberately flew directly over the Lifeguards' Headquarters near the Santa Monica Pier, going 'feet wet' a moment later. We (me and Loudmouth) dived steeply, picking up speed scarily fast. I pulled a high-g pullout on Loudmouth at the very last second; he almost bounced off the water at the bottom of the pullout. In proximity, his emotions showed a thoroughly deserved surge of terror. He flew along about five feet above the water as we decelerated rapidly. When he was going slowly enough, I lifted him to a 20-foot altitude, held him stationary, then dropped him in feet first. I hung around long enough to make sure he came to the surface in a good enough condition. I could've checked him while flying away, but this way made me look better on TV. He was fine, so I flew back toward the beach. I maintained a fifteen-foot altitude as I headed straight for the Lifeguards' Headquarters with my wings flapping impressively, keeping an eye on Loudmouth with a rearward looking sight blob. I alighted in front of the Headquarters' front door, which I opened with NP as I landed, to look slightly cool. There were several lifeguards gaping out the window in wonder at me. I imagine I'd given them quite a surprise as I passed into their sight from directly overhead, closely followed by the sound of several helicopters to make sure they knew to come to the window to look. I made a couple of steps into the room, telling them, "I just dropped an annoying FBI agent into the drink about two hundred yards out. He's fully dressed, so one of you should probably go out to keep an eye on him; but unless he's in serious difficulty, please let the loudmouth make his own way to shore." "WHO ARE YOU?" | "WHAT are you?" "Archangel Michael. I was passing Earth and thought I'd stop in to check on things. To put it succinctly, what I've seen isn't good. I don't want to be rude, but the loudmouth that should be checked on. It'd be embarrassing for us both if he died while we stood around here jawing. Do any of you want a quick flight out to him?" I had a sight blob about three hundred feet behind me and two hundred feet up, cycling through looking at Loudmouth, the helicopters and fighters. He was swimming ashore and not in need of rescuing. My claimed concern over him, and my saying he needed watching, was just an excuse to ask if any of these likely candidates wanted a flight. "COOL! I'm in," volunteered one guy quickly. "Damn," said another; closely followed by, "Oops. I..." "Don't sweat it. Swearing isn't against the damned rules. You can come too if you like. I can take as many of you as want to go; I'm like the 747 of angels." This was the large-scale idea I'd had earlier, when I'd skated past this place. As I'd hoped, I got several volunteers. Half a dozen of them signed up, most of them showing no or very little hesitation, proving my belief that lifeguards would be the right sort of people to approach for the offer of a flight. One of them asked, "You're the guy who caused the disturbance on the Pier forty five minutes ago?" "I'm not a guy; impressive schlong notwithstanding. But if the disturbance involved some walking on water and flying away afterward, then you got the 'disturbance' part right. I'll give you half a point." "Are you really an angel?" I answered, "Sure am, but I'm not allowed to prove it. It's one of those 'take it on faith' freewill things. There always has to be some uncertainty." "You don't dress like I imagined an angel would?" "What, this old thing? It's just something I threw together in a hurry. I learned a long time ago that it's best I hide my body when I deal with humans. You've got all sorts of prejudices that kick in too strongly. On the other hand, I just can't resist poking a big stick at some of your sillier ideas, like your sexual contradictions. We'd better hit the skies to check on Dipstick. Follow me all those who want to do some flying." Five guys and a gal came out, the boss complaining that he had to stay behind, although he did come out to watch the takeoff. I told them, "An easy and comfortable way for you is if I arrange a flying sled for each of you. Everyone take one step forward and up, as if you're walking up stairs." I demonstrated myself, stepping up an invisible step. A couple of them were getting nervous, but they did it after the non-nervous lifeguards showed them how. I added, "You're standing on the backboard of the sled. I'll tilt them forward so you can lie down comfortably. I'll do it to myself first so you can see the effect." I tilted my sled, then theirs, then I said, "Here we go!" We accelerated with a 60 degree upward angle, at about 0.3 g. It took about 1.5 seconds to get a body length above the ground. After 4 seconds we were 75 feet in the air and rising steadily. I didn't have to ask them what they thought; proximity and their yahoos told me that. This part of my plan was all about their and my having fun. I tilted down to a lower angle, heading out to sea faster. It was getting on for lunchtime so there was a decent crowd on the nearby pier. It didn't take them long to spot the flying angel with the large, attention-getting wings, or the half dozen very happy yahooers. Everyone rushed to the south side of the pier to get a better look. No doubt the news cameras were getting great shots too. This was great PR; a thought that might've occurred to me back when I first had the idea. We passed over Loudmouth, swimming to shore slowly in his jacket and leather shoes. I slowed us so we were hovering in a group over him. I asked, "Does anyone want to be lowered into the water to swim ashore with that idiot, or shall we head down the beach so you can buzz your friends in the other stations?" The latter option got all the votes. I arranged the group in single-file, with the young woman (Bonnie) in front, then the guys, then me at the rear still flapping my wings. We accelerated steadily heading south down the coast. We were close enough and going slow enough that talking was easy. I called out, "Bonnie, you drive. Use your right hand to point where you want to go and we'll all follow you. When you extend your hand a long way in front that means you want to accelerate faster. Pulling it halfway back to your shoulder means no acceleration, pulling it back farther means to decelerate; to apply the brakes. Does that make sense to you?" "I think so. Let me give it a try." The guys were very eager to swap places with Bonnie, but she wasn't giving up the driver's seat to anyone. She did some unexciting experiments to gain confidence, then took us on a dive toward the next hut, getting all her co-workers worried that she was going to cause a seven-sled pileup in the sand. She responded to their cautions by moving her hand forward to instruct me to accelerate faster. Bonnie knew what she was doing. She changed our path to pass in front of the hut, at the height of the window and my six passengers yelled at their friends as they flew past. Bonnie turned our group in a tight circle around the hut while the occupants came boiling out to check they hadn't gone insane, to join the crowd of beach goers who were also doubting their sanity. "WHAT THE FUCK!" one of the very surprised lifeguards exclaimed. The others either struck speechless or exclaiming something similar. My flying lifeguards yelled various things back. I particularly liked, "Michael's doing it. He's a cool angel." After rocking her coworkers' view of the Universe, Bonnie accelerated us higher and out to sea, where she started a discussion about how fantastic this would be for lifesaving, sometimes having to yell because of the increasing throng of news helicopters following us. They started inventing lifesaving techniques they could use, and getting quite excited about it, until I said, "Sorry to rain on your parade people, but this flight is a one-time deal. In a few minutes this'll be over and you'll never experience it again." "Can't you leave some of the sleds with us?" "The sleds aren't real; they're a figment of my imagination and will. When I leave, my imagination won't be staying behind." "Can you teach us how to do it?" A moment later he thought of a good addition, "So we can save lives?" "It would also be great for impressing the panties off girls, but neither reason is going to help. It's a law of nature that humans don't have angelic powers. Bonnie, one more station for you, then we'll rotate the order. Angels are big on fairness." We worked out way south, spreading STUNNED excitement all the way down the beach. The other guards had been alerted over their radios by now, but that didn't come close to preparing them for the sight of us flying around them. I had to intervene a few times, like not letting us go inland because I worried about causing traffic accidents now that we'd be on live news. I prevented a pileup of sleds because one driver tried to be too impressive, I didn't let them try to break the sound barrier, nor play among the helicopters, nor fly in circles to make their experience last as many hours as possible. Other than those restrictions, we all had a blast! Flying openly in daylight is FAR more fun than sneakily at night, so I enjoyed myself as much as the lifeguards did. After they'd all had a chance being the driver for about the same amount of time, I turned them around and told them to head back to the headquarters. They played similar games on the return leg, but we were soon opposite their Headquarters again. There was no sign of Loudmouth, but he'd had time to swim ashore. There'd been plenty of helicopters flying overhead too, so he wouldn't have drowned. The main reason I'd pretended to be so concerned about him was so I'd appear to have been concerned about him, like a nice angel should be. One of the flying lifeguards asked, "Can we check out the beach north of the pier please?" "All the way to Alaska I suspect. Sorry people. You do good work and I was happy to give you a thrill because of it, but I've got other things to do. You've seen how many news-choppers there are, and they must be wetting themselves by now, and through them hundreds of millions of people wanting to know what's happening. It's time for all of us to get back to work. I'll fly you down to the Headquarters, where you're doubtless going to be having a busy afternoon because of your experience." There were reporters waiting outside the Headquarters, so my last comment was a safe guess. "Can I give you a kiss, like Spidey did?" asked Bonnie. The "Spidey" reference confused me for a moment, until I remembered that I was wearing a mask and Mary Jane had pulled an upside-down Spiderman's mask half off to kiss him. "Sorry Bonnie. The mask has to stay on. You really should kiss guys closer to your own age; I'm a few billion years older than you." That got me several exclamations of surprise. One of the comments was, "But you behave so young; like a kid?" I wanted to eliminate that idea! I answered, "Can you imagine living billions of years without having fun? Being childlike is part of how I have to be. Have a good life, bye." I sent their magic sleds down to the reception waiting for them at their headquarters. ------- Chapter 331: Archangel Michael's Press Interview Preliminaries Thursday, April 5, 2007 (Continued) I pointed upward to let the choppers know, then ascended myself. By now the sky was pretty crowded, with 24 helicopters (15 news, 3 private, 2 police, 2 Air Force, 2 Army), 6 private planes and 6 Air Force fighters. The armed forces were keeping their distance, either from military caution about getting too close to a possible enemy, or because the news choppers had 'elbowed' them aside in their desire to get close to me. I stopped at 3,000 feet ASL, about five hundred feet offshore and five hundred feet south of the Pier. I recreated the square, walkway and helicopter landing pad, then I made a broad invitation motion to the helicopters. They could sort of their landing order for themselves. The closest chopper - unsurprisingly a news chopper - had no hesitation in taking advantage of its nearness. It immediately came in for a landing on my pad, showing caution as it touched down. There was a small dispute onboard over who was going to be the guinea pig to find out whether the invisible platform was really there or not. The cameraman won, so the reporter went first. Her journey of discovery made for Good TV, because: All the other news-crews were filming her exiting the helicopter. The helicopter still had its engine turning over at normal flying revs generating 99% of its weight in lift. She used both hands to hang onto the chopper as she transferred her weight to her feet. She was wearing a skirt and - as revealed to people all over the world by the considerable reflected downdraft from the helicopter - pretty, blue panties partly over a very cute ass. The camera-toting guy joined her without showing the world his underwear or ass, and they cautiously edged away from their ride, the reporter going first again. When they were on the walkway, I motioned to the pilot to take off. He gunned his engine to get his ex-passengers' attention, motioning that he was going up. They weren't happy, but they'd known it was going to happen. They nodded grimly, and the chopper left, quickly replaced by another. The second set of passengers had debarked before the slow moving first pair had arrived on my square. It was amusing watching the expressions on the first pairs' faces. They were naturally extremely cautious about walking off the edge of nothingness and falling 3,000 feet to their deaths, but they also wanted to rush to me as quickly as possible to get the jump on their fast approaching opposition. Caution won, so the more confident second pair caught up to the first ones just before they arrived in my square. Both reporters started yelling questions at me. I answered, "It would not be fair to answer your questions ahead of the other reporters' arriving." "We took the risk first!" "Your colleagues should fairly give you all the credit you deserve for that." They didn't appear too hopeful about that, going back to yelling their questions as they edged closer to me. I preempted my being slowly mobbed by creating a few more lights that appeared to cut the corner I was standing on off the larger square. I drifted my triangle a few feet farther away, so it looked like there was a five-foot gap between their section of the square and mine. I also asked, "Do you know what happened to the FBI agent that annoyed me?" They looked down, which answered my question. I added, "I'm not a tolerant being, and dropping you in the ocean would be much more effective than turning the other cheek, so keep yelling questions at me if you want to take a dip." The third reporter's solo arrival - his cameraman having chickened out - was accompanied by his yelling questions as he came. I commented, "You're an uncivilized group. You're as bad as each other, so if I get annoyed enough, you'll all be taking a dip. I suggest some of you go halfway back to warn newcomers of that fact." None of them wanted to leave me, and the third reporter kept asking questions, so the entire 'construction' - except for my corner - abruptly dropped by six inches (all of it had to drop to avoid the problem of there being a nasty drop where the walkway connected to the helipad). The drop was a HIGHLY effective motivator, scaring the shit out of everyone (the floor was invisible remember, so they didn't know how long their fall would be). The original four YELLED at the latecomer to shut up. A fourth team arrived. They yelled a question, which I responded to by dropping the floor again. A couple of the reporters told their cameramen to go halfway back to warn newcomers, which I thought was an excellent idea. A couple of teams later, another reporter couldn't abide by the unnatural silence and yelled another question at me. Another six-inch lurch resulted. A few minutes later the interview area was starting to get a little crowded. Not very crowded, but reporters are vigorous jostlers. The first arrivals had gathered at the edge facing me, and now there were enough people to have a couple of rows behind them. People at the back were pushing forward, which the people at the front thought was REALLY bad. They'd already tested the area beyond the edge-indicating line of small lights, and they knew there was no floor there. The front row were starting to get terrified, and they were screaming at the people behind them to stop pushing. I said, "If anyone is pushed off, I won't let them fall to their deaths. I will catch them, then lower the entire platform to just above the water and cancel it. Hopefully the next bunch of reporters will be more civilized. I know this seems radical to all of you, but why don't you all sit on the floor so there's no risk of anyone being pushed off?" They didn't like that idea, even though it would've made the cameramen's job easier. Too undignified I guess, or maybe years of experience at jostling made it impossible for them to be passive sitters. They did manage to restrict their jostling though, dialing it back several notches. When it did occur, there was some serious yelling directed at the perpetrator, so it was kept under control. A couple more six-inch drops in response to questions directed at me kept their memories fresh about the risk of dropping into the ocean. I stood in silence most of the time as the number of newsies continued to accumulate, climbing beyond two dozen in increments of one (occasionally), two (mostly), and three (there were two groups like that, their third person being a sound engineer). I was silent but busy, as some of the arrivals were feeling the wrong emotions. Not excited or competitive like the others, but far more suspicious and cautious. Most of the news-crews got over most of their caution fairly quickly, and it surged back mostly when they looked down, which wasn't easy in a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. But the unusual minority were continually very cautious about me. I was using sight blobs to check them out; to look inside their ears, jackets and pockets, and to search the helicopters they'd arrived in if they passed within range. It was easy to find out that they were all Feds posing as reporters. I'd told the policeman that I was going to be allowing interviews, so the Feds had obviously thought to take advantage of that. Among the late arrivals was a private helicopter. It flew up beside us first, and the passenger motioned to check whether it was okay for him to join us. I gave him a thumbs-up. It landed, and the sole passenger got out and joined us. I was interested to note that unlike any of the reporters - who showed almost no initiative or intelligent curiosity - the new arrival kneeled down to check out the platform, knocked it with his knuckles, moved to the edge to check that out, and checked the light, including poking a finger into it, which led to his waving his whole hand through it, and reaching through it to feel the underside of the platform. One of the other private choppers landed and let out its three passengers. They made a cautious beeline for me, joining the crowd of just over thirty people, and trying to worm their way to the front. They were pretty stupid, trying to worm their way through professional wormers. They got elbows in their ribs then shut out (so much for the public's right to know). Their helicopter was an eight-seater, plush people-mover with Christian magazines in a rack in the back, so I was pretty sure there'd be some fun soon. I waited until it was clear that no more helicopters were going to land, then I announced, "That appears to everyone, so we'll start. The..." Questions erupted, but another sudden six-inch drop immediately fixed that. They'd lost half my body height now, so the perspective was getting silly. When the Christians recovered from the shock, the older man led them in a charge at me, very roughly pushing intervening people aside as they rushed at me, the rear two raising crucifixes while all three of them told some guy called Satan to get back to Hell. They apparently had me confused with someone else. They violently pushed their way through the four rows of reporters ahead of them. I thought Jesus taught politeness, but I've must've got that wrong. The leading numbskull broke through the front rank of reporters, his spare hand pulling a vial of presumably holy water out of a pocket as he raised the cross in his other hand triumphantly and ran right over the edge. He dropped out of sight while demanding, "Get thee hen ... AHHHH!" The reporters on either side of him were still recovering from their being pushed so hard so weren't able to save Numbnuts, even if they'd wanted to. To clear the deck for some useful conversation, I used NP to give hard pushes to the two remaining Christians. Their attempts to brake themselves couldn't compete with my NP force, so they fell into the gap too, hard on the heels of their devout, dimwitted, descending leader. I caught the three of them about fifty feet below the platform, decelerating them so they ended up hovering about a hundred feet below us, well out of our earshot over the sounds of the not very distant helicopter engines. I said, "To catch them or not to catch them? Talk about a moral dilemma! I'll lower us down to a safe height to drop them into the water from." I started the descent, edging farther out to sea as well. While moving, I added, "On the way down I have a few things to say before the Q&A session begins, so please listen attentively. -- "First, I'm going to cancel the helicopter landing pad. I don't want to do that without warning you in case you feel I'm trapping you on this flying platform. If any of you wish to leave before I cancel it, now would be the time to do so. Anybody?" I waited a few seconds. "Nope? Okay. It's gone." They all looked, and there was no longer a helipad or walkway. They were made very uncomfortable by the loss, although it made no logical difference to their predicament. -- For good PR I said, "If any of you feel you have to leave, just let me know and I'll recreate it for you and call your helicopter back. None of you are forced to remain here, although I suggest there are better ways of leaving than what was just so intelligently demonstrated to us. -- "Second, I notice that some of the helicopters below us are filming upward. The women wearing skirts might want to take some measures to retain their modesty." I'm nothing if not a moral angel. Some of the women were wearing quite short skirts, but even the long-skirt wearers played safe by poking their skirts between their legs and clamping them there. -- "Third, would I be correct in assuming that it would be better to have the cameramen to the side so they can film the conversation clearly?" I got several agreements to that. -- "In that case, would all the cameramen move to the back of the platform. I'll separate the two halves and move the cameramen around to the side." I could see that made them even more nervous, but their reporters - who doubtless wanted to be clearly filmed - encouraged them and it slowly got done. "I presume the sound engineers are staying with the reporters?" "Yeah," from both of the soundmen. I pointed at the remaining private citizen, saying, "Which group do you wish to join: reporters, cameramen, or Christians who understand gravity as well as they understand God?" "Haha. I think I'll stay with the reporters. I want to ask some questions too. Am I allowed to do that?" "I'd be disappointed if you didn't. Yours are likely to be the most intelligent." "Why do you think that?" "The outward signs are that you've taken more interest in the construction of this platform than anyone else, you seem to own a helicopter, and you take risks in pursuit of knowledge. There are other reasons, but those are enough. -- "I've got one more group I need to assign a location for. Where would the undercover law enforcement agents like to stand?" Once they understood the implications of what I meant, everybody looked at everybody else, no one saying anything. Interestingly, five proximity senses suddenly showed worry; the four I knew about and one I hadn't previously suspected. I added, "It's an EXTREMELY bad idea to lie to an angel, so hands up if you work for a State or Federal Government?" As I'd intended, the five people's worry got MUCH worse but everyone else's worry only rose a small amount, which was good confirmation. Some of the reporters were excited, probably hoping for something newsworthy; or a little worried, probably fearing they'd see something newsworthy they didn't want to see, or maybe that I might think they were undercover agents. I couldn't identify the source of their worry, but it was too small to imply they were in law enforcement themselves. I started checking out the suspect that I hadn't identified before. Her helicopter was out of range and I knew she didn't have a gun as I'd already checked everyone for those (the four originals were carrying, but no one else was). She was carrying a handbag though, which I soon discovered contained a CIA ID. I could even move the obstructions away enough to read her name on it: Makayla Rogers. #19: Apparently, until I'd asked my undercover law enforcement question, her acting ability had been better than my proximity sense's ability to detect her having non-reporter-like emotions. I wasn't surprised, as despite proximity being an accurate sense, it's not very detailed and there's quite a lot of personal variation in how emotions are felt. I slowly increased the angle at which we were going out to sea. I wanted to be about 1,000 yards out when we got down to a good person-dropping height. I said, "Last chance. Put your hand up if you're from the State or Federal Government." One of the original four, ostensibly a cameraman, dithered for a few seconds, then hesitantly raised his hand, "Ahh, me." His reporter-partner was very unhappy, but didn't show any reaction at all, deliberately giving the impression that he had no association with the traitor. No doubt he was hoping I'd forget who the confessor had come with. I said, "Good man. You get off lightly. Speaking of getting off, please jump over the side. Don't worry, I'll catch you and put you with the Christians. On second thought, that'd be too cruel. I'll keep you apart from them. I'm serious; jump off or I'll simply take away the floor you're standing on." In this moment of high drama, the smart private citizen's phone started ringing. He pulled it out and quickly turned it off, saying, "Sorry." Meanwhile, the self-confessed State or Federal Government employee had no neighbors, as they'd all rapidly backed away from him. #24: I did that, and he screamed as he dropped. I moved the Christians to the side to make sure they wouldn't be hit by the tumbling camera, and so they and the decelerating Fed would have their own corners of the basement. By the way, I was enjoying playing a little game by not moving my body to look at anything. When the Fed had put his hand up to confess, I hadn't turned to look at him. Nor when he fell did I look down. When I had a conversation with someone, I did it without looking at them. They looked up from the dropped Fed to see that my head hadn't moved at all, then they looked down to see that I was still moving the suspended people exactly as I obviously intended to. It created an impression of non-humanness. I could see and sense that it did a good job of weirding-out the spectators. I grabbed the three remaining Fibbies by their belts in the middle of their backs, and by the backs of their shirt collars, raising them vertically in the air. As expected, all three of them went for their weapons. I let them start to draw, but then held their fingers tight so they couldn't use them while I pushed their gun arms so they were pointing vertically but slightly out to the side so their other arms weren't long enough to reach the guns. There was a short period of chaos from the reporters, as they squealed and ducked for cover. There wasn't a lot of that around, except each other, so it was quite funny. The cameramen were clearly stauncher people, as none of them squealed and even those that ducked managed to keep filming the Fibbies. I told the reporters, "I'm holding the criminals' arms so they can't use their guns. You're safe; you can stand." Because I was standing still and never moving my head in reaction to what was going on, no one could tell who I was talking to, but I guessed the reporters would be reassured anyway. I moved the three Fibbies to a group to one side of us. I ripped the jackets off all of them, letting everyone see the shoulder holsters. I told them, "You've already insisted that you don't work in law enforcement, but you're carrying concealed weapons that you seem very eager to use. I'm going to throw the book at you. Or maybe you at the book." "We're FBI!" yelled one of them. "God help America if employees of the FEDERAL Bureau of Investigation are too stupid to realize they work for the FEDERAL Government, like I asked. Or maybe you're not stupid, just dishonest? My money's on both. Lying to an angel and then drawing a weapon in my presence. Tsk, tsk. You ARE in trouble. Let's see who you are." I floated their jackets over to have them hover near me, using NP-fingers to pull out their wallets and ID badges, then throwing the jackets away, letting them flutter down to the ocean. I'd been tempted to set fire to them, but decided to keep that ability in reserve, especially because the idiot public would too easily associate fire with the devil, although Christians also claimed fire was "purifying" (the Salem Witch Trials, killing of Joan of Arc, and other such events, used fire because the Christians claimed it "purified" the bodies. Also, I suspect, because it caused excruciating agony and great public spectacle). I floated the three badges to the cameramen, saying, "Please get a shot of those, so the world will know that these three people lied to an angel." One of the Fibbies begged, "What're you going to do with us?" "You're guilty of lying to an angel and drawing a weapon on one. Those are very serious offenses." "We're Federal agents! We're allowed to carry weapons!" "You are NOT allowed to lie to an angel or draw weapons on one! Whatever your laws allow, God's rules trump them. God did create this planet after all, so your ideas of what you're allowed to do are totally irrelevant." "We didn't know!" tried another. "Bullshit! I warned you not to lie to me, and there's no conceivable way that your drawing weapons in response to my lifting you could be deemed anything other than an intended aggressive action toward my body, especially as I could feel that all of you were trying to lower your gun arms in my direction. You're guilty. Shut up now." I clamped their jaws hard against their heads, so all they could do was grunt and moan. I used NP to open the three wallets, extracting the cash and making a bundle of it. I threw the wallets over the side, saying, "They won't be needing these any more," which caused some serious groans from the three and "Oh nos!" from some of the female reporters. I floated the cash to the Private Guy, saying, "Donate that to a charity. Preferably not the church the three idiots below us belong to. If it can afford a plush helicopter like the one they came in and lets idiots like that use it, then they don't need any more donations." One of the reporters volunteered, "They're from the Los Angeles Church of Jesus Christ." I said, "Never heard of it," then waited. It took a second, but the private guy got it and started laughing. That clued the others in, and they all started laughing. Some of them probably got it too. I resumed, "Speaking of helicopters, if there are any insurance claims people watching, you're about to witness acts of God; or of his official representative, which is much the same thing." I pointed to the church's helicopter. It'd come close, after seeing its three passengers falling from the platform, and now uncomfortably held by one ankle and dangling upside-down beneath us (because I felt like it). Their chopper was easily within my 500-foot range (to see clearly enough for small-scale work, my practical range wasn't much over 400 feet, but it was well within that too). I'd located the fuel line and now I pulled it. I was a little worried about my playing various games with the helicopters in case it reminded people of the helicopter crash over my home. I'd chosen to disable it by pulling the fuel line because that'd leave evidence that was completely different than the Corvallis collision. [There are quite a few helicopters operating out of Corvallis Airport, including being used for helicopter flight training, so I'd several times seen them practicing autorotations. My fixed-wing instructor had explained the technique to me, and I'd browsed it out of interest. It's THE emergency procedure for helicopters when their engines or transmissions fail. They practice it a LOT, because most helicopters are single-engine crafts, so one failure is all it takes to turn them into something that flies as well as an anvil. They set the controls to allow the chopper to fall in a way that speeds up the rotors, until they're in the "green-zone" for having the right angular momentum for an autorotation. Just before the choppers reach the ground, the pilot increases the angle of the blades to generate lift using the angular momentum of the freewheeling blades, timing it so the chopper's vertical velocity is reduced to zero just as it arrives at the ground, ideally before the blades lose all their momentum. The good pilots get very good at autorotating, landing very softly. The trainees are considerably more erratic. I imagine that it's a very scary maneuver the first time it's practiced.] A few seconds later, the church's helicopter belched then started dropping. It was too far out to sea, too low, and with no significant horizontal velocity, so there was no way it could glide back to the beach. The pilot had no choice but to ditch. The cameramen filmed it all through the floor, while I watched it with a sight blob at sea level to get a better angle. It took about twenty seconds; nice and short for Good TV. It was a big chopper so difficult to handle, but the pilot knew his stuff, letting it and its props pick up speed as it fell, then applying the lift to slow it just above the water, then settling into it. The craft bobbed a couple of times, then rolled over, the still-spinning blades hitting the sea and flying apart. The craft had rolled to the pilot's side because of his weight. He'd anticipated it though; as soon as it started rolling, he'd unbuckled and dived onto the floor behind him, between the passenger seats. A very wise move, since high-velocity pieces of rotor blade were flying in random directions when they shattered from hitting the sea at high speed. The dangerous phase was over in a few seconds, the rotor reduced to slow moving stubs. The pilot got up, grabbed a life jacket and put it on loosely, opened the passenger-side door, jumped into the water and swam a few strokes away, turning to watch his craft sink. When it was over, and seeing it'd worked so well, not even needing my intervention, I said, "One down, two to go. Those," pointing with both my arms, "are the choppers the Federal agents who drew guns on me came in. They're about to have engine failures too." As soon as I'd pointed at them, both pilots had turned for shore, which got them about two seconds closer to the shore, which wasn't nearly enough. They'd been higher and going faster than the church chopper, which are both helpful factors in autorotations, but there was an awful lot of ocean under them and the shore was too far away, so they suffered the same fate. I picked up the three swimming pilots and quickly flew them five hundred feet closer to shore, before dropping them into the ocean again. I had no doubt that the lifeguards had a TV on and would've seen the need for a rescue, plus there were boats coming from other directions or a chopper could've descended to help. I dusted my hands together, saying, "I'm an easy entity to get along with. The lifeguards and I had fun because they're good people. That's the way I'd like to get on with everyone. If there are Christians who fear that I might be Satan and want to find out whether that's the case, a better approach would've been a polite request for me to read from the Bible, kiss a cross, walk into a church, or whatever else seemed reasonable. Instead the three numbskulls were too arrogant about their own beliefs. Likewise the FBI agents who arrogantly assumed they could lie to and draw guns on me. -- "I have to say that one of the greatest differences I've seen on this visit compared to my previous ones is in how much naked arrogance there is now. People in power are treating the powerless with contempt born of arrogance. There used to be constraints on that, but you've progressively diminished most of those. I have seen important people in your world stand up and lie over and over again, with not a care that everyone knows they're lying. No one holds them accountable for it, and there are no negative consequences for them. -- "There ARE consequences when any entities - human or whatever - attempt to arrogantly empower themselves at my expense. I answer to God only. No one else can command me. Which brings us back to the three agents who drew guns on me. Presumably they intended to either coerce me into behaving in a way different from that I wanted, or they were intending to shoot me. Both are unacceptable to me. The idea of a human ordering me around is ludicrous. The purpose of a gun is to fire bullets. That's what they were threatening me with, so that's what they will receive." I moved their gun arms down and I pressed the muzzles into one of each of their own thighs, turning their bodies so the shots would be going away from the platform, then flicked the safeties off. -- "You've got thirty seconds to pull the triggers or you'll be shot in both your thighs." I'd chosen thirty seconds because it'd give enough time for the platform to get down to sea level. I wanted to be low, because the military might intervene after this. To make my escape I'd need to cancel the platform, and I needed to be low enough that my passengers wouldn't die in the fall. Surely the armed forces wouldn't fire into a crowd of reporters, but I was keeping a close eye on them just in case. I waited quietly, ignoring the Fibbies groans and unintelligible attempts to speak with immovable jaws. As the platform got so low that the three Christian nutcases would've gone into the water, I moved them to the side, holding them about a hundred feet away and fifty feet above us. The sole honest Fibbie (or religious one, or whatever his motivation to 'fess up had been), I positioned similarly, but fifty feet away horizontally from the nutcases, positioned and oriented to make sure he had a good view of what was to follow. I leveled the platform off at twenty feet above sea level. One of the Fibbies had a watch with a second hand. I didn't say a word before or after the thirty seconds were up. I simply shot each of them in the leg, moved their guns to point at their other leg, and pulled the triggers again. The whole thing didn't even take a second. I pulled the guns out of their hands and dropped them into the ocean. The suddenness of the action, especially my not giving any warnings in advance, caught the reporters by surprise. There were many moans and exclamations, which I ignored. I'd made sure that none of the shots had hit bone or a major blood vessel. They were just impressive flesh wounds that'd hurt like hell and keep them off active duty for a while. I said to the private citizen, "Are you able to contact your chopper and would you agree to its being used to take the three idiots to a hospital? I'll fly you back to shore when we finish here so you won't need it." "I'd GIVE you my chopper for that! You want me to call them now?" "Yes please. Quickly, so I can get them to safety in case your military tries to intervene." He pulled out his cellphone, while everyone else looked very worriedly at the sky. I cheered them up by saying, "I'm sure you've got nothing to worry about. The last time I visited Earth the bards that traveled from village to village to spread the news were sacrosanct and treated with great respect. Surely your military wouldn't attack the present day equivalent of those bards?" In case you haven't noticed, I don't have a high opinion of reporters and I enjoy twisting their tails a little. Some of the cameramen thought it was funny too. -- I told the helicopter caller, "Have it hover a couple of hundred feet away. I'll place the blubbering Fibbies onboard." He added that to his instructions, and moments later his helicopter started its approach. I floated the sole honest Fibbie to me. When he arrived, I said, "I was going to drop you in the ocean but I've changed my mind. I think you've had enough of a scare so I'll send you back with your coworkers. I'm sure your bosses are watching this live anyway but let me spell out the lesson I'm trying to convey: I'm carrying out the instructions of my boss. If the Will of God takes me in a direction that breaks some of your human laws, guess how little sleep I'll lose over that?" [Regarding my comment about watching it live: some of the cameras had built-in radio transmitters and were sending live signals to their helicopters. I'd discovered that when I'd snooped those choppers and seen a technician operating the relaying equipment and watching a screen with the live feed on it. There was sometimes a producer onboard too, issuing the cameraman with instructions via a radio earpiece. Modern technology is very impressive.] Meanwhile I'd ripped the shirts off the three Fibbies to bandage one of their legs each. I also ripped their trouser pockets open and tossed everything they'd contained into the ocean, including their cellphones. They hadn't been wearing earpieces or carrying radios, so the FBI was saved the expense of losing that equipment as well. I needed three more bandages for the three as yet unbandaged legs, and there was an ideal source of excess material nearby. I grabbed hold of the pretty CIA spy, causing her to scream from the surprise. That attracted everyone's attention to her, but it wouldn't have taken long for that to happen even if she'd kept quiet. I floating her up to near the three wounded guys, then ripped her blouse off. She screamed again. (I've yet to experience an occasion where a female's screaming has actually helped, and it all too obviously could cause major problems, so my search for an evolutionary justification for it continues.) I was holding her upper-arms and hands away from her body to keep her helpless. It had the additional benefit stopping her from covering her pretty bra. Her underwear being seen would soon be the least of her troubles. I ripped her skirt off, tore it into two strips, and use those to tie the last two bandages. Guess what scene most of the camera-MEN were filming? The Fibbies were ready for transportation, so I floated them up to the helicopter, opening its door and depositing them inside. Some of the cameramen filmed that. Private Guy said, "There's a first-aid kit with bandages in the chopper. You could've used those." "Where's the fun in that?" The near-naked woman gave another scream as I removed the descriptive modifier simultaneously with her bra and panties. She was now stark naked, held upright with her arms and legs spread, and was being well filmed. I said, "In case any of the pretty women here are worried, let me introduce you to Makayla Rogers from the Central Intelligence Agency. She also lied to me about not being a federal employee, and this is her punishment. I imagine you've already noticed that she wasn't carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. I can confirm that there isn't one in her purse either. She didn't have a gun to threaten me with, thus her punishment is only for lying to me." I opened her fingers and floated the purse a couple of feet away from her (I'd made sure it was held during her undressing). I opened it and used NP to extract her wallet, CIA badge and mace spray. The purse was floating higher than my head and I wasn't looking in its direction, so pulling specific items out of it without seeming to look in was another little non-human weirdness. I floated the badge to the cameramen, explaining, "This is to prove she is who I said she is," then I floated the money out of her purse over the Private Guy, saying, "Ms. Rogers feels contrite over her deception and wishes to make amends by making a donation to your favorite charity." Private Guy picked the money out of the air and added it to the same pocket the other money was in. -- I held up the mace, saying, "I have a use for the mace. If you will please direct your attention to the Army helicopter that is behind me to my left. You can see that it has drifted closer and has a sniper in the door facing me. His finger is outside the trigger guard and the safety is on, but his rifle's crosshairs are currently centered on me which is very impolite." Given that I was facing the wrong way, the Army helicopter was four hundred feet away, and the safety switch was on the side of the rifle, I was demonstrating remarkably good eyesight. The sniper was clearly discomforted by having all the cameras and everyone except me suddenly turn to look at him. He became a great deal more uncomfortable when I sprayed his face with mace from the canister that zipped into sight from immediately above him. I'd already placed NP-plates around the trigger so he couldn't get his finger into the guard, and now I pulled the rifle out of his hands. I instructed, "Cameramen, focus on the pilot." I zipped the rifle around to the front of the chopper, so it was pointing directly at the pilot's face. The pilot did not like that AT ALL, and he was outta there! He emergency-turned the chopper away from us, and started diving away. I held the rifle in front of him during his turn and dive, freaking him out even more. He tried other evasions, sometimes usefully coming back into view for my cameramen. The rifle stayed in position almost as well as its being stuck there, because it effectively was (I had a couple of NP-points holding the rifle's muzzle against the front of the chopper, and it was easy to keep them there no matter what gyrations the chopper went through, especially as I could see the pilot's hands on the controls which gave me clues about how the chopper was about to move, my reactions for moving my sight blob and NP-points around being far faster than the chopper's). The pilot had several seconds of terror before he was nearing my maximum range, so I pulled the rifle away from his face, fetching it back to me. I thought I'd made the point pretty well. The cameramen had gotten great shots of the solder aiming his rifle at me, and of the result of his doing that, as well as the pilot's fearful reaction. I commented, "The people with guns in this world think nothing of pointing them at people who don't have guns; but when their own guns are turned around to point at them, they object strongly. Your society is too willing to use power but refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of its use. It's a corruption that is imperiling the human race. It'd be a pity if you wiped yourselves out, but that's looking more likely than not from my perspective, and species' extinctions are something I've seen many times. -- "However, preaching is not part of my job description so we'll move on. Here comes the rifle. As gunpowder weapons go, it's quite impressive." I held it still for a couple of seconds while they admired it, then I said, "Isn't human ingenuity impressive?" I shrugged, then tossed the gun over the side, to demonstrate what I thought of human ingenuity. "I'll just tidy up Ms. Makayla Rogers before finally starting our Q&A session." I kept a strong grip on one of her ankles, letting everything else go, and letting her upper-body fall so she dangled from my hold. She interrupted her crying to scream again. She covered herself with her hand; a case of only slightly better late than never. I flew her upside-down and inserted her into the middle of the Christians. I'd rearranged them into three-sides of a square, the open side facing us. With Ms. Rogers in the middle, only an arm's reach from the guys. I was holding her about three feet lower than the guys, so their eyes were at her belly button level. I held the guys facing inward and stationary, and I slowly rotated Ms. Rogers. The group was too far away for me to monitor them with my proximity sense, which was a bit of a nuisance because it meant I had to remember to look at them more frequently than every thirty two seconds or they'd fall into the ocean, not that I was too worried about that. I could've moved them closer to me, but that would've meant listening to them, which would've been a much bigger nuisance. While I was moving her, I asked, "Can anyone guess what would've happened if any of those five wonderfully effective spies had immediately answered truthfully when I'd asked where the law enforcement agents wanted to stand?" I got some laughter, and one reporter answered, "You would've let them stay?" "Stay and choose where to stand, exactly as I'd asked them. What saddens me is their automatic assumption that skullduggery is the way to behave. Secrecy, being the control of information, is another form of power that is habitually abused in this age. ------- Chapter 332: Archangel Michael's Press Interview Thursday, April 5, 2007 (Continued) I suggested, "Before we start the Question and Answer session, I have some advice for you. I would like you to behave sensibly and maturely. You're all adults, so I'll assume you're all aware of what I'm asking for. If you behave in ways that annoy me, I will sensibly and maturely toss you into the ocean. At the risk of annoying all the reporters, I'll take the first question from the only non-reporter smart enough not to remove himself from the platform in one way or another." Private Guy asked, "What is God's plan for mankind?" "Good question. The short answer is that It doesn't have one, but I won't be so unfair as to stop there. A better answer would be that It's letting you develop to be all that you can be. The importance of freewill cannot be overstated; that's what God created your Universe for. That's why God doesn't have a plan as such; It's letting you choose your own path. You can flush yourselves down the toilet or ascend to the heights. Everything you do is entirely your choice, including failure." There was a pause, then several questions came at once. I wobbled the floor a little, which very quickly restored silence. I'd been slightly frustrated by not knowing Private Guy's name and I hadn't wanted to ask, so I used this as an excuse to satisfy my curiosity. I instructed, "I guess you've been reporters for too many years to behave like polite adults. This is what we'll do. You'll form a rectangle. The front along the edge facing me, then a second rank behind them. I'll lengthen the platform to accommodate that. The person in the front corner nearest the cameramen will state his or her name, network and question. While I'm answering, you'll rotate one position clockwise, to rotate a new person into the hot seat ready for the next question. Please form the rectangle now, then we'll restart." It took a while, but I used the time to check around the area carefully. No one was pointing weapons at me that I could see. The suspended Christians were paying the CIA woman's womanhood a lot of attention. Speedboats had started arriving five minutes ago, with many more on the way. So far I'd been turning their engines off whenever they got within three hundred horizontal feet of us, then picking up the boat so it was five feet out of the water, turning it sideways, and putting it down again. Some of them had gotten the hint the first time, but those that persisted in trying to get closer got picked up and put down fifty feet farther away. I'd keep that up while it worked. If things got too chaotic I'd disable the trouble-making boats or move us much higher. I preferred to stay low though, as that made for a much easier getaway for me should one suddenly become necessary. The reporters had moved into position, and the next question was a classic trashy reporter's question, "What do you say to viewers who think you're Satan or some other evil demon?" "Nothing. Their opinions don't affect my ability to do my job." "But if you want to people to believe you're an angel the way you claim, you should provide some proof." "I've already answered your question. Move to the right please." "You can't claim ... AHHH! HELP!" I'd picked her up and started floating her down to a suitable location to drop her into the water from, near some of the boats on our shoreward side. I explained to the survivors, "I would've given her one more warning, but she made the mistake of telling me what I can't do. Anyone that stupid would've been a nuisance. Next question please?" "Why do you look like a man wearing a homemade costume?" "I'll answer those two questions separately. I look like a man because I'm dealing with humanity. When I decided to make an appearance, I found someone willing to let me borrow his or her body, since being incorporeal wouldn't have filmed well and it's difficult to talk without a mouth. The donor happened to be a male rather than female, but that was happenstance. -- "The homemade outfit is partly a necessity and partly a joke. You might have noticed that I like jokes. I needed a covering to protect the identity of the man whose body I am using so he will be safe after I leave, and because humanity has too many prejudices that have too much effect on your thought processes. The color of my host's skin would have irrationally affected your thoughts about my comments so I'm hiding it. That I'm hiding it behind a silly outfit is because I have silly sense of humor. If you listen to enough of my jokes, you'll want to throw me into the ocean." The reporters rotated, the next guy asking, "Is God male or female? Black or white? Old or young to look at?" "You can't look at God because It isn't accessible via the electromagnetic spectrum. 'God created man in his image' couldn't be more wrong, as God doesn't have an image. Thinking of It as human is a comfortable but an incorrect anthropomorphism." The next reporter asked, "Is the Bible true?" "Most of your questions, I'm happy to answer bluntly. Questions about humanity's holy books I will be more circumspect with. They provide a source of inspiration, strength, community and many other positives, so their value to humanity over the millennia has been enormous. That's all I'm willing to say on that subject." Also because they could VERY easily catch me out if I allowed them to quiz me on the Bible. The same reporter added, "Why did you leave out 'providing moral guidance'?" "I'll answer your follow-up, but you'll be skipping your turn when you go around again. -- "I left it out because that aspect is greatly overrated. People who adhere to one holy book too often believe they have a moral superiority over the people of other books, or people of no book. That's incorrect, but too easily believed because the comparison is usually made across different cultures. What is moral in one culture is sometimes immoral in another, creating beliefs of moral superiority in both." Someone from the middle of the pack yelled, "Hang on! Are you saying that right and wrong aren't fixed?" "In some human cultures, a wife who is incapable of sex for any reason would be behaving morally if she arranged regular visits from a prostitute for her husband, while an American wife doing that would have her morals questioned. In America, a mother who drove her children to church services three times a week would be considered a moral woman, but in other cultures she'd be a harlot who people would spit on in the street. The same act in different cultures has different meanings, reasons and effects, so it MUST have different moralities." "I don't see that," commented one reporter. "Then you need to get out more. Visit other cultures with your eyes open and your moral superiority turned off. You'll learn a great deal. We're overdue for a rotation and a new question." The next question was, "Are you a Christian?" "I see that the way I've been talking has made you doubt that. You're putting the cart before the horse. I've been in existence for billions of years; Christianity for a couple of thousand. Christianity attempts to explain me and what I'm involved in, as do other major religions. They all succeed and fail in various ways. Their failures don't mean I'm a bad Christian; it means Christianity is not accurately reflecting what I am, which means what God is, because what I am is what God wants me to be." "Was Jesus the Son of God?" "Jesus was a mortal child who grew up containing an angel. I've been using this body irregularly over the last two years, but Jesus was angel-occupied almost continually from birth, except for the missing years when the angel had work to do elsewhere. Whether that makes Jesus the 'Son of God' I'll leave to you to argue about." "You're saying that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were normal people?" "I don't know what criteria were used to choose that family, so they might've been special in some ways, but they were normal in the sense that they weren't divine. Mary wouldn't have been a pregnant virgin, for example; that's one of the more amusing and absurd inaccuracies that got added to the story. You humans have some strange psychological fixations about virginity." "Your saying that is going to upset a lot of people." "Everyone should know that people are rarely honest about sex, so it's foolish of anyone to invest much emotion in such an implausible myth. It makes no useful difference to anything at all whether or not people believe Mary was a virgin mother, and the value of the message isn't affected by whether or not the messenger's mother had ever had sex, so I suggest you spend this time asking about subjects that matter." "Do we have souls, and do they go to Heaven or Hell when we die?" "That's a more difficult question to answer. I'll restrict myself to saying that all of your holy books are mostly inaccurate on this topic, but not entirely so. Atheists aren't correct either. Dying isn't an absolute ending, but it wouldn't serve a good purpose for me to explain it in any detail." "Do we have souls?" "Sort of. What you understand by that word isn't very accurate, but there is something that the word soul could be stretched to fit. While there are some individual aspects to it, it'd be more meaningful to say that humanity has a soul which you all contribute to, but that's as much as I want to say about that. A change of topic please." I'd watered the seed, so hopefully the question I was waiting for would grow in someone's mind sooner or later. If not during this visit, then fingers crossed it'd be during the next. There was a momentary pause while people tried to mentally regroup. A woman reporter in the middle of the group called out, "I have a Bible and a cross with me. Would you hold them both and swear you're an angel?" "Sure, but I would've thought my halo proved that." I'd thought of this joke a few days ago and had deliberately chosen not to activate my halo effect for this interview. "What halo?" | "You don't have a halo." | and several other similar comments. "Is the damned thing on the fritz again. Hang on..." I hit myself on the side of the head a few times. The halo blinked on and off a couple of times, then appeared and stayed on. -- "There ya go! Just a loose wire. I should've taken it in for its thousand-year service seven years ago, but I haven't got around to it yet." There was some weak laughter from a couple of the reporters, and from most of the cameramen, but it wasn't a belly-splitter. I'd known it wouldn't be. It was the sort of joke which everyone watching their TVs would think about later, and it help them see me as a "good guy", in the usual (non-divine) sense. "You're a hard audience to get a laugh out of. Lighten up! My arrival doesn't presage Judgment Day, Armageddon or any such End Of Time, because God's intentions are open-ended." -- Meanwhile I'd floated the Bible and cross out of the reporter's hands and was now holding them in each of my mittened hands. I didn't want anyone to ask me to swear in Hebrew, so I didn't waste any time saying, "I swear by Almighty God, on the Holy Bible, and by the Holy Cross, that I am an Archangel of the One True God." I floated them back to her, saying, "There you go." She said, "Please hold them in your bare hands when you do it." "How can you believe swearing an oath to God to be a powerful proof if it can be negated by a thin piece of fabric? Do you think the all-powerful God is fooled or held back by a single layer of cloth? In other words, stop being so superstitiously foolish. As I explained before, I don't wish to show you what racial group this body belongs to because that would cause too many unhelpful reactions. Next question please." "How do you hold us up in the air like this, and the other impossible things you do?" "The Universe is God's to command, and God has commanded it to cooperate with me, so the Universe will comply with many of my requests. I imagine that doesn't help you much, but that's the answer." "You make it sound like the Universe is alive?" "You're getting into the realms of physics now, which most of your audience won't have any interest in. I'll just say that it has some of the aspects of being alive." "What aspects?" "Ask your physicists. I don't want to give you any science you haven't earned for yourself." "So you don't believe in science. Does that mean Intelligent Design is correct?" "Haha. I've been in existence for billions of years, during which I've witnessed life evolve. Intelligent Design is right up there with Political Integrity. To put it bluntly, it's a crock of shit. Of course I believe in science. Don't you believe 1+1=2? Mathematics is a science, you know. -- "Humanity is a very irrational species. Some of you say that because God is so powerful, the lifetime of the Universe must only be a few thousands years rather than billions. How can believing God is powerful be used to justify reducing the magnitude of It's achievement? Isn't it more impressive to believe that humanity is the current-day culmination of an extraordinary series of evolutionary steps, compared with humanity being made in a single step? People who try to limit God are doing so because their egos are weak. They want to feel more important, so they argue that God is smaller. It's a good thing God doesn't take that personally! Haha." "For the last year, someone who calls himself Majestic Countdown has been leaking highly embarrassing government documents. He's been using 'Angel' and 'Michael' as verification codes. Are you associated with him?" "I emailed those documents. I've been observing humanity for quite a while on this visit, and what I saw led to me deciding to shake things up before I leave, culminating in my appearing in front of you the way I am now." "You're leaving soon? When?" "That depends on how humanity reacts to the shaking. Humanity has a couple of serious problems: its leaders are abusing their power in ways that can destroy civilization or humanity totally, and they're so arrogant they refuse to listen to reason. Arrogant people take a LOT of shaking, so I'll keep escalating the shaking until I think it's had the desired effect, and then I'll leave." "What are they doing that could destroy civilization?" "You're probably thinking of specific problems, which are symptoms, not the disease. God could fix problems with a wave of It's non-existent hand, but humanity would simply dig itself other civilization-destroying holes. Remember, I spoke of how important freewill is to God, and that It's letting humanity be all it can be. I'm not here to tell you to fix Global Warming, religious-inspired killing or any other specific issue. I'll shake you up to encourage you to do some thinking for yourselves, but what you decide to do and how you decide to do it is up to you. -- "The most I'm willing to do is point out that you can't arrive at good decisions now because your leaders are corrupting the decision-making process for their own short-term purposes. Your leadership crisis is so entrenched and widespread that you're not going to be able to prevent or fix critical problems until you fix your leadership one. That shouldn't be taken as my endorsing any political party. I think in terms of centuries, not election cycles. None of your political parties existed the last time I visited Earth, and I'm sure they won't exist the next time I visit." "Would God truly let us destroy ourselves?" "Sure. It gave you freewill knowing that was possible." "What would God do then? Flood the Earth and restart with another Noah and the Ark?" "Haha. You should've learned enough about God from me already to know It doesn't do quaint things like that. If humanity pursues a path toward self-destruction, God won't intervene. Your destiny is yours to choose." "Then why did He create us?" "God didn't create you. It created a Universe for the expression of freewill, and the Universe evolved you." "But if we destroy ourselves, won't that mean everything will have been in vain?" "Why would it mean that? Humanity's extinction affects a miniscule proportion of the Universe, and in another few hundred millennia, something else will have evolved to sentience here anyway. If you destroy yourselves, it's not even a pimple in the road the Universe is heading down." Private Guy said (unfortunately without introducing himself; most people were forgetting to do that), "You're saying there are alien species throughout the Universe?" "I wondered how long it'd take before one of you was open-minded enough to ask that. I can't answer that question, except I will give you a rule of thumb. If there are two ways God could've done something, believe in the most impressive option." "Why haven't we met any aliens yet?" "I won't talk about that." "Why not?" "Because God wants you to have freewill. There are very few types of information I can give you without compromising that. Verifiable scientific data is the worst sort." A male reporter commented sarcastically, "How very convenient for you." "No, it's very inconvenient. It'd be much easier to get you to do what I want if I wasn't so constrained." The sarcastic reporter thought I needed it explained, "I meant it's a good excuse for your not providing us with proof that you really are an angel from God." "Yes, I know you meant that. I don't need an excuse for not proving it, because I'm prohibited from proving it. There always has to be ambiguity so you've got room to exercise freewill. I agree that this makes this all seem like a big con job and I'm happy that you suspect that." Private Guy asked, "Explaining why we haven't met any aliens doesn't remove any of our freewill, because we've got no way of knowing whether your answer was true or not." "Not you personally, but humanity might decide to put a great deal more effort into space exploration than it would have if I hadn't answered, or maybe put in a lot less. Or humanity might develop technology to negate the reason I said the aliens were failing to contact you. Or if humanity eventually encounters those aliens and finds out that my reason was true - especially if the reason was unusual and specific - then those future humans might believe they'd just discovered definitive proof that I was who I claimed to be, and that God existed, making believers out of everybody. There are too many changes of behavior that could send humanity down a very different path than it would've gone otherwise, so I won't answer questions like that. -- "What I can do are things like have you stand on an invisible, flying platform. God prefers you not to self-destruct, so I can do some things to ensure that you do have a path to follow. But if you can turn your path away from the cliff, you'll have to choose for yourselves where it goes." "Why do bad things happen?" asked the next reporter, obviously bored with the talk about freewill. "Because of freewill." "I don't understand?" "Let's say your wife dies of cancer..." "I'm not married." "Imagine if I'd said 'Your wife dies of cancer' to someone who is married? That person would be deeply worried. To continue; let's say your wife dies of cancer and some years later your child grows up to become a research doctor who invents a cure for cancer. Was your first wife's death a 'Bad Thing'? Because without her dying, millions of others might've died until someone else invented the cure..." "Why should anyone die of cancer? God should eliminate it." "To quickly finish my previous point: if God chose which present-time events to allow based on It's judgment of their future outcomes, then It would be steering humanity, thus depriving you of freewill. To answer your interruption: cancer and other 'Bad Things' are allowed to exist because they provide the force behind evolution. Survival of the fittest wouldn't work if every creature survived." "So? What does that matter, now that we've evolved?" "I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you're not the pinnacle of evolutionary perfection that you seem to think you are. I know it's hard to believe, but God's still hoping for something a little better." Even my victim laughed. I was sure that most of the reporters didn't know what evolution actually was, but they still recognized a deserved put-down. "Speaking of perfection, your body's shape is extreme?" "Yes it is." "Did he look like that, or did you change him?" "I found myself a healthy and physically impressive human, although he's on the short side. I would've preferred him to be an awe-inspiring seven feet tall, but changing human bodies isn't one of my abilities. I will admit to finding the size of his cock amusing. Humanity is unlike any other species. You surround yourselves with sex everywhere you look, yet pretend it doesn't exist or is bad. It's essential for the species, it's one of the strongest psychological drives you have, and it's a lot of fun for you, but you create futile moral indignation over its appeal. You're a very self-dishonest species. I've been especially amused when the condemning looks this cock has earned me have come from those of you who've had YOUR external sexual characteristics expanded. Please put your hand up if you've had breast implants installed." There were fifteen news teams on the platform. All the cameramen and sound technicians were male, as were six of the reporters, none of whom had elected to get breast implants. There were nine females who could've responded. Two of them put their hands up without hesitation, presumably having already gone public over the issue. One hesitantly raised her hand halfway, not indicating half a job, only indicating reluctance. That left four liars. Amusingly, all but two of the female reporters had bags in their breasts. The two that didn't, VERY obviously didn't need them. The hesitant confessor's cameraman was surprised and amused. I searched her handbag with a sight blob, seeing business cards in the name of Lydia Bowman. I'd heard some of the reporters call her Lydia when they'd been talking before the Q&A session started, giving me the confirmation I needed. I said, "Congratulations on being honest Lydia Bowman, even though you were clearly reluctant to do so. That speaks well of your character. What I find amusing is that some of your compatriots are lying by not raising their hands when they should. Is it acceptable for reporters to lie on camera?" One of the liars answered, "Many women think it's private." "Yet they get it done because they want the results to be publicly noticed. Personally I think you can do almost anything you want with your body, if it's not offensive to others, so I'm not criticizing women who've had the operation done. Nor do I care much about whether they tell others or not. I'm just amused by your criticizing my body's large external sex organ, yet not admitting you've enlarged your own when I turn the question around. It's hypocritical of the four of you that didn't put your hands up when you should have, which is the point I wanted to make. Because humans lie to themselves and others about sex, you've made a minefield out of an issue that should be a great deal more joyful and less problematic than it is. Enough on that topic I think. Time for a change of question." One of the two 'natural beauties' asked, "Who're the women who lied about not having the surgery?" "I don't like your motivation for asking that question so I'm not going to answer it. I know who the liars are, and that's all that matters. One day they will be judged." "We get judged when we die?" "Your contribution to mankind's soul is measured. That's how God measures your progress. It's not interested in your physical or mental accomplishments, only your moral ones." Private Guy asked, "So the purpose of the Universe is to develop moral beings?" "It's more that immoral beings tend to destroy themselves and other species, delaying the Universe's development. Immorality is the most damaging consequence of freewill, so God keeps an eye on it. Which is why I was sent here." A reporter asked, "So what happens to people who're judged badly?" "Something happens, but you wouldn't understand it and it wouldn't be helpful for me to try to explain. To be honest, I can't say that I understand it fully myself either. God didn't give me powers in that area, so I don't know anything about it by direct experience, only from what I've picked up from the angels who work in that department when we get together for beers after work on Fridays." "Huh? You drink beer?" "You're not very good at detecting when I'm being silly. I often don't take myself seriously, to make my existence more enjoyable. I have to amuse myself because I left my deck of cards in my other pants." It got a couple of chuckles this time. "Why do you keep saying 'my existence' rather than 'my life'? Aren't you alive?" #14: "That's a definitional issue. I don't have a body, and in some respects I'm not even an "I" because I overlap with other angels in some ways, and with God in many ways. I'm a creation of God's will rather than an entity that was born. Plus, it seems to me that one of the requirement of being called 'alive' is that it should be possible to be 'not alive', but that's not something that can happen to me. I can exist and not exist, but I can't die, so maybe I can't be said to have a life." "Then why were you so scared of having guns pointed at you?" #4: "For several reasons: It demonstrates a very rude lack of respect, which annoys me in much the same way as lying to me does. It was a thoughtless attempt to exercise power over me. Your society exercises excessive power over people far too routinely and with an appalling absence of moral consideration. And most importantly, I wasn't scared for myself because only God can end my existence, but I was worried about my host. He is a human so his body can be killed by bullets. Obviously I have some very effective ways of defending him, but I'm not infallible. The people who attacked my host's body would live to regret it, but that wouldn't bring my host back to life. God won't let us do that unless there's a very good reason for it, and my sloppiness wouldn't qualify." With considerable excitement, several reporters asked variations on, "You can bring people back to life?" "If God empowers me to. That shouldn't excite you because you know Jesus came back to life after having been crucified. But as I said, God doesn't like us doing it without good reason. There was a good reason with Jesus, because his death and resurrection were part of his angel's plan to inspire a new religion. He had prior permission from God to resurrect Jesus or he wouldn't have let the crucifixion happen. I don't have any such permission for my host, so unless the circumstances of his death were extraordinary, he'd stay dead. I wouldn't want to be the indirect cause of that." "Could you could bring back someone else, such as Elvis?" "What is it with your society's fixation on Elvis! He was killing himself with bad food and drugs. If I brought him back, he'd quickly kill himself again, especially because all of his friends and family have grown older and changed in other ways. You're barking up the wrong tree suggesting Elvis." "Could you bring back Jesus?" "Once again, I COULD, but I WON'T. Why on Earth would you want to bring back someone who would completely fail to understand modern life? The poor guy would have no chance of making the transition. He'd be a highly distressed fish out of water." "But think of all the questions we could ask him! We could find out what truly happened! Find out..." "Stop right there! I would NEVER bring back someone to suffer so others can benefit so selfishly. It's unacceptably immoral of you to suggest that, especially considering how much Jesus suffered the first time. If anyone is resurrected - which is highly unlikely - it'd be done for their and their loved ones' benefit, not so society can squeeze more songs out of them or have its curiosity satisfied. Please try to think morally; I highly recommend it. We'll drop that subject. Next question please." This was the WHOLE reason for my "Angel Plan"! The purpose of this interview was to talk about religion until someone asked something that I could use to get us onto the resurrection issue. In a later appearance, Archangel Michael is going to follow up on the issue, and that's going to culminate in the angel bringing Mark Anderson back to life. Because Mark's body has been lost, someone will have to volunteer to give up theirs. Somehow I have a feeling that Ron Fisher will feel so indebted to the Anderson family for how wonderfully they've treated him that he'll volunteer. It will be a publicly SPECTACULAR plan, but it's essentially a very simple one: "Me will change me into me so I can live the rest of my life as myself." It's a very self-contained plan. After a momentary pause while the reporters thought of a new subject, one of them asked, "Can you turn water into wine?" "Sure. Do you want me to do it for you?" #18: #3: "YES!" from everyone. "Okay. It'd normally take me a several hours to change a cup of water into a cup of wine because changing the atomic and molecular structures of so many atoms is an EXTREMELY tedious task, so I'll give you the short version of the demonstration. We'll start with a small amount of water and I'll only change part of it into wine. You can take it away to be analyzed and let the public know later. Sorry I can't create dramatic TV for you by waving my arm and having it happen instantly, but there are limits on what I'm capable of, and transmutation isn't something archangels normally need to do as part of our jobs. Bianca, can I use the bottle of water you've got in your bag please?" "How did you know I've got water in there?" Several of them had water. I chose her because I knew her name. "Angels have better senses than humans. Can I have the bottle please?" "All right." Bianca pulled it out of her bag and held it up to me. I floated it across to me, taking it in my left hand. I removed the cap with my right hand, then poured nearly all the water over the side of the platform, keeping a very small amount in the container. I poured most of that into the cap, then lowered the bottle while I held the cap of water up in front of my face, studying it intently (that was the body language anyway, which was actually irrelevant as I couldn't see through my mask). I held the cap steady, never moving my head away from apparently staring at it. After thirty seconds, I lifted the bottle up and carefully poured the cap's contents back into it, screwing the cap on afterward. I floated the bottle across to Bianca, saying, "There you go. I was asked for wine rather than pure alcohol, so if you have that analyzed they should find a diluted white wine that's as similar as I could make to the wine your society drinks these days." (In case you are wondering, they really will find wine in the bottle. That was an easy trick to do with my abilities. If you can't work out how, you'll read about it when I explain the trick to my families. There's a clue only a few paragraphs below.) I added, "Being highly motivated servants of the public's right to know, there's no need for me to sully you with a demonstration of my transmuting a base metal into gold, so let's move on to another topic." "I've got a nickel," proudly boasted one of them. "Would you change that into gold for us?" "For us or for you? The answer is no. You've seen transmutation done once already and you'll get the results from Bianca shortly. Transmutation is tedious work, especially for a nickel's quantity of atoms. I'd much rather spend the time zooming around the sky with a group of lifeguards." "Or with reporters," suggested one of the male reporters hopefully. "No. I'd rather give rides to people who provide a valuable public service." "We do that!" insisted another male reporter. "You don't SERVE the public, you're part of a SALES operation. That's why such a high proportion of female reporters think it's necessary to get boob jobs and why all of you reporters are so well dressed even though the cameramen aren't. Do you want me to explain my thoughts about the moral decay of the journalistic profession, or would you rather ask me questions about myself?" The latter, it turned out. [And apparently the sacrosanct "Public's Right To Know" must have some gaps in it, because the last few seconds were never aired. Nor was the discussion about my cock, so I guess reporters and cocks must be similar.] There's no need to quote the rest of the Q&A session. I'd achieved what I'd wanted by getting the resurrection idea out there, and the rest of the session was just me spouting more crap for a while so the ending of the session wouldn't be associated with my resurrection comments. It wasn't all easy, for example, there were several questions about Islam and Judaism that I had to be very careful with. Fortunately, I'd anticipated worrisome issues like these and I'd done the necessary research so I could sound knowledgeable while I politely ducked saying anything of any substance. The only thing of note I did during the remaining session was to suggest to the cameramen that they point their cameras at the leader of the three suspended Christians. He'd been dangling long enough that he'd gotten over his terror, and an entirely different reaction had started, something the cameras were easily able to record. It took the Christian men a while to notice they were being filmed since they were all busy looking elsewhere. When my pointing out their points point had been made, I floated the three Christians to near one of the coastguard vessels that were trying to keep order, then dropped them in the water because that was more fun than depositing them neatly on the boat. The naked CIA woman, I lowered into a boat containing a bunch of heavy drinking, male party animals. There were too many other boats around for anything TOO bad to happen to her; just the right amount of bad, I hoped. After a suitable period of time, and after a topic that ended with a good note, I said, "I think this is a good time to end the session..." I was interrupted by a dozen shouted questions. I suddenly dropped the floor another six inches, shutting them up very effectively. Once the females stopped their screams, I commented, "Let me repeat myself. I think this is a good time to end the session. Do any of you believe that what you think is more important than what I think? No? That's very wise of you." I brought the cameramen's platform back into contact with the reporters', joining them together again while I ignored their questions. Then I recreated the helipad, motioning an invitation to the helicopters to land on it. I didn't create the walkway, as I intended to float the reporters into their choppers as soon as they landed as that'd be quicker and easier. The first helicopter to land was one that had arrived recently and which contained important looking men in suits. Their helicopter had moved in, then hovered around near where the "H" had been last time, the other choppers not contesting its position. Presumably the important people had made their intentions known by radio, and had the authority to make it stick. Four guys gingerly got out, and walked toward my newly recreated connecting path. I'd extended it only half the distance to the reporters' platform, as I was pretty sure I didn't want to talk with these suits. Any group where half of them bring a briefcase to a midair meeting with an angel had to be horribly anal. When they walked into my proximity range, I sensed that one of the younger guys was thinking about clenching his right, briefcase-holding, index finger, and was also visualizing a line projecting from the side of the briefcase to me. It was only a plan at this stage, not a decision to act, so there was no urgency to my reaction, but checking it out seemed like a good idea. I looked inside the briefcase, to find that it contained a metal frame holding a pistol firmly in place, pointing forward at the side of the case. There was a cable attached to the gun's trigger that went around a roller on the frame then up to the briefcase's handle, where it obviously connected to a remote trigger. Acting immediately had gained some sudden appeal. I canceled the NP-points under the nearly hovering helicopter, using all my spare ki to flood the briefcase carrier's finger with EKP to make it harder for him to pull the trigger. I also redirected one of my sight blobs to look for the helicopter's fuel line. That barely took a second to find, because by now I knew where to look, so I yanked it loose. I canceled all the walkway except for immediately under the assassin/guard/whatever, using the large amount of force that freed up to push the front of both cases away from pointing at anyone, especially me. The three other suits all screamed as they suddenly started falling. I paid attention to all my senses to find out whether any of them would carry out any sort of attack on me, especially the other young guy who was also carrying a briefcase, but all their attention was on falling, waving their arms, panicking, etc. Meanwhile I was using some EKP to project the bad guy opening his hand, while I used considerable force to put the case out of his weakened grip. I moved it a few yards away then turned it to face him. I asked, "Any last prayers?" "PLEASE DON'T!..." I pulled the trigger, shooting him in the stomach. I don't think there's anything vital in that area, provided the guy gets medical attention soon, which he presumably will. I just wanted to make a very clear statement, and I didn't mind that it must've hurt like a bitch. I 'disappeared' the floor on him (it was already invisible, but you know what I mean), and he fell screaming into the water twenty feet below. [[I was curious whether he'd been an assassin or not. A little bit of digging just informed me that he'd been a Government-assigned guard. Apparently the two "important Government people" (State Department officials who happened to be in LA at the time) didn't trust me so they'd asked to be accompanied by guards when they came to talk with me. As a result of which they'd gotten dropped in the sea before they'd said a single word, and the guard who'd been conscientiously thinking about shooting me had gotten himself shot in the stomach.]] I flicked the gun's safety on, then floated the briefcase toward the reporters, making sure to keep it pointed away from anyone just in case. I said, "The briefcase contains a concealed gun. I've flicked the safety on, but please be careful not to stand in front of the hole in the case's side or to grasp its handle because the trigger is built into that. I'll open it so you can see for yourselves." The briefcase was locked, but it wasn't built to withstand several tons of pressure pushing out from the inside. It ruptured, and a little extra pushing to clear the ripped fabric clearly revealed the frame and gun. The cameramen had only just started filming that, when I said, "Some of you might want to film the chopper those guys came in, because that's going down too." Its engine had already cut out and it was falling. When I'd canceled its support, it'd risen to only 100 feet ASL when its engine died, so it wasn't going to take long to hit the water. I grabbed the four newest swimmers and moved them away from the falling chopper before dropping them back in the water. A coastguard launch was already going to their rescue. We watched while the chopper went {Splash}. When the splashdown drama was over, I commented, "Today's turning into an expensive day for helicopters. I wonder if you'll wise up before you run out of them." I tossed the briefcase contraption into the water, then recreated the helipad again. I was eager to finish this. Having only two sight blobs meant they were kept VERY busy tracking everything going on around me. Fortunately I didn't need to observe the reporters often as I could keep track of them with proximity; but the several military aircraft and the boats needed very careful attention. I couldn't ignore the helicopters either, in case someone on them started doing something unpleasant. None of the helicopter pilots were 'landing' on my pad, either because they didn't want to experience the same fate as their predecessor, or possibly because they all wanted their reporters to be the last to leave in case something else interesting happened. If the reporters weren't going to leave the way they came, then I'd have to provide an alternative. Dumping them in the water was too cruel, and flying them up to their individual helicopters was too risky because the choppers could suddenly bob down, decapitating their news-crew. The quickest and easiest solution was to push us to the beach and deposit them all there. They could arrange their own transport after that. I canceled the helipad, saying, "Your rides are playing reluctance games, so I'll let you off on the beach." I started moving us that way, while several of them protested that they wanted to get picked up by their chopper. "They had their chance to land but they chose not to. I value my time too highly to waste it, which I hope people will remember in the future." I had enough force to push us sideways with over 1 g of acceleration, which was far too much as they would've fallen off the back. We were close enough to shore that a third of a g was ample, as it'd take less than a minute for us to get feet-dry. During the trip the reporters had moaned about my decision, when they weren't asking me more questions that I was ignoring. Interrupting them, I asked the Private Guy, "Do you still want a personal ride after I drop everyone else off?" "Yes please! I'd love what you did with the lifeguards. That's what you're talking about isn't it?" "Sure." Several of the reporters moaned even more. Apparently they thought I was being unfair by choosing who I spent my time with, after I'd usurped his helicopter. To be fair, in their shoes I would've moaned too, because flying around is COOL, which was largely why I was doing so much of it. After Private Guy agreed to his ride, I plucked him off the big platform and settled him on mine, increasing our separation from the noisy platform. I told him, "A few minutes' joyride with me isn't without its risks. It's possible the military might try to forcefully intervene, which could be bad news for you if my host's body was taken out before I could get you back to land safely. Are you sure you want to do this?" "I'd never stop regretting it if I didn't. You've handled them easily so far and I don't think they'd fire on you over the city, so I'll take the chance." I explained that I'd let him steer in the same way as I had for the lifeguards, describing how that was, and asking him not to take too long because I had a date with a pretty mermaid. He thought about that for a moment, then realized I was pulling his leg (I couldn't pull hers) and he laughed. We'd arrived at the beach. I'd had to use NP to fence off an area so dozens of spectators wouldn't run into it, but otherwise it was a simple procedure to drop the platform onto the sand and then cancel it. I tilted my passenger onto his own sled, then said, "After you." He shot straight toward the CBD, at only a few hundred feet AGL and at top speed, which I limited to 300 mph to keep some of my capabilities secret. I'd restarted my wings too, in the hope that would make the authorities think that I couldn't travel inconspicuously at night. The helicopters had trouble matching our speed, which pleased me. The fewer aircraft I had to keep eyes on the better, because the number of "eyes" I had was terribly limited. He made a beeline straight for one particular high-rise building, and had a lot of fun showing off to his VERY impressed friends - circling around the building, doing loops and yahooing it up. A couple of them held up phones and pointed at him to answer their calls. He asked me, "Can I take calls?" "We have to finish this very soon, so I suggest you concentrate on what you're doing. You can talk to them when it's over." He did a couple more loops and other aerobatics, then he headed us back the way we'd come, slaloming around several other high-rises. Once we were free of the CBD, the helicopters started closing in, so I requested he take us way up above them, which he did. Their climbing speed is far less than mine - less than 20 mph compared with my 300 - so we very easily got above them then outpaced them horizontally. He took us on a fairly straight line, with some climbs and dives, to Santa Monica Airport. We came in safely from the side, slowing down above the helicopter I recognized as his. We were going slow enough to talk now, and he started thanking me profusely. I was worried that the military might be more likely to try something while I was alone, so I wanted to make that possible only from the four nearby fighters (there were several others much higher and farther away), which I could keep reasonably good track of if there was nothing else distracting me. So I cut Private Guy off, eager to get away before the horde of helicopters caught up, "Don't worry about it. I enjoy seeing joy. I gotta run. Have a good life, bye." I lowered him to the ground. #26: [No one special. Just an internet millionaire who was smart and sensible. Those two traits don't necessarily occur at the same time but did in his case, as indicated by his laughing at my jokes.] I headed for the coast only two miles away, flying just above building height and accelerating quickly to a good speed. It only took seconds to reach the coast, flying low over the beach and straight out to sea. The fighters accompanied me, but that was their usual behavior. They didn't dive at me, launch missiles, or any other alarming action. Half a mile out, I rapidly decelerated down to about 10 mph, created my enclosed submarine around me, then dived into the water. I liked to imagine that it surprised the heck out of everyone. I descended as rapidly as possible, to get deep enough to be safe from anything the fighters could fire at me. Unlike scuba diving, with my submarine there are no sore ears or any other problems from changing air pressure as the submarine remains a constant size, therefore the air remains at atmospheric pressure. Diving so fast, it only took three or four seconds before I felt safe. I thought it was pretty unlikely that the fighters would have depth charges installed when they were sent on a mission to watch an angel. That's presuming depth charges even exist for fighters. I'd never heard of it, but that's not saying much. I dived a little deeper, then turned northwest, paralleling the coast, amused to see the four fighters descend to fly low over the area where I'd first dived. They searched the area until the military and every other helicopter arrived. I knew that helicopters could carry depth charges and sonar buoys, but I wasn't surprised when the ones searching for me seemed to lack any of that equipment. I sped away from the area at a steady 15 mph, making the impossible task of locating me even harder for them. I aimed for the offshore location where my clothes should be. Finding them took less than a minute because sight blobs move through the water as fast as they move through air. Getting the bag out of the water and into my submarine without getting a drop of water on me was easy too (I'll leave working out how that was done as an exercise for the reader). I put my clothes on top of my angel costume, and for the lack of anything better to do, continued my submarine journey north up the coast. I stayed close enough to the shore to check out the coastal houses. Many were empty, but of those that were occupied, a very high proportion of them were watching Archangel Michael on TV. Admittedly these homes were close to where the action had taken place which might distort the statistics, but if even half that proportion extrapolated across the country, then it'd been a MAJOR event. I hadn't expected otherwise, but I still enjoyed seeing it confirmed. I continued north for several hours, changing my vocal tract back to Ron-normal, waiting for darkness while thinking about the rest of my plan. One VERY important aspect of it - probably the most important - was that I could stop it at any time. I wouldn't have started this plan without discussing it at length with my families if it'd been difficult to abort, but nothing could be easier. If Archangel Michael never reappeared, then no harm would be done to me or my families. Maybe even some good, because even just one appearance would shake people up and get some interesting conversations and maybe improved national behaviors going. But my intention was to reappear in a week or two. In Washington DC seemed appropriate, but it didn't really matter, although not LA again because that'd make me appear small-scale. Popping up briefly in another country would be great too, but the travel time for that was too long. If my plan goes all the way through, Ron Fisher will be getting a great deal of scrutiny, so I'll have to make it seem as if Ron is in town for every future angel appearance. With my families' cooperation, that should be doable, but not if I go on trips that take the best part of 24 hours. What Archangel Michael would say and do during his reappearances would depend on how the public reacted over the next week or so, and how Government employees such as the Army and Air Force reacted when I reappeared. I wanted as few appearances as possible, while still making it seem like a reasonable progression had led to the need for Michael to resurrect someone. Two more appearances seemed the minimum number. The first of those two to say it was necessary to resurrect someone and to get the public to start suggesting candidates. The last appearance to say that I'd chosen to resurrect Mark Anderson, and to describe what doing so would entail: A volunteer would be necessary to provide a living body, Mark's having been lost by the evil CIA. That I'd be changing Mark's body chemistry because humanity isn't ready for living for hundreds of years yet. That I'd be leaving a minor angel with Mark to protect him from future harassment. That'd be a light blob, hehe. ------- Chapter 333: The Angel Heads Home Thursday, April 5 (Continued) to Saturday, April 14, 2007 When it was dark enough, I surfaced and flew east until I reached the Cascades. I flew north along the spine of the mountain range, staying very close to the ground and below the nearest ridge. I sometimes divert from my northward journey to enter a deep gully and follow it east or west until it got too shallow, then I'd pop out and resume going north. If they were tracking me with some sort of technology, I wanted to make it as hard as possible for them. I stopped to recover my stash of gear (watch and wallet mostly), getting changed out of my A-man costume at the same time because there was little chance I'd need to become him again on this trip. I carried it closer to home, hiding it about fifty miles from Corvallis, then flew to my bike. I pedaled home, searching very carefully for any unwelcome activity, especially when I got very close to home. There was no sign of anything wrong. About 750 feet from home, I slowed down to barely moving so I could make completely sure there was no one hidden on the side of the road, around our gate, overlooking it, or inside it. When I was close enough, I checked inside the house. It took me a few seconds to find anybody because they were all watching Archangel reruns in the games room, probably in that room because it was the most secure. Everyone looked serious, but not highly fearful or angry. I checked the grounds and the house, finding nothing untoward, so I rode up to the gate and let myself in. One of the guards spotted me and came over, asking, "Hi Ron. What do ya think of the news?" "I've been out of touch. What's happened?" "You haven't heard?" "I've been riding and thinking. I've been having girl troubles recently and wanted to take some time to think about it." In the guards' opinions, the only "girl troubles" I had was trouble choosing which girl to have sex with next. They thought I was the luckiest guy alive: I'd arrived a destitute, unskilled wheelbarrow pusher, and now I was a major millionaire who slept with three girls every night and several others casually. After he'd recovered from the shock, the guard said, "At lunchtime an angel appeared in LA. He said he was an angel, and he could do some amazing shit." "Haha. If it happened in LA, it has to be some sort of movie gimmick to get publicity." "He was flying through the air. Him and other people..." "Wires or trick photography obviously." "Wait till you see it on TV. It'll blow your mind!" "You haven't been smoking something unusual, have you?" "I wanted to when I saw the news. It's VERY weird shit. You'll see." I rode my bike around to my garage, having an abbreviated version of the same conversation with another guard on the way. I parked my bike then walked through the tunnel to the games room. Just as I was about to enter the room, #12: #25: #12: #All: I entered the room. Everyone turning at the noise and showing some very strong emotions upon seeing me. Fortunately mostly relief and happiness; but there was definitely some "You're gonna get it" on the parents' faces too. I NP'd everyone except Donna's lips closed, motioning them to come to where I was standing. I also indicated that they should leave their cellphones behind. Julia jumped to her feet in a shot, closely followed by the rest. No one said anything, which caused Donna to ask, "Why's no one talking?" I answered, "We'll talk in a moment, Donna, just as soon as everyone is close enough." A couple of seconds later everyone had walked onto the floor of my NP-box, so I closed the side and roof. The sound from the TV immediately cut off. I placed one hand in front of my mouth, holding it just in front of my lips so I could speak but any video bug wouldn't be able to see my lips move, in case there was a video bug and the recording was sent to someone who could read lips. I said, "I've found a way to cut off the sounds of our conversation from any audio bugs..." A deluge of questions started, including from a very proud and excited Donna. I yelled, "SHUT UP!" That surprised everyone into silence, so I continued, "Cover your mouths like I am, so any video recordings can't be used to lip-read what we're going to say. This conversation is going to be a VERY secret one. It's suspicious enough that any video bug will see that we're talking but will have lost sound, but we absolutely cannot let them lip-read this conversation." Donna had her hand over her mouth and was repeating her excited demand that I confirm that I was the angel. I'd been wondering how to politely exclude Donna but it was obviously too late for that; her huge excitement making it obvious what she thought. Hand over mouth, Mom said, "She recognized the lights, so you might as well tell her." "Yes Donna, that was..." A VERY excited Donna interrupted, "How fast can you fly? Can you take me? I'd LOVE to fly like that! Can you take all of us? How come you never told us before? When can you take me?..." Her hand had started lowering, so I grabbed it with my real hand and slapped it against her mouth forcefully. #1: My mouth was still covered with my other hand, so I sternly stated, "Keep your mouth covered or I'll kick you out of the room. I'm serious! This is too important to risk people knowing what we're saying. Before I say anything, have you all been cautious about what you've been saying before?" They nodded or said, "Yes" in various ways, but there was also some sheepish looks, so I suspected they hadn't been as cautious as they should've been. There was nothing I could do about the past, but I'm going to make damned sure I don't say "Yes I am the angel" in a way any lip-reader could decipher. I said, "I can go about five hundred miles per hour, Donna, and I'll take you for a flight as soon as we're sure it's safe after..." "WHEN? Can we do it tomorrow?" "No we can't. During the day is far too risky because people will see us. I only fly at night, and not again until things calm down. That'll probably take a few weeks." "You flew at daytime in LA. We saw you on TV. So why can't you take me..." Mom interrupted, "Enough Donna! Everyone else wants to talk with Ron for reasons much more important than your having fun." -- To me, Mom said, "Why ON EARTH did you pull such a stunt?" I answered, "It's the first step in a plan that leads to the angel proving its divinity by resurrecting Mark Anderson. I can stop the plan at any time, but I get my life back if it goes all the way to the end. I REALLY want that back because living as Ron Fisher feels like an empty waste of time rather than anything satisfying." "What plan?" asked Julia. I explained my plan. It was a simple one, so explaining it didn't take long, even with having to be cautious not to let Donna know that light blobs were my creation rather than helpful aliens that could accurately judge when human girls were ready to start having sex. The parents had been ready to judge my plan harshly, but it ended up getting some respect from them. Admittedly mostly because they liked that it could be stopped at any time, but they also liked that a small angel would be staying to protect me afterward. Not only would that provide a lot of protection, but if any weird things were subsequently observed around me, they could be attributed to the angel. Donna's presence made it best not to list what "weird things" could be, but they could include light blobs, my using NP around the house (it's amazing how often it has minor uses), through to the family flying up to have breakfast on top of the Cascades. In other words, my plan didn't just allow me to resume my life as Mark, it also provided some long-term security that the original Mark never would have had. My plan certainly didn't get enthusiastic support though, and especially neither did my starting to execute it without discussing it with anyone first. I defended myself with, "Three weeks ago I told you I had something large and complex I wanted you all to think about and to discuss, but we needed to be in the new house for security reasons and so most of you would've stopped being so utterly fixated on decorating to the exclusion of all else. You couldn't give me a date so I had to start without you. My plan has to be carried out while the weather is still cold so Ron can wear clothes bulky enough to hide his new body. If I'd waited for the decorating to be mostly finished, I'd have had to delay the plan for at least six months, and I don't want to spend another boring six months as Ron if I can avoid it." "Why is cold weather so important?" asked Prof. "I wanted the angel to dress in a way that showed his body very clearly so no one would suspect later that the angel was really Mark or Ron. I don't want people to wonder about that, especially as the angel is the same height as Ron. It took me three weeks to change my body from Ron's to the angel's, which is about a thousand times too slow for me to go back and forth whenever I need to, so it has to be done at a time of year when Ron can remain fully clothed between angel's appearances, to hide the changes to his body. People would think it was suspicious for Ron to wear bulky clothes in summer, and it'd only take one look at Ron's cock to confirm that Ron and the angel were the same person, so that suspicion can't be allowed." I'd deliberately referred to my cock, rather than my body in general, hoping to get a reaction from Julia. I'd keep referring to it until Julia swallowed the bait, so to speak. Julia isn't bashful, so she responded right away, "But your cock isn't that big. We assumed you were wearing a dildo." "I don't want to wear a dildo because I can't risk being caught doing anything fake. I want it to be totally lifelike and totally unlike Mark's and Ron's. It's been much larger than normal for the best part of three weeks now, but you never noticed because you were too busy agonizing over the choice of pillowcases and other decorating issues which were far more important to you than your husband." "That's not true! You're FAR more important to me than decorating." "Then how come you never noticed that my cock is twice as long and three times as thick as before? Isn't that the sort of thing a wife should notice?" "You must've changed it very recently." "Nope. I started changing it three weeks ago, and it was one of the quickest things to change because it's a relatively small change. Plus you never noticed any of my muscles changing either. It's been over a month since you even looked at my body, let alone since we made love. That's why..." "It CAN'T be THAT long!" "It DAMNED WELL is! Why do you think three weeks ago I said I couldn't discuss anything complex with you until you'd finished decorating. Your head is so wrapped up in decorating that you haven't even got a clue what your husband looks like these days." "You should've said something..." "Are you saying that I need to remind you that I'm more important than pillowcases?" "Ahh..." Vanessa joined in, "When was the last time you had sex with Ron, Julia?" "Ahh, I can't remember. It might be as long as he says." Carol added, "Me too. I'm just as much at fault as Julia." I corrected her, "Not nearly as much as Julia, Carol. Julia swept you up in her decorating hysteria. You've never behaved this way before, while Julia has a history of getting excessively carried away. Fortunately Ava is a good girlfriend. She noticed, unlike my two so-called wives." Everyone looked at Ava. She was smart enough not to side with Julia on this one, just commenting, "It was noticeably larger two and half weeks ago, and too big for comfort for the last week." As Ava's timing implies, I'd been waiting for my musculature to catch up before the angel appeared in public. Cocks can apparently grow faster than muscles, maybe because of all the practice they get. "I've been busy for the last week," Julia attempted hopefully. I answered, "It's been NOTICEABLE for two and a half weeks, as has my extreme muscular developments, and you've been too busy to make love to your husband for over a month." Vanessa added, "There's no excuse for your ignoring Ron so much, Julia. We've warned you many times that your obsessiveness could lead to trouble, and I suspect your and Carol's neglecting Ron so badly has been a large part of the reason he's attempting such a risky plan. If it blows up in our faces, the disaster will be laid partly at your feet." Julia and Carol burst into tearful apologies. Julia wanted to be VERY abject - she has a liking for the dramatic - and Carol was just terribly apologetic. I was happy to have both girls feel bad for a while because I had suffered from their being insane for the last few weeks, but I eventually started getting them to stop. Apart from their repetitious apologies being pointless, I couldn't really get angry since I'd deliberately hid my body from them for the last few weeks and had told Ava not to mention it. I could see that Julia and Carol had DEFINITELY got the lesson I'd wanted them to get, so it was time to move on. As soon as I got my girls to quiet down, Donna delayed things further by asking to see my new cock. I told her I'd show her later as I didn't want to show any video bugs that I had the same-sized cock as Archangel Michael. Under the covers in bed one night was much safer. Donna's request prompted a forceful conversation with her about the need to keep EVERYTHING secret. She promised she would, but she didn't seem sufficiently concerned, so we all put even more pressure on her, until she looked REALLY worried. I made the point that we weren't in our bug-proof house yet because the women insisted on getting the right pillowcases before we moved in, so in this insecure house Donna couldn't even discuss it with any of us unless I was there and had put everyone in a soundproof box so any bugs couldn't hear us. That caused another digression for me to explain how I'd just realized I could create a soundproof box. It was somewhat embarrassing because if I'd realized earlier I probably could've discussed my plan with everyone, even though half of them were too distracted with decorating issues to think about it properly. Then we got back to discussing my plan, along with occasional reminders for people to keep their hands over their mouths. One thing I was eager to know was, "What's the public response to an angel appearing?" Vanessa answered, "Judging by what the reporters are saying on TV, there's a phenomenal amount of confusion over it. The leading theories are: angel, demon, alien, man-from-the-future and hoax. Man-from-the-future and hoax are running last because many of the things you did were too strange. For a while they thought that flying was your only special ability, which might've meant a scientist who'd made a breakthrough could've been hoaxing everyone, but other people have come forward to describe things you did that were nothing to do with flying. The reporter's bottle of water was found to contain alcohol too. That impressed everyone, including us. How did you do that?" I explained how, "Quite a few of the boats under us had people drinking on them. I just created a small thimble of NP, stole a small amount of white wine from a glass and flew it up near me. While everyone's attention was on me staring at the cap, I divided the wine into small drops which I flew into the bottle which I was holding it down by my left side, the side opposite the cameramen. It was easy." I got quite a few laughs from my families, and some congratulations for pulling such a cute trick. Vanessa added, "That trick's got a lot of people very worked up. Unless the reporter was your partner, it eliminates the hoax possibility and it makes the man-from-the-future seem unlikely. -- "It's hard to tell which theory is winning between angel, demon and alien. Most of the strongly religious groups are claiming you must be a demon because of your blatant sexuality, shooting people, the derision you had for the three preachers who ran at you, and because they strongly disagree with many of the things you said about God. The average person in the street usually goes for angel, alien or 'don't know'. The people you interacted with are much more in favor of angel because you were so nice to them. Not the preachers and law enforcement agents, but the others were impressed by you." "Good. Lots of confusion was what I was going for. That way I'll have to do something to prove my divinity." Mom said, "You certainly succeeded at spreading confusion. There's a great deal of yelling going on, to not much benefit." Dad asked, "What do you intend to do next?" "Find out what people are thinking by watching TV, reading newspapers and listening to people in the street; and to see what the Government's stated position is, if any. I'll wait a week or so, and then reappear to complain about the lack of a suitable reaction to me. -- "I'd really like my next appearance to be my pulling Bush out of the White House. Grabbing him by the back of his belt and flying him out ass first, and holding him suspended by his belt while I tell him that now that I've established my credentials, why hasn't he moved to punish all the criminals that I as Majestic Countdown exposed in my email leaks. I expect he will have done next to nothing about my many leaks, especially because most of them incriminated his own party members. His failure to act would give me a great excuse to prove my divinity by offering to resurrect someone. Unfortunately grabbing Bush would probably be too dangerous, so I'll have to do it with someone else. I haven't decided who yet, but it'll be someone I can have the same theme of discussion with." The conversation went on for quite a while. It had three levels of topic: Low-level individual things I'd done, or was thinking of doing, such as my shooting the guard in the stomach. Mid-level aspects such as how many appearances I'd need and what I'd be trying to achieve with each of them. High-level issues, by far the main one being the question of whether Mark could have a safe life after apparently being resurrected. Safety was the biggest issue. Was it safe for the angel to keep reappearing in public? Would a resurrected Mark be safe? Would the families be safe? We discussed those questions at length. We would have an 'angel' for protection, a light blob with very strong NP that could appear on demand and could even do illegal things if necessary, such as using excessive force to stop the DHS or CIA taking me away for questioning. We also had billions of dollars to protect ourselves with. Mark's resurrection wouldn't require us to pay that money back, as the purpose of a pretrial settlement is to avoid dependence on any truth. In any event, my Fourth Amendment rights had been breached whether or not I was dead. The magnitude of the damages could be questioned by people ignorant of the law, but the angel would be saying that it was going to modify Mark's body so it was no longer usable to teach humans how to live forever. The main purpose for saying that was to keep people from wanting to experiment on me afterward, but it would also strongly imply that Mark's body used to be immortal, giving validity to our damages claim. Another advantage we had was living in a small, mostly non-religious (i.e., sensible), and loyal community. But by far the greatest safety came from my special abilities. I didn't believe anyone could take me out with a pistol, for example, because he'd try to get close enough for an accurate shot, which would put him within my proximity range. The other likely weapon was a rifle, which was the biggest worry. When I am being Archangel Michael I can take precautions against a rifle attack by picking the few locations I'll stand in, such as against a wall with an open space in front of me and nothing overlooking the area. But when I become Mark, I'll have to use sight blobs as my main defense, using them to check out sniper locations around me, plus under and inside my car for bombs before I get into it, inside the jackets and purses of strangers coming near me, etc. It'd be a nuisance, but hopefully it'd fade away as a serious issue after a few weeks, especially if we kept a very low profile. No going on talkshows, no visits to the Vatican, or the like. A few highly aggressive 'angel' interventions against any troublemakers should provide a strong disincentive too. Despite everything we could do, my life as Mark would still be riskier than my life as Ron. There'd be some additional risk to the rest of the families too. The parents were better able to judge those risks than I was, as they understood how the public would react better than I did. On the other side of the coin was that we'd all prefer to have Mark back, especially me. It was the strength of my preference that drove the whole plan, which was something only I could judge. The parents spent quite a long time talking to me about that issue, because it was the key one. To take examples at either extreme, if my life as Ron depressed me so much that it'd drive me to suicide, then we should go ahead with my Angel Plan. Alternatively, if I preferred being Ron to being Mark, then I should abort the plan. The reality was that all of us wanted Mark back, but did we want that enough to take the risk? Which boiled down to whether I was depressed enough to make the risk worthwhile. We discussed that at length, the parents being surprisingly understanding. I was glad they were so understanding, as I would've struggled to put into words how dissatisfying it is to live falsely, but they obviously grasped that well without my having to explain it. Other than the risk issue, the only downside of my changing into Mark was for Carol's and my relationship. We'd have to go back to having a publicly non-sexual relationship. Donna was never publicly sexual with Ron, so my transformation wouldn't make any difference there. There were plenty of upside issues. One that worked very well on the parents, especially Prof, was my telling them that I'd finished studying all the courses for the three degrees a few nights ago. Ron was very limited in what he could do with that knowledge, which probably frustrated Vanessa and Prof more than it frustrated me, and Mom didn't like it either. Dad wasn't really clued in to how important education was, but he understood that the only jobs that Ron could get were similar to the jobs that Dad could get, which he knew were a waste for my intellectual abilities and that I wouldn't enjoy them. Everyone could understand why I wanted to be Mark again, but everyone could also understand the risk of lunatics (religious or otherwise), immoral scientists, and Government agents. After much discussion, we could only agree that despite there being only one con that really mattered (the risk), and there being several pros, the pros roughly equaled the con in value. There wasn't an obvious answer either way, so we decided to wait and see. We adjourned our meeting and returned to the TV. I had a very humble and apologetic Julia sitting in my lap, Carol beside me, and "my only good girlfriend", Ava, on my other side. Donna sat on another chair. I saw her looking toward my cock, then she opened her mouth to say, "Remember you promised to show me..." I clamped her lips and jaw HARD, then ordered, "Go to bed, Donna." I relaxed my clamps. She said, "But..." I clamped her again. I sternly demanded, "GO TO BED!" Mom backed me up, "I agree with Ron; go to bed, Donna. Use the time to do some thinking." Donna looked around, but no one was offering her any support. She tried to apologize, but we wouldn't let her do even that, so she had no choice but to morosely leave the room. It wasn't a good omen for her ability to keep her mouth sensibly shut about my secrets, but hopefully she'd learn from her mistake. Watching TV was amusing. I particularly enjoyed the 'experts' giving their opinions - some of those were hilarious. God knows how anyone could claim to be an expert on fictitious angels or never-encountered aliens, but there were several people who were introduced as such. Of those two types of experts, the alien ones were the best, because SOME of what they said actually sounded reasonable. Not the ones that talked about how aliens could take over human bodies though; they sounded stupid, although not as stupid as the LA wanna-be starlet who offered to let the angel take over her body, gushing, "I'll show you a good time, Big Boy." She was gorgeous, so I imagine there are hundreds of men trying to find out her phone number so they can claim to be the angel. A surprisingly large proportion of the airtime was devoted to the question of my race. There were some vitriolic arguments over that, even though I'd made it quite clear that I was just borrowing the body. Many people thought that because I was hiding my race it had to be a 'bad' one, i.e., that I was a Black. Many Blacks were accusing the Whites of being racist assholes, even while the Blacks were saying they hoped I was Black as that would prove their superiority, i.e., they were being racist too. There were also arguments about my religion, which was just stupid. There were NO comments about my cock - not even during the race debate - because you can't refer to those even indirectly on TV. Probably some people had, but their comments had been cut out. Before 10pm, the major networks showed only above-the-waist pictures of me, other than a few long distance shots of me from the rear, although my costume made even those push the limits of decency. It wasn't until after 10pm, and after "warning" the viewers that they might be disturbed, that a below-the-waist shot was shown. Makayla Rogers' naked breasts were shown several times before my entire clothed torso was shown the first time. The networks occasionally put on a real scientist. A physicist, for example, talking about my abilities. My wings came in for a fair amount of attention (they were very attention getting), but how they worked had the experts stumped. My telekinesis was analyzed more accurately. It discomforted me, but before I'd started executing my Angel Plan I'd accepted that my using NP in public would lead to people analyzing the videotapes and learning some facts about me. Telekinesis was quickly seized on as the likely explanation for many of my miracles. As Vanessa had said before, there wasn't any consensus. I can't write, "There was a lot of uncertainty," because there was actually a considerable amount of certainty: many people were CERTAIN that I was the Devil, others were certain that I was an angel, others were certain I was something else, etc. They were in every possible camp, and in quite a few impossible camps too. Some of them believing I was from Atlantis ('proved' by my diving into the ocean at the end), some that I was Jesus sent to test us, another that I was the spirit of Mother Earth here to warn us about global warming and every other ecologically unsustainable activity. There were quite a few angel experts, and it was fun to watch them arguing with each other. I'd sown not only confusion, but discord as well. Even just my comment that Jesus was a guy inhabited by an angel caused major discord. The boss of the Los Angeles Church of Jesus Christ was particularly incensed at me as I'd deprived him of his helicopter and his church's namesake of his divinity. There was also an amusing contrast between two other groups of interviewees. On the one hand, lots of positive comments from people like the lifeguards and the internet millionaire (I finally learned his name, but as I said before, who he was had no significance). On the other hand, religious leaders weren't complimentary. There were several miscellaneous doctors of divinity, reverends, and other professional delusionals, almost all of whom had no hesitation in giving strident condemnations of my obviously demonic behavior and nature. Spokesmen (they were all men so far) for the more established churches, such as a Catholic bishop, were much more cautious in their judgments. They clearly weren't impressed by me, and it looked like they also wanted to condemn me, but they weren't brave enough to take the risk of denouncing me only to find out later that I was real. That implied they actually did believe in God. They were self-deluded and sincere about it, but I couldn't make up my mind whether that raised or lowered my opinion of them. One of the comments made me laugh at myself. The angel had appeared in Los Angeles: "The City of Angels". The significance of the name had never occurred to any of my minds, but we all liked it. It was a pity that Thailand was too far away, because there's a City of Angels there too, that being something I'd discovered when reading up on Thailand before my honeymoon. In short, most people agreed something important had happened - apart from the sizeable minority who were loudly arguing that it'd been a trick - but there was no consensus about what it was. I was very pleased. I was even more pleased that the only references to the Anderson family were in very few sentences like, "The angel says he is Majestic Countdown, the 'person' who has been leaking government corruption documents for a year now. Majestic Countdown's first leak was about Homeland Security's illegal incarceration of, and the CIA's imprisonment and experimentation on, Mark Anderson. Since then Majestic Countdown has leaked documents about..." There were no comments about the helicopter crash over the Anderson family home, or anything else that implied any connection between the angel and the Andersons. I'd worried about that when I was sending the helicopters into the drink off LA, but I hoped there were enough helicopters incidents around the country not to make the ones I've been involved in stand out. The nature of the new incidents was deliberately very different from the previous one, which I thought would help keep them unconnected. One little thing that worked very well was the way I didn't turn to face whomever I was talking to. My body's and head's orientation had nothing to do with any conversation or action, and that successfully came across as inhumanly weird on TV. The TV people commented on it several times, even going so far as to do slow motion replays of my reacting (usually verbally) to movements behind my back. It was a nice little mind-game. ^ The next morning, I put a soundproof box around Donna and me. With our hands over our mouths, I told her off in no uncertain terms. "You've GOT to keep your mouth shut about anything special about me, Donna. Asking to see my cock as if it was a big deal just after the angel's appearance is exactly the sort of thing that could cause Homeland Security to send a dozen agents to grab and strip search me. As soon as they saw me naked, my life would be over." "I'm sorry. I didn't..." "I'm not interested in that. What good would your being sorry do after your big mouth had caused my death? You've got to stop and think BEFORE you say anything about me. Blurting out whatever you want and then saying "Sorry" afterward doesn't help anyone. You have to stay constantly aware that there could be microphones all around you, and NEVER say anything that could get me killed. We took a risk letting you in on the secret, but if you ever look like you're about to make another mistake we'll make you leave the room before we have any more conversations. As far as all your conversations are concerned, I'm perfectly ordinary Ron. There's nothing special about me at all. Got it?" She promised that she got it. During the rest of the day, I had several conversations with our staff and other random people about "the LA angel, or whatever it was." As had been the case on TV, there was no consensus. Some people thought and/or hoped it was an angel or an alien. No one really thought it was a demon or the Devil. The only people pushing the demon/Devil argument were religious nutcases, who weren't the sort of people I talked to often; never would be my preference. A few days later I had another conversation with Donna, asking her, "Do you want to be involved in the secret things that are still happening with me?" "Of course," Donna answered with considerable enthusiasm. "I strongly dislike the way you answered that. Your answer was so immediate because the only thing you thought of was satisfying your own curiosity. You didn't take the time to think that every secret you learn about me is one more thing you could thoughtlessly let slip to cause my death. That's a damn sight more important than your curiosity, so I'm going to exclude you from any of our discussions until you've proved yourself with the secrets you already have." Donna tried to argue, but she knew she'd shot herself down already. In Donna's presence, I told the families what had happened. Mom and Dad took her aside later and had another session with her. Poor Donna: just like 3B's Donna, this one was learning that secrets aren't nearly as much fun as they should be. ^ Over the next week or so, two wonderful things happened: Progress FINALLY started happening on our moving into our hilltop home, as a result of my ambush on Julia and Carol, and everyone seeing that we truly did need the security of a bug free home and non-decorating fixated minds. Mom and Julia had, for their respective houses, wanted to get everything perfectly planned before they committed to anything. For example, the drapes hadn't been chosen and fitted in case Julia couldn't find perfectly matching teacups (I made that up, but by now I wouldn't be surprised if it was true). Over the next few days the new houses were made habitable: walls were repainted where the original color scheme had been changed, drapes hung, sofas delivered, as well as beds (my very big bed was moved from Peoria Road, but it 'needed' totally different custom-made bed linen), dining tables and chairs, TVs and stereos, and much, much more. Even, miraculously, a dinner service. Just in the Kids' House though, as Mom hadn't been able to decide for the Adults' House yet, so was forced to temporarily make do with the perfectly good one they'd agonized over for the Peoria Road home. The angel issue started rapidly fading from the public's attention. It'd been a hot item for five whole days, and then it cooled rapidly, dropping further back, and then off the news schedules entirely. That pleased me considerably. Ideally everyone, especially the Government and religious nutcases, would have VERY short attention spans on the issue. That was especially important after Mark returned. A third thing that happened - that I can't in good conscience call a "wonderful thing" - was Julia and Carol wanting to have sex with me again (I know that sounds good, but keep reading to see why it wasn't wonderful). They were both FAR more attentive to me these days, but I couldn't resist punishing Julia by refusing to have sex with her. I had the perfectly true excuse of, "You're too small to take it. I COULD make it smaller, but it's a bad idea as the angel might have to reappear without the week's notice I'd need to get back to my current size. It'd create all sorts of dangerous suspicions if the angel reappeared with a different-sized cock than before." I did have sex with Ava and Carol though, which did a mind-job on Julia. Now that she was aware of her failure to have sex with me, not having it was a big deal to her (it's female logic at work again). Carol's and Ava's struggling to take my cock was a physical reason why Julia shouldn't have sex with me, but emotionally our not having it frustrated the hell out of her. I knew I was being childish, and probably some worse things too, but I enjoyed punishing her. I arranged the multi-screen computer company that I'd found to deliver the 36-screen system on Friday, April 13, the day before we were going to move into our new hilltop home. And, yes, I did order thirty six screens. The four extra screens would be used by any mind that wanted to run any other programs during study time, so the new windows wouldn't overlap their courses, and also to disguise the mathematical progression of my abilities. I'd gone from two screens (when I'd had four minds but only two eyeballs), to eight screens (when I'd merged to eight minds and had discovered sight blobs), now to what mathematically should have been thirty two screens. The multiples of four were a little too neat and close to an important truth, while 2, 8, 36 should disguise the progression fairly nicely. To avoid any chance of it being bugged, I'd lied to the computer company about who the client was, using Logan at OSU as my middleman. Logan and I met the delivery guy at the appointed time, then I got him to follow me to my new home. We drove into the garage under the Kids' House. The installation guy and I loaded up the elevator with all the equipment and took it up to my bedroom. Everyone was at school or at work, so we had the house to ourselves. He set the system up on my bedroom floor, got it going, and trained me in what I needed to know, which wasn't much. It worked just like one computer with thirty six screens; so the only training required was with a very helpful, little software program that his company had written to make managing multiple windows and screens much easier. It amused me considerably that Windows didn't include good windows-management software. I made the hardware installation guy a cup of coffee in the kitchen (it didn't take long, because kettles boil water REALLY fast when I want them to). I spent some of the time using a sight blob to check the screen in our security control room that monitored electromagnetic radiation from our house. It confirmed that the new computer system hadn't radiated anything on frequencies that it shouldn't. [I'd made sure that I'd been trained on how the bug monitoring software worked, what its output meant. It operated 24/7 with a screen dedicated to it down the far end of the security control room, so I could press a few keys with none of our staff seeing or hearing anything strange. It was very convenient for me to be able to check it with a sight blob whenever I wanted.] I made the installation guy wait in the kitchen while I returned to my bedroom to connect the special keyboard the Electrical Engineering Department had built me, and install the software Logan had given me. Those tested out perfectly the first time. Logan had assured me that it was very easy, but it seemed like an impressively big job to me. I also installed the fake browsing software that we'd used to simulate my browsing in Peoria Road, because it wouldn't be good for the browsing to stop on nights when the angel was active. I used NP to disassemble the system and to fly it down to my secret study. Imagine thirty six monitors, several CPU cabinets and other boxes of electronics, the pieces of the mounting rack, and heaps of cables, all floating down the emergency slide and along the Panic Room Tunnel. It was a weird sight. I attached the rack to the wall using the tools I had ready in the room, and reassembled the system on it. Even if it had been bugged, there was no chance of its transmissions getting through the steel-walled vault and so much rock and earth. With so many NP-points and minds able to work on multiple jobs at the same time, I finished assembling and had tested the installation before the supplier's guy had finished his coffee, after which I thanked him and sent him on his way. I'd gotten the supplier company to preload the system with a firewall, anti-virus software, anti-spyware, and anti-everything-else-possible, so it was ready for use. ^ We moved into our new hilltop house nine days after my April 5th angel appearance, on Saturday April 14. I transferred the money and guns I'd hidden near our Peoria Road home to locations near our hilltop one, and the rest of the moving job was done by deliverymen. [Over the next several weeks, the women found more and more stuff for our new home. They did a superb job of making it look incredible, visitors flipped out over it, and I thoroughly enjoyed living in it, but I won't bother describing the furnishings, let alone the decorations. I'd found the design and construction interesting, but after those jobs were over, the rest was just window dressing.] My family was busy all Saturday putting stuff away. We'd already had some short conversations about the angel plan during the previous nine days, but nothing decisive. We'd agreed to make Sunday the day to decide about the angel's possible reappearance. April 14 was the second anniversary of Mark's marriage to Julia and Carol. There was officially no Mark anymore, and we were all distracted and worn out by the moving process, but there was a great deal of cuddling between the three of us later in the evening. Julia and Carol were very apologetic for being bad wives earlier, and I was apologetic about letting it go on for so long without speaking up, etc. It was kind of nice; only "kind of" because at times like these I remember that there are far too many dimensions in which my wives, and Vanessa sometimes too, will be widows as the result of the two kidnappings I've been the victim of. ------- Chapter 334: Archangel Michael's Second Appearance; Washington, DC Sunday, April 15 to Monday, April 16, 2007 The meeting to discuss Archangel Michael's next appearance started in my bedroom, one of the reasons for locating it there being that it was one of the Faraday cage rooms and we had that function activated. All of us attended except the pointedly excluded Donna. Ava was included because Ava is fully included in everything these days, effectively being part of what I refer to as "my families". Her trustworthiness has resulted in her knowing as many of my secrets as Julia and Carol do. Even one more, during the few weeks before the angel's first appearance. To give you an idea of what my bedroom is like, it has a living room area at one end with enough seats for all of my families, without anyone having to sit on the bed. Silly really, although the prospect of accommodating that many pretty girls did appeal to me. The first thing I said was, "Before we start, I've got something to show you in my Secret Study that has relevance to our discussion. You should see it first." These days Julia was instantly agreeing to my every suggestion, but Mom wasn't feeling contrite, so she asked me, "Can't you just tell us?" "I could, but your seeing it will have more impact. Besides, we need to practice using the slides." ^ [The Army had given us various emergency drills to practice, but we'd barely started on those. So far we were way too slow getting to safety. We were improving though, and learning useful lessons: Our male guards learned that the best job during a drill was to be holding the stopwatch outside The Kids' Panic Room. The Kids learned that the slides didn't 'slide' well when the users were naked, the stickiness of human skin acting as a very effective brake. The second problem was fixed by replacing the smooth base of the slide out of our bedroom with thousands of small rollers (they had to be small, close-fitting rollers, or important parts of our anatomies might've been injured or plucked. Paul Olsen, our Head of Security, won't let us delay to put clothes or robes on before we're all inside the panic room with the door shut behind us, so the first 'problem' was fixed for my girls by getting the stopwatch recording done by one of our two female guards. My modesty wasn't an issue because I apparently sleep dressed in a bulky set of pajamas. I don't really, but we had to lie about that because I need to hide Archangel Michael's body. The etiquette for these drills is that there's no etiquette. When the siren sounds, we've been told to leap down the slides and run for the panic rooms as fast as we individually can. The males have been told not to be chivalrous gentlemen who pause to let the females go first. Dad will help one-legged Prof get from the bottom of the Williams' slide to the adults' panic room because that can shave a few seconds off the total time, but Paul insists that my pausing to help my girls would only increase the total time. Fortunately, I'm easily the fastest member of my household, especially because I'm normally awake when the siren sounds. That gives me time to get dressed in my pajamas, hold my cock discreetly between my legs with NP, and get down the slide before the last of my girls. No doubt our security staff think I'm crazy for wearing long pajamas when I sleep with naked girls, but their thinking that is preferable to their thinking that I'm Archangel Michael.] ^ I opened my bedroom's "cat flap", as we called the flaps to our emergency slides, even though they're FAR, FAR stronger and more secure than an ordinary cat flap, as it's essential that even well-equipped baddies be delayed long enough for all of us to get to safety inside a panic room. I held it open while everyone slid down, Dad first so he could assist with the others' landings. I led them to the Kids' Panic Room, my bedroom's nearness to this being the other reason the meeting had started where it had. I opened the door (it uses a fingerprint scanner to unlock the door quickly, which we can deactivate once we're all inside. I usually open it from the inside as I approach, as that's even quicker). I ushered them into the first of the two rooms inside the panic room, using NP to unlock the other side of the door into my Secret Study, suggesting, "Prof, you lead the way into my study please." Prof wasn't any good at leading the way, because he opened the door then froze on the spot, immediately understanding the implications of what he was seeing. Vanessa looked over Prof's shoulder (which wasn't hard to do), exclaiming, "Gosh!" That got Prof moving again. Soon everyone was entering the room and admiring the nine columns of four portrait-oriented screens. It looked very impressive, even though 24" screens aren't nearly as intimidating as 30" ones. Prof asked, "Does this mean what I think it means?" I answered, "Pretty much, I can read a number of sources in the high-20s or low-30s now. Rather than my old rate of three degrees per year, now I can complete the studying for about twelve degrees, although doing them formally isn't practical because there'd be about fifteen courses completed per week, so forty five hours of exams per week. With lab work, group work, and other reasons I'd have to go to OSU, I'd have to spend nearly every daylight minute struggling to keep up with the my nighttime studying rate. Not to mention that twelve degrees in one year seems WAY too freaky for the rest of the world to react well to." (I could practically do more like twenty five or thirty degrees worth per year, or forty five if I really pushed it, but I didn't want to explain the reason for that increase. See if you can guess how? I'll give you the answer in a few hundred pages.) -- "If I become Mark again, I'll formally enroll in only three degrees per year, but I'll read the online notes for every course in them, even though many of the courses are electives. Reading the surplus optional courses is what I'm doing at night now. Plus I'll read courses from whatever other degrees interest me..." Vanessa interrupted, "I hope you've got broad interests, because at fifteen courses per week, it isn't going to take long for you to cover a significant proportion of OSU's total offerings." Prof was shaking his head, saying, "I can't possibly imagine how you could do this. I could vaguely understand how someone MIGHT be able to read two or even three screens at once. Eight was REALLY stretching my ability to accept as possible, but 30-odd isn't conceivable under any circumstances. No one could even make out the print on that many screens at once, let alone comprehend them individually." "I can't read them with my flesh-and-blood eyes, but I can with the other way I've got. I had this system installed on Friday and I spent last night studying on it, so I can tell you with certainty that it works very nicely for me. Let me show you what it's like in use." I used NP to wiggle the mouse, waking up all the screens at the point that I'd left them before breakfast. I moved my overwatch sight blob into position, expanding it to the same size as the display area, and started studying. I've long since got past the point where I need a mind to be on Inactive Duty to study. Remaining centered is unconscious second nature to me now; so much so that even the concentration and thought required to study doesn't make me lose center. I wouldn't want to guarantee that some highly exciting emergency wouldn't uncenter me, but it's pretty unlikely. As a result, I can study on thirty two screens at the same time, although I'd closed three of the windows before the meeting started, to disguise the geometric progression. [One of the other things I don't have to consciously keep practicing because I can now do it automatically, is strengthening my ki by 5% per month through constantly projecting it. I no longer have to have a mind dedicated to practicing that. I'm still doing it, and whenever I'm near Prof, I usually practice projecting ki by radiating it into him. He had asked me to. Prof is very conscious of the damage done to his body by being nearly dehydrated to death. He has frequent medical checkups and keeps me informed of how he's doing; which is pretty good, but he's getting on in years so he could do better. Vanessa also gets me to help her heal when she is feeling sore somewhere. Mom and Dad know about it, but they don't really appreciate how useful it is, although I do project ki into them if they make a comment about pulling a muscle or the like. There's no sensation from incoming ki, so they don't know.] I said, "I wanted you all to see this so you can see how much Mark would be capable of achieving. Ron could read the same material of course, but he can't do anything public with that knowledge, which severely limits his life." While I was carefully studying, Vanessa commented, "Your eyes aren't shut?" I've never explained the full functionality of sight blobs to the parents; not even the name. "No. I don't need to shut them to use my special vision any longer. During the day I have my special vision looking behind me as an extra safety precaution. It's literally impossible for anyone to creep up on me. I've got a few little capabilities that I've never explained to you in detail, but which allowed the angel to uncover the law enforcement types on the platform." -- "If you've seen enough, shall we go back upstairs to restart our meeting?" They agreed. I used a sight blob to check that my bedroom was empty, then floated everyone up the emergency slide. In a real emergency I could use that to help get everyone into a panic room faster, and especially to slow the attackers down, but we'd still practice the way the Army told us to, and now how our own Head of Security tells us. Back in my room, we started discussing whether the angel should reappear. My studying demonstration had shown everyone that Mark could achieve a great deal more educationally than they'd previously thought, and that I also had greater defensive abilities than they'd known about; both of which argued in favor of proceeding with the angel plan. The purpose of the angel's next appearance was to extend the suggestion that he resurrect someone, and to invite the public to suggest who. There'd be no mention of Mark Anderson or anything else specific to my families, so the only risk from the next appearance was in what could happen to me during my exposure, or my saying something that gave myself away. We could minimize those by doing the next appearance outside of LA, giving no prior notice, keeping it short, and leaving quickly. Because the risk was small and brief, and because the prospect of having Mark back was even more attractive than before, the families agreed with me that the next appearance was worth doing. We wouldn't make any decisions about activities beyond that yet. We needed to create a pretext for my having to prove my divinity, and the one we came up with was to have the angel snatch the Director of the FBI - Robert Swan Mueller III (with a name like that, he was almost asking for trouble) - carry him to a hastily called press conference, where I'd ask him about the prosecutions of criminals identified by Majestic Countdown's leaked emails. I wouldn't be satisfied by whatever answers he gave, which would lead to an apparently spur-of-the-moment decision by God that I should resurrect someone to prove myself. I already knew he had an office in the FBI headquarters in DC, near the White House. I'd discovered that fact during one of Majestic Countdown's several snooping visits around DC. I'd fly there tonight to check the situation out, and hopefully do the deed sometime on Monday, if I got the chance. I had a little preparation to make. It was quite likely that investigators could turn up in a few weeks asking questions about Ron's movements and we didn't want my absences to coincide with the angel's appearances. My families could say I was at home all Monday, April 16, helping to unpack after the move, but that could come unstuck if any of the gardeners had unsuccessfully come looking for me that day. So I went looking for the Head Gardener, telling him, "I've been reassigned off gardening duties for the next couple of days. I've been demoted to Julia's household slave, to help her set up our home's furniture. Already I've changed the living room into six different layouts, so it's going to be a nightmare. Let's discuss the gardening plan for the next few days so I won't get interrupted by queries from your staff. Julia wouldn't appreciate me being called away at what she'd doubtless consider a critical moment." I was sure Julia wouldn't mind my using her for an excuse, if I tell her about it very carefully. He laughed in sympathy with my pained expression, and I spent fifteen minutes with him, delegating all my current landscaping jobs. ^ As soon as it was dark enough, I flew off to retrieve my A-man costume, putting it on and then my black traveling clothes on top. I set a course for Washington DC. I descended halfway to do some research on Robert Swan Mueller III, especially to find a photo of him. It only took a couple of minutes to find a house with an unattended computer, and even less time to find Mueller's photo. That accomplished, I resumed my journey. I knew which was the FBI head office, and where the Big Man's office was. I was reasonably sure it'd been Mueller's name I'd seen on paperwork in it, but I hadn't made a special effort to remember it so I wasn't positive. Once I carefully got near the building, it only took a few seconds to confirm that I'd remembered correctly. As expected, he wasn't in his office late on a Sunday night. There was also no indication whether he was in town or away. No appointment book open on his desk, for example, so I'd have to wait and see. The 'high-rise' buildings in DC are all about the same low height, none more than thirteen stories high, a surprising situation considering the towering egos here. I appreciated their being so much lower than my 500-foot maximum range because that would make it conveniently easy for me to sit on top of a building and watch the cars arriving. I located the garage entrance the Director's car would use and found a suitable waiting spot, in a cranny a couple of rooftops away, out of direct line of sight of the FBI building just to play safe. I moved a few miles away, looking for a building roof that was a suitable gathering point for the press. After finding that, I flew out of town to find a suitable second location for when I moved the press conference. The top of the roof I'd be waiting on was white, so I went in search of a house that had a small, white sheet in its linen closet, which I stole by sliding it out the narrow opening in their bathroom window. I flew to the nearest point of the east coast, flew a little offshore, then moved around until I found a place where the geography lined up nicely to enable me to find this spot again and the water was about twenty feet deep. I put a box around myself and descended to the bottom. I removed my dark clothes, put them in the watertight plastic bag I'd brought with me, then placed them under a rock on the seabed. Taking the sheet with me, I ascended then flew back to the rooftop of the building opposite the FBI's garage entrance. I flew standing upright, to minimize the chance of my silver-colored suit being seen. I descended rapidly onto my target location, then lay flat on it, along the corner of an air conditioner protrusion, using NP to hold the sheet taut over me. Any helicopters flying above during daylight would have to look extremely carefully to tell that the small diagonal corner at the base of the protrusion was unusual. I used one sight blob to toggle back and forth to cover the two directions the Director could come in, using the other sight blob to snoop with, to pass the time entertainingly. I just did low impact snooping; nothing that would leave much trace of my presence. There were enough people working in the FBI and other nearby buildings that what I mostly did was read over their shoulders. Occasionally one of the Fibbies would leave their desk, giving me a chance to do a quick search. "Angel Michael" found me a file titled, "Michael, Archangel". I thought that'd make for interesting reading, although it had to be in short bursts, depending how long it took people to get coffee, or get rid of it, depending on what part of that cycle they were on. The file turned out to be dryly worded versions of much the same material that'd been repeated on TV many times. With no other sources of information, I guess that was inevitable. There was one exception though, the file contained a large section analyzing my speech. I had used different rhythms and accents (I've gotten good at mimicry), and especially once the cameras were rolling, I'd tried to avoid some of my usual expressions, humor styles, etc. My mixed English and American heritage muddied the waters quite a lot, especially because I hadn't picked up a lot of the normal vernacular kids use because I was a loner for several years, but there were still too many comments in the file that struck uncomfortably close to home. They were buried among other comments that were wide of the mark/Mark, but I definitely had to be more careful. The file several times mentioned the need for a larger sample of my speech, so I'd make sure I'd try to keep those short in the future. One thing that did please me was that the file confirmed my previous guess that the physical way I talked was more important than the words I used. The file had many pages of tonal analysis, and comments that it would be very easy to compare the angel's tones to the recordings of any suspects to find a match (the FBI was VERY eager to find the owner of the body I had borrowed). Because I'd reshaped my throat, mouth and nose, the sounds I produced as Ron, Archangel Michael and Mark would all be different and wouldn't match tonally. There was a link to "Majestic Countdown", that file containing far more, and FAR more detailed, information. Ever since Maj's first appearance, the FBI had been hot on his non-existent trail. There was a great deal of dead-end information (e.g., biographies of the people who worked in each of the buildings I'd used, attempts to find common threads between them, etc.), and I was pleased to find no references to telekinesis being used to access computers. There were several references to collecting videotapes from the surrounding area and using them to spot any common people. That was worrisome because I'd done quite a lot of walking around. I was almost positive they'd be unable to ID me from those photos as I'd always made sure I was fully covered. But what might happen is that next time I wandered around, they might vector cops to me because I matched the height, gait and dress of the commonly recurring person. I resolved to do a great deal less walking around the outsides of my snooping locations in the future, and to change my gait when I did. The favored theory seemed to be some sort of RAM-based virus, which deleted itself after I used it. There was a great deal of technical analysis on how that could be possible, and several technicians were busy searching for traces of it in computers I'd already used, or computers I hadn't yet used but were owned by outfits that fit the profile of those I'd snooped. There'd been several programs written by the FBI's software guys to monitor their own computers for anything like that. They'd be ineffectually running on the computer I was using now. Then I found a VERY interesting section on trapping me. There were half a dozen bait computers spread among likely offices in DC. If anyone touched a single key on one of them, The areas would be immediately sealed by high-strength security doors, while an alarm screamed to bring half the Fibbies in DC charging for me. There were also several more computers that were in areas that didn't suit fitting security doors, so were just wired to activate silent alarms if anyone touched a key. All these computers were full of files about governmental corruption. All false, but designed to be interesting and be time-consuming reading. I wondered what to do about my new knowledge. My first reaction was to want to zip around town setting every one of them off. On second thought, with a second mind, maybe I should just set one of them off as that might bring the Director to his office, which meant I might get home before daybreak. It was very tempting, but when I worked out the timing it was too tight. Most likely I wouldn't get all the way home in time, which wouldn't help at all. The first option appealed to my ego, which meant I should be doubly cautious about doing it. The Fibbies would wonder how I knew about all the locations, which would lead them back to my snooping in their own files. It'd probably be best that they not know I could do that, because I'd almost certainly want to do it again. It was boringly disappointing, but I ended up deciding to set none of them off. I just memorized their locations to make sure I didn't do so by mistake in the future. Doing so wouldn't cause any direct harm, as I'd be sitting on top of the building at the time so safe from capture; but it'd eliminate one of their theories about my methodology, which I'd rather not be eliminated. The more wrong theories they had, the less chance there was of them eventually arriving at the highly implausible but accurate theory. I resumed my reading, leading me to another little discovery. The Government's email server had been reprogrammed to reroute any emails containing "Majestic" and "Countdown" to an office where they'd be checked by a human. If okay, they'd be allowed to proceed to their original destination; if not okay, they'd be permanently blocked or changed before being forwarded to their intended recipient(s). Apparently the FBI didn't want news of government corruption getting publicly released. The reprogramming was three months old, so I knew my emails would get through if they originated from a non-governmental location (the last couple of months of leaks had come from law firms), but it looked like they certainly wouldn't have gotten through if they'd come out of a Government office. I could get around it easily by misspelling my name. Then I'd have to check this file again to see what the Fibbies were doing next. Majestic Countdown had been low key for the last few months. The scandals were taking so long to be resolved that I was releasing new ones only every month or so, plus finding good quality dirt had become VERY difficult. I wasn't going to do any leaking while the Angel Plan was in progress, so the Fibbies' efforts wouldn't matter for a while. Perhaps for a very long while, because one of the consequences of the Angel Plan working would be that the angel had to stop appearing in public, because my body had to change to become Mark's. And it should stop making its presence felt even by arranging leaks, otherwise people would keep chasing Mark to ask him to get the angel to resurrect their loved ones. People chasing Mark would be a pain in the ass and potentially dangerous, so it'd be best if the angel said it had to leave Earth and then it disappear entirely, thus there could be no more Majestic Countdown leaks. Juggling my four personas - Mark, Ron, Archangel Michael and Majestic Countdown - is a tricky business. I went back to my reading, finding lots of details about stuff that didn't much matter, plus a few reminders of things I should be careful of if Majestic Countdown stays in business, presumably because the resurrection doesn't go ahead. For example, there was a geographic analysis of my leak locations, using them to predict where I might appear next, as the necessary first step in creating some sort of trap. I patted myself on the back for using random number generators. At the end of the file there was an update section discussing the situation now that Majestic Countdown was apparently an angel, or whatever the claimed angel really was. A previously very dry and technically oriented file lurched into cuckoo-land. It was amusing and wouldn't be useful to anyone. VERY pleasingly, there was nothing about the Anderson family. The highlight of the rest of the morning was seeing an early starting secretary spit into a pot of coffee she was making for her yet-to-arrive boss. Otherwise I just got an education about what people in the buildings around me did, when they weren't spitting. At 8:30am, I spotted Robert Swan Mueller III in a car heading toward the garage entrance. In the front were a driver and a bodyguard (I presumed), with Mueller putting paperwork into his briefcase in the backseat. I sent a sight blob under the hood, then created NP-fingertips to disconnect the spark plugs. The car's engine died and it rolled to a stop about fifty yards short of the garage entrance, and not much farther to the building's front door. The driver spent a few seconds trying to restart the car, which was ample time for me to use a nearby building's computer to compose an invitational email to the major news networks. I held a fingertip over the "Send" button, waiting to see that my snatch was going to work. The car having proved itself to be as dead as a dodo, Mueller and his escort got out to walk the remaining distance. It was trivially easy to give the bodyguard a push away from Mueller, while I grabbed Mueller and accelerated him upward. I hit the "Send" button, inviting the networks to send a reporter and/or cameraman to record a conversation between Archangel Michael and the Director of the FBI on top of a nearby convention center. I added, "The conversation will start in five minutes. We won't wait for you. Any crews containing a law enforcement ringer will be thrown over the side, as last time, but with a concrete landing." If there were ringers, I would toss them over the side, but I'd brake their fall so they only got injured rather than plummeted to their deaths. I removed the briefcase from Mueller's hand, flying it rapidly down to place it beside the upset bodyguard. He had his gun drawn and was eagerly looking upward for someone to shoot, but the only person above him was his rapidly receding boss. I stood, bundled the sheet tightly within a squashing NP-box to take with me as I didn't want to leave any evidence lying around. I launched myself skyward. Mueller had more vertical velocity than me, but I eased his acceleration and increased my own, and we were soon in formation a couple of thousand feet up. Getting two different accelerating objects into formation is mathematically quite tricky, but I'd had so much experience flying things around now that I did it intuitively. I formed a box around us and let go my NP-grabs on his body. He didn't take any time to recover, filling the instant quiet with an immediate demand, "What do you want?" "We're going to have a talk in front of some press soon..." "What if I refuse?" "Then you can make your own way back to the ground from here and I'll extend the same invitation to the new Director a week from now. Don't ask stupid questions; you have no power and all I'm doing is requiring a couple hours of your cooperation. You can keep your gun provided you don't try to touch it, and I'll let you call your office shortly. I have very little tolerance for people who insist on being idiots, so behave like you're in the presence of your superior. Got it?" "Yes." I canceled the floor he was standing on, reforming it two feet lower. He was still recovering from the shock of his unexpected fall, when I suggested, "Try your answer again." "Yes, SIR!" "Watch the attitude, Mueller." I kept him standing two feet below my level while I flew the distorted box we were standing in toward the convention center. After thirty seconds of silence, he asked, "WHAT are you?" I canceled his floor again, recreating it four feet below him. We were flying horizontally and not under any acceleration, but he still hurt himself when he landed. I imagine it's damned hard to land gracefully when you fall by surprise and you've got no idea where the invisible floor is. I was being harsh with him because I wanted him have at least a halfway decent attitude before we got in front of the cameras. When he finished his profanity, I said, "When I first picked you up, you should've said, 'It's an honor to meet you, sir. How can I be of service?' If you keep falling short of that attitude, you're going to keep falling distances that double each time. I'll leave it to you to determine what gives way first, your ego or the bones in your legs. In answer to your impolite question, I'm an archangel. One of God's many 2ICs. Don't you watch TV?" Much more intelligently, Mueller answered, "Yes sir, but you also said there had to be some doubt." I could use this topic to plant a seed for later, by saying, "I've always said that I'm an angel, so when you asked me what I was, you were always going to get that answer. God wishes living entities to have freewill, which means flexibility over whether or not they believe my answer. That you've got freewill doesn't change the truth or my answer, only how much effort I put into convincing you. -- "Your questions were witless and indicated you don't have even a superficial understanding of the points I made during my previous interview. Plus your first question was rude to the entity who was holding you 2,000 feet in the air when you cannot fly yourself. I would've thought the Director of the FBI to be more intelligent than you've demonstrated yourself to be." "I'm sorry. This situation caught me by surprise." "So you're intelligent only when events are what you expect? Not an ideal trait in someone who heads up an agency that fundamentally has the task of solving puzzles. More likely, your intelligence was diminished by your ego. I suggest you keep an Earthly expression in mind, 'Pride goeth before a fall'. That fits your situation very well. You can phone your office now. Unless the US Government wants to lose even more helicopters, I suggest you tell them to keep at least a mile away or leave their weapons at home." I had no real expectation that letting him make the call would stop hordes of Fibbies gathering around me, but neither was there any reason not to let him call, and I could maybe use it for PR purposes later. I listened to Director Mueller tell them, "The angel picked me up." (I was amused that he didn't refer to me as the "so-called angel". or something else doubtful.) "I'm unharmed. He says we're going to a press conference." Then he gave the street intersection we were over, our height, flight direction and speed; ending with, "The angel says he doesn't want any armed helicopters within a mile of him." There was a pause while whomever was on the other end spoke, then Mueller said, "I don't think that'll be necessary. I'll try to call you back if he lets me." Thereby letting them know that I was controlling Mueller. When he hung up, I said, "I hope for your sake that your staff treat my wishes with greater respect than you've demonstrated so far." "What do you mean?" After a short pause, he remembered to add, "Sir." "I noticed you chose your language carefully, telling them that I don't want armed helicopters near me. You didn't say YOU didn't want them. It'll be interesting to see if your staff act on your implied instruction. I'm a firm believer that people are responsible for the consequences of their decisions, so I'll be holding you responsible for your attempted subverting of my wishes. If any weapon gets too close, don't be surprised if it goes off when it's pointed at you." "I'll call them back," he said as he extracted his cellphone out of his pocket again. I used NP to jerk it out of his grasp, floating it over to me while I said, "I prefer to let your attempted sneakiness play out. You were already warned to be more intelligent, and there comes a point when repeated stupidity has to have consequences." He was smart enough to be worried about that. I held his phone in formation beside me, while he looked at it worriedly. We turned 120 degrees, and headed down to the rooftop about half a mile away that my email had designated. The first news-crew arrived on the convention center's rooftop moments after I started our descent, so they filmed the last stages of our flight. I landed and canceled the NP-box around me. I left Mueller standing in an armpit-high box floating about six inches above the rooftop. I'd pulled his arms out when I created his narrow box, so they were now on the outside of it, making it a slow, squirmy job for him to draw his gun. I didn't know why the Bureau's head bureaucrat was carrying a gun. Macho crap probably. The bundled-up white sheet and Mueller's cellphone I left hovering a few feet away from me. The reporter had started yelling questions - in the very un-endearing manner they all have - as soon as I'd come within twenty feet of the rooftop. I'd ignored him while I'd landed facing 60 degrees away from the reporter and 80 degrees away from the cameraman, as I like how non-human that makes me seem. I continued ignoring him, standing still and saying nothing, so he started asking Mueller questions, determined to get a jump on his presumably soon-to-arrive competition. Mueller was able to answer a couple of the questions, describing how he'd been picked up off the street, but the majority of the reporter's questions were answered with, "I don't know." The reporter and Mueller went back and forth unproductively, with me standing silently ignoring the questions that were thrown my way. After a couple of minutes the reporter realized he wasn't getting anywhere. He turned to me, asking, "You asked us here for a reason?" "Yes. It was clearly stated in the email I sent your network." "Which was?" "Clearly stated in the email I sent you. Have you been wasting my time blathering thoughtlessly for the last several minutes because you didn't bother taking the time to find out why I invited you here?" "My producer just said to get here as fast as possible because you and Director Mueller were here." "Your producer didn't appreciate the value I put on my time then. That disrespect will cost your network." I picked the reporter and cameraman up, flew them screaming across the street, and placed them on top of the neighboring building. I was tempted to crush their expensive looking camera, but could too easily imagine that every reporter team that arrived would be similarly ignorant. I needed someone to be able to record my resurrection offer, so I settled for holding the cameraman firmly while I ejected the cassette from his camera, crushing it in front of their eyes. I commented to Mueller, "I've never known humanity to be so disrespectful. It doesn't bode well for its future." Mueller chose not to respond, probably worried that his earlier disrespect didn't bode well for his future. I heard a chopper thumping its way toward us and sent a sight blob to check. It was still a fair distance away, but it appeared to be a news-chopper. The invitation I'd sent was for them to "record a conversation between Archangel Michael and the Director of the FBI." God knows how they thought a chopper could do that as its hovering overhead was going to eliminate any possibility of a conversation. The news-chopper was still several hundred yards away when another reporter emerged from the stairwell to run toward us, preceded by the sound of her voice yelling to ask us what was going on and instructing us to wait for her cameraman to arrive. I picked her up and sent her screaming over the street to the now vacant rooftop, the previous team presumably having found a way off it. A cameraman ran through the roof doorway, saw us and headed our way, looking around for his reporter. He stopped in front of us, asking, "Where's Liz?" I pointed, "I put her on that roof. She yelled instructions at me, like an annoyingly yapping poodle. Do you want to film us here, or shall I send you over there to join her?" "Ahh, I'll record you, if that's okay?" "It's why you were invited." My last words had to be spoken at a semi-yell because the news-chopper was annoyingly close. It came a little closer, and then started circling us I floated Mueller's phone to me, worked out how to redial, then when it was answered, I yelled, "This is Archangel Michael. Starting five minutes from now, every helicopter that comes within one mile of me will likely be disabled as I did in LA. Tell Air Traffic Control to clear the air around me unless you want to risk helicopters falling into central DC. Do you understand?" "Yes. Can I speak to the Director please?" "No." I hung up. I sent a sight blob to check the time on Mueller's watch, then I yelled to the cameraman, who was doing his job already, "Did you hear that?" "Yes." I explained, "I invited the media to record a conversation between Director Mueller and myself. Sending a helicopter to hover over us while we're trying to talk is deliberately rude. If any are overhead five minutes from now, they're going to get suddenly quiet. We'll wait for them to make their choice." During the next few minutes several minor things happened: More news-crews arrived on foot. Any reporters that asked annoying questions (i.e., all of them), were picked up and transferred to the rooftop across the street, much to the amusement of the rival cameramen. My real reason for sending the reporters away was because I was sure their networks would've primed them with all sorts of questions they could use to test my legitimacy as an angel; asking me to speak Biblical Aramaic, for example, although I expected most of the tests to be things that I couldn't even imagine, let alone know the answers to. I needed to avoid those tests. Any transferees that reappeared and repeated their annoying yapping were immediately picked up and transferred again, this time hanging upside-down by an ankle, something the female reporters particularly objected to, much to the further amusement of all the cameramen. Despite several of the cameramen ringing the studios and telling them not to send any helicopters, another news-chopper arrived, circling at the same distance as the first, thereby doubling the noise level. 3.5 minutes into my grace period, one of the news-choppers suddenly turned tail and sped away. The other one didn't. I waved "Goodbye" at it, and the pilot got the idea. Seeing so many choppers fall into the drink off LA must've taught them some caution. Not the FBI though, as one of their choppers approached just as the second news-chopper was leaving. I said to the cameramen, "I specifically told Director Mueller not to allow any FBI helicopters to come near me if they were carrying weapons. He chose to deliberately hint to his subordinates that he didn't agree with my instruction, so I promised him that if any agents arrived carrying guns, they'd be likely to 'accidentally' go off when they were pointed in Mueller's general direction. It'd be a pity if anyone else got hit because of his arrogant stupidity, so I suggest you put some distance between yourselves and him." The cameramen turned and ran, apparently having no doubt that I could arrange for distant guns to accidentally go off. They hid behind cover, or went as far away as they could on the roof, crouching at the edge to present a small target. All pointed their cameras at Mueller, in case there was some "Good TV" soon. I'd been prepared to fly toward the helicopter in order to get within NP'ing range of it, but there was no need as it came toward me. I commented to Mueller, "I clearly said, 'EVERY helicopter was to stay away.' I wonder what that pilot thinks he's flying." Mueller answered, "They'll be trying to check on me." "Unnecessarily as I've never mistreated anyone who treated me civilly. I'd suggest they must know how stupidly egotistical you are, except they have to be equally stupid to fly into my proscribed zone. Uh oh. I see they are carrying weapons. Today isn't going to be a good day for you." Mueller started protesting, but I ignored him. The Fibbie chopper came within four hundred feet of me, so I yanked its fuel line. There was a sniper in the doorway, as usual. Presumably because it's their Standard Operating Procedure, to be used in the absence of intelligent thought about alternatives. I kept a very close eye on him, looking for his putting his trigger finger inside the trigger guard. I had my other sight blob pulled back to give me a top-down view of the chopper, to make sure there'd be no fatalities when it went down. The sniper had a moment of distraction a few seconds later when the engine suddenly missed. I pulled his rifle away, flying it toward me. He made a grab for it, but I'd given the rifle about a 100 g's of acceleration (holding the trigger carefully so inertia didn't make it fire), so it was several yards away from him by the time he'd reacted. The chopper's engine died entirely. It was only a hundred feet above us, but it was still going fairly fast past us which is very helpful for autorotations. The pilot sensibly aimed for a flat rooftop straight ahead of him. He passed out of my range, but it looked like he had the landing well under control (I've seen several autorotations recently), so I didn't bother flying myself back into range as a safety precaution. When that drama was safely over with, I announced, "I'm moving us somewhere quieter, before any more stupidity can get started." I picked all the cameramen and Mueller up, moved them into a line, put a common NP-floor under them and a wall in front, then tilted them onto a very wide sled. I made one for myself too, and we accelerated away, heading for the location I'd scouted out before. I was flapping my wings-of-light; the cameramen and Mueller weren't bothering to flap anything. I was tempted to damage the FBI chopper to teach them a stronger lesson. At the moment, all they had to do was reconnect its fuel line and it could fly away, which was too easy. I could rip the tail off easily, or set fire to it; but as tempting as those were they risked making the authorities think of the helicopter accidents over the Anderson family home. Then one of my minds remembered that I was carrying the FBI's own sniper rifle. I slowed everyone to a hover, saying, "Cameramen, you will want to record this." I waited a few seconds for most of them to get their cameras focused on me, then floated Mueller's cellphone up to the side of my head again. I redialed, then spoke, "In thirty seconds I am going to start shooting your rifle at your downed helicopter. I suggest you clear your agents from the area." I hung up. Twenty seconds later the agents - who'd been hanging around the helicopter watching us flying away - suddenly sprinted away from it. I flew the rifle about three hundred feet closer to my target. There was still a range of several hundred feet, but I wasn't concerned about pinpoint accuracy. I figured I'd be able to hit something as large as a helicopter, and I didn't much care where I hit it; my point would be made regardless. I flicked the safety off, held the rifle firmly, lined up a shot at the instrument panel, and pulled the trigger gently. I scored a direct hit within a couple of inches of where I'd aimed. I operated the bolt action, adjusted my aim a few inches to the side, and shot again. Considering I didn't know how to adjust for range or wind, it was a VERY accurate rifle, which didn't please me at all. I stopped after sending four bullets into the panel, figuring they would've done enough damage that the Fibbies wouldn't be flying their chopper away. I didn't want to keep firing because sooner or later the rifle would run out of bullets and it'd diminish my image of infallibility if I attempted a shot after using up the magazine. [[It had five rounds in its magazine, so I wouldn't have looked silly unless I'd tried for two more shots.]] I returned the rifle to me, while telling the cameramen, "I specifically told Director Mueller 'No helicopters with weapons.' He chose otherwise. I hope they take the repair costs out of his doubtless over-inflated salary." I was also tempted to take the pistols off each of the agents that'd been in the chopper and shoot them all in a foot, as a lesson not to bring weapons into my presence. I would've done it if I'd been intending to have many more appearances as Archangel Michael, but it wasn't worth training the Government's law enforcement people so harshly. It was hard to resist though, because I would've enjoyed setting up a situation where the rank and file would deliberately disobey their superiors' instructions, "Because Archangel Michael told us not to." It'd be a good lesson for everyone about individual responsibility. Just before I resumed our journey, I remembered to ask, "While we're high in the air seems like a good time to ask whether any of you are ringers? Government agents? Law enforcement types? Or anything other than legitimate cameramen?" They all shifted nervously and looked worried, but none of their proximity readings betrayed any special degree of guilt. There were several "Not me"-type comments. I'd already searched them all with a sight blob and none of them were carrying anything incriminating, so I believed them. I said, "That's good," and accelerated us south at a low altitude. When we passed over a line of hills I reduced height to duck behind the ridge, then turned and flew west for a couple of miles, descending into a forested area. The cameramen had gotten a scare to start with, but they'd quickly decided that this was fun and they'd filmed their flight. A couple of them got cellphone calls during the short flight, and I was close enough to see their excited faces as they described their adventure. Mueller had a different expression, looking decidedly unhappy, probably because he remembered my comment about shots coming his way, and he'd noticed that I was still bringing the sniper's rifle with us. We landed and I instructed that the cameramen should set up where they could film my conversation with Director Mueller. A couple of them started asking me questions, presumably phoned to them from their studios. No way could I allowed myself to get trapped by prepared questions, so I cut them off with an angry, "Your invitation clearly stated that you were here to film my conversation with Director Mueller. Your networks' inability to read and their very annoying intrusiveness - including hovering helicopters overhead making conversation impossible - have wasted too much of my time already, so shut up, line up where I indicated, and let me start my discussion with the Director." I'd put enough anger in my voice that the cameramen's questions weren't restarted. They eagerly arranged themselves into filming me again. I turned to Mueller and started the discussion with, "When I revealed myself in Los Angeles, I mentioned that Majestic Countdown is me. It's been a week and a half since that revelation, ample time for the Director of the FBI to have made considerable progress on the information I made public. Starting with the most recent of Majestic Countdown's leaks and working back, Director Mueller, tell us the state of your inquiry into Robert Arnold's taking bribes?" Mueller looked decidedly uncomfortable. He shifted nervously, then apologetically said, "Sorry sir, but I can't talk about that." "Oh? You'd better have a good reason for refusing me?" "I can't talk about active investigations. Doing so would..." "I am ordering you to talk about them. If you say anything I deem unsuitable for the public to know, I will order the networks not to broadcast it. Proceed." "Ahh, it's against the law, sir." I held his arms out from his body as I drew his macho pistol out of his macho shoulder holster, flicked the safety off, lowered it to his foot that I was now pinning to the ground, and I shot him once in the middle of the top of it. I'd noticed the wildlife rush away from us as a result of the shot, which gave me an idea. I sent a sight blob searching the woods around us for animals. Not close to us because the gunshot had frightened them away, but I started searching a few hundred feet away. Whenever I found an animal (from now on), I scooped it up with an invisible pair of NP-hands, carry it gently to somewhere out of sight and generally behind me. Then I'd use EKP to calm them for a few seconds, then to direct them to approach me, getting them to sit around or on me (not actually on me, but on NP-plates on me, to catch their droppings). It'd take a while for an impressively large number of animals to accumulate, but it should be excellent PR. While Mueller was swearing - very macholy, I thought - and the cameramen making some surprised exclamations too, I had the idea (I often have several ideas at the same time) of giving him the white sheet I was carrying around. I was intending to set fire to it where no one could see and where its ashes would never be found, but giving it to him as a bandage could be a nice mind-game. I decided not to, just in case the FBI could find some evidence on it from the several hours I'd lain underneath it. When Mueller quieted down, and had crouched to remove his shoe and tie his jacket around his foot, I explained to the cameras, "I specifically told Director Mueller when I first picked him up today that I didn't want any armed FBI agents to approach me. He deliberately relayed that instruction to his subordinates in a way that implied that I may not want that to happen, but he did. He was being uncooperative and too smart for his own good. He was effectively shooting himself in the foot, so that's what I did for him. Next time he tries to be a smart-ass with me, that's where the next bullet will go. -- "Director Mueller, you objected to answering my repeated question because doing so was against your law. I have now demonstrated how little humanity's laws constrain me, so for the third time, describe the state of the case against Robert Arnold." "I CAN'T! I don't know!" #30: "You are aware, are you not, that I am Majestic Countdown?" "Yes sir." "And that I released the information detailing Robert Arnold's criminal behavior?" "Yes sir." "What could you POSSIBLY have been doing for the last week and a half that was more important than carrying out the obvious wishes of an archangel and God's representative on Earth?" "You said yourself that there was deliberate uncertainty about that, sir. You've made sure that no one knows for a guaranteed fact that you are an archangel." "Whatever I am, I have vastly more power than any of you, so only a fool wouldn't take my wishes seriously. Unfortunately, we have already established that a fool is what you are. Are you aware of how much I dislike having my time wasted, Director Mueller?" He worriedly answered, "Yes sir." "You and I will have another talk in a few days. I advise you to bring yourself up to date with all of the investigations resulting from my emails and in making sure they're progressing as fast as humanly possible. Not 'bureaucratically possible, ' but 'humanly possible.' I'm sure you don't want to disappoint me again, do you?" "No sir." It was time to kick the Angel Plan into high gear. ------- Chapter 335: "Pick Someone to Resurrect, Jonathon Winters." Monday, April 16, 2007 (Continued) "I've got a job for you too, Jonathon Winters." He was one of the cameramen. I'd picked him because I'd been able to find out his name and he seemed to have a positive, happy attitude. "What? Me?" he asked in surprise. My not turning my body or head when I addressed him caused even more confusion. "Yes. God just told me to provide humanity with more proof that I'm an archangel. He's unhappy with humanity's unwillingness to divert itself from its lemming-like, 'life as usual' behavior, as just ably demonstrated by the less-than-able Director Mueller. Humanity is heading for a series of calamities unless it pulls its head out of its self-absorbed ass, but almost none of you have seen daylight yet. -- "After reading all the documents I have as Majestic Countdown, I'd very much enjoy proving my power by getting Old Testament on Washington DC, but God prefers that I prove my divine nature by resurrecting someone. Make a list of several good candidates for me, Jonathon Winters, and I'll get it from you in a week." "Ahh, I don't understand. Are you asking me to pick someone to bring back to life?" "That's correct. In LA someone foolishly suggested Elvis. I'm sure your network has that clip on file. Listen to my reasons for rejecting Elvis, then make up some good criteria of your own. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest people who died less than five or ten years ago so they won't be out of touch when they're brought back. People who died unfairly would seem a good choice too, as I'm big on righting wrongs. You'll need to make up many more criteria of your own. Once you've got several good ones, use them to choose some candidates. -- "If ABC wishes, it might want to get involved by allowing public submissions for what criteria could be used, and no doubt people will be clamoring to suggest individual candidates too, although getting the criteria right first is the better process to use. ABC can display the evolving process as you work on it." OF COURSE the network would LOVE to get involved! Talk about a ratings hit! It'd also allow us to track whether Mark Anderson qualified. -- "It is YOUR project though, Jonathon. If any of your bosses tread on your toes, let me know and I'll shoot them in their feet too. I've found it to be an excellent way of adjusting attitudes. Similarly, listen to the public's opinions if you want ideas, but you're working for God on this, not the public. It's YOUR list I want. -- "I'm only half-joking about motivating your bosses. Millions of people have died in recent years so you've got a great deal of work ahead of you developing suitable criteria and then applying them. You'll need a considerable amount of help and I expect your network to provide it to you. I imagine your bosses are smarter than Director Mueller, so they should act on my wishes..." Someone's cellphone started ringing. I demanded, "Turn it off," which he quickly did. So did all the other cameramen, to play safe. Shooting someone in the foot really is an excellent way to maximize people's helpfulness. I resumed, "Jonathon, I'll email you in about ten days or so, to arrange a meeting where you and I will review your list of candidates. I want your list finalized by then, so you're going to be VERY busy until then. Do you understand?" "I'm going to pick a DEAD person to bring back to LIFE?" "That's half-correct. It wouldn't be nice of me to let you suffer the condemnation you'd receive from everyone who disagreed with your final pick, so I'll take responsibility for that. You'll make the shortlist and I'll get you to talk me through everyone on it, whereupon I'll choose the resurrectee. I imagine your list will contain approximately twenty names, but if you want more or less that's fine with me. If you've got a good set of criteria and thirty people qualify under them, then thirty will be fine. Quality is more important than quantity." I was intending to do some manipulation if Mark Anderson wasn't on the list. I imagined it'd be easy to steer Jonathon because he'll probably be blown away by the task and me. If he resisted, it was still going to be my choice so I could insist on Mark Anderson. One of the other cameramen asked, "Will we be able to film the resurrection?" Obviously there couldn't be any filming as it'd be rather difficult to get Archangel Michael, Ron Fisher and Mark Anderson in front of the camera at the same time. It'd be good PR for me to agree to the cameraman's request, and I'd cancel it later by using the excuse of Mark not having a body. For now I answered, "God wants me to provide proof of my divinity. Filming the resurrection would help with that, so 'Yes, it can be filmed.' Whether you're the people doing the filming might depend on where it's taking place. Or maybe you'll be busy with something else more newsworthy, such as Paris Hilton remembering to put her panties on." All of them laughed, except for Jonathon Winters, who was too much in shock. By now there were twenty animals who'd either walked into the clearing to sit around my feet, or who'd flown down to land on or around me. They were just sitting there, most of them looking at me with apparent devotion (actually with mindlessness, but it's often much the same thing, even in humans). The cameramen were starting to get weirded out by it. Only the amazing topic of my resurrecting someone had kept them from changing the subject to discuss the animals. Having come down from the rarified heights of resurrecting a dead person by mentioning Little Miss Hilton, one of them asked, "Why are there animals and birds all around you?" Ignoring the redundant fact that birds are animals, I explained, "It happens whenever I stand still long enough in a natural environment. Natural creatures react to God's servants differently than self-aware, self-centered, thinking creatures do. Wholly natural creatures' souls resonate with mine, which draws them to me." "Birds and animals have souls?" asked several of them, in surprise. "Of course. That's what defines life. Humans are animals too you know. You evolved from little fellows like this." I crouched and extended my hand toward a squirrel, which seemed to happily run up it as I stood again. An act captured by most of the cameras, the others panning around the area, recording the Disneyesque scene. I continued, "Humanity is too egotistical. A few million years ago you were an animal species indistinguishable from many others. A million years from now you'll be totally different again. Presuming you don't destroy yourselves in the interim, in which case something else will have evolved to take your place. God's plan is flexible that way, and It's willing to wait many billions of years for something to work." The cameramen spent a few seconds absorbing that. One of them commented, "You've lived billions of years, and you've seen us evolve, yet you know about Paris Hilton." "Yeah, my job isn't always awe inspiring. Your civilization is considerably less civilized than several which have come before it, which is something you need to think about because those earlier ones no longer exist." After a pause, another cameraman asked, "When did God tell you to resurrect someone?" "A couple of minutes ago, at the end of my useless discussion with Director Mueller. The easiest way to explain it is to say that God is connected to all of It's angels at all times, so It knows everything we're doing, what we're seeing, etc. In reality, we're more 'of God', than separate entities connected to It. -- "I should move things along, so Jonathon, I'm sure questions will occur to you later. Post them on your network's website addressed to me, and I'll email you the answers. We'll agree on a code phrase soon, so you'll know the emails are from me. -- "That concludes our business for today; short as it was because Director Mueller had more important things to do than react intelligently to the most important event in Earth's last 2,000 years. Pack up your gear and I'll fly you back to town." One of the cameramen who'd received a cellphone call back when we'd been flying here, said, "Wait a second please. My reporter wants me to ask you a question. She wants..." I interrupted, "Are you about to ask a question that I would welcome, or are you going to waste my time for someone else's benefit?" "Ahh, on second thought, it doesn't matter." "Good decision. Director Mueller, here's your gun back." I pulled his arms away from his body, put the safety on, and flew it back into his holster; adding, "I suggest you leave it there until I'm out of sight. Here's your phone back too. You're not in my good graces so I'm not going to be your taxi back to town. The FBI seems to have choppers to spare so I'm sure you'll be able to call for a ride. You can productively spend your waiting time reassigning the many agents around the country who seem to have nothing better to do than ride around in helicopters pointing guns at me. Put them onto getting my leaked documents acted on with the degree of urgency I require. I've also got some expenses coming up and I seem to have left my wallet in my other suit. I'm sure you won't mind if I take yours to do God's work with." I extracted his wallet, sending it to sit on top of the white sheet I had floating to one side of me. -- "Jonathon, the FBI would like you to have this spare rifle as a souvenir. Sell it, keep it, whatever you like. I'm sure Director Mueller will fast-track the paperwork for it, and if you want instruction in its use, I'm sure the FBI will be only too willing to provide it free of charge. Correct, Director Mueller?" "Yes sir," he agreed immediately. "Good boy." I enjoyed talking to an important 62-year old man that way. "It's time to go." I gently brushed the animals sitting on me off. The wildlife remembered it was meant to be wild, and scattered. I picked up everyone except Mueller, putting them on a mass sled. We flew up at forty five degrees toward town. I kept a sight blob focused on Mueller, not that they need focusing, in case he was stupid enough to go for his gun. He watched us passively, not being THAT stupid. Actually, I was sure he wasn't stupid at all. His problem was ego and not realizing how fawningly I wanted him to treat me; neither fault motivating him into drawing his gun as we flew away. A minute after we cleared the top of the hills, I saw two fighters in tight formation came zooming down toward us. The cameramen were carrying a lot of metal, so we'd probably shown up on radar, or maybe the Air Force had gotten our location from the calls the cameramen had taken during our flight. The reason didn't matter, especially because the annoyance wasn't going to last long. The fighters were acting aggressively, and I knew they were REALLY expensive and the ground under us was uninhabited, which made my idea irresistible. I moved a sight blob into each cockpit as soon as each plane came into range. The sight blobs had no difficulty keeping up with the planes as I searched around the cockpit (literally "no difficulty". My frame of reference for the sight blobs was "inside the cockpit", and the sight blobs automatically moved around inside their cockpits just as if the planes were stationary. My subconscious processes are very helpful that way). I easily found the clearly labeled ejection lever, a big yellow, triple-pronged handle between and below the pilot's legs [[the fighters were Air National Guard F-16Cs]]. I formed NP-fingers around the rubber handle, waiting for the planes to pass us. Proximity clearly showed that the cameramen were filming the planes, so there was no need to ask them to do so. As soon as the trailing aircraft had SCREAMED past us - at a distance that was FAR too close for our comfort - I pulled both planes' ejection handles. I zipped the nearest sight blob back to get a look. The canopies were both flying up into the air and being blown behind each plane. The trailing plane wasn't flying directly in the leader's exhaust, so there was no danger of the first canopy hitting the second pilot when he ejected. The cameramen had barely begun to react when the rockets went off under the pilots' seats, blasting them clear of their planes, whether or not they wanted to be so blasted. While both planes were still in my range, I moved the errant sight blob back into the cockpit, grasped both planes' joysticks and pushed them forward identically. The planes curved downward, toward the forested ground only two hundred feet below. I left my NP-fingertips holding the sticks forward while I pulled my sight blobs back (it sure wasn't going to take thirty two seconds for the fighters to impact). Both sight blobs zoomed ahead to check that the impact area was clear. The cameramen were having a great time, excitedly calling out comments to each other, trying to narrate into their mics, etc. I searched in extremely rapidly widening circles around the likely impact area, happily finding nobody. I kept searching until I heard the loud explosion of the first plane's impacting, added to a moment later by the second's. I pulled the sight blobs back a hundred feet to find the exact impact locations, then zoomed around each of them to make sure there was no one I'd missed. Nope, all was clear. From pulling the ejection handles through to finishing the search afterward, had taken less than four seconds. The pilots, sitting in their seats, were still flying upward from the impetus their ejection rockets had given them. I said to the cameramen, "We'll postpone your return to town for a conversation with the pilots." None of the cameramen objected. I started us rising. The crashes were several hundred feet away, but I was happy to get even farther away from any cooking-off ammunition. I caught the pilots' seats as they reached their highest points, holding them at that altitude and bringing them toward each other as the cameramen and I rose toward the central meeting point. The ejection seats fired their parachutes, but I just used more NP-fingers to bundle them up and hold them against the back of the seats; something I imagined worried the pilots considerably. On the way up to the pilots, one of the cameramen asked me, "Did you do that, sir?" "Yes. I'd requested that helicopters should stay more than a mile away from me or they'd be downed. A sensible person would've known that two fully-armed fighters screaming past me in an aggressive and annoying attempt at intimidation wasn't going to be tolerated. I'm amazed at how long it's taking your Government to learn that disrespect is not a good idea. Your leaders are very full of themselves, aren't they?" The cameramen were agreeing with that as we neared the pilots. I'd moved their seats side by side, and they were talking together. Proximity showed me that the pilot for the rear fighter was uninjured, but the lead pilot was bashed around a fair bit. Nothing life-threatening, but he certainly hadn't had a clean ejection. The uninjured pilot accused, "You did that!" "Sure. Didn't your mother teach you not to be rude? We were flying along peacefully doing God's business when you obnoxiously intruded into my airspace..." As I'd baited him to, he reacted by proclaiming, "This is AMERICAN airspace. We can fly wherever we want!" "God has a different opinion. You might've heard, 'In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth.' It's claim predates America's by several billion years and is considerably stronger because It MADE the airspace. I can't imagine how you can be so arrogant as to claim you have dominion over God. I've heard enough of your nonsense, so shut up now." I clamped his jaw shut, turned his chair around, and sent it twenty feet away. To the other pilot I said, "You've got a broken right tibia and cracked ankle, your neck's been badly strained and is going to need some work, and your left upper-arm has some muscle damage. Plus some contusions and mild strains. Nothing life-threatening, and you should be flying again in several weeks. -- "There's more fat lining your major blood vessels than there should be for someone your age and occupation. You don't want restricted blood flow or a clot during high-g maneuvers so you should reconsider your diet." (I'd learned that from the reading I'd done for my own flying.) "I also suggest you see a dentist about a sizable cavity you've got forming in your lower left jaw. Judging by the amount of work done on your teeth, you're eating too much processed sugar too. Other than your dietary problems and recent injuries, you're healthy. -- "That leaves your major problem being your lack of wisdom. Goodness only knows why you thought it was a good idea to come screaming past me like that. I suggest you spread the word among your fellow pilots that a nice, respectful, two-mile distance would be much safer for them. If you want a close look at me, carry a pair of binoculars. It'll cost the American Government a lot less than replacing your annoyingly loud toys. -- "Do you want me to set you on the ground here, or would you prefer being delivered to a hospital in town?" Through gritted teeth, against the pain from his right leg and neck, he said, "Here please." I knew pilots had emergency locator beacons in their ejection seats, or maybe in their flight suits. I wasn't sure exactly where, but I knew there was probably a chopper already on its way to pick them up. Presumably he'd answered the way he had because he wanted to be away from me as soon as possible, which was fine with me. I lowered him and his partner to the ground, taking a few extra seconds in his case, to be gentle on his injuries. [[At the time of his ejection, the lead pilot had been turned in his chair to look back over his left shoulder at me. F-16s have seatbacks that recline at thirty degrees, making looking behind an awkward body maneuver, so it had been a bad time for him to be ejected.]] The cameramen and I sped back to town, with them getting me to prove I could see the health of human bodies by telling them about their own. There are plenty of things I can't see about human bodies, so I manipulated the conversation to hide that fact. Fortunately being a cameraman doesn't seem to be a healthy lifestyle, so there was plenty I could talk about to kill time. Including explaining to them why I wasn't going to be healing all their ills. I gave them some crap about freewill, and not opening cans of worms that billions of people would want in on. I was headed for a location several miles east of the convention center I'd picked the cameramen up from. One of them queried where we were going. I answered, "I don't want to play more gun games with the FBI. I imagine you're also not eager to head back to an area where bullets could start flying, so I'm dropping you off a safe distance away. -- "Jonathon, I'll need you to give me a code you want me to put on my emails to you, so you'll know they're from me. Make up an unlikely phrase please?" He answered, "Okay. Do you know my email address? It's..." I cut him off by quoting the address I'd seen on the business cards in his pocket. "That's right! How did you know?" "One of the little birdies that sat on my shoulder told me." "Really?" "Nah. I'm jerking your chain. I find some of your expressions amusing and can't resist making a joke out of them. I know your email address because angels have ways of knowing things that humans can't duplicate. I'll float you over now so you can whisper your code to me." When he was close enough, he whispered, "The cat sat in the hat." "Got it." I floated him back to his pack. Not that it mattered much, but I'd wanted all the cameramen to see Jonathon whispering to me, rather than me to him, to make it look more like Jonathon was independent of me, because that might reduce the risk of someone later claiming that I'd told Jonathon to put Mark Anderson on the list. On his way back, Jonathon said, "The job you've asked me to do is too large for me. It'd take me MONTHS to do it and I'd never live it down afterward." "I agree it's too large for you to do it yourself, but you're the boss not the sole worker. If ABC doesn't give you enough resources, call up George W. Bush and tell him you want a thousand secretaries and researchers. He can strip them out of the armed forces and bureaucracies all over the country and send them to you overnight. It's also going to take computer programmers to match your criteria against everyone who has died in whatever period you decide on, and other specialists too, depending on what aspects are important to you. -- "George, when you listen to this, call my helper Jonathon here and put yourself at his disposal. I'm sure there's nothing else more important for you to do than smoothing the way for one of God's specific instructions. -- "Don't sweat the small stuff, Jonathon. Your job is to have the final word on the criteria, to make sure the work is being done quickly and well enough, to decide on the shortlist of candidates, and to present their biographies to me a couple of weeks from now. You've got an accurate gun now, so if anyone doesn't give you the cooperation you need, shoot them in a foot. You're doing God's work. That's not some self-deluded Catholic priest spouting some bizarre nonsense like 'God is against condoms.' You ARE doing God's work. You were with me when I got the instruction straight from the horse's mouth so don't let human laws stand in your way. You've heard of 'Presidential Pardons', well now you've got as many 'Angelic Get Out Of Jail Free Cards' as you need to get the job done. If you're having trouble getting cooperation from anyone - and I mean ANYONE - put a comment about your problem on ABC's website, and if they don't straighten up immediately, I'll fix their attitude. It's not often God gives me a specific instruction like this, and when It does, I move Heaven and Earth to get the job done. Ten days is ample time for the resources you're able to command. -- "You're right about not living it down afterward though. It will change your life. That's a consequence of hanging around with angels; unusual things can happen to you. A very self-important man got shot in the foot and dumped in a forest. While you, who Director Mueller doubtless considers far less important than himself, have the major role in choosing only the second human being to be resurrected in the hundred thousand year history of your species. You may recall that Jesus valued people in unusual ways too. Angels don't judge people in the same way your society does. -- "If you think your life is going to change, imagine how much more the life of the resurrected person is going to change! Which reminds me, one of your criteria for the people that you put on your list is that they have at least a moderate ability to defend themselves emotionally from the pressures that being resurrected will bring. For examples, very young, infirm, or previously vain persons would not be good choices. You don't have to worry about physical defense, as God will provide physical protection for the resurrected person." Jonathon asked incredulously, "The President has to do what I say?" "If you said you needed the Swedish Bikini-Babe Beach Volleyball Team flown to you, then I wouldn't give George a hard time if he refused to put Air Force One at your disposal. You could give it a try, and if you got away with it, then kudos to you, but that's not something the President would be required to do for you. But if some bureaucrat is blocking your staff's access to a database of death certificates, and if George hasn't removed the obstruction within fifteen minutes after you've called him to explain the problem, then I wouldn't want to be in either of those politicians' shoes. Same thing if George doesn't take one of your calls or if he tries to claim one of your country's laws prevents you from getting what you want. Working on God's direct instruction supersedes every one of your laws. From what I've been reading as Majestic Countdown, most of the senior politicians in your country spend most of their time plotting to break your nation's laws anyway. My comments apply at the State level too. If a Governor is being unhelpful, call George and tell him to send one of his goons to shoot the Governor in the foot. And if that doesn't motivate the Governor enough, get him shot in the head and see if his replacement is any more cooperative. You've only got ten days so don't stand for ANY time wasting. It'd be disrespectful to God, and you don't want to permit any disrespect to an entity that can erase your solar system far easier than I can disable helicopters. You got the idea, Jonathon?" "It's UNBELIEVABLE! Why ME? I'm just a cameraman, not anyone special." "Were Joseph and Mary 'special' when they were chosen? Being special is overvalued, especially by the people who think they're special. Don't denigrate being a cameraman either. Your work is continuously and openly judged. If you do a good job, people can see it. If you do a bad job, they can see that too. Director Mueller risked the lives of several of his agents by deliberately distorting my instruction not to bring guns on helicopters within a mile of me. If the pilot had not carried out his emergency landing so well, deaths could have resulted. The FBI's helicopter was damaged to reinforce that I mean my instructions. I should never have had to do that, but I needed to because Mueller insisted on considering himself more important than one of God's archangels. The cost of recovering and repairing that helicopter should come out of his pocket, but it won't because he'll refuse to take responsibility for its getting damaged. -- "One of the reasons I gave you the job of producing the list of candidates is because I want someone who will do a job because a job needs doing; not someone who thinks that his ego is more important than the job. You work in a profession where you're used to dealing with egos. In the job I've given you, it'll be important that you manage the egotists that'll try to grab at the glory of the task. Some of them you'll need to get work from, others you'll be able to blow off immediately. You've only got a week and a half, so you don't have time for people who play games with you. You should be experienced enough at recognizing bullshit quickly, and knowing how to deal with it. In a couple of weeks it's just going to be you and me sitting down somewhere and going through the shortlist's biographies together. I'm not going to allow anyone else there, no matter how big their ego is. Your knowing that is going to keep it real for you, just like when you hand over a tape. The final result of your work will be judged for what it is, with everything else left outside the door. -- "I also expect you're not the sort of person who'd agree to wear a wire or play any of those types of Government games. I'm sure your job experiences around this town have left you with no illusions about how wise and benevolent anyone working for the Government is. This is God's business, not your Government's, and you've got the experience to appreciate that. -- "There are other reasons," although I couldn't think of any, other than my knowing his name, "but that should be enough to counter your, 'I'm just a cameraman' concern. In this town, there aren't many professions more suitable to draw from than yours..." #13: I ended with, "That's a good place to end it. I'll drop you here and leave you to file your stories." "WAIT!" begged my unaware smoke-and-mirrors guy. "I've got more questions: Do you want Americans or do I have to search the entire world? Do they have to be Christian? Do they have to be as sinless as possible, like not having a criminal record? What about..." "Jonathon, I could resurrect a dead squirrel on live TV and achieve most of what God wants, so don't get so worked up. God wants me to resurrect a human, but It doesn't much care who that is. It's my being seen to perform the action itself that matters the most to God, so I could pick a dead person at random. Your job boils down to my giving you the opportunity to find someone more deserving of resurrection than a random choice would likely be. There's no way of anyone doing a perfect job in ten days. Not even in ten years, as it's very much a matter of personal judgment. Do the best you can, and that'll be fine. You can answer your own questions easily, but I'll get you started to illustrate how you should think about them: -- "'America or the whole world?' There's no reason to believe that the most deserving Americans are any more or less deserving than people from other countries, so if you chose to restrict yourself to America, the quality of your shortlist won't suffer appreciably. An American serves God's stated purpose just as well, and it's America which is currently causing the greatest harm to humanity, so I'd prefer the resurrected person be an 'in your face' reminder of my visit. Plus you've only got ten days and there's no way you can comb the world in that time, and if you tried you'd only start jingoistic arguments. In your shoes, I'd choose American citizens who died in America. It meets God's requirements and it's quickest. You'll easily find plenty of very deserving people for your shortlist. -- "'Do they have to be Christian?' Do Christians' friends and families somehow grieve more? Are Christians somehow more deserving of having an unfair death reversed? I can't see why. You could even argue the reverse: that their friends and families grieve less believing their loved ones are happily floating around on clouds strumming on harps. Don't get hung up on religion; it has surprisingly little to do with God. God is the God of all of you, regardless of what you believe, or if you believe nothing. Despite their constant claims, each religion isn't the sole source of morality either. I mentioned condoms earlier. It's immoral for Popes to prohibit the use of condoms. I would even say it's an evil act. Non-Catholics also commit evil acts, and all sorts of people can commit wonderful acts. People are people, regardless of religion. The only people I'd judge on religious grounds are people who are extremely religious, regardless of which religion. They tend to be intolerant, arrogant, and treat others with immoral contempt rather than compassion. If you wish to use a religious criterion, exclude extremists of every religion, including Christian. How you'd implement such a criterion I'll leave for you and your advisors to decide. -- "'Do they have to be sinless?' Having a criminal record is the only practical way of judging that in bulk, and I agree that criminals are unlikely to be the most deserving candidates. You could argue that some crimes, in some circumstances, shouldn't invalidate the person, but there are plenty of non-criminals to select from and you don't have time to investigate individual cases or to decide whether a conviction for Crime X, Y years ago counts or not. It's your choice, but I'd blanket eliminate anyone with a conviction for anything. -- "Your questions indicate you're getting hung up on being fair, Jonathon. I strongly suggest you don't worry about that so much. No matter what criteria you decide on, most people will believe you're being unfair. You could choose all the firemen that died in the 9/11 collapses and you'd be attacked for excluding females. If you included females, you'd be attacked for including them just because they've got tits, when they hadn't been as meritorious as the firemen they knocked off the list. Every affirmative action group will attack you because you're not over-representing their constituency. If you do over-represent any group, every other group will attack you for it, demanding you replace the undeserving excesses with their constituents. Millions of people will be impossible to reason with because they'll be desperately trying to force you to change your criteria so their recently deceased loved ones can be included. No matter what your criteria are, you'll make a couple of dozen people happy, and millions will think you're being unfair. -- "Fortunately you're not working for 'The People' so there's no need to try to meet their expectations. You're working for God and me. We aren't quite the same thing because I've got freewill and God hasn't told me everything that It knows and intends, so It and I can have different ideas. That's part of God's plan too, so don't worry about it. God instructed me to resurrect a human, so to make God happy all you have to do is find a dead human. To make me happy, you just have to find a few people who I think are deserving. Don't worry about pleasing everyone else; just me. You'd never get anywhere if you tried to satisfy your society's ceaselessly argued and irreconcilable ideas about fairness. -- "So you need to research me to help you decide what I think 'deserving' means. That's another reason why I've picked you for this job, because the only research material worth studying is everything I've produced over the last several years. For you, that means the Majestic Countdown emails and the videotapes of my LA revelation and this visit. You have easy access to all that material. Don't waste your time reading any historic or religious documents about me as they're almost entirely imaginary and overlaid with religious and political agendas. The opinions of the so-called experts the networks have rolled out since I revealed myself in LA are useless too. Just read what I have written and listen to what I've said. -- "I've described the process I want you to use, but I'm going to tell you almost nothing about the specific outcomes I want. I just want your list. I'm not going to be judging you on so-called fair representations. If your entire list is female or male, or Black or White, or any other token and its deemed opposite, then I won't care. If you honestly believe that I think blind, Black, lesbian, single-mother members of Greenpeace are the most deserving candidates, and every name on the list belongs to that intersection of groups, then I will be happy with the job you've done. In reality, you'll be unsure about what group or groups I think are most deserving, so you'll just have to give it your best shot, which is all I want. -- "Get ideas from any sources you wish, including listening to what criteria the public suggests, but it's up to you to decide what you think I mean by 'deserve'. If you put the names on the shortlist honestly, and present reasons that are well thought out when we discuss them, then I'll be happy. Any improvement you can make over a random choice would be good, so the project isn't as daunting as you think." I was quite pleased with myself. I'd made up the last few minutes of crap on the spur of the moment and I thought it worked very well. It gave a very plausible reason for not trying to pander to the public's wishes, and reasonably explained that pandering to mine was the way to go. That should nicely lead to Jonathon's noticing - or being told - that Majestic Countdown's first email leakage was about Mark Anderson's unfair death. I'd almost guaranteed Mark Anderson would be favorably considered, in a way that would make it seem a logical necessity rather than a trick. I'd spent more than enough time on this topic. I'd been flying us over the eastern fringes of DC, zigzagging randomly and not staying in one place to avoid the risk of someone running to get their rifle to indulge in a spot of angel hunting. I'd kept the sled of cameramen below me too, as a human shield. But word of my meandering around this area had spread, no doubt aided by the cameramen's gear being easily detected on radar, as there were now several aircraft shadowing us from a distance. So many of them that my previous idea for how to anonymously move onto my next task wouldn't work any more. I had intended to buy some clothes that'd cover me from head to foot (by entering a house, stealing the clothes, but leaving nearly all of Director Mueller's money behind), then taking a taxi to near the White House. I'd meander to within about 450 feet of the Oval Office, inside of which I'd suddenly create dozens of light blobs. A dozen or so would sequentially run down each and every wire (telephone, computer, intercom, lighting, etc., as if to invade the whole building), single other blobs would merge into the desk, into every cellphone, into the corners of the room, and into the head of every person present (hopefully including Georgie Boy). It'd be all over in a couple of seconds, but would FREAK them out! My family had suffered from the paranoia of having to live with the possible presence of bugs, so the White House could do so too. It should also incline George toward cooperating with Jonathon Winters, especially if I indulged in some convincing NP at the time that I created the light blobs. Unfortunately, I thought there was too much attention on me now. I could probably lose it, but that might be a risk even if only by leaving too many clues about my abilities and limitations. 'Bugging' (pun intended) Georgie Boy wasn't worth it. I floated Director Mueller's wallet over to Jonathon, saying, "Jonathon, help yourself to any money you need to get back to your office or for any other purpose. When you need more, call up George and tell him to get it delivered to you or wired into your account. The Government is at your disposal now, so make use of them. Once you get your clips aired, if there's anyone who doesn't fall all over themselves to help you, publicize it and I'll react when I get a chance. I'm demanding a very high level of cooperation, so you'll be letting me down if you don't do the same. -- "I'll set you all down in that sports field shortly. Work hard over the next couple of weeks, but not too hard. I don't want you to burn yourself out chasing unattainable perfection, merely to do the best you can reasonably be expected to. If you don't get at least one hot date out of being so important I'll be disappointed in you. I don't see any reason why the Government shouldn't pay for your entertainment expenses either, so make sure you let off steam from time to time. Get back to your offices, get those tapes aired, then get things moving, okay?" Jonathon answered, "I'll try. I could easily fail at this..." "Get the Government to send you two or three of their very best and most highly effective secretaries. Let them organize the details. You can sit behind your desk with your feet in the air thinking about the big issues." "I don't even have a desk." "If you haven't got a fully equipped office BUILDING by the end of the day, the Government will regret it. Ten days doesn't allow time for fooling around. I know you don't have the skills and knowledge necessary to organize the facilities you'll need, but there are plenty of people in the Government who do have the necessary skills. If enough of them aren't immediately unleashed to set everything up for you, then I'll express my displeasure in an unmistakable manner. I've got other tasks I need to do, so I'm setting your down now." "WAIT! What do I do about..." "You do the best you can. Bye for now." I lowered them rapidly toward the sports field, one large enough for the many helicopters that'd doubtless be landing beside them soon. And that was before any of their tapes had been aired. After that'd happened, the frenzy would REALLY start! I climbed as I flew roughly east, reaching about 2,000 feet before I leveled off. Several helicopters had landed on the sports field, but there were still quite a few aircraft following and flanking me. All at least a mile away, and of several different types: fixed and rotary wing; press, FBI, military and civilian. It was quite a circus. I was still carrying the damned sheet but didn't want to set fire to it while anyone was watching. My plan required me to confuse people so I could unconfuse them by doing a resurrection. Its having a religious theme meant that I particularly had to confuse religious people, so I needed to do some things that were goodly, like the Disneyesque animal scene just before, and some things that were 'badly', such as having a prominently outlined large cock. God knows why, but religious people have a fucking ridiculous attitude to sex, so my using that had been irresistible. Using fire should probably be resisted though because I wanted them confused; not certain that I was from Hell. When I was about ten miles out to sea, I slowed to a stationary hover, then moved about a hundred feet northwest, as if the exact location was important, which it wasn't. Then flew in an ever-widening spiral as I descended, as if searching for something, which I wasn't. I was just playing a little mind-game to make people even more confused. When I was down to about six hundred feet, I tilted into a perfectly vertical, head down, arms at my side, dive. I fell, letting gravity do the work until the last hundred feet, when I decelerated myself down to a more reasonable entry speed. Several aircraft were already rushing inward. I don't know what they intended to do, but I wasn't going to hang around to find out because they were all military craft. That the others were holding back was a cause for concern. I speared into the water and dived straight down to about thirty feet, where I turned and motored at full speed toward where my black clothes were hidden, about fifteen miles away. I was about two hundred feet away from my entry point when the first pair of fighters streaked over top of it. Nothing happened: no gunfire, missiles, depth charges or anything like that. Two more fighters had buzzed the point before the first two military helicopters arrived on the scene. The military always seem to do things in pairs, so our armed forces must be a friendly place to work. By then I was five hundred feet away, which was surely a safe distance from any depth charges dropped on my entry point. If any came lobbing toward me, I'd throw the damn things back! The two choppers had approached at a low altitude and with a couple of hundred feet separating them. When they had my entry point bracketed, they each dropped something small in the water as they hovered above it. The dropped objects were on the end of wires, which caused me to guess they were some sort of sensor. In the few submarine movies I'd seen, sonar operators had listened mostly for the sounds of propellers turning and engine noises. My submarine didn't have propellers or an engine, but my rushing along at 20 mph must disturb the water, which might be detectable by whatever was at the end of those wires. So I canceled 80% of my pushing fingertips, which almost immediately cut my speed to almost nothing. I still had at least one public appearance to do, and possibly even two or three more, depending on how events unfolded. I didn't want to have to put up with this military invasiveness so I decided to teach them to show me some respect. Whose ocean did they think this was anyway! I turned around and slowly headed back toward the helicopters. It only took a minute to get both of them within my range; slightly over four hundred feet because I needed clear vision. I simultaneously disabled them in the time-honored, well-proven manner. They were hovering close to the surface, which ruined any chance of their autorotating to a gentle splashdown. Their unpowered rotors still had a moderate amount of angular momentum so were able to partially combat gravity, just not as much as the pilots would have liked. A second apart, they both dropped fairly heavily onto the ocean. They were the same type of helicopter, with pontoons and a boat-shaped bottom that was evidently strong enough to withstand a hard landing (watering?). They sat on the surface, bobbing up and down with the swells as their rotors slowed down. I used NP to friction-brake the vertical masts of their rotors, slowing them more quickly. While I was doing that, two fighters buzzed low over the downed choppers. They were the same types of fighters as I'd ejected the two previous pilots from, so I knew exactly where the handles were. I yanked them again. Both fighters had been banked about forty five degrees so the pilots could see the helicopters clearly, so they ejected at that angle. They wouldn't get much height out of the ejection, so I kept one sight blob on them to watch to see if they needed help to avoid a disastrous landing. I soon saw that they'd be fine, as the ejection seats cleverly reoriented themselves so the rockets pushed the seats directly upward. With the other sight blob, I was watching as I pushed one helicopter's pontoon skyward, tipping it over. I did it slowly to give the crew time to realize what was happening and to prepare for getting wet. Seeing the fighter's ejection seats be so clever, I used that sight blob to start tipping the second chopper quicker than the first. The rotors were going slow enough that they didn't fly apart dangerously when they hit the water. The first blade of each chopper to hit the water snapped, but the pieces just skipped a short distance then sank. The impact finished braking the rotors to a halt, so no more pieces snapped off. I finished rotating the choppers 180 degrees, their pontoons now ensuring they floated upside-down. I sent a sight blob to check each cabin, and was pleased to see that the crews were evacuating competently. I imagine it'd be something they trained for. The fighter pilots' parachutes were deploying now too, so it looked like they'd have safe splashdowns. Unlike the first two fighters I'd downed, with these two I hadn't bothered controlling their crashes. It didn't matter to me where they came down because there was no risk of anyone being underneath them when it happened. The fighters had been tilted at forty five degrees at the time they'd become pilotless, which isn't a stable orientation for a plane. They'd rolled back to level [[modern fighters are slightly 'intelligent' thanks to their fly-by-wire computer assistants]], but the planes' initial 45-degree tilts and the increased wind resistance caused by their cockpits having no canopies conspired to make them lose altitude. They had very little of that to start with, so it didn't take long for both of them to impact with the water at high speed, ensuring their complete destruction. Another thing that took even less time, was for every other aircraft in the area to turn around and make high-speed beelines back toward land. I waited to see that the ejected pilots splashed down safely, and that their ejection seats didn't drag them under. They had small rubber rafts that kept them safe, and both were conscious and appeared not to be badly injured. The helicopter crews had all gotten out of their cabins, had deployed a large life raft each, and were now paddling them toward both fighter pilots. I ripped the now empty helicopters' pontoons open, destroying their buoyancy and causing the choppers to sink like stones. We were ten miles out to sea, where I presumed the water was deep enough to ensure that was the last anyone was going to see of these helicopters. There was a pair of fighters standing off at a very high altitude and at a considerable distance, but otherwise the skies were rapidly clearing. Presumably a very nervous rescue boat would arrive in due course, but there was no sign of it yet. I resumed my underwater journey at 20 mph, confident that the military wouldn't crowd my ass so closely next time. It took me three-quarters of an hour to get back to my clothes and to don them on top of my A-man suit. Then I headed toward the mouth of the Potomac River. It gets dark about 8pm at this time of year in DC so I had to wait quite a few hours before I could fly home. I wanted to watch TV while I was waiting, to see what the reaction was and if necessary to intervene while I was in the area. I had planned to cruise up the south side of the river looking for an area where I could 'leap' out of the water and enter an unoccupied house to watch their TV. Now that I was in the river I found a much easier and better option: watching the TVs in one of the many luxury launches anchored in the river. I cruised along until I found a nice looking one (nothing but the best for a guy doing God's business). It had a TV, no occupant, and no apparent alarm. I positioned myself almost underneath it and created a snorkel so I could hear if an alarm went off. I NP-picked up the TV's remote and tried to turn it on, but it didn't work. I opened the fridge and saw that the light turned on, so there must be power. Some investigation found a well-labeled power supply panel, with it indicating that the boat was on battery power, but with almost everything turned off. I turned several things on, then tested the TV again. It came on this time. I turned off individual switches on the control panel, until I had the bare minimum activated so the TV worked. As much as I would've liked to climb onboard, make myself comfortable and have a meal, I didn't want to leave ANY evidence behind. Instead I turned the volume up very loud, moved myself directly under the hull, formed an NP seal between myself and the hull, and confirmed that I could hear the TV fine that way. I even had to turn the volume down somewhat. I lay back, prepared to spend the next several hours lying in my submarine with a sight blob watching TV for me, while the other sight blob kept overwatch to make sure no one came near. I did make a meal though, lowering it and some drinks down a snorkel to me. I also got rid of the damned sheet by detaching it in its own small NP-box, raising it to the surface and enlarging the box considerably. Sinking it again, and then setting fire to it. It burned until the oxygen supply was consumed, then I let the remnants go, to be washed away by the river. TV was VERY interesting. From when I'd dropped the cameramen off, it'd taken me slightly over an hour to get to where I was now. That'd obviously been long enough, because all the networks were running my latest appearance continuously. Something like two or three million Americans must die every year, but my offer to bring just one of them back was BIG NEWS! In an amusing turnaround, the cameramen were in front of the cameras this time, with their reporters or more senior network people interviewing them about their experience with me. Most of the networks were saying, "Archangel Michael appointed local resident Jonathon Winters to decide on the shortlist of candidates for resurrection." Everyone knows the media STRONGLY believe that the public has a right to know, but apparently that didn't include knowing that Jonathon Winters worked for a rival network. Whereas, on ABC, almost every sentence was something like: "ABC's own Jonathon Winters", "The archangel requested ABC's assistance", "ABC is proud to be helping choose the candidates for Archangel Michael's resurrection", etc. To listen to ABC, they were virtually solely responsible for God's picking Jonathon Winters. If they could have managed it, I got the impression that ABC would've tried to take credit for God too, but they couldn't quite carry that off. One lesson I'd learned well from Julia, was to confuse people that you wanted to lead by the nose. There were many very confusing aspects to what I'd done, which kept the networks in a frenzy: from my shooting the Director of the FBI in the foot with his own gun, through to the animals gathering around me. The networks LOVED the animal trick! They SERIOUSLY loved it! I suspected I didn't need to prove my divinity any more, because of how moved the commentators were by my trick with the cute little animals. I think I'll still go ahead with my resurrection offer though. The cameramen all said I was a nice guy, but I'd destroyed $100 million worth of the Air Force's aircraft. I'd shot holes in the FBI's chopper, which seemed very petty, but I'd also miraculously diagnosed everyone's health without even touching them. I had profaned (saying things like, "pulls its head out of its selfish ass"), yet I insisted I was an angel in constant contact with God. I'd even blasphemously referred to God's instructions as having come, "straight from the horse's mouth," for God's sake! I was astonished when I changed channels into the middle of an interview with a sensible sounding female cleric. She was talking about God and angels, so that part was obviously crap, but her tone and thoughtfulness made for a refreshing change. She was seriously trying to connect my statements to established Church theology in workable ways. I wished her with that. I waited until her name came up - "Bishop Schori" - then went back to my channel surfing. It'll be interesting to see if she gets more airtime. She was sensible, so I hope she will. [She was intelligent, thoughtful, sensible and moderate, so made for Poor TV and I never saw her again. She self-evidently wasn't Catholic, and the TV networks preferred to have that bunch as their guests if they wanted weighty opinions, as Catholics somehow seemed to have acquired a greater cachet for their authoritative knowledge about God.] The media normally like their stories to have a single, simple, theme. Ideally something that can be presented in a five-second sound bite. That certainly wasn't the case with me. They were in a tizzy trying to untangle my story. Different networks were playing different sections of their tapes, getting different 'experts' to explain what they meant. One often-repeated issue was my saying that "having souls defines life." My wording hadn't been clear, but the consensus of opinion was that I meant that all living creatures had souls. There were experts coming from all directions to give the world the benefit of their expert opinions on that issue. The meat industry was bleating, so I made a mental note to do something pro-meat on my next appearance (I like meat! Not just roast chickens either; meat is DELICIOUS). In retrospect, I should've said "all sentient creatures have souls," because trees and flowers were roped into the issue. The environmentalists were having a field day! There were comments about topics ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous (literally in this case: from God to Paris Hilton). But by far the biggest issue was the resurrection itself; that had people beside themselves with excitement. ABC had a huge advantage reporting on that issue, because they could talk with Jonathon about his plans. The poor guy was in over his head. None of the cameramen were old guys as it's a young man's game. I'd guessed Jonathon's age to be late-twenties, but it came out during his interview that he was twenty five. It was a big responsibility for a young guy, and he was visibly feeling it. ABC was enthusiastically offering him as much help as he needed (i.e., they were willing to help him get the really expensive help from the Government). One of the things they'd done was install a phone on the desk in front of Jonathon. I'd missed its installation, but apparently ABC had gotten Jonathon to call the White House and ask to speak to President Bush. Unsurprisingly, he hadn't gotten through, because it'd apparently been done right at the beginning of the story's breaking, before any of the tapes had been aired. He'd left his name and number with a request that the President call him back. Every few minutes there'd be a comment from ABC that the President still hadn't done so; something that was self-evident as the phone and an incrementing timer were permanently displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen, under the heading, "Time waiting for the President's call". It was permanently on-screen, even when clips from the videotape were being played. I'd put Jonathon onto the right track for getting his job done, by telling him he should get the Government to set him up with all the resources and people he needed. ABC played small snippets out of my advice, and discussed them with Jonathon. There was a great deal of discussion about how it could be done, and corollary aspects like whether dead people have a right to privacy, what would happen if the resurrected person hadn't wanted to be brought back, what would happen if their heirs had already spent the inheritance, and other such issues. The other networks tended to discuss topics like how on Earth I was able to eject pilots out of F-16s when I was underwater and there'd been no sign of any weapon breaking the surface. Telekinesis was still the favored explanation, as it had been since my appearance in LA. That was a pity, but there was far too much evidence of my using it. For example, when I'd carried one of the DC female reporters across the street suspended upside-down, the video showed the indentations on her lower-leg where I'd been gripping her. The tape also showed quite a lot of the female reporter too, but apparently this network thought the public had a right to have this very important scientific marvel explained to them, in slow motion too. They could've used the tape of my clamping Mueller's mouth shut - as the network the female reporter worked for did later - but in their wisdom they'd used the moving, squirming, footage. The reporter's squirming made it less scientifically useful, but that apparently hadn't been the networks' sole criterion. The non-ABC networks were also calling around trying to get a response from the Government. The FBI and Air Force weren't talking, and the media didn't have enough leverage to make them. The White House was a different issue though, as it needed to cooperate with the press. A couple of hours after I started watching - when the timer showed 2:24:30 - an ABC executive came on-camera to say, "We've just received a call from the White House saying that before they can respond fully, they need our original tapes to analyze to ensure this isn't a hoax. We've agreed to provide them and someone's coming to collect them now." They left the timer incrementing though, explaining, "The President still hasn't called, as Archangel Michael instructed." Then they spent some time discussing what that meant, and that the delay while the analysis was done was likely to be a considerable portion of Jonathon's ten days. Jonathon summed up my feelings correctly when he said, "I don't think the angel's going to be happy with the delay." The angel had already thought of a good way of putting pressure on President Bush, so I set off to do that. ------- Chapter 336: Air Force One and Two Monday, April 16, 2007 (Continued) I turned off the TV and returned the boat's electrical switches to their original positions, stole a raincoat and cap from the boat, detached myself from the hull and motored myself farther up the Potomac, crossing over to the north shore while I did so. I was looking for a bicycle to steal. I wasn't being very angelic, but no one's perfect. There are plenty of fancy private homes with their own jetties, lots of narrow inlets, etc., so ample choice for discreet locations for me to leave the water. It didn't take long for me to find one with an accessible, adult-sized bike. It was inside the garage of a very upmarket house; the garage's pedestrian door being easy to open from the inside and not alarmed. There was no one at home, and the whole place was walled or hedged off from its neighbors, right down to the waterline. I put the raincoat and cap on while the water was still deep enough for me to stand easily, then I motored to their jetty, climbing up onto it quickly and walking casually onto the property. The bike came out of the garage to meet me, I mounted it, and rode to the gate. I couldn't see any button to open it from this side, so I used a sight blob to scout outside the gate. The road was a quiet one. Weeks ago I'd spent a couple of hours memorizing the geography of DC, suspecting that something like my current little plan might come up. I was in St Mary's County, about fifty or sixty miles SSE of central DC. The river bank isn't heavily populated and the roads curve around a lot, so it was only a matter of waiting until there were no cars coming toward me, then quickly making sure no one was looking out of the windows of the nearby houses, then I flew myself and 'my' bike up and over the gate. I hit the ground pedaling. I'd thought about 'borrowing' a car (I didn't need keys; simply put it in neutral and use NP to push and brake it), but I preferred to leave my ski mask on, and that'd be too suspicious. I'd stolen a bike because it's natural to ride a bike in a head-down position. A cap and a raincoat hood over the top completely obscured my head in a non-suspicious manner. Another major advantage of the bike is that my DNA material wouldn't accumulate in it, the way it might inside a car, even if I changed into fresh clothes. Chances are that after completing my little mission I'll have to get out of the area quickly, and taking a car with me would reduce my maximum acceleration and make it easy for them to follow me on radar. All things considered, a bicycle was the ideal form of transport. I was heading toward Andrews Air Force Base about forty miles away. Once I was more than about five miles away from where I'd taken the bike, I started looking for a good place to stop, where I could sit behind some bushes out of sight of any passersby, but close to several houses. I easily found such a location, rode behind some trees, then hunkered down while I searched the nearby houses for a computer I could use without interruptions. I found two in the same house and spent the next twenty minutes using them to read up on Andrews Air Force Base and the two planes used as Air Force One; both 747-200B's, tail numbers 28000 and 29000. Purchase price sixteen years ago had been $325 million each and I was sure a great deal more had been spent on them since then. I was VERY pleasantly surprised to discover that Google Earth identified the hangar that the two planes were kept in, labeling it rather cutely as "Hangar One". That saved me the bother of having to find the planes on the very large base, making my mission planning much easier. I was presuming that the planes were in the hangar now, as I hadn't heard anything about the President or Vice President being out of town. I only needed one plane to make my point with anyway. According to Google Earth, Hangar One was placed in the middle of a square grass field that was about 1,500 feet across in both directions, bordered by roads on three sides and a runway on the other. Other than the runway side, which would be an unwise direction for me to come from, there was a considerable amount of grass between the roads and the hangar, typically about six hundred feet. About three hundred feet from the hangar on the three grassed sides were two wire fences, one about thirty feet inside the other. The hangar had ancillary buildings as part of it; I guessed for workshops, crew restrooms, storerooms, etc. The main part of the hangar, the largest part of it so where the two planes would be kept, was in the middle of the ancillary buildings that were to the east and west of it. The point of closest approach to where the planes would be was directly south of them. If I could move along the southern fence line, I'd get to within three hundred feet of the main hangar's southern wall, which should put the planes themselves comfortably within my range, although the far end of them might be getting tricky as they're nearly two hundred feet long. That location would suit me very nicely, but I would have to leave the road and ride across open grass to reach it, which the guards might object to. Failing what seemed the ideal approach, I could simply ride up to the security entrance for Hangar One, which was a separate building five hundred feet to its west. I could easily knock out any number of security guards without warning as I got close, then I could carry on straight through the gate and another two hundred feet east to get within range of the planes. Another very pleasant surprise was there being so much bush-covered land, especially southwest of the target hangar, where there were three golf courses, the closest of which approached to within a thousand feet of the hangar. That offered possibilities for getting close to my target. There was a perimeter road that ran all around the large base, with security gates at several points, but there were many locations where the separation between public roads and roads internal to the base was only a few dozen yards. Admittedly there were walls and often areas of heavy vegetation separating them, but they wouldn't slow me down much. Trees would even provide helpful cover for me. I could pick my moment to very quickly 'jump' from a public to an internal area, then ride around the internal roads without having to pass though one of the base's main gates. Another important feature of the base was that there were hundreds of houses inside the perimeter, many of which would doubtless contain spare uniforms. So many houses meant there'd be a great deal of internal traffic, so one more person biking around wouldn't get any attention. Biking would continue to work well for me because people wouldn't try to talk with me. I did some more research on the base, spent some time memorizing its layout, did some research on 747-200s, making sure I knew where their fuel tanks were (mostly in their wings). My research over, I got back on the bike to pedal and push myself the rest of the way to Andrews AFB ("AFB" is "Air Force Base"). With NP-pushing from behind, it took me a non-tiring ninety minutes to get close to my destination. I stopped a couple of miles away from the base to watch an empty house's TV. The ABC's "Time waiting for the President's call" stopwatch was still counting up. I turned the volume up very loud and moved close enough to listen. A few minutes later, one of the talking-heads pointed to the stopwatch and mentioned that the White House still hadn't responded since they'd picked up the tapes. That was good enough for me. I turned the TV down then off and resumed the last stage of my journey. The Perimeter Roads (that's what they're called) around Andrews AFB enclose a rectangular area about 2 miles east-west by 2.7 miles north-south. Hangar One is pretty much in the center. To its east, running the full north-south length of the base, are the main runways. To the north and west of Hangar One are VERY many buildings, mostly residential; and to the south and southwest are three golf courses. A Google Earth image of the southwest corner of Andrews Air Force Base, "Hangar One" indicated. It was easy for me to stick to public roads while I rode around the base's exterior, using a sight blob to watch how people inside the base behaved. I saw dozens of uniformed Air Force men and women walking around unchallenged. Only some of them had security tags on, which implied I wouldn't need one but I'll grab one anyway to look more legitimate from a distance. There were plenty of buildings containing sleeping personnel whose tags would be easy to fly out of a bathroom window. There was a long stretch of public road that had heavy bush between it and a residential area in the southwest corner of the base. It was easy for me to develop bike trouble at a suitable location, pull off the side of the road, fiddle for a few seconds, then duck behind some trees. I'd chosen a location close to the home of a sleeping guy whose clothes were slightly larger than my size. I opened a rear window of his house and everything I needed came to me, including his boots and a spare pair of black socks that I'd wear as gloves. I'd been holding my raincoats sleeves down previously. That'd been fine on the open road, but passing people up close, I preferred to have my silver mittens completely covered. I had to strip myself bottomless to remove the flip-flop's bases from my A-man suit's booties, then I put the suit back on, my own black pants on, and then the Air Force uniform and boots. It wasn't raining, but wearing a light raincoat as a windbreaker was reasonable for a cyclist, so I wasn't too worried about that. I was leaving it open anyway, so my uniform could be seen. The only purpose of the raincoat was to provide me with a hood to hide my ski mask, which I had to keep on to hide my silver mask, which was hiding my black face, which was a fake face that I'd grown to hide my white face. The number of layers was amusingly ridiculous, but my life has been getting rather complicated recently. There was too much chance of my getting caught on a security camera somewhere so I had to keep covered up. From a distance, my ski mask would make me look like a Black man, which two layers further down I was (sort of). The security badge was for a white guy, but anyone who got close enough to see that and my face would be seeing silver material in the eyeholes of a black ski mask, so the badge would be the least of the issues. Making sure there was no one looking, my bike and I 'jumped' over the wall, landing in the small stand of trees on the other side. I was hiding at the end of a very short street, containing only fourteen houses. I checked them out to make sure no one was going to see me ride out of the "court" (it was a small street, but Google Earth had called it a "court"). A couple of the houses had someone active in them, one of whom was in the kitchen preparing a meal. He had a view of the street and looked like he'd take a while, so I opened and closed a door at the other end of his house and he went to investigate the noise. I left the trees and cycled down the street and into a more populated area. I still had nearly a mile to go, riding along one of the base's main streets that led through much of the residential area and almost straight to Hangar One, passing to the south of it. I wasn't going to try for a surreptitious approach. I'd seen that there was plenty of foot and vehicular traffic and that it wasn't being checked, so being one of them was less risky than crawling through trees and undergrowth. There were a few bikes in use on the flat base, so I blended in very nicely. The worst thing that was likely to happen was that I'd get challenged, whereupon I'd knock the challenger out and take off vertically at the greatest acceleration I could cope with. I'd be out of pistol range before anyone could react, but if they drew a weapon while I was within five hundred feet of them, I'd knock them out with NP-punches. I'd angle away from the well-equipped guards, so they'd have no hope of shooting me. It was only twenty five miles to Chesapeake Bay. If I was being closely pursued I'd dive into it for either an easy submerged trip to the ocean, or to move to somewhere I could hide until nightfall. Or I could simply fly the extra seventy five miles to the ocean, where they had no hope of locating me. In other words, the worse that was likely to happen was my having to flee without accomplishing what I came here for. Bad for my reputation, but certainly not a disaster. I continued pedaling east along the street; cars passing me, and me passing pedestrians, so no one could get a good look at me. I had my head down so my raincoat's hood and my cap's brim hid my head entirely (I was using NP to hold my hood in place, against the wind blowing it off). People saw a uniformed guy, security badge waving in the breeze, pedaling unhurriedly along an internal street. There was nothing suspicious about me. Wearing the hood might be SLIGHTLY unusual, but no one was concerned enough to leap on the issue in the short window of opportunity they had before we separated again. I rode all the way through the residential area without a word being said to me or my getting even a second look. I left the houses behind, carrying on in the same direction for another quarter of a mile. To my immediate south was part of a golf course, to my north were three baseball diamonds. None were high security concerns that the Air Force would guard from a cyclist. After that quarter mile, I had arrived at a choice. I was now at the southwest corner of the block that Hangar One was in the center of. The hangar itself was about a thousand feet northeast of me. If I carried on riding east on the road for another eighth of a mile, I'd be directly south of the hangar but still eight hundred feet from it, which was still too far, so I'd have to turn north at that point and ride across the grass toward the hangar. That might attract unwelcome attention, as it was a big, wide, empty grass area and I'd be the only thing moving in it. While heading this way, I'd already decided to turn north at this point rather than continuing east as just described. The road north took an eighth of a mile to reach the branch east that took a few dozen yards to reach Hangar One's substantial security gate and guardhouse. North was clearly the best way to go because it provided several options. On the west side of the northern road were the baseball diamonds, then north of them, a car parking area which currently contained fifty-odd cars. No one was playing baseball, so I thought most of those cars probably belonged to staff in Hangar One (the road to the security gate was roughly opposite the parking lot entrance). Usefully, I'd seen that north of the parking lots was a running track that several people were using. By riding north I was staying in a reasonably heavily traveled area which offered several possible reasons for my presence, so it wouldn't attract curiosity. I would attract curiosity if I continued to ride east as that took me into an area where there was no explanation for my presence, especially as it ran into the end of the runways, which wasn't believable bicycling territory. Going north permitted me to turn right onto the grass and head directly toward the hangar's southern fence, getting me within three hundred feet of my target; or I could snoop out the guardhouse as I headed toward it, to decide which was best of cutting east across the grass, or knocking out all the security guards and going in the front door. Or if both those options looked like bad ideas, I could bike right past the security station and proceed innocently on my way, to try to think of a Plan C. At the time I turned north, I thought my likely action would be to knock out all the security guards and enter the front gate. It was inelegant, but unconscious security guards couldn't cause me any trouble. It wouldn't take me long to do what I'd came here for, so by the time anyone reacted to the guards being unconscious - if they failed to answer the phone, say - I'd be long gone. My riding across the open field with no apparent purpose and with several well-armed guys five hundred feet to my left didn't appeal nearly as much as knocking them all out first. As I turned north, I was pleased to note that the empty grass field that led to Hangar One's fence just seemed to be an empty grass field, rather than a minefield. There were no warning signs and no fence to stop people wandering onto it, which there'd surely have to be if it was a mine field, as Air Force people have been known to get drunk. That meant my favorite two plans were still both possible. I was just about far enough north to start snooping the impressive looking building that was part of the Hangar One's security gate, when I noticed a couple of Air Force guards and a dog walk into sight around the outside of the fence at the far eastern end of the southern fence-line. If I rode across country toward them at double their walking speed, then we'd meet just outside the fence directly south of Hangar One, in my ideal spot three hundred feet from my target(s). Doing that became my preferred plan immediately, with just a little more caution required. I continued north for another fifty feet to get within four hundred feet of the security gate, then I pretended to notice the dog team. I braked to a stop, lifted my head and looked directly at them. I put my left hand up as if to shelter my eyes from the overhead sun, but it was actually to block the sight of my ski-masked face from any of the guards at the security gate. I held that position for a few seconds, while one sight blob searched the security gate area and the other kept an eye on the dog team, mostly to make sure they didn't raise binoculars to their eyes to look at my ski mask. The security gate was VERY substantial. That didn't worry me much because if I went that way all the guards would be unconscious. I'm very brave in the face of thickly reinforced concrete and unattended guns. I was pleased to note that none of the guards were interested in me. They might not even have seen me yet. I made my decision. I gave the dog patrol an exaggerated arm wave, then set off across country toward them. I watched the security guards in the blockhouse carefully, using my other sight blob to alternate between the dog team and looking at the ground just ahead of me. I'd gone about fifty feet (heading slightly north of directly east, to reach the fence), when one of the gate's security guards spotted me. I chose that moment to give another exaggerated wave toward the dog team. They'd noticed me too, and looked a little puzzled. The gate guard picked up a pair of binoculars and aimed them at me. He said something while doing that, attracting the attention of a couple more guards who turned to look at me too. I had nothing to worry about yet, as my head was completely hidden from their side views. I was about 350 feet from the gate, angling toward it slightly so would probably be about 300 feet away at the closest point, before I rode east far enough to start opening the distance again. 300 feet was way too far for pistols, so I'd only start worrying if they picked up rifles. They had plenty of weapons close to hand and there were a dozen guards, so lots of lead could come my way if I let it. If they went for their weapons, they were all going to get put to sleep very abruptly. What one of them did pick up was a walkie-talkie. Moments later, so did one of the dog-team guys. I waved at them again and kept cycling, closing the distance fairly rapidly. I sent a sight blob into the hangar the moment I got within range of it, as I didn't need much visual resolution to count the number of 747s. They were both there. I smiled to myself. There was no mistaking them even with the poor vision I currently had, as the paint job is unique. As my vision improved I could make out quite a few people inside the building, and some inside the planes themselves, maintenance people and guards mostly. I'd move them all to safety, of course. I was glad they were there, as my taking care of them would add to my reputation. The security gate guards didn't get worked up about me. One of them kept his binoculars on me, and the others returned to guarding an empty driveway. The dog team looked toward me with curiosity. I kept my head down as I approached closer. I was about halfway to the two guards when I started my attack on the closest of the 747s. Making an NP-fingertip with a one-sixteenth inch thickness, adding a considerable number of other fingertips behind it, and placing them on the top of the plane's roof above its stern cattle-class seating area (presumably for the press), I pressed down very forcefully. It penetrated the skin effortlessly (literally, because all I had to do was think about what I wanted to happen). Then I turned the wedge ninety degrees to face forward and I pushed it horizontally. It sliced the top of the plane open from the base of the tail fin toward the cockpit. I didn't have the range to slice the entire length open as the plane was too long and extended beyond my maximum range, but I got most of it. I couldn't hear anything from where I was, but inside the hangar people were incredulous, and starting to run around, some toward the plane, some away from it. Other than a few people inside the cabin, almost no one would've seen what was happening, but I'm sure they knew where the sounds of tortured metal were coming from. My online research had taught me that 747 wings weighed about 40,000 kg empty of gas. My maximum force was about 7,200 kg so I certainly couldn't pick up a whole wing, which is a pity because I would have loved to cut them off the fuselage and mount them vertically sticking through the roofs of their planes. Not being able to manage that in its entirety, I'd do so with just the tips of the wings. I repeated the slicing technique to sever the nearest wingtip (the last 20% of its length) from the rest of the wing. There were some strong points across the wing, but nearly eight tons of force applied to a blade one-sixteenth of an inch wide didn't have too much trouble slicing through them. The point of the blade, even though it was the only NP-fingertip created by its owning mind, tended to collapse under the pressure, so that was the "trouble" I had. It only slowed me down a few seconds though because the wings weren't designed to resist a sheering force. I'd kept enough force out of that effort to use it to pick up people near the plane and fly them as far as I could toward the hangar's main door, which was on its north side. The hangar was too large for me to carry them all the way there, but putting them down then giving them a strong push in the desired direction gave most of them the clue for what I wanted. I imagine being picked up by invisible hands and being carried made most of them only too happy to run away. Sirens started wailing as I was shoving the severed wingtip into the open top of the plane, with the base facing down so fuel would drain into the plane. I didn't try to mount the wing so it'd point straight up, because it was too long to hold that position and would fall sideways if I tried. Instead I inserted it while it was leaning backward. I wedged it in, with the sides of the fuselage and seats providing enough support to hold it in place. While I was doing that, I used my other sight blob to briefly look at the dog team. I grabbed hold of their arms with NP, pulling them wide of their bodies so they couldn't reach for anything. Then I moved the sight blob to check the guards at the front gate. They were still in "What the fuck is happening?"-mode after hearing the sirens start. They had partially answered that question by looking at security monitors showing the inside of the hangar, which was doubtless causing them to repeat the question even more emphatically. I wanted to get out of their sight quickly, in case wailing sirens put them into the "Shoot first, ask questions later"-mode, so I pushed my bicycle much faster. I REALLY needed more sight blobs. I would've preferred to have two or three for different places inside the hangar, one for the security gate, one for the dog team, and one for me to see where I was riding. Not having six of them, the two I did have were VERY busy. I turned the dog team around and marched them east at a fast running pace. I'd join them about a hundred feet farther east of where I'd grabbed them, because that'd get me far enough along the building for its corner to cut off the line of sight, and line of fire, of the guards at the front gate. I was pedaling, hopefully giving the impression that I was rushing to help rather than causing the emergency. Someone riding a bike doesn't look like he's ripping planes apart, so no one should single me out for an excessive reaction, I hoped. The front gate's guards were grabbing weapons, on phones and on walkie-talkies, closing a steel barrier across the entrance, and other useless things. No one was even looking at me, which was wonderful. Back inside the hangar, the second plane was still too far away for me, so I used the time to cut off the first plane's second wingtip, sticking that into the top too, jamming it in behind the first wing and hoping they'd hold each other in place. I checked to see if the first one was leaking fuel, and was disappointed by the amount. Rather than waste time looking, I formed a fist and punched it up the middle of the inside of the wing, rupturing whatever fuel tank(s) it encountered. I looked again, and there was a veritable flood of fuel gushing into the plane. I checked the guardhouse. No one was pointing guns or even binoculars at me, so I repeated the fuel tank puncturing process on the second wing. There were some people too close to the first plane, even some idiots running toward it, so I spent a few seconds picking them up and flying them toward the main door. Two of the guards were having their second pick-up, because they'd rushed back inside determined to somehow protect the planes. When I put them down, I gave all of them a VERY hard push in the direction of "away". It sent them sprawling, and hopefully pushed some sense into them. No guns were pointed at me from the guardhouse yet, but the binoculars were back on me. The dog team were 'running funny', only halfway out of sight, which might alert the guards, but it was effectively too late already. I checked my riding direction and the lay of the land ahead of me. I cut off the nearest wingtip of the second plane. The remaining people in the hangar had wised up and were fleeing the area. I searched both planes again to make sure. They've got three decks, the cockpit, bathrooms and several rooms, but sight blobs can move extremely quickly and straight through walls. Both planes were clear. I also punched a few holes in floors of the top and second decks of each plane, to help the fuel spread. Still no guns pointing at me and the path ahead of my bike still looked clear of obstructions, so I sliced open the roof of the second plane, shoved its wingtip into it, then ruptured its tanks. I returned a blob to look at where I was riding. I'd just got close enough to the dog team to pick them up in my proximity sense, and I checked to see whether we were out of sight of the gate guards. Not quite yet, but another twenty yards would do it. While I was getting the dog team and me where I wanted us to be, I cut off the last wingtip and jammed it into the top of its plane. Someone ran into the hangar from one of the rooms it had on its southern wall. I spent the next twenty seconds searching though the whole hangar, picking up everyone I found and ejecting them toward the front door. I was much closer to it now, so could carry ejectees closer to the door, hopefully improving the hint that they should leave that way. Seeing the 747s' wings ripped off and floating through the air should have created additional encouragement for people to leave the area, but it was amazing how many of them were determined to "protect" the planes, however the fuck they thought they were going to do that. Meanwhile, I'd stopped the dog team where I wanted them, still holding their arms out wide so they couldn't go for their guns or walkie-talkies. I removed those items and threw them a hundred feet away. I clamped their mouths shut as I flicked my hood back and raised the bottom of my ski mask so it became a hat, and I turned my halo on. Their eyes widened. Probably mostly in terror, considering what was happening to them. I said, "I am Archangel Michael. I will not harm you so you have nothing to fear. I have come here to give you a message I want passed all the way up your chain of command. -- "Earlier today I recorded a TV interview in which I required your President's cooperation with a specific request of God's. Your President chose not to cooperate, so I have just destroyed two of his toys. I will destroy more toys at frequent intervals until he is cooperating fully. -- "You should also let him know that he shouldn't tempt me by traveling anywhere by air unless he's absolutely sure that I'm very happy with his behavior. Now go and tell your superiors what I've said." I let go of their arms and NP-nudged them from behind to give them the idea. One of them had been holding the German Shepherd's leash, unable to let it go before because I'd included it in my clamp. Now he dropped it, pointed at me while ordering his dog, "TAKE!" The dog trotted over to me, did a half circle around the back of my bike, then sat down by my side to watch his owners, who I'd informed - the bullshit type of inform - "Animals will never attack me." I patted the dog on the head with the hand I had waiting for his arrival, then I NP-picked up the two guards by the back of their belts. I flew them a couple of hundred feet closer to the front gate (still several hundred feet away), putting them down inside the 30-foot gap between the two fences so they had almost nothing they could do except head toward the gate house. With my other sight blob, I'd finished ensuring there was no one in the hangar, so I starting smashing all the electronics in both cockpits and throughout the planes. There was a great deal of electronic equipment in them; which soon became electronic junk. I did NOT set the fuel alight, because I didn't want to remind anyone of the Fort Dodge disaster. The planes were well and truly fucked already, so there was no need for a fire, although if a short circuit caused one, I wouldn't mind too much. I'd evacuated the building because of the risk of that. I had the idea that there must be packets of matches or cigarette lighters onboard, so I could use them to set the fuel alight in a way that used telekinesis only, but then I thought that it might be more fun to use the matches to spell out a message to my uncooperative President. I searched one of the planes, finding a storeroom on the lower level that had a huge supply of presidential matchbooks, complete with the presidential seal printed on the cover. I guess it's important that people know that the office of President is proud of its ability to generate hot air. I grabbed a large supply, and on the floor of the hangar not far inside the main door, I laid out the matchbooks to write, "HELP JONATHON, GEORGE. OR ELSE." I underlined it too, in case the extra emphasis would help them react correctly, and also because I had spare matchbooks. I heard the sound of a jet taking off. I looked to see a Gulfstream going wheels-up and starting its climb-out. It was taking off at the end of the runway closest to me, and I had a momentary temptation to catch up with it on my bicycle as per the "E.T." movie. It'd be amusing to 'ride' my bike a few yards away from the Gulfstream's cockpit, pedaling hard as if racing it, but that was probably a little too childish (tempting though). That the Gulfstream had taken off was an indication of how fast my attack had been; not much more than a minute had passed from ripping open the top of the first plane until now. A sight blob looking down from a few hundred feet up showed me that what appeared to be all the base's security force, fire trucks, and several other vehicles with flashing lights, were charging toward the hangar. They were all coming from north or northwest, so the very large hangar was between me and them. I could easily stay longer, but my job was done so it was time to leave. I was still sitting on my bicycle. I didn't want to leave it behind as evidence, so I laid it flat on a floor of NP-plates, made another layer above it, and laid myself on that, forming the rest of the panels to make a Magic Flying Cargo Sled. I left my friendly guard dog behind, accelerating directly east just above ground level to stay out of sight as long as possible. My path took me directly over the end of the two runways, and gave me a full mile to get up to a high speed before I had to gain altitude to clear the buildings to the east of the base. At 3 g, I was up to 600 mph before I went 'wheels-up' (an accurate term for me this time). It was about a hundred miles to the ocean. Because of the way the coastline curved, that was true whether I continued directly east or southeast. I turned southeast after a few miles, just to throw any pursuers off track, although there was no way any plane taking off from Andrews could catch me in ten minutes. Admittedly they have a higher top speed than I do (I wasn't willing to risk trying to go supersonic), but they have a truly lousy acceleration. Most modern fighters have power to weight ratios near 1.0, so they have a 1 g acceleration in level flight. That's simplistic, as I'm ignoring the forces acting in other directions, such as lift and drag, but those aren't significant enough to matter, especially for a modern fighter. It'd take the pilots so long to run to their planes, take off, turn east, and then accelerate up to my speed, that I'd already be feet-wet by the time the distance started narrowing. At that point they've got a large disadvantage, as I can manage the transition from aircraft to submarine a great deal better than any plane in the Air Force. I flew at fifty feet above the tops of the houses and at 600 mph. I doubted the Air Force was able to pick up my bicycle on radar at that height, so there was very little chance of any already airborne fighters being vectored toward me. [[Many airborne radars could've easily picked me out of the ground clutter, but none of them were above me in time.]] I saw no sign of any pursuit, so when I neared the coast I slowed down to about 30 mph. Looking ahead four hundred feet or so enabled me to find a household computer that had been left powered on. I slowed down further. At the speed I can type, I hadn't even reached the house by the time I'd typed another Majestic Countdown message and sent it to my usual distribution list. After the usual Majestic Countdown identification code, the body of my message was: Because the American Government has not rushed to help Jonathon Winters carry out God's instructions, ten minutes ago I went to Andrews AFB and destroyed two 747-200Bs, tail numbers 28000 and 29000. I order the Air Force to permit the media immediate and unrestricted access to the wrecks. God created this planet and its resources are mine to do with as I wish. I will frequently 'rearrange' the locations of some of those resources until God's Will is being carried out to my and Jonathon Winter's satisfaction. I accelerated out to sea, moving the bicycle several yards away from me so I could cover it with heat blobs, incinerating the seat, handlebar grips, etc. About ten miles out to sea, I pulled it apart and scattered the pieces widely as I turned south. Such was my respect for politicians that I felt more guilt about depriving someone of their bicycle than I did about depriving the President of his two personal jets. Five miles farther south, I slowed and submerged. I was about three hours submerged travel from my original TV-watching location. That was unnecessarily long as there was no shortage of luxury boats elsewhere, so I headed for the closest location, twenty five miles southwest to Virginia Beach. When I tuned in to ABC again, the first thing I noticed was that the timer had stopped. It seemed that the President had gotten off his ass about fifteen minutes ago. I enjoyed listening to the commentators. Apparently it was one thing for me to destroy F-16s that were flying very close to me, but it was an entirely different thing for me to destroy massive planes like Air Force One and Two in the middle of what was called "One of the world's most secure Air Force Bases," although I thought that description to be a wild exaggeration. The commentators would from time to time explain, "They shouldn't be called Air Force One and Two because the President and Vice-president aren't onboard," and then they'd carry on calling them those names; factual accuracy versus simplistic convenience not being a tradeoff the news organizations were willing to make. That I'd been able to carry out that feat had impressed everyone, but some condemned it as an act of vandalism, others were frightened by it, others asked, "Why didn't the stupid Government do what the angel wanted? I want to see someone get resurrected." Some people loudly proclaimed that it proved I was the Devil, fewer that it proved I was an angel. Julia would be happy that I'd learned so well from her, because I'd certainly succeeded in sowing more confusion. It amuses me that highly religious Christians are so strongly predisposed to interpreting everything as Evil. They say they worship Good, but they seem incapable of seeing it anywhere other than in themselves and people who TOTALLY agree with them (TINY differences in theological interpretation being enough to cause each group to see the other as Evil and deserving of being wiped out). Jonathon was no longer on-camera, as he was now too busy talking to Government people about what should be done. I was surprised that ABC didn't have cameras in that room, but apparently not, judging by there being no extracts from it. Various 'experts' gave their opinions. Military experts about how I would've carried out the raid, through to a Doctor of Divinity discussing what the theological implications were. The military analysts were the only experts who actually knew something about what they were saying. They had my telekinesis limit pretty well pegged by now, as I'd never used the ability beyond 450 feet from my body. I might shake them up about that, as I could use it a great deal farther away by taking advantage of the 32-second "Blinks Allowed" effect. If I NP-carried something past me at 200 feet per second (about 140 mph; fast, but still slow enough to see clearly), then it would continue in a straight line - other than the effects of gravity and air resistance - for thirty two seconds after it passed out of my 500-foot range. 500 + 200 x 32 = 6,900 feet (1.3 miles). Air resistance would slow it down, but it'd still get something like 10 to 12 times farther away than what people currently thought my limit was, so it'd shake up their assumption considerably. I just had to think about whether I wanted to do it and with what. The circumstances weren't easy to arrange because the effect of gravity would make it look like I'd simply thrown the object(s). It had to be done in a way that made it obvious that I was still carrying the thing(s). Doing it to a person would be ideal in one respect because they could tell everyone afterward that they'd been held the whole time, but the problem was that the landing would kill them. Alternatively, I could carry a lot of small items inside an NP-box and their not flying apart would indicate that they'd stayed inside the box. I was stumped about what items to use. It was a pity that NP couldn't be made visible, because that would have made the demonstration much easier. On further thought, I decided it would probably be better to leave that surprise - presuming I could think of a way of doing it - for Mark Anderson's Guardian Angel, because that'd give the impression that it was even more physically powerful than Archangel Michael; a useful trait in a GUARDIAN Angel. In my own head, I still call it "The Blinks Allowed Effect", but only because it amuses me to do so. Because of my greater understanding of how my subconscious does things, I have an idea about how that effect happens. I'm not sure, but it seems to be a consequence of how strongly I impose my will on the Universe. Or to put it another way, it's how long it takes the Universe to 'forget' what I want after I stop reinforcing it. That the effect originally lasted long enough for me to blink was just a coincidence. [[That's a good enough explanation to let stand.]] One point that displeased me, and that the talking-heads mentioned several times, was that the Air Force was not allowing the media into what I've called "Hangar One". The media weren't being allowed onto Andrews Air Force Base at all, because of "Security Considerations". That was going against a direct order of mine - how dare they! Or, "How dare the President," because he should've overridden the Air Force. I wouldn't do anything about it yet because I wanted to watch some more TV before I rushed off to do another smashing job. I hung around under the yacht, watching TV and getting a feel for the public's reaction. That could be summed up by "mostly confused", followed by a whole range of other emotions, excitement through to, "Oh my God! It's the end of the world! The dead are going to rise!" Churches were doing a roaring business, which was ironic because it was the churches who were the most condemning of me. As I said, it was a confused situation. If you exclude the idiots (which, admittedly, didn't leave many people, as every possible form of idiocy seemed to find a reason to get involved, from religious idiots through to UFO idiots), then Average-Joe and -Jane seemed to think my appearance was a good thing. They didn't know what it meant, but it felt good, mostly "Because the animals love him." It was stunning how impressed so many people were by that simple trick. They were trusting dumb squirrels to correctly judge me more than they were trusting themselves or their fellow human beings. People can be incredibly stupid - which means it probably is a good idea for them to leave their important decisions to squirrels. Around the country there were dozens of busy fire-fighting teams putting out the fires people had started to burn all their worldly possessions in preparation for the Apocalypse. Often including their homes! Those people were going to look VERY stupid in a few days, not that they didn't look stupid already. People from other countries were urging me to come to their country, or were urging me to stay away. Their politicians were usually non-committal, but sometimes they did confidently plant their flags in one camp or the other, not that it mattered to me; I just admired the confusion I'd caused. Muslims were as confused as everyone else. Angels are mentioned in the Koran but don't have the prominence they do in Christian mythology (all the networks wanted to know what Muslims thought. Jews could hardly get a word in edgewise, which must have annoyed them). I'd learned about the Koran's paucity of angelic mentions when I'd done my earlier online research about angels. I'd like to say that'd improved my opinion of the Koran, but my opinion of any book that presents angels as real creatures is rock bottom anyway. Researching angels had actually been more fun than watching a Simpsons' episode because it was obvious how, over the centuries, more and more wish-fulfillment crap had piled on top of itself. I'd several times had to stop reading because I couldn't help laughing out loud over how stunningly self-delusional mankind is - that failing being quite useful to me now. ------- Chapter 337: USS Harry S. Truman Monday, April 16, 2007 (Continued) At 4pm I detached myself from the boat and headed closer to the shore to find a computer to use. I hadn't done enough research about the military bases in the area, so it was time for me to do some more googling before people got home from work. I found a seaside house with a couple of computers that I could use, so I browsed away. I used Google Earth on one of them, and noticed that Hampton Roads was only fifteen miles away from where I was now. If I remembered correctly, and I usually do, there's a big naval base in the misleadingly named Hampton Roads. A quick google confirmed that there was a BIG naval base there. Naval Station Norfolk is apparently the largest naval base in the world, so it certainly qualified as "big". Reading about that led me to the information that several nuclear-powered aircraft carriers were homeported there. I knew the Navy considered their nuclear carriers to be incredibly important, so fucking with one of those would be a VERY effective shot across the US Government's bows. From Wikipedia: USS Enterprise (CVN-65). Stationed at Norfolk and, "Currently surge-ready ahead of a deployment later in the year." USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). "Her 2005 World Cruise concluded with a homeport change to Norfolk, Virginia for a Refueling and Complex Overhaul, which includes refueling her nuclear reactors. She will return to sea duty in 2009." USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71). "On 7 March 2007 the Roosevelt began a nine month Planned Incremental Availability in Norfolk, which will see the addition of RAM missiles among other upgrades." USS George Washington (CVN-73). "She entered Norfolk Naval Shipyard for a Planned Incremental Availability in September [2006] to prepare for her upcoming homeport transfer to Yokosuka [in 2008]." USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75). "Left Norfolk Naval Shipyard in December of 2006 and is currently in a training cycle to prepare for surge capability beginning in April of 2007." ("CVN" is a classification code for ship hulls. "C" codes for "Carrier"; "V" for "voler", which is French for "to fly"; "N" for "Nuclear powered". The number suffix is incremented chronologically as each ship is built.) It appeared that I'd have my choice of targets. There was also a shit load of other ships homeported at Norfolk: cruisers, destroyers, frigates, submarines and God knows how many others. Then I discovered another delightful little fact. Slightly farther into the inlet was Newport News where our latest Aircraft Carrier was being constructed: the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77). (What's with "Roads" and "News"? Didn't "Port" or "Harbor" occur to the namers?) Construction of CVN-77 started in 2001, delivery is due next year and commissioning in 2009. It had a construction budget of less than $6 billion, which seemed surprisingly cheap to me, but maybe I've been spoiled by MAF's big numbers. Regardless of its cost, I decided we didn't need a mega-sized ego-testament to the Bush dynasty, so it'd have to go. I didn't think I'd have any trouble sneaking into the navy's yards. Obviously the water was deep enough for aircraft carriers, so I'd be able to stay deep enough to be out of sight of anyone on the surface. If they did see me, the Air Force uniform I was still wearing should confuse them (haha). I'd be quiet, careful, and try not to collide with any submarines. I'm joking about that, as of the dozen SSN's homeported at Norfolk, most would be out on missions, and if one of the few still here did move, it would have to do so on the surface in these shallow and busy waters. If I was discovered, I thought it'd most likely be from emplaced sensors or maybe Navy frogmen during an exercise. The carriers might even have a permanent guard of frogmen swimming around them, but I could search the water VERY quickly and easily with a sight blob, and I only needed to get within 450 feet of my target to do anything, so I didn't expect much of a problem. And if there was a problem, fifteen seconds later I can be at 10,000 feet doing 600 mph. I spent a couple of minutes reading up on A4W reactors, the nuclear reactors used in all the carriers except for the old Enterprise. There wasn't much information available (of course), but it gave me an overview to think about for the next couple of hours. If I decided I wanted to sabotage one of them, I presumed I could get all the highly detailed information I'd need by reading the maintenance manuals inside the carrier itself. I checked ABC's website to see if there was anything interesting. My resurrection offer was prominently featured, but didn't contain anything interesting other than a comment that the media were being refused access to Andrews AFB. I exited the browsers, moved out to deeper water, and motored north around the cape then west toward the naval base. I took it slow, starting at 15 mph and slowing to 10 as I neared the inlet. I raised a sight blob high in the air, and it could see three carriers tied up at dock about three miles from me. I smiled to myself. There was so much water traffic that I wasn't the least concerned about my submarine making detectable noise. There were so many noise sources that they'd never pick out the slight swishing that I might make. I doubted I made much, if any noise, because my submarine had a streamlined shape and no engine. My only real risk was in being picked up on some sort of underwater video surveillance. I had no idea whether the navy used such things, but it was easy to check for: I just kept a max-sized sight blob farther ahead of me than the water had visibility range. The water was so murky that the visibility range was shorter than the diameter of my sight blob, so it'd be impossible for anything to see me before I saw it. If my invisible blob saw a camera housing of any sort, I'd easily be able to stop before it saw me. I waited for a moderately large incoming boat, checked to make sure it didn't have any worrisome sensors protruding from its hull, then positioned myself twenty feet directly under it. I kept formation as we passed over the tunnel part of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (a public vehicular road across the mouth of the inlet), and proceeded farther into the harbor. I accompanied the boat as it motored down the main channel, leaving it at its point of nearest approach to the carriers, about one mile away from them. I cautiously headed toward the nearest one, going only 4 or 5 mph at 30-foot of depth, with a max-sized sight blob looking for anything ahead of me, and with another blob quite high above the water, looking down for anything suspicious, including any trace of myself, which there wasn't. Apart from the three HUGE aircraft carriers, the only thing of note was a net strung around the piers. It was about six hundred feet out from the ends of the piers, suspended from floating buoys and a few more substantial fixed points. (Actually, not "fixed", as they could be towed aside to let the ships in and out.) The location of the net was annoying, as it would've been SO MUCH easier if they'd strung it only three hundred feet out! My caution proved unnecessary, as there were no incidents all the way to the net. Well before I got within visibility range of it, I paused and sent a sight blob to check it carefully. The thick, metal cables were spaced too close together for me to pass through the holes. I sent a sight blob into a buoy, and saw that it contained electronics, so it was a great deal more than an ordinary net. Looking carefully, I was sure the buoy contained a sound sensor. It certainly wasn't a sight sensor, as there was too much marine life growing on its cover. The cables themselves didn't appear to be anything other than ordinary steel cables. They might contain a copper cable in the core that would break a circuit and set off an alarm if cut, but the outside of the steel cables appeared to have no 'intelligence' of any sort. There was plant growth on the cables, fish life was nibbling on it or just swimming around so they sometimes made contact with a cable, etc. I was pretty sure I could touch the cables with NP-fingertips if I wanted to, especially because NP-fingertips have no mass and are therefore perfect insulators. At the bottom of the net there was slack, which pleased me. I'd thought there'd be slack for when the tide came in, but it was good to see it confirmed. The bottom of the net made a bundle on the seabed, the strands of which banged against each other when waves on the surface caused the net to bob up and down. That movement was obviously acceptable to the Navy, so if I lifted up the bottom of the net and slid under it, no alarms should go off. I tested that hypothesis by moving about 300 feet away, then using some NP-fingertips (formed on the surface and quietly submerged and moved to where needed) to raise the net off the bottom to make a large enough gap for me to glide through. I held it open for fifteen seconds, then gently put it down. I waited, searching for any reaction. No underwater explosions occurred, the water wasn't suddenly full of frogmen, the skies weren't full of helicopters. Every destroyer and frigate didn't suddenly come screaming toward the suspect net. It was life as normal. While looking around for frogmen I discovered a string of sensors placed along the bottom, parallel to the net line, but a dozen feet out into deeper water. I couldn't determine what they were doing as the manufacturer had annoyingly not labeled them properly, and moving a sight blob into one of them couldn't make out anything that gave me a clue. It was too packed with circuitry for me to make sense of it. There was no external sensor, so they didn't appear to be sound or pressure detectors. They had a plastic casing, which made me suspect that they were some sort of electromagnetic sensor. The casing wasn't transparent, so it wasn't a camera housing, but I knew that already as I would've recognized one of those during my internal inspection. My two guesses were: They detected metal (such as a scuba diver's tanks) by the moving magnetic field. They detected the electrical activity inside nearby living creatures. That theory was more science-fiction than real, I hoped. I did have some metal with me, from the Air Force uniform and security badge. If the sensors did detect moving metal, they couldn't be ultra-sensitive about it or the nearby waving net would be setting them off. Nonetheless, I decided to ditch the uniform. I'd been hoping to keep it for possible future use, but I didn't care enough to take the risk. If they detected the electricity of life, then fish life must be a problem. If I passed thirty feet over the sensors, surely they'd pick up less of my electricity than they'd get from a fish one inch away. The mystery sensors were laid in a straight line, while the net arched inshore between the buoys because of the current flow. For my penetration I'd use one of the midway places where the net arched the most. I'd pass high over the mystery sensor until I got near the net, then descend to the bottom before lifting the net and sliding into the protected area. I kept searching around the area, waiting for any reaction to my experimental lifting of the net. After fifteen minutes there'd still been no reaction, so I removed the Air Force boots, uniform and badge, putting them in a small box that I detached from my submarine. To avoid a sudden burst of air bubbles underwater - because that'd surely sound like a diver - I sent the box up to the surface before canceling the NP-points. The boots and badge sank immediately, the clothes floated like all the other pollution on the water's surface. I located a place where the net bowed inward nicely, and headed for that. I passed over the line of mystery sensors just as I'd planned, about thirty feet above the nearest one, descending to the bottom again just before reaching the net. I waited for several minutes, looking for any reaction to my passing the mystery sensors. There was none, so I used NP-fingertips to lift the bottom of the net and slip inside, lowering it slowly behind me. I breathed a sigh of relief at having overcome (undercome?) the tricky part so easily. ^ [[Underwater port security was a LOT better than I gave it credit for. The good news was that the "mystery sensors" I'd been so worried about were the least of my worries. They were magnetic anomaly detectors, and were virtually useless against anything smaller than a four-man submarine as they need a lot of metal to set them off. The net and its attached sonar-buoys were reasonably high-tech. Cutting the net would've set off alarms because each cable had a fiber optic core, and my making the wrong sorts of sounds would've caused an alert too. Highest tech of all was IASS, the Integrated Anti-Swimmer System. It's a Coast Guard, anti-diver, ultrasound weapons system. It has three components, all of which were mounted on the end of every second pier and at the end of the breakwater 1,300 feet to the north: A sonar system. Each unit had a range of about 1,500 feet. They overlapped considerably to provide accurate triangulation in three dimensions. Underwater loudspeakers which could be used to broadcast messages like, "You are ordered to surface immediately or we will use lethal force." An underwater shockwave emitter to stun any divers in the area. It's meant to be non-lethal, but unconscious people relax, including relaxing their mouths. For an underwater diver, dropping his oxygen-supplying mouthpiece means his next breath is nothing but water, so the weapon's non-lethal nature quickly becomes a moot point. The second and third items were fairly simple, so extra units were installed in the port's first response security boats. The key to the system is the highly sophisticated first item. In a busy harbor, it had to be sophisticated to filter out all the various types of boat and natural marine life noise. It was highly intelligent, able to differentiate a swimming man from a swimming seal, regardless of whether the man was on the surface or beneath it, using a snorkel, scuba or rebreather system. With several sonar units operating (as was the case at Norfolk), and sending their data back to a central control room, the resultant information display was very much like that of an air traffic controller's radar. The operators could watch a diver moving through a 3D plot in real-time. The Navy's own divers had been unable to fool it in several penetration tests. Fortunately I hadn't been swimming; I'd been lying flat and still inside an airtight box. The highly sensitive sonar units couldn't have picked up the sounds of my kicking, because I hadn't been. Even more powerfully, they couldn't have picked up the sound of anything, not even my breathing or heartbeat, because I had been inside a SOUNDPROOF box. That totally negated the effectiveness of the passive sonar microphones they had listening for suspicious sounds. If they had gotten suspicious and had used active sonar to ping me, they would have got an extremely clear result as the water-air interface acts like a mirror to sound. As they had several sonar units, they would have known my position exactly. I was safe from the acoustic weapon they had, as its sound would have bounced off my box just like the active sonar would have, but upon seeing such a clear active sonar return from my 'sub', their Plans B, C, D, E, etc., would have made things unpleasantly lively for me. It was a good thing they didn't use active sonar unless something made them suspicious first.]] ^ I was about 750 feet northwest of the closest corner of the closest carrier, so I had to move at least 300 feet closer. Probably more, as the carrier was 1,100 feet long and I didn't know where in it the nuclear reactors were (carriers have two). Probably in the middle or somewhat sternward of that, I thought. I slowly moved closer, searching ahead of me very carefully for any more security measures, and not finding any. About 400 feet from the carrier, I stopped, holding myself against the bottom so I could spend some time searching the area even more carefully. I started with whatever portion of the hull and pier I had the range for. I very quickly found several things I didn't like the look of (I didn't know what it was, but they were the components of the Integrated Anti-Swimmer System, as well as underwater surveillance cameras around the ship). The cameras and speakers were easily recognized, but the other units were more confusing. Plus I was confused by the speakers, as I couldn't imagine a use for them. The biggest piece of unrecognizable equipment looked like half a depth charge, which seemed an unusual thing to mount on the end of a pier right next to an aircraft carrier. I looked inside it, and there was lots of electronics. There was also a transducer (it had "transducer" written on it), which I knew was a type of underwater microphone. I made a mental note to keep my singing to a minimum. There was no sign of any reaction occurring on the surface (I had one sight blob up there), so I stayed where I was and kept searching the pier, the carrier's hull (outside and inside), and the intervening seabed. The carrier was the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), the most modern of all the carriers that could've been here, according to Wikipedia. It was supposed to have just finished being made fully ready to go to sea again. Its presumed readiness would hopefully be a problem shortly. To describe the geography of the situation, the piers were like the horizontal bars of the letter "E", except that there were over a dozen of them and they poked out to the west rather than east, i.e., rotate the "E" 180 degrees clockwise. The USS Harry S. Truman was tied up inside (south) of the northernmost pier, with another carrier tied up north of the next pier south, so there was a narrow gap between them (300 feet, which is narrow compared to the size of the carriers). If the reactors were in the middle of the 1,100-foot long ship, then my needing to be within 400 feet of them was a problem. I didn't want to swim directly under one of the carriers. I knew modern warships had automatic guns that could shoot down incoming missiles traveling faster than Mach one, so I'd hate to have to take off right next to several such ships if I was detected, and swimming right under one of them surely maximized the chance of that. Fortunately the solution was fairly easy (I hoped). I'd come at the ship from the north, from above the top of the "E". The pier was 150 feet wide, and the carrier about 200 feet wide (actually less at the water line, but I had to allow for how far it was being held away from the pier). It was likely that the reactors were less than 150 feet from the pier, so I could come in about 100 feet north of the "E", traveling east along it and searching the carrier's hull until I found the reactors. By being 100 feet north of the pier, the underwater cameras wouldn't see me as visibility was a dozen feet at best. I hoped that any other detection systems or defenses wouldn't be focused on anyone that far away. I'd have to get somewhat closer to the transducer than I was now, but it hadn't detected me yet, judging by the lack of reaction. I was 300 feet away from it now, and I could loop north and east before moving south to approach the carrier again, thereby avoiding getting within 250 feet of it. By moving even more slowly and keeping my fingers quietly crossed, I thought I was safe from being detected. I searched the seabed in the direction I was now intending to go. Recalling that mines can be suspended on cables to either float on the surface or be held at any fixed depth, so sensors could be too, I carefully searched the surface, the volume of water I'd be passing through, and the seabed I'd be passing over. Other than boats going about their business on the surface, there was no sign of anything worrying. No more mystery sensors, no frogmen, no anything except lots of dirty water, so I slowly arced north and around the transducer. I only had about 750 feet to go to get into a good position to start my search of the ship itself, so even at a mere 1 mph, it only took me ten minutes to get to the point 100 feet above the "E" and about 200 feet along it. There'd been no reaction, I'd searched very carefully while I moved and had seen nothing, and the transducer didn't seem interested in me. The carrier was parked bow forward, ready to steam out easily. It was nearly as long as the pier, so my being 200 feet along the pier meant I was about 100 feet back from the front of the carrier. The flight deck protrudes forward, so I was north of a very narrow part of the forward bow. I'd already searched this part of the ship and there were no nuclear reactors in it. I moved fifty feet east, checking the surface, water and seabed around me carefully. Then I stopped on the bottom and used the two sight blobs to cover the three locations I wanted to keep an eye on: Above the surface. Very important because that's where any reaction would first be noticeable. In the water around me. Very important because I needed to see if anyone was down here with me before they saw me. Inside the carrier. So I could do what I'd come here for. By swapping back and forth rapidly, I was able to cover all three locations well enough to make me feel reasonably comfortable, although I wished I could operate more simultaneous sight blobs. Not finding any nuclear reactors, I carefully moved another fifty feet east, and repeated the process. I eventually found the reactors, nearer the stern than the bow because that's what always happens when you're searching for something. I moved myself a little farther east and slightly south, to improve my vision a bit, then searched inside the reactors themselves (the nearer one of them, as they looked the same). In essence, they're a simple technology: High pressure water flows into the reactor vessel, is heated to 315 degrees Celsius (it doesn't boil because it's under pressure), flows out, is piped through a chamber containing cooler, unpressured water. The pipe the pressurized water is flowing through radiates heat into the cooler water around it, heating that to above 100 degrees C, boiling it into steam which is used to turn steam turbines to power the ship. Heating the unpressurized water naturally cools the pressurized water, so it's pumped back into the reactor chamber to be heated again. The pressurized water goes around continually, transferring its heat to the second loop of cooler water, which transfers its energy to the turbines. I wanted to leave my mark as much "inside" the nuclear reactor as possible. The central unit is the reactor vessel, where the fuel rods do their fissioning. Unfortunately for my purposes, that container is jam-packed with stuff, not leaving me any room to work. The next level out is the "Containment Structure". It's much larger, containing the reactor vessel, the entire primary loop of pressurized water, and the part of the secondary loop of unpressurized water where it picks up heat from the primary. The Containment Structure is a sealed unit, as much of what's inside it is radioactive. It offered me plenty of space to work in. I formed an NP-chisel, placed it against the inside of the exterior wall of the containment structure and slowly added more and more force to its push, while simultaneously adding an equal and opposite push on the outside of the container so it wasn't ripped from the deck. After several seconds, I found the amount of force required to make the 'chisel' leave a significant indentation in what they'd lined the wall of the casing with, which appeared to be a fairly soft metal; perhaps lead, although it seemed much harder than the soft lead I'd personally handled before. I moved the chisel half an inch and repeated the process with the required push, going much faster now that I knew how much that was. It only took a few minutes to 'draw' my message on the inside of the back wall of the containment structure, a "Smiley Face" with a halo over it, underneath which I wrote, "WARNING: IF THE US GOV'T DOESN'T OBEY MY ORDERS, I CAN CAUSE GREAT DAMAGE." Then I located the captain's cabin and used a pen to draw my Angelic Smiley Face on his pillow, which I placed back on his bed "sunny side down" so it wouldn't be noticed for a while, in case one of the important jobs on a nuclear aircraft carrier is turning down the captain's sheets before he has his after-dinner nap. Mission accomplished, I slowly and carefully left. It took about fifteen minutes for me to get far enough away that I could breathe a sigh of relief. It'd been scarier than I'd thought [[good thing I didn't know about the Integrated Anti-Swimmer System]]. I headed out of the inlet, in formation with a launch conveniently going the same way. Once I was in Chesapeake Bay itself, I went in search of an unoccupied boat that had a TV and was far enough from its neighbors that I could play the TV loud without attracting attention. Half an hour later ABC told me that they still weren't allowed access to Andrews Air Force Base to see Air Force One and Two. There were plenty of houses nearby, so I easily found one whose computer was currently unattended. To all of Majestic Countdown's usual recipients, I sent, George Bush has failed to ensure the US Government abided by my explicit order to grant media access to Hangar One at Andrews AFB. In punishment for his disobeying God and as warning, thirty minutes ago I made an alteration to one of the nuclear reactors of USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), currently tied up at Norfolk Naval Base. Proof of my presence onboard can be found inside the starboard nuclear reactor and in the captain's bed. George W. Bush failed to ensure one order was obeyed, so now there are three: The existing one: the media to be granted immediate unrestricted access to Hangar One to record the punishment inflicted because cooperation was not offered to Jonathon Winters with the alacrity God and I want. When what I have done in USS Harry S. Truman has been discovered, that is also to be made public. The Navy can issue photographs rather than allow reporters into a reactor room. I feel sorry for the future sailors of the soon to be commissioned USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77), as that family name is becoming synonymous with an intolerable level of godlessness and incompetent bumbling. I therefore order that CVN-77 be renamed after someone considerably less embarrassing. It is to become the "USS Homer Simpson." Failure to immediately and fully abide by all of my orders will result in an ever-increasing series of punishments and additional orders. I sent it, then motored back to the boat I'd been watching TV from under, to watch for another hour before it'd be dark enough for me to fly home. ^ Pandemonium broke out in Norfolk, with townsfolk fleeing the area because of the dreaded "N" word ("Nuclear", as the other dreaded "N" word isn't quite so terrifying). Looooong-distance telephoto shots from news-choppers showed a harbor swarming with patrol boats and a sky full of military jets and helicopters. EVERY ship was putting to sea and scattering with indecent haste, including an unpowered USS Harry S. Truman being pulled straight out to sea by every tug the navy could attach to it. The Navy's response clearly couldn't be greater, which made even more townsfolk flee the area. The Navy was refusing to comment. Not even about the captain's pillowcase. That must be a matter of national security. As time passed without any nuclear explosions, people started relaxing. There was some joking about my order that CVN-77 be renamed to USS Homer Simpson. Some people thought it was a good idea - "America will show a friendlier face to the rest of the world" - but most thought it was stupid, insulting and/or disrespectful toward a great man and a great nation. People also couldn't agree whether my order was a joke or not. One thing they did agree on, was that if my order was serious and the carrier wasn't renamed, then there'd be BIG trouble. Neither George Bush, the senior or junior, was available for comment. It took over an hour, but the Government decided it might be a good idea to let reporters into Hangar One. That was half good, because by the time I started flying home there'd still been no official word on the renaming of CVN-77. ^ [[I had assumed it'd take hours, if not days, for them to get inside the Truman's reactors to see what I'd done. I could've read their procedure manuals to get an idea how long that'd take, but I hadn't bothered as it didn't matter. However long it took them, the Navy were frightened, and they'd be terrified when they saw that I'd had access to the insides of a nuclear reactor with enough force to score the metal lining of the vessel. It took slightly less than 24 hours for both my Smiley Faces and the containment vessel's message to be publicized. They caused some public laughter, but did NOT cause laughter within the Navy. The text of my imprinted message implied that I hadn't done anything nasty this time, but the Navy was NOT going to rely on an implication about that! I'd had access to their reactor(s), and the Navy does NOT take risks with nuclear reactors! Huge numbers of other systems on every ship had to be checked carefully too. For example, were the unarmed bombs in the ammunition bunkers really unarmed? Maybe the angel was using the reactors as a smoke screen to obscure something else he'd done? That sort of thing worried everybody from the Cooks up to Captains and beyond. But it was the reactors that caused the major trouble. All I'd done was draw a couple of Smiley Faces, but I'd COMPLETELY underestimated the massive disruption that would cause. The Navy had to immediately shutdown every nuclear reactor that'd been in Norfolk at the time of my visit. They couldn't be powered up again until the Navy was SURE there wasn't a single change in them, not even a very subtle change. I'd transmuted water into wine, so there was no telling what I might've done inside a nuclear reactor. Disaster could ensue if I'd changed just a few thousand atoms in a valve, a dial, temperature probe, fuel rod insertion motor, the wall of a pipe, or hundreds of other places. There aren't many items inside a nuclear reactor that aren't critically important. The Navy bosses appreciated that possible consequence almost immediately, and the possibility became a certainty when my message was found inside the reactor. I'd repeatedly shown no hesitation in destroying aircraft, even going out of my way to do so inside of Andrews AFB. I'd promised an escalation of punishments, so the loss of a $5 billion aircraft carrier after the loss of $1 billion worth of aircraft was worryingly plausible. ALL the reactors in Norfolk had to be disassembled, inspected down to the atomic level - it was usually easier to replace the part - and then rebuilt. Neither the Navy nor its major subcontractors had the capacity to process that number of nuclear reactors at one time, so it fucked up the Navy's deployment schedules for several of its most important assets for YEARS! [Before the end of the current year in most dimensions, although not in this one, the Navy's aircraft carrier deployment schedule was considerably simplified.] The Navy bosses conveyed their opinion to the Government using small, very emphatic words. They did NOT appreciate that the huge disaster had been dropped in their laps just because the Government had refused to allow reporters to photograph two wrecked 747s. And because of that asshole angel too of course, assuming angels have assholes.]] ^ My flight home lasted six hours because I put quite a lot of effort into throwing off any possible attempts to track me. I could think of three ways such tracking could be attempted: aircraft using visual or radar tracking, satellites, and ground-based radar. I used large sight blobs to search the skies for aircraft following me. I did see planes from time to time, but they never made any attempt to follow my course, appearing to be minding their own business rather than mine. I used a variety of evasion techniques: My trip started with me underwater initially, looping east farther out to sea, then north far enough to take me into Canadian waters. From which I flew west across Canada. Ducking under water when I passed near a large enough lake. Underwater I'd change direction and motor at full speed for fifteen minutes or so, then emerge at full speed in an unexpected direction, heading that way for a hundred miles before turning west again. Anyone or anything tracking me with a lens zoomed in enough to make out a human-sized target should lose me. Simply flying low, especially if I could fly alongside a ridge or in a narrow mountain valley. Once I even flew for several miles under the tree canopy of a forest. I had to slow down for that! By far my favorite subterfuge was one that didn't slow me down at all. I created a ten-foot long, six-foot wide, half-inch deep tray, then filled it with snow. I put a lid on it, then flew with it in formation directly over me. With snow-covered terrain beneath me, and snow on top of me, any infrared tracking would be ruined. Infrared was what I was most concerned about (it seemed the most likely, especially as nothing has ever happened that indicated that I showed up on radar), so I liked the snow umbrella technique. I didn't head for Corvallis, instead heading mostly west across Canada. When I got to the Pacific Ocean I dived in and motored south for a while. When I emerged, I flew at a very low altitude with a layer of water over me. During most of the long flight home, I tried to work on extending my 500-foot ki-effects range. If it'd doubled with each merge, the way everything else seemed at least to (with other things increasing by a factor of four or eight), then these stunts would be far easier. Maybe that range hadn't doubled because I hadn't figured out a way of doing that, even though I hadn't need to figure out how to get 500 feet initially. It was a long flight home, so I had plenty of time to try every idea I could think of, but I couldn't make any of them work. My maximum range didn't budge an inch. ^ [[I need to know where the ki-effect is taking place in order to be able to interact with the Universe's Consciousness at that point. Beyond about 450 feet (less if I can't sense the area clearly, such as when looking through rain with my ordinary eyes), the small errors accumulate into an error large enough that the process breaks down badly. At about 500 feet, it breaks down entirely. It's similar to aiming a rifle. A target ten feet away is easy to hit. By 400 feet the small angular error is causing many misses. By 500 feet, there are so many communication misses that the ki-effect process fails. I can use sight blobs to overcome the limitations of my natural eyes, which permits me to generate ki-effects virtually anywhere within 500 feet of me, but even sight blobs can't get the effects to work beyond 500 feet. My mental knowledge of where those locations are is too inaccurate. Unfortunately, merging had done nothing to improve my mental 'aim'. Despite my failure to improve my range during my flight, there were three types of solutions that would've extended it. (1) The easiest solution type was not to rely on my senses to tell me where the ki-effect was happening, but to get the Universe to tell me. Currently the remote location and I were 'lobbing' information back and forth at each other, a process that only worked if we 'lobbed' the packets of information accurately. If we'd included our physical 'addresses' in the packets, that would've made targeting the lobs easier, which would've made the process more accurate and extended its range. I had the power to get and use that information, so I could've done it during my experiments on the long flight home, but I didn't know such addresses existed, and didn't have the knowledge necessary to know how to use them. (2) The next solution type - which required more knowledge and power than I had - was to use 'addresses' and to make an "information tunnel" between me and where I wanted the ki-effect to be, and constantly re-tunnel if the ki-effect or me was moving. Metaphorically, rather than 'lobbing' information back and forth with the result that sometimes lobs aren't caught, I'd be creating a zero distance connection between the two points so the information can be handed back and forth with no chance of missing it. This is almost exactly how quantum entanglement occurs. This offered a MUCH increased range, as it meant the distance didn't matter. The range constraint became my ability to pick the spot I wanted to communicate with. I couldn't, for example, pick a spot on the moon, because the 'spot' would've been something like 10,000 square miles! I needed to see (or otherwise sense) the location with enough resolution to know what address I wanted. What I could've done though, is create a sight blob within sight of me and connect myself to it, then use it to identify another location within sight of it, then connect that location directly to me, etc. It's not a normal relay system, as each new location is connected directly to me, but setting it up requires a relay approach. I could circumnavigate the planet using this approach, although it'd be very boring to establish. (3) The best and most powerful type of solution starts with realizing that there was no such thing as "distance". It's a concept that doesn't really exist. As I've mentioned already, every 'pixel' of the Universe has properties which include its position. Those properties are far more flexible than humans understand; a pixel can be in multiple locations, for example. Most forms of life (including humans) invent the concept of "location" - and consequently "distance between locations" - as a simplification made necessary because of the way they perceive the Universe and because of their limited mental abilities. It's a very constraining and not particularly accurate mental model, but it's the best most forms of intelligent life can do. Three analogies come to mind: Colorblind animals not understanding color properly. Some animals don't understand movement well, as their ability to perceive it is only a subset of what humans can perceive. Other species use multiple senses to perceive space (e.g., sonar and sight), causing them to think of "distance" in a way different than humans do. For example, the perceived distance between two objects can depend on those objects' distance from the observer; or beyond a certain distance, their brains don't process the input three-dimensionally, treating like a 2D image, similar to our early cosmologists thinking that the stars were lights on the surface of a dome that covered the sky. If I'd known that "location" was a simplification of reality, and if I'd had the ability to work directly with the Universe's intrinsic properties, then I could've created ki-effects 'anywhere' in the Universe, any-"where" not really being a concept that would apply any longer.]] ^ It was 3am by the time I sneaked into home. Everyone in my families was asleep, so I slid large notes face up under the parents' bedroom doors, telling them I was back and inviting them to come to my bedroom for a chat as soon as they wished (they'd see it when they awoke, reassuring them). Knowing they'd want me to, I activated my bedroom's Faraday Cage then woke Julia, Carol and Ava. They were instantly excited, with their mouths leaping into action. There was SO MUCH that'd happened: what I'd done with the cameramen, Mueller and Jonathon in DC, destroying Air Force One and Two, and doing "something" (no one knew what yet) to the aircraft carrier's reactor. Julia was VERY proud of me! She loved the Big Lie approach I was taking. It was a global-scale manipulation, and she was very impressed by my ambition and how well I was carrying it off. Carol was mostly relieved, because she'd been very worried about me. She'd been horribly scared several times during the videotape replays - when guns were being waved around, F-16s screaming toward me, etc. - so she was very reassured to see me back safely and couldn't stop hugging me tightly. Ava had a considerable amount of confidence in my ability to get things done, and of the three girls, she was the most interested in how I'd done them. I wouldn't call her a tomboy exactly, but she is into physical activities more than Julia and Carol. [Now that I think of it, it'd be reasonably true to say Julia is mostly mentally oriented, Carol mostly emotional, and Ava physical. That's too one-dimensional, but there's enough truth in those categorizations that assigning them in a different order would obviously be wrong.] Despite the three different viewpoints I just described, the three girls are still girls (that's the only type of human I like in my bed), so they focused on girly stuff: "Are you happy with how your plan is going?", "What sort of guy is Jonathon Winters?", "What do you think about the public's reaction?", etc. They'd stayed up late waiting for my return, so after only half an hour of talking I insisted we went back to sleep. They didn't want to, but I said, "We're going to repeat the same conversation with the parents shortly anyway, so it's not worth your being tired all day tomorrow just to get the news a few hours earlier. Besides, you might need your wits about you tomorrow if something unexpected happens." That argument worked well on Julia, but not on Carol or Ava, so I cheated. "You can keep talking among yourselves if you want, but I've had a busy day so I'm ordering my body to sleep." After some "Goodnight" hugs and kisses, that's what I did, fairly effectively taking the wind out of their sails ("wind out of their mouths" would be more accurate). ------- Chapter 338: Aftermath of the Angel's Vandalism Tuesday, April 17, 2007 I woke up after my usual brief sleep, and lay in bed using my downstairs study's computer to browse the news networks' websites, primarily the print media because the TV networks use sound too much and, as I believe I've mentioned, I can't get goddamn sound blobs to work. The most important consequence of my activities yesterday was that Jonathon Winters was now a VERY busy guy. He now had a large office building, many people helping him, etc. The "Make a Shortlist of Resurrection Candidates" had gotten off to a slow start, but it looked like it was firing ahead now. ABC's website had a link entitled "Jonathon's Blog", which led to a series of brief diary notes about Jonathon's experiences and thoughts. A few of those were addressed to the angel, describing the cooperation he was getting from the Government, the last ones letting me know that I didn't need to light any more fires under governmental asses (I'm paraphrasing the overall impression). There was no mention of "Mark Anderson" in any of it, but I didn't expect there would be this early in the process. There were photos of the wrecks previously known as Air Force One and Two. Before I'd flown home last night I'd known that reporters had been granted access and I'd caught the first photos, but I hadn't seen more than a few minutes of the initial response to them. From hearing it now, it was obvious that my destroying such prestigious icons of the presidency in the middle of a supposedly highly guarded air base was a message that people certainly understood. I was amused by the Government stating that they'd been considering replacing the two VC-25's anyway ("VC-25" was the correct model number for the two presidential jets). #5: I believed them when they said they'd been considering replacements, although I didn't really believe their stated reason, which was because the two planes were getting old. I think it was because several other people, mostly Arab sheiks, already had larger and considerably more impressive private planes, something I'd discovered while I was researching BBJs before we took delivery of our one. The Navy had released photos of the captain's pillowcase to the media, but were saying that it'd take a day before they could open the containment vessels of the two reactors. I didn't know whether that was true or not, but it looked like the Navy was going to be reasonably forthcoming and I didn't particularly care about them possibly stalling for a few extra hours. They hadn't yet renamed CVN-77. They were being non-communicative on that issue, maybe hoping it'd go away, or maybe waiting to see what was inside the reactors. I was willing to wait a day. The official website for CVN-77 made no reference to Homer Simpson. The official website for the Simpsons did make reference to CVN-77. Matt Groening thought naming a nuclear vessel after Homer Simpson was very appropriate, given Homer's expertise in the area of nuclear safety; a coincidence I hadn't thought of. I googled, "Angel Michael", and clicked my way one by one through the top several dozen listings (all of this googling was "one by one", as if I only had one mind. I didn't want thirty two simultaneous accesses of anything other than OSU lectures, because that's what the NSA knew we had a software program to do). There were all sorts of stuff about Archangel Michael, none of it useful in any real sense, but good to read to get a feeling for what the public thought. Everything from naked women offering to have my baby through to religious rants, and sometimes both of those at the same time. There were condemnations on non-religious grounds, rapturous praises on religious grounds, supportive statements, puzzled statements, and even jokes about me (I admired those people for being brave enough to risk committing blasphemy). There were discussions about Jonathon Winters and his job: was he fit for it, what it all meant, etc. And there was much, much more. I'd created a monster that almost everyone seemed to have an opinion on. In several of the sites there were comments to the effect that I only did terrible things (shoot people in the stomach or foot, destroy aircraft, raid military bases), when people were breaking my rules. So, the commentators suggested, "The Government shouldn't break them." One person commented, "He looks like he's fun when no one's hassling him." Another wrote, "He seems very moral, but quick to anger and heavy-handed. I guess he hasn't got much tolerance left after billions of years." There were fewer of those sorts of comments than I'd hoped for, but it was good to see that some people were falling for my bullshit. Hopefully more would if I kept shoveling it. There was a GREAT deal of crap. Every religious nutcase in the world (not a small number) had a perspective that they thought everyone needed to know. I particularly enjoyed the idiots who wanted me to resurrect everyone who'd ever died. Senior people from the 'sensible religions' (that appears to be an oxymoron, but it's not when they're compared to the other religions) were being pressured for their churches' opinions, even of just my comment about condoms. If I resurrected someone soon, that'd be the greatest religious event of the past two millennia. On the other hand, I had said, "Don't get hung up on religion; it has surprisingly little to do with God." That sounded horribly like secularism should be extended to include God! The man-in-the-street didn't recognize the significance of that, but professional clergymen and people who'd done as much religious research as I had did, as it'd leave the concept of "religion" as an empty bag of hot air. If religion had no meaning, what was the point of the churches? That statement of the angel's was a VERY threatening one, and many of the studious religious commentators hated it even more than they hated my comment about condoms - that's how bad it was! Plus there were UFO-freaks, Elvis-freaks (thousands of people were still clamoring for me to resurrect Elvis. It occurred to me that maybe I should have turned up as Elvis rather than an angel), and the eco-freaks were particularly strident because "The animals love him." Many people thought I was a Government conspiracy, while others still thought that I was promoting a Hollywood movie. Some non-judgmental people claimed I was both. The moralists were having conniptions. They hated the graphically displayed shape of my excessively large cock, hated that I'd made an exhibition of women's bodies, and weren't too happy that I'd shot people either. I'd even said I'd be disappointed if Jonathon didn't get a "hot date". The moralists were convinced that I was Evil Incarnate. Only Evil would show the shape of his cock, so obviously my resurrecting someone was going to be a trick. That last point is one that amused me highly: every religious person had no doubt whatsoever that God could resurrect someone and that the Devil could not. Where did that certainty come from? As far as I could tell, virtually every part of the Bible is endlessly argued about and there's even been huge religious wars over tiny differences of interpretation, but no religious person at all doubted the resurrection capability of God and incapability of the Devil. I was sure that certainty came from people's unanimous desire for that to be true. I would've liked for interviewers to question people about that assumption because I was sure the answers would've been very amusing, even if unintentionally so, but no one raised that issue. It was an accepted 'fact'. Gun and ammunition sales were way up as people prepared for the End Of The World and/or the Alien Invasion. All the dead were about to rise up and/or millions of alien body-snatchers were expected any minute, so clearly people needed lots of guns and ammo. Unfortunately, some of those newly acquired guns and bullets were being put to bad use already, by people with a variety of insane justifications such as, "I thought she was possessed, like Archdevil Michael is," or, "I don't care if you arrest me. I got my revenge and the world's ending soon anyway." There weren't just murders either, but several suicides from people who wanted to end their world before The End Of The World. One group of fifteen nutcases had a different motivation, committing suicide while holding hands and praying, so they could be my "Helpers On Earth". I wasn't quite sure how they expected that to work, but I was sure that people can be self-deluded to an astonishingly unrealistic extent. I felt bad about events like these, but I'd have been stupid to think I was responsible for them. No one else was blaming the angel either; although one woman was blaming me (as the angel) for her cat dying and was demanding that I resurrect it. Other than Catwoman, I was getting a lot of positive comments for only messing up equipment and not killing people, as I obviously could have. The stock market was bouncing up and down, with people unable to agree which industry segments my appearance benefited or harmed, although oil had surged $15 per barrel on the expectation that I'd be "taking care of the Arabs shortly," which would presumably interrupt oil supplies. Last but not least, the question of "Who Should Be Resurrected?" was being endlessly discussed. A surprising number of those discussions actually included sensible attempts to develop suitable criteria along the lines I'd suggested, but most simply started with a name and then attempted to justify it. Suggested names varied considerably, from Hitler (so he could be tried for war crimes and then sentenced to death), through to Biggie Smalls (the rapper a.k.a. "The Notorious B.I.G."), and I even saw a suggestion for The Spice Girls (the person who suggested that was VERY confused, on a number of levels). There were several online polls. According to one, Elvis got more votes than Jesus, probably because the voters were aware that Jesus wasn't an American citizen who'd died in America - the voting was open to everyone in the world, so not just Americans. JFK and Martin Luther King got a good amount of support, with Princess Diana being up there too (the foreign voters' influence again). Strongly featured were several religious people, such Pope John Paul II - not likely! "Mark Anderson" didn't appear on any list of potential candidates, which was disappointing; I'd thought I looked REALLY good in those bright yellow Speedos. How quickly people forget. The only list that mattered was Jonathon's, which I'd do something about if Mark Anderson was inconveniently left off it. In a not-unrelated issue, many people had raised the issue of there having to be a body to raise from the dead. Many of the famous names that were being suggested no longer had available bodies, or even more often, people argued about whether it was available or not. As is the case on the internet, many of the arguments were highly insulting and personal. I couldn't understand how people could get into a screaming frenzy over whether Mozart's body was intact enough. They seemed to take it personally, but I was pretty sure it wasn't. There were lots of side arguments over issues like whether the Government had the right to hand personal data over to the angel or Jonathon's group. They were all ignorable, although I did smile at the thought that it'd make my plan much easier if Mark Anderson was the only person put on the list because everyone else objected on privacy grounds. I also liked the comment from one guy that only rich people should be candidates, "Because they've already proved that they're successful at life, so they'd be good people to give another life to." No one else seemed to like it, probably because none of them were dead and rich like I was. As best as I could judge - after ignoring all the idiots who ranted and raved about their favorite topic regardless of its disconnection from reality - the tone of the sensible people had shifted. After LA I'd seemed amazing, but in a way that was mostly irrelevant. After DC people realized that I had an agenda and great power to get it enforced. That sobered them. They didn't think it was necessarily bad, as proving my divinity would be an AMAZING thing, but it was clearly something VERY serious indeed. People 'remembered' the historic fiction that Archangels are POWERFUL beings not to be taken lightly. It worried many of them. There were a pleasingly large number of idiots who said, "It's God's Earth, so the angel can do whatever he wants." I wondered if any of them had big-titted, teenage daughters. There was no official US Government response, not that I would've believed the official response to be the real one anyway. It's sadly true that total distrust of the Government is automatic. There were very few comments from international governments either. The Israeli Government invited me to pop in for a chat (they used different words), but I thought I might skip that. The Vatican was still in an emergency meeting. They'd had 1,500 years to prepare for the Second Coming, but were apparently caught unprepared for a scaled down version of it. Poor contingency planning on their part, I thought. International reactions didn't really matter, as I wasn't able to fly fast enough to visit other countries. ^ [By the way, I have a plan for trying to learn how to fly faster than the sound barrier, but it scares me too much so I haven't attempted it yet. Ava and I would take off in my two-seater Cessna, Ava in the pilot's seat (we've both got our Private Pilots' License now). We'd climb to 10,000 feet then I'd get out to do my tests. We'd both wear skydiving parachutes, mine with its Automatic Opening Device set to 9,000 feet, as I'd be doing my tests at 10,000 feet (all skydivers have AODs, usually set to about 1,000 feet. The devices open the reserve chute if the skydiver falls through the set altitude with a too high rate-of-change-of-altitude, that implying that the main chute isn't deployed or working properly). If I passed out or was injured during my tests, I'd fall to 9,000 feet, my chute would open, and I'd float 'reasonably' safely back to Earth. That "reasonably" wasn't comforting, as landing unconscious could be injurious. If Ava saw me descending under chute, she'd try to talk with me on the walkie-talkies we'd have. If I was in trouble, then she'd fly to a few hundred feet above me, would point the plane west, bail out, pull her own ripcord, and descend beside me. She'd have some medical gear and a radio with her to call for a helicopter pick up as soon as we landed (we'd have a chopper on standby somewhere close but out of sight). Ava suggested that she should have a water pistol to try to wake me up during the descent, which I thought was a good idea, even though I could easily imagine her using it even if I was conscious. We hadn't tried this yet because the idea of tumbling out of control at very high speeds didn't appeal to me. It was too easy to imagine my arms, legs and possibly head being ripped off. I could do my tests with my body firmly sandwiched in an NP-cocoon, so my body parts hopefully wouldn't flail around if I went unstable, but it was still a very scary thought. I was pretty sure my wonderful minds wouldn't be able to regenerate me a new body from the neck down, so that image was more discouraging than the benefit from being able to fly at my theoretical maximum speed, which was Mach two, triple my practical maximum speed. I didn't have enough reason to take the risk, especially because creating sonic booms would probably attract official attention.] ^ From what I could see from the internet, my Angel Plan seemed to be more or less on track. There were even more idiots than I'd expected, which is saying something because I'd expected quite a few of them, but that didn't matter. There were only two things I wanted to make my plan work: confusion, and enough people taking Jonathon's job seriously to make my proceeding with it seem credible. Both requirements were easily met. It didn't really matter that I'd excessively overachieved on the "Create Confusion" objective. I wanted to do some research on radar and satellite tracking to confirm my belief that my methods of being careful were sufficient. I felt pretty safe in assuming that I'd riled up the military by now, so some caution was called for. I hadn't expected my DC visit to get so serious, but now that I was playing in the big leagues, I'd better discover what I could about my opponent's radar capabilities. I resisted doing that research from home, leaving it to Majestic Countdown to do one night soon. ^ I sensed the four parents and Donna approaching my bedroom door at 5:45am. I stopped my studying and turned off the Faraday Cage mode to let them in, as that mode locks the door shut. [To give you another idea of the size of our bedroom, I'd had to use my Lordly authority to get the bed positioned only fifteen feet from the door, specifically so I could sense people approaching our room. Julia hadn't liked having the bed so far to one side of the room, "because it visually unbalances the room." I thought keeping us safe from being murdered in our beds was more important than the aesthetics of our bedroom. Julia wasn't sure the tiny risk of being assaulted in our beds was worth the permanent sacrificing of the balance of the room's décor, hence my needing to exercise my Lordly Might.] I opened the door for the parents as I woke my girls. I turned on our TV so we could catch up on the news, re-engaged the Faraday Mode, and we started talking. Before my trip I hadn't actually let anyone know what I'd do if the Government didn't play ball fast enough. I'd just said, "I'll play it by ear. I'm sure I'll find some way of waking them up." The parents probably thought I'd do something similar to what I'd done in LA, strip someone naked and embarrass them, disable a helicopter or two, or if I was pushed hard enough, maybe as much as shooting someone in the stomach. So the videotape of my DC discussion with Director Mueller was pretty much what they had expected. The F-16 ejections and subsequent crashes were unexpectedly dramatic, but they had flown impolitely close to me - the sight and sound of them screaming passed had been captured by the cameramen with me very well - so my reaction was understandable. The parents had therefore been greatly surprised when the network read out the email I'd sent them about my going to Andrews Air Force Base and destroying the two presidential 747s. Not long after they'd recovered from that surprise, another email arrived announcing that I'd gone to the largest naval base in the world and had sabotaged the reactor of a nuclear aircraft carrier. Mom thought I was crazy, while Dad and Donna were VERY impressed, so Mom thought they were crazy too. Prof and Vanessa asked me whether I thought I'd been crazy. That's not meant facetiously; they asked me about how I judged the risks, what I thought the benefits were, did I have an escape plan in mind the whole time, etc. I was able to give them answers that reassured them. [[I didn't know how lucky I was that I'd been inside an airtight box for my submerged approach.]] I explained to Mom, "I'm conning the whole world with a big lie, Mom. Thinking small would diminish my credibility, but doing huge things gives me a lot of credibility. Not just because I had the power to do them, but because I claimed I had the right. Did you notice that the FBI's Director made no attempt to arrest me for the illegal things I did in LA? I claim to be above human laws and they're falling for it. Or at least not willing to test my reaction to an arrest attempt." Vanessa and Prof weren't very interested in what I'd done; they were much more interested in what I intended to do next. It was good having them around, because they saved me at least an hour of Mom's agonizing over past deeds. Mom, and some of the others, still expressed their concerns. I'm tempted to say "because that's what moms do", but I have to admit that I'd gone out of my way to get most of the country's military pissed off at me, so Mom did have good reason this time. I'll assume you know what noises concerned parents make, so I won't bother recording those comments. I pleased Mom by answering Prof's question with, "I hope I shouldn't have to do much more. It looks like Jonathon is going to get all the resources he needs, the Air Force has abided by my order to let the press into the hangar, and the Navy seems to be abiding by my orders too. They haven't renamed the carrier they're building yet, but they've released photos of the captain's pillowcase and will presumably release photos of what I did inside the reactor." Then I had to explain what I'd done inside the reactor and why I wanted the new carrier to be called "USS Homer Simpson". The latter was to motivate the President personally, in case he responded better to attacks on his ego than my destruction of military hardware, which he didn't have to pay for anyway. Because our first legal settlement had quickly been broken by the Government, I suspected the President didn't really care about taxpayers' money, but maybe he did care about his family name and would act to stop it being damaged any further. I continued, "Provided the military and Government keep behaving themselves, the only thing I'll need to do is keep an eye on ABC's website to see if Jonathon has any issues. There's a good chance that all I'll have to do is email him occasionally, and I'll do that like a normal Majestic Countdown trip. You'll probably have to send an email too, Mom." I had to explain my last point. (It's a small issue and it happens tomorrow, so I'll omit the explanation for now.) "What if the Government doesn't behave themselves?" asked Dad, almost looking hopeful. I wouldn't be surprised if he thought I should keep causing the Government grief even if they did behave themselves. "I guess it'll depend on how they misbehave. If it's the military backsliding in some way, then I'll cause them some expensive mayhem. I like the idea of destroying a whole lot of fighter planes because they're such an aggressive weapon, so I'd probably raid an Air Force base somewhere. If the Government itself is proving uncooperative, then I'll have to think of something appropriate. Maybe knocking the Statue of Liberty down, or wrecking the Oval Office. I haven't thought about it." "Destroying the Statue would anger a lot of people," opined Vanessa in a disapproving way. "Yeah, I think so too. If she had a set of scales symbolizing Justice, I'd be tempted to symbolically remove them, but removing the torch or tablet wouldn't have the right impact. If the Government misbehaves, I'll think of something else. There's plenty I can do." "I'll say!" agreed Dad. Donna giggled happily. I asked, "There are a couple of questions I forgot to ask the girls when I got home. Did anyone notice my absence, and did any reporters try to talk with any of you about the angel?" The latter question because the Majestic Countdown's first leak had been about Mark Anderson, and a reporter might've thought to explore that aspect. "I don't think so," answered Julia. Several others confirmed it. Dad added, "When the news about the angel being in Washington started being broadcast, we gave the gardeners permission to stop work and watch TV, so they had no need to talk with you." "Good idea. And good that no one noticed my absence. It's a pity no reporter thought of Mark Anderson though, but it's still early. I spent an hour browsing not long ago, and Mark Anderson hasn't appeared as a suggested resurrection candidate yet. Too much competition from Elvis, unfortunately." "Maybe it's because your body is missing?" suggested Mom. "Eighty percent of the names people are suggesting are ludicrous for various reasons, so I don't think practical issues are occurring to many people. I'm hoping Jonathon will question me about cremations shortly. He and his staff are supposed to be thinking about the resurrection methodically. We'll see whether my response to the cremation issue prompts their memories enough. If that doesn't work, you guys can start the campaign for Mark." We spent the next half an hour re-discussing whether resurrecting Mark was a good idea or not. There were four major risks: Government suspicion leading to intrusive investigations and subsequent problems. Evil scientists wanting to experiment on me. Religious nutcases deciding I was Evil and wanting to send me back to Hell. Nutcases of any type who might, for whatever reason, want to assassinate me just because I was famous. I didn't want what had happened to John Lennon to happen to me. My families' and my main protection would come from my Guardian Angel. After Mark was resurrected, Archangel Michael would announce that he was leaving the Earth but that God was sending a minor angel to guard Mark. That angel would appear only as a yellow sphere (a light blob), and would defend us very ably. All of the above four risks would be very much reduced by my having a highly motivated minor angel defender, especially because if the minor angel broke any laws - beating someone up, stripping them, taking their gun, whatever - I could simply say, "It's nothing to do with me. If you don't like what the angel did, take it up with God." If they tried to arrest me for anything the angel did, the prosecution would have to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Mark Anderson was capable of impossible feats. They'd never be able to do that, even if they had video evidence of it, as I'd just say, "It's the angel doing it, not me. If I could do things like that, I wouldn't have let the DHS and CIA kidnap me and experiment on me for a month." We also had a marvelously secure home and a LOT of money to spend on defensive measures should they be necessary. To be unrealistically hopeful, we shouldn't need much defense because the apparent fact that I'd been resurrected should give Archangel Michael's divinity a huge amount of credibility, so the religious nutcases that professed to be Christian should all fall to their knees and thank God. To be more realistic, religious nutcases are - by the definition of both words - not rational, so not all of them would suddenly believe that the angel was Good, but hopefully most of them will, which should reduce the threat to us. We discussed those issues again for quite a while (we'd discussed them previously too, as post-resurrection safety was the most important issue in the whole plan). Nothing new was specifically added, but there was a shift in feelings. Previously it'd very much been an issue that we were all uncertain about. Even I hadn't been sure whether the plan should go all the way through, because - without doubt - it was a VERY risky plan. No one felt sure that it was a bad plan, but everyone was very uncomfortable about the risk. But we'd gone ahead with it thus far because it could so easily be aborted simply by Archangel Michael never reappearing. The previous balance of opinion had been that the plan was PROBABLY too risky. Not "definitely", but "probably". To put a number on it, the consensus was maybe 60% against. But my demonstrating how capable I was by destroying the 747s and etching my message inside the aircraft carrier's reactor had given the parents more confidence. I had the feeling that the plan was now about 60% acceptable. Still scary, but less so now. We stopped when it was our normal breakfast time. Before we left the room, Donna was warned not to speak about the subject unless one of us raised it first in a secure room, causing her to look "picked on", that being the childish version of aggrieved. In the afternoon, the Navy released photos of the inside wall of the reactor, showing my angelic smiley face and block-letter message. That my message was a warning relieved the public and caused several commentators to talk about how I was moral and cautious. Some of them were surprised by that, because I obviously had the power to do whatever I want. A lot of emphasis was put on the fact that I ONLY did bad things when people didn't behave the way I wanted. Their comments gave me a smiley face. The Navy didn't appear very happy, but for national security reasons they refused to tell the reporters what actions they were going to take as a result of my message. [As previously mentioned, they started doing a shit load of highly expensive and disruptive disassembly, testing and refitting.] The Navy also did not commit to saying 'Yes' or 'No' to renaming CVN-77. They were "Thinking about it," and "There's a complicated and time-consuming procedure involved in renaming a vessel." Both comments displeased me. There was nothing for them to think about and it wasn't complicated at all. I'd already renamed their vessel for them, so all they had to do was carry out my order. It was important that I continue to demand full and rapid compliance with my orders. I could say that I had no choice because my image required it, but I'd created that image in the first place. The crux of the matter was that I NEEDED rapid compliance because I didn't have time to waste. Especially because if I let the Government waste my time, they could waste YEARS of it. It would soon be unnatural and therefore suspicious for Ron not to wear shorts and a T-shirt during the day. I had to get the resurrection candidate chosen and the resurrection underway before we had a spell of sunny weather. There were also several questions from Jonathon to Archangel Michael posted on ABC's website. Most of them were because he was nervous and unsure how much I wanted to micromanage him, so I could answer them with, "You decide. It's your project, and I have faith in you." (I was amused by the reversal in direction in the last phrase.) He hadn't asked whether cremation prevented someone from being a candidate. The closest he came to that was his questioning whether the surviving family would need to consent to having the body exhumed. There was one question that I had to laugh at myself for not anticipating, "If someone died of a disease or injury, will they die again from the same cause after you resurrect them? Do we need to pick only people who died from avoidable causes?" Between answering Jonathon's questions, lighting a fire under the Navy's ass, and my wanting to research radars somewhere away from home, I decided a nighttime trip of a few hours' duration was in order. ------- Chapter 339: Radar Blobs Tuesday, April 17, 2007 (Continued) After it was dark, I flew to collect my A-man suit, putting it on then my black clothes back on top. I flew to the Cascades, then south down among the ridges and trees. After a couple of hundred miles, I diverted toward some lights to find a spare computer or two and started researching radar detection limits. Five minutes later, I was VERY worried! I'd assumed that radars didn't work unless their targets contained metal. When the army guys had described our home system to us, that's what they'd said. I knew there were weather radars that could pick up storms, but I'd presumed they worked because of the sheer mass of water involved. Each drop would only reflect a tiny amount of the radar beam, but many cubic miles of raindrops added up to a huge amount of reflected beam. I was a lot smaller than "many cubic miles", so I hadn't worried about it. I should've worried! There are several different types of radars, some of which are capable of phenomenal feats of detection. I could pick up a phone and rent a radar unit on a trailer that was capable of tracking the flight of an individual moth! If the public could rent mobile radars that could do that, God knows what the military radars were capable of! (And God knows why people would be that interested in a moth.) Further reading eased my minds somewhat. The good news was that search radars capable of that much discrimination had extremely short ranges. They'd lose track of their moth if it went much more than a mile away from the radar station. There were still some problems though: I have a reflective area about a thousand times larger than a moth, and I'm denser so presumably more reflective. Call it 2,000 times worse. That extends the detection range by the fourth root of 2,000, about 6.7 times, giving the stations about an 8-mile radius. (Fourth root because it's an inverse square law going out, and again when coming back.) The military could pump more power into the transmitter. Ten times more power would give the station an 80-mile radius for detecting me. The military wouldn't need to track me continuously. Over the course of several of my flights, they'd be able to get data from whenever I flew over any of their radars. Eventually they have enough data to take some guesses about where I was coming from. They could move several mobile stations into the state, and then into the general area, and then into our backyard. Very worried, I kept reading. The next snippet I read was a comment about identifying bird species. There are radars that use the Doppler Effect (called "Doppler Radars") that can tell from the frequency change in the returned signal how fast the target is coming toward, or going away from, the radar station. Some of them have enough discrimination to identify the species of individual birds by how fast their wings are flapping! That's a scary amount of discrimination and precision. Not so bad was that the military radars are generally tuned to frequencies which give a long range. Those frequencies bounce off metal well, but not off flesh. Airfields which are having bird strike problems often have to set up dedicated bird radars to detect flesh. They're very short range, and I made a strong mental note to approach all military airfields at very low altitude in the future, preferably on foot or bicycle. I'd been lucky that I'd biked to Andrews AFB. I had no idea whether Andrews AFB had bird problems, but they had the presidential jets so it was hard to imagine they didn't have every possible precautionary technology. Meteorological radar is tuned to a frequency which bounces off water well, and Avian radar to a frequency that bounces off flesh well. It turns out that those two frequencies are effectively the same because flesh is mostly water, and radar readers (whatever that job is called) often have trouble differentiating a rainstorm from a flock of birds. That means I was at risk of being detected by bird watchers as well as by meteorological stations. The next item I read was very bad. It was a meteorological radar coverage map for the continental USA, which showed that the land area covered is greater than 95%. There are stations dotted in a fairly regular row and column pattern across the entire country, so their range circles touch each other, and there are only a few corners that aren't covered. Then I realized that the range circles were for detecting cubic miles of rain. I was a lot denser than rain, but tiny in comparison. The meteorological radar stations were sited efficiently, so their ranges only just overlapped. That meant that if their detection range for me was one-tenth of a rainstorm, then their coverage area dropped from nearly 100% to nearly 1%. That was still a worry though, because if they got enough samples they could draw some inferences from my comings and goings. I imagined that the meteorologists didn't routinely share their data with the military. That might change now that there was an angel flying around, and they might even hand over their recordings. I had no idea whether, or for how long, meteorological radar stations stored their old data. That was a worry, but it offered a hope that they didn't keep it long. Maybe occasional radar glimpses of Majestic Countdown's many dozens of flights would've been lost by now. A good piece of information was that meteorological radar looks upward. It's not interested in low-level effects, so flying low was my new altitude-of-choice. Unfortunately, all the comments just above are only about meteorological radar. That and avian radar are mentioned extensively on the internet, but the performance of military radar is hardly mentioned at all so I had to guess about that. If the best publicly available systems could track individual moths, the military ones would obviously be easily capable of tracking me. I hoped it was not a question of capability, but of intent. I guessed that the military hadn't previously been interested in flying flesh (whether birds, moths, bats, or undiscovered angels), but they would be VERY interested now. I made some mental notes: fly as little as possible, fly very low (underwater would be ideal), make many random direction changes, and worry a lot more about the radars on military aircraft. The last point was a particularly serious one. An AWACS plane had so much radar gear on it that surely one of them could be tuned to the right frequencies to track me easily. It could follow me wherever I went, regardless of how much zigzagging I did. It could even be used to provide targeting information to a missile fired from miles away. If I saw an AWACS, I'd have to take extreme measures, either defensive or offensive. Then I thought of something even worse. The Air Force has those very small, high-altitude, unmanned drones. They could mount a suitable radar on one of them and follow me with it, and I wouldn't have a clue. Even with a max-sized sight blob, I wouldn't see one of those little things high above me. There could be one over me now! #7: #14: #7: #1: #12: < Think of those trips we took up to the Cascades for breakfast. We were DAMNED lucky that the meteorological radar stations are well away from the flight path we kept taking.> #30: I did some more reading. There were four bands (arbitrary subdivisions of EM frequencies) that seemed to be the key bands, but to play safe I included the bands on either end, giving me six to worry about: UHF (0.3-1 GHz), L (1-2 GHz), S (2-4 GHz), C (4-8 GHz), X (8-12 GHz) and Ku/K/Ka (12-18/18-27/27-40 GHz) bands. I'd combined the three K-bands because they all seemed to be involved in very short-range surveillance, such as traffic cop speed radars. The long wavelength frequency (L-band) was what was typically used for detecting aircraft under normal conditions. I was confident that our home's radar would use the L-band. The shorter wavelength frequencies were increasingly good at discriminating flesh and small details, but their ranges are shorter because their energy is absorbed and deflected by dust and water in the air. The much longer wavelength UHF radars didn't worry about dust in the air because they can penetrate the ground! That's why they weren't any good at detecting flesh, because their beams passed straight through it! ^ I didn't answer Jonathon's questions from this computer because I didn't want the Government to know I was researching radar. I found a secluded spot and removed my A-man suit. I stole a garbage bag from a house and put the suit in it so I could carry it without people noticing. The A-man suit had been on TV far too much to allow anyone to see even part of it. I was outside a small town. It was dark, I was a young Black man wearing black clothes, and I didn't look to be a safe pick up, so I walked to the main street, found a public phone, and called for a taxi to take me the 250 road miles to Corvallis. It was expensive, but that was the least of my worries. I sat in the back and prepared to experiment on frequency-shifting the input from a sight blob. Frequency-shifting seeming like the obvious solution for how to make radar wavelengths visible to my brain, and it'd be FAR easier to learn how to do it with light that I could see, rather than light that was invisible to me. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve for the first step: I wanted to map one visible spectrum color onto another. There was a very convenient and colorful sticker right in front of me. After having a good look at my target sticker with my eyes, I shut them, looked at the sticker again with a sight blob, then I wished that the light blob sent the picture to me with the yellow parts changed to appear a particular shade of blue that I had in mind. I concentrated hard for a couple of seconds, and then had complete success, the yellow suddenly changing to exactly the blue I'd imagined. I looked around and noticed that there were other shades of yellow still showing as yellow (obviously, or I wouldn't have noticed them), so whatever it was that the light blob had done, it appeared to be precise. Before I experimented any more and possibly screwed up my vision permanently, I thought I should check that I could undo the color change. If I was right, there were three ways to reverse the change. I'd try them all: I canceled the sight blob, opened my eyes, and could see the original yellow. I closed my eyes and created another sight blob. The yellow was yellow. I shifted it to blue again. I ordered the sight blob to map that particular shade of blue back to the original shade of yellow that I remembered. That worked and the sticker looked normal, but now anything that shade of blue would appear yellow. There were no examples in the taxi, but I didn't worry about that now; I just canceled the blob, created a new one, then applied the yellow-to-blue shift again. I undid the change simply by wanting the sight blob to go back to normal, without any frequency shifts. That immediately worked. I repeated the above experiments using the yellow and another color that was in the taxi, so I could better see the effects of what I was doing. The changes worked exactly as they logically should. It was amazing how simple and easy this was. Sight blobs are wonderfully cooperative. For my next experiment, I wanted to try a range of frequencies rather than one specific shade. Now I tried to imagine a range of yellow shades changing to a range of blues. I struggled to picture that until I remembered a long, drawn out picture of the spectrum I'd seen. I imagined the yellow portion on top of the blue portion, ignoring every other color. I spent a few seconds visualizing that all those yellows transformed into the blues beneath them; and so they did! There were a few shades of yellow in the taxi, and they all changed as I'd wanted. I ordered the sight blob to stop doing any shifting and my blob's sight returned to normal. I did some practice between other pairs of color ranges, and different widths of ranges. The only difficult part of the process was to make sure I got my visualizations correct for what I wanted done; the light blobs themselves were totally obedient. #15: I couldn't do any radar work because I didn't have a radar to play with. I was pretty sure I could - and I was certainly hoping I could - tune a sight blob to pick up radar frequencies. I knew I could 'dial' light blobs to emit through the visible spectrum and into the infrared, so I should be able to do that for receiving light too. The trouble was that my 'dial' didn't come equipped with a calibrated digital readout of the frequencies involved. The 'dial' was a mental visualization crutch, rather than a precise, scientific instrument. I sent a sight blob a few hundred feet up in the air above the taxi, and tried to tune it to pick up radar frequencies, imagining that whatever frequency I was 'dialing' through mapped to a particular shade of yellow. To explain that better: I wasn't dialing the input frequency for the whole sight blob. They can see a whole range of frequencies, as is obvious from their giving me color vision. I presume they can detect a much wider range of frequencies than just human-visible light because there's no logical reason for them to have the same constraints as my flesh-and-blood eyeballs, but that flexibility isn't immediately useful to me because my brain can't process information about non-visible frequencies. What I'm attempting to do now, with quite a lot of confidence that it'll work, is keep the sight blob seeing normally, but in addition, any light on a specific dialed-to frequency is to be sent to my brain as if it was light of a particular yellow frequency. Thus when I see that shade of yellow, the source could either be something that is physically yellow, or the dialed-to frequency. I won't be able to tell which type of source it is visually, but should be able to deduce it from the circumstances. I wasn't the least bit worried about the dangerous frequencies: microwave, gamma wave, etc. First, I was dialing my sight blob in the opposite direction from them (radar is beyond infrared, whereas the high energy, dangerous radiation is beyond ultraviolet). Second, I wasn't emitting the radiation, only seeing what was already present. Third, I knew that sight blobs don't send electromagnetic radiation directly into my brain, but only information about what they perceive. The brain obviously can't process the light itself as it doesn't have eyes in the middle of it. As I was dialing through the frequencies, I had many yellow flashes as I picked up 'stuff', but I had no idea what they were. They might be different radio or TV stations, cellphones, or whatever else EM frequencies are used for. Visible light is in the mid-E14 hertz range and radar in the mid-E9 hertz range, so there's plenty of room for all sorts of other transmissions to confuse the issue. I wasn't in a tearing hurry to develop the ability, content to wait until I got home so I could do it properly using the radar dish of the top of our home as a known source. So the only thing I did of note on the way home was get the driver to stop at a public convenience so I could take a piss and also send an email from a nearby computer. I'd addressed the email to all my usual media to make sure my answers were well publicized, but marked it "Attention: Jonathon Winters of ABC News." I gave Majestic Countdown and Archangel Michael names, including Majestic Countdown's usual authentication code. The parts of the message that mattered to my plan were: Jonathon, For most of the questions you have listed on ABC's website, you can decide for yourself. It's your project, and I have faith in you. You can pull a cat out of the hat if you want. Regarding people re-dying from the initial cause. God through me will fix it, as well as everything else that might be wrong with them. Regarding your question about family consents for exhumation. It's not an issue. The resurrectee will appreciate being resurrected, and their opinion will take precedence over their family's in the unlikely event that a highly deserving candidate has a family who refuses consent. Your question implies you're assuming bodies are necessary, which they are not. It's trickier without them, but still possible. Concentrate on the merits of the candidates rather than resurrection practicalities, because God's very capable. The end of the first paragraph was close enough to his suggested authentication code, and everyone else would think the angel had confused the human idiom. I got the taxi to drop me at the wrong suburban address to retain my anonymity, and I walked home. I was greeted by my family laughing about the public's response to the angel's no-body-needed resurrection service. Apparently the public were REALLY amazed by that. Resurrecting a corpse was one thing, but resurrecting without a corpse was apparently much more exciting and impressive. Several 'experts' had been describing how it could be done, what the theological implications were (to listen to them, there were quite a few serious implications to the definition of "self", "life", etc.), what it meant to Jonathon's search, etc. The clergy were pressed for their views, some of whom had an amusing variety of them. My statement that I'd fix whatever else might be wrong with the resurrectee got people excited too. Their getting excited indicated that an increasing number of people were starting to believe that this was real. Mom had already sent the email I'd suggested yesterday to Jonathon (his organization's email address had been well publicized). She'd waited about fifteen minutes after the no-body-needed news broke, then she sent a letter introducing herself as Mark Anderson's mother, and asking if the angel's "no body" comment meant that Mark could be resurrected. No doubt Jonathon's people were buried in emails, but it'd go on file and look good later. It might even be read and my name suggested to Jonathon, which would be nice, although so unlikely we weren't relying on it. Having thirty two minds means I'm really good at multitasking, so while the above conversation was going on, I was also working on my radar detection skills. We have a phased-array radar housed in a flat-topped triangular pyramid on the top of the Adults' House. I didn't know the term "phased array" until a few hours ago when I read about it during my radar research, and recognized that ours was the same as that the article was talking about. I had assumed that our radar housing contained a rotating radar dish because don't all radars have rotating dishes? As it turns out, no they don't. Our radar is new technology and has no moving parts, including not having the rotating dish. Our radar works in all directions continuously. For my immediate purposes, that was a slight nuisance because it'd be easier to be sure I was tuned into the right signal if it went on and off in sync with the dish's rotation, but it wouldn't matter much. What I did was move my sight blob fifty feet away from the radar transmitter. Presuming what I was about to try worked, then I should be able to see a bright source of 'red' light coming from the pyramid when I got to the right frequency. "Red" because I'd decided to map the non-visible light frequencies into shades of red since there's not normally much red in our environment. The sky and water is blue, vegetation is green, and buildings are mostly neutral tones. So red is a distinctive color; an appropriate one too, being - perhaps not coincidentally - the color of danger. There were six bands which I'd used six different shades of red for: UHF, L, S, C, X and my group of the three K-bands. The UHF-band was almost certainly irrelevant because it was used for foreign ICBM launch detection, ground and foliage penetration scans, and the like. I was TOTALLY invisible to those frequencies because those radar beams didn't bounce off me at all, going straight through instead. The L-band didn't worry me directly either, as it also didn't see me [well before we moved into out hilltop home, I checked that I could fly around it without my blip appearing on our radar screen, which is in our Security Center off the car entrance tunnel.] I still wanted to learn how to detect the L-band though. First because it was what I had to work with now, to help me learn to detect the other bands. Second, the military forces use L-band a great deal, so it'd be a wonderful telltale of any of their planes or mobile radar stations are in the area, including those that could be snooping on me out of sight from miles above. The bands beyond L are especially worrying because they get progressively better at tracking flesh, although their range gets progressively shorter, to the extent that the range of the far end of the K-band can be measured in yards rather than miles. With the sight blob looking at our radar transmitter, I imagined the shade of red I would use for the L-band, and keeping that as the output frequency, I started imagining the input frequency for it sliding in the infrared direction. I'd keep it going in that direction until the radar suddenly started shining brightly, which should mean that I'd dialed into the L-band signal I was searching for. The first non-visible frequency I dialed into was infrared. I'd easily learned to emit infrared from light blobs (making them heat blobs), but I'd previously never bothered to try to detect infrared. When I'd been searching for people at night, large sight blobs had done the job so well that I'd never needed to try to see in the infrared, and certainly not in the more esoteric wavelengths - not until now. I quickly found out that seeing infrared was just as easy as emitting it. I already had a feeling for the amount of dialing required to emit infrared, and the same amount was required to see it. I was seeing red now from where there'd been no red a few seconds ago, and it was obviously infrared because it was from our wandering security patrols. They looked similar to the monochrome rendering of infrared vision that you sometimes see on TV. It was nighttime so I wasn't seeing much in the way of the normal visible light, but the infrared sources were VERY easy to see. I gave myself a mental kick for not developing infrared vision earlier. I had spent HOURS patrolling our home looking for lurkers, a task that would've been vastly easier with infrared. With an expanded sight blob, the lurkers' infrared output would've been like a searchlight and got my attention immediately, without my needing to search for it. I confirmed that by expanding my sight blob to its maximum size, and it worked exactly as I'd thought. Our security guards were SHINING! I kicked myself again. I'd had such a useful set of abilities that I'd stopped trying to improve them. I'd merged to escape the CIA just over a year ago, which had obviously improved my abilities, but I hadn't WORKED on improving my abilities for a very long time. There were a few exceptions - mainly the huge effort I'd put into getting two sight sources working and I'd also less consciously learned to respond to the emotional information from my proximity sense - but my self-chastisement was still richly deserved. I should've done more, including what I was doing now. I put my sight blob back to its earlier, small size, then I resumed moving its 'dial' past infrared. The microwave region was pretty boring. There's some of it around, but very little of the interstellar microwave radiation penetrates our atmosphere (I'd done some research on what to expect before I performed this experiment). Things livened up a great deal when I got into the radio region. That's where radio, TV, all sorts of other stuff, AND radar are. Don't for a second think that I could watch TV programs. They're modulated and need post-reception processing before they can be made understandable to a human. And I couldn't listen to radio signals either because I was SEEING the signal, not hearing it. I wasn't interested in detecting radio or TV so I kept dialing ... I stopped to kick myself again - VERY HARD! - because I WAS interested in detecting bugs! #32: #28: #4: #7: #All: We went back to moving our 'dial' for the frequency we wanted to see. It was obvious when we reached the right one, because the radar pyramid on top of our building suddenly started glowing. It wasn't very bright, but still easily bright enough for me to know where the glow was coming from. (L-band radars don't need much power normally, and even less than normal for ours because we're only interested in detecting planes within a few miles.) I was talking to most of my families at the moment, so I asked them to excuse me for a minute. I went to bathroom and shut my eyes so I could use a second sight blob in our Security Center. When I'd researched radars, the articles described that modern radars are very flexible, so I used a sight blob to see how I might 'flex' ours. I quickly found a "Transmission Power" dial. No one was giving the radar screen much attention (it had alarms built into its software so didn't need an attentive operator), so I used NP to dial the power up and down a little, enough to confirm that the sight blob I had up in the air observed a change in the brightness of the light coming from the radar housing. I returned the power to the original setting and then moved to the "Frequency" setting. It had two positions, "A" and "B", which wasn't particularly helpful labeling. Ready to flick it back if our guards reacted, I changed the setting from "A" to "B". There was no reaction from our staff in the room and the radar display didn't change either; remaining empty. There was a change up top though, as that sight blob could no longer see any light coming out of the radar transmitter. I started sliding the blob's detection frequency, looking for whatever frequency the radar was now on. It could've been 'up' or 'down' but I got the direction right the first time, finding it within a few seconds. I fiddled with the transmission power to confirm that. Now I had two different L-band frequencies (I assumed they were; if not, I'd fix my mistake later), I ordered my sight blob to map all input in the frequency range from "A" to "B", and an 'inch' to either side, to the L-band color (by "inch" I was conveying how far I move my imaginary dial. I was talking to my own subconscious, so I was assuming it knew what I was talking about). Normal vision sees multiple frequencies as that's what colors are, so I could easily tell my sight blob to see "A" and "B" at the same time, plus all the frequencies between and slightly outside of them. I turned the radar from "B" back to "A", which didn't change what my top sight blob saw. Good. It'd be extremely unlikely that, "A to B plus an inch to either side" got all of L-band and nothing else, so I'll refine that later, as I get more samples dialed in. I returned from the bathroom to the families, saying, "I need to go for a drive for a few hours for something I'm working on. It'll mostly just be driving around, but anyone's free to come who wants to?" "What's it for?" asked Julia. I engaged the Faraday mode, then told them, "I'm working on seeing radar signals because I'm worried about the military tracking my flights. Modern radars are pretty damned effective, so it'd be a good idea for me to know when they're being used around me. I need to visit some radar locations so I can calibrate my vision accurately." Unsurprisingly, that led to some follow-up questions, starting with, "What do you mean, 'seeing radar'?" "Radar is electromagnetic radiation, just like visible light, but it's in a frequency our eyeballs can't see. I've just finished teaching myself how to see it with the visual technique I use for studying, but I need to calibrate my vision for the various bands that different types of radars use, so I can tell them apart. I want to visit a couple of airports and a meteorological radar station that I've got the address for, plus get the local traffic cops to demonstrate a radar gun for me too, because that's at one end of the range I'm interested in." When they finished shaking their heads, I asked Prof to casually ask our radar guys a few questions (as described below), and to hire his LA debugging company to come to our house with working bugs ostensibly so we could test our house's detection system, but also so I could secretly find out if I could see bug transmissions. I got more head shaking and laughs at that. Then I re-asked if anyone wanted to come with me. My bedmates all thought it sounded interesting, so they enlisted in the trip. I warned them, "It won't be interesting. It'll be driving for an hour or so, followed by a couple of minutes of parking with my eyes shut, and then we'll drive to the next location. Not exactly thrilling stuff." Julia and Carol thought it might be better if they stayed to do schoolwork. Ava was happy to come though. That was good, as I wanted someone to help me with the first visit. ^ [Prof casually asked one of our radar-trained security guys a few questions. "Why didn't Andrews Air Force Base pick up the angel on radar?", "Could our radar do that?", "What frequency does our radar use and why?", etc. Ours used 1.8 and 1.4 GHz ("A" and "B" respectively). "A" was used most of the time because it was better for short-range work, including being better at detecting small aircraft like microlights. "B" was available if we needed to track something at longer ranges. Our radar guys weren't experts on radar. They weren't professional radar technicians, instead being our security guys who'd volunteered to learn how to operate our radar system. The Army had spent some time giving them a very abbreviated training course, specializing in our specific setup and nothing else, so the guy Prof talked to didn't add anything very useful. He did say that if our rig pumped out a great deal more power - which would need its power supply to be upgraded - it might be able to detect the angel. I was already planning to keep an eye open for L-band radars, so if I saw an extraordinarily bright one I'd take whatever measures seemed appropriate at the time, most likely flying directly away. The LA debugging company only needed to send one guy with a suitcase of samples since we weren't going to be using any of their detection gear, so he came the next day. The good news was that our house easily detected the bugs, and the further good news was that I could easily pick up the transmissions too. They were in or near the VHF-band, but the exact frequency didn't much matter. Even the fancy bugs that frequency-hopped didn't matter. What made it easy for me was that they didn't use dishes to focus their transmission path - they were tiny so obviously couldn't have dishes - so their transmissions were in every direction. I could see a red light shining from behind a painting, for example, where a light had no business coming from. I could even see it from two or three rooms away as bugs have to use frequencies and power that enable their transmissions to penetrate walls. I wasn't able to detect bugs that were in standby mode, or the tape recorder type of bugs (they usually use computer memory chips rather than a physical tape, but you know what I mean). I wasn't worried about either of those shortfalls in my ability because our house still detected them - it's a GREAT house! - and I detected the bugs that woke up out of standby mode. The tape recorder bugs required repeated visits to service them and they provided out-of-date recordings so would presumably be an unattractive choice for any bugger. Bugs weren't an issue for my flying around, only when I was inside the house, and there was virtually zero risk there. Our cars could be easily bugged, but our security staff had a set of sensors mounted around one parking spot in the tunnel (a version of what was mounted in our home's walls). Each of our cars was rotated through that check regularly to help ensure they were clean. We were careful what we said in cars anyway. I was VERY happy at our home's and my capabilities.] ------- Chapter 340: Radio Blobs Tuesday, April 17, 2007 (Continued) Ava's and my first stop was at the local cop station, where Ava asked for a demonstration of a speed radar. I was sitting in my car parked where the cops wouldn't see me. Ava would never be suspected of being the angel - her bumps being in the wrong places - but I could, so I was avoiding being seen doing ANYTHING unusual. The cops thought Ava's request was strange, but there wasn't much they wouldn't do for anyone in our families. Walking outside their front door and showing a pretty multimillionaire how a radar gun worked wasn't one of them. Radar guns use the K-band. Above the K-band is the Ka-band (the "a" is for "above", radar being a masculine science), which is used for very short-range work, such as triggering a camera to photograph the license plate of cars that jump a red lights. I was probably being excessive, but I wanted to include the Ka-band in my detection range, but we don't have any such radars in Corvallis. The radar gun's K-band was the closest I could find for now. I'll look for a Ku-band transmitter later (if you're a guy, you'll have no trouble guessing what the "u" stands for. If you are a guy and you do have trouble guessing, stop spending so much time with females; it's making it harder for you to UNDERstand simplicity). During Ava's demonstration, I was easily able to dial my sight blob into the radar gun's frequency. Once I had it, I ordered my mind to detect frequencies ranging from an 'inch' above that frequency through to an inch below "B" on our L-band radar at home. That wouldn't include the UHF-band (it's on the other side of the L-band), but I was only casually interested in that since it had no chance of detecting the angel and UHF-radar wasn't used by movable military units. I'd find a UHF transmitter one day soon - probably by calling around the local radio and TV stations - but it didn't matter for now. I ordered that the top half of the newly determined range be mapped to the shade of red I was going to use for the K-band group, and the bottom half mapped to the color I'd be using for the L-band. I tapped Ava on the shoulder when I'd gotten all the calibration I needed. She gave the cop a kiss on the cheek (she was probably taking out a little insurance because she likes to drive fast), then she headed back to me. #14: #12: [I'll carry on describing the radar calibration I was doing now, but I also allocated a few more colors for different communication bands, especially to distinguish those used by law enforcement and military communications. It was easy to do, as those bands are clearly documented online and I was tending to see a lot of law enforcement and military people these days.] After the cops, I drove us to Corvallis's airport, parking near it and doing various calibrations. It's a small airport - there's no control tower, for example - so I was surprised by how many radio sources there were around the place. ^ Now would be a good time to describe what seeing radio frequencies is like. For the sake of clarity, I'll cheat a little, describing aspects that became evident only after my sight was better calibrated. Let me start by reminding you that I can't decipher ANY meaning from these transmissions. Apart from anything else, these radio waves had frequencies of millions or billions of cycles per second, and there's NO WAY my brain can see light flickering that fast. A few dozen cycles per second is all it takes for our brains to believe the light is continuous (our eyes and brains work chemically, which can't come close to performing millions of operations per second). And even if I could detect the radio pulses, there are all sorts of protocols, encryptions, unsymmetrical distortions (FM broadcasts have their highest frequency components transmitted with greater power than their lower frequencies, for example), and probably a dozen other problems I don't know about. All I see is a single color of light. There are three types of sources: Focused transmissions, such as the radar gun. I have to position a sight blob in front of the transmitters to see if they are operating. Omni-directional transmissions. Most transmissions are undirected, expanding in a sphere. Reflections. Whatever the original source, frequencies bounced off various things (VHF-band radiation penetrates wood easily, while K-band bounces off wood like it's polished steel). To discuss the third point first. The highly 'bouncy' frequencies are all around me, giving the world a red tinge in the visual processing center I'm using with the "Radio Blob" ("Radio Blob" rather than "Radar Blob", as I've enlarged its job description). Unless I'm near a source, there is much less of the bouncy frequency light than you might expect because such frequencies dissipate and are absorbed quickly. The 'un-bouncy' frequencies only bounced off very solid objects, primarily metal, so metal often has a red sheen, with the shade of red I have allocated to these frequencies. If I'm looking in a direction where there isn't any metal, then I usually don't see any of that shade of red. The important thing about reflections is how weak they are. Unless the source is nearby or particularly strong, the reflections are so dim they're ignorable. It's like wearing glasses with very slightly colored lenses, Focused transmissions are obvious. It's like having a flashlight or a searchlight shining at me - depending on how much power they're putting out - so it's hard not to notice. There are very few focused transmitters, and it's even less likely that my radio blob would be in the beam of one. Omni-directional transmissions are by far the most common. They include such things as cellphone signals to and from the phones, TV and radio broadcasts, some computer frequencies (e.g., wifi, bluetooth), GPS from several satellites, and many others. Strictly speaking, satellite signals aren't omni-directional as they're beamed at just the Earth, but they spread so wide that they seem omni-directional most of the time. There were confusingly many red color sources after I'd expanded the range just after the radar gun's demonstration, as that had widened my mapped frequency range enough to include MANY in-use frequencies, but that only affected those minds that wanted to pay attention to the visual processing center that the radio blob was using. The mind that was driving the car was using the visual center my real eyes were sending information to. In other words, I wasn't overwhelmed because I could isolate the radio blob's activities and interpretations from everything else I was doing, removing all the pressure and giving me time to get used to it. It would've been impossible for me to untangle all those frequencies, except that I could often see the sources. When someone's cellphone started glowing red, I knew it was transmitting. Or I could send the sight blob up into the air until the source shone bright red, then send the blob to find out what that was (e.g., someone with a ham radio in their attic). Many of the sources were identifiable and then ignorable. Some were so invariably constant (such as TV stations and geosynchronous satellites) that I considered ordering my radio blob not to map those exact frequencies into my visual range, but I decided to leave them active. They were easily ignored and one of those frequencies might be important when I was somewhere other than Corvallis. Once I had several sources identified in the easy ways, I could slide my dial between known sources to estimate the frequency of the mystery ones. Then some googling usually supplied the explanation of what that segment of band was allocated for. Sometimes google would hit on the exact frequency, so I could read about the specific cause, such as a local radio station that transmitted its program on that frequency. I didn't really need to identify sources around Corvallis - especially in frequency ranges which were obviously not radars or bugs in my home - but it was an exercise worth doing as it taught me a great deal about who and what emit transmissions of various types. That information could be useful one day, and it was interesting in its own right. I ended up with several additional color assignments - from red through orange and into yellow - to differentiate the sources that I wanted to know about. I also added blinking to the important ones, to make sure they got my attention (subconsciouses are wonderful for taking care of thousands of tiny details). ^ Ava and I drove north to Portland's airport, which is far larger than our local one. Soon after we started heading north, I remembered that my body uses energy differently than other people's, and wondered whether I'd appear differently in infrared. I created an appropriately tuned sight blob and used it to look at Ava and myself. To my surprise, from the neck down Ava's and my bodies radiated heat very similarly. [[My torso radiated as much as anyone else, as my deep subconscious minds were already creating heat internally to regulate my body's temperature. That adjustment had been made very soon after my latest merges. They had reduced the amount of food my body burned for fuel, which had also lowered my body temperature, which was a bad thing because there are an amazing number of mammalian biochemical reactions which start failing if bodies get outside of a very narrow temperature range. Because of their heat sensitivity, mammal bodies contain many mechanisms to regulate heat, and subconsciouses are aware of the issue. My subconsciouses automatically responded, but not so much in my head or limbs because they're less dependent on remaining in a narrow temperature range.]] It was our heads that looked particularly different; Ava's radiating more heat than mine (a disproportionately large proportion of normal humans' heat radiation comes out of heads, but not mine). That the difference was noticeable was a worry because it meant that ever since I'd started getting a significant proportion of my energy needs from the Universe, I would've looked suspiciously unusual to any infrared camera. Even worse, Ron Fisher and Archangel Michael's host were the only two humans on the planet whose heads would radiate such little heat (the angel's costume wasn't insulative, so that didn't provide an excuse). If someone spotted that coincidence, I could be in hot water. It'd be VERY hot water if, when he arrives, the new Mark Anderson ("Mark2") was spotted having the same 'uniquely' cool head. I obviously had to park a heat blob inside my head and have it radiate enough heat that my head looked the same as other people's. The question was which of my three heads do I do that to: Ron's, Archangel Michael's and/or Mark2's? Certainly Ron's because he has to appear boringly normal, but who else's? When I'm flying around at night I don't want to be radiating more heat because that would make me easier to locate and track, so I wouldn't use such a heat blob when I'm being covert, but what about when I'm being overt as the angel? I didn't want the angel to appear similar to Mark2 because that'd make people suspect they were the same. That meant either Mark2 had to use a heat blob for the rest of his life, or Archangel Michael did. Given that Archangel Michael wasn't going to be around for long, that was the easiest choice to make. Mark2 was going to be known as having an usual body chemistry, so that would be the excuse for his being coolheaded. I spent most of the rest of the trip finding the correct setting for my head's internal heat blob. I set it for a low temperature, then kept an infrared eye on my head, watching it slowly increase in temperature as the heat penetrated it. After several minutes, when it had stopped getting hotter - the input from the heat blob being equaled by the head's extra heat radiation - I compared my head to Ava's, saw it wasn't hot enough yet, so cranked up the heat blob a smidgen. It took quite a while for my head to reach thermal equilibrium after each adjustment, but we were on a long drive so it didn't matter. I eventually arrived at the right setting. [When I returned home, I compared my head to those of the rest of my families - in case Ava's was unusual for some reason - but they were close enough to being equally radiative, depending on how much hair they had. I thereafter centrally heated my head whenever I was Ron or in public as Archangel Michael. In my subsequent déjà vu's, I made sure the other Marks were aware of the need to manage our body temperature better.] [Within a few days, my considerable concern about having the Government or military connect my various personae through our heat differences having been noted by my subconsciouses, they responded by regulating my entire body's temperature more carefully. I was still using infrared sensing sight blobs to check my heat output and noticed that having a heat blob in my head was making it too warm, so I dialed the blob down. Then dialed it down further. Then canceled it.] ^ I'll abbreviate the description of the rest of my calibration trip. Portland airport gave me several calibration opportunities, with radars being the most important. I got more samples, but had the same overall experience as at Corvallis. The last thing I did before leaving that airport was to raise my body into their air traffic control beam while I was close enough to see their radar display. As I expected, I didn't appear because they were using a band that penetrated flesh too well. That was a little freaky to think about, but wonderful news. The sky is FULL of radar signals in that band. If they can't detect me at a range of four hundred feet, then I can fly around at high altitudes again. While in Portland, I did some communications radio calibrating around the FBI and DHS offices, as well as confirming that Portland police used the same frequencies as the Corvallis cops. After that we drove east to the nearest meteorological radar that I'd identified from the US coverage map. These were the transmitters that worried me the most, other than the worry I had about the generic "Military Radars". I snooped the met' radar carefully, seeing that, like our radar at home, it had two settings. I got the frequency values from their instrumentation, adjusted my radio blob into the frequency the station was currently transmitting, then twitched their dial so I could dial-in the other frequency. That caused the operator to leap to his feet to fix it, and it no doubt puzzled him, but it didn't seem like much of a risk to me. I got both of their frequencies pegged. The water-sensing radars have to use a frequency that bounces off non-solid objects, which makes them bounce off flesh too (flesh being mostly water), so getting these radars pegged was very important. I didn't bother to give a specific color to the met' radar's output. ANY radars from the C-, X- and K-bands worry me greatly because they can detect flesh, so I'll be steering a path around all of those. S-band radars can theoretically pick up flesh, but only just. S-band's normal use is for air traffic control and long-range weather radar; long-range because its beam penetrates well, including through me. An S-band radar that REALLY pumps out the power might get a usable return from me so I'll be careful of them when they're very bright (within in a few days I should have every band color mapped accurately, so I'll know what I'm dealing with when I'm flying around). The next band beyond S was L, which couldn't see me, but a moving L-band transmitter would be a nice giveaway of a radiating aircraft. Meteorological radar stations were too far apart for Ava and me to drive to another one tonight, but how good my radio blob was at seeing radar had given me an idea for an experiment I wanted to do which required our going home and then coming back to this station. One of the VERY nice things about radars is that their signals attenuate in both directions: from the transmitter to me, and from me back to the receiver. By an inverse square law too, so the rate of attenuation is substantial. Because the signal is stronger at me than at the receiver, I might be able to detect it better than it can detect me, depending on the relative sensitivity of their receiver versus my blob. That's what I wanted to find out. If a max-size radio blob was as sensitive as I hoped it was, I'll be able to fly along seeing transmitters before they can see me, and then diverting around them. I'll be able to wend my way to my destination. I might fly into some boxed-in areas and have to backtrack to go around them, if I can't get through by flying low enough, but I'll soon learn some suitable corridors for flying across the country. Ava was happy to keep being helpful, so we drove home, collected the equipment we needed - a video camera tied to a broom handle, a pair of binoculars, our cellphones, and complete body and face coverings for both of us - then I very carefully flew us back to the meteorological site. Such radars aren't high security and it was in a usefully remote area, so this would be easy. We flew toward the station from an uninhabited direction and at ground level. We were moving quickly, but only a few feet above the ground. We ran the last few yards, apart from the 'jump' over the fence. Ava positioned herself under the right window, turned the camera on, zoomed it in as far as it went, and raised the stick it was mounted on. The camera's LCD screen was facing down, so when the camera was high enough to see through the window, Ava could aim it at the radar display. Using binoculars, Ava could see the LCD screen clearly, letting her observe the radar image. Confirming that arrangement worked, she lowered the stick until I was ready. I left her, rushing to get into my position as quickly as possible to minimize her exposure. The meteorological radars are sited roughly 150 to 180 miles apart, and their rain detection coverage areas barely overlap. Let's err on the high side and say they have a 90-mile range. I'm denser than rain, but a great deal smaller than the cubic miles rain occupies, so their range for detecting me should be considerably less than 90 miles. I flew away at low-level to be about 40 miles away. I landed and called Ava (her phone was on vibrate), telling her, "I'm ready. Raise the stick. I'm at about 200 degrees. Look about where 7 o'clock is, but halfway back to the center because that's how far away I am. Okay?" "Yeah. I understand. Okay, the stick's up and I can see fine." "I'm doing my thing now. Let me know if something appears." Our language was a bit vague just in case our calls were been recorded. We had no particular suspicion, but maybe the Government are liars and are recording everyone's cellphone calls. I floated three hundred feet up in the air facing toward the station in an upright posture to maximize my radar echo back to it. That was also why I was happy to be carrying my cellphone: I wanted to know how easy I was to detect in a reasonably likely worst-case scenario. Three hundred feet was almost certainly higher than I needed to go because the beam's intensity had seemed constant since I'd got above one hundred feet, but I wanted to maximize its chance of detecting me. As that says, I could see the station's radar beam. I could see it VERY easily with the max-sized radio blob I had going. I nearly always fly with a max-sized sight blob because I fly at night, so I wanted to get a feel for the radio input with the same-sized blob. ^ I've simplified the previous paragraph a little. In the pursuit of accuracy I should explain that weather radars actually aim upward at a certain angle, scan around themselves, raise the angle, scan again, etc., until they've scanned the highest angle they want, then they restart the cycle. Scanning in a narrow band concentrates the power of the output, giving them a better image. The angles are low, starting from 0 degrees (horizontal) and rising to about 5 degrees in roughly 1-degree increments. I only noticed because the changes in angle were so abrupt that one minute I'd be in a strong beam, and the next minute it'd be passing entirely over my head. I had to choose the right times to conduct each of my experiment's little tests, but it was easy to allow for. I'll ignore this complication in the following description. In case you think of it, flying high would very likely keep me safe from met' radars because they don't point upward enough, but I still need to take off and land, and I often have reasons to prefer flying at low altitudes, so I needed to learn this stuff. By the way, my terminology is unfortunately somewhat misleading. It shouldn't make you think that radio, sight and light blobs are independent and distinct from each other. Radio blobs can not only function as sight blobs, they probably always will, because there's no benefit in cutting off the visible spectrum. Sight blobs can also function as light blobs, just by getting them to emit. It's close enough to say that functionally speaking, "Radio blobs > sight blobs > light blobs," with the complication that radio and sight blobs might not be radiating any light. Sorry about the confusion, but I'm giving you the terminology that I use and I always know what I mean by the terms. If you can manage my use of "Nipple Power" you should be able to adapt to "Radio Blob". ^ Ava said, "I don't think I can see you yet." "I'll go down and up a few times to make sure." I bobbed up and down four times. The down direction had to take me back to the ground. I was doing this behind a small rise so I was in the shadow of the beam when on the ground. There was still a very small amount of it hitting me, but only from atmospheric scatter and it was far too weak to matter. Ava repeated, "I can't see anything." "Okay, I'll try the second idea. Keep watching." That was for me to stay high and fly closer (I didn't want to say that over my phone!). I should appear eventually. I flew reasonably quickly toward the station, about the speed of a car so my open cellphone call wouldn't register as noteworthy. I wasn't worried about letting the radar get a return off me because it wouldn't last long and they wouldn't learn anything useful from it. Not even that the angel had appeared momentarily, as there had to be many more likely explanations for a momentary blip. The beam slowly got brighter, and three minutes later, when I was about 20 miles from the station, Ava said, "Now! I think I can see you." "I'll bob again. Let me know exactly when you lose and gain me." "Okay. This is exciting." #4: The plan for that is for her to tell me if someone spots her, and I'll swoop in at full speed and pick her up. It'd only take a few seconds and leave the person who briefly caught her with a great story. I didn't want it to happen, but it was worth the risk because I needed to confirm my hypothesis about radar detection ranges versus my radio blob's sensitivity. I had to get down to about 40 feet AGL before Ava said I'd disappeared from the screen, which was disappointingly lower than I'd hoped before we'd started this experiment. I'd been hoping for something like 100 feet, but never mind. I could fly nape of the earth if I needed to, although it'd be slower and a nuisance. It shouldn't need to fly under one of these things very often, probably only when there was one near my destination. I popped up again, and Ava confirmed I was back on screen. "Thanks. I'll come get you now. You can lower the stick." It took me a couple of minutes to get there at a cautious approach speed. Collecting Ava took no time at all, and then we were on our way home. I was extremely happy with the three results from this experiment. From least to most wonderful: The 40-foot "under the radar" safe height, the 20-mile detection range, and my radio blob's ability to see the radar beams LONG before the radar station could detect me. The 40-foot safety height would depend on the ground's contour and would reduce as I got closer to the station, but I could fly at FOUR feet AGL if I wanted to. Having a few dozen feet to work with meant I could fly fairly rapidly so it wouldn't take long to get far enough away that I could raise my altitude and speed. The radar picking me up at a range of 20 miles was great. Radar detection ranges are linearly proportional to the target's cross-sectional area. By lying flat when I fly, like I usually do, my side area would reduce by a factor of approximately 2.5, giving a detection range of about 8 miles. If I needed to, I could even point my body directly at the station, reducing my area by a factor of at least 5, giving a detection range of less than 4 miles. Comparing the excessively conservative 20-mile detection range (which assumes I'm standing upright, facing the station and carrying a cellphone), with the 95% land area coverage with a 90-mile rain-detection range, then the angel-detection coverage area is (20/90)^2 x 95% = 4.7%. So for angels the country is 95% NOT covered! I can't quite ignore the problem, but going around the meteorological stations is going to be very easy. As I nearly always fly lying on my sled, the 8-mile detection radius will nearly always apply, making the coverage area (8/90)^2 x 95% = 0.75%. I could probably find a straight-line course to DC! I'll stick to my safe, 20-mile assumption, because that still leaves me able to fly almost unconstrained. Sub-1% coverage is probably the reality of the process though, which might explain why no one seems to have reacted to all my Majestic Countdown and other flights. There are radars that aren't part of the National Weather Service, but that organization has the largest network of meteorological radars. With theirs and everyone else's combined, I still won't have any problem avoiding them while still getting to my destinations easily. I didn't know how many radars the military had, but other than meteorological and the bird radars installed at airbases, I can't think of any reason why they'd have angel-detecting radars in operation. Whatever radars are in use, I'll easily detect them in time to evade them. That's the best and most wonderful result of the experiment: my max-sized radio blob detected the radar emissions FAR better than the radar station's receiver could pick up my return signal, giving me warning tens of miles before I'd be within their detection range. I need to be a little cautious about that, because the different radar bands have different operational parameters. If I flew right into the middle of a short-range Ku-band radar at top speed, I MIGHT have trouble braking and diverting in time. I don't think I would, but I might (I don't know where one is to test myself against). It's extremely unlikely I'll encounter one though, as their range is so limited, probably well under a mile for detecting me. Even if I was picked up once or twice, it wouldn't provide the authorities with enough information to statistically analyze my likely base of operations. The other possible risk was a radar station that was turned on when I was already within range, but once again, this was so unlikely that at worst it might only happen once or twice. Unless the military installs at least a thousand flesh-sensing radars across the country, my ability to fly around isn't going to be particularly constrained. I won't even need to fly low to take advantage of ground clutter (flying behind ridges, for example), as I understand the physics well enough to be confident that I'll see a detection threat from any of the radar bands in plenty of time. Another wonderful consequence of my being able to see radar emissions from such long distances is that I can now fly into clouds or rain and avoid becoming disoriented by using radar sources to keep my bearings, especially the longer wavelength radars like those of air traffic control because they cover the country so well and go straight through rain. I'll be able to fly straighter lines than before because I'll no longer need to divert around poor weather. I will need to curve somewhat to avoid getting too close to flesh-sensing radars, but weather is a far more common problem, so my travel times will improve. I'll also no longer have to worry about my departure or arrival locations being obscured. That had several times caused Majestic Countdown to divert to another city to do his leak research. I made a mental note to make sure that all the other Mark Andersons I déjà vu from now on are aware of the wonderful, new radio blobs. Now that I can avoid ground-based radars so safely and easily, it's only air-based radars or air-based visual observation that worry me much. Air-based radars would be a nuisance as I'd have to get rid of them before I could go home. Air-based visual (including infrared) observation is scary as I'd have no way of knowing it was being done. The various techniques I'd used on my flight across Canada would be my best defense against those. #16: #23: #16: #23: #8: #29: #28: #14: #All: #18: #23: #11: On the way home, Ava lustfully announced, "Spying on that radar was exciting. Let's celebrate when we get home." I'd successfully sneaked into Andrews AFB to destroy the presidential planes, and into the largest naval base in the world to get access to a nuclear powered aircraft carrier's reactor, so looking in the window of an unguarded meteorological radar station was quite dull. I enthusiastically agreed with Ava's lusty request. #13: I was pretty happy too. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and physics, I knew for certain the range of frequencies that radar stations could use to detect flying flesh. There was no way any radar outside that range could detect me. Beyond one end of it radar ranges were measured in yards; beyond the other end, the EM beams went straight through flesh as if it wasn't there. And thanks to the wonders of radio blobs, I was seeing that entire range - actually more, as I'd added some communication bands - and my radio blobs would provide me with ample warning of the need to divert around a radar station. Other than kicking myself for not doing it sooner, especially considering how easy getting radio blobs going had been, I was very happy. Ava's being excited was another source of happiness. I made a mental note to take her on more of my exciting secret spy missions. When Ava and I got home from our spying trip, Julia suggested that she help me give credence to the cover story I was using with my gardeners. In other words, Julia wanted me to move furniture around. I carefully weighed up the two choices, and after the required amount of thought, I let Julia know that I thought Ava's need for celebration came first. Julia agreed, and it turned out that Ava's celebration also came second, third and fourth. ------- I'll take the time to make some background comments to catch you up with everyone in my families. First about Ava, seeing as I'd just spent several hours talking to her. It's been eight months since Katie and Carson had died, and Ava has long since gotten through the grief processes. She accepts their deaths now, and functions normally apart from rare attacks of grief, such as on her parent's wedding anniversary or birthdays, or sometimes just out of the blue. I can sympathize with that, since the minds you know as 3B often had the same emotions after the Casino Kidnappers' disaster. Ava doesn't have a job yet, or even have her sights set on one. She likes the idea of being a Park Ranger but doesn't want to leave home, which pretty much kills the Park Ranger career path. The west end of our property is being converted into a one-hundred acre, privately owned, micro-National Park, which I'd noticed Ava's interest in so I'd roped her into helping me. She's in charge of our micro-park's fauna (animal life), which necessarily overlaps with my work on the landscaping and flora because she needs to ensure a viable food chain, the base of which is vegetation of various types. She has quite a lot of research to do, is enjoying visiting other similar projects, is auditing some relevant OSU courses, etc. That's as close as Ava has to a job. For her non-job activities, she's still in the running club, is clocking up some flying hours in the little Cessna I'd bought for our flight training, and we'd both done about two dozen skydiving jumps. We're not into that last sport much, as flying around on a Magic Sled blows skydiving out of the water (although skydivers try to avoid being blown into water in the first place). She's also taken up Karate with Donna, partly to have something to do, and maybe in case another dangerous thing happens around me. Ava won't have to work a day in her life if she doesn't want to, especially because her money is increasing faster than she's spending it, but people need a direction in their lives. That's an expression I'd heard adults say from time to time and never really understood at the time, but I SURE do now that I'm Ron Fisher! Once I'd escaped from the CIA, getting back into my families' lives had been my sole goal. Having achieved that, I'm very aware of what it's like to have no direction in life. It's very dissatisfying, so Ava will probably start moving her life forward soon. I've noticed that the parents are taking an active interest in Ava's studies at OSU, so I won't be surprised if she's encouraged into enrolling for a full-time degree next year. One thing I'd done is working out quite well for Ava [I'm looking ahead here, as this is the best place to mention how Ava's new hobby developed]. I'd created lots of different types of photographic blinds in our natural area, and they turned out to be quite successful, especially as 'our' animals lost some of their fear of humans. We introduced a few unusual species in our area too. Nothing very rare, but our ability to keep predators out meant we could introduce flora and fauna that people didn't often see in the wild. Photographers started using our area more and more, and they often talked to Ava as her being the boss of that area's fauna meant she was in charge of managing the photographic blinds for it. She acquired an interest in wildlife photography herself, and many of the photographers were only too happy to help her learn, so she got a lot of encouragement. She got good at it, and even got some of her photos published. She had the advantages of 24/7 access to her own micro-wildlife area, willing help from dozens of knowledgeable people (some were highly skilled, professional wildlife photographers), and she could afford to buy as much photographic equipment as she could ever imagine using (and did buy it, taking over a sizeable area of one of our underground storage rooms). Ava's photography went well mostly because she applies herself to things that are important to her. The examples you'll know about are that she's been a dedicated runner for many years, she'd diligently used her sick parents' system to find a "good boy", and once she'd understood how she'd fit in with Julia and me, she'd been very careful about getting that right. Because of her advantages and attitude, her photography progressed in leaps and bounds, although she was smart enough to hold still when pressing the button. She became particularly good at "telling a story": having several shots - Ava prefers still photography - spread over time to convey an aspect of the subject's life, a clichéd example being from a bird's laying eggs through to those chicks' first flights. She started taking more courses at OSU out of her desire to better understand and document the wildlife in 'her' park. Most importantly, Ava is happy. She's always been an outgoing girl, so she'd been reasonably popular in her running club and its social circle before she became a multimillionaire, and she's considerably more popular now, such is one effect of being rich. It's relatively easy to spot slimy assholes of either gender, but the majority of people who're friendly to you when you're rich just seem like nice people. Suddenly there are dozens or hundreds of nice people around you, and it does make your life more enjoyable. There's probably ammunition in there for several derogatory comments about the human psyche, but that's the way it works. Many of Ava's female and male ex-classmates kept in good contact with her, invited her to outings, shopping trips (if female), parties, etc. It's not hard for her to be happy most of the time. From time to time some guy will try to convince her that she can be even happier if she dates him, but she's not interested. She laughs with guys at parties, and even flirts with them in public, but she's not interested in one-on-one dates with any guy except me. I wouldn't object if she wanted to - although I'd feel some concern that the guy was good enough for her and honestly interested in her rather than her money - but it's a moot point as she doesn't date. I'm pretty sure not because of any silly reasons like wanting to prove her loyalty to me. She's simply very happy with the status quo of being with me, Julia and Carol. Dating guys would mean less time to spend with us, which Ava enjoys more than she would a date with a comparative stranger. ^ Julia's final year of school is a couple of months away from finishing. She's doing well. I'm not at school to distract her, although furnishing and decorating the hilltop home was a major distraction for far too long. Having so much money in her bank account means Julia has to go on a lot of shopping trips. She has an image to maintain now, and that's very important (I suspect Julia's thinking image is so important is because she wants to be taken seriously but is so small she's too easily dismissed). Julia is going to start a Business degree at OSU next academic year, unless my life takes us elsewhere, in which case she'll follow me - To The Ends Of The Earth if necessary, because her devotion hasn't slackened at all. Julia has less to teach me, and less opportunity to do so, but she's still just as fixated on my 'importance'. I think she's blowing my importance out of proportion. Sure I can play some tricks on the public and politicians, and perhaps even force some significant changes to be made, but they're still tricks. I mentioned that to Julia once, and she hadn't hesitated to express her disagreement with a "{Raspberry}," and then told me off. My problem is that ALL of my life is a trick now. It's unsatisfactory and unsatisfying. I live from day to day. That's exaggerating somewhat, but the longest-term plan I've had since Ron settled in, is only about three weeks duration, and that's the Angel Plan to get Mark back again. Otherwise Ron doesn't have any even medium-term ambitions. ^ Carol's life, on the other hand, is going GREAT. She's changed more than the rest of us put together. Internally I mean, as my exterior has changed a lot more than hers; thank God, because I don't want hers to change at all. The two-year anniversary of my first date with Julia was just two weeks ago. In those two years, Carol has BLOSSOMED even more than I'd expected from my experiences in 3B-land. Julia, Ava and Carol have a solid group. Just Julia and Carol at school this year, but the three of them are often together outside of school. That is exposing Carol to the company of many older girls. With Julia's support, Carol has gained confidence from being part of those social groups, especially because Julia has made damned sure that the other girls treat Carol VERY well. That started way back when I was in the Seattle Hospital, when I first asked Julia to help build Carol's confidence. Carol has also seen how commanding Julia is, and has learned to do the same herself sometimes. Having groups of girls do as she wants has given Carol even more confidence. To a significant degree during the first year, Carol learned to stop treating older girls as if they were on a pedestal. Julia had gotten Carol and Ava involved in so many manipulative schemes, which so many other girls fell for - or willingly leaped into - that Carol realized that she was smarter and more sensible than most other girls. Once her confidence started building, it easily sustained its own growth. In her own grade (10th this academic year), Carol has a very prominent position. She doesn't compete on the 10th grade status ladder, except by out-dressing the other girls, but that's Julia's evil influence. Nor does Carol play any of the usual boyfriend-girlfriend games, including not the status game with other girls of "My Boyfriend Is More Important Than Your Boyfriend", as Carol is firmly the first and main girlfriend of Ron Fisher, leaving the wannabe Queens of 10th grade unable to get much response from her. The Queens-In-Training can put on all their airs and graces, and Carol simply ignores them. Carol saw the school's top Queen Bitches manipulated into proving themselves to be shallow, inconsequential nobodies by my Target Girls sex game, so she knows the 10th grade's wannabe Queens are of no consequence. Not only do the mini-Queens have no leverage over Carol, but Carol has considerable leverage over them. Any 10th grade guy, and almost certainly any 11th and 12th grade guy too, would come running if Carol gave him half an indication. Not that she ever would, but the Queens understand that she could, so they don't dare play "My Boyfriend Is Higher Status Than Your Boyfriend" games with Carol. But even more seriously, Carol controls something WAY more important than guys; she controls - (with hushed, reverential tones) - FASHION! Carol often goes on shopping trips that the other girls can only dream about. Carol returns with the BEST clothes from the BEST stores, from the VERY BEST designers. I don't know how Julia does it, but Julia - with a body as different from Carol's as a girl can get - knows how to dress Carol in clothes that make her look incredible, in a VERY high-quality, semi-conservative way. Except for once every couple of months, when Carol feels like shaking things up. Occasionally Carol will turn up to a social event in something SCANDALOUSLY sexy. Usually with me accompanying her, but sometimes with some other combination of her three bedmates. For example, she once went braless under a very light green, almost invisibly wispy transparent top. The rest of her attire was flawlessly matched, from perfect makeup and earrings, down to four-digit price-tag shoes (which I'm sure only exactly half the attendees ever looked at). 98% of the time Carol dresses with class and style, appropriate to a very wealthy 15-year old, but 2% of the time she walks around graphically displayed, outwardly acting as if she is dressed normally and inwardly loving it. Carol particularly enjoys displaying herself to her 10th grade classmates because they're so reluctant to react. The guys REALLY want to get into Carol's good graces (well, not actually into her "graces", but you know what I mean). Most of them try very hard to look her in the eye occasionally, and otherwise be as pleasant as they can, but some of them can't resist making fools of themselves. I have no trouble fixing any problems that result from their lack of control, and if I'm not attending, then either the my other girls fix it, or one of them presses the button we all carry and the security guards stationed outside the front and back doors of the party rush in to fix the problem. As the previous sentence implies, we take guards with us to some events. The other kids have learned to like it for when they throw parties, because it provides the best of both worlds. Their parents approve, thinking the kids will have adult supervision; and the kids approve as the guards stay outside and turn a blind eye to everything unless one of us gets them to act, which we rarely do. Carol's female classmates are especially unable to act, because Carol has a superb weapon hanging over them. From time to time Carol invites some of her friends to go on shopping trips with Julia's and Ava's friends. Sometimes just to LA, sometimes to distant New York, and occasionally to EUROPE! {Gasp!} No girl is going to complain even if every boy at a party spends all night imitating a deer caught by Carol's utterly gorgeous headlights. Carol has matured wonderfully - other than the above behavior, which is perhaps not mature but is certainly wonderful. She's confident and knows she has reason to be. She's at least a full partner in our three-way marriage; is trusted with all my deadly secrets (as much as I can trust anyone); and she spends most of her time with Julia and her friends, all of whom accept her, if not look up to her. Plus she has four parents keeping an eye on her, so she's being brought up with plenty of attention and love. ^ Donna is getting even more parental attention because she's living in the Adults' House, both at Peoria Road and our new hilltop home. She seems to have no interest in maturing emotionally, preferring to hang onto childhood as long as possible. The parents sometimes shake their heads and question how a 14-year old in a double-household of mature people can resist learning how to be mature for so long. She doesn't do anything terribly bad, just the usual young teenager stuff like getting caught smoking and trying to lie about it. With there being four parents looking over her shoulder, and smelling her breath, Donna should've known better. Donna is too decisive and direct for her own good sometimes - those times when her decision isn't one the parents approve of - and then she's usually too stubborn to let it go until the conflict becomes much greater than it needed to be. But to everyone's considerable surprise, Donna hasn't spread her wings sexually, nor her legs either. I'm pretty sure that's the case because I question her about it at least once a month, and I'm sure I know her proximity readings well enough to be confident of catching her tell big lies. She's often wonderful too. It's very easy to have fun with Donna because she's so direct. In a not unrelated topic, she's getting pretty damned good in bed because of her natural athleticism, zero shyness, and having only one opportunity with me per month. She puts her heart and soul into it, leaving me to do the rest of the "putting things in". We both very much enjoy our sessions together. Donna is also growing herself a mighty fine body. She's tall, slim and is developing large breasts - my favorite type. They're heading toward the same size as Carol's and Mom's. If they do develop to be the same size as the family's other females, then on Donna's slim frame they'll appear somewhat disproportionate large, which is a VERY attractive look. There should be a lot more girls with disproportionately large breasts; ideally all of them! ^ Dad is back at the lawnmower factory again. He likes working there; obviously, otherwise he wouldn't. The only real change is that he's not as eager for overtime as he used to be. I enjoy teasing Dad about one aspect of his job now, because Charles van Crasbeek (the owner of the factory) is using Dad's photo and endorsement in some of their ads. You know the sort of thing: "Dad is known to be rich (although that's politely understated in the ad) so can afford the best, and Dad has one of these very reasonably priced riding mowers, so everyone else should buy one too." Dad is a laid-back kind of guy, and he seems to enjoy himself no matter what the circumstances are, but he's certainly enjoying the billionaire lifestyle. It has a lot of perks. Mom's still busy with critical home decorating issues. Dinnerware doesn't just pick itself, you know! She'll soon resume working for MAF, although I'm well aware that applying the word "soon" to "picking dinnerware" cannot be describing any reality that I've ever experienced, and I've experienced quite a few of them by now. Mom's trying not to be a worrywart (one of her terms) about me, and is mostly managing, until I go and do something crazy like declare war on our nation's armed forces. That sort of thing tends to get her worked up, even if she holds it in. She's not too fond of my shooting FBI Directors in the foot either, although I quite enjoyed it. I didn't have anything personal against him or the FBI - not like I do against the DHS or CIA - but the FBI didn't exactly impress me in the way they dealt with Archangel Michael and I can't help suspect that the FBI probably isn't much different from the other two three-letter agencies. Mom has admitted on several occasions that, "Our life is AMAZING!", so having me as a son is a good-news/bad-news situation for her. ^ MAF and Vanessa are going great. It's too early for MAF to have had any significant social effect yet, but the process appears to be working. MAF has an absurd amount of money, so it's got as many top-quality staff as Vanessa wants all working away on socially valuable projects, although the Government employees that MAF has in its crosshairs probably think otherwise. There are several reporters who've now been paid for publicizing the type of stories MAF is targeting, with their payments being publicized too. They were SUBSTANTIAL payments, so highly encouraging for other investigative journalists. MAF's payment amount is mostly proportional to the importance of the scandal rather than the effort that went into it getting the story, but the easiest way of giving you a feel for the size of the payments is to say they're worth about five times as much as a journalist would've earned on a salary during the investigative time, so if the investigation took six months, the payment would be about two and half years' salary. As I said, that's not how it works, but it'll give you an idea of how motivating it is. Vanessa has many times publicly emphasized that MAF will be operating this way for at least decades and probably for any practical measure of "forever", and she's encouraging people to make investigative journalism a career. She's getting a substantial amount of attention as she's good at frequently getting herself, MAF and its causes into the media. There have been enough MAF-led cases now that people are impressed by what MAF is doing. One amusing consequence of that is that Vanessa is often getting invited to give guest lectures in universities around the country, in topics like Investigative Journalism, and if you can believe such a thing exists, Political Ethics (yeah, it's hard not to laugh). Prof is still very much the same guy; or about 90% of a guy, measured by volume. Mathematicians have a tendency not to notice the rest of the world, focusing on what's going on inside their esoteric field. They can remain the same for decades, judging by several of the older Math lecturers I've met, either at OSU or because most of them have visited our home for dinner parties and the like. One way Prof has changed is that he's done quite a lot of physics reading so we can talk about the physics of my abilities. He's not excessive about it, but he'd clearly love to understand a lot more about what I can do. I've been made uncomfortable by some of his questions, but he's a smart guy and he picked up on that. I'm perfectly happy to help him measure how fast I can boil water and other unrecorded quantifications of what I can do, but "how?" and "why?" are topics he's learned to stay clear of. He's pretty sure that genetics is not the explanation. I've refused to confirm or deny that (Political Ethics in action!), but he's read meaning into my embarrassed silences. The demise of that cover story doesn't matter anymore. Not with Prof or Vanessa anyway. As far as I know, no one has disabused Mom and Dad, and that's fine with Carol and me. ^ The Boys are both doing well. Robert's enjoying his oceanography work, and Andrew's wedding is in only two months, so Sophia is very worried that she won't have the dinner service picked out in time. Okay, I made that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's true. I must remember to not ask her. Neither of The Boys have asked any pointed questions about the angel, but I wouldn't be surprised if they suspect something. If it hasn't already, I'm sure the penny will drop after the angel chooses to resurrect Mark Anderson. After the penny's dropped, their jaws will follow, because knowing that I can do the stuff that the angel did on TV will blow them away. They're trustworthy guys, so no one expects any problems from them. ^ Julia and Carol have informed me that Mark's second-tier girlfriends (Alexis, Pat, Katelin, etc.) are managing without Ron's good lovin' while I'm carrying out my Angel Plan. They ask after me from time to time, which is sweet of them. Alexis' version of sweet being, "I'm horny for Ron. When's he gonna get back into action?" She's my favorite sort of second-tier girlfriend. In retrospect I've probably given too strong an impression that my relationship with Alexis is nothing but sexual, by my so frequently mentioning her asking for sex and by my under-mentioning the other things we do. She does ask for sex quite often because she enjoys it so much and has no shame about that, but she doesn't nag and her requests are only a tiny proportion of our interactions. Alexis comes on many of our group trips because we enjoy her company. She's a simple and straightforward girl, a lot like Ava and Donna in many respects. She lives each day as it comes, without any agenda for the future, which I enjoy and appreciate. Because money is irrelevant to us now, we can do almost anything we want, constrained only by how much time it takes. We have lots of fun, and my second-tier girlfriends are often part of it, especially Alexis because she has few constraints on her actions. ------- Chapter 341: Jonathon Makes Progress Wednesday, April 18, to Sunday, April 22, 2007 In the very early morning, while the other celebrants snoozed, I spent half an hour practicing creating a ghost version of Archangel Michael. Ideally it would be indistinguishable from what I looked like in my A-man suit and still leave me with plenty of minds uninvolved so they could do other things, but that was never going to be possible, but a partial duplicate might have its uses. I already knew how to do the wings, so I 'just' needed a body. My light blobs are a lot more flexible than they were when I first discovered them, but there was no way I could make a realistic looking body so I didn't try. Michael's wearing a semi-metallic silver suit didn't help matters either; I should've chosen a yellow fabric. Instead of going for realism, I tried for an impressive looking special effect, to inspire awe and fear (in either order was fine). My final version wasn't very impressive, not as I judged it anyway. A guard surprised in the middle of the night by its appearing in front of him might have a different opinion though. I had a half-plan that I could have the ghost storm though a military base. It could walk through walls, stand in the middle of desk, and otherwise seem to be nothing more than light (I thought I could manage that). But when the angel wanted to, it would be extremely solid and strong, such as when it picked up a soldier by the neck. The soldier would be kicking and punching, with his blows passing straight through the ghost. The soldier could even fire his gun if he wanted to. I could imagine that the soldier would be REALLY freaked out! When news of that capability reached the top echelons, the bosses should develop some additional caution, because how on Earth could they fight such a creature! Having learned how to make the angel-ghost look as good as I could with my capabilities, I resumed my OSU studying. ^ Wednesday was a day of minor- and non-events. The non-event started first, probably because it had an unfair advantage. In the morning's news, the Navy had still not renamed CVN-77. By lunchtime they still hadn't renamed it. They maintained their consistent position - sitting on their asses - all day. Mom got an email from an underling in Jonathon's organization at midday, confirming that "According to the criteria set down by the creature referred to as Archangel Michael, the absence of your son Mark Anderson's body would not seem to be an impediment to his possible resurrection. However, this organization is currently in the process of formulating a comprehensive set of criteria, which blah, blah..." Translated into non-Government-speak, it said, "Yes, but don't get your hopes up. And don't call us, we'll call you." Mom's getting a reply didn't have any significance, but Mom still sent back, "How do we get Mark's name put on the list?" In the afternoon, Jonathon's group released the first draft of their criteria. That wasn't the sort of thing the Government would normally do, but the angel had suggested putting that information on ABC's website so Jonathon had pushed for making that part of his job public. Giving ABC a scoop didn't appeal to Jonathon's advisors, so they released it more widely. There was nothing particularly surprising in the list of criteria: "Not Elvis Presley." Bureaucrats don't have senses of humor, so I was pretty sure Jonathon was having some fun throwing his authority around, which pleased me. "American citizen who died in America, had a social security number, and the death certificate was issued in America." It seemed a little redundant, but who was I to make a fuss. "Died January 1st, 2000, or later." "Has no criminal convictions." "Has at least one of: a mother, father, husband, wife or child still alive." There was an explanation that this was so the resurrectee would have somewhere to reestablish him/herself, which was specifying something I'd said in general. There were several more minor criteria, such as "Younger than 45 at time of death", none of which excluded Mark Anderson. VERY importantly - because Mark Anderson didn't have a death certificate - there was a process people could go through if they wanted someone to be considered who met the other criteria and who were American citizens, but who either hadn't died in America, hadn't had a social security number, or didn't have a death certificate. Mom immediately followed that procedure for Mark Anderson. The angel could have sent Jonathon an email to get him to change the troublesome death certificate criterion, but it was much better to use the mechanism they were helpfully providing as it avoided having the setup job look like a setup job. [[Other than the criterion of being an American citizen - which was required to avoid the nightmare of opening the list to everyone in the world, because it'd be impossible to achieve anything in ten days if that happened - the other requirements of the second point weren't really requirements at all, but a place to start. Jonathon's organization had to create a list of dead people, and copying all the databases of death certificates was a very easy way to kick that off. It would've been far too time consuming for Jonathon's group to search for all the dead people who didn't have such certificates, so they simply put the onus on the public to inform them of any ex-Americans who could be added.]] There was also an explanation that there'd be several soft criteria as well, such as "The resurrectee himself/herself or at least one of the qualifying people in #5 has to be capable of financially supporting the resurrectee until he/she is capable of managing his/her own life." That was left out of the current list because it was too subjective. They wanted the initial criteria to be capable of being processed by computer, then the list of people who emerged would be looked at manually for the soft criteria. I did landscaping work for most of the day, chatting as usual with my gardeners and agreeing that just like them, I hadn't gotten much work done yesterday because of the amazing angel. I added, "The angel may be able to take on the Air Force and Navy, but if he delays Julia's decorating one more day he's going to be in serious trouble." The gardeners have met Julia, so they laughed. I didn't want to die just before I was resurrected, so I added, "Please don't tell Julia I said that." More laughter. When the sun went down, it was time for me to do go up. I had three items on tonight's agenda: Borrow someone's computer to research military aircraft, spy systems, satellites, and whatever other interesting links I could find. Go to a military base to calibrate some military frequencies. Do something about the Navy's failure to rename CVN-77 with the prompt responsiveness that an angel of my elevated status deserved. I knew Edwards AFB was a big one and somewhere in California. I wasn't sure exactly where, but I headed in that general direction for a while, with a radio blob leading the way. There's not much angel-threatening radar in the valley that runs south of Corvallis, so I barely had to deviate from the path I would've traveled anyway, but I felt proud of myself every time I altered my course. Not long after I passed Mount Shasta in northern California, I found myself an available computer and started reading up on the various types of military hardware that I might run in to, or that might try to run into me. I wasn't looking for detailed specs, just an overview of capabilities. Things like, "The Predator drone has a laser designator that can be used to paint a target so a long-range missile can take it out," caught my attention. I decided to do some googling to find out what frequencies those laser designators use. I was of the opinion that it'd be REALLY good to know if I was being painted by a target-designating laser! Especially because I'd also found out that the damned Air Force use smokeless fuel in their missiles, so you can't see them coming (how unfair is that!). Hollywood's got a lot to answer for, because every missile I've ever seen in a movie always leaves a very easy to follow, white smoke trail. I was VERY glad I'd learned the truth by googling, because learning it the other way would have been very upsetting. Fearing the Navy might be waiting for me the next time I dove into the ocean, I checked out what they could do. For once, I was pleased to see nothing too worrying. Depth charges of course, but apparently they're reasonably ineffective against human bodies. That's because we're mostly water so the shockwave passes through us in the same manner as it passes through the water around us. Plus they'd be easy for me to toss back if the Navy sends any my way. I don't know what would happen to my submarine if a depth charge went off nearby. If the sides collapsed, I could quite easily recreate the box, not even needing to do it above the surface as I could create the initial tiny box in my mouth, then expand it to push the water away, using a snorkel to fill it with air after I entered it and drained the water out. The main risk was in my being knocked out, but I wasn't too worried as it was unlikely that I'd ever let a depth charge go off near me. A more serious weapon for a swimmer was a multiple launcher that could blanket a wide area of the ocean with mini-depth charges. They were contact explosives, so easy to avoid and even more fun to throw back. The Navy also had sound weapons, which made me laugh as I'd be in a soundproof box. I spent an hour researching, having to change houses partway through because the first house's owner came home. My research session was productive and scary. The Navy's weapons were only as scary as I'd thought, but what I'd read of the Air Force's capabilities scared the crap out of me. I'd seriously underestimated the sneakiness of their weapon systems. I'd been lucky so far because all my appearances had been a surprise, but I had a feeling that turning up on Jonathon's doorstep in a week's time could result in an overly tricky visit. #2: #10: #28: #All: I returned my attention to the computer to find out where Edwards AFB is, what it does, what sort of planes are normally there, etc. Good background information to learn before I paid it a visit. While reading, I encountered a mention of a Beale AFB which was only about a hundred miles away from where I was now, and almost directly in my flight path for going to Edwards. I liked the idea of visiting two bases so I could check how consistent their frequencies were. Reno, Nevada, wasn't far off my path, but not close enough to Beale AFB to alert them to my presence, so I flew to Reno. I found a computer there, used it to check the ABC and CVN-77 websites for any change to the naming situation. There was none, so I sent my usual recipients the following: Hello from Reno. As the Navy is gambling, this seems an appropriate location to use. I'm feeling charitable because Jonathon is getting the resources he needs. At the same time, I'm feeling highly annoyed that my order about CVN-77 is not being treated with the respect all my orders should be. I will wait three hours. If there is no media coverage of the name change having been made by then, I will create a very expensive fire. I am God's representative on Earth and I speak for him. You are disobeying a command from God. The only gamble is over how many billions it's going to cost you if I get Old Testament on your asses. Have a good life, Mickey. Three hours gave me plenty of time to fly to Beale AFB, calibrate my radio blob against the base's many transmission sources, confirm that Air Force air traffic control radars couldn't see me, fly to Edwards AFB, and do the same there. [[Amusingly, Beale is the base from which RQ-4 Global Hawks are remote-operated. These are state of the art, unmanned, unarmed, aerial reconnaissance vehicles. A lot better at surveillance than the old Predators that I thought of when I'd thought of unmanned planes. The Air Force had Global Hawks over LA and Washington DC, hoping to acquire Archangel Michael if he turned up in either of those cities again. If I'd taken the time to snoop Beale fully, I would've found their operators at work, and should've recognized the cities they were flying over. Their orders would've been interesting reading. As it was, all I did was identify some more ground-to-satellite communications frequencies without making the effort to find out why they were communicating.]] Edwards is a HUGE base, with runways scattered all over the place and large numbers of very expensive planes, the total value of which would be considerably more than the cost of a new carrier. All things considered, it would be cheaper for the Government if it bought a new pot of paint and used it on the bow of CVN-77. Sneaking into parts of the base was tricky, but fun. There was a great deal of security around the base, as there had been at the much smaller Beale, but I had enormous advantages. I had superb night-vision courtesy of a giant sight blob, and I also had infrared frequency-shifted into my visible range, which made people and guard dogs shine in my vision. Even if my body was completely hidden under or behind something, I could still sight-blob search all around the area, including inside and behind buildings. I could arrange wonderful distractions, like sending a couple of the guard dogs charging off in the wrong direction, or more subtly, have one of the ground-radar operators spill his coffee badly, which I ensured resulted in his display going out of action by pulling a wire loose inside it. As I said, it was fun. Provided I took my time and was careful, they didn't have a hope of keeping me from doing what I wanted. I wasn't trying to penetrate to the center of the fields, only to find samples of as many of their transmission sources as possible, and to identify what they were. Emplaced navigation beacons I couldn't care less about, for example. When my three-hour time limit was up, I pulled back from Edwards to find an empty house with a TV that I could look at while my ear was near a recently opened window. It was all over the news: the US Navy had surrendered to my demands. It was in the process of creating the USS Homer Simpson, to spread shock, awe and American parenting skills throughout the world. #29: #27: [[The delay over renaming the carrier had been entirely political. The President didn't want to order it done because it'd upset his daddy, and the senior admirals were concerned about their career futures if they advanced the suggestion. There wasn't anyone who had clear responsibility for the decision to follow my order, so the buck had been ignored as much as possible, and when ignoring it hadn't been possible, it had been passed. My ultimatum had brought the issue to a head, so a group of admirals had an excuse to collectively raise the issue with the President.]] #12: #1: #14: #3: #All: I flew home. ^ [[One thing the armed forces didn't need was a reason to feel more nervous about me. Take just one issue: nuclear weapons. They had highly secure bunkers around the country containing nuclear bombs, missile warheads, depth charges, torpedoes, and probably other weapon forms. But as far as they could tell, I could waltz in and set them off. All of a sudden, the country's entire nuclear arsenal was insecure. Putting more guards on the doors wasn't likely to help, although they did that anyway. Should they try to hide the weapons? Should they replace them with dummies to try to fool me? Maybe they should destroy them? Or as a halfway step, sabotage them in some reversible manner? (But maybe I could quickly fix that?) They didn't know enough about my abilities or intentions, so were left with having to guess. They couldn't even pray for guidance, because God was obviously on my side, hehe. They analyzed my abilities as best as they could. They had my telekinesis's maximum force and range pretty well pegged, but adding to their worries was the fact that I obviously had several abilities that they didn't understand anything about. How had I identified the law enforcement agents on the platform in LA? How did I know which reporters had boob jobs? How had I turned water into wine? The angel's not turning his body or face around had them very worried because it proved that I could see things all around me. Or maybe I simply "Knew Everything," perhaps with a range limit or perhaps not. It was damned hard for them to design a security system to keep me out of their nuclear weapon stores. Even if they expanded the perimeters considerably and filled it with soldiers, tanks, etc. - which they often did, massively intruding on and inconveniencing the normal operations of many bases - I could obviously smash my way through them in a second. Even automated defenses were no good, because I could pull their insides apart. They did their best to start upgrading their nuclear security. It was a panic project; highly argued, expensive, and more than anything else, highly disruptive. Many doubted it'd do any good at all, but the military had no choice as being nervous about nuclear weapons inside their own country, and sometimes in the middle of substantial population centers such as at Norfolk Naval Yards, wasn't something they could ignore.]] ^ For the next few days, there were only two things I had to do (not counting moving furniture around for Julia): Make sure that Mark Anderson got on Jonathon's list. Plan a safe way of meeting with Jonathon when it was time for that. The first objective was advanced in a very unsubtle manner: the major Saturday morning newspapers across the country contained a full-page, full-color advertisement from Mom and Dad, asking people to support Mark Anderson's inclusion on the list of resurrectee candidates. We had a bullet list of major reasons in a largish point size near the top of the ad, with some discussion of them further down the page. The main reasons were all pretty obvious: As per the CIA-started scientific enthusiasm over my body, there was the possibility of a "Mark Anderson Immortality Pill". My apparent genius was also listed, with hints about what that might enable me to do for humanity. Because so many Americans are obese, we included the point that, "What could be learned from his body might cure obesity, as Mark didn't have to exercise to look as good as he did." Several pictures were included in the ad, naturally including the shot of me in those bright yellow Speedos, sigh. Also mentioned was that Majestic Countdown's first leak had been about Mark Anderson, so the angel should greatly approve of Mark's inclusion. There was no point in trying to hide that connection, so it was best to scream it loudly as if we were proud of it. There were also other small problems that we could do nothing about, such as it would've been better if MAF was actually named the Mark Anderson MEMORIAL Foundation, because the absence of "Memorial" might make some people suspect we'd always known Mark was alive. That word's absence had simply been because Vanessa had wanted an easier name and my Angel Plan hadn't been in place early enough to stop her naming MAF the way she had. One of the discussion points was our money. We wrote, "Legally, the billions of dollars we received in our settlement is ours to keep if Mark is resurrected, as the payment was for the Government's breaching of Mark's Fourth Amendment rights, for kidnapping and for experimenting on him. Those actions were illegal whether or not Mark died. We recognize that the size of the settlement was because Mark's body might have been used to find cures for every disease and to make everyone who wants to be fit, healthy and genius, so if Mark is resurrected and scientists discover any medical advances from him, we promise to give back to the American taxpayers 80% of the annual net profits from those, until we've paid back ten times the amount of the settlement." It was, in effect, a multi-billion dollar bribe that we'd never pay, as my plan called for there to be no such profit. The taxpayers were welcome to 80% of that. In the resultant media attention, Mom and Dad were accused of trying to buy or bribe Mark's way onto the list. Mom answered, "We think it's the fair thing to do, and we don't need that much money ourselves. But if people think we shouldn't, then we'll keep it." Vanessa called out, from off camera, "It would be ethical to let people choose. Have a box on their tax returns that they can check to indicate whether they want the tax deduction from the Andersons or not." "Good idea," agreed Mom. The reporter scoffed (they're generally very cynical people, when they're not too busy being intrusive and obnoxious), "Ha! Everyone's going to take it. You're still offering a bribe." "We think it's fair and we would be happy to give it to anyone that wants it. If you're such a know-it-all, you tell us what should be done with the profits from Mark's body if he's resurrected?" The reporter wasn't eager to answer, but Mom and Dad, plus the nearby Vanessa and Prof, pressured him, including refusing to answer any other questions until he had answered the one aimed at him. Vanessa demanding, "Come on! My 18-year old students knew not to criticize someone's ethics unless they could justify their criticism. Are you saying the Andersons should refund only exactly the same amount as the settlement to avoid allegations of bribery? They'll do that if it's more ethical. Every taxpayer in the country would hate your guts, but I'm sure that's not important to someone as ethical as you?" Vanessa let the guy wiggle out of the hole he'd dug, as being hard on him might've made us look bad. The accusation of our bribe was pretty well killed, perhaps because all the other reporters wouldn't mind being able to check a box to get a sizable tax credit. (That implies that their journalistic integrity was secondary to their greed for money. I just thought I'd point out that implication to you, in case you didn't get it.) The point that we should give the money back immediately if Mark was resurrected, rather than waiting for profits, came up. The answer to that was obvious, as it is to most questions reporters ask, and Dad took them through the wording we'd prepared, "If you went to a casino, would you expect them to give your money back if your bet came up wrong but let you keep their money if you won? The Government made a gamble when they offered us the amount of the settlement, and we took a gamble when we accepted it. If Mark is resurrected, we'll find out that either we lost that gamble or the Government did. If Mark's worth a trillion dollars more than the settlement, would the Government pay us the extra? So if he's worth less, why should we pay some of it back? The Government didn't have to settle with us, but they wanted to do that rather than gamble on..." Prof had suggested a nice little addition to my Angel Plan to take advantage of this anticipated point, which Mom acted on now, interrupting with, "I don't like gambling, so I'll suggest something else. I believe Mark's body was incredible, that he would've changed the world, and that he was worth even more to humanity than the $242 trillion we sued for. The angel seems honest, so let's ask him what Mark would've been worth alive. If he says Mark was less than we got, we'll give the extra money back; if he says Mark was worth more than we got, the Government will give us the extra. We agree to that, so now it's up to the Government to agree to it." Dad, Vanessa and Prof all enthusiastically agreed, demonstrating great belief in my body's worth. The reporters thought that was an excellent idea. They knew the Government obviously wouldn't take the word of God, but it made for Very Interesting TV. We were happy because we could kill the accusation every time we were asked about refunding our money. All we had to say was, "We've already agreed to let the angel decide. We're waiting for the Government to agree." We were sure it would come up many times, and we could come out of it looking good. We were, after all, trusting in God. It would be the Government that would look bad for not trusting God. The interviewing returned to the advertisement we'd run, which led to another reporter picking up the money-refund theme again (reporters' minds tend to go around in very small circles). He conveniently accused, "When Mark's resurrected, you could break your promise to repay the profits you make." "Are you suggesting we pay in advance? Wouldn't that allow you to accuse us of bribery even more loudly? When we settled with the Government, we included VERY substantial payments to residents of Benton County and some other households near our home. There was no reason for us to give away even a penny of that money, but we did. Your accusing us of greed, lying and dishonesty is not appreciated. There are tens of thousands of people living around us who can attest that we're not like that. I wonder whether you would've given away hundreds of millions of dollars that you could've kept for yourself?" That ended that issue, and it convinced everyone viewing this interview (what with replays, that ended up being a high proportion of everyone in America), that we were generous, kind people who could be trusted to give very large sums of money back to the taxpayers. In other words, that we'd follow through on our bribe offer. There were three noteworthy consequences of the seed we'd planted about having the angel set my value: The Government would NEVER agree to it. Almost certainly they'd perpetually refuse to comment on the issue, because everything else made them look terrible. (So this is more of a non-consequence really.) For the idea to work in practice, the Government had to agree to be bound by it, and then the angel had to be asked the value. It was very important that the angel not be asked for the value first, as that'd ruin the fairness of the process. But it was totally predictable that on the very first opportunity that a reporter has to talk with the angel, the reporter will ask about Mark's worth. That the reporter was destroying a possibly useful process wouldn't concern the reporter in the slightest. That point neatly illustrates that reporters should never be allowed to be involved in government decision-making. They have ZERO patience and their objectives are entirely removed from serving the people who're affected by the decisions they're reporting on. It gave me, as the angel, a wonderful opening to make a very effective statement. I could make the Government look terrible, the Andersons wonderful, and most importantly, I could use it to dramatically increase the chance of Mark Anderson making it on to the resurrection shortlist. Vanessa added a point, "The Mark Anderson Foundation would abide by the angel's ruling, but I think MAF is making better use of the money than the Government would, and I hope the Government would agree to MAF's keeping the $5 billion amount it originally asked for even if the angel sets a value lower than that. It's important that MAF continues to keep the Government honest and its employees from abusing the power they have..." You know the sort of stuff Vanessa went on to say. While it looked like she was putting in a plug for MAF, she was mostly giving the impression that she was worried about the possibility of the angel's ruling going against us. Obviously there was no chance of that happening - we had the fix in! - but it was good to imply we were worried about it because it gave the impression that we didn't have the fix in. While I remember to mention it, Vanessa finds it extremely easy to get lots of good press about MAF. Can you work out why? I'll give you a clue: MAF gives large sums of money to reporters who uncover - or randomly stumble on - Federal or State Government wrongdoing. How many reporters are going to say bad things about MAF and risk their possible future payments? Not only won't they criticize MAF, they'll try to maximize the amount of any such payments by kissing MAF's ass every chance they get, by giving it and Vanessa good press. Vanessa chose to have MAF achieve its goals by paying for investigative journalism, knowing that would guarantee MAF got extraordinary levels of media support, which is the best way to pressure the politicians into behaving the way she wanted. In short: manipulating the press is how things get done. It is far better than just taking the most corrupt of them to court from time to time. Mark met all the criteria that Jonathon's organization had released, the death certificate criterion having been taken care of. Mark passed both the hard (able to be filtered by computer) and the soft (needing human judgment) criteria groups. The latter hadn't been finalized yet, but so far Mark was looking fine. There was certainly no doubt that Mark's death had been undeserved. There was also a great deal of sympathy for the Anderson and Williams families for their losing Mark, and my families had established an exceptionally ethical reputation, with the exception of our scandalous attitude to sex, which didn't do our getting publicity any harm at all. Sex raised an interesting issue - as it so often does - which received some frivolous debate in the press. How old would Mark be if he was resurrected? He was born on November 9, 1989, about 17.5 years ago, but had been dead thirteen months so far. Would that make him 17.5 years old if resurrected, or only 16.4? If, after November 9 this year, he had sex with any of his many younger lovers (scandal!), would he be committing statutory rape? If he had sex with legally adult Julia or Ava (or even Julia AND Ava at the same time - more scandal!), would the women be committing statutory rape? If he was given the younger age, then he was innocent with the young girls, but Julia and Ava would be guilty. If he was given the older age, then he was guilty with the younger girls but innocent with Julia and Ava. Someone had to be committing a sex crime. More accurately, that depended on whether the state the sex was happening in had a law that allowed sex between underage people to happen if they were close enough in age. Oregon did have such a law, allowing up to a three-year difference, but some other states did not. The facts of the situation doing nothing to reduce the frivolity of the debate, or how worked up some people got over the terrible issue of teenagers have sex. Some people suggested that Mark should abstain from sex until his youngest possible age was over eighteen, and then only have sex with women who were also over eighteen. See if you can guess what I thought of that suggestion and the screwed-in-the-head, retarded, moralistic, moron fuckwits who suggested it? There was easily enough public interest to motivate reporters to include questions about Mark Anderson in their next interview with Jonathon Winters. Jonathon was still an ABC employee, so that network had very good access to him, and they allowed other networks to have some access too. Jonathon did have a lot of work to do, but he gave two short interview sessions per day, plus ABC had a documentary-making team following him around almost 24/7. Jonathon's attitude to Mark Anderson's inclusion was, "We're choosing the criteria first, like Archangel Michael told me to. When they're finalized, which they nearly are, we'll see what people appear on the list. I can confirm that Mark Anderson passes all of them so far but you knew that already, and there could be tens of thousands of other people who also qualify. When we finish choosing the criteria, I'll let you know about Mark." "Will Mark pass the criteria you haven't chosen yet?" asked one of the reporters, because that's the sort of question which reporters frequently ask, especially the ones that are particularly attractive (handsome, in this case). Jonathon rolled his eyes and gave a less than polite answer. He'd spent nearly all of his time in the company of reporters, so probably had very little tolerance for their stupidity. He looked like he enjoyed the opportunity to express his opinion of them. The bottom line was that the public and Jonathon both thought that Mark Anderson's inclusion on the list seemed like a good idea. There was no reason why not, especially because he'd be only one name of two dozen or so, and there were several very good reasons why he should be included. Right at the top of the list of reasons were two biggies: Hundred billion dollar bribes tend to work fairly well (that was of the order of a thousand dollars per taxpayer, a nice amount, and a thousand dollars more than any other candidate was offering). The exciting prospect of the "Magic Pill", to make everyone perfectly healthy and sexy looking. Being a genius had some appeal too, although for many people - those that most needed more IQ - not as much as the thousand dollars. ^ Sunday afternoon (April 22nd), Jonathon released what he described as, "These are the PRELIMINARY final criteria. In the next few days we're going to be very busy getting the databases we've accumulated run through the hard criteria. Once we've got the list of names that come out of that - what we're calling our "hard list names" - we'll start manually checking them. We might find something in the files that gives us an idea for a new criterion that we should've thought of earlier..." "Like what?" asked the handsome reporter who'd asked about my passing the yet unwritten criteria. Jonathon ignored Pretty Boy, " ... If the new criterion is suitable for being a hard one, we'll add it to that list and rerun the computer program again to reduce the size of the hard list. It's likely that we'll end up with a number of hard candidates which is either too many or too few. If there are far too many then we're going to change criterion number 5 so it requires at least TWO family members to be still alive. If there are too few, we'll try to fix it by extending the dying date in criteria number 3 by a few years. If that doesn't add enough, we could relax some of the other hard criteria, but it's more likely that we'll have too many hard names. My point is that the list of criteria I'm giving you now might be changed depending on the results we get..." "So it's not the FINAL list?" "No it's not. That's why I called it the 'PRELIMINARY final list' a few seconds ago. 'Preliminary' because it might change. 'Final' because it might not, but if it does, the changes should be minor. -- "We're going to produce the hard list in date order, with the most recent deaths on the top. We'll investigate them to see if they pass the soft criteria in that order, until we run out of time, out of names, or until we've got a thousand people who pass the soft criteria. Then we'll take the people who're on the soft list, and pick the twenty we think are the most deserving, like the Archangel Michael wanted." That was too complicated for most of the reporters, so Jonathon had to answer several stupid questions and then explain it again slower, but eventually most of them understood the gist of it. I could insult reporters' intelligence, but that wouldn't be fair. The fault lies with the public's intelligence. The public strongly prefers "SIMPLE", even in preference to "factual". Reporters are continually forced to go for "simple", so their on-the-job attention spans have been conditioned to be the same as that of their viewing audience. The worst things you can say to a reporter during an interview are things like: "On the other hand..." or "Then the next stage is..." Not only had Jonathon presented a THREE-stage plan (he'd made it sound like two-stages by skipping the explanation of a stage at the end, when the reporters' attention was failing), but he'd also listed several contingencies. That was WAY TOO MUCH! There were a lot more questions, some of which were even intelligent, such as, "How will you decide which twenty are the most deserving?" (That was the third stage.) "We've got a list of reasons to give each candidate points, such as points for each dependent child they have, points for each family member still alive, and things like that. The soft list will be put in total points order and I'll go through it. We'll investigate the top fifty better, then I'll choose the twenty that seem the best." "YOU will choose. How will you ensure that's done fairly?" "By trying my best. Have you read the sort of things the angel writes? He believes the person in charge is responsible. He put me in charge, so I'm picking the top twenty. If you don't like it, complain to him." There were other questions that couldn't be so easily disposed of. Several of them were concerned with the investigation area. For example, the Government's databases could tell - reasonably accurately - how many family members people had, but they couldn't tell whether the dead person had been hated by their family or were deeply mourned by them. That needed to be investigated by one of the huge number of police, FBI and approved-PIs who were lined up ready to go (and were already doing field trials of the process of getting information on the soft criteria issues). Investigation by humans means bias and errors are to be expected. Jonathon's answer was, "Yes, there are problems. We've got ways of reducing them, such as having some investigators spot-check the results of others, but there's only so much we can do. Archangel Michael indicated 'ten days or so', and we're already running two days behind schedule. He set the time and he knows how hard the job is, so I'm insisting we do it his way rather than take months or years the way some of my advisors want." That there were inaccuracies in the Government databases was questioned too. Jonathon answered, "There are fifteen million people who've died since January 1st, 2000. Archangel Michael can get into any computer he wants, so I'm sure he knows there are inaccuracies. There's nothing we can do about it in time." [In the next few days, hundreds of thousands of hopeful, worried people rushed to Government offices to check the records of their loved ones. Too late, as the information had already been copied into Jonathon's computers. The job of getting all the various databases accessible was a substantial one. There were whole blocks of records that never got integrated in time, such as death certificates from some technologically backward counties. Jonathon wasn't worried, because he remembered that Archangel Michael had told him, "Do the best you can but don't sweat perfection." He was smart enough not to publicize those omissions.] There were lots of other questions, but none of them mattered to me. As far as I was concerned, it was a good interview, because: Jonathon was getting things done. Things could've gone wrong within his organization, but so far it seemed to be working well. As far as I could tell, he hadn't even needed to use his new rifle to shoot anyone in the foot. If Jonathon failed totally, the angel would simply declare Mark Anderson the winner, but it was better that Jonathon got Mark's name on the list in the first place. Mark Anderson passed all the hard and soft criteria. That may not have been a coincidence, because the criteria could've been finalized with Mark in mind. Jonathon would be aware that Majestic Countdown's first email had been about Mark, and that the Andersons, Williams and MAF seemed very much to be the sort of people that the angel approved of because he'd responded to their public requests to leak more of the Government's shameful documents. I was amused that Jonathon always referred to the angel as "Archangel Michael", even though I deliberately played mind-games by being casual with my name. I imagined that if I was in the middle of a personal job for a very powerful angel, I'd be very polite too. There was also one comment of Jonathon's that had pleased me the moment I heard it, but after further thought had worried me. Jonathon had said, "Archangel Michael said that the person should be resurrected for their and their family's benefit, not so they could sing some more songs or satisfy people's curiosity. So people aren't going to be given points for being famous. Famous people are going to have the same chance as everybody else," ("everybody" being a very appropriate word in this context). Every poll I'd seen was full of famous people, so it was good that they'd have to stand on their own two feet. What worried me was whether Mark Anderson would earn his way onto the list on his own merits. I'd get points for having four family members still alive who very much wanted me back. My dying relatively recently would help too, but it was still worryingly easy to imagine that I wouldn't stand out from the pack. Jonathon seemed to be looking for a soft list of up to a thousand names. It had to be large enough so there'd be plenty of truly nice, decent, deserving people on the list. All of the hard criteria, and many of the soft ones, didn't have anything to do with the quality of the person. There'd be the same proportion of assholes on the hard list as in the whole population, and there'd still be quite a large proportion of them on the soft list. In other words, even the soft list would contain many people who were poorly deserving of resurrection. They'd be on the list mainly because they'd been demographically lucky. Jonathon's point allocation system would hopefully succeed in picking out the good people from the thousand soft possibilities, which would hopefully result in Mark Anderson moving upward through the pack, but it was hard to imagine I'd float all the way upward to the top twenty. I didn't have any children, for example, which was one of the two points-allocation reasons Jonathon had mentioned. He'd refused to list the rest of them, on the grounds that people might lie to his investigators to boost their loved one's score. [[Not that Jonathon's team would've discovered it, but I actually had one child, courtesy of Lily Cheng. My son was now fourteen months old and being doted on by the Cheng's extended family.]] The main question was whether I'd be allocated bonus points for potentially offering immortality to humanity. I'd like to call Jonathon up to check on that, but it wasn't practical. Visiting him didn't seem like a good idea either, as he was probably under a great deal of surveillance [[and then some!]]. So it was time for Archangel Michael to have another press interview. ------- Chapter 342: The Angel Visits Memphis, but not Graceland Sunday, April 22, 2007 (Continued) I discussed my plans with the parents, especially Mom and Dad because they'd be taking the calls. Later that evening, I flew to Memphis, located a reporter typing up a story in his station's office. He was sitting within twenty four feet of the exterior wall, which made it even easier for me to type. During a pause in his typing, I machine-gunned, "Grab your phone, tape recorder and camera. Come to the roof for an interview you'll love." I repeated it five times, the sound alone guaranteeing to get his attention. His eyes bugged wide, he looked around frantically, looked under his desk, looked at the screen again, then looked worried. He eventually summoned the courage to gather up the items and to take the stairs to the roof. It took him a while to arrive, walking slowly and peering cautiously around every corner, but he finally spotted me and broke into a big smile. Even without his seeing my face, it's easy to recognize Archangel Michael. He paused the smile long enough to ask, "Is this a prank?" I lifted him a few feet in the air then put him down again. He seemed to find that quite convincing. I told him, "I'm going to hold a small press conference and I want four reporters present; you and three others. I want you to call one of your coworkers, and two good reporters from other organizations. You won't tell them why, only that they should come to meet you outside your building's front door as fast as possible. Tell them to bring a tape recorder, and a cameraman if it won't delay them. Do not tell them anything about why, but do ask them for their ETAs. Can you do that?" "Ahh yeah. But I can do everything they can." "Are you really going to argue with me?" "Ahh, no. I'll do what you want." He pulled out his phone and started doing so. It took him a while to convince his competitors to come, but eventually there were three more reporters and two video cameramen gathered around the building's front door, and shortly after that, on its rooftop. I told them to remove their cellphones and leave them on the roof, then I picked everyone up and we flew to a remote location. I didn't tell them why we were moving, but it was so that when I left after the interview, I'd have time to get well away before the military found out that I'd been in the area. I REALLY didn't want the military to get on my tail. I started the interview by explaining that I'd come to Memphis in part to apologize to the Elvis fans for my comments about him. That resulted in several minutes of good sounding bullshit, the only intelligent question being, "Why don't you cure Elvis after you resurrect him, so he wouldn't need pills or eat so much?" "Because of freewill. He chose to abuse his body and there are consequences of exercising freewill. In this case, one of the consequences is that he has invalidated himself as a candidate for resurrection." "That's not fair! He didn't know that at the time." "He took excessive food and drugs for years, so had plenty of time to see that he was killing himself." Another reporter asked, "Many people think addictions are a disease?" "If you're referring to my comment that the resurrectee will have his or her diseases healed, then I was referring to diseases which are caused by something which, if removed, makes the disease go away. If necessary, I will remove the resurrectee's viruses, or cancerous cells, or whatever the cause of his or her disease is. What could I remove from Elvis to cure him? I can't remove weak will. God grants freewill, and that includes weak will. Some species are stronger willed than others, and some individuals within each species are stronger than others - that's life. Even if we're so charitable as to say Elvis was only half to blame for his ongoing decisions to put things into his mouth, that still invalidates him as a resurrection candidate because there are millions of people who are entirely deserving of resurrection. -- "It's time to change the subject, so I'm going to briefly mention your navy's renaming of CVN-77. I will be leaving Earth soon and probably won't be personally back for a few decades or centuries. Your navy's bosses would be foolish to think that God won't know if they renege on the renaming after I leave. It wants me to pass on a threat: If there's an attempt to subvert the intent of my order, then the ship will sink at sea. The ship won't be unlucky in any respect before then - knowing God, it'll be lucky - but if there's an effort to go against my wishes, then the crew would be well advised to leave their valuable items on shore when it next sails; and themselves too if they can arrange it." I wasn't entirely bullshitting about its sinking, because if they did re-rename the ship, I truly would be tempted to covertly sink it. Doing so would remind people to take angels and God seriously and cautiously, making them more likely to leave me alone. The bit I'd said about luck was because of a comment I'd read about the Norfolk Naval Yards, that "It has no Pier 13 because that would be bad luck." I remembered hearing somewhere that sailors are superstitious and I didn't want the USS Homer Simpson to have trouble finding crew because I - as Archangel Michael - could be blamed for that, besmirching my good name and perhaps reducing my - as Mark Anderson - safety. I'd attempted to cancel out that worry, but without overselling the good luck aspect because I had no control over that. (If I had been in charge of the US Navy, I would have named the piers: "13A", "13B", "13C", ... up to "13L" and then "Double 13". Anything to discourage superstitious people from working on ships with state of the art weapons systems and nuclear reactors.) The reporters had several questions ("Where are you going?", "What will you be doing?", etc.) I refused to answer, saying, "Humanity isn't ready for that knowledge yet." During those questions, my radio blob saw the sudden glow of what was obviously a cellphone transmitting in one of the cameramen's pockets. (When a caller calls your cellphone, the carrier company needs to find your phone to make the connection. One very inefficient way for the carrier to find your phone would be to start electronically searching for it at the North Pole and slowly working south through every cellphone tower in the world until it was able to make contact with your phone. Eventually, many thousands of attempts later, they'd find your phone. A better way would be to start with the last cell tower your phone used and search outward in spiral from there. That can still take too long a time because people get on jet aircraft and fly thousands of miles. So most cellphones "check in" periodically, just by making a brief connection to a cellphone tower in their area. The phones don't ring or anything else their owner would notice; it's a silent and invisible process, unless you happen to have a radio blob operating. I'd seen hundreds of examples of this happening already, and knew exactly what it was.) I did answer some follow-up questions about the USS Homer Simpson, during which I used a sight blob to carefully search everyone for more phones, finding none. I made a mental note not to take media people's words in the future. When the current thread of questions finished, I said, "Remember before we left town, I told you to leave all your cellphones behind?" None of them had wanted to leave their phones, so they certainly remembered, including the guy whose proximity sense was suddenly showing worry. I'd seen him leave a phone behind, so he must've had two. I picked up the cameraman and his reporter partner by their ankles, dangling them upside-down and moving them a few feet back so the others could see them clearly. The others were very worried themselves now, so ignoring the first pair's screams and yells (from the reporter and cameraman respectively), I quickly turned the cameraman around so his cellphone-carrying pocket was closest to us, then I ripped it open, pulling out the cellphone. I explained, "I insisted that every cellphone be left behind. This man put one down but retained another one. None of you have anything to worry about; only these two. The reporter because she chose to invite this cameraman, and the cameraman because he deliberately disobeyed me..." "I forgot I had it," yelled the cameraman; lying, because proximity had shown his worry earlier. "Has it occurred to you that angels can tell when humans lie? Tell me another lie and I'll break your legs." He shut up, which gave the reporter the opening to start her own begging, "I didn't know!" she protested. "It was nothing to do with me!" "Which is why I'm not going to punish you nearly as badly as I'm going to punish him, both for his disobeying my order and for lying to me." I started ripping the cameraman's clothes off, shredding them as I went. I even shredded his shoes. I kind of had to, to show that I was an equal opportunity angel. According to my act, I wasn't human, and although I hadn't explicitly stated it, I was supposed to have no sex of my own, so I shouldn't only strip females. I let the reporter maintain her decency - she was holding her skirt 'up' as far as she could reach - while I stripped the cameraman totally naked, including removing his watch and ring. When he was naked, I positioned his cellphone where he could see it and then crushed it flat. Then I did the same to his camera, making sure that the tape in it was pulled out and shredded into uselessness. I also crushed the other items of equipment he had, spare batteries and tapes mostly. I crushed his watch (six tons of pressure on a narrow point; it didn't have a chance). I took his ring in two pairs of fingertips and rotated them in opposite directions so it twisted and tore. He complained, "That was my wedding ring!" "You can tell your wife you lost it because you were repeatedly dishonest to an angel. She probably already knows how stupid you are." I flew the two pieces of his ring in opposite directions, letting the pieces fall when the fingertips self-canceled. I flew his wallet to me, saying, "I'll drop this in the lap of a homeless person in some other city. I'm sure it'll be appreciated." I moved the reporter and cameramen a hundred feet away and faced them away from us, then invited the surviving reporters, "Next question please." "Why did you punish Stephanie?" I knew that was the reporter's name as I'd heard the conversation when she'd been invited to meet my first contact outside his building. I answered, "Like I said before, she invited him to come tonight, so she's partially responsible. Plus, I want their employer to miss out on this interview because they employ people dishonest enough to lie to an angel. Or am I misinterpreting your question? Maybe you're suggesting that I should strip Stephanie naked too?" That idea appealed to all the guys, but they decided to deny it. They even laughed to prove they treated it as a joke. I let them get away with their lies. I'll omit most of the rest of the interview, quoting only the important part of it: One of the reporters finally got around to asking the question I was waiting for, "The Andersons - Mark Anderson's parents, the boy that the CIA experimented on - they wondered whether his body would've let our doctors find out how to cure every disease?" #4: #7: #4: I answered, "I never met the boy. Let me ask God..." I paused, holding my body still (I don't move it around to face whomever I'm talking to, but that doesn't mean I behave like a statue. I was now though, which was a noticeable difference). I held it still for several seconds. One of the reporters started asking another question, but I held up my hand to silence him. After a few more seconds of stillness, I suddenly relaxed and chuckled to myself, then explained, "God had a great deal to say. It hadn't explained much about Mark Anderson to me before. Now I understand some of It's earlier orders, such as having me start my Majestic Countdown role with the CIA file on Mark Anderson. -- "God has told me to partially answer your question. You asked about curing disease, but that's focusing on a minor benefit. Increasing people's IQ would've PROFOUNDLY changed humanity. You would have solved problems easier, advanced quicker, made fewer mistakes, and had far better quality of lives than you're managing now. -- "I know you can't appreciate the difference that much more IQ makes, so I'll put it this way. The difference between human and chimpanzee IQs is half of the difference between you and what the improved humans would've had. In a few decades, New Humans would've looked back on your current society, way of life, achievements, and everything else that you've got now, and they'd think that you might as well have been walking around naked in a forest picking fruit and scratching for bugs. -- "You had a great prize in your hands, but your stupidity and immorality destroyed it. In Los Angeles I said that immoral societies destroy themselves. Losing Mark Anderson is a perfect example of that. Within a few decades, every problem that this humanity can currently imagine would've been solved, but now they're going to be major challenges to your survival, several of which could wipe you out or set your civilization back for hundreds of years. You're a very stupid species sometimes." "But you can resurrect him, can't you? You said you don't need a body?" "It's tricky without a body, but you're right that God through me could resurrect Mark Anderson." I had planned to make this specific point in my next meeting with Jonathon, but this press conference was a better and easier time to do it, so I carried straight on with, "There needs to be a volunteer donor, for example. Someone willing to give up their body for the resurrectee." "Would you explain that some more please?" #3: "If you want. The resurrected person needs a body. If his or her corpse isn't available, or is too badly damaged, then God has told me that It will require someone else to volunteer to be a body donor. God - through me - will take the donor's soul out of their body and put the resurrectee's soul in, then I'll change the body's DNA to start the process of the body reforming itself into that of the resurrectee's, which will take a few months. Exactly how long will depend on how much difference there is between the donor's and resurrectee's bodies. Different ages, heights, weights, genders, etc., will affect the speed of that process. As I said, it's trickier than having a corpse readily to hand, but God doesn't want to restrict the possible candidates to only those people." I'd said the process would take months because I needed the first two weeks to get from the angel's body to close enough to Ron's to not be suspected of being the angel. I could hide my body's current shape from my gardening staff by wearing shapeless clothes, but we'd have to prevent the press from seeing my body for the first two weeks after the so-called resurrection because they'd want close looks of the transformation process. After I'd speedily become sufficiently Ron-like, I'd say, "I feel psychologically ready to let you see my body now." They'd get regular chances (every morning say), to document my SLOW transformation from Ron to Mark. Going slowly was also a good idea in case I ever needed to do some quick changes in the future. No one would know that I could do that. #19: #3: I said, "You're not as surprised as I expected, so I suspect you've missed the key point. The donor must be alive at the time of the resurrection." "Huh? But what happens to the donor?" "The donor's body has its DNA changed to that of the resurrectee. The donor's soul, which means their mind too, are removed by God to make room for the resurrectee's soul and mind." "You're going to KILL the donor!" "God's not going to kill the donor. The body will remain alive obviously, because killing it would defeat the purpose of the resurrection. The donor's soul and mind will be removed. That's 'removed', not 'killed'. God will be taking them." "What will He do with them?" "God's not a 'He'. What IT will do with them is the same as what It does with all of humanity's souls, which is not for you to know." The reporters, and even the remaining cameraman, got even more agitated than I'd expected, and the discussion turned chaotic for a while. In no particular order, because they were often mixed up, the following points got discussed. ^ "You're STEALING a soul!" I replied, "If one of these types of resurrections occurs, then it'll be the soul of a VOLUNTEER, so a gift rather than stealing. God will be returning the soul of the resurrectee so the net result will be no change in the number of souls anywhere. Billions of souls have left their Earthly bodies since we've been talking, and you haven't made a fuss about any of those." "Huh? Billions? But there aren't that many people alive." "First, yes there are. Second, not only humans have souls. You're just the only species arrogant enough to believe you're unique that way." ^ "Why doesn't God create a new body for the resurrectee?" "It told me It wants to do the resurrection the way I described. I didn't ask for It's reasons and I won't do so just to satisfy your curiosity." "You've asked God questions before. We saw you ask about Mark Anderson." "Asking about Mark Anderson was to obtain information I didn't have and that I could make use of. I don't need to question God about something It has already decided and described to me. Your little finger has got more chance of arguing back with you when you tell it to bend, than I have in questioning God's instructions. I'm an instrument of God's Will, and It's Will is clear." Reporters never take "No comment" for an answer, so they argued some more. I just stood there silently until someone asked a question on a different topic. ^ "Some of our readers will think this is a trick for you to get someone's soul?" "Your mythology about the Devil buying souls is childish nonsense. First, you can't sell your souls. If I asked any of you to give me your soul, or to try to stop me taking it, or just to show it to me, none of you could do any of those. You have no control over your souls. You don't even know what a soul is. How can you sell something you have no control over? -- "Second, God can take your souls if It wants. They all go to God when you die, but It could take them earlier if It wanted. It has total control over your lives, deaths and souls. -- "Third, it would only take me a few seconds to obtain many millions of dollars' worth of gold and jewelry. You're such an avaricious species that I'd have no trouble finding people willing to sell their souls for that much money, if there was such a thing as selling souls, which there isn't. -- "Fourth, the Devil doesn't exist. That's religious claptrap invented to keep commonfolk obeying the orders of their religious leaders who use fear to manipulate people. There's nothing fundamentally different between humans and other species. All animal species have brains, minds, souls, bodies, and various physical and mental abilities. There are some things humans do better than other animals, and there are some things other species do better than humans. You humans aren't as distinct and important as you think you are, and you CERTAINLY don't have a mythological boogeyman running around fixated on your souls as if they were somehow special. That's as absurd as imagining God sits on a cloud strumming a harp all day long. -- "Stop being superstitious savages, and try to pretend to be well-educated, enlightened, 21st century men and women." They REALLY preferred the "superstitious savages" role, especially the "superstitious" half of it. They were obviously highly uncomfortable with the idea of souls being moved around, and deeply suspicious of it. They were pathetic. #14: #22: We agreed on what to say, so I exclaimed with exasperation, "Good grief, you're pathetic! The WHOLE point of my resurrecting someone was to prove that I'm a divine being operating on God's behalf. Now you're upsetting yourself with superstitious, thoughtless fear that I'm the Devil. Make up your primitive minds! God is going to take the donor's soul. If you can't trust God with a soul, who can you trust! -- "It occurs to me that your attitude is a very good example of what Jonathon Winters would call a 'soft criterion'. Once Jonathon's short list is published and volunteers are called for where necessary, the only people who'll volunteer are the sensible ones who use their brains to think with, rather than run around in circles spouting fearful religious claptrap. There's a good chance that some of the possible resurrectees won't know any altruistic sensible people, which will eliminate them from the list quite nicely. It'll be interesting to see how much damage your species' superstitious stupidity does to some candidates' chances. Next topic please." They didn't want to leave this topic, which gave me the opportunity to add another thought, "I would never TAKE someone's soul from them; that'd be very immoral. If a volunteer wishes me to do so, so their loved one's resurrection can go ahead, it would be immoral of YOU, or anyone else, to stand in the way of their gift. You have NO moral control over someone else's soul! Anyone who thinks they do is an immoral, arrogant fool. I'd like to say 'they'll go to Hell for it, ' only there is no such place. There are times I regret that." ^ Eventually I got another sensible question out of them, "Does the volunteer have to be a loved one of the candidate?" "God wants them to have some connection. I don't want mental hospitals full of unstable people volunteering to be donors for every candidate. Nor am I going to provide 'Suicide by Angel'. When Jonathon's final list is published - twenty or so names - his organization will call for volunteer body donors for the people on that list whose body is unavailable. Every volunteer will have to include an explanation of their connection to the candidate and their reasons for volunteering. In the interests of saving time, that will have to be done by email or couriered letters as I'll only be allowing 24 hours for that process because I'm running short of time. -- "If I choose a resurrectee who needs a donor body, I'll read their volunteers' letters to review their reasons and connections, then I'll interview those of them I feel pass those criteria. It'll be easy for me to determine the truthfulness of their gift. If a potential resurrectee doesn't have a usable body and no worthy volunteers, then I'll pick another candidate and repeat the process until I find a candidate who meets all the requirements. -- "As much as it would amuse me to have several candidates miss out because they were too suspicious, and their friends and loved ones were likewise, I doubt that'll happen. I hope Jonathon's team will identify people who are truly worthy, and such people tend to attract loyal, high quality, friends." ^ They wanted some more details on the actual resurrection process, so I shoveled some more bullshit: "If there's a usable corpse, God will simply heal its damage, return the soul and mind, then make it live again. It'll take only a few seconds and will make for some interesting TV, I imagine. -- "If the final candidate needs a volunteer, then the process will take much longer. Removing the donor's soul and mind and inserting the resurrectee's will only take a second. The only thing you'll see on camera is a confused look on the body's face. Mentally and emotionally the resurrectee will be back; just in a different body. -- "God will be increasing my transformational powers, so I'll be able to change the body's DNA much faster than I could change water into wine, so that won't take long either. You should know that your bodies are constantly renewing their cells. Some cells much faster than others, but God will be changing that process to make the donor's body change into the resurrectee's. That'll take a few months, depending on how different they are. -- "That process will be too slow to be exciting TV, and whether it makes TV at all will depend on the wishes of the resurrectee..." They didn't like the sound of that! They protested. "Don't be immoral! OF COURSE it's the person's choice. It's their body for goodness sake! I'm sure you'll have nothing to worry about: if you treat the families on Jonathon's final list with respect and honor, they'll be happy to advise their newly returned loved one to cooperate with the media." They weren't so sure. ^ "Will the resurrectee remember what it was like to be dead? What the Other Side was like?" "I'm not going to discuss memories until the resurrectee is chosen." "Why not?" "Because there are too many possible answers. Everyone's lives and deaths were very different, and talking about memories is too simplistic. There's the soul, mind, memories, subconscious assumptions, and even some hardwiring built into the brain. All those interact with each other, resulting in many possible answers to your question. I'll wait until we all know who I'm talking about before I answer." I had my answer ready, but now wasn't the time to give it. They asked more questions about memories, which I stood silently through until they got the hint to change the subject. ^ "Does the volunteer have to be the same gender?" "I've already said that how long the change takes depends on how similar the bodies are, and I gave different genders as an example of one of the reasons that could slow the process down." "So one can be male and the other female?" "Do you have any more repetitious questions for me, or shall we stop wasting time?" "Ahh, what about race?" "What about race?" "Can they be different races?" "Good grief. I'm changing their DNA! What do you think race is?" "Ahh, I thought you might want to explain to our audience." "I'm not going to spend my time on Earth teaching remedial biology." I was already adopting a somewhat pissed off tone of voice. I'd said all I wanted to say, so I was pretending to run out of patience, "Enough of this time-wasting. I'll finish by reminding you of something that your species seems to keep forgetting: that people are responsible for the consequences of their actions." "What do you mean?" "I told you when we were talking about Elvis that you can't know all the future consequences of your actions, but that good judgment could help with that. I'm not in a mood to spell out the possible consequences of humanity's actions now. You'll find out some of the consequences for yourselves; others you're too self-centered to ever notice. This interview is over." I took off, taking the naughty cameraman's wallet with me as I went to avoid seeming forgetful and fallible, even though I was the latter as the interview hadn't gone as well as I'd planned. I wasn't sure why it hadn't flowed better. Maybe starting with some anti-Elvis sentiments had got them all in the wrong mood, or maybe the fault had been my lack of experience at this sort of stuff. In any event, even though it felt clumsy, I thought I'd got my main points across well enough. As I was leaving, I lowered the reporter gently to the ground. The cameraman having seen that, so being somewhat prepared, wasn't too badly hurt when I dumped him by canceling the NP-points holding him. There were a few yells from the other reporters, "Wait! How do we get back?", and things like that. I did what I most enjoy doing with reporters, other than stripping the pretty female ones naked: I ignored them. It'd take a fair while for the reporters to get to a phone, so the military wouldn't get a chance to get on my tail. Leaving so quickly also saved me from having to invent any more bullshit for their stupid questions. They must've been stupid reporters, because they all argued in favor of my resurrecting Elvis. I guess being pro-Elvis is obligatory for anyone seeking to be popular with the public in Memphis, but I still considered arguing with me about it an indication of excessive stupidity. Unfortunately, I hadn't gotten around to making a pro-meat comment to overcome the damage that the Tree-Huggers and my crap about all life having souls was doing to the meat industry. I'd better do it next time, because the meat industry was bleeding. They're one of my favorite industries. Obviously not loved as much as the Australian Bikini Manufacturers Industry, but still well thought of. The ABMI would be hard to catch up with, especially with Donna's less than subtle methods of trying to tempt me into an extra session with her. Very enjoyable methods they were too, although she didn't get any extra sessions, only my appreciation. I headed home quickly, shredding and dumping the cameraman's wallet and its contents in a lake as I passed. ^ I checked out the house with a sight blob as I neared it. Mom was on the phone. Considering how late it was, that was most likely because the story had gotten out. I entered the house and went straight for Mom. She was talking about Mark's intelligence, so I guessed the reporters must've gotten on the air before I got out of it. I wrote Mom a note about resurrection volunteers, but judging by her nods and thumbs-up, I think she'd worked it out already. We'd discussed that part of my plan previously, but not in full detail as no one had expected me to make it public tonight. Mom seemed to have adapted though. The others were in the living room. I was hugged fiercely and greeted as I always am upon returning from a "dangerous mission", even though the greatest danger I'd been in was in tearing my hair out over some of the reporters' questions. "Do you want us to send the emails, darling?" asked Julia. She was being very subdued these days, still very contrite over getting too carried away decorating to notice her husband's body changing. Vanessa and Prof hadn't been kind to her either. "Yes thanks. What would seem most natural is for the people who usually stay up late to do it tonight, the others do it in the morning." We discussed what the emails should say, then those that should started typing them up and sending them. ^ [To jump ahead a little, by next morning's breakfast time, all the Andersons, Williamses and Ava had sent emails to Jonathon's organization volunteering to be Mark's donor. We were jumping the gun as the angel had said the timing for volunteers was after the soft list was published, but we wanted to establish how eager we were, and how worthy Mark Anderson was as a candidate. Not just because he could improve humanity incredibly, as described in Memphis, but also because his family and friends loved him so much. As described by the angel, the emails had to cover two issues. The connection aspect was easy, as everyone was either immediate family or had lived in the same house. The reasons varied. Prof and Vanessa said they were old and thought their lives would be far better dedicated to bringing Mark back than giving themselves a few more years. Julia and Ava were my girlfriends who loved me in their own, highly committed, unselfish ways. My sisters had joyful reasons based on what a great brother I'd been for them. Mom and Dad because parents sacrifice for their children, especially when their child is as worthy of such sacrifice as Mark is. You get the idea: just lots of the usual stereotypical stuff. None of them were going to be chosen, so it was just PR crap. Midmorning the next day, Ron sent his email in. I'd been thinking about it from time to time, and we all worked on it, so it came across very well. At its core, there were really only two points, "I never met Mark, but every day I see the effect he had on his family, the Williamses, Ava and others. The love they have for Mark is greater than I've ever seen in any family..." The other point was, "The Andersons and Williamses welcomed me into their family with incredible generosity. I arrived in Corvallis a penniless, Black, ex-gang member with several criminal convictions. They opened up their hearts to me, trusted me, encouraged me, let me date their daughter Carol, included me in their settlement so I got millions of dollars I did nothing to deserve..." The punchline being: "I already owe them more than I'll ever be able to repay. The last year has been the most wonderful time of my life. I've received more love and had more fun than I expected to receive in all of my life. If I died tomorrow, I would die truly happy and satisfied. I have been thinking about this ever since I saw the angel on TV last night. There is nothing I want to do more than give my life as a gift to the people I live with, so they can have their son, brother, lover and friend back. It ended with a request: "Please don't make my request public unless I'm chosen. I don't want to risk anyone here thinking I'm dissatisfied with my life in any way, or that I'm trying to make myself look good, or any other reason. I also don't want to upset Carol..." It was just more crap to make Ron come across as selfless and caring. It would end up being publicized, and it'd reflect well on all of us, and would help many people believe that the angel had chosen the right candidate and volunteer.] ^ It turned out the reporters hadn't beaten me by much. They'd already rushed to present the main points about the resurrection needing a volunteer, and the lesser point about the angel confirming that Mark was a miracle, but various stations were going through the tapes more methodically, so I was able to watch the story unfold. My comments about Elvis and the USS Homer Simpson didn't get much airtime or comment (except on Memphis stations, I was sure). My punishing the cameraman for lying to me got a lot more play. Most commentators agreeing that the cameraman had been stupid to hide the cellphone and lie about it. People COULD have said: "It was stupid to try to fool the angel and lie to him. He catches everybody who does that." "It's wrong to disobey or lie to the angel." "It's wrong to lie." I'd like to think that the third option was pushed, but it was never mentioned. Most commentators advanced the first reason, with some of them suggesting the second. Apparently lying is not generally perceived as a bad thing. Not a single person suggested it was only acceptable when seducing girls with big tits. My destruction of the guy's wedding ring had given the impression I wanted it to, "The angel takes dishonesty personally. Anyone would be a fool to lie to him." A very easy comment to make in a studio. I doubted my actions, or the talking-heads' comments, would make any significant difference to how often people lied to me. Certainly not to the important liars, who are professionals at it. I was making an issue out of it just to give myself the right sort of reputation. The angel's revelations that Mark Anderson's body would have provided humanity with incredible advances had the feathers flying. I was happy to see that although my truthfulness and possibly being the Devil were raised as issues, most commentators said they believed I was what I claimed to be, and believed that Mark Anderson had been as the angel had said. The Government in general, and CIA in specific, came in for a considerable amount of abuse. There was one comment that I thought was impressively stupid. A commentator quipped, "We got off lightly with the settlement amount then." He'd just lost a shot at immortality and was happy at how little money it'd cost him. As such programs always do, they did their, "Now we cross live" to a strident religious ignoramus who was foaming at the mouth about something or other, in this case, it was me being the Devil intending to steal everyone's souls. The reporter deliberately invited, "What do you think of the angel's saying the Devil doesn't exist?", to drive the preacher into even greater paroxysms of religious denunciation. TV loves confrontation, and will feed it to help it grow. The soul-swapping process clearly had some ordinary people worried that I might be the Devil, but they mostly swallowed my counter-reasons. They would've preferred not to have to swallow them, but they did. I was impressed by how much crap I'd gotten so many people to believe. The WHOLE masquerade was accepted by far more people than not, and most of those that objected to it, still accepted some of it, such as thinking that I was supernatural but a fallen angel rather than a good one. A couple of times, someone raised the issue that the angel might have a large agenda that no one was seeing. "Like what?" asked the commentator. The original speculator would say, "I don't know." "Hmm." They'd think about it for maybe a whole second, then change the topic. No doubt the military and Government were thinking about it a great deal more though. In terms of having an agenda, maybe the soul swap was disturbing people so much because it was the only thing I'd tried to get out of my visit. Maybe I should've asked for a cubic mile of pure gold first. #4: #7: #18: #23: #4: As you can tell, I was feeling some relief that the, "He's the DEVIL after our SOULS!" cry wasn't catching on as much as the reporters had led me to fear. Another thing that wasn't catching on was that people didn't really understand what greatly increased IQ implied for humanity. They could say something like, "We could cure cancer," because they knew what that meant, but all they were doing was imagining our current society with no cancer. They also had a shopping list of other individual changes, such as a cheap replacement for oil, no global warming, the end to world hunger, etc. Almost no one - of those who appeared on TV anyway - was capable of realizing the fundamental changes to human society that would result from everyone gaining 120 IQ points. It'd transform humanity unbelievably. Give it a few decades to take effect and human society would be unrecognizable. Some experts understood that, and did their best to convey it, and some of them did a pretty good job. It was irrelevant, of course. I'd deliberately chosen to highlight IQ in my Memphis interview because a lot of people wouldn't understand the implications of it. My answer wouldn't seem like a con job because I wasn't selling the most attractive aspect. Smart people would grasp its significance, but that didn't matter much. My plan didn't require that people understand it well; just to know that something fantastically great could have happened. I had to balance making resurrecting Mark highly attractive to ensure he got onto the list and that the angel's choosing him was seen as a good thing, but not to make Mark so attractive that scientists would want to kidnap him for experimental purposes after he returned. Part of how I was doing that balancing was to sell IQ rather than health, because I didn't want people to get too excited. But the main balancing mechanism was time dependent. My interview's closing reminder about people being responsible for the consequences of their actions was a hook to hang a future explanation on: for why mad scientists needn't bother trying to get anything miraculous from Mark's living body. That was a major threat that I had to negate. Mom had given a couple of phone interviews, which was more than enough because even the first one repeated its own questions. After the second, Mom had diverted the phones so our staff would answer and take messages. [After the mail is checked in the mailroom, it's delivered appropriately: to each of us individually, to the business people we had working for us in the Office, their private letters to our resident staff, etc. The majority of letters are individuals and organizations wanting money. One of the offices in our Office is occupied by two full-time women who answer those. There's also a switchboard in their room to which we can divert our landlines or any of our cellphones. When that happens, to their job gets added being telephonists, passing calls through, taking messages or just saying "No" and hanging up. If we divert our phones outside of the working hours of these two ladies, a security person or persons (depending on how busy the phones are) mans the switchboard.] Mom's interview came up on the TV, played with a stock photo of her. There were the usual highly intelligent questions. My favorite was, "Do you hope the angel picks your son [to resurrect]?" How can reporters care so little about looking stunningly stupid by asking such asinine questions? Both interviewers asked her about the volunteering issue, and Mom's answer was a good one, "I grew him in my body eighteen years ago, and I wouldn't hesitate to offer to grow him in my body again." The media love that sort of slightly scandalous, quirky, but still innocent and loving comment. It was short too, so they could plug it repeatedly. Mom added the usual parental sacrifice points, added how much his sisters loved and missed him: "Mark had better relationships with his sisters than any other siblings I've ever heard of. They were each other's best friends and had a lot of time and caring for each other. Other parents of teenagers were always complimenting Steven and me for raising such a loving family, but it was actually Mark that made it happen." Then she segued into emphasizing how unique, special and important Mark had been. The interviewers asked Mom questions about trusting the angel, her losing her soul, being fearful, etc. "The only thing I'm fearful of is the angel not selecting Mark. The angel is obviously trustworthy. He's never done a single evil thing, only punished people who've misbehaved in some way. If people treat the angel properly he treats them very well back. It's a pity there aren't angels on the Earth all the time because I'm sure they'd stop a lot of the bad things that happen. Look at how many of our politicians have been exposed as immoral and criminal by Majestic Countdown." The only other question of significance was asked by both interviewers, "Mark would be a minor, so would you and your husband consent to Mark's resurrection being filmed?" I wanted plenty of filming because it'd be very convincing that I was Ron originally, and that Mark had grown out of Ron. That'd prove - by normal standards - that Mark and Ron weren't the same person, so that we weren't pulling a substitution trick. I'd discussed this with the parents in reasonable detail because there was a major problem with Ron's body currently being exactly the same as the angel's. Mom answered the way we'd discussed, "I think it would be WONDERFUL to have something so miraculous filmed!" thereby earning us the enthusiastic support of the TV networks. Mom continued, "Hmmm. We'd have to be careful of it being too traumatic for Mark. If we were lucky enough to be picked, then I'd like to talk with the angel about it first, but I guess there'd be nothing wrong with having reporters and cameras on the other side of a window to start with. When Mark felt comfortable about talking to them, they could come into the room to interview him, but that'll depend on Mark's agreeing. Until then, whichever one of Steven and I are still alive would insist you stayed on the other side of a window. We'd make sure you got a good view of the angel bringing Mark's soul back too." Mom's last comment diverted the reporters nicely. There was no need to return to the topic because they'd received confirmation of what they wanted. We'll be making damned sure the reporters do NOT get a good view of the angel bringing Mark's soul back, as I'd find it very hard to be in bed as Ron while standing above him as the angel, so the angel will be overriding Mom on how the resurrection act itself will be done, after which the angel will leave the Earth. Thereafter Ron will be in bed and covered with a bulky duvet so no one could see his body shape; only from his chin up. We'll be very cautious of having any reporters or cameramen in the room, because one of them might try to pull the bedclothes down. Proximity, EKP, NP and Dad will prevent that happening, and maybe we'll nail the duvet to the bed's base to be extra sure. One visitor at a time will be allowed into my room to avoid the setup looking like a fake. We'll stall the reporters and restrict them to short-term daily visits for the couple of weeks it'll take me to get my body far enough away from the angel's shape. After the two weeks, we'll open up considerably, giving the reporters and cameras much greater access to me. There was nothing in either of Mom's current interviews that had any factual content. Mom just had to provide the human drama crap that the media loves above all else, and she did it very well. Fortunately Mom has a great deal more patience than me, because I would've struggled to avoid giving smart-ass answers to some of their inane questions. The angel's ending the interview so precipitously was also commented on. Everyone agreed that the angel had a short temper, and that it was a bad idea to rile him. I was amused by one talking-head saying to another, "Who would've thought a month ago, Ken, that we would've been knowledgeably talking about the psychology of angels?" "Yes," agreed Ken, "the world has changed. It's an amazing time we live in, Tom. We're truly honored to be reporting on Archangel Michael's return." "And the resurrection, Ken." "Absolutely. I was just about to say that. The world is witnessing something amazing. So stay tuned to CBS and we'll be right back after these important messages." Despite their saying it had, the world hadn't changed. If Archangel Michael never reappeared - and it was getting close to that final decision - almost everybody would quickly revert to business as usual. Some people would be agitated and there might even be a few changes, like maybe the Catholic Church withdrawing its disapproval of condoms or someone starting a Church of Archangel Michael - the latter being more likely than the former - but nothing fundamental would change. All I'd done is blow some hot air, and the only evidence of my existence was a few aircraft wrecks and some videotapes. People's day-to-day concerns would soon dominate their attention. That's what I was hoping for anyway, as I wanted Mark's resurrection to be a short-lived issue. The sooner everyone else stopped being interested in it, the better. Archangel Michael would do what he could to help with that. ------- Chapter 343: Introducing a Guardian Angel Monday, April 23 to Thursday, April 26, 2007 Over the next few days, there was much media discussion about whether Mark Anderson should be on the list, and I was very pleased to see that most people agreed that I should be. I wasn't so silly as to think it was because I was a wonderful person. The possibility of learning how to make everyone super-healthy, the huge taxpayer bribe, and the possibility of gaining 120 IQ points were the main reasons, in that order. Plus, as one person said, "They can add Mark Anderson to the list, making it twenty one long. The angel was flexible, so adding Mark doesn't bump anyone off." I was reasonably sure Jonathon would ensure Mark Anderson made it to the final twenty. Jonathon was clearly taking my advice to look at my videotapes carefully, so he'd realize that Archangel Michael had an interest in Mark Anderson, especially after God had taken so long to tell the angel about Mark during the Memphis interview. Not quite as important as my getting resurrected, but Jonathon had also taken my advice to have a "Hot Date". Judging by his twice-daily press conferences, he'd been quite flustered about the job initially, but once the work stated flowing smoothly, he'd gained confidence enough to get himself a hot date. He hadn't even needed to ask for volunteers during one of his media sessions, so I'm guessing that he was getting unsolicited offers. However he got his date, she was HOT! They went to a show, dinner, then back to her place (she was very wealthy, with a penthouse apartment). He didn't emerge until the next morning, a fact that was very widely reported. Many religious people clearly wanted to get highly irate that a man with an important job direct from God would even have sexual urges, let alone act on them. But, of course, Archangel Michael had told him not only to have a date, but to have a hot one. Many religious people took that as definitive proof that Archangel Michael was actually the Devil. It was quite funny, and even Jonathon was smiling, although his happiness might have been caused by something else. On Monday afternoon, stories started emerging from all over the country of investigators obtaining information on people who'd made it onto the hard list. Jonathon's investigators had asked people to keep it quiet, so only half of them were blabbing to the media. Or maybe they were bragging to their neighbors or just expressing their joy. There was even one family that took pride in going on TV and stating that they refused to have anything to do with the Devil's trick resurrection. The comments made about that family, whether supportive or condemning, were very funny. People immediately demanded to know whether their dearly departed loved ones had made it onto that list. We wanted to know too, because no investigator had come to our home yet. In his Monday evening press conference, a well-dressed Jonathon - he was dressing better these days, hopefully on the Government's or his network's dime - announced, "We'll be releasing the hard list on Wednesday evening, to give our investigators the best opportunity to get accurate information on those people." Speaking for myself, I had no trouble imagining that people weren't happy with that. We wanted to know NOW! Preferably in time to complain loudly if the name we were looking for wasn't on the list. We had until Wednesday, so we let Monday night go past without doing anything, other than worrying. Jonathon had said that the hard list names would be investigated in chronological order of death. I'd died just over a year ago, so I should be investigated soon, but not immediately. He'd also said they'd stop when they reached a thousand people who passed the soft criteria. If the hard list had a number of names on it less than 7,000 then my place in the chronological sequence would guarantee I got investigated, as they couldn't get 1,000 soft criteria passers before getting to me (the hard criteria included people who'd died in only the last seven years, so 1,000 per year). If there were more than 7,000 people on the hard list, then my probability of being investigated started reducing. If there were 70,000 names, say, then they could easily find 1,000 soft passers before they got to me. Tuesday early-morning, no investigator came knocking. Tuesday mid-morning, no investigator. Tuesday late-morning, no investigator. At lunchtime, Dad got a call at his work from one of the senior local cops, telling him, "I thought you'd like to know that Mark's on the resurrection list. State told me to keep it quiet, so please don't spread it around." Dad answered, "Thanks very much. We've all been worried sick about that." That was an exaggeration, because Mark Anderson was damned well going to be picked, one way or another. "How come no one has come to ask us questions?" "Your family's circumstances are well known. I could answer every question without getting out of my chair." "I don't suppose you know how well he scored?" "No idea. Mark is the only candidate we did this for, and all I did was answer the questions and send the result back." Dad was getting ahead of himself, as scoring didn't get done yet. This investigation was just to determine whether the person passed the soft criteria or not. There was no score, just a pass/fail result. I guessed the soft criteria had to be a good enough filter to eliminate at least 90% of the names on the list, so that implied at least 10,000 hard names, too many to thoroughly investigate. Once Jonathon's group had received 1,000 names that passed the soft criteria, they'd stop the current investigations, and send the investigators back to those 1,000 to obtain the considerable amount of additional information they needed to calculate the scores. [Actually, Jonathon later explained that they sent a pair of investigators to those 1,000, different from the investigator that'd first gone, to double-check the first result and to help minimize the effects of bias on this more critical stage.] Dad thanked our considerate cop, then spread the word to all of us. The information required to determine whether a person passed the soft criteria was - on average - fairly easily obtained, especially because it only took one wrong answer to terminate each investigation. To save time and expense, the questions were listed with the easiest to determine and hardest to pass questions at the top. Most of the eliminations only took two or three questions. The result of this was that it didn't take long for the 1,000 soft names to be determined. Actually slightly more than 1,000 made it to the soft list, as the hard list investigations took a while to shut down, and their results came back in somewhat random sequences, depending on how fast the investigators sent the results back. In any event, over 10,000 investigations didn't take as long as it might seem. It was a nationwide effort that spread the work out, and the Government had allocated a lot of staff to it. They thought that'd be cheaper than replacing a $5 billion aircraft carrier, or whatever else the damned angel would do to punish their being tardy. Every name on the hard list that made it onto the soft list had to be re-investigated to obtain the information for scoring them. There was no need to do those investigations in any particular order, so in some areas it only took a few hours before the first cycle of investigations had finished, their results sent to DC, the passes determined, and the much shorter list of soft names readied for sending back to the area for pairs of investigators to revisit. Jonathon's group delayed sending out the second round of assignments for a few hours to give more time for the first cycle to finish, so many investigators could start the second round simultaneously. The second round was going to take more time per candidate because every question had to be answered and there were far more questions. By timing it well, a large proportion of those 1,000 started at the same time, minimizing the chance of the questions getting publicized widely and distorting the results of the later investigations. Mom got called Tuesday evening, and asked if a couple of cops could come over now to do the soft list scoring investigation. Mom very happily agreed. Amusingly, but frustratingly, I wasn't allowed to attend, as it was for "Immediate family only" in our case. I had a feeling that claiming to be the dead person himself wouldn't be a good idea, so I had to wait in another room. I could spy on the cops' clipboards to see their questions and the answers they were recording, but that wasn't as satisfying as being in the room or hearing the discussion. #14: #20: #28: #20: [[We NEVER would have guessed where our next home would be.]] The cops were pretty relaxed, coffees were served, I saw laughter several times, and I saw the answers the cops were recording, but I had no idea what effect they'd had. Was my being a minor at the time of death a good thing or not? How many points would I get for it? Was having two sisters a good thing? On the resurrection score sheet I mean; it was certainly very good in other respects. The cops weren't recording our scores, just the raw data from which the scores would be calculated in DC. But even if they'd had the scoring system, that wouldn't have told me what my position was compared to other people. The questions themselves were many, varied, and mostly subjective. The cops sat apart from each other and both wrote their answers for every question on their own copy of the form, held on a clipboard. The interview being was videotaped too. Most of their subjective answers were on a 1-to-10 scale. That may have looked like the score but it was clear from the instructions printed on the forms' first page that it wasn't. They were merely the subjective answers that would then be scored. For example, two of the questions were "How missed is the candidate?", and "Is the surviving family able to financially support the candidate?" Both cops gave me "10" for both questions, but obviously the first questions was far more important and would be worth more points in the final score. As far as the second question is concerned, there'd be no practical difference between the cops answering anywhere from "6" to "10", so those answers would probably earn the same increase to the final score. The process seemed well designed, and the questions were focused on people who'd been in the dead person's close circle, especially immediate family. My scores were generally higher than the midpoint, but that also meant nothing because every other candidate's could have been too. The cops left after three hours, leaving the way clear for the rest of us to grill the Andersons on what their impressions had been. They knew even less than I did as they hadn't see what the cops had written down, but their overall impression was that they thought it'd gone well. The local cops certainly treat our family well, especially because their jobs are made easier and more enjoyable by having brand new everything. Most of them live in Benton County too, so got payments from the settlements. Hopefully they'd been biased. Mom and Dad explained that the cops had started the interview by warning the family to answer honestly. They'd be verifying some of the answers from other sources, and dishonest answers would incur a sizable penalty (other than a method of forcing honest answers, there was also a real justification for this. Jonathon's group wanted an honest resurrectee, so lies by the family should count against the score). In our case, the cops knew enough about us to judge the honesty of the answers on the spot. They'd do some perfunctory cross-checking, because they'd been told to, but it'd be a rubberstamp. As he'd promised, Jonathon's organization released the hard list on Wednesday afternoon, by which time the soft list had been determined and almost every scoring investigation completed. That the soft list was being worked through was already widely known, with many of the questions being revealed by those questioned. The rapid developments and approaching 'deadline' (either an appropriate or inappropriate word; I can't decide which) were spurring public interest to increasingly high levels. It was almost like the Survivor TV series, except with dead contestants playing in reverse. Tomorrow was the tenth day since the angel had told Jonathon, "In about ten days or so." They'd caught up the earlier lost time because nearly all the families were being extremely cooperative with the investigators. There were only a handful of families who hadn't been revisited for the scoring interviews, so few that if they didn't make themselves available tomorrow, then it'd be tough cheese for their possibly not-so-loved one. During the interview in which the hard list was given out, Jonathon had added, "I'll reveal the soft list tomorrow evening. By Friday evening we should have finished scoring everyone on it." Jonathon's team was ahead of that timeframe, but they were evidently cautious about letting the public know what was happening; probably because all the Government employees involved preferred it that way. "That will tell us who the top twenty four candidates are. That's the list I will be giving Archangel Michael. Unless he tells me not to, and provided we're ready in time, I'll give out the alphabetical list of the final twenty four on Friday evening. We won't give out anybody's scores. They won't be relevant because Archangel Michael will be making his own final choice." I'd seen the forms the cops had filled out when interviewing my family. It'd take only a few minutes to get the results into a computer, which could display the total score immediately. The news networks couldn't tell how far through the scoring interviews the investigators were, but I doubted it'd take until Friday evening to finish the job, so it was definitely time to email Jonathon. I'd grown concerned that I was leaving home shortly after it became dark then flying somewhere and doing something. If the Government analyzed the times at which I started doing things, they might notice a trend that the greater the distance from Corvallis, the later the events started, with Corvallis's sunset being the base time. They wouldn't be able to zero in on Corvallis, but they might be able to get the general area. To counter that possibility, I deliberately waited until 2am Thursday morning before I left home. During my trip to Boise, Idaho, I did some more thinking. For several days I'd been puzzling over how to contact Jonathon, and I hadn't come up with a method that pleased me. Having read how good some of our military's surveillance and weapon systems are, pleasing me was a very difficult hurdle to achieve. One of the major problems was that the Government almost certainly had Jonathon under heaps of surveillance now. If I contacted him, or even got within five hundred feet of him, the Government could acquire me. Three things worried me: If there were multiple surveillance systems in place, I might not be able to get rid of them faster than they could be replaced or reacquire me. I couldn't be sure I got rid of them all. Visual surveillance particularly worried me because I couldn't detect it happening. Some of the high-flying surveillance planes had superb visual tracking abilities, including infrared, which was difficult for me to get rid of. What else the Government might do besides surveil me. My day could be ruined by a cloud of knockout gas, a sniper's bullet, a hundred smokeless Mach two missiles, or several REALLY big missiles each with a 500-foot kill radius. There was a great deal of risk in meeting with Jonathon and there was no real need to. Jonathon could email me his candidates, then I could let him know my choice by emailing him back or by holding an impromptu press conference. All things considered - with how to keep my skin intact being especially well considered - I was seriously thinking of not meeting Jonathon again. There was no need to let the Government know that though, so I'd keep my options open. When I got to a good location outside of Boise, I set up a new email account, "Archangel.Mickey@gmail.com", as "Archangel.Michael@gmail.com" was already taken. I was curious by who and for why, but I had more important things to do. I used my new address to send Jonathon an email. I identified myself, gave the, "The cat sat in the hat" authenticator, then wrote the body of the email: Well done on working so rapidly, Jonathon Winters. You're getting close, so please reply with the current soft list in descending score sequence. If the scoring is incomplete when you reply, please indicate that and resend the list when it is complete. The first twenty four names of the fully scored soft list will be your final candidates. I have only one instruction for how you publicize any of your results: don't release your final list until 24 hours after you send it to me, to allow me time to investigate them unhindered. Please publicize the body of this email too. Starting from the end of my 24-hour investigation period, keep with you no more than a single briefcase with paper files about the final candidates. I will 'pick you up' when the time is right for us to review them. To the Federal employees who are impolitely reading this email: Attempts to surveil or intercept Jonathon or me while we are carrying out God's business will be punished in ways I consider appropriate. You should know that already, but I wish to make sure you have no excuse. Keep up the Good Work, Jonathon Archangel Michael. p.p. God. #15: #All: I hit "Send". I had borrowed an engineless old car and had sat in it, parked on a side road, while I wrote that email. Now I rolled the car down the road and for another fifty miles before I abandoned it and took to the sky. I was getting paranoid and was fearful that my email to Jonathon might've gotten a satellite immediately switched to searching my area with an infrared camera. Rolling away in the dead car wouldn't give out any infrared from the car or me so I'd be invisible to them in the infrared, and in the visible wavelengths too at this time of night. I'd be visible if I passed under a streetlight but I'd chosen a remote location that didn't have them. Even if momentarily illuminated, my image would still look fine unless visual and infrared were simultaneously compared, which I thought was so unlikely as to make this method of escape far better than driving away in a functioning car. Knowing that I absolutely had to shake any surveillance if I'd been acquired, I continued to take more than my usual level of precautions. I went west all the way to the ocean, submerged, then motored north for two hours before sneaking up a small river. After I was inland as far as possible, I surfaced and flew home with a thin water shield on top of me. To find and track me, a camera had to be zoomed in so far it covered only a small area. By going underwater and moving fifty miles away before I reappeared, reacquiring me should be damned near impossible, I hoped. I was also having some paranoid thoughts about the two weeks after the announcement that Mark had been chosen. Under my existing plan, the angel would've said that Mark was the choice, that Ron was the body donor, and that the resurrection had already been done (that had to be the case, because the angel and Ron couldn't be in the room at the same time). Archangel Michael would also say that a Guardian Angel had been assigned and had arrived. I'd already roughed out a description of how fixated on defending its assignment the Guardian Angel would be, and how anyone would be stupid to threaten Mark. Despite that warning, it was too easy to imagine the Government swooping in to grab hold of Ron/Mark. The swoopers would get themselves into a great deal of difficulty because of the Guardian Angel's defense, but if they got a look at my body the angel scam would be instantly uncovered. That would have VERY bad consequences! It would be much better to have the angel delay naming the resurrectee for two weeks to allow time for Archangel Michael's body to revert to Ron's. That way, if the Government did swoop in and overcome the Guardian Angel, what they'd capture would be a body that had Mark's DNA and mind, but looked like Ron, exactly consistent with my story. Before breakfast that morning, I had a Faraday-caged discussion with the families. I had no trouble convincing them that I should be more cautious. Prof in particular had been thinking along the same lines and had already decided that we needed to change the way we did the endgame. He was happy with my new suggestion. It was quite easy to reduce my exposure, as Archangel Michael's remaining jobs could be reduced to just two: Publicly explain a couple of minor details about the resurrection, and the major detail of the Guardian Angel. Pick the final winner, explain God's cunning logic behind why it is Mark, and include an explanation for the two-week delay. If I could insert a pro-meat industry comment in either of the two real jobs, that'd be yummy. Notice that performing the resurrection itself isn't one of the jobs. It will be a fictitious job that we'll pretend happened. The second task couldn't be done in public because by then I would've already had to change my body into Ron's shape. It could be done in public if the angel hid its body shape, which was not something it'd ever done before. Doing so might cause suspicions about bodies, while the angel simply sending an email explanation wouldn't create that suspicion because the angel uses emails a great deal. As Majestic Countdown it'd sent many dozens of them. In Jonathon's morning press conference, he produced the body of the email I'd sent him last night. I'd been slightly worried that it'd be intercepted and kept from him, so I was pleased to see that hadn't happened. Judging from the reporters' questions and the commentaries afterward, my email got a good reaction, but it was mostly because it helped fan the flames of the excitement about the upcoming resurrection. The commentators agreed among themselves that the Government would be foolish to go against the angel's wishes by surveilling Jonathon, because the angel didn't like it when people went against its wishes. The commentators did wonder why the angel objected to surveillance so strongly, but they didn't have any clue about that so they quickly moved on to something else. Jonathon mentioned that he had replied to the angel, so I spent all day itching to check that email address, including worried that the damned Government might've deleted the email. In the list of tasks the angel had to do, I left out contingencies like punishing the Government if they misbehaved. Hopefully there'd be none of that, but I'd do it if necessary. Another contingency was if Mark Anderson didn't make Jonathon's final list of candidates. That was the main reason I'd instructed Jonathon to wait 24 hours before going public with the list, to give me time to check my email and get him to fix his mistake if he left me off the list. I'd had a momentary thought of rewarding Jonathon by flying down to LA and taking as much money off every drug dealer and other criminal I could find, and giving it to him for a job well done, but doing that was too dangerous. The drug dealers didn't worry me in the slightest; it was the damned Government. ^ I arrived in Seattle, Washington about 11pm Thursday night. As much as I wanted to check my emails, the first job was a press conference because I'd have to flee the city after I logged into my emails. I arranged a press conference in much the same way as I had in Memphis, except I simply grabbed the first guy, holding his mouth shut until he reached the rooftop and saw me. After I got him calmed down, I then got him worried again by promising him that all sorts of bad things would happen to him if he mentioned anything about me while he called for a cameraman to come. I only needed one reporter this time because it wasn't going to be a Q&A session. I normally need several reporters for those to ensure that at least one of them asks a question I want, but this time I was just going to be making some statements so all I needed was someone to record them. When the cameraman was picked up, calmed down, and was performing his job, I started my little speech: "I have some statements to make. First, I'm running out of time on Earth and will be leaving soon. I've lived for billions of your years, but I'm still busy and run out of time. I have another task waiting for me that I need to get to work on. That means the resurrection will be done soon..." "When?" interrupted the reporter. One of the problems with wearing a full-face mask is that you can't glare at people to shut them up. It was a poor substitute for a glare, but I told him, "No questions until I finish speaking. As I was saying, the resurrection will be accomplished soon, and then I have to leave. God believes humans might mistreat the resurrectee, so I want to make it very clear that whoever I choose will merely be a lucky, deserving human. There won't be anything profoundly different about that person, so don't try to turn him or her into another Jesus Christ. He or she must be allowed to resume a life of his or her choosing. -- "To ensure that, God will be providing him or her with what I'll call a 'Guardian Angel'. I've mentioned before that I wasn't born. Angels are created by God to fulfill a variety of functions. There are several different types of angels. Some are like me and many are different. All angels get their powers from God. In many respects God works through us, although we also have freewill and can decide for ourselves what we'll do and how. God can alter our powers at will too. That's unusual because we're normally capable of performing our allotted tasks, but it does happen occasionally, such as for my resurrecting someone since that's not one of my normal powers. -- "I'm telling you this because God wishes me to warn you about Guardian Angels, otherwise you'll find out the hard way, and that wouldn't be good for you. Guardian Angels have one purpose and one purpose only: as the name implies, it is to guard. To enable them to perform that task capably, they're very different from me. -- "They do not use a body, whether a host like I have now or any other type of body. Doing so would split their attention between guarding their body and guarding their assignment. Having a body would make them vulnerable to weapons, which is a disadvantage that God doesn't want them to have. God has therefore created Guardian Angels as bodiless and invulnerable. There's absolutely nothing in humanity's arsenal that can affect a Guardian Angel. -- "They are single-minded. I don't mean simple-minded, because they're not; I mean they're focused. They don't exist to provide conversation, guidance, to give interviews, or any of the sorts of tasks that I perform for God. Nor are they in any way the servant of the person they're assigned to. Their only job is to guard, and they do that with endless patience and with great effect. If someone or something threatens their assignment, they remove the threat. They are working for God, so they rightfully consider that God's Will supersedes all other considerations. They're not strong believers in what you call due process, or giving suspects the right to an appeal, or of any of your other legal processes. There's an amusingly apt expression you sometimes use that talks about killing someone and letting God decide what to do with them. When the resurrectee's Guardian hears that expression it will laugh at its relevance. They won't kill unnecessarily, but they won't give a threat the benefit of the doubt when it's time to do what's necessary. -- "As well as being invulnerable to weapons, they're also considerably more physically powerful than I am. They have some of my powers but more so, and they have additional powers, especially in the physical domain. Plus God can always increase their abilities if It wishes to, of course. -- "They're a great deal more intelligent than humans, because intelligence makes them better guards. If someone rushes up to their assignment and gives that person a big hug, the Guardian will remain passive. If someone approaches with hostile intent, that person is unlikely to get time to wonder what hit them. In the unlikely event that a Guardian Angel is unsure whether its assignment is at risk or not, it'll take defensive measures while it determines the true situation, and then it'll act. -- "The bottom line is that anyone who threatens a Guardian Angel's assigned subject is going to suffer damage - possibly terminal damage if the Guardian deems that appropriate - but no one else has anything to worry about. God wishes my resurrectee to be protected and to live a long, enjoyable life. The Guardian is easily smart and powerful enough to ensure that. God does not do things by halves. -- "During this visit I have noticed that humanity is more arrogant than I have ever seen before. Time and again I have tried to teach you to treat me with respect, hoping you'd learn some humility as a species, but you have almost refused to learn. I suspect that if I stayed on Earth, some of you would continue to try to impose what you arrogantly think is your power over me. God and I both want to make VERY sure that you understand that if you try to do that with my resurrectee, then the Guardian Angel will act swiftly and decisively. I have been a pussycat by comparison. Many of my responses have been designed to humiliate the idiot du jour, or my punishment has been half-humorous, if only for my entertainment. Guardian Angels do have a sense of humor and they do like to enjoy their existences, but guarding their assigned subject is their single-minded focus. Don't expect them to be anything other than highly effective guards. -- "Hopefully this warning will minimize the number of casualties. I know there'll still be some idiots, but after hearing this warning anyone who goes after the resurrectee with hostile intent deserves whatever they get. Now you can ask questions?" The reporter was too overwhelmed to respond for a second or two, but he finally found his tongue. He verbally stumbled around, but he eventually came out with a question that allowed me to say, "No, it's not a killer, and certainly not an evil killer. It's called a 'Guardian Angel' because it's an ANGEL, which I think makes it a great guy, haha. It's a guard and it's an angel. Neither of those words have any evil connotation. If no one attempts to harm the resurrectee, then the Guardian will happily do nothing for year after year. You might even forget it exists. It's not going to get bored and decide to kill a few humans for the fun of it. It's an angel, so it's a very moral creature..." "How can it be moral! You said it'd kill people?" "Remember that all angels are instruments of God's Will. You just accused God of being immoral. Haha, relax! Just as well God's got a thick skin, or It could get It's panties in a twist from your insinuation." [Many religious people were far more incensed by my joke that God wore panties than my bluff that the angel might kill people.] -- "Yes, it is true that the Guardian will kill people who're foolish enough to try to cause harm its assignment. But you'd be foolish to think that's all there is to the situation. God is a great deal more perceptive, subtle and far thinking than that. God ALWAYS plays the long game, especially when It sets something in motion Itself. God will be sending the resurrectee a Guardian Angel with the capabilities and instructions that I described. God could have easily chosen to give the Guardian less aggressive instructions, which should tell you that there are cause-and-effect chains which have some very moral and interesting outcomes, or God wouldn't be doing things the way It is. -- "I think one of the reasons you're upset is because you're picturing the Guardian as something fearful. It's not. It'll be invisible nearly all the time unless the resurrectee is attacked..." "Invisible?" #14: "Of course. That makes it a better guard. It doesn't have a body remember, so what's there to be visible?" "But it can be visible sometimes right? What does it look like then?" "It might need to be visible sometimes, to intimidate or distract a possible attacker, for example. Normally Guardians form something simple. They don't see the need for anything complex because they're normally very direct creatures. As I said before, that's not because they're stupid, it's because their jobs are very direct. There might be weeks, months or years of invisible inactivity, and then it'll be visible for only a quarter of a second while it stops an attacker. There isn't much need for a Guardian to put much effort into its appearance." "How can a creature with no body move around, or make itself visible, or stop an attacker?" "It can do those three things very, very well because they all make it a better Guardian. It can move astonishingly quickly, which is another advantage to not having a body. It makes itself visible by controlling energy. Visibility is about light, and light is energy. Guardians have greater power over energy than I do. It can stop attackers in different ways, none of which need a body. When I lifted you up to this roof, I didn't use my body to do it. Guardians can do that considerably better than I can. -- "I'm sure the Guardian will show itself when it arrives and will give a demonstration of its powers. Its job is to prevent attacks on its assignment, so it'll want to prove it exists and to intimidate any would-be attackers out of doing so. Once you see it in action, your inability to imagine it won't matter." "It won't kill someone will it?" "It's an ANGEL! Have you ever seen me mistreat anyone who didn't misbehave in some way first?" "Ahh, no. Everyone agrees you only punish people who asked for it." "We angels have that in common. Guardian Angels are good, moral entities. They're an extension of God so they couldn't be anything else. No one has anything to fear from any angel, unless the person does or intends something wrong. For a Guardian Angel, 'wrong' is a very simple concept: an attempt to harm its assigned subject. -- "I should mention that 'harm' doesn't mean just physically. Causing mental or emotional harm qualifies just as much. Guardian angels are SMART; you should never forget that. The resurrectee could get involved in a highly emotional argument with other people and the Guardian won't intervene if there's no ill will involved. But if someone tries to harm a loved one of the assignment, then the Guardian will act to prevent it, because that would emotionally harm the assignment. "So it'll keep the whole family safe?" "It'll keep them VERY safe." "It's like having a guard dog then?" "Doesn't need food, doesn't need walks, and doesn't shed hair all over your couch. Never sleeps and there isn't a burglar in your world that could get past it." "They don't sleep?" "Would God create a Guard that needed to snooze on the job?" "They sound incredible." "Incredibly effective guards yes. They make terrible conversationalists though. Now that you've got me thinking about dogs, they'd be very good at fetching your slippers, in the same way that I fetched you up to this rooftop." The reason I was emphasizing the Guardians lack of conversation skills was so when it does something harshly effective (which it's certain to need to sooner or later), and the cops or Feds come calling, I - as Mark - can sadly admit that I'm unable to help the cops talk with the Guardian because it never has conversations with me. I could say, "I'm sure it understands us - it has to, to be able to judge threats - but it has never talked to me. You can talk to it if you want, but good luck on getting a reply." Whereupon the cops will probably say, "Ahh, where is it?" Their investigation is going to have insurmountable problems. Notice my emphasis on behaving morally. I learned that from Julia. Remember the Hot Tub Party? Julia had repeatedly claimed to be highly moral, and she'd tricked all the girls into believing it even though her only objective was to get me into the girls' panties. Now I was using the same trick to get into my own panties. I added, "I can see you've got the idea about the Guardian Angel now, so this'll be a good time to end the interview." #1: "WAIT! Who are you going to resurrect?" "a) I haven't picked anyone yet. b) When I do pick someone, I have to check out the situation with his or her body and possible volunteer to make sure resurrection is possible under the constraints God had decided on. c) Then I have to check that the person wants to be resurrected. d) Then I need to..." "What! How can you ask if the person want to be resurrected? Aren't they dead?" "It'd be very hard to resurrect them if they weren't. God would NEVER resurrect someone who didn't want to be resurrected. I would've thought that was obvious. In answer to your question about how, I thought that was fairly obvious too. God has to send the soul to me to put into the body. Before God sends the soul to me, God will ask it whether it wants to be resurrected or not. If not, God will tell me to pick someone else." "Can souls talk like that?" "Not really; I was simplifying. A person's soul, mind, memories, and some other things are mixed up. God won't really be 'talking' to the soul, as such, but It will know and understand the soul, so the end result will be like that. Another way of explaining it would be that a person's soul, mind and memories are all information, and even when the person dies, that information isn't lost. God will look at that information before deciding whether to send it to me or not. That's not right either, and I can't even say that the reality is somewhere between the two, because it's not. But the key point is that whoever I resurrect, God will make sure beforehand that the person desires it. It'd be very rude not to. -- "To continue what I was saying: d) Then I need to talk with the family about how they want to do the resurrection. I won't let my pick's family refuse consent because the resurrectee's wishes are more important than theirs, but I doubt that any of the candidates will have that problem. I'll listen to the family's requests otherwise. They might want privacy, or they might want to do it in the middle of a football stadium so everyone can see. -- "Then there are issues like the state of the body. It might take me some time to make it habitable. There are a few other issues too, so as you can tell, there are a few things to check before I go ahead with the deed itself. You can't just go around resurrecting people willy-nilly, you know? Haha. -- "Other than someone not wanting to be resurrected, which would just move me on to my next pick, none of the problems are insurmountable. I've got God on my side, and It's very good at overcoming problems. We just want to take it slowly and carefully, to make sure the emotional and physical needs of all concerned are taken care of properly. Think about it from the soul's point of view: It died, which is something that's normally traumatic, and now it's being put back, which is another traumatic event, especially if it's into someone else's body. Care and gentleness are required to make sure that the person is as comfortable as possible. The world may be in a hurry to see the resurrection happen, but it'll go as fast as God and I judge is best for the persons involved." #13: #14: I finished with, "I have to go now. Shut the camera off and..." "WAIT! When do you..." His question got shut off because I shut his mouth for him. I resumed, "Shut the camera off and I'll give you a lift down to the street. There will be no more questions." My last sentence had been spoken particularly firmly as I relaxed my grip on the reporter's mouth. I'd said everything I wanted to say, so it was time to end this. The reporter wisely chose to nod. A few seconds later the cameraman was ready, so I picked them both up and we floated over the edge of the building, then I paused. While they were floating with nothing underneath them except a long drop to a hard landing, I said firmly, "One more thing. There's an open burger joint a couple of blocks down the street. When I put you down on the street, you will walk to that diner, enter it and sit there for at least two full hours before you do ANYTHING that involves me in any way whatsoever. You won't call anyone, you won't tell anyone you've seen me, you won't tell anyone you have a great story. You won't hand your tape to anyone. If someone calls you, you won't tell them anything about what we've done. You will sit on your asses and waste two hours in the diner. -- "After that time, you may do anything you want, but if I find out that you shaved even thirty seconds off the two hours, then I will pick you up off the street, bring you up to exactly where your are now, and drop you. You know my attitude to people who cause me trouble, and I PROMISE you that I'll make good on my threat if you disobey me. Will you obey my command, or should I drop you now?" Both of them thought obeying me was the best option. They were quite insistent about it. "Make sure you do." I dropped us to the street, fast enough to give them a scare. I told them "Look at your watches now, add two hours exactly, and don't commit suicide by breaking your word." They looked at their watches VERY carefully, then I let them scuttle up the street. I wanted two hours so I could get home. It wasn't a big deal; it just seemed better to be tucked up in bed at home when the new press conference was aired, in case it caused some unexpected reactions. I walked quickly to the undercover garage where I'd hidden my black clothes, putting them on top of my A-man suit, then walking out of the garage and heading toward the water not far away. I had located a convenient computer before the interview, and had turned it on and checked that it had internet access. While I was walking, I used it to check Archangel Mickey's emails. There were three: One from Google with a subject of: "Welcome to Gmail." Since the entire armed forces of America could now be tearing toward me with every weapon in its arsenal, I decided to save time by skipping that email. I hoped the nice people in Google's email division would forgive me. Two from Jonathon, the first labeled "Preliminary Scored Soft List", the other labeled "Final Scored Soft List." I opened the "Final List". Not only was Mark Anderson in the top twenty four, he was in position 1 with 999,999 points with everyone else only having a few thousand. Jonathon had clearly gotten my hints. That saved me from the considerable complication of getting him to add Mark Anderson. I was getting more and more paranoid as my plan drew to a close, and was extremely happy to be able to do as little as possible. The fewer the number of flights I had to do, the better. I couldn't believe that I used to do them for fun! #11: #8: #30: #28: I'd taken what I'd thought were more precautions than I ever had before, because of my increasing paranoia. I usually take off from somewhere secluded within a mile or two of home, but this time I'd driven out of town to a secluded spot very near the river, where under the cover of trees I'd gone for a 'swim', submerged, motored away underwater, emerged in another place with a water shield to cover me while I flew to where my A-man suit was hidden, etc. In retrospect, my caution hadn't been as good as it could've been. I'd thoughtlessly assumed I didn't have to worry about extra surveillance starting until after the list became PUBLIC, but obviously the surveillance could start as soon as the list was created! In retrospect, that was GLARINGLY obvious! It was like a huge elephant right in front of me, but I hadn't seen it because I had been too busy thinking about other stuff and hadn't thought to question the assumption. The damned Government almost certainly had our home under observation well before I'd driven out, especially because Jonathon had put me right at the top of the list. Position number 24 would've been so much better! My score was obviously a fake score to ensure my presence on the list, but if anyone's home was going to get surveilled, it was going to be the Anderson home. Our legal dispute history with the Government and that top score guaranteed it. What I was scared of most were surveillance planes, because they had optical systems that were far too good for comfort. Our radar hadn't registered any planes earlier (I would've heard about it if there'd been one loitering in our area), and I hadn't noticed any strange transmissions from point sources high in the sky. None of that proved anything as the Government might've inserted some software into our radar that masked some planes, and the Government spy plane might've used a frequency which the air is full of all the time so it didn't get my attention. Plus I also couldn't detect satellites using cameras or guys sitting far enough away with night-vision binoculars. Hopefully, if our home had been under surveillance, none of the surveillers had followed me when I'd driven away. Cars come and go from our property at all hours because our security staff work three shifts, so I might've been missed. [A lot of security operations apparently run twelve-hour shifts. Paul had wanted eight-hour ones and his reasons had seemed perfectly valid to us.] I drive the Lexus SC430 these days (Ron had purchased it from Mark), but so do other people sometimes, especially Ava on sunny days. She has considerably upgraded her own car, but it's more sensible than the SC430 and she likes being 'un-sensible' sometimes. I hoped that I'd been unimportant enough for any surveillers to have ignored me when I left, or that I'd been missed for some other reason. There'd definitely been no one anywhere near me when I'd gone for my swim, as I'd used a max-sized radio blob to have a very good search of the area before I'd even got out of the car. On the other hand, the Government's knowing that I'd left home just before the angel gave an interview in Seattle was not good! If they did follow my car (maybe by satellite), they'd be wondering why on Earth I went for a swim so late, and they'd be wondering where I was now. Maybe I should steal some running clothes and shoes before I got back to Corvallis, so I could jog back to my car from several miles away, looking like I'd gone for a run after my swim. I'd seem weird but not too outlandish. If questioned, I could claim that volunteering to be Mark's donor had unsettled me greatly. Unfortunately, the Government tends to ask its questions after you've already been hauled into custody, rather than as a polite way of finding out whether you should be brought in or not. While I was still in range of using the computer, I memorized the entire list. I didn't recognize the other twenty three candidates, so famous people were out of luck. I checked the 8:45am "Preliminary" email. Mark Anderson had 999,999 points in that one too. So the Government had had at least twelve hours to do anything they wanted. Damn! I exited the browser, shut the computer down, and walked faster. I wanted to rush home to check everything was okay, except that rushing home could easily make things very not okay. I couldn't even call to ask how they were, because how did I manage to place a call from here when my car is all the way back there? Not to mention that here is where the angel was a minute ago. Damn. I'd better stick to my plan, except running shorts wouldn't be a good idea because of my elephant trunk of a cock. My life is getting overly complicated. ------- Chapter 344: The Easiest Way to Get Rich Friday, April 27, 2007 I thought of one idea while I was making like a submarine up the river: the angel said he'd research the candidate list, so it made sense for him to be in the vicinity of the hilltop house and talking to me ("me" being Ron in this case. I juggle so many hats it's sometimes hard to keep them straight). If the Government questions me when I get home, I could say, "I met the angel. He said not to tell you anything." Ideally (fingers crossed), the Feds would be so scared of the angel they'd apologize to me and let me go. If not - which I had to admit was by far the most likely - I'd repeat, "He said not to tell you anything" as often as necessary. Not the best of plans, but it might confuse them into forgetting to strip search me, ideally for about two or three weeks. Thinking of my cock, my expectation was that the angel should have no more appearances, so I started wishing VERY HARD that my body was back to Ron's shape. I allocated some of my minds to the job of using my proximity sense to guide those body-changing processes that I could consciously affect. If the angel needed to reappear for some reason, a day or two's changes wouldn't be apparent. It was a hell of a pity I couldn't change my body in just a few minutes. And while I'm wishing: teleportation, invulnerability, time travel and the ability to make girls' tits grow larger would be wonderful too. Unfortunately I just had to make the best of the abilities that I did have. It'd take too long to get all the way to my car underwater, so when I was about five miles away from my entry point, I emerged. I stayed just above the water in the middle of the channel, with a sheet of water on top of and beside me to block my infrared emissions and make visible light (with a light amplification device) just see water on water. It might look a little strange, but not as strange and dangerous as them seeing me flying along. With a max-sized infrared-sensing radio blob flying about fifty feet up in the air and two hundred feet ahead of me, I'd get enough warning of anyone on the riverbank so I could dive and submarine my way past them. I also had another radio blob immediately in front of me to steer by. There was no sign of out-of-place military transmissions or anything else alarming. It was a good night for a flight; my current definition of "good" meaning lots of drizzle and low clouds. When I got within five miles of my car, I submerged and motored toward it as fast as I could without making a wake on the surface. Making like a submarine in a river is much harder than in the big, wide ocean. River travel requires constant attention to what's immediately in front of me (which is often old trees that I need to quickly avoid), and it requires another blob above the water level so I can see where the main channel is, which way the river is turning, etc. I also wanted a third blob roaming around looking for any spies lurking in the area, but I had to stop to enable myself to do that. I wished I had more sight blobs. Even just one more would be VERY useful at such times. Every quarter mile or so, I stopped for a minute to have a particularly good search around me, especially toward my car, but I never saw anything of concern. One of the nice things about infrared is that it also shows wildlife easily. If there were any humans in the area, chances are that the wildlife would be gone, which meant their presence or absence provided me with a useful indication. I wouldn't rely on that, because a guy could've been lying still so long that the animals returned, but it was still reassuring to see a constant level of wildlife on both sides of the river. I approached without problem to within two hundred feet of my car, then searched the area VERY carefully. I'd parked next to the water in a small, secluded area, so anyone spying on my car had very few locations they could hide in. It didn't take me long to confirm that there was no one near it, and there weren't any unwelcome transmissions coming from my car either. I looked skyward as intently as I could, trying to see if there was any aerial observation going on. I couldn't see anything worrying; just lots of sky with the usual sources of EM beams. I couldn't risk simply getting out of the water and walking to my car, because there could be overhead observers and I was still wearing the A-man costume under my black clothes. I motored farther south, passing my car at a fairly slow speed to make sure I didn't leave a wake in the area most likely to be under observation. One of the scariest high-flying reconnaissance spy planes that I'd read about had three in-built zoom settings, the most detailed covered an area of about 4 square miles. If that was centered on my car, the observation would cover 1 mile in every direction. I was feeling a little paranoid, so I motored 2.5 miles south, found an area where there were trees which overhung the river nicely, and spent a couple of minutes searching the area while I undressed to remove the A-man suit and redressed in my black clothes. I dug a substantial hole in the riverbed, put my A-man suit in a Ziploc bag (I carry a couple in my black pants for situations like this). I put a stone inside the bag too, to make sure it'd never float to the surface, then I buried it under some particularly large rocks in the riverbed. I emerged from the river under the trees, made my way through them to the road, then jogged back toward my car. I wasn't wearing good jogging clothes, but they were reasonably good at covering my physical attributes, which was important. I kept a radio blob very actively searching around me as I jogged along, but I got to my car without discovering anyone or anything worrying. It was wonderfully anticlimactic, much to my relief. I gave the car a search, looking under its chassis, inside the engine compartment, under the driver's and passenger's seat, inside the ignition housing, inside the seatbelt socket, and everywhere else that I'd ever seen Hollywood put a bomb trigger. That only took a few seconds because sight blobs can move extremely quickly and through metal, and I'd practiced searching our cars several times before so knew what everything should look like. When I'd done my radar testing with Ava, I'd carried my cellphone and keys, so I was no longer afraid of doing that, but I'd been more cautious this time. I'd left my phone behind rather than have my cellphone carrier record the phone's movements. I'd hidden it and my keys up a tree. I retrieved them and unlocked my car from fifty feet away, without triggering even a small explosion. I continued to be cautious, but I never detected a single problem. I drove home slowly. My eyes were open, which meant I had only one radio blob to search with, so it was very busy with having to vigilantly search the sky for helicopters, the insides of the cars on the road around me for any Government agent types, and once I got within a couple of miles of home, the cars parked on the side of the road too. I even thought about checking the stormwater drains, but that was getting silly. My suspicion was aroused by the white panel van with a laundry service sign on the outside, but containing state-of-the-art electronic surveillance equipment and two guys who were watching video screens of my home and its front gate. It was parked one street off the one we take into town, but it had a good view of our front gate and a segment of the street we take into town. It had poor views of our homes because of intervening trees, but it did have partial lines of sight, especially to the Kids' House. The video screens proved we were being spied on visually. If the spying was audio as well, it would have to be invasive because our homes had random noise generators built into the window frames which continually vibrate the glass enough that it swamps the much smaller vibrations caused by people's voices inside the rooms. I checked the paperwork they had. There was a clipboard containing a form that had several entries on it, one of which was "2205. Out. Ron Fisher only. Lexus SC430, [the license plate of my car]." It was a log of the vehicular comings and goings for our property. The earliest entry I could see was 1645, but there were a few pages flipped over that I couldn't read. That didn't give me much of a clue about when the surveillance had started, as there's a shift change for our security team at 4pm, so possibly quite a lot of traffic around that time which might have filled up two or three pages. I had three questions: Why did they need a panel van full of fancy electronics to log cars going in and out of our driveway? A 10-year old kid on a skateboard could write that information down. Were they surveilling just our home, or every one of the twenty four resurrection candidates? What did we want to do with America now that we owned it? I'm exaggerating, but presuming the guys in the van are US Government employees, and assuming they don't have clear proof of a crime that they're legitimately investigating, then the Government was in breach of our last settlement agreement. That would make them immediately liable for the amount the jury awarded in our suit against the named defendants, namely $216 billion. That was probably worth waking my families up to discuss. #18: #14: #29: #1: That suggestion was hard to top - Australian girls have SUPERB bikini tops - so we concentrated our attention on the van. There were two sets of headphones plugged into a pair of similar looking electronic cabinets, but they were both hanging on hooks and the machines they were plugged into were turned off, so maybe there was no audio surveillance involved. The LCD screens were displaying video feeds, all amplified to daytime light levels. One each was: Zoomed in to a full frame of our front gate. A fairly wide shot showing the street leading up to our gate, the gate, and the driveway into our property. Showing the top of our hill, composed so the Adults' House and Kids' House were easily in the frame, obscured by quite a few trees. The framing also included a fair amount of the sky over our home too. The Office wasn't visible from the van. One screen had two images displayed on it, one in the top half of the screen, one in the bottom. They were up and down the street from the van itself, to allow the occupants to see any people approaching them. These pictures used wide-angle lenses which wrapped around the sides of the van, but I noticed they didn't wrap perfectly: they had a blind spot immediately to their right because the house they were parked in front of had some thick bushes which grew quite close to the side of the van. The pictures showed that the lenses were mounted on the roof, so by the time someone crawled out from under the property's bushes, they'd be so close to the van that they'd be under the field of view of the camera. There were no windows in the body of the van. By the time I'd finished finding out the above information, especially checking that the blind spot really was blind, my car had driven into the field of view of the camera which showed the street up to our gates. During the drive to the gate, I wondered whether our phones were tapped, because I imagined that we might want to get advice from our very astute DC lawyer. I thought about calling my home to see if any of the van's equipment gave that information away, but I didn't want to place a call when they could see that I was virtually at home already. I could find out later because although the van was about 1,000 feet from our gate, it was only about 350 feet from the closest part of our wall (it was to the west of the gate and south of where Donna's and her friends' horses are kept). I could easily stand inside our wall at that point and have a sight blob inside the van when someone called out on one of our landlines, and then on a cellphone to test how extensive the phone bugging was. I didn't discover anything else of significance from the van during the rest of the time I was in range of it. The good thing about this development - as if $216 billion wasn't good enough - was that exposing the Government to the full glare of publicity and the beginnings of another legal action would surely force them to pull all their surveillance back at the precise time that I most needed it pulled back. The Government was giving us a gift. In some respects I felt sorry for them (not many "respects", just "some"). They could hardly imagine that I'd be able to see inside their van while I was driving down a different street a couple of hundred feet away. I never would've thought to look in their van had I not been so paranoid. For all I knew, the van might've been parked there for the last month, as today was the first time I've been so careful. I should be paranoid more often, as it can be very profitable. I didn't say anything about the van to our guards, merely waving to them as I drove into the tunnel to park. I didn't turn any lights on in my home, not wanting to alert the van's occupants that a conference was about to start. I woke up my three bedmates by shaking them and holding their mouths shut, saying quietly, "Don't turn any lights on. Something interesting has happened. We're going to Felicity and Steven's room to discuss it." (I'd long since gotten into the habit of calling Mom and Dad other than that. If I resurrect as Mark, I'll have to get back in the habit of "Mom and Dad" again.) "What is it?" whispered Julia, while Carol and Ava got out of bed. Julia likes information before action. "Shh." I like teasing. I won. Not having any choice, Julia got out of bed too. While my girls were getting robes on, I used a sight blob to check our Security Center, especially the computer that is monitoring the houses for any emissions. Everything was dull. Then I used a radio blob about 250 feet above me to search around the hilltop and the area around it, again not finding anything untoward such as infrared glows from hidden spies or strange transmissions. When the girls were decent, we went through the walkway tunnel to the Adults' House, then into Mom and Dad's room. I woke them in the same way as the girls, with the same message, adding, "I'll get Vanessa and Prof. No lights and no talking." Julia came with me, probably in case I said something informative to her parents. All of us except Donna were soon gathered in Mom and Dad's room, Prof using his crutch rather than putting his leg on. [As a complete aside, Prof had bought a spare leg that he put in the Panic Room, so he'll have one to put on in case he ever has to flee there in too much of a hurry to take his usual leg. I find the idea of his having spare legs around the house quite funny, but I suspect I'm being weird.] I said, "Steven, please put the Faraday cage on." Dad knew what that was as we take security seriously in this house. Dad even knew who Michael Faraday was, because I'd told him one day. With the room sealed in metal, we could turn the lights on. I allocated one mind the job of searching the room very carefully to make sure there were no breaches in the cage, nor any transmissions from this room or the whole house that there shouldn't be. I could tell that no frequencies were getting into the room, so chances were that none were getting out, but "Better safe than sorry," as Mom always says. Julia and I tend not to, but I've become so worriedly paranoid these days that I'm starting to think the idea has a lot of merit. Still quietly - better safe than sorry - I said, "Not the main topic, but Mark Anderson is on Jonathon's final list of twenty four. Jonathon gave Mark a million bonus points to jump to the number one position. The score is artificial, as everyone else on the final list got scores in the early thousands. The score just means Jonathon got the angel's hints and made sure Mark got on." They all quietly congratulated me. I was feeling REALLY paranoid. As much as I've mentioned that recently, it's worse now because there's a van parked down the hill spying on us, which did a great deal toward increasing my feeling that people TRULY were out to get me. I was almost certain they couldn't bug our house, especially not through a Faraday cage, but that word "almost" isn't a comfortable one for paranoids. The next topic of conversation was the van, and I didn't want to discuss that while the van might be listening. I said, "I need to go to the bathroom. Can you open the cage, please Steven. Close it after me and talk among yourselves; I'll be back in five minutes." I got some funny looks. I'd woken them all up a minute ago, and now I was leaving. I gave them a wink. They had no idea what it was about, but they knew to play along. Dad disengaged the cage. I didn't use Mom and Dad's en-suite (only the core bedroom itself is inside the cage, so opening it gave me access to their bathroom), instead I ran through the house heading for the west wing, then out past the adults' pool and toward the zip-line that runs down to the horses' paddock. Before I'd left Mom and Dad's room I'd known the van hadn't moved as I'd had a radio blob up high looking at it and for anything else interesting. I'd checked our Security Center's radar display too, and that had been empty of planes. As best as I could tell, there was nothing untoward going on, except the van having cameras focused on our gate, but I was very eager to make sure that looking at our gate was the ONLY spying they were doing. Their bosses wouldn't have sent an expensively equipped van if looking at our gate was the limit of their intentions, so had they achieved any of their intentions, or had our house's defenses kept them out? Nothing secret ever happens at our gate, but we certainly weren't going to let that surveillance continue. It was MUCH better to ensure that the Government's entire surveillance operation was shut down, and collecting another $216 billion would be a nice bonus too. Not that it was critical, but Donna had left the zip-line ready to use which saved me a minute's running. From where it stopped to the wall nearest the van was only another 1,000 feet (I've gotten very good at estimating those sorts of distances). I sprinted it, keeping one radio blob as close to the van as it could reasonably function, looking for transmissions in either direction. If there was aerial surveillance overhead, my running toward the wall close to the van would be suspicious. I was heading for a shed some of the horses' gear is kept in, but my running still looked unusual, especially if they'd heard my comment about going to the bathroom. If the van suddenly took off in a squeal of rubber, then that'd be interesting too. As it happened, I was able to reach the van with my radio blob when I got within 150 feet of the wall. A few seconds later I could see clearly enough to see that the guys in the van were watching a very boring gate and nothing else. The headphones were where I'd last seen them with that equipment still turned off. The handwritten log (so much for "state of the art") showed my return a few minutes ago and nothing since. I ran into the horses' tack room, grabbed a bridle, and then started the run back to the house carrying it. My idea was to give any aerial surveillance the clear impression that I hadn't been running toward the van, but to get some strange leather straps. What could a teenage boy who sleeps with three teenage girls possible want with a strange leather harness? I thought it was a plausible cover story, plus I got to keep the leather harness to see if I could find a use for it later. It'd be more appropriate to use on Donna, and I even felt somewhat aroused by that thought, except I couldn't think of anything I could actually use it for. #8: #6: #17: #8: #32: I pulled the zip-line back up with me, waving to one of our security patrols across a gully when I was halfway up. #13: #11: #1: #8: #12: #8: #1: #16: #22: #1: Dad had engaged the Faraday cage again, so I knocked on his door and they let me in. Dad was turning around to press the button again while everyone else was looking at the bridle in my hand, and clearly failing to come up with a sensible theory for my having gone to get it. I tossed it onto the center of the bed, saying, "I thought you might want this, Felicity. Apparently there are internet sites which have pictures illustrating how it can be used in bedrooms." -- I put on a silly, formal voice, "The reason I've called you all here today is to discuss a moneymaking scheme I have recently discovered. How would you all like to be rich?" Mom looked suspiciously at the bridle. Most of the others looked suspiciously at me. "There is a new season's range coming out shortly," agreed Julia. Julia and I have a running joke about her clothes spending. She can afford whatever she wants so it is just a joke. No one cares how much Julia spends, except for the store owners, who care very much. Julia and her influence on so many of her peers must have caused a noticeable improvement in the profitability of the local clothing retail businesses. After a few very confused comments by others, I explained, "In that little street between Goldfinch and Swallow Drives, I don't know what it's called, but parked in that street is a white panel van that's full of electronics and two guys. They're spying on us. They've got cameras focused on our gate, driveway and the houses, and they're manually recording the details of all the cars that come and go through our gate. I'm reasonably sure they can't hear inside our homes, but it'd be best to play safe by not saying anything bad outside of a Faraday cage until we take care of them. I don't know whether they're tapping our phones, but we can check that later..." "How?" asked Dad. "I can use my studying vision when one of you places a call. I can't film it for proof or anything like that, but I'll know if they're listening in." Dad was nodding, so I continued, "I don't know whether they're watching us because they're watching everyone on Jonathon's final list or because they suspect something about the angel, but if they're Government people and if they don't have any legitimate crime they're investigating, then they're breaching the last settlement agreement..." Everyone started laughing. The idea of the Government fucking that up AGAIN was just too stupid of them. "How much was it?" asked Julia. "$216 billion. The interest is $30 million per day. I remember the old days when I got very excited at the thought of winning a million from Binion's. Pretty soon it won't be worth bending over to pick up a million dollars." "Not that it matters," corrected Prof, "but if the Government is forced to pay us that much, they'll have to borrow it. An unexpected cost that high will drive up interest rates significantly, so the interest will be more like thirty five or forty million per day. The question is what we should do now..." I interrupted, "I've got a strong desire to do something quickly. I'm getting very paranoid about the Government's maybe wanting to crucify the angel's ass. That's especially true if the other names on Jonathon's list aren't being surveilled. I didn't want to ask Jonathon for their addresses and I wouldn't want to fly around checking them out even if I had them, but I'm thinking it doesn't really matter how many people are being surveilled as we should do the same things either way. -- "It's looking like Archangel Michael probably won't need to appear ever again, which is great, but I'm still worried about the Government charging in here and accusing me of causing all the damage that the angel did and locking me up forever. All you guys would be up custard creek too. I don't think they've got any proof, but I wouldn't want to bet they haven't managed to catch some radar tracks or maybe even some video, and they might have some circumstantial evidence too, like the places and times the angel and I appear or disappear. One of my biggest fears is that if we don't stop them, they'll keep spying on us and might get lucky one day, if one of us has a slip of the tongue for example. Or even worse, if we don't push them back, they'll get more and more intrusive. Planting bugs in the house or maybe even kidnapping and torturing information out of some of us. Putting that van on primetime news and making it cost the country $216 billion should make the public scream for blood. Heads should roll, and the next batch of heads should be a damn sight more careful not to try to spy on us again." "You could always set the Guardian Angel on any of them," suggested Dad, not earning brownie points from Mom. He should be careful, because she's got some leather straps now. Vanessa said, "It isn't meant to be here yet. We could arrange things to explain its presence but then it won't have been introduced in minor ways first, and I think there'd be too much trouble if the Government tried to fight it." #19: #11: . #13: We discussed the issue some more, but it didn't need much. Everyone agreed that the outrageous invasion of our privacy that we were suffering from - having our gate photographed - had to be stamped on hard and quickly. All joking aside, we cannot let the Government get away with spying on us. It was literally a life-or-death problem, and that's not intended as any sort of joke. Mom suggested, "I think we should get Donna in on this, so she knows how important it is to keep her mouth shut. What do you think, Ron?" "Okay." "I'll get her," offered Carol, getting up as she spoke. While Dad was letting Carol out, Mom asked me, "Why on Earth did you get this?" nudging the horse's bridle suspiciously. "The spy van is parked near the tack room. I wanted to get near the van to find out whether they were listening to you talking, so I knew whether it was safe to have the main conversation. I ran down, got that, and ran back, so anyone watching will think I'm kinky rather than checking up on the van..." Mom relaxed, "Haha. That's a relief. You're too young to be getting into things like that..." "Are you saying they're for people your age?" Dad piped up, "We could try." He didn't have any brownie points left, so there was no harm in trying. Not much point in trying either, by the look on Mom's face. Donna and Carol returned, Dad caging us in again. Donna asked, "What's happening?" I explained about the van, how dangerous it could be to us if any of us misspoke, how they might try to grab some of us... Dad interrupted, "How are we going to travel around for the next few days? If we take our security with us, they'll suspect we're on to them, but we don't want the girls to go to school unescorted." Prof said, "Let's see what comes out of this morning yet. It's only 3:30." We carried on with the explanation to Donna. When we mentioned the $216 billion we might get, Donna said, "Cool! I need some more clothes." I answered, "Yeah, I noticed you're getting fat on top." Donna knows very well that I think she's got great tits already, and they're getting greater all the time. She takes considerable pleasure in showing them to me every chance she gets, and I take pleasure in thanking her for it. It's good when a brother and sister can make each other happy so easily. Donna agreed, "Yeah. They're STILL getting bigger! They're gonna be REALLY good in a few months!" "They're REALLY good already." Donna used to not want large tits because they'd interfere with her running. Nowadays Donna seems to have developed a different set of priorities, along with her other developments. To help her feel comfortable with a reality that she doesn't have any choice over, I make sure I compliment her new figure often. It's also a good way of ensuring she shows it to me more often. Mom said, "I think we've got more important things to talk about than Donna's breasts at the moment." I said, "I'm a teenage boy so you'll have trouble convincing me that there's anything in life more important than breasts. But we should finish explaining the situation to Donna." I finished the short story, then Donna asked "What're you going to do?" "We're about to discuss that." Now Donna knew the point she'd come in at, she asked, "Did Mark get on the list?" There's no need for you to be impressed by Donna's saying "Mark" rather than "you". We all talk like that. One of the unintended but nice little aspects of my resurrection plan is that it won't much matter for a few months if people make mistakes between "Ron" and "Mark" because they'll apparently be sort of the same person, as the body transitions from one into the other. It was nice that Donna thought to ask about my goal though. I answered, "Yep. The van might be spying on us because whoever they are, they're spying on all the families on that list, or maybe they're spying on just us. We don't know and can't easily tell. It doesn't matter because we need to get rid of them either way. They're too dangerous to be left alone, plus you need money for some new clothes." We discussed what to do next, and everyone easily agreed that we should call our DC lawyer to get his advice. Getting rid of the van was easy: we could send a couple of our security guys to tell them to leave. The van's cover having been blown, they'd leave. What we wanted to do was get rid of the van, AND completely fuck up the entire spying operation (however big it was), AND be able to use the van's presence to claim the $216 billion. Those objectives were important enough to justify taking considerable care. It was about 3:30am here, so 6:30am in DC; a good time to get our lawyer's attention. We couldn't call him from our home or our cellphones because we couldn't guarantee those phones were safe (if we did the test I described before, and I saw that the people in the van were listening, that proved our phones were tapped. But if I saw that the people in the van didn't listen to our call, that proved nothing useful. For all we knew, another team of baddies was in charge of monitoring our phones). We decided that the four parents and I would drive out in an SUV. Vanessa at the wheel and the rest of us lying on the floor out of sight. All but Vanessa would leave our cellphones behind in case their positions were being tracked. Vanessa often leaves very early and completes her sleep on the plane when she has mornings of work in DC, so the behavior was consistent, if they knew that much about us. We'd go to OSU and use one of their many public phones. The four girls would go to the panic room and stay there until we summoned them. The plan wasn't met with much enthusiasm from the girls, but they had to agree. We didn't want the four girls left undefended with unknown baddies outside, and we didn't want to alert our security guards in case that alerted the baddies before we could do what was necessary to earn $216 billion. Vanessa and Prof went to get changed, and Vanessa to get her phone and folder of business cards in case we needed to call someone she hadn't put into her phone. Before we left the room to let Mom and Dad get dressed, Donna pointed at the bridle and asked, "Why's Star's bridle here?" It was an opportunity not to be missed, so I quickly jumped in with, "Your parents have kinky sex with it." Donna and Dad laughed, and even Mom chuckled briefly, but she quickly cut it short to correct me. Donna spent a couple of minutes teasing Mom about it, demonstrating rather more knowledge of kinky sexual leather practices than the parents of a 14-year old girl would like her to have. I had no idea what to do with such things, but Donna did. I'd had sheltered childhoods, but somehow Donna hadn't. We got shooed out of the room and the girls were told to go to the panic room. When the adults were dressed and reassembled, we went down to the garage and grabbed one of the SUVs. I searched it for suspicious installations and kept an 'eye' - of the radio blob type - on it to make sure it wasn't transmitting unusually. One good thing about the SUV trip was that we put the TV on and were able to listen to me describing how Guardian Angels worked. My families agreed that I'd conveyed it well. There was a great deal of confused commentary of course - including fear, delight and skepticism - but that didn't matter at all. The first time the Guardian Angel gave a demonstration of its presence, tonight's descriptive tape would be replayed and then most people would nod wisely and say, "I thought so." Of course, the "Now we cross live to..." segment took us to yet another religious nutcase du jour. He unsurprisingly ranted, "The Devil is populating the Earth with his Demon Spawn!" The nutcase demanded that humanity "Resist!" God knows what he thought that meant. If the Devil had invisible, invulnerable demons at his command, exactly how were humans meant to resist? He didn't describe his cunning resistance plan in full, but the first step of it was for the listeners to send him money. Our driving slowly down the street gave me some more time to check out the inside of the van. It wouldn't be reasonable for us to turn down their street but I'd get about twenty seconds of inspection as we drove past the end of it as Vanessa's normal cautious driving speed. That wasn't long, but I couldn't ask Vanessa to stop in range of them because we could be under observation and the angel is fairly well known to have about a 450-foot range. We very definitely didn't want anyone to think, now or later, that the angel might have been in the car. Twenty seconds is a decent time though, especially because I could use two sight blobs. Only two, unfortunately, leaving thirty minds twiddling their two thumbs. The sight blob in the cab searched the glove compartment, door pockets, and under the seats; finding nothing more useful than an unmarked map of Corvallis. (By the way, it's very easy for me to open and close unlocked glove compartments virtually silently. An NP-fingertip can hold the catch open from the inside while the glove compartment is being opened or closed, then release it as slowly as possible.) That sight blob spent its last few seconds helping to search the back. In the back, I could see that the van's occupants hadn't changed in composition or activity. The recording of Vanessa's current departure was the only noticeable change since my last snoop. I looked around for letterhead, IDs, badges, the monthly CIA Staff Newsletter, or anything like that - finding none of it. I was greatly hampered by having the two guys in the 'room' as I couldn't do anything freaky. For example, there was a closed photo album sitting next to the clipboard. I guessed it was to identify all of us, but it would've been nice to open it to make sure. Nor could I flip the previously used pages of the clipboard back to read them. Nor could I pull their wallets out of their pants pockets and open them to obtain IDs. I was able to see that they didn't have guns, which surprised me. With the constraint of the two guys' presence, I didn't have much success. I got no definitive information at all. The strongest lead I got was from getting each of their cellphones to display the last number called, with an NP-cover over the speaker to muffle any beeps. I memorized the names and numbers that appeared, then canceled the calls before they could connect. One was to "DC Office", the other to, "Brown, Luke, Cell." Stepping through their phones' entire list of names, calls made and received, and text messages, would have been too slow and risky. But if I come back to snoop the van properly, I'll be able to do a much better job. That would have to wait because our SUV could be under aerial observation. We weren't followed, there was no sign of any other suspicious vehicles on the ground or in the air, and there was no problem getting to OSU. We located a public phone, gathering around while Vanessa looked up our lawyer's cellphone number (we also have his home number. We have LOTS of people's home numbers. They give them to you when you're rich. It's a great system - when you're rich). He was about to leave for the office, but Vanessa got his attention with, "There's a van with a laundry service logo parked on a street with a clear view of our front gate. It's packed with video and audio surveillance equipment and two men are currently occupying it. They are covertly filming our front gate, the approach street and our property as a whole. They're logging every vehicle and person into and out of our property. Their audio surveillance doesn't appear to be working, possibly because of our home's defenses, but we're not using the landline phones at home or our cellphones for this call in case they're compromised. We're at Oregon State University now, using a public phone. There's no one near us. We discovered them recently, but we know they've been there at least twelve hours, but quite possibly longer. We don't know who they are, although we suspect some connection with the angel's resurrection offer because Mark Anderson has made it on to the final list..." "Congratulations to you and the Andersons. Good luck for his being the one." "Thank you. Felicity and Steven are beside me, so they heard that. The decision to put Mark Anderson on that list was probably made about 24 hours ago, give or take several hours. That might be the cause of the surveillance, but we'd be very surprised if it was being done by Jonathon Winters' organization. The final list of twenty four names is already in the angel's hands so there's nothing left for Jonathon's organization to do; only his personally reviewing the files with the angel. Jonathon's organization no longer needs to acquire any information, and they never did it by covert means before." "There's no sign of any other activity?" "None whatsoever. We have some very good detection systems and they're reporting nothing. So far the entire incident is only what looks like a state-of-the-art, covert surveillance van being used by two men to track people and cars into and out of our gate. We've got the last two numbers dialed on the two men's cellphones. We don't want to call them ourselves in case we alert anyone. Are you able to find out who they're to without the owners knowing?" "Easily, but how did you get them?" "I'd rather not say, but you'd be surprised at what money can buy. Have you got a pen?" I held up the appropriate number of fingers for each digit, Vanessa reading them off to our lawyer. He repeated the numbers back, I nodded, then he said, "I'll put you on hold while I get someone to track them down. Hang on a minute." We chatted among ourselves for a couple of minutes, then he came back on the line, "The first number is the FBI's main switchboard in DC, the second is a mobile owned by a Luke Brown of Portland, Oregon. Our investigator is looking into Mr. Brown, but that'll take a few minutes. In the meanwhile, I think the very first thing we should do is put your client file on a contingency fee basis. What do you think?" "That you've thought of the same thing we've thought of. It's good of you to be flexible about it, but I think we prefer to stay on an hourly basis, thank you. -- "The phone numbers aren't definitive proof that it's an FBI operation. One of the options we've got is to spy on the van ourselves. We've got some impressive toys and some very capable staff, so we should be able to obtain additional indications. But we'd also like to seize the moment in case they decide to fold up camp and leave. What do you advise?" Actually, our main objective was to fuck up the baddies' operation as thoroughly as possible, ideally fairly soon, but we'd agreed on using the financial motivation because we didn't want anyone to suspect that we were doing anything we didn't want spied on. Our lawyer replied, "We have to obtain evidence we can use in court that it's a Government agency operation. Thanks to paper shredders we shouldn't rely on finding that at this end, so getting hold of the physical evidence at your end would be best. I imagine that your local police force is appreciative of the money you've sent their way?" "Very much so. I'm sure they'd normally be very cooperative with any of our requests, but would they interfere with an FBI operation?" "Don't tell them about that aspect, especially because you shouldn't know about those numbers. Tell your police that your security team has discovered that the van is being used to spy on your home and you want the police along as backup when your team approaches it, in case they're kidnappers preparing to snatch your girls on their way to school or something similar. The police won't be able to search the van without probable cause. Maybe they'll be able to see a camera lens from the outside, or maybe your security can arrange for a glimpse of the interior by tricking the occupants into opening a door, or even by smashing a window. Just make sure they do it fast enough to prevent the evidence being destroyed. -- "If the occupants identify themselves as FBI agents, ask to see their warrant. If they produce one with any of your names on it, you've got them. If they don't have a warrant, or have one for someone else nearby, you'll need to obtain something from inside the van that shows that they've been observing your home. You're sure they are, right?" I nodded vigorously. Vanessa answered, "Yes, we are." "It'd be a letdown if they're surveilling someone else. It's most important that you obtain the proof of what they're doing. I suggest you have a discussion with your security team before you do this to make sure they understand what you need, and that if they have to do something like smashing a window to get it, that you'll make it worth their while." Vanessa said, "I'm sure we won't have any trouble with that." She knew enough about my capabilities. #3: #10: #3: Our lawyer continued, "You want to make sure that your policemen see the evidence so they can give affidavits to the effect. Also take cameras with you to photograph everything: their faces, their IDs, the warrant if there is one, the interior of the van, what their cameras are recording, etc. If you're unlucky, you might get only a brief glimpse inside, so make sure your team is prepared for it." "We'll manage that fine," assured Vanessa. "We've got very good people." "Good. The best outcome for us is getting hold of a warrant that names one or more of you. Failing that, the next best is if your policemen can find a justification for arresting them. That way the police can go through the van with a fine-toothed comb and have every piece of evidence photographed and cataloged. You might have only a couple of hours before the FBI move to get their people and equipment back, but their doing so will work in your favor too. -- "Presuming that it is the FBI and you obtain evidence that they're surveilling you, then the Federal Government's only defense to their breach will be that they were investigating a crime that had been brought to their attention. Whether or not they're doing that, we should still proceed as discussed. It helps you either way." "Yes, we agree." The only other significant part of the conversation was our lawyer recommending that we get Corvallis's Chief of Police involved, "Because if it's an FBI operation, they'll be on the phone to him quickly. It'd be best if he was involved right from the start." When the call ended, we got back into our car and drove home. Our security guys will need time to plan and prepare, and when they're ready, we'll contact the police. The cops won't need much advance warning as they'll just be 'in the area', to back our guys up at the appropriate time. We agreed on the way home that Vanessa would be the front person for this. She'll claim that "an anonymous member of the public" had caught a glimpse of the inside of the van when one of the men in it had opened the rear doors (it didn't have side doors or windows, just a windowless pair of doors at the back. For the sake of a complete description, the cab's windows were heavily tinted and there was a door that separating the cab from the back of the van). The eagle-eyed member of the public had seen that cameras were aimed at our gate and house, and had contacted Vanessa about it. We needed our security guys to get close to the van, so I described the blind spot to Vanessa, so she could describe it to our guys. All the camera lenses were mounted in two 'vents' that protruded a few inches above the roof of the van, one vent near the front, one near the rear. They were far enough away from the edges of the roof that they didn't have a view down at a steep angle, so once our guys reached the van, they could crouch and walk around the back and to the other side of it unobserved if both baddies were in the rear so unable to use the cab's side mirrors. We have VERY good security staff of our own. I haven't talked about them much yet, but they're not just in a different league than that of the average "rent a cop", but are several leagues higher still. There was absolutely no need for me to suggest ways to get the baddies to open the doors of their van - so the cops could see enough to justify their getting involved - because I was confident that our staff would take that sort of problem in their stride, but I considerably enjoyed thinking about tricks that I could use. They would have to seem reasonable to my audience (our own security guards, the cops and the guys inside the van), but there were still some interesting possibilities. I'll give you a couple of slightly unsatisfactory options to give you an idea of the range of the possibilities, but I'll let you imagine your own acceptable possibilities for what I could do: Have one of the neighborhood cats jump onto the roof and sit in front of the raised vent that faced our home. One of the spies would have to get out of the van to remove the cat. It wasn't ideal as it was too freaky for us to expect it to happen, but I could take some sardines and carry a cat that I claimed loved sardines. Once we were beside the van, I could throw them both onto the roof where it'd sit where I wanted thanks to NP and EKP. I could pull the battery cable loose, then wiggle it so the electronics inside the van flickered on and off until one of the guys got out to check. We could claim to have some sort of "Electrical Interference Gun" at the house that Julia would be aiming at the van once we were in position. Our return trip home past the van didn't provide me with any new information. Working for the FBI has to be a VERY boring job. Their log showed they thought Vanessa had been the only occupant when she'd left the property, and hers was still the only head showing when she drove back through our front gate. ------- Chapter 345: "I'll Get the Ground Team to Park Safely Out of the Way." Friday, April 27, 2007 (Continued) Vanessa parked in the tunnel, the parents went up to the Adults' House to get some cameras while I walked back down the tunnel to get the security guys. We could've summoned them by intercom because it used buried cable that never leaves our property and was therefore almost certainly untapped, but I didn't mind going for a short walk and it'd give me a chance to help ensure there wasn't a traitor in our midst by monitoring their reactions in proximity. With $216 billion at stake, not only did I want to be sure that we got paid, but the Government might have made sure they didn't have to pay by bribing one of our guys to give them warning of our becoming suspicious. While I was walking down the tunnel, I checked that the girls were in the panic room, then used NP to let them know that we were home again. My standard way of letting them know that "I'm is back and everything is okay," is to squeeze their nipples. It'd evolved from a way of me reassuring them that I was happy, my happiness implying that everything is okay. I suppose I could invent a less sexual way of conveying the message, but I haven't gotten around to it yet, as it's near the bottom of my To Do list (slightly below the bottom, but "near" to it). I let them know I was back, noticing that none of my bedmates were surprised as they expected us back and they were used to the method. I'd never done anything like that to Donna before though. She'd seen the angel in action on TV and knew most of my secrets now, so there was no real reason why she shouldn't have her nipple squeezed too. I gave her two simultaneous squeezes as well as a BIG surprise. I could see the other girls laughing at Donna's reaction, and I presumed Julia's subsequent talking was her explaining it to Donna. Donna looked happy and very excited, which will shortly be a good little test for her. The next time she sees me, I'll have some of our security guys with me and it'll be interesting to see how good she is at keeping herself under control. I'll be ready to shut her up if the wrong noises start coming out of her mouth. I entered the end of the Staff Quarters that has the senior staff's accommodations (the Staff Quarter's exterior doors are never locked. There are too many comings and goings and no need). I went downstairs and knocked loudly on Paul's bedroom door, and waited for him to answer. "Yes?" "It's Ron, Paul. We've got a non-urgent situation. Get dressed..." I was intending to say, "and get your gun. I'll wait," but he opened the door, his body language indicating he wanted me to keep talking. I summarized, "Our property is being surveilled by a couple of guys in a panel van with high-tech equipment inside parked in a good position a couple of streets away from our front gate. In that little street between Goldfinch and Swallow Drives, whatever it's called." (It's a new, short street, and the signpost isn't visible from the street we drive to town on). "We think they're FBI but that's not definite. We've just talked to the lawyer partner we use in DC and his advice is to find out shortly. The idea is to take some of your guys and get some cops, creep near the van, then trick them into opening the door so we can grab the evidence of what they're doing and so the cops can see enough suspicious gear to have probable cause to get involved. -- "The four parents are up and waiting to have a planning session in the Adults' dining room because it has a Faraday cage. Our phones might be tapped and there might be aerial surveillance so we're trying to show as little reaction as possible. No phone calls, no lights going on, no large groups of your guys running around." I didn't have to motivate him by mentioning that $216 billion was at stake. As Head of Security, Paul was VERY aware that the Government had kidnapped Mark Anderson and done heinous things to him, with his eventually dying while in their custody; and that the CIA had duped the Army into a military invasion of our Peoria Road home. I was very pleased to sense plenty of concern in his proximity reading. He was nodding away and was now fully dressed and equipped, including his gun. He grabbed his robe from behind the door, putting it on over his clothes. He rolled up his trouser legs, took his shoes and socks off and carried them hidden inside his robe, then said, "Okay, let's go." We walked in the tunnel again, talking about something entirely innocuous the whole way, in case of parabolic microphones. Donna and the other girls were in the dining room when we arrived. Donna rushed over to give me a hug, clearly excited to know that I could squeeze her nipples from several hundred feet away, even when she was inside an incredibly strong panic room. Having her privacy invaded was apparently not one of her concerns. She couldn't say anything - and what's more important, she DIDN'T say anything - but she gave me the very clear impression that she'd be upset if I didn't keep remotely molesting her. We - every member of the families plus Paul - shut ourselves in the Faraday cage and had ourselves a planning meeting. We did explain the $216 billion issue as that dictated the only tricky objective for the operation: to gather evidence to sustain our claim for that payment. Vanessa repeated the information I'd given her and from what she'd seen herself driving past twice, including roughly describing the inside of the van, that it had two vents on top for the camera lenses which meant there was a blind area low down and beside the van, and how bushes covered the approach all the way into that blind area on one side. The main difficulty came from my fear that there might be aerial visual surveillance. That was purely the result of my paranoia as I had no evidence for it. It was what the angel most feared. For good reason, I thought, because it was exactly what the authorities should use to track the angel. Having to plan our operation so it was safe from aerial observation was a considerable pain in the ass, so Paul queried how sure we were of it, especially because our radar should pick it up. I answered, "The radar came from the Government too, so I wouldn't bet on its showing Government planes if they didn't want it to." Prof added, "We found out a few hours ago that Jonathon Winters has put Mark Anderson on the list of twenty four resurrection candidates." That was interrupted by the expected congratulations, then Prof continued, "Quite possibly the Government is trying to catch the angel, in which case aerial surveillance would be an obvious choice. We can't see how surveilling our front gate could possibly be relevant to spying on the angel, but there might be both types of surveillance going on. Regardless of the motivation for the gate team, we want them stopped and we want the $216 billion from it, if only to make the Government much less likely to stick its nose into our business again because we don't like what happens when it does that to us. To be safe, we have to allow for the possibility of aerial surveillance as well. As our radar can't pick up anything, maybe it's being done by satellite or one of those little drones that are becoming so popular." When I'd been doing my recent military research, I had read up on UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, a.k.a. drones), but I hadn't mentioned them now because I didn't expect the Government to be using a UAV over our home. None of them were stealthy so our radar should pick one up if it was being used over us. Nor did I expect them to be used over the other resurrection candidates' homes, as Wikipedia gave the production numbers for each of the various UAVs and the numbers were low. Most of the UAVs would presumably be in Iraq and Afghanistan, making twenty four domestic aerial surveillance operations even less likely. I wasn't going to disagree with Prof though, because I was perfectly happy to be as paranoid as possible. Planning went ahead assuming we were being observed from the air. Chronologically, the first problem was how to get half a dozen armed security guys into a vehicle and to drive them out the gate without alerting the baddies. It would've been easy if there'd been a tunnel from the underground bedrooms of the Staff Quarters into the underground part of our garage tunnel, because then they could've made their way to Vanessa's SUV in secret, hidden in it, and Vanessa could've driven them out. As fond of tunnels as we are, we hadn't thought to have that one built. A pity, because it would've been quite easy for the Army to do as part of the initial construction, and free for us, but no one had thought of it. For aesthetic reasons, there were no garages around the Staff Quarters. All their cars were parked inside our garage tunnel, in a 'room' near the tunnel's entrance, so it wasn't possible for six guards to get into a car without being observed by our suspected aerial observer. [We got a double garage built a few weeks later at the end of the Senior Staff's Quarters, with a connecting door into their house. A couple of them kept their cars parked in it, making them usable for something like this morning's operation.] The same figment of my paranoid imagination stopped the guards from simply climbing over a wall out of sight of the baddies' van and walking to it. I came up with a plan that involved tits. I'd been thinking about Donna's tits and the idea popped into my mind. Funny how things like that happen. I explained it and the girls loved the idea, even though the parents told them they'd be kept away from the action around the van. Paul liked it and confidently predicted his guys would like it too. The girls rushed off, in a panic about what clothes to wear. Especially Donna, because Mom hadn't let her buy any scandalously sexy tops. I had a feeling that deficiency was going to change soon, with or without Mom's consent. Ava offered to lend one of hers to Donna, earning Donna's undying gratitude. Donna was growing up. Already she considered that getting the right clothes deserved "undying gratitude". Donna's breasts are larger than Ava's, so Ava's top might not contain them properly, for which I was prepared to give Ava some serious gratitude. Maybe not "undying", but at least "vigorous". Paul had no hesitation in suggesting a simple way of getting the two guys to open the van doors. I was disappointed that I didn't get to try one of the tricks that I (or you?) had thought up. All my families' males - Prof, Dad and I - were excited about the operation. We hadn't planned this in advance, but I realized that I wanted to be in on it so I could make sure it went well (six two-letter words in a row! It could even be seven if I referred to myself as "we". I wonder what the record is?). I could all but guarantee that it would be a perfectly safe operation. For example, if the guys in the van had hidden guns, one of them would go off accidentally, shooting one of them somewhere non-fatal, and he'd fall onto the uninjured guy. The shot would give the cops probable cause, and the baddies would be distracted long enough for it to be all over by the time the uninjured one got out from under his partner. I responded to Dad's show of excitement by suggesting that he and I should join the operation. Mom and Paul both disagreed, but I used two NP-taps on Dad's head at the right time to encourage him further, and then a small NP-pinch on Mom's lips to stop her objecting. There are some advantages being the boss, because Dad was able to insist to Paul that we'd be involved. Prof joined in too, but only to offer support if it was needed. Mom and Vanessa had no interest in being involved; they preferred to stay at home and worry. Women are boring sometimes. Fortunately for my Tit Plan, my girls weren't yet mature enough to be - what Mom would no doubt describe as - sensible. Prof's and Dad's enthusiasm proving that guys never get sensible. When the discussion ended, Paul stood and said, "I'll go get my guys ready." I'd been hoping to be with the security guys when they heard about the van so I might sense if there was any funny business. It was a bit rude to question the loyalty of Paul's staff in front of him, but after a very quick thought, I decided that I didn't mind being a bit rude to ensure we got paid $216 billion and the Government was given a great disincentive against surveilling us in the future. At the risk of being thought rude, I said, "Because there's a shit load of money involved for the Andersons," (I talk a little rough to people outside the families, as a result of my bad upbringing in LA), "I want us to be careful. If it's the Feds they'll know there's two hundred billion at stake and they might've bribed one of your guys to signal if we learn about them. I want to sit at the back of the room when you tell only the guys who'll be part of the operation, and I want to stay with them after you tell them, so I can keep my eyes on them." Dad said, "That's a good idea, Ron. Thanks. Is that okay with you, Paul?" "It's fine. I'll wait to go down with you." "You'd better come to the Kids' House with me then. I don't know how long I'll be because Julia will have lain out half a dozen outfits for me to try on so I'll look my best for this non-existent party. If you're waiting for me I'll have an excuse to pick the first outfit." Prof said, "Steven and I will wait for you in the garage." Paul and I took the tunnel down to the Kids' House. He waited in the living room because my bedroom was doubtless full of girls in various stages of undress, panicking over how to achieve exactly the right looks. When I entered the bedroom, the situation was just as I'd expected. And then they all yelled at me to leave - which wasn't what I expected at all. I decided to be brave, staying to ask, "Why?" Julia explained, "Donna wants to look her best for you, so we don't want you to see her until she's ready." That explained why Donna was hiding behind Ava and Carol. What it didn't explain, was WHAT FUCKING PLANET THE GIRLS THOUGHT THEY WERE ON! I'd suffered through the girls (not Donna, but the others) pulling this crap many times before. They fart around for hours, and then usually decide to wear the first outfit they'd tried on anyway. I couldn't tell you the number of times I have missed the first part of a movie or play, or even kept other people waiting for us, all because of this crap. It's one of the worst aspects of living with multiple girls, because as soon as one girl gets into "Or Maybe I Should Wear Something Else"-mode, the others encourage her then join in themselves. And as soon as one girl changes her mind - hardly an unusual event - or even just wonders out loud about changing her mind, then all the other girls have to discuss what they would change their dresses to in that event, to ensure they still match each other in the many ways they have to get very carefully balanced (not just color - don't be such a male! - but in well over a dozen other respects too, such as all being dressed at similar quality levels). It's pissed me off on multiple occasions, and this was the worst possible time for them to start doing it again. I had considerable pleasure in expressing my reaction, "You have GOT TO BE FUCKING JOKING! You're FUCKING AROUND wasting time and delaying a TWO HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR operation so you can play FUCKING DRESS-UP. ARE YOU INSANE!" #4: I continued, "Donna's beautiful and she knows I think she's beautiful. I couldn't care less what clothes she wears or doesn't wear; she's still beautiful regardless. What I DO care about, is your incredibly stupid timing over this insanity. Paul's in the living room. He and I will go down to the Staff Quarters now and start briefing the team we'll take. We'll load up the cars and pretend to be a bunch of guys going to a party. If you pull your heads out of the clouds quickly enough to get ready to do your JOB - that's JOB, get it! - then you can join us, otherwise you can stay in whatever version of reality you're in where playing dress-up is more important than hundreds of billions of dollars." I'd only just got inside the door before they'd yelled at me to leave, so it was very easy for me to turn around and leave now. I slammed the door behind me, cutting off their various noises: Carol's and Ava's apologies, Julia's insisting, "We wouldn't have taken long," and Donna's starting to cry. I used NP to hold the door shut so the girls couldn't come chasing after me. They'd already considerably exceeded my tolerance limit, not that I had much tolerance for that crap. I marched to the living room, said to Paul, "They're FUCKING AROUND playing dress-up like little children with all the time in the world. I blew my stack at them and told them we'll start briefing your guys. If they don't join us in time, we'll just pretend to be a bunch of guys going to a party. They probably will though. They're good girls once their heads are pulled out of their asses." #18: It was much quicker to head to the Staff Quarters on an exterior path rather than take the elevator down to the parking lot and walk both legs of the "T". Being seen walking casually out of the Kids' House should convey a good impression to any watchers too. The girls had stopped trying to open the door by the time Paul and I had left the house, and I doubted they'd come running outside after me when they were only semi-dressed, so I canceled those NP-points. I wanted to keep a sight blob on the girls to see if they calmed down all right, but I had to cancel that too as I needed to have a radio blob on overwatch. I was with Paul so I had to keep my eyes open, allowing only one other sight source. I really wished I could run more sight sources! Paul said conversationally, "I'll have to tell Larry we're going to a party so he can cover for us while we're away." Larry was the security shift supervisor who was on duty now. (There were four shift supervisors for the three shifts, none of which were Paul as he didn't fulfill that role for any shift. He rotated his time around all the shifts and was sometimes off-site.) I assumed Paul meant that he should warn the staff we were leaving behind that something was happening, and that they should go to "Code Yellow". We don't actually have that term in our Security Procedures Manual, but you know what I mean: That the current shift will become more careful and the off-shift guys will all be woken up if necessary, dressed and armed. There were plenty of ways our normal security could be heightened without it showing. I said, "I doubt he'll need to be told that after the noise your guys will make when they're getting ready to leave, especially after the girls arrive, but tell him if you like." Larry would probably be invited to sit in on the briefing so he'll know enough to make good decisions later if this escalates. Like it had with Paul, my proximity sense should provide me with a pretty clear indication if there's a problem with anyone who hears about the van, so I wasn't worried about leaving Larry behind with the news, although I would ask Paul to tell him not to tell the other staff after we leave. Paul and I entered the front door to the Senior Staff Quarters and he went to his room to quickly put his party clothes on and reposition where he was carrying his gun. We went through the connecting door into the Not-Senior Staff Quarters. A couple of the guys he wanted were in the living room (Paul was going to use off-shift guys to avoid depleting the on-duty staff in case there was any subsequent trouble). Paul called their names, and asked where four other guys he wanted were. Three were in the building but one was out with a girl, so a substitute was named. Paul specified the bedroom of one of the guys in the living room as the place for the briefing, sending some of the other guys in the room to round up the other four and send them to that room. He also sent a guy to invite Larry to the briefing, telling the guy, "Walk casually. Tell him some of us are going to a party and I need to talk with him about it in Wayne's room. Make sure he doesn't use his radio and strolls back casually with you. Okay?" None of which attracted as much curiosity from the other guys as you might expect, as Paul frequently got the guards to do all sorts of weird things. Our security doesn't have a rent-a-cop, time-killing attitude. They knew that Mark and Prof had been kidnapped from an earlier home and had nearly died from the experience; that Mark had been taken by the DHS and did subsequently die; and that Delta Force and the Rangers had tried to attack our previous home but had fucked it up, no thanks to the useless hired security force. The two families were a great deal richer now so an even more attractive target. Our guys trained as if another attack was only a matter of time. Even if the remaining guards weren't put on "Condition Yellow", they'd still be extra vigilant if only because Paul might be taking the six guys away so they could try to sneak back in. When Larry and the six guys for the mission (two very experienced guys, two of average experience, and two of the younger guys), had gathered, the briefing started. It went very quickly, taking less time to explain than it'd taken me to explain it upstairs. They had a great deal of their own terminology, and a single phrase often contained many sentences' worth of information (as telling Larry, "Go to Condition Yellow" would have, if we'd had one. Our Conditions were actually multi-dimensional, giving the ability to convey a richer variety of responses). Then there was also quite a detailed explanation of where all of the family members would be during this and what was to be done with them under various circumstances. Our guards' primary job is to guard us, so having us part of the operation rather than hiding in a panic room complicated their job, requiring about as much discussion as the rest of the operation. Paul gave a bit of a motivation talk at the end, "This is our first real mission, so stay alert, THINK..." We'd had plenty of people try to talk their way in the gate for various reasons, and we'd even had a few people climb the wall, but that's as much as had happened before. Even the wall-climbers were simple jobs. All were easily detected (we have a very clever wall), and mostly complete morons who hadn't understood that they were committing a real crime they'd be arrested for. All of our security team had emotions that looked good in proximity. I'd spent enough time with these guys that I had a semi-reasonable handle on how their emotions showed in proximity, so I was happy enough. Paul, Larry and I went back upstairs, leaving the six guys to get changed into their party clothes and gather their personal gear: guns, vests, radios, and assorted other items. Upstairs, Larry gave his explanation and orders to the guys who were up there, and they got on with them, mostly spreading out to tell the others and getting dressed and equipped. The first two of the away-team who arrived back upstairs were sent to get the two SUVs we'd use, one of which would have Dad and Prof hidden in the back. All our cars are parked with the keys left in them. We sometimes forget to leave the keys in our personal cars, as taking keys out of the ignition is so much of a habit, but the more communal vehicles are left ready to go for anyone who wants to use them. The rest of the team set about gathering the mission-specific equipment, carrying it outside and piling it on the side of the driveway. It looked like plenty of booze. The house contained twenty four mostly young guys, so even though a lid was kept on too much drinking, it wasn't difficult to put together a few cartons of booze. The cartons were half occupied with bottles so they rattled and clunked, even though they were also half full of our gear, including a vest for me. Also two small gas-fueled camping stoves and several plastic containers. While that gear was being piled up outside by the clearly enthusiastic party-goers, the girls drove up in my SC430, parking it where I'd told them to: just inside the gate where the surveillers would see it and us. All the tops were down, the car's and the girls'. Ava was driving (she'd be getting out shortly, but she likes driving my car). Julia was in the front passenger's seat. Carol and Donna weren't really in the backseats, because they'd raised themselves so they were sitting where the headrests would be. Another thing they weren't really doing was wearing anything much, something it didn't take our ever-vigilant, party-going guards long to notice. They loudly whistled their appreciation, catcalled, and otherwise carried out their orders. Paul seemed to have chosen guards who were exceptionally good at acting lecherous when ordered to. Some of the home-team guards came out to see the girls, adding their contributions to the degenerate atmosphere as Ava and Julia got out of the car. The home-team guys had been told that some of them should come out to see the partygoers off, but as far as I could tell, they were only interested in seeing the girls. They added to the whistles and catcalls even though that hadn't been part of their instructions. I guess our security staff have been trained to use their own initiative. I doubted the Fibbies thought we were trying to sneak out of the property, although some of our guards were starting to look like they had pistols hidden in their pants. The SUVs pulled up behind my car and the party-goers started loading the booze into them. Julia and Ava came over to me, Julia looking particularly pathetic. Before she could open her mouth, I quietly said, "Not now. We've got other things to do." I'd really wanted to say, "We've got MORE IMPORTANT things to do," but if the baddies had audio focused on the gate area, that wouldn't be a good thing for them to hear. We headed out a minute later, me driving while Ava had swapped into one of the SUVs. Carol and Donna sliding down to sit properly. The home-team yelled "Lucky bastards" at the departing away-team. We headed to OSU first, so Prof could call the police chief. Dad had acted a little bit too lowbrow on TV, so Prof was the better caller. OSU was also the most sensible party destination, especially at 4:15am on Friday morning, and it allowed us to check for a tail. I knew there wasn't one, but Paul didn't. At an appropriate point, hidden under trees, the middle SUV dropped a guy off quickly, so he could see if anyone followed us. We'd pick him up on the way back. Prof had the Police Chief's home phone number from when a deputation of emergency services people had come to our house to thank us for all the money we'd sent their departments' ways. They'd all passed over their cards, telling us not to hesitate to call if we needed anything. It was 4:15am, we needed something, and we didn't hesitate. Paul certainly had the Chief's numbers too, and probably the numbers of every cop in Corvallis. Prof identified himself, apologized for waking the Chief, then told him, "Our security staff has identified a surveillance van with two guys in it watching our gate from a good position, possibly to swoop on the girls as they go to school. Six of our guards are about to have a word with the occupants and we would like to have a police presence with us please. If it's not too much trouble, you and one or two others. But PLEASE no radio chatter. They have a high-tech operation and they're certain to be monitoring your frequencies." The Chief had some questions, but they boiled down to Prof repeating, "We KNOW what's inside that van. We've got some high-tech equipment of our own. They have cameras focused on our gate and the street leading up to and through it. Whoever they are, we are their focus. In about ten minutes - before it gets light - we're going to open that van up and all your questions will be answered." "Yes, there are only two men in it." Prof looked at me for confirmation. I kept a perfectly bland face because of our guards. Prof took my silence as agreement that there'd been two the last time I'd looked, about five minutes ago. There was no way the Chief was going to refuse to come. The only issue was whether he'd refuse to cooperate. He asked, "Is Paul Olsen with you?" "Yes. He and six of his men are doing this." The Chief knew the caliber of our security team as there'd been a great deal of interaction between the local cops and our guys. Maybe not the youngest two, but the other four guys on the team were all more impressive than any of Corvallis's cops, and Paul left them in the shade. The two youngsters were fit and strong, but that's not the type of "impressive" I'm talking about. If Paul was leading this operation, then such was Paul's reputation that the Chief was comfortable with whatever we wanted. When you're billionaires and your lives are truly under threat, you hire the BEST Head of Security that money can buy and you let him hire a damned good team. Prof reminded him not to use his radio and arranged a rendezvous point near the police station. We chose that location because as soon as we left the rendezvous, the girls and Prof would drive my overloaded SC430 to the police station and invite themselves into one of the central offices for the duration. Sadly for the cops, the girls had already pulled on the spare clothes they'd packed in the trunk, while the rest of us had put on our bulletproof vests, our guards their gun belts, etc. The girls' bedroom farce of agonizing over clothes had been so they could be seen for a grand total of ten minutes, half of which was traveling time. As it turned out, during those ten minutes I'd been pissed off and had pointedly acted in party mode, refusing to let any of them apologize. The moment they tried to speak, I'd loudly say something party oriented over top of them. The girls had gotten the accurate impression that I wasn't happy with them. The Chief was on time and was accompanied by a Sergeant. The cops were invited to leave their car and join Paul in his SUV so he could brief them. Prof got out to take the girls to the police station. The layout of the streets was similar to that of the letter "E" rotated 180 degrees, as often seems to be the case in this autobiography (the Naval Station Norfolk was that shape also). The vertical, eastern street is the north-south street we take when driving out of our home toward town, our home's gate is about nine hundred feet northeast of the top of the "E" (northeast because the street turns to the right halfway to our gate. That why the surveillance van could park on a side street and get a look straight into our gate). The area of the "E" is a newly developed residential area, with town itself being directly south. The three horizontal bars of the "E" are fairly small streets, with the center bar being the smallest, newest street and poorest signed, which is why I didn't know the name of it; only the names of the two streets to its north and south of it, Goldfinch and Swallow Drives respectively. Paul briefed the cops on the way to the van. The property that van was parked too close to the vegetation of had a street on either side of it; unusual in a residential area as there are normally two properties between parallel streets (I guessed the newest road was added as an afterthought, although I have no idea why). We could conveniently park one block north on Goldfinch, then scuttle south across the property. We'd crawl rapidly under the surely transplanted vegetation, seeing as the houses were brand new (excuse my landscaping habit) until we were closest to the van, then simply keep on crawling the last few feet, forming a group close beside the van, but all around it to cover every door. We'd trick the occupants into opening a door. Ideally the back door so a cop could see inside easily, but a cab door could be made to work too. A more detailed version of that description took until we arrived at our drop off point, not giving the cops time to ask questions as Paul didn't want to describe Plan B. Plan B is what will happen if the van gets word of our approach and tries to flee. It's virtually impossible for the baddies to get worried before the SUVs have dropped off their passengers, because it'll look like we are driving home until we turn off onto Goldfinch. It'll seem a little strange that we're returning home so soon after leaving, but that strangeness won't seem threatening to them until it's too late. We only have to drive a hundred feet down Goldfinch before we reached the desired unloading spot. That could be done so quickly that even an aerial observer would have very little time to make contact and warn the van's occupants, and without aerial support, it'll take the van's occupants longer to worry about our not reaching the gates by the time we should have, and even with that worry, they're unlikely to decide to flee the scene as fast as possible. So the Basic Plan B assumes the drop-off has been done and we're still approaching a stationary van. Dad and one of the young guys would be left driving an SUV. After dropping off everyone else, they'll do a U-turn and drive to just beyond the end of the van's street, idling out of sight of the baddies. If the van starts up, Paul will break radio silence to announce it. The other driver and Dad - in that order - will accelerate around the corner and charge for the van to ram it head on. It shouldn't have had time to get up to more than about 10 or 15 mph on that short street, so it wouldn't be a bad accident. The van's occupants probably wouldn't have taken the time to fasten their seatbelts, so we'd win. By now there'd also be several of our vehicles lined up in our tunnel ready to go. As soon as Paul gave the "Plan B Go!" word, they'd open the garage door and gate, and come charging to help block the van off. There being only nine hundred feet from our gate to the end of the street the van was on meant the reinforcements wouldn't take more than a few seconds to arrive. The streets around that area aren't convenient for a van getting away: apart from the straight stretch to our gate, they're otherwise short, curvy and with lots of intersections, so our cars would easily be able to chase down an electronics-loaded van if it somehow manages to avoid being rammed by both SUVs. The team that will be approaching the van - Paul, five of his team, me and two cops (I'd gotten Dad to insist to Paul that I go on the operation all the way to the van. Paul had been reluctant but Dad had insisted that it'd be educational for me. Paul had reluctantly agreed. I wondered how much because I was the least important principal). The nine of us would be moving very quickly as soon as we were dropped off in case a plane saw us coming and alerted the van. Hopefully, it would take the plane several seconds to get through to the van's occupants, and then more time for the occupants to get into the front seats and start the van. Our first two guys would be carrying road spikes to throw into the path of the van if it started up but hadn't moved yet. If Plan B happens, Paul thought the most likely result would be our lead SUV crashing into the front of the van, disabling it, and at least stunning the occupants for a while. Our foot guys would arrive seconds later, would break into the van "to render assistance" whether the occupants needed it or not. Various documents might fall out of the van, and many photographs would be taken. Our driver might get hauled up for dangerous driving, but there'd be a dozen witnesses that the van suddenly pulled out from the side of the street without signaling clearly, thereby causing the accident. I knew that in reality Plan B is almost certainly not going to happen, because as soon as I get within five hundred feet of the van, they're not going to be able to get away. The keys will drop out of the ignition onto the floor and slide under the driver's seat, the van will jump out of gear, I'll push down on the brake pedal, and other such things. The baddies would only have seconds to get away, and they'd lose it trying to find their keys. We approached our target. I had a radio blob up high, so I'd seen that the van was in position while we were still a mile away. I waited, impatient to get within five hundred feet of it, fearing the van would start moving while I was too far away, but it didn't. As soon as we were within range, I knew they were ours. The same two guys were doing nothing more than watching the monitors. They couldn't even see us approaching yet, and they weren't talking to anyone on a radio or phone. They were sitting ducks. Our SUVs drove normally toward our gate, until we reached Goldfinch Drive, where we suddenly turned off and accelerated down the street, braking to a halt at the right point. Most of us leaped out of our vehicles and sprinted in the agreed order across the property. The cops were surprised by how fast we were moving (we hadn't told them about the possibility of aerial surveillance), but they were the designated last runners so they weren't holding anyone up. There was actually no need to run fast as I could see that the van's occupants had no clue. Our high-speed dashes then low-speed creeps went perfectly according to plan. By the time I'd reached the van, Paul's team had spread around its two sides and back, and they were just about ready to smoke our opponents out. Two of our guards had backpacks containing the small gas camping stoves (we only needed one, the other was a spare). In silence, Paul pointed to one pack and the owner removed the stove and passed it to Paul. Paul lit it, and careful not to scrape its base on the road, moved it a couple of feet under the van. The backpack also provided some plastic food containers, the first of which Paul put on the pot holder, in the flame. The soft plastic quickly got even softer, than then started burning. A few seconds later we could all smell burning plastic. The guards got even more ready for a reaction. The two cameramen starting their video cameras; everyone on their feet, but squatting down ready to rise in an instant. It took several more seconds, but then my sight blob saw one of the Peeping Toms turned his head suddenly and made a deliberate sniff. He said something, and the other Peeper sniffed too. It was a very strong smell out here, and apparently a fair amount of the smell was getting into van, because the two Peepers were frantically looking for the source of the rapidly increasing burning insulation smell. I was the only one who was running a sight blob, so the others didn't know of these events so accurately, but they heard enough to know that the van's occupants were reacting. The Peeper closest to the back doors grabbed a fire extinguisher off its rack while they both kept looking, dropping to their knees to search around the bases of the electronic units, where the smell seemed stronger. None of the plentiful smoke was visible inside the van, which was a pity as it would've substantially increased the occupants' sense of urgency. #14: #20: < Things are just about to go critical, and you're diverted by science. You're as bad as Julia!> #14: #31: A few seconds later, the Peeper nearest the back said something to the other. The Other checked the screen of the exterior view, seemed to say, "It's clear," and the first Tom opened the back door and stepped out into something that couldn't be accurate described as "clear". I used NP to make sure the door finished opening wide, giving a great view of the interior to one of our cameramen and Corvallis's senior policeman, who just happened to be in the area when he was walking past a vehicle whose door opened to reveal several probable causes. The Peeper who'd exited the vehicle hadn't even finished his step out of it when the Chief had gotten his glance inside the van and had decided there was no need to hesitate. He'd seen exactly what he'd been told to expect, and he did what he'd already decided to do under the circumstance: His hand was already on his gun, which he drew quickly, yelling, "Police! FREEZE!" into the van. As concerned citizens who happened to be in the area, Paul's team drew their guns to render aid to a member of Corvallis's finest and cooperative-est. The outside Peeper was grabbed and pulled out of the doorway and into the path of two guards coming to assist. The guy in the van had been looking down and sniffing, so the "Police! FREEZE!" was his first indication that his boring duty was over. More guns appeared in the doorway and one of our guards reached in an around to open the second half of the back door, giving them unobstructed vision and the inside Peeper no chance of ducking out of sight. "OUT!" ordered the Chief. "Move slowly and touch nothing." That guy was halfway out when the police sergeant called out, "I've got an FBI badge." Paul said, "Get them both out and under control, then we'll see. Chief, did the FBI inform you they were running an operation in Corvallis?" "No." Which cured most of the Chief's hesitation. "You're making a mistake," said the exterior Fibbie. It didn't seem to convince anyone to let him go. Otherwise the Fibbies were quiet, which isn't like Fibbies when they're being inconvenienced by local cops, but it is like Fibbies who've been yelled at by their boss's boss, "For Fuck's Sake, the Andersons MUST NOT learn about this operation. If they discover the Bureau's watching their home, we'll be in a world of shit and you'll be the first team up against the wall. Put NOTHING into a computer, stay WAY back from their home, don't go anywhere near them personally, don't do anything to attract attention to yourselves. Talk with no one, say nothing, and you don't even know how to spell FBI. If anyone asks you anything, deny it! Got it?" It'd seemed so safe and simple, right up to the time they'd seen the Anderson's Head of Security holding a gun on them. (They hadn't seen me yet. My babysitter was keeping me on the opposite side of the van away from the potentially dangerous bad men. They might give me a dirty look and bruise my ego.) Top priority for Paul now was getting proof that the Fibbies were surveilling our house, so as soon as the second Fibbie was out of the van, Paul said, "Chief, please accompany me inside to confirm they were surveilling my employer." A few seconds later, one of our cameramen was summoned, and the very incriminating contents were photographed. With the Chief watching, Paul used the end of a pen to flip back each of the clipboard's pages, pausing while each was photographed, until he reached the first page. The photo album I'd noticed was beside to the clipboard, and Paul opened that next. Comically, the first two pictures were front and side shots of "Archangel Michael", with that name written under the picture in case the Fibbies needed help identifying exactly which silver-suited, monstrous-cocked, flying angel they were looking at. Front and side shots of Jonathon Winters were next, and then shots of all the hilltop residents, then a picture of Mark Anderson and all of our staff. The angel, Jonathon and Mark Anderson were the only persons pictured who were not either residents or our employees. Paul asked, "Chief, would you swear in court that this is a surveillance operation aimed at my employers?" "Yes. No doubt of it." "In the Anderson's settlement agreement with the Federal Government for their kidnapping Mark, there's a clause that states that the Government isn't to surveil any of the twelve members of their double family unless there's reasonable prior evidence of their doing something criminal. There's another clause that states that if the Government breaches any of the terms of the settlement then the Federal Government is liable for the amount of damages ordered in the Anderson's civil suit against the individual perpetrators, which was $216 billion. From what you see here, the Andersons will be sending the Federal Government a bill for $216 billion. If the Anderson's are as generous as they were the last two times, Benton County is going to be a great place to live." "Two hundred and sixteen BILLION, with a 'B'?" "Yes. Which means documenting this crime scene fully is very important." "Crime scene?" "They haven't offered to produce a warrant yet which is suspicious. You could hold onto them as suspected kidnappers whether or not they're FBI, because Federal agencies have an established history of illegally kidnapping or trying to kidnap Mark Anderson, and he's on the angel's final list of resurrection candidates..." "He's one of the last twenty four? I haven't heard any news of that." "The Andersons told me a few hours ago, and I understand that the angel told them about a day ago, several hours before that log started. Jonathon Winters is using Government people, so the FBI will know who's on the list and the times mesh nicely. The photo album shows the angel and Jonathon Winters are involved in an important way, so I think it's very possible that the FBI is gathering preliminary information for another kidnapping attempt on a resurrected Mark Anderson. -- "The photographs my team have taken already should prove adequate in my employers claim for $216 billion, but it'd be much better if you treated this like a crime scene for a few hours and documented everything thoroughly. It only needs to be for a few hours, and my employer will be very appreciative." "Let's ask to see a warrant first." The two Fibbies were now kneeling on the road's verge, with plastic cuffs on their ankles and wrists. Both refused to confirm they had a warrant. "That's good enough for me," said the Chief. He personally arrested them for Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping and read them their rights. Paul said, "There are two handwriting styles in their log before midnight, and a different pair of styles after midnight, so there'll be another team resting somewhere handy..." "I'll get people on it." "I can lend you half a dozen of my men if you need them?" "We shouldn't. There aren't many possibilities and their car will be easy to locate. We'll go through their cellphone registries too; that might lead us straight to them. I'll tell my people to stay off the radio until we've got the second pair and I'll get a forensics team rolling. How does that sound?" "Very good. As much as possible, all the evidence should have multiple copies made as soon as it arrives at your station, and transferred to safe locations. I'm sure the Andersons will offer one of their safe rooms as a repository for you." "I'm sure they will too. It would be a pity to have the FBI walk in with a court order giving them access to our evidence locker." The Chief and Paul both took a break from their discussion to make some calls, after which they discussed a few minor issues, such as: how to roll-upward from these lowly functionaries, and Paul would leave his photographers here to help record the evidence, which the Chief easily understood to mean get more photographs for the Andersons. Paul got our phones tested by calling their numbers himself and watching to see if anything came to life in the van. Nothing did. There was no need for me to move from my location on the side of the van opposite the prisoners, and it might be good if they didn't see that I was part of the raid, so I stayed there until the prisoners were picked up and taken to the station, where they would no doubt refuse to help the police with their inquiries. The police chief went back with them, to direct the activities at the station. Paul, the police sergeant, and our two photographers stayed behind, while the rest of our group returned home via the police station to pick up Prof and the girls because there were too many of them for my 4-seater car. I was in a better mood, so I accepted Julia's apology. The camp stove had long since been removed, in case you wondered about that. It was preferable that the Fibbies not know they had been tricked into opening the door. They'd suspect it, but they wouldn't know and wouldn't be able to convince the court of it, if it came to a court case. ^ [[To explain the situation from the other side's point of view. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's organizational mission statement starts with, "To protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats." "Terrorist" didn't quite fit Archangel Michael, even though he did seem to have the potential to create terror, was religiously motivated, and did wear un-American headgear. Was the angel a "foreign intelligence threat"? The "foreign" seemed to fit. According to Archangel Michael, it had come into existence even before the Earth was formed and you can't get much more foreign than that. It was certainly a threat. Putting a smiley face inside a nuclear reactor had NOT been a laughing matter, as it had put a significant proportion of our navy's most important vessels out of commission for many months. Was it an "intelligence" threat? No one knew what the angel was up to, what it wanted, or pretty much anything about its motives, but it was damned good at getting into secure computers and that was VERY bad. It had the potential to be an enormous intelligence threat, and the many leaks it had caused showed that it clearly understood the use of information as a weapon. Many politicians were demanding - behind closed doors and not by email - that the FBI do something to stop Majestic Countdown's many illegal activities, and it was hard to argue that the FBI shouldn't. Plus there was the chance that the angel wasn't an angel at all. If it was an incredibly impressive human fake, then the FBI was the ideal investigative agency as the angel was criminal and federal in scope. If it was non-human, then no one else had jurisdiction over aliens, so it might as well be the FBI, especially as they were better equipped than any of the other investigative agencies. So the FBI had formed a team devoted to "To protect and defend the United States from the angel." They were immediately faced with some problems. First, they didn't know how to find the angel. The military were already trying hard and were finding a lot of nothing. Second, the FBI didn't know what to do with the angel even if they found it, and they were very scared of even trying. No one wanted to appear in front of the angel and to yell up at it, "You're under arrest. Please come down so I can put handcuffs on you," or anything else Protective Of America, in case the angel thought it was also Disrespectful To Angels. Everyone was very well aware that the angel didn't like being disrespected. No one wanted to annoy the angel even from a distance. It'd really mess up a Federal employee's career path if he did something that pissed off the angel and it responded by turning everyone in Washington DC into a pillar of salt. It'd threatened to get Old Testament on America's ass, and so far it'd been dismayingly reliable and effective at carrying out its threats. Exercising some caution seemed advisable. Unfortunately, the mission statement of the FBI doesn't say, "To protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats, unless they're scary," so the FBI had to do something. Fortunately, the question of "What to do with the angel once we find it?" was very much up in the air, pending accomplishing the necessary prerequisite. Going door to door, holding up a picture, and asking, "Have you seen this, umm, person?" wouldn't have been helpful. Doing the usual of staking out airports, train and bus stations also seemed to be a dead end. The only opportunity seemed to be at a death's end. Complicating finding the angel when it met with the resurrectee's family was the issue of getting a warrant. No judge would issue a warrant to spy on a family just because they had a loved one highly deserving of resurrection. "Conspiring to Commit a Resurrection" isn't one of the conspiracy charges documented in the criminal statutes. Asking for a warrant to spy on the angel was an invitation for years of ridicule, and no judge would sign it for that same reason. So the FBI decided to do without a warrant. The angel insisted it wasn't of this Earth, so it therefore wasn't protected by the Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. That wasn't strictly true as non-Americans have rights in America, but the FBI would use the excuse that the angel was not even a person, even though its form-fitting pants made it look like one. They'd have to argue that they were surveilling the angel itself, not the host it was using, as he was a human and was covered legally, even if not covered decently. Even before the final candidates were chosen, the FBI had decided that it would stake out all their homes and wait for the angel to turn up. The angel was annoyingly inconsistent and tricky. It'd ridden around Andrews AFB on a bicycle; at Norfolk it seemed likely that it'd operated underwater, although there was no evidence of that; and it was damned effective in the air too, as four F-16 pilots could attest. So the FBI had to watch everything around the twenty four candidate families' houses. (As a slight digression on the "twenty four houses" issue. Some of the resurrection candidates didn't have a single, clear-cut home. For example, one candidate had no wife, but did have two grown children each with their own home. Another candidate had no possible home at all, her old one now occupied by strangers. There were several complicating factors, but for simplicity I'll say there were twenty four homes for the twenty four candidates.) The FBI gathered as many resources as they could, begging and borrowing UAVs, which were agreed to be the best way to track the angel. The military had shared that the angel radiated heat like a human. Most modern UAVs can track an individual human body by its heat, so they should be able to track the angel easily. The fastest recorded speed for the angel was slightly less than the airspeeds of the most modern UAVs, which would be perfect, except that there were only four RQ-4 Global Hawks available. There were a dozen MQ-1 Predators that could be used, although their top speed was a worryingly slow 135 mph. (They'd have worried even more if they'd known what my true top speed was.) These sixteen UAVs were strategically placed around the USA, ready to be vectored toward the angel when and wherever it showed up. There was also a considerable allocation of assets to try to cover as much of the sea as possible. Not helicopters with dipping sonar since they didn't last long around the angel, but there were plenty of planes which could drop sonobuoys from altitudes over five hundred feet. Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) was very advanced and there was a great deal of detection and prosecution (attack) equipment available. The FBI kept acquiring as many assets as it could, or got cooperation from the Air Force and Navy. The assets were accumulated and their placements optimally adjusted, until Jonathon produced his final list of twenty four resurrection candidates. The addresses were obtained, teams allocated and told to get to their assignments as quickly as possible. UAVs were launched (they can stay airborne for up to forty hours) and directed to fly over sixteen individual homes, chosen so the eight uncovered houses would be in the middle of locations where the UAVs were, so if the angel turned up at one of them the nearest UAVs could be vectored toward it from several directions. Unfortunately for the FBI planners, one of the names of Jonathon's list was "Mark Anderson". The functionary who recognized it trotted into his boss's office saying, "I know you ordered the assets to be put into play when we got the list, but you might not want to send surveillance to Mark Anderson's house. Look at the specs for it." "Shit!" "Yeah. His family's the one that got billions and has a contract that they can't be surveilled..." "What! How can a citizen refuse to be surveilled?" That unpatriotic situation was explained, surveilling my home discussed some more, and the boss decided, "Have the assigned ground team proceed to Corvallis. Get me their cell number and I'll caution them to set up well back and observe only..." "Look at the sat photo. The angel could fly in at low level from at least three different directions without being seen. To observe all the air accesses to that house, we're going to need at least two more teams in place. Three more would be better. And two of them will have to be placed on the hills so won't be able to operate out of vans. -- "Our trying to monitor foot access will be even worse, as there's a forest around most of the property. The angel could walk in from any direction then pop over the wall wherever it wanted. I know you want to ensure we'll know if the angel enters any of the properties, but surveilling the Andersons' well enough to ensure we pick up the angel will be a nightmare." "Why the hell did this damned family have to get on the list. We should've done something to stop that happening." "Yeah, but it's too late now. Apparently Winters insisted on Mark Anderson, so it would've been hard to stop him even if we'd known before the list was released." "Weren't there a couple of stealth UAVs on the list you're trying to squeeze?" "Yeah, but they're prototypes and the manufacturer isn't willing to let either of them go." "Shake one of them loose somehow. It's the only way we can keep an eye on that place. I'll get the ground team to park over here," pointing at the satellite map, "safely out of the way, but close enough to see if the angel flies in or if Winters approaches the main gate or front door of the houses. Have the UAV that's tasked to the Andersons station itself outside of their radar range and get me one of those stealth UAVs. How do they expect me to do my job if I don't get the resources I need?" The developer of the stealth UAV - Northrop Grumman - was EXTREMELY reluctant to part with either of them. They flew, but weren't ready for operational use. The killer issue for the developer was that a crash at this late stage of any new model's development doomed the model to never being picked up by anyone, regardless of the cause of the crash. That'd flush several hundred million dollars of development cost and loss of future profits down the toilet. The developer wanted the FBI to reimburse the full loss in the event of a crash, about $800 million. The FBI's annual budget was $8.7 billion, and the developer was asking for a guarantee of about 10% if the UAV crashed. That was unaffordable. Amusingly, $216 billion was also 10%, but of the ENTIRE Federal budget, making it considerably less affordable.]] ------- Chapter 346: Reaching My Return's Point-of-No-Return Friday, April 27 (Continued) to Friday, June 1, 2007 All the family members gathered in the Adults' dining room and the girls started putting together a celebratory breakfast while we called our lawyer. Unsurprisingly, he took our call right away. I knew the most about what had been in the van and the conversation between Paul and the police chief, so I did most of the talking. It was a good way of bringing everyone else up to date too. At the end of the conversation, our lawyer said, "Writing down your names and tracking your movements meets every definition of 'surveillance' that I know of. A technical escape might be possible, but we put a considerable amount of work into that settlement contract. Claiming they were investigating a crime offers them the only way out that I can think of. They'll claim to have received an anonymous tip-off serious enough to justify their surveillance effort. They'd be foolish to prosecute anyone because that'd give you rights to dig into the accusation, so I wouldn't worry about that. My advice is that we go public immediately, to push the FBI into having to reveal their reason as quickly as possible. If we're lucky, they might make a two hundred billion dollar mistake." We did as he advised, contacting the media and a few hours later providing them with interviews and many of the photographs we'd taken. We only released the photos taken from the street, as there's no expectation of privacy for people who leave their vehicle doors open on a public street. Those were good enough as they showed the interior of a real, live, FBI surveillance van, and showed that its screens displayed our gate and hilltop homes. The reporters were also very interested in our claim that we were now owed $216 billion. Under considerable pressure, the FBI responded a few hours later with a statement saying that they'd give a statement tomorrow. Later that evening, Jonathon Winters' final list of twenty four alphabetically sorted candidates was released, causing a great deal of additional interest in the Andersons. The angel's resurrection was way more important (i.e., would sell more advertising space and newspapers) than yet another "Government Spies on its Citizens" story - yawn. Although the possibility that the two stories might be related was intriguing. Midday Saturday, the FBI gave the reason for their surveillance of the Andersons: "In the course of an unrelated investigation, one of our undercover agents overheard a conversation which mentioned that a major new lab was turning out industrial quantities of synthetic drugs. There were references to tunnels and that the DEA would have a great deal of trouble getting near the place. -- "We compiled a list of over a hundred possible sites and we were investigating each of them. The operation wasn't aimed specifically at the Andersons at all, but over a hundred locations. Their home was included in the list because it has extensive tunnels, a great deal of security, a military-grade radar, and the Anderson's jet makes an extraordinary number of private flights all over the country which would be ideal for delivering drugs. Those reasons gave us more than enough reason to suspect there might be illegal activity being carried out. People with nothing to hide don't need tunnels and radar systems. -- "The Andersons' irresponsibility in publicly releasing the pictures of our surveillance van and two of our agents has caused great harm in our War on Drugs..." He went on to attack our patriotism, intelligence, selfishness, and everything else he could think of. The FBI spokesman was asked about the lack of a warrant, to which he'd responded, "We were recording the names of people who drove along a public street. We don't need a warrant for that." "What about the camera that was aimed at the Andersons' gate?" "It was aimed along the street. The gate just happens to be at the end of it." "What about the camera that was showing a picture of the Anderson's home?" "We also wouldn't need a warrant for that, not when recording from a public street. That wasn't part of the operation though. The agents were tasked with recording the names of people who used the street outside the Anderson's residence. That camera was surplus and wasn't being used; it just happened to be pointing upward at that angle after the last job the van was used for. You saw that it was showing more sky than anything else, so it's clear it wasn't being used to observe the Anderson's home. -- "It is possible that the agents might've heard on the grapevine that the Andersons were on the angel's list, and they might've been hoping to catch a shot of it, but they're denying that. We don't think that's the case, but we're investigating it. If that's what they were doing, they'll be reprimanded for misusing FBI resources for their private benefit." "So the van wasn't being used to watch for the Archangel Michael?" "Of course not. The FBI doesn't have jurisdiction over angels! I've never heard of anything so silly." "Who does then?" "I don't know. Maybe the Fish and Wildlife Service, or Border Protection, or NASA. You'll have to ask them." He regretted that he couldn't answer any detailed questions about the current investigation, and the press conference soon ended. The reporters thought it was too boring to bother wasting time on. Obviously the FBI was lying, but that hardly qualified as news. As they'd intended, it was impossible for us to disprove that, "An undercover agent had overheard comments." Digging into whether there really was a list of one hundred other locations wouldn't get us anywhere either. I thought of flying up to Portland for some snooping (the four arrested agents all came from Portland), but Majestic Countdown was NOT going to risk any unnecessary flights at this time, especially because we already had more money than we could spend, and there doubtless was such a list by now. The good news was that it put the van out of action [[it forced the FBI to pull ALL twenty four vans out of action, as damned reporters were all over every one of the twenty four candidates and would've spotted the vans now that they were alerted to the possibility of them]]. Plus it almost certainly forced the FBI to cancel anything else they might've been doing to spy on us. They might want to spy on us even more than before, but they couldn't risk it now. Everyone from the President down knew the FBI had been caught surveilling the Andersons, and the risk of being caught doing it again was totally unacceptable (risk $216 billion for a 1-in-24 chance of seeing the angel arrive!). It was a safe bet that there were some very bruised asses in the FBI, from the kicks they would've received for being caught the first time. We asked Paul Olsen to check whether Corvallis's Police Chief had gotten in trouble for supporting us. The Chief had supplied a lot of assistance to us, and he'd had a very busy and high-pressure day. Paul reported back that there was no problem there. The Chief had enjoyed sending a shot across the FBI's bow, and he didn't regret it afterward because he thought their explanation was a crock of shit. He'd told the Feds, "It's your own fault. I was not informed that you had an operation in my town and your agents didn't have a warrant. That's a very smelly coincidence. If you pull a stunt like that again, your people will get the same treatment or worse. I don't appreciate anybody playing fast and loose with the rights of the citizens under my protection, especially when those citizens have done as much for this town as the Andersons and Williamses have." Another job Paul suggested to us that he should do, because of the level of official interest in us, was find someone in our telecoms carrier that we could bribe to alert us if any of our phones were being tapped. Despite the source having to have the necessary access, not leave an audit trail of his actions, and having to be "reliably dishonest" to properly do the work we were paying him for, Paul was confident of finding someone. Probably two someones as a cross-check. Telecom companies leak like sieves, which is something the investigation industry makes good use of. Paul had acquaintances who doubtless had contacts inside the major carriers. Given how badly the Government had treated Mark Anderson, the CIA-inspired Army attack on the family home, and the Government's other dishonest dealings, our sources would probably feel justified in leaking the information. They'd still need a few hundred dollars a month of course, but they wouldn't have any moral qualms over doing the job. [[The FBI wasn't tapping our phones. There wouldn't have been any deniability, so it wasn't worth the risk, especially as the angel was unlikely to phone us to make an appointment for his visit.]] Having to pull all their vans back was a nuisance for the FBI, but no more than that. By now they'd extensively bugged the other twenty three homes and had video cameras covering the air approaches of all of them. The other candidates were all 'ordinary' people, although nicer than normal. Most importantly from the FBI's perspective, they were not living in unpatriotically well-defended houses, so covering them in surveillance had been easy. Plus sixteen of the homes had a UAV high overhead (sixteen rather than fifteen, as the UAV near our home had been reallocated to one of the non-radar equipped homes). That Majestic Countdown operated at night had been long known, but the angel seemed to prefer flying during the day. That left the UAV operators with the problem of when to land and refuel their craft. Unfortunately for them, no one had yet developed midair refueling for UAVs. It was being looked into, but that was no good for now. So the FBI got Air Force cooperation, having manned reconnaissance planes cover the sixteen homes during each UAV's landing and refueling times. Northrop Grumman detected a certain sense of urgency from the FBI over their acquiring a stealth UAV, which lit up dollar signs in Northrop Grumman's corporate eyes. They squeezed the FBI by sticking to the truth. It wasn't often that they had a chance to do that, especially not so profitably. A deal was struck where the FBI pre-ordered ten of the new UAVs at top dollar, for delivery when they were ready (although the FBI would normally have zero need for stealth UAVs), and the Air Force bought one of the prototypes immediately, for a nicely expensive price. The Air Force had suffered badly at the 'hands' of the angel and were happy to help the FBI track it down. Northrop Grumman had insisted on the right sort of publicity about their sale of the prototype UAV, so the Air Force had to publicly announce, "UAVs are the way of the future so it's important we develop suitable dogfight tactics, both for our UAVs against other aircraft, and for our aircraft against other nations' UAVs, as air forces around the world are investing in them too." Much later in the press statement, there was, "As part of this testing, and at an appropriate time, we'll push the UAV to its limits, deliberately causing it to crash, because it's better to do that now rather than lose a manned aircraft in a real combat situation." The not-unlikely crash of the prototype would now be seen as deliberate, that preemptive excuse being a condition of Northrop Grumman's for their selling it. The ten non-cancelable orders would also guarantee that the model was put into real use, which would make obtaining further orders much easier for the developer. NG was rubbing its corporate hands together with glee. The Air Force immediately deployed the UAV to one of the air bases nearest to Corvallis, where the FBI immediately made use of it. That doesn't mean the FBI flew it, because they didn't have any staff who could do that nor the equipment to do it with. (UAVs are operated from a base station that can be anywhere in the world. For example, the UAVs that fly in Iraq and Afghanistan are operated out of Beale AFB in California. The planes themselves are based in the Middle East, but the 'pilots' are based in California). Northrop Grumman rented out their operators and the base-station to the FBI, and that UAV was piloted from the developer's premises in El Segundo, a suburb of Los Angeles, with FBI agents hovering over the operators' shoulders. It was the fastest and most reliable way of doing it. "Fastest" was particularly critical, because the angel was expected to visit one of the twenty four families any minute now. The angel was supposed to visit Jonathon first to discuss the files, but there'd been no word from the angel about that. The danger was that the angel would visit Jonathon, then immediately visit the selected candidate, so the FBI had to be ready. Jonathon was, of course, under HEAVY and multiple layers of surveillance. He didn't have "a belly full of surveillance", but only because he'd refused to swallow a tracking device (he was being uncooperative), but unbeknownst to him, his watch was bugged, all his belts and shoes were bugged, and his briefcase produced more output than a TV studio. There'd even been arguments about surgically implanting something in him, but there was no need as he was so well bugged already. Plus there were agents all around him, several planes overhead at all times, sonar equipped boats in the river, ASW ships out to sea, and when in suitable positions, surveillance satellites on the job too. Lastly, and pretty much leastly too, several FBI agents were sent to Corvallis. They weren't surveilling the Andersons (Oh no! Of course not!); they were merely in the general area. Riding horses in the nearby hills, admiring the view from the top of the nearest high hill, bird watching, set up in a rented house with an attic that gave a camera an excellent view of the sky above the Andersons. Strictly "above", the Andersons' home was NOT in the shot. All the agents were ordered in writing NOT to surveil the Andersons home or anyone who lived there. The agents were to watch the sky, and give warnings of anything colored silver larger than a gull. Hopefully, the FBI thought, they'd be able to acquire the angel when it met with Jonathon. Following it after that would be a good test that they could do so. If they had any problems and lost the angel, they could reacquire it when it visited the soon-to-be resurrectee's family. Hopefully by then the FBI would have found a way to correct what caused them to lose it, so they'd be able to track it wherever it went after the resurrection. [By the way, around the nation some people called the angel an "it", and some a "he" (no one said "she" though). Which word people used mostly depended on their attitude to it/him. Within the FBI, the angel was generally referred to as an "it". They didn't like me at all.] It'd taken a LOT of work, and had turned into a HUGE expense - especially for the UAVs - but the FBI was finally ready to intercept the angel and to follow it to wherever it went. ^ Early Sunday morning, the media got an email using Majestic Countdown's usual authentication codes, saying: I not you call Archangel Michael. He gone busy other place long time. Resurrect wait one your lunar cycle. Problem with chosen soul. God fixing. I stay learn this planet until fixing done then I do Resurrect then I do go. You call Archangel Michael say thank you Jonathon Winters and sorry have to go so quick. The media and public weren't sure what to think, but the FBI was: it was PISSED! My sneaking out to send that message had taken some planning and effort, as: I had previously noticed a very faint Ku-band signal coming down from above. Ku radar is short-range, as atmospheric dust and moisture quickly block the signal. There is no Earthly reason I knew of for a plane to have a radar in that band. But I'd read that satellites used that band for command and control links with UAVs, in large part because those frequencies attenuate so quickly at lower altitudes so won't leak sideways very far. I detected the Ku-band radiation very infrequently, but its being so unusual and related to UAVs made me cautious. (Stealth UAVs have Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) communications antennas mounted on their tops. They ensure that UAV-to-satellite communications are undetectable, and minimize the risk of satellite-to-UAV communications 'spilling over'. But "low probability" isn't the same thing as "no probability".) I'd noticed more people around our property than usual, and a LOT more than usual at nighttime. They were very easy to find. Their infrared emissions were helpful, but that was obscured by vegetation. The easiest way of spotting them was when their cellphones "checked in" or when they used their Fibbie-frequency radios. Both sources of radiation spread in all directions on EM frequencies that penetrated vegetation easily, giving me bright point sources declaring, "Here we are!"). I'd confirmed they were FBI by following some of them with a sight-blob back to their rental house, where I'd read their orders, so I knew everything I needed to know about them. My families had agreed that we shouldn't do anything about either of those problems. We didn't expect to get paid $216 billion for revealing them since their orders were so explicitly not to surveil us and they were truly following their orders to watch out for the angel. We'd also worried that our repeatedly uncovering the FBI's surveillance might start them wondering how we were so good at that. Given that the angel was also good at things like that, it risked creating too much of a connection. I'd REALLY been hoping that all the surveillance would go away, but I guess that was being too hopeful. I only had one more email to send (the one quoted above), and after that they should go away because the object of all their orders - Archangel Michael - had left the Earth. Even if their surveillance did stay, I wouldn't be going on any more flights or using my other visible abilities for quite a while, so the surveillance wouldn't matter anywhere near as much. To send the email I had to find an excuse to get away from home for a few hours. Mom and Dad volunteered to visit Dad's parents in Seattle, an unavoidable obligation from time to time, especially since we started being so "successful". I hid in their car's trunk, climbing out of it when Dad pulled into a rest stop which had plenty of trees to park under. We hadn't been tailed, and it was unlikely that a UAV had followed us because not long before we'd left home, Ava had driven off in another direction, while Julia and Carol went in another. Not long after we'd left, Prof and Vanessa went to visit friends, and then Donna got a ride to one of her friends from one of our guards (they often drive Donna and Carol around if everyone else is too busy. Two of our guards take Donna to and from her Karate classes for example, even after Ava joined in and could've driven Donna, as things we do regularly are treated particularly cautiously). Splitting us up so much would've made it very unlikely for a UAV to be on my tail. There hadn't been enough UAVs manufactured for it to be practical for the Government to have several of them lurking over our home, plus I hadn't detected any Ku radiation during our drive. I knew that in an event like this, the operator would have to fly the UAV live rather than leaving it into a pre-programmed auto-piloted pattern, so if there'd been one above me, I should've caught several glimpses of the back-and-forth communication. After Dad drove away, I walked into the restroom, killed a few minutes productively, then flew off to do my other business: sending the badly worded email given above. We'd worked out roughly how long Mom and Dad would stay at his parents (never very long, but often what felt like too long), and the travel time for them to get back to the rest stop, so I chose a city for my emailing that got me back fifteen minutes ahead of Dad. I sat in the woods playing with the nice, little animals (little, so there'd be insignificant infrared output) until I was able to sneak back into the trunk again. As an aside, small animals have less than one-twentieth of a human's amount of ki. I had thirty two minds, trained enough to be able to produce 70 minds' worth of ki, so my EKP swamped their ki by a factor of at least 1400. I had no trouble at all getting them to do simple tasks. I couldn't order them to do forward rolls or other such tasks, because I could only reinforce their normal ki, but getting them to sit still or walk where I wanted them to was very easy, the latter requiring a little bit of NP to get them 'thinking' in the right direction. ^ I neglected to mention one of Archangel Michael's contacts with humans. The evening after the surveillance van was exposed was an ideal time, as the four FBI agents were still in jail (the Police Chief had been VERY uncooperative with the FBI) and the FBI hadn't had much time to get whatever their Surveillance Plan B was into operation. It was also the evening before the list of the final candidates was made public. On that evening, Archangel Michael visited the Anderson families to tell us that he'd chosen the candidate, and that it was Mark. Honest he did! We're all willing to swear to it, so it must be true because we're a very moral family, as proved by how much God was favoring us. We were all highly appreciative! The girls all insisted on kissing the angel to thank him, but he had to sadly refuse to take off his mask. We were actually role-playing it in Mom and Dad's Faraday-enclosed bedroom, so everyone would have a common story to tell in case we get questioned closely. The angel said that Mark's soul would need a volunteer body, and he asked whether Ron was still willing. Everyone was shocked, because Ron hadn't told anyone about his email. The angel recited it (so they'd all be familiar with it. Reciting it was a good idea because in reality most of them had helped write it, and it was smart to line up reality with our story as much as possible). The girls thought Ron was wonderful, and insisted on kissing him, which Ron gracefully accepted. (Of my two roles, I preferred playing Ron.) The parents refused to let Ron give up his life for Mark. Ron insisted that he wanted to because of how wonderful everyone had been to him, saying, "This is my only way of paying you back for the love you've give me." It was very touching, and the parents put up a good fight, but Ron got his way, especially after the angel said God agreed. It's hard to argue with God. (It truly is, as the bastard never answers.) The angel then explained that God had informed him that Mark had been so traumatized by the CIA's experimentation on him, and the deadly attack on the lab, that he was psychologically and mentally damaged - ("Oh no!" cried the girls) - but that God was going to fix it. ("Yippee!" said the girls. Vanessa told them to calm down and role-play properly.) "It'll take a few weeks to heal him because God wants to use Mark's soul's own recovery mechanisms. I'll be leaving the Earth shortly, but a minor angel will arrive to perform Mark's resurrection and a Guardian Angel will be staying to protect Mark after that. God will leave some of Ron's memories behind, but only for events that will help Mark understand what has happened since he was kidnapped by your Homeland Security. That's so he won't feel disconnected or puzzled by the changes. Ron's childhood memories won't be staying because they'd be of no use to Mark, but many of the things Ron did with everyone here will stay, so Mark will understand your conversational references to them, and so he'll appreciate Ron's role in your families. Do you understand?" They understood, and I'll assume you do by now too. By role-playing it, we'd later give realistically consistent stories - including a realistic degree of inconsistency - when questioned about it, which we surely would be considering how important a resurrection would be. Everyone thanked the angel very profusely, there was some badly acted crying, and we pretended the angel left by opening the door and flying away, the reverse of how he'd arrived. Then the family role-played the discussion they had after the angel left. Ron got more kisses (especially from Julia, as she was honestly very upset over her "Playing Dress-Up" disaster), and we eventually decided that we'd achieved everything we wanted at ten minutes past midnight. All the girls, including Donna, insisted that Ron should be shown some serious appreciation. He apologetically refused Donna, saying, "I'm sorry, Donna, but all of you are going to be asked about this a great deal, and you're so young it'd upset a lot of people. -- "Out of character: I'll stay with you in your bed one night soon to make up for it. Tomorrow night hopefully, unless too much FBI crap messes it up. -- "Back in character: I'm sorry you can't stay now, Donna, but I'm sure you understand. Besides, Carol is my main girlfriend and I'd be uncomfortable doing anything with her sister. I appreciate your offer, but I don't think it'd be right." Donna did a very poor job of acting sad when she left the room, anticipating tomorrow's extra, non-monthly, session. Julia, Carol and Ava gave Ron a very good time; Julia trying very hard to make up for her Dress-Up Stupidity, although it would've been out of character to mention that out loud, and it was kind of more fun to leave the apology and its acceptance as unspoken. We all 'heard it' in the appreciation she was giving me. My cock was still too big to fit inside Julia, but I did go out of character long enough to tell her that I'd already ordered my body to return to Ron's, so it should only take a few more days before doing her would be doable. It was a good night, as it jolly well should have been, considering the sacrifice I'd made: putting up with so much bad acting. ^ There's no need to detail the next couple of weeks, so I'll just say a few things about it. The Angel Plan proceeded nicely: My body returned to Ron's version of me roughly on schedule, taking about 2.5 weeks. The last 1.5 weeks of which had Julia apologetically making up for lost time. It's true what they say on TV: make-up sex is great! Plus, I must admit, I think I get satisfaction out of seeing Julia trying so hard to be subservient and contrite. It's probably wrong of me, but my excuse is that Julia genuinely enjoys proving her devotion, so it's a win-win situation. For my landscaping work, I started documenting it rather than working from my head as usual. I introduced my changing attitude slowly, not telling my staff why. When any of the gardeners asked me about it, I said something like, "It's better this way. You won't have to ask me questions so often because you'll be able to look up the plan yourself." But once Ron had sacrificed his life to bring Mark back, the gardeners would say, "Ahh! So that's why all the landscaping plans are in folders with monthly To Do lists. I wondered why Ron was getting so organized. That must've been very hard for him, knowing when he was going to die... ," etc. There was a flurry of media excitement over the final list, but twenty four people is too many to make Good TV, and every one of them said that they hadn't heard from Archangel Michael or the new angel. After a couple of days of being pains in Mom's and Dad's butts, the media attention faded away. The new angel didn't appear in public or send any more emails, so that got to be old news. It didn't take long for almost everyone to decide that the whole thing had been some sort of weird trick. Archangel Michael - if that's what he had been - had done miraculous things when he'd been flying around, but the silence was suspicious. Sure, the new angel had said "one your lunar cycle," but that required an attention span beyond that of most watchers of TV News. The FBI's surveillance remained for a few more days in case the last angelic email had been a trick to get the FBI to pull back, but after nothing happened for those days, they did have to pull back because they couldn't keep so many agents in the area so long. All twenty four candidates' houses had their teams reduced down to a skeleton level, just enough to monitor the bugs in twenty three of the cases, or keep the attic-mounted camera running in our case. Software was provided to summon human attention if motion was detected by the camera. There were many false alarms (from flocks of birds and clouds mostly), but the two agents babysitting the camera mostly just did a lot of reading. Most of the UAVs had to be returned to where they'd been begged from. The stealth UAV was retained, but kept out of the air nearly all the time as flying it continually increased its risk of crashing too much. They'd launch it again if something happened to justify it. A couple of days later, one of our guards' routine sweeps of the area looking for anyone surveilling us spotted the Fibbies camera surveillance. The procedure for that was to photograph the surveillance, report it to the police, they get a warrant, and they raid the place with a couple of interested spectators coming along for the ride (Paul, for example). The FBI was caught pink-handed (not "red-handed", because the camera wasn't pointed at our home). The agents were sent scurrying home with pink-faces. The Chief gave a press conference at the property that'd been used. He explained how the FBI was skating toward a harassment accusation, and showed the press through the attic with the camera gear reinstalled to create Good TV. The attic gave a good view of our property, and the implication that the FBI had been spying on us was obvious. The FBI came in for a great deal of public abuse for risking a $216 billion penalty, and they got some private abuse too, the Corvallis Chief of Police particularly enjoying yelling at them. That left the FBI with a grounded UAV and the highly unsatisfactory situation of having to wait to hear something from a public source to tell them when to launch it. When my body was fully Ron's again, we had another family conference to discuss the three major options: aborting the plan totally, going ahead with it, or some sort of difficult to arrange mid-point to feel out what sort of response the public might produce if we proceeded further. We went over the same ground we'd discussed several times before, and decided to keep moving forward. The first committing action was a small one: destroying the A-man suit. I went for a walk along the riverbank and from a location about three hundred feet away from where I'd buried it, I dug it up, then held it suspended halfway between the surface and the bottom of the river. I created a snorkel down to it, with a couple of sizable bends in it so no overhead camera could look down the tube and see any silver fabric. They might see some smoke, but that didn't worry me. The snorkel continued past the bag, to near the riverbed, before it curved back up to the surface again (so like a U-shape, with the suit halfway down one leg). I expanded the area around the suit then covered it with heat blobs. The hot air rising up the flue sucked fresh air in from underneath, so the suit and bag burned very nicely. When there was nothing left, I canceled the NP-points, letting the ash wash away. An even more committing action - which we all agreed on doing - was on one of her trips to DC, Vanessa visited our DC law firm. She stunned our lawyer by telling him that Ron was giving his body to Mark via angelic resurrection in a week's time, and "Yes, we all believe it's true. We've had conversations with Archangel Michael, and he comes across as very sincere. And no, we don't believe it's any sort of devilish trick to steal Ron's soul. Ron doesn't want his money to be grabbed by his LA family when he goes..." After some further explanation so the lawyers understood what would be happening, documents were drawn up giving Carol control of Ron's assets. In case his parents got Ron declared legally dead, a Last Will and Testament was signed leaving all his assets to Carol. Whether he was alive or dead, the Fishers would get nothing. The only people who'd get anything would be the Government, who'd get very disappointed about not getting a huge estate tax windfall (our tax exemptions included estate tax). The next afternoon I called each of the second-tier girls who'd been my lovers: Alexis, the two good (i.e., naughty) Norris girls (Carol made that call), etc. I invited them around the next afternoon, "Because I've got something good to tell you all." Every one of them asked, "Are you and Carol getting engaged?" I answered, "It's nothing like that, and fifteen is too young for her to be getting engaged anyway. You'll never guess what it is and I'm going to be mean and not even hint, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow." If Julia or Carol had been the ones calling these girls, some of them might've guessed it was about Mark's possible resurrection, because that'd been discussed a GREAT deal around Corvallis, but coming from Ron, the girls never thought of that. The next day, when they were sitting in the sofas in my master bedroom, I activated the Faraday cage, explained it was for privacy, then I said, "I have good news, and VERY good news. The good news, especially for me, is that my time of not being close to any of you has ended. The fantastic sex we had before is back on the agenda..." Alexis interrupted to give her opinion of that development. " ... The VERY good news is perhaps not so good for me, although I feel very happy about my decision. What I'm about to say is a BIG secret, so please don't tell anyone else, okay?" Of course it was okay. BIG secrets are VERY okay. "Archangel Michael's choice about who to resurrect is Mark. It's going to be happening this Friday evening, and I'm donating my body for it." Once they checked they'd heard correctly, and my first-tier girls had confirmed it, and then they'd checked that they understood it correctly, especially that Ron Fisher would effectively cease to exist, the invitees were utterly stunned. The rest of the conversation needed a lot of time and hankies. Sex disappeared off the agenda. It's a sad fact, but when girls are sadly wet at the top end, their getting wet at the other end can't happen. For any self-respecting guy, the prospect of sex would have instantly removed any sadness, but girls aren't nearly as emotionally resilient as guys. By deliberate arrangement, there was enough time until Friday for me to offer, "I'd like to spend a night with you if you could, or have you visit for an hour or two during a day, or whatever suits you. So I can cuddle with each of you wonderful girls for the last time and say goodbye." This sort of stuff would give great credibility to Ron's leaving, and by obvious extension, to Mark's arriving. I passed out fresh hankies. The conversation lasted several hours, and included Julia explaining Archangel Michael's comments about some of Ron's memories remaining. I said, "I hope the angel leaves Mark the ones of the times I spent with each of you." They thought I was TOTALLY marvelous! By this point of the discussion, the girls had learned that it was okay to show happiness at Mark's returning - I'd explained that I was doing it voluntarily and it made me happy to do so - but they were still far more blown away by my sacrifice than they were excited at Mark's coming back. It was a VERY emotional time, and would've made a great Oprah show. The last two things we did were to cheer the girls up otherwise they'd go home and their parents would question their strange expressions, and then to swear them to secrecy. It wouldn't be a disaster, but it would probably be a damned nuisance if word got out before the event, especially if the FBI got silly. Over the next few days, all of the girls easily made time to visit me. I was so wonderful for "doing what you're doing," - they still had trouble saying it - that there was no way they wouldn't come. It would've been very tedious to have all the visits be maudlin, but it was pretty easy to avoid that just by my girls and me behaving happily. We joked around, smiled, I said things like, "I've only got a few days left, so why should I waste it being sad when I can be happy with wonderful, naked girls. So how come you're not naked yet? Cuddling naked girls is SO MUCH better!" It worked most of the time, but all the girls had surges of sad emotions. It was too huge for them not to. That was okay with me, just so long as they didn't do it too much, and not at an inconvenient moment. ^ Then it was "the last minute": early evening Friday, June 1st. It was time for the BIG decision: Do we really do it? Without doubt the main beneficiary was me, while everyone would have to suffer a considerable amount of crap and possibly even danger. But good parents are good at sacrificing for their kids' benefit, and loved ones are pretty good at it too. The parents would receive some benefits - Prof would love to see me advance further in my education, for example - but the main benefit was one they had no trouble appreciating the value of: it would "let me be myself." That expression was more literally true than it'd ever been before, because weird things I did in the future could be blamed on the Guardian Angel. There's an aspect of my Angel Plan that I've not explicitly spelled out to you yet. I've hinted at the edges of it a few times, but never laid all of it out. Mostly because in the early days of the Angel Plan it seemed inappropriate to look so far ahead [[When I'm writing this autobiography, I relive the emotions I had at the time, which affects my writing choices.]] Now that we're so close to the big go/no-go decision, I should explain the final consequences of the Angel Plan. The parents knew most of it, and it was affecting their thinking, as implied at the end of the preceding paragraph. The Angel Plan is called that, and not "The Resurrection Plan", because the latter name would imply resurrection was the objective, which it's not. It's one of the stages, and a pretty damned important one, but there's a later objective that is just as good (I imagine it's quite unusual for a dead person to have multiple objectives, including one comparable in importance to being not dead). Resurrection comes with a Guardian Angel to protect me, otherwise my resurrection might be short lived. There's no sure way of knowing how people will react to my resurrection and the existence of a Guardian Angel, as there haven't been many prior examples to extrapolate from. But I'm betting (literally) that most people will accept it, and quickly too. I'll be walking around, chatting, and generally doing things that 6.5 billion other people are doing. I'll crack jokes, such as, "Mom says I've gotten out of washing the dishes for the last year, so I have to pull double duty until I've caught up." I'll be doing my best to look mundane and ordinary, and pretty soon I'll be old news for most people. The public's accepting the Guardian Angel is another issue, but I believe that most people will accept it quickly too. Archangel Michael started the process. People met him, some had physical contact with his body (the basketball players, for example), know he was real, know he was a good guy, and they'll be even more sure of that after the resurrection. Accepting the Guardian Angel should be a continuation of Michael's acceptance. The Guardian will be invisible most of the time too, which should make it less intrusive and even easier to accept. Mind you, when it's not invisible it's going to be causing trouble, which won't help, but Michael paved the way there too. Michael often flew other people around, and the Guardian will do the same. Unlike Michael, the Guardian will do so only for protective reasons. If someone annoys me a little, the Guardian will pick him up and place him farther away. More annoying people might be dropped from a foot or two in the air. Even more annoying people might get dropped from a few feet higher. It'll be part of what the Guardian does, probably more than anything else, and it should seem reasonable to most people. So I hoped that most people will accept me and the Guardian Angel fairly quickly. A few months should easily do it, and that long mainly because my body's changing into Mark's will be slow. Those good reasons and good people aside, there are bound to be some people who won't accept my resurrection or the Guardian. They're one of the major risks, and we're going to have to be very careful about them. Once things are reasonably stable, I'll add three nuances to the mix: The first nuance I'll add is having the Guardian fly me. I'll arrange to get myself into a situation where I'm surrounded by a large crowd of annoying people (on past experience, just walking into middle school would do it, or I could walk into a fundamentalist Christian church. Wherever I do it, it'll be on camera). To get me out of the bad crowd, the Guardian will grab me by my arms, lift me out and fly me away while I dangled beneath its grips. That won't surprise anyone, as it was obviously within the Guardian's capabilities and it's a logical action. The second nuance is that I'll be slowly increasing the amount of help the Guardian gives me. I'll talk with it (obviously it has to be able to understand our speech to be able to detect threats), and I'll ask it to do more and more things for me. For example, I could walk halfway out of a restaurant at the end of a meal, then suddenly remember that I've left my jacket behind. I'd say, "Guardian, will you please get my jacket for me?" The Guardian will become visible beside me, and my jacket will amazingly float across the room to me, creating a great story. The third nuance is that the Guardian will develop a personality. To start with, the angel will be focused entirely on its guardian task. It won't interact unnecessarily, won't have any humor, etc. The ONLY thing it'll do is protect me. But as it gets to learn about humans or maybe when it relaxes into its job (it'll be hard to tell which), it'll start showing some personality, making it more natural for it to start doing things for me when I ask it, and even to anticipate my requests. When I was writing about a few weeks ago, I mentioned that the FBI's surveillance won't matter as much in a few weeks. That was also because if I'm caught on secret camera doing anything freaky after the resurrection, such as my using NP to carry something, I'll be able to say, "The Guardian Angel did it." The amazing consequence of that is since I won't mind that stuff being caught on secret camera, then I shouldn't mind it been seen in public either! I SHOULD do it in public, to get the excuse widely known. Do you remember back when I described taking the Santa Monica lifeguards for their fun flight up and down the beach, I wrote that my plan called for their and my having fun flying around? I deliberately made Archangel Michael fly people around very often, specifically including just for the fun of it. I was establishing that angels like to fly and they like to have fun. Once the three nuances above are progressing nicely, I'll ask the Guardian to fly me around (and later, my girlfriends too). I'll even start by using the same steering system as the lifeguards did, as it was caught on camera and the lifeguards and internet millionaire described it in their interviews. I'LL BE ABLE TO FLY AROUND AND USE MY NP IN PUBLIC! I can't express how fantastic that will feel. My quality of life will take a huge leap forward (it'll literally "fly forward"). The Angel Plan is high risk, but it's also VERY high payoff. Being permanently constrained in what and where I can use my special abilities, and always being conscious of the need to be 100% careful, is a huge pain in the ass; whereas being open about them would be FANTASTIC! I would LOVE to live my life in the open. I'll have to make sure it looks like the Guardian is doing things for me, but that'll be easy. I'm mostly talking about my NP, as I won't make public abilities like my proximity sense and sight blobs. I don't need to because I'm already using them as much as I want, and I also don't want the public to know about them. There are abilities that are in a questionable middle ground though. Revealing that I can read thirty two (or thirty six) screens at once, for example. There are advantages in being able to do that openly, but risks as well because I can't say the Guardian is doing it for me. I could claim that God improved on my already impressive ability to read quickly, but that's a long way from a rock solid explanation. I have the same question about revealing my phenomenal memory, the absurdly small amount of food I eat, or my infinite endurance even when sprinting. Not just endurance at sprinting, come to that. Now that I've done five merges, I haven't found an activity that uses up energy faster than I can get it from the Universe. Out of a sense of scientific inquiry, I've even tried going REALLY fast at sex for an hour or more. No matter how many times I repeat the experiment, I can't get fatigued (I'll keep trying though. Science demands that I be thorough). There are various advantages in revealing these abilities, and disadvantages too. There's no need to decide yet, so I'll wait and see how the resurrection and Guardian Angel play out first, and then how the angel's open use of NP is accepted, and only then worry about making any other abilities public. The parents had for a long time been very aware that there was a serious and perpetual risk of my being seen doing something freaky. I could slip up in public, someone might slip a video-bug into our home, or I might get caught out in some other way. It might not ever happen, but it could happen sooner or later. There was uncertainty over how damaging such a slip could be, but it could potentially be very bad indeed. I'd told everyone several weeks ago, "One of the major benefits of the Angel Plan is removing the risk of anyone catching me doing something freaky. That could cause a disaster, but after the Guardian Angel appears, anything like that can be attributed to it. We can even make sure of that, by getting it to do freaky things for me in public. Like I'll leave my jacket on my chair when I leave a restaurant, and the Guardian will float it after me. It'll seem perfectly reasonable for the Guardian to do things like that for me. So the Angel Plan removes the risk of a slip-up causing a disaster." The parents recognized that advantage immediately; in less time than it took for me to explain my logic. They have often seen me NP'ing stuff around, and they have often worried about someone else seeing it. They'd many times told me to be DAMNED CAREFUL not to thoughtlessly use it in public, so they were VERY pleased by that benefit of my Angel Plan. I hadn't specifically mentioned to anyone that I was thinking of openly flying around during daylight. There was no need to mention it, as it was only a possibility. If we get to the stage that it's looking possible, I'll talk with the parents about it. But the dream of it was VERY much on my mind, and had been for months. It had greatly influenced how Archangel Michael had behaved on his first and second public appearances. Even leaving flying out, NP is still AMAZINGLY useful. It has a 1,001 uses every day! And for once, I'm not exaggerating. Many, many times per day I want to use NP, but can't because I'm in public. It's constantly frustrating and it'd be wonderful to be able to use NP everywhere, once the highly intelligent Guardian has learned to anticipate my wishes so well that it hardly ever makes mistakes; just enough of them to prove that it's independent of me (hehe). On a final related topic, while I will talk with the Guardian, it will not communicate back to me beyond a very rudimentary level, such as 'nodding up and down' or 'shaking its head'. There won't be ANY conversation from it to me. Its not having a body means it can't speak - although it will somehow hear - and while it could pick up a pen and write with it, it won't. Its job is to guard me, so there's no need for it to communicate with anyone. It won't need to tell me where I can or can't go the way our guards sometimes do, because my Guardian will be able to guard me from anything. (Or maybe it doesn't want to restrain my freewill. I can only guess about its reasons because it doesn't communicate with me, hehe). It will simply follow me wherever I go and protect me there. With no communication, it can never get into an argument with anyone, such as some judge in court pissed off that the Guardian just did something illegal (for a human). The Guardian will ignore ALL of that crap, saving me from having to put up with it. We were at the point of no return for my return. Do we do it, or not? There'd be two significant advantages in doing it: I'd get to live my own life, including building on an amazing ability to study multiple degrees, as Ron can't risk doing anything like that. Any freaky slip-ups could be attributed to the Guardian Angel. Possibly extending far enough to allow me to fly around in public. There'd be two significant disadvantages: Loss of privacy. We'd be under intense scrutiny for a while. It'd ease off later, but it'd always be there. Real risks to our safety. Mostly to mine, but to the others' too, although some risks would decrease, as per the above second advantage, and with the Guardian Angel being able to openly and effectively defend us. I'll be able to defend myself - and my family too if I'm in the area - amazingly well, especially as I'll be able to do so openly. I'll have to pretend that the Guardian is doing it, but that's no hindrance as that's satisfied just by having a yellow light blob somewhere in the area, and maybe not even that. Even Mom has accepted how powerful I am now, after seeing Archangel Michael in action on TV. Plus we live in a very defensible house and we can afford to hire as many additional guards as we want. The key point was how much resurrection would improve my life. This is an exaggeration, but it makes the point clearly: "My life isn't worth living unless I resurrect as Mark." In other words, the first advantage bullet point (of the four points above) is a very large one, and the parents understood that. They could actually see it better than I could explain it, which seemed weird but it is true. They said enough back to me to prove that they understood the issue. [[Adults accumulate enough experience at having to wear false faces - being nice to obnoxious customers, bosses or parents-in-law, for examples - that they gain an understanding of how unsatisfactory living falsely is.]] Everyone said they were in favor of going ahead. I said, "There's no going back. If this turns into a pile of very nasty shit and causes us endless grief, there's no undoing it." "Sure there is," said Dad. "You go away and come back as someone else." "Ahh, yeah. There's still the risk that something very bad might happen quickly, like someone setting off a bomb." "We'll live with it," joked Mom, deliberating smiling at me to confirm she was aware that she was using my humor. "Are you ABSOLUTELY SURE?" "Yes we are, and you should do it before we're too old to appreciate the chaos you're going to cause," insisted Prof. "Not exactly an encouraging image, but okay, we'll do it. Thanks everyone." "You're welcome, son." | "It'll be fun." | "I'm doing it for Patch; he misses you." | and other encouragements. I said, "Oh boy." ------- Part 15: A Better Life ------- Chapter 347: My Resurrection Friday, June 1, 2007 (Continued) During the previous days I'd many times thanked everyone for permitting my plan's progress, so I just said, "Thanks very much YET again. Okay, I'll get changed and lie on the bed and we'll role-play it. Not that there's much to do." This was taking place in Mom and Dad's bedroom because it had a Faraday cage and it seemed like an appropriate place for their son to come back into the world. I changed into the shorts I'd planned to wear. Mom had washed and ironed them for me! She'd been nervous, and said she wanted Mark to make a good impression when the press arrived. I'd be wearing shorts and nothing else so the media's first glance at my body would stop anyone suspecting that I was Archangel Michael. While I changed, I suggested, "Let's say you felt like coming to this room. You had a feeling that the angel that replaced Michael wanted you to come, but you can't explain how you thought that. We'll say that it happened at the time that you did come here, so about thirty minutes ago, and that you'd each been previously doing whatever you'd truly been doing, so no lies about any of that. -- "When you got to this room, you had a feeling it was time for the resurrection, and we spent twenty five minutes talking, mostly your thanking Ron for his sacrifice and he insisting that it was the least he could do to pay you all back. You've heard me describe that stuff before so we'll just run through it quickly so you have common stories." We did it. I'm sure you can easily imagine what we said, so I won't bother recording it. I continued, "Then the angel that had replaced Archangel Michael appeared about five minutes ago. It had a MUCH better command of English. It has no body, so we'll say we heard the voice coming from all around us. You can each say that the voice sounded like your own voice, which will confuse people a little, but that's good. -- "It told you how God had always intended that Mark be the resurrectee because God wants the world to have an 'In Your Face' object lesson about how wasteful immorality is. If Mark had been kept alive, the discoveries from his body would have changed human civilization enormously for the better, but humanity's immorality destroyed and lost Mark's body. God will resurrect Mark, but will change his body chemistry so it won't lead to the breakthroughs it could have. The Guardian Angel has also been told not to allow many experiments to be done on Mark, making it even harder for scientists to discover anything useful. God wants humans to get just enough from Mark's new body to be tantalized and excited by it, but not to be able to get any of the incredibly wonderful things humans could have gained if the first body hadn't been killed. -- "The angel also said that Archangel Michael was sent to Earth to observe humanity in general, but also how humanity treated Mark as he grew into his potential. God was greatly disappointed in humanity when it treated Mark so immorally that humanity ended up killing him. God says it's going to be a very long time before there's a chance of someone like Mark happening again. As we talked about before, to get more religious people on our side we'll say the angel said that Mark was not only physically and mentally advanced, but his soul was advanced too. After the resurrection, I'll have that soul back, which should give me some credibility with the religious people, which are the ones we worry about the most. The angel can say that God has resurrected me with my body rendered less useful, but my mind and soul are just as advanced as they used to be. -- "I've said all that in one burst and I mixed the structure up a little, so when you talk about it you'll give slightly different versions. Does anyone think we should go through it more carefully?" Donna said, "I didn't understand all of it..." "And that's perfect, Donna. You'll be more convincing if you don't understand. It's all a pile of custard anyway, so you're not missing out on anything real." "Okay." "According to our story, the new angel has been talking to us for half an hour, and at this point it says it's time to do the resurrection. I - as Ron - lie down on the bed and all the pretty girls kiss me goodbye. We can actually role-play that part, if you like." The girls kissed me and thanked me for my noble sacrifice. I said I was looking forward to finding out what came next. The parents said some short, sweet, in-character words, gave me hugs, then we got on with the play. I said, "We'll say the angel was hovering here for the last half an hour while it was talking to us." I created a white light blob in a convenient location. Donna asked, "I thought those were aliens that had to come a long way to see you. But now they come whenever you want, and the Guardian is going to appear and disappear a lot too, right? So what are they?" "Just think of them as angels for now. When all the media frenzy has died down I'll tell you more, but telling you too much new stuff now might cause you to say the wrong thing when someone asks you about them." "It's very weird the way they come whenever you want?" "For now, let's just say it's because angels are very smart and clever because they work for God. I'll tell you more later, but now isn't the time. There are too many other important things to worry about." "Okay. I want to know though." I got back to the main issue, "We'll make the resurrection very simple. After the angel saw we'd all finished saying our goodbyes and thank yous, the angel got brighter and brighter," which it did, "taking only a few seconds to get so bright it was hard to look at," which it was. Everyone could still see though, as it getting too bright for us to see might make the public suspect that it had played a trick on us. "When it was bright like it is now - bright, but you can still see - the angel paused for about five seconds, then it said, 'Mark is here now.' Before you can say anything, Ron's body says, 'Mom, Dad, is that you? Where am I? How did I get here? Donna, why are your, umm, breasts so big?'" While Donna giggled, Mom soberly asked, "Do we really want Mark to talk about Donna's breasts at this historic moment? That's going to upset some people." "I'm trying to deflate the pretentiousness from the event, to establish an air of normality. The faster we appear normal the better. Plus Mark's got no idea what's happened to him, so he should ask ordinary questions..." Vanessa added, "Plus you enjoy jerking people's chains." "Yeah, that too. But I still think my other reasons are sufficient. It also seems like such a down-to-earth comment that it might help people believe that there's no trick involved in this." "I think we should leave it in," opined Dad. "It does make things seem more real." I asked, "Does anyone have a good reason to exclude Donna's tits from being mentioned in thousands of history books?" Donna giggled again, then suggested, "Maybe I should get changed into something better for the photographs?" Julia ALMOST agreed, and then realized her mistake. A guilty look flashed across her face and she looked at me to see if I'd noticed. I let her know that I had, and she hung her head with well-deserved shame. Mom said, "I think it's better you don't look like you dressed for the comment, Donna. We were doing ordinary things around the house because we didn't expect this to happen." Donna was more concerned with other issues, "I didn't know I was going to be photographed and put in books when I put these clothes on..." I interrupted this mindlessness, "You'll be appearing on God knows how many TV shows and you'll be interviewed until it drives you up the wall, so you'll have plenty of opportunity to dress how you want." "Goody! Umm, but I don't really have anything suitable. We'll have to go shopping. Julia, Carol and Ava; can you help me PLEASE?" #4: #15: #4: #32: #20: Mom said, "Donna, this isn't about you. Trying to get Mark's life back is a great deal more important than what clothes you're wearing." "Umm, sorry. It's just..." Mom's dirty look shut Donna up. Or maybe it "shut her down." It probably did both, such is the power of glares from mothers. #13: I said, "Let's get back to role-playing. I've just said 'Mom, Dad, is that you? Where am I? How did I get here? Donna, why are your, umm, breasts so big?' Let's play this out for real, so who speaks next?" Mom was still thinking about clothes (it takes females quite a long time to disengage from that issue), and the others thought one of my parents should speak, so it fell to Dad. He said, "You're at home, Mark. We moved a while ago. You don't remember what happened to you?" "I was being held prisoner by some scientists who were doing horrible things to me. I didn't think I'd ever get out. Did they drug me in my sleep again and then give me back? -- "Out of character: I'll try to make my voice stumble a little bit occasionally, but I don't think I should do it much. I'll be clumsy when I walk around for the first few days, but speaking shouldn't be so hard. Does everyone agree?" "Sounds fine to me," agreed Prof. "It's not as if scientists have other cases to compare you to." No one else argued the point, so I said, "Okay. Back in character then. The angel will now say that it's okay to talk with Mark about what happened because his soul is strong enough to handle it." Prof asked, "Why hasn't Mark asked about the big blob of light?" "Because I stupidly forgot that I wouldn't know about them. Let's change my first words to, 'Mom, Dad, is that you? Where am I? How did I get here? Why is that light so bright? Donna, why are your, umm, breasts so big?' We'll pretend I initially thought the light was some sort of lamp stand." You should have the idea by now. We played it out, with my families breaking the news to me that I'd been killed in the CIA lab and resurrected by the lamp stand about fifteen months later. It took us about ten minutes to get the next five minutes of dialogue planned, then I said, "For the sake of the FBI watchers outside, the Guardian Angel should arrive and the other angel leave about now, and the email should be sent too. We've still got about five minutes of dialogue to invent, but I need to do those things now. Okay?" Everyone agreed. I wrote the email on Ron's computer system. After the usual authentication codes, the body of the text was: I am the angel that replaced the servant of God that you know as Archangel Michael. God, through me, performed the resurrection ten minutes ago. Mark Anderson and his families are getting reacquainted. They have much to discuss. You need to be aware of some aspects of this resurrection: First, Mark's Guardian Angel will be joining him soon and will be with him by the time any of you arrive. Remember what Archangel Michael said about Guardian Angels: they are single-minded about protecting their assigned subject and they can be deadly. The Guardian has been given a single instruction by God: "Protect Mark Anderson." The Guardian will understand that to include Mark's quality of life and the lives of those people nearest and dearest to him. It will not feel constrained to be gentle with offending humans. If any person oversteps what the Guardian considers acceptable behavior, the Guardian will make that person wish they'd been more cautious, presuming the person is still alive to wish anything. Guardians can be deadly, so respect it! You have been warned. Second, the resurrection was delayed because Mark's soul was badly damaged by the very traumatic experiences prior to his death. God needed him to heal before the resurrection could take place. That healing has been accomplished, so Mark's soul is now robust and strong. For Mark's sake, and because God thinks it appropriate for other reasons, some of Mark's memories have been removed. One removal is worth mentioning now. Mark does not remember anything subsequent to a few hours before his death. Those hours contained a particularly horrific experiment, his death itself, and his time with God. That removal was to preserve Mark's mental health and so he can retain his freewill over his beliefs. Third, Mark's soul now inhabits Ronald Fisher's body. Ronald's soul is no longer on your Earth. God left a few of Ronald's memories behind to help Mark transition to his new reality, and so Mark would appreciate the full value of Ronald's gift to his extended family. At the end of what I wish to say in this email, I will reproduce Ronald's volunteering email to Jonathon Winters. Fourth, all of Ronald's cells now contain Mark's DNA. They and God will transform Ronald's body into Mark's. God has changed that process from what it would've been if left to nature, so it will take just a few weeks to give Mark a better version of the body than he had at the time of his death. Fifth, Mark's first body was - if you'll excuse the expression - miraculous. As far as I know, it didn't come about as a result of God's deliberate action but from natural processes and a great deal of luck, as the potential for all of humanity to have bodies and brains as capable as Mark's exists within human DNA, although far beyond your current ability to locate, understand and activate. Had Mark been left to pursue his own life, the source of that potential could have been identified and duplicated by your scientists. However, humanity chose to behave immorally, leading to Mark's body being destroyed. God has decided that humanity does not deserve a second chance to achieve the wonders that it threw away by destroying Mark, so God has altered the body chemistry of Mark's second body. It is still wondrous, but it will no longer give you the clues you need to unlock its previous great potential. Furthermore, the Guardian has been instructed to allow medical access to Mark only if he permits it, and only to a very limited degree even if Mark wishes to allow more. The information you will receive will taunt you and serve as an object lesson for what your immorality has cost you. Sixth, God sent Archangel Michael to Earth to observe humanity at close hand, and to monitor Mark Anderson's growing into his potential. God was very interested in Mark Anderson, as his soul was as advanced as his body and mind. God was most displeased by humanity's immorally taking a wonder and subjecting him to barbaric treatments. Not only did you deprive yourselves of a substantial leap forward in your evolution, but your actions indicate that there is a substantial chance that humanity will destroy itself soon. I tell you this for two reasons: to encourage you to take corrective actions, and to help you understand the need to be cautious of the Guardian. It knows God's current attitude toward humanity, and it won't hesitate to apply harsh lessons if it deems them useful. It has been interesting to observe your societies since I arrived here. You have much potential, but also a selfish immorality that will be the end of you if you don't get control of it. Good luck on avoiding your self-destruction. Ce qui sera, sera." Note that the first point is very clear on the 'fact' that the Guardian Angel is under God's orders and not under mine, so I can't stop it or be blamed for anything it does. If, for example, the CIA turns up and tries to take me away, the Guardian Angel can protect me as aggressively as it wants without my being responsible for any human crimes it commits. The second point is to save me from endless hard-to-answer questions. In the fifth point, the Guardian Angel will override me, so clearly I can't be blamed if it ever breaks the law. The last sentence is French for "Whatever will be, will be." Mainly to give the impression that the angels weren't wholly concerned with America, which was starting to worry me. I followed that with a retyped copy of Ron Fisher's email to Jonathon's organization. It was a real tear-jerker, and might even get as much airtime as Donna's tits will. Then I hit "Send". While a couple of my minds were writing the email - only a couple were needed because my families and I had already discussed it pretty thoroughly - another of my minds did the angel movements: The Guardian Angel's arrival was relatively low key. It was nothing more than a fairly bright, yellow light blob, in the shape of a one-foot radius sphere. I thought that was large enough to be impressive, as it's about ten times the volume of a human head, without being so large as to intrude annoyingly or be cumbersome. It came into existence about a hundred feet above Mom and Dad's bedroom, starting at a pinhead size, expanding as it descended quickly. It was full-size by the time it was fifty feet lower, retaining that size as it descended right through the roof and into the room. It moved around the room quickly, then faded into invisibility. I put on the angel's voice, said, "Ahh, the Guardian is here. It will look after you from now on, Mark. It's time for me to go. Have a good, successful life everyone." Before anyone could say much, it rose up through the ceiling and roof. It was much brighter than the Guardian, and white rather than yellow (whatever that signifies; mostly that there were two different angels), but it otherwise just did much the reverse of the Guardian Angel's arrival, including shrinking into nothingness. I said, "Our guards would've seen those, so you'd better drop the Faraday cage and be ready for their calls." Our phones were already plugged into the antenna system we have in each Faraday-equipped room, so Dad's and Prof's phones were able to start ringing even before the cage was opened. Dad took it, "We're here and we're fine. The lights you saw were a couple of angels. They resurrected Mark ten minutes ago. We've been talking to Mark in Ron's body for the last few minutes and it's really him. One of the angels said it was going to email the media and we'll let them briefly interview Mark, so we'll go with that scenario. We're with Fely in our bedroom at the moment." One of Dad's code words was "Fely", which meant "Everything I'm saying is the truth." Each of us had a couple of dozen code words for various circumstances, and Paul had made us and his staff practice with them, which is how I'd learned everyone else's. We'd picked our own code words, with Mom very happy to agree that her name should be associated with Dad telling the truth about everything. Paul had prepared security scenarios for different ways the angel resurrection could happen. That had nothing to do with him believing the resurrection was possible, merely him using recent events to inspire preparation and training. He was constantly throwing up different scenarios and having his staff prepare plans for them, often having different shifts invent their own response plans and then try to shoot holes in each other's. Most of his angel scenarios dealt with the whole thing being some sort of scam so that's probably what Paul thought most likely, but there were scenarios for it being real, and for handling the media being invited after it happened, so that's the plan that swung into action now. It was early evening and about a quarter of our security staff were asleep, but not for much longer. They were woken up because this was going to be a circus. They dressed, equipped, shook their heads in disbelief at the situation, then rushed off to their assigned stations or to do the various preparation jobs that were required. Some guards went to the Main and Kids' Houses, others to block off our helicopter pad as all arrivals were going to be made to pass through security at our front gate, not be allowed to land right next to our house. The patrols around the property were substantially increased, and many other preparations were made. Various people were called: the airport, all the emergency services, the mayor, the local paper (we look after them so they'll hopefully look after us). Most of these were just heads-up calls to warn the recipients to expect a circus. I imagined that those calls would've had very similar responses: "What! You're joking, right?" "No sir. This isn't a joke or a drill." The airport was going to be busy shortly, as we were going to order all helicopters to land there (there's an air-frequency radio in our Security Center, of course. We even have a marine radio there, and we're forty miles from the coast with a mountain range between us and it). For the first few hours our guards will provide an airport shuttle service with our SUVs which will allow them to control the arriving hordes and give our drivers and shotgun passenger chances to eyeball the arrivals for anything suspicious. Paul and three other guards arrived in Mom and Dad's bedroom, saw me lying on the bed, and they looked puzzled. Prof explained, "Mark's mind and soul are inside Ron's body. Ron's mind and soul are gone, although the angel said a few of Ron's memories were left behind to help Mark adapt. Ron's body will change into Mark's over the next few weeks. -- "Mark Anderson, meet Paul Olsen. Paul's our Head of Security..." I said, "We have a Head of Security now?" Dad said, "There've been a lot of changes. You're in for some big surprises." Paul politely demanded, "Codes please?" The families gave their individual "Everything is fine" codes. I easily realized that my role required me to have no idea what they were doing. When everyone had given it except me, Paul looked at me. Whether he expected Ron to answer, or was trying to trick me, or something else, I didn't know. His proximity was full of suspicion and concern, but that would've been the case no matter what. I told him, "The only code I've got is my PIN number, and I'm not giving that to someone I've never seen before. I'm glad I'm back, but this is the weirdest thing I've ever heard of." "You sound like Ron." "From what little I understand, that'll change over a few weeks. I can promise you that I'm Mark. I can give Mom and Dad endless details about my and the girls' childhoods, but I haven't got a clue what Ronald Fisher's childhood was like..." "You haven't found any of Ron's memories yet?" asked Vanessa. "How do you look for someone else's memory? I haven't noticed anything yet. I'm still trying to get over the fact that what seemed like a minute ago, I was imprisoned in an antiseptic underground laboratory, and now I'm inside the body of a Black guy who gave me his body so an angel could resurrect me. It's going to take me another minute or two to get used to that!" Paul said, "Can I see everyone in the living room except for Ron please?" #4: Prof said, "If that's what you need to be convinced. Mark, will you be okay alone for a few minutes?" "Sure. As it seems to be mine now, I'm eager to check inside my pants to see if what they say about Black guys is true." Paul wasn't in a laughing mood. While my families were chuckling, Paul told two of his guys to stay to look after me, while he indicated everyone else should move out of the room. On her way out, Donna was suddenly hit by a good idea, "Oh! Mom! Can I run and get changed now please? Now's a good time, before the cameras come. PLEASE?" "I suppose that'll be..." "Yay! Thanks Mom." Donna grabbed Carol's hand and started pulling, "Come on! I need HELP!" It only took a fraction of a second for all the girls to realize they could get changed too, so they rushed off; leaving their long-dead, recently resurrected brother and lover to look after himself. It's a matter of priorities. As they rushed away, Donna's voice could be heard asking Carol, "Something that shows a lot of my tits, but not too much, right?" "NOT MUCH AT ALL!" yelled Mom pointlessly. #14: Paul, one guard, and the adults, walked out of the room, leaving me with two guards. They weren't sure what to do, so they posted themselves staunchly by the door, and looked big and mean like guards do when they're in the presence of someone who might be a threat. I thought of some comments I could make to try to break the ice ("A few minutes ago I was being guarded by the CIA, now I'm guarded by you guys..."), but there didn't seem much point in it. They looked like they weren't in the mood for idle chitchat. I wondered if I could use them to solve a little problem I'd created for myself. I hadn't thought about how to publicly explain or perform my finding Ron's memories. That's why I'd denied having found them yet, because I wasn't sure what to say. I had to find them soon though, otherwise I might end up painting myself into a troublesome corner with that issue. Then an amusingly nice idea popped into my mind. I pulled the waistband of my shorts well away from my stomach, studied the view for a second, then told the two guards, "Looks about the same size as mine used to be. A very different color though." They didn't comment. No self-respecting guy would. I looked under my waistband again, then a moment later started laughing, interrupting the laughter to occasionally comment, "Oh my", or "They would!", and a few things like that. After a minute, I eased the laughter off, then pointed as each of the guards and named them, "Enrique and Matt. And the other two are Paul Olsen and Conner. Right?" "Yeah," admitted Enrique. "I've found Ron's memories. Looking at his cock brought them out. Somehow I have the feeling that the angel did that deliberately. The first thing I remembered was Julia, Ava and Carol having sex with Ron. It's a WEIRD feeling having a clear memory of your sister having sex! And then I remembered lots of Ron's other memories. Your names, how my families took him in not long after he arrived in town, and a lot of the stuff that happened with him since. He was a nice guy. A VERY nice guy, considering he gave me his body. -- "I remember all the money too. That's a laugh; the Government handed over a fortune for what they did to me, and now I'm back. They're gonna be pissed about that, haha. I hear everyone coming back. Don't let the girls know that I remember anything. This is too wonderful an opportunity for teasing them." The adults came back; no sign of the girls yet of course. I had mentioned the girls to make it seem that I didn't know how big our property was. The girls would barely have reached the Kids' House yet, let alone had time to try on the 450 outfits they'd each have to experiment with. It's weird; girls can remember what every other girl at school has worn day by day, probably going back forever; yet they can't remember what they look like in an outfit they bought themselves only a month ago. They have to try everything on again before deciding what to wear. Why can't they mentally decide what to wear, pull it out of their closet and put it on? It's one of the biggest mysteries in my life, because I so often wish it worked that way. I spoke first, "I found Ron's memories! My two guards weren't great conversationalists, so I took myself up on my joke and looked at my cock. That brought all the memories out, and I have a feeling the angel did that deliberately..." Vanessa corrected me, "The angel said it was God that chose what memories to leave behind, so it was most likely God's doing." "He's got a sense of humor then..." It was Prof's turn to correct me, "God isn't a 'He'. The angels always referred to God as 'It'. They said God didn't have a gender." This was a prepared little by-play to make me seem more convincingly Mark. We wanted to be fairly convincing to our own staff. Apart from anything else, they walk around among us carrying guns, so it'd be wise to ensure they're loyal. "After getting me out of that hellhole, God can call Itself whatever It wants. -- "I was saying that I remember Ron's memories. There are quite a few of them and I'm sure I haven't thought about all of them yet, but one thing that stands out was how happy he was with you guys. He thought you were wonderful for treating him so well, and he loved Carol VERY much! Carol is the most emotional part of his memories. Ron's emotions are going to take some time to get used to. It's strange enough looking at my body and seeing his, but reliving his memories is far more personal. This is an AMAZINGLY freaky situation!" Paul had been, if not convinced, then at least reassured by his being able to separate everyone from me and talk with them freely. In the absence of any apparent internal threat, he turned his attention to managing the external situation that would be developing very soon. That mostly meant managing the media. They'd been calling back incessantly to confirm the email and to get interviews. All the calls were being picked up by one of our guards manning the switchboard. As per the previously developed plan, our guards had been confirming that the resurrection had taken place and had refused to pass the call through to the house. Instead they'd described the process any media representatives would have to go through to be included in the press conference that would be happening later. Only deserving calls would be put through to the house, and there'd been none of those yet. The parents were starting to get calls to their cellphones though, most of which they ignored, but a few callers were answered and briefly talked to. Mostly we waited for the media to gather. There were a few noteworthy events: The girls returned, led into the room by Donna's almost totally bare tits. Mom told her to take them away again and put something on them. The girls laughed and pulled out the top they'd hidden behind their backs. Donna put it on. It was one of Ava's, and Donna looked very good sticking out of it. Mom was very uncomfortable with Donna being so proudly displayed, but after some dithering, Mom decided to let it go. The girls had judged it perfectly. They were dressed nicely too, just not as nicely as Donna (in my masculine opinion). I tried walking, but I was very bad at it. You know that feeling you get when you try to walk on a leg that's had its circulation cut off and the pins-and-needles are still going? I ordered both my legs to feel like that, then I tried walking on them. Judging by the reactions I observed, I looked as clumsy as I felt. I lay down again, still unaccustomed to my so differently shaped body. Julia went to Ron's computer and printed out a copy of the email that the angel had sent, passing it around so everyone knew what it said. We'd discussed most of it in our planning sessions, but when the reporters arrived it'd be best if we'd read the email directly. Some local bigwigs arrived, the Mayor, a couple of councilors, and the Police Chief. They were hospitably directed to the living room using the excuse that I had very little endurance to face their questions individually. (Too late it occurred to me that the "living room" would have been a very appropriate room to be resurrected in. Maybe next time.) One or more of the parents chatted with the dignitaries; usually the men, because the women felt the need to get changed. The dignitaries were told, "There nothing to see; just Ron's body. Mark's soul and mind are inside it and we've been talking to him, but you don't know him so won't be any the wiser for the experience." They wanted to see me anyway, so when they'd all gathered, they were brought into my hallowed presence. They were disappointed that there was nothing divine-like to see. I chatted with them a bit, but pretended to be overwhelmed by it all because my repeating the same protestations of ignorance too many times might start to look weak. They were ushered out again, "Because Mark has to save himself for the press conference. You can stay to watch that, if you wish." Helicopters started gathering. That would have been okay if they'd acted responsibly but they were the opposite of that. They took advantage of our being on the top of a hill to hover at window level so they could film straight in, making an intolerable amount of noise, killing our ability to talk, and panicking the horses. What was most alarming is that some of them dropped passengers off on our property. We couldn't allow random people to be dropped next to our homes at a time of probable religious hysteria. Anyone deposited on our property was treated EXACTLY as if they were a trespasser: security came running, told the trespassers to lie face down on the ground, if they didn't immediately do so voluntarily then they were made to do so involuntarily using whatever level of force was necessary, they were plastic cuffed, loaded onto a trailer then carted to the cops at the front gate. When enough had accumulated, they were taken to the station for VERY slow processing and credential checking because the cops were very busy tonight, hehe. The reporters got off lucky because Donna was very mad about the horses being so scared. We radioed an order to the pilots to leave the area. When they didn't all leave, the pilots were told, "This family has been attacked by armed helicopters before. If you don't leave immediately you'll be considered hostile and appropriate action will be taken. This is your final warning." When that was ignored, one of our guards covertly shot at them with a slingshot firing a good-sized ball bearing. The sound of the impact was enough to make any pilot wet his pants and get the hell out of the area, screaming into his radio, "Fucking Hell! They're shooting at me!" which did a great job of getting the others to leave too. New ones would arrive, with the process repeating when too many had accumulated. [Some pilots did file police complaints against our guards for shooting at them, but no evidence was found.] We had a couple of opportunities for quick family conferences - just us in the room with the Faraday cage closed - to discuss issues that we'd just thought of. One that I'd thought of was a plan that might make it possible for me (as Mark) to be open about having sex with my sister Carol. I explained to the parents, "The justification would be my having memories Ron's loving Carol physically and emotionally. I could say, 'I KNOW how Ron felt when he made love to my sister. He loved Carol so greatly he gave up his body to make her happier by bringing Mark back. His emotions were very strong, and they've affected me.' I could pad it out a lot more, and make it sound very loving and sickly sweet. I could plant the seeds for it in the press conference." The parents laughed my idea down as being totally impractical. I told Carol, "Sorry Carol. I tried. Looks like it's back to Plan A." (Renaming one of the spare bedrooms "Carol's Room" and keeping our sexual relationship secret again.) ------- Chapter 348: The Resurrectee's First Press Conference Friday, June 1, 2007 (Continued) Before the press conference was due to start, we decided to have it outside the front of the Adults' House. The light rain that'd been going for a while had stopped during the wait, we preferred not to have reporters invade our home (reporters hot on a story aren't the sort of people you want in your home), and having the conference outside meant there was less chance of one of my distinctively Negroid loose hairs being found by a nosey reporter looking for a cunning scoop. Analysis of one of Ron's pre-resurrection shed hairs would show it had Mark's DNA in it. We could do without accusations of fraud, even if we could refute it because the hairs were impossible. They looked like the hairs of a Black, but had genes for a light-colored Caucasian, so as per the email, when God had changed "all of Ronald's cells now contain Mark's DNA", It must have changed ALL of Ron's cells, even those in discarded hairs. It would be best not to have that come out though because it made it seem too likely that I'd been Mark all the time. [In case you're wondering, genes serve as blueprints for the body, but those blueprints aren't translated directly into action. The hair follicles don't say to themselves, "Right, it's time to grow the hair longer. I'll check the DNA to see whether to make it black and kinky, or blandly straight and light brown." What happens is that there are several levels of message decoding and passing between the DNA and the hair follicle because human bodies have a truly ridiculous number of indirect processes. It's as if a guy reads the DNA, and phones someone else with the information. That person sends the next person in the chain an email. The recipient pays for a plane to write a sign in the air, where someone else sees it and writes a letter to the next link. That person ties a note to a carrier pigeon who delivers it to a guy who uses a blinking flashlight to signal in Morse code to the hair follicle, telling it to grow straight and brown. Human bodies can truly be that indirect. Somewhere along that process, my subconscious intrudes with my order, "Ignore what you've been told; Mark wants Negro hair. Pass it on."] My being topless now seemed too deliberately exhibitionistic, so I put on a T-shirt. I was still insufficiently dressed for the cold, but I wanted my non-angelic physique to be seen and I could simply say that I couldn't feel the cold, which might add a little bit of credibility to our story. I ordered my body not to report the cold to my brain, as the temperature wasn't cold enough to do any damage. I could've used a heat blob to warm me, but that would seem too strange to the infrared camera of the UAV I expected above us sooner or later. [I detected some brief Ku-band radiation "sooner", less than an hour from now.] Dad assisted me in my walk outside, as I was apparently still having trouble managing my legs. Donna carried a chair for me to sit in, and I suspected so she could hover around behind me with her tits in the shot most of the time. She's very proud of her dual accomplishments. I must admit to encouraging her by giving them lots of appreciation, praise and attention. I might have to cut back on that if she gets much more carried away about them. Mom intercomed down to have the reporters escorted "up the garden path" (literally and figuratively). They'd been accumulating in the uncovered parking lot just inside the front gate on the other side from the Staff Quarters, corralled there by our guards. The reporters were shepherded up to the interview area, where I was sitting with my families spread out to either side of me. Mom and Dad closest, then my sisters and then the Williamses. Just before the reporters arrived, Mom whispered to Donna, "Don't do anything sexual! Remember Ron's your brother now." "He was..." I NP-clamped Donna's mouth shut, before "before" emerged. Some of our guards were nearby, so I couldn't say much; but "Grrr!" proved to be sufficient. Donna was still looking ashamed when the media arrived. I'd been hoping that some of the reporters would come running at me, so the Guardian could appear and deal with them in a memorable way, but our guards had the reporters under too much control. That alone should tell you how good our guards are. We're experienced enough in doing these interviews that we hadn't bothered to plan out its details. Mom started, "I'll summarize events and then we'll take questions." Mom didn't pause, carrying straight on with, "As you know, our son Mark was kidnapped and illegally held in Portland for several days by the Department of Homeland Security. Then he was transferred to one of Homeland Security's offices in Washington, DC, where he was subject to illegal experimentation. After several days of that, they transferred Mark to the CIA, who took him to their secret bioweapons laboratory underneath Fort Dodge, Iowa, for even worse medical experimentation, where Mark and over two hundred CIA criminals were killed in mid-February last year. The CIA has constantly refused to return his body to us. -- "When Archangel Michael mentioned his offer to resurrect someone deserving, and that he'd put Jonathon Winters in charge of determining the shortlist, I sent an email to Jonathon's organization asking whether our son Mark would qualify..." Mom went on to describe the events that brought us to where we are now, including the fictitious visits by Archangel Michael and the angel that took over from him. (All the angels' appearances were fictitious really, but some were more fictitious than others.) The resurrection was described in detail - not that there was much of it - with Mom making a big deal about Ron's sacrifice and gift. Mom finished with, "For the last couple of hours we've been talking to Mark, even though his words have been coming out of Ron's body. It's been a very peculiar experience, but it's been a very convincing one. There's no doubt that our son is back." Mom gave my shoulders a squeeze, then offered the press, "Are there any questions?" As it turned out, there were. I'll present them in a somewhat logical order, even though they came in a much more chaotic fashion. I'll leave out the dialogues around the particularly stupid questions, such as "Are you glad to see your family?" Sheesh! "Are you really Mark?" "Are you asking the body or the mind?" "Ahh..." "The mind!" yelled a more mentally flexible reporter. I answered, "The mind is Mark." "How will you prove it?" "I haven't thought about that. My families know I'm Mark from talking to me and I'm too busy getting used to what's happened to me to worry about anyone else." Mom added, "It's been traumatic for Mark. From his point of view, three hours ago he was being illegally held against his will inside a CIA laboratory having increasingly dangerous medical experiments done to him. Then all of a sudden he's in a different body and he's told it's a more than a year later. -- "The angels said that Ron's DNA would be changed, so a DNA test will prove it. I don't know whether it'll take time for new cells to be made with Mark's DNA, or whether it's changed already, but we could get a test done tomorrow to find out." -- Mom turned to me to ask, "You don't mind giving a sample tomorrow, do you darling?" I answered, "I'm used to being strapped down, having holes drilled in my skull and samples of my brain scooped out, so a blood test will be easy." My blood being pinkish gray was the most obvious reason I'd included the crap about my body chemistry being changed. I prefer for that not to be discovered because it was so weird, but it was hard to see how we could avoid such a basic identity test. As I was on camera, it was best to pretend to have no qualms whatsoever about being tested. "You've got a hole in your head?" asked one of the reporters hopefully. Apparently he had a hole in his too: a cavernous one, in the center. "In my OTHER head." "Oh," as he realized his mistake, his realizing it assisted by his co-workers laughing at his mistake. Another reporter asked, "What did it feel like to be resurrected?" "It was like blinking and when my eyes opened I was in new body and new location. The CIA's experiments were so bad it was obvious they would never let me go afterward, so I knew I was going to be killed when they'd finished with me. So you can imagine how happy I was when I blinked and suddenly I was no longer a prisoner and my families were around me." "You don't remember anything?" "Not about the resurrection, no." "What about God?" "He's got my undying gratitude." I got some laughs for that, then the original reporter asked, "I meant, do you remember anything about God?" "Not a thing. As I said, it was like I blinked. Mom's already described the resurrection so you know that the only divine presence I was in, was a few seconds with the two angels, and for most of the time I thought one of them was a bright lightbulb. I was in too much shock to be good at noticing things." "Do you believe in God?" #23: "That seems only fair, as God seems to believe in me." I could see that my joke didn't appeal to the reporters. I guess it required a sense of logic. I continued, "Remember that I have no recollection of God and I only spent a few seconds with the angels in Mom and Dad's bedroom. I didn't even know that I was dead, because the last thing I remember of my CIA prison is my room's door starting to open. Obviously something amazing has happened, and everyone I've talked to has said it was done by angels and God, but they could've said it was done by Little Green Men and I'd be none the wiser. -- "From what I've been told, you've had angels flying around giving interviews, so you know more than I do. But in terms of what I BELIEVE, rather than what I know, then I have to believe that there's a God. I've got no idea what He's like, or what His plans are, or anything like that, but something put me inside Ron's body, and that's very convincingly Godlike." I resisted making some sort of joke along the lines of, "If you were in my shoes, would you take the risk of saying you didn't believe?" Archangel Michael had often been irreverent, so it wouldn't be a good idea for me to be too much so, even though it was hard to resist. There were a bunch of religious questions, which I'll omit because they were annoyingly stupid (they were stupid, and I was annoyed that I couldn't respond by giving my truthful opinion). I knew there was going to be a great deal of religious crap over the next few weeks - hopefully only weeks, as years would be too depressing. It'd be nice if I could think of a way of defusing it, but I couldn't. Asking religious people to behave sensibly was a waste of breath. "Why are you sitting down?" "Because I'm having a lot of trouble standing and walking. Ron's body shape is very different than mine used to be and it's going to take a while to get used to that." "Can you try walking for us?" "It's awkward, hard work, and falling on my face would be painful, so I'll pass on your kind invitation to make a fool of myself on national TV, thank you." Plus I didn't want an expert in orthopedics to analyze the videotape and say that I was faking. I'll pretend to quickly learn how to walk, so that risk will soon vanish. "Where's your Guardian Angel?" "I've got no idea. I wasn't really paying attention at the time, but you heard Mom say it flew around Mom and Dad's bedroom when it arrived and then it disappeared. I haven't seen hide nor hair of it since." I looked around at my families, "Anyone seen it?" "No," they all said. I shrugged toward the reporters, saying, "No idea. I've had too many other things on my mind." "How do we know whether it's here or not?" "I don't know and I can't say I care. I'm too busy getting used to my situation and catching up with my family." Donna stirred hopefully, but it was too early to draw the world's attention to her tits. Although, on second thought, half the viewing audience had probably noticed them already. "Can you ask it to appear?" For an answer, I invoked: "Please appear, Guardian Angel." Everyone looked around at nothing happening, so I said "Here Guardy, Guardy" in a high-pitched "Here Kitty, Kitty"-type of voice. Sometimes, especially about religion, I really can't help being facetious. Some people laughed, some looked nervous, and some laughed nervously. I said, "It appears not, in both senses." "Maybe you could command it to appear?" "Like you see in the movies when someone commands a demon to appear? I don't think I should act like I'm summoning demons three hours after God kindly resurrected me. Thank you for your suggestion though." You might notice that I'm in a sarcastic mood. That'd started during the religious questions which I omitted recording here. They were long-winded, tedious, stupid, and several other sources of annoyance. I'd held my tongue for a while, but I was running out of patience. A reporter asked, "The email we got said that God left some of Ronald Fisher's memories behind. Have you remembered any of those?" I gave a little chuckle, then said, "There's a funny story behind that. Right after I was resurrected I said the clichéd, 'What's happened?', 'Where am I?' and those sorts of things. Dad asked me - I think it was Dad - if I remembered anything. I didn't. Then Mom and Dad told me about how Ron's memories should be still in my head. I couldn't remember any of them. I tried to find them, but had no success at all. -- "A while later I had a quiet moment because the girls had gone to get changed and prettied-up because they knew cameramen were coming to take their photographs. Maybe to interview me a little too, but the girls didn't care about that as much." I got some chuckles, and the girls didn't know whether to preen or look embarrassed. Some of the cameramen took my comment as a cue to pan over the girls, so preening won out. I continued, "The parents were out of the room for a few moments too, so I did what any teenage boy would do in my situation: I checked out 'The Equipment'." I nodded downward. -- "As soon as I saw it, Ron's memories came flooding in. Somehow I got the feeling that God intended it to happen that way. From what my families have said about Archangel Michael, he had an irreverent sense of humor, so maybe God does too. -- "In answer to your question, I remember lots of Ron's memories. Julia printed out a copy of the email the angel sent to your networks from Ron's computer, and I saw that it says the memories were left to help me transition to my new reality and to appreciate Ron. Transitioning to my new reality sure hasn't happened yet! I'm still freaked out by what's happened. But appreciating Ron is something I'm VERY aware of. -- "I've re-lived some of Ron's memories of his time living with my families. They're FAR, FAR better than watching something on TV, because they come with all the emotions and side-thoughts he had at the time. I've felt his emotions for my families, and especially his emotions for my sister Carol. He loved everyone here, loved his life since my families welcomed him in, and he especially loved Carol. All his memories of Carol are GLOWING with how wonderful he thought she was. I don't think there was much love in his life in LA, but he was AWASH with it here. He was hugely appreciative over how wonderful his life was. -- "And then he voluntarily gave it all up so I could come back, because he wanted to make my families as happy as they'd made him. It's the noblest sacrifice I've ever heard of and it blows me away. I'm thankful for being back, but I'm blown away with appreciation for his sacrifice. He didn't give up his life because it wasn't a good one; he gave it up because his life was so wonderful he couldn't find a less profound way of showing how much he loved my families. That God chose to accept Ron's sacrifice does more to convince me that God exists than anything else, because I have to believe that Ron has gone to a very good place." My eyes were watering even without my ordering them to do so. I'm so good at spreading bullshit that I can even fool myself. The girls were very blubbery too, and Prof's hanky was getting passed around among them. I'd been tempted to work in some reference to Ron and Carol being physical lovers. Putting it in with the rest of that sweet-smelling bullshit would've given it a very good shot at being treated non-salaciously, but although I emotionally wanted to say it, there was no point. The parents were right that the public wouldn't agree to Carol and Mark being lovers, so it was foolish to raise the issue in any way at all. It was just inviting condemnation. In respect for the highly emotional nature of the moment, the press gave us two seconds before the questions started again. I ignored the first few, then paid attention to them again. "So you know what's happened to your family while you've been away?" "'While I've been AWAY.' You make it sound like I went on vacation. I don't think you should de-emphasize what's happened. From what I understand, God did it because He wanted to prove a point and get people to sit up and take notice. He may not appreciate reporters who downplay His miracle." "Ahh, you might be right. Do you know what happened to your family while you were DEAD?" "I know some things from Ron's memories, and I've been told some more things since my resurrection, but there are bound to be gaps that I'm not aware of yet. Most of the memories I have from Ron seem to be personal ones rather than a factual history book approach. I gather that the Government gave us far more money than they needed to, and then they broke their word by sending the Army to attack us, so had to give us even more. Ron thought the Government was incredibly stupid. Speaking for myself, after the living hell I've been through, I think the Government is despicably Evil. -- "I've got Ron's memories of the people of Corvallis being very nice to us, especially by letting us have this hill to build a safe home on, but also in lots of other ways too. Ron enjoyed watching the Army dig the tunnels and build the houses here. He was very impressed by how careful they were to do good work. Ron apparently did a lot of landscaping work on this property and there were hundreds of volunteers who helped him with a huge natural project he had going somewhere around here." This is an advanced people-manipulation technique called Kissing Ass. My sucking up to Corvallis and the Army wouldn't do any harm at all. -- "I don't have detailed memories of his landscaping work, so I hope someone else can take over running them because I don't have the necessary knowledge." In other words, I didn't want to keep doing landscaping. "What do you intend to do from now on? What are your ambitions?" "Hmm, I haven't thought about that." Not strictly true, as ever since I've been Ron Fisher I've been wishing to be Mark Anderson and thinking about what I'd prefer to be doing. "I guess I can't do much until I graduate high school." I turned to Mom to ask, "You said today is June first, right?" "That's right. Exams start on the 11th," said Julia, taking a good guess at what I was heading toward. "I guess I'll see if school will let me cram for the exams so I can graduate. I'll get Mom to write the school a note - 'Please excuse Mark's missing school recently. He was dead, but he's better now.' Hopefully they'll recognize that as an extenuating circumstance and let me take the exams, otherwise I'll lose another year." The reporters didn't know what part of that to respond to, which just meant that the next few seconds' worth of yelled questions were even more confused than normal. The smarter reporters just laughed at my joke. I quite enjoyed it too, such is my deadpan sense of humor. Others asked, "Is that all you want to do, go back to school?" or, "You think you can do a whole year's schooling in ten days?" One guy opined, "You're going to be far too busy for school." The last comment was one I responded to, "I don't think I'll be too busy for school. School is important and it would impact negatively on my quality of life if my graduating was delayed a year. According to the angel's email, the Guardian Angel will think that protecting me includes protecting my quality of life. So if I want to go to school and some officious busybody thinks I should do something else I don't want to do, then I'd expect the Guardian Angel will ensure that I can go to school. Some of you may doubt that the Guardian Angel exists, but I've got very good reason to believe anything an angel says. Besides, I can't move easily at the moment and I don't want to go anywhere away from my families, so spending the next few days cramming sounds better to me than whatever else you think I might be too busy doing." "The world should be told what happened to you. It's incredibly important." "I blinked and moved away from the CIA's medical torture chamber to my parents' new bedroom fifteen months later. I don't know ANYTHING else! No angel talked to me about it and I have no memory of God talking to me. All of you know more about what happened than I do because you listened to the angels over the last several weeks. -- "Which makes me think of something. I'd LOVE to see as much footage as possible about the angel. Can the TV network that's got the most please send me a copy of it all." I turned to Mom and Dad, "From Ron's memories I know you're very rich. I have money of my own, don't I?" Dad answered quickly, "No, and you're more than a year behind on your chores too." Julia said, "I'll lend you some, if you do half of my chores." One of our little tactics was to try to seem ordinary, to take any pretentiousness out of the resurrection. We didn't want the Pope camped on the doorstep wanting to wash my feet every morning, or God knows what other crap that could happen. The faster we became boring, old, unimportant news, the better. One of the reporters addressed a question at my parents, "What is the legal situation with Mark?" Mom answered, "I'm not a lawyer, but I think it should be fine. We thought there was a chance that the CIA was keeping Mark alive somewhere because they kept refusing to hand over his body. Their lawyers swore he had burned up in their lab, but everyone knows what criminal, lying scum the CIA are, so we weren't going to get Mark declared dead until the usual seven-year period was up. He's never been legally declared dead, so his being alive shouldn't raise any legal problems. I think he just needs to do a DNA test and then no one can contest that he's fully, legally Mark." "What's Ronald Fisher's legal status?" Vanessa said, "I think I can guess the legal answer to that. Our laws were never written to allow for minds being moved between bodies, or bodies having their DNA changed, so the law is shooting in the dark on this one. I think the law will have to consider Ron to be missing and presumed dead. If tomorrow's DNA test says that body is genetically Mark Anderson, then it can't be Ron Fisher. There'll be no body that's legally recognized as Ron so he'll have to be considered missing. Eventually someone will petition a court to have Ron declared legally dead, which is usually after seven years as Felicity said, but can be done earlier. -- "We got legal advice about the missing persons laws when the CIA wouldn't give Mark's parents his body back, which is why we know about those. I'm not sure about the identity laws though. I guess that DNA overrides everything else, but maybe the law is out of date and fingerprints are the most important. If that's the case, I guess someone could try to have the body that Mark's inside legally declared to be Ronald Fisher, but that seems like a stupid and pointless exercise to me." "Why would it be stupid and pointless?" asked a reporter who needed those issues explained. "Mark's mind is in that body, so even if someone gets the body declared to be legally Ron, it's still going to behave as Mark wants it to behave. Also, the angel's email said it'll take a few weeks for Ron's body to turn into Mark's. If someone goes to the trouble and expense of starting a legal action, what will walk into the courtroom won't be a short, Black man; but a tall, well-built, Caucasian teenager. By then he won't have any of Ron's DNA, fingerprints or looks, and the judge would throw the case out of court." [In an earlier strategy meeting with my families, Dad had checked to make sure that I really would have Mark's DNA. I assured him that I would, that I was the same Mark underneath, just with a good suntan and some other changes. Fingerprints were asked about, and I admitted that I'd tried to give myself the same fingerprints as Ron, but I'd never been positive that I'd succeeded and I'd been happy that they'd never been put to the test. The status of my fingerprints - whether Ron's, Mark's or some mishmash - wouldn't matter after the resurrection though, as they'd soon turn into Mark's, if they weren't already. What might matter was my dentition. My Guardian Angel and I would make sure no one can examine that for at least a few weeks, to give time for it to plausibly change into Mark's.] "Will you let ABC News film your body every day so..." The non-ABC affiliated teams shouted over the rest of the sentence, insisting that they be allowed to do whatever it was that ABC News wanted to do; presumably film my body changing, but ABC shouldn't be allowed to get in first regardless of what it was about. All my families knew it'd be a gradual change, but we'd anticipated the process being asked about and had decided to be unsure. Mom answered, "I guess Mark's body will change slowly because the email said it'll take several weeks, but I'm not sure of that. God could do it any way It wanted. It's up to Mark whether he'll let you film him every day though." I preferred not to provide the Government with film evidence of my body-changing ability, but we didn't really have much choice. If I spent a few weeks out of sight then emerged as Mark, there would be accusations of trickery and probably a murder investigation and search for Ron's body. Even if I was seen in public more or less daily while my body changed, it could be attributed to makeup or some other skullduggery, and I could be filmed anyway. We had to very clearly establish that Ron's body turned into mine, so it was best to document my change with exposed skin - underwear on - and occasional hands-on inspections from a doctor who'd confirm there was no trick photography involved. I'd be content to transform my body very slowly, taking three months or so to do it, provided my passing the DNA test allowed me to live the formal parts of my life as Mark, which mostly meant finishing school and restarting OSU. Accessing my bank accounts wasn't urgent, and my parents could execute any legal documents for me as I was still a minor. Reasons to change that schedule might come up, but we all thought going slowly to disguise the full speed of my ability was a very good idea, especially because Ron Fisher had been missing from LA for several weeks between his gang being snatched and 'his' returning to LA to tidy things up with the police and the Fisher family. We didn't want anyone to wonder whether Mark had turned himself into Ron back then. After I'd finished in LA, I'd deliberately spent some time showing my Ron-face around northern California and southern Oregon to establish an alibi for those missing weeks - relying on some people misremembering when I'd been around, and incorrectly giving dates during the missing period - but it'd been a weak, just-in-case effort, and certainly wasn't good enough to keep me safe by itself. Changing slowly and talking about it as if it was completely outside my control were our best defenses to that. I agreed, "I think taking regular photos would be a good idea. Maybe the networks can share a single camera set up somewhere that I could turn on and do a twirl in front of most days. And maybe our family doctor can come once a week and take measurements of my height or whatever else seems important. Biology isn't my interest - I like math and physics - but I like the scientific approach and my body's changes should be a fascinating subject." I could safely sound eager to have myself studied because the Guardian Angel will intervene to make sure it's very limited. "You like science?" "I think it's great. Science generally, and math and physics in particular." "How do you reconcile that with what happened to you?" "How do I reconcile my liking science with being resurrected?" "Yes." "I can't see that they've got anything to do with each other, so there's no need to reconcile them, and no way of doing so either. Do you reconcile your checkbook with your favorite food? The two issues are independent." "Many people think science and religion can't coexist?" "I imagine those are people who don't understand science." I was going to say, " ... don't understand the purposes of science or religion," but I couldn't think of a non-antagonistic answer for what the purpose of religion was. -- "The two of them fit together neatly and easily. Science provides fact-based explanations for things we do know, and religion provides faith-based explanations for things we don't know. Not only can they coexist, they coexist perfectly. Knowing that is hardly rocket science." What it was, was bullshit. Bullshit isn't rocket science, so at least my last sentence was true. "Do you think Intelligent Design is a religious or scientific matter?" "Why on Earth would you think that my opinion on that subject has any relevance to anybody?" "Umm, because of what you went through." "According to my memory, three hours ago I blinked and moved from the CIA's torture chamber, to a year later in my parents' bedroom. What part of that experience gives my opinion of the Intelligent Design versus Evolution debate any relevance? Do you also want my opinion on who shot JFK, whether Area 51 contains alien UFOs, and whether the moon landings were faked? I'll talk about any of those if you want, but you're wasting everybody's time, and I'm going back inside soon because I'm getting tired." A less unintelligent reporter asked, "You don't think your experience has given you any special insight into God's plan for mankind?" "According to the email the angel sent you earlier today, my memories of God were deliberately removed. It seems to me that God was ensuring that I have no insight at all. I spent about a month being increasingly tortured to death with medical experiments by the DHS and CIA, and then I blinked and was at home a year later. Now you know as much as I do, so you can draw your own special insights about Intelligent Design or God's Plan For Mankind." #14: #12: #23: #3: "You say you were tortured, but the documents we saw only talked about experiments. Were you tortured too?" With some pretended amazement, I asked the reporter, "You've got documents about what happened to me?" Vanessa explained, "One of the angels emailed your CIA file to the media after you were killed. Everyone who participated in your abduction is either dead or in jail for many years." "Some of them got the death penalty! Wow, that was quick work." Dad continued the little act, "It wasn't like that. They were killed when the lab was raided by some people. A foreign government probably, but the CIA isn't saying. They say they don't know who, but no one with half a brain would believe anything those assholes say. They're just covering their asses to avoid looking even stupider." "They shouldn't be allowed to cover their asses. What they did to me was terrifying and had to be totally illegal." Vanessa said, "Many of them are in jail. The senior bosses refused to take responsibility and the politicians let them run for cover, but everyone you dealt with got convicted." "Good! Some of them were very evil. They knew I was going to be killed when the experiments finished and they didn't care. -- "In answer to the torture question, I was locked up, starved, denied access to my parents or anyone else, and experimented on so heinously that it was obvious that I would never be let go at the end. I knew I was going to die, and I knew it was going to be a horrible death as the experiments got worse and worse. So, yes, I was tortured." I'd half-intended to make a joke about being very familiar with torture because I had a girlfriend who often took me clothes shopping. But according to our story, my perception was of being in the middle of the CIA's torture only three hours ago so anger over this issue was more appropriate than humor. A reporter asked, "From what the CIA file and the angel's email said, your body could have led to some amazing medical breakthroughs, such as immortality. Do you think that was true?" "Health, disease resistance and fitness seemed very likely to me. Extending longevity by decades or even centuries might've been possible, but obviously not 'immortality' the way you say." "Why not?" "Do you know what that word means?" "'Can't die'." "Do you expect research on my old body would've found a way for a human to have his body chopped up into a thousand small pieces and thrown into a pool of ravenous sharks, and he still wouldn't die?" "I didn't mean that. I meant not dying from natural causes." "Then that's what you should've said. I've spent the last month being tortured by Homeland Security and the CIA so I'm not in a good mental state, and I'm getting tired and frazzled by what's happened to me. Your questioning me using misleading words because you're too lazy to think about what you mean is annoying me and wasting time. Does someone else have a sensible question?" I was disappointed that I hadn't quite managed to find a reason to get angry enough to unleash the Guardian Angel on someone's ass, as I wanted to get its presence and attitude made public to discourage some of the impending idiocy. The one time in my life I wanted the media to be unruly, our guards had them too well behaved! I was using the reporter's laziness over "immortal" as an excuse for me to start getting angry, hopefully in a way that didn't make me seem like an asshole, but did escalate to a reasonable level for the Guardian could appear. Another reporter asked, "The angel's email said your body's chemistry has been changed. Do you know what it meant by that?" "No idea. My body's size and shape feels strange, but it seems to work fine and I haven't noticed anything along those lines. We'll probably have to wait for the doctors to check me out." Another reporter interrupted with, "You refer to it as 'your body'. Why don't you call it 'Ron's body'?" "Because he gave it to me. In the future, when I'm at home and the doorbell rings, do you expect me to yell out 'Ron will get it' rather than 'I'll get it'? Do you seriously expect me to use different words to differentiate when my mind does something from when my body does? How stupid is that! If I go to school to take an exam, is it my body doing the exam because it's the thing doing the writing, or my mind because it's the thing doing the thinking? Is it Ron or Mark? I hope you don't think it's both because the school has rules against two people colluding on an exam. However it came about, it's obviously my body now." "What do you think of Ron's gift?" #17: "That it should NEVER have been necessary! And if it had been, Ron should've stayed where he was and the Director of the CIA should've had his mind ripped out of his body and flushed down the toilet like that piece of shit deserves. Apparently God doesn't work that way, which I think is a great pity, because I'd much rather have Ron in this world than the asshole who runs the CIA so criminally. Does that answer your question? I can be considerably more explicit if you want?" "That's okay, thanks." #13: #12: #9: Another reporter commented, "God seems to take an interest in you. The email said Archangel Michael was sent to observe you, you were resurrected and you've got a Guardian Angel sent to you. What have you done to deserve such special treatment?" "My special treatment sure convinces me that 'God works in mysterious ways, ' because it doesn't make much sense to me. The email said I had an 'advanced soul'. I didn't even know I had a soul, let alone an advanced one..." With apparent surprise, New-Oprah exclaimed, "You didn't!" "First, I said I didn't KNOW I had a soul. Science has knowing; religion has faith. I'm pretty sure souls are in the religious camp. Until science discovers them, anyway. Second, your exclamation sounded almost accusatory, as if everyone should know all about their souls. Why don't you point to where your soul is and describe its size, shape and other properties to everyone. Next time an angel or God passes through, we can ask how accurate you were." "I didn't mean to accuse you. I was just surprised that someone God resurrected would express doubt he had a soul." "I'm going to shamelessly admit that I did have doubt. But I have it on good authority that I have an 'advanced soul', so I couldn't care less if you criticize my attitude to it..." #8: #19: #8: #4: <'D'?> #8: #4: #8: " ... I don't know why God's so interested in me. I'm grateful that He is, of course, but I can't imagine why. I doubt it's for my intellectual or physical abilities because they seem too mundane; plus He's blocked off research into granting them to the rest of humanity, which implies they're not important to Him. It's not for my devoutness because I've never been interested in going to church and I'm not going to start now... With a scandalized tone, new-Oprah questioned my heresy, "You're NOT going to go to CHURCH!" "That's what I said. Do you have a point, or did you just interrupt to check your hearing?" "But you've been RESURRECTED! You have to go to church!" "Oh, is there a rulebook for resurrections that say what I have to do? Stop looking so morally outraged for a moment and try turning your brain on. The angel's email said God was removing some of my memories so I can retain freewill over my beliefs. There's also nothing whatsoever in that email about how I should behave, and God certainly didn't give me any instructions about that. He left me TOTALLY able to decide for myself how I behave. -- "He deemed me worthy of resurrection and said I had an advanced soul. I achieved that without going to church so I'm very comfortable about continuing to not go to church. I was also lucky enough to have some wonderful girlfriends and lovers, especially Julia and Ava here, and some others who I'm very much looking forward to seeing again. God obviously didn't disapprove of my past behavior in that respect either, so I see no reason not to resume it. I'm looking forward to it, once I learn how to use this body properly. That'll have to be after school's exams are over because I'm going to have to cram like crazy to get myself ready for those, assuming I'm allowed to take them." Saying I'd put my studies before sex sounded good. That should score me some points with the sensible people. Everyone else would be SCANDALIZED about my having sex after being resurrected. For some reason that I've never been able to work out, religious people think sex is terrible. They can't be doing it right. -- "I know you and others like you are going to get on your high horses and yell your moral outrage at me, but as far as I'm concerned you can take your moral outrage and jump into the river with it. If you force me to make a choice between what you tell me I must do, and what I KNOW God approves of my doing, I'm going to put my trust in God every time. Are you so arrogant in your own opinions that you're going to insist I change my behavior away from what God approves of?" "You don't know that God APPROVES of you doing those things. He might..." #4: I interrupted, "I'm not interested in mights or might nots. God DID resurrect me, and He did so knowing what sort of guy I am. The email said God sent Archangel Michael to Earth in part to monitor my growth, which means God's had His eyes on me for years, and He certainly knows me very well by now. Plus He's doubtless smart enough to know how I'll react in the future. Excuse me if I base my decisions on trusting His judgment ahead of yours. Unless you think you're smarter than God? Do you?" "Ahh no. It's just..." "Then how can you be so arrogant as to impose your moral judgments on me when God isn't doing so? Are your moral judgments more important than God's?" "No, of course not." "Then why did you leap forward with your moral commandments about what I should do?" "I'm sorry. I didn't think. It just seemed..." Julia had taught me well so I knew exactly what to say, "That's EXACTLY right: you did NOT THINK! You tried to change another human being's moral behavior without thinking what you were saying. Even without the issue of how stupid you were to try to do so to a person who's obviously in God's good graces it's still inexcusable of you. Moral behavior is extremely important, and you MUST stop to think before you try to get someone to change theirs, or you risk pushing them in an immoral direction. -- "You CLAIM morals are important to you, but you don't stop to think before you risk someone else's morals by pushing them in whatever direction first pops thoughtlessly into your head. Your actions were stupid, arrogant, dangerous to the recipient of your thoughtless advice, and above all else, they were immoral. You're a bad person and I don't want you on our property any longer. Please leave immediately." #17: This moral argument didn't justify the Guardian appearing to deal to the reporter, as there wasn't any hint that I needed protecting, but I was hoping for a real argument because if I got angry enough, its appearing would seem reasonable. Unfortunately, one of our overly useful guards leaped to enforce my request. It was frustrating how good they were at keeping the reporters under control. As soon as her weak protests and apologies faded, I joked, "That was the most fun I've had in my whole life!" Most of them got it, including the reporter's cameraman, who had elected to stay behind. I knew I was going to be getting a great deal of moral condemnation from self-superior assholes, so I reinforced my point as a preemptive defense, telling the reporters, "I never cease to be amazed by how people who claim to be morally superior almost invariably never stop to think before they tell other people how to behave. Morality is, by its very nature, a matter of making good judgments. Giving moral advice preempts the person from developing their own judgment, is dangerous, a heavy responsibility, and certainly not to be done thoughtlessly. I think anyone who gives moral advice without taking the necessary care is demonstrating their own immorality, and should be treated accordingly." Vanessa told the reporters, "That should answer some of your questions about why God chose Mark." Julia was very proud too, although I could detect a fair amount of self-satisfaction in her pride because she knew that most of what I'd said I'd picked up by watching her manipulate girls. A reporter asked, "Where did you learn your moral beliefs, Mark?" #14: "'In the Cauldron of Battle', 'On the Front Line', 'Under Fire', 'Between a Rock and a Hard Place'. -- "You look puzzled. For the last year or so - from my perspective, I mean - I've had multiple girlfriends at the same time. You may think God is scary, but you should see what it's like being caught between two of my girlfriends when they think I've misbehaved. I have to be INCREDIBLY fast on my feet to invent the moral justifications I need to emerge intact, haha." "You think it's morally acceptable for a guy to have more than one girlfriend?" asked a hopeful-looking male reporter. #14: I answered, "It MIGHT be. First, you said guys with more than one girlfriend, but I don't see any moral justification to restrict the genders that way." No moral justification, just a yuck one. -- "Second, only if every person in the relationship honestly thinks that adding someone else will increase everyone's happiness, not just their own. Ideally, everyone should think that their partners gain more from the addition than they do themselves. -- "Third, what people can put into the relationship and what they need out of it has to be compatible. You need to keep on your toes with this point because it changes over time, and sometimes quickly. -- "Fourth, every relationship combination has to be highly successful. In a three-person relationship, A & B have to succeed together; ditto for A & C, B & C, and all three at once. Between two people there is only one relationship; between three people there are four relationships, so a lot more care has to be taken. Every person has to nurture all four relationships, and that takes a great deal more attention, time and effort. A multi-person relationship is a MAJOR commitment, so don't even think about it unless you're willing to make that investment. -- "I see your eyes glazing over and I haven't even gotten up to 'Honesty' and what I call 'Mission Statement' yet. Maybe I should've given a shorter answer. How about I simply say that it can be moral, provided you do it for moral reasons and work on it hard enough." #26: #8: ^ That's a good point to break off, not that you should ever break the points off tits. The interview lasted another hour and covered a lot of ground: Questions about the CIA's lab: What did it look like? What was it like living inside it? Did I know who attacked it? And several others. Did I think Moran, Wright, Phillip and Byrd were killed by the angel? I remembered to pretend the right degree of ignorance, and once the explanation of those events was provided, I said, "I don't know who killed them, but they were certainly very evil people and the world is better off without them." More questions about God and angels, nearly all of which were pointless because I knew nothing about any of them - which is actually true. One of the religious questions led to a dialogue I was somewhat proud of, so I'll quote it in full. The reporter asked, "You said something earlier about science discovering souls. Do you think that's possible?" "My resurrection proves souls exist, and if something exists, then science will find it sooner or later. Science is pretty good at discovering things." "Do you think science should be allowed to delve into religious areas like that?" "You sound like the religious idiots of a thousand years ago who refused to let sailors sail out of the sight of land because what was beyond the horizon was God's business and not mankind's. Or the religious idiots of a few centuries later who inflicted the Inquisition on any scientist who dared investigate outer space because the entire Universe was God's business not mankind's. There've been short-sighted religious idiots trying to restrain science for as long as there's been science. -- "It would be WONDERFUL if science discovered souls. Can you imagine how much better life would be if we could wear a special pair of glasses that showed us the soul of everyone we looked at? We would instantly know who was a good person or a bad one. We'd only put good people into positions of responsibility, and we'd be able to see our own souls, which would make us FAR more careful about our own actions. It would revolutionize human society in unbelievably profound ways, and be the GREATEST discovery of all time!" Most of them grasped the concept and looked impressed. I was quite impressed myself; it's amazing how much good-sounding crap having thirty two minds allows me to invent. #13: #11: Another mind - one that wasn't busy boasting - said, "Religious people are defensive because they think science is encroaching on and diminishing their territory, which is small-minded nonsense. When I was a child, I had very little scientific knowledge and very little appreciation for religious matters. As I got older I learned a lot more science, and that's increased my wonder at the Universe. Science is increasing the size of the pie amazingly, resulting in science and religion both having larger slices. People who try to hold back science on religious grounds are damaging religion as much as they're damaging science." "So you think science should be free to investigate anything it wants?" "Three hours ago I was locked in a science lab and being experimented on to death, but that wasn't science's fault; that was because there were evil people in charge. Evil people shouldn't be allowed to be in positions of power, and people should be vigilant to prevent that happening. Provided the experiments aren't being run by evil people, then my answer is that scientific investigation shouldn't be constrained." "You're suggesting that the Church should oversee scientific experiments?" "No I'm not. It's ridiculous of you to claim that it takes the Church to decide what is good or evil. Religion and science are in PARTNERSHIP. Together they are working to explain the Universe. Neither is superior to the other, especially because both contain evil people. Hundreds of Catholic priests molested little boys for generations and the Church hierarchy covered it up and allowed it to continue. History is replete with countless examples of evil being performed by people of every religion. There are evil people in religions, in science, business, the arts, politics, the military, and every other area of human endeavor. It's part of the human condition and no group is immune to it. All I'm saying is that people should be vigilant for evil and not allow such people to have power. -- "Evil can be done by omission too; by failing to act. The Catholic Church says it cares for people, yet I'm amazed that women aren't allowed to be priests and bishops. Females run circles around males when it comes to understanding and caring for people. All my life - my previous life - females gave me countless examples of their social understanding and their caring natures being far superior to males'. Without doubt, women would make FAR better priests than men. How many millions of people could've been better cared for and helped but were let down because the Church's MALE hierarchy refused to permit women to be priests and bishops? Given the inestimable loss of comfort they've caused millions of people, I'd call that an evil act by the Church. They're not immune to evil, as all their pedophiles have proved, so your knee-jerk suggestion that they should be in charge of science to stop evil experiments is nonsense." One of the reporters said, "The Catholic Church's position is that it doesn't have authority to ordain women priests." "Huh? The Catholic Church says the Catholic Church doesn't have authority to promote women who are already working for the Catholic Church to higher positions in the Catholic Church to perform jobs in the Catholic Church? That's got to be the best example of an organization that has its head stuck up its own ass that I've ever heard of. Is it too late for me to say the God told me to tell the Church to pull its head out of its ass and ordain women priests so millions of people can be cared for more effectively? I think He said that right after He said that pizza should be given away free as a necessity of life, haha." -- "Stop looking so shocked. If an organization behaves like a fool it deserves to be called on it, especially when it's harming people. If the Church wants to take out an ad in our local paper explaining its reasons for being sexist, and if I find those reasons convincing, then I'll publicly apologize and happily admit it's right. I'll even give it a sizable donation in recompense for my being wrong, as I understand I'm quite wealthy now. But until then, I'm not impressed by its sexist selfishness. Anyway, I thought there were laws against sexual discrimination? How can the Church get away with not promoting women solely because of their sex? Someone should prosecute the Church for that." If I hadn't managed to drop this pre-prepared point into this interview, it would've come up soon anyway. My resurrection was going to result in religious organizations clamoring to get in my face. My face would rather they be anywhere else, so I'd had the idea of using religions' misogyny against them. When any church wants to see me, my staff's stock response will be, "Does your church ordain women?" Any that answered in the negative will be refused access to me, as "Mark does not want to talk with you because you do not represent all of humanity." That will keep the worst of them away for a reason that'll make me look good. During the interview, I never mentioned that Ron had been the boyfriend of Julia and Ava (I had mentioned that Mark had; but I hadn't said that about Ron). Ron's relationship with my girls was fairly common knowledge among our social crowd, but it was a good idea to not mention that similarity. But on the topic of sexual matters, I did get a chance toward the end to mention that Donna's new shape had been a weird sight when I opened my eyes after being resurrected, as she'd been flat-chested when I last saw her. Donna looked suitably bashful and even half-turned away from the cameras in apparent embarrassment, thereby giving them excellent shots of her very nice profile. The sound of my voice was biologically different than Archangel Michael's, and I used a very different rhythm and accent, so hopefully no one would think to compare the content of my speech to his. I had thought of keeping the interview short and saying very little, but they'd be able to collect samples of my speech sooner or later anyway, so it was better to provide a large sample now when I was very conscious of the need to keep it different. Even if there was a suspicious match in the speech, it wouldn't be conclusive so they'd have to get confirmation some other way. God knows how they'd do that, but if they did there was a very good chance I'd notice it. One thing was for sure, the Guardian Angel wasn't going to be permitting any of that sort of crap, and I'd certainly never be getting into an SUV for a ride with the DHS ever again. Obviously the physical sound of my voice was the same as the sound of Ron's, as I hadn't physical changed any of my vocal system, but I was otherwise speaking very differently than Ron had. As with making the link between me and Archangel Michael, if people were suspicious about me and Ron, they'd have a hell of a job proving it now. It was a pity I couldn't send the Guardian up to get the UAV, or go up myself, as dropping the UAV onto the ground in front of all the reporters would've made for Good TV. A stealth UAV above a radar-equipped house that wasn't supposed to be under Government surveillance would've been embarrassing for the Government and possibly very financially rewarding for us. No doubt the Government would try to wiggle off the hook, but after the van and the camera in the nearby house's attic, a third item would have the Government shitting bricks. I'd like to think it'd make a fourth breach extremely unlikely, but the Government was proving to be so exceptionally stupid and intrusive that it was hard to expect them to wise up any time soon. [[Not "stupid" per se, just arrogant and so used to doing whatever they wanted. Especially in cases where there wasn't going to be a trial so legal niceties weren't something they needed to worry about.]] I never got a good opportunity to produce the Guardian Angel, not even when we ended the interview and the reporters didn't want to go. The guards too quickly made sure the reporters did go. No doubt there'd be plenty of opportunities for the Guardian Angel's appearance later, some of which were bound to be caught on camera. Speaking of cameras, the media wanted to know about their having access to film my body. I wasn't eager to allow strangers carrying large pieces of electronics equipment into the house every day, so I said, "One of you leave a camera and some tapes behind when you go. Show one of our guards how to use it, and every few days we'll deliver the tape to you." That wasn't how they wanted to do it, and they suggested far more annoying and invasive alternatives. "Either what I said, or we'll do it ourselves with whatever camera my family has got lying around in this house." They wanted that even less, plus they all wanted to be the network whose camera was used in case that gave them an advantage, so they all ended up volunteering the use of their cameras. I picked one from a cameraman who had a very relaxed attitude, and that was the end of that issue. ------- Chapter 349: I'm Surrounded by Idiots Saturday, June 2, 2007 Just because the interview had been in progress didn't stop the rest of the world from responding, especially because some of the news teams had been able to get live feeds set up in time. Those that hadn't still had the angel's email to rave over, with either excited breathlessness or cool skepticism, depending on which attitude the producers or network executives thought would be the most profitable. All the networks had plenty of material about Mark Anderson dating back to our big lawsuit, so summaries of my life were aired, like an obituary but in reverse. Overhead helicopters had added top-down shots, until our security guards threatened their networks with a news boycott unless the choppers left the area. When we ended the interview and headed back inside, Julia checked her phone and there was a message for her to call Alexis back, "no matter what time it is." Julia checked it was fine with me, which it was, so she made the call, a few seconds later telling Alexis, "Yes, it's really Mark. He still looks like Ron, but that's supposed to change over a few weeks. Do you want to talk him." I took the phone and said, "Hello Spanky." "Are you really Mark?" "At the moment. It's a bit like musical chairs with bodies around here. So have you been a good girl while I've been away?" "Fuck that! Can I come over?" Julia was listening in, and she appeared fine with it. It wasn't as if Julia and I had just been reunited after fifteen months apart. I was fine with it too, so I said, "Things are going to get very chaotic around here soon, but if you don't mind that crap, you can certainly come. Bring your pajamas if you want to stay." "Cool. See you soon." {Click}. Phone conversations with Alexis tend to be quite short - she's not a typical female. I let the gate guards know to let Alexis Joseph in. It was very late, but the parents had a few calls too, although they didn't invite anyone to come over in their pajamas. When everyone was off their phones, we told our security staff that we'd be in a Faraday cage for a while. We started comparing notes about the interview, which mostly meant asking why I'd said various things, suggesting improvements and ideas for future interviews - there were bound to be MANY of those - and quite often congratulating me for doing so well. One point is worth recording here. I said, "I'm pretty sure there was a UAV - that's an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle; a remote-controlled spy plane like the Predators you see on TV sometimes - over our home during the interview. It's probably still up there now. I'm almost certain it's part of the FBI's surveillance because it started about the same time as the FBI's other surveillance methods. They can stay up for more than 24 hours and presumably don't take long to refuel, so it'll probably be overhead almost continuously for the next few days. -- "Our getting lots of photographs of it overhead at all hours of the day, for day after day, could be used to give the Government some grief. The photographs will have to be taken through a good-sized hobby telescope as UAVs are much smaller than normal planes and they fly pretty high, but I think telescopes with cameras are readily available. It shouldn't be set up in our property because that'd be noticed, but on a rooftop in town somewhere would be fine." Mom was first to respond, "Don't Predators have big missiles on them?" I shouldn't have said that. The last time I'd detected the presumed-UAV had been late-April, shortly after the FBI surveillance van was exposed and at the same time as I'd discovered the several FBI agents around our property and their attic camera. I'd mentioned all these to my family but I'd not said "Predator" and Mom hadn't reacted to "UAV" the way she was reacting to "Predator" now. That was a much scarier word, and I'd been foolish to use it. "They can have small ones, Mom, but what's above us isn't necessarily a Predator. Most UAVs can't carry missiles, and even if the one above us could, it doesn't increase our risk of being fired on because there are probably a thousand different ways the Government could do that to us if they wanted to. The helicopters that attacked our Peoria Road home, for instance. The UAV's presence doesn't mean we're about to be fired on because it's already been up there for hours. It's just doing surveillance. If we get a telescope we'll soon find out whether it's armed. If it is, we'll publicize it much more quickly." Mom was in favor of getting a telescope very quickly. Dad was Paul's direct boss, so tomorrow morning - actually this morning, because it was so late already - Dad would get Paul onto it. He'd have to be vague about the source of our suspicions, but Paul was our employee so we didn't have to explain ourselves to him. Most of Paul's guys are tech-savvy so he'd easily be able to find someone to manage that little project. When Alexis arrived, I moved to give her a hug, then at the last moment surprised her by bending down to hoist her up over my shoulder, giving her bottom a smack as I headed for the bedroom. "It's really you, Mark?" "Yep. Cross my heart and hope to die again." #14: #19: "Wow. That's amazing!" "I think the correct word is 'miracle'. Have you ever made out with a dead guy before?" "Does 'dead drunk' count? Umm ... Do you think we should?" "I definitely think we should; probably five or six times. What makes you ask?" "God may not like you doing ... you know." "Fucking like a horny rabbit who's excited about being free again?" "Yeah, that. You're not worried?" "I don't know whether you noticed or not, but I used to have quite a lot of sex. I'm surprised I have to tell you that because I could've sworn I saw your legs waving in the air fairly often. Anyway, there were millions of less sexually active people God could have chosen to resurrect, but He chose me, so it's obvious that He doesn't have a problem with sex. It's stupid to believe He would, considering how fundamental and important it is. It'd be like saying God objected to our eating or breathing." Ava added, "I think He resurrected you because he wants to watch you have more sex." "I think that's an EXCELLENT theory, Ava! We should give Him a good show before He hits my ass with a lightning bolt to hurry me up." That ended the conversation for what should have been a few hours, but only a minute later Alexis suddenly exclaimed, "Hey Mark! You're making out with Carol! I don't think God would approve of THAT! Haha." None of the thirty five of us - Julia, Carol, Ava or my thirty two minds - had thought of that. We were so used to going to bed together that we did so out of habit. Everyone froze, while we wondered what to do. What I wanted to do was keep having sex with Carol, right now and in the future. Having to avoid Carol every time some other girl was around would be a pain, especially given how often we would be doing things with the second-tier girls. Alexis is - to understate her attitude - fairly accepting of sex. She wasn't horrified now, merely surprised and amused. She'd be cool with it. I said, "Wow, that's weird. My head is full of so many of Ron's memories of his making love with Carol that doing it seemed normal to me. Better than normal, because Ron's memories are VERY good ones. Hmm ... the idea doesn't put me off at all; I find it rather sexy. What do you say, Carol, shall we become lovers?" Carol had thought what to say, "It's easy to forget you're Mark. I liked sleeping with Ron, Julia and Ava every night, and I liked the sex we had, and I think I'd like to keep doing that with you. Can we try it and see how it feels, please?" Carol had asked nicely, and it did feel great for both of us, so we decided to enthusiastically continue the experiment, at least for another few decades. For the next fifteen minutes, Carol and I were the center of attention. Including when I made Alexis hold my cock and line it up with Carol's pussy as my hips descended, so, "It's officially all your fault now, Alexis." "Cool! I can't wait to see you doing it when you look like Mark. That's going to look SO kinky. Neither of you feel yucky?" Carol answered, "I feel great. I've always loved Mark and now I can get used to loving him even more while his looks slowly change from Ron's to his own." I said, "I've certainly always loved Carol too, but the biggest factor is that this feels totally natural and good. Ron has many dozens - probably hundreds - of memories of his making love with Carol. Those are part of me now, so this feels like Carol and I are having sex for the 151st time. There's absolutely no 'yuck-factor' at all; totally the reverse. -- "Intellectually I know it's our first time, and that most people will think we shouldn't do it, but I don't care about them. I like the idea of being closer to Carol and this feels too good to stop. By the way, how come no one told me before how sexy Carol is? Someone should've talked me into this ages ago." "That's Julia's fault," volunteered Ava. "She was in charge of getting new girlfriends for you, but I think she wanted to keep the Carol for herself. Shall I punish her for you?" "Good idea. I'm too busy to do it myself now." Ava mercilessly attacked one part of Julia. #2: #13: (Janice is one of the later pipeline girls, not individually discussed before.) #2: #13: I'd already consciously changed my sex style to be Mark-like rather than Ron-like. From kissing differently, through to showing a great deal more vigor and endurance than Ron ever did, and roughness with Alexis. That meant the sex session lasted quite a long time, but that was a price I was willing to pay. My efforts were rewarded, when Alexis exclaimed, "Oh my God {pant}, you ARE Mark!" I gave her another, even more vigorous celebratory fuck, just to drive the point home. In our post-coital conversation, for Alexis' education, I described in more detail our bullshit about God's leaving Ron's memories for me, including that they appeared when I looked at my cock, and that God chose to leave many dozens of memories of Ron and Carol having sex. "That obviously proves that God is cool with sex, and cool with Carol and me having it." Alexis was convinced. She even added more ammunition, talking about how Archangel Michael's cock had been so easy to see and awesome, proving that God wasn't a prude. Then she spent five minutes drooling over how she would've liked to jump the Archangel's bones. We had fun teasing her for her obvious lust and ambitious idea of her body's capabilities. We weren't the only people having a busy night; Paul, the Chief of Police, the Mayor, and their staffs, were busy too. The public was already starting to congregate outside our walls, and it was safe to assume that it was going to get far worse when America woke up and caught the morning news. There was a lot of planning going on, gathering of resources, and trying to work out how crazy things could get, etc. From minor tasks like making sure our entire supply of walkie-talkies were fully charged, through to getting a fire truck parked inside our front gate so its water hose could be used to discourage the crowd if it became too unruly. The National Guard was informally warned they might need to be activated, and an email sent to the Governor's office bringing him up to date and warning him that a state of emergency might become necessary. [Although our guards called them "hand-helds", I call them "walkie-talkies" because it's both logically correct and humorously silly at the same time, and you can't create a name much better than that. They are mounted on the guards' belts, with a cord that runs up their backs under their shirts, to microphones that clip onto their collars and earpieces. Press a button on the mic to talk, and everyone with an earpiece can hear it. They are encrypted, which probably means that the Government can easily eavesdrop but few others can.] The tapes of the interview started playing in the wee small hours, so had little effect around Corvallis. The first broadcasts caught the early risers on the East Coast though, so Paul, the Chief and Mayor got some indication of what things could be like by seeing how the East Coasters reacted. I was awake too, and had gotten out of bed so I could watch TV. Without a sound blob I couldn't usefully watch TV from bed as we'd never bothered getting remote headphones for it. [By the way, it's now very easy for me to get out of bed without disturbing my bedmates. I can use a slight nudge plus EKP to get them to let go and give me room, then NP pulls me up and out easily. I make it look like I'm doing it myself just in case someone has found a way to see what's going on in our bedroom because we don't sleep with the Faraday cage activated as it's as close to airtight as makes no difference.] The network commentators' opinions were all over the map, so God knows how far the religious nutcases' opinions would spread. The so-called "Resurrection" looked like a pathetically incompetent con job or joke. Ron Fisher claimed to have Mark Anderson's mind and soul inside him, but the only 'proof' was the Andersons' and Williams' saying so, which was far from convincing. On the other hand, Archangel Michael had been spectacularly capable, but his last appearance had been over a month ago. None of the network commentators wanted to say that they believed the resurrection was real or that it was fake. Even the experts were more noncommittal than their normal highly opinionated selves. The religious community was confused too. Never individually confused from what I could see on TV, but collectively confused because the individuals were totally sure of every possible interpretation. It was quite funny. One of the commentators commentated (as they do) about the confusion, saying, "The angels did say they wanted to us to have freewill over believing or not believing. They've achieved that." [I was particularly proud of that aspect of my plan. It would've been impossible for me to pull off a totally convincing "I'm an angel from God" act as I didn't have nearly enough religious knowledge and no desire to spend years trying to acquire it, so I negated that weakness by refusing to play any "Prove You're An Angel" games.] There were the usual religious nutcases who claimed I was the Devil. They were especially strident this time - even MORE than normal! - because too many other religious nutcases were claiming that I was Jesus Christ. Because Jesus was the last person to be resurrected, many people thought I must be him again. Have I mentioned that religious people don't seem to have a particularly good grasp on logic? Or on reality either, come to that. Archangel Michael had specifically said that whoever was resurrected wouldn't be divine in any way, but that had been completely forgotten, which added "don't seem to have a particularly good memory either" to the list of religious people's faults. It's a wonder they can tie their own shoestrings, given their many mental deficiencies. (If you'd listened to all the religious crap I had recently, you'd have the same low opinion of religious people.) My being Black was clearly an issue to quite a few of the nutcases, some of whom were so confident of their devoutness and/or bigotry that they didn't hesitate to claim my Blackness proved that I must be from the Devil. I saw one of the interviewers enjoy asking, "But Mark Anderson is white. If Ron's body transforms into Mark's, what will you think then?" That bigoted nutcase was clearly EXTREMELY uncomfortable with that prospect, and declared it impossible because it was so ungodly. He spewed some biblical verses; I think to prove that Blacks were evil, although it was hard to tell because most of the verses didn't make sense or have any relevance to anything that I could work out. One aspect pleased me: that most people thought the resurrection was a fake. Hopefully lots of doubtful people would mean less of a circus outside our home. "He obviously wants to be famous, as you can see by how much he enjoyed talking to the cameras." The last point had some merit, as I had no trouble performing for the cameras. I didn't enjoy the media's crap, but I did enjoy using them as part of my plan. I had long since gotten over being nervous in front of cameras, and if I had been nervous I could've turned it off. Nor, with thirty two minds, was I ever tongue-tied; I usually had far too many choices for what to say. [While I remember to mention it, back when I'd had two, four or even eight minds, we would usually discuss among ourselves who was going to talk next. With thirty two minds, internal discussions could take far too long. Unless one of us had been allocated the mouth for a particular reason, we usually just let whoever took control of it speak. That was far less chaotic than you might imagine, as the winner was the person most motivated, and he usually had the most worthwhile thing to say. Because we all have much the same judgment, upon hearing what he said, the rest of us usually agreed that his comment had been best. I would occasionally wonder how terribly chaotic it'd be to have multiple different minds in my head, and I'd give thanks that my minds were all so similar.] Entertaining Alexis the night before prompted me to make some phone calls fairly early in the morning. I called all of my - as Mark - old girlfriends. Ron hadn't been active with some of them, which made my calling those ones even more appropriate. The conversations were highly repetitive and got tedious, but I still thought it was a good thing for me to do. Once they got their heads around the situation - the fake situation that my Angel Plan had created - and the world accepted it better, they'd get a HUGE buzz out of the world-famous resurrected guy ringing them so soon after he returned. Doing anything more than ringing them, such as depraving them, would have to wait for the chaos to calm down, because the scene outside our gates was rapidly getting too wild to risk inviting anyone to come here. By midmorning, I was thanking God that I hadn't been more convincing! The street outside our property was PACKED with idiots: Christian zealots wanting to worship at my feet. Other Christian zealots wanting to burn me at the stake, feet and all. Sick people wanting me to cure them. The merely curious. I assumed that's what they were. They weren't waving placards so it was hard to tell. Plus some weird groups: UFO-nuts, Enviro-nuts, etc. There were even a couple of placards saying "Bring Back Elvis". I like to think they were having a joke, but I feared they might have been serious. (The "feared" wasn't for my safety, but for my plummeting opinion of humanity.) The media, encouraging it all. I was amused to note that the two groups of Christian zealots were particularly aggressive toward each other. Apparently "turn the other cheek" wasn't in either of their versions of the Bible. I was hoping they'd largely eliminate each other, preferably with the "burn him at the stake" faction losing. I was also hopeful that some of the "feet worshipers" had big tits, in which case I'd redirect their aim somewhat higher. I was impressed by some entrepreneurial non-idiots selling "Official Resurrection Souvenirs". They were making a killing. Our security guards were NOT amused. They were being run ragged by people climbing over our walls. We'd learned from our mistake around our Peoria Road property, and had a 13-foot high wall around this one. Without a ladder or other wall-climbing tools, it wasn't easy for people to get over the wall, but a lot of them still managed it. With a property as large as ours, we didn't have nearly enough staff to cover the perimeter fully. Fortunately, between the wall's sensors and the gardeners acting as spotters, our guards could be directed to each incursion. The trespassers were quickly and roughly downed - by hand, baton or taser, depending on the trespasser's degree of non-cooperation - plastic cuffed, and the tractor called to collect them. Usually the guards had to run off to another incursion almost immediately. The tractor, with trailer attached, was doing circuits of our property, collecting loads of trespassers and taking them to a holding area where a chain was passed through their cuffs to hold them while a couple of overworked cops processed them. It was going to take many hours before their situation improved from being chained to a stake in the ground. The cops were being run ragged too, even with the reinforcements they were getting from other towns. They were mostly on the outside of our walls trying to deal with the accumulating thousands of highly excited people. That wasn't easy because the mob had left their brains at home. I'm charitably giving them credit for possessing brains in the first place. Most of them were highly religious, so that's doubtful. Contributing to the noise level were far too many helicopters and planes passing overhead - a midair collision seemed more likely than not - and a dozen megaphone-equipped preachers exhorting feet-worshiping, stake-burning, and pretty much every other extreme view that you could think of. No "Free Love" though, unfortunately. Our eastern neighbor is a mega-church, "The Church of The Horsemen of Christ". My nickname for them is "The Galloping Ninnies". They're nutcases even for religious people, believing in the literal truth of the Bible and other absurdities. God knows how they reconcile the Bible's direct contradictions, but I'm sure the illogic of their beliefs doesn't cross their minds, even given the much shorter than normal crossing distances involved. Thousands of them were gathering in their recently built church. ^ [I'd read their website not long after I heard about them being our neighbor, and I had no doubt that my "Philosophy of God" - whether espoused by me as Ron, Mark or Archangel Michael - wouldn't have been or is to their liking, so their attitude to me now wouldn't be of the feet worshipping variety. Gems among their espoused beliefs were: "The Bible is the only inspired, infallible, inerrant, and authoritative word of God." "The Scriptures and Holy Spirit supply us with all we need that pertains to life and godliness." "Man in his essential being is sinful, depraved, and unfit for God's favor." They got the "Man is depraved" bit right, as I'm eagerly looking forward to a life filled with a great deal of depravity with pretty girls and beautiful women, but otherwise they're telling their followers: "Don't think for yourselves because you're flawed. Do what we tell you the must-be-obeyed Bible means." They were really overdoing the point about the Bible's perfection, as "infallible", "inerrant", and "authoritative" all mean exactly the same thing, and "inspired" isn't too far off that meaning either. I guessed they were aware that their followers were so stupid that they'd be impressed by repeated variations of the same word. Maybe doing that would counter all the silliness in the Bible, such as its repeatedly treating unicorns as real creatures (and to think that millions of people think science should be taught out of the Bible). I was astonished at how transparent their control game was, but despite the transparency, it's clearly very successful since the Ninnies is a MEGA-church. It's huge and growing huger all the time; that's why they'd had to build a much bigger church than what they'd used previously, and why they could afford so much good land. It's very sad that so many thousands of people are willing to surrender their intelligence in order to get the comfort they so desperately need from such an arrogant organization. And what do their followers get for their reward? Judging from... "Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, lived a life without sin, willingly died a sacrificial death for the sins of the world, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. He will come again to judge the living and the dead, and to establish God's realm of righteousness and peace on the earth." ... well-behaved followers get "righteousness and peace on [lower-case] earth." I can't say that prize would motivate me much, but I've got thirty two minds of my own, which is about 31.9 minds more than I'd need to avoid falling for their control game. What astonishes me is that the control game is so blatant yet thousands of people flock to it. What does it tell you about people that the bosses of that church know and openly exploit people's willingness to give up responsibility for thinking about something that is meant to be as important as their soul and the everlasting life they claim they'll have after this one? I've occasionally wondered - VERY occasionally - why Jesus allowed Himself to be crucified. After reading the above, I understood why: after thirty-odd years of living a life without once enjoying any of the sins that Christianity rails against, I'd be begging for crucifixion too. While I'm in the area, what is it with religious people and virginity? What does virginity have to do with having well-developed spiritual beliefs, being a good person, and a valued member of society? How is Jesus' wisdom going to be improved by his mother having a narrow life? If his mother had traveled the world, seen many peoples and cultures, been with several amazing men, and had a very impressive life full of amazing accomplishments, then I'd be much more likely to believe that she'd imparted some useful wisdom to Jesus while she was bringing him up. Instead, Christians value her solely for having an inexperienced life. It's a pretty sick religion that praises repressed rather than expanded lives. I'm obviously only talking about female virginity, as religious people never question that men can achieve the feat of being simultaneously moral and non-virginal. Why men can do that but women can't escapes me, especially because men are FAR more immoral than women when it comes to sex. On a related note about the Virgin Mary, I've got two rather obvious questions: If God was going to provide a miracle, wouldn't it have been much better to make it about getting the baby out rather than putting it in. In other words, what sort of god deprives the mother of the pleasure of conception but lets her suffer the painful and, at the time, dangerous birth? But that's obviously not the way Christians think. Seriously, it's not. They're misogynistic and sadistic; not a good combination if you're a Christian woman because Christian males have got all their justifications lined up, thanks to the "inspired, infallible, inerrant, and authoritative" Bible. How did the baby Jesus get out past his virgin mother's hymen? Must've taken the back stairs, I guess. If you laughed at the absurdity of that, then congratulations for having avoided Christian brainwashing. If you found it even slightly offensive, then even if you believe Jesus really existed, you don't actually think that his mother was a virgin at the time of his birth, do you? Feel free to answer anyway you like, because the Catholic Church has been forced to stop its centuries-long practice of burning people at the stake for denying Mary's virginity.] ^ So far the mega-church's sheeple were only listening to their preacher, but I doubted that'd remain the case for much longer. Devout Christians have an overwhelming need to stick their noses into other people's business and then tell them that they're wrong, so the Galloping Ninnies wouldn't stay where they were. Their church was too far away from the center of action at our gates, so they needed to move in order to give everyone else the benefit of their wisdom. They would either march around the property to our front gate, which could cause a great deal of trouble, or they'd come over our wall, which would cause a GREAT deal of trouble! The construction of their main church building is finished, but there are still several minor construction jobs going on around their property, so there's ample material available to make ladders or ramps over our wall. We could have two or three thousand of them in our property with very little warning. A couple of our gardeners were stationed where they could keep a constant eye on that threat. I don't know what Paul's plan was in that case, but I knew what my plan was: the Guardian Angel was going to make a highly effective entrance, and there'd soon be Christians being tossed hither and yon. Mostly yon, because the ground was harder in that direction. My families were all sitting in the living room, watched over by a couple of our guards, who thought they were our last line of defense but they'd never get to do anything as I was going to make sure no idiot got into our homes. I hadn't needed to do anything yet as Paul had arranged an effective defense-in-depth, with plenty of gardeners - plus the few mechanics, maintenance and other specialist staff we have - in good locations to act as spotters to provide radio warnings to our guards. So far every trespasser had been caught and dealt with. I had one radio blob zipping around as much of our property as I could cover, as well as a second blob high in the air, both of them being used to keep tabs on what was happening in case something turned nasty. One thing I was particularly on the lookout for was a midair collision, as there were FAR too many aircraft over our heads and judging by the way some of them were flying, they were piloted by too-excited Christians who were trusting in Jesus rather than Minimum Separation Distances to keep them safe. If there was a collision that I couldn't prevent, I'd make sure the wreckage fell somewhere where it'd do no damage and hurt no one, or possibly where it would cause damage: onto the mega-church's main building, depending on how aggressive the Ninnies were behaving at the time. A falling light plane or helicopter could easily be made to flutter down in the direction of the Ninnies' roof in a way that didn't hurt anyone, but did cause quite a lot of damage and started a fire. I was almost looking forward to there being a midair collision. The hateful religious rhetoric I was hearing from the TV made the idea of a plane crashing on top of a lot of them very appealing. I was wearing my wrap-around mirrored sunglasses, with the excuse that the transformation into Mark must be making my eyes sensitive. We were dealing with the phone calls that were being put through, making some calls of our own (getting permission for me to take the 12th grade exams was one of the issues), watching TV and discussing the steadily worsening situation outside. Human intelligence must not be accumulative - other than inside my skull - because as the crowd outside grew larger, it grew stupider. The presence of so many TV cameras making things noticeably worse too, as the crowd competed for the cameras' attention. A new street had been built across some empty fields to connect our property to the nearest existing street, resulting in there being plenty of open space in the fields for the idiots to gather. The cops had ordered that one side of the new street be for supporters of the resurrection, the other side for the detractors, and that the street in between be kept clear for traffic. That worked except when some group decided to be particularly idiotic (i.e., except for quite often). An argument would develop in the middle of the street. Sometimes the cops could manage to push people back to their sides of the street, but sometimes not, and a fracas would develop. The cops would try for a few more seconds, then back away and give the fire truck permission. It fired up (so to speak) a high-pressure hose. There was nothing to hang on to in the middle of a street, so the idiots were easily knocked over and sluiced down the street. By the time they were far enough away that the pressure let off, they'd lost their ardor, and they'd creep sheepishly back to their respective side of the street. For an hour or so anyway, because the fire truck had repeated that process four times that I'd seen. It'd also hosed the gateway twice too, when idiots had tried to get inside when the gate opened to let a car in or out. The first car in was our family doctor's (described below). His subsequent departure had been uneventful as it'd been soon enough after his arrival that even the idiots had enough attention span to remember what it'd felt like to be hit with water from a high-pressure hose held only a dozen feet away. The second car in was one of our SUVs returning with a couple of gardeners who'd been sent on an early morning shopping trip by Paul. They'd collected the telescope (also described below), got several boxes of plastic handcuffs from a company that made them, and some other supplies to cover as many contingencies as Paul could imagine. ^ I'll describe the doctor's visit. Mom had called our family doctor early in the morning, asking him if he wanted to do a physical examination on a recently resurrected body. I doubt Mom said exactly that, but I would've. I also doubt that he answered, "I haven't done one of those for a while," but he should have. Whatever they said, he agreed to do the job and came over, getting a free carwash as a bonus. Mom had already explained the purpose of the examination, that it'd be filmed for TV, and a few other minor details, so we got straight down to business in the living room. Dad had already fetched the TV camera that'd been left for us. It was on a tripod, so he just had to turn it on and aim it at me and check it was focused correctly. While the doctor was pulling his equipment out of his medical bag I was stripping down to my underwear and no further. I was amused at my being embarrassed, considering how blatant the A-man costume had been. The doctor felt the need to make a commentary for the camera, commenting that on my physique, "Good muscle tone. Slightly overweight though. You should cut back a little on your food intake, ahh ... What do I call you?" "Mark Anderson would be easiest for me to react to, but it doesn't much matter to me." Not in an accusatory tone, just as an observation, the Doctor said, "I examined Mark Anderson many times, and you don't look like him." It would be good to get the doctor on my side, so I said, "I was at your examinations of course, so I remember them. The last time was..." I described each of my previous few visits. Not in great detail, because I didn't want to show off my memory too much to the camera, plus I didn't have a perfect memory of the visits anyway, but still in enough detail to trigger some of his memories and to do a pretty good job of opening his mind to the possibility that I was Mark. The first thing he did was get cheek swabs from me, Mom, and Dad. From what he was saying, I learned that it was easy to get the swabs tested to confirm that Mom's and Dad's swabs were the parents of my swab (maternity and paternity tests). That would take only one working day if we paid for a quick service - which Mom said we would - and would effectively prove that I was Mark as there wasn't any other explanation for my parents having a Black son. I had imagined that proving I was Mark would require a blood sample, so I'd been very pleased when all it took was some saliva. My blood was very weird and I'd rather not have that known. There'd be all sorts of stupid accusations, such as my being an alien. My blood would have human DNA in it, but that wouldn't stop people claiming I was an alien. I'd once watched a TV clip of very loud crowd of anti-genetic engineering protestors screaming outside the gates of a company that sold frozen fish eggs to anyone who wanted to stock ponds or lakes. There was no "genetic engineering" involved, but that didn't stop the protestors frothing at the gills. I was happy not to have similarly poorly educated people outside our gates screaming "Kill the alien!" [I later expressed happiness that the DNA test didn't require a blood sample. Mom explained that she'd known that and - in her phone call inviting the doctor to come - had told him to take saliva samples. That's why it was the first thing he'd done. That was a bit of luck, especially as Mom didn't know how freaky my blood was.] The doctor was somewhat old school, doing things like tap my knees with a little mallet and thump my chest. That sort of stuff I passed fine, or better than fine. His first real surprise was when he used a stethoscope to listen to my heart. The little approving comments he'd been making stopped suddenly. I said, "A little unusual, huh?" It had taken me quite a while to notice myself. After my last two close-together merges, my blood composition had slowly changed. It now had far fewer red blood cells and was somewhat less viscous when I bled [[those two are closely related, as red blood cells are largely responsible for the blood's viscosity]], so my blood was now easier to pump and it also needed less pumping as my cells didn't need to be supplied with fresh blood nearly as quickly as they used to need. Even though I could proximity sense my heart's beating and the blood flowing through my major arteries, I'd been unaware of the changes happening as they'd been gradual. After I'd cut myself gardening and had seen the grayish-pink blood, I'd paid attention to my proximity sense of my own body, compared it to other fit people's, and had realized I was different. Not exceptionally so, but still noticeable when it was looked for, like the doctor was doing now. He said, "You have a slow heartbeat." "And a weak one too. I noticed it last night. It feels quite different from what I had as Mark. The angel's email said God was going to change my body, so I'm guessing my heartbeat is part of that." He listened some more and took my pulse, recording the results. I asked, "I'm happy for the public to know simple fact like my pulse rate and the like. What was it?" He looked at Mom, who nodded, so he said, "35 bpm. It's low, but not exceptionally so." He took my blood pressure, then took it again. I said, "I'm guessing it's low?" "80 over 50. Do you have any periods of lightheadedness? Dizziness? Fainting? Do you fatigue easily? Taking any medications for anxiety, blood pressure, heart, anti-depressants? Painkillers or alcohol?" I was shaking my head through the questions. When he got to the end, I said, "My answers were based on the time since my resurrection and Ron's memories. They might be incomplete, so does anyone else know if Ron was taking any medication?" "He wasn't," answered Julia. I made a mental note to ask Julia to let Carol answer living-together types of questions. The doctor said, "It's unusually low, but if you're not experiencing any symptoms it's not too much of a concern. Let me know if you have any dizzy spells though." "I will, but I doubt that'll ever happen. I don't think God would've done that to me." I'd achieved everything I wanted to medically, so when the Doc pulled a syringe out of his bag, the Guardian Angel appeared. Doctors are trained to be observant, so he noticed the one-foot radius, bright yellow, glowing blob appearing in midair only a few feet in front of him. I'd created it in the camera's field of view, in a direction I wasn't looking in, and not too close to the doctor. The doctor recoiled in surprise. I deliberately did so too, to a lesser extent, as I happened to see it. No one else was in the camera's field of view so their reactions didn't matter. "What's that?" Doc asked. "The Guardian Angel. I haven't seen it since a few seconds after I was resurrected, but there's not much else it could be." While I'd been talking, the packet that contained the syringe had been pulled out of the doctor's hand and then floated back into his bag, so I added, "I'm guessing that means the examination is over. The email did say the Guardian Angel would limit that." Doc was still staring at the 'angel' when I canceled it. He looked at me, saying, "That wasn't what I imagined an angel would look like." "Me neither. It appears painters have used a fair amount of artistic license in their works. Or maybe not, because Archangel Michael looked very different. Maybe only Guardian Angels look like that." "You don't seem concerned by any of this?" "Nope. I've got a lot of faith that God knows what He's doing. Plus I was dead, so whatever happens is better than that. I'm just going with the flow." Doc said, "I have some more tests I wanted to do..." "I suggest you reconsider that. The angel's email repeated itself about the need to be careful of Guardian Angels and how deadly they can be. I doubt your tests are worth the risk." The doctor agreed, promised to call us with the paternity and maternity test results as soon as he got them, and left. ^ Tech-savvy guys love working for rich people who ask them to buy equipment. In this case, their enjoyment in buying the telescope needed for UAV-spotting was sadly curtailed because Paul wanted all the security guys to remain onsite. A few of them knew enough about optics to be confident that the telescope idea was a goer. They worked out the two magnifications needed: one to find a UAV-sized target at up to 60,000 feet in the wide open sky, and the other to get a very close look at it once its location was known. Paul maintains a pile of innocuous credit cards, cash and prepaid cellphones for activities he doesn't want the authorities to know about, as he knows the authorities have proved to be one of our greatest threats. Using those, our guys called a large telescope store in Portland to buy what they wanted. A Portland camera store provided that important piece, and paying extra got them to deliver a working camera to the telescope store and have it set up on our purchase for when our gardeners arrived to collect it all. Our SUV had already left to pick up the other supplies, so it wasn't even midmorning when it arrived in Portland to pick up the telescope and digital camera. One of the gardeners had already volunteered to be its operator, so the store trained him in how to use the telescopes, how to set them up and get the two tubes aligned - it was a very nice, double-barreled scope on a dual-mount; our money was no object. On their way back to our property, the telescope and its operator were delivered to his house. Most of our older gardening staff are Corvallis residents with their own homes; the volunteer operator's home having a backyard that was private and suitable for our purposes. The three gardeners set up the telescope in the garden, inside a tent with a roof section that could be folded back or reattached for when it rained (the tent was another purchase). They left him to do the fine-tuning while they headed back to the besieged Anderson-Williams residence. By early afternoon the telescope was in business. ^ Meanwhile the number of people around our property was rapidly increasing and their collective IQ was rapidly decreasing, and it hadn't been all that high to start with. At 11:30am, a southeastern segment of our wall reported that someone had successfully climbed over it. The wall has video, infrared and seismic sensors on the inside and outside faces, so can easily detect someone climbing it and jumping off it into our grounds. As walls go - which is admittedly rarely very far - it was a very smart wall. A pair of guards were sent to intercept the intruder but were unable to locate him among the trees of that area. The trees were quite widely spaced but there was no sign of the guy. The guards reported their failure to our Security Center, who made sure the next layer of guards and spotters were alerted to the area of concern. The intruder had entered our property at the base of the easternmost ridgeline of the "m", the one with our Office on it. From there [we learned later], he'd sprinted counterclockwise, staying in the belt of trees that was growing inside our wall. That took him to and along the steep eastern downslope of the main hill. He'd gone from the 6 o'clock position relative to the Adults' House, to the 4 o'clock position, while also getting much closer to the House as the eastern side of the top of the "m" is a lot closer to the house than the hill's southeastern foot. The trespasser was detected crossing an electric eye beam - there are many of them covering likely intrusion paths around our property - at the same time as he was spotted by the pair of gardeners Paul had placed to observe the mega-church ninnies. He'd broken cover about halfway between the Adults' House and the Office, and was running for the Adults' House about three hundred feet away. The inner-circle guards were alerted and the nearest two pairs sprinted to cut the guy off. When the nearest pair got within shouting range, one of them yelled, "Freeze!" That rarely works, so our guards kept running to cut the intruder off. The intruder also kept running. He didn't ignore the yell though: while still sprinting, he pulled a pistol out and fired it in the general direction of the pair of guards who'd yelled at him. I hadn't seen any of the preceding events, our property being far too large for me to observe more than a small part of it at a time. I'd missed the intrusion and was still looking around the wall and at the sky, but the sound of the nearby shot immediately changed my priorities. I looked at the Adults' House with both blobs and quickly located the action. The shot also energized the two guards we had with us in the living room: they drew their weapons and leaped to guard the doorway, listening intently to their earpieces for updates, while one of them warned us, "Get ready to hit the slide if we give the word." We moved to the slide, opening it and lining up with the girls at the head of the line, Julia explaining what the slide was to Alexis, who thought it was "Cool". As he probably intended, the trespasser's shot did succeed in discouraging our guards from running in front of him, but what it did encourage was considerably worse for him. Our guards have a procedure for what to do if there's a guy running around the property shooting a gun at people, especially if he's running toward any of the principals. Needless to say, the welfare of the gunman hadn't been high on the list of concerns of the people who'd written that procedure. The intruder was only a few seconds away from the bedroom wing of the Adults' House so the guards followed the quick version of the procedure. They stopped and drew their weapons. They aimed at the target while the senior guard yelled, "FREEZE or we'll shoot!" The intruder was nearly at the 'safety' of house, so he thought running faster would be a good idea. He was dead wrong. Our senior guard had barely managed to start telling the other guard "Put..." (of "Put him down"), when the younger guy double-tapped the runner. Slightly above I wrote that the intruder was "only a few seconds away from the bedroom wing". As it turned out, he was actually a lifetime away. [I blame Jesus. The intruder turned out to be a religious nutcase; although I never found out whether of the Feet-Worshipping or Stake-Burning camps, as it's hard to know what Christians are thinking. They do so little of it that it tends to be erratic and unpredictable. Whatever form of nutcase he was, he would've thought that Jesus would keep him safe, but Jesus must've allowed Himself to get distracted by the thousands of prayers for our damnation coming from the nearby Church of the Galloping Ninnies. Christian churches are partly to blame for the nutcase's death because they tell their flock, "Put your life in Jesus' hands," without adding the very important, "But make sure you've got his attention first!" The need for the addition is logically obvious, but the churches know they're dealing with Christians so they should've spelled it out.] The two further shots had everyone in my families worried. I couldn't say anything because there was no way I should know about the action. Our two guards were still hyper-alert in the doorway, so there was no clue from them. It only took a few seconds before the guards visibly relaxed, one of them telling us, "Relax. It's all over." Dad asked, "What happened?" The guards looked uncomfortably toward the girls, causing Vanessa to suggest, "It's going to be part of their lives and it'll teach them some caution, so they should know." Rapid shots and then our guards relaxing and saying "It's all over" made it pretty obvious what had happened. Mom didn't look comfortable with having it made explicit, but she didn't object either, so the guard said, "A lone male intruder. He was trying to get into this house and he took a shot at Tristan and Sanchez when they moved to stop him, so Sanchez dropped him." Dad asked, "None of our guys were hit?" "No. Just the intruder." Donna asked, "He's dead?" When the guard nodded, Donna added, "Good." Carol asked, "What was he trying to do?" "We'll probably never know, but he had a gun and he used it so he was too dangerous to be allowed into the house." "What'll happen to Sanchez?" Dad asked. "He'll be fine. Security guards have taken down armed intruders plenty of times before so there are no legal worries, 'specially not in this town. The police will have a word with Tristan and Sanchez, and fill out some forms, but there'll be no charges. Tristan will keep an eye on him and we'll get him drunk one night if he wants to. He's not much of a drinker so I doubt he will. It'll just be work as normal." "Should we pay him a bonus?" "Talk with Paul about that, but it doesn't look good to pay your staff to kill people. Just give him a pat on the back to show your appreciation. Paul will give him time off if he asks for leave, and Tristan will keep an eye on him and provide an ear if needed. I think it's Sanchez's first, but enough of us have been there that he won't feel alone. He's going to be too busy anyway, because it's a madhouse out there." "He won't be stood down during the investigation?" "Not when we're this busy. He'll have to surrender his piece for forensics and give a statement, but there are even detectives on crowd control at the moment so they'll make it quick. Paul will give him a spare piece and put them somewhere away from the front lines for a while. Probably swapping with Ray and me in here. It's no big deal; just part of the job. He would've been in a lot more trouble if he'd frozen or missed; Paul would've canned him for that." [As predicted, Sanchez was never in any trouble. A police procedure had to be followed, but it was a formality as the shooting had been legal and witnessed by plenty of people: the two gardeners and three guards; I kept my hand down.] The immediate aftermath of the shooting included the local cops deciding "Enough is e-fucking-nough!" A State of Emergency was declared. It should've been a "State of Lunacy", but "Emergency" was the closest legal version they had. Troops were called in. It took a while, but: The area around our home was cleared, with the fire truck's crew making an enthusiastic early start on that, being fed up at how stupid the crowd was. All roads into Corvallis and to our hill from the north or from town were blocked, only residents and workers allowed in. Leaving was unobstructed and encouraged. A no-fly zone was declared within five miles of our home, and the airport was closed to non-approved planes because too many planes were ferrying in more idiots. That very nearly caused a disaster when it forced an arriving charter plane's pilot to turn away. His passengers - highly opinionated Christians (is there any other sort?) - disagreed with the pilot's obeying the law. Their physical remonstrations very nearly caused a crash and did cause the pilot to declare a real emergency and to land in Corvallis, where the passengers were arrested for hijacking a plane. That's the stupidest crime it's possible to commit in America these days, as it carries about a 5,000-year mandatory prison sentence. You get automatically put on the "No-Fly List" too, but that's somewhat academic. The already worked up Galloping Ninnies were HIGHLY pissed off at being ordered to go home just because their church was inside the half-mile "Everybody Get Out" radius. They'd already worked themselves into a righteous frenzy, and were just about to burst forth and tell everyone else what they should be thinking, so going home didn't suit them at all. They insisted on their religious right to yell at people wherever and whenever they wanted, and it turned into somewhat of a war between the Army of God and the Army of the USA. Jesus must've been having an off day, because the US Army won. ^ Meanwhile, back at the recently created Anderson & Williams Observatory. It only took our gardener a few minutes to find the UAV because its underside had a white paintjob that contrasted nicely against the currently blue sky. Centering the target in the view of the least magnified telescope automatically aimed the high-powered scope at it (he'd already gotten them aligned), showing him that the UAV had no missile pods. [[There was a stealth UAV on the drawing board with retractable weapon pods, but it was not much more than a concept.]] Our astronomer called Paul, telling him, "I've found what you told me to look for. It looks safe." "Good job, thanks. Check to see if there are any more and get regular photographs." Paul subsequently relayed that news to us. Mom was very pleased at the UAV not having any missiles. It didn't displease the rest of us either. We'd nearly bought an automatic movement-tracking package for the telescope, except our tech-savvy guards had thought to ask about its maximum traversing speed. They worked out that the electric motors couldn't move the mount fast enough to keep up with a plane. Relative to us, planes move sideways quite a lot faster than what the telescope had been designed to track. I mention this because it proves that learning trigonometry at school isn't always a waste of time, like you probably thought it was. Having to steer the scope manually, it took the gardener a few trials and errors before he learned how to get good photographs. Once he had several of them, he searched the rest of the sky for more UAVs. He didn't find any. He thought he had a few times, but it was the same craft flying back into view during its circular orbits of our home. Paul gave our Security Center's radar operator a prepaid phone to call our astronomer. [[There are twenty times more astrologers than astronomers in America. You can draw your own conclusions about people from that, or you can base your opinion on the behavior of the thousands of idiots gathering around our wall - both will give you the same impression.]] Our radar has a facility where the aperture of the radar beam can be narrowed considerably, resulting in a much more focused and high-powered beam (the beam is the same power, but it's concentrated in a smaller area). With the telescope operator talking to the radar operator, they were eventually able to get the UAV into a very narrow beam, where despite its being a stealth plane, enough of the highly concentrated radiation bounced back to our radar's receiver to be detected. The radar operator switched the radar into "Follow Mode". Unlike the telescope, our radar certainly was designed to follow planes, especially as the "following" was entirely in software since the radar has no moving parts. That gave us continual monitoring of the UAV's location as well as proof that it was flying wide circles at a constant distance from our home [although we later saw that it did sometimes divert to fly closer and lower when something particularly interesting was happening, especially if the event was in an area that would have been obscured by trees or buildings for much of the UAV's normal orbit. It also departed every night for a while, obviously to be refueled]. The FBI would have great trouble explaining how a stealth spy plane flying circles a constant distance around our home could be doing anything other than spying on us. Once the UAV's orbital path was understood, the radar was occasionally toggled back to its original wide-area search job, and when that showed nothing it was put back to reacquiring and following the UAV. Most of the time it followed the UAV as that was known to be in the area and therefore more important than likely empty sky. Our astronomer took half-hourly, date- and timestamped photographs of the UAV during the rest of the day [and the days that followed]. We also got a couple of independent people, such as the Chief of Police - when he got a chance - to visit the 'observatory' to be witnesses that the UAV was circling our house. Anticipating $216 billion coming into the Benton County economy made them very willing to help (they were unaware how much of that money would be lost to European fashion capitals). ------- Chapter 350: The Guardian Angel's First Public, and 1000 Pubic, Appearances Saturday, June 2, 2007 (Continued) Saturday afternoon was saner for us, but not for some other people. TV showed us scenes at the main access routes into Corvallis, especially the highway bridges over the river. There were many hundreds of cars parked down the Corvallis-Lebanon Highway (the main road into Corvallis, to the east of the river) that had been prevented from getting any closer by the roadblocks. Consequently there were thousands of people yelling at the soldiers to demand that they be let in. Whether to add their worship to my feet or throw another log on the fire wasn't clear. The two bridges over the river into downtown Corvallis are both long and one-way. The two-lane northern bridge is for traffic going into town, and the direction of the one-lane southern bridge you can probably work out for yourself. Both bridges had to have roadblocks erected to control traffic because several idiots had tried to use the southern, long, one-lane, one-way bridge to get into town, presumably trusting Jesus to keep them safe from head-on collisions. That was foolish of them because Jesus was busy keeping safe all the fully clothed idiots who'd abandoned their cars and were trying to cross the river the wet way, many of whom were as good at swimming in water as they were at walking on it. Considering how against ANY sexual exhibition in public Christians are, they were doing a great job of turning Corvallis into a fucking mess. The unfortunate people who'd bought our Peoria Road property from us were doubtless wishing it was surrounded by the 75th Rangers again, because TV showed that thousands of religiously inspired souvenir hunters had found it and were in the process of ripping the house apart to get keepsakes of 'Saint Mark', or whatever the hell they thought I was. The owners should have put their property on an eBay auction for an immediate cash sale, as they probably could've gotten millions more than it was worth, assuming there'd be a religious organization rich and silly enough to pay that much, which I thought was a safe assumption. Our original home had the same problem too, but to a much lesser extent because it was inside the cordon around the town, and (I guessed) because it'd never been on the news before. Of course, now that it was repeatedly pictured on the news with the name of the street being mentioned, that advantage was destroyed. [Mom and Dad had originally rented it out, but had sold it when they were convinced that our post-Binion's bank account values were real.] The native population of Corvallis was relatively subdued. The city had a fairly small population, and a good chunk of that was students with exams starting in a week or so. Plus Benton County's previous claim to fame was having the lowest rate of per capita church attendance of any county in the country, so it clearly had a population of above-average intelligence. Despite those advantages, there were still a few thousand locals who got themselves worked up over my resurrection, plus there were the few thousand imported idiots who'd managed to get into town before the barricades were put up, and the thousands that'd arrived on foot or by swimming the river since then. The latter group were continually arriving, mostly wet and bedraggled, and out of sorts from having to walk through town to get to our hill. The soldiers and cops maintaining the half-mile perimeter around our hill were being increasingly outnumbered. With increasing numbers, the crowd was getting increasingly stupid, and it looked like it was only a matter of time before they broke through the cordon. The Governor appealed for calm. Just in case his appeal didn't work (do they ever?), he was also sending every military and police reinforcement that he could lay his hands on. By air preferably, because abandoned vehicles and accidents had made the roads impassable for several miles around Corvallis. #3: #14: #19: #23: Judging by the quality of our thoughts, the intelligence-decreasing effect of large groups of people is contagious even by watching them on TV. The TV networks were clamoring to interview me again. Not wishing to make the situation worse, we were refusing. Even telling them our reason didn't stop their desperate desire to get me on air again. Apparently the public's right to know outweighed the risk of turning Corvallis into something resembling downtown Baghdad. The Governor's reinforcements were arriving at about the same rate as more Idiots (they get a proper noun now, having achieved the non-critical mass required to form a new type of subhuman), which if all else had been equal, would've been enough to maintain the status quo, especially because many of the Idiots were too busy fighting each other. The trouble was that as the crowd got larger, its IQ got lower. At 4pm it had traveled the relatively short distance down to zero, and any faint semblance of rational thought disappeared. On the street that led to our gate, in front of the cameras (because they contribute significantly to reductions in IQs), a very large group of Idiots decided that orders from soldiers and policemen with guns could be ignored. Because it was the main street to our home, there were a lot of soldiers and several policemen guarding it and trying to keep order, and there were several large vehicles parked across the street to form a substantial barricade. The crowd simply swarmed forward, not caring about any of that. This was the most strongly defended and largest barricade anywhere around our property, so the worst place for the crowd to make a push, but they didn't care about that either. They simply swarmed forward. The soldiers and cops had to back out of the way. Those of them that had non-fatal ammunition - rubber or bean-bag bullets - could have fired into the crowd, but it was so large and so determined (in a mindless sort of way, i.e. religiously) that it was no longer controllable. It was a pity that the goodies couldn't open up with live ammunition, because it was an ideal opportunity to raise the nation's average IQ by several points. The mob reached the barricade and from what we could see on TV, it looked like they simply "flowed over it." In reality, they each had to climb over the obstructions. Many of them were crushed against the sides of the vehicles, stumbled, slipped, or were even pulled back by following climbers blindly grabbing for whatever handhold they could reach for, even if it was the person ahead of them. Dozens were injured and trampled where they fell. The mob didn't care, mindlessly pressing on regardless. If they were lucky, the injured could roll under a vehicle. If not, they got trampled on a whole lot more. Judging by their ability to swarm over the large trucks blocking the street, our wall wouldn't slow them down for long, and there was no way our security force could slow them down at all without a great deal of bloodshed. This was a necessary and ideal opportunity for the Guardian Angel to make its first public appearance ("first" because the tape of the doctor's examination hadn't been handed over yet, as that would've only made things worse). My families were watching this on TV with me, and saying things like, "Uh oh," or "Oh dear," while our two guards - Tristan and Sanchez, as predicted - looked like they wanted to say, "Oh Fuck!" I created the Guardian Angel. My families weren't fazed and Alexis had already walked bowlegged to her car and driven home, but Tristan and Sanchez were startled. I immediately told them, "Relax, it's the Guardian Angel. I imagine it was watching TV and saw what's coming our way." Our guards kept their hands on the butts of their guns, relaxing not at all. My sitting in the Adults' House meant I was too far from the gates for the Guardian Angel to intercept the crowd there - it was a GREAT pity my 500-foot range hadn't doubled with every merge - so I created several NP-fingertips. A few of them grabbed my arms and lifted me off my seat so I could create an NP-seat under me as that's more comfortable than being carried by my arms. I also used fingertips to lightly push everyone in my families back in their seats, holding them there while the NP-seat started floating me slowly out of the room, led by the Guardian Angel. Tristan and Sanchez were not happy with this development. Before they could do anything, I said, "The angel's job is to protect me, so I'm sure you don't have to worry. Staying here to guard everyone else would be best." Tristan had another idea. He told Sanchez to stay, while Tristan followed me. He radioed, "Tristan in the Adults' living room: The TV is showing a thousand-plus people overwhelming the main barricade and heading for the gate. ETA three minutes. The Guardian Angel has picked up Ron and is carrying him out of the room. Ron's not in distress. Sanchez is staying in the living room with all the other principals; I'm following Ron. We're in the hallway heading east at walking speed. Ron's sitting on nothing three feet in the air, which is the weirdest thing I've ever seen." A few seconds later he said, "Understood." I told him, "I don't think you have to worry..." "I'm paid to worry." "You're earning your money today then." "You got that right." A few seconds later, Tristan told his mic, "We're waiting for the Adults' elevator. The call button came on by itself. The doors are opening. The Guardian Angel and Ron are going in. I'm following." The angel preceded me into the elevator, and was kind enough to turn me around so I faced the door again. Tristan entered and the "Down" button went on all by itself. Just after the doors closed, the Guardian Angel resumed its position in front of me by moving straight through my body, giving Tristan a heck of a surprise. (I had moved it so quickly that Tristan hadn't had time to think about drawing and shooting it. By the time he started going for his gun, it was already hovering motionless in front of me.) I gave a small jerk to show a lesser surprise, then said, "That was weird. I never felt a thing." I waved my hand through the blob, scaring Tristan again. I added, "I thought so. It doesn't have a body. You can forget about trying to shoot it." Tristan activated his radio to describe the angel's passing through me and its apparently having no body. He ended with, "Ron's hand passed straight through it. If it does something I don't like, I don't think I can restrain it or shoot it. I can't touch it with anything. Anyone got any idea on how to manage it?" By his body language it was clear that no one had a clue. Most of them were probably busy getting ready for the arrival of the thousands-strong mob. Every vehicle on the property had already been put away, except for the tractor used to collect cuffed intruders, the fire truck just inside the gate, and a few dirt bikes positioned around the property in case the security force needed to relocate quickly (keys NOT in the ignition, so intruders couldn't use them). The Guardian Angel led us to an SUV, opened the back door and deposited me inside far enough to make room for Tristan. The door remained open. I invited Tristan, "You coming in?" He climbed in, saying, "No choice. I don't know where you're going." -- He keyed his mic, reporting the recent development, then suddenly added, "Christ! The whole SUV just lifted of the ground. It's flying down the tunnel now with the angel flying a few feet in front. We're heading out." Partway down the main tunnel out we encountered two incredulous looking staff wives walking into the hill on the walkway on the side of the big tunnel. They normally live with their husbands in the Senior Staff's Quarters, and I guessed were now being evacuated to the much safer Adults' House. They didn't have radio earpieces so they had no idea of what the explanation was for the bright yellow light and flying SUV. I waved reassuringly to them as we floated past. There was a pressure pad on the "Out" lane to get the tunnel's big doors to open. I NP-pressed that as we 'drove' up to it. That didn't work, presumably because the property was on lockdown. I used a sight blob to find the door-opening switch in the Security Room and toggled it, using NP to hold the surprised guards back from immediately switching it back. The SUV flew out the mouth of the tunnel, then slowed to a stop horizontally. It rose several feet, moved backward and sideways a few yards, then it parked itself on the slope of the hill facing the gate. The car's gearbox was in "Park" and the parking brake was on already, so nothing else was required. I said, "We've got a grandstand view out the front gate. I've a feeling the Guardian Angel wants us to see what's about to happen." That was my excuse for having to reposition myself within range of the gate. We were now about a hundred feet from it. The SUV had tinted windows, we were in the backseat looking around the front seats' headrests, and were far enough away that no one in the crowd would be able to make out my face. I had my chin resting on the front passenger seat's back, on the side away from Tristan so the headrest was stopping him seeing that my eyes were closed. Proximity would tell me if he moved enough to get a look at my face. I hadn't decided what to do yet. In particular, the issue of how rough to get with the Idiots was still open. I had to be somewhat rough, otherwise the Idiots would probably feel honored that the Guardian Angel had interacted with them. On the other hand, ripping a few thousand heads off would be terribly excessive, even if tempting. Somewhere between the two extremes seemed best, but that covered a large number of possibilities. A high radio blob looking down on the approaching mob was definitely moving my thoughts toward the uglier extreme. There was a very large number of them, and they looked very unreasonable. I decided on a middling level of ugliness; something to teach the Idiots a lesson they wouldn't soon forget. The morning's activities had resulted in a lot of damage to trees around the outside of our property, as people had pulled off branches to use them to help get over the wall (sometimes a dozen or more people had swung on tree limbs to get them to break off; a lot of branches couldn't bear that sort of weight). Thus there was plenty of raw material for clubs. That was good, because I was planning to use a lot of clubs. I decided the average club probably weighed a few pounds, easily less than ten. Call it six or seven at most. I needed the clubs to be able to be quick and nimble around the crowd, and be able to bash heads pretty effectively, so at least 10 g's of acceleration would be good. Assuming my minds created the maximum number of fingertips, then each would have 7.2 kilograms of force (nearly 16 pounds). To get 10 g's on a 7 pound club would require 70 pounds of force, which was five fingertips worth. Call it six to play safe. With thirty two fingertips per mind, I could wield five clubs per mind, which would be too many for each mind to coordinate because I wanted to bash the Idiots' heads with some precision and care. I decided on two clubs per mind, which gave me far more force per club. That let me create fewer fingertips per mind as fewer would be easier to control and their individual maximum forces would automatically be greater. At two clubs per mind, I needed about sixty clubs. I sent the two radio blobs left and right from the gate, looking for suitable weapons. I found several immediately usable clubs, and some longer limbs that I could break into pieces, which increased my arsenal considerably. I'd gotten over thirty clubs when I remembered that our guards had truncheons. I checked the gate area. Paul had set up a layered defense again. Just inside the gate were Paul (currently talking into a cellphone), five other grim-faced guards, two senior cops (the most senior holding a megaphone), and three firemen holding their hose ready. There were quad bikes and the flatbed truck parked a few yards behind them, pointing back into the property and I could see that the vehicles were idling. Fifty feet farther into the property were another half a dozen guards, spread out widely so they formed a line about a hundred feet wide. They were armed with tasers and rifles, and looked very unhappy. There was no sign of all the wall-hoppers that'd previously been chained to a stake just inside the front gate while the police processed them [they'd been relocated to one of the several rooms off the main tunnel]. Paul was evidently still concerned with people accessing the property from directions other than through the front gate because there were still pairs of guards and spotters positioned around the property. They were all pulled back to be located much closer to the Adults' House than the exterior wall, presumably so they couldn't be cut off by the mob if we had to flee to the panic rooms. I'd had a foolish image of Paul standing outside our gate in a glorious attempt to single-handedly deflect the mob, but that was obviously stupid (clearly the result of too much TV in my impressionable childhoods). It looked like he and the cops were prepared to use waterpower initially, and if that failed, then tasers - several of my minds had fun imagining how tasers would work when people were drenched and standing in huge puddles - and then to use firepower. Thousands of Idiots rampaging through our property couldn't be allowed. My families could hide in the panic rooms easily and safely, and we could get some of our staff in with us, but quite a few of the staff might get cut off and could be at great risk, and the houses would be wrecked. It'd be better to shoot several of the attackers in the legs (which is what I guess Paul would order), and hope that the rest regained some intelligence and decided to run away. [[The plan was different than I'd expected. Paul and the Police Chief were going to attempt to stall the crowd at the wall by using the fire hose and rifle shots into the air. A large Army chopper was on its way and expected momentarily, to hover only feet over the crowd to have its considerable downdraft and intimidating size further discourage the mob. The first chopper was empty because there hadn't been any troops available, but later choppers would bring reinforcements into our property, provided the previous tactics could stall the crowd long enough. Only if the crowd rampaged onto the property would harsher action be necessary, but that was thought unlikely. The decision whether to fire live rounds at anyone had yet to be made; that'd be the Police Chief's unenviable decision.]] Even though I very much wanted to see multiple tasers put to use while the fire hose was spraying the crowd, I liked my idea better. I'd been waiting for an opportunity for the Guardian Angel to make an entrance, and this would do that very nicely indeed. I could hear a couple of helicopters coming too, probably news-choppers who'd been unable to resist entering the no-fly zone because the imminent clash was going to be Great TV. I zipped the Guardian Angel from the front of my SUV in a very rapid arc up and over the intervening guards, descending to the middle of our driveway, between the gate and Paul's first rank of defenders. I gave them a couple of seconds to get used to its appearance. Our guards had all heard Tristan's comments, and the firemen and cops were getting quick explanations from the nearest guards. I picked up all the 'fall back' vehicles, moving them from just behind Paul's group to just behind the second rank of defenders. Everyone watched the movement in amazement. After I'd put the vehicles down, I gently picked up all the front rank guys and the fire truck, and moved them fifty feet farther inward, putting them down on the driveway just behind what had been the second line of defenders. Just before I released their arms, I borrowed their batons. I thought about borrowing the batons from the guys in the second line, but they were holding rifles and I didn't want to scare any of them into pulling a trigger by mistake. They should've been far too professional to react that way, but it'd be best to play safe. I had forty one batons and clubs now, which should be enough. I flew the tree branch clubs over the wall onto our side of it, then toward the gate, sending the batons to join the clubs. They were hovering halfway up the wall, just to either side of the gate so out of sight of the imminent mob. Paul and everyone else could see the hovering clubs, and it was pretty obvious what they were going to be doing very soon. Tristan was occasionally talking to me, asking me what I thought the Guardian Angel was doing, or just making comments. I gave him fairly obvious answers. I've left that out as it was only a distraction (for you; I can easily talk to someone while my other thirty one minds are concentrating on doing several other things). Seconds before the front of the mob arrived at the gate, the first of the choppers arrived overhead. I spared a moment to look up at them. They weren't the media choppers I'd guessed them to be. The first one was police and the other one that I could see coming was an Army transport helicopter. The police chopper came close and a loudspeaker ordered the crowd to go back the way they'd come. The crowd didn't do as ordered, presumably because they were feeling either far too religiously inspired or moronic - those two moods being extremely difficult to distinguish. Ignoring the police chopper the same way they'd ignored the police at the roadblock, the mob kept advancing toward the gate. They reached it a few seconds later. Some people started fanning out to either side, but others braced themselves against the gate and in several cases, started trying to climb over it. I could see that Paul and the policemen were about to do something. I didn't know what, but it was time for me to act anyway as I didn't want the mob to fan out much wider than the street. I put one sight blob just above the gate looking into the mob, and another sight blob nearly a hundred feet farther down the street, also only about ten feet above the mob's heads and looking back toward the gate. Then the clubs and batons (I'll collectively call them clubs from now on) flew up over the walls and divided themselves into three groups: a quarter of the clubs for the right flank of the mob nearest our wall, a quarter for the left flank nearest our wall, and the remaining half for the back of the mob; those being the areas where I had the best vision for clubbing. There wasn't a "back of the mob" yet, just a long line of people that stretched back hundreds of yards. There'd be a back soon though, because when I started clubbing people below the far sight blob, people slightly farther away would run away. I'd let them, but I wouldn't let anyone closer run away. I was going to use NP to hold the front hundred feet of the mob in place while I clubbed them ALL, with the exception of the several kids. Who brings kids to a riot? Obviously morons who trust in Jesus' protection WAY too much. Seeing the crowd up close, I thought of an improvement to my tactical plan. I had a lot of unused minds with spare NP force and I just thought of a good use for it. I needed only 9 minds' worth of force to wield the clubs, leaving 22 minds available. 22 minds times 32 fingertips at 15.8 pounds each was 11,100 pounds, about 5.5 tons. I'd allocate about 2.1 tons to each of the long sides of the mob, and the remaining 1.3 tons to hold the back of my 'net' closed. That would imprison the Idiots very nicely. I wasn't going to create a continuous wall around whole group. A static barrier wouldn't scare them enough and they'd start to try to get over or under it. I was mostly going to use sudden body blows to push them over and back into the group, probably in bulk rather than individually. I'd suddenly and strongly bulldoze a 20-foot width of one flank inward, and while they were recovering from that, I could use the NP-fingertips to bulldoze another section. I'd be doing that on both sides and at the rear, and it'd freak the shit out of all of them. I'd probably also need to use some fingertips for other purposes, such as pulling the kids out and moving them to the side safely, gathering back any individuals who managed to make a run for it, and little tasks like that, but they'd be minor. I figured there were about a thousand people in the area I was about to clobber. If my forty one clubs could take fifteen people down a second, then it'd take only a minute to get them all. That was overly optimistic as I was going to err on the side of hitting too lightly. I'd start by hitting even lighter than I thought I should and see how many didn't stay down, and adjust my force appropriately. All I wanted was to take the fight out of them. Unconscious was fine, but just stunned was okay too. Especially because if they woke up and tried to run, I'd simply clobber them again. Clubbing them all might take two minutes, I guessed. Not long, but they'll be EXTREMELY frightening minutes for the mob, if not outright terrifying. It should teach everybody, including the non-participants, a very good lesson. One reason I was using clubs was because even the people watching on TV would be easily able to imagine how painful it'd be to be on the receiving end, which should encourage everyone to stay away. There was a cameraman and reporter flanking the mob, so the film would certainly get out. It wouldn't be as impressive as a top-down filming would be, but side-on would still do the job very nicely. The next thing I did was extract every kid that I'd noticed. My definition of "kid" was anyone that looked too young to be clubbed on the head. People were looking at the glowing light above the gate (the Guardian Angel, although they had no idea of that yet), and they'd just got a scare by seeing all the clubs flying up and over the wall toward them, when fourteen kids shot up into the air. That added greatly to their surprise and concern. Especially for the kids' parents. Some of those were quick enough to grab at Little Johnny or Suzy, but invisible stomach punches easily distracted the would-be grabbers. The tree branches quickly caught up in the race to be the most surprising development, because they started attacking people! My first few blows didn't deck anyone, so I upped my forcefulness, careful to hit the females somewhat less forcefully. I was rapidly flying the kids off to the side. They were screaming for their parents; their parents were screaming for them, the people I was hitting with clubs were just screaming, and the mob in general was doing a great deal of yelling too. An already noisy mob was rapidly getting even noisier. I flew the Guardian Angel light blob low over their heads to be an additional distraction, to be Good TV, and to reinforce my lesson. I kept clubbing. I placed the kids on the ground about a hundred feet to the side of the mob on the same side as the film crew; in a clear, easily filmed location. The damned kids immediately started running back to join the mob, thereby proving that they were Christian children. I was glad the kids had been in the riot group, as my careful treatment of them would be very good press for the Guardian Angel, but they were a damned nuisance because I had to divert a sight blob away from clubbing to look after them. I picked them up again and started flying them into our property. I'd place them among our security guards, but for now I turned my attention back to the mob. I'd look back at the kids in about twenty seconds, when they'd be in about the right place. The mob tried to scatter of course, but they were very easily contained by very sudden, chest-high, 20-foot long barriers that not only stopped their rush, but pushed back so quickly and forcefully that everyone in the area fell over backward on top of each other, taking many seconds to stand up and get themselves ready to try again. I had three such barriers operating, only taking a second or two to push over a group, and virtually zero time to relocate to a new area to repeat the action. I also had several fingertips doing individual actions, so none of the thousand corralled people had a chance to escape. Pushing a group of people over with my forceful barriers and clubbing a few of the people on top of the heap considerably slowed down the recovery of those underneath. A few nimble people did manage to break free, but I simple picked them up and dropped them into the middle of the mess, where their nimbleness was ruined, especially if they were clubbed as well - that needed one of my clubbing minds seeing them as a good target as they flew by. The lucky people just behind my hundred-foot cutoff point saw the people immediately ahead of them get attacked by twenty clubs. They ran like the Devil was after them, very quickly creating a wide gap between themselves and the imprisoned mob, making containing my victims even easier. Clubbing people was extremely easy, mainly just requiring care that I didn't hit them too hard or in the face because many of the clubs had protrusions that could easily poke out an eye. My victims quickly started covering their heads, but a medium-strength, invisible NP-punch to their guts invariably made them lower their arms, whereupon they got whacked. Usually they lowered their whole body at that point. It was even easier than I'd thought it would be. They had no idea what they were facing, no idea what tactics to use, and no chance of communicating because of all the screaming. The number of conscious ex-rioters was rapidly reducing, making it even easier for me. I heard the sound of two shots going off almost simultaneously. A panicky, quick look showed a couple of very rough looking guys standing together near the middle of the group shooting at my clubs with handguns. If the clubs had been wielded by invisible creatures, their idea might've worked, but not in this case. At the most, they'd knock a club out of my grip. I probably be able to catch it quickly, but that didn't really matter as my having one less club wasn't going to change anything. Regardless of the gunmen having no chance of stopping my clubbing operation, they certainly couldn't be allowed to carry on shooting in case they traversed to follow a club and ended up shooting someone's head off. All my clubs raised straight upward, which caused the two gunmen to raise their aim into the air. I used NP to grab each of their arms and hold them outstretched and upward, making sure their guns pointed up too, then a couple of the clubs came down unusually forcefully. I extracted the guns from their nerveless fingers, dropped their sleeping bodies to the street, and flew the guns onto the top of the wall for temporary safe keeping. There were three more guys dressed the same standing near the first two shooters. I gave them a careful look, seeing skinhead haircuts at their tops, big boots on their feet, and scumbag racists in between. They had swastika symbols on their clothes, ugly facial and arm tattoos, and one of them just drew another gun. Everyone around them had already hit the deck to avoid getting shot, but he was aiming at the deck now so it wouldn't be safe to grab his gun. I sent a club toward his head from above. He raised his gun to point at it. I grabbed his two arms, and the four arms of his still conscious friends, and clubbed their heads heavily. I extracted the latest gun and placed it with the other two on the wall. I picked up the five bodies and dumped them to the side apart from anyone else. They were still in my sight blobs' fields of vision, which was important because I wanted to know if any of them stirred. I already had a couple of clubs allocated to revisit anyone who was recovering, and I definitely wanted these guys to be quickly reminded to stay asleep if they stirred. My plan was to search the thousand clubbed people after the clubbing was finished, when I didn't have hundreds of people still trying to run away in various directions. I'd make the skinheads the first five people searched, but in the meantime, back to clubbing. The police chopper yelled at the Guardian Angel to desist. I temporarily disabled the sight of one of my sight blobs, gave sight to the Guardian Angel, then zipped it extremely quickly right up through the floor of the chopper, stopping it immediately in front of the Chief of Police's face. I pulled the microphone from his shocked grasp and crushed it. If anyone was going to be doing any desisting, I wanted it to be him. He seemed to be agreeable with that idea. The pilot freaked, doing a very abrupt diving turn. I let them go. The Army helicopter was hovering over our hill, observing what the Guardian Angel was doing but not interfering. I was happy with that. Returning the now-sightless Guardian Angel to its spot over top of the clubbing area, I carried on clubbing a few more people then spared a glance to make sure the police chopper was under control. It looked fine. Fleeing still, but fine. They were probably going home to change their pants. I spent some time lowering the kids into the care of our security guards, then returned that sight blob to the gate so it could help the other one guide the clubbing operation. Six guys from just behind my corral's back wall, who I'd previously let run away, made an attempt to cautiously approach my clubbing operation. I had no idea what they thought they were going to achieve, but I rarely understand what Christians are thinking. They were getting quite close to the outskirts of the unconscious people, and it was encouraging more of the initial runaways to start edging closer too. That confidence deserted them abruptly when the first half dozen creepers were picked up in the air, flown into the center of the clubbing area, where they were clubbed unconscious and dropped among the others. The pile of unconscious people was getting substantial now, and I had to start spreading the bodies out rather than risk crushing someone under a high pile. Even with my not being too concerned about some piling up, 1,006 collapsed people take up a lot more real estate than 1,006 close-packed walking people, even with all the arm and placard waving they'd been doing. What with all the interruptions, it took me nearly three minutes to knock everyone down. Some were probably faking unconsciousness, but that was fine with me. They weren't rampaging all over my home while they were lying still, and they weren't stopping me going on to the next phase. Phase two started with my strip searching the five skinheads. They made that much easier by having several sharp knives, so I was easily able to slice through their leather jackets and tight jeans. I might've nicked their flesh a few times, but that didn't worry me because by that time I'd searched their pockets. Including the three guns I'd already taken off them, they had a total of eight handguns, a dozen spare clips, between two and four knives each, and often a few little personal items like pliers and a long spike mounted in a thin wooden block that I didn't know how was used, but it looked extremely nasty. Their many tattoos indicated they were into hate, racism and violence. And they were either HEAVILY into personal protection, or they were intending to misbehave rather badly today. Given that they're racists and I'm apparently Black (at the moment anyway), I assumed the latter, which was going to be very bad news for them soon. I started creating several piles: Weapons: These were put on top of our wall for safety, although I kept a few of the knives floating nearby because they were good for cutting belts and difficult clothes off people. Naked People: To the west of the clothed people, where the cameraman could film them easily. Clothes: I accumulated a pile outside our gates, and when it was large enough, picked it up and flew into our property. I dropped it in a spot visible to the cameraman. Cellphones and other technology: I removed the batteries and crushed the rest. On the street under where I was stripping people, I made one pile for batteries and one for the newly worthless junk. Keys: Were put in the "worthless junk" pile. Wallets/purses: I flew into our property putting them near but not quite with the clothes (the reason for the slightly different location is explained a few paragraphs below). [[Don't ask me why, but "wallets", "purses", "coin purses", "billfolds", "handbags", "clutch purses" and a few other such words are used with different meanings in damned near every dimension. In one dimension, "purse" means something barely large enough to hold a few coins and a tube of lipstick, in other dimensions purses can hold kitchen sinks. I'm not going to bother customizing my autobiography for each dimension I make it available in, so some of my word usages might seem strange to you. I'm using "wallet" to mean what men use to carry their money, business cards, and usually a 15-year-old Rubber Of Hope. Wallets are carried in men's pockets. I'm using "purse" to mean the female equivalent of "wallet", although its cargo is more diverse but often equally self-deluded. Purses are usually carried inside "handbags", by which I mean the large bags that are worn dangling from a long strap that is worn over a shoulder.]] Handbags: Some women carried handbags to a riot! They were a nightmare to search, so I only extracted their purses and put the bags in the clothes pile. Anything else inflammable: Went with clothes. Anything else nonflammable: Was made into "worthless junk". Jewelry and watches: I couldn't be bothered with them, so left them on their owners. As I imply above, after the skinhead strip searches, I continued doing the same with everybody else, starting with the bodies closest to our gate but otherwise picking them up in no particular order. I could process several people simultaneously, ripping their pockets open and catching whatever fell out. The average woman wore a blouse and slacks, which took a grand total of less than a second to remove (lots of grips around the front and back of neckline and waistband, then PULL outward). Bras and panties took another second. Men were easier in not having a bra, but their strong belts usually required a slice with a knife. Not many people were wearing jeans, but for those I'd slice the waistband in the small of the back, then just rip them off. With so many minds able to coordinate so many NP-fingertips, I could do it very fast. With a thousand fingertips, so much could be done simultaneously that it took less than five seconds per ten-person group, so about ten minutes in total. I was stripping people with them facing the public, and the public didn't believe that was right. Early on in the stripping process, some of the public talked themselves into stepping forward to express their moral outrage that members of the public were being shown members of the public. I had three hundred feet of range beyond the end of my clubbing victims, which probably included at least four thousand more people. When the morally outraged group stepped forward, they were in my grabbing range right from the get go. I let them get to within about twenty feet of the nearest unconscious person, then I picked them up, clubbed them on the heads, and added them to the pile. Subsequent expressions of moral outrage were made without the outraged person stepping forward. Fairly often someone I picked up to strip would struggle and/or protest (I could see their mouth move but not hear what they were saying). I kept a baton flying in front of my strip-search area, which I rapidly flew toward anyone who was not hanging limply. If they were smart, they quickly went limp. If they weren't smart (have I mentioned that they were Christians?), they got another tap on the noggin, half strength the first time, full strength a brief time later if they didn't wise up. Sometimes an even stronger third whack was required if they were particularly religious. The rate of weapon discovery dropped off considerably after the first five guys. A surprising number of women, nearly two dozen of them, were carrying personal defense items: sometimes just a whistle on a chain around their neck, but sometimes some kind of spray. I made the mistake of crushing the first of these as I did to all nonflammable items before putting them into the "worthless junk" pile, but that was very quickly seen to be a bad idea as the fumes started affecting people. I had to very quickly move people away from the immediately area while I 'captured' a large volume of the air over the crushed can in an airtight box, which I zipped high into the air before releasing it. Thereafter anything in a spray can was put into the junk pile without crushing it. Other than that mistake, the stripping process went fairly smoothly. When I'd accumulated a sizable pile of clothes inside our property, I used a few heat blobs to set it alight. Subsequent deliveries of "Clothes" (including handbags and other predominantly inflammable items) got added to the fire. At the rate I was stripping people, it rapidly grew into a bonfire. It didn't grow as expensive as it seemed though, as when wallets and purses were thrown onto the fire they actually flew through it to make a pile out of sight behind it. I'd chosen the location for the fire in part because there was a dip in the ground behind it. I accumulated the wallets and purses there. I finally finished stripping all the people. The VAST majority of the naked people were very unattractive and/or male. I haven't described them. You should thank me for that. There were a FEW attractive women, but so much ugliness had put me off even thinking about that. Other than the skinheads' arsenal, I'd found only the following items worthy of special action: Two women had been carrying small handguns. Probably they were for personal defense, but they were trying to charge onto our property as part of a riot while carrying guns. That wasn't acceptable. There were two young men carrying hunting knives. It was time for the next stage. I removed the two women's handguns from the top of the wall, flying them out to the clear area between all the naked bodies and the crowd that was still on their feet fifty feet or so farther back. The guns were pointing directly upward, but naturally people got nervous. When unintelligent people get nervous they scream and run around in circles a lot. This group's geometry ability must've been very poor, because running in circles caused the fifty-foot gap to very rapidly became a hundred-foot gap. They made up for their inaccurate geometry by screaming especially loudly. I stopped the guns about thirty feet beyond the last unconscious body, letting the guns hover while I floated out the two women who'd brought the guns to the riot. I lay the two women on the ground, moved the guns so the muzzles were above the fleshy part of their outer-thighs, then I shot them both. One of them woke up, but her screams couldn't be heard over the crowd's sudden resurgence of screaming and very non-circular running. Some of them kept on running directly away, presumably in search of a friendlier riot somewhere else. I re-engaged the guns' safeties then flew them back to the top of the wall. Next I floated out the two previously knife-armed wannabe-toughs (I suspected that's what they were), and fetched their knives as well. I laid the boys down next to my previous two victims, moved their knives to be above their thighs, and then drove both knives home to the hilt. I left the knives imbedded because it looked good. Hopefully it hurt more too, as both guys were screaming. Several more people left, but quite of few of the others knew what was important so they kept on praying. There was a lot of praying going on, but I hadn't noticed it influencing the angel much yet. Maybe it takes a while for prayer to start working so it would affect my angel later, or maybe not. It would have been more practical of the watching mob to rip up their shirts for bandages, but Christians aren't really into practicality, given that they worship a god that's so impractical he's fictitious. Next was the biggie: the five racist skinheads. I'd been debating how badly to treat these guys, but had made up my mind now. The deciding points were: To run a Big Lie, I had to lie BIG. If the authorities saw through the Big Lie, so they knew I was controlling the Guardian Angel, then I'd be in so much shit for what I'd done already that adding to it didn't matter. What I'd decided to do would be a damned good discouragement for any future mindless riots and assholes wanting to storm into my home carrying enough weapons to start a small war. I floated the five racists out as I had the previous four, along with all their weapons. I laid the guns, ammunition clips, knives, and the spike out neatly on the sidewalk, where they made an impressively scary looking pile. I raised the unconscious racists 400 feet in the air. They were about 250 feet away from me horizontally, so that was about as high as I could go without using the Blinks Allowed Effect or tossing them. I was looking for an opportunity to use that Effect to prove that the Guardian Angel had a range exceeding 500 feet, but in this situation using it vertically would be indistinguishable from tossing, and using it horizontally would take them out of view of the TV camera and I wouldn't have control of exactly where they landed or what they landed on. I'd do this the simple way. I was pretty sure 400 feet high would be enough. I canceled the thugs' NP supports. They dropped. The crowd watched them falling. All the way down. Five seconds later the naked bodies splattered on the street. The public had seemed not to believe it was going to end that way, and had watched the bodies the whole way; something the vast majority of them deeply regretted 5.1 seconds later. "FUCK!" said Tristan. "That's a HELL of a way of making a statement. I thought angels were supposed to respect life." "The Guardian's orders aren't to respect life, but to protect me. I suspect it's going to be quite good at its job." "You got that right!" While the conversation with Tristan was happening, the Guardian Angel had returned all the skinheads' weapons to the top of our wall and I'd moved the Guardian Angel's light blob so it was hovering directly in front of our gates. It picked up several of the naked bodies closest to our gate and flew them down the street until there was a clear place to put them. I've got enough force to pick up about 120 people at a time now, although that doesn't leave me any force to accelerate them with. By doing waves of ten people at a time, each wave a few seconds apart and several waves in the air at any one time, the air immediately over the street was full of bodies moving farther away from our gate in a sort of huge naked leap-frogging party. Some of the bodies were conscious now, and some had seen the skinheads fall. They screamed in terror thinking it was going to happen to them. It was an appropriate addition to the sounds of retching, sobbing and prayers. The terrified people were placed farther down the street only a few seconds later, much to their relief. No doubt they'd take it as proof that prayers work sometimes. I included the kids on the inside of the gate in the process, so they could be reunited with their naked parents. With my other sight blob, I started doing some tidying up. I picked up all the keys and other crap and flew the pile into our property, dumping it into a large trash bin. We have a smaller bin for environment-damaging things like batteries, so they were easily disposed of. Then I picked up all the batons and returned them to the feet of the owners I'd borrowed them from. I used nearly all my fingertips to open all the stolen wallets and purses and removed all the money. Emptied wallets were inserted into the bonfire, the paper money was accumulated in an NP-box. The box became a very valuable one as a thousand people collectively carry a lot of cash. When I was coming to the end of that processing, I made the Guardian Angel expand in brightness and size. Fairly slowly, so it took about ten seconds for it to stretch the width of our gate and to become so bright that it was uncomfortable to look at. Each of my minds can output about 2,500 x 60 Watt lightbulbs' worth of light. I can superimpose thirty two minds if I want to, which I didn't this time; ten superimposed minds' worth of output was sufficiently bright. Everyone being distracted and semi-blinded by the Guardian Angel, I zipped the box of money around some bushes and plants at ground level, flying it into the Staff Quarters without anyone seeing it. There I counted and sorted it quickly. It's stunning how fast I can do tasks like that. There were probably something like ten thousand individual bills; call it three hundred per mind. With so many fingertips per mind, it didn't take me much longer to sort them than it'd take you to check that there were fifty two cards in a pack. There was slightly in excess of $3,500 per staff person, counting all of them: security guards, gardeners, mechanics, maintenance, the Office workers, and the few one-person jobs. I'd seen that nearly every one of them was onsite and helping today, so they deserved a full share, including our astronomer who would've been onsite if not more useful elsewhere. Most of the Office workers had been told to stay home, but excluding them from the bonus could've caused resentment so I included them. My purpose in giving out this money wasn't because the staff individually or collectively deserved it, but to give the impression that the Guardian Angel considered our staff to be on the same side as the angel, which would hopefully go a long way to reducing our staff's fear of it. It was going to be living with me from now on, and I wanted the staff to be okay with that. I'd been worried about this issue since the beginning of my Angel Plan, when I'd first had the idea of giving myself a light blob pretending to be an angel. The angel could have stopped the mob without stripping any of them, but I'd done that mostly because it provided an ideal cover for my stealing their money. Archangel Michael had taken money off some people, but that was done on camera as a way of expressing disapproval and punishing them. This was being done to ease our staff's fear. There were enough coffee mugs in the staff quarters to put $3,500 in a mug for everyone that lived onsite. Then I put $3,500 in glasses for everyone who worked onsite but lived offsite. The mugs I placed on the floor immediately outside every lived-in bedroom door. It was pretty impressive to look down the hallway and see mug after mug with a good bundle of bills in it. I put mugs outside the doors of the Senior Staff's Quarters bedrooms too. They certainly deserved shares, especially Paul, who must've been shitting bricks the last few hours. That's why he gets the big bucks of course, but an equal bonus was still coming his way. Inside the Head Gardener's bedroom I put a glass for each gardener that lived offsite. Similarly inside of Paul's and the Head Mechanic's bedrooms. Amusingly, the three doors were all locked. Trivially easy for me to unlock from the inside, but putting the money in them then locking their door again would add to the Guardian Angel's mystique nicely. For the offsite staff that didn't report to the Head of Gardeners, Mechanics or Security, I put their glasses on the floor outside the unlived-in Senior Staff's room. The three Heads should work out the meaning for themselves, as the whole concept is pretty obvious. There were a few bills left over, so I put them under a beer in the fridge. The staff would need some drinks when this was over. The Guardian Angel suddenly disappeared, having done its job VERY effectively, and as a bonus, achieving a new world record for the "Most Naked Christians in Public". ------- Chapter 351: Saturday's Aftermath to the Resurrection Saturday, June 2, 2007 (Continued) The news-crews had exacerbated the initial riot and I'd been very tempted to have the Guardian Angel punish them in the same way I had everyone else, or perhaps just by stripping them naked and burning their clothes, but I didn't want to antagonize the media - which is probably why the media gets away with so much (literally) irresponsible behavior. I converted the sight blob watching the scene outside our gates into a radio blob. I hadn't wanted any weird color distractions when I was bashing people with the clubs, but I wasn't doing any precise work now, merely watching. I didn't pick up anything significant [other than, from time to time, I sensed the UAV's communication beam. Our radar and telescope operators were keeping us informed of its behavior anyway]. The police and Army had caught up to the mob while it was stalled by the Guardian Angel. They took command unopposed now, as there was no fight left in the ex-mob. The mob's cause had originally been glorious, right and even fun (they'd thought), but DEFINITELY wasn't now. Most of the still-clothed ex-mob members left, although quite a few of them stayed to render emergency aid. Especially for who most needed it: the poor, naked, bashed people. They had to be covered up as a matter of urgency, because who knew what terrible damage the sight of them could do to impressionable, young minds. "Think of the children!" was normally such an empowering call to arms, and there were sparks of righteous indignation trying to get started, but seeing the five skinheads' bodies splatter had clearly been too traumatic for the mob. When the police got closer and were in control, I flew all the confiscated weapons down to them, depositing them on the ground in front of the cops, who quickly took care of them. Every ambulance in Corvallis was already busy shuttling the mob's casualties to the hospital, starting with those that had been injured swarming over the main barricade. All of that group's most injured people had already been hospitalized, so the ambulances were redirected to our gates. First aid was soon being rendered to the non-splattered victims. There was a great deal of first aid needed because many of the clubbed people had bleeding skulls that needed to be looked at. The radiology department at the local hospital had no hope of doing the number of cranial X-rays that would be required, so those people were going to be sent in all directions. More ambulances were called for. There were a thousand naked people with no money, no keys, no ID, and very little intelligence. Plus they were stunned at what had happened to them. It'd been a perfectly good riot, and then EVERYTHING had gone wrong! Most of them were too traumatized to be much use to themselves (insert your own anti-Christian joke here). Tristan said, "Paul wants half of us to hit the sack while we have a lull. You okay to get back inside by yourself?" "I'd like you to drive us into the tunnel please. I'll take over from there." I didn't want to show myself to the UAV, because I didn't want the Government to see that I had to be within five hundred feet of all of the Guardian Angel's effects. Being my bodyguard, it had a very good excuse for keeping close to me, but it should be able to operate remotely on occasion. None of which I explained to Tristan, but it'd take less time for him to do what I asked than argue about it, even if he'd been so inclined. He got out of the SUV, walked around to the driver's door, got in, then drove us down the slope and onto the driveway. A few yards farther on we were in the tunnel and I took over from him. I enjoyed watching, via a sight blob, the look on the staff's faces when the first of them walked down to their bedroom level. I had a feeling that the angel had just bought itself some instant acceptance and support, and it hadn't cost me a dime. All I had to do now was get Mom's acceptance for what I'd done. I had a feeling that giving her $3,500 wouldn't cut it. I waved to the two returning staffs' wives as I more traditionally motored past them in the tunnel. I was saved from having trouble with Mom because: She was inhibited by the presence of our guards. Paul was still worried about small-scale intrusions, so we were in much the same mode as we had been earlier in the morning, safer because there were more police and many more soldiers inside and outside our property now, but less safe because half our staff had been ordered to rest so they'd be able to work tonight. It was quickly obvious that pretty much everyone else had already been on Mom's case. I walked in the door and I was pointedly told, "Wasn't it wonderful how the angel got rid of those thugs?" (from Julia), "Who knows how many people they would've killed if they'd gotten in" (from Prof), and "Serve the assholes right" (from a very certain-of-himself Dad). Everyone was nodding happily, except for Mom, who looked like she'd prefer to be righteous but she'd been badly outvoted. I got lots of cuddles and congratulations, "Because your Guardian Angel is so wonderful." Not exactly a profound argument, but it helped Mom keep quiet. We settled down to watch TV. The events of the last few hours had gone out live, and the networks were beside themselves with glee. It'd been REALLY Good TV. You know it's going to be really good when not only is there a talking-head who says, "The following segment contains scenes which might disturb some viewers," but while he's saying it, he's too excited to sit still. The networks had films with LOTS of naked people. It was on a public street and therefore privacy laws didn't apply, and there was even a good reason to screen it: because it was legitimate NEWS! It wasn't often that the networks actually had a good excuse for showing naked bodies, so they seized it with both hands. Although, sadly, when they looked closely at the film they discovered that they were very limited in their choice of what to broadcast, because of a VERY important sensitivity. Producers had to cut out all the shots with ugly people in them, which was the vast majority. Viewers instantly change channels whenever they see naked, ugly people, which is something advertisers have a great sensitivity to. Nonetheless, the networks could show hundreds of naked bodies in wide-angle shots, then CAREFULLY selected zoom shots. VERY carefully selected, with just the right amount of "this is serious news" attitude while pushing the envelope of sexual titillation. Almost entirely "TIT-illation" of course, NEVER any male frontal shots from closer than one mile. To let even one of those get in the shot would be a disaster of mammoth proportions. Not only did it have sex, it also had violence, religion, magic, and even caring for the children. Plus there was SO MUCH the commentators could say. There were legal issues (there were many of those), psychological issues (from crowd psychology to "think of the children!"), physics (the clubbings, the bright light, flying bodies), theology (expert opinions about the nature and morality of the Guardian Angel), and more than anything else, a very lively debate about Good versus Evil. The Guardian Angel had KILLED five people and deliberately wounded four, but it'd also been very careful to care for the children. The previous angels had warned everyone that the Guardian Angel would guard Mark Anderson remarkably effectively and that everyone should be extremely cautious of it, which had been proved to be exactly the case when a dangerous mob had threatened to storm the property. There was a wonderful amount of ammunition for that debate, especially that the angel had stripped so many people. That last point had to be mentioned over and over again, as it gave the networks a reason to repeatedly screen shots of large numbers of naked people. It was WONDERFUL TV. I was particularly interested in the legal issues, so listened to those carefully. I learned that legally it'd be helpful for me if Guardian Angels could be considered as a cat rather than a dog. If your dog runs across the street and causes a traffic accident, you're liable because dogs are deemed to be trainable. But if your cat does the same thing, you're not liable because cats aren't trainable in the eyes of the law. The law is silent about the responsibility of an 'owner' to train his angel, leaving legal liability up in the air. Complicating the issue is something that I'd deliberately tried to create. As a lawyer said in one interview, "Archangel Michael's verbal comments and the email on the day of the alleged resurrection from Archangel Michael's unnamed replacement clearly state that the Guardian Angel is appointed by God and is following God's orders. If anyone is responsible for the actions of the Guardian Angel, it would seem to be the Guardian Angel itself or God, rather than the young man it has been ordered to protect." There was an amusing discussion on what "Act of God" means when there is a specific agent performing specific acts for God. The phrase "Act of God" is mostly applicable to contract rather than criminal law, so it wasn't a giant loophole my Guardian Angel could use to do whatever it wanted. It didn't apply in the current circumstances at all, except possibly for the medical insurers for the many injured people. The expert's opinion was that the insurers would likely refuse to pay out. Not only had the injuries been caused by an Act of God - presuming the insurance companies believed the Guardian Angel was from God - but the injured people had chosen to participate in a riot and had attacked a property they'd been warned would likely be defended in a way to cause them injury, so they'd brought the injuries upon themselves, invalidating their medical insurance policies. There was also some jurisdictional discussion. Did our courts have the authority to rule that anything an angel or God did was illegal, and what would it mean to find God guilty of a human crime? It gets even sillier because forcibly stripping someone against his or her will can be considered the crime of "Sexual Assault" even if no sex is committed. How can a bodiless, semi-transparent sphere of light have sex? Can God be accused of Sexual Assault? As every Christian can tell you, God is adamantly opposed to even the existence of sex outside of marriage, and the angel certainly hadn't married the thousand victims, half of who had to be of the wrong gender regardless of what gender the ball of light was. Then there was the problem that there was no proof that the angel had done the stripping as that had all been done invisibly while the angel hovered nearby. It was obviously an utterly ridiculous aspect, which the TV networks debated at length and many times because it gave them the ideal excuse to show more footage of the possible crimes being committed against the better-looking victims. Ignoring that silly issue, there was also the question of whether I'd be culpable in any way. I learned that it was a fundamental legal principle that to be guilty of a crime, the person had to both intend to commit that crime and to perform the act. Clearly I had done neither directly. However, maybe I was guilty of inciting the Guardian Angel to commit violence. The issue was therefore whether I'd asked my Guardian Angel to do any of the illegal things it'd done. I was willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that I'd never said a single word on the subject. There were the usual, and apparently obligatory, preachers screaming, "This PROVES it's the DEVIL!" They had no doubt whatsoever, as the act of taking people's clothes off was SO EVIL it had to be diabolic! #31: #23: The 'sensible' churches were noncommittally vacillating all over the place, saying things like, "We believe firmly in the sanctity of life," and then refusing to be drawn about what conclusions or even judgments flowed from their statement. One interviewer asked with apparent and defendable innocence, "If that was a true Guardian Angel from God, then your belief must be wrong?" That interviewee's dithering cranked up to a whole new level. He managed to avoid answering a single question after that. The mainstream churches were very unhappy. Doubly so because they couldn't actually admit to being unhappy about an angel being on Earth. All over the world, churches were enjoying record attendances; unfortunately with congregations who wanted the priests to preach about current events, and the senior members of the churches were going to take decades to decide on their official position. Fortunately for the large numbers of the people who felt the urgent need to be told what to think, there were many non-mainstream churches which were only too happy to fill both of those vacuums. A large number of science fiction movies had portrayed aliens as balls of light, probably because it's an easy special effect, so there were many short clips aired as part of the "It's an ALIEN!" segment of each network's show. A physics expert appeared on one to explain why spherical was the most energy-efficient shape, and he became my favorite expert when he added, "There's a problem with your alien theory though, because the Guardian Angel was introduced by Archangel Michael, and he wasn't a ball of light. He had two balls, but they looked to be very human." To cover the unforgivable breach of human decency - that expert would NEVER be invited back! - the interviewer quickly asked, "But Archangel Michael said that he took over a human's body?" "Not 'took over'; he said it was voluntary. I don't believe an alien energy sphere could 'take over' a human's electrochemical brain because the systems are too different. Although even cooperation seems highly problematic to me." I also enjoyed seeing my NP explained by, "The alien has invisible noodly tentacles five hundred feet long!" That was by a bunch of "Pastafarians" - as they called themselves - who were having a great time laughing it up. Finally, a religion where people have fun! What an amazing concept. There was a tone of respect that ran though some of the comments that I liked. To paraphrase one guy in a man-in-the-street interview, "The other angels repeatedly warned us that the Guardian Angel would be deadly. Five heavily armed guys tried to force their way onto the property and they discovered that the Guardian Angel is deadly. To me it sounds like the earlier angels did everything right by warning us, and the Guardian Angel did its protection job right too. It didn't torment the five guys or let them suffer; it just did its job. I have to respect the angels for their honesty." The reporter asked, "But the five men didn't even get onto the property. Why should they be killed when they hadn't done anything?" "Maybe the Guardian Angel knew they would've done it. If it knew that, it'd have no reason to wait. Much better to take care of them before they caused any damage. Our legal system makes mistakes, but maybe God's doesn't. Remember how good Archangel Michael was at finding law enforcement agents who were trying to blend in with the reporters. I think angels can see into our souls, and know who and what we are. That would explain a great deal." I liked his thinking, as it could be very useful for me and there was no hint of accusation in it. His logic was terrible - hypotheses have to be tested against different facts from those they're developed from - but that sort of fundamental mistake is ALWAYS being made by the people who're paid to bring us the news and their analysis of it. [More details of the neo-nazis emerged a few hours later. They were multiply convicted violent scum who had 'friends' only too willing to go on TV to describe how the dead guys had hated Ron Fisher for being a nigger; having a pretty, white girlfriend; being rich; and getting so much good press after his giving his body to Mark. They'd driven to Corvallis after boasting, "We're gonna teach that nigger a lesson." A few days later their families filed a $500 million dollar lawsuit against everyone from the Guardian Angel to the City of Corvallis. It was a source of late-night talkshow comedy, and eventually of zero value.] All things considered, it was a wonderfully confusing, but highly effective introduction for the Guardian Angel. Paul joined us after dinner to discuss a few things. The first issue raised was the $3,500 payments. My families hadn't heard about those, so the news caused a fair amount of laughter. I had to pretend ignorance and laugh along, and then deflect all the compliments for my angel that were addressed to me. Paul asked for my opinion of the situation. Once I'd had the situation described to me well enough - which also told me that they'd worked out that every one of our staff was to get the same amount - I said, "The Guardian Angel doesn't appear to be too concerned about human laws, which is hardly surprising. It chose not to burn the cash, and I'll guess that it appreciates the work you guys are doing protecting us. But regardless of the reason, it looks like a no-strings-attached gift to me." "I'm concerned that it might be considered theft, and that we should give it back. It's hard to imagine God agreeing with theft." "It's even harder to imagine Him agreeing with murder. I suspect that humans don't imagine God very accurately." "Good point. Some of the guys suggested the money could be a test of our honesty? The Bible is full of..." "Irrelevant crap and tricks to manipulate people. Look at how the angels have behaved the last few months: they're BIG on being straightforward. The angel made it clear it wants everyone to have that money, so that's what it means. Anyone would be silly to give it back, especially because the IRS has no idea about it. Shove it in your pockets and whistle innocently." "I'm sure they'll be happy to hear that. We found hundreds of keys in one of the trash bins, obviously from the people today. We're not sure what to do with them?" "Unless there's good reason to think otherwise - like twenty-foot high, flaming letters giving you instructions - I'd just leave them there. It sounds like the angel threw them in the trash, so treat them like trash. -- "Depending on what happens, your guys might meet the angel repeatedly from now on and I think it'd be a good idea for you to tell your staff to be straightforward with it, so they don't get themselves tangled in impossibly circular worry. The bible and churches are full of tangled logic because they're frantically trying to disguise that just about everything they say is nonsense, whereas the angels and God themselves are obviously very real. Just treat them as real. I'm sure the angel will be straightforward with your staff too. Did Tristan tell you about his experience?" "Several times. Everyone is eager to get his impressions." "The angel wanted to do something and it did it simply, including giving Tristan the choice of coming along or not, probably because it knew Tristan was protecting me. It held doors open for him and the like. It's just your ordinary, everyday, common-garden-variety Guardian Angel. Nothing to get your panties in a twist trying to understand. It's got a simple job, and it does it simply." "That seems to fit. Its job may be simple, but it complicates mine considerably..." "How?" "It's got intimate access to all my principals, and I have very little knowledge of its abilities or motives. That would drive any security guy up the wall." "I imagine Tristan mentioned it flew through my chest and my hand passed right through it?" "I think he's going to have nightmares about that! For a second he thought it was eating you." "Apparently I'm not tasty enough. It's transparent and it can pass through my body without my feeling a thing, which confirms that it doesn't have a physical body. There's no point in your worrying about how to defend us from it because you literally can't touch it. Your job and its job are highly congruent, so I'm sure it'll be very helpful if such situations arise again. Hopefully they won't, but I'm not holding my breath on that." "Nothing more certain, I think. I want to talk about some of the things that happened today to improve our performance in the future..." His later sentence was directed mostly at Dad. Paul went through several of the things that'd happened. His requests included clearing the vegetation back on the eastern bank so any repeat intruder would have to break cover a hundred feet sooner, placing more sensors in that area, getting some high-pressure water pumps and hoses of our own built in around the gate and two homes so we didn't need a fire truck. Stuff like that. A lot had happened today and he had quite a few ideas, especially about mass infiltrations because our having to face those hadn't been envisaged in our original security plans. They were all good ideas that Dad and the other parents were happy to rubberstamp. Increasing the security staff numbers was an issue. Paul said, "We didn't have enough people today, and I haven't got as many staff sleeping now as I'd like. If we're pushed for another couple of days, we'll have fatigue issues. We're getting plenty of police and soldiers around the outside of the walls tonight, but I want us to be self-sufficient rather than relying on getting that sort of support in the future. If Mark emerges from Ron's body, we're going to be the focus of a lot of long-term attention, and the state of emergency isn't going to last that long." "How many more are you thinking of?" asked Dad. "A minimum of a 50% increase in security staff. I'd prefer 100% more." Not that I should know it yet, as I officially met Paul for the first time only a few hours ago, but I knew everyone would ignore the +50% figure and work with +100%. If Paul said he preferred it, then we'd take his word for it. He'd know we'd do that too. Besides, the cost of too much security would be far cheaper than the cost of too little. We started discussing the increased staffing issue, with me complicating it by saying, "One thing to be aware of is that I won't be living here much longer. Probably only one more year, although possibly two. After I finish my OSU degrees, I'll be going to a good university somewhere. No idea where yet, but Julia and Carol will go with me, and maybe Ava too." Ava said, "I'm sure I will. I can't imagine not staying with the three of you." Prof said, "That'll reduce the size of team needed here, because most of the risk will follow Mark." It was a new aspect for Paul, and we discussed its impact of the more general staffing level issue. Some of the items that emerged were: To build a second Staff Quarters. To buy the properties south of our gate, to give the flexibility of expanding that way, "perhaps if Mark comes back home after finishing university." To employ more female security staff for the team that'd need to go with the girls when they leave. Who to be the leader of the Kids' Team. (As indicated by the name of "The Kids' House", "Kids" is the official, non-derogatory term used to refer to us kids.) Prof said, "You'll lead it, Paul. This place will be the Second Team's responsibility. Guarding Mark is your priority because he's the most important principal, and the one most at risk." That initially surprised Paul, but her quickly adapted to it. There was no priority conflict now, except under extremely unlikely either/or circumstances. There was no hurry with any of those issues, so Paul would think about them for a few days and then we'd discuss it again. [It took several months to do, but we went ahead with the first three of the above items. We weren't spending our money as quickly as it was accumulating anyway, so there was no reason why not, and some pretty good reasons why we should. Although it's digressing into the future quite a long way, I'll put some explanation about those changes not far below.] Dad asked, "How's Sanchez after his shooting?" "He's fine. He won't have any trouble. Most of us don't, especially when the target makes it so obvious that he needs to be shot. I expect he's spent more time planning how to spend the angel's bonus than worrying about the takedown. That's not callous; it's just what happens when people are properly trained." ------- [As Paul had requested, we did start on the plan to increase our security staff's numbers; somewhat more than 100% too, to get ready for when the team had to split in two. The eastern side of our southern wall was currently recessed north about three hundred feet because the boundary of Chip Ross Park had followed the north-turning contour of the main hill. Imagine the figure "8" lying on its side, but with the western circle being enlarged to the south to be twice the size of the eastern circle (which is the "Main Hill". It's smaller horizontally, but much taller vertically). The bottom half of that shape is roughly how our property's southern boundary looks, except with a much wider 'waist'. The land south of our property at the southern base of the main hill is privately owned but undeveloped. It has already been cleared of all its trees and has random secondary growth taking over, so it has no environmental, scenic, or other significance. A mere hundred feet farther south are cleared fields that the City Plan already envisages being built on shortly. We bought the extra land, built a new wall straight east from our gate, squaring up the southeast corner of our property. That added an area about 300 feet north-south, and 1,400 feet east-west, a total of about ten acres. For about three-quarters of the circumference of our wall, excluding mostly the front gate area, we built a high, strong fence a few yards inside the wall as a second line of defense. In the new area, near the gate, a second Staff Quarters was built, roughly south of the middle ridge of the main hill's "m". The new Staff Quarters was larger than the first Quarters, having capacity to sleep forty, but it followed the design of the first Quarters by having an underground level for all the bedrooms, with the living areas on the ground level. It was to be roughly 50/50 occupied by male and female security guards. It had no Senior Staff Quarters adjunct because there was no female hierarchy. The female security staff would work alongside the males, reporting to whomever their shift manager was. Despite not having such an adjunct, the Second Quarters still had two complete sets of living areas (kitchen, laundry, living room, etc.), as one was for females, one for males. We segregated the bedrooms, so the western bedrooms were for females, the eastern for males, each with a set of stairs that led up to their living areas. The bedroom hallways, two in parallel as it was a wide building, ran the whole length of the Quarters, but they each had a partition which could be moved east or west then bolted in place, to easily permit a flexible proportion of female or male guards. Not just guards, as some of the gardeners were young females who liked the idea of free accommodation. They'd previously lived elsewhere because they didn't want to live in the male-dominated First Staff Quarters, but the female half of the Second Quarters was leaped at and into. The bedrooms in the middle, about where the partitions would be, were double bedrooms to allow for the possibility of male and female guards pairing up (either with another employee, or an outsider). Depending on whether the pair chose a bedroom east or west of the partition, they'd be living solely among males or solely among females which wasn't ideal, but they were getting their accommodation for free so they'd put up with it. As it turned out, the immediate first inhabitants of a double bedroom were two of our male guards, who lived on the male side as neither of them was the least bit effeminate. They were both very good, tough, capable security guards; just with an inexplicable sexual orientation. Unlike how the First Staff Quarters and the attached Senior Staff Quarters had a connecting doorway, there was no such connection between the male and female living rooms. Instead, they both connected to a third, VERY large living room that was attached to the north of the two gender-specific living rooms. The communal living room was where the staff mixed-and-mingled off-shift, had parties, etc. That way each gender could relax in its own gender-specific living room or mingle in the shared room, as each person preferred. We (my families) didn't require the segregation to be absolute, leaving it to the staff to manage it for themselves. In practice - and I'm sure this'll be no surprise to you - female guards were usually very welcome in the male half, but unattached males were rarely welcome in the female half. The female guards enjoyed their privacy too much to let males intrude on it. If some of them wanted male company, they'd go to the shared living room. The location of the Second Staff Quarters was - by deliberate intent - ideally suited to fix a mistake we'd made in the initial design for our property. We excavated under the location of the communal living room to build a large underground parking garage for the staff in which was kept a bulletproof SUV for emergency escape purposes, or just to smuggle people in and out unobserved, as I described us needing to do several pages earlier. Potentially even more important than that was the rest of what we did. Extending north from the staff's underground parking garage was an underground shooting range. That seemed like a reasonable thing to have, and it was useful for staff training, but it was also a disguise for what I really wanted: a secret tunnel into and out of our hill. The far end of the shooting range 'just happened' to be located quite close to the east side of the beginning of the main tunnel. That had been bored as a six-meter wide, circular shaft. It'd been fully lined with semicircular concrete panels, then had concrete floor panels bolted in for cars to drive on. The floor was about half a meter thick, and had been constructed so its top surface was about a meter below the tunnel's maximum width, which left a 1.5-meter (almost 5-foot) space under it. That space was empty, so could easily be used as a secret tunnel. We waited until all the officially approved work was finished (for the Second Staff Quarters, garage and shooting range), and then we had our maintenance workers do the secret work themselves so it'd never appear on any plans. What the Government didn't know, they couldn't use to hurt us. Directly under the Adults' House was a large area excavated off the north of the top of the "T" of the main tunnel. That was the area the Adults' elevator descended into, and where a parking garage had been built, capable of holding about fifty cars (we'd been excessive, as it was free). Right next to the main tunnel's circular shaft, just inside the parking area and against its west wall, our guys dug a hole vertically down for five feet. It was in solid rock so it took them a while with jackhammers. Then they drilled sideways a few feet until they'd broken into the casing of the under-floor space of the main tunnel. Some tidying up (fitting plywood panels for the floor, walls and ceiling, making the short ladder required, etc.), and it was usable. Above the hole, they built a storage shed with a trapdoor bottom. On the shed's shelves they put miscellaneous, innocuous car stuff (car polish, rags, wiper fluid, etc.). Exactly the same thing was done under the Kids' House. That gave us access to the main tunnel's under-floor space in which we could crouch and run all the way to where the main tunnel's garage door was. The main door was incredibly strong, and naturally the area under the floor had been plugged so no one could use it to get past the door, which is what we wanted to do now. It was easier to burrow out of the tunnel and around the plug. A small, but EXTREMELY strong security door, was fitted to the new crawlway. It seemed best to make the door operable from the inside only, so we could get out but no one could get in, unless I was with them. Just inside of that security door we placed emergency supplies in airtight bags: black clothes, caps, cash, even some wigs. Also several of our security staffs' uniforms, so all of my families could put them on as a disguise if we needed to. The blast door had its own electricity supply and emergency backup, so we ran lighting for the emergency tunnel from the door's supply. The LED lights were very small and widely separated, so the lighting drew very little power when turned on, despite being over a thousand feet long. That just left connecting up the underside of the entrance of the main tunnel to the end of the shooting range. The back of the shooting range had a small equipment and supply room for spare parts and oil to service the targets' electric motors, brooms to sweep up the spent bullets, etc. Our maintenance guys drilled a doorway-sized hole in the external concrete wall inside that small room, then dug the short tunnel through to the underside of the main tunnel. A few panels of plywood to line the tunnel, and a false wall for the back of the storage room, and the job was complete. In an emergency, we'd most likely be best off hiding in our panic rooms, but the secret tunnel could be useful under some circumstances. The most likely of those was if our house was under observation and a family member (or all of them) wanted to get out unobserved. We could also get back in the same way if we left the plug's security door open, or we signaled someone to open it from the inside, or I was involved. As a secret exit, it only got us as far as the garage under the Second Staff Quarters. It didn't go under the wall and emerge a mile away, or anything dramatic like that, but we still thought it was worth having. I particularly liked it, as coming and going sneakily was right up my alley. I could go down the Kids' Elevator from my home, open up the trapdoor in the little storage shed and descend into the crude tunnel and along it to get into the under-floor space of the main tunnel. Then I could fly along the main tunnel quickly to the plug at the blast door. I'd put on a security uniform and cap, zigzag around the plug, then along the rest of the main tunnel until I diverted sideways and into the end of the shooting range. From there into the staff's underground parking garage, walking up the ramp into open air. Unless the observers were amazingly careful, they'd never be able to tell that the body wearing yet another security uniform and under a cap was mine. Alternatively, I could get into the car and drive away. I added a motorcycle to what we were keeping in the staff's garage too, because that meant I could ride out with my face hidden by a tinted helmet. (As Ron, I'd already bought several tinted helmets, with different colored paint jobs and several different colored sets of motorcycle leathers so I could vary my look for the first leg of my frequent sneaky journeys.) As a further digression, having our own shooting range encouraged Paul to get the parents to agree to everyone being firearm trained, "Just in case". Dad and I had done a bit of that late in 2006, but we hadn't kept it up and no one else had participated. Mom and Carol didn't like it at all, preferring to shut their eyes, grimace, and not be in the same room when they pulled the trigger. Donna and Ava enjoyed it, and got very competitive with each other. They quite often did that with other things too, like playing tennis, racing horses, or doing stunts down the zip-line. As Donna was getting older, she was also getting closer to being able to run faster than Ava. Julia was happy to learn how to defend us from anyone that was threat. She didn't believe she'd ever need to defend me though, which deprived her of most of the satisfaction she would've derived from learning how to kill someone. Prof already had a handgun, but not out of any enjoyment from the activity; it was just something he'd long ago decided was necessary for him to protect his family. Vanessa learned which way to point a gun and where to pull to make it go {Bang}, but it wasn't her cup of tea and she soon withdrew from the training. Dad quite enjoyed it. He enjoyed hanging around with the security guys anyway, and doing a manly activity with them suited him fine. I did the training. I was already accurate from the small amount of training I'd done in 2006, and I rapidly became easily the best shooter on the property. My eyesight is as good as a human's can get, my body control is superb, etc., so I learned very quickly and very well. No one in my families was the least surprised (they would've been surprised if I hadn't been the best) and by then the security guys and gals were starting to appreciate how good I was at things. They were more surprised by how indifferent I was to my skill, thinking that I should take it further and compete. I'll close with a reminder that the preceding is a digression into something that happened several months later, in response to our learning some lessons from the Idiotic events of today.] ------- Chapter 352: Post-Aftermath Press Conference Saturday, June 2, 2007 (Continued) The networks were BEGGING for interviews. It suited our purposes, so Vanessa agreed with a condition. We didn't want a couple dozen news-people and potentially FBI or CIA plants in our home or even on the grounds, so she told one network that we'd allow a team of two to enter the property for an interview provided they freely provided copies of the tapes to the other networks and none of them made any on-air mention of having the tape until 11pm PST, when they all could simultaneously broadcast it. The first network - ABC - Vanessa explained that to, responded by saying, "That's not how we do things, we..." Vanessa hung up, then used the intercom to tell the security guard manning the switchboard to block ABC's calls for 24 hours. A few minutes later NBC called. Vanessa made the pitch again, this time including, "Freely offer the tape to all the other networks except ABC because they refused this deal when I made it to them a few minutes ago." The current caller had no trouble at all with Vanessa's suggested way of doing business. Vanessa intercomed the gate to ask them to let two people from NBC through when they arrived, and to escort them up to the Adults' House. Then she intercomed the switchboard operator telling him that if any networks other than ABC called, he was to tell them about NBC providing them with a tape after the interview, and that they weren't allowed to broadcast even a reference to it before 11pm PST or they'd be excluded from future interviews. The interview took place in the entrance foyer, as it's large, beautiful and barely inside the house. Vanessa got the cameraman to record her repeating the rules for the interview, and the reporter's agreeing to them, then Vanessa said, "I'll hand over to Mark." I hit the ground running: "The crazy behavior around our home and throughout Corvallis today was pointless, senseless and dangerous. Five men died outside our gates; I understand from the news that three people have drowned trying to swim across the Willamette River; dozens of people have been injured, some very seriously; there's probably been over a million dollars of property damage throughout Corvallis; and all the participants have achieved is to make criminals and fools out of themselves. -- "I saw signs being waved around asking me to cure diseases or perform other miracles. I understand those people are desperate, but they're also foolish. I'm not the least bit divine. God is divine and the angels are divine, but I'm entirely human. Jonathon Winters made a list of twenty four candidates, from which Archangel Michael chose me. I'm sure that all twenty four of us were nothing more than dead humans. The act of resurrecting my mind into Ron's body didn't make me divine. His body is an unexceptional, ordinary body, and my mind is the same as it was a few hours before I was killed. -- "If one of your neighbors went to the hospital and had an appendectomy, would you go to him when you had a sore stomach and ask him to remove your appendix? I was merely the patient that God operated on. I didn't miraculously learn how to cure even a pimple, let alone any serious disease. As far as I'm concerned, what happened to me is just a bigger version of a human doctor reviving a dead patient. I know they can do that if the person hasn't been dead for more than a minute or so. Apparently God can manage a year or more, but neither event makes the patient divine. -- "Those of you who are sick and contemplating coming to Corvallis in search of a miracle, my advice is to stay at home and rest. Coming here and standing outside our property for hours on end is only going to tire you out and hasten your decline. Plus why throw your money away on pointless travel? If you want to give your money away, give it to institutions that are researching whatever disease you've got. That might not cure you in time, but it might help cure someone in the future, which is a heck of a lot more useful than pointlessly walking back and forth in front of our gates. -- "I saw other signs proclaiming that I'm Jesus Christ or the Devil. I'm happy to announce that I'm neither of those. I won't be announcing that Armageddon has arrived and neither am I here to corrupt everyone's souls and trick you into going to Hell. From what I've been told about Archangel Michael, he said there wasn't any such thing as the Devil or Hell, so I'd be pretty stupid if I tried to do anything along those lines, not that I'd have a clue where to start. -- "I'm Mark Anderson. That's all I am and all I want to be. My primary interests in life are carrying on with my education, spending time with my family and pretty girls, and perhaps playing some games of soccer with my friends after I've gotten used to this body. Getting on with my life is what I most want to do. -- "I'm as likely to impart religious wisdom as I am to pick the winner of the next Superbowl. I can impart some commonsense though: anyone who thinks I'm anything other than a very lucky guy is being an idiot. Everything that I heard about what Archangel Michael said, and the email his replacement sent from Ron's computer, all said that a person would be resurrected and that humanity needed to pull up its socks. They didn't say anything about my miraculously saving the world for you, curing your diseases, reducing taxes, making your cars get ten more miles per gallon, or whatever other stupid fantasies you might have. -- "The nitwits who think their personal problems are going to be fixed by running around our property yelling religious nonsense might as well go jump in the river again for all the good their self-delusions are going to do. If you don't jump in the river, at least stick your head in a bucket of ice water for a while, because you badly need to cool your overheated brains. -- "To the alien conspiracy theorists out there, I almost have some sympathy with you because I think outer-space is an interesting place, but the idea that Archangel Michael or the Guardian Angel are aliens sent ahead to scout out the Earth for invasion is absurd. Scouts are supposed to be sneaky, not draw worldwide attention to themselves. It's also obvious they could scout us all they wanted without resurrecting me. If they wanted to plant alien spies on Earth, doing so in a way that attracted the world's media spotlight seems particularly stupid. Goodness only knows how you think my resurrection helps mythical aliens invade us, as I would've thought any invaders would be better advised to kill Earthlings than bringing them back to life. -- "But if you're absolutely convinced the world is about to be invaded, how on Earth does running around our gate waving placards help? If you want to be helpful, sell everything you own and give the money to the Air Force so they can buy some more weapons. -- "And to the Elvis freaks out there. Sorry, he's still out of the building, but better luck next time. -- "Lastly and most importantly, from what I've been told about Archangel Michael, he didn't tolerate people going against his wishes. When someone annoyed him, he quickly made the person regret it, and he didn't hesitate to do so in ways that seemed very excessive. The Guardian Angel has the same creator and apparently the same attitude. It was obvious that the Guardian Angel could have caused far more damage today but it was holding itself back. I'm very worried what it will do if thousands of people continue to go against its wishes. -- "The other angels warned you several times that Guardian Angels are DEADLY! I know several thousand people were so dimwitted that they couldn't help themselves from marching on our property in a mindless mob. Clearly those people are incapable of intelligent thought, but for those of you sitting at home thinking about coming to Corvallis, I STRONGLY suggest you'd be better off staying at home. You're certainly not going to get whatever it is you want from me - because I'm just an ordinary guy who has been lucky enough to be given a second chance - so all you'd be doing is taking a very large risk by going against the wishes of a very powerful, deadly, and probably annoyed servant of God." I stopped, letting the reporter ask any questions she wanted. She started with, "Can't you control your Guardian Angel?" "Nope. I'll prove it for you by asking it to do something I know it's very good at." I enlarged my voice and looked around the room as I said, "Guardian Angel, please strip the reporter naked for me." I hadn't liked her attitude in the conversation we'd had before the filming started. The reporter shrunk back in horror, while the cameraman - very professionally I thought - kept his camera pointing straight at her. She backpedaled to a wall, looking around in fright. After a few seconds of nothing happening, she relaxed. I said, "I'm a teenage boy, you're a pretty woman, and we already know the Guardian Angel doesn't have any compunction against stripping people naked, but sadly for your viewers and me, it doesn't do what I want it to do. It got its orders from God, and I imagine it thinks that God has slightly more authority than an adolescent boy. -- "You called it MY Guardian Angel. It's mine only in the sense that it's been assigned to protect me. It's not my pet and I'm not its boss. I have no control over what, when and how it does things. It has never made any attempt to communicate with me, and it has only appeared to do something protective, after which it immediately disappeared again. I think it'd be fair to say that it's got a one-track mind. Unfortunately not on the same track as my one-track mind, which is a pity because it's REALLY good at 'picking up' girls, haha." It took her a second to get it, even with my having emphasized "picking up". It wasn't a difficult joke to get, but I charitably decided she must still be recovering from her scare. I'm more charitable toward pretty woman, even if they are reporters. "Have you thanked God for giving you a Guardian Angel?" I downgraded my charitable thoughts about her. Now there were only two small parts of her body that I still had good thoughts about. Well, not that small, but that was okay because my thoughts weren't that good either. I answered, "He didn't 'GIVE' me a Guardian Angel - the word 'give' means to transfer ownership - so naturally I haven't thanked Him for giving it to me." "Have you thanked God for ASSIGNING the Guardian Angel to you?" "No. I'm sure He knows I'm appreciative, especially after I saw how mindlessly people behaved earlier today." "Don't you think you should thank Him? He did save your life." "First, he did NOT save my life. I died nearly a year and a half ago. What he did was give my life back to me at the expense of Ron losing his, which is not the same thing at all, especially from Ron's point of view and for the people who loved Ron, like my sister Carol. Please don't cheapen Ron's sacrifice by rewording it out of existence. -- "Second, I have not thanked him for returning my life to me because I can't communicate with God, and even if I could, it's pretty obvious that He's not interested in chatting with individual people. He's interested in humanity as a whole over periods of thousands of years. And for the sake of completeness, let me add that I also haven't thanked the Devil, any aliens, or Elvis." "Why don't you communicate with God?" "I didn't say 'I don't'; I said I 'can't'. The former means a lack of willingness; the latter a lack of ability. You either need to buy yourself a dictionary or have your ears cleaned out. Can you communicate with God?" "Ahh. Of course. Everyone can; you've just got to pray." "In that case, please tell him 'Thanks very much' from me. And also ask him where the keys Mark's body had when Homeland Security picked him up have gone. Do that now; I'll wait for your answer." I folded my arms and looked the picture of patience, waiting for her to do her talk-to-God thing. The cameraman swung his camera around to point at her, which didn't help her self-composure at all. She dithered for a couple of seconds, then came up with, "Prayer shouldn't be used for frivolous things." "You've been repeatedly implying I've been wrong for not thanking God, so you obviously feel that part of my request isn't frivolous. Second, not having my keys is a nuisance. God strikes me as very helpful and he seems to like me a great deal, so I'm sure He won't mind if you pass on a question for me. You could've done it by now, so please hurry up." "Prayer is private." "Yet you asked several questions about my communications with God so you could broadcast my answer across the country. How come my praying practices aren't private but yours are? Doesn't God believe that all people are equal?" She put her palms together, bowed her head, and her lips moved silently for a few seconds. When she looked up I asked, "Did you thank Him for me?" "Yes." "And did you ask him where my keys are?" "No. It's wrong to use prayer for personal favors." "He gave me my life back. I'd call that a HUGE personal favor. Compared to that, telling you where my keys are is a trivially easy request. To make doing what I ask more acceptable to you, if you tell me where my keys are, I'll give a million dollars to your church. I'm sure they could do a great deal of good with that much money and God will doubtless be very thankful for your bringing in so much money for His church. Ask Him now; I'll wait." I folded my arms again. "It doesn't work like that!" "You're not even going to try to earn your church a million dollars?" She was between a rock and hard place, and being filmed, so she was not happy. I ended her misery by asking, "Do you know why I've been deliberately picking on you?" "No." "Because you were deliberately picking on me. You were so sure of your beliefs about God, prayer and the necessity of saying 'Thank you' to Him that you were condemning me for not having the same beliefs as you. You were no better than the many contradictory groups of self-opinionated dimwits who tried to storm onto our property earlier today. -- "I've got news for you, Little Miss Know It All. I'm the ONLY person on the planet who has had an email written about him by an angel that says that God wants me to have my own beliefs. God spent several weeks healing my mind and soul after the tortures the CIA inflicted on me, so God certainly knows everything He wants to know about my thoughts and beliefs. Not only does God find them acceptable, but He even went out of His way to remove some memories from me to ensure that I was free to retain the same beliefs. So I know - FOR A FACT! - that God is VERY happy with what I believe. -- "For all I know, He may also be happy with what you believe. I have no proof of what He thinks about your beliefs. Nor do I care what they are. If you want to behave toward God like a seven-year old girl trying to ingratiate herself with her politeness-freak of a mother, then that's fine with me. Personally I think God has got ENORMOUSLY more important things to do than worry about whether every person on the planet says 'please' and 'thank you' to Him every time they think their mother would want them to. He KNOWS how appreciative I am for being given a second chance, and he certainly doesn't need my prattling at Him about it. -- "What I do object to though, is your criticizing my beliefs, especially because you were misusing your role as a reporter to do so. I KNOW my beliefs are fine with God, so your verbal criticisms and condemning looks were TOTALLY worthless, wrong, and insulting to me. All you've done is prove that you're a thoughtless, arrogant, judgmental person, and a very poor excuse for a reporter, especially after you repeatedly didn't listen to my words before you started giving me the benefit of your superior religious knowledge. It should be obvious that I don't want you to interview me again. I don't know how you got assigned to such an important job. Not for your brains obviously. Probably for your tits, because you don't seem to have anything else going for you." -- I turned to the cameraman, "The deal for this interview was that your tape is shared among all the networks who want it. That means the WHOLE tape. If any part is held back, your network won't be invited to any other media conferences involving me." -- I turned back to the reporter, "You should go now, before I repeat my request to the Guardian Angel to strip you. You've offended me and I'm angry at you, so I wouldn't be surprised if it did what I asked this time." She couldn't leave fast enough, not bothering to wait for her much slower, more hopeful cameraman. I was proud of myself. Presuming my rebuke of Miss Know It All gets aired - which it should because it was theatrical and ended with a sexual element and was therefore Good Enough TV - then my point about God having approved of my beliefs should hit home widely. People should think twice before judging me badly for my beliefs. Many people don't think even once so they certainly won't think twice, but a large number of ordinary people should get the point. One of the problems with people is that they LOVE to form negative judgments of other people. Then if they get together in a large crowd, their IQ plummets down to zero and they become dangerously mindless toward those people they're negatively judging (somehow, while they're mindless, they can still retain the opinion that they're right and everyone else is wrong). When aired, hopefully my comments will convince large numbers of relatively ordinary people to stay away from Corvallis, so future crowds won't be nearly so large, and their IQs won't plummet all the way to zero. I remembered that a long time ago, when Vanessa had delivered my casino disguise to me at our original family home, she'd caught me incorrectly leaping to a negative conclusion about myself. She'd verbally clobbered me pretty well, and had made the comment that she'd hadn't had the lesson in mind at the time she started talking; that it'd just emerged. I hadn't understood that then, but I've had several experiences of doing something similar myself in recent months. In this case, the email I'd written was proving to have great uses that I'd never intended. I could draw what I wanted from it, then hit people over the head with the 'lesson', and they'd think I was intelligent and right. It was surprisingly easy. Learning how to bullshit has to be the most important skill in life, and I was very pleased at how good I was getting at it. We walked back to the living room with the families asking me why I had said specific things. Vanessa was particularly probing. Other than cautioning me against coming over as arrogant, "Because that stands out very badly on TV," she was happy with my performance, which was high praise indeed. We stayed up to watch how the airing of the interview went, to see whether the networks abided by the rules, and what sort of reception it got. Fox News jumped the gun by five minutes. Vanessa intercomed the switchboard telling our operator to put Fox on the blacklist for seven days and to tell them why, which Vanessa explained. [The next time Fox called, they were aghast to be told of their being blacklisted and why, and even more upset when that was followed by their being hung up on. They called back and launched into an excuse about a technical difficulty pulling a previous story out of its slot, so moving all the subsequent stories forward. Being on the blacklist meant the operator hung up on them again, and continued to do so every time they called for fourteen days. It had originally been seven, but they gave a false name on a call on the fourth day. When they got put through and we learned they were Fox, they got hung up on and their blacklisting got extended another week.] The other networks behaved themselves; other than ABC which didn't have a copy of the tape so had no opportunity to either behave or misbehave. After some excerpts, the other networks all ended up playing the entire clip; except for NBC, which had very carefully edited the second half so it wasn't clear that I was attacking their less-than-competent but big-titted reporter. The attitude of the commentators was generally very good. There were three types of comments that interested me: About my suggestion that people not come to Corvallis, about my pulling the moral rug from under the reporter, and the more general issue of what people were thinking about the resurrection as a whole. The mainstream commentators were unanimous in their agreement with my first point. Obviously mobbing a home at any time was wrong, and mobbing one protected by something as fierce as the Guardian Angel had proved itself to be was wrong and dangerously stupid. It remained to be seen whether the masses agreed. My second point didn't work nearly as well. The commentators understood it, and they even commented how surprising it was that God could approve of such a non-religious attitude, but it simply wasn't Good TV. It was about logic rather than anything interesting, so it got very little attention. I was curious about what people thought of the 'forest', rather than the 'trees', but none of the commentators zoomed back that much. The closest they got to the big picture was in discussing the Guardian Angel. There was a great deal of discussion about that, and I'll quote one reasonably representative sample to give you an idea of the tone: David asked, "I wonder how deadly the Guardian Angel can be, Jeff?" "That's hard to say, David. We know it could remove the clothes from over a thousand people..." A carefully selected montage of titillating, naked people appeared on the insert screen behind the two talking-heads. "Why did it do that, do you think, Jeff?" "We saw Archangel Michael do that several times, David. He used it to punish people by humiliating them, and I think it's clear that the Guardian Angel was using it for the same purpose, on a greatly increased scale." "There's been no sign of another mob forming, so I'd say it'd worked very well, Jeff, haha." "Very well indeed, David. -- "The Guardian Angel lifted over thousand people in the air to remove their clothes. It could've lifted them higher and dropped them, like it did to the five men a few minutes later. It would've been quicker to do that, so I think it could be deadly enough to kill two or three thousand people, Jeff. The other angels and the resurrected man - Mark Anderson, I guess we should call him - have been very worried about people's understanding how deadly Guardian Angels can be. We should take their warnings to heart." "Killing thousands of people is very 'Old Testament'." "I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Anderson's Guardian Angel was responsible for some of the events described in the Old Testament, David." "That's quite possible. You showed some uncertainty over how to name Mark Anderson, Jeff. Let me show you some clips our producer has put together for us." "Good," said Jeff, turning to look at the screen behind him. The screen played some quick extracts from old clips of Ron being interviewed, mostly after the CIA-inspired army raid on our Peoria Road home, interleaved with extracts from my latest interview. David said, "It's the same body, but they speak very differently." "You're right, David. Mark Anderson is very well educated, intelligent and articulate. He could get a job on TV!" "Haha. He could buy his own station if he wanted to, Jeff, but you're right. Ronald Fisher's speech was considerably coarser and he was of average intelligence. I'm NOT saying he wasn't a wonderful young man. His willingly giving his body up so his girlfriend could get her brother back is as selfless and noble an action as I've ever heard of." "Yes. It's an inspiration to us all. -- "We'll be back after these inspirational messages from our sponsors." Other networks had different commentators but much the same comments. They were worried about how deadly the Guardian Angel could be, but they appreciated that it'd held back and that the neo-nazis had been scum who clearly deserved their fate - not that anyone said that out loud; they just didn't condemn the killings nearly as forcefully as they normally would have. Plus everyone had been warned not to upset the Guardian Angel, so could hardly complain about the consequences of doing so. There was some discussion about whether the residents of Corvallis were at risk. With VERY careful comments - no doubt written by their legal departments - the talking-heads 'thought' (using the term loosely for obvious reasons), "They'll have to decide for themselves, but one opinion would be that they might be okay if they don't do anything to make the Guardian Angel angry." That pleased me, as it meant they commentators were buying into the Guardian Angel's protective motivation and inherent goodness. There were quite a few calls for the Government to investigate the situation. Many people were discomforted by having something so freaky and deadly living among them, and they wanted the Government to find out about it and tell them what to think. I had a different opinion, and it was fortunate that so did other people. One pointed out: "Remember what happened to Air Force One and Two when the first angel had got annoyed. He said Guardian Angels are even more deadly and I think people would be crazy to risk getting it angry." I thought his comment had a lot of merit. The Government was behaving very similarly to the major religions: being totally unsure what to say, so saying nothing. Presumably they were waiting to see what the FBI's spying could discover. We went to bed about 11:30pm. It'd been an interesting day. It isn't often you get to murder five neo-nazis, strip a thousand people naked, steal a hundred thousand dollars, then convincingly claim that God thoroughly approves of your morality. ------- Chapter 353: Sunday After the Resurrection Sunday, June 3, 2007 Our astronomer couldn't do nighttime photography of the UAV because it moved too fast for the long exposure times the ordinary camera required, but nighttime was good in one respect, because our radar tracked the UAV breaking off its orbits to head almost straight south (slightly east of south; at about 170 degrees), returning about four hours later. We didn't actually know that it'd "returned" four hours later, but it was a good guess. Once it'd left, the best our staff could do was aim the radar at one point of the UAV's circuit and wait for either a daybreak visual sighting of it, or for the radar to reacquire the UAV when it passed through those coordinates again. It did the latter four hours after it'd left our area. It might've been in the area for a few hours already, but it was a reasonable assumption that the operator had immediately put the UAV into the same GPS-defined circling pattern as usual. Dad told me about the UAV's departure and return over breakfast. Because I'd done the same trip, I immediately had a good idea where it'd gone: to Beale Air Force Base, the US Air Force's largest UAV operations center. I was tempted to do a snooping trip. The operator's orders should contain text that'd ruin the FBI's ability to deny they were spying on us, handing the $216 billion to us on a silver platter (we'd buy a gold platter after we got the money, provided Mom agreed that it matched our dinner service). The problem was how to get the orders into our possession. Majestic Countdown and the unnamed second angel had left the Earth. The Guardian Angel was still around, but snooping wasn't its job and I didn't want it to do any communicating either. Complicating the issue further was that I guessed I'd probably find the orders in written form rather than in a computer that I could email them from. Smuggling out a printed copy could be tricky, or I could be unsubtle and simply punch a hole in the roof and carry them out. However we got the orders, explaining how they came to be in our possession would be a problem that could very easily cause us a great deal of trouble. In a nutshell: if angelic accessing of military bases was too closely associated with the Andersons, then we might end up with a large number of very angry military people determined to find out how it'd been done, and wanting to get revenge for what had been done to them at Andrews AFB and Norfolk Naval Yards, plus the assorted F-16s and helicopters of theirs that I'd downed. The parents favored caution, preferring that I not do any snooping, especially because there was so much high-risk stuff already going on. Our radar and telescope evidence was already wonderfully effective proof of our $216 billion claim without being dangerously miraculous and worryingly inconsistent with our established cover story. As bizarre as it seems, considering the amount involved, we didn't want the $216 billion nearly enough to take significant risks to get it. [[Although 'our' UAV was flying out of Beale AFB, it was being controlled out of the developer's facility in Los Angeles, so I wouldn't have found any useful orders at Beale. If I'd looked in the right place, I might've found servicing orders, but it was very unlikely I would've searched for them because I would've been concentrating my efforts on the very large operators' area. Even if found, the servicing orders wouldn't have said that the UAV's mission was to spy on the Andersons. It was mostly a coincidence that our UAV was based at the major UAV operations air base; Beale just happened to be one of the closest Air Force Bases to Corvallis (385 miles). There were a couple of smaller bases that were slightly closer, but Beale was a large, secure base where the presence of the new UAV wouldn't stand out, which it very much would have at either of the two slightly closer, smaller bases.]] Even without my going on a snooping trip, it was good to know that we had the FBI's sur-veillance under such good sous-veillance (the "sur" of surveillance is French for "from above". "Sous" is French for "from below"). Our gardener/astronomer had even used his home computer to identify the exact model of UAV overhead, and had found the article about the Air Force purchasing one of them from Northrop Grumman to develop air-combat tactics with. The Air Force needed to do a hell of a lot more work on their air tactics, because so far they couldn't even get a fighter into the same sky as a UAV flying in a small circle for twenty hours a day, day after day. ^ There'd been no riots or other major events overnight. There'd only been two intrusions over the wall, and they'd both been ordinary guys of no significance or intelligence. Many of the participants in yesterday's mob had wisely decided that going home would be a good idea, but that was proving problematic for many of the thousand people who'd lost their car keys. They had no keys, no clothes, no cellphones, no money (the banks were closed, but the people had no ID either), no food, and usually no friends in Corvallis. I like to think that they had a very difficult time overnight. According to the morning news, most of them had gotten friends or family to drive to Corvallis with spare keys and clothes, but there were still quite a few of them stuck in Corvallis because there was no one back where they'd come from who had access to their house to get spare keys, or even if keys were delivered, often their cars were blocked in by all the other cars that had been abandoned so the owners could congregate around our walls. Teams of tow trucks from cities all around Corvallis had been called in and were in the process of removing those hundreds of cars, but it would take a fair while yet. The local churches had taken in many of the 'refugees' overnight, which was both nice of them and appropriate, since it was church sermons that'd deluded most of the Idiots into volunteering to be refugees in the first place. Although many had left, more were arriving. They were much better behaved and were keeping their distance from our home. They had little choice, as there was plenty of Army and police now. The crowd was generally splitting up and congregating in distinct areas; Alien Invasion Freaks in one place, Cure My Terminal Illness Desperate Dreamers in another, Feet Worshipping and Stake Burning Christians placed as far apart from each other as possible, etc. I felt sorry for the town's municipal workers because the local infrastructure was being overwhelmed: there were not enough parking places so cars were parked illegally in and around the city; public restrooms couldn't process people fast enough, with the obvious and offensive result; all the normal accommodation options were fully booked, making lack of accommodation a serious problem for the Idiots. More than half the new arrivals were flying in, as it was apparently essential that they get to Corvallis as quickly as possible, presumably in case my divinity wore off. Corvallis airport was closed to non-official flights but surrounding airports were open and bus operators were doing a roaring business bringing people to town, who thereafter had no accommodation at all. People with spare rooms in their houses were making small fortunes renting them out to people desperate for somewhere to stay, tents were being rented or sold and were springing up in all sorts of places, most against local bylaws and with no hygiene facilities, and many people were living out of their cars, which would get old fast. Many of the visitors were saying, "I'm prepared to stay for a long time, because [insert whatever lunatic theory the person had]." Most of them said it was so they could be in the same area as my divine miracle, or words to the same illogical effect. #19: #8: #20: #8: #20: #19: Dad got a phone call from the Chief of Police saying, "We have to investigate the killing of the five men outside your gates and we'd like to talk with your family and the Williamses about that. Can we come over this morning please?" Dad said, "Hang on. I'll ask everyone." I'd have preferred the police to take no interest, but that was being too hopeful. Refusing didn't seem like a good idea, and no one could see any benefit in delaying, so Dad told them it was fine. We planned what to say. It was pretty obvious that we should simply say the truth, just not all of it. The Chief and one of his detectives arrived. The detective led the questions, which were of three main types: Where had we been during the angel's appearance? I made sure they understood that the angel had taken me and Tristan to see it without my having any choice, and definitely without me asking it to do anything at all. They'd like to talk with the angel about what it'd done. We explained that the angel seemed to be interested only in protecting me, as that was the only time it had appeared and was the only thing it had done. It wasn't a conversationalist and I had no authority to order it to become one, "I didn't appoint it; God did. It does what God says, not me." I proved the point by once again asking it to appear, but it didn't. Which led to a useless conversation about what angels were, how they worked, etc. My families helped me shovel that crap very well. I was amused by the difference in tone compared to the earlier times I'd been questioned by the police, such as after the Eaton family had attacked me. Having a few hundred million dollars in the bank changes quite a few things, including totally stopping the in-your-face aggressive attitude that cops project. Cops only threaten people who can't cause the cops trouble afterward. Speaking of attitudes, as was often the case the two cops were reluctant or self-conscious about calling the Guardian Angel an "angel", and they had a similar reluctance with calling me "Mark Anderson", but that didn't really matter as it didn't change their current investigation in any way. It will be interesting to see how people's attitudes change as my body does. The investigation was doomed to fail because they had nothing to work with. They couldn't even prove that the angel killed the five men, because no one had seen it do so, and there was no forensic evidence linking their deaths to an angel. I was hoping they'd make a comment along the lines of, "It's not police business anyway; we only investigate crimes carried out by humans," but they never did. I had my fingers crossed that somewhere up the chain someone would decide exactly that, as an excuse to leave the five murders in the Too Hard basket, but it was more likely that officialdom would decide that it wanted to know more. Eventually they'd have to give up; it was just a matter of how much of a nuisance they were first. Judging by this visit, not much of a nuisance at all. As we'd confidently expected, the cops left having learned nothing but bad news about their chance of concluding the investigation successfully. ^ The Boys both called again. They'd been calling quite often recently, concerned at what had been happening. The conversations had been very innocuous. I should mention that back when the country had been waiting for Jonathon Winters to produce his list and for the angel to make its choice, Vanessa and Prof had warned their sons to be VERY discreet. Andrew and Sophia visit quite often, sometimes with her parents too. I've been assuming you don't want to know - because I sure didn't - that Andrew and Sophia's wedding is only three weeks away, scheduled for June 23, and it's being held on our property, riots permitting. I've nothing against Andrew and Sophia, but I avoid wedding planning discussions like the plague because females turn them into a nightmare. There was a great deal to be discussed, including an additional dinner service for all the guests, so you can imagine how bad it was. One amusing aspect was that all our spare bedrooms were going to be occupied by out-of-town wedding guests staying overnight. It would be the first time the Visitors' Quarters and the four unused staff bedrooms under the Activity Level would be used, so Ava and Carol were nervous over whether they'd remembered everything for them. The spare bedrooms in the Kids' Wing would be pressed into service too, and I can't say I was the least bit nervous. They contained a bed and each of them had bed clothes, so they looked complete enough to me. During one of Andrew and Sophia's visits, only a few days before the resurrection, Prof had taken Andrew aside - much to Andrew's relief because the wedding discussions were getting to him too - and had let Andrew know that there were likely to be some extraordinary developments involving Mark over the next few weeks. Andrew was to assume the Government would have him covered in bugs, so he had to be VERY careful about what he said to anyone, including not phoning his parents to ask revealing questions, nor discussing his secret knowledge with Sophia. Prof explaining, "You can tell Sophia all of YOUR secrets if you wish, but you cannot tell her any of Mark's. Mark doesn't know her well enough to trust her with his life, and there's too much risk she'd tell her family, they might tell their best friends, and so on to disaster." Andrew had been curious about what was going to happen, but self-disciplined enough to accept Prof's saying, "It's best not to tell you yet. Events might not happen the way we plan, and whatever does happen, it'd be best if you looked surprised at the time." Vanessa had also called Robert, giving him a less detailed version of the same warning. When Archangel Michael had first appeared, The Boys hadn't known anything more than the general public did, including not knowing that there was any connection between it and me. They were as mystified as everyone else by the self-proclaimed angel that could perform impossible feats. Some of their confusion had been removed, and additional questions occurred to them, when Mom and Dad had placed the full-page advertisements in the national papers asking for people to support Mark Anderson for resurrection. That didn't make sense because The Boys knew that Mark Anderson was alive and well, even if Black. Their puzzlement increased when Mark Anderson was on the final list of Jonathon's twenty four resurrection candidates. Their parents refused to answer their questions. Nothing happened for weeks after that, until Prof and Vanessa had warned them that some extraordinary things were about to happen with Mark and to keep their mouths shut. Shortly after that, there was a public announcement that Mark had been resurrected into Ron's body. The Boys were very puzzled and curious, but self-controlled enough that their phone calls after the resurrection were innocuous, saying no more than anyone could be expected to say under the publicly known circumstances. On Saturday afternoon The Boys saw TV clips of the Guardian Angel in action against the mob, and they immediately recognized it as a light blob, the same as they'd seen at my three-way wedding a year and a half ago. Recognizing the light blob was the LEAST curiosity-inducing thing they saw. They were amazed by the Guardian Angel lifting people into the air, horrified that five people had been killed, and had been reminded of everything Archangel Michael had done. Now that they thought about it, Archangel Michael had been in a suspiciously anonymizing costume and they knew that I was capable of changing my body's shape. They became convinced that there was a great deal more to Mark Anderson than they'd thought before. They'd suspected a few things earlier, but they hadn't suspected ANYWHERE near enough! Their parents' over-the-top attitudes to me made much more sense now. The Boys' curiosity was an anticipated issue, hence their getting advance warnings from their parents to keep what came out of their mouths innocuous. My families and I had already discussed it, and we'd decided we trusted Andrew and Robert with the full explanation, but not Sophia. Roughly 50% of marriages end in failure, and 50% of those in very angry failure. Those weren't good odds to bet everyone's lives on, especially because there was absolutely no benefit in Sophia knowing about my abilities. On this Sunday morning, Andrew visited to confirm with his eyeballs that we were truly okay, and to find out what was really going on. Andrew was visibly excited when he and I moved to a separate room and engaged the Faraday cage. I ignored his first stream of questions, instead asking him, "Are you going to have a stag party before your wedding?" "Yeah. Did you want an invite?" "Quite the opposite. With the secrets I carry, I can never afford to get drunk. Except maybe at home with just family around, but that doesn't appeal. I asked about your stag party because my secrets have turned all of your family and my family into my accomplices. If my secrets get out both our families would spend the rest of their lives in jail or worse, like what the CIA was doing to me. If someone at your stag party starts talking about the angels and the resurrection - which is likely given your family's intimate connection to me - then can you guarantee that you won't let anything slip if you're drunk?" "Ahh, no. I wouldn't want to guarantee anything when I'm drunk." "When you're able to promise never to get drunk or even tipsy again in the presence of anyone who doesn't know the secrets, then I'll answer your questions. Which won't be until after your stag night by the sounds of it. Secrets don't come any bigger than these, and there's too much chance people are going to ask you about them. There's even a good chance that people will deliberately get you drunk so they can ask you questions about it." "Yeah, good point. I get asked frequently already, so I'm sure you're right. You've as much as admitted that my suspicions are correct though." "I couldn't think of anything to say that could've gotten you to give up your suspicions, even though your suspicions are probably wrong in several respects." I said that just to make it easier for him to keep the secrets secret. In reality, most of his suspicions would be correct, especially the important ones. To change the subject away from his degree of accuracy, I said, "There's another promise you'll have to make before I'll tell you anything. I don't want you to tell my secrets to Sophia or anyone else. If I want anyone to know anything, I'll tell them myself, not you." "Mom and Dad have said the same thing already. Sophia asks about you sometimes, but it's easy to pretend that I know as little as she does. -- "I understand your conditions and why. The guys won't let me not get drunk on my party, so I'll ask Robert to stay reasonably sober and keep an eye on me. I'll think about your conditions again after that. I'm not much of a drinker but I do enjoy letting loose occasionally. It seems a pity to lose that for information I can't do anything with, although I'd LOVE to know more about you." "It's your choice. My suggestion is that you don't ask immediately. You can always ask, but you can never un-ask, so the best approach is to keep both options open by not asking yet." "I hear ya, but I also want to know. Robert is in the same boat?" "Yep. You two are as bad as each other. We won't get a chance to talk openly with him about it until he comes for your wedding. We have to do it in one of these safe rooms because the Government has us under surveillance." "I thought you would've scared them off by now?" "There's an unmanned, stealth spy plane flying over the house as we speak. Owned by the Air Force but currently working for the FBI, we think. This isn't a game; it's high-stakes, lives-on-the-line stuff." "Oh. In that case, it might be best if I remain uninformed." "The fewer who know, the better. You don't have to choose that option; just don't choose to be informed." "Damn, I was so looking forward to learning at lot more about you." That ended the discussion with Andrew. Presuming it remains above us, I made a mental note to mention the UAV up-front with Robert when he arrived in a couple of weeks, hopefully discouraging his curiosity too. ^ There were a couple of educational consequences to the Guardian Angel's stopping the mob. Prof, I, and even Vanessa - amusing, considering her academic specialty - started getting phone calls from people who worked at research institutions, especially from different departments of OSU as they knew us and had our numbers. The callers wanted to study the Guardian Angel and in a few cases, use it as a direct conduit to God. We had an easy answer to that, "It's not possible. The Guardian Angel is invisible unless it's actively defending Mark, and it doesn't appear when he asks it to. The only way we know to make it appear is for someone to attack Mark, which we don't recommend." That worked with most of the callers, but not with the physicists: they were positively salivating at the thought of studying a room containing an invisible Guardian Angel. Prof got a call from the Head of OSU's Physics Department, which after the usual reason failed, he transferred to me. I told the Head, "I have no communication with it, so I can't ask it whether it'll cooperate or not, but it seems obvious to me that it won't want to be studied. If anyone discovered that it had any weaknesses, that could ruin its ability to do its job, and I get the very strong impression that it takes its job very seriously. I fear what it might do to stop the experiments. -- "You were very helpful when I was studying, so if I let anyone study it, you'd be the guys, but you'd better think very hard about it first. From what I heard about Archangel Michael, he'd tolerate a little bit of misbehavior, but if someone crossed the line, he came down very hard on them. I suspect the Guardian Angel would be even less tolerant and more punishing. How would you feel if it let you know that it didn't want to be studied by destroying all of OSU?" "Surely it wouldn't do that!" "I've only got two datapoints. Yesterday morning a doctor tried to take a blood sample from me. The angel appeared and gently removed the syringe from the doctor's hand and floated it back into his bag. Then there was the way it stopped the mob yesterday, which included deliberately killing five people. It's possible that the magnitude of its response depends of the severity of the attack, or it's possible that those two examples are on a deliberate trendline, in which case destroying OSU would be about right for the third datapoint. Do you want to take that risk now, or would you prefer to wait for more data?" "You'll give us first dibs on studying it?" "If I find out something that makes me think studying it will be a good idea, you'll be the first guys I think of. In all seriousness though, I cannot imagine that it'd ever agree to diminish its ability to do its job by having its nature better understood. Remember that God, and therefore the Guardian Angel too, knows I was kidnapped and killed while being experimented upon by scientists, so I doubt it'd have any sympathy at all with your idea." #4: #13: Despite our internal comments, we knew we couldn't let any scientists research any part of me, especially not me and the angel at the same time. Scientists are too smart. They can take the tiniest piece of data and build a scarily large amount of accurate information from it - the history of science is full of amazing examples of that. So the angel would never allow us to be studied, and it'd be VERY clear about that if someone tried. The calls continued to arrive, so we revised our method of handling them. Our staff were instructed not to pass any such calls through, except for the Head of the OSU's Physics Department - I wanted to resume my studies so it'd be a good idea to be polite to him. Any callers were to be told to submit their requests in writing, specifying exactly what experiments they wanted to run. It'd keep them busy for a while and I was curious to see if there were any worthwhile ideas for experiments I could conduct myself, even if I had to buy expensive equipment. Amusingly, there was one call that we didn't receive: from researchers who identified themselves as being "from the Government." I was sure that somewhere in the Government - probably several somewheres - there were Government scientists who desperately wanted to examine me and the angel, and even whose job it should have been to examine us, but we never got such a request. Most of the requests we got were from institutions we'd never heard of before, some of which were bound to be Government fronts, but whether or not they were didn't matter because we turned every request down. Nor did the Government try to order me to subject myself to examination. I had no trouble imagining that if anyone else in the country had been resurrected, the Government would have been all over his ass, and probably up it too, but there was none of that for me. Imagining their frustration made me smile. The second educational consequence was a casual conversation between Vanessa and Mom. Vanessa asked, "Felicity, you haven't got permission for Mark to take the school exams yet, have you?" "No. I've talked to the Principal and someone from the Corvallis Board of Education, and they're both saying it's very doubtful because the rules require a minimum attendance. Mark didn't attend a single day, and wasn't even enrolled this school year." "Next time you talk with them, tell them you really hope they can find some way for Mark to be counted as home-schooled so he can take the exams, because you're worried what the Guardian Angel might do to any school bullies if he has to enroll for next year's classes." "Won't they refuse his enrollment if he's a danger to other children?" "I'm sure they'd like to, but we'd take them to court and they'd come off very badly because their only defense is admitting that school violence is still continuing and that they can't stop bullies attacking students, so they're choosing to protect those bullies by refusing to allow the enrollment of an exceptionally good student. It'd be best for all concerned if he's allowed to take those exams. If he passes them, then he will have proved he deserved the opportunity and it would've been foolish to insist he wasted a whole year at school. If he fails, letting him try hasn't cost them anything." ^ Sunday was actually relatively sane. Almost boringly so after Saturday's drama. It wasn't a normal day by any means, as there was still a great deal of chaos happening outside of our property; it was just that we were insulated from it now, provided we stayed behind our gates. Speaking of "chaos", you should've heard the howls of outrage from The Church of The Horsemen of Christ. They'd been refused access to their church for their Sunday services, and they were screaming their heads off (not literally "off", unfortunately). A few thousand of them were accumulating behind a roadblock about half a mile from their church. A news-crew had found them and was filming The Galloping Ninnies getting increasingly lathered. The confrontation had been anticipated and the authorities were prepared with a well-manned, strong barricade, with a fire truck's hose all ready to go. The Ninnies were in complete meltdown over "The Government's repression of our Constitutional- and God-given Right to practice our religion." Which they apparently took to mean wherever and whenever they wanted, including in an area cordoned off as part of a state of emergency. It promised to be very entertaining and I was looking forward to The Galloping Ninnies turning into The Rolling Ninepins as they were sluiced down the road in their Sunday best. Unfortunately that didn't happen. The Galloping Ninnies got into a real tizzy about it, but they decided to have an open-air service instead of losing another war against the Army. ^ MANY members of the priesthoods of The Peoples of the Book - Christians, Muslims and Jews - wanted to "examine" me. Delegations had already been sent to Corvallis for that purpose, but had been diverted to nearby towns because our airport was closed. The "examine" sounded very arrogant, as if I had to submit myself to their tests before they would decide on my acceptability or otherwise. Their attitude didn't endear them to me, and I was pretty damned sure my attitude wouldn't endear me to them. I didn't have anything useful to say to priests, but my four parents thought I'd have to say it to their faces before they'd get the message. The parents obviously knew me well, because they cautioned me against being too harsh on the priests (or rabbis, ayatollahs, or whatever the right individual terms should be. I'll write "priests" to mean them all collectively. By doing so I'm probably being rude to Muslims and Jews, so to be fair I'll throw in a few extra derogatory comments about Christians). Mom intercomed our switchboard, asking the operator to put though the next call from any network except Fox. Five minutes later, a call from ABC was put through. Mom overrode whatever it was the caller wanted to say, got the caller to transfer the call to a senior producer, then told him, "Mark will accept a delegation of three Catholics, three Muslims and three Jews outside our gate at 2pm tomorrow. Your network is to immediately inform the churches so they can choose their delegates and get them here on time. ABC may provide a single camera-man or -woman to film the interview, but no reporter. After the interview is over, you are to give copies of the tape to all the networks except Fox, which is on a one week blacklist because they aired the last tape five minutes early. As the delegations are leaving, we will tell you the earliest time we want all the broadcasts to start, so no network has an unfair advantage. Do you agree?" "We're set up for live broadcasts now, but we can provide tapes to the other networks as you requested." "This isn't a negotiation. Either you agree to what I want, or I'll ask another network. Yes or no?" "Live broadcasts are much..." {Click}. Mom intercomed our switchboard, asking the operator to put though the next call from any network except Fox and ABC. Ten minutes later CNN was put through. Mom repeated the same, adding only that ABC also wasn't to be given a tape because they'd insisting on trying to negotiate when she'd made them the same offer ten minutes previously. CNN agreed to Mom's 'request'. Clearly I wasn't the only person who'd learned lessons from Vanessa and Prof. ------- Chapter 354: Donna's Sexual Advisors are Unmasked Sunday, June 3, 2007 (Continued) Donna approached me to say, "It's boring being stuck at home. How about you tell me what the 'thing' is all about?" She made a Guardian Angel-sized shape with her hands and 'floated' them, so at least she'd asked discreetly. #18: I decided on a different approach: I took her to bed, getting Carol to come with us as reinforcements. We activated the Faraday cage, stripped off and got into bed, Donna very enthusiastic about this new method of getting explanations. I took Donna's hands off my cock, pulled her into a cuddle, with Carol on the other side of me so we could both look Donna in the eyes when we talked to her. She looked disappointed that the explanation didn't start with rampant, full-on, fuck-like-bunnies sex. She hadn't tried that type of explanation before, but she had no trouble imagining that it'd be the best sort. I proceeded cautiously, saying, "This conversation is about your sex-life, Donna. It's partly about how much sex you've had in the past, but it's mostly about how much you'll be having for the next few years. You've still got three and a quarter years until you're eighteen, so your behaving calmly and maturely is important for a lot longer yet." My explanation wasn't proving to be nearly as much fun as Donna had thought it might be. -- "I know there are a few girls your age who're having sex," [some of the stories I'd heard had been real eye-openers. Where had all the horny 14-year old girls been when I'd been that age?], "but most of them aren't, and even the ones that are aren't getting anything like the good quality of loving that you're getting. They're getting some fumbling, ignorant, rushed sex, panicking that their parents might catch them. You get to sleep with me all night and you don't have to panic about Mom and Dad finding out. You can even ask Mom for advice on what position to try next if you want," I put on a humorous voice to add, "although you CERTAINLY don't seem to need advice!" Donna giggled, then added, "But I only get it once a month." "Remember the evening we pretended Archangel Michael came to tell us about his choosing Mark as the resurrectee. The next night you and I had an extra session that wasn't one of your monthly ones. You've been mature and responsible about sex, so we're starting to relax the reins a little, just like you do when you're riding a horse you trust." "I like riding you more!" #3: "I enjoy your riding me too. Let me ask you a question that seems strange, why don't you have any close girlfriends who're two years younger than you?" "Why would I want friends like that?" "Answer my question first. WHY don't you have any girlfriends two years younger?" "They're too silly and stupid. Some of them like horses, but for everything else they're too annoying." "You wouldn't take them on a shopping trip with you, or talk with them about their boyfriends..." "Haha. No. They haven't got a CLUE! They've got no idea what's in fashion, and they get silly if a boy even looks at them." Donna was overstating the case, but people have been known to do that when they think they're better. "Two years ago you were much like those girls. You weren't giggly about boys, because you weren't even interested in them yet, but you didn't know a fraction of what you know about fashion now. You buy very good clothes for yourself these days, whereas two years ago the only things you wanted to buy were very expensive running shoes. You've changed a great deal and you're maturing into a lovely, young woman. -- "Two years ago Julia wouldn't have let you choose her clothes for her, but these days Julia listens to your comments." Mostly out of politeness, but never mind that. "Two years ago Mom would've killed us if we had sex, but these days Mom's cool with our having it occasionally. Now she even thinks it's a good way of helping you learn about life. -- "As we knew you would, you've matured WONDERFULLY over the last two years. You can be very proud of yourself for how much you've achieved. You used to run around covered in dirt like tomboy. Now when you walk down the street, all the guys eyes zoom around to look at you. Well, mostly at your tits, but there's no doubt that the guys are very impressed by you..." "Yeah, they LOVE my tits. Everywhere I go even men stare at my tits. I've got REALLY good tits!" "You certainly do! And you like showing them off too, which I think is great, although it drives Mom up the wall sometimes." "Haha. Yeah. She says I should be more modest and not encourage men to stare at me, but I like doing it when I'm with the rest of you." I put on a sonorous voice, "On behalf of mankind, we thank you, haha. -- "The point I'm making, is that you've developed amazingly wonderfully not just in your body, but in your intellectual and emotional maturity too. As I said before, you can be proud of the long way you've come in the last two years. The fact that you came such a long way should tell you that two years ago you weren't very mature. You don't want 12-year old girlfriends now, you laugh at how little girls that age know about important topics like fashion and sex. That's what you were like two years ago. Do you understand that?" "I guess so, but what's that got to do with the aliens?" "I'm getting there." I was scared to get there though, hence all my pussy-footing. "Two years ago we were all scared for you. Mom, Dad, Carol and I were scared of how you'd behave if you were told you couldn't have sex. I don't know whether you've ever noticed this about yourself, but when you don't get what you want, you have a very short temper." My phrasing was one that Donna would recognize as one of my standard ways of making a humorous joke about how someone behaves, which I hope would take the sting out of my comment. "Much less now, but two years ago you were very quick to fly off the handle. I know you remember that?" Donna's getting her temper under better control gets talked about from time to time, so she was well aware of the issue. The conversation didn't sound like it was going in a good direction for her, so she just nodded. I continued, "When you wanted sex with me two years ago, what could I have done? I could've tried to have sex with you. I wouldn't have enjoyed it because you were too young, just like I'm sure you don't want to have sex with a 12-year old boy now. Mom and Dad would've screamed bloody murder when they found out, and most importantly, it wouldn't have been good for you. You were too young to understand sex then, and it would've given you all sorts of wrong ideas. -- "Or I could've refused to have sex with you. You would've lost your temper big time, and almost certainly would have found some boy or boys at school to fuck you. You would've gotten a bad reputation, and possibly caused our family a great deal of trouble if the authorities heard about it. Even if I'd just said we'd wait for a year first, you still would've hit the roof." I was playing a bit loose with the times. It hadn't been as long ago as two years ago that Donna had first asked, nor had she been twelve when she'd asked, but "twelve" sounds much younger to a fourteen-year old than "thirteen" does. Another error was that she'd ended up waiting for more than a year, but Donna wasn't the sort of person who'd spot my 'rounding errors'. -- "I couldn't say 'Yes' to you, I couldn't say 'No', and I couldn't even say 'Not yet'. Every one of those choices would've worked out badly. So what should I have done?" "I dunno. Oh yes I do: You got the aliens to do it." "None of us needed the aliens to tell us you weren't ready for sex, Donna; we already knew that. You were like a girl who'd never ridden a horse insisting she wanted to jump on and gallop around a cross-country course." Carol added, "On the biggest, fastest, most virile stallion." Donna giggled and agreed. I said, "Thank you for calling me a horse. We had a problem, Donna. If we let you climb on the big, fast, virile, HANDSOME stallion, then you would've hurt yourself in some way. If we refused to let you climb onboard, then you would've found some other stallions to ride, and they would've hurt you even worse. We knew you'd be ready to start riding in a year or so, but if we told you to wait that long, you would've jumped on some other stallions. So we found a way of getting you to agree to waiting a little while, and now you've become a wonderfully mature young woman. You're still maturing of course, both your wonderful body and your wonderful personality. But because you started slowly and carefully, you're learning the right lessons at the right times, which is excellent. I think there's a good chance Mom and Dad are impressed enough by you to allow us to have two sessions a month from now on." "REALLY! Starting RIGHT now, seeing as we're in bed already?" "I wasn't going to count this session toward your monthly allowance at all, but if you want to count..." "NO! Not counting it is fine with me. But you didn't explain what the aliens are?" I'd started making my cock go hard, so it bumped distractingly against Donna's hip. "Didn't I? I thought I did. Because you weren't ready for sex yet, and it'd be bad for you to leap on any stallion too soon, we had to find a way of delaying you." I rubbed my cock up and down her hip a couple of times, while I said, "Mmm. It seems my body is eager for another wonderful sex session with you. I'll just say that the aliens were half a trick." I hoped it'd be harder for her to get mad at "half a trick", especially if she didn't understand which half. I'd said that while sliding down the bed, where I separated her legs and put my mouth to much better use, my hands joining in because they're very helpful at such times. Plus I needed to get Donna turned on as quickly as possible. Donna only gets sex with me once a month, so she's never hard to get turned on, especially not after we've been naked and cuddling for a while. She's more like a short-fused firecracker. Donna was already starting to respond, but she still managed to ask, "What do you mean?" I diddled her another few seconds, making sure to spread a lot of moisture around her hole, much of it from my mouth because I wanted to make sure I could ramp this up quickly. I raised my head and the rest of my body, using NP to line my cock up and rub it around Donna's pussy. I answered, "You want to talk at a time like this! I must be losing my touch. Here's a light blob. You check it out for yourself. I'm busy." I created a three-inch radius, green light blob an inch above the bed, between Carol's and Donna's shoulders, while I slid my cock into Donna. I started slowly fucking her while I said, "Check it out, and maybe Carol can show you." (In case it occurs to you to wonder, Mom put Donna on the pill immediately after she started having sex with me.) Donna was hugely distracted - well, maybe not "hugely", but certainly "enjoyably" - but over the next several minutes Carol managed to convey to Donna that the aliens were really just harmless, unintelligent, colored balls of light, totally under my control. When she got it, Donna said, "You, {grunt}, tricked me?" "I HELPED you. Mom and Dad weren't going to let you have sex no matter what you said, so the only difference the aliens made was in keeping you peaceful and not upset." "But you LIED to me! A BIG lie." "I'm very sorry about that, but I love you too much to allow you to hurt yourself by chasing after other stallions when you'd never ridden a boy before. We've got a great life now, Donna, everything is working out wonderfully for you. You've got lots of horses to play with, lots of money to buy new clothes and other things you want, you're living in the best house in Corvallis, and one of the best parts is how friendly you and I are. We've got a great relationship and it's getting better all the time. Please don't get upset that I did what did to protect you." "But you LIED to me! We're not supposed to lie to each other." "Donna, sweetheart, I didn't lie to you because I wanted to. I lied because two years ago you couldn't control your temper nearly as well as you can now..." #4: " ... If we'd been able to honestly tell you to wait a year, that's what we would've said, but you know how immature your temper was two years ago. I HAD TO lie to you, to protect you from doing something bad to yourself. You do know that you used to have a bad temper way back then, don't you?" "I s'pose so." "And things are going very well for us now, aren't they? Especially right this second, if you'd let me concentrate." "You still shouldn't have lied to me. I thought aliens really did exist and they'd come all the way to visit me." "I'm very sorry about that, sweetie. Would it make you feel better if I gave you two orgasms before I gave Carol a turn?" "No. I'm not going to feel better unless I can sleep with you all night tonight. NOT counting toward my two turns." "You drive a hard bargain. Having two turns a month still needs Mom and Dad's approval. I'll tell them you've been very good over the alien thing, and very good about everything sexual too, but I can't guarantee they'll agree. I'll try my best to talk them into it though, seeing as you've been so understanding." #19: "Ask them for THREE turns," suggested Donna. "That won't do any good, sweetie. When we get too greedy, Mom just says 'No' and we get nothing. Better to stick with asking for two." "How about some extra ones that don't count, for when I'm 'specially horny?" "Which would be about once a day, right? In all seriousness, Donna, Mom would prefer you to have no sex until you're seventeen or so. She's not so mean as to wait until you're eighteen, but she thinks sixteen is on the young side. You're not even fifteen yet..." "Nearly. It's only a couple of months away." "Yeah, it's not far away. And fifteen seems much older than fourteen. High school next year too. So you're nearly fifteen, and if we're careful and don't annoy Mom, we'll be able to relax the restrictions more and more. Can we stop talking now, so we can do something a LOT more fun?" "Okay, but I'm still upset." I cranked my actions up a couple of notches - well, still up the same notch, but more vigorously - Donna responded, and it appeared that no more need be said. #14: #All: We went on to have a very good session. Two simultaneous twosomes rather than a threesome, as Carol and Donna don't have any sexual attraction for each other. They couldn't care less about bumping up against each other during sex, but it simply doesn't mean anything to them. They're both concentrating on making love to me, which is still pretty damned good as far as I'm concerned. I understand Donna's not being sexually interested in Carol, because of their being sisters and growing up sharing the same bedroom. When I'd started my sexual relationship with Carol, three-quarters of me didn't see her as being my sister, exactly. Without that happening to either of them, it was natural that Donna and Carol had no interest in each other. [[That's the main reason I thought I was initially sexually attracted to Carol. In reality it was just because I'd been a horny, desperate boy with a gorgeous sister; and Julia had pushed Carol into my arms over my pathetically weak not even halfhearted (or even quarter-hearted) protests.]] I'm surprised that Donna hasn't shown any interest in any bedroom hanky-panky with Julia, or especially with Ava considering how well Donna and Ava get on. Donna has had plenty of opportunities with other girls too, but not only has she not taken the initiative to make anything happen, she's stopped participating in her previous occasional sexual explorations with her various sports' teammates. She doesn't seem to care about sex other than with me. She'll participate in other sexual activities if I get her involved, which I must confess I've done a few times in foursomes with Claire and Diana, and even a couple of fivesomes with Carol or Ava as well. Of my two sisters, I wouldn't have hesitated to predict that Donna would easily be the more sexually adventurous, but she's not. She hasn't shown any interest in boys either. There'd be hundreds of them who'd leap at the chance to have a crack at her, especially at her crack, but Donna seems indifferent. They're damned hard things to predict, are girls. A couple of hours later, when we were cuddling and talking, I went over the light blob information with Donna again, mainly to make sure she knew to keep it quiet, and to take care of any questions she had now rather than have her running up to me to ask about them over the next few days. She didn't need to be reminded about the need for secrecy - I reminded her anyway - but she did have quite a few questions, such as, "They seemed intelligent. They talked to you, and moved around like they knew what was going on, and things like that?" I reminded her how hand puppets could seem intelligent, as I'd done with Jennifer, our horse-riding cousin in England. I created a couple-minute-long play where my hand puppets 'talked' about how wonderful Carol's and Donna's tits were. My left hand preferred Carol's tits, and my right hand thought my left hand was crazy, because Donna's tits were obviously better. They got quite angry, and ended up fighting about it, but at the end I got them to shake hands and be friends. I finished by saying, "Even things with no brains of their own can be made to look smart if they're made to move the right way." Donna had already gotten it. Way back when, I'd used a crude jumping frog to help explain light blobs to Carol and Julia. My control over light blob shape, and especially the quantity of them that I could make now, permitted me to do something a lot better than a crude frog. So I did a crude play instead: a short, pornographic play in which a big-titted pink-colored girl rides a white horse. She meets a blue boy. The boy's cock grows very impressively, the girl gets off the horse (horse wanders off and disappears). Boy rubs girl's tits; girl rubs boy's cock. White spurts come out of the end of the cock onto the girl's tummy. Girl scoops it up and eats it. Girl lies on ground and boy gets on top of her. They screw, then stand up and face us. I simulate several very rapid sunrises and sunsets, having the yellow suns fly in an arc over the top of the boy and girl, as the girl's belly gets bigger and bigger. A green baby squirts out and the girl's belly shrinks again. The girl picks up the baby, kisses it, then turns to face us. The girl and boy bow to us, then walk off the stage, accompanied by Carol's and Donna's claps. There was no script for the play, which allowed us to talk with each other through it. Carol had shown Donna two hours ago that she could wave her hand through light blobs, so during the play I said, "If you got out of bed you could walk through them, Donna. There's nothing there, including no brains." "That means YOU killed those five guys?" "I'm afraid so. The scumbags deserved it, and I also did it so all the other criminals out there will think twice before trying to do something bad to any of us." I hadn't been afraid at all. I'd been looking for an excuse to send a loud and clear "Don't fuck with us" message. "I didn't intend to originally, but when I saw how many guns and clips of ammo they had, it was obvious they were intending to break into the property and cause major problems. If thousands of people had broken through the gates, we would've been in our panic rooms, but some of our staff would've been in serious trouble, and five bad guys attacking our staff could've shot quite a few of them before our guys finally won. In the chaos and out of their excessive aggression, the skinheads probably would've shot quite a few of the other mob members too. "What did Mom say when she saw you murder those guys? Mom knows the Guardian Angel is a trick, right?" "She knows. She wasn't happy, but she accepted it. Mom, Dad, Vanessa, Prof, Carol, Julia and Ava know. Now that you do, that's all of us that live here. Andrew and Robert don't know, nor do any of our security guys or the other staff. PLEASE don't talk with ANYONE about it, Donna. Not even the people who know. There's too much chance of the damned Government having a bug on us, or a spy overhearing. There's no need for ANY conversation about it. If you think you have to talk with someone, come to me, and make sure we're in a room with the Faraday cage on before you say a single word. I MURDERED five guys, Donna, and everyone in our two families knows about it, which means we're all accomplices to murder. If you let it slip so someone discovers it, we're ALL going to jail for the rest of our lives. This is VERY, VERY serious!" "Oh! I wish I didn't know that now." #31: "You repeatedly asked what the aliens were. You should know by now that asking to know secrets is a risky business and it has consequences. Maybe next time you're curious about something, you might decide that it'd be better not to know. When I talked to Andrew earlier he was VERY curious to know what on Earth is happening. He knows much less that you do, so he's BURSTING with curiosity about Archangel Michael, the resurrection, whether God exists, and EVERYTHING. But when I told him about the spy plane above us, he decided it'd be best if he wasn't told anything. He'd rather not know than take the risk of getting us in serious trouble. He's got an amazingly mature and sensible attitude, especially considering how curious he is." Donna knew enough about how the world worked to understand that my being a murderer and all the rest of us being accomplices to that meant that she was in possession of a truly scary secret. It sobered her mood considerably, which was good to see. It seemed like a good idea to leave Donna in that mood for a while, so I got us out of bed and into the showers to get the doubtless considerable smell of sex off us, that not being a good thing for our staff to smell on the three Anderson children. Our staff rarely come into our homes, and only when invited. They don't even come near the homes normally because we value our privacy. They patrol at a distance. Our property and its electronic monitoring systems make that perfectly adequate. One of the rich families Mom had visited very early on when starting to design our hilltop home had told her, "You can have staff or you can have secrets, but you can't have both." We'd done a pretty good job of having both, although we'd made that a lot easier by not having any staff in our homes. We did most of our own housework, cooking, etc., except one afternoon a week when a crew of three women went through the two houses and cleaned for a few hours. That was regular and scheduled, so we easily worked and played around it. Donna pleased me in the shower (not in the way you probably first thought of; she wasn't in the mood for that), when she asked, "I just remembered that the aliens were warm, but light blobs aren't. How come? But DON'T tell me if it's another scary secret!" "It's not scary. Thank you very much for understanding the need for caution though; that pleases me very much. In answer to your question: I can make them warm. Infrared light is a type of light which is warm." "It is?" "Yep. Google it one day, and you'll see." "It doesn't matter." #14: #19: #4: #5: #32: #5: ^ The rest of Sunday was fairly ordinary, if your definition of "ordinary" includes watching TV to observe the effects of the worldwide controversy you've caused and asking your parents if they're okay with doubling the number of times you have sex with your younger sister. The second issue included letting everyone know that I'd told Donna about light blobs, including that the aliens and Guardian Angel were fakes (the dining room's Faraday cage was activated), and that she had received the news without anger or drama, so I wanted to double the number of her sessions as a reward for her being so mature. Mom couldn't resist the opportunity to have an 'adult' conversation with Donna, keeping Donna on tenterhooks for fifteen minutes because that's what moms normally do. But then Mom agreed that Donna could sleep with me twice a month, which was a large deviation from what moms normally do. From Mom's perspective, Donna was too immodest at times, but how many mothers of teenage girls haven't thought that? (Not that I knew much about mothering; I'd just heard that joked about many times in TV sitcoms. Personally I think teenage girls should be far more immodest.) Otherwise Mom was actually quite pleased with how the sexual activity was working out with Donna. In other words, Mom was pleased Donna wasn't getting it anywhere else. Donna's enthusiasm for sex with me had initially worried Mom, but it'd amazingly never moved outside of my bed, even though Donna enjoyed showing herself off to other guys. Not for the same reason Carol did, although Carol did that infrequently these days. Donna's motivation was mostly vanity and a bit of a power trip for her, probably in reaction to her being the youngest and least powerful member of my family. That was fine with me, because she had quite a lot - and they're still increasing - to be vain about. TV was interesting to catch up on. The world had absorbed the resurrection details by now, and reactions were happening the whole world over, although nowhere was more affected than Corvallis, which was getting buried by the constant stream of arrivals. By Sunday night, the common estimate was that there were 100,000 extra people in the area. That would've tripled the population of Corvallis, except that many of them couldn't fit into the town so were scattered throughout the surrounding area. Even spread out, it was FAR too many people. There's a lot to be said for private enterprise, because entrepreneurs were flocking from all directions to provide goods and services to this captive, desperate, particularly stupid market. There were tens of thousands of people who'd flown or bused in with nothing more than the clothes on their back and the money in their wallet. No doubt they'd thought that God would provide, but as it turned out, their enormously overpriced provisions required cash. Half the RVs in the Pacific Northwest were heading to Corvallis, or were already here if the entrepreneurs had been particularly quick acting. They were being rented out for truly exorbitant amounts, or even auctioned off to the most desperate bidders. Portable toilet suppliers were sitting on a gold mine, and people were pissing their money away to buy bottled water at ten to twenty times the normal price because they couldn't get into town themselves. Entrepreneurs of the petty criminal variety were becoming all too common too, with the local cops snowed under already. The National Guard was helping stop looting in the downtown area, but many homes were being broken into throughout Corvallis. International reaction was all over the map. The Latin American countries were particularly volatile, with very large marches for and against believing my bullshit. That I'd said Mary wasn't divine was especially upsetting to the Latinos. If two marches met, the result was very noisy and highly disorderly. On the other extreme, the Vatican was VERY quiet. The Catholic Church was still in emergency session and was urging calm at this moment of crisis and/or moment of transcendent glory. They weren't sure which yet, but they'd give the world the benefit of their infallible wisdom when they'd finally reached a decision. You'd think that if anyone could place a quick prayer through to God to find out the truth about a godly event, it'd be the Pope, but apparently not. Strange, isn't it? Israel had adopted an air of intolerable superiority and was telling its neighbors, "You're gonna get yours now!" (or whatever the Yiddish equivalent was). Most of the Arabs shrugged and said, "Insha'Allah" ("If it's God's will") and carried on doing whatever they were doing. That was often firing missiles into Israel, who launched various military responses back, so both nations were carrying on doing what they normally did, only with even more religious fervor than before. Otherwise, reactions were difficult to categorize. In Bursa, a city in the northwest of Turkey, the imam of a mosque spoke out against me. Later that night (their time) the mosque was destroyed by explosives that a Christian group claimed responsibility for. The news about that caused several other Turkish Christian groups to encourage the Muslims to declare a jihad against me, but most Turkish Muslims instead heaped disapproval on the destroyed mosque's imam. It was a confused situation. I was happy that the reaction of Muslims in general seemed to be either quite muted or even outright supportive. I didn't think that was just because they were being out-shouted by the very un-muted Christians, but because what Archangel Michael had said was less offensive to them. I hoped my impression was true, as that would reduce my potential number of enemies by about one and half billion, which would be good. Because of all the manipulative Fear Rhetoric of our politicians, I'd been taught a fearful attitude to Muslims, and I was noticeably relieved that those 'scary' people hadn't reacted badly to my resurrection. [[Much of what I'd said and done during my "Angel Plan" had been much more consistent with Islamic theology than Christian; not by intent, but the coincidental agreements still pleased the Muslims. They believe in "One True God", without any of that "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" Trinity silliness. Their faith is simpler and in many respects easier to swallow, for examples, they don't believe Jesus was divine, or even that their version of the Devil is divine. That was reasonably close to what Archangel Michael had said. Muslims believe that angels are creatures of light (so the Guardian Angel was spot on!) which can make themselves look like anything they want, that they were created to serve God including by collecting the souls of the dying (so it made sense that an angel took Ron's and brought Mark's soul back), and although sentient, angels don't have freewill. The last point was in theological conflict with my statements, but the rest were pretty good matches. Rather than being divine, Jesus is considered a prophet, along with Muhammad, Abraham, Moses and many others. Prophets are considered as close to perfect as humans can get, and they receive messages from God delivered by angels. It wasn't a difficult stretch for Muslims to imagine me as a prophet-in-the-making. I clearly still had flaws, such as my incorrect attitude to sex, but I was young yet. My very studious attitude and academic accomplishments were good signs for my future development. In short, Muslims didn't have anywhere near as many problems with my "Angel Plan" as Christians did, so they didn't feel as personally threatened by it. My remoteness from the Muslim countries helped with that too.]] My impression from watching TV was that I'd underestimated the magnitude of the response to my resurrection. I had known that many people would think it was a big deal; I'd just expected that most of them would think that from the comfort of their living rooms rather than making the effort of getting off their asses and coming to Corvallis to be damned nuisances in person. I was hoping that when my continual denials of being divine sank in, the interest would go away. I hoped the "going away" would happen as fast as it'd risen, but I knew it'd probably take quite a lot longer, although there were some signs of it starting. For example, the "He's an alien!" proponents were disappearing. The people who'd initially leaped to the conclusion that I was the first step in an alien invasion had reconsidered and calmed down. The TV comments about that theory were quite disparaging now, pointing out that Majestic Countdown had been active all over America for so long, and he'd been so incredibly capable of getting into computers and secret files, that any alien spying could have been completed long ago without the need for the current public spectacle, especially because no one could suggest a sensible reason why aliens would want to create a false Mark Anderson (obviously no one believed aliens could resurrect the real Mark Anderson). If aliens wanted to insert false people into the world, any of the hundreds of thousands of people that go missing every year would be a much easier choice. ------- Chapter 355: Assassination Attempt Monday, June 4, 2007 We all had breakfast together, in front of the TV to catch up with the latest breaking news. "Breaking" being the operative word, because things were being broken all around the world: store windows, marchers' heads, church attendance records, and every hope I had for people being sensible. The parents had already informed their workplaces that their going to work was going to be problematic for a while. Vanessa and Mom could do MAF's work from home. Vanessa had employed very good staff for MAF who were easily capable of taking up the slack, especially with Vanessa being available on the phone and by email. OSU's lectures had finished, so Prof's work would've mainly involved students panicking over something or other. He got a secretary to put a note on his office door telling people to email him. Dad was the only 'real' worker, and such was the chaos that it wouldn't have been a good idea for the father of the resurrected boy to go out in public. He called his work to talk to his boss about it, but that guy transferred the call upstairs because he knew the owner would enjoy talking to Dad. After Dad explained why he'd called, the big boss said, "We have bereavement leave, but I'm not sure what the company policy is on resurrections. You'd better stay at home with your son until I work it out. Is he REALLY your son?" "He sure is. There's no one like Mark, and no way anyone could pretend to be him. It's an amazing situation." Mom had been on the phone to the Department of Education people even before breakfast, pestering them on my behalf. They'd made the mistake of giving her their cellphone numbers after one of my school's earlier contretemps with us, making it easy for Mom to get on their case first thing. They quickly already agreed that the rest of us who went to school could have "dead week" at home rather than at school. Kids are still meant to go to classes for the last week before exams so the teachers can review the year's work with everyone, but the Board didn't want 100,000 people frantically pursuing the relatives of the resurrected boy onto school grounds, so that was an easy decision for them. They weren't so sure what to do about me though, and would be having an emergency meeting later this morning to discuss that problem. Ava and I did the breakfast dishes. Apparently it's good for all us kids' characters, despite the fact that our characters are all very different - how unlucky is that! Everyone else got on with their activities. Julia was especially under pressure because it was her final year of school and her parents wanted her to do well in her exams. She would of course, but her parents' idea of "do well" was a high standard. All of the parents were probably thinking that of all the weeks that we could've been locked up inside our home, the study week before the end-of-year exams had to be the best possible time. Ava and I were walking hand in hand back to the Kids' House, chatting about nothing in particular, when my proximity sense showed the bone in Ava's left upper-arm suddenly burst apart. I'd just started thinking when I heard a loud {CRACK} from the direction of Dimple Hill, to my right. #3: Having multiple minds can be FANTASTICALLY useful in emergencies: I let go of Ava's left hand, grabbed her body with both my arms while several NP-points lifted us both and accelerated us rapidly behind the nearest bushes. Another mind created the Guardian Angel to justify the use of NP because the damned UAV was watching. Another mind had the idea of creating ten max-sized, max-brightness, overlapping Guardian Angels, up and down the path from us, obscuring the sniper's sight. Another mind created a couple of dark blue human-shaped light blob dummy targets over us and had them 'run' down the path away from us to draw any more fire. Another mind pulled my cellphone off my clip, hit speed-dial 9 (that calls Paul's number; speed-dial 9 being our local version of 9-1-1). That mind held the phone to the side of my head as we flew. Another mind thought, #14: Another mind thought, #1: Another mind thought, #15: Another mind created a sight blob to search for the shooter, but couldn't see him. He was probably at least a mile away given the topography of the land and there being a cordon a half-mile from the west wall of the property. {CRACK}. Only a second had passed since the first shot, but Ava and I were already more than ten yards away from where she'd been hit. I had no idea where the second bullet went, which was VERY fine with me. #12: #All: Ava was just starting to draw a breath, her mouth opening ready to scream. I said, "You're safe, darling. You were..." Ava started screaming. {CRACK}. Another miss, but Ava screamed even louder. Our alarm siren went off, adding even more noise. My families were ordered and trained to run to the panic rooms the instant this particular siren sound occurred (and most other siren sounds too). Paul had made a BIG deal about it, even telling Mom, "If Carol gets shot and she's lying on the ground at your feet, you leave her and RUN for the panic room. There's nothing you can do for Carol in the few seconds it'll take one of my guys to get to her. Not only that, but my guy could run up to Carol, scoop her up, and run her into cover. He could do that in a second. But if you're fucking around with Carol, you and my guys are all going to be sitting ducks stuck in the open, and you'll have stupidly gotten yourself and several of us killed. You'll turn a mess into fucking disaster. If you EVER don't run for the panic room when that siren goes off, I'll rip you a new one." We'd all been given instructions that forceful. The siren was sounding, but I was too busy to head for a panic room now. Ava and I sunk below the back of the ridge, so we were totally safe from the sniper now. I reduced our sideways (relative to the ridgeline) velocity, turning us right to accelerate down the gully toward the Staff Quarters. Paul answered his phone, "Yes?" Hoping he could hear me over Ava's screams and the siren, I yelled, "Sniper on Dimple Hill. Ava's hit once in her upper-arm. The angel's flying us down the gully. I'm guessing to the Staff Quarters for medical help. Ignore the lights on the path; they're an angel special effect. Everyone else is inside either house, I think." They'd better all be inside, or Paul would rip them a new one. "I see you." We were coming to the end of gully. Paul hung up. I created dozens of max-sized, max-brightness, overlapping light blobs, obscuring the entire exposed distance to the Staff Quarters. I also created several human-shaped dark blue blob stacks and had them run or fly across the gap. We zipped across the gap with them at an altitude of ten feet. If the sniper fired blind into the area, he'd hopefully aim below us at one of the running pairs of targets. Maybe thirty seconds had passed since the first shot, but the staff were already boiling out of their Quarters, and those on the grounds were running flat out. The procedure for a shooter on the hill has the first reaction of securing the principals, which is the first reaction to almost everything. The next phase, depending on the situation, is nearly always for our guards to go into full-on guarding mode, i.e., they hunker down and surround us with a highly armed and alert defensive shield. There's an optional - meaning unlikely - possibility in the procedures manual which has some of our guards sally forth to go after the shooter. This time Paul sent six guards out to do that, as they were near our dirt bikes and we were already in a security alert so all our guys were wearing bulletproof vests and were armed. It took almost no time for the six guys to run to the bikes, mount up and roar out of our gate, which was re-locked behind them. With the obvious threat of a sniper on Dimple Hill posed, our staff had already practiced responding to it several times, including practicing riding dirt bikes all over the hill. They knew their way around it, and the security center staff will already be directing each of the riders to different locations on the hill to block the main routes off it, and then to start searching inward. Most of the hill, especially the side nearest us, is used as the McDonald Forest. It's research forest for OSU, so is more like an open wood and a normal forest. According to our manual, other guards were to scan the hill with binoculars looking for movement. There wasn't much hope of that, but it was deemed worth a try. It had a good chance of spotting movement if there was a large number of attackers. In this case, there was a half-mile radius cordon around our property, so there'd be two or three dozen (I guessed) National Guard soldiers in the woods around that side of Dimple Hill's base that was near us. That was probably partly why Paul had let our guys go, because the cordon of soldiers kept our house safe from a massed assault, and our guys roaring up the hill would have a lot of support. Presumably that support was already running toward the sound of gunfire. If so, they'll be creating plenty of movement, and hopefully some gunfire too, if they find the fucker. I worried that the National Guardsmen might mistake our guards on their bikes as the baddie escaping, but there was nothing I could do about that. I was busy decelerating Ava while trying to cushion her injured arm from my maneuver. The guards coming out of the Quarters had seen Ava and me coming, and Paul had probably warned them we were on the way too. All the light blob effects I had going confused them, but they understood me yelling, "Ava's been shot." Her cries conveyed that same message very effectively. Getting the principals to cover was top priority, so the guards that saw us quickly blocked others from running out the door, leaving it free for the angel to drop me and Ava into it, where we were grabbed and pulled inside. "She took one shot in her arm. The bone's shattered and the bullet passed through." I couldn't think of anything else useful to say, and there wasn't much else that I should legitimately know, so I stopped talking. Our guards knew exactly what to do. Ava was laid on the kitchen table and three of them moved into medical action so smoothly that I immediately felt a lot better. Two more guards adopted defensive positions to cover any baddies coming in the doorway, which would've been hard because there were still guards coming up from their bedrooms, seeing the situation and looking VERY unhappy as they were running through the room and out the door. The guards were so unhappy in part because Ava is well liked by them. She spends a fair bit of time with them, is officially single, and enjoys flirting with them a little, although it didn't take them long to learn that light flirting was all they were ever going to get. In some respects that made it even more fun for them because it was safe fun; although that's not as much fun as unsafe fun would've been. Paul didn't come in, but there was no need for him to. His guys could look after Ava and me, while Paul had the whole operation to coordinate. I canceled the light blobs outside, and supervised the medical treatment by keeping an eye on Ava's vitals - as my proximity sense showed them to me - holding her other hand and distracting her with sweet words and kisses on her cheek. She'd recovered from the initial shock, and was able to get some words out now, asking, "I've been shot?" "I'm afraid so, darling. One shot in your upper-arm. You'll recover easily, but I bet it hurts like a bitch now." "God yeah! Was he ... ARGH!" one of the guards working on her had moved her arm while doctoring it. When she'd caught her breath, Ava completed, "Was he aiming for you?" "No one could have a reason to aim at someone as lovely as you. I should've taken the tunnel..." "Too pretty." I knew she meant the springtime garden, but I said, "Yes you are, but you're still pretty in the tunnel too." One of the guards had radioed to tell Paul what Ava's condition was, making it sound non-serious, and suggested that they use one of the SUVs to take Ava to the hospital. Paul apparently agreed. The guard then picked up a wall phone, looked up the hospital's number on a list attached to the wall, called them, made VERY sure they knew this was "THE Ava West, who lives with the Andersons and Williams. She was shot in an assassination attempt and she needs immediate orthopedic surgery." After he was put through to the right person, he effectively dictated the first couple of pages of the medical chart for them, finishing with, "We don't need an ambulance; we're bringing her in ourselves now." An SUV pulled up outside as close as possible to the front door. A couple of tables and sofas were carried out and placed to obscure the SUV and the gap between it and the doorway. Three of the guards carried Ava out gently, with other guards standing between her and the obscuring furniture as an additional shield. I tried to join them but was blocked by one of the guards who'd been guarding the doorway. He said, "Paul's orders are that once Ava's on her way, we take you downstairs and protect you there. There's at least one shooter still at large and you're probably his target. You're not going outside until the all-clear has been sounded." He was right and there was no way I was going to win that argument, so I gave in gracefully. I'd not had a chance to say "Goodbye" to Ava, so I'd do it with NP. I created a sight blob outside to find her. She was lying on her side in the back of the SUV covered by several bulletproof vests, with heavily armed security guards all around her. Another reason I couldn't have gone with her was there being no empty seat. One of our female guards was beside Ava, with the rest of the SUV packed with male guards, most with a weapon in their hands. It was an intimidating sight. They would have to get through the cordon to get to the hospital. As stupid as the people waiting outside the cordon were, I couldn't see any of them being stupid enough to get in the way of this team. I gave Ava several light strokes on her cheek. She smiled at my touch. Two more guys with drawn pistols climbed onto either the side of the SUV, hanging off it drove out the gate, guns pointing forward ready for any more trouble. That was probably against several traffic regulations, although I had no memory of any reference to it in the Oregon Driver Manual. I had a feeling any cops they passed wouldn't remember any regulations our guys could be breaking either. I was locked inside the bedroom of one of the guards I was with. Two inside with me, two more in the hallway outside. I asked one of my babysitters, "Has there been any other trouble?" "No, just what happened to you and Ava." "Are the rest of my families in their panic rooms?" "Yeah. It's just a matter of clearing the area now. We've called for a police helicopter with FLIR - that's a Forward Looking Infrared vision system." I knew what it was, but I didn't want to reveal any military knowledge so I kept quiet. "They'll search the woods and have a good chance of locating the shooter. The roads are being blocked so he won't get away that way. There haven't been any reports of engine sounds, so he probably doesn't have a motorbike. There are a large number of mountain bike trails so he could have one of those, but if he goes downhill from his spot he'll encounter the National Guard. If he heads for the top so he can take the trails down the other side, then there's a good chance our guys will intercept him. The odds are against him unless he's very good. We've run this scenario several times ourselves, and a shooter is normally caught." #5: #10: #29: #1: My guards asked me details about what had happened to me and Ava, what the angel had done, what the HUGE lights had been, where the angel was now, and whatever else occurred to them. A few minutes into that conversation, very muffled by our being underground, we heard a faint burst of gunfire, one shot of which sounded noticeably sharper. I looked inquiringly at my guards, hoping they'd gotten word through their earpieces. The chatty one said, "That sounded good." "No word from your earpieces yet?" "Those weren't our guns so it might take a while to find out." A minute later my guards' body postures changed as they listened to their earpieces, then one of them told me, "The shooter's dead. National Guardsmen got him; no friendlies hurt. The police are heading to the location." "GREAT! Serve the fucker right! Can I go to the hospital to be with Ava now?" I started walking toward the door, assuming that I could leave. It turned out that I couldn't, because, "There might be more of them." I'd read the Security Procedures Manual so I knew that, I just hadn't thought of it in my eagerness to be with Ava. It took another three hours before the hill was searched thoroughly enough for the principals to be let out. By which time we'd learned: The shooter hadn't tried to make an escape after his first shots. He'd been wearing a ghillie suit and had apparently thought he'd be able to hide through any search of the area. A National Guardsman had spotted and challenged him. The fuckwit had tried to bring his long rifle to bear on the Guardsman, who had a different idea and an automatic rifle that was already pointing at its target. The local commander of the National Guard had deployed several of his Iraq vets to the hill, suspecting that if any combat occurred, it'd be there. It was one of them who'd done the world a favor. Ava was in surgery having her upper-arm put back together. She'd be fine, but with a fair amount of metalwork in her arm until her bone filled in the gap. ^ [Subsequent developments were: First, and definitely the most annoying, I wasn't allowed to go to the hospital to see Ava. It was considered too dangerous because of all the potential idiots out there who'd become highly excited if they saw me. I was also told that there was no need for me to go because Ava was going to be fine, but that didn't stop everyone else in my families going to see her. I talked to her on the phone sometimes, although not as often as I wanted as I became VERY busy over the next few days (that'll be explained in due course). Ava wasn't the type of person to let a physical injury depress her. The psychological issue of being at risk just by being near me was something we all discussed over the next few days. Ava, from her hospital bed, summed it up, "There's no way I'm leaving! I LOVE all of you and I love living with you." No one else was going to leave either, so we settled for using the tunnels exclusively until we could get many tall trees planted to obscure the view from any part of the overlooking hill to all the areas of our property where members of the families went. Dad rang up a company and told them to immediately assign as many workers and rent as many choppers as it took to transplant mature trees as fast as possible to our property. They obviously didn't understand what "as fast as possible" meant because they quoted a cost and said it'd take four to five weeks to do. Dad doubled the value of their quote and promised a half million-dollar bonus if they got it done in four days. That got them into the right mindset, and into a great deal of action. The trees cut off some of our view, but they cut off sniper fire from Dimple Hill too, which was considered a net gain. We got the company to plant the trees to cover our most frequently visited areas first, so it only took a day before we were able to start walking in our most usual open areas again, such as between the two homes. As you'll read soon, something happened which messed up the schedule before the four days were up, but that wasn't the company's fault so they got their bonus when they were able to complete the job later. The shooter's identity and details were subsequently released. He was a gun- and religious-nut. I'd write "that's a bad combination," but gun-nut combined with any other type of nut is a bad combination. There was plenty of evidence of his mental state in his house, showing that he'd had a pathological hatred of the Devil, and had presumably 'thought' (using the word religiously and sarcastically) that I needed to be sent back to Hell. His ghillie suit wouldn't have hid him from a FLIR-equipped helicopter, but he'd probably felt safe because he thought Jesus was looking after him. It seems that he'd infiltrated the area during the night, found a good location at first light, and then had waited for me to appear. There was no explanation for why he hadn't shot at me on the way up to breakfast. I'd walked up with all my girls, so maybe he'd been unable to get a clear shot, or maybe he thought he was a virtuous guy and didn't want to risk killing someone innocent, only the Devil. You can think of your own reason for why he'd taken the risk of hitting Ava on our return trip; I'm only speculating anyway, and doing that about the thought processes of such people is largely a futile exercise. I felt REALLY pissed off that I couldn't get any revenge on his ass. I badly wanted to make him suffer for a long and very painful time, and then to kill him, but the fucker was already dead. I felt badly cheated. I did decide on one thing though: the fucking UAV had to go! I was probably redirecting my frustrated anger and desire for revenge onto the UAV, because I was DAMNED mad at it. For a start, the fucking Government had no right to spy on us. Plus, the UAV could either seriously restrict my possible actions in an emergency, or could catch me doing something revealing because an emergency required it. As it happened, I hadn't needed to, but I could've EASILY found the shooter had I been able to fly up to the hill. I would've used two huge, infrared-sensing radio blobs to look for him. At the speed they and I can move, I'd have covered the whole side of the hill that faced us in very little time. In the next emergency, my being able to react freely might be critically important. I also decided that it'd be a good idea for me to learn how to fly faster than Mach one, again in case of an emergency. That could wait for a while, until Ava can pilot a plane for me. Getting rid of the UAV wasn't going to wait that long though. (Both events are described below, where they chronologically fit.) I wanted to use a TV interview to attack the churches for being so fucking irresponsible in the way they tell people to hate and fear the Devil. The Devil doesn't exist, so the violence-inducing emotions that the churches deliberately create have no outlet, but the churches keep churning out the "Fight the Devil" literature that the internal walls of the fucking sniper's home were plastered with. That can and demonstrably does unbalance people, and it's a REALLY bad thing to have unbalanced people motivated by hatred and fear while also full of self-righteous confidence that God is on their side. It's almost guaranteed to lead to tragic violence. As much as I would've thoroughly enjoyed RIPPING into the churches for their irresponsible evil, Vanessa pointed out that if we'd told the church to go soft on the Devil, it'd convince many of the religious nutcases that we were working for the Devil to undermine resistance to his evil influences, or some such crap. So we had to keep those thoughts to ourselves. There was nothing we could say that would help the situation. People who already thought I was the Devil were highly irrational so there was no hope of getting them to change their minds and we didn't want to risk inflaming them any further. When we were interviewed about the shooting, we could only make the obvious types of statements, which were deeply unsatisfying and totally pointless.] ^ The Corvallis Board of Education had an emergency meeting Monday morning, calling Mom afterward to tell her that they'd decided to let me take the exams, and that they'd decide what to do once they had the results. I wasn't pleased with that weasel non-decision, but Vanessa told me, "Don't worry. All they're doing is agreeing with what we want in a way that avoids their taking any responsibility for it. If you fail, they'll say that they never would've given you permission anyway. If you pass, they'll congratulate themselves for letting you take the exams and say they have no choice but to consider you as having graduated." "Isn't there a chance that I'll do all the study and take the exams, but they'll decide against them being valid?" "It's a legal and a logical possibility, but it's not a political one. They'd look stupid making you waste a whole year to study subjects you've already passed the exams for. They don't want you at school anyway, and they'd especially not want you if you were bored out of your skull because you know all the subjects already. They're giving you what you want in a way that covers their asses. All you have to do now is get studying. Can you get copies of the notes you need?" "I'm sure I can, but if I can't, who's going to be brave enough to say no to Julia asking on my behalf?" I have thirty two minds to read about thirty two weeks of schoolwork. Actually, more like the equivalent of twenty four weeks of notes, as Math and Physics would be credited to me based on my almost perfect OSU results in those two subjects. Before the DHS had kidnapped me, I'd done about a third of my senior year's schooling. That was for the previous school year but most of the material would be the same as this year's. I'd still need to re-read everything to spot any changes, but that would go quickly. In terms of the volume of reading, one mind could read three-quarters of a week's notes in a single overnight session. It wouldn't be as easy as that because I'd often be slowed down by not having read the prerequisite information. It was hard to imagine that it'd slow me down by more than a factor of three though, so if I collected all the notes today and tomorrow, then early morning sessions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings would be sufficient to allow me to easily finish all my reading in plenty of time for the exams starting the following week. (You may remember that several hundred pages above, I mentioned that two merges ago I'd been able to do the online lecture reading for 3 degrees per year using 8 screens. I'd said that after the most recent merges, giving me the ability to read 32 screens simultaneously, I'd be able to do 12 degrees' reading per year. Then I'd said that I'd actually be able to do 30 or more degrees' reading, possibly up to 45 if I worked hard at it. I invited you - my readers - to guess how it was possible for me to achieve so much more. Here comes the reason.) The above calculation's result of three overnight sessions was incorrect in one very important respect. The "three" part was right, but the "overnight session" aspect wasn't relevant now. I used to have study sessions for about six hours during the wee small hours of every night, but that's no longer all I can do. Now that I can operate with two simultaneous sight sources, I can move around the house using my body, eyes and one mind, while thirty one minds are studying with a sight blob in my secret study. I could make love to my girls for 22.5 hours per day, while thirty one minds were studying nonstop, with frequent rotations of my mental assignments to avoid a mutiny. I'd gone from 7 minds being able to read for 6 hours per day (without intruding on the rest of my day), to 31 minds for 22.5 hours, a 16.6-times improvement. Three degrees per year potentially becomes fifty, if I want to hang around within 400 feet of my secret study every day. I was going to CREAM the schoolwork! Or to put it another way, 31 minds x 22.5 hours of reading = 700 man-hours of reading per day. In two days, that'd achieve as many hours (1,400) as a WHOLE YEAR'S attendance at school! Given that at least 75% of school time is non-productive, I was going to CREAM the schoolwork! I'll be able to read all the textbooks and class notes for every subject in less than one day, while doing anything else around the house. [By early May, about three weeks ago, I'd finished reading the online lectures for every BS Math, BS Physics, and BBA course, even the optional courses I wouldn't have elected to do for my degrees. Since then I'd been casually reading courses from other undergraduate degrees; Anthropology and History were my current favorite areas, but I was reading from other subjects too. I was avoiding advanced Math, Physics or Business courses because I didn't want to accidentally seem too knowledgeable when I took the undergraduate exams in those subjects. I was doing my OSU reading mostly during my "overnight sessions". I was awake at those times and no one else was, so I might as well read interesting courses. During the other hours of the day, when there were other things to do, it was those other things that my minds tended to concentrate on. But if I was somewhat bored at home, I'd send a spare sight blob to my secret study and some of my minds would pass the time reading whatever courses they were into. That didn't happen often, maybe only 10% of the time. The damned Government's spying made me want to keep my studying rate low key, and there was no sense of urgency over studying as I was going to run out of interesting OSU courses in a few months anyway.] All I had to do was borrow the class notes and textbooks in the morning, then return them in the early evening. I'd have to send someone from our staff to get them because there were too many Idiots prowling around Corvallis for me to risk appearing in public. The bulk of my autobiography before this time was for when I was in the 10th grade with Julia, and those 10th graders were the students that I'd socialized with the most, and gotten to know best. I'd jumped a grade ahead of them; then lost a year to the DHS, CIA and being Ron Fisher; so they're once again in the same grade as me, the 12th. Thus I had plenty of names and numbers I could call to ask to borrow their notes. Julia told me a few names of people she thought were doing each of the subjects I wanted to take exams for, and I started calling them. The calls took quite a long time, because they had LOTS of questions, "Are you really Mark?", etc., etc. At one time in the conversation I said, "I'll get one of our security guards to return everything to you later the same evening, so you won't be without that subject's notes for long." Julia assumed I was being a wimp and overly considerate to the note-lender, so she interrupted to urge me not to return them so quickly. "It's fine, Julia. One day will be enough." "Photocopying whole textbooks is a pain. You should keep them as long as you need to get through all the notes." It wasn't worth arguing about, and I didn't want to explain my improved efficiency to Julia right now, so I told the person on the other end of the telephone, "I'll get them back to you quickly, in plenty of time for your studying." That was fine. For the second conversation I just said I'd return them very quickly. That conversation was still a long one, because that person wanted to ask all the same questions about me that the first person did. I interrupted the questions to check with Julia that it was okay to have all my note lenders come to breakfast tomorrow so I could answer all their questions at once. Julia agreed, so I passed the invitation on. He wanted to know whether he could bring some friends. "ONE friend. You'll have to let me or Julia know who it is in advance and both of you bring photo IDs because our security guys have to be very strict at the moment. If you try to bring more people, security won't let them in, so don't bother trying." Then I called the other people on my list, to extend the same invitation and note-borrowing request to them. I asked for the notes of two people per subject, partly so I learned each subject well, partly to be pretty sure at least one person from each subject would turn up, as it would be more efficient if I could read all the notes at the same time. I assured them that they'd be inside the tunnel or inside the bulletproof house the whole time, so didn't have to fear a repeat of this morning's shooting drama. They were eager to come. Even if everyone turned up and I got two sets of class notes for every class, I'd still be able to read them all before the early evening. That'd help me get good grades, not that I was worried about that. I'd been a little worried a few days ago because the school subjects all had some proportion of coursework that counted toward their final grades, none of which I'd done so my grades would suffer. In some cases, when the subject had a sizable proportion of course work, my grades would suffer quite badly. But that was no longer an issue. I wasn't going to be doing the exams as a student of the school, but as someone who'd been home-schooled and the Board of Education had agreed that only my final exam grades would count. I'd have thirty two minds doing the exams for me, so I didn't expect much difficulty getting good exam results. And my final school grades didn't matter much anyway, as I somehow doubted that I'd have a future employer who'd be looking closely at them. If that happened, and he was disappointed in a grade, I'd explain that I'd been hindered by death for all but two weeks of the school year. In another education note, after discussing the situation with me, Prof called the Dean of OSU, asking him, "When Mark was kidnapped by the DHS last academic year, he was partway through several subjects. He wants to take the exams for those courses next week. We're stuck at home until the outside world calms down so he'll have time to read this year's lecture notes before the exams. After those exams, he'd like to carry on with studying and taking the exams of as many of his remaining courses as possible, especially those without coursework requirements. Can you look into those please?" There were some issues, but there'd never been any doubt that the Dean would be very happy to help. ^ At 1:45pm, just before the priests were due to arrive, we got a call from our family doctor to let us know that we were a family: that Mom's and Dad's swabs were my swab's mother and father, respectively. Dad looked relieved, NOT - for those of you with suspicious minds - because he was in any doubt of my paternity - you should know my mom well enough by now not to have any doubts either - but because he didn't really understand how fundamental DNA was and all the media hype we hear about "DNA Testing" had caused him to worry that I'd somehow fail that test. Mom and Dad were self-evidently not Ron Fisher's parents, so the only possible explanation was that Ron's genes had been changed into Mark's. Admittedly the only possible explanation was an impossible one, but all the other explanations were even more impossible, so we considered that proved. Our doctor faxed us the report. [One of the future consequences of this was that the Fisher family sued us to get their hands on Ron's millions. By then our lawyers had created more legal hurdles for any claimants to get over. They showed some of them and Ron's Will to the Fisher's lawyer. He had a long, difficult battle ahead of him trying to get the court to overturn the documents Ron and Carol (countersigned by Mom and Dad) had executed, and at any stage during that battle we could petition the court to have Ron declared dead in which case his Will would trump the Fisher's action. They had no chance of getting their hands on any of Ron's money, which meant their lawyer's share would inevitably be zero. He withdrew from the case. The Fishers tried another lawyer, but the same thing happened. The Fisher's gave up. With or without Ron's being legally declared dead, our lawyers had no difficulty arranging for Ron's money to drift into Carol's direct possession. With the Fishers out of the picture and the IRS not caring what legal money games we played because we didn't have to pay tax on it anyway, it wasn't hard to transfer all the money over to Carol.] ------- Chapter 356: Multi-Denominational Religious Interview Monday, June 4, 2007 (Continued) The three religions' priests arrived in convoy a few minutes after 2pm, escorted by police and filmed by several film crews. They exited their vehicles, all dressed in their various types of regalia, as such people do. Led by the Catholics, they marched regally to our front gate, clearly expecting to have it thrown open before them. There was a problem though, as there were five Catholic priests. The gate didn't open, thrown or otherwise. The collective group of priests came to a stop in front of the gate, where one of our guards spoke to them through the bars, "We were told to let delegations of three through. Are two of you staying outside?" The Catholic Bishop answered, "It is important that we all examine the boy." "Please wait while I call the house for instructions." The priests didn't have much choice about waiting, considering they were on the wrong side of an un-thrown, locked gate. I'd seen the arrival in a radio blob, so I took the intercom call. I was tempted to reduce the Catholic quota to two, but that was probably too mean and perhaps also too much like what Archangel Michael would've done, so instead I told our guard, "Delegations of three only. Two of the Catholics have to remain outside. If they can't decide quickly, open the pedestrian gate and let the Muslims and Jews in. When the Catholics finally get their arrogance under control, you can let three of them in. Remember a CNN camera is allowed in too." "Yes. He's already introduced himself." The guard took the news back to the priests, where it wasn't received with good grace. His Grace explained to the guard that the four other Catholic priests were all specialists in different areas of Catholic theology and they all had to examine me to rule on whether I was legitimate or not. The Bishop told our guard to call me back and explain this to me. Our guard already had a good clue what my attitude would be from my saying "When the Catholics finally get their arrogance under control", so he moved sideways to the pedestrian gate, opened it, and invited, "The Muslims and Jews can enter. When the Catholic delegation is down to three, they may enter." The guard raised his voice to call, "Gage, you can come too," he being the CNN cameraman. The Muslims and Jews had no hesitation in coming forward and through the gate. Gage came running too. The Catholics had a hurried conference, with the Bishop indicating which two priests were to remain behind. Three Catholics followed Gage through the gate. An ABC cameraman tried to join the group, telling our guard, "ABC got a call inviting us to provide a cameraman today." Our guard told him, "Get lost." We'd thought that it would look too suspicious to the more religiously stupid public if we drove the priests out of sight into the tunnel to take the elevator up, because only evil people go underground. The Idiots would probably think that we were possessing the priests with demons, or some such other crap. The walk from the gate up to the Adults' House would be too difficult for unfit, old men, so we had three electric carts ready to take priests and several security guards up to the house. Gage leaped on the back of the Catholic cart, probably hoping to record some interesting conversation. The carts made their way up one of our paths. Our security had erected a metal detector 'doorway' in the Adults' House's foyer. All the clerics were invited to pass through it, and with all the gewgaws some of them were wearing, and were forced to divest, getting a clean reading from them took several minutes. They were important personages in their churches, and a couple of them weren't pleased to be treated with suspicion, so you can imagine how they reacted when the next stage was to pat them down. Paul responded to their anger with, "People who proudly identify themselves as being of the same faiths as you have called for Mark's death." He let them draw their own conclusions from that. Meanwhile, Gage got a more thorough patting down and search, including his camera being carefully examined. I noticed that he didn't get his camera back until processing all the others had finished, so he hadn't been able to film our being impolite to them. Everyone gathered in the living room, where my family and I were already waiting for them. Several of the security guards joined us, just in case. During the introductions, the Catholic bishop took the opportunity to immediately insist that it was important that the two priests left behind at the gate join us. I answered, "Important to you perhaps, but not to me. We invited equal numbers of each of your religions to be fair. Your wanting special treatment is lowering my opinion of you." "We're not asking for an unfair preference, but to be allowed to perform the tests that are necessary to examine your claims." "Why does it take five of you to perform the tests?" "Because there are many different types of tests..." He started listing all the different types of tests, throwing out polysyllabic words one after the other. All sounded impressive, religious and nonsensical. If you can imagine a bunch of VERY highly educated medical professors discussing the state of the art in their specialist subject, what the Bishop was saying was as incomprehensible as that. It was a never-ending stream of polysyllabic jargon. #14: #22: #17: #18: #1: #4: I let the Bishop get to the end of his list, then I said, "If it takes you that long just to list the types of tests, I imagine the tests themselves will take a very long time?" "They're VERY important. What you're claiming is the greatest religious event for 2,000 years..." I interrupted, "The EVENT was certainly of great religious significance, but I am not. If you saw Jesus walking on water, would you want to spend hours examining the water? I'm a teenage boy of no personal religious significance. I don't go to church, or to anti-church for those of you who think I'm Evil Incarnate. I invited you here for a little casual chat. It was arrogantly presumptuous and incorrect of you to assume that I would waste God knows how many hours or days of my time for the sake of your unscientific tests. I have no interest whatsoever in having a religious role. I've got my final school exams starting in one week and I'm terribly behind in my studying. For the last year I've spent too much time lying around doing nothing..." "You don't understand. You..." "YOU don't understand! You are in my home and you do NOT lay down the rules for what I must or must not do. If you continue to misbehave so arrogantly and impolitely, I'll ask our guards to eject you from the property. You may think your fancy robes, gewgaws of office, and deluded self-importance give you the right to judge me, but your judgments mean nothing to me. God personally sent me an angel to care for me, so I'm assuming that I've already passed every religious test that I need to. Unless you're so arrogant that you think your tests are more important than God's?" He wasn't going to give up so easily, "We've yet to determine whether your guardian came from God." "I'm perfectly willing to discuss other logical possibilities with you, but I am NOT willing to put up with your arrogant belief that you can march in here and treat me however you wish. Even God and His angels weren't as arrogantly demanding as you are, and I know what that makes me think about you. -- It was best to change the subject, so I said, "Before we start the discussion, my parents want the cameraman to record something for them." Mom and Dad described the cheek-swab tests, showed the results, and stated that there was no doubt that Ron's body now contained Mark's DNA. Mom added, "You'll see that the test gives the gender of our child as a male, so it can't have come from Carol or Donna. Steven and I have only ever had one son, who was Mark." Dad had a comment that amused me, "Ron was nearly three and a half years older than Mark. If he'd been our baby, Fely and I would've been seventeen when she gave birth to him. She wouldn't even let me hold her hand until we were seniors. Either Fely and I had a Black child in 11th grade without either of us doing ANY of the essential earlier activities or noticing her pregnancy, or God has done what the email said, and has changed Ron's DNA into Mark's." As there was no reporter, there were no obvious or silly questions. One of the rabbis asked, "Have you done a direct comparison between an old sample of Mark's genes and a sample from Ron's body now?" #16: Mom answered, "The paternity and maternity tests were the quickest and easiest to do. The Government kidnapped Mark a year and a half ago and we've moved house since then, so it's difficult for us to find old samples." The rabbi asked, "Wouldn't Homeland Security or the CIA have blood samples from all the tests they did on Mark?" Mom opened her mouth to answer, but I quickly NP'd it shut, gently so it wouldn't show on film. Just the touch was enough to make Mom pause. I answered instead, "They SURE took enough samples from me, so they should have. If the DHS or CIA have got samples, it'd be great if they sent one to our family doctor so he can get it tested for being identical to my current genes. His address is on the form Mom's holding. Read it out again please, Mom." Mom did so, while I crossed my fingers, hoping that some junior level lab technician would send the requested sample. Both our first and second settlement agreements with the Government required them to destroy all medical samples, so if they provided a blood sample it'd be a $216 billion gift to us. [Unfortunately they didn't send any such gift. The one time in my life I really wanted the Government to be incompetent, and they let me down!] Dad said, "We did keep Mark's clothes when we moved, so maybe when Ron's body changes enough to wear them, Mark might find old hairs we could get tested." I think Mom had realized what I'd hoped for, because she answered, "I thought of that before. Mark had short, indistinct hair so they'd be difficult to find, and then it'd be difficult to be sure we'd gotten one of his. We'd have to search out several samples, some of which would probably belong to other people so would confuse the issue. It was much quicker and easier just to test for Mark's current body's maternity and paternity." Julia added, "Besides, we aren't going to be unpacking Mark's old clothes." I asked, "Why not? The email said I should get my old body back." "They're WAY out of fashion, Mark. You'll need an ENTIRELY new set of clothes." "{Groan}. I have to go shopping with you AGAIN!" "Me, Carol, and Ava when she's better. It'll give Ava something to look forward to, to speed her recovery." I almost said, "Please don't make me go to Rocky's again!" but doing that on national TV would be a cruel thing to do to Rocky and Nigel. They're not really bad guys, and not just because they're not really guys. Instead I said, "In terms of the DNA tests, let's hope the DHS or CIA come up with an old blood sample. In terms of the clothes shopping, I wonder if God would mind sending Ron back for that day." Julia laughed, then corrected me, "It's going to take FAR longer than a single day. You need new EVERYTHING!" "God help me! I hope the Guardian Angel comes to my rescue, because that sounds like Hell to me." My joke about God sending Ron back for the day, and my last comments, would likely offend some people, but I wanted to teach people to stop being so sanctimonious about the resurrection. The sooner they stop treating it as a big deal, and ideally forget all about it, the better. I also wanted to make myself come across as an ordinary teenager: "There's nothing happening here folks. Move along." We had pre-resurrection samples from my body stored with two labs. We didn't want to mention those publicly because there was too much chance that some people would react badly, especially if they thought I might have been immortal. In which case, God knows what some idiots would do to get hold of my sperm. Nor did we want the CIA to get hold of any of my samples either. Preferring to keep those samples secret, we'll use them for before-and-after genetic verification only if it seems that the world doesn't accept that I am Mark, or if one of the labs divulges the samples' existence. To get the stupid religious meeting underway, I said, "Let's get the religious meeting underway. When we invited you here, through CNN, we didn't specify a purpose. I'm curious to know why each of you came here, what you're expecting or hoping to achieve, etc. You start," I indicated the Catholic priest nearest to my left, "and we'll go clockwise around the room." The first priest had come to help his bishop perform the tests necessary to examine the veracity of my claim to have been resurrected and having been in God's presence. I was far too smart to ask how he intended to do those things. Next was the bishop who was here to oversee the tests. I said, "Hang on a moment. You're here to 'OVERSEE the tests'. Aren't you intending to perform any of the tests yourself?" "No. The training required to administer them is unusual and specialized." "You left two testers at the gate because you didn't want to give up your seat to one of them. That's good to know. From now on I'll treat your church's tests as less important than I think your ego is." The bishop was not amused, which meant he had a pretty good idea of how important I thought his ego was. He wasn't dumb enough to argue about how important he was though. The next priest echoed the first one. Then there were the three Muslims. They also had a boss, again the one sitting in the middle. Their attitude was much more acceptable though; they admitted they were unsure what recent events meant, and had come hoping for some answers or insights. The first Jew said, "I came because I thought it'd be interesting and fun." "That's an unexpected comment. Where's all the religious profundity?" "I can do that too, but I thought you'd respond better to my first answer." He wasn't the same Jew that'd asked about the genetic testing, so that made two smart Jews so far. They were running circumcisions around the Catholics. With only a light sarcastic tone, I said, "Thinking about it from my point of view; that's an unusual approach this afternoon." The middle Jew informed us that he was a scholar of ancient Israel and was particular interested in what he could learn from me and the Guardian Angel. I told him, "I think you're likely to be sadly disappointed today, but we'll see what happens later." I nodded to the third, genetics-aware, Jew, who said, "I trained as a scientist before I became a rabbi. We thought that might provide a useful perspective." "More useful than some others, I suspect." -- To the group, I said, "Before we start our discussion proper, I'll mention that I'm allowing an hour for this conversation. It could very easily be shorter if I lose interest or suffer too much rudeness, but if it's proving useful, then it should last that long. Possibly even longer if I'm enjoying myself. I'm envisaging the first half hour being a free-form discussion during which you can get a feel for me. Then in the second half hour, each delegation can have ten minutes to say whatever they wish, within reason. I hope that's acceptable to everyone?" One of the Catholic priests said, "One hour isn't long enough to perform the tests we need to make." "In that case you've got a problem, because you're only going to get ten minutes of my undivided attention. It's your problem though, not mine. I couldn't care less whether or not you have time to do your tests. My family and I know who and what I am, and that's perfectly fine for us. -- "To start the discussion off, the bishop raised a logical possibility a few minutes ago: that the Guardian Angel that's looking after me might not have come from God. That would necessarily mean that Archangel Michael and the unnamed angel both lied, because they both said that the Guardian Angel was being sent by God. I find it hard to imagine that an angel of God could lie, so presumably the bishop was implying that God may not be involved in my experience at all. Being interested in science I'd like to believe that aliens exist, but I can't imagine that they'd be able to return a year-long dead human's mind and soul to a body. I will freely admit to not having an extensive religious knowledge, but to me, 'God did it' seems to be the only logical explanation. What other possibilities are there? Bishop, you raised the subject, so you go first." And so the discussion started. The discussion was, as a whole, three things: A load of crap. A Public Relations con job. A good test of my ability to control my temper, sarcasm and boredom. I couldn't tell them anything about hardly any of the things they most wanted to know about. According to my Angel Plan's strategy, I had no memory of God or my death and had only a few seconds in the company of an angel, but somehow the talking never stopped. Normally I'm the verbose one (you might've noticed that by now), but the nine preachers were certainly no slouches in the mouth-flapping department. They wanted the see the Guardian Angel and got the usual disappointing no-show. They wanted to know whether I could perform miracles, to which I said, "I can breathe. To me, that's a miracle. But if you mean am I divine, then the answer is no." This was the main point that I wanted to stress in the interview, and I did stress it many times. I wanted the world to think I was not the tiniest bit divine. I was merely the luckiest of the twenty four names on Jonathon's list. I'd made that harder for myself by the crap I'd written about God being interested in my advanced soul, but claiming that had been irresistible as it would let me get away with all sorts of bullshit while being able to float above any criticism for any of my behaviors. Given that most of the things I enjoy doing are disapproved of by the all-too-easily morally outraged religious sourpusses, I expected to use the "God approves of my soul" excuse many times. I repeated many versions of: "My body was better than many other people's, as was my mind and apparently my soul, but there's nothing divine about any of them. They were just better than most other people's. For all I know, the CIA has already killed several other people who were just as gifted as me." Logic doesn't work on religious nutcases, so I also used more effective ways of convincing them, such as hugging Julia while talking about her and Ava being my simultaneous lovers. That was so WRONG I couldn't possibly be divine. My biblical knowledge is patchy and I'd been surprised two days ago by an interviewee's comment on TV that I was the third resurrected person. I knew the bible claimed Jesus Christ had been resurrected, but I didn't know of anyone else. The interviewee helpfully named the guy as "Lazarus". I'd previously thought that was some mythical guy who was rumored to live forever, but I googled him. According to the Gospel of Luke, Lazarus and his family were friends of Jesus. Lazarus got sick and Jesus deliberately didn't visit the family until four days after Lazarus had died, whereupon Jesus turned up and resurrected him. The bible is quite clear that it was a deliberate PR exercise by Jesus to impress people more than they'd be by a simple healing of a sick person. If I'd been Lazarus or either of his two sisters, I would have been pretty pissed off at Jesus for putting the family through so much grief just for a PR stunt, but that's beside the point. It was a very useful example for me because it was clear that Lazarus wasn't of any particular significance himself. He was apparently a nice guy, but nothing more than that. Thus I could present myself as a modern-day version of Lazarus since Archangel Michael's offer to prove his divinity by performing a resurrection had also clearly been a PR exercise. Lazarus' and my experiences were very similar in several respects: both were done to manipulate the public, were unnecessary, and were fictional. I several times truthfully stated, "I'm not divine, just like Lazarus wasn't." There were many theological questions, especially from the Catholics and Muslims. Most of which I answered with variations on, "I haven't got a clue what the question means, let alone what the answer could be. Can't you use plain English?" Sometimes they seemed to use plain English, only it wasn't, which led to periods of confusion. The only slightly humorous example of that was my making the mistake of thinking "Millenium" meant a period of a thousand years. Apparently - for religious folks - it's yet another word for The Apocalypse, Armageddon, The End Of The World, The End of Time, Eschaton, Judgement Day, The Rapture, The Second Coming, The Final Battle, etc. (Christians have a fixation on the issue). So my answering, "We've just had it" when asked about the Millenium caused them a few moments of considerable consternation. It served them right. Other questions were simply pointless, like, "Do you know what this means, [some unintelligible words in another language]." The third time they did that style of question on me, my sarcasm got away on me, "I'm hoping it means 'Pretty girls should wear very short miniskirts this summer.' Honestly, why do you waste time asking me silly questions like that? The Corvallis education system doesn't include Ancient Babylonian or whatever the heck that language was." "God might've put knowledge in your soul that you're not aware of." "And God might've put that knowledge into the soul of one of Donna's horses. God MIGHT'VE done God knows how many billions of different things. I have it on pretty mediocre authority that He works in mysterious ways, so good luck on your guessing what He might've done. Since I was resurrected, I haven't found a single piece of unexpected knowledge, so I think you're barking up the wrong tree looking for Ancient Babylonian and whatever else you might think of. It's your interview time that you're wasting, but my advice is to use it to ask me questions about what He did do." Another approach the Catholics tried was to give me a type of moral dilemma scenario and ask me what I'd do. "I'm not going to play that game. First, you've presented a difficult scenario with many options that seem equally bad, so at least 75% of the viewing audience are going to disagree with whatever I choose. Second, I've effectively got four parents, because Vanessa and Prof don't hesitate to speak up when they think I need it - and Vanessa's an ethicist, for goodness sake - so I'm certainly not lacking for moral guidance. Like every other teenage boy, I think I get far too much moral guidance. Third, God deemed me worthy of resurrection, and that's all the moral approval I need." "The purpose of the test is to find out if your moral framework has been corrupted..." "If it has been, I am VERY SURE that my mother will let me know! She's always been far too good at catching me out, and I doubt if she lost that skill while I was dead." I refused to play their moral dilemma scenario game, so they were forced to drop it. The Muslims asked me several questions that I didn't understand the significance of. Most likely they were to do with things from the Koran, about which I knew as close to nothing as made no difference, and what little I did know is what I had picked up reading about angels, which apparently don't feature much in the Koran. [[Angels are actually very important in Islamic theology, but their role is simple so they're not discussed much.]] They also asked me, "What do you think of the Arab-Israeli Conflict?" "I haven't got a clue. I don't know what started it, what keeps it going, what the aims of the various groups are, or even who the various groups are. The only thing I know is that it's a terrible mess, which is hardly a useful comment. It's a pity Archangel Michael didn't go over there and sort it out, because it badly needs that." "What should the angel have done?" "Stopped the conflict and made everybody happy. How he could've done that, I haven't got a clue. There's no point in asking me about issues like that, because I have no more knowledge than any other teenage, American boy." "What is your opinion of the Iraq situation?" #23: #14: #All: "Now THAT issue I do have an opinion about. Not for any divine reason. My reason is the exact opposite of divine, because it's all about our Government. My family and I have had extensive and repeated dealings with our Government, and we've learned three truths about it: It's unbelievably criminal, unbelievably arrogant, and unbelievably irresponsible. -- "The Government criminally kidnapped me, repeatedly lying about having me in custody because it arrogantly couldn't care less about mistreating and lying to its citizens. And then it tried to deny responsibility for my abduction and death. The CIA duped the Army into criminally attacking our home, somehow arrogantly believing they could get away with it. They screwed up and tried to avoid responsibility by blaming a rogue CIA agent even though it was a full-scale CIA operation with the NSA's cooperation. The FBI has been criminally spying on my family, in arrogant breach of the legal agreement the Government signed. When their surveillance van was discovered they invented a pathetic excuse to deny responsibility. Their camera team was discovered, and they again lied to deny responsibility. I could give you several more examples, including lies from our very dishonest President, but they're all the same. Our Government is criminal, arrogant and irresponsible. -- "With regard to Iraq, just as the Government has with my family, it criminally concocted false reasons to invade another country. Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 and it didn't have a single Weapon of Mass Destruction, let alone enough of them to be a threat to America. I'll point out that we know from Fort Dodge that our government DOES develop its own WMDs in breach of international treaties that it has signed, making that another example of its criminal and arrogant irresponsibility. Although I don't think anything the Government has done is more arrogant than invading an innocent country and thinking we'd be welcomed with open arms and everything would be sunshine and roses. What an unmitigated disaster that's turned out to be. -- "Lastly, the Government is unbelievably irresponsible. As soon as they learned that there were no WMDs and Iraq was unconnected to 9/11, America should have IMMEDIATELY pulled out of Iraq and PROFUSELY apologized. Got down on its knees and BEGGED for forgiveness from the Iraqi people for invading their country. And while our politicians were at it, they should've apologized profusely to the United Nations for lying to it so many times. We should've given Iraq a couple of hundred billion dollars in reparations, fired every single person in America - including the President - who'd caused us to go to war with an INNOCENT country, tried to criminally convict everyone responsible, and done everything else that anyone could think of to make good for our unbelievably criminal war of unprovoked aggression. -- "When I make a mistake and do something wrong, my parents insist that I own up to it and make good as fast and thoroughly as I can. They've told me a thousand times that it's the ONLY responsible thing to do and an absolutely essential part of growing into a good adult. The Government has a GREAT deal more power than I do, which means it has a great deal more responsibility, but it absolutely refuses to accept ANY responsibility WHATSOEVER for its crimes, continually lying to avoid taking responsibility for their disasters. -- "In Iraq, hundreds of thousands of innocent people have lost their lives, hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted, God knows how many people have lost their homes or limbs, and doubtless many other terrible things have happened, all because our Government is criminal, arrogant and irresponsible. My opinion of what you called the 'Iraq Situation', is that it's a perfect example of the evil of the people in senior positions in our Government. Those people must be evil, because there's no way any decent human being could live with the shame of what they've done." #15: The rest of the questions don't matter; they were just more crap. By the end of the first half hour, the Catholics and Muslims delegations had managed to un-impress me, considerably so in the case of the Catholics who were intolerably arrogant as well as foolish, traits shared with the Muslims but to a lesser extent. Both groups' thinking was too narrow, too rigid and often so much about their unreal beliefs that they were simply illogical nonsense. They even seemed to prefer to be illogical, which doesn't make any sense and is made even worse by their being so sure that they were right. It made for a very pointless and dull discussion. The Jews, on the other hand, were very impressive. Several times their incisive questions made me stop to think carefully about how to answer. They were quick too; if I made flippant answer to someone else's question - a temptation I often couldn't resist - one of the rabbis would immediately jump on my answer and make me take it back and answer properly. They still had a lot of religious baggage of course - that comes with the job - but otherwise they often did nearly as well as Vanessa or Prof would've, which is a substantial compliment. When the first half was over, and the individual religion's turns started, the Catholic bishop said they wanted to exorcise me for their ten-minute session. I'd had a feeling they would, because most of their questions had been negatively judgmental and proximity showed me that their emotions weren't happy ones. I said, "Fine by me, but one question first. Are you intending to splash holy water on me?" "It's part of the rite." "Assuming that means 'Yes', I'll agree to that provided you sprinkle some of it onto yourself first, to prove it's not a contact poison. I've heard too many religious people calling for my death and after the Christian assassination attempt this morning I'm understandably worried about Christian murderers." They were insulted, but the bishop had no logical reason to refuse, so he complied. And then the interview turned hilariously surreal when the Catholic priests started dancing around, spouting total nonsense, waving and thrusting their crosses and other weird items at me [[Catholics believe exorcisms work better if they use 'powerful' (cough, cough) religious relics]]. They VERY successfully made utter fools out of themselves. After a few seconds, I asked, "Can I talk with any..." "QUIET SATAN!" "My name's Mark. If you..." "QUIET SATAN!" "If you want me to be quiet, call me Mark." "QUIET MARK!" I leaned back and looked bored while the priests did their pathetic best to banish me back to Hell. Mom went to make some more coffee. When the clowns had used up their ten minutes with their truly pathetic, primitive, superstitious ritual, I said, "Time's up." I was answered with increased aggressiveness with their cross-thrusting and strident Latin. I'm not sure why, but most of the exorcism was in Latin. Apparently they believe Latin to be better than English for sending non-existent demons back to non-existent Hell. I was almost tempted to ask the priests for their justification for believing Demons are more frightened by air molecules vibrating in Latin than in English. I was sure their answer would be amusing, but it'd also be pointless. They'd already made such utter fools out of themselves by their pathetic mumbo-jumbo that it wasn't worth sitting through a crap-filled explanation just to listen to them prove how pathetic they and their beliefs were again. I stood up and repeated more firmly, "TIME IS UP." They redoubled their efforts, which taught me a new law of the Universe. Exorcisms are governed by a square function: when priests double their efforts, they look four times more pathetic. I waited until the bishop's prancing lined him up the way I wanted, then I gave him a HARD shove on his chest. He went stumbling backward several feet, falling into his chair. In the shocked silence, I said, "What part of 'Time's up' didn't you understand? There are two other delegations who've been patiently waiting through more than ten minutes of your primitive voodoo dance for their turn, so please show some politeness and consideration." One of the priests muttered, "Ten minutes isn't long enough..." "Then starting something you couldn't finish in time was foolish of you, wasn't it? Now please have the decency to return to your seats and sit quietly while the Muslims have their ten minutes." The Catholics did so, but with very bad grace. The Muslims and Jews both spent their ten minutes asking more questions. The Muslims mostly asking questions they hoped would prove my claims, although I'd been officially dead at the time so not in a position to make any claims, and as Mark Anderson I haven't really made any since. The Jews asked questions that were often interesting, such as about my ambitions for the future, what I thought the impact of my resurrection would have on the world, what I'd like to use my high public profile for, etc. My answers to them were disappointingly along the theme of, "I'm not a religious person, so I have no ambitions in that direction. I enjoy science, and at this time think I'd like my career to be that of a scientist. That's the direction I want my life to go." Eventually the Jews' ten minutes, and thus the whole circus, came to an end. I should make the point that never during the interview was I in trouble of being revealed in any way. One of the beauties of my plan is that there's almost nothing for me to talk about. I claim that I went from being experimented on in the CIA's lab (which I could easily and safely talk about), to being in my parents' bedroom on Resurrection Day (from that moment on was also very easy and safe for me to talk about). Mark didn't exist during the gap in between, so Mark had nothing to say about it. If I made a slip, I could use Ron's memories as the explanation, or maybe that someone had told me about it since my arrival here. Because of those timing issues, most of the questions I was asked weren't capable of trapping me. "What did I think of angels?", for example, wasn't going to get me in hot water. The Catholic priests and bishop weren't happy when I declared the meeting over. "It is important," they insisted, "that you put yourself into our hands so we can examine you properly." I answered, "I've seen your negative attitudes. You WANT me to be evil, probably because my being resurrected and what Archangel Michael said about God shakes up your comfortable little world too much. I could spend a month submitting to your tests and you still wouldn't proclaim me to be a good person because you don't want me to be one. -- "I've just realized that Archangel Michael was a clever dude, because he said something that I'm going to copy. I have it on very good authority - an Archangel's - that God likes there to be some doubt. So I'm not going to waste any more of my time worrying about your tests. You had an hour with me, with ten minutes to splash me with holy water, aggressively thrust things in my face and yell in Latin at me, and I didn't show any sign of disappearing in a puff of sulfurous smoke. That should be enough reassurance for any sensible person. Plus, when the frenzy around Corvallis dies down enough that I can safely leave my home, I'll visit a church. That should reassure many Christians that I'm not the Devil or a demon, and as a free bonus, not a vampire either. It's time for you to go now." With sincerity, I shook the rabbis' hands, telling them, "You guys impressed me. I actually enjoyed some of our conversation. You were much smarter and more logical than the other delegations." "We argue a lot. We're Jews; it's what we do. You're very sharp yourself, Mark." "Smart move calling me by name; the others were avoiding it. Your mental skills are sharp because you argue a lot; mine are sharp because I've effectively got four parents and I live in a house surrounded by girls. If I wasn't quick to defend myself, I'd be in all sorts of trouble." "Are you interested in Judaism, Mark?" "I'm impressed by your process, sir. Your content, and that of other religions, doesn't interest me at this stage of my life." When the Catholics were leaving, I asked the bishop, "Tell me, why is it that the Catholic Church doesn't ordain women priest and bishops?" "Christ was a male, the Apostles were all men, and the Church has always maintained a male priesthood. That's God's plan for his Church." "Sure Christ was a male, but that doesn't automatically mean women can't be priests. He had to be one gender or the other, and it's illogical to assume that whatever he was automatically meant the other gender couldn't be priests 2,000 years later. If he was taller than average, would you exclude short people from being priests? If he had white skin, would you exclude non-whites? If he had brown eyes would you exclude the blue-eyed? If he was right-handed, would you exclude the left-handed? Your church has seized on one particular characteristic and used it as an excuse to give yourself authority for not doing something you don't want to do. -- "As for the apostles, for all I know he chose male apostles purely for practical reasons, such as mixed groups of unmarried people traveling together being considered very inappropriate or maybe even illegal in those days. Or maybe the society at that time was not willing to receive wisdom from females, which certainly isn't the case these days..." #15: #12: " ... You've got no definitive proof whether or not God wants female priests and bishops. All you've got are a couple of illogical inferences derived from 2,000-year-old and probably totally irrelevant facts. -- "I think women are much more nurturing than men and would make wonderful priests. Your church has over a billion followers, so this question is very important to an amazingly large number of people. The next time I'm talking to God, the very first thing I'm going to ask him is whether the Catholic Church's hierarchy should be open to women all the way up to Pope." I paused to look at the expression on the Bishops face, then before he could speak, I continued, "HA-HA. Thank you VERY much! You've just confirmed something I suspected. A bishop who cared about the people would've been delighted at getting a definitive answer from God on an issue that could help hundreds of millions of people. Instead, your expression immediately soured. You are more interested in keeping power away from women than helping hundreds of millions of people. That confirms my opinion of your religion's motives. It'll be interesting to see how the public reacts to your expression, as the cameraman was recording our conversation." #21: #19: #4: #6: I internally discussed the idea some more while the Bishop tried to recover from his lapse. His face hadn't actually shown much expression - most of my understanding of his reaction came from my proximity sense of his emotions - but I let him prattle on a bit because it made him look weak and partly confirmed my accusation. Even without his face showing much reaction to my comment, his failing to show delight would be fairly convincing. I made a mental note to point that out, in case people didn't think of it. When he ran down, I held up my hands commandingly, saying, "Listen up everyone. My little tactic to reveal that the Bishop had a total lack of delight in my finding out an important truth for his Church has given me another idea. I've got a homework assignment for all of you. For your religions I mean, not for you personally. Because God sent a Guardian Angel to keep me safe, and he did send Archangel Michael to keep an eye on my development, it seems He has a continuous personal interest in me. -- "I didn't say it before, but I'm pretty sure that whatever God intends for me, it's not religious. I wasn't a religious person before my resurrection and I'm even less of one now after seeing the bishop's selfish desire for power and the foolishness of so many tens of thousands of religious people who've rushed to Corvallis or who're appearing on TV from around the world. Despite my being not interested in religious matters, I shouldn't ignore the fact that religions are important to billions of people and I shouldn't miss the opportunity to help them. -- "God's plan for me might simply be to leave me to live my life however I want. I might die of old age without any further contact with God. Or maybe several years from now, I might suddenly find myself having a chat with Him. Given His interest in me, that seems to be a possibility, so I should prepare for it. I want each of your religions to give me questions you want me to ask God, in case I ever have the chance to. Here are the rules: -- "First, there are to be four questions only from each of your religions. So twelve in total, if there are no overlaps. Twelve seems like an appropriate number. -- "Second, the questions are to be for the good of the people, not for internal political reasons or for purely theological reasons. I'm doing this for the PEOPLE, not for the churches. -- "Third, your homework is due in one year's time, so on or before 3:30pm, June 4, 2008, to be hand-delivered to me by someone I will recognize as having considerable authority within each of your religions. I'm aware that there are sects within your religions. I will not take sets of questions from different sects. If the sects can't cooperate together on something this fundamental, then 'Shame on you!' -- "Fourth, I will publicize the twelve questions. -- "Fifth, after the twelve questions have been delivered to me - which might take less than a year if you can act quickly - your three religions have then got another year to tell me in which order you want the twelve questions asked, from the question that they collectively think is the single most important one, down to the collectively judged least important, in case God restricts me to fewer than twelve questions. -- "To the viewers at home: I will NOT be taking part in ANY discussions about this with anyone. If any of you have opinions about what the questions should be, tell your church. Do NOT try to tell me. Our mail is opened by our security staff and I'll be asking them to dispose of any mail about this subject. Any email will be deleted before I read it. Any notes passed to me will be dropped on the ground. Any attempts to reach me through my family or friends will be treated in the same ways. I'm not a religious person and I have no interest in being inundated by millions of religious nutcases all pushing their own ideas about what questions should be asked. All I am doing is offering to serve as a mailman between the church hierarchies and God, to deliver their questions and return the answers so the churches can perform their functions better. You don't discuss your mail with your mailman, and I won't let you discuss it with me. I will talk with ONLY three people about this: the three representatives who deliver their list of questions." -- I turned to the three rabbis, "You enjoy arguments, so this should make you happy." They looked positively delighted. One of them was even rubbing his hands together in glee. He answered, "It's a brocheh; a blessing. It's going to do much good. It's also going to keep us arguing for years, even after we've given you our list. Can we revise our questions if we arrive at a new list?" "My original intention was to make it a one-time-only offer. I was thinking that if any religion can't work out what's important to its followers in twelve months, then it doesn't deserve to participate at all. But making it a one-time deal assumes that what's good for your people remains constant, and it might be that something major happens which invalidates that assumption. Individual question amendments don't work, but I see nothing wrong with the three religions repeating the entire process whenever you collectively agree to do so. Just deliver the final sorted list to me whenever you do so." Just before they left, the cameraman said, "My producer asked about the daily tape of your body Mark. Can we swap it out please?" I answered, "In my first interview after my resurrection I asked the networks to send me copies of the tapes they had of Archangel Michael so I could learn about him. No one sent me anything. I'm waiting for someone to do so before I provide you with more material." The cameraman said, "I never saw that mentioned." "Nor did I. It wasn't newsworthy enough to broadcast and no one in any of the networks bothered to respond internally. I'm sure someone will eventually." "I'll mention it." "Thanks." [A few hours later, a courier pack arrived from CNN with a large collection of tapes about Archangel Michael, a blank tape labeled with an instruction to swap it with the one in the loaned camera, and a pre-addressed courier pack to send the tape we'd already partly used back to CNN. The deal was supposed to be that the networks shared that tape, but none of them had bothered to send me the tapes I'd requested so tough cheese for them. Therefore CNN was the first to broadcast the clip of the doctor examining me, with the historically important chronologically first appearance of the Guardian Angel. The commentators were pleased by how gentle it'd been when returning the syringe to the doctor's bag. They weren't impressed by my body though, as it was a very boringly normal example of a young Black man.] Mom told the cameraman, "It's 3:30 now. Your tape should be supplied to all the other networks except Fox and ABC. Can you do that quickly?" "Sure. We upload to our studio and it retransmits to them. We do that all the time. It only takes a few minutes." "Okay. The broadcast time is no earlier than 5pm today, our local time. Any network that jumps the gun will be blacklisted for a week, like Fox is now. Make sure your studio passes the tape on immediately and with that time restriction mentioned. If there's any game-playing, CNN will be blacklisted." The networks would never broadcast a 1.5-hour tape, so they edited it down to a minute or two, which resulted in different impressions across the different channels. Generally it went across pretty well. The unsuccessful but theatrical exorcism got the most airtime, hopefully convincing the millions of idiots who had previously thought that I was the Devil that I wasn't. Unfortunately the networks usually aired my pushing the bishop back into his seat without the reason for the push, which made me look much worse than the full reality would have. I made a mental note to try to avoid doing things on camera that would make me look bad if reported out of context. The next most aired segment was my Twelve Questions offer. It'd been a spur of the moment addition, but it obviously appealed to most of the producers. It actually had no informational content, but it was more dramatic, which made it better TV. Otherwise the various channels showed different bits and pieces of whatever questions and answers sounded the most interesting to them. Three of the TV networks' comments are worth reproducing: One commentator said, "Notice that Mark Anderson always refers to God as 'He'. Archangel Michael invariably said 'It'. Mark doesn't have any memory of his time with God." Another network produced a numerologist who declared, "Mark Anderson is the Devil and I can prove it! He wants the three religions to meet again at 3:30pm. 3 at 3:30. 3-3-3, that's half the number of the beast. He's two people, Ron Fisher and Mark Anderson, so that makes 666! Look at the date he wants to meet - 6/4/08. The digits add to 18, just like the number of the beast does! Everywhere I look, there are signs that he's the Devil. I've obtained much more evidence too. For more information call me on 1-900-GOODNOS; that's 1-900-466-3667." A group of people from The Church of The Horsemen of Christ (a.k.a. "The Galloping Ninnies") was asked for their opinion of my interview (the local TV reporters and cameramen were bored, so were trying to create something interesting). The Ninnies were REALLY scathing about me. I was the Anti-Christ, Evil Incarnate, as proved by my favoring the Jews; it was all a con job; people were fools for believing our nonsense; I repeatedly maligned the ineffable - and also authoritative, inspired and infallible - teachings of the Bible, etc. They'd been prevented from attending their church because the local authorities were giving preference to the Andersons over their religious rights, and they were spitting mad about it. One of them even said it was a pity the gunman had missed me. My low opinion of the Ninnies turned to very active dislike, especially as a result of that last comment. Despite the numerologist's appalling misuse of mathematics, and the appalling crap from the Ninnies, my families thought the religious interview had been a reasonably successful PR exercise. While we were sitting around watching TV, one of the commentators said something that reminded Vanessa to ask me, "I was surprised you were so emphatic about the Iraq War. I didn't know you cared so much about it?" "I can't say I've ever given it much thought. Even in all of Majestic Countdown's reading, international politics rarely came up. I was so strongly anti-Government because I'm REALLY pissed off about the UAV that's spying on us. It made my job of protecting Ava harder, and it could either terribly constrain my actions in another emergency, or catch me doing something impossible to explain if I was forced into doing it to save someone's life. It's recording too much about what goes on here. If the Government gets enough information, either blatant evidence or just circumstantial stuff that adds up over time, it might cause us some very real trouble. What I'm intending to do - if everyone agrees - is to crash the UAV right outside Mom and Dad's bedroom window one night soon, and then for us to kick up a stink about the Government trying to kill us because I'd criticized their actions in Iraq. That'll get rid of the UAV, be an EXTREME embarrassment for the FBI that should force them into stopping spying on us, and we should get the $216 billion for their breaches too. I'm killing three birds with one bird, haha." There was a short, confused period as everyone gave different reactions, from Donna's gleeful laughing to Mom's "Oh no." The first useful thing said was Dad asking, "How can you make it crash. It flies WAY above your limit?" Dad knew my ceiling was 10,000 feet from the days of innocence when I used to fly them to the Cascades for breakfast. "Same way as I can 'fly' underwater: I'll put an airtight box around myself at low altitude so it's full of air, then I fly up to the UAV's level at 45,000 feet. I could stay up there for hours if I made a big enough box." That's what I'd first thought when I'd realized how to fly so high, so that's what I told them now, even though I knew that I didn't need to breathe. I'd kept quiet about that little nuance of my biology, suspecting it'd probably freak out the parents too much. I'm sure Mom would prefer a son that breathed. "Of course. I should've thought of that myself." "I won't tell you how long it took me to think of it. I kicked myself around the room when I finally did." Donna hadn't gotten used to these types of amazing planning sessions yet, but wide-eyed as she was, she still managed to offer, "Don't kick yourself. I'll do it for you. I like to be helpful, haha." Donna and I are quite different: she likes creating physical humor, and as you know, I like creating cerebral and extremely funny humor. Prof asked, "Can you make sure that when it crashes, enough of it survives to identify what it was?" "That's easy. The only tricky thing is to make sure I crash it in a way that looks realistic. I could easily cut or pull a wing off just before it hits, but the edge would be wrong. I'll fly the UAV straight down right beside the house, and I'll make sure one wing hits the edge of the roof so it'll break off. That'll create the right sort of impact fractures and it'll leave evidence of the collision on the roof too. The UAV body will impact the ground next to the window and with luck and a bit of persuasion, the tail should break off. I'll make sure the wing and tail roll far enough away not to get caught in a fire, if one starts. -- "What I'd really like to do is crash it into the Galloping Ninnies main building. It'd serve them right for some of the very nasty comments they've been making, but doing that wouldn't be nearly as useful for us as outside Mom and Dad's window." My idea started an enthusiastic discussion, as my families didn't like having the UAV overhead all the time. Getting rid of it sooner or later was a necessity, and crashing it as I planned would be superbly embarrassing for the Government, and possibly impoverishing too because we'd hit them up for $216 billion that we should have been paid already because of the FBI's previous spying on us (the van, the attic camera, the several agents who had lurked around our property for a while, and the UAV). [[The first two had been exposed and withdrawn. The several agents hadn't been exposed but had been withdrawn a few days after the resurrection went on a one lunar cycle suspension. The UAV, although originally tasked with finding Archangel Michael, was still surveilling our property because there was now another angel in residence - one that killed people - so the FBI's mission of protecting America applied even more strongly. Besides, the FBI thought the UAV was a safe way of spying on us, as they thought it couldn't be detected.]] There were a few parts of my half-formed plan that got some criticism. Dad asked, "Why crash it outside our bedroom? Why not outside yours if we're going to claim your speech caused it?" "Mainly because I think it's better to do something that doesn't make sense. People expect the Government to be stupid, so the attack's inexplicability will make it seem more like the Government did it. It's confusing, so people will be able to invent lots of different conspiracy theories to explain it, and we'll be able to invent several accusations ourselves. That there'll be several theories will make the media go back and forth a lot more, making the issue bigger than if it was easily understood. One thing I've learned from Julia is that sowing confusion is good. You can use that for all sorts of tricks, including things you don't think of until after the event." "I can't recall teaching you that," commented Julia. "There was no need for a specific lesson. You're wonderfully and naturally confusing, so I've had plenty of informal lessons. Thank you." Julia wasn't sure how to take that, and I was looking extraordinarily innocent to avoid giving her an accurate clue. While she was thinking about it, Prof said, "No one will believe that the Government tried to kill us because you spoke out against the Iraq War. They don't kill people for speaking out. We could mention that as a theory, but it'll get ignored. I like your idea of creating confusion though, because that'll invite people to invent their own explanations that they'll naturally believe more than any of our suggestions. Most of all, I like the idea of getting rid of that plane, because you're right about it being too dangerous to leave up there. -- "In terms of forcing the FBI to totally stop spying on us, and making it possible for us to be paid for their repeated breaches of the settlement agreement, I don't think simply crashing it on our property would do that. It'll result in some media noise, just like happened the last two times we caught them. The crashed UAV will be more dramatic, but what will happen is they'll say it was transiting across country and it just happened to crash on our house. We'll provide our radar files, photographs and witness statements proving it'd been circling our house for several days, and they'll be caught lying again. Nothing happened in the face of their obvious lies last time, and nothing will happen this time either. Getting caught previously didn't stop them their spying, and it's unlikely to stop them this time; they'll just replace the UAV with the next method of spying on us. -- "The only action we could take is to sue them for the $216 billion. After the three events it's hard to imagine how they could avoid that liability because the balance of probabilities is far over to our side. The problem is that they'll stall our claim as long as possible, for a couple of years or more. By the time it got through all the courts, it'll be the next administration's problem, and in the meanwhile the FBI could carry on doing whatever it wants in the belief that they can't get in any worse trouble. We need something to give them a significant amount of immediate pain, and to make them too scared to come near you again." That started a brainstorming session for what we could possibly do that would be painful enough to the FBI. It was obvious from my families' suggestions that everyone thought too small. They didn't understand my abilities enough to see how much mayhem I could cause. Or perhaps they were just too cautious. Whatever the reason, it was me that came up with a seriously evil plan (they're my second favorite type, after plans involving big tits). My description of Stage One was surprising enough, but Stage Two shocked Mom, Carol and Donna. (I'll surprise you with it later.) I asked Vanessa, "You don't look against the idea?" "They're obviously careless about risking the taxpayers' money. We thought that a huge financial downside would keep them honest, but all it's done is make them quicker to lie afterward. If $216 billion isn't enough to keep them honest, then no amount of money will. As I see it, we've only got three choices: -- "Leave the country, emigrating to where citizens' rights are better respected. But the FBI, CIA or other agencies could easily follow us. -- "Let them continue to spy on us. But they won't be satisfied with having a camera several miles above us. They'll try to add more surveillance, and they'll eventually succeed well enough to record something that'd cause us very serious problems. You'd have to avoid all your special abilities for the rest of your life, which would be a loss rather than a solution. -- "Or we give them a very sharp, effective lesson, so it'll take a very brave agency head to authorize going anywhere near us again. We could think of several ways of doing that, but I don't think that matters a great deal. Your idea is a good one and anything else we could think of couldn't be less brutal without also being less effective. We might as well do as you suggest." [[Vanessa had another reason for agreeing to my idea: She and Prof believe in giving people room to make their own decisions, mistakes and successes. In this situation, as in several past ones I've already written about and future ones you'll read about soon, they let me - or Julia if she was their focus - do as we wished. Had they thought my idea was fundamentally wrong, or if I'd used bad logic to develop the idea, they would have been quick to speak up, but if I was in the right ballpark and there was some merit to my plan, they let me carry on. They were educationalists rather than micro-managers.]] Prof said, "Sooner or later they must work out that bad things happen to them when they treat us illegally, but that nothing bad would have happened if they'd left us alone. It should be obvious that we've got no malevolent purpose; we just want to get on with our lives peacefully and productively." Further discussion made us realize that crashing the UAV tonight was too soon because I had to finish my schoolwork before I could go to war against the United States of America. Plus there were some small preparations we needed to do first. We put the war off for 24 hours. That night I slipped out wearing a disguise as one of our security guards, easily penetrated the cordon, and went to do some of the preparations. Mostly for Stage One, but I flew to Washington DC to find out what I needed to know to make sure Stage Two would work the way I was intending. A quick bit of active snooping in the operations area of a large DC police station let me use a computer to get the information I needed, then I flew to and quickly checked the two addresses, and confirmed that what I planned for Stage Two seemed easy. Getting to Washington DC and back in one night required some EXTREMELY fast flying, so it was a good thing I knew the hills around western Oregon so well that I could quickly do the little job I had there. I'm more comfortable flying around these days, but this trip averaged 700 mph (Mach 0.92) and I did not enjoy it at all as it was far too bumpy. The bumps were probably less than you imagine, but I have a very low tolerance for bumps because I could too easily imagine them turning into cartwheeling instability aided by my constant pushes on the rear of my sled. Summer is my favorite time of the year but the reduction in the number of nighttime hours limits my flying time badly. If not for the Cascades casting a large, morning shadow, I would've had to descend short of Corvallis and make my way home in a more mundane manner. As it was, the twilight got strong enough that I thought about flapping my arms to look more bird-like. ------- Chapter 357: Some Post-Resurrection Socializing and Making of Travel Plans Tuesday, June 5, 2007 Breakfast with my old classmates was fun. We had it in the Kids' House, Carol having fetched a good supply of food from the Adults' House; not that she really needed to get much as most of our guests were girls. They eat like sparrows at the best of times, and even less when they'd rather talk. A couple of the people I'd called hadn't come because they'd made the mistake of telling their parents where they were going, and their parents had vetoed the idea of their going to a home that had people shooting at it. Most of them came though, usually after phone calls to check it was safe. I proved to them that I was Mark, mostly by reminding them of funny and embarrassing things they'd done a couple a years ago. The incidents that weren't public knowledge I whispered to the victim, causing some good blushes. All of the girls had had some kind of sexual relationship with Mark1 (I was Mark2 now). We hadn't necessarily had sex, but there'd been at least some flirting and teasing, so I knew some amusing things to embarrass them with. Julia was convincing too: "He's Mark all right. We can't go out until the craziness dies down, so we've spent HOURS having sex. He can go forever, just like the old Mark could. Ron was very good, especially because he was so sensitive, but no one had Mark's superhuman endurance. It's a very convincing proof. But I feel doubts coming on, Mark, so you'd better prove it to me again tonight, haha." In the following discussion, most of my old classmates accidentally called me Ron quite often. Even though Ron hadn't gone to their school, they'd met Ron many times and I still looked exactly like him, so "Ron" popped out more than "Mark". I didn't make a big deal out of it, or even a medium deal. I'll leave those highly repetitive bloopers, consequent apologies and my dismissive replies out of the description of my sort-of classmates' visit. Having convinced them that I was Mark, I got their notes and one of each textbook off them, and excused myself to put them away. I carried them up to the bedroom level, then flew them down the escape chute to my secret study, divided them into thirty one piles and laid them out on the floor. I rejoined the breakfast conversation (to be precise, my body and one of my minds rejoined the conversation), while all the rest of my minds were studying through a sight blob in the secret study. I played, "So what happened to..." a few times, to make my coming back seem plausible, but mostly they talked about their plans for summer. I'll give you a clue what plan they spent most of the time talking about: it started with Julia asking, "Would any of you like to go to Italy for a week later this summer?" They all answered in the affirmative. Prof and Vanessa were talking about going to Italy for a week, which left a lot of spare seats in the plane that were desperately crying out to be filled. Julia and the girls starting planning the trip, which largely involved discussing what stores they wanted to visit. They knew the store names and the best streets in each city. I'd say it was unbelievable, but it was unfortunately all too believable. Since Vanessa got her big jet, Julia's, Carol's and Ava's friends have had five overseas trips. They're eager for more, especially because it's not the same people that go each time. Our school's senior girls are solidly plugged into the international fashion and shopping scene, and I'm confident that they have knowledge of the shopping districts of Paris, Rome and Milan that far exceeds that of the girls of any other school in America. The five guys and I rolled our eyes at each other (I'd invited two guys, the other three were friends of the note-lenders). For all the guys' eye rolling, they were still eager to get a free trip to Italy. What happens on these trips is that the plane is pretty much filled with girls in a total shopping frenzy. There might be seats in the corners for a few boys, who're ignored for the duration of the trip, other than being told to carry bags if we're nearby. We - the other boys and I - do our own thing for the duration (we CERTAINLY don't want to do the girls' thing!). I've been to Paris twice, Rome twice and Milan once, which is enough. I've seen all the tourist things those cities offer that interest me, and it's not as if I go to keep Julia company because she does nothing but shop and talk about shopping, even on the flight back. I suggested, "Julia, how about some other time over summer, we have a boy-girl romantic week away? I'd like to go to somewhere like Noumea for a week's scuba diving. We could take an equal number of guys and girls, each pair would have their own individual room, and we'd lie on the beach working on our tans. I might need one by then, haha. The guys would enjoy that more than fitting into the corners of a shopping trip." Most of the guys were nodding their heads VERY vigorously and grinning from ear to ear, especially because showing lots of enthusiasm might help their chances of being invited. Tropical island, girls in bikinis, own rooms; it was a HUGELY better than a shopping trip. The only guy not nodding must not have had a girlfriend. Julia asked, "One guy, one girl. Which girl would you take?" She was teasing. She knew I'd never take one of my girls and leave the other two behind. I'd been explaining the rules for everyone else, NOT for me. Rules don't apply to ME! What a silly thought. I answered, "Maybe the plane will have to make two trips, the second one to fetch my girls." Julia said, "That's much better; for a moment I was worried about you. It's a good idea. It'll have to be late enough in the summer that Ava's arm is not troubling her." "Yeah. I'm confident she'll heal fast enough. Let's see, I'll take you, Ava and Carol. I think I'll ask Donna too. She loves the water and hasn't been on a trip like that." Carol agreed, "Great idea. She'll be thrilled to be included. We should invite her to Italy too. She's getting into fashion." "Yes. It's sad how all girls go insane at that age. Oww! Oww!" One disadvantage of having Julia and Carol sit on my lap is that they can retaliate VERY quickly. When I got a chance to resume my counting, "You two bruisers, Ava, Donna. Pat will be good to take because lots of the girls go topless on French islands." BOING went the guys' eyes. Now even the guy without a girlfriend was eager to come, if only for the sightseeing. Julia teased me again, "Trust you to know useless facts like that." "To me it seems like a more useful piece of knowledge than the exact sequence of clothing stores down every street in the fashion district of Milan." Carol said, "Donna will DEFINITELY want to come." We were in company, so I lied, "I never thought of that. Yeah. She probably will. I was trying to count my girls. Let's just say seven in total, plus me is eight. We'll need a big suite. That leaves twenty two seats in the plane. I'll invite eleven guys, and let them choose which girls they want to take. You five guys here, and six others." Now that I'd specifically invited the current group, the guys' enthusiasms LEAPED up, closely followed by the amount of noise they generated. Only one boyfriend-girlfriend couple had come this morning, and the guy was VERY nervous over his girlfriend's decision about whether they'd go or not. When she agreed a minute later his "VERY nervous" turned into "VERY happy". It was clear who wore the trousers in that relationship. He should try being a Lord for a while; it makes getting sex much easier. There was a period of random, chaotic questions, none of which mattered much so I won't bother recording them here. One problem emerged which had an amusing aspect. It came out of David being sad that he didn't have a girlfriend. To his absolute delight, I said, "Girls - all of you - I'm putting you in charge of making sure David gets a girlfriend for this trip. You've probably got about two months to matchmake him enough that a girl will spend a week living in a hotel room with him. Are you up to the challenge? It looks like you've got bad sunburn already, David. Maybe you shouldn't go?" Julia said, "It'll be EASY. I know some girls who're interested in David. Leave it to us. David, keep Friday and Saturday evenings free starting after exams are finished. We'll set you up with dates with three or four girls and you can take whichever one you like the most." #5: #8: #5: #12: As you can tell from the internal dialogue, my minds weren't exactly riveted on the schoolwork they were supposed to be doing. They were doing it with most of their attention, but they had half an ear open - making fifteen and half additional ears - for anything more interesting than schoolwork, which was most things. David gulped, then asked, "Who's interested in me?" "I'll tell you after the exams, otherwise you'll daydream your study time away. Guys have one-track minds." Then Julia changed the subject back to the one track that girls' minds operate on. It took about an hour for the girls to take a breather from talking about shopping in Italy. Fortunately there were five guys to talk with. That occupied us for about five minutes, then we went to play 8-ball in the Adults' House, using the tunnel to get there in case of another sniper, although there were more soldiers patrolling Dimple Hill now. I know it took the girls an hour to come up for air, because fifty five minutes after we left them the intercom beeped and I heard Julia's voice asking, "Mark? Are you still in the house? Where'd you go to all of a sudden?" Julia hadn't even noticed when I stood her and Carol up, extracted myself from underneath them, and wandered off with the other guys. I told her where we were, and asked her whether it was safe for the guys to come back, i.e., that the girls had finished talking about clothes shopping. Julia said something that sounded vaguely reassuring, so the guys and I risked returning. Now that the girls had temporarily satisfied themselves talking about the critical topic, the girls' thoughts turned to relatively unimportant things, like my death and resurrection. One of the girls asked, "Mark, are you going to be as sexual with as many girls as you used to be?" "Even more! I was dead for more than a year, so I'm very 'stiff', haha. -- "To answer better: I doubt I'll become that sexually active again. Not that I have anything against it; it's just that it happened as part of the school social scene and I won't be at school any longer..." "You'll be at OSU though won't you? There are THOUSANDS of college girls there." "Including me!" declared Julia. "I'll make sure Mark gets plenty of girls to play with." The other girls just chuckled, long since used to Julia's bizarre - and excellent - attitude. I expanded my explanation, "College doesn't have anything like the same social scene. People come and go to different classes at different times..." "He'll have lots of girls chasing after him, Gail, so he's bound to get plenty of sex." corrected Julia. "He's going to be the most famous student OSU has ever had, the most genius, with the best body and will be the richest. He'll have me making sure he's his own social scene, so there'll be five thousand panting girls following him around begging for his attention. His 'stiffness' will be put to good use, haha." Carol said, "Hey! That reminds me. I'm the richest one here because I've got Ron's money. I should give that back to you, Mark." #24: "Ron gave it to you, sweetie. Mom and Dad made sure I got a one-twelfth share, which is plenty for me. You need it more than I do anyway, because girls spend money FAR faster than guys do, especially when they spend a week in Italy." #12: #19: #12: #21: [My maximum NP force is currently the equivalent of 125 average-weight girls. I prefer girls with big tits, so make that 120 girls. If I lifted 50 girls, then after allocating some minds to help with the sled's construction, I'd have not much more than 1 g of pushing force available. The sled required to hold 50 girls would be so large that air resistance would soon cancel out the motive force. At a guess, our top speed would only be about 40 mph, depending very much on how tightly I squeezed the girls together on the sled, or low long I made it (which would use up even more NP-plates, decreasing pushing force). A BBJ2 would be far better for any sort of 50-girl trip, unless it was short trip such as just down the street to the Aquatic Center, or the 40 or 50 miles to the coast. A more reasonable NP-powered trip, say with just my immediate harem (call it 20 girls, as I'm very stiff), gives 3.75 times more propulsive push, with 1/6th the sled's frontal area, increasing the top speed considerably.] #30: #20: Carol replied, "The money's yours, Mark. The lawsuit was for you having your Fourth Amendment rights smashed. Plus you suffered everything Homeland Security and the CIA did to you." "I'll toss you for it later." One of the girls laughed, "Boy! I wish someone would insist I kept millions of dollars. You guys are SO lucky!" #5: #2: #8: #2: I was actually quite happy for Carol to keep Ron's money. Transferring it to Mark might give someone the idea that Ron and Mark had always been the same person. I don't know what they could do with the idea, but it was certainly better they not have it. Mark's share of the two settlement payments was more than enough to keep me comfortable for a very long time, if I didn't buy too many 747 Business Jets and use them to pay for girls' trip to European fashion capitals. A plane wouldn't be that expensive - $300 million would probably cover it, not much more than 1% of the money I'd get - but flying 100+ girls to fashion capitals could get expensive REALLY fast. One of the girls asked me, "How long before Mark's body comes back?" "I don't know. The angels were very vague on that. There hasn't been any noticeable change yet, and Julia has looked VERY diligently in all sorts of unusual places. It's been three and half days, exactly half a week. If there's been no noticeable change in half a week, then the whole job would seem to need quite a few weeks. On the other hand, maybe it takes a while to get started, and then it happens quickly. There are no previous examples to judge from, so we'll just have to wait and see. I'm kind of looking forward to having my body back, but kind of not too, because people are going to get very weird about the change." Another question that got raised was one I'd not only anticipated, but had invited by keeping Carol sitting on one of my legs with an arm around her. I was treating Carol and Julia identically, so it was only a matter of time before someone raised the courage to question it. It took quite a while, but eventually one of the girls said, "You don't treat Carol as your sister; more like your girlfriend. You don't mind me saying that, do you?" "I guess the way I've been holding the girls encourages that question, although that was unintentional." All of our audience was paying attention, so the question needed an answer, as I knew it would, "There are a number of reasons for it: -- "First, Carol and I have always been affectionate and friendly. Carol, Donna and I have excellent relationships. We have a REALLY good family that way. As well as her having my love for being my sister, Carol is also my very good friend, and her company is enjoyable to me in every respect. Cuddling with her is something we both enjoy. -- "Second, I was murdered. That tends to change the way you look at life, and it certainly makes you appreciate your loved ones a great deal more. I suggest you take my word for that rather than trying it yourself, haha. I joke, but it was SURE AS FUCK no laughing matter at the time. I was kidnapped by the people who're supposed to keep us safe. That meant I knew the cops would never find me, because the cops would never think of investigating the DHS or CIA, or be allowed to investigate them even if they did think of it. I knew I was never going to be rescued, and from what the CIA was doing to me, it was obvious they were never going to let me go. The experiments were getting worse and worse and they were obviously going to end in my death. I couldn't tell you the number of times I cried in agony because I was never going to even have a chance to say 'Goodbye' or 'I love you' to my family. I can see by the look on your faces that you're getting it, so let me remind you that according to my memory, that was only FOUR DAYS AGO! My cuddling Carol sometimes isn't surprising. What's surprising is that I manage to let go of any of my family at all. Not to mention that they don't want to be let go. My death and absence hurt them badly too, of course. We're an extremely close and loving family, so my dying hurt Carol and everyone else, so she naturally wants the reassurance of being in my arms. -- "Third, Carol and Ron were in love, so they cuddled a lot. Carol knows I'm Mark but I still look like Ron. Just as it's not even four days ago that I was in physical and emotional agony, it's also not even four days ago that Ron gave his life to make Carol happy, and that's a VERY big deal for Carol. She had no idea he was doing that until the angel appeared to do the resurrection, so she had almost no chance to thank Ron, or to tell him how much she loved him. The only thing left of Ron is his body; now my body. Its going to change and Ron is going to fade out of Carol's life, never to be seen again. Carol has been seeking out my arms every chance she gets, to strengthen her memory of Ron as much as possible, while she still can. I am VERY willing to cuddle her." That had done the job superbly well. Carol and Julia both had tears running down their faces (they'd been unaware this was coming, but it was obvious how they should react). Some of our visitors looked nearly as affected. Even the guys were rocked somewhat. I nodded at one of the girls, telling her, "A little while ago you said 'You guys are SO lucky!' I know you didn't mean anything by it, but when you're lying in bed tonight, think about what Carol and I have been through, and the rest of my family too, and then ask yourselves whether we've been 'so lucky'." The girl cried, "I'm SO SORRY! {Sob}. I never meant..." "I know you didn't mean it. In many respects you're right, because I have got a second chance at life, and we are rich. But it's been a VERY hard earned 'lucky'. I think this would be a good time to call this the end of the breakfast. I'll put the girls to bed together. Leave the dishes; I'll get them shortly." "Please forgive me..." "Nothing to forgive. Thanks for the notes. Someone will return them this evening. Good luck with your exams." I put my arms under Carol's and Julia's asses, stood, holding them both against me. It wasn't hard, they had their arms around my neck, sobbing into it; and I had 75% of their body weights' worth of NP helping each of my lifting arms. I carried the girls to the bedroom. I shut and locked the door behind me. The girls' eyes were dry before we reached the bed, but their mouths were just getting started, praising me for my wonderful bullshit. They didn't use that word, preferring to talk about my "ability to pull on girls' heartstrings", but it's the same thing. In the course of singing my praises, Julia said, "You did it wonderfully, but what is it that you did? Why get them so emotional?" "Despite your promising me five thousand new lovers from OSU - thanks for that by the way, although I do think that five thousand might be somewhat excessive - despite so many new girls, I don't want to give up being loving with Carol in public. I've very much enjoyed being able to do that as Ron, and I'm going to miss that a lot when I become Mark. So I thought I'd try that heartstring pulling and see how it went over. Very well, as it turned out. -- "If I repeat it a few more times, and the story of it gets around, then people will know that Carol and I have both had some very traumatic experiences and we need to comfort each other. It's a purer story than my original idea which had been to make up some emotional bullshit around my having Ron's memories of his making love with Carol. I could add some tearjerker material to that, but it still suffers from having sex at its core. If people repeat it several times - especially if guys are involved in the process because they'll leave all the non-sex stuff out of their retelling - it'd end up as a sex story, which would have the wrong effect. My current approach doesn't have that problem. -- "Probably Carol and I will have to be discreet in fully public places like around town, but when we're in our social group - like when we go to Noumea - then it should be easy for Carol and me to behave like we were for the last couple of hours." "I'll say!" agreed Carol. "None of them would dare to suggest anything improper. If they overheard someone else say something like that, they'd leap to your defense." "(a) I agree. But (b), 'leap to MY defense'? You could've at least said 'our defense'. I'll have you know that at least five thousand girls are going to be following me around soon. Apparently they'll be panting too, so if anything improper happens, it's unlikely to be my fault." We joked around or a few minutes, then started fooling around. Julia paused to ask, "Have they left yet?" "I'll check; hang on." I shut my eyes. A couple of second later, "Most of them are gone. A few of them stayed behind to take care of the dishes, by the look of it, but they're in the elevator halfway down to their cars now. We can be as improper as we like. I'm thinking VERY improper. It's not often I manage to fool even one female, so I want to celebrate." "{Raspberry}. Like it's so hard for you to outwit girls that you need to celebrate it! Not these days, darling. But you should celebrate what wonderful actresses Carol and I are." "That works for me. There are two of you, so that means twice as much celebrating." I dived in, because if something's worth celebrating, it's worth doing so immediately and twice. ------- One little piece of news that you might find interesting, even though it's not directly related to me any longer, is about Jonathon Winters. He was still very busy as a consequence of his angel-appointed role. Quite a lot of abuse was being directed at him for not including each abuser's dead loved one on the final list; the abuser usually being certain the angel would have dropped Mark Anderson (I wasn't so sure). Jonathon tried to explain that he hadn't personally picked the people on the list, as the angel had told him to choose the criteria. Most of the unhappy people couldn't or wouldn't understand what a "criteria" was, they just knew they wanted their loved one back and it was obviously Jonathon's fault that hadn't happened. The many sob stories made for great human drama, even if they were utterly irrelevant and illogical, so the media played many such scenes. Overall, Jonathon had come out of the experience a winner. He was in demand on the speaking circuit, with many people wanting to hear or interview him. They had many questions about his task, from the moment he was appointed - at this point in a televised interview, the network usually played a clip of Archangel Michael surrounded by all the cute animals in the forest - through to the strange non-appearance of Archangel Michael for his final interview with Jonathon. There was much conjecture about where Archangel Michael might be now, what sort of job had made him leave so quickly, and if the job wasn't on Earth then there were some very interesting possibilities for what might it be, etc. There was much discussion about me too, of course. The networks REALLY wanted to set up an interview with me and Jonathon together. I'm sure you can easily imagine how sickeningly sweet that would've been. I emphatically turned down such suggestions, which greatly annoyed the media because it would've been a major coup for them and gotten fantastic ratings. They were quite pissed off at me for my unreasonable attitude. I managed to live with the shame failing to worship TV ratings. Speaking of shame, many people thought Jonathon should be ashamed of himself for charging for his time on the speaking circuit and the other events he was invited to, especially because he'd been acting for God. His answer was, "Archangel Michael would think I was crazy if I didn't do well out of it. He told me to make sure I got a hot date, so I'm sure he'd also tell me to make money too." Not being a dummy, he was making sure he was continuing to get as many hot dates as he could. They wouldn't last much longer. In another few weeks his fame would have faded too much, and it'd be unlikely that he'd be able to get anything more than the occasional lukewarm date. Because I'd disrupted Jonathon's life so greatly, Vanessa had sent him an invitation to have a talk with her about a job at MAF after all the craziness died down. He'd acknowledged it, but hadn't done anything more about it, the craziness still being in full flow. [He ended up staying at ABC, essentially in his old job but with a higher profile and working for more important reporters. Jonathon's fame often allowing the reporter to get more and better stories than would've been the case otherwise, which enabled Jonathon to negotiate himself a nice pay hike.] ------- Chapter 358: I Need a New Educational Process Tuesday, June 5, 2007 (Continued) While I was getting very celebratory with Carol, Julia said, "Oh! We'd better be quick. You've got a lot of schoolwork to do, Mark." #19: I pressed the button that activated the Faraday cage. When it was closed, I answered, "First, if something's worth celebrating, it's worth doing thoroughly. Especially about something as highly erotic as your wonderful acting abilities. Second, I'm about 30% through the schoolwork. At the current rate, I'll finish it about 3pm." "Huh?" "What didn't you understand?" "Everything. How can you be 30% through? And 'at the current rate' is zero. Unless you think that what we're doing now is part of the school curriculum? Haha." "Don't I wish! Although then I might choose to fail the exam so I could repeat the year. But to explain what I mean by 'current rate' - and I'm surprised you couldn't work this out for yourself, Julia. Maybe I should give you some Math tutoring. I got the notes about two and a quarter hours ago and as I said, I'm about 30% through them, so my current rate is 30% divided by 2.25, which I make about 13.5% per hour. I've got 70% left to go. 70% divided by 13.5% is just over 5 hours, so I'll finish about 3pm, like I said. Would it be easier for you if I got a calculator?" Julia and Carol could easily tell from my tone of voice that I was teasing them. Carol wisely leaving Julia to keep picking away at it, as Carol knew Julia wouldn't be able to resist doing. Julia asked, "I don't need a calculator to help me with the numbers. What I need to know is why there are numbers in the first place. Are you capable of studying while we're talking now?" "Aww! You spoiled my fun. I thought it'd take you two or three more guesses to work that out. I've been studying since about two minutes after I walked out of the room with the notes to 'Put them away.' They're in my downstairs study and I've been working on them every second for the last two and quarter hours." [In case you need reminding, we called my secret study the "downstairs study", and my non-secret study the "upstairs study", just to avoid saying "secret" out loud. We don't want anyone to think we have secrets, because their next step might be to try to investigate them. Not even Paul knew I had a secret study built into the kids' panic room because the door into that room was fitted with a lock that only I could open using NP from the inside.] "You can study AND talk?" "Even better than that: I can study and have sex!" "Not until you've explained yourself you can't! All the time we were having breakfast, talking, even when you were manipulating them with your wonderful sob story, you were studying at the same time?" "Yep. It's been almost a year and half since I did any serious studying. That came to an end when the DHS kidnapped me. In the year Ron was living with you, he never did anything more than casual reading, so I never got around to specifically pointing out that I could do what I'm doing now. You had the pieces: You knew I could lie in bed and study remotely using a sight blob. You also knew I could use sight blobs while I did other things during the day. You just didn't put the two halves together, and I never had a reason to show you before. This is the first time I've been in a hurry to study something, so I'm using every trick in the book, except there isn't a book telling me about my skills, unfortunately." "But studying is HARD. You have to think about it. During breakfast, you didn't seem to be thinking about anything else. You seemed to be paying attention to us, were relaxed, talked a lot." "Sure. You know I can think of more than one thing at a time. I've been splitting my attention today. Part of it was on the breakfast conversation and now you, and most of it is downstairs studying the school subjects through a sight blob, and using NP to turn the pages." "You're actually turning pages now, while we're talking?" "There are currently thirty one piles downstairs, the textbooks and chunks of the class notes. With that many piles there are almost always some pages being turned, and often three or four at the same time." "This I gotta see! Coming, Carol?" "Too right! I gotta see it too. It sounds amazing." I pouted, "So I'll just stay here and have sex with myself then?" "Haha. We won't be long. When we come back we'll be so impressed we'll make it up to you. You'll lift us up the way back as usual?" Julia meant up the slide on the way back. When we have drills, I usually boost everyone back up afterward as it's a lot easier than climbing up manually. "Sure. Looking up at your naked asses like that will be the most sex I've had today." "Not in five minutes it won't be." On the way to the chute, Julia suddenly exclaimed, "Oh my God! You could study for 22 hours per day! 36 screens for 22 hours per day. How much is that?" "It'd be better to call it 30 screens for 20 hours, so 600 hours worth per day." "What does that mean? I know it's awesome, but can you put it in a way I can relate to?" "Sure. Let's say you do 6 hours of reading a day, which is definitely at the top end. It'd take you 100 days to read what I can read in one day. So a whole school year's worth of reading for you, I can do in two days. Those numbers may not be very accurate because it's only going to take me about 7.5 hours to read all the class material that I've got. There are no Math or Physics notes or textbooks, but I've got two sets of notes for most of the subjects, so it probably works out about the same. So 7.5 hours - a third of a day - for me to read a year's worth of schoolwork." "Wow! What about college degrees? You were doing three in one year before. How many now?" "Ignoring the time to do exams, lab work, assignments or anything else - just doing reading - then 4.5 times as many screens and 3 times as many hours, so 13.5 times more. I thought of it as 12 times as many, because I'm not able to utilize all 36 screens yet. Call it 36 degrees per year." "God! Does OSU even have that many degrees?" "It does, but I'm not doing my reading by degrees anyway, just by what courses interest me. OSU has a huge number of courses. If I stay within four hundred feet of my downstairs study - remember range limits me - then I could read the online lecture notes for about forty five courses per week. I've been averaging about twenty per week for the last three weeks, three-quarters of which I do in the six hours while everyone else is asleep. Three weeks ago is when I finished all the undergraduate Math, Physics and Business courses, and started just browsing around out of interest." "THIRTY SIX DEGREES PER YEAR! That's INCREDIBLE! That's the most amazing thing you've ever done." "I haven't DONE it Julia. And it can't be done. Forty five courses per week is 135 hours of exams per week, or 20 hours per day. When would I have time for sex?" Carol giggled, but the sex reference went right over Julia's head. Bizarrely, the twenty hours of exams per day wasn't nearly as much of a problem as it seems. I could sit in my living room and do twenty hours of exams per day using one or two minds, while the other minds were simultaneously studying the courses that would be examined the next week. Not that it matters much, but it would be "next week" because while it used to take 2 weeks/course/screen when I studied for 6 hours per night, at 22 hours of study per day, it'd take about 4 days/course/screen. Accessing my computer system while doing exams theoretically meant that I could cheat by looking up the lecture notes for the course the current exam was for, but I'd have it committed to virtually perfect memory anyway so there'd be no point. Provided I could do the exams within four hundred feet of my study, exams weren't the factor that limited how many degrees I could do a year. The limiting factor was things I had to move away from the house for, like lab work, research (Google doesn't provide all the answers. Some of my Business courses required the student to go to companies and interview their management, for example), projects (also sometimes within companies), and most importantly, having a life. Avoiding freaking out the entire world was a consideration too. "We've GOT to tell Dad and Mom. They're gonna wet themselves! COME ONNN!" The last was uttered IMPATIENTLY because Julia had rushed back to the bed and was now dragging on my hand to get me moving. I rolled my eyes at Carol, then said, "Give me time to get some shorts on. Unlike you, I'm not comfortable running around the property naked." Julia looked down and discovered she was naked. She looked puzzled, as if she had no idea how that'd happened. The three of us started throwing on our clothes, Julia clearly unhappy with the unexpected delay. Carol, seeing my horny and disappointed - and possibly somewhat annoyed - expression, told me, "You make her very happy." That did cheer me up. Even more so, when Carol added, "She's SO going to jump your bones when she calms down enough." #13: #22: #12: Julia grabbed me by the hand again, and started dragging me out of the room. I used NP to flick the Faraday cage off, otherwise Julia would've gotten very pissed off at the door for it being locked. She dragged me up the tunnel - for someone with such short legs she can move amazingly quickly - and into the Adults' House, where she started yelling, "MOM! DAD! Where are you?" There was no answer, so she started dragging me through the house, repeating her yells, accompanied by Carol's chuckles from behind me. We have an extensive intercom system that is perfectly suited for asking someone where they are (provided they're in just about any room in either house, the Office, the Staff Quarters, the Gate Guardhouse, Mailroom, Nursery (plants, not babies), near the two pools, and a few other locations). Her parents were almost certainly inside because no one wanted to go outside in case there was another sniper, but Julia preferred to yell. I took the risk of shutting my eyes for a quick sight blob search while we were walking down the hallway. I told her, "They're in their study." I hadn't seen either of my parents, and I didn't bother looking for them, as Julia wasn't in the mood to wait. Julia moved determinedly in that direction, yelling, "MOM! DAD!" a couple more times. Apparently just to let them know we were coming so Julia could start talking the moment she was inside their doorway, without wasting valuable time. Julia dragged me into their room, Prof and Vanessa already swiveled around to look at us. Something must have alerted them. "GUESS WHAT MARK'S DOING?", demanded Julia. I used NP to activate the Faraday cage for this room. The sounds of the metal shutters sliding into place and the door locking shut, plus the room suddenly getting darker, gave Prof and Vanessa a good clue at the type of conversation we were going to have. Prof took a stab at it, "Being led around the house by a very noisy, overly excited young woman?" "No, that's not it! He's STUDYING!" "That's nice, dear," said Vanessa, deliberately playing with fire. "He's studying NOW!" Prof and Vanessa suddenly looked interested. Before they could speak, Julia continued, "That's not all. Wait until you hear how MUCH he's studying!" "Why don't you..." "FORTY FIVE DEGREES PER YEAR! That's how much! Isn't he incredible?" #13: Prof and Vanessa were very interested, but they hadn't been told nearly enough to understand what Julia was raving about. Julia was too excited to be rational or explain well - or to have sex, unfortunately - so I took over. I explained, "Over the last year or so, some of my abilities have improved in ways which combine to produce some educational benefits. A particular young woman just learned about them, and she finds them very exciting..." I was going far too slowly for Julia. She interrupted to declare, "FORTY FIVE DEGREES PER YEAR! That's how many Mark can do. Not COURSES, but DEGREES! How many courses can you do a week Mark?" "Forty five." "Huh? Forty five courses AND degrees. That can't be right..." "Let me explain it, before you burst something important." To Prof and Vanessa I said, "Remember when I showed you my new computer set up, we discussed my capability. There are roughly 4 times as many screens, so rather than 3 degrees per year, I can do 12, which works out to be about 15 courses per week. That's just the time to read the online lectures, ignoring the time required for exams, lab work, projects, etc..." Julia was shifting on her feet impatiently, and was about to interrupt, but Prof headed Julia's interruption off at the pass, "Let Mark explain it, Julia. It's his ability." Vanessa added, "It'll be good practice for your self-control." "But he's going so SLOW!" complained Julia. "Is there a hurry?" asked Vanessa. "YES! He's INCREDIBLE! Wait till you hear about him studying ALL THE TIME! Tell them Mark! Hurry up!" Julia started shaking my arm, to hurry me up. #14: I said, "As I was saying, I could read the online lectures for 12 degrees per year, which is the equivalent of 15 courses per week..." "ARGH!" expressed Julia, with considerable intensity. Prof warned, "Julia! Enough is enough. Let Mark tell it his way." "Argh." "It's quite simple," I enjoyed saying that, remembering all the times Julia had used that phrase to inflict the impenetrable mysteries of female thinking on me. "It's not SIMPLE, it's INCREDIBLE! Mark's future is going to be the most mind-blowing..." I was tempted to use NP to pick her up by her ankles, especially because she'd been in too much of a hurry to bother putting her panties on, but I didn't want to upset her. Instead I bent down to muffle her mouth with a kiss, picking her up and holding her against my chest. I pulled back from the kiss to say, "This really will go faster if you let me explain it. You're slightly too excited to explain it coherently yourself." "Hurry up! You could've explained all of it by now." Holding her close, so I could seal her mouth again if necessary, I resumed, "The 15 courses per week rate was assuming my usual six or seven hours per night of studying while everyone else is asleep. The last time I did that much was a year and a half ago, before Homeland Security kidnapped me. Since then, Ron had no need to study, often no decent computer system to study on, didn't want the Government to spy on it, etc." Julia started opening her mouth to speak, so I kissed her again, giving her a warning squeeze. Vanessa said, "We'll make you wait outside if you can't control yourself, Julia. You've got less patience than Donna sometimes." I removed my mouth, letting Julia complain, "He's going so SLOW!" "So we can understand," approved Vanessa. Prof added, "Please go even slower, Mark, because Julia needs practice at controlling herself." Julia subsided, knowing she was going to lose this one. Her excitement had receded too, which hopefully meant that I would be getting some sex soon, that being another reason not to tease her too much now. I resumed, "Regardless of my not studying, some of my abilities improved. As you saw, there are 36 screens now. My ability to see with my eyes shut has also improved in two important respects: I don't need to shut my real eyes to use my mental eyes, and I can move my mental eyes around quite easily. You know what light blobs are. Now I have what I call 'Sight Blobs'. They're my mental eyes. Actually a mental eye, singular, as its vision isn't stereoscopic." My irrelevancy caused Julia to shift in my arms, but she chose not to speak. It must've hurt her, because she was still very excited. -- "Light blobs and sight blobs are actually the same thing. One radiates light, the other receives it. I can make them do both at the same time if I want, which is what I do when I'm reading something in the dark, but normally I set sight blobs so they don't radiate any light, which makes them invisible. Light passes straight through them because non-radiating light blobs are totally transparent. I've got no idea how something which is totally transparent can see light. That's a puzzle for any physicist, but they certainly work fine. I can move them anywhere within five hundred feet of me, although the vision quality degrades beyond about 430 feet. Any walls in the way don't matter, not even solid rock. -- "You know from my being able to study on multiple computer screens that I can have multiple conscious streams of thought, so I can pay attention to multiple things at one time. What Julia is so excited about is that I've currently got all my borrowed schoolwork laid out on the floor of my downstairs study, I've got a sight blob there, and I'm currently talking to you AND studying at the same time. Provided I stay within about 450 feet of my downstairs study - which I'm just on the edge of now - I can study 22.5 hours a day. That's triple my previous 6 or 7 overnight hours. 15 courses per week increases to 45; and the reading for 12 degrees per year increases to 36." "He's INCREDIBLE!" Julia declared, in case anyone was in any doubt. No one appeared to be though. Prof asked, "You're studying right this second, while you're talking to us?" "Yep. Because I can do about 30-odd conscious things at the same time, I've got one stream of thought focused on this conversation, and the rest studying. So talking to you is reducing my maximum study rate about 3%. During my overnight sessions, I use all my consciousness to study, which maximizes my rate. During the day, I've not bothered studying much. Since we moved into this place in mid-April, I've been averaging about 15 courses per week from the overnight sessions, plus about 5 per week from my studying at other times. I don't divide the courses up by time of day - I just work my way through them until they're done - but that gives you the idea of my daytime effort. I've kept the daytime studying low key mainly because the Government is paying too much attention to us. Also because there's no need for me to go as fast as possible because I'm going to run out of interesting OSU courses before long, and because I generally prefer to pay attention to whatever is going on around me." Prof said, "I know the answer to this, but I have to hear you say it again. You can study 30-odd computer screens continuously, almost 24-hours a day, as well as talk with us and behave normally around the house, and you understand and can remember EVERYTHING you've read?" "Yep. Not that it makes any significant difference, but it takes less attention to talk with you than it does to study, so this is fractionally easier for me than my overnight study sessions." Julia added, "We spent two hours talking to the gang over breakfast. Mark was the center of attention and did most of the talking... #14: #22: #12: " ... including a WONDERFUL and very smart manipulation I'll tell you about later. No one had any idea that he was reading through all the schoolwork at the same time. He'd done a third of it even before they'd left. It's the most amazing thing I've ever heard of, and Mark's amazed me so many times before. It's going to allow him to achieve an incredible amount during his life." "It sure is!" agreed Vanessa. "Mark, when you're studying multiple screens, you can use your NP-fingertips at the same time can't you?" "Sure. I used them to make the screens scroll up and down, and I'm using them now to turn the physical pages of the textbooks and notes." "So could you answer multiple emails at the same time?" "I'd have to have multiple computers, because I'd need multiple keyboards, unless Logan can connect 35 more keyboards to my existing computer system and have them linked to each screen." "I'm not worried about that end of things; I'm just thinking about your productivity. Not only could you do the work of thirty six people - provided it was all computer based - but there'd be enormous synergistic benefits because you'd know everything that every one of you had done, and you've got so much other shared knowledge." #1: #8: Prof agreed, "Your 'shared knowledge' point is a major one, dear. Mark could have so much scientific knowledge, from so many diverse fields, that he'd see connections that no one else would think of. He'd be able to coordinate a massive amount of research activity too. I've got a foolish mental imagine of him heading up thirty six research labs, managing them all by email rather than by personal appearance, like a spider in the center of large web. In reality it wouldn't be set up that way, but his potential productivity is incredible. -- "I'm ASTOUNDED by what you'll be able to achieve, Mark. I already thought you had a good chance of becoming the world's leading scientist, but that was based just on your acquiring knowledge a dozen times faster than other people. Now you tell us you can acquire it three dozen times faster AND be three dozen times more productive than other people. Plus the synergistic benefits as Vanessa said, which have got to be so substantial I wouldn't be surprised if there was an order of magnitude improvement just from that factor alone. Rather than being the world's leading scientist Mark, you might be the equivalent of two or three HUNDRED leading scientists, all working together. I'm overwhelmed." He was too: Prof was totally dazed. I have a HUGE amount of respect for Prof. His being so blown away meant I'd underestimated myself yet again. I said, "I didn't realize it was such a big deal. I'm not arguing, but I've got a few correction points. The 'three dozen' value is optimistic. I put 36 screens on my computer, but I'm still operating at the high-20s or low-30s level, depending on how demanding the activities are. I might never get to 36..." I was interrupted by everybody disagreeing with me. Prof got in first with, "Now you're REALLY freaking me out. I was stunned at the consequences of your managing 36 streams of consciousness, but you just reminded me that you're still getting better. It was only two and a half years ago that you went from one computer screen to two, and I remember how amazed I was by that. Then eight screens two years ago. Now 36 screens. What's next? 100 screens, 200? Not just screens for more input into your brain, but increased synergy within it, and increased output from it too. I've seen how fast you can type, so a hundred or two hundred..." "Back up PLEASE, Prof, before YOU burst something. I joked about Julia doing that, but you do look in danger of it. I can ONLY do about thirty screens now, and you're getting far too excited about unhatched chickens. There obviously has to be a limit to what my brain can handle, and I doubt very much that it's much higher than thirty. That's already straining any realistic possibility. It's an organic system, and it simply can't have much more functionality than I'm already getting out of it." #14: #23: ^ [[I didn't know that déjà vu'ing gave me even more minds, if only for about three minutes at a time, that being the approximate average duration of déjà vu's these days. (The durations increasing from about twenty seconds before my first merge was simply because there was more information to synchronize.) I'd had over six hundred déjà vu's since my last merge and never had any brain capacity problem from having sixty four minds in my head, and nor has any other Mark mentioned anything. I do so much bullshitting that I occasionally tell the truth by accident. In this case, I'd spread some reasonably accurate bullshit when I'd been giving interviews as Archangel Michael. The greatest point of accuracy was that the soul existed and it was intrinsic to minds. You could perhaps argue about whether it should be called a "soul", but minds do have a non-physical component, which was therefore not physically constrained by the number of neurons in a brain, which is what I'd been worrying about above. The Universe is built of Space-Time, Matter-Energy and Consciousness-Ki. Life has evolved WITHIN the Universe (obviously), so life necessarily interacts with the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. Thus all life interacts - in various ways and extents - with Space, Time, Matter, Energy, Consciousness (in the sense I mean that label it to apply to the Universe) and Ki. Humanity is almost totally ignorant of the existence, let alone the effects, of Consciousness and Ki, so you're unaware of how fundamental to your life they are. Now that I understand them, it's almost as ridiculous for me to imagine life without them as it is to imagine life without Space, Time, Matter or Energy. Because of Consciousness-Ki's properties, it doesn't interact with life, but with minds. It interacts with them a GREAT deal. Mindless life is totally unaffected by Consciousness-Ki, but as soon as minds are involved, Consciousness-Ki starts to have a beneficial effect. Only tiny effects with tiny minds, but increasingly so with larger minds. As minds evolved into existence and into increasing size, they did so in a way that relied on the Universe's properties. That helped their survival, and therefore evolution selected for it. The Universe provides minded life with ki (a type of energy), which is a small boost to survival. It's a VERY small help for most life, but very small effects spread over millions of years are significant. Minds which interacted with the Universe's Consciousness survived better than minds that did not. Consciousness assists human minds in ways that you're almost entirely unaware of because the interactions are in those parts of your minds that evolved millions of years ago, long before you had a consciousness. There is however one way in which humans interact with the Universe's Consciousness that you're all almost conscious of: you can get a feeling when you're being observed. Given that for virtually all of mankind's evolution - starting right back at when it was much smaller than a mouse - having a feeling when you were being hunted was a VERY pro-survival sensation, so it has been bred into humanity as the most intense and almost-conscious sensation we can get from the Universe's Consciousness. Over the long history of the evolution of minds, their increasing power has enabled them to interact with the Universe's Consciousness to greater degrees. That's been pro-survival, so it's been a steady trend. Nowadays, a very substantial proportion of where a human mind operates has been 'out-sourced' to the Universe, as that's more efficient and therefore pro-survival. Humans who could do that well starved to death less often than humans who couldn't, sometimes going on to have children. Effectively - to use a software analogy - much of what makes human minds 'runs on' the Universe's pixels (the term I'm using for the fundamental structure of the Universe. They can't really be compared to atoms or quarks, and exist even in an atom-less vacuum, because they're the structure of the Universe rather than discrete 'things'). There is no need for minds to run on only those pixels which are within the volume of space occupied by the physical brain. It's actually our sense of self that constrains where our minds are; and it is the power of our minds which controls how large a volume that can be. Human minds are powerful enough to extend their sense of self nine inches beyond the physical limits of their bodies. At this time in my autobiography, my mind enabled me to extend my sense of self twenty four feet, thereby giving me a GREAT deal more volume in which to hold my minds (the concern of mine that spurred this explanation). My physical brain was still a limiting factor, but very little of a mind is within a human brain, and brains have a VERY high upper limit on what they can manage. Brains are designed, by unguided evolutionary processes, to multitask. Potentially every single neuron I had could fire at the same time, so operating the physical aspects of multiple minds was not difficult. Ask any severe schizophrenic. As a slight digression, you might recognize the two physical measurements given just above (nine inches and twenty four feet). Those are the proximity sense ranges of ordinary humans and me. Proximity functions as a sensing organ because things within our proximity range are within our mind!]] ^ I continued my discussion with Prof, "Let's please stick to thirty screens as my limit. If I ever get to more than that, I'll let you know, but I doubt it very much. The second correction I wanted to make is that you assumed I could learn thirty times faster AND output thirty times more. I can't do both at the same time. I can do thirty things at once, so doing fifteen inputs and fifteen outputs is possible..." Prof un-dazed himself sufficiently to interrupt, "I wouldn't worry too much about that. At your learning rate, you're going to quickly run out of published material in your fields. Thereafter you'll just need to stay current, which many scientists find too time-consuming but you won't. At your stage of life, input is the only activity you're involved in. No one expects any original contributions from you yet, not until you do your first thesis. At the PhD level people are still mostly inputting, but with your thirty streams of consciousness, you'll have run out of input in your fields by the time you get your doctorates. How do you feel about telling people that God must've supercharged your brain? Because it's ridiculous that your undergraduate degrees are going to be held up because you haven't done a certain number of hours of lab work. You could pass all the remaining exams in your first three degrees now, couldn't you?" "Easily. I don't like the idea of going public with my brain having been changed yet. The public is too insane already without adding anything more. Once things have calmed down, which hopefully will take only a week or so because the public's attention span is so fickle, then we can start talking about it to the people who need to know, like the Dean. If it leaks out slowly from people like that, it shouldn't have any effect. We shouldn't say my brain's been changed because people without much brain of their own would get worked up about that. We should say my intelligence has been raised. It's the same thing but the public isn't interested in intelligence so their only reaction will be to yawn and wonder whether Paris Hilton has found her panties yet." "I'll be happy to wait for the chaos around us to dissipate before speaking up. Let me know when you're feeling comfortable about that and I'll talk with the Dean about getting your progress accelerated. -- "Back to your capabilities. I was countering your point that your thirty processes won't be as effective as I claimed originally because the total has to add to thirty, such as fifteen inputs and fifteen outputs. By the time you finish your PhDs, you'll be almost entirely output oriented. Scientists stay current with less than 10% of their attention. Even if you had five fields you were staying on top of, that'd be at most one input, leaving you with twenty nine outputs. The difference between one input and twenty nine outputs, or thirty inputs and thirty outputs as I originally implied, is negligible. There won't be enough for you to input, so it's just a matter of you having twenty nine or thirty outputs. -- "Your correction is logically correct, but in reality it'll make no difference. Especially because it'll be difficult to find ways to get full use out of your output potential. I hope we get that $216 billion from the Government because I can see you building your own lab in a few years, and staffing it with a thousand scientists who you'll keep busy trying to handle all the work you'll shoot their way. That's assuming you get involved with experimental science. A Pure Math career would function very differently. We'll have to wait and see about that, but not for long at your new learning rate." "Okay. I didn't know that the balance would be so one-sided. My third attempt at correcting your excitement was just querying your estimate about the importance of synergy. You said an order of magnitude gain for that, and that it'd make me like two or three hundred scientists all by myself. I can accept that I might be equivalent to thirty scientists, but surely three hundred is stretching my abilities WAY too far?" "It's impossible to put an accurate number on it. Let me give you a couple of examples. If you choose a career in Pure Math, there will be very little synergy possible because it operates so much out on a limb by itself. I almost hope you don't concentrate on math, which is a sad thing for me to say because I'm sure you'd set the math world alight. It'd constrain you too much though. -- "As an alternative which is very much on my mind at the moment, let's say you decided to study the brain. You could quickly learn all there is available to learn in the related fields, and there are MANY related fields: medical fields like neurochemistry, biochemistry, psychology, through to electrical engineering maybe. Studying the brain isn't something I know much about, so I'm only guessing at those fields, but I'm sure there could easily be one or two dozen specialist fields that almost everyone else can only ever master one of. You could master all of them. There could very easily be many major roadblocks in our understanding of the brain which are roadblocks only because they take two or three bodies of knowledge to solve. You might solve them one after the other in next to no time because they're obvious to your combined knowledge. That might produce progress faster than three hundred scientists. Maybe even more than three thousands, if there are that many in that field. -- "The more knowledge people have, the easier it is for them to solve problems and have new ideas. You're going to have an unprecedented amount of knowledge and the intelligence to use it effectively. In a complex environment - such as building a spaceship capable of taking man to Alpha Centauri, because you like science fiction - the synergistic benefits could very easily be considerably more than a single order of magnitude. You might overcome the multi-faceted hurdles a thousand times faster than any other single scientist. You're young yet, and you haven't seen the benefits of synergy when it comes to problem solving and idea creating. The more I think about it, the more I think my guess of factor of ten was too low." "You've reminded me that I have seen synergy in operation similar to the way you describe. The later courses in the BBA tie together a lot of the earlier courses, and I could see that designing a strategic plan for a company that had marketing, finance, manufacturing, etc., all lined up properly, would be far more successful than if they weren't. I can easily imagine a company trying to solve a business problem and failing because it lacked knowledge in one of those areas. I underestimated the importance of my improved educational ability because all I've ever done is input. But input is obviously just the prerequisite to output, and that's where I'm going to produce much more quality and quantity than other people." "Exactly right," agreed Prof. "It doesn't apply to you, but everybody else is severely input constrained. To become productive in any specialist field requires a bachelor's, a master's and a doctorate, plus at least a few years of work experience. Call it a dozen years of input. Then they start producing output and often slowly get behind in their field because they can't devote the necessary time to staying current with new input. You're not input constrained at all. Even if you had your own lab the way I described, after everyone goes home to sleep you can still be gathering more input. There won't be enough of it, so you'll end up adding more doctorates. -- "But, as you said, input is just the prerequisite. Everybody else takes about twelve years to get useful in a field; you'll take no more than three, and you can potentially do it in a dozen different specialties at the same time. Even if you can't formally do the degrees, you can still learn and use the knowledge. The quantity of your work will be thirty times more than anyone else's if it's set up properly, and the quality will be exceptional where you're able to combine your extensive knowledge in ways never considered before." #15: "I told you so!" declared Julia victoriously. "Mark's INCREDIBLE! This is the most incredible thing he's ever done." "It certainly is," agreed Vanessa. "It's a very profound development. We're going to have to give a great deal of thought to a new educational process for you, Mark, because the current one will be holding you back very wastefully." "It wouldn't be first time we've had to do that," agreed Prof happily. "Coursework has to go. The Dean and I are going to have a very interesting discussion soon. I'll try to get him to allow you to take all his exams, and we'll see about jumping you straight from bachelor's to doctorates formally, as self-studying the master's courses will be sufficient. I'm incredibly excited over the prospect of what you'll be doing about three years from now, Mark." Julia had a different version, "Not as excited as I am about what he's going to be doing in three minutes. Let me down, Mark, we have to get back to our room NOW!" "Shouldn't you tell Felicity and Steven first?" asked Vanessa. "Not NOW Mom! You tell them please. You know I'm no good at explaining things when I'm too excited. I have to show Mark how much I love him." "Have you done any study this morning, Julia?" "MOM! I'm too excited to study." She was too. Julia was bouncing up and down with lustful impatience (it's like ordinary impatience, but MUCH better). "ONE hour Julia, and then I'm knocking on your door." "ONE! Didn't you hear how incredible he is! I need at least..." "ONE HOUR. Mark's incredible but you're not. The clock's already running, so stay here and argue if..." "Come ON, Mark!" #15: "Run FASTER, Mark!" ------- Chapter 359: Donna has a Very Good Day Tuesday, June 5, 2007 (Continued) Vanessa did indeed knock on our door exactly one very enjoyable hour later. Julia knew her mother well, so we'd already stopped and were under the covers, ready to restart if Vanessa had been distracted, but no such luck. Julia called, "Come in, Mom." Vanessa came in, sat on the side of the bed, saying, "Prof's VERY excited about your future in the sciences, Mark. He was before, but now he's like a little boy in a candy store. It's very good to see him so happy. You're giving us a very interesting time. It's quite a change from the quiet retirement we were imagining a couple of years ago." "I couldn't begin to describe how much I've benefited from what you've given me, including a daughter that gives me more than a few 'interesting times' herself. Ouch! Hey, I meant that as a compliment! -- "I agree with what Prof said just before Julia dragged me out of the room; about the situation in three years from now, that is. I like his image of my directing a large laboratory too, although I've got no idea how laboratories run yet. Getting the $216 billion from the FBI's spying is actually looking useful now, rather than just more numbers in a bank account that we'd never get around to touching. I'm sure we could set up a hell of a good lab for that much money." "I'm sure it would be a world leader, and very productive if you were in charge of its science. As Julia so politely requested, we did tell your parents about your latest development. We've got some questions about minor aspects of it, but they can wait until we're together at lunchtime. Julia and Carol, I hope you're ready to apply yourselves to several hours of diligent studying?" "Yes Mom." | "Yes Vanessa." "Good. Get up, get showered, and get the books open. I'll bring your lunch down at lunchtime. You can work through it because you've got several hours of lost time to make up for." "Yes Mom." | "Yes Vanessa." Vanessa got up and pulled the covers down to enforce the girls getting out. She continued, "You come to lunch, Mark, if only to stop you distracting the girls. How's the study going?" She had a mischievous look on her face, so she obviously knew what she was asking. I'd prepared an answer because I'd expected Julia to ask it, but she'd been too busy to think of it yet. I said, "Very well, thank you for asking, Vanessa. I'm about 50% of the way through. It's speeding up slightly because I'm having less trouble from not knowing prerequisite material and I've confirmed that almost none of the schoolwork I'd done before the DHS kidnapped me in the previous school year has changed in this one." Julia stopped halfway to the bathroom, turned and asked me unhappily, "You were studying while we were having sex?" I activated the Faraday, waited for all the panels to slide into place, then said, "In the last hour I got thirty hours of studying done. That's a LOT of work; as much as you'll do between now and your first exam. I could be extremely busy the next several days because of the mini-war, and I'm sure that the reason Vanessa asked that question while you were in the room was to give your ego a little message: it's going to have to get used to me doing multiple things at once rather than focusing on you. Hundreds of thousands of hours of productivity would be lost over our lifetimes because you wanted me to be 'polite' by paying all of my attention to you. That piece of etiquette is for normal people who don't have attention to spare so they end up doing a poor job if they split it. I didn't do a poor job of making love to you, did I?" Carol quickly spoke up, "You did a great job as always, and I think it's wonderful that you can do several things at the same time. You never have to stop your important work for me, Mark. You're my Lord, so you do whatever you want." Which left Julia with no possibility of objecting. She said, "I was just surprised, is all. You and Carol are both right. Thank you, MOM, for making sure my ego never has a chance of getting big." Vanessa said, "Getting any bigger, you mean. It was my pleasure, Julia. You were very bossy to Mark when you dragged him to see us and when you dragged him away again. You were getting too big for your britches. Turn the cage off, please Mark, so the girls can shower and get some britches on." I hit the button, while Julia apologetically said, "I'm sorry, Mark. I have been too egotistical lately, and I might've reacted badly if Carol hadn't set me right." Vanessa told me, "Don't keep them talking long. The last thing they need is another sex session by way of apology." "I won't, Vanessa." I re-engaged the cage after Vanessa walked out, just in case Julia wanted to rave about my new ability again. I answered Julia, "Your ambition and leadership is a large part of what I love about you, and it's certainly a large part of the value of what you do for me. Plus you were right to drag me to talk with parents because I'd considerably undervalued the effect of those abilities. Vanessa also criticized you for dragging me away, which was just SILLY of her. I WANT you to drag me away whenever you're so horny you can't stand still, haha. -- "While I think of it, how come you understood so quickly how important my new abilities are? I now understand why I didn't understand that originally, and I would've thought you had the same lack of perspective." "Umm. I felt it rather than understood it. Mom and Dad say having an education is 'very important', and they're talking about ONE education. You can get hundreds of educations, and keep on getting more of them even when you're working, for all the rest of your life. That's got to be thousands of times more important than 'very important', so I got a thousand times 'very excited'. I didn't really understand why until I heard Dad's explanation." "Yeah, he was very convincing." I disengaged the cage again, and we went through to the bathroom. In the shower I thought of another topic to ask about, "How come you were so confident about being able to get David several girls to choose from? I would've thought it was hard to find even one girl willing to spend a week in a hotel room with a guy who's not currently her boyfriend." "It'll be easy. I'll tell the girls to spread the word that whatever girl hooks David will get to go to Noumea and Italy." "Wow. I know girls are enthusiastic about shopping, but I didn't know they'd be willing to compromise themselves that much for it." "Shopping in ITALY! Plus that's only part of the bait. Spending two weeks in a small group with you is the biggest inducement. There are many girls who'd do much more than sleep with David for the opportunity of being with you so long. You're the most famous high-school kid in the world, you're rich, will be gorgeous in a few weeks, and all the other reasons. David will be fighting them off." "I will admit to being famous now - I have to admit it because I see myself every time I turn the TV on - but I sincerely hope that'll fade away in a week or two. Even if a girl leaps onto David immediately, when she sees my fame fade away, won't she get cold feet?" "I doubt it, but even if one or two do, David will have his pick of the others. It's not worth worrying about. You don't really care that David comes or not, do you?" "No, not really. I was just trying to be a good host and follow your lead of inviting people on these trips who're being helpful to us at the time. If David hadn't been here today, I never would've thought of him. Enough about him, but on a related matter: You said that girls would chase David in part to have two weeks with me. Unless you object strongly, that'll only be one week. I was thinking of not coming on the Italy trip." Julia was genuinely puzzled, "Why not?" "How to put this delicately: Because it'd bore me to tears. I've been on five of your overseas shopping trips now, and they're no fun for me any longer." They were no fun at the beginning either, but there was no need to mention that. "They're not? Everyone seems to have a fantastic time?" "All the girls do. And the guys do if they haven't been to that city before, but I've done everything I want to do in Rome and Milan. If you, Carol and Donna needed someone to protect you, I'd certainly go with you, but you always take guards and the worst that's happened is some pinched bottoms, plus I'm rarely with you when the stores are open anyway. Mom and Dad will be at home, so I might do a family thing with them. Or maybe Dad and I will go on a little fishing trip together. A male bonding thing." "Okay, I guess. But it won't be as good without you." "Julia, it'll be EXACTLY the same without me. From about three days before the trip until after we get back you don't even notice that I exist. You're totally focused on the shopping. Even when you come back to the hotel each night after the stores close - which is often very late if a fashion house puts something on for you - you sit with the other girls and talk clothes. If I'd told you I'd go on the trip but had stayed at home instead, there's at least a 50% chance you'd arrive back with no idea that I hadn't been with you. That may be an exaggeration, but not by much." "I'm really that bad?" "You're that FOCUSED, yes. It's not 'bad' because the other guys and I plan our excursions, but I've already done all the excursions I want to in Rome and Milan, so it'd be boring to go again." "We don't have to go to Rome and Milan. We can go anywhere in Italy. Mom and Dad are traveling around." "You DO have to go to Rome and Milan. That's where the best clothing stores are, and that's what you and the other girls are most interested in. I heard the breakfast conversation, and it was ALL about Rome and Milan. No one would forgive me if I made you spend most of the time elsewhere. Plus there's nowhere else I particularly want to go in Italy. It's a girls' trip, so you do your girly things. I can easily find something else to do during that week." "But I wanted to get you some new clothes. You'll need many new clothes by then, and there are some fantastic men's clothes in Italy." "Somehow that doesn't quite manage to change my mind. Good try though." Carol giggled. Julia looked at Carol suspiciously, and Carol explained, "Every word Mark said is true, except he understated it. How many guys do you know who'd happily go on girls' shopping trips the way Mark has? I'm surprised he didn't beg off four trips ago." "It doesn't seem right to go without him." "You mentally go without him every trip. Mark was only slightly exaggerating when he joked about your not noticing if he missed the plane. We'll have a great time, especially with introducing Donna to it. Mark can do his male bonding things with Dad, or whatever else he wants to do." "Maybe we should cancel the trip?" half-suggested a depressed Julia. I gave her the answer she wanted, "You have to go. The winter ranges will be coming out, and you and the girls have to see what the trends are. Besides, it's not just this one trip that I'm talking about; it's all the future ones as well. Canceling would mean you never have another shopping trip, and you don't want that, do you?" "All of them?" "Unless you were going on a lingerie shopping trip. Is there a lingerie fashion capital of the world?" "No." "See, the fashion industry just isn't organized with guys in mind; it's for girls. You go enjoy your trips and I'll find a guy-thing to do while you're away." "But it doesn't feel right to separate for a whole week. You won't have Carol or Ava with you either." "It'll be GREAT. I'll be able to wear the same clothes all week, and no one..." "YOU WOULDN'T! You're joking, right?" "Relax. Even I know that I'd have to change my underwear at least twice." After some more discussion, Julia reluctantly agreed to go on her trip without me. She was quite depressed by it, but I had no doubt she'd bounce back as the trip got closer. In case you're wondering, this wasn't part of any sneaky plan of mine. The reason I wanted to avoid the week long shopping trip was because I wanted to avoid the week long shopping trip, and that was even before Julia had mentioned that "There are fantastic men's clothes in Italy," which I knew all too well already. They do have some extremely good men's clothing in Italy - even I have to admire the quality of some of the stuff I've bought there - but I'm certainly not so impressed by them that I'm going to buy more while my body is still changing. Lunchtime had the four parents, Donna and me gathered together. Until most of the additional 150,000 insane people in and around Corvallis went home, we were staying inside our homes as much as possible. That was particularly hard on Donna, but I had a couple of things to say that should cheer her up: "Donna, I heard Carol and Julia talking about having a week-long girls' shopping trip to Italy, going in the plane when Vanessa and Prof go. Don't tell them I told you, but I think they're intending to invite you along on..." "WHEEE!" Vanessa yelled, "Don't disturb their studies," but she was WAY too slow; Donna was already out of the door and sprinting for the Kids' House. Donna may have gained some weight up top, but her legs haven't lost any of their ability to move her pretty damned fast. She hadn't thought to use the tunnel either, but the overlooking hillsides were now cordoned and patrolled a great deal better than they used to be, and Donna was neither the prime nor an easy target. News of the fate of the previous gunman should act as a disincentive for any potential snipers too. Mom said, "I guess that means Donna's going to Italy. It'd be difficult to stop her now." I hadn't really been usurping Mom's authority much as I've several times recently heard the parents comment about Donna's improving maturity. Donna had BEGGED to go on the last foreign trip, and hadn't quite managed to convince Mom, so I was pretty confident it'd be acceptable now. It was time Donna got lucky. We discussed that a bit. None of the previous girls' trips had experienced any trouble - having two uniformed guards with the girls had helped considerably, even if their holsters were empty. Julia, Carol, Ava, Jill and Jan (our two female guards) were old hands at shopping in Italy now. They knew how to get around and quite a few useful Italian phrases, as well as all the ESSENTIAL phrases like, "Do you have this in the next size up?" I explained that I wouldn't be going on this trip and why. Mom worried that I wouldn't be there to guard the girls, but, "I'm not with them most of the time anyway, plus having me around might actually cause more trouble next trip because of all the resurrection drama. They'll be much safer if you send a third guard in my seat, because he could stay with the girls while they shop. You'll have to pay him some danger money though, because he'd be risking his sanity." Donna's going, even though I wasn't, was accepted. I told the parents, "I've begged out of the shopping trip because they're far too girly for me. While the girls are away, I don't want to get together with a bunch of guys and get all masculine for a week, but I wondered about us going on a little fishing trip somewhere, Dad. Two or three days somewhere natural and quiet. Except that it'd leave Mom all alone in the house, unless you'd like to come too, Mom?" "Not me! Sounds like a perfect father-son activity to me. Vanessa wants me to cover for her while she's away, so I'll have plenty to do. I might take some of my friends to DC and spend a few days there. Catch some shows, visit some art galleries and museums. We'll have a cultural time while you're splashing around in a boat with slimy fish and smelly bait." "Count me in, Mark," agreed Dad happily. "It sounds even better than visiting art galleries and museums." "Good. I can pretty much guarantee we'll catch plenty of fish." "You can?" I nodded: sight blob to search the water for them, capture them in an NP-box, move them to our bait, and jam them on a hook if they're not hungry. "Now that's what I call a useful son!" "Speaking of things aquatic, I was hoping to be able to borrow your jet please, Vanessa, to fly somewhere for a week's scuba diving. I had Noumea in mind, although I haven't researched it much yet. I'd invite a dozen guys and they can bring a girlfriend each, and I'd take half a dozen of my favorites for me. I was thinking of taking Donna too, because I'm sure she'd love to learn scuba diving." "Is it safe?" asked Mom. "Most of the learning is in a swimming pool watched by an instructor, and when she dives in the ocean, I'll be with her. She couldn't be safer. You know she's a very good swimmer. She'll have a blast." Vanessa commented, "I was wondering how long it'd take you to ask to use it for something significant. When were you thinking of?" "It doesn't much matter. Ideally shortly before the Italy trip, but that's only a small consideration. Any time during the second half of summer would be great, to give Ava time to heal enough to participate. Knowing her, she'll want to learn to scuba dive too." My kiatsu could guarantee that Ava's arm would have healed enough by whenever we go on the trip. "If you're away for a week, then the plane will have to return home in between. That'll be a long trip for the crew, so they'll need to sleep between their return and my using them next, which will block out at least a day and a half. Does flying down one Saturday morning and returning the next Saturday morning suit you?" (Sometimes when the plane is very busy, especially if it's going to be flying a particularly long trip, Vanessa will temporarily employee a new co-pilot to give one of ours a couple of days off, as it's a really bad idea to overwork pilots. We prefer not to hire strangers though, so try to schedule our trips so it isn't necessary.) "Sounds great. The timing isn't critical, and that'd work nicely." "Have a look at the schedule to find two adjacent open weekends, and let me know." Vanessa meant for me to do that the next chance I got. She'd forgotten that I could do it immediately. I used NP to activate the room's Faraday cage and turn the lights on. By the time it'd closed, I'd checked the plane's schedule on our home/office intranet. I said, "There aren't two free weekends in a row until after your Italy trip. We can't solve it by taking a two-week holiday because there aren't even two free weekends two weeks apart before September. The first available dates are the two weekends after you get back from Italy, September 8 & 9, 15 & 16. The girls will still be talking about how exciting the clothes shopping was in Italy, but I can stick my head underwater to make the pain go away." "Okay, block out those two weekends for you." "Done." Prof got it first, saying, "Ahh! You just recorded your booking, didn't you? Using your new ability?" "Yeah. I thought you'd be amused by a demonstration, not that you actually saw anything. I'm still doing my schoolwork in my downstairs study, so I diverted a little attention for a few seconds." "Even through the Faraday cage?" "Yep. I was wondering if you'd spot that. You were too excited in your study, but you've got it now. That means it's not an electromagnetic effect. I'm reasonably sure it ignores the intervening matter, jumping directly from me to it and back again, unlike electromagnetism, which propagates." "Like quantum tunneling?" "That's about the movement of quantum particles, but my effect seems to be transferring information only. But it's a tunnel in the sense that it seems to take a shortcut through the intervening distance." "I thought that's what quantum tunneling is?" "No. Don't worry about it, Prof. I've got no way of knowing how it works; I just know that it does, and the intervening distance or matter doesn't seem to affect it. It could be tunneling, or maybe it uses neutrinos or tachyons, or it could be something else I haven't thought of. Heck, maybe it's even God. One day I might do some experiments on it, if I have my own lab, but not for a few years yet. ^ [["Distance" is only a valid concept in a framework constrained by a limited number of spatial dimensions. Some life forms cannot perceive any dimensions (e.g., single-celled organisms). Some can perceive only one dimension, so they can move closer to, or farther from, heat or light. Some life forms can perceive two dimensions, such as some of those that live on a surface (like a tree trunk. It's not necessarily a flat surface, and not necessarily the same surface all their lives either, which surely confuses them at times, assuming they have brains capable of being confused). Humans can perceive three dimensions, but it's only hubris, perceptual and mental limitations that makes humans think the Universe is three dimensional. There's no reason why life forms cannot perceive more than three spatial dimensions, and some do, just not any that you've met (although Mom's complaints about it make me suspect that some socks, always only one of a pair, are capable of extra-dimensional travel, especially while they're in a load of washing). With each additional dimension, the perception of "distance" changes. An easier-to-visualize breach of a spatial principle might be what the interior angles of a triangle add up to. It's normally taught to total 180 degrees, but that's only if the triangle is drawn in a two-dimensional framework. Draw it on the outside of a sphere, and the angles add up to more than 180 degrees; 270 degrees being easily visualized (from the North Pole down to the Equator, a quarter of the way around the Equator, then back up to the North Pole, giving three corners of ninety degrees each). On the inside of a concave 3D surface, like the top of one of Donna's saddles, the total is less than 180 degrees. Draw it in a 4D framework, and the sum of the interior angles can be pretty much whatever you want, although measuring the angles with a tool stuck in our 3D world would be problematic. Those examples hopefully help you understand that a Euclidean concept like "distance" isn't necessarily worth the paper it's written on. Not so much with increased perception, but with increased understanding, the concept of "distance" gets recognized as only applying in simplified frameworks. The structure of the Universe is in 'pixels' that are not laid out in any spatial sense. You should think of them all existing in the same single location, as if the Big Bang's Singularity never actually moved (in some respects that's true, although not in your 3D representation of the Universe). Each pixel has many property values, some of which include its spatial coordinates. Not by discrete sets of numbers, such as one set of numbers for humanity's x-, y- and z-dimensions, because that would imply that spatial dimensions are quantized, which they're not. Time is quantized (that's a major issue I won't get into 'now'), but there's no shortest-possible distance. Location is defined by a smooth function that generates values for any arbitrary number and choice of spatial dimensions, as they effectively 'slice' through the full reality. Choose a different set of dimensions to consider and the apparent 'distance' between any two pixels changes, even though the pixels themselves aren't 'separated', just the values of their spatial properties.]] ^ In the ensuing discussion about my new distant-seeing ability, I confessed to the parents that I'd had sight blobs for a while, but hadn't mentioned them because I feared the parents would be worried about the potential loss of privacy, a statement that immediately made Mom worry about the potential loss of privacy. Vanessa gave a scoffing laugh, then said, "Feel free to peek if you want. I'm sure you won't make that mistake twice, haha. We've seen your body - both of them - several times. You're a little self-conscious about it, but you know it doesn't mean anything. Your seeing our bodies would mean even less. Sometimes you worry too much about the upsets you might cause people and you don't think enough about the happiness you give. We're amazed and delighted by your sight blobs. Especially Prof..." "That for sure!" agreed Prof. "Thinking about the implications of your new abilities UTTERLY blows my mind. I'm very, very excited. I feel like asking Donna to do cartwheels around the room for me, haha. We're not worried about your having voyeuristic inclinations, and we wouldn't care much even if you did; not compared to how delighted we are with your new capabilities." Dad added, "What Vanessa and Prof said, plus you can guarantee we'll catch fish. It doesn't get any better than that, haha. Fely's still got her English reserve, but I could care less. With your harem, you've got better things to look at than us. It's just as well I don't have your ability though, because I'd be tempted to look into your bedroom some nights, haha, oww!" (See if you can guess which of his wives hit him?) Another issue that came up during the discussion was how many different tasks I could do at once. I answered that dangerous inquiry with, "How many things can you think about at once? Sometimes you can have several balls in the air at one time, other times you get engrossed in one activity. Schoolwork is pretty easy and I can slow down my reading of any part of it if it gets harder, but if I have to keep up with fast moving, complex material, my ability to track several of them might diminish substantially." It was all bullshit, as you know, because I didn't want them thinking it was a fixed number, and certainly not a power of two. Not because I had any fear of their abusing the knowledge in any way, but because someone bad might extract it from them. Prof and Vanessa are sharp people and they're accumulating a lot of little clues about me and my abilities. With human civilization on all the parallel Earths at stake, lying to keep them in the dark about a big clue was justified, especially because there was no need for them to know the truth. For the next several minutes we discussed the educational and career consequences of my new abilities, then my proximity sense picked up Donna coming into range, still a few feet away from the door, but closing rapidly. I said, "Donna's nearly at the door. Okay to turn the Faraday off?" Which meant, "Has this freaky discussion ended?" We were all disciplined about activating a cage if we were going to start a dangerous conversation. Our discussion was about stuff that would be happening years from now, so it could easily be interrupted. I got a few nods. I used NP to open the Faraday cage and turned the lights off as Prof added, "Were you looking for Donna?" Wording it in a non-dangerous way, I answered, "Remember a couple of years ago Sensei tested me at three feet? Twenty four feet now." Prof chuckled, shaking his head with amazement. The door unlocks almost immediately when the Faraday cage is turned off, which was just as well because Donna was in a hurry to get through it. Or alternatively, it was fortunate that our dining room is smaller than my bedroom, so my proximity range extends several feet beyond the door. Donna burst into the room, immediately raving about her going to Italy and all the wonderful clothes they have there. Several minutes later, when Donna had calmed down enough, I briefly described the trip to Noumea and asked her is she wanted to come along to learn how to scuba dive with me. Donna's excitement skyrocketed. The rest of her must've been rocket powered too, because she somehow flew out of her seat and into my lap. She was a VERY happy girl. Among her enthusiastic comments, Donna exclaimed, "This is gonna be the BEST summer EVER!" #4: I told her, "It's a pity you have to go all the way to Italy and waste time doing boring shopping just to avoid the crowds in town. Hopefully all those idiots will leave soon so you won't have to run away overseas." Donna had a different perspective on the trip. After setting me straight, Donna started asking me questions about Noumea: When? Who? How long? Etc.? My saying I'd get a dozen guys to invite their girlfriends to make it a boy-girl trip confused Donna. She asked with puzzlement, "I have to be paired with a boy?" "I somehow can't see Mom letting you stay in a hotel room with a boy for a week, Donna..." "Not even a minute," clarified Mom. " ... You'll be going with me. The other boys will have one girlfriend each. I'll have several girlfriends because I'm a good friend of the owner of the plane. You'll be one of them." "I AM one of them!" "You are indeed. I'll take you, Carol, Julia, Ava and a few others. I'll make sure we get a hotel suite with enough beds in it for all of us. The other guy and girl pairs will have their own ordinary rooms, but nothing but the best for my girlfriends." "Can I invite some of my friends, so I've got someone to talk with?" "How about Claire Norris, if she's allowed to come. Diana too, if Claire's allowed to." "I know why you want them to come!" "Absolutely! But Claire will still have plenty of time to be with you." "Can I invite Violet too?" A girl whose horse is kept with Penelope and Patch. She's a nice girl, but not one of my conquests. "Sure. I was thinking that my girlfriends, including you, Diana and Claire if they can come, and the others, will all stay in the big suite, so if you invite Violet then you should also invite another girl so the two of them can share a room. But let me get my invitation list planned first and I'll let you know later." "Goody. If you let me, I'll invite Samantha too. She's in the swimming club I used to belong to, and she's been here a few times. You've seen her swimming in our pool sometimes." "I sure have. She'd make an EXCELLENT choice!" "Haha. I thought you'd agree. She's a very good swimmer too, and I bet she'd like to learn to scuba with me." Samantha is even better than a "very good swimmer", and I'm not just talking about her gorgeous face and figure, which includes just ordinary breasts, not that there's ANYTHING wrong with ordinary breasts. What's gorgeous about her figure is that she's got unusually wide shoulders, which for some reason that I absolutely refuse to think about I find very sexy on girls. Samantha is an EXCEPTIONALLY good swimmer, winning lots of competitions. I could out-swim her easily by having NP push me, but there'd be very few other people in Corvallis who could beat her, male or female of any age. [I'd never tried to swim against her in our pool. I'd only met her when I was Ron, and Ron wasn't an athlete because Mark had been. It'd be amusing to out-swim her as Mark though. Hopefully that'd impress the pants off her. Ideally her top too.] "She's a year older than you, isn't she?" "Yeah but that doesn't matter. We're friends and I'm pretty sure she'd love to come. She'd enjoy it more than Violet, but Violet's my best friend so I have to ask her first." Dad added, "You should allow for a couple of guards too, Mark." "I didn't think we'd need to. I thought those little islands were peaceful places. If Noumea isn't, I'll pick a different destination." "People are people everywhere, and you'll be there long enough for trouble to come looking for you if it wanted to. You'll be very famous by then, so you'll be getting more attention than you used to, and some of it could be bad. I know you can look after yourself, but there's going to be thirty of you and you'll often be in more than one group, like when you're diving." "Okay. I'll plan on two guards. I'd better make sure I spend some time impressing Paul with my ability to defend myself so they'll guard the other group when we've split. I'll suggest Paul chooses male guards. It's about time males got an overseas trip, especially with girls sunbathing topless there." "They do?" asked Donna eagerly. "So I believe." "Neat! I'm only going to need a VERY small suitcase, haha. What a pity Violet and Sam aren't bigger on top." I put on a depressed voice and moaned, "I know. My life never seems to work out well. It's so sad..." "Haha." I'd probably have to suffer through more clothing talk, but it'd be worth it, so I said, "I think you'll need at least an average-sized suitcase, Donna. We'll go out for nice dinners some nights. It's a French island so I presume it has fancy restaurants." I could only "presume", as I couldn't easily research it now. I'd have to stop all my schoolwork to move the sight blob up to the screens, which had been fine for the few seconds it'd taken me to do the BBJ booking, but not for wanting to spend fifteen minutes researching Noumea (real-time: I could do it on thirty one screens, but it still took time to read the pages). Or I could create a second sight blob, but that required that I shut my eyes, which wasn't convenient now. It really is a pity I can't have at least one more sight source going. -- I continued, "If you want to, although you may not because it's hardly very important, but if you REALLY want to, then maybe when you're in Italy you could make the effort to look in a store or two for a reasonable looking special occasion dress, like..." "YES! That's AWESOME!" Donna launched herself from my lap, declaring, "I've GOT to tell Carol and Julia!" Vanessa yelled, "Take them some lunch," but she was WAY too slow. #15: #18: #9: Dad chuckled, saying, "Donna's having a good day." Prof said, "Yes. It's great to see such uncomplicated happiness. She's at a good age." Mom expanded, "She's at an age which is normally very complicated for girls, but she's not having any trouble at all. She's moving into womanhood much easier than Carol or I did. If anything, she's too enthusiastic for aspects of it, but I can't say they seem to be doing her any harm." I reinforced with Mom how well our collective raising of Donna was working by saying, "If by 'aspects' - plural - you mean sex, then I agree that she's enthusiastic and it seem to be surprisingly nothing more than harmless fun for her so far. But far, far more importantly than sex, is that she's being very responsible about other things. She's a good kid all round." "Yes, you're right," Mom agreed. Not long after that, Vanessa got me to make Julia and Carol some sandwiches, and I delivered them, passing on the message, "Donna, the parents want you to get back to the Adults' House and with your head in your books again." "But we haven't finished talking about the dresses I need to buy." "Exams are in one week and Italy isn't for eight weeks, so you'll have seven weeks to plan your buying of several low-cut, highly revealing dresses. But if you get poor exam results you might not be allowed to go. I REALLY advise you to impress the parents because they're finally letting you do good things. You don't want to mess that up and have to wait another year, do you?" Donna got my point, being well aware of the concept of parents being restrictive. #5: Donna wasn't quite as well endowed as Carol yet, and Carol's breasts are also wider which is an important factor for that dress of hers as it increases the proportion of breast not covered by the two straps. Nonetheless, standing behind Donna when she was wearing that dress and running my hands around her and under the straps, while facing a mirror or a sight blob, was a DELIGHTFUL image to anticipate. I kicked #5 for not thinking of it earlier. ------- Chapter 360: Studying: Noumea, CNN's Tapes, New Special Abilities Tuesday, June 5, 2007 (Continued) Some of my families had already visited Ava in the morning, and the rest visited her after lunch. Not me unfortunately, because the parents thought my appearing in public would cause too much trouble. The town's population had quadrupled, and the last thing Ava needed was three-quarters of them trying to crowd into her hospital room to do insane things. Donna couldn't go in the afternoon either, much to her distress. She'd visited Ava in the morning, but she wanted to visit again because she had FANTASTIC news to add about her going to Italy and Noumea. Mom made Donna stay behind to study, telling Donna, "I'll tell Ava about your trips." Donna was dissatisfied by that, but she had no choice. Ava had already been told something else almost as important as Donna's news. In the morning, Dad had quietly told her, "Don't worry about some scary news that's going to happen tonight about home. It's a trick of Mark's. We'll be hiding out for a few days and won't be able to visit you, but it's all part of our plan so don't worry. Just pretend to worry, to fool everyone, okay?" This was about our declaring war on the US Government. It'll actually look like they're declaring war on us, but it doesn't really matter who starts a war; only who finishes it. Ava is very used to our games and enjoys them, so her reaction was amusement. Dad ramped up his warning because what we were intending to do went beyond our usual level of "games". It was likely that the authorities would question Ava quite insistently. She was too injured to be taken with us when we went into hiding, but we thought her being away from all of the events and 'only' our young friend rather than an Anderson would stop the authorities getting too heavy with her. She has our security guards guarding her in the hospital but they'd be unable to keep the authorities away, so that sort of security wouldn't help. Dad just repeated his insistence that she not worry about us, and that she says she knows nothing when asked about what will happen. Prof visited Andrew in the early evening, giving him a similar warning, and asking him to call Robert when it hit the fan, "Reassure Robert that we're fine, but don't mention ANYTHING about getting advance warning about it. We'll call you and Robert when it happens, but we'll have to speak as if our calls are being recorded. Our security guards were not warned, not even Paul, so they'd be in for a very worrying time. We had no choice about that. [A related safety issue, and quite annoying for the parents, is when we're in a heightened security level like we are now, Paul strongly advises that we travel in small groups, and don't congregate anywhere other than at home. He also prefers that Mom and Dad don't go out together, nor Vanessa and Prof. So the parents 'wife swapped' to visit Ava: Vanessa and Dad in one group, Mom and Prof in the next. The idea being that if the worst happens, then neither of our two families would lose both parents.] Being left at home while half the parents went to see Ava and the rest of the kids were studying, I did something fairly unusual: I went to my upstairs study. I did some reading about Noumea. It's the capital of New Caledonia, and although you'd think you wouldn't want to stay in a capital city when you wanted a relaxing seaside vacation, that's where the vast majority of the tourists in New Caledonia stay. I'd seen some gorgeous pictures and read a little about the place when I'd been choosing where to go for our honeymoon. I'd settled on Ko Phi Phi, but I remembered that Noumea sounded appealing. The whole country had 240,000 people, with nearly 100,000 in Noumea, so the city has twice the population of Corvallis (not at the moment though). The girls would want stores and fancy restaurants; the guys would want beaches where the girls could go topless. I was a guy, plus I wanted access to the coral reefs for scuba diving, and we needed a fancy hotel that could cater to the size of our group, and especially to the size of my personal group. Noumea had it all; amusingly, even a casino near the hotel that I liked the look of, although the last thing I needed was another pissed off casino operator. The hotel was advertised as five star - although the online reviews said it was more like four - and it was on the ocean and had some large suites, so it sounded pretty good to me. For anonymity reasons I sent them an email using Julia's computer and email address describing what I wanted, then went to watch some TV to catch up on what might be happening. The good news was that when I turned the TV on, the current news story wasn't about me. That was a good sign because I very much wanted interest in me to diminish. The good news lasted all of three minutes. The Church of Galloping Ninnies had gathered in a large group half a mile from our home and were conducting a mass-exorcism in our direction. Apparently they'd been doing it for the last hour and none of us had even noticed. I hadn't gone back to Hell either, which was very inconsiderate of me. They truly were stupid people. For a start, they're Christian. I'd read somewhere that IQ is negatively correlated with the amount of superstitious belief a person has, into which basket I include Christianity as it meets every definition and test of "superstition" that I can think of, especially after seeing the three priests dance around my chair reciting mumbo-jumbo nonsense and waving symbols in the air to exorcise me. It was identical in form to every primitive superstitious dance by tribal witchdoctors that I've ever seen on TV. I'd ask "How on Earth can a religion take itself seriously when it trains its priests to conduct rituals indistinguishable from those of a witchdoctor?", but the answer is obvious: both types of religion cater to the same human need, so they look the same. Not that I'd had much to start with, but my respect for the Catholic Church had taken a large nosedive after seeing its magic dance. I wondered if they had a magic dance to make it rain, because quite a few of the visitors to Corvallis would need a shower by now. In addition to the church attracting stupid people, I suspect they get even stupider after they become Christians, as their preachers encourage them to not think for themselves. Seriously! They're told that faith is a virtue and exhorted to practice it as much as possible. By definition, faith requires the suspension of intelligent thought. From what I've seen, most Christians get VERY good at faith, certainly including nearly all of them that I've recently listened to on TV. It can't be easy, but somehow the Ninnies were succeeding at being even more stupid than most Christians, by a thousand of them being PROUD of being recorded on TV while standing half a mile away from our home and fervently chanting mumbo-jumbo at it. Lastly, overwhelmingly, and increasingly temptingly, the Ninnies were proving their stupidity by badmouthing me and my Guardian Angel when their brand new, very expensive church was literally only a stone's throw away from our wall. Archangel Michael hadn't shown any compunction at all about being destructive, and the Guardian Angel had been advertised as being even more deadly and physically powerful, so how could the Ninnies be so stupid as to badmouth me and the Guardian Angel when they were obviously such a tempting and vulnerable target? (Don't bother answering; my questioning their degree of stupidity is rhetorical.) They clearly do not want to be our neighbors, which was VERY agreeable with me, and I had a method of achieving that outcome which would be a great deal more effective than what they're doing. I couldn't flatten their church now, as tempting as that was, because I'd have to walk to our eastern boundary to be within range of their main building. There was no way I could risk doing that with the fucking UAV recording everything. I couldn't do it at night either, because the UAV's sensor pack certainly included infrared. It was a prototype plane so there was nothing definitive about its capabilities online, but it would be able to carry a standard sensor pack and the FBI would hardly have it patrolling night after night if it couldn't see then. Despite the Ninnies begging for a response from me, it'd be best if I got my war against America sorted out first before I declared war on the Ninnies. If they don't change their tune in the next few days, they're going to get an entirely predictable - for anyone with half a brain - surprise. [[By this stage of my autobiography you will have noticed my derogatory attitudes toward Christians and politicians. At this time - when I'm 'typing' this - I've had WAY more than a gut's full of both groups. They maligned me to an extraordinary degree, attacked me verbally and physically, even attempted to kill me several times, and have caused my families some terrible troubles. Their persecutions of us never had good reason, but were always motivated by the persecutors' arrogance, selfishness, greed, aggressive insecurity, and other reprehensible emotions. A few years ago I couldn't have cared less about politicians and I merely thought religious people were silly. I was happy to ignore both groups, but now I hate them. This is not an apology - because I consider my attitude justified - but an explanation that my attitude isn't one of blind prejudice, but the predictable consequence of their deliberate verbal and physical attacks, and obvious stupidity. Call it "post-judice".]] Tired of watching the Ninnies be ninnies, I starting playing each of the CNN tapes about Archangel Michael, although not paying much attention to them. Mostly I was concentrating on my schoolwork. I had needed to publicly ask for the tapes so I could talk knowledgeably about Archangel Michael. To date I'd had to restrict my comments considerably, and what utterances I did make had to be prefixed by, "From what I've heard," which couldn't be said too often. I didn't really need to watch the tapes now, but there was no reason why not, as I had to be somewhere while I was studying, and in front of a TV kept me from interrupting the girls' studies. When I'd been Ron and watching the news of Archangel Michael's 'visit' to Earth, I'd often been swapping channels and hadn't paid much attention to which one I was watching at any given moment, but I paid enough attention now to pick up several of the CNN commentators' opinions, so in the future I'd be able to say things like, "On the tapes CNN sent me, one of their news anchors said that..." and then whatever relevant point I wanted to make. It'd reinforce that I knew nothing about Archangel Michael other than by watching these tapes. After I'd seen enough of the tapes, I kept watching TV. One contrast between the pre- and post-resurrection TV commentaries that was easy to notice was the reduction in the number of agnostics and atheists appearing to promote their non-religious theories. There were still some, but considerably fewer than before. That would make TV viewers think that such people lacked the courage of their non-convictions, but I knew that impression was mostly false. From the conversations my families and I were having with other people, we knew there was still a great deal of uncertainty, disbelief and many weird theories out there, but the TV networks weren't giving them as much airtime as they had earlier because people saying, "We're not sure"-type comments makes for Dull TV. There were still some crackpot theories being aired; the latest I heard said that Mark's body had not been found in the CIA lab because I'd been snatched by aliens and was now back in a fake copy of Ron's body; for what purpose no one could say, although the crackpot had several silly ideas. That the networks were erring toward the religious explanations pleased me because I did need to be accepted as Mark Anderson. That acceptance would gain great credibility when my body slowly transformed, but hopefully by then most of the extreme excitement will have dissipated. Despite my moaning to Donna that nothing in my life worked out well, one thing that had narrowly escaped working out badly was the distance from the Adults' House to both the Kids' House and my secret study. The living area of the Adults' House was JUST within usable range of my secret study. Likewise from the Kids' House back to the Adults' living area. I'd made use of their being within range many times, and it now meant that I could sit in the Adults' living room to watch TV while studying, without distracting Julia and Carol at all. They were in our upstairs study, but even having me in the Kids' House might've distracted them. Given that Donna and I were in the same building, theoretically she might've gotten distracted, but there were also at least two parents in the Adults' House, so Donna wouldn't dare take her nose out of her books. The bedrooms of the Adults' House, especially Mom and Dad's bedroom, were too far away from the Kids' House for me to see inside them. The voyeuristic possibilities weren't the issue as I have less than zero interest in that. Mom has a good figure, but it's MOM'S! I'm as likely to get voyeuristic over Mom as I am over Dad. Even less likely actually, as looking at Mom would feel wrong, whereas looking at Dad would just be boring. Prof and Vanessa were safe from me too, because who wants to look at old bodies! I was concerned about the distance between the Kids' House and the Adults' bedrooms because their being slightly too far apart could be a disadvantage in an emergency. Such an emergency hadn't happened yet and hopefully never will, but had I thought about it when we were planning our hilltop home, I would've had the Kids' House built fifty feet farther up the ridge. It would've caused it to intrude on the Adults' House's view a little more, but it would've been very worth it had an emergency happened. As it was, the two homes' living areas being in range was sometimes useful several times a day, so I'd been lucky about that. The closer I got to the end of the schoolwork, the less often I was slowed down by as yet unknown knowledge. I'd divided the handwritten notes for each subject into several piles (how many depended on how thick the original stack of notes was), then I'd allocated one mind to each pile. So the minds reading the piles below the top one were often reading material that assumed prior knowledge. In some subjects that was rarely an issue as they had several independent chunks, but in others it was a significant factor. But as I said, that was happening much less as I got near the end. Some minds finished their stacks early and I was able to grab half a remaining stack from slower readers, bringing forward the completion time even faster. Only one mind at a time could read textbooks, as their owners wouldn't appreciate me ripping them into smaller piles. Another approach would have been to double the textbook reading rate by holding pages upright and reading both sides at once, but that required considerably more sight blobs than I had. I 'solved' the problem of textbooks being slower reading by skimming them faster, only getting serious about reading sections of them when the mind reading the handwritten notes couldn't understand the material. That was usually because 'my classmate' (so to speak, me being semi-officially dead at the time) had made a copying error in his or her notes. The first time I encountered one of these mistakes, I flew a pen to my secret study and corrected the notes. Writing with a pen being held by NP was tedious, so I kept the corrections minimal. I finished my schoolwork half an hour ahead of my initial 5pm estimate, flew it up the emergency tunnel toward the parents' panic room, then up a convenient chute into the Adults' House. I bundled each classmate's items together, put their address on each bundle - I'd gotten them to recite their addresses at breakfast, deliberately not writing them down as part of my proof that I was Mark now - then I intercomed security to collect and deliver them for me. I was now very confident that I'd cream the school exams, provided my war against the United States of America was over by then. That gave me five days, but that should be long enough as I was planning to use "Shock and Awe." They'd provide the first shock, then I'd provide all the rest of them and a fair bit of awe too. ^ Seeing how I've been writing about impressing my families with my constantly improving 'new' abilities, I'll take a moment to say that my attempts to develop new abilities were very much stalled. Adding infrared, radar and radio capability to my sight blobs had been amazingly easy. So much so that I'd kicked myself for not working on developing my abilities earlier. I'd resolved to get busy on that. In accordance with my resolve, I had been busy trying to do so over the last several weeks, but not as successfully as I would have wished, although I had made some improvements. I was NOT going to experiment with emitting high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Radiating ultraviolet light would enable me to give people suntans, disinfect water and erase EPROMS, none of which provided me with any motivation to experiment. Being able to emit X-rays and Gamma rays was even less useful and much more dangerous. I preferred not to risk giving everyone around me cancer. I could make emitting those radiations safer by tuning in my sight blobs to see them, so I could manage the emissions better, but I couldn't think of a practical use for any of that stuff. [[One use that didn't occur to me which would have been handy very soon, was having my light blobs emit a very large amount of microwave radiation to fry electronic chips.]] I did make two small improvements to sight blobs though. The first was to give myself a really good sense of direction by seeing the Earth's magnetic field, giving me the direction of magnetic north and south, provided I wasn't standing near high-voltage power lines. My new direction sense initially required conscious use of a correctly tuned sight blob [[to extract additional information from the photons the blob was already interrogating as they passed]]. I soon became consciously aware that there's a subconscious part of human brains that has a very rudimentary magnetic sense. An evolutionary hang-over, I suspected. I wished it worked better, and soon it did, so I became permanently aware of where magnetic north and south were, which was very helpful of my brain and replaced my need to use a sight blob to sense direction. I continued to use my watch to navigate by, to double-check my new sense of direction, which was soon as good as my watch's compass. Plus, geosynchronous satellites were useful beacons because they stayed in the same place and constantly transmitted radio signals. The second improvement I'd made to sight blobs in the last five or six weeks was a special case improvement. Previously, it was the sight blob's 'front' surface (in whatever direction I wanted it to look) which detected light. I'd improved that so now when I made the mental effort to want it to, the entire volume of the blob detected light. Doing so degraded my vision for two reasons: a photon passing through the bulk of the blob was unfairly brighter than a photon passing through an edge, and the result was a 3D image which caused a problem because my brain was set up to process 2D sight (each eye gives 2D images). It couldn't handle 3D, and I want to become capable of it because I could imagine that resulting in a massive increase in the size of my brain. What I saw was an image as if all the 3D "slices" (planes cut through the blob) were compacted into a 2D image. That caused superimposition but the images were mostly the same, other than tiny parallax differences, so all that usually happened is that my vision became fuzzy. However, if I put a large sight blob over something smaller, such as a toaster, then the slices had major differences: I could see one side of the outside of the toaster from various distances up to right next to it, then I'd see slices progressively farther through the toaster and then out the other side. As sight blobs do normally, I was only seeing in the direction I wanted to at a time, so I was saved the complication of seeing in both directions at the same time [[they normally only report photons passing through their front surface into them, not photons passing out of them through that surface. Even when in 3D-mode, I was still looking in a particular direction so they only reported photons coming from that way]]. Seeing the overlapping stack of different views of the toaster's outside and inside was still confusing, but I learned to focus on just one slice at a time though, which made it a clear image until I defocused and that superimposed stack of slices returned. The new way of using sight blobs was no use for normal circumstances as it either made my vision fuzzier or I had to put more mental effort into focusing on just one slice, so I rarely used it. Where it did prove useful was when what I wanted to see didn't suit being looked at by a curved surface. I could make the sight blob very large to reduce the curve, but that wasn't always a good solution. If I wanted to search inside something, such as inside small parts of my car to make sure a bomb or bug hadn't been installed, a very large sight blob wasn't ideal. My new 3D-mode meant I could create a sight blob slightly larger than the volume I wanted to search, having the sight blob radiate light if the volume was dark, and then search just by moving my focus forward. Because the FBI was being a pain, I was doing a lot of such searches, and developing this technique was very helpful. I was particularly proud of myself because I was fairly sure I'd overcome an assumption to get it to work (that sight blobs see with just their 'front' surface), and I'd developed the ability by logically thinking through what I wanted and then developing the techniques necessary to make it happen. My patting myself on the back was sadly muted because I still couldn't practically use three sight sources at once. I often tried to find ways to overcome the superimposition problem, but never successfully. That was it for sight blobs. Sound blobs were a non-event, either for sending or receiving. In terms of sending, I'd be better off teaching my families Morse code and tapping my messages on the tops of their heads. Receiving sound made even less progress. NP was the only other existing ability that seemed to offer opportunities for experimentation and possible improvement. After some cautious practice on myself, I learned that I could create a small NP-point inside my trachea just before it reached my lungs, then expand it spherically so the trachea was completely blocked, making it impossible to breathe or talk. Although breathing didn't seem necessary for me, the physical sensation of something blocking my throat was VERY unwelcome - my body instinctively reacting against it and trying to cough it up with considerable urgency, but failing if I was using enough NP force to hold the ball where it was. It would be an EXTREMELY unpleasant experience to give to someone who needed to breathe, and it would very rapidly become a terrifying experience. In the right circumstances, with the right aggravation, I'd be very tempted to use it. I could take it all the way through to killing someone if necessary, although its use was constrained by my victim having to be within my proximity range for me to be able to create the initial point inside their trachea. It would either leave no forensic evidence behind, or at most, never-before seen and therefore very confusing evidence. [[Thinking of people having their breathing cut off prompts me to explain that human bodies can't detect an oxygen shortage. What they detect is an excess of carbon dioxide. That's the 'oxygen' detector that has evolved. It amounts to the same thing most of the time, since if we're alive and breathing in a space, and carbon dioxide is rising, then oxygen is probably decreasing. Human bodies have that inverse relationship quite nicely calibrated for how serious the lack of oxygen probably is, producing the correct degree of mental and physiological urgency. However, in some unusual circumstances the oxygen and carbon dioxide proportions can be out of kilter. The normal proportion of carbon dioxide with either too much or too little oxygen are both situations that human bodies don't notice until the symptoms become extreme enough to be injurious, and we often fail to react properly as one of the common symptoms is the equivalent of drunkenness. I find it a simple and amusing example of evolution's hit-and-miss process. There are tens of thousands of other processes in the human body which are similarly inefficient. They're convincing proof of Non-intelligent Design.]] A MUCH more generally useful new NP technique was that I thought to question the amount of friction my NP-fingertips had, rather than assuming they'd be the same as my flesh-and-blood fingertips. That led to my learning how to adjust the friction of my NP-fingertips. Actually, I didn't learn "how" the effect worked; I just learned how to do it. All I had to do was dial up or down the coefficient of friction and I got the effect I wanted. Even with my improved understanding of my subconscious processes, I couldn't consciously follow what was happening, but it certainly worked. Friction is a REALLY useful property, so my having control over it pleased me considerably. It didn't permit many new things that I hadn't been able to do before, but it made most existing NP uses simpler and easier. One very notable new thing it did let me do was create really smooth and highly appreciated anal dildos. They became a frequent part of our sex-life. To be more descriptive: the anal dildos are frictionless for their first penetration, thereafter I give them some friction because that gives the girls more pleasure. If they're used vaginally they're given much more friction, often even more than my cock would have because my girls love the way that pulls on their skin. My wanting to pat myself of the back for this advance was negated by my being too busy kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner. If I'd thought of it before my Casino Kidnapping, I might have been able to undo the buckles on my hood and restraints while I was in the back of the van, possibly taking the two kidnappers down and saving many dimensions' Profs and Marks. I confirmed something that I'd suspected back when I'd cut the wings off Air Force One and Two (using the lazy nomenclature myself): that NP-fingertips had become internally stronger. Back when my fingertips had only a few pounds of force, they'd 'squash' if too much force was applied to them, such as when I squeezed an NP-fingertip between two of my own. Their original ability to resist a squashing force had equaled the force they could apply, which made a kind of sense. Now they could resist quite a lot more, which made no kind of sense but was a welcome improvement. I tried practicing this effect to improve it further, but my fingertips gave me the finger over that. I also tried to develop new abilities. One that appealed to me very much was turning myself invisible. NOT for the pathetically immature, childish fantasy of walking into females' changing rooms and perving at the girls - sight blobs were FAR better at that - but because with invisibility I'd be able fly around with much greater freedom. There'd be no risk of my being seen taking off and landing, no scary high-speed trips to Washington DC and back in one summer night, no worries about being tracked by UAVs or satellites - assuming the invisibility included infrared, which it should because that's a type of light. I'd be able to float within easy range of the Oval Office's window and give the President a "Leave the Andersons Alone" message he'd never forget, and he'd have the sore trachea and brown-stained trousers to remind him. Speaking of trousers, I hoped to find a way of creating invisibility that included my clothes. The ideal way to get invisibility is to have light pass straight through me. I couldn't imagine how that could possibly happen, but I spent a few minutes hoping for it in case it somehow magically happened, like the way my NP-fingertips and light blobs had first happened. I had no such luck. The next alternative was to get light to bend around me. There were two ways that might be possible: using NP plates to diffract the light, or light blobs to absorb the incoming light on their front surfaces and radiate it out again somewhere on their back surfaces, while I stood in the middle. I spent quite a long time playing around with those two approaches, and made a grand total of zero progress. Neither NP-points nor light blobs could influence the existing light in any way, no matter what I tried. Theoretically the last way of getting a kind of invisibility is to project in front of me what appears behind me. For example, if I'm standing in front of a tree, I create an image of that tree in front of me, leaving me to move around behind the image without being observed. That only works if the observers all have a similar perspective, but that could happen often enough to be useful. I didn't have anywhere near enough resolution with my light blobs to create an image with any detail in it at all so a false tree wasn't going to happen, but if I was standing in front of a wall painted a single color, then I could create a wall of that-colored light blobs in front of me. Unfortunately, light blobs are transparent. If I'm sneaking into an army base and need to create a wall of khaki light blobs in front of me, then I'd still be clearly visible through them. The khaki blobs would obscure me slightly by making everything behind them look khaki-ish, but the effect would be minor and I'd still be easily seen, especially if I moved. I'd even relied on that when I'd distracted the Dimple Hill sniper with human-shaped light blobs moving around behind a wall of huge, very bright, Guardian Angel-colored light blobs. Camouflage was the next best possibility, but unfortunately even that didn't work well. Camouflage clothing has lots of different colored blotches, and I could easily create those, but the trouble was that my blotches all radiate additional light. If you're trying to be covert, covering yourself with patches of light isn't the best way since light tends to attract attention. If I was trying to disguise my outline on a bright, sunny day in a snowfield or desert, then bright blotches would probably work well, but the sneaky stuff I do is mostly creeping around at night, when light-emitting blotches are the last thing I want. I spent a while trying to see if I could get a light blob to reduce the amount of light passing through it. I put a dark red one over a white lightbulb, but the blob didn't filter the white light at all. The room was still well illuminated, with just a little extra red light added in. Putting a succession of red, green and blue light blobs one after the other, so the white light had to pass through all of them sequentially, only added to the amount of white light in the room. After a lot of playing around and wishing that my light blobs worked in various ways, I achieved nothing but failure. I eventually had to admit that I couldn't see how to create invisibility. The best I could think of is that I could manipulate my shadow slightly: I could make it less obvious by putting a light source somewhere which muted the shadow, or I could create a second shadow in a misleading direction. I could even move a light blob slowly so my shadow moved. Done carefully and if I pretended to walked on the spot, it might fool people who could see my shadow into thinking that I was walking. As a form of invisibility, it was pathetic. Whoever had designed how my abilities worked had done a superb job of making them skirt all around the possibility of invisibility while making it frustratingly unachievable. I've got a good mind to write him a letter of complaint. Another ability that would've been fantastic was being in two places at once (two places in the same dimension, I mean). It would've allowed me to create perfect alibis. One of my worries is that someone might realize that when freaky angel stuff had happened - such as when Archangel Michael had appeared in public - then Ron Fisher was never in public at the same time. That might cause serious trouble one day. If I developed the ability to be in two places at once, I'd definitely have Archangel Michael pay a flying visit back to Earth just so he and me could be documented as coexisting. Unfortunately, I never managed to magically clone myself. I didn't really try to create a whole new body, but it would have been great to create even the image of one. Nor could I find a way to change my features REALLY quickly, which would be useful for alibi purposes too. More hopefully, I again tried quite hard to increase my 500-foot range limit. That'd originally been dependent on lighting conditions, so had been less than fifty feet at night for example, but sight blobs had overcome that limitation. Now, if I used a sight blob to see where it was that I was doing something, the range limit was always 500 feet (after my last two merges the maximum range was actually 518 feet, but vision was so bad for the last few feet I've been calling the limit 500 feet). I tried daisy-chaining successive sight blobs at various intervals, tried using binoculars, tried spending hours getting to know an area as perfectly as I could, to see if any of those ideas increased the range. Nothing worked. The only solution I could think of was to kill myself enough times that my proximity range went from 24 feet, to 48, 96, 192, 384, and 768 feet. Five suicides seemed excessive, plus I'd look pretty silly if the fifth suicide took my proximity range up to 500 feet and no more. (The preceding is more frustrated joking than an accurate description because increasing my proximity range does increase my ki-effects maximum range, so merging repeatedly would help that. I wasn't the least bit tempted.) Unlike the earlier foolishly hopeful ideas (invisibility and magically duplicating myself), I actually had some hope that the 500-foot limit could be exceeded. There was no physical reason that I could see why the limit had to be that amount. There had to be a reason for the limit because there always is. How far people can be apart and talk with each other is a good example because how loud we can yell and how good our hearing is determine the maximum conversation range in an easily understood way. I knew of no reason why my ki-effect range had to stop at 500 feet. Plus I was encouraged by when I send NP-fingertips flying away from me, and they go beyond 500 feet, I can still sense them as they continue in a straight line (they aren't affected by gravity unless they're carrying something with mass). I can't send them any new orders and the sensory feedback I get from them ceases, but they do persist for the Blinks Allowed Effect duration before they self-cancel. That implied I might be able to increase my 518-foot limit, but that implication didn't translate into reality no matter how long I spent working on it. As a special case of the previous attempt, I tried to exceed my 500-foot range by "Leaving NP Behind". I created an NP effect, then walked out of range, waiting with the intention of walking back into range after thirty two seconds and wanting the NP-box to still be there. The NP effects always self-canceled after thirty two seconds of being out of my range. Blobs self-canceled as soon as I was more than 500 feet away from them (I couldn't even get them to behave like NP-points), so this situation was rather confusing as well as being disappointing. [[Successive merges had changed the QUANTITY of my mind(s), allowing more powerful ki-effects; but more merges did not change the QUALITY of my mind. (In case you think my higher IQ contradicts the previous statement, that was from using what I had better, not from having better, i.e., wasn't a qualitative improvement in the brain or mind itself.) My type of mind, no matter how many of them I had, couldn't interact with the Universe beyond 500 feet. As an analogy, there's a limit to how large land-based mammals can be. As they scale up, their weight goes up by the cube of the scaling factor, but their bone strength only by the square. Eventually the physical limits of bones are reached, constraining any further development. The sizes of land-based mammals, and my 500-foot range limit, remain restricted until there's a qualitative change in whatever's causing the limit.]] If I couldn't increase my 500-foot limit directly, maybe I could increase it by increasing my proximity range, that being a useful goal in itself. It had always automatically doubled after each merge, and automatically doubled immediately a déjà vu started, so it didn't appear to be something I learned. Nonetheless, I tried hard to learn how to make it larger. All I did was waste time and effort. I had thus far achieved no other improvements, although another 'I' did. I was déjà vu'ing every seventeen hours - more or less - so I was communicating with lots of other Marks. I'd told a few of them about things I'd discovered but they hadn't - the discoveries of radar and radio blobs had surprised a few Marks - and one of them told me something he'd discovered but I hadn't. It turns out that I'd made another silly assumption. The maximum force a fingertip can exert isn't the neat and tidy limit I'd thought it was, being the maximum force the owning mind can exert divided by the number of ki-effects it has active. Instead the total force of all a mind's fingertips can't exceed the mind's total, but they can be in any combination that adds up to that total. For example, if one fingertip is already exerting 90% of the mind's maximum force then any new fingertips and radiating blobs are pussies until such time as the first fingertip relaxes. Knowing that would've made flying things around FAR easier back in the days when my force was weak, so I kicked myself a few times. Tricky things those damned assumptions. It REALLY would be great if someone gave me an instruction manual for all this stuff. In short, I had made a little progress, but not much. Mostly just slightly improved sight blobs, allocation of NP force, and adjustable friction on my NP-points - which my girls particularly appreciated and which was generally helpful almost every time I used NP. I was running out of my own ideas for what to try, so I sought ideas by reading lots of superhero comics and other similar sources, but all it achieved was to make me feel self-conscious about buying that stuff, childish when reading it, and disappointed that it didn't help. Speaking of feeling self-conscious, one dinnertime Mom - with a smile on her face - showed me pictures of a range of "action figures" of myself some company had written a letter to us about. They had everything from bobbing head dolls through to a children's range that included a school lunchbox and "Resurrection Band-Aids" that would have my face all over them. The company was particularly eager to get regular photographs of my slow transformation into Mark, and they'd mocked up several pictures of what merchandise they could release, each more tacky and embarrassing than the last. Tacky bad taste can be funny, but this stuff was so terrible it was impossible to laugh at it, although my families had no trouble laughing at me. ------- Part 16: War! ------- Chapter 361: War Comes to Us Tuesday, June 5, 2007 (Continued) Over the dinner table, with the Faraday cage activated, we first discussed whether we still wanted to go to war. My enthusiasm for the idea was even stronger now, because I loved the idea of me being able to use much of the $216 billion to develop an incredible science lab when I was ready to do that. That'd take a few years, but it could take about the same time to drag the Government all the way through the courts to force it to pay for breaching its agreement with us. That timing would work out quite nicely, assuming the Ninnies' exorcism doesn't send me back to Hell in the meanwhile. Not even one of my toenails had been sent there thus far, so I was probably safe to dream about the breakthroughs that my lab could produce. Prof had used getting to Alpha Centauri as an example, but even just a practical way of getting around our own solar system would have PROFOUND consequences for the human race. Everyone agreed that the UAV had to go, and using it to attack ourselves was unanimously thought to be a great idea, as it'd get rid of the UAV, embarrass the Government enormously, and it should make us incredibly rich. The most important decision was really how aggressive we should be after that. We could just call the Government bad names in a press conference, or we could go to war, or somewhere in between. Julia, Carol, Donna and Dad were enthusiastic over my causing mayhem. Prof and Vanessa were more cautious and logical, their motivation being intellectual. You can probably imagine what Mom felt about my going to war, but she did agree with the necessity of forcing the Government to get its nose out of our business. We didn't hurry the conversation, as starting a war isn't the sort of thing that you want to change your mind about afterward. If all we wanted was to get rid of the UAV and have a shot at getting a truly insane amount of money, that could be achieved easily. Apart from the dramatic crash itself, the process to be gone through to get the money would be a fairly simple and boring: The UAV would crash, we'd hold yet another press conference where we'd show the TV cameras the wreck and all the evidence we'd accumulated so the entire country would know that the Government had been spying on us, and we'd make "We're outraged!"-type comments. Then we'd send the Government a bill for $216 billion. Assuming it didn't respond by saying, "You're right, we're sorry, here's your check," we'd then sue them for it. What we were most concerned about was that the Government obviously wasn't letting financial risk restrain its actions. The FBI had been using multiple surveillance methods in the full knowledge that they were risking discovery, and they hadn't been scared off. If the risk of losing $216 billion hadn't stopped them before, it seemed likely that even when they were embroiled in a lawsuit for that amount, it wouldn't stop them risking it again. They might even increase their surveillance efforts in an attempt to catch us out in some way that would let them defend themselves from the lawsuit by showing that spying on us had been necessary. If all we did was crash the UAV and hold press conferences, the only 'improvement' we could realistically hope for from the FBI was that they became sneakier. We needed to do something to provide them with a much greater disincentive than losing the taxpayers' money. We also worried that the FBI's continuing to spy on us despite being exposed several times might indicate a level of determination that was irrational. If we put pressure on them they might irrationally respond in some very aggressive way, such as by planting false evidence on us to prove that we were a threat to national security, drug traffickers, terrorists, or whatever. Once we were 'caught' like that, we'd be prosecuted, which could send us way up shit creek. It was too easy to imagine that exposing the UAV operation and taking the FBI to court could result in them defending themselves this way. Putting pressure on them from another direction, which my idea did, would reduce this risk considerably. Complicating the issue was that we didn't know for a fact that the UAV was acting for the FBI. The only indication of that was the timing of its appearance being concurrent with other activities known to be FBI. That's why my idea had two stages, because the first stage was to find out for sure which organization was responsible for the UAV spying on us. Only then could Stage Two be used against the culprits. Given the nature of my suggested Stage Two, the results of Stage One had to be publicly known and accepted first. I could follow the UAV back to Beale AFB, snoop the base thoroughly, getting leads from whatever I found, track those leads down, etc., until I had found everything there was to find. One worry was that such evidence wouldn't be convincing. I doubted, for example, that there were any documents that ordered "Surveil the Andersons." They probably used code names for everything, and had doubtless thought of other safety measures. Majestic Countdown's snooping effectiveness had made the Government very cautious about their documents, and it had to be doubly so when its documents were about us given that Maj had leaked about and for us before, so there wasn't much chance of finding a "smoking gun" type of document. Another worry was that doing it that way was what Archangel Michael would do. The Guardian Angel was a different creature and it should perform in much more direct, dramatic ways. It was a good idea for the Guardian Angel to be dramatic, because that made future openly dramatic actions more acceptable. Everyone would know that was the Guardian Angel's modus operandi. So the plan wasn't for me to search for evidence of the FBI's involvement. The plan was to 'encourage' the Air Force to announce who was responsible for their UAV being where it was. It was how we supplied that encouragement that we had to think about carefully. People react badly when on the receiving end of forceful encouragement, so one of the consequences of our going down that road was that we'd better go down several other roads, i.e., we couldn't remain at home. It was difficult to imagine that the Government wouldn't come swarming all over our home when the encouragement started. Their getting their hands on us too early would be bad enough, but their discovering that I was elsewhere would be extremely bad, so the families were going to go on the lam, to stay hidden until the Government had accumulated so many lessons from the Guardian Angel that it'd have to call "Uncle". Whether "Sam" or not, we didn't care, just so long as they took so much damage that they named who the UAV was working for. A sufficiently strong application of force now would also serve as an extremely good lesson to discourage the Government from pissing off the Guardian Angel in the future. There was virtually no risk to anyone in my crashing the UAV, or in my families hiding out when I was inflicting my lessons on the Government. The risk started when we reappeared, so that's what we discussed the most. We took guesses at what harmful actions the Government might try to take, and what we could do to counter them. We controlled when we would reappear and the method of our reappearance, which gave us a great deal of flexibility. Ideally we'd like to return in time for the kids to take our exams. I didn't think that mattered much, as we should have the Government on the ropes so much that if we missed the exams we could tell the Government we wanted A+ recorded as our grades for every exam, but I didn't say that out loud as the parents wanted the girls to study hard between now and exam time, and it'd give the girls something to do while I was out fighting the war for us. We weren't trying to solve every potential reappearance problem now, because we'd have nearly a week to think through those issues. We were concentrating on trying to think of anything that ruined the plan entirely. By the end of dinner, no one had come up with something that bad. We agreed that meant the plan was a goer. #18: #12: There was a period of conversation around the table similar to my internal thoughts, while we all reacted to the idea of creating so much mayhem. Every person had to make a mental list of what to take, the parents insisting that the girls include all their schoolwork. My schoolwork too, but that was just for appearance's sake for any outsiders. The girls were going to be roughing it for a few days, so they'd have to leave their fourteen different types of shampoos and conditioners behind, plus their countless creams, lotions, balms, mud packs, and God knows what else (with the girls having more money than they knew what to do with, they used it to buy - I swear - every female beauty product on the market. That was a LOT of products! I've seen pharmacies that carried a smaller range than my bathroom). It truly was going to be a rough time for the girls, because the parents were insisting they packed light. Not light as fashion conscious girls think of it, but barbaric light. I was going to have a very busy night, so we wanted to start as early as possible. That would be as soon as my parents could reasonably be expected to go to bed, because that's when the bad Government was going to attempt to assassinate them. Darkness in Corvallis at this time of year lasts from 9pm to 5am, only 8 of the 24 hours, unfortunately. My wives returned to my upstairs study to continue their schoolwork, leaving several of the lights on in the Kids' House to indicate that they were there. Donna studied in Prof and Vanessa's study, well out of the way of any trouble, and a reasonable place for her to be studying, it being a "study". At 9:15pm, the four parents will walk through the Adults' House, turning all the lights off, moving to their bedrooms, where they'll turn the lights on, get undressed and into bed, exactly like they would normally, except earlier because, if asked later, they'll say they'd had a tiring day. At 9:25 all the parents will get out of bed, and without turning any lights on, move into the spare bedroom across the hallway from Vanessa and Prof's bedroom, Dad doing a quick diversion to make sure Donna is in the study with the door shut. He'll go to the spare bedroom, shut its door behind him, and get into the closet with the others. They'll be diagonally opposite where the UAV is going to crash, so almost certainly taking excessive precautions, but that's fine. The parents have to be in the bedroom wing when the crash occurs because the house will close some internal steel shutters, one of which will seal off the bedrooms from the rest of the house. It'd contradict our story if the parents are outside that wing when our staff came to rescue them. We'd decided to make the crash even more spectacular than I'd originally intended. I'd previously though of having the UAV come straight down and impacting on the ground immediately outside Mom and Dad's bedroom window, so close that one wing would hit the roof. The four parents had decided they preferred the UAV to crash directly into the window aimed at Mom and Dad's bed. I'd crash it so one wing hit the wall to the left of the window. The wing would break off, and I'd make sure it 'bounced' far enough away from the house to survive a fire. The wing was distinctive enough to easily identify the exact model of UAV. Given that only one of them had been sold by the developer so far, it's ownership will be easily pinned on the Air Force thanks to their helpful press statement. Our houses' walls are VERY strong, so there was no chance that the UAV's wing impacting one of them would cause a collapse. There were various possibilities for what might happen during the UAV's attack. First, if the sirens went off before the UAV impacted, then Mom and Dad would NOT head for the panic room because they wouldn't know how much time they'd have between the siren starting and the crash occurring. It wouldn't be long so there was too much chance of their being caught in the open hallway and injured (the spare bedroom had no escape chute, requiring them to use the hallway to get to one). They'll hide in the spare bedroom's closet until after the crash, and then they'll immediately run for the escape chute. Assuming no alarm sounded then the parents wouldn't go for their panic room. The next unknown was whether or not the UAV would penetrate the room's bulletproof windows. We were pretty sure it would because there's a shit load more momentum behind a UAV than a bullet. We didn't have any specs for the windows, or most of the specs for the overhead UAV, but other UAVs with similar wingspans weighed several tons. This one presumably did too, and several tons at a few hundred miles an hour was surely more than any glass would be able to withstand. We knew our houses' windows were exceptionally strong, but we doubted they were strong enough to be able to resist a UAV crashing into them. If the UAV penetrated the window, a fireball might blast down the hallway, which was why the parents would be behind two sets of doors. If Mom and Dad's bedroom was rendered unsurvivable, they'd need an excuse not be dead. Mom and Dad would say they'd JUST got up to tell Donna to go to bed and because they wanted to have some ice cream in bed before going to sleep. Dad has a sweet tooth and they do that sometimes. They're getting on in years so that's about as depraved as they can get, although Dad was still fit enough to chase me around the room when I said that. If their bedroom was not too badly damaged, Mom and Dad would return to the room and say they'd been in bed at the time of the crash. Or if the bed was totaled, they'd say they'd been in their bathroom or closet, whichever had survived best. They'd rush back to their room from the spare bedroom's closet so they could be discovered looking stunned and confused when our guards arrived. Prof and Vanessa had it easier. If the sirens had sounded, they'd say they'd gone to the panic room. If the sirens had been silent, they'd say they'd been in bed when the attack occurred. I was fairly sure that they really could stay in bed rather than shelter in the other room's closet, because I should be easily able to steer the UAV for an accurate impact, but there was no reason for them not to gain the additional safety of being with Mom and Dad. Our house has excellent fire-fighting systems. Even if a fireball blasts down the hallway and the carpet or walls catch fire, it'll be very quickly doused. Mom and Dad's room might end up severely damaged, and Mom might have to buy a lot of new clothes, but that was a sacrifice she was willing to make to help the cause look convincing. The first part of the plan having been roughly described - what I've left out should be fairly obvious - I'll now recount my actions. While my four parents were watching TV in the living room, I monitored our radar operator's schedule for toggling our radar between "Follow the UAV" and "Wide Area Search" modes. I saw that the latter was only for one minute every fifteen, which was fine with me. That's how it'd been on previous days but it was important to check that it hadn't changed without my hearing about it. We wanted our radar to record the UAV's attack so we could use the recording in our media statements and in court against the Government, and also to increase the chance that our security staff would activate the alarm during the UAV's attack as that made my parents' absence from their bedroom during the attack more believable than their getting ice cream. I'll be taking control of the UAV roughly in the middle of the "Follow the UAV" mode to make sure that our radar operator will see the UAV behaving strangely enough for him to know not to flick the radar into wide-area search mode, because he'll never be able to reacquire the UAV if he does that. At the appropriate time, I put on my black flying clothes, a couple of layers of shirts, and then a security uniform, took the elevator down to the tunnel, and borrowed one of our motorcycles to ride out of the tunnel and out of the gates (we've told the guards they can borrow our non-personal vehicles if they want to, and they often do). With my face covered by the tinted-visor crash helmet not even our guards knew who I was. It wouldn't have mattered much if they had stopped to check me at the gate because we had a variation of the plan worked out to explain that, but they didn't so I won't bother you with it. I had the same lack of trouble leaving the cordon. The cordon guards were freely letting people pass outward; it was getting back inside which required being identified and checked against the list of authorized people. I rode into town, mingled with other traffic for a few minutes, then south away from town so I could find a suitable spot for an unobserved takeoff. I hid the bike, helmet and keys, but did something unusual with the leathers, extra shirts and uniform after I took them off. I laid them out flat on an NP-sheet, with another NP-sheet on top to hold them from flapping around, then I raised the 'sandwich' until it was about three feet over my head, making it a type of umbrella. When the UAV went offline I expected the satellite to look down to see what was wrong. Its seeing a man-sized infrared shape near the UAV would be bad, so I'd fly upright and with the 'umbrella' over me to block the satellite picking up any of my radiated infrared. (NP-plates are transparent to infrared, so I needed the clothes.) If the satellite had amazingly good low-light cameras, they'd see a very confusing shape, but I couldn't imagine they'd be able to see anything. At the UAV's height, there would be virtually zero light to bounce off the top of my clothes and all the way up to a satellite. I took to the sky. At about 3,000 feet I created a pointed, airtight silo around myself, not so much to have air to breathe, but because it gets damned cold up there and I certainly couldn't risk using a large heat blob to keep myself warm. One slight nuisance of flying in an airtight box is that I have to take my watch off and have it fly outside the box so its altimeter works; a lesson that had confused me for a few seconds just before I learned it. I carried on ascending, with two radio blobs searching for the UAV. I couldn't see our radar's beam, which meant it must still be in its narrow mode, which was good. Once I was above the UAV's cruising height, I easily spotted it as I knew its regular orbit and it wasn't stealthed from above, its exhaust being vented upward over its body making a large infrared bloom. Moving a radio blob closer confirmed that it was constantly broadcasting upward from an antenna on its topside. The beam was quite wide, which I guessed was so the satellite wouldn't lose the feed when the UAV banked. My radio blob also confirmed that our radar station was VERY bright. I followed the UAV from a couple of hundred feet above and behind, using a sight blob to study its insides. I easily found the cable that ran from the base of the antenna to the UAV's electronics. I also checked through the entire craft looking for anything that resembled explosives or a flight recorder black box. Both would've stood out had they been there, but neither was. I was astonished by how small the fuel tank was, and its being three-quarters empty meant there wasn't going to be much of a fire at the crash site. I checked my watch, seeing that I was a few minutes ahead of the schedule I'd given the parents. Mom and Dad should have turned their bedroom lights out by now as if they'd decided to sleep, which we'll claim is what triggered the start of the attack. They probably hadn't reached the spare bedroom's closet yet, but that wasn't an issue because it'd take quite a while for me to get the UAV down from this altitude. I'd stick to the timing we'd agreed on though, just in case someone at home had decided to vary their movements. At 9:35 I used NP-fingertips to pull the antenna's cable out of its socket at the electronics end, so there wouldn't be even the cable to act as an antenna. The UAV stopped radiating. If it somehow restarted, I'd crush the rest of its electronics. I grabbed hold of it and forced its nose down. Its autopilot tried to correct, but I had so much force that its moving a couple of ailerons wasn't going to change anything at all. I had 45,000 feet of altitude to lose, which is a long way. Planes normally move vertically much slower than they move horizontally, although that was going to take an abnormal change on this occasion. After a few seconds the satellite started radiating in the general direction of the UAV, but the UAV wasn't interested. I was though, as it told me exactly where to hold my 'umbrella' to obscure my body from the satellite. As far as the UAV was concerned, I assumed its last instruction was to fly in a defined circle with its camera pointed at a particular GPS coordinate, and that's what it was going to keep trying to do for the rest of its short existence. It would neither send nor receive any more information. I stayed at about the same position relative to the UAV, roughly at the same altitude at it but way to the side, careful not to get between it and the satellite so I wouldn't occlude any telescope the baddies might be employing to check their mute craft. I was especially careful to keep my 'umbrella' positioned correctly. I was going to crash it into a south-facing window, so I was aiming the descent at a point about five miles to the south of our home, which was the other side of the city. Hopefully our radar operator wouldn't find the UAV's descending in that direction to be threatening enough to sound the alarm, because I didn't want guards rushing to the Adults' House so soon. If they did that, and their presence prevented me aiming for my primary target, then my secondary one was my bedroom. That'd be clear of girls because the alarm would have them rushing for the panic room. If the secondary target had too many guards around it, the Galloping Ninnies were going to be even more upset with the Government. So much for "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." They hated the Government for keeping them out of their church. We hated the government for kidnapping and effectively killing me in most of my dimensions, and now threatening me in this one by surveilling us so closely. Yet the Ninnies also hated us, and that fueled their horrible statements, including publicly saying they wished the sniper had killed me. That was tantamount to inciting others to try again, consequently I wasn't too fond of them either. It's a good thing Christianity preaches "Love Thy Fellow Man", because imagine how bad their behavior would have been otherwise. I pushed the UAV down as fast as it seemed realistic for a UAV operator to do. My point of aim required a downward angle of more than forty five degrees, which wasn't credible, so I made it zigzag down on legs about half a mile long. It was being tracked by our radar - I could easily sense that happening - and that recording would become part of a court case, so it had to look good. It had to lose about eight miles vertically, to finish about four miles south of our home, before it could turn to aim for the target. All the zigzagging made the total distance flown about thirty miles, taking about four minutes. At 5,000 feet AGL and four miles south of our property, the UAV turned north and headed straight toward Mom and Dad's bedroom window, speeding up to about 600 mph, faster than its normal cruising speed because of the downward angle. It'd take just under thirty seconds to get there. The sirens went off almost immediately, not even five seconds into the final run. I was four miles away but could clearly hear them because a full emergency gets ALL the sirens blaring (practice drills use fewer) and they're LOUD. It was night too, and sound travels well at night. I also saw all our property's lights come on, which happens automatically with the alarm going off. Baddies attacking at night almost certainly would have night-vision systems, which are so good we might as well turn our lights on because doing so makes it much easier for our guys to do their job. I zipped ahead of the UAV to check that the target bedroom was empty, that the parents and Donna were where they should be, and that no guards would be near the impact point in time. All was ideal, so I carefully steered the UAV directly into Mom and Dad's bedroom window, crashing it exactly where I wanted to. Window? What window. Theoretically the UAV must've slowed down when it hit the window, but I never noticed it. The UAV seemed to fly straight into Mom and Dad's room. I'd had four miles to line up the UAV correctly, and with all the tons of force I had available to hold it onto the desired path, the very confused autopilot had no chance of causing a deviation of even a few inches. The nose was lined up to hit the left side of the window, so the house's exterior wall hit the plane's left wing near the fuselage. This plane had a wingspan of 75 feet, so the wings were each about 35 feet long. They were certainly much weaker than a wall built to provide a challenge for a small missile, so the wing was crushed near the point of impact, but most of it survived because it was ripped off as the plane carried on into the room, swiveling away from the momentarily arrested wing. The left wing had no chance of penetrating the wall of course, so it was only a matter of how far back it bounced. I watched it, and the swiveling action caused by the right side of the plane moving forward while the left side was stopped dead threw the torn off wing behind the UAV and to the right; east toward the Ninnies' Church. I wasn't thrown hard as there hadn't been much swivel, the wing not being strong enough to make that happen, but I gave the wing a hard push while it was in the air, and I made sure that when it hit the ground, it rolled farther away from the house rather than digging in and stopping. The ground sloped down somewhat and I easily got the wing to roll a couple of times and come to rest about fifty feet from the house. With my other sight blob, I was looking at the scene inside Mom and Dad's bedroom. Their room is at the end of the hallway, and to maximize the quality of their views, their bedroom doesn't have any walls, just floor-to-ceiling glass on all three exterior sides: NW, NE and SE. Their bed is effectively in the middle of an open-seeming room, with the closet behind it to the south, and the en-suite behind it to the north. The UAV had hit the SE window, just on the bedroom side of their walk-in closet. The closet does have an exterior wall, so the left wing was stopped dead while the rest of the UAV flew straight into the bedroom. The glass hadn't been a significant barrier at all, the fuselage and right wing blasting straight through it. The plane had been traveling nearly horizontally so it basically just flew across the room and out through the window on the opposite side, but that's putting it FAR too tidily, because it TOTALLY FUCKED Mom and Dad's room. A normal building would've required the two easternmost corners of such as large room to have pillars in them to support the roof. Not this house, though. Its roof was so strong that Mom and Dad's room didn't need any supports beyond the load-bearing walls of the closet and en-suite, leaving the easternmost 20-odd feet of ceiling unsupported, and allowing them to have glass ALL the way around. But not any more. The fuselage and right wing had penetrated the SE window easily, and the wing had then tried to plow sideways along the length of the NE window. Breaking dozens of feet of double-paned bulletproof glass from the side was an impossible task. The pressure on the glass caused some of it to buckle and break, but after only a few feet the glass was providing so much obstruction that the plane started spinning sideways as it crossed the room. Pieces of the plane were breaking off and flying at high speed in all directions around the room, smashing everything that was smashable (dressing table, pictures, lights, TV, etc.) The long NE window did resist the initial sideways plowing, but then it was impacted and smashed by large chunks of cartwheeling plane crashing into it perpendicularly. The closet and en-suite weren't damaged much because the plane was swiveling away from them, but the bedroom itself was DESTROYED. The coolest thing - that I'd hoped for but not really dared to believe would happen - was that the plane swept Mom and Dad's bed straight across the room with it, the bed and UAV smashing through the NW window and out into the void. Out the back of the Adults' House, to the north, the hill slopes down much more steeply than to the south. It doesn't start to get steep until about 100 feet NW of the house, and then drops about 100 feet for every 300 feet horizontally. That's not overly impressive, but imagine you'd been either Mom or Dad in their bed. I'll take a guess and say the UAV, the bed, and you, all exited the opposite side of the bedroom still doing 300 mph. The UAV had been going 600 mph initially, and had tons of mass, so I doubt very much that it would slow that much, but I'll be very conservative. Three hundred mph is approximately 450 feet per second. In the half second it'd take you to drop to where the ground should be, you would've moved 225 feet horizontally. You'd now be about 100 feet above the ground, because the hill is falling away beneath you. By three or four seconds after leaving the bedroom, you'd have moved so far horizontally that you'd be off the hill entirely and now about 300 feet above the ground. You'd have been swept out of the room, and have ended up falling about 400 feet vertically, hitting the ground at well over 300 mph and certainly dying. That's presuming you'd survived being hit by the plane in the first place, which you wouldn't have, and had survived being pushed through the breaking glass window, which you wouldn't have been either as it would've started breaking only a fraction of a second earlier so you would've been shredded by all the pieces of glass your body had flown through. In short, the UAV would've done a SUPERB job of assassinating Mom and Dad, if not for - we will claim - the twenty-second warning the radar operator gave them, which let them LEAP out of bed and dive into the escape chute for safety. It's located beside the room's door, between it and the closet. The slide goes downward in a southwesterly direction, parallel to the hallway. It's very close to the bed and it's easy to imagine my parents leaping into it, and only JUST clearing the room before the massive destruction happened right behind them. A little point that might've occurred to you, is that Mom and Dad's bedroom was equipped with a Faraday cage, so why haven't I mentioned metal plates? Blocking EM radiation doesn't actually require a solid metal plate; a fine-holed mesh works too. The holes in the mesh have to be smaller than some factor of the wavelength of the frequencies to be blocked. I haven't bothered researching it fully, but the Army certainly had. We have solid metal plates everywhere they're possible, in part because that helps strengthen the house, but in Mom and Dad's room there was nowhere to store metal plates when they weren't sliding between the window panes, so their room had mesh 'drapes' that dropped from the ceiling into the gap between their double-paned windows. Not any more though. This was going to work out FANTASTICALLY, because the only warning we got was from our radar operator, and the UAV was a stealth version that shouldn't be detected by radar. Our normal mode of radar operation wouldn't have had a hope of detecting it, not until it was so close that there'd be no possibility of anyone reacting in time. It would've been all over even before the radar operator had time to look at the screen. Mom and Dad would've had no chance of surviving. We'd only had the UAV on radar because we'd been using a tiny width of beam rather than dissipating our radar power over a whole upward half of a sphere. This attack will look like the Government chose the perfect weapon to take my parents out, and executed the attack flawlessly, but our buying a telescope a few days ago had saved our lives by giving us twenty seconds' warning. NO ONE would believe that a stealth UAV had taken out my parents' bed by accident. It was literally "unbelievable", and therefore a wonderful false-flag attack. Rubbing my hands together in glee, I gave Dad the NP-tap that meant "Run for the panic room." They had to run across the hallway into Vanessa and Prof's room. Since our staff had managed to sound the siren in time, one of my jobs was to give Dad the tap as soon as possible because it was important for our credibility that our guards didn't find the parents in the house. I had to delay the tap long enough that there was no chance that they'd be running across the hallway at the same time as a fireball erupted or any debris flew down the hall, but there was no chance of either of those risks because EVERYTHING had been pushed out the opposite window, and was now falling to the ground several hundred feet below. The wreckage of the UAV and Mom and Dad's bed was going to make a WONDERFUL photograph. I checked the emergency tunnel, and was pleased that Julia and Carol were hurrying to our panic room, and that Donna was already waiting inside the adults' panic room. There was ample wreckage scattered around to identify the plane, and we had our radar recording and many photographs from the last few days. The evidence and the logic of the situation - the CIA had ordered a deadly force attack on my family when we'd been in Peoria Road, and now the FBI had too - would immediately hang the Government in the Court of Public Opinion. The highly spectacular and deadly nature of the attack and the graphic wreckage would make this a VERY big story. It was a dishonest story, but the Government had many times lied about us in the media, so it seemed reasonable to us that we lied about the Government. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." ------- Chapter 362: We Get Out of Harm's Way Tuesday, June 5, 2007 (Continued) It was time for me to get to our panic room. I was reasonably high over the midpoint between the Main and Kids' Houses, so it only took a few seconds for me to drop down to where the emergency tunnel's exit was (where the Tunnel Boring Machine entered the hill to make that tunnel). The entrance had been secured by two vault doors, the opening itself disguised, and just outside the entrance the ground had been excavated down several yards so the door was now high up a vertical cliff face. None of which posed any problem for me. The cliff wasn't illuminated by any lights, making it shaded and black, so it was easy for me to drop down into its shadow, open the netting that disguised the hole, open the nearest vault door from the inside, and slip in. The doors have sensors on them that report to the security center when they're opened, but I had long since learned how to temporarily disable those. Being able to create a sight blob and NP-fingertips inside an airspace means I can unplug a cable, open and close the door, then plug the cable back in again. That's SOP("Standard Operating Procedure") for me moving sneakily around our property wherever there are inconvenient sensors. I shut the door behind me as I opened the next one, then I flew myself rapidly down the tunnel, joining my girls just after they entered our panic room. The procedure is that as soon as we're inside and the door locked, we call security to let them know who's inside (both panic rooms have very good telecommunications). I made the call, just to make it explicit that I was here. Julia would have made the call otherwise, and lied that I was with them. I asked, "Is it a drill? What's happening?" "It's not a drill, but I don't have any information yet." He certainly did have information. The houses were fully illuminated and at least half the current security shift would've seen that my parents' bedroom no longer existed. They all had radios, so if one of them knew, they all knew. He just didn't want the kids to know yet. The kids are faster at getting into our panic room than the parents. Dad's quick, but the other three aren't so good, especially Old Hopalong. Tonight the plan was for Dad to go down the chute first, sprint to the adults' panic room, and place the call to report that everyone was with him. That would partially recover the time they'd lost hiding in the spare bedroom until after the crash, so make the event's timing seem more plausible. Some delay was okay - it could be blamed on Prof stumbling in the tunnel, for example - but it'd be best to make the timing seem as kosher as possible. Donna could've placed the call from the adults' panic room even earlier than Dad, but the guard would have asked to speak to one of the adults, so that call had to wait on Dad's arrival. About thirty seconds later, Dad called our room. It was on the direct line laid in a hole bored between the two rooms before their steel walls were erected. It was inaccessibly deep into the hill, and had its own telephones at either end which were unconnected to anything else, so we could certainly talk freely on it (which was the idea, in case the emergency tunnel was overrun by baddies). Dad checked, "Who's in your room, for real?" "Carol, Julia and me. What about at your end?" "Just Donna so far. I can hear the others coming. How did it go?" "Wonderfully well. I don't think it could've gone any better. Remember that you need to look horrified when you see the damage and say you heard some terrible crashes behind you as you went down the chute. There wasn't any fire, so don't mention anything about that. Pass that onto the others please. I don't think the closet was damaged, so you won't have to suffer through Mom's shopping, oww, oww." While I was fending off my attackers - attacking me out of principle, to defend womanhood's propensity to shop - Dad said, "That's one problem that doesn't affect me as badly as it affects you. Fely does her own shopping and I usually don't even know." "Lucky you..." Dad interrupted to say, "The others are here now. Fely wants to talk with you." I had to repeat the same information to Mom, modified by my saying, "I'm sorry to say that I don't think you'll have an excuse to buy new dresses. I think the closet survived pretty well." "What about the bedroom itself?" "It'd probably be best if I don't describe it to you. That way your reaction will be more honest when they finally let us out of these rooms. There wasn't any fire - at least not for the first few seconds that I saw - so don't mention anything about hearing a whoosh behind you. Just lots of crashing sounds." "We could hear them from where we were. It sounded like a train going through our room." "A train might've been tidier." Donna came on the line, and she was telling me how noisy it'd been when one of the other phones in the Kids' Panic Room rang (there are landline and cellphones, as well as the direct point-to-point phone I was using). Julia answered it. I heard her say, "We know, thanks. Mark's on the direct line to them now. What happened?" From Julia's convincingly horrified comments, the person at the other end was describing the attack. We sat on our butts while our security guys reacted. They knew the UAV was owned by the Air Force and had probably been used by the FBI, and the radar operator would've tracked its deliberate-seeming zigzag descent and straight-line attack on Mom and Dad's room, so our security would believe the Government had just carried out a deadly force attack on my parents. No doubt our guys were FRANTIC! If the attack was going to be followed up with anything, then it sure-as-fuck wouldn't be a small "anything". Last time we'd been attacked by the Government, it'd been two helicopter gunships, two Delta Force teams, and most of a 75th Rangers company. What was it going to be this time? Our guys would be RUNNING! As it turned out, they just got some needless exercise, which I'm sure they were VERY happy about. Time passed and no more violence happened. As soon as he thought the current moment's lack of violence might continue, Paul called the Chief of Police to quickly report that the UAV the Chief had seen through the telescope had just been deliberately rammed into the bedroom of Steven and Felicity Anderson and would certainly have killed them but for the radar operator's last second warning. The remnants of the UAV had passed through the house and over the northern wall and they needed to be secured by the police. Paul couldn't spare the guys to do it because they were still on high alert in case the Government followed-up with another attack. Paul finished with, "Treat it as a crime scene. This was a deliberate attempt to murder Steven and Felicity." [The radar operator's back got VERY well patted and his hand well shaken by his workmates over the next several hours. He got a BIG bonus in his next paycheck - we reward people who do their job well enough to save our lives.] No fire had started, so there was no need for that emergency service. There had been very little fuel and it'd been sprayed out widely by the spinning wreckage. Any sparks hadn't caught. Everybody on the surface did their running around while we sat on our asses chatting about how well the war was going so far. The Government had just badly lost a very important action, and it had no idea. We didn't want to waste much time sitting in our panic rooms. I had more battles to be getting on with, and I needed to get moving. I talked about it with the parents, and we agreed on what to do. After twenty minutes, I created the Guardian Angel in my panic room as a visibly yellow radio blob, then I sent it straight up. It rose up through the ground to a height of about fifty feet AGL, where it paused for a few seconds. There were no alarming radio or radar transmissions. The Guardian Angel moved toward the crash site. It was too far away for me to send the blob into the room, so it paused at the edge of my range, pretending to look from the distance, then it moved directly back to me, angling down through the ground. A few seconds later, Dad called Paul, telling him, "The Guardian Angel has opened the door and is nudging us out. Is there any reason why not?" "I'd like you to stay there until we're sure nothing else is going to happen." "The Guardian Angel wants us out. I don't think we have a choice. It's pushing me quite hard. Bye." The parents exited their panic room and walked down toward ours. Prof had fitted his spare leg. At our end, I'd left our security uniform on a shelf, had put my ski mask in my pocket and had put on a casual shirt I'd flown into this room before the Government's evil attack started, putting it over my black shirt to make myself look less cat-burglar-like. I also powered down the secret study computer. I'd prefer the Government not know about it, and leaving it running might make it easier for them to find it if they were looking for things connected to the internet or drawing power. I'd thought about disassembling it and piling the components on the main room's shelves (the panic room had shelves of tinned food, water, blankets, unfashionable clothes, weapons, etc.), but decided it wasn't worth it. If the Government went to all the effort of drilling through the panic room's vault door, and through the far easier door into my secret study, then they would've also gone through the house with a fine-toothed comb. I had done just one thing to leave them with some doubt: I turned all but eight of the screens off. The DHS had seized my 8-screen system eighteen months ago, and that had been widely publicized as their returning only five screens had inspired much ridicule, so my having only eight screens turned on now might confuse any Government searchers. I memorized exactly where I'd left the mouse and the locations of the CPU and other boxes on the floor, to help me know later whether anyone had used the computer. We exited our room, waiting for the parents and Donna to arrive. The rooms are about 350 feet apart, so it took them a while; not Donna though. She ran down to us, calling ahead how eager she was to see the damage. "Remember you have to look shocked, Donna. Your mother and father were nearly killed." "Oh yeah. I'm not very good at acting things like that. Maybe I shouldn't look?" "That's easy. After we've packed in my room, the Guardian Angel will herd the parents up the tunnel to the Adults' House to pack and Mom can pack for you too. It'll herd the kids down the elevator and along the main tunnel to where the SUVs are." We told the parents of the small change when they arrived, then we walked to the chute that led to my bedroom. I used a sight blob to make sure no guards were in the room, then I lifted myself up the chute, quickly followed by everyone else. I used NP to float three small suitcases onto our bed, and my wives and I started packing. Dad called Paul on my cellphone, putting it on speakerphone and saying, "Steven here Paul. We're all in the kids' bedroom. The Guardian Angel is getting them to pack small suitcases." Paul said, "Stay there. I'm on the way." "We'll stay here if the angel lets us. I'll call you back if we're pushed to move." Paul and three other guards arrived about the time the girls finished packing, smashing their previous fastest trip-packing record by at least a factor of two hundred. Paul half-addressed the Guardian Angel, half-talked to us, "I don't think you should go anywhere until we've found out what's going on." He would've said more, except that the angel picked everyone and the suitcases up with NP, and floated us out of the room. The angel was holding the guards' arms to their sides, so they had no way of slowing our progress. At the Kids' elevator, I used NP to press the button, and the kids were diverted out of the group to be parked in front of the elevator doors. Everyone else floated toward the tunnel to the Adults' House. Paul told the Guardian Angel, "Half the guards should go with the kids." The Guardian Angel ignored him because Paul's suggestion would've been VERY inconvenient. I said, "I'll have the Guardian Angel with me Paul, and we'll be underground, so I think we'll be safe." He had no choice. His shoes were only a couple of inches above the floor, but that two inches totally removed all of his control over his movement. The Guardian Angel did a clever trick: it split in two, both the same size as the original, one staying with the kids, the other moving to join the adults. Paul and the other guards didn't say anything but they were visibly impressed, in a worried way. Sometimes I wish I could read minds, because it'd be very interesting to know what Paul thought of that development. Just inside the tunnel up to the Adults' House, there's a security door that'd shut because of the alarm. The adults remained hovering in front of it until the parents convinced Paul to radio to get it opened. The alternative was for them to get taken to the Adults' House by the above-ground route, which seemed unacceptably dangerous. Paul radioed the Security Center to open the doors, and all the adults floated up the tunnel. I kept Guardian Angel B following the adults while the kids descended in the elevator with Guardian Angel A. Or maybe A and B were the other way around; it was hard to tell. The Kids' Elevator descends 110 feet. By the time we got to the bottom, the adults were a fair way up the tunnel, and in risk of getting outside my 500-foot range, so I raised the kids with NP and zipped us down the tunnel to catch up with the adults ("catch under with the adults", in this case). The Adults' elevator is 150 feet tall, so that geometry should tell you that we didn't have to move far along the tunnel to get within range of the adults. I flew us quickly all the way to the SUV as there was no reason why not. I put the suitcases in the back, and we climbed in, all in backseats. I very definitely didn't get into the driver's seat because I didn't want to give the impression that I was in charge of this in any way. We chatted while I did the necessary things up top. The parents were flown to the hallway outside Vanessa and Prof's bedroom. The Williams adults were moved into their room with two of the guards, and I put two of their suitcases onto their bed and opened them. The Guardian Angel, Mom, Dad, Paul and the other guard floated into what was left of Mom and Dad's room. I don't know what Mom said, but the destruction turned her face white. The carpet was gouged up; the windows were all gone, apart from dangerous looking shards; there were pieces of plane and small remnants of furniture scattered randomly around the room. One shredded pillow was lying on the floor about where the bed had been, creating a forlorn, scary symbol. Mom's and Dad's feet were bare and the floor was covered in glass, so I floated some strong looking shoes out of their closets. I moved my parents and their shoes back down the hallway, lowered Mom and Dad to the floor, and put the shoes down in front of them. Dad bent down immediately, but Mom was slow to react so one of her shoes kicked her. That broke the spell and got her moving. When they were shod, I picked everyone up and floated them to the closet, lowering the guards outside the doorway, while Mom and Dad got placed inside. I pulled two suitcases down, opened them, and watched Mom and Dad start to pack (part of our preparation had been to make sure every room had the suitcases we'd use in it, to make things flow better). Paul was talking earnestly to Mom and Dad while they were packing, but it didn't matter that I couldn't hear him as he'd never be able to talk them out of leaving. I thought to fly Dad's toothbrush and toothpaste from the bathroom to save him the trip, but God knows what Mom would need. Actually, God didn't know, so it'd be best to let her get it herself, which meant it'd look best if Dad did so too. When Mom shut the closet door so she and Dad could get dressed, the Guardian Angel moved through the wall back into the bedroom itself, that ability impressing the guards again. I canceled the angel with the kids and created another sight blob in the kitchen, bagging up several days' worth of food for us, even some fresh veggies. No doubt the mothers would've made different choices, but they'll manage for a few days with what I'd selected. I carried the bags to the elevator and down to the SUV. When they emerged from the closet, I saw Dad look at where the bed used to be and pat his pants pocket unconsciously. Dad had made the mistake of habitually leaving his wallet on his bedside table. It was probably still somewhere in the vicinity of his bedside, but that was scattered over the hillside. Next time a plane is scheduled to fly through his bedroom he'll know not to leave his wallet in its flight path. Prof and Vanessa came into the room and inspected the devastation, with suitably shocked expressions on their faces, talking to Paul while Mom and Dad packed their toiletries away. I picked everybody up and moved them down the hallway, then Mom and Vanessa into Donna's room. I'd already laid a case on her bed and Mom got busy filling it. You can tell when a girl gets to a certain age because the contents of a pharmacy moves into her bathroom. Vanessa gathered the essential half a dozen items, passing them to Mom. We'd originally planned for Donna to do her own packing, so I hope she wasn't going to be too upset about Mom's and Vanessa's choices. Then the group was carried to the Adults' Elevator, and came down to join us in the SUV. I'd recreated the Kids' Angel, and I had the two of them merge together again (they'd probably missed their better half). I left it hovering in front of the SUV. I flew the suitcases and parents ahead of the guards, quickly putting the suitcases in the back and the parents on the ground next to the doors I wanted them to get into, with the two men in the front (Dad into the driver's seat), the two women into the back. I prodded each of them in the back a couple of times, just to look good. The guards I left hovering a few feet away, where they couldn't interfere. Covered by the sound of Donna asking Mom whether she'd packed specific items of clothing, and the other girls asking less important questions about the state of Mom and Dad's bedroom, I quietly asked Prof, "Did you give Paul his instructions?" The plan had envisaged us meeting Paul outside as we were leaving, where Prof would instruct Paul what to do in our absence. Paul's coming inside had been a small wrinkle and I needed to know whether or not we could now leave immediately. Prof answered quietly, "I've told him. We can leave." Paul's instructions were to let the media onto the property and into the bedroom, show them the pieces of UAV then the article of the Air Force buying the UAV. Show them the daily datestamped photos of the UAV over our property, and get the witnesses who'd used the telescope to corroborate the UAV had been there. Also to have our radar system replay the UAV's loitering overhead for days and then its attack. He was told very explicitly "Do NOT mention that the FBI has ANYTHING to do with the UAV. We don't know for certain that they were operating the plane. Our credibility is going to become very important in a few days and we don't want to have any blemish on it if it wasn't the FBI's plane. We only know that the Air Force bought the UAV for combat tactic testing, and immediately had it do nothing but fly incessant circles over our home." There were additional instructions about securing the house, what to do if the Government descended on the property with or without a warrant, how to communicate ("presuming the angel lets us"), and some other minor details. One detail was our fake-guesses at the UAV owner's motives, "Maybe the Government wanted to kill Felicity and Steven so they could get Mark declared a ward of the state to gain legal control of him and the Guardian Angel. That doesn't make much sense, but it's one possibility. Another is that Mark made very strong anti-Government statements in his comments about the Iraq War when he was with the clerics so maybe that upset the Air Force enough for them to take some revenge. Or maybe it was CIA-inspired again, like the attack on our Peoria Road home was. Those are the only semi-reasons we can think of for their wanting Felicity and Steven dead. Or even less sensibly, maybe the Air Force simply wanted to get revenge for Archangel Michael destroying some of its planes." We'd said those things mainly because Paul would expect us to. Paul was smart and experienced, so Prof wouldn't have had to spell out many of the instructions. Paul was also very unhappy at our leaving, but he'd get over it. I picked our SUV up, flying it and the four guards out of the tunnel, preceded by the Guardian Angel. The guards were flying in formation a few feet beside us so there was nothing they could do about our leaving. Paul just talked to us as we headed out. One of Prof's little jobs, according to our plan, was to tell Paul, "If the Government wants to kill us, this hill doesn't offer enough protection. One big bomb and we're all dead, you and your guys included. It looks like the angel thinks it best that we leave and disappear for a while, until we know what's going on." That, and there being nothing Paul could do, probably explained why he wasn't doing anything. He did try to insist we take some guards with us, splitting the families across two SUVs and filling the empty seats with guards. We couldn't allow that because it'd screw-up the rest of our plan. Dad answered, "If the angel wanted that, it would've done it already. I'm sure the angel can look after us, especially if no one knows where we are." Paul wasn't happy. As soon as we had open sky above us, I put the guards down, while the Guardian Angel led the SUV in the opposite direction, up about twenty feet, then northwest over the top of Donna's horses - she called "Goodbye" down to them - toward the forested hills. Any hope Paul had about following us in another vehicle was doomed. Not far past the horses my hidden stash of guns and cash came up to join us. I hadn't mentioned those before, but after I explained them now, three-quarters of the parents thought they might be useful. I canceled the Guardian Angel and we headed into the large, unpopulated, hilly area northwest of our home. As soon as we were flying, Prof called our very good DC lawyer. I overheard only Prof's half of the conversation, so that's what I've quoted below: "For the last several days there's been a stealth Unmanned Aerial Vehicle above our house. That's a UAV, like a Predator drone but unarmed. It's been flying mile-radius circles at 45,000 feet above our home..." "Wait, there's more. The Air Force bought it from Northrop Grumman a few weeks ago and there was an article in some papers saying it was going to be used to develop dogfight tactics, but much of the time since they've had it, it's been flying circles above our home, except when it refuels each night. We have a telescope at the home of one of our gardener's that has been taking hourly date- and time-stamped photographs, and three prominent Corvallis residents have eyeballed it too. -- "It's a stealth model, so it was nearly invisible to our radar, but once we found it visually we narrowed the radar beam which cranked up the juice enough to track it. We've been following it for several days and have saved the radar data to a file. -- "Less than an hour ago, it descended over Corvallis, and when it was low, it turned and headed straight toward our home. Our radar operator sounded the alarm and we managed to get to safety a couple of seconds before it crashed straight into Felicity and Steven's bedroom, utterly destroying everything in it." "Yes, they're fine. Shaken but uninjured. If they'd been in bed they would have been killed. They'd gone to bed fifteen minutes earlier, and the Government's using a stealth UAV as a missile should have guaranteed their murder. We're very lucky we had a telescope at a separate location as part of our security system, and a radar system good enough to detect a stealth aircraft with a narrow beam. -- "Here's where the story gets even stranger. Mark's Guardian Angel has nudged us into an SUV and we're currently sitting in it, with the engine off, flying a dozen feet above the treetops heading away from home. It's clearly getting us to safety in case the Air Force tries again, although there's no sign of that so far. There don't seem to be any planes in the area or any other sign of trouble. -- "We don't know how long the angel will keep us away from home so we've instructed our Head of Security, Paul Olsen, to go public with all the information we've got and to show the media through what's left of the bedroom. We want you to do whatever you think is best at your end. We're assuming we'll be incommunicado for a while, so you'll have to manage that yourself. If you call our home's landline, security will pick up. Introduce yourself and ask for Paul Olsen, and he'll be able to send you copies of all the information he's got. He's expecting your call." There was a short back and forth conversation about the various things our lawyers could do for us, but Prof cut it short by saying, "The Guardian Angel wants me to hang up now. Do your best, bye." When Prof had finished, Vanessa called Andrew to let him know what had happened. Andrew naturally freaked out, and didn't listen to Vanessa's assurances. These days we always assume our phones are tapped, so Vanessa's couldn't say, "It was a fake attack; Mark did the whole thing." Being careful with her words, Vanessa emphatically repeated, "We did warn you that things like this were possible. You shouldn't be surprised." After a couple of reminders, Andrew suddenly remembered yesterday evening's conversation with Prof, and realized that we'd known about the attack in advance. That had all sorts of implications, including that there'd been far less risk than it seems. Andrew calmed down. Vanessa said, "I'll call Robert now. He's not in the loop so much so he'll react worse. I'll get him to call you for reassurances. Don't bother trying to explain anything to him; just be reassuring. We'll probably be out of contact for a few days, but don't worry about it because we're in VERY good hands." Then Vanessa called Robert. His not having had any prior warning gave him no reason to calm down, except Vanessa said, "I've talked to Andrew and he's not worried. You're out of the loop so it's hard for you to judge what's going on here. Call Andrew and take your cue from him." Dad had already warned Ava, there was nothing we could usefully add to it now and it might reduce the pressure that the authorities subsequently put on her if we don't call her now, so we turned off all our cellphones and removed the batteries for good measure. I turned the SUV around to go directly south, toward our hideout. I kept the SUV low, flying it between hills so only an overhead radar would have any hope of picking us up, and there were none of them operating in the area. I do a lot of flying over these hills, either the hilly, unpopulated west side of the Willamette Valley (the Oregon Coast Range, average elevation about 1,500 feet), or the mountainous east side (the Cascade Range, between 4,500 and 5,000 feet high). Usually the west side as it covers my approach almost to my doorstep and I can get into the ocean from it. The western third of Oregon is almost entirely hilly, unpopulated, wilderness area, except for the coastal towns and narrow Willamette Valley, so it's very convenient for my flying around, allowing me to cover large distances unseen. I often hide things in the western hills - the spare fabric for my Archangel Michael costume is still hidden there, for example - and I've gotten to know the hills well, including which remote cabins are rarely used. 'Our' hideout was one such cabin. I'd scouted around the previous night, picking an empty cabin surrounded by other empty cabins. There were plenty of choices, so I'd even been able to find one with a handy spot to hide the SUV from overhead searchers. Even with flying low restricting my top speed, it took less than half an hour for our SUV to reach our hideout - pretty good considering it had no road access. When we were close enough, I confirmed the cabin was still unoccupied, then 'parked' the car. A couple of hundred feet lower down the hill there was rocky overhang. I broke off a few inconveniently placed trees and moved the car into the gap that created. Everyone got out, Dad's taking the keys amused me as there was NO chance of someone else driving it away. Dad's a creature of habit. I floated everyone and the groceries to the side, and then laid the trees over the parking spot to hide the vehicle even better. I floated everyone up to the cabin. It was large and crude; especially crude. It was clearly intended for hunting parties used to roughing it. I got some, "Couldn't you have found somewhere better"-type comments. "Sorry, but I favored your not being found over comfort. It'd be bad news if the Government got their hands on you before they were totally beaten into submission. I'd love to stay and talk, but I've got a war to win." I swapped my shirts around so the black one was now on top of the non-cat-burglar one, kissed all the females goodbye, shook a couple of hands, put up with all the "Be carefuls", then left. I'd done one little sneaky thing, I'd pulled one of the handguns out of my stash and had kept it below the car where no one would see it. I left all the rest of the guns and half the cash with Dad, taking half the cash myself, as well as having the separated gun surreptitiously join me as I left. After I'd flown several miles away, I descended for a quick experiment. As I was about to start a war, I thought it'd be a good idea to find out whether I was bulletproof or not. I had a hope that I might be. I'd heard somewhere that some bullets are supersonic and some are not, so for the purpose of my calculation, I'd assumed a bullet speed of 400 meters per second (Mach one is 340 m/s). I guessed a bullet weighed about 200 grams (0.2 kg). I'd been very surprised how light the gun I'd taken off the Casino Kidnappers had been, and even more so when I later saw how many bullets it had in it, so I knew they couldn't have weighed much. 200 grams might even be too much, but I'd much rather err conservatively in this calculation. Presuming I could apply my NP force to a bullet in flight, slowing it from 400 m/s down to stationary would take how long? Using v = u + at, with v=400, u=0, and a=37,500 (assuming every mind participated, so 700 kg opposing force / 0.2 kg weight of bullet), then t=0.01 second, during which the bullet would go 2 meters. That looked extremely practical, hence my desire to test the result. It'd be much better to find out I was wrong in a test than in reality, especially because I could see that my wonderful theoretical result had some problems: I'd have to get thirty two minds' worth of NP-plates lined up in the path of the bullet before it was fired, because I couldn't react fast enough to catch it otherwise. Even from 40 meters away, a shot would only take 0.1 seconds to reach me, which was too quick. And God knows how I'd see the bullet to know where to catch it. Would a bullet punch right through the NP-plates before they had a chance to slow it down? Those NP-plates would probably have to be pushing back against the bullet, not just hovering in midair, unless the act of punching through them slowed the bullet enough, or unless it pushed the plates ahead of it, in which case their air resistance would brake the bullet very quickly. I stood a few yards away from a tree, aimed the pistol at it (using NP to hold it, so there'd be no fingerprints), put thirty two NP-plates in the way, and pulled the trigger. A moment later I was very glad that I hadn't been standing in front of the tree, or I'd be dead now. The bullet had hit the tree exactly where I'd aimed. #7: I tried again, trying to push back with the plates. I killed the tree again. #23: We tried angling the plates, hoping to deflect the bullet sideways. It made no difference at all, to my and the tree's annoyance. We gave up, hiding the gun to be picked up on our return trip. ^ [[Think of the NP-plates as similar to pieces of paper hanging from a clothesline. In this case paper with zero mass, so when a bullet hits one it gets instantly accelerated backward with infinite acceleration. Air resistance starts as soon as the NP-plate encounters air molecules. The plate is 12 inches by 12 inches square, and at 400 m/s (800 mph) it encounters a HUGE amount of air resistance. Try putting your one-sixth as large hand outside a car window at 100 mph. The NP-plate felt 390 times as much air resistance as that. The plate was effectively held stationary by the air resistance while the bullet drilled straight through it. Each NP-Plate could exert 230 kg of force, and they had an 'internal penetration resistance' of three times that amount, call it 700 kg. They were 1-inch thick (0.025 m). So simplistically, but good enough for this, the bullet would encounter a 700 kg opposing force for the time it took to travel 0.025 m. At 400 m/s that'd take 6.25E-5 seconds, temporarily ignoring the increasing time required as the bullet slowed through successive plates. v = u + at, with u = 0, a= 3500 and t = 6.25E-5, gave v = 0.22. Punching through one plate would slow the bullet by 0.22 m/s, so 32 plates would slow it by 7 m/s. So the tree got drilled at 393 m/s rather than at 400, which pleased me as much as it did the tree. I could've made my plates thicker by making them smaller in the other dimensions, but that risked the bullets missing them, and wouldn't make a useful difference anyway. If I merged again, I'd have twice as many minds with plates of four times as much opposing force (assuming the internal squash resistance remained a factor of 3, which it would), and they could be twice as thick, so a sixteen times improvement, slowing the bullet by 112 m/s. Actually slightly more, because as it slowed it'd take longer to drill through each successive sheet, so call it about 130 m/s. Done at an angle to the bullet's flight and far enough away from me, that might deflect the bullet enough for it to miss me, but I wouldn't want to bet my life on it. Another merge would slow the bullet by another factor of sixteen, so would allow me to easily stop it. I could be bulletproof then provided I could interpose the plates in time; I'd just have to kill myself twice first, which didn't seem worth it.]] ------- Chapter 363: The Home Team Fights 'Back' Wednesday, June 6, 2007 The second battle in our war was going to be at Beale Air Force Base. According to the very helpful Wikipedia, it's the USAF's (US Air Force's) largest UAV operations center, almost certainly where the UAV that had taken out Mom and Dad's bedroom had been operated from and out of [half right, as it'd been operated from a Northrop Grumman's facility in LA]. The Government, media and public would recognize the appropriateness of the Guardian Angel's counterattacking Beale AFB. I'd been so pressed for time recently that I'd not done as much research as I wanted, only having time to read up on Beale. For obvious reasons I didn't want to research any Air Force bases from my home a few hours before the UAV's attack on our home and the Guardian Angel's subsequent retaliation attacks on those bases. I'd have to do the extra research this evening. I didn't know enough about the Guardian Angel's targets after Beale AFB, so I stopped at a conveniently accessible computer near Beale to google for the list of American Air Force bases, researching those that were nearest to Corvallis. I was pretty sure the news of the attack on our house would get on the air quickly. Paul was told to do so and there were too many camera crews in Corvallis with little to do and with live transmission capabilities. I wanted to make sure my attack occurred after the public knew about the attack on our home so they wouldn't get confused over which one was retaliation for the other. I wanted that to be very clear because an inexplicably large proportion of the public are Christians so aren't equipped to think logically. I did my usual trick of turning on the TV in an empty house, and turning the volume up loud enough for me to hear it from outside a window. I didn't need the volume because I immediately recognized the pictures of Mom and Dad's devastated bedroom. It was still fun to listen to the commentary though, as everyone was SHOCKED AND HORRIFIED that the Air Force would 'allegedly' do such a thing. The "allegedly" was pronounced almost with sneers, as the evidence Paul was presenting with the Chief of Police's corroboration was damning. There were enough pieces of the UAV lying around to match it with our photos, proving the legitimacy of the photos. A quick internet search of the model Paul named showed pictures of it, and those were recognizably the same as the wreckage's larger pieces and our telescope photos. Only one of that model had ever been sold, recently to the USAF. Even more suspicious was that the UAV-oriented internet sites clearly described the one that attacked our home as a stealth development. There was absolutely no need for a stealth UAV to be flown in American airspace at all! Whose radar were they trying to hide it from? The obvious answer to that question being: The Andersons'. Everyone believed that the Air Force had been behind the attack, despite the "allegedlies". The Army had been duped into attacking the Andersons by the CIA, which made an attack by another of our armed forces easily believable. Shocking and unbelievable, but in a head-shakingly believable way. The commentators weren't asking "Did the Air Force do it?" but, "Who duped the Air Force or did they do it themselves?" Occasionally a commentator would remember to tack on a sneered "allegedly". A few minutes later I had my itinerary planned and it was time to get the ball rolling. I arrived at Beale AFB a couple of minutes into Wednesday, ready to get the Air Force's day off to a bad start. The land around the base was flat and empty, making it easy for me to approach. It would've been almost impossible to sneak up on during daylight, but at night I could drop out of the sky almost wherever I wanted. The area of Beale that I wanted to fuck over was a north-south rectangle about 6,000 feet long and 1,500 feet wide. The runway itself, which wasn't included in my target area, was 2,000 feet farther to the west. I was targeting the main service buildings - control tower, hangars, maintenance workshops, offices, the UAV operations buildings, etc. - and the parking apron immediately to the buildings' west. The area contained about two dozen buildings and quite a few aircraft parked in the open, such as half a dozen U-2 reconnaissance planes, several smaller planes, including a few UAVs and several large planes parked at the northern end. A Google Earth image showing Beale AFB's main facilities and parking apron. The runway is out of the picture to the west. This photograph is not contemporaneous with my attack. It was far too large for me to take care of from one hidden location so I'd have to move along it. I didn't want my physical body to be seen - only the Guardian Angel - so I couldn't be at ground level, especially because my running zigzags down the middle of a 1,500 feet wide, well-lit, busy area would get me shot. That meant my physical body had to be up in the air. That'd work fine, as I knew that if I flew at an altitude of two hundred feet no one would see me at night. I'd be far enough to the side of the runway that its upward pointing lights wouldn't illuminate me, I was wearing black and I'd be flying standing upright. I'd also be arranging for some massive distractions down at ground level. My next target after Beale was a couple of hundred miles north, so I started at the southern end of Beale to attack it in a south-to-north direction to make for an easy departure afterward, not that it would matter much which direction I did this in. I was at two hundred feet AGL about a thousand feet south of my target area and heading rapidly north, slowing down as I got closer. I created the Guardian Angel at six feet AGL, starting with it as the size of a pea, expanding it to its normal size as it reached the target area, making it considerably brighter than normal to be more distracting and better at ruining people's night-vision. It was lined up on the eastern edge of the apron, so it'd pass immediately in front of the doors and windows of the buildings, except those which were recessed east of the apron. The first building coming up was a column of six long, thin hangars. As soon as I was within four hundred feet of the first one, I used a sight blob to look inside for people. Seeing none, I ripped the roof off, tilted it, and smashed it down into the hopefully very expensive plane inside the hangar, and then I set fire to the mess. I traced the overhead sprinklers' pipe back to where it entered the hangar, and ripped it apart. Total time about ten seconds. I slowed down to about 20 feet per second (15 miles per hour; 22 kilometers per hour), slightly slower than I needed for the 250-foot long hangar but there were other buildings coming up on my right which also needed demolishing. The Guardian Angel was just a light blob, leaving me two invisible sight blobs to operate with, so I could destroy two buildings at a time without slowing down any more. The control tower was the next on the list. I looked inside and there were several people working, most of whom were staring out at the Guardian Angel and what I'd just finished doing to the first hangar. For the visual effect, I zoomed the Guardian Angel straight at them. It covered the four hundred feet in about a tenth of a second (the equivalent of 1,200 mph), then braked to an instant halt in the middle of the control room. Angels have good brakes, even better than the brakes that car salesmen rave about. I stomped six major pieces of electronics with a ton of pressure each, instantly squashing them flat. Then another six items, then another six, and that was about it. I grabbed the recoiling guys, pushed the roof off and dumped it on the empty land to the tower's west. I lifted everyone out, lowering them quickly but non-injuriously on the ground to the east, several dozen feet away from the tower. The tower had several exposed support legs that didn't look individually strong, and a quick maximum-force push against the western leg bent it out of position. I repeated that in the same direction on two other legs and then pushed the Leaning Tower of Beale over. I quite enjoyed watching it crash to the ground, and regretted I didn't have time to stop for a celebratory pizza. Meanwhile I'd noticed some Air Force cars in the parking lot beside the tower, so I picked those up, smashed their fuel tanks open, and literally threw them into the burning hangar. Non-Air Force cars I left alone. The other sight blob was providing the visual guidance for my fucking over the next hangar in the column of six. It didn't contain a plane, so I just trashed it quickly and set a fire where I thought it might do the most good (or bad; depending on whose side of the war you're on: God's or America's). The fire would probably go out, but there was a U-2 parked on the runway not far ahead which I'd drop into the empty hangar soon. The third hangar and a large office were the next two buildings to be simultaneously processed. Again ripping off the roofs, smashing them into the building, setting fires and ruining the sprinkler system. About two hundred NP-fingertips can empty a LOT of filing cabinets very quickly, as well as smashing holes in several internal walls so it's easier for them to catch fire. A couple dozen max-effect heat blobs scattered around the room set fire to everything they touched in seconds. The parked U-2 got cut into quarters and dumped into the second and third hangars to encourage their fires. According to Wikipedia, the empty weight of a U-2 is 6,760 kg, about 90% of my current maximum lifting force. If it had fuel in it (hopefully) then it'd be even heavier. Even if empty, 90% of my maximum force was too heavy because it'd take me too long to move it, so it got sliced first. That was MUCH quicker. A couple of fuel storage tanks were next and very easily ruptured and ignited when I was safely NOT above them! To my surprise, they didn't explode the way I thought they would, but they did burn well. [[Too much of my education had been provided by Hollywood. A storage tank full of fuel can't explode in the spectacular manner movies inevitably portray, as fuel needs oxygen to burn. The fuel leaking out of the ruptures burned really well though.]] Two more small buildings and the rest of the initial column of six hangars were quickly dealt with. Two of the hangars had people in them, but pulling them out could be done while I was raising the roof, so it barely slowed me down at all. I placed them on the ground several dozen yards to the west, on the parking apron. Most of the hangars contained planes, which pleased me. I reached another externally parked U-2, and a nearby small, two-engine prop plane of an unknown model. Both of them got tossed into destroyed hangars. When I finished working on the sixth hangar, I was in range of the UAV operations area. It was a complex of six buildings, four quite small, one large, and one even larger at about 300 x 300 feet. There were something like a hundred cars parked around the buildings. I slowed myself and allocated both sight blobs to working on this complex. The roofs of the two big buildings were too big for me to lift in their entirety, so I'd have to process these buildings differently than the earlier ones. I started with the biggest building. I flew the Guardian Angel (operating as a sight blob now, that change taking only a thought to put into effect) into the building, passing ghost-like through the wall into an open area in the building, freaking out everyone who saw it. There weren't that many observers though, as the building was divided into dozens of private operating areas and offices. There was an empty field immediately to the west, so a large chunk of the west wall exploded outward. One sight blob watched the outside area so I'd be able to see where to put the people, while the other sight blob (the Guardian Angel) enabled me to grab everyone in the room and fly them out through the missing wall. As soon as they were in the external sight blob's field of vision, the Guardian Angel went searching through the building. After entering each room, it pushed the wall out in the direction it'd come in. That kept everyone in the room safe, would make it easier for the fire to spread later, and gave me a path to evacuate people through. After any people were ejected, the contents of each room were destroyed if they were electronics, or emptied if they were paper files. It took a couple of minutes to get everybody out of the building, which is a very long time considering I had two sight blobs that could move with an infinite speed and hundreds of NP-fingertips. By then people were screaming (the office ladies mostly), and panicking (pretty much everyone, as the Guardian Angel is freaky, walls were inexplicably bursting apart, people were being grabbed and flown through the air, etc.). Some of the people I'd carried outside tried to run back in; I guess because it's illegal for the Air Force to refuse to employ Christians. Considering their intelligence, I responded by knocking them out. I heard sirens and looked to see two fire trucks rushing down the apron toward the burning hangars. The first fire had started three minutes ago so the fire teams' response had been slower than I'd expected. They took a few more seconds to get close enough to me, at which time I created a second Guardian Angel in front of the trucks, picked them up, turned them upside-down and put them back down again, taking a moment to push down very forcefully on the rear axle of each until the back of the truck collapsed, presumably ruining most of their functionality. I only crushed the rear because there were guys struggling to get out of the cab. I canceled all the NP-fingertips I'd used to pancake the back of the fire trucks, recreating them as heat blobs throughout the main UAV operations building to set a dozen fires throughout it. The new Guardian Angel zoomed back into the building and went searching for the main sprinkler system pipe, which I wrecked as usual. The Guardian Angels - now both functioning as sight blobs (actually radio blobs, although the radar systems had stopped radiating when I'd destroyed the control tower) - zoomed into the second largest building, repeating the process of the first, the only difference being that the building was half the size, less partitioned, and I ejected people to the east. It took less than a minute. Total attack time four minutes so far. Over a dozen UAVs somewhere in the world just lost all their guidance. I'd like to think that they'd fly until they ran out of fuel and then crash in remote areas of the world. Unfortunately, I suspected that almost certainly wouldn't happen as it'd be too easy for other USAF controllers to reestablish contact and order the planes to land, especially because some of the UAVs probably had over thirty hours of fuel left. While one Guardian Angel was destroying the smaller buildings in the operations area, the other Guardian Angel was picking up Air Force cars, puncturing their fuel tanks, and throwing them into one of the already cleared and burning buildings. The next seven hundred feet was a couple of parking lots and some trees, so of no interest to me. To its west were four comparatively small hangars in the middle of the parking apron; presumably for top-secret planes. I zigged my body that way to get within range, while the two Guardian Angels caught up with me at ground level, merging in front of dozens of witnesses. Actually, the merge happened behind most of the witnesses, as they were scattering in panic at the Guardian Angels' heading their way (this was the group I'd ejected from the big building). Some of them were Air Force guards, were armed, and took panicky shots at the angels. It had no effect on the angels of course, but two of their panicky overshots hit people. As soon as I heard the gunfire, the Guardian Angels climbed several feet so any future gunfire would be aimed too high to hurt anyone. I very much wanted to have a war in which no one died. Two of the small, isolated hangars did have interesting looking UAVs in them, but not for long. A nearby U-2 helped the fires nicely as its fuel burnt REALLY well. The people were ejected, as usual. I zagged back east, toward a 400-foot wide tongue of the tarmac that extended eight hundred feet east of the apron, surrounded by UAV servicing and maintenance buildings. I did the southern buildings first, throwing any Air Force cars into already burning buildings. The firehouse was in this area too: another truck came charging out of its garage and got all of ten feet clear before it shared the fate of its predecessors. I wrecked the rest of the fire trucks before they could be started. There were quite a few planes parked in this area, so the buildings were soon burning very nicely. Looking back, I could see that nearly all the buildings behind me were burning very well too. A couple of hangars were disappointing, but the large buildings were making up for it by blazing very enthusiastically. Wary of all the extra light from the fires, I raised my body a hundred feet higher to make my being spotted less likely, at the cost of reducing my ground-level horizontal reach somewhat. The next area was a very large administration area. It was mostly empty, and a few seconds later, was entirely empty, wrecked, catching fire very well, and containing eight U-2 quarters. There was a large parking lot to the admin building's east, but it was mostly empty so only a handful of Air Force cars got tossed into that fire. I heard the sound of cars and moved a Guardian Angel to look. Several cars were speeding north up the apron. As soon as they saw the angel come their way, rifle fire erupted from the cars' windows. I didn't want to leave trigger happy riflemen behind me in case one of them noticed something black occluding the stars. The riflemen's night-vision would be ruined from looking at all the fires, but I'd rather play safe, and I could play playfully too. I ZOOMED the light blob toward them, having it split into two, four, then eight Guardian Angels. They zoomed around the cars, causing chaos as the drivers slammed on the brakes and/or turned sharply. There would certainly have been accidents, probably bad ones as I doubted the occupants were wearing their seatbelts, but I saved them by grabbing hold of each car and lifting them a few feet into the air, decelerating them as I turned them over. I pulled the rifles and pistols out of everyone's hands. I could've demonstrated to them that bullets don't harm Guardian Angel's, but I was sure there'd be ample proof of that before this night was over, so I simply tossed the weapons a long way away and lowered the cars back to the tarmac on their roofs. I resumed going north. About half a mile ahead was a large airplane parking area built off the north end of the runway. It had a couple of decent-sized buildings and five of those big KC-135 in-flight refueling planes, hopefully containing a lot of fuel. I took out the two buildings simultaneously in the usual way. The KC-135s were certainly way too heavy for me to pick up without chopping them up into a dozen pieces, which I couldn't be bothered doing. I simply punctured up into the underside of both wings of the first plane in multiple places, causing fuel leaks that I ignited. The flames immediately engulfed the plane. Now that I knew where the fuel tanks were, it only took a few seconds to puncture and set fire to the subsequent planes. After the last plane was engulfed, I quickly accelerated north and climbed to get clear of any possible small-arms fire. Rolling up the whole air base had taken eleven minutes. There was virtually nothing left of the place, and there'd be even less by the time the fires burned down. I'd destroyed every plane, every building - apart from a few minor ones too far off to the side that I couldn't be bothered going after - and every significant piece of electronics. Eleven minutes had been a bit longer than I would've liked, but it was fast enough that there'd been very little opportunity for people to get organized. There was literally nothing at all they could do about the Guardian Angel(s) directly, other than dropping a very large bomb on one of them that happened to catch me in the blast radius. I thought that was unlikely in eleven minutes. What I did fear more was them getting organized enough to start searching the sky carefully. I'd averaged a speed of about 6 mph along the target area, which wasn't as fast as I would've liked as it left me observable for too long, even with Shock and Awe on my side. I'd try to do better in the future. Hopefully practice would make perfect. ^ Two hundred miles north of Beale AFB is Klamath Falls Airport, also known as Kingsley Field. According to the useful Wikipedia, it's mostly used by general aviation (like Vanessa's BBJ), by one commercial airline, and by the Oregon Air National Guard for, among other things, "advanced air to air combat training for F-15 pilots." There was a good chance that advanced F-15 air combat training would need F-15s, which made Klamath Falls my next destination. Tonight was all about pressuring the Air Force, and the Air National Guard wasn't formally part of the Air Force, but that just made Klamath Falls and even more tempting target. It'd demonstrate that the angel's vengeance wasn't constrained, would cause another organization to yell at the Air Force, and would tell the Air Force that the Guard wouldn't be able to backstop them. It took half an hour to get there. I flew low, at 200 feet, low enough to dive to the deck quickly if a radar near me started operating in one of the flesh-detecting bands, but the trip was uneventful. As best as I could tell, there'd been no reaction to my attack on Beale AFB. I hoped I'd carry on seeing no reaction, but I somehow doubted it. The Wikipedia entry for the airfield identified three hangars as being used by the Air National Guard, so I checked them out. The first two I came to were close together, and both contained F-15s. The hangars were near other buildings that were owned by non-Government organizations, which had yet more neighbors close beside them. I didn't want to burn the whole block down, so I'd do things a little differently this time. I dropped a Guardian Angel into the middle of each hangar and immediately started turning F-15s into F-15 pieces. The sight and noise caused people to rush to investigate. I held them away while I made a pile of F-15 pieces in the middle of each hangar, and then set fire to them. I didn't have to wait for the fire to take hold, because it WHOOSHED. I left the sprinkler system intact and released the people to do whatever they wanted, including fire fighting. I watched long enough to make sure none of them did something crazy, then I moved to the third Air Force hangar at the north of the airfield. It was larger, stood apart from any neighbors, and had a munitions area. The people were running around frantically, presumably reacting to an alarm from the other hangars. The Guardian Angel flew through the wall ghost-like, picked everybody up while a large part of the roof was pulled off. The people were evacuated, and the building and all its contents suffered the same fate as the Beale buildings, just without the car tossing. Reducing the Guard's small presence in Klamath Falls had taken less than five minutes. ^ Two hundred miles east of Klamath Falls is Mountain Home AFB. Every leg of my journey tonight was about two hundred miles because that's how far apart Air Force bases seem to be placed in this area of the country, for no reason that I can imagine. Maybe it was just a coincidence. The Wikipedia article about Mountain Home AFB had said that it is the home to two F-15E Strike Eagle and one F-15C Eagle fighter squadrons. The F-15Es are about 50% more expensive than the Cs, but although I wanted to hurt the Air Force financially, I was not glad that there were two squadrons of Es because - according to Wikipedia again - Es have VERY good infrared sensors, including an infrared targeting system. Speaking as someone who radiates infrared, that wasn't welcome news. My building damage was going to be curtailed at this base too, because Google Earth had shown the base's key buildings to be spread out too much, with residential housing and other unsuitable buildings intermingled with some of the worthwhile targets. I wasn't going to risk destroying residential homes. To play safe I wouldn't even destroy the buildings two rows back from the apron; I'd restrict myself to destroying the tower and only the buildings immediately beside the apron. Those were the highest value and most important ones anyway. As I neared the base, I detected a hive of activity. There were six planes aloft, flying around the base with their radars on. The radars were in a band that is excellent for picking up other aircraft or missiles but no good for picking up me, so the radars didn't worry me, but visual sighting using infrared did. Having half a dozen F-15s gunning for my ass would definitely count as bad news, especially if they were Es. Even Cs could cause me grief if I created fires and flew over them, as the fliers could get a glimpse of me, alert the rest of their flight, and they could all come after my ass. On the other hand, it'd be very good for the Air Force to see the Guardian Angel emerge unscathed from everything half a dozen F-15s could throw at it. That was worth thinking about. I had no problem with the Air Force throwing high-speed high-explosive things at the Guardian Angel. It was their throwing those things at me that I was highly motivated to avoid. If the planes above me were Es they could pick me up on infrared if I got closer. Wikipedia said their infrared system could be displayed on their Heads Up Display, " ... effectively giving them daylight visibility at night time." My flying around in "effectively daylight" would be far too dangerous. So I backed off and went in search of some items. Despite Wikipedia's comment, I knew enough about how infrared vision systems worked to know they did not turn nighttime into daytime. If I wrapped my body in tinfoil and took to the air, they wouldn't see me until my internal heat penetrated the tinfoil, which would take quite a while. Not that I'm going to do that, as I'd show up on radar BRILLIANTLY. I'm just explaining how their infrared system worked. I searched quickly through the houses under me, several miles away from the base, until I was able to steal a full-head crash helmet and a large, dark-colored sheet, then I headed back to the Mountain View AFB. I had the sheet over my head as an umbrella and was holding the helmet ready to put it on when I got closer, to minimize the time it would be heated up by my head. A couple of months ago, as part of getting radio blobs going, I'd seen that my head and limbs didn't give out as much heat as other people's. For a few days I'd used heat blobs to correct that, but my body had adapted and now radiated the usual amount of heat. It was subconscious though, so I couldn't dial my body's heat output to zero, which would probably be very unhealthy anyway. People radiate a lot of heat from their heads and I would be flying upright so any planes looking down would see my head clearly. My wearing a helmet would block that, plus it'd obscure the top-down view of the heat radiating from the rest of my body. Perhaps my already using the large, dark sheet as an umbrella made the helmet unnecessary, but all things considered, it seemed better to err on the side of caution. The radar beam sources told me that the planes flying overhead were flying in pairs: two of them at about 2,000 feet, two at what I guessed was about 10,000 feet, and two much higher, at something like 50,000 ft. They were flying circuits, which made keeping track of them easier. I could differentiate between F-15Cs and Es easier from above, so I put the helmet on, made sure the mind controlling the sheet's position was paying attention, then raised myself to 3,000 feet and moved close enough to see to see the lowest pair of patrolling planes. Unlike the F-15E's infrared system, a max-sized radio blob did effectively give me daylight vision - the absence of shadows not being an issue at 3,000 feet - allowing me to clearly see that the planes had a crew of two, so they were Es - bugger! (Cs have a crew of one.) I'd have to be very careful with Es above me. I backed off and descended, thinking about what to do. I even landed in a deserted area and took off my helmet to let it cool down. [[Crash helmets are actually very good thermal insulators, so my worrying about it heating up enough to radiate was unnecessary.]] When I'd been high, I'd also seen that the base itself was a hive of activity, with many planes being made ready to take off, so this wasn't going to happen the same way as my attack on Beale had. I'd lost the element of surprise so Mountain Home AFB was now alert and had fighters patrolling, but I had a helmet and a dark sheet so I wasn't too worried. With those covering me, I doubted if any of my heat radiated upward. Maybe, at most, a faint smudge of heat, far less than a human normally does and with a non-human shape. The Weapon Systems Officers of the planes above me would presumably be looking for signs more significant than a faint smudge. Provided I stood upright so most of my heat radiated horizontally, and I kept the sheet between me and the overhead planes, then I should be fine. It was time for me to think about how to attack this base. I don't know much about how Air Force Bases operate, but I imagined that if I destroyed the "Flight Control Tower", then the flights might not have much control, i.e., they'd be confused about what to do. Confusing the enemy sounded like a good idea. In the open warfare part of the Iraq War, the generals had made a big deal about taking out the enemy's Command and Control functions first, so I'd follow their lead and place that high on the list of things to do. I'd already seen that there were dozens of F-15s out in the open: a few F-15Cs stationed at one end of the runway, and many more mixed-type F-15s on the apron, several of which had service crews working on them, loading missiles and that sort of thing. The planes' engines hadn't been going when I looked, but they'd been hot so had been used quite recently. If I took eleven minutes to carry out the destruction of this airbase, I'd have something like forty F-15s on my ass before I'd finished because they were all lined up and pointing so they could scramble quickly, so modifying my Beale method seemed to be a good idea. The obvious first step was to do as much damage as possible without being seen to do any. The runway was oriented NW to SE, with the apron and service areas NE of the runway. There were six Cs ready for immediate takeoff parked at the far southeastern end of the runway, a mile away from any other planes. I'd make them my first target. I adjusted the sheet so most of it was wrapped around my body, only a corner of it over my helmeted head. I'd stand with my head bowed down to minimize the chance of anyone detecting any heat radiating through the helmet's faceplate. I circled wide around to the west and south (I had been coming from the northwest), approaching the closest F-15 to study its internals. The fuel line led into a piece of machinery that I was fairly certain was responsible for squirting the fuel into the engines. Its exact purpose didn't really matter, only that the end of the fuel line's tubing was metallic. I squeezed it flat, released it, and it stayed flat - excellent. I crimped the second engine's fuel line then flew close enough to identically disable the other five planes in this area. I circled wide around the end of the runway, then flew NW, parallel to the apron but above the buildings just east of it to better stay out of the light. I crimped the fuel lines of all the aircraft parked on the apron. They were neatly lined up along a 700-foot length of the apron, all close to its buildings so easily within my range as I passed overhead. I was high enough that no one could see me, my sabotage was invisible and made no sound, and they'd have no idea it'd happened until they tried to start their engines. It was anticlimactically easy, just the way I'd hoped it'd be. While doing that, I used the other invisible sight blob to check out the buildings I was passing over, checking to see where the fire sprinkler feeds were, planning how I'd clear people out of them, etc. I saw some more planes in hangars or maintenance workshops and I crimped their fuel lines too. When the sight blob that was being used to examine buildings was between jobs, it frequently and nervously looked up at the Es above me. There was no reaction from them, which was a relief. In total, counting the 6 F-15Es in the air (I only knew the lowest pair were Es, but I was assuming the other four were too), I'd discovered 24 operational F-15Cs and 18 operational F-15Es. Plus there'd been 2 Cs and 3 Es under maintenance. That didn't seem like enough Es, but I guessed the missing ones were flying around Baghdad. It was only about $1.5 billion worth of planes, which was sadly a lot less than the value of planes I'd destroyed at Beale, but it was still worth doing to drive the two lessons home: First to the Government, that it shouldn't have UAVs or any other surveillance anywhere near our home. And second to the public, that it should control its Government better. The public knew that the Government had repeatedly broken the law against us, right back to the DHS kidnapping me, but the public had been useless at forcing the Government to obey the law. Regardless of the specific lessons I was teaching, I also enjoyed destroying fighters because they were made for aggressive acts. The harder it is for the armed forces to be aggressive, the happier I'll be. I'd been thinking about my next step. The immobilized planes were out of the equation for now, although probably not for long because sooner or later one of them was going to try to start up, and then the mechanics would start diagnosing the problem. I had two other immediate issues: the six F-15s overhead, and the buildings I wanted to destroy. Which to do first? One fairly important consideration was that the buildings couldn't come after me and shoot my ass off, even if they had warning that I was in the area. On the other hand, I didn't want to waste a lot of time chasing after the airborne F-15s because people on the ground might do something bad, like get trigger happy. I'd hate for them to shoot skyward at anything that was occluding stars. Ideally, I wanted to take out the overhead planes and the ground buildings at the same time. Failing that, as quickly as possible after each other. Surprise, speed, shock and awe were my key advantages, and having an invulnerable Guardian Angel was good too. The F-15s above me were flying circuits that made their positions predictable. Assuming I flew upward at my highest speed, it'd take me about ten seconds to get from the pair at 2,000 feet to the pair at 10,000 feet. At that vertical speed, if I got my timing right, I could crimp the fuel lines of the bottom pair in the one second I'd have (presuming I passed within about 200 feet of them), and then arrive at a point of space at 10,000 feet just as that pair arrived nearby, where I'd have another second to squeeze their lines. My having only two sight blobs but four engines to disable meant half a second per fuel line, which was doable because I'd had a lot of practice recently. That'd only leave the two very high planes in the air. It'd take me too long to get all the way up to them, and then all the way down again to start attacking the buildings. I decided that leaving two planes way above me wasn't so bad. Keeping track of and reacting to the positions of two overhead fighters - so I wasn't backlit by fires, for example - was far easier than six. By the time the top pair of planes got down far enough to engage me, I would've finished most of the ground-level job and be ready to take them on. I liked the idea of pinching off the fuel for the bottom two pairs. It wasn't noticeably an attack so it should confuse the enemy. Ideally the second pair of fighters would continue to fly their predictable course for the few seconds it'd take me to get up to them. Their current speed would be a little slower than my maximum, so I shouldn't have too much trouble adjusting my aim as I rose to 10,000 feet to make sure I got close enough to them. I needed to match my horizontal speed to the planes' fairly well as I arrived at their altitudes, so I backed away far enough, lay down flat on my sled with the sheet spread over my body and also curved forward to cover my face. It blocked my eyes' vision but I wasn't using them anyway. I did some calculations then waited for a couple of minutes for the circling planes to get into a suitable position for my idea. Then I accelerated myself horizontally at 6 g's. Urgh!, even with most of it applied to my arms and hips. My blood rushed to my feet, but that doesn't matter much for me since I wasn't going to pass out for lack of oxygen in my brain. At about 200 mph horizontally, I curved upward, still accelerating both horizontally as well as vertically. I needed to go horizontally faster than the lowest pair of planes so I could approach them from behind. If I'd been slower, I would have had to angle upward from in front of them which would increase the chance they'd see me. As I had to get within a couple of hundred feet of them, I didn't dare take the risk of a frontal approach. They were flying subsonically - or I never would've attempted to exceed their speed - but they were still flying fast enough that I very much didn't enjoy going as fast as matching their horizontal speed required, especially as I was also climbing vertically as well. I did it though, adjusting my angle and vertical acceleration to arrange something close to an intersection. I motored toward them from below and slightly behind, passing through their altitude about 150 feet behind and between their slipstreams. The turbulence rocked me around a little, but the minds in charge of the flying sled handled that. Meanwhile, both sight blobs went into the same plane, one to each engine. If I ran out of time, I'd rather wreck one plane and leave the other untouched, than have two planes with one engine working as I suspected they could continue to fly, search for and engage me on only one engine. After crimping both fuel lines on the first plane, I jumped the sight blobs to his wingman and repeated the crimping there. Having practiced on thirty six planes on the ground, I did it so quickly that I probably had at least a quarter of a second to spare. I was already going somewhat faster than I was comfortable with, but I had to maintain it as I adjusted my path to line up for my attack on the next highest pair. The four engines for the planes beneath me cut out almost instantly, the simultaneity of which had to be very suspicious. A few seconds later, the pair I was screaming up toward put their noses down and turned toward the two gliders. That had the immediate effect of reducing their horizontal speed, which gave me a greater horizontal advantage over them. We were now approaching each other faster vertically, and they were no longer perfectly positioned for me to sneak up on, but I was able to reduce my vertical speed and increase my horizontal, changing my angle to make much the same turn as they had so I was still approaching from their rear. They sped up in their dive, so it only took six more seconds for us get within 450 feet of each other. Three quarters of a second later, their fuel lines were crimped too. I wanted to get back onto the ground as quickly as possible, especially because I wanted to create a bright Guardian Angel to distract everyone from searching the sky for an explanation for the recent events. The first step was to decelerate as fast as I could. As an important safety tip, you don't want to do a 6 g deceleration by pushing backward on the front of your flying sled, as you'd slide forward and smash your head into the sled's nose cone, breaking parts of your body that you don't want broken. Ideally I'd like to rotate my sled so it was flying upward feet first to decelerate with my legs absorbing the weight, but flipping my sled when it was doing over 700 mph was a decidedly bad idea. Instead I put about 3 g's of push against my shoulders, 1 g on my hips and another 2 g on the tops of my feet (I decelerated by putting my "foot to the floor"). Those forces and gravity slowed me 2 g faster than I'd accelerated upward. I was in a "standing upright" position, which was how I wanted to fly over the base, so when the deceleration turned onto a downward acceleration, I kept applying it while I mentally reshaped my flying sled to add a windshield beneath my feet and subtract the one over my head. The first pair of planes looked like they were gliding into position down the far end of the runway for unpowered landings. The second pair I'd hit had also lost power and were gliding, but they had a lot more altitude and weren't doing anything that resembled lining up for a landing yet. It didn't much matter what they did, because whatever it was, it was certain to include lots of descending, modern fighters having very small wing areas and therefore terrible glide ratios. I deviated to the west, wanting to get down to ground level out of the way of everyone looking upward. As another important safety tip: it's a good idea to err on the side of caution when flying straight down toward the ground at near Mach one. I decelerated earlier rather than later, so it took me more like thirty seconds to return to near where I'd started my high-speed climb. From there I 'sneaked up' on the control tower, which just means I flew toward it at two hundred feet AGL, relying on the darkness and my umbrella to provide all the "sneak". When I was 450 feet away from the tower I unambiguously announced the start of an attack by having the Guardian Angel rise up through the floor, instantly getting EVERYONE'S attention. I grabbed them all, lifting them toward the ceiling as I pushed the roof off. I let the roof and all its electronics fall to the ground while I lowered the staff at a less damaging rate. I had spare force so I used another sight blob and the time required to evacuate the staff to smash every piece of electronics inside the main room. Then I tried to topple the tower. That looked easy as it was a round building on top of a high 'stalk', like a tall mushroom, but my seven tons of lateral force wasn't enough to push it over. I wanted to leave total destruction behind me, but I didn't want to spend much time achieving that. I could easily break into the stalk - several tons of force applied to a square inch would shatter the concrete - but I didn't know whether I'd be able to bend or break the support beams it was bound to have. Trying and failing at that would make the angel look weak which would be bad for its and God's reputation, so I did something else instead: I created a sight blob in the middle of the support stalk immediately underneath the tower's floor, then I punched upward as forcefully as I could, which succeeded in creating a hole in the middle of the room. Enlarging the hole was quick and easy, and then I pushed most of the wrecked contents of the tower's main room down the hole, letting it fall into the stalk. The building wasn't totally destroyed, but the cute nature of the damage I had done should hopefully distract people from thinking that the angel wasn't strong enough to wreck it more structurally. It's worth mentioning that the Guardian Angel was radiating only yellow light and NO heat. I wanted the enemy to see that angels weren't worth searching for using infrared. There were the half a dozen F-15Cs parked in what I guessed was a fast response area, or whatever the Air Force term for that is [["Alert Pad"]]. It was a parking lot for planes off the southern end of the runway. It had individual parking locations with interleaved access at forty five degrees to the 'driveway' which led directly to the end of the main runway. The fighters had missiles mounted very impressively along their wings, the pilots were raring to go, and I had no doubt they'd be screaming down the runway by now, if only they'd been able to get their engines going. That problem must be causing a great deal of frustration. A Google Earth image of the Mountain Home AFB Alert Pad. Most Air Force bases have these and keep planes ready to scramble in them: fighters, bombers or tankers, depending on the types of planes stationed at each field. #5: #18: There were some service vehicles rushing from the nearby building toward the planes, so I definitely had to take care of these planes before the problems were identified and fixed. I'd better check on the planes parked on the apron soon too. The fast response area was a mile away from me, but the land between us was empty fields so I could fly straight there, quickly and with no worries about anyone being close enough to see me. The planes were parked about two hundred feet apart from their opposite number, left and right of the central tarmac strip that connected their area to the main runway, but their being about four hundred feet apart from their left and right neighbors meant I couldn't take them all out from one location. If the pilots stopped trying to get their engines started long enough to look outside their cockpits, it'd surely be to look at the ruins of the control tower or at the two F-15s coming in for a gliding landing, so I came in from the south to be out of either of their likely lines of sight. As soon as I was within range to do so, I arranged another distraction by creating an invisible light blob about three hundred feet down the tarmac strip that connected this area to the main runway (all the planes were half-pointing that way, requiring only a forty five degree turn of the head, left or right depending on what side of the strip the plane was parked on). I sank the light blob a few feet into the ground, had it radiate as a very bright Guardian Angel, then had it 'surface' like a submarine does, angling up at about ten degrees and moving fairly slowly so it took several seconds to separate from the ground. I thought it looked very cool, and it had to be VERY scary. Imagine an enemy that could rise out of the ground beneath your feet! Swimming in an ocean with sharks can be frightening, but at least there's a chance to see sharks coming and to fight back or get away. Angels coming out of the ground would have the generals pissing themselves. The angel split in two - that'd surely make the generals piss even more. They moved apart to be one hundred feet to either side of the central taxiway, then they headed directly toward the front planes on each side. The planes were angled inward at forty five degrees so couldn't shoot at the angel that was coming for them. Being unpowered, the planes couldn't move either, so the term "sitting ducks" seems appropriate. I had my fingers crossed that one specific pilot would be aggressive though, because he would shortly get a great cannon shot. That was why my angels were moving at walking speed and at the height they were, to give him time to realize that he had a target 'walking' directly into his line of fire. The back four planes wouldn't shoot because neither angel would enter their line of fire. One of the planes in the first row shouldn't shoot because the Air Force, in its wisdom, had placed the building that serviced this area directly in the front-left plane's line of fire. That left the front-right plane, which would have a perfect shot at one of the angels as there was nothing but empty fields for the overshots. I was pretty sure he'd take the shot, because the mechanics who'd just arrived to work on his plane were running behind it. Sure enough, as soon as the angel floated into the right spot, the cannons on front-right F-15 opened up. They evidently work even without the engine turning over. The perforated angel moved slightly, to get INTO the path of the cannon shells better. Both angels paused for a few seconds so the spectators could appreciate that the gunfire wasn't having any effect. Having made that point, both angels rapidly charged toward their targets. Even before the angels reached them, I used NP to hold the pilots in the front two planes firmly, released their harnesses and intercom cables, then punched the canopies open. I lifted them out and moved them sideways to the outside of the formation, while the angels moved through their planes, slicing and dicing as they went. When I placed the pilots on the ground, I formed a hand-shaped NP to shake the hand of the pilot who'd fired his cannons. He had his helmet on so I couldn't tell, but I like to think that the handshake confused the hell out of him, and when the story gets repeated upward, it'll confuse the chain of command too. Confusion would be good, but the main reason was that the handshake, and especially my taking care not to hurt anyone, should make the frontline airmen respect the angel. They, and the public, should understand that the Guardian Angel had nothing against the airmen, just the Air Force (in case you've forgotten why, the public will think it's for the Air Force's owning the UAV that attempted to assassinate Mark Anderson's parents. The real reason is to put the Air Force under so much pressure that it divulges who the UAV was working for, presumably the FBI but that needed to be established, so I could then punish them so harshly they'd never want to spy on us again). I set fire to the first two piles of F-15 bits. They were fully fueled so they went up with a huge whoosh. The angels emerged unscathed and unhurriedly from the flames, heading toward the next pair of planes. The remaining four pilots were frantically getting out of their planes. I helped the first pair, and by the time I'd finished slicing, dicing and igniting their planes, the last two pilots were already on the ground and running. The mechanics had already run or driven away. I'd moved my body so it was on the north side of the pile of burning planes, careful to go around the flames so the Es above me wouldn't see a black shape occlude the fires. After I set the last pair of planes alight, it was easy for me to zoom myself and the angels the 1,200 feet to the building that was beside the front plane of this area. There was nothing else within a mile of this plane-park, so I guess this building was for the pilots who were on standby when the alert wasn't high enough for them to be sitting in their planes. By the look of the building, it was also a base for mechanics to fix easy problems, and maybe an armaments store too. Whatever it was, it was an Air Force building, which gave it a very short life expectancy. I ripped the roof off, evacuated it, set fire to it, and threw a couple pieces of the nearest burning F-15 into the building for good measure. It'd also had a couple of fire trucks in it, which I caught coming out and treated the usual way. I sank the two angels into the ground, then flew myself north to get out of the line of sight of everyone looking from the base to these bonfires. The first pair of overhead F-15s that I'd 'turned off' were lining up for their landings, coming down over the bonfires. They were still a long time - compared to how fast things were happening on the ground - away from landing, and not worth waiting for. The pair that'd been at 10,000 feet were minutes away. The highest pair were diving down much faster, but could be ignored for a while yet. I could see some emergency vehicles rushing from the main base toward the downed tower, but they were too far out of my way to do anything about. Presumably some fire trucks would be heading toward the rapid response area in a few moments too, but there'd be nothing they'd be able to do as those planes were already well and truly destroyed and their ammunition was starting to cook-off. For their missiles, that was quite impressive. I had a choice of whether to hit the buildings or the parked planes next. I decided on the buildings. There weren't enough mechanics to fix more than a handful of planes at a time and it'd take them a few minutes to do so even after they found the cause. Once fixed, the planes would have to taxi to the runway, which would give me plenty of time to react. My destroying the buildings, on the other hand, would greatly disrupt the base's operations. Lots of out-of-contact people running around in circles while their places of work burned down had far less chance of thinking of and doing something unpleasant for me, and far less equipment to do it with too, as nearly all of it would be inside burning buildings. As I approached the southeastern end of the base, I noticed an Air Force car tearing along the street. That'd work nicely for me. It had only one occupant, so I knocked him out and used NP to steer and brake the car to a halt. I left him in the driver's seat while I landed and ran to the car, opened and climbed into the trunk. A street ran parallel to the apron behind the first row of buildings. I used a few NP-fingertips to sit the 'driver' up, hold his head upright, and hold his hands on the steering wheel. I put the car in neutral then pushed it along the street. I created a bright Guardian Angel about four hundred feet to my left, which made it about a hundred feet into the apron. I put it at fifty feet of altitude, where it'd be easily seen and very distracting. As I drove northwest along the base, the angel kept pace on the other side of the buildings. I was only going to destroy one row of buildings, those to my left, so most of the time I'll need only one sight blob, letting me use the other to steer with, with momentary side trips to do quick tasks, such as disabling each building's sprinkler system. I pushed the car along the road, destroying the buildings in exactly the same way as I had at Beale. I tried to push the car as fast as I could, consistent with still having time to wreck the buildings. I got it up to about 20 mph. That was considerably faster than I'd averaged at Beale, but I'd pre-scouted the buildings and this was a much simpler job as I wasn't bothering with the planes yet. Although I was faster than at Beale, my car was slower than the other traffic on the street, which probably seemed a little strange but wasn't so slow as to be too suspicious. People had other things to worry about - such as the chain of fires starting along the length of the base - and they simply passed me. This base was just over a mile long, and it took me only five minutes to get to the end of it, leaving trail of massive destruction behind me. I heard a great deal of gunfire as the angel was an easy target moving placidly along the entire length of the apron at a steady 20 mph. At fifty feet AGL, everybody with a gun could safely shoot at it, and they all did. I'd quickly looked at what was happening when I first heard shots, but thereafter didn't bother, my sight blobs being too busy to watch that 'battle' again. It must've been intensely annoying for the Air Force guards seeing building after building ripped open and set alight as the angel approached them, but being unable to stop it. The street turned ninety degrees to the right just before the end of the base because there was a large maintenance area built off the right of the apron. It had several buildings around it, so I pushed the car around the external street, destroying buildings as I went. That took the car into an area that had no buildings and open fields to its north, so I'd finished this phase. During the trip I'd realized that I didn't want to leave the car at the north end because the driver would likely report his mysterious journey, so I turned the car around by lifting it a few inches, rotating it, then lowering it back onto the street. I pushed it quickly back toward where I'd first gotten into it. Because of the right turn caused by the maintenance area, the street I took back was one block farther east than the one I'd used for my northwest leg, which made me decide to cancel the Guardian Angel. I was so far away from the apron that even if I put the angel at my maximum range to my east, it would seem strangely 'inland'. I especially didn't want the angel's travels to be correlated with this car's, as it made no sense for the angel to have moved a car along with it. People might realize that a physical body had accompanied the angel, which would be very bad for Mark Anderson because that's who it must be. So I moved the car quickly back without any angel in sight. Early on the return trip, before I'd returned to the densely inhabited area, I did see one irresistible target: three storage tanks of fuel. Naturally they were isolated from any neighbors, so it was safe to smash them open and set fire to them. The four unpowered F-15Es had glided into landings by now, the last pair less than a minute ago, leaving just two F-15Es in the air. Several seconds after I exploded the fuel store, they gave me a gift by flying low over the area, obviously trying to find the angel. I imagined they, like everyone else, must've been very frustrated. There was nothing on their radars, their tower was down (well, it was still up, but all its equipment was down), and I doubted they were in contact with any senior officer because I'd probably taken out any backup radios in the buildings I'd destroyed. At most, the two flying F-15s would have been able to contact the planes sitting on the ground, who would've told them that the fucking angel was cruisin' uncaringly northwest up the apron. So the last two F-15Es came looking for the now-missing Guardian Angel. They passed within three hundred feet of me. They were too low to crimp their fuel lines because they might not have been able to maneuver for a landing, possibly resulting in a fatal accident for a pilot. The ejection handles weren't in the same place as an F-16's but they were easy to find, clearly labeled, and there were two per plane (one for each crewman). I pulled the four of them simultaneously and pushed the empty planes' joysticks to bank them so they crashed into some fields to the west. I was VERY glad to take care of the last Es so easily. I got the car back to the place I'd joined it, got out leaving the trunk open as I ran behind some dark buildings before raising myself into the air. Meanwhile I'd pulled the driver out and had placed him safely off the street, punctured his car's fuel tank, and had thrown it into the nearest fire. They weren't going to find any of my DNA evidence in the trunk now. I made another Guardian Angel, and made it do what it'd done the last time: fly the length of the apron at fifty feet AGL. I was at 350 ft AGL on the far side of the burning buildings to hide my body. I picked up every Air Force vehicle I could find and threw them into the nearest fire. Any passengers were knocked out lightly and pulled out first, thereby making what I'd done to the earlier guy seem normal. Even though this trip was much faster than the previous one, the Guardian Angel drew even more gunfire, which mattered not the slightest. I also saw some people trying to run into burning buildings. Christians, I presumed. I knocked them out, which didn't alter the amount of intelligent thought they were doing but did substantially improve their safety. At the far end of the runway I flew my body west a few hundred feet to be on the other side of the angel. The Guardian Angel and I returned the way we'd come, on this pass wrecking and burning F-15s and any vehicles on the apron. There were a lot of people that needed to be picked up and moved to safety. Some of the buildings weren't burning well so they got pieces of F-15 thrown into them to help them along. Throwing a plane with a full fuel tank into a slowly burning building "helped it along" considerably. A few exploding missiles didn't do any harm either (they actually did quite a lot of harm, but you know what I mean). Service vehicles I came across usually got picked up, turned over, wrenched open, and placed on top of the nearest burning F-15. I learned to wait until I was well passed them before doing that with fuel and ammunition carriers. I got to the southeast end of the apron with total devastation in my wake. That just left the four F-15Es that glided in for landings. They were sitting at the northwestern end of the runway. They'd been too far away for me to reach when I'd started my last pass so I had to go back for them now. I had the Guardian Angel make yet another rapid pass along the length of the apron. For PR reasons, I moved several people farther back from the fires, placing them flat on their stomachs and giving them a push on their backs to encourage them to stay put. You'd think the exploding ammunition would have been encouragement enough, but a bizarrely large number of them must've been religious. It wasn't as if it was their property, for goodness sake, so why risk their lives for it? The four glider pilots saw the angel coming and decided all by themselves that it'd be a very good idea not to be in their planes when the angel arrived, which made my final destruction job for this base even easier... ------- Chapter 364: God's Servant Lands Some More Punches Wednesday, June 6, 2007 (Continued) Next on the itinerary was Fairchild AFB, about two hundred miles north. According to Wikipedia, home of KC-135s and some Huey helicopters. Soon after I left Mountain Home, on my way to Fairchild, I picked up two high flying radars ahead of me. Judging by the weakness of their signals, they were a long way away, but the signals were slowly getting 'brighter' in my vision-mapped detection system. They were on the same band as the F-15Es behind me had used. It was a commonly used band, but there were fifteen Mountain Home F-15Es unaccounted for so maybe these were two of them. I decided it would impress the authorities more if I intercepted these two, plus I didn't want fighters flying around in the same airspace as me. I put the helmet back on, adjusted the sheet so it also blocked infrared sight from the direction the radars were coming from, and headed straight up, putting an airtight silo around myself when I got to about 5,000 feet. I thought about dogfight issues while I climbed. There were a number of factors that seemed important to me: Detection systems. This was probably going to decide the battle, as they should never see me while I already knew the direction they were coming from. I wouldn't be able to tell their exact distance until I saw them, but that didn't matter much. Even if they turned their radar off and I lost sight of them, a max-sized radio blob would allow me to see them well before they saw me. Provided I was careful with how I positioned the sheet, my ability to detect them was a great deal better than their ability to detect me. Speed. Their top speed was Mach 2.5, three times faster than mine. They could easily get away from me and stop me getting away from them. If they were flying supersonically now, I'd have to act very quickly before they were out of range. Maneuverability. I was ALL over them for this. I knew enough about how planes flew to know that for a sustained maneuvering duel, power-to-weight ratio was a critical issue. All modern fighters have ratio of about 1.0; maybe as high as 1.3. I had 88! Sure they could pull high-g turns, but they did that by increasing wind resistance on one side of the plane, which slowed it down. Every time they turned, they traded away speed. With their low power-to-weight ratio, it'd take them a long time to rebuild that speed. After a few 'jiggles', they'd be going so slow that they'd be lame ducks compared to me. I could 'jiggle' all day long, and then accelerate after them far more rapidly than they could accelerate away. I'm particularly good at accelerating upward, whereas they can barely do it. Weapons. My best defense against their weapons would be to fool them into firing at the Guardian Angel(s) rather than my much harder to see physical body. Guardian Angels could move DAMNED fast, so they'd be a hellishly hard target to hit. That should keep the pilots busy for quite a while, until I lured them into passing within five hundred feet of me. Assuming they actually fired at my body, then missiles and bullets would be the worries (bombs, not so much). Self-guided missiles shouldn't be much of a threat as radar-guided missiles would wonder what to do, and heat-seekers could be led around by the nose by heat blobs; which would be invisible to the pilot's eyes, to further confuse him. Missiles that the pilots could guide, maybe by putting a laser designator on me, would be more serious, but I could jiggle like crazy. I could also hide behind a huge area of max-sized light blobs, like I had for the sniper that had shot Ava. Jiggling and hiding is what I'd have to do versus cannon fire too. In short, they'd have trouble taking me out with their weapons. On the other hand, my 'weapon' was only a short range one, but if they got within 450 feet of me, it'd be all over. It'd be a very interesting duel, but my money would be on me, especially in an ambush situation like this. [[A point of explanation: The Blinks Allowed Effect means I could look away for up to thirty two seconds and NP-fingertips and blobs would not self-cancel provided they remained within my maximum range. I could send NP-fingertips out beyond my 500-foot limit, and the Effect allowed them to coast along for the next thirty two seconds before they self-canceled. That wasn't the case with blobs; they self-canceled the moment they got out of range. NP is a physical force that persisted after it got out of range, like a stone continues to exist after its thrown beyond five hundred feet. Blobs had no physical presence; they were maintained by my mentally interacting with the Universe at the desired location, which I couldn't do beyond five hundred feet. That, unfortunately, meant I couldn't send a Guardian Angel flying away from me at Mach 3.0 to have the planes chase after it. Nor could I 'fire' Mach 50 max-heat blobs toward the planes from miles away, which was a pity. That also would've made destroying air bases far easier and safer. Firing NP-propelled, long-distance missiles didn't work because beyond five hundred feet gravity exerted its influence and air resistance would slow them down and blow them off course, because I couldn't apply any corrective force.]] I rose to 50,000 feet before the radar beams were coming at me horizontally. I lay down with my feet toward the radar sources, moving the sheet to cover that direction. I flew myself to be where I judged directly in front of the planes to be, although that was a bit of a guess so far. I also raised myself another 2,000 feet, and had a max-sized radio blob about three hundred feet above me and closer to them, to see them more easily when they approached. I adjusted my position as my opinion of their flight path changed. Five minutes later, my radio blob saw them, as clear as day. That made it easy to get myself lined up nicely. I started accelerating in the same direction they were flying, like the receiver in a baton-passing relay race. I didn't want to get up to even half their speed as that'd give them too much time to see me. I just wanted to have some speed on to give me more time to find where their ejection handles were. I heard them coming, which confirmed they weren't supersonic. Had they been, I would've squeezed their fuel lines instead since I've heard somewhere that ejecting at supersonic speeds is REALLY bad for pilots. I sped up to about 300 mph, angling down at a good angle to be just a little slow for a collision, so they'd undertake me. I carefully watched them get closer and closer, waiting to see it they reacted to my presence. My being in front of them made it very easy to imagine that they'd spot me even with my feet-first attitude and sheet in place. If they did react, I was ready with some VERY bright, high speed, and highly distracting lighting effects designed to herd them back toward me, but they weren't necessary; the pilots never saw a thing - I pulled all four ejection handles simultaneously. #12: One of me, that wasn't otherwise busy high-fiving himself, grabbed the planes' sticks, pulling back to make them climb steeply, then centering them again, making it easier for me to accelerate upward after them. If they flew above my range, I'd keep climbing until I caught them, as they'd slow down and stall soon. Going up also put me above the pilots, making it impossible for them to see me once their chutes deployed, not that I thought they had much chance of seeing me anyway. By the time they recovered from the shock of the ejection, and their world stopped tumbling around, I'd be a tiny dot. I accelerated upward, braking my horizontal movement so the airmen would fly forward away from me. The planes easily climbed out of my 500-foot range, but they were slowing down and I was accelerating, so I narrowed the gap quickly. They hadn't gone up in a tidy formation and were separating from each other, and one of them was spinning too. They were out of control, especially because the open cockpits had to be producing some messy drag. I got within range of one plane, grabbed its stick, and tried to steer it closer to the other one, but flying one of these things was a hell of a lot trickier than flying my little two-seater training plane. I can't write, "I was all over the sky" because there hadn't been enough time for that yet, but I was working on it. I was still struggling with the stick, when another of my minds suggested we 'manhandle' the whole damned thing. I grabbed hold of it with a great deal of NP, stabilized its spin and got it pointing in the right direction. It weighed more than I could lift, but it only required a fraction of my total force to push it around. I didn't bother with the stick, instead steering and pushing it with brute force as it caught up with the other one. The other plane also required some manhandling to get stabilized, and then I pushed both sticks forward to put them into a shallow dive in the direction of the next base. It took a few adjustments (mostly the brute force way), but I eventually got them partnered and semi-stable; the open cockpits presumably the cause of the bouncing around they were still doing. I would've LOVED to put a Guardian Angel in each front seat and fly it around the descending pilots, and maybe even buzz the next base with them. That'd be a superb distraction for my next attack. Unfortunately for that fantasy, the Guardian Angels would self-cancel five hundred feet from me, along with all my ability to control the planes. The planes' tightest turning circles were probably more than a thousand feet wide, and that'd be with a pilot who knew what he was doing. The only thing I was going to do with these planes was hold them in a controlled descent so I could crash them somewhere harmless (except for the planes). There were no other radars currently emitting that I needed to worry about, only the very long range, metal-detecting emissions that the air is permanently full of, but I didn't want to be nursemaiding these planes for long so I made their descents steeper. If they got too fast for me, I could lift their noses for a little while. On the way down I fiddled with one of the backseat controls to find out how to use it, so I could find out how good the infrared vision is. It took about 20,000 feet of altitude, but I found a way to display the infrared vision on one of the two screens. I flew four hundred feet ahead of that plane and looked at its screen. With the sheet in place and my feet pointing at the plane, I couldn't be seen. With the sheet removed there was a faint smudge. I enlarged the sled so it could continue to fly directly ahead stably, while I turned my body sideways on it. The image that formed would have alerted the pilots. Taking my helmet off and facing the plane was even more noticeable. I was only four hundred feet away and the obvious human shape shouldn't be so bad at more usual ranges, but it was still scary how much I stood out. I kept my body position and interposed the sheet, seeing that it hid me very well again even without my wearing the helmet. I put it back on anyway. First chance I get, I'm going to buy something dark and sheet-like that folds up tightly, to carry around with me on these types of missions. #23: #All: #16: Locating the IR camera was simply a matter of creating a small heat blob near me and keeping it centered on the screen as I moved it toward the plane until it was right in front of the camera. Then we searched the cabling from the camera back through the plane. It merged into other things, but it wasn't that hard to find a cable that ran into a small, very strongly constructed box containing electronic chips. We removed that box from the plane, opened it up, and scattered very small pieces of chips across the countryside. I did the same to the other plane just in case its camera had got a shot of me during the struggle I'd had to get control of these things. The planes and I descended to 8,000 feet and leveled off. I didn't bother increasing their throttles, just pushed them harder and somewhat upward with more NP-points, as I could control those precisely. We flew with me looking for a suitable crash site. The terrain under me was very hilly with lots of forest. At this time of year, forest was definitely not a good place to crash two high-explosive jet fighters. I kept heading west looking for a suitable spot. I was getting worried how long it was taking, because if any other plane came to investigate, they'd be eyeballing the two empty planes carefully, and they might see me flying nearby. I finally found a small lake. More like a temporary widening of a mountain river, but it'd do. It wouldn't burn and there were no humans or houses in it, as could be the case with the forest. I steered the planes in an arc so they could get into a good position for a side-by-side dive into the lake. I got them oriented properly with their wings lining up with the long axis of the lake, tilted their noses down, and guided them all the way down. Their dual impact splashed a HELL of a lot of the water out of the lake, damned near emptying it, but it rapidly refilled. Wreckage had broken off and scattered all over the place, but none of it ignited, saving me from having to scoop up tons of water to dump on any fires. It would've been a lot less trouble if I'd cut the fuel instead of ejecting the pilots, but I wanted the Guardian Angel's destruction to be total. I wanted: Shock, Awe, Respect and Terror. Plus some Big-Titted Girls please, that being something to think about for the next settlement agreement. I headed west again. I was a little confused about where I was, as the little dogfight and subsequent struggle to recover and control the two planes had made me lose my bearings somewhat because I'd stopped keeping track of my sense of direction. When I saw the lights of a town in the distance I angled toward it, read signs to find its name, then searched through cars parked in out of the way places to find one with a map. I found where I was, where Fairchild was, got a new compass heading, and headed that way. I'd just got up to speed when two more radars lit up ahead of me. Two more of the missing F-15Es, presumably. The ambush had worked before, and after my experiments with the plane's infrared sensor, I had even more confidence in the wonderful effectiveness of my $5 sheet versus $100 million worth of fighters. Plus I knew where a suitable lake was to put my soon-to-be-acquired toys after I hijacked them. I climbed rapidly. A few seconds later I could tell that the new radar sources were heading to the previous planes' graveyard, no doubt to find out what had happened to them. Long story short: a few minutes later, there were four planes in that little lake. #5: ^ When I finally managed to get close to Fairchild, I saw two more F-15Es flying a circuit over it. It would've been rude to exclude them from the fun, and they were flying circuits in a neat formation, which made it SO easy. I didn't want to waste time trying to control the two planes, and I couldn't let them fall to earth themselves as there were many houses in this area, so I crimped their fuel lines. I'd let the pilots glide them down for me, then I'd destroy them on the ground. There were no fighter aircraft at Fairchild, just a couple dozen KC-135s and a few helicopters. It looked like the order had gone out to evacuate the base, because everything that could get into the air was lining up to do so as fast as possible. The first few of the choppers were already rising into the air and the others weren't far behind joining them with pilots and ground crew running flat out to get that done. I had a bright Guardian Angel rise from the tarmac at one end of the helicopter area and fly along its length while I followed it a few hundred feet above pulling fuel lines out of their sockets. One after the other all the chopper engines died. Those in the air already weren't for much longer, returning to the ground fairly quickly after their engines died. Quite roughly in a few cases, but I'd been confident that none of the landings would be so hard as to injure anyone. The impacts might be hard enough to damage a few of the choppers, but that wasn't going to matter in a few minutes. The first KC was just starting to lumber down the runway, with the rest lined up behind it like a lumbering line of elephants. The Guardian Angel accelerated across the airfield to intercept the leading KC. The angel slowed down when it neared its destination, flying into the middle of the first plane's large cockpit by passing through the glass and pilot at a speed slow enough that the crew could see it happening. I imagine that'd give them nightmares, especially the pilot, and the story will scare the shit out of everyone that hears it. I used several tons of force to push the cockpit's instruments and controls out of the sides and front of the aircraft. There wasn't even a yoke left for the pilot to hold. They were left sitting in their seats with the front and sides of the cockpit missing and the breeze blowing straight in. A second later, the roof was missing too. I held the three crewmen firmly, unbuckled their harnesses, and lifted them out; placing them a hundred feet away while I was slicing, dicing and then burning their ex-aircraft. The other KCs were lined up going nowhere, blocked by the burning wreck. They weren't the sort of aircraft that could make a quick cross-country getaway, but they tried. The Guardian Angel flew from cockpit to cockpit, quickly repeating what it'd done to the first plane. There were only twenty four KCs, and it only took a few seconds to destroy each cockpit, so the most successful evaders only managed to get about twenty yards cross-country. Sadly for them, that was much shorter than their minimum takeoff distance. Soon there was a VERY big bonfire going because they'd been quite close to each other and chopped up airborne tankers burn REALLY well. There were the usual fire trucks, which suffered the usual fate. And when the last KC was alight, the buildings, helicopters and any Air Force cars and trucks got dealt with in the usual way too. It was just business as usual. The base didn't have much in the way of aggressive attack options, only small arms, which did the usual damage to the angel. Wiping out Fairchild AFB had been quick and easy. ^ Last on the night's itinerary was McChord AFB, about two hundred miles west. Dad's parents' lived in Seattle, only thirty miles north of McChord, but popping in for a visit after destroying the base probably wouldn't be a good idea. McChord is home to quite a few C-17 Globemaster IIIs. At $250 million each, it was going to be an expensive visit. Or not, because when I arrived there wasn't a plane to be seen, not even any F-15s on patrol. #14: #28: The pattern of my movements had been fairly obvious: all the airbases around Corvallis, going counterclockwise starting from Beale in California and finishing in McChord in Washington state. That was three sides of a square around Corvallis, the Pacific Ocean being the western side. That pattern was somewhat risky, but the whole thing had been very quick, needing only about two hours from the start of Beale to now. In terms of the risk I'd been taking, Beale shouldn't really be counted because the first attack doesn't reveal a movement pattern, especially when it was so deserving of attack. It wasn't until the second or even third attack that the Air Force could've spotted that there was a pattern to my attacks, after which my risk started climbing. By the look of how they'd responded, they seem to have suspected the pattern when I was about halfway to Mountain Home, so they'd had only a few minutes more than an hour between then and now, which wasn't time to do much. Deploy some of Mountain Home's F-15Es to Fairchild and McChord, it seemed, and get the C-17's away somewhere. I could think of only three things the Air Force could do that worried me now: launch a nuclear missile at McChord the moment I started causing any damage to it, have snipers with night-vision goggles around the area, or put some sort of reconnaissance above McChord to spot me while I was here and follow me after I left. The reconnaissance threat was possibly in play already, so I wouldn't let it affect my "Attack or Leave?" question. One good thing about having McChord as the last base on my itinerary was that it's very close to water, giving me the option of submerging and sneaking away if I thought it necessary. I could search for snipers or another trap before I revealed the Guardian Angel's presence here. Snipers were a fairly unlikely threat as the Guardian Angel had taken thousands of rounds already, so a few more would seem pointless. The nuclear option was surely unthinkable for an inhabited area, but I could minimize the risk by wrecking the place very quickly and then heading for the water as fast as possible, flying low over it so I could dive at the first sign of trouble. I didn't think the Air Force had time to set up anything that could cause me grief. There were no suspicious radars above me, for example, and almost everything the Air Force does involves radars. They had no idea that I could detect them, so their absence strongly implied there wasn't an Air Force attack waiting for me. Because my movement pattern was obvious now, the Guardian Angel's not destroying McChord would look weak, which Guardian Angels should never appear to be. I decided to do a search, and if all looked fine I'd wreck the place. I made sure the sheet was obscuring me all around and from above because I was sure there'd be long-range observation of this base, probably from men with binoculars through to overhead satellites. Reassured that I was covered, and careful not to pass over any lights or light-colored surfaces, I moved closer. Searching was easy because the base was almost deserted. A few guards stationed just outside the perimeter was all. Even the tower was unmanned. The only discovery of note was that three C-17's had been left behind. They were stripped down to various degrees for maintenance. They'll be needing a great deal more of that shortly. No snipers, no automated heat-seeking missiles, no super-patriotic base commander holding a dead-man's switch to a nuclear bomb; just a nearly deserted Air Force base. It wasn't really going to be an attack as such, more an act of vandalism. An invisible sight blob zipped from hangar to hangar for me to do all the quiet, internal preparation that I could first, so any external reaction would get the minimum warning time. When I'd done all of that, I started setting the fires. The Guardian Angel appeared in the sky, flying around distractingly, smashing the control tower, tossing some vehicles into the burning buildings, and generally made a quick, big mess. It was over very quickly. The last attack of the night finished about 2:15am, two and a quarter hours after the first had started. ^ Fearing any counterattack or surveillance measures the Air Force might have coming my way, I fled northwest while the Guardian Angel flew east as if going toward more Air Force bases in that direction. I hadn't bothered googling any other bases, but there must be some that way, and it made sense for the angel to head inland now that it'd taken out the base closest to the Pacific. As the angel's and my separation neared five hundred feet, I had it angle down into the ground, still heading east. It self-canceled immediately thereafter as I'd moved too far away. I was almost positive that my body was invisible to every form of surveillance that could have been focused on McChord, and that all that surveillance would have been fooled into concentrating on the angel. When it disappeared they'd be worried about it heading east, so I imagined the bases in that direction would be scrambling to evacuate, if they weren't already doing so. The surveillers should have no way of picking me up now as I was already off the base and very rapidly getting farther away from it. Nonetheless, I would take EXTREME measures to shake any possible tail. I headed for the nearest part of Puget Sound, only five miles away, then flew so low up Henderson Bay that I was almost walking on water, then when the Bay ran out, the 70 miles cross-country directly west to the Pacific Ocean. I submerged gently to avoid causing a splash, then headed northwest. After a couple of hours of submarine travel, I surfaced with a water shield above me, careful to make the minimum amount of disturbance as I surfaced. Still flying upright to minimize any outline I might have through the water shield, I flew north for about an hour, turning inland near Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Canada. I flew inland to Prince George, a moderate-sized city - by Canadian standards - in British Columbia, descending into an alley just before daybreak. I rolled the ski mask up into a hat then walked down the street until I was under a store's overhead cover while other people were walking under it too. I quickly took my hat and black shirt off, revealing my light-colored shirt. Carrying my removed clothes, I changed direction to emerge from under the awning as part of the group. They gave me some funny looks, but funny looks from them versus what the Government would give me was no contest. A couple more activities like that, and I was positive that any overhead observation would've lost me. I walked to an area of town with less foot traffic but a decent amount of vehicular traffic. I waited until a suitable truck was driving past with no cars behind it, then I 'jumped' onto its back, letting myself into it. I kept a very careful sight blob search going around me in case my leaping onto the truck had been observed and baddies were about to intercept the truck, but there was no sign of that. Half an hour took me far enough away that I could 'jump' out again when it was passing through a little 'canyon' where the road had been cut through a hill, so only observation from directly overhead would be able to see me. A small amount of cross-country flying took me to an empty house on the outskirts of a nearby town. I would spend the day in it. Hearing or proximity would let me sense someone several seconds before they got to the front door, giving me plenty of time to slip out the back. The four parents and I had discussed whether I should have any communication with them, such as my sending them an "I'm okay" message. I could use a random house's phone to dial a prepaid cellphone they'd turned on at 5am, letting it ring once, then hanging up (presuming I chose to put them in a cabin that got cellphone service). They'd decided against that. They'd be unable to help me in any way, and a reassurance wasn't worth the risk. They had a portable radio and spare batteries with them, which I'd known would work in the cabin I was going to take them to because I can see radio frequencies, so they'd be fairly sure I hadn't been shot down, especially as I'd completed a tidy circle of attacks, which was something I had warned them might not happen. I got myself a drink of water, using an NP-cup to avoid leaving any dishes. I was wearing gloves so fingerprints weren't an issue; I just wanted to be very tidy so no one would ever suspect that anyone had been here. I settled down to watch TV. Despite being in Canada, I had no trouble picking up American channels. The networks had all the facts: "At 10pm Pacific Standard Time, Steven and Felicity Anderson, parents of Mark Anderson, the resurrected boy, narrowly escaped death when their bedroom was rammed by a US Air Force stealth unmanned drone a few minutes after they went to bed." Pictures showed the mess, including where the bed had ended up. The bed frame was a mangled wreck, the clear implication being that the Andersons would've been too. Being hit by a multi-ton UAV going 600 mph will do that to you. The TV summarized our history versus the Government: my kidnapping by the DHS and CIA, my consequent death, the Army's aborted attack on our previous home, our lawsuits and settlements, including that we still had one inching forward against the CIA. That MAF had already several times publicly trumpeted and pursued Government employee illegalities was included too. The description of my families ending with: "The Anderson and Williams families have been taken into hiding by their Guardian Angel," with an unspoken but loudly obvious, "hardly surprising, with the Government trying to kill them again." "Two hours later, the Guardian Angel started attacking Air Force bases in retaliation." All five bases were named, very large fires and explosions being hard to keep secret. The map graphic the network used had each base's attack appear one after the other in the sequence I'd attacked them, making my pattern very obvious. Also mentioned was the UAV significance of Beale AFB and the geographic proximity of the five bases to Corvallis. "The damage is described as TOTAL - every aircraft and every building! Billions of dollars of damage has been caused, and the bases will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Approximately 10% of the US Air Force's America-based aircraft and bases have been destroyed so far tonight. Ten more nights like this one, and the Air Force won't have a plane or base left in the country." (It would take only nine more nights at that rate to reach 100%, so the media was being unusually accurate with their arithmetic.) There were several pictures of burning buildings and wrecked planes from some of the bases. "There have be NO reports of fatalities so far. There have been reports that the angel removed everyone from the planes and buildings before destroying them. It appears to be causing massive materiel damage only. We repeat: five US Air Force Bases TOTALLY destroyed, WITHOUT a single casualty! We understand there have been several injuries incurred during the fire-fighting efforts, but only after the angel had left the area." "The Air Force is denying responsibility for the attack on the Andersons' home." A clip was played of an Air Force general denying responsibility, who - I thought - seemed very sincere. Most importantly at this stage of the plan, the general did not say who was responsible. He was a very unhappy general, especially because the reporters hit him with Paul's evidence of the UAV flying circles over our home for day after day, despite the Air Force having said they bought it for what they had publicly described as "dogfight tactic development." The reporter enjoyed asking, "What dogfight tactics did you develop by having it fly in circles by itself for a week and a half?" And, "Why is it that the airspace you chose to develop dogfight tactics in - with your STEALTH spy plane - just happened to be directly over the home of a family that has its own radar system and which other branches of the Government and armed forces have repeatedly attacked?" Politicians who were interviewed added nothing except expressions of outrage. Who the outrage was directed at varied, but the uselessness of the expressions did not. There were many very pleasing details about the Guardian Angel's "tactical capabilities": passing through walls like a ghost, bullets not affecting it, moving incredibly fast, and causing MASSIVE destruction all around it. Rising up through the ground and splitting itself weren't mentioned, but what they did talk about was still very exciting. Most of this information came from interviews with witnesses. I was surprised that there were any witnesses willing to go on TV, let alone so many of them, but apparently the Air Force employs a lot of civilian contractors and many of them seemed perfectly happy to go on camera. The reason became apparent when one of them said she was out of job now. I hadn't thought of that aspect. The facts were well presented, but more important to me was the public's reaction to them. The talking-heads' attitude could be summarized by their exclaiming, "Attacking the Andersons! WHAT WAS THE AIR FORCE THINKING!" There was no doubt at all that the almost universally believed sneaky assassination attempt was seen as a truly heinous act. It received nothing but scathing contempt, apart from, for legal reasons, a few "allegeds". There was also wide agreement that the Guardian Angel's reaction was predictable, as it was an extension of Archangel Michael's behavior, consistent with the warnings about Guardian Angels that the other angels had given, and consistent with its action when the mob had tried to storm the Anderson's property. "Consistent" in all but one respect: people were amazed that the Guardian Angel hadn't got angry and killed thousands of Air Force personnel. Or, at the least, not removed them from harm's way before doing all its destruction, which could have killed hundreds. The only source of argument was over whether the Guardian Angel's actions were justified. There were comments like, "These damages are going to badly affect the Air Force's ability to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan." Some respondents thought that proved the Guardian Angel was criminally irresponsible, others thought it was irrelevant as "The angel is doing the job God gave it." Many others just said, "Good!" The eyewitnesses were fairly useless at giving me national reaction, as their role was to rave dramatically about the Guardian Angel's awesome destructiveness and about any human drama minutiae so beloved by the media. Some of the non-eyewitness interviews were interesting. A high proportion of them were with Air Force people and they were pretty upset. They wouldn't have worked for the Air Force had they not thought it did an important job, so they would naturally think that destroying a large chunk of it was wrong. There were many patriotic comments, interleaved with statements like, "You don't solve problems with violence," which I thought was a particularly ironic quote from someone who worked for a branch of the armed forces. The non-Air Force commentators leaned much more toward the middle, except for the religious brigade who were too busy jumping up and down to do any leaning. Many of them yelled, "It's the work of the DEVIL! It's getting rid of our defenses so the demons can attack! Everyone needs to [insert various crackpot solutions, depending on the crackpot speaker, although praying and sending money were often mentioned]!" The consensus from thinking Americans - as distinct from the religious ones - was that this was VERY serious, but they weren't sure how serious yet. They wanted more information, especially confirmation that the Air Force had deliberately tried to kill the Anderson parents. If that was the case - which VERY few people disbelieved but still wanted official confirmation of - then some retaliation was definitely justified. People argued a great deal over what was the right amount of retaliation, an issue complicated by the Government having repeatedly attacked the Andersons in the past. Judging by the near universal condemnation being heaped on the Air Force, it was in VERY hot water. They'd clearly lied about the intended purpose of the UAV, plus the zigzag pattern of its final descent and its so accurately hitting my parents' bedroom screamed "Assassination attempt!" There must be some extraordinary conversations going on behind the scenes. When I wrote above that "The only source of argument was over whether the Guardian Angel's actions were justified," I was talking about the general public. One non-general subset of public were having some very happy arguments: scientists. The eyewitness accounts of the Guardian Angel's capabilities had scientists almost as excited as the religious fanatics. The networks didn't play clips of scientific discussion much, but I enjoyed them the most. Some of the scientific explanations and conjectures were very imaginative and even I got excited; foolishly, given that the Guardian Angel was nothing more than a lighting effect. The scientific speculations should impress the general public with how wonderful the abilities of Guardian Angels were, and the military should be damned worried. Only an hour later, the first report of a fatality emerged. Exploding ordinance had killed an Air Force ground-crewman. The next several hours brought the total to three fatalities and many reports of injuries, especially burns from when people ran into burning buildings. None of the injuries would've occurred if the victims hadn't rushed into danger, but neither would they have occurred if I hadn't attacked the bases, so I wasn't blameless. I wasn't sure what I felt though. I could think of reasons why most of the blame was mine, and I could think of reasons to justify passing all the blame onto the victims. Gray areas over big issues like responsibility for causing people's deaths are very uncomfortable. Knowing that I was mainly feeling discomfort while other families were grieving made me even more uncomfortable, and made me want to believe it was the victims' fault for not keeping their heads down. Having the desire to avoid responsibility made me feel even more uncomfortable. For what it was worth, the media generally didn't blame the angel. That meant almost nothing because I wasn't going to take my moral guidance from the media. I was interested in the fates of the several F-15 crewmen that I'd ejected, but the news was silent about them. As the day progressed, more minor details came to light, but as I wasn't creating any more new news, the commentators started spending most of their time discussing big picture stuff like, "What does it mean?", "Why does the Government keep attacking the Andersons?", "What happens next?", "What is the Air Force going to do now?", "Where are the Andersons?", etc. There were no useful answers; it was just the media interviewing itself because the story was too big to let drop but there was nothing new to report. The President appeared for a press conference and made a statement condemning the, "wanton destruction," urging "patience until the investigation is complete [into the attack on my parents]." He refused to take questions, leaving the room after he'd read his statement. The networks left in the sound of the yelled questions, and it was no wonder he didn't want to hang around to face them. They were no-win questions, mostly about his Administration's repeated illegal acts of aggression against the Andersons. My favorite wasn't about us though, it was one reporter yelling, "Do you disagree with the way God is punishing the Air Force?" In the late afternoon someone drove up the driveway of my hideout, so I turned the TV off, grabbed my helmet and sheet (I'd kept those after seeing how effective they were at blocking the fighter's infrared sensors), and slipped out the backdoor. I hid myself in a comfortable spot a couple of hundred feet away. I was too well known to show my face, so I just lay still while reviewing my plan, trying to think of improvements, etc. The house's owner turned on the TV, and I watched that too, but didn't see what I was most interested in: "FBI" never appeared anywhere. It rained for a while, but that didn't affect me as I was undercover in a centrally heated NP-tent. It didn't get dark enough "to resume flight operations" (I've been hanging around Air Force bases recently) until 10pm; an inescapable consequence of my hiding in Canada at this time of year. As soon as it was dark, I donned my ski mask and stolen (but hopefully not "hot") crash helmet, recreated my Standing Upright Flying Sled, with the sheet spread above and around me. I greatly feared satellites were capable of seeing the infrared emissions of a single person, so this war required taking considerable precautions. The first thing I did was find a house with a usable internet-connected computer. I had to find out whether anyone had put their hand up and said, "We were operating the UAV at the time it went out of control." Finding that out was the main purpose of Stage One, and that stage had to keep going until that information was released. The last I'd heard, the Air Force was denying it, in a vague, "We don't know anything" sort of way. According to the main news network websites, the Air Force was still saying "Not us," and no one was saying who. Everyone thought that stank, because someone had to have ordered the assassination attempt. When the parents and I had planned this stage of the war, we'd left the details open for me to decide at the time. The strategy was simply to continue to apply pressure to the Air Force until they came clean with who was responsible for the UAV's spying on us. If they pointed their finger at anyone other than the FBI, and the pointed-at organization denied it, then I'd probably have to do some snooping to confirm the situation. If the Air Force declared, "The FBI did it!", we'd thought it'd be safe to assume that was the case regardless of what the FBI said, and I'd proceed directly to what I thought of as "Stage Two" of my plan, which was really its main purpose. Stage One was just so I knew who to do Stage Two to, and so everyone else would know why. Not seeing what I needed to stop with Stage One, I used the computer to help me plan a second night of it. I was looking to hit another two or three Air Force Bases. Not on any pattern this time, which was going to give the Air Force a worrying time. I could cross the entire country in five hours, so I could easily hit two or three random bases a night. I wasn't looking for "random" hits though. I had some higher and lower priority targets. Top of my hit list was any base that dealt with UAVs or other spy planes, like the U-2's I'd destroyed last night. Also high on the list were fighters because they're aggressive and dangerous. I wanted to take out tanker aircraft too, because if the USAF lost a significant proportion of those they'd have trouble keeping their assets in the air every night, which would be what they'd be forced to do soon to avoid my attacks. If they couldn't keep their planes aloft all night, then they'd have to send them out of the country. Running away from their own country would surely cause them great international embarrassment and ridicule, which would be another form of pressure on them, which was what Stage One was all about. Low on my list of priorities was any base that I could hit during the day. Those were usually bases that had a public street that passed within five hundred feet of all the high priority targets. I'd do nightly attacks for a couple more nights, and then surprise them with some daytime hits. Probably only one or two a day as even with positioning myself the previous night, I'd be restricted to road travel speeds to get away and to the subsequent targets that day. Although less frequent, the daytime attacks would still be a horrible surprise for the Air Force, adding to the pressure. If Stage One lasted long enough, a succession of day and night attacks would also be quite good evidence that I personally couldn't have been controlling the attacks because I couldn't have stayed awake that long. I started looking at bases in the northern states as that's where I'd be shortly. I didn't want the northwest because that was too close to last night's activities, so the central northern or northeastern states were the ones I was interested in, say North Dakota and eastward. Wikipedia informed me that there was only one Air Force Base in North Dakota, by the name of Minot, which didn't ring any bells with me so it probably wasn't very important. I clicked the link anyway. It's home to the 5th Bomb Wing and the 91st Space Wing. I knew from previous research that "Space Wing" wasn't anything exciting and sexy, like I'd first thought when I encountered the term. It was just ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile), which seemed like scary shit to me. I had no problem setting fire to a plane, but I didn't want to do that to an ICBM that might have a nuclear warhead on it! I'd also found out that they were very cheap, only $7 million each, so not worth bothering with. Better than ICBMs are bombers because they're big, expensive things, especially the B-1 and B-2 bombers as they cost hundreds of millions each. It was likely that Minot's 5th Bomber Wing has some bombers, so I read further. Unfortunately for me, Minot AFB only has B-52H's, worth something like $60 million each. It might be worth paying them a visit if they have more than a dozen. Further reading made Minot look like a very mediocre target. If I couldn't find anything better I might consider it, but probably I wouldn't. It was worth researching though, if not for immediate use, then for later. Google Earth is an essential tool for anyone planning the destruction of Air Force bases. This computer didn't have it installed, but that only took a few minutes to remedy. The picture for Minot AFB showed about twenty big planes, which was promising, although the photo could've been out of date. What caught my eye was a comment a helpful Google Earth user had added to the image, saying that Minot had 1,254 nuclear weapons. He'd even helpfully listed all the bomb, cruise missile and ICBM nuclear warhead types. I wasn't interested in screwing around with ICBMs, but according to the poster, Minot had two hundred W80 bombs in stock. "Bombs" sounded interestingly different from "ICBM Warheads", so I googled W80s. There was a picture of a W80 being worked on by maintenance guys, and it was SMALL; judging from the picture, about 3 feet long and 1.5 feet in diameter. I could tuck one under each arm and walk around! According to Wikipedia, they weighed 132 kg (290 pounds) each, so no problem at all for me to carry. I read more. The W80 was a cruise missile warhead rather than a gravity bomb, but that didn't matter to me; all I wanted was a device capable of going {BOOM}, which W80s certainly were. They had "dial-a-yield" from 5 to 150 kilotons of TNT. I'd heard enough about the suicide bombings in Iraq and elsewhere to know that a small truck full of explosives made a VERY big explosion. Even if modern explosive material was better than TNT, 150,000 tons implied W80s were HUGELY effective bombs! I googled "Nuclear Bomb Radius", curious to learn what 150 kt would do. I quickly learned that Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's bombs had been between 12 and 22 kt. I didn't need to read any more - if a W80 went missing from Minot, the US Air Force would be "UNDER PRESSURE"! I did read more though. There was a comment that the Oklahoma City bomb was the equivalent of 0.002 kt, and that'd been horrific enough. Scarily, the US had fifty B53 bombs in storage, rated at 9 Mt each. Assuming inverse square, the blast radius would be 25 times wider than that of the two bombs dropped on Japan. There are COUNTRIES smaller than that! And we had FIFTY of them! Then it occurred to me that even better than pressuring the Air Force, would be pressuring the President. The more I thought about that, the more I liked it. It made me smile. I closed the Wikipedia pages and got back to Google Earth, looking for an area in Minot AFB which was secured better than others because I had feeling 1,254 nuclear bombs would probably have good security. It took me less than five seconds to find it, because some helpful Google Earth user had placed a "Weapons Storage Area (WSA)" label on the location. Not that I really needed it, because the road leading to the area was called "Weapons Way". #15: The WSA was a 2,400-foot by 1,700-foot walled area, with what looked like several underground storage rooms in the middle. There were a lot of above-ground buildings too, but no one had helpfully labeled what they were for. The wall around the WSA looked very substantial, but I doubted it have much affect on my ability to find out what the buildings contained. I decided to hit the sky. I could think about it on the way, dropping down to use other computers if I needed to check something. I took a compass direction for the route I'd take, memorizing the towns I'd pass over and those to either side, uninstalled Google Earth, cleared the browser history and shut the computer down. That should be good enough to stop the owner having a reason to phone Minot AFB in the next few hours. I headed east-southeast, staying well inside Canadian airspace while I worked on my plan to up the ante in my little war. At Moose Jaw, 1.5 hours later, I turned more southerly, heading for Minot 250 miles away. I crossed into America at midnight, Minot AFB and its 1,254 nuclear warheads only 70 miles ahead of me. ------- Chapter 365: I Acquire the Knockout Punch Thursday, June 7, 2007 Almost immediately after I crossed into America, when not diverting around the many missile silos there were, I was searching for the things I needed for my various contingency plans. I had several of those: Three different ways of flying away with my ill-gotten gains afterward: by Flying Sled, by taking over an Air Force plane, or by covertly flying immediately under an independent Air Force plane so our radar images merged. With the loot I was hoping to grab, I'd be creating a substantial radar echo. Hiding places if I decided to stay in the area for any reason (underwater, digging a hole and burying the bombs and maybe me too, letting myself into someone's house, etc.) Leaving by car, motorcycle or truck; possibly an Air Force vehicle, or possibly not. Hiding the loot in a good location nearby and coming back for it later. Whether or not to attack the base. There were quite a few pros and cons; for example, if I stole an Air Force car, I could hide its loss for at least several hours by tossing several other vehicles into burning buildings. I needed some more dark sheets, some large plastic bags and a backpack big enough to carry a bomb in. I stopped to check my hope that putting light blobs inside a parked car's light fittings would look sufficiently like its lights were on, which it did. They didn't cast a very good beam because to radiate enough light they had to be larger than the usual bulb, but that didn't matter much. I thought having to drive away was quite a strong possibility, as I suspected there'd be too many planes above me with what's called "look down radar". Those radars can track targets moving on the ground. I wouldn't personally show up on their radars, not being metallic, but my loot certainly would. When I got close to Minot, I identified several houses that had cars at home, parked in places where I could roll them silently away without anyone seeing, and with the keys in accessible places. Ditto for motorcycles. If I needed transport, a motorcycle would be good because wearing a face-hiding crash helmet wouldn't be suspicious. I could easily carry a W80 in a backpack. Before I approached the base itself, I flew a circle around it at an average of a ten-mile radius but with a fair amount of zigzagging, covering most of the area from five to fifteen miles from the base. I was looking for good hiding places for myself or for the bombs, looking for any sign of a trap, and generally just looking. It was better to look now when there was no pressure on me. There were four planes circling above in close formation, almost certainly F-15s again, I thought. I didn't much care at the moment, as I knew neither their radar nor infrared could detect me. I'd have to take care of them later, but there was no need to announce my presence yet. A Google Earth image of the east half of Minot Air Force Base and its residential area. The Weapons Storage Area is the square northwest of the Highway 83 symbol. Minot AFB is isolated from the wider community. To be metaphorical, it's an Air Force island in a sea of farmland. Part of the base is a large residential area, nicely distinct from the rest of the base although quite close to it, starting about three-quarters of a mile north and northeast from the runway. I was coming from the north, so I reached the residential area first, which suited me nicely. This was going to be a very serious operation, so I put myself inside an almost airtight box to reduce the chance of any of my stray hairs floating down into the soon-to-be-crime scene. The box was only a little larger than me so it wouldn't create much air resistance if I needed to fly fast, and it had just a few small holes on the top for fresh air, and perhaps more importantly, so I could hear any external noises, such as sirens going off. I searched the residential area to locate the items I might need, depending on which plan I ended up choosing to use. Finding them was easy because sight blobs are REALLY good at searching for stuff. Directly east of the runway was the area I wanted to check out next: the Weapons Storage Area. I drifted south across their golf course, approaching the north wall of the WSA. I had one radio blob searching the ground several yards ahead of me (for trip wires, seismic sensors, electric eye beams, etc.), while the other blob was higher and looking farther ahead. The high blob located a large truck beyond the far side of the WSA. It had a big box angled upward and pointing west. It was too far away for my blob to move for a good look, but I was pretty sure it was some sort of SAM (Surface to Air Missile) launcher. I doubted it was infrared guided, as it didn't make sense to use that sort of guidance against enemies coming at you [[actually, IR seeking technology can guide nose-on attacks against planes these days. My nose's IR was blocked by my crash helmet, so it was safe]]. It was probably radar-guided, and it'd be in the same band the fighters used, which didn't worry me. Its radar was either off or radiating away from me because I couldn't sense any radar from it. I'd check it out more thoroughly when I got closer later. The WSA had a VERY impressively strong wall all the way around it, which didn't make the slightest difference to me. The high-flying radio blob confirmed Google Earth's photo that three hundred feet south of the WSA was a very strong and secure looking guardhouse complex. Road access to the WSA required passing that detached guardhouse complex then driving north into the main gate of the WSA, although "gate" is a highly misleading word as it was a covered building, so more of a "gatehouse", or perhaps "gate-castle" would be a more informative term. The entire WSA was very well lit, was guarded and patrolled by many soldiers, with especially large numbers of them at the detached guardhouse and the gate, and the latter also had two outward facing, manned tanks. None of the guards were wearing night-vision goggles. That wouldn't have worked as the entire area was extremely well lit. The lighting pleased me greatly because my body was never going to be in that area, so all the guards' night visions would be ruined and they'd never be able to spot me flying around overhead. I slowly drifted closer to the north wall at an altitude of three feet above the ground, so I'd be hidden by the wall but far enough off the ground to have a good chance of not triggering anything I didn't want to trigger. When I was close enough, I sent the leading radio blob to the wall, to examine it for any sensors. It was dumber than our wall at home, only having wires running along the top of it. Having assured myself that the wall wasn't anything special, I let myself get closer to it while I sent the radio blob through it to have a closer look at the guards and buildings. I didn't see anything that concerned me. A lot of heavily armed guards, with a surprisingly large number of dogs, a few sandbagged machine gun and small missile emplacement pits, but that was all. Nothing to worry me. When I got within one hundred feet of the wall, I circled around it to the east - the side away from the rest of the base - still seeing nothing to worry about. When I'd gone all the way down the east side, where to go any farther would have exposed me to the detached guardhouse, I stopped and reversed myself. I went north up the east wall, then along the top of the north wall and down the west side. Everything still looked fine. I'd been looking through the buildings inside the walls that were within my range. The WSA was so large that most of the buildings were out of my range, but circumnavigating most of the perimeter let me search quite a few of them. Even if I'd been moving right next to the wall, which I didn't want to risk, I'd still be unable to see the noticeably more interesting looking buildings in the center. The internal buildings I had managed to see inside of were nearly all for weapons storage. The procedure was to use lots of small buildings to hold explosion-causing weapons, rather than one big building. It seemed wise not to keep all the exploding eggs in one basket. There were quite a few buildings for other purposes too: an office area, some facilities for the guards, garages for the specialist vehicles they used, and several maintenance workshops: some vehicular, some armament, and some that just appeared to be general engineering facilities. Hiding behind the southwestern corner of the wall was the closest I could get to the detached guardhouse, the SAM launcher, and the southern wall's gatehouse, without exposing myself to any of them. The buildings were hundreds of feet beyond my maximum range, and the SAM launcher was about fifteen hundred feet away, but the land between me and them was mostly flat grassland. I sent a radio blob as close as I could get to the front of the launcher, and it didn't detect any radar emissions. The crew were alert, but nothing was happening. They weren't wearing IR goggles either. It looked to be a non-issue. I sent radio blobs four hundred feet toward the gatehouse and detached guardhouse, searching for any sign that either set of guys had infrared sensors going. There was no one at the windows wearing them, and no TV cameras pointed in my direction; just up and down the access road and driveway. I was pleasantly surprised that no one was using infrared detectors. It was a small risk, but if there was anywhere which had very good all-around sensors, it'd be in the detached guardhouse buildings, so I had to get closer to look. I quickly lifted myself up a hundred feet then flew toward them, ready to flee if sirens started wailing. Nothing happened, and as soon as I was close enough, a quick look inside the buildings showed the guards to have just an ordinary level of alertness. Nor was the SAM launcher's crew reacting in any way, so that was all good. A slower search of the guardhouse revealed surprisingly few sensor systems. Our home had better sensors, which seemed incompetent of the Air Force. I couldn't think of anything likely for the sensors to be guarding against, but you'd think with 1,254 nuclear warheads there'd be every defensive measure known to mankind, whether or not it could be imagined as being useful. On the other hand, anyone other than me would have a MAJOR battle to fight their way into the WSA and God knows how they'd be able to escape with any booty, so the existing defenses were more than adequate. Having established that it was okay for me to fly around over the WSA, I did exactly that, passing over the wall and into the area at three hundred feet AGL, heading to the center where there were several strangely shaped buildings. They had wide front doors, and the roof was a reasonable height over the front door, but then the roof sloped back and down to the ground level, like some small hikers' tents do. The implication was that these buildings didn't need headroom because they were just an access point for underground areas. If Minot AFB had 1,254 nuclear weapons, and every one of them was more powerful than Nagasaki's, then I was sure the Air Force wouldn't keep them on the surface. Quite a few of them were presumably in ICBM silos scattered around the wider area, but there should still be hundreds of them under my feet. Or more meaningfully, under the guards' feet. I soon found out the reason why there weren't a large number of sensors around the facility: the place was built like Fort Knox inside. If the BIG underground doors were shut, you'd need a nuclear bomb to blast your way in. It was "business as usual" now though, a surprising number of workers moving around for the time of night it was, and the buildings were surprisingly accessible as workers buzzed around all over the place. I had imagined that all the nuclear bombs would be in one building for each type, and that building would be sealed shut, but it wasn't like that at all. Mainly, I guessed, because there were far too many bomb types. From what I could see, every model of weapon came in several configurations: its normal explosive payload, a nuclear payload, a training load, a sensor pack load (I wasn't sure what that meant, but that's what some of the signs said), some with laser guidance packages installed, some had parachute options, some had choices of different tail assemblies, etc. There were so many combinations that they'd need half of North Dakota if they wanted to give each of them their own building. I watched their operation for a several minutes, seeing how they had to swipe their cards to call an elevator, what their pin numbers were, etc. I also wanted to make sure which were the W80s with the real warheads rather than the various training options. If I ran the Air Force, I'd have had all the real bombs painted red with skull & crossbones stickers all over them, but they hadn't done something obvious like that. It was easy for me to make sure though; I just sent a sight blob inside each one. It was VERY obvious which warheads were nuclear bombs. Having found the bombs I wanted, it was time for some light reading. I wanted to sound knowledgeable about these things, so I sent one sight blob in search of something useful in the currently unoccupied nuclear weapon maintenance area. The other radio blob was on overwatch and staying there. The last thing I wanted was a surface to air missile up my ass unawares. Or even awares, come to that. If the nearby launcher turned to point at me, I wanted to know about it immediately! I found some sets of technical documentation inside an extremely strong looking safe. I didn't bother trying to open the safe; merely flicked through the "W80 Mod 1" material where it was. In a couple of minutes I'd learned enough for my purposes. I didn't need to know much, just enough to be able to pretend I did. I'd seen enough of the WSA, so I moved closer to the SAM launcher, from behind it. I got close enough to read over the operator's shoulder. Its radar control panel was powered up, but the radar was not radiating. There was no indication that it was receiving or displaying IR data. No "Infrared" written on any switches, for example. I though it likely that if there was one of these at the east end of the runway pointing west, then there could be one at the west end pointing east, which would pick me up if it had infrared, so I spent a couple of minutes carefully reading and thinking about everything that I could see about how it operated, and I was pretty sure it was radar only. I created a zero-output heat blob in front of it, then flashed it on for about quarter of a second. Nothing happened. I decided it was probably safe, but I'd steer a wide path around it. I moved back north, approaching the air base's main buildings from their northeast. As I got closer I saw an anti-aircraft machinegun and crew. They were scanning the sky looking for something to shoot. The guy holding the gun was using his naked eyes, a loader wasn't doing much, and a third guy had big binoculars. I crept close so I could check, and I confirmed that his binoc's were light-amplifiers. They probably wouldn't see me if I flew overhead with the sheet covering me, but a probability of 80 to 90% left a worrying 10 to 20% chance of my ass getting shot off. They were looking up, so I dropped lower and slid closer. Fifty yards farther on was a team of two guys. On the ground beside them was one of those shoulder mounted missile launcher tubes and several missiles for it. #27: < The defenses inside the WSA don't matter, but their having so much outside it is getting a little scary. I think I remember a movie where the operator of one of those things was talking about getting an infrared lock. We haven't even seen 20% of the base area yet, and there's far too much dangerous stuff for our body to be flying around above it.> #15: [[Most of the Patriot and Stinger missile systems were overseas. The few that were in America had to be spread around all the country's bases, and there weren't nearly enough for that. I'd seen the only Patriot battery this base had, positioned to cover the WSA and airbase; mostly the base since the Guardian Angel had just been destructive so far. There were more Stinger teams available, with three of them deployed here: the one that I'd found about halfway between the WSA and base proper, another halfway down the runway on the side opposite the buildings, and the last at the far end of the runway. There were also quite a few antiaircraft machineguns set up around the base. Not around the WSA as it gave out so much light that it would ruin the night vision of anyone near it (I presumed the workers needed so much light to make sure they didn't make mistakes or drop things best not dropped). The above defenses were very recent additions, as a result of last night's Guardian Angel attacks. The tanks near the gatehouse and the extra dog teams and sandbagged emplacements inside the WSA had been among the defenses added after Archangel Michael had raided Andrews AFB and Norfolk Naval Station. The Air Force's not knowing either angel's capabilities had left them taking guesses about how to respond, and some of those guesses were fairly silly in my opinion. Did they really think guard dogs would help?]] #6: I backed off, keeping low and double-checking that the sheet was wrapped around me properly. It was pinned in place between two layers of NP-plates, but this seemed like a good time to be paranoid. (Important safety tip: if you're ever intending to destroy USAF bases, make sure your dark sheet is tucked in properly.) I went back to the residential area, gathering the additional resources I'd need for what I'd decided to do: five more dark sheets (after taking a while to find the first two, I settled for the next three being bulkier dark blankets instead), a couple dozen large garbage bags, a motorcycle with its keys, a large backpack, a large-sized Air Force shirt, and four dozen dark-colored socks. The small items I kept in their own airtight NP-box, taking ridiculous precautions that nothing of me got anywhere near them, not even a windblown hair. I wouldn't go within four hundred feet of these items unless they and I were in a sealed box and I'd keep them upwind of me as much as possible. I also found a conveniently located car, and I'm pretty sure I disabled the alarms so I could open the door later if necessary. The motorcycle I pushed away, tested it to make sure it started, then hid it just off the road behind some of the golf course's bushes northwest of the WSA. I left the keys and shirt with it. The socks I filled with sand from a convenient sand trap, making the socks into what I think is called a "sap". I've seen them used to hit people on the head in movies and the victim invariably goes straight to sleep, so they're obviously very effective (I'm being facetious about movies, but I'll check how good saps are for real soon). Hitting people with NP alone works, but it requires a very hard push against the skull to get it to knock the person out. I worried about pushing so hard in case I did so when someone's head was at a bad angle and their neck got broken. A sap to the noggin seemed better to me, based on my less-than-extensive medical knowledge. The sheets/blankets and garbage bags I placed near the northeast corner of the WSA. [[It occurs to me in hindsight that I never mentioned that I'd learned to ride a motorcycle. By this stage of my autobiography I've mentioned riding one several times, but never that I'd gotten my license. Ron did that as there were several dirt bikes and motorcycles at home and he was often bored. My failing to mention that demonstrates that your new God isn't infallible. That's not as bad as it seems, as I think you would have a great deal more reason to worry if your God considered himself infallible. And imagine how bad it'd be if I also considered myself "inerrant and authoritative".]] Because I had a suspicion that not everything I've seen in Hollywood movies is factually correct, I returned to the home of the owner of the motorcycle I was borrowing. I'd borrowed his of the many that'd been available because he was alone and lived on the nearest edge of the residential area, so it was easy for me to access his place. I flew a sap in through his bathroom window, grabbed his arms and legs to pin him in place while I also expanded an NP-fingertip inside his trachea so he couldn't yell. Then I practiced hitting him with the sap, getting a feel for where on heads to hit and how hard. He had a few seconds of terror, but only a few seconds because hitting just behind an ear works very well. He was inside my proximity range, so I saw his lights go out. I hit him again behind the other ear just to play safe as the clock was running now. I took half a second to wreck the guy's phones, then my sap and I flew back to the WSA. The detached guardhouse just south of the WSA had security camera screens showing the inside of the WSA, but there weren't any cameras working in the opposite direction, not even in the gate-castle, so the southern guards had to be the first to go. My saps led the way with me following, to keep me downwind of the saps so they wouldn't pick up any of my stray hairs. They and I were in airtight NP-boxes too (not quite airtight in my case, so I could hear any sirens). I was being VERY careful. There were no vehicles approaching or leaving the WSA, so I could make my move right away. All the guards in the eastern building simultaneously got a much faster version of the same treatment my test subject had: they were pinned, their voices muted, and saps flew into the room and banged them all on the heads pretty damned hard. I didn't want these guys to wake up for a fair while. With so many saps and NP-fingertips, it took less than ten seconds to have all the guards out for hopefully a really long count. I destroyed their telephones and radios as doing that only took a couple of seconds. The first person awake could hit an alarm (I wasn't going to risk trying to disable that), but he wouldn't be able to get any detailed information out for a minute or more. The crews of the two tanks were just as easy to take care of. Then I and my saps flew over the WSA to repeat my actions there. That would need much more care because there were so many guards and they could often see each other. I'd start inside the buildings because that could be done covertly. The buildings didn't have conveniently opened windows, so I had to sneak my saps past the patrolling guards. I'd chosen dark colored socks and I could accelerate them with 50 g's (they're not heavy, unless they're hitting your head), so it was easy to wait until the guards' backs were turned on the destination doorway, then zip the saps silently down out of the dark and inside. The saps were only needed for buildings that had people inside them, but that was nearly all of them as every sensitive building had at least four guards inside it. Doing one building at a time, the people inside the ground floor were held immobile and rendered unable to yell, then the saps flew into the room and whacked them behind an ear. Each underground building had its own flight of saps and its own timing challenges, but being able to stomach punch and grab people without warning, then knock them out less than a second later, made it a quick and easy process. Having access to their swipe cards and knowing several of their pin numbers made calling the elevator so my saps could descend very easy too. The only real challenge was from trying to do it as fast as possible. I had to be especially careful inside the W80s' underground building because if any of the intervening doors were locked I probably wouldn't be able to get them open again. But despite the worry of ruining the entire purpose of tonight's raid, it was still amusingly easy to do. A US Air Force's nuclear weapons store was beaten by several pairs of dark-colored socks, and handfuls of sand, and some simple magic. How embarrassing for them. Now I had some lifting to do. First I grabbed five W80s and flew them off their racks to the elevator, using a borrowed swipe card and pin number to open the intervening doors. I added all the bodies for this building. There was no "Overloaded Weight" warning, as I'm sure these elevators can lift some SERIOUS weight. Some of the bombs are HUGE. I had to load up the elevator with sleeping people in every underground room which contained people, but that took only a few seconds in each, then I pressed the elevators' "Ground" buttons. I pushed every internal door closed, locked them, and fucked with their internal mechanisms to make them impossible to unlock. Some of the doors were SUBSTANTIAL. Whether intended to keep invaders out or non-nuclear explosions in, I didn't care. They'd take a long time for the Air Force to get open again, preferably more than three hours. It wasn't essential, but it'd be nice if the President was still in DC when I delivered my punch. The elevators may be strong, but they're SLOW and the underground bunkers are a long way down, so I had a lengthy wait for the elevator cars to get up to ground level. A minute seems like forever during a covert robbery. When the elevators finally reached the surface, the saps started doing their thing to the surface guards and their dogs. I had to be careful not to let anyone see someone else get clobbered, but I had a very good top-down view. I had to do some test-hitting on the first dog, but that was easy as he and his already asleep handler were behind a building and I could muzzle him enough to stop him barking until I found the right force. After rendering the last WSA guard and his dog unconscious, I dropped most of the saps wherever they were, keeping a few just in case. Plenty of my victims had seen them so they weren't a secret. Things could start getting tricky shortly. All the guards and their dogs were asleep, but I was holding up the patrollers with NP and walking them around as if they were still patrolling, so if the overhead planes were using infrared to look inside this compound they'd not yet see anything strange. That was about to change though, because I was about to start evacuating everybody out of the place. I was reasonably sure - fingers crossed - that the planes would be using their sensors to search the sky. That was their area of responsibility, leaving the ground to the many dozens of guards, missile men, machine-gunners, and who knows what else. If the planes did look down with their infrared sensors, hopefully it wouldn't be for another few minutes. Each of the planes' circuits was taking about two minutes. The four planes were flying in close formation, presumably because the previous tactic of pairs at different heights hadn't worked too well, so I waited until they started heading away from me before I began evacuating the area of people. I SHOULD - fingers crossed - get a minimum of one more minute of covert action. I quickly flew around the WSA area, picking up every human and dog in the compound and sending them to the northern most internal corner, ripping communications systems off those that had them. I sent the five W80s with them too. When I had everybody, I picked them all up and 3-g accelerated them and 'my' bombs over the north wall and northeast into the golf course. I laid all the bodies behind a small ridge and some bushes about 1,000 feet from the WSA. A couple of them had started recovering during the flight, but that was easily fixed. I didn't need much more time, but a little more would be good. While flying the bombs, I'd bagged up each of them in multiple garbage bags, hoping to make them as air-, water- and my-DNA-tight as possible, squeezing the air out of each bag before tying it closed. Then I wrapped each bomb in a dark sheet or blanket to make them harder to spot visually as the plastic bags glistened too much. I hid the bombs under some bushes close to the golf club's parking lot. There were three cars parked in it. No one was playing at this hour, but maybe the owners had gotten drunk in the clubhouse, or the cars had broken down, or whatever. The reason didn't matter to me, because I could roll one of them regardless. One of my contingency plans was for me to put the bombs into a car and 'drive' away. I was pretty sure I'd disabled the alarm on the car closest to where the bombs were hidden, but I didn't want risk testing that yet. Plus it was only a contingency plan, not my first choice. I wanted to get to Washington DC as fast as possible, and driving all the way in a car - more likely a succession of cars - would take 24 hours. Flying would only take two if I went direct. That would be too dangerous, so I was planning to be somewhat indirect, not really wanting to be caught with five nuclear bombs in my possession because that was probably against the law. The evacuation went quickly, taking not much more than a minute, but every second that went past with no alarm from the base was a pleasant surprise now. Ignoring my first experiment with the sap, because I thought that guy was likely to be out for quite a while, my first overt action had been less than four minutes ago. I wished I could've gone faster, but the damned elevators had been so slow. Sooner or later someone was going to arrive at the guardhouse, phone them, or the patrolling planes might do an infrared look-down at the WSA to see that there were no guards patrolling it, which was decidedly not what the Air Force wanted. I flew rapidly to the block of four buildings that constituted the guardhouse. It was only three hundred feet south of the WSA's southern wall, which I thought could be dangerously close for the occupants when the very big shit hit the fan. The tank crews were certainly too close, being immediately outside the WSA. I picked up all those guys and moved them south toward the missile truck. I quickly added the missile men to my collection of unconscious people, flicking what appeared to be the main power switch off, which I confirmed by watching the panels go black. The missile men might be in communication with someone else, but I didn't need to be covert for much longer, and I didn't want their missile system to be active when planes started coming down as I'd be nearby and could be caught in the blast if they launched their SAMs at the planes. I carried the Sleeping Beauties southeast, avoiding the B-52H's parked in the rapid response area a thousand feet southwest of the guardhouse. There was a second rapid response area half a mile farther southwest, which had four fighters parked in it. I'd have to get to them later because I didn't want any planes hot on my tail as I left. I dropped my current load of evacuees about 1,000 feet from the south wall, in some soft soil behind a hedge. The cover wasn't great, but the distance should be sufficient. I shot up into the air, initially angling my body so my feet were pointing at the base, but once I was a couple thousand feet in the air, realigning myself to come up underneath the patrolling fighters. They were flying circuits in a tight formation at 30,000 feet, so it took less than a minute for me to reach their altitude, even with my slowing down vertically and accelerating horizontally to come up from behind them. They were F-15Cs which made it even harder for them to spot me, their single occupant having to do more work and not having as much technical assistance. The two that were in the front had their fuel lines crimped, then the outside two had their ejection handles pulled. I was pleased that the ejection systems worked, because Plan B had me cutting up planes on the ground and throwing their burning bits into the WSA, and that wouldn't have been nearly so spectacular as Plan A was going to be. I pulled back on the sticks of the two pilotless planes, repeating my reasonably well practiced "Catch Up And Take Control" process. Once I had the two planes under control, I set their throttles to their weakest setting, then put them into a dive angled away from their recently departed pilots to make it harder for them to spot me. Then it was just a matter of: Not letting the planes dive so fast that they got ahead of me. Restraining them with NP helped with that, or if still too fast, pulling on their sticks until they'd slowed. Being careful to make sure we stayed well south and east of the base during the descent, as there were an unpleasant number of upward pointing lethal weapons at the base. Making sure my toys would be roughly at the right distance from the WSA when I tipped them into their final dive. None of those was difficult after my recent practice. The base's siren going off made no difference either. No missiles, machinegun fire, or anything else came my way; just the noise of the siren. I was positive I didn't register on any of the radars that were operating as they were all in the wrong bands, and I was almost as sure that I wouldn't show up on infrared scans either. I'd been a faint smudge at four hundred feet to the F-15E's sensors. I was now thousands of feet away, so they'd have to have extraordinarily good sensors to pick up anything. Light amplification binoculars would just see a small cross-sectional area of dark sheet against a dark sky, which wouldn't be discernible. The progression of occluded stars would be my biggest giveaway, but I was a very small obstruction at these heights and moving very quickly, so I doubted anyone would notice that effect, let alone shoot at it. I thought my greatest danger was their deciding to shoot down the two diving fighters, which I tried to minimize by making sure they didn't point at any part of the base during their descent. There being no emergency distractions, I was able to make the descent happen almost as fast as my ascent had been. Not much more than a minute after I'd ejected the two pilots, I was at an altitude of 2,000 feet. That was low enough, so I turned the two planes toward my final target, pushing the two sticks forward so they'd dive more steeply straight toward the center of the Weapons Storage Area. I was south and above the two side-by-side planes, about four hundred feet from them. I stayed within control range just long enough to be sure I had them lined up properly, then a couple of seconds before the impacts I started strongly decelerating myself vertically while accelerating southwesterly. If I'd been going 600 mph for one second, I would've covered nearly 900 feet. My speed of separation from the planes wasn't quite that fast, but I still managed to get a very useful distance away before they both slammed into the ground in the middle of the WSA, producing a VERY spectacular and satisfactory explosion. The simultaneous impacts spread a very large fireball across nearly all of the area, almost immediately creating a succession of many secondary explosions. There was enough explosive stuff at ground level that some of those explosions were VERY large, throwing flame, wreckage and armaments into the air. It was a wonderful disaster. There were going to be multiple fires, and with luck, bombs, cannon shells and machinegun bullets would be going off for hours. It should take ages before it'd be safe for anyone to approach the area, and even longer before they could get down to any of the underground rooms, and far longer to get through the fucked-over doors, to eventually find that five of the W80s were missing. In case you're worried, there was no chance of a nuclear bomb being detonated by the two fighters' crash. The bombs were at the bottom of deep shafts, behind at least two extremely strong, locked doors. They'd barely notice any bump from the ground-level explosions, and no heat would get to them, not even if one of the planes had crashed directly into one of the elevator shafts. All I'd done was arranged for a big mess on the surface, to delay the Air Force's finding out about my light-fingered pilferage. My southwesterly movement had taken me over the rapid response area, where nine B-52H's were parked. Normally "rapid response" would be so they could rush off and bomb someone, but in this case it was also so they could get away if the damned angel was rampaging their way. What had happened to the F-15s less than two minutes ago had obviously been sufficient reason for running away, because the crews were scrambling out of their "Ready Room" (I guess it's called? I've heard the term somewhere). The planes closest to the room were already occupied by their flight crews, with ground crews at work under them. More distant planes (the most distant was 1,500 feet from the Ready Room), still had flight and ground crews running toward them. For the unoccupied planes only, I ripped open the undersides of their wings where the fuel tanks were, immediately setting fire to them. They were instantly engulfed, and their crews frantically braked to a halt and started running back the way they'd came. The flight crews were wearing bulky clothes and carrying helmets, bags and other crap. They dropped everything to run faster. I just ripped open the underside of the wings of the occupied planes, without setting them on fire. The planes' crews heard and sometimes saw what I did, their ground crews were screaming, fuel was gushing out, and there were large fires behind them. The planes were four hundred feet apart, but none of the crews thought sitting in a plane that was hemorrhaging fuel four hundred feet from large fires was a good idea. They leaped out of their planes and sprinted for safety. Despite my decelerating (because I wanted to go back the way I'd come), it only took me seconds to reach the next area, where the four F-15Cs were parked. The pilot of the first of them, closest to the Ready Room, had already gotten its engine going. He'd obviously shortcut his checklist considerably, or skipped it entirely. I cut the planes in half just behind their cockpits, one after the other, not even a second apart. I set fire to the one farthermost from the ready room, as that plane's pilot was a safe distance away. The others I just left in pieces. I turned my southwesterly motion into an easterly one, and then curved it around the north, to circle around the B-52s and the very dangerous looking and sounding WSA. That was looking so wonderful I increased the radius of my circle and raised myself higher, to make it less likely that any of the shrapnel might hit me. I had to fly about 200 degrees of a circle, for a total distance of six or seven miles, to get back to the hidden motorcycle. Because it'd been a curve, it hadn't been a high-speed run so had taken me about two minutes to get there. I should have hidden the bike where I could have gotten to in a much faster straight line. I'd remember that lesson if I ever need to do something like this again. I had a crash helmet on, so all I had to do was put on the Air Force shirt, jump on the bike, start it, and roar down the street to the base, apparently in a frantic hurry to defend my country. The good things to destroy started only a mile away, but I wasn't the only patriotic defender rushing to do his duty, so it took me a couple of minutes to get there through the traffic. I didn't want to take the time to process the buildings as thoroughly as I had at the previous bases, so I rode to the front of the base's buildings, then turned right and rode up "Flight Line Drive", the closest street to the apron. The Guardian Angel rose out of the tarmac about two hundred feet behind me, climbing to an altitude of fifty feet, and started spreading destruction left and right. The Guardian Angel had to be a boring light blob as I needed my eyes to drive with and I had one invisible radio blob zigzagging behind me to coordinate all the destruction inside each building. The only aircraft near me was a small helicopter, which quickly became even smaller. The buildings with any expensive looking electronics had it crushed, and every building was set fire to. People could make their own way out, or stay to fight the fire, as they wished. I was riding at about 30 mph, but taking every opportunity I could find to slow down to go around other people. I let the Guardian Angel maintain a constant 20 mph so it didn't look coordinated with me. It was already receiving an impressive amount of machinegun fire. I was too busy to look - what with my being chased by the Demonic Angel and all! - but I was pretty sure it wasn't suffering much damage. I did see a small missile fly up over my back and into the sky ahead of me; going to wherever it is that missiles go to when they miss. Or maybe it had hit the Guardian Angel, as that would have had the same effect on the missile's trajectory as a miss. I went faster along the half-mile long street that separates the light aircraft area (where I'd come from), from the bomber area (where I was going to). There was very little for the angel to do, so it sped up too, diverting from side to side to dive through the small buildings we passed, to keep it looking busy and unrelated to me. As we neared the bomber area, another small missile shot toward the angel, this one from the other side of the runway. It appeared to miss the angel and continued northeast, up over the residential area. I hoped it had range of at least a couple of miles, otherwise it could come down in a bad place. I judged that it would look wrong for me to ride on the tarmac here - both now and in any later review of this attack - so I had to turn right for a few yards, and then left to ride behind the first row of buildings, leaving the angel to carry on straight ahead. There were a lot of B-52s here, most of which had crews in them, so the angel settled for slicing them up and crushing their electronics. Unfortunately, half of them were too far away from me, so they were left intact. The buildings we passed got dealt with in the same way as the earlier buildings, with the radar facility getting a particularly good hammering, including everything on its roof being ripped off. The entire run was about 1.5 miles long, and took about four minutes. When I got to the end, I turned right one block, while the angel carried on straight ahead, descending into the earth, never to be seen here again. I rode the bike back the way I'd come, one block farther away from the runway. When I came to the end of the road, I headed cross-country across an empty field, then into the golf course. I jumped up off the bike, catching myself with a flying sled. I'd grabbed the bike with NP too, lifting it up and flying with it toward where I'd hidden the bombs. I deviated slightly and slowed down, to replace the bike exactly where I'd taken it from, and returned the keys to inside the house. No one should have reason to suspect it'd been used. Then I headed straight for the bombs. I created an upper-deck for my flying sled, putting the five bombs on that, laid out in a 2x2 arrangement with the fifth bomb sitting on top and in the middle of the other four, to plug the gap caused by their non-square shape. They were a few inches above me, and covered all my body. Anyone who subsequently caught sight of us from above would just see a black lump with no sign of a human. It'd still look strange, but strange without a flying human was better than strange with one. I wasn't worried about radiation. The Air Force had guys working around these things all day long. Not as close as I was now, but I'd only be in this position for a few hours. I also picked up the backpack, but not with my hands: it got put into an airtight NP-container before I got within four hundred feet of it. The attack having been completed, I made my departure. ------- Chapter 366: I Deliver the Knockout Punch Thursday, June 7, 2007 (Continued) My explosive cargo and I flew northeast across the farmers' fields at a very low altitude. Once I was clear of the base's residential area, I turned north and rocketed toward Canada, only forty miles away, zigzagging to avoid the many missile silos there were in the area. I stayed VERY low, because - unlike me - five steel-cased W80 nuclear bombs would definitely show up on radar. So far there wasn't a radar beam coming down at me, so if I stayed low I wouldn't be detected by the ground-based systems. I'd stand out like a searchlight if a radar emitter got above me and radiated down, in which case my plan was to stop as quickly as possible to pretend to be a stationary car. Or a stationary truck or stationary combine harvester. I wasn't proud; I didn't care what I was mistaken for. I was reasonably sure that the look-down radar systems used by combat planes would be set to filter out non-moving targets, so the pilots wouldn't even be shown my 'ping'. And even if I was displayed, they should have no reason to swoop down to investigate one stationary metallic shape out of thousands, so they should pass over me and move off to search somewhere else, letting me resume my escape. If they did loiter in the area, I'd move off at the speed of a car. If that didn't work, I'd put the bombs down and go up to take care of whatever plane(s) were hounding me. One of the main reasons I'd liked the idea of pilfering from Minot AFB was that Canada was so close. At 500 mph, and some zigzagging to avoid silos, I could be over the border in six minutes. Presumably the US Air Force wasn't allowed to send combat planes over Canada willy-nilly. Maybe they could if they were in hot pursuit of stolen nukes, but I'd arranged for that loss to be hidden for several hours. I knew I wasn't being tracked by radar yet, and if I got into Canada, that'd be even less likely to happen. I was radiating no infrared upward because the bombs and my sheet were blocking it. The bombs were, theoretically, "hot" (a term that's used about nuclear bombs because the decaying radioactive material does indeed release heat), but my max-sized radio blob couldn't detect any warmth from them since I'd bagged and wrapped them, so no one else would be able to either. The bombs and I should also be impossible to track visually, so I think I had all the bases covered. I had thought of the radiation being traceable either after the event (like a bloodhound) or live (from a satellite tracking system), but I didn't believe either of those were possible. Other than having to avoid crashing into the sides of silos and barns, the six minute flight to the border was without problem. My luck continued at the border crossing, because the customs officer didn't ask me what W80s were, so I got through all right (haha). I flew about 250 miles north into Canada, up the western border of Manitoba (I'd collected a map on the way to Minot, because I could've ended up going in all sorts of directions, depending on what happened). I turned east, flying low across sparsely inhabited areas of Manitoba and into central Ontario. I passed hundreds of lakes. About mid-trip, I submerged into a decent-sized one for a few minutes. Partly to throw any trackers off, and also to burn the Air Force shirt in a separate NP-box, letting the water wash it away when it was ashes. I played submarine for ten minutes to change my location, then emerged at a different angle to resume my journey across the rest of Ontario, then into southwest Quebec. I curved SSE, and then south. I was aiming to head south between Ottawa and Montreal, then into the US again. Before I got too close to Canada's more heavily populated areas, I started looking for a good location to stash four of the five bombs. I saw some messed up ground alongside a length of roadwork several miles south of a small town. I put myself in an airtight box to make sure none of my DNA dropped into the area, then headed toward it for a better look. It appeared suitable for my needs, so I looked around carefully to make sure I could remember this location, as it'd be very embarrassing to forget where I'd put these things. I dropped lower and started digging a deep hole beside the road. I'd originally intended to bury the bombs in the plastic bags and sheets, but I was having second thoughts. I was paranoid that some sample of my DNA might've somehow gotten into the sheets or bags, despite my extreme precautions. After the hole was dug, I flew the bombs a few miles away then moved them under some thick tree cover. I tore the coverings off four of the bombs, burning the bags and sheets very thoroughly. I made the NP-box the ashes were in very small, then I accelerated it VERY fast up into the air. By the time the box self-canceled, the ashes would be so high there'd never be any trace found of them. I flew back to the hole with the four naked and one still covered bomb. I placed the four naked bombs into the hole and refilled it, raking up the ground afterward. With the fifth bomb in my backpack, but still kept separate from all my DNA, I flew to the nearby town to get its name. I was amused to discover that it was called Ferme-Neuve, as there'd been an important early nuclear scientist named Fermi. This was an appropriate place. I searched for a relatively unpopulated quiet area east of Cornwall, Ontario, finding one about fifteen miles away, crossing back into the US just before 7am local time, about three and a quarter hours after I'd left Minot AFB. I'd originally intended to travel a shorter, faster route, but the fire in the Weapons Storage Area had looked so good and the massive doors so difficult to reopen that I'd figured I had plenty of time, so had chosen a wider, slower route as it'd be safer. Safe was good! It had been both safe and easy so far, as there'd been very few radar stations to deviate around, very few houses to worry about passing too close to, and the land was fairly flat, which facilitated high-speed, low-level flight. That easy flying continued for the trip down the length of the Adirondack Park Reserve, across a couple of highways, then down the length of the Catskill State Park. My first 250 miles since crossing the border only taking me about three-quarters of an hour. I found a computer and printer in an empty house outside of East Stroudsburg. I typed up the one-page note I wanted, printed it, then floated it out the bathroom window as usual. I put it in the backpack, again taking extreme measures to make sure nothing from me got anywhere near it. I also did a little internet surfing to see what the news networks were saying about Minot AFB. The Air Force wasn't giving ANY details yet. They admitted there'd been a disaster there - the explosions had been heard for miles around, with flames and smoke clearly visible, so denying it was a disaster was pointless - but the isolation of the base had allowed the Air Force to deny the press any access. So far they were even refusing to say whether the Guardian Angel had been involved. There was no word about missing nukes and I was sure the Air Force didn't know about that little aspect yet. My attack on Minot had looked so similar to my purely destructive attacks on other bases that although they might worry about their nukes, they shouldn't think that I'd taken any. When I was airborne again, I sealed myself in an airtight box, moved the backpack ahead of me, then let the wind blow against it to blow any foreign matter away. I removed the letter between two NP-plates, and the bomb from the bag too, letting the wind do its thing inside the bag, and on the outside of the bomb. Then I repacked and re-boxed them. Travel got trickier after that, as there was a lot more population. I had to fly very low so my bomb wouldn't show up on ground-based radar (America is blanketed by radar, such as the air traffic control network. Fortunately, the vast majority of the "blanket" uses frequencies that go straight through me). I was reaching an area of the country where there was a much greater than normal density of radar signals so I had to make sure I stayed very low, but there were so many houses that I couldn't avoid them all. Flying low over thousands of homes risked someone seeing me, and I obviously wasn't going to get all the way to DC before daybreak, so I might as well land sooner. I approached the next big town, seeing that it was Allentown. I was intending to locate the bus station, land within walking distance, then get a bus to Washington DC; probably via Philadelphia, I imagined. While looking for the bus station, I saw some men riding big motorcycles. Taking one of their bikes was better than catching a bus because I preferred to keep my helmet on. Their clothes implied they were criminals, but I knew lots of ordinary men bought Harleys and dressed the part. I flew closer and did a quick sight blob search. I stopped bothering after seven knives and four handguns. It worked with F-15s and helicopters so I'd try it with a motorcycle: I flew low enough to locate and pinch the fuel line of one of the bikes. It was plastic so I had to hold it closed and keep pace while the engine died and it rolled to a stop. I made sure it stopped rolling quickly as I was having to fly lower than I liked. The bike's rider and his friends stopped and worked on his bike trying to get it going again, with a complete lack of success. I'd been hoping they'd give up, park it, and he'd get on someone else's bike and they'd all ride away, leaving me to steal his bike. I'd put it in neutral and push it all the way to DC with light blobs in the head- and tail lights. Unfortunately they didn't abandon the bike. One of them pulled out a cellphone, made a call, then they annoyingly settled in to wait. They continued to try to get the faulty bike to start, so while they were making a lot of noise trying to start it, I punched a minimum-sized hole (one-sixteenth inch in diameter) in the underside of the gas tank. A few seconds later, I set fire to the leaking gas. The owner LEAPED off the bike, yelling and beating his jeans. There was a great deal of commotion, especially as the fuel tank ruptured even more and the bike was engulfed in sudden flames, getting everyone's attention and ruining their night-vision. During the commotion, the bike that was parked the farthest away lifted an inch and zipped around the next corner. It even had its keys in it, which was convenient. Wearing my bomb-containing backpack, I dropped down the opposite side of the building I was sitting on top of, while the bike came around the next corner to meet me. I dropped onto it, then I rapidly flew it down the street an inch above the surface. When I was a couple of blocks away. I stopped, got the bike started properly, and rode quickly away before I had a large gang on my tail. It was a much bigger motorcycle than I was used to, but that didn't worry me because if I lost control, NP would hold it steady and control it for me. I used a sight blob to watch behind me, but I never saw any pursuit. It should take them a few minutes to notice the bike was gone, and I had a feeling they weren't on speaking terms with the cops so they might not even report it stolen. I rolled along, the bike idling in neutral all the time, with NP providing the push. I didn't want to stop for gas because gas stations have cameras, but I wanted the bike to look realistic. Idling was perfect because the all the lights worked, saving me the bother and small risk of having to fake them. I stopped in a deserted area off the road about half an hour outside of Washington DC. I placed some NP-plates around the flesh of my body, pushing out my shirt to give any later security cameras the impression that my body and arms were considerably bulkier than in reality. I was particularly proud of how fat my belly looked. I took the backpack off, and spent a couple of minutes flying it and the bomb - still inside the trash bags and sheet - back and forth to make sure none of my genetic material was on or in them. I put the bomb back in the backpack, put it in an airtight NP-box, and moved it so it was lying on its side, facing forward, down by the bike's rear wheel. It looked like it was mounted on a frame, which it effectively was, NP providing the mounting brackets. I arrived in Washington DC at 10:45am. I knew from my snooping around the FBI Headquarters that Pennsylvania Avenue ran in the direction of the Oval Office. A nuclear bomb going off outside the Avenue's Old Post Office Tower, for example, would have nothing more substantial than a few trees and a sheet of glass between ground zero and the President's ass half a mile away. Half a mile was easily inside the "Every Building Is Flattened and Everyone Is Dead" radius of a W80, so placing it within line of sight of his office was unnecessary. I thought it'd create a nice, "Looking Down The Barrel Of A Gun" effect though, which would pressure him more. As I rode toward the White House, I used a computer near a set of lights I was stopped at to send an email message to the major news networks: From: Guardian Angel assigned to Mark Anderson. Be in Freedom Plaza, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, 11:30 am Archangel Michael's authentication codes: [I gave them]. Clearly the Guardian Angel isn't as verbose as Archangel Michael. Or as I am either, come to that. I stalled for a while in an area that had no security cameras, then headed toward Freedom Plaza, being careful to arrive exactly on time. I'd given the media enough time - barely, but I imagined that the Guardian Angel was their top priority - and hopefully not long enough for the Government to cook up some messy plan. I also liked the image of the angel doing EXACTLY what it said, right down to the second if possible, as that could reinforce its other messages. I rode up Pennsylvania Avenue from the east, heading toward the White House. From about 1,500 feet away, I sent a sight blob ahead and up to check that the media was at the designated spot. I was very pleased by the turnout. There were even some TV vans parked in the Plaza, which was surely against the traffic rules. Perhaps those rules only apply to normal people, not to important television reporters. A couple of blocks short of Freedom Plaza, in the slow traffic, my backpack opened and the contents flew under the SUV I had put myself next to. My leg, bike and the car hid the action from everyone else. My backpack retained its full shape and resealed itself, thanks to more NP. I'd chosen a car that was in a middle lane, implying it was going past Freedom Plaza rather than turning off before it. That wasn't essential, because the package could always change cars or simply fly the remaining distance to the Plaza. After the transfer I changed lanes to the right, to be in position for a turn north up 12th Street before I reached the plaza, and to let the SUV serving as my unwitting bomb carrier pull ahead of me. I wanted my involvement to be as discreet as possible. That wasn't essential since I was fully covered with my shape hidden, but the fewer clues the Feds got, the better. I was fairly sure that they'd be looking VERY hard for clues after this. I was making that turn as the SUV drove past the Plaza. The package slid out from under it, around the tires of the cars in two more slow moving lanes, then onto Freedom Plaza. Its flying across the sidewalk and into the middle of the plaza got people's attention. I pulled the coverings off it, then stood it on its base with the top of the note pinned face up underneath it. The sheet and garbage bags I put in a very large NP-box, lifted them up fifty feet, opened the top, then set them alight. I poured on the heat and kept the remains inside the box until there was virtually nothing left, when I reduced the box to something tiny, and launched it upward with great acceleration, as I'd done with the other four coverings in Canada. The fire got some attention, but the steel, bullet-shaped thing got the most attention initially. As I said before, it's about 3 feet high by 1.5 feet wide. It looks like a large bullet, except that it has no nose. The top is flat, about a foot below where a scaled-up bullet would have its point. The warhead has almost no writing on it, and not even the international radiation trefoil symbol. It has a small metal plate with its model and serial number, some mounting lugs and a dataport for plugging into the missile (so its yield can be set, detonation command give, etc.); otherwise it's just a boring-looking steel casing. People looked at it, and then they looked around for the Guardian Angel to appear, or for something else more interesting and easier to interview than a truncated artillery shell. I could make things more interesting. I had to do it quick because I'd be riding out of range soon. The Guardian Angel emerged from the ground behind the shell, rising to a height of six feet. It paused for half a second, and then picked up all the reporters and, ignoring the female screams, moved them to the note. It sank back into the ground. Some of them got the hint, and read the note: From: Guardian Angel assigned to Mark Anderson. You would not believe I could create such effects, so I took W80s from Minot AFB earlier today. Serial numbers: [I listed the five numbers]. If Mark Anderson's quality of life is unacceptably degraded, including by deceit, I may kill those I consider even partly responsible. If that includes an organization: If a friend or family of Mark Anderson is imperiled, I will detonate 1 W80 near that organization's ultimate leader. If Mark Anderson is imperiled, I will detonate 2 W80s, one near the organization's ultimate leader, the other to do maximum damage to that organization. If Mark Anderson is killed again, I will detonate 4 W80s, one near the organization's ultimate leader, the others to do maximum damage to that organization. God is permitting my actions. We are unhappy. The lights had changed in front of me so I had to ride out of range before I could see their reactions. When they finally learn what they're standing in front of, I'm sure the reactions would be a joy to behold. Perhaps not to experience, but definitely to behold. I had originally intended to write more, including something to make me sound scarily knowledgeable about nuclear bombs and to imply I could increase the yields beyond what they were designed for, but I figured my still having four 150 kt bombs was scary enough already, and I quite like the effect of the Guardian Angel's minimal wording; that had a scariness all of its own as its being so short made it easy to imagine the angel would be equally abrupt when it acted. The grammar was also deliberately somewhat unusual, which I thought added a little to the scary inhumanity of the angel. I had succumbed to one temptation though, I'd copied Archangel Michael's idea of putting a "smiley face" inside the aircraft carrier's nuclear reactor, by undoing one of the bomb's internal screws and using it to scratch a "sad face" on the inside of the casing. If the Government opened it up - which I was sure they would - they'd see the face. That had some scary implications for them, including that I could activate the bomb. I'd originally intended to aim the note at "The US Government", but then worried that might encourage enemies of our Government to kill me. So I thought about aiming it at "governments", but I thought "organization" was better. That this demonstration was aimed at the White House would be obvious to everyone because that was in sight just down the road, but hopefully "organizations" would be understood to include the US Air Force, the FBI, and anyone else who might contemplate causing us problems. The note's last paragraph should've been obvious given the rampage the Guardian Angel had started since the assassination attempt on the Andersons, but I thought it would apply more pressure if stated explicitly. Our politicians like to pretend to be religious (if you'd read even 1% of the documents Majestic Countdown had, you'd use "pretend" too), so my making it clear that God was on the other side, they'd have great trouble defending their position. I can't risk flying during daylight and I didn't want to hang around the scene of the crime (I wasn't sure what the charge would be, but I suspected that leaving nuclear bombs in public areas was a crime. At the very least it'd be first-degree littering), so I headed south to stay near the coast. When it came time to get rid of the bike and backpack, I could take them out to sea and dump them. One thought that had crossed my minds several times during our little war had been: I'd had many periods when I regretted not getting out with only one merge, but I'd needed the boosts to my abilities. They'd made my war quite easy. ------- Chapter 367: Nuclear Aftermath Thursday, June 7, 2007 (Continued) Being the responsible people they were, the reporters agreed to keep the news secret to avoid panicking The People, instead quietly phoning The Authorities to report the presence of a nuclear bomb in downtown... - Oops! I appeared to have slipped into a weird parallel dimension (correction: an "opposite dimension"). Wait a second while I pull myself back to reality. I'm back now. As a general rule, DC-based political reporters don't know a great deal about nuclear physics - or much else come to that, although they do have encyclopedic knowledge of all the bars in central DC and they dress very well - but the morning's news about the F-15s crashing into the Weapons Storage Area at Minot AFB had made them all aware that Minot's WSA stored nuclear weapons. That fact plus the tone of the Guardian Angel's note added up to an EXTREMELY disturbing possibility. Some of the reporters owned handheld gizmos which were capable of accessing the internet (for email purposes rather than fact-checking, because they're POLITICAL reporters). The vans had laptops with internet access, and all the reporters had cellphones to call their studios: "Hi, it's Sandy here. Can you google 'W80' for me please. What is it? 'A small thermonuclear warhead'? Okay, thanks. By the way, can I put in for some vacation time please? I'm thinking of taking a trip to Fiji. Right now works for me." Meanwhile the cameramen had been doing their job. They'd missed the package's silent arrival in the plaza, but they'd filmed the casing sitting there, the Guardian Angel's appearance, and the reporters floating toward the note. Some of the cameramen had zoomed in on the note before it became obscured by reporters' legs. Some of the reporters had pretty legs, so the cameras tended to linger on those as there was nothing else to film. Then the heads on top of the pretty legs found out what a W80 was, so the pretty legs, and the other legs too, turned away and RAN! The heads screaming, "It's a BOMB! A NUCLEAR BOMB! RUN!" Being the responsible people they were, the network producers getting the live camera feeds decided to keep the news secret to avoid panicking The People, instead quietly phoning The Authorities to report the presence of... - Oops! That damned opposite dimension got me again. The public had the right to know and it'd make for FANTASTIC ratings, so all across the country: "NEWSFLASH! NEWSFLASH! BREAKING NEWS! We have unconfirmed reports that moments ago the Guardian Angel deposited an as yet unexploded nuclear bomb in Freedom Plaza, central Washington DC, a short distance from the White House. Repeat: There is an as yet UNEXPLODED NUCLEAR BOMB IN CENTRAL DC! We cross live to our reporter on the spot, Sandy Johnson. Sandy? Are you there, Sandy?..." Not everyone ran away, as some of them didn't or wouldn't believe it could be what it seemed to be, so some of the networks continued to get live feeds. Cameramen are pretty staunch guys, standing next to a nuclear bomb requiring more than your average degree of staunchness. Most of the networks were able to 'reassure' - while actually scaring the shit out of - the people that the unconfirmed nuclear bomb was just sitting there. Despite the reassurances, it would be fair to say that it was NOT "work as normal" in DC. Many people, then even more people as the report gained confirmation, then hundreds of thousands of people, and then pretty much everyone else, fled the city. That was especially true of the inhabitants of the central city, most of them getting about twenty feet before gridlock stopped their cars. Some people in other cities even fled those cities, just out of panic. The networks showed the note, explaining that it was a FUTURE threat. That probably kept some people from fleeing, but it didn't seem that way judging by the videos of the bumper-to-bumper conditions on the streets and highways out of DC. I hadn't bothered finding out whether the President was in the White House today. I didn't want to take any risk by asking or snooping for that information, especially as it didn't really matter. He'd understand the warning just as clearly whether he was in his office or not. As it happened, he wasn't in the Oval Office when the newsflashes intruded on normal programming, but he was having a meeting elsewhere in the White House. It only took seconds for the White House to get confirmation that W80s look like the picture they were staring at, and that the five serial numbers matched those of warheads that were supposed to be in Minot's armory. That was enough to utterly disrupt the President's schedule for the day. The Secret Service GRABBED him, and he was outta there as fast as they could get Marine One onto the lawn. The secret service agents, the pilots and the President were shitting themselves during the evacuation because Archangel Michael had warned the guards at Andrews AFB that the President shouldn't fly if Archangel Michael was unhappy. Recent events had provided the more astute analysts with a good hint that the Guardian Angel was probably unhappy, but by helicopter was the only way to evacuate the President fast enough to get him outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb that was effectively parked on his front lawn. Everyone on the helicopter was very happy to be leaving ground zero, but they also knew all too well how their helicopter would do in a Marine One vs. Guardian Angel dogfight. There was also the VERY real possibility that the angel had done what it'd done specifically to get the President into a helicopter. There were VERY scared people in the chopper. The President could have hidden in an underground safe room, but the angel apparently had four more W80s and no one wanted the President to be in a known location given the angel's letter's enthusiastic repeating of "detonate W80 near that organization's ultimate leader." It had waltzed through Air Force bases completely indifferent to every weapon fired at it, and had obtained the W80s out of security equivalent to what the President would be hiding in, so no one thought the angel would have any trouble dropping a warhead at the President's feet if those were left in a known location. The President had to FLEE! The other workers whose actions are worthy of note were a couple dozen of the FBI agents in the J. Edgar Hoover Building just a quarter mile down the street from the Freedom Plaza. They RAN up the street and surrounded the warhead, sending pictures of its ID plate back to the office, and standing guard. The Government keeps sophisticated Geiger counters on hand in case of something like this, several of which were at FBI headquarters. The nearby Secret Service has them too, but the FBI got theirs to the bomb first. It only took moments for the FBI to verify that the casing contained radioactive material, and still the agents stood guard. They might know that they were safe from casual radiation - the same as I'd been safe to fly around with five of them - but they didn't know whether the Guardian Angel had rigged it to explode at any moment. They had to have big balls to stand guard over it. [[They were "protecting the United States of America". Ironically that's the same attitude that had caused this mess. The UAV had been stationed over our home because the FBI considered they had the right and need to "protect America" from Archangel Michael initially, and then the Guardian Angel. National loyalty, combined with the arrogances of sovereignty and unaccountable power had caused them to do as they saw fit, with little regard to having to face any consequences for it.]] That the serial numbers matched and the casing contained radioactive material meant the shit had well and truly hit the fan. The biggest possible size of fan and truckloads of shit. The Government had contingency plans for a nuclear bomb being smuggled into the city, so they put those plans into action. Some parts of those plans were easy to carry out, such as the evacuation of essential personnel, fetching the right sort of bomb squad, putting the Air Force on high alert in case it had to go bomb another country, scrambling lots of fighters so they could scream back and forth over the city to look impressive, reviewing the videotapes from security cameras to find out who'd left the bomb (that was a little tricky in this case), and a whole multitude of other actions. [The videotape did eventually result in the tag of the motorcycle I'd used being traced, as were the tags of every vehicle within a thousand feet of Freedom Plaza. That motorcycle's tags led investigators to its registered owner, a member of the Allentown chapter of the MS-13 gang. It had a very bad reputation and an ambition to be the biggest, baddest gang in America. There was a mutually disagreeable conversation between the Allentown Bad Boys and the Washington Serious Men. The Serious Men won and the full story of how the bike had gone missing emerged. The investigators considered it sufficiently angel-like for that to be the most likely explanation of how the bomb had been delivered. The investigative discovery didn't make any more real progress, getting stuck on questions like "Why would the Guardian Angel choose to travel by motorcycle?", "Who was the fat guy on the bike?", "Can the Guardian Angel possess people like Archangel Michael claimed he could?"] Part of the Government's contingency plan called for trying to capture the culprits. Sealing all the exits from the city would be ideal, but the Government knew that hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of Washingtonians would disagree with not being allowed to flee. Roadblocks were put in place, with vehicles and people being tested for trace radiation before being allowed to proceed. I'd suspected that I might be sealed in by roadblocks, a suspicion that was confirmed by the sight blob I had scouting ahead. I saw the cops in plenty of time for me to turn away before they saw me. I'd seen that they were waving a wand-type thing at people and it wasn't hard to guess what it was. Having spent several hours in the close company of five nuclear warheads I doubted I'd come up clean, but even if I'd been sure I would, I couldn't go through the roadblock. I didn't have any ID with me and I didn't want to lift my visor or remove my helmet because Ron Fisher/Mark Anderson was too well known. With a sight blob a few hundred feet above me, it was easy for me to navigate away. Being on a motorcycle helped too, although they're not as good at dodging traffic as flying sleds. #6: #13: #20: I headed east until I reached the water. Some scouting around took me to Daingerfield Island, a mile south of Ronald Reagan National Airport, although accessed off completely different streets as I didn't want to face any airport security at the moment. The island had a small marina at the north end, which was far too busy for me. People would notice if a guy on a motorcycle rode off the end of the jetty. Other than the marina, road access to the riverbank was very limited. That was great for me because I didn't want anyone else to be there. Most of the island was brush and trees so I stopped on the side of the road in an uninhabited part of the small island, waited for no traffic, then used NP to push the brush to either side and float the bike and me through the gap. From above it'd look like I was pushing the bike along a path, even though I was really a couple of feet above the ground. There were quite a few fighters zooming back and forth overhead by now, some at low level although I'd waited for a gap between those before making this move. I was confident that the high altitude planes would never spot the slight impossibility of what I was doing. I got to the riverbank and it provided me with all the privacy I wanted. Unfortunately the river itself didn't provide me with the depth I wanted, since it got deeper very slowly. I'd have to go out about fifty feet to get two feet of depth, and out about four hundred feet before it'd be deep enough for me to be invisible from above. That problem was fairly easily overcome though. I created an NP-tray about fifteen feet long and five feet wide, with sides an inch high. I lowered it slowly into the water about a dozen yards out, settled it on the bottom, then bulldozed the mud around it onto it. I waited a minute for the mud to settle, then slowly lowered a lid onto it. I lifted it to the surface and looked down at it from above. It didn't look sufficiently murky, so I lowered it to the bottom again, canceled the top, raised the sides to be two inches high, then scooped up dozens of small boxes of mud from the bottom around it, tipping them into the box. I waited for the mud to settle, then put another lid on it. It looked much better when I inspected it on the surface this time. I curved the sides down, to make a two-foot high dome shape. A check showed no one coming from the land, no boats close enough to matter, and the only planes were at very high altitudes. The bike and I lay down on an NP-mat which I covered to make an airtight box that was as vertically thin as possible. We slid toward the water, as the 'water' seemed to slide toward and over the top of us. As soon as we were inside the water-filled dome, the dome reversed its direction and we collectively slid into the real water. I kept the submarine moving quickly and almost sliding along the bottom to be as deep as possible. The dome's top protruded as I headed for the middle of the river, but I thought it wouldn't be too bad. From side-on it looked like a weird swell that quite rapidly diminished in height and area. From above, the dome itself wasn't noticeable, only the wake it was making and that there was an outline of an unclear dark shape under the water. As I got deeper, the outline got vaguer. The dome wasn't attached to my submarine, so water flowed between the submarine and dome, obscuring my and the bike's shapes even more, especially after I pushed the air out of the dome to let it fill with the dirty water we were passing through. I didn't have a dozen fighters scream down to fill me with cannon shells, so I guess it worked. That was good. When I thought I was deep enough, I moved the dome to the side then looked down on myself from four hundred feet up. I couldn't see even a blur of me or the bike, so I canceled the dome and resumed my journey. When the water was another few feet deeper, I paused to expand my submarine by stopping, raising a snorkel, etc. I'd initially made the submarine very flat to have as much water over me as possible, but that was now less of an issue than comfort was, because this was going to be a long trip. With room to move, and my feet no longer tangled up with the bike, I canceled the snorkel and resumed the journey. It was nearly two hundred miles from my entry point to Virginia Beach, as the crow swims, which is following the deepest part of the channel. The Air Force was on high alert and very busy. They had a great deal of real estate and airspace to cover so didn't worry me much, not even the low level passes by pairs of fighters mattering now that I was invisible underwater. The Navy was a nuisance though. It wasn't anything like as frantic as the Air Force, but still inconvenienced me. I'm not sure what they thought they were looking for since everyone thought the Guardian Angel had no body and could 'fly' through the ground, but whatever they were looking for, I didn't want them to find me. The two hundred miles I estimated my travel distance to be was clearly going to be an underestimate, as it didn't allow for the zigzags I had to make to avoid getting near any occupied boat, many of which were busy Navy boats. My underwater speed is mostly governed by how much of my force is lost to overcoming buoyancy. A large submarines takes a great deal of 'holding down', leaving not much force for pushing it. (A large submarine is also constrained in depth, not being able to go much below fifty feet, because I can't make the walls strong enough without running out of minds to push me down, but that wasn't an issue now.) With it having to contain the bike, my submarine was quite large, so its speed was constrained. The water was initially too shallow for me to risk going at even my bike-reduced top speed to avoid creating a wake on the surface, so I averaged about 10 mph for the first three or four hours, although my speed was gradually picking up as the depth increased. The water was soon deep enough for me to speed up even more, but I didn't have any push left after I got up to about 15 mph. Carrying the bike was slowing me down, so it was time to look for a good opportunity to get rid of it. I preferred to do it in water as deep as possible and as far from the central city as possible. I was going to burn the bike before letting it sink, so that meant smoke. Anything unusual near the city would probably get some rapid interest at the moment, but sixty miles away from ground zero was a very different situation. The naval activity had taken a while to peak - while the crews rushed to their boats, presumably - but it had peaked and had been decreasing recently, either with time or because I'd gotten farther away from the city. I found an old, unoccupied catamaran at anchor, moved myself under it and ascended to be near the surface to free up as many NP-fingertips as possible. I split my submarine in two (normally a bad thing to do to a submarine you're in, but okay with my type if done carefully). The bike and backpack was in one box; me, my sheet, helmet and map in the other box. Then I SMASHED the bike, making as many of the big pieces into smaller pieces as I could. I created a large air intake from the surface down to the bottom of the box and several small chimneys that ran from the top of the box to multiple locations between the cat's hulls, to spread the heat out. Then I set fire to the pool of gas. WHOOSH. I splashed water on the underside of the cat because it got hot pretty fast, according to the infrared-sensing radio blob I had looking out for that. I didn't need to let the bike burn out, just enough to destroy any of my DNA on it. That'd probably been achieved in the first few seconds, but I gave it a minute and then blocked the vents. When the fire was out, I descend down to a depth of twenty feet and resumed my travel down the river dropping off pieces of bike as I went. About 6pm, I decided it was time to watch some TV. I was bored and curious to see if anything interesting had happened today. I found a suitable boat and did the usual playing around with the electric switches to get the TV going. It must've been a slow news day because there only seemed to be a single topic worth talking about, although most of the people were yelling rather than talking. The Government's many politicians weren't sure who to scream bloody murder at, but the Air Force, angel and "to the Heavens" came in for a lot of outrage. Politicians were screaming at each other too. They were genuinely very upset, as were the reporters they were talking to and the commentators back at the studios, because all of them and many of their families would've been killed had the w80 exploded. Non-Governmental Washingtonians were screaming too, some at the Government and/or Air Force for pissing off the angel by attempting to kill Mark Anderson's parents, and certainly at the Air Force for not guarding its nukes properly. Some were yelling at the angel for threatening them when it wasn't their fault if the Air Force attacked the Andersons. The Air Force had chosen an interesting set of responses: To the accusation that they hadn't guarded their nukes properly, the Air Force said a politer version of, "Don't be silly, it's impossible to guard something from God." To the accusations that they'd attacked the Andersons, their answer was, "We've given a full report to the President. So far he's chosen not to release it." Apparently in response to the President continuing to not release the document that exonerated the Air Force, a REMARKABLY well-informed, retired, independently wealthy Air Force general was giving ALL those details to the media anyway. In a nutshell, he was saying, "The FBI did it!" The FBI was saying, "We did not!" In response to further questions about whether they'd been using the UAV to spy on the Andersons with Northrop Grumman operating it - information courtesy of the well-informed retired general - the FBI was saying, "We did NOT attack the Andersons." Northrop Grumman was saying, "We can't say anything. We've signed a confidentiality agreement." In answer to the reporter's next question, I learned that NG's confidentiality agreement even kept confidential who the agreement was with. The President was in an "Undisclosed Location" and couldn't be reached for comment. There were dozens of other opinions: "I KEEP telling you, it's the DEVIL! We've got to drive it out! Join me in prayer and send money to..." "The angel didn't set it off. It was just a warning. If no one attacks the Andersons, nothing bad will happen." "It's the President's fault!" "It IS NOT the President's fault!" "We shouldn't have nuclear weapons. This wouldn't have happened if they'd never been built in the first place." I watched for half an hour, but there's only so much outrage and yelling that I can take, especially when it's going around in circles. I resumed my submarine cruise, continuing to litter a piece of bike every minute or so (I'd made a lot of pieces). #2: #30: It wouldn't get dark enough for me to fly until 9pm, so I continued to swim away from DC. The farther away I was when I took to the air, the better. At 8:30pm, I stopped under another boat to get the latest news before deciding what to do tonight. Hopefully not something that required me to top what I'd done last night. The biggest development was that all the pressure the Guardian Angel had been exerting finally forced a useful reaction: The President and FBI Director (my friend Robert Mueller) were standing shoulder to shoulder in an Undisclosed Location, and Director Mueller said, "Yes, the FBI was using that UAV - under the control of Northrop Grumman - to surveil the Anderson residence. But - and I cannot stress this too strongly - neither we nor Northrop Grumman ordered the aircraft to attack. The last order it was sent was to circle overhead at 45,000 feet. Northrop Grumman lost all contact with the UAV at 9:35pm, moments before it started its attack. Either it suffered a malfunction - it was an experimental model after all - or it was taken over by a third party. We and Northrop Grumman are investigating both possibilities." #31: The President then put his arm around his Director's shoulders, stating, "I have full confidence in Director Mueller, blah, blah..." There were no reporters, so no questions. The network's talking-head then told me what Mueller had told me, and then the talking-head told me that the President had backed his Director, and then he asked his co-host what he thought. The co-host thought it was only to be expected that the President would back his Director, which led to the two hosts discussing the fascinating issue of political mutual support for the next couple of minutes, which left my brain totally free to internally discuss the situation. #4: #1: #10: #16: [The financial cost had been very much on the President's mind. No way did he want to lose $216 billion out of his budget - he could bring democracy to Iran for that sort of money! (not him personally, you understand). The FBI might've been willing to take the tiny risk with our detecting a supposedly undetectable UAV, but it was another thing entirely for the President to admit liability for that amount. #16 was wrong because "that they openly admitted to breaking the settlement agreement" did NOT mean the financial penalty wasn't a sufficient disincentive. The Prez never would have allowed the admission if he hadn't already okayed a way of weaseling out of paying it, as will be mentioned later.] The TV news had many other related items, like, "The bomb's been removed. The White House says it's safe to go back to DC now." A DC news anchor scathingly inserted, "You'll know it's safe when the PRESIDENT comes back, whenever that'll be!" The anchor was still rattled and was bitter about being pressured to stay in DC during the day. After reading the note that the Guardian Angel had left, he was SERIOUSLY thinking about applying for a job in another city. Or maybe just going to another city and worrying about finding another job once he got there. Northrop Grumman released a prepared statement more or less confirming Director Mueller's comments. They had sold the UAV to the Air Force, who'd lent it to the FBI. The FBI had hired Northrop Grumman to fly the plane, which they'd done under continuous FBI supervision until 9:35pm, when the signal had cut out. They were sure the subsequent actions of the plane were not the result of a malfunction, but of a third party hijacking the plane. They admitted that because it was still a prototype model, they had been operating it with a simplified communications system, which hadn't been as secure as it would have been fitted with when ready to be deployed to war zones. Regardless, they would be upgrading all their UAVs to have even more advanced communications encryption and other security measures. The FBI's admission made the angel's attacks on the USAF bases and the nuclear warning seem more reasonable and justified. Not for Washingtonians though! - they were still adamantly against the idea of them and their city being blown to Hell - but the rest of country softened a little. The Government had previously denied all responsibility for the UAV's assassination attempt, but now the FBI's admission made the previous denials hollow. The Government had also previously denied that the DHS and CIA had participated in Mark Anderson's illegal imprisonment and subsequent death, and the CIA had denied deliberately duping the Army into attacking the Anderson home, and those denial had all been shown to be lies, so it was very easy to listen to the FBI's denials and believe them to be lies in an attempt to cover up that they'd tried to kill the Anderson parents with the Air Force's active cooperation. A wit rhetorically asked, "CIA and the Army; FBI and the Air Force. Will the DHS partner with the Navy or Marines for their turn at attacking the Andersons?" Director Mueller's comments were interpreted by most people as a confession of an attempted assassination. The public thought, "Thank God the angel ONLY issued a warning this time. That's amazingly tolerant of it." Destroying a few planes and bases now seemed very small potatoes. The FBI had confessed and the angel had made its point, so could everything please go back to normal now? Normal except the Government would have to be INSANE to displease the angel ever again! There was speculation over what the Andersons had done to incur so much hatred from the Government. People were confused about that because the Andersons didn't seem like bad people. There was no hint of a crime they'd ever been involved in, other than the obviously fake pretext about Mark funding terrorism and the even more ridiculous fantasy threat of him having mind control. The FBI had said they were looking for a drug lab in a tunnel as their excuse to surveil our street, but no one had believed that then, and less than no one believed it now. The Government had never come clean with why it had kidnapped Mark Anderson the first time and how his death had been caused, so no one really expected the Government to tell the truth about why it was continuing to attack the family. It was undoubtedly true that MAF was embarrassing the Government, but not nearly enough to justify assassination, especially because the target of that would have been Vanessa. The Government wasn't that embarrassed by MAF anyway. When required by the pressure mounting high enough over any MAF-led issue, the Government investigated the issue quickly but thoroughly, then took whatever action seemed best, often a prosecution and/or making some recompense, and always a little speechmaking with its attendant photo opp'. A Government spokesperson would say, "We don't permit abuses of power and we're grateful to the Mark Anderson Foundation for bringing this person's criminal activity to our attention." It was always the fault of the culprit, never of the Government. That position was fine with Vanessa so she didn't give them any grief for it, even going along with their SOP by setting up mutually supportive press conferences. In short, MAF's actions hardly justified an assassination attempt. One commentator, with a memory good enough to remember the news of a week ago, pointed out that Director Mueller's admission meant the Federal Government would be liable to pay the $216 billion. That caused a moment's hush, while the talking-heads imagined what it'd be like to have $216 billion. #6: #3: #6: #14: We knew from our family's earlier discussions with our local Chief of Police that a warrant was definitely required for the UAV's surveillance. The FBI's surveillance van hadn't needed a warrant to record what was happening on a public street, and not even to record the details of our cars as we drove into and out of our property, but the UAV was a very different kettle of fish, especially if it had been using infrared surveillance at night, which it certainly would have been. #21: #23: That left the somewhat tricky job of getting to my targets, but it was nighttime now and I had my trusty dark sheet to block infrared emissions and obscure my human outline. Plus I could fly most of the way just above the water so I could duck into it if a flesh-detecting radar or another of the low-flying pairs of fighters appeared. I did a little more submarine travel to spread the last pieces of the motorcycle around, then I flew at an altitude of three feet ASL down the rest of the Potomac River, then north up the Chesapeake Bay. I would've flown lower but that produced a wake even after I'd changed the design of my sled so almost all of the displaced air went upward. The total over-water distance was less than a hundred miles but it took me over an hour because I flew so low and slow, and because I often dived to avoid Navy and Air Force activity, including some low-level passes by fighters. I'd certainly stirred up a hornets' nest. Fortunately it was fairly easy to unnoticeably dive quickly using my black sheet to block any sign of my splashes, then pull the sheet down to me. The amount of military activity made me re-reconsider the location for the climactic final scene of my plan. I'd originally intended Beale AFB as it was the obvious location. Upon learning that Northrop Grumman had operated the UAV out of their El Segundo facility, I'd changed my mind and decided to use that. Now I was thinking that it'd be too risky to carry my victims anywhere. I'll do it in their homes instead. I became feet-dry at Annapolis, intentionally next to a home that had a motorcycle and keys that I could borrow. I had to be very careful not to leave evidence, so I was in an airtight box that was riding the bike. It was awkward and I was uncomfortably restrained, but no one would see me clearly enough to notice that I wasn't actually sitting on the seat, holding the handlebars, etc. I rolled it a block away before using NP to start it, then I rode it to within a couple of blocks of the Director's home. Mueller had guards so I didn't want to get any closer. I didn't need to either, especially not yet, as I was only checking that he was home and ideally asleep. I got half of what I wanted, as he was working in his home office. That's all I needed for now. I continued on to the Deputy Director's (John S. Pistole's) home. He wasn't in residence so I was in for a wait. I'd intended to do a last check of TV anyway, so waiting was no problem. I rode around until I found a deserted house that gave me enough privacy to roll my bike on to the property, park it out of sight, and privately listen to some TV. I watched, listened and waited until 11:30pm. There was nothing in the news that changed my plan. In particular, nothing that convinced me to let the FBI off the hook. Not that I could imagine anything that would absolve them; not even their having a warrant for our surveillance would do that. I HAD to get the Government off my case whether they thought they were acting legally or not. And "legally" was a word that had lost nearly all of its moral weight recently. Top Government had been giving themselves immorally invasive legal powers hand over fist for several years now, and ignoring the laws that didn't suit them anyway, so their having a "legal right" was a joke. But I was happy to see there hadn't been any late night announcements about the existence of any such legal pretext. The FBI's Director and Deputy Director had certainly known about the surveillance of my families - those operations had been widely reported and must've been widely discussed within the FBI because of the potential $216 billion price tags to our discovering the surveillance van and attic camera stakeouts. The D & DD had allowed the UAV's surveillance to continue, so tough shit for them. They were going to serve as a cautionary lesson for all the senior bosses of the Government's investigative agencies. I went back to Pistole's home at 11:35pm. He was in bed. He looked to be still awake, but that didn't matter. I left him alone while I went back to Mueller's home to confirm he was still there. He was, and was sleeping with his wife. They had a shared bedroom but separate beds, which made things a little easier for me. Pistole slept in the same bed as his wife so I'd have to be more careful with him. Because Mueller had security outside his house, I wanted to do him last because that attack had more chance of being discovered quickly, perhaps in time to warn Pistole. So having established that both my targets were home, I turned around and headed back to Pistole's for the last time. I could get within twenty four feet of him, which made it even easier. I inflated an NP-fingertip inside his trachea at the same time as I grabbed his limbs, head and body, holding him totally immobile. His eyes flew open, that being about the only part of his body he could move. I sealed his mouth and nose with NP to make it even harder for him to wake his wife: he had no airflow to yell with, but maybe he'd think to click his tongue or bang his teeth. I lifted up the bedclothes on his side of the bed and floated him into his en-suite, pushing the door quietly shut behind him. I tilted him upright, ripped his pajamas off him to add to his indignity, to even more discourage others from making nuisances of themselves with my family. I tossed his PJ into a corner. Then I had the Guardian Angel rise up through the floor in front of him, just in case he was in any doubt. Using small light blobs, I spelled out, "YOU DIE NOW." He was already in terror because of the ongoing blockage in his trachea and from his being handled so forcefully, but I gave him a further couple of seconds to appreciate his situation and then I cut his head off as quickly as I could, holding it out of the way so his blood would spray over the room. Telling him of his death was perhaps too cruel of me, but I'll be honest and admit that I actually enjoyed that small aspect. The Government, collectively, has caused me a great deal of terror and fear. The DHS, CIA and Army each put me in terrifying situations that lasted far longer than a few seconds. Specific to Pistole, the FBI's surveillance has caused me a great deal of fear, which would've rapidly become terror had they been able to be as intrusive as they doubtless wanted to be. Plus there was all the fear, grief, and other negative emotions the Government had collectively caused my families in the four dimensions they'd done it to 'me' (i.e., to Marks who had contributed minds to me). They'd threatened my life repeatedly, so I was threatening theirs. I can't even joke that I was better at it than they are, because in other dimensions they'd killed me in three out of those four dimensions. #18: I laid his body on the floor in the center of the room, with his arm and legs spread, oriented so his open legs would be the first thing anyone would see. For more indignity, I put his head into the toilet and closed the lid on it. They could discover it later. Speaking of toilet, it's true that bowels void themselves in terrified death; in this one anyway. I was very happy with the effect: the scene was HORRIFIC. Red blood was sprayed all over the white bathroom, piss and shit wherever it'd gone, and there'd been a look of stark terror on his face. I doubted that'd hold because I thought muscles would relax in death, but I hoped it remain long enough to be seen as it'd be a very clear message not to mess with the angel. Then I went to do the same thing to Mueller. I didn't want to risk getting within twenty four feet of him so he didn't get the trachea treatment, but otherwise it was identical. Perhaps slightly more satisfying because he was the top boss and most responsible, but mostly I just felt glad when I'd finished it. I rode the bike back to where I'd gotten it from, returning it and the keys without problem. Then I retraced my previous journey: flying south down Chesapeake Bay, having to go slowly and sometimes dive for the same reason as on the inward trip. At Pocomoke Sound, the level of military activity having reduced, I cut east to pass over ten miles of the short width of land to get to the ocean, where I'd be able to travel much faster. While I was crossing the peninsula, I slowed down to use a convenient computer to send an email to the major news networks: Mark Anderson and his big-family have nearly-two-years fear of undeserved death-at-any-moment. Now Washington-humans know same. W80s buried 25 miles south Ferme-Neuve, near road-works. I only (past) kill people who deserve. I only (future) kill people who deserve. People's-government interferes-spies-threats-attacks my assignment and his loves. God tell stop. If people's-government not stop, people will deserve. Now you have understanding. Now (future) you deserve. I had to give the nukes back, of course. Otherwise the Government would search for them forever, starting with pulling our home's hill apart. They might've started searching there already, but not much would have been achieved in the half-day they'd known the bombs were missing. I'd have preferred to give the bombs back earlier to avoid the risk of our home being invaded, but I didn't want the two FBI bosses to go rushing off somewhere as a result of it. What I'd done was the best timing I could arrange. I was quite proud of the plan. I'd pressured the Air Force into publicly revealing that the FBI was responsible for the UAV's spying on us, and I'd proved that the US armed forces were helpless against the angel. The military were reacting automatically now, but when the nukes were recovered - hopefully amid screams of outrage from Canada - and the current alert canceled, the armed forces should be VERY cautious of going anywhere near the angel again. If not, I could easily give them some more lessons because they were sitting ducks against my random attacks, although I'd have to be careful of anything they might've learned from my recent attacks, like "shoot anyone riding a motorcycle along the flight line." I'd also pressured the politicians. I'd clearly identified them as being culprits too for allowing so many of their agencies to repeatedly attack the Andersons, and I had no doubt that the pressure I'd put the public under would find a release in yelling at the politicians to stop their anti-Anderson actions. Last, and probably the most important, the senior bosses of the major investigative agencies should be EXTREMELY reluctant to even hear my name, let alone allow anything to be done against me or mine. I'm sure their wives would be saying words about the issue too, not wishing to face the same sights that Mrs. Mueller and Pistole would be seeing shortly. Most amusingly, I thought I'd done the whole thing in a way that made the Guardian Angel seem very moral. Sure, the two decapitations stretched the normal understanding of "moral behavior", but I was confident that most people would understand, accept and possibly even agree with that action. Especially as it came at the same time as the "Nuclear Warhead of Damocles" was removed from over the heads of millions of Washingtonians. Two deserving deaths was a small price to pay for the relief of the nuclear fear ceasing. My PR was also boosted by God being so clearly on my side. ------- Chapter 368: Northrop Grumman Integrated has a Bad Day Friday, June 8, 2007 It was 12:40am and I had a long way to go: south past Florida; west across the Gulf of Mexico, across Mexico itself and a hundred miles out into the Pacific; then north to LA. It was about 3,800 miles by my reckoning. Sunrise off LA was 5:30am, giving me five hours. That was an average of 760 mph - exactly Mach 1, which I was NOT going to attempt. I changed my intended route to cut across Florida and estimated that reduced the journey to 3,400 miles, giving 700 mph as the required speed. I could JUST get there in time, so I headed south. #5: #11: I initially had to fly considerably slower than 700 mph so I could duck underwater quickly when a plane came streaking low over the water. There was nothing ominous about that, as there'd been planes flying around at low altitudes since the Freedom Plaza bombshell. It only took me about fifteen minutes to work my way sufficiently south that I could start speeding up. Either the air traffic was reducing with increased distance from DC, or my email was having an effect. Probably just the former this early, I guessed. Another fifteen minutes had me up to 700 mph a dozen feet above the water. It'd take me about six seconds at 6 g's to slow down enough to get underwater without making a too-large splash, by which time a fast moving plane could cover a lot of ground (water, in this case). So I not only had to concentrate hard on not letting any of the bumps get me into an unstable tumbling, but I had to concentrate on searching the sky too. Fortunately I'm very good at concentrating on many different things at the same time, although having more sight blobs would've been very helpful. You might be amused to know that I flew feet-first, as rapid decelerations are more comfortable that way. My eyes were closed so it didn't matter which way my body was facing. It had taken me a while to get over the psychological weirdness of flying backward when I'd first started doing so several flights ago, but it was second nature to me now. Rather than mentally imagining that I was flying, my mental imagery was now that the sled was doing the flying and I was a passenger free to move around in it, so the position of my body on the sled was irrelevant. Another recently acquired help was the discovery of how to adjust the friction of my NP-plates. Making the exterior surface of my flying sled frictionless reduced the drag and turbulence considerably. The turbulence wasn't totally eliminated, but a 95% reduction was wonderful, especially when flying 700 mph a dozen feet above very hard water. I cut across Florida between Gainesville and Ocala, slowing down considerably because the land isn't as flat as the water and it'd hurt to fly into something. I paused at one place to do some quick research on Northrop Grumman's El Segundo facility. Google Earth showed me that it was bigger and more impressive than I'd imagined. Good. I crossed Mexico about two hundred miles south of the US-Mexico border to avoid the surveillance in the border area. The US Border Patrol could VERY easily be using radars capable of detecting people! It would be bad if they detected one flying at 500 mph, that being my average low-flying, cross-country speed, when I'm not slowing down to steal a bottle of drinking water. I'd originally intended to fly a hundred miles out into the Pacific before turning north, but I turned north only fifty miles out to sea because I had a timing problem: I'd picked up a little bit of extra speed during the trip. Partly from getting better with practice so able to put another fingertip or two into pushing, and partly from making small changes to the design of my sled - necessarily only small changes, because I REALLY didn't want to have a failed experiment 12 feet ASL at 710 mph! But despite the improvements, there'd been too much time lost to delays so I was running behind my optimistic schedule. I wasn't going to get to LA early enough to fly over the Northrop Grumman facility in the dark, so it was going to have to be a daytime, land-based attack. That would normally mean angling into the land and borrowing another motorcycle so I could keep my helmet on. My target was three hundred miles directly north of me (although I was out to sea, LA was directly north because the American coastline conveniently bulges out to the west, which was geometrically obliging of it), but even being able to head straight to my target wouldn't get me there before daybreak. I'd be lucky to get another two hundred miles under my belt before dawn broke. If I angled toward the coast to reach it about two hundred miles from now, I'd be pushing my luck to get across the border by daybreak. People-detecting radars have a short range, but flying so close to the area where any border surveillance had to be the strongest would be inviting detection. Having no choice, from dawn onward, today would have to be a day of submarine travel. It being so much slower, I had only flown fifty miles out from Mexico's coast. I kept flying north, which would be roughly parallel to the Mexican coast. There were several radar transmitters sending beams out here, but they weren't in a band that worried me because unlike my high-flying radio blob, my body was well below their horizon, thanks to the curvature of the Earth. The amount of signal reaching my body was far below the detection level. I wouldn't get any closer to land until I was well past the border, so the only thing I had to worry about was patrol boats, which my very large radio blob would see coming long before they could possibly see me or get me on radar if they had the necessary type. The sun drove me underwater even earlier than I'd expected, probably because I was too used to the Cascade Range throwing a large shadow at dawn, which was something the Pacific Ocean didn't do much of. I submerged when I was about fifteen miles east of the southern tip of San Clemente Islands, which was about 75 miles from my target. Since I was several hours of underwater travel away from my destination, I decided it was a good time to do the laundry. Seeing the cops at the roadblock out of DC use some sort of Geiger counter on people had been a reminder of the trace radiation issue. The undergraduate Physics courses I'd read - which was all of them that OSU had online - had included very little material about nuclear physics. Without wanting to be rude, a BS in Physics is useless for anything except doing an MS in Physics, as all the BS does is build a foundation. After doing all the BS reading, my physics knowledge is about as good as the state of the physics world 80 years ago, at best. That has no use, except as a base to add more knowledge to. I wouldn't be surprised if, after completing an MS in Physics I'd only be 25 years behind the times, because physics gets REALLY complicated! Anyway, I digress. My point is that I knew fuck all about "trace" or any other type of nuclear radiation. #24: I didn't know if I had picked up any trace radiation, whether it could be washed off, and even if there was such a thing as "trace radiation" from handling warheads, but in Hollywood movies the characters always have to strip and shower while being scrubbed with a broom, so I should do something similar just in case it was good for my health. Not that I feared the teensy amount of radiation possibly involved, but I did fear the Government learning that I was responsible for stealing five nukes and doing several billion dollars of damage to their military's equipment. I was pretty sure their discovering that I was to blame would be VERY bad for my health. [[I was in less danger than other human beings from radiation damage because my cells were extremely good at repairing genetic damage. Having their energy supplied to them by the Universe freed the cells up from a major task, letting them perform their other tasks better. Obviously that was unintentional as individual cells don't possess brains to have intentions with; it was just a wonderful consequence of my cells not being so badly overworked as everyone else's. And I do mean that cells are OVERWORKED; you would NOT BELIEVE how busy cells are! Imagine every airport in the world, including the ones I'd recently put out of business, scaled down and inserted into a single cell, with all their flights taking off and landing on each other constantly, with time sped up as much as distance is scaled down. That's what the inside of each of your cells looks like on a slow day. Complete with crashes too. Thousands of times a day molecules fly straight through each cell's DNA strand, ripping holes in it. The cells' DNA repair mechanisms are busy little beavers (very little, and VERY busy).]] I hadn't wanted to do the laundry in the Potomac as that hadn't been as clean as I would like, but fifty miles out to sea and twenty feet deep in the Pacific was pretty clean. And - I soon discovered - COLD. I'd stripped and was pushing myself through the water at about 5 mph while my hands and NP-fingertips rubbed my body to dislodge everything dislodgeable (and nothing that wasn't, which wasn't much because it was COLD!). I had other fingertips washing my clothes as they were being towed through the water. I didn't know whether I was achieving anything, but it sure woke me up! Drying the clothes would require snorkeling to vent the moisture-filled air and replace it with dry air. I didn't want to do that while moving because it'd leave a noticeable wake. I could've stopped but I didn't see the need. I had an idea about what I'd do when I got to LA, and it probably included dumping these clothes because they might still be slightly radioactive. It might be better for me not to put them on again even if they were dry, so I decided to stay naked in my recreated submarine. It was centrally heated so I was quite comfortable. My underwater sled was frictionless now, but water isn't noticeably compressible so my speed hadn't increased usefully, so it still took about four hours to get close offshore from the marina at Marina Del Rey. I'd hidden some clothes and cash here when I'd first appeared as Archangel Michael. I spent a couple of minutes looking for them but they appear to have been washed away, which didn't surprise or worry me as Plan B was so easy. There were quite a few boats passing in and out of the marina, each of which I searched and perhaps pilfered from, until I had everything I needed. I kept everything dry by dropping them into a hole in the ocean when the boat's occupant(s) were looking the other way. It was easy to arrange an NP-distraction if needed. It didn't take long for me to obtain a new set of long-sleeved, long-legged stretchy clothes, the top of which had a hood, a hat with a big brim, a large pair of dark sunglasses, colored sunscreen to disguise my face even further, a bag large enough to carry my helmet and dark sheet (the latter two items being new acquisitions obtained during my trip across Mexico), a towel, a book, a pair of sandals, some loose change, and a banana because I was hungry. I incinerated my old clothes and let the ash wash away as usual. Dressed, with sunscreen applied liberally and fake NP-fat padding inserted under my clothes to further disguise myself, my submarine proceeded into the marina. There were hundreds of boats tied up and it was easy to find one parked where its stern was hidden by other boats around it and without any security cameras pointing its way. I unlocked and opened the little stern gate it had on its rear deck, and with a last sight blob check that the way was clear, I made like a seal at Marineland: rising out of the water and onto the ledge, sliding forward on my belly, low so no one could see me. The gate shut and locked behind me. From the boat's rear deck next to its cabin doors, I flipped my hoodie up, stood up with my bag, disembarked onto the jetty and strolled away. There were security cameras operating, but I'd chosen my location carefully. At the worst, they'd have a tape of someone walking off a boat without there being a tape of that person walking onto it, no matter how far back they searched. They'd never bother doing that because no one would know that I'd been on the boat. Even if someone did look at the tapes with suspicion, I hadn't shown my face and my apparent build was very misleading. I walked around the outside of the marina until I could get to the southern beach, then I walked down the coast, past the western end of LAX airport. After a 3.5-mile pleasant walk in the sand, I cut inland on Grand Avenue, then walked through El Segundo for about 2.5 miles until I neared the Mariposa Nash train station. The block east of that station is Northrop Grumman Integrated ("NGI"), the division that deals with UAVs. Northrop Grumman has several divisions in this area, but that was the one that was going to have a bad day. As I neared the train station, I could tell that my 500-foot range wasn't quite enough. Seven hundred feet would've been perfect, but five hundred feet only covered 75% of the three buildings on NGI's block. So rather than walk into the station as I'd planned, I kept walking east along East Mariposa Ave. I was walking head down, hood up, reading my book. I appeared fatter than I really was and I walked with a limp because I was holding a small stone in one sandal. I even had an upside-down NP-bowl pushing up the inside of my hoodie to make me seem taller. All things considered, I didn't fear being identified from surveillance footage. I used sight blobs to scope out the train station to ensure I knew the procedure for getting tickets, that I knew the destination I wanted (the next stop, Aviation Station), the price ($0.50), how often they ran (every twenty minutes), when the next train was due (eleven minutes), etc. Then I searched NGI's building. I was looking for: In particular, the operating panel for 'my' UAV. That was easy to find, as the one I wanted was being guarded and had documents lying around which identified the correct model of aircraft. In general, every other piece of electronics in the place. When the time came to do this, I wanted everything more expensive than a coffeemaker to be history. As this was in the middle of LA, setting a big fire wouldn't be a good idea. I would crush rather than burn, so the job would take a while to do as I'd only have two 'teams': two sight blobs each with 3.5 tons of NP force available. Northrop Grumman Integrated occupied three multistory buildings. They weren't large buildings but there was still a lot of total floor area, and the company did a great deal of electronics work so there were many hundreds of crush-worthy targets. Searching the buildings now would make the job go quicker later. I made a plan of the sequence of rooms I'd attack, starting with the room that contained the most expensive looking collection of electronics, and progressing toward coffeemakers (actually, I'd attack room by room and the coffee makers were spread around, but you get the idea). If I had time, I'd go back and get all the coffeemakers too, to send the company a clear message. In the course of my searching, I noticed that they had quite a few safes. After seeing half a dozen of them I got curious and looked inside. They mostly contained computer media and some paper files. Onsite fireproof backups, by the looks of them. They'd surely have offsite storage too, but I still enjoyed going through all their safes and melting/burning everything inside them. Fireproof meant airtight, so I couldn't create much fire, but it also meant that no staff could tell that the materials the safes contained were being turned into ash or melted slag. I would start one real fire, a small one for 'my' UAV's controller. It was going to be a pancake and then badly burned toast. I wanted to send a message about that too. It only took me four minutes to finish the searching, which meant having to wait seven minutes before the train was due. Because I had to start the attack from the street, to meet the train I should wait about five minutes and then hit them as I started walking back to the station to catch the soon-to-arrive train. I decided that was too much time hanging around on the street and the train's timing might not be accurate either. Hanging around their block or walking away then back again wasn't much of a risk, but it was an unnecessary risk, so I changed my plan slightly. I crossed to the other side of the street to be more unassociated when the fun started, and to disguise that I was changing directions to walk back to the west again. After I'd walked a hundred feet west, I made sure my body showed no change in motion as I started my attack. It doesn't even take a second to 'stomp' something with 3.5 tons of force (or squeeze it, if that seemed more appropriate), and both the rooms I started in had many pieces of equipment in them, so their staff saw multiple and rapid stomp, stomp, stomp ... Having pieces of equipment being noisily squashed into flat wrecks in rapid sequence around the rooms REALLY freaked the staff! My UAV's panel got the extra treatment, being stomped, pummel, ripped open, then the heat got poured into to, starting with only a few minds' worth and rising quickly to let the guards and the guys working on it feel the heat rising and to get away. I didn't need many minds for that, so the other minds were stomping everything else stomp-worthy in the room. I didn't want to have the trail of destruction head west at the same pace I did, so I'd planned to have the stomping happen in my guess of descending value of rooms, and I'd stop my attack when I found myself out of range of the next location I wanted to stomp (well, I might do two or three more areas that were in range, but no more than that). The way it worked out, my attack lasted as long as it took me to walk three hundred feet, which took about 1.5 minutes. Each team could 'stomp' about 2 times per second, depending on how fast the cabinets collapsed, so that was a total of more than 360 stomps during the attack. Probably 450 pieces of expensive equipment got turned into scrap as sometimes one piece had been sitting on top of another, enabling me to get both of them in one stomp. It was one and half minutes of panic-inducing nightmare for the staff of Northrop Grumman Integrated - now "Northrop Grumman Disintegrated". As a parting message, I successively picked up a couple dozen of the most expensive looking cars out of the staff parking lot and placed them in a big "sad face" on the roof of the largest building. I didn't damage the cars, merely relocated them. They'd be usable again once Northrop Grumman got them down off the roof. Half the staff looked like they were running home today anyway, judging by the way they were pouring out of the doors and not stopping. I was looking forward to seeing the "sad face" on the TV soon. Its connection to Archangel Michael's smiley faces would be obvious, and that it'd turned sad sent a clear message of the angel's opinion of recent events. I walked farther west, turning south at the first street that took me out of sight of the targeted buildings. Then I increased my slow walking speed about 50%, heading for the coast, the sounds of sirens already approaching. I was walking through a high-density residential area and there were enough people on the streets that I wasn't noteworthy. It was an easy, worry-free 2.5-mile brisk walk to the coast, then a few more miles of walking north paddling my feet in the water with my pants' legs rolled up and my towel dangling around my neck, looking like any number of other lunchtime beach visitors. The helicopters and fighters overhead were buzzing and zooming around pointlessly. [Northrop Grumman Integrated went on to have a VERY bad year. I'd done a huge amount of damage. Some of the stomp targets had been worth tens of millions of dollars, but more significant than the replacement cost was the lost time. It took months to replace their testing and production equipment, then months longer to replace the prototypes, etc. By the time they were finally back to square one, all of their competitors were a couple of years more advanced. To make it worse, many of Northrop Grumman's staff thought IMMEDIATELY was an excellent time to look for another job, the best staff easily finding other employment as the arms industry was having boom years and its companies were very eager recruit new staff. And last, NG's insurance company decided that Northrop Grumman had invited the trouble by acting illegally and predictably incurring an Act of God, so their insurance was voided. There was a lot of money at stake so that turned into a LONG, drawn-out legal battle, with NGI suing their insurers and then the FBI. Legally speaking, it was an interesting case. Financially speaking, it was an expensive failure for NGI.] I retraced my path to the marina, returned to the boat I'd used before, checked the way was clear, ducked down, then slid off the stern into a hole in the water. I recreated my submarine and motored, in a motorless way, out to sea. Fifty miles offshore, I set fire to EVERYTHING I had: my clothes, the dark sheet, helmet, watch and even the cash. I was "as naked as a jaybird" (that must be an English species because I've never noticed any naked birds walking around America. They'd presumably have to walk, having no feathers). I got rid of everything in case there was any trace radiation on it. I even had another bracing swim in the ocean, scrubbing myself with sand I'd collected while leaving the LA beach. I turned right and motored north at a steady 20 mph for the rest of the day, heading toward the coast as the sun set. After searching several boats unsuccessfully, I finally found and liberated another of those most essential of traveling items: a dark-colored sheet. I submarined away from the boat, wrapped the sheet around myself, then ascended to fly farther out to sea then north considerably faster than my previous 20 mph. After what seemed like the right amount of time, I headed inland. Without my map and watch I was forced to navigate manually, which was no problem at all. I've flown over northern California and southern Oregon often enough that I know all the major settlements by the pattern of their lights. I don't even need to check street signs. I stopped once to break into a house for a very long and thorough shower. 'Breaking' into houses is SO EASY with NP and sight blobs, especially if I take the time to search for an especially easy one. I wasn't worried about the house having an alarm - the one I used now did - because bathrooms are rarely wired. All I need this time was an unoccupied house with bathroom windows I could open from the inside. This one had louver windows, so I pushed the louver glass out, then carefully slid my body headfirst in through the narrow window frame. Once in, I kept a sight blob looking for anyone coming home while I had a very nice shower, using NP to wield a scrubbing brush borrowed from the laundry. If trace radiation could be scrubbed or washed off, I was sure it was gone by now. I thought of picking up the latest newspapers for my families, but it'd be best not to bring anything to the cabin that shouldn't be there in case we had to explain it later. I was also tempted to watch some TV, but I'd rather get back to my loved ones. It'd only been two days since I'd left them, but it felt like FAR longer. They should know the latest news; but if not we could relocate somewhere that had a TV. I slid my clean, naked body out through the narrow window, replacing all the louver panes while simultaneously wrapping myself in the sheet. As Mom would say, "Many hands make light work." No hands involved this time, but a thousand fingertips can also make work go quickly. I hit the air, easily following the line of hills I recognized to lead me to my families. I collected the pistol I'd left loose on the way because it's not safe to leave weapons lying around. When I neared my families' hideout, I proceeded very cautiously: checking out any obvious places for observers to have set up, landing out of sight of it and approaching closer through the trees while searching for any watchers, stopping every couple of hundred feet to sight blob check the area ahead and to the sides of me very thoroughly just in case there was any sort of ambush waiting for me. I sneaked closer and sight blob searched close around the cabin and inside it. My families looked relaxed and happy enough, with everything else as it should be. Paranoia is hard to give up so I even sneaked up next to the side of the cabin to get within twenty four feet of them to check that their emotions were acceptable, which they were. I walked around to the door and called out, "I'm back!" I was nearly trampled to death by the rush. ^ There was the usual low-informational-content, high-emotional-content greetings: "You're back!", "We were SO worried!", "How are you?", "You got NUCLEAR BOMBS!", "What ARE you wearing?" I couldn't resist a little tease, "You've been stuck out here too long, Julia; the fashions have changed. This is what everyone's wearing these days. Do you want to wear this one back to town?" Julia didn't fall for it. (Okay, I'll admit I was out of practice. You should laugh at my joke anyway, or I might drop a W80 on your ass.) When the greetings were over, I changed out of my sheet and into some clothes while explaining why I was wearing a sheet. I mentioned that I was hungry after my war, so I sat at the crude table while the girls cooked and the parents grilled me. After the irresistible initial comments were taken care of, the parents made me recite my actions from the moment I'd left them, step-by-step (not that I'd walked hardly at all). What I'd done, why I'd done it, what had been happening around me. They weren't interested in things like, "And then I pushed the fighters' joysticks forward", but in making sure they knew everything they needed to decide what we should do next. I'd not caught any news since the decapitations, but their radio had been on an all-news channel continually for the last couple of days - it was on in the background now, although drowned out - so they were able to bring me up to date after I finally finished giving them the details they wanted, as that's the way around it goes with parents. The plan for Stage Two (after the Air Force had divulged who was responsible for the UAV being over our head; probably the FBI we'd thought), had originally been for me to kidnap the top boss or two and their wives, fly them to Beale AFB, place the women on the tarmac, then drop their husbands at their feet from several hundred feet up. The parents had already signed off on that so I knew they'd have no objection to the decapitations, as that tactic had been consistent with the original plan. It'd been safer too (for me), which they agreed with. The original Stage One plan had been for me to attack Air Force bases until the Air Force squealed about who was responsible for the UAV, and then for me to inflict Stage Two on those criminal assholes. My leaving a thermonuclear warhead in central DC had added a nuance to Stage One that the parents felt the need to discuss. They told me that the bombs had been recovered already. The Canadian Government had cooperated, wanting to get rid of them as fast as possible. It had naturally complained bitterly about the bombs being in their territory, and the US Government had predictably replied (to paraphrase only a little), "It ain't our fault; the angel did it." We'd be saying the same thing soon when people tried to blame us for the angel's deeds. It was an irresistible excuse. The parents were unanimous in being happy that I'd given the bombs back, and VERY happy that I hadn't pushed the button on any of them, not that they have buttons. Dad did joke that it was a pity I hadn't set a very small one off under the White House. Mom told him off for even joking about it. I think Mom was worried I might think it was acceptable, which was silly of her because I knew there'd be far too much collateral damage. I'd taken the bombs and a few hours later had arranged for their return, so in the physical sense everything was back to normal, although Minot AFB had a big repair bill coming up. The significance of my adding a nuclear nuance to our original plan wasn't physical, but intellectual and emotional. Especially emotional! The public was VERY emotional about the Government not pissing off the angel EVER again. Once my last email had been translated into comprehensible English, and it was explained to the public that the angel was going to be holding them responsible for the actions of their government in the future, the public was EXTREMELY insistent that the Government stop doing EVERYTHING remotely connected with my families. Public sentiment was strongly in favor of the Government forgetting about Oregon entirely. The DC media community gave the public's opinion a LOT of airtime, and NO ONE was interviewed in DC that had a view in any way derogatory toward the angel, the Andersons or the Williamses. There must've been some people with the opposing view - since there are rabid, thoughtless Christians everywhere - but apparently no DC reporters or cameramen could ever find them. Can you work out why the WASHINGTON reporters reported only that side of the story? Elsewhere in the country, Christians were given airtime to express their views, many of which were of the "It's the Devil!" type, further reinforcing my opinion of Christians. Even the 'sensible' Christians who were interviewed - by which I mean Christians who weren't televangelist money grubbers - mostly condemned my angel. Their criticisms were very carefully worded, and sometimes no more forceful than a "Tut tut" would be, but they clearly disapproved. Presumably no self-respecting Christian would disagree with God, so they were effectively saying that they didn't believe the Guardian Angel was from God. It wasn't of course, but I was amazed that virtually every Christian who appeared on TV thought that. It wasn't because Christians are smart - God no! - but clearly because they didn't want to accept ANYTHING that disturbed their fervently held beliefs. Their needs were more important to them than their god. The intellectual effects of my nuclear nuance were harder to judge because it was the back room effects that mattered. It was widely agreed that everything the angel had done was to protect Mark Anderson and his family, so there was an extremely obvious logical conclusion to be drawn, but had the Government drawn it? Everyone wanted to know that, especially the DC reporters, who chased as hard as they could to get that question answered. The Government insisted that it had no intention of doing anything that would give the angel reason to react. Its spokespeople even appeared outraged that anyone would imply otherwise. Given the Government's previous attacks on my family and killing of me, no one was reassured. It was impossible to tell what the Government thought. The politicians could yell back and forth at each other in front of cameras all they wanted, but the Government's response was going to be decided by only a few men in rooms well away from any cameras. There was little official reaction to the decapitation of the heads of the FBI (that'd been discovered and publicized already). There was a short, official statement condemning acts of violence, and a statement that replacements would be found as soon as possible. I imagined that might be a difficult process. The head-hunters would earn their commissions finding applicants for those two jobs. There was little unofficial reaction either. Grieving-widow stuff of course, but at the end of the day the D & DD had kind of asked for it. The FBI had been caught illegally surveilling our house, they'd lied in their initial denials, and they had continued the surveillance. It also seemed very likely that they'd inexplicably tried to kill the Anderson parents - the CIA's prior actions making the FBI's attack seem very plausible; certainly more plausible than their denial - and everyone had been repeatedly warned that Guardian Angels were deadly. The public consensus was that it would've been surprising if the angel hadn't done something similar to what it had. Northrop Grumman was extremely angry about recent events, but with the exception of Northrop Grumman employees and shareholders, no one cared. They'd been operating a stealth spy plane over the private home of American citizens without the FBI having a warrant - that omission had been quickly established - so tough shit for NGI. Hadn't they heard that Guardian Angels are deadly? People were too relieved to have the nuclear bomb threat removed to care about Northrop Grumman. The company talked about suing me, but nothing came of that. Perhaps because their lawyers said they had no hope, or maybe they were scared of the Guardian Angel paying a return visit to all the remaining Northrop Grumman divisions or to the company President's home one night. One point that came out of it which I very much approved of was that the commentators said, "The Guardian Angel protects Mark Anderson from EVERYONE. Whether the first five young men it killed outside Mr. Anderson's home, the Air Force, the directors of Government agencies, or public corporations; if anyone threatens Mr. Anderson, the angel takes action. Everyone would be well advised not to do anything to anger the angel." That was a sentiment I totally agreed with, and was happy to hear it mentioned several times (some of this information was being supplied by the parents, some I heard from the radio over the next few hours. I'm collapsing the timeframe somewhat to give you a fuller explanation). My families also approved of what I'd done to NGI in LA, so that was fine too. The bottom line, as far as my families were concerned, was that they thought my modified plan had been even better than the original. Judging by the public's reaction - as best we could judge through the radio - "Nuclear Deterrence" is a powerful and highly effective strategy. The angel had deliberately killed only two people, and those were the two in charge of the organization that'd probably tried to kill the two parents of the boy the angel was ordered by God to protect, so the public didn't think the angel had been out of line. Gruesome, but not out of line. A significant proportion of the public even admired the angel, as it'd demonstrated a great deal of restraint and had still been incredibly effective at getting its message across. Other than from religious nutcases, nearly every other person's accusations and condemnations were directed at the Government, Air Force and/or FBI, rather than at the angel. With that result, the parents liked what I'd done. I raised the issue of the people who'd been killed 'incidentally': from being too close to ammunition when it'd cooked off, or in one case, from rushing into a burning building to save the Air Force's paperwork. Five people had died at various bases after I'd gone, and several dozen people had suffered a range of injuries, often burns. The parents got quiet and shook their heads, but they didn't have a good answer. Vanessa's was the only substantial comment, "You can't make good to those people or their families, but you can strive to make your life as worthwhile as possible. You have the potential to save or transform thousands or even millions of lives." Theoretically, my largest source of comfort should have been the knowledge that if the Government got their hands on me and somehow stopped me from killing myself, then it was all too easy to predict the "End of Human Civilization in Every Dimension" outcome. Measured against that unimaginably large calamity, a few accidental deaths were a very small price to pay. In reality though, that wasn't a very effective comfort, perhaps because it was too abstract. Other than my parents not blaming me now, my largest comfort was that I was stinking rich - unlike just about everyone else in the world, I wouldn't need to devote my working-life to earning money, letting me devote it to worthwhile projects. As Prof and Vanessa were, I was very confident that I could achieve some remarkable advances. The official parental seal of approval of my little war having been granted, we discussed what we should do next. More rampaging from the Guardian Angel was off the agenda, but there were plenty of other options. As bizarre as it seems, that school exams started in three days was an issue. The parents thought we should be able to return to our home soon, so they wanted to do it in time for Monday morning's exams. We discussed the $216 billion too. I told Julia, "You'll be so rich that you can wear rags and no one will dare criticize you. Imagine all the time you'll save! That must be a relief?" "{Raspberry}." We discussed less important aspects of the situation, agreeing to wait and see what the radio had to say in the morning. Sleeping conditions were primitive as we had to sleep on the floor, which was probably another reason the parents were eager to get back home as soon as possible. ------- Chapter 369: Returning Home; Part One: It Wasn't Easy Saturday, June 9, 2007 After my one and a half hours sleep, I extracted myself from my tightly clinging wives and went for an enjoyable walk in the woods. Partly to make sure we were alone, but mostly just for the pleasure of it. We were in a very natural area so surrounded by lots of good quality flora and fauna. I'd learned a great deal about Oregon's natural life as a result of Ron and Ava's mini-National Park on the west side of our property. Where I was now was higher and with a much wetter climate, but I very much appreciated its unspoiled nature. I can see better at night than you can in daylight, I can zoom my two sight blobs 400-odd feet in any direction to observe animals that'd never let humans near them or are normally invisibly high in the trees, I can sneak along noiselessly by floating inches above the ground, my proximity sense picks up almost every lifeform within 24 feet of me that's large enough to have much of a mind (birds, mice and anything larger), and I can use EKP to hold it placid if I want. With all of those advantages, I'm a SUPERB woodsman. Eat your heart out, Daniel Boone. After a happy walk, I headed back to the cabin at dawn, accompanied by a few of my new friends: a gorgeous cougar, a larger black bear, some deer including a couple very cute Bambi-equivalents, some coyotes, squirrels and a couple of owls. Snakes I left behind. I parked my little menagerie outside the cabin and went inside to start making breakfast for everyone. Camp cooking is REALLY easy for me. (Think about it, you'll be amazed what my abilities allow me to do.) The smell of food, sunlight, and the dawn birdsong soon woke everybody up. The hard floor probably helped too. When Donna bounced up, I said, "Donna, there are a couple of nice animals outside that you might want to have a look at." "Okay." She went out the door at her usual speed. "EEK!" as Donna leaped back into the cabin at considerably more than her usual speed, as I had the black bear and cougar sitting near the front door, facing it. "It's all right, Donna. I've got control of them." I led the way outside. It took a while to get the humans calmed down enough to enjoy the experience, and I had to put up with Donna hitting me on the arm for scaring her so much, which I deserved, but soon everyone was happily admiring the animals. Donna wanted to know if we could keep the cougar. Or failing that (because that request did fail) could she go for a ride on the bear. That request got the same answer from the same mother. Vanessa said, "When we get back we should talk about this happening. Not that Mark made it happen, but that we woke up this morning and these animals were sitting here like this, and we came out and visited with them. It'll distract people from the death and mayhem, remind them of what happened around Archangel Michael - which was WONDERFULLY effective PR - and make them think the Guardian Angel is a Good soul." "I like it," I agreed, also for the additional reason that it'd serve as a small introduction to the Guardian Angel starting to interact with us in non-protective ways. Eventually it'll be able to fetch my forgotten jackets from restaurants and fly me and my girlfriends around the country during daylight. It's quite an amazing thrill to be so close to animals as powerful as a fully grown cougar and bear, so it took a while for everyone to get enough of them, especially Donna, but eventually breakfast won the day. We went inside where I reheated breakfast while Mom warned Donna, "Don't play with wild animals unless Mark says it's safe!" Donna rolled her eyes. We got busy eating our food. I released the animals a species at a time, keeping the carnivores to last. Listening to the radio during breakfast, I was surprised to learn that all-news radio stations are a good source of news. I'd expected the lack of visuals to be a serious deficit because there was no pictures of a scene, no body language cues, etc. But in many ways it was better than TV because its news stories were mostly designed to inform, whereas on TV they're mostly to hook and entertain. A night without attacks from the Guardian Angel had confirmed what the public had suspected when it'd gone to bed last night: that it was all over. The Guardian Angel had delivered its warning, had inflicted its punishment on the perpetrators of the inexplicably stupid assassination attempt, and was now presumably going to wait and see if the Government did anything stupid again. The public was REALLY hoping that the Government didn't! I liked to think that the Washington-based Government decision makers, especially in the FBI, CIA, NSA and every other nasty organization, hoped so too. It was hard to imagine that they'd agree to do anything against our family ever again, knowing that all of their friends and family could be atomized. The angel didn't have any W80s any more, but they should be smart enough not to rely on that. Washingtonians had a three-hour start on the day compared to us, so they'd gotten past the "Thank God nothing happened" reaction and were now discussing less immediate issues. Things like "What is the nature of the angel?" According to its last email, its stealing the nukes had apparently been intended to teach the Washingtonians what it felt like to live with the fear of "undeserved death-at-any-moment," a lesson they'd learned very well. The latest email also implied the previous one's promise to blow up 1, 2 or 4 W80s had been a trick, or maybe even a lie. Are angels allowed to lie? It was pointed out, to no one's enjoyment, "The first email might not be a lie. If someone kills Mark Anderson, the angel might set off four W80s. It could take more of them off the Air Force, or maybe it could make its own bombs. It implied it could do that when it said, 'You would not believe I could create such effects.' The FBI would be crazy to rely on the hope that the angel can't keep its word. From what we've learned about angels since Archangel Michael appeared in LA, I'd say they seem very good at keeping their word." That the Guardian Angel had deliberately and brutally killed was discussed too. It'd killed the skinheads outside our property's gates, which had certainly shocked many people, but that didn't have the same impact that killing two such important people had. Nobody felt personally threatened by my killing the skinheads because everybody else considered themselves better than those scum. But my killing two very prominent men meant ordinary people were not safe from the same treatment. The Guardian Angel would, it now seemed obvious, kill anyone to perform its job. The Guardian Angel had warned the American people that they were now responsible for the acts of their Government, and that was a VERY uncomfortable feeling! The Government had an awful track record of screwing things up in general and repeatedly attacking the Andersons in particular, and the Government had also been totally unable to stop the angel doing whatever it wanted. It was a worrying situation and there were calls for "Someone to do something to ensure the Andersons will be left alone." People were very anxious about that because no one had yet given them a reason why the Government kept attacking the Andersons. MANY people wanted to know that and were demanding to be told, but the Government wasn't saying anything sensible or believable, which made it even harder to have faith that the Government wouldn't try to attack the Andersons yet again. The language structure of the two Guardian Angel emails received comments. People were confused by that, especially by the grammar getting worse. The second email was "almost alien", suggested some people. It was a very confusing situation, because maybe God, Archangel Michael, the unnamed angel that did the resurrection, and the Guardian Angel, were all aliens who were using humanity's beliefs as a smokescreen? Or maybe God really is God, but the angels are aliens? Or maybe just Guardian Angels are alien? Or maybe God has always been God but is also an alien? There were some very confusing questions and no way to get answers. (In case you're curious, I'd used such bad grammar in the latest email just to be confusing. I liked how well that works. That no one could work out why the UAV had targeted my parents, for example, was fueling a seemingly endless debate; "debate" meaning "screaming accusations" because that's how politics works.) Further confusing the "It's an Alien" theory was that no one could suggest a sensible motive for why aliens would do what had been done. For example, the Guardian Angel had given the nukes back, presuming it'd returned the real ones, so stealing our weapons didn't seem to be a likely explanation. That Mark Anderson had been resurrected was also a major indicator of Godliness, again presuming that wasn't a fake. Which it did actually appear to be - a white boy's soul swapped into a Black guy's body, gimme a break! - but incompetent con jobs had never before been followed by unstoppable, overwhelming attacks on multiple USAF bases. It was a very confused situation, although there was absolutely no confusion about whether it'd be a good or bad idea to upset the Guardian Angel again. I'd done the cooking so I got let off the dishes, although there were fewer of them than normal even for camp cooking. The girls did those, while we all discussed what to do next. There were quite a few possibilities for our return home, so the conversation took a while, but by 8:30am we'd decided. We packed up our gear, leaving our non-perishable food in the cabin. Just in case something messy happens at home which requires me to prove I'd been at the cabin, I borrowed a blank page out of one of the girl's school pads and wrote a note thanking the cabin owner for the use of his cabin, apologized for not asking him first, and told him we'd left our spare food for him. I didn't sign it or name who we were as we preferred people to know as little as possible about our movements, but the handwriting and fingerprints would match if we asked for them to be tested in the event that I needed to establish an alibi. I floated us down to the car, removed the trees covering it, loaded us up, and we floated east down the valley. I flew us at treetop level while there was nothing but trees under us, then at ground level when I could do so. We were still flying, as the ground was undriveable, but staying low made it harder for anyone in the area to see us, and from a distance it might look reasonable. I chose a route out of the hills that avoided all signs of population, until we were low enough that I could see a usable road. Then Dad started the car and took over the driving; my job being using sight blobs to scout for trouble. We picked up the interstate near Roseburg, then headed north. We turned off I-5 and onto 99W at Eugene, because that gave us more options if my overwatch sight blob saw any trouble ahead of us. Several miles south of Corvallis my blob noticed a late-model car parked a few yards behind some bushes. It was in a spot where the two young men in it were getting good looks at the north-bound cars, which they were observing very intently. I got Dad to pull over to the shoulder and advance slowly. When we were closer, I could see their car had a law enforcement radio. They had some paperwork with them but I couldn't open it up without their seeing it happen. We backtracked a bit, headed west, then turned north onto Bellfountain Road, which ran into the west side of Corvallis. It'd add a few minutes to the trip, but we weren't in a hurry anyway. Bellfountain had another pair of observers parked over the crest of a hill, so I got Dad to park while I walked through cover to get close enough to investigate properly. I used a stone to tap on their back bumper and when one of them got out to check what was causing the sound, I was able to open the file for some quick looks. Our photos, the details of the SUV we were in, and orders from the Portland office of the Secret Service to report any sighting of us but do nothing else. #5: #19: I walked back to the SUV and told my families what the folder had contained, and an expanded version of what I had in mind. They more or less agreed. We discussed it a bit, they added a couple of tweaks, Donna laughed at how stupid the Government was - which earned her a quick reprimand from Mom because Mom didn't think anything that was happening was a laughing matter - and we drove back to Eugene to find a motorcycle for me. I eventually found a place that met all my criteria. It looked like the guy had taken his car to work, leaving his motorcycle in his garage for me. The property was secluded enough for me to get into without neighbors seeing me, some sight blob searching found his helmet and leathers, which were conveniently larger than me, and some more searching eventually found his spare bike key. The helmet had a transparent visor, unlike the very nice tinted ones I'd been using recently. I found a dark T-shirt of his in the house and used NP to press that flat on the inside of the visor. From the other side it looked like a darkly tinted visor. His leather jacket was very distinctively colored which wasn't ideal, but a nearby house had a bland looking raincoat that I borrowed and put over the top. I didn't want the bike's owner to recognize his leathers and bike if he got a glimpse of me on the news later today. I left my families in a good spot to wait for me while I went idling rapidly north on yet another motorcycle. It's just over a hundred miles to Portland, so it wouldn't take long. I hadn't been to the Homeland Security building in Portland for a while, but I hoped the Secret Service office was still in it, because that'd give me a good opportunity to address some bad memories (the Secret Service is a division of the DHS now). As I passed the first surveillance car I'd spotted, I distracted them sufficiently then stole their file, tucking it into my jacket as I continued to roll past. I drove north on I-5 past the Corvallis turnoff, finding another SS surveillance car just south of Salem. I distracted them and stole just the page that had their orders. Just before I arrived in Portland, I picked some trash out of a bin, making a rough package that appeared to be tied to the back of my bike. It had a few loose ends protruding from it, one of which covered the bike's license plate. When I arrived in Portland I rode to near the DHS office. I sent a sight blob in when I was a block away. I was very happy to find the small Secret Service office where I remembered it. It wasn't a big operation - they would have needed to borrow some of the manpower for the teams observing all the roads leading to Corvallis - but however big the Portland SS division was, it was about to get downsized. That was a consequence of the image that the Guardian Angel had established for itself. It can't just slap the Secret Service over the knuckles; it has to do something dramatic, and there was no time like the present for that. I was riding my bike in traffic so I had only one sight blob available for snooping. I moved it into the office of the local boss of the Secret Service, he being the guy whose name was on the bottom of the orders I had in my jacket. I positioned the sight blob immediately in front of him as he did his paperwork, and then turned it into a visible Guardian Angel. I gave him half a second to appreciate his situation, then I grabbed him roughly and lifted him out of his seat. I pushed his top-floor window in (there were people outside, so exploding the windows outward would've been bad), and then carried him screaming and kicking out into the fresh air. His secretary rushed in, blanched, then rushed out. I left him dangling about twenty feet outside his window, WAY too high in the air for his comfort. I used my sight blob to get the big boss - the DHS senior man for Oregon - from his fancy office, giving him the same treatment. I presumed he was the first guy's boss. I moved the big boss to be beside the Secret Service boss, making a mental note to look at them more often than every thirty two seconds or they'd be having a worse day than I intended. I obtained a state road map and a pen, flying them out to be near the SS boss. Then the Guardian Angel started moving around the Secret Service offices, wrecking them and causing much screaming. It got shot quite a few times, but it didn't give a shit, for a variety of reasons. Alarms were going off and people on the street were turning to look at the yelling, hovering pair of senior agents or managers (or whatever they get called at that pay level), which gave me an excuse to stop my bike on the side of the street and use both sight blobs to manage the Guardian Angel. When I'd sufficiently expressed my displeasure at the Secret Service's office, I took a moment to find the building's sprinkler system and ruined it, then the Guardian Angel hit one of the "Fire Alarm" buttons. The Guardian Angels - two of them acting as sight blobs - spent a couple of minutes rampaging around the entire building, smashing and throwing stuff, and generally encouraging people to evacuate as rapidly as possible. I was very effective at that, judging by the evacuees' haste. I particularly enjoyed trashing the areas Moran had operated out of. Then - because I'm a truthful sort of guy and I had triggered the fire alarm after all - I began setting fires throughout the building, in several places on every floor because I was feeling particularly truthful. Then I searched the building for people who weren't evacuating the way they should. There weren't many Christians so it didn't take me long to evacuate all of them out through windows I imploded for them. I placed the evacuees on the street among their intelligent coworkers. The Guardian Angels had been buzzing around inside and outside, drawing attention to the hovering men, and generally attracting a large crowd of spectators. Seeing and hearing evacuees being flown out of the windows and down to the ground got a lot of attention too. I finished searching the building, including checking the locked cells in the basement and the parking garage, which were empty. It was embarrassing and amusing how easy it was now to search through the entire building, compared to when I'd been locked up here. It was a strong lesson about how powerfully limiting expectations can be. The building was empty now. There were real fires and Guardian Angels, so most people hadn't wasted any time fleeing, especially after shooting didn't work. The first couple of fire trucks arrived, screaming to a halt and the firemen leaping out. Their normal fire-fighting procedure was interrupted by all the firemen being gently picked up and flown to the roof of a building about three hundred feet away. The same thing happened when more fire trucks arrived. I kept that up for about five minutes, by which time I was happy with the damage the fires had done, so I let the firemen get on with their jobs, even putting the hoses into their hands to let them know it was okay to start. The crowd had thickened around me, standing so close that it was easy for me to secretly use NP to slide the folder out from under my jacket. I maneuvered it along the street toward the burning building, mostly by moving it under parked cars. When it was a considerable distance from me, I flew it up to join the map and pen. I borrowed a megaphone from one of the emergency vehicles too, sending it up to the same place. I let the closest TV cameraman record the firefighters doing their thing for a couple of minutes, then I picked up a reporter and cameraman team. People always freak out when that happens, so I had to allow some time for them to calm down. Sitting them in an invisible chair with what feels like a floor underneath their feet is much more comfortable than being carried around. Also some gentle strokes on the cheek (for females) or handshakes (for males) reassures them. I lowered the two Government troublemakers to an altitude of only a dozen feet, putting them in front of the cameraman and reporter. I pointed the camera at the two bosses, and the cameraman got the hint. The folder floated to be a few feet in front of the reporter. I opened it, showing her the top photo, which was of me. I floated the pen around in front of the reporter to get her attention, then used it to circle the names underneath the photo ("Ron Fisher a.k.a. Mark Anderson"). Then I fairly quickly showed each of the other photos, then the page that gave textual information about us and our car. The next page was one of the orders. I showed it to her and the cameraman, then used the pen to circle the name of the person who'd issued the order. Then the pen floated over to the SS boss, pointing at his ID badge. I floated it off the owner's neck, moving it to be beside the order, where the pen pointed out that the two names were the same. I could see she was easily following. I flew the ID back to its owner. The pen circled the part of the order that specified where the team was to set up. I floated the map over, and put an "X" on the spot. The reporter said something short and nodded. I moved that order away, showing her the next order. I circled the location on the order, then made an "X" on the map at that location. Then I put another "X" on the side road we'd discovered the other team on, then I drew a circle through all the "X's", which encircled Corvallis. I pointed the pen at "Corvallis" on the map, tapping it a couple of times for emphasis, then I drew around the surveillance circle for three complete circuits, hopefully giving her the idea that Corvallis was encircled with Secret Service watchers. My penultimate action was the float the megaphone to the reporter as I turned her around to face the bulk of the crowd. I moved her hand up to hold it, while waving the last order and the map side by side in front of her. She got my meaning, squeezing the trigger on the megaphone and after a false start, got into the flow of it, telling the crowd, "The angel has shown me that the Secret Service has put watchers on all the roads around Corvallis, looking for Mark Anderson, his family and the Williamses." It wasn't as full an explanation as I wanted, so I floated the SS boss's ID in front of her, jiggling it. She got the idea, and informed the crowd whose order it'd been. I returned the ID. My families and I had planned for me to break the troublemakers' arms now, but I had an idea that had more Shock and Awe, especially Shock. I located two desks that hadn't caught fire yet, floated them out of the building with the 'top' facing forward and the drawers facing up. I held the bosses upright, pulled their arms out to their sides, and pressed them against the tops of the desks, looking like a crucifixion. I floated three axes up from the fire trucks. When the three axes came into view, hundreds of spectators suddenly inhaled in shock, doubtless fearing two more decapitations (the public isn't very good at mathematics). I didn't waste time, immediately propelling the axes into and through their targets: the SS boss had both his arms severed mid-forearm; the DHS big boss losing his right forearm. Blood sprayed and my victims screamed, but not nearly as loudly as the screams of the females in the crowd. No helpful saber-toothed tigers appeared so the screams carried on for a ridiculous duration. I quickly lowered the 1.9 bosses (excluding their severed limbs) and the axes to the ground in front of paramedics. The desks and three forearms went into a part of the building that was burning particularly well. These guys weren't going to have their arms reattached, as that would've ruined most of the value of the lesson. I'd left them their elbows though, out of mercy. The folder of evidence and the map I pushed into the reporter's hands. She was in shock as it'd happened only a few feet in front of her, so the folder had to nudge her a few times. When she had it, I lowered her and the cameraman to the ground, then the Guardian Angel followed them, disappearing into the ground. My task was done now, but I couldn't leave yet because the crowd had hemmed me in. I'd have to wait for it to dissipate when nothing further happened. It might take a while but I wasn't in any particular hurry. I heard some bright spark yell out, "The angel's gone to get NUCLEAR BOMBS!" The previous screaming was NOTHING compared to the bedlam that caused! People were screaming, running, colliding, screaming, falling over, screaming, getting trampled, screaming, getting up, pausing to have a scream, and then running away while screaming. There was a lot of screaming. The fireman had to drop their hoses and put all their efforts into stopping people who thought that the fastest way out of the area was through the burning building. The crowd was thinner that way so that's where some people ran. They must have been too busy screaming to be able to think. On second thought, the cause and effect was probably the other way around. It took less than a minute for the area to get noticeably emptier. My staying would've stood out, so I started my bike and left without bothering to scream. The emergency services obviously don't hire people who run around screaming at the first hint of trouble, because all the emergency workers were busy doing their jobs. The DHS building isn't a small one (yet), and it's in a high-density area, so the firemen had their work cut out for them. The building also houses the Portland Post Office, which was burning well. There'd presumably be many thousands of destroyed letters and who knows what other collateral damage. With any luck it'd piss off very many people and the Secret Service would get the blame. People in the surrounding buildings were very cooperatively running away screaming too. Central Portland was rapidly turning into a ghost town. More accurately, a gridlocked ghost town, but motorcycles not only provide a great excuse for wearing a crash helmet, they're also very good at negotiating gridlocked streets. I'd expected the surveillance team just south of Salem to still be in their position, figuring the SS's radio transmitter and all their phones had gone up in flames, but the team was gone when I rode past their spot. Also absent was the team just north of Eugene. I rode to where my families were and waved at them. Without stopping, I led them back to the house I'd borrowed the bike from. When I got out of the leathers, I did so in the center of an open area of his private yard. As each article of clothing came off, I turned it inside out and shook it repeatedly to dislodge any trace of me, paying particular attention to the helmet as I didn't have a ski mask any longer. I'd buy several the next time I got a chance, as they're almost as useful as dark sheets. I'd used NP to keep the girls away from me while I was putting everything back to normal, so I got the hugs and news when I got back into the SUV. They'd been listening to the portable radio. They could've watched the SUV's TV, but it was best to follow the story we would use later: "When we got to Eugene, the angel made us drive to a quiet spot, took the keys and had locked the doors with us inside to make the point that we should stay." So my families knew about the 'hand jobs' I'd given in Portland, and could confirm that "Shock" had certainly been achieved, along with massive panic in Portland and Washington DC. People were streaming out of both cities. A much slower stream in DC because its streets were terribly inadequate for emergency evacuations. Parents were descending on the schools to grab their kids, offices were emptying, passengers on planes heading for those two cities were demanding the pilots turn around, while other passengers demanded the planes landed so the passengers could rush home to rescue their families. Fights were breaking out in the aisles. Some airlines ordered the planes going to DC to turn around, and some airlines did not. Sometimes the pilots followed their orders, and sometimes they disobeyed them. It was chaos in all directions, just like it had been the previous time. The President, from an Undisclosed Location, urged calm, but didn't go so far as to say it was safe to stay in either of those cities. It'd be rather embarrassing for him if he'd told people to stay and I nuked one of the cities. He was trying to encourage calmness, but he was totally failing to achieve any - people were ANGRY! The Guardian Angel had made it EXTREMELY clear in its last email that it didn't want, "People's-government interferes-spies-threats-attacks my assignment and his loves." Having Secret Service surveillance operations set up around Corvallis with pictures of us all certainly fit the definition of "spies", and no one trusted the Government not to progress to "interferes", "threats" or "attacks" once they knew where we were. That was even a predictable and widely believed escalation, given the Government's habit of repeatedly attacking my family. As we drove toward home, the national Director of the Secret Service, also from an Undisclosed Location phoned in an explanation that, "The Secret Service merely wants to talk with the family about issues to do with the President's safety." Everyone thought the Director needed to get his head checked. The most sympathetic statement I heard about the fate of the Portland SS boss was, "Stupid IDIOT!" The interviewee was in too much of a hurry to say more, or maybe it was censored out. Several miles from home we stopped behind a hill, in an area I thought would make it difficult to triangulate a cellphone signal. Dad put his battery back in his cellphone and called Paul's cellphone. After several rings - much longer than it should've taken Paul to pick up a call from Dad's phone - I could hear a man answer and say something. Dad said, "To whom am I speaking?" #29: I could tell that from his proximity reading too. A few seconds later, Dad covered his phone while he turned to tell us, "FBI." -- Then Dad said into his phone, "Put Paul Olsen on." The guy at the other end spoke, until Dad lost patience and hung up on him. Dad told us, "FBI. They wouldn't put Paul on and wanted us to come in to talk with them." Dad's phone started ringing. He looked at it then said, "No caller ID. Any ideas?" Prof said, "Answer it in case they've decided to put Paul on. Hang up quickly if not." It proved to be the "if not" scenario. Dad hung up and disconnected his phone's battery. We drove away quickly. I had already planned our hiding location: an old, partially collapsed barn in the middle of a field not far behind us. There was no road access to it, which made it a great place to float the SUV into. We discussed the situation. We thought the FBI's presence was probably unrelated to recent events in Portland, but that conclusion didn't make it any easier to decide what to do next. We could've understood the FBI intercepting calls to our home's landline numbers, but intercepting Paul's cellphone was a surprising and surely bad sign. Paul obviously hadn't been rampaging all over the country the last few days, so what legal justification could they have for not just tapping but intercepting his calls? I could see the road with a high radio blob, and we'd only just started discussing the issue when my overwatch radio blob saw two black SUVs tearing south down the road we'd been on, their lights flashing. After a few more seconds, we could all hear their sirens too. Our conversation paused. I explained what was happening, adding, "Nothing to be worried about I don't think; they don't seem to be slowing down. No, they've gone past this field now. I can see anyone approaching us long before they get close." We resumed our discussion. We couldn't believe how stupid the various agencies were being, but Prof thought the reason for that might be because they were "various" agencies: there was too much bureaucracy, too many overlapping jurisdictions, too little regard for what happened outside their areas of responsibility, etc. The Secret Service's job was to protect the President and the angel had threatened his life, so they were pursuing that investigation. The FBI was doing whatever it was that it was doing for whatever reasons it had. And for all we knew, the fire department has investigators trying to chase us down too. It needed someone in a senior position of leadership - the President would be the obvious choice - to order them all to back off. But all we'd heard from him was just platitudes and generalities, usually from an Undisclosed Location because he was worried about a nuclear bomb being dropped on his ass. We'd gained the impression that he'd been equally ineffective away from the media too, or maybe he'd even ordered everyone to keep investigating us. It was hard to tell which without more information. Vanessa said, "The situation is too confusing for him. His country is under attack and he's a militarily aggressive President who won't have kept any advisors around him who counsel non-aggression, so his advice and desire will be to attack. But he likes to present himself as a devout Christian and angel might be from God, plus whoever or whatever it is, it's winning hands down and seems easily capable of carrying out its threat to kill the President. If he's not proactive he'll look weak or even cowardly, but he can't do anything decisive without more information, which he's unable to get without ordering investigations which are going to run straight up against the angel's orders, risking further and extremely damaging escalations. He's on the horns of a dilemma." "How do we get him to pull his head out of his ass?" asked Dad, who has a different style of metaphor. We brainstormed ideas for how to motivate the President, and whatever other ideas came to us. We saw that they could be categorized as follows: Pressure the President. For example, by calling the media and making a statement that required him to act in some way. Pressure the Government. Such as by going on another destructive spree. Pressure the decision-makers of the agency/agencies. We'd already done that to the FBI and very recently to the Secret Service, but it seemed the lesson wasn't obvious enough yet. Pressure the front-line troops. We hadn't done any of this yet, but to take an extreme example, if I killed every FBI agent on our property (assuming that's where they were), and kept killing every agent who participated in any action against us that we didn't like, then after a while agents would start refusing orders from their superiors to go anywhere near us. Pressure the public, so they would pressure the Government and President. There was also the essential need that whatever we did had to seem a moral response by the angel to the Government's going against God's wishes. I couldn't do anything large scale until nighttime, which gave us several hours to do small-scale things. We kicked it around and came up with some ideas. The first idea was for me to do some scouting at home so we'd have a better idea what situation we were facing. It'd be foolish of us to go public with a big fuss about not being able to go home if our home was wide open and ready for our return. We didn't think that was likely, but we should check first because our credibility is so important. It was our credibility and the Government's lack of it that had made the UAV false-flag attack so effective and was making the whole "God is on our side" thing believable. We wanted to maintain our credibility because it was a huge advantage in our favor. The night I'd crashed the UAV into Mom and Dad's bedroom, I'd left our property on a motorcycle. I'd hidden it to the south of Corvallis, only about four miles from where we were now. I'd left the key and helmet hidden near it, so I should be able to use it to ride around Corvallis checking out the situation. It was risky to leave everyone in the barn while I was away in case the FBI started searching the area around where Dad had made the phone call, but it was also risky to try to move everyone because the FBI might have a high-flying plane observing the area by now. They're damned good at making life difficult. The best I could do was to do my scouting quickly, to get back here as soon as I could. I changed into some jeans and a light-colored, long-sleeved top, then set off carrying a long board out of the barn, like that was my purpose for walking away from here. I found the bike where I'd left it. With my having so much NP force I'd easily been able to move it to a location where it was unlikely to be found, let alone someone be able to get it down. The helmet and key were even easier to recover from their hiding place. I waited until there was no traffic on the road, then pushed the bike out of the trees and onto the road, mounted it, then headed toward town. My families and I had wanted me to check on Ava. We would much rather have taken her with us to the cabin but she'd been too injured for that, which meant she'd been left in the hospital with only our security guards to look after her. Especially after I'd escalated the Stage One plan to include the threat of nuking DC, it was worryingly believable that the authorities might come down hard on Ava. I drove past the hospital and was very unhappy to see that someone else was in what had been Ava's room. #15: There were too many staff hovering around the computers, so I did a quick search of all the hospital rooms instead. I was an increasingly worrying time, but I eventually found Ava in a private room in a quiet corner. There was no sign of our security staff who should have been guarding her. A male and female agent were talking to Ava, and she was clearly very unhappy. She was lying in bed and looked healthy enough, but had her mouth clenched closed and was trying to ignore the agents. She deserved some cheering up, so I rattled something behind the agents. They looked around in reflex and I used NP to hold Ava's lips and stroke her cheek. The agents caught her bloom of happiness when they turned back. They looked around for a reason, not seeing anything. Ava quickly relaxed her expression, but they were suspicious. It was worth their useless suspicions to cheer Ava up. Our little group's etiquette for situations like this is that I have to rub the girl's nipple to tell her that all is well. As etiquette goes, it's one of my favorites. I had to move Ava's good arm to make a gap between her nipples and the sheet. Having her arm moved confused her, but she got my point as soon as I got hers. Ava seemed happy enough for now and her chart seemed fine as best I could decipher the handwriting and meaning. There were a couple of big Government goon-types outside her room, but that didn't seem to matter and there didn't appear to be anything else that I could usefully do, so I got back to my main job. Still several blocks from home, using a radio blob 400 feet above me, I could see half a dozen pairs of guys in suits walking around our property, but I couldn't see any of our guards. There were also a couple of large RVs and several SUVs parked in the parking lot just inside our gate. #19: I would've loved to search through the FBI's (presumably) vehicles, the Main and Kids' Houses, etc., but I couldn't get near enough. Even if I'd had a 1,000-foot range, it would've been difficult to search without getting so close that I'd draw stares. There are very few Black people in Corvallis [1.2% of the population; I'd googled it when playing with Savannah], so there was too much chance they'd suspect that any young Black guy near my home was Ron Fisher. To be safe, I couldn't get within half a mile of home. I saw as much as I could, then out of paranoia I rode into the center of town and did things to throw off any overhead observation. In some streets there were long runs of trees that offered several possibilities for throwing zoomed-in overhead surveillance off, such as riding along them under cover, quickly placing a handkerchief over the top of my helmet to change its apparent color, and then riding out in a different direction. I rode back to the barn where I recounted my discoveries. Everyone was pleased that nothing worse had happened to Ava, but worried about all our missing staff. The results had been much as we'd expected so it didn't take long to decide what to do next. Dad and I went for a moderately long ride on my motorcycle, Dad wearing obscuring headwear. We ended up on the other side of the Willamette River, several miles south of the barn. I broke into a house near the river - without actually breaking anything - Dad put some money under their phone, and then used it to call our DC lawyer's cellphone. It bounced to his secretary, who informed Dad that our lawyer was in a meeting and offered to take a message. Dad said, "I'm Steven Anderson and..." "Putting you through now." Once they were connected, Dad told our lawyer, "The Guardian Angel is writing me notes to tell to you. The first one is for me to tell you about the last few hours. -- "You know that it discovered the Secret Service had a ring of cars watching the roads all around Corvallis, right?" I had my ear to the phone so I heard our lawyer say, "Yes. Half of our firm are fleeing the city. Are you calling to warn us to leave?" "No. I don't think the angel's lost that much patience yet, but it must be getting close. Hang on, it's writing me another note." I truly was writing a note, to make Dad's acting job easier. Back when Archangel Michael had been choosing who to resurrect, I'd intended for the Guardian Angel to be the strong, silent type for the first few months, but the Government's inability to learn had made that too restrictive so the angel was having to communicate now. Dad said, "It says, 'Other options first.' Now it's waving the first note. -- "So I should tell you that after it got back from Portland we carried on driving home. When we were close to home, I called Paul Olsen on his cellphone to check on the situation at home. Instead of Paul answering, an FBI guy did. He refused to put Paul on and told us to come in because he wanted to ask us some questions. The angel zipped ahead to check our home itself. It came back and wrote a note that there are wrong people there and none of our people. Then it brought me to this phone to call you. Hang on, it's writing another note. -- "It wants you to tell TV what I just said, and that Government-President should tell all his people to leave or angel will cut their heads off. -- "And there's more. Umm, 'Home should be same before'. I'm not sure what that means. Oh yeah. It's writing, 'Good people free. Bad people gone never come back. No tricks.' I guess it means our staff back and no bugs; the same as before we left." -- "It just wrote 'Home is Embassy of God.' I'm not sure what that means either." "I think I do. It means America has no legal jurisdiction, as for a foreign embassy." "Yeah, it just wrote something like that. Now it's writing, 'Angry so many wrong men disobey God. God has plans Mark Anderson. Your plans throw away. Warn wrong men I will kill wrong men. Any stay is their choice. Any come back is their choice. Any do wrong thing is their choice.' I don't think it likes killing people without warning, but I think it's cheesed-off with giving so many warnings." "It sounds like it. What time will you get home?" "I don't know ... Wait, it wrote, 'midnight', so I guess that answers that. Please make sure you don't forget all our staff being released unharmed, and I'm worried about Ava too. She was in the hospital when we left." "I've written notes and I'll make all of your and the angel's points. Would it be okay for you to ask the angel whether it's safe to recall our staff?" "Sure." Dad repeated the question to me. I nodded, which Dad relayed, "It says 'yes'." "Will you be able to give us warning if it's going to explode a bomb in DC?" "I'll ask." Dad did. "It's writing something: 'Mark Anderson my only priority.' I guess that means no warning, sorry." Dad looked puzzled at me, surprised that I'd refused the request, but I'll explain later that the angel couldn't accept ANY obligation to anyone else as that was totally against its supposed mission. Especially an obligation like that, because news of it would quickly spread around DC and some people would wonder at it. Dad finished the call, I destroyed the notes and wiped my fingerprints off the pen, we got on the motorcycle and rode across the Willamette River. We'd chosen this house because it was close to a section of the river where we could fly across it without anyone seeing us. If the FBI had traced our call (NAUGHTY them for tapping a lawyer's phone!), then they'd naturally start searching the roads on the same side of the river. That might give us a little advantage. We returned to the barn without incident. The midnight returning time had been the result of small amount of prior discussion. There was merit it making our arrival home almost immediate to give the FBI less time to set up an unwelcome Plan B, but waiting until dark gave me the chance to do some high quality snooping before the families put themselves at risk by reappearing. The latter consideration won, so we had several hours of waiting ahead of us. The first development was our lawyer getting the TV conference underway. That happened very shortly after Dad and I got back, the TV stations presumably being eager to hear about the angel's plans. We crowded into the backseats of the SUV to watch it (the TV is mounted where the driver can't see it as Prof and Vanessa have a thing about car safety). Our lawyer was very dry and factual, recounting the circumstances of the conversation: Mr. Steven Anderson calling him, the Guardian Angel writing notes for Mr. Anderson to repeat verbally. Then our lawyer recited each of the points made. He worked from his notes, did not embellish, and it took less than two minutes for him to finish, even including the last two points about the angel saying that it was safe for people to return to DC now, but that there would be no warning in the future. Then the questions started, the VERY first one, from ALL the reporters, being, "Are you SURE it's not going to bomb us?" "The Guardian Angel, through Steven Anderson, said it was safe for us to recall our staff. We are in the process of contacting them to inform them of that, leaving it to them to decide whether to return or not. Speaking personally, the angel strikes me as trustworthy and reluctant to take such an extreme step, so I'm reassured for now. -- "I'm NOT reassured about the future, not unless the President does as the angel requests and orders all the agencies to leave the Andersons' extended family alone. The Government is going directly against the commandments of one of God's angels, and unsurprisingly the Government is losing that conflict badly. Do millions of Americans have to die before our Government realizes that it can't win a war against God?" "Do you think the Guardian Angel really is from God?" "Yes I do." Maybe he did, or maybe it was just that he was representing clients who wanted the world to believe it. "The two families are convinced that Ron Fisher's body is now Mark Anderson. I cannot imagine that bringing back the mind and soul of a person dead for more than a year could be anything other than an act of God. The angels have extraordinary powers and they seem very moral, as you would expect. They're certainly more moral than the Government, as I'm unaware that the Andersons have ever been charged with a crime or that a warrant has been issued to justify the Government's ongoing persecution of them." Several questions later, one of the reporters thought to ask, "Is Portland in danger of being bombed?" "My personal opinion, and why I'm still in DC now, is that the punishment the angel inflicted in Portland was sufficient for the moment. Now it is concerned about the situation at the Andersons' home and is giving the Government the opportunity to leave before it punishes them for that misbehavior. I think it's reluctant to do something extreme and is giving the President another chance, but Portlanders need to make their own decisions about that." The Q&A session went on for considerably longer, because - to the reporters - there was NOTHING more important than this. Our lawyer did a very good job for us. (He's equally good at generating very large bills; those two skills being closely related.) The basic theme of the interview was simple and it got repeated several times: "The Guardian Angel is insisting that Mark Anderson and his extended family be left alone. If the President doesn't order that, more people are going to die, possibly millions of people." Proving he wasn't totally dry, he managed to insert a little joke, referring to his firm as "God's legal counsel." A couple of hours later, a spokesperson for the President let the beseeching media know that, "The President has ordered that the Andersons and Williams be freely allowed to return to their home. Sorry, but I have no more than that. There'll be no questions." The statement was a very incomplete agreement with what the angel had requested. Whether unintentionally or ominously we couldn't tell, but it certainly made us determined that I did some SERIOUS snooping first. We discussed various scenarios, what I should do if I encountered different things, etc. It passed the time. ------- Chapter 370: Returning Home; Part Two: It Gets Harder Saturday, June 9, 2007 (Continued) At 9:30pm I put on some dark clothes, my crash helmet and my dark sheet, and hit the skies. My families and I had agreed that I had to be very cautious about being detected because if the Governments agencies or armed forces were going to do anything, our reappearing at midnight would be the perfect opportunity to grab us, or whatever it was they had planned. If they were crazy enough to piss off something as seemingly powerful as the angel, there might be a great deal of Government power focused on our home, and we didn't want it all focused on me when they spotted me flying around. Cautious reconnaissance was definitely advised My first reconnaissance was at a VERY high altitude, looking for things like squadrons of B-52s, UAVs, or anything else unwelcome. I couldn't tell my exact height without my watch, but it was something like sixty thousand feet, roughly the ceiling of most modern aircraft. I crisscrossed over our home for many miles in all directions. I saw nothing untoward, and continued to see more of the same while I progressively decreased my altitude while making more passes over the area. I hadn't expected to see anything up here, but it was worth checking just in case the Air Force was REALLY angry. Once I was low enough, I could see that Corvallis still had too many people in it, as there were RVs, tents and cars in many locations in and around town, but not near our home thanks to the half-mile police and army cordon that was still being maintained around it. I guessed that the number of religious pilgrims had maybe halved from its peak. Corvallis had faded in importance since the Guardian Angel had started attacking air bases three nights ago. My families and I had left town, so hopefully a lot of the Idiots had too. I smiled over the cordon's still being in place pissing off the Galloping Ninnies again in a few hours. I was happy to see that there weren't any strange transmission coming out of my home, or anything else wrong that I could see, which wasn't much as I was still several thousand feet up. The Government passed the first test. It didn't pass the second test though: several people were behaving strangely around our gates. Achieving two sensible behaviors in a row was beyond the Government's ability. I continued to descend cautiously, searching widely for anything, and especially for infrared sensors being used to spot me. I'd spot humans using them easily enough, by the humans' heat, but standalone instruments were a worry, especially because they could be mounted on the nearby hills and other distant locations. It would be very bad to have my presence reported to the baddies' boss, who could order some of his men to equip themselves with rifles and night-vision goggles - they could easily have both handy - jump out of a room then open up at me. I had arranged the large sheet in a tube around me so it would do a great job of obscuring my infrared emissions, but it'd do a very poor job of protecting me from incoming bullets, so I was very cautious and thorough in checking a very wide area around home. Fortunately not finding anything worrisome. During that slowly descending search, I repeatedly passed over our gates for looks at the activity there. There was a small group of guys doing some work on both pillars of the gate, with a cordon of guards in a wide half-circle on the public side of the gate, presumably to stop any member of the public getting close enough to see what was happening. I saw them do something in the grating between the gates, the one from which very strong spikes can pop up to block access by impaling incoming vehicles. They had also drilled a wide hole down from the top of both gateposts, the holes close to the inside edge of the posts. Into the holes they'd inserted long poles which seemed to contain many repeats of some sort of sensor aimed inward at the gateway. I was reminded of the security systems a lot of stores have to stop people shoplifting, or the metal detectors at airports. If they were hoping to detect metal, they weren't going to pick up our SUV because that was going to come in over the wall because we wanted to be unpredictable. The gate itself totaled a substantial amount of metal and it was mounted on the inside faces of the posts only a few inches away from the sensors, so I doubted the sensor array was for detecting metal. When I was quite low, I could see that near the base of one of the posts, on the street side of it, they'd dug a small hole in the grass and there was already a box of electronics in it. There was a cable running in a tiny channel from the box into a hole drilled into the underground base of the nearest post, where the cable plugged into the sensor-pole. There was no such box for the other post, but I assumed that was because the two posts were connected together by the cable that ran between them under the grating and spikes. A few minutes later the work halted. A guy got a small metal box out of the trunk of his nearby car and carried it through the gate, paused, then walked back in again. Apparently a successful test, because the workers immediately started hiding evidence of their activities - filling in the holes in the ground, putting the sods of grass back, cementing over the tops of our gateposts and sweeping up the cement fragments from the drilling. A few more tests were done during the tidy up, all apparently successful, then the box of what I guessed to be radioactive material was returned to the trunk. The bombs had already been recovered so I didn't understand what the sensors were for. Did they think the angel would be radioactive? That'd be a good trick for something that didn't have body. And why on Earth would the angel need to use a gate when it could pass through or over the wall just as easily? Also, if they were going to install such a device, why not do it days ago? Those questions were enough to make me think the device wasn't for detecting radiation but for some other more nefarious purpose, but that didn't make much sense either because of their using the box to test it. #13: #18: That job had taken long enough that I'd done other things while watching them work. I'd confirmed that the Fibbies were Fibbies by searching their vehicles. As well as several cars, they had two big RVs. One was packed with bunks, making it a mobile dormitory. Currently vacant, but hopefully its presence meant they'd kept their grubby bodies out of our beds. I didn't know the FBI had mobile dormitories, but my ignorance just meant I'd never seen one on TV. Hardly surprising, because they weren't exactly glamorous. The other RV was an office, although they doubtless called it something more impressive sounding, like "Mobile Command Center". It had a couple of satellite dishes on the roof, quite a lot of electronics inside, a couple of small tables, some filing cabinets, etc. just the usual office stuff. A couple of boss-types were in it, with a couple of flunky Fibbies. They weren't doing anything productive, just drinking coffee (the bosses), and tidying up (the flunkies). It looked like they were getting ready to move it, which was wise of them because if it was on our property after midnight it'd need a lot more than a little tidying up. Because of the presence of the four Fibbies I couldn't read files, use the computers, etc. I also had my eyes and radio blobs open for any strange transmissions. If there were any bugs in any of our buildings I wanted to know about them! There were several sources of transmissions that I investigated, but they were all non-Fibbie. The most numerous source was several abandoned cellphones in the Staff's Quarters and the FBI's own radios, plus there were a few other miscellaneous but acceptable sources of transmission, such as our still-functioning radar. I hadn't seen a single one of our staff. They certainly weren't in any of our surface level buildings, as those were empty of people. I hadn't gotten within five hundred feet of the subterranean rooms yet. The Staff's Quarters building looked lived in, but it always looks that way so that didn't mean anything. There were no signs of violence: no corpses, bloodstains, smashed furniture, bullet holes, etc. Whether or not the Fibbies had a warrant, our security staff wouldn't have resisted with violence. That'd been included in Prof's instructions to Paul before we left; unnecessarily because Paul wouldn't have permitted it anyway. Everyone on our property seemed to be baddies: the workers at the gates, the cordon to keep the public away (strictly speaking they were currently off our property), the inhabitants of the mobile office, and four pairs of Fibbie guards strolling around our property's grounds. Mom and Dad's bedroom was still missing all its windows so was open to the elements, and all three of its doors (to the en-suite, closet and hallway) were open. I'd deliberately closed them when I floated everyone out, but the media had been all over the room since then. I couldn't imagine that our guards would have left the doors open after the media left, so it appeared that the Fibbies had been deliberate assholes. I could see that leaves and other trash had blown through the open doorways, but it'd take a personal inspection to find out whether anything more damaging than littering had occurred. Even more annoying was that the fourth half-door - the cat flap covering the chute down to the emergency tunnel - was 'open' too. The security panel had been unscrewed from the wall and the internal electronics were now dangling loose. The flap covering the chute was still in place, but it swung freely when I NP-pushed it slightly. It should have been very strongly immobile, so they'd totally disabled it. The only work going on around our property was at the gate, and when that was finished and passed inspection by the boss, all the Fibbies were recalled. The strolling patrollers headed toward the front gate, and two guys I hadn't known about walked out of our main tunnel. Given the timing of their appearance, I guessed they'd been in our Security Control Room. While the distant patrollers were still returning, the boss addressed the nearby agents. I really wanted to hear it, but it was too dangerous for me to creep that close and I unfortunately can't make sound blobs. After the little speech finished, a few of them got into a couple of cars and drove away. Some of the rest got into the remaining vehicles, drove them out the gate, and parked them on the side of the street immediately outside our gate. Everyone, including the patrollers when they returned, wandered through the gate and joined the line for the coffees that the lone female agent and one male agent were handing out from the dormitory RV. The female was the one who'd been trying to talk with Ava, which doesn't matter at all. I only mention it because she had nice tits and I couldn't help having the momentary thought of finding a pretext to strip them all if they were still here when we returned at midnight. I'd like to think that she was serving coffee because sexism was rife in the FBI, but it was probably ageism because she and her co-coffee-server seemed younger than most of the other agents. The boss sent one guy from the last pair of patrollers back inside to close the gate. I watched while the Fibbie did so, demonstrating complete knowledge of our gate control's location and use (not that they're complicated). I was annoyed by how familiar they were with our home. Having all the Fibbies outside the front gate meant I could now get close enough to search the property thoroughly. I circled around the back of the hill and checked out the tunnels. Both panic rooms had their vault doors ruined by having been drilled into. Getting them replaced would be a major expense so I made a mental note to get the cost added to our $216 billion bill. Both rooms were strewn with the cans of food and other materials we'd had on shelves on the walls, and several of those shelves were now pulled loose. The door into my secret study had a hole where the lock used to be, and you probably won't be surprised to learn that the mouse and computer cabinets had been moved. I was actually surprised that they were still there, although I'd never be able to use them again out of fear that the assholes had put spy software or hardware bugs in them. The two vault doors leading out of the emergency tunnel weren't ruined. They hadn't needed to be because they could be opened from the inside, but I was surprised the Fibbies hadn't destroyed them just to be assholes. The inside one was wide open and the outside one partially so. I hadn't noticed that from the outside because the exit is camouflaged with a net strung with material that makes it look like the surrounding earth and foliage. The elevators and elevator shafts looked fine. The main tunnel and all the rooms off it appeared undamaged. The big garage door was open but not visibly wrecked. The security room was operating normally, and our radar wasn't detecting any planes. [In case you think of them, the secret escape tunnel under the main tunnel's floor and out through the shooting range hadn't been built yet.] All of our staff were still missing. Some of the staff, especially the Office staff and the older gardeners, lived offsite. I knew where a couple of the gardeners' homes were and made a mental note to check on them and Ava on my way back to the barn. That was my quick-and-dirty initial search of home finished, so now it was time for a VERY thorough one, to look for anything small that shouldn't be there. The software program we had that reported EM radiation in our home was running and not reporting anything untoward in its current display, but the Fibbies could've fudged it so its current silence meant nothing. I was near the Kids' House, so I started with our bedroom. Searching for bugs in a room with a Faraday cage is easier than other rooms because there are only three possibilities: Tape recorder type bugs. Bugs with wires that run to a transmitter through one of the very few holes in the metal shielding. Bugs with wires that ran to a transmitter through a new hole in the metal shielding. Any transmitter really has to be outside of the room. If inside the room its signal would be cut off whenever we activated the Faraday cage, which is when the conversations would be the most interesting. Theoretically the bug could have its transmitter in the room and store what it hears until the cage is opened again, but I didn't think there was much chance of the Fibbies installing a system with that restriction. They'd want live feeds, and for all they knew, we might keep the cages closed all day long. There's also the problem that there's so much metal in the walls and ceiling that too much of the signal could be blocked even with the cage open. That's why we can't walk around the house while using a cordless phone; it has to be used in the same room as its base station. I knew there were no bugs currently transmitting because my radio blob would see them if that was happening, but there are many types of bug that can be ordered not to transmit for as long as the owner wants, so I needed to do a laborious search. I wasn't going to worry about the first of the above possibilities for now as they'd be hard to find and I doubted the Fibbies would settle for non-live transmissions and bugs that require visits to collect the results of. For the second possibility, there were only three types of entrances into a Faraday cage room: doors (there are three of them into our bedroom), AC ducts (one in and one out) and the under-floor cabling duct that all intentional wiring snaked through (there's one of those). It was a simple matter to inspect all four sides of each doorway, including rubbing an NP-fingertip along them to see if it snagged on a thin wire. They were clear. The AC duct I did similarly, both inside and outside of the duct itself, running my vision and fingertips all through the flexible cross-sectional area where the Faraday panels would pinch it. The S-bend under-floor duct was more difficult to search, but wasn't too hard: I picked the bottom of the S-bend, looked and felt around all the cables. I had previously searched this, so I knew how many and what types of cables there should be, and there were no extra ones. Hardly surprising as it would've been damned-near impossible to thread a new cable through the S-bend and along the pipe laid under the floor. I guessed it might be possible for a bug to be attached to an existing wire, such as a power cable, with the microphone inside the room and the transmitter outside, using the existing cable to connect them. That seemed very high-tech to me and I'd never heard of something like that, but I searched along all the cables that ran into the room. I could make an NP-clamp by using two C-shaped fingertips facing each other. If I made it fractionally wider than the cable, I could quickly slide it along to feel for anything suspicious. Sometimes I hit real obstacles and needed to check each obstruction with a sight blob, but the process was still pretty fast and it came up clean on all the cables. The third of the above bullet-point possibilities was also quite easy to check for. I remember the HOURS I spent searching for bugs in Peoria Road, but I'm better at using sight blobs now. I created a large, mostly flat, sight blob, and moved it so it was inside the ceiling's concrete slab. It would need to radiate light so I could see with it, and I didn't want any video-bugs to see anything weird, so I adjusted the blob's shape so no part of it protruded from the slab. Then I made it radiate and I moved it horizontally. Steel is very dense and thick, while a hole in the steel is not. Because I can see with all of a sight blob's volume, a hole drilled through the steel plate would be a sudden bright spot and immediately noticeable. A few seconds later, I found a small hole in the ceiling's 'solid' metal plate! Moving a second sight blob to look very closely at the ceiling directly below the bright spot revealed a very well hidden, very tiny bug. Long story short: the Kids' and Adults' Houses were RIDDLED with bugs. EVERY room - even the bathrooms - had at least one bug, with large rooms having two or three of them. Each bug was installed in the same way, whether the room was a Faraday cage-equipped room or not. A hole had been drilled down from above, through the ceiling's concrete slab, and necessarily through the metal sheet core if the ceiling had one. The drilling had generally stopped about a quarter of an inch before breaking through, except for a very thin, central point which had been allowed to penetrate. From the top, an impressively small bug was lowered on a wire and positioned so the microphone covered the small hole. They were all audio-bugs, which will please users of the bathrooms. Concrete not being very attractive for us to look up at, all of our rooms had their ceilings covered with something or other (it was either a decorating or a furnishing issue so I won't describe it in any detail). Thus the FBI buggers had done different things in each room to ensure the bugs' invisibility but good sound reception. In all cases, even knowing exactly where to look, it was damned hard to spot a blemish. The guys who'd wired our place had done a SUPERB job. In the roof-space, on the top of the ceilings' slabs, channels had been cut by what was almost certainly a concrete-cutting skill saw judging by how it overlapped the holes, cut straight lines and couldn't handle corners. Each bug had two wires running from it. The wires were placed in the channels that had been filled in with something that looked like concrete so the channels could no longer be seen by anyone in the roof-space. The filler material wasn't concrete, as it felt like firm putty. The wires in each house ran to a single point, where they plugged into the back of a box that looked like an internet router but with far more sockets. That was wrapped in a fine meshed metallic 'fabric' - presumably to dampen its incidental EM transmissions - and also buried in an excavated hole in the concrete slab and covered in the concrete-looking putty (I knew what it looked like because my sight blob had overlapped it). In the Kids' House, it was right at the western edge of the roof-space and had three power cable-sized wires coming out of the other side of it. One was actually a power-input cable judging by its connecting a short distance away to one of our existing wires. The other two cables ran through a hole drilled in the exterior wall of our home immediately behind a gutter's downpipe, then continued through another drilled hole into the downpipe itself. Below the downpipe, an inch underground in the stormwater drain, the cables ran out through yet another hole and into a slit that'd been cut in our ground. The west side of the ridge that the Kids' House is on is quite steep and covered in scrub and small bushes, so it's essentially impassable. (It's the same cliff face that the Emergency Tunnel's camouflaged exit uses.) They'd dug a little cave for a small parabolic dish, pointed toward some houses on a ridge to the west of Corvallis, and had shielded the dish from sight with vegetation. From this end I couldn't tell exactly which house it was aimed at, but I knew the general area and it'd be extremely easy to tell from the other end - it'd be the house with a dish aimed at my home and a room full of audio equipment and goons in suits. Not that I'd have any trouble finding it, but if I did, I could wait until the dish started transmitting and follow the beam (it wasn't transmitting now). The Adults' House had its satellite dish hidden under the Activity Level and pointing north, but was otherwise the same. I checked, and the Office was also bugged, its dish pointing to the same place as the Adults' House's dish. The Staff Quarters and other minor buildings were not wired. #28: #1: #4: #12: There was no time like the present, so I went house-hunting. I was disappointed. The two FBI-infested houses each contained one weenie guy who was babysitting the local dish (or two dishes for the northern house) and the satellite uplink it (they) was plugged into. I'd been hoping for a dozen goons as so many bugs must've needed a lot of listeners. That would've enabled me to give a VERY bloody demonstration of the penalty of disobeying a Guardian Angel. The weenies had binoculars but no night-vision equipment or anything else that mattered. They were soldering iron and pocket protector-types, not field agents. ^ [[This operation had come about in response to the Guardian Angel's Freedom Plaza revelation that it had four more W80s. The Government HAD to get those back! The FBI had been put in charge of finding them. One of the many actions the FBI had taken to achieve that was to set up this operation at our home. This will sound REALLY stupid, but it was still going because of bureaucratic inertia: no one gave these agents permission to stop! By the time the Government got its W80s back there was no one who: (1) knew about this operation, and (2) had the authority to cancel it, and (3) still had a head on his shoulders. Of course the Agent In Charge of this operation queried his boss when the W80s were recovered, but one of the stated objectives for this operation was to find out as much as possible about the Guardian Angel, so canceling the operation didn't automatically follow from the W80s being recovered. The Agent In Charge's query got passed up the chain, where it dead-ended for a while. If I'd just killed the FBI's Director, then the Deputy Director probably would've taken up the slack and this operation would have been canceled, but my killing the D and DD resulted in a two-level power vacuum, and that caused a messy transition for the replacements. The new Acting-D and Acting-DD had been frantically trying to get up to speed on all the stuff that'd been going on that they'd previously known nothing about. It took them another day or two yet before one of them got around to looking at a query that had no apparent urgency. Even if he wasn't as institutionally arrogant as his predecessor and had realized that this operation was too risky, it was too late to fix the problem easily by then because the bugs were already installed and we were back in residence, making removing them impossible without telling us that they were there. That might anger the angel into nuking DC, so it was a very dangerous risk that needed to be passed further up the chain, which took more time... ]] ^ During my house-hunting, I enjoyed myself thinking of ways of using the information I'd discovered to screw the Government. Ideas ranging from: Trying to get two payments of $216 billion out of them: first for the surveillance up to and including the UAV because that breached our second settlement contract. After we got that payment, we'd 'discover' the bugs in our home and send the Government another bill. Cutting off more heads in ways that made the Government seem appallingly dishonest, e.g., get the Director of the FBI to personally and on-camera promise there was no more surveillance on us, then have the Guardian Angel poke a hole in our ceiling to show him a bug, show him photos of the bugs' wiring in the ceiling, then the parabolic dishes, then the FBI-receiving houses, including the FBI badges of the weenies. Then cut his head off. Or possibly, in my fantasy, do that to the President. That'd please Dad, but I somehow doubted the President had the balls to face up to us, let alone make a promise that he'd be accountable for. After identifying the second FBI-infested house, I was about to head to where the nearest gardener lived, when, #15: #12: #All: We thought it fairly unlikely that bombs would be hidden under our floor, because it'd be damned hard to get a bomb under it, and our floors were very thick so would deflect much of the blast sideways. Anyone standing on top of such a bomb would be screwed, but unless it was a phenomenally huge bomb, people in another room would likely be safe. I already knew there were no bombs in the ceilings because I'd had sight blobs go all over those. Bombs were much more likely to be in the rooms themselves, I thought, based on all my Hollywood-provided bomb training. Plus it made sense that they'd be in rooms where we tended to congregate, so I started by searching the dining room carefully. Finding nothing suspicious, I checked out other rooms. There were no bombs hidden under the dining room table, in or under our beds, inside our TVs, or anywhere else that I could see - and there wasn't anywhere that I couldn't see. My search included looking for suspicious cavities in our floor, in the earth under our floor, and for any signs of digging around the exteriors of our houses' foundations. I'd already searched the walls when I was looking for bugs. They'd only been in the ceilings, but I can search through solid matter quickly so I'd done all the walls anyway, even though it was obviously unnecessary as EVERY ceiling was bugged, sometimes even two or three times. #5: #30: We have a very good air conditioning system. Our houses were designed to be very strong defensively, and that included defending our air. There were sensors on the AC system for many types of nasties, filters, air reservoirs, rapid room sealing and back-flushing, etc. If attackers tried to spray something bad into our air intakes, it shouldn't get as far as any of the rooms. I was reasonably sure that it was better to be safe than dead, so I searched anyway. I ALMOST didn't find it. It was only because sight blobs move so effortlessly through everything that I kept them going into an area I wouldn't have bothered searching had it been any bother. Tucked far up inside the AC duct that led to the outlet into my bedroom was a gas canister the size of a small fire extinguisher and with a small electronics attachment near the valve. God knows how they got it so far up the duct; the FBI must employ midgets with extremely long arms. [[Or they have double-sided tape and extendable rods with claws.]] A few seconds' searching of other AC ducts found some more of them. In the Kids' House there was one for my bedroom and one for the room we'd made look like Carol's bedroom. In the Adults' House there were canisters in the outlet vents to Vanessa and Prof's room, Donna's room, and the spare master bedroom that is obviously where Mom and Dad would relocate to until their room is repaired. Usefully the canisters had a label on them that identified the gas they contained "Carfentanyl (R33799)". That meant nothing to me, but it hopefully will after I google it. There was one aspect of the gas booby-trap that made me kick myself: there was a wire running from each canister's control box up into the ceiling, then along a disguised channel to the large control box that all the bugs were plugged into. When I'd been looking inside the control box I'd seen that it had dozens of sockets, but I'd been so mentally focused on tracing the bugs to the box that I'd never thought to do two other obvious things: trace the wires from the box back to the bugs, or just to count how many sockets had plugs in them and compared that to how many bugs I'd found. Kick, kick. I counted the plugs now, and I was happy that they did exactly equal the number of bugs + canisters in each house. And then to be thorough, I traced every cable that left the box to make sure it ended up somewhere I knew about. They all did, so I only gave myself one more kick. #3: #14: I gave myself another kick for not thinking of that earlier - #14 objecting to his being kicked along with the rest of us - and then I did that check. Yep, only the one data and power cable per dish, which I back-traced carefully and they led to a known control box. I could tell which cables were data and which power by seeing what they plugged into inside the master control box. There weren't that many places parabolic dishes could be practically hidden near to our homes, and I searched them all, not finding any more. I also looked in weird places like inside our radar pyramid, the swimming and spa pool pumping 'rooms'; which prompted me to search for any sign of the baddies being able to remotely dump nasty chemical in the pools, but they seemed fine. I was getting paranoid, very justifiably. I'd told the families I'd be back before midnight and it was nearly that time. They were only a couple of minutes' flight away so there was no point in making them worry by being late, so I headed back to them, with a few very quick detours on the way. I located the two gardeners' homes I knew about and was very pleased to see that they were both sleeping peacefully with their families. That was a good sign. I passed over the hospital. Ava was sleeping with two different goons on guard outside her room. I didn't wake her up. Instead I found an unused computer and googled the name from the gas cylinders. I read that Carfentanyl (or Carfentanil, it seems to have an alternate spelling) is an opioid, which I learned means much the same as opiate, apparently meaning that it's a type of opium. It has "a quantitative potency approximately 10,000 times that of morphine." I would have been scared by 1 times as potent as morphine, so 10,000 times sent shivers up my spine. It's used as an animal tranquilizer. The article stressed that it should only be used on animals, "as its extreme potency makes it inappropriate for use in humans." #4: There was also a comment that in the 2002 Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis, the Russian military used an aerosol form of either Carfentanil or something very similar. I remembered that quite a few innocent people died in that screw-up, but the link said that their deaths had been easily preventable with the right measures, which the linked article listed and they were fairly simple. I hoped the Fibbies use Wikipedia. I searched for more articles about Carfentanil, and the second one I read described it as being incredibly fast acting. #24: #3: Back at the barn, I told the families, "I have two pieces of good news and several of bad news. The first good news is that Ava looks fine. She's still in her private room although still under Fibbie guard. The other good news is that I checked out the private homes of two of our gardeners, and they're both there and sleeping peacefully. I decided not to try to talk with them, but I can easily go back and do that if we want. -- "The bad news starts with the Fibbies. They control our property and have been all over it as much as they want. Bad news number two is that none of our staff are on our property. There's no sign of where they are, but the Staff's Quarters has several cellphones lying around in various rooms indicating they didn't leave voluntarily. Bad news number three is that the Adults' House, Kids' House and Office are riddled with bugs. Every single room has at least one bug in the ceiling, even the bathrooms..." Dad had to say, "The Government is STUPID! How could they do that after everything you've done?" We all agreed with Dad, even more forcefully than he'd put it. Dad must've been cautious about swearing in front of the kids in front of Mom. Vanessa said, "We're on a path where we have to keep punishing them until they learn their lesson." I said, "Wait till I tell you the rest of the bad news then we can discuss suitable punishment." I told them about the canisters of super-potent knockout gas, the parabolic dishes aimed at the two FBI-weenie manned houses, the probable radiation sensors in our front gate, the reception committee waiting for us there, the damage to our homes. I finished with, "I THINK I found everything but I can't be positive. I searched very carefully for bombs and didn't find any, or stumble on anything else bad, but I can't guarantee I didn't miss something. I'd like to go back for another hour or two, to search the houses some more, and hopefully the RV that contains the FBI files." No one liked the idea of sleeping in a house that had an unforeseen nasty trick up its sleeve (assuming houses have sleeves. They probably don't because they have wings), so everyone agreed that I should go back for further searching. Five minutes later I was near the Command RV. The Fibbies were alert and looking around, expecting our return momentarily as it was shortly after midnight. I slammed the door on the Staff's Quarters, which got all the Fibbies to rush to the gate. I opened the filing cabinets in the RV (they were locked, but they're very easy to open from the inside), pulled out the files, and flicked through them very quickly. With the size of eyeball I was using and the number of fingertips I had on the job, I was reading a HUGE number of files very quickly. It only took seconds to find what I most wanted: an overview of the operation. I opened a window and stole it, putting everything else back and locking up behind me. The "Mission Objectives" were: "Obtain information which will facilitate the recovery of the thermonuclear weapons stolen from Minot Air Force Base on June 7, 2007 by the creature commonly referred to as 'Mark Anderson's Guardian Angel'." "Obtain intelligence on said creature." #15: #All: Following the two objectives, there was a paragraph explaining why each of them was important. Apparently the author thought it necessary to explain why the first objective was important in case the FBI agents involved had been unaware that leaving city-destroying thermonuclear weapons on the loose was bad. The explanation for the second objective was all about the risk "the creature" posed. The author didn't quite say " ... to the American Way Of Life, Mom and Apple Pie," but it was clear that he thought it was fundamentally wrong that so much destructive power was not even understood, let alone under official control. I imagined the Air Force thought similarly. It wasn't said in so many words, but the easy implication was that gaining information about the creature was the necessary first step in gaining control over it. Also not said anywhere was "God" as the significance of the word "angel" was never touched on. There was also no mention of "alien", "devil", "demon" or even "Elvis". The issue of the creature's background was ignored. The FBI was treating it as a creature that needed to be understood and presumably gained control of one day. I was particularly pleased that the document listed the methods the FBI agents would use to achieve their objectives, as I'd already spotted most of them: Physical searching. Listening devices. Radiation detectors. Conversation and negotiation. Tranquilizer aerosol followed by interrogation. Each of the methods was very briefly described: Physical searching needs no additional comment here as I've already described the visible results of it, and what the Mission Overview said about the listening devices was also pleasingly consistent with what I'd discovered. The purpose of the radiation detectors was "To determine whether any of the subjects have handled or been in the proximity of radioactive material, are still in possession of radioactive material, are storing radioactive material on their property or in their residences, or might obtain such material in the future." This document didn't mention how any of the equipment was to be installed, so there was no explicit mention of gateposts for these sensors. There was only mention of "emplaced sensors" and "handheld sensors". Presumably deployment decisions were either left up to the local Agent In Charge, or were covered in a document that I hadn't read. [[The Agent In Change had delayed installing the sensors because by the time our property was cleared of all our staff so it could be done unobserved, the W80s had been returned and he expected the operation to be called off. It was only prior to our return when he had to vacate our property - relocating to just outside our gates - and he still hadn't received orders canceling the operation, that he thought he'd better install the gate sensors. His logic was quite simple and typical of Government employees: He couldn't get in trouble for following his orders, but if he failed to install the sensors and more w80s were stolen or something else nuclear happened, then he could be in deep shit when his failure to follow orders came to light. Never mind that his following orders might possibly lead to Washington DC being vaporized; that unlikely possibility was someone else's problem. His ass was covered because he'd emailed his head office to query the wisdom of installing the sensors. That they'd chosen not to email back was their problem.]] Regarding the fourth bullet point, the Mission Overview stated that "As much as possible is to be discovered through conversation and negotiation. Opportunities for both are to be sought and created." The fifth option, the tranquilizer gas, was stated to be a last resort. That would normally be reassuring except I had no confidence in the FBI's ability to handle the frustration of not getting what it wanted. I didn't enjoy reading about the possibility of being interrogated again, but I did enjoy the thought of what everyone else would think of the FBI when they read it, especially phrases like "Transport in secret to our Portland facility" and "Do not involve local law enforcement. They are thought to be biased in favor of the Subjects and are to be considered untrustworthy and likely to cause difficulties." The public would also be shocked at how little consideration there was to the danger of antagonizing the Guardian Angel/creature. The omission was because the document was written soon after the Freedom Plaza threat. At that time the only deaths the Guardian Angel had caused were the skinheads outside our front gate. It'd done a huge amount of physical damage to Air Force bases, but that seemed to have increased the urgency of understanding and controlling the creature more than it'd increased the need to be cautious and fearful of it. The document's date would be too uninteresting for the media to emphasize, and understanding its context would require too much thinking for most of the public to bother with. They'd react to reading it as if it was a current document. The public would react emotionally and greatly, so the document would hurt the FBI badly by making them seem unbelievably callous about the risk of pushing the angel one more time when it had clearly indicated that it now considered the public liable for the actions of their Government. It also pleased me a great deal because it didn't mention B-52s, cruise missiles, CIA ninjas, or God knows what other deadly measures that might've been directed at us. The only thing we had to worry about was the knockout gas, and I could think of several ways of negating that threat: Unplugging the cables from the control box. That would work, but might create a fault signal back in the FBI main control room. If all the canisters registered faults in rapid succession, that would tell the Fibbies that we knew about the canisters and surely the bugs too. I didn't want them to know that we knew, because they might have a nasty Plan B. I much preferred their Plan A because I knew all about it, could stop it, and I might be able to twist it to our advantage. Securely taping sheets of plastic over the vents so no AC air could get into our bedrooms. Our vents are independent of each other because of the need to monitor, filter and control their airflows, so blocking some vents wouldn't cause the gas to emerge from others. Run the AC in reverse. Turning it off would probably be insufficient as the gas would still leak into our bedrooms, especially if it was heavier than air. The third option intellectually appealed to me, but our AC system is smart and it might 'change its mind' at some point, so I preferred the second option as I knew it'd work. In fact, I preferred it so much that I decided to do it right now, while the bugs were probably still turned off - they had been the last time I'd checked, a few minutes ago. The stolen FBI document also named the Agent In Charge and his Deputy, gave operation numbers and various other crap that didn't matter now but might be useful later. I folded it up using NP and put it between two NP-plates attached to the side of my sled so I wouldn't lose it or get DNA on it. The parabolic dishes were now transmitting, so the bugs were presumably on. A bit of a nuisance, but not too bad. I didn't have sheets of plastic, but I did have many sheets of photocopy paper that I thought was just as airtight. I floated a ream of paper, a roll of wide packing tape and a pair of scissors out of my upstairs study, down the hallway to a bathroom, then out the narrow window opening (bathroom windows are proving themselves to be exceptionally useful for me). Outside and far enough away from the house not to be heard, I taped four pages of paper together in a two-by-two square, with tape down the full length of the internal joins on both sides to guarantee it was air- and knockout gas-tight. Then I ran long strips of tape along and overlapping all the outside edges. I flew the paper shield into my bedroom. We have controls in our rooms to allow us to adjust the volume of airflow because drafts can be uncomfortable in small rooms. That control doesn't let us turn the airflow off, but I turned it down as much as possible and then positioned the paper over the vent and rubbed the tape against the wall all around. It looked pretty good to me, and I looked VERY closely. Maybe a very small amount of the gas might get through, but the amount and subsequent concentration of it would be so low that I doubted it'd put a mouse to sleep, let alone several humans. As an additional precaution, whenever anyone in my families is asleep, I won't be. I'll be watching the canisters very closely so if any of them activate I'll silently move everyone out of their bedrooms. When every booby-trapped vent was papered over to my satisfaction, I returned to the barn. On the way I had a good idea, so I backtracked (not that I leave much in the way of tracks). I found Vanessa's digital camera in her study, covered that room's microphone with a soundproof NP-plate, turned the camera on, checked it had a charge and the memory stick had room for plenty more pictures - it was empty because Vanessa is very methodical. I fiddled around until I'd managed to turn off the date- and time-stamp function so they wouldn't be added to each picture, then sent the camera outside to take a photo of the front door of the Adults' House, then inside to take a photo of the study (I moved out of the shot!), then a zoomed-in photo of the tiny hole in the ceiling. I did pairs of internal shots, to identify the room, and show the bug(s) in those rooms' ceilings. I did that for the Adults' Study that I was in, Vanessa and Prof's bedroom, the dining room and one of the bathrooms. Then I flew the camera to below the trapdoor that goes up into the Adult House's roof-space, photographing that from below and then from above. I flew the camera to a bug, where I carefully and quietly dug out the putty from the first few inches of the channel, and the lump that sealed the top of the hole. I covered the hole with another invisible, soundproof NP-plate (to think that very originally I'd been disappointed that NP-fingertips were invisible!), and photographed the bug, making sure to get part of the channel that was still covered in putty as that looked very professionally invisible. Then I flew to where the control box was hidden, did a "before" shot showing the innocent looking corner of our roof-space, then I dug all the putty out and opened the mesh foil over it to expose the box as well as the first foot or so of the channels. There weren't that many channels as most of them had multiple wires that separated closer to their bugs. The number of plugs on the back of the control box and the number of wires running out of those plugs told the story very well. I photographed the cable running out of the front of the control box and through our exterior wall; then sent the camera outside to photograph the cable emerging from the exterior wall and going into the drainpipe. That required using the flash outside. It was out of sight of the front gate but the weenie might have seen it from across town if he'd been looking through his binoculars. He'd have gotten an instant flash and no more, so I wasn't worried. The camera was gone moments later. The next shot was at ground level, which was out of every baddies' sight, showing the wire leaving the stormwater drain and into the channel cut in our lawn, which I'd pulled up a few inches of. Then the parabolic dish showing its camouflage. I flew across the top corner of Corvallis and took a picture of the weenie's setup after making a small noise in the kitchen to get the weenie to go investigate it. I didn't want him in the shot in case he changed his clothes by the time I used these photos, because that'd date them. I wasn't sure if I'd use these, and if I did, I might want to pretend they were taken on a specific date, so I was making sure nothing in them limited my choices. I returned to the Kids' House and did an abbreviated version of the same thing there, and an even more abbreviated version for the Office. Then I flew to the barn, taking the camera with me. I showed my families the page that gave an overview of the Fibbies operation and that reassured them that the knockout gas was the only nasty trick the Fibbies had prepared. I told them what I'd done to block the vents and how I wouldn't sleep while anyone else was. "I only need one and a half hours per day, and I can easily put that off or grab a catnap on the sofa during the day." And I showed them the pictures and explained why I'd taken them. Apart from me, everyone was tired. They hadn't slept well in the cabin because it didn't have any beds and the exciting news the Guardian Angel had been creating had always happened at night. They wanted a good night's sleep and for the girls to be rested before exams, presuming there was a chance of those going ahead. The beds at home were calling out to the parents, inviting, "Come have a good night's sleep on me." It was a very seductive call. But one thing for VERY sure: we couldn't go home without having our security staff back. There'd be FBI, Secret Service, religious idiots, the media, and God knows who else swarming all over the place if we were sleeping unprotected. The Guardian Angel could pick them up and put them outside again, whereupon they'd immediately try again. Or the angel could be a great deal more forceful, in which case there'd be cops, ambulances, media and all sorts of other crap to wake us up. We needed our guards back to keep all of that crap from happening. Even with guards, we were at risk from what I thought of as the"B-52" type of attack. Once our location was known, the Government could unload World War III on our asses. The FBI didn't seem to have that intention, but there was no telling what every other agency or the Air Force thought. They should understand from the scenario we'd painted that the Guardian Angel was a creature independent of Mark Anderson, so if they killed or even just upset Mark they'd have a VERY angry angel to deal with. Hoping that the Government wouldn't do something that "made no sense" wasn't a comfortable feeling. (My English teacher used to tell me off for double negatives, but she never said nothing about no triple negatives.) The trouble was that we had to reappear sooner or later, and we couldn't think of a reason why delaying it would reduce the risk from B-52s. Another option was to sleep here tonight, then reappear tomorrow during the day. That had the advantage that we wouldn't be sleeping targets overnight, but it meant my mobility would be badly constrained. We decided that if we couldn't get our guards back then we'd stay in the barn, but if we could get them we'd go home. I was sent out again to see if I could find our guards. We hadn't expected finding them to be hard, as it seemed most likely they were being held somewhere nearby. Prof had suggested that the FBI was most likely using returning our staff as a "created opportunity for negotiation", as per the Mission Overview. If that was correct, I wondered how the FBI would enjoy the angel's negotiation style. I found our missing staff after a bit of a search. All of our staff that normally lived onsite were now shoehorned into a motel room on the western outskirts of town a couple of miles away from home. Apparently the FBI was willing to piss away $216 billion so it could play spy games on us, but it didn't like spending extra money on motel rooms for prisoners. Our staff were manacled and roped together, and were well guarded. Wise precautions given the background of some of our guys. [[So I thought at the time, which was silly of me because our staff wouldn't have physically attacked FBI agents.]] #17: #2: I got close enough to the back of the unit to get most of our staff into my proximity sense, to check their health and emotions. Both were surprisingly good. Those that were awake weren't happy, obviously, but they were less unhappy and fearful than I expected. Maybe they'd had time to calm down, or maybe it was professional stoicism. Those comments didn't apply so much to the few young gardeners and handymen who were awake. They hadn't signed up for this sort of risk and were upset, although still less than I'd expected. I made a mental note that the staff needed to receive some serious compensation for this, preferably from the Government but from us otherwise. Prof had guessed our guys wouldn't be held at the police station, and he was right. The police station would've been better though, because these conditions were cramped, very uncomfortable, and had to have been very scary at times. I knew from my own experiences that when you're held outside of the Government's official process and not granted your legal rights, you fear for your life. I was more than a little pissed off, which inspired me to have an evil idea. It might've been literally "evil" but I didn't much care. I'd check it with the parents first though. Before I did that, I went in search of a reporter/cameraman team. The parents hadn't mentioned that, but we like to do things in front of the cameras so the public can see how illegal and risky the Government is being, and to spread the lesson to other 'law enforcement' (ha!) agents. There were far fewer news teams around than a few days ago, which was generally a good thing even if it did make my search take a few minutes longer. I found a hotel room containing camera gear, and a quick snoop of the adjoining rooms let me discover which one had the reporter. They were sleeping, but that'd be easy to change when the time came. I headed back to the barn. ------- Chapter 371: Returning Home; Part Three: It Was Hardest on the Fibbies Saturday, June 9, 2007 (Continued) My families and I discussed our next steps. I suggested my plan, making Mom decidedly unhappy because she's not big on evil ideas. The rest of us worked on her. Prof told her, "They may be Government employees but they're no better than criminals, Felicity. Worse in some ways because they don't have a fear of prosecution to restrain them. They deliberately planned to avoid the local police because they know what they're doing is illegal. Mark wouldn't be suggesting what he is if our staff had been booked into the police system properly, so they've brought it on themselves." I said, "I could ask to see warrants or legal authorization, but you know there aren't any, Mom. The DHS and CIA kidnapped me and it would've led to a horrible death for me, so Government kidnappers don't get ANY sympathy from me. They've got too much power and no responsibility, so now they're going to get a hard lesson about that. Tough shit for the participants this time, but hopefully other agents will discover the need to behave morally and legally in the future." Vanessa added, "Mark is in too much danger if the Government is allowed to behave illegally. They've installed deadly gas canisters in our home so they can knock us out and interrogate us if they arbitrarily decide they want to. Do you want your family to be exposed to that level of illegal threat for the rest of their lives?" "No, I CERTAINLY do not!" Which pretty much ended that issue. The timing was tricky for one little nuance I wanted to include, so we planned our actions into carefully arranged stages. First we loaded everything and everyone back in the SUV and I carried it and the motorcycle on a wide loop around the hills to the west and north, to get us closer to our home without being observed. I set down in a hidden location not far outside the half-mile cordon. I went ahead so I could search around our home for hidden observers. There were quite a few people manning the cordon, but they weren't observing our home and neither was anyone else. As I flew over my previous hiding place for my stash of guns and cash, I hid them again. While I remember to mention it, I had thought to leave payment behind when I stole stuff from people (sheets, helmets, etc., although probably not the motorcycle from the very nasty looking gang members), but I didn't want to leave any clues behind me. I felt a little bad about my pilferage, but tried to reassure myself with an "It's for the common good" sentiment. It was initially for my good of course, but I was also doing my best to keep human civilization in every w-dimension from collapsing into chaos, including this one, so it was for my theft victims' benefit too. Then I went to collect the news team. I formed a Guardian Angel sight blob in each of their rooms, borrowed their phones to type a text message: "I have a scoop for you. Get up and get ready." I woke them up, covered their mouths to still their screams, and showed them the messages on their phones. To calm them down, I floated the cameraman's gear to him and the reporter's hairbrush to her. They discovered their professionalism; in other words, the idea of getting a jump on their competitors for a Guardian Angel exclusive was irresistible. The cameraman got up and started getting his gear ready. The reporter got up and I was struck with an irresistible thought of my own. She was wearing a very attractive, mostly-transparent nightie, and what was under the nightie was even more attractive, so I didn't give the pair time to get dressed. As soon as they were vertical, I grabbed their gear and them, flying them out their balcony doors in their nightwear. The Guardian Angel and news team - them sitting on invisible chairs to be more physically and emotionally comfortable - flew in formation to our home, with my physical body as far away from them as I could be. Our straight-line route took them over the Fibbies at our gate at a 25-foot altitude, something that didn't go unnoticed by the ever-vigilant enforcers of the American Way of Life, which as far as I can tell is: "Abuse power." I gently placed the news team inside just inside our gates, the Fibbies rushing up to ask them, "What's going on?" Leaving the news team to explain everything they knew to the Fibbies, I rushed to the rear of our hill to collect my families, flying us over the top of the cordon (those people were in trees so couldn't see us above them). Dad was the only one in the SUV, the rest I carried 'loose'. I placed the motorcycle just inside our northwestern wall where I'd collect it later. The loose people I placed on the ridge the Kids' House was on, in a position that was behind the ridge so they were out of sight of the Fibbies, and near the base of the ridge to be fairly close to the gate. I placed the SUV on the visible side of the ridge but quite a long way up it. The Fibbies saw it arrive, saw its lights come on, and would shortly see its being carefully driven down to the gate (I've omitted writing that the Fibbies would see Dad do those things because they wouldn't be able to make him out because our property had few of its lights on. I'd wanted the Fibbies to wait patiently at the gate rather than do anything else harder to plan for. If they thought all of us were in the SUV and coming to them, they'd wait for us to arrive). There was no easily driven route down to the gates for Dad, just some gardens and trees that he'd have to avoid, so his cross-country driving would seem unsuspiciously slow, giving me some more time. The Guardian Angel had accompanied the SUV when it arrived, but once the SUV had been started, the angel departed in a high arc north and out of sight over the back of our hill, where I canceled it. That was a short-term misdirection because my body was already accelerating south to go to the motel where our staff were being kept prisoner. While I was still in range I turned on Julia's laptop in our upstairs study to use it to communicate with Dad later. Seeing that its power hadn't been drained by the Fibbies, I flew it down the ridge while it was booting, hiding it in some trees about four hundred feet from the gate. I flew rapidly to the motel/prison where I made sure the four guards were not on the phone or using their radios. I'd timed events so the Fibbies back at the gate would have had enough time to have already informed these Fibbies that things were starting to happen back at the house, but after having done so would've ended their calls because nothing else seemed to be happening. I simultaneously created a Guardian Angel in the motel room, blocked the tracheas of the four Fibbies, held them immobile, and rotated their heads through 360 degrees. They were dead from spinal shock before anyone had recovered from the surprise of the angel's appearance. I lifted one of the cellphones off a corpse, typed a message on it, and floated it to Paul: "Security report to Anderson home for work now. Take FBI cars. Other staff stay here, call local police, report everything." I pushed the corpses within reach of the staff so they could find the keys they needed. Our staff's hands were manacled behind their backs so waking everyone up, searching the corpses, extracting the keys, unlocking themselves and then finding a phone should keep them busy for long enough that I wouldn't have a timing inconsistency caused by the staff calling the police too soon. I'd taken the cellphone off Paul and was removing every phone from the room. As soon as they were outside I crushed them and dumped the junk in the trash. The Guardian Angel zoomed through the wall in the direction of home and was canceled it as soon as it was out of the room. I accelerated myself rapidly toward home. Meanwhile, in accordance with our plan, the Fibbies had gathered outside our gate to talk with whoever was in the SUV. They doubtless could've opened the gate but they were pretending to be polite. The news team had moved to a better position and had filmed the approach as Dad had slowly driven down the hill, pulling to a stop about thirty yards back from the gate. From that far away from the Fibbies he'd have to yell loud enough so I'd be able to hear him from where I'd be, once I arrived back. Dad had gotten out and asked the Fibbies, "Who are you?" "FBI Mr. Anderson. We're here to..." "Where are our staff?" The Fibbie boss opened the negotiation with, "I want to talk with you about that." Prof and Vanessa walked into view from the back of the ridge, about two hundred feet away from Dad. Prof waving and calling out loudly to Dad, "Hi Steven, we're back. What's happening? Where are our staff?" Dad called back, "I'm trying to find out." "Okay. We'll check the houses." Prof and Vanessa walked up toward the Kids' House. Dad turned back to the Fibbies, asking, "What's the story with our staff?" "We're investigating the theft of the nuclear bombs from Minot Air Force base..." "The Guardian Angel did it. Everybody knows that. No one knew it was going to do that, so our staff had nothing to do with it." "We're back, darling," called Mom, who'd just walked into view with Carol and Donna. "Where is everyone?" Dad called back, "Good to see you again, Fely and girls. It sounds like the Fibbies are blaming our staff because the angel borrowed the nukes." "That doesn't make any sense. How could they be responsible for what God wanted done?" called Mom. I arrived behind the ridge, joining Julia. I'd seen Mom and my sisters pretend to arrive as I flew in, and it was too soon for Julia and me to appear, so we stayed put for the moment. Dad called, "It seems stupid to me too. I'm trying to find out." "Okay. I hope they're okay. Where's everyone else?" Prof called out from just short of the Kids' House, "We're up here, Felicity. The angel delivered us after Steven, and I guess it's getting Julia and Mark now." There was some more back and forth, which I won't bother quoting as it was all meaningless crap. Prof and Vanessa first, then Mom and my sisters later, walked into the Kids' House where they started turning on lights and saying things like, "It's good to be back", "I hope the angel gets the others okay", and other misdirections or ordinary comments for the bugs' benefit. Dad got back to talking to the Fibbie, but that was meaningless crap too, in both directions. Julia and I walked into sight, holding hands and yelling out to Dad, "Hi Dad! Are we the first ones back?" Dad answered, "You're the last. Everyone else is in your home." "Where are our staff?" "I don't know. It seems the FBI is holding them hostage or some..." The Guardian Angel appeared right beside Dad, startling him even though Dad expected it to happen soon after I appeared. The laptop flew into sight and decelerated into a hover beside Dad, at an angle where the cameraman would get a clear shot of it. The light from the Guardian Angel on Dad's other side was helping too. Windows was just finishing booting. I opened a blank Word document, changed the font size to 24, and typed: To: FBI. I told Mark Anderson father tell lawyer tell TV tell everyone: "Home is Embassy of God. All good people back. All bad people gone never come back. No tricks." I know TV tell everyone. You know. You chose disobey God. Dad read it out, accidentally stumbling over the message body's first line and having to restart it, which nicely emphasized the non-rehearsed nature of his reading. The moment Dad finished the last word, a second angel shot out of the original, speeding very rapidly in the direction of the motel/prison. I made the 'Rescue Angel' shrink in size as it departed, creating an optical illusion of it going much farther away than it really had, which had been exactly 518 feet minus how far away from Dad I was. Several of the Fibbies reached for their communication devices, obviously to warn their motel team. I called out to Dad, "Do you need any help, Dad?" Dad called back, "The angel's doing everything! I just read what it writes." "Okay. I'll check on the others." Julia and I turned to walk up the slope. It'd take me quite a while to walk out of range, and heading the wrong way would make me appear innocently unconnected to the angel. If the 'negotiation' took longer than expected I'd either invent some excuse for returning to help Dad, or just sit down behind some bushes in the dark. Meanwhile, the angel that had remained behind had picked up the head Fibbie by the head, putting a lot of strain on his neck and making him panic ineffectively. He was only three feet off the ground, but his staff were totally unable to help him. Pulling down on him certainly didn't help, a fact that their boss shrieked at the pullers. He waved his arms around his head, unsuccessfully trying to fight off something that wasn't there. Then he tried to pull my fingertips off his head, but he never had a hope of making a difference. Most of the other agents already had their guns out and pointed at the angel. The suspended boss was going for his gun too. With Dad being so close, I had to be careful. The Guardian Angel rose in the air and all the guns tracked it. Once they were pointing upward safely, I grabbed every agent's hands. There were sixteen hands in total, counting the suspended head Fibbie, and I raised them all so high that the hands' owners were having to stand on extreme tiptoe, and in one case, three feet higher. I removed their guns by pulling on them with far more force than the Fibbies could resist, and floated them inside the gate where I formed them into a nice floating line pointing toward the Fibbies. They were still dangling from their arms so they couldn't do anything to avoid being their own guns' targets. The 'Rescue Angel' returned just as rapidly and optically deceptively as it'd left, merging with the original angel, which typed another message. Dad read out, "Four bad men kidnappers now dead. Good men free. I told security good men come here; told gardeners and other good men call police tell what bad men did." God's helper on Earth constantly referring to our staff as "good men" and the Fibbies as "bad men" would play very well on TV, as would its instructing our staff to call the police. The Fibbies looked very unhappy. They couldn't get their hands down or move away, their guns were pointing at them, four of them were apparently dead, and they were being filmed. I don't know how much having the police called added to their misery, but I doubted it made them feel any better. From now on, every baddie - by which I mean Government agent - would think twice before mistreating our staff, and obviously before mistreating us too. What I particularly enjoyed was that the motel was 2.5 miles away. That the angel could split in two and operate independently had to be VERY scary. I'd created eight angels to zoom around the cars that were chasing the angel at Beale AFB, but those guys might not have been listened to attentively. This event was being captured on film and it proved that the Guardian Angel could split in two and operate 2.5 miles apart from each other. How many times could it split and how far apart could they operate? The Government already knew how destructive the Guardian Angel could be, so if thinking about its being able to replicate itself didn't teach the authorities some caution, it was hard to image what teaching that lesson would take. In addition, the Rescue Angel had apparently accomplished its mission in about fifteen seconds, which was a speed of 600 mph, not allowing ANY time for what it did at the motel. It should come out from the police statements that the angel's rescue had taken about ten seconds, implying a flying speed of 1,800 mph, which was a sonic boomless Mach 2.5. During some of the air base raids I'd had the angel move faster than that, but this was on videotape. The authorities would be under no illusion (hehe) that angels were faster and more dangerous than they ever imagined before. So much for the 500-foot limit! If the Fibbies were unhappy before, you should've seen them when I dropped 95% of their local boss to the ground. Because I was holding their arms up in the air so forcefully, they couldn't even dodge the blood spurting out of the stump of his neck. As carefully required by the script for this stage, Dad waited until there was enough quiet - that took a while - then called out, "Who's second in charge?" Naturally enough there wasn't a volunteer. Even though all their hands were in the air, I didn't think any of them were volunteering. I typed a couple more lines: Agent In Charge: Dillon Anders. Deputy Agent In Charge: Nathaniel Matthews. Dad read them out. We'd scripted this little bit carefully as we weren't sure that the onsite boss would be Agent In Charge, as maybe that guy was back in DC, which would presumably make the onsite boss the deputy. We didn't want the angel to incorrectly identify someone as that'd damage the angel's reputation, but we did want to name the two agents because it demonstrated the angel having access to information it should have no way of knowing, given that it'd only just arrived here. That it could pull the names and positions 'out of the air' had to be scarily impressive too. I didn't know his name, but I knew who the local 2IC was from my having observed the way the Fibbies interacted with each other. I lifted that guy by his head, exactly as I had his predecessor. He cried in terror. Dad demanded, "Are you Nathaniel Matthews?" As using that name implies, we'd guessed that "Agent In Charge" meant onsite. "PLEASE don't kill me!" Dad answered, "I'm not doing anything; you're doing it to yourself. The angel's message on TV was it wanted all our staff to be free and all you guys gone. -- "You're unbelievable idiots! We don't know any more about the angel than you do, and the angel warned it'd cut the heads off anyone who was still here. How on Earth did you think it'd react when you stayed here AND you admitted to kidnapping our innocent staff to force us to answer your questions, AND you were the guys who almost killed Fely and me a few days ago?" Dad was interrupted by several of the Fibbies all declaring that they'd had nothing to do with that. Some of them even going so far as to say the FBI hadn't been involved, which they had no way of being sure of. There were various other pleadings, and then one of them said the predictable, "We didn't have a choice; we were ordered to stay." Which wasn't quite the intro Dad wanted, so he asked, "Were you ordered to kidnap our innocent staff?" "YES! We were! We're innocent too." They were coming across as cowards, but see it from their point of view: They had a headless corpse at their feet that'd pumped blood over most of them since they'd been in a circle around their boss when his headless body collapsed to the ground, they were held on their extreme tiptoes helplessly and magically, their guns were hovering in midair pointing at them, they knew the angel was capable of cruising through Air Force bases spreading massive destruction all around it while ignoring everything the Air Force hit it with, they knew it'd killed the FBI's Director and Deputy Director, knew they'd illegally kidnapped our staff, knew the angel had said it'd cut people's heads off, and it was still holding one head in the air to prove it. They expected to die horribly very soon, especially Nathaniel Matthews. Dad countered, "If your boss ordered you to kill the President, would you? Of course not. You pick and choose what crimes you're willing to commit. You agreed to kidnap our staff because you thought your all-powerful FBI would protect you from the law. So how's your illegal agency doing at protecting you now?" More incoherent, useless replies. That didn't matter as this was all for the benefit of the camera. Dad added, "The angel told the President to order everyone to stop hassling Mark because God's plan for Mark was more important than whatever stupid ideas you morons thought you were going to accomplish by kidnapping our staff. The angel said it'd cut the heads off bad people who were still here, and angels keeps their word, so now five of you are dead..." I typed "Are you finished yet?" on the laptop. A little bit of possible-humor from the angel wasn't inappropriate and fitted my longer-term plan for it. I moved the laptop in front of Dad, cutting off his tirade. The Fibbies couldn't see it but the camera could. Dad laughed. He knew I'd interrupt him but we hadn't scripted how. Similarly unscripted was the only point Dad had to make next, which was that we just wanted to be left alone. How he did it was up to him. He did it by ranting: "No I'm not! I'm fed up with the fucking Government morons who keep sticking their noses into our lives. They kidnapped Mark two years ago because they insanely thought he had mind control powers, fer Christ's sake! -- "And two years later they're still acting just as stupidly and criminally. Kidnapping our GARDENERS to force us tell them things we don't have a damned clue about! How fucking stupid is that! The angel dumped us in the middle of nowhere, back in the hills somewhere, and then it flew off. We didn't have a clue what it was going to do. You don't honestly think God checks Its plans with us first, do you? When we found out it'd taken some nukes we were as scared and worried as everyone else. If you want to know anything about the angel, ask the Chief Moron Bush. He said God told him to invade Iraq so he's obviously in better contact with God than any of us are. -- "I feel like the only sane person in a lunatic asylum. We've got the FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, CIA and God knows who else fighting all around us while the angel tries to convince you all to back off. I'm FED UP with the whole thing! All our kids have got exams on Monday. How on Earth can they get good grades with all this crap going on! -- "We haven't committed any crimes. This is ALL because the fucking Government is nosey and doesn't care about committing crime after crime just because it has the power to do whatever it wants without caring about ordinary people or the law. Its stupid power-games got Mark killed two years ago, and now five more people are dead today, and if that fuckwit Bush doesn't pull his head out of his ass he's going to force the angel to set off a nuke to prove it's serious..." #14: #12: Dad kept it up for another minute, forcing me to stop walking toward the Kids' House or I would've been out of range and earshot, although the way Dad was ranting, earshot wouldn't be a problem for another few hundred feet yet. Dad managed to include, "We just want to be left the fuck alone!" toward the end of his rant. He actually did a VERY good job. Excessive, but still very good. Provided the studios didn't edit him poorly, he'd come across as he is: a VERY concerned, loving parent. Especially the concerned part. Then it was the angel's turn again. I thought of typing, "What he said," but had to reject it as too flippant. Instead I wrote the following, letting Dad read out each line after it was typed: I angry-sad also. God resurrected Mark Anderson and has plan for Mark Anderson. God plan more important than human plan. All humans stop their plans for Mark Anderson unless Mark Anderson happy with. I do not want to kill anything, but you not understand-learn. Killing only way to stop you. God want me protect Mark Anderson. I must protect Mark Anderson. If you not stop I forced to kill many. No more humans do bad things to Mark Anderson. Why you not understand? Is simple. All good people come back. All bad people go never come back. No tricks. Is simple. Go now. I enjoyed typing "No tricks." We'd included that requirement in our phone call with our lawyer, but now we knew that there were bugs and gas canisters in our homes. The Fibbies would shortly be fleeing for their lives, leaving their "tricks" behind, which we could later claim was them breaking God's instruction YET again! That'd allow us to put even more pressure on them. We hadn't been sure how to end the confrontation, so it'd been left open for me to decide at the time. I might've snipped another head or two, although everyone much preferred that I not do that. I might've exposed the sensor poles in our gate, and/or shown the photos of the bugs, and/or shown the Mission Overview page. I decided that there was no point in creating more fear or in using ammunition that might be useful later. Plus it'd be fun to feed false information to the microphones. And maybe a true miracle might happen: a Government agency might honestly confess to what it'd done to our homes and ask to be allowed to remove it all. It'd be good to give them the opportunity to show some responsibility. If they didn't - and I knew what my money was on - that could possibly be highly rewarding as we might be able to use it to extract a second $216 billion from the criminally stupid and stupidly criminal Government. My overwatch sight blob - I had my eyes shut more often than not to enable a second sight blob - could see what I assumed was Paul's convoy approaching. Still half a mile away but it'd be easiest to have the Fibbies on their way before Paul's people arrived. So when Dad read out, "Go now," I let go of all the Fibbies. Most of them ran for their cars with no hesitation at all, especially Nathaniel Matthews. A couple of them - God knows what they were thinking - hesitated. I didn't find out whether it was to retrieve the corpse of their ex-leader, their guns, or for some other highly important reason, because Dad yelled, "The angel said 'Go now!'" They decided to follow the angel's instruction. Their hesitation had been so stupid that I would've thought they were Christians, but surely Christians would have obeyed an angel the first time? I tossed the head and body onto the grass at the side of the street, made sure all the guns had their safeties engaged, and put them inside our gatehouse. It's actually more of a booth than a house, but it's a very well-armed booth now. I decided to jog down to join Dad. He probably needed a pat on the back, at the least. I was also feeling guilty about not working in a "Leave Ava alone!" command, and thought to ask Julia to go inside and call the hospital to find out how Ava is and when she can come home. Then I really started worrying about Ava. SURELY the FBI wouldn't do anything stupid with her, would they? I whispered to Julia, "I want to go give Dad a hug because I think the last few days have been very hard on him, but I think I better scoot to check on Ava in case the FBI decides 'second time lucky' when it comes to kidnapping people to use as leverage against us. I don't want to fly around without my crash helmet and sheet, and I don't want to go get them if we're under observation already, so I'll grab a ride with one of Paul's cars. Come down to take over Dad's hugging from me please?" "Sure. Ava should be able to come home now unless there's been a problem, so bring her back if you can." "I will if the hospital lets us." We jogged downhill. Paul's convoy arrived before us. Dad had hit the button to open the gate and they'd driven in and parked in the visitor area. A reunion conversation was getting underway when I ran up. I gave Dad a quick hug, and said, "GREAT job, Dad! You did us proud. Sorry to be quick, but I'm worried about Ava. I want a ride to the hospital RIGHT NOW to check on her. Paul, can I grab a couple of your guys and one of these cars please?" Paul looked to Dad for approval, who amused me by saying, "What he said." Paul indicated four guys. While they were getting the car started and turned around, I whispered to Dad, "Make sure to keep Paul and the other security guards out of the bedrooms with the vents papered over." If we keep our bedroom doors closed there shouldn't be any chance of a guard seeing the paper. Our guards rarely go into our houses, mostly just Paul or a shift manager, and then we talk to them in the living areas rather than the bedrooms. A little care should avoid us having to say "The angel told us to" about the paper covers. That was worth avoiding because it seemed weak and would ruin our ability to later pretend that we didn't know about the gas canisters. Dad nodded. I jumped in my ride and we took off, except that we actually stayed on the street surface this time. I said, "Please hurry. The FBI hasn't been law abiding recently and I'm worried about Ava." While they were hurrying - it was a VERY good thing Prof wasn't watching them drive - we compared notes about our recent experiences. I told them, "We were stuck in a crude cabin way up in the hills somewhere. Sleeping on the floor, that's how crude it was. We had food, a radio and our school notes which our parents made us study. We missed all the fun, which I guess is what the angel intended. How about you guys? You weren't at home so I guess you were having an easy time slacking off somewhere?" They hadn't had as bad a time as I'd thought. They'd been forced into house arrest most of the time, being restricted to inside the Staff Quarters. The staff that lived offsite had been told by the FBI to go home and not come back. It was only earlier today (yesterday now, as it was after midnight) that they'd been bundled up and moved to the motel. Prof's guess that our staff was intended to be a negotiation point was probably correct, although it was difficult to confirm that with the Agent In Charge now. Our security staff hadn't been as worried as I'd thought they would've been, as they'd easily worked out what was going on. That didn't stop me thinking the Government should give them a bundle of cash though. The part of the experience that stood out the most for them was seeing all four FBI guards have their necks broken at the same time, and with no warning, visible cause, or chance to defend themselves. That was a scary capability. They'd seen plenty of TV and had heard everything there was to hear about the angel's capabilities, but seeing four big guys go down without any chance at all was a shock. I picked up on these guys emotions about that. They were sorry it happened to a greater degree than I'd thought. I sounded them out about it, and gained some appreciation that they operated on two levels. They were paid to protect us and doing a good job at that was a big deal for them, but when that wasn't the issue, the rest of it was a kind of game. The Fibbies were playing the game, and their being killed for it was a bummer. It was easy for our guards to imagine that they might've been on the other side and been the ones getting their necks broken. The fact that the Fibbies had been playing the game illegally wasn't really the issue, as the game had unwritten rules which often didn't stay within the law. That didn't make me feel horribly guilty. Or even un-horribly guilty. Our guards didn't know how far the Fibbies had gone - the dangerously effective knockout gas was no laughing matter - and they didn't know how HORRENDOUS the Anderson and Williams lives would become if the Government got their noses as far into our business as they wanted. We were, quite literally, fighting for our lives, and possibly for human civilization in every w-dimension. That made it REALLY bad timing for the Fibbies to play "The Game" against us. They would have been much better off if they'd stuck to abiding by the law. When we got to within 450 feet of Ava's room, I could see that she was asleep and looking good. There was no sign of any goons at her door, which I guess proved the FBI had finally learned to run away. Whether they'd learned to stay away remained to be seen. My appearance in the hospital caused a little ruckus. Fortunately only a small one, and only among a few of the nighttime staff because everyone else was asleep. It was the perfect time for me to visit because the hospital is never quieter. It was also a bad time to try to get Ava discharged, but they were eventually persuaded to let us take her home. Ava was very eager to return, even after I warned her that it might be risky (I didn't tell her that being in the hospital might be too). She blew a raspberry at me, and then clung to me and wouldn't let go, which made getting her changed into her clothes harder and more fun. She had lots of questions, and so did the ever-increasing number of hospital staff around us. I was positive the discharge took considerably longer than it should have because the hospital staff preferred to have their curiosity satisfied, but we eventually got out of the place. Ava hadn't been lonely. She'd had heaps of visitors, but none of them had been us recently, and she didn't like being so far out of the loop. In Julia's case, "being out of the loop" would've meant, "not knowing what's going on, and preferably being in charge of it," but with Ava it meant, "not know how everyone is." So I spent most of the trip home telling her how everyone was for the last few days, and how they are now. Plus unnecessarily apologizing for not coming to see her in the hospital before. I was aware that I was in an FBI car so shouldn't say anything secret, but nothing like that came up anyway; it was just about how we were. When we got out of the car in the tunnel, and were walking for the elevator up to the Adults' House to say goodnight to the parents first, I quietly whispered to Ava, "Every room in both houses and the Office is bugged by the FBI now. Be VERY careful not to say anything secret. There's also some paper taped to the wall. Don't talk about it or touch it." "Oh boy. I won't. What are you going to do?" "Not sure yet. We have to see how the Fibbies behave over the next few days. If they're good people, they'll own up to the bugs. If they're bad people and say nothing, we'll probably try to embarrass them in some way." When Ava and I arrived upstairs, I called out for the parents, and they called back, "We're in the living room." Ava and I headed that way. When we got there, we found the four parents and four Corvallis cops, including our Chief of Police, having coffees. Mom immediately said, "We've sent the girls to bed because they were very tired." Mom looked worried, no doubt about the gas canisters even though the vents were blocked. I sent a sight blob to check on them. Carol was necessarily in 'her' bedroom. I'd been away long enough that the girls had fallen asleep, hardly surprising with how tired they'd been (I'd assured them back in the barn that I'd sealed the vents well enough that they'd be safe in the bedrooms). They were breathing normally and the gas canisters hadn't been triggered. There's an electronic control box around the valve that very conveniently had status lights on it. They were all currently "Armed". The next two statuses are "Discharging" and "Discharged". There was also a "Discharge Rate" display that was currently not displaying anything. I had the impression that it was remotely controllable rather than preset. That meant that if the FBI triggered the discharge, they might pick up from the sounds from the room that we weren't succumbing and they'd increase the discharge rate. I doubted there was enough gas in the canisters so that what tiny fraction of it that could leak through the paper, if any, could affect us, but it still encouraged me to be very vigilant about these things. If the Fibbies do trigger them, I'll cover the bugs with soundproof NP-caps while I evacuate everyone from the bedrooms, probably taking them down to the panic rooms. I'll leave the bugs covered so the ongoing silence should convince the assholes that we'd succumbed, and it'll be interesting to see what they do after that. I know that I'll be in a very foul mood so I wouldn't want to be in their shoes if they come storming onto the property, because bits of them are likely to go flying back over our wall. It'd be best not to raise that issue with Mom though. I gave Mom a smile and said, "Everything's fine," while I NP-tapped her twice on the top of the head. The police would probably think I was referring to Ava, or something, but Mom would know I'd checked on the girls. There were the expected inquiries after Ava's health. She was fine. From the families' previous visits we knew Ava's bone would regrow and then she'd have another operation to remove the metal hardware from her arm. A straightforward recovery was expected, and the last few days hadn't changed that. There was some back and forth conversation in the living room, from which I learned - because I asked - that the reporter and cameraman had already finished their interviews and had rushed off. I was sorry to have missed that because it would've been great to see the reporter "rush" in the nightie she'd been wearing. [Mom had offered to lend the reporter a dress, they being much the same size. The reporter had turned Mom down until the interviews were over, and had then accepted so she'd have something to wear when she left, so the "rush" wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable as I'd thought.] I had returned from the hospital hoping to spend some time in the company of a beautiful, well-endowed, semi-naked reporter, but was instead chatting to some of our local boys-in-blue. They're quite nice to us these days, but "nice" boys in blue couldn't compete with a considerably more than nicely displayed reporter. I was disappointed. [When they'd arrived to discuss what had happened to our staff and the larger issues, the cops hadn't been overly fearful of the Guardian Angel because they hadn't known about the anti-law enforcement theme of the night's activity. That'd emerged about fifteen minutes into the discussion. Dad had enjoyed letting the bugs hear him reassure the cops with, "You've got NOTHING to worry about. You were polite, you asked to come onto our property, you haven't tried to do anything illegal, and I'm sure it'd never occur to you to kidnap our staff to coerce us into answering your questions. The FBI agents were stupid, criminal assholes. They tried to kill Fely and me, and then they invaded our home and kidnapped our staff AFTER the angel had repeatedly warned people not to mess with Mark. How on Earth could they be stupid enough to think the angel would stand by and let them commit their crimes? It's no wonder it thought killing some of them was necessary."] As you've read, our official position on the UAV attack is, "The FBI did it to kill Mark Anderson's parents." No one can prove otherwise, and most people wouldn't believe any proof the FBI produced anyway. The FBI's protesting its innocence will be even less believed when their planting a dangerous gas in our house is made public. It's also possible I destroyed the UAV's flight records when I stomped around Northrop Grumman Integrated, but that didn't really matter as the records wouldn't have usefully answered any questions anyway. The cops wanted to talk with me, being the closest they could get to the Guardian Angel, and Ava wanted to stay close, so we settled into a sofa to help the local police with their inquiries. Or not, as it turned out. I recounted my version of events, which would have been remarkably similar to the parents' version. I described the trip back from the cabin exactly as it had been, except I said "We waited for the angel" at the various times I'd gone flying off somewhere, such as Portland to punish the SS and DHS there. The only slightly tricky deviation from reality was the angel's bringing us in small groups to the hilltop. Our explanation for that was, "The angel split us up and made us wait in small groups while it went away. It didn't explain why, but it never does. It just grabs us and moves us however it wants. We trust it so it's no big deal, although it would be nice to know why it's doing things sometimes." We all had variations on that theme. Mom's, for example, included, "It would've been nice if we'd had a chance to argue it into putting us in a better cabin, but it doesn't listen to us." Prof's had included, "I get the feeling it's so much more advanced and capable than us that it doesn't think we're worth listening to." When it came to tonight's killings, you'll not be surprised to know that our position is, "It wasn't anything to do with us; the angel did it." | Dad adding, "Good job!" | Mom adding, "Unfortunately." | Me being apparently indifferent. | Etc. We sympathized with the cops' situation, but as Prof said, "It's not human. Some people don't believe it's an angel. We do because Mark was resurrected and all the angels seem to have very strong morals. Not quite the morals we expected, but that's clearly our error. But whatever it is, it isn't something the law gives you any guidance on, does it?" "No," agreed the Chief. "We're going to write it up then pass it off for someone else to worry about. I'm not even sure we can call what it did a crime. If someone died because they got hit by lightning, we don't include that in the crime statistics, so should we include a death caused by an angel? I don't know." I could tell that he really was concerned about that, I guessed because Corvallis's recent murder statistics didn't reflect well on its police force or on him personally. That was either contemptible, understandable, or somewhere in between. I could see reasons in both directions. I helpfully suggested, "Count the deaths as suicides. I watched all the videotapes that CNN sent me about Archangel Michael, and he always followed through on anything he said. Ditto for the Guardian Angel. It said it wanted the bad men gone and our staff back, and that it'd kill anyone who disobeyed it. When we arrived here, the bad men weren't gone, our staff weren't back, and the bad men admitted kidnapping them. And to make it even worse, the bad men stood at our gate trying to blackmail Dad into answering questions. They committed suicide at least three times over. I'm amazed the angel didn't kill all of them. Or if you don't write it up as a suicide, you could say they died of terminal stupidity." "That'll be the coroner's call," he said with a smile. I presumed that a member of the public who shot and killed armed kidnappers who were holding two dozen hostages would be lauded as a hero, but I was tempted to ask if the hero's laurel would be changed to steel handcuffs if the kidnappers were FBI agents. I decided not to ask though, as I didn't want the cops to think I cared either way. The cops also asked, "Can we talk with the angel?" I answered, "I think you are talking to it. I can't tell for sure because it's normally invisible, but I think it's around me all the time. It obviously takes protecting me VERY seriously so I imagine it never leaves me, especially now that we've seen how good it is at splitting itself. Or duplicating itself, or whatever it did when it went to rescue our staff. -- "Talking to it isn't the problem; getting it to talk back to you is. It has only ever communicated with anyone - like with Dad an hour ago - for its job. Archangel Michael would ramble on happily but the Guardian Angel has never made a single unnecessary comment to anyone, not even me. I thought girls had one-track minds when it came to clothes, but the angel's dedication makes them look like amateurs, haha." Nonetheless, the cops tried to talk with the angel/empty air. All they achieved was to make themselves feel foolish. At one point of their fruitless efforts, the Chief referred to it as "your angel". "It's not MY angel, Chief. It's God's angel. If you ordered one of your staff to guard a goldfish, would the goldfish own the guard? That's pretty much what I think the relative difference between me and the Guardian Angel is. But on the off-chance, I'll try for you." To the room in general, I asked, "Guardian Angel, please appear for me." It didn't. I waited a couple of seconds in case it changed its mind, then I shrugged helplessly. We talked for long enough that the news-team's story appeared on our TV. We'd had the TV on but muted, but it easily caught my attention. The opening picture was a very flattering one of the beautiful reporter in her nightie, and that sort of thing tends to catch my eye easily. You shouldn't assume that means I've got a one-track mind, because my eye would also have been caught by a beautiful reporter out of her nightie. I was also very curious to know what had been said during the interviews, so I excused myself to cross the room to listen to it. That prompted Vanessa to tell the cops, "We've had a very exhausting last few days and we want to get to bed. If you'll pardon the bluntness, we'll kick you out now rather than leaving you in the presence of a minor while you're investigating a possible crime." That was fine with the cops. They were used to bluntness and they weren't exactly hot on the trail of any highly useful information. Ava and I stood in front of the TV listening to the story while the parents ushered the cops out. Then the parents said they were hitting the sack I asked, "Do you want me to record the story for the morning?" Vanessa said, "I don't need to see it." No one else cared either, despite how good the contents of the nightie were, so that was that. Mom looked tired but hesitant to go to bed. I realized she was probably afraid of the gas, so I made a gas mask shape with my hands then removed it to give her a thumbs-up and reassuring smile. I'd have to spend the night in the living room so I was within sight blob range of all our bedrooms, just in case the FBI had the brilliant idea of gassing the parents so they could kidnap them to coerce me to answer questions, or God knows what else they might think up. Although Mom was worried about it, I really wasn't. The gas canisters had been installed back when there'd been four missing thermonuclear weapons to recover, and there was much less urgency now. Reassured, the parents went to bed, leaving Ava and me cuddled together in front of the TV, with me pouring lots of ki into her arm to give its healing a boost. Except when I'm actually using my abilities, I am always projecting as much ki as I can as that practice is what's increasing my ki by 5% per month. It's no extra effort to project it into Ava's arm, not that I wouldn't go to a GREAT deal of extra effort for her. In my proximity sense, Ava's arm was looking like it was healing nicely, although I didn't have the resolution to see the fine details of the process. Its healing was just a matter of time; which would be less than the doctors expected thanks to my kiatsu. I'll spend as much time with her as possible over the next few days to give her almost continuous kiatsu. It would triple her recovery rate. After about four days or so, she should be mobile and not in any pain, so I'll stop the kiatsu to avoid freaking out her doctors. I could've kept pouring the ki into her and attributed Ava's amazingly rapid healing rate to the Guardian Angel, but that'd cause the public to get insanely excited again, and damned near every sick person in the country would start lining up outside our gates. That would be nothing but a disaster, including because there wasn't any way my kiatsu could treat thousands of people. Ava would be getting frequent checkups, and I'd give her a few bursts of kiatsu between each of those to minimize her total recovery time in a way that didn't appear too freaky. Because the reporter's attire was considerably over the line that the network considered decent - i.e., that they thought they'd be allowed to get away with showing - they twice had the anchor STRONGLY warn viewers of the need to exercise discretion in viewing this, and that the network was doing so only because it was very important breaking news. They would have also given that warning before the muted TV caught my eye. Then the network would cut to the reporter's breathless apology, "I'm VERY sorry for the way I'm dressed, but the Guardian Angel woke me up and flew me out of my hotel bed without giving me a chance to grab anything. I apologize if any of my viewers are offended. That was never my intention and I'm very embarrassed." She made no reference to turning down Mom's offer of a dress. Despite the reporter's embarrassment, she managed to square her shoulders and perform her job to the best of her very impressive ability, judging by how often selected excerpts of the clip were aired over the next few days. Censorship was required for two reasons. In the action part of the breaking news the camera had framed the Fibbies, Dad and the hovering laptop. That had been fine for a while, but then the decapitation had happened. The event itself was cut from the replay, and the head that I'd kept hovering over the Fibbies thereafter was so heavily pixilated that it was difficult to tell what it was. The network hadn't pixilated the entire image when the Fibbies were being filmed, so the blood splattered on the agents was a very good clue about what had happened. The Guardian Angel had already established Fibbie decapitation as a precedent, and so recently that no one would have forgotten it. After the action was over and the Fibbies had scuttled away, the reporter interviewed the parents and some cooperative security guys about their ordeal, which resulted in her being in quite a few of the shots. That required more pixilation, but only in a couple of small spots, located on the end of a similar number of not-so-small mounds. We all had a lot of practice at giving interviews by now, and we knew our roles: Dad was the staunch defender of his family, Mom the concerned mother, Vanessa the moralist, Prof the intellectual. Watching the interviews now, the parents' comments were along the lines I expected. Vanessa was particularly effective, I thought, saying, "The angel has repeated that God has an important plan for Mark. The last guy God resurrected was Jesus Christ two thousand years ago, and we all know how important he's been to the world ever since. Plus God sent a Guardian Angel to look after Mark, which not even Jesus got. I initially thought that made Mark even more important to humanity than Jesus Christ, which was an incredible thought. Nowadays I realize that God sent the Guardian Angel because It knew that our Government is so evil that it would kill Mark again if he wasn't given extreme protection. Nonetheless, God and angels are actively involved in Mark's life so it's clear that he's incredibly important. So what does our Government do? It flies a secret spy plane into Mark's parents' bedroom in an assassination attempt that was only a couple of seconds away from killing Felicity and Steven when they were defenseless in their bed. It sends the FBI in to kidnap all our guards leaving us helpless to any crackpot that wanted to climb our wall, like the sniper who shot Ava only a few days ago. It had the Secret Service post teams of watchers all around Corvallis for what reason we don't know, but I'm confident wasn't for our benefit. -- "History is going to record George W. Bush's government as the most heinous, anti-God, anti-religious, immoral Government that this country has ever had. His Government is going directly against God's wishes. God resurrected Mark for a reason which is more important than anything that has happened to the human race for the last two thousand years, and the criminals in our Government are doing their incompetent best to kill Mark again. What if Mark had gone into his parents' bedroom to talk with them at the same time the spy plane assassination attempt happened? The Government's illegal activities have already killed Mark once. If they kill him again, God is going to be EXTREMELY angry. I shudder to think what the Guardian Angel would do if that happened, especially because America has tens of thousands of nuclear bombs available for the Guardian Angel to use. With that number of nuclear weapons available, the Government needs to take far more precautions to keep its citizens safe from a nuclear explosion." "What precautions could possibly work against the angel?" queried the reporter, asking an obvious question as they so often do. I forgave her unintelligent question though, because I liked the way she took a deep breath before asking it. "Stop disobeying and annoying it. If the Government doesn't stop doing that, then the angel will almost certainly detonate one or more bombs. That's what it promised to do in one of its recent emails." "Wasn't that email just intended to scare us?" "I'm sure it was intended for that, but I fear it was also truthful. The angels have always done what they've said they'd do, so anyone would have to be crazy to do one of the things the angel said would result in it detonating a nuclear bomb. MAYBE the angel wouldn't do what it said it'd do, but who'd be crazy enough to risk millions of people's lives on the hope that the angel wouldn't be as reliable as they've always been so far?" You get the idea: Vanessa overdid the "Stay away!" lesson very nicely. Dad's interview included a nice, little point: "The FBI is meant to be the number one agency in charge of stopping kidnappers, but now they're doing that crime themselves - THAT'S how criminal our Government has become! The boss who ordered our staff to be kidnapped and the four guards who had them tied up and manacled inside a motel room were all committing a crime. The angel didn't kill five FBI agents; it killed five criminals. They were scum who were no better than the Neo-Nazi thugs the angel killed outside our gate. Even worse, because they were hiding behind their badges to commit their crimes. -- "Over a hundred Government criminals from the DHS and CIA are in jail now because they participated in Mark's first death. We've had the NSA track our internet usage illegally. We've had the CIA spy on our property and get the Army to do an armed assault on us because Fely carried a bowl of cereal around. Fely and I were nearly assassinated by a secret plane. The FBI is denying responsibility for that in EXACTLY the same way the CIA lied when they denied any involvement in the Army's attack on our home, and EXACTLY the same way the DHS lied when they denied any involvement in Mark's kidnapping. The Government is FULL of criminals!" Mom worried about her kids' ability to do well in their exams tomorrow, worried about the effect on her poor children from seeing so much bloodshed, worried about her kids having their respect for authority ruined by all the criminal things they were seeing the Government do, and especially worried about her family's physical safety. All good mothering-type things. Prof was the voice of science, "I like to think about the future. Mark is an amazing genius. There's only one person alive with a similar IQ to Mark's, but she doesn't have Mark's aptitude for the sciences. I don't know why God resurrected Mark, but I like to think about what the reasons could be. -- "One possibility is global warming. God might know that in fifty or a hundred years our planet will be uninhabitable because all the ice has melted and flooded half the land, intense sunlight is baking what's left, the crops are all dead, starvation is worldwide, horrible diseases and intense storms are everywhere, and wars have broken out all over the world as every country tries to grab what it needs to survive from its neighbors. I have no doubt that countries would try to use terrible nuclear and biological weapons to kill off their enemies so the aggressors could take what they needed. It's all too easy to imagine humanity totally destroying itself and nearly all life on the planet because of all the nuclear and bioweapon fallout. Some humans MIGHT manage to live underground on food they'd grow down there, but I doubt if more than a few hundred people could survive for more than a few years, as eventually something essential like the air filters would break down and the last humans would die. It'd take many thousands of years for our planet to become habitable again, far longer than anyone could survive underground, so catastrophic global warming could be the end of mankind. Maybe God wants Mark alive because Mark is our only hope of stopping that? -- "Or maybe God has another reason. Archangel Michael said there were several threats heading our way. Whatever God's reason for resurrecting and protecting Mark, I'm positive that Mark is critically important to the future of humanity, which means our Government is risking the destruction of mankind. Felicity and Steven are concerned about the welfare of their three children. I can't help thinking that EVERY child on this planet is going to die horribly because the Government is so criminally stupid and arrogant. The Guardian Angel has told the Government to "back off", but it won't. The Government thinks it's in charge of God, and it's going to keep exerting its arrogant power until it kills Mark again, and then God may simply decide to let humanity wipe itself out as a failed experiment. George W. Bush would be the President that destroyed the human race because he put his ego ahead of God's wishes." Prof's last sentence was a great sound bite [which got repeated many times over the next couple of days]. Prof was effectively speaking the truth, in that he and Vanessa truly believed I was incredibly important to the future of humanity. Not to save it from an imminent threat because that piece of bullshit was from my Angel Plan's PR, but they still thought I'd have dramatic and important effects. They were horrified that I was under so much threat from our Government, and they hated that we had to kill people to defend ourselves, but they strongly believed that I was worth it. After my four weeks in the merciless hands of the DHS and CIA, I had far less compunction about killing Government assholes, but Prof and Vanessa would never have gone along with it if not for their faith in my importance. Talk about creating high expectations for yourself to live up to! Prof generated another good sound bite. It came from a thread that started with, "Mankind has been the most powerful form of life on the Earth for thousands of years. Now something has arrived which is far more powerful and wondrous than we ever dreamed was possible. How does our Government welcome the emissaries that God has sent to Earth? It tries to assassinate the parents of the angel's assignment." "We can't lay blame for that yet, Mr. Williams..." pointed out the reporter. "The angel punished the Government for it, and that's all the proof I need. I completely trust the angel's judgment so I have no doubt whatsoever that the Government attempted to murder Felicity and Steven Anderson." Prof was very convincing. He was seriously worried about the Government killing me, so he had buckets of motivation. Prof's logic wasn't original as others had been saying it, but coming from a source so close to me and my parents gave it much greater status. It was echoed and amplified many times in subsequent news shows, destroying any hope the FBI had of convincing anyone of their innocence. As one interviewee said, "In court, witnesses swear on the Bible to tell the truth. Now we're getting the truth directly from God. I don't have any doubt the FBI tried to assassinate the Anderson parents." Ava and I thought all of the parents did very good jobs. They'd been under so much pressure recently that the strength of their feelings made for very convincing interviews. The commentators and the general public were solidly on our side. One comment that the angel had typed that worked well was "God want me protect Mark Anderson. I must protect Mark Anderson. If you not stop I forced to kill many." People liked that the angel was reluctant but was being forced to take its actions; that said good things about the angel. It also made it REALLY obvious that the Government should pull back. The only sizable groups that weren't fed-up with the Government's continual illegal stupidity were the outspoken Christians. Or maybe they were fed-up with the Government? It was hard to tell because they were too busy accusing the angel of being the Devil and me of being the Son of Satan, as proved by our living in a two-family residence, which clearly indicated that we reveled in unnatural practices. Speaking for myself, I'm too busy reveling in natural practices. I hope Dad handles the bad news well: that Mom cheated on him eighteen years ago with Satan. Mainstream Christians were keeping a low profile, not having a clue what to say. [[They needed several more decades to think about it before deciding what directions they might possibly consider very slowly moving in. That's no joke, because they do take decades to think about changing their positions even a miniscule amount on any issue. If you want to get Christians REALLY angry, talk about the changes church doctrine has gone through for the last few hundred years. Many Christians require their church to be unchanging because it's their crutch. They became highly insecure, disturbed and angry at the thought of it changing, so the Church deliberately moves glacially slowly. The Church's problem was that many of the things Archangel Michael had said and done were totally incompatible with Church doctrine, so it was unable to agree with them without lurching Christianity so far sideways that many people would feel abandoned. Nor did they want to say the angels were wrong as that could prove to be VERY embarrassing, so they obviously chose to say nothing. It was the only politically acceptable option, the Church being a very politically aware organization. When you think about it, it is an ENTIRELY political organization because it doesn't actually do anything other than manipulate people.]] Non-mainstream Christians required considerable less than decades to think about it, and even in the wee small hours of the morning were immediately eager to share the fruits of their opinions. They were actually right that the angel wasn't an angel, but I didn't let that raise my opinion of them. With the exception of the idiots that see the Devil behind every bush - especially the bush between women's legs, which is just bizarre (the idiots, I mean) - it was a pleasure to see how gullible everyone else was. Half the people in the country were calling on the President to order the agencies to pull back and explain why the fuck they were continually attacking the Andersons. The other half of the people were calling on the President to stand down because he was obviously incompetent, and what's worse, anti-God. He hadn't responded to either group yet. He was keeping a VERY low profile. I couldn't really blame him because he was going to get crucified by reporters the moment he appeared in front of them. Ava got tired of watching TV so I walked her to bed, putting her in with Julia. A few hours ago I'd half-suspected that when we got home Julia would want to have vigorous, long-lasting, impressive-sounding sex with me - as a dig at the listeners and to boast about me - but she was too tired. When Ava joined her, Julia became slightly less unconscious, mumbled something short and incoherent, smiled, and then fell back into a deep sleep. I returned to the Adults' living room to watch TV while I guarded all the sleepers. ^ I'll finish with a couple of miscellaneous points. Our security staff slotted back into the place without much difficulty. The parents told the non-security staff that they could take some days off with pay if they wanted to, until it the situation seemed stable enough for normal work to resume. Most choose to stay away initially, but some wanted to get busy. Mom and Dad's bedroom needed some repair work, to put it mildly! Some of our Office staff had work piling up, and there were also some gardening projects which were time-dependent and "needed doing" - good staff take their jobs seriously, often unrealistically so. The Police Chief had his night shift staff and a helicopter - our local police force is VERY well equipped these days - out scouring the area looking for any signs of trouble, such as a gathering of troops. We didn't really expect a military response, no matter how pissed off the Air Force was. Military people know not to go charging into combat without reconnaissance to get a feel for their enemy. They had a 'feel' for the Guardian Angel all right, including the feeling that it'd be a REALLY bad idea to go head-to-head with it. Unlike the military, the FBI and Secret Service - being the recent transgressors - are used to citizens being powerless, so they found it harder to adopt a cautious mindset. They hadn't actually behaved too badly. The Secret Service naturally wanted to talk with us AS SOON AS POSSIBLE about a nuclear threat against the President, as the Guardian Angel's email had been very clear that the President's life was in ongoing danger. They'd just been impatient rather than malevolent. And as previously explained, the FBI was suffering from bureaucratic inertia, left to follow orders that had been written at a time when there'd been no particular reason not to trample all over my families' rights. The SS's and FBI's lack of regard for ordinary citizens had made it wonderfully easy for us to put pressure on the Government, and because politicians are so well known as being liars, the Government was unable to escape that pressure. ------- Chapter 372: Super-Aikido Invented Sunday, June 10, 2007 TV didn't show any progress being made until Washington DC started waking up. It was Sunday, so not much progress was made even then. Some important people were chased down by reporters - the DC media people being even less concerned about politeness than normal. The interviewees' most conservative comment was, "For goodness sake, let's pull back and consider the situation. We've got agencies tripping over each other with seemingly conflicting objectives and they're dealing with something that is very dangerous and important. The situation is clearly out of control. This country desperately needs is a capable leader..." (that interviewee was a Democrat). More outspoken critics were demanding a Senate Investigation, and, "If anyone is found to have criminally imperiled millions of Americans, then MORE heads should roll." There were also calls for "A full investigation into the exact nature of the so-called Guardian Angel and the entire God situation," (good luck on them getting that to fly), and opposing calls that the country should throw open its arms and welcome the angel. Probably with a parade. I thought that was a wonderful idea. They could have it in Washington and I'm sure the invisible angel would attend. There were suggestions flying in all directions. The indecisive Decider (President Bush) had been saying nothing useful, and certainly hadn't been leading, but it was now obvious to everybody that the situation was heading toward a massive clusterfuck - if not a nuclear clusterfuck - unless someone did something. Everyone had ideas about what that something should be. Bush's advisors got him to pull his head out of his ass, so a couple of hours into the day he publicly ordered every agency to "Pull back until I decide what needs to be done." He sounded very decisive about the need to make a decision. He also said, "I'll pray for guidance when I go to church this morning." I somehow doubted Bush and God were on speaking terms, for a variety of reasons. Judging by his ineffectualness, he definitely needed to get advice from somewhere because the situation appeared to be something he was incapable of getting his head around. I guess it was just too weird for him. I was hoping to see something that I could twist into a plan that included a highly embarrassing exposure of the crap that the FBI had left installed in our home, but nothing Machiavellian enough came to any of my minds. Watching TV got repetitive - although I enjoyed the repetition of the 'highlights' of the original, nightie-clad interview - so my thoughts drifted. Ever since I'd been resurrected there'd been a considerable amount of verbal animosity directed at me, and not only verbal, as Ava's injury proved. My resurrection, Ava's being shot beside me, the UAV attack on my parents, the nuclear almost-war, the deaths of the neo-nazis and FBI bosses, plus all the religious crap that had been going on, had got many people VERY worked up. They were worked up in all sorts of different ways: some sympathetic to me, and others very much not. They were often busy arguing with each other, but I certainly couldn't assume that they'd cancel each other out and never directly affect me. I'd thought about the self- and family-defense issues a great deal before mentioning the Angel Plan to my families and we'd discussed safety many times since. Nothing had happened which made me regret our decision to proceed - although what had happened to Ava had come close to making me regret it very much indeed - but the aggressiveness of some of the interviewees over the last ten days made self-defense natural to think about. I was otherwise bored and had to stay awake to guard my sleeping families, so most of my minds started thinking about how I could improve Aikido to defend myself better. The more I thought about it, the more impressed with my ideas I became. I hadn't thought about Aikido much while I'd been Ron because I couldn't practice it then, but now that I was Mark and approaching the time when I could use my abilities more openly, thinking about how I could combine them with Aikido was quite a lot of fun. I had many scattered thoughts, most of which were very silly - inspired by some of the nonsense you see in martial arts movies, like combatants running around on treetops, most of which I could actually reproduce now but would be too embarrassed to. After enjoying the silly thoughts for a while, I decided to take this seriously and be more disciplined. I would restrict myself to thinking about techniques that I could use which looked plausible. Perhaps incredibly impressive, but obvious unrealism wasn't allowed. Even with that constraint, the abilities I had now should permit the creation of some very effective martial art moves. This was a real exercise even though having the Guardian Angel should mean I never need to fight to protect myself, but maybe something might happen in the future which forces me to do without the angel's protection for a while or permanently. I couldn't imagine what might force me to do that, but I could imagine that I might have to do some fighting soon after that, so I'd better get ready in case it takes me some time to improve my fighting ability. That's why I was restricting myself by the requirement that the techniques had to look reasonably realistic. It was also an interesting way of passing the time even if I never needed it. There was another small advantage in developing some impressive fighting techniques: When I'd asked Paul for some of his guys to take me to the hospital for Ava, Paul had looked to Dad for his consent. That'd been normal behavior back when I was Ron, as Ron was merely a lucky outsider with no authority over anyone other than the gardeners, and them only because the Andersons and Williams had given him that authority. But as Mark, I wanted to be able to order the security staff around because I could easily imagine all sorts of future troubles where I knew better what to do than the security staff, thanks to sight blobs or other reasons. I would get the parents to tell Paul that he and his staff should take my orders, but an impressive martial arts demonstration would help my authority by making the security staff respect me, something they didn't do at all at the moment. Getting instant cooperation from them might save their, my families and/or my asses one day. My ass will be getting slowly cuter over the next few months, so at some stage it's going to become worth saving. Aikido would be my basic fighting style, of course. I like it, it's the only one I know, and it's ki-based. The last time I'd trained with Sensei, my maximum ki force had been 74 kg. It was now 7,540 kg! (two merges to get out of the CIA lab, each giving an eightfold improvement, plus seventeen more months of mental training to increase the amount of ki I could consciously project). I had so much ki and ki force that I'd be AWESOME at ordinary Aikido techniques now. Plus I was about to add new techniques to my version of Aikido. The use of proximity was already obvious and I couldn't think of any ways to get more benefit out of it. External Ki Projection was in a similar boat. Its uses weren't as obvious, but there wasn't much I could think of for EKP that needed practicing now. It'd be interesting to see what new techniques or modifications Sensei was teaching these days, after the chaos outside our property died down enough for me to resume going to his classes or having him come here to teach me in our small dojo (part of the Adults' House Activity Level is fitted out as a dojo. Donna and Ava use it sometimes). NP, however, offered several interesting possibilities for enhancing a martial art. The first of my thoughts was to use NP to add force to my punches and pushes. To punch someone hard normally requires a big swing to get a fist moving fast enough. Not in my new martial art. I could start with my fist stationary an inch in front of my opponent's face, and then I could push my forearm forward with seven tons of force. My arm not weighing very much, that much force would accelerate it to a significant speed even in just an inch, hitting my target's face shockingly hard, and the follow through would be pretty impressive too. More realistically, I'd use an amount of force that made my punch seem as hard as if I'd swung a haymaker. To avoid damaging my hand, I'd have an NP-plate on the front of my fist, shaped to fit over its contours perfectly to spread the impact over my whole hand. I could even create a boxing glove out of NP plates, not to cushion the impacts but to transfer the impact force to my forearms. That could be done by having a thin plate in front of my fist supported by plates tightly wrapped around my hand and forearm. That would permit injury-free punches several times harder than other people could deliver. Pushing an opponent would be even easier, as I'd simply put extra force on the back of my hand as I pushed with it. An extra 50 kg (110 pounds) or so would make a highly effective difference. If I acted as if I'd pushed hard, then I could semi-realistically add a momentary extra 100 or even 200 kg of NP force, which would send people flying backward. I could push incredibly easily, but people would find it extremely difficult to push me, as I could create an equal and opposite force to their push, canceling it. If someone pushed on my chest, I could use NP to push on my back just as hard. Not that I expect it to happen again, but if I was walking down a corridor at school and some approaching jock crashed his shoulder into mine as we passed, then my shoulder would plow straight ahead and his shoulder would bounce backward. No one was going to win a shoving contest with me ever again. Similarly if someone tries to throw me. Unless he can lift seven tons, it ain't gonna happen. Nor could individual parts of me be pushed unless I chose to allow it. If someone tried to twist my arm up my back, for example (it's a classic "Come Along Hold"), I could push down on my arm so he couldn't raise it above my waist - ignoring the issue of how he survived long enough to get a grip on my arm. A more subtle and very useful improvement would be moving faster than everyone else, as if I was running while everyone else was walking. This was the first technique I wanted to work on, as it seemed the most fun. Aikidoka don't step during techniques. Stepping is a leaning forward motion, resulting in an overbalancing and having to move the rear foot forward to recover balance, whereupon the process is repeated for the other foot. It's a series of controlled mini-falls, which you most definitely don't want to be doing in a fight. So instead of stepping, aikidoka slide our feet along the mat. Necessarily one foot at a time, while most of our weight is on the other foot. Both feet are always in contact with the floor, and we're never catching our balance. I had occurred to me that I might be able to NP-push my feet much faster than manually sliding them, and it should look realistic-ish. I was eager to find out for sure. I stood up to experiment in the living room. I could've easily created an NP-plate for me to stand on and flown around the room half an inch above floor level, but that would look totally unrealistic. The next option was to create an NP-shoe for each foot with very little friction on its bottom surface. Moving them alternately would look a lot more realistic than the previous option, but probably not realistic enough. I'd return to it if nothing better worked, but it wasn't my first choice because I wanted my new technique as close to reality as possible, only faster. To take sliding steps in reality requires a cycle of: Shifting my weight off the foot I intend to move (not a minor task considering it requires moving the bulk of my weight). Ordering the foot to start moving in the desired direction (i.e., sending the nerve impulses to starting the muscles working). Moving the foot in the desired direction (a step usually takes about half a second, I guess, so a significant amount of time). Ordering the foot to stop. I created an NP-'clamp' on both ankles (two half-circle NP shapes facing each other, fitted snugly around each ankle). With a very high friction setting on all their surfaces, the clamps served as a good location for other NP-fingertips to push against. The most obvious approach to speeding up my sliding movement was to get rid of wasted time. Shifting my weight was an entirely unproductive 'step', in that it didn't step (move) me anywhere, so it was my first target for improvement. I could've simply pushed a foot horizontally forcefully enough that it moved no matter how much of my weight was on it. I didn't want to do that though. It'd have trouble with different ground surfaces, and it'd look very unnatural as my upper-body would be sliding sideways smoothly, which isn't what normally happens. Bodies sway back and forth as weight is transferred from foot to foot. We may look smooth when we walk, but compare it to a guy who truly is smooth, such as someone rolling along on a skateboard. What worked well was not pushing the moving foot directly horizontally, but pushing it forward and upward. The upward angle varied mainly depending on how much weight I had put on that leg, how much friction the floor had, and how much total force I was using. I didn't want the foot to rise off the floor, only slide along it, so the angle off the floor would normally be quite small, much less than forty five degrees. By pushing upward on one leg I automatically tilted my body, which transferred my weight on to the other leg, resulting in a natural look. The push's horizontal vector got the foot accelerating in the desired direction. I accelerated the foot for about three-quarters of the distance I wanted, then decelerated it to a stop, friction helping with that. To decelerate the moving foot the actions required of my NP-pushers are: stop pushing up and forward, disconnect, fly around the outside of the leg, connect to the front of the clamp, push backward to slow the leg down, and stop pushing when the foot stops moving. It sounds tedious, but isn't in reality. When I'd first discovered TK and had flown things around my room, it had been a very tedious process, but I'm HUGELY practiced at it now and don't think about it, just like you don't think about the individual finger motions when you type on your keyboard. The pushers could relocate so fast that I used the same stack for both legs, moving them back and forth alternately. That guaranteed that only one leg moved as a time, which was nicely realistic. It felt weird though, like someone was kneeling at my feet, grabbing hold of one ankle, lifting and pushing it forward, putting it down, then swapping to the other ankle, repeatedly. As fast as another person could do it to me, was about the speed I was doing it to myself with NP. Very slowly and deliberately, to confirm the process worked. After some practice, I found that I could stand with my leg muscles relaxed while I slid across the room at a very slow walking pace. I had effectively removed the entire "Shift weight" stage (bullet point #1 above) because it happened automatically as part of moving the foot. The "Ordering foot to start" and "stop" processes (points #2 & #4 above) virtually disappeared as it was FAR faster to move NP-points with my mind than to send nerve impulses all the way down to my legs, and for the right muscles to start contracting, although the time saved wasn't as much as that implies because the entire physical stepping process does overlap its stages somewhat. The "Moving foot" stage (point #3) would speed up when I got confident enough to use more NP force. It needed practice. For example, the amount of weight each foot had on it differed by quite a lot, depending on how far the previous step had been as that controlled my weight distribution. I had to develop the mental reflexes so that when the previous sliding push had gone a different distance than normal, I automatically and quickly adjusted the force and angle of the next foot's push. It had to become a reflex because I wanted to be able to do this at high speed. I probably had over eight hours before anyone woke up, and at the rate my mind and body learns new skills, that should be plenty. It took only a little practice to learn to keep my leg muscles relaxed. Even though there's a lifetime of habit behind manually stepping, I knew I was in a weird mode so staying relaxed was easy. When you're using a skateboard, you don't keep trying to walk - same with me now. I knew I'd still have trouble with reflexes though. For example, if I was sliding forward to cross a room and someone pushed me to the side, my unconscious reflex would be to muscle-move one leg to regain balance. When I was in "Sliding Mode" I wanted no such muscle-moves, only NP-powered foot slides. Relying on my mind to move my leg to catch my balance would take a lot of practice. Fortunately I would be able to practice that easily too: once I felt ready for that complication, I'd task one of my minds with giving me surprise sideways pushes. Once I had the NP-sliding process working slowly, I sped it up, to cross the room faster and faster. Now that I had the basic process working, I was fairly quickly able to increase my speed. Some learning was required because as I increased the force, I had to decrease the angle to avoid lifting my foot off the floor. Pushing a leg with two, three or four times as much force significantly reduced how long each sliding step took, and I learned the additional lesson that after speeding across the room and stopping at the other end, the top half of my body didn't want to stop. I had to quickly use NP to push my body back upright before I fell on my face. I made a mental note to stop with one foot placed to look like it could realistically brace me, and to use NP on my upper-body to negate its inertia. Adding surprise sideways pushes on my upper body didn't even take ten minutes to get expert at countering. I stopped my speeding up development when I was using four times more force than was required for slow slides. That gave me faster slides than you might expect because if the original amount of force was half lifting/half pushing (say), then the fourfold increased force had just over seven times more sideways effect, as the force needed to lift my weight actually reduced a little. A sevenfold increase in the rate my feet accelerated horizontally sped me across the room more than seven times faster because acceleration compounds. I could go faster still, and I wanted to, but not in the presence of the bugs. So far my movements were within human ability ranges so I didn't mind the bugs hearing me. In case the bugs could be used to triangulate my position I had to avoid crossing the long room at an impossible speed. Nor did I want to cover the living room's bugs with soundproof NP-caps in case that alerted the Fibbies that we knew about the bugs. I'd practice in the unbugged Staff Quarters' gym/dojo later, when the families were awake. That was the easy part done: going forward in a straight line. Now I wanted to learn how to go in any direction, to change directions, etc. To be able to 'run' around my opponents, to dodge, and to dart in and out. As Mom would say, that was a whole new kettle of fish. I moved through Ikkyo - the first Aikido technique - using NP-slides for all my foot movements, even when I twisted on a foot to turn my body to face in a new direction. I was slow and unsteady, and even stopped several times when I had trouble, but it was a great learning exercise. Aikido techniques are like complicated dances, so I was forced to learn how to do virtually every possible type of foot slide. When I got to the end, I did it again, and then again. The first few trials improved rapidly, from "comically ridiculous" to "successful but painfully slow". Further improvement took much longer. Straight line walking had been very easy to get good at, but it was much harder to attain the precise control necessary to move through a complicated dance properly. While I was improving my ability to move my feet, I was thinking about where this could ultimately go. What would my "Super-Aikido" be like? I couldn't fully use my NP-foot-sliding process during an Aikido technique against a real opponent because moving my legs four times faster through techniques than my upper-body could do its parts of the techniques would be a ridiculous mess. If you can't see that, just imagine darting in to punch someone then darting out again: my darting would be so fast that I'd be in and out before my punch had even started, so it'd end up missing because I'd be too far away. To speed up a technique, I'd have to use NP to speed up all of my body's movements, and that was FAR more complicated. It wasn't just "a new kettle of fish," it was at least "a new lake of fish." Sliding is effectively an alternating series of one-dimensional actions, but hand and body motions are HIGHLY varied, multi-dimensional actions, many of which are occurring at the same time. My feet just slide over the floor; my hands can do all sorts of grabs, twists, pulls and pushes. Not to mention the movement of individual fingers, my hips, shoulders, etc. To train myself to be able to make all of those movements without using ANY muscles, using NP as the motive force instead, was going to take a great deal of training. When I pick up a glass of water, my conscious mind doesn't have to think about the individual movements - thank God, as there must be hundreds of decisions involved. My subconscious takes care of all that detail. What I was intending to do - eventually - was to move my arm to pick up a glass of water without using a single muscle. NP would push my arm, open my fingers, stop my arm in the right place, close my fingers with the right pressure, lift my forearm and upper-arm toward my mouth, allowing the relaxed elbow to bend correctly, etc. And I wanted to get so good at it, that I could do it several times faster than a normal person. Not with a glass of water though, as that'd result in my tossing water into my face when the glass braked to a sudden stop at my mouth. It was going to take some SERIOUS practice to get all my body's movements into high-speed mode, to still have precise control over them, and for the process to be programmed into my subconscious. And when it came time to try applying high-speed body movements to Aikido techniques, I was going to need some very capable training partners. I would be bending and twisting parts of their bodies so rapidly that they could get injured if they reacted badly. Luckily, I had more than a dozen suitable training partners among our security guards. Once I had the Ikkyo foot movements flowing pretty well, I repeated the learning exercise with the next technique, and eventually through all the Aikido techniques I knew that involved a significant amount of footwork. Then I went to the kitchen and did it all again on a non-carpeted floor, as that changed the upward angles I had to push at. I also repeated the exercise on the mat in Donna's Dojo, then outside on a path then the grass, and again on the edge between the last two just to keep me on my toes. It took me several hours to get to a skill level where I thought I could move through the footwork for all the techniques as smoothly and correctly as I could with muscle-driven leg movements. I had a sight blob watching myself from the side, and my movements looked fast, smooth and realistic. I could be exceptionally fast in some of the simpler moves, but it wasn't blatantly unrealistic. I'd gotten to the stage where I was moving my feet subconsciously; no longer having to think about what I was doing, which was great. I also had control over what I was doing, which was important. If I was rapidly going in one direction and something unexpected happened, I needed to be able to react in mid-step, not carry on straight ahead for another step or two. It was already light when I went back inside to do some more practice in the living room. I didn't mind that I'd been seen rehearsing the Aikido techniques on the lawn, as nothing I'd done looked inhuman. There was no secret about Mark having taken Aikido, and it was even good that I was seen putting effort into it again, as that reinforced that Ron had been replaced by Mark. Some of our patrolling security teams had seen me from a distance (we don't let them routinely patrol near the houses for privacy reasons), so they might ask about it soon. I would be bringing it up if they didn't. I went back inside the house using NP-slides. I'd 'walk' that way quite often from now on, until the subconscious routines were second-nature to me. Back inside, and while I remembered, I got out the borrowed TV camera, stripped myself down to my underwear, and did a twirl in front of it to show my body off. Then I redressed and put it away in the out-of-the-way cupboard we keep it in. I thought it was time to work on other ways of improving my martial arts skill. I'd thought of punching, pushing and negating someone trying to push or throw me. Pushing was so obvious there was nothing to practice, as was negating opponents' trying to push or throw me. The latter was easy because I'd be able to sense my opponents' intention before the push started, giving me time to counter it. Only punching needed a little practice. I positioned some of the sofa cushions in a row as a punching bag, while the mothers were safely asleep. I punched them as hard as I could using unaided muscle power, to give me the sight and feel for how hard "as hard as I could" was. Then I set about reproducing it using Super-Aikido. To take the extreme example, if my fist started one inch from its target, I worked out how much force I needed to push with so my fist hit with an impact equivalent to "as hard as I could". It turned out that an inch was too close, but you get the idea. I learned the force required from every likely distance, all without using any muscles, other than to close my fingers into a fist. Not using muscles was consistent with my ideal of getting my whole body moving quickly with Super-Aikido, which in this case meant I could react faster and get the punch in sooner. If I'm boxing with a guy and I see him let his guard down for a moment, it'd take an appreciable amount of time for me to physically order my arm muscles to start a punch into the opening. I could get my fist moving much faster by mentally grabbing my wrist with NP and pushing it toward the target. Cutting even a quarter second off the time required to impact on my target should allow many more punches to get through. Once I had that going well, I added muscles. Not because I needed the extra strength - I could've added more NP force if that'd been the reason - but because I believed that when I punched someone, the ki of my punch had an internal effect on them. Just pushing my fist forward with NP didn't project any ki, so I added the physical aspect. Because my muscles were slower to act, that meant they were assisting NP rather than the other way around, so it didn't really invalidate the main strategy of Super-Aikido. Adding muscle power would result in my punching someone harder than "as hard as I could", but I could live with that. In practice, I'd adjust the amount of my NP-push as the circumstances required. I also practiced quickly creating the protective NP-pad over the front of my fist, to make sure I could spread the impact over all of my hand and forearm. That was easy, as the size and shape of NP-plates are flexible enough now that one of them could mold itself to the shape of my fist. One thing that I had no trouble with was in deciding which mind provided the shield. In an emergency I wouldn't want every mind to think some other mind was going to do it, and nor would be want every mind to do it themselves. The mind that did do it ideally should be one that wasn't creating any other ki-effects, that way its plate would have the maximum strength, currently about 230 kg theoretically, although they've gotten three times more 'squash resistant' for a reason that isn't apparent to me. [[Using a material with a breaking strain of "x", you can construct a brace - triangles work well - that can withstand more than "x". Because having NP-points collapse on me was a nuisance, something similar to a braced internal structure had developed. The development was NOT done by the Universe because it doesn't cooperate intelligently, but by my own deep subconsciouses. They understood enough about braces to include them in NP-points. Getting a threefold improvement in squash resistance was the best they could do.]] My minds had become very good at working together. In the early days, with two or four minds, we had to discuss who did what. Even in an emergency, that dialogue had been necessary back in those days. Nowadays, we seemed to cooperate instinctively, so we don't get ourselves tangled up like baseball players do sometimes, when zero or several of them try to catch a high ball. With the protective cover over my fist, I lightly punched myself a few times to see what it felt like. It felt like I was glad I'd done it lightly. In other words, the new punching method worked very well. Inspired by the protective fist shield idea, I added fake karate chops to my repertoire. I put my flat hand inside a sandwich of two NP-plates, with the plates wrapping around the edges of my hand. As with punches, I used NP to push my hand into my hypothetical opponent (the cushions), so it was the plates doing the impacting rather than my hand. They had a lot more internal strength than my hand, so they wouldn't 'give' when they hit, making blows hurt more than if I'd used the same force to hit with my naked hand. I could either jab forward with what appeared to be the end of my fingers, or I could chop sideways with the edge of my hand. Both were equally effective as NP was doing the pushing and impacting. Imagine someone tried to punch me (silly them!). I'd proximity sense it coming, and could easily deflect it with a very strong sideways chop; so strong that I could snap my opponent's forearm if I wanted. I couldn't realistically cut it off - my 'sharpest' edge is one-sixteenth of an inch wide which requires a three-interleaved-pieces scissors action and then some ripping to sever flesh fully - but I could certainly fuck their arm totally. I wasn't using an edge that narrow anyway, as the NP-plate was wrapped around my hand and was therefore even wider than my hand. I could have created a much sharper edge by extending the NP-plates beyond the edge of my hands, but that was getting too unrealistic, especially in the wounds it could've caused. Karate blows finished with, I decided to do more work on my NP-sliding speed. Because of the bugs I couldn't risk crossing the room at high speed, but I could practice the foot movements for the techniques because they're done in a small area and the Fucking Fibbies wouldn't be able to tell anything from the sounds. I spent over an hour working on those, steadily increasing my movement rate above "normal": defined as how fast I used to do the movements with my muscles, which was pretty fast as Sensei and I had moved beyond the static practice method we'd started my training with. By the time my footwork technique practice had finished, I was moving through those 'dances' about three times faster than normal, which I guess was probably about one and a half times faster than humanly possible. That was a seriously impressive improvement. Admittedly I was only impressing myself, but there are thirty two of me and we were all VERY impressed. I knew I could get my straight-line movement up to four times faster than normal, and maybe even five times. To go faster than that would probably required moving both feet at the same time, which would look freaky even if I only took the shortcut of overlapping my movements by starting to move one foot while the other was coming to a stop. I'd be happy with a five times improvement. It'd be about two or three times faster than humanly possible. I don't mean that I could run 100 meters in a third of the world-record time, but that I could move three times faster than anyone else in the same upright, feet-sliding stance. I might be able to sprint-slide 100 meters in less time than the current sprinting record, but that was irrelevant as it would look ridiculously unrealistic and sprinting in a fight is foolish - remember what happened to the Eatons. In a combat situation, with some more practice on my footwork, I should be able to move up to three times faster than my opponents, which would be a very handy speed advantage. I wouldn't quite be able to run rings around them, but it would be very difficult for them to get to grips with me, and I'd easily be able to dart in, attack, and dart out again, exactly like I'd pretended to do when I poked Don Eaton's eyeballs a couple of years ago. Because I can concentrate on multiple things at the same time - for example, for all of the previous hours I'd had a mind dedicated to keeping a sight blob rotating around all the gas canisters to make sure they weren't being activated - I also started trying to speed up my hand and body movements while I was practicing the high-speed footwork for each technique. I gained a WHOLE new appreciation for the HUGE amount of work our subconsciouses do for us! Keeping my upper-body relaxed and trying to use NP to move my body in all the necessary ways was such a disaster that I had to laugh at it. There were entire movements that I forgot to do, parts of my body went off in the wrong directions, all the movements were horribly uncoordinated with each other. It was a joke. I would've rolled on the floor laughing, except with my current ability to move my body, my roll would've missed the floor. I decided that I'd been a wee bit ambitious trying to move all of my body the new way, so I restarted with just my right arm and hand as my upper-body focus. I could've concentrated on all my other parts at the same time, but I was making so many mistakes with them that it was a collective disaster. Better to get only one part wrong because it didn't ruin my ability to carry on through to the end of the technique. Especially when using hands, there are times in Aikido when we project ki from them to influence our opponent's ki. I could have added muscular movements as I'd done for punches, but those had been very simple, one-dimensional movements. The hand movements I was working on now were far more complex and I didn't want to add muscular movements to the mix. I'd use EKP to influence my opponent instead. EKP was quicker, I could apply it sooner and for longer because it could be used even when my physical hand wasn't in the right place. I could use EKP to provide the ki component of my punches too, but using my muscles would be more fun, so I left that unchanged. For the first several repetitions of Ikkyo, my right arm and hand were almost all over the place (I wrote "almost" because if I'd written that "they were all over the place" that would have implied that they were sometimes in the right place, which would've given you entirely the wrong impression). Try this: have your right forefinger touching your left hip, then slowly move it so it's touching your right hip. Think about making that happen by keeping your right hand TOTALLY relaxed and moving it only by applying external pushes - for you, necessarily with your left hand. It's somewhat tricky but not too bad. Now move it from touching your right hip to touching your right shoulder. That's even trickier. Now go from touching your left hip with your right arm in front of your body to touching your left hip with your right arm going around your back. The number of individual accelerations, decelerations and joint rotations involved is getting ridiculous. Sliding a foot along the floor was FAR easier! I wanted to be able to move my body faster than my muscles could move it, which means I was in much the same situation as a baby learning to walk for the first time: I was learning a new way of moving completely from scratch (and can you imagine how tedious scratching would be?). To put it accurately, if not politely, it was going to take a SHIT LOAD of practice! Nonetheless, I slowly got better at specific, individual movements. They certainly didn't flow smoothly as they were often too slow or too fast compared to the speed the rest of my body was doing the technique, and they were usually poorly positioned, but at least they were in the right ballpark. I made considerable improvement, from looking like a spastic having an epileptic fit, to looking like a spastic at the end of his first Aikido lesson. That was just for my right arm doing some specific movements. To learn all the movements, for all the parts of my body, and to coordinate them correctly for all the techniques, was going to be SO TEDIOUS that I'd never do it. This was the killer issue. Sliding, even with turns added, had been fairly easy to learn, taking only a few hours to get good at. But there are millions of hand movements, they're much more complex (imagine scratching your nose), and they have to be coordinated with everything else that is going on at the same time. Even if it'd been a hundred times easier to learn than it evidently was, it'd still be too tedious. Plus the pedantic, action-by-action rote learning wasn't flexible. If I found myself in a slightly unusual situation, I wouldn't be able to move smoothly. I kept it trying though, because it'd be REALLY cool to be able to move superhumanly fast. Probably no more than three times faster than anyone else because I didn't want to look impossibly unrealistic, and I doubted my mind(s) could react quick enough for me to move faster than that anyway, but that'd still be great to be able to do. I had my fingers crossed - in the usual way - that if I practiced for a while then my wonderful, highly cooperative, helpful, and damned near magical subconscious would take over, and it would all start happening much easier. I was reasonably sure subconsciouses could do that sort of thing, as it was similar to people learning to walk the first time, or amputees learning to use prosthetic devices, or learning to use a tool subconsciously (like playing a guitar, riding a bike, driving a car, etc.). With enough practice, those operations become subconscious and very easy, even in unexpected, unpracticed circumstances. If my subconsciouses could learn to do that with superhuman movement speeds, I'd give them anything they wanted. Even without being able to do general high-speed body movements (yet?), I did already have: Superhumanly fast footwork. Extremely fast and powerful punches, chops and pushes. I was un-pushable and un-throwable. Awesomely powerful ki and EKP. A 24-foot proximity sense. Super-Aikido was looking fantastic, and when I'd trained enough to do the full techniques at high speed, it'd be incredible to see. It was a pity that Super Aikido didn't include the ability to stop or catch bullets. That wouldn't look realistic, but I would've been willing to compromise the realism requirement for little things like bullets. Amusingly, I have been using superhuman body speed in one specific situation for several months: pushing my hips forward-and-back more rapidly than my stomach muscles could. The girls had been delighted when I'd started doing that, and I'd made it a standard part of my love-making technique. NP was also useful for supporting us, sometimes so much that we have sex hovering above the bed. My abilities really are very useful. The girls are very appreciative, and I greatly appreciate their appreciation. ^ I heard noises coming from the kitchen and wandered over to see who it was (I'd been watching gas canisters, not beds). Donna was up first, and surprised to have beaten the parents. She saw me dressed in the same clothes I'd been wearing last night. Julia NEVER lets me do that, so Donna asked, "You've been up all night?" "Yep." I gave Donna a wink and pointed at the ceiling to remind her while I continued, "I tried doing some of my Aikido moves, but Ron's body is so different from what I'm used to that I was clumsy. It annoyed me and I got carried away trying to get myself to move well again so ended up working on it all night. I didn't really feel like sleeping so I suspect my body's changing is screwing up its sleep cycle. Not that I'm ungrateful to God or Ron, but I wish I had my original body. It's good to have ten fingers again, but right now I'd rather have my nine-fingered body." "I never thought of that. You'll still have ten fingers when you've finished changing, right?" "I'm pretty sure I will. Having ten fingers is in my genes, just like a big appetite looks like it's in yours." "I'm hungry. Looks like your hair is changing already. The roots are much lighter." "That's a good sign. The sooner my body doesn't feel the wrong size and clumsy, the better." I'd known and expected the hair change to show about now. Most of my body changes could be done smoothly and slowly: my shoulders widening, waist narrowing, ass getting cuter, etc., but the hair was a binary thing, so I'd ordered it to change totally. I'd also ordered it to change immediately, rather than delaying it the way I was slowing my body's changes. I wanted my hair to look strange as soon as possible. I'll soon have visibly straight, mousy-brown new growth, with curly, black old growth. For several weeks my hair will be a bizarre and obvious proof that Ron is turning into Mark. It'll give God and us some credibility, which is very important. From that point of view, it was a pity I couldn't turn from Ron to Mark far quicker, even in hours, because seeing that happen would REALLY convince people that something miraculous was happening. Unfortunately safety was more important than credibility, so my transformation speed was best slowed down a great deal. Playing her own game with the bugs, Donna asked, "No more idiots attacked us last night?" "Not last night. It can't be easy for the Government's agents to think of things to do that are even stupider than what they've already done." "{Giggle}." We chatted away on inconsequential stuff (not forgetting to drop in a few FBI-specific insults) while I made some breakfast too. I asked her, "How's the studying going?" With considerable feeling, Donna exclaimed, "I've NEVER done so much! Vanessa and Prof are TOUGH! It's like I've got four parents." "Tell me about it! It could be even worse in my case, I could have six of them if I counted Ron's parents. There are a few of his memories which include thoughts comparing our four parents with his, and I get the idea that his were pretty crappy." Conversation got interrupted by eating, with Donna installed on my lap. It's rare she gets an opportunity to sit there, so she wasn't going to miss out. She had quite a lot more to eat than I did, so I finished first. That was good news as far as I was concerned. Donna hadn't tried to dress sexily, just wearing PJs as normal, but they still offered all sorts of interesting possibilities. We had to keep it noiseless, but we had fun fooling around. And when I say "we had fun", I do mean "we", as Donna isn't shy. She wolfed her food down, then we made inane conversation while our hands were roaming all over each other's best parts. I was happy, as Donna's got considerably more best parts than I do. One of the time-wasting, alibi-providing conversation points, was Donna asking, "What are we going to do today?" "We'll have to stay on the property I guess, and I imagine we'll mostly be studying..." "{Groan}." "Yeah. But as a nice change from that, I thought that when everyone else is up and about, I might wander down to the Staff Quarters and see if I can find any guards who want to help me with my Aikido training. Aikido is a good way of getting me used to this body, but it's easier with a training partner." "Cool. Can I watch?" "Sure. That's why I told you. Also so if they're too rough on me, you can chop them to pieces with your karate." "Haha. I DON'T think so! They're a LOT better than Ava and me. I bet you could beat them though." "Not at the moment." I pointed at the ceiling to remind Donna not to get carried away, adding, "I'll be trying to overcome my own coordination problems rather than worrying too much about beating them. Maybe after some practice though. Then I'd LOVE to practice on the FBI assholes who tried to kill Mom and Dad!" "Yeah me too!" agreed Donna, who went on to describe what she'd like to do to them, while she did something completely different to me, involving the same part of the male anatomy. Donna got so involved in what she was doing (me), that I had to talk nonstop for several minutes about what scuba diving was like. Apparently Donna needed more protein with her breakfast, and she got it too! She's going to make some lucky guy a great girlfriend one day. We chatted for a couple of minutes afterward, then I suggested that Donna should hit the books for a while because the parents would be bound to get up soon, and they'd see her studying and be very impressed. Donna thought that was an excellent plan, and gave me a last squeeze. I gave her front two back (you can write some terrible but grammatically correct sentences in English. I often do). Donna left to carry out my little parent-management plan. I washed her dishes - it was the least I could do - then went back to the living room to watch TV. While Donna had been giving me my silent blowjob, Bush had apparently been in communion with God (if you can't think of at least a dozen jokes that could be inserted here, you need help. Maybe you should pray for guidance, or get a blowjob, whatever inspires your creative juices the most. I know which method works best for me). Anyhow, God and Bush working together had made a decision. Bush and his senior advisors, presumably excluding God, were going to have a meeting about the situation tomorrow. In the meantime, Bush said that he'd ordered all Government agents to suspend all active operations involving the Andersons family or the Guardian Angel, "Not that there are any operations," he insisted. Also in the news was an interview with an extremely irate Galloping Ninnies preacher. He was totally outraged by his Ninnies being prohibited from going to their church yet again. He said several very unkind things about the Government (Yay!), but several even worse things about us, me, and the very helpful Guardian Angel (Boo!). I was tempted to have the angel cut his tongue out, but unfortunately he was well out of range and my walking to within five hundred feet of him during daylight would've been too much of a giveaway. That was the ONLY thing that saved his tongue. The alternative idea that occurred to me was to make some extensive renovations to his church one night soon (take out the walls, lower the roof, and that sort of thing). And when they rebuilt it, I'd renovate it again, and again, and again; until they wised up or ran out of money, although God knows how long either of those would take. I'll talk with the parents about the Ninnies when I get a chance. Prof wandered into the living room not long after. Vanessa was in the kitchen, so we joined her and I brought them up to date on the night's few developments. We just chatted about general stuff, throwing in several comments to substantiate our cover story. Feeding misinformation to the bugs was going so well I was beginning to suspect that we should create a way of getting rid of them that makes it clear that we had no idea that they were there. Perhaps by accidentally finding the gatepost sensors and using those to demand the FBI come clean, or have one of our gardeners find a parabolic dish and we trace the cable back. There are several possibilities. Ava joined us, telling us, "Julia and Carol are still sleeping. They must've been very tired." "Julia hasn't seen a clothing store in a whole week. I think her body has decided that this reality is completely unacceptable and is withdrawing from it." I couldn't think of a funny joke about Carol, so she got left out. Apparently my joke about Julia wasn't all that funny because I only got a couple of chuckles. I pleased Ava more by making breakfast for her and then spoon-feeding her as she sat on my lap. I'm very good at spoon-feeding because my proximity sense tells me when she swallows the last of each mouthful. It gave me a good opportunity to give her some more kiatsu. Donna joined us, bored with waiting for Mom and Dad. And then Mom and Dad arrived less than a minute later, much to Donna's chagrin. She managed to drop into the conversation that she'd "ONLY JUST stopped studying." I told her, "Don't study too hard, Donna." Unnecessarily, as I was pretty sure she wouldn't. "Come down to the Kids' House at 10:30 to give me time to have a shower, and then we'll go to the Staff dojo together, okay?" "Yeah, that'll be good. I'll have done a LOT of studying by then." I explained my Aikido training to the parents in the same bug-misleading way as I had with Donna, then I brought Mom and Dad up to date on external world's overnight developments. Meanwhile Vanessa was grilling Donna on EXACTLY how much studying she'd done on each subject, where she was up to, what areas she was having trouble with, what she intended to do about them, etc. Poor Donna. Dad intercomed the Security Center to check on things. They reported that there were no immediate issues, only a lot of reporters at the front gate clamoring for interviews. I'd often sent a radio blob up to circle the property at the limits of my range to check that all was well, and had seen that the reporters had started accumulating outside the gate even before dawn. They were doubtless desperately eager to interview us about the Air Force base attacks, stealing of nuclear weapons, threatening Washington DC, etc. I wished them good luck for getting the Guardian Angel to agree to an interview. Dad checked with us, "Do we want to give any interviews?" "No," from everyone. I added, "You guys did the last interviews VERY well, but how come that reporter didn't ask questions about the nuclear bombs and the Guardian Angel's other activities?" Prof answered, "She tried to, but it was very late and we didn't want to waste time answering questions about subjects we only knew about by listening to the radio, so we laid down the law with her." It was going to be quite a busy day for a lot of our staff. The office staff would have a HUGE backlog of letters asking us to ask God to resurrect the writer's deceased loved one, and a great assortment of other requests for miracles (they'll all get a sympathetic form-letter back, stating the obvious). There was a great deal of work required to fix the damage caused by the FBI, especially to the panic rooms' vault doors. That work should ideally done by the Army Engineers, as Paul also wanted them to check over a lot of our other equipment to make sure it hadn't been tampered with, such as our radar and bug finding systems, the main tunnel's blast door, the elevators, Faraday cages, etc. Paul had the most work of all, as he hated the idea that the FBI could've copied our security procedures book. Now that the parents were up, quite a few of the staff had quite a few questions for them. The peaceful breakfast came to an end, probably to Donna's relief. Ava and I wandered back to our house, finding Julia and Carol in the shower. Our shower area is very large, with a pair of showerheads on each of three of its walls, so it could easily accommodate the four of us. Unfortunately for me the damned FBI bugs made that inappropriate. Ava joined the two girls to get help because of her cast, and that was easier in the large cubicle and with two willing helpers. I went to have a shower all by myself in the non-en-suite bathroom. Damned FBI! All the girls wanted to watch me "try to get good at Aikido again," so Julia and Carol had a quick breakfast in our house to be ready when Donna arrived. It turned out that Donna was early, but Carol and especially Julia eat an absurdly small amount of breakfast, so they were soon ready too. Actually, I eat very little breakfast too. It isn't a particularly tasty meal, so I only have a couple of mouthfuls normally. Lunch I often miss or just have a drink and a piece of fruit, but I usually have a normal-sized dinner because it's as much a social gathering as anything else, and it seems impolite not to eat while everyone else is. Plus there's the important consideration that the food is often very tasty. Vanessa is a very good cook and Mom has lifted her game considerably, plus Carol and Ava are increasingly often cooking things too. Julia very occasionally, but it's not really her thing. Because all the cooks take turns, they put more effort into it when it's their turn, or they often help each other. It works out very well for the rest of us. I still need nearly as much water as I used to though. I should need more because I'm not getting any from the food I no longer eat, but there must be some efficiency gains somewhere in my body because the net result is that I'm getting less. After seeing the horrific sight of 3B's Prof's body and face as he dehydrated toward death, I'm very conscious of my liquid intake and keep it topped up; consequently I crap and pee often and a lot. All things considered, it's a small price to pay. [Thinking of the "Casino Kidnappers", if I'd had my current capabilities back then, that kidnapping would've turned out TOTALLY different, although the kidnappers would've eventually been equally dead. Even if they'd caught me while I was asleep, it would've been comically easy for me to take care of them in dozens of different ways, even if I'd still been blindfolded, gagged and chained.] My Aikido gi was in a box in our 'basement' (the huge storage room a hundred feet down through solid rock), and I couldn't be bothered digging it out or asking one of our staff to, so I dressed in tracksuit pants and a T-shirt. Looking very martially unimpressive, my audience and I wandered down the path to the Staff Quarters, the girls giggling about the shock the poor guards were going to get. Ava was on one of my arms. Ava's taking a bullet because of me had gotten her promoted to deserving of an arm of mine whenever the opportunity existed. Carol and Julia are sharing my other arm. Not that I would've objected, but I was amused that I'd had no part in the making of those decisions, or to put it more amusingly, I'd had no hand in allocating my arms. While we were walking down the hill, Julia asked, "Why do you really want to show your skill to our guards?" "I need training partners to improve my martial abilities. It's been a long time since I've worked on those and I've learned some interesting things overnight. Also because I'm using it as a foot in the door toward getting them to respect me and take my orders, especially in emergency situations. Ron has never exerted authority over them before so they don't take me seriously. One day I might need them to do something quickly, and more likely than not I won't be able to explain why because it'll be weird or they won't understand how I can know what I know." That made sense, so the conversation turned to more important matters, like Donna pointing out that my hair was changing color at the roots. I explained that it was growing out my original color, and the girls insisted that I bend over so they could see for themselves. (And when I write "the girls insisted", you know specifically who I mean, don't you?). We stopped and I bent over so they could examine my scalp carefully. "Are you going to have your original eye color too?" asked Julia, already worrying about color coordinating me. "That'd be best." "Can you make them something more interesting, like bright green?" "I hope you don't mean 'bright' as in 'shining'. I imagine I could make my eyes green, but the main trouble is the government. They've taken genetic samples from me and they might've decoded them enough to know that I shouldn't have green eyes. The last thing I want is for them to suspect that I can change my body. That'd be very bad." "You're still going to make your face and body gorgeous, like it used to be, aren't you?" "Yeah. They won't be suspicious about that because that's what the old photos showed and there aren't any easily read genes for waist-width and ass-cuteness. Our body shapes are very flexible and very subject to environmental influences such as exercise, but eye color can't be changed that way." Having discovered the rules for my physical malleability, the girls excitedly discussed among themselves what they wanted for my body. They decided that 6 feet 3 inches (1.9 meters) would be my new height, and that I needed to make my cock a little bigger than it was now. I had intended to make myself look like the last time the CIA had seen Mark, as if the missing months had never affected my body, but there was no strong reason not to make it look like what we'd state was its chronological age. I could do that easily just by getting my facial whiskers to grow, which would make my adding a few extra few inches of height seem reasonable. I'd just say, "God seems to have brought me up to date." It was the other extra inches that got to me. I pointed out, "Ahh, Mark's cock was actually a little smaller than Ron's." "That was the Old Mark. We're talking about the New Mark. We'd like him to have a bigger cock please. Not like when you were impossibly huge, but we liked it when you were just a little bigger." "You've already discussed your cock size preference among yourselves?" "Of course. We had chances to try yours when it was changing back, and we liked it best when it was a little bigger than now. We know you can do it." "Sure. I'm just trying to work out whether I should be offended or not. I think guys are supposed to be offended by comments like that, but I'm confused about whether that applies to me." "Of course not! You can make your cock anything we want so it doesn't matter." "{Sigh}. Okay. So how much bigger do you want it?" "Just make it grow and we'll test it often, {giggle}. We'll let you know when to stop." "Me too!" insisted Donna. "I need to test it often too." "We all do," agreed Carol, making Donna very happy. Then Carol - who somehow manages to seem innocent most of the time - added, "Can you make the knob on the end bigger, please? I think that'd feel great going in and out." The other girls agreed and they enthusiastically discussed my knob until we arrived at the Staff Quarters, where they surprised me by letting it drop. ------- Chapter 373: Super-Aikido Tested Sunday, June 10, 2007 (Continued) It'd be impolite for us to walk into our staff's home uninvited, so I knocked on the door and we waited. When one of the off-duty guards answered it, I explained, "I used to do a martial art called Aikido before I was killed and I spent a while last night trying to get Ron's body to move as well as I used to, but it's difficult without partners. I was hoping I could do some training in your dojo with whoever's around? The girls just want to watch." After he'd done the mental gymnastics necessary to parse my weird phrases, he said, "That'll be fine. Give me a few seconds to make sure everyone's decent." "Sure." A minute later we were in their dojo, although they don't call it that. Their gym is about two-thirds exercise equipment and about one-third open mats. None of our guys are the stereotypical 'gorilla', as doing their job well requires being smart more than strong, but they're physical guys (and two gals), they workout regularly, and nearly all of them have martial arts training. In a few cases, a LOT of martial arts training, as I'd learned when I read their files before we employed them. No one was using the training mat at the moment, but there were four guys on the exercise machines. (Depending on what seems better to me at the time, I'll write either "mat" or "mats". They are many individual mats placed beside each other, then with a very large canvas sheet laid over the top of all of them, turning them into a single surface.) I explained what I was doing here again to the new audience, emphasizing that, "I haven't gotten this body under very good control yet, so I'd like to spend a few minutes alone working on my footwork, and then some sparring with some of you. I'm clumsy, so it'll have to be light sparring, otherwise I might hurt you too much." I said the last sentence with a smile, and they thought it was quite funny too. Regardless of whether I was called Mark or Ron - that was their employers' decision - they didn't mind humoring me, so they chuckled their agreement and mostly returned to their exercises. With four good looking girls in the room, I suspect they put more effort into their exercises than normal because they didn't bother giving me much attention as I took off my shoes and moved onto the mat. The guy who'd let us into the building wandered back to the kitchen to continue making whatever meal he was working on, depending on which shift he was cooking for. Paul rotates his staff around so I don't bother keeping track of their individual assignments. Back in the Adults' living room, I'd gotten my footwork up to about three times the speed I considered normal for me, which I estimated was something like one and a half times faster than anyone else could make the same movements. Because of the bugs, I hadn't done much about getting my straight-line speed above what was possible for other people, so that's what I started with now. After a slightly slow start while I adjusted my feet-pushing vectors to allow for the mats having so little friction but being spongier with more depth, I got myself up to the speed I'd achieved in the living room, and then was able to work my speed up even higher. I was surprised that none of my audience were impressed by my 'zips' across the mat. I guessed it was because my zips didn't look at all superhuman. I was moving fast, but slower than a sprinter would, and my speed was deceptive because I was standing upright, relaxed, and there was no one else to compare me to. I noticed that I didn't have all of Donna's attention; hers was frequently wandering to the guys working out. My three girls' eyes didn't stray that way though, other than as a quick response to an unexpected noise. Their loyalty was firmly established, especially now that they'd told me to grow my knob bigger. For straight-line movements, it didn't take me more than a few back-and-forth trips before I had the ankle-pushing force increased substantially. The only very slightly tricky aspects were getting the upward angle of the accelerating push so that nearly all of the weight on the sliding leg was countered and it was lifted enough not to get held back by the depth of the mats, and making sure I countered my increased momentum when I stopped at the far end. Both aspects only had to be roughly correct, so I didn't have much trouble with them. Straight-line movement turned out to have a considerably higher limit than I'd thought, as I got myself up to about six times faster than "normal" and thought I could go faster still. It'd be an exaggeration to say my legs were a blur, but they were getting that way, and the staff were starting to look impressed if not incredulous. I now thought that eight times my previous muscle-driven normal speed might be about the limit, but I decided not to try to go beyond my current speed. I wanted to stick to my goal that Super-Aikido had to look realistic, or at least, not look obviously superhuman. I changed to doing the straight-line zips across the mat backward. I was coordinated enough, and the process was similar enough, that it only took me a few journeys to get that up to the same speed as forward. I didn't get as much attention doing that as you might think, as my moving quickly backward didn't look particularly weird. Sliding backward while standing upright is an easy movement, whereas going backward in a sprinting posture would have looked quite bizarre. High-speed sideways slides were next, which also didn't need much practice. Then I mixed it up by crossing the length of the mat in a straight line while changing the direction my body faced during the journey. Sliding feet is SO much easier than stepping because it's almost purely one dimensional. I could push my feet in any direction, so the only tricky parts of turning around while zipping across the mat was to avoid pushing one foot into the other, and to twist my feet slightly during the move so the upper-half of my body could turn to match. This took considerably longer to get right, but mainly because the previous tasks had taken so little time. After a few minutes, I was able to zip across the mat while my body turned to face whichever directions I wanted. All the straight-line possibilities having been taken care of, the next task was high-speed zigzagging. The only tricky parts of that were making sure my new direction didn't tangle my feet and to use NP to negate the upper-body inertia when I changed direction, both of which I already knew how to do. I was soon zipping all over the mat, including changing my facings mid-zip. Darting in and out to attack someone is just an extreme form of zigzag, so that got included in my current practice too. Despite my slow restarts for each new type of movement, I was getting quite a lot of attention from our staff. Sliding straight across the mat hadn't looked like much even when done very quickly, but zigzagging was a different matter. To go fast in one direction, then immediately fast in an entirely different direction, looked impressive. But even though I was actually going slightly faster than a sprinter could run, it didn't look superhumanly impressive. I was standing upright, looking relaxed (because I literally was), always had my balance, wasn't sweating or showing any form of exertion, etc., so there were no cues that something extreme was happening. I just seemed to have superbly fast footwork. The watching guards were impressed but no more than that. It would take having someone else on the mat to compare me to before the differences in our speeds was glaring. I spent several minutes behaving like a crazy pinball seemingly bouncing all over the place. In a fight, the last thing you want to be worried about is your footwork, so I wanted to have that so well worked out that I could rely on it moving and facing me however I wanted, without it requiring more than a very low level of conscious thought. When I was satisfied, I cruised to a stop on the edge of the mat near the exercise machines and asked the watching guards, "I want to keep practicing my footwork. Would one of you please play tag with me on the mat?" By now they were very curious about my speed, so they all agreed. The closest guy got to the mat first though, so he became my partner for this. I held my hands behind my back, reversed a few yards, and said, "You're it." He started slowly, but quickly discovered that he had to go much faster than that to get anywhere near me. In less than a minute he was charging around after me as fast as he could move. With my proximity sense and being able to move about twice as fast as he could run at me, I avoided him nearly all the time, but he did occasionally manage to tag me as the mat was too small for me to avoid him all the time. He only managed it by moving in ways that'd be very foolish in any sort of combat situation, so I was happy. After he tagged me, I'd let him back off, I'd say "Ready?", he'd nod, and then I'd zip up to him and tag him. My 24-foot proximity sense meant there was no possibility of his dodging successfully no matter what he tried, as I knew where he intended to go. I could simply run twice as fast as he could directly toward wherever he was go to. How incredibly easy he was to tag amused everyone, especially his workmates. If he'd been one of the jocks at school, he would've lost his temper at me, but he didn't have a weak ego and he wasn't going to let a game of tag make him angry. He tried as hard as he could, but he had to admit defeat. Another of the off-duty guards jumped forward to replace him, sure he could do better. It turned out that he couldn't. The third guy tried with no great expectation of success, and he achieved what he expected. I was VERY pleased. I was moving very quickly and I was doing so smoothly. I'd not stumbled even once. I hadn't expected to, not with thirty two minds to pay attention to what I was doing, but it was still very gratifying. My cheerleaders agreed, clapping and yahooing from the sidelines. After the third guy gave up, I said, "I think I've got my feet working pretty well. Now I'd like to do some sparring please." They were visibly reluctant, and no one volunteered. I asked, "I know you guys practice fighting with each other... ?" "That's part of our training. You're our client." I tried convincing them, but they weren't going for it. They quite happily inflict pain on each other as part of their training, but beating up their client wasn't right, and it could get them in trouble with Paul and the people who wrote their paychecks. I didn't waste much time arguing because proximity showed me they were too reluctant to be convinced otherwise, so I used the room's intercom to call "Dad?" When Dad answered from wherever he was, I said, "I'm in the staff gym like I said at breakfast. They're reluctant to spar with me because they fear they'd get in trouble for it. Can you tell them it's all right please?" If I'd been in Dad's shoes, I would've said something like, "Not only is it all right, I WANT you to spar with Mark. He needs training partners to get better..." Dad had a different answer though. After a moment's thought, he said, "Anyone that can draw Mark's blood gets a week's paid vacation in LA and I'll cover all your costs, including booze and hookers." In a different tone, Dad added, "Is that what you wanted, Mark?" "They certainly look more enthusiastic now. I'm tempted to punch myself in the nose before they get a chance to." "Haha. If Fely found out I bought hookers for you, I'd be the one bleeding. Prof and I might come down to watch. All right?" "Sure. You'll be impressed. I'll make sure I leave some of them standing for when you get here. Would you also call Paul please, and let him know it's okay for his staff to let me beat them up. They need to get his permission too." "Sure. It'd be a good idea for Paul to watch too, wouldn't it?" "The more the merrier." Paul's voice joined in, "I'm in the Security Center. I'll be there in a couple of minutes. Don't start without me please." Dad added, "Prof and I will come down too. Don't worry about waiting for us, just don't get through everybody before we arrive." "Okay, I'll go easy on them." One of the guards asked, "Vanessa and Felicity wouldn't mind?" I pressed the intercom button again, "Mom? Vanessa?" Mom answered, "We're in the Office. We're too busy catching up on MAF work to come to watch." "I didn't think you'd want to anyway. I'm calling because even after getting Dad's and Prof's okay, the guys are worried about getting in trouble with the mothers. They must think that mothers outrank fathers." "Smart of them. Tell them it's fine with Vanessa and me. Please don't hurt them too much." "I won't, Mom. Bye." There was a bit of joking conversation between the guards, my girls and I while we waited, one comment from a guard being, "Everyone's got a very high opinion of your prowess, Ron." The guards had called me "Ron" several times already this session. I'd not bothered correcting them on it yet; that'd come later. Their choice of name was understandable as it'd only been nine days since my resurrection, none of these guys had ever met me as Mark, and they'd spent six months knowing me as Ron. Paul manages to call me "Mark", but only because he deals with the parents regularly and was diplomatic and astute enough to call me whatever his bosses wanted me called. I answered the comment with, "They've got some idea of how good I am, yes. They underestimate it though. I've been working on some new ideas recently which they don't know anything about, like how fast my footwork is." "That's VERY impressive. How'd you get so fast?" "Natural aptitude and training. Mostly the natural aptitude. You know me as Ron, but now I'm really Mark under Ron's skin. I used to be superbly physically coordinated and I'm getting that back. Plus I'm the only boy in a family of four girls and four parents, so I HAVE TO BE very fast on my feet, haha." The girls raspberried me, with Julia joking about how easy I was to catch. Nothing else of consequence was said - if anything had been - until Dad, Prof and Paul arrived together, Dad and Prof having picked up Paul in the electric scooter they'd used. Paul asked, "Mark, can you explain what's going on please?" "Sure. There are several things I'm trying to achieve. First, it's only nine days since I was resurrected. None of you knew me as Mark but you knew Ron for six months, who - for an amazing reason - I obviously still look exactly like, although my natural hair is just starting to show. Most of you naturally think of me as Ron. Even you, Paul. You call me "Mark" but you treat me the same way you treated Ron. You wouldn't believe how different Ron and Mark are... ," #23: " ... but by the time I leave here, you'll have had your eyes opened. -- "Second, and related to the first, from what I can tell Ron didn't have any authority on this property, other than directing the gardeners on behalf of the families. Ron was bottom of the status ladder. I'm pretty sure he was perfectly okay with that, but I'm not. When I asked for some of your guys to drive me to the hospital last night, you wouldn't agree until Dad okayed it. When I asked these guys to spar with me, they wouldn't agree until all four parents okayed it. That has to change. My requests or orders have to be acted on..." Prof interrupted, "I'll put it stronger than that, Paul. Mark outranks EVERYBODY else when it comes to security, and he's to be obeyed instantly. If Steven and Mark are giving you contradictory orders, you do what Mark says. Don't waste time checking with Steven, just do what Mark says. Clear?" Paul looked at Dad, who confirmed it, "What Prof said, only stronger. I know diddly-squat about security and I'd never dream of contradicting Mark on a security matter." Prof added, "Don't be fooled by Mark's age, which is even younger than he looks now. He's far smarter, more knowledgeable and capable than you can imagine." I came back in, "I think that established my second objective well enough. My third objective for being here is to help me get used to Ron's body. I'm not as coordinated as I used to be because everything is the wrong size. It's taking time for me to get used to that, and martial arts training is an excellent way of making me aware of the areas I'm making misjudgments in. -- "Fourth, I'm exceptionally good at Aikido. I couldn't train for a month when the DHS and CIA had me in their clutches, plus it's been over a week since I was resurrected, and in that time I've thought of several enhancements that I want to practice and refine. Some of them are easy and hardly need any practice at all, some are middling difficult, and one of them is going to be a bitch. It might take me months or years to get it right, or I might never be able to. To test out the ideas I've had, I need training partners. We've got two dozen security guys, most of whom have martial arts training, so that works out perfectly for me. It's going to be pretty hard on them, but they know that a little pain never hurt anyone, and they'll find the experience amazing. -- "That's what's 'going on', Paul." "You don't talk like Ron, that's for sure. As you seem to be the boss now, what do you want to do?" "I need to start slowly because I'm clumsier and I'm trying some new techniques, so I want to start with just one of your guys attacking me. When I'm comfortable with that, I'll add more attackers." "Some of my guys are very capable - we shorten Daniel's name to Dan for several good reasons." I'd read Dan's file with interest back when we'd employed these guys. He was high-dan rated in three martial arts, all of the "Beat Your Opponent To A Pulp" variety. He wasn't in the room now, which I was glad of because I wasn't confident enough to take him on yet. "I'll play safe by starting with someone else, until I feel comfortable, but if it goes the way I expect then Dan won't give me any trouble." To his guys, Paul said, "Who wants to go first?" One of them asked Dad, "A week in LA, right?" "Yep. Give it your best shot, Jorge." I added, "As part of helping you realize that I'm Mark rather than Ron, remember I said that I was 'exceptionally good at Aikido'? I've had twenty eight lessons, including one that I just watched because my arm was in a cast. Half of them were three-hour long, one-on-one sessions with my Sensei, but less than sixty hours of training in total. Ron was an exceptionally nice guy, especially to Carol, but he had no particular skills. I, on the other hand, am exceptionally good at acquiring new skills. What you're about to see is how much I can learn from less than sixty hours of Aikido training." Jorge advanced onto the mat, asking, "What rules?" "I imagine you'll be trying to draw my blood, and I'll be trying to stop you without hurting you too badly. It's a training session of course, so either of us can call it off any time we want." Paul suddenly interrupted, "What about the Guardian Angel! That might defend you and it was DEADLY!" Jorge took a couple of rapid steps back. Everyone suddenly looked decidedly uncomfortable, glancing worriedly around the room. I'd been hoping they'd forget about that until we'd already been fighting for a while, but no such luck. I said, "It won't do anything, for a whole bunch of reasons. Remember Archangel Michael said Guardian Angels are highly intelligent? It's heard what we've been saying and it knows that the purpose of this fight is to train me to be better able to protect myself in the future. Second, I doubt very much that I'll need any protection from any of you. Third, I asked for this to happen. In fact, I insisted on it..." I could sense that I wasn't having any effect. I guess the Guardian Angel's propensity for decapitating people was a bit too much of a worry for them. I tried a different tack, calling to the room, "Guardian Angel, will you appear please?" Amazingly enough, it did, well away from any of the staff. Before they could get even more nervous, I quickly asked it, "You know this is a training session, right?" It bobbed up and down a few times. "You know it's good for me to train to protect myself better?" It bobbed rapidly up and down nearly a dozen times, clearly thinking that was a wonderful idea. "You're not going to hurt anyone are you?" It shook its head - or its ball, I guess. "Not even if someone is good enough to make me bleed?" More ball shaking. "No interference at all from you, unless I ask for it, okay?" It nodded again. I'd run out of good questions, but a much better idea had occurred to one of my other minds during my Q&B (Question and Bobbing) session. Paul's cellphone floated off his belt toward the Guardian Angel. The phone paused in midair while quite a few keys got pressed, then it floated back to Paul, the Guardian Angel disappearing when Paul caught his phone. Paul read it out, "It says: 'If too many of them make you bleed that your father can't afford so many hookers, I'll strip more stupid people naked and steal their money again to pay for the prize weeks. I understand what you are doing and I approve. I hope someone beats you because you will learn more that way. Have a good fight.' -- Paul concluded, "I'll call that a green light." Dad and Prof were amused, and the guards were very reassured. There were even some jokes about how funny it was that an angel would steal money to pay for hookers. I added, "I think it said that mostly to prove that it understood, but I agree it's funny. Jorge, are you ready to try?" Jorge was slow to get aggressive, but he got the idea after I'd dumped him on his ass a couple of times by darting forward, standing on his toes, and pushing him backward. It was an embarrassing way for him to go down, so he gave himself an attitude adjustment. He bent into an aggressive stance, put his hands up properly, and started advancing on me. I responded by putting my hands behind my back as I had during the tag game, and I backpedaled out of his range. He advanced, and I slid around him. He tried to get close again, and I moved away too fast for him again. While we kept playing that game, I explained to Dad and Prof, "One of the new techniques I thought of is a way of making my footwork faster. We tested it by..." Jorge took a sudden lunge at me. He thought it was "sudden", but I'd proximity sensed him planning it out for the last few seconds. He lunged forward. I darted extremely quickly to the side as he lunged past me. Without any pause or change of tone, I continued, " ... playing a game of tag. I'm hard to tag, aren't I, Jorge?" "You're quick; I'll give you that. But can you fight?" "I'll give you a few more tries first while I test my maneuverability in a combat situation, then I'll show you. You should try harder because I imagine there are some very beautiful hookers in LA, it being a city of failed starlets and all that." He tried maneuvering me into a corner, but I easily slipped out to the side. When we'd played tag earlier, the guys had tagged me sometimes, but they'd had to RUN and lunge to achieve it. In any sort of combat stance, Jorge had no chance of moving fast enough to tag me, let alone to draw blood. He knew that, but he was taking his time. I wasn't putting him under any pressure, so it made sense for him to take it slowly. When he'd failed to get near me on half a dozen attempts, he tried a feint - he lunged at me and then immediately dived to his right, figuring he had a 50% chance of diving in the same direction I went. Except I hadn't moved. The first time I'd not moved was the first time he'd feinted, something that Jorge and all the spectators understood. I asked him, "Did you see a hooker over there?" An inoffensive, little wind-up; just as a fun way of pretending that I really was winding him up. "Lucky guess." "Lucky guess, my ass!" yelled Ava from the cheap seats. Jorge was in no hurry, so we played faint-and-dodge again. Several times, with me always getting it right. His feints got cleverer, in that he'd lunge forward prepared to dive to the side, but would keep proceeding straight ahead if I didn't move - so I feinted to the side he was thinking about the most, sending him leaping that way while I pulled back from my feint. Other times he wasn't feinting, but was making direct lunges at me, but those were easy to dodge. The other options, where he did two or more jiggles, were pointless because I was long gone by the time he'd finished them. The next time he did a fast lunge for me, arms spread out to both sides to catch me, I ducked forward under his left arm, using my left arm to lift his higher while I gave him a light rabbit punch in the side, just hard enough for him to feel it. He braked to a halt and I grabbed his left upper-arm and pushed it high around the back of his head as I walked around behind him with it. That corkscrewed him off balance backward and kept his right arm on the other side of his body from me while I kept walking around behind him. The trick to this technique is to make sure the guy is leaning over backward enough to be off balance, and then to rotate his body at the same speed as the corkscrew effect is happening. He goes backward in a tight circle and is amusingly incapable of getting out of it or attacking me because I stay positioned about a foot to the left of his left shoulder, which is too far away for his right hand to reach me. I quickly spun him all the way around a couple of times then dumped his ass on the floor. He'd tried to get his feet under control during the spinning, but my EKP had made that even more impossible for him. After he got back up, I said, "I suggest you don't take the hookers dancing." "Right now I'm more worried about how I'm going to catch you." "Why don't you stand still and I'll come to you?" He thought that sounded much easier than what he'd been failing to do, so he stood still. I approached slowly from directly in front of him. I slowly and non-threateningly lifting my right hand, holding it open with its palm facing him. I stopped with my hand about six inches in front of his upper-chest. My arm was straight, which meant it couldn't do much to him, and my body was out of his reach. I suddenly moved forward at top speed, my palm contacting his upper-chest. I let my elbow bend slightly, and then I pushed HARD, aided with about three hundred pounds of NP force on the back of my hand. Because I'd pushed upward a little, he lifted off the mat and went flying backward. Several feet back, he fell on his ass again. He got up, saying, "I won't make that mistake again." "Let's find a new way to put you on your ass then." Donna giggled. I moved toward him again, this time raising my left hand as I had my right last time. When my hand came within range, Jorge swatted at it, but I moved it just enough for his swat to miss while I continued to move closer to him. His other hand swatted, again just missing. Then he launched a rapid kick at my belly from my open left side. He'd had that planned even before his first swat; he'd just been waiting for me to get closer and hopefully be distracted by his swatting attempts. I did look distracted too because I was looking at his hands. Proximity told me all I needed to know, so when he kicked I zipped backward, caught his leg with my right hand with a considerable amount of NP force behind my hand to kill all his momentum and force, then I heaved his leg upward to put him on his ass again. I asked, "I hope your ass isn't getting too bruised?" Donna giggled. I turned my back to walk away from Jorge, causing him to leap quickly to his feet and after me, hoping to catch me unawares. With my 24-foot proximity sense, that wasn't going to happen. He tried punching me in my back with his right hand, and it was easy for me to zip to the right and use EKP to reinforce his punch forward, causing him to extend it farther than he should've, unbalancing him forward. It was simple Aikido technique to grab his wrist and twist. It forced his right shoulder down to relieve the pain. I kept twisting as I pulled him forward more, and he lost balance and sat on his ass again. It was more of a rolling-down than a hard fall onto his ass, but it was still on target enough for Donna to giggle. I let go and slid back, letting Jorge get up. I stood still while he advanced on me, letting him get within attack range. He started attacking with punches, jabs, chops, kicks. I ducked, deflected, dodged, blocked and whatever else that seemed to work. I wasn't sure I could handle a flurry of attacks, and I was prepared to zip backward as soon as I felt I was getting overwhelmed, but I found I could keep up. For about twenty individual attacks, I stayed inside Jorge's attack range and nothing got through to me. My proximity sense was essential for my surviving the flurry, although that alone wouldn't have been enough because he was firing away very rapidly and out of reflex most of the time. NP was also essential. By holding my arms mostly relaxed I was able to use large amounts of NP force to move them into blocking or deflecting positions very quickly. Most importantly, large NP forces stopped all his attacks dead, even when they should've powered through my blocks. For example, he could launch a roundhouse kick at me, with a huge amount of force behind it, and I could casually catch it in one hand and not have my hand pushed back even an inch. I could also move my body sideways very quickly to get out of the way, which was especially necessary when he kicked and my hands were busy dealing with his punches. EKP also helped by making some of his attacks go wider than he intended, or cause him to take longer to recover from a movement, to give me a little extra time. After the twenty-odd attacks, I gained enough confidence in my ability to survive in the center of the storm, to speak while Jorge was still attacking me. In a normal tone of voice I asked, "Not that it'll matter, but what's your favorite type of hooker?" He chuckled and took a couple of steps back, saying, "I've a feeling its going to be my right hand." Jorge had found a new way to make Donna giggle. Lucky for her Mom wasn't here. Jorge accused, "You're playing with me, aren't you?" "It looks like that because I'm trying out my new techniques and they're working. This is a training session after all. If they didn't work I'd be too busy running away from you to look like I was playing." Paul asked, "I've seen almost nothing that looks like Aikido?" "You know Aikido?" "I've never trained in it but I've seen it performed. 'Never meet force with force' is one of their catchphrases, but you're doing that more often than not." "True. Aikido avoids force on force mostly because it's easier and gentler that way, but easiness doesn't worry me much because my ability is so much greater than Jorge's, and I'm being gentle with him most of the time, apart from dumping him on his ass because Donna thinks it's funny. I'm using just-invented techniques for the very first time and I haven't begun to think about how to use them efficiently. Plus I don't know anything about any other martial arts, so when Jorge does something, I prefer to stop it as quickly as possible. -- "Not to be rude, but I've only had a few minutes practice with one person, so this isn't the best time for a learned discussion about the pros and cons of my style. I need to learn more about when my new ideas work and don't work before I can develop anything like a style." Paul said, "Okay. What do you want to do next?" I turned to Jorge, "Do you want to give up?" "You haven't beaten me." "I didn't try to. You were trying to draw my blood and I was trying to stop you without hurting you much. If you want carry on, we can spend a minute sparring with each other?" "This is going to hurt, isn't it?" "Only you." "Haha. No injuries?" "I'll just thump you a few times to prove I can. I don't need a hooker, I've got Julia." "Hey!" protested Julia. "You need to work on your complimenting style, buster." "Yes, dear." My being able to accelerate my fists faster than other people could threw Jorge's defensive timing off, but the technique that really ruined his defense was my EKP. That made his blocks and deflections slower to get going and then sent them to slightly wrong places. He was effectively wide open for me. He tried to hit me a couple of times early on, but I responded by punching him hard enough to hurt, and I was doing it almost continually. He backpedaled frantically, trying to get out of my reach. At the speed my feet can move me, he had no hope of getting away. I chased and hit him all the way off the end of the mat, where I stopped when he stepped off the end. Jorge paused in relief and to check he was still intact, while saying, "You've got a hell of punch. Looks like no Hollywood hookers for me. I can't understand how you were able to do that so easily, especially block my attacks..." "Let me beat up more of you first and we can talk afterward, although I won't be able to explain much. Does anyone else want to try for Dad's prize?" "I'll try," volunteered another horny, hopeful contender. I'd been carrying out specific tests of all my new ideas versus Jorge: fast footwork, powerful punches, being un-pushable (my blocks used that skill), ki and EKP, and my 24-foot proximity sense. All of them worked incredibly well. I'd even done a limited amount of upper-body high-speed work, by using NP to move my blocking arms much faster than my muscles could. I wasn't able to use that for anything more controlled than crude blocks, but those had worked very well. I was by no means practiced in my new skills yet, but I had some confidence now. I'd known that they were damn good skills, but I hadn't known that I could use them quickly and powerfully enough in a combat situation. Judging from my experience with Jorge, I could. To the second contender I said, "I took it slow with Jorge because I wasn't sure how I'd go. I'm more confident now, so we'll make this more of a combat, okay?" "So long as the prize's the same." "Yep." I let him make an attack on me. I beat it off, then counter-attacked him. I backed off to let him recover, and to wait for his next attempted attack. After which I counter-attacked him again. We alternated attacks - but not results - nine times. When it was time for this tenth try, he stepped back and gave a small bow, saying, "I give up. You're too good for me. You don't have any technique, but you're amazingly fast and powerful." "That's a good description. I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to combat, so I'm relying on speed and power. -- "I'd like to have a match which is more like wrestling. Where we grab each other, try to throw and pin each other, and that sort of thing. Is someone up for that?" "Same prize, right?" asked another willing victim. I said to Dad, "I think you picked the right inducement, Dad. They seem very eager to get to LA. There must be a good show on, or something." The early stages of a wrestle, when the opponent is coming at me and trying to get a grip, is like Aikido training. My new footwork speed, ki and EKP, made ordinary Aikido techniques much easier - and I'd been pretty damned good at them already - so he had no chance of getting to the later stages of a wrestle unless I let him. I did let him sometimes though, just to confirm that I was just as unbeatable in a wrestle as in a fistfight. I had to be careful of his jabbing his elbow into my nose or head-butting me - both of which he tried - but otherwise wrestling was easy. With up to seven tons of NP force available, whenever I heaved him, he got heaved; when I held him, he stayed held; etc. Whenever he tried to do anything, such as flip me, pull me down, or move me in any other way, I moved only if it suited me. Once I'd confirmed that my abilities worked as well in wrestling as I'd thought they would, I lost interest in it. I couldn't imagine ever being in a wrestling situation with an enemy, so I reverted to a more flowing combat, which meant that I threw him around the mat. I wanted to progress to taking on multiple opponents soon, which meant that getting good at throwing them around would be helpful. While my current opponent was in mid-flight, I said to Paul, "I feel up to trying my luck against Dan if he's available? He's your best, right?" "Yes. I'll get him for you." Paul activated his radio to rearrange his staff to free Dan up, telling him, "We've got a sparring partner for you in the gym. He says he can whup your ass." I'd said no such thing but Paul obviously had his own way of motivating his staff. I THOUGHT I could take on Dan, but if anyone could beat me, it'd be him. It'd hurt too! My current opponent kept trying different attacks, and especially tried to land a lucky blow somewhere on my head to make me bleed, so I had fun finding new ways to send him flying. Dan entered the room eagerly, saw the two of us facing-off on the mat, and he declared to Paul, "No way can Owen whup my ass." Owen being my currently opponent. Everyone chuckled, Paul answering, "Not Owen; Mark." "Huh? Ron?" "I think you'll find he's Mark. Get your gear off and let's see how you do." By "Get your gear off", Paul was referring to Dan's radio, gun, plastic cuffs, shoes, etc. (our guards carry quite a lot of "etc."). As Dan was unloading himself, he watched me closely as I played with Owen, and he saw enough to appreciate that Owen certainly wasn't the best fighter on the mat. Paul also informed Dan of the "One week in LA" inducement for drawing my blood. Dad confirming it. To Donna's disappointment, Dan stopped stripping when he still had his pants and shirt on, as our security uniforms are suitable for fighting in. It would've been stupid for them to be otherwise. He advanced to the edge of the mat and waited eagerly. I finished off the current movement with Owen, then said to him, "Enough?" "And then some. I'm AMAZED by how strong you are. You don't look strong enough to throw me around the way you have." "Clean living and staying away from hookers. You should try it." "It looks like I will. Thanks, it was fun." Owen left the mat, and Dan walked on. I quickly said, "WHOA BOY! Don't you know you're supposed to get the measure of your opponents first?" I'd said that because proximity showed Dan about to launch an all-out attack on me. I'd much prefer him to go slow because I REALLY want to get used to his level of ability before being on the receiving end of what he was intending. Dan and my spectators looked at me strangely, so I explained to the room, "Big guys are always cocky." Dan was a BIG guy. A big, strong, HIGHLY trained, confident guy. I was a shorter, smaller, worried guy. Dan decided to start slower. He walked onto the mat, saying, "I've never seen you train?" "I haven't had time to yet. I've only been back nine days and we were stuck up in the hills for most of it." Paul explained, "He's not Ron, Dan; he's Mark." Dan was getting within range of his attacking me soon. Because I can move so fast, I could take the fight to him earlier than he expected it to start. Mostly because of EKP, I'm better at attacking than defense, and I thought it might be good idea to teach Dan some caution. I darted forward at FULL speed, using EKP to direct very strong flows of ki along his arms, to cause them to lift higher and expose his torso more. [Projecting ki onto an opponent doesn't force them to behave like a marionette, so Dan wouldn't move his arms in the direction I was projecting. EKP does nothing until he starts to move his arms. If he tries to move them in any direction other than where my EKP is pushing, his ki will be largely swept into the direction I want. That still doesn't make his arms go the wrong way, but if I'm projecting in a direction mostly opposite to what he intends, it will take him longer to get his arms to move and they'll move slower. If I'm projecting in mostly the same direction as he's intending, his movement will be reinforced, moving too quickly and too far. Usually I use EKP to delay their movements, and then once they've started, I switch the EKP fingertip around so it reinforces their movement but deflects it off the path they intended, opening up a gap for my attack. Although I can't make the person behave anything like a marionette would - because his mind is constantly correcting his movements - in a combat situation even just small delays or deflections make huge differences to the results.] I zipped forward and when I was in range, gave Dan two VERY HARD, simultaneous punches - a particularly hard one to his chest and a lesser but still very strong one to his stomach. (Not "very hard" in the sense that I didn't put tons of force behind it as that would've killed him. I mean "very hard" for a human punch). The dual impacts pushed him backward. I used EKP to make it much harder for his feet to backpedal, keeping them rooted to where they were for long enough for him to start to overbalance backward. I'd already started backing away and to his left. His left hand shot out toward my face. I used EKP to direct it upward while I also caught it with my ki-assisted left hand to deflect it farther upward and backward over his head to make his unbalancing worse. I zipped in under his open left side and gave him a solid punch to the ribs with my right fist as I passed behind him. My left hand had been sliding along his upper-arm but I tightened that grip now, using some NP assistance to make sure it was gripping very tightly. My right hand reached in front of me to grab his substantial belt in the center of his back. I spun to face back the way I'd come and crouched, my upper, left hand pulling Dan over backward, although he was starting to pivot around too. Before that could have much effect, I HEAVED up and behind him with my right hand and a substantial amount of NP, launching him up into the air, throwing him back the way he'd come. I leaped to my feet and zipped after him, moving sideways beside him as he tumbled through the air in a rough summersault. I alternated my left and right fists to get four hard punches into his left upper-arm before he dropped too low for me. I zipped back to the center of the mat to wait for him. Despite his inelegant tumble, he landed very well and was back on his feet in an instant. Seeing me several yards away, he stopped to test his painful left arm. Over the cheers of the crowd, he exclaimed, "What the hell technique was that?" He wasn't angry, just enormously surprised. "I don't know; I just made it up. Shall we call it 'Dan Dives like a Drunken Duck'? Nah, that doesn't really work, does it?" He moved his left arm around a few more times, kneading it while saying, "You've gotta hell of a punch." "Sorry about that. I heard you were pretty good so I might've overdone it a bit. Feel free to give up anytime you want?" "Haha. Not yet. I like a challenge." He advanced on me again, much more cautiously this time. I let him get close. The instant his attack started, I zipped backward while landing a very hard punch on the forearm he'd attacked with. I stood still, and let him get close again, repeating the exact same thing. His third attempt was a feint with his hand immediately followed by a real attack from his leg. I caught it with one hand and punched his calf muscle with the other, letting go as I zipped backward. Catching a massive, fast moving leg in the palm of one hand and stopping the leg as effectively as if it'd hit a brick wall is an impressive effect. It truthfully implies that I have a huge amount of strength. It prompted Dan to say, "I had a lot of force in that kick." "Not enough. Maybe you're getting old and lazy?" "Haha." He did his version of zipping, coming straight at me with both his hands shooting out at me. I backpedaled, staying just out of his reach. I could go faster than he could, so I led him around the mat for several seconds, with him landing nothing on me. All I had to do was easily brush aside the blows that extended to the limit of his reach. The instant he stopped his attacks, I charged forward and landed another very hard blow of the center of his chest. I instantly changed direction and backpedaled out of reach again. "You're very fast." "You're not." Actually, he was, both physically and mentally; he had fighting combinations that were programmed into him which gave me almost no proximity warning. No way did I want to stay within his attack range and let him take multiple shots at me the way I had with Jorge. Dan would get something through, and it'd REALLY hurt! Not to mention how painful all his follow-up blows would be. With Dan, my fast footwork was my salvation. He came at me again. I kept to the same strategy: keeping out of his reach most of the time, until the time was right for zipping in for a very quick attack, and then getting the hell out of his range. If he was badly unbalanced I could get a couple more punches in, but even then I had to be very careful because he had an uncanny ability to turn his being unbalanced into the motive force for a spinning kick or some other attack. Another risk was his having a longer reach than me. I could attack from an angle, which negated the reach advantage for his off-hand, and I'd have his near hand under some sort of control - pushed out of the way or in an Aikido grip - but that generally just worked for the brief time it took me to get a punch in then get away. I didn't want to hang around inside his reach. After another couple of minutes, I zipped back several yards then called a halt. It's great training with disciplined people because he immediately stopped and stood up straight. He didn't have even the briefest thought of a sneak attack. In a similar situation with any of the jocks at school - back in the days when I used to go to school - they would've tried to cheat every time. I said, "You're a good fighter but now you're taking advantage of my never punching you anywhere that'd risk damaging you. You're leaving your head open, and walking into punches not caring about them. You're too good for me to let you get away with knowing that my blows aren't going to hurt you, and you're obviously capable of absorbing some pretty hard hits, so I want you to know that I'm stopping the 'Mr. Nice Guy' routine. If you leave your head open, I'm gonna take a shot at it, and I'll stop pulling my body punches so much..." "You're pulling your punches?" Dan didn't believe me. "Yes. I'll increase how hard I hit you from now on, and I want to make sure you let me know before they get too hard for you, okay?" "I doubt you can hit me that hard, unless it's on a vulnerable spot, but I'll keep myself covered better." "We'll see what you think in a few minutes." The next attack I got in was a VERY hard punch to the outside of his shoulder, twice as hard as I'd hit him before. He staggered and backpedaled, saying, "Christ, you weren't joking! If you hit my head that hard, I'd be down for the count." "Worse than that, I suspect. Now you know to keep your head protected." "Damn right! Thanks for the warning." "No problem. This is only a training session." We resumed. I kept to the same combat strategy. It was the only one I could think of that kept me reasonably safe, provided I was cautious about when I moved in, because Dan often tried to lure me into traps. I was gaining confidence against him, but I still had to be careful because he'd be damned good at capitalizing on any mistake I made. I hit him on the head a few times, usually from the rear when I'd pushed him around as I zipped behind him. I didn't hit him hard, just enough to make the point that I could've. His body got a hammering though. I was hitting him hard enough to hurt him, and his left arm was taking so much punishment that he was starting to have trouble using it properly. I hit Dan once more on the left arm, and he pulled back and cried, "Enough! You're too fast and powerful for me. I've never fought a guy like you before. Some of the things you do don't make any sense, and how the hell did you get so fast and strong?" I waited for my cheerleaders to quiet down, then said, "The 'not making sense' comment I can only answer by saying that if you showed your ability to someone who'd never seen martial arts before, they'd think what you could do wasn't possible or didn't make sense. I've got some techniques you haven't seen before, so you don't understand them. My being fast and strong is partly muscular, but it's mostly a lot of ki, technique, and natural aptitude. As Mark, I was superbly athletic, and I'm getting that back in this body. To change the subject, you're so fast and powerful yourself, that I was scared to let you get close to me..." "You did a damned good job of staying away from me." "I call it my 'Chicken Strategy'. It seemed like an EXCELLENT idea against you. Purely for training purposes, I want to try staying inside your reach and have you attack me at half speed initially, then gradually speed up until you get one through. It won't count toward winning Dad's prize because I'm inviting it. Is your arm up to that?" "If you give it a few minutes and don't hit it again, it should be." "I won't be hitting, just blocking like crazy. I've got a couple more skills I want to work on, so you can recover while I do that with other people. Thanks Dan." To the other guys I said, "I need two volunteers from the audience please?" "What for?" asked one of them worriedly. "Some two-on-one training. It'll negate a lot of the advantage I get from my fast footwork, force me to invent new ways to defend myself, and improve my situational awareness. And whichever one of you draws blood first gets a trip to LA." "Why didn't you say that first!" There was a rush from them to be the first two guys onto the mat, then we got to fighting. Punching them wasn't a good defense, unless I hit them hard enough to put them out of action for at least a few seconds, which I didn't want to risk in case I overdid it. Apart from anything else, I didn't need any more punching practice. I defended myself by being much more Aikido-like than I had before. I moved to make one of them reach out in a grab or blow, then I'd take his limb and use Aikido principles to move him so he impeded his partner's attack. I'd get them tangled up, then I'd let go and retreat, ready for their next attempt. I'd done similar things in a few of the advanced classes Sensei had invited me to, but this was quite different as these guys were REALLY trying to draw blood. They were very eager, and they seriously thought that two-on-one gave them a good shot at it. For the first half dozen optimistic attempts, they mostly competed with each other to be first to get to me. After those attempts failed and they saw that it was going to be much harder than they'd initially thought, they settled down into being much more cooperative and cunning. Thank goodness for proximity! Being super-strong helped too because I could grab a guy anywhere and pull or push him off balance, and even throw him if I wanted. I'd dithered about whether to do the old "Blindfold Routine" or not. I could do it easily, as proximity was wonderfully detailed now and its 24-foot range was at least double what I'd need in this situation, plus I could use sight blobs if I needed. I could easily fight blindfolded, but the question was whether I should? I decided on a halfway compromise. Five minutes into the two-on-one training, while I was waiting for their next attack, I closed my eyes. I also tilted my head and tried to give the impression that I was listening as intently as I could. They moved out to flank me, then one of them said, "Hang on! Ron's eyes are closed." I said, "Remember I said I want to work on my situational awareness? Closing my eyes sometimes helps me practice that." "You want us to attack you when your eyes are closed?" "I'll open them if I lose track of you, but yes, attack away. Plus I'm worried that you guys will be too old to enjoy hookers at the rate you're going." "I was starting to worry about that too," agreed one of them, while the smarter one was angling in for a silent attack. I pretended not to know he was coming, right up to his fist being inches away from my nose, although Donna did yell out a warning when she thought I wasn't going to react in time. I leaned back, windmilled his arms to send him rolling along the mat while I zipped straight for his partner. That guy hesitated for a moment, and got a very strong two-handed push in his chest as a penalty, sending him flying back on his ass. I moved away, turned to face them with my eyes still shut, then pointed my two hands at where each of them was. As they got up and moved closer, my pointing fingers tracked them. They tried to step very quietly as they circled, but that didn't help. They changed directions and crossed past each other in front of me, forcing my arms to cross each other. I said, "Now you're just being difficult." Then I reassigned the person each finger pointed at, to untangle my arms. They walked fairly close to me, then tried a simultaneous attack. It was easy to dodge to one side and push the nearest guy into the other. I moved away and opened my eyes, not wanting to give the impression of being infallible. We did half a dozen more attempts, two of which were with my eyes closed, the last one of those they 'nearly got me', they thought. I said, "Phew, that was close. One of you nearly managed to hit a blind boy. Are you sure you could find a hooker if Dad sent you to LA?" It wasn't really logical, but I got some laughs anyway. I beat off another attack with my eyes open, then I added, "For the sake of the LA business community, I think we need to add a third volunteer." He was on the mat before I finished the invitation. Unlike with Dan, I wasn't hitting these guys much; mostly spinning them around and sending them crashing into each other. It was embarrassing them more than anything else, and with free hookers at stake, they didn't much care about some minor embarrassment. Guys willingly make fools of ourselves just for a faint chance at sex, so we have no hesitation whatsoever in embarrassing ourselves when the sex is a certainty, especially when someone else is picking up the tab. I closed my eyes and tried to point at three guys with two fingers, waving my hands back and forth confusedly, saying, "Uh oh, this isn't going to be easy." It turned out that I was right, but from their point of view rather than mine. (Who else's? With my eyes shut I didn't have a point of view.) Escaping a three-way attack was trickier, but my being faster, stronger and having advance notice of their movements gave me a huge advantage. I opened my eyes, and we trained that way for a while. I had to get more aggressive because the three of them often encircled me. I had to bust out of that before they made the circle too small. Rather than a series of distinct attacks, this session was more of a continuous action. I might tangle two of them together, and then have to deal with the third. By the time he was on the mat, the first two were coming at me again. It was fun, and the guys didn't mind getting smacked around a fair bit. One of them complained, "When are you going to close your eyes again?" "It's MUCH harder keeping track of three of you, and I'm pretty happy with the situational awareness practice that I've had already. Plus it occurs to me that if someone wins the prize, he won't enjoy it nearly as much knowing he'd won too easily." They laughed and pointed out my two mistakes: they sure as shit would enjoy the prize, and it damned well wasn't easy. "How about if you win when my eyes are closed, then you're only allowed blind hookers?" "How about normal hookers with their eyes shut? Haha." "I haven't tried attacking you with my eyes shut yet. I think I know your styles well enough now; so are you ready to get your butts kicked by a blind boy?" "Bring it on, Blind Boy." I shut my eyes and zipped to where the closest guy was standing, giving him a couple of quick punches, twisting him around and pushing him not quite in the right direction to collide with another one. I said, "No collision. Did I miss?" One of them started a smart answer, which made him my next target. I kept my attack going for about thirty seconds, then opened my eyes while saying, "I'm opening my eyes," (I'm nothing if not truthful). "I lost track of you" ( ... some of the time). We sparred around for several minutes as I was enjoying trying to develop a decent style. I'd initially been meeting force with overwhelming force, which certainly worked but it wasn't a martial 'art'. My opponents and audience had commented on that many times. But between proximity, EKP, NP and the speed I can move, I was able to improve the gracefulness of my performance considerably; sliding around the mat and my opponents, breaking up their coordination by moving too fast for them to adapt to, sucking them into reacting to me, leading them the way I wanted them to move, etc. I was increasingly able to dance around them, choosing when, where and how their and my attacks happened. My latest goal was to use as little "force on force" as possible. I still needed quite strong NP to slide around the mats and for my punches, but I cut way back on the number of forceful blocks or my NP-assisted heaves of my opponents. EKP helped considerably with that. With a 24-foot range and three opponents to use it on, I was using it continuously to adjust my opponents' timings and create easy opportunities to imbalance them, my minds constantly talking to each other to coordinate their various actions, those of them assigned to concentrate on each guy warning the rest of us the moment their assignee hatched a new plan, etc. Although I'd never tried to coordinate so many minds in a combat situation before, we're so used to working together and so similar to each other that we became very good at it very quickly. As fun as it was, after about ten minutes of three-on-one, it was mostly a performance for the sake of my audience. It suited my cover story for them to see me get better at this basic stuff, but in reality it didn't matter. If I had an enemy (or enemies) and privacy, then I'd use NP to fuck them over, like I'd done to the people in the CIA lab. If the enemies were in public, then I couldn't care less about gracefulness. I'd block their attacks with excessive force if necessary, and then I'd punch their lights out. If there were a lot of them, I wouldn't be dancing around them, spinning them into each other; I'd be mowing through them, leaving a pile of unconscious or disabled people behind me. I needed to get our security force to respect me enough to follow my orders, and that objective had been achieved as much as it was going to be by this session. The only other benefit yet to achieve was my developing Super-Aikido to include high-speed total-body movement, and that was going to take a shit load of time to become second-nature, if it ever did. By now it was obvious to everyone that these three guys weren't going to lay a hand on me, let alone draw blood. One of them asked about my shutting my eyes again, but I said "I've done all of that I want. You try it sometime. It's damned scary when you're on the mat with some big, ugly guys who can't wait to punch you on the nose." There was also no point in my adding more opponents. That'd be the path I'd take if I wanted to learn how to get the most out of the abilities I currently have, but I was much more interested in increasing my abilities. High-speed total-body movement ("Call me Flash") would mean that any combat would be one-sided, no matter how many opponents there were. When I was some distance from my three dance partners, I stopped and gave them a small bow, saying, "Thank you, gentlemen. I think that's given me enough to think about for today." They'd been aware that they weren't going to win Dad's prize, but the remaining guards had been hoping I'd keep increasing the number of opponents, so there were some protests from that direction. I answered, "Sorry guys, but apart from the blocking exercise I want to try with Dan, I've achieved everything I wanted to from this visit: One, to make you aware that I'm Mark rather than Ron. Two, to establish that I have authority, which Dad and Prof have already made clear and that Paul should disseminate. Three, to help me get used to Ron's body. Four, for me to physically try out some fighting ideas I had over the last six weeks of my time. I've tried them, and now I need to think about the results and think about how to improve my techniques. I'm sorry that none of you won a week in LA, but that was only Dad's way of saying it was okay to train with me. Remember how worried you'd been about getting in trouble for hurting me?" They laughed at what a silly fear that'd been. ------- Chapter 374: Super-Aikido Under Pressure Sunday, June 10, 2007 (Continued) Paul asked Dad, "Steven, do you want Mark to have authority over Security because he's a good fighter?" Prof answered, "I thought of a better way of phrasing it, Paul. As far as I know, no human being has ever had a Guardian Angel before. Not even Jesus Christ, judging by what happened to him. So God thinks Mark is more worthy of protection than any other human being has ever been. The Andersons and Williams agree with God. Mark understands his capabilities and security needs better than any of us - which would be the case even if he was as bad at fighting as I am - so he's in charge of security." I added, "I don't want be involved in the minutiae, Paul. PLEASE continue to dump that stuff on Dad. All I want is when I give any of your guys an order, they jump to their feet and run to do it, no matter how strange they might think it is. They don't think about needing permission from anyone else, not even from you. I'm sounding dramatic, but there's some VERY weird shit in my life, and in an emergency it might be impossible for me to explain it in time. For example the angel might have told me something that no one could possibly know, or maybe it knows about the future and only some strange behavior at the right time can cause a good outcome. In other words, I might give your staff orders that they think are crazy. I don't want to run the risk of their not instantly obeying in an emergency, and that's a large part of why I'm down here now. Okay?" "I understand what you want and that your parents want it too. I'll make sure everyone knows it. Speaking of 'weird shit', we witnessed a considerable amount of that over the last hour. Can I ask you some questions about it?" "I can't promise to give satisfactory answers, but you can try asking, sure." "Let's start with your not breathing hard. You spent the best part of an hour running and fighting, but you don't look like you've been doing anything." "I think Ron's body is changing into mine from the inside out. I'm not breathing hard, but this body feels like it's been working. My previous body wouldn't have noticed that amount of exertion at all. I used to have an extraordinary amount of endurance. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll be back to what used to be normal for me." Julia couldn't resist, "He had AWESOME endurance! He was incredible, and it's GREAT to have him back!" "I'LL SAY! Mark could go for HOURS!" agreed Ava. Donna looked eager to say something. It might be okay, or it might not. To play safe I NP-pressed her lips lightly to remind her to think about it. Donna looked at me and said, "I was just going to say that some of my girlfriends CAN'T WAIT to visit again, especially Claire and Diana." "We should have a party after exams are over to make contact with everyone again." Julia said, "It'll have to be the Saturday right after exams because the next weekend is Sophia's wedding. I'll talk with Mom about getting someone to do the preparations for it..." #15: Ava interrupted, "I can do it, Julia. It'll give me something to do while you're all busy with your exams." "Will you be well enough?" "No problem. I'll enjoy it." "Great. This is what I want..." I tuned out. As long as they invited lots of pretty girls the details were irrelevant. Fortunately the girls were off to the side so the rest of us could ignore them to continue with our masculine, fighting talk. Paul asked, "I saw some feats of strength which were unbelievable..." "Sure. I've got great ki. You know what ki is? Mental focus, or mental energy. Right?" They nodded or made agreeing noises. Paul said, "What we saw was considerably beyond what I thought ki could do." "Which is a pretty good way of describing many things about me. My brain allows me to achieve three college degrees in a single year, my athleticism allows me to out-fight any of your well-trained guys even though I've only had twenty eight lessons, my returning endurance allows me to run the legs off anyone you'd care to name, and my ki allows me to do extraordinary things in that area too. All of those..." "Don't forget how good you are in bed, darling," called Julia helpfully. "I was only listing things I could prove, Julia, but if you don't mind all the security guys standing around our bed watching us the next time, that's fine with me." "They can take Ava's and my word for it!" To the audience I apologized, "I thought that might've been a good alternative entertainment since none of you are going to LA, but no such luck. Sorry." After the chuckles, Paul's next few comments worked out to be the equivalent of, "We'll train you and you train us." I clearly needed some training because I was useless at many aspects of martial arts. My punches, for example, were very fast and powerful, but they were pathetic in every other respect. Paul had said, "With your speed, power and some training, you'd be a deadly martial artist." The rest of them had enthusiastically agreed. They also agreed it'd be great if they could learn my speed and power. "Sorry guys, but your learning from me isn't possible. You're guarding my loved ones so I'd CERTAINLY train you in my abilities if I could, but they're not trainable. My body and mind are too unusual for you to duplicate what I can do. You couldn't learn how to pass three degrees in one year. I presume you all know bowling. I bowl 300-point perfect games more often than not..." "That's impossible!" protested a couple of them. Julia wasn't going to let them get away with that, "It's TRUE! We've seen him. Tell them, Dad." Prof and Dad confirmed my claim. I said, "I should've chosen a better example. You've got a pool table in your games room, don't you?" "Yeah." "I'm almost as good at 8-ball as I am at bowling. If Dan doesn't addle my brain too much I'll give you a demonstration after we've finished here. Until then, just take my word for it that none of you have got what it takes to duplicate my speed and power on the mats. -- "It's not a reason for my not teaching you, but I also don't want you to teach me. I'm still in the process of adding to my capabilities, so it doesn't make sense for me to stop to learn techniques at my current level. It's like you're asking me to stop inventing my machinegun so you can teach me how to get more accurate with a bow and arrow. It's better I carry on with my development. Once my raw abilities are as good as I can make them, then that'll be the time to train me to get the most out of them, but that's probably months or maybe even years away yet." There was a bit more conversation, but nothing of any consequence. Stuff like how I'd been able to fight with my eyes shut. I just spread some bullshit around. I asked Dan if he was recovered enough to rain blows on me, and that he understood there'd be no prize for this. He was and he regretfully did. Julia hadn't minded me sparring with these guys because she'd been supremely confident they wouldn't be able to hurt me. They hadn't, but I still considered Julia's confidence in me to have been excessive, but that's normal for Julia. However, the idea of me standing still and blocking Dan until he got some blows through didn't seem particularly sensible to Julia. She expressed her opinion quite clearly. She ended up coming over, 'getting in Dan's face' (more like his belly button), poking him in the chest and giving him a very stern talking to, adding, "and not between his legs, and ESPECIALLY not his head. That's his most valuable part." I exclaimed, "Darling! You say the sweetest things." Julia wasn't amused. Dan started slowly and didn't speed up much. I encouraged him to speed up, but he didn't do so until Dad told him to get on with doing the job properly. Dan's attacks picked up speed more rapidly, and he soon had me working damned hard to defend myself from his blows and kicks. He had highly trained routines, while my reactions were necessarily much more conscious and deliberate, so slower. When his speed got high enough, he started getting blows through. I took occasional hits on my arms, legs and torso, but not on either "valuable part". When Dan's hits became more than "occasional", I slid back out of range, saying "Thanks Dan. That's enough." He stopped and stepped back too, saying, "Thank goodness! Your blocks are like hitting a brick wall. Damn, they hurt!" He was shaking his arms to help relieve the sting. I'd long since learned to keep an NP-'plate' wrapped around my arms and thighs to spread the impacts, but I could easily imagine how hard my blocks must've felt to him, especially after having been on the receiving end of so many of them. I said, "Sorry. I've been harder on you than anyone else today." "It'll just be a few bruises; I've had worse. It's an experience to train with someone with so much power and speed." "Most of the training I want to do for the next few months I'll be able to do by myself, but it's good to know where I can find a bunch of guys who don't mind a little pain." Paul said, "Come down whenever you like. It'll be interesting to see your progress." "Thanks for agreeing, but there won't be any to see for a long time. I'm going back to the basics on something, and it'll take months at least for me to get to the stage when there's any improvement to show for it, presuming my idea works at all." -- "I said before that I'd give an 8-ball demonstration as a crude way of proving my bowling claim and reinforcing my point about being Mark rather than Ron. It'll only take a few minutes, if anyone wants to see it?" I'd impressed them so much already that they were curious to see what else I could do, so we all moved through to their games room. I noticed Donna held back to let the parents go first, and I used a sight blob to watch her talking earnestly with the guards in the rear of the group. #3: #All: While the balls were being racked, I asked, "Donna, I didn't notice you trying to make a bet, did I?" In a dismal attempt to look innocent, Donna answered, "Nooo." "Just as well, because I'm going to lose the first game." Donna was relieved, which wasn't the reaction I expected so I asked, "How come you're relieved, Donna?" "I didn't make any bets." One of the guards she'd been talking to explained, "We weren't silly enough to bet against you." Dad warned, "Don't make bets with our employees, Donna. They work FOR us. It's not right to take advantage of them." "Sorry," apologized Donna, no doubt interpreting Dad's comment as permission to bet with non-employees. I canceled my idea of losing the first game, and I proceeded to clean the table a few times. It only took a few minutes to make my point, and they were suitable impressed. My ambidexterity helped too. I ended with, "I'm not doing this to be boastful, but so you appreciate that I'm not Ron. A few minutes ago on the mat, Dan wouldn't speed up when I asked him to because Julia had scared him too much, and probably because you've had six months to get used to Ron having no authority. I look like him, but I'm not him, and that attitude could be bad news in an emergency." "I understand, Mark," said Paul. "It's an unusual situation, but I'll make sure I stress it strongly." Dan apologized to me, but I dismissed it with, "Don't worry about it. Erring on the side of caution when there's no hurry is fine, and Julia scares the heck out of me too." I thanked them for their time, then Dad, Prof and Paul took the cart back into the main tunnel, and the kids walked back up to our house. I was pretty happy with how it went; I'd impressed them a great deal, but not too much. Everything they'd seen pushed the boundaries of what they considered possible, but nothing had shattered the boundaries. I'd achieved the four objectives I'd listed to Paul, plus I had training partners whenever I wanted them. I'd change the way I behaved toward the guards from now on too, to be more commanding to emphasize that I was a completely different person. ------- There were only a few minor points worth mentioning from the rest of the day. For safety reasons, Prof arranged for the four of us doing exams next week to do all of them at home. We hired a supervisor from OSU and we set up the Kids' Living room with four small tables in it. We'll do each of the school exams at the same time as the kids at school do, and I'll do my college exams when not doing school ones. The mothers agreed to our having a Kids' Party next Saturday. It was short notice for many people but I was sure it'd take precedence over most people's other arrangements. We tend to throw pretty lavish parties, and a couple of them had become legends among the kids at school. The girls were allowed half an hour to work on their invitation list, and then they were sent back to their studying, leaving Ava to do most of the phoning. Formal invitations would be sent out, but it was important for Ava to phone around as soon as possible so the important invitees would have enough information to base their clothing choices on. We got one of our guards to tell the media camped outside our gate that we wouldn't be giving any interviews until tomorrow evening at the earliest, after we'd heard what the Government's position was. [[Our not having an interview possibly saved two more FBI agents from having their heads cut off. Before he'd been decapitated, their boss had ordered them to pose as a news team. The reporter's mic contained a traditional Geiger counter, while the camera contained a 'sniffer' that sampled and analyzed the air for dozens of different substances - including tiny proportions of radioactives and explosives. When turned on, both pieces of equipment would have transmitted their results live, which I would've seen in my radio blob and been suspicious about. Looking inside the camera with a sight blob would've shown it to be totally bogus. The agents had heard of the President's telling the media he'd ordered operations to cease, but the FBI's chain of command was so messed up that the agents hadn't received official word yet and they weren't going to take their operational orders from what they heard politicians saying in public press interviews. It's possible their AIC's decapitation would have put them off the plan, but it's also possible they would have proceeded with it, but that risk was avoided because they got their official "cease and desist" order the next day, before I consented to another press interview.]] With Julia, Carol and Donna studying, and Ava very busy with lavish party preparations, I was at a bit of a loose end. Not having anything better to do, I decided to work on the upper-body half of the high-speed movement. I wanted to start with a muscular movement that was simple and repetitive, so I chose walking in a straight line (not sliding, but walking). It wasn't "upper-body", and I could already slide wonderfully fast, but I thought it'd be a simple action to start learning basic principles from. I turned on the TV in our living room to listen for any new news, then tried to walk across the room using NP to move my legs rather than their muscles. Pushing upward against the back of an upper-thigh just above the knee did a great job of starting a step, but I put too much upward push into the action and would've fallen backward had I not used NP to hold myself up. Whereupon I started tipping sideways. I put the foot back where it'd been and manually regained my balance. I tried again with much less push, which was much better as I only started falling sideways. I put the foot back to rebalance. I realized that before I could take my first step, I had to adjust my center of gravity so it was above the foot that wasn't going to step. Starting with the weight on both feet equally, I pushed my body sideways so all the weight was nearly over the right foot, then decelerated my body's sideways push to stop it at the right point, more or less. It didn't have to be precise because the supporting foot could accommodate some latitude. #14: Once I finally managed to pick up a foot and move it forward without losing my balance, I then had to learn how to deliberately lose my balance forward by the right amount so my leading foot could reach the ground. Getting the timing of that wrong caused me to start falling on my face, as I didn't brace the leading leg's knee correctly. Then I had to push my weight forward, changing its support from the rear leg to the front one. That also required a sideways push as my legs are naturally on different sides of me and my center of gravity had to move to be over the forward leg. Both the forward and sideways pushes also needed to be decelerated at the right time. Getting that wrong caused another fall. An out-of-control topple - to either side, forward or back - was far more difficult to avoid than I would've guessed. It wasn't just a matter of using NP to push in one place, then push in the next place, etc. I had over half a dozen NP operations going on simultaneously. They were interrelated, and for amounts of force which were changing from moment to moment, and I haven't even started on my second step yet! The simple action of walking turned out to be FAR more difficult than I'd imagined. I decided that walking, even in just a straight line, was too complex to be a good first experiment for me, especially because I had to constantly adjust my entire body's balance. I changed my experiment to my arms. I will operate my hands normally, but I'll let my arms hang loosely, moving them only by NP. It's a pity their uses won't be as repetitive, but at least I won't have to constantly rescue myself from falling over. ^ [From now on, whenever I could do so without worrying about making a fool out of myself, e.g., not at Sophia's wedding, I tried to train my subconsciouses to control my upper-body with NP rather than with muscles. Babies and toddlers take a year or two to learn how to walk and handle things capably. I had the advantages of being much more intelligent, having a better understanding what I was trying to achieve, being highly coordinated, and having a very adaptable brain. On the other hand, babies learn through total immersion in the task, and what they need to learn is probably instinctive so hardwired to a significant degree. I came to appreciate that the "hardwired" point was probably the most powerful of all the pros and cons, as "External NP-Muscles" (that's effectively what they were) CERTAINLY weren't easy to operate! They required concentration, careful thought and anticipation, were slow and clumsy, and most annoyingly, showed no useful improvement. What I was most hoping for was that my subconsciouses would take over the movements, which would effectively make them 'mindless' as far as I could tell. Provided they were done with a good degree of control, that'd be perfect for me. But there was no sign of that happening. Movements in a single direction - such as when I'd moved an arm to block a sparring partner's blow in the combat training described above - were easily performed. I also got quick at tasks that were slightly less simple (such as the two actions required when I was 'vibrating' my hips when making love with my girls), but none of the relatively simple tasks became in any way subconscious; they required fully conscious, deliberate NP applications for every individual movement, both to start and to stop it. The lack of progress was discouraging, and although it sounded cool to be able to physically operate at three or four times normal human speed, it was starting to look like it wasn't going to be worth the effort or happen at all. Apart from high-speed sliding, blocks and punches, which might be useful one day, moving my arms and upper-body fast wasn't all that useful anyway.] ^ While I was unproductively stumbling around the living room waving my arms around like a demented Frankenstein's monster, I watched more TV. It was repetitive as there were only a few issues that nearly every interviewee wanted to discuss, and they had almost the same attitude to them: The Guardian Angel was DANGEROUS! It could destroy Air Force bases with impunity, and presumably do a lot more besides. That it could obtain nuclear bombs and threaten to use them HAD to be respected and feared. Even though the Guardian Angel was such a terrible threat, it wouldn't be going too far to say that most people trusted that its intentions were honorable. It was clearly only trying to protect Mark Anderson, like God had ordered it to. It was widely believed that if the attacks on my family and me stopped, the angel would cease to be a threat. The Government's repeated illegal, immoral, inexplicable attacks on the Andersons were taking the country to the brink of a catastrophe. So EVERYONE was demanding that the Government STOP! And then to explain what the fuck it thought it was doing. Actually, not quite "everyone", as some were calling for "your prayers and money," and others for, "the Devil worshippers to be sent back to Hell," but they were in the minority and mostly ignored, priority going to VERY REAL concerns like a nuclear bomb being left in central Washington and the FBI carrying out an assassination attempt on two seemingly innocent US citizens lying peacefully in their beds. Public sentiment in the period after the resurrection but before the UAV attack had been all over the map. Now it was almost unanimously directed with anger at the Government and its agencies. It's nice when a plan goes so well, especially when it includes a $216 billion bonus! Julia will be able to buy Paris. I almost felt sorry for the Government (in very the same sense as I almost respect politicians). It'd destroyed its credibility so thoroughly that it'd left itself total vulnerable to a very expensive false-flag attack. It's amusing how deep in the shit is that the Government is in, considering there have really only been four misbehaviors that caused it: The very first Government employee that'd done something bad to us had been Homeland Security's Robert Moran. Part of his job was to investigate large international transfers of money, so there was no fault for him looking into that. Our strange win from Binion's was attention getting, and he wasn't to blame for noticing my attention-getting achievements either, but he was to blame for his absurd fantasy about my having mind-control powers. That'd been bad luck for me, but had not been as unlikely as it might seem. The newly formed DHS had employed large numbers of poorly competent people at all levels. The Government had told them over and over again that they must be extremely paranoid - that message being hugely overemphasized for political reasons. The Government had given the DHS too much power too quickly, in too much secrecy, and had then let them loose with steadily decreasing amounts of accountability but a never-ending encouragement to be paranoid. It was no wonder that some of them had become clinically paranoid and had abused their secretive power. Moran passing me on to Wright, and his subsequent finding of an immoral CIA scientist to hand me over to was even less unlikely, especially the last transfer. Governments who pay scientists to break the law by developing weapons capable of killing millions of people have got to expect those scientists to lose their regard for the law and morality. The second Governmental 'bad incident' was the CIA and NSA spying on our Peoria Road home. That was so routine it's hard to call it a "bad" at all, especially given the CIA's enormous desperation to recover all the material and samples lost in the raid on their Fort Dodge lab. After taking our two baits (Logan's random lecture browser and Mom's trick with the bowl of cereal), the Army's apparently wildly excessive attack on our home was actually not unreasonable, as we might've been harboring the highly effective force that'd taken out the lab, and it was necessary to make absolutely sure that I didn't get away because my apparently being alive almost certainly meant that I had critical information about what had happened in the lab. The third incident was the FBI's surveillance of our hilltop home, which hadn't been aimed at us but intended to acquire Archangel Michael. The FBI had been surveilling everyone else on Jonathon Winters' final list, but that had never been made public. Archangel Michael had naturally aroused the Government's intense curiosity and fear, so it would've been remiss of the Government not to find out everything it could about him/it. That and too much arrogance about their chances of being caught - which they normally wouldn't have been, and when they'd been caught doing such things in the past it'd never had any real consequences - led to the FBI's being caught three times (the surveillance van, the attic camera setup, and the stealth UAV). I'm not counting this as a point, but I'll mention it because the public counts it: the FBI's UAV assassination attempt on Mom and Dad. The fourth incident was the one just finished: the FBI's heavy-handed invasion of our property. That had been easily justified initially by four nuclear bombs being missing, the Guardian Angel's threatening to use them, and our home being its last known address. That desperate urgency, the decapitation of the Director and Deputy Director of the FBI, the short timeframe, and bureaucratic inertia had let that operation's heavy-handedness carry on for long enough that it collided with our return. If we'd stayed in the hills for two or three days longer, the FBI team would've been pulled out or had the aggressiveness of its orders substantially reduced. The above list hadn't actually been so bad, with the exception of most of the first point. The second incident wouldn't have happened if not for our tricks, and the third and last incidents had been aimed at the angels rather than us, although none of the public believed that after the FBI's apparent attempt to assassinate my parents. Another absurd reason no one believed the Government was that God really did seem to be on our side! The public response was to heap scathing condemnation on the Government. It would almost be possible to say that the Government didn't deserve to be in so much shit, except that it KILLED ME! It's hard to imagine how making people yell at the Government could possibly be considered excessive compared to being kidnapped and murdered, even if the people are yelling really loudly. Speaking of people yelling, it was fun seeing the one-sided accusations against the stupid Government, and how many people accepted that my Guardian was behaving with commendable, moral restraint. The pressure being exerted on the Government to pull back from us was huge, even more than we'd hoped when we'd planned the false-flag attack. As enjoyable as it was to watch interviewee after interviewee find different ways to condemn the Government's mistakes, it was repetitive and the high-speed movement practice was discouraging, so I went to offer Ava my help with whatever she was doing. Ava was hard at work preparing for the party, by gossiping on the phone. I amused myself waiting for her. Apparently she found my method of amusing myself highly distracting, as she lost the thread of her phone conversation, so she started describing what I was doing to whomever she was talking to. That inspired me to redouble my efforts at 'amusement'. Ava's conversation quickly turned pornographic, which inspired me even more (I'm easily inspired). I could hear the tinny, feminine giggles from the phone, but had no idea who the recipient of the voyeuristic (aural-istic?) phone-sex was. That inspired me. Ava seemed to feel some inspiration too, or maybe it was because she'd gone without for several days, because she was panting even before I put my head under her skirt. I got additional inspiration from her smell (now that I think about it, it's been too long since I've had sex too). I used NP to remove my clothes. This was an excellent use of NP in a high-speed situation because I only had to take my mouth off Ava's pussy for half a second, and my fingers kept her from missing my tongue. NP was also wonderful for levitating her a few inches off the seat and pulling her panties off with no interruption to our activity. I stood up, using levitation to keep Ava's pussy in contact with my mouth while her dress departed in the other direction. I used NP to take over holding the phone for her, so she could use both her hands for more pleasurable activities. Once her dress was somewhere across the room, I moved the phone back against the side of Ava's head, then her pussy led my mouth and the rest of me to a sofa. Ava was keeping up a great, running commentary into the phone. Obviously leaving out the superhuman stuff, but still talking and groaning nonstop. "He's pulled my dress off! We're both totally naked now. He's carrying me to the sofa while he's still licking me ... Oh God yeah, just like that!" Julia likes being screwed in midair because she gets off on my being so powerful. We often have floating 69s, or floating daisy chains when there's more than two of us (NP really is quite useful), but for good, old-fashioned thrusting, being on something solid works very well. I lowered Ava onto something very solid - my cock - and then down to the sofa, where I gave the three of us (not counting the buggers) a very good time. I'm assuming the listener was enjoying herself, as she was still on the line and being treated to more commentary whenever Ava found the willpower for a giggly, X-rated exchange with her. We'd not done any exhibitionism games for quite a while, apart from some fairly casual group nudity around the pool or spa pool, which didn't have the same emotional effect. We hadn't pushed Ava's or Carol's kinky buttons since the good old days when Mark1 was alive. It looked like Ava might've missed it, so I'd have to think of something appropriate for next weekend's party. Ava was very vocal, and for our listener's benefit I joined in too. I'm always self-conscious about making sex noises, while no girl ever seems to be, but I did my self-conscious best to make us sound better. I was also extremely aware of the buggers, but Ava didn't seem to be the least concerned and I was enjoying teasing them. Ava and I were obviously both horny; especially me. Ava got off very quickly, but not as quickly as I would've had I not done micro-go-softs to hold myself back until she caught up. After we both climaxed together, I flipped her over, did half the go-hard I needed to make myself useful again, then restarted. I would've beaten Ava to the finishing line again if not for go-softs. It wasn't until our third effort that Ava let loose before I would have. She looked like she needed a rest after that one, so I stopped. I floated the phone to me from the sofa beside Ava's head, and formally intoned into it, "This is Mark Anderson speaking. With whom am I having the pleasure of conversing?" "Haha. Not as much pleasure as Ava. It's Jo-Ro, Mark." (Joanne Rojas, a friend of Ava's and not a conquest of mine. Mark1 only met her a few times, and Ron tended to be more popular with the younger girls, which was something that he had less than no complaints about.) "It sounded like you gave Ava a good time." "It's good to be back. I enjoy being alive a hell of a lot more than being dead." "Huh? You can remember being dead?" "Nah, I just like making weird comments like that. It appeals to me that no one has ever said sentences like that before. It's great to be alive though, and having sex with Ava is GREAT! You should try it sometime." "Haha. Not my scene. By the sounds of it, you want to get straight back into being Mark again." "Get back into it AND make up for lost time. I spent a month chained up inside a small room. At times like that you think to yourself, "Gee, I wish I'd seen Jo-Ro's nipples." "You did NOT!" "No. But it's a nice thought. Knowing I've been dead affects how I look at things now though; it makes me more direct and I appreciate the simple pleasures of life more. I certainly never wished I'd spent more time doing schoolwork, but I did regret not spending more time with Ava, Julia and my two families. Plus I seem to be hornier these days." It couldn't do any harm to advertise that, as Jo-Ro is quite pretty and has nice tits. -- "Ava's starting to stir. Did she tell you about our party next Saturday before she lured me into having sex with her?" "Yeah. Me and my nipples will be there." "Great. I'm looking forward to giving the three of you welcoming kisses. I'll put you back on with my irresistibly sexy temptress." I fetched a towel from the bathroom while I licked our juices off Ava's non-sensitive areas, and unashamedly enjoyed hearing Ava's nice comments about how good I was. I particularly smiled at Ava's saying, "He may look just like Ron on the outside but there's no doubt Mark's on the inside now. It's strange, and I feel sorry for Ron, but it's GREAT to have Mark back. There's no one like him..." It got soppy (one of Mom's words, meaning "overly sentimental"), so I concentrated on getting the other end of Ava not-soppy (meaning "not-wet"). After a minute, Ava said, "Uh oh. I think Mark's ready for another round. I'd better go, Jo. Bye." I wasn't, and proximity showed Ava wasn't either. She was just hanging up in a way that complimented me, so I carried on with the cleaning. Ava asked, "Jo broke up with her boyfriend a few weeks ago. I think she'd be easy to get into bed, if you wanted her?" "I was mostly flirting for fun and to help people realize that even though I look like Ron, I'm not. She's a good sort but I'd rather reconnect with my old favorites before I spend time on new conquests. Speaking of which, if you're calling around about the party, are there any of my favorites you haven't called yet?" "Most of them. The lists of names are over by the chair I was on before your irresistibly sexy temptress tempted you, haha." "I'll get them in a second. I'll just clean this little bit here." "Oh yeah! Clean it again!" Several minutes and another cleanup later, I went to get the lists. Each of us kids had generated one sheet of invitees, with duplicates removed (e.g., Julia and I both inviting Alexis but she only appeared on my list). I knew the duplicates were gone because we use a database for our contacts now. Gone are the days of all of us having our own independent, handwritten address books. Our having security staff meant they have to have access to our friends' addresses and phone numbers. I asked, "Are people worried about safety?" "Yeah. I'm just telling them the party's on and letting them decide whether to come or not when they see what happens over the next week. No RSVPs needed or any other pressure." "Okay. I'll take these two pages," grabbing mine and Donna's. "When you're talking to girls, you'll need to tell them..." Ava went on to tell me lots of girly crap. I grabbed another phone and towel, we sat at opposite sides of the sofa and lightly played footsie with each other's interesting parts while we made phone calls. As Ava had said, safety was a concern with pretty much every parent and quite a few of the kids too. When I was put on to a parent, which happened more often than not, I said, "I'm just calling to let [invitee] know the party is being planned. We think the Government wouldn't dare risk doing anything now, but you can make up your mind five minutes before the party if you like." If nobody comes, the local hospital will be getting some very nice leftover food delivered to it to cheer up its patients, or wherever it is that our excess food will be sent. The other thing that I was asked almost every time was, "Are you really Mark?" It got tedious, but I got better at keeping that short. I did my list first, which you might be surprised to know had about a third of the names on it belonging to guys. Ron, not having gone to school, hadn't stood on the toes of as many fragile male egos as Mark1 had. When I called them I said, "You're on the list because I'm told you were a friend of Ron's, but you'll know everyone else there, so it doesn't really matter that you don't know me well." My list also had people like Diana and Claire Norris on it, and I enjoyed lying to Mr. Norris. I included, "My sisters are too busy studying now, but they both made me promise that I'd personally apologize to Diana and Claire for my sisters being under Vanessa's and Prof's thumbs. May I talk with them please?" Ever since I'd started playing around with the two Naughty Norris Nubiles, we'd deliberately mixed up who called their home. Sometimes it was Carol or Donna that called, sometimes Julia, Ava or me (as Mark1 and Ron). The Norris parents had long since been trained to think my families just divided up the calling when there was a group event planned. They even liked it when Mark1 had called because they were encouraging Diana to flirt with me, as long as they thought she was flirting in a moral way of course. So it was no problem getting both girls put on the line, crowding around the handset. I reassured them, "Yes, I really am Mark. Are you having a good day?" The last question was our code for, "Can you talk freely?" Mark had started it, and they'd told Ron about it - after he dropped a hint about needing a code - so they'd easily pick up on my using it again. Diana answered, "Yes. Mom and Dad are in the garden and Mackenzie's at a church group meeting." Suspecting that the call might get somewhat risqué, I carried the phone's handset outside to be out of the range of the bugs in our house. I wasn't TOO worried about being recorded by possible phone taps, as it was well known that Mark had been very sexually active and the Norris girls were almost old enough that their being active wouldn't be a big deal. It was worth walking outside to reduce the chance of the conversation being recorded though, to save their embarrassment if the tapes somehow became public. "In that case, shall I prove I'm Mark by taking you back to a certain little nest in the woods where we first had fun?" "You remember!" "Of course. I'll NEVER forget that! Even being dead for a year wasn't enough to stop me from remembering how wonderful that was." "Wow!" | "{Giggle}." "I also remember how wonderful the two of you are, and I'm VERY eager to see the two of you again, but I've got something very surprising to tell you..." "What?" x 2. "I haven't seen you for almost a year and a half and your bodies have changed a great deal in that time, especially Claire's, but I don't need to see you again to see how you've changed because I know EXACTLY what you look like now." "How?" | "Did Carol tell you?" "Something much stranger than that, Diana. I don't know whether you heard, but God left some of Ron's memories behind for me, including several VERY lovely memories of you, Claire and Ron having sex together..." "Oh. Ahh, Mark..." "They are WONDERFUL memories, Diana. You've got nothing to be ashamed of at all. You should be PROUD, especially because Ron was such a terrific guy. Carol loved him very much and he loved her even more, which is all I need to know to make me have total confidence in his being a wonderful guy for the two of you to be with. I told you several times that I wanted you to be strong and independent about your own choices for relationships and what to do in them, rather than listening to your parents unhappy ideas. I'm proud of you for being Ron's lovers. I'm even prouder of the great taste, judgment and confidence you showed by seducing him." "{Giggle}. We did NOT seduce him! He was much older and more experienced than us." "Oh yeah? How come I've got a very clear memory of the two of you flirting with him in the hot tub after the other girls had gone inside. You even asked him to put his finger in your pussies when he kissed you because that's what Mark had done the first time." "{Giggle}," x 2. Claire adding, "Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that." "Ron certainly hadn't because I've still got his memory of it. You two were wonderfully naughty and I'm very proud of you. I want you to know that you don't have to be embarrassed at all about being with Ron. I'm looking forward to hearing some of your stories about him because I want to get to know him better." Amusingly, that was the mirror image of how Ron had gotten through Diana's and Claire's reluctance to be with him, by getting them to talk about their feelings for Mark. -- "I still look exactly like Ron, so you might find that weird when you talk with me, but I hope you can come on Saturday because I'm definitely looking forward to seeing you both again. I thought about you many times when I was in the CIA's prison and they were doing bad things to me." "You did?" x 2. "Absolutely. You know I like you very much. You're two of my VERY favorite girls, so I often thought of you." I was telling the truth too. Obviously I'd thought about my families much more, but the Norris girls were on the list of other people I thought about. I genuinely liked them back then, and Ron's subsequent experiences with the girls had added positively to my opinion of them. -- "I'll mention a second strange thing. I was dead from mid-February 2006 to just a few days ago, about fifteen or sixteen months. Because I was dead, I wasn't growing any older. That sounds silly, but I wasn't learning anything new, wasn't having experiences, wasn't getting more mature, etc., I'm effectively sixteen months younger than I should be by now. That means I'm now only a few months older than you, Diana." "Oh wow." | "Does it work like that?" "Imagine a five-year old boy went into a coma for twenty years. His body would continue to grow older, but his mind wouldn't. When he woke up, he'd still think just like a five-year old would, not like a 25-year old." "Oh yeah. So you're closer to us now." "Yep. I know you might find it awkward to be close friends with me again after not seeing me for sixteen months, but I still like you both very much. Even more than before because I think you were wonderful with Ron. I hope we can carry on where we left off because it's only been a few weeks for me..." "Ahh, can we wait until we talk with you personally?" "Of course you can, Diana. You can take as long as you want; I'd NEVER pressure you about something like that. I'm just letting you know that from my point of view, it's just like I went away for a short, very unpleasant vacation. I'm back now and I'd like to spend some time with two of my favorite girls. Whether I do or not is up to you, like it's always been. I know my feelings are still great for you two, but naturally your feelings might have changed over those sixteen months. I respect that fully. My sisters have changed a great deal too. You wouldn't BELIEVE the tits that Donna's got now!" Claire answered, "Haha. Yes we would. We've seen them." Diana said, "Hey, if you've got memories about Ron and us, what about Ron with Donna or Carol?" "That's a very intimate question, so I think I'll wait until you decide whether you're my girlfriends still. I don't want to discuss things like that with people I'm not very close to." "I understand." "I'll tell you one very small advantage for my being sixteen months younger. If you make me happy by deciding to be my girlfriends again, then you'll be able to explain my being nearly the same age as you to your parents, which will make it easier for them to believe that Diana should try to flirt with me again, like they used to encourage you to, Diana." "I don't know, Mark. Since then they've heard how many girlfriends and, umm, lovers you used to have. A lot of them went on Oprah and Mom had a long talk with me about you. She believed me, especially because I said that Claire was always with me when I was at your house, and that you always treated us very respectfully like you do your sisters, but I think we'll have to be careful. It might be better if we tell them that you're no longer interested in me, and we just go to visit your sisters." "Your father seemed perfectly fine when I talked to him just before. He talked for longer than I wanted, but once we got past the expected questions about my really being Mark, God and stuff like that, he wasn't worried about putting you on the phone." "Maybe he forgot, or maybe God resurrecting you has convinced him you must be a good boy. They've talked about that A LOT." "It doesn't matter until you make your decision, so let's not worry about it now. Do you have any questions about the party, like what to wear?" "I'll ask Carol at school tomorrow." "I forgot to say that she, Donna and Julia won't be there. We're doing our exams at home to play safe because there are still too many crazy people in town." They didn't really want to talk with a boy about clothing, but I assured them that I'd been fully briefed by Ava, and we started discussing that critically important issue. Part way through that, Mrs. Norris joined the girls. I heard her say to them, "Can you ask for Mark back so I can talk with him please." "He's on the phone now." Given the girly subject matter, that surprised Mrs. Norris. She recovered though, and asked for the phone. "Mark?" "Yes, Mrs. Norris." "You sound like Ron rather than Mark." "I've still got his body and voice box, Mrs. Norris. My vocabulary and grammar are considerably different than Ron's though, and people are already complimenting me that my sense of humor is too." Mrs. Norris was not amused, confirming my opinion of her. She said, "We learned several months ago that you were having sex with several girls. We don't think it's appropriate that you call here..." "Mrs. Norris! I would NEVER even THINK about touching Diana! She's much to fine a person for me to..." "It's not appropriate for you to call here. Don't do it again. Goodbye." I heard the beginning of Diana calling out "Mom!" but it got cut off by the phone hanging up. #14: I spent a while feeling sorry for Diana and Claire, and for myself a little, and then I cheered myself up with the thought that we'd find some way to work around their parents. I made a few more calls outside, then went back inside to complete the rest of the calls. They were much easier. And when it comes to "easy", there's no one like Alexis: "Hi Spanky, it's Mark Anderson nee Ron Fisher here. Are you up for some wild sex after exams are over?" "Yippee!" That settled, I told Alexis about the party. "I'll be there! I get very horny when exams are over." "Haha. You get very horny when the world is spinning." "Yeah, then too. Have you had any more memories come back, like what was it like being dead?" "Still no memory of that. One second I was in the room the CIA had locked me in, the next second I was in my parents' bedroom. And inside Ron's body, which is still weird! I skipped sixteen months, which means I've got a lot of sex to make up for." "I'm glad you're back; all the other guys are fucking useless compared to you. Except Ron. He was great, but he couldn't keep it up for as long as you and he wasn't as rough as I like." A couple of minutes of conversation later, Alexis suddenly exclaimed, "Uh oh! I just remembered your family are giving a bunch of us $5,000 every birthday..." "I know all about it. They decided it was a gift I would've liked to make and they were absolutely right. I won't change a thing, but you're going to have to pay me back in sex." "Now I'm glad I'm cheap. A dollar a time okay with you? Haha. Thanks very much for letting us keep that. I'm relying on it for college..." "That's what it's for. I'm more than happy to help you pay for college. So what's your major going to be?" Ron already knew Alexis would be doing Applied Anthropology, but it was best to be ignorant of developments like that so. We chatted about that, school exams and other stuff. One thing I didn't have to do was talk with Alexis about what to wear. #16: #20: It was a slow but enjoyable process reestablishing contact with my old favorites, and I kept it up until dinnertime. Ava and I finished off the calling after dinner, and I spent the rest of the evening helping the other girls with their exam preparation. ------- [As the last few chapters have been about Aikido, this is an appropriate place to mention something related to self-defense: more self-defense. I'm sure that our being inaccessible to the public for the first couple of weeks after my resurrection helped my safety a great deal. My families' safety too, as they could have been caught up in any attack. Those two weeks gave time for many of the hotheads to calm down. It would also have affected the reasonably sensible loudmouths. The day after my resurrection, from the incident in which the skinheads were killed, the public learned that the Guardian Angel was REAL! Religious people are used to being able to rant on and on about their fictitious beliefs as much as they want to, without any chance of their being proven wrong, or anything else real happening. That situation had come to a shocking and crashing halt. Whether the Guardian Angel was a real angel was open to debate - and that was MUCH debated - but the angel was indisputably very real; just ask any of the thousand Christians it had clubbed, picked up and stripped naked. You could ask the dead thugs too, and their failure to answer would be a very convincing proof of the angel's realism. Before it had made its first appearance, the religious fanatics had started pontificating vehemently against me, pontification being something they'd loudly and obnoxiously done from time immemorial. Probably millions of Christians have killed each other because of those arguments: Pretty much every Christian sect has killed and been killed by its contemporaries, with the Catholics and Protestants being particularly bloodthirsty. Likewise the Christians and Muslims have killed each other in very large numbers, and both groups have killed Jews during the off-seasons. Meanwhile, the Muslim sects have been busy killing each other, as well as going back and forth versus the Hindus. Because of its prevalence, it's easy to see that religious intolerance has very little to do with religion and a great deal to do with human nature (hardly surprising, considering religions are a product of human nature). All of those deaths were over nothing other than differences of opinion over the interpretation of written words which had no direct bearing to anything in the real world, other than what was in people's minds, which very often has nothing at all to do with the real world. In short, they were killing each other over the argument about who had the best imaginary friend. Fortunately those opinionated arguments rarely became so widespread that mass killings resulted, but that's also unfortunate as it's had the effect of making the loudmouths believe they can spout off loudly and nastily without there ever being any adverse consequences for them. That's what all the Christians who marched on our gates the day after my resurrection assumed, so none of them, including those of them interviewed on TV before and during the riot, had any hesitation in ranting and raving vitriolically. The reality of the Guardian Angel was an extremely shocking surprise to all such people. Harshly condemning someone who had something that killed in his defense was an unwelcome change to the usual "rant, rave and condemn with no consequences" situation. Over the two weeks they had to think about it, the more sensible loudmouths would have thought that now that they'd bravely had their say, they should go home where they could safely wait and see what happens. Obviously there are a large number of intolerant religious people who can't ever be described as "sensible", but I have to believe that there are a significant number that can be. It was impossible to judge how many such people there were because the TV networks always found plenty of non-sensible loudmouths to rant on-camera, but surely there was a large number of sensible religious people, for whom the events of the last couple of weeks would have discouraged their attacking me, thereby reducing the threat to me and my families. Another excellent result of the first couple of weeks was how confusing it was for so many people. Confusion was good; it was certainty that could be a killer. To most people, the Government appeared to be the baddies, which implied that my side was the goodies, which further implied that maybe everything we'd said had been true. The people who thought we were goodies wouldn't attack us. Because I'm a logical sort of guy, I must point out that any Devil Worshippers out there should want to kill us because God was on our side, but no Devil Worshippers had ever appeared on TV calling for us to be sent back to Heaven or had tried to send us there themselves, so Devil Worshippers are apparently more sensible, law abiding and moral than God Worshippers. In short, I thought the events of the last two weeks had substantially reduced the risk of our being violently attacked. However, judging by the extensive TV coverage of them, there were still a lot of frenzied nutcases out there, so the risk had not been eliminated, hence my interest in developing my martial arts prowess. The above discussion is longer than it needed to be, but that's because I want you to understand why the tone of my autobiography is so scathing toward Christians. I've always thought they were stupid for believing in so much obvious nonsense, but I couldn't have cared less how stupid they were in their own lives. But day after day of hearing their morally disgusting and physically dangerous rhetoric against me is increasingly pissing me off, and I'm not pleased by the TV networks for so frequently airing it either. However, having explained that the risk has reduced and why, I'll make some general comments about what happened in the weeks and months following this point. The same sorts of things happened over and over, and it would be tedious to write about them individually. Whenever I was out in public, I always had one of my minds tasked with "Overwatch Duty", and often another mind tasked with concentrating on reviewing what our eyeballs saw for any possible threat. I wanted to see and react to the trouble before it acted on me. I did have quite a lot of trouble too, so whichever minds that were on duty had to stay on their toes. The most common 'threat' wasn't a threat to my safety but to my peace of mind, as far too many people made nuisances of themselves by getting excited when they saw me and rushed up to talk to me. Being thronged in public is bad enough, but when it's quite possible that one of the throngers might have evil intent and perhaps a knife or gun, then the thronging becomes VERY unwelcome. Thank goodness for my proximity sense being able to easily differentiate between strongly negative and positive emotions, and for it having a pretty good radius. Excited throngers were extra annoying when I was doing something I didn't want to be repeatedly interrupted. Merely having the Guardian Angel appear between them and me usually made most such people give up on their intent to intrude on me. A brief admonishment and a gentle NP-push took care of the slow learners. I only treated them in those ways if it was clearly rude of them to intrude, such as when I was having dinner in a restaurant with friends. I often did spend a few minutes talking to people, for PR reasons. The frequency eased off over time as the locals got used to my presence, and the temporary nuisance was a small price to pay for having my own life back again. Most of the negative-emotion people were quicker to deal with than the excited people. The angry people - or whatever their negative emotion was - usually weren't intending to do anything dangerous; they were just wanting to yell accusations at me, exorcise me (attempts to do that happened several times), spit on me, or most often, just pointlessly argue with me about some aspect of my life that they thought I was interpreting or living wrong, and then they'd insisted that I had to adhere to their specific form of religion. Unless there were unusual circumstances, I pretty much gave all of them one of my standard responses, which one they got depending on how badly behaved they were. After the angel appeared, which it always did in any of these circumstances to clearly establish that it was to blame for what followed (rather than me), then my standard responses were: Most often the troublemakers would be scared off by the angel. I'd do nothing other than watch to make sure they left. If they persisted - proving they were particularly courageous, stupid and/or devout - then I would watch carefully to make sure they didn't do anything dangerous or particularly troublesome, such as throw their drink at me. I would let them do what they wanted for just enough time for the people around me to see that the person was being a unacceptably annoying, whereupon I'd interrupt to tell them to leave and the angel would also move toward them threateningly (it's remarkable how scary a semi-transparent ball of light can be). A surprisingly large number of these people would stridently assert: "I've got just as much legal right to be here as..." And that was about the point when the angel NP-bulldozed them away from me, usually knocking them off their feet and pushing them painfully along the ground for a hundred yards or so. After that experience most ex-troublemakers scuttled away. Repeat offenders or particularly obnoxious people were forcefully picked up about ten feet off the ground and flown out of my body's hearing and sight, then they were stripped naked and all their ex-possessions were burnt, including their wallet or purse and all their money and clothes. If I was annoyed enough, I'd drop them without warning, otherwise I'd lower them a few feet before dropping them. If they were obnoxious enough and I could identify their car, I'd destroy it too. All the insurance companies were refusing to pay out on "acts of God". After the precedent for cutting a person's tongue out was established (that incident is described later), I sometimes did that for the particularly loud and vitriolic offenders. They had to be very bad though, but a few of them sought me out repeatedly to be as annoying as they possibly could, so they got the treatment. People carrying a handheld weapon, or with a concealed one that they started reaching for (I was usually able to spot those with a sight-blob search), were held VERY tightly immobile and their weapon carefully exposed to the audience. They were given the stripping punishment and then injured in some appropriate way. If they'd tried to use a knife, then the angel knifed them with it in several non-fatal locations. If they had a gun and had clearly intended to use it on me, they were shot. That happened twice: the first guy I shot in both kneecaps, the second guy I fatally shot in the middle of his forehead because proximity had shown me that he was about to do that to me. If they merely had no weapon but plenty of aggressive intent, such as if the sight of me had angered them so much they couldn't control themselves from charging forward to attack me with their hands, the angel usually just broke an arm or two. If the situation was suitable, I might add to any of the above punishments. I sometimes flew the person onto the inaccessible roof of a tall building or the top of a distant tree, so they couldn't get down and annoy me again for a fair while, hopefully giving them time to get scared out of making another attempt. Or if there was a news camera nearby, I'd fly them in front of it hold up their license in front of the camera so the whole world knew who they were. Sometimes I borrowed a pen and wrote some appropriate comments on their naked body. In all such occasions, I made sure that the person started acting out their intentions before I took action. I had to be VERY careful that no innocent person was at risk when weapons were involved, but given the fierceness of the punishments I inflicted, giving the attackers a chance to act was necessary. Fortunately, after several such incidents it became widely accepted that the angel was an infallible judge of criminal intent, so I was able to act as soon as I was certain of what the idiot intended. Our staff had to create a new type of form letter: to refuse the eager requests of law enforcement agencies all over the country who wanted the Guardian Angel to interview suspects and report on their guilt or innocence. My victims, even of just the bulldozed variety, often tried to get the police and/or lawyers involved. It never got them anywhere. The angel wasn't under my control so I wasn't responsible for its actions. Heck, some of the incidents had happened while I was looking the wrong way, so I couldn't have been responsible. I'm sure you can easily imagine how impotent the cops and opposition lawyers were, especially because cops who talked to me for more than about a minute caused the angel to appear and it started gently pushing them away. I gave a few media interviews on the topic. By far the most common problem was with people who just wanted to yell their opinions into my face - that happened dozens of times. Those were bulldozed away and often tried to sue me for it, usually for several million dollars (apparently their opinions were worth a LOT, in their opinion). One of my on-camera comments that I quite liked was: "Yes, Mr. Lee" the latest outraged claimant, "does have some legal right to stand on the street in front of me, obstruct my path and yell false religious doctrine and insults at me. Human lawmakers have given him the right to do some of those things. On the other hand, God ordered His Guardian Angel to stop people doing things like that. Seeing as how God created the entire Universe including the Earth, Mr. Lee would be silly to think manmade laws can overturn God's commandment. Mr. Lee's attempted lawsuit makes as much sense as if he climbed onto the roof of his home, jumped off, and then tried to sue someone for his hurting himself. After all, both the Guardian Angel and gravity are equally God's creations." Another little point I liked was: "Archangel Michael gave an interview in which he described how God would be sending a Guarding Angel to Earth to protect me, and he VERY emphatically warned that Guardian Angels had to be respected and treated with caution. I've seen a tape of that interview, and it was clear that God had already decided exactly what the Guardian Angel's orders would be. That interview took place well before I was resurrected, so I was dead at the time God decided on those orders. The angel pushing Mr. Lee across the sidewalk is consistent with those orders. I think it's amusingly hopeful of Mr. Lee to sue me for something that was decided while I was dead. Is he going to keep suing corpses whenever he breaks God's commandments or laws. If he covets his neighbor's wife, will he sue that woman's deceased parents?" You get the idea. It was a nuisance, but between the cops' unwillingness to get involved, our having a good legal excuse and great lawyers of our own, and pretty much everyone being on our side, the idiots that attacked me had no comeback. It amazed me how many people were willing to attack me, whether verbally or physically, but as my four parents several times told me, "When people's beliefs are threatened with exposure for being wrong, they can get irrationally angry." Amusingly, I never used any of my martial arts skills against any of these people, as that could have got me into legal trouble. The Guardian Angel did it all.] ------- Chapter 375: The FBI's Second Assassination Attempt Monday, June 11, to Friday, June 15, 2007 Exam week - blargh! Especially with as many exams as I had. On Monday afternoon, the House of Representatives announced that they were forming the "Special Committee on Resurrections". The plural "Resurrections" amused me, as trying to investigate any resurrection other than mine would be rather difficult, and mine wasn't going to be easy either. They wisely chose not to immediately subpoena anyone, instead telling the media that they would be sending us a letter asking if we'd appear before them. The media wanted to immediately know what our reply would be. That would have saved us the cost of a postage stamp, but we preferred to put some thought into the issue first. The media didn't like that process, but we stuck to it anyway. We got the Committee's letter the next day. We discussed it among ourselves, not in any of the bugged buildings, and came up with a list of demands for our cooperation: In recompense for the FBI's illegal actions while we were away: each of our staff are to receive an immediate tax-free payment of $250,000; all of us (the 5 Andersons, 3 Williams and 1 West) are to be given $1 million each, which we'll donate to our choice of charities; there's to be an additional payment of $1 million to cover repairing the house, with any remaining money given to charity; plus a $20 million grant to the local hospital. In return for which, we and our staff will forgo our right to sue the FBI over the incident. We'd checked with our staff first, and enough of them agreed to that (those that didn't wouldn't participate in this). We'd also confirmed with our lawyer that it wouldn't negate the $216 billion claim we had against the Federal Government for surveilling us in breach of the previous settlement contract, which he'd already lodged and we were awaiting payment of. All the vehicles used by the FBI in the commission of their illegal actions are to be delivered to Corvallis Airport and forfeited to the Andersons, for donating to charity. The President to go on nationwide TV, put his hand on a Bible, and swear an oath to God that there'll be no future Government sponsored investigative or any other action against any of the twelve members of "The Family" or their descendants unless it is with the prior written approval of the majority of the qualifying people (The Family plus descendants). A law was to be enacted to the same effect, in perpetuity and with a mandatory 20-year prison term for offenders, our lawyer to provide the text. The President, still under oath, is to read out an exact and highly detailed description of any current surveillance or investigation actions, "current" as of the moment we emailed this document. There should be no such actions, but if there are, they are to be removed immediately after the President lists them. The email ended with, "Once the above conditions are met, the Special Committee on Resurrections can send up to six people to our home at a mutually agreed time - which will be after exams are over - for an informal question-and-answer session. The session's duration will be at our sole discretion." We'd debated including something about penalizing and prosecuting the FBI agents involved in the action. As a general rule that'd be a good idea, but in this case the onsite boss and the four active kidnappers had been killed, and it wasn't clear that anyone else was guilty of anything too bad. It was too easy to imagine that the FBI would blame the dead people, including the recently deceased Director and Deputy Director, so to avoid our looking weak we said nothing about this. The deaths of the five agents would've sent a very clear warning to other agents anyway. Once we'd sent our reply on Wednesday morning, we gave a copy of it to the media, Mom making a statement saying, "Obviously we're not trying to blackmail the Government because we're not keeping a penny of the money ourselves; it's all going to our staff, charities, or the local hospital. We are concerned about God's being insistent that Mark should be left alone to live his life as he wishes. If the Committee subpoenas any of us, or just sticks their noses into our business, the angel is likely to react forcefully, and we fear that could lead to tragic deaths. But if the Government agrees to honorably provide the three items we've listed, then we believe the angel would not object. We can't guarantee that of course, because it's working for God not for us, but that's what we guess. -- "Clearly the FBI committed crimes against us and our staff. They rammed a secret spy plane into Steven's and my bedroom in an unmistakable attempt to assassinate us - something we consider proved by the angel's subsequent actions - and they invaded our property and kidnapped our staff. They are liable for their actions so our staff and ourselves could easily sue them for it, but we're hoping that a quick and enthusiastic settlement by the Government will make the angel happy. The President's assurances are needed for the same reason." A reporter pointed out, "This gives you open license to commit any crimes you want." "No it doesn't, and we most definitely don't want that. Our settlement agreements after the DHS's and CIA's terrible crimes specified what we wanted but the Government repeatedly broke that provision and illegally spied on us, which taught us that a legally binding contract is insufficient to make the Government behave properly. They've forced us to elevate that requirement to a law. The way it's worded, if one of us turned bad the rest of us would give permission for the Government to investigate and prosecute that person. Taking responsibility for our actions is VERY important to us. That's why the Mark Anderson Foundation's meetings are webcast live with all the supporting information available online. -- "The Government has never once accused any of us of any crime, with the sole exception of the DHS's pretext that Mark might possibly be thinking about becoming a terrorist financier, which was the lie they used to cover up their insane fantasy that he had mind control powers. Obviously he doesn't have such powers or he would've long since ordered the President to leave us alone. None of us have been accused of anything, while over three hundred Government employees have committed crimes against us and our staff. It's not our committing crimes you should be worried about, but the Government's power-mad, unaccountable agencies. The FBI, DHS, CIA and NSA have all committed crimes against us, and I'm sure against many other Americans too." The House Special Committee on Resurrections' spokesman appeared on TV, and he was not a happy man. Apparently we were "Undermining Democracy" and other heinous sins. He sincerely stated, "For the good of the nation, it's essential that the House be able to investigate major issues of concern to the entire country, blah, blah..." Mom's reply was, "It's their choice what they do. It could be what we suggested, or they could subpoena us, or ignore us completely, or do whatever else they think is a good idea. I can't control them and I can't control the angel, so it's out of my hands. I have no doubt God will let them know if It disagrees with their decision." The House Special Committee on Resurrections fell silent. As they understood the risks they were facing, that was probably wise, but it was a pity because it meant we had to put up with the FBI's bugs and gas canisters. We'd been hoping there'd be some sort of action to get rid of those, such as the FBI admitting to the equipment and asking to take it away, but so far nothing along those lines had happened. The parabolic dishes were still transmitting, and the two nearby FBI houses were still occupied by a single weenie each, which meant we continued to feed misinformation to the bugs. That was occasionally fun, but it was getting old. I had to stay up every night to guard my sleeping families from a gas attack. We didn't think an attack was likely given that the political atmosphere was relaxing significantly, but it certainly wasn't worth taking a risk over, especially when I could so easily guard my families by sitting in the living room and reading. Catching up on my sleep with a catnap during the day was easy. We covered up for my sleeplessness by feeding the mics some bullshit about my body feeling weird and going through some sort of transition which was screwing up my ability to sleep. I had no need to use my computers at the moment, so I hadn't done anything about replacing them. I was hoping the FBI or the President would suddenly discover a startling new concept called honesty, and would remove everything bad in our house. That could obviate the need to buy and setup all my hardware and software again, but that concept was so far eluding them. The parents had decided that they were less optimistic about getting a second $216 billion payment out of the Government than they were pissed off at having the gas canisters and bugs in our home, so Prof started talking to the Army Engineers about coming back to our home. He used an anonymous cellphone and talked away from any of our bugged rooms so the FBI would hopefully not have any advance warning. The FBI had had enough time to own up to their crap by now and hadn't, so we wanted to use their failure to harm them. We wanted the Army to discover the bugs and we didn't want the FBI to have prior warning of that so they couldn't make themselves look good by owning up only once they knew they'd be caught anyway. The Engineers were perfectly willing to come back. More than willing in fact, the colonel joking that he'd get more volunteers for the job than he'd need because of how well we'd treated them during the initial construction and because they thought the Government were assholes for attacking us yet again. The colonel also adding, "Most of my men are eager to meet Mark and the angel too." Prof recognized the hint and passed it on to me. [I made sure I socialized with the Engineers as much as I could between exams, feeding them the usual cover story and being unable to make the Guardian Angel appear on demand.] There was the issue of whether we could trust the Engineers. We decided that we did. The Army's attitude had been great right from the moment the 75th Rangers had realized that they'd been duped by the CIA. Vanessa had also used various Army people from around the country several times on MAF business, as part of the Army's "Community Service sentence", and they'd had a literally PERFECT attitude to that too. They'd been happy and proud to help, and had gone considerably beyond the extra mile to make sure the various jobs were done excellently. Both the Army and MAF were having their reputations enhanced by how well those jobs had gone. The Army had also done an honest job on our homes' initial construction. [When the Army Engineers arrived, I proximity checked most of them, especially the colonel while Dad or Prof asked them questions designed to test his loyalty. They all passed fine. It was only an indication rather than a proof, but it was still reassuring.] The Army was going to send us the bill for the cost of all the repairs, so it wasn't hard to get their agreement to do the job. A general had approved it, and the necessary replacement parts were being obtained, such as two panic room vault doors and several custom-ordered, very large sheets of bulletproof glass. The Army would be arriving on Friday morning. I knew they'd be all over the houses, so after everyone got out of bed Friday morning, I removed the papers I'd taped over the vents. I also tried to put the fake-concrete putty back from where I'd excavated it for my photos, but it'd turned as hard as rock so I had to leave everything in the roof-spaces as it was. If the Army finds the bugs, hopefully everyone will think the FBI got interrupted before they could finish the job. On Friday morning the Engineers noisily arrived - some by Chinook, some by truck - to start making good the damage the FBI had caused. I watched the transmitter dishes quickly go silent ("go dark" would be more accurate although less meaningful). In addition to working on repairing the obvious physical damage, the Engineers also looked for covert changes. The control panels for our garage blast door, for example, were taken apart, the chips replaced, the originals sent away to be checked, the cabinets inspected for any unwanted additions, etc. The task I was most interested in was their checking the system that searched our house for bugs. If the Army found them: It'd get rid of the bugs. Embarrass the Government even further. Give us more ammunition to use against the Government. Increase my opinion of our house's safety (a good feeling). Pretty much prove that the Army was among The Good Guys. We wanted the Army to find the bugs themselves, rather than my tricking them into it in some way, as that'd seem better to the public and FBI later and it'd be a good proof of the Army's honesty. In case the Army missed the bugs, we still wanted them to be 'discovered'. I could ensure that in several ways, but I needed to see what was happening at the time so I was casually walking passed the Security Center when that work was starting. I'd had to rush through an exam and say I needed a break before the next one, but I got there in time. They were checking the radar system when I arrived, so I chatted physics to give me an excuse for hanging around during the work. I knew a thing or two about radars by now so I could talk reasonably intelligently about them, and our life-saving detection of the attacking UAV was an obvious topic to justify my interest. The Army guy was interested in me too, so it was easy to maintain a conversation while he did his job. The tests of the radar's software passed fine, and the software specialist doing that then moved across to the bug-detecting computer that I was most interested in. I asked him, "You know about this system too? I thought they'd have different specialists." "The software on this thing is simple." Software is obviously a good job for a lazy person because the Engineer only had to connect his laptop to the computer that was running the bug detection software, copy our program across to his machine, and have his computer compare our version to the one he'd brought with him. He didn't even have to compare them himself! Not even a second later, his attention suddenly jumped, "What's this?" Fortunately he answered the question himself, "There are seven changes in the parameter file. Let's see what they're for." #4: I'd done the minimum number of computer subjects at school, staying clear of the technical aspects like C++ programming because I was never going to be a computer nerd. I've nothing against computer nerds, although I am hoping to be richer than Bill Gates soon, but computers don't really interest me and it wasn't the right sort of career path for me. Besides, Julia wouldn't let me; she tells me I'll be hiring nerds. After a little digging, he said, "The first one's a reduction in an antenna's sensitivity, and I bet the others are the same. -- "Yep, so's the second ... And the third." I'll assume you know how to count up to seven so I'll skip the rest of the quote. I'd hate for you to think I was padding out my autobiography unnecessarily. -- "Let's set them back to their original values and see what shows up." -- "Okay. Reinitializing the program. No alarms going off; that's a surprise. Let's eyeball each room. Tell me if you spot anything unexpected, you know the rooms better than I do." He was talking to me and the security guards gathered around us, who'd been attracted by his comments when he'd found the changes. He called up the part of the program that displayed a 3D representation of a single room with all its EM sources displayed, the Adults' living room being the first room displayed. We all looked at the display carefully. I knew exactly where the three bugs were in the living room but there was no sign of them on the screen because they were totally unpowered now, unless the FBI had turned their transmitters back on again, which would have astonished me since there were several teams of Army Engineers scattered around the houses. (There were quite a few tree transplanting guys on our property too, from the company finishing off the last parts of that job. That'd been what we'd urgently got done after the Dimple Hill sniper had shot Ava.) I could arrange for a bug to be detected simply by flying a flashlight up to the ceiling where a bug was and flicking the light on. I didn't even have to wait until we were checking that room because the software was still monitoring all the rooms. I'd hide the flashlight and make sure we physically inspected that ceiling at the point the sensors had said the consumption of electricity had occurred. The bugs were well hidden, but eyeballing the ceiling from inches away would find one. That was my Plan B; Plan A being waiting to see if the Army could find the bugs themselves now that the antennas' sensitivities had been set back to their proper values. The guards said the room looked fine, and I added my agreement too. The Army guy changed the display to the next room. The sequence of rooms this software displays is east to west across the Adult's House, then north to south through the Kids' House, and room after room in that succession looked fine. I was getting a little worried so I asked, "There were seven antennas that'd been adjusted, right? Do you know what rooms they were in?" "I can find out with a bit of digging. If I remember correctly you've got something like ninety antennas installed here, so let's do a quick eyeball check first. We should do that anyway." There were a couple of small false alarms when one or other of the security guards would query a reading, but I'd say, "No, that's fine. That's the [some known piece of our equipment]." I have previously written that our security guards don't go into our homes, but that's only a general rule for our privacy. Of course all our guards were VERY familiar with our homes, had been given tours of them, had done contingency planning for how to defend against different types of attacks, etc. Included in their knowledge was where all our electrical devices were located so they could use this anti-bug system effectively. Our guards had acquired their knowledge of our homes by appointment so our privacy hadn't been compromised. When we got to the home theater room in the Adults' Activity Level, I saw what I was hoping for. I waited hoping the Army guy would speak first as that'd be an indicator of his organization's honesty, but it actually was one of our guards who first queried, "That smudge there. That's not right." What it was, was the master control box that all the Adults' House's bugs and canisters plugged into. The Engineer rotated and zoomed the display to give us a different perspective (it's a 3D representation that's the view from a "virtual camera" which can be moved anywhere around the room, just like a sight blob). He said, "I thought so; that's above the ceiling. That'll be why the alarms didn't trigger. You don't have anything electrical installed in your roof do you?" "Absolutely nothing near there," I answered. I'd searched that area recently so I knew WE had nothing. "We don't use the roof-space for storage because we have such a huge amount of that in the rooms off the main tunnel. The space should be totally empty in that area." About the only electrical devices we had in our roof-space were water heaters, some parts of our air conditioning system, and motors to drive some Faraday cage components. None of those items were anywhere near the smudge, probably by the FBI's deliberate intent. "Let's check the rest of the rooms then I'll call the colonel." A few rooms later, the Army guy spotted a similar smudge in the roof-space of the Kids' House, where I knew its control box was. I said, "Anyone want to bet the seven antennas aren't around those two smudges?" No one wanted to give me their money. I'd have to get some more off the Federal Government instead. We finished searching the rooms in the Kids' House for more EM sources, finding nothing more. It was only the two homes that had the bug detection system (not our Office, the Staff Quarters or the smaller buildings), so that was the end of the software search. The Engineer called his boss, while one of our security guards called his. Both were soon heading our way. #13: #16: #13: #All: Paul and the colonel arrived, the Engineer called up the images of the two rooms to show the smudges in the roof-spaces. The colonel - whose proximity reading was all it should be - commented, "I can't remember anything on the plans in those locations. I think they're suspect." #14: #20: The colonel let his software guy come along to see what he'd discovered. Paul called for a couple of his guys to meet him outside the front door of the Kids' House with flashlights and a stepladder, and we walked out the front of the tunnel then up the hill to my home. On the way I asked, "Paul, how come you're starting with the Kids' House? I thought the Adults' House was more obvious." "Your parents insist you're the primary principal, so we check your house first." "Oh. Thanks." I was embarrassed, but I wasn't sure why. Paul climbed the stepladder into the roof first, immediately heading toward the box. Because I'd pulled out the putty to photograph it, it only took Paul a few seconds to get close enough to see it, then he yelled back the codes that mean, "Possible bomb. Evacuate all the buildings." One of the guards immediately grabbed me and pulled me out the nearest door and down the hill, the other guards running through our house to check both floors (ordering "Evacuate the buildings" means our guards run INTO the buildings to find the principals). The girls' exams were very abruptly interrupted when guards rushed into the room, yelled the codes, threw the veranda doors open as the girls leaped to their feet and were rushed out of the building. The middle-aged exam supervisor got a hell of a surprise when one of the guards effectively picked her up and ran her out of the room, yelling, "BOMB!" The siren erupted seconds later. Dad and Prof were at their respective jobs, but Mom and Vanessa were in the Adults' House and were sent running outside. Ava was also in the Adults' House but she misinterpreted the "evacuate" sound of the siren, incorrectly leaping down a chute and running into the doorless panic room. (Paul had ordered an evacuation because it was possible that the panic rooms were compromised too, as their doors had been breached.) Guards were running in all directions, and Engineers were asking, "What the hell's going on?" Our guards yelled the explanation to them, which got the Engineers moving pretty damned fast too. #3: #11: I'd only worried about what Paul would think of what appeared to be a terrible putty job, the result of my foolishly not putting the putty back in the channels after my photography. I'd hoped he'd just think that the FBI had been interrupted before they could finish pushing all the putty into the channels, but that was rather implausible. [I never heard him mention the putty problem and I was too scared to ask him in case my inquiry made him even more suspicious. My foolish mess not becoming a topic of conversation was fine with me.] The principals were checked off and Ava was missed. The Security Center (which was kept manned) called the panic rooms. It wasn't the first time one of us had gotten a signal wrong, and we've been repeatedly told that if we're not sure, to head for the nearest panic room. Ava was told to run out the far end of the tunnel where a couple of guards would meet her. Things settled down fairly quickly, with all the principals except Ava already held behind hard cover to protect us from any explosion debris. We'd practiced often enough that this was almost routine. The mothers didn't know what the exact cause was, but I doubt they were worried much as they knew the bugs and canisters weren't a threat, and I'd told them before we'd returned that I'd searched carefully for bombs. Paul hadn't left the roof-space. Once the building was clear, he followed a wire all the way from the exposed box, digging up the channel it was in until he'd pulled the bug out of its hole. He radioed his discovery, exited the roof-space, sending pairs of his guys into the roof-spaces of all the buildings on the property to search for similar equipment, trace every wire, document and remove everything. Only the Kids' and Adults' Houses had the bug finding system installed, so the other buildings were searched with no knowledge of where the "smudges" were. The box in the Office was quickly located because I'd also exposed that one when doing my photography. Paul had noticed the wire running out through the exterior wall, so the first parabolic dish was traced, the second located only a few minutes later. I didn't have to suggest calling the cops because Paul did it without prompting. Unfortunately my idea of the cops swooping on the weenies never happened, as the cops needed warrants before any "swooping" could be done. Nor could I personally swoop on them because it was daytime, so the weenies had plenty of time to flee, taking their gear with them, damn it. Every ceiling had to be searched, including the Staff Quarters, Gatehouse, Mailroom and all the rooms inside the tunnels. Sometimes our guards have exciting jobs, other times they have to tap every square inch of a concrete ceiling or wall with a chisel to find out if there are any funny sounding areas. Some of our buildings are very large, so there was a huge amount of tapping required. Paul also got guards on ladders to go over the exteriors of every building carefully, looking for any more wires exiting the buildings. The Army Engineer software guy was allowed into the Kids' House roof-space to have a look at what he'd discovered, "But don't touch! We want to preserve any fingerprints," although no one really expected any. He was watching when one of the two guards who were pulling up bugs said, "Uh oh, this doesn't feel like a bug. You'd better get out of here." That led (literally) to the discovery of the first of the gas canisters, although finding out what the discovery actually was took several minutes and a mirror taped to the end of a pole. The Chief of Police turned up to inspect the scene of the crime in person, and he got his guys to go to the areas the dishes were pointing at and to start binocular searches for any receiving equipment pointing at our hill. He got Mom's and Vanessa's permission to divulge what had been discovered here, then he put more of his staff on phoning homeowners in the two likely areas to ask permission for visual inspections of their homes, and particularly to find out if any of them were rented. He gained widespread cooperation from the public by using the explanation of the situation and " ... to help the Andersons." The exam supervisor woman decided that now would be an excellent time for her to leave, so she was outta here, a guard getting her handbag out of the living room for her. Everyone in my families who was here had congregated together by now, and Vanessa almost immediately raised the issue of letting a news team in to record what was happening. It was consistent with our "Shame and Pressure the Government" strategy, so we all agreed. We had nine security guards babysitting us at the moment, Vanessa asking one of them, "Please ask Paul if it's okay to let one news team in." Paul could see the merit in it, so he put one of his guys onto calling around the media to find who could send a team to our place the quickest. They'd stopped camping at our gate a couple of days ago but there were some of them still in town so it didn't take long for a network to say they'd have someone here in a few minutes. Mom also called the local paper and they sent a photographer and reporter too. When the four members of the media had arrived, they were brought up to the Kids' House, where the female media-ettes had to be bluntly steered because they tried to give themselves a Grand Tour through our lovely home. They all got sent up into the roof-space where they were shown the box with all the wires and the bugs. It'd taken a while, but the first of the canisters had been extracted by then, so they got to see that too, including its label. Once they were herded out of the house, they were shown the parabolic dish. Meanwhile we'd had a quiet family conference to agree on our statement. Mom and Vanessa called their respective husbands to get their opinions of our idea. We'd discussed possibilities before, leaving the final decision of which way we went to depend on the circumstances of the discovery, so the decision was quickly made. Once the reporters and cameramen had finished seeing the evidence, Mom made the following statement to them: "We contracted the Army to repair the extensive damage the FBI had done to our home, and in doing so the Army discovered that the FBI had installed dozens of bugs and several canisters of an extremely potent gas. I'm told that every room has at least one bug, including the bedrooms and bathrooms. Every bedroom we use has a gas canister in an air conditioning vent. -- "Our security staff have researched the gas and they tell us it's probably the same gas that was used in the Moscow theater siege a few years ago where even in that huge building it killed many of the terrorists and innocent people who were exposed to it. We're told it's a very risky gas in small concentrations and inevitably lethal in large doses. Our bedrooms being tiny in comparison to an entire theatre, there's enough gas in the canisters to kill all of us many times over. -- "As you know, the FBI very nearly succeeded in killing Steven and me ten days ago. This trap wasn't aimed at just the two of us though, as these gas canisters are hidden in every bedroom's vent, even in Donna's, our 14-year old daughter. By remotely triggering the canisters to empty their contents into our bedrooms while we were sleeping, the FBI would've killed all of us in our sleep, which was obviously their plan. We were lucky to have a radar system good enough to see the spy plane coming to kill us, but we would never have seen this gas coming. All of us would've died in our sleep." "Oh my God!" exclaimed the horrified and not particularly professional local reporter. "What are you going to do?" "Quite honestly, I think we're all going to die. The Government's assassins are going to succeed in killing us soon. Please leave now; I want to be with my family." "But what about..." Mom had walked away, our security guards moved in, and the interview was over. While the horrified news people were being escorted off the property, Mom asked one of the remaining guards to request Paul come to see them when he had a moment. When Paul arrived, we moved him apart from the other guards, and Mom told him what she'd told the reporters. "Christ! The FBI is going to be in a world of shit!" "They've had a week to come clean and remove their hardware, so tough luck for them. Maybe next time they'll be more reluctant to install it. -- "What we're worried about is the effect on you and your staff. Some of you might be getting worried about how dangerous this job appears to be because you don't know that what's going to appear on TV shortly is just PR spin. We'd prefer not to tell your staff the whole truth in case it leaks, but we want you to know that we were fully aware of the gas canisters and bugs even before we returned from the hill cabin." Paul grunted in surprise, not sure what to say. "Yes, the angel searched the house before it allowed us to return. It found the canisters, bugs, and there is also a radiation sensor installed in our gateposts; by drilling holes down from the top, I believe. The angel neutralized the canisters and we could care less about the FBI listening to our daily conversations. The angel showed us the FBI orders for this mission, which weren't to kill us but just to knock us out if they decided they needed to interrogate us about the bombs or angel. I painted the blackest possible picture with the media because the Government still hasn't learned to behave properly. They should've owned up about and removed the stuff they left behind immediately, rather than continuing to monitor the bugs. We chose to exaggerate in the interview so the punishment they'll get now will encourage them to stay away from us in the future. If they don't learn, the angel could do something a great deal worse than hold an exaggerated press conference. Which takes me back to my concern that by making the situation look dire, it might worry you and your men excessively. We're under less threat and a great deal better protected by the angel than you and your men will think." Paul answered, "I'm glad you told me that, especially about how capable the angel is. I wasn't thinking of leaving, but it's good to have my mind eased. I'm AMAZED to be involved in these events and the job is far more challenging and interesting than any I've had before. Or will have in the future, I'm sure. -- "I doubt that many of my team are thinking of resigning but it would be good to reassure them. Is it okay if I tell them that the angel is even more capable than we thought, and that you were making the situation look more dangerous than it really was to put more pressure on the FBI?" "Just so long as they don't get the idea that we knew about the gas in advance, or that it was only intended to tranquilize us. We can't risk news of our knowing that getting out." "I won't mention any specifics. Most of them are enjoying the excitement of this job as much as me." #24: ------- Chapter 376: Two Bushes in the Hand Friday, June 15, 2007 (Continued) Coincidentally, at the same time as the Army was discovering the FBI's little presents, back in Washington DC a little plan our beloved leader had approved had come to fruition. Back on June 7, the President and the then FBI Director, Robert Mueller, had stood shoulder to shoulder while Director Mueller said, "Yes, the FBI was using that UAV - under the control of Northrop Grumman - to surveil the Anderson residence." That'd given us an undeniable claim on $216 billion. Our lawyer had sent the Federal Government our bill for that amount, and we were currently awaiting payment. In the event that it didn't arrive with fourteen days, we'd file a lawsuit for that amount plus interest. Before the President let Director Mueller give us what appeared to be a "Pass Go, Collect Two Hundred ( ... and Sixteen Billion) Dollars" moment, the President's advisors had already given him a method to avoid paying us. This morning's busy session of important law making included a tiny bill tacked onto the third reading of a piece of totally unrelated legislation, leading to the enactment of the "Fiscal Responsibility Toward Private Individuals Act". It had only one significant clause: "In a lawsuit taken by private individual(s) against the Federal Government, no court can order a payment to the plaintiff(s) for a total of more than $100 million, unless the Senate gives its prior consent for the suit's damages to have a larger maximum amount." We were still standing around outside waiting for the gas canisters to be removed when our lawyer called us with the poor news. He explained it, adding, "It's not unconstitutional and there are no other grounds to have it struck down. They've successfully pulled the rug from underneath us. When the fourteen days are up, we can sue them for $216 billion, but the court cannot order payment of more than $100 million..." I VERY nearly said, "It's hardly worth it," but then I realized how utterly stupid that was! " ... The suit against the CIA will be affected too because the law affects all judgments from today on." That was the suit we had going for the CIA spying on our Peoria Road home, and duping the Army into attacking it. We were claiming a billion, just as an arbitrary amount as there weren't any precedents to work from. The court would decide how much we got in a few months. #12: When we'd been deciding on the strategy Mom was going to use in her media statement, we'd been aware that there were some downsides to the exaggeration we were going to use: It'd doubtless scare the hell out of anyone intending to come to our party tomorrow evening, so that was going to flop. Much more important, Andrew and Sophia's wedding was the following weekend and that might be affected too. Hopefully by then everyone would be able to see that the Government was in full retreat, but if the situation still seemed dicey the Anderson family could publicly leave the property for the weekend to diminish the perceived risk to the wedding guests. The trickiest issue was how the Guardian Angel should respond to the FBI's latest "assassination plan". The last point had caused the most debate. The angel had to react in a way consistent with its public image, but that'd be so unfair it was unpalatable to the mothers and even to me. If the FBI had really tried to assassinate us, I would've FUCKED the Government and FBI over mercilessly! There would've been massive destruction and several deaths, ideally starting with everyone in the top two or three management levels of the FBI, to send a VERY clear message. But punishing them that severely just for bugging our homes and installing knockout gas canisters wasn't acceptable. Doing nothing wasn't acceptable either; we had to push the Government back, and the public and other agencies had to see the angel do that. It'd been a problem we'd had to discuss for while to arrive at an acceptable compromise. We'd decided that the Guardian Angel would reveal the photos it'd taken and explain that it'd known about the gas canisters, bugs and gate sensors even before it returned the families, and it'd cut the head off the onsite FBI boss in appropriate punishment, he being terminally stupid for thinking he could hide stuff from God. It would claim that it had left the bugs and canisters in place because it'd stop the gas working if the FBI ever activated it, and what the bugs overheard would help convince the FBI of the families' innocence so reduce the threat the FBI posed to the Guardian Angel's assignment. It might also go to some military bases somewhere and cause a billion or two's worth of damage just to punish the Government for not owning up to the crap it'd left on our property, but that's the only retribution it would've taken. We thought the public would see that as a "good" - in both the intelligent and moral senses - response. That was before the slap-in-the-face new law. It pissed me off because I'd wanted that money for my fantastic new lab in a few years. Not only was the Government changing the law to avoid taking responsibility for the FBI's blatantly and repeated breaking of the settlement agreement, but the Government's using the law as a weapon against those less powerful than itself brought the law into disrepute. I used to think the law should be respected and honored, but they were prostituting it. Worse than that actually, because prostitutes' customers are volunteers and get something in return. The Government was using the law to steal $215.9 billion from us. It was fucking us in a very different way. My anger made me want to reconsider our previous decision for how the angel should retaliate for the FBI's latest illegalities. After our lawyer had finished the discussion about the new law, Mom told him about the Army's finding the FBI's bugs and deadly gas canisters in our home, and about the statement of hers that would shortly be appearing on TV. Our lawyer was HORRIFIED! He even used the word "unbelievable", proving he was a smart guy. Mom added, "Don't broadcast it to the media, but you can tell your staff not to worry about anything bad happening in DC this time. The Guardian Angel has already given us an indication what it's going to do." "What?" "It's best that I don't say." After our lawyer had hung up, I said, "I had been okay with our plan for the angel response to the so-called second assassination attempt, but I'm unhappy about it now. We can't allow the Government to get away with smacking us twice without retaliating in an effective way." "What have you got in mind?" asked Vanessa. "Nothing yet. I'm just suggesting we reopen that discussion." The moms agreed that publicly letting the Government get away with two bad actions wasn't acceptable. There was a huge number of options as the Guardian Angel can do just about anything - except make the Government behave morally or legally - so we had plenty to discuss. A decision was eventually reached (more on that later). While the FBI's crap was being removed, and in response to a question of mine to Paul about our being able to use it, I learned an astonishing fact: we had to give it all back to the FBI. If we didn't, including if we destroyed any of it, the FBI could take us to court and we'd be in big trouble, especially given how high-tech this stuff was. They'd deliberately left the stuff on our property without our consent, and had even drilled dozens of holes throughout our homes to install it, but we were liable for it! It's very handy being a government and able to write your own laws. I'll remember that if I ever become Emperor of the Earth. Mom started calling MAF's middle management to let them know not to worry about the angel nuking DC shortly, and Vanessa took the girls and me back inside and supervised us while we finished our exams in the correct amount of time. I had two more exams left to do. The supervisor had left them behind in her haste to leave, so because there were just us in the room, I did one of them with my right hand and the other with my left. I finished the last of them only a few minutes after the girls finished. Yippee! Exam week was over. It'd been an even bigger pain the ass than usual; a sentiment that Donna particularly agreed with. Vanessa got the change of supervisor approved so we wouldn't have any problem with that. The Army didn't find anything else wrong. The FBI had done plenty of physical damage, had planted the bugs and gas canisters, and had tweaked the software to reduce the sensitivity of the seven antennas around the two boxes, but that's all they'd done. None of our other equipment had been tampered with. The Army never thought to check our gateposts, but that didn't signify anything and we couldn't care less about that. It might even be another useful way of embarrassing the FBI later. Most of the Army guys returned to their bases in the late afternoon. [Repairing Mom and Dad's room and the two vault doors took another couple of days, and many more after that for Mom to decide on the new carpet she wanted. To play safe I decided to replace all my computer systems, right down to the mouse. It was probably unnecessary, but the cost was trivial. I paid Logan to do it all for me, so it wasn't any trouble either. It's good to be able to hire computer nerds.] What was most fun, was the TV broadcasts and the public's reactions. Mom's statement had aired long enough ago for the reaction to have grown to a massive degree. Almost every time Mom's very short interview was repeated, it was followed by a quote from one of the Guardian Angel's earlier emails: "If Mark Anderson is imperiled, I will detonate 2 [W80s], one near the leader, the other to do maximum damage to that organization." There was no doubt at all that installing a lethal gas canister in the air conditioning vent of Mark Anderson's bedroom constituted imperilment. There was no doubt at all that the Guardian Angel was capable of getting hold of two W80s. There was considerable debate about where "the leader's" current Undisclosed Location was. Everyone in the country was praying for "PLEASE not near me." There was no doubt or debate that the second W80 would do "maximum damage to that organization" if exploded in Washington DC, whether "that organization" was the FBI or the Federal Government itself. There was very little doubt that the angel was a "man of its word" (well, considerable doubt about the first part of that phrase, but none about the last part). All things considered, there was absolute certainty that Washington DC was about to be nuked. Many people - elsewhere in the country - were even starting to think that it deserved to be because of the Government's heinous lethal attacks on citizens who'd never been accused of a crime, including a pretty, young girl (the public always gets much more upset about crimes which are committed against someone who is pretty). The Government seemed so hell-bent on pissing off the angel that it seemed that there was no choice but to nuke DC because the Government was obviously insane and was going to keep on attacking the Andersons until it was stopped the hard way. So, for the third time, Washingtonians were fleeing in terror, even more certain of their city's imminent nuclear annihilation than they had been the previous two times. There was a difference this time though: the people were not only terrified, they were also ANGRY! The fucking Government had caused this crisis through being UNBELIEVABLY stupid and criminal. Many people didn't try to get out of DC, through not having their own transportation, or not believing they'd have time because of all the gridlocked streets, or maybe they felt so much anger it swamped their terror. Whatever the reason for their staying, many of them were expressing their anger. There was widespread destruction, looting, setting of fires, and everything else people could think of to express their anger. It was a fucking mess. It wasn't a well reported mess because the vast majority of media people were fleeing too, but there were a few still reporting, and there were many mounted cameras around central DC that could provide live images of the chaos and destruction. Elsewhere around the country, the public was just ANGRY! There were demonstrations, FBI buildings were having their windows smashed by stone-throwing and even gun-firing mobs, and there were placards saying things like, "We're Innocent, Kill the FBI scum." There was no hint of anyone sticking up for the FBI. I liked all the placards, but one that I particularly admired was, "God Damn the FBI." It was logical, clever and concise. I like being "logical" and "clever", and I'd like to be "concise" too, which is probably why I admire examples of other people doing it so well. Unsurprisingly, President Bush was nowhere to be seen. He wasn't even reporting from "an undisclosed location". No one had any doubts that he was hiding in a very deep hole somewhere and that he wasn't going to say or do anything that could give his location away. Spokespeople were saying, "Be calm, there aren't any missing bombs," but that had no effect. Everyone remembered, or if they didn't the media was reminding them, that the Air Force had said it was impossible to stop God taking bombs if He wanted them. There were nuclear bombs all over the country and one of the Guardian Angel's emails had implied it could create nuclear explosions itself anyway, the media also helpfully explaining the latter point. Many people were CERTAIN that the angel had to lose his temper over the latest Government crime. #4: #10: An FBI spokesperson was lucky to survive his attempt at a press conference. He walked into the room, letting the nearest female reporter make herself an instant heroine by being filmed spitting on his face. He had to run out of the room immediately after that because the male reporters' attacks were clearly going to be more physical. He did manage to yell over his shoulder something like, "That wasn't what we intended to do," but no one gave a shit about what he said. The FBI's Acting Director and Acting Deputy Director were not available for comment, and were no doubt worrying their heads off. There was almost no one in Washington who was available for comment, but there were almost no reporters in Washington either, so the whole official statement process was pretty much a non-event for quite a while. We had dinner while we watched the crap the Government had gotten itself into. There was no possibility of the Government being able to placate the people with nice sounding promises after this mess, so it was going to have to do something useful at long last. It truly was the best TV I'd seen since the reporter who'd interviewed us in her nightie. Much more important than the rabble, was that there were several smart, influential people who were making serious statements about the need for some fundamental changes to the way the FBI and similar agencies were allowed to do their business. Something good might come of that, although I doubted it as I've become cynical about what the Government really wants to do. Speaking somewhat in that area, there was no mention of the new, "Steal $215.9 Billion From The Andersons Act". Another FBI spokesperson, in a much better controlled venue, did manage to make an official statement. With great sincerity and anguished beseeching to be believed, he said what we knew to be the total truth. No one believed him. The W80s had been recovered eight days ago and it made no sense at all for the gas canisters to still be in our homes, and especially not in pretty, young Donna Anderson's bedroom. The angel had taken the nukes, not the Andersons, and the FBI had already tried to kill the Anderson parents with the UAV, so its denials and explanation had zero credibility. I would've enjoyed staying to watch more, but the sun had set and I had to put the night's plan into action. My families, including Ava, loaded up in a couple of SUVs, me in the driver's seat of one of them. We drove off, telling Paul, "The Guardian Angel is insisting on it again." Paul is getting used to these trips, even though this one was at an unusually low altitude, still being in contact with the ground. We did some dodging around in Corvallis to make overhead surveillance harder; not that we expected any, because the Government would have to be stupid! Then we headed south. The driving was easy by recent standards because the crowds of Idiots in Corvallis had largely gone. Resurrection Day had been two weeks ago, which was considerably longer than most of their attention spans. Most of them had been forced to go home so their preachers could tell them what to think next. We stopped to get gas soon after leaving Corvallis, me doing the refueling and paying so my face would be recorded. The attendant recognized me too, which was good. That was just to make it explicit that I was with my families. We drove a few miles farther south, then turned onto a side road, then onto its side road. Then I flew us across country, parking the SUVs in another barn. It was dark so nobody was likely to come calling. Leaving the families to get comfortable on the blankets we'd brought, I put my crash helmet on, wrapped myself in the dark sheet I'd brought, and took to the sky. I headed toward Texas, using a recently purchased replacement watch to check my navigation sense. The Air Force was noticeably more active and there were areas of considerable activity that I circled around, but there weren't any problems. No radar in the flesh-sensing bands turned on near me and I could easily avoid getting within detection range of those I spotted in the distance. I was happy that there seemed to be only the normal number of them as they were the most likely thing to detect me. Fortunately it was well established that the Guardian Angel didn't have a flesh body so the military shouldn't bother blanketing the country with thousands of those radars. Thanks to a dark crash helmet and trusty sheet, I had nothing to fear from visual or infrared observation. Two-thirds of the way to Texas I stopped to do a bit of computer browsing. Google, Google Earth, Wikipedia, motorcycle helmets and dark sheets make beating the US Armed Forces and the Government's secret agencies so much easier. It took me a few minutes to find what I wanted, Google Earth gave me the aerial view of the addresses and the neighborhoods, and I resumed my journey to the most-distant address: Tanglewood, Houston. One of the articles said they often spent their summer elsewhere, but exams had only just finished so I was trying their main home first. An hour later, I found George H. W. and Barbara Bush safely tucked up asleep in their bed. Not for long. I snooped through quite a few houses in the area until I found some rope, towels and two large dark blankets that I flew out that house's bathroom window. Back at the Bush's, it was trivially easy to knock out their Secret Service protectors, strip the guards in case they had location trackers on them, gag and tie them up very securely. I flew them into a nearby park where I tied them securely high in a large tree. I returned to the house and pulled the Prez's parents out of their bed then raised them up into the sky. They were in separate boxes so they couldn't communicate, because I didn't want them to be able to comfort each other, to maximize the abuse they'd heap on their son the next time they talked to him. I wrapped their small NP-boxes in the two blankets, making sure to cover the tops of their heads but leave their face open and pointed toward their home. I raised myself from the trees I was hiding among into the sky behind them, raising them higher as I rose. Holding them several feet apart from each other, I set fire to their home in twenty roughly evenly spaced places, pouring out as much heat as I could. I also trashed the place, smashing open all the internal walls and floors so the fire would spread much better. On a personal level, I looked for everything that they might have stored away of sentimental value. Photo albums were ripped apart and spread in the fires, every drawer was opened and upended. I found a safe whose contents I skimmed, not seeing anything of interest to me so I burned it all. I threw the SS agents' clothes and gear into the fire to keep their fate a mystery. I had heat blobs throughout the house feeding it every watt of heat I had available, so within a minute it was blazing fiercely from many places. Within two minutes there wasn't anywhere in the house that wasn't engulfed in flames. All their stuff was already gone, just leaving the structure to burn, so I flew us northwest. They were still a few feet apart, had an air hole in the bottom of their boxes, which were wrapped in blankets so they could only see straight down. Less than half an hour later we arrived at the Prez's Crawford, Texas ranch. There was a large security force and other staff there, none of whom knew what hit them. I laid them all in a row away from all of the buildings, then did the same to the President's buildings as I had to his parents'. I even punched several large holes in his swimming pool's bottom to make sure he knew I was unhappy, although my throwing all his vehicles into the main house's fire might've accomplished that anyway. So my ripping up all his fences, gardens, and mailbox was probably unnecessarily petty. The senior Bushes had seen me fuck over both places, which I'm sure they took the right message from. Seeing cars casually tossed considerable distances had to be an impressive way of creating cautious respect too. Probably unnecessarily, I added more force to my message by borrowing one of the cellphones lying with the unconscious people, flying it up to the senior Bushes. I moved the two of them together, merging them into one box, let them have their touching reunion, then typed a message slow enough for them to read it: "Your son is Evil. His people are Evil. They already do great Evil to my assignment and his large-family. They damage my assignment's parents' house and his house, so I do same but more to your son. If his people hurt my assignment's family, I will do same but more to you. You are responsible for creating his Evil. The consequence of not stopping it will be on you and all your descendants." I returned the phone to its owner, then flew the Bushes farther northwest until I placed them on a small hill that was at least an hour's walk away from the nearest person and phone. I let them keep the blankets since they didn't have much else left. I let them see the angel for the first time too, partly because their never seeing it would've been weird, and partly because it damaged their night-vision so they'd not see me occluding any stars. I also made the angel do the optical illusion effect of shrinking as it flew away, making it look like it was going much faster and farther. No real reason, just to mislead the enemy about my capabilities and limitations. I sped back to my family as rapidly as I safely could. There were two risks from this operation: The Government might locate my family and see that I was missing. That clue would be very dangerous, so we'd left home and hid to make that as unlikely as possible, and I was hurrying back to minimize that risk. Bush might go into Berserk Mode. Dad had warned Paul that the angel was going to be busy tonight, that the Government might get very angry, and that it'd be a good idea to send everyone away for the night about five hours after we left, leaving only a couple of guards outside the front gates. We'd see how the Government reacted in the morning before bringing our staff back. It was about 1,840 miles from Houston back to my families. If the angel's involvement wasn't suspected until after the Prez's ranch was fucked over, then that gave me a couple of hundred miles headstart back, reducing the time the Prez had to react against my families before I joined them. From Crawford, and hurrying, it took me a little over 2.5 hours to get home because the Air Force's activity level was inconvenient. The Berserk Mode risk worried me somewhat. I could've left the Senior Bushes on the sidewalk outside their burning home but I hadn't wanted the angel's involvement to get out so quickly, and their being missing for a few hours would give the Prez the shits, especially after his place went up and the angel's involvement with both became obvious. I'd placed his parents where I thought the timing of their getting to a phone would be about right: long enough to scare the crap out of Dubya, but not long enough for him to organize anything effective. He could've immediately ordered an air strike on our home - the politicians in DC having, in their wisdom, given the President the legal authority to order military strikes against American citizens purely on his opinion that it was a good idea - but there was no one there so it would be a horrendously tragic disaster only in the sense that the womenfolk would have to buy new dinnerware. As catastrophic as that'd be, the risk was low because Bush shouldn't order such a strike out of fear that it'd be the end of his presidency when the public saw it in the morning, and out of fear of the Guardian Angel's revenge making his impeachment an unnecessarily posthumous event. For the President's Berserk Mode to do something worse than forcing us to buy new dinnerware my families would have to be found, and I didn't think he could get that done before his parents reappeared. He could still be angry with us, but I hoped his parents would hold him back from doing another Evil act. Speaking of "Evil", I had to make that point more widely. I zoomed back to my families' temporary barn, saw they were fine and that there weren't any baddies encircling them. I gave everybody who was awake a pat on the shoulder, cheek stroke or nipple squeeze, as appropriate, then zoomed to a randomly available computer about fifty miles away. I sent an email to the usual media and bloggers (the small grammatical mistakes were deliberate, just to remind people that the angel wasn't human): I reluctant to kill innocent people, but the US Government is not. All of Mark Andersons large-family are innocent, but US Government did kill Mark Anderson and is repeatedly trying to kill more of his large-family. I try hard to stop US Government, but it is too Evil. Maybe best to destroy it so you can make new Government? Before I explode Washington DC I try one more time. I try holding US Government President personally responsible for actions of his Government. One more bad thing happen to Mark Andersons large-family, even small bad thing, then what US Government has tried to do to Mark Andersons large-family will happen to US Governments Presidents large-family. I give example tonight. Mark Andersons home attacked many times. Mark Andersons Parents home attacked many times. So I attack US Governments Presidents and US Governments Presidents Parents home. I tell US Governments Presidents Parents - "Your son is Evil. His people are Evil. They already do great Evil to my assignment and his large-family. They damage my assignments parents house and his house; so I do same but more to your son. If his people hurt my assignments family; I will do same but more to you. You are responsible for creating his Evil. The consequence of not stopping it will be on you and all your descendants." PS. The missing SS agents are tied high in a tree [the directions to the tree]. I headed back to the barn. I told my families that it'd gone exactly to plan, we had a short discussion, and then everyone settled down to sleep as best they could. I spent the rest of the night keeping guard on my families and periodically checking on home from a safe distance and with great care not to be picked up by any surveillance systems that might be in the area. ------- Chapter 377: The President Capitulates Early Summer Vacation, 2007 I also did a little TV watching while my families slept. The two fires had been VERY big news for a couple of hours, especially with the senior Bushes being missing for most of that time. That Washington DC wasn't a crater, but that the two Bush residences had been destroyed so thoroughly, gave people a great deal of hope that the angel had decided on a different approach from that specified in the "explode 2 W80s" email. That the President's parents had been missing for the first few hours inescapably caused people to think that the angel had exacted an appropriate revenge on the President for his failure to stop his agencies repeated attempts to kill Mark Anderson's parents. People were, quite frankly, astonished when the senior Bushes turned up unharmed. Not nuking DC and not killing the old Bushes, and then the most recent email I'd sent, made the Guardian Angel look even MORE moral. And by glaring contrast, the Government even LESS moral. The nation was MIGHTY relieved; except, I imagine, that part of the nation that was the Bush family. I would've LOVED to have heard their next family conversation [[it was exactly as you'd expect, including being highly amusing for me, but not so much for Dubya]]. The nation was thankful and amazed at the angel's forbearance. Hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians started heading back to the city, although very large number of them decided to stay away for the weekend just in case the President was stupid. An early morning telephone survey was being done of Bush's popularity rating, working from east to west as the nation woke up and caught the news. For the first time ever, a President had a single-digit approval rating. Even in the worst periods of Nixon's fall from grace, he'd been Mr. Popularity compared to the younger Bush. That survey was also conducted for Washington DC itself, which was a statistically incorrect time to do a survey there because the people at home to answer their phones wouldn't be randomly distributed in their opinions, but even those people gave Dubya's an approval rating that didn't reach even a single digit, being below 1%. Which explains that while the nation was "Thankful and amazed at the angel's forbearance," many Washingtonians were "Disappointed and amazed" by it. Very many of them were hoping for a change of President, and they wouldn't mind at all if the angel did it for them in the same way it'd caused a change of senior management in the FBI. Washingtonians were VERY angry at the President. Three times they'd thought they were about to be destroyed in a nuclear explosion, after which the Government kept doing even more insane things to anger the angel. If someone does something stupid once, that's one thing, but repeating a mistake of that magnitude over and over again is inexcusably insane. It wasn't a little mistake! At the very least, millions of people would die if the dial-a-yield was maxed out and the warhead optimally placed. That would only happen if the angel was angry, but even it had to run out of its godlike patience eventually. When it did so, people expected some VERY serious anger! People couldn't understand why the fuck the FBI - and the CIA, DHS and maybe even the Secret Service - wanted to keep trying to kill the Andersons. It made no fucking sense whatsoever! And it ESPECIALLY made no sense because killing the Andersons would make the angel REALLY mad! And to make matters even MORE INSANE, God could resurrect the Andersons again anyway, SO WHAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT! The angel's latest email had included, "but US Government did kill Mark Anderson". I'd been a bit lazy in my wording, partly to put a negative spin on it and partly because I knew the CIA would have killed me after they'd finished experimenting on me. I hadn't foreseen that the angel now having so much moral credibility meant that statement was taken as gospel, and it fueled even more anti-Government sentiment because it was now very believable that the DHS's and CIA's treatment of Mark Anderson had been part of the Government's ongoing anti-Anderson crusade. That sentence of the angel's made people ask, "Why did the CIA kill Mark Anderson?" It appeared that I'd been killed in the raid on Fort Dodge, but there was no actual proof that a raid had happened - only the CIA's word, which was worth less than worthless. Large numbers of people jumped to the conclusion that there hadn't been a raid by some still-unidentified, mysterious enemy force, but that the lab's disaster was part of a very nasty Government plot. The conspiracy theorists decided that the Government wanted to be able to release deadly bioweapons inside America and be able to blame it on the mysterious Fort Dodge raiders. People were screaming that the Republicans were going to deliberately cause a nationwide civil emergency, put the country under martial law, suspend elections, and take over using military force rather than lose power when they inevitably lost the next election. An astonishing number of the recent law changes (e.g. empowering the President to use military force against civilians purely on his say so and outside of ANY due process) and illegal Government actions (e.g. the NSA's spying on damned near everyone, and certainly anyone they wanted to) supported that theory, and the Government's current bloodthirsty insanity did too (maybe the Government was trying to kill the Andersons because they'd learned something about the Fort Dodge conspiracy cover-up), so a very large number of people were seriously worried about the Republicans starting a biowar in America. The people's anger and fear about the Government was skyrocketing to unprecedented levels, and pressure on the Government was climbing just as fast. The international press had only two themes: "America is EVIL" and "Bush is EVIL". As fast as international editions were being published, they were being quoted by the American media, especially in Washington. Hearing unanimously condemning headlines from all over the world being read out one after the other for dozens in a row had a powerful effect. The US Government had turned America into an international pariah. Protests were forming outside US embassies all over the world, especially those countries that had sizeable Christian, Islamic or Jewish populations, which is pretty much all of them. Other countries were issuing travel advisories to their citizens warning them not to travel to America, and clearly worse was yet to come because the world was only just starting to react to the US Government's latest illegal, immoral, blasphemous act. With all that condemnation and with the fear of their nuclear destruction, you have to wonder that 9% of surveyed Americans thought Bush was doing a good job. They were probably Christians who were staunchly supporting their President because of how critically important it is not to tell teenagers about condoms. It was worth losing a city to keep teenagers pure. The Guardian Angel's email to the media got one totally unanimous response: EVERYONE thought holding the President and his family personally responsible was an EXCELLENT idea. They wished the angel had started doing it earlier. A few people tried to be sympathetic to the elder Bushes, but others gleefully pointed out, "The FBI damned near killed Mark's parents with their unmanned plane and the poison gas would've killed everyone in his family. The angel just gave the Bushes a little taste back, and it's not as if they can't afford to build a new house." Many federal buildings had been attacked overnight. Usually by being spray painted with obscenities, shot at, or having Molotov cocktails thrown at them. That was especially true in DC, and especially true of FBI buildings, although easier Government targets had been popular too. The Washington media was VERY happy to report on it, and on everything else that involved people expressing anger and condemnation of the Government. If you'd been out of touch for a week and came back this morning, you'd have thought that Fox News was under radically new management. It being Saturday meant that the public had nothing better to do than let the Government know that The People STRONGLY disapproved of it. Large protests were formed, some becoming riots when there was something nearby they could vent their anger at, like an FBI building. The President was a VERY unhappy man: His parents had just lost their main home and everything in it, and it was because their son was pissing off an angel. Who, if it was pissed off again, had threatened to wipe out three generations of the Bush family tree. Bush had also lost his own ranch home, which he dearly loved and where he had spent a great deal of time. He was very angry at that, and really wanted to take revenge on someone for it, but the Andersons were the only obvious target and the public would tear him from limb from limb if it became known that he'd ordered any form of retaliation. It would become known, because there was so much condemnation of the previous attacks that someone would leak the details of a new one. Because he'd been hiding deep in an Air Force nuclear-proof bunker, the Air Force generals with him took the opportunity to let Bush know that they were reluctant for there to be any military response to anything involving the Andersons. That meant they'd either refuse a direct order, or more likely that they'd leak their orders fast enough that the public would demand the operation be stopped. The Prez could ask for something to be done quietly, which would either be a disaster if it failed, or a disaster if it succeeded. If anything happened to the Andersons now, it wouldn't matter if the angel took revenge or not because the public would tear the President apart with their bare hands. My repeatedly speaking of the public tearing him apart wasn't an exaggeration. There were so many public calls for his assassination, especially from religious groups, that the FBI and SS had no hope of being able to investigate them. He had to cancel all his public appearances for the foreseeable future. Even low-level members of his administration were suffering attacks on their persons, homes or offices. Nothing lethal yet, but a widespread and dangerous level of anger was being directed at them and a great deal of physical damage was being done. The President of America was now the subject of so much public anger that he was afraid of appearing in public anywhere in America, and especially in DC. That was a MAJOR gut punch to his ego. Most of all, he was mortally afraid of Christians, his traditional support base. He felt, and was, besieged. To make matters worse, it was obvious that the angel could get hold of Bush whenever it wanted. For the past few hours he'd been in genuine and substantial fear for his life. It could ignore bullets and pass through walls or the ground, so could appear in the Oval Office or in the deepest underground bunker regardless of how much security he had. Bush had VERY determinedly asked his protectors about how to stop the angel, but no one had a single clue, let alone an answer. Plus, to quote one advisor, "Even if we could take it out, there are probably more of them wherever it came from. Do you want more of them sent to Earth to get revenge for the first one?" Then there was the whole issue of whether the Guardian Angel really was from God? As in THE GOD, rather than some super-powerful alien or the even crazier theories that'd been thrown around. The President had prayed for guidance about that, but that'd proved inconclusive (prayer tends to be conclusive only when the person praying already knows the answer he wants. Which I guess proves that God is omniscient and omnipotent, because how else would He know the opinions of all the millions of people who pray to Him?). As I said, the President was a VERY unhappy man. How'd you like the job as the speechwriter for the President's next speech? The President could hardly condemn the attacks on his and his parents' homes because: (a) He was condemning an agent of God, and (b) The President's agencies had repeatedly attacked the Andersons' homes. He couldn't even publicly express sympathy to his parents because what happened to them too closely paralleled what his Government had been doing to do to the Andersons. The Prez couldn't say that he was ordering the Federal agencies to stop harassing the Andersons because he'd already ordered that. He was looking pathetic because the agencies appeared to be ignoring his orders, but he'd look even more pathetic if he repeated the same order. The President had been repeatedly called "Evil" by an angel of God. It was difficult for the speechwriter to think of a snappy comeback that would negate that accusation. Everything the Prez could say, even if it was heartfelt, would be received with harsh condemnation. People were ANGRY! Nor could the Prez duck the issue. As hard to imagine as it was, that'd be even worse. I almost felt sorry for him - the speechwriter I mean; obviously I don't mean the asshole who didn't get his agencies to leave us alone and who just stole $215.9 billion from us. The FBI HAD surveilled us repeatedly and extensively, in clear breach of the settlement agreement the Government had agreed to be bound by, so that money was inarguably owed to us, and I'd been REALLY looking forward to being able to establish an absolutely wonderful scientific lab. From the Government's perspective, the ONLY good thing about the Guardian Angel was that it should stop its attacks if the Anderson family was left alone. That, not having any other choice, and being in real fear for his life, dictated the strategy Bush had to use: to give up handsomely. The President had FINALLY decided to do the obvious, although doubtless hating that he'd had to back down about something that was happening inside his country's own borders - although "backing down" wasn't really the right phrase because the President couldn't find out why there'd been any "going forward" in the first place. (Why isn't the opposite of "backing down" "forwarding up"?) The Prez had tried hard to find out why there'd been any attacks on the Andersons. He'd DEMANDED to know the reason for the attacks, but the FBI swore black and blue that they'd never intended any assassinations. The previous Director and Deputy Director weren't available to answer questions and there was no written evidence of any assassination intent that anyone could find, so it was a screwed-up situation all around. The best the FBI's new Director could do was to apologize profusely - while blaming the previous management - and promise he'd never allow the FBI to do anything like that again. The Director did get his ass SEVERELY kicked over the bugs and gas canisters though, the Prez screaming at him that he should have ordered those removed. Clearly the Director had to bend over and take it because the Prez wasn't interested in excuses, but the Director had been in a real dilemma over that issue: It had appeared that the Andersons and angel were unaware of that stuff. Because there'd been no way of getting FBI technicians onto the property sneakily to recover that stuff, the Director would've had to ask the Andersons for permission for technicians to "do something secret" inside the Anderson's homes. No way would the Andersons have granted that request! The Director would have had to explain about the bugs and canisters. When the angel learned about them, it was all too easy to imagine that it would've reacted by immediately nuking Washington. On the other hand, if the Director said nothing and the angel eventually found the stuff, maybe it'd nuke Washington then. It would be VERY bad for the Director's career if he and the rest of DC was vaporized, so he'd been very unsure which way to go. The only thing he'd been sure about had been the merit of letting tensions ease for a while before doing anything. That had seemed the best option because the Andersons clearly hadn't known about the stuff. He didn't think the President would appreciate having that logic explained to him now though. The Prez may have been ignorant about why things had happened in the recent past, but he knew very well what would happen in the near future if someone pissed off the angel again. His doing anything other than backing down would lead to a public uprising on a scale never before seen in modern America, and the unstoppable angel would exact a terrible penalty, quite likely including several Bushes in the retribution. The Old Testament was full of examples of all sorts of things that the Prez couldn't afford to let happen let alone be blamed for afterward, and the only way of preventing them was his total capitulation. The angel mocked every single weapon America had in its arsenal, it could ignore matter including bullets and missiles, and the energy it'd been exposed to - passing through flames, for example - seemed to have no effect on it either. Bush loved the power of being the president, but he hated that he was powerless in the face of the angel. Military scientists, when they weren't drooling with envy, wondered about the angel's vulnerability to things like high-energy lasers or nuclear explosions, but there was no way to test those, or to work out the answers from first principles because no one had the first clue how the angel's non-body worked. Archangel Michael's description about Guardian Angels had said that God created them without a body so they'd be invulnerable, and that truly seemed to be the case. Scientists couldn't even understand how the angel could exist without a body, let alone be as powerful as it so demonstrably was. They'd dearly love to understand it, but all they had were wild ass guesses that they suspected would be almost certainly wrong (they were right about that). The speechwriter crafted a "Magnanimous in Defeat" speech. The President made a nationwide address in which he praised the angel's dedication to its job, stated unequivocally that there'd be no more misunderstandings or mistakes by federal employees, and other bullshit. Bush banged his rostrum and firmly declared that he'd decided that every employee of the CIA, DHS, NSA and Secret Service had to sign a form stating that they understood the Anderson extended family was not to be subjected to any investigative or other interfering actions. He firmly announced other strong "Take Charge" measures that he was taking, making himself seem like an innovative, go-getting, problem-solving sort of guy. He barely mentioned the disastrous past - maybe because people laugh when he says "nukular" - instead spending most of the speech enthusiastically concentrating on the wonderful future. There was lots of crap about the glowing success that was going to be Mark Anderson's career and the contribution he'd make to America, plus even more crap about how wonderful it was to have God's personal involvement in events on Earth again and God's representative in America. Bush said he was sure that it would reinvigorate the spiritual life of all Americans and lead society to re-embrace the decent, Christian values that the country had been so successfully built on. He even worked in a "Praise God!" and his speech ended with a short, touching prayer to show that he was on God's side too. He regretted he couldn't stay to answer questions, making a carefully rehearsed impromptu joke about all the work he had piled up because his protectors had kept pulling him away from his desk. But - he stated with impressive determination - he was going to ensure that there would not be any need to pull him away from his desk again. I'd seen his capitulation - as every commentator recognized it to be - even before dawn in our area. The President had presumably been woken up when his parents' house was burning and they couldn't be found, so he'd had plenty of time to get other people woken up to get things done. ^ [[In Vanessa's earlier interview with the nightie-clad reporter, Vanessa had said, "History is going to record that George W. Bush's government as the most heinous, anti-God, anti-religious, immoral Government..." That does explain something, although not the point that Vanessa was making. It explains a large part of Bush's recent ineffectiveness. Bush's government certainly isn't "anti-religious" because his party gets an absolutely essential proportion of its support from conservative Christians. Most of Bush's problems originated from how religious he and his party were. Right from Archangel Michael's first appearance, President Bush had been in a major dilemma: On the one hand: There was an ARCHANGEL ON EARTH AND IN AMERICA! Bush should have been leaping for joy, declaring a national holiday, and doing everything he could to claim personal responsibility for this triumph: "I am overjoyed that God sent an archangel to America during my presidency. I am proud that during my watch, our country has re-embraced its Christian heritage and improved its morals to such an extent that we are now blessed with the greatest religious event in the last two thousand years and probably for thousands of years to come. I, for one, blah blah." Unlike many self-proclaimed Christian politicians, Bush truly did believe, albeit with the very convenient picking-and-choosing approach so commonly used ("truly" is an inappropriate word to use about a fiction, so he was more accurately described as "sincere in his self-delusion"). He wanted to be religiously ecstatic about the archangel's arrival, but... On the other hand: Both Bush's support base and Bush personally deeply disagreed with the so-called archangel's many sacrilegious and heretical statements about God, and they hadn't been happy about his pants either. Archangel Michael's statements and personal clothing style were appalling, but they weren't so unacceptable that he could be instantly dismissed as the Devil, a demon, an alien, from the future, a Hollywood publicity stunt, or anything else people could think of. It was worryingly possible that he was from God, especially because of the miracles he kept performing. On the other hand (politicians usually have at least two faces, so having three hands is easy for them): Archangel Michael attacked the US Government! Almost immediately after his first public appearance he'd denigrated the FBI, he'd destroyed Air Force One and Two, sabotaged a nuclear aircraft carrier, downed several aircraft most of which were USAF helicopters or fighters, and generally showed contempt for the Government, the renaming of the carrier to USS Homer Simpson being especially contemptuous of Bush's daddy. It was difficult for Bush to sing the praises of someone/something that was insulting Bush and his government, especially as it had revealed itself as Majestic Countdown who'd been responsible for leaking dozens of highly damaging documents, mostly about Republicans. The so-called Archangel had even ordered Bush to obey Jonathon Winters, a cameraman! Post-resurrection the situation had gotten even worse: Was the resurrection real or a fake? If a resurrection, it was HUGE! Bush could have a prominent place in history books for thousands of years. If it was a fake, Bush would go down in history as a buffoon if he linked his name to it. The resurrectee was Mark Anderson, who had been a MAJOR embarrassment to the Government in general and Bush in specific. Through no fault of Bush's (Bush thought), the Guardian Angel had overreacted terribly to the FBI's surveillance and had gone on several rampages across the country, some of which were directed at Bush himself, such as threatening to set off a W80 next to him and by destroying his and his parents' homes. There was absolutely no precedent for this situation. Bush and all his advisors were operating in the dark, and what's worse, so were the public. It was impossible to predict what the public would think a week from now, so it was extremely difficult to pander to them. The only members of the public Bush understood were the religious conservatives, and they hated just about everything that Archangel Michael had said. There's more but that's enough for you to see that not only was Bush personally utterly confused about what to do, but his doing anything risked upsetting a critically important proportion of his party's support base. He risked being damned - in the political sense - if he did anything, so he employed the politician's usual tactic of doing nothing, hoping that the situation would become clearer one way or the other. His inner circle was giving him advice to be aggressive, but the most he could risk was not reining in his agencies as forcefully as he implied he was. Even with such cautious aggression, the situation had just got rapidly more politically and physically dangerous, forcing Bush to act to save his presidency and skin. His family circle was giving him VERY unequivocal advice about that. He still did the bare minimum. He had to praise the Guardian Angel and me in his capitulation, but he did nothing useful outside of that speech. The red carpet wasn't rolled out for me, I wasn't showered with honors and invitations to dine at the White House, etc. Bush HATED the situation he was in, especially because he was losing so badly. Who could've foreseen how bad it'd get!]] ^ I updated my family when they woke, we watched a little TV together, then Dad called Paul about an hour after sunrise to check that all was well at the homestead. "Everything seems satisfactory," (the latter being Paul's code word for "safe".) "The only development is that we've got an FBI technical guy and couple of workmen here asking permission to remove some nuclear-material sensors from our gates." Dad pretended ignorance, "Oh?" Paul pretended ignorance back, repeating more of what the FBI had told him. Dad said, "Make them wait until we get home." "Will do." We talked about the FBI's little removal job, but none of us could think of a useful way of making any real gain out of it, so we'd let them get on with it when we got home. Dad called a couple of networks and let them know about it, so that the FBI had done something else to our home would be televised, further embarrassing them and giving us more proof of their illegal actions. We loaded up and headed home. When we got there, Dad gave the small FBI crew the go-ahead as we drove in. We ignored the media, so it had to concentrate on continuing to harass the Fibbies. It only took the Fibbies a few minutes to remove their gear from our gateposts, and not many more to refill the two cavities with new concrete. Paul gave them their bugs and other crap back (with one small exception, described below), and that was the end of that. We didn't ask the Fibbies to repair any of the other damage they'd done to our home, not even filling in the holes they'd drilled in our ceilings. We weren't going to let the Fibbies anywhere near our home again; we'd get the Army to do all of the repairs. None of them were difficult, not even repairing the holes drilled through the concrete-encased Faraday cage plates in our ceilings as they just required metal plugs. The "small exception" was one of the tiny bugs. Prof had sent one of them to the debugging company we'd used in the past, telling them it was coming and warning them to keep its source secret. We wanted them to be as good at finding bugs as possible. The FBI would inventory all the returned equipment and discover that one of the many dozens of bugs was missing, but we would have been amazed if they'd had the balls to ask us about it. I was almost hoping they would, because it would be fun to think up a suitable reply and then to publicize it and their question. The President's capitulation did much to deflate the public's hysteria, and the heavily reported situation returned toward normal. Not all the way there, and certainly not in DC, but life around Corvallis improved considerably. ^ [Over the next few months, there were some major variations on "returned toward normal", and nowhere more so than in Washington DC: We were close enough to events to judge the outcome as a good one, and we obviously knew what the angel was going to do - although it had surprised the parents a few times - but ordinary Washingtonians had no foreknowledge at all. They'd been repeatedly sure they were about to be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Feeling that much terror for hours on end during the attempted evacuations, and feeling it three times in rapid succession, had emotionally exhausted and even emotionally broken many people. They had no faith in the Government - it would be more accurate to say they had a great deal of faith in the Government's deliberate or inadvertent fucking up again - and they were sure the angel had to be totally out of patience by now, so the next stupid act by a clearly VERY stupid Government would result in DC being obliterated. Many people were 100% sure that was inevitable, so they cleared out of the city as fast as they could arrange it. As did those people who were only 90% sure, and even those people who only 10% suspected it. Only an idiot would take the risk of staying around. The residential real estate market in Washington fell through the floor. Over a hundred thousand households in the greater area decided to pack up and leave, and the number of new arrivals dropped to effectively zero, so there were very few buyers for the houses that were put on the market. Many of the houses had been rented, so both markets had a huge glut of supply and no demand. It only needs a very small difference between supply and demand in an open, economically efficient market to affect prices significantly. In this case, the excess supply was unprecedented, and prices plummeted like a plumbum balloon. With such extreme price drops, speculators would normally have picked up the real estate steals, but even they didn't want to buy land that might be turned into molten slag that'd be untouchable for decades, and not worth shit even after that. Nor did the banks want to lend against it, refusing mortgages right, left and especially center, so the commercial market was screwed too. Banks started urgently calling in loans and overdrafts when the borrowers couldn't immediately provide securities outside of DC, causing substantial financial damage to many businesses and people. Many insurance policies already had clauses which exempted deaths or damages caused by a nuclear event, but those that didn't were being cancelled as fast as possible, causing further trouble because in many circumstances it was a contractual requirement for insurance policies to be in place. Many businesses relocated out of the city, initially those with bosses who led the retreat or vocal staff who demanded it. Businesses continued to leave because they couldn't get the staff they needed to keep operating or they didn't have enough customers left. Meetings that would normally have been held in DC were held elsewhere, on a massive scale. Non-DC residents all but refused to go to DC in fear that they'd be caught in the next crisis, and many local residents were extremely eager to get out of the place if they had half a chance to, so the participants in every meeting very quickly agreed to meet anywhere other than DC. The normally very vigorous DC hotel and conference industry was gutted. Over the course of a single week they lost more than half their bookings, and within a month the industry was at less than 10% of the previous year's level. Because the city of DC did not bounce back, that ended up bankrupting every non-diversified company in the hotel, motel and conference industry. Over the summer vacation, the school system went into crisis as approximately a quarter of a million kids were removed from school rolls; either moving away with their families, or being sent to boarding schools a safe distance away; the schools near but not in DC were inundated with applications for the next academic year. Many teachers left DC too, exacerbating the educational crisis. The college and university system was even more adversely affected because their students could relocate so easily. College enrollments next academic year were a third of the previous year's. There was simply not enough reason for those students to take the risk, so they transferred, damaging those institutions badly and the local economy even further. The FBI's ability to recruit took a heavy hit all over America, its reputation having taken a nosedive. It normally recruits people who're very dedicated to law enforcement, which didn't sit well with the FBI's conducting multiple, illegal, incompetent assassination attempts against a family that had never been accused of a crime and which appeared to be in God's good graces. So the FBI did what any other politically operated organization would do: it denied it was responsible and blamed someone else. In this case, it blamed Mueller and Pistole. The newly appointed Director and Deputy Director swore the FBI would never behave like that again. They had no idea how the behavior had happened in the first place, but they were sincerely determined that it would never happen again. Very sincerely, as they hadn't liked the way their predecessors had left their jobs. MAF was affected but not nearly so badly. The staff who worked for it had the inside running on finding out if anything bad was about to happen, plus Mom and Vanessa were reassuring them that the angel was very happy with the Government's staying away these days. MAF did lose quite a few staff, but there were also many Washingtonians that wanted to or had to stay in the city and who saw getting a job for MAF as a way of protecting themselves and their families, or at least of getting advance warning of the need to flee. Businesses, Government departments and many infrastructure services (such as schools, trash collection, and even power supply) were collapsing because so many of their customers and staff had left. It was surprising how lacking in resilience a large city is, especially because people from outside of DC didn't come in to fill the gaps. There were systemic failures all over the place, many of which caused cascades of more failures, which created a great deal more anger from the people who suffered the consequences of those failures. There was a large and prolonged power failure because the three guys who understood how to use a particularly critical piece of equipment had all left, leaving it in the hands of someone who didn't really know what he was doing and he'd blown it up. That sort of thing occurred quite often because the very smartest people could easily get jobs elsewhere. The frequency of such problems steadily increased because the few remaining and not particularly competent maintenance crews couldn't keep a whole city's worth of infrastructure going, so it degraded. The City was forced into bankruptcy and emergency measures were required to keep its essential infrastructures running. There were strident calls to massively increase the ability of the populace to respond to a nuclear emergency quickly because the three previous evacuations had all resulted in widespread gridlock, panic over being stalled in traffic, many very angry fistfights, etc. Many more people were threatening to leave the city immediately unless evacuation speeds were greatly increased and large-capacity, nuclear-bomb-proof shelters were built all over the city, those two demands requiring major investments in additional infrastructure for a city that was rapidly decreasing in population. There were thousands of lawsuits being filed against the Federal Government for all the ruined livelihoods, loss of property values, emotional trauma from repeatedly exposing people to nuclear death, etc. Those lawsuits had a good chance of success because the Government's later attacks against my family and I had been carried out after it had been warned what the consequences would be. It was a massive city-damaging clusterfuck. It wasn't as bad as what Hurricane Katrina had done to New Orleans, but it was getting there. What was most astonishing about the city's semi-collapse was that there'd been no external damage inflicted on it whatsoever. The massive ruptures in Washingtonian life had all been caused by perceptions, which was highly ironic and even appropriate. Despite there being no reality behind them, the consequences were profound, widely suffered, reported on, and much discussed within Washington, serving as excellent ongoing reminders to the remaining Federal Government's employees to keep away from the Andersons.] ^ I had a little dilemma I bounced off the parents. I was concerned that because everyone outside of our property thought the gas canisters and bugs hadn't been spotted by the Guardian Angel, they might feel encouraged to repeat something similar in the future, maybe something like planting bombs in one of our cars, or something else very bad. In truth, I had found the FBI's nasties only by making a very deliberate search, so I'd made a mental note to do that far more often in the future. I have plenty of spare minds and often don't need to use both visual processing centers, so I can easily do some searching of our homes and cars quite frequently, and I damned well will, but it'd obviously be much better to discourage people from planting bombs and other undesirable additions in the first place. Vanessa's camera held pictures of the bugs, including the weenies' setups. It would be easy to give in to the media's clamoring for an interview, to insert some reference to the FBI's operation, and then have the Guardian Angel fetch the camera to show the photos. That the weenies' setup was included meant the photos must've been taken earlier, which could be made to lead to the realization that the angel had known about the FBI's crap right from the beginning, thereby making everyone even less likely to try any more crap in the future. The problem was that the angel had retaliated for the 'discovery' of the assassination setup by destroying the Bushes' homes, which would look strange if the angel knew about the bugs and canisters the whole time. If we didn't use the photos, then we shouldn't leave them around either, in case someone else came across them. The decision was to delete the photos and say nothing. Mainly because the Government had so many reasons to avoid planting a bomb on us, or any similar activity, that it was pointless giving them another reason. It might even be better to leave the Government with the idea that the angel wasn't as capable as it really was so if they did overcome all the other reasons they had to behave, their underestimating the angel might make it more likely for us to catch them at it. ------- Chapter 378: Aftermath to the President's Capitulation Early Summer Vacation, 2007 (Continued) The latest FBI fiasco meant that attendance at our End Of Exams party took a hit. We assured everyone who called that it was still on and that we obviously thought it was safe because we were here, but many of them - or their parents - decided playing safe was a better idea. As did the live band we'd hired. It was understandable, and in the grand scheme of things didn't matter at all, so we just had a quieter party than expected. A VERY over-catered one too. Most of the girls that I think of as my second-tier girlfriends turned up. Alexis I expected as she'd probably ride her motorcycle around invading tanks to get to a party, but so many of the others coming was a pleasant surprise. They'd watched the news avidly, decided the Government couldn't possibly risk doing anything, and decided they trusted our word that we thought it was safe. [I'll mention here that my déjà vu's with other Marks revealed that in some dimensions Alexis rides a motorcycle, and in others drives a car. Dimensional differences like that do get discovered from time to time and usually aren't worth commenting on, but Alexis' form of transportation does get a small mention later and I wouldn't want you to think that my autobiography isn't word accurate.] Our party was a low-key event, but enjoyable anyway. Sophia was having kittens about her wedding next weekend. She wasn't even married yet, so she shouldn't be having anything, or perhaps only butterflies. Andrew was a multimillionaire in his own right, so Sophia got busy spending his money arranging a Plan B. Or, as she thought of it, a Plan A. [As it happened, by the next weekend there'd been nothing but good news, so the wedding went ahead on our property as originally planned, to my regret.] ------- The Norris girls hadn't been allowed to come to the party, "For your safety" insisted their parents. Their physical and moral safeties were both cited as reasons. Back in Mark1's days, I'd gotten Diana to repeatedly tell her flirt-encouraging parents things like, "I'm SURE Mark likes me because he's more attentive to me than the other girls that are visiting Carol and Donna, but Mark won't do ANYTHING about it! He treats me properly all the time. He won't even flirt back when I try to flirt with him. I know I'm not very good at it, but he has to notice that I'm trying..." Bullshit like that back then meant the Norris parents now believed their daughters' assurances that nothing "bad" had ever happened between me and them, so the parents weren't nearly as suspicious and controlling as they needed to be to keep their girls from visiting my home. The Monday after exams, when both Norris parents were busy at their places of work, the girls jumped onto their bikes, rode to my home, then jumped onto my bones, their initial reluctance to resume having sex with me having been swept away by their parents' refusal to permit the girls to see me. Teenage rebelliousness is the best thing since sliced bread, or maybe even better. I patted myself on my back for training the girls to quietly disrespect their parents' stupid attitude to sex. Diana was nearly seventeen now, Claire a year younger - so the terms "Cutie" and "Duckling" were becoming inappropriate - and they both had enough freedom to do what they wanted during the day, even though their parents wouldn't let either of them buy a car. Plenty of other Cuties and Ducklings were eager to come to visit our place, or go to the Aquatic Center, movies, beach, etc. [we met at all these places over this summer], so the Norris girls could easily tell their parents they were going to visit friends. They'd truly be with their friends all day, just also with me. The Norris parents' attitude meant no one from our family could call the Norris' home, but that didn't affect things much. Either we prearranged the next visit during the current one, or we called an intermediary like Zoe - she was an excellent choice since she enjoyed multi-way sex - and got her to call the Norris girls. It was a slight nuisance, but no worse than that. In our Monday morning reunion, I had a great time convincing them that I really was Mark. I joked, "I haven't had sex with you for sixteen months so I'm VERY horny!" I was amused by the situation. They'd had sex with Ron's body not long ago, but according to Mark's memory it'd only been a couple of months since Mark had bedded them, but according to their memories it was sixteen months since they'd had sex with Mark. What was the 'right' answer for how long it'd been between us? However long it'd been, I didn't waste time discussing the interesting philosophical point; we charged straight into making up for lost time, not caring how much had been lost. Or maybe our going at it like bunnies might've been because of teenage rebelliousness. I can't say I cared what the reason was. After a few hours, the girls begged for a pause. "But your bodies are SO much sexier now! I feel inspired..." "{Groan}." They were truly convinced that I was Mark because Ron had never worked them so hard. During their rest, Diana asked me, "Do you have Ron's memories of having sex with Carol and Donna?" I'd already discussed this with my girls, including Donna, and we'd decided what line to take. I answered, "Better than having sex, I have many memories of his making LOVE to Carol. He was totally in love with her, and his memories are fantastic to recall. It blows me away to remember those memories and to feel how strong his emotions were. It makes me want to cry to think that he loved Carol so much that he gave up his life to make her happy by letting me come back." Having set a useful moral tone, the rest of the conversation was at a very nice level. I denied having any memories of playing around with Donna (the Norris girls had participated in sex with Donna and Ron a few times), saying, "If Ron just played around with her, God probably didn't think it was an important memory to keep. I'm very thankful that God let Ron's memories of making love to Carol stay because they mean a very great deal to me. They also mean that God must be a pretty cool dude, and not negatively hung up on sex like your stupid parents believe." I swore the Norris Nymphets to secrecy about my having memories of sex with Carol, which they sincerely promised to respect. Diana asked, "Do you think you might make love to Carol again?" "I've thought about it, Diana. Obviously Carol and I love each other very much as brother and sister, and having Ron's memories about how wonderful it is to make love to Carol certainly makes that aspect of it appealing, but there are two big issues that make me not sure: -- "Ron's memories of his loving Carol are very special to me, and I worry about my sullying or diminishing them by doing the same thing myself. I'd very much like to keep those memories pure so I can appreciate Ron as much as possible. -- "The other reason is even more important. Carol obviously has very strong memories about Ron too, and I wouldn't want to diminish her memories of him. I worry that my still looking like Ron but being Mark would mix up her memories if we did anything now. She loves to jump on my lap every chance she can get, and I see her staring at my face trying to memorize what I look like before I change, but I don't think it'd be a good idea to go as far as making love to her. -- "I'm really just a spectator, as the relationship was between Carol and Ron, so my thinking is that Carol and I shouldn't do anything until I look like Mark again. But that's just what I feel; what Carol feels is FAR more important. If she decided she'd like to make love to me, then I'd be HONORED to do so." Diana and Claire thought I was WONDERFUL, so I took advantage of their reaction to prove my Markness to them yet again. Arranging dates with the Norris girls quickly turned out to be so easy we decided we didn't need to use the $5,000 payments to pressure their parents into letting the girls openly visit my family again. We even decided that it would be best not to remind their parents about the money, in case they did something annoying like making the girls get summer jobs so they wouldn't need my money. The status quo was fine, so I suggested Claire and Diana should keep their mouths shut. It was only a few days later when the parents suddenly remembered anyway; the penny dropping during the discussion they had with the girls when their exam results came out a week after the last exam. Claire and Diana both laughed when telling me about it the next day, as their parents' expressions were priceless after realizing they'd thrown away $40,000. (They were quite mean-spirited people, including about spending money on their daughters. You may recall that Mackenzie didn't have a cellphone way back when I first mentioned her. Suddenly discovering they were out $40,000 was a blow.) Mr. Norris had said, "He's probably not giving it away now that he's back." Diana countered, "He still is, Dad. He told the other girls that went to the party that he'd keep doing it. Some of them have called me and asked me why I wasn't at the party, and they told me about it." [I hadn't needed to make that announcement at the party because I'd made sure to tell them all, once Alexis had reminded me of the issue. Diana was fibbing about how it had happened, but she was telling the basic truth as the payments were continuing. She'd learned that when we'd discussed whether she should mention it to her parents.] She added, "I can call Mark to ask if..." "You CANNOT!" objected Mrs. Norris. "That's terribly rude. You can't ask people about money like that, Diana." "But we need to know. Whenever I used to ask Mark a question, he always stopped whatever he was doing and gave me his full attention. He was VERY polite to me so I'm sure if I asked him now he wouldn't be offended." Her parents refused, appalled that their daughter could be so immoral. When the girls told me about it the next day, I typed a letter for them, even typing up an envelope and using the postage meter in our Office so the girls could claim it'd been posted a couple of days ago. The letter said: Dear Diana and Claire, As you weren't at the party and I am not permitted to phone you, I am writing to let you know that your annual $5,000 college payments will continue exactly as initially described to you, on each of your 18th through 21st birthdays inclusive. The payments were offered to you by my family because they were aware of how much I liked you both and how much I valued the importance of a college education. God's resurrecting me has not changed either of those sentiments, and my sisters tell me that you're still very wonderful girls, so I won't be penalizing you for the sins of your parents: their condemning blameless people, insulting their daughters' virtues, insulting me, being unfairly judgmental, and being bad Christians by being so uncharitable and unforgiving. It's a wonder that you've managed to be such wonderful young ladies with such poor parents, which makes me think even more highly of you. I'm sure your parents' unchristian prohibition on my phoning you extends to my visiting you, so I will mail your checks to you three days before those birthdays to make sure you get them in time. Keep working hard at school, and I look forward to hearing from my sisters about how well you are doing. I am honored to have known you. Mark Anderson Diana got it and the envelope "it came in" framed later that day and produced it that evening after her parents had gotten home, pretending it had arrived in that day's mail. She asked her parents where in the house she could hang it. They were extremely reluctant to hang it anywhere, given the letter's listing of their faults, so Diana had a crying fit about her parents ruining her chances to be friends with someone as good and wonderful as Mark, including the line I'd told her to use, "Even GOD thinks Mark is wonderful! Who do you think you are to be a better judge of Mark's morals than GOD!" Diana hung my letter in her room and EVERY visitor to the home was immediately invited, "Come and see the letter Mark Anderson wrote me." Diana was having a great time getting revenge on her parents for years of repression. Apparently my training them to be "quietly disrespectful" had been more successful in one aspect than the other. ^ [To look ahead several more weeks. The Norris parents were shamed into softening their condemnation of me, but they didn't go so far as to permit Diana to restart flirting with me, not even in a Christian way. We didn't care, as the girls had enough freedom. We did take advantage of a couple of opportunities to work on the parents though. The first was when the three Norris girls were going to the Aquatic Center. I arranged to be there with my sisters when they arrived, and we 'accidentally' met each other. Later that evening, Claire privately told her mother, "We ran into Mark, Donna and Carol at the pools today. He was uncomfortable being there with us and he wouldn't even look at Diana. He refused to talk with us, telling Mackenzie it was, 'Because your parents aren't permitting it.' We saw them leave right after that, and he didn't even wave goodbye. Diana spent ages crying in the bathroom about how unfair you've been." "He's had sex with far too many girls Claire. He's not suitable..." "WITH girls who wanted to have sex with him AND whose parents agreed! He's a WONDERFUL boy and most of girls at school wanted to be his girlfriend, so it's no wonder he had lots of chances. But he NEVER misbehaved with us! He was always totally well behaved with Diana, and now he won't even talk with her because you won't permit it. If he won't even TALK because you disapprove, you're crazy for thinking he'd ever have pushed her into having sex. -- "I know Diana had a very good chance with him because I saw how much attention he used to pay her. He liked her very much and it didn't matter to him that there was no sex. She was safer with Mark than ANY other boy. They're always trying to get their hands on us, but Mark wouldn't dream of doing that. You've made Diana very unhappy for a reason which is totally wrong." "Maybe we've been a bit hasty..." "AND you've been everything else Mark said in his letter and very cruel to Diana too!" After a couple of those types of events, and a few things the girls said on their own initiative, the parents were softened up considerably. Other events intruded though, so that effort didn't bring as much benefit as it should have.] ------- The Army finished the last of the repairs on Tuesday and we had a small party-ish media event for it. The few Engineers that were still around got to have some drinks and admire the many girls Julia had invited for the event, the girls welcoming the excuse to buy flattering new dresses. Prof had asked the colonel for the bill days before the party, telling him to make it a BIG one, "Because the FBI will be picking up the tab." At the appropriate moment during the party, there were a couple of speeches, one from Dad thanking the Army for the very impressive work. Dad is quiet in a family role, but he's a raconteur in public and enjoys making speeches. The colonel responded with some nice platitudes back. Our check was handed over, making sure the media caught how much it was for. Drinks were refreshed and the Engineers got back to flirting with the girls. Which probably guaranteed the slowest possible service from every Engineering team that comes to our house again, to ensure they're the last group to leave so will be there for the completion party. In the informal conversation/interview with the TV reporter later, she queried the size of the check. Dad answered, "I know! Don't blame the size of the bill on the Army; they did a superb job and we're very happy with them. It's all the FBI's fault. They did a terrible amount of damage to our home when they tried to kill us with the spy plane, and even more when they invaded the place to install the bugs and poison gas canisters. We'll be sending them a copy of the Army's bill and it'll be interesting to see whether they pay it promptly or not." It was really "tranquilizer gas", but we always called it "poisonous gas" and that had even caught on in the media because no one was giving the FBI the benefit of the doubt; there being no doubt that the FBI had being trying to kill us. It's true that the FBI had done some very expensive damage to our home, but that'd been when they were looking for the missing nuclear bombs so you shouldn't really blame them. Dad can, but you shouldn't. Also worth a quick mention is that in this and one of our earlier interviews, my parents thanked the people of Benton County, "For letting us build our home where it is. As we'd feared after the Government kidnapped and killed Mark, and the CIA-led attack on our Peoria Road home, the Government's ongoing illegal attacks against our family could easily have killed several innocent people if we'd been living close to any neighbors. Without our living in a home equipped with a radar and emergency slides to underground safe rooms, Fely and I would be dead now, and probably everyone else in the house too if we'd still been in Peoria Road because the UAV would have destroyed that home totally." It was only a small point, but it was good to remind Corvallis that they had been right to give us what we'd wanted. As Dad had said, we sent a copy of the Army's bill to the FBI with a letter seeking reimbursement. The FBI had a check for the full amount and a sincere letter of apology from the Director in our hands even before our bill would've arrived at their headquarters. I'd had no idea that a Government department could be so efficient. The reason we'd made the bill payment part of the farewell ceremony was to get it done as quickly as possible, otherwise the Army might've waited a month or more before sending it. Our staff were VERY eager for the money aspect of the FBI's actions to be progressed as fast as possible (you might've forgotten about it, but our staff hadn't. There was the prospect of their getting $250,000 each in recompense for their kidnapping and associated mistreatment). It was clearly best to do it while the Government wanted the public to see how contrite it was. We waited until the Monday after Andrew and Sophia's wedding to avoid increasing the risk of that being upset, then our lawyer let the Government's lawyer know that we were about to file a lawsuit against the FBI for illegally bugging our house and rigging it with the deadly booby traps. Their lawyer said, "I'm sure my client will be willing to consider settling that." The LAST thing the Government wanted was to inflame the public with yet another Anderson issue. "I'm sure it will. I'm emailing you the settlement contract now." It was modeled after what we'd tried to squeeze out of the House Special Committee on Resurrections, plus 50%: Our staff were to receive an immediate tax-free payment of $375,000 each. There were about 40 staff, so that'd come to $15 million. All of us (the 5 Andersons, 3 Williams and 1 West) were to be given $1.5 million each, totaling $13.5 million. We'd donate that to charities. A $30 million grant to the local hospital. All the vehicles used by the FBI against us recently to be forfeited to the Andersons. Again going to charities. Our lawsuit against the CIA for their inducing the Army raid on our Peoria Road home to be settled for $100 million (we'd keep that!). Our lawyer had said that the law change we wanted to protect us from future investigations wasn't going to fly, so we'd had to drop that. There was some back and forth, their lawyer not being happy - on their behalf - about our including the independent CIA suit. They thought there was a good chance that the final value of that suit could be less than $100 million. Our lawyer had told us that it was anybody's guess what the jury would decide; there being no precedent. They might award a few million, or hundreds of millions. Thanks to the new law, regardless what the award was, $100 million was the most we could possibly receive. Our lawyer answered theirs, "That award is due soon and the publicity over the last few days will have damaged your client's standing with the jury considerably, so we expect a sizable award. I would've thought that the last thing your client needs is the negative publicity arguing the suit would cause." They bounced it back and forth, arriving at $50 million as a fair value (just for the last bullet point above; the other points weren't argued because lawsuits over them would have earned amounts similar to what we were asking for). Their lawyer raised a similar topic, "Your client has sent mine an invoice for $216 billion..." Actually, it'd gone from our lawyer to theirs, but that's how the Government's lead lawyer talked. "Yes. I imagine they're looking forward to receiving that payment. When can they expect it?" "My client will be contesting that any payment is due." "Not that it matters, but on what grounds?" "The plane was tasked with surveilling Archangel Michael and any other angels. It wasn't directed at your clients." "And the bugs and tranquilizer gas?" "Both for the angel." "Which doesn't speak and is almost certainly immune to the effects of a tranquilizer gas formulated to work on the human anatomy." "Nonetheless, my client will be contesting that payment is due. I therefore suggest that to save time and to move on with their lives, your clients settle that suit also. We're prepared to offer $100 million to settle all outstanding issues your clients have with the FBI." "You're forgetting that my clients can sue for the assassination attempt. We don't see any difficulty convincing a jury that the FBI are culpable and we expect a very large award for that. We also expect your client to be very unwilling to let that go to court." "That's not covered by the settlement agreement, but we'll let it stand. $200 million to settle all clams arising out of the FBI's actions." Amusingly, our settlement agreement had specified that the Government weren't to surveil us or investigate us for crimes without prior good reason, but none of us or our lawyers had thought to exclude assassination attempts, so the UAV's ramming my parents bedroom had been more contractually permissible than looking at us with binoculars from a distant neighbor's attic. "Add it to the current settlement before your client signs and my clients will think about it." Which meant: "Yes, unless they change their mind in the interim." -- Our lawyer added as a side comment to the other side's lawyer, "I don't know how, but I wouldn't be surprised if one day your client rues the day it passed its opprobrious new law. It saved itself a great deal of money, but I can't help thinking that it was shortsighted." "That's the nature of government," agreed the other side's lawyer. Another issue was their lawyer confirming, "I presume the law enforcement electronics can be removed from the vehicles before they're handed over." "No. They're to be delivered as they were used." "Your clients allowed the removal of that equipment last time." "That was back when they still had some goodwill toward the Government. Your client's actions have destroyed that now. I'm sure that if there are any vehicles your client doesn't wish to forfeit, then an offer to purchase them for ten times the value of a new base vehicle would be acceptable to my clients. Otherwise they'll be sold or given away to whomever my clients wish. Your client has got export controls, but it might prefer the ten-times formula." We hadn't anticipated this issue, so this was just our lawyer making up stuff. It was smart of him and acceptable to us because, as he knew, we were going to auction off the vehicles for charity so his idea brought in more money. The FBI very much preferred that the mobile command post not be auctioned off, so they opted for the ten-times formula for that, pleasing the charities that benefited from the extra money they got. We'd dickered a little over the list of forfeited vehicles. The FBI claimed that at the time planes had been used, none of the participants had known where they were going, let alone had any intention of committing a crime there. We couldn't prove anything without my snooping, and that wasn't worth the risk, so we just got a bunch of road vehicles. Because I was a party to the settlement contract, I had to be written into it. There was also some lawyerly discussion over who I was because the Government's lawyer wasn't sure. He wasn't playing games; he was genuinely unsure. Our lawyer answered, "No one in his family has any doubt and they would've discovered an imposter by now. I suggest you don't raise it as an issue because you'd be risking making them very angry at your client." It amused me that the much argued greatest event in human history was never formally addressed. The few people or organizations who had legal standing to bring suit to get a court to rule on my identity, such as the IRS, had more important issues to worry about, such as not making the angel mad by questioning whether the resurrection had been legitimate. Our staff got their $375,000. Its being 50% more than they expected was a nice surprise for them. The local hospital was very happy, as was the local community who used that hospital. Several charities were tickled pink too. We got to keep $250 million among the nine of us. It was simply divided and each of us had nearly $28 million dropped into our accounts. Ho hum. #11: #19: #10: My families had collectively decided not to do anything extreme to get the "Goberment" to pay us the $215.9 billion they'd effectively stolen from us. We did formally ask them to pay the full amount, and did mention it several times in interviews to maximize the Government's embarrassment over their cheating on their agreement with us, but that's all we did. Despite the theft, to unleash the Guardian Angel for it had several problems: it would have been disproportionate and therefore unethical, it would have been bad PR, it was suspiciously outside its job description, and no one wanted to expose me to more risk just for money that we might never have a use for. We lost a few of our staff, especially among the gardeners because they hadn't signed up for such an 'exciting' job. Whether they resigned before, or as most of them did, after the settlement, they all received their $375,000. The resignations were so understandable that we were surprised that more of them didn't hand in their notices. We gave the leavers good sendoffs, good references, and wished them all the best. We had a long list of people wanting to fill the vacancies, but usually for the wrong reasons so it took a while to find suitable replacements. ------- The House Special Committee on Resurrections presumably got on with their "Critical for Democracy" task. God knows how because we weren't hearing from them. Maybe they were studying their term of reference in chronological order, which had a certain logic: self-protection. More likely was that our conditions were too onerous. We'd demanded that the President swear an oath to God that there'd be no more investigation of us, and we'd wanted a new law to protect us. The President was busy trying to pretend the Andersons didn't exist and his advisors had probably thought that the law-making process shouldn't be abused they way we wanted. Especially in the first couple of weeks of the summer vacation, we gave a few media conferences, mainly to make sure that everyone knew we were well established on the moral high ground. A great deal of the public's support of us had been because they feared the nukes. That's a negative reason and not a good one for the long run, so we wanted to replace it with positive reasons to support us. In our interviews, we several times asked the same questions that many other people were asking: "Why was the Government investigating us so much?", and, "Why were they trying to kill us?" We demonstrated great confusion about those issues, and urged the Government to come clean, stating, "There HAS to be a reason." When we were asked what we thought the reason was, we answered variations on, "None of us know. We can't even guess because it makes so little sense to us. I'm not joking when I tell you that our best theory is that they've got us confused with some other Andersons and they're too ashamed to admit it." Our calls for an explanation could've been ignored, but the entire country - including some very influential and important people - also VERY much wanted to know why the Government had repeatedly risked the nuclear destruction of a city to persecute the Andersons. The Government was never able to provide even a semi-satisfactory answer. They couldn't risk saying, "We can't tell you because of national security," because it was all too possible that if they'd used that line the Government would somehow be forced to divulge the reason anyway, as some of the important people twisting the Government's arm were VERY important. That there was no "national security" reason would expose the Government as liars, and the last thing it needed was to get people angry over this issue again. Plus there was the problem that there were too many insiders who knew there wasn't any reason, so the Government couldn't risk giving any answer at all. After a few weeks of not providing any explanation for the incessant spying and assassination attempts on my family, the Government was starting to look pretty stupid. The questions were still being repeated over and over again, and clearly weren't going to go away. There were many senators, congressmen, and their families and friends who would've died had the Guardian Angel set off a nuclear bomb on any of the three occasions it seemed about to, so regardless of their party affiliations, they demanded a formal inquiry to find out what the real reasons were. The Secret Service had a reasonable excuse for their observation posts: their wanting to interview us about the angel to find out the magnitude of the threat he posed to the President's life. With all the other shit that was going on at that time, the Secret Service probably should've decided the big picture recommended more caution, but being too narrowly focused on their job was the extent of the SS's mistake. The FBI came out of it looking pretty sick. They had plenty of documentation showing their desire to surveil Archangel Michael when he turned up to do the resurrection on whichever of the candidates he chose. But after that: The best interpretation of the FBI's actions would be to say that they were totally disorganized in their inability to stop an operation to recover the nukes after the nukes had been recovered elsewhere. A medium interpretation would be that they'd pursued the "gather intelligence on the angel" aspect far too vigorously. (They hadn't actually: it wasn't their vigorousness that was a problem as that had been reasonably typical for "The Game". Their problem was not being able to apply the brakes after the D and DD had been killed and the angel's dangerousness established. It was more of a bureaucratic screw-up than an operational one.) The worst interpretation was that they'd used the UAV to try to assassinate the Anderson parents. There was no evidence of that, but believing the craft's flight path was a malfunction was too incredible, especially given its final destination. That the tranquilizer gas could've been used to kill us all was a fact not lost on anyone, even though all the FBI's documents painted a different picture and they'd had the medical equipment on site ready to keep us breathing. The committee eventually released its conclusions, which I'll summarize as, "The FBI drove the angel toward exploding a nuclear bomb and killing tens of millions of people because it was incompetent. It had no anti-Anderson objective at all; it was just floundering around." They worded their report's multi-page conclusion quite differently, but that's what it meant in English rather than Governmentese. The committee had a number of recommendations about the FBI command and control processes, which the public thought it'd be a REALLY good idea for the FBI to implement. The FBI's new Director said he was already overhauling his predecessor's systems and would certainly act immediately to incorporate the findings of the latest study. Another point we made in our interviews was an amusing little play on the separation of church and state. Vanessa explained, "God resurrected Mark, and there is now an angel on Earth protecting Mark. 'God', 'resurrection' and 'angel' are all religious words. They're not the Government's business because the Constitution requires the Government to stay out of religious matters. I'm aware that I'm stretching what the Constitution says, but the Government has proved itself dangerously incompetent at dealing with angels. When Archangel Michael first appeared, Government employees pointed guns at it, and they recently forced an escalation in hostilities that nearly led to at least one of our major cities being destroyed. The Government exists to perform certain types of tasks, and getting involved with angels is not one of them. It was wrong of the Government to get involved in something that wasn't its business, and it shouldn't do so again." The People STRONGLY agreed. Speaking personally, the "separation of church and state" that I wanted wasn't to separate those two from each other, but to separate them both from me. The Government and church were both groups of people who had been major pains in my and my families' asses. The Government seemed to agree too. As far as we could tell, the Government was doing its best to pretend that there was no such thing as the Andersons and Guardian Angels, which was fine with us. Although I was a little sad about not getting to use a line I'd been saving up. I wanted to get a senior politician, ideally the President, in a situation where he had to take an oath on a Bible about something to do with us. I was going to make him say, "Cross my heart and hope to die if I'm telling a lie" while the Guardian Angel looked on. I even had the idea of making a substantial, momentary flash of light at the time the oath was finished to make it seems as if God was treating it as a real oath. It would have been interesting to see how a professional liar handled that pressure, and it should have increased our safety. One group that tried to reverse their separation was OSU's Physics Department. I had to say, "I'm sorry, but I have to refuse. I'd like to agree because I'm as curious as you are - probably even more so because I'd LOVE to know more about the creature that is living with me - but it's too dangerous. Remember that I was killed in the first place because a boss in Homeland Security had a paranoid fantasy that I had mind control powers, and I doubt very much that he was the only paranoid control freak in the Government's employ. Your results will be published and there's too much risk that another Government idiot will decide to act on something he reads in it, maybe thinking that the Guardian Angel has a weakness that the Government can exploit. The next thing we know, Washington DC doesn't exist anymore. Your research would be fascinating, but betting tens of millions of people's lives against there not being another paranoid idiot in the Government isn't worth it. Given how badly the CIA and FBI have treated my families, I'd have to say that the Government seems to be riddled with paranoid idiots." ------- I should mention Sophia and Andrew's wedding. There ya go, I've mentioned it. In other words, it wasn't my favorite event, falling a long way short of the usual fun we have at our parties. It was TEDIOUS, it went on ALL day, there were dozens of people I didn't know all wanting to ask me the same questions, and I wasn't permitted to run away and hide. Andrew's a very nice guy, and Sophia's nice too, but ALL DAY! Every one of my weddings - across all thirty two of my minds - lasted only a few minutes, which was much more civilized. The females thought Sophia's wedding was WONDERFUL, which was doubtless why it went on for so long. Their wedding doesn't have any significance to my story, so I'll spare you. [[If you're female, my apologies. Maybe Julia will write an autobiography too, and you'll be able to read ALL about it in hers. I have no doubt that she'll devote several chapters to it because she can certainly go on and on about all sorts of uninteresting stuff.]] ------- Chapter 379: Tongue Job Early Summer Vacation to Sunday, July 1, 2007 One of my strong regrets about the way things had unfolded was that I'd never gotten a chance to destroy our neighbor's church. The Galloping Ninnies had said many terrible things about us and I'd been particularly angry at what they'd said after Ava had been shot, but teaching them a lesson hadn't seemed doable before I got rid of the UAV, and since then I'd been too busy decimating the Air Force and exerting as much pressure on the politicians as I could. But after the President's capitulation, there were far fewer constraints on my actions, which didn't bode well for the Ninnies. For the first few days after the capitulation, there was too much going on for the Ninnies to get a word in edgewise, but when that settled down and the media had run out of real news, it started giving various church groups a platform to state their opinions about recent events. The Ninnies used their geographic proximity to the angel as a way of getting themselves far more media prominence than they otherwise would have received, and they used it to stridently denounce the behavior of the Andersons in general, and me in specific. ^ [I'll give you a little background about the Ninnies, although I didn't find most of this out quite yet. They have a thing about beautiful scenery. They pitch it as being a religious issue, but it's clearly nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with manipulating people by using our innate enjoyment of natural beauty. As one example of their using nature, the Ninnies have built a couple dozen outdoor meditation areas around their property in its most picturesque spots. The open-sided constructions range from 1- to 50-people capacities, and they're very important to the Ninnies. By arranging for people to feel the beauty of nature in a church setting they're gaining credibility by arrogation, and they use that credibility to gain control. They do exactly the same thing with the "inspired, infallible, inerrant, and authoritative word of God," by claiming credibility in telling people what it means, and how they should behave, because everyone else is too "sinful, depraved, and unfit for God's favor." Once their flock buys into those claims of credibility, they're turning themselves into sheeple. It's such an obvious control game that I didn't even need Vanessa to explain it to me. A couple of years ago, the Ninnies had tried very hard to get permission to buy Chip Ross Park, and had been laughed at for it. They'd had plans drawn up and pictures made showing how beautiful the final result would be, had reports written about how several thousands of people could benefit every week from the new facilities, etc. All they'd done was waste money and get themselves laughed at again. The Corvallis city council had officially told them, "We are NEVER going to permit private ownership of Chip Ross Park!" Having visualized how incredibly wonderful it would've been to have their church on top of the beautiful hill overlooking all of Corvallis, the Ninnies were forced to lower their sights way down, and buy the land at the eastern foot of the hill. Theirs is a pretty spot but vastly less so than the top of the hill, and I'm sure the top of the hill had a major ego appeal too. Then about the time their church's construction was finishing, the city happily agreed that the Andersons could own Chip Ross Park and a large chunk of additional land to the west. We'd built our private home on it, to the benefit of less than a dozen people. The Ninnies were righteously angry and extremely ill-disposed toward us. There might've been some hurt egos involved in that too. Right from Archangel Michael's first appearance in LA, the Ninnies had hated almost every word that'd come out of his mouth, and they hadn't been too fond of how he looked when he stood silently either. The Ninnies consider themselves to be good Christians - in other words, they knew they were right and everyone else was wrong - so Archangel Michael really got their backs up; and his front REALLY got their backs up. And then he'd chosen to resurrect an ANDERSON! And then to make matters even WORSE, the local government had almost immediately cordoned off the Anderson's property with a radius that stopped the Ninnies getting to their OWN church on their OWN land! That they'd bought FIRST! The Galloping Ninnies had been righteously pissed - and no one can do "righteously pissed" as much as devout Christians can. They still were. Since the resurrection the Ninnies had done some research - gossiping really - and their anti-me comments on TV were full of carefully chosen details about my life, especially about my sex-life because that particularly irritated them and proved that I was evil.] ^ They were making personal attack after personal attack and I was getting more than a little pissed off about it. We were all watching quite a lot of TV these days - you do that when your life might depend on spotting something developing - so we heard many of the Ninnies' slurs. Over dinner one evening, after yet another nasty comment by the church's main spokesman, I said, "I'd thought about flattening their church after they said they regretted the sniper that hit Ava hadn't been a better shot, but a good opportunity never came up. I'm starting to think I should make an opportunity." Vanessa said, "It would be a good idea to remind people that the Guardian Angel is still on the job, but remember that these people don't have any real power so there's no need to be harsh on them." The next Sunday afternoon (July 1st, a week after Sophia's wedding) was a very nice day, so several of my lovelies and I were lying around the Kids' Pool catching the rays. They were in their Australian bikinis and I was in Heaven. And the Galloping Ninnies were in a lather. After a prayer-and-placard-painting session at their church - the State of Emergency and cordon were gone by now - a very large group of them marched en masse around to the front of our property to loudly and annoyingly protest. I had no idea what they thought the point of the protest was, as even they couldn't be so stupid to think that it might cause God to take my resurrection back. But what their protest lacked in having a point, it made up for in being loud and annoying. There were probably over a thousand of them (their church can hold up to five thousand idiots at a time), and they were VERY loud. It was an ideal opportunity. I got up and put some pants on [soon after moving here I'd made the mistake of telling Julia, "I'd rather go naked than wear a G-string swimsuit." Julia had agreed, so when the girls "go Australian", my clothes just "go"]. I told the girls, "That's a mob of Galloping Ninnies." I saw that name confused the non-family girls who were with us, so I added, "That's my name for people from The Church of The Horsemen of Christ. There are a couple of TV cameras with them and they've obviously gone to some trouble to arrange a big event..." "How can you tell there are cameras?" asked Pat. "I've had enough experience with mobs to be able to tell from the sound when they're performing for cameras. I think I'll wander down to the gates to see what my appearance inspires their preacher to say. You'd better stay here because it might get ugly if the angel thinks it has to intervene." "Goody," said Julia jumping to her feet to join me. "That loudmouth is begging for a good dose of ugly." Several of the other girls wanted to come too, but Pat said, "If there are cameras I'd better stay here because I don't want Mom and Dad to get worried. Is that okay, Mark?" "Of course it is, especially because I'd prefer ALL of you to stay here." #5: One girl who hadn't been bothering to wear the top half of her Australian bikini was just standing waiting for the others, without putting any clothes on, so I told her, "You're going to have to cover up, Donna." "They can't control how I dress in my own home." "True, but if we have a confrontation with them we want it to look like it was entirely their fault. If you go down undressed like that you'll be deliberately annoying them, and people could use that to blame us for whatever happens afterward." "Darn! You take all the fun out of teasing them." "Sorry about that. Perhaps we should rent a football stadium and sell tickets to the thousands of guys who'd appreciate staring at your sexy body." "Haha. No, I wanted to deliberately annoy this lot, like you said. I'll put a shirt on." "Thanks, sweetie." Donna did that and we walked down the path toward the gate. #12: #11: The girls might've cooperated by covering up, but they couldn't resist some teasing. When the path widened out at the bottom of the ridge, Julia and Ava had an arm of mine each, with Carol holding Julia's other hand, while Donna had her arm around Ava's back. The other girls linked arms and followed behind us. When the mob saw us coming they got suddenly excited; their yelling, pointing, and waving of signs dramatically increasing. I was pleased that even despite their additional efforts, they failed to persuade God to undo His resurrection. There were several guards formed up inside the gate, one of whom quickly jogged to us, arriving when we were still over a hundred feet from the gate. He said, "Your presence is making them worse." "I know. I'm hoping they get inflamed enough that the Guardian Angel makes an appearance. Remember how much money you all made last time a bunch of stupid Christians formed a mob outside our gate?" "Yeah I remember, but also that some of them had guns." I hadn't forgotten that, especially with the girls arrayed out to either side of me to make a very attractive small-barn-sized target. I had a sight blob searching the mob but I hadn't seen anything worrisome. Certainly no heavily tattooed skinheads. They were just your average bunch of over-dressed, over-weight, under-intelligenced, short-memoried, church-going Galloping Ninnies, i.e., typical ones. I said, "I'm sure the angel hasn't forgotten either. You're right though, so we'll stop here." The preacher kept glaring our way and getting increasingly worked up. I blamed it on the girls' long lengths of bare thighs because they looked VERY erotic. Christians don't react well to natural beauty of that type. The preacher was ranting into his bullhorn. Mostly he was pointing it toward his followers, so we couldn't hear what he was saying, but every now and then he'd point it our way and yell at us. There were too many other people yelling behind him so I couldn't catch most of it, but I'm pretty sure he thought we were very bad people. By this stage of my description of these events, and given that you're reading my autobiography so clearly have better than average intelligence and judgment, you've doubtless wondered how this mob could be so stupid as to repeat the activity that got the last mob stripped naked, the skinheads killed, and a few others injured with the weapons they'd brought with them. The explanation is obvious. You're not seeing it because you're thinking intelligently, which is a hindrance when trying to understand Christians. That's not a facetious joke; that's the truth. They see something they don't like, they KNOW they are RIGHT and that the other people wrong and usually evil too, so their mouths fly open and their condemnations pour out. There's no thinking involved in that process, so naturally there's no intelligence either. The last mob hadn't included any Ninnies because the Ninnies had been at their church at the time, so it was easy for the Ninnies to not think about what had happened last time. They KNEW that they were RIGHT and that people who go to other churches are wrong and probably evil, so what had happened to the last mob was something they had deserved and was not relevant this time. The Ninnies, armored in their righteousness and full of confidence that God was on their side - what with their being RIGHT and us being wrong and so obviously evil - had no hesitation in expressing their moral outrage. Christians never have any hesitation in expressing that; they usually can't wait to start. They've had all their lives to get used to getting away with expressing moral outrage against anyone who has disagreed with them, and they've always been right to do so, so the Ninnies considered themselves right to do so this time too. Plus there's the additional factor that group 'mentality' - using that word loosely in this context - is very powerful, making everyone in such a group feel invulnerable. I shouldn't denigrate Christians so unfairly, since every other religious group is equally stupid. One hundred and thirty years ago Zulu witchdoctors told their warriors to charge straight forward into the massed firepower of British soldiers, and the warriors did it believing the witchdoctors' assurances that their spells would deflect the British bullets. The warriors did it battle after battle, suffering appalling casualty rates but never wavering in their religious belief, such is the intelligence-removing nature of religion, especially when the worshippers have been worked up by their leaders. All religions require adherents to accept their leader's statements "on faith", which precisely means "without intelligent thought". Devout people are very practiced at operating without intelligent thought when their preachers tell them to. The Ninnies' behavior wasn't inexplicable; it was actually very typical. While the asshole ranted some more, I flew a large knife out of the Staff Quarters' kitchen window and to the top of our wall, where I floated it toward the gate so it'd be hidden but very handy if I had a good excuse to use it. Several of the bullhorn ranter's TV appearances ago I'd had the idea of cutting his tongue out. It'd be such an appropriate punishment for a slur-casting preacher that it had strongly appealed to me. Whenever he'd reappeared on the box - which had been far too often - that idea had always returned. Clearly God was sending me a message, and I always do what God hints at me to do when it's also what I want to do (which I understand is how faith in God works with other people too). After using his bullhorn to tell his followers what to think, he quieted them down so he could use the media to tell everyone else what to think. I was starting to think I'd have to move much closer to get something from him that I could use, but he solved the problem for me. Apparently he thought that the camera needed to see more action because he started interspersing his answers to the reporter with bullhorn-assisted yells at us. We could hear them clearly and they were very obnoxious. His fourth yell was, "You should be dead!..." #4: #10: #21: #All: He was yelling the beginning of his next sentence into the back of the bullhorn ("You're not..."). It was best to do the act immediately after the sentence that merited the punishment, so I moved the sight blob close to his head to get a good look, then used some small but forceful NP-plates to force his mouth wide open while two fingertips entered at the base and roof of his mouth, pinched down on his tongue, then they stretched it out. Each mind has a maximum NP force of over five hundred pounds now, so it only needed two fingertips from one mind. The damage might have been too grievous if I simply pulled his tongue until it separated from his head, and my NP-points edges weren't sharp enough to cut a tongue, so I needed the knife. I had it in my grip already, waiting for the right moment to move it. I was using other NP-grips to hold him still, including making sure his arms didn't get in the way. The preacher's back was to nearly all of his followers so they had no clue what was happening. The few people who could see the preacher were puzzled by his sticking out his tongue, having such a weird expression on his face and groaning, but they weren't yet alarmed. The alarm happened about half a second later, when the Guardian Angel popped into existence about ten feet above the preacher. He couldn't, but everybody else looked up, including the cameraman, so they missed the knife. It'd dropped down on our side of the wall, zoomed sideways to the gate then through the bars in front of the preacher. I held his head more firmly, pulled his tongue out extra hard, and made one extremely quick sideways slice immediately in front of his lips. Our guards had seen the knife but it had moved far too rapidly for them to try to stop it, even if they'd had that idea. Blood spurted from the foul-mouthed preacher as I accelerated the two-thirds of a tongue and knife very rapidly into our property (rapidly because I wanted my sight blob back asap). I canceled the NP-points holding the preacher, letting him fall screaming and spraying to the ground. I dropped the tongue where I'd had the bonfire with the clothes of the last bunch of Christians. It wasn't far from me so I could see that location with my eyes. The knife I returned to the Staff Quarter's kitchen, washing it under the faucet and wiping it with a dishcloth. One of the gate guards was running for the Staff Quarters, presumably for the first-aid kit although I couldn't imagine how anyone could treat that wound. I said to the guard by us, "Looks like we need an ambulance." "We're on it already." #31: There looked to be about a thousand people around our gates and down the street. Apart from the small gap they'd left around their boss and the news team, they were mostly packed fairly tightly, making it conveniently easy for me to fence them in. The guard closest to where I was standing was looking at the gate, so I closed my eyes to create a second sight blob. Proximity would tell me if our nearby guard started turning around to look at me. (From about now on, when I'll write "sight blob" I'll usually mean "radio blob". In our internal conversations we'd initially been very careful about the nomenclature, but we got lazy and I want to write the same words we used at the time. We preferred saying "sight blob" since it seemed a more descriptive term. Unless there was a need not to, we usually used radio blobs to see with just on the chance they detected something we should know about, but this time we were actually using non-radio sensing sight blobs because we wanted very clear vision, without strange color shifts to it.) The crowd had just started reacting to the Guardian Angel's appearance, with a few of the people on the outside just starting to run away. Judging by the crowd's shock, it hadn't occurred to any of them that standing outside my gates and yelling death threats into my face might result in the creature assigned to protect me making an appearance. These were obviously very devout Christians. The next several minutes of picking up people and stripping them were so similar to what I'd done to the last mob - even in the number of people involved - that I won't bother going into any details except for noting a few variations. I didn't club anyone, mainly because this crowd had only stood outside our gates and ranted nastily whereas the previous mob had been intent on storming our property and doing God knows what once they were inside. It was easy enough to hold this bunch in an NP-fenced area, with sections of the 'fence' actively bulldozing them off their feet every time a group of them were standing. If someone did manage to get past the fence, I'd pick him up and make him the next person I processed. The news-crew was inside the invisible corral. My first action was to pick up the cameraman and move him outside the area so he could film the event better. While he was recovering from that experience I picked up the reasonably good looking and momentarily well dressed female reporter, held her facing the camera, and stripped her. Her screams alerted every cameraman and saber-toothed tiger in the area. By the time she was processed, which took only a few seconds, the cameraman was already being the consummate professional, albeit with a rapidly developing erection, but that's beside the point. The cameraman got some very graphic shots, which he visibly enjoyed. The reporter was responsible for making the demonstration louder and more annoying than it would've been without her, so she was now truly creating the news, just like she'd wanted. Maybe not "just like", but she'd wanted a riot and now she had one, not to split hairs - because spreading her legs had done that already. When I put her down outside the invisible corral, she covered herself as best she could and ran screaming behind the cameraman, who kept the camera on her until she was close enough to make him regret it. After hitting him, she started demanding either his shirt or the tape - I couldn't tell which - but it didn't much matter as I picked her up and held her between the cameraman and the corral, facing him with her arms stretched apart. I held her in that position while I got on with processing everyone else. I'd already remembered that knives were useful for removing some clothes. Not having any skinheads to take knives from, I'd borrowed a couple of suitable blades from the staff's kitchen. I didn't remove the idiots' jewelry, watches or fool around with any of the minutiae this time. Not even shoes unless I needed to do so to get their clothes off. I stripped them naked and burned everything burnable on the bonfire I created on top of the tongue. I made a pile of newly created junk out of everything else, mainly crushed cellphones and keys. I did the behind-the-fire wallet and purse accumulation, of course. The guard nearest us could see that happening and was happily amused. After stripping each person, I placed them on the ground on the outside of the corral and let them go. They'd go running and screaming down the street to get away from the horror. They ran different distances. My first victims were the most terrified so they ran a long way, but later victims had seen that nothing else seemed to happen to anyone who was released so they'd cover themselves with their hands and scuttle away with acute embarrassment rather than terror. Christians may think God created mankind in His image, but they sure don't want that image to be seen by anyone. The logic of their being ashamed rather than proud of God's image escapes me, just like all the rest of their 'logic'. (Actually it doesn't: many people are Christians because they're insecure, especially the members of authoritarian churches. Being exposed horrifies insecure people.) Some of the processed people didn't go far at all, waiting a few yards away until their family had regrouped, then they moved off together. When I could see that a group, such as a family, were together, I processed them at the same time because Mom has raised me to be considerate. Some of the Ninny wives weren't as considerate as my mom tends to be; not when they noticed that their husbands had erections from all the scenery. Once the initial terror was over and a routine established, quite a few guys had that problem: an angry wife. My processed victims couldn't walk back to their homes through Corvallis naked, and quite a few of them would've lived too far away as the Ninnies' church has a large catchment area for its 'drips', so when a large enough group had accumulated that they felt they had safety in numbers, they headed cross-country around our outer wall back to their church. Where - and this is just my thirty two opinions - they probably should've stayed in the first place. A police car and an ambulance arrived at the same time. The paramedics would have difficulty getting though the mob to the de-tongued preacher, so I picked the asshole up, moved him over the top of the mob and placed him beside the back doors of the ambulance. I didn't strip him, figuring he'd probably been punished enough. The paramedics got to work. The cops got out of their car and were surrounded by naked people pointing at the Guardian Angel demanding the cops stop it, but the cops didn't even bother drawing their weapons. One of them got on the radio while the other moved toward the as yet unprocessed people. Halfway there I stopped him with a firm 'hand' on his chest, then increased the pressure until he had to take a step backward. I gave him a couple more backward nudges until he got the idea and returned to his car. It was hard to imagine he hadn't heard about the last time this had happened, so he'd know there was nothing he could do other than wait to let it play out. I got back to my stripping operation. It takes several minutes to strip so many people; time enough for the ambulance to leave with the tongueless moron, and for more cops and more just-in-case ambulances to arrive. The new cops handed out their cars' blankets, and then they joined the existing cops in doing nothing. If they walked toward the clothed people, I politely but firmly pushed them back toward their cars. The only remaining point worth noting, were two points that were VERY worth noting. When I'd processed about two-thirds of the mob the following happened. #14: All of my minds could see what the sight blob could see, but #14 had been stripping that girl so he noticed her charms first. The rest of us didn't take long, #All: I moved the sight blob to get a better look. Occasionally my minds had made comments about a person being stripped, but that was actually a rare event. We'd seen so many naked Christians by now, the vast majority of which we'd have preferred not to have seen, that the concept of naked people had lost all of its appeal. But apparently not quite "all". The girl #14 had just stripped had a PERFECT body, and an extremely pretty face too. She was about eighteen years old I guessed, dark-haired and medium-height, but certainly not medium-figured: she had absolutely perfect D-cup breasts, a narrow waist, and a fine looking ass. Especially with the old Target Game's manipulation of some of the school's A-list beauties, I'd seen quite a few very beautiful girls' bodies before, but this girl blew them all out of the water; she was a wet dream. I was gobsmacked by her beauty. Her breasts should have sonnets written about them. Or even better, I should get to suck on them. #5: #8: #5: #13: #22: #14: #8: #14: The Ninnies' church was to the left so that's the way nearly all the already processed people had gone. Those still hanging around were down the street a ways, covering themselves as best they could while they talked to the cops, sat on the grass crying, looked dazed, or otherwise struggled to handle the enormous tragedy of this terrible event. To the right was mostly an empty, open field, although with some spectators in the distance as this had been going long enough for the closest members of the public to come for some entertainment. The gorgeous girl was crying but not dramatically. It was the most common female reaction to recent events so it didn't signify much. I started moving her toward the right and down, about half the speed I usually moved my recently stripped victims. #19: #14: #19: #30: #1: #4: #16: (In case you think to wonder how we do it, to indicate "that boy" or "that [anything else]" when it's not obvious from the situation, whichever one of us is talking usually creates an arrow out of a couple dozen NP-points which is positioned immediately in front of and aimed at the subject, canceling and recreating the arrow a couple of times so it strobes. We all sense that easily, we can now tell who creates our ki-effects, and we know who's talking because we start everything we say by giving our number-name. It's an excellent system, although #14 had decided to modify it when he'd said "Wow, look at how gorgeous this girl is": he'd pointed at her with two flashing arrows. You can probably work out where they were pointing.) #14: #31: To strip someone, I have grips on all of their limbs so I can move them around as required. The subject of our current interest - for the lack of a better name let's call her "D-Cup" - was crying and had been unable to wipe her eyes. During D-Cup's descent, I placed an NP-seat under her. (In case you wonder, I could feel her naked ass with it, but unless I stroke with it the tactile feedback almost immediately becomes meaningless, just like your immobile hand on a bare ass will. I'll pause for a minute while you undress to grope your own naked ass to confirm that I'm right.) (Finished? No? I'll resume anyway. Try to catch up later.) Retaining just the grips I had on D-Cup's waist to hold her in the seat so she wouldn't jump off and hurt herself in the fall, I released her legs and arms. Unfortunately she immediately covered up her exquisite assets, but that was the price I had to pay for my act. I tried to impress her with my gentleness. I stroked the top of her head the way a mother would to give comfort. I lightly stroked her cheek a couple of times, then used that fingertip to wipe the tears off her face. As her seat neared the ground I patted her on the shoulder a couple of times, hoping to reassure her enough that she'd stay put so I could continue to gently caress her. D-Cup was responding to my touch somewhat, by calming a little and looking puzzled, but as soon as her seat was low enough she tried to jump off it, presumably wanting to run away. I was holding her waist so could have easily prevented her, but instead I helped her to her feet, patted her on the shoulder again, and then canceled all the NP I had around her. She ran away from our property's wall, running parallel to the street. The good news was that she didn't stop to look back at the boy who was looking at her the whole time. She ran - very nicely I must say, judged from every possible angle - a couple of hundred feet down the street, to join a group of women giving each other mutual support and protection, and for the lucky ones in the middle, cover as well. D-Cup was still inside my maximum range, so once she'd settled into the group and stopped talking, I lightly stroked her face. Her hands flew up to her cheeks as she looked around in reflex. I didn't let her catch my fingertip as that might have freaked her out even worse. Instead, once her hands were still, I lightly stroked the back of one of them. She looked at it in wonder. Still with a significant amount of fear, but wonder was in her expression too. I had to keep processing people, so I got back to that. Having only two sight blobs is a real pain, especially when I'd like to have one of them devoted to admiring and hopefully starting the seduction of D-Cup. Every now and then I'd take a second out of my stripping operation to use a sight blob to let me rub her cheek or some other little sign of affection. Each time I did so the magnitude of her response reduced, so by the fourth time she barely moved. She wasn't smiling though, so the next time I touched her, I used two fingertips, one of each of her cheeks. They stroked down to the corners of her mouth, where they pushed it upward gently, to make a smile out of her mouth. It didn't make her happy, but it certainly increased her puzzlement, and her fear appeared to be gone by now. The first couple of times I'd touched her when she was standing in the women's group, it'd looked like she'd asked the women around her if they were being touched on the cheek. I yet again regretted not having a sound blob because I would have loved to get a sense of what sort of person D-Cup was. Some of the women had shaken their heads, one had looked closely at D-Cup's cheek to see what could be seen, which was nothing other than a very pretty cheek. From the third such touch onward, D-Cup didn't say anything to the women, which pleased me. If she said too much she might get in trouble with her parents or become the focus of some nasty treatment from her church, and possibly be prevented from forming a wonderful new relationship with a particular local boy I had in mind. D-Cup's women's group decided they were large enough to risk the walk around the outside of our property to their church. The rapidly increasing number of spectators had probably forced that issue. I gave D-Cup a last, gentle pat on her shoulder. She still didn't smile, but there wasn't any visible negative reaction either. The rest of the mass-stripping operation was straightforward. There were no guns or any other drama, merely a large number of highly embarrassed people. Over eight hundred of them, I guessed. One of the girls with me made a comment partway through, "It's boring. Let's go back to the pool." Some of the others agreed but I had to stay within range so I'd said, "I want to wait here until the cops can get into our place, in case there's any trouble like our guards being accused of not helping enough. It is boring, so any of you can go if you like." D-Cup's wannabe boyfriend - I hoped that was the extent of his status - was my antepenultimate (third to last) victim. He'd seen D-Cup leave before then, so he behaved just like most of the other guys. I released the reporter at the same time as the last person. I canceled the Guardian Angel then too. The reporter immediately covered up. She'd been on display so long that I was amazed she still had any modesty left. The area in front of our gates was virtually empty of people now, all of the casual spectators had wisely decided to observe from a distance, and to back much farther away as the angel started running out of people to process. The only people nearby were the cops standing nervously by their cars. Even the news team was rapidly leaving the area, the reporter now wearing the cameraman's shirt. Paul approached me to ask, "Do you think it's safe to let the police in?" "Sure. There was never any direct threat against us so this was just the angel imparting a little lesson. The cops don't need a lesson so they're safe. The angel isn't a subtle creature because its mission is easier if it's blatantly obvious, so I'm sure you understand the situation as well as I do." Paul nodded, and we - including Carol and Julia who were still with me - walked together toward the gate, Paul motioning one of his guys to open it. Some of the cops started heading nervously our way. While I was walking I was also doing some tidying up with NP. I'd already hidden D-Cup's purse and cellphone under some bushes most of the way back to the Kids' House. I'd extracted all the cash, covered it in a piece of cloth that'd escaped the fire, then flew it very rapidly into the Staff Quarters. I put the rag in the trash and the money in the fridge on the beer shelf, leaving it to the staff to divide evenly. I returned the knives too. There was a lot of trash left behind as I hadn't let them use their placards as cover when they'd scuttled away. I picked those up, the many shoes that'd fallen off women's feet when I'd been holding them in the air, some jackets, a few handbags and other assorted crap. I fed the burnable stuff to the bonfire in the usual way, the non-burnable stuff to the trash. On the way to the gate, I said to Paul and the guard who was still with me, "Don't mention anything about the angel not burning the cash." "No chance of that!" said the guard. Paul said nothing, not having known about the cash. I got the impression he'd continue to say nothing. Paul's a "Think twice, act once" sort of guy. He'd realize that speaking up would piss off all the staff and potentially the angel too, so he wouldn't risk it. Mom and Dad walked out of the main tunnel and joined us at the gate. The cops arrived at the gate at much the same time. Nothing of significance had happened after the deaths of the skinheads and the first mass stripping, so I doubted much would come out of this much less bloody event. When I was asked to explain what happened, I answered, "We were at the pool when we heard the bedlam that mob was making so we came down to have a look. We stopped over there," I pointed, "and didn't do or say anything to provoke them. I heard the preacher say something about making me dead - I couldn't hear it very well but the news team should have it on tape. The angel must have better hearing than me because it took exception to whatever the preacher said and appeared right above him. From what I could see, the angel ripped the preacher's tongue out, which must've been a horrible experience. And then it did the mass stripping thing, the same as it did to the last mob of Christians that made a scene here. Would you ask them to give us advance notice next time so we can put up bleachers and sell tickets." I added the joke because I could see and proximity sense that the cops were pretty relaxed. I got a few chuckles, and the cops asked a couple of follow-up questions and a request for me to get the angel to answer questions by typing on a cellphone. I tried, but the angel didn't want to play that game. The cops gave up and turned to ask the others their stories. Mom made the main point, "We've seen that preacher on TV many times over the last few weeks and he always makes nasty comments about all of us and especially Mark. He seemed to be deliberately provoking the angel. I don't understand why because we've never had anything to do with his church." Julia was considerably more expressive, "It's fuckwits like him who incite people into shooting at us, like happened to poor Ava. The angel should've cut his head off." One of the cops told us his guess that the Ninnies - he used their proper, less accurate name - might have been angry with us because they'd wanted to buy our land just before we did, but they'd been turned down (I explained this point more completely earlier this chapter so I won't repeat it here). There was some general conversation that didn't amount to anything much. I made one more comment near the end, "Every now and then you hear about some religious nutcase climbing into a lion's cage at a zoo because he thinks God will protect him. The angel could take on every lion in the world and not get a scratch, but the preacher deliberately aggravated it. Why would he think that God would protect him from God's own angel?" "Who knows." The cops had mentioned that they hadn't heard about the preacher's medical status, so there was nothing else to talk about. My girls and I excused ourselves and headed back to the pool. Once we were far enough away, Julia exclaimed, "Good job! That'll teach the fuckwit to attack you." "If the angel doesn't convince the preacher to mend his ways, I'll bring out my big guns and unleash you on him." Back at the pool, we told the others that the cops were relaxed, took off our excess clothing, and resumed enjoying our peaceful afternoon. Meanwhile, I'd flown D-Cup's purse and cellphone into the house and was in the process of looking through them. I found her driver's license, which taught me that she was "Nevaeh Smith", aged sixteen. #32: #28: #12: #1: #4: Our thirty two prayers were answered. Nor were there any other names we recognized. She didn't treat her phone's memory as a highly structured filing system, unlike one particular girl I know. Nevaeh's phone entries were mostly entered as: "Firstname Lastname", but there were quite a few exceptions. She wasn't an anal person, which was good because I preferred her front. I added entries for Carol's and my names, giving our landline number. All our incoming calls are answered by our staff so there's almost no risk of nuisance callers annoying me. I added Carol's name even though we have the same landline number because she was going to help me seduce D-Cup. Bringing my sister on our first date would be non-threatening especially because Carol is good at being soft and caring, which was my best guess at the right approach to take because there hadn't been a membership card for a horse-riding club. D-Cup had been through a terrible experience, so Carol seemed like a very good choice. There were no saved text messages, and her calling/receiving history was almost entirely girls' names, her parents, or a few to or from "Harrison" which I hoped was a sur- rather than a boy's-name. There were a couple of incoming calls from a "Peter" [no last name], including one at 9:30pm last night, a Saturday. I was beginning to dislike Peter [no last name]. I took heart and at least one other organ from there being no calls logged from her to him. I turned her phone off and stashed it and her wallet in a drawer. At dinnertime we caught the news about this afternoon's incident. The preacher, Isaac Barry, was out of surgery to sew the stump of his tongue closed. The news item mentioned that the missing piece had not been found so he was going to have trouble talking intelligibly for the rest of his life. We knew none of us would be able to resist that invitation. #15 got in first with, #15: Then the network did a very good thing: they played a succession of several bad things he said about me: a dozen sound bites of the preacher's invective against me, including several along the lines of, "Mark Anderson should be dead", "He never should've been resurrected", and the best one at the end, "It's a pity he missed." The reporter subsequently explaining that the last comment was about the sniper who'd hit Ava but missed me. The reporter summarized, "Mr. Barry has been crusading against Mark Anderson by making verbal and inflammatory attacks. It would seem that he finally pushed Mark Anderson's Guardian Angel too far." Most of the news item was spent showing carefully selected shots of naked people, with various time-wasting drivel being said so more footage - but much more often ass-age and tit-age - could be shown. D-Cup didn't appear on screen, lowering my opinion of the cameraman's judgment considerably. If she'd been filmed, the producers would CERTAINLY have shown her repeatedly, so it had to be the cameraman's fault. It had to be his unintentional fault too because his sexual interest in females had been pointedly obvious at the time. I could only think that he'd used up all his film or battery power by the time I'd gotten to D-Cup, because there was no other possible explanation. By that time I'd got bored and hadn't been paying much attention, so I couldn't remember if he'd been filming then. I was pleased she wasn't shown because it would have been embarrassing, making the whole incident more negative for her, and her harder to seduce for me. There was very little condemnation directed at us or the angel. For some reason, the usual "They're EVIL!" yells were muted tonight. Later that evening I informed Carol, Julia and Ava about, "Nevaeh Smith, or as I like to call her, D-Cup." Then I explained why I called her that. I might have waxed poetic too much because they laughed at me quite a lot. They explained their laughter, and it turned out that I'd actually "waxed lecherous" to such a degree that they'd thought it was very funny. They also laughed at my new way of meeting girls, but I defended myself with, "It's very efficient to see what they look like naked first. That saves unpleasant surprises later..." "{Raspberry}." " ... and the staff certainly appreciate my new method." "That's true. They've been doing very well lately." They'd received their $375,000 each only a few days ago. Today's $1,600 was small potatoes but doubtless still appreciated. "Here's what I have in mind for D-Cup tonight..." I described my plan and the girls thought it was very funny. D-Cup was already bringing a great deal of pleasure into our lives, if only by giving my girls reasons to laugh at me. Julia and Ava were sorry they wouldn't be there to see it. "It's only the beginning of a plan. If she's REALLY gullible it might work fully in one night, but I doubt that even Christians can be that easily fooled. It's probably going to need several sessions so I'm sure I'll have opportunities to get you all involved." Notice that the previous few sentences state that I was perfectly happy to implement my plan without Julia's supervision or even input. That implies a change in my level of confidence and ability to manage people that hasn't been well documented lately. It's been a considerable time since this autobiography talked about our social plans in much detail, the last such events discussed in detail were when I first started playing around with Diana and Claire Norris and the other Cutie-Ducklings, the Target Game with some of the A-list girls from school, and my failure with Chloe Moon. Those events were in mid-2005, two years ago. I lost several months because of my second kidnapping, and even after I escaped the CIA's lab it took further months to become Ron Fisher and to get my new life to join with my families' lives. I was non-social until the lawsuits over the DHS/CIA kidnapping were finally settled. My autobiography's chapter: "Ron Reacquires A Previous Life's Hobby" was for the period starting mid-September 2006, nine months ago. For those months, when not at war with the US of A, I've enjoyed a busy social life and have learned a great deal, but I chose not to write about it. Those seductions weren't individually of much consequence. In fact, they were often not even "seductions", as being very rich and widely known to be a nice guy - thanks to my girls' advertisements - tends to remove the inhibitions from many girls. It was difficult for me to seduce a girl in the few moments I had while she was in midair, having thrown herself at me. My interactions with those girls weren't of individual consequence, but they were of collective significance in their boosting my confidence. A much greater boost to my confidence than I got from my ability to seduce or catch girls, was from my abilities. After my fifth merge my abilities gave me a level of power it was impossible for me to treat lightly. I could change my body radically, fly, exert several tons of force, study thirty two subject simultaneously, and I'm sure my IQ had risen some more too. I was, without doubt, POWERFUL! I was so confident about it that I willingly took on the armed forces and Government - and won! Telling my girls how I wanted to seduce D-Cup wasn't anything I had any hesitation in doing, especially because it was only a game. Which takes me to the next reason I was more confident. I'll warn you that the reason sounds somewhat unbelievable but it's actually true: it's not all that much fun to have sex with as many random girls as I do. I'm sorry, but that's true. It still fun of course, just not "all that much". Enough girls had thrown themselves at me that they've devalued the sexual experience enough that I actually enjoy the seduction more than the sex sometimes. The "Thrill of the Chase" is truly a thrill, and sometimes more of a thrill than what happens after the chase, which can be boringly repetitive especially if the girl isn't very good in bed. It's sad how many girls aren't, just lying on their back and passively letting the guy do whatever he wants. That probably makes many guys happy, but I've become so discriminating that it actually annoys me. D-Cup's seduction offered considerably more than the usual "thrill of chase" because of her body's perfection and beauty, and because of the seduction's bizarre start. Getting her into my bed after her being forcibly stripped naked for protesting against me outside my home was going to be a considerable challenge. Her incredible beauty was the main reason of course - it never would've occurred to me to seduce any of the other females from that protest - but the situation did make for a delightful challenge. I wouldn't get the thrill from the chase if I got Julia to do the chasing for me, as had happened in the early days of my experiences with other girls. I wanted to be in charge of seducing D-Cup because it might be a lot of fun for me. Although I was hoping to succeed, I didn't really mind failing since there are plenty of other fish in the sea. Very few of them are as beautiful as D-Cup, but I expected my interest in her to be only temporary anyway as she probably had less than an average-quality personality, given her Christianity and beauty. The chase should be fun, but by the time it's over I'll probably know her well enough to lose interest. I have been remiss in not writing about my changing personality while I have been growing in confidence, and it's about time that I write about one of my social interactions to illustrate my progress in that area. I'll take this opportunity to write in detail about my seduction of D-Cup. You'll be impressed by my improved effectiveness compared with my earlier attempt to seduce Chloe Moon, another very well-endowed Christian girl. Suspecting that D-Cup's protesting about me outside my home probably meant that she and her parents didn't approve of me, I couldn't rely on my normal seductive technique of smiling at a girl then standing still so she could throw herself at me. I was going to do something different. I had a rather amusing plan so you should enjoy the next several chapters; I know I did. ------- Part 17: Make Love, Not War (God Keeps On Helping) ------- Chapter 380: I Pick Up D-Cup, With Some Help From God Monday, July 2, 2007 Carol and I went for our drive shortly after midnight, driving to D-Cup's home, stopping a block away so I could do some snooping. I searched the house quickly to find out if she was there. After a quick glance in a couple of wrong bedrooms, I found her in the third. I took that as confirmation that God approved of my plan, which was good because He was going to be helping me. I looked around the house more slowly to get a feel for the Smiths. In a word - and it's not my favorite one - they're religious; even excessively religious by normal standards, so you can imagine how they compared to mine. For examples, the living room had a large crucifix on a wall and a bookshelf containing a large Bible and other mindless pap, at least half the pictures on the walls throughout the house had Christian motifs. I wrote "at least" because I feared that I was failing to recognize the motif for some of the others. The calendar on the kitchen wall by the phone was issued by my friends, the Galloping Ninnies. Mr. and Mrs. Smith slept in the same double bed, which gave me a faint hope, although I had to admit there was a significant difference between her parents sleeping together and D-Cup and me doing so. I was sure that her parents would agree with me on that, and I had a feeling that would be the only time her parents and I would agree on anything. The family photos in the living room showed four children. There was a family shot that had to be taken recently because it was in front of the Ninnies completed church. As I judged the ages from it, the children had been born in the order of: boy (looked about eighteen), girl (D-Cup; looked eighteen but was sixteen), boy (fifteen?), and girl (fifteen?). The younger girl was almost as gorgeous as Nevaeh and she had a very pretty face too. The house was a moderately upmarket one, having five bedrooms, all of which were occupied. I'd thought the older boy might've moved out if I'd underestimated his age, but he was sleeping soundly in his room. The parents' bedroom had an en-suite, and there were two other bathrooms, one of which was OBVIOUSLY for the girls. The parents' bedroom had a prominent crucifix on the wall above their headboard, which literally sent a shiver up my spine at the thought of how mentally ill people would have to be to do that, but none of the kids' bedrooms were similarly afflicted. The kids' rooms were all tidy, which for teenagers meant they were probably mentally ill too. There were no posters of rock stars or anything normal like that. This family was one of those that seemed not to have purchased a poster of me in my bright yellow Speedos. There were no TVs in the kids' rooms, and only the oldest boy had a computer. "Repressed", was the word that came to quite a few of my minds. I concentrated on D-Cup's room. The walls of her room were covered by many paintings. Some of them were framed, but most were merely pinned in place, giving me a feeling that they were her creations. If so, then she had quite a lot of talent, according to my very uninformed opinion. Other than art, her room held several soft toys of the type that girls seem to find irresistible, several fine-quality china ballerina figurines in a large display case mounted on a wall, and a musical instrument case that was somewhere between violin- and guitar-size. The room also had a music stand and a seat for her to sit on while playing whatever is inside the case. Given her family's attitude, I doubted she played any music I'd enjoy so I didn't care what the instrument was that she didn't play it on. Her bookshelf contained a Bible. I looked at the top of it very closely while I rubbed a small NP-fingertip along it, and I was VERY happy to see a good amount of dust. Yippee. I gave Carol that piece of good news as part of my running commentary to her. Carol gave me an agreeing "Yippee" back. There were a handful of other religious books. Things like, "The New Testament Explained for Teenagers" and other guides for how kids should think. None of them appeared to have been used recently. There was a year's worth of schoolbooks indicating D-Cup was into music and art. Mostly art I thought, as there appeared to be some extra art books that it seemed she'd bought for her pleasure, judging by their placement away from the schoolbooks. The majority of her bookshelf was filled with fiction. Some were classics like "Pride and Prejudice", but most were more modern. I didn't recognize most of the titles or authors, determining their modernity by the look of them. I pulled several of them out to read the blurbs on their backs or inside their dust covers. They all seemed to include romantic love. They weren't the lurid romance books that Julia used to read - which seems so unlike her personality these days; I certainly changed her life substantially - but they still offered a clue about D-Cup's personality. They looked like they'd seen considerably more use than the religious books, which was very pleasing. She had a shelf beside her single bed which contained a couple of books, presumably those she was reading now. I picked them up to have a look at their blurbs, and they were both fictional love stories. She had a closet that Julia would commit suicide in preference to restricting herself to (Carol laughed). It was packed solid - as girls' closets always are - but I was able to see that her dresses and skirts were all far too long, and it seemed she didn't have any tops that exposed much of her chest, which had to be at least a federal crime if not a hanging offense. There were no high-heeled shoes, but were a couple of low-to-medium ones. There was a pair of very too-small ballerina shoes in the front row, where they'd be easily seen. What with her china ballerinas, a couple of her paintings having a ballet theme, and these shoes, Carol and I decided that D-Cup used to do ballet when she was younger. That the ballet shoes were too small and there were none the right size implied she no longer did it, to her regret. I believe I've heard somewhere that ballerinas should be slim, which hadn't been one of the many words that'd come to my mind when I'd seen D-Cup naked, so maybe that was the reason. Three-quarters of the bras in her drawer were ordinary, boring, functional white ones; plus she had a couple of ordinary dark-colored ones. By "ordinary" I don't mean excessively unsexy; I just mean "ordinary". Happily she also had a few pretty bras. Not many, not even 10% of the number that Carol has - to please me Carol has bought a large number of VERY pretty bras - but it was still great news that D-Cup had some nice holders for her namesakes. None of the bras were thin, but none were as huge, thick and protective as Chloe's had been, thank God! They were mostly 34D's too, so I patted myself on my back while hoping that my next pats would be on someone else's front. Her panties were similar to her bras, in that most were ordinary. I didn't want to rummage through her panties because they were harder to inspect and put back into their original positions, and I feared she'd notice and suspect I was a pervert. From what I could see, there weren't any G-strings or other wonderful designs. The back of her drawer held some panties made of sheerer fabric and they looked to contain less material than the others, but not dramatically less. She had a small vanity setup on top of the set of drawers that contained her underwear. It had a mirror and a very limited array of makeup. A quick check of the girls' bathroom revealed no birth control pills and very little in the way of additional makeup. It did contain four different types of shampoo, five different types of conditioner, eight different types of moisturizer (although most of them didn't call themselves by such a mundane name), three different soaps, plus several creams and lotions that I couldn't comprehend the labels of enough to assign to a category. Carol wanted to know what they were, so I read out some of the names. Carol was impressed, which meant that I should be too because my girls don't let money - or the amount of shelf space in our bathroom - stand in the way of their cosmetic purchases. Having gleaned some clues about D-Cup's personality, it was time to move on to the risky part. If I hadn't done a good job of reassuring her earlier, Carol and I would very shortly be driving home while I worked on inventing a Plan B. D-Cup's purse and cellphone were in my car. I'd asked Carol to turn the phone on a couple of minutes ago so any noises it made would be over with before we moved on to the active part of my plan. Now that it'd told us about the missed calls, etc., I flew her phone and purse toward her house. Her bedroom window was too small for the second use I wanted to put it to, so I didn't bother opening it for these two items. Instead I opened the large sliding door they had going outside to their backyard from their living room. The stolen items entered that way and flew through the house to D-Cup's bedroom door. I opened it slowly to avoid making noise, slipped the items inside, then carefully closed the door again. I moved them to be floating in the air a few inches in front of her face, then created a mini-Guardian Angel that was about four inches across and much dimmer than normal. It was positioned at the base of her bed on the side that she was facing so she'll see it when she opens her eyes. I started stroking her cheek. The first stroke had no effect, the second made her smile, and halfway through the third her eyes FLEW wide open and her head shot around to look at who was touching her. I moved the Guardian Angel and stolen items back into her line of sight, the angel staying past the foot of the bed. I lightly placed an NP-fingertip across her lips and stroked her cheek and hair with other fingertips. She still looked panicky, and opened her mouth to draw a breath. I quickly moved her phone and purse right in front of her eyes and jiggled them to distract her. I also moved the Guardian Angel three feet farther away. I pressed her lips together more forcefully. Not in any way violent, and she could easily scream if she wanted to, but I hoped enough to help her decide not to scream. I moved the angel even farther away, all the way to the far wall where it hid 75% of its 'body' behind an ornament on a shelf. It was doing everything but roll on its back and wave its legs in the air. D-Cup paused with her mouth open, but I could see that it she wasn't screaming. It was just open in quiet shock. That was perfect as far as I was concerned. I jiggled her items again. She snaked a hand out from under the covers and plucked the most important item out of the air, pressing a few buttons to confirm it worked. I placed her purse on the bed covers, right in front of her nose. D-Cup put her phone down on the covers to use both of her hands to check her purse. Once she'd seen that the contents of her purse were as they should be, hopefully reassuring her further, I slowly floated the phone up a few inches and faced its screen toward her. I typed in a text message, "God wishes me to apologize. I am very sorry. I not know Miss Nevaeh Smith in the crowd." Unsurprisingly, she was puzzled. I hoped she was also very intrigued by getting a message that implied she was of direct interest to Heaven. Intrigued was much better than screaming in panic. She read and re-read it, frowning in even more puzzlement. Only the last two sentences were fully displayed, part of the first piece of bullshit having scrolled off the top while I typed the message. I was pretty sure she remembered it all though, so I didn't bother trying to bring it back. D-Cup opened her mouth, but I placed a finger across her lips again, which quieted her. I typed, "I would not have destroyed this phone and your purse if I had known. God has fixed them for you." Her eyes went WIDE at that! She was very impressed; as was Carol that I'd been so outrageousness. I told Carol, "All over the world, the churches make equally outrageous claims about their mythical God's actions, so I am too." I typed more on D-Cup's phone: "Is important to God and u that u come with me. Is quick, safe. Please?" I'm playing the Big Guy's card frequently and hard. You might think that's being too manipulative and sneaky, but in my defense I offer the first word of the next paragraph. D-Cup wasn't happy with that idea. She reached for the phone and I let her take it. She scrolled up and down through the accumulated message, reading it again. Still puzzled, she saved the message, cleared the screen, then typed, "Why?", turning it around to face the angel across the room. I moved the Guardian Angel back to just below the base of her bed. Obviously not so I could read the screen, but to show her that she could interact with it and nothing bad would happen. I floated the phone out of her hand, turned it around to face her, then typed, "Sorry, not for me to say. God wants done It's way. I promise you safe. Angels cannot lie." Being fictitious makes it impossibly difficult for angels to tell lies. I stroked her cheek gently while she thought about it. She took the phone, saved the message, then typed her own, "Where go? How long? M&D come?" I answered, "Trust in God. This is for Good. Please faith in yourself; you good person." #5: She typed, "I'm scared." "Yes. God only wants u if u strong. R u?" I pulled the side of her bedclothes open so she could get out of bed, took hold of one of her hands, and pulled her gently toward the open side of the bed. I wasn't pulling hard, and she was easily able to stay right where she was. I kept pulling with the same force. She started speaking, but I gently pinched her lips closed then waved the current message in front of her face again. I was debating if I needed to get the Guardian Angel to pretend to leave, maybe with a "I'm sorry u not suitable for God" (don't worry, I wouldn't have given up on her, just thought of then used another approach) but D-Cup saved me from that game by finding the courage to get out of bed. #15: #20: D-Cup had stood on a 3' x 3' NP-plate I'd created and placed on the floor for her to stand on. I'd retained my hold on her first hand, and I now took her other hand too, to help her keep her balance as I raised the plate a few inches. The surprise made her say something short. I couldn't tell what it was, but I was hoping for, "Fuck me!" I slowly accelerated the plate toward the door, holding her hands to keep her steady on it. The door opened for her, and the cellphone followed. At the time D-Cup was passing through the doorway, the Guardian Angel moved through the wall, to be in the hallway ahead of her. I hoped that'd impress the pants off her. Speaking of which, she was wearing a boring nightie. It fell to mid-thigh, making it shorter than her dresses, but that was the only faintly sexy thing about it - other than the two very large lumps in it. Not that the nightie mattered much because it will hopefully be off her soon. The Guardian Angel led the way to the living room. D-Cup was visibly nervous, but she was being moved slowly and I wasn't holding her hard, so she didn't feel too threatened. But she got considerably more nervous as soon as she saw she was heading for the open door to the outside, so I halted her movement, removed 75% of the force I was using to hold her hands, then floated the cellphone up to her eyes again, so she could re-read, "Yes. God only wants u if u strong. R u?" The Guardian Angel moved about two feet outside the door, then stopped to wait for her to make up her mind. She thought about it, then reached for the phone. I moved it back a foot, and she stopped her attempt. I saved the message for her later perusal, moved the phone closer so she could read it easily, then typed a new one, "Ur choice back or fwd. This only 1st test. R u strong for God?" #6: #19: #6: D-Cup made up her mind. She stood up straight and nodded determinedly at the Guardian Angel. I patted her on the back to congratulate her for her faith in God, tightened my grip on her hands slightly, then slowly accelerated her out the door. She didn't even look back as we passed into the outside. She was looking more and more like my favorite sort of girl: gorgeously bodied and highly gullibly minded. I flew her around the outside of the house toward the street, zigzagging her around trees and bushes. It would've been more direct to go up and over the house but it was important to minimize her stress. Like many streets in Corvallis, hers had trees growing along it. I stopped her in a carefully selected spot beside a large tree, lowering her to the grass where I canceled the plates she was on. She could feel the grass under her bare feet and immediately looked more relieved. I held up the phone to her, typing, "2nd test now. This easy for you." I was still holding her hands, and now I pulled them gently up in the air. She let them rise. When her hands were fully vertical, I started lifting the hem of her nightie up. It took her a second or so before she felt what was happening, and then her hands PULLED out of my soft grip, shot down and held her nightie hard against her thighs. I entered a new message, "You have poor understanding of God if u think any harm will befall u. This is being done for ur benefit, to teach u something VERY important for u to know. If u cooperate, in 15 min u will laugh at how foolish u r now. This I promise; I cannot lie. Trust God; It works in mysterious ways." I gave D-Cup the phone so she could scroll up and down while she thought about it. She'd calmed down considerably, but a large part of that would be because I was no longer pulling her nightie up. I wasn't touching her anywhere at the moment, and the mini-Guardian Angel was hovering dimly ten feet away. She read and re-read the message again, which was certainly a lot better than running screaming back into her home. After a long think, she saved the message and typed, "U could make me?" I answered, "No. This is for ur benefit. Cannot be forced or benefit lost. You must agree to do or I leave." #5: #13: After some more thought, D-Cup typed, "People might see me." "Trust God. It works in mysterious ways." She thought about it some more. #14: #3: D-Cup raised her arms. I didn't waste any time celebrating, instead getting the nightie off her very quickly indeed. By now I was very eager to see some return - where "return" means "tit" - for all the effort I was putting into this. Instead I saw a bra and panties. #6: #14: #20: I didn't want two more battles, so I typed another message, "Remove rest yourself. Drop on ground. Nearly too late; please hurry." I'd dropped the nightie on the ground beside her, to give her the idea. To my considerable surprise, D-Cup quickly complied, removing her bra and panties. #19: #20: As soon as she straightened up after dropping her panties on the pile, I picked up the pile and flew it rapidly out of sight back into her property. By the time she'd taken a breath and half raised the hand covering her breast to protest, her clothes were out of sight and the Guardian Angel had disappeared. She subsided. ^ [I imagine you're surprised that a girl would strip naked outside; it doesn't seem believable. It doesn't even seem believable that I'd be silly enough to try to get her to do it. It certainly didn't happen because the angel had already stripped her once so she'd willingly strip for it again. I didn't know much about how girls thought, but I knew they didn't think that way. I attempted it because: I'd learned from Chloe Moon not to waste my time with Christian girls. I wanted to find out as quickly as possible if the direct path would work, so that's what I tried first. I could always use a Plan B if it didn't, assuming I still wanted her after seeing the manner in which she'd refused Plan A. If she'd refused with all sorts of Christian drama crap, I might've chucked the whole seduction away. If she'd refused reasonably then I would've tried a Plan B. There was no real downside to starting with such a direct approach. I suspected it had a decent chance of working. The church she goes to is the Galloping Ninnies, which is a very authoritarian church. I'd read their website quite thoroughly because I was astonished at how transparently obvious their control game was. They state up front that going to their church means not thinking for yourself and doing everything the church leaders tell you. That message is given behind a veneer of religious verbiage, but the veneer is so thin it's transparent. One of the approaches I'd thought of for Nevaeh was to have the Guardian Angel command her to do what I wanted, but I'd decided against it because a relationship based on orders would have no "thrill of the chase", and would have been tedious after it'd started. Nonetheless, as her church does, the angel's text messages were designed to encourage her to give responsibility over to a religious authority figure, God in this case. He'd seemed like a good choice. Nevaeh had gone along with it because: She was a very religious girl, where the version of religion is what she'd learned from her very authoritarian church. God wanting her to do something, although presented as a request, had a truly powerful effect on her. GOD wanted HER to do something! It was effectively a command. As you'll read later, her parents are particularly religious and prominent in the Ninnies, so she'd been very well brainwashed for many years.] ^ Having FINALLY gotten her into the position I wanted, I started the next stage of my plan. Carol and I were sitting in my Lexus convertible with the roof down and the engine off, parked on the side of the street around the nearest corner. I lifted the car about three feet off the ground, and flew it silently around the corner and toward D-Cup. Where the angel had placed her, the trees obscured her view of our approach. It was also a still night and my car was silent. With its roof down, Carol's and my voices would be easily heard. At the right point I gave Carol's leg a squeeze, and she started reciting her script, asking me with apparent confusion, "You don't have ANY idea where we're going?" "No idea at all. The angel has NEVER done anything like this before. It's only ever..." "Stop Mark! There's a naked girl there." "I can't stop, the angel is ... Oh, it's lowering us." D-Cup had tried to hide behind a tree but NP forced her to stay where she was, by acting as a wall in each direction she tried to flee. Carol exclaimed, "Don't look at her, Mark! She's upset." "Okay." I looked the other way. I even shut my eyes, which had the benefit of letting me use two sight blobs to see everything with. Carol got out of the car, approached D-Cup, and asked her, "Are you all right?" The Guardian Angel reappeared about three feet to the side of the two girls. D-Cup was surprised, but Carol wasn't, saying, "Oh, the angel's here." Carol turned to me, "The angel's here, Mark." I kept looking away, saying back, "It's up to something. Is the girl still upset?" "Yes," answered Carol. Adding, "Hang on, I'll give her my nightie." Carol was wearing the most boring nightie she had, to appear virtuous. I was wearing pajama bottoms only, so I obviously couldn't offer to give anything to D-Cup. Carol pulled her nightie off over her head, rendering her naked (no bra or panties for Carol, not that she wears them to bed anyway). Carol passed her nightie to D-Cup, saying, "Put this on." Before D-Cup could react, the pesky angel plucked the nightie out of Carol's hand and flew it into D-Cup's property. Carol called to me, "The angel took my nightie, Mark. I have a feeling it wants her to remain naked." "Find out her name while I get the blanket out of the trunk. I won't look at her." I popped the trunk and sidled around the side of the car, very carefully facing away from D-Cup the whole time. While I was getting the blanket out, Carol introduced herself, "Hi. I'm Carol Anderson, Mark's sister. Who are you and what's Mark's angel doing with you?" D-Cup answered, "I'm Nevaeh Smith. I don't know what it's doing. It made me strip and it won't let me move." "That's very strange..." I interrupted, "I've got the blanket, Carol. Please come and get it from me." "Okay." Carol tried, but the naughty angel stole the blanket too. After Carol informed me of that piece of mischief, I said, "The angel's definitely up to something. We need to talk about this. I'll keep my eyes shut, so can you lead me over there please, Carol?" "Sure." Carol came the few steps to me, taking my arm in her usual manner and leading me over to D-Cup. The fact that Carol was naked and my bare upper-arm was pressed into her breast was something she and I completely ignored. D-Cup noticed though, but decided to say nothing. I did my "Blind Man" routine as Carol steered me toward D-Cup. I was walking toward her and my face was pointing her way, but I had my eyes closed. That wasn't enough for D-Cup, she tried once again to move behind a tree but the angel wouldn't let her. Even though her best bits were covered by her hands and arms, D-Cup still demanded of me, "Don't look!" "I'm not. My eyes are shut." By now Carol had stopped us in front of D-Cup. I extended my hand in an offer to shake hands, my hand deliberately at not quite the right angle, saying, "Hi, I'm Mark Anderson. I didn't catch how you pronounce your name?" "Please look away!" Carol explained, "Nevaeh, Mark has already said he won't look. He knows you don't want him to, so he won't." "But he could open his eyes." Carol used that to justify delivering the line we'd scripted, "Mark is SO moral that God has given him an angel! Isn't that incredible? You've never met ANYONE in your entire life more trustworthy than Mark, so your worrying about him looking at you is unnecessary." I repeated, "I won't look at you. Is your home nearby?" "Ahh, just behind me." "Good. Let's get off the street and go inside for a talk." D-Cup moaned, "I CAN'T MOVE!" "I'm guessing that the angel wants us to meet and to talk, and now that we have, it'll let us walk somewhere together." I must be a good guesser because the angel immediately led the way back onto D-Cup's property. She didn't want to go first, clearly still worried about me sneaking a peek, so Carol led me while D-Cup followed us. We didn't get to go inside, as the angel had spread the conveniently provided blanket in a quiet corner of their garden. It was an especially quiet corner because once we were standing on the blanket, I built a high NP-box around us, leaving just the center of the top open for some fresh air. We could talk at normal volumes now without anyone at ground level hearing us. We sat on the blanket with me roughly facing D-Cup, Carol in front and to the side of me, leaning back on me with my arm around her. We often sit like this, with NP providing me with a backrest - it's very useful ability. My eyes were shut and they remained that way. D-Cup was very suspicious initially and often checked. The angel was to one side, and it got things started by calling up the list of saved messages and giving Carol the phone. Carol asked, "What's this list, Nevaeh?" Nevaeh never did introduce herself to me properly, but considering the circumstances I can't say I really blame her. Carol pronounced Nevaeh's name as "neh-VAY-uh", and Nevaeh never (pronounced "nev-er") corrected Carol, so it was presumably right. As my plan specified, Carol read out each message in turn, giving us time to discuss each of them before reading out the next. The discussion didn't take long as the messages were mostly on the same theme. The messages and discussion were as follows (somewhat condensed): "God wishes me to apologize. I am very sorry. I not know Miss Nevaeh Smith in the crowd. I would not have destroyed this phone and your purse if I had known. God has fixed them for you." I checked with her that she'd been at the demonstration today, then I shoveled some sympathetic crap. We all thought this message was very interesting because it implied that the Guardian Angel knew Nevaeh's name in advance and that she was important to God in some way. D-Cup thought that was amazing, but she thought that God fixed her phone and purse was utterly mindblowing. I dismissed it as unimportant: "Of course God can make or fix things. Why are you impressed by that?" She had difficulty answering as most of her thrill came from ego. I concentrated the conversation on conjectures about why she was important. She couldn't guess, and Carol and I certainly weren't going to tell her. D-Cup tried to use the phone to ask the angel, but it sent back with, "Up to u 3 now. I witness only, to report to God." That impressed D-Cup again. Carol made a sympathetic comment about poor Nevaeh being stripped naked twice in one day. "Trust in God. This is for Good. Please faith in yourself; you good person." Carol asked, "ARE you a good person, Nevaeh?" Nevaeh thought she was, to which Carol answered, "Then why are you unable to trust Mark not to peek? Your lack of trust doesn't speak well of you." The next several messages had all been to get D-Cup to do what I'd wanted. Carol asked, "Why didn't you do what that angel wanted the first time? It's an ANGEL for goodness sake. If you can't trust an angel, who can you trust?" That shamed D-Cup nicely, hopefully making it easier to get her to strip naked in the future. "You have poor understanding of God if u think any harm will befall u. This is being done for ur benefit, to teach u something VERY important for u to know. If u cooperate, in 15 min u will laugh at how foolish u r now. This I promise; I cannot lie. Trust God; It works in mysterious ways." Carol chuckled and said, "AHH! I understand now." Nevaeh didn't and asked for an explanation. Carol was happy to provide it, "God sent the Guardian Angel to Earth for Mark. If it's involved with you, then it's for Mark. It wants you to meet Mark and it wants you to trust him. That's why it made you meet Mark when you were naked: so you can see that Mark is too moral to steal peeks like you're still so worried about. That'll also be why the angel got me out of bed to come with Mark, because the angel knew you'd see how much I trust Mark. I enjoy sitting with Mark's arm around me, and I don't care that I'm naked with him because I trust him totally. God wants you to learn to trust Mark. That God knew your name in advance is VERY interesting! I think something very special might be about to happen to you." Once the messages in the phone were exhausted, the conversation wandered around of its own accord. Nevaeh had one MAJOR problem, "Reverend Barry preached that Mark is a bad man. He even said Mark is evil." Carol laughed, adding, "That's RIDICULOUS! God would never resurrect an evil person, let alone assign an angel to protect him! I've known Mark all my life and he's the most wonderful person I've ever met. Your preacher couldn't be more wrong." I said, "That's probably part of why the angel said Nevaeh has to be strong. If you want to carry out God's will, Nevaeh, you're going to have to be strong enough to form your own opinion of me, not blindly accept your church's opinion. That's not going to be easy for you. Look up 'Anderson' in your phone. I bet my name is there." D-Cup did so, not finding any Andersons. She said, "You're not in here." The angel held the phone still in her hand while it pressed some more keys D-Cup said, "Oh, here it is. You're in as 'Mark Anderson'. The angel's searching again ... You're in here too, Carol. You were right, Mark. How did you know?" "I can feel that the angel made us sit in a remote corner of your garden to have a conversation rather than in your living room, so it wants your relationship with us to be kept secret from your family. The obvious thing for it to do is put my number in your phone so you can call me when you're able, as my calling you could let the secret out. And now I suspect that Carol is here tonight for the reason Carol said - so you can see how much she trusts me - but also because the angel wants you to meet Carol because you two are going to become friends. That's why her number's in your phone, because your family will be less upset with you being friends with Carol than with me. I bet you are either fifteen or sixteen, aren't you, Nevaeh?" "I'm sixteen. Why?" "Carol turns sixteen on the 12th. You're the right age to be Carol's friend. God has set this up very carefully." "Wow! I can't believe God's involved in my life. That's AMAZING!" #9: Carol answered, "We're still getting used to it too. That's something else we have in common, although it's really only because of how special Mark is." #4: Having warmed up with the "God Wants Us To Be Friends" reason, Carol brought out the REALLY big gun, "I wonder if we'll be good enough friends by mid-August so you can come to Italy on our shopping trip?" Our trips and that we let many friends come with us had been written of in Corvallis's newspaper several times, so it was a safe bet that D-Cup understood that Carol's comment meant a free trip to Italy to go clothes shopping. It really is a superbly tempting bait to dangle in front of a girl. D-Cup immediately responded, "That'd be FANTASTIC!!!" (My English teachers told me to never use more than one exclamation mark in a row. This is the ONLY place in my autobiography that I use more than one. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion about what Nevaeh thought of Carol's suggestion.) #1: I did NOT want to talk about clothes shopping in Italy, so that bait having been dangled, I QUICKLY changed the subject. I wanted to get to know D-Cup better. Now that I think of it, I should get used to calling her by her correct name, since accidentally calling her "D-Cup" in conversation wouldn't help my moral image, which gave me the idea of what to distract her with. I asked, "Nevaeh, God wants me to get to know you better, so we'd better do EXACTLY what God wants. Let's start with your name. I've never heard it before..." Nevaeh was still excitedly gushing to Carol about how wonderful going to Italy would be, but my invoking God so forcefully caught her attention back to me. Nevaeh started excitedly answering my question. We learned that "Nevaeh" isn't an old biblical name, but it is a sort of modern one, being a recent invention by some idiot who decided to spell Heaven backward and give that name to his daughter, and it caught on with other idiots. We all thought it was amazing that even her name implied that she should get together with me. I didn't bother explaining all my logic to her, but in case you can't quite see how inescapable it was, it goes like this: Nevaeh should get together with Mark because: (a) Her name is Heaven spelled backward, and (b) She's got fantastic tits. Logic is a very powerful tool. Note the "get together with me" comment just above. Carol and I had previously agreed that telling D-Cup my true intention for her - "God wants you to be one of Mark's lovers" - would be best not made explicit until we'd seen how she reacted to everything else. I did want to tell her quickly to avoid repeating the terrible waste of time and effort Chloe Moon had been, but we'd decided it'd be best to just talk about God wanting her to be friends with Carol and me first. I'd made the "get together with me" comment because she seemed accepting enough of me that I could start steering her toward being intended specifically for me rather than a friendship with Carol and me. Nevaeh had apparently not grasped the situation's inescapable logic because she responded, "Ahh, what do you mean 'together'? I hope you don't mean boyfriend because everyone disagrees with you having so many girlfriends." She was wrong that "everyone" disagrees with that. As just one counter-example, I HIGHLY approve of my having so many girlfriends! I suspected she meant everyone in her world rather than in mine. She's going to be straddling two 'worlds' soon, and perhaps some other things too, so her attitude needed to be fixed. I had heard the Ninnies' spokesman rail about my sexual lifestyle several times so I was very well aware that they objected to it. We'd prepared a defense: Carol said, "God knows Mark's mind inside out because God personally spent several weeks healing it of the damage the CIA did. God knows Mark has other girlfriends but still chose to bring you together with him. The angel has been sent to Earth for Mark's benefit, so while you and I might become friends and enjoy each other's company, there's no doubt that God wants you to be with Mark. God has obviously chosen you to be Mark's girlfriend, so don't even think about not doing it, and especially don't think about refusing on moral grounds - that's nonsense and highly insulting to Mark and God. It's not your place to think you can judge people's morals better than God, but to do what God wants you to do." Nevaeh had started the topic with a serious, deal-breaking concern, and after Carol's short speech the concern was totally gone. In proximity, her concern disappeared. She'd think of something else to be concerned about shortly, but the multiple girlfriends issue was history. It REALLY pays to take your sister and God with you when you're seducing girls! In all seriousness - because a seduction of a girl with tits as glorious as Nevaeh's has to be taken seriously - the best thing we had going for us was Nevaeh's gullibility and willingness to do what God told her. I could tell in proximity that she was eating up the God crap to a degree that truly did make me question her intelligence. It didn't make me question her tits so I didn't hesitate to keep charging ahead with my plan, but it did make me wonder how any girl could be so easily misled. "Do you really think God wants me to be Mark's girlfriend?" Nevaeh was directing her question at Carol. She may have been extraordinarily gullible, but she was certain to have already learned not to trust boys to truthfully answer questions about ANYTHING to do with boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. I'm almost ashamed to say it, but guys have been known to exaggerate and even to tell lies to get their hands on pretty girls. (I'll pause for a few seconds to let you recover from the shock of learning that.) Carol tightened the screws, "God sent Archangel Michael to Earth to check on my brother, and then the Guardian Angel to live with and help him. The Guardian Angel arranged for you to meet Mark in a way that would show you how moral he is and how much you can trust him. The angel even knew your name in advance, so I think God has very serious plans for you to be part of Mark's life. To me it's obvious that you've been given the opportunity to serve God and have the most amazing experience of your life, provided you don't show as much distrust of God and Mark as you were doing before. I couldn't believe how hard the angel had to push you to get you to do what it wanted. I hope you don't disappoint God by not trusting Mark the way you should." Carol was being quite impressively convincing, but I worried about pushing D-Cup too far too fast. We didn't intend her to be my girlfriend but my lover; we were saying "girlfriend" euphemistically at the moment, as a halfway point in telling her what her true place in my life would be: either under me or on top of me; both would be good. I had no doubt that getting into that detail would be "WAY too far and too fast" for her, so I thought I needed to establish more credibility before getting to the stage that Carol was going for, so it was time for some boastful bullshit. I waited while Nevaeh gushed her assurances that she did trust God, wouldn't make that mistake again, etc. It sounded good but it didn't mean anything, including not meaning that she'd actually behave any better in future, especially as she didn't say that she'd be happy to be my girlfriend. She was just gushing as people do when something they pride themselves on is questioned, in this case her not trusting God. When she ran out of breath, I said, "By the tone of your voice a little while ago, when you were questioning my having other girlfriends, you're not unattached either. But I get the impression that whoever the boy is, he's chasing you a lot harder than you're chasing him." "How on Earth can you tell that!" "God doesn't personally get involved in people's lives unless something VERY important is happening, so I'm giving you my TOTAL attention. To do otherwise would be highly disrespectful of God, which I'd NEVER do. My eyes are shut but I'm listening very hard, which in some ways makes it easier for me to pick up nuances that other people might miss." Carol added, "Mark's too modest to say it, but he's incredibly smart. He's a huge genius. You can tell from how well he can read you already, that lying to him would be a very foolish idea." D-Cup replied to our implicit question about her boyfriend, and we learned that the Harrisons were close friends of Nevaeh's family, that Mr. Harrison was one of the church leaders, and Peter Harrison was the son. Their families expected Peter and Nevaeh to marry before many more years. Nevaeh's parents were particularly happy with the idea, and for the last year or so, Nevaeh herself had been particularly not. She finished with, "I've been thinking about breaking up with him for a while, so I'm happy to do it for you, Mark." Carol wasn't going to stand for that! "Nevaeh, how DARE you imply you're doing it as a favor for Mark. He's a thousand times better than any other guy you'll EVER meet. He's doing YOU a favor by spending time with you. You're just an ordinary girl, while Mark is so important and wonderful that God Himself is looking after him." "I didn't mean it like THAT, Carol! I meant I was happy to do whatever Mark wants me to do." "I should think so! I'll get very angry with you if you ever forget how important Mark is..." #5: #10: I continued my bullshit to build my credibility, "Thank you for your support, Carol, but I don't believe Nevaeh will misbehave on more than a couple of small occasions, and even then only out of thoughtlessness rather than deliberate disobedience. God knows what sort of girl I need, and I'm sure Nevaeh meets those needs. -- "For example - as you said before, Carol - God and I already have an understanding that overrides anyone else's views for how I should live my life, so I need a girl who's obedient to me. Clearly Nevaeh would be such a girl when she's in the company of a man she respects. -- "Another example would be that because I'm studying at the rate of three science degrees per year, I do a HUGE amount of scientific thought. It'd be great for me to have a girlfriend who's into the arts. I bet God picked Nevaeh because she is, right Nevaeh?" "Oh my God! I AM! That's EXACTLY right!" She spent a couple of minutes blathering on about all the art and music stuff she did, which I tuned out. I did manage to hear her say, "It's amazing how much you know about me." "That's partly true. I was able to predict some things about Peter Harrison for example. But the main reason is that God and I have an understanding. I can't say I understand HIM - that'd be a ridiculously arrogant claim! - but I can say that I understand SOME of His actions. Because He obviously approves of me so much I can use that to understand some things about what He does around me. Obviously He'd only send me a girl who is very suitable for me, and I know what sort of girl that is, so all I have to do is guess that's how you are. It makes me seem smart but that's not my intent. It's just simple logic and confidence in having God's support and attention." D-Cup was very impressed. She raved for a while, which was music to my ears because she was effectively gushing about how utterly convinced she was. I said, "To return to the conversation about what you should do about Peter. My thought is that you should break up with him sooner rather than later, and I'm guessing you've got a great excuse available already. Peter was close beside you at the demonstration today, wasn't he?" "Yes. How did you know that?" "You already said you were there. Peter's father is important in the church so he was probably there. And I've a feeling that Peter would think that he'd be able to impress you at an event like that, so he'd have made sure to stick close to you." "That's exactly right again. You're VERY smart!" "That's only because I left out the obvious reason why he'd want to be with you: you're beautiful and have a fantastic body." "What! You PROMISED you wouldn't peek! I BELIEVED YOU! I..." She was getting upset, so the angel NP-pinched her lips together quite forcefully. The surprise of that shut her up. I filled the silence with, "I know that ONLY because that's the type of girl God would send to me. I have NOT peeked at you. I said I wouldn't do so and I keep my word. What distresses me greatly about your outburst is how quick you were to assume I was a liar..." "Oh no! I didn't mean to..." Carol rammed the knife in even further and twisted it, "Mark is DIVINELY blessed! He has his own angel, for God's sake! I'm APPALLED how fast you forgot how special Mark is, and how ordinary you are by comparison." By the look of her reaction, including in proximity, Nevaeh truly did think she was "ordinary by comparison", although anyone looking at her now sure as hell wouldn't think so. Sure as heaven too, spelled either way. "I know! I know! I won't do..." I especially enjoyed Carol interrupting with, "You should be ASKING Mark to look at you, not screaming your selfish head off because you think he peeked. God has GIVEN you to Mark! If Mark wants to look at you, your only concern should be how fast to twirl to give him the best possible view of you. You accused my wonderful brother of being a liar AND you proved that you were totally self-centered. I think Mark should reject you and ask God to find him a girlfriend with a better personality." #15: #1: Nevaeh was wonderfully contrite, BEGGING for forgiveness. She lunged forward and grabbed the arm I had innocently draped over Carol's shoulder. It was lying along Carol's arm rather than anywhere sexual, and it was an easy grab for a very panicky Nevaeh. She squeezing it repeatedly, urging me to forgive her. I let her stew to make her ready for the next topic I was going to raise. During the stewing period, Nevaeh wanted forgiveness and reassurance so much that not being able to look me in the eyes upset her. She said, "PLEASE open your eyes so I can talk with you, Mark. There's no need for you to keep them shut. You can look at me all you want." To increase D-Cup's discomfort I said, "I'm going to keep them shut. I'll spend tomorrow thinking about whether you're suitable for me, and it'd be best if that decision is based only on your personality." Proximity showed her to suddenly have a huge amount of worry, and even some quiet panic. It wasn't hard to guess why. The news that she might be rejected was bad enough, but to base the decision only on her personality was terrible news. Carol had only just finished saying that she thought I should find a girl with a better personality, and now I was saying personality was the only criterion. I'd deliberately chosen to use the same word as Carol to make Nevaeh less secure. She knew she had a KILLER bod - every male that crossed her path would've sent her that message. She also knew that her personality wasn't even close to being in the same league as her body. She'd lost her biggest advantage and now had nothing going for her. Less than nothing even, because she did seem to consider herself inferior. I guessed her self-image had suffered from having been brought up in a strongly authoritarian Christian environment that had exposed her to a never-ending stream of messages that females are inferior to males. I'm sure that sexist belief is the real reason the Catholic Church doesn't allow female priests. Logically, she should believe all her competitors for my attention were equally disadvantaged so it'd cancel out, but that's not the way such things work. Messages like that get personalized and internalized. In the presence of someone as wonderful and God-favored as me, her self-doubts magnified greatly. Having heard that I'd be rejecting her tomorrow - that's how she interpreted it - D-Cup burst into tears, sobbing, "Oh no!" and a bunch of incomprehensible blubberings. #15: #12: Nevaeh had initially used her arms and hands to retain her modesty, but she'd recently started relaxing about that, such as when she'd grabbed my arm to beseech me. My being so trustworthy about keeping my eyes shut and Carol's being uncaringly naked had eased D-Cup's frantic concern about her body, and the whole conversation was blowing her normal concerns away. Carol comforted D-Cup. Carol is so good at it that she can say "There, there" at least five times more effectively than I can. I interrupted Carol before D-Cup was too reassured, to raise the next issue, "Are you a virgin, Nevaeh?" It would've been good to make another impressively accurate guess, but I could've gotten it wrong. From what she was saying before, she and Peter have been together for quite a while, and I doubt she's let him commit any sinful acts on her, but I wasn't sure enough to risk losing my credibility. My question cheered Nevaeh up immediately. She declared proudly, "Yes I am! I've been keeping myself pure." "Good. I'll decide whether or not to accept you by tomorrow evening; and if I do, we'll arrange something nice for a couple of evenings later when I take your virginity." "What! But, umm, I was saving..." The Guardian Angel bobbed up and down rapidly, which I was about to comment on when I realized that I wasn't meant to be able to see that with my eyes shut, so the cellphone raised itself a few inches and its display brightened as the angel typed in a new message: "VERY good! Do what Mark says Miss Nevaeh Smith. If Mark accepts you, he will be your leader and you his follower. Not equal relationship. OBEY him always!" Yes, I know I wrote a while ago that it wouldn't have been thrilling to base our relationship on her obeying me. I've spent the last several minutes looking very closely at her naked body. I've already taught you what a powerful tool logic is, so you should be able to deduce my current thinking on the matter. #16: #All: I made an issue out of my being blind to get Carol to read the message out to me, after which Carol added, "Wow, Nevaeh. It looks like God's got your life planned out already, and it's going to include spending a lot of time with Mark. You're going to be the envy of millions of girls." "This is SO unexpected..." I chuckled, "Yeah, I imagine that when you woke up this morning, you didn't expect God to tell you to give yourself sexually to a guy who was dead for a year, haha." "Mom and Dad aren't going to believe this! They're..." "You're getting ahead of yourself, Nevaeh. First I have to decide whether to accept you or not. And then we'll keep our relationship a secret for a while, until I know you well enough to understand what I should be doing with you. Obviously God has a plan for you, but you'll have noticed that God and His angel don't tell me what to do. They give you orders, but they're deliberately making me learn for myself. It's easy for you because you just have to obey me. But I've got to make all my own decisions, and with God looking over my shoulder the whole time I have to take that responsibility very seriously. So don't worry about your mother and father yet, okay?" "I understand. But don't you have to accept me because God obviously wants us to be together?" "You made two mistakes. First, God doesn't want us 'to be together'. It's clear that He wants you to serve me. Maybe in public we'll say we're boyfriend and girlfriend, but that's only because people don't believe in God well enough to understand what it means for God to have given you to me. Privately we'll know that we aren't 'together'. You'll be mine and I won't be yours in any sense. -- "Your other mistake was in thinking that I have to accept you. I don't HAVE to do anything. God wants me to make my own decisions. I'm going to become an incredibly important and powerful man in a few years, and God is preparing me for that responsibility..." #5: #9: " ... Let me put it this way. When the angel wanted you to strip naked half an hour ago, you put up a heck of a fuss and worried about all sorts of bad things, but what's happened since has been NOTHING like you imagined. The angel told you that 'God works in mysterious ways.' He does that with me too, far more so than He does to you. He resurrected me into a different person's body, and you can't get any more mysterious than that! This situation looks like it's obvious that I should choose you, but half an hour ago it was obvious to you that you shouldn't let the angel strip you naked when you were standing outside in the middle of the night. With God involved, and with Him being so mysterious, powerful and knowledgeable, I'd be very foolish to make obvious decisions about something as important as another person's life. Everybody deserves to be treated with care and consideration, so that's what I'm doing with you." "But I want you to pick me! I'll obey everything God and you say. I REALLY will!" "It's more complicated than that. There are many good reasons why you will fit into my life well, including many we haven't mentioned: your classical arts training in something like an orchestra or ballet, your bisexuality, your care over keeping..." I was going to say "keeping your appearance healthy with..." and then some crap about her using moisturizers carefully and not too much makeup, but she saved me from having to invent and pad out that crap. She had started reacting to my mentioning ballet, but my immediately following it with "your bisexuality" threw her for a loop (that's what bisexual girls aim for). She floundered speechless for a second, then exclaimed, "I am NOT bisexual! I've NEVER done anything with a girl! I..." "QUIET!" Somewhat to my surprise, she did shut up. She respected all the bullshit Carol and I had fed her. I continued, "Judging by the timing of when you drew your breath and the way you drew it, I'm guessing that you used to do ballet and that you used to enjoy it a great deal, but you had to give it up for some reason. Am I right?" "You're EXACTLY right! You knew that just from the way I breathed?" "Sure. You're badly underestimating me, Nevaeh. I'm not like anyone else you've EVER met. God wouldn't have resurrected me and given me a Guardian Angel if I was an ordinary person. I'm EXCEPTIONALLY intelligent and perceptive. I can learn things about people that would amaze you, so your disagreeing with my opinions is foolish and insulting. All you're doing is making us believe you won't be a suitable person for me to accept into my life, because I CERTAINLY don't want someone who's going to constantly disagree with me about things I can see are obvious. -- "You ARE bisexual, and I know that for two different reasons. They're both totally convincing reasons so there's no possibility that I'm wrong. First, because God wouldn't have chosen you unless you are bisexual. Carol's a lesbian and I sleep with Julia and Ava every night, both of whom are bisexual and often have sex with each other and Carol. Plus we have other girls as our friends and lovers too. To fit into my life, you have to be bisexual..." "But I've NEVER..." "Then how can you know?" "I've never even WANTED to!" "Only because you've repressed it in yourself. Probably your upbringing has made you bury your feelings. If you think back to your early adolescence, I'm sure you'll remember some times that you had feelings like that, but you refused to accept them and now you've buried them too deep. They'll come out fine once you're in a healthy, non-repressed environment." I'd talked about bisexuality plenty of times with various girls - it's somewhat of an interest of mine - usually because I've gained a new lover and I've wanted to educate/trick her into the undoubted merits of sexual sharing. I knew all girls had mixed-up sexual feelings in their early adolescence. Hormones were flying all over the place and there was a great deal of inexperience and confusion going on. I could sense Nevaeh's embarrassment as she remembered incidents from her past, and could see that she was impressed far more than she should've been by my very safe and easy prediction. I continued, "Plus there's the second reason I know about your orientation. You and Carol have been sitting naked together for the last half an hour and Carol is a very beautiful girl. I've sensed dozens of signals of interest from you, Nevaeh." "But I haven't felt ANYTHING like that. Obviously I've noticed that Carol's naked and beautiful, but it hasn't affected me that way." "Not consciously, but it certainly has subconsciously. I know what I'm talking about. I was right in all my statements about your ballet background, wasn't I?" "Yeah, but I can't understand how you could know so much about me. Even with your eyes shut, for goodness sake!" Carol answered, "Get used to not understanding him. He'll do things or tell you to do things that'll make no sense to you. Some of them might even seem wrong to you, but it'll ALWAYS be because you're not smart enough to see his reasons or to understand them. Mark was dead for all of the last school year, but he took the 12th grade exams - and aced them! - after only FIVE hours of study! It took everyone else nine months to learn what Mark learned in five hours - that's how smart he is." D-Cup looked sufficiently impressed, so I moved on, "Don't worry about your bisexuality, Nevaeh. It's just sex and you shouldn't treat it like it's a big deal. If you remember, your being a bisexual, ex-ballet dancer came up when I was explaining that whether or not I accept you is more complicated than just depending on your obeying me. Even though there are many reasons why you'll fit into my life, such as your ballet and bisexuality, I'm not going to accept you unless I'm comfortable with everything that will result from that. To give you some examples: You'll be spending time at my place and interacting with my families and friends, so I need to decide if you will get along well with the people that I love. It wouldn't be right of me to make them put up with someone they didn't like. Then there's what's best for you. God may want you in my life, but if I think that it'd damage your life too much then I won't allow it. You seem like a nice girl - although you have a problem trusting people even after God tells you to, which makes me suspect you're very arrogant - but..." "Oh no, I'm not arrogant! Please believe me. Truly I'm not..." "I'm sure you're beautiful, Nevaeh..." "She's VERY beautiful," complimented Carol. "I'll see for myself in a few days. Being beautiful very often makes girls arrogant toward boys. When you look at me, you can't see my intelligence, my thoughts, my moral code, and you can't see the Guardian Angel most of the time, so it'll be easy for you to forget how special I am and treat me like an ordinary boy. Your treating me with arrogance is as stupid as me trying to be arrogant toward God. I'll never make that mistake, but you've already several times assumed you were right and I was wrong. -- "All I'm saying is that I have to weigh up many issues before I make a decision about you. Just because God and my angel are recommending you doesn't mean I'm going to ignore my responsibility to care for everyone else. God certainly knows me well enough to know that I wouldn't duck my responsibilities that way." "I understand Mark. You're very different than I expected. Reverend Barry said you were a very bad person, but you're very careful about doing the right things with people." "Thank you. It's not hard to do. God's involvement in my resurrection and life means that He approves of me very highly. That gives me total confidence to do whatever I think is best. I can treat my sister with the love I feel for her without worrying about people thinking I'm behaving incorrectly because I KNOW God doesn't object. I can even be confident that it is truly my decision whether to accept you or not because I know God approves of the way I approach important issues about people. -- "It's the same with sex too. People from your church seem REALLY upset about my having several lovers and often being in bed with two or more of them at the same time, but they're wrong. God's attitude to sex is a lot different than what your church tries to claim it is. Which reminds me of a point I must've gotten interrupted from. I was saying before that Nevaeh should break up with Peter sooner rather than later and that there's an easy excuse for it now. Peter was at the demonstration and saw Nevaeh get stripped by the angel, right Nevaeh?" "Yeah." "Break up with him because you didn't like the way he looked at you with lust in his eyes. You can tell your and his parents that too. It'll get rid of him and it'll give your parents confidence in your morality." "I don't want to lie, Mark. Can't I just say I don't like him enough?" "Nevaeh, if you're anything like as beautiful as I imagine you are, I can promise you that you won't be lying. Peter DID look at you with lust in his eyes. I'll ask the angel." I turned roughly but not quite accurately toward my very helpful angel, asking it, "Do you know who Nevaeh's boyfriend Peter Harrison is?" The angel nodded, Carol informing me of that. "Do you remember him being at the demonstration?" More cooperative nodding. "Did he experience lust for Nevaeh?" The cellphone lifted up and a message appeared on it, "He stared at Nevaeh for as long as he could after I removed her clothes and he became erect." Nevaeh said, "You're right, Mark. I'll do it your way." Carol pointed out the lesson, "You should have said that IMMEDIATELY after Mark told you what to do. I keep telling you that but you're not listening to me." #15: I said, "Thanks for being such a wonderful supporter, Carol, but most of the time I'll prefer a little give-and-take in my interactions with Nevaeh. If I tell her that I INSIST on something then she'd better jump to it right away, but if it's a small issue and it doesn't seem urgent, then I don't mind her asking me a question about it, or suggesting an alternative. I might've failed to think about the situation fully, or she might know something that I don't which changes the best decision. Those aren't likely but they are possible. Plus, our discussing it gives me a chance to understand Nevaeh's thinking better, which might become important in the future, depending on how well she fits into my life. -- "On that topic, Nevaeh, if I do accept you, chances are it'll only be a cautious acceptance to start with, to see how well you work out with everybody. Don't expect any hugely dramatic changes to instantly happen in your life. Caution and caring is much better when we're dealing with people's emotions. Okay?" "Yes. I think that's the best way too. I'm sure I'll be wonderful for you because it's amazing how carefully God has chosen me. Just like you said you were confident about your actions, I'm confident about mine now. God wants me to, and I can see that you're a very good person, so I'll do whatever you want." "Good girl," said Carol. The angel gave Nevaeh a pat on the back. It seemed to think she deserved it. ------- Chapter 381: D-Cup Gets Picked Up Even Farther Monday July 2, 2007 (Continued) Because of her gullibility about God, seducing D-Cup had gone even better than I'd expected. Possibly even so well that a bit of caution might be a good idea in case we overreached ourselves because of how easy this seemed. Applying an even more determined go-soft after her wonderful throwing of herself at me, I said, "Thank you, Nevaeh. I'm impressed by your commitment, but I still want to ask you some more questions to get a better understanding of you. Such as, why did you give up ballet?" Her body didn't show any sign of knee or ankle problems, so the answer might provide some clues to her life and personality. "Dad didn't like me doing it when I started maturing. He said I shouldn't be dancing with boys that way any more. He didn't like the touching and how many hours we spent training and rehearsing together." #28: #21: "What a pity, especially given how much you loved it." "You're amazing Mark. I've never met anyone who can understand people so quickly." "He's amazing all right!" declared Carol with considerable sincerity, earning herself a hug and a kiss on the top of her head. Nevaeh added, "I don't want to seem suspicious, but you didn't know anything about me before tonight, did you?" It's difficult to tell outright lies, but I looked closely at the two things that were at stake, and they motivated me to pick my words carefully. With complete sincerity I said, "Before we saw you on the side of the street, I'd never heard your name before." The honest part of my answer over with, I continued with D-Cup's education, "An hour ago I was happily asleep in bed between Ava and Julia when the angel shook me awake and made me get up. It let me put these pajama pants on, but otherwise it just made me go down to my car. Carol was already there, looking even more confused than I was. Then it flew us here. It's very hard to put on the brakes when the car's three feet in the air." I thought the flying car trick was VERY cool, especially with a sexy looking car like mine, but the girls didn't seem to care. Girls are weird. "The first I knew about you was when Carol told me not to look. I still haven't seen you. I'm going to be very disappointed if you're a boy putting on a silly voice." Nevaeh gave a chuckle, which was her first for quite a while. I made a mental note to tell more jokes because I liked the way she looked when she chuckled. She followed up on the little bait that I'd dangled, "You sleep with your girlfriends every night?" With considerable feeling, I stated, "It's one of the very best experiences of my life." Nevaeh easily heard my emotion and was impressed by it. She pressed on with her prepared question though, "They don't mind sharing you?" Carol laughed heartily, which puzzled Nevaeh. Carol explained, "Mark is so much greater than any ordinary guy that even a small share of him is more than any woman can handle. Julia and Ava don't share Mark, they help each other with him. We all love each other, so it's fantastic that way too. All of us are happier than we've ever been before. You'll see that it's nothing like what you imagine. It's not Mark taking advantage of multiple girls; it's Mark giving love to us. That's why he's being so cautious about letting you join our life. We have a fantastic life now and he doesn't want to upset it in any way." Once that point was finished with, I asked Nevaeh, "What school do you go to?" Nevaeh informed us, "Sondarm," (Sondarm Christian High School). "I'm in 11th grade next year." #14: "What were your results like?" "Great. I get good grades." That surprised me as I had the strong impression that Nevaeh was a devout Christian. Further questions informed me that she'd done great in subjects in the Art and Music areas, pretty well in English, and average in the couple of important subjects that she'd taken. Questions about her family taught us that Nevaeh's father was a reasonably senior manager in a fairly large local company. Her mother was an accountant in a local accountancy firm. (Ava's parents had been accountants too, but all the other girls I play with have non-accountant parents, so don't think that Corvallis is full of accountants. Nevaeh's parents feature in what follows, so I'm mentioning them in more detail than I have other girls' parents.) The oldest brother had just finished high school and was going to OSU to get the same Business degree that I was hoping to restart soon and that Julia would be doing. The Business College is a large one with many classes doing the same courses so I'm unlikely to share lectures with him, especially because I rarely go to lectures. The next child is Nevaeh and then another brother who was fifteen, but he was irrelevant so I didn't ask anything about him. The youngest girl, Grace, was aged thirteen. "Does Grace like horses?" "Yes. Why?" "We've got seven horses on our property at the moment. Two belong to my youngest sister Donna, who's fourteen..." #15: #8: #26: " ... The others belong to friends of Donna's who keep them with us because we've got so much land. Maybe in a week or so it might be good to invite Grace and you to our home to play with Donna's horses as a parentally acceptable excuse..." "I don't think Dad would permit us to visit your home. Reverend Barry has convinced everyone that you're an evil person and that you despoil young ladies." Carol chuckled again, saying, "Does he ever! He 'despoils' them REALLY good. He makes them very happy, as he will you too, if you're lucky enough to be accepted." Nevaeh was worried about the despoiling aspect, but there was no sign of refusal so I thought she was worrying about her younger sister's possible despoilation (or "despoliation" as they're both the same word even if spelled differently, because English is 'clever' that way). [This is a good example of my proximity sense not giving me the causes for the emotions. I could sense that Nevaeh was worried, but my assumed reason was wrong. As you'll read later, Grace was probably "despoiled" already, or at least, behaved like a spoiled brat. Nevaeh was worried about introducing Grace to me because Nevaeh didn't want me to get a bad impression of her family.] I said, "Don't worry about it, Nevaeh. We'll think of something." Nevaeh had some other questions for us, mostly about stuff that'd been in the paper or on TV as that was the extent of her knowledge about us, what her church's reverend had said not really being "knowledge". One of her questions was, "Are you really as rich as it says on TV?" I answered, "Ask Carol, she's the richest of us." Carol was surprised, saying, "Huh? Oh yeah, Ron's money. I keep forgetting about that. We should do something about that." I was just about to say "Leave it where it is," when I had a better idea. I asked Carol, "What do you think about dividing it up evenly between you, me, Julia and Ava?" "Ava won't accept it. She would from the Government at the beginning but she won't accept any of our money. Sharing it equally among the three of us is perfect though." Carol moved her hand casually, in a way that left her ring finger emphasized. I stroked that finger with NP to tell her I got her point, while I said, "Excellent idea. We'll do that." [Which we subsequently did, Carol being right that Ava would refuse to be included.] Because Carol was still working on Nevaeh, Carol explained what we'd just agreed to, and she managed to drop a few numbers into her explanation. Agreeing to divvy up $375 million so casually impressed the long-lost panties off Nevaeh. There was no harm in making triply sure they stayed off, so I said to Carol, "That works out quite neatly. Our original 375 plus a third of Ron's each mean we're worth half a billion each. Plus what we've earned over the last few months. Probably something like 520 or 530 million each." Nevaeh exclaimed, "Wow! It's incredible that I'm sitting in our garden with two people worth a billion dollars. What're you going to do with so much money?" "Change the world," I answered with impressive sounding conviction. I liked the idea, but mostly I was making sure Nevaeh's panties were never going to come back. I explained, "When I have enough education I hope to start working on something that'll change the world for the better. Probably several somethings, according to Vanessa and Prof. The way my brain works should allow me to make a lot of important scientific breakthroughs, and my money will enable me to develop and market them." [[As it turned out, changing the world didn't cost a dime.]] "Not just YOUR money," insisted Carol. "We'll all contribute if you need it." "I know, sweetie," giving her a hug. "I'll try to leave you enough to buy a few dresses." "You'd better, or I wouldn't want to be in your shoes when Julia gets hold of you." A few minutes of chitchat/brainwashing later, I said, "It's time I took Carol home, Nevaeh. She doesn't need any beauty sleep, but it'd be good to let her have some." Nevaeh asked with some panic, "What's going to happen next?" "You break up with Peter later today, then call me in the late evening, and I'll tell you what my decision is." "You want me to break up with Peter before I know whether you're accepting me?" I wasn't going to let her get away with that crap, and I could feel Carol breathing in before launching her rebuke. I got in first though, because I could use it to teach her a couple of lessons about how moral I am and how she should treat me. "My impression is you want to break up with him anyway, regardless of me. You've got a good excuse for it now, but if you want to do it some other time you can. Or maybe you can talk with you family today about being unhappy with Peter and then pretend to make up your mind tomorrow if I accept you. You know Peter, his and your family better than I do, and you know what makes you happy, so you're the best person to manage your relationship with them. -- "I need an obedient girlfriend, but not one who needs me to make all her decisions for her, and I ESPECIALLY do not want one who tries to pressure me into feeling obligated to her. I will make my decisions to the best of my ability, and I know God approves of my morals and the way I think. I am not responsible for your relationship with Peter, and it is not moral of you to try to make me feel responsible for it." Nevaeh rushed to apologize and promise not to do it again, blah, blah. I cut her off as soon as possible because I hadn't finished driving my point home, "You have to stop thinking of me as a potential boyfriend, Nevaeh. You can't cover your bases with Peter while you negotiate to trade-up to a better quality boyfriend the way a lot of girls do with boys and a lot of boys do with girls. I am so VERY different from other boys that it simply doesn't work that way with me. God is offering you to me and it's my decision whether I accept you or not. You don't get to negotiate about that or to play one boy off against another. If I decide you aren't suitable for me, you won't be able to influence me into changing my mind; and if I decide to accept you, you also have no say about that. Saying 'No' to me is the same as saying 'No' to God. You do NOT refuse or try to negotiate a better deal for yourself with God. What God wants you to do is unmistakable and it has NOTHING to do with little, Mr. Peter whatever-his-surname was." Nevaeh was the most beautiful girl I'd almost laid my eyes and hands on, and I was very much looking forward to getting her into bed, so I was pulling out all the stops with her. If I overdid it, I'd make up some crap to dilute my influence after success had been achieved. -- One of my minds couldn't resist tacking on another lesson while Nevaeh was so clearly on the defensive, "Moral behavior is very important to me, Nevaeh." It truly is: it's very important for me to keep it separate from my immoral behavior because that'd ruin too much of my fun. "I'm worried about your morals. You didn't instantly obey the Guardian Angel when it first appeared and told you what to do, you tried to play me off against Peter which was wrong of you in so many ways I can't be bothered listing them, you were constantly suspicious of and accused me of peeking at you after I said I would not, you argued with me about several things which I can easily see the truth of better than you can, such as your bisexuality. I'm starting to think you wouldn't fit in well with my families, friends and me because you're too immoral." I paused because Nevaeh HAD TO speak. I didn't bother listening as she was just venting her anxiety and gushing meaningless reassurances. When the sound level dropped, I continued, "God knows me inside out and thinks I am so special that He resurrected me and assigned an angel to guard me. The only other person God has ever thought worth resurrecting was Jesus Christ and even he didn't get an angel assigned to him. God thinks I am MORE special than JESUS CHRIST." We publicly play down my personal importance by likening me to Lazarus because we want the public to lose interest in me, but this situation was the opposite of that. "I can't understand why you even think about refusing anything at all that I say. Would you accuse Jesus of breaking his word so he could sneak peeks at a naked girl? Would you try to trick Jesus into feeling obligated to you over the way you broke up with a boyfriend you didn't want any longer anyway?..." I was just about to make my point - I was borrowing her church's tactic of gaining credibility and then using it to control people - but Nevaeh interrupting me by breaking down into loud, sobbing tears. That was good because it meant she understood my reasoning and knew that she'd misbehaved terribly in terms of the scenario I'd painted for her. I sealed the top of our NP-box to make sure her loud blubberings didn't wake any of her family or neighbors, then Carol and I started reassuring her. That took a while, especially because I didn't mind her feeling so contrite as it'd be a good lesson for her. It isn't easy to teach girls with great bodies to give them unconditionally to a guy. Their defensiveness is strong and deeply ingrained before they're in their mid-teens, so it takes much more than a few polite words and some logic to break their attitude. Amid my "There, theres" I made sure I inserted a few more lessons into my reassurances, for example, that if people in her church said bad things about me, who was more likely to have the correct opinion of my value: her church's members or God? Nevaeh gave the only possible answer, as she continued to do to questions such as, "What about all your church's earlier comments condemning me for my sleeping with more than one girlfriend at a time?" She didn't get what I meant, but after a couple more leading questions from me, she suddenly realized that my multi-girlfriend behavior had been RIGHT, amazing her greatly. Unlike when we'd discussed my having multiple girlfriends before, this time Nevaeh really 'got it' (my bullshit), and she even reacted positively when I added, "And God wants you to join in. NOT be my girlfriend instead of the others, but to join in with all of us - presuming I agree to accept you of course; I still haven't decided about that." Nevaeh assured me with GREAT sincerity that she understood, she apologized again, and assured me she'd never go against God's or my wishes. To prove her new-found perspective, Nevaeh announced, "I'll break up with Peter today. I want to prove that I'm committed to you, Mark." "Good girl." "If you accept me, what's going to happen next?" Better than my saying "I'll tell you later" was to reinforce something I wanted to make sure she clearly understood. I said, "When we talk on the phone, we'll plan a way for us to spend several hours together as soon as possible so I can take your virginity." "That's really going to happen, isn't it?" "If I accept you, it will, and almost immediately." That's the Chloe Moon Lesson: don't waste a huge amount of time chasing a girl for sex if she won't put out. Get it done as quickly as possible and worry about training her personality later. "Oh boy. Ahh, why? Not that I'm refusing or anything, but I don't understand why it's important to do it so quickly." #5: #8: "You used the word a few minutes ago Nevaeh: 'commitment'. You've been consciously saving your virginity for many years and you've been repeatedly telling yourself that giving it to a man is the ultimate commitment for you. You were very proud of yourself when you said you were 'pure'. You'll have made such a big deal about it that it'll be programmed into you by now, so you won't be able to commit to me until I take your virginity. Once I have it, I have you, like God wants me to have." "You're right. You understand me amazingly well." Carol said, "Not just you; Mark understands everybody very well." #5: As we stood up to leave, Nevaeh invited, "Mark, you've totally convinced me that you're a good person so you don't need to keep your eyes shut. You can open them and look at me if you like." She made it sound very casual, but she was very anxious about our leaving. This was her last opportunity to improve her chance with me and she wanted to use her lovely big guns. Just pointing them at me wasn't enough; I had to see them. I answered, "Remember my Guardian Angel typed a message that said, 'You have poor understanding of God if you think any harm will happen to you. This is being done for YOUR benefit, to teach you something VERY important for you to know.' This meeting was set up by the angel so you could learn to trust me totally. My angel is very smart; it made you come naked because it knew I wouldn't look at you, and that's already helped you trust me a great deal, but you don't yet trust me enough. -- "I have a lot of sex in my life and the girls around me have a lot of sex too. It's the way we live. We think it's fantastic fun as well as fantastically loving in the emotional sense, and we know God approves of it." The angel nodded up and down a few times to make sure there was no mistaking God's opinion about this very important point. It wasn't actually relevant to my replying to her "Look at me" request, but one of my minds had thought it worth inserting. -- "If I looked at you now and accepted you later, then you'll always wonder whether my acceptance might have been because of your body. I know my decision won't change even the tiniest amount if I open my eyes now, but you don't have that much faith in me so I'm going to keep them closed. This way, you'll be much happier in the future if I accept you. Your happiness is important to me, and it's obviously far more important than a brief look at you." "Ahh. Okay, I guess." Nevaeh was talking slowly, drawing out her answer while she tried hard to think of a reason why I could still open my eyes. I added, "There's no point in trying to get me to open my eyes. I know you want to use your beauty to tempt me into accepting you, but..." "No, that's not it. It's just that I, umm..." "Nevaeh, you DO want to physically tempt me. You're VERY anxious about my not accepting you. You're doing a good job of hiding it but you can't hide things like that from me. You're an open book to me, even with my eyes shut, haha. -- "I appreciate that you're so eager that you're willing to try tempting me, because that's not something you'd ever do normally. But I can honestly tell you that opening my eyes won't alter my decision in the slightest, so there's no point in your trying to get me to do that. -- "There's also the serious point that I don't think it would be moral to look at your naked body until I have accepted you. It wouldn't be right so I don't want to do it. If I do accept you, then I promise to make up for lost time by looking at your body VERY closely! That's the best offer I can morally make right now, haha." "Okay Mark. You're not like other boys." "I'm very, very different from anyone else. How many other boys have angels to find their dates for them?" "Haha. Yeah. Found me and took all my clothes off..." Nevaeh paused, hoping I'd open my eyes in reaction. When I didn't, she continued, "This is the most AMAZING night of my life..." "You don't normally stand naked on the side of the street waiting for people to drive past?" "Haha. No, I've NEVER done that before! I nearly didn't do it tonight either. I was very close to refusing your angel several times. I'm SO GLAD I was brave enough. -- "Can I give you a kiss goodbye please Mark? Just on the cheek." "Not when you're intending to press your breast into my arm, no." "No WAY! You MUST be able to read minds! There's no way you could know I was thinking about that." "Ha-ha, Nevaeh; it was EASY! You're very inexperienced at flirting while I've had thousands of girls try to flirt with me. I've seen ALL the tricks. Predicting what you'd try next was simple. Or maybe I should let you believe I can read your mind? That way you'll stop trying to trick me." Carol copied another of Julia's comments, urging, "Stop putting time and effort into trying to get Mark to do what you want, Nevaeh. That's totally WRONG. You should be putting ALL your efforts into doing what Mark wants. He's so incredible and you're so ordinary compared to him that you have to try as hard as you can to be as good as he deserves. -- "Any other guy would take advantage of you if you devoted yourself to doing what he wanted, but you already know Mark well enough to know he'd never do that. If he just wanted you for sex, he could have already told you to lie back and spread your legs and you would have had to obey him. He is trying very hard to make everyone happy including you, so your trying to use your body to get what you want is selfish and wrong. Give yourself to Mark, do everything he says as soon as he says it, and don't worry about your relationship with him. Let him manage everything. He can do a FAR better job of it than you can because he's so much more intelligent, sensitive and moral than you are. He's got his own angel for goodness sake, so I think you can trust him." #13: #11: "You're right. You explain it very well. Mark said before that I'd make the mistake of treating him like an ordinary boy, and that's what I just tried to do. I'm sorry, Mark. I'm starting to understand how amazing you are, and I'll try very hard not to make that mistake again. From now on I'll do exactly what you say. You, Carol, and the angel are right. You're so amazing I should devote my life to you." #6: "Congratulations on learning the first and second lessons so well. That's to trust me, and to put yourself into my hands. You've still got more lessons to learn though. For example, you said you should devote your life to me. You're thinking of yourself again. You don't know what I'll need in ten years time, so you don't know that you can provide it. You should devote yourself to me, but for how long for remains to be seen." A suddenly worried Nevaeh said, "Oh. Umm, I see what you mean, but I didn't think of that before. I think it's going to be very hard on me to lose you, when that happens." "What advice did Carol just give you? She said, 'Give yourself to Mark and don't worry about your relationship with him. Let him manage everything.' I suggest you do what she says and let me worry about the future. I understand you and what our relationship will be far better than you understand me and our relationship, don't I?" "I don't understand ANYTHING! I don't even know why your angel wants me to be yours. What can I do for you that Carol or your girlfriends can't do?" "I believe I know what the angel has in mind, but it's far too early to tell you... #15: #14: #1: " ... It's an important reason and now is definitely the wrong time to tell you. An hour ago, if the Guardian Angel had told you why it wanted you to go outside and take your clothes off, and what would happen when you did, you would've thought it was crazy and you wouldn't have done what it wanted..." "Yeah. I NEVER would've believed that this could've happened so well." "Just do what Carol said, Nevaeh. Put yourself in my hands and do what I say, and let me take care of the future. I'm much better at it than you are." "I will. Umm, Mark. I REALLY want to 'put myself in your hands'. I've never felt like this for a boy before, but I suddenly feel..." "I know Nevaeh. Your lust started when you said 'happened so well', and it skyrocketed when I said 'Put yourself in my hands.' That sent a thrill right through your body." "Wow! You're amazing. I AM an open book to you. PLEASE decide to accept me, Mark. I want to give myself to you REALLY badly!" "Good girl. You just offered your biggest commitment to me for the first time. I'll make the rest of the decisions from here, and I'll make them quickly. You've had a VERY overwhelming night, so we shouldn't do any more serious talking." -- I turned to face the angel, although my blind act meant I deliberately got it slightly wrong. I asked it, "Can you do something amazing that'll make this night truly memorable for Nevaeh?" And also so this evening would have an impact on her far beyond mere talk. As it happened, the angel could do something. Angels are very clever that way. We had already stood up in preparation for Carol's and my leaving, so I used NP-grips on our waists to lift us a couple of inches so I could form a floor under us. I made the NP-box we were in smaller and with a pointed roof, then I accelerated our room upward. Nevaeh had a second of worry, during which I told her, "Trust the angel, Nevaeh." She instantly relaxed and was soon experiencing nothing but joy. The angel's holding her around her waist made her feel secure, and there was no sensation of wind in the airtight box. It was quiet, peaceful and amazing. Almost identical to the quiet moments of a hot air balloon ride, for those of you who've done that, ideally in one with an invisible balloon and basket. I started with less, and built it to only 1 g of acceleration, a third of which was upward on our waists, so Nevaeh wasn't stressed by the 2 g weight. It was amusing watching the effect of that acceleration on her and Carol's breasts. It wasn't erotic because it made them sag so much, but it was amusing, although not as much as the pictures Ava's and my skydiving club had of their members skydiving naked: the 100 mph winds on their bodies had made the well-endowed females look particularly funny. We were in the same relative positions as we had been for the last few minutes of our ground conversation. Carol on my left side holding my arm as she always does when I have an arm free, with Nevaeh standing about three feet in front of me, slightly to my right because she'd maneuvered to kiss my cheek and to rub herself on my free arm. Nevaeh had been facing Carol and me, and as we rose, her eyes had darted all around. She learned that it was safe to take steps too, so she cautiously turned to look around her, while making "Wow"-type comments. It only took a few seconds to reach a thousand feet, where I smoothly reduced our upward push to a little below 1 g so we started decelerating. Nevaeh had spotted that my eyes were closed still. She'd said, "Open your eyes, Mark! This is wonderful." "The angel has flown me around many times before and I prefer to keep my commitment to you. I know I'm being overly fussy about it, but I made a big deal about it before and it'd be a pity to waste it just before we finish. If I accept you, I'm reasonably sure there'll be other flights we can share." We stopped in a hover at about three thousand feet, a good height to see the city and the lights of next towns. The ride had easily taken long enough that Nevaeh had become comfortable, even with having an invisible floor. She clearly had a great deal of trust in the angel, which boded well for my sex-life as that was something that the angel was very eager to improve. Nevaeh was VERY happy; far happier than I'd expected. She said, "We were talking about God and the angel before, but I didn't appreciate how important that was. We were just sitting on the grass talking. Now I'm way up in the air! This is a MIRACLE! Jesus walked on water, but we're walking miles up in the air. I'm in the middle of a miracle, and it's happening to ME! I'm SO SORRY I ever doubted you! You're..." "It's okay, Nevaeh. You don't have to say anything else, and you don't have to apologize. It's understandable that you couldn't grasp what being in the middle of a miracle is like..." #8: #12: " ... Let me add another little example of how smart the angel is..." "Hey, where is the angel?" "It's always around me somewhere but it prefers to be invisible so it doesn't intrude on whatever else is happening." And also because a big light in the sky might get other people's attention. -- "I was saying the angel was smart in another way that I hadn't realized before. I'm glad it found me a possible girlfriend who's not modest about her body." "But I am Mark. I dress..." "Fifty thousand people can look right up your pussy." She'd been naked for an hour, and she'd pretty much forgotten about it, until my reminder. "Eek!" Her legs slapped together and hands shot down to cover herself. It only took a moment for her to pause. "Haha. You got me. No one can see us up here." "You're right. I just wanted to break your serious mood. 'Yes', the angel is amazing; and 'Yes', there are miracles going on around us, but life is also for having fun and being happy. That's where I think your church and many others have gone wrong. It's obvious from what Archangel Michael said when he was here that his attitude was very different than that of most religious groups. They've gotten very repressive and judgmental, saying that's what God wants, but obviously it isn't. It looks likely that you and I are going to become lovers soon, which I'm sure your church will think is very wrong. Churches justify their telling people how to behave by saying that God requires it, but in our case we KNOW that's not true. God WANTS you to give yourself to me, to be my lover and to do everything else I want. That should give you a lot of strength if you have any trouble from them in the future." "I don't need any more strength, Mark. I'm a million percent convinced already. I've heard everything they've been saying for years and there's nothing they can tell me now that will have ANY affect on me. I'm miles up in the air standing on nothing. A miracle is happening to me and I feel WONDERFUL! I'm TOTALLY committed to you. I'm yours already, and you can have my heart and soul whenever you want. Just tell me what you want, and I'll do it. PLEASE let me serve you like God wants me to..." #3: <"Heart and soul"? Somehow those weren't the two things I most wanted from her. It's a good thing the rest of her has to come along for the ride.> #16: #19: #12: " ... Will you AT LEAST hold me Mark? I REALLY need to be held now!" #9: I opened my eyes and arms to Nevaeh, saying, "Come here, my Accepted Serving Gir ... ugh." We were three thousand feet in the air and there were no visible walls, but Nevaeh had no hesitation in launching herself at me, squealing with joy. With NP bracing my back, I caught her. Holding an ass-cheek in each hand and with her legs around my waist, she rained kisses and "Thank yous" all over my face, usually at the same time and with much slobber. Her tears wet my face even more. She was VERY emotional. #2: When she had sufficiently drenched my face, Nevaeh held her machinegun kisses back long enough to ask, "When can we do it? PLEASE soon. I want to be yours forever!" Ignoring the "forever" issue, I asked, "What are you doing this afternoon?" "Anything you want. I'm yours now." "That's great and I'm very pleased by your enthusiasm, but we don't want to disrupt the rest of your life..." It took a while, but Carol and I managed to get Nevaeh calmed down enough to have a useful conversation. It required landing back in her garden and the girls redressing after the angel returned their clothes. That I got Nevaeh cover up her treasures should tell you the extreme sacrifice I had to make to calm her down. Carol was useful in one subtle way. I had the angel give Carol her nightie back first so Carol was the first one dressed. I sat and had Carol sit between my legs and lean back on my chest with my arms around her. When Nevaeh was dressed she REALLY wanted to snuggle with me, but I was fully occupied already. She had to sit apart from me, which helped her calm down. I said, "I can see your frustration, Nevaeh, so here's your first lesson in serving me. No one - literally NO ONE at all - comes between my sisters and me." I had to use the plural to avoid any correct suspicions, even though my comment didn't apply to Donna with anything like the intensity it did to Carol. "My sisters and I have wonderfully loving relationships that have lasted for many years. I met you for the first time less than two hours ago, so please sit across from me so we can talk face to face. Thanks. I know you want the reassurance of being held, and I know you're bubbling over with excitement right now, but it's important that our relationship starts in the right way." Comments like that settled Nevaeh down so we could plan sensibly. I said, "I'll introduce you to everyone that I live with, including telling them that you have given yourself to me. I'll explain that to them in full, so they'll know exactly what your status is in my life..." "Even your parents?" "Absolutely. You'll find their attitude to be very different from your parents. Or from any other parents that you know, I imagine. You know that Julia Williams is my main girlfriend, right?" "Yeah. She's not going to be jealous of me is she?" Carol and I both laughed. I explained, "She'll congratulate me for getting myself such a beautiful new girlfriend. The reason I mentioned her is because her parents also live with us. I'll be introducing you to Julia's mother and father - Vanessa and Prof - and they'll know your status too. Not only won't my main girlfriend be jealous of you, but her mother and father will be perfectly fine about you too. They'll even help you fit in. Everyone that I live with knows how unusual I am so they treat me in ways that no other boy would experience. You'll find it strange initially, but everyone will be friendly and you won't have any trouble. My point is that everyone at my home will know all about you, but I don't think anyone else should initially. You don't want your parents to know you're going to give yourself emotionally and sexually to Mark Anderson, do you?" "I'd be grounded FOREVER! Or they'd send me away. That's what they'd do; they'd send me to one of my uncle's or aunt's places if I didn't promise to give you up, which I NEVER will!" "So it'd be best if they not find out how emotional you are about me. Because of what happened to your preacher yesterday it's very likely that there will be lots of conversations about me. Maybe even over your breakfast table in a few hours. I don't want you to defend me. Sit there and let them say whatever they want to say. It doesn't matter to me, and most importantly, I don't want you to get in trouble or for me to lose you because you gave your feelings away. I know the insults people say about me are wrong, and you know they're wrong, and God knows they're wrong, but there's no way in the world you can convince your parents or your church that they're wrong. All you'll do is get yourself sent away and I'll be very disappointed. Can you sit quietly while people all around you are saying bad things about me?" "I'll try but it won't be easy..." "Yes it will. God knows that I'm a very good person, and that's all you need to know. Your parents can make all sorts of terrible comments about me, and you can sit there and let their comments wash over you because you know that they're wrong. It's not your job to correct your parents, and I don't want you to. Your job is to serve me, and you can't do that if you get sent away. I'll put it even stronger: If any of your regular contacts say bad things about me, I ORDER you to answer in exactly the same way as you would've if you'd never met me. Say all sorts of horrible things about me, if that's what you would've..." "I could NEVER do that! You're God's favorite so you must..." "Shush Nevaeh..." #5: " ... Let me try explaining it in another way. I'm going to tell Carol something now, and I'm going to be lying my head off. Every single thing I'm going to say is going to be false. Here I go." -- I leaned sideways so I could look at Carol. I put on a silly voice to say, "I was looking at Nevaeh Smith recently. She's got to have the SMALLEST, most USELESS pair of tits I've seen on any girl. I've grown pimples bigger than her tits. I'm sure no boy would EVER be interested in her. They'd go running away screaming if she got with fifty feet of them, that's how ugly she is. She's growing a mustache on her upper lip big enough for an albatross to nest in. And have you heard her flatulence! Every step she takes, she farts. It's terrible." -- Over Nevaeh's giggles, I told her, "You weren't insulted because you knew I was talking total nonsense. If you sit at your parents' table and you agree with them that, "Mark Anderson is a bad person," I'm not going to be upset. I know for a fact that it's not true because God likes me. You'll be talking nonsense because I want you to, so you can carry on serving me rather than being sent away." "I understand. I think I can do that okay." "Good. Your job is to serve me. It's NOT to run around Corvallis correcting anyone's opinion of me. If God wanted people's opinion of me to change, He could find someone much better for that job than a 16-year old girl that no one is going to listen to..." "That's a good point. I feel much better now." "Good. Keeping our relationship secret from your family is important to me. That means you must speak and behave in ways that don't give it away. I asked you before what you were doing this afternoon and you said you'd do whatever I want. I appreciate your attitude, but practically speaking that wasn't a good answer because that could mess up our whole relationship if your parents expect you to be somewhere else." You get the idea. In her enthusiasm for me, it took a while for me to get Nevaeh to see the big picture, but she eventually understood that I didn't mind if she said lots of bad things about me, or let other people say bad things, missed some of our dates because her parents intruded, or any of that sort of thing. All that mattered was the long run. I didn't want her to have a huge family crisis because she messed up over something as minor and unimportant as coming to see me so I could play with her. She was very happy at the idea of serving me so understood the need for caution. From what I'd learned about her parents, caution would be a very good idea. Nevaeh understood that once she got her head out of the clouds. In the course of that discussion, I remembered something important that I'd nearly forgotten. It wasn't really my fault though, because I'd been staring at four gorgeous tits all this time. No guy would be at his intellectual best in that circumstance. I asked Nevaeh, "Do you go to your gynecologist with your mother?" "Yes ... Oh no! She'll find out I'm not a virgin any longer." You might remember that I made a comment a fair way back that Ron tended to get on best with the younger girls who visited our home. I'd picked up a few tricks along the way. I asked Nevaeh, "Who's your gynecologist?" "Dr. Paige Peters." "No problem then. Give her a call and tell her you've become sexually active, that your mother comes with you to your examinations, and that you don't want her to know that you're active. It's a very common situation and Dr. Peters has several ways of handling it. She'll describe them to you and you can pick whichever method suits you the best." Nevaeh looked at me weirdly. Before she could make up her mind what to say, I helpfully explained, "I've had sex with LOTS of girls, Nevaeh, and quite a few of them were virgins with nosey mothers. I had to find a good solution to that problem." I wanted to educate Nevaeh into having the right attitude toward me, so I maximized my apparent involvement by not mentioning that I'd asked Julia to find me a solution, and she'd discussed it with her gyno, who'd explained the situation fully. It is - I'm happy to say - a very common situation. I'm even happier that I'm doing more than my fair share to make it so common. Nevaeh wasn't sure what to say about my extensive sexual experience. I gave her a second to make sure the issue sunk in deeply, then I said, "Carol, what do Julia and Ava think of me having so many lovers?" "They wish you had more, and they'll do everything they can to help you get them. They're HUGELY proud of you!" "That's the attitude I want you to have, Nevaeh. Until you have it you'll be a poor serving girl for me. God knows I have sex with lots of girls and He's perfect happy with it. He even sent the Guardian Angel to get you for me, partly so I can have sex with you. If it's good enough for God, who are you to be unhappy about it?" "I wasn't unhappy Mark. I was..." "Nevaeh, you WERE unhappy. I can read you like a book remember, and it's even easier now that my eyes are open." After the resultant apologies, Nevaeh explained, "When I was unhappy, that was because I reacted the way my parents and church told me. I forgot how special you are." According to this evening's bullshit scenario, which I'd built on the comments Archangel Michael had made, all humans should be willing to have more sex. Not just with me - although CERTAINLY including me - but everybody shouldn't be so repressed about it generally. Archangel Michael strongly implied the churches had it wrong by being so sexually repressed. Therefore Nevaeh's using my being special as justification for having sex with me was theoretically wrong. It was a good place to start though, so for the moment I just said, "Very good. I'm happy that you realized that and were willing to admit it." "I'm so used to thinking the normal way that it's going to be hard for me to get used to you. Please don't get impatient with me when I get it wrong. I want to do my very best with you, and I'll try very hard." "I know that I'm a unique person so it's impossible for you to immediately behave perfectly toward me. I know I'll have to teach you some things, and that's what I'm starting to do now. You'll do your best not to judge me negatively about sex, won't you?" "Yes. I totally understand that I was wrong. God is encouraging you to have sex because you're so special." Once again she'd missed the plot somewhat, but she got the important part right. "Good. One thing I want you to do is bring ten new girls to me for sex." "Oh." After a worried pause of a couple of seconds, Nevaeh added, "Umm. I'll try, Mark. I want to do everything you tell me." "You don't have to do it, Nevaeh. I said that only to show you that changing your attitude is hard. Carol, what would Julia have said if I asked her to get me ten new girls?" "Either 'Yippee!' or 'Please let me get you twenty.' Haha. Julia LOVES doing things like that for you. -- Carol turned to Nevaeh, "Nevaeh, there's a very easy trick to learning the right attitude for Mark. Don't try to work out what the best reaction is by thinking about the situation. That's too hard because every situation is different and it can take too long to think about everything he says. All you need to do is watch how your emotions react to Mark. If he asks you to do something, the only feeling you should have is joy. If you feel unhappy then YOU are doing something wrong. As soon as you feel a negative reaction, ask yourself what you're doing wrong. If you don't know, ask one of us. Julia, Ava and I will help you learn the right attitude. Or you can ask Mark, but you shouldn't waste Mark's time if one of his girls is available. -- "Your role is to SERVE Mark. If serving him makes you unhappy then there's something wrong with you. Mark has ANGELS doing things for him. Even an especially important Archangel, because it was Archangel Michael that was sent to Earth to check on Mark and then to get the resurrection started because the CIA messed up so badly. If Mark's got such important angels doing things for him, then you should be HONORED to serve him in whatever way he wants." "I AM, Carol! I really do understand that. When we went up in the air, that was because Mark asked the angel to do something special to make tonight truly memorable for me. He asked the angel for a MIRACLE! And the angel DID IT! No one else can ask an angel for a miracle like that, but Mark asked just for a silly favor to make me happy. I feel so honored I want to burst!" "That's great." I got the topic back to something that was important to me, "So is it safe for you to come to my home this afternoon, Nevaeh? What would you be doing normally?" "I don't have anything planned. Some of my friends and I would probably call around in the morning and find something to do." "Could you break up with Peter in the morning and then come to my house in the afternoon? If anyone asks where you went, you could say you needed some time alone after the break up." "That'd be easy." "If you've got a better idea please suggest it. Serving me properly means doing so to the best of your ability, with all of your intelligence and creativity." "Your idea is a good one. What time can I come?" "As soon as works for you. I'll be at home so come after you've broken up with Peter. You'll need your energy so try to get enough sleep. I imagine that'll be hard for you, but don't make it any harder by trying to get up early and rush around. I want you to enjoy yourself when I take your virginity this afternoon." "Can I come before lunchtime?" #19: "No sooner than 11 o'clock. We'll have plenty of time so there's no need to rush it." The next thing I did might surprise you a little: I programmed my cellphone number into D-Cup's phone. I'd previously added just our landline number, which we can easily get our staff to filter. Over the last year or two I'd relaxed about letting people have my personal number. I still didn't hand it out willy-nilly, but the people I was dealing with these days were more mature and much less likely to make nuisances of themselves than when I last wrote about my reluctance to divulge my number. My attitude had matured too, which might be the most significant change. I gave it to D-Cup now because I'd oversold her and thought I should give her a sign of my accepting her. I made a small drama out of giving it to her and asking her to keep it private so she'd appreciate that her status with me was already unusually advanced. And so she'd keep it private. After that was completed, I said, "It's time we left. See you in a few hours, Nevaeh." She showered fervent "Thank yous" on Carol and me. Personally I thought I should be thanking her for giving me total control over her wonderful body, but I kept that to myself. Her methods of expressing appreciation included giving me some very heartfelt, passionate kisses, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she wasn't the inexperienced kisser I'd expected. I guessed kissing must be a religiously acceptable behavior. Nevaeh made no effort to kiss Carol. The thought never crossed her mind, judging from her spontaneous, uninhibited hugging, thanking and praising of Carol. I thought of ordering Nevaeh to kiss Carol passionately. I even thought of saying, "I want you to lie in bed shortly and think that you'll soon be having bisexual sex. I want you to get used to the idea because it's a necessary condition to be part of my life." I decided not to. We'd spent at least twice as long on this as I'd expected, had achieved ten times as much success, and Nevaeh already had more than enough buzzing around in her head. I left her with several warnings not to give the game away to her parents, and Carol added some more about Nevaeh's not mentioning me to her girlfriends. I finished with, "You'll fail God and me if you get caught. I'm going to work on making myself more acceptable to your parents, but that's going to take months and I order you to wait for me to do that rather than trying to convince them of the truth about me." "I won't do anything. I know my job is to serve you and not to do anything else. How are you going to get them to like you?" "Your getting some sleep is far more important than discussing plans for weeks away. I just wanted you to know that I'm thinking about the situation." I discovered a good way of ending meetings: the angel picked Nevaeh up and flew her inside. I used a sight blob to check the house first, and her family were all in their beds. I sent Nevaeh's cellphone after her, and shut the living room door again. In her room, the angel opened the bedclothes wider, tilted Nevaeh horizontally and slid her into bed. It covered her again, stroked her cheek gently a couple of times, then disappeared. ^ Carol's first words when we were alone were, "You SURE did a number on her!" "Yeah, I overshot my objective on that. I hope it doesn't cause any problems." "I wouldn't be surprised if it did. She's VERY excited and could easily lose control. You'll have to find some way of making good if she does." "The responsibility's mine, that's for sure! I can't even blame God, haha. -- "Thank you for your help, Carol. You were as great as I knew you would be. I'm sorry it took longer than I thought." "I like being involved in things you're doing, and you ALWAYS take longer than you think you will when you're dealing with people. I'm surprised we're finishing so early, haha." "If she hadn't been so blown away at the end, I probably would've kept going, knowing me. What did you think of her?" "I could certainly see why you're attracted to her. She's going to look good wearing one of your Australian bikinis." "First, please don't call them 'MY Australian bikinis'; people might get entirely the wrong idea. Second, WILL SHE EVER! Yabba-Dabba-Doo!" "Haha. What're you intending to use her for?" "That's a problem. I just wanted her for eye-candy and sex, but her level of dedication is going to drive her to do more. I'll need to give her things to do or her emotions will crash once the initial euphoria is over. I've had one idea already involving her school that kills several birds with one stone. Well, not exactly 'kill them'; more just bruise them somewhat. What do you think of..." I described my multi-benefit plan for the rest of the drive home. We were driving in the traditional manner. Flying my car could cause massive public distraction and bad accidents, so I only do it when there are D-cup tits at stake. As we rode up in the elevator after parking, Carol said, "It's a good plan. Google the school to learn what you can about them and see if you can make some time to bounce it off Nevaeh this afternoon." You can tell that Carol spends a lot of time with Julia. Julia and Ava were asleep. Our bed is so huge Carol and I could easily slide in without disturbing them. A few hours ago, my intention for after delivering Carol back to bed had been for me to destroy every building on the Galloping Ninnies' land, as an obvious consequence of their preacher's nasty comments about me. Given the situation with D-Cup I decided to leave the Ninnies church alone. Destroying their buildings would cause them to hate me even more, including Nevaeh's parents doing that too, which wasn't a good idea at the moment. Having easier access to D-Cup's body was more important to me than getting my revenge on the church. If they'd known, I wondered whether they'd appreciate that their church was saved by tits. I held Carol while she fell asleep. It didn't take her long, but it took me even less time to read the small amount of online information there was about the Sondarm Christian High School. I'll talk with Nevaeh about it later. There'd be plenty of time for that as she'd not have much endurance for her first time, especially not if she was as excited as I expected her to be. ------- Chapter 382: D-Cup's Slide Toward Depravity and My Bed Monday, July 2, 2007 (Continued) Julia was the first of the girls to wake. She whispered, "Mark?" I was reading thirty two assorted OSU courses with my eyes shut, so I opened them to look at Julia. Over Carol's and Ava's sleeping bodies, I whispered back, "Good morning, darling." Apparently Julia thought morning greetings weren't as important as, "How'd it go with D-Cup?" Julia calling Nevaeh by my nickname was Julia's way of showing encouragement and approval for my taking the initiative in planning and executing a people-management activity. She still wanted to know all about it though. I whispered back, "If anything, too good. Let's talk in the kitchen." I was already pulling back the covers for her. As soon as we were out of the bedroom, Julia eagerly demanded, "Give, buster." Dicing with death, I asked, "Shouldn't we wait for ... oww, oww. Haha. Okay, I get your well-argued POINTS. -- "It started very much the way I planned..." Julia was too focused on what I was saying so I made our breakfasts, flying a couple of extra glasses of fruit juice to our bedroom for the late sleepers. Ava woke up ten minutes later, so I moved Julia off my lap so I could get Ava's breakfast ready for her; Ava's damaged arm giving us all an excuse to pamper her every chance we got. When Ava arrived a few minutes later, her breakfast was ready for her. We gave her Good Morning kisses, Julia correcting her oversight in not giving me one earlier. I gave Ava a summary to catch her up to where I was in the story with Julia. That didn't take long as Ava's need for details is considerably less than Julia's. Then I carried on with a far more detailed version of last night's events. At the end of my description, and after the girls had finished laughing at me, the discussion moved on to the girls' thoughts about the situation. They'd already agreed that I'd overdone my sales job, so the issue was what to do about that. I agreed that I had to give Nevaeh tasks to do beyond the sexual. I described my plan for D-Cup's school (I'll explain it to you later) and they thought it was excellent. I said, "It doesn't actively involve Nevaeh though, as I mostly intended it to be a PR exercise. Maybe I could get her involved in the community projects?" Julia had some suggestions, and as usual, they were good ones. We didn't spend much time on the Sondarm plan. To quote Julia, "We've only got three hours until D-Cup comes here and we need a good plan for that." It was 8am and none of us had any doubt that Nevaeh would be here at 11am, if not earlier. I described my plan for Nevaeh's visit. Julia and Ava laughed at me, and then they started developing a better plan. Apparently, "Take her to bed and have lots of sex with her" wasn't an acceptable plan. I can't say I was surprised; I might have been guilty of teasing them. I didn't have to worry about Julia's new plan not including what I wanted, so I started washing the dishes while listening to the girls plan Nevaeh's assisted slide into depravity. When I'd finished the dishes, I interrupted the girls to ask something that'd been on my mind since near the end of last night's visit with D-Cup, "Something occurred to me last night that needs your permission before I'll do it. D-Cup is a virgin and I'm sure she's never let any guy get anywhere near her pussy. She'll be disease free and I only fire blanks these days, so I was thinking about not using a rubber with her. It's much more enjoyable for me that way and it seems very safe with her. I won't do it unless you agree though?" "You're obviously intending for her to be a long-term lover?" "Probably not long term, but medium term is likely. Mostly because I think I owe it to her now. She's got an incredible body - which I believe I might've mentioned once or twice already - but that won't keep me interested for long if her personality isn't good for us. From the way she reacted last night, her personality seems okay so far. It was a weird situation so it's hard to know what she'll be like normally, but my initial impression was good enough to think about her lasting a while. We're already planning to do things with her school that'll take several weeks because of how much I oversold her, so it'll be at least a medium-term relationship I think." Julia decided, "We'll explicitly ask her about her previous experiences before you take her to bed, but you're almost certainly right about her being clean. Going without a condom with her would be fine with me provided you're ABSOLUTELY sure you won't be releasing any sperm. You're not going to lose control in the middle of your orgasm, are you?" "No. It stays shut when I want it to. I've cum hundreds of times in the last six months and it has never opened accidentally. The only time that valve opens is when I order it to. I do that sometimes to make sure it doesn't seize up entirely, but only when I'm getting a blowjob or I'm cumming in an ass. It's under my complete control and I don't even let it open when I'm using a rubber with another girl. I wouldn't risk getting D-Cup pregnant if I wasn't sure. If the idea of me going bareback is okay with you two, I thought I'd call the doctor to see if I could get a medical confirmation that there were no sperm in a sample. What do you think?" The girls agreed, so I called the family doctor. His nurse was happy to interrupt the doctor's current consultation to put him on the phone to me. It's sometimes useful being famous, especially so in my case because I've often heard that people become more famous after they die. I can confirm that's true. I gave him my spiel for what I wanted, "Something Archangel Michael said before my resurrection is making us suspicious that God doesn't want me to have any babies and we want to get that checked out. Can I come down now to give you a sperm sample? You can check those yourself can't you?" "Not really, no, but we can get a sample from you and send it to the lab for analysis." "I don't think there'll be anything to analyze. I'm pretty sure there'll be no sperm at all in the sample; just semen. You could check for that, couldn't you?" "That'd be very unusual..." "My situation IS very unusual. The question is whether you'd be able to confirm my suspicion?" "Come here and we'll have a look. About 9:15 would be good for me." I agreed and we hung up. I told my two eavesdroppers, "He didn't really answer my last question, but I might as well go and give a sample anyway as it'd be good to find out definitively even if we have to wait for a few days while he sends it off to a lab." The girls returned to their plotting, occasionally asking my opinion, but more often telling me what I needed to do. They'd missed out on the fun last night so it was good to let them have the fun of planning Nevaeh's first visit. At 9:00, I returned to the bedroom to put some clothes on. Carol was still sleeping peacefully so I was quiet, but apparently not quiet enough because she woke while I was dressing. I gave her a suitably appreciative kiss for her efforts last night, pointed out her glass of room-temperature juice, and told her, "Julia and Ava are in the kitchen plotting what needs to be done to D-Cup when she arrives." "They'll need to talk with me!" declared Carol, leaping out of bed and jogging to the kitchen with urgency. There were, after all, only two hours remaining. As I was leaving the bedroom, I got a text message from an unknown number, "Peter dumped. Cu at 11. Love n service, Nevaeh." Chuckling, I saved her number. Not under "D-Cup" in case I got caught doing that. Under "Smith, Nevaeh, M" ("M" for mobile, as opposed to "H" for home or "W" for work), this being the structure I inherited from Julia when I copied her phone's SIM card way back when. I returned to the kitchen where I interrupted Julia's interrogation of Carol to point out, "You don't need to ask Carol any questions, Julia. I've already explained everything important that happened last night." After the girls finished laughing, I showed D-Cup's message to them. They were impressed by the "and service" addition. Julia saying, "I bet she wrote 'Love' first, and then realized you might not like that, so added the 'service'. That she's thinking about your reactions is a good sign." We agreed, and then I had to leave, telling them, "I've got a hot date with a test tube." Julia and Ava laughed, but Carol looked puzzled. I quickly explained my preference for going bareback with D-Cup, asking Carol, "Is that okay with you?" "You can make her pregnant if you want. You're our Lord." There was nothing particularly significant in Carol answering that way. It gives her pleasure to make dramatic references to my being their Lord, and she does it whenever a particularly good opportunity arises. She means them too. I had my hot date to get to, and I could sense Carol was okay with it, so I just said, "I'll take that as a yes. I'd better go. I'll get back as soon as I can so you can explain your elaborate plan to me." Quick kisses and I was on my way. I'd only just driven out the gate when my phone rang. My phone informed me the call was from "Smith, Nevaeh, M". I answered, "Hi sweetie." "I was worried that you didn't call back. You got my message, didn't you?" She sounded very nervous. "Yes I did, sweetie. Thank you for sending it to me. I didn't answer because I didn't know whether it was safe to. I'll always try to play safe because making our relationship last a long time is far more important than any single message could be. I know you're worried, but you don't need to be. I've fully accepted you now and I won't turn a cold shoulder to you or ignore your calls out of spite or anything nasty like that. That's not moral and I don't behave that way. If I don't call you back, then there's a reason for it that has nothing whatsoever to do with my not liking you, so you shouldn't be even the slightest bit concerned. Okay?" A small point of clarification for you. I'd told her that "making our relationship last a long time is far more important than any single message could be." I didn't expect our relationship to last a long time. I'd met a LOT of girls by now, and had bedded a pleasingly high proportion of them, and the vast majority of those relationships had ended well before "a long time". Chances are that my relationship with Nevaeh wouldn't last a long time either. Apart from anything else, it's not easy for girls to adapt to living with my other girls. Showing possessiveness, competitiveness or just bitchiness ends a relationship damned quickly, and just the absence of happiness does so sooner rather than later too. I was being careful with Nevaeh not because I expected her to be around for long, but to avoid her screwing up her life badly because of her over-commitment to me. I was responsible for that so had to take care. "Okay Mark. I'm sorry. I didn't know and I was worried. The last few hours have been very stressful for me..." "I'll do my best to make the next few hours FAR, FAR better, sweetie. Hopefully better than you've ever had before." "Oh boy! I hope so. I've been getting very worked up about that too. I can come any time you want, even right now. Please?" "I've got some other things to do first. I'm just leaving home now to do them. Let's stick to 11 please. I should be ready by then." "I'm MORE than ready right now! I've been ready for HOURS! I couldn't sleep last night and I can't stop thinking about you..." "Only two hours to wait, Nevaeh. Just a quick point then I have to go. Like I said before, if you send me a text message I won't normally answer it unless it's something obvious like a question that needs an immediate answer. Your not getting caught is very important to me. If you want me to call back, put 'PCB' on the end of your message, for 'Please Call Back'. I can't promise I will because I might be busy, but I will if I can. If I don't call back almost immediately, then I won't call back at all. If I called half an hour later, you might not be safe any more. Okay?" "I understand. I don't want to get caught either because my parents would kill me. It's just that I was so nervous..." "That's okay, sweetie. It'll take us a little while to get used to each other's styles. I've got to go now. See you soon, bye." As you know, I can cum on demand. Most of the middle-aged women in America know that, thanks to Julia's blowing my trumpet on Oprah. I had a little fun with the nurse. She gave me the tube and escorted me to a room, saying, "Bring me the sample when you've produced it." "Wait outside the door for five seconds and you'll have it." Six seconds later, because I'd fumbled with my zip, I passed it back to her. She was a typical, young, doctor's receptionist and somewhat pretty so I couldn't resist teasing her, "Impressively fast, aren't I?" She chose not to answer, although she did look suspiciously at the tube to make sure it was the same one that she'd given me. She'd already labeled it - an act that had taken longer than mine - and she saw it was correct. She led me to an empty consultation room where I waited for our family doctor's opinion of my ability to have a family. Fifteen minutes later the doctor came in. He was concerned, and he delicately said, "I've looked at your sample, Mark, and it appears that your suspicion is correct. There are a number of tests we can run to find out what the specific cause is, so we'll know what treatment options..." "Doctor, you misunderstand. I have no intention whatsoever of getting any treatment. If God has deliberately changed my body so it doesn't produce sperm, then I'm certainly not going to go against His will. All I want from you is confirmation of what I suspected. Did you find ANY sperm at all in my sample? Even a single one?" "No, none at all. I didn't look at the whole sample of course, but I did make three slides and none of them contained any." "So I'm totally infertile? Or impotent, or whatever the right word is?" "Yes. You're not concerned by that?" "Not at all. I'm living proof that God knows what He's doing, and I'm perfectly happy to let Him resurrect me in whatever way He wants. It'd be rather churlish of me to complain, wouldn't it?" "Good point. Leaving that topic then, I can see that your body has changed significantly. Would your guardian allow me to take a blood sample?" "Try it and see Doc." "Ahh. I'm reluctant to do that. It's killed quite a few people before." "Only when it considered that they deserved it, which I'm sure it doesn't about you. But if you like, I'll take the sample myself; just point me at what I need to use." Before the doctor could answer, I started floating slowly toward the door, which opened for me. I called back, "Are we done?" "Looks like it." I was placed on my feet just before the door. I turned to the doctor, "I think we can call that a fairly clear hint." "Yes. I appreciate its answer being non-violent." "It's a Good creature, by definition, Doc. I noticed you never said 'angel', but that's what it is." I left, by walking. ^ I should expand on a comment the Doc made about noticing my body had changed. It's now thirty one days after Resurrection Day. I'm aiming to complete my physical transformation roughly at the end of summer vacation, or if I err, taking a little longer is fine. So I was about 30% of the way from Ron to Mark. Ron had been 5' 6" and my girls had decided that the new Mark was going to be 6' 3", a gain of 9 inches, thus I was now about 5' 9". My skin color was one-third lighter, shoulders one-third wider, ass one-third cuter, etc. My hair looked particularly weird. Every hair had a very noticeable straight, brown length, and then a longer length (if pulled straight) of black, curly hair. It was an unprecedented and VERY strange look. Julia wanted me to cut it because it was so silly. I kept it for exactly the same reason: that silliness gave an unambiguous impression about what was happening to me. I'd made it up to Julia by getting my cock to change size much quicker than the rest of my body. It'd been three weeks since I received my possibly insulting orders to improve that part of my anatomy. I'd started by getting it to lengthen until the girls democratically decided when to call "Stop." To my surprise, it was when I was only 7 inches long, as I'd expected them to prefer longer than that. It was only a little longer than I'd started with, so the original me didn't feel hardly any insult at all. And then they got me to work on its width, which ended up insulting the original me a great deal. First they had me expand my knob, and they definitely enjoyed having that wider. That experiment was so successful, they wanted to widen the whole shaft. That turned out to be an even more successful experiment; they declared it to be a "fucking fantastic success." I'd never thought to measure the width of my cock before the changes started so I can't give you a quantitative description of the change. Let's just say it went from "able to rest in my palm so I could easily close my fingers around it", to "I almost need two hands to hold it up." I'm exaggerating, but it was freaky to look down at a cock that appeared twice as thick as my natural one. The time I'd been Archangel Michael didn't count because I'd always known it was just a temporary trick, whereas these changes were for the real me (I'm aware that "real" is a concept that's harder to apply to me than other people). Girls being allowed to change their minds, they got me to reduce the size of my knob, so it was now narrower than the shaft, giving my cock a spear-like look. A couple of days ago they'd declared that to be the perfect shape, although anal play was totally off the agenda for it now - the spear shape was good for anal but the width of my shaft was NOT! A near-frictionless NP-ass-dildo works great for the girls anyway, as D-Cup will be finding out shortly. [As it turned out, it was okay to use my real finger because I was in the shower. Sometimes it's okay to modify plans on the hop, because D-Cup SURE did hop when that happened!] ^ I returned home and told my girls the result of my visit, and they confirmed that they were still happy for me to go bareback with D-Cup provided she answered their questions in the expected way. That issue was decided without it occurring to any of us that Nevaeh should have a say. The closest anyone came to worrying about Nevaeh's opinion, was Ava saying, "If D-Cup doesn't get pregnant after a few months, maybe we can stop taking the pill." I'm aware that what Ava said has nothing to do with worrying about Nevaeh's opinion. Julia and Carol agreed they'd probably do that. They told me their plan for D-Cup. It was quite elaborate but their reasons for its various stages were good ones. They'd be doing most of the work so it was easy for me to agree to their plan. All I had to do was give Nevaeh a jolly good fucking, which - so I wouldn't spoil my girls' elaborate plan - I was willing to do. And also for other reasons. I made a few changes to what they'd come up with. Nothing fundamental, just a few things to make sure Nevaeh got taught the lessons that were important to me. My girls had covered most of those already and it was easy to insert new ones. We're VERY experienced at this sort of thing now. [I didn't write about them, but even though Ron's lifestyle was low key originally, there were still dozens of plans and schemes involving him once his sex-life heated up. Julia enjoys her schemes, and I've found that I tend to enjoy them too, both for themselves and for what I learn from them.] Julia had already informed our security gate to let Nevaeh Smith in, direct her to the kids' parking lot, and tell her she'd be met there. At 10:55 our intercom informed us that Miss Nevaeh Smith had just been let in. The girls went down to meet D-Cup, while I went to my upstairs study where I killed time pretending to be busy. For the lack of anything better to do, I googled something appropriate - "D-cup" - so my time was spent enjoyably. The internet really is a marvelous resource. I was watching my girls with a sight blob. D-Cup arrived at the parking lot before my girls, probably setting a new Underground Speed Record in the process. She was standing beside her hurriedly parked car, pacing back and forth. #14: When the elevator door dinged and opened, D-Cup rushed to it, opening her arms to hug me. Seeing Carol, Julia and Ava - Nevaeh would have recognized the last two from their newspaper and TV appearances - but no Mark, caused Nevaeh to stumble to a halt. I could read her lips saying, "Where's Mark?" Carol said, "He's busy," or something similar, as that's what the girls' plan called for. They started doing the introductions, during which the Guardian Angel emerged from the tunnel wall. (I can create blobs inside matter - inside my hand, for example - but when the location is so far from me I find it easier to visualize the creation's location if it's empty space that I can see rather than inside a wall. If it was important I could create a blob in matter, but it's not worth the extra effort for normal stuff. I created the Guardian Angel inside the tunnel but with zero luminosity, moved it into the wall, turned up its output, then moved it into sight.) The girls noticed the angel, but didn't react much to it, not even Nevaeh. She was inexperienced sexually, but she was an old hand at being in the company of an angel. When the girls started moving toward the elevator, the angel zipped in front of D-Cup, blocking her path and instantly causing her to stop. She could have walked right through it, but who'd be rude enough to walk right through an angel! Invisible fingertips started undoing D-Cup's blouse. Quickly too, because the remote controller of the fingertips was feeling very horny. My girls seemed to get the idea, and they helped undress a concerned looking D-Cup. Carol was easily able to provide reassurance, things like the following having been suggested to her earlier: "You were worried last night and look how wonderfully that worked out." "An ANGEL wants you to get undressed. Surely you're not going to argue with God?" "You're in our home, so you're safe here." D-Cup, bless her, relaxed halfway through the process and even helped. I was also pleased to note that D-Cup was wearing one of her sexiest bra and panty sets. They looked VERY nice on her, although that's not saying much as it would take one hell of a bad underwear set to look anything other than fantastic on D-Cup's body. Having only partial use of one arm, Ava's job was to collect the removed items of apparel, and as soon as the panties were placed on the top, the pile floated out of Ava's hands and toward D-Cup's car. I triggered the remote door lock to unlock the car - the keys being in one of the pockets I was carrying - the unexpected sound startling D-Cup. I opened the car door, placed the clothes on her seat, closed the door and pressed the lock button. Her nakedness now seemed enforced, although should it become necessary, my girls have one or two extra items of clothing they could lend Nevaeh. D-Cup looked down worriedly, concerned about her nakedness, but my girls laughed some comments at her, took Nevaeh's hand, and towed her into the elevator. This was one of the changes I'd made to the girls' plan, after I'd sternly rebuked them for their inexplicably not thinking to strip D-Cup naked the moment she arrived, telling them they needed to consider their Lord's needs more carefully because they were playing in and with the bigs now, hehe. I wanted D-Cup trained to be naked around me. Not in a forced, compulsory sense, and not when it was inappropriate such as when we had outsiders visiting, but I wanted her ready and willing to get out of her clothes at the drop of a hat. No hesitation, no silly games, no having to provide her with endless reassurance or any of the other sorts of crap I'd put up with from Chloe. D-Cup's job would be to serve me, and her body was far too wonderful not to have it freely available to look at, so she was going to be trained to willingly and happily display it for me. "Start as you mean to go on," says Mom, although probably not with this exact situation in mind. My girls gave D-Cup "The Grand Tour," showing her all around our home and impressing the panties off her. That's half a joke, and half not. Our home is GORGEOUS and it has fantastic views. Especially on a lovely day, such as this was, the guided tour would impress anyone. It clearly impressed D-Cup. Several times I saw her standing in a room and look around, saying "Wow!" D-Cup was taken straight past our upstairs study, Julia saying, "Mark's in there working and the door is closed, so we only disturb him if it's important. Obviously your arrival isn't." When D-Cup queried that - if not immediately then after a few more similar comments - Julia's answer would be, "You've got to understand two things, Nevaeh: Mark's an incredibly capable person, which means he spends a lot of time working on important things. Carol told you last night that it took Mark five hours to do all his 12th grade work for the whole year, so you know he can get a phenomenal amount of work done in an amazingly short period of time. To read that fast, with the level of understanding that he has, and to almost perfectly memorize everything the way he does, requires INTENSE concentration. We don't disturb him when he's working if we can avoid it." And ESPECIALLY not when I'm looking at dirty pictures! -- "Second, God wants you to serve Mark. Mark is your superior and your master. It's not his job to run around after you to make you happy. It's YOUR job to be available to do that FOR HIM. When he wants you, he'll let you know. When he's with you, he'll treat you VERY well. He's extremely careful and considerate about people. I bet last night he was bending over backward to be very cautious with you, to help you not be scared..." You get the idea. It was all stuff to get Nevaeh into the right frame of mind about what her position in my life would be. It was a very safe bet that she had thoughts, or at least subconscious assumptions and instincts, of a relationship that was fundamentally a boyfriend-girlfriend one, with all that implied about equality, two-way commitment, faithfulness, etc. She had to have those assumptions destroyed as quickly as possible because they were doomed to failure. We are going to use "Mark is your superior and your master" on her a great deal, "Lord" being taken. Over time, depending on how things work out, we might shorten that to "Master" if she continues to need the reminders and reinforcement. Another approach to the same lesson was, "God thinks Mark is so important He resurrected him and has sent angels for him. But God hasn't sent you any angels that'll do miracles whenever you ask, has He, Nevaeh? Mark is more important than any other human being; maybe out of everyone that's EVER lived, which is hundreds of billions of people. You're just an ordinary 16-year old girl in a small town in Oregon. There's nothing special about you, except for two things: you're willing to serve Mark, and your personality might please him. Both of those depend on your working hard to be as perfect as you can for him, otherwise he'll ask the angel to find him a more suitable girl. There are millions of girls who'd love to be with him and you know the angel is happy to do what Mark wants. The ONLY way you are going to remain near the miraculous man that Mark is, is by making him happy. If some of the things he asks you to do make you unhappy, then keep them to yourself because if you complain, Mark will simply ask his angel to find a girl who will enjoy doing the things he wants done. Mark honestly doesn't want to see you unhappy because he's a very caring guy, so if you show unhappiness he'll stop letting you serve him." I'd pushed the "God Button" and it was too difficult to use that tactic at half-strength, so Julia was going to jump on that button and hold it down. She had no compunction about getting D-Cup lined up perfectly the way I wanted because it meant giving Nevaeh an attitude that Julia believed in totally. Julia could argue with me, and often did, but a girl like D-Cup damned well better not! How dare she think her opinion was more important than mine! Yet another lesson that Julia was insisting be learned would start with Julia and Ava repeatedly mentioning things that had happened last night. Sooner or later D-Cup would comment on them knowing so much about it. That'd give Julia an opening to say, "There are no secrets between Mark, Carol, Ava and me..." She'd use that to teach D-Cup that there'd be no possessiveness game-playing allowed. Because I'd oversold D-Cup so much, it seemed likely that she'd be around for a while - unless she screwed up with her parents or with us - so Julia wanted to ensure that D-Cup learned to play nicely with everyone else. I'd had plenty of experience with other girls by now, most of whom hadn't stayed in my life for long, and sometimes not more than a hour or two, but for some reason I really did think D-Cup would last until the medium term. The God tactic's working so well making her so easy to boss around made us hopeful that she wouldn't screw-up with us, especially if we educated her properly right from the start, but I didn't think that was the full explanation for why I felt reasonably confident about her having a chance for some longevity in our lives. I couldn't put my finger on why I thought that (that's not meant as a joke, especially as I would soon be putting my fingers wherever I wanted). I wasn't worried about the issue much. She'd last or she wouldn't; time would tell. [[I mentioned my confidence about Nevaeh to give me a chance to emphasize something about my proximity sense: its ability to show me people's emotions is now something I respond to unconsciously. When I'd first developed that ability, responding to what it showed me was necessarily something I did consciously, but now I rarely think about it, just as how you behave toward someone who is smiling or scowling is something you rarely think about - you just react. My feeling that Nevaeh would be around for much longer stemmed from the absence of the usual emotions girls have when allowing themselves to be seduced or when seducing me. Many girls, especially once I became rich, would initially act or even think they were compliant, but they weren't really. They were usually making decisions each time, and once they thought they had sunk their hooks into me deep enough, they'd start trying to take rather than give. Or perhaps the girls had started without greedy intent, but it had surfaced after they had enjoyed our wealth for a while. Even after just one meeting with Nevaeh, I could unconsciously tell that she was different. She was so blown away by God wanting her to serve me that it had changed her, whereas the previous girls hadn't changed at all, except possibly for the worse as their greed ramped up. Nevaeh would still have some boyfriend-girlfriend instincts that would thoughtlessly get in the way, but they should be easy to negate. In short: because my unconscious reading of Nevaeh's proximity failed to show the usual things I associated with girls who only lasted a short time, I expected her to last longer. Plus she was so extremely beautiful, fantastically figured, compliant and willing, that I hoped she'd be around for a while.]] It was a pity Nevaeh didn't get to see inside my upstairs study - after I'd exited the webpages I'd been looking at - because it's a SERIOUSLY impressive room. Julia and her family consider my studying ability to be the most important one that I have, so Julia has - even for Julia - gone totally overboard on my study. My downstairs study has thirty six screens on the wall and no furniture. My upstairs study has eight 30" panels. It used to have two with Ron, but Mark upgraded it to eight because the world already knew Mark used to have an eight-panel system. The room has the most expensive and impressive furniture that Julia could find, and she looked REALLY hard! Julia often uses the expression "Money is no object," but I was pretty sure she didn't use it about my study because getting it to look like she'd spent SERIOUS money on it WAS the object. When Julia had originally got the plans for the Kids' House drawn up, the architect had earned himself a VERY severe rebuke for not paying attention to Julia's written and verbal brief that Mark's study had to be "VERY impressive". He'd made the mistake of making it VERY impressive, rather than INSANELY OVER THE TOP impressive. He got kicked in the ass, reeducated, and sent back to his drawing board. Since then Julia has spent a lot of money making it exceed its design potential. In the five months since we moved into this house, she's continued to upgrade my study, dissatisfied over its not yet reflecting how awesome she thinks I am. I don't even use it much, but that's irrelevant to Julia. My Peoria Road study had been very impressive at the time, but Julia wouldn't let me be seen dead in something like that now. D-Cup's Grand Tour concluded in the master bedroom, which got a "WOW!" Julia and the other girls had put a HUGE amount of effort into making our bedroom as impressive as money, more money, and yet more money - for hired experts, so they could suggest how to spend even more money - could possibly make it. It was designed to make any visitor believe that "Mark is Awesome", to quote from the lengthy design brief. Unlike most married couples' bedrooms, mine isn't feminine; it is clearly a man's room. More accurately, an AWESOME MAN'S ROOM, and "a man's awesome room" too. That doesn't mean it's masculine, because it's not. Its target audience is females so it "spoke to them", but what it spoke was male power, prestige, wealth and taste. D-Cup was suitably impressed. Even more so than most girls had been because her emotional investment in me was far greater. She wanted and needed to have faith in me, and seeing this room conveyed a lot of that. Silly really, as it just required throwing money at it, and not even my money as Julia had paid for most of it. For some weird reason, girls project the image of something onto its owner, e.g., the owner of a brand new Hong Kong cellphone must be very [whatever adjective best emerges from the particular styling of that phone]. That makes it extremely easy to impress girls, provided you've got a few million dollars. It certainly impressed D-Cup now. Having jammed the God Button full on, and then having blown D-Cup's mind with what two unlimited budgets can do - one for decorating and the other for furnishing - Julia then administered the coup de grâce. Julia took D-Cup into the huge closet, and indicating suitable empty areas, telling her, "These drawers, those two shoe racks, these accessory slides, these hooks, that overhead shelf area, and this length of hangers, are yours for the clothes we'll get you." Nevaeh was STUNNED! It was one thing for Julia to share her boyfriend, but it was another thing ENTIRELY to share her CLOSET! That screamed a level of acceptance and commitment that completely GOBSMACKED Nevaeh. Even most married couples don't share closets! And then Julia added, "We'll fly you down to LA in the family jet the first chance we get, and maybe to New York too. We need to get you quite a few new outfits of the quality Mark deserves." Nevaeh's legs starting shaking, and she had to grab hold of one of the freestanding units in the middle of the closet to hold herself up. She started crying, and the girls moved into a group hug to comfort her, the closeness and support of which made her cry even more. ^ In case you think I'm hyperbolizing when I write about Nevaeh's legs shaking and her crying, let me assure you that I'm not. The last nine hours of Nevaeh's life had been overwhelming. All her life she'd been raised to believe that God was All Powerful, All Important, and To Be Obeyed - ESPECIALLY by young girls! And then God's angel had appeared in her very own bedroom and had turned her world upside-down. She'd texted messages back and forth with an angel on a phone that God had personally rebuilt after the angel had mistakenly crushed it, the angel had miraculously taken her high into the air over Corvallis, and she'd talked to a man who was so favored by God that he'd been resurrected! From being DEAD! Mark had seen into her soul - he'd found out things about her unbelievably fast, even with his eyes shut! He could even override her denial with complete certainly, insisting on things like, "No, you ARE unhappy." Her father didn't even know when her mother was unhappy most of the time, even after twenty two years of marriage. And GOD wanted her to serve this man. God - who must be obeyed - was even insisting on it. She'd broken up with the only boyfriend she'd ever had, that both their families had intended and expected her to marry. That normally would've been the MAJOR drama of her life, but she barely even noticed it. Everything else that was spinning around in her head swamped Peter Harrison into nothingness. Her virginity was precious to Nevaeh. She'd many times stood up in church youth group meetings and pledged to God that she would keep herself pure until she was safely and morally married. Peter had done so too, standing beside her. He'd recently been pressuring her to break her purity vows ("Everyone knows we're going to be married soon, Nevaeh, so there's nothing wrong with our..."), but she'd been very pure and strong, and very proud of herself for it. She LIKED being pure and believed it was very important to be a Good Christian Girl. She was proud of not just her virginal purity, but of her being a Good Christian in all respects. Christianity was the rock her life was proudly built on. But last night, God - through the angel and Mark - had told her that her church and parents had been lying to her all her life. Much of the foundation of her life had been proved to be lies. She had nothing to hang on to, and what's worse, no one to turn to for advice. And in a few hours she had to go to Mark's house and give him her virginity. That was a terrifying thought, and at the same time she was desperately longing for it. She'd risked making herself blind more times last night than all of her previous nights put together, admittedly that was a very small number as she'd previously been a GOOD Christian girl and determined to stay out of Hell. As if visiting Mark's house to surrender her virginity wasn't scary enough, she was going to be introduced to his girlfriends, his family, and his girlfriend's family, and they were going to be told exactly what her status was. She wasn't sure what that was exactly, which made her being overwhelmed even easier, but she knew for sure that she wasn't going to be a typical girlfriend. Whatever she was going to be would be strange and highly sexual, even including bisexuality, which scared her even more. The uncertainty put even more pressure on her, and made her head spin even faster. Yet it was also thrilling in many ways. She'd effectively forgotten Mark and his family were rich. She'd heard it many times in the news stories, and they'd talked about it briefly last night, but it didn't mean anything to her personally and it'd been swamped by all the other things she'd thought about. Driving to his home she'd seen the hill rising up in front of her, and she knew his family owned all of it. The security gates, the guards, the huge tunnel, and the elevator ride, they were impressive enough, but - oh my God! - the HOUSE! It blew her away. NOW she understood that they were RICH. Mark was too busy to see her yet, and Julia, Ava and Carol were telling her things about what her relationship with Mark was going to be like. She kind of heard what they were saying: the words got into her head all right, but she had trouble dealing with and accepting their meaning - her head was spinning too much. There was more stuff about God, and how she had to do what God wanted, which was to serve Mark. She knew she was ordinary and not even a particularly worthwhile person, so she couldn't understand why anyone so fantastic would want her to do these things. Why would Mark want her? Why would God want her to serve Mark? He could get ANY girl! And what did "serving Mark" mean anyway? She couldn't even tell whether or not she could do that because she didn't know what it was! Nevaeh was LOST. And then Julia had said, "We're sharing the master bedroom closet with you. You're an important part of our life now." My girls held Nevaeh up while she had a VERY good cry. You might also question why my girls were being so accommodating. They certainly don't make room in their closet for any of the other girls I play with! The main reason was that they'd picked up on my over-selling Nevaeh. That I'd tried so hard to sell her probably meant that I wanted her much more than I wanted the other girls, so my girls automatically treated her as important. That says things about my girls' loving and generous attitudes that prove they're WONDERFUL people! That I had succeeded in selling Nevaeh so much also meant we had a responsibility to be careful with her, and it's an easy bridge from being careful to caring. My girls would do both, keeping a close watch on her to make sure she was managing okay. Unlike my early dating days, these days I'm very casual about girls. I'd learned that there truly are plenty of fish in the sea, and more will be along soon. My girls had seen me not try hard many times, especially as it's a common tactic for girls to stage the bluff of walking away, expecting me to rush after them and beg for them to come back, as a way of building our mutual commitment to our relationship. Often I just let them go, even though it'd only take one word to get them back once they were looking over their shoulders in panic. That I was putting much more effort into Nevaeh was a change of attitude that my girls responded to. They knew me well enough that they easily knew most of my motives, but they were unconcerned about them mostly being just for fun. D-Cup's physique and beauty was my most obvious motive and the one I'd joked about the most, but my girls knew that my entire seduction strategy was something that I was also enjoying very much; probably even more than I would enjoy the sex act itself. My girls love supporting me and sharing my activities, and that's what they were actually doing rather than what they appeared to be doing, helping Nevaeh. They were being nice to her as a way of being nice to me. Carol's comments about our seduction of Nevaeh last night had shown Julia and Ava that Carol was involved and responsible too, so they were also supporting Carol. Allocating some of their closet space to Nevaeh was a very symbolic act, but it wasn't hard to do, and it wouldn't be hard to undo either, so there was no real reason why not. Their offer to go shopping with Nevaeh and spend their own money on her certainly wasn't a "reason why not." I don't know whether you've picked up on this nuance of my girls' characters yet, but they quite enjoy clothes shopping. Nevaeh was beautiful with a fantastic figure, so my girls would have great fun playing dress-up with her. We've got so much money it's ridiculous, and it's accumulating faster than we can spend it, so spending some on Nevaeh was no problem at all. There might also be an element of "Julia being Julia". She might have taken my positive comments about Nevaeh and run ahead of me, as she so often does. Julia likes to do things to excess, and that's never more so than when it's for my benefit. Something like this, which gives Julia many opportunities to proclaim my importance, would be a lot of fun for her. And where Julia leads, Carol and especially Ava follow. Although you don't know much about it yet, Julia particularly liked that I already had a plan for something I'd do with Nevaeh's school. Julia's enthusiasm was because: I'd almost never got involved with any of my other seduction targets' lives beyond our immediate interactions, so my doing so with Nevaeh reinforced some of the points above. More importantly, my idea would be an excellent training exercise for my developing people-management skills, well beyond chatting up girls. MOST importantly, I'd talked about it as only the first idea I'd had for a campaign of improving my image among the local Christians. Given that some of them had called for my death, Julia was VERY happy to do what she could to help my relationship with Nevaeh, even if it meant temporarily giving up some closet space! All things considered, it was natural for my girls to be so nice to Nevaeh, and for her to react to it so much. ^ D-Cup cried for a long time. Fortunately I wasn't too impatient because google had found quite a lot of interesting stuff for me to read. Well, not so much "read". I was using the internet for both its original and main purposes: I was being scientific about sex. So far Nevaeh was better looking than an accurately determined sample of 98% of the girls whose pictures I'd seen, and they had the advantage of makeup, lighting and flattering angles. Sadly, for about half of those girls, no amount of tricks could help them because their tits sagged too much. I guessed that'll happen to Nevaeh in a few years, but at the moment her tits were truly spectacular, and I was truly happy. [[There are advantages to my being a god now, and making sure none of my girls' tits sag is right up there.]] As well as putting the internet to good, scientific use, I also had a sight blob watching the girls and was pleased when I finally saw D-Cup wipe her eyes in an unmistakable, "I've finished" fashion. She stood up straight on her own legs and looked a lot better. #14: The girls stood around and talked. And talked and talked, because that's what girls do at times like this. #5: After an incredibly long fifteen minutes, they moved on with the plan. #29: They were heading up the tunnel to the Adults' House. I gave Donna a tap to alert her, and texted Mom's cellphone with a five-minute warning. Mom was in the Office with Prof doing "Family Business" stuff with our in-house accountant and commercial lawyer for most of today. Vanessa was in DC and Dad was supervising the assembly of lawnmowers. Donna wasn't necessary for the plan, but Julia had thought it'd be a good experience for her to be involved. In other words, Julia was training up another tool for her to use, but in a way that would build the self-confidence and important people-management skills of the tool. Donna had been heavily involved in the Donna's Ducklings schemes, and with the combined Duckling-Cutie schemes, but rarely in others. She was looking forward to proving her usefulness to us. Donna had quite an easy job, to conduct The Grand Tour for the Adults' House. Donna had seen enough of them done that she'd have no trouble, as we've had a LOT of people visit our home since it was built (obviously I'm not going to bore my esteemed readers with details about that type of event). During the tour, Donna was to "talk dirty" to Nevaeh: ask detailed questions about Nevaeh's sexual experiences with boys and girls, close physical inspection of Nevaeh's body, get Nevaeh to do the splits and a few other agility tests, ask about her running endurance, and a few other related topics. Donna would also talk about what sort of sex I liked. Notice that we called D-Cup "Nevaeh" to Donna; Donna's a bit too likely to say the first thing that crosses her mind so we'd made sure only to tell her the correct name. Maybe not to Donna, but D-Cup was bound to ask someone how come my young sister Donna was so expert about sex in general, and sex with me in specific. The two answers are to be: About her knowledge of sex in general: "There's nothing dirty or shameful about sex. They're the lies churches say, not what God says. It's a non-shameful, fun, important part of life, so of course everyone helps Donna learn as much as she can about it." About her knowledge about sex with Mark in specific: "Many of Donna's and Carol's friends have had sex with Mark. Usually in groups, so there's usually plenty of talk about it afterward." Both answers are intended to further break D-Cup's existing sexual attitudes, which I somehow suspect aren't as permissive as they should be. The sooner that personality fault of hers is fixed, the better. I knew that I could blow her away by having sex with her, but making her capable of fitting in with all of us was important if she's going to be around for a while. Regarding "blowing her away by having sex with her", I'm even better at that these days. Most of the detailed descriptions of my sexual acts in this autobiography are back when I had done three merges. Having done five now, my proximity sense is about a hundred times more detailed. The extra information it gives me makes me even better at understanding girls' bodies, so I'm even better at sex. Nothing like a hundred times better - that'd be silly. Not even twice as good because I can't sense what nerves are doing or how brains are interpreting those signals, but my greatly improved proximity sense still increases my skill and girls' pleasure noticeably. In addition, I'm happy to say that I'm considerably more experienced now; so much so that even #8 stopped bothering to keep count once I got over a hundred notches on my bedpost. Probably something like 150 different girls have succumbed to my charms so far. Most important of all when it comes to giving girls a great time in bed, there's my attitude: I LOVE to give them the best time I can. I'm not so determined about that as I used to be [[that'd been because of my weak ego]], but I still enjoy it very much. I've also got my unlimited endurance, various "Go-" abilities, a few NP tricks, and my girls tell me that the size and shape of my new cock is a very noticeable improvement too. All things considered, I could guarantee that D-Cup would be eager for more sex with me. Making her relax her attitudes to sex wasn't to make her eager to get back into my bed, it's to help her relax about our entire sexual lifestyle. I was particularly worried about Nevaeh's ability to handle group and girl-on-girl sex. Proximity had shown me that her emotional reaction to my statement that she was bisexual was strongly negative. Life would be better if that was fixed. She had to be, at the very least, extremely relaxed about it. I'd much prefer, for obvious reasons, that she was an enthusiastic participant. All of my girls would work on Nevaeh's attitudes. There'd be plenty of opportunities for that because sex was going to come up for discussion VERY often. Donna would be helping with that, as we could use her apparent search for knowledge as a way to have her outright ask Nevaeh questions about whatever it was that we wanted to teach Nevaeh about. Nevaeh's answer to Donna's question, then the rest of our additional comments, would enable us to do plenty of teaching. Donna was going to be useful in one specific topic. We'd use Donna's sexual interest and knowledge to get D-Cup curious. With Donna's being so young, D-Cup should ask someone if Donna has had sex. If she doesn't ask that this visit, she will soon. The answer would ideally come from Donna. If D-Cup asks someone else we'll intercom or phone Donna if she's available, to get her to answer. If Donna isn't available then one of the other girls will give the same answer. Assuming it's Donna that answers, then she'll say, "I'm physically ready but sex is too emotionally powerful for me yet. I'm only fourteen, and I'm thinking that I'll probably wait until I'm sixteen, depending on if I meet a boy that I like enough. Mark is so nice he makes other boys seem very shallow so I might have trouble finding a good boyfriend. If I haven't found one by the time I'm eighteen, I think I'll probably ask Mark if I can be one of his lovers." The objectives for that answer are: To make Donna out to be impressively mature and responsible about sex, proving to D-Cup that being open about sex is a good thing and further encouraging her to trust whatever we say about sex. To discover D-Cup's attitude to incest in a safe way. That Donna "is currently thinking that she might ask me for sex in four years if she doesn't meet a nice boy in the meanwhile," is about as safe as it's possible to be. If D-Cup thinks to ask Carol about having sex with me, Carol's answer will be, "I'm a lesbian." With Donna being so pro-Mark, D-Cup will see that both my sisters love me very much, increasing her opinion of me even further. That's important because we're going to be changing her understanding of life a great deal and we need a lot of credibility for that. My being seen as a very good person is essential for our incredibly powerful "God Is On Our Side" tactic to work. That's most of Donna's job described. Julia had got my Mom and Prof to agree to do a shorter version of the same job. They'll be less graphic and take less time so they can get back to their work, but the effect will be much the same and cumulative with Donna's. They'll express friendly openness about sex, discussing Nevaeh's losing her virginity shortly, admiring her beauty, expressing hope that she'll do a good job of devoting herself to serving someone as important as me, asking her if she'll want to stay for dinner. Just your basic, ordinary, everyday, parental-type questions - that's both a joke and the attitude they'll be deliberately conveying. Mom will say some mothering things, Prof will say some supportive father-of-the-main-girlfriend things, and D-Cup will be very confused but also educated in the right direction. By the way, notice how cooperative Mom is about sex these days. The last big argument with Mom that I quoted in this autobiography was two years ago, and she's improved greatly since then. She's not really had any choice, as she's been totally outvoted and everyone that Mom wanted to protect has been wonderfully happy. Not knowing much about D-Cup's past I have to guess this, but I'm reasonably sure that she would never have been in a family environment like mine. Remember that she'll be naked during all of this, maximizing the mind-bending nature of her experience. By the time The Grand Tour of the Adults' House is finished, D-Cup should be wondering whether she's fallen through a wormhole into an alternate Universe, although I doubt she's read the right sort of books to think that - it's VERY hard finding the perfect girl! Then I'll take her to bed for two or three hours, and her world will be turned upside-down and ROCKED! There's one more part of Donna's job to mention. As a result of her talking to Nevaeh about her sports experience and endurance, Donna will design and print out an exercise program for Nevaeh. Donna will wander into my bedroom fairly early in Nevaeh's and my sex-session to deliver the exercise program. Donna, Nevaeh and I will talk about it while I continue to have sex with Nevaeh, although I don't expect Nevaeh to be physically or emotionally able to do much talking. Donna will ask some questions about Nevaeh's sexual performance so far, will make a couple of intelligent recommendations, and then will leave. Donna will easily be able to impress Nevaeh given the differences in their sexual experience and knowledge. Donna has learned a surprising amount given how few times she's had sex. Only having it once a month for a while, now formally twice a month - although we sneaked in several extra sessions to get her opinion of my cock's ideal size and shape - makes her focus on sex very intently and she often talks with my girls, me, and even Mom and/or Dad about how to do things to maximize our pleasure during her terribly infrequent sessions. My other girls will be wandering in and out during D-Cup's bedroom session to get changed, check how it's going, ask if we want a drink or snack, or any other pretexts they want. They'll give me a few kisses in passing, and give D-Cup a kiss on the cheek too, or if she's up the other way, a kiss on the cheek. By the time I finish having sex with her, and we finish working on her attitudes, D-Cup's previous understanding of sex should be TOTALLY SHATTERED! She should be so confused and ignorant that she'll ask us what she should believe, whereupon we'll tell her. That means that her church and we will have both told Nevaeh what she should believe. I hope "The best man wins." That should be me because I've provably got God on my side, which is something her church will have great difficulty competing with, an irony that will amuse me while it's destroying their credibility. Having explained the plan for Nevaeh's first visit, I'll just say that reality followed it very closely, which was nice of it. D-Cup was compliant and easily led. Even when she realized she was going to the Adults' House to meet people while she was naked, her steps barely faltered. #9: <24 hours ago, she was a well-behaved, modest, Christian girl, and now she's walking to meet strangers while she's stark naked, and she never looked like balking. That's a phenomenal turnaround. Either she's even more gullible than we thought, or she's so blown away she doesn't know what to think.> [[Mostly the latter, other than she knew that she should do what she was told. Her parents and church had been teaching her that nonstop for many years, the lessons had taken firm root, and she wouldn't dream of kicking up a fuss now that God had specific plans for her.]] #7: #8: #14: #All: I was VERY horny - and well on the way to being VERY, VERY horny - so it naturally took twice as long as I expected for the girls to return from the Adults' House. No good reason; they just talked a lot. Having my girls seduce other girls for me works awesomely well, just far more slowly than I would like. You'd think that with all the practice they've had they'd get quicker, but they were evidently determined to do a very thorough job with Nevaeh. I noticed that when the girls were showing D-Cup the Adult House's living room, Donna opened the door out to the pool, leading the girls out far enough for Donna to point down where the horses were. That wasn't part of her instructions, but it was good to see because it hinted that young, impressively built Grace Smith might be getting an invitation to visit. I was impressed that D-Cup walked from inside to outside without any shyness over being naked. I couldn't tell why she was so casual. It wasn't as if she'd forgotten she was naked because she'd shown sudden modesty when Prof had first appeared a few minutes before. Julia had made D-Cup come out from behind Carol. Then after a couple of minutes of conversation, to place her hands at her side to display her body to Mom and Prof. [Prof later complimented me on my taste in female bodies.] It seemed I wasn't going to have any difficulty getting D-Cup to wear one of 'my' Australian bikinis around our pool. When the girls - not Donna yet because she was typing up an exercise program for Nevaeh - arrived back in the Kids' House, they found me swimming laps in our swimming pool. I was using a considerable amount of NP assistance to make my swimming FAST; about three times faster than every freestyle world record. Water is so dense that to go even a few percent faster than the world record rates requires an increase in power beyond what was humanly possible. All our lives we've seen people swimming and we have a very clear idea of what the maximum speed looks like. My speed was inhuman, and it was happening right in front of D-Cup's eyes - she stopped dead and her mouth fell open. My girls moved past her casually, as if nothing much was happening. Carol wandered down to one end of the pool, waited until I powered my way down to it, then called, "Nevaeh's here." Another couple of strokes and I reached the wall. I stopped swimming, then leaped out of pool with impressive athleticism. Not super-impressive - not by flying out, for example - as I didn't want D-Cup to think I had angelic help. Carol took my arm and we walked toward the others, my body naked and heading straight toward D-Cup. She looked down, blinked, looked again, and her eyes widened even more. #15: D-Cup must be a modest girl because of the two very recent events that boggled her mind, she chose to exclaim, "How on Earth can you swim that fast?" "Nevaeh, you believe that I'm special because God resurrected me, is looking after me, has sent me a Guardian Angel. Right?" A hesitant, "Yeees?" D-Cup was worried where this was going. She had no specific reason to worry; it was just that she'd been hit with overwhelming stuff over and over again and she feared another breach of her reality was about to happen. "You've got it backward. I'm not special because God is looking after me; He's looking after me because I'm special. You just got a look at one of the many things I'm exceptionally good at. After you dry me, we'll go inside and I'll show you another one." Julia gave her a nudge, saying, "Get Mark's towel and dry him off. You ARE his serving girl." The nudge turned into a push, and got D-Cup moving. My girls chatted to me about what they'd been doing with Nevaeh while I'd been hard at work in my study (more accurately, "hard in my study"). That gave the girls a chance to remind D-Cup of the key lessons. Meanwhile D-Cup had picked up my towel and had dried my back, arms and legs. That was easy, although my ass fazed her for a few seconds until she summoned the courage to pass the towel over it. D-Cup was even able to answer a couple of questions from my girls while drying me. She walked around to my front, holding out my towel for me to take. Julia wasn't going to stand for that nonsense! "Nevaeh! Dry your superior and master. Why are you telling him to do half the work for you? That's ridiculous!" D-Cup started doing as Julia had ordered, but there was one specific part of me that she seemed to have a big problem with. Julia sympathetically suggested, "Mark, I think you need to ask the angel for a new serving girl. This..." "NO! I'll do it! I don't know how though. I've never touched one before, and it's so BIG and, umm, 'wavy'." [I've been reluctant to mention this, but in the interest of keeping my autobiography factual I should tell you something more about my cock: Back when my girls had requested that I enlarge it, our conversation had been cut short by our arriving at the Staff Quarters. The girls had obviously kept thinking about such an important issue, because when we next had privacy Julia informed me, "We'd like your cock to be ribbed please." After I discussed it with them enough to understand what they meant, I did it for them, they tested it, and pronounced, "It's great! Make the ribs bumpier please." A few days later, "Even bumpier please." After making a couple more increasingly reluctant adjustments, I had to draw the line - a very bumpy one - because my cock already looked bizarre. Thank God I'll never have to show it in public! The only people who will see it will be girls who are already my lovers, or who are about to be, such as D-Cup soon. If the imminent lovers have any sexual experience, the sight of my cock should make them even more eager, once they stop laughing.] #5: Julia eased D-Cup's mind by saying, "If you think that's big, wait till you see it when he's hard. AY, CARAMBA! Haha. -- "Grab hold of the end, pull it out horizontally... , argh! Never mind. I'll do it. Watch me because I'm not gonna help you next time." Julia took the towel off D-Cup, dried me quickly and efficiently. Then she bent down and put my cock in her mouth, even more efficiently getting me wet again. She sucked and jacked me, obviously wanting me to get hard so I eased off on the go-softs that I'd been doing continuously since Nevaeh arrived (have I mentioned that D-Cup has D-cups shaped better than 98% of the similarly endowed girls on the internet, and that she was naked and about to be mine?) When Julia had me nice and hard, she pulled her head back to give D-Cup a good look. "Isn't he magnificent?" asked Julia "He's so BIG! That's HUGE. I'll NEVER get that... , you know." Julia answered, "It fits in me wonderfully, so it'll easily fit in you." I had a better answer, "Nevaeh, I know FOR AN ABSOLUTE FACT that my cock fits your pussy PERFECTLY! There's no doubt about it. None whatsoever!" "How can you know that?" "Because God sent you to me. He knows I'm going to have a lot of sex with you, so he would've picked a girl who had the perfect-sized pussy for me. God is VERY good at details like that. You don't think God would be so silly as to forget to check your pussy, do you?" Nevaeh looked down at herself, clearly nonplussed at the thought of God checking out her pussy. "Ahh, I never thought of that." Hardly surprising, considering that all her life she's been told that God has nothing whatsoever to do with pussies and that it's always the Devil who is down there. Julia declared, "I'm glad that silliness is over with. Let's go inside." ------- Chapter 383: D-Cup Loses Something Very Precious to Her (Hint: It's Not Peter Harrison) Monday, July 2, 2007 (Continued) My three girls started moving inside. I bent down and scooped D-Cup up, holding her in front of me as I carried her. She was getting cold feet so they would've worked too slowly. I wanted to get started NOW! To distract her I said, "You're not officially my serving girl yet, not until I take your virginity. So just this once I'll carry you inside, but after this you'll have to carry me, okay?" It fell mostly flat with her. She wasn't in the mood for even my humor because she was too disoriented. For the same reason, she wasn't in the mood for sex either. Julia had a small commitment ceremony planned for the bedroom, but it wasn't going to work because D-Cup's ability to absorb any more whelm was over. As we neared the bedroom, D-Cup started squirming in my arms, saying, "Ahh, Mark. I'm not sure..." "Shh, Nevaeh. There are no more decisions now. God sent you to me and I have accepted you. You are mine already. God knows it, the angel knows it, I know it, and in your heart you know it too. It's all over except for a small action that you don't have any say over. You never did, not from the moment God decided that you were going to be mine. Lie back and trust me and God. We know what we're doing. You love me. You need to be with me. You've never met a man like me before and you never will. I can read you like a book, and I know what what's best for you..." After the first few sentences had established my meaning, D-Cup's anxiety and fear steadily drained out of her with every sentence, especially with every repetition of "God". She liked the theme of my last few sentences too. I kept the responsibility-removing statements going nonstop. I used NP to pull my girls to the side and make them stop walking as D-Cup and I walked passed them and into the bedroom, the door magically closing behind us to block the girls out. I NP-rubbed their nipples to let them know I was fine, then rubbed their cheeks to let them know I loved them. The plan for the sex part of today was for me to spend an hour or so giving D-Cup virginity-retaining orgasms before I used NP to summon the girls, who would come in to witness the act itself. I had just decided to modify the plan. I kept telling D-Cup things she wanted to hear - cycling through variation after variation of: "You have no choice", "God wants this", "We know best", "I am special," and, "You love me." The more I said those things, the less anxious she was. And after a dozen more sentences, her happiness started returning. Half a dozen more sentences, and her enthusiasm started registering. I recited them one after the other, variation after variation; it's very useful to have thirty two minds. There was no attempt at a conversation. My chant was washing over her, draining her fears and uncertainties away, and then reminding her of all the incredibly excited thoughts she'd been having ever since being three thousand feet over Corvallis. I remembered to mention that too, as she'd reacted so well to it at the time. Her excitement grew, her lust bloomed, and I kept my incantation going, knowing very well that I should NEVER mess with a winning formula, especially not when the stakes are so high (she was lying on her back). Thirty seconds later, D-Cup launched herself on top of me, kissing and praising me, while she laughed and cried at the same time. D-Cup was REALLY good at multitasking her face. I kissed her in return, started rubbing my hands over her body for the first time - at LONG LAST! - and kept my recitation going, but upping the proportion of the "God wants this" and "We know best" type of statements. I was waiting for her to get aroused enough that I'd be able to take her easily, and I was prepared to wait up to a whole minute if I needed to, although how fast her lust was surging made that seem unlikely. D-Cup didn't wait for me to decide. She started begging me, "Take me Mark! Take me now! I want you. I want to be yours. PLEAZE make me yours. I'm ready NOW! Like God wants us to." #14: #11: #14: #11: I climbed on, raised myself and lined myself up, placing the head of my cock in the entrance of her pussy. I suddenly remembered we'd placed a towel beside the bed for this, but getting it arranged would be too disruptive now. D-Cup was chanting music to my ears, "YES Mark! Take me! Make me yours! I LOVE YOU! I want to serve you. I'll serve you better than ANYONE! I'll be PERFECT for you..." D-Cup being a typical female in talking about something rather than just doing it, I was having to wait to get a word in edgewise. I wasn't going to say anything particularly important, but something should be said to make the moment special for her. It'd probably be something along the lines of, "I ACCEPT YOU!" as I simultaneously thrust into her. Or it might be something else similar; I was still tossing around ideas among the other conversational threads we were having (we multitask our conversations far more than I write herein. There are thirty two of us, and it's not as if any of us ever have anywhere else to go, so we have a LOT of conversation. Take it from me thirty two times, you really don't want to read all of our conversations, just representative samples). Anyway, at the appropriate time one of us will say something suitable to Nevaeh, as that's the way it usually works with me. We don't consciously decide minor things anymore - that'd be a real pain with so many of us - they just emerge when needed because we've gotten so efficient at working together and trust each other so much. That D-Cup never seemed to run out of breath made me create the Guardian Angel to startle her. I also realized that it'd be a good way of making this moment special for her. We'd planned to have my girls be her witnesses but it wasn't happening that way. Having an angel as a witness of her giving her virginity had to be a very special thing. It was much better for her than being watched by other girls, I now realized. I'd make it glow brighter at the moment of consummation to better show its happiness. Surprised by the angel's appearance, Nevaeh stopped speaking. I started saying whatever it was that'd come to mind when I opened my mouth. The long litany of telling her that she was going to obey me and God put me in the mood of saying, "Do you swear to God to obey my orders to the very best of your ability?" "YES! I SWEAR!" I was suddenly reminded of an old idea I'd had back at the end of the FBI problems, the reminder probably coming from my creating the angel just now and thinking of making it glow brighter. I suddenly acted on my impulse, creating three VERY BRIGHT, red, green and blue superimposed light blobs (i.e. a white blob), then almost instantly canceled them and the angel. The result was a blinding flash of white light. Then I thrust deep into Nevaeh and paused. "Mark, I swore to G ... Oh, you're in me?" "Yes I am." "I swore to God. Did you see that burst of light?" "Yes I did." "I swore TO GOD. A REAL oath. Not like promising to be pure at church. This was REAL! With a bright light and everything." #5: #19: #1: "I saw it, Nevaeh. You are mine now." "I swore to obey you always, didn't I?" "The exact words were, 'Do you swear to God to obey my orders to the very best of your ability.' That's what you have to do now." "Oh boy! This is serious. This is bigger than the wedding vows, bigger than being married, or ANYTHING. People get divorced, but I can't disobey you, can I? Not EVER, not even once?" "I think that'd be a VERY bad idea. You swore to God and He accepted your oath." "He sure did! Oh boy. I just did something very big, didn't I?" "I don't think there's anything bigger." "It was a miracle, wasn't it?" "A big one. I've never heard of God taking an oath so seriously before. That was something VERY special, and definitely a major miracle." "You've never heard of it before?" "No. I think God created that miracle just for you." "Wow." I could see her struggling to come to grips with it. After a few seconds her emotions stabilized, and she announced not-quite-proudly, but getting there, "My life belongs to you now, Mark." "For as long as I want it. You swore to obey me, so I have control over you until I cancel your oath." "You can do that?" "Yes. I have a strong feeling that I can. It's the only moral possibility. You have to obey me for as long as I want, and when I decide it's over, then it's all gone." "Boy. This is like being married, but even stronger." "No it's not, Nevaeh. In a marriage both people make an oath to each other, but you know I didn't make an oath to you. We are not equals. I am your superior and your master, and you are my servant that I can order to do whatever I want." "So you OWN me!" "I can remember your telling me last night that you wanted me to have your mind and soul. Now I have ALL of you, so I guess you could call that 'owning'. I don't like that word much because it's for 'things' and it sounds insulting to use it on someone as lovely as you. A much better way of saying it would be that I now have your TOTAL loyalty." "I don't like that, Mark. It's too weak. I like 'own' much better. I can't risk disobeying you even once. I could go to Hell for making a SINGLE mistake, so I have to be VERY careful. I want you to say you own me because that will make it much easier for me to remember how important it is for me to obey you." #14: #10: "Okay Nevaeh, I 'own you'. Just so long as you're not insulted by it." "I wouldn't mind an insult if it kept me aware of how important it is that I obey you, but I don't feel insulted to be owned by you, Mark. You're a special favorite of God, so I can trust you. I'm glad it's not any other boy that owned me. That'd be TERRIBLE!" "Yeah, they could force you to have sex with them." I vibrated my hips a little. "Haha, haha. I FORGOT! I can't believe I forgot you were in me..." "You were distracted by something MUCH more important. Sex isn't nearly as important as swearing a real oath to God." #15: "You're very mature, Mark." "Thank you. I try. I'm very glad to see that you're happy with your decision to swear that oath." #12: #19: #1: "I'm over the shock now, and I think that I like that it happened. I wanted to be with you, and now I am. Now I'm tied to you as strongly as it's possible to be..." "That's not a good way of thinking about it. If you were tied to me, then I'd have to be tied to you as well, but I'm not. I OWN you. I own my car, and even though I like it, I don't feel obliged to visit it every day to see how it is. I don't feel obliged to take it with me everywhere I go, or any other obligations like that. Obligated is a similar word to 'tied', and I'm not obligated to you at all. I will try to be kind to you because that's the sort of guy I am, but I'm not obligated to be. This sounds cruel, but it is true and I want you to understand it. If I'm very busy on something else, I might not talk with you at all for several weeks. I could simply order you to wait for me to call you, and you'd have to wait for as long as I wanted. Weeks, months or even years if I wanted. Do you understand?" "I easily understand, Mark. I swore a powerful oath to God and He accepted it. I have no choice about obeying you. I wouldn't like being left alone, but what I like or don't like doesn't make any difference." "That's exactly right. I will try to order you to do things you'll enjoy, but sometimes something needs to be done which is unpleasant no matter who does it, and I could easily order you to do those things because that's what having a serving girl is for, after all." "I understand. I've taken a big risk, and it's too late to try to back out now." "You've taken the BIGGEST risk because you've given me control over your entire life for as long as I want, even for a hundred years. Or maybe it'll just be ten years or one year. Whatever it is, it's out of your control." "I don't think I'm going to mind. I've seen TWO miracles in the SAME DAY because of you. I'm still learning how special you are, but it's VERY, VERY special isn't it?" "It is quite a lot, yes. I've got some amazing physical abilities like swimming fast and other more useful ones, but my most useful ability is my intelligence. I'm incredibly good at studying and learning. And I'm very good at reading people too, as you know. Those are very useful abilities. -- "Something else, while I remember it. You're only sixteen, so you're still legally under your parents' control. Obviously if your parents ordered you to do one thing and I ordered you to do something else, you'd..." "Do what YOU said. I understand that. I swore to God to obey you." "That's right. The problem is that if you disobeyed your parents they can legally do things to you that I can't. They could send you away until you're eighteen, for example. My point is that we have to be careful until you're eighteen, so I'm not intending to use my power over you for anything dramatic. Something incredibly important just happened to you, but the next few months might be quite ordinary for you." "Maybe, but I don't think so. I've a feeling that being in your life is going to change my life amazingly." "I'll tell you one difference, you're going to get a LOT more sex than you used to have, starting NOW!" I started my hips moving. "{Giggle}. You've already given me more than I used to have." I concentrated on the job at hand. Also on the job at cock. The at-cock job was great. I must confess that I get a very nice amount of additional pleasure out of having a wider cock. I should have expanded it years ago (take my advice: stop squeezing your own one so often, in case you're making it narrower). On the other hand, the at-hand job, and the other hand's at-hand job, were both on D-Cup's namesakes. I was REALLY enjoying those too. I was so glad I owned them. I've never owned a pair of tits before and I'd chosen a magnificent pair to start my collection with. We took it slow to start with, not having much choice about that because the width of my cock and the narrowness of her never-penetrated pussy were extremely similar. In a nutshell, D-Cup was VERY tight! I made a mental note to ask God to make my next serving girl one with the next size up pussy; not that I was going to send this one back, not after all the effort my girls and I had put into giving her a good attitude. I kept my rhythm slow while she got used to it and while I started learning about her body. I've had a great deal of experience in learning about new bodies, quite a few of whom had been - until a few moments previously - virgins, so I was very confident in what I was doing. My cock was thicker than ever before, but other than needing to be more careful for the first several minutes, it made it even easier to give her a good time. D-Cup had waited almost seventeen years for her first sexual experience, and it took her less than seventeen minutes to discover that she'd waited far too long. "I LOVE sex! This is fantastic! I love being owned by you. Speed up again please. Oh yeah, like that. Oh boy!" One thing that really punched her buttons, was dirty talk, specifically things like, "I OWN your body now, Nevaeh. I can do ANYTHING I want with it. You can't stop me. All I have to say is 'Take your clothes off, lie down and spread your legs, ' and you have no choice but to obey. I have TOTAL control over you, and I'm going to use it to fuck you every time I get the urge." She thought that was a great idea, and urged me to do it now. "I am." "Do it faster then. I can't stop you, so you can go as fast as you want." #5: Her previous opinion of how good sex was got blown out the window when her orgasm hit her. After she'd caught her breath, she exclaimed, "Oh my God! That was better than ANYTHING! I've never felt..." "Roll over and raise your hips." "Pardon." "I OWN you. Roll over and raise your hips." "You're going to do me again!" "I own you, so I don't have to explain myself. Roll over so I can fuck my possession again." "Oh boy!" Doggy position with D-Cup was FANTASTIC. Her tits hung down and swayed gorgeously with my thrusts. I moved my sight blob around to see her breasts from the side, from underneath, from the front. They were all fantastic. From the side was my favorite view. As was from underneath. From the front was pretty damned good too. Times like this, I REALLY wished I could have more than two sight blobs. Which reminds me to mention a little use of NP that I've neglected to tell you about until now. If you've got a really good memory, you might remember that Julia's bedroom in her home back when I first dated her included an excessive mirror setup that pulled out from the wall, swiveled and rotated to allow her to get all sorts of simultaneous views of herself in the outfit she was currently contemplating wearing. Julia likes having mirrors in her bedroom, so we had an equally complicated setup in our Peoria Road home and we have one here inside the walk-in closet, as well as normal mirrors elsewhere of course. The current version is large enough for Julia, Carol and Ava to preen together. In the course of my thinking about sex one day, which I do from time to time, and from my enjoying the many sights that sight blobs give me during sex - as they were doing with Nevaeh now - I'd had the idea of floating mirrors around the bed so the girls could see us during sex. It's amazing how sexy it is to see yourself and your loved ones going at it from the unusual angles provided by multiple nearby full-length mirrors. We enjoy that so much that the mirrors in our current home's walk-in closet can all be detached from their holders, and quite often are, as using them has become a fairly common part of our lovemaking. NP is EXCEPTIONALLY useful! Sight blobs were letting me enjoy the same experience now, but Nevaeh had to miss out on enjoying that because it was asking too much to expect her to believe God or His angel would hold mirrors for us to better see our sexual acts. That sounded too much like what the Devil would do, which was something I couldn't risk her thinking. Donna had been waiting outside the bedroom door for the last five minutes. D-Cup had been too excited to benefit from Donna's visit during that time, so I'd gotten Donna to wait. Now that D-Cup and I were at the start of a second round, it was an ideal time for Donna to come in. So I gave Donna a pat on the ass. More of a rub really, but she got the idea and moved forward. I kept rubbing to make sure she kept getting the message, as young kids these days have terribly short attention spans. And in Donna's case, a nice ass. As per her instructions, Donna didn't knock. She opened the door quietly and walked toward the bed. We grinned at each other. About ten feet from the bed, and with an ordinary conversational voice, Donna said, "I've drawn up a..." "EEK!" D-Cup tried to drop her body flat on the bed. She tried REALLY hard to do that, but I was holding her up by her hips so she couldn't lower an inch. To make matters worse (in her opinion) I was still thrusting in and out of her. D-Cup's arms flailed around while I said, "Oh, hi Donna. I didn't hear you come in. Have you met Nevaeh before?" "Yeah. I showed her around the Adults' House. We talked about exercise and I don't think she has enough endurance to be a good lover for you, so I've drawn up an exercise program for her." "That's a great idea. Thanks Donna. -- "Nevaeh, you're squirming around unusually. What's the matter?" "I never expected anyone to see me having sex!" I couldn't resist, "Oh. Do you want Donna and me to leave?" "What? No, not YOU. I mean ... Oh. You're teasing me, aren't you?" "That's because you're doing something very silly. You're behaving as if sex is something to be ashamed of. I know the church has brainwashed people for hundreds of years to be ashamed of it, so I understand your reaction, but can you think of a SINGLE reason why you should be embarrassed? If you met Donna at the Adults' House then she's already seen you naked, so that can't be a problem..." #18: #11: " ... You told me just a few seconds before Donna came in that this was the best fun you've ever had in your whole life, which seems like a very strange thing to want to hide because people usually like company when they're having fun. Is it because you're stark naked and Donna's got clothes on?" "Yes! I want..." I thrust particularly hard, interrupting her speech and trail of thought Donna said, "That's easy." She dropped the exercise program on the bed, pulled her T-shirt off and started removing the rest of her clothes. D-Cup groaned and chuckled. "You tricked me. You're teaching, ugh, me a lesson?" The "ugh" because I was still thrusting away. "Yep: to let go of your embarrassment about sex. I don't mean to have it in public because some people would be offended and some males might become a danger to you, but everyone in my extended family has the correct attitude to sex. I'm even surprised that the other girls haven't come in to check how your first time is going." I was holding them back for the same reason I'd held Donna back. Donna probably wanted to get out and do something so I was letting her carry out her part of the plan first. The other girls would arrive soon after Donna left. "I understand. I keep saying that, but there's so much you're teaching me." "I'm happy to, sweetie. It's not your fault you were given bad information and I'm impressed by how quickly you're changing your attitudes. You're probably a bit distracted now, but when you've got a quiet moment try to think of a good reason why the law doesn't allow everyone to have sex in public. I can't think of one. Think about all our other bodily functions: We eat and drink in public. People will fall asleep in buses or planes. We don't quite go to the toilet in public, but we get close to it as men stand beside each other at urinals and both sexes normally have bathroom cubicles with open tops and bottoms, and when females are out in public they always take a friend to the bathroom with them. Admittedly sex can be a bit messy, but so can eating, and that's sometimes a VERY social activity. And there are plenty of puritans who get upset at a couple just kissing passionately in public, which isn't messy at all unless they're doing it very badly, haha. -- "I think the church has done everyone a HUGE amount of damage by repressing sex. It's caused all sorts of problems and it's stopped people being as friendly to each other as they should be able to be. Donna's taken all her clothes off now, even though you understood her point after she'd only taken her T-shirt off. She's not the least bit worried about being naked around me. Nor me around her, and the same with Carol. I'll take a guess that you wouldn't strip in front of your brothers?" "NO WAY! That'd cause a terrible family crisis. Your family is far healthier than mine. Although yours is strange in some ways." "What ways do you mean?" "Like Donna wanting to have sex with you when she's eighteen. You knew about that, didn't you?" "I thought Donna DIDN'T want to have sex with me; that she'd much rather find her own boyfriend. I was just her backstop if she couldn't find anyone else." "That's what I meant. IF she can't find anyone, then she'll want to have sex with you. I'm not saying it is, but a lot of people would think that's very wrong." "That the churches' nasty influence again. If Donna doesn't find a good boyfriend by the time she's eighteen, then I'd be worried about her getting very lonely and desperate for male company, and she might hook up with a bad choice. I don't want her to have that risk, so the safest and best thing would be for me to give her some relief from time to time. Plus I love my sister, and I love helping her and making her happy. Doing that and protecting her at the same time is something I'd be honored to do. We wouldn't be making a baby; just having some friendly sex. Donna and I are VERY good friends." "I'll say!" agreed Donna. "Mark is one of my MOST best friends. It'd be better if he was horse, but he's pretty good for a human boy, haha." Nevaeh commented, "You make it sound so simple." "Can you think of a single good reason society should not be perfectly happy for all brothers and sisters to be the same as my sisters and me?" "I can't imagine my family being like yours, but you're right that I can't think of reason we shouldn't be allowed to. It would make people happier, I think." "It certainly makes my family happier, so I agree with you. But don't worry about Donna's sex-life because it'll never happen with me. Donna will have plenty of boyfriends; probably too many of them. I don't know whether you're aware of this or not, but boys are VERY attracted to girls with big breasts." "Haha, haha. Yes, I'm aware..." "Oh, did someone tell you?" "About a million boys have told me." "Could I get away with claiming that I'm so pure that I never noticed them?" "I DON'T THINK SO! Not with your thing inside me, haha." "Try to get used to calling it a 'cock', Nevaeh. Being scared of saying the correct word is silly. Or in my case, you can be even more accurate by calling it, 'The Most Amazing, Wonderful and Incredible Cock in the Universe." Something that wasn't a vain claim, not after my girls had redesigned it for their benefit. "So far it's the best one I've EVER had, haha." I made a mental note to make sure she got no more comparisons in the foreseeable future. Donna said, "Nevaeh, can I make some suggestions of ways you can enjoy yourself more?" "Ahh, I guess so. That's all right, isn't it, Mark?" "Sounds like an excellent idea. Donna knows a lot more about sex than you do." "How did you learn so much and still be a virgin, Donna?" "You don't have to be something to learn about it. Like be a non-virgin, I mean. I know about horses but I'm not a horse, although sometimes I wish I was because I'd love to gallop like a horse. You know how to drive a car, but you've never been a car. Everyone says that sex is a HUGE amount of fun and I want to be REALLY good at it when I start, so I'm studying it very closely now. You studied how to drive a car before you drove one, so why wouldn't you study how to do something important like sex before you started?" "Because my parents wouldn't let me. But you're right, it seems stupid not to learn first. You're very lucky to have such good parents." Donna cracked up. After several seconds, she explained, "It's not my parents; it's MARK! Mom and Dad were good parents, but they were ordinary about sex. Everything that's special about our family is because of Mark. He's changed EVERYTHING! How wonderfully we love each other, the open way we are about sex, where we live now, the money we have - Mark did EVERYTHING! He used to have big arguments with Mom until he made her learn that his way is better, and now we're SO HAPPY. He's the BEST man in the world." Donna jumped into my arms. My hands were busy holding D-Cup's hips up, but the choice was simple. I dropped D-Cup and caught Donna. She'd gone off the rough script we'd given her. The last couple things Donna had said had been her improvising, and I'd been impressed by her "being a horse" and "being a car" analogies. They were intelligent choices of things to say that'd be good for our plan, and she'd made the whole point very well, but her last speech about me was nothing to do with the plan. It'd been Donna's honest feelings, and it was VERY nice of her. We held each other in strong hugs and Donna had a little cry on my shoulder while she told me how much she loved me. I didn't know what had made her spill over like this, but not knowing didn't slow me down in the slightest: I told her I loved her straight back. More often than she did me because I didn't lose time sobbing. I got a little teary though, because you do when you see emotions like hers. Donna settled down quickly, did a last sniff, then said, "Sorry, I didn't..." "You've got NOTHING to be sorry about. That was very nice." D-Cup had turned over and scooted up the bed to make room for us. She was watching us, and she was VERY impressed. I said, "I don't think I'll wait as long as we intended, Donna. How does seventeen and three-quarters sound, and even if I have to fight my way through all your boyfriends?" "That sounds wonderful. I love you very much." "I love you too. I'll make some time for you very soon, and we'll do some high-quality goofing off together." "Thanks, {sniff}." "Maybe I should go?" suggested D-Cup quite sincerely. I answered, "If everyone went home whenever one of my sisters told me they loved me, I'd NEVER get any sex." Both girls chuckled. "It's okay, Nevaeh. Donna just had a nice moment." Donna said, "I'm better now. Thanks Mark. I didn't expect that to happen." "Yeah, emotions can be surprising things sometimes." "I think I'll go back to my room for a while. You don't mind if I just leave the exercise program behind do you?" "You've been WONDERFUL, Donna. I'm sure I can figure out how to get started with Nevaeh again without your expert help." "Haha. Thanks." Donna gave me a last kiss on the cheek and hug, then she slid off the bed. Standing, she turned to Nevaeh and advised, "Nevaeh, when Mark's doing you doggy style, rest one shoulder on the pillow so you can reach down and play with your clit. You'll enjoy that a lot more." I said, "Good advice, sweetie. If necessary, I'll spend hours making sure she gets it right." "Okay. Bye. Thanks for letting me... , you know." "You're welcome, sweetie. We'll talk later." Even when she was departing, Donna did a smart thing. Halfway out of the room she realized she was naked, and she thought to turn around to get her clothes. But she quickly overrode her first reaction and continued walking out naked because she knew it'd help our plan a little. "Boy! Your sisters love you HEAPS, don't they?" "Yes they do. There's a lot of love going in all directions around here. When you arrived, I bet Julia and Ava didn't show you any jealousy at all. Everybody is far too busy giving love to worry about negative things like that." "I wish I lived here. This is so much better than my family. My family were lying to me about..." "Shh Nevaeh. I'm in such a good mood, please let's not think about anything negative." "Oh. Sorry." "That's okay. I understand what you feel and I appreciate the sentiment. Do you realize that you've only known me for just over two hours, and look at how much your emotions and thoughts have changed?" "My whole life has changed. I think you must be a miracle too. It's a million times past incredible what you've done to me." "Here's what I suggest we do now. Let's have a shower then go to the kitchen to have an early lunch because you're hungry. We'll talk with the other girls about your swearing to God and anything else you want to talk about." "You don't mind stopping?" "Remember I can order you to do whatever I want. If I wanted to have sex now, we'd be having sex. So 'no', I don't mind stopping. Besides, I've got a feeling I'm going to enjoy having a shower with you." "Oh boy, that sounds like fun. I've never had a shower with a boy before." The shower turned out to be a great deal more fun than she expected because I used NP to invite my three girls to join us. It took Nevaeh a few minutes before she relaxed enough to enjoy it, but after that it was a great new experience for her. She was the center of attention, and my girls struck the right balance of sexiness, making it mostly about slippery fun, but with some cheeky feels and rubs - enough so Nevaeh knew there was a sexual element to it, but not so much that it was threatening to her. My treatment of her was different: I was unashamedly sexy and took considerable liberties. Although since she thought I owned her, I'm not sure "taking liberties" is possible, but I did my best to take them anyway. I soaped her breasts - OF COURSE! - and thoroughly enjoyed washing the soap off and reapplying it countless times. The girls pretended to help, saying things like, "You missed a spot, Mark," then reached out and played with one of D-Cup's nipples for a few seconds. Nevaeh was on the receiving end of so many hands rubbing over her body that she couldn't help but get increasingly aroused. I was very pleased to sense it growing in her. To make a point, I soaped up my finger, and inserted it into her asshole when she was distracted by Carol. To say the Nevaeh was surprised would be putting it mildly - she leaped in the air and tried to climb the wall in reaction to the surprise. #13: With three showerheads going and five people in the cubicle, it was too noisy for a real conversation, but Nevaeh still managed to let us know that having a finger inserted up her asshole was a VERY unexpected development. She started protesting, so I told her very firmly, "I OWN your body. I can do ANYTHING I want to it. I put my finger up it to teach you a lesson about who owns your body. I ORDER you to lean forward at the waist, hang onto that shower unit, and spread your legs apart. I'm going to fuck you again." Nevaeh complied immediately and silently, like a Good Christian Girl who has sworn an oath to God should. I adjusted her position a little, grasped her hips, inserted my cock into her, and then started thrusting. I wanted to get her very hot, so I immediately started calling loudly to her, "I OWN this body," giving her ass a light smack a few times to make her think of herself as a child to my must-be-obeyed-adult. "I can and will do ANYTHING I want to it. There is NOTHING you can do. You are TOTALLY helpless because you MUST obey me. I have TOTAL power and mastery of you. Over your body and over your mind. No human has EVER had more power over someone else than I have over you. God is powerful enough to create the entire Universe, and He's given you to me as my plaything. If you even THINK of disobeying me, God will know about it and will punish you. You HAVE TO spend the rest of your life pleasing me. You have NO choice about that. And you are going to please me by being INSTANTLY available for me to fuck whenever I want. AREN'T YOU? "Yes master. I'm sorry." "You're not sorry at all; you're LOVING this. Having an owner that's the most powerful man on the planet, who has God's favor, and his own powerful angel, is turning you into a helplessly sex crazy slut, isn't it?" That and my rhythmic thrusting. "YES! OH GOD! I LOVE YOU, MARK!" My girls were quite impressed by my effective new people-management technique, and more than a little curious too. I yelled, "JULIA, SUCK MY HELPLESS PLAYTHING'S PUSSY. CAROL AND AVA, SUCK THE HORNY SLUT'S NIPPLES." "{GROAN}. Oh God!" I already had an NP-cover wrapped around Ava's cast to keep it dry (I've been doing that every time we're near water since I first kicked myself for not thinking of it earlier), so none of the girls had any reason to hesitate. Nevaeh was already very turned on and my three girls diving to obey me impressed and aroused her even further, as did the three of them clamping lips on their assigned areas, and my rapidly increasing the energy I was putting into my thrusts. Less than a minute later Nevaeh exploded BIG TIME! Me right along with her too. After waiting so long during her tour of our homes and everything since then, and all the while seeing her naked and knowing I was going to have her soon, I desperately wanted to cum - with the valve closed of course - and my God did it EVER feel good! Nevaeh's consciousness was wobbling in and out so I held her up. My girls stood, smiling happily at a job well done, and with some curious looks in their eyes. A few seconds later, Nevaeh's consciousness decided to stay around, and she started moving to get her balance and stand. I helped her do so, then she turned around and threw her arms around me, declaring, "That was the BEST one I have EVER had! It was a MILLION TIMES better than any other time..." "I told you you're bisexual Nevaeh. I don't know why you didn't believe me the first time." "I'm bisexual?" "It's just starting to come out, but you certainly are. Let's get you cleaned up so you can get something to eat. Just having a drink for your breakfast was foolish on a busy day like today." "You know what I had for breakfast! You do, don't you? You really know?" "A drink, like I said. Your stomach's empty now and you're hungry. Your bladder's uncomfortably full though." "How can you possibly know what's inside my body?" I shook my head in apparent dismay, saying, "And you STILL have trouble believing me when I tell you that you're bisexual. If I can tell what you had for breakfast early this morning, how hard can it be for me to tell what your sexual orientation is after making love to you several times and in seeing how you react when you're doing sexy thing with other beautiful girls?" "I'm sorry, Mark. I'll NEVER disbelieve you again. You know things about me that are amazing. I honestly didn't think I was bisexual." "It common for girls to hide it too well, especially in repressive Christian families like yours. You certainly are though..." #13: #11: #19: #22: " ... Nevaeh, stand over the drain and pee right now." "In here?" "Who owns that body?" "Sorry Mark." Nevaeh did what I'd instructed. While she peed, I bullshitted about my owning her so thoroughly I could even control her going to the toilet. "I understand. You can make me do anything you want, no matter what it is." "Good girl. Now wash yourself. Make sure you wash inside your pussy too because I shot a big load into you a couple of minutes ago." "'Big load'? Your stuff? Oh my God MARK! I'm not on the pill! I've never..." "Nevaeh! Shh. I know you're not on the pill." "You do? Argh, sorry. Of course you do. But you didn't wear any protection Mark. And your stuff is inside me..." #23: " ... I could get PREGNANT! My parents would KILL ME! They really would! I'd be in..." "NEVAEH! Shh AGAIN! Whose body is that?" "It's yours but if..." "SHHH! It's MY BODY! I can do ANYTHING I want with it. If I want to get it pregnant, that's my choice not yours. You don't get a say in that. I OWN you, Nevaeh, so behave yourself. You're making a second mistake thinking of me as you would any other boy. I'm nothing like that. Do you really think that with all my money and with God and His angel on my side, we couldn't EASILY take care of everything you need if you were pregnant?" "Oh! Of course you can! Sorry Mark, I was stupid. I forgot that you can do anything." "Maybe not quite 'anything'. I might need God's help with some of the trickier things, but you're essentially right. If I got you pregnant it would be EASY for me to take care of everything and bring up our child in a wonderfully loving and moral environment." #4: #12: Nevaeh was giving me a funny look, which I probably deserved for some reason or other. Curious about it, I asked her, "Yes, Nevaeh?" "Do you really want me to wash your stuff out? Wouldn't it be better to leave it in?" "Washing it out doesn't stop you getting pregnant. If that was the case no one would have accidental babies because all they'd need to do is take a shower." "Oh. I didn't think of that. I'm sorry Mark, I don't know much about sex stuff." "You don't need to apologize for no one having given you the information. That's not your fault; it's theirs. I'm just taking a guess here, but I have a feeling that if you spend more time with us then you might learn some things about sex that you didn't know before." "Like how INCREDIBLE it is! No wonder they don't want us to do it, because now I don't want to do anything else." Julia corrected Nevaeh's mistake, "Sex with MARK is incredible, Nevaeh. Sex with Peter would have been pathetic." #1: #15: <"Horny thing"?> #1: #15: #1: Nevaeh washed herself out, wincing a little. Considering I was partly to blame (0.007%: I've spent 3 hours in her company, and she spent about 5 years growing her tits), I asked, "Are you sore?" "Not much, and I'm VERY glad I am. Today's been the BEST day of my life!" "And it's only lunchtime," I hinted. "You want to do MORE?" Julia answered her, "Did Donna give you the exercise program she was working out for you?" "Yes. I haven't looked at it yet, but it's in the bedroom." "Have a look at it. Donna's seen what's happened to dozens of girls who've had sex with Mark. She knows what she's talking about." "Have you really had dozens of lovers, Mark?" "I don't know whether you've noticed this yet, but sex is quite good fun." "Haha. Oh boy, is it ever! I guess it's surprising you've only had dozens..." Ava explained, "He was dead for a year and half, so that slowed him down, haha." Julia commented, "Seriously Nevaeh, I'm very worried that you asked about that out of jealousy. You CANNOT claim Mark for yourself. He's far too important for any girl to be allowed to tie him down..." "I didn't mean it that way. I was just surprised, was all." "Be very careful about jealousy, because if you show it I'll kick you out of here and you'll never see Mark again." Nevaeh looked at me, clearly wanting to ask. I saved her the bother by saying, "Nevaeh, if Julia, Carol, Ava or Donna complains about you, I'll kick you out and never see you again. Those four people are VERY important to me. They are generously willing to give up some of their time with me so you can have it, but if you try to grab any extra for yourself, or if you resent the time I spend with them, then they and I won't want to give you ANY more time ever again. When I was making love to you and Donna needed to be cuddled, I pulled out of you and hugged my sister for as long as she wanted. As beautiful and sexy as you are, these three girls and Donna are more important to me. Got it?" "Yes, Mark. I wasn't really asking out of jealousy..." "Nevaeh, you forget who you're talking to. I can read you like a book, remember. You were starting to feel jealousy. It was only a small amount and it's gone now, but it would've gotten larger if no one had spoken up." "Boy oh boy. A boyfriend that no one can lie to. That must be very strange?" Nevaeh was looking at my girls. Carol indicated for Ava to answer, and Ava just said, "We don't lie so it doesn't make any difference." #6: When we left the shower, Julia offered, "Shall we put on our bikinis for lunch?" "EXCELLENT idea!" "I don't have a bikini," said Nevaeh, unknowingly lying right after having been told not to. "Yes you do," corrected Julia. "It's in one of your drawers in our closet." "But how could you buy me a bikini already? Can you see the future, Mark?" "Wrong magical power, Nevaeh. I used the magical powers of 'Horny Teenage Boy' and 'Credit Card'. The first time we moved into a house with a swimming pool, I went online and found a store in Australia that sold sexy bikinis and I ordered a box of assorted colors and sizes. I give out new ones to any girl that wants one. Julia or Carol would've gotten one out and put it in your drawer to save time." [The first delivery I'd received from Australia had long since run out. What's the chance I didn't think to resupply? Three times so far.] "I've never worn a sexy bikini before..." "Fine. Stay naked then." "Huh? Oh, yeah. Haha, I forgot about that. I think I'll wear the bikini." Julia had gotten enough of the plot already that she knew how to answer, but I cut her off because I wanted it to come from me. "Nevaeh, it's not your decision. Julia already asked me whether the girls should put bikinis on for lunch, and I said it was an excellent idea. So you will be wearing you new bikini, won't you?" "Yes, Mark. I'm sorry. I'm not used to being owned. I'll do my best to get better at it as fast as I can." "I understand it takes time to get used to. Nonetheless, I think this time you have to be punished. All lunchtime you have to sit in my lap with my cock in your pussy. Let that be a lesson to you!" "Haha. I like your lessons. I think I'm going to like having you as my owner." Julia was itching to have Nevaeh's use of that word explained, but she held off because we were in the closet now and it was time for the girls to put their bikinis on. Ava handed Nevaeh's to her, Nevaeh asked, "This is a BIKINI? There's nothing here." "Now you know why Mark bought them," explained Ava. I said, "I'll wait in the kitchen so I see the final products walk in." I started walking out as Nevaeh held up the bottoms, saying, "It's see-though EVERYWHERE. These are the rudest clothes I've ever seen." "Now you know why I bought them. I'll add something else too. I bought those bikinis and handed them out to about three dozen girls before I was killed. I had sex with quite a few of those girls too. God still resurrected me. What does that tell you about God's real attitude to sex?" "He's a teenage boy?" "Haha. VERY good answer. Well done, sweetie." Not only was it a true answer since it was me that was pretending to be God via my fake angel, but it was also a good answer because it proved that Nevaeh wasn't like so many Christians in having a total absence of humor about God. If the only thing I knew about Christianity was its adherents' condemning and repressive attitude to humor about God, that'd be sufficient to turn me off the religion. Such an attitude only indirectly says something about Christianity itself, but it says a lot about Christians. -- "What I meant is that it shows He's very tolerant. I'm sure that if I'd bought conservative one-piece swimsuits, God would still have resurrected me. He's not interested in telling humans what they can and can't do for sex. Just like He doesn't issue rules for what food we can eat or when we should sleep or the colors of clothes we have to wear or any of those sorts of things. It's the churches that have invented all the crap they have about sex. -- "I like your answer though. I'm going to be talking to God shortly so I'll ask Him about making it compulsory for all pretty girls to wear bikinis like that one." "You're going to talk with God?" "Yep, while we're having lunch. You'll see it because you'll be receiving your punishment at the time." "Oh BOY! You're really going to talk with God while I'm sitting on your, you know." "Cock, Nevaeh. Say the sentence again properly please." "Yes Mark. You're really going to talk with God while I'm sitting on your cock." "Good girl. I'm going to be talking to Him while my cock is in your pussy. We'll be talking about you, so that seems reasonable to me." "What are you going to be talking about?" "You'll see. I'll start making lunch. See nearly all of you shortly, as you'll be wearing those bikinis." "Oh boy." Nevaeh walked into the kitchen ahead of the other girls. I paused the food preparation to give her a HIGHLY appreciative whistle, then, "WOW, Nevaeh. That style of bikini suits you VERY, VERY well!" "I feel worse than I did when I was naked." "'Worse' is TOTALLY the wrong word. You look VERY SEXY! Yummy. I'm not going to have ANY trouble getting hard for when you sit on me. See," I looked down at my naked body, "I'm hard already." "I saw it. Your cock got hard very quickly." "Good girl for saying 'cock'. You learn very quickly." "Julia says I have to try very hard." "Julia's right. I'm so unusual it's too easy to make mistakes unless you stay alert and keep trying. Come over here so I can lick your pussy." Nevaeh blushed, which surprised me because she's not much of a blusher. She asked me bashfully, "Umm, is that to get me wet so I can sit on you?" "That's what I thought, yes." "Umm, Carol already did that to me just before. She said it was to be helpful for you." Julia said, "Go sit somewhere with Nevaeh, Mark. We'll finish making lunch." "Thanks Julia. For some reason, sitting with Nevaeh appeals very highly at the moment." I sat on a living room sofa, slid only halfway back, got Nevaeh face me - or as I thought of it, "put her tits right in front of my face" - as she straddled me. I pulled her bikini bottom to the side, as she lowered herself onto me. I slid home surprisingly easily, considering how tight she was. "Ahhhh," sighed Nevaeh. "You're very wet, sweetie." Nevaeh said shamefully, "I know. I can't help it." "Why would you want to?" Nevaeh opened her mouth, paused, then said, "You're right. I keep thinking it's something to be ashamed of, and it's not." "I'll give you two out of three for that comment, sweetie. One point because what you said is true. That's by far the most important part, so congratulations for that. The second point because you didn't end the sentence with ' ... and it's not, IS IT?' You normally end with a question because you're not sure, but you're getting sure now, so that's great. You missed getting the last point because you said 'it' to avoid saying 'sex'. It would've been perfect if you'd said, 'I keep thinking SEX is something to be ashamed of.' The one you missed was the least important one, so I'm VERY impressed by you. You're doing far better far quicker than I thought you would. This is so enormously different than what you've ever done before, but you're adapting amazingly well." "I can't say it's easy because I keep making mistakes without realizing it, but I know you're right. Everything you say makes sense and I can see that it's true, God resurrected you, you've got the angel, and I see how much love there is around you. My family doesn't show love like yours. I don't even like my sister, but your sisters love you so much they're bursting with it." "I've got great sisters all right; there's no doubt about that. What's wrong with Grace that you don't like her?" "She's bad news. She lies and steals, hangs around with bad boys ... Oh! I guess I do that now. That's what my parents would say, I mean..." #14: #9: #11: #20: "Only one boy for you, Nevaeh. And I think we can let you off because God told you to." "That's a VERY good excuse, but it's a pity that Mom and Dad would never believe it." "At this stage I'm much more interested in getting to know you than worrying about your parents. Especially because we can win just by waiting until you're eighteen. It'd be much better to win the war without having to fight a single battle, especially a battle as messy as yours would be if your parents could see you now." "I don't think they'd recognize me." "Changing the subject slightly away from your parents, is your pussy sore? Can you raise and lower yourself?" "Like this?" "No, not all the way off. Let me put it back in. There ya go. Now go down and halfway back up so I stay inside. Good. Down and up again, and keep it going nonstop." "I'm having sex with you now?" "We're having sex together, and you're fucking me." #5: #9: "This is GREAT! I LOVE fucking you, Mark." "I'm happy to hear that because I like being fucked by you." Ava and Julia came over, sat on either side of us, and hand-fed us so we could carry on our slow fucking, which I thought was very decent of them. But it was Carol's actions I appreciated the most. She stood close behind Nevaeh, put an arm over each of her shoulders, and reached down to fondle both of D-Cup's breasts. Julia and Ava ran their hands up Nevaeh's legs and starting caressing her clit and ass. I took over the raising and lowering job, speeding it up to excite us both more. Nevaeh moaned and looked up to say something to Carol. Carol leaned down and starting kissing Nevaeh on the lips. Nevaeh didn't even last five minutes with the four of us working on her. We laid her on the floor, removed her bikini, and went to work on her again, my head between her legs for the first time, Ava and Julia to either side, and Carol took off her bikini bottom and straddled Nevaeh's head. Nevaeh protested to Carol, "I've never done this before." "Do what you think you'd like, and I'll tell you what works well as we go. It's very easy. Extend your tongue and leave it out, and I'll get myself started on it." And Nevaeh did as instructed. She's a VERY good girl, in an increasingly non-Christian sense. I was surprised at the effort Carol was putting into seducing Nevaeh into bisexuality. Carol didn't often get involved outside the core four, and when she did, it was casual and almost always in response to my requests; not with the intentness she was applying to Nevaeh. I made a mental note to ask Carol about it later because I like to understand the things that my girls think are important. I licked and played with Nevaeh's pussy, building her toward, but not quite to, a REALLY good climax. Arouse, plateau, arouse, plateau. There were four people holding her down, but after fifteen minutes Nevaeh was climbing the walls and begging for a release. Nevaeh was too close to the edge to be able to lick Carol by now, so Carol had dismounted and was adding to Nevaeh's torture by kissing, nibbling, and caressing wherever seemed a good idea at the time. She was also talking dirty to Nevaeh, using the ownership theme that had been so successful in the shower. We kept Nevaeh stretched to breaking point for another five excruciating minutes, then I gave my girls the nod and we went for broke. I created two NP-dildos which fucked Nevaeh's pussy and asshole at the same time as I went to town licking her clit while using fingers placed firmly on either side of it to vibrate up and down very rapidly and forcefully, the way I'd already learned that she liked, and my girls were doing their highly experienced best on other parts of Nevaeh. Nevaeh EXPLODED! She SCREAMED a very unchristian word very loudly, as her body's convulsed up and down on the carpet. She had a wonderfully impressive sequence of orgasms, one after the other constantly for thirty seconds. None of us were even touching her during most of her bucks. It looked like she was having an epileptic fit, but if so, it'd be the most pleasurable one in history. When Nevaeh finally collapsed, Ava said, "Wow. That was a monster. She's going to be feeling that later." Julia asked me, "Is she all right?" "She's fine as far as I can tell. Pulse, respiration, and blood pressure all look fine. You sometimes pass out like this too, just not with the thirty seconds of rodeo riding before it. While she's out, I'd REALLY like us all to go to the bedroom. I'll put her on one of the bedroom sofas and then I want to give you all an enthusiastic 'Thank you, ' starting with Carol while Nevaeh is still out of it." ------- Chapter 384: God and I Go Head-to-Head, and the Best Man Wins Monday, July 2, 2007 (Continued) We ran to the bedroom, me carrying D-Cup. I laid our poor, shattered, previously inexperienced, previously Good Girl on a sofa in our bedroom. Whether inspired by Nevaeh's monster of an orgasm, or by my obvious desire to reward Carol, Ava and Julia had already thrown Carol onto the bed and had leaped into action on her. I hurried to join in. We all hurried to get Carol off before our sleeping beauty stirred. Carol was already excited so that took very little time. Nevaeh showed no sign of recovering and Mom has always told me that "If anything's worth doing, it's worth doing well." Carol is VERY worth doing, so we did her again, slower this time. We made it last until Nevaeh stirred about fifteen minutes later - I think her body had decided it needed a real nap, probably because she'd got so little sleep last night. Her stirring was no more than an incomprehensible mumble accompanied by a small decrease in her degree of unconsciousness, but it prompted us to give Carol a nice finish and then start working on Ava. A minute or so later, a voice was heard mumbling from across the room, "Whher am I?" I answered, "Heaven." "Ha... {GROAN}. It hurts! What happened?" "You had a very good multiple-orgasm and it overwhelmed your body." I left Ava briefly to go get Nevaeh and carry her back to the bed, placing her on the side of it with a couple of pillows under her head so she could watch us. It would be good for her education to see my three girls in full-on action with each other. We are VERY experienced at three- and foursome sex now, and we know each other's bodies superbly as I've trained all the girls on what they all like best. The only change to the routine now was to have Carol and me keep a little distance from each other. If the bed had been any bigger, Carol and I could've lost sight of each other over the horizon, so we had no problem avoiding too much intimate contact. Once Nevaeh got her breath and consciousness fully back, she wanted to talk, but I cut her off, "Not now, Nevaeh. My girls spent a lot of time today giving you pleasure because you're our guest. Now it's time they had their turn..." "Sorry Mark..." "Don't be; we enjoyed it. Just lie there and watch. You'll be participating in sessions like these fairly often, so look and learn." "Oh boy." A couple of minutes later she said, "You guys are VERY good at sex. You move so smoothly, especially you, Mark." "You can help a little. Reach out with your hand and caress whoever's closest to you. You can just rest your hand on them if you're too sore to move much. Any skin contact is a nice feeling." We kept our session short, finishing thirty minutes later. I left the girls in bed while I went to get the rest of our lunches and some fruit drinks. On my return, Nevaeh asked me, "Julia said you don't get tired, and you don't do you? I can see you're moving around easily." "I've got an enormous amount of endurance. In sex my partners always give up before I do. That's part of the reason why I have multiple girlfriends, although the real reason Julia encourages me to have so many is so they can all gang up together to tease me." "I think they need to gang up for self-defense against you. You're too good at everything, especially sex." Julia agreed, "EXACTLY right. Mark's awesome at everything." Nevaeh added, "And, umm, especially with your thing - your cock - being 'ribbed' like that. I asked Julia about it just before, and she said God changed you to make you a better lover than any other guy has ever been." "That's right. Last night you were concerned about my having multiple lovers and I didn't want to offend you by showing you my cock then, but now it should be obvious to you that God wants me to enjoy my life in many ways, including with sex. The ribs He added to my cock don't change my physical pleasure but they do increase my lovers' pleasure, so I get to enjoy giving them more pleasure and seeing their happiness, which makes it a very unselfish and moral improvement; exactly the sort of thing you'd expect God to do. It's also extremely good proof that He wants people to enjoy sex." "I'll say!" agreed Nevaeh. "I'm amazed that He would do things like that. They NEVER talk about that sort of thing at church!" "Yeah, it's very sad that they've gone so far away from what God wants." -- "Speaking of God, I'll do that communication with Him that I talked about before, if you promise not to distract us the way you did last time." "Me! What did I do?" "Don't you have ANY IDEA how good you looked in that bikini!" "Haha, {GROAN}. Please no jokes." "It wasn't a joke. You have a spectacular body, and in that bikini it looks even better, which I would've thought was impossible." "Thanks, but your girlfriends are..." "{Raspberry}" x 3 from all from the girls. I diplomatically kept quiet. Julia added, "It's going to be a real pleasure taking you shopping, Nevaeh. I've already got several designers in mind that I want to take you to see." "DESIGNERS! Who?" Remember that when Nevaeh first arrived at our home I made a little comment about her being nicely dressed, and that I should check to see whether her family might be suspicious about her overdressing for a day's solitary thinking? The next several minutes brought me some good news and some bad news, and then the bad news quickly descended into REALLY TERRIBLE news. The good news was that I learned that Nevaeh's family wouldn't be suspicious about how well she'd dressed today because she dresses nicely all the time. The terrible news was that Nevaeh REALLY loves fashion, EVEN WORSE than most girls do! She and Julia started RAVING together about designers, fashion, the next season's trends, their predictions for season-after-that's trends. Nevaeh knew what she was talking about and even impressed Julia; it was TERRIBLE! Oh GOD! Of all the terrible things that could've gone wrong today, I was caught flat-footed and without a contingency plan by the disaster of Julia and Nevaeh hitting it off. My suspicion that it was going to be truly dreadful was confirmed when Julia said, "We have to allocate you a LOT more closet space." #1: #14: I didn't have a contingency plan, but I did have a distraction. It's very rare that I have a distraction that can compete with high-end fashion - the "never before" kind of "very rare" - but I had one now. I lied, "Sorry to interrupt ladies, but I've got several important issues that need to be worked on first. A conversation with God, for example. I'm operating on the assumption that talking to God about Nevaeh's life is more important than fashion, but I'm aware that you might have other ideas, so let me know if you think I'm being silly?" My girls attacked me, and then Julia told Nevaeh, "We're sorry for Mark's sense of humor. He's good for fetching things off high shelves so we're willing to put up with his humor most of the time." -- Turning to me, Julia waved her finger at me, accusing, "Why would you want to drive such a nice girl away by exposing her to your worst vice on her very first date with us? Shame on you for trying to be funny in front of Nevaeh. She's a poor, innocent girl. She's never been forced to endure hardships like that before." Ava declared Julia the winner again, but I was given the consolation prize of being allowed to talk about whatever was on my mind, "I've got several items I need to work my way through:" I counted off on my fingers as I listed them: -- "First, I should explain to the rest of you why I was saying I owned Nevaeh's body. Doing that first will help you understand some of the later points. -- "Second, I need to talk with God about something to do with Nevaeh, that comes out of the first point. -- "Third, then I want to discuss something I'll call 'Initial Orders', which I'll explain when we get to it. -- "Fourth, I've got something about Sondarm School to check with Nevaeh. -- "Fifth, a general discussion for what we intend to do with Nevaeh over the next few weeks. -- "Sixth, Nevaeh might have some points or questions she wants discussed. -- "Does anyone else have anything for the agenda? No? Okay. Nevaeh, would you like to describe why I own you?" "I swore an oath to God?" Nevaeh was looking at me, but I already knew the story so I told her, "Explain it to Julia, Carol and Ava please." "Okay. It was when..." She did a reasonable job of explaining it, taking a bit longer than necessary. That would eat into their shopping-discussion time so I kept quiet. My girls easily understood the reality behind Nevaeh's story, the "blazing flash of light" not fooling them for a moment. When the description was over, I said, "In summary, Nevaeh made a miraculous type of oath to God. The exact words that miraculously came out of my mouth were, 'Do you swear to God to obey my orders to the very best of your ability.' For obvious reasons Nevaeh considers herself incredibly powerfully bound to keep to her oath. -- "One thing Nevaeh didn't mention is that I have a strong feeling that I can cancel her oath whenever I want. Sort of like ripping up a contract because then it'll be all gone. I could do that tomorrow, or in a hundred years, or any time in between. It's up to me. Except obviously not tomorrow because I want to see Nevaeh in that bikini some more first..." "Haha. I can wear it for you whenever you want." "I'm sorry, but you look so good in that bikini that I'm not willing to take the risk that you might change your mind. I can guarantee that you're not going to get out of your oath to obey me any time this summer, that's for sure! More seriously, I'm very worried what might happen to Nevaeh if she breaks her oath, especially if she breaks it accidentally. I might order her to do something and then she forgets it, but remembers it again when it's too late. I'd be very pissed off at God if He hurt her for something like that." -- I'd chosen the language and angry tone of my last sentence carefully, and as I'd expected, Nevaeh was scared by both the manner and content of my speech. I reacted to her reaction by telling her, "Nevaeh, don't worry about how I talk with God. You have zero experience at talking to the real God, while I've got more than any other person alive. Your opinion of how God should be talked to is what your church has taught you, and we all know what we think of that crap! I'm the world's expert on the real God, okay?" "Yes. It's hard to ignore what I've been taught." "I think it's scary how deeply their prejudices are programmed into us, and we don't even know it. -- "The other thing I'm very worried about is what Nevaeh might do to herself if she thinks she's failed to obey properly. I'll be VERY pissed off at myself if she hurts herself because of an order of mine." "Why would you be pissed off at yourself?" Obviously that was Nevaeh asking because my girls understood why. "Because NONE of my orders will ever be worth more to me than your being healthy and happy. You're important to me, okay?" Nevaeh took a moment to appreciate the moment, then said, "Thank you very much. You're very nice to me." "You're a good person and you don't deserve any less than being cared for. And that was BEFORE I saw you in the bikini!" "Haha, Ow! Stop making jokes; it hurts too much." Julia said, "We told you he liked those bikinis." "He sure does. I'll wear it every chance I can for you, Mark." "Thanks, sweetie. I honestly, sincerely, and lecherously appreciate it." "Haha. {groan}. Stop with the jokes PLEASE!" "I'm ready to talk with the angel now about how I want God to manage the oath Nevaeh swore. Has anyone got any points before I call for the angel?" "{Gulp}. What's going to happen to me?" "I'm going to argue in your favor so well, and you'll be so impressed by me, that you'll leap on top of me and offer me more sex." "Haha. Oww! {Groan}. You're too cruel! I mean what's going to happen if I accidentally break my oath? That was a REAL oath, the sort that CAN'T be broken, so I'm very worried about that!" "I agree that you certainly shouldn't break it, but I've never seen one of those oaths before so I need to talk with God about it so I can understand my responsibilities to you. ANGEL! Appear please." The Guardian Angel - no doubt forced to do so by my commanding tone - appeared at the foot of the bed. "Have you been listening to us?" It nodded in the way that it does. "If Nevaeh breaks her oath by disobeying one of my orders, will she be punished?" Nods. "Who by? If God, go up to the ceiling, if by me to the floor, if something else stay where you are." It went to the ceiling. "Oh no!" worried Nevaeh. I declared, "That's NOT acceptable! Is the Big Cheese listening?" A sudden inhalation from Nevaeh, but no comment. The angel nodded. "Listen here, God! I don't agree with YOUR punishing Nevaeh if she disobeys one of MY orders. It's MY order, for heaven's sake, so it's no skin off your nose!" Nevaeh cringed. One of our cellphones floated into the air and we heard a message being typed on it. It floated to me so I could look at it and read out, "It says: 'Miss Nevaeh Smith made oath to me. She break, I punish.'" "Oh no," from an even more worried Nevaeh. I countered God, "At the time she made her oath she was talking to me. It was me she was wishing to serve." The cellphone did its thing again. "It says: 'True, but weak and insufficient. Miss Nevaeh Smith knew she was swearing to me.'" I paused for a thought, then seemed to have a good idea, "Listen, Smarty Pants, YOU found Nevaeh for me, and your angel dragged Carol and me to Nevaeh's house. You pushed Nevaeh into my arms, which made me responsible for her. She's MY responsibility, not yours anymore. You abrogated your responsibility. She is MY property. Keep your grubby hands OFF MY PROPERTY!" Poor Julia was having trouble holding back her laughter, while poor Nevaeh was worried sick and not too pleased with her defense counsel's calling the Judge rude names. The cellphone received God's reply and offered it to me. I informed my audience, "It says: 'Conceded Miss Nevaeh Smith. Not conceded oath.'" With a panicky voice, Nevaeh asked, "What does that mean?" "It means God agrees that you are my property and that I'm responsible for you..." "PHEW! Thank God!" I was amused by the appropriateness of her second exclamation. "Not so fast, Nevaeh. The message says I own you, but it also says that God still owns the oath you made to Him." "Oh. Umm, what are you going to do?" "I'm thinking about it. Give me a second." I pretended that it took me several seconds, then I told the air, "What we've got here, God, is layered responsibilities. My ownership takes chronological and contractual priority over your oath. If Nevaeh breaks one of my orders, I get first dibs at punishing her. It'd be immoral of you to punish her twice for the same crime, so if I punish her, you cannot. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!" The cellphone keys clattered, then moved back into my hand. I looked at the phone, reading out, "It says: 'Conceded you have priority. If your punishment is too minor, I will consider you've abrogated your responsibility to enforce your rights and I will exercise mine.' That's pretty good." "What does it mean?" asked D-Cup with concern. "It means that if you fail to obey me, then God will let me punish you first. If I punish you appropriately then God won't do anything to you, but if I don't punish you enough - say if I fined you $1 or something else silly - then God will step in and punish you." "How much is 'enough'?" "That's the big question. In fact, I'll ask God the same question. God, please define 'too minor'?" God did It's thing to the phone for a few seconds. I picked it out of midair and read, "It says: 'You will define it with your attitude at the time.' Ahh! Good answer. Okay God, we have a deal." The Guardian Angel disappeared. "WHAT HAPPENED?" "It's a good deal, Nevaeh. It's like we said before. I get to punish you first if you fail to obey me. If I punish you enough, then God won't punish you Himself. What we just agreed was what the word 'enough' means, which is whatever I think it means at the time, which is very clever of God. I'll give you an example. Let's say I ordered you to give me $100 of your own money but you failed to do it. If my punishment was a fine of $1, that'd obviously be stupid of me, and God would punish you himself. But let's say I ordered you to give me a dime. If you disobeyed me and I punished you by fining you $1, that would probably be a perfectly acceptable punishment. In both cases the punishment was a fine of $1, but in one case it was far too little and in the other case it was enough. What God is saying is that He's not going to define what 'enough' means because it depends too much on the circumstances of the disobedience. What He's going to do is read my mind when I punish you. If I honestly believe that I punished you enough then God will be happy, but if I deliberately knew I punished you too little then He will punish you himself. So God's answer about what 'enough' means is that it means whatever I HONESTLY think it means." "Wow, that's very smart." "It certainly is," agreed Julia, who was looking right at me and talking about the next level. Ava knew there was a trick, though she couldn't see all of it, but I heard Carol whisper to her, "I'll tell you later." When Nevaeh misbehaves - which all girls do, if only because they don't look at life the same way as guys, so they make strange judgments - I can punish her however I want, and tell her that I honestly believe it is enough. And so it would prove to be because God won't do anything more. It lets me have total control, and I'll always be able to invent some bullshit reason to turn some terrible drama that Nevaeh might think deserves suicide into an easily managed punishment. Nevaeh exclaimed, "Oh my God! I just realized you beat God in an argument, and it was for ME! That's incredible. That..." #18: #29: #30 : "Haha. Sorry, Nevaeh. It wasn't like that at all. Not even close." "It wasn't?" "There is NO WAY I can beat God in an argument. He knows my mind inside out. He'll have known how the argument would end even before it started. God's training me for the future. That was just a little test for me. It was a true test - because if you disobey me that's what will happen to you - but mostly God was giving me a test. It wasn't the sort of test you're used to. God doesn't need to test me because He already knows all about me. What He was doing was letting me test myself so I know my own capabilities. It's like school giving you a test that you take, but then you decide how well you did. Do you understand?" "Only a little?" "You said before that you thought I won an argument against God, so you presumably think I did pretty well in that argument, don't you?" "I think you were WONDERFUL! I was REALLY scared. I could easily make a mistake and mess up one of your orders. If I do that, I'd much rather have you punish me. I'm terrified of God punishing me. You get to go first and all you have to do is give me a punishment you think is fair. I think that's a wonderful result. You're my hero! I DO want to jump on you and give you more sex but I'm too sore. When I'm better, I'm going to thank you as hard as I can!" "I heartily agree that all heroes should be rewarded. Maybe even two or three times. I'm happy you think I passed, but the point of the test was for me to decide how well I did. Which I agree was pretty good. Do you understand that what God is doing to me is giving me tests from time to time, Nevaeh?" "I think so. We just saw one." "You've actually seen two tests. There's another test going on right now. Can you see what it is?" Nevaeh looked around, as did Ava and Carol. Julia didn't bother, knowing she wasn't going to see anything, although her proximity reading showed puzzlement so she didn't know what I was referring to. I gave them a few seconds, then said, "The other test is YOU, Nevaeh." "Me what? I don't understand. What are you doing with me?" "I don't know. I know God gave you to me, so I think part of the test is to work out what the test is. I'm being tested, and I don't even know what the test is about. I have to find that out for myself." "That sounds unfair." "It's not unfair, sweetie. Remember the tests are all about showing me things about myself. I decide how well I pass each test. He's just making me do interesting things so I can see how good I am at them." "Oh. That's not so bad then." "I'll give you an example of how tricky God is: 24 hours ago I didn't have a clue who you were, and now I'm VERY responsible for you. God found you for me, and He pushed you into my life, right?" "I'll say! My whole life has changed because He pushed me into yours." "God has given you to me as a test. I've been scratching my head but I can't think of what it is yet. Obviously it starts with my being so responsible for you. I find it very suspicious how fast I have become your owner. I think God set that up to happen..." "He tricked me?" "Not at all. God is too moral to misuse people. You want to be owned by me. It makes you happy and it turns you on. Likewise, I like owning you and that turns me on. There are many things about us that suit each other very nicely. God didn't trick us to be together. What He did was find you for me, made sure we met, and then He sat back and let nature take its course. We're together because we want to be. If you want to leave, you're perfectly free to any time you want..." "But I've sworn to obey you." "Which I'd cancel. I am NEVER going to keep you against your will, Nevaeh. You're free to leave any time you want." "I don't want to, Mark. I love being here with you and Julia and everyone." "You singled out Julia's name to mention. That's ANOTHER example of how moral God is. He found me a new girlfriend who loves following what fashion designers are doing, knowing that girl would be IRRESISTIBLE to Julia!" Julia laughed at how tricky God was. She also added, "Nevaeh isn't YOUR girlfriend any longer; she's mine! You can borrow her sometimes though, if we're not busy discussing important fashion developments, haha." "God's got a lot to answer for, doesn't he?" (Note the lower-case "he". I was talking about myself, which Julia would understand.) "He's doing very well so far," disagreed Julia. I resumed, "Like I was saying, Nevaeh, I've very quickly gained an enormous amount of responsibility for a girl that I didn't even know existed a day ago. I even 'own you', which is very extreme. That happened so quickly and so thoroughly that I'm sure it was a setup. Now think about the argument with God a few minutes ago. We both agree I won it. Before the argument, if you disobeyed me it was God's responsibility to punish you. At the end of the argument, I'd 'persuaded' God into letting me be even more responsible for you. I think God deliberate set up that argument so when I did well in THAT test, it would make me even more responsible for you, to help with the much bigger and more important other test. God is VERY smart!" -- When they'd all expressed their admiration at God's smartness, I said, "Other than having a great deal of power over you, and responsibility too, I don't have a clue what God has in mind for my test that involves you. I can't even guess the timeframe. It might be next week, or after you turn eighteen, or even later. Until that becomes clear to me, we'll mostly just be having good times together: hanging around the pool, having sex... ," "Going on shopping trips," injected Julia. "Thank you, Julia. I'm sure that activity wouldn't have occurred to me. -- "So Nevaeh, don't be concerned if nothing seems to be happening. We'll just be hanging around and doing stuff together for the fun of it, until I learn enough to understand what this test is about. As I said, that could take months or years. Okay?" "I'd rather do that than have any more tests; they're SCARY! I don't know how you do it! You don't even know what the tests are, what the rules are, or ANYTHING! But you're so calm about it. I'd be a terrified wreck if God was setting me tests, even if I knew what they were." Julia thought this was a GREAT manipulation-game, and she couldn't resist adding, "Now you know how special Mark is. Not only is Mark strong enough to face God's tests, but Mark is so special that God is putting a lot of time and effort into making up the tests in the first place. God is helping Mark grow into the best possible human being he can, with huge responsibilities, very strong morals, and whatever else God thinks is important. Mark told you a while ago that he isn't special because God is helping him; but that it's the other way around: that God's helping him because he's special. Now you can see exactly what Mark means." "I'LL SAY! Mark must be INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT! He must be MILLIONS of times more important than anyone else. I can't..." Julia interrupted, and in a forceful voice, demanded, "Listen to me, Nevaeh. You will NEVER understand how important Mark is. It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to ever do that. My mother and father are very, very smart people, and they can't understand how important Mark is. Everyone Mark lives with has been trying to understand, and the only thing we know is that we can't even see the tiniest glimpse of it, and that's after living with him every day for years. Mark is SO IMPORTANT, that even when the Government screwed up and got Mark killed, God had to fix it by bringing Mark back to life. MARK'S SO IMPORTANT THAT GOD CAN'T EVEN LET HIM BE DEAD!" "Oh my GOD! That's HUGE! That's ... I'm not sure what that is. I can't imagine how important that makes Mark. He's miles more important than ANYONE has ever been before..." Julia corrected Nevaeh, "My family and I think Mark is more important than EVERY other person ADDED TOGETHER." #14: "Wow! I feel dizzy. I knew Mark was special, but what you've just said is WAY bigger than that. I had no idea before. Boy oh boy!" "None of us have sworn an oath to God, Nevaeh, but all of us - Carol, Ava, Donna, my parents, his parents and me - will do whatever we can to help Mark. We don't need an oath to God to make us want to serve him." "Nor do I any more! You've opened my eyes, Julia..." #20: " ... I'll do anything he wants. Or you too, Julia. Just tell me what Mark needs and I'll do everything I can." #1: #9: #29: #26: Julia smiled in victory, saying, "That's good to know, Nevaeh. Let me ask you a question. After you go home tonight, what are you going to do if Mark doesn't call you?" "Ahh. I think Mark wants me to call him, because if he calls my family might get suspicious if they're with me." "We'll use a better system than that. Change Mark's name in your phone so it's very similar to the name of a girlfriend of yours that your parents know about but don't know her parents so they can't check up easily. When Mark wants to talk with you, he'll send you a text message telling you to call. As soon as you can get some privacy, you do that. Or if you can't get any privacy, send him back a message telling him it might take an hour or whenever you think you might be able to get free, just to give him an indication." "I'll always be able to call back. I'll run outside or something..." "NO you will not! You will behave completely normally around your family. Mark is incredibly important, but YOU'RE not. You're totally unimportant, and there's nothing you can do for Mark that can't wait an hour or more. Mark has already told you several times that he doesn't want to cause a crisis in your family. Your running outside to make a private phone call in the middle of your family's dinner would be disobeying his order not to make your family suspicious. Mark or God would have to punish you if you did that." #19: "I understand now. I didn't want to keep Mark waiting..." "Mark knows that, and he's smart enough to know that if you don't call back right away then there must be a good reason for it, like not having privacy." "Oh yeah. Sorry Mark." "That's okay, sweetie." Julia added, "I was asking you that if you go home and Mark doesn't call you, what are you going to do?" "Wait for him, I guess. Should I call to ask?" "You shouldn't call Mark. He's too important and busy to take unimportant phone calls. I'll give you my and Ava's numbers before you leave, so you can call us. -- "Mainly what you'll do is wait. You'll wait for days, weeks and even months if Mark is busy. That's the point I want to make. Mark is not your boyfriend. He's not under any obligation to call you every day. He's not going to spend time worrying about anniversary or birthday presents for you, or taking you to events you want to be taken to, or any of the usual boyfriend tasks." You may have noticed that Julia and I had already mentioned this point to Nevaeh, and now Julia is doing so again. After having so many girls come into my life, and having seen them maneuver to make me their boyfriend, we've learned that this issue is the best one to disabuse them of as soon as possible. If a girl thinks I'm obligated to her just because she let me have sex with her - and many of them do think that since there aren't many Alexises around - then many of her subsequent actions will be motivated by trying to increase that obligation, and then to use it to make me behave in the ways that she wants. Given that I will never do what any of those girls will ultimately want, and usually not even what they want in the short term, their believing that I'm under an obligation to them guarantees the relationship will end disappointingly, and sometimes unhappily and angrily. It is MUCH better to quickly destroy girls' ideas that I'm obligated to them. That does a great job of getting them out of the very powerful boyfriend-girlfriend mindset. We and they can genuinely enjoy ourselves when there are no strings attached. Some girls are unable to let go of those strings, but those that can - Alexis, Claire and Diana Norris, Donna, and others - become mutually enjoyable company, and my favorites. Julia continued working on the issue, "Your job is to SERVE Mark in whatever way he wants, and that's all. If Mark doesn't call you, then he doesn't need you, and you'll wait for him patiently. It might be weeks or months before he calls you..." "I hope not. You wouldn't..." {SLAP!} Julia had delivered a strong, open-handed slap to Nevaeh's face. It shut Nevaeh up, but I wasn't brave enough to add it to my pathetically short list of ways to get girls to be quiet. Julia proceeded to give Nevaeh a STERN telling off. Things like, "Your hopes are irrelevant," and, "Don't you EVER try to pressure Mark into behaving the way you want with 'You wouldn't do this or that' questions. Mark OWNS you. He doesn't have to run around wasting his valuable time doing things to make you happy." Nevaeh got the idea in the first ten seconds, so Julia kept it up for five minutes. By the time Julia finished, Nevaeh was a very convinced, contrite wreck. A couple of years ago, or even less than that, I would've been extremely uncomfortable at how much misery Julia was heaping on Nevaeh, but now I knew to see past Nevaeh's suffering. It was all about managing her expectations to avoid her being more upset in the future. I was even pleased by the magnitude of Julia's punishment, as it indicated that Julia expected Nevaeh to be more significant in our lives than most girls had been. Considering Nevaeh had been chosen for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with her personality - they were both EXCEPTIONALLY good reasons though - it was lucky that her personality suited us so well. [[It wasn't luck. I'd not understood how much impact we'd had on Nevaeh. Her previous personality would have been incompatible with us in several ways, in addition to just her being proud of being sexually inactive. She seemed luckily suited to us mostly because we and God had blown her mind by what we'd put her through, and then we'd insisted on a small set of behaviors from her that suited us. Some of her authoritarian Christian upbringing/brainwashing had helped us achieve that, such as females being inferior to and should obey their males, especially male authority figures. In short, we'd ripped much of her psyche apart, removed many of her strongest core beliefs, and then told her how we wanted her to behave. It's no wonder that I was pleased with her. My being pleased, and Nevaeh being willing to be owned by me, guaranteed that my girls would be pleased with her too. That she loved fashion was totally unnecessary.]] I took Nevaeh in my arms to comfort her after Julia's lesson. Nevaeh now knew not to even think about wanting me to do anything for her, unless I wanted to. She'd backslide of course, because getting totally rid of selfishness is an impossible change to make to anyone's personality. It's an important source of motivation and is often perfectly fine, but not being able to resist being selfish at my expense was a mistake we'd seen lots of girls make with me because I had a lot that they were greedy for. Their mistakes invariably killed those relationships, so it was important to negate it as much as possible with Nevaeh. God and Julia had made a very effective start to the process, and we would continue to put a lot more effort into educating her than we had with other, easily replaced and often even easier forgotten girls. I 'apologized' to her, "I'm sorry, Nevaeh. It was very cruel of God to throw you into the deep end of my life with so little time to prepare. I know it's been like taking you out of an ankle deep paddling pool and throwing you into the ocean miles from land. God considers me so important and makes so many strange things happen in my life - including that I actually have a life again - that people near me get swept up in all those strange things. I'm so important to Him that He has to put my needs ahead of everyone else's, so things are happening too quickly for you. Fortunately my other girls are in the ocean with you, and they'll keep you afloat until you learn to swim well enough to be comfortable. Do you understand my metaphor?" "I do. That's how it feels for me, except you forgot to say that God threw me into the ocean during a wild storm. I feel like there's lightning, thunder, huge waves crashing over me, and I'm being tossed all over the place. I'm so turned around and confused I'm not even sure where up and down is anymore." "We'll help you," offered Julia. "I know! Thank God for your help today, Julia. And Carol's last night. Um, Ava I don't know well yet..." Ava waved it away, "Don't worry about me; I'm no one important. I'm the same as you, except I joined Mark's life two years ago." "You went through this too?" "A different way, but it was the same thing." Julia added, "We all had to go through something similar, Nevaeh. We all started out thinking that Mark was just an ordinary guy, and then we had our eyes opened in different ways. None of us can understand how important Mark is, but at least our heads have stopped spinning now." "How did you find out?" I interrupted, "That can be discussed some other day, and I'm sure it will be. I've still got quite a few things I want to discuss now." "Yes, Mark." "I'll quickly mention one small point before going on with the agenda. You were worried about my calling God names like 'Big Cheese' or 'Smarty Pants'. God plays games with me. They're important and worthwhile games, but they're still games because He's making them up for me. They wouldn't happen without His deliberately creating them, like when you swore your oath to God. Millions of people swear to God every day and He ignores all of those. He could easily have ignored your oath too, but He chose to magically and powerfully accept it because He could use it to play a game with me. As well as their being deliberately invented to test me, I also don't have any choice about the games. God never asked me if I wanted to play these games, He just started doing them to me..." "Oh no! That's terrible. That's..." #28: #13: "No it's not. He's doing them for GOOD reasons. He's God remember! He does things for Good reasons." "Oh yeah. I forgot." #5: #9: <(a) People are stupid; and (b) manipulating big-titted girls is SO easy because of (a). The "Everything We Do Must Be Acceptable Because God Is On Our Side And God Can Only Do Good" argument makes this so easy it's hardly a challenge any more. We should try corrupting the next girls without God's help, to make it a challenge.> #21: #9: "I'm pretty sure I could refuse to play the games if I wanted to Nevaeh, but I'm not going to do that. If God thinks I should do these tests, then I think it's for the best that I do them." "You're very wise." "Because we're in a game is why I call God by silly names. He plays games with me, so I call Him names partly to acknowledge that I understand we're in a game. I wouldn't call Him a name outside of a game situation. If my father was in a bad car accident and was seriously hurt in the hospital, then I'd be talking to God VERY differently..." "Would God save your father for you?" "I don't know, sweetie. God rarely interferes with people's lives. He's GREATLY messing with my life though, and with some people around me - like you - but He's doing that only because I'm so important. I hope He'd look after my father, but maybe Dad isn't important for whatever God intends me to do in the future. If Dad didn't matter to that, then I think God would just let nature take its course. Dad would get better or not, depending on how bad his injuries were. God hasn't told me anything about His future plans for me, so I don't know the answer to your question. -- "About my calling God names. I also do it as a protest that these games aren't voluntary. It's true that I can refuse to play, but He knows that I won't because I trust Him to only play important, worthwhile games with me. I will do what He wants, but it still annoys me that I have to so I show my annoyance by calling Him 'Smarty Pants'. People get angry when they're called names because it hurts their ego, but I'm SURE God doesn't have a weak ego! He's not going to get angry with me. He understands me inside out, so He knows why I call Him by those names, and He's not going to get angry with me. Remember that He's training me to be a strong leader - willing to take on commitments and responsibilities - so I think He likes that I stand up for myself in the way I do. I'm showing Him that I've got some spirit." "You SURE do! I'd be TERRIFIED to argue with God, but you stand up for yourself and talk right back to Him, like you were equals." "NEVER like we were equals, Nevaeh. I'll never make that mistake. God could snap His fingers and the Earth would be destroyed in an instant. I'm a tiny ant compared to Him. The ONLY reason it looks like I treat God as an equal is because He lowers Himself down to my level when He deals with me." "Oh yeah. That makes sense." I'd had a couple of jokes in mind since the 'argument' with God and this seemed like a good opportunity for the most important joke, one I wanted to tell because it served a good purpose. I said its introductory line, "I'll never forget that He's the Big Dude, Nevaeh." The cellphone moved up and a message was typed. I read it, then angled it for Nevaeh to read: "Big Dude? I hope you're not calling me fat? Or I'll make Miss Nevaeh Smith permanently refuse to wear bikinis :)" On the first reading, Nevaeh didn't have her sense of humor engaged because Christians have taken ALL the fun out of God. The message confused her, until she realized it must be a joke. She read it again, then CRACKED up, gasping out, "He's got a sense of humor!" I passed the phone to Julia while Nevaeh kept laughing, probably quite a lot more than the fairly weak joke merited, but she'd been under a lot of pressure recently. Nevaeh kept laughing. In my proximity sense of her since her oath to God had been so dramatically accepted, Nevaeh had being experiencing a considerable amount of fear, especially during my argument with God, but still a lot after I'd won that. But the moment she got God's joke, her fear started draining away from her, which was great to see because she had been putting up with a great deal of it. Nevaeh managed to add, "He knows how much you loved me in that bikini." "He sure does, but I doubt if He has a sense of humor in the way that you're thinking." "Huh? But there's a smiley face at the end. It's meant to be a joke." "I agree it's a joke. I even think it's a good joke, although I STRONGLY object to the idea of your not being allowed to wear bikinis! This is a perfect example of what I mean about God talking to us on our level. God is VERY big and powerful. Could you understand someone who could make the Universe in seven days? I'm sure none of us can, so He's talking to us in a way we can understand, which includes using humor to make us feel better." "Ahh, I see. That makes sense too. You're very good at understanding all of this." #29: < All things considered, that's hardly surprising.> "I'm very smart and I've had longer to get used to having Him in my life than you have. I'll tell you something else. God wrote that joke specifically to make you laugh." "Me! Why would He care about me?" "You were VERY scared of Him, sweetie. Almost terrified. Probably because your parents or church brought you up to be what they call, 'A good, God-fearing, girl.' God used you in a joke to make you stop fearing Him. You feel MUCH better now, don't you?" "I feel a million times better. You're right. I was very scared of Him. It felt like He was looking over my shoulder all the time, and if I did anything wrong I was going to be in terrible trouble." "Why would God want anyone to fear Him? Fear is used to FORCE people to behave in certain ways, but that's very definitely not the way God operates. He leaves us to behave the way we choose. Even in all the games He's playing with me, He's letting me choose what I do. He's not forcing me to play, I can cancel your oath to God any time I want, and there are many other examples like that. Using fear to force people to do things is SO immoral it's Evil, and God would NEVER do that! He didn't like you being afraid of Him, so He made that joke to make you realize that He's a Good guy. Although I'd have to SERIOUSLY reconsider my opinion of that if He makes you unable to wear bikinis, haha." "Wow! I never thought the church teaching us to fear God was so wrong, but you're right. It's OBVIOUS now you've explained it! YEARS of lessons and sermons about it, and they were ALL LIES! That STINKS!..." "Hold on, Nevaeh. Stop getting yourself worked up. You're absolutely right that the church should be ashamed of their using His name to create fear to manipulate people, but their immorality is THEIR problem; not yours. Even if your parents did it to you too, it's still not for you to do anything about. God wants you to serve me. Your getting in a fight with your church or family doesn't do me any good at all, and it could get you sent away or have your freedom to move around restricted." "I understand. Sorry, I got angry at them but you're right. I need to remember to concentrate on you." "Exactly right," agreed Julia. I suggested, "Everyone here knows the Galloping Ninnies - that's my nickname for your church..." "{Giggle}. That's a funny name." "I think so. You should remember it because it describes my attitude to them. They're 'Ninnies', which means their opinions don't matter. We all know they're wrong, but we couldn't care less about it. You're going to have to keep going to church and behaving normally to avoid your parents getting suspicious and possibly restricting you, so just remember that they're all ninnies and don't get angry at them. It's their problem, and they'll eventually pay whatever the cost for that is. You just concentrate on doing what God and I want you to do." "I understand. Thinking about them being silly ninnies will make it easier. Thanks Mark." "You're welcome, sweetie. Another idea that might help you if you find yourself upset with them and people notice, is that you can always blame Peter. He's the son of an important man in the church but he behaved very immorally toward you. You can say that's making you feel uncomfortable about the church. It's not a good excuse, but it'll cover any small losses of control that you have, if you get angry over something else." "It's a good excuse. I'll try not to need it, but I can easily use it if I need to. But doesn't God care about us telling lies?" "Of course not! What a silly idea! Ha-ha Nevaeh; you should see the look on your face. I'm sorry I teased you with the way I answered, but my answer is still right. The church telling everyone that God doesn't want liars is exactly the same as telling people to fear God, it's just a way to make it easier to control people. Parents don't want their children to lie because truthful children are easier to control. Same with the church; it's easier for them to control all their believers if the believers are trained not to lie to priests. Churches treat everyone in very much the same way as parents treat their children - "The Church Knows Best" is the same as "Mother Knows Best." They both order other people around "For Their Own Good", and lots of other expressions that are the same. It's just a way of manipulating people." "I understand what you're saying, but isn't lying dishonest?" "Yes, but you're so well trained that you're making an assumption. 'Dishonest' has two meanings. One is 'untruthful', which telling a lie obviously is otherwise it wouldn't be a lie. The other meaning is to do with stealing. I wouldn't give my wallet to that sort of dishonest person to hold, for example. -- "Stealing is bad. No doubt about that. I didn't peek at your body during our meeting last night because that would've been stealing something - the sight of your body - from you that you didn't want me to have. But unlike stealing, being untruthful isn't automatically bad. It's not good either; it's simply a tool. I could hurt someone very deeply by telling them something that was true, or I could make them very happy by telling them a lie. Whether lying is good or bad is exactly the same as whether telling the truth is good or bad: it depends on why the person did it and what the effects are. -- "People often lie to get what they want, which is a selfish and bad reason, but that doesn't automatically mean lying is bad. Julia slapped you a while ago, which was an act of violence that would normally be bad, but she did it for a good reason. Slapping isn't automatically evil. Or to put it even sillier, hands aren't automatically evil. They're just tools; it's how they're used that matters. -- "I'm suggesting that if you have moments of anger at your church, then you use a small lie about Peter to hide your lapses. Now that I've seen your body, I am POSITIVE Peter would've been lusting after you - he'd be CRAZY not to! - so the only part of your story that's a lie is saying Peter's lust is the reason for your upset. Lying about the source of your upset is perfectly fine by me. Telling the truth about your being angry at the church's lies would cause a big argument, all sorts of people would get angry with you, your parents would freak out big time when they heard that I was involved, etc. It'd cause a great deal of trouble and it wouldn't do any good at all because the church certainly won't start telling the truth just because you pointed out one of their lies. They'll attack you rather than admitting they were lying." "That's for sure! They never let anyone criticize them." "People who can't take criticism are the worst sort. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes and they need to have those mistakes pointed out. Back to lies briefly. They're a tool like a loaded gun. Like all tools, they're not intrinsically good or evil; that comes from how and why they're used. A 10-year old shouldn't be allowed to play with a gun and shouldn't be allowed to lie either, because children don't understand the consequences of their actions well enough to make good decisions. But as people get older, they get better at making decisions, so guns and lies can become useful tools that can sometimes be used for good reasons. They're usually used for bad, but they can be used for good. -- "There's an easy test for lies: Are you about to lie for your or other people's benefit? If your benefit is greater than other people's, you probably shouldn't lie. But if other people will get more benefit than you, then it's probably okay to lie. That's too simple, but it's a very good place to start your thinking. Your lying about Peter being the source of your upset would save you, me, your family and your church from having a huge, angry battle; and it'd mean you'd be able to keep serving me, which God obviously thinks is very important." "You're VERY good at explaining things. You make everything seem so simple and easy to understand." "I have a feeling you might be in my life for quite a while and I'm trying to calm down the wild storm you feel you're being tossed around in." "You're helping A LOT. I feel much more relaxed and happy now. The storm has died down a long way." "Good. One small point while I remember. I'm guessing you might be in my life for quite a while, but you know enough already to know that I can't be sure of that. It depends on what God is up to. It's possible that God's use of you might only last a few days..." "Oh no! But I can keep seeing you afterward, can't I?" "What if right after the test I have with you, God sends me to live overseas somewhere? In other words, I simply don't know. I don't know ANYTHING about the future. With God messing with my life so much, it's impossible to predict what might happen. I don't know when my test that involves you will be, what it will be, how long it'll last, or what will happen afterward, so I can't make you any guarantees. All I know is that there will be a test sooner or later, so there will be an afterward. It might be a week from now, or maybe a year or a decade. Perhaps even a century, in which case I'd have to change your swimsuit style about halfway through." The girls' suggested I should adjust my time estimation for that. "We don't know when, but we do know that there will be an 'afterward', so please don't mess up any part of the rest of your life. Keep seeing your friends, keep doing well at school when it restarts, keep your parents happy with you, etc. I'd be very sad if your being involved in my life caused damage to your life." "I understand. Thank you very much for caring for me so much. You don't need to, but everything you do is so caring. You're a VERY good person!" I said something truthful for once, "I consider myself responsible for your situation, so I have to care for you. -- "One more comment about lying that just occurred to me. The church preaches strong sermons about lying being evil, and all the time they're lying about God not wanting people to lie. I find that very amusing." I got a little agreement, but no laughter. It's REALLY hard to find the perfect girlfriends. Now was a good time to try the other joke that I'd thought of, so I said, "That text message that God sent about His threatening to make Nevaeh not wear bikinis was a joke, but God is capable of carrying out some VERY serious threats if need be. The text message reminded me of an INCREDIBLY nasty, clothing-related punishment that God inflicted on mankind a few decades ago." I paused, secure in the knowledge that anything "clothing-related" would force the girls to find out more. "What?" Julia and Nevaeh asked eagerly, immediately and simultaneously, which worried me greatly. "A very large number of men all around the world were involved in some VERY bad actions. I don't know the details, but there were so many men involved, and their actions were so bad, that God decided to punish EVERY man for all time. He unleashed a horrendous punishment on MAN-kind." "What was it?" x 4. "He created fashion designers." Julia is normally first to get my jokes, but she was badly handicapped by having entirely the wrong emotional response to the words "fashion designers". In proximity, that phrase clearly gives Julia a sudden surge of happiness. Carol and Ava got my joke almost immediately because my attitude to clothes shopping is reasonably well known by my girls. Carol's and Ava's laughter got Julia onto the right mindset and she laughed too, also hitting me playfully for good measure. Nevaeh didn't really get it, although she joined in weakly the way people do. Julia hit me one more time, then explained it to Nevaeh, "Mark's got a crazy idea that his girls spend too much time shopping for beautiful clothes. His insulting reference to fashion designers after such a big buildup was a joke about his inexplicable attitude." "But most of the best designers are men, and they do VERY good work," puzzled Nevaeh. #9 #11: "We know that," agreed Julia, "but Mark doesn't see the great value of what they accomplish. It's one of his blind spots that we've had to learn to make allowances for. Mark is a truly exceptional person, but he's not perfect." Julia poked out her tongue at me. I accepted her action, happily secure that I'd won this exchange. -- "Don't worry about it, sweetie," continued Julia to Nevaeh. "You'll get used to Mark's sense of humor in time." It was a good time for me to suggest, "How about we sit in the outside spa pool for a while, to help with Nevaeh's sore muscles." We also have a smaller spa pool in the master bedroom's en suite, but the outside one is in a nicer setting and I like the idea of getting Nevaeh used to being naked outside, or "Australian" when we find her bikini again. "That'd be great," agreed Nevaeh, "but I don't think I can move." "I'll carry you. Your being so sore is something I'm partly responsible for, although it's mostly Julia's fault." "I'll bite," offered Julia. "How am I responsible?" "You said, 'Shall we put on our bikinis for lunch?' You knew I'd have absolutely no self-control when I saw Nevaeh in one of those. I think you owe her a large apology for how sore your suggestion inevitably caused her to become." "Haha. Did you think that - knowing your lack of self-control - you should've told me 'No' when I suggested our wearing them?" "I did think of that, but it's still your fault because you should know that my lack of self-control is also verbal and in every other respect. When it comes to girls as beautiful as all of you, it very much controls my life from the moment I wake up every morning." After my insulting fashion in any way, it's always a good idea for me to do some groveling. ------- Chapter 385: D-Cup's Initial Orders Monday, July 2, 2007 (Continued) I carried Nevaeh out to the spa pool beside our swimming pool. It was landscaped and shielded for privacy, but Nevaeh showed no hint of modesty about being outside, not even in proximity. Julia, Ava and I were also naked, as would Carol be when she arrived after getting the drinks, but Nevaeh's acceptance was still impressive. The Nevaeh of twelve hours ago would've fought tooth and nail to avoid it. I complimented her, "We're outside and you're naked, Nevaeh. You've got a much healthier attitude to your body now." "I trust you. No, that's not a good answer. I do trust you, but even better is that I can SEE that you're right. You've all got wonderful attitudes to bodies. I like being naked with all of you because it feels better emotionally. I feel safe and closer to you, and I can tell that it's the right thing to do." "Exactly right. You're trusting us by showing us your body, and we're trusting you by showing you ours, and unsurprisingly, that builds trust. That's a VERY good basis to grow a friendship from. You're very sensitive to it now so it's having a large impact on you. After a while you'll get used to being naked with us and the emotional impact won't be so obvious, but it will always be a good thing. Clothes are an emotional barrier as well as being a physical one." "You're VERY wise." "Not really. It's just that I've spent HUNDREDS of hours working out good-sounding excuses for why pretty girls should take their clothes off around me." "Haha, {groan}. I wish you weren't so funny." #31: Once we were settled into the pool, with Nevaeh cuddled on my lap, I resumed, "The next item on the agenda was something I called 'Initial Orders'. Those are orders that I want to give you immediately, Nevaeh." "Oh." "I'll start with one I know you understand fully already: 'I order you to live those parts of your life that don't overlap with my life as you would have had you not met me.' That means still going to church, not getting angry there, and things like that." "I understand. I should be fine." "I agree. I'll use that order to illustrate a couple of things though. I'm not a lawyer so I don't want to make all of my orders to you into some sort of long-winded, cover-every-possibility instruction. Apart from anything else, you'd never remember them. I'm relying on you to be sensible about understanding what I mean, and then doing your best to comply." "I was assuming that anyway. Anything else wouldn't work." "Good. I'm glad you're so sensible as well as gorgeous." Nevaeh smiled happily. Julia instructed, "Give him a thank-you kiss, sweetie." Nevaeh was VERY happy to do so, not needing any more prompting. After our passionate kiss, when Nevaeh's attention returned to normal, Julia added, "An important part of your serving Mark doesn't require him to give you specific orders. Your job includes making him happy. Try to do nice things for him. If you're sitting on his lap and he compliments you, giving him a kiss is an easy example. I'm sure you haven't, but let's say you had a bikini at home that was as sexy as the one that's lying on floor inside. You'd wear it next time you came here, to give Mark a nice surprise. I'm assuming you're smart enough to have noticed that Mark likes seeing you in sexy bikinis." "Haha, oww! You're all too cruel! I was smart enough to notice that, but not smart enough not to laugh." "I'm glad you're smart. Being nice to Mark is very important for you, otherwise you won't be in his life for long." "I think I want to be in his life forever. It's scary because I've got a feeling that it's going to be a very big life, but I think it would make me happier than anything else that could ever happen to me. It's okay for me to say that, isn't it? I'm not trying to be jealous or take him away from you; I just want to be here too." "We understand, sweetie. We all want to be in his life forever. Mark is so wonderful that everybody who gets to know him wants that..." #5: " ... It's fine for you to want it and say it. It's even better if you try to make it true, by being as good as you possibly can for him." "I WILL! This is the most important thing that's ever happened to me..." "Or ever will," corrected Julia. "I'll say! I was sitting right beside Mark when he was arguing with God. With GOD! And ABOUT ME! Nothing as huge as that is ever going to happen in the rest of my life. I know he doesn't want me to, but I'd give up everything else in my life just to spend my life around him, trying to do everything I could for him." "Good girl," agreed Julia. I gave Nevaeh an encouraging squeeze (you should show appreciation when girls have that attitude to you) while I resumed, "I was saying that I won't phrase my orders like a lawyer. It's important to me that you run your life well, so I'll give another example based on my first order. I ordered you to live your life as if I hadn't come along. Next Sunday you would normally go to church, but let's say you're still far too emotional and you know that if you went you'd be certain to explode in some way." Nevaeh was about to object, which I cut off with a squeeze and by saying, "It's just an example. I don't believe it'll happen either." She subsided. -- "If you followed my order literally, you'd force yourself to go to church because that's what you would've done if you hadn't met me. But I certainly wouldn't want you to go there if there's a danger of your exploding. Obviously I'd want you to find some excuse not to go. To say you were sick, or something, even though that's not what you would've done if you hadn't met me." "I understand. The only thing that worries me is that God may think I've disobeyed one of your orders if I do it a way that I think is best?" "That's a smart question. I hadn't thought of it before but it's very easy to answer. You've got NOTHING to worry about because God is VERY understanding. He created mankind, for goodness sake, so He understands us very, very well. I'm sure He won't even mind if you fail to carry out one of my orders, just so long as you tried to the best of your ability." "He won't? Are you sure?" "I'm positive, sweetie. I've dealt with Him long enough to understand that very clearly. He's not like religious people paint Him, as some sort of dictatorial, must-be-instantly-obeyed, judgmental authority from on-high. That's what priests want to be themselves, so they lie by saying that's what God is. You saw the text message He sent to make you lose your fear of Him..." "Oh yeah. I forgot about that." "He's an easy-going, relaxed, good guy. He lets mankind do its thing without interfering at all, the way Archangel Michael described." "I don't know what the Archangel said. Mom and Dad wouldn't let us watch TV whenever he came on." "OF COURSE they wouldn't, he was ONLY an Archangel from GOD! Good grief! The close-mindedness of some people constantly amazes me. We've got copies of CNN's tapes here, sweetie. If not this visit, then next time I'll take you through them and show you all the important parts." #13: "Thank you. I'm sorry my parents are such bad people..." "I wouldn't go that far. They were given wrong information, and I imagine they grew up going to church so they've been brainwashed into having wrong ideas. They're victims, just like you were heading toward being. You were very proud of remaining a virgin, for example. The worst you can accuse them of is being fooled, and the church has had hundreds of years' practice at fooling people." "Thank you, Mark. I feel much better about them now." "You're welcome. They made you, so there has to be a great deal of good in them too." "Time for another kiss," declared Julia. Nevaeh was on it. When I got my mouth back, "Okay, so you understand the order-giving process now, and I've given you the one about living your life normally. The next order is easy, 'Nevaeh, I order you to obey Julia, Carol and Ava as if they were me.' Do you understand what that means?" "I have to do what they say too?" "Very much. If they order you to do something, it's the same as me ordering you. I know it scares you, but I'll even point out that if you disobeyed them, then I would have to punish you, or God would." "Oh. Now I've got to obey four people? I've got four owners?" "Yep." I put on a stern voice, "So - young lady - if Julia orders you to kiss me again, you'll have to obey." "I think I'd do that anyway." "I think you would too. I was just making you relax. I've given my girls authority over you because they understand me and what's going on around me pretty well. It's possible that something might happen that requires that you be given an order when I'm not around. It might even be an emergency, so I want all of my girls to be able to force you to do what they know is the right thing." "That's a good idea. Thank you." "It's not entirely for your benefit, sweetie. My girls are putting a lot of effort into helping you as much as possible - which I'm VERY appreciative of, thank you Julia, Carol and Ava..." "You're welcome," (or the equivalent) x 3. " ... But here's something else for you to think about, Nevaeh. They can give you orders for other things too. You are very beautiful and all of my girls like having sex with girls, so they can order you to have sex with them." "Oh." "I think I probably will," said Carol, very intelligently. "Oh boy." #5: Nevaeh gave her lips a small lick while looking at Carol. #22: #8: I said, "Carol, you'll be pleased to know that Nevaeh is feeling some lust toward you at the moment." Nevaeh twitched, then turned to look me in the face. Carol said, "Good. In that case I will DEFINITELY be having sex with you soon, Nevaeh." Nevaeh had turned back to look at Carol, and her lust had jumped fivefold by the time Carol finished speaking. Ava added, "I think I'll have sex with you too. You're very beautiful." Julia saying, "Goody. Lots more good sex for all of us." "Oh boy! 'Specially 'more sex' for me. I never had any before, and now with four of you. My life is changing so much I can't believe it!" -- Nevaeh turned to me, saying, "When you said I was feeling lust for Carol, you knew, didn't you?" "Yep, and that when Carol said that she'd definitely be having sex with you soon, your lust jumped much higher. It's not strong lust yet, but it's the first time you've consciously felt lust for a girl since you've been here, so it's an important step toward your rediscovering your bisexuality." "How can you tell things like that?" "I'm just extremely good at reading people. It's a skill that some people are better at than others, like professional poker players, for example." I watched a Texas Hold'em poker tournament on TV a year ago, amused by the idea of my playing it, and it wouldn't have been my opponents' emotions that I would have been reading. "There are many skills that people have that I can do extraordinarily well, such as swimming..." "And sex," added Ava. My other girls heartily endorsing the addition. " ... Swimming, sex and reading people. I can even read that Carol is the only one of my girls that you have any lust for, and..." "Umm. I'm sorry Julia and Ava. I think you're..." Julia interrupted, "Nevaeh, you've got nothing to apologize for. We'd never blame you for what your honest feelings are." I added, "You also don't need to apologize because I know it's only temporary. You're reacting to Carol first only because she sat on your face first - 'sat on your face' is an expression that means she offered you her pussy to lick. You'll soon be finding Julia and Ava sexually attractive too, as well as other girls. We have a great deal of sex around here. It depends on how often you can visit, but you're bound to be involved in quite a lot of it." "Oh boy. Um, what about other boys? Will you make me have sex with your friends?" #4: "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there won't be any other boys." #14: #All: "I'm not disappointed Mark. I was worried that..." "Nevaeh, you keep forgetting that I can tell what you're feeling. You felt some lust at the idea of my making you have sex with other boys." "Argh, I did too. I don't mean to lie, it's just..." "It's a reflex for you to deny things that don't make you seem squeaky clean, and I've a feeling that most of the denial is aimed at yourself because you've been taught that you shouldn't have lust for boys. You're saying those denials without thinking, just out of a bad habit. Amusingly, a bad habit to avoid seeming bad." No one else thought it was very amusing, but artists are often not appreciated during their lifetimes. "Have I described it correctly?" "Better than I would have. It must be amazing to see right through people the way you can. How can you put up with all the bad people?" "First, my reading people doesn't work that way. I can sense your lust, but that's not saying anything about your being good or bad. If you were a 50-year old man lusting after a 5-year old boy, then I'd be worried, but even then it's not a bad thing if it's never acted on..." "But that's SICK!" #6: "We're getting into an area of morality that I'm not knowledgeable about so I could easily give you wrong answers. I'm VERY busy learning the lessons I need to learn in my life, and fortunately my life doesn't have those sorts of problems in it. I've never read any books on the issues of sexual morality, have never talked to professionals in the field, and it's never come up between me and the angel or God," I couldn't resist ending, "because they obviously don't have ANYTHING to do with my sex-life." Nevaeh didn't notice my joke, but all three of my girls did and then tried to stifle their reactions, and Nevaeh noticed their efforts. She looked at them with curiosity. Julia answered, "Ha-ha Mark. They got Nevaeh for you!" "So they did. I'm EXTREMELY embarrassed by this confession, Nevaeh, and PLEASE don't tell any other boys that I said this, and I BEG you to forgive me, but most of the time I'm thinking of you, I'm not thinking about sex. There! I've said it. I feel so ASHAMED." I even hung my head with shame, to prove it. The girls, Nevaeh included, laughed. In Nevaeh case, she added a small groan when her stomach muscles hurt her. I added, "It's ridiculous to think that God and the angel pushed Nevaeh into my life just so I can have sex with her. Obviously I will, especially once she's had a few days to recover. HUGE amounts of sex! Over and over again! In all the bedrooms, in the living room, in the kitchen, in the shower, and ALL over the house! In the spa pool, in the swimming pool, on the ground BETWEEN the spa and swimming pools. In all the private areas around our property, on the back of every one of Donna's horses, in the greenhouse among the smells of so many flowers. Even sliding down the zip-line although I'll have to be much faster than normal. And if the angel cooperates, three thousand feet in the air above our home, like we did last night." "Wow! That'd be incredible." I hadn't planned on her interrupting, but I could use that, "I think so too, but please don't interrupt me when I'm in the middle of explaining why I don't often think about having sex with you." Nevaeh was too busy being ready to apologize, but my girls - who knew me a GREAT deal better - started laughing. Nevaeh quickly joined in. I protested over top of their laughs, "But I'm only HALFWAY through my answer! You have to wait to hear ALL of it first. I'm pure! HONEST I am!" When they calmed down, I said, "Okay, I'll admit that the thought of having sex with Nevaeh MIGHT'VE crossed my mind ONCE or TWICE, but mainly I've been wondering why she is in my life. In all seriousness - for a change - I'm very responsible for Nevaeh now, so I have to spend time thinking about what the right thing to do with her is. Apart from all the sex, I mean; that's a VERY right thing! Yippee!" I got some more kisses from Nevaeh. She must've thought I'd complimented her. I said, "Back before I was accused of having a one-track mind - which, by the way, is entirely incorrect. I've got at least THREE tracks. I've got my three favorite girlfriends here, and I'm thinking of having sex with all of you." #15: #21: #23: "Am I REALLY one of your favorites Mark? But you've had DOZENS of girlfriends, and I didn't know how to do anything. -- I was just about to open my mouth to answer, when Nevaeh thought of more. She cut me off to add, "And you only met me a few hours ago. You didn't even know me yesterday. I'm only sixteen and I'm very inexperienced. You must've met lots of girls much more sophisticated than me." #7: #9: "I've had dozens of LOVERS, Nevaeh, but far fewer girlfriends, but that's off the topic. I read people very quickly, so even though I haven't known you long, I bet I know you better than Peter Harrison does." "Peter who? {Giggle}." #2: #9: "I think you just complimented me, so I'd better give you a kiss before Julia tells me." Nevaeh was on it. She was overly eager to spend as much time as possible on our kisses without consideration for her making my other girls wait for the conversation to resume, but there are worse faults big-titted girls could have, such as not letting me own them, so I forgave her for now. We'd fine-tune her awareness of group politeness on another occasion. -- "A while ago, Nevaeh asked me how I can put up with all the bad people, and I was explaining that most people's emotions aren't bad or good, they're just emotions which are often not acted on. For some reason lust was the first example that came to mind and I talked about a 50-year old man lusting after a 5-year old boy, which Nevaeh said was sick and I absolutely agree with her. I was explaining how I don't have any knowledge about judging people's sexual morality, but what I do have is a great deal of experience at reading people. To carry on using lust as my example, I've been in many public locations where I've sensed people feeling what I'll call 'inappropriate lust'. You were right to condemn the example I gave, but the trouble is that every time I go out into the public I see a very large number of other lusts that should be condemned too. -- "If a pretty 10- or 11-year old girl, dressed in a short skirt and tight top walks down the street in the middle of town, a lot of the guys notice and feel lust. Usually not much of it, but they do feel some, especially because some girls that age wear clothes that'd be sexy on teenage girls. Women sometimes feel lust for young boys, and there's often same-sex lust too. You'd be surprised how much of that there is. When you walk down a street Nevaeh, at least 15% of the women who see you will feel lust for you." "Really? That's a LOT!" "I'm assuming you're wearing your normal clothes. If you wore one of Carol's nicer outfits, then about 40% of the women would lust after you." "WOW! I had no idea so many women were like that." #16: "AND if we dressed you in VERY sexy clothes, we could probably get the result up to 60%. Many of the passive 40% might be in bad moods or have other reasons not to desire anyone at the moment, so the 60% who would lust after you is actually understated. Bisexual attraction is FAR more common than you think because nearly all of those people refuse to act on their feelings. They repress them, sometimes so well they refuse to be consciously aware of them, just like happened to you. So there is a sadly large number of people who are cutting themselves off from experiences they would enjoy, just because the church has made everyone swallow a bunch of lies about how evil different types of sex are." "That's horrible!" "Yes it is. The church hierarchy plays their power-games to control people, and they don't care about the unhappiness and harm they cause. That's mostly because they believe they're right, but it's still very wrong of them to impose their opinions of morality onto other people. -- "Girls your age VERY commonly have bisexual interest. Probably about 75 or 80% of girls would enjoy have a sexual relationship with a girlfriend. Unfortunately only about 25% of girls do..." "25%! That's a lot more than I thought. I thought maybe 1%." "Girls have to keep it secret because there'd be too much social condemnation. You think 25% is high, but I think it's terribly low. It should be 80%! Girls your age would benefit considerably from being able to freely and openly have bisexual relationships. It'd help them learn a lot more about their bodies, relationships, how to make friendships richer and deeper, and lots of other good aspects. It'd also let them have sexual relationships which weren't totally one-sided, with the guy pushing for more and more sex all the time, and the girl trying to fend him off." "That's what Peter was like. His hands were ALWAYS wandering and he kept begging me for more. He was getting to be a big nuisance." #25: #21: "You and EVERY other pretty girl have that problem. But if two girls were in a relationship there wouldn't be any of that unending aggressiveness. They could relax and be themselves far easier. It'd be much easier for the girls to find deep friendship with each other because all their time together wouldn't be a sexual combat." "Wow. You're right. I never thought about it in that way. You make me want to have a girlfriend." "MORE girlfriends! Aren't these three enough for you already?" "I forgot! Are you really going to be my girlfriends?" "If you're Mark's girlfriend then you're our girlfriend," answered Julia. "You've already seen that. We share when we're in bed, and we share when we're out of bed, like the four of us going on shopping trips together." "I'm going to LOVE being with you!" #14: #All: #15: I said, "I've a very good feeling that we're going to enjoy your company too, Nevaeh, although I must admit that I'm getting very worried about how much Julia is going to enjoy it. -- "I was trying to list inappropriate lusts that I've seen in public and we somehow got diverted into bisexuality, so I'll go back to other lusts I've seen. As far as I can tell, boys between about twelve and sixteen feel lust for EVERYTHING, nearly all of which is inappropriate. But I'm sure you don't need to be told what young teenage boys are like." "Haha, no. They're all over me, even the boys at church, who should know better." #12: #All: "Then there are unusual lust situations like mothers who're breast-feeding their babies. It's quite common for them to feel some sexual stimulation from that. Pregnant women are another source of inappropriate lust because quite a few guys get turned on by pregnant woman, and some pregnant women feel surges of lust for all sorts of people because their hormones are all over the place. -- "Inside families is another place society considers inappropriate for lust. There are two people I know who're in their 30s and who're brother and sister. They have so much lust for each other that I'm sure they must have discovered it. I can tell they're not lovers though, which is a huge pity because their feelings for each other are so strong." I'd made that up to see if Nevaeh felt revulsion. Happily she didn't. -- "There are sibling pairs like that at every age. Usually not with the strong emotions of the two I'm thinking of, but still with some of what society would consider inappropriate lust. Is there anything at all wrong with two siblings in their 40s being lovers? What about if they were in their 20s? Or teenage siblings lovers?" There was no sign of a negative emotional reaction from Nevaeh, which was great. -- "You know Donna's been talking about maybe having sex with me when she's eighteen. Everyone inside our two families knows about it, and even a few people outside, although not many because society thinks it's 'inappropriate'. But anyone who knows Donna and me would have to be insane to think there was anything wrong in the love we have for each other." #4: "You saw Carol and me in bed and having sex with Julia and Ava in various combinations. Most people would condemn that, but you didn't see anything bad, did you?" "I think you're WONDERFUL together. I've never seen any family where there's so much love between the kids. You keep referring to Carol, Julia and Ava as 'my girls.' You don't treat Carol as less than your girlfriends. When you were having sex, you never tried to hurry Carol up or intrude on what she was doing. You and she share perfectly, even during sex, which you're right about society being upset about. It was wonderful to see. I'm glad you let me lie on the bed and watch. Thank you for that." "You're welcome." "You're trusting me a lot. My parents think you're evil because you have sex with two girls at once. I'd NEVER tell them, but if they knew Carol was having sex with you - not WITH you, but you know what I mean don't you?" "Sure: what you saw us doing." "Yeah. If my parents knew about that, they'd be denouncing you in church with terrible language. They'd call Child Protective Services and all the people at church would be demanding your arrest. They'd be Crusading for it." A couple of years ago we'd all been extremely scared of Carol and me being found out. [[The parents hadn't been so worried. They'd oversold the need for caution to us kids. Apparently they'd thought that teenagers might have trouble controlling their sexual activities.]] These days we're considerably less worried about it. I'd only been resurrected for a month now and we'd not had a serious discussion about the issue, but I was sure no one was worried. It'd be best if news of Carol and my relationship didn't get out, but if it did we had an unlimited legal budget and a Guardian Angel. People would find it a GREAT deal harder to cause us trouble than they would have a couple of years ago. Trying to separate Carol and me would be downright dangerous for them, and after a very painful warning or two, I'm sure people would stop trying. The important point from the recent conversation was that I hadn't detected any negative reaction from Nevaeh to the thought of my being sexual with Donna or Carol. I hadn't confronted the issue head-on with her, but I was comfortable enough not to need to investigate much further. I'd discuss it with my girls after Nevaeh left, but my feeling is that Nevaeh thought it was impossible for us to do anything that was morally wrong or unloving. "I never thought for a second that you'd tell on us, Nevaeh, so don't worry about us not trusting you. God wouldn't have let you into our life if He didn't know you were trustworthy." "That's right. Good. I was worried that you might've worried about me." "I never was. Plus I can see that you totally understand that your parents and church are wrong about sex, and that we're right." "I'll say! I'm never going to believe a word they say again, that's for sure!" "That's a healthy attitude. If you're not sure whether something is right or not, just ask one of us; we're very moral. -- "Just to quickly finish my topic about inappropriate sex, I was mentioning families. There's even more family lust when the kids are teenagers. Usually it's teenage boys who're lusting after their sisters. They don't lust all time, but if their sister just bent over and showed some cleavage, most teenage boys will get a surge of lust. Girls not infrequently lust after their brothers too. One sign I see quite often is when a girl's older brother talks to a pretty girl; I often sense sisters feeling jealousy. Sometimes pride if their sister loves her brother properly and wants him to be happy, but jealousy is very common. I can also often tell when brothers and sisters have been playing sex-games recently. That's quite common with pre- and early-teenage kids. -- "And a last example of inappropriate lust. I'm POSITIVE that if you walked down the street, virtually every man who wasn't blind would feel some lust for you. Acting on that lust would be a serious crime if the guy was more than three years older than you, which obviously nearly all of them would be. -- "So there's a long list of lusts that I see every time I go out in public. At one end of the spectrum, it's considered wrong for two 40-year old siblings to have sex, even though I think it's absurd that two adults who've known each other for forty years aren't allowed to decide for themselves whether they want to have sex in the privacy of their own bedroom. On the other end of the spectrum is the 50-year old man lusting after the 5-year old boy. The problem I've got is that I see this lust all over the place. How could I stop thousands of people feeling inappropriate lust every day? I can't just judge it on what lusts would be criminal if acted on, because if you walked down the street more than half the adults - males and females - that saw you would feel some degree of lust. It's obviously nonsense for me to phone the police station and report that half the adult population of Corvallis want to be criminal perverts. Why should I try to stop them when they haven't done anything? All the examples I gave are ones society doesn't approve of, so they're all 'bad' if acted on, but when I see them being felt in public, they aren't being acted on. -- "I've only talked about lust. Shall I talk about all the other 'Deadly Sins' I see: anger, laziness, greed, envy, pride, etc.? I see all of those all the time too. -- "People are highly flawed. They make lots of mistakes, they're distracted, short-tempered, stressed, lazy, lustful, and all sorts of other things. You asked originally about my seeing so many bad people. What I see is people. Nearly always neither good nor bad; just people. Nearly all the time I leave them to get on with their lives and make their own mistakes. That's what God does to Earth, and that's what I do when I go around Corvallis. -- "There have been a few times I've intervened. I recently saw four big boys chasing after a small one with real anger and violence in their intentions. They were going to beat the little boy up, and probably quite badly. I arranged for the small boy to get away from them. Did I do any good? I don't know. For all I know the four big boys knew where the small one lived and they went there in an even worse mood than when I stopped them, so the little boy would've gotten an even worse beating. Or maybe the bullies took out their frustration on an old lady. -- "If I reported my suspicions about a 50-year old man lusting after a 5-year old boy to the cops, would that help or harm? The man might never have done anything wrong in his life and might never do so, but if the cops visit him he might be so wracked with guilt that he commits suicide. Or maybe he thinks that if the cops are going to arrest him anyway, then he might as well do the crime while he still can. Or maybe I truly did prevent a crime. The trouble is that I have no way of knowing what the consequences of my actions will be, but if I interfere then I have some responsibility for them. I can't do that just based only on someone showing an emotion, and I especially can't do it for a thousand people every time I go out in public. -- "I know you didn't ask me to do anything, you just said that the man lusting after the boy was sick, so I've spent far too long talking about it. Probably because what I've learned about people is not to judge them. EVERYBODY has bad times; it's part of being human. I've seen what looked like a really bad person one day, then the next day they're doing something very nice." Julia asked with concern, "You've not talked about this with us before, Mark?" "Never came up, I guess. I get a huge amount of information that I can't do anything practical about. I think it came out now not because of Nevaeh, but because I've been thinking about Good and Evil a lot more recently. The Guardian Angel has killed people to protect me, and that's something I lose sleep over." I'd added the last comment because my girls were looking worried, and it cheered them up immediately. They knew I never lose sleep over anything, and they correctly realized I was talking bullshit. Most of what I'd said was so I could push Nevaeh closer to bisexuality, and after that success, to test her emotional reactions to incest. The remainder was just how the topic seemed to come to an end. It seemed to taper off in a depressing manner, but mainly because I couldn't be bothered thinking about the topic hard enough to come up with a happy ending. It was just bullshit anyway. It was true that I often detect a wide variety of emotions in people when they were close enough to me to be in my proximity range, and they are often bad or unacceptable emotions, but I rarely do anything about it. I had tripped the four big boys chasing the small one, and I have done other similar things, such as getting Julia to approach the parents of the damaged unborn baby in LA, but I don't agonize over any of it. It's EVERYWHERE so I accept it, and I've never had any real trouble doing so. Sometimes I've dithered over whether to do something or not, but whatever I've decided I've simply done it and then carried on. I wouldn't have lost sleep over any of it even if my losing sleep were possible. I said, "Let me change the subject back to what we should've been talking about. We're discussing what I called my 'Initial Orders' and we got very distracted by my ordering Nevaeh to obey my girls. We got sidetracked by lust, which hardly ever happens to me because I'm such a pure person..." "{Raspberry}," from Julia. She's usually the one that gets them in first. The other girls just laughed. The depressing mood had now been successfully chased away. "It was all Nevaeh's fault. We got sidetracked onto lust when I insisted she'd been feeling lust at the idea of sex with other boys..." "I remember now," Nevaeh said. "I wanted to tell you that I don't want to sleep with any other boys. I did feel a small amount of lust, but I think it was because I thought you'd be making me do it, and I got excited about having sex for you, even if it wasn't with you. I don't want any other boyfriend. I know you're the best guy I'll ever meet so I don't want to be with anyone else. Unless you order me to, but I don't want to do it for myself. Is that all right?" "It's about perfect, sweetie. I'll even go further and tell you that you're hereby ordered not to have sex with anyone that I haven't given you permission for. While you're my serving girl, all of your sex will be under my and my girls' control. I promise you won't miss out though; you'll be having a LOT of sex with us!" "Good. I've had feelings a million times better than I've ever had before, and now that I know sex isn't evil I want much more of it with you. And with Carol, Julia and Ava too." "I think I can pretty much guarantee that, even if I have to temporarily stop being so pure." "{Raspberry}," from Julia. I'd been doing go-softs because Nevaeh was too sore for any more sex. I was keeping my cock soft out of consideration, which I thought was very nice of me. On the other hand, I was still horny and Nevaeh had been on my lap for long enough, so I told Julia, "Thank you my devoted fan. It's time for a change in who sits on my lap. Carol has been wonderfully helpful today, so I think I'll start with my loving, non-raspberry-blowing sister." Nevaeh had already stood up. Her not being clingy was VERY good. Clinginess is quite a common reaction with just-fucked girls, and had to be even more likely with Nevaeh given what she'd gone through recently. With the magnitude of the emotions she was feeling, a clingy Nevaeh would have been bad news, so I was relieved and impressed that she wasn't. Nevaeh wasn't sure where to move to, but Julia indicated that next to Julia was an excellent location. Carol settled onto my lap. I let my cock go hard naturally (BOING), and I used NP to line it up and put it inside Carol as she was - it looked like - settling into a comfortable position. Carol probably wasn't lubricated much, but I didn't worry about that; I wrapped my cock in a thin layer of NP, set the outside surface's friction to zero, and it slid it home easily. I canceled the NP-sheath to enjoy the direct cock-to-pussy contact. Once Carol was happily settled, I had my arms around her, and she had her arm over my arms to better get me to hug her, I said, "I've got another order for you, Nevaeh. It may not be necessary but I want to be safe. 'I order you not to punish yourself for any reason associated with my being in your life.' If you disobey an order somehow, I don't want you to decide that you're a terrible failure and to punish yourself in any way. I could say that I own you therefore I get to decide on that. That's true, but it's even truer that I fear that you might get too emotional and hurt yourself too much. I'll be VERY upset if you hurt yourself at all. Your role in my life is to serve me, and it does not serve me AT ALL for you to hurt yourself in any way. You may NOT punish yourself in any way because of me. Okay?" "I understand. Thank you for caring so much about me." "I'm responsible for your life being turned upside-down, and I'm responsible as your owner too, so I'm required to care for you. I particularly enjoy being responsible for your breasts being well washed whenever we have a shower together." "Haha. I noticed. I'm glad you like my breasts so much. They've been a nuisance a lot of the time but I'm happy that I have them now." #11: #13: #20: Nevaeh suddenly thought of something else to add, "Carol has very nice breasts too, don't you think?" "VERY nice ones, yes. My sister is a beautiful young woman inside and out." Carol clenched her pussy as a nice way of thanking me. She also pivoted around to kiss me on the lips briefly, then pivoted back. The kiss was nice, but I particularly enjoyed the pivots. Apparently having received the confirmation she wanted, Nevaeh asked, "You love each other so much, why aren't you lovers?" "Carol's a lesbian." "Oh yeah, I forgot. What a pity. Ahh, I didn't mean to insult you, Carol. I..." "I'm not insulted. You want me to express my love for my brother even more, and there's nothing insulting about that." "You worded that very well." "I've thought about it many times. I'd like to be able to express more of my love to Mark, if I could." "I don't understand how you could love him so much, and be physically comfortable with him the way you are, but you can't make love to him?" Carol shrugged, saying, "It doesn't feel right. Maybe it will one day, but I don't want to try to force anything. Our relationship is too important to me to risk doing something that doesn't feel right." "I understand. I hope it does feel right for you one day." "I'm VERY happy with my current relationship with Mark." "Yes, I can see. You're very lucky." "Yes I am. Very, very lucky. The luckiest girl in the world." Nevaeh never asked me about my having sex with Carol. Apparently she thought that it was the girl that defined the sexual extent of a relationship. Fortunately that wasn't a rule that she'd be so silly as to apply to our relationship. It went quiet, so I said, "I don't have any more Initial Orders. Does anyone have any suggestions for one?" There was a little back and forth discussion, but no one did, until Nevaeh suggested hopefully, "I think you should order me to come back tomorrow." "You might feel differently about that when you climb out of the pool. Your soreness will take a day or two to fade, and it'd be best to let your torn virginity heal fairly well before you have any more sex. Obviously you could come here and not have sex, but I imagine that most of your girlfriends will want to gossip with you about your breaking up with Peter." Torn virginities and spa pool chemicals aren't a happy mix. Because of the number of virginities I've taken, we'd learned back in Peoria Road not to use chemicals in our spa pools; we change the water more often and have staff clean the pools properly from time to time. "Oh yeah, you're right. Both our families know, so the word would've gotten out by now. My phone will be full of messages." "You need to catch up on your sleep tonight, and I suggest a day of gossiping at your home tomorrow so you don't have to do much walking." "Good idea." "That brings us to the next item on the agenda: Sondarm School. It's a nuisance that Nevaeh's parents won't approve of her coming here, and I thought of some things we can do to start helping that situation. One approach is to generally make me more acceptable to the Christians around town, and another approach is aimed more specifically at you, Nevaeh. I thought your school might be able to help with both at the same time. I don't know how your school operates so I'll tell you my ideas and then you can tell me whether you think they'll cooperate..." I described the various parts of my plan, keeping silent about the Guardian Angel's ice-breaking step as it wasn't necessary for her to know about it, and I didn't want her to see the angel as being so much under my control. It took several minutes to explain, after which her first comment was, "You're going to spend THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS just to maybe make it easier to see me!" "Only a few thousand, and we're not giving it away because we hopefully get some nice artwork out of it, and the community is improved too. The money is irrelevant. You know I'm worth about $500 million, right?" "Ahh, yeah. You said that last night. I forgot about that." "In the bank at 5% I get $25 million from interest per year, or $2 million per month. That's $67,000 per day. If I spend $3,000 at your school in one day, that means I'm only $64,000 richer that day." "Wow. $64,000 a day. That's like what Dad and Mom earn in a whole year." "And best of all is I earn it even if I lie around in bed all day long having sex with their daughter. How's that for a good job?" "That's a VERY good job! You guys are so lucky..." "Not the girls, Nevaeh. That only works with the amount we started with. Judging by our closet, the girls have already spent most of their money on clothes." "Carol, I'm too lazy to move," called Julia. "Hit him for me please." Carol proved that she was more the pivot-hug-and-kiss type, which I generally prefer. Before we resumed talking about my Sondarm plan, Carol invited, "Who wants my seat next?" I started my go-soft. I could sense Nevaeh thinking about sitting in my lap again. She particularly concentrated on the image of my arms enclosing her. She never acted on her desire though, which was good. Girls should share. Julia and Ava debated it for an artificially long several seconds, then they decided on Ava. By then my cock was safely soft, lying flaccid on my thighs. When Carol got up and my lap was exposed, Nevaeh didn't look to see if I was hard, making her very unusual among girls who'd raised the issue of Carol and me having sex. Whether unusually trusting or unusually naïve, I couldn't tell. It didn't really matter, as both were excellent traits. #6: Ava's approach for getting my cock into her pussy was different than Carol's. Before Ava sat down, she took hold of my cock and started rubbing it, saying, "I'll just get it hard so I can have it in my pussy when I'm sitting on your lap." "Oh, could I have done that?" asked Nevaeh. I told her, "You can every time you come in the future, but today you need to be allowed to heal." "I feel okay." "You've been sitting still in hot water so you're relaxed. You'd feel differently if we got busy again. I appreciate your attitude though. Do you think your school would cooperate with my plan?" "Ahh, I think so. They do other extra-curriculum things over summer, so they should agree to do yours." There was a brief pause while Ava ensconced herself on my lap, then I proceeded to ask Nevaeh the several more questions I had about her school and its bosses, all of which got good answers. (I'll describe the plan when it unfolds.) "That sounds like a goer then. I'll send them an email and we'll see what happens. We'll be able to think of other things we can do to make it easier for Nevaeh to socialize with us, but we'll wait to see how the artwork plan starts first." I said, "The next item on the agenda is how we get together with Nevaeh over the next several weeks. There are different ways we could do that: Nevaeh can come here like she has today, although the 'Needing Time Alone to Think' excuse won't last long so others will be needed; we can meet through my Sondarm plan; I have a suspicion that Julia might possibly want to visit one or two clothing stores with Nevaeh, which I'm sure Julia will somehow make happen. Another way we can meet is in other locations, like 'coincidentally' going to the same beach one day, but that'll be restricting if Nevaeh has to take some of her friends with her. -- "Something that's worked well for us when a girl's parents have not liked our reputation is to use an intermediary that the parents approved of. We know quite a few girls who have good reputations who'd do favors for us, especially if they were offered sex with me or shopping trips with Julia, not necessarily in that order. Nevaeh, you could tell your parents that one or more of those girls has become your new friends, and your parents would see you spend a great deal of your summer with them, but you'd really be spending nearly all that time with us." "I'll do anything you want if I can spend more time with you. Peter is involved in most of the same groups as I am and most of my girlfriends know him, so I could easily tell Mom and Dad that I want to find some new friends that don't keep reminding me of him." "Good girl!" praised Julia. "We're going to get along very well together." #8: ------- Chapter 386: D-Cup's Corruption Comes to a Climax Monday, July 2 (Continued) to Thursday, July 5, 2007 "The last agenda item is Nevaeh's questions, or anybody else's come to that. Do you have any non-clothes shopping questions, Nevaeh?" "Everything is so strange. I've got millions of things spinning around in my head. One that I kept thinking about last night sounds silly, but I was wondering whether it was the angel or God that found me for you. The angel knew my name but didn't recognize me the first time it saw me, so that means God wanted me for you, right?" "I haven't discussed it with them, but I'm sure I know what the answer is. Archangel Michael explained some of how angels work - which I'll show you next time you come. God created angels as independent creatures so they do have freewill, but they're also part of God and He knows what they're doing. I get the impression that when they're doing something important, then God is paying close attention. -- "I'm sure it was the Guardian Angel who was doing the hunting around, finding out information, and whatever else was involved, with God watching very closely and giving direction. I think you can probably say that the Guardian Angel provided the hands and eyes, while God provided the brain. You asked which one 'found you'. I'm sure the Guardian Angel found you, but it was God that chose you. Apart from anything else, there are so many ways that you're working out very well for us that you had to be picked by God." My answer pleased Nevaeh a great deal, mostly for ego reasons I was sure. She was more important if she'd been picked by God rather than a run-of-the-mill Guardian Angel. After smiling pridefully, Nevaeh asked me, "Am I really working out very well? Compared to all the other girlfriends you've had?" "Yes you are, but it's still very early. I've known many girls who started well and then messed up badly enough to be told to leave. That also means they'd never be allowed back because once we kick a girl out we never give her a second chance. Usually they're kicked out for not trying hard enough and bad habits. Not trying hard enough often happens when the girl does well initially. She thinks she's got it made and she starts enjoying herself. Julia comes down on them like a ton of bricks. Julia wants girls who truly appreciate how special I am..." "I do Mark! You're a million times more important than anyone else." "I think you truly do appreciate it, but I'll carry on anyway. When Julia sees a girl that started well stop trying to please me because she thinks she's secure, what that tells Julia is that girl cares more for herself than she does for me. Julia also thinks I'm worth more than a million other people, so any girl caring for herself more than me means the girl is undervaluing me by a factor of a million. That angers Julia a great deal, so she kicks those girls out of the door so fast their heads spin. They beg for a second chance but they never get it. Once they've shown Julia that they don't think I'm worth more than a single person - themselves - then Julia knows they'll never think I'm worth more than a million. -- "The other major problem is bad habits. This is an especially bad problem with beautiful girls, so I'm astonished you don't have a huge problem with it, considering how fantastically beautiful you are..." "I'm not that good looking..." "Oh dear. I thought I was getting a beautiful, new girlfriend. I'm upset that my judgment of your beauty was so wrong. Maybe I better not have any girlfriends for a few years while I try to improve my judgment. It'd be very embarrassing if everyone was laughing at me because I was really going out with an ugly girl..." I like it when naked girls laugh, especially when I have my cock in one of them. When their laughter had wound down, I said, "I have another order for you, Nevaeh. I order you to stand on a seat, spread your legs, thrust your tits out, and loudly declare, 'I am beautiful. My body is incredible. Sex is wonderful, and I love my life!' Up you get." "{Giggle}." She did it with pride and so much happiness that I didn't need proximity to sense it. Still standing up on the seat, Nevaeh ended her declaration with, "I love my life and I LOVE Mark Anderson. I know I'm going to love Julia, Carol and Ava too. And I feel wonderful that I can stand up naked like this and feel proud rather than ashamed. Thank you all very much for what you've done to me." I sincerely answered, "It's my pleasure, Nevaeh." When the other girls had responded and Nevaeh was about to step down into the pool. I stopped her with, "Sit on the edge of tub, please Nevaeh. Thanks, now spread your legs wide and lean back a little. Good. Carol, would you please lick Nevaeh's pussy gently for a couple of minutes." "I'd love to." "Oh!" from Nevaeh, as she leaned back with a smile on her face. Once Carol had started, I asked the somewhat distracted Nevaeh, "Nevaeh, do you know why I asked Carol to do this?" "Ahh. Because you liked what I said?" "No. It's because I'm punishing you." "Huh? This is GOOD punishment! {Giggle}." "It's APPROPRIATE punishment. I promised God that when you disobeyed an order of mine, I'd punish you appropriately. I ordered you to say certain things when you stood up, and you changed them, so technically speaking you disobeyed one of my orders so I had to punish you appropriately. I think this is VERY appropriate, don't you?" "Haha. Thank you for being so nice to me, Mark. {Moan}. And you too, Carol." I waited for it, watching Nevaeh enjoy herself until... It took her all of fifteen seconds, much longer than I'd thought it would, before she suddenly said, "Oh! God's not going to punish me more if He disagrees with you, is He?" She'd done very well being so slow to think of it, as that implied that she'd largely accepted my earlier reassurances about God not being a fearsome tyrant, but she was worried now that she'd thought of it. This was her first disobedience since I'd maneuvered God into letting me punish her first, and the idea of being in trouble with God still scared her. I'd thought it would, which was why I was using the opportunity of her theoretical disobedience to help ease her fears. "You already know God well enough to know that He wouldn't do that. God is a GOOD guy, and He'd certainly never punish you for improving on an order I gave you so you could tell us how happy you are. I bet He's smiling proudly at you, like the rest of us are. He invented sex, and it's obvious that He deliberately made it pleasurable for us. It's complete nonsense to believe that He doesn't want us to enjoy it. He will be happy that you now feel so liberated about your sexuality that you wanted to announce it." Nevaeh's worry had started disappearing soon after I'd started speaking, as I was just confirming something she'd already started believing. When I finished, she said, "He truly is a good guy, isn't He? He's nice." "Yes. He's powerful so we shouldn't take Him lightly, but He understands us so we don't have to live in fear of Him. He CERTAINLY isn't going to be upset about people being happy about pleasure that He built into our bodies. He doesn't even need to be nice to be okay about that. He made us what we are, so He obviously wants us to be this way. That's so obvious and natural it doesn't really count as being nice. His niceness shows itself better in things like when He sent that text message joke to help you stop fearing Him, because that was a deliberately nice action. You're doing what God wants you to do, and you're trying very hard to please me and to improve your understanding of how He really wants people to be, rather than what the church has been brainwashing people about for hundreds of years, so I'm sure He's very happy with you. He'll be doubly happy because He can see how happy you are." It was a joy to sense her joy. Nevaeh's understanding of God had been turned in its head, and years of repression and fear were being replaced by relief and happiness. "You're right! Everything you say makes complete sense. Why do you think He let the church tell so many lies for so long?" "I'll answer that in a second, but let me complete my previous point first. When I give your orders in the future, what's more important than whether you literally carry them out, is that you behave sensibly and positively. You stood up on that seat and you literally disobeyed my order, but everybody including God is happy with you because of why you did it. He's a VERY reasonable guy. If you mess up an order of mine at any time, don't get upset about how God will react. You don't have to ring me in a panic about it; just talk to me the next time you have privacy from your family and I'll take care of it. You know that God will wait to see if I punish you appropriately first, so you don't have to fear Him at any time, not even if you mess up an order. He will wait to see what I do, and because He's such a reasonable guy, if He thinks I didn't do a good job of punishing you, I'm SURE He'll talk to me about it rather than punish you Himself. He's got no interest in punishing people anyway, and He does want to train me, so He will definitely use my not punishing you properly as a training exercise for me. In short, provided you do your reasonable, human best and keep a good attitude to God and us then you NEVER have to fear Him. I want you to relax and enjoy your life, and enjoy being part of mine, okay?" "It's wonderful. I'm very, very happy that God gave me to you. My life is going to be so much better and happier because of you, even from just what has happened in the last few hours. I'm going to thank God VERY much in ALL my prayers from now on!" "That's great. I'm glad you understand God so well. I'll answer your question about the church's lies: It's because He wants humanity to have freewill. Archangel Michael made a big deal about that, as you'll see in the tapes. God wants to leave us alone so we can become whatever we want to become, as individual people and as a whole planet of people. It's only in absolutely extraordinary circumstances that He'll intervene, like bringing me back to life and giving you to me. Now I suggest you lean back and let Carol punish you properly." "{Giggle}." Nevaeh was perfectly okay with God now, which is how it should be. She leaned back and fell silent, until her moans started a couple of minutes later. #11: #10: Julia took the opportunity to move next to me, hug my arm, and quietly congratulate me, "Well done. She's REALLY yours now." "I hope you approve?" "I like her anyway, but I LOVE how totally devoted she is to you! It'll be fun finding things for her to do, and I've already had one WICKED idea that I can't wait to work on." Julia was experiencing a considerable amount of excitement, so I eagerly asked, "What?" "You'll enjoy it more at the time if you don't know in advance." "Of course I will; how silly of me. You seem to be enjoying knowing about it now though?" "That's because I'm thinking of how much pleasure my surprise is going to give you." "Haha. Smart answer. Okay, you win yet again." Carol took her 'punishing' of Nevaeh to its conclusion, sat back down and waited for Nevaeh to recover. When Nevaeh was getting back into the tub, Carol offered her lap as a seat. When Nevaeh sat on it, Carol pulled her into a passionate kiss. Nevaeh hesitated momentarily. The only other time she'd kissed my girls was in the middle of hot and heavy sex, when it'd been done to her and she'd been only half-conscious of it. This was quite different since she was fully aware, and although Carol had started it, it was up to Nevaeh to deliberately decide whether to participate in having sex with a girl. Her hesitation didn't last even a second; Nevaeh leaned forward into the kiss and put her arms around Carol's shoulders and head, and started participating in the kiss just as much as Carol was. One of Carol's hands slid slowly down to Nevaeh's pussy. Nevaeh opened her legs and moaned when Carol made contact and started rubbing. Nevaeh was kissing with enthusiasm and I was thoroughly enjoying watching their mouths duel from only a couple of inches away with the sight blob I had right beside their heads. Nevaeh's kissing was uninhibited, but she was vacillating over whether to move one of her hands down to Carol's breasts. It took her several seconds to summon the courage to initiate her first-ever deliberate sexual contact with a girl. When Nevaeh finally did so, Carol moaned her approval, and that was pretty much the end of Nevaeh's reluctance about bisexuality. Seeing Nevaeh's enthusiastic slide into delightful depravity turned me on greatly, so much so that I definitely had to do something about it. Still inside Ava, I picked her up and carried her out of the pool, using NP to lead Julia too. I lay Ava on one of the nearby mats where I could get an extremely good view of Carol and Nevaeh - which was anywhere within 500 feet - and I started fucking Ava. Julia got on top of Ava in a 69, and we went for it. It took me what would've been an embarrassingly short time to be ready to cum, but I held it off with micro-go-softs until Ava and I went off together. Carol and Nevaeh interrupted their session to get out of the pool and to get into a 69 right beside the one Julia and Ava were rearranging so I could fuck Julia. The two 69'ing pairs fondled everyone they could reach, and frequently shared their designated partner's pussy juice by kissing sideways. It was a HOT session, and we were all getting off on it big time. I would've shot off first except that my being such a gentleman meant I waited for Julia. I know her body so well and she was so turned on - I had no doubt mostly by how well I'd gotten so much power over Nevaeh - that I didn't have to wait very long at all. After our orgasms, Julia and I concentrated on Ava again; and after hers, the three of us concentrated on Carol and Nevaeh. When Carol was the 'victim', I touched her, but no more sexually than hugs or caresses in non-sexual places. Nevaeh never cared. She was very turned on which might have distracted her, but I thought her lack of reaction was probably because she totally trusted us - if we were doing something, then it must be moral. We were all so excited that it was only a few minutes later that the five of us were cuddled in a big heap on the mats, agreeing, "Wow! That was GREAT!", or in Nevaeh's case, "Oh boy! That was GREAT!" ^ [From this point on Nevaeh happily and freely joined in with all of our sexual activities. Any hesitation she experienced wasn't caused by a lack of enthusiasm, and certainly not by a moral objection, but concern about not knowing how to do something new. It didn't take long before there weren't many new things left for her to be hesitant about. She was even less hesitant than other girls are when it came to having sex with yet more girls. Most girls are reluctant to expand their circle widely, as they prefer to have an emotional basis for having sex (although why that preference is so strong that they actually turn down sex is a bit of a mystery). My girls are like that. They'll spread their wings when it's for my benefit, and occasionally if they feel a strong urge, but their choice is to nearly always keep it close to home. Nevaeh had no such reluctance because our removing her inhibitions enabled her to totally get into sex, and she LOVED it. She eagerly sought it out - with partners I gave her permission for - secure in the knowledge that what she was doing was Good, Right and personally approved of by God! For a girl with her reverence for God, that was a very powerful source of encouragement. She was so enthusiastic about sex that I felt it necessary to remind her she wasn't allowed to have it outside of my or my girls' permission. She instantly assured me that she knew that, telling me, "Boys chase me every day. Even girls sometimes too, which used to make me angry. I get reminded to be faithful to you every day, so I'll never forget." It wasn't her forgetting that worried me, but her being tempted by someone else because she enjoyed sex so much. I decided I didn't need to worry about it. Nevaeh did want to devote herself to me, plus she believed that God TRULY was watching and was sure to punish her if she secretly disobeyed one of my orders. There wasn't much chance of her straying, and it would hardly be the end of the world; I'd just have to go back to use rubbers with her. Amazingly, of the two reasons she had to obey me - devotion to me or fear of disobeying God - it was the former reason that she was most conscious of, making it her primary motivation. That God approved of me was a huge factor, but Nevaeh genuinely LOVED being in my life and was HUGELY enjoying herself. Part of that was the weight of her repressive upbringing being lifted off her, and part was the care we took not to abuse her servitude to us, by ensuring that we made her happy. Julia was particularly good at that, as they often went shopping together and had long discussions about their shared vice. Nevaeh was having so many wonderful emotions, which she gave me all the credit for making possible, that she became extremely devoted to me and tried very hard to make me as happy as she was. It was a mutually VERY enjoyable situation. I got a great deal of pleasure from seeing how happy she was with us. It's surprising how unusual such unbridled joy is. Other people in our social circle are often envious, greedy, and sometimes even thinking hard about how to manipulate money out of us. It's not often that bad, and not for long, but most people are too conscious of their own thoughts and desires. Nevaeh threw nearly all of that away. God had given her to me and her oath made it utterly beyond her power to change anything at all, so she didn't even think about it. Her happiness had no constraints at all; no greed, no doubts over our being wonderful people, no moral qualms, no need to protect herself in any way whatsoever. She was emotionally wide open - physically too although that was far less important for her - and felt totally safe about it, valued for it, and joyful because of it. Somewhat to my surprise, all my girls enjoyed having sex with Nevaeh. Girls think weirdly more often than not, especially about sex, so I'd expected them not to be hot for Nevaeh's beauty and body. I'd underestimated how hot my girls were for Nevaeh's total surrender and devotion to me, especially Julia. When we'd first seduced Ava, she'd promised very strongly to obey me and Julia, which she'd done an excellent job of until we'd stopped bothering with it and just accepted her as one of us as that was better for everyone. Nevaeh's determination blew Ava's initial attitude out of the water. Carol and Ava were very pleased with Nevaeh too, just not as much as the - I sometimes suspect - somewhat insane-about-me Julia. Carol's and Ava's being less sexually excited by Nevaeh's devotion to me didn't matter, as Carol and Ava also have less reluctance than Julia to having sex outside the core group, so they weren't reluctant to play around with Nevaeh. Her being uninhibited physically and joyfully appreciative made her a pleasure to have sex with, and Nevaeh was soon a regular feature of our sex-lives, especially because of her joy - all of us LOVED Nevaeh's joy. We'd not expected it, and it was a wonderful surprise. That alone made her great company and made having sex with her a heck of a lot of fun. You probably won't be surprised that my girls and I quickly decided to let Nevaeh know about Carol and me being lovers. Nevaeh thought it was wonderful and I could easily sense that she was happy at the news, both for our sakes and because our telling her meant we trusted her. She expressed considerable thanks for our telling her, and took pride in it (she was often quite prideful, but it was never a problem, especially because it was nearly always for her being so good for us). She saw Carol and me having sex together many times and she never felt any negative reactions to it. I didn't fear her telling anyone as I didn't fear that much anyway, and her devotion to me was total. Her parents, her church and the world in general were WRONG! Nevaeh knew that for a fact, straight from the cellphone that God had borrowed.] ^ We resumed our talking session back in bed. I'll skip most of the questions Nevaeh had, as some were silly, many were "Getting To Know Us"-type questions (which I'll assume my esteemed readers do by now), some were reassurance seeking, etc. I'll quote a small subset of the topics. Nevaeh asked, "Mark, does God want you to get me pregnant?" Since she'd learned that my "stuff" was inside her, she'd several times imagined her belly swelling, so I knew it was on her mind. I'd originally intended my not telling her to be a powerful reminder of my owning her body, but she didn't need that reminder so I answered, "You're not pregnant, sweetie. That isn't the sort of test God would put me through with you." "But you had unprotected sex with me. I'll get pregnant from that." #4: "With other boys you would, sweetie, but not with me. I can control whether or not I make a girl pregnant." I was expecting - not in the sense that I'd gotten myself pregnant - her to have more questions, but she simply said, "Okay," and that was the end of whether I could do that or not. I hoped she wasn't so gullible that she'd believe any other guys making that claim in the future. She added, "I was hoping you would make me pregnant. I'd like to be a mother for you." "Thank you, sweetie, but that's not going to happen. I hope you don't mind if I keep having sex with you though?" "Haha. YES PLEASE! I LOVE having sex with all of you." A couple of minutes later, Nevaeh made a little comment, "In the early religious painting, halos were painted as solid circles, exactly like your angel would look like if it was painted on a flat surface. I wonder if that means other people had Guardian Angels?" Julia wasn't going to stand for that! She immediately responded, "I doubt that VERY MUCH. If there'd ever been anyone as amazing as Mark, we'd still be talking about him or her with awe in our voices today. That must've been the painters making something up that they all copied. If Guardian Angels had very distinct shapes that had been painted, I would think you're right, but painting a boring circle could have happened for many other reasons." "Okay." I'd originally had a little idea to get the "D-Cup" nickname officially established with Nevaeh because I'd wanted a negative sounding name to use as a lesson for her about her place in my life, and also to have it available as a way to make sex an obvious part of our relationship and something we'd both be reminded of, to encourage her into being easy to have sex with. I even had some bullshit prepared to justify it by saying that I wanted it because it sounded offensive, but it was really a compliment. But I decided to forget about it. It'd been a pretty messed-up idea and she didn't look like she needed any more lessons; probably just a few little reminders from time to time, as every girl needs those. And Nevaeh wasn't having ANY trouble getting excited about sex; she was a firecracker! Getting TOTALLY rid of a girl's sexual inhibitions toward me and my girls had turned out to be an excellent tactic. The last part of our conversation that I'll quote was started by Julia saying, "I need you for a couple of hours shopping one day soon, Nevaeh. Tomorrow you'll be too busy gossiping, but later in the week would be perfect. I need to make an appointment for you first, so can you text me tomorrow evening with a time you'll be free on Wednesday or later?" "An appointment? That sounds exciting. Who with?" "I'll tell you later when Mark can't hear. It's to surprise him with something nice. Doing nice things for him is what all of us do all the time." #29: "Okay. I could be free on Wednesday before lunch. Would that be okay?" "There's no need to decide now. Let your friends do all their anti-Peter gossiping first, and then you'll be able to choose a time more accurately. It's very important that we're as careful as possible." "I understand. I wanted to be as helpful as possible." #31: "Mark wants you as his girlfriend for a long time and he doesn't want to wreck your family life during it, so being careful is MORE important than being quick." "I understand. It's hard not being too excited. All of you are so special..." [If I'd known what Julia had in mind, I would've gotten "too excited" too.] Julia corrected Nevaeh's mistake, and the conversation moved on to other things. Nevaeh left us at 4:15pm so she'd be home before her parents. The departure required some more happy crying, many heartfelt "Thank yous" - mine were addressed to God - and some walking with sore-muscles and pussy, but Nevaeh was eventually driving down the tunnel, turning her cellphone back on as she reestablished essential contact with the rest of her social network/gossip-circle. "Nevaeh's got it BAD for you, Mark!" exclaimed Ava. "You can say that again!" agreed Carol. "I've never seen a girl want to give herself to you as much as she does." Julia adding, "I'm VERY impressed. You did a fantastic job manipulating her. She's devoted to you to an extent that'd be insane if it was to anyone other than you." I corrected them, "You're underestimating her devotion because she can't express it strongly enough. I can see it in proximity, and she's considerably more devoted than you think. She not only swallowed our bullshit hook, line and sinker, but she swallowed the boat we were fishing from. She doesn't have any doubts at all." "Good. What are you going to use her for?" "I know this is hard to believe, but I haven't really thought beyond her tits yet..." "Haha," from Julia and Ava. | "They are VERY nice," praised Carol. "I'm surprised how sexual you were with her, Carol? I've not seen you feel so much lust for a new girl before." "I did it to start with because I wanted to help you make her bisexual, same as I tried to get my Cuties to be, but you're right that I got excited. She's very beautiful, but mainly because she's so devoted to you and enjoying what's happening. She's just like one of us in her devotion." [Over the next few days, Nevaeh became even more fun to have sex with, as the last faint doubts and worries disappeared and her joy blossomed unchecked.] Not that I suspected Carol of consciously lying, but I believe she was more turned on by Nevaeh than she was admitting even to herself. I can't directly tell the source of emotions, so some of Carol's lust might have been because of Nevaeh's body, but I doubted that was much of a factor. I had two more likely theories: (1) Carol's taking a very active role in Nevaeh's initial seduction had created an emotional commitment to the seduction that had morphed into some lust of her own. (2) The powerfulness of my God Tactic was turning Carol on. Carol has occasionally got a kick out of having power over someone else, such as over Diana when I'd started seducing the two Norris sisters. It's never lasted long, but Carol had enjoyed it at the time. I mention my theories because all of my minds try quite hard to understand my girls and we internally discuss them quite often, so I can do things to make them happier. Julia will normally speak up for herself if she wants something - although surprising her from time to time is still a good idea - but Carol and Ava are less forthcoming about what they want, so I have to make the effort to think about their needs and desires. If Carol persists in enjoying Nevaeh then I'll make sure Carol gets plenty more opportunities to do so, and I might create opportunities with other girls too if that seems likely to please her, which it doesn't at the moment because I think Carol's lust is specific to Nevaeh. In all honesty, I would even arrange a boy for Carol if she wanted one, but I know she never will. She's married to me and her definition of that includes her not even feeling desire for any other guy. Many of them have tried quite hard to pick Carol up, but she has a total lack of interest. Ironically, it's Carol's strong love of me that both gives me the confidence to think about getting a guy for her, and why she'd turn him down. "Yeah," agreed Ava, "she's hooked big time, but for VERY silly reasons. I nearly burst out laughing several times. Mark, how could you make up so much nonsense that fitted together so well?" Julia added, "What I liked best was adding the aspect of God testing you. That gives you so much flexibility it's amazing. You'll also be able to use it to let her go in a very good way." "That was very much in my mind. I've done such a horrifically effective job of picking her up that I better make damned sure I let her go equally well, or she'll be a mental wreck. -- "Ava, I don't know how all that nonsense fitted so well. Maybe luck, or maybe I was inspired by her tits. As great as they are though, I do need to find other things to do with her. More than the Sondarm-type plans, as those are just a means to an end, not an end." Julia said, "They'll keep her busy for quite a while. You're not going to win over the religious community easily. Speaking of which, that gives me an idea. We didn't have a good party after exams finished, so let's have another one, and with a religious costume theme. We could write on the invites, 'Come dressed as anything out of the Bible, but not God or Jesus because we don't want to show any disrespect.' It'd be foolish for us to try to deny there's any religious connection to us, so let's show some connection to it in a friendly, inoffensive way." I pointed out, "Just having a party with a religious theme is going to offend some people." "Some people get offended by any sort of party. I'm not going to worry about the lost causes, only the majority. Being open about the party and doing it respectfully will improve a lot of people's opinion of us, and you know how much I enjoy planning big parties." "When do you want to have it?" "I haven't decided yet. Let me do some initial planning and I'll let you know in a few days." We agreed. ^ The rest of the above conversation is fairly predictable, so I'll jump ahead a few days to describe Julia's so-called "initial planning". I didn't know anything about it at the time, but the result was so spectacular that I made sure I found out. Nevaeh had called Julia on Wednesday as ordered, and they'd agreed that Nevaeh would be free Thursday morning for some shopping with Julia. Nevaeh wanted to know where, but Julia just told Nevaeh to call for directions a few minutes before the meeting time. On Thursday morning, Nevaeh eagerly called Julia. Julia said, "Carol and I will meet you inside Raging Rocky's Rags. Do you know where that is?" "The homosexuals' boutique?" "Yes." "But aren't homosexuals evil? Wait! They're not, are they? That's another lie?" Julia had two convincing proofs, and she led with the strongest one, "They design and make fantastic clothes, Nevaeh! How could they possibly be evil? Besides, Rocky's was one of Mark's favorite stores before he was killed, and as soon as his body stops changing he'll be visiting it again, so obviously God doesn't see anything wrong in it." [There was a small corner of truth in Julia's answer, as I had been to the store a few times. Once we'd become super-rich thanks to the two DHS/CIA kidnapping settlements, there was no chance that Julia wasn't going to drag Ron to Rocky's repeatedly. She was already asking me when my new body would be ready for some custom-designed clothes, although I don't think she believed my answer. I also had a very strong suspicion that the girls had asked me to be 6' 3" to ensure that I'd need to buy ENTIRELY new clothes.] "But don't they just sell men's clothes?" "Mostly, but they do some women's clothing and some wonderful custom design work too. That's what we're getting for you. We've got a costume party coming up at our place soon, and you're going as an angel." "A round ball?" "No, a very different type of angel. You'll hear me describe what I want to Nigel. Do you know where the store is?" "Yes, but I've never been in it before." "Rocky and Nigel will be waiting for you in five minutes. I'm not going to use your name either, just to play safe for afterward. I'll call you 'Toy', okay?" "Joy?" "No, 'Toy', with a 'T'." "That's a strange name. Why did you pick that one?" "I'll explain later, Toy." "Okay, I'll see you soon." A few minutes later, Nevaeh worriedly walked into Rocky's, where Julia said, "Hi Toy. Take off all your clothes." Julia liked Nevaeh, but it was important there be no doubt who was the boss between them. There hadn't been, so maybe Julia just gets a thrill out of giving extreme orders that she knows will be obeyed. "In the middle of the store! In front of men!" "I order you to strip immediately and not to say one more word until I give you permission to!" Nevaeh silently stripped naked in front of two evil homosexuals in the middle of a store on a Thursday morning because God would punish her if she didn't. Rocky locked the door while Julia described to Nigel what she wanted. There were a lot of clothing details and jargon terms which I'll omit (I'm scrubbing my brain as we speak). Julia was asking for, "A white leather angel, the SEXIEST that's humanly possible, her identity hidden but everything else exposed. It doesn't matter if she can't walk in it, and money's no object." "Money's never any object with you, dearie. You're our fav client." After Rocky and Nigel had made several admiring comments about what they had to work with (they could admire Nevaeh, they were just incapable of desiring her - their loss), they got to work taking measurements of EVERYTHING. After watching for a minute, Julia corrected them about something, "No need to be gentle with her. She's my toy and she'll stand there no matter what you do. If you need to measure the depth of her pussy, just stick your finger in; don't worry about her." [Julia had talked to Rocky and Nigel before Nevaeh arrived. You shouldn't need me to tell you this, but Rocky and Nigel are familiar with many deviant sexual practices - probably all of them.] As per Julia's secret instructions, the length of Nevaeh erect nipples needed to be measured, which required Carol to spend a couple of minutes getting Nevaeh as turned on as possible; effectively having sex with her while she was standing voicelessly in the middle of the store. Also needed was the length of Nevaeh's pussy and her clit. In the course of the measuring, Rocky's hands were taking great liberties with Nevaeh's body. This was a test Julia was giving Nevaeh. There was no need for those measurements because Nevaeh's breasts and pussy would be totally exposed in the final costume. Julia was testing the limits of Nevaeh's obedience and sexual willingness. Nevaeh demurring in either respect would have consequences. She wouldn't lose her job as my serving girl but we'd have to put more effort into training her, and it was also important to find out now if Nevaeh couldn't handle being so sexually exposed because the design of the costume would need to be moderated from what Julia wanted. Nevaeh took it all, honestly believing she had no choice, and especially believing that it was Right. She truly trusted us to know what was Right when it came to sex, and probably also everything else we wanted to claim authority over. All her years of strong religious training transferred their benefit to us once we proved to Nevaeh that God was on our side. Julia was very pleased. Given how well Nevaeh was doing, Julia pushed the test to the EXTREME, telling Nigel, "Design it so she can be fucked from the rear or the front. She's going to be screwed quite a few times when she's wearing it." Nevaeh bit her lip in worry, but she stood still and quiet. She wasn't turned on by what was happening to her - Carol was enjoying the game though - but she was determined to do her best. Which, with the huge amount of faith she had in us and God, was a very good best. Then Rocky and Nigel flanked Julia and they started discussing possibilities, Nigel drawing many quick sketches. Nevaeh stood silently for over an hour. Sometimes Carol would play with her or sometimes Carol would participate in the design discussion. Several of the sketches were shown to Nevaeh, especially the ones where Julia had told Nigel, "Draw in her breasts and pussy." And Nevaeh heard every word of the discussion, including phrases like, "She'll be on display to a large crowd outdoors and people will need to walk around her easily, so don't make her wings too wide. They can be high though; even very high if you want because we can easily arrange support for them from above." Julia got a time estimate for making an angel from the two fairies, which was what her comment to me about "needing to do some initial planning before she could choose a date for the party" meant. Allowing some extra days for a safety margin, made the earliest party date Saturday, August 4. Carol's sixteenth birthday was very soon, on July 12. Donna's fifteenth birthday was August 1, and Julia's nineteenth was on August 21. Squeezing in an additional party was going to be difficult, especially as the trip to Italy was on August 25. Obviously Julia would never agree to combine any of the parties because that'd mean one less party. Fortunately it was summer vacation so having parties was much easier. [[In reviewing the girls' memories of this event, I watched Julia spend a few minutes discussing some of Nigel's designs for "Markie". Julia - the cheeky minx - had given them my target height and they already had my other measurements, which they could roughly scale, and they knew my original coloring. From that information, Julia had asked them to have some rough designs ready for various types of clothes that Julia wanted me to have as SOON AS POSSIBLE after my body had stabilized. At the current time of my autobiography, none of Ron's or Mark's good clothes fit me, and Julia considered my fashion situation as a national emergency and disgrace.]] When the 'work' on Nevaeh was finished, Julia said, "You may talk when you're fully dressed, Toy. Dress now." In much less time than it'd taken her to undress, Nevaeh was able to ask, "I'm going to be EXPOSED in public? With people touching me and even having sex with me?" "If Mark or I order you to do that, you will, won't you?" "I have to Julia! I made an oath to God!" This had to be one of the weirdest conversations that'd taken place inside Rocky's, and you can imagine what some of the competing conversations must've been like. "What about if Mark suspended your oath for a day and only ASKED you do to it for him?" "Can he do that? I never heard anything about suspending and I was listening carefully." "I'm sure if Mark wanted it, he could. He wouldn't hesitate to grab God's ear and tell Him what he wanted. I imagine the Big Cheese would easily agree, after making Mark responsible for the consequences in some way. I'm thinking of asking Mark to do that, and then for him to ask you to do what you've heard us talking about. Would you agree to do it of your own freewill, Toy?" "My face covered, like in the pictures?" "Of course. You know how careful we are that your parents not find out." "YES! I'll do it. I suddenly feel better but I should feel more scared. Why am I relieved?" "You just realized how much you trust us." "I don't think that's right. I do trust you but that's not what happened. I'll ask Mark when I see him next. Do you know when that'll be?" Julia felt a surge of pride that Nevaeh thought I would easily be able to provide the answer. "You've been so excellent, sweetie, that I'll ask him if we can do something with you tomorrow." "Thank you very much. I miss not being with all of you when I'm away. Nothing else has any point to it; it's all so fake and wrong." "We like having you with us too, sweetie. When you see Mark, don't tell him about your angel costume because that's our surprise gift to him. He'll love seeing you appear in it at the party." "Oh boy, will he EVER! Ahh! I just realized something. Or I think I did. Other boys aren't going to have sex with me, are they? Mark doesn't want that. This is all for Mark, and not for anyone else?" "EVERYTHING I do is for Mark, sweetie, so you're right. You'll be at a party, but you'll be perfectly safe. Did you know that Guardian Angels can split in two?" "Yes, it was in the news several times." Her parents had prevented their kids seeing Archangel Michael on TV the instant they saw the obscene prominence of his large cock. Later they'd heard some of the things the Archangel had said, and they objected to those very strongly too. The Guardian Angel having neither a cock nor a mouth, it was okay for the kids to watch news about it, although obviously not the times it'd stripped the two groups outside our gates. Nevaeh's parents wouldn't even let her watch the news about the mass stripping that she'd been in! Julia said, "I'll be asking Mark to get the Guardian Angel to split in two. One of them will be with you while you're wearing that costume. I'll get Mark to tell it to be gentle to everyone, so don't worry about that. It'll be with you so you can choose who you want to touch you. No one will know who you are, so you can have as much naughty touching as you want and you'll be totally safe the whole time. -- "If the Guardian Angel doesn't agree to do that, then you won't have to wear the costume in public; only in private for Mark later. I'm fairly sure the angel will agree though because God likes giving Mark responsibility for things." "I think you're right. I feel much better now. You made it sound so bad to test me, didn't you?" "Of course. Protecting Mark from poor quality people is one of my important jobs. You're not a poor quality person though, are you, Toy?" "I don't think so. I think I'm doing very well for Mark, aren't I?" "You're doing VERY, VERY well for him." ------- Chapter 387: Sondarm Christian School Visit; Inside Tuesday, July 3 to Saturday, July 21, 2007 I wrote an email to the Principal of the Sondarm Christian High School, introducing myself then saying: I believe the antagonism from some elements of the Christian community toward me and/or God's Guardian Angel is mostly caused by unfamiliarity. Resurrection is unknown in modern times, and as far as I am aware, the Guardian Angel is unknown in all times. People fear the unknown, and fear often leads to worse emotions and actions. I wish to reduce the possibility of future problems by making myself better known. I would like to make myself available to interact with the Christian community in a suitable venue. I propose that your school and I jointly organize a meeting to start this familiarization process. What I have in mind is that on a day that is convenient to you, my parent(s) and sister(s) (depending on availability) and I will attend a meeting that you will have invited your students and their families to; past students and their families too if you wish. We would spend a few hours socializing in a way you are certainly more experienced at organizing than I am. I do have one suggestion for the process, which I describe on the next page. I'm aware that you will incur costs for this, which I will happily reimburse you for. I gave my contact details and some date and timing suggestions, then the closing salutation. On the next page I wrote, ART STORE SUGGESTION I feel that a Question & Answer session would be too formal and not ideal for allowing people to get to know me as a person. I would like a process that permits casual, personal interactions, ideally through an activity that breaks the ice and gives us something to talk about. It just so happens that I would like to buy some pieces of art. I am living in a different home now than when I was abducted by the Department of Homeland Security, and my new home's artwork doesn't suit my taste. I want to buy some pieces that appeal to me, but my resurrection was only a month ago and my shopping in public still causes too much fuss. I suggest that your students display their artworks and I will 'shop' for any pieces that appeal to me. That will give us something to talk about as my family and I walk around the room, and I'll hopefully pick up some pieces I enjoy. Other members of my family might do so too. I think I need to make a few points explicit: First, I am not judging an art competition, as I am singularly unqualified to do that. Consequently, I won't be picking exactly three 'winners', but however many I like the look of. I hope to find several pieces so I can rotate them every few months to keep my appreciation of them fresh. Second, as is usual in stores, I would expect to pay for what I take home. I would like to be generous in support of young talent, but not so generous as to spoil them (aren't all artists required to suffer?). How much to pay is a judgment that I would appreciate your input on, but what I have in mind is a payment of $1,000 per piece, payable to the student responsible. If more than one student contributed to a piece I choose, then I'll have to rely on your school's help (maybe their art teacher?) to apportion the money fairly. I know $1,000 is likely to be too much commercially, but my family believes in giving back to the community and I'm feeling even more altruistic in this life. Third, I know nothing about judging formal quality in art (brush techniques, etc.). I will be choosing works based on nothing other than their subjective appeal to me. It is certain that many people will question my taste. I don't mind my being laughed at for my taste, but I would like the students to know that if they think their 'better' work was passed over so I could buy an 'inferior' work, then they could be right. They shouldn't take any personal slight from my having an entirely different and uneducated idea of what "better" means to me. I see from your school's website that it has art classes - hence the above suggestion - but I am unable to discern how many of your students take art. If the number is very low then the 'shopping' experience would not take long enough to be worthwhile. With my suggested "Art Store" example to illustrate what I have in mind, if you don't have many art students then I am sure you could schedule other similar socialization activity/activities to occupy the remainder of the time, with due regard to the purpose of our visit. ^ The school's Principal called back a few days later to say that his school's board thought it was a great idea, "But $1,000 per piece is too much. Even $100 is more than they would expect." "I don't mind overpaying by a factor of ten. I do want to be generous and that sounds roughly what I was aiming for. My parents have raised me to believe in supporting the local community. I don't know whether you remember, but the first settlement deal we did with the Government a year ago had us giving Benton County three times as much as we wanted for ourselves. The Government stupidly kept throwing more money at us so the final numbers were different, but the original amount is what we thought was fair." There was no chance of him not remembering that, as it was a local legend, if not a national one. Chances are that he lived in the county, so he'd definitely remember it, and quite appreciatively too. We agreed on the rest of the details, and shortly thereafter the school sent out a newsletter to their database of addresses. They reproduced the core of my letter and my "Art Store" suggestion, putting a cover page with it to specify the date, which was a couple of weekends away, time, place and other necessary details, such as asking high school students to deliver two pieces each, with younger students one piece each. There were quite a few Art students - which I already knew from Nevaeh - and the one or two pieces from each student was the Principal's judgment for the best size for the 'store'. Having warned Nevaeh in advance, I sent the Guardian Angel to her bedroom one night to choose which of her pieces she should submit, telling her, "God knows my mind inside out, so the angel will be able to pick which pieces I like the most." The Principal's instructions included the submitters having their names on their works so I didn't need to see her pictures to recognize them in the 'store'; I just wanted to make sure that she submitted pictures that I liked. I'll be buying one of them and I'll have to hang it at home because Nevaeh visits two or three times a week. We could get away with her visiting so often because Nevaeh had several parentally approved new girlfriends who were easily capable of justifying her absences from her usual social circle during the day. Her parents didn't have a clue that their daughter was having orgies several times a week with "the evil Mark Anderson". She'd even been able to stay overnight once. I'd like to say that it'd been for a sustained orgy, but it was even more depraved than that: the girls spent most of the time talking fashion. Nevaeh's interest in fashion is even worse than Julia's (shudder). My offer to SCS created many articles in the paper and a very emotial debate via letters to the editor. A lot more people wanted invites to meet marvelous me, while many other people thought I shouldn't be allowed near defenseless schoolchildren. Unknown to them, the latter group's position did have some merit, as part of the reason for my visit was so I could find more beautiful Christian girls to seduce. The school had quite a moderate Christian stance, according to their website, and the Principal had no problem dismissing the calls of the people who wanted the event canceled. Attendance wasn't compulsory so people who didn't like it could simply stay away. He did talk to me about the risk of the angel running amok and killing people, but that was easily countered with, "It's an angel..." etc. I'm sure you know the crap I'd use. The Principal asked me about extra demand. Apparently there was a LOT of extra demand, far more than they could accommodate. It was my first 'official' engagement outside my home and it was looking like thousands of people from the local community wanted to come, and God knows how many from the national community. I told him, "Packing a hall with ten thousand people would totally defeat the purpose of my coming. You look after your students and their families, and the unrelated people can wait for another occasion. If it works well I'll arrange several similar events over the summer." It was clear that we would have to use a lot of police and our own security to control the expected protestors and gatecrashers. I called the Chief of Police to politely request his help for the event, then put him on to Paul so they could start planning it. A subset of the Galloping Ninnies were among the groups that called for the event to be canceled; their "call" coming from a new "caller", the previous one no longer capable of that function. I was pleasantly surprised to see how small the group was that the call was coming from. [[After not having seen any comeback from their vitriol spewing during their lifetimes, what had happened to the Ninnies' preacher had made many of that congregation aware that yelling moral judgments at me wasn't the risk-free, posturing, look-good-for-each-other game they'd thought it was. They'd known that the angel killed people, but they'd NEVER thought that it might attack THEM! Most of them did not have the courage of their convictions - having neither courage nor, often, any real convictions, because churches like the Galloping Ninnies' appeal to weak-willed people looking for security and validation - so they found reasons not to participate in public opposition to me or my SCS event.]] Many of the public were scared of the angel. "Is it safe for children to be around the dangerous Guardian Angel?" was a hot topic. Several points decided the majority of the public's reaction: The Guardian Angel had been exceptionally careful with the children in the riots outside the Anderson home. I interacted with people every day and no one had been attacked just because they'd been near me. "My angel isn't a wild beast; it's a highly intelligent servant of God, for goodness sake. Why would you think a servant of God would ever attack innocent children?" The victims of the angel had ALL deserved it by threatening me. Some people argued that death was never deserved, but it was inarguable that there'd been some degree of deservedness. Kids standing around hoping I bought their pictures would be about as undeserving of death as you could imagine. People were curious. They wanted to meet me, my letter hadn't been noticeably Evil, and the event was happening in the middle of the day in a school, so it seemed as boring and safe as you could get, although some people suggested that it should be held in a church for the extra safety that'd give everyone. Sheesh! Being staunch Ninnies, Nevaeh's parents weren't in favor of the event and didn't want to attend it. They didn't make their opposition public, but they quite strongly didn't want to be among the participants, even though they qualified as all their children went to Sondarm, other than their eldest who had just graduated from it. Their negativity was mostly because they objected strongly to my lifestyle and didn't want to be associated with me in any respect. Only Nevaeh and her younger brother argued in favor of going. Nevaeh wanted to go for the obvious - although not mentioned - reasons, and the younger brother was just curious. The oldest boy didn't want to go because he had better things to do than go to boring school, and Grace only wanted to do things that were bad, according to Nevaeh. #8: Our plan for her parents refusing was for Nevaeh not to make a fuss, but to quietly go anyway. Doing that wouldn't do her any real harm, as sneaking INTO a school function is hardly a terrible crime. The event was going to be a success and she'd be $1,000 richer, so her parents wouldn't have anything much to complain about afterward. But as it happened, the massive public interest in the event convinced her parents that they should go themselves. It didn't really matter either way, but I was pleased by the implication that they weren't excessively negative, inflexible people. The Williamses and Ava wouldn't come, to avoid rubbing our unusual lifestyle in people's faces. If there's one thing Christians hate, it's people with unusual lifestyles (actually, there are many things Christians hate). [I can't resist a small scientific justification for that unfortunately largely true joke. There's a great deal of research being done these days on how people think. Neurologists, economists, ethicists and many other "-ists" are involved in the studies (I learned about it from Vanessa, in one of her many little educational sessions with me). There's a common Game Theory experiment called the "Ultimatum Game" in which person A is given a pile of something worthwhile (usually money for adults, or candy for children). Person A decides the proportions to keep for himself or give to Person B. Person B can then "Accept" (both of them keep what they've got), or "Reject" (both of them have to give it back to the experimenter). If Person A allocates the money 50/50 then Person B will "Accept" all the time, but if Person A keeps 70% or more, then Person B will "Reject" increasingly often, even though Person B ends up with nothing that way. One of the strong results of these experiments is that religious people (of any religion) are slightly fairer in their allocations when they are Person A, but are FAR more likely to punish when they are Person B.] Somewhat to my surprise, all the Anderson family volunteered to go. My letter had implied that some of them might not because I'd expected them to be bored by the idea. This scheme had only come up because I wanted to get into Nevaeh's panties, and it was a boring part of the scheme too, but Mom said, "We rarely get to see you operate so we're looking forward to it." Carol was always going to be with me, so Donna was the only other uncertainty. Before I'd talked to the family about it, I'd hoped Donna would want to come because I wanted her involved in as many of my schemes as possible. I'd learned a huge amount about people from participating in Julia's schemes, and for the last year or so Donna had been mature enough to deliberately learn about people - a couple of years previously, any learning she did seemed accidental. Donna's emotional maturity was improving in leaps and bounds, and I was enjoying her company more and more these days. I'd rather thoughtlessly not realized that OF COURSE Donna would come. From the instant I mentioned one aspect of my plan, she was begging to be allowed to participate. Neither wild nor any of our domestic horses would keep her away. On the day, we all dressed conservatively- my terrible clothes and exposed ankles nearly brought tears to Julia's eyes, as this would doubtless be televised nationally - and headed off in convoy with our rather large security detail, as some of the protestors had been very strident. They were Christian, so "strident" was de rigueur for them. The event unfolded pretty much as I expected. I'll skip most of its description as being too obvious and boring: Protestors, crowd, speeches, looking at a lot of pictures I wouldn't want to look at once let alone live with, etc. There were three TV cameras allowed in the hall, and the room was packed with so many people that moving around was awkward. As soon as we arrived, I insisted that we walk around the outside of the hall next to its walls. This puzzled my security but they knew I was the boss. After the circumnavigation, I'd proximity sensed all of the crowd who were inside the hall within twenty feet of the walls. I had identified several - for the lack of a better word - "idiots". They'd been identified by their having the wrong emotions, mainly hatred, strong fear, and way too much nervousness for the situation. When I'd identified a suspicious person with proximity, I'd checked him or her with a sight blob. The density of the crowd sometimes made sight blob searching them tricky, but the crowding did make patting them down easier. They might feel something, but they were often being jostled by other people and there's nothing to see from an invisible pat down. The suspicious people earned the label "idiot" because most of them were carrying eggs, two each in a cut-down egg container in one of their pockets or handbag. The remaining idiots seemed to be unequipped: tactically and probably intellectually. There were metal detector systems on the main door that our guards and some policemen had been manning from when the doors opened, so I wasn't much worried about guns, and I was even less worried about eggs. There was no one hiding in the rafters, there being no rafters. I searched the stage with proximity and a sight blob, and there was nothing untoward there. No explosives under it, for example. Our security would have checked all that stuff anyway. When we completed our circuit I staged the usual cellphone theater to tell our security there were egg-throwers and to leave it to the angel to do something appropriate and non-fatal about. We entered the hall from the door farthest from the stage, with me in the front of our party. By the time we'd walked down the middle of the hall, I'd proximity sensed everyone. Theoretically someone might've luckily dodged my sweeps, but that was very unlikely, especially not from my last sweep as it covered a 50-foot wide rectangle down the center of the hall. We arrived on the stage without incident. We sat in a row to one side while the Principal gave his introduction to me. When I stood up and walked toward the mic, one of the Idiots stood up yelling "NOW!" #16: The egg-equipped, intellectually-unequipped idiots jumped to their feet. They were spread out in the seating area in front of the stage - there were so many people and the artworks had to be displayed too, so only the front half of the audience had seats - so eggs came at me from all the frontal directions. Half of the idiots threw too hard and broke their eggs before they'd left their hands, which annoyed their splattered neighbors. Immediately after their first half-volley, they reloaded and fired again. At about that time they noticed that the first eggs hadn't behaved in quite the manner they'd expected. They were circling in a halo-like effect over my head, the second volley of eggs joining them. I looked up in faked surprise, then chuckled to myself. I used NP to grasp every egg-thrower, holding their feet to the floor where they were, pulling their hands down by their sides, and holding their upper-arms and backs of their necks so firmly that the idiots couldn't turn, sit, or even budge. And last but MOST importantly, I blocked their mouths and held their jaws shut. The idiots could now only grunt and twitch, rather than the boringly pointless and annoying crap they'd certainly otherwise be inflicting on everyone. The crowd was just starting to react with fear, so I quickly and loudly said into the mic, "If someone throws bacon and tomatoes we'll have the makings for a tasty meal. At the risk of hamming it up, are we getting a Home Ec demonstration as well as an Art show?" It wasn't my usual standard of humor, but it did break the tension. The eggs floating around my head, my casual attitude and the idiots being immobilized and silenced stopped the situation getting out of control. The non-appearance of the Guardian Angel probably helped the most though, otherwise the crowd would've almost certainly run screaming from the room, the adults no doubt badly injuring many of the precious children. I flew an egg toward every baddie, hovering it about two feet above their heads. I tilted all their heads back, and everybody expected to see the eggs smash of the throwers' faces. That calmed people down because the retribution was very minor and aimed only at the offenders. My cellphone floated up to me and a message appeared on it. I told the hall, "The angel just typed a message on my phone. It says: 'Not strip them because children here. Not smash eggs because messy. I will take their money and put them outside.' It sounds like the entertainment will be over shortly folks." Four of the idiots were two married couples, the men being the throwers and the women providing very temporary, verbal support. There were five other men by themselves, so nine idiots in total. Nine times in sequence, a wallet or purse lifted high above each person, had its cash removed, and the wallet/purse was returned to its owner. The cash accumulating in a pile high in the air too, so everyone could watch the process with fascination. Meanwhile, some cops had tried to intervene. The big problem they had was in working out how to do that. One of them tried to catch a wallet as it was being removed. Not being able to accelerate his hands with 1,000 g's, he missed. Two of the cops approached me, one of them instructing me, "Stop it from taking their money." "I don't have the authority to order God around." #2: "It's your angel." "No it's not; it's God's angel. Give it up, officer. Angels don't consider themselves subject to our laws and they certainly don't consider themselves subject to my or your orders. It said it was going to take their money and put them outside, and that's what it's going to do." When the last guy's wallet was processed, the bundle of cash burst into flame. I had it in a large box so the smoke and ash were contained. Once the flames had died down, which only took a few seconds, the smoky box led the way out of the hall, followed by each of the idiots. They were held immobile, so all they could do was grunt and squirm as I lifted them up vertically, rotated them to be horizontal, then floated them down the length of the hall and out the front door. People's mouths were open in astonishment. All the eggs followed the idiots too. When they're outside on the grass, they're going to get their just desserts, specifically an egg pudding. [[The expression is actually spelled "just deserts" having the same linguistic root as "deserve", but that joke cracked me up so I couldn't resist.]] I waited for the remaining unequipped baddies - four more people whose proximity reading seemed extremely angry - to do anything, but they didn't [and continued not to do so, for the whole meeting]. I made a couple of jokes, apologized for the fright everyone had got, explained a few things about how the angel protected me but only against people who misbehaved, and I conveyed a very casual attitude to defuse the tension. I anticipated the obvious questions that'd be on people's minds and provided the answers unasked, and generally just chatted in a relaxed manner. I took the opportunity to make a couple of "I don't know how people can go against God like that"-type comments. A reporter and some others who'd followed the idiots outside came back in and informed the crowd what had happened to the egg throwers, which relieved the audience further. After a while the tension was gone, and I was able to get the meeting back on track. I would've preferred to have not had that crap, but it'd been relatively painless. I introduced my family to the audience. I used a several-minute long "Get To Know Us" micro-family history as an excuse to insert many jokes and loving references. Giving speeches with thirty two minds helping is trivially easy. I don't have even tiny symptoms of nervousness anymore, and saying nice things about my family couldn't be easier. Dad unexpectedly commandeered the mic to make a humorous reply for a couple of minutes, then the Principal said a few things about the picture-shopping process; stuff like people should stay where they are and listen to us as we walked around, rather than everyone in the hall try to follow me around. Because we'd said that liking pictures was a matter of personal taste, my family split up to look around the hall. We could work the crowd better that way. Donna stayed with me because she didn't want to buy any pictures and didn't want to miss any of the action. There were too many pictures for me to spend more than a few seconds looking at each of them, thank God because most of the pictures weren't to my taste at all. That was probably my fault, but that doesn't negate my point. There were also statues, textile creations, and other types of artwork. Early on in my walk around the hall I came to a bronze of a father and an approximately ten-year old son standing on the tip of a rocky peak they'd just hiked up, judging by the packs on their backs and hiking clothes. To my eyes it conveyed an emotional closeness between the father and son very well. For some unobvious reason - my not being a father or ten-years old - that pulled on my heartstrings and I whipped out my checkbook as soon as I saw it, praising the guy who'd made it. He liked my praise, but he loved my check. He told me that he'd worked from photographs and I seriously considered commissioning him to make another with my girls as the subject. I'm sure I would've been happy with the result, but I'd probably be even happier getting an acknowledged expert to do it, so I made a mental note to do something about that. [And did. One of the advantages of being rich is being able to order my staff to create a shortlist of suitable artists, I reviewed some of their work, picked the artist whose style I liked the most, then commissioned him to do what I wanted. Money was no object. I got a fantastic piece out of it, which I kept on my desk in my study. My getting a bronze of my girls naturally resulted in their wanting one of me. I just wished they'd let me keep my clothes on for it and hadn't displayed it where they did. Julia insisted it was for advertising purposes, as I was fully Mark and therefore very cute-assed and rib-cocked by then.] I'd previously always assumed that Christian girls would be a frustrating waste of time as girlfriends, but it'd turned out - judging from Nevaeh - that when you've got God on your side they lay back and open their legs very quickly. They consider themselves deeply honored, which is an excellent attitude. So I had my eyes open for any more Nevaehs. I'd known that none of them would equal her beauty, but I did see several that interested me. I didn't do any flirting, getting of phone numbers, or ANY of those types of things. That'd be a bad thing to do with their Christian parents already fearful of me and my being filmed for TV. This was mainly a PR exercise with a couple of side benefits, one of which was its being a scouting mission to collect a few good looking girls' names. There'd be opportunities for follow-ups later, including asking Nevaeh to help me with that. I proudly expected her to be surprised, and then to help me seduce as many of her schoolmates as I wanted, as she was taking to her new role in life very enthusiastically. It was only the art students whose names I could easily get because their names were on their works. My getting anyone else's name required our being introduced, which I'll get to when the meeting becomes more mixed up later. Art is a much better school subject than I thought because it had a disproportionate number of female students. Whether that inequality was usual across the country, or the result of SCS's artistic males having better things to do today than attend this meeting, I didn't know or care. The three paintings I bought were purchased more cautiously than the bronze. I didn't purchase any of them on my first pass around the hall, although there were several paintings that I stopped and talked to the artist for much longer than normal. I made a second pass to make it look like I was seriously considering my first-pass favorites, and I eventually decided on three of them, including one from a somewhat overacting Nevaeh. I played my part too, asking her how she pronounced her unusual looking name. I was meticulously careful to suppress all typical male behaviors with anybody during this meeting, especially with Nevaeh. Her parents weren't going to see ANY hint of interest from me when our clip appeared on TV, which it almost certainly would. Given a choice of which of my four check-handing-over clips to broadcast, it'll be the one with the big-titted beautiful girl that all the networks will select. [Appearing on national TV gave Nevaeh a big thrill. She'd been getting a lot of thrills recently.] Mom and Dad bought one piece; Carol two, one of which was a weird textile wall-hanging thing, so God knows what she was going to do with it. Using it for the horses' doormat at the stables seemed like a good idea to me. I smiled at her and said, "Good choice," which was true, I just didn't say what it was a good for. We returned to the stage. That was the end of the shopping process and the hall was so full that only half the crowd had been seated thus far. Designated helpers started removing the unsold artwork so more chairs could be put out. They were doing it as quietly as they could so we could carry on with the meeting during it, after turning up the volume on the mic a few notches. After some feel-good stuff about the artworks we'd seen, I introduced the first of my surprise additions to the agenda. "I didn't buy it, but one of the paintings I saw - by Jackson Jones but it's been moved now so I can't point it out to you - reminded me of something. The home we were living in when Homeland Security kidnapped me had a large mural painted on the outside wall of my house. It was behind an area of garden and it gave the illusion of a forest extending for miles behind the garden, and we liked it very much. After that was done, I noticed that there are a few similar outdoor murals around town, mostly on municipal buildings. Some of you may have seen the large water pump that's painted like a whale rising out of the sea on ... I see lots of agreement, good. Artworks like that cover up intrinsically unattractive facilities with something beautiful. Given the level of ability I saw around this room, I wonder about my sponsoring a project with what will be the junior and senior art classes when school resumes, where students contact the city, develop a concept for painting a public building, and then carry it out. It might be as small as the control box for a set of traffic signals, or a bus shelter, or maybe the city councilors would let you paint their offices to look like a hot-air balloon." I got a good number of chuckles from that, and once I said some more to make it clear that I was actually totally serious about sponsoring my 'sudden' idea, the discussion became more casual, and there was some back and forth between the room and me. The Principal and Art teacher got involved, and it was quickly agreed to be a good idea as an extra-credit option within the Arts stream. I added, "Some of the most important lessons about life that I've been learning over the last year - correction: the last TWO years because I missed a year when I was dead - have been about the value of leadership, planning and teamwork. My eyes have been opened about how important they are." For leadership and teamwork certainly, but I don't do much planning. Winging it usually works fine for me as I can rely on one of my minds to think of something at the time. 99% of this visit was unscripted, for example. I was making it up on the fly, going directly from an outline of a plan to its execution. -- "I like killing two birds with one stone, if it can be arranged. In this case I'd like to see the students do as much of the entire job as they can, from contacting the city for buildings they'd agree to have done, developing concepts, presenting them to get the go-ahead on one of them, making a list of all the materials they'll need, even getting quotes from subcontractors if it's a large job that they need to hire a gang of laborers for the bulk of the repetitive work. None of that is ART, as such, but it's all part of life and those skills are what students will need to learn if they go on to become professional artists. Is my leadership, planning and teamwork development idea compatible with how this school prepares students for life?" I looked to the Principal for the answer. #15: The Principal assured me it was exactly the sort of thing they prided themselves in doing. He did admit, "It's not something we expect to be able to achieve from an Art class, so it'll be a valuable addition to their curriculum." "Good. Let me talk about money for a moment. I'm not going to say that I'll sponsor a fixed amount every year because one project could be a small, detailed one which has very little cost, or a huge job which needs tens of thousands of dollars of paint and hired laborers. So part of the team's job will be to come to us and ask for the money for each project. That skill is part of life too, although I'm sure the students have been practicing it on their parents for many years." I got plenty of laughing agreement with that. -- "I'll let the school know who to contact for that request. It won't be me because I'll be going off to a university in a year's time. I'll appoint one of our accounting staff. Someone who's very stern and demanding so the students will have to make a good presentation. If I can, I'll keep an eye on the first couple of projects, but after that my role will just be the check signer." I wanted to downplay my involvement in case parents had fears about their children coming to me, especially because they'd be asking for money, as that could easily have bad connotations among suspiciously minded (i.e., Christian) people. -- "We won't be the only source of money because the city should contribute too. They're getting a building of theirs painted as a public improvement so they should contribute. It won't be at a full commercial rate because they're providing the building to the school as a favor as much as anything, and the city will presumably be responsible for long-term maintenance, but they should provide something. Especially because I happen to know they've got quite a lot of money at the moment." That got some laughs too, as the city's money was thanks to my family. Sondarm Christian High School is located outside of Corvallis so it's not formally part of the city, but it's still in Benton County so nearly everyone in the audience will know where the money had come from. Not only did the city have plenty of money, but even more important was that they'd cooperate with the school. We'll make sure they know it's my idea, and there's no way they'll not cooperate with my family for something like this. I'd get Mom to have a quick word with the mayor too, to make sure the projects moved along smoothly and to quietly assure him that we'll backstop any screwups by the kids. -- Having reminded everyone how wonderful we are, I continued, "I keep referring to the city council because it's got so many buildings and it's tasked with public improvements so it should be a good source of work, but businesses or private families might be a source of jobs too. I'll still be subsidizing the work, so you might find jobs in unusual places. This is the point when I have to confess to having an ulterior motive. I mentioned that our last home had a mural that we liked very much. Our new home doesn't have any of those, and speaking for myself, I think there are a couple of places where it should have them. Plus Donna keeps telling us that we should have more horses because the existing ones are lonely, so maybe we should get her stables painted to look like there's a whole herd of horses there. That'd save her the bother of having to ride any new horses." I turned to look at Donna, who laughed and poked out her tongue at me. "I'm sure the LAST THING any students would normally want to do over summer vacation is any schoolwork, but I've a feeling that artists might be different. If enough of you got together and formed a team, then the first of your outdoor art projects could be at our home, provided that Mom and Dad agree, of course?" Mom said her prepared line, "I was thinking while you were talking. Our formal Japanese garden could certainly be improved by some appropriate artwork. It'd have to be in a compatible style..." Donna added, "I LOVE Mark's idea of painting my stables too, Mom. A horse picture on that would be great." I added, "Obviously for something like that we'd personally pay the students a fair amount too, like we did for the works we just bought. Does doing a project like that over summer appeal to any of next year's junior and senior art students?" Nevaeh had been cautioned not to leap to her feet with enthusiasm, but to wait and see how others reacted. If my idea fell completely flat we'd find another way of getting her life to openly overlap with mine. As it turned out, it wouldn't have mattered if she'd forgotten her instruction because the kids were eager! ESPECIALLY if we paid "a fair amount", like we had for the paintings. During the mini-ruckus, Mom took over the mic. When she could speak, Mom said, "It's great to see so much enthusiasm. Here's what we'll do. Mark's idea has caught us flatfooted so we'll need to walk around our home to make a list of the places on it that could have such a project done on them. -- "From your side, you need to create two teams, one for each of next year's grades. More than two teams at a time would be too much for me to manage, so I'll have to restrict it to one team per grade, sorry. It also wouldn't be practical for the teams to be too large, but I'll rely on your Art teacher to judge what the right number is. If there are too many students who want to participate, then I'll ask her to please send me samples of your work and I'll choose the names of the people I want on the team." Mom had been given this point as a contingency plan. If there was too much interest we needed to be the ones picking who was on the teams or else Nevaeh might get bumped. It'd also give me a chance to include a couple more good looking girls, presuming they were in the right grades and wanted to be in a team. -- "I'll caution you now that I won't be mollycoddling you." This was Mom being stern, to make the kids' parents think she'd be a moral and suitable supervisor. "Mark says you'll be paid for your work, so I'll be requiring you to WORK! One of the buildings we could have done is the changing room near our swimming pool. If I find out that instead of working, you were indulging in horseplay in the pool, I'll be having very sharp words with you and your parents. I expect good attitudes, good quality and timely work. If you haven't finished your work by the time school resumes, I'd be inclined to call it off and get whatever you've already done painted over ready for another group to try to complete it in a timely fashion. Needless to say, you wouldn't be paid if that happened. -- "You can celebrate when you've FINISHED your work. We'll throw a combined celebratory party and unveiling ceremony an afternoon a few days before your school restarts, or earlier if both projects are completed quickly. It'll be for the artists and their families, plus any teachers that were involved in this extra-curricular activity, and the Principal if he wishes to attend. It'll be a pool party for the artists and a more sedate, catered lunch for the adults." This was an idea of Mom's, as it'd get the students' mothers instantly on our side. Most of the moms would kill to get The Grand Tour of our place. We didn't need them to kill, merely to sacrifice their unsupervised daughters into my care, which was a nice bonus for this plan, in addition to its main purpose of generating good PR for me among the local Christian community. After a couple dozen moms had been suitably entertained at the unveiling party, had eaten their fill of some tasty upmarket finger food, and had been given the Grand Tour, they'd be far less likely to think my mom and dad were the parents of an evil demon that should be sent back to Hell. And hopefully Nevaeh's parents will become more amenable to Nevaeh visiting our home socially. There were a couple of minutes of the Principal and his Arts teacher taking care of administrative details. One question that arose was that many of next year's 10th graders wanted to participate. Mom looked at me. 10th grade or younger girls would have too little freedom, so I looked completely unaware of Mom's look at me while I NP-tapped her once on the top of the head. It took Mom a second, but she got it, then told the Principal, "Two teams at a time are as many as I want. I'd also be concerned about the quality of the final work if younger students produced it." Not all the Arts students who could join wanted to, but at least half of them did, including Nevaeh of course. Most students weren't bothering to ask their parents for permission either, which was an attitude I appreciated. There were so many volunteers that the Arts teacher would have to deliver portfolios to Mom, and the details of that were agreed on, and the students informed to get their portfolio to their teacher in the next three days. Mom was taking the lead on this, but we had the intention that she'd hand the two teams over to me once their parents were accepting of their kids visiting our home. Mom was also involved because she wanted to be. Mom wanted the initial, middle and final say on what artwork got done around our property regardless of how horny I might be for any of the artists. When those details were taken care of, in an atmosphere that was now much more relaxed - and happy and excited for the possible team members - I got back to business. Taking over the mic, I said, "When I was walking around before, I was asked some questions several times. I'm sure my family had the same experience too. Many of you wouldn't have heard our answers to those favorite questions, so I thought we'd answer them again, so you can all hear." The family gathered around the mic, and we took turns announcing a question each of us had often been asked, and then re-answering it, preferably in an entertaining way. I was amused to see that Mom preferred to let Dad do most of the talking, as that NEVER happens at home. [[Such was my amused thought at the time, but the reality wasn't quite so one-sided. Dad is very voluble when they're entertaining for example, which they do a lot more of these days.]] The session went well, with some good joking back and forth and plenty of examples of our family being very close, although I was careful not to hug my sisters hardly at all. Pats on the shoulders was what I did instead, because Christians could be relied upon to be excessively sensitive to my hugging Carol and Donna. In terms of my ostensible reason for the meeting - to ease tensions between the Christians and me - it was going extremely well. Once my family had repeated answers for all the questions we identified as common, the process became the usual Question & Answer one. It worked well, although I had to be careful to avoid giving offense. Questions like, "What do you think of Christianity?" had to be answered diplomatically, even with Christianity itself not being so bad. It's fiction, but it's not "so bad". It's the Christians that I strongly dislike. I'm sure there are nice Christians (there are, aren't there?), but those aren't the ones who keep getting into my face or getting on TV to denounce me with appalling language. I also blame the TV networks because I'm sure they refuse to put Christians on who say nice things because that's too boring. Instead the networks put on people who say obnoxious things about me and my families because that's more entertaining and better for their ratings. That it affects our life negatively, and even dangerously, doesn't matter to the networks. After about twenty minutes of Q&A, I judged the time suitable for the second of my surprise additions to the agenda. While I was answering a question, my cellphone floated up in front of me. I paused my answer while I read the screen, then informed the crowd, "The Guardian Angel wrote: 'Walk off the front of the stage then ask Principal to join you.' I guess it wants me to do this..." I walked to the front edge of the stage, then cautiously felt over the edge with my foot. Finding an invisible platform there, I cautiously walked out onto it. The stage is raised about four feet above the rest of the floor and my walking on the air was reasonably visible to everyone as the audience were all sitting now, apart from security and a few other people standing against the walls. The audience couldn't see it well, as my position lined up with the stage too much, but it was visible enough to cause many intakes of breath and excited comments. About four feet out from the stage I stopped and turned to the Principal, gesturing for him to join me. Funnily enough, he wasn't eager. I talked very loudly so most of the hall could hear me without the benefit of the microphone, "The angel is VERY strong," I jumped up and down a few times to prove the point, caused more inhalations of breath. I added loudly, "But more important than being strong, is that it's VERY TRUSTWORTHY. It comes from God, so it must be. It's flown my family around several times, like when we evacuated our home after the FBI's spy plane attack. I trust it with my family, so I CERTAINLY trust it with a school principal, haha." Jumping up and down does make it too difficult to hold the floor perfectly stationary because I can't counteract the changing forces accurate enough, but it doesn't move much when it's me doing the jumping because I know the timings so well. I'd given Donna lots of little jobs to do during this visit if various situations merited it, such as now if the Principal was reluctant for too long. I gave her a couple of NP-taps on the head, and Donna called, "It's easy!" Donna ran out and joined me, not hesitating or stumbling when she ran off the end of the stage. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to run out onto an invisible ledge. She'd needed to practice it several times at home. Donna stood proudly beside me, giving me a reasonably long hug before separating from me a little (Christians don't mind girls hugging their brothers, only the other way around is evil). Dad would've been the next to shame the Principal but it wasn't necessary. He girded his loins and marched resolutely to the edge of the stage nearest Donna and me, where he stopped and very cautiously felt ahead with a foot. Finding an invisible platform, he extended one foot onto it, and very slowly transferred his weight to it. Five seconds later, he took his second step, removing his rear foot from the stage. After that, it went much easier. To applause from the audience, he joined Donna and me. Donna was wearing a skirt. It was long like a Good Christian Girl would wear, but it wasn't suitable to fly her over the heads of the audience. The Principal and I floated slowly upward, while Donna floated back to the stage. I physically held the nervous, wobbly Principal steady, saying, "Trust God. You'll be fine." They've heard "Trust God" so many times during their lives that his brain did what it was trained to: it turned off. We floated up to about five feet above the floor, so over the heads of the sitting audience, and then we started a slow circuit of the room. Once the initial reactions to our flight had quieted down somewhat, I held up my hands, gesturing and calling for quiet. "I'll tell you what I think is happening. The Guardian Angel wants people to be less fearful of it. If it'd appeared in the room it might've started a panic, so it's introducing itself in this way. It's flown my family and me a few times and we've always been safe. As we talked about before, the angel is from God. I know it behaves in ways you think are unusual, but it's still from God and should be treated with respect and considered honorable and trustworthy." Even though Archangel Michael had been widely televised doing a great deal of flying around with other people, I didn't use him as an example because his cock had been too big. A guy stood up and used his hand to feel the underside of the NP-plate. I'd sensed his reach coming and it was perfectly fine with me. "I can feel the angel," he called out. He was wrong, but considering that there's no such thing as angels it was pointless correcting him. More people stood up, and soon everybody was. I raised our altitude slightly for safety reasons, but stayed low enough for everyone who wanted to feel the angel's bottom to do so. Just for something to say, because hearing me talk about it made people feel safer, I said, "I don't think you're actually feeling the angel itself. As I understand how it works, it doesn't have a body so it can't be felt. But it can do things like what's happening now." It wasn't long before one of the kids called out, "Can I have a turn flying?" "JAMES!" screeched a horrified woman. "You..." I had a feeling she intended to say more, but she was drowned out by hundreds of other kids yelling out that they wanted turns too. The parents tried to drown out their excited kids, but when have parents ever been able to do that? Certainly not now. I moved the Principal and myself back to the stage while the clamor worked itself out. We were beaten to the stage by several kids who'd rushed up onto it, eager to leap onboard. I stopped us short, too high and far away for anyone to jump to us. My cellphone flew back up to me. I read it for several seconds while the crowd quieted down in anticipation. (I always do type the message. It's easy to do and it's too risky not to as a camera might be zoomed in on me and catch the text, or the phone might get knocked out of my hand and be found to be blank, or I could be caught out in other ways.) Then I addressed the crowd from my raised pulpit, "As you know by now, that was another message from the angel. I'll paraphrase what it said and I'll mix in some of my own comments too. The angel is a very ancient, very powerful, very intelligent servant of God. It is NOT a Disneyland ride. It was given a job by God to protect me. From the emails I saw after I was resurrected and from what has happened since, the angel has a one-track mind about its task. It feels that I will be safer if good, decent, non-criminal people are not afraid of it. It's willing to cooperate in activities that we think are fun, but it insists on doing so in an orderly, peaceful manner." I'd finished explaining the current message well enough, so 'the angel' cleared it and typed a new message for me, which I read carefully, and then explained, "Here's how we're going to do it. The angel will give short rides to ten..." "ME! ME!" shouted a particularly annoying Christian boy on the stage, jumping up and down and waving an arm as if he was desperate to go to the toilet, hopefully not while he's floating over everyone's heads. I NP-clamped his mouth and jaw shut, grabbed him in a tight vise-like hold around his ankles, thighs, and his arms pulled down to his side. I towed him rapidly to the front edge of the stage, where I held him. He was writhing in panic and trying to cry out, producing only loud groans. I called out, "Who are the parents of this stupid, inconsiderate boy?" They were already making their way forward through the crowd. They waved their hands and called to identify themselves. "The angel had just asked for an orderly and peaceful manner. Your son ignored the angel's request and shouted selfishly at it, which must have annoyed it. That's hardly surprising as it's equivalent to shouting selfishly at God. Please take your boy away and teach him some self-control." I sounded just like everybody's stern and controlling mother, which was instantly familiar to all the Christians and eased the tension caused by the boy being invisibly grabbed. The father had arrived in front of the stage, and he asked me, "What's it doing to him?" "Imposing the self-control your son doesn't..." The mother arrived, asking in panic, "How long will he be like this?" "Good grief! No wonder your son doesn't stop to think before he talks because neither of you do either. You should trust the ... oh." Both parents were clamped in the same way as their son, raised in the air, turned horizontal, and sped toward the door. The son was getting his ride, but it probably wasn't as much fun as he'd anticipated. Once I'd gotten over my apparent surprise, I said, "They were questioning God's actions and not trusting Him. The angel rather than God directly, but I assume that God wouldn't permit angels to act other than how He'd want, so they're effectively the same. You might remember that was one of my answers earlier. I never cease to be amazed at how stupid some people can be. The Guardian Angel proved that it could destroy our entire Air Force if it wanted to, yet some people came to this meeting thinking they were going to succeed in throwing raw eggs at me. You've got to admire their confidence, but their intellect leaves much to be desired." The family had floated out the main doors during my last sentence, followed by one of the cameramen, the same guy who'd gone out to record the egg-throwers getting their just deserts. Hopefully he'd be back shortly to report something slightly more interesting. [The angel was going to fly the family directly to their car in the parking lot. As soon as I'd gotten the father outside, I'd removed the keys from his pocket and they'd been as I hoped: the remote opening type. I'd set the family floating toward the parking lot while I'd zoomed the sight blob and the keys ahead. I'd found their car easily by unlocking it. I opened three doors, put the key in the ignition and had then returned the sight blob to the family before their thirty two seconds was up. The cameraman would see me drop the family by their car's open doors. The slight trick to this is that the cameraman hadn't seen the keys fly ahead so he'd have no way of knowing how the angel knew which car was theirs. Hopefully that'd be reported because there was no way Mark Anderson could know that information either. If one day someone analyzes all the 'miracles', I want many of them to appear impossible for me to have done.] I told the audience that the parents should've immediately taken their boy off the stage, trusting that God knew what He was doing, and that it wouldn't be anything evil. I used that to give a short lecture about trusting God and the Guardian Angel, stating that I was "appalled that I have to explain these obvious things at a Christian school." The moral of the story was that everyone should always do whatever I say the angel wants. I hoped the pretty girls were listening attentively. [[I wanted everyone to believe that the Guardian Angel was stern and didn't stand for any crap because I needed people to respect it. Not just people in the hall now, but everyone who watched this event on TV, which will be most of the country. I needed them to be wary of it because that'd keep my families and me safer. But in retrospect, I'd overreacted by ejecting the family from the hall. It was in reaction to their starting to play Twenty (Annoying) Questions when I just wanted them to take their son off the stage. I've never been particularly tolerant of stupid, noisily intrusive, little kids. In any event, it didn't do any harm.]] I restarted the Disneyland ride part of my plan. Ten people at a time on the platform, any adults that wanted to, but kids only if they had a parent here who would give them permission. The angel insisted on that point because it made the angel seem more moral. It was actually just more restrictive, but that's what Christians think morality is. There was a noticeable drop in the level of enthusiasm compared to five minutes ago, but it was still good enough to easily get ten volunteers. The Principal helped, having enjoyed his flight. The first group had an enjoyable, uneventful flight, so getting volunteers for the second group of ten was easy. After that people were already lined up raring to go. It took longer than I expected for someone to say what I'd been waiting for, "It'd be MUCH more fun outside." I replied, "Remember, the Guardian Angel isn't a Disneyland ride. You've got to treat it ... oh." My cellphone had floated up in front of me. I read it then announced, "The angel agrees it'd be more fun outside. The angel is the boss, so I guess that means we're going outside." ------- Chapter 388: Sondarm Christian School Visit; Outside Saturday, July 21, 2007 (Continued) and a little looking ahead. Getting everyone outside wasn't easy as our security had to do a lot of running around and clearing of a large enough area for us. They were reluctant to start doing that, so the angel had to pull rank on them. Once that had been carried out and we were gathered outside the front of the hall, I called for the first ten volunteers who had parental permission for a flight. The change of venue made the parents cautious all over again. I guess they feared the Guardian Angel would 'run off' with their kids. It was an accurate fear, as there were a few girls that I'd like to abscond with. Ten kids had parents who trusted God, so they were the test pilots for today. Unlike inside, where ten people had stood together on a single floating platform, I was going to fly these kids individually, on cut-down flying sleds so they could feel the wind much better. No one knew that, so the test pilots were in for a HUGE and delightful surprise. I had to keep my physical eyes open so I could carry on with ordinary conversations during the flights, so I only had one sight blob available to coordinate the flying. I'd park it about four hundred feet to one side and two hundred feet up so it would see the entire volume of space I'd be flying the kids around in. Obviously I didn't want to crash kids into each other, but having only one sight blob so far away wasn't nearly as restrictive as you might think, thanks to two things: First, I know exactly where all my NP effects are, so where each kid would be. Second, I was EXTREMELY experienced at flying things around, so I was superb at judging time, distance, velocity and acceleration; including just from the input I was getting by knowing where my NP locations were. I would've preferred to have had several more sight blobs, and in their absence I'd be a little more cautious, but I would still be giving the fliers a FANTASTIC time. I could've done the whole thing without sight if I'd needed to, but it was better to have it so I'd know if any of the kids were upset, were vomiting, or other issues like that. I grasped the ten test pilots gently and lifted them a few inches to put flying sleds beneath them. I 'strapped' them reasonably firmly to their sleds with bands over their shoulders, waists and thighs, similar to what I do for myself, although when I strapped the girl test pilots, I modified the straps to do an even better job of holding their legs together and their skirts from billowing out, to stop outraging the Christians by giving them a momentary glimpse of panties. And then the ten kids TOOK OFF, individually and in ten different directions, to everyone's amazement. By the time the crowd had reacted in fear, it was obvious that there was no need for that emotion, as the kids were already zooming, swooping, looping, screaming and laughing all over the sky - "all over" within five hundred feet of me, and with all the extreme maneuvers occurring to the one side of the crowd in case anyone vomited. The crowd was gobsmacked at the spectacle. The crowd watched with awe, with my family and I doing the same thing for a while. Early in each flight I zoomed every kid into a low-level pass within twenty four feet of me, and from time to time thereafter, so I could check they were emotionally fine. They were VERY fine! They were the ones that'd begged their parents to be test pilots, so they were very thrilled thrill seekers. I enjoyed looking at the wet-blanket protestors. Good luck on them EVER getting a future Mark Anderson & Guardian Angel appearance canceled. I turned to one of my neighbors, who was staring at the kids with her mouth wide open, asking her, "So, anything interesting happen to you today?" "Haha. That's my son Josh in the blue shirt. He's having the time of his life. Thank you VERY much for this." "I'm not the one to thank. I can toss a little kid a few feet in the air, so this is WAY out of my league. This is all the angel's doing." I'd asked for ten kids in the first group to make it easier to get things going. I gave them five minutes of flight, landed them all, and thereafter took intakes of twenty, adults and kids in whatever order they volunteered. As each group landed, they'd rush around trying to tell everybody what it'd been like. The kids were so excited that most of them were unable to express how excited they were, but they sure could SMILE! While the flights were happening, my family and I wandered through the crowd chatting to everyone, with me collecting the names of beautiful girls, especially the ones that flirted with me. The flights were a WILD SUCCESS, especially the "wild" part, and especially the "success" part too. People were ECSTATICALLY blown away from the experience. "The MOST AMAZING experience of my life," was a frequently heard comment from an adult; the Kids being too busy saying, "Can I PLEEEEZE have another turn?" There'd been eight hundred people at the meeting, which had been the maximum capacity of the school's hall. At 240 flights per hour, I'll be here for about three hours, depending on how many flightless chickens there are. It'll be worth the time investment as this is both a major PR coup and a great leap forward in my being able to fly myself and my loved ones around. Allowing repeat flights was obviously not practical, but I'm fortunate to have a superb memory and was easily able to recognize people trying to get a second turn. I also had to reject new arrivals. The first to try that were some of the protestors - whom I rejected with pleasure - then others who'd been summoned by cellphone. Within half an hour there were hundreds of visitors eager to get a turn but I'd told our security guards to refuse requests from people outside the cordoned off area that contained the people who'd been inside the hall. Some of the visitors REALLY wanted a flight but it simply wasn't practical. They didn't cause any real problem as we had plenty of security here. Our guards had the job of creating a line of would-be joyriders who were waiting their turn and that was done in the middle of our area, so dozens of yards away from any outsiders. When one group ended its flight, I inspected the line with a sight blob, then the first twenty valid people shot up into the air, leaving any wanting-a-second-ride cheaters behind. The frustrated cheaters often tried to protest, but there was no one to protest to, our security guards not being overly sympathetic and having no way of influencing the angel's choices. Anyone who came to me to complain I simply told, "It's nothing to do with me. It's the Guardian Angel who is doing the flights." The presence of so many happy people and TV cameras stopped the complainers making too much of a nuisance out of themselves. Another easily avoided group of annoying people were the many hundreds of protestors or spectators who wanted to express their religious views and were determined that I, my family and the TV cameras should all receive the benefit of their 'wisdom'. My family refused to go near any of those people, so they only got to prattle pointlessly at the cameras. I did have a small issue with kids coming to me who were here without a parent. Most were able to get a parent on a phone, but some were not able to and were distraught at the thought of missing out. I told them to wait while I thought about it. I waited about an hour so it was very well established that this was nothing more than a safe and thrilling experience of a lifetime for everyone, then after one flight landed and the noise level had reduced, I called loudly for everyone's attention and explained, "Lots of kids are coming to me asking for flights when they don't have a parent here to vouch for them. Obviously it isn't a safety issue because the angel is from God, but I think it specified that the kids had to have parental approval because it didn't want to usurp their authority. Can I ask for a show of hands from PARENTS ONLY, for who thinks it would be okay for the angel to give rides to kids who don't have a parent here?" It was close enough to unanimous, except for a few people had been too busy in their own conversations to hear what I'd said, or had been too Christian to understand the concept of democracy - it's an unnatural process for most Christians because it involves people making up their own minds. I added, "Not that I EVER did this in my youth, but sometimes kids have been known to tell fibs to get what they want. It's possible that there are kids whose parents have refused permission, and they might lie to me about not having any parents here. Please put your hands up any parents who don't want their children to have a turn?" Horrifically, there were nearly two dozen such families. Thank God I didn't have parents like that. I got them to identify their kids to make sure the angel would know them. I couldn't see them directly myself because the crowd was too large, but after they'd put their hands up I used a sight blob to get a clear look at them. Then the flights resumed. I was asked about gentle flights, which was easily solved by making two lines. It resulted in people trying to get one flight from each line, but that never worked. The TV people that had already been here had already frantically chased after me for interviews and flights of their own. Their interest had been low key inside the hall, but they'd nearly wet themselves once the flights started. To their requests for flights, I said, "Excellent idea. You probably have to stand in the line with everyone else and wait your turn because I imagine that angels are very fair creatures." When the reporters and cameramen came back to complain that the angel wouldn't give any of them a flight, I just shrugged and said, "I wonder why it wouldn't do that." There was very little "wonder" involved, as I consider media people to be very "unwonderful" individually and even worse collectively. I didn't give them rides simply because I disliked them. As a small additional reason, they are meant to report on the news, not be part of it. Their not getting flights would result in today's event getting slightly less enthusiastic media coverage than it would have otherwise, but it was going to get fantastic coverage anyway so I didn't care. It even proved to be helpful for me when one of the reporters asked me, "Please ask the angel to give us flights." "Sure," I agreed. I looked up and said loudly to the empty air, "Please give the media people flights." -- Nothing happened for a few seconds, so I suggested to the dummies, "You probably have to join the line again." As it turned out, that didn't help. The subsequent discussion gave me plenty of opportunity to point out that the angel made its own decisions and wasn't under my command even when I agreed that giving the reporters and cameramen flights was an excellent idea. The reporters had to be content with interviewing me, and that was bad enough. The trouble was that they were excited without having any intelligent way of expressing to it. Their gushing was repetitive and annoying. I gave them five minutes of my polite best, then I told them, "I've got a lot of other people to talk with and you're repeating questions that have already been asked at least once inside the hall or out here, so I've got a new rule for you: any of you that ask me a question I know you've already heard, I'll become deaf to you for the rest of the day. Now carry on." Five minutes later I was fully deaf and couldn't hear any questions, so I wandered off to make sure I hadn't missed any pretty girls. The first news-chopper arrived over the scene - fortunately at least 500 feet over it - about thirty minutes after the outdoor flights started, with several more choppers arriving over the next hour. I was very pleased with what they were seeing. My family and I were wandering around at ground level chatting to various people unconcernedly, while above us were kids and adults zooming around. I would appear to be totally unconnected as I wasn't even looking up most of the time. Nevaeh had her flight about one and half hours into the process. Her brother and father were in the line with her, and I wandered in their general direction just before their flight started, pretending not to notice her. Nevaeh was excited and couldn't help saying, "Mark! Mark! Hello!" I looked at her blankly for a moment, then said, "Ahh, yours was one of the pictures I bought. I remember how to spell your name but not how to pronounce it. How does it go again?" "Nevaeh," she pronounced carefully for me, by now taking my hint to be careful. "Nevaeh?" I ventured. She nodded. "Good. My apologies for not remembering it." It was important that her family believe that I had no interest in her. "I liked both of your paintings. Are you old enough to be in one of the teams that Mom's going put to work?" "I'm in 11th grade next school year. I'll be trying to get in. There's a lot of competition though. Mrs. Simmons" (the Art teacher) "says that ten people is the limit and I think there'll be more than twenty trying to get in. Even more after this," indicating the current FAR-better-than-Disneyland ride. "I like your work but I won't be able to influence Mom's decision. That's going to depend on what she thinks of your portfolio." I would've said more, but the angel didn't let me, snatching Nevaeh away because the next flights had started. The Principal was VERY happy. The day was turning out fantastically and he was swept up in the excitement of it. I'd never seen a happy Principal before, let alone an ecstatic one, and it was good to see how proud he was of his school. People started asking me, "Where's the angel?", or, "Can we see the angel?" I answered, "I'm sure it doesn't want to appear in case it causes a panic. A lot of people are very scared of it." Each time this issue came up, the people I was talking to were increasingly confident that it was okay for the angel to appear. One such discussion caught on, resulting in everyone around me calling on me to get the angel to appear. The current flight of twenty was a gentle one and therefore much quieter, so I didn't have to wait for them to land to address everyone. I got the crowd's attention and put the question. The majority agreed that they wanted the angel to appear. There were some nervous people who'd rather it didn't, but those that wanted it to appear were very vocal. I agreed, and said to the sky, "Angel, if you haven't appeared because you don't want to cause a panic, everyone says it's okay now so could you appear please?" I was looking the wrong way so didn't see it happen, but the angel appeared in the middle of the group of protestors, where it certainly did cause a panic. The screaming caused us all to turn to look, to see the angel hovering stationary where it'd appeared, while the screaming protestors were fleeing for their lives. The large group around me laughed, which was a good indication of their sentiments now. Even the unequipped idiots - those people who'd been very fearful earlier in the hall but had not been equipped with eggs - had calmed down a great deal by now. When it was apparent that the Guardian Angel was going to stay immobile in the newly cleared area, I said, "I guess it'll stay there and anyone who wants to can go over there to have a close look at it. Those of you who're concerned are safe here. Having said that, if there are any pretty girls who need a comforting hug, I'll be right here." Not only had I made a thoroughly immoral joke in front of Christian parents, but they'd laughed, THAT'S how well the meeting was going! That wasn't the only reaction either, every girl in the school suddenly felt an overwhelming need for a comforting hug. I'd created a monster. Oh no. I'd been aloof before, so nearly all the girls had behaved themselves. Those that had flirted with me hadn't received any more than the same attention and attitude I was giving everyone, although I had made sure I'd gotten and remembered the names of the good looking ones. Extending my invitation for a hug opened the floodgates. The flood would have to behave itself in front of their parents and so many other adults, but they found ways of letting me know they were interested. And almost all of them were. Literally "almost all". Either Christian girls are INCREDIBLY loose, or it's much easier to pickup girls when: You're worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You're their peer but can hold the attention of a thousand people for hours (you'd be surprised how strongly this factor influences mid- to late-teenage girls). Are funny (I had been! I'd downgraded the level of refinement usually inherent in my jokes). Are reasonably good looking. Are world famous, as very strongly indicated by the several TV choppers flying overhead right now because of me. Have God on your side. The girls' parents had laughed at your hugging joke, which was an INCREDIBLY high level of sexual contact approval for Christian parents. The girls were giddy with excitement at what that implied their parents might permit after only thirty or forty more dates. I received many hugs until I left. I lost track of how many breasts were rubbed against me (no I didn't, but writing, "I kept track of how many breasts were rubbed against me," doesn't convey the right impression. I'm especially conscious of right impressions, although left ones are good too). Nevaeh tried to be one of the breast rubbers, but I frowned at her and shook my head enough to remind her to behave herself. I'll make up for it later by letting her rub them on me twice, or even more times if I'm feeling especially apologetic. I did not reciprocate with any of the scandalously immoral girls. I did not hug them back, did not give out my phone number, didn't ask for theirs, and I especially did not rub my breasts against their arms. There were far too many parents around and I needed them to trust me enough to send their kids to my home. That meant I had to be squeaky clean. If a girl recited her phone number at me, I remembered it. That happens almost automatically if I pay any attention as my memory is extraordinary these days. I also made sure I had the names of the pretty girls who seemed particularly forward, because if I'm going to play around with girls, ones who make it clear that they want to play around with me are the perfect choice. It took a few minutes for the girls to get organized, but soon they turned up with notes and stuck them into my pocket while grabbing a comfort-hug from me. I'd pull the notes out, always in a way that had them open. If they'd been folded a few times, I usually had to use NP to do some unfolding inside my pocket first. I'd apologetically pass the notes back without even looking at them, except by a quick sight blob while I did a slow blink. Thus I memorized even more numbers and some very promising offers, while the eagle-eyed parents saw me behaving like a VERY well-behaved gentleman. It had the unfortunate affect of discouraging some of the other girls from passing me notes, but no plan is perfect. I was amused by the moral dilemma that confronted the girls over whether or not to make an "encouraging comment" on their notes. The usual "I'll do ANYTHING you want" would seem a somewhat inappropriate offer to make to a guy who lived with an angel looking over his shoulder. That'd be almost as bad as making an indecent proposition to Jesus. But not standing out from the crowd was doomed to fail too. The tactics employed ranged from far too much religiously inspired crap, to hearts drawn on their notes, through to explicit descriptions of exactly what the 'everything' they wanted to do with me was. Most notes just provided a name and number, which I thought was a poor choice under the circumstances, especially when they shouldn't expect me to be able to put faces to names when I read the notes later. (It was only a poor choice under the current circumstances. Normally any girl just needs to let any guy knows she's available and he'll frantically pursue her, even if he can't remember what she looks like.) Regardless of their chosen tactic, I remembered them all, even the girls that had tried to attract me by using religious crap since the Guardian Angel made their panties very accessible. I even remembered the unattractive girls' numbers as there was no reason not to and maybe they might be useful as camouflage to throw off parental suspicions. The people who came back from visiting the angel essentially said that it was boring. They didn't say it that way, but that's what they meant. I replied, "I hardly ever interact with it directly myself so I don't know much about this. Maybe it's being cautious or maybe it's concentrating on flying the people safely. My best guess though, is that it simply doesn't want to interact with anyone. The other angels said that Guardian Angels are very single-minded, so guarding me is the only thing it's interested in doing. Flying people around is part of that because it's easing tensions wonderfully. It's quite possible that it thinks my safety won't be increased by it doing anything more, so it's doing nothing. Remember that this is a GUARDIAN Angel. God sent it here to guard me and that's all." They weren't particularly happy with the answer, but they were welcome to complain to the angel if they wanted. Dad wandered over and asked me, "What do you think of the family having a flight? Donna's busting a gut to get one." "Yeah, she's mentioned that to me two or three thousand times already." Mom, Dad and Carol have had several flights already, mostly in the days of innocence when we used to have dawn breakfasts up on the Cascades, but Donna hadn't even known about those, so she was BEGGING for a flight today. She'd been begging ever since I explained the flying aspect of my plan. I'd agreed of course - it suited my long-term plan and Donna would never forgive me if I refused her - but I joked about her begging me now so the people around me would have reinforced the impression that these flights were unplanned. The only reason Donna hadn't already had a flight today was because I preferred the family to have ours near the end. "Let's ask Mom and Carol, and then find out whether the angel will take us." It was a good time to discuss our flights with the females as a newly arrived TV news-crew was interviewing Donna and Carol, and I had an idea for something I wanted to do which would be good to have captured on film and hopefully broadcast. We collected Mom first, then joined my sisters. I lied, "Sorry to interrupt. Carol, Donna; Dad suggested I ask the angel about the family having a flight too. Would that appeal to you?" I'd tapped them twice on the head as I asked my question. By then Donna was already flying, leaping at me in excitement. Carol gave a more demure agreement. Mom only partially acted worried, saying, "I don't want a scary flight." I'd intended to get the reporter curious by asking the angel for our flight simply by standing where I was and asking quietly, ignoring the fact that the light blob that everyone thought was the angel was a couple of hundred feet behind me, but Mom's comment served as a good lead into making the same point, so I used it by saying, "It would've heard you say that, Mom." I saw the reporter look to check the distant location of the angel, then turned back to me. A polite person wouldn't have intruded on our conversation, so the reporter talked into her microphone when she asked me, "Mark Anderson, how could the angel have heard your mother's comment from so far away?" Then she shoved the mic into my face. "Because the angel will be hovering right over my head." The reporter and camera immediately looked up, seeing nothing; just a couple dozen people flying through the air, which was no big deal by now. They both looked back at me, the reporter checking the remote Guardian Angel again. She asked me, "It's over by the corner of the hall." She pointed, so I glanced in the direction indicated, then looked back at her to say, "Sure. But God told it to protect me, so it'll be hovering over my head too. Don't you watch your own network's news? They've shown clips of the angel being in two places at once." She hadn't been here long, and was nervous at the idea of the Guardian Angel hovering above her. She nervously asked, "There are two of them?" "No, there's only one. The emails the other angels sent about the Guardian Angel made it clear there was only one of them being sent to me. It can be in multiple places at once is all. God is omnipresent, so why can't you accept that an angel can do a much-reduced version of the same thing?" She didn't want to discuss her religious beliefs, instead asking, "How many places can it be in?" "I have no idea. I didn't know it could be in two until I saw it on the news..." #15: #1: #All: " ... I'm just using logic to tell me that it'll ALWAYS be guarding me closely even if it's elsewhere as well. God gave it the job of guarding me and I can't imagine that it'd take its eyes off me for any reason. The other angels did say that Guardian Angels are extraordinarily single-minded. Let's put it to the test shall we." I lifted my head slightly to speak to the air above me, "When the current fliers are finished, if it's okay with you, would you please take my family and me for a flight. Go slowly with Mom please because she's getting old and cautious." Mom laughed and gave me a hug that I returned, because that's what we do in front of cameras. I said, "I'll get back to the people I was talking to before. Sorry to interrupt." I walked off, as did Mom and Dad in another direction, leaving a somewhat confused reporter behind. When the current flight ended, from wherever we were standing, my family and I shot up into the air, proving that there had indeed been a Guardian Angel hovering near us at the time of my request. I'd been thinking about what to do during the flight. For example, use the Blinks Allowed Effect to send Donna upward fast enough to reach three thousand feet or so before her sled canceled. She'd freefall down, where I'd catch her - obviously! She'd love that, but there were too many helicopters overhead to risk it. Showing off with some family formation flying seemed trite and I couldn't think of any benefit to it either, so that was another idea scrubbed. I'd decided that this was a perfect time for the news-crews to record me learning how to control my direction like the lifeguards had. Doubtless every camera would be on us and mostly on me, so it'd be well recorded. For the first minute of our flight, I put us through the usual individual swoops, loops, etc., with due regard to Mom's advanced age, and even faster for Donna and Dad because I sensed they loved it so much. Then I spoke, asking the angel to let me control myself the same as the lifeguards had. No one could hear what I was saying as I was using a normal tone, but I was saying it out loud in case there were any cameras zoomed in on my face. I positioned my right fist half extended above my right shoulder, said, "Starting from now." Then I started learning how to control my flight. I was erratic, and a couple of times pulled my fist back too far causing me to brake too hard and I had trouble matching velocity with others of my family. By the end of the five minutes, I was getting pretty good at it. In fact, I was so good that I decided to try to land myself. Landing was apparently tricky, as I made a bit of a mess out of it. Oh well, I guess I'll have to practice. I'd only just recovered my balance when Donna came charging at me to leap into my arms to thank me. She was WILDLY excited. So much so that her leap was very unladylike - young ladies shouldn't throw their legs around men's hips like that. I caught her, letting everything Donna intended happen except using EKP to make her kiss miss my mouth and land on my cheek instead. I hugged her while she raved about how wonderful it'd been. After about five seconds, I lifted her off while telling her, "Let's check on the others." I put her down, put my arm around her shoulders, and we walked to where Mom, Dad and Carol had landed. Donna had landed there too, but my landing had been so bad I'd missed landing with the others and had wobbled along the ground for several yards before getting down, so Donna had sprinted after me. A reporter was even so useful as to intrude on our reunion to ask several questions, including asking me, "Why was your flight so different from the rest of your family's?" "Archangel Michael let the lifeguards in LA control their flight by using their right hand. They described it quite well afterward and I thought I'd try to use the same system. It's trickier than I thought, especially the landing. I REALLY hope I can talk the angel into letting me keep practicing because it'd be fantastic to be able to fly wherever I wanted." The reporter's eyes widened in amazement, "You mean flying every day, instead of using your car?" "Wouldn't that be AMAZING! I just need to twist the angel's arm into letting me, which isn't going to be easy considering how many arms it's got. Maybe if it doesn't agree, I'll sick Donna onto it. You'd like more flights, wouldn't you Donna?" "I'd LOVE it! That was the best fun I've EVER had!" #11: #2: I told the reporter, "The Guardian Angel wasn't sent here for entertainment purposes. I have yet to see it do a single thing that wasn't to make me safer in some way. It's obviously providing flights today to reduce the fear than many Christians erroneously have about the angel and me. Less fear should mean fewer religiously inspired attacks, making me safer. I don't think it'll give flights for fun again because giving more won't make me safer in any way. I'm sure we'll get a million letters from people begging for flights, which will be great for the Post Office's profit, but I doubt will achieve anything else. People can go to Disneyland rather than trying to turn something divine into an amusement ride. That's what I guess the angel will think of everyone else's request for flights, but I'm hoping it'll see that flying me around can be safer for me, that way I get more safety and a huge amount of fun." "You want flights for yourself, but not for anyone else?" "When did I EVER say I didn't 'WANT' other people to get rides? I explained why I thought the angel would decide FOR ITSELF not to give them. It's the angel's decision, not mine. God sent it to Earth to do a job, and the angel is doing that job. Doing it very well too, thank God, or my whole family would be dead by now from the Government's repeated assassination attempts. -- "It's a bodyguard sent from God. If - repeat, IF - I can talk it into guarding me in a way which has the side benefit of being fun for me, then I think that'll be reasonable compensation for my spending a month being tortured by the CIA so badly that it took God several weeks to repair the psychological damage that I'd suffered. Not to mention the intense pressure of months of living in fear for our lives that the criminals in our Government put my families through afterward. -- "You should be up in arms and angry about the fact that I need to be guarded. It's APPALLING that I need to be guarded! How'd you like to live like my family do, knowing at any moment that yet another assassination attempt might succeed? Instead of worrying about that, you leap to the conclusion that I'm being selfish because I explain why God's angel won't allow itself to be lowered to the level of a carnival ride." #3: #19: I ended the interview and walked away. I approached some other reporters and started a conversation by making some jokes about what the FAA's reaction would be when they turned on the news and saw so many breaches of FAA regulations. That led to a discussion of the flying, as I'd expected, and I was able to repeat the same, very useful points I'd made in the previous interview, except in a much more relaxed, conversational tone of voice to give them a much better chance of being aired. [As I'd hoped that segment was aired, because my flying around daily like a real life Peter Pan amazed people and made them very envious. Strong emotions, rather than facts, make the Best TV, as judged by TV producers.] I was intending to eventually let the public see the angel being used for entertainment purposes. I had to do that to get the benefits I wanted out of being able to publicly use my abilities. If you can't see how that works, turn it around and think about how restrictive it'd be if I was only able to use my abilities if the public would understand that each and every use was to "Improve My Safety." That would eliminate a huge amount of fun! To give just one of the MANY uses of the angel, think of all the ways I could impress the panties off pretty girls if I could fly them in any way I wanted, rather than just in ways that improved my safety. I didn't want to jump straight to the final way I'd interact with the angel: the full-on, full-service, do-anything-for-me angel. The shock of "too much, too quickly" would cause a wide variety of bad reactions from the public. The angel had needed to start very sternly to stop the fucking idiots who kept trying to cause us trouble. That mostly meant the Government because those were the idiots with the resources, power, arrogance and disregard for the law to cause us a lot of grief. Now that the Government had finally pulled back, the angel could start becoming entertaining. Slowly though, because a slowly changing character would seem more natural, as it "got used to life on Earth". People don't get irate about gradual changes, even if they end up going further than the maximum they would have accepted from a sudden change. I wouldn't fly myself or anyone else again until the reaction from this event had died way down, and then I'd wait for an opportunity for a flight that had a good reason. I'd have to wait and see how the public reacted before I could judge how many "good reason" flights I'd have to provide before I could start doing entertainment flights. [We didn't get millions of letters begging for flights, only several tens of thousands of them. Some offered very large payments for the experience, which had no chance of success as the angel doesn't have any pockets in its pants. Only the Little-Johnny's-Last-Wish-Before-He-Dies-Of-Cancer-type letters got a sympathetic form-letter response from us; the rest just got tossed.] When the last of the meeting's attendees who wanted a flight had landed, it was time for us to leave. We did the necessary "Goodbyes," which took a major effort because the crowd loved us, then we headed to our cars. The school's driveway was jam-packed with vehicles abandoned by latecomers in their panicked rush to get a flight, which none of them did. I would've liked to pick up all five of our vehicles and fly us home, but our entire convoy, including the security guys who'd arrived early, weighed more than I could lift at once. I could've leapfrogged our vehicles over each other all the way home, but that was too silly and would've too obviously defined the angel's limits, which I very much preferred people to think it didn't have any of. What I did instead - after playing the usual cellphone message game to inform our staff - was to pick up our vehicle and two of the Security vehicles. I accelerated the two security SUVs twice as much as our vehicle, heading us toward the nearest navigable street. It was more than five hundred feet away but less than a thousand, so when our vehicle would be at the midway point, I'd be able to put the leading two down on the street then pick up the two vehicles left behind and accelerate them up and over to join us. We'd drop down behind the first team, then drive home together. That was the plan. The execution of it went off the rails when the highest, leading Security vehicle was shot at. I heard the shot and impact, and because I'd been watching the SUVs in order to be able to fly them, I saw where the bullet hit the SUV's side, so was able to instantly send a very bright Guardian Angel-configured sight blob in the direction the shot had come from, to draw fire and spot the shooter. Dodging was a major problem with several tons of vehicles in the air as I had very little acceleration available. Gravity would help though, so I let the two security occupied vehicles drop, making a mental note to remember to catch them early enough to slow them with the poor acceleration I had. The cars had gone much farther horizontally than we'd risen, heading for a street at the back of the school, so we were above a safely unoccupied sports field. I had a choice between running away or killing the fucker. The latter had a great deal to be said for it, but there was no one within five hundred feet of us in the shooter's direction. In other words, the shooter was out of my range. I'd either have to push our car his way to get in range, or get out and fly that way myself. The latter was instantly rejected as it exposed me far too much, but such was my eagerness for the "killing the fucker" option that most of my minds had immediately started pushing our car that way. #19: #21: #19: #All: #11: I canceled the NP-points that were holding us up, so all three previously flying vehicles were now falling vehicles. #2: #All: I created five more Guardian Angel-configured light blobs, one each over our family and the security guards' cars. That five more of them could suddenly appear out of thin air would scare some people as it got broadcast by the TV networks, which struck me as an excellent idea because not enough people are scared of the angel, judging from the current situation. The family car was the lowest one as I'd given the Security cars more acceleration when they'd taken off, so our car would get to the deck very soon. The deck would be safe because the lay of the land obscured us from wherever the shot had came from. Less than half a second had passed since the shot. A second or two after the first shot, another one rang out, enabling my sight blob to see the shooter. The lucky fucker - lucky for being more than five hundred feet away, actually about 1,200 feet - was standing beside a small truck, resting his rifle on the roof and shooting at the angel. He was parked on the side of the street that we would've used to drive home on had we not had flying cars, so he'd presumably planned to ambush us. The asshole was working the bolt of his rifle for another shot, so he obviously wasn't a professional assassin. A single-shot rifle shooting into the middle car of a convoy going down the street would probably have gotten only one shot off, so it was a bad choice of weapon. He was just a stupid fucker, especially because his single shot wouldn't have penetrated our car's armor anyway. I had an idea for how to turn him into a dead stupid fucker. I looked down and shut my eyes so I could create another sight blob to look for decent-sized rocks, finding several in someone's garden. I couldn't put them to use for a while because I needed nearly all my NP force to catch our cars, but I could gather a pile of them together in a suitable location while I spent several seconds getting the three cars safely down. I needed to keep the fucker busy for a while, so I made the Guardian Angel a light blob rather than a sight one as I needed sight blobs for gathering rocks and landing the cars. The next time he shot the angel, the angel staggered and a small red blob appeared on it. The angel recovered, and moved off slowly in a direction that would turn the fucker's body somewhat away from where I was collecting rocks. The angel moved slowly, and dipped sometimes, as if wounded. The fucker must have been working his rifle's bolt at top speed, because there were several more shots over the next several seconds. I assumed he was 'hitting' his target so I created red injuries on the angel's 'body' each shot. By the time the last of our cars was down, the angel was visibly suffering. It was moving slowly, sagging downward, and even dripping 'blood'. I almost felt sorry for it. Our family car was quickly surrounded by our security guys, including those from the car that'd been shot, as none of its occupants had been injured. The shooter was a STUPID fucker. Now that I had all my NP force available, I had to make a choice. Did I sit here and do nothing until the fucker was apprehended by the cops that were running out of the school's gates and eventually to him, or did I throw the gathered rocks at him, that being the only worthwhile action that I could think of? There were three issues on my mind: Throwing rocks made the angel seem unable to go over to the shooter and deal with him directly. That had worrying possibilities. On the other hand, there was plenty of past evidence that directly contradicted the angel's being so limited, so maybe it was acting "in mysterious ways" this time. The cops would probably be able to take the fucker down without too much trouble since he was so stupid, but "probably" wasn't "certainly", and I much preferred that no cop or innocent civilian get injured in a firefight. I VERY much wanted the world to know that anyone fucking with me or mine was effectively committing suicide. The last point decided me. I picked up the fourteen rocks I'd accumulated, zooming them up to as high as I could get them while still being in my range, which was about three hundred feet AGL. I encased them in perfect spheres of NP with outside surfaces having their friction dialed to zero to minimize the effect of air resistance, including from wind blowing the rocks off target. The frictionless surfaces wouldn't help much, but was still worth doing as it took no extra effort. I allocated the number of pushing fingertips for each rock in proportion to its weight, so they'd all have roughly the same acceleration. I formed a somewhat spread out cloud of them, then my minds accelerated the rocks as fast as they could toward the fucker, aiming to impact on the rear quarter of his head, as the 'wounded' angel had moved to turn the shooter as much as possible away from the direction the rocks were coming from. The reason I'd lifted the rocks so high was so those that missed their target would hit the street or his truck at a steep angle and would lose most of their speed, so they wouldn't carry on and hit someone else. They might bounce and hit nearby cars, but I was happy to write a check to pay for any of that damage; it was hitting other people that had me worried. Everyone had scattered away from the shooter, but at the speed these rocks would be going, someone innocent might've been badly hurt by an overshot if I'd used a flatter trajectory. The rocks' accelerations cut off when there was still about 800 feet to go. Air resistance had stopped me getting them faster than what I thought was something like 500 mph, the equivalent of just over 700 feet per second. Even though the rocks were angling down, wind resistance would slow them more than gravity sped them up, but the remaining 800 feet shouldn't take significantly longer than one second. Having performed that calculation in advance, my minds had aimed about 20 feet above the fucker's head to allow for gravity's effect. Because I wanted to ensure that at least one of the rocks hit him somewhere on his body, and preferably on his head, some rocks were aimed higher, some lower, some to the left or right, and a couple were aimed dead on. They were all decent-sized rocks, at least a few inches across, so one of them hitting him had a very good chance of putting him out of action long enough for the cops rushing in that direction to safely take him into custody. I canceled the pushing fingertips - actually more like deeply concave palms because the rocks' casings were frictionless - when the rocks passed out of my maximum range, but I didn't cancel the NP-spheres because I wanted the Blinks Allowed Effect to keep the rocks wrapped in their frictionless spheres to maximize their accuracy. Those I canceled moments before impact so the jagged rocks would do more damage. Just as the fucker was ready to take yet another shot at the grievously wounded angel, the cloud of rocks arrived. Only one of them mattered, the one that collided with the fucker's head. He took a couple of body blows too, but his not having much of a head anymore made them somewhat irrelevant. That was the end of that. I removed the fake damage from the first Guardian Angel, then zipped it back to the family car. The six Guardian Angels merged into one, and then it disappeared. I'd been looking out the window so could plausibly announce, "The Guardian Angels have merged back into one and have vanished so it must be over. Let's get out of here before the cops arrive and we get bogged down for hours." My instruction to our security screen to return to their vehicles wasn't a popular one, but I insisted and there'd been no shots since the angels had merged and vanished, so it did seem to be over. #26: #20: #18: We repeated the previous departure attempt, with a variation at the end; the family car flanked by two of the security cars flew all the way home at two thousand feet AGL rather than risk taking any more streets containing fuckers. Everyone calmed down during the short flight home, except in one minor respect. When we'd landed, some of the security staff who'd seen the joyrides the Sondarm kids and parents had received asked me if they could get flights from the angel too. Unfortunately for them I couldn't think of a good enough justification for it yet. Later would be okay, when the angel is being more entertaining, but it was too early for that. I asked the angel for them, but it refused to answer. I felt sorry for our staff as the flying car ride home had been positively boring after the fun they'd seen the 700-odd people have. I wouldn't do any daytime flying either, while I waited to see how events of the day panned out. ^ Excluding the fucker part of the day, the PR value of the SCS event was FANTASTIC. The rapturous looks on the faces of the kids after their flights was money in the bank for good PR. Some of the adults had looked positively ecstatic too. There were nothing but good comments about me, my family and the angel. A large chunk of the local Christian community was immediately won over, as were many other people across the country after they saw it on the news. Nevaeh let us know that her parents were impressed, happy with how the meeting had gone, and somewhat doubtful over my degree of evilness. I was clearly still very immoral in my conduct with girls, and while the Guardian Angel had been WONDERFUL with the kids, I had been terribly brutal in its killing of the shooter, so her parents were conflicted about how to judge me. That was a considerable improvement on their previous opinion. It was obviously not yet possible for Nevaeh to mention that she wanted to be one of my girlfriends - that'd cause a major explosion in the Smith household - but good progress had been achieved. Prof did something very smart in an interview: he described the angel as being "wrathful", a word that has an emotional connection to how God acts. My Guardian Angel's killing someone was bad, but its acting "wrathfully" caused a very different emotional reaction in the religious viewers. Those people don't think, especially if God was involved anywhere in the issue, so Prof's tactic worked well. We were interviewed by the police about the fucker. My statement was: "I was in a car that went up. I heard the shot, and then the car went down quickly. I never saw a thing." It didn't leave the cops much to go on. We learned that the fucker had been a Christian. What a surprise. A spokesman for the Galloping Ninnies said they did not believe my so-called Guardian Angel was from God, he accused me of being an imposter, called for me to be charged with the murder of the man outside of the Sondarm Christian School, who'd only been doing God's work by trying to save the world from my Evil influences, and some more equally stupid comments. He didn't go as far as calling for my murder, but the shooting had already put me in a VERY bad mood with Christians, so that night I wrapped myself in a black sheet and flattened every building on the Ninnies' land. Then I located the spokesman and removed his tongue. I was also in a bad mood with the TV networks for giving the Galloping Ninnies and similar hate-filled groups so much airtime, so I went to Los Angeles and located the main studio owned by the network of the reporter who'd interviewed the Galloping Ninnies' spokesman, and I smashed the shit out of the place: every piece of equipment in it including the coffeemakers, and then the building itself. I didn't leave any note explaining why I'd trashed their studio, but the Guardian Angel accompanied all the staff as it evacuated them before the destruction started, and it was done the same night as my anti-Ninny attacks so the attack's motivation was obvious enough. Vanessa told the highly indignant media(s) - plural because the print media was invited to ensure this was reported - "Here's how I read the situation. There have been repeated murder attempts aimed at Mark which were committed by people who proudly identified themselves as Christians and who were motivated to commit their crimes by their religious beliefs, rather than for money, a jealous lover, a drug deal gone bad, or any of the other usual reasons for murder. -- "The Guardian Angel has been told by God to defend Mark, so it has to do something to stop those murder attempts. If you were the angel, how would you do that? There are too many individual Christians for any reasonable course of action involving them. The best way of stopping the attacks is to stop the people who are spreading lies, hate, fear and even exhortations to violence about Mark, as they're motivating the murderous Christians. Those messages are being spread by some churches and TV networks, so it seems to me that the angel has decided to stop them doing that." "But we report the NEWS!" protested a reporter from the network in question. "Spokespeople from that church have had their message of hate and fear aired two or three times every week since Mark was resurrected. Their rantings are so lacking in factual or topical content that you could shuffle them up and air them in any order and no one could tell that most of them had been misplaced. Calling them 'news' is a lie. -- "Your network repeatedly aired the views of that group with the sole purpose of creating conflict. Stories with conflict are more exciting, which increases your viewer numbers and profit, especially if the conflict erupts out of control. The conflicts you create normally only damage the participants, but this time God has decided to hold your network accountable for your choices." To make matters worse for the TV Network, the majority of the Galloping Ninnies denied that the person who the network had identified as their spokesman had that mandate. He wasn't listed on their website, didn't have a letter of appointment or any other authorization. The Ninnies blamed the Network for the destruction of their church. They blamed the angel too, but the Network was better to file suit against. Their church's destruction harmed my reputation with Nevaeh's parents, but that had been a price I was willing to pay to stop religious idiots encouraging people to shoot at me. As FANTASTIC as Nevaeh's body is naked, I wouldn't be able to enjoy it if I was dead. Fortunately Mr. and Mrs. Smith didn't agree with the so-called spokesman's comments being aired, and they understood why the angel had retaliated for them, so they didn't condemn me as much as they could have. Their opinion of my suitability as a lover for Nevaeh was undoubtedly still WAY negative, but it hadn't gone backward as far as it could. I'd just have to find some extra ways to move it forward. The public reaction to these events was on two levels: In the specific: The TV Network got some, but not a lot of, sympathy for their decision to air the Galloping Ninny interview that had angered the angel. Most people who were asked their opinion repeated Vanessa's point that those interviews had no news value, especially because the spokesman had been inflammatory and almost vicious. People were pretty unhappy with anyone doing anything that could anger the angel because cities could be nuked. In the general: The Network did get support because what the angel was doing now was suppressing freedom of speech. Vanessa answered accusations from the affected network by saying, "If you were standing on a soapbox in a public area and were holding forth on some topic, and the police tried to get you to leave, you'd be within your rights to wave the First Amendment at them and insist on continuing to speak. -- "If instead of the police, a wild lion approached your soapbox, you could still wave the First Amendment at it. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that, as the result would be predictable. Similarly with the Guardian Angel. Wave your piece of paper and insist on your human rights if you want, but it's not human and it's not bound by human laws. If you broadcast material that the angel believes endangers Mark, then the result will be predictable. The angel is not bound by a document signed by a few men a couple of hundred years ago; it's bound by God's command to protect Mark. -- "What I find the most revealing is that you're upset at being forced to fall into line about something that God thinks is so important that It has sent three angels to Earth for it: Archangel Michael, the angel we don't know the name of, and the Guardian Angel. Plus God also thought the miracle of a resurrection was worthwhile too. What's happened to Mark is the second greatest intervention in human affairs that God has ever done, so it has to be INCREDIBLY important. You KNOW God wants Mark to be alive, but your company has repeatedly aired clips of religious fanatics calling for Mark to be killed. You've been deliberately choosing to go DIRECTLY against God's wishes because you can make more profit that way. -- "My husband sincerely believes that Mark will be the savior of humanity. Not a savior in the sense that Jesus was, but that Mark will literally save the human race. Maybe from global warming or something else we can't even guess at, but we're certain that Mark's future is of paramount importance to the human race - God's actions make that clear - but your network is risking the destruction of humanity so you can make a few extra dollars in advertising revenue by airing clips of people calling for Mark's murder. Yours is the most evil and despicable example of corporate greed that I can imagine. I hope you all rot in Hell!" The network found it difficult to defend itself from that criticism, other than not airing it. The other TV networks didn't air it either because they'd all committed the same despicable example of corporate greed, but the print media was only too willing to take up the slack because the vast majority of such publications can't create conflict in a way that increases their circulation effectively, so they do very little of it. The disgust that The People had toward the Government for attacking my family and me was quite easily transferred to the anti-Mark churches and the networks. In effect, the Government actions had completely exhausted The People's tolerance of any nastiness toward me, so when the two new sources of attacks toward me were clearly identified, The People immediately yelled their upset. Vanessa's (or Prof's really) "Mark will save humanity"-point was widely believed, and from the highly successful Sondarm Christian School visit, I was obviously a good guy, my family were good people, and the angel was good too. All those "goods" could easily be thought of as "Good", especially as that was strongly implied by the last one. If we were Good, then anyone calling for our murder was EVIL, and the networks that broadcast those evil messages weren't much better, especially because most people could see that the networks were just after money. The networks VERY quickly lost interest in trying to apply the First Amendment to anybody called Anderson. They were in serious danger of angering an expensively large proportion of their audience if they didn't change their editorial policy, so financial criteria once again determined the networks' decisions. In our favor this time, so we didn't criticize them for it. The churches weren't nearly so compliant. The TV networks get statistically significant rating feedback on the consequences of their decisions in ten-minute intervals, while churches are so sure they're right that they have no interest whatsoever in feedback and they ignore the consequences of their actions. However, without the media's help the churches' filth virtually disappeared from the airwaves. Not from the 'inter-tubes' though. I kept an eye on several "Hate Mark Anderson" websites. I didn't act immediately in case their pages might have been old ones. It didn't take long for a couple of them to update their sites with fresh filth, which made them my targets, except I wasn't sure how to go about hitting such a target. Where were their computers? Where were the creators of the filth? I needed to locate them because I was thinking of cutting off all their fingers. I could go to the addresses of the churches the websites stated they represented and wreck those churches, but that wouldn't affect the computers unless they were physically in the churches, which I doubted. Wrecking churches would also encourage people who thought I or the Guardian Angel was the Devil (people, even the same person, weren't consistent in who or what they aimed that accusation at). Even worse, the churches might even be innocent if the website was using their name without permission. That was unlikely, but still a worry. I discussed the problem of tracing the exact address of the originators of the filth over dinner. Vanessa said, "Leave it to me." Knowing full well she wasn't, I inquired, "I didn't know you were a computer nerd?" "MAF employs several. I'll put one of them onto it." The solution that Vanessa returned with, after getting the idea during a casual conversation with one of her nerds, was more effective than my intended isolated acts of violence. A few nights later, the Guardian Angel sent an email from our home - there was no need to send it from elsewhere - to the many media companies and several major bloggers, saying: There is much violence inciting against Mark Anderson on your internet. Warn hosts, hate-churches and public that I will destroy computers, buildings and hands of people responsible. I can get Majestic Countdowns computer knowledge through God. There was some howling, but the number of bad sites dropped precipitously. After a week, their number was much reduced. Not down to none, and not even down to very few; merely "much reduced". People will spread filth on the internet that they'd never do in person because they assume they're safe from any consequences. They never dream that they're not physically safe. Vanessa had directed me to some sites that taught me the technical procedures I needed. Using them got me the first half of the information I needed, with the rest easily obtainable from any police station: using a police computer system to look up the web hosts' corporation names to get their owners' names, and then looking up those names to get their home addresses. The two co-owners of a hosting company got successive house calls from the angel. For each visit, I pulled the owner out of bed - with his wife in one case - showed them a "Kill Mark Anderson" site on their home computer, highlighted some of the worst text so they wouldn't mistake what the angel was objecting to, used the technical knowledge I'd acquired to show them that the site was hosted by their company, started up Notepad then typed a super-fast message - that fast to hopefully impress them with my computer skills: "Tomorrow you are to make complete public disclosure of your disobedience-to-God. Make sure it ceases, or I will return and do far more." Then I chopped all the fingers and the thumb off their right hands (just of the two co-owners; I left the wife alone), incinerating the five lumps of flesh in front of their eyes. They lived in an apartment building so I couldn't set fire to it, but I smashed EVERYTHING, including a large exterior window through which I flew everything and made a great big bonfire out of it on the street. They were left with their nightwear and nothing else. After releasing the first of the two owners, I rushed to the second before he could be alerted, doing the same to him. After he was dealt with, I went to a particularly stupid and hateful church. At the first church I went to, I couldn't be sure enough of who the culprit was, so I did nothing, going on to my fallback target. The second church was easy to be sure about as there was a detached house for the reverend, in which he had an office and computer. Inside his filing cabinet were drawers labeled with several topics he preached hate on, including "Mark Anderson". I fired up his computer and looked for documents for his weekly sermons, to see if he preached the same material that his website contained. I couldn't find anything regular, just what looked like some special-occasion speeches. I decided to give the church building itself the benefit of the doubt, so I only ruined the reverend's day: He got much the same treatment as the hosting co-owners, only more so, losing all ten digits and I burned down his house. I thought it likely that the house was owned by the church, in which case they'd learn a lesson not to employ preachers who spread hate and encouraged murder. He also got a note instructing him to go public, plus, "You are never to preach again. God no longer wants your services as you are too full of Hate and Evil. Make sure you mention that point to the media or I will return to ensure you never draw breath again." A couple of weeks later, I did something similar, and by then the only anti-me sites I could find were foreign ones, which were unfortunately beyond my practical ability to punish. I'd gotten rid of over 95% of the sites, and probably 99.9% of the sites that could affect my life. Every month or so I'd do some more browsing to see if I could find anything, but I wasn't much worried about it. The level of "Hate Mark Anderson" rhetoric was zero in public, and spreading the word in private was very much curtailed. ^ The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) sent us an extraordinarily politely worded letter expressing concern that the flying cars they'd seen on TV might cause an air accident. They were wondering - but only if it was okay with us - whether there was anything they could do which might help us reduce that risk, if it wasn't too much trouble. There's no doubt the FAA does some very important work. Unlike most Government Departments, if the FAA screws-up the consequences are often extremely difficult to ignore or pass the blame for. It's still a Government Department, with all that implies, but it manages to do many things right. Ava and I being pilots have been on the receiving end of several FAA services and they've generally been very well run, so we were inclined to treat the organization well. We wrote back to the brave man who'd signed the letter to us saying that we couldn't control the angel so had no say over what flights it caused, but if there was any equipment we could fit to our vehicles or any procedures we could follow if we went airborne in them, then we'd be very happy to discuss it with the FAA. We couldn't promise anything, but we'd try. Our SUVs were soon fitted with equipment not normally found in your typical family car, such as airplane radio sets and transponders that broadcast a unique identifier and the cars' altitude above the ground. I knew how to disconnect them if I wanted to be covert, at the risk of incurring the FAA's fearsome ire. ------- Chapter 389: Planning for the Costume Party Saturday, July 14, to Saturday, August 11, 2007 In my following the Sondarm School thread from planning through to execution, I skipped over a few things that I'll attend to now. Carol's birthday was the first event. She didn't want a big bash because she's not really a gregarious person and there were plenty more parties coming up anyway, so she chose to have a small gathering with our families plus three of her best friends from school. It was a very nice evening, and Carol's being sixteen seemed like a significant milestone. A couple of years ago - when I'd been the pre-Ron Fisher version of Mark - I'd been very much looking forward to Carol turning sixteen. Before she reached that age my having sex with her was the felony of Rape in the First Degree, that being VERY serious trouble! The moment she turned sixteen, it wasn't even the smallest possible misdemeanor. Getting a parking ticket was legally more serious than my having sex with Carol now, whereas my having sex with her yesterday was a heinous crime. Go figure. After I eventually returned as Ron Fisher. Ron was legally not Carol's sibling so our having sex wasn't illegal in that respect, but was in another because Carol was underage and Ron was five years older, Oregon permitting only a three-year difference. We'd had to continue to be careful. When I was resurrected and became Mark again - a transformation which amusingly had yet to be put to a legal test - I was once again Carol's sibling, so up until yesterday my having sex with her was a heinous crime, but today it was a matter of complete indifference to the police. Even before Carol turned sixteen the legal issue was pretty much a lame duck for my latest incarnation of Mark because no one would have been able to enforce the law on me. I was still having sex with Donna regularly, with complete indifference to the date of her sixteenth birthday. We obviously kept our incest secret because we didn't need the crap that would result if it became known, but it was nice to have the Guardian Angel on my side to remove the legal fear. I had decapitated the FBI's Agent In Charge on national TV immediately outside our front gate, so the legal consequences of boinking my sisters with their enthusiastic consent was hard to get worried about. Anyway, we had a very nice, friendly, small dinner party for Carol. ------- Donna's fifteenth birthday bash was of a very different nature than Carol's. It started with our dropping rafts into an inaccessible stretch of river from four large helicopters; we needed four because Donna had invited thirty of her closest friends. We jumped in after the rafts, and were going to whitewater raft down to where the oldies would set up a party on the side of the river. Donna had told Mom, "It'll be my last chance to have fun like that because I'll be too mature after this birthday." Donna was angling in her usual unsubtle way to have her "Sex with Mark Twice a Month" limit improved, preferably by removing it entirely. Judging by Ava's eager anticipation for the trip, Donna still had a few years of fun ahead of her yet, and I don't think Mom fell for Donna's claim of imminent maturity. Nearly all of Donna friends are the sort to think that leaping out of helicopters into a river is great fun, only a few of them preferring to wait for their choppers to land beside the water. I was in charge of three things during the rafting trip: Safety. We had guides who thought they were in charge of this, but really I was. If a girl fell overboard, which they did sometimes because Donna had chosen a wild river, they got pushed right back into the rafts even before they had a chance to be scared. They knew the Guardian Angel was going to be looking after them, so they weren't feeling much fright anyway, especially not after the first couple of rescues. Rafts never got hung up, tipped, into bad areas of the river, etc. I also did un-safety things during dull stages of the river, to make them more fun. Fishing. I took some suitable bags and collected some superb fish on the way, to cook fresh with our party food. Our guides were incredibly impressed by my ability to snatch fish out of the river with my bare hands. I didn't have a fishing license, but I did have a Guardian Angel so I didn't worry about the very small chance of game wardens checking on me. The fish were kept alive in mesh bags tied to the raft but floating in the river, so there was no risk of our being caught. Entertainment. I played the fool to entertain the girls. It wasn't easy for me, but I applied myself to the role diligently and managed to achieve an amusing amount of "fool". The last point is worth some examples. The Sondarm School event had been two weekends earlier, permitting the Guardian Angel to openly participate in Donna's event, so quite a few 'magical' effects occurred. For example (the best one), the girls' bikini tops kept coming off. Other less useful, although probably more amusing, miracles occurred. When I dived into a swimming hole we'd stopped at, I dived off a cliff into the pool (after doing a sight blob Safety Inspection of it), but the angel stopped my perfect dive just before my fingers touched the water. I hovered in a going-nowhere vertical spear for a few seconds while I joked around, then the angel rotated me 270 degrees and slammed me into the water in what appeared to be an unbelievably spectacular belly buster, judging by the amount of water that got splashed out, drenching all the girls and half the state. Or, when the raft went over a sudden drop, I got bucked several feet up in the air and didn't come down again. I sat in the air going nowhere until I started using my paddle to nonsensically paddle the air frantically in order to catch up with the raft, just like you'd see in children's cartoons. When we'd passed through a rapid that had been particularly exciting, the angel would pick up the rafts and take us upstream so we could run it again; sometimes four or five times. I socialized by changing rafts quite often, floating - in the NP sense - from one to the other. It didn't take long - microseconds - for the girls to excitedly ask for the same service. And soon after that, they even more excitedly asked to be flown around as had been done at Sondarm School. When we were in a particularly beautiful area, which happened quite often, the angel would float us all (including the guides) up and around to admire the scenic beauty. If we passed through a spectacular gorge, for example, I'd float us up to the top of the highest cliff so we could look down into the gorge and around the wider area. Sometimes we flew up individually, and sometimes I'd fly the rafts up with us still sitting in them. By the end of the trip, the girls and guides would unhesitatingly run off the edge of a cliff to have the angel catch them at the bottom. I warned them not to try that at home. One of their favorite miracles was the Guardian Angel's going into the forest to get several wild animals for them to pet and hug. I couldn't find a cougar, which disappointed me, but a mother bear, her two cubs and several deer were big hits with the girls. A fifth chopper had dropped the parents, a huge pile of gear, and four of our security guards as helpers (two of each gender), at the spot we'd have as our overnight campsite. By the time the excited and happy girls came screaming and giggling into camp, the tents were erected and beds made, tables set up with presents ready to be opened piled up on one, fires going, food mostly cooked and immediately descended on. Between hungry mouthfuls, the girls RAVED over how fantastic it'd been, how nice the angel was, and what an idiot Mark was (I might've overachieved on the Playing The Fool job). After a few quick bites, and while my freshly caught fish were searing (Vanessa was in charge of the kitchen; yummy), I asked, "Shall I go and get some more animals for you, maybe with the angel's help?" "YES!" they screamed - there'd been a lot of screaming today - then started yelling their requests to the angel. When they considered the angel sufficiently instructed, the angel and I left the campsite, me calling out, "Here Skunky, here Skunky." I could pretty much guarantee that there'd be no sane animals within a mile of the screaming, yelling girls, so I had to go hunting. I collected most of what the girls wanted but again failed to find a cougar in the time I was willing to be away. I flew the animals back to near the camp, then I entered camp accompanied by a menagerie and riding on the back of the biggest bear. Playing my entertainment role, I was facing the wrong way and making silly comments about being a "bear-back rider." Our guards had trouble believing their eyes. Apart from enforcing "No feeding the bears" (otherwise they can start hanging around humans, which can be dangerous for both species), the girls had a great time eating their meals, sharing them with the rest of the menagerie, and playing with their temporary pets. The bears were certainly strong enough to give rides, so that was on the agenda too, using an NP saddle blanket because wild bears stink. The novelty of playing with them compensated for the assaults on our noses. Dad, Prof and the guards gave bear-back riding a go too. You may recall that Mom had refused to let Donna ride the first bear I'd introduced her to, outside the cabin my families had hidden in during my nuclear war, but by now Mom had more confidence in my abilities, so let Donna have a ride. It was her birthday after all, and she said she was more mature now. Unlike when we'd been at Sondarm School or home just after that, the guards didn't have to remain on the job and I didn't need to worry about the angel being frivolous, so our guards got some very exciting flights from the angel too. After a couple of hours, I returned the animals back to where I'd gotten them. The adults had very wisely pitched their tents a long way from the kids', because we made lots of giggling sounds as we played naughty games around the fire. Not so much giggling from me, if only because my mouth was full most of the time, causing whoever it was full of to giggle enough to make up for my silence. Donna had already enjoyed a good session the previous night, and was looking forward to another one tomorrow night, so she was at her generous best in encouraging her girlfriends. ^ [A few days earlier, I'd said to Donna, "Seeing as I won't be able to have sex with you while we're away, I'm having a very hard time deciding between our celebrating your birthday the night before we leave or the night after we get back. What do you think, sweetie?" She'd started thinking about it seriously, until she'd had the obvious idea, suddenly declaring, "BOTH! It is my birthday!" "You drive a hard bargain, but okay."] ^ All things considered - and I pretty much did consider all things, when I wasn't busy doing more than just consider them - the girls didn't get much sleep that night, most of them crawling into a tent when the party/orgy ended about 3am. I knew most of the girls very well already, and they'd known what could be getting into them if they came on this trip. That was another reason they'd been so excited. I did sleep with Donna in my arms in a tent shared with a couple other trustworthy girls. We didn't indulge in any hanky-panky since everyone would hear us, but we liked the naked cuddling anyway. After I'd had enough sleep I went for a nice walk/float through the woods. I can see as well at night as during the day. It's not quite the same - shadows are different, for example - but it works just as well. Despite effectively having daytime vision, the forest at night is still a different experience. Very enjoyable though, especially with a heat blob going. After my nature walk, I returned to the adults' campsite just before I expected them to emerge, got their fire going nicely (1 second), and put a pot of water near the fire ready to make coffee for them. There was plenty of leftover food, so I got a selection of it ready and spent the time feeding myself and any birds that flew within five hundred feet of me. One of the guards emerged first, shook his head at the sight of all the birds, and wandered off to have a pee. He came back and I told him the water had just boiled, and we chatted as he made his coffee. He had quite a few questions about the incidents from the stories the girls had told about their rafting trip. Some I could answer, but a common theme of my non-answers was, "The angel and I seem to be getting better at working together. I have the silly ideas and it does the heavy lifting. Or it might be that it's always been able to cooperate but it just hasn't wanted to until recently. It and I rarely communicate so I don't understand it. It'll do something or it won't, and there's never any explanation. It seems to have let its hair down on this trip, but whether that's because it feels I'm safe out here or for some other weird angelic reason, I've got no idea." #4: #10: I fed him breakfast and more bullshit until the other adults started emerging. Our two female guards looked good when they joined us in their nightwear. Their clothing wasn't sexy and I didn't mean any other sexual connotation to my comment; I made it as an intro to me explaining a little nuance of my proximity sense. I've got very used to living with it now, so much so that I associate attractiveness with people who have fit and healthy bodies, which you'd think was a very weird association if you could see a picture of what I was sensing. The best analogy I can give you is a living, breathing version of those full-color anatomical drawings you see in medical publications. I offered them coffee and food the same as I had for the guys. The guards teased me about my activities last night and marveled that I was up and about so early. "The benefit of living a virtuous life." That was more or less the tone for the early morning. The girls had to be woken up for breakfast, which caused lots of moans and requests to be allowed to sleep longer, but there was too much fun to be had, so they scrambled around inside their tents to find their 'nightwear', to put it on so they could look innocent when they emerged, then they ventured forth, excited over starting another fun-filled day. The girls ate while our staff packed up the tents and other gear, provisioned the rafts, and after the necessary morning activities, the girls were finally ready to resume our journey. We cast off and floated away with our guides, leaving the parents and helpers to finish the packing before their chopper arrived to take them home. The day was a repeat of the first afternoon. Longer and with a stop for lunch on top of a beautiful rocky peak, but otherwise the same and still very good fun. The stop for lunch was especially enjoyable because the girls got quite affectionate with the trip coming to an end. The guides were going to have a few stories to tell after this trip. We arrived at our pick-up point to find the choppers already there, so we were all too soon heading back to civilization. I'd given the girls and guides permission to take non-sexual photographs during the trip - no topless girls, for example - and to release them to the press on their return. The world saw that we'd had the most amazing rafting trip imaginable. Shots of a canyon full of swooping girls and of our having fun with the Disneyesque menagerie were particularly commented on. In an interview afterward, I said, "The Guardian Angel let its hair down during the trip. I'd almost suspect it of having fun, but I don't think that's correct. From the other angels' emails we know that Guardian Angels are single-minded, so I'm sure its motivation was deeper than mere fun. My guess is that it wants to prove its Goodness and that humanity should welcome its being on Earth. There are probably other reasons, but there's no way of knowing for sure because it never explains itself to anyone. I'm just glad that it decided to make my sister's friends so happy." It had been done out of the public's sight, but the photos and interviews with the girls was another PR triumph. Not as mind blowing as the Sondarm event had been, but that was by my deliberate intent. I wanted the angel's flying people around to become less exciting, not more. ------- This would be an appropriate spot to mention that before the end of summer I did two more public meetings like the one at the Sondarm Christian School. One was at the fair grounds and open to all Benton Country residents, and the other was at a large church and was open to their flock and whoever else they wanted to invite. The latter was chosen to 'prove' the Guardian Angel and I weren't the Devil, demons, vampires, or God knows what else people had stupid superstitions about. Both appearances were just more of the usual crap so I won't bother describing them in detail. The Guardian Angel didn't offer to provide free rides for anyone, disappointing them terribly but very effectively making the point that the angel decides for itself what it will do. The church visit needs to have a few comments made about it. I'd suggested it because I thought the angel's and my being able to enter a church might relieve some of the stupider Christians, but I'd utterly underestimated how many stupid Christians there are, and especially the depths of their stupidity, because my offer ignited them all over the country. It was accepted with alacrity, and the selected church was subject to a frenzy of blessings and consecrations like they were going out of style. Senior church bigwigs were flown in to mumble nonsense all around the church's grounds, in its doorway, up its aisle, all over its altar, and God knows where else. Apparently the local priest couldn't be trusted to mumble the nonsense himself. A media pack was on hand and excitedly captured the amazing accomplishment of my walking through a doorway. The angel's ability to float through the same doorway was an even greater cause for celebration. Apparently we had somehow proved that neither of us was a creature from Hell. That belief was so mindlessly stupid for so many reasons that I'm horrified that anyone at all believed it, let alone that so many people did. It was a PR triumph of astonishing proportions - that it had any proportions at all was astonishing - and was even more successful than the Archangel Michael's Disneyesque scene with the birds and squirrels in the DC forest. I should explain what I mean by "successful": it probably emotionally affected fewer people than the Disneyesque scene, but it affected the people that were the most likely to cause me serious problems, such as coming after me with a gun or motivating others to do so. Given the response it got, I should have arranged it earlier, but who would have thought that people could be THAT stupid? I despair about humanity being a rational species at all. ^ [[To be fair to the Christians, mostly because the novelty value of it amuses me, in buying into their fairy tale they get a totally unrealistic, dichotomous perspective on reality imposed on them. Running through all their mythology is Good versus Evil. Those two aspects are emphasized continually. The emphasis never stops and Christians are brainwashed into viewing the world that way. Good is, by definition, things they agree with, and everything else must be Evil because there is no other choice in a dichotomy. The Guardian Angel and I didn't appear to exactly fit the mythology that any Christians believed in, regardless of which sect they'd bought into, therefore there was a very real possibility that we were Evil. Evil is REALLY bad! Christians are told that over and over again. Creating and building fear is a large part of how the Christian churches manage their sheeple, so it was no wonder that so many Christians were very worried about the angel and me. One of the consequences of separating reality into a dichotomy is that the two polar opposites can't be thought of as coexisting - pure light and utter darkness can't be in the same place. In reality people are naturally a mixture of good and bad, and which dominates and how much it dominates changes depending on mood, circumstance, and point of view, but that rational truth doesn't fit Christian mythology at all. The Guardian Angel and I were either Good or we were Evil. Because the two concepts can't coexist, our entering a Good church meant we couldn't be Evil. Given how much the Christians had been taught to fear Evil, that made them feel VERY relieved, hence all their excitement and celebration. Theirs is a foolishly simple-minded and unrealistic perspective on reality which will clearly cause them to make many bad decisions about their lives, but it also makes them much easier for their churches to manage, which is fundamentally what it's all about. How the Good versus Evil dichotomy evolved seems so obvious to me that I can't understand how everyone can't see it: Humans have a compulsion to personalize things. We personalize machines, such as our cars or computers, often talking about them as if they have emotions. We personalize our pets, very often believing they have human emotions even when their actions are obviously instinctual. It's an easy extension to believe that what humans think of as good and bad behaviors are Good and Bad spirits which are causing non-human things to behave in the personalized ways we observe. Most human religions throughout history have been spiritualized. From what little I've bothered to learn, the Holy Ghost still is a spirit. The next extension is to embody spirits, making them into anthropomorphic gods. Whether Poseidon to explain the 'moods' of the sea, or The God and The Devil to personify Good and Evil. The logically amusing thing is that having created such an extreme dichotomy, humans can't make sensible judgments about them anymore. I suspect that so many hundreds of thousands (it seems) of children were molested by priests, who got away with it for so long, because people and the Church were unable to grasp the concept that men who were representing Good were capable of doing an evil. That perspective disturbed people's religious views and need-for-certainty so much that they turned a blind eye to the abuses. Similarly, the action the US took against Osama bin Laden enlarged to include Saddam Hussein because the Government painted them both as Evil and the simpleminded public were unable to tell them apart, in large part because President Bush had trouble separating them emotionally; a failing of his that some of his advisors encouraged and took advantage of. A large proportion of the public still conflate bin Laden and Hussein. Making Goodness or Evilness the most significant defining characteristic of people means all their other differences become submerged and disappear, causing Christians to make many bad decisions. Sometimes to my advantage though, as my being able to walk through a doorway apparently proved I couldn't be Evil, therefore their simplistic little minds knew I must be Good.]] ------- I'll keep writing about parties, and later back up to fill in the other activities I'm jumping over. The weekend after Donna's rafting trip was the costume party. Julia had planned it to be a BIG event. It wasn't written on the invitation, but it somehow got out that there would be quite a lot of wildness. Some wildness was the norm for our parties anyway, so if Julia was advertising it in advance then it was going to be a good one. Nevaeh had come to our house quite often over the six weeks since God had given her to me, but mainly for private time with the three of us; occasionally including the girls who were her "new friends", the ones we were using to misdirect her parents. So those girls had seen Nevaeh naked, but no one else had, and very few people outside my families had seen her at all. Julia had done that deliberately so Nevaeh wouldn't be recognized at the costume party. [By the way, Nevaeh had told her parents that she'd met Julia a few times because some of Nevaeh's new friends were also friends of Julia, and sometimes they all got together for a day's shopping around town or other such girly activities. That was to cautiously break the ice with Nevaeh's parents. After a few such 'accidental' encounters, Mr. and Mrs. Smith learned that their daughter and Julia were hitting it off because of their common interest in fashion. Her parents had got the impression - because Nevaeh had flat out lied to them because God approved of that if it was for Mark's benefit - that she had yet to meet me other than at the SCS event. We were going to break that ice very cautiously. Carol had come to the latest of these girly get-togethers, and Nevaeh had told her parents that Carol seemed to be a very nice girl.] A couple of days before the party Julia led me outside to see Nevaeh newly shaved and dressed (so to speak) in her angel costume. Carol and Ava were off doing something else together so weren't here for this, but they'd been to some of Nevaeh's fittings so they knew all about it already. Julia had kept it secret from me until now, so I got a fantastic surprise. I gave Nevaeh a long and deeply sincere wolf-whistle, then exclaimed, "WOW, you're MIND-BLOWINGLY sexy, Nevaeh! Is that for the party, or are you intending to wear it in the pool?" (We were standing outside near the pool, the costume's wings being too high to wear it inside.) I spent a couple of minutes raving about the costume, and enthusiastically complimenting Nevaeh. Praising how she looked, her bravery, her sexiness, her understanding that sex is meant to be fun, and celebrating as many aspects of her personality that I could think of as having any relevance at all, plus a few other aspects just because I'd gotten carried away. I'll start the costume's description at the bottom ... No, strike that, as it didn't have a bottom. I'll start with her boots. They were ABSURD! I'd swear they had 18-inch heels, which doesn't make sense because Nevaeh's feet would only be a third that length. The boots were made of dark blue leather. They were light-colored enough that they were unmistakably blue, so maybe I should've said "rich blue". I'm not a girl, so you'll have to forgive me (you'll never see that sentence anywhere else in this autobiography). The boots rose to what I'll call "quarter-upper-thigh", stopping a little above her knees, at a level that was halfway to her mid-thigh (I'm sure there's a name for that length, but I'm still not a girl). From a couple of inches below the knees to the top of the boots, the shade of the boots reduced smoothly from rich blue to mid-blue. Above the top of the boots, on each leg, were three widely spaced bands of leather, similar to dog collars, but smooth, fairly thin, and reasonably tight on her legs. The bands just above the boots on each leg were colored one-third of the way from the color of the top of the boots toward white. The middle bands were two-thirds of the way to white, and the top bands on each leg were pure white. There was considerably more bare leg than band, which the bands drew attention to. There was not the slightest attempt at panties; Nevaeh's hips, ass and pussy were totally bare, their bareness accentuated by the bands on the top of her legs. I'm not sure how her wearing bands on her legs made her torso seem even more naked, but it somehow did. No wonder clothing appeals to the female gender so much, because it doesn't obey the rules of logic. The next piece of clothing was what looked like the bottom half of a very tight, white leather corset, giving Nevaeh a much-narrowed waist and rising to cover the first few ribs. There was no top half to that corset, just gloriously naked breasts. In addition to narrowing her waist and accentuating the nakedness of her sexual organs, the purpose of the corset was to provide the support for the frame that was mounted on Nevaeh's back. That was held in place between the top of corset and the strong head-and-neck piece (described below). The rear frame held two narrow, ten-foot high wings. They were pure leather, with no attempt to simulate feathers. They were tall, starting behind Nevaeh's knees rising to about five or six feet above her head, and about three feet wide at their widest points. There was a 'waist' about 40% of the way up the wings and the bases were wider than the tops to give a two-part effect seen on some butterflies. The corners were on a curve, making them look nothing like demon's or bat's wings. Definitely more butterfly-like, but unnaturally long and narrow for that. They were kind of familiar but unlike any other wing shape I'd ever seen, so somewhat unsettling too. The bottom tips and the top third of each wing picked up a blue color again, going from white in the center of the wings and then progressing to the shade of the middle leg band at the tips of wings. The color was only around the wide edges of the ends of the wing; the center of the ends remaining white, giving the "color on the outside" look that many flower petals have. To help hold the frame in place, there were three straps running vertically up from the top of the front of the half-corset, one up Nevaeh's breastbone connected to the base of her headpiece, and two on the outside of each breast, just forward of each armpit, slightly and delightfully pushing her breasts together. Those two straps went up over each shoulder, attaching to the top of the frame on her back, to help hold it up. There were also three straps running up Nevaeh's spine and a few inches to either side, to attach the frame down to the rear of the corset and up to the base of the headpiece. The wings weighed quite a lot judging from the amount of support they needed. The headpiece/mask was pure white leather that covered her head and neck entirely, and was extremely reminiscent of the mask Archangel Michael had worn. It included the same rubber inserts around her ears, mouth, nose and the top of her head, and there were no eyeholes, making her look just as freaky as Archangel Michael had. Skintight leather gloves rising to "quarter-upper-arm" and colored the same as boots, including the graduation at their tops. Only one white band on each upper arm though, just above the biceps. I asked, "It's incredibly sexy, but can you breathe in there?" "It's fine, and there's a hole and a flap in the center of my mouth so I can drink with a straw. My head gets a bit warm, but I'll be outside at night so should be okay." Suspecting that Nevaeh didn't have the sight blob ability, I asked, "What about sight? Can you see in that thing?" "The front of the mask has got lots of little holes. It's fuzzy but not too bad." "What about walking? Those shoes look impossible." Julia answered, "She can take a few steps but that's all. It would be good if the Guardian Angel would float her around the party. That'll add to the image wonderfully. It can support the weight of her wings and even flap them a reasonable amount too." "When the angel sees how sexy she is, it's going to be a VERY turned on and cooperative Guardian Angel!" Nevaeh giggled behind her mask. By now she totally accepted that God didn't mind jokes about sex. Why would He? Sex was generous, giving, and Good, and He wanted people to feel free to have as much of it as they wanted. I walked around to look at the back of the costume, for a variety of reasons. To my unthinking surprise, the wings were smooth on both sides, with no sign on anything to hold them in their extended shape. Julia explained, "They're made of two pieces of leather with a thin frame inside, padded to look smooth. If you look at the wings edge-on, they're about a quarter of an inch wide." "Is it comfortable enough to wear for an evening, Nevaeh?" "I'm looking forward to it. I've NEVER worn anything like this before, but you probably knew that, haha." Proximity told me that she was excited and proud. There was some worry, but it was minor and diminishing with my appreciative comments. "You've got 'Best Costume' won already." #2: I commented, "I wonder if the Guardian Angel can do anything to make you look even more spectacular?" The Guardian Angel appeared, and as it turned out, it could do some things. It first suggested - by creating - two inch-wide, pale blue light blobs which moved to place themselves inside each of Nevaeh's eye sockets. It would give everything a very faint blue tinge for her, but far less than you might first think because all the normal incoming light was still its original color. All that was happening was Nevaeh was seeing a small amount of blue light in addition to her normal vision. Wearing colored glasses would have had far more effect. I asked her and she confirmed that it didn't bother her, but it would "bother" anyone else looking at her because enough blue light radiated out through her mask's blank eye areas that the effect was quite freaky. I created a couple of small NP-patches inside the spaces in front of her eyes, and tucked them upward so they were wedged between her eyebrows and the mask. They weren't pushing in any direction, so they necessarily moved with Nevaeh when she moved her head, and I mentally 'fixed' the two light blobs to be positioned relative to the NP-patches, so they moved around with her too. Before I had such a phenomenal amount of force, I nearly always had to coordinate multiple fingertips and my subconsciouses got very good at synchronizing such effects, essentially 'flying them in formation'. With the right mindset, it's easy. In the small space created by the insert ring in the crown of her head, I created a circular tube of light as a blue halo effect. It was inside her headpiece rather than spinning on top, as keeping a spinning one going all party would be too much of a nuisance for me and I liked the shine-through's understated but still freaky effect. I adjusted the halo's brightness so it gave the correct effect, although I'd need to adjust that again at the time of the party as it'd be at night. Julia suggested making the halo slightly darker than the light coming from Nevaeh's eyes. I understood that it'd fit the "Outward Equals Darker" trend of her wings and boots, so I adjusted its color by the right amount. I could do something spectacular inside her wings, like Archangel Michael's flowing ribs of light, but decided not to. This costume was intended to display Nevaeh's body, which incredible wing effects would detract from too much. I decided that was enough lighting effects and Julia agreed. These two were small, freaky, and could be explained afterward as electrical devices. Nevaeh hadn't been able to see the lighting effects, so when we'd finalized them, Julia went inside to fetch a mirror; the mirror meeting her at the front door. When Nevaeh saw herself, "Oh boy! People might think I'm a REAL angel! Like Archangel Michael. He was an angel inside a human body, and that's what people might think I am." I corrected, "Except you're MUCH sexier than he was!" Nevaeh smiled - the shape of her mouth was completely hidden by the inserts in her mask, but proximity wasn't so easily fooled. She said, "I can't believe I'm going to a party dressed like this." We discussed that for a while, giving me a chance to heap more compliments on her. I felt tempted to invite some of Nevaeh's classmates. It would've been exciting for her to walk among them so sexily and anonymously, and we could have invited them as we'd started getting to know some of them from the outdoor art project they were working on. On a little further thought I realized there was too much chance that one of them would later tell their parents too much about the party, and that'd ruin the fun I was having setting up the best looking girls in SCS for sex. I should be able to get access to ALL of them, using the two art teams as my foot in the door (wrong body part, and definitely the wrong opening, but you get the idea). In response to one worrying comment of Nevaeh's, Julia reassured her, "You'll be completely safe. We'll ask the Guardian Angel to split in two and have one of them stay with you, like I said at Rocky's." I exclaimed, "Ha! I should've known this came from Rocky's. I bet they had a blast making it for Nevaeh?" "Did they ever," agreed Julia. Nevaeh asked worriedly, now that the party was so close, "Will the angel split like that, just for me?" The Guardian Angel moved to be within her line of sight, then split off a quarter-sized, dimmer version of itself, which flew to above Nevaeh's head then hovered there. She had difficulty looking up or down sharply because her headpiece was so firmly attached, but she'd tracked enough of its movement to know where it had stationed itself. I made sure she understood, "There you go, Nevaeh. It's floating over your head to show you what it'll be doing during the party." "Oh boy! An angel looking after ME. I never imagined that happening to me. I'm not anyone special." Julia explained, "It would upset Mark if anyone he cared for strongly was hurt, so part of the Guardian Angel's job is to protect everyone close to Mark. That includes you, sweetie." Nevaeh felt the need to hug and kiss me in appreciation. The kisses didn't work out too well because of her mask - she'd momentarily forgotten about that - but the hug was great as it gave me a chance to check out the exposed parts of her lack-of-costume. While I was kissing those parts, I had a better idea than Julia's just using the Guardian Angel to look after Nevaeh. I suggested to Nevaeh, "How about I ask the Guardian Angel to be invisible when it guards you so no one will know it's there, and it'll do things for you. Let's pretend Julia is a boy who's getting too fresh with you at the party. Hold out one of your hands with your palm facing Julia, good, now - if the Guardian Angel will cooperate with this please? - make a slow pushing motion toward Julia." Nevaeh did as I asked, as did the Guardian Angel, causing Julia to be slid several feet backward. It was actually quite tricky to make the slide look smooth. An NP-push on Julia's chest would have caused her to stumble and possible fall over backward. Anyone looking at what I'd done would think it was a very simply movement, but the person it was being done to could feel the grips of their ankles, knees, arms, etc., and the upward and backward pushes to remove the vast majority of their weight and move them away. "Haha. Oh boy! People are going to think I did that." "They sure are. I imagine that will be VERY convincing! I just wish I'd thought of doing something like that for myself. I might've been able to fool people into thinking I had special powers." "Haha. You still could, even if I do it at the party." "People already know I have a Guardian Angel, so they'll probably realize it's doing the pushing. Plus I think I'm getting enough attention from everyone already." "That's true. I'm still getting HEAPS of phone calls from my friends asking me about you." (Because of Nevaeh's involvement in one of the outdoor art projects and her common fashion interest with Julia. This conversation took place three weeks after our visit to SCS and the two art projects were already underway. Nevaeh and the other members of the two teams had been to our home a few of times to look at the buildings that Mom wanted painted, take photographs of them, discuss possibilities, etc. The students were currently developing design ideas, so they hadn't spent much time with me yet; just introductions - I'd pleased each of them by knowing all of their names - and general chitchat to break the ice for their later visits. I've jumped the chronology around a bit, but the next few chapters will get it lined up again.) I spent some time training Nevaeh for how to let the Guardian Angel know what she wanted at the party: an open palm push toward someone to gently move them away, the motion to make whenever she wanted a drink to float to her, and most importantly, how to fly. That was easy to control because the only flight maneuver she needed to do was fly slowly in the direction her head was pointing. I had the two NP-patches over her eyebrows already, so the angel typed a message to me, telling me that it would fly Nevaeh in the direction she was looking whenever she was frowning strongly. Nevaeh practiced flying for a while, and was soon an expert at the simple process. She could, for example, be standing still, look upward over her right shoulder, then frown. I'd feel the NP-patches move (I was close enough to sense the frown in proximity too, but that would often not be the case at the party). She'd lift off the ground and float to her right, her body turning toward the new direction as she moved, the turn stopping when she let her head face forward. When she was high enough, she leveled her head, and I kept her going in the desired direction until she tilted her head down again, whereupon I'd take her down for a soft landing. It wasn't a perfect system. For example, if she turned her head sideways to point in a new direction, I couldn't tell whether she wanted a sharp or a gradual turn in that direction, but I'd guess that from the context at the time. It also required that I stay within five hundred feet of her and watch her with a sight blob the whole time, but that'd be no hardship at all; my minds would fight over who wanted the next turn of that 'duty'. The Guardian Angel left Nevaeh in a midair hover whenever she stopped frowning, which - I suggested - meant she could stand on the swimming pool, or even pretend to walk across it, an idea that made her laugh. She loved the flying and the whole deception we were playing on everyone. Julia told her, "You know we believe sex is fun and nothing to be ashamed of, so you don't have to worry about us if you want to have sexy fun with anyone else. You can use your being the anonymous center of attention to have a great deal of fun on Saturday, and we hope you will. Mark, Carol, Ava and I will break the sexual ice with you, and I expect most of the other kids will want feels too. It's a pity you can't use your mouth, but you can still have a lot of fun, and the Guardian Angel gives you complete safety and control." "No sex with boys though, right? I don't want to and Mark doesn't want me to." "You're right that Mark doesn't want you to, which means you can't do it. But I bet that by halfway through the party you'll be so horny you'll be dripping wet and desperately wanting sex. I can see you're turned on now, and we've only been talking about it." "Talking about it AND wearing this costume. This is an AMAZINGLY sexy thing I'm going to be doing, Julia." "You haven't heard the sexiest part yet. If the party goes well, later in the evening I'll give you the word to do something special. I want you to float yourself above everyone's head, then point to Mark and bend your finger to indicate you want him to come to you. The Guardian Angel will make Mark float up to you, will take his clothes off, and the gorgeous, sexy female angel will have full sex floating over everyone's heads with the most wonderful guy in the world." "WOW!" Nevaeh and I said. Nevaeh adding, "Your party is going to be FAMOUS!" Which is exactly the type of party that Julia likes to throw, so Nevaeh's comment brought a big smile to Julia's face. "I know," agreed Julia. "It's going to be the talk of town and maybe even the world." #15: #4: #All: I realized that Julia's using an unknown girl with a spectacular figure would make people believe that Nevaeh really was an angel, which would give our guests a huge thrill. Imagine what boys would think of being allowed to suck the nipples of a spectacularly sexy angel? You know how excited we get about Earth girls' nipples! I'd initially assumed Julia had intended the deception to be a short-lived one. Sometimes we throw parties that get VERY sexual. Even without Nevaeh's costume, this party was destined to be one of those as Julia had spread that word right from the beginning. I'd expected that after 11pm or so, Nevaeh and all the other girls would be topless at least, and couples or groups that wanted to would already be getting busy with each other. It'd be damned certain that Nevaeh would be the center of my core group's "getting busy". I'd assumed Nevaeh would be naked before the party was over, so the deception about her being an angel would be over with, but it sounded like Julia intended otherwise. Nevaeh worried, "Umm, I've never had sex in the air before. I might not be any good at it." Julia answered, "It's great fun. Would you like to go inside to practice?" "YES!" I agreed. Nevaeh had been excited before, and was even more excited now, so we made an "angel-line" for the living room (it's like a beeline except you have to be tipped sideways to get in the door). I've had sex floating above the bed and around the room with my girls many times, especially with Julia, so I've learned most of the tricks to making it work well, and a few tricks that made it work particularly well. I enjoyed demonstrating most of them to Nevaeh. There are quite a few things that can be done. For example, I can recline flat on my back (in midair) while the girl is sitting on my cock with her body in a "V" shape above me, her back and legs can be supported comfortably by NP, so her pussy is lowermost and very easy to thrust into. Holding that position on a bed is very hard work for a girl's stomach muscles, but with NP support she can be totally relaxed, even if her legs are pulled wide out to either side. Neither of us needs to move a muscle, as NP can provided all the action if I want; spinning us slowly in opposite directions while we're both thrusting up and down works well because of the novelty of the sensation. I was particularly enjoying the thought of fucking Nevaeh in the doggy position over everybody's heads (I guess that'd be the "Floating Doggy Position"), so they could see her fantastic breasts hanging down and being bounced around by my thrusts. I was so motivated by that image that I decided that we were going to practice it 'religiously', i.e., with an angel helping us fuck. I turned Nevaeh face down, NP supporting her almost entirely by her hips but with some support under the front of her shoulders to keep her body horizontal. Her legs could dangle down fully relaxed, but the crowd would get a better look if I spread them widely apart and angled them slightly forward, so her ass protruded nicely. With NP providing all the support, and my saying, "You're still clenching your stomach. Try to relax it," and similar instructions, Nevaeh soon learned to relax all her muscles. I 'stood' behind her, with my legs and torso bent backward slightly, so I was leading with my cock. NP did all the thrusting. Julia said, "It looks GREAT from below. Your cock looks fantastic going in and out of Nevaeh's sopping wet pussy." "{Giggle}. It feels great too. I LOVE having sex with you, Mark." "Me too, sweetie." I thought about making a joke out of some variation of, " ... with you I mean. That's even better than 'with Mark'." But I didn't. As enjoyable as logical jokes are, that one has been badly overused and Nevaeh's sense of humor isn't logical, so isn't as perfectly developed as her breasts. After I spoke about how wonderful Nevaeh's breasts must look, the angel helpfully fetched a couple of mirrors for us so Nevaeh and I could get good side and beneath views of what she looked like being fucked in her costume - and also so I could add that service to our normal lovemaking with Nevaeh because my girls and I missed it. Nevaeh LOVED looking at herself having sex. I'd like to say that she enjoyed looking at "US having sex", but it was herself that she most admired. I was certainly admiring her the most too, but I suspect our thought processes might have different motivations. Vanity was a large part of hers, both for how good she looked and because the angel was helping her so much. I couldn't fault her for either of those reasons because she truly was GORGEOUS, and God being in her life was a large part of how we'd hooked her. She was also excited by the novelty of seeing herself from a perspective she'd never experienced before. I understood that very well because it'd taken me quite a while to get used to seeing myself from every possible angle with sight blobs and watching ourselves making love in mirrors had turned on all of my girls. I said, "Being able to watch ourselves having sex in a mirror is VERY sexy. I hope the angel will hold a mirror for us again in the future." "Me too," agreed Nevaeh. Julia stripped off and floated up to join us, and the three of us had a great time, several times. After Nevaeh had gone home, I asked Julia, "Are you intending to keep Nevaeh's deception going the whole time so word will get out that there's another angel on Earth?" "It's up to you. You can have sex with her, cum in her so people will see it dripping out of her; then she could say, 'Thank you for giving me your child, ' and leave. That'd REALLY twist people's minds! Or she could get out of her costume after an hour and everyone could have a good laugh at the deception. What do you think?" "Your idea tempts me. There have apparently been three angels on Earth recently, although the middle one wasn't named or seen." [According to MANY stories reported in the media from all over the world recently, thousands of angels are popping up all over the place. They've replaced UFOs and Elvis as the thing to see. Hundreds of people are reporting conversations and other activities - some of them very weird - with angels. Being self-deluded already, Christians can very easily delude themselves a little more.] -- "Apart from the special effect of the Guardian Angel, there's never been a case of me and an angel being in public at the same time. You guys would swear I was with you when Archangel Michael was in public, but there's no independent proof of that. If Nevaeh was believed to be an angel, then our having sex together would throw any investigators off the "Mark Did Everything" idea. -- "Unfortunately, I can't see it working. Rocky or Nigel might leak that they made the costume, or perhaps they've already told other people that they're making an angel costume for your party. Another worry is that if people took it seriously, the media would start digging and they might stumble onto it being Nevaeh, which would get back to her parents and badly screw-up the good situation we've got going with her now. -- "Then there's the part about the angel and me having sex together. You know how Christians are about sex. Many of them are going to get seriously angry of the sacrilege of my having sex with an angel. And many people will decide that because we both had sex, we must both be evil demons. We could skip having sex at the party - which truly would be a sin! - but even secondhand reports of the costume are going to upset people." "I agree," said Julia, agreeably. "News of how much sex goes on at your parties might get out too. That'd be a pity." Julia had said "your parties". She calls many things mine that clearly aren't, except in her mind. They're "HER parties". Even "our parties" doesn't sit right with me as Julia does ALL the planning, managing and work, and loves doing it. I just turn up on the evening and enjoy the fruits of her labors. She's a VERY loyally biased girlfriend. "It certainly would be. Things are going superbly well at the moment. The Government has learned its lesson, the public has gone from hateful to excited and is finally starting to settle back down enough that I can move around in public without being mobbed. Soon I'll be able to do another flying event, and the public's reaction will cycle back to normal even faster. Soon my flying events won't excite anyone and I can start living my life to my full potential. Even OSU is going great. I think it'd be best not to rock any boats. -- "There's also the major consideration of if we try to claim Nevaeh is a real angel, and then she's uncovered as a fake, people might suspect the other angels were fakes too. Archangel Michael was in costume too, so he could easily lose credibility. His miracles would be hard to explain away, but I'd rather he didn't lose any credibility." Julia and I discussed it some more and agreed that Nevaeh would keep to her angel persona until after she and I had our hovering sex, then Nevaeh would descend and remove her costume. Julia wouldn't tell anyone Nevaeh's real name nor that she went to SCS, as there was too much chance of the excitement of the event causing stories that got back to her parents. Instead we'll continue to call her "Angel" even after her delectable humanity is revealed. We'd explain it was a deliberate nickname to avoid her parents finding out about her lewdness, because they'd kill her. That'd accentuate her normality very well. When we later discussed it with her, Nevaeh was okay with our decision. She wouldn't have the courage to be so sexy without the mask on, but taking it off afterward was something she would do for us, especially because we'd assured her that quite a few of the party goers would be similarly undressed by then. ------- A little background on my comment just above that "Even OSU is going great". Two months ago I'd told Prof and Vanessa about my ability to walk around home during the day and study thirty one screens at the same time. They'd almost exploded in excitement, especially poor Prof who'd been seriously affected by the news. Ever since then he'd been busting a gut to get my education moving forward faster. I'd suggested we waited until things died down before we risked making people excited again. A month ago I'd given Prof the nod to talk with the Dean about it. He hadn't told the Dean the truth about either how I studied - that's TOP SECRET - or that I could study approximately 36 degrees worth per year, but Prof had said enough to get the Dean very excited. Probably Prof had been showing a great deal of excitement at the time too. Our cover story is: "We think God did something to improve Mark's intelligence." That's sufficiently vague, non-threatening and boring for the general public, which made it a good excuse. For a university there's nothing exciting about undergraduate degrees. They're a dull, mass-produced, necessary first step. The Dean's excitement was about getting me into the graduate programs, which is what he started working on making happen. They'd relieved me of the need to do about 80% of the required coursework for the remaining courses in my three undergraduate degrees, opening the way for me to complete them very quickly. I had to do some additional work to make up the difference, but it was work that I could easily and quickly do. Writing an assignment, for example, was extremely easy for me. With effectively perfect memories, thirty two minds suggesting ideas, and my being able to type amazingly fast, even a large assignment takes me only a few minutes, especially if I got different minds to type different parts of it simultaneously. [[You'd be astonished to know how little time it's taking for me to write this autobiography.]] I'd already read all the lectures - not that I'd tell OSU that, as it was too fast - so I mostly just had to take exams, which I was spreading out over summer. I'd go to OSU to do the coursework that was considered essential - labs, groupwork, etc. - and so the lecturers could check my understanding face to face, but those would be straightforward. I'd easily finish all three undergraduate degrees by the end of summer vacation. OSU's only obtaining that dispensation a week ago didn't give me anything like enough time to consider going to a university in the too-rapidly approaching next academic year. There was way too little time for me to select a university I wanted to go to, then for it to get ready for me, for us to find secure accommodation, new security guards, etc., so I'll be spending another year in Corvallis, during which we'll do the university search and other preparation. Prof and I are both looking forward to that - Prof even more than me - as it should be a very interesting experience. During the next academic year I'll do Masters degrees in Physics and Math, plus a few more undergraduate degrees in the subjects I've become interested in, which are: Anthropology, especially Social, as that interests me much more than Physical Anthro'. Alexis and I will have another common interest to enjoy together. Biochemistry and Biophysics (it's a single degree). Computers, mostly because I think I should. A language, probably Chinese (OSU call the language degree major "Chinese", but the spoken component is Mandarin only). This'll depend on my getting a lot of the speaking practice coursework waived. I shouldn't need it as my ear-to-mouth coordination is extremely good. [[That's a result of my body 'repairing' itself so thoroughly. My ears worked as well as human ears can, through to my brain being efficiently organized to process sound. It was the same sort of change as my gaining physical agility.]] I should learn their language(s) because the Chinese are obviously going to take over the world economically. Their hundreds of millions of peasants all wearing the same single clothing style saves billions of women-hours per year that'd otherwise be wasted agonizing over clothing issues, giving the Chinese nation an awesome competitive advantage. I'll also keep reading a lot of courses for fun, as I can read far more courses than I need for the above degrees. I could easily do twenty more degrees, if not for the time needed for all the exams and my doing so many being dangerously freaky. I'd chosen to do the first two of the above undergraduate degrees because a high proportion of their courses interested me, which means I'll probably go on to do master's degrees in them. A computing degree isn't that interesting to me, but I'm doing it to plug a possibly important hole in my knowledge. Whatever I do in my life - I dream of building a spaceship that can zip around our solar system, for example - it'll almost certainly require a lot of computer work, so I should become more knowledgeable in that area, even if only to understand what the nerds I have working for me are doing. Learning Chinese is another subject I don't think I'll do a master's in. I just thought it could be interesting to do something very different than science. I am still finding interesting reading material in OSU's database. I'd recently looked at a major I'd previously skipped passed with aversion - the Military Science major - and was surprised by how much I'm enjoying many of its courses. Being a boy, I guess military stuff is in my Y-chromosome. No way am I going to enroll in a Military Science degree though. The LAST thing I want to do is make the military think of conscripting me. They'd have another war on their hands if they tried that. I'll also do a GREAT deal more reading than my enrolled degrees require. OSU's Masters in Physics are in one of: 1) Experimental Physics. 2) Computational Physics. 3) Theoretical AMO (atomic, molecular, and optical) Physics. 4) Nuclear and Particle Physics. 5) Solid State Physics. With the Dean's and Physics Department's assistance, my MS will be in all of them, even though I only need to take one set of exams at the end to get my "MS Physics". The same non-specialization will occur in my MS in Math. It has even more areas to choose between: 1) Actuarial Science, (no). 2) Algebra. 3) Analysis. 4) Applied Mathematics. 5) Computational Mathematics. 6) Differential Equations. 7) Financial Mathematics, (no). 8) Geometry. 9) Mathematics Education, (no). 10) Number Theory. 11) Numerical Analysis. 12) Topology. 13) Probability. Apart from the three I've noted with "(no)", all the other Math specialties have some interest to me and could be important in my future, so I'll do them all. My doing what will effectively be fifteen Master of Science degrees in one year, plus a few undergraduate degrees for light entertainment, will have the advanced universities wetting themselves to get me into their doctorate programs. Doing the master's degrees at an average university like OSU is okay, according to Prof, but he says it's important I do my doctorates at a top-tier university, so I'll definitely be hitting the road in twelve months. Carol will be another year older before we leave home, which will be easier on her, not that she'll be lacking in support from Julia and Ava. By the way, unlike when I started my undergraduate degrees, I'm confident that I can understand all the material I've listed above. I blew straight through all the undergraduate reading material without coming close to raising a sweat, and OSU has never had a student who got 100% exam after exam in Math and Physics the way I did. I am intelligent enough to take on masters degrees, and if I do need to stop and think about something, having thirty two minds on the job will mean that I won't be pausing for long. ------- Chapter 390: The Heavenly Costume Party Saturday, August 11, to Monday, August 13, 2007 Having described the "Nevaeh As An Angel" plan so thoroughly, I'll leave that aspect out of my description of the party. I'll describe other parts of the night, plus where Julia and I had added to the plan. Nevaeh hid just inside the mouth of the emergency tunnel for the best part of an hour, waiting until the party was going well. Boring for her, but Julia wanted her creation to have a grand entrance with maximum effect. Julia had told Nevaeh to bring a book and I'd put a chair there for her to sit on, but I saw that Nevaeh spent most of the time daydreaming and lightly playing with herself. I wanted to use NP to help her, but even if I created a Guardian Angel near her, I dared not risk it. For centuries Christians have preached that Sex, the Devil, and Evil are all closely related, if not the same thing, and that's far too deeply brainwashed into people now. If the Guardian Angel touched Nevaeh sexually there'd be too much risk of her flipping over to believing the Guardian Angel was the Devil trying to seduce her into sex. Once that happened, we'd never get her back and she'd be giving herself a huge amount of very real psychological damage and torture. When Julia decided it was time, the Guardian Angel appeared in front of Nevaeh, stroked her cheek comfortingly, picked her up and flew her out of the tunnel, locking the vault door behind her, like a tidy Guardian Angel should. Under my control rather than her directing it, Nevaeh flew up to about 400 feet above and to the side of the party. I turned her halo and eyeball lights on, adjusting them to give them the look I wanted, which was freaky but in a low-key way so they wouldn't detract from Nevaeh herself. I placed a large light blob around Nevaeh, shaped to be a tall oval that was just large enough to contain her and her slowly flapping wings. It was light blue in color and too dim to be visible, but as Nevaeh slowly descended to the party, it brightened slowly and steadily; mostly "slowly", as it was just to accent her. The party was outside around the Kids' pool area. It's a large, very well landscaped area - if I may say so myself - and very suitable for our style of parties. It has total privacy from the rest of the property, bushy areas for the partygoers who want to slip away for some quiet 'cuddling' (we spread dozens of outdoor cushions around to make that more comfortable), plenty of seats around the outside of the open area, good party lighting, a natural looking bar at one end, a 20-speaker sound system - no live band at this party as it was going to be too sexy and weird for that - tables with plenty of food, and an area near the pool that was suitable for a dance floor, a good sized pool-house for freshening up, etc. The lighting was dim so it didn't take long for someone to point up at Nevaeh and say, "What's that?" I turned up the lighting around Nevaeh quicker, and soon people were saying, "OH MY GOD! IT'S AN ANGEL!" Mostly it was girls that said that, the guys being unable to speak with their tongues hanging out of their mouths. The Guardian Angel appeared above my head, then immediately shot up to 'meet' Nevaeh, zooming around her excitedly, like a young puppy running circles around its returning master, only in three dimensions now. I said loudly so everyone could hear me, "It looks like my Guardian Angel recognizes her." Nevaeh's descent continued, with her encapsulating blue light blob becoming a very noticeable feature. It wasn't bright, but it made up for that by being incredibly impressive and freaky. It looks VERY strange to see someone glowing. She slowed into a hover about twenty feet above us and turned in a circle to look at everyone, who were ALL looking at her. I heard several excited exclamations along the lines of, "Her eyes GLOW!" Nevaeh turned to face me. She pointed at me and made the "come here" finger-bending motion. I floated up in the air, stopping in front of her but two feet lower since I was just a mortal. Nevaeh reached out and put a forefinger on my forehead (I'd read a lot of science fiction in my pre-girlfriend days). After twenty seconds, she took it off. I looked down at all the open mouths, then said, "I can't say her name. It's not in English. It sounds like a harp and an organ playing at the same time, so it's unpronounceable. I'll call her 'Angel'. Angel heard I was having a costume party and decided she would like to come. She hopes you like the costume she made for you?" When she lands, people will see that her costume is artificially constructed so I was making it clear right from the start that it wasn't meant to be real. The girls were awestruck, and the remaining third of our audience - the sexes aren't invited equally to our parties - were struck in two different ways: awe- and lust-. I said, "She's not from here and can't speak English. I don't think she can talk at all. She can understand English though. She's going to join the party..." That caused an excited ruckus that I had to pause for. Someone recovered from their 'struck-ness' enough to pull out cellphone and take a picture, which started a deluge of copycats. ^ [Some time after Nevaeh, Julia and I had finished our floating sex two days ago, I'd thought about the risk of Nevaeh's getting photographed. We have a strict rule at our parties that no photography is allowed once things heat up, but people might not think the rule applied to a visiting angel. I could make an announcement about it, but I expected our crowd to be very excited by the angel's costume and they might misbehave. Nevaeh would have her mask on for the first couple of hours, but her identity would be revealed later, and thereafter many people would know who she was. I wasn't happy at the idea of there being pictures of her body in potential circulation, especially not considering the angle the first ones would be taken from, so I'd thought of a solution. A little testing on my cellphone camera confirmed it, as did some online research. The digital light sensors inside cellphone cameras detect a wide range of light frequencies. That's no good for color photography because every color would register the same (the sensors can't tell what frequency they're sensing; only that they're receiving light), so each pixel of the total sensor is made to detect an individual color by placing a filter over it, usually red, green or blue for the obvious reason. It'd be useless if the filters only passed through one specific frequency each because all the parts of a picture that weren't one of those three specific frequencies wouldn't register on the sensors and would be pure black in the final image, so the filters have to let through a wide range of frequencies; roughly a third of the width of the visible light spectrum, although that's a simplification. I experimented, and found that if I took a picture of something with my phone while I had an infrared or ultraviolet light blob in front of it, then the red or blue filter let a lot of my blob's light through to the sensor. That caused the camera's auto-exposure system to believe there was a great deal of light - which there was, just not visible light - so it made the exposure time extremely short, and therefore useless for nighttime photography. The pictures would've come out totally black except that infrared and ultraviolet were displayed on the camera's LCD screens as visible red and visible blue, which would've washed out the image even if the shutter speed had been slower. To make doubly sure I would ruin any photographs, I would use both types of light blobs at the same time. The way the filters worked, more ultraviolet seemed to get through so the camera's display was mostly blue, not that I cared whether it was blue or red, just so long as it wasn't embarrassing for Nevaeh. I didn't use the above techniques when Julia and I took a lot of pictures of Nevaeh after she'd put her costume on before the party. We wanted them for our albums, and Nevaeh wanted us to retain some copies for her too, to give to her when she was old enough to have enough privacy from her parents. I had some fun imagining her kids one day seeing those photos of their mom and having their opinion of her blown away. During our photography session, Nevaeh had asked me worriedly about her being photographed at the party. I'd told her that the angel had already messaged me that it would protect her from that, which had evaporated her anxiety because she trusted God totally.] ^ After the deluge of photo taking, there was a deluge of, "Oh no, it didn't work." I'd interposed the infrared and ultraviolet blobs between Nevaeh and the crowd. Not for long enough to cause sunburn, as I'd calibrated how much I would output against the sun's output in the afternoon. I was radiating about ten times more ultraviolet than the sun does at noon, but it'd be for less than a minute. Infrared was less of a danger but I didn't want people to notice it. I could see that they were so distracted that I was able to radiate quite a lot to make sure the photographs failed. Even the second - and from the guys, the third and fourth - photography attempts didn't work. Nevaeh was puzzled but pleased, which was a good improvement over her suddenly being worried and unhappy when the photography had started. Julia was puzzled and pleased too. Mostly pleased as she wouldn't bother puzzling over it much. She'd just assume I'd done something. Julia doesn't care about the "how" of my abilities, just what they can be used for. Once the crowd had proved to themselves that photography didn't work, I loudly stated, "NONE of you thought to be polite enough to ask the angel whether she'd agree to allow her naked body to be photographed. She obviously does not agree and she's stopped it working somehow. I STRONGLY suggest you do not try to take any more photos of her because I wouldn't be at all surprised if your phones get crushed next time. You saw the way Archangel Michael escalated his punishments, so please take the hint before it gets painful." I could see they'd taken my point very well, and most of them were already putting their phones away. No one within my proximity range, which was most of them, was intending to take another shot, so I canceled the infrared and ultraviolet blobs. I added, "First, I think you're insane for being impolite to an angel. I'll assume you were thoughtless but please don't make that mistake again. Second, she's now a guest at our party so I'm insisting on no photography. You know one of our strongest standing rules is no photography once the party gets wild. None of you would like it if people took photos of you later, so please extend Angel the same courtesy seeing as how her costume is wild already." They were all suitably contrite. I turned to Julia, "All our friends seem to be immoral. Did you spread a rumor for them to behave that way?" Our immoral friends were too worried to get my joke immediately, but Julia did. Her laughter and apologetic suggestion that I should spank her later made the others realize what I'd meant, and the mood lightened. While Julia was talking, and our friends were letting out their tension, I whispered to Nevaeh, "Feel my body in a few seconds." "Thank you, Mark," was whispered back. "If that's for stopping photos, thank the Guardian Angel later. I can't stop cameras." "I meant for telling them to stop." "You're welcome, sweetie." Nevaeh reached out her hands and placed them on my shoulders. With my NP guiding her hands, she started slowly rubbing them on my body. It cooperated by slowly rising in the air so Nevaeh didn't have to bend over. The crowd watched with intense silence, which became particularly intense and especially silent as Nevaeh's hands approached my manhood. She showed no reluctance - it'd be more accurate to say she was looking forward to it - her thinly gloved hands sliding under my fig leaf and fondled my cock and balls. Under my leaf was a matching green leather G-string, sigh, which Nevaeh's hands stayed on top of. She and I would get sexier later in the evening. [Julia hadn't put the same effort into my costume as she had into Nevaeh's. It'd been made by the same people though, amid much joking about getting Markie in for a measuring. Julia had already provided them with a detailed description of my improved equipment and the perverts were very eager to see it for themselves (Julia hadn't been able to resist teasing me about that). They would see it too, a few minutes after Julia decides my body's growth has stopped. Carol was Eve, by the way, as Julia deemed Carol my #1 wife - in my affections rather than in authority; Julia had a lock on that. There was no risk of our guests thinking Carol and me being Eve and Adam implied that there was anything sexual between us, as these were our close friends and they knew us far too well to think of us that way, hehe. To our guests tonight, Julia had pointed out, "Eve had Adams genes, so Carol was the only choice."] After my cock and balls were felt up, my body raised so Nevaeh could feel my legs all the way down to my feet. When she was finished, my body dropped down to its original inferior-mortal position. I said, "Would you allow me to introduce you to my sisters and girlfriends, Angel?" She nodded, and we floated down toward my girls, who were standing next to a particularly well-landscaped, small stone wall, so we'd only have the crowd on one side of us, making them easier to manage. A gap opening up in front of my girls as people backed WAY back. Just before we landed, people started exclaiming, "She's got a HALO!", and similar comments. It increased the excitement even further. Judging by their emotions - and it was very easy to judge them because they were so strong - everyone had fallen for our deception. Maybe someone more than twenty four feet from me felt different, but I doubted it. (I should mention that three of the girls here were the ones who were pretending to be Nevaeh's new friends to deceive her parents. They'd seen Nevaeh naked several times so were necessarily in the loop for this plan and were keeping quiet. In my description of the party, I'll write thing like "all the girls did [something]", or "everybody did [something else]". It's too tedious to write "everybody except the three girls in the know". You can assume they did the same actions, as part of their acting as surprised as everyone else.) I canceled the big light blob around Nevaeh when she touched down. No particular reason; it was just easier. I said, "Angel, this is my sister Carol Anderson." "Hello, Angel. I am honored to meet you," said Carol politely, as you should be when talking to angels. Angel responded by spending the next minute feeling Carol's body. At this early stage of the evening, Carol was still wearing her fig leaf bikini top and bottom, so the sexiest it got was Nevaeh cupping one of Carol's breasts in both of her hands, gently squeezing and rubbing her hands over it. That was still pretty damned sexy judging by the proportion of guys that had erections, 97.5% of us because I was using the ever-useful go-softs. Then I introduced Donna. Donna had chosen to go as a young Mary Magdalene from when she was still a prostitute, and - according to Donna - wore a dress/robe-thing that bared one breast. The guys would later be spoiled for choice, but Donna has been extremely popular so far during the party. Nevaeh felt Donna, including a full exploration of Donna's exposed breast. 97.5% of the guys were struggling mightily to prevent an accident occurring. Nevaeh and Donna hadn't done anything sexual together before, but neither was the least hesitant about this. Donna had been sexually excited from even before she put her half-costume on, and Nevaeh was even more excited because of her costume and what she was going to do later tonight. Neither lusted specifically for each other, but they knew each other well enough to know that neither of them had any silly sexual hang-ups. [To explain my knowing that "neither lusted for each other" even though I knew they were both feeling lust: I can proximity sense emotions, such as lust (it's one of my favorites), but the sense doesn't tell me who the emotion is for. I have to get that from the context. Because I can sense everybody within twenty four feet of me with so much detail, including when they let their guard down because they think no one is looking at them, I usually get plenty of the context I need to interpret emotions. For example, Carol often feels lust when she looks at Nevaeh, which reduces when she looks elsewhere, so it isn't hard to work out who Carol's lust is for. Alternatively, I could always do something direct like: "What do you think of Person B, Person A?" At the moment, both Donna and Nevaeh were experiencing lust, but I knew from the context and prior experiences with them that it wasn't for each other.] Julia - dressed as a very impressive looking Queen Jezebel - was the next. I floated Angel a couple of feet sideways to place her in front of Julia. Upon hearing me introduce "Julia Williams", Nevaeh turned to me and placed her finger on my forehead again for a second (this was scripted in advance). When Nevaeh removed her finger, I laughed for a couple of seconds, then stopped to explain to everyone, "Angel has a sense of humor. It's hard for me to translate the sensations, but as best I can, it felt like Angel said: 'I was told Julia insisted everyone MUST wear costume, so I make costume. Heaven very scared of Julia.'" Our audience laughed at that. When Julia tells people that Mark is throwing a costume party, then people know they DAMNED well better be wearing a GOOD costume when they come. If they don't, Julia will think they're being disrespectful toward me, and Julia thinking that about somebody is not good news for that somebody - shortly to become a nobody. So no one was the least surprised that Heaven was scared of Julia. When Angel had finished feeling Julia, she took Julia's hands and placed them on her [Nevaeh's] shoulders. Julia asked, "Do you want me to feel you, Angel?" Angel nodded, so Julia starting feeling up God's servant. As we'd planned, Julia bypassed Angel's pussy, but the angel took Julia's hand and pushed it back where it should be. Julia started rubbing, and the angel sighed. That was the first sound she'd made and it surprised people. The angel's hips started moving, causing considerably more surprise and comment. Then she put her finger on my forehead for a second. I informed the crowd, "She's never been in a human body before. She was taken by surprise by how good Julia is with her fingers." When we'd planned this, I had been scripted to say, "She didn't know how good it felt," so my new wording had given Julia a surprise compliment. Julia chuckled appreciatively. After several seconds, Angel sighed and stood back. Julia lifted her hand, saying, "You're very wet. May I lick my fingers?" The crowd was SHOCKED at Julia's brazenness. Then even more shocked when the angel nodded and Julia did it. Julia had a good lick, then said, "Hmm, heavenly," which was backward. The crowd laughed at the half of the joke they understood. The next introduction was to Ava. The moment the introduction started, Angel grabbed Ava's hand and put it on her pussy, sighing as she started moving her hips slowly forward and back. She grabbed Ava's other hand and put that on one of her breasts, then she returned the favor to Ava (over her costume, but it's the thought that counts). I completed the verbal part of the introduction, then waited half a minute for the girls to complete the non-verbal part. When they were finished, I said, "Now you've met the people I live with. Is it okay if I let everyone else introduce themselves to you as you circulate?" The angel nodded. There was a momentary pause, and then YOU SHOULD'VE SEEN THE GUYS RUSH TO BE INTRODUCED! For about one second, until a nervous Nevaeh made the pushing motion toward the bulk of them. All the guys slid backward several feet, then the NP-points canceled. Nevaeh was very happy now; this was going to be fun! I laughed, then asked Angel, "I'm a poor host. Do you want a drink?" She made the gesture toward the bar, and a drink poured itself into a glass, a straw added itself, and the drink floated across to her. People were very impressed. She took hold of it and took a drink. I hadn't thought of it in advance, but I should've told her not to use her hands to hold it. It would've been cooler to have it follow her around, and that would've left both her hands free for introductions. I'd whisper it to her later. I asked Jessica, one of the nearby girls, to step forward. Jessica is bisexual. Quite a few of the girls in our social circle are, even if they aren't, girls being delightfully adaptable creatures. Jessica truly is bisexual so she had no reluctance about that part of the introduction, but the whole concept of being introduced to an angel was blowing her mind. She very hesitantly faltered her way forward. When Jessica got close to me, she said, "I don't know what to do?" That gave me the ideal opportunity to explain the contact rules. I said loudly for everyone to hear, "The Angel is new to humans and you're new to angels, so let's make up some simple rules. If any of you don't want to be introduced to the angel, step backward if she approaches you. I know enough about angels to know she won't force it and she won't be offended either. Angels are very moral and would never go against someone's wishes like that. Obviously that only applies to the girls here because none of the guys would DREAM of refusing an introduction, guys being so much more polite than girls. -- "If she doesn't want to meet you, she'll either step back or do that pushing thing that worked so well against the stampeding horde of very polite guys a few seconds ago. Is that okay, Angel?" Angel nodded. -- "Once the introduction has started, there's the issue of sexual contact. Angel can't talk so I suggest that if she wants to be touched sexually, then she makes the 'Come Here' finger motion, like this," I demonstrated it so no one had any doubt what I meant. "If she does that, you're permitted to touch her sexually. You don't have to, but you can if you want. If she wants to touch you sexually, she will half-advance her hand toward you, then pause. If you say 'No' or are just silent, she'll withdraw her hand. You have to say 'Yes' or something else agreeable for her to proceed. PLEASE NOTE that Angel initiates both her being touched and her touching you. She will indicate 'Come Here' or she will half-reach for you. That means - GUYS - that you do NOT reach for Angel. I'm sure you want to but she's a VERY special guest so we're going to be VERY polite to her, AREN'T WE?" There was a chorus of begrudging, disappointed, "Yeses" and moans. I turned to Nevaeh, "From time to time human males have been known to get pushy about sex. If any of them misbehave toward you, I suggest you push them into the pool. If one of them misbehaves a second time, push him into the pool and hold him on the bottom for five minutes. I promise he won't misbehave again." We hadn't scripted this conversation, and Nevaeh was scared about agreeing to what I'd just said. She was probably worried that the Guardian Angel would do it if she agreed. As worried as she was, and even without her nodding, the guys were a GREAT deal more worried. Even scared. They apparently thought the angel wouldn't know how long humans could hold their breath, so it was frighteningly possible that she would hold them on the pool's bottom without any awareness of how serious it was. Their fright would dissipate quickly - Angel had exposed D-cup breasts - but hopefully enough of it would remain to keep them polite. I said, "Let's restart this introduction. Angel, if you want Jessica to touch you, make the 'Come Here' motion." Angel did so, and a nervous Jessica reached out to touch Angel's hip. Angel used her hand to correct Jessica's aim, then she half-extended her hand toward Jessica's breast. "{Gulp}. Yes," agreed Jessica, the shameless hussy, that trait of hers being a large part of why she'd gotten an invite to our party. The angel started feeling Jessica through her clothes, which spurred Jessica to get her own hand moving, and a few seconds later things were progressing nicely. Angel added her second hand, then Jessica did so too, and they spent a few seconds getting to know each other's good parts. When Nevaeh had enough, she stepped back. Jessica sighed, then raised her hand. She asked Angel, "Can I taste please?" Angel nodded. Jessica tasted Nevaeh's juices cautiously. Then took a couple of bigger licks. With a surprised voice, Jessica exclaimed, "She tastes like a normal girl!" I pointed out truthfully, "She is a normal girl. That's a human body there, in case you hadn't noticed." "Ahh yeah. I expected different, but you're right." #6: #2: #6: Jessica made some welcoming comments to Angel, then I said loudly, "Hmm, I need to introduce Angel to a male. Who will I..." "ME!" from every male here, edging forward eagerly but without the stampede this time. It would've been better to let Nevaeh pick, but she didn't know any of these guys so I did it. I announced, "I'll choose the guy who was the most polite when the rest of you were trying to stampede Angel. Ross, do you want to be introduced?" By the time I'd gotten to the question mark, Ross was standing in front of Angel, panting. I doubted it was from his short run, regardless of its being so fast. Angel made what Ross thought was the best hand gesture in the entire Universe. Being the gentleman he was, he spared Angel the hassle of having to make more than half the gesture, his enthusiasm for her invitation was very quickly demonstrated. He also let her know that he was VERY agreeable to her touching him. Once the two of them were pawing each other, I explained loudly, "Ross should've waited for Angel to extend her hand before he agreed. I understand he was excited and his little head was doing all the thinking for him, but be careful you don't annoy Angel, guys." Far too quickly, Angel stood back from Ross, much to his anguish. He asked her, "Can I taste you?" Angel nodded. While Ross was licking his fingers, I announced, "I don't think Angel cares about anyone tasting her juices afterward, isn't that right, Angel?" Angel nodded again. "So don't bother asking anyone. If you're lucky enough to get some, go for it." -- "Angel, if you want, someone can lick you between your legs. It's even better than fingers. If you want someone to, do the 'Come Here' gesture then point to your pussy, okay?" I nearly laughed out loud because I sensed what Nevaeh was about to do. She made the Come Here gesture to me then pointed at her pussy. We'd finished all the arrival script already, just having the much smaller Floating Sex and Unveiling scripts left, so I'd been improvising and had thoughtlessly not expected Nevaeh to choose me. Not that I minded at all! I floated her up to my mouth, spreading her legs as she approached. Several of the girls made comments about that being a very cool way of getting into position. I got stuck in (speaking colloquially) and Nevaeh responded very quickly. I thought she probably needed it by now so I took her all the way. So she wouldn't ruin the deception by crying out something in passion, the Guardian Angel - she would think - held her mouth gently closed. Nevaeh managed to get out some impressively emotive grunts and groans though. After I'd taken her edge off, I lowered her to the ground and we let everyone mingle. In other words, let them surround Angel. The guys were very polite for all of fifteen minutes, which I'm pretty sure is a new world record for guys around a girl with exposed D-cup breasts. Then a guy called Michael (no relation to the Archangel) got carried away by trying to upgrade his caressing of Angel into a finger-fuck. Nevaeh started stepping back, but Michael changed his caress of her ass into a grip to hold her from leaving. Doubtless a thoughtless reflex on his part, but Nevaeh didn't appreciate it AT ALL - making a forceful pushing motion. In accordance with her obvious strong disapproval, Michael went FLYING: thrown high into the air in the direction of the swimming pool. That'll be the last time he ever tries to forcibly finger-fuck a reluctant angel! I checked on Nevaeh and she was fine, and even happy. [She told me later that the LOVED that the Guardian Angel was looking after her. It made her feel very special and safe.] I decided not to kick Michael out, figuring that the damage to his cellphone was probably punishment enough. I still needed to teach the others to be polite so I announced, "Michael started finger-fucking Angel, and when she stepped back because she didn't want that, he grabbed her ass to stop her from getting away. That'd be bad enough with a normal girl, but it was a REAL stupid mistake with an angel. Michael is obviously too immature and insensitive for sex, so to all the girls here, how about you give him 24 hours of no sex so he can do some growing up? He can think about his mistake while the rest of us guys are having a great party." The girls agreed, so Michael was cut off for the evening. [With twice as many girls as guys at our parties and with the action that happens during them, the guys normally have fantastic times, but Michael went home when the party got wild. Depressed, I guess.] A few minutes after that, some of the guys approached me, "Ahh, Mark. We're very worried that Angel might drown the next guy." I knew what their concern was, but I wanted them to learn to be careful with Nevaeh and I enjoyed prolonging their worry by answering, "I doubt Michael will misbehave again." "We're worried she doesn't understand English well enough and might hold someone else under if one of us accidentally upsets her." They were too worried for me to simply say, "Make sure you behave yourself then." Their worry would damage the mood of the party, so I said, "I'll talk with her." "Thanks very much. We think she's FANTASTIC and don't want to upset her." Angel wasn't just FANTASTIC, she was PERFECT! She had exposed, goddess-perfect, D-cup tits; a fantastically sexy body especially with the corset making her waist even narrower; she was asking guys to grope her; was fondling them back; and she didn't talk. From a guy's perspective, a girl could only be better if she could materialize pizza. Nevaeh was currently flying across the pool. She LOVED flying and looked for any excuse to do it. She couldn't walk in her bizarre boots, so she found plenty of excuses. I called her over, she filed a new flight plan, heading my way. I walked to the edge of the crowd, got her to stand with her back to the crowd and used NP to lift her finger on my forehead. Then we had a quiet conversation. There was no one within 24 feet of us and I had an NP-box around us so we wouldn't give the game away. First I checked that Nevaeh was happy. I could tell in proximity that she was, but it was still polite to ask. After a short, enthusiastic reply, Nevaeh added, "I have a question though. Is it okay for me to give the guys hand-jobs? I don't mind if you say no; I just want to know." "Thank you for asking. You definitely have my permission for that, just make sure none of their cum gets near your pussy. You're very wet and I imagine there's a chance a sperm could swim inside you. You'd better wash your hands before you finger any other girls too, although nearly all of them are on the pill. Other than those cautions, the guys are half-creaming themselves already, so a couple of tugs from you and they'll blow their loads." "Yeah, that's why I want to do them. They're so turned on I've had to stop touching some of them after only a few seconds, but now that I know you're okay with it, it'll be fun to see how fast I can get them off." "Have a blast, sweetie." "It's crazy how excited they are. I haven't said a single word and they can't see my facial expressions or anything, but they're falling all over themselves to be with me." "That's a puzzle. I wonder why they behave like that?" "Because I've got fantastic tits! That's what you keep telling me." "Sorry, what were you saying. I was distracted by your fantastic tits." Nevaeh is very proud of them now that she knows how much I love them. That's the best example of a win-win deal I've ever come across. It ties for first place with Donna having the same attitude - I seem to be very good at showing my appreciation to girls who have great tits. Angel flew back to the party while I walked back to the group of worried, waiting guys. I told them, "Angel understands what I meant. She touched my forehead and sent me what she understood, and it's correct. I taught her about giving guys hand-jobs, so if any of you are particularly nice to..." I was suddenly standing alone, so I yelled at their backs, "You're welcome. See you later." I didn't think the guys' worry would depress the party now. #19: #12: #19: I was enjoying myself talking a great deal of bullshit at this party; even more than I normally would. For example, people were asking me, "What's it like to have her touch your forehead and communicate that way?" I had fun inventing a huge pile of bullshit for that one. Another question was, "How come she never communicates to anyone else that way?" "Because it only works on people with an EXTREMELY advanced and sophisticated sense of humor." They laughed and then assured me that explanation couldn't be right, which had to be contradictory. I was talking to girls so it was no use pointing out the illogic of their position. I said, "Okay, I'll admit I might've made a small mistake there, but only in the last few words. You might remember that one of the other angels mentioned in an email that I have an advanced soul? If she tried to communicate with anyone else, she might damage them, but my soul can handle it." "Wow!" The girls were SERIOUSLY impressed, and were looking at me with a HIGHLY respectful attitude. It was a pity that we'd be unveiling Nevaeh in a couple of hours. It was also amazing that souls had such a widespread and good reputation that my claiming to have an advanced one so impressed EVERYONE who was listening. Almost all of our friends would describe themselves as non-religious, yet they'd been brainwashed into believing that souls were real, despite no one ever having produced a shred of evidence for them. To anyone with half a brain, souls were obviously a wish-fulfillment fantasy. People are amazingly gullible, although my current audience would doubtless claim the excuse of having just seen an angel arrive. That would hardly argue against their being gullible since the 'angel' was obviously a very human girl, including how she tasted, in a costume. It's not as if Julia and I make a big deal out of religion: my post-resurrection attitude and behavior is the same as it's ever been, and when one of my friends starts a religious discussion - my recently being resurrected making that irresistible - I just wave my hand dismissively and tell them I couldn't care less. One more guy ended up in the pool involuntarily. Brent was sitting about twenty feet behind me, fiddling with something hidden down by his side with a great deal of caution in his proximity reading. I scratched my forehead to cover me blinking to use a sight blob to check what he was doing. He was changing his phone's camera settings, turning off the flash and a couple of other things. Then he stood up and started heading toward Nevaeh. I excused myself from my current group and wandered parallel to our next high-diver. When he considered himself to be in a good position, he slid his phone out of his pocket and prepared to shoot from the hip, with his phone aimed at Nevaeh. Ki doesn't just show intended body movements, but also shows when someone is aiming something because they're visualizing the path enough for it to create ki. I don't know why that is, but I don't know why living creatures project ki in the first place. Brent's taking aim was good enough for me. I NP-snatched the phone out of his hand and grabbed him with NP. He squealed as he was accelerated forcefully up and half the way to the pool, where I let him go, effectively tossing him into the pool. I'd initially left his phone where it was. Now I picked it up and moved it toward the trashcan, slowly enough that people saw it and alerted their neighbors. I crushed and mangled the phone into small pieces that dropped into the trash. I walked over the Nevaeh, using NP to pull her forefinger toward my forehead. She completed the movement herself once she knew what I wanted, as usual. After a couple of seconds I pulled back a few inches, telling her, "I'll tell everyone as soon as Brent is out of the pool." Brent had apparently decided that playing ignorant was the best strategy because he emerged from the pool saying, "I wasn't anywhere near her. What was that for?" I answered, "You were about to take her photograph..." "I didn't! I haven't got any photos in my phone. I'll show you." He moved toward where he'd been standing. I said, "Angel told me that you were ABOUT to take it. And I wouldn't bother looking for your phone. It's been crushed into small pieces and dropped into the trash." "What! But I hadn't done anything!" "Brent, you're arguing with an angel from GOD! Do you really think God doesn't know what you were doing, and what you were about to do. Angel certainly knows. If I were you, I'd shut up before you get yourself into serious trouble." Brent wisely decided to shut up. He muttered something no one understood, then went to look in the trash. He wouldn't like the look of that, as I'd even snapped his SIM card in half. I told the group, "Angel doesn't want photos taken of her, so if you take one you're stealing it. I don't know if anyone else has taken one, but if you have I STRONGLY suggest you go to the bathroom in a few minutes and delete it. You've seen on TV that Archangel Michael usually shot people that pissed him off, and that was after only one mistake. You've been told 'no photos' twice now plus you know it's one of our standing party rules, so I shudder to think what would happen to anyone who's caught with a photo after this. You've seen what the Guardian Angel did to people it objected to, so please don't risk it." The innocent soon realized they had nothing to fear, so the mood bounced back reasonably quickly. I didn't bother keeping a sight blob on the bathroom to see if anyone followed my suggestion. All I'd learn from that would be that guys are pathetic and incapable of thinking when it comes to sex, which is something I already knew. I couldn't even blame the guys as Nevaeh is gorgeous at any time, and at the moment she was truly the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. ^ Nevaeh was enjoying herself immensely, as were the MANY guys she gave amazingly quick leather-gloved hand-jobs to. She also frigged off some girls, and after checking with me, allowed some girls and the gentler guys to frig her off too. Nevaeh was so turned on that she was easy to get off. Not just Nevaeh either, as virtually everyone at the party was EXTREMELY turned on; it was easily the horniest party we'd ever thrown, and that's saying something. After a couple of hours of Nevaeh enjoying herself, she let me know that she'd had enough so we started the final scene. Nevaeh floated higher in the air and the large blue light grew around her entire body, getting everyone's attention. It wasn't anywhere near bright enough to obscure anyone's vision, as it doesn't take much of a blue glow to get people's attention at night. I deliberately appeared busy and unaware until almost everyone had noticed this new development. When I turned around to look up at her, Angel pointed at me and beckoned. I floated up to her, stopping two feet below her. She put her finger on my forehead for a couple of seconds, removed it, and I exclaimed, "I would be HONORED!" There was silence beneath us, so everyone heard. Angel turned away from me and bent over. My body rose to get lined up properly, while my costume was pulled off, causing a flurry of comments. Few of the crowd had seen my enlarged and re-shaped cock. All the girls had heard about it - Julia and Ava had been very proud of the favor God had done them by improving my body and they'd ensured that all my lovers and potential lovers heard about it - but seeing it floating over their heads and getting rapidly hard was still a shock. As was the next thing I did with it: push it into Angel's pussy and start vigorously fucking her with it. Nevaeh was so horny that there was no need for foreplay - she'd already had hours of that - so it only took a couple of minutes to give her an orgasm. I flipped her over and gave her another one, and then another. She'd already had quite a few finger-induced orgasms this evening so she got tired fairly quickly, despite all the endurance training we'd been giving her over the last few weeks. I let myself cum with her on her fourth. The Floating Doggy Sex was a wild success. The guys loved it for the obvious, swaying reasons. It was the best pornography they'd ever seen, and it was happening right over their heads, with an angel's juice dripping on them. The girls loved it too, for a whole variety of different reasons because girls are VERY complex creatures. At one end of the spectrum, their emotions were very sexual, as they eagerly anticipated being fucked by my large, ribbed cock. Most of them had been my lovers in my previous life, and during my circulating this evening I'd made sure they knew that I wanted to pick up where we'd left off. I was vastly more famous, richer and better equipped now, so they were VERY eager. When they saw my cock in vigorous and impressive action just over their heads, their eyes had widened in wonder, as in: "I wonder how fantastic it feels to be fucked by that?" They already knew that I gave them the best sex they'd ever had, so imagining it being even better was a lot of fun for them. At the other end of the spectrum, there was the wonder of my having sex with an angel. That blew quite a few female minds, and even some of the males', although not nearly as many because nearly all of them were thinking entirely with their small head, and that'd probably been blown a few times already tonight. After Angel had recovered from her fourth orgasm, she said, "Thanks Mark, that was great," and pulled her headpiece off, surprising the hell out of everyone. I turned the lighting effects off. As her head emerged, she said, "Phew, it was hot in that thing." The crowd was GOBSMACKED! Their mental wheels were spinning but their brains weren't making any progress. They had no idea what to think. I let Julia have the fun of telling them, by floating her up to join Nevaeh and me. From her podium, she broke the news, "We fooled you ALL! Angel is a wonderful but perfectly ordinary girl. She's one of Mark's and my friends. It's all been a trick. It IS a costume party, after all." "She wasn't possessed by an angel?" asked one of the crowd. "No," Julia answered. "It as ALL a trick. Mark's Guardian Angel provided all the special effects. You saw the kids flying at Sondarm. It was just a costume, some flying, and lots of verbal trickery." "How did she push people away?" asked Richard. I answered, "The Guardian Angel wants us to explain that it was all a trick, so I'm sure it'll cooperate with this. Turn to face Susan, Richard, and make the same sort of gesture." Richard did so, and Susan was slid a few feet away. I explained, "It's just a gesture to show my Guardian Angel what to do, and it does all the work. It's been very cooperative recently." "Why didn't the photos work?" asked one of the guys, who then hurriedly added, "At the beginning I mean. I haven't tried to take any since then." "Obviously the Guardian Angel wanted to protect our guest from having her photograph taken, and it must have a way of stopping them. I've got no idea how, but I'm sure it has all sorts of abilities that we don't know anything about. I don't worry about those things because they're none of my business and I'll never understand them anyway." There were several other questions, but they were all answered with either, "The Guardian Angel did it" (such as for her flying around) or, "We were bullshitting you" (about the forehead touching, for example). It was easy to tell when belief started kicking in because the tone of the questions and comments changed. Everyone had been TOTALLY fooled, so everyone had to say something; it got pretty noisy and chaotic for a while. Most of the comments, questions and laughter were fairly obvious and don't need repeating here. I will mention that guys asked about being able to fly, and girls asked about having sex floating in the air with me. Guess which of those requests I was more inclined to grant? For the moment though, I answered, "Before the party, the Guardian Angel typed a message on my phone telling me it wanted to do what we did with Angel." I pointed at Nevaeh so they knew who I meant when I used that name. "It hasn't sent me a message about anyone else, so I don't think it intends to do anything with any of you. If it does, I'll let you know." "Can't you ask it?" almost-demanded one of the would-be fliers. "My life depends on the Guardian Angel so guess how eager I am to plague it with requests to be an amusement ride for my friends? It's not my employee, and it's not even my friend. It's a VERY powerful creature so I am not pushing my luck with it. If I could fly anyone around, don't you think it'd be me?" "It flew you at Sondarm." "Yes, and it volunteered for that too. If it ever tells me that it wants to fly you around, I'll give you a call to let you know. Listen to me carefully: IT IS NOT UNDER MY CONTROL! Got that?" "Why did it want to do the trick with her?" "I have no idea. It doesn't explain ANYTHING to me. It just tells me to do specific actions every now and then. That it orders me around and never bothers to explain anything to me should help you realize that it doesn't see me as its boss. Its job is to protect me and it doesn't need me to understand its reasons for doing things." One of the girls asked Nevaeh, "What's your real name?" Julia answered, "We're going to keep calling her Angel. If you knew her real name then what she did might get back to her parents and they'd ground her for twenty years." The girls asked for other personal details, but Nevaeh said, "We'll talk after I get out of the costume and have a shower. How do we get down, Mark?" "Hopefully the ... here we go." Nevaeh, Julia and I floated toward the front door of the house. I let Julia and Nevaeh go inside for their gossip session, so they could congratulate each other and celebrate how well their game had worked. I hung around outside the door to make sure others didn't intrude, except letting Carol and Ava through because they wanted to congratulate Nevaeh too. Guys hurriedly gathered around me and there was one question on all their lips: "She's not your girlfriend, is she, Mark?" They were desperately hoping the answer was "No." They knew that nearly all the girls I have sex with aren't my girlfriends and are free to date anyone else. With the revelation that Angel was human, she had suddenly become attainable. She was extremely beautiful, had a fantastic body, and was the sexiest girl they'd ever met - let alone fingered and gotten hand-jobs from - so they were BURSTING with eagerness to be the lucky guy that attained her. "Yes she is. Hands off guys." "{Groan}. It's not fair. You get ALL the best girls." "It's a competition. You know that. I do better than you, and you do better than some other guys. You guys need to improve your game. I suggest trying to make your senses of humor more like mine." "Like THAT'D help!" | "You're just saying that so you can get even more girls!" We joked around, with the guys shaking their heads and bemoaning that the sexiest girl they'd ever met was out of their reach. While they were moaning, they moaned about how badly they'd been suckered by Angel. Because guys are so guy-like, I laid down the law for them so there'd be no misunderstanding, "Now that Angel is getting out of her costume, she is no longer playing the game she was before, so DON'T try to get sexy with her! She's my girlfriend and your coming on to her is the same as you coming on to Julia or Ava." None of the guys in my social circle had ever thought of chatting up Julia. Occasionally Ava got polite invitations but rarely from someone in our main social circle. Those two girls were so obviously mine, especially Julia, that they weren't possibilities. Despite my comparison, I could easily see and sense that the guys still had the hots for Nevaeh. She had gorgeous D-cup tits and she'd given them hand jobs not long ago, and those aren't the sorts of things that guys can easily forget. I tried warning them again, but the guys were only semi-listening to me, their attention mostly on the doorway waiting for Nevaeh to emerge again. Stronger measures were required, so I asked the Guardian Angel to appear. It did so, immediately in front of and above me, so in the middle of the guys around me, which got ALL of their attention. I asked it, "Would you please keep an eye on the girl we're calling 'Angel'. If anyone tries to get fresh with her, please throw them in the pool and hold them under for one and half minutes. Okay?" The angel nodded and then split off a small, dim version of itself which flew directly toward where my girls were, passing through the wall of the house. The guys' passions were quelled very nicely. They'd get horny for Nevaeh again soon because guys are like that, but I'll have the mini-Guardian Angel appear whenever a guy approaches Nevaeh, and that'll scare their little heads into behaving themselves. When a very happy Nevaeh emerged wearing her Australian bikini, the guys were hesitant about advancing toward her, leaving the way clear for all the other girls to rush up to talk to her. They were very eager to get all the gossip: "How do you know Mark?", "How old are you?", and all the other exciting details. The mini-Guardian Angel never needed to reappear as my girls kept a very close guard on Nevaeh for the rest of the evening and no guy talked to her without having a chaperon in his face. Julia is feared nearly as much as the Guardian Angel, so there was no trouble. The guys were soon too busy anyway, as the party started getting very sexy not long after. The girls and the guys were all aroused and as soon as Nevaeh wasn't the central focus, the crowd started focusing on each other. A good time was had by all, although I had to listen to quite a few moans about how badly the moaner had been fooled. That was more than compensated for by the other type of moans I was hearing: from the large number of girls who went for a test ride on my new cock. ^ When I wrote, "A good time was had by all" just above, there was nearly one too many people in the "all" group. Donna had been showing a worrying amount of lust in her proximity reading, so I'd kept a reasonably frequent eye on her. Because of her half-costume, with all that showed and implied, she'd been very popular early in the party. Angel's appearance - both meanings intended - had eclipsed Donna for a while, but some guys had decided that Angel was probably out of their reach, so had stuck with their very acceptable Plan B. As the party started sexing up, so did Donna's emotions. It almost came to a head when Donna led a guy away from the party into a copse of trees where they got into some heavy petting. Their hands were all over each other (actually, not "all over", just over a few very specific places, but writing "Their hands were hardly over much of each other at all," doesn't work). I let her continue, to see if she'd let it go too far. That was a nuisance for me because I don't have enough simultaneous sight sources. I couldn't take one off Nevaeh, so I had to go to the bathroom so I could get the privacy to shut my eyes to watch Donna. We - all of my families, sometimes with or without Donna - have had conversations about Donna's sexual development, and I knew the parents considered her too young to have intercourse outside the family (she'd just turned fifteen). She was actually reasonably mature about sex; it was other things she was immature about, such as being too thoughtlessly impulsive, and then trying to cover up the problems her impulsiveness caused with impulsive lies. My girls and I had promised to keep an eye on Donna, a promise I would keep because I agreed that Donna was still a little too young yet. Maybe not by as much as Mom thought, but still by some. Not only did Donna let it go too far, but she was the one that tried to take it there. They'd had their hands busy between each other's legs for a couple of minutes, when Donna leaned down with her mouth opening, ready to swallow Chuck's cock. That was the last straw. A few inches short of its goal post, Donna's head bumped into an NP-plate. She instantly knew what it was, and her look of "Oh fuck, I've been caught!" was very amusing to behold. I pulled her upright, pulled her panties up right where they should've stayed, and pulled her right toward me. I went to meet her halfway so we'd have privacy from the rest of the crowd, although the almost lucky boy had recovered his pants and had started back, so he'd find us soon. When Donna saw me walk into view twenty feet away, she immediately started in with her apologies and pleadings. I'd not quite reached Donna when Chuck jogged into view. He stumbled to a halt when he saw me, suspecting that my presence wasn't good news. How right he was. I said, "Go back to the party, Chuck. Donna's too young for heavy sex." "We weren't doing anything, honest! Just talking." #32: #21: "Go back to the party, Chuck. Your talking to Donna is over." "We weren't..." "If you're not gone in five seconds, you'll never be invited to our parties again." He spent half a second trying to think of anything he could say, correctly deciding that there wasn't anything - he'd used up his best line with "We weren't doing anything, honest" - so he ran away, calling "Sorry Donna" over his shoulder. I was sure that Chuck was telling the truth this time, as he would have been very, very sorry. Donna started her defense again, but I cut her off, "You promised Mom and Dad that you wouldn't have sex with any other boys..." "We weren't having sex. Just touching." "I'll tell Mom EXACTLY what you were doing, where your mouth was and what it was heading for. Maybe Mom will agree with you that blowjobs aren't sex. Personally, I think Mom will hit the roof as soon as she finds out that you put your hands on a boy's cock and allowed him to finger your pussy. Not only did you allow him, but it was you that led him away from the party." "I'm SORRY, Mark! PLEASE don't tell Mom! I won't do it again, I promise!" "Like you promised not to do it the first time? I WILL tell Mom and Dad because it was a serious promise and they should know you broke it. I'll tell them over breakfast. I think you should go to bed now." Donna tried some arguments on me, but I said, "Save them for Mom and Dad. They're going to be the ones deciding on the consequences for this." Donna left, head hanging low. I told Carol, Julia and Ava about it. They all said, "Poor Donna," and I had to agree. They agreed that we should tell the parents. The rest of the party doesn't need commenting on, so I'll jump ahead to when Donna arrived in the Kids' House in the early morning, equipped with several reasons why I didn't need to tell Mom and Dad. That Carol and Julia supported me and Ava was merely sympathetic wasn't good news for Donna. I described the situation to the parents over breakfast, and no one was surprised that Mom and Dad considered Donna's action to be sex. Donna tried the all-too predictable, "Carol had sex when she was fourteen. She was only fourteen and one month old when she started, a WHOLE YEAR younger than I am!" Mom had long since thought of answers to that. She'd even discussed it with Carol in preparation for this moment. Mom said, "You're right, Donna. Seeing as how you insist on being treated the same as Carol, we'll put you on the same rules as Carol. Do you agree?" Any kid would have to be a total moron to agree to an offer like that. Donna's alarm bells were all ringing, so she asked suspiciously, "What do you mean?" Mom asked, "Carol, how many guys have you had sex with?" "I've only had sex with Mark. I'll never have sex with any other man for the rest of my life." Mom made it worse for Donna by telling her, "As you insisted on being treated the same as Carol, we'll put you on the same rules as she lived by. Carol had no sex with anyone until she was married to Mark and Julia, and then for the rest of her life the only man she'll have any sex with will be Mark. So from now on, no sex for you until you're married, and then you can have sex with no other man for the rest of your life." That wasn't quite what Donna had in mind, so she quickly abandoned the "It's Fair To Treat Me The Same As Carol" argument. Mom's agreement with it had somehow revealed that it was logically inapplicable. Donna tried, "I've been VERY good for a long time. You've all told me that many times." "Yes, you were very good, and now you've wiped that out by being very bad. What's your point?" "Ahh, I was good for a VERY long time. For YEARS! But I was naughty only once for only a few minutes." Mom answered, "I've never robbed a bank, so if I rob one tomorrow will the judge let me off if I tell him I've been good for a very long time?" You get the idea: Donna tried all the typical teenage stuff, and Mom replied with all the typical mother stuff. Although the discussion did get somewhat untypical when Donna asked in desperation, "Could I marry Mark?" She didn't really want to marry me; she just wanted sex, but it's not unknown for people to propose marriage to get sex. It's probably the usual reason. Mom answered, "You can't marry Mark. You'd have to marry Mark, Carol and Julia." "That's what I meant." Mom said, "If you proposed and they accepted, then you could marry them, yes." (Told you it did get somewhat untypical.) Before Donna could look too excited, Mom added, "What are you bringing to the marriage, Donna?" "Eh? What do you mean?" "We all know what you WANT from the marriage: sex with Mark. But what are you going to give Mark, Carol and Julia back? In a successful marriage you have to give more than you take, so what can you give Julia that would make her want to marry you? How can you make Julia's life better?" Donna's marriage idea fell apart too. After a few more minutes, even Donna could see that the only issue was her punishment. All things considered, the parents were actually very happy with Donna. She'd been sexually well behaved far longer than they'd expected given the environment around our place. She'd just been hot for sex last night, and sex was no longer something that Mom freaked out about. Donna was on the pill and for someone her age, she actually had very good emotional and intellectual perspectives on sex. Her problem was being a little too immature in other respects. If she'd gone to Mom and Dad before the party to discuss her being allowed to do more, they probably would've agreed with oral sex being permitted. Intercourse with another guy wouldn't have been permitted quite yet, but if Donna had been a good girl for another few months that probably would've been allowed too. Mom said, "What you did was so serious that Steven and I are going to have to think about it for a few days. Obviously you've been getting too much sex from Mark recently, so that'll have to be cut WAY back, or maybe eliminated entirely..." "Oh no! But MOM!..." "Don't protest too loudly, Donna. I'm still reconsidering whether you should be allowed to go to Italy." I'll save you the rest of it. It was loud and got very wet toward the end. A couple of days later, the decision came down from on high. For the next six months: Donna was back to once a month with me, "and not again in August because you've already had too much sex this month." Mom had to approve the clothes Donna wore to parties, "and I won't be allowing any that show ANY cleavage, so don't even try." A mother controlling her party wear was a terrible punishment for any teenage girl, but especially for Donna because she loved wearing low-cut tops when it was safe for her to do so. Donna had to leave our parties before they got sexy. And, of course, "NO dates, kisses, or touches with ANY other boy, only Mark." -- "If you're PERFECT for the next six months, we might relax the rules a little, Donna." There was no mention of Italy, and Donna was smart enough to keep it that way. ------- Chapter 391: Donna's Sexual Education Begins (Her Sexual Training Having Started Long Ago) Saturday, August 18, to Friday, September 7, 2007 The following Saturday was Julia's nineteenth birthday party. It was a VERY formal affair, with a string quartet, lots of flower arrangements, weird finger-food, fancy wines, and - of course - elegant dresses. My girls all needed new ones, with Donna really needing one because none of her existing dresses had a high enough neckline in Mom's opinion. The girls in Corvallis take fashion very seriously. Having the right attitude - the one I just stated - could get a girl invited on a free trip to a European fashion capital, so dressing for Julia's formal birthday party was a MAJOR crisis in dozens of homes around Corvallis. I had no trouble imagining that it caused a considerable number of tears, especially from the many parents who'd had to cough up big money to dress their daughters. It was totally different from the costume party, which had been fun. I'm being unfair because I did enjoy seeing my girls so happy, I just would've liked some of the guys to be happy too. The girls were all done up to the nines, and many of them looked GORGEOUS, but no way would they risk getting mussed up by even hugging their dates, let alone what normally happens at our parties. I must admit that I hadn't helped by suggesting that we get a custom-made tux for the Guardian Angel. It somehow gave Julia the impression that I didn't have the right attitude to her birthday party, so I spent the rest of the run up to and the party itself walking on eggshells to avoid offending her again. One good thing about the party was... (I'll come back and complete this when I think of something.) ^ Four days after the party, Prof and Vanessa left on their Italy trip, accompanied by twenty eight very excited girls. There were no seats wasted on any guards because a sizeable security detachment had gone earlier on a commercial flight. All the previous overseas shopping trips had been eagerly anticipated, but none as much as this trip was because it was for a whole week. Vanessa has always wanted her plane back, restricting the previous trips to almost impossibly short periods of time. Only "almost" impossible, as the girls had always staunchly done their best to overcome the timing adversity. A whole week meant the girls could shop PROPERLY. For a whole WEEK! In ITALY! Speaking of which, Nevaeh was going. To her surprise she'd easily obtained permission from her parents. They'd agreed because it was free, a girls-only trip with security guards, they knew Nevaeh loved fashion, would never forgive them if they refused, and especially because they thought it'd help her get over her depression from breaking up with Peter. They gotten the impression that she was very unhappy because I'd suggested to her that she should not only suppress her happiness at home, but act morose about boys in general and Peter in particular. She'd had no compunction about doing that as she was very pissed off at her church and her parents for their telling her so many lies about God and sex. She understood my "They're victims too" argument about her parents, so she wasn't too angry with them; just the right amount of anger to not have any qualms about deceiving them. Her parents were trusting Nevaeh even more than they had previously, reassured by her reaction to Peter's reported leering at her and her frequent scathing comments at home about boys being so interested in sex. She knew they were because I vigorously proved it to her several times a week. In her enthusiasm for me and sex, she was a lot of fun. I took the girls to the airport, said, "Gee, I wish I could go with you," and got laughed at, so I tried, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," and that wasn't believed either. I waved them goodbye, then returned home so Dad and I could get ready for our trip. We'd flipped for it between a real-man's fishing trip or doing it in luxury ("flipped for it" used as a figure of speech, as using random chance would be a silly way of making a decision). Roughing it for a week appealed to both of us, but we'd decided that luxury appealed more. I'd been put in charge of finding the most beautiful fishing location I could. We wanted a five-star fishing lodge on the nicest possible river or lake, and we didn't care what the fishing was normally like because if there were any fish in the water, we'd catch them. I found a place that had what we wanted. We leased a large, pontoon-equipped chopper that could fly us, our canoe, fishing gear, and our security detachment to whichever one of several nearby lakes we wanted to use that day, so we could get a variety of scenery. Varying our fishing locations also made our security staff's job easier; it was annoying, but we had to take security very seriously. We had a great time. I'd never spent so much quality time with Dad before, and sitting in a comfortable canoe on a sunny, placid lake was very conducive to wandering thoughts and man-type conversation, with long silences that neither of us felt had to be immediately filled. Dad had lots of questions because he didn't understand hardly anything about my future. He didn't even know what his and Mom's life was going to be like because theirs was almost certainly going to continue to be greatly affected by mine. Two and a half years ago we'd been a very average family, then I'd changed and had sucked the whole family's lives along with me. Because of me, we were enjoying a fishing trip that costs considerably more per day than Dad used to earn in a month - still does earn, excluding his investment income - while the girls were in Italy and doubtless spending considerably more than us, once they'd finished scouting the market properly. I wasn't much better than Dad in terms of being able to predict my future, but I could guess at possibilities for the next three or four years based on some of the things Prof had talked to me about. Beyond about five years was a complete mystery to me as I didn't know enough about how the real world worked to even begin to guess. Dad didn't know either, not in the areas of the world that I'd be moving in. I don't mean geographic areas, but areas like world-leading science, the business of invention commercialization and God knows what else that might be relevant to my life. Julia and I were thinking that we'd go in the direction of an invention commercialization company as it appealed to both of us considerably. Julia wanted to run something huge with me; something that'd shake up the world and let me achieve the potential her family all thought I had. Whatever I did clearly had to be with science because that was the only career interest I had, and it was the only area in which I could affect the world as much as WE wanted me to ("WE" is emphasized because even I had changed enough that I was looking forward to that). To be simplistic but not without merit, scientists are either backroom theoretical researchers who operate on a level far from real life, or they're inventors who often take decades and untold testing to develop a single breakthrough. We believed I had the capacity to not only be both, but to lead a scientific organization that developed new theories and took them all the way through to selling world-shaking products. That was our hope anyway, despite the HUGE number of uncertainties involved. Dad and I spent a fair amount of time talking about our lives with the Williamses. Dad was very thankful they were in our lives. Not because he felt pressured about giving me advice, because he'd left most of that to Mom anyway, but because he appreciated that I was getting the good advice I needed from them. We discussed the girls' futures: Carol's and Donna's, Ava and most recently Nevaeh. Dad knew all about how I'd seduced Nevaeh so deeply that I'd created a lot of responsibility for myself, including from Vanessa as she'd spent a couple of dinner conversations leading a discussion with me and Julia about that. Plus Dad had questions as far afield as where my powers came from and whether they might harm me in the long run. If anything crossed his mind, between pulling up fish, he asked about it. There was no hurry. ^ [Although this chapter is dedicated to Donna's education, she wasn't the only one receiving some of that. To explain about my above reference to Vanessa's dinnertime discussions, Vanessa and the other parents were aware of my use of the God tactic to seduce girls. They thought it was immoral - although amusingly equivalent to what churches did - but they were waiting for me to learn that lesson for myself rather than imposing an unlearned behavior on me. As that description implies, their visible reaction to my new seduction technique had been very understated. They used to believe that I might grow up to be an important, powerful man; they no longer "believed that I MIGHT" - the growth in my powers in just the two years they'd known me was phenomenal. I was already awesomely powerful, but what really blew their minds was imagining what my powers would be like in another ten or twenty years. I didn't think that way, and you probably don't either, because we know that my powers jump up only after a merge, but the parents didn't know that. They were concerned about how much power I might develop and the harm I could do with it, so they were letting me misbehave with individual girls now to reduce the risk of my destroying countries later. They were keeping a close eye on me, ready to ensure I took responsibility for my actions, made good for any harm I caused, and most importantly, learned the lessons I needed. As this implies, Vanessa and Prof had gotten Mom to take the long view on parenting; Mom's knee-jerk reactions were a thing of the past. Given my increasing power, it was absolutely essential that I learn to handle it, including judging how much of it to use. Picking up a girl 'too effectively' was a concept I'd never heard of before, let alone had to learn not to do it. The dinnertime conversations Vanessa had led were ostensibly about my increasing propensity to treat girls as playthings, which the parents also didn't come down heavy on. All guys always try to make themselves seem better when they're trying to seduce a girl, and guys often try to score with girls just for the fun of it, so my overdoing it wasn't that big a deal. The parents didn't particularly care about that issue - not compared to the future risk of my destroying countries or causing other similar calamities - because undervaluing what you have an excess of is a very common problem; even Dad had experienced that in his high-school days, and had grown out of it. Thousands of adoring fans throw their bodies at rock and film stars every day, and those fans nearly always get used, abused and discarded; such is human nature on both sides of that 'relationship'. Likewise, thousands of wannabe rock and film stars throw themselves at those industries every day, where they are nearly always used, abused and discarded; such is human nature yet again. The parents were mainly using this common problem - my failing to respect Nevaeh and other girls - as a way of staying informed about, and subtly prompting me to consider, my uses of power. They expected that as I learned to stop having such a weak ego, it'd swing too far in the arrogant direction. They weren't concerned about that happening, because they had confidence that I'd swing it back toward a good position once I'd made a few mistakes. It would have been shortsighted of them to prevent me making those mistakes. These issues were explained to me after I finished my SCS project (more on that later). I mention the issues now because I wouldn't want you to think that my four parents were doing a poor job. I think they were doing a superb job. It was an extremely difficult one for them because of how much was at stake, there being no precedent for how to raise someone as powerful as me, and there being no one they could turn to for advice, so they were putting a great deal of behind-the-scenes thought and discussion into it, and acting very carefully and deliberately when they raised parenting issues with me. They believed raising me was the most important job of any of their lives, so it got a great deal of their attention. Mom fully understood that now, which is why her knees no longer suffered the maternal Patellar reflex. Dad was taking the opportunity of our fishing trip to do some 'fishing' about my learning the important lessons. I hadn't learned them yet, as you'll see when you read about my SCS project, but Dad didn't force the issue, knowing it was best to let me learn the lessons myself.] ^ The fishing was VERY good. There are a lot of fish in a lake, and it's surprising how large some of the cunning ones can get. Dad was turning into a fishing legend in the lodge, as he came back day after day with exceptional catches. Usually three or four monsters, and a large number of good-sized fish. I should mention that before the trip, Paul, Dad and I had very carefully planned our security. One of our options was to completely book out a lodge so there'd only be staff there. Dad and I had opted not to do that, hoping that we'd enjoy the social interactions with other fishermen. Having other people in the lodge turned out to be a mixed blessing. It was initially awkward, as the other guests were discomforted by us and our guards, but once they'd asked all the obvious questions and had got used to us, it became friendlier. Except in one respect: to the annoyance of some of the other guests, Dad didn't have enough knowledge about fishing to justify his record-breaking catches. We took whatever bait the lodge gave us, went to spots we chose for their beauty and security, baited up our lodge-provided lines and dropped our hooks over the side. We had no idea whether good fishing practice dictated that we should fish close to the shore or not, under overhanging trees or not, near streams running into the lake or not. That we didn't know any of that stuff didn't impress the serious fishermen, and some of them were very serious indeed. The most rabid of them were quite offended at Dad's haphazard successes. Their attitudes were sometimes annoying, although funny in the sense that they had no sense of humor about it. Fortunately enough of the others guys in the lodge were good company so we could ignore the sourpusses. As we kept returning with exceptional catches, speculation grew about angelic interference. The competing fishermen were annoyed by their theory that God was helping us. I thought it was great because when the story got out, anything that helped convince people that "God was on my side" was to our advantage, and it fitted in nicely with my "Oops, I Left My Jacket At Our Restaurant Table" plan. We neither confirmed nor denied having angelic assistance, but on the last couple of days we said say we'd fish "normally", thereby indirectly confirming that God was indeed on our side. We'd caught enough big fish to satisfy our desire for that, so we let nature take its course, which - being poor fishermen - meant we didn't catch much. We probably should've been fishing in shallower water, or deeper water, or something. Apart from the fame hassle and the considerable hassle we'd put our security people to - but that's what they get paid for - everything else about the trip was great. Well-bonded, Dad and I returned to civilization as renewed men. Except that I was increasingly a "re-olded man", steadily reverting to my old self; with about a month to go for that. ------- The planeload of Italy returnees arrived home soon after we did. Prof and Vanessa had thoroughly enjoyed themselves and were like Dad and me in being well rested and happy. The girls were exhausted, but still had enough energy to threaten me with those horrible words that sent shivers up my spine: "Wait till you see what we've bought you, Mark." I knew I was going to be the dummy in a many-hour long "Dress Up and Twirl" session. Donna had thoroughly enjoyed herself. Mostly she raved about clothes and shopping, which my minds hid from. She caught me by surprise when she said, "The Italian men are terrible flirts and some of them are very handsome, but I didn't give any of them any blowjobs, Mark." "Haha. That's good, sweetie." As we were finishing dinner, Donna told me, "I think Carol, Julia and Ava are VERY tired tonight." "I'm sure they are. You must be very tired too." "No I'm fine, although I was thinking of going to bed soon." "Goodnight, sweetie." "Argh. You know what I want. Today's the 2nd and I'm hoping you can sleep with me please?" "That's a REALLY tricky question. I haven't seen my wives and Ava for a week so we really should catch up with each other... Donna moaned, "Yeah." " ... On the other hand, if I try to catch up with them they'll just rave about the clothes shopping, and you know how dreadfully dull that is." Donna had to think about it, but she'd already done the clothes shopping and the sex was looming, so she said, "Yeah. You don't like it at all. I won't talk about it with you." "Good girl. I can't answer you without checking with the others though..." "I'll finish the dishes for you so you can check now." The above exchange makes me realize that I haven't written as much about Donna as perhaps I should have. I have had to keep my autobiography's focus on myself - as is normally the case with autobiographies - to avoid it becoming too long. I have tried to write only about events that are relevant to my ascendancy, which Donna has been a little too peripheral to. She's almost three years younger than me, is four years younger than Julia and five years younger than Ava. For the duration of this 'story' thus far, Donna has been too young to be one of my core group, but the maturity gap is starting to narrow. As the above conversation shows, she's still young but she can be good company. The trouble is that Donna can also be bad company: she has childish lapses in which she loses her temper, acts petulantly, completely fails to consider other people's feelings, and pretty much all the other traits from young kids that I imagine you're familiar with. Those lapses are why she's still living with the parents and isn't part of the Kids' House. She's improving - although erratically, to the parents' frustrations. I walked down to my bedroom. There was no hope whatsoever of my going to bed in this room - the bed wasn't even visible. Our HUGE bed was entirely buried in boxes, paper, bags, and many, many dresses. "Good grief! All the women in Italy are going to be naked next season because you bought ALL the clothes!" "Look at this, Mark. Isn't it gorgeous. See the clever way they've cut it so..." "Ahh, I'm sorry to interrupt, but Donna's begging me to sleep with her tonight. Normally I wouldn't dream of not sleeping with you after we've been apart for a week, but I know you're tired and I can't even see the bed. By the time you find it again, you'll be exhausted." "We're just tidying up." "Yes, I can see that. It's going VERY well." "Julia, show him the maroon dress Nevaeh got," suggested Ava. "There's really no need... ," I started protesting, not wanting to put Julia to any trouble, and other reasons. "GREAT idea!" agreed Julia, burrowing into the piles of stuff on the bed. #1: There were some subterranean disturbances on the bed, then Julia emerged holding a dark red dress saying, "You should see Nevaeh in this." Julia held it up and I gave it quick glance because her waving it caught my eye. Then I gave it another glance, and then I answered Julia, "You're right, I should. That's a GORGEOUS dress! I particularly like its front." "Haha, what front?" asked Ava. "I'm standing firm on my opinion," I insisted. Carol said, "Don't tell Mom, but we got Donna one like that too." "Wow. Donna would look SPECTACULAR in that!" "We didn't get her one of these, Mark. 'One LIKE it.' Nevaeh has a greater hips-to-waist ratio than Donna, so Nevaeh's dress has got the two panels on the sides to give extra shape because this fabric won't naturally hang the way it needs to when it's cut the way this, while Donna's..." "Yes, I see. That's very clever. You've got to hand it to those Italians." "This is a FRENCH dress! You can tell because this season the French are using more textured fabrics, while the Italians are sticking to..." Carol interrupted, thank God, because I was having trouble coming up with a polite way of stopping the torture, "Julia, don't forget to ask Mark about his clothes in the closet." "Oh yeah, thanks Carol." Turning to me, Julia said, "We might have to move some of your clothes out of the closet and into one of the spare bedrooms. We're running short of space. You don't mind do you?" #13: "I don't mind. You usually lay out my clothes anyway so it's mostly going to inconvenience you. I must admit to being somewhat surprised that you've filled it though." "We have to hang a lot of clothes for Nevaeh and Donna. Clothes their mothers won't let them have." "I thoroughly approve of both girls having clothes their mothers wouldn't approve of, but wouldn't it make more sense to hang their clothes in one of the spare bedrooms so mine can stay here?" "No." Julia looked at me like I was simple-minded. "You'll need to explain why, because I can't see what's wrong with my logic." "The five of us will often be getting dressed together and we have to coordinate. That's much harder with five than with three. It would take us forever if we had to go back and forth to another bedroom." #15: #12: #31: I said, "I think I understand, Julia. Sometimes I'm glad I'm a guy and have a life that's so simple compared to what girls have to think about. I've had two thoughts you might want to consider. I'm going to be finished my physical transformation in about a month and I believe I've heard you talk about taking me shopping. I've a feeling my new clothes would be unlikely to fit in any one of the closets in a spare room, so they'd end up being split over three or four locations, which would be getting impractical. I was wondering whether it's possible to extend this closet. I don't think horizontally works in any direction, but maybe vertically would. Dig a hole underneath and have the racks on some sort of carousel that rotated them up from below. If that worked, you could easily double your rack space, more like four or five times, I would guess." Julia rushed over and threw her arms around me. That was good, but to do so she'd dropped Nevaeh's wonderful new dress on the floor, which is not the way new dresses should be treated. I picked the dress up with NP and draped it over the bed carefully. I made a mental note to tell Julia to care more for clothes. Meanwhile I hugged her back, asking, "I'm curious why I'm getting hugged all of a sudden?" "For being so understanding. I know I'm a little bit silly about clothes sometimes, but you didn't complain and you tried to help." #19: "You help me FAR more than I help you, darling. Clothes are about the only significant thing that you're interested in which is not focused on me, so I'm happy to see you have a hobby that you care about so passionately." There was more of this type of stuff. The girls are usually frazzled after their shopping frenzies and I've learned to be very careful. After a weeklong trip, extreme caution was definitely called for. Julia apologized for all the mess in our room, explaining, "We didn't have enough time to be as methodical as we would've liked. A week isn't long enough to cover three cities." #5: #12: [They'd spent a couple of days in London. It wasn't long enough, and they'd decided that they needed to go back again for at least a week, although two would be better. They had called me from time to time while they'd been away, but they'd never thought to mention that they'd changed countries.] Julia rambled a bit, then said, "It's going to take us AGES to get our clothes sorted out, and then we'll crash. Donna's been very eager about having her monthly turn with you as soon as possible, so it might be a good idea for you to do that tonight. Is that all right?" Carol and Ava were amused, showing that they hadn't forgotten why I'd come into the room. They kept quiet. I said, "It'll make Donna happy. It'll make the three of you happy because you'll have time to get your new purchases sorted out without me pressuring you by my presence. And it'll make me happy because sleeping with Donna is enjoyable and I'm looking forward to having a good talk with her, plus I don't like getting in your way when you're having so much fun with your hobby. So I think your idea is perfect, Julia." ^ I should mention that Nevaeh had done VERY well on the trip. She'd been Julia's perfect travel companion: enthusiastic, compliant, and HEAVILY (insanely?) into fashion. She hadn't had the money to actively participate in fashion before, but she'd been following it avidly for years, and she was GOOD at it. (When I'd snooped her home I'd briefly seen that it had a sewing room. I'd assumed that was her mother's - as it was - and hadn't looked closely enough to notice that many of the hundreds of magazines and drawings were of fashion that was too young for Mrs. Smith.) With her level of interest, artistic eye, and being a fairly smart girl, Nevaeh was better at fashion than Julia, although Julia had the advantage of a year's headstart in being able to afford to visit Europe's fashion capitals. Julia is certainly egotistical and bossy, but not in a way to make her feel the slightest negativity toward Nevaeh for her greater fashion acumen; Julia was too busy being positively DELIGHTED by Nevaeh. They were on exactly the same wavelength, and the two of them had enormous fun together. They hit it off BIG TIME! By the time the trip was over, Nevaeh had made herself a very strong friend of Julia's. And of Carol's and Ava's too of course, if only for making Julia so happy. ("BIG TIME" also describes Julia's expenditure on Nevaeh. I know Nevaeh took many of her new clothes home, but when I saw the ones left hanging in what used to be my closet, it looked like Julia would have spent over $100,000 on them. I've learned enough about designer brands from being around Julia over the last year to be reasonably confident in that estimate, crazy as it seems. Nevaeh's figure and beauty cry out for her being dressed as well as Julia's money can buy, but I know that as much enjoyment as I'll get out of seeing her dressed to perfection - and Julia knows my definition of "perfection" - my enjoyment will be only a fraction of that the girls experienced from buying and having those clothes. The cost is truly trivial to Julia anyway, so everyone is very happy.) All the other girls in the plane were sold on Nevaeh too, although in a different way. They'd previously known Nevaeh as "Angel", so her real identity was well and truly out now. The costume party had been two weeks before the Italy trip started, so the initial wave of excited stories about it had already run their course. From even before the plane took off on the trip, it was obvious to everyone that Nevaeh was in tight with Julia, Carol and Ava; that tightness was mostly because of Nevaeh's relationship with me, which we had to take seriously because I'd hooked her so severely. None of the other girls were socially suicidal enough to say a single bad word against Nevaeh. Nor, when they returned home, would they spread the name of the sexually promiscuous female angel, especially because by the time the trip ended, Nevaeh was IN TIGHT with Julia. All the girls on the plane appreciated the need to keep Julia happy - that's how they'd gotten seats on the plane in the first place - so Nevaeh was enthusiastically befriended by everyone, regardless of her being two or three years younger than most of them. Nevaeh enjoyed the trip IMMENSELY. She was turning out to be a truly marvelous addition to our lives. The only concerns I had about having her as a girlfriend were because of: The inherent instability of her having an ingrained Christian upbringing. She might suddenly decide we were all demons, or some such crap. Her parents because they might cause trouble. Those two concerns were minor compared with the many reasons I - increasingly, we - had for welcoming Nevaeh into our lives. With care, the concerns should be manageable and they'll fade over time. The second problem legally disappears when Nevaeh turns eighteen in just over a year, with her seventeenth birthday being in just a few days, while we are in Noumea. We'd not bothered getting her to ask her parents for permission to come on that trip, as their refusal was so guaranteed we'd be stupid to bring it up. ^ Donna's bed was also covered in boxes, papers, bags, and clothes. She pushed them all on the floor, pushed me on the bed, then jumped on top of me. #28: #3: Donna was very worked up, and we went at it flat out for over an hour, then the exhaustion from her trip started catching up with her. I introduced my intended topic by saying, "Boy! I think I saved Chuck's life three weeks ago. Having sex with you is like trying to ride a wild horse. You're VERY athletic in bed." "I LOVE sex! It's the BEST fun. Even more than horses." "I don't want to sound immodest, sweetie, but what you love is sex with me. Chuck wouldn't have been even 10% as much fun for you." "Yeah, I know. All the girls say you're miles better than anyone else. I just got so horny I needed sex." "That's partly true, but mostly not, sweetie. I think you went to the party wanting to get horny and to have sex with someone." "Umm, yeah, you're right. I wanted to have sex with another boy. I still do. I want to find out what it's like." "I understand. In one way it's a pity you didn't get it because that would've gotten it out of your system, but there are too many other reasons why it was a bad idea. For instance, as turned on as you were then, you would've fucked him into the ground. You're used to me and there's no way he could've kept up with you. You would've humiliated him badly, and a lot of guys get very angry if their sexual performance is ridiculed. -- "He might've gotten so angry that he physically attacked you. I know you're good at karate, but it's FAR better to avoid getting people that angry in the first place. It could have ended up with the police being called and he could've gone to jail just because he reacted badly when you sexually embarrassed him. -- "Most likely though, is he would've taken the humiliation at the time, then later put a lot of effort into spreading very bad stories about you. You know people love gossiping about our family, so EVERYBODY would have heard and spread his stories about you. Possibly even the authorities. If they interviewed him and he told them how expert at sex you are, they'd be VERY concerned." "Am I really that good?" "Yes, in two types of ways: The first is that you're enthusiastic, athletic and fit. You know what you like and you go for it; and you know what a guy likes and you're perfectly happy to give it. You were about to give Chuck a blowjob, which is a generous thing to do. -- "The other way you're good is something you're TOO good at. You're like a girl who has ONLY ridden galloping racehorses. Never ever walked or trotted, not even for a few seconds. The only speed you know is a very fast gallop because that's the speed you learned at. Normal guys like Chuck can only manage a slow trot. If you jumped on him and rode him the way you know and like, you'd physically injure him, humiliate him, or scare him so badly he'd run away in panic. All of those could have very bad results for everyone. -- "You're good at sex because you can ride it so fast, but you're not good because that's the only speed you know. Someone who is truly good at sex can match what they do to their partner's needs and ability, and you haven't begun to learn that yet. So I'm going to start teaching you, because I want you to have a good, happy sex-life with a nice boy when the time is right for that, okay?" Donna hugged me, saying, "Thank you. I'm sorry I messed up so badly. I didn't know what you just said. I knew you were better, but I didn't think about what Chuck would think of me." "I know you wanted to learn more about sex, but it's not as if the rest of us are hard to ask about it. You know you can ask us anything. You SHOULD have asked us whether you were ready for sex with other boys yet, and what you needed to learn to get ready. We would've all enjoyed helping you with that, and it would've worked out much better for you than the mess you caused for yourself." "Yeah. I know now. I was stupid." "Yes you were. But if it cheers you up at all, I'm pretty sure you're not the first teenager who has been stupid about sex. I think you're probably closer to the fifth or sixth BILLIONTH." "Thank you for being so nice about it." "In that case, I'll be not-nice for a moment. You snuck away from the party to have sex, which means you didn't make an honest mistake. You knew you were doing wrong and did it anyway. If I know Mom, that's the thing that disappoints her the most. -- "We're going to make a deal now. My bedmates and I are going to teach you how to have sex with other guys: what you need to know physically, emotionally and intellectually. When we think you're ready, we'll help you make it happen, even if it's cutting corners off what Mom decided. In return you have to do what we say..." "I will, Mark. I promise. I know I messed up." "Good. Here's the first rule. The next time you try to have sex with another boy, you WILL NOT sneak off for it! You will only have sex when the rest of us from the Kids' House approve in advance. Or maybe if Mom agrees first, but somehow I suspect one of us will agree before Mom." "Haha. Yeah, I think so. I don't think Mom ever wants me to have it." "You're wrong about that. Mom got upset about your sneaking off more than the attempted blowjob. If you'd tried to blow Chuck while he was sitting on the side of the spa pool with all of us around you, we would've stopped you, Mom would've verbally told you off, and I doubt you would've gotten any punishment at all. Mom probably would've been secretly happy that you were willing to be open and honest about it. Even Mom knows you're nearly ready for a normal sexual relationship, and it's now a matter of making sure you do it right. Unfortunately for you, grabbing a boy by the hand and sneaking off to the trees was exactly the wrong way." "I'm REALLY sorry I did that!" "Me too. With the extra sessions I found excuses to give you, we were averaging nearly one session per week, so in the next six months we would've had about twenty times together. Now Mom has dropped our number to five. You lost us fifteen sessions. You're one of my most favorite lovers, and now I'm going to miss out on fifteen times with you just because you wanted to have one pathetic session with a boy who wouldn't have been one-tenth as good as me. "I'm glad I'm one of your favorites." "So am I. By the way, it's polite to tell the boy that he's one of your favorites too." "Haha. Okay. You're my number one favorite! For a few more weeks anyway, haha." "Still impatient I see. It'll be months, Donna, not weeks. You've still got a lot to learn, starting with my teaching you what an ordinary boy will be like. We're going to start right back at the beginning. We'll have sex again, and we'll do it just like Julia and I did it on our first date." "Goody." "We were sitting on a park bench, so I'll sit on the edge of the bed. We started with wearing clothes but I'll save time just by putting my underwear on." "You could save more time by staying naked." "That's true, my enthusiastic lover, but I have a good reason for dressing that much. To set the scene, remember that Annette Neumeyer had teased me in the hallway and..." "You said only Julia pushed your buttons and Annette was humiliated. She got you beaten up and your arm broken. Everyone knows the story." "Okay. So Julia and I arranged our first date while I was in the hospital, and we had to wait several days, during which we both got very excited. We had a good dinner first and then we walking into the restaurant's big garden. We found a seat in the remote corner. I sat down like I am now, Julia faced me and kneeled to either side of my legs. You do that ... Yep you got it. Just sit there and I'll tell you about the timings. You know how shamelessly fast you were at grabbing Chuck's cock once you got him away from the party..." "{Giggle}. Yeah. I was VERY horny." "Well Julia was about a hundred times faster. She sat on my knees, undid my zip, then pulled my underwear down and lifted my cock out. "Boy! I thought I was quick." "I thought you were quick too. You should've taken at least three months longer. Remember to pretend to undo my zip. Ready to do it?" "Yep. Now?" "Yeah, do it." Donna sat on my knees, pretended to undo my zip, then pulled my underwear down with one hand as she grabbed for my erect cock with the other. Then she said, "Why is there stuff all over you?" "Because that's what happened on my date with Julia. I blew off in my underwear when Julia touched my zip." #4: #6: "Before she even touched you?" "Yep. I was so excited just the thought of her touching me made me blow." Donna giggled, "That's TERRIBLE! What did she do?" "She pulled my underwear off. You can do that now." "It's messy." "Yeah, so be careful not to get it on any of your new clothes." "Okay. Now what?" "She put a rubber on me. By the way, did you have a rubber with you yesterday?" The guys come to our parties fully equipped, so Chuck would've had a dozen or two in his pocket, guys being the overly hopeful creatures that they are. "Of course. EVERYBODY has given me lots of talks about diseases and pregnancy, even Prof." "Good girl. Even though that meant you were deliberately after sex, I'm glad you were prepared. Back to the story: let's pretend you've put my rubber on already. You're naked, but at the time, Julia was fully clothed except she'd gone to the bathroom in the restaurant and removed her panties." "She was a shameless hussy! Haha." "What she was, was more excited than she'd ever been in her life. She was about to give me her virginity, and that was a big deal for her. I should've said that before." "I remembered it. Everyone knows the story." #4: "Good. Don't do it yet, not until I give the word, but what Julia did next was move forward until her pussy was over my cock, she held my cock upright with one hand, and she lowered herself onto me. She missed the first couple of times but that was my fault because I was sitting so far back in the seat that she couldn't get forward enough to make it work. When we start, we'll do it just as she's about to start her third attempt, so you can sink right onto me. -- "We'll role-play this for real now. You're not Julia any more, you're Donna and you're out on a date with a guy who happens to be called Mark but I'm not your brother. This is a real first date, maybe four or five months from now. Everything that I say and do will be me pretending to be Mark Smith, although I'll be doing things the same way they happened with Julia. Everything you do, you do as you think best for a real date that's just got to the REAL exciting part. Remember that Julia was VERY excited, so when we start you should be too. We'll ignore that she was a virgin and you aren't - just play it as you think you would for real in a few months. I'll squeeze your nose to start the role-play, and again when I want to stop it. Ready to start?" "Yes." I squeezed her nose with NP. Donna sank onto my cock. She smiled happily and started bouncing up and down. On her fifth downstroke, I grunted, came and did a go-soft. "Huh? Did you just cum then?" "Yes Donna. I'm sorry. I was too excited." "THAT'S what you did?" "I don't know what you are talking about, Donna. I have never done this before. This is the first time I've ever been with a girl." "Oh yeah. Sorry. Umm, I don't know what to say. What should we do?" "I think we should go home now, Donna." "You do? Can't we try again? I'm sure I can get you hard again." "I don't think that's a good idea. I think we should go. It's all been a bit much for me." The role-playing session wasn't working the way I'd expected. It hadn't 'clicked', or something. It wasn't going to improve and it'd gone far enough that my point had been made, so I NP-squeezed Donna's nose. "That's it?" "Yep. We went straight home. We spilled some of our juices on my jacket that Julia had put down for me to sit on and she got upset about that and said she'd get it cleaned for me. I told her that the date had been perfect anyway..." "Ha! That was a TERRIBLE date! But when Julia talks about it, she always says that her first date with you was fantastic. Did you leave something out?" "Nothing important. That's what happened sexually. There were a couple of kisses, but other than that, what I showed you was 100% sexually accurate. The first time I came was in my underwear before Julia touched me. Then the second time was within half a dozen strokes of our losing our virginity. She never had an orgasm or came close to it. Julia barely had time to notice that I was in her before I'd finished." "I don't understand. What you just said and what she says don't make sense." "Let's ask her on the intercom. I'll do it from here." I pushed the button for a private call otherwise every intercom station broadcasts the conversation, which wouldn't be ideal for this one. I NP-dialed our bedroom and loudly - because I was sitting some distance from the intercom - asked for Julia. When she answered, I said, "Julia, I'm telling Donna about our first date. The one where we lost our virginities. I assume you remember it?" "Haha. Vividly. It was the best night of my life up to that point." "I'm talking about the sexual aspects with Donna, so let me ask you how many times did you orgasm?" "None, but that wasn't important, Mark." "I know. How many times did I cum? In total, inside and outside." "{Giggle}. Counting in your underwear, twice. You were VERY fast back in those days, haha." "I'm happy to say that practice makes perfect. Can you estimate how long we were actually having sex for? How long there was any thrusting going on?" "I don't know. A few seconds I guess, but I wasn't thinking about that. I was too happy to worry about things like that." "I know. I'm giving Donna an education on how wonderful you were despite how pathetic I was..." "You were WONDERFUL! It was the BEST night of my life. I went home and cried with happiness with Mom. You were perfect, and it was a perfect night, apart from my nearly ruining your jacket." "Considering how many clothes you've bought for me since then, I think we can probably call that debt canceled now. You've answered my questions exactly the way I knew you would. Thank you. You were a wonderful example of how a fantastic girlfriend should behave." "I was terrible. It was YOU that was fantastic!" "Thank you, darling. Sorry to interrupt your unpacking or packing or whatever stage you're at. Bye for now." "Bye, darling." I turned to Donna, "Think about that date from my point of view. I was fucking useless and useless at fucking... "{Giggle}." " ... I was humiliated, worried, scared and panicky. But Julia honestly believed it was the best night of her life. You heard me ask if she remembered when we lost our virginities, and her immediate answer was that it was the best night of her life up to that point, so she still believes it was fantastic." "I don't understand how she could think that?" "I'm sure she'd love to tell you why, and she'll do a better job of describing her feelings than I could. The crucial point is that you should be able to imagine how CERTAIN I was that I'd ruined everything. If Julia had made just ONE negative comment or had even just looked unhappy, I would never have dared look her in the face ever again. If she'd laughed at me - or to be more general - if ANY girl laughs at a boy at a time like that, the boy could be emotionally and mentally damaged for the rest of his life. He might even commit suicide over it." "That's what I would've done to a boy. That's what you're saying, isn't it?" "Yep. You would've leaped on the boy and expected him to gallop like I can. And when he could barely trot, your dissatisfaction would've been obvious. You would've physically humiliated him, which would've made him very emotionally vulnerable and easy to hurt, and then would've ridiculed him because until just now you had no idea that you needed to be sensitive to the boy's feelings. -- "Obviously you shouldn't have sex with a boy who's a virgin, but in some ways you shouldn't with non-virgins either. Nearly every experienced guy is confident that he's a great lover. If you shatter a guy like that, he's got a lot further to fall than a virgin who knows he's useless. I believe Chuck's had a reasonable amount of experience with girls, so he's probably quite full of himself..." "He was very nice to me." "You've got lovely tits." "Haha. Yeah, maybe that was the reason." "Chuck's older and smoother than the boys you're used to, so he might've fooled you, or he might have been honest. Either way, it doesn't matter because if you'd had sex with him, you would've been very disappointed and you would've shown it. If he's got a high opinion of himself and you PROVE that he's a bad lover, then his ego will have a long way to fall. If you laugh at a guy or get angry at him, or do something else like that, then you could make a bigger mess out of him than you would out of a virgin. It's not going to take you a few weeks to learn, it's going to take at least a few months. Okay?" "Yes. I'm sorry, Mark. I had no idea." "It's largely my fault. I was treating you like my other lovers and enjoying myself with you, when I should've realized I had a responsibility for your education, especially considering how much I was messing it up by giving you so many wrong ideas about what guys are capable of. Now you've experienced how terrible I was on the well-named April Fools' Day two years ago, if you have sex with a guy who isn't very good, you won't be so shocked and hopefully you'll react much better. -- "Another thing to think about is that Julia experienced the most pathetic sex imaginable from me, but it was still the best night of her life. The short reason for that was because she was looking for love and commitment rather than sex, so what the sex was like didn't matter to her. The lesson being that the reason you have sex can have a huge influence on how successful it is. -- "Let's think about the reason you tried to have sex with Chuck. Before you went into the trees with him, I bet the two of you spent a couple of hours telling each other how much you liked each other. But if you'd started having sex with him and he was bad at it, you would've walked out on him. After a few hours of saying nice things to him, you would've walked out in ten minutes, which is not how you treat someone you truly like. The reason you wanted to have sex with Chuck was selfish. He was probably using you too, but that doesn't make your lies any less dishonest. -- "If there'd been even the tiniest hint of that selfishness in Julia's and my first time, then we wouldn't have wanted to see each other again. If that'd happened, we wouldn't live in this house now, wouldn't have any money, horses, you wouldn't have just come back from Italy, and you and I wouldn't be lovers, nor me and Carol and Ava either - because ALL of those needed the huge amount of help the Williamses have given me. Good sex for good reasons can lead to fantastic results; but cheap, deceitful sex will usually lead to disappointment." "I messed up EVERYTHING!" "It was your first time, Donna. People make mistakes the first time they try something new. What's more important is whether you repeat any of those mistakes again." "I'm not doing ANY sex again unless you say I can!" "I say you can do it again RIGHT NOW! How'd you like to try sex floating in the air?" I felt a little bad about overstating the perils of sex to her, but it was worth it to stall her in a way that didn't upset her. My girls and I would start getting Donna ready for a relationship with another boy, and we'd make sure we did a very good job of it. The lucky guy or guys that Donna chooses to date aren't going to believe their good luck. ------- We only had six days and then we left again for the Noumea trip - I LOVE summer! In those six days, the "Galloping Ninnies Rebuilding Fundraising Appeal" politely asked us if we'd contribute. Paying to put their buildings back up hadn't been what I'd had in mind when I'd knocked them down. Quite the reverse, as I'd intended to keep demolishing their rebuilt buildings until they got the hint to sell their land and move away from us. But since the Sondarm School event, the Ninnies had been much less offensive. No marches, no appearances on TV or in newspapers that contained even mildly anti-me sentiments, and my Mata Hari (Nevaeh) reported that their new preacher wasn't calling for God's wrath to descend on my head, and her parents no longer thought I was evil incarnate, or even outcarnate. I no longer thought of the Ninnies badly enough to motivate any more demolition, but I certainly didn't think well of them; I'd had fun imagining how embarrassing it must have been for a church to file an insurance claim and have it denied under the Act of God clause, and I didn't like the idea of giving them any money at all, good PR or not. The parents found it easier to say "No." They also had less sense of being responsible for the damage, so felt no shame in refusing to pay for it. Their full answer was, "Sorry, but no. We believe the Guardian Angel knocked your buildings down deservedly. You were publicizing hateful and harmful messages without taking the time to meet Mark or to investigate the facts. That was immoral of your church so God punished you for it. We don't wish to undermine the angel's actions so we won't contribute. All we're prepared to do is withhold filing a lawsuit against your church, contingent on your future good behavior." ------- Julia acted with alacrity on my life-saving idea of extending her closet downward. Her initial idea was to excavate the whole room downward, to a depth of about twenty feet. That'd quadruple the amount of wall space. Better too much than too little is Julia's closet motto. She'd gotten it wrong the first time because she'd failed to allow for how much more shopping she'd do with an effectively infinite shopping budget, including for holding clothes for Nevaeh and Donna, but she wouldn't underestimate her 'needs' again. With such a total excavation, there'd need to be some sort of hydraulic, cherry-picker system so the girls could move around in the cavern. They'd each need their own "picker" because they usually get dressed together. Alternatively, the floor sections in front of each wall could be on hydraulic rams that lowered and raised them. That would allow for more closet space to be carved into the walls of the central island of the closet (it has sets of drawers in the middle of the room), which appealed to Julia. It was the machinery that complicated the decision so much, as there were significant safety, reliability and ease-of-use issues, plus some of her ideas simply weren't possible. It frustrated Julia and she moaned to me, "What a PAIN that we can't float ourselves like you can! That'd get rid of ALL of these problems. One, big, cavernous closet would work perfectly." "It might be tricky to explain to visitors why your closet floor is twenty feet straight down, but I know what you mean. Unfortunately for the world's clothing stores, my abilities aren't transferable or trainable. I would love to give them to you if I could, but it can't be done." "How do you know? You've never tried doing that with us?" "Because how I do my things isn't something I learned from training. I have the intrinsic ability and you don't. It's like you asking me to teach you how to jack off until you spurted semen and sperm. Despite my never having tried to teach you how to do that before, I'm sure there's no point in trying. You don't have what it takes. I would LOVE to give my abilities to you, Carol and probably Ava too, but I can't. Sorry." "I know. I'm just frustrated over getting our closet large enough and not being a pain in the ass to use." Julia doesn't talk that crudely normally, but she was very frustrated. The final design was less grandiose, merely to excavate down the sides, and to put eight-foot widths of racks or shelves on vertically rotating oval tracks. Each oval would be capable of holding enough racks to effectively triple the capacity of the closet. It necessarily encroached toward the center of the room by a few feet, but there was plenty of floor space for that. It also meant that only two of each vertical array of racks would be visible at a time, making it impossible for the girls to choose their clothes by eyeballing their entire range and waiting for inspiration to strike. They didn't like losing the ability to see all their clothes, but there wasn't any choice. (In case you think "have fewer clothes" was a choice, I'll go get the bandages while you suggest that to Julia yourself.) ------- One little thing I did which I enjoyed, was inviting Sensei and his wife over for dinner one evening. I couldn't have contacted them when I was Ron, but could now that I was back as Mark. I hadn't mentioned it to my family for the best part of two years, but I reminded them and let the Williamses know that Aikido had been a major help in the development of my abilities, albeit in an indirect way. So when our guests arrived for dinner they got plenty of good attention from my families. They got the Grand Tour, including the room we had set up like a dojo. Sensei asked about my resuming training. I didn't need to learn Aikido as a self-defense anymore, and my original idea that there might be aikidoka like me was now so doubtful that it was effectively discarded, but there could still be useful and enjoyable lessons in the art for me. (My development of Super-Aikido had stalled because of the impossibility of coordinating anything beyond very simple, effectively one-dimensional, body movements.) I answered, "I'd like to, Sensei. When I've got my body fully back would be easiest for me; sometime soon after the academic year restarts. I'll let you know closer to the time." [I sort of did; sort of didn't. Life gets a little complicated soon.] Mr. and Mrs. Sensei (Nigel and Edith) are both very nice people, and we had an enjoyable dinner and a pleasant evening. ------- Chapter 392: SCS's Outside and My Get-Inside Projects Begin; the Pitch Saturday, August 18, to Friday, September 7, 2007 During the week that Dad and I had spent fishing, the two SCS "Outside Art" projects had reached the stage where the students were working on our property, under the temporary supervision of one of our staff while my families were away in their various directions. Nevaeh missed that week of extra-curricula art, but seemed to handle the disappointment well. The soon-to-be-juniors team was working on the Adult Pool's Changing Room/Shower/Bathroom (most people call them a pool-house, but that name always gives me the wrong image), and the soon-to-be-seniors team on two exterior walls of Donna's Stable. On her return from getting culturally edified with some of her friends in New York, Mom took over supervising the SCS teams to make sure they were working well. Reassured, after a few days Mom became "too busy" and delegated much of their supervision to me, giving me plenty of opportunities to work on my "Get Inside Some Of The Students" project. The multi-faceted project needs a little explanation. There are three levels to it: The world, including SCS, thinks we're sponsoring two extra-curricula art teams. They are working on our property as their first two jobs because that had been quickest and easiest to get going, and because we did want some murals done. After completing our two jobs, they would find their own jobs from the city, businesses, other private individuals, or wherever else they could, and I would continue to subsidize their costs out of a sense of civic responsibility. My family and Nevaeh knew that my real reasons for sponsoring SCS's art classes was a PR exercise intended to improve my image with the public in general, the local Christians especially, and Nevaeh's parents in specific. It would also give Nevaeh an excuse to be on our property often, although that wasn't directly for sex because we couldn't risk her leaving her group to come to my bedroom because that would get back to the school and then to her parents. Having her visit our property even if just to work alongside her classmates was a good way of breaking the ice with her parents because they'd see that nothing evil happened. We'd make sure that all the reports they got were squeaky clean and thereby improved our reputation as good people. I had another purpose known only to my girls, and not even to Nevaeh yet. I had enjoyed the strange way Carol and I had seduced Nevaeh, and I was enjoying how cooperative and pleasant her company was, so it hadn't escaped my imagination that maybe I should seduce other Christian girls too. As I was interacting with SCS for the two reasons above anyway, that school was the obvious source of potential new Christian seductees. None of them would be as gorgeous as Nevaeh, but I certainly couldn't use that as a restraint on my future activities because then I wouldn't have ANY new future activities! I'd intended to use my contact with the two arts teams as an entrée to the rest of the school with the intent of seducing some of its best looking girls, but after some more thought I'd decided to achieve more. That was partly because of how wonderfully Nevaeh was working out - which wasn't actually logically relevant but it did make me happy to think about spending more time with the other SCS girls - and partly because I'd seen from my family's visit to the school that so many of its girls were throwing themselves at me already. My new goal was to try to seduce ALL of that school's junior and senior beauties. It was a "thrill of the chase" thing again as trying to bed them all would be much more of a challenge, and there was quite a lot of ego satisfaction in knocking off - but not knocking up - every beautiful girl in a school. Julia was delighted by my ambitious new people-manipulation project. My "project" explained, I'll get back to describing its progress. You may recall that during my family's visit to their school, Mom had insisted the students work professionally. Soon after I took over their supervision, I expressed horror in their lack of professionalism about taking breaks. I insisted they got an hour off for lunch and fifteen minutes for mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks. I encouraged them to use the Adults' Pool during their break times. One of the teams was working right alongside it anyway, not by coincidence as Mom had given me the choice of several locations she thought suitable for some artwork, so the poolside became the lunchroom. I chose it mainly because the casualness and fun of a pool would encourage a friendly atmosphere. It would also allow me to use a sight blob to check the bodies of the girls who get changed to have a swim. I'd stopped being a general voyeur at places like the Aquatic Center, but will use my sight blobs to check out girls bodies if there's a specific purpose; in this case because I'd like to know what I'd be getting if I made the effort to get any of them into my bed. Checking them out was only a minor benefit though, as none of the girls on the two art teams were included in my definition of "The School's Most Beautiful Girls" - I'm not including Nevaeh in this project as she already has a much higher status. I might bed one or two of the arts girls if the situation seems to call for it, but it wasn't my goal, merely a bonus point possibility. When I told them that their work had to include proper breaks, I watched carefully to see which of them accepted my authority without question, as opposed to something like insisting that my mother confirmed my suggestion. To my surprise they all agreed without any sign of doubt. I was 17, their age more or less, but they had no hesitation in believing I had the authority. Their obedience wasn't that they wanted to slack off - they were actually somewhat intimidated and wanted to work hard - but because they looked up to me. That would be convenient. Other than insisting that they took breaks and had fun during them, I was helpful in many little ways, such as by letting those who wanted to swim keep their swimsuits inside the changing rooms that they were working on (there were male and female rooms). To emphasize that God was on my side, the Guardian Angel often put in appearances in small ways, such as just by being visible around me, or helping me carry a lot of cold drinks out of the house for them. It gave the students a thrill to accept a glass floating toward them. Very few people in the world have ever been served by an angel! Given that angels are fictitious, fewer even than the people who were currently thinking that they'd just been so served. I was polite, considerate, and the epitome of a Good man. I didn't even use the pool with the students, explaining, "I have my own pool by my house and I don't want any accusations of impropriety." Such was my properness that Nevaeh hadn't realized I was seducing some of the other girls. Nor did their Art teacher when she arrived to check on progress from time to time. (I wasn't seducing them into my bed, although it will look like that later when I turn up the sex content, but into being my feet into the doors of their beautiful classmates' pussies.) A major element in our relationship with them, and a very useful one initially, was that they knew that Nevaeh had gone on the Italy trip. They'd heard a lot of the stories, seen the photos and some of her purchases, and were green with envy. The cover story was that Nevaeh and Julia had hit it off over their common interest in fashion, proving that the truth is useful, even if sometimes distressing. Julia, Ava and Carol often joined the SCS teams for lunch and they talked up a storm with Nevaeh, creating a good, friendly atmosphere. The full extent of our relationship with Nevaeh was of course kept secret. They didn't even know that Nevaeh had some clothes stored here. As per my request to them, Julia, Ava and Carol several times kissed each other on the lips around the two teams; Nevaeh didn't participate in the kissing lest it get back to her school or parents. The kisses were so I knew which SCS kids were repulsed, indifferent or attracted by bisexuality. It was those that reacted negatively that I most wanted to identify. Revulsion leading to suppressed anger, and sometimes lust leading to anger, were the most common negative emotions. It's an indication of the psychological damage inflicted by a Christian education that two of the seven GUYS reacted negatively - talk about an unnatural act! A couple of days before we left for Noumea, I expressed horror at discovering during a morning tea conversation that the students hadn't been given The Grand Tour. It had been deliberately omitted because I wanted to create a positive relationship with the girls before their tour. I judged that they respected and liked me well enough by now, so upon 'discovering' they'd not had The Tour, I said, "I'll give two tours at lunchtime, one for the guys and the other for the girls, because I've noticed those groups spend very different times in different rooms. Decide among yourself which group goes first and I'll take that group at the beginning of lunch." Predictably the girls wanted to go first, no doubt so they could take the whole hour if necessary. To them, their Grand Tour was far more important than allowing time for the boys' Tour, and it was even more important than food. We left the guys by the pool while I led the girls inside the Adults' House where we 'happened' to meet Carol and Ava, who joined in. Julia was busy with workmen in our closet, telling them what she wanted done while we were in Noumea. We started at the Adults' living room, then worked our way southeast through the house. Every room was better than any room the girls had ever seen before, and the combined effect was wonderful. The thirteen girls were blown away by the tour, with their proximity readings including some massive envy. As we came to the foyer in the middle of the house, the angel appeared. It picked up Ava and moved her to the mouth of the tunnel to the Kids' House, and Carol to the top of the stairs leading down to the Activity Level, where I just happened to be standing. Then it picked up the thirteen SCS girls, putting four of them with Ava and nine, including Nevaeh, with Carol and me. I said, "Looks like we're dividing into two groups." "Why?" asked one of the four homophobes in Ava's group. "I often don't know why the angel does things. I don't even bother thinking about it because I never question why God or his servant do things. They're in charge; not me. Do you think you should be allowed to questions God's judgments?" That ended that issue and also stopped any of the girls trying to swap groups. Carol's and my group went down the stairs, while Ava led the rejects down to the Kids' House. One of the rejects was good looking enough to be worth a good bonus point, but it was too risky to push against her anger-inducing sexual attitudes. I could've arranged one-on-one sessions with her but I didn't want to waste the time I could spend working on many girls at once. My project wasn't about any of these individual girls anyway. After seeing the Activity Level, Carol's and my group wanted to go downstairs to see the in-house staff quarters, even though they weren't used. The girls didn't want to miss ANYTHING. Looking through the little staff apartments, one of the girls said, "God! I'd love to live even in here. This is a BEAUTIFUL home, Carol." Carol looked at me because this line was close enough to what we'd been waiting for. The girls had enough of the emotions I wanted already, even so early in the tour, so I tapped Carol on the head twice. Carol answered, "If you're truly eager, Nyasia, you should try to become one of Mark's new girlfriends, that way you could live with him and the rest of us in the Kids' House." "Huh?" | "What do you mean?" | "What new girlfriends?" | and a several other overlapping questions. Nevaeh was surprised too. Carol asked me, "Haven't you explained this to them, Mark?" "These girls are effectively our employees at the moment, so it wouldn't be proper to get them involved in anything like that. Their school might be embarrassed too, which would be unfair because it's been very nice to me." "What are you talking about, Carol?" asked Nevaeh. Carol explained, "Julia, Ava and I recently decided that we want Mark to have one or two more girlfriends. They'd live with us and become part of Mark's life. Part of all of our lives because we all live in the same home." Carol took Nevaeh's arm now, while Carol continued to speak, "There's a chance that" - Carol squeezed Nevaeh's arm - "one of you might become Mark's live-in girlfriend in the not too distant future." Nevaeh asked with leaping hope, "You mean?" Carol answered, "Almost certain, Nevaeh. It's just a matter of finding the right girl or two - girls that we all enjoy - and then making it happen somehow, including getting their parents' consent. That might take several months, but finding the right girls is important to us." "Oh boy!" Another girl asked, "I don't understand what you're talking about. Doesn't Mark already have Ava and Julia as his girlfriends?" "Yes," agreed Carol, "and we want one or two more. The Kids' house has heaps of room for more people, as you'll see when you get there. Let's go up and finish looking at the Adults' House." Nevaeh was the reason Carol was saying "one or two new girls" to the SCS teams. Nevaeh was getting along so well with all of us that inviting her to move in was looking very likely. There was no doubt she'd love to, so it if it happened was entirely dependent on getting her parents' permission. It was still WAY too early to ask for that, but it was possible that it might happen before my SCS project finished and I didn't want the other girls to give up trying to win a place with me. We walked upstairs, with the questions flying. You know the sort of bullshit we spread at times like this, so I'll skip repeating it all. Carol easily planted all the seeds I'd asked her to. I was letting Carol do most of the talking, while I pretended to be modest and moral. Looking through the rest of the Adults' House was a slow process. The girls were highly distracted by the idea of their living with us, but they weren't so distracted that they were going to miss out on seeing ANYTHING! They were probably even more eager to do so. They were getting very hopeful, especially after I said, "Julia, Carol and Ava have decided they want one or preferably two new girlfriends to live with us. I could joke that I'm outvoted three to one, but that wouldn't be fair. We're not a democracy about important decisions like that. The four of us live an incredibly happy, loving life together, and all of us believe that adding another wonderful girl or two would make all of us even happier, so it will be happening. It's only a matter of finding the right girl or girls." I used NP to stroke a very happy Nevaeh's cheek. She was confused about all the other stuff we were saying, but she'd grasped the point about her living with us. She probably thought it was very sweet of the Guardian Angel to reassure her. After every cupboard in the Adults' House was inspected, etc., Carol said, "Now for the Kids' House. We call it that, even though it's really Mark's House. That's where he and his favorite girls live." We started walking toward the door outside. "You live there, don't you, Carol?" "My wonderful brother insists on it. I love Julia and Ava very much and Mark wants me to live with them. It makes him uncomfortable sometimes, but not often now that we're used to it. He sees how happy I am, and that's more important to him than anything else." Carol gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. I countered with, "Don't believe a SINGLE word Carol just said, girls. She's such a fibber sometimes! It's nothing to do with me at all. Carol has earned Julia's, Ava's and my love, and she makes us so happy to have her with us that everyone insists that Carol be included. The ONLY reason Carol lives with us is because she's so lovable." I gave Carol a hug and a kiss back, while the girls ate up our sales job. Carol said, "Don't believe a SINGLE word Mark said! Haha. He's the center of everything. He's so loving and wonderful to all of us that he makes all our relationships work. He's got two girlfriends living together with him and they're both loving every second of it. How many guys could make that work? Most boys aren't much good at making even one girl happy, but Mark's so fantastic that we want to share him with even more girls! THAT'S how exceptional he is. I'm just lucky that I get to be included." Carol gave me a hug and kiss again. For my turn, I said, "Don't believe a SINGLE word Carol said, girls..." I was cut off by laughter. There was no need to use the next piece of ammunition I had ready ("I may be the glue that holds Ava and Julia to me, but that's nothing to do with their relationships with Carol, blah, blah."). The girls were already having "Aw, shucks" moments. Proximity showed them basking in the loving sentimentality of it. They all believed it too, which was great. As I said earlier, the truth can sometimes be useful. When we were outside the Adults' House, the Guardian Angel picked everybody up and flew us down to the Kids' House to save time, both for The Grand Tour and for me To Get Into Their Panties, as the angel is good at impressing them off Christian girls. Three of the girls in the group hadn't been at the school when I did my flying demo, so this was their first experience of flight. They knew not to be scared and they LOVED it, squealing in delight even louder than the experienced fliers. The homophobic group had been walking up the tunnel to the Adults' House at the time we'd flown down, so we didn't have to worry about the groups meeting. That was convenient but not important, or even much of a coincidence as that group's tunnel walk down and back up again roughly balanced the extra time it'd taken my group to see the larger Adults' House. We started with the lower level of the two-level Kids' House, or as Carol was now calling it, "Mark's House". The wealth of the two homes, my wanting a girlfriend or two, the quality of the life Carol was describing, the angel-powered flight, and that there was an ANGEL involved in this, was blowing these girls minds to a remarkable degree. They were seriously close to being overwhelmed and needing to sit down to recover, which was very amusing. They pressed on with The Grand Tour courageously though, not wanting to miss ANYTHING. I described my upstairs study when I recounted D-Cup's - as I no longer think of her - Grand Tour. She hadn't seen it then because I'd been inside looking at pictures of naked girls and being deliberately unavailable as a way of sending her a message about my importance. She'd seen it a few days later though, so she was the only girl of the nine who wasn't gobsmacked at the sight of it now. It's SERIOUSLY impressive, including there being deliberately very impressive webpages displayed on all the panels once Carol had wiggled the mouse. Carol made damned sure they appreciated how important I was, following the script and strict instructions that Julia had given her. I looked on in apparent embarrassment. We were saving the master bedroom for last, so the four other bedrooms and the bathrooms were shown next. Including Carol saying, "This is Ava's room. She doesn't sleep in it usually; it's where she keeps her favorite memorabilia of her parents, for when she wants to spend time with her memories of them." The girls all knew about Ava's parents' deaths. They'd asked many questions over the previous several days to help them get their heads around the social structure of our extended family. -- "I'll let you look through the doorway, but please don't go inside as this room is too important to Ava." [It was, especially recently, as the first anniversaries of her parents' deaths had been only a few days ago. Katie had died the day before Julia's birthday, which was a large part of the reason Julia had celebrated her formal birthday party early, because Ava wouldn't be up to it on the real day. Carson had died on August 26, which had been the day after the girls had arrived in Italy, so Ava had spent a good chunk of that day in a very nice church with Carol, lighting candles and remembering her parents. Julia enjoys shopping, but she certainly isn't so fixated on it that she'd failed to offer to be with Ava, but Ava had insisted the other girls needed Julia to look after them, and that Carol would be comfort enough.] The next room was Carol's bedroom, so she claimed. "This is where I sleep. Sometimes with Ava or Julia, or with both if Mark is sleeping with other girls." You can probably imagine expressions of surprise and the resultant conversation. I've quoted several like it before - for some reason the issue keeps recurring - so I'll skip it here. Carol made very sure that these girls knew that the girls who shared my bed ALL begged to come back, enthusiastically saying that it'd not only been the best sex they could ever have imagined, but they'd loved my company and how caring I was. Carol was laying it on thick. Last on the Tour was the master bedroom. Fortunately Julia had finished her in-the-closet discussion with the workmen who'd be excavating and fitting it out, so we had the room to ourselves. #5: #10: Carol showed the SCS girls into the master bedroom. I was amused by her saying, "Notice how big the bed is." They'd already noticed, as it's hard not to notice an aircraft carrier-sized bed. #5: I was standing at the rear of the group, but I had a sight blob at the front looking at them because I'd been looking forward to seeing their expressions. Carol showed them the en-suite bathroom and the HUGE closet. Carol explained, "We're getting the closet enlarged because Julia and Ava have almost filled it already. There no room for all the clothes two new girls will have, so it has to be made much larger." "Wow. That's a LOT of clothes!" | "It's already bigger than my WHOLE bedroom at home!" | and other highly envious comments, especially when they got a look at the quality of the clothes hanging up in it. I questioned all of their sanities because not a single one of them questioning my girls' lack of it. "Mark's girlfriends have a huge number of clothes. We have to make several flights to Europe every year to get the clothes we need, and that'll be the case with his new girlfriends too of course. Julia, Ava and I have got a few hundred million of our own, but we'd give the new girlfriends a few million if they need some shopping money." #29: #22: The SCS girls were looking at me in an entirely new light, and it was a very, very attractive light. Irresistible really. With the emotions the girls were feeling there was no need to beat about the bush. Nonetheless I said, "I think this is the last room on The Grand Tour. Carol and I will stay here and discuss what's involved in becoming our girlfriend to any girls who're interested in becoming that girl, so anyone that's not interested should return to the Adults' Pool now." There wasn't exactly a stampede to run away. The only stampede was to stay exactly where they were (you know what I mean). -- Just in case they'd misunderstood (snigger), and also to sound good, I added, "I don't want you to stay if you're merely curious. This is for girls who want to become my girlfriend, and the girlfriend of Carol, Julia and Ava too. Unless you're willing to join our group, you should leave now." That sounded scary to a few of the girls, but scary didn't stand a chance against the other emotions they were feeling. Besides, they couldn't see any harm in staying to listen. They'd be reconsidering that opinion in a few minutes. -- "Okay then. Thank you for the compliment of your staying. To explain the situation. I will be getting one or two new girlfriends. We decided on that recently and we've started searching. I was excluding you because I don't think it's moral to take advantage of employees, especially school-aged girls who are working on an extra-credit project. However, I can see that you're interested and Carol wants to include you, so I'll relax my unwillingness and we can get to know each other while you're working on the projects." [For the rest of summer, the girls' work rate slowed significantly, despite their eagerness to be here almost every waking hour. Quite a few of them wouldn't have minded sleeping here either, hopefully permanently.] Carol said, "It might be none, one or two of you. As you can imagine, there are a very large number of girls wanting to be with Mark. He's God's favorite human being, he has an angel of his own, he's worth nearly a billion dollars, he's a wonderful person, and you've seen how great his body is when he's been doing his exercises during the day..." "No we haven't?" | "What exercises?" | " We haven't seen Mark's body, Carol." Carol turned to me, "Have you stopped going naked when you exercise?" All the morally raised, Good Christian Girls looked down at my crotch. I ignored them, answering Carol, "I've not been exercising while they've been here. I didn't want to look like I was showing off." "You've not been exercising AT ALL? Not even with clothes on?" "Not my usual outdoor exercises, no, just some indoor routines." "Sheesh, Mark. You don't have to be modest in your own home. Just warn them to stay away from the Kids' House when you're exercising. Starting from after lunch, please restart your exercises. Your body is still changing and it might be important to exercise it properly." Nevaeh was getting worried about not understanding what was going, so I NP-stroked her cheek. She relaxed immediately, as the angel always brought Good things. Carol added, "You saw how big Mark's bed is. There's room for several more girls. We've only just started searching for Mark's new girlfriend or girlfriends. It'll be two if we can find two VERY good girls, but we definitely want at least one perfect girl." I NP-squeezed Nevaeh's shoulder, but she didn't need it. She'd already worked out that she was in. She was VERY happy. Confused over the strange process, but happy. The girls had several very urgent questions, but it was all the usual bullshit so they're not worth quoting in detail. In brief: Question: "How do we try?" Answer: "How do girls ever try? Flirt, be attentive and nice, and everything else you can think of." Q: "When?" A: "When Mark finds two great girls. That might be a month or a year or never." Q: "Will we have to have sex with him?" A: "You never HAVE to have sex. But he obviously has sex with all his girlfriends. Mark is AWESOME at sex!" Q: "What about sex with girls?" A: "All Mark's girlfriends and Mark have sex together often." That spurred the following fun: "But that's a sin!" opined one girl. Nevaeh snorted at the silly fool. The girls looked at her, so Nevaeh explained, "Mark has an ANGEL! That proves it ISN'T a sin!" One of the girls asked, "Would it leave you if you committed a sin, Mark?" I said, "I've never asked it. It might be good to know so, ANGEL, please appear." It did. "If I committed a sin, would you leave me?" The angel remained motionless for a second, then my cellphone floated up and keys were pressed. When the message was finished, I read it, then commented, "Jeepers, that's a surprise!" (it wasn't really). -- "Umm, I don't want to be immodest, but it says: 'Mark has advanced soul. Can't/won't sin. That's why God so interested in Mark. Is first human with.' That's amazing. I'd better pass that around in case people think I made it up." "You COULDN'T, Mark! That'd be a sin," insisted Nevaeh. #14: #5: The SCS girls were very impressed Carol was also very impressed, but I suspected it was at the magnitude of the bullshit I was spreading. One of the girls said, "But you, Julia and Ava have sex at the same time. That's VERY sinful." "It's NOT!" insisted Nevaeh. Continuing angrily, "What the church has been..." I pressed her lips with NP, held up my hand for silence, and started speaking all at the same time. Something would work. Nevaeh was too emotional about this issue and hadn't stopped to think how little these girls' opinions mattered compared to the risk of her outburst getting back to her parents. I said, "We don't know each other well, Nevaeh, but seeing as how Carol is insisting that you girls be included as our potential girlfriends, I'll explain a few things carefully. -- "First, I don't agree with telling people what they must believe when it comes to personal matters such as sex. Society has to have rules about not stealing, murdering and similar things, but it's important to me that everyone be allowed to freely choose their own morality about the personal parts of their life, such as sex. You can explain your personal opinions to others if they're willing to hear them, but please don't insist that other people have to listen to you and do what you say. I think doing that is immoral. -- "You were also being unfair to the church. You were very smart to see that the church must be wrong because of what the angel's message said, but please don't get aggressive toward them about it. We don't know whether the church got it wrong on purpose, by accident, by a mistranslation, or some other reason. Plus we have no need to judge them. They can live their lives as they wish, and I'll live mine as I wish. All of you can make your own choices too, as you're all old enough to make up your own minds about what you want to do. I believe in 'Live and Let Live' rather than imposing my beliefs on anyone else. That's true even though I know I'm right, because everyone else believes their beliefs are right too; that's why they're called 'beliefs'. -- "Second, I've always believed that what people happily do with each other in private can't possibly be a sin, and now that message from the angel confirms that I was right about that. I'm VERY happy with my life and I know the girls that I share it with are very happy too. We would enjoy sharing our lives with more girls, but that would never work if a new girl felt pressured into participating in something she wasn't truly comfortable with, so please don't try to pressure anyone with your opinions, Nevaeh. If you try to coerce people into behaving in a way they're not comfortable with, then sooner or later it'll cause unhappiness and problems. It's much better and more moral to let people choose for themselves. -- "Third, it doesn't actually matter whether any of you believe the way I live my life is a sin or not, because none of you are a part of my life." I NP-stroked Nevaeh's cheek again to reassure her, if she needed it. She was feeling upset at having caused my speech, especially as it kept lengthening. "If any of you do wish to be involved in my life, then you already know that includes a wonderful amount of sex, including bisexual sex. If you think that's a sin or it makes you uncomfortable, then don't worry. I won't be trying to chat you up or push you into doing anything. Even though bisexual sex isn't immoral, it obviously IS immoral to push people toward it if they don't want it. You saw the angel's message: I CAN'T do immoral things like that, so you're DEFINITELY safe from me. -- "Seeing as how Carol insists on including you as our potential girlfriends, I'll make it happen in a non-threatening way. I'll continue to treat you on the job in exactly the same way as I always have, but in the future we'll arrange additional ways for us to spend informal time with each other. You are free to come and go to those events as you wish and I won't do anything to pressure you into coming. I might ask you not to come if our personalities don't suit each other, but that's the only reason I'll do it and that's obviously moral, as it'd be immoral of me to lead you on and give you false hope in any way. -- "Fourth, this conversation has to be kept secret. You know that there was a great deal of religious trouble about me after I was resurrected, even including Christians shooting at us in murder attempts. That's subsided a great deal, but if you talk about my not being able to commit a sin, that's going to immediately make a lot of religious people think I'm the Devil doing some sort of trick so I can do something very sinful, and they'll decide it's best to kill me in advance. I know that sounds bizarre, but that's exactly the sort of thinking that too-devout people do. You KNOW the message was from the angel because you saw the phone floating and you heard the sounds of the keys being pressed, but some other people won't want to believe it's true and they'll get very angry and violent. -- "You know an important personal truth about me, which you learned from my angel while you were inside my home. It's MY business, not yours. I will be EXTREMELY unhappy with you if anyone blabs my business to anyone else. Don't tell your parents because they'll talk about it at church. Don't tell your friends about it because they'll talk. Don't tell ANYBODY! You'd be risking my and my families' lives, and I'd be extremely angry. I do NOT want Ava shot again, or anything else like that. -- "I have a very fascinating and complex life. I have God and an angel looking over my shoulders continually and performing miracles like flying you to this house a few minutes ago. Jesus' walking on water is considered a major miracle, but you flew through the air. Things like that make my life very strange. This isn't some silly schoolgirl gossip; this is my families' lives at stake. Every private thing that you learn while you're on this property stays private. From religious revelations right through to ordinary stuff like the sex that you might see or be involved in. Do you understand how seriously I take this issue?" They did, and repeated their assurances many times, especially Nevaeh because she thought she'd started the trouble. She'd just provided the opportunity I'd been waiting for, so I'd make it up to her later. When their assurances that they'd keep everything confidential subsided, I said, "Raise your right hands and say, 'I swear to God that I will not reveal any private information from this property or people, unless Mark allows me to.' Get ready, I'll lead you through it." ------- Chapter 393: SCS's Outside and My Get-Inside Projects Begin; the Clinch Saturday, August 18, to Friday, September 7, 2007 (Continued) "Oh boy," said Nevaeh, remembering what happened last time she swore to God. She thought about it for a moment, then put her hand up ready to swear. A couple of them, with considerably less reason than Nevaeh, were reluctant, one saying, "There's no need for that. We won't tell anyone." "You're failing to understand how important my families' safety is to me. I would give my life to protect them, so I will certainly get you to swear an oath. If you don't, I will call your Principal in five minutes and tell him I don't trust you on my property, asking him to remove you from the project and to call your parents to explain what my reason was." The two girls had their hands up even before I'd finished. I said, "Repeat after me, 'I swear to God'." Eight of the nine did so, including Nevaeh proudly and with a loud voice. I NP-caressed her cheek again. To the ninth girl I said, "Emily, if you don't participate I will call your Principal." "I DID say it!" "Your mouth moved but you weren't exhaling or saying the words. Re-raise your hand and say the first words now by yourself or I will call your Principal." "I don't think you should make us swear to God over a personal matter. It's disrespectful to Him and we shouldn't do things like that." In answer I called out, "Angel, am I being disrespectful to God?" The angel appeared, the usual process occurred to my cellphone, then it floated to me. I refused to take delivery of it, instead saying, "Send it to Emily. She needs to read it herself." My phone flew to her. She expected that she was about to lose her argument so wasn't happy, but she took it. I said, "Read it out loud, Emily." Emily read: "God thinks protecting Mark is very important. God wants the oath, and It wants to add on the end, 'I swear to protect the quality of Mark's life.'" I didn't really care if other people heard that I couldn't commit a sin. It'd probably be best to keep it quiet because it was so silly, but otherwise it didn't matter. I was just using it as the reason for the oath because it sounded better than getting the girls to swear to keep my sexual game a secret. By wrapping the two issues together I got what I wanted in a way that reflected well on me. Plus I got to find out whether swearing a 'real' oath to God was an effective tactic [I write more fully about another of these tests quite a long way below (I can't really say "quite a lot later", for a reason you'll understand at the time)]. I pointed out, "I think that pretty much destroys your point about disrespecting God, doesn't it?" "Yes. I'm sorry. It's amazing that you can communicate with God so directly." The other girls chirped in to express their amazement too, but I quieted them down quickly, "We can talk all you want AFTER the oaths, but I want them first. Let's start again, with everyone's participation this time. I took them through all the phrases of the enlarged oath, with all of them doing it properly. That the oath ended with a blinding flash of light surprised all of them except Nevaeh, and probably not you either. Nevaeh was the first to speak, "Oh boy!" After the first couple of, "What was thats?" I answered, "That was your oath to God taking effect." You're probably also not surprised to know that they had some follow-up questions. One was an almost accusatory, "You knew that'd happen?" "I've seen it happen once before several weeks ago. I thought it MIGHT happen this time, and I was hoping it would because I take my families' safety very seriously. Now you can't break your oath." "What would happen if we did?" "I've never bothered to ask. I'm sure it'd be serious though, so you should behave yourselves." Predictably, they wanted me to bother to ask, so I did so. The answer came back: "God would be very angry. Oathbreakers would have a short life full of misery and pain, and then they would be killed. Their souls would be destroyed rather than moving on to the next stage." "Oh boy," from Nevaeh. The other girls were NOT happy and they started telling me all about it! I suddenly yelled, "Shut up!" It worked very nicely. "I told you before that those of you who aren't interested in becoming part of my life should leave and you all elected to stay. I also told you that this isn't some schoolyard gossip session; that it is SERIOUS business! I've got my own angel and God looks over my shoulders. Did you think God's so involved with my life because He's got nothing better to do? Don't be so stupid! It seems I'm incredibly important to the human race. You can't simply waltz into my life, bat your eyelids at me, then enjoy a life of luxury, high-living and flitting around the world in private jets to buy as many high-fashion clothes as you want. That's absurdly naïve. My girlfriends and Carol LOVE their lives, but there are serious responsibilities that go with being in my life. -- "You swore a binding, powerful oath to God, and God is holding you to it. But if you don't like it, all you have to do is walk away from my life. No one is forcing you to stay in it. You're safe to carry on doing the projects for the next couple of weeks because you're not going to learn any more secrets or have anything weird happen to you doing those, and after that you can leave and never see me again. If you really want to, you can even leave right now and never come back. Your life will be unaffected if you keep your mouth shut about what you've learned so far. I'm sure you all know how to keep secrets; you're teenage girls, so you'll have dozens of those you're hiding from your parents..." #5: " ... or a few anyway. Secrecy is important not just for what you've already learned, but for new secrets too. If my girls and I like you, you might get invited to come on shopping trip, to have sex or other things you wouldn't want your parents to know about. Now you know you're VERY safe from stories of those activities getting out because none of the other girls would dare say a word. Even a girl that I find doesn't suit my personality would be crazy to try to get revenge on you by spreading rumors because God would destroy her life for breaking her oath. -- "A door to a fantastic lifestyle is possibly opening for you, but it'll require that you act responsibly within the rules that God and I will set for you. Those rules are for everyone's protection, including yours, and any good person shouldn't have any trouble keeping to them..." I was throwing out stuff to help them calm down and see the positives. They'd seen the stick, but it was better to motivate them with a carrot. They didn't need more pressure now, but reassurance. I kept it up, adding references to usual boy-girl stuff they'd be familiar with to give them a feeling of normalcy, until I could sense that their concerns had eased enough - definitely not all the way, but enough. It took a lot of talking to ease their fears and it was all very tedious stuff so I won't bother recording it here. I was eventually able to say, "I think we've talked enough here. Let's walk back to the Adults' Pool. There's not much time left in your lunch hour anyway." Carol said, "Oh, Nevaeh, I just remembered that Julia has some fashion magazines to lend to you. They're in my room. Will you help me carry them please?" "Yes please! Julia gets GREAT magazines." It's bizarre, but about a third of the magazines Julia gets aren't even in English, her only language, but she still 'reads' them avidly. Nevaeh is just as avid to borrow them. Carol really did have some magazines in bags for Nevaeh. She also wanted to pull Nevaeh aside to tell her a few things, such as: "Of course one of the new girlfriends will be you. You're working out fantastically for us. As soon as we can find a way of getting permission from your parents, we want you to move in here. We all want it very much." Nevaeh was VERY happy. Tears were involved. "You've seen how loving our group is and how well it works. We want to make it bigger so there'll be even more love and happiness. We do want one more girl after you. You've been so wonderful that we're hoping we can find another girl like you from SCS." "The reason we didn't tell you in advance was as a little test. Mark was right about his life being complicated at times, and we need girls around Mark that we can rely on. We'll give you little tests from time to time and help you improve in any areas you have trouble with, but so far you've been fantastic." Nevaeh told Carol about Julia's test in Rocky's (when Julia had told Nevaeh "you will be having sex with a lot of people at the costume party"), then Nevaeh said, "I don't mind being tested. It's a bit scary but I trust you and I want to be as good as I can for you, and especially for Mark." Julia had trained Nevaeh well. It'd been easy, with Nevaeh knowing that God agreed with Julia. On their walk back to the Adults' Pool, Carol told Nevaeh a few things we would like her to do for us this evening. Meanwhile I'd been walking the other eight girls up to the Adult Pool and giving them some rules for the future, mostly to do with avoiding making the other girls, the boys, their Art teacher, principal or parents suspicious that something was going on beyond the art projects. Things like, "I forbid you to sneak away from your painting jobs to find me so you can flirt with me," and, "No doing your painting topless to get my attention either." "{Giggle}. We wouldn't do THAT!" "Good, because I suspect that the boys might tell other boys, and then we'd have 350 Sondarm boys outside our gates with binoculars. When you finish at 5 tonight, any that want to can pretend to leave and can waste time getting into your cars until the others have driven out, then you can come back up and we'll socialize around the pool before dinner. You can even have dinner with us if you like. That way we can start to get to know each other. We usually swim naked so you can do all the topless attention getting you want after everyone else has gone." "You'll be naked too?" "Knowing Julia, she'll insist on it." Another issue that came up was me telling them, "Don't tell a word of this to the other four girls, the ones that went on their Tour with Ava..." "Why weren't they included?" Which I'd been just about to explain when she'd interrupted me. It was good to see they were relaxing after the frightening oath. "My girlfriends and I have sex together, and they sleep with Carol too. There's a lot of bisexual sex that goes on around me. The four girls that went with Ava all hate or fear bisexuality, while the nine of you are all positively inclined toward it. A few of you are even eager for it, which pleases me and my girls a lot." I was exaggerating the willingness of this group, of course. Competition, peer pressure and avarice would work their magic on them. "We are!" | "I don't think so." | And several other exclamations of surprise and doubt. "Carol, Julia and Ava quite often kiss each other on the lips, and they've done it in front of you several times. Not that I was paying attention at the time - because I wasn't thinking of including you in my search for new girlfriends - but I've seen how all of you reacted to those kisses. The four girls that the Guardian Angel put in the other group are the four anti-bisexual girls, and it put all of you in this group because you're either fine with it, or you like the idea. I'm not going to embarrass each of you by stating what you think about it, but I could easily line you up in order of increasing attraction toward girls. -- "One thing most people get wrong about me, and I'm sure you are too, is that you think I'm special because God resurrected me and I have an angel. That's the wrong way around. I'm not special because God's interested in me; God's interested in me because I'm special. God resurrected me and sent me a Guardian Angel because I'm valuable to humanity. I'm incredibly intelligent. I've almost finished my first three college degrees, which will have taken me a year to do, not counting the time I was dead. Next year I'm going to finish two master's and four more bachelor's degrees. That would take a normal person a third of their entire working life, but I can do it in one year. So deciphering the expressions on your faces is very easy for me. I can easily tell that Emily and Elise don't believe what I'm saying at all; Abigail is undecided in the middle; Olivia and Hannah are half-believing; and Madison, Tatum and Alayna believe me." They excitedly confirmed my descriptions, amazed at how clever I was. After I've done that sort of thing a couple more times, they'll believe I know how bisexual they are better than they do. Not that it mattered beyond making sure that none of them got angry about discussing our lifestyle including it. When I delivered the girls back to the Adults' Pool, I apologized to the guys for how slow these girls had been and said I'd take the guys on their Tour during tomorrow's lunchtime. I avoided the teams for the rest of the day to give them time to settle down, but I did send Carol to them. Carol carried a clipboard with some bullshit school-type questions on it. Each person was called away for a private mini-interview. Real interviews occurred with all the team members as the school did want our feedback about the projects, but when with my eight targets and Nevaeh, Carol also asked if they had any urgent questions that needed to be asked before the post-5pm pool and dinner get-together. She also reminded the girls that if they needed to call home to explain why they wouldn't be there for dinner, then to do so where their teammates couldn't hear them. ^ Some explanation is probably overdue. I referred to the bisexually tolerant girls as "targets" just above. I meant "targets for deception", as we had no intention of any of them joining our life in the way we had described to them. It's theoretically possible that one of them MIGHT be so wonderful that we'd want her to join us, so using it as bait wasn't an absolute lie, but it was extremely unlikely. Comments like those just made, and many other similar comments that follow, sometimes do and sometimes don't apply to Nevaeh: she isn't included in this project as she's already in an entirely different category, but in front of the other SCS girls I had to pretend that Nevaeh was included because they weren't aware of her special status. As you've got this far through my autobiography, you must be good at handling confused situations so I'll assume you'll manage the minor issue of Nevaeh's inclusion or not. "Targets" most definitely didn't mean "sexual targets", as there were only two or three of these girls who appealed to me (depending on how horny I was feeling), four that positively didn't (yeech!), and a couple that I could bring myself to do it with if the situation required it, such as to avoid upsetting the atmosphere. Even among the two or three that appealed to me, there was really only one of them that interested me significantly. The purpose of these nine girls wasn't to directly supply me with sex, but to be my agents inside SCS, to give me access to the entire population of 11th and 12th grade girls. There had been 135 students in those grades according to SCS's website entry for last year, and presumably a similar number would be this year, and my ego rather liked the challenge of fucking my way through every single good looking junior and senior in a school. The most beautiful 10% would be only 6.75 girls, assuming equal division of the genders in the SCS roll, WAY less than the number of girls from my high school that I'd had sex with, but the challenge and ego appeal of bedding every beautiful girl from a school motivated me more than the quantity. It'd be a fun project, for a number of reasons. [When the new school year started, SCS had 155 students in the oldest two grades, of which 86 were female - 85 excluding Nevaeh - so my objective became to have sex with the 8.5 best-looking girls. I was willing to round that up to 9, or even 13.] ^ That evening, seven out of the nine "target" girls stayed after work. The first issue that caught our guests' attention was that my girls and I were naked. Ava was face up and naked on a deckchair, while Julia, Carol and I were in the pool. Not much could be seen of us through the water, but enough to see that we were naked. Julia's removed all doubt by saying, "We have only one rule about clothing here, and it's a rule we're adamant about: it is every person's individual choice how much or how little they wear. We won't pressure you and we don't want you to pressure each other either. We take morality very seriously in our home so we insist on rules like that. We usually go naked because it feels better and we like being sexy in front of Mark and each other, but you can remain dressed, get your swimsuits, go topless or naked. It's up to you." They dithered for several seconds, and then decided that they'd all go to get their swimsuits, other than one girl who said, "I don't have a swimsuit here, but I'd like to go for a swim now. I don't want to be naked though." Ava said, "I could lend you a T-shirt and a pair of my exercise shorts?" "Thank you." They went inside to get that done. The others returned already changed into their swimwear, they apologized on behalf of the two girls who'd left, saying that they wanted to stay but they'd had no choice. I replied, "Please tell them it's perfectly fine. It's only a get-to-know-you meeting, not a commitment. If it takes me a few days longer to get to know them, it's no big deal." Some of the girls got into the pool, but most of them sat near Ava. They were awkward and unsure what to do, but were slowly relaxing. They were very self-conscious whenever looking in my direction though. After a couple of minutes, Julia laughed, "Mark, stop teasing them. You know it's not their fault." "I know, but I was curious to see if any of them were smart enough to work it out for themselves." "They won't. And even if they do, they're too scared to ask it. Put them out of their misery please, so they can relax." "Okay." I swam to the nearest ladder, climbed out of the pool and walked toward the girls who were sitting on chairs. "Oh my G ... oops. Umm," and other inarticulate expressions of fascinated shock. Being well-brought up Christian girls, they didn't know what to say. Nevaeh giggled at her schoolmates' reactions. I would've thought well-brought up Christian girls shouldn't look, but that didn't seem to apply to these girls. Perhaps their parents weren't as good at bringing up as they should have been (I'm not sure whether "bringing up" is the form of "brought up" that I wanted. It looks like it should be, but doesn't seem right, although not as bad as "broughting up". English can be confusing sometimes). Some of them even unashamedly stared at that part of me - good girls! (by my definition). The others looked away, but their eyes couldn't help themselves and they dragged their owners' heads back to the fascinating sight. The 'good girls' made some accurate anatomical comments, such as, "Wow, you're THICK" further raising my opinion of them. I was particularly impressed by Tatum's, "God! I bet those bumps feel fantastic!" Perhaps Christian education isn't as lacking in important details as I'd thought. I stopped about ten yards away so I wouldn't be too 'in their face', and started explaining - where "explaining" means "corrupting" - "You've been taught that naked bodies are sinful, but I'm standing naked in front of you showing you everything I've got and God told you a few hours ago that I can't commit a sin. So we have what I'll call a 'moral dilemma'. Is my showing you my body sinful or not? Nevaeh, what's your opinion?" Nevaeh answered, "It's NOT a sin. I believe God before my parents; they're just trying to control me. The church and our parents are wrong." "VERY good answer. You were very quick to understand during the Tour too. You're a smart person." And a well-primed one, thanks to Carol's instructions after the Tour. The other girls were going to see Nevaeh become my favorite for deserved verbal reasons rather than her beauty and figure. That would make me seem more moral, would educate the other girls, and would set a very high behavioral benchmark they'd have to compete with. That one of their number was doing so well intellectually would also encourage the best ones to try even harder, rather than giving up because none of them could compete with Nevaeh's beauty. -- To the group I said, "A lot of what you've been taught about sexual morality is wrong. There is NOTHING sinful about the human body. Obviously it can DO some bad things, like if I hit any of you, but there's nothing wrong with it in itself. I have a hammer in my toolbox. That hammer is neither Good nor Evil. It's a thing, so is neither moral nor immoral. I can use the hammer to do something good, like help build a home for a charity; or I could do something bad with it, like use it to threaten someone. Regardless of how I'm using it, the hammer is still neither Good nor Evil because it's still a thing. -- "Our bodies are things too, so they are neither Good nor Evil. If my body does something good or bad, my body is still just a thing. Good and Evil is TOTALLY about our minds and our souls. That's where the concepts of Good and Evil exist, and they don't exist anywhere else. If I slapped your face in anger, that would be a bad act. But if I was waving away a bee that was about to land on you, and I accidentally hit you, that wouldn't be bad at all. I'd tried to do you a favor and I'd even risked getting stung myself, so I was doing a good deed. In both scenarios I slapped your face, so the action could be bad or good, but my hand was neither, regardless of which scenario occurred. -- "Same thing for what I'm doing now. I'm showing you my naked body. If I walked into the center of town like this, I'd be offending many people and that'd be a bad thing for me to do, but doing it now is a good thing. You've all come here knowing that you would see me naked. You've been trying to catch glimpses of me for the last few minutes and it was distracting you from talking and behaving normally, so I'm showing you my body. I'm perfectly happy to be looked at because I know that God is perfectly happy for me to do this. There's nothing sinful in it. Does anyone want to come closer for a look?" "I do!" declared my agent provocateur, surprising the girls who knew her well, or thought they did. Carol hadn't given Nevaeh much in the way of detailed instructions. Mostly she'd explained to Nevaeh what we were intending to achieve this evening in terms of getting the girls' attitudes correct, and she asked Nevaeh to volunteer quickly for anything I offered, to lead the others on by example. Nevaeh approached and walked around me, looking me up and especially down. When she got back around to my front, she knelt, looked up at me and asked, "Can I touch it, please Mark?" The others were scandalized, in a fascinated, envious sort of way. "Seeing as how you asked so nicely, sure." With a great deal more assurance than she'd shown the real first time she'd handled my cock, Nevaeh unhesitatingly reached up and gently took hold of my cock. She pulled it out inspected it from every direction, ran her finger along its length. Then she lowered it and let it go, stood and said, "Thank you." "You're welcome. You were gentle in your movements and mature in your attitude. You impress me very much." With HEARTFELT sincerity, Nevaeh answered, "I want to be your girlfriend VERY MUCH. God thinks you're the most amazing person in the world, and being your girlfriend would be the greatest thing that could ever happen to me. Can I take my swimsuit off?" Some of the other girls even groaned. They all felt suddenly depressed and hopeless. Even in her terrible swimsuit, there was no doubt that Nevaeh had by far the best body of all of them. I answered, "You don't need to ask. Do whatever you feel comfortable with." "I will then." Nevaeh stepped back and started removing her swimsuit. I looked away from Nevaeh, toward the rest of the girls, to ask, "Does anyone else want a close look?" "Can I ask a question?" one of the girls in the pool asked. "Sure." "Why didn't you get hard when Nevaeh played with you and why aren't you looking at her now?" "I didn't get hard because - to me - we aren't doing anything sexual. I know all of you are feeling some sexual arousal, and several of you are feeling a lot of it, but all I'm doing is showing you my body so we can get past the silliness all of you were experiencing before, when so much of your attention was on my submerged body that you couldn't socialize properly. -- "My morals are very strong and it's very easy for me to control my sexual feelings. It'd be inappropriate for me to get sexual with any of you so soon because I barely know you. If we did anything sexual now, I'd be taking advantage of your fascination for me and my lifestyle. I won't consider sex until after we come back from Noumea, and even then it'll only be after making sure you're fully aware and comfortable that it might happen. Until then you can relax because we'll just be getting to know each other." In the past when I've denied that I wanted sex it was just a way of getting more of it from the girls later, but now I was denying that I wanted it because I didn't want it from these girls. It was a very unusual situation. -- "As for not looking at Nevaeh get undressed, I've got a whole bunch of small reasons for that. Things like I was in a conversation with the rest of you and it would've been impolite of me to make you wait so I could look at Nevaeh's body. Also because we'll be here for an hour or more, so there's no hurry, and I'd rather wait for any of you who want to undress to catch up to Nevaeh so I can treat you equally. Lots of small reasons like that. -- "There was one reasonably large reason though. A significant part of why Nevaeh took her swimsuit off was because she understood my point about bodies not being sinful. Taking off her suit was her way of telling me that she understood. She's impressively perceptive and smart, and also courageous because I imagine too many boys make nuisances of themselves because of her body, so she'll have gotten defensive about it. So she not only demonstrated understanding and courage, but even more importantly, that she trusts me. So you can see that if I'd turned and stared at her naked body, I would've been doing exactly the wrong thing." The girls started expressing their admiration of my morality, but I held up my hand to cut them off, saying, "Thank you for the compliments you're just starting, but I need to add one little explanation. The large reason I just described is actually completely untrue. In fact, Nevaeh would like me to look at her body. She wants to be my girlfriend and she knows she has a very good body, so she wants me to see it. -- "In a few seconds I will look at her and I'm sure I'll be pleased by her beauty, but before I do that, I want you to understand that although my reason wasn't true, it could have been. When I was thinking about whether or not to look at Nevaeh, it was one of the reasons I thought of. I realized it didn't apply because her motivation was different, but I told you about it because I want you to get to know how I think because that's what this get-together is for. Because we won't have many hours of private time, I'm having to be more boastful than I'm comfortable with, but if I don't show you enough about myself you'll keep underestimating me badly. I do a HUGE amount of thinking - far more of it than you or anyone else can do - but you're used to dealing with boys who barely do any thinking at all, especially if you're wearing swimsuits. If you treat me the way you treat other boys, you'll be making a large mistake. -- "Tatum, I see you're very eager to get close to my cock, so how about you be the next person to look at it." "Umm. Why do you think that?" I proved how observant I was by saying, "You're highly aroused, you've been rhythmically squeezing your upper-thighs together, whenever you look at my cock your mouth opens and your tongue hangs out a little, and your right hand has formed a circle while you've been imagining jacking me." Tatum's blushing response was drowned out by the laughter. I'll omit the rest of the rest of the 'date' as it was just our usual seduction routine, which you should be very familiar with by now, including me swimming at triple world-record rate to, using my usual logic, (a) Help them realize how special I was, and (b) Plant the seed that they should help me fuck my way through all the beauties of their school. It worked wonderfully, of course, because my girls and I are experts at this seduction system by now, plus I had God on my side, as proved by his adding ribs around my cock. By the end of the dinner the victims were flirting with me to the best of their sadly underdeveloped but still appreciated abilities; except for Tatum, as her flirting abilities weren't underdeveloped. She'd obviously been a Less-Than-Good Christian Girl. There are only a couple of minor points worth mentioning: The first is given just because it amuses me a little. The victims had called their parents and told them that they were having dinner with the Andersons and would be home about 7:30 or so. Their parents had, for the most part, naturally assumed it'd be a safe, normal family dinner, with parents in attendance. In reality, we had dinner in the Kids' House so theoretically we could've had a nonstop orgy. [My girls were much better cooks these days. Not so much Julia, but Carol and Ava often help out in the Adults' kitchen, getting cooking lessons from whichever mother was on the job. Often the other mother joins in and it turns into an extensive lesson. Increasingly often my girls give the mothers a break from that duty, especially if the mothers are late back from DC. My girls quite often make dinner in the Kids' House for just us, to practice our being a mini-family. Carol particularly enjoys that.] A second point is worth mentioning because it's so unlike my usual approach: how I dealt with ugly girls. In response to a concerned questioner, I said, "I will uninvite any of you from participating in these dates if I feel you're not suitable girlfriend material. The Guardian Angel has effectively already done that to the first four girls who weren't told about my looking for a new girlfriend, because it knew that their fear and hatred of bisexuality might cause them to be dangerous to me if they told other people about what they'd learned. I'll continue to uninvite those of you who show me that you're unsuitable for other reasons. -- "You're concerned about your lack of physical beauty, Abigail, but that doesn't make you unsuitable, and you won't be uninvited for that reason. It's possible for any of you to become my girlfriend no matter what you look like. You can tell that I'm impressed by Nevaeh. She was smart at lunchtime, she was the first to look at my cock closely, she was mature and gentle with it, she took off her swimsuit in part because she understood my point about bodies and wanted to show that she trusted me to react sensibly about hers, and there's even the point that I bought one of her paintings because I liked it so much. If Nevaeh had been the least attractive girl here, she'd still be my favorite of all of you at this stage because what she's demonstrated to me is a great deal more important than physical beauty." I had to do this to stay on the moral high ground, plus nine girls will get me better access to the rest of the SCS beauties than two or three girls could. Unfortunately, having so many uglies among these nine meant that these group dates would never get very sexual. It was a sacrifice worth making for the good of the greater plan. I intend that after we return from Noumea, I'll pick a couple of girls at 'random' to have sex with, so they can tell the other girls what it's like. Of course I'll cheat to avoid the uglies. I'll get one average and one reasonably good looking girl. I won't choose Nevaeh, which will allay their suspicions nicely as she'll clearly be my favorite by then. [I've mentioned what my intentions were because you won't be reading about them later. For a reason that will soon be explained in due course, the SCS plan got messed up after our return from Noumea.] The next couple of days, before we went to Noumea, we kept up the same approach. We'd warned the girls off trying to flirt with me during work hours. A couple of times they tried, and I walked away offended. In one case I heard several of her teammates tell her off, including a couple of the bi-phobes. ------- Chapter 394: Worrying News in Noumea Saturday, September 8 to Sunday, September 16, 2007 The trip to Noumea was one I was looking forward to very much. A week on a tropical island with sun, sand, sea, sex and scuba; and sadly, some shopping, sigh. Donna was very eager too, probably for the same six reasons, although hopefully not too much because of sex. Her sex education was progressing slowly, exactly how Mom and Dad - and me to a lesser extent - wanted it to progress. It was a safe bet that Donna wouldn't misbehave with any guy during the trip. Mom warned her though, and I promised I'd do my best to make some good quality boinking times for her. It'd be easy to book a nice boat for an afternoon 'family trip', as Carol should get some time with me too. We had an early flight time, to maximize the vacation time. Going were: Eight guys and their dates, including David and his. He'd been the lucky guy that didn't have a girlfriend when my school exam study notes were delivered. I wrote "lucky" because Julia released the hordes of avaricious girls on him, and he was nearly eaten alive by several girls wanting to be picked to go to Noumea with him, so they could worm their way into our social circle. Me and nine of my best girlfriends: Julia, Carol, Ava, Donna, Alexis, Pat, Carina, Diana and Claire Norris (there's an explanatory comment about the Norris girls' inclusion just below). Violet and Samantha, two friends of Donna's. Violet was a horsy friend, Samantha a friend who was an exceptionally good swimmer from Donna's old swimming club. Two very lucky male guards. The Norris parents had been worked on, softened up and lied to extensively to convince them to give permission for their younger daughters to go. You may recall that post-resurrection they initially refused to allow me contact with their daughters, and then we shamed them into relaxing. By this far through summer, they'd been pretty well bamboozled by the several tactics we'd used. In addition to those already mentioned, after the weeklong Italy trip there was a long article about it in the local newspaper that emphasized how safe and well behaved it'd been (I wanted to encourage parents to believe it was okay for their daughters to go on such trips, not all of which would be for shopping). One of the girls who had gone on the trip had a younger sister who was friendly enough with Diana to be able to visit Diana's home one evening, bringing photos and some of her elder sister's clothing purchases. The girls had raved about the trip, repeatedly emphasizing how morally acceptable it'd been. Carol and Donna had enthusiastically wanted their very good friends, Diana and Claire, to come, convincing the Norris parents. As I was the sort of guy who even left the Aquatic Center when Diana arrived in the spirit of her parents' disapproval of my associating with Diana, they trusted that I wouldn't misbehave. Carol stressed that I did, after all, have God looking over my shoulder. How much avarice was in the Norris parents' decision I neither knew nor cared. The hotel was four rather than five star. Maybe five star by local standards, but not compared to any of the mainland five-star hotels we'd stayed in. But the somewhat reduced quality of the hotel as a whole didn't matter much as our suite was very nice. It was located at the end of a wing so had great views in several directions, and was very close to the lovely hotel pool and the ocean. The hotel had delivered on their promise that the main bedroom in my suite would have two king-sized beds pushed together with double-king-sized bed linen for 'friendly' sleeping. There was also another king-sized bed in the suite's other bedroom for Carol, Donna and whoever else wanted to, so sleeping ten in my suite would be easy. The main problem was an appalling lack of closet space. The girls were quite upset at the terrible oversight and the hotel had to supply some emergency mobile racks that could be set up in the second bedroom. The eight boy-girl couples, plus the fake "couples" for accommodation purposes, of Violet and Samantha and the two guards, each had their own rooms, which they were very happy with until Julia showed them our room. The two Norris girls were supposed to have their own room too - so their parents understood - but somehow the hotel seemed to have lost that booking, so they were forced to sleep in the only room which had space in a bed for them. Oh well. Ava's gunshot injury was three months ago and she'd healed very quickly thanks to a lot of kiatsu, so she was in good health now. The metal was out of her arm and the only long-term effect was some surgery scars on her upper-arm. Kiatsu had helped minimize those, and I was giving her heaps of it whenever she was near me to make the scars fade as quickly as possible. She had full use of her arm and was eager to learn how to scuba dive. Learning with her would be Donna, Samantha, Alexis, Claire, three of the guys and one of their dates. None of these had done any scuba diving before and would be learning from scratch. (Financially, the deal for these trips is that we pay for the travel and accommodation, and usually most of the dinner meals too. I usually pay all the non-shopping costs of my dates, so Alexis' and Claire's scuba courses would be free to them. Otherwise people pay their own way. So the three guys, for example, would by paying for their own scuba courses. Donna was paying for Samantha's.) I was the only vacationing person who was a certified diver - although both guards were chosen from the list of guards who were certified - so I wouldn't dive for the first few days. We'd be dividing into two groups for a couple of hours each day: Scuba Divers and Sightseers. While the novice divers were doing their initial training in the dive center's swimming pool, I'd be with the sightseers. Once the novices progressed to doing ocean dives, I'd dive with them. The dives would be tamer than I could've done with more experienced divers, but they'd be with my friends which would much more than make up for it. In the afternoons and evenings we'd all do whatever appealed. Hanging around the pool or beach sounded pretty good to me, as I hadn't forgotten about the topless bikinis. That was the plan, and it got off to a great start. No one recognized me because my features and skin had changed significantly since the last time I had been on TV. My body was now very close to being Mark's, so I looked almost nothing like Ron. Mark's photos had been publicized somewhat, but not much, and not for quite a while. [The THOUSANDS of international media representatives, self-important politicians, dignitaries from all over the world, self-appointed international religious investigative groups, university and other research organizations, and all sorts of other people who wanted to meet/interview/test/worship/suck-up-to me (excluding Jessica Alba unfortunately), had given up by now. I was still filming my body's slow transformation most mornings, but hadn't handed over the tape for several weeks. I'd had a haircut too. My slow transformation required far too much attention span for the media.] The weather and sea were beautiful and all nine of my dates were being very considerate in their choice of beachwear, which quickly shamed most of the other girls into removing their tops too, especially the ones that were trying to flirt with me. They had no chance of success as all their dates had worriedly asked me to leave their girls alone, which I'd promised to do. I didn't tell the girls that though, because I enjoyed ogling their attention-seeking method. I was having a great time, as were the other ten voyeurs: my eight male guests and our two guards. My largest concern was in warning the Norris girls not to let their breasts get too suntanned in case their mother got suspicious. Obviously I told them to prevent this by using lots of strong sunblock on the important areas, which I volunteered to apply for them because that's the sort of guy that I am. In the middle of the second day, I had a déjà vu. Nothing unusual about that as they happen every seventeen hours or so. It was the content that was unusual. Once the introductions were over, which didn't take long, the following happened. (Normally I paraphrase my internal conversations to make them more intelligible to you, because we use some very strange shortcuts. Just to give you a slightly better understanding of how we talked, in the following I've written "I" or "me" when the action was performed by the body, and "we" or "us" when the action was mental. It reads awkwardly, especially as "we" sometimes refer to the cross-dimensional collective of Marks, but you might enjoy a small extract with that strangeness. It'd be even stranger if "you" wasn't both singular and plural.) One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: A note on the mention of "extreme measures to sneak out unobserved". That was a lot easier these days as our secret tunnel had been completed a couple of weeks previously. I could take the elevator from my home down to the main tunnel, drop down through the cupboard's false floor to enter the tunnel's under-road area. A quick subterranean flight would take me to the very end of the main tunnel, where the short side tunnel connected to the end of the shooting range. From there to the still mostly empty Second Staff Quarter's underground parking garage. Either a motorcycle with a helmet or the trunk of someone's car made for easy exits. One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: We discussed it until the link ended, but it had just been bouncing ideas around for various highly speculative what-if scenarios. ^ A large shadow was cast over the rest of my Noumea vacation. I was constantly worried, was repeatedly searching our suite for bugs, was continually looking over my shoulder - which I can do extraordinarily well - and I called home a few times to check that everything was okay there, keeping my conversations casual to avoid alarming the parents or letting any eavesdroppers learn that I was on to them. Everything seemed fine at home. I had to restrict my use of my abilities. I'd previously intended to swim rings around Samantha in a swimming race, for example, but doing that when I might be under observation wouldn't be a good idea. Another thing I would've liked to have done, even more, was take Carol and Donna out for a private dinner, and then make love to them somewhere nice - such as 5,000 feet above the island, or fly them out to one of the tiny, beautiful islands for sex on the sand - but that was too risky. I still found ways to have private time with them, but it was a great deal less romantic than it should have been. The baddies - whoever they were - had pissed me off even before I'd seen any of them. The vacation did have its fun moments though, especially in seeing what a great time everyone else was having. There were times when I was happy - it's hard not to have those when you're on vacation with so many sexy lovers - but there was the constant worry dragging me down. I kept a happy face on, but during the fifth day Carol asked me, "Are you all right? You're not your usual self." "I'm worried about something at home. The parents are fine; it's something external. We'll talk about it when we get home because there's nothing to be done about it here." "Except you're worrying about it." "Yeah, that part's a bummer. It's my business so I won't load it onto anyone else until we get back." I never noticed any surveillance or other monkey business in Noumea. People looked our way quite often, but that was mostly because there were so many uninhibited girls in my group - the hopeful images I'd had of beaches full of topless beauties had been true to only a minor degree. Luckily I'd brought my own topless beauties. I had nine more déjà vu's by the time I got home, all with five-merged Marks: One of them had spotted the X-ray trucks himself. Three of them had already heard about it from another Mark Anderson. Five times I broke the news to them, and they all remembered the trucks. I didn't learn anything new from any of them. When it was time to leave the hotel, I made up an excuse to go to the plane an hour before everyone else, and spent the time very carefully searching it for "bad things", especially of the variety that went {Bang}. There were no bugs, no lumps of putty-like substance or sticks of dynamite, and no suspicious gas canisters - there were plenty of gas canisters, but none of them were suspicious. There were lots of electronic units that I had no idea about, but I wasn't too concerned about those. If one of them was a sabotage device, it could easily down the plane, but I'd have time to save everyone. In case of a gas attack, I kept the bed in an airtight box most of the time. When people were cycling through it, or when I had to leave the room for a few minutes, I held my breath. In any event, the trip home was uneventful. The route home from the airport took me close enough to see the baddies' house from the outside (I was tentatively assuming they were "baddies"; it seemed a reasonable assumption). It looked the same in this dimension as the others, but with an additional satellite dish mounted on its roof. I wasn't close enough to see whether it was transmitting, receiving, or even which of the many satellites up there it was pointing at. Get close enough to determine those was a low priority because they wouldn't tell me anything useful. At home I very carefully searched one of the rooms to confirm it was bug free, then I called a families conference. "I think we might be under surveillance again. While I was away I connected a couple of things that I'd noticed before I left, and I think that's the case. I'm going to check it out tonight, but I want you all to be extra careful about what you say from now on." They wanted details, but I said, "It's too early as I've only got suspicions. Let me get some information first. You didn't notice anything untoward around town or home over the last week, did you?" "No." That night my girls went to see the same movie they had in the other dimension, with me in the trunk 'again'. The baddies' house was a lot busier this time. There were five muscular looking agent-types, one of whom was female, plus three support personnel (what I call "weenies"). A couple of them were sleeping, but most were in the well-equipped living room. They had a laptop displaying an overhead shot of our property, which helpfully had a date- and timestamp on it, showing that it was a live feed. It had an infrared overlay and I could see movement from our guards and the horses. A quick check confirmed that their satellite dish was transmitting and was pointing directly at a source of EM radiation in the air or possibly in space (I can't tell distance). The dish was mounted on a motorized pivoting mechanism, so it would be able to track a moving source. There were three more screens displaying side-on live feeds of our property: From the southwest in approximately the same direction as the FBI's bug dish for the Kids' House had been pointing. It was showing all of the main hilltop, although the Office was out of sight. From the north, which only showed the Adults' House and the unused Guests' Quarters as everything else was on the southern slope. From the southeast aimed slightly upward. It covered our gate and above, including the Kids' House and the Adults' House, although the latter was obscured by several trees. Knowing the topology of Corvallis, I knew the hills the cameras must have been on, and they were all about a mile away from our home, the location of the northern one being the most uncertain as there were plenty of hills to our north and northwest and I couldn't tell exactly which one the camera was on. The three side-on feeds had infrared overlays too. As well as needing to find out what was going on, I needed to gather proof of it too. The living room windows were all shut with the drapes drawn and the screens were facing the wrong way to allow me to get photographs from the outside, but the ever-helpful bathroom window was open so I should be able to use that after some more snooping. There was zero paperwork, no printer to generate any from, no briefcases, no filing cabinets, or any of the things you'd expect from a Government operation. It's always been the Government's agencies who have stuck their noses into my business, but if this was a Government operation then its level of paperwork was unprecedented. I saw how security conscious they were when one of their phones rang. I saw the guy reaching for it, so zoomed in for a close look. The call was from "Twelve", the phone had a fingerprint scanner on its side and required a pin number before the call could be answered. I had a feeling I wasn't going to be getting the list of all their contacts easily, although I was sure that when I did, I'd recognize all their names: "One", "Two", etc. I was surprised they weren't wearing gloves and even masks, given their cautiousness. The kitchen was stocked with plenty of food, mostly of the heat-and-eat precooked variety. There were several toiletry bags in the bathroom and small suitcases in the bedrooms. Nothing personal was unpacked; they could grab their bags and be gone in seconds. There'd be fingerprints and hair samples left behind, but that was all. The two sleepers were the easiest to check out. Their wallets were totally devoid of ID, the same as the wallet the other Mark had lifted from the card player's removed jacket. I decided not to touch their cellphones in case not entering a fingerprint fast enough set off an alarm. The four suitcases in the room held clothes and a few miscellaneous items such as paperback books, packs of cards, an electric razor, spare batteries, ammunition and clips, etc. Their mothers hadn't sewn their names into the backs of their underwear, and there was nothing of use to me. The suitcases in the other bedrooms were just as useless. I spent about half an hour searching the house and garage from top to bottom. I didn't find anything useful. Not finding bomb-making equipment or rocket launchers was a good thing, but not finding any leads at all was a worry. I had some ideas for things I could check out, but they weren't nearly as useful as what I'd hoped to find. While I was snooping, the laptop's point of view moved west at a steady rate (always centered on my home, but the perspective changed). The source was moving too fast for a UAV and they'd be unlikely to use one of those as we'd proved capable of discovering them. How their dish was mounted and the view's speed and constant westerly direction made it pretty obvious that they were using a low-altitude satellite feed. That surely made it more likely to be a Government operation. I searched around the neighborhood homes until I found one with a charged video camera that used the same memory stick as one I had at home. I borrowed it, flying it in the bathroom window. I got photos of the two sleeping baddies, and a quick shot through the living room doorway at two of the screens, the others angled the wrong way for me to record them. I returned the camera but kept the stick. I'd bring some replacements next time I came, as well as at least a Dictaphone so I could get a sample of what they were saying, or better still, I should get a decent bug into their living room. I made sure my black sheet was still in place, then went to check out the three camera locations. Searching from house to house in the general area was quick and easy. All three cameras were mounted inside of houses that I presumed were being rented, and each was being babysat by a weenie. Their feeds were being broadcast upward by fixed-mount satellite dishes, which implied they were aimed at a geosynchronous satellite. That upped the resources involved even higher. I slipped back into the trunk of Julia's car. When they returned from the movie, I pinched their nipples to let them know I was in place, and they drove home. I played the memory stick for everyone, so they all knew the 'game' was on: a very serious game of "Cat and Cat" (I didn't see myself as a mouse). I described what I'd observed, especially the level of cautiousness involved. Prof asked, "How did you get onto them in the first place?" I told them about the X-ray trucks in considerable detail, as that was an important clue to the current thinking of baddies. They couldn't understand why I didn't speak up at the time, but I said, "There are complicated reasons I can't go into." We discussed what to do. One thing we very much wanted to do was bring Paul into the loop. His advice could be extremely useful. On the other hand, there were some problems: He'd learn that the angel was extremely cooperative, e.g., it would plant a bug for us. This wasn't unreasonable since its job is to protect me, but it was far more cooperation than it'd ever been seen to provide before. I'd have to give him some bullshit about "helping ourselves" to explain why God didn't wave his hand to make the whole problem go away. That the angel and God didn't react forcefully and were totally ignorant about the operation was a major problem. Most worrying were the restrictions on the angel, especially that it could only operate at night and I had to be within five hundred feet of it. We might be able to hide those restrictions for a while, but Paul was bound to suggest many excellent ideas that we'd have to reject because of those reasons. He was a very smart guy and it wouldn't take him long to spot that the angel and I were much more closely linked than anyone previously knew, and from there it was only a small jump to the truth. We didn't even want him to ask us questions, as lying to him - which he was too astute not to spot - would poison our relationship. So Paul had to stay out of the loop for now. Dad did ask him to check with his contact at our phone company to find out whether our phones were being tapped, "Just as a precaution." [The next day, we were told that they weren't.] So it was up to me, with some advice from my families, to take care of the problem. My successful nuclear war had given me a great deal of confidence, and it had taught me how my abilities' were capable of producing some amazingly large consequences. I felt up to the task of taking on the latest baddies. ------- Chapter 395: Dicing With Fate Monday, September 17 to Sunday, October 21, 2007 Getting a bug was easy. I sneaked out again in the wee small hours of the morning, flew to Portland, where I stole a few each of several different varieties of bugs from the FBI, including parabolic mics, suction cup bugs that could be attached to the outside of windows, and different types that transmitted or just recorded what they heard. I even took some video bugs although I didn't think I'd use them with my current set of baddies. I also stole a good supply of batteries, chargers, the operating manuals, tape recorders and a lot of the FBI's other associated equipment in case it might be useful one day. Taking that much equipment out of the FBI's storeroom amused me, which was why I took so much of it. I didn't want to fly home with so much metallic stuff but I could risk flying it around Portland at a very low altitude, so I temporarily left it on the FBI's roof while I searched around the area for a company that had a lot of packages piled up ready to be picked up. I found a suitable company, flew my loot there, extracted the manuals, packaged everything else in that company's own boxes, addressed them to myself, and left my boxes with the others that were already in the outward goods area. Then I flew home with the manuals. My loot arrived mid-afternoon, by which time I'd already read the manuals from cover to cover because some of the bugs, transmitters, receivers and audio processing equipment were quite tricky to set up and use. With Dad's and Prof's help - because these toys were cool - we set up my planned system in the Adults' living room to make sure we had everything working, and then we waited until it was dark. I returned to the baddies' base and started my operation by sticking a suction cup mic on the middle of their largest living room window. The rest of that system's required equipment was already set up, including my having the earphones on. Like most windows in Corvallis, it was double-paned, but I got fairly clear reception on my first attempt - I'd stolen good gear. The baddies weren't saying anything interesting at the moment, but the main purpose of the window bug was so I'd know if the people inside got suspicious of what I would be doing next: installing a much better full-time bug. I needed to create quite a large hole under the eaves to get my equipment into the roof-space. I chose a place hidden behind a large tree's branches. I pushed the branches away then burned through the eave because smashing or drilling would've been too noisy. A couple dozen small, overlapping, max-heat blobs applied directly to the wood along a nearly foot-long length of the eaves made it catch fire, whereupon I canceled the blobs and created an airtight box around the inside and outside of the burning area, snuffing it out. Repeating that a few times weakened the wood so much that it was easy to push through it to make the size of hole I needed. I sprayed the area with water from a plastic water bottle that I'd brought with me. Into the roof-space went the bugs, transmitter and cabling. The roof of this house had line of sight to our Adults' House so my bugs were going to report home using a direct beam rather than a wide-area broadcast. I didn't want to put a transmitter on the roof because the baddies might discover it when they next adjusted their communications equipment, so I was using one of those fold-up mesh dishes, similar to an umbrella. I flew it into the house's roof-space far enough that there was enough room to open it up and point it roughly in the right direction. The baddies' living room had a light fixture hanging in it, so it necessarily had a hole in the ceiling for the light's electrical wiring. It was therefore easy to thread the mic down the light fixture's cabling hole and into the fixture itself. The mic was now exposed to the air in the middle of the living room so should easily pick up their speech. Dad had shown me how to splice my bug's base station into the house's power cable, and two cables from the base station to the dish provided its power and data. All the lights were green, so it was only a matter of getting the dish pointed to where we had erected the receiver at my home. It was behind a window in the Adults' House, in a box covered in thin gauze so no one could see what it was. I used a neighbor's phone to call Dad's cellphone then hung up after one trill to alert them to the start of the sound check. I did my best to aim the dish at the right window of our house, that being somewhat tricky as the roof blocked my vision. I had to place my sight blob immediately behind the dish and move the blob in the direction it was 'facing'. Once the blob was through the roof, I could see whether it was heading toward the receiver. It wasn't, so I guessed how much to move the dish and tried it again, until it looked reasonable. Julia didn't react. The people beneath me were talking and their TV was on, and the dish was transmitting, so those aspects were fine. After a few seconds of not getting any feedback, I tweaked the angle of the dish and waited again. It took three tweaks before Julia walked in front of the window talking on her cellphone. Before I'd left home she'd told me that she'd do her best to have a long-winded conversation about fashion. I'd apologized for making her role in my plan so onerous. My radio blob saw the point source transmission of Julia's cellphone for three seconds before she hid it again by walking out of the window frame back behind the large, metal serving tray we were using to block my radio blob from seeing her phone's signal when she wasn't wishing to show it to me. Seeing her signal for three seconds meant "three out of ten", which wasn't very good so I tweaked the dish again. Julia's cellphone signal was exposed in the window for six seconds this time. After several more tweaks, I'd got it up to eight, which I thought was probably good enough. That was my families' opinion of how easy it was to hear the voices, on a 1-to-10 scale, and it was quite likely that the mic's location stopped us getting any better than an eight. I called Dad's phone again, letting it trill four times before I hung up. More than two rings meant: "Finished this stage, starting the next." Which was to successively bug the baddies' kitchen, master bedroom and the house's mini-office. The process was so similar to what I've already described that I won't describe it again. The bugs were all wired to the same dish as it multiplexed its signal back to our house, where we'd already configured it to be split and sent to four different tape machines. After calling called Dad's phone again at the end of the home-office test, the next stage was an easy one: Dad was to walk out on to the roof of the Activity Level. He'd be inside a wooden frame we'd made, over which was fixed a black sheet. He'd be wearing a crash helmet too. I wanted to know whether the baddies' infrared cameras were sensitive enough to detect Dad. He was the largest member of my families so if they couldn't see him, then they shouldn't be able to see me. There was very little ambient light where Dad was going, so he shouldn't appear in the visible spectrum either. I watched their screens carefully, seeing nothing. After a minute, Julia walked in front of the living room window again, letting me know that Dad had returned inside. I sent another four trills. The next stage was for my families to place several innocuous calls, calling from their landline, their and my cells, while I watched to see if there was any reaction below me. There was none. That didn't mean the baddies weren't doing it, as this might just be the visual observation post with another team on audio, but it had been worth doing the test anyway. After Julia gave me her signal again to let me know they'd finished, I called Dad's phone and let it trill quite a few times, which meant "Finished." I'd told Julia it meant: "Finished and get back to bed because I'll be coming home horny." It's important to keep my helpers' morale up. Mine too, come to that. I'd been looking through the baddies' house in odd moments and there'd been no improvement in my chance of getting hold of any useful information visually. The only difference was one guy was missing, which had worried me a little until I realized I was being silly because for all I knew twenty other guys were 'missing' too, as I had no idea of the size of this team. I collected my gear and went to climb back into Prof's car's trunk, that being how I'd hidden my departure from home. The multi-channel receiving system was part-computer and part-tape and it was possible to listen to different segments while the tapes were recording everything. It was also possible to skip silence on the playback, which I'd thought would save us a lot of time but turned out to be less useful than I'd hoped because the baddies in the living room kept the TV on and talked crap almost nonstop. Keeping up with how much listening we needed to do was a 24/7 operation and we couldn't get anyone else to help us, so each of us had to pull some tape baby-sitting duty. ^ Apart from learning more than I ever wanted to know about many sports, over the next few weeks we did learn some interesting things: They ALWAYS called each other by number. There was never a slip, which was inhumanly consistent of them unless they didn't know each other's real names. Half of them were foreigners, mostly from the Eastern Bloc. We got that from the sports talk, their accents, and they sometimes said things like, "Back in Prague..." Some of them used foreign words sometimes, presumably when they didn't know the correct English, but "English only" was a rule that was quickly enforced whenever any of the foreigners started speaking 'foreign' to each other. They seemed a distrustful bunch. They didn't plan anything. They were called by a low numbered person and told to do something specific and detailed. Their job was to collect the equipment they needed from where it was left for them, carry out the tasks, report back, then wait to be called about the next job. It was clear that the group I'd found was only the tip of the iceberg, but they never gave away any information about the rest of the 'berg. I gained the increasingly strong impression that these guys were mercenaries who didn't know or care who their bosses were. There was some talk about what they'd do after this job was over, from which I got the impression that this was an open-ended job which could last a long time. They hoped it did because they were happy with whatever they were being paid. There were standing instructions that they were often reminded of. Not to get within five hundred feet of me was rule #1. Preferably not to get any of their equipment within five hundred feet either, although some jobs required it. I several times heard things like, "Yeah, yeah, I know it's deadly. I won't fuck up." So presumably these guys knew about the Guardian Angel and were wary of it. I was pleased they weren't saying "I know HE'S deadly." I'll describe several of their jobs to give you an idea of the sort of shit they were up to. For descriptive convenience, I'll categorize them as either recurring jobs or oncers. Recurring jobs included: Collecting samples of my hair after my haircuts, which Julia makes me get frequently because image is important. A baddie entered the hairdresser's after I left and used a covert tube down the inside leg of his trousers to suck up hair off the floor. Watching my movements, primarily by using the satellites; there had to be at least a dozen of them judging by their having 24-hour coverage. I sincerely hoped they hadn't been launched specifically to spy on me because that'd be a very scary degree of commitment. I got Ava to take my car for a spin up the highway one night and I learned that they were able to call up immediate helicopter support. I got Ava to repeat it the next night and I tailed her from very high above. When the chopper arrived, I snooped it. I discovered that my car had luminescent paint smeared on its trunk that was not in a visible light spectrum. The helicopter had a wide-angle 'invisible' light that excited the paint and displayed the bloom on a screen in front of the pilot. I learned its frequency. I followed the chopper until Ava had returned home and the chopper returned to its base in a farmer's field outside of Albany. I snooped it and its crew thoroughly, but pointlessly as they were clean of any clues. They even had a stack of different tail number decals they could swap between, as one example of the measures they were taking to avoid revealing anything useful. Knowing about my car's paint smear, I checked and easily found out that all our families' vehicles were similarly smeared. I later learned that it was more of a chemical than a paint, and it lost effect or got washed off fairly quickly as renewing it was another of their recurring jobs. They were annoyed every time they saw our family vehicles being washed. We did NOT increase the frequency of that. Stealing our trash on trash collection days. One-time jobs included: Collecting my fingerprints. Getting hair samples from everyone in the families, including the roots. That took them a while, especially because Donna was growing hers longer. The most common type of one-time jobs were attempts to gain information about the angel. They took laser and thermal measurements of the air around me and our home. The thermal measurements were done by an extremely sensitive infrared camera they set up in a tent on their property and aimed on the front slope of ours. I deliberately showed them that the angel didn't register on infrared to encourage them to stop using that technique because there was too much danger of them catching me flying. They also used a millimeter radar detector similar to the ones that are getting installed in airports these days, the ones that can see through clothes, so they could see if I was carrying anything to create the angel's effects. They were testing every angel possibility they could think of, from the air above to the water below, as they were also intercepting our drainage water so it could be tested for exotic elements the angel might give off. I'm sure they would've done a lot more angel experiments but they must've been difficult to think of given the continual absence of ANY positive result, leaving them with nothing to follow up on. Ron's body completed its transformation into Mark's shortly after our return from Noumea, including the well-tested changes 'requested' by my girls. We held off announcing it for a few days hoping to solve the surveillance problem quickly. When that proved intractable, we announced the completion of the transformation in order to con(vince) the public into believing that the resurrection was real. That created a renewed media and public frenzy. A much smaller one than last time but it still gave the surveillers opportunities for one-time accesses to me. We carefully managed our actions over these days to prevent the baddies from having too much access to us or our property. Spiking my food in a restaurant so I threw up and got the shits, letting them collect vomit and shit samples. Being a spy is a very glamorous job. The Kids - by which I mean the occupants of the Kids' House, so excluding Donna - booked a weekend in New York for a show and possibly a little clothes and other shopping. I had no idea how the behind-the-scene controllers learned about our trip, but it caused a flurry of activity as the local baddies got orders to set up several experiments in our hotel room, which the caller knew the hotel and room number of. Obtaining an EEG reading and a blood sample were the two experiments I objected to the most. They also wanted another of my shit samples presumably because the previous sample had produced some weird results, so they were going to rig the hotel toilet with a holding tank. No way was I going to let them get EEG and blood samples so we simply arrived in New York on Saturday morning, did everything we wanted to do then flew home late in the evening, calling the hotel to apologize and letting them charge us for the room anyway. Except for the New York incident, we'd so far - about four weeks since our return from Noumea - let them carry out nearly all of their plans as they were mostly innocuous and we didn't want to alert them to our eavesdropping. When it seemed easily believable we'd do something that prevented their experiments happening or working, as that would delay their operation, giving me more time to find out about them. I needed that time because I was making next to no progress in backtracking them, and what little progress I did make was only going very short distances before hitting dead ends. It was very frustrating and worrying. Forward tracking - searching the FBI's, CIA's, etc., databases for any sign of an operation involving me - was obviously not going to work because of the level of paranoia these guys had and how careful the Government had learned to be after Majestic Countdown's demonstration of skill at accessing computers. Given forward tracking's dismal chance of success and the very real risks involved in trying to get sight blobs into places like Langley, that approach was closed off. I did things like steal more equipment from another helpful FBI storeroom and put GPS trackers on the baddies' cars. I could download their journeys whenever I wanted, but the trouble was that they never went anywhere that led to anything useful. They were deliberately isolated, and even when their next job needed new equipment, they were told where to pick it up after it was already placed, and it was always in different, public locations. Their controllers were being so careful I was sure that the people who delivered equipment were also ignorant, mercenary cutouts. I used a DMV computer to do a search on one of the cars parked in their garage. I'd previously noticed another Corvallis car which had a license plate with only one character changed, so after the first search, I immediately did the second on the local car, hoping that if the first did ring any alarm bells, they might see the second and believe the first was a typo. The address of the registered owner of the first car existed, but there was no one living there with the name of the car's purported owner, and the occupants seemed to have been there for years. I got suspicious of the baddies having cash but no ATM cards. They were buying groceries but never seemed to run low on money. I found an ATM card in a drawer in the kitchen. I borrowed it, took it to a bank and got their account number. The balance was $700-odd dollars and the account had become active a month before our Noumea trip with a $2,000 deposit made by TT (telegraphic transfer) from a Cayman Islands account, with a $400 withdrawal at the local supermarket two days later, then frequent withdrawals thereafter, mostly at the supermarket and video store. Every month another $3,000 was TT'ed in, with occasional small extra deposits that I guessed were to cover incidental expenses. The account holder's residential address turned out to be a likely fake too, and bank statements were sent to a PO Box. I went to quite a lot of trouble to set up a video bug pointed at the PO Box, but it was cleared by a courier company that held on to everything they collected. There was much more happening in both directions - me to them and them to me - than what I've described, but you should have the idea by now. The key point was that I'd used up all the covert, non-risky things I could think of to get information on these people, and I'd effectively gotten nowhere, as had all the other dimensions' Marks that I'd heard about. The only inter-dimension information I got was that it appeared likely that none of the Marks with less than five merges had this surveillance problem. Meanwhile, the baddies were starting to get unacceptably invasive, as indicated by the spiked restaurant food and New York hotel room examples. There were quite a few risky things that I could do, but the trouble with my doing risky things is that they might blow up in my face very quickly. I knew these baddies had a lot of resources, but that's all I knew, so was unable to guess how violently they might react to my showing that I knew about them. Nor could I guess whether they'd include my families in their reaction, which meant that my families had to go into very effective hiding before I started taking overt action against the surveillers. ^ While the above had been going on, my families had been suggesting everything they could think of to help me. Unknown to them, I'd also been working behind the scenes on another approach. Actually, "beside the scenes" would be a more accurate phrase, as I'm talking about the parallel dimensions. One approach I had available was to take advantage of their being so many Marks. 80% of the Marks I contacted during the four weeks since we got back from Noumea were experiencing this surveillance, and they reported much the same proportion among their five-merge contacts too. Ever since I'd achieved my fourth and fifth merges, the frequency of our déjà vu's had given us not-too-inconvenient opportunities to try to gain some knowledge about the science behind déjà vu merging. We'd been able to conduct different types of experiments, collect statistics, etc. We'd learned some things, but nothing urgent or profound [some of them are mentioned later when they become appropriate]. That these experiments were ongoing made it easy for us to think of helping each other with the "Surveillance Problem", as indicated by the cross-dimensional help idea being suggested by the first Mark who had warned me of the problem back in Noumea. We could do something like put the word out across the W-Dimension for a couple of weeks that we'd all roll three dice on a particular date. Any Marks that rolled triple-1s (1 chance in 216) would then do a risky strategy and then use subsequent déjà vu's to let the waiting Marks know what happened. One experiment we'd done ages ago was to generate random numbers in several different ways to see if there were any mechanisms that influenced cross-dimensional randomness. Rapidly determined random numbers, such as by rolling dice, produced values that were independent across dimensions. Slowly determined random numbers, such as the rainfall on a particular day, were highly dependent across dimensions. Rolling dice would be a fair way of choosing which Marks to take risks. Putting the word out through all the five-merge Marks was practical given that the surveillance problem was lasting weeks. We get almost exactly ten déjà vu's per week, so if one of us had an idea and started spreading the word through his déjà vu's, then after the first déjà vu there'd be two Marks with that idea, after the second déjà vu there'd be 4, then 8, 16, etc. After one week (10 déjà vu's) there'd be 1,024. After two weeks 1,048,576 (call it a million). After three weeks 1,073,741,824 (call it a billion). There are two important assumptions in those calculations. The first being that the idea started with a single Mark, which is clearly not the case with this problem, but this is also a general discussion. An idea coming from just one Mark is very unlikely as we tend to think alike. How many Marks had the idea would probably depend on how weird the idea was and how unusual its inspiring event was across the W-Dimension. The second assumption is that the number of Marks is infinite. We were sure it wasn't a low number. Tens of thousands seemed the bare minimum; with millions, billions or even more seeming as possible as any other number. If there was a fairly low number of us (say 100,000) then the idea-spreading process would soon be hitting Marks that'd already heard the idea, slowing its spread. Whereas if there were billions of Marks, the idea's spread wouldn't be slowed until hundreds of millions of us had heard it. There was also a third minor assumption - more of a simplification really - that none of us would be asleep when his déjà vu arrived. That wasn't significant enough to matter. [While I think to mention it, we sometimes have déjà vu's between Marks in different situations. You may recall that happening to me when I was waiting to get stronger so I could push the floors inside the partially ruined Fort Dodge lab. We've never had or heard of a déjà vu between a sleeping and an awake Mark, presumably because their minds are too different. We were slowly accumulating information like that; it was interesting but hardly useful.] To decide on the optimal strategy for having only some Marks find out what strategy worked to solve the "Surveillance Problem" - as we had began calling it - we needed to know two pieces of information: How many weeks it'd be before the Surveillance Problem got badly out of hand, forcing the "Waiting Marks" to act - those of us waiting to learn what the "Risk-Taking Marks" learned. How many Marks there were. If there aren't many Marks (say 1,000 to make the example clear) and we had only a short time frame (say 2 weeks), then 1-in-216 might not get the word out well. We'd need to take one week to spread the word to do the dice rolling. With so few Marks in total, we'd quite often be déjà vu'ing with Marks who had already been told. After a week, maybe only 700 had gotten the word, and say only 600 of them were under surveillance. Rolling three dice for all 1s would give about 3 Marks to do the risky strategies. Then they had to get the results out in time for the rest of us to take advantage of them. If it took three or four days for the strategy to play out, maybe only two hundred or so Marks would get each result, and very few waiting Marks would get all the results if they needed to choose the best one before acting. In this scenario, it'd be necessary to roll only two dice, with those Marks that got double-1s doing a risky strategy. Now considering if there are a huge number of Marks and we have at least seven weeks to work with. Three weeks to spread the news gets 1,073,741,824 Marks to play the game, and that's assuming the idea started with only one Mark. In which case we certainly don't need 1-in-216 of us to take big risks. That'd be nearly five million Marks taking risks. We wouldn't need five million risk takers, but only one. He can try a strategy and feed the results back to us. If it solved the problem, he's got weeks to send out the results. If it didn't work there's time for him to try something else. Under this scenario, we shouldn't roll three dice, but eleven, with the Mark that rolled eleven 1s being the unlucky winner. Those are the sort of numbers we were tossing around in our own minds and during déjà vu's. On September 25, just over two weeks after we'd returned from Noumea (so I'm backing up a little, as I've already mentioned that experiments were still happening four weeks after our return), and when school had resumed which made baby-sitting the listening post more of a nuisance, I had the following in a déjà vu: One Of Them: (This isn't rigorously explained, but because our minds think very similarly we understood what he meant.) One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: I rolled a die six times, and I'm sure you'll be fascinated to know that I got 151633. I also worked out how many numbers I'd need to learn before a clash occurred. In an infinite population, I had a 50/50 chance of getting a clash on or before the 254th number, which I could easily memorize as it was only eight numbers per mind, and I could do that with both hands tied behind my back. It'd only take us a few days to accumulate lists about that long, so we'd soon be able to tell each other how many numbers it took for the first clash to occur. Once we knew the average of a few hundred first-clash occurrences, we'd have an accurate result. How much lower than 254 it was would enable us to calculate how many Marks were participating in this experiment (the average couldn't be greater than 254 because that required the impossibility of a greater than infinite population). The next several déjà vu's I had, I told the other Mark my number and the list of all the numbers I'd gotten from my recent déjà vu's, and he told me his number and those of the other Marks he'd already encountered. The list of numbers we had doubled in size each déjà vu. It became a pain to recite them all, but not excessively difficult since I had multiple communication channels. I had one déjà vu partner tell me he'd hit his clash at 110. That number would've implied a VERY low number of Marks, but it was meaningless in isolation as there had to be random variation. I hit more and more Marks who were reporting clashes. Mine occurred at 272. We couldn't rely on the calculated results until all the Marks we 'met' had hit their clashes, so every time I met a Mark who was still going I had to cancel my previous tentative result. I had a guy still going two déjà vu's after my clash, but after that I only met Marks who'd clashed. We continued to déjà vu and swap our first clash numbers, as well as all the accumulating total and sample count of first clash numbers we'd collected from other déjà vu's. Because each déjà vu doubled our sample size, the average first clash number settled down quickly, to a value that was only 0.2 under the expectation from an infinite population. It wasn't even worth doing the math on it as that obviously meant that there were a LOT of Marks out there. So after 3.5 weeks of being back from Noumea, we'd confirmed that there were at least a million five-merged Marks, and almost certainly a great deal more. It would've been interesting to know even roughly how many more, but the test to determine that would've taken a lot longer, and it didn't really matter at the moment because we had an obvious answer to the question of how many dice to roll if we decide to carry out the risk taker idea. With so many of us, we'd not do a 1-in-216 chance. Using five dice, for a 1-in-7,776 was the obvious choice. There was no real point in using more dice because the additional proportion of us that it was keeping safe was so tiny it didn't justify the risk of slowing down getting the results back. Using one more die reduced the proportion of Marks who would be taking careful risks from 0.01% to 0.002%, while keeping 99.998% of us waiting longer to get the results - it wasn't worth it. I kept one issue out of the above to make it easier to explain, but we wanted lots of results. I could think of dozens of risky things I could do, from kidnapping the President down to stealing fingerprint samples from the baddies and running them through the police database to see what popped up, the latter idea being considerably less risky than the former. Fingerprinting would be easy: I could steal a few of the baddies' cups or other things they'd handled, smuggle them in through a crime lab's bathroom window at nighttime, extract the prints and run them. I'd have to snoop the lab the day before to see how fingerprinting is done, but I was sure it'd be a simple procedure given how often cops do it. All the other Marks and I wanted to test quite a few of the risky options - perhaps not the President one; not initially anyway - let all the various Risk-Taking Marks report their results throughout the W-Dimension, until the Waiting Marks had received buckets of information about how all the ideas worked out, so they could choose the best action for them to take. We couldn't guarantee that repeating a particular approach produced the same final result because the repetition would be started a few weeks later and something might have changed in the interim, so we wanted to make sure that the Waiting Marks received lots of information to work with. That's why we wouldn't use more than five dice, as there might be too few tests done and the test results would take longer to spread out through our network and accumulate to a useful amount for each of the Waiting Marks. I decided that five was the obvious number of dice to use. Over the next few days, other Marks agreed with me. We all thought that four was a reasonable choice, but five was definitely better. The end of the week in which we reached that consensus was the weekend of our trip to New York, where the baddies had planned to EEG my head through the hollowed-out wall behind our bed's headboard, and get me to slice my hand by booby trapping a door handle. They were getting damned annoying. This autobiography has omitted everything else in my life during those four weeks because this problem was dominating my and my families' thoughts. It wasn't so much that the baddies were intruding on my life much, although having to listen to our audio bugs of their rooms was a MAJOR pain in the ass for the families. What pissed us off the most was these guys were obviously very serious and highly resourced. That meant that something very bad could happen at any moment and that's VERY distracting and it put me off doing many of the things I would've done otherwise, especially the fun things. ------- Even though I was distracted from it, my life had to carry on, so I'll briefly describe other things that were happening in it, up to the end of the New York visit's shortened weekend. I'd finished all my exams for the three degrees. The paperwork for my formally being granted my degrees was still a few days away, but I was effectively now, "Mark Anderson, BS (Math), BS (Physics), BBA." I was starting the master degrees in Math and Physics. Because of the surveillance I'd reduced my educational commitment so the only undergraduate degree I was enrolled in was BS in Biochemistry and Biophysics. I had wanted to do Anthropology, Computers, and Chinese, but they'd keep until later. ^ I had become totally Mark Anderson to look at. In one respect I even overshot the mark - the pun applies - because my skin had become too white. My blood not being red anymore made me look like an unresurrected corpse. I'd turned Black shortly after my fifth merge, before my blood chemistry's slow adaptation following my fourth and fifth merges, and this was the first time I'd been White since then, and I was too white. With some experimentation, I confirmed that I could fool my body into believing it had sunburn, turning my skin slightly red. Under Julia's very careful management, I applied some sunburn (red) and some tan (brown), until I arrived at the color that best suited the new image she was creating for me. I never bothered to ask what my new image actually was, but it certainly required lots of clothes shopping. Our publicly announcing the achievement of this milestone re-excited the media and public. Because of the Surveillance Problem we had to carefully manage the process. We didn't grant interviews to any random media people who turned up, but only with reporters and cameramen we knew by sight. Having the baddies bugged was a great help, but it couldn't be relied on because there was always the danger that the people behind the local agents did something else using other people, so we were very cautious. We released the videotape of my body's transformation and allowed some medical examinations, although the Guardian Angel kept those VERY minimal, including preventing a blood test. Hair, saliva and skin scrapings were allowed. Mom and Dad submitted to those too, because some people still didn't believe I was Mom and Dad's child. I also gave a couple of media interviews. The interviews were VERY boring. I emphasized that I had NO religious interest whatsoever, whether godly or devilish, and that, "I'm just going to get on with my life in much the same way as I would have done if the Government hadn't kidnapped me, except I won't be able to discover any medical miracles from my body because the Guardian Angel is annoyingly not allowing even a blood test." That led to one of the reporters asking, "What about the 'Immortality Pill'? Your parents said that nearly all of the profits from that would be returned to the public?" If you've ever been on the receiving end of a reporter's interview, you won't be surprised by the obviousness of that question. My answer was, "God doesn't want humanity to benefit from my body. That's God's punishment for humanity letting the Government destroy my body the first time, and it's why the Guardian Angel prevented the doctors taking more than a bare minimum of samples from me." "Why should everyone lose out on being perfectly healthy because of a few Government criminals?" "Complain to God. I have no authority over the Guardian Angel or God so it's no use complaining to me. That career having been shut off from me, I'm going to be concentrating on math and physics. I don't know what I'll do with them yet. That's something I'll decide after I've got my PhDs." Discussing multi-year higher education wasn't exactly exciting TV, which suited my goals for these interviews. I managed to insert a few little seeds along the lines of, "It's hard to tell, but God might have helped me a little bit by making it easier for me to read faster, and perhaps improve my memory. I'm finding it easier to do my studying than I expected, which if my guess is right, was very nice of God." Again, it was hardly exciting TV, and it helped excuse my studying throughput. The tone of the interviews was, "There's nothing exciting happening here. Move along." I was quite proud of how dull I could be. It was sad that my long monologue on the beauty of mathematics was never aired. ^ Another serious issue was Nevaeh. We'd had several discussions with her about her moving in with us, the first discussion being immediately after Carol and I had sort of popped the question during our Grand Tour for the SCS girls. Julia had been working on making that happen, the only problem being getting Nevaeh's parents to agree to it, so we were softening them up ready to ask them for their permission. For an example of the progress we were making, Nevaeh's seventeenth birthday was celebrated at our home a few days after we got back from Noumea, ostensibly at Julia's instigation. Nevaeh provided herself, her family and her friends, and we provided everything else. Most of the reason for that was so her parents could get to know us better, visit our home, see how friendly Julia and Nevaeh were together, etc. The timing worked out very well in one respect because our bedroom was a shambles. All the bedroom furniture was piled against a wall with the bed hidden behind the sofas, then the room was lined with plastic sheeting because of the dust caused by the closet's excavation. When Nevaeh's parents got The Grand Tour, the embarrassingly large bed was hidden. They were briefly shown the master bedroom, and also the other bedrooms, which we referred to as Ava's, Carol's and two spare bedrooms. During the Tour and the party, we made sure that Mr. and Mrs. Smith saw that Julia was my main girlfriend. We were open and honest that, "Ava sometimes sleeps with us, but she has her own room and usually sleeps there. The media have overplayed that aspect of our lives. You know how they love to make everything as salacious as possible." Because we were obviously Good people with God on our side, it was fairly easy to convince Nevaeh's parents that the media had created my bad image almost totally undeservedly. Before the Smiths' arrival we had expected the issue of Ava's sleeping with us to arise, and Julia had asked Ava's permission to use her grief over her parents' deaths as an excuse for her sleeping with us. Ava had no problem agreeing to that, especially because sleeping with us had provided her with a lot of comfort at that bad time. Ava even did most of the talking to the Smiths, telling them how suddenly alone she'd been, how much she'd needed to feel loved, how our families had committed to Ava's parents to look after her, and how she'd originally come to our bed when she was in great need of comforting. Ava was very convincing because much of what she said was true and she was highly appreciative of it. The party had been a great success, with Mr. and Mrs. Smith impressed by us. Nevaeh's younger sister Grace attended the party too, and quickly convinced me that she was as much trouble as Nevaeh had said. She was nosey, extremely focused on our money, and so full of herself you could see her stuck-up attitude even when looking at her from a distance. She was obviously "Trouble" with a capital "T". A couple of days after the party, an upset Nevaeh called me to say that Grace was threatening to tell their parents that Nevaeh was having sex with me unless I paid her off. Nevaeh didn't think that Grace believed it; she was just threatening to tell a nasty lie unless I gave her money. I had a better idea for how to ensure her silence. That night, the Guardian Angel paid Grace a visit and put the fear of God into her. She woke up to a very bright Guardian Angel floating over her torso. Before she could scream, her trachea was blocked by my NP-sphere - I was just outside her bedroom window to get her inside my proximity range - and she was held rigid by NP-hands. She was flown out of her room and raised 5,000 feet in the air, where the Guardian Angel explained via her cellphone that Nevaeh was under the Guardian Angel's protection because of her close friendship with Mark's girlfriend Julia. The Guardian Angel had reminded Grace what happened to people who annoyed angels, and showed her what having her arms and legs ripped off would feel like by pulling them in four different directions hard enough to cause her a considerable amount of pain and a loss of bladder control. Then I dropped her and didn't catch her until she was scarily close to the ground. The hard deceleration required hurt her, which was tough shit for her. She was held immobile and silent again while she was flown back to her room. There the Guardian Angel rose up through the floor, a very small light blob separated from it, and Grace was made to look in a mirror when the tiny light and an overlapping heat blob entered her forehead, the glow and heat diminishing as the blobs got deeper inside her skull. The angel explained that a tiny part of it was now in her permanently, to keep an eye on her. If she ever tried to hurt or even just disobeyed a request from Nevaeh, then she'd be punished. The angel forced her take all her money out of her wallet, go to Nevaeh's bedroom, wake her up, give it to her, and apologize profusely. The next morning Nevaeh told Grace to do something demeaning and Grace didn't want to. Invisible hands grabbed her arms, held her mouth shut, and pulled her arms hard enough for her to fear their coming off. There was no sign of the Guardian Angel, but mid-torture the mini-angel popped out of her forehead for a few seconds before returning into it, so Grace thought it was her internal mini-angel doing it (rather than me parked out on the street). There was very little chance of Grace causing trouble after that. Every now and then - when I was in the area anyway - I'd drive past the Smiths' home to see if Grace was in. If she was and it was convenient, I'd give her some little reminder that the mini-angel was still around, such as by having the Guardian Angel appear out of the floor or a wall and the mini-angel come out of her forehead to report to the boss. Nevaeh used her power over Grace to force her on to the straight and narrow. I helped with that too, by being in the area when Nevaeh told Grace things that she was likely to object to, such as ordering her to resume going to church with the family on Sunday mornings. Grace's immediate refusal was followed by her head suddenly starting to get MUCH hotter. She very quickly agreed to go to church. After several such events, Mr. and Mrs. Smith were very impressed by Nevaeh's being able to manage Grace, and the good behavior and morality that Nevaeh 'encouraged' in Grace made Nevaeh seem more that way herself, which was useful for us. Because Grace is GORGEOUS, including having a figure as good as Nevaeh's - which is about as good as it's possible for a female's figure to get - it crossed my minds to use my power over her to force her to have sex with me. My minds being the way they are, they even thought of making it a threesome with Nevaeh. That maturity thing must have been doing its unwelcome work because I quickly dismissed those thoughts. Grace's nasty behavior had made me dislike her, and I knew Nevaeh would be very disappointed by me if I showed any interest in her obnoxious sister. I didn't want to disappoint Nevaeh, so that was the end of that. I was relieved that Grace was three years younger than Nevaeh, and therefore too young for her or her friends to be involved in my SCS project at all - I could too easily imagine how much trouble Grace could cause if she learned about that. I was very disappointed by young Grace Smith, especially that she wasn't like Claire Norris. I hope God does a better job the next time he finds a new girlfriend for me. ^ The outdoor art projects finished behind schedule, but just before Mom's end-of-summer-vacation deadline. We had an afternoon unveiling party that also went very well with Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They weren't ready to be asked to let their daughter move into our home yet, but they were getting there. One very good reason we weren't pushing the Smiths as fast as we could was because I wanted the damned surveillance problem fixed first, preferably in a very permanent manner. I was going very slowly with the SCS girls. That wasn't what they wanted, but I was often deliberately unavailable for them. With satellites staring down at us, cavorting around the pool wasn't as much fun as it used to be. A lot of things weren't as much fun as they used to be. The surveillance was the least of my worries; the biggie was what the power behind it might be used for next. ^ Julia started her BBA (Bachelor Business Administration) at OSU, Ava was doing an increased number of courses in areas that interested her because our micro-National Park was stimulating her interest in natural wildlife, Carol was in the 11th grade and Donna in the 9th, putting her in high school with Carol. Julia had been looking forward to not only starting her BBA at college, but to starting to manage my college social life. In her opinion I hadn't been NEARLY social enough at college. That I had been only popping into and out of college briefly, often just to take exams, wasn't a good enough excuse. Unfortunately for her ambitions, the baddies were a good reason not to imperil people unnecessarily by bringing them into my life. We were all very eager to solve that problem, but it was proving to be impenetrable. ------- After the fourth week post-Noumea, the baddies' invasiveness was starting to cross the line into unacceptable. I previously hadn't cared much that they collected our trash or stole my hair after it had been cut off, but blood and EEG samples could cause me big troubles. It was the fault of their bosses as they were the ones ordering the actions. My impression was that they were getting over-confident because the operation had gone on for a long time with no sign of any trouble, and that the bosses considered themselves totally insulated from the consequences if anything did happen. The trend the surveillance invasiveness was on was going to result in something messy soon, especially because they'd get suspicious if I kept changing my plans to frustrate their experiments. The inter-dimensional help process needed a few days to get it going - no doubt many Marks would decide that at the same time rather than the idea starting from a single source - then probably a few days for the results to be achieved, then another week or two for the results to be promulgated widely. By then we expected the invasiveness might be intolerable, so it was coming up to the time when it looked like we'd have to get that plan rolling. We were persisting as long as possible in trying to get the information we needed covertly as that approach was possibly much safer, but we were failing so it looked like we'd have to expose quite a few Marks and their families to the risks of taking on their dimensions' baddies in much more overt ways. We spent several days checking with each other, but all of those of us under this surveillance agreed that we liked the plan and that it had to be started soon. There wasn't a single dissenting voice. We decided to make October 21 the "Die Rolling Day". We'd wake up that morning and roll a die five times. Whoever rolled five 1s would make a list of the three or so dozen risky strategies that we commonly discussed, and he'd roll dice to choose one of them, then do it. I put it off until the girls were in the shower before breakfast, then I picked up the die and rolled the first number, a... "4". #3: ------- Chapter 396: Dicing With Death Monday, October 22 to Saturday, November 3, 2007 With the pressure to make a decision removed and knowing that I could leave solving the Surveillance Problem to other Marks, I would be happier over the next few days, and especially over the next few minutes while I was celebrating in the shower. It should be easy for me to stall the baddies for several days because our knowing their plans in advance gives us a huge advantage. If we repeated avoidance maneuvers like we had in New York too many times they'd get suspicious, but avoiding anything unpleasant for a few more days should be easy. If I really need to, I could go away on a trip with no pre-announced itinerary, which would stop them doing anything until I returned. Julia quickly noticed, asking, "You seem happier all of a sudden, and I doubt it's just because of what Ava's sucking?" I agreed, "Yes. I've found a way to get some useful information about our problem and I just have to wait for it now. Prof has told me not to worry about things if you've got more information coming in, so I'm taking his advice." "What information?" "There's a time and a place for serious discussions, and when your Lord is happy for once and his cock is hard and ... That's better, good girl. -- "Oh! VERY good girl!" The other Marks I déjà vu'd with over the next few days were pretty happy too. I didn't encounter any of the unlucky Risk Takers, but I didn't expect to with the odds being 1-in-7,776. I met one Mark who'd rolled a "1" for his first roll, and he'd confessed that it'd given him a fright. Doing one of the risky things didn't scare us as most of the ideas we'd had were quite easy to do, it was how the baddies would react next that was scary. One risky option was to go public with all the information we had, another was to interrogate the baddies in a bloody effective way and leave the mess for the police to clean up, and neither of those, nor most of our other ideas, were the slightest bit difficult or risky in themselves. But those sorts of actions would result in the baddies' boss reacting in some way, and we suspected it wouldn't be to apologize. Those Marks, and their families, could be in for a tough time if the boss decided to wield the power he clearly had. [Regarding my "bloody effective way" comment just above: We were in a life-or-death struggle with the surveillers because they only had to stumble on one piece of the wrong type of evidence for all of my families' lives to be destroyed. My first instinct was to write, "It was a pity for the surveillers that they didn't know they were in a life-or-death struggle," but when you think about it from the surveillers' point of view, they did know that. The DHS and CIA had kidnapped me and effectively killed me, the FBI had tried to assassinate members of my family twice, the Guardian Angel would kill people to protect me, and the eventual purpose of the current surveillance was clearly not just to write an article for a science journal. The surveillers knew they were part of a very serious, illegal operation. In addition, the surveillers were the sort of people you'd expect to be involved in a very nasty, illegal operation. I haven't mentioned it yet, but from listening to the tapes we'd learned that they were VERY unpleasant people; their discussing their fantasies about what they'd like to do with Donna and Carol (especially but not exclusively) made that sickeningly clear. The girls heard many of those comments as they had to pull baby-sitting duty on the tape machines. The parents weren't happy about that, but we didn't have enough "man"-power and there were some educational benefits in it for the girls. If I did end up killing them, no one in my families was going to be very sorry about it.] Being a "Waiting Mark" I wasn't off the hook yet as I still had to do something once I got enough information, but that should be sufficiently detailed to allow me to destroy the Surveillance Problem in a way that causes as little subsequent trouble as possible for us, and the maximum amount of subsequent trouble for the baddies. A few days later we déjà vu'd with a Mark that reported: One Of Them: We discussed it a bit, but all it meant was that the baddies had access to the FBI's computer system, which didn't surprise us. We'd have to wait for further information. A couple of uneventful days later, we got another noteworthy déjà vu: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: <6s? What happened to 1s?> One Of Them: One Of Us: <'Winning' would be a VERY much mixed blessing, that's for sure, but I understood what you mean.> One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: <6 to the power of 12 equals nearly 2.2 billion, so if there are multiple winners that'll be amazing, but it's not worth spending weeks longer to prevent a few billionths of unnecessary merges. We might need the winner's knowledge earlier if some baddies - the current lot or a new bunch - are giving us grief.> One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: Whoever had thought of this idea originally - while doubtless a highly intelligent, all-around good guy - had definitely cut it fine, as most of the Marks I déjà vu'd with over the next few days hadn't heard about the idea before. They all agreed with it though. By the end of October the proportion was improving rapidly, but I guessed it was probably only about 75% by then. That didn't really matter as the proportion of unaware Marks drops EXTREMELY quickly once about a third of us are spreading something. In three or four more déjà vu's, which will only take about three days, there'll effectively be no one that doesn't know. ^ On November 1, I got up, had a pee, cleaned my teeth and performed the other mundane morning activities. I had to wait for the girls to finish with their makeup before I could escort them to breakfast, so I left them to it while I wandered to my study where I'd already left a die. I opened my drawer and took it out, ready to roll it a time or perhaps two. I gave it a shake and dropped it on my desk, getting a "6". #3: #6: Getting another "6". #22: I wandered over to that table, shook my cupped hands well and let the die fall out to roll along the table, getting a "6". #1: We picked up the die, shook it particularly vigorously and dropped it onto the center of the table, getting a "6". #2: #31: #22: I went downstairs to where we had some games in a cupboard. I got a die out of the Monopoly set, gave it a good shake and dropped it onto the top of the box, getting a "6". #15: We did that, and thoroughly enjoyed throwing the die violently at the floor. It did indeed "bounce all over the goddamn place", eventually coming to rest to show us a "6". #32: #29: We did that, getting a "6". #3: That got a "6" too. #3: We shook it in the mug again, very vigorously for several seconds, then upended it on the counter. Removing the mug revealed a "6". #14: #5: #1: #All: #14: #17: We shook the die in the mug and upended it, getting a "4". #All: #6: We used the mug method repeatedly, getting an obviously random selection of numbers. #15: #17: #All: Being experts at rolling random numbers now, we rolled the die with the same technique as the last twenty times, getting a "6". #8: #19: #4: We got a "6". #19: #18: #8: #3: #12: #1: #All: #6: We shook the mug, upended it on the kitchen counter, took a DEEP breath, and with a shaking hand lifted it off to reveal ... our death. "FUCK!" [[Now you know why this Mark, out of all of us - and there were about a billion five-merged Marks at this time - was chosen as the focus of this autobiography. As a result of his randomly rolling twelve 6s he went on to pioneer our development, as you'll read. The only choice required for this autobiography was which of his thirty two minds to start with, and I chose one who'd had a fairly average time getting to this point.]] We stood there, hanging on to the bench. Unable to move; unable to function at all... We couldn't think for several seconds... Finally, #1: #9: We had no trouble imagining the magnitude of the disaster; tears started rolling down our face. #19: #3: We hurriedly dried our eyes and put away the game. #15: #11: #10: #22: #All: #6: I checked myself with a sight blob, wiped away a couple of wet spots on my cheek, looked closely to make sure I looked normal, straightened up my posture, then walked back upstairs. A sight blob check showed me that the girls were nearly ready so I headed to the bedroom to collect them. Carol asked, "Have you been crying, Mark?" "Ahh, yeah." The girls immediately started coming toward me to do what girls do at a time like this. Sharing in the misery is their first step in recovering from it. That opening up the wound to share it is the last thing a guy wants to do is something girls don't understand. I held them off with, "I leaked prematurely. As soon as I started I thought of something else that might invalidate my first reaction, so don't worry about it. I need to do some research first." "What about?" asked Julia. "It may come to nothing at all so I'm not going to hold up our breakfast for that. Let's go." I went, and they hurried to catch up. For the rest of the walk they hung onto my arm and checked if I was truly okay. It's not like me to cry so they were worried. I was feeling better - because there OBVIOUSLY had to be something screwy with my rolling twelve 6s - so I was able to deflect their concerns. I got through the breakfast and had a busy day at OSU until I had another déjà vu in the early afternoon. All Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: I had another déjà vu early Friday morning, just before breakfast, giving me three Marks who'd not rolled twelve 6s ("three" because the latest déjà vu gave me two data points: his own and the Mark he'd déjà vu'd with his previous time). I kept a brave face on, but it wasn't easy and my girls could see I was struggling. I told them I needed some more time yet. 10pm Friday I had my third déjà vu since the appropriately named "die" rolling. He added four more samples: himself, the two people he'd déjà vu'd with previously, and the one person his preceding partner had encountered the time before. I now had seven samples in total, other than mine all seemed random and no one had rolled more than twice. I told him, One Of Us: Saturday, I was lousy company. I couldn't force myself to try to act happy so I excused myself from my girls and went to a nice spot in the hundred acres on the western side of our property that Ron had landscaped to be natural forest. It was heavily wooded so I could sit in a spot completely surrounded by trees and cry as much as a wanted, which was a hell of a lot. I'd left my phone behind but I'd told the girls where I'd be. I'd told them that I really wanted to be left alone, so they gave me a few hours and then came to check on me about noon. They weren't happy with what they saw, and they tried their best to cheer me up, to find out what the problem was, or get me to come back. I insisted that I wanted to remain alone here, that it was too soon for me to explain, and I REALLY wanted them to go. They very much wanted to stay to comfort me, but I said, "Please give me more time, and then I'll explain as best I can. At the moment I can't say or do anything. I need a few more hours." "Can we please stay to comfort you?" "You're making it harder for me. Now isn't the time for this, Julia. Let me do what I need to do, and then I'll come to you." At the best of times Julia doesn't like not knowing what's going on, and especially when it involves the center of her universe, and even more especially when she thinks she can help me. I was crying so of course she can help, her being a girl and wanting to share my pain. "But you're upset. I've never seen you like this." "I NEED to be alone, Julia. This isn't a time for sharing or healing, and you're making things worse." The last two things a guy wants when he's feeling bad pain is to open it up and to inflict it on his loved ones. Guys want to handle pain in silence. My girls not taking no for an answer and repeatedly trying to get the explanation out of me was making my pain much worse. Unless I learn of someone else rolling twelve 6s in the next déjà vu, then in a few hours I'm going be informing them that I'm about to do the worst possible thing I can do to their lives. Their trying to comfort me was totally wrong and I couldn't handle it. All it was doing was making me angry at myself and my situation, and my getting angry around my girls wasn't what I wanted. After the next déjà vu, I'll either be calling my departure off (hopefully) or telling them that I'm leaving their lives, in which case my accepting their comfort now would be horrendously undeserved. Once I know what I'm doing and start doing it, then we can face those emotions square on, but I needed time for that. I held back the flare of temper that their intrusive was creating in me, and I INSISTED that they leave. They weren't happy about it, but they did go. They'd somehow managed to ruin my wallowing-in-anguish mood. I still didn't want company, but at least I could do some constructive thinking. What I thought about was the act of my leaving. I didn't have to leave immediately, and I thought of several options about how to do so. I suddenly had an idea for how to partially cheat on my commitment to merge. Maybe I could do a merge but leave my body alive with most of my minds still in residence. Only send eight minds to the other dimension, leaving twenty four minds behind. That would still give me most of my powers so I could continue to protect my families, and most importantly, they would not grieve. Not just this "they", but every subsequent "they" too, as I would take only eight of my future hosts' minds with me every subsequent time I merged out of a dimension. 'Cheating' in this way would save a huge amount anguish. Maybe not huge in proportion to all the Marks, but it'd be huge in the life of those of my minds that were repeatedly merging because I wouldn't have to put my families - one after the other in every dimension I passed into and out of - through the grief of my dying on them. If eight of my minds left, my families wouldn't even notice, making it VASTLY better than "Death Merges". I didn't think there'd be many Death Merges, but even one of them was far too many. Avoiding any of them would be WONDERFUL. To explain the reason I didn't expect many Death Merges. It was because we, all the Marks, agreed that I would hit a limit to my expansion sooner or later, and probably sooner. That limit would kick in when: My brain couldn't hold any more minds. What that might do to me if it happened was FUCKING SCARY. If that limit expressed itself in a very nasty way, it was better that one of us find that out than billions of us. I'd get so different from the other Marks that I'd not be able to déjà vu with them. That'd isolate me, which would be upsetting but the other Marks would obviously send a few of them one or two merges forward to see if they could reestablish contact. Or something else might happen that I couldn't imagine, which I thought was more likely than the above possibilities given how little I understood the merging process. Since my first merge four years ago, I've been gaining impressions about how the system works. I haven't really gained any real knowledge, and certainly haven't gained any understanding, but I do have some impressions. I haven't written much about those impressions as they've never affected my life. Not now though! I'll explain the second bullet point above some more, and wander into some of the W-Dimension thoughts and impressions that I've accumulated over the years. No three- or more-minded Mark had ever déjà vu'd with a single-minded Mark. We knew single-minded Marks existed only from stories passed along from the two-minded Marks that'd merged with them, to create three-minded Marks. (All two-minded Marks had merged rather than just déjà vu'd. Do you remember from way back at the beginning of my autobiography that one merge hadn't been enough to make me happy. I'd acquired poison and an antidote to be ready to merge again the next time another déjà vu occurred. If a two-minded Mark's next déjà vu was with a single-minded Mark, the two-minded Mark took the poison to merge into the single-minded Mark's head, making one-third of him very surprised.) By the way, because déjà vu's are semi-random over the period between déjà vu's, the four years since I started this adventure has permitted some of the two-minded Marks to next merge with one-, two-, three- and even four-minded Marks, resulting in pretty much every possible number of minds in the lower levels. Events in their lives have determined how often they've progressed to yet higher levels, resulting in a wide variety in the number of minds some Marks had. Marks with numbers of minds that weren't an integer power of two had their abilities interpolate in obvious ways. There were, or probably were, other oddities too. Based on the fact that we didn't all déjà vu at the same time, we guessed that large numbers of single-minded Marks would've committed suicide outside of déjà vu. They were dead and gone, and those dimensions were inaccessible to us now. It was weird to imagine that versions of myself had never known what the rest of us had discovered. "Rest of us" probably isn't right either, as there are probably many of the single-minded Marks that had not suicided and who have only déjà vu'd with other single-minded Marks for those four years - that'd be only two déjà vu's because of how infrequently they have them - so none of them would have any idea about parallel dimensions and merging. We knew those single-minded Marks existed because sometimes a two-minded Mark déjà vu'd and immediately merged with one of them and was subsequently able to spread the word about the solo Mark being unaware for so long. As best we can judge, based on the news we've been getting through the W-Dimension grapevine for the last several months, the merges between two-minded and single-minded Marks have nearly stopped as the two-minded Marks have nearly all achieved their next merges. The only ones that'd been delayed this long were the ones who'd been frustrated by having their intervening, widely-spaced déjà vu's at times impossible for quickly taking the poison, such as swimming at the pools, asleep, at the doctor's, etc. We'd collectively debated whether to ask the remaining two-minded Marks not to merge (ask them REALLY quickly, before they took their poison), so they could spread the word to the one-minded Marks, but the idea wasn't acted on. "Spreading the word" would be a PAINFULLY slow process as 1-minded Marks are not able to déjà vu with each other well enough to communicate new information, as you know from your own experiences with déjà vu. Two-minded Marks déjà vu with other two-minded Marks mostly, and with a single-minded Mark about every seven or eight years on average. Asking two-minded Marks to give up on the adventure for fifteen years - to inform two single-minded Marks, who'd then be asked to merge and inform two more single-minded Marks before they merged again, to get a geometric progression going - was asking WAY too much, and wouldn't achieve much before all the single-minded Marks died of old age. The time intervals were just too long. The single-minded Marks didn't know what they were missing, and never would because nearly all the two-minded Marks had already progressed. Another consideration was that two-minded Marks most often déjà vu'd with other two-minded Marks, less often with four-minded, and even less often with one-minded, but that didn't mean there were very few single-minded Marks left. The disparity in up and down déjà vu frequencies might've been caused by the difficulties in establishing contact. The 32-minded Marks most often linked with their peers, as did every other level of Marks, so we couldn't conclude anything much from the preference for déjà vu'ing with peers, other than I'd likely find it increasingly difficult to déjà vu with other Marks as I accumulated more and more minds. In more detail, 32-minded Marks most often déjà vu'd with other 32-minders, very rarely with 16-minders, rarely with 8-minders, and VERY rarely with 4-minders. (We thought the aberrant frequency with 16-minders was because there were so few of them.) That didn't mean that beyond a 'reach' of a factor of eight, déjà vu's would be virtually impossible for me, making me unable to merge again once I reached 128 or maybe 256 minds, presuming there were no other Marks that'd rolled twelve 6s. Single-minded Marks never déjà vu'd beyond two-minded Marks, so they had a 'reach' of a factor of 2. It might be that when I reach 128 minds - presuming my brain doesn't explode first - that a reach factor of 16 or even 32 might be possible. Another possible reason 32-minded Marks never déjà vu with low numbered Marks might be because plenty of better candidates are available. Maybe if there was no one else for a 32-minder to déjà vu with than 3-minders (or 2- or even 1-), then he would do so. There was some indication that this might be the case as our early déjà vu's used to require both participants to be performing very much the same actions and experiencing the same emotions, but successive merges have progressively relaxed that apparent requirement. Not by much each time, but it is noticeable and is an undoubted trend. We think that's because the pool of available partners has reduced, so the déjà vu process is less 'fussy'. When I get to 128 minds, we hope that'll continue to apply, and that I'll continue to be able to déjà vu and merge with 32-minded Marks. Rather than merging upward in jumps of thirty two minds for each Death Merge, if I could leave twenty four minds behind each time then I'd increase my number of minds by only eight each merge, presuming I only ever merged with 32-minded Marks. Not only would that be a hell of a lot easier on my and each of their families, but it'd also speed up the experiment that I was about to embark on (why picking up a quarter as many minds each time speeds up the experiment is explained soon). I would have pauses between my merges so I could learn about my new abilities and to spread the word about my experiences and any new knowledge. Spreading the word meant that I had to be aware of two risks that, if they both occurred, would be bad news - where "no news is bad news" in this case: There will be a significant chance that my next merge - at every level - might isolate me. Possibly the Mark I tell something important to might get killed before he can spread the word further. With very powerful baddies actively sticking their noses into our lives at the moment, that's a much greater risk than normal. Obviously I wouldn't merge every déjà vu I had because there'd be no one to spread the news, so I'd have to have at least one non-merging déjà vu at every level. Because of the second risk listed above, I should have at least three non-merging déjà vu's between merges. As a simple approach, I could merge every four déjà vu's, which would be every 2.8 days at the current rate, which should speed up once I get more minds. Merging upward and reporting my progress is what the experiment required, but there's going to be the HUGE requirement for my families and I to say goodbye properly. Allowing ten days for that seemed about right. If the situation gets really nasty with the surveillers then I could accelerate my merges considerably, but I'd much rather leave solving the Surveillance Problem to the Marks that'd already rolled five 1s and were acting on their strategies. My experiment was a long-term issue, and I'd HATE to have to hurt my families by leaving too quickly. There also wasn't much point in taking longer than ten days to say goodbye because it'd just make it more painful for everyone. If I was able to leave twenty four minds behind, it'd speed me up because the goodbyes would no longer be necessary. My families wouldn't even know that anything had happened to me. I could merge into and out of successive Marks every couple of days, picking up forty minds in the ten days a Death Merge would take to pick up thirty two. So leaving my bodies behind with twenty four minds in them while multiples of eight minds accumulated each merge appealed to me greatly as it was somewhat faster and it'd save my/their families all the pain of losing me. Leaving the remaining Marks slightly weaker was a small price to pay for not hurting multiple sets of my loved ones. In much less time than it's taken to explain the Only-Eight-Minds-Go idea to you, I'd regretfully decided it probably wouldn't work, as it was the body's death that made a merge happen. We could chat back and forth in déjà vu's as much as we wanted, but merges were made to happen by killing one of the bodies. When it comes time for me to depart, I'll try VERY hard to get just eight of my minds to go, but I don't expect it to work. Just in case though, I flipped a flat rock twice to choose which eight of my minds would try to go. [[Most of our reasoning was wrong. We thought our body's dying enabled us to launch our minds out of our body and/or enabled the other Mark to suck our minds into his dimension. We didn't know that we already had copies of each others minds in both bodies and what we had to do was block the destructive dissonance that caused the copies to be corrupted and destroyed. If the chosen eight minds had committed mental suicide (somehow) in their source Mark's dimension - while not doing so in the linked-to Mark's dimension - their eight copies would've been safe from dissonance. Committing mental suicide never occurred to us, and if it had it would've been instantly rejected because it was nonsense to expect a mind to be able to merge across to another dimension after it had already killed itself. There was also the problem that we knew of no way to commit mental suicide. We had enough conscious control of our body's normal processes to be able to stop our heart, but there are no consciously controllable processes that can stop a mind (I'll wait while you try that out for yourself).]] Thinking interspersed with several long periods of melancholy occupied me until the girls returned with reinforcements a couple of hours after they'd left. Mom and Dad accompanied my three girls this time, but it was otherwise a repetition of the previous visit. They were worried about me, cared for me, wanted to help me, etc. I gave them the same answers, especially my needing more time. I didn't look like such a mess this time, so I managed to get them to leave with less of a battle. It was about 2pm when they left. If the déjà vu takes the average time to arrive, that'd be at 3pm, but its getting to 2pm already means the statistically likely time is 5 or 6pm. Prof turned up at five, asking, "I hear you're having a difficult time, son?" "Not so good, no. I think something bad is going to happen. Before you ask, there's a chance it won't and it's too soon to talk about it. I should know in a few hours and it's not something we can take action to head off." "It sounds like you've thought it through." "I've been thinking of little else." "Would you like me to send some dinner down when it's ready?" "If I'm not back in time, then yes please. Please ask for a guard to deliver it." "Will do, son. Don't hesitate to come to us if you need any help." "Thanks, but I knew that already. I need to wait for more information first and then we'll talk about whatever the outcome is." "You expect to get more information when you're in here?" "Yes, but also wherever else I might be. I came here for the peace and quiet. I should've put a lock on the gate." "Julia would've found a way through. I'll leave you to it." A guard bought my dinner down. I thanked him and said I'd take the dishes back myself. Not long after 7pm the déjà vu finally arrived. It followed the same pattern as the previous couple: I asked him what he and the other Marks he'd linked with since had rolled on the twelve 6s exercise. He told me all their numbers (we share numbers a lot across dimensions because they might reveal something interesting). Unfortunately they were all random, never going past two rolls. I told him what I'd rolled. He was incredulous. Then he was panicky in case I wanted to merge now, because if I did the second stage of my journey would require killing his body and taking him with me. I reassured him. He expressed relief and sympathy. I told him my 151633 number and asked him to spread it. We discussed my situation, achieving nothing. He liked my Only-Eight-Minds-Go idea, but he didn't think it'd work. He expressed sympathy again. I picked up my dishes and walked with heavy heart up to the Adults' House to tell them the bad news. This was going to hurt. ------- Part 18: My Voyage of Discovery ------- Chapter 397: Telling My Loved Ones About My Voyage Saturday, November 3, 2007 (Continued) Everyone was in the Adults' House, mostly in the living room but some scattered around. Julia spotted me coming up the hill and used the intercom to summon everyone else to the living room. I entered through the living room's ranch slider doors, my girls running to cuddle with me. My dishes would be in the way so I bent over and put them on the floor, where the baddies' cameras wouldn't see them as they skidded along the floor to the kitchen while the girls rushed into my arms. "Are you all right?" | "What happened?" | "It's bad news, isn't it?" | "You're okay, aren't you?" "Sit down and we'll talk about it." They didn't so much sit down as stayed glued to my body while I walked across the room to sit in the middle of the nearest sofa. Carol and Julia in my lap, Ava and Donna to either side, with everyone looking very worried, including me. The four parents were here and sitting, so I started, "Last Thursday something happened to me which was a major development in my life. I can't describe what it was, but I can say that I entered into it willingly and the result of it includes that I've made a very large commitment that I have to keep. There was a chance that my commitment wouldn't be necessary, so since Thursday I've been checking that out, but now I'm sure that it will be. I don't need to leap into action right away, so I'll spend a few more days making sure. A week would be fine, maybe even two weeks, although that's pushing it a bit." "What do you have to do?" asked Julia. "I'm nearly up to that part, darling..." #13: We did that, leaving them on the floor just outside the living room. " ... This isn't about the Surveillance Problem. As potentially big and scary as that could become, this is something much bigger. If that problem disappears tomorrow, my commitment isn't affected. In answer to your question, Julia, what I have to do is go on a journey of discovery..." "We'll go with you," stated Julia instantly and firmly; Carol, Ava and even Donna echoing Julia's declaration. "I would love to take you all with me, but that's not possible. Only my mind is going; my body is remaining behind." "Huh?" "Like Astral Projection?" queried Vanessa. "Unfortunately not. When I leave my body, it will die." "What! But how will you get back?" "I can't come back, Julia; this is a one-way journey. I'm sorry everyone, but I'm going to be leaving your lives soon, and I won't be able to come back." "I don't understand?" said Donna. No one else did either because no one was crying yet, although I was close. "In a week or two, my mind will leave and my body will die. Mark Anderson will be gone from your lives." "You'll be like a ghost, right?" asked Julia, clutching at a wisp of hope. "I have to go on a journey, my love. I'm leaving your lives totally, and I can't come back." "Never ever?" checked Carol. "Never ever. I'm VERY sorry, but I have to do it, and it's a one-way journey." Julia's voice rose into a shriek, "You're going to DIE! And we'll NEVER see you again!" "I'm sorry Julia, but that's right." "NOOOO! YOU CAN'T MEAN IT! PLEASE DON'T MEAN IT! PLEASE MARK?" "I'm sorry, my love..." #5: #9: #All: "NOOO! MARK, PLEEEASE DON'T GO. I LOVE YOU! YOU'RE MY WHOLE LIFE. WE ALL LOVE YOU. YOU'RE OUR LORD AND OUR HUSBAND. YOU CAN'T GO WITHOUT US. WE WANT TO GO WITH YOU." #24: "Your mind isn't powerful enough..." "TEACH ME! TEACH US!" "You know I would LOVE to do that if I could, but I can't. Why do you think I've had such a bad time the last few days? I HAVE to go, I CAN'T take anyone with me, and I can't come back." "We're going to lose you?" "I'm very sorry, Julia, but you are." Carol was the first to burst into tears, closely followed by Julia. Ava and Donna joined in, the mothers came over to comfort their daughters, and they got caught up in the emotion themselves. In a few seconds, the floodgates were open, and the hankies were being grabbed off the midair stack. I had no spare hands, with frantic girls grabbing my arms in their need for reassurance. The next quarter of an hour was as bad as I've ever seen. Living among girls I've seen a lot of tears before, but nothing on this scale. Saying "There, there" had NO chance of having any effect whatsoever. There were many sobbed comments, most of which were too blubbery for me to understand. The few I could make out I couldn't respond to because there was too much noise and the girls weren't paying attention. Toward the fifteen-minute mark I corrected one of the half-sobbed comments with, "Don't think of it as me dying. My mind will still be fully alive and active. I'm just going on a very long journey, is all." It didn't help much, but perhaps fractionally more than "There, there" would have. Maybe if I repeated it twenty or thirty times it might sink in. Prof showed me how to do it. He pointed out, "Each of you is losing Mark but you've still got each other. Mark is losing ALL of you. He's going to be alone on his journey. When you've finished crying for yourselves, please pull together for his sake. He's going to need your support." Prof's comment, "When you've finished crying for yourselves," wasn't said sarcastically or accusatorily, it was his literal instruction. He wanted the girls to have their cry, and then to see that there were - according to Prof - more deserving issues for them to be concerned about, such as Poor Lonely Mark. The girls heard his point and ZING: the waterworks stopped. It was a hell of a lot more effective than "There, there." Next thing I know, they're all apologizing to me. I was dumping them in my wake, and they were apologizing to me! I assured them there was no need ... They assured me there was and that they felt terrible for being so selfish ... That went on for a while. Carol still had to question it, "You're REALLY going to die. Just like someone killed you?" "From your point of view, it'll be exactly the same as if I had a peaceful heart attack." "But why would you do that? We love you and you love us. You shouldn't leave us." "I love you all VERY much, and I've NEVER been more aware of that than I am now. You KNOW I love you, Carol, and you know how much, but this is even more important. This is more important than staying with every person I love, and more important than all the hurt I am going to cause you by leaving." "What is 'this'?" asked Vanessa. "I can't answer that directly, but I can give you a comparison which is quite accurate in terms of its emotional value. -- "Imagine that I had a choice between staying here, in which case every person on the planet would be in mortal danger, including all of you; or if I left to go on my journey of discovery, I'd have a very good chance of saving everybody's life. I HAVE to try to save everybody, includes my loves. There's no choice." "Is something forcing you to sacrifice yourself for humanity?" asked Prof. "Nothing like that. That's a good guess based on the information I've given you, but you're not even close. My saying everybody on the planet was in mortal danger wasn't meant literally, but because it's similar to the emotional value of the real reason, which I can't tell you." "Why can't you tell us?" "Because it would destroy human civilization and kill almost everyone. You don't want to know that secret, do you?" "No I don't." "What's going to happen to you?" asked Mom. "I'll answer that in more detail than I normally do. My dying will start with my mind leaving my body first. That's the thing I can't teach Julia or anyone else how to do. It's very similar to my being able to see with my eyes shut. Julia, if you ever learn to see things in other rooms with your eyes shut the way I can, then you'd be halfway toward being able to follow me on my journey - but I know you'll never be able to do it so please don't waste your time trying to learn, especially because even if you learned it, you wouldn't know which direction I've gone in so you'd never be able to find me. -- "Then I'll order my body to die, similar to the way I order it to go to sleep..." "Let it stay alive, Mark! That way you can come back when you've finished," suggested Julia hopefully. "Sorry. It doesn't work like that. It's a one-way journey whether or not my body's left alive. My mind can never get back, and all that would be left behind would be a mindless shell. My personality, memories, hopes, dreams, knowledge and EVERYTHING that is in my mind, is going with me. My body would have nothing left inside it, not even enough of a mind to tell the heart when to beat, lungs to breath, or anything else to work either. My body will die, and there's no way around that, and even if there was, it'd be a mindless shell. -- "To finish Mom's question. Once my mind is free, I have a journey of discovery ahead of me. A very good metaphor is a series of rooms with connecting doors. When I'm in one room, I can open the door and see into the next room, but I can't see into the room after that because that door is on the opposite wall and is shut. When I leave here, I'll be going into the next room. I already know what's in there and I won't be discovering anything new. The door will shut behind me. The problem is that it's a one-way door. Once I enter a room, the only way out of it is to go forward. Once I'm in the next room, I'll look through its next door and study the next room. If I like the look of it, which I almost certainly will, then I'll move into that room. That'll be the process for room after room. I can estimate what the next two or three rooms are like, but beyond that I'm expecting some interesting surprises. -- "You know I like science, and the scientific part of my journey will interest me greatly, but that is NOT why I am doing it! There's NO WAY I'd ever leave you behind just for scientific curiosity. I'm going because it's very important and I made a commitment to do so..." "Who did you make the commitment to?" asked Vanessa. #4: "I can't say, Vanessa. I'm sorry there's so much I can't say, but it's all tied up in that horrible secret that'd destroy the human race." "Are you sure it would?" "Positive. If the secret got out, we'd be doomed." Dad asked, "How will you manage without a body?" "Good question. The answer is 'fine'. You've seen how my abilities have improved over the last couple of years. I can see without my eyes and I can move things around with my mind. I don't even need to eat much now. I've gotten to a stage where I don't really need a body. Provided I disconnect my mind in the right way, which is very tricky but I know I can do it, then I won't need a body any longer. Unfortunately, that means I won't be able to go clothes shopping any more." #6: "You're REALLY going, aren't you?" "Yes, Ava. I'm sorry. I can stay maybe ten days or so, and I'll try to make them as special as I can for each of you, but what I have to do is too important to delay it for longer than that." "Ten days?" "Sorry Carol." "And we'll never, ever see you again?" "We'll know each other are alive, but we'll never meet again. We can't even send messages. Once I start my journey, we'll only have memories." "BUT I LOVE YOU!" "I love you too, Carol; very, very much." "PLEASE DON'T GO!" "I have to, My Love, My Wife." "{SOB!}" x just about everyone. #1: Carol interrupted her sobs to declare, "I want your baby!" "Me too!" declared Ava, followed by Julia and Donna echoing it in unison. I was debating how to answer that diplomatically, but Vanessa had no hesitation in saying, "We'll discuss your lifelong commitments when you've got cooler heads." The girls accepted Vanessa's unequivocal tone; even Carol, who was by far the most determined. The girls returned to Prof's theme of my being alone, expressing great sympathy with that, comforting me, expressing their apologies for their selfishness again. #6: #19: #27: Donna asked, "Are there going to be people where you're going?" #4: Prof added, "WHERE are you going? The way you were talking it wasn't on Earth. Do you know of life elsewhere?" "Both good questions. Unfortunately, like most of your good questions, I have to duck answering them. I'm telling you everything I can, but not those answers." Carol argued, "We'd like to know what your life will be like so we can imagine you better; to help us feel connected to you." "I understand that, and I wish I could help you do that..." #7: " ... but the secret is too important." "Can't you give us a hint?" asked Donna, still struggling with the concept of what "secret" meant. "No, and please don't ask again. You've had enough experience with secrets by now to know that it can be best not to know some of them. This one is the worst secret I can imagine. I wish I could cut it out of my brain. -- "Changing the subject to the opposite end from brains: assholes. I had an idea what to do about the assholes that are surveilling us. Seeing as how my body needs to die anyway, I thought of getting good use out of it by exposing the surveillance operation to the media, show that they're using satellites, give out copies of the audio tapes we've got, etc., then tell the media that rather than nuking Washington DC, God has decided to remove my mind and soul from Earth again because there's too much evil down here, and stuff like that. Once I'm visibly dead, there'll be nothing for the assholes to chase after." "Better yet," suggested Vanessa, "as it's most likely that the Federal Government is behind the surveillance, leave out the part about not nuking DC. Let them think it will be. There's a great deal of public anger against the Government in DC because of the previous times they've risked getting the city nuked. Their doing it again will cause an even greater public backlash." As Vanessa just said, the baddies have so much government-level technology, especially the satellites, that we're assuming it to be a Government operation. The movies often have ultra-secret cabals of rich industrialists and the like, but we didn't give those dramatic theories any chance of being realistic. The Government had never contacted us to ask to be able to conduct tests on me and/or the Guardian Angel - no doubt because they could easily predict our response - so the Surveillance Problem was presumably the Government doing their experiments covertly. "We'll do it whatever way you think is best. One of the aspects of this that worries me is that I won't be around to protect you any more. I won't be around to draw trouble either, which is probably the greater of the two effects, but I still wish I could guard you in some way. Getting the most value out of my departure is the best I can do in that respect. We can think about that for a while because I don't want to publicly mention my leaving for several days in case it makes the surveillers charge in and ruin too many of my last ten days." Prof asked, "What's your 'Voyage of Discovery' hoping to discover, Mark?" "A number of things. I'll learn a lot of general science, like I'm learning for my current degrees... #2: " ... but with more biology. I already know that the next of the connected rooms I go into will have more biological information available than here. I've already learned some of that. Controlling the valve out of my ejaculatory duct was something I learned by looking into the next room from here..." Julia remembered. It's not every girl who takes her boyfriend's semen samples to school; not in a test tube anyway. "That was a whole year ago." "Yes, last December. I've always known about the rooms, Julia, I've just never wanted to leave where I am now. I'm awesomely happy with my life here. -- "I also expect to learn a lot more about my abilities, Prof. I have reason to believe that knowledge could be very important, and I know that where I'm going there's a lot more information available about them. -- "That's just the next connected room. What happens beyond that I can only guess at, except that I know the quantity and quality of information improves. It's like being in a library and working my way upward through the sections, from kids' to young adults', to adults', to undergraduates', to master's, etc. Where that information takes me I can't guess, but I'm sure it'll take me a good distance before I reach my limit. There's a limiting factor built into the system. Julia and every other human except me can't get into the first room. I'm going to find my limit at some point and that's where I'll spend the rest of my life, however long that is." Mom asked, "If you don't have a body, how can you have a 'rest of your life'?" "I don't know. I know I'll be alive as a mind, so presumably being dead is possible too, but the details of that will have to be one of the things I'll be finding out." Prof asked, "You said we can't get into the first room, and you've also said that you're in a room, so what room number are you in already?" "That doesn't mean much without you knowing the relative differences between rooms, and it's skating close to areas I don't want to talk about, so I think I'll duck that one too, sorry Prof." "Don't apologize, son. You've exceeded the wildest dreams we ever had for you by so much its incomprehensible. You've transcended life and death, matter and energy, and you're talking about obtaining knowledge as if you're going to be capable of drinking it from the Universe itself. My ambition for you was to hope you'd be an important scientist one day, but you're still six days away from turning eighteen and you're off on a phenomenal journey that's emotionally worth the lives of billions of people. I don't understand what you're doing, but I understand how impressed I am by you. It's a REAL honor to have known you, son, and I can't imagine that's ever been said with more justification than just now." Prof wanted to give me a hug but I was covered with girls. I used NP to pick them up and gently moved them away so Prof and I could have a weepy male moment. While I was telling Prof how much of my success I owed to him, and he was telling me it was all my own doing (you know how it goes), Vanessa said, "Julia - Carol, Donna and Ava too - Prof chose a very good word when he said 'transcended'. Julia, you've told me several times that you worry about holding Mark back, but he's far transcended anything that you're capable of supporting now. Your last job is to give him as many good, final memories as you can. No more begging him to stay, please. You know that's the wrong thing to do, because you know he would never leave if he had a choice." "Yes Mom. I'm sorry." "We're sorry too," agreed Carol, adding, "Sorry Mark." Ava and Donna echoed it too. I transferred my hug from Prof to my girls. #14: #2: #All: I looked to my parents over my girls' heads - so much easier now that I'm 6' 3" rather than Ron's 5' 6" - "Not long ago I was thinking how great all our lives were going, and now this has come out of the blue." "You're doing it for a good reason, aren't you, Mark? You're not just committing suicide because you think it'll protect us?" "No Dad. What I'm doing to you is a bad thing, but the external reason is so strong it compels me to hurt you anyway. It's a VERY good reason; I wouldn't leave all of you otherwise. I know my not explaining what I'm doing makes it much harder for you, but there's no doubt that I have to do this. The harm I'm doing you should be repaid a billion times over, unfortunately just not to you, I'm sorry. I wish there was some way I could make it up to you..." "You've more than made it up to us in advance, son," reassured Prof. ^ I hadn't told them that there was a chance that I might be able to stay. There were two ways I thought that could happen: if the next few déjà vu's revealed other Marks who'd rolled twelve 6s, or if I could get just eight of my minds left in the merge, in which case I'd tell my families that I'd found a way to send part of my mind. I thought both of those possibilities were so unlikely that it'd be wrong of me to give my families hope. Only at the time one of them happened would I say, "I just learned that I don't have to go. Sorry about the anguish." I talked about my "Sending Eight Minds Only" idea to my next déjà vu partners, and they thought it was a good idea, unlikely to work, but worth trying. They even wished me "Good luck with it," which probably doubled my chance of making it work. The hope I'd had of other Marks having rolled twelve 6s faded rapidly as each successive déjà vu doubled the number of dice rolling results that I knew about. It only took two more days before I had over a hundred samples, all of which were enviably random and short. Mine was the only absurd result. I must've really pissed God off somehow. [[Naturally there were Marks that'd rolled scarily long sequences of 6s - ten of them say - but I didn't meet anyone who'd had contact with them over these days.]] After I exceeded a hundred samples, I told that Mark, One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: I went on to describe what I'd said, what Prof's and Vanessa's points had been, and the results. So the word was spread that November 13 would be the day. The actual date didn't matter, unless something weird happened that the other Marks could learn from. The inter-dimensional broadcast wave that'd started on November 1 - that there was a twelve 6s 'winner' - was the most important wave because it would be the wave that prevented all the other Marks repeating the exercise on December 1 with eleven rolls. Although I only just now (November 5) decided to definitely go ahead, my first few contacts after I'd 'won' knew the reason I was hesitant to carry out my commitment. After a few days they would've learned for themselves that the results were random, and they'd assume I'd be a good boy, so my initial hesitation had no effect on the wave. November 1 to December 1 was long enough that pretty much every five-merge Mark would know that at least one 'winner' had been selected. The second broadcast wave, starting immediately after my next merge on November 13, wouldn't be an important wave, but it'd be good to get the results started. I'd be déjà vu'ing either four times or twice as often as normal too, so I'd be seeding the wave quicker than normal. Those déjà vu frequencies are assuming I merge with another five-merge Mark on November 13, to give me 64 minds; then subsequently déjà vu with either 64-minded Marks (if more of us rolled twelve 6s) or 32-minded Marks. It'll be interesting to see what our ki abilities during those 128- or 96-mind déjà vu's are like. I doubted the 128-mind déjà vu's were likely immediately after my next merge, as they require I déjà vu with another 64-minded Mark. That's too unlikely to hope for even though déjà vu's tend to favor linking with peers. I may not be the only 'winner', but with only 1-in-2 billion of us the chance of me déjà vu'ing with another one is presumably extremely remote, although things with that improbability have been known to happen, fuck it. It had already started, and increasingly over the next few days, the déjà vu's I were having were providing me with an ever-increasing supply of information about the various risky strategies other Marks were taking against the surveillers. It wasn't as necessary for me as the other Waiting Marks because I had the unique strategy of going public and then killing myself, but it was good to see that good information was being discovered and spread. It was immediately useful for some Risk-Taking Marks, as some of their randomly selected ideas hadn't worked out too well. Those Marks, and sometimes their families too, were on the run and fighting back, needing every piece of information they could get. ------- Chapter 398: Starting the Goodbyes Sunday, November 4 to Sunday, November 11, 2007 Everyone in my families dropped out of everything: Carol and Donna stopped attending school, Julia, Ava and I stopped attending OSU, and the parents stopped going to their workplaces. For the parents, that statement was true only most of the time because if I was spending the day with Mom and Dad primarily, then Prof and Vanessa could do some urgent work that day, but it had to be VERY urgent. The girls were out of the education process totally though. One thing I felt acutely was that ten days is a terribly short time to say goodbye to eight people you love. I gained a bit by not needing much sleep because I could stay up with some of my loved ones, who'd catch up with their lost sleep while I was with the others. They suggested I delay my departure until after Thanksgiving, but that would add a couple more very hard weeks and the 'celebration' would be ruined, so I stuck to the schedule. Many of our family friends and colleagues became concerned and called to inquire. When the time required to field the calls got too much - and we all had a very low tolerance for wasting our time these days - we turned our phones off. That especially alarmed the girls that called Julia, and many of them drove to our place. As instructed, our gate security told every that we weren't receiving visitors until my birthday party. Julia was certainly the hardest hit by my leaving. I was her purpose in life and she was already feeling lost at my going soon. She'd adapt. She's smart, driven, business oriented and enormously rich, so she'll find things to do. Her parents will make sure of that. In that respect, my leaving on an over-sold mission was very helpful. I was able to say things like, "Julia, you trained me to accept responsibility, to have confidence in myself and be willing to take on large projects. It's thanks to you that I can do this VERY important thing..." Stuff that made her proud of herself, and gave her a sense of "mission accomplished" about me. Hopefully that'll make it easier for her to find a new mission. Carol was DETERMINED to have my babies. She put her foot DOWN with Mom and Dad and prepared for a knock-down-drag-out battle. Mom and Dad said, "Of course you have our consent. As soon as you've graduated high school and turned eighteen so its legal, then you can have as many as you want. We think it's a wonderful idea. How many do you want?" Their agreement surprised Carol. Ava said she'd like to start immediately after Carol. They both asked my consent and I told them, "I'd be honored and our babies will be the luckiest kids in Oregon to be bought up in such a loving family." Donna was told by Mom, "We'll see how you feel when you're eighteen." That was good enough for Donna, who wasn't even sure how she felt now. Julia was embarrassed about her losing enthusiasm for the babies idea. I told her, "You don't need to have one of my babies to prove to me that you love and have pride in me. You've been singing both from the rooftops since our first date. Don't ask me who, but I've heard some people say that you get a little bit carried away when you're praising me. I know you love me with every fiber of your being. We both know what you're driven to do and that's what you should do. Let Carol and Ava find their role in life with their babies; you can have your mega-company." Nevaeh was an issue I left to my girls as I wouldn't be around for the consequences to matter to me. They liked Nevaeh a lot, and they decided that they'd still like her to move into our home. It'd be a different dynamic without me there so it may not work out, but they could always ask her to move back to her parents if that was the case. Nevaeh was in the same grade as Carol, so they had some commonality there and Nevaeh wouldn't be 'slowing down' the Kids' lives any more than Carol would. If Julia set up a business in New York, for example, then Carol and Nevaeh would be equally able to move there with Julia. Especially because my girls wanted to keep their relationship with Nevaeh going, I should spend some time with her before I leave. With so few days remaining, no one wanted me to spend a lot of time with her, but it would be unfair to Nevaeh if she didn't know that what time she spent with me was to say goodbye, so we invited her to come over Friday after school. Friday was the 9th and my birthday although we were having its party the next day. The 13th would be on Tuesday. I told Nevaeh, "I've got some fairly major news. Sometime Tuesday or Wednesday next week, God is sending me to do an important job..." "Oh boy! You do amazing things." "You can say that again," agreed Julia unhappily. "It's a BIG, important job, sweetie. It's going to take the rest of my life and I won't be coming back. After next week, you, Julia, Carol, Ava and my families will never see me again." "Oh. Umm, can't you visit? Or we could visit you in the plane if you're too busy." "It's not on Earth, Nevaeh. God is taking my mind and my soul, and taking them to wherever souls go. Because my soul is so pure, He wants me to work there." "Wow. Will you be able to visit, like the angels have?" "God has already told me to make sure I say goodbye properly to everyone who's important to me because I won't be coming back. I'll never see any of you again after Tuesday or Wednesday." "Not your parents or Julia or Carol or anyone?" I shook my head. "Oh no! That's terrible!..." "No it's not, sweetie. I'll be doing an important job for God. Remember I was dead a few months ago, and now I've met my family again, had chances to tell them I love them and say goodbye to them properly, and I've had the good fortune of meeting you. Well, not really 'good fortune', considering the Guardian Angel made you stand naked on the side of the street so we couldn't miss you. I don't think that can be called luck, can it?" "Aren't any of you sad?" Julia answered, "We cried when Mark first told us, but that was mostly because we didn't understand. We're sad and we're going to miss him terribly, but this is far better than it was few months ago." "I suppose. It still seems very sad to me. I want to cry but I can't because you're not." "You can cry if you want, but the reason we asked you here was to give you some time alone with him to say goodbye. We'll leave you to it. Give him a good time, Nevaeh; it's going to be his last memory of you and him being alone." "Oh boy, {sniff}. I feel like crying." I pulled her into a hug and said, "There, there," whereupon Nevaeh burst into tears. #7: #9: Nevaeh didn't cry for long. I'd like to take credit for that, but I suspected there might've been other reasons. I held Nevaeh while she double-checked her understanding of the situation, triple-checked that she'd NEVER see me again, then decided that some sex would be an excellent use of our time. I would've thought it'd be the last thing she'd want to do. (That's a bad choice of phrase given that this was her last time with me. I'll just say that I was very surprised by her wanting sex. I guess I don't understand girls yet.) [[I'd always been VERY happy to have sex with her, and she wanted to make me happy. She believed that to be a large part of why God had put her into my life, because she knew that her beauty was the only way in which she excelled, and we'd all praised her for being so enjoyably joyful and happy with sex.]] #7: #21: We were still warming up, when Nevaeh asked, "Where are Julia and the others?" "In the spa pool." "You and they are going to miss each other a lot more than you'll miss me. I think they should be here instead of me, Mark. I love you, but they're more important. Julia is going to miss you VERY much, isn't she?" "Yes, she's going to be hurt. I'm glad you're her friend." "I'm glad I am to. I'll go and get her for you." "How about we all share? How does that sound?" "Sharing is good." She's heard that from us a thousand times. With four kids in her family, probably from her parents too. I don't think I'll take the time to send them a thank you note though. "Stay here, sweetie. I'll send the Guardian Angel to get the girls." The last few words were said with a raised voice, and the Guardian Angel conveniently got the hint. It's been very cooperative since I knew I'd be leaving. That must be part of God's new employment package, or something. When my girls returned to the room, I said, "Nevaeh was going to leave because she wanted to give her time with me to the three of you. I suggested that we share. Would you like to come to bed." Nevaeh got a considerable amount of praise and special attention. Afterward, I told Nevaeh, "Please don't tell anyone about my job until after I've gone." "I won't. I know I have to keep quiet about your secrets." "Thanks, sweetie. At the end of my birthday party I'm going to ask my favorite guests to stay late, which will obviously include you, and I'll be telling them what we told you a few minutes ago, so they'll have a chance to say goodbye to me..." "Oh boy. It's going to be a VERY sad party." Julia said, "We'll be trying to keep it happy, but it's going to be very hard not to cry a lot at the end. We know Mark will be going away to do something special, but we're still going to miss him terribly." Nevaeh needed another hanky, especially after I added, "That's the last time you and the other party guests will see me, Nevaeh. After that, I'll be spending all my remaining time with my families." When Nevaeh was over the worst of it, I added, "Part of the reason God resurrected me was as a lesson about how evil the Government is getting, so God's probably going to do something reasonably dramatic when He takes my soul on Tuesday or Wednesday. From what the Guardian Angel has told me it'll be on the news and it's very important to keep my real reason for leaving secret or you'll spoil God's plan..." "I won't tell ANYONE Mark! I'd NEVER do that." "Thanks. I'll be asking my favorites the same thing at the end of the party too. It's very important for the safety of my families too, so I'll be making a big deal about keeping it secret. -- "The last specific thing to tell you is the Guardian Angel has told me that after I go, God will be releasing you and the other eight girls from the oaths they've taken, and it wants you to tell them that after I leave. Okay?" "I will. I wish you didn't have to go though." "You've got NO IDEA how much I wish I didn't have to, but it's kind of hard to say 'No' to God." "Yeah. I'm so glad He let me get to know you. If you can, can you thank Him for me please." "I'm sure He knows how you feel. He was smart enough to pick you for me in the first place. Look how well you fit in with us." [[Not that she'd had much choice about the major parts of that, given the overwhelming psychological tricks we'd played on her. Her basic personality was a very moral one and such people are very nice to have around once their sense of superiority is eliminated. She had fit in well.]] "It's been WONDERFUL! I'm sorry I was only in your life for such a short time. It's only been four months, and we didn't do anything except be good friends and have sex." "Then maybe that's what God wanted, sweetie. Maybe He wanted me to have a good time before I was taken away again. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but your body pleases me very much." "I think you have mentioned that." "Knowing what I know about God, that wouldn't have been His only reason. It's a VERY good reason, and I'm certainly going to thank Him for that, but I'm sure He had others. Maybe He wanted you to learn the truth about sex, or maybe His main reason was so you and my other girls can remain friends after I've gone." "Oh yeah. Umm, what's going to happen..." Julia interrupted, "You're still invited to live here, Nevaeh. It might take a week or two for us to be ready for company again, but then we'll go to your parents and ask permission for you to move in as soon as possible. We'll set up a spare bedroom to look like it's yours, but we'll all be sleeping in Mark's bed together. That is, if you still want to after Mark's left?" "I'd LOVE to, Julia. It'd be FANTASTIC, I just wish Mark could still be with us." "So do we," echoed Carol and Ava. I was in full agreement with them. ^ The baddies were still up to no good, as is their nature. Quite a lot of no good actually, because their bosses were very eager to get blood and EEG samples, neither of which are easy to obtain surreptitiously and both of which I was determined not to let them have. They did some very clever thinking to invent ways of getting those samples without me knowing it'd been done and with no baddie coming within five hundred feet of me. We had to admire their imagination and expertise. Their plans being admired was all we permitted though; we waited until they'd set everything up, and then I'd get a hair cut while I was in LA rather than from my usual hairdresser, for example. It was pissing them off highly and it easily kept them stalled for the days we required. [The New York hotel room incident, which had been the first escalation into areas I objected strongly to, was on October 13, four weekends after we returned from Noumea. I'd rolled the twelve 6s on November 1 and told my families about my Voyage on the 3rd. My Un-Resurrection Day would be on the 13th. It was only the last couple of weeks that the baddies' actions were frequently annoying; previously we'd had to dodge something only once or twice per week.] Soon after my "I'm leaving" announcement to my families, we'd told Paul about the baddies, telling him, "The Guardian Angel discovered them for us." We immediately put our staff onto monitoring the bugs I'd placed because none of the families wanted to waste valuable Be-With-Mark time on that activity. To Paul's and our guards' frustrations we weren't taking any active countermeasures, vetoing their suggestions with, "The angel has its own plans." By now - a few days before my departure - every déjà vu included me and my déjà vu partner swapping stories about every Risk Taker's Strategy that we'd heard about: what those Marks had done, what information they'd obtained, and what results they'd achieved and were still achieving. That had rapidly become a large number of reports. All of us Marks learned a lot of facts about the surveillers, their bosses, the operation, etc. There were some minor contradictory elements, but they were due to dimensional differences and weren't important; 99% of the situations were the same. Several of the tested Risky Strategies had run their course and had worked very well, and most of the Waiting Marks had started to make very good use of what they had learned. We expected that every dimension that had such an operation would have it totally destroyed. The best solutions were quick and highly effective, so the delay in solving the Problem in every dimension was mostly in how long it took for each Waiting Mark to get enough information from his déjà vu's to decide to act. Often they delayed a while because there was no real reason not to make very sure that the apparent best strategy didn't have an unforeseen 'tail' to sting with. Some of the Marks that'd made unlucky random choices of strategy, and whose families had been forced to flee home, were VERY thankful for the knowledge they'd received as they'd been forced to act on what they'd learned much faster than the rest of us. They'd eagerly awaited each of their déjà vu's, hoping that the next one would give them the information they wanted and sometimes desperately needed. They'd eventually learned what they'd needed to get the baddies' operation shut down. Given how hairy the lives of some Risk-Taking Marks had got, it was possible that some of them and even their families had been killed, but we had no way of confirming that. We hoped and thought there wouldn't be many of them, as the Marks that'd been on the run had done pretty good jobs of keeping everyone out of the clutches of the evil CIA. Yes, it was a CIA operation. The CIA didn't believe in God, and didn't believe the bullshit the so-called Archangel Michael had spread, regardless of his impressive special effects. There was more than enough physical evidence to justify the CIA's suspicions, and they were determined to find out who Archangel Michael was, what the Guardian Angel was, how I was involved, and what we were up to. I can't say I blamed them, but I absolutely couldn't let them know the truth or my and my families' lives would immediate turn to shit, and soon after that, so would every civilization throughout the W-Dimension. The usual way of shutting down the surveillance operation was in publicly exposing it in a way that implied that God would shortly be responding appropriately, and no one doubted what that meant to DC's habitability for the next few hundred years. The public in all those dimensions was SCREAMING! They were very quickly joined by EVERY politician who wanted to get any votes at all in their next election. They were also joined by very large numbers of CIA staff who were in abject fear of the Guardian Angel nuking DC or just killing everyone in the CIA, so they were trying to prove that neither was necessary by spewing out as much information as possible to prove that they were coming clean. The media took the information that dimension's Mark had initially provided, plus the new information that didn't so much leak as deluge, and they researched it further and produced even more details. I now knew, for example, the real names of every baddie in Corvallis - and a few that weren't in my dimension's Corvallis - with extensive information about their histories, personal lives, etc. So I was no longer worried about my surveillers. They were a nuisance, but I knew enough to shut them down whenever I wanted. Inter-dimensional cooperation was hailed by all the Marks as a huge success. We might have lost a few Marks whose risky actions had blown up in their faces, but without doubt the number of losses was FAR less than what would've happened had we not shared our knowledge. Inter-dimensional cooperation was a fantastic way of solving slowly developing problems. All the Marks, except me, were eager to see how our second cross-dimensional research project developed. We - all the Marks - have another fantastic long-term idea for the future. The simple version is that all through our future career as scientists, whenever one of us makes a breakthrough or encounters a dead-end, he can share that information through the grapevine. That will make our research astronomically more productive. We can do better than that by making sure that we work in thousands or millions of different directions. It makes no sense for all of us to get exactly the same degrees, and then do the same experiments, for example. This academic year has already started and we won't bother disrupting it, but for future years we should make a list of every possible degree that we have any interest in, and then choose however many we want to do by rolling dice to guarantee a nice spread of expertise. We can also proactively direct our research by assigning different projects to groups of Marks, so the image of me being in the middle of a spider-web of research labs would become reasonably accurate, no matter which "me" you take the perspective of. Prof and I have sometimes talked about how many scientists I could be the equivalent of. If a single Mark is the equivalent of a hundred ordinary scientists, what will a network of billions of slowly communicating Marks be like? The Profs who have relationships with a Mark - not all Profs do - are going to be VERY surprised by how productive their Marks are. It's going to be VERY interesting to see what we can produce, and what the effects on the worlds are going to be. Finding out how to solve the Surveillance Problem took all the urgency out of starting my Voyage of Discovery, but it unfortunately didn't take away the usefulness of it. Nor did it give me an excuse to call for another dice rolling determination for who had to go. I was the one, and there was no way for me to get out of it. Delaying my departure for a few days or even weeks was possible and even quite reasonable from the other Marks' point of view, but it would've been too cruel on my families. They would feel better if I could delay my leaving for many years, but that wasn't right either. The information I learn might be a lifesaver for millions or billions of Marks and their families, especially if something bad happened suddenly, giving me no time to do what I should've done already. So the Surveillance Problem being solved across the W-Dimension didn't change my schedule. ^ Robert and Andrew were summoned home and given the true news about my departure, as my families understood it, as well as a great deal more information about me than they'd ever had before. The Boys had reached some pretty amazing conclusions of their own, but they were still gobsmacked. There was simply no reason not to tell them everything that my families knew because this dimension was going to be "orphaned" (cut off) as far as Mark Anderson was concerned, just like the thirty one other dimensions that each of my minds had already left. Most of the remaining time was spent either with my girls, or with the parents, or with all of them. Some of it was attempts at being lighthearted, like my joking, "It's so unfair I have to go now that Carol's got so good at cooking roast chicken dinners." Other conversations were more serious, such as my wanting my girls to get on with their lives after I left, including having boyfriends and getting married. That comment just got me several lovingly delivered raspberries and more coherent responses such as, "We're intending to spend the rest of our lives living with each other. We don't need a man and we'll never find one that doesn't seem pathetic after you." Maybe they would do without another guy, but I hoped not. With peculiar exceptions such as Rocky and Nigel, we need cross-gender relationships to feel complete. There was no convincing my girls of that now, so I was just letting them know that I was in favor of their doing so, should they feel any desire for it. I told them, "Please don't hold yourself back from living your life as happily as possible out of some misplaced idea that you're honoring my memory. Your being happy is the best possible way you can honor me, as that's what I want more than anything else. Although another pizza would be nice." Carol was seriously determined that she was going to have my babies - her only doubt was over how many to have - and I thought it'd happen. The parents had not let her stop taking the pill to try to get pregnant during our final ten days, but they'd told her "Not until after you've finished school." They'd said "school" rather than "college" They'd also checked that my sperm samples were being stored correctly by the two companies we were using. I thought Ava would probably join Carol in young motherhood too, and I was sure their/our kids would have wonderful lives. We decided on the gifts I wanted to leave behind for my favorite friends. The core gift that I'd give to all of them was $1 million (inflation adjusted and net of tax), to be given on April 1 after their 20th birthday, and repeatedly every ten years thereafter. I'd originally suggested, "on their birthdays", but Julia wanted the same date for all of them as it'd be easier for her to administer. I'd suggested November 13 but Julia had said she'd be incapable of doing any work those days. April 1 was chosen because it was the anniversary of our first date, was amusingly named, and would be a convenient time of the year for Julia. There were some conditions on the gift as I didn't want to create lives of indolent waste. The recipients would have to sign a contract that would give Julia permission to investigate their lives as much as she wanted, so she could confirm that they were living active, useful lives. A criminal conviction would be given as an example of an almost certain reason to have the gift stopped, although that and everything else about the gift would be up to Julia's sole and arbitrary control. If Alexis got a conviction it'd probably be because she WAS having an active life! The recipients could opt out of Julia's investigation of their lives any time they wanted, with the obvious consequence. Legally the gifts would be from Julia so the recipients wouldn't be able to contest Julia's control of them. As well as those payments, I had some other ideas more specific to each person, but I didn't spend any time on them. Mostly I just gave Julia a list of ideas and left it for her to flesh them out and get them done after I was gone. I didn't even mind if she changed them. I'd suggested that Julia might want to caution Diana and Claire to keep the monetary gift secret from their parents, who I judged too willing to compromise their morals for money. Or maybe tell Diana and Claire that Mark had a gift for them but they weren't going to be told what it was until they were nineteen, when they'd be stronger and more able to resist their parents' predations. Or Julia could simply tell them the same time as she told the other girls; it was up to her. Another possible change was giving Nevaeh $1 million every year as my gift to her, or even $5 million per year, so she wouldn't feel indebted to Julia and Carol. Julia and Carol would be earning a total of nearly $100 million from their investments every year, so giving Nevaeh $5 million was no big deal. Julia knew my attitudes and she'd do what I wanted as well as I would, if not better. If Nevaeh didn't work out as a live-in friend, for example, Julia could decide then what to do about the gift payments better than I could predict all the possible future scenarios and my instructions for each. I'd not be telling any of the recipients about their gifts, nor taking the time to prepare the gifts now. All I'd done was type up a new Last Will and Testament and get it signed properly. At the speed I can type, that hadn't taken long, even with the time I'd wasted internally joking about adding an invalidating "s" into, "being of sound mind and body." My Will - a retyped, slightly amended copy of what Ron's had been - left all my money to just Julia and Carol as everyone else had refused. When she felt ready, Julia would let the recipients of my gifts know about them in whatever manner suited her. Another topic of conversation was the parents cautioning everyone, especially Donna because it was too easy to imagine her not thinking of the consequences, "PLEASE don't proudly boast to media about how wonderful Mark was after he's gone. Stick to the resurrection story, the angels, God, and all that. Do NOT tell them that all those abilities were his. People get very angry when they're made fools off. We'd be arrested and convicted for being accessories to murder, the Air Force would sue us for their monetary damages, and the residents of Washington DC who kept fleeing from impending nuclear destruction would sue us for their mental anguish. Our lives would be ruined." Everyone understood that. I did nothing but express my love to my families. Sometimes verbally, sometimes physically. Sometimes one on one, sometimes in a group. Some of it was enjoyable, like giving Donna a jokingly called "Urgent Sex-Education Lesson", and some of it was very hard. For example, as mightily as I tried, I couldn't convey to Prof and Vanessa how much I appreciated their help in my life. Mom and Dad had created me of course, and had given me my fundamental beliefs and values; the sorts of things that are so deeply entrenched that you don't realize you've got them. But there are many of them, they're very strong and they're very important, despite their being unconsciously absorbed. Prof and Vanessa had given me gifts that I was much more aware of because I'd had to consciously learn them. Their attitudes and ways of thinking - often delivered via Julia - had profoundly improved my ability to be successful with people and life, from having the confidence to take on tasks, how to plan to achieve them, etc., plus so much more at the personal level, such as their very conscious attitude to personal responsibility. As much as I expressed appreciation to them, I wanted to express more. So much so that I had to fight very hard to hold myself back from telling Prof too much about my abilities, including how in MANY dimensions he'd never said an ill word to any of me when slowly dying in the Casino Kidnappers' basements. I wanted him to truly know how awesome I thought he was, and it was very hard not to use that example. Of my many regrets, a big one was that I couldn't tell Prof the full story about déjà vu merging, as he'd be fascinated by and love the mathematics and science behind it all. I spent time talking to everyone about their plans and dreams for their futures. I'd see other versions of my loved ones, and provided my Voyage ended without my head exploding or my going insane, I'd be able to share in a set of version's plans and dreams coming true, but I wanted to know about THIS set's ideas. I wanted them to be able to share as much of their life with me as they could, including the parts of it they hadn't lived yet. Mom and Dad haven't been given nearly enough appreciation in my autobiography. I've written about the things that happened to me, while Mom and Dad didn't "happen", as much as they were "always there". They weren't new in my life, and most of what they'd been able to teach me had been taught before the point I started my autobiography, but in no way does my comparative silence about them diminish their importance to me. I felt sorry that they hadn't been more involved in my life and its decisions over the last year or so, and I told them that - we were all totally open and emotionally honest these days. I did my best to show them how much I understood and appreciated their obviously massive impact on my life, personality, attitudes and beliefs. They, in turn, said they'd been well aware that I was growing strong and independent of their immediate support. Mom saying, "Every parent wants their children to grow strong and capable, and we all greatly miss nurturing them when they do so. I had a lot of trouble adapting to your maturing so fast, but I never wished for you not to. We're incredibly proud of you." I replied, "I couldn't have done it without you, and I also owe you hugely for letting Carol be with me." You know how it goes, only with even more tears. There was a great deal of very emotional talk, and a great deal of crying. The ten days was a terribly short period, but an incredibly draining one too. ------- I'll not mention much about my eighteenth birthday party; just the following: My families and I kept brave faces on but the more astute guests - all of whom were female, as it happened - could tell something was amiss. I would've liked to have been able to say my goodbyes to everyone even if it was only done as part of a fake story such as my going to an unnamed overseas university for several years, but it would've ruined the important plan I had to destroy the surveillers' operation. I needed to do that brutally so my families would be as safe as possible after I left. So to most of the guests that noticed that my families and I weren't as happy as we should be, we just dismissed their questions with an "I've got a lot on my mind" type of answer. To my favorite friends, I just asked them to stay late because I needed to tell them something. We would've preferred to do something special for my eighteenth birthday, what with me becoming a legal adult, but circumstances ruined our desire for that celebration. It wasn't a good party, but I was glad to spend some time talking to many friends of mine for the last time, especially those that didn't quite make it into the favorites group. The party wound down early. Leaving the adults and staff to clean up, I led my girls and my favorites to the Adults' living room, well away from the party's late leavers, and with a couple of guards posted outside to keep any nosey visitor away. "What I'm about to tell you is a secret and it's VERY important for my families' and my safety that you not breathe a word of this." After their assurances, I gave them the same story I'd told Nevaeh: that I was being un-resurrected in a few days to work for God somewhere that wasn't on Earth, and that I wouldn't ever be coming back. There was a lot of disbelief - as you'd expect - but most of these people had already seen that my girls and I weren't our usual joyful, lecherous selves (respectively) during the party. My girls leaking tears now was pretty damned convincing too. As belief sunk in, it turned into a very emotional scene. After the noise level was down to tolerable levels, I said, "I've asked God for a favor. I'm very worried about the safety of my families after I leave. The Government has been invasive digging into my families' lives, and once the Guardian Angel goes, they could do so again..." "They've stopped that, haven't they?" "No they haven't. There's a major CIA operation going on against us right now..." "{Gasp}," from several of them. " ... Yeah. They've got satellites watching our home, they've drugged me to get me to throw up in public so they could get medical samples about how my digestive system works. They've done things against my family like get hair samples from everyone. They got Donna's by bumping into her in the street and pulling some of her hair out. -- "God's going to let me tell some half-lies just before I go. I'm going to totally blame the Government and the CIA for my having to leave, rather than its being half because God wants me to work for him, and half because God is disgusted by the Government and thinks I can do more good elsewhere rather being wasted on this world. I'm very worried that after I leave the Government might continue to do evil things to my families, so I'm going to leave in a way that'll cause an ENORMOUS stink, so the Government should be incredibly scared off. So PLEASE don't tell ANYONE why I'm really leaving or that you know the stink is half-false, or you'll put all my family into very bad danger." They all urged me to believe their assurances, which I did. I had contemplated getting them to swear an oath to God and doing the blinding flash thing again, but it didn't need that. There's a consequence of being rich and famous which I haven't commented on herein, but it's frequent and very annoying: people make up all sorts of crap about you. It's nearly always bizarrely unlikely crap, so I've been calling it the "Bizarre Stories Effect". I think people make up such stories so the storyteller will appear to be better connected by knowing something very interesting that no one else knows, gaining prestige-by-association. As well as being unlikely, most of those stories are also insulting, courtesy of the well known "Drag Down Effect", which is also common in people with weak egos. All of us - Julia, Carol, the parents, etc. - have suffered from people spreading unlikely, insulting lies, and no one has been the subject of those as much as I have. The bizarreness of my life - as the public knows it - inspires stories which are even MORE unlikely. The rumor mill will be going to go into hyperdrive after my death, especially because of there being little chance of the storytellers being contradicted. It's always been a damned nuisance before, but it'll be helpful this time because if any of my favorites do later repeat what I'd told them, it'll be lost among all the other bizarre stories that'll be going around. There being no proof either way means their blabbing later won't really matter. I got each of them to spend a few minutes sitting on my lap for a last conversation. Praising Diana and Claire, for example, and telling them to let their parents coldhearted, repressive nonsense wash over them until they were old enough to enforce their own decisions. Mostly I just thanked everyone for the good times and good emotions we'd shared. It took quite a while and was emotionally difficult, but I was glad I'd done it. ------- Chapter 399: Taking the Surveillers Down Monday, November 12, 2007 On Monday, it was time to take the surveillers down. "At last!" Paul exclaimed, when I told him very early in the morning what the angel wanted done, giving him time to get it prepared. It wasn't going to be anything fancy. There were really only two parts to the takedown, which would occur roughly simultaneously in the mid-morning. I'd wanted to get this over with early enough that I could see that it had worked before I left. If the Government persisted in trying to keep the operation alive, I could give my families a LOT of advice because other dimensions had experienced that problem, or I could even delay my departure. I didn't think either would be necessary as I knew more than enough to ruin the operation in a way that put the Government under so much pressure that it would crumble rather than be foolhardy enough to try to fight back. I could've done it earlier, but a weekday would make as many as possible of the politicians and CIA assholes in DC fear for their lives again. Doing it as early as last Friday was simply unnecessary, and the subsequent news-crew nosiness would have detracted from my birthday party and the quality time my families were spending with me. Those things made Monday morning the obvious time to do it. The first part was Paul sending out four small teams of his guys, one team each to the three houses the camera babysitting weenies were in, and a fourth team to where the CIA's helicopter and its two pilots were operating from. The teams got into position, scoped out the job covertly, then waited for the go signal. Scoping out the helicopter operation was particularly easy as it was literally the middle of an unused farmer's field, remote from every air traffic control system and all other signs of civilization because the CIA had been paranoid about creating any computerized records of their activity. The second part of my plan was a media job. With the minimum of advanced notice, we'd invited four TV news-crews to meet us in a specific OSU parking lot, telling them to arrive at 9am with cameras and vans capable of uploading live to their studios. They liked the sound of that and had arrived early. They were made to wait until Dad and three of our guards told them, "Get back in your vans. One of us will go with you to give you directions to where Mark's waiting. Hurry, or you'll be too late." The vans sped toward the baddies' base. I'd contemplated inviting only two news-crews and flying the vans from my home to the baddies' base, but it was about 7,000 meters. Using 2 g's of sideways acceleration, it would take us 20 seconds to get halfway there, and another 20 seconds to decelerate to a stop near the house, for a total of 40 seconds. That gave the baddies too long to react. I could shave about 10 seconds off by accelerating a little longer than halfway, so the vans would overshoot the destination. That wouldn't matter because I could hold the baddies immobile while the vans slowed and returned (I had to be accompanying the vans, for an obvious reason). I could fly ahead of the vans by a few hundred feet, to get within range of the baddies faster, and I could also use more acceleration, but I still felt we'd take too long. I wanted the news-crews to film the baddies with their live satellite feeds going, and 20 seconds' warning might ruin that. Instead, I'd gotten one of our Black guards (so he obviously wasn't me or any of the other principals) to walk out of the Staff Quarters while he was putting on a motorcycle jacket and helmet. He walked into the tunnel room where the bikes are kept, and I rode out seconds later wearing the same gear. That way the satellite surveillance would have no reason to track the bike rider, letting me get close to the baddies' base without their receiving a warning. I'd arrived at the base about the same time as Dad was telling the news-crews to get in their vans. The Guardian Angel had appeared in the middle of the baddies, and had instantly clamped them to their chairs. Those in bed were flown to the living room and held there, waiting immovably for the news-crews. I sent the word to Paul for him to give his security teams the word to do their takedowns of the three camera-sitting weenies and the pilots. The security teams had no trouble entering the houses and disabling the lone weenies. I'd checked they were alone the previous night, and our teams had been large enough to easily handle up to three baddies, especially as our guys weren't going to be gentle. Taking down the two helicopter pilots was even easier, as one of them was sleeping and there'd been no locked doors to get through. The weenies and pilots were tied up VERY securely, and then our guys photographed everything - especially the weenies, their gear, and what their gear was aimed at. They took fingerprint sources as well as DNA samples from the baddies. What especially worried the baddies was our security calling them by name. The evidence our teams had collected was only in case the cops were forced to drop the ball, which we very much doubted would happen, not with the public outcry that was about to occur. The weenies were left lying on the floor, tied into position just inside the open front doors of their houses. That was to give the cops an excuse to enter the houses and make it easy for them to grab the weenies. The pilots were tied to their chopper's skids. Our teams pulled back and sat in their cars outside the properties. When the cops arrive, our guys will say, "The angel tied them up and messaged us to guard them until you arrived." It was a lie, the CIA contractors would certainly blame our guys, and no one would care. Paul's guys had worn gloves and left no evidence, and no one would be interested in the baddies' protests. They'd be lucky to escape a public lynching. Meanwhile, the news-crews were en route to the baddies' Corvallis base. Our guards and Dad had prevented the newsies from broadcasting anything yet, and had told them that when they arrived they were not to transmit anything or their network would never be invited to another Anderson event. They could record, but not go live yet. Being inside the vans, Dad and the guards could ensure those orders were obeyed. When the news-crews braked to a halt outside the baddies' base, Dad and the guards stayed in the vans to prevent any transmissions. I greeted the news-crews, insisting they waited outside until they'd all arrived, a delay of less than a minute. Then I led them into the baddies' living room, where I explained, "They are all being held immobile by God's Guardian Angel, so you have nothing to fear, even though some of them are armed. -- "What you're looking at is a CIA operation using independent international mercenaries hired to spy on and carry out other more intrusive operations against me. For example, they slipped drugs into my food in a restaurant to give me diarrhea and make me vomit so they could obtain samples to use for medical analysis of me. In the hall closet you'll find an umbrella with a hypodermic syringe in its point which they were intending to 'accidentally' bump into me in the street, to get a blood sample from me. I'll give you more examples later." The bosses had sent the hypodermic umbrella recently, presumably in frustration at not getting a blood sample from me. The local baddies had refused to use it because it was both too dangerous and a stupid idea for how to get blood from me, but that didn't matter. -- "You'll notice that all their screens are focused on my home. They're using sixteen near-Earth orbit spy satellites launched by the US Air Force at the CIA's request, primarily to provide 24-hour coverage of our home although they perform other missions when over suitable parts of the world. Make sure you get some shots of those screens because they'll lose their feed in a few minutes." I paused to let the media record the scene for several seconds. After they'd had long enough I resumed, "You'll want to make sure you get audio of what happens next. It'll be quiet so make sure your tape recorders are set to be as sensitive as they can be, if that's how they work." I pulled out the cellphone of the senior guy here, the angel pulled his arm up and pressed his thumb to the panel on the phone. I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket and typed in the pin number. The angel split off a little mini-angel, which flew into my voice box and hovered there, where half of it was clearly visible sticking out of my throat. Allowing the cameras to film what I was doing, I found the person called "One" in the phone's list and I placed the call, moving closer to the reporters and holding the phone so its speaker was facing the reporters' eager microphones, and so their cameras could see the number it was calling. When One answered I put on the phone owner's voice - we had HOURS of tape of his talking and I'd practiced copying it in front of my families - to say, "The team's worried about the orders getting too dangerous. They want me to tell you they aren't happy." "What do they want?" "To be made happy and to be reassured. You'd better have some convincing reasons because they think you're going to set them up, and some of them could get killed by that." Mr. One spent about thirty seconds telling me what to tell the team, that he'd look into upping the pay rate, and gave some reassurances that they were safe. I said, "I'll pass it on and get back to you." I hung up. The angel left my neck, merging with the main one in the middle of the room. In my normal voice I told the baddies, "One wants you to know that you're safe from the angel and that it'll never find you. I hope you feel reassured." -- To the cameras I said, "What you just heard was the software-distorted voice of Robert Briggs. He's an Operations Controller for the CIA working out of Langley. You'll have his voice recorded well enough for evidence later. It's heavily distorted but the CIA will be forced to release the software that did the distortion so you'll be able to reverse it to get his natural voice. The phone company's records - the angel's notes say they're using AT&T - will confirm that the cellphone he just used and the second phone that Robert Briggs habitually carries were both in the Langley area. -- "With that established, what we'll do is go outside, I'll stand by the front door with the Guardian Angel. You'll contact your producers to get them ready to break into your current programming in two minutes, at exactly 10:45 local time and not before. Then you'll approach me from your vans, this time transmitting live, and we'll reenact your arrivals and my explanation." ^ [I knew Robert Briggs used AT&T because one of the Risk Takers' strategies that'd worked was to wait until the local boss was asleep, float his phone to his thumb, press lightly then float it away to enter the pin number. Those Marks (I'll call them "I" for this description; that being reasonably accurate) had scrolled through the list of phone numbers memorizing them all. Then I'd gone snooping at phone carriers until I'd determined the current location of One's phone. I'd flown to Washington, obtained an AT&T phone of my own, placed a call to a phone-sex number - I've always been slightly curious about those - and had driven along the roads near CIA's head office in Langley keeping precise notes of my location and times. Using AT&T's computers later had told me when my call had been transferred to different cellphone towers, which gave the locations that happened. I'd acquired a movie camera with a very high-powered zoom lens and timestamp function, and had filmed cars leaving Langley for all of an afternoon and evening. Then I'd gone to the DC AT&T building again and found what time One's phone had changed cellphone towers and in which direction. Reviewing the tape gave me a list of several dozen possible people; so many because he hadn't been talking on his phone at the time, so I got its new location only from its periodic check in. I'd used this approach because I'd deemed it too dangerous and difficult to do a sight blob search of the CIA's huge head office. Doing checks on their cars' plates at a police station had narrowed that further and had given me many of their addresses and occupations. It'd been easy to check their homes to see who was carrying around a fingerprint-secured phone. Unfortunately no one was. Further database searches, using a CIA database and facial recognition software this time, had given me much better information, narrowing the list down to three guys. Two of them had been carrying two cellphones, so I'd picked the most likely guy and called One's number using his own home's landline phone. I'd seen one of his cellphones respond so the angel had appeared and grabbed him. The Guardian Angel spent an enjoyable - for me - several minutes convincing him that he should verbally and completely answer the questions typed on his phone. Once he'd become cooperative, I'd turned on a video camera I'd brought then the Guardian Angel started asking every question it could think of. After several hours and tapes, I'd cut off his head while the camera was still rolling. Then I'd tracked down his boss, interrogated then decapitated him. Then I'd duplicated the tapes and given them to several media studios, busting the operation wide open. Paul's men and the cops had, just as the news was about to break, captured the local baddies to make sure they didn't escape. The audiotapes from my bugs and other evidence we'd collected at home supported everything. That had ended the Surveillance Problem for that Risk-Taking Mark.] ^ The arrival reenactment went without a hitch. I even had the baddies' TV muted and tuned to CNN so I could see them cut over live to my breaking story, confirming that the broadcast was getting out. Dad and the security guys came in to watch the circus. I repeated to the cameras, "What you're looking at is a CIA operation using independent international mercenaries hired by the CIA to spy on and carry out other more intrusive operations against my family and me. For example, they drugged my food in a restaurant to give me diarrhea and make me vomit uncontrollably so they could get samples to use to medically analyze me. Apparently the CIA didn't get enough samples the last time they had me as their illegal prisoner, so they have been continuing their illegal operation on the sly. -- "In the hall closet there's an umbrella with a hypodermic syringe in its point which they're planning to 'accidentally' bump into me with, to get a blood sample. We've got many weeks of all their plans on tape so there's a wealth of other examples. We've already placed copies of the audio tapes in the news teams' vans, with typed notes of the locations of the best segments to save you time searching through weeks of material." The baddies were looking decidedly worried. They were well and truly blown, all on live TV. It wouldn't do their highly secretive careers any good at all. -- "You'll notice that their screens are focused on my home. They're using sixteen spy satellites launched by the US Air Force at the CIA's request. They provide 24-hour coverage of my home." -- I pulled many pages of notes from my pocket, explaining, "The angel typed up the information I needed. It wants me to do the introductions first." I turned to the second page, asking the angel, "Which one is Sergeyev Kozak?" The angel moved to hover over the Ukrainian, whereupon I said, "Thanks." Then I read out a good summary of his life history, with emphasis on the types of illegal missions he was typically involved in. It was possible that his history might be different in this dimension, but so unlikely I didn't worry about it. I'd contemplated having the Guardian Angel enter each baddies' head for a few seconds, then enter mine, whereupon I'd describe the guy's life, but I'd decided that might frighten the paranoid Government too much. Just reading from typed notes was safer. I went on to give the name and capsule life history of every guy here. Soon into the second guy all the satellite feeds were cut. I pointed that out, saying, "Someone in Langley - probably a guy called Samuel Sutton according the angel's notes - just ordered the plug pulled on the satellite feeds. No doubt the Government will claim the satellites weren't actually looking at my house, but were doing valuable research on the gopher problem and just happened to be looking at my land when we arrived." I got a few polite chuckles from the news-crews, but not from the gagged baddies. I carried on with the introductions, impressing the news-crews considerably and scaring the hell out of the baddies. They'd TOTALLY underestimated the angel. It was clear by the expressions on their faces - that the cameras were catching - that the angel was on the money. Even better for me than just being accurate was that several of these guys were REALLY BAD baddies. They shouldn't have been allowed to draw breath let alone be paid by the Government to operate against its own citizens. One of the Eastern Bloc guys had blown up a school bus full of young kids in a failed extortion attempt, for example - admittedly the worst example. Our Government's knowingly employing such a monster would cause them a great deal of embarrassment, as it had in many other dimensions. "There are five other people in and around Corvallis that the angel has taken prisoner this morning. Three in the houses where the three ground-level cameras are based, as well as two pilots who provided helicopter surveillance of me whenever I left the city. Their addresses are being given to the police as we speak, as will this address shortly." Having established the angel's credibility, I then detailed the CIA end of it - the name of the controller, the name of the operation: an utterly meaningless and unimpressive "Orange Potato", that it was operated out of the Technical Services Division of the CIA, who the controller reported to: the "Deputy Director of the CIA, Stephen R. Kappes", and that he reported to Vice-President Cheney. Naming Cheney got immediate reactions from the news crews. "Are you SURE?" one reporter couldn't help asking in surprise. "It's what the angel typed for me to read. See for yourself." I handed over the page. "I mean, is the ANGEL sure?" I asked the angel, "Are you sure?" It bobbed up and down. Another reporter said, "That's a VERY serious allegation. What evidence do you have to back it up?" "It's not an allegation; it's a statement of fact. It's from God, ma'am. You don't think God would make a mistake like that or lie about it, do you?" "Ahh no, I guess not. Do you have any real proof though?" It was earlier than I'd planned to say it, but it was a good opportunity so I used it. I let my face harden and look grief-like, saying, "There's no need for any." "Why not?" I turned up the amount of grief I was showing. It was easy for me, as I just had to imagine myself being forced to leave my family tomorrow. I looked at the angel, and it nodded at me. I pulled out the bottom page of the notes I had and held it up for the cameras. It read, in a large font size: When you've explained the operation sufficiently, I will give you permission to show this page. To: The US Government From: God Because you are incapable of moderating your Evil, the Guardian Angel assigned to Mark Anderson will shortly be creating a large thermonuclear explosion over Washington D.C. "{GASP!}" | "OH NO!" | "How long do they have?" from the one professional. "The angel split in two several hours ago and one of it went toward Washington. I don't know how much longer there is, but God wouldn't have let me speak of it now unless it was very close." As you can see, we'd upgraded our plan to give greater emphasis to Vanessa's idea. "If you don't mind, this interview is over now. I'm going home." I handed my pile of very detailed notes over to the nearest stunned reporter, although there were already copies in each of their vans, and I walked out of the house. The angel started cutting the heads off all baddies, doing it slowly enough to ensure that several of them were caught by the cameras. That'd give anyone else thinking about operating against my family second thoughts about their ability to have third thoughts. Outside, I gathered our guards and Dad, picking us and my bike up, and flying us home. Below us, we saw the cop cars heading toward the slaughterhouse. I dropped off the security guys and the bike outside their Quarters, then flew Dad and me to the Adults' living room, where everyone was glued to the TV. My girls rushed to grab me. Julia said, "EVERYONE believes it! They're wetting themselves. The studios in Washington are off the air because everyone's fleeing. It's a total panic, even worse than the previous times." Unfortunately it was also a total panic for MAF's staff and their families, our DC lawyers and several investigative journalists and other people that Vanessa would've liked to have warned. We'd had three options with these people: Let them know there was about to be another Guardian Angel incident that seemed to threaten their city, but they didn't have anything to worry about. Unfortunately that was certain to get out later, destroying the next part of our plan. Give them warning to leave the city early, so they could do so without panic. It'd corroborate our story wonderfully, but unfortunately risked alerting the CIA in advance and upsetting all of my plan. Tell them nothing. Unfortunately this was the only practical choice. Five minutes later, Dad called CNN's head office in Atlanta, Georgia. He introduced himself and asked to be put on air. He got forwarded to someone with more authority, who wanted to know more. Dad told him, "God has called off the attack on Washington and I have an explanation about it that I want you to broadcast. You have our home number in your files. Call us back and then record my statement." Dad hung up and told our switchboard operator to let a call from that CNN guy through, but no one else. Less than a minute later our phone rang. Dad answered and it was CNN again. Having proved well enough that it was Dad, they recorded Dad while he said, "This is Steven Anderson. My son Mark has asked God to undo his resurrection to stop DC being nuked. God has agreed and the Guardian Angel has been recalled. God has given my son a couple of days to say goodbye to us, then God will remove him from us so he'll no longer tempt the assholes in Government to commit even more evil actions. Because of that fucking prick Cheney and the evil assholes in the CIA, Fely and I are losing our son a second time. I hope they all ROT IN HELL!" Dad hung up. Especially at the end, Dad had put a great deal of feeling into it. He truly was losing his son, so 'acting' upset about it was no act at all. We were still patting him on the back for a job well done, and to help calm him down, when the phone rang again. Prof answered it, then said, "No he can't come to the phone again." A few seconds later Prof said, "Yes, there are several things I wish to say." This was unplanned but no doubt Prof had plenty of useful things to say [he told me later that he'd been mentally rehearsing what to say in later interviews], "First, it would be an EXTREMELY bad idea for the Government to intrude on Mark's remaining days. God wants Mark to have time to say goodbye to his family, and if the Government gets in the way of God's plan again, I imagine It could decide to get rid of DC anyway. -- "Second, for the same reason, the people responsible for the latest set of criminal attacks on Mark and his family should be punished swiftly and without mercy. But for Mark's sacrifice, their actions would have caused millions of deaths. They knew they were risking that but they didn't care, so they should be punished with death as that's what they would have caused on an unprecedented scale. They are despicably evil men. You'll see from the evidence that the angel gave Mark that God knew EVERYTHING about their operation. How they could be so insanely immoral that they were willing to risk millions of lives on the chance that they could keep secrets from God Itself truly amazes me. -- "Lastly, our Government has driven Mark away. He has been forced to sacrifice his life to save millions of people because he believes that his presence is a temptation to evil that our leaders cannot resist. I believe Mark is the most extraordinary human being that has ever existed, and that he would've profoundly affected mankind in ways we can't imagine, perhaps solving hugely important and extinction-threatening problems like global warming, or other unimaginable things, as Archangel Michael warned. The cost to humanity of his being driven away is incalculable. -- "I believe God wanted Mark back on Earth because humanity is heading for a crisis that only Mark could solve, and that's why God had to take the extraordinary step of resurrecting him after the DHS and CIA caused his death. But what's happened in the meantime is that our leaders' evil acts have made God give up on us. I think God agreed to take Mark away because God has given up on humanity. God is going to wait for us to destroy ourselves, and then He'll start again on this planet. Archangel Michael said that God was willing to let that happen, and I think our Government just made the extinction of humanity a reality. At this moment, I believe we deserve it, for letting such despicably evil men run our country. Goodbye." Almost immediately after Prof hung up, CNN played Dad's tape, followed by Prof's. We pretty much ignored the world after that. We didn't even watch TV, getting our staff to do it for us. From time to time one of my parents who wasn't busy with me would intercom our staff and ask for a short summary of what was happening out in the world. An even shorter summary of that summary would be told to me at a quiet moment. To summarize further: it worked. I would've been astonished if it hadn't, considering the wealth of highly detailed and highly damaging information that I'd released. The weeks of 24/7 audio tapes contained discussions ranging from the guys listing the things they'd like to do to Carol, Donna, and even Mom - their fantasizing had been a frequent event and it did not reflect well on the Government - through to the logistical planning for specific operations nearly all of which were obviously illegal. Also taped were several joking references to how easy we were to fool, and how dumb the angel was. On the topic of the "highly detailed and highly damaging information that I'd released," every member of my families was VERY curious about where I'd gotten it. The first they knew about it was when I passed out copies to everyone over breakfast. In response to their questions, I simply said, "I'm sorry, I can't tell you." They had some very wide-ranging, inaccurate guesses, including that I'd somehow got it in exchange for agreeing to die. I repeated what I'd told them early on, "My having to go on a voyage of discover is nothing to do with the CIA's stupid operation. It's about what I'll discover on the voyage." In one respect it wasn't a good way of solving the Surveillance Problem. My families had previously thought that I had an extraordinary mind. Being able to read multiple computer screens, create NP-fingertips and blobs, and my various other abilities, those were all things that it was believable that someone with a truly extraordinary mind might be able to do. They even had some reasonable understandings of my limitations, especially as those had often come up during our discussions for how to penetrate the Surveillance Problem. But for me to suddenly have that HUGE wealth of information - EVERY detail had to be included in the report to make the rest of the world believe that God knew everything - was too freaky and inexplicable. They suddenly didn't know what I was, and it discomforted them. There wasn't much I could say to reassure them; only be myself, crack jokes, and try to be as down to Earth as possible. ^ [As told to us by our TV-summarizing staff over the rest of my time in this dimension, the public EXPLODED in outrage. Even the CIA exploded in outrage. Being paranoid about the Guardian Angel wasn't nearly as justifiable as it'd seemed before, despite: The HIGHLY suspicious claim that God turned Ron's DNA into Mark's, which had been doubly suspicious because Ron had disappeared without trace for several weeks before his reappearance in LA and he'd been avoiding his family ever since. The angel's steering of pilotless fighters - such as those I'd crashed into the narrow lake and the Minot AFB Weapons Storage Area - seeming identical to what had happened to the FBI's UAV. A few other suspicious mistakes I'd made (you might have spotted some of them yourself. I'll mention a couple of them in later chapters). The very smart and very suspicious people within the CIA had - quite correctly - not believed the bullshit that I'd fed everyone. They especially didn't believe that God was involved, instead thinking that the very weird shit was something to do with me. Whether it was my own weird shit through something like psychic abilities, or it involved aliens helping me, or I was from the future (to give their three favorite theories) they didn't know, but they VERY much wanted to find out. Every one of those theories had MAJOR implications if true, easily enough to justify conducting an operation. What had happened to the previous operations made it important that the CIA's one be extremely covert, but the CIA was confident of its well-proven capabilities in that area. And even if the local operatives were discovered and revealed, they didn't know who they were working for. The CIA still wanted to find out how I was doing the weird shit, but their having an unsatisfied curiosity was the ABSOLUTE least of their problems now. Very few people within the CIA had known about the just-blown operation, and all the previously ignorant CIA staff now tried to protect themselves from the nation's ire by vilifying the few that had managed the operation. The Director, in fear of his neck both figuratively and literally, fired everybody involved, and did everything else he could to punish them to make himself look innocent. The best snapshot example of Cheney's public image was when his house was firebombed by an angry mob, the firefighters apparently had a major problem working out how to get their trucks out of their firehouse. A malfunction in their garage doors, apparently. When they finally got down their driveway, they turned the wrong way. When they eventually turned up very late at what was left of the Cheney residence, there was something wrong with their pumps. It's hard to imagine any workforce less likely to deliberately sabotage their job than firemen, but they did. Cheney was charged with every crime imaginable, was impeached, resigned his vice presidency, and was vilified even in the White House. Perhaps especially there, because all of its staff and their families would've been killed by the angel's attack. Perhaps even more meaningful than the firemen's refusal to do their job, was Cheney's lawyers' refusal to represent him. Mass murdering pedophiles can get legal counsel, but Cheney's law firm didn't want anything to do with him, such was his opprobrium. He tried to say, "We needed to learn what the so-called Guardian Angel is," but no one was interested in his justifications, as there wasn't one for getting an American city nuked. My showing that God had known EVERYTHING meant that Cheney had been a total idiot. Everyone knows you can't keep secrets from GOD! Some of the information in the typed pages I'd given the media was eerily convincing that God must be involved. For example, the low-level functionary who'd cut off the satellite feed had his name included in the notes. They'd been typed and handed out before the feed had been cut off, which strongly implied a godlike foreknowledge (there were several such examples of prescience, although I've only given you the one so you'll know the type of things they were). Knowing how many of the other dimensions had reacted to similar revelations made it REALLY easy to know how this dimension would. The 'guilty' CIA employees weren't treated quite as badly as Cheney, but only because they couldn't be impeached, otherwise they suffered very much the same fate. There was a huge amount of public anger. None of the recently ex-CIA employees or Cheney dared appear in public - they'd likely have been killed by a mob if they'd tried - so that anger expressed itself in many other ways. The firebombing of Cheney's house was only one example; there were many, many others all over the country. Huge protests against the Government's illegal excesses broke out in every city. Every aspect of the CIA operation had been DIRTY: the scum they'd employed, the invasive operations they'd conducted, and especially the cost that had been only moments away from being imposed on millions of people. The Government tried to contact us for whatever reason, but we weren't interested. They even sent a delegation on Tuesday. They never got past our gate, a non-event that was filmed by the hundreds of news-crews outside our property. The Government's delegation was smart enough not to try to force their way onto our property. Those members of the public who weren't busy attacking the Government were saying wonderful things about me, begging me not to go, and other pointless things like that. The Democrats even got into the act, insisting they'd treat us properly when they were in power. They'd won a majority in both houses in the mid-term election a year ago and nothing had changed. Having read what I had as Majestic Countdown, the Democrats' promises underwhelmed me. Both parties are equally venal because both parties are equally human, and the political system allows people considerably opportunity to abuse it. All of which we ignored. The plan had worked, which was all we needed to know.] ^ Because of the overhead choppers, we spent the day inside. ------- Chapter 400: Return to Sender Tuesday, November 13, 2007 I had a déjà vu at 2:10am on Tuesday morning, too early for me to use, much to the relief of that Mark. So it was probably going to be early evening, plus or minus several hours. Over an early breakfast, I told my families, "I think it's going to happen this evening..." "Oh n..." started Julia, who was stopped by a look from her mother. "Sorry Mark." "Don't worry about it, love. I feel the same way, only with more swear words. -- "I guess it'll be some time around 7pm, but it's very imprecise. It could be within four hours either side, or even wider. It'll take about one and a half minutes from when I know about it to when I have to go. I won't be able to give you any more warning than that, so I'll carry one of the security walkie-talkies with me so when it starts I can get them to sound the siren right away. Come running and I'll fetch you with NP as soon as you're in range." Prof didn't even look tempted to ask questions about the process of my transcending matter and energy. He'd probably be curious when he thought about it later, but he had dismissed his scientific curiosity for the last few days as there were more important things to think about and value. -- "If you agree, I'd like to do it outside so the news-choppers can get it on film. I'll throw in some special lighting effects, but it's mainly so they see my body die. I want there to be no doubt about that, so the damned Government doesn't keep intruding into your lives." We'd already discussed having a doctor on hand to confirm my death and issue my death certificate. I'm donating my body to medical science too, so there'll be no doubt that I'm very dead. Maybe some good would come out of it; certainly an enormous number of bizarre medical puzzles will. Those puzzles will confirm my special nature, especially as one of the terms of my Will is that the research on my body is to be done publicly and the results made available to everyone who wants them, which will put even more pressure on the Government to reform its illegal attitudes because it'll provide a great deal of evidence that maybe my body could have provided the secrets of immortality and perpetual health. I had to give a media interview because the cover story required it. I wandered down to the gate after breakfast to get it done and out of the way. My families stuck close, as they would all day. The throng erupted into a storm of questions yelled through the gates. So much that I couldn't hear anything distinct. I said to the guard next to me, "Can I borrow your gun please?" He handed it over without question, which was probably naughty of him. I flicked the safety off, pointed it up and to the left, in a direction I knew there were farmers' fields rather than city housing, then pulled the trigger, {BANG}. The cops could charge me for it tomorrow. Silence had started falling as soon as the guard had given me his gun, but it fell totally now. The guard said, "You missed. Try again." I chuckled as I gave him his gun back, before I yielded to the temptation. To the reporters I said, "I have ZERO patience for your childish screaming today. Thanks in large part to your profession devoting most of its energies to reporting worthless nonsense rather than providing a useful public service by upholding democracy, I have to die today to..." "Why do you have to die?" yelled a particularly stupid, impatient reporter. I looked up, saying, "Shut her up please, angel." The angel appeared, zoomed toward the reporter, picked her up, and with her screaming in terror, carried her away across the fields. "What's it going to do with her?" I looked up to say, "Him too please, angel." Another angel appeared, and repeated the process with the male reporter. He repeated his part of the process by screaming. My cover story required me to be unhappy about dying. It was an easy act and I didn't mind at all that reporters were the unwitting and unwitted victims of my unhappiness. In the silence after his departure, I said, "As I was saying, I have to die today to keep my bargain with God, otherwise He would've destroyed DC. I HATE that I have to die and hurt all the people that love me because your profession totally failed in its duty to be our first line of defense against Government corruption and abuse. Because of the social importance of your profession, you are granted extraordinary privileges and protections that no other profession enjoys. You've got laws that protect you from court orders to divulge your sources, through to getting better access to public events, officials, crime scenes, etc., and you're able to get away with being far nosier than other people because "The public has a right to know." Those additional rights are given to you so your profession can carry out your socially important role, but how do you respond? Not by recognizing that by accepting your privileges you're also accepting any obligation. No, you'd rather climb the walls of starlets' homes so you can photograph them sunbathing topless because you can make more money publishing pictures of tits. -- "Your incessant and fevered concentration on issues at the level of which trashy LA slut isn't wearing panties has meant our Government has been freely permitted to behave criminally for so long that they no longer have any respect for the law or concern for the consequences of breaking it. They're so used to getting away with everything that in their arrogance they even believe they can keep secrets from God! Their arrogance is so extreme that they were willing to gamble with the lives of millions of innocent Washingtonians, just like the CIA was risking tens of millions of our lives when it was developing biological weapons in Fort Dodge and the other smaller facilities that Majestic Countdown exposed. Your profession's failures have led directly to my death, so I have ZERO tolerance for your crap today. I have only a few hours of life left, and I'm not going to waste it putting up with yelled interruptions from gutter-crawling trash like you." -- I visibly collected myself, then more calmly proceeded, "God tells me that my death will be some time in the next several hours. I got the impression it'll be this evening but I'm not sure about that. I don't know why He's being so imprecise, but I'm sure He's got His reasons. I would much rather die in privacy, in the arms of my family, but in a hopeful attempt to convince the Government not to dangerously intrude into my families' lives yet again, I will try to die outside so you can film it happening. -- "When I go, the..." I was interrupted by a reporter who just couldn't help herself. She got barely the first half of her first word out, when the angel appeared in front of her. Too late she remembered why all her competitors were silent. She managed to get out both the first and last halves of a very loud scream as she was grabbed and flown away. That gave her peers the opportunity to look in that direction, where they saw what was happening to the previous two reporters. They were several hundred feet away, being towed in speedy circles around a field, held by one foot and facedown to make it much worse for them. They were battered, bruised, bloodied, and especially in the first woman's case, bawling. I restarted, "When I go, the Guardian Angel will leave with me, leaving my extended family defenseless. I'm VERY worried about that because the Government was already stealing biological samples from my sisters and parents, and you know the FBI rigged poisonous gas canisters to kill every one of us not long ago, and used the stealth plane to try to kill my parents. The insanity of our Government's evil knows no bounds so my family and I fear those assholes very much. This morning I talked to God via His Guardian Angel, and He assured me that He'll keep an eye on everyone in my extended family. -- "I don't know what 'keeping an eye on' means, but as the CIA discovered, no one can keep secrets from God, so I find that very reassuring. Anyone would have to be insane to act against my family now. The trouble is that our Government IS insane. Insane with power, arrogance, corruption, greed, and a total lack of human decency. Their repeated attacks on my family have all been insane and I have no doubt that if they're left to carry on the way they have, then they'll commit yet another insanity soon. Each of their previous attacks has usually been only a few weeks after they swore they'd never do it again. -- "One thing I'm sure of is that God believes in escalating punishments. Archangel Michael and the Guardian Angel have both proved that several times. I won't be here to sacrifice myself to avert the punishment if there's a next time and I expect whatever that punishment is to be a great deal worse than the nuking of a single small city. I grew up thinking that America was a nation favored by God, but it's obvious to me now that the stink of America's evil offends God. I doubt very much that He has any reluctance toward wiping America out. After the repeated actions of your elected representatives, I imagine He's looking forward to wiping all of you out. -- "I am beseeching the people of America to take action. You cannot leave your Government the way it is. It is evil, insane, and is determinedly on a path that will lead to the destruction of God knows how many tens or hundreds of millions of you, if not the entire nation. You cannot trust your media to keep your Government honest because the media is far more interested in sticking its noses and lenses up the skirts of worthless LA sluts. The PEOPLE have to do something to take control of Government. You've let your Government commit evil in your name far too long, and if you don't quickly step in to stop it doing just one more evil against my families, then you'll deserve to have God destroy you all." I turned and walked away, my families joining me. I always like to finish my speeches on an upbeat note, and in this case it'd been "If anyone touches my families, God will beat up America." #5: People walking away from them creates an automatic reaction in reporters. It causes their mouths to open and yell the first thing that comes to their minds. With reporters' minds the way they are, their first thoughts are never worth yelling, but they still do it anyway. For some reason their yells were slow to get started this time. After we'd gotten a few yards, one reporter murmured something quietly. The lack of immediate retribution encouraged others, and within a few seconds they were in full voice again, yelling crap through the gates at me. We kept walking and I canceled the Guardian Angel's punishment of the three reporters after we were a hundred feet from the gate. The only thing I did of note for the rest of the day was to give angelic flights to all our staff that wanted them. I sat on the top of our hilltop in front of the Adults' House surrounded by my families and talking to them, while a few of my minds managed the flying. It didn't detract from my families being able to interact with me at all, and many of our staff had experienced crap far beyond the normal call of duty. We had several new staff who hadn't experienced so much crap, but they got flights anyway. Some of the newbies were to replace the guys that'd left with their very nice payout from the FBI, plus Paul had recruited nine females guards and several more men to give him plenty of time to get to know them for when my girls and I relocated to go to a university. The new guards were mostly living in the Second Staff Quarters, which had been completed a couple of months ago. The whole "Go To A University With My Wives" plan now shot down in flames. After an hour of giving the staff some fun, the staff lined up and I went down the line shaking their hands and speaking to each of them, the early hand-shakers relieving the gate guards to they could participate. Then they left us alone. There were some rain showers during the day, but we were sitting comfortably in an NP-tent to keep the rain, wind and sound of helicopters out, with the Guardian Angel floating above us to explain the effect. I didn't use heat blobs to warm us because that might increase my families' risk after I left, but we were too upset to pay the temperature much notice. All sorts of random things popped into our heads. I remembered to tell Dad where I'd stashed my hidden weapons and cash, for example. We went inside for meals, comfort stops or to put some warmer clothes on, but otherwise we sat outside talking and waiting. It got dark at 5pm, which changed nothing other than we had to turn on the outside lights so the cameras and crowd - by now there was a VERY large and mostly idiotic crowd outside our walls - would be able to clearly see it happen. There were also delegations of all sorts of people - city councilors, religious leaders, federal politicians - all of whom wanted to talk to us; none of whom got past the gate as our guards had very clear orders. There was also a sizable police presence backing up our guards to ensure order was kept. Helicopters that got too close got chased off by the Guardian Angel. No pilot was insane enough to risk tangling with that. A few idiots climbed our walls but our security was on high alert and wasn't in the mood to be gentle, so the idiots were quickly dealt with. Just as well for them because if any of them had intruded on my families and me, I probably would've used a very high trajectory to throw them off our property. The déjà vu started just before 7pm. I looked at my watch so I wouldn't lose track of how much time I had left. One Of Us: It was extremely unlikely that he'd heard that in only twelve days, but my question made for an easy introduction regardless of his answer. One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: <'Fraid so. Sorry.> One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: We spent several seconds doing everything we could think of, as HARD as we could, to send eight of my minds across to him, or for him to suck those minds into him. I was continually able to talk to my minds without any of the cross-dimensional problems that déjà vu communication has, so they were obviously still in my head. I'd had several days to think of things to try, and had a surprisingly long list of desperate ideas. I can perform mental tasks extremely quickly and many of them simultaneously, so it didn't take long to exhaust my list. About twenty seconds after the déjà vu started, I gave up. I told my families, "It's started." "OH NO!" cried Julia. "Be strong, Julia," asked Vanessa. But Julia didn't want to be strong; she wanted me not to go. I'd told my families several hours ago how it was going to appear to happen. The first action was the Guardian Angel appearing and flying in excited circles over us, the only reason for that was to alert the media to get their cameras rolling. I created three tennis ball-sized light blobs: red, green and blue but with zero emissions initially. I moved them into the center of my skull where I turned up their output until my head started glowing. Not much, but enough to be slightly visible. I kept it constant for a while so my families wouldn't be too distracted. I had previously explained that, "I won't be leaving my body until after I've finished the special effects, so there'll be a few seconds for you to say your last words after the light rises out of me. I'll slump and be unable to answer because it wouldn't look good on camera if I was active after what appeared to be my soul leaving me, but I'll hear what you're saying. I'll be holding each of you with NP, and when those stop is when I'll be gone." Everyone had obviously spent time thinking about their final words. I'd several times told them it'd take one and a half minutes and that I wouldn't be able to extend it, so they knew we didn't have much time. Immediately after Vanessa's ignored instruction to Julia, Prof grabbed my hand, shaking it firmly then hugging me as he said, "I'm extraordinarily honored and proud to have known you, son. You'll always be in our thoughts and we'll always love you." "Thank you, Prof. Your intellectual guidance, support and love have been invaluable." There was SO MUCH MORE I wanted to say, but I only had ten seconds to interact with each person. -- I turned to Vanessa, "And your moral guidance and love too, Vanessa. I dropped some horrible choices in your lap at times..." "And now you're strong enough to face them alone. Achieve Great and Good accomplishments, son. You'll be in our prayers." Dad gave me a forceful hug, saying, "No father has ever been so proud and impressed as I am, Mark. We love you, and hope you have a fantastic life." Mom joined in the hug, adding, "Thank you for all the love and happiness you bought to our lives, Mark. You've enriched us all with your miracle." "You've been WONDERFUL parents. You taught me the path to love and happiness by example. I love and value you VERY much." And then I had to let them go. -- "Ava, thank you for becoming such a loving, essential part of my family." "Thank YOU! I love you, Mark. I pray you're very happy where you go." "Memories of you will help greatly, Ava darling." Carol was next around the circle. I faced her, saying, "My Carol. I was SO looking forward to our life together. I love you with all my heart, My Wife." Even in this moment I had to be aware of the fucking press. The NP-tent was double-layered to make sure no sound got out, and I was looking down with my head turned away from the gates so no cameras could record my lip movements. "I'll love you forever, My Husband. Oh Mark!" Carol rushed into my arms, bawling into my chest and hanging on as hard as she could; the phrase "hanging on for grim death" being tragically all too appropriate. I turned us toward Julia, "Julia, My Wife. You've provided everything I've needed to travel my road, and supported me with your entire being. The strength I have now is thanks to you more than anyone else. Thank you very much for everything you've done me, My Love." "Thank you for being in my life, My Husband and My Lord. I LOVE YOU, MARK!" Julia rushed into to hug me beside Carol, both of them weeping now. Donna was crying already, but holding herself in check for her turn. I pulled Julia and Carol to either side, to give Donna room in the middle. Donna grabbed for me, saying, "I love you VERY much, Mark. I'm going to miss you terribly." "Me too, darling. You're becoming a fantastic young woman, and I would've loved to be with you for that and more." I used a sight blob to check my watch again. We had fifteen seconds left before my 'deadline'. I said, "Nearly time. Thank you all very, very much. I LOVE you so much that I'm bursting from it." Julia, Carol and Donna weren't capable of giving up their spots, so the others gathered around, doing their best to hug me while they gave me their last-second expressions of love and best wishes. I hugged them with my arms and NP, stroking their cheeks and telling them again and again how much I loved them. I turned up the brightness of the white light in my head, so my head was now giving out as much light as a 60-watt lightbulb. It immediately resulted in the sobs doubling in volume and the hugs in fierceness. I cried my last words, "I'M SO SORRY. I LOVE YOU ALL. GOODBYE." While they were frantically repeating their last words to me, my 'headlight' got even brighter, then slowly accelerated upward. When it cleared my skull, I let my body slump; head, arms and legs going weak. I still had NP holding everybody to me and stroking their cheeks, so their press was holding me up. The white light accelerated upward, accompanied by the Guardian Angel flying spirals around it. I'd warned my families that when I gave them an extra tight NP-squeeze they were to look down, have their eyes closed and covered by something solid like my chest or their forearm, because the flash was going to be INCREDIBLY bright. I gave them that squeeze now. Julia and Donna didn't realize what it was, so I squeezed their arms again and pushed down on their eyelids. They remembered and closed their eyes, pressing their faces into me. My 'soul' took about four seconds to reach four hundred feet above me, where I canceled the Guardian Angel, then moments later FLASHED the white light blob AS BRIGHT AS POSSIBLE, putting everything into it - except only for the NP-points I was using to touch my families, as I wasn't going to give up even a fraction of a second of those just for a visual effect. I was mighty glad I'd shut my eyes because the flash was BRIGHT! Being in a déjà vu my abilities were increased. I now had sixty four minds worth of output, so I'd produced a fifteen-million-watt flash. The world would be left in no doubt that God had made a MAJOR statement. I canceled the NP-points I had holding my families, heard their last cries of love, then killed myself. ------- Chapter 401: My Sixth Merge, to 64 Minds Tuesday, November 13 (Continued) to Friday, November 16, 2007 I was in the kitchen of the Kids' House, having gone there to make drinks for my girls who were doing their studies in the upstairs study. #3: #45: #23: #45: #30: [Except it proved to be slightly inaccurate fairly soon. Not in the way I MOST wanted though; not with my finding a way to open the door(s) behind me. Back there I had no minds so there was nothing to déjà vu with. Fairly soon I didn't have a body back there either, as it was in unusable pieces with teams of medical scientists more bewildered by what they were seeing than they'd ever been before in their professional lives. Nor could I reconnect with a dimension I'd left by déjà vu'ing with someone else similar to me in it. We knew similarity was required because we most often déjà vu'd with Marks having similar lives, and it was obvious that other people simply aren't similar enough. A different-person déjà vu had NEVER happened across all of the Marks, and we're talking of at least hundreds of billions of possible occasions, and probably many trillions of them. It's even less likely now as our minds are getting weirder. And even if we did déjà vu with someone else, the chance of them being in the dimension we wanted to contact would be infinitesimal. That door was shut and LOCKED. The metaphor's inaccuracy that I alluded to was minor and will be revealed in due course.] #44: #12: #40: #12: Over the next few minutes 6B learned about 6A's life. It took so long because our usual ability to access each other's memories didn't work across the A-to-B divide yet. That would take a while to develop, during which we could do a great deal of internal chatting. 6A's life was very much the same as 6B's, except: The "Seduce All The 11th and 12th Grade SCS Beauties Plan" was moving ahead faster than where I'd come from. Unlike as in 6B-land, 6A had resumed it shortly after returning from Noumea, although he'd kept it fairly low key because of the Surveillance Problem. It was a month and half into the school year, and four art teams - two per grade as they were popular - thought our family was wonderful, and that I was incredibly wonderful. A couple of days ago 6A had taken the first steps to put the SCS Plan into high-speed mode, but our killing ourselves in two weeks derailed it. Nevaeh wasn't living with us, but she openly visited very often. Julia was softening Nevaeh's parents up, and it shouldn't take long before Nevaeh is allowed to sleepover. That'll be a big step because her parents know Julia to be an active bisexual, although Nevaeh had naturally had to deny that there was any taint of that in her relationship with Julia. Nevaeh was working out even better here than in 6B-land because I was making more time for her and my SCS scheme, which she was actively and unjealously - because "sharing is good" - helping with. Donna was maturing into good company just as well here as 6B-land. She'd misbehaved with Chuck in this dimension too. For some reason 6B had felt that it might be a dimensional difference that'd only happened our old dimension, or perhaps in just a few others, but it was identical here which implied that Donna had been a universally naughty girl. A large dimensional difference was that Robert had married Ashley rather than breaking up with her. They were living in Massachusetts, where Robert was working. A major difference was that Dad was considerably more outspoken in our family life in this dimension than in any of 6B's previous dimensions. 6A was surprised to learn that Dad had ever been anything other than confident and outgoing in the family environment. They were quite puzzled by that because it seemed so unlike Dad's character to be quiet. I learned to envy Mick Jagger even more, as in this dimension's Lord of the Rings movies, Arwen was played by Marna Jagger, the gorgeous daughter of Mick Jagger and a Swedish model he'd met (briefly) during one of his European tours about thirty years ago. This was the fourth Arwen actress we knew about, and the third who was a daughter of Mick Jagger. The Universe has some weirdly similar differences, and some damned lucky rock stars. We discovered several minor differences, as there always are quite a few inconsequential changes. There was a different picture hanging in the living room, and 6A had different dinnerware than 6B, which no doubt Julia would consider a MAJOR difference. [We later discovered that the plaque Corvallis had mounted with the money the President had sent them was worded differently, one of the camera-weenie surveillers had been a different guy, and my car had done a thousand more miles. None of these or several other similarly innocuous things mattered in the slightest, especially with our leaving so soon. These were typical dimensional differences that we spotted every time we changed dimensions.] From our very many earlier déjà vu's, we knew what our special abilities should be like. We could already see that proximity had improved exactly as we'd expected, so we went through the other abilities, checking them all. Assuming the next déjà vu was with a 32-minded Mark, which is what we thought was the most likely, then unless something had broken the simple mathematical progression it'd most likely happen between 6.5 and 10.5 hours from now, so it'd be nice to have something to tell that Mark. Proximity was 48 feet and with the extra detail we'd expected, including sensing the consumption of large amounts of electricity. Not small amounts though; I couldn't detect my cellphone's consumption of power, for example. We actually counted off to make sure there were sixty four of us, in case the failed attempts to send eight minds separately had messed something up. All sixty four of us were present and accounted for, which was a relief. We'd felt our previous body die so there was no possibility of any minds being left behind with it. We had one mind create as many fingertips as it could, which was the expected 64. Our unconscious NP force should be 410 kg per mind. With the conscious tapping and projection training we've been doing for the last 31 months, that's now increased by 1.55 times, giving 410 x 2.55 = 1,050 kg per mind. We sent a sight blob into our garage and picked up a car with one mind, accelerating it in a way consistent with our NP force being the predicted 1,050 kg. That confirmed that our maximum force would be nearly 67,000 kg, nearly 74 tons. Vanessa's BBJ2 weighed between 41,000 kg (empty) and 80,000 kg (maximum takeoff weight). If I was onboard it wouldn't need to carry any fuel. The pilots might be a tad nervous, and the Government might get suspicious, but it was doable, which would be good if an aviation emergency occurred in the next two weeks. The plane could dump its fuel and the angel could push it to safety. [[It actually takes far less force than the weight of a plane for it to fly because the moving wings generate lift. Very few planes have thrust-to-weight ratios over 1.0.]] The NP-fingertip minimum size in any dimension (in the classical sense) was 1/32nd of an inch. The maximum size was 32 inches, making "fingertip" a somewhat misleading name. The amount of force I have now means I should be easily able to exceed Mach one when I fly, providing the turbulence problem isn't too bad, which it shouldn't be any longer. Having frictionless surfaces and leading edges of 1/32 of an inch on my flying sled should help noticeably with turbulence, so a Mach one test flight is definitely on the agenda, since my job as the "Voyager" is to find out new things and report them to the rest of the Marks. Not that I'd ever tested it, but many months ago I'd calculated that my maximum possible speed in my smallest possible flying sled had been almost exactly Mach two. Since then I'd trained myself to project 55% more force, and now I'd just gained a factor of eight, so I had about 12.4 times more force, which meant my maximum speed increase of the square root of that, being Mach 7. That was 5,300 mph (8,500 kph), plus there should be a speed boost from making the sled's exterior frictionless. The circumference of the Earth is 40,000 km, so if I could fly at Mach 7, then I could fly anywhere in the world in 2.4 hours. Corvallis to Washington DC in 35 minutes provided I didn't care about creating sonic booms. [And a large heat signature, as I discovered when I did some serious reading about super- and hyper-sonic flight.] We sent a sight blob toward the Adults' House, sending it continuously farther away. It self-canceled at a point that was better than we'd ever achieved before, but not much greater. We estimated our new maximum ki-effects range was 542 feet. #14: #54: A similar experiment with NP confirmed that the factor of four improvements in the Blinks Allowed Effect continued, giving us 128 seconds now. At this rate, especially if the amount of sleep we need keeps reducing, after a few more merges we might be able to have a good night's sleep and wake up to find that any NP effects we left going 'last night' are still active. I couldn't practically test to see whether my light blobs were giving out four times as much light as before because the guards would've freaked. Testing the maximum output of my heat blobs was even less practical. I'd anticipated the problem though. Blobs smaller than a certain size have their maximum output reduced, so I created a very small light blob and had it radiate as brightly as possible. It looked to be four times brighter than that size blob had achieved pre-merge. A small heat blob was noticeably hotter too. That was a good enough confirmation, especially as my blobs now had more output than I was ever likely to use. The maximum number of sight sources we could operate was still two. We had been sure it would be, but we still thought, #All: The basic tests over with, and being fairly happy that we hadn't gone insane or our brain exploded under the load, we finished making the drinks and took them to the girls. #63: "We thought you'd forgotten," joked Julia, knowing what my memory is like. "Sorry, I got distracted by something." "Are you all right Mark? You look strange." 6A had been looking at 'his' girls with new eyes. In two weeks he was almost certainly going to be losing them, and that dramatically changes the way you look at your loved ones. 6B had been looking at them unusually too, as he'd just abandoned his girls to a lifetime without him. These weren't his girls, but they almost were, but only for a couple more weeks. So, regardless of whether 6A or 6B were influencing our face the most, it certainly had a strange look on it. "Love does that to me. I love the three of you very much, and I'm amazed at how lucky I am to have each you in my life." Expressing love isn't uncommon in our families, and there'd been quite a lot of it as the pressure of the Surveillance Problem came off, so the girls weren't suspicious. They got up, gave me some nice hugs and returned the sentiment, then returned to their work. #22: #50: #24: #50: #13: #50: #23: So I went to the outside spa pool where I'd be able to cry without anyone hearing me or wondering at my face being wet. Even 6A wasn't going to have any trouble finding something to cry over. The flying could wait until another night. We wallowed in the spa pool and in our emotions. We got the worst of it out of our systems - two different mental systems and one physical - before the girls came looking for me. I had forty eight feet of warning, so I was able duck my head under the water to wet all of it. While my face was underwater I scrubbed it with my hands for a few seconds. I wasn't sure why, it just seemed like the thing to do to get rid of the signs of crying. Then I sat up, wiped most of the water off my face, called out to the girls, put on a happy face, and smiled at them as they arrived. "Have you been crying?" #60: "Just a little, Carol. The thing that distracted me when I was getting your drinks is sad. I'd like to spend a few days checking into it before I mention it because it may turn out to be nothing at all." Julia looked at me suspiciously, "It's something big, isn't it?" "Let me check it out first. It's not an active danger we need to take action about, or anything like that. I can take as much time as I need to make sure." "You'll tell us as soon as you know?" "When have I ever been able to keep secrets from you? I'll tell you when I know. It's not a threat like the Government doing anything bad. It's more like a research project. Has my cunning plan to look sad so three wonderful girls will strip naked and try hard to cheer me up worked?" They stripped and joined me anyway, regardless of my plan's lack of cunning. #23: #12: I put on an even happier face and tried to pretend everything was fine. My crying had the girls worried. I almost never cry. I swore a lot during the Surveillance Problem for example, but had never cried over it, so my doing so was not a good sign. I could read their emotions far better than I could before, and their putting on happy faces fooled me even less than my happy face fooled them. An hour later the mental separation between 6A and 6B started being pierced. Within a couple of minutes of that starting, we were fully integrated, which was conveniently quick. We could access each other's memories as much as we wanted, and we did so, being interested in the other dimension's lives. We discovered several more dimensional differences: Some inconsequential, e.g., 6A's and 6B's Alexises had different tattoos on their right hips. Some relatively large, e.g., some of 6A, back when they'd been 3C, had spent a fair bit of time working on a Chinese girl over the 2005 summer vacation that Lily had been back in Hong Kong, hoping the new girl would be as compliant and useful as Lily. It turned out that she'd been initially easy, but once she'd thought her hooks were deep enough into me, she'd become a gold-digger. Her requests for me to repeatedly buy her stuff in return for sex - and she preferred the stuff first otherwise the sex was desultory - had quickly killed that-subset-of-me's interest in her. None of the differences mattered though. Even the ones that might've mattered in the long run didn't matter because there wasn't going to be a long run. We went to bed earlier than normal because the girls thought I needed cheering up. They weren't wrong. I slept for an hour, woke up, then got up without disturbing the girls. They're used to me flying myself out of bed and have stopped being disturbed by it. I went down to the living room to watch some DVDs while waiting for the DV. With déjà vu's presumably occurring with an 8.5-hour average - or 4.25 hours if there are other 64-minded Marks readily available - waiting for them was an easy option. We'd merged just before 7pm, so 3:30am was the likely average arrival time, and if one comes late, it'll almost certainly still be before breakfast. [[The starting of a déjà vu is a cooperative process, at the level of the Universe cooperating with itself rather than needing our conscious cooperation - we'd NEVER been able to initiate a déjà vu on demand, and we'd tried that experiment many times. The Universe doesn't pick a 'spot' (an area of Universal Consciousness) in one dimension, then 'grab' a partner for it. If that was the case merging would only double the frequency of déjà vu's rather than the fourfold increase that occurred to me. It's more akin to areas of Universal Consciousness seeking a partner across the other dimensions, which is why we déjà vu four times more often after a merge than before, when linking with equally minded peers. When the déjà vu is with a partner with one less merge, it takes twice as long to déjà vu as with a peer, which implies the Universe 'waits' when it knows such a link will be established. Once I gained the knowledge given in this paragraph so far, I was quite curious about the 'wait' because if the Universe was seeking connections, many of those 'waiting' situations should be preempted by a peer being found in the meanwhile. I thought it meant some very strange and interesting implications about the nature of time. As it turned out, it didn't. The explanation was that the dimensions are linked far more and for longer than I thought, it's just that I was conscious of those links for only a very small proportion of the time. The link is made and retained long before the small portion of it that I'm conscious of.]] I partly watched the DVD and partly mourned, the latter especially true for 6B, although "mourned" isn't the right word as we sort of hadn't lost anyone. I was mostly sympathizing with their loss of me. An obvious comparison was with the Casino Kidnappers. Half of us had died in their basement, and that Prof would've died shortly thereafter. Those families would've grieved a great deal more than 6B's families were now, plus there were numerically more of those 3B families too. 6B's four parents would be okay. They were proud of me for the journey I was going on, and they'd seen grief before and were strong enough to get through it. It'd be the girls that would be the most upset: Julia would be the most messed up initially, but I expected her to be much less affected in the long run as her drive and intensity would get her involved in other projects. Carol would be strong initially so she could support the others, but she'd be the most affected in the long run. Julia loved me in large part for what I was and what I could do, while Carol loved me for who I was. Carol's and my love was stronger and purer, and it'd stay with her for a lot longer. Not that I'd ever know, but I could imagine her never having another boyfriend despite the huge number of would-be boyfriends who'd wish otherwise. Being housewife to Julia and mother of my kids would most likely be the rest of Carol's life. Ava would perhaps join Carol in motherhood, until Ava was swept away by the right man. That was more likely than not, I thought, because I couldn't imagine Ava giving up men. Unlike Carol, Ava has a strong sex-drive. Donna's emotions would be pretty messed up for a while, as she'd been partially romantically in love with me, but she was like Ava in many respects, and neither of their hurts would last too long, I thought. My being able to say goodbye to my families had been extremely hard at the time, but leaving that way, with their having a reason to be proud of me, would make a huge difference to their grieving processes and recoveries. When 3:30am arrived without a déjà vu having happened, I started feeling some very cautious hope that one wouldn't. I didn't really believe it though, as 32-minded Marks sometimes linked with 16-minded versions, so 64-minded Marks (me) should be able to link with 32-minded Marks. The next déjà vu arrived at 3:45am. One Of Them: One Of Us: <64. One of the 32-minded Marks in here rolled twelve 6s.> One Of Them: Another One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: Our abilities tested out exactly as 96 minds should have according to the well-established mathematical progressions. (Abilities that normally double after a merge, such as proximity range, were now only 1.5 times better. Abilities that normally quadruple, such as the Blinks Allowed Effect, were now 1.5 squared, i.e., 2.25, times better. And total NP force, which normally increases by a factor of eight, was now 1.5 cubed, i.e., 3.375, times greater.) One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: We chatted until the déjà vu cut out after nearly four minutes, that being slightly longer than any previous déjà vu had ever lasted and pretty much what we'd predicted. We'd told that Mark that we'd do things like try to influence emotions, invisibility, etc., but we weren't in the mood for it. Life was too depressing. We returned our attention to our DVD, to kill time until breakfast. ------- The rest of November 14 was a busy day. Ending the Surveillance Problem had increased the demands on my time in a couple of major ways: There were several sorts of media, Government, and other groups that wanted to intrude on me. I TRULY did want to encourage the reorganization of the Government's law enforcement and spying organizations to make it harder for them to operate against us and other innocent people, so I had to take the time to encourage it by making myself available to people who could help with that. There were some things that I'd delayed for the last couple of months, such as seducing all of SCS's beauties, restarting Aikido, enrolling for undergraduate degrees in Anthropology, Computers, and Chinese. I'd started or restarted those things in the last few days, and they needed some of my time now. After a night in which I'd tried to think as little as possible, I had a busy day, interrupted by two déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks. They went very much the way of the first déjà vu, except they were even more depressing for me. It was pretty obvious that I was going to have to leave my families again. Compared to my crying in the spa pool last evening, I did a better job of hiding my feelings, although it wasn't a perfect hiding job. In the evening Julia asked me, "How's the problem that upset you last night?" Carol's and Ava's attentions were instantly on me. "It's unchanged. I'm still researching it and I'll let you know when I've reached a conclusion." #46: I didn't do a supersonic test Wednesday night, instead doing other ability tests: invisibility, controlling people's emotions, sound blobs, more sight blobs, etc. No progress was made. I spent some time trying to learn fundamental truths about our ki abilities, as my die-appointed job required. Early on we'd made major mistakes in thinking that our proximity sense extended from our center (not that it mattered much now for the five-merged Marks), and in thinking intervening matter restricted our abilities. We could be making other mistakes like that and it might be important for millions or billions of Marks if I discovered them. So I reviewed my abilities and tried to identify their assumptions to test them. I didn't discover anything like that tonight. I did manage to quantify my electricity sensing ability though, for whatever that's worth. Any appliances consuming more than 160 watts - such as microwave ovens - showed up in my senses, as well the supply of electricity flowing to them. I didn't know whether that was the case with DC, but I wasn't interested enough to bother finding something that consumed that much DC power. [I quickly encountered some though, as car starter motors use something that 'looks' like a thousand watts.] I was putting off the supersonic test because it'd be easier to do it if I didn't have to keep it totally secret. I had a fear that my need for secrecy would soon not matter at all. When I slept that night, it was only for half an hour, half as long as the previous night. [Subsequent nights all had me sleep for half an hour, something I added to my inter-dimensional reports. On the topic of bodily needs, our need for food was unchanged, probably only 5% of what normal people need as my body shape was stable (it'd been about 10% when I was changing from Ron's body into Mark's).] By lunchtime on Thursday the 15th, I'd been merged for forty three hours, and had déjà vu'd five times. As best we could judge from the "doorway", there was nothing scary about "the next room", only horribly sad about leaving this one. On Friday morning I intercepted Mom and Vanessa at their very early breakfast before they left for a full day's work in DC. I asked them, "I'd like to have a family conference about something tomorrow morning. Will you be at home then?" "Yes," they both confirmed, Mom asking, "What about?" "I'll tell you then." "Julia and Carol say you've been sad recently?" "No fishing allowed, Mom. I'll tell everyone at breakfast tomorrow." I had the same conversation with the rest of the families at their breakfast. Julia fished even harder than Mom but I wasn't going to hint about this topic. I did the supersonic flight test Friday night, as my families wouldn't want to be out of my presence after breakfast tomorrow morning. I was VERY cautious about the death-defying aspect of it, including spending some time borrowing a row of computers near the coast to do lots of reading about the process of super- and hyper-sonic flight. I wasn't much worried about being detected though: To minimize the chance of it, I was more than a hundred miles out to sea. That seems unsafe, but I didn't think it mattered where I was if something went badly wrong. If the Government was brave enough to raise the issue of their seeing me fly, I'd say "The angel did it for me." I would do all my flying with my right fist steering me like the lifeguards had, to look like the angel was doing me a favor, and I was intending to do it during daylight in public soon. But more than anything else, I'd be leaving soon. Whatever trouble my flight caused would be cut off. I doubt it'd cause any though, because the fallout from the Surveillance Problem was huge. God had known EVERYTHING about the surveillers, gaining God and me a GREAT deal of credibility because it was impossible for anyone to imagine how that huge extent of detailed information - a couple of items of it requiring foreknowledge - could have been gathered other than by God. The local baddies had all had their heads cut off, the Government was running for cover and didn't dare say a bad word against us, let alone start another operation. If it was so stupid as to order something to start, the staff involved would almost certainly blow the whistle and flatly refuse to carry out their orders. In terms of the process of flying above Mach one, I had several very useful advantages over planes: Overheating wouldn't worry my craft. Supersonic flight can melt the leading edges of planes' wings or noses, but my NP-fingertips have no mass so they can't have temperature or heat, and certainly can't melt. My sled didn't need wings. Planes need wings to generate lift, but I can simply push up from inside of my sled against its roof, so there's nothing at all happening outside. No wings meant no drag on those surfaces. At Mach one the drag on a plane increases substantially as the air piles up in front of it, but my sled would have an amazingly small and highly pointed frontal area. I made the external surface of my sled frictionless so the air slid past it more easily. Drag and turbulence would be dramatically reduced. Not totally removed, but getting rid of most of it was very welcome. I formed a smallest possible, very sharply pointed, flattened (because my body is when lying down "flat"), frictionless flying sled, and did the test VERY cautiously, even wearing a crash helmet which had to be a useless precaution. It wasn't even useful for hiding my body's heat signature given how much heat the nose of my sled was going to generate. Supersonic flight turned out to be delightfully easy, especially as I had the force to blow straight through Mach one. As the research articles had said it would, the turbulence and drag eased off very quickly once I was through that barrier, so they went from minimal to almost non-existent. It was a good thing I didn't need my real eyes to steer with because the front of my sled was obscured with red hot, incandescent air, as the molecules were superheated and ionized. My sled's being frictionless didn't prevent it colliding with air molecules, and those subsequently collided with other air molecules as they were displaced and compressed by my sled's volume. Those were VERY violent collisions, imparting enormous temperatures to the air molecules, so there was no way I could see through my sled's nose cone. My vision was a large radio blob positioned ahead of me, keeping a VERY close eye on the horizon and distance to the ocean in case I accidentally steered downward - my sled was heavily reinforced and I was 'strapped in' immovably but I had exactly zero chance of surviving a Mach seven impact with the ocean. The nose cone's heat was a problem as my sled was transparent and quite a lot of the heat radiated into me. A partial solution was to lengthen my sled by several feet so a much smaller proportion of the heat intersected me. I also inserted a couple of airtight compartments ahead of me so the air inside them would absorb some of the heat before it got to me. I still overheated very quickly and had to keep my supersonic runs much shorter than I would've liked, dropping down to subsonic to cool down. I filled the compartment ahead of me with water, so no radiative heat would reach me. A large amount of water - probably two or three times the volume of my body - can absorb a great deal more heat than my body can tolerate, so that worked quite well, although it only extended my time limit rather than removing it because the water would eventually get too hot. I made a mental note to find some highly reflective material that I could conveniently carry folded and would deploy facing forward just ahead of the water compartment to reflect as much heat as possible. I couldn't tell my speed especially as I was flying over water, but the sled was very narrow and I'd added a lot more thrust than I'd used with my normal flying around, so must've gotten very fast. Judging by those two changes, I should've got to at least hypersonic (Mach five). It was a great success, as I could even do sweeping turns at whatever my top speed was. I slowed down to subsonic speeds several times, to cool off and reshape my sled in attempts to find what worked best. I tried: Whether to have any fins at the front and/or rear of the sled? No. Whether a perfectly cylindrical sled worked better than a flattened shape? As I'd expected, flat was better, doubtless because it had a smaller frontal area. With a flattened shape, whether to give it an airfoil shape to generate lift? No. Whether to change the shape when supersonic (e.g., to extend small fins at the rear to help with turns)? No. Experimenting with air intake holes rather than flying in an airtight sled. I was moving faster than the surrounding air, so - speaking simplistically - I'd have to have holes in the front of the sled or intake scoops on the side to catch any air, but I wasn't stupid enough to try those ideas. Holes in the rear worked because the turbulence allowed some of the air to enter those holes. It didn't work well though, not letting nearly enough fresh air in unless I made the holes so large that they started causing wobbles. I ended up deciding to retain an airtight shape. If I was carrying passengers and wanted more air, I'd go subsonic, open my sled, re-enclose it and speed up again. [In one of my later déjà vu's, a Mark who'd done more research than me had discovered a better shape and was spreading the information through our grapevine. Imagine a sphere with two pins inside it. Push those pins away from each other in opposite directions, say one to the left and one to the right. The pins don't penetrate this hypothetical sphere, so they'll stretch it out horizontally, pulling it inward in the other two spatial dimensions. The best hypersonic shape is when the sphere is about ten times longer than it is wide, with EXTREMELY sharp nose and tail cones. Amusingly disproving my previous confident assumption that a flat shape would be best.] What I learned from my test flights would be enough to teach the five-merge Marks how to travel supersonically, at slightly over Mach two probably, depending on the as yet unquantified benefit that a frictionless sled provided. Being able to fly that fast might be very useful to them in an emergency. I headed home, very happy with the result. I dropped down to subsonic before I reached the coast, flying directly home and landing without worrying unduly about being observed. I had one set of supersonic experiments yet to do, to find out how loud my sonic booms were. The research I'd done said that the loudness of sonic booms, for listeners on the ground, depended mostly on the height of the craft, its size, and its speed. I had a VERY small craft so I thought it might be possible that the other Marks could fly Mach two at 30,000 feet (say), and not be heard on the ground. That wouldn't make them undetectable because they'd show up VERY clearly on infrared surveillance. One thing was for sure, holding an NP-encased black sheet over the craft wouldn't hide my sled's heat bloom! (The sheet couldn't keep up with the sled without creating its own heat flare.) So supersonic flight wouldn't be stealthy for any of the Marks, but it'd still be good for them to know whether they made a loud noise or not. As well as knowing how loud a five-merged Mark's sonic booms would be, I was also curious about my Mach seven (or whatever my top speed was) sonic booms. For an obvious reason I couldn't hear my own faster-than-sound sonic booms, so I'd get my girls' help with that. It'd only take a few minutes, and then I could get back to comforting them. ------- Chapter 402: Saying Goodbye Again Saturday, November 17 to Tuesday, November 27, 2007 Saturday morning after breakfast, I said to everyone, "Something major has happened which means I have to go on a very important 'Voyage of Discovery' soon. Not a voyage by water, but in a way connected to my abilities. It's a one-way voyage and I'll never be able to return again." I provided the rest of the explanation, trying to make it seem not too bad, until they finally understood what I meant, whereupon everyone fell apart exactly the same as before, except I fell apart more. I'll spare you having to read through a repetition of the anguished beseeching and tears. Because our victory over the Government had sunk in, we'd been happily restarting stalled activities and anticipating the future, so this time was even worse for these families than the previous ones. There were practical differences too, which I'll describe (these are going back in time somewhat): In 6A-land the Surveillance Problem had been resolved without the dramatic note from God saying Washington DC was about to be nuked. Doing that in 6B-land made my having to die anyway more credible, had gotten my families a great deal of popular support, and had put even more pressure on the Government. Each of those aspects would increase my families' safety after I left, which was far more important to me than my concern about incorrectly panicking millions of DC inhabitants. I'd felt sorry for the innocent Washingtonians who'd genuinely thought they were going to die, but the politician scumbags - which is all of them - deserved the fear, and they deserved the pressure the innocent people would put on them afterward. Plus my concern about "the innocent people" had been diminishing recently because I had started thinking that The People were indeed responsible for how criminal and arrogant their Government is. It's not as if the Government operates in a vacuum separate from the general populace and immune from their feedback. It's the people who ultimately have the power, but they're ignoring their responsibility for it. People have known for decades that politicians are two-faced lying assholes, yet people have let politicians become increasingly corrupt. And of all the people who are to blame, it must be the Washington DC people who are the most culpable because very large numbers of them see and have opportunities to influence the Government's behavior, if only by leaking documents of Governmental misbehaviors. The People's long-term failure to require and enforce an appropriate level of integrity from their leadership was providing them with a very painful short-term lesson now, as is nearly always the case when the consequences of long-term mistakes become apparent. 6A had staged a dramatic revelation of the Surveillance Problem very much as already described in 6B-land, with the TV cameras appearing at the baddies' Corvallis base and 6A revealing many of the operation's details, although he hadn't known as many of them as I had in 6B-land when I'd done the same thing a few days later, not that 6A's leaving out most of their baddies' life histories mattered much. The main difference here was that 6A hadn't produced the note about God nuking DC. As in 6B-land, 6A's Vanessa had also suggested frightening the DC residents to motivate them to put pressure on the Government, and that had been done just by waiting for one of the reporters to worriedly ask me (calling 6A "me") what I thought the angel would do. I'd answered, "The Guardian Angel doesn't tell me what it's intending to do. It might destroy the Bush family homes again, or decapitate everyone in the entire Bush family tree as it had implied before, or it might destroy Washington DC. There's no way of knowing." I'd greatly enjoyed imagining what the Bushes must be thinking and doing, but the reporters had chosen to get very worked up about the possibility of DC becoming a molten crater. I'd simply repeated, "There's no way of knowing." There'd also been no way I was going to make myself publicly responsible for starting a stampede. A stampede had started anyway. The spark for it hadn't been so dramatic as in 6B-land, and the result was slightly less powerful - this Bush didn't look likely to be impeached - but the result was along the same lines. After the riots that'd followed from the FBI's second assassination attempt, the people had been convinced by the President's total capitulation and other Government responses that the drama was all over. Being caught carrying out YET ANOTHER illegal and invasive operation against the Andersons and the angel had made everyone conclude that the Government was irredeemably out of control. The people had concluded that the Guardian Angel HAD to destroy the Government because there was clearly no other way of stopping it attacking the Andersons. The vast majority of DC residents had thought it'd be an excellent idea to be somewhere else when the Government was destroyed. The Government hadn't wanted to hang around for that either, so the city had rapidly turned into a ghost town. Or as rapidly as the transportation systems had allowed, which meant most of it had happened at a panicky crawl. The number of vehicular accident insurance claims that had accumulated since the first nuclear threat probably exceeded the number of cars in Washington by now, as so many people had tried to bull their cars through the traffic snarls. As it happened, Washington had not turned into a radioactive pit and some people were returning, the others preferring to wait longer yet, maybe several years. Everyone - especially including my families and me - had wondered how the angel would retaliate for the latest breaking of its orders. The angel had beheaded the Corvallis mercenaries but that was obviously insufficient. I had threatened to nuke DC or to kill three generations of the Bush family, but those had always been bluffs that I'd never, for a moment, believed the Government would call me on. The Government hadn't actually "called my bluff"; it'd simply not believed the angel to be real and the Government had so much arrogance about its power that it never expected a proper spying operation - the FBI's operations never being fully covert - to be caught by whatever the angel really was. And if it had been caught, never expected the operation to be traced back to the Government. But however it had happened, the net result was that my bluffs had been called, and the Guardian Angel HAD to respond. The idea of killing the entire Bush family tree had been very tempting (to put it mildly when thinking about him personally): he'd let his agencies commit crimes, had stolen hundreds of billions of dollars from us, and whoever the next President would be, he'd be a great deal more careful about keeping his Government's nose out of our business. Unfortunately all four of my parents and 6A themselves had known that it was too dangerous to attempt. I obviously wasn't going to set off a nuke, so the angel had to do something else to retaliate for the Surveillance Problem. It had appeared in front of the media and told them via its usual typing method: "Cheney, the Director and Deputy Director of the CIA are to report to the front gates of the Anderson property where I will remove their heads. Because the US Government is too arrogant in its power, every CV-designated aircraft carrier in the US fleet is to be returned to a US port for immediate decommissioning and scrapping. Failure to comply will result in your wishing you had." We'd chosen to punish the Government by forcing the scrapping of aircraft carriers because it would be a huge slap in the face, in the ego, and as best we could understand of the world's geopolitical situation, the only meritorious military action of any significance that America was involved in was in Afghanistan, which has no coast. Every other military adventure could be done without the carriers, or would probably be better off not being done at all. Protecting Taiwan from Mainland China's posturing, for example, could be done using other assets. Whether Cheney would have come to our gates would never be known, as the house he'd been hiding in had been discovered and attacked by an angry mob that had killed him. The Director of the CIA had suicided by eating his own gun. As those events imply, the public vilification of and anger toward those people was extreme; like nothing ever seen before in America. The Deputy Director had not followed the angel's instruction yet, apparently preferring the US's judicial system over God's. Nor had the Navy responded as ordered. The public had protested the Navy's half of the angel's orders, especially because it seemed to be weakening the US for an invasion by demons and/or aliens. Dad had pointed out, "Wouldn't America be safer if all the planes and weapons on the carriers were based in the US rather than spread all over the world?" That easy counter-argument had been one of our reasons for choosing that particular punishment. Vanessa had stated, "The way I interpret the angel's logic, is that it thinks the American Government is too evil to be allowed to project its power on innocent countries around the world, so the angel is making us bring our power back. Maybe one day, when our Government has proved itself to be not so arrogant in its power and that it can behave legally and morally, the angel will relax its restrictions and allow the rebuilding of a carrier fleet." The Deputy Director and Navy still hadn't cooperated by the time 6B merged into 6A, but that had only been a few days after the angel had issued the order. 6A's plan was to wait until the refusal to comply was obvious to everyone, and then to periodically hit Air Force bases, Navy ships and yards, weapons development companies, and anything else that seemed a good idea at the time. Possibly even steal more nukes and leave them lying around in major cities to get the population worked up, although that idea didn't really appeal, although I hadn't bothered trying to think why yet. A better approach would probably be to diversify my attacks. I loved the idea of destroying weapons development companies because their not being part of the military would result in new groups of people getting angry and pressuring the Government to start obeying the angel. If the Government still didn't comply, the angel could start wrecking things like the NY Stock Exchange. After all, the angel sees the Government as merely the People's chosen representatives, so there's nothing inappropriate about the angel pressuring the people directly. Hitting those sorts of targets would result in a GREAT deal of pressure being exerted on the Government, especially if accompanied by the right sort of PR statements. The unpredictability of widely spread semi-random attacks would make them a great deal safer for me than following through on any of our 'bluffs'. Eventually the US Government should be forced to comply. Their only real alternative was to do something very extreme like kill all the Andersons, which we thought unlikely not because it was illegal, but because the Government wouldn't survive doing that to us as an amusingly large proportion of the population were stupid enough to believe that God was on our side. Top politicians had no respect for other people's lives, but they had plenty of 'respect' for their own quality of life. So that's how the Surveillance Problem aftermath differed from that of 6B's. If I wanted to, I could make my next departure resemble 6B's by stealing a nuke a few days before I left - off the top of an ICBM probably as the weapon storage areas would be heavily guarded by now - and writing a note saying the failure of the US Government to do as the angel ordered meant the Government's moral corruption was so great that it had to be destroyed. A few minutes later I'd make my noble sacrifice, giving myself up to save all the poor, innocent people in DC. Once my families had recovered enough after my announcing my going on a Voyage of Discovery, and were capable of discussing the situation, I said, "I have to leave so I want to do it in a way that increases your safety by making it VERY clear that I truly have gone. The Government paranoids won't have me around to get themselves worked up about, so they should be more likely to stay out of your lives. I'll donate my body to medical science so there's no doubt that I'm truly dead, and I'm sure scientists can get some fascinating insights out of it which might do some good. To get the biggest bang for our bucks when I leave, I suggest we do the following..." I went on to describe my Noble Sacrifice idea. The parents weren't happy with it. They thought it mostly unnecessary because no one in DC had forgotten the last scare only a few days ago, when the Surveillance Problem had been exposed. A significant proportion of the last scare's evacuees hadn't returned yet. For the limited benefit of another reminder of what the angel could do, my plan was deemed too dangerous. The Government had called my bluff and it simply wasn't worth the risk of repeating the same punishment. Mom suggested something very different and simple: to announce that God had decided that the last incident plus the Government's refusal to abide by the Guardian Angel's orders meant that the US Government was irredeemable, and God was washing Its hands of America, including Its deciding that my soul can be put to better use somewhere other than on Earth. It's giving me some time to say goodbye, then It will take me. We all liked the idea, and that's what we did. It had a very different tone than in 6B-land, as God wasn't killing me but taking me away to do something for Him. Our public image was that my families and I would miss each other, but they were proud of me. It was an easy act for all of us since the emotions were substantially the same as what we were all feeling anyway. There were many people who called for me not to go, from my second-tier girlfriends through to the Government. In other words, "from sublime lovelies to ridiculous assholes". The Democrats got into the act too, and you can decide for yourself into which of those two categories I put them. My answer was generally, "It's God's decision; not mine. If He thinks it's best, I'm not going to argue with Him." I was less polite than that about the Democrat assholes. [Knowing what I've learned about politicians, I'm amazed how stupid the public is. People have been polarized into supporting either the Republicans or the Democrats, and very often support them with irrational vehemence. When you look at a product in a store, the salesperson shouldn't ask you, "Do you want to buy that?" because given a buy/not-buy choice, you might choose not to buy. The salesperson should ask, "Do you want to pay with cash or credit card?" or some similar buy/buy choice. By presenting the voters with a choice of two political parties, and by fueling a vehement debate over the choice between them, the public is fooled into not demanding that the system itself be changed (sure, some people do call for that, but so few that they don't matter. Ignoring them is made easier because we've been subject to so much 'educational' propaganda about how our Constitution and Democracy are SACROSANCT and immune from criticism, rather than being just some ideas a few guys had two hundred years ago). The vehemence of the debate is deliberately so extreme and polarizing that it very effectively prevents intelligent discussion. As Majestic Countdown has learned, the political debate is nothing more than people choosing whether to be under a left-leaning or right-leaning rapist, and both rapists have a vested interest in keeping the system working for them, even if they have to take turns.] We made a BIG deal out of God's washing his hands of America. The angel hadn't used that exact phrase in its announcement, but the world clearly understood that's what was happening, and that it was the fault of the US Government. There were calls for political reform so strident and powerful that they'd been unimaginable just a few months ago. That was especially true because the current administration's power base was the religious right, and they'd just been told that God disavowed the Government and wanted nothing to do with it. From all over the world, and especially from Christian countries, enormous international pressure was being applied on the US Government to reform itself morally. The ex-Deputy Director of the CIA was even coerced into appearing in front of our gates where the Guardian Angel appeared and removed his head. That didn't affect my imminent departure at all, and neither did the aircraft carriers being ordered to return to their homeports. That was particularly meaningless as the Guardian Angel and I would be long gone before the Navy decommissioned anything. Their doing so seemed unlikely as the carriers were returning to their homeports, which were often incapable of scrapping them. The Navy might slowly mothball them, but that could easily be reversed later. Whether any substantial long-term good came of the political reform was questionable, but at least it should distract the power-men in Washington from bothering my families after I left. One good consequence was that Nevaeh's parents were convinced that I must be incredibly moral. In their minds, that meant their daughter was safe from sex, although God knows why they thought that. They consented to Nevaeh's moving into the Kids' House, something we didn't act on while I was alive because I didn't want even a partial outsider to intrude on this very valuable time. We did let Nevaeh stay overnight with us once, as my way of saying goodbye to her. I made another significant change to my previous departure's style: the Guardian Angel became fun. It gave flights to all of our staff that wanted them - a couple of the office ladies declined - and to me and to my families quite often. We even had a sunrise breakfast on our favorite spot in the Cascades, returning home in daylight. When Vanessa was returning from DC on the one day she'd had to go because of some important MAF business, I got her to act out a nice little plan (actually, not so little). She returned during daylight hours and called me when they were a few minutes out from Corvallis Airport. The angel and I flew up to meet the plane, with me on a bicycle and pedaling energetically as we rose up into the air (I liked linking myself to the E.T. theme because it's so strongly associated with good emotions, so would make people think - in a thoughtless way - well of us. I'd been doing some reading about propaganda recently). Vanessa gave her phone to the pilots so I could give them LOTS of reassurance, then I took control of the plane, turning its engines off and slowing it down. I rode beside the cockpit window while the angel floated near me and we all descended noiselessly toward our home, until we were hovering fifty feet above the Adults' House. I pedaled around to the city-facing cabin door, got off my bike, put it on its stand, opened the door from the inside with NP, offered the waiting Vanessa my arm as she walked out onto the air, then got her to sit on the handlebars of my bike (she was actually sitting comfortably in a much better NP-seat), then I pedaled us down to the front door of the Adults' House. Depositing her at home, I biked back up to the plane and invited the pilots to stand on the wing for the rest of the trip to the airport. They much preferred to stay in the cockpit - there's probably an FAA regulation requiring it - so I just rode alongside the plane as it floated to the airport where it did a vertical landing in front of our hanger, after which I ET-pedaled myself back home. We had cameras outside our home 24/7 these days, and the sight of a 737 hovering noiselessly over our hilltop home while I gallantly escorted Vanessa out of the door then biked her down to our home was "Breaking News" which interrupted regular programs all over the world, gobsmacking it with the silent freakiness of a 737 hovering directly over a home. The Guardian Angel and I returned home after delivering the plane, and I landed near the reporters and got off my bike to talk to them. They had some questions. They ALWAYS have questions. It's intelligent questions they very rarely have. After a couple of mindless Q's & A's, I offered one of the reporters, "Do you want to interview the pilots too?" "That'd be great." She had no idea that I meant the invitation to be immediate. I looked at the angel saying, "Please take her and her cameraman to meet the pilots." She was just starting to protest when the angel picked the two of them up, put them in a box with seats, seatbelts and a frictionless outside surface, and rapidly accelerated them upward at forty five degrees in the direction of the airport. The angel also split itself and one of it flew with them, the start of their journey being filmed by several other cameramen. The angel faded from sight during the first few seconds. The news-team quickly accelerated beyond my 540-foot limit, going about 160 mph and starting to curve downward due to the effect of gravity. In 100 seconds they'd be 80% of the way to the 6-mile distant airport and heading downward at a very scary velocity. I made a mental note not to forget them, and with a Guardian Angel still hovering beside me, I answered another couple of questions. Then I said, "The flying news team should be nearly at the airport by now. I'll pop there and back quickly to introduce them to our pilots." I took off using 5 g's of sideways acceleration to get up to just under Mach one, which took seven seconds, catching up to the pair with about ten seconds to spare. I overshot them because I hadn't wasted time decelerating, but that was fine because getting within five hundred feet reset the countdown for the 128-second Blinks Allowed Effect and allowed me to start decelerating them forcefully. By the time I slowed myself, and returned to the pair at a more sedate speed, they were very near to the airport. I floated them down to our hangar, called down to the pilots, "They want to interview you," then I sped just as fast back home so my first leg wouldn't seem suspiciously urgent. It'd take the news team several seconds to recover from their experience before they'd be able to start doing their job. When I returned to the throng of reporters outside my gate, I answered a few questions, including making the statement about its ability to carry a 737, "The Guardian Angel appears FAR stronger than I thought it was. I suspect it was deliberately hiding its capabilities so anyone that tried to attack me would underestimate it, making them easier to catch. It's not doing that now because its job is over." I turned to the angel, "That's right isn't it? There's no need to protect me anymore because God wants my soul back anyway?" It bobbed up and down. "Why are you still here then?" asked one of the reporters of the angel, quite irreverently I thought. My cellphone floated up, paused for some typing, then into my hand, "It says: 'God says for Mark's fun. I will still protect so he can have fun and say goodbye, but not so important now." Being very aware of the plane's weight, I noticed that every one of the subsequent news stories gave a weight that was almost 100% too high. They used the Maximum Takeoff Weight of a commercial 737. Admittedly Vanessa was somewhat overweight, but implying she weighed as much as a hundred passengers was excessive. From innumerable air-disaster stories, all the reporters would know that planes carry only enough fuel to reach their destination plus a safety margin. I'd done my stunt at the destination and the amount of safety-margin fuel was a quick google away, as was the empty weight of a 737, so the weight calculation was very easy. An eight-year old could have gotten it right, but none of the reporters had bothered taking the minute required. The wrong value was slightly easier and more entertaining. The pair of news-people that I sent to the airport was occasionally mentioned. I hoped they'd be questioned in enough detail so their always being strapped into a seat inside an airtight box the whole trip would come out. Hopefully that'd destroy anyone's idea that I might be at the center of a deception, assuming they believed in the 500-foot limit. After those events, doing a "sound check" of my flying sled at Mach two and Mach seven was easy. I told the girls what I wanted, and then flew myself up to 30,000 feet. I used two landmarks on either side of our hilltop that were a known distance apart, thanks to Google Earth. I'd already worked out the time required to travel from one to the other at Mach one, so whatever fraction of that time it took me to cover that distance was the reciprocal of my Mach number. I held my head in a fixed position by slotting it into a helmet-type shape built into the ceiling of my flying sled, and used a piece of paper on the sled's floor to give a hard edge to time passing the landmarks with. I'd get a very accurate flight time and therefore speed provided the sled remained level. I measured that with a tennis ball placed on the floor after my acceleration was finished. One subsonic pass overhead with a conservative amount of push gave me a speed of about Mach 0.6. I wanted to find out how loud the sled would be when going at the maximum speed that the five-merged Marks would be able to manage, so my next pass would use sixteen times as much pushing force for four times as much speed. That'd simplistically be Mach 2.4, but would actually be somewhat less because air resistance increases slightly faster than the square law at those speeds. The as-yet unquantified effect of the sled's being frictionless would apply to the low- and high-speed runs, although perhaps not equally. I was confident the final speed would be close enough to what the other Marks would achieve not to invalidate my sound check. Before I started the first supersonic run, I texted Julia with a "Coming shortly," as I was far too high for her to see. The time of the second run equated to Mach 2.2, and Julia texted me back with, "A quiet pop. If we weren't expecting it, might have missed it." #5: #18: I made the return trip with every bit of push I had, and achieved an impressively high Mach 10, which was pretty cool! Not that Mach 7 (my expected top speed), Mach 2 (the five-merge Marks' top speed), or even Mach 0.01 (being able to fly at all) wasn't already cool. #44: The speed of sound is significantly slower at 30,000 feet, but I was measuring ground speed, so the 1h:40m time is correct; the 30,000 feet of height not adding significantly to the circumference of the Earth. Julia sent, "Have you done it yet? We didn't hear anything." #18: The faster aircraft go, the sharper the sonic boom's cone of sound behind the craft's nose, like the letter "V" lying on its side with the legs opened or closed. If the craft is VERY fast, then the legs are very close together. Mach 10 produces a cone with a 6-degree spread off the central axis of the line of travel, which is very sharp indeed. As my flying sled was so small, the sound waves it generated were small, and they dissipated as they spread. Going high enough and fast enough ensured that my sonic 'pops' dissipated before the cone reached the ground. I texted Julia back with "I have done it. I was hoping for silent. I'll descend for test 3 now." I descended to 10,000 feet, re-calibrated at a subsonic speed because the air was much denser now, then did a Mach 2.5 run overhead, getting me, "a quiet crack" from Julia. That was all I needed, so I descended into my girls' arms. Before I could ask the girls to manually reproduce how loud they thought the two sounds they heard were, Julia asked, "What was your top speed?" "Let's get a drink while we talk. The angel made me so excited my mouth is dry from all my yelling and yahooing." With so many cameramen at the gate, I didn't want to talk outside. Inside I answered, "My top speed is Mach 10." "TEN! Wow, that's FAST. That's faster than any of the Air Force planes, isn't it?" "Much faster than any of their normal planes. The space shuttle goes faster when it's in orbit and some of their rockets go very fast, but their fastest fighter goes about Mach 2.5, so I can fly rings around it. I can even outrun any missiles they fire at me, provided I get enough warning to get up to speed." "How come you're so much faster now?" "Mostly because I was too chicken to try before. I was scared of having my abilities discovered and of turbulence throwing me out of control. In late-May I discovered how to make my NP frictionless..." "That was your BEST invention!" Ava was joking, but we do find it very useful during sex. "It's a good one, I agree. As well as the essential uses we put it to, it's also great at reducing drag and turbulence on my flying sled. I didn't try to fly faster than the speed of sound earlier because I was worried about being discovered. I'm not any more, obviously." The angel was already flying us around the property very often, and we'd been on TV for it many times. After so much practice, the girls were quite proficient at the right-fist control method, and I was even better at it. I'd learned supersonic skills and related knowledge that would be useful for the other Marks, and in a way that was obviously safe for them. The safety issue was what had been keeping them from performing much the same experiments as I had. They'd been afraid of the flight itself even after discovering how to control their sleds' friction, and afraid of their governments too. In passing this knowledge on to them - as I'd do during the next several déjà vu's - my "Voyage of Discovery" was achieving its purpose already. As a small side benefit, my flights might make this Government respect the angel more, hopefully discouraging those assholes from interfering with 6A's family after I leave. I'll be playing the "God is going to keep an eye on my families" card again, and would get the Guardian Angel do some scary things just before I left to leave my last impression a fearful one. I'll be walking down to the gate and asking the reporters for "Some quiet human decency for my last day please." Reporters wouldn't know what human decency was if it slapped them on the face, so they'll reply by yelling inane questions at me. I was predicting questions like, "How do you feel about dying later today?", "Is your family upset?", and other stupid vampiric leeching. The Guardian Angel will get angry and do some things that express my opinion of reporters, and which will hopefully help the Government fear the attention of angels in the future. Even after I leave there'll still be some idiots who'll come knocking on our gate wanting flights, but our guards have had a great deal of practice dealing with idiots, and my families will make appropriate public statements to further dissuade them - I'd suggested ridiculing the idiots, but mainly because I wouldn't have been able to resist doing that myself. My families might prefer to use another tactic at the time. The guards had eagerly enjoyed their flights, not the least concerned that doing so would increase the number of idiots that would turn up in the future hoping to get their own flights. Don't let the above descriptions of doing useful or fun things fool you into thinking the last ten days were pleasant. They were hell for all of us. There were brief periods of attempting to have fun, but it was done with our hearts breaking and with none of us forgetting for a second that our time was rapidly running out. Nearly all the time we were in each other's arms and trying to express lifetimes' of love in ten days. Thanksgiving was on the 22nd, and was especially emotional. In recent years, Dad's family have always come to our place for a big Thanksgiving, but he had a powerful reason for canceling that this year. We kept it to my loved ones plus Robert, Andrew, and their wives. There were several heartfelt speeches and attempts to be "thankful", but no one could possibly have mistaken it for a happy occasion. I was theoretically letting 6A do most of the talking, as these were his families and 6B REALLY didn't want to go through it all again, but our sixty four minds were so overlapped and it was so easy for 6B to treat these families as his own, that 6B ran our body nearly as much as 6A did, and suffered just as much anguish, again. The only other noteworthy event was that toward the end of my ten days in this dimension, the level of information I was getting from my subconsciouses started improving. Only by a small amount, but it was noticeable. I thought that something like half of the gain was probably just from my understanding the information better because my IQ had presumably risen somewhat again. I had to be close to the limit on IQ because I was very smart already, probably well into genius territory. How fast I'd understood my MS courses before I'd dropped out of them was proof of that. Amusingly - because there was very little else to be amused about - we'd calculated that if we'd done another school IQ test, our score would be 7,232 now. It'd been 226 with two minds, so 32 times more now, assuming a linear improvement. We didn't get any stunning insights from the improvement, or even any un-stunning insights; we just understood what was going on slightly better than before. It might've been interesting to wait to see if the improvement continued, but it'd come with us to the extent that the process was software, and reproduce in the next body to the extent that it was hardware. We were committed to going and the small improvement didn't come close to justify upsetting the schedule. My departure would be done in very much the same way, with only three minor variations: It wouldn't be recorded by so many cameras, thanks to the Guardian Angel's fear-inspiring actions earlier in the day. I wouldn't flash with my maximum brightness as my 'soul' left, as the last flash had been scarily bright. Last time I'd assumed that having it four hundred feet in the air and the inverse square law would diminish its affect a lot, but after seeing that flash through my closed eyes I'd worried about the helicopter pilots. I have a high opinion of the skill levels required by chopper pilots, and I was sure they could fly for several seconds even with their eyes blinded, but it'd be wise for me to reduce the power this time. I'd do this flash with two minds giving it their all; that'd be enough to make the point because each mind would have four times more power than last time. The déjà vu's were longer, so our final speeches to each other would have a few more precious seconds. I let a déjà vu go past at 3pm, much to his relief. We were gathered outside, as before, when the déjà vu I was waiting for started at 8:20pm, early by about a hundred years. "It's started, My Loves." "OH NO!" You know how it goes, including too fucking often. ------- Chapter 403: Seventh Merge to 96 Minds; Into the Unknown Tuesday, November 27 (Continued) to Tuesday, December 11, 2007 Arrival at the other side was much the same as usual too. My girls and I were sitting in our study, it being homework time for everyone again. None of the girls had noticed anything, as I study by sitting motionless with my eyes closed. It's pretty easy to carry on doing that without giving anything away. I conversed internally for a minute or so about what was happening, what we'd learned already, our lives, etc. 7A knew that someone had rolled the twelve 6s but he hadn't gotten any word of any results from the experiment, so 7B's experiences were all new to him. 7A had some differences in his life compared to the other two contemporary versions we'd experienced, but there's no fucking point in bothering to list them. [It took a few hours, but I discovered that about ten years ago, all but two countries on this Earth had standardized on a date format of "day month year" (e.g., my birthday was now the 9th of November) rather than the widely varying mishmash used in every other dimension I'd been in. That was the geographically largest dimensional difference I'd personally encountered, although I'd heard grapevine stories of bigger variances. This autobiography will stick with its usual format.] I stood up and asked my girls, "Anyone for a drink or snack?" I took their orders, then wandered down to the kitchen to test my new level of abilities in private. I soon confirmed that all the abilities had progressed in the expected fashion, by factors of 1.5, 1.5^2, or 1.5^3 because I had merged with a 32-minded Mark, which had increased my number of minds by a factor of 1.5. My total NP force was now 226,000 kg (500,000 pounds, or 250 tons). It was a good thing that all of my minds were well behaved because each of them had enough force at their command to do some very serious harm. I hadn't known about this metaphorical 'room' back when we were so stupid as to roll twelve 6s so it was officially new territory, but because of all the "look ahead" déjà vu's 7B had experienced over the previous ten days - twenty six of them, plus probably one while asleep - 7B knew what it'd be like. Our current level of ability was new to 7A and he was impressed to see how much better the abilities of 96 minds were than 64. 7A felt some excitement, but 7B was just depressed. The next déjà vu should be in around 5.7 hours and I didn't have any real hope that it wouldn't come. I was only a factor of three above the 32-minded Marks, and I expected to be able to déjà vu when I was a factor of four ahead, and probably further than that. I'd be doing this a few more times yet, unless something else intruded, like my head hopefully exploding. I returned to the study with what the girls had ordered. I kept my emotions under better control this time and the girls didn't notice anything untoward. Not crying first probably helped. My sleep requirement was back to an hour again, which seemed a little weird, but I guessed it probably needed a day or two for my new body to adapt. [Which is what happened, half an hour being required the next night and thereafter.] The next déjà vu was more or less on time. Nothing bad happened when it started, so 128 minds' worth of power didn't cause any problems. It was difficult to believe that I could have that much power, but it was hard to argue with the reality of it. My abilities scaled exactly as expected, all the way through to how long the déjà vu lasted. All of my earlier merges had increased déjà vu's duration by a factor of about 1.5, not the usual factor of 2 for some reason we could never work out [[had the déjà vu's linked just our minds and nothing else, they would have taken progressions of twice as long, but they also include some of the volume of space around our minds which didn't take any longer to synchronize as we merged upward because their information density was unchanged]]. Now I was merging with my non-peers, the durations weren't increasing by factors of 1.5, but they were still up to or slightly over four minutes at this level. So déjà vu worked and there didn't appear to be any reason not to merge into the next metaphorical room. I didn't feel like throwing a party about it. On Saturday, December 1, I told my families over breakfast, "The reason I asked for a family conference is to tell you that I have to go on a 'Voyage of Discovery' soon..." You know how it goes. And goes, and fucking goes. I did the next ten days much the same way as last time, except I left out most of the joyride flights because I worried that it'd generated too much enthusiasm last time. I still staged the scene where the angel messaged that it was hanging around to give me some fun to excuse a small number of flights. I did get it to fly my families and me a little, such as up to the Cascades for a special breakfast. I also repeated having the 737 impressively hover over our hilltop to let Vanessa out again, but I did it without the E.T. joke; I just flew up in the normal way the angel flies me around, and I escorted her down the same way. The 737 was easier to handle this time, as I'd only had enough force to propel it with 0.2 g's of acceleration last time, but now had over 3 g's, which was far more than I needed. We had a few more seconds for our last farewell speeches. Wasn't that fucking wonderful! ------- Chapter 404: the Start of a Social Interlude Mid- to Late-September 2007 I'll stop describing the details of my Voyage of Discovery in order to devote some chapters to a "Social Interlude". I'm sure you understand that I - 8B, the just arrived minds - need R&R (Rest and Recreation) even more than I want to experiment with my special abilities, as required by my job as the Voyager. That's especially true for the minds that had rolled the twelve 6s to start the Voyage. R&R and experimentation were both good reasons to pause in this dimension, so I planned on being here much longer than has been the case in my Voyage so far. Even before the Voyagers arrived, 8A were deserving of some R&R. They'd had a tough life recently, for reasons briefly listed in the next section. The next few chapters are mostly about 8A's life before the Voyager's arrival. Until that happened, 8A were a fairly typical five-merge Mark, one of a billion such Marks throughout the W-Dimension. [To confirm the "one of a billion such Marks" comment: While carrying out the "First Clash Numbers" test we'd realized that something similar could be done except that only 1-in-1,000 five-merged Marks would participate to keep the data volume manageable. It'd find out how many thousands of us there were. If the First Clash Numbers were insufficiently distinguishable from an infinite population, we'd repeat the test with only 1-in-1,000,000 Marks participating to find out how many millions of us there were. The process would repeat with ever-larger magnitudes until the experiment returned a value that was significantly distinguishable from an infinite population. Nothing had been done about that idea until soon after most of the five-merged Marks had heard that a Voyager had been determined. They'd started the population estimate experiment at the million magnitude because there being a Voyaging winner implied that there were something like two billion five-merged Marks. The way it was tuned, an answer of roughly 2,000 (the million multiplier was built in) would be easy to distinguish from infinite. News of that census method had also been spread downward, so the smaller Marks would be doing their own census estimates too, but those will take MUCH longer to produce a result. The census eventually returned a value of one billion five-merged Marks, but not for a few weeks yet so I'm being a little naughty giving the figure now. I'm doing so because it's easier for me to write about there being a known number of five-merged Marks rather than writing of it as being indefinite all the time. With there being only a billion of us at the time we'd diced to determine a Voyager, it had been slightly unlikely that one of us had rolled twelve 6s, but all of us would have rolled again a month later with one fewer die, and again the next month too if necessary, so one or more of us would have 'won' sooner or later.] It's been a while since my social situation has been discussed and there are some differences in this dimension, so I'll take the time to set the scene properly. It's cumbersome for me to write the following chapters while retaining the perspective of the Mark that this autobiography is focused on, especially because he hasn't arrived here yet, so until further notice, "I" and "me" refers to the Mark in this dimension, "Mom" refers to his mom, etc. Notice that the date range for this chapter starts three months before the Voyager's eighth merge brought him into "my" dimension on December 11. ------- My need for recreation stems from the accumulation of many events [the Voyaging Marks' emotional agony from having to say "Goodbye" to his loved ones so many times not having impacted on me yet]: I'd lived as Ron rather than my true self for slightly more than a year, from mid-2006 until my pseudo-resurrection as Mark. As Ron, I'd done fairly well for myself recreationally, but living a false life hadn't been truly restful. Being careful not to give the game away had been a constant worry, and it was surprising how the lack of being challenged to achieve anything of personal significance had become annoying over time. The few days leading up to the resurrection had been particularly hard, as Archangel Michael had been very active and I'd been increasingly worried and paranoid about the Government's many possible responses. The parents and I also had to make the go/no-go decisions for each of Archangel Michael's appearances and of the resurrection itself, which were scary, high-stakes decisions. All of our lives might have been lost. Still might be, if one of the many risks facing us gets out of control. Post-resurrection, nearly all of June had been spent battling the Government. The direct causes of those conflicts were the UAV being over our home and the FBI's gas canisters and bugs being found by the Army, but those were just the symptoms. We HAD to push the Government out of our lives. If we didn't, then sooner or later they'd see or hear something that would ruin our lives. The assholes wouldn't have let the law or morality constrain them if they'd decided we might be controlling Archangel Michael, or if they became aware that Ron and Mark might be the same person, or that I had marvelous abilities. They'd swoop on us and our lives would be over. The only alternative was for me to live the rest of my life as an ordinary person, NEVER doing or saying anything unusual. That sounds like an easy, safe choice, but it was actually so intolerable that it didn't even need to be discussed. So June had been a VERY tough month. My raiding military bases, threatening nuclear warfare, and trying to covertly exert maximum pressure on the Government had stressed everyone in my families. The public, media and religious organizations had not made our situation any less stressful, and the religious nutcases had been very real dangers. I haven't written much about it, but being in public had never been restful as too many people kept reacting strongly to me. The President had capitulated - so he promised and we believed - in mid-June, but the public nuisances and dangers had continued throughout the rest of June and into July and August. Although we'd tried to keep everything low key, my body's changes had to be seen to happen, which kept some of the spotlight on us. Fortunately the July 21st visit to the Sondarm Christian School, especially the angel's demonstration of its goodness by flying people around for fun, had helped reduce the public threat, as had the simple passing of time. Even by late-August there was still some pressure on us, and especially on me. I had been able to leave home and do things in public, but I'd had to be extremely careful. When Dad and I had gone on our fishing trip, for example, we'd been accompanied by a large security detachment and the local police and park rangers had also been involved. Our vacation had been less relaxing than it should have been, although much better than staying in Corvallis. I had truly relaxed for hours at a time when out in the canoe with Dad, but a few hours out of months was not a happy proportion. In mid-September I'd had a couple really enjoyable days in Noumea before the déjà vu that warned me of the Surveillance Problem, which I'd confirmed immediately upon our return from Noumea. That Problem not only largely ruined my Noumea vacation, but became a long-lasting, major source of stress. Very shortly after we had returned from Noumea, Ron's body had completed its transformation into Mark's. The announcement of that milestone excited the public anew. Our being very rich and having the Guardian Angel had given us considerable control over our interactions with the rest of the world - I shudder to think of the abuses we would've suffered had we been without those protections - but they hadn't given us total control. I hadn't been able to walk casually around town, go to the movies when I felt like it, or even do much open chatting-up of pretty girls in case that got twisted into me being immoral and therefore obviously the Devil which nutcases would feel inspired to kill. Fortunately the public interest had reasonably quickly waned after my full transformation, aided by the very boring, non-religious press interviews I'd given. It had taken a further two months, until November 10, to blow the lid off the Surveillance Problem (earlier in this autobiography, it'd been blown on November 12. The lid was blown the same way but two days earlier here). But because of the sources of stress described above, I'd started having some fun even before November. That's why I'd started my SCS project: my game of trying to seduce every beautiful girl that went to that school, which I restricted to just the juniors and seniors for practical reasons and to reduce the risk of emotionally upsetting too-young girls. The surveillers were a problem that temporarily put my SCS project on hold, but when it was clear that the surveillers were being very unaggressive, I let the SCS project proceed. It would be an entertaining, long-term distraction for me, and because I'd been holding it back - many of those girls already being very interested and trying to press themselves forward - it was very easy to take the brakes off it and let it gather speed again. I'll describe my SCS project at length. Because it was such a long-term project its description has the side benefit of providing a convenient framework for me to include references to other events, but I'll be describing it at length mostly because I did devote a great deal of time to it. I gave it far more attention than it deserved because it WAS undeserved. After months of making life-or-death decisions, it was GREAT to be able to just play around with girls. They can be very relaxing once you're good enough at managing them. In this dimension, my SCS project had started the same way as it had in the original Voyaging Mark's dimension: I'd had the angel separate out the four bi-phobic girls from the artwork teams, then Carol and I had told the nine sensible girls about my looking for another girlfriend or two, we'd had some fun around the Kids' Pool that evening, and they'd made an oath to God to keep my secrets. The two arts teams had continued with their work while we'd been vacationing in Noumea, half of their members working slowly to maximize the time they could interact with me. School was due to restart only one week after we returned from Noumea, so the non-bi-phobic SCS girls didn't have much time to make me interested in them, which worried them considerably. All that was as previously described. Events in this dimension differed on our return from Noumea in mid-September. I never bothered trying to find out why they did, by now being used to dimensional differences being inexplicable. It was useless trying to determine the branching point because that answered nothing, especially as I believed they were the consequence of earlier branching points, and the first one for a particular cascade was the result of simple random variation anyway. I'll start explaining events in this dimension from this point in time. ------- On our return from Noumea, on the way from the airport to home, I confirmed that the Surveillance Problem existed in my dimension. One of the consequences of that was my deciding that it would be safer to limit my SCS project to fewer and to non-physical events. No more swimming laps in our outdoor pool at three times the world-record speed! Even my talks with the girls would be watered down, with far fewer references to God backing me up, and I'd stop using the Guardian Angel to type text messages. I feared that the surveillers might question the girls about what went on when they were with me, and the bullshit I could fool girls with would be too obviously self-serving when considered by suspicious investigators. To have the Guardian Angel participate in my self-serving bullshit would create the dangerous suspicion that it was too servile toward me, which would quickly lead to the thought that perhaps it was of me rather than of God. [[Cheney and the top CIA bosses had decided weeks ago that the Guardian Angel wasn't of God, and were already trying to find out what it was. My having been observed swimming so fast by a satellite as part of my chatting up the SCS girls was just one of my many little, and some not-so-little, giveaways.]] On our first morning back from Noumea, my girls and I approached the SCS art groups working on our property. Not all of the group members were working that day - it was vacation time after all - but all nine of the girls I'd started seducing had come because they were very eager to meet me again (I'll hereafter call them my "first-contact nine"). We did some innocuous "We're back and we had a great time. How are you?"-type chitchat as we reviewed their two paintings. Meanwhile, Carol was pulling each of them aside ostensibly to do one-on-one, art-project-related interviews for our reports to their school. She covertly told my first-contact nine that they were invited to dinner two evenings hence, and that they weren't to try to talk with me before then. I was keeping them away from me until I'd evaluated the "Surveillance Problem" [as it was only later called, once I understood its nature] to find out how much of a threat it was. Had I concluded that the baddies had aggressive intentions, I would've canceled the dinner invite. Fortunately for my SCS project, the bugs I planted on the baddies quickly let me know that they were extremely non-aggressive, not even wanting to get within five hundred feet of me. They truly deserved to be called "Surveillers". Before the dinner for the first-contact nine, I coached Nevaeh with a few things I wanted her to say and do, what attitude I wanted her to have, etc. I also explained an aspect of my SCS project that she hadn't previously known about: "You know that the main reason I'm dealing with your school is to help my reputation with your parents and the local Christians generally. But seeing as how I'm dealing with so many people from SCS, there's more going on than just a PR exercise. I know we told you before that I was looking for another girlfriend or two from SCS, and that truly might happen, but the real reason behind what we're doing is that God has given me another test, this time to seduce and bed the most beautiful girls at your school. I have to do it in a way that keeps them happy both before and after I bed them. It's a difficult test of my people-management skills. God didn't specify, but I've decided 'most beautiful' means the top 10%, and that His test applies only to the junior and senior girls. Younger girls would be so easy for me to seduce that they wouldn't be a test." That the targets be happy was an important moral requirement, even more important to me than my getting sex from them. I was going to be manipulating the girls for the challenge of it, but my need to win my self-challenge wasn't high enough for me to abuse them. I was also so famous that I was actually getting too many offers for sex, so that wasn't really my motivation, and it certainly wasn't worth upsetting my targets over. God and I actually thought alike when I explained my morally important "the girls remain happy" requirement to Nevaeh. I was worried that Nevaeh might think that I'd had ulterior motives in meeting her, so I made sure she understood that this project had started AFTER Carol and I had met her, that it had NOTHING to do with why she was our friend, and that she was neither part of nor counted in the test. I told her that I was sure that it was her presence in my life that made God suggest the test, because I never would have had anything to do with SCS if not for her. She trusted me, so that was fine. As you can see, God does work in mysterious ways. Nevaeh certainly thought so. She knew I was sexually moral and she'd never criticize God's morals, so her main reaction was giggling over the amazing tests God gives me. She joked about how much her schoolmates are going to enjoy it, and she was eager to help. She's a wonderful girlfriend. Nevaeh would be a great agent provocateur because none of the SCS girls knew the extent of her relationship with us. They knew that Nevaeh and Julia got along disturbingly well together (in my opinion) because of their common interest in fashion. They thought that Nevaeh was probably my favorite among the SCS girls because she'd said some surprisingly smart things when we'd had our pre-Noumea Grand Tour, poolside flirting and cock examination, but as far as the SCS girls knew, Nevaeh hadn't even kissed any of us. We were well prepared for the first-contact nine's dinner. Not long after the last attendee arrived, we started passing around pictures of our Noumea vacation. One of the girls queried Nevaeh for why she was studying one photo so closely. Nevaeh answered, "It shows Carol's body very well." It showed Carol in just the bottom half of an Australian bikini, so she was effectively naked. "I'm thinking about how much I'll enjoy being Carol's lover if Mark picks me to live here." "NEVAEH!" screamed all the other SCS girls, shocked by something they never expected to hear from her. "{Giggle}. I know; I'm surprised too. We know the Guardian Angel approves of girls having sex together, so God must approve too, and I think Carol is very nice and sexy. If Mark asks me to live here, I'm looking forward to sleeping with Carol some nights." While her friends were expressing their surprise at Nevaeh's new attitude, Carol got up, walked across to Nevaeh, and 'laid one on'. The two girls kissed passionately for several seconds, while Nevaeh's friends looked on in further surprise. Carol finished her kiss, climbed into Nevaeh's lap, and the two girls hugged each other with visible lust on their faces. No acting was required for that, as they both very much enjoy having sex together. Carol was particularly enjoying behaving sexually in front of the other girls. Nevaeh asked Carol, "Would you mind if I wait to see if Mark will take my virginity first, before you and I become lovers?" Carol enthusiastically agreed, "That's a WONDERFUL idea. I'll lie beside you when you and Mark are making love for the first time, and after he cums in you, you can roll over and sit on my face so I can suck his jism out of you." "CAROL!" screamed all the SCS girls. They'd spent enough time socializing with Carol during their art projects and the long lunchtime conversations that they weren't reluctant to express their shock. "Just because I'm a lesbian doesn't mean I'm scared of male cum. I love Mark and it'll be hot to suck his seed out of Nevaeh's pussy." "But he's your BROTHER!" "So?" The ensuring discussion gave us many opportunities to teach these girls to give up their stupid sexual hang-ups. In summary: "Sure the church and society has taught you that some sexual practices are immoral, but they've taught you incorrectly. Do you want me to ask the Guardian Angel to confirm it?" This was an important point and worth bringing out the big guns for. Not only did the Guardian Angel confirm that Carol's suggestion was perfectly fine, it even communicated that Carol's idea was a wonderful way for her to demonstrate her love for me. The angel didn't stop there either, adding, "If Carol wasn't a lesbian, God and I would expect Carol and Mark to be lovers. Relationships built on mutual love are always moral, and God wants sex to happen within such relationships. Sex is for fun, but it's also for sharing love." "Wow!" exclaimed the surprised SCS girls, who had previously misunderstood what the correct and moral role of sex in their lives should be. "What about between a father and daughter?" asked one of them. "That's easy," I answered, having anticipated this question. I had no interest in convincing these girls that incest of any sort was moral. I was just using it to push them into believing that far more sex was permissible than they'd thought before, and to test something (explained soon). I gave them an answer that quelled the incest issue, but not in a way that was foolishly anti-sex: "This applies to mothers and sons, fathers and sons, and mothers and daughters too, because genders don't make any difference to sexual morality. All of those cases are immoral because parents have an essential responsibility to be dependable authority figures for their kids. Kids absolutely need that. It would not be true love for the parents to diminish their ability to raise their child properly just because they wanted some sex. Being a parent is an authority role, while being lovers is a partnership role. Once their 'child' is fully independent, say aged thirty or more, then sex with their parents would be fine as it'd be between equals, but not until then." Julia got us off this irrelevant topic by saying, "Carol has often sucked Mark's cum out of Ava and me. She's also hung up his clothes on the clothesline. Do you think it's immoral of her to handle her brother's underwear? Things associated with sex, like underwear or cum, aren't actually sex themselves. Plus God wouldn't mind sex between Carol and Mark anyway because they love each other so much. It's not your fault, but you've been taught some foolish and unhappy attitudes to sex. I'm impressed by how quickly Nevaeh has rethought what she's been taught." "Thanks," said Nevaeh, "but it's easy. I just have to see what you do to know that it's fine. I think I'll just assume that all sex is fine if the participants' attitudes are giving rather than taking. That seems to be what God is saying." We hadn't coached Nevaeh on this point so she was giving her honest opinion of what she thought God's attitude was, based on what she'd learned about God from us and the Guardian Angel. Her interpretation was more or less right so I let it stand (actually less right but more useful). Julia was quick to agree, tacking on something we'd planned to insert at an opportune moment, "Exactly right! God doesn't really care about WHAT we do, but It does care about WHY we do it. Speaking of God, all of you should remember that you swore an oath to God not to spread any of Mark's secrets. You've seen that the Guardian Angel does kill people, so you'd be committing suicide if you tried to tell anyone that Carol has tasted Mark's cum. Breaking an oath to God would be a VERY serious mistake, especially because the oath was to protect Mark and you know he's VERY important to God." "{Gulp}." They were scared. I could have scared them a great deal more, but I didn't want to. Telling them about Carol drinking my cum was a test. Not of their integrity. They were chosen only for their art skills and being non-bi-phobic, so their integrity would be random. Over the nine of them, some were bound to be somewhat dishonest. What we were testing was the effectiveness of the "Oath to God" tactic because one day it might be useful to be confident that it was a very powerful motivator. Carol's drinking my cum was very salacious and would make wonderful gossip, so if the story never gets out the Oath will have proved itself. If the story does get out, it won't matter much. It wasn't the slightest bit illegal because it was being done 'second hand' (so to speak), and it wasn't even particularly immoral because a girl was doing it. Girls don't get in legal trouble for sex. Hollywood sluts can flash their pussies and the press clamors to take photos, but if a Hollywood male flashed his cock in public, he'd be ridiculed, convicted of a crime and sent to jail. If questioned about it, Carol would simply say, "I'm a lesbian but I was curious about how guys taste. I was never going to ask any guy to give me some directly, but Julia and Ava let me try it from them. My curiosity has been satisfied now and I don't like the taste so I won't be doing it again." If she's feeling particularly racy, Carol could add, "I'm happy to remain a lesbian because girls taste much better." If I'm asked about it, I'll simply say, "I was shocked when Carol did it. I understand why she didn't want to taste any other guy, and I feel some pride that she does feel safe about me, but I SINCERELY hope she never does it again because it made me feel very uncomfortable. Mom has told me that sharing is good, but I'm pretty sure she didn't mean that so I'm going to draw the line." The worst that would happen is that our mailroom would be inundated with thousands of letters from guys offering to let Carol suck their dicks. We'd have to put some of our male staff on the letter-opening job for a couple of weeks, rather than the usual middle-aged ladies, to intercept all the self-promoting pictures. Or maybe we should let the 'ladies' choose whether to be temporarily swapped out of that job. The SCS girls understood the possible lethality of their oath, and it naturally worried them, so I started cheering them up. "Relax, provided you keep your mouths shut about my secrets then you've got nothing to worry about." It wasn't that easy to relax them, but I eventually distracted them by talking about sex. Using the earlier events as the starting point, I got a discussion going about girl-on-girl sex, group sex, drinking my jism, and other topics. Initially it was just me and my girls talking, but the SCS girls eventually started participating. The conversation was just more bullshit to justify what we wanted the girls to believe about sex. As it happened, what I was saying was the truth because there's nothing immoral about girl-on-girl action. It's a good, happy, fun and friendly activity. As Julia pointed out, "If they're both generously trying to please each other, it's obviously moral." The same argument applied to group sex too. I was even happy to answer the obvious question with, "Sure. If I meet a guy that I sincerely want to give physical pleasure to, then that'll be fine with me." Despite its tiny size, "if" is an amazingly useful word. My girls kept linking sex to several other things that they knew girls loved, such as, "It's SO romantic making love in Paris. Whenever he's feeling especially sentimental, Mark can fly all his girlfriends to Paris for a romantic getaway. We can make love all night, go to private viewings of designer collections during the day, and fantastic restaurants, art galleries and the world's best theater shows in the evenings, with all of us dressed in the VERY best designer dresses available. Nevaeh, get your maroon dress out of the closet." "Good idea!" exclaimed Nevaeh happily, extracting herself from under Carol and rushing to get it. I'm not into fashion, but I LOVE fashion where there's not much of it for the girl to get into. That dress of Nevaeh's has virtually no front, is even sexier than Carol's first special occasion dress, and it somehow manages to be FAR classier too (it probably cost nearly a hundred times more, so it should look classy). Although it's way more glamorous and impressive than that dress of Carol's, hers will always have a VERY special place in my heart. Not that Nevaeh ever could, but if she wore her dress to a school social, at least half the guys would mess their shorts. That's no joke! If I had seen Nevaeh in it before Julia provided me with so much sexual experience, I have no doubt that I would've blown off in my jockeys. I get very hard when I see her wear it. She's only had it for two weeks, but I've asked her to wear it several times, even if only temporarily. I'm no fool! When Nevaeh returned with her dress, even just holding it up on its hanger blew the socks off our visitors (males and females are different; with males it would have blown "in their jockeys"). Amid their praises, they demanded that Nevaeh put it on; their depression over the threat of being killed by the angel completely forgotten as it had no chance of competing with high fashion. Nevaeh stripped down to her panties in front of all of us, then put the dress on. Then she had to rush back to the closet because she'd inexplicably forgotten to get the shoes the first time. On her return she paraded back and forth giving twirls whenever asked and - I imagine - smiling from ear to ear the whole time (my eyes rarely got up that high, so I'm only guessing about that). When the audience was sufficiently cheered up and excited, Nevaeh snuggled into Carol's lap. Carol gave her another passionate kiss and took advantage of the openings provided by the dress to hug and fondle Nevaeh very intimately. The audience was scandalized and oh so jealous, of the dress and the rich lifestyle it implied. In their current mood, and with Carol and Nevaeh's making out being something that God and I approved of - I'm not sure which of us the girls thought was the more important to butter up to, not that it mattered since we were the same - some of the other SCS girls tried to initiate some girl-on-girl activity. Nothing heavy; they just wanted to improve their chance of being picked to live with me. After seeing such an elegant and obviously expensive dress, they were inspired to try harder to achieve that goal (am I being too cynical?). None of my girls (Carol, Julia or Ava) wanted to cuddle with any of the other SCS girls, and some of the SCS girls weren't happy about receiving such attention from their friends either, so I stopped those things happening in a way that gave the impression that I was very moral. Between my proximity sense and my previous careful studying of their bisexual attitudes, I was able to talk accurately about how each of them felt about the issue. Two pairs of the SCS girls were friendly enough to cuddle together, but I otherwise claimed the moral high ground by insisting that no one else do anything sexual, telling them, "There's NEVER any sexual pressure here. That would be VERY immoral!..." You know how that particular line of our bullshit goes. It's a great tactic because the more you initially tell girls you're not after sex, the more sex you'll get later. Not only does saying such things make them lower their defenses making "later" possible, but "later" also lasts FAR longer than "initially". It's a great tactic with reluctant girls if you can convey it convincingly. In this case it wasn't sex with these girls that I was after, but that doesn't invalidate my point nor stop the tactic being useful in this circumstance. Nevaeh introduced another of her pre-arranged topics while we were eating. She suggested to her schoolmates, "After dinner, we should make a list of all the girls in our school that we think Mark might like, and phone to invite them to come here. I've got the phone numbers of a few girls in my grade that he might like, and I'm sure the rest of you have a lot more numbers too." Then she started quoting individual names and asking the other girls whether they judged that person good for me or not. Nevaeh had surprised her schoolmates yet again, and not in a good way. They were unhappy at the idea of increasing the number of competitors. They were all busy trying to think of a diplomatic way of killing Nevaeh's unwelcome idea. In the quiet caused by the other girls' inability to find a suitable response, Julia said, "Before you start making that list, you need a better idea of what Mark wants in a girlfriend. Mark, give them some ideas of what sort of girlfriend you'd like them to find for you." "That's easy: a girl like Nevaeh. I'm becoming very impressed by you, Nevaeh. You and Julia hit it off very quickly, and judging by the smile on Carol's face, she likes you a great deal too. I'm amazed by how quickly you've understood the implications of the Guardian Angel being in my life. When we were around the pool just before we went to Noumea, you were the first to show that you trusted me, and the first to maturely understand that it was okay to examine my cock when I offered it. Every time we talk you impress me more. This evening you stripped in front of us to put that dress on, again showing maturity and trust. And just now you proved yourself to be very helpful and unselfish by suggesting other girls that I might like. I'd never be so silly as to choose a girl for her physical beauty, but you've even got that going for you to a spectacular degree. If there are any other girls at SCS who are even half as mature, understanding and generous as you, then I would love to meet them." In the ensuing conversation about my ideal girl in general, and Nevaeh in particular, I made sure I praised her for understanding that she wasn't in a competition with any other girls. I explained that point to the others in case they weren't as smart as Nevaeh, "I can have as many girlfriends as I want living here. I can even expand the house and buy a much bigger bed if necessary. There may be no other girls at SCS that appeal to me, or there might be several of you. If my girls and I invite Nevaeh to move in here - as is looking increasingly likely - that doesn't reduce the chance any of you have of getting the same invitation. If I like you well enough, if I think you'll make all the rest of us happy, and that you will benefit from being part of our lives, then I will invite you. If I don't think it'd work out, then I won't invite you. The only person you're competing with is yourself. Nevaeh's intelligence and generosity in suggesting helping me meet other girls from SCS is a perfect example of why she'll fit in so wonderfully with us." Thereby letting the other nine SCS girls know that they should do their best to find me other girls too, which should greatly help my SCS project. I finished with, "Julia offered to host Nevaeh's birthday party here in a couple of days, and I think that'll be a good time for my girls and me to get to know Nevaeh's parents better. That'll help us decide whether to invite Nevaeh to join us because I've got a feeling that decision will be coming up soon." The birthday party had been arranged before we went to Noumea. I'd thought about canceling it because of the Surveillance Problem, but had decided it was okay to carry on with. Paul didn't know about the Problem yet, but he wouldn't be complacent about lots of people coming into our property. Dad would ask Paul a question or two, just to make sure. We didn't want the surveillers slipping in a ringer or an adult posing as the parent of one of the attendees. [The bugs never revealed such a plan. Perhaps the surveillers hadn't known about the party in time, or had been too worried about getting close to me. That wasn't definitive proof they wouldn't try though, as we were sure the power behind the surveillers could easily carry out their own operations if they wanted to. Paul's guys were required to be very careful screening everyone who entered the property through the gate, and to be especially vigilant about someone coming over a wall as they could have mingled with the crowd.] "Oh boy!" exclaimed Nevaeh excitedly. "I hope you invite me, and I hope my parents let me live here." Nevaeh knew she was already invited and that the only issue was how long it would take to talk her parents into it; preferably much less than the year it would take for her to turn eighteen and come even if her parents objected. It was easy to convince the other nine SCS girls what they needed to do in order to be invited to live with us. With Nevaeh serving as an example of what we considered the perfect behavior (meaning "perfect for my project"), the others were easy to push in the same direction. Those of the first-contact nine that didn't think themselves pretty - most of them because nearly all girls consider themselves ugly unless they consider themselves utterly gorgeous - worried about that deficiency ruining their chances with me. I was able to say, "You KNOW why Nevaeh is doing so well, and it's obviously nothing to do with her beauty. I'm glad that she's beautiful, but I'm not like the stupidly immature boys that you're used to. It's Nevaeh's wisdom and inner-beauty that is impressing us and making her our good friend." They believed me because they had several times seen Nevaeh be surprisingly smart with us. It was useful to reassure the non-beautiful SCS girls about this point because I wanted all of them to be working hard to get me my target girls. I especially didn't want any of them to be negative about me. Getting more SCS girls would be easier if every girl the other girls talked to raved about how wonderful I was. There is no strategy better for seducing a girl than using other girls to do it for you, because girls trust other girls. Having fourteen girls help me - these nine plus Nevaeh, Julia, Carol, Ava, and Donna sometimes - would be even more effective. I'd encouraged Nevaeh to invite almost every one of her school's 11th and 12th grade girls to her birthday party, leaving out only those that she actively disliked. We expected every one of the invitees to attend, whereupon we'd all work on seducing them. The first-contact nine wouldn't know that seduction was what they were doing for me, but that point of ignorance didn't matter at all; they just had to rave about how wonderful I was and the listeners' mating instincts would rise to the occasion. Another issue I was asked about was the bisexuality requirement for the other girls that Nevaeh was making the rest of the first-contact nine discuss inviting around to meet me. That was easy to answer for someone as moral as me: "Don't worry about it. I have no interest with getting sexual with so many girls so it doesn't matter. Plus it's impossible to predict how girls will react once they understand that society's negative attitude to bisexuality is wrong. Look at Nevaeh. I bet none of you would have guessed that she was bisexual, but she became enthusiastic about it as soon as she understood God's true morality." My goal of having sex with every junior and senior beauty didn't have anything to do with their being bisexual, so it would be silly of me to use that attitude as a requirement regardless of how silly girls were for being bi-phobic. I'd excluded the deluded girls from the first-contact group only because there was too much chance that the sexual atmosphere I'd be building would cause them to get righteously angry, and then troublesome. I let the girls discuss their schoolmates for a while, but when they asked about ringing them to invite them to come over, I said, "I think it's wonderful that you want to introduce your friends to me, but let's not do that this evening. Keep making your list, but all I'll do is memorize their names so I can pay particular attention to them at Nevaeh's party. We'll discuss what to do next at the unveiling party." (Nevaeh's birthday party is on Friday evening, the art project's formal unveiling on Saturday afternoon.) Once the list was completed and I memorized it - impressing everyone with how quickly I could do that - I started a new topic: "I don't want any of you to tell anyone else about my looking for another girlfriend or two." I had decided that the rest of the SCS girls would be told far less than the first-contact nine had been. I was going to play safe for a while because of the Surveillance Problem and because I didn't want a sexually oriented rumor to get back to Nevaeh's parents, as that would reduce her chance of moving in here. That was far more important than my recreational project. We discussed how we would talk to the rest of the SCS girls, during which one of the current girls digressed to ask me, "Are you interested in meeting my 20-year old sister? I think she'd like you." "Good on you for offering, but no thanks. If we opened it up beyond your school's juniors and seniors, to sisters, cousins, friends, etc., it could easily expand out of control. Let's just stick to your schoolmates for now." My project with these girls was focused on SCS, so adding non-SCS girls would be a distraction. Besides, the offering girl wasn't pretty, so her sister probably wasn't either. -- To help these girls realize how lucky they were, so they'd try harder, I added, "It's easy with you SCS girls because you can come to the same events, keep each other informed, etc. Adding girls that don't go to your school would be much harder to manage. I don't want more candidates just for the sake of more. Nevaeh's quality makes me wonder that other SCS girls might be as good as her, so that's where I'll focus for now. If I just wanted more candidates, I could put adverts for a live-in girlfriend in newspapers and on TV across the country, and I'd get millions of..." "That's a GREAT idea, Mark!" enthused a suddenly excited Julia. "We could make a list of criteria and hire a vetting panel that could..." "Down girl! I don't want to..." "But we could find FANTASTIC women! Intelligent, accomplished, beautiful women. You wouldn't have to do the work because I could hire people to process all the applications." "I'll explain later why I don't want to do it. Drop it for now please. I was just using that as an example to explain that I'm not interested in looking beyond SCS." "But there'll be some WONDERFUL..." "DROP it, Julia!" My commanding voice got her attention. With humility - which Julia was proud to show us - she responded, "Yes, Mark." Julia hadn't had time to get properly excited so it wasn't difficult for her to remember that she was meant to obey me. It might be more difficult when she reopened this issue later, as she was certain to do. [And did, as soon as the SCS girls had left. I had two major reasons for refusing: I need more maturity before I'm capable of forming successful relationships with high-quality women, and we'll be moving around too much. In eight months we'll be moving to be near whichever university I choose to go to for my doctorates, and about two years after that we'll probably move to wherever I'll go to work. Once we're settled will be the right time to start searching for seriously high-quality women to join us. Hopefully I'll be mature enough by then. Julia agreed with my reasons and was very happy that I was planning ahead. I accepted her compliment, even though my thinking about the issue had mostly been because I was conscious that my SCS project was immature. That I still wanted to proceed with that project meant I was particularly conscious of my immaturity. Being conscious of it was probably the first sign of losing it, but I knew I wasn't able to achieve a successful relationship with a young woman, especially one who'd been picked as the best of those found from Julia's nationwide systematic search. It'd be better for me to learn by casually socializing with the young women I'd meet at University first, before unleashing Julia's ambitions for me.] I resumed our discussion with our nine guests/victims/foot-in-the-doors. It was just more explaining what I wanted from them, with some bullshit about my reasons. It had crossed my minds - especially the horny ones - that I could give the first-contact girls a sex demonstration at the end of this evening. I wouldn't touch them, but I'd let them watch Julia, Ava and me having sex together. In light of my "play safe" decision, I easily decided against doing that. These girls were HIGHLY motivated already, so there was no point in impressing them even more. We finished our discussion, reminded the girls of their oaths not to blab any secrets to anyone no matter how much they wanted to tell their friends about this, and then we sent them home. ------- We had Nevaeh's birthday party Friday evening, and Saturday afternoon was the formal unveiling of the two finished art projects. We put quite a lot of effort into making sure both events went very well, using them to help my project along and to help improve Nevaeh's parents' opinions of us. From an outsider's perspective, Nevaeh's birthday party was even better than some of those that we throw for ourselves. Our own parties involve our friends so we have plenty of fun without external 'gimmicks', but for Nevaeh's we wanted to impress her entire school. Two fantastic bands were flown in, awesome food supplied, we had a couple of expert and highly entertaining barmen - one for the alcoholic bar, the other for the youngsters' bar - great decorations, etc. Nevaeh got some VERY enviable presents from all of us too. For example, although Nevaeh knew it was actually from me, the crowd was told that Julia had given Nevaeh a small Lexus (one of the mid-sized "IS" models). Julia didn't just hand over the keys. I had the Guardian Angel float the wrapped-up car over the heads of the crowd, then float Nevaeh up so she could pull the huge bow open to reveal her present as the bow and wrapping fell off. The angel was very much in attendance to further lift this party above what anyone else's party could EVER achieve. The next afternoon's unveiling party was similarly successful. There were far more adults than kids in attendance for the second event: the school's Principal, the Art teacher, and several other SCS people who had horned in; we invited the city mayor and councilors to encourage them to continue the art projects with civic buildings; the parents of all the kids involved; and one national network's news-crew and a local reporter. The kids were allowed to invite a date or friend too, as long as it was done in advance so our security could vet them to prevent ringers getting in. Most of the speeches and other formal activities were performed around the Adults' Pool, next to one of the artworks. Set up in the area were a string quartet and bar, finger food was served, etc. The Guardian Angel provided lifts for people to the stable and back again so they could admire the other painting. After all the formalities were over, we split into groups and gave guided tours through the Adults' and Kids' houses. After which the adults returned back to the Adults' House while the kids hung around the Kids' Pool, where we had more food and a sound system playing music that was 250 years less old fashioned. Those that wanted to could swim, as mentioned on the invites. My girls and I changed into conservative swimsuits to join the swimmers for a while. Donna and Ava supervised horse rides for anyone who wanted them, and the angel also provided some entertainment, although nothing too spectacular. The media had been sent away, and in the absence of the adults, my girls and I were better able to make progress on my SCS project. Our master bedroom's closet was still being excavated and fitted out, with my bed still hidden, so the Grand Tours hadn't revealed the full extent of my lifestyle's sexual depravity. We downplayed that aspect during our conversations, but we had no hesitation in describing every other way in which life here was wonderful. Nevaeh's parents had been worried by the attention and expense showered on their daughter at her party. Julia had told them, "We'll talk about it at the unveiling." When Julia had quietly talked to them earlier today about their daughter moving into one of our spare bedrooms, her parents had reacted fairly well. They'd several times seen how friendly Nevaeh and Julia were together, including from Julia's visits to Nevaeh's home, and weren't upset by it. They'd neither agreed with nor rejected the idea. It was going to be quietly thought about and discussed. Julia believed we'd eventually be able to talk them into consenting. We took the time to have a short meeting with my girls, Nevaeh, and the first-contact nine, during which I told them, "I don't want to do anything about gaining any more girlfriends for me at the moment. Julia has talked to Nevaeh's parents about her moving in here..." I had to pause for the resultant congratulations and girly gushes that were directed at Nevaeh, then I resumed, " ... We have told her parents only part of the truth. They know that Julia and Nevaeh are becoming very good friends, and they believe it's Julia's idea that Nevaeh moves in. That's true, but we're leaving out that Nevaeh will also become my girlfriend. We have to keep quiet about any boyfriend stuff because her parents would refuse to let her move in with a boy. Until her parents have decided, there can't be any mention of me even knowing what a girlfriend is. Once Nevaeh has settled in nicely, or if her parents have irrevocably refused although we hope that's unlikely, then I can resume looking for another girlfriend among all the older girls at your school. Having Nevaeh here should make it even easier for another SCS girl to get permission." I added the last sentence to discourage any of these nine competitively sabotaging Nevaeh's chances, and I went on to specifically discuss possible sabotage, including reminding them that if they did that, then they'd be breaking the oath they'd made to God. I even got the angel to appear and agree to tell me if any of the girls sabotaged Nevaeh's chances. I was VERY forceful about their not doing ANYTHING to diminish Nevaeh's getting permission. By the time I'd finished, the first-contact nine were fearful of being in the same city as Nevaeh's parents. I had thought of asking the first-contact girls to try to encourage Nevaeh's parents into agreeing, but had decided that it was far too likely to backfire so I just warned them off instead. The party and unveiling were hugely successful events by every possible measure: The art projects had been done very well, so the school, city council and kids wanted to continue with them when school restarted next week. There appeared to be so many eager students that there would need to be four such projects. We volunteered two additional sites on our property, and the city would provide the other two. Nevaeh's parents hadn't rejected their daughter's proposed change of address. My SCS project was going as well as it could without its subjects knowing anything about it. My unaware future conquests thought we were great people and they envied our lifestyle. Other than the first-contact nine, they had no idea of the live-in girlfriend bait that I would be dangling in front of them when the time was right. I had allocated part of one of our underground storerooms (off the vehicular tunnel) for storing all the school's outdoor art-project equipment: ladders, paint, brushes, overalls, etc. Our staff could provide trucking services to and from the other project sites when required. We also set up one of the large apartments in the Visitors' Quarters for them to manage their various outdoor projects from. I pointed out to their Principal that our storage and meeting rooms were always available, while their access to the school's buildings was limited outside of school hours. Thus I would have plenty of opportunities for further contact with several SCS students, and through them, all the other junior and senior girls. We got some very good national press. That the Andersons in general, and the Resurrected Boy in particular, were doing Good things for a Christian school made us seem less like a family of demons that should be sent back to Hell. In addition, the Guardian Angel's helpfulness came in for a considerable amount of comment. Joe Public said in an on-the-street interview: "It's amazing that we have an angel living on Earth, even if it's a strange type of one. It's very nice of it to be helpful and fun, but I guess that's what a little angel would do." It wasn't a profound comment, but it accurately reflected the consensus of the non-hysterical, no-vested-interest members of the public. The Guardian Angel's helpfulness was nicely reducing the chance of a member of the public attacking us, and it was getting me closer to the day when I could fly around and use my NP openly, provided it appears that my Guardian Angel is doing it. I continued to take my SCS project very slowly because of Nevaeh's parents and the Surveillance Problem. In one respect the Problem became less worrying as it was clear that they were being ultra-cautious [it took them a few more weeks before their confidence made them more invasive]. My bugs and understanding of their operational caution let me relax somewhat, although I was getting increasingly frustrated that I couldn't penetrate beyond the front-line operatives, and worried about what the power behind them might eventually be used for. When the new school year started in late-September, the SCS art classes were very popular, and almost every budding artist was eager to participate in an extra-credit outdoor art project. In part because the first two teams had made very nice pocket money out of it - and that rarely happens from doing schoolwork. I agreed to sponsor four such projects, two each from the 11th and 12th grades. I had several opportunities to interact with them, but didn't do anything more than be politely social as I got to know them. I smiled happily at girls that flirted with me, but didn't let them take it any further. One event I did create was to invite the nine first-contact girls around for dinner and a chat. As soon as the last of them arrived, I asked them all to cook dinner for us. I used the excuse that we needed dinner anyway, and one of my minor criteria for an ideal girlfriend was that she be a good cook, so it'd be useful for me to see how good each of these nine were. That was true to a small degree, although I'm not fussy about food quality. The main reason was so I could observe them to learn who were naturally cooperative or competitive. It looked like the Surveillance Problem was going to be hard to get rid of, so I might be working with these girls for quite a while, making it a good idea to get to know their ability to work with others. Unlike the kitchenette in my wing of our Peoria modular home, the kitchen in our hilltop home is as good as money could make it. Julia had been determined that the Kids' House reflected how awesome she considered me. Nine cooks working at once was doable but awkward for them, which helped me see them interact. I subtly encouraged their competitiveness, so it was an excellent exercise. Nevaeh's sister Grace made her blackmail threat a few days after the birthday party. If she blabbed her lies (she thought) to her parents it risked upsetting Nevaeh's moving in with us. Nevaeh certainly couldn't prove her innocence by pointing at her hymen because that was long gone, that loss increasing our worry now. Paying Grace off would only encourage further blackmailing so I had the Guardian Angel give Grace a very powerful lesson. It was a slight risk because of the surveillers, but Dad had already confirmed that their infrared cameras couldn't detect him when he was inside black sheets, and all their surveillance was aimed at our home so it was fairly safe for me to teach Grace her lesson. It went very much as previously described. In the middle of the day a couple of Saturdays after school restarted, the Guardian Angel flew my girls and me to the Aquatic Center, causing quite a stir. We flew slowly so were recorded arriving on several cellphone cameras, and by many dozens more when we left after our swims. While we were at the pools, quite a few people tried to make nuisances of themselves by begging me or my girls for flights. The Guardian Angel, which remained visible the whole time, firmly but gently pushed everyone away. People continued to nag us. Imagine nagging an angel! People are so rude. I got the Center's management to let me use the public address system. Included in my announcement was: "You're bothering an ANGEL! It won't hurt you because you aren't being threatening, but it's still foolish of you annoy something so powerful. It has NEVER done anything anyone has ever asked it; not even me. We were about to get in our car to drive here when it picked us up and flew us. I have no idea what its reasons were because it never explains itself to me. It's a super-intelligent, super-powerful, servant of God, not something that you should nag because you want to have some fun. Please give it your respect." On my return to my group, the angel split into four and they stationed themselves at the corners of a square around us, impressing and intimidating people. Anyone who tried to get the angel to do something after that was pushed away increasingly forcefully, in some cases knocking them over and bulldozing them into a pool. People got the idea. I gave a couple of telephone interviews when I got home, during which I made the point: "I don't mean to be insulting, but I can't understand how people can be so stupid as to nag US for rides. They didn't nag the angel directly, but picked on us. From what I understand, God created the angels billions of years ago, they are awesomely powerful, and if I interpret what Archangel Michael said correctly, they even contain some of God's essence. How can people possibly think that my sister or I can tell a creature like that what to do? We're ANTS compared to it! -- "In all seriousness, God sent the Guardian Angel not just to keep me safe from the lethal attacks made by mentally disturbed Christians and the morally deficient Government, but also to ensure my quality of life. Clearly the angel is extremely moral, but if people keep annoying me by nagging incessantly every time I appear in public, the angel might decide that it needs to give people a lesson. You know how it gives lessons, so I strongly suggest that people control themselves. Treat me just like an ordinary person and everything will be fine." The incident made national news and got nothing but good comments, except about the foolish people who'd risked their lives by nagging me for a joyride from the angel. I did a few other PR stunts from time to time, always without prior warning so the surveillers wouldn't be able take advantage of them. I did usually let them carry out their plans, but only when I knew in advance exactly what they were and that they wouldn't be harmful or divulge information I wanted kept secret. For an example of one of my PR stunts, because my previous church appearance had worked so wonderfully, I did another one. On a Sunday morning I walked into another church during their service. It wasn't the Ninnies' church because it hadn't been rebuilt yet, and it wasn't the church I'd visited last time, but was that of one of the more sensible congregations in town, judging by their being polite after my resurrection. After my appearance had disturbed the service, I said, "I'm sorry for disturbing your service, but the angel directed me to come this way." It's SO useful being able to blame the angel for everything I want to avoid responsibility for! "I'm not a preacher but I will offer to come to the front and answer any questions any of you might have. Or I'll leave if you'd rather carry on with your normal service?" They urged me to the front where I was very diplomatic in my answers, the angel did appear but refused to answer any questions itself, and the incident got more good press. We, especially Nevaeh and Julia, continued to work on Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Nevaeh was DESPERATE to move in with us. She was sure that it would be the greatest opportunity and most important event of her entire life. Teenagers very often claim that - usually about being allowed to attend the next party - but in this case Nevaeh's parents could see that she was probably right. I didn't see most of what Nevaeh and Julia did because it was best for me to keep a low profile. I did know about one of their better tricks: Nevaeh borrowed Vanessa's jet for a day trip to LA, taking nearly twenty of her closest friends, her mother, a few of the other girls' mothers, my girls and me. The jaunt let me become friendlier with some of the 11th grade girls, but the main purpose was to demonstrate to Nevaeh's parents that she was accepted by us and that when I was in Nevaeh's company, my behavior was of a boy who was very happy with his sole girlfriend: Julia. I was friendly and slightly affectionate with Ava, but only in the same way I was with Carol. Nevaeh's parents were somewhat reassured by my actions, and were amazed and impressed that their daughter could borrow the Anderson family jet. The other mothers' envy significantly helped our case too. (Religion is simply mass brainwashing, and the people who fall for it are those who are easily swayed by mass opinion. Nevaeh's parents were very religious, so were especially easily swayed by other people's opinions, especially if those people were already part of their inner group). Speaking of jets, we'd recently put our name down for a BBJ3, the stretch version of the Business Jet we already had. One family jet wasn't enough. It would take two years and about $85 million before we got it, so we might have to lease another jet for a while as a stopgap. We'd ordered it mostly because my families would split in half when I went to a university and it'd be easier for us to get around if each group had their own jet. NP wasn't really a substitute for a plane as NP required me to go on the flight, and we'd rather only do short flights with NP as Flying Sleds lack bathroom facilities. Keeping them short also makes us a little different from Archangel Michael/Majestic Countdown, who flew all over the country. Unless something unexpected happened, the kids would get the new plane as Vanessa was fine with the BBJ2 as she rarely needs it to carry more than thirty people. BBJ3s have 11% more cabin area than BBJ2s but we'd be able to configure it to carry about 50% more people as we wouldn't need so many rooms; mainly just a large bedroom and a spa pool room (yes, you can have spa pools in planes). I wouldn't bother working out the final fitout design until the plane is in production at Boeing, but it was fun to think about it. If Vanessa ever does need to transport more people than her plane can handle, I certainly won't begrudge swapping planes for a while. ------- Chapter 405: Nevaeh Moves in, and Widening My SCS Project Late-September to Mid-November 2007 Shortly after the major job of excavating and fitting out the girls' closet was completed, Nevaeh's parents gave their consent for Nevaeh to move in with us. I teased Julia with how the timing indicated which event she considered the essential prerequisite for the other. We set up one of the spare bedrooms to look like it was Nevaeh's, but that was just for appearance's sake. One of the advantages of having our own security - in addition to preventing our being murdered in our sleep by religious nutcases - was that Nevaeh's parents couldn't catch us unawares. Our security is not allowed to let ANYONE, not even themselves, near either of our homes unless they get our prior approval. Emergencies are the only exception, and the siren had better be wailing already. Other than for misleading her parents, Nevaeh's bedroom will only get used for some of her future "Quality Time" pairings with me, Carol or Ava (Nevaeh's "quality times" with Julia happen in the closet). With five of us living in our big relationship, there are quite a few pair combinations, so quite a few individual relationships to nurture. Nevaeh's permanent arrival didn't make any substantial difference to her or our sex-life as she'd been coming and going often anyway, and she'd even been able to stay overnight a few times so we'd already enjoyed sleeping with her. We still had a celebratory orgy though, as a matter of principle. Donna helped us welcome Nevaeh, which was good of her. We knew that the main effect from having Nevaeh live with us would be on our mental and emotional relationships with her rather than our physical ones. Having her around all the time would make it easier for us to get to know each other, to do things spontaneously, to have time for casual conversations, etc. It'd simply be nicer. To say that Nevaeh was overjoyed would be understating the case ridiculously. Nevaeh thought we were INCREDIBLE people! I had, after all, been resurrected and assigned my own angel, which when you think about it is pretty incredible. Our wealth and lifestyle - including our sexual lifestyle - also made her extremely happy. You'd think that her close proximity to us would cause her opinions to become more ordinary, but that didn't happen. She simply didn't judge us, believing that almost everything we did was right. Even if I'd farted in bed - my body didn't do that anymore so this is a hypothetical example - she still wouldn't have been disillusioned into seeing me as a normal person. I still had plenty of foibles, but reality never seemed to affect her opinions of me or of us. It would be reasonably accurate to say she worshipped us. Nevaeh was certainly the happiest of us. Next happiest was Julia since both girls LOVED fashion. Left to themselves, Nevaeh and Julia would rather talk fashion than have sex together, which is WRONG in so many ways! I joke about fashion quite often - I get lots of inspiration for my humor - but it is great to see my girls so happy, including so happy together. Carol and Nevaeh also got along very well because they were the same age, had quieter than normal and quite moral personalities, and had similar body shapes which was convenient given all the clothes swapping they did. I could have sworn that both girls had more than enough clothes of their own and therefore had no need to swap to find something to wear, but apparently I was wrong. Carol and Nevaeh also had quite a lot of sexual attraction for each other. Proximity showed me that Carol's lust was genuine, not part of any playacting she was doing. Nevaeh's reciprocation was genuine too. Ava had the least to do with Nevaeh but that wasn't a problem. Ava and Nevaeh were both extremely non-judgmental and couldn't be easier to get along with. The activity they had most in common was sex. Ava is an unusually enthusiastic and fun lover, and once Nevaeh had learned from God that sex was Good, she also became very enthusiastic about it - and why not! Outside of sex, Nevaeh wasn't interested in anything athletic so didn't have much in common with Ava, except that both of them respected Julia and me enormously. Don't get the impression that Ava was left out at all. She pursued her athletic interests with Donna, her many friends and sometimes with me, and all of us could pursue whatever interests we wanted. Ava got plenty of friendship from us, and had heaps of her own friends. From Nevaeh's perspective, and in summary: Ava was fun, Carol was a perfect sister with benefits, and Julia was a highly respected big sister. I was on a whole different level, so different that Nevaeh didn't even think to judge me. God already had, so it was unnecessary and wrong for Nevaeh to. We made two half-revelations to Nevaeh once she was one of us. The first was that we explained that the rings that Julia, Carol and I wore were a type of informal wedding ring. "We love each other so much that we like to think of ourselves as married until death do us part, which is why the rings are blood-red, to represent our life." We explained the significance of Ava's half-red ring, and said that when she [Nevaeh] was loved enough by us, we would get her a half-red ring too. It was a nicer conversation in reality than how it reads. We did it well, and that we were expecting to love Nevaeh that much made her burst into happy-tears. That evening Nevaeh volunteered to sleep on the outside of the bed, so Carol and Julia could sleep next to me. My sleeping in the middle was enforced, but the girls had deliberately not adopted a pattern for their positions, preferring to mix it up. Nevaeh's suggestion was refused, Julia and Carol insisting that we continued to shuffle the girls every night. Sometimes the sleeping positions were truly random; just where we'd ended up when the sex stopped, although I was always pushed toward the middle if I wasn't already between two of the girls. Other times one of the girls would either ask to sleep next to me, or would suggest a rearrangement because they anticipated that one of them might want to be next to me. It was never democratic because there were never any votes. Certainly I was rarely asked. The girls assumed they were in charge of our sleeping positions and it seemed to work fine. Julia was particularly careful to ensure there was plenty of variation in our sleeping positions, I think because she was ashamed of her failure to spot Ron's body changing into Archangel Michael's. It was very convenient that I could study from bed and fly myself out of it when I wanted to get up early, because clambering out with two bedmates on both sides would've been very awkward. The girls also managed our "Quality Time" sessions, except that I quite often felt the desire - nearly always in the emotional rather than physical sense - to request a night alone with one of them. My suggestion that I didn't need to sleep in the middle of the big bed had always been instantly rejected, but my requests for quality time sessions were always immediately honored. Why my girls had no hesitation in reacting so differently to my two types of sleeping-position requests was yet another example of how females truly do seem to operate from different assumptions and rules than males. The second half-revelation for Nevaeh was concerning my control of the Guardian Angel. We didn't divulge the truth to her as everyone, parents included, considered that FAR too dangerous, but we let her see that the angel was much more cooperative with me than any outsider knew. We told her that it could read my mind and that I could even send my thoughts to it. "We think that God must have done that to me when He repaired my mind after the CIA's damage." We made sure that Nevaeh understood that when the lights flicked off from across the room after Julia told me, "Please turn out the lights, Mark," that Julia was really asking me to ask the angel, but was too lazy to keep saying that in full. Nevaeh believed everything we told her, so within a few days we were able to talk and behave naturally around her without there being any risk of her leaping to the right conclusion. We didn't reveal to Nevaeh that I studied while lying in bed, as we couldn't think of a believable explanation for it. She didn't even know about the downstairs study. As far as she knew, I did my studying in the upstairs study at the same time as the girls were doing their studying. I truly did study then, using my eyes to read its screens. I just had a sight blob reading far more screens downstairs at the same time, and at other times too. Soon after Nevaeh moved in we had her family over for dinner a couple of times only a few days apart. The first time was in the Adults' House so all of my two families could formally meet all of hers, and a few days later in the Kids' House so her family could get to know Nevaeh's housemates better. Both dinners were successful, and the Smiths were comfortable with Nevaeh living with us. Nevaeh was shining with happiness and it would be difficult for any parent to object to a boy who had God's evident and extreme approval. Like everyone else outside my core group, Nevaeh's family thought that her relationship with us had started with a fashion discussion between her and Julia, they'd hit it off, the rest of us had met her and liked her too, and that she was slowly drifting into being one of my girlfriends. That was true in only one respect: that fashion had been critical to my initial interest in Nevaeh, specifically how fantastic she'd looked floating outside our gates when all of her fashion had been lying on the ground beneath her. We downplayed the sexual element and spouted lots of bullshit along the lines of, "Yes, our kissing and cuddling probably will progress further, but only when it's morally right to do so." The size of my bed was mostly blamed on Julia's vicarious megalomania on my behalf. That was believable because our home contained MANY other examples of Julia's excessiveness. There were very few places where she hadn't gone over the top. We admitted that Ava did sleep with Julia and me sometimes: "When she feels the need for our companionship." I also added, "It's amazing what a difference having an angel living with us makes. We KNOW what God approves of, and He is not nearly as concerned about prim and proper as most people think, not when there is honest love involved. Love is very important to God." It was difficult for the Smiths to disagree or condemn us after that. One point worth mentioning is that Mrs. Smith - whom I now called Anne - used the excuse of showing the house to Nevaeh's brothers as a reason to see it again herself. Having anticipated another Grand Tour, I'd left a pile of cash on the side of my desk in the study and had made sure Grace saw it during the Tour. Grace was poor these days because Nevaeh was making her donate half her allowance to charity, and we'd suspected that she might fall into a suitably baited trap. Later that evening, Grace excused herself from the table ostensibly to visit the bathroom. She instead headed straight for our study, closed her eyes, walked backward into it, then felt around behind her for the cash. Her tactic failed to fool the mini-Guardian Angel, for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately it was only THIS time that she failed to fool it - by which I mean that the trap had been placed because Nevaeh suspected that Grace had been misbehaving again out of all of our sights. It was predictable that over time she'd lose her fear of the angel and backslide into being a very bad girl again, which Nevaeh didn't want. Nevaeh and I had prepared for the possibility of Grace going for the money, and the angel now gave Nevaeh the signal: two taps on the top of her head. Nevaeh excused herself and went to the study. Grace was being held totally immobile by many excessively strong NP-clamps, with her hand still on the cash and her mouth gagged. Nevaeh arrived and a phone floated up off a desk as the mini-angel emerged from Grace's forehead. It informed Nevaeh that Grace had misbehaved several times since it had been living inside her. Nevaeh showed the message to Grace, who looked guilty. The angel pretended to list some of Grace's transgressions, with Nevaeh holding the phone so Grace couldn't see that the angel was typing random characters. Nevaeh made rehearsed comments to imply the list's existence, such as, "Stealing! Grace, how could you be so stupid?" (If Grace hadn't stolen before, the message was okay as a reference to this event, but if she had stolen on other occasions, those are what she'd probably think the message was about.) After several more key presses, Nevaeh stated, "I can't believe how often you lie!" After Nevaeh told Grace off for thinking she could misbehave without God knowing, the phone messaged: "The misbehaviors now add up to enough dishonesty that her head should be pulled off." Nevaeh showed it to Grace, panicking her greatly. Everyone in the world knew the Guardian Angel had a propensity for removing bad people's heads. Nevaeh begged the angel not to pull Grace's head off. The angel and Nevaeh argued about it for a couple of minutes, and included several references to Grace's imminent and bloody death to scare her even more. Another threat that worked even better was when the angel typed, "I don't approve of half-punishments, but if you don't want her killed I could burn her face off so she'd be hideous. That would destroy her overweening pride." After Nevaeh showed Grace that message, the angel emerged from Grace's skull, hovered in front of her face, and turned the heat WAY up for a few seconds. It was a very effective demonstration. Grace had already been terrified by how forcefully she was being held and by the strong upward pull on her head, but the face-destroying demonstration REALLY got to her - not that she could do or say anything about it. Nevaeh finally won the argument, but only after two objectives had been achieved: Nevaeh got some experience at, and proved herself capable of, playing along with one of my little games; and Grace learned that all the times that she'd thought she'd been fooling the angel, it had been adding up her dishonesty until it was enough to cause her decapitation. Nevaeh accentuated that point by saying, "You've heard about the angels and God. They let people act however they wish and then they punish them at the end. You were STUPID thinking you were fooling God!" Grace agreed. After her wonderful sister got the angel to agree to give Grace ONE more chance, Grace - still fiercely clamped and gagged - was floated back to the dining room, with Nevaeh walking behind. Grace's floating into the room in obvious although inarticulate distress caught everyone's attention. Nevaeh explained that the Guardian Angel had caught Grace trying to steal money from me, and because its job is to protect me, it had wanted to execute Grace but Nevaeh had convinced it not to. Grace's gag was released and great hysterics burst out of her. She really was terrified, especially because she was still being held so tightly that it was causing her a considerable amount of pain. My proximity sense allowed me to know how hard I could squeeze and I was squeezing slightly harder than that. During the discussion, Nevaeh made sure to mention that the angel had told her that Grace had done several other bad things recently, and Nevaeh tricked Grace into confessing all of them to her parents. Given her terror, we were pretty confident that Grace wouldn't be brave enough to hold anything back as she was a great deal less scared of her parents than she was of the angel. In punishment - texted by the Guardian Angel - Grace's charitable donations were to increase to three-quarters of her weekly allowance, and her mother was to sort through Grace's clothes and donate 75% of them to charity, choosing the most attractive ones (sorry mankind), and "Until she turns 18, Grace is to wear clothes she will take no pride in and not wear any cosmetics, to teach her humility." The angel showed Grace one message: "If you misbehave even half as much as you have recently, I will IMMEDIATELY disfigure your face so you will be ugly for the rest of your life. No one will have time to stop me." The angel gave her neck an extra squeeze and I put an invisible heat blob over her head for a few seconds of discomforting heat. That message was cleared and replaced with another one that was shown to everyone: "Grace is not welcome at this dinner. I will hold her by your car until the end of the evening." A pitifully sobbing Grace was floated to the elevator and down to the Smith's car parked under the Kids' House, while I verbally reassured the rest of the family that there was no need to cut the dinner short, pointing out that the angel didn't want us to do that. I managed to talk them into continuing, although we had to spend a while discussing Grace's situation. It was a good opportunity to add to my reputation for being a very moral person. "The Guardian Angel is looking over my shoulder 24/7 - it never sleeps or loses concentration - so you can imagine how careful I am of always being moral. Not just me either, as everyone who lives in this house has to live very morally. It's a very good environment for Nevaeh." Because Mom has taught me that a job worth doing is worth doing well, and for other reasons, when Grace arrived at her family's car I ripped all her clothes off, stripping her totally naked. She had a FANTASTIC body, which looked especially sexy with the motions caused by her sobs. She was a slightly scaled-down version of Nevaeh, and I would have loved to get her into my bed, especially with Nevaeh at the same time. It was such a pity that would never happen. While I was admiring her body, the mini-angel emerged from her head, floated down to the pile of clothes, which immediately burst into flames. Still radiating some heat, the angel floated back into Grace's forehead, terrifying her even further. I picked up the empty burlap sack I'd placed nearby for this eventuality. It already had a hole ripped in the top, so it was easy to drop it over Grace's head. She was now dressed in a very humble way. Nevaeh had told me enough stories about Grace, and I'd seen and proximity sensed enough of her behavior myself, to agree that she had been heading toward serious trouble. Hopefully this might forcibly get her through her teenage years without more trouble, and she might wise up during her 'possession'. Speaking of Grace's attempt to obtain money from us reminds me to mention that we set Nevaeh up with an effectively bottomless credit card, gave her a sizeable monthly cash allowance, and let her loose. It didn't really effect her. She would spend her/our money to keep up with us while we were all sharing the same lifestyle, but she didn't throw it around otherwise. For example, if she was clothes shopping with Julia she wouldn't hesitate to spend several thousand dollars on a dress, but she wouldn't give any more money to her friends than she would've done before she moved in with us because she didn't consider it her money to give away. As she always had been, Nevaeh was a very moral girl, and doubtless was even more so now than before we'd met her because she thought that she was living with an angel and that God was watching her closely. (I thought of joking, "and doubtless was even more so now - apart from all the sex" but that would imply that I think that our sex is immoral, which I absolutely do not. I strongly believe it to be wonderful in every possible way. I cannot imagine how anyone seeing how joyful Nevaeh is during sex, and how she makes her partners happy, could think it immoral.) ------- Once Nevaeh was firmly part of our household, it was time to get my SCS project moving forward again. The surveillers were an even bigger problem now because they were starting to get invasive and I'd gotten nowhere useful in more than three weeks of trying to get rid of them. The good news was that they were clearly non-aggressive and our bugs were doing a superb job of letting us know what they were up to. Presumably because of Majestic Countdown's computer and paper file uncovering expertise, the local baddies weren't using computers, so all their communication and planning was verbal, telling us everything we needed to know about their front-line operations. We should know if they started planning to get aggressive, in which case the Guardian Angel would immediately demonstrate that it was even better than them at aggression. The surveillers were a pain in the ass, but they weren't stopping me from advancing my SCS project. Having Nevaeh live with us gave me an excuse to arrange various things with her schoolmates. Acting on a request of mine, Nevaeh booked out a large restaurant the next Saturday. It wasn't as upmarket as I would have liked because the best ones in town couldn't fit the number of people I wanted in one room. The invite list was almost identical to Nevaeh's birthday party, but with the addition of one beautiful bitch as required by the test that God had set me. In total, there were seventy five out of the maximum possible eighty five SCS girls coming to the dinner, the last ten not wanted for social or godly reasons. The restaurant was chosen for not being large enough to allow any of the girls to bring dates. Given the subject matter I was going to talk about, guys would have been a big nuisance. We made the necessary preparations: I spent a minute thinking about my speech, my girls spent a week agonizing over what they and I should wear, and then we went to the dinner. My girls' dresses (the term "my girls" now includes Nevaeh) blew the SCS girls away, and there was a great deal of envious talking. It was a room full of teenage girls talking fashion, so you can probably imagine how I felt! The things I put myself through in the pursuit of pussy! As soon as I could - which wasn't nearly soon enough - I got the mob to hush so I could tell them the true reason for this dinner. I constructed an NP-wall to prevent the restaurant's staff hearing us, then I started jiggling my bait: "I must confess that we had two reasons for arranging this dinner. Obviously the first and most important was to give my sister and girlfriends an excuse to get dressed up. I think they're beautiful all the time so they might as well wear any old thing, but none of them asked my opinion in the week they spent agonizing over their clothing decisions for this dinner. But I shouldn't really criticize girls' fascination with fashion because it is what brought Nevaeh into our lives and that's working out wonderfully for all of us. -- "The second reason for this dinner is something that knowing Nevaeh has made me think of. As you know, Julia is my first and main girlfriend, and she's not at all possessive. Julia's compassion for Ava exceeded the jealousy that Julia doesn't have, so Ava became my girlfriend too, and that's working out fantastically well for all of us." [The whole world knew how we took Ava in as her parents were dying, and included her in the Government settlements. In some of the interviews she'd given, Ava had said, "I love my life and everyone I live with now. I've got enough money to live anywhere in the world, but I'm exactly where I want to be, and that's got nothing to do with money." In short, the whole world knew that Ava's being with us was GOOD. It was a story that all females loved.] -- "Some time after my resurrection, the girls that I live with - Julia, Ava and Carol - decided among themselves that I'd had such a terrible time with the DHS's and CIA's tortures that I should be encouraged to do things that I would enjoy. They gave me a very big surprise when they told me that they wanted me to have one or two more girlfriends. Once I got over the shock, the angel used a cellphone to type a message that it encouraged me to do that, which shocked me again. We discussed it very carefully, and my girls convinced me that it was something that could make all of us happy if we found the right girl or girls. Neither Julia nor Ava are the slightest bit possessive of me, and obviously Carol isn't either, so it's possible for a new girl to be a good friend for all of us. We checked that the angel really was okay with the idea, and it told us that it was. It had quite a lot to say on the subject, but it boiled down being that doing things out of mutual love is a very good thing, and even just out of friendship that might lead to love is fine too. -- "I didn't have much idea of who to choose because I'd been dead for so long, so my girls took charge. They compared notes about all the girls they knew from school or their clubs, discussed whether we would all get on with them, etc. I was against it initially, but they told me that the SCS girls who were working on the art projects should be considered too. I didn't think that was moral because those girls were effectively our employees and they had to trust that they were safe when they were on our property. My girls told me off for being silly, that OF COURSE every girl would want the chance to be my girlfriend. Carol, Julia and Ava are very loyal to me and I was worried they might be biased, so I agreed to mention it to the art project girls provided it was done VERY cautiously. We had a chance to do that when we gave them a tour of our two houses. The angel split them into two groups, so Carol and I mentioned it to the group we were with. They were interested, so I had to suffer the later teasing of my girls telling me, 'We told you so!' -- "Soon after that, the angel told us to put the search for another girlfriend on hold. We were worried that God considered what we were doing immoral - when you live with an angel you are VERY careful to be moral - but the angel assured us that it supported our having another girlfriend or two, and that it only wanted us to delay looking until it told us to restart again. It never gave a reason, but it almost never does. -- "By the time the angel told us to restart something very unexpected had already happened: Julia had found a girlfriend for HERSELF: Nevaeh. To cut a long story short, we all got to know Nevaeh and got to like her very much. The other art-project girls will be able to tell you stories about how smart Nevaeh was about relationship things with us. She VERY quickly understood the implications - especially the moral implications - of our living with an angel, and she behaved wonderfully. Now she is one of us, and she is making all of us happier with her company. -- "One result I didn't expect is that I've now got FEWER girlfriends than I had before! Julia and Nevaeh spend so much time together that I'm getting less female company than I used to." It was almost a déjà vu of when I was claiming to have only half a girlfriend because I was sharing Julia with Carol. I hope Julia feels suitably apologetic for all the difficulties she has caused my love-life. -- "Julia joked that because Nevaeh is working out so well for both of us - especially for Julia - that I should look for another girlfriend or two from SCS. We thought it was a great idea. Nevaeh is a WONDERFUL addition to our home, and with God's angel being permanently part of my life, finding a Christian girlfriend seems the obvious approach. The main purpose of this dinner is to announce that if any of you would like to move in with us the way Nevaeh has, then we'd like to get to know you better to find out if you're suitable. Are there any questions?" As it turned out, there were, but there was less enthusiasm than you might expect. I could easily tell that most of the girls assumed they had no chance as nearly all the proximity readings showed either no hope or a lot of hopelessness (they're different emotions); I assumed because they were judging themselves ugly in comparison to Nevaeh. Their belief that they had no chance of success was almost certainly true but it was very unhelpful for my project, so I bullshitted enough to encourage them. I emphasized something that they already knew: that Nevaeh was living with us because of her friendship with Julia, which obviously had nothing to do with her body being a male's idea of a walking, breathing fantasy (especially the breathing part; Nevaeh does that VERY well). I had fun asking them, "SURELY you don't really think that someone as moral as me would judge girls just by their body! I know most guys are like that, but I can't imagine that I'd have an angel at all, or that it would encourage me to look for another girlfriend, if that was the sort of person I was." The girls wanted to believe that they had a chance, so they were fairly easily convinced into getting more interested. Since Nevaeh had moved in, and on my instruction, she had been very open with her friends about how her new life worked, except to keep very quiet about the amount and variety of sex we had. They knew she had a no-limit credit card, had as much cash as she wanted, could use the family jet, and was treated as a full and equal member of my household and families. The other girls WANTED that! Nevaeh's achieving it gave them all hope, and it didn't take much more conversation from all of us to get the SCS girls' hopes high enough for them to get excited over having a chance to follow in Nevaeh's footsteps. The rest of the evening was FULL of excited talk. You're familiar enough with my style now that I won't bother reproducing much of it. I'll touch on only a few topics: Several of the girls asked the art-project girls what Nevaeh had done that had been so smart. One of the nine first-contacts started answering, until one of the others frantically reminded her about their oaths. That shut the conversation down! I explained, "The oath doesn't apply if I give you permission to talk, which I do." That completely failed to reassure any of them, with the girl who'd started answering looking particularly fearful, so I added, "Hopefully the angel will appear to confirm that." It appeared. I was grabbing almost any excuse to have it interact with people these days so I could eventually use my NP in public. It confirmed that although their oath still applied, they could talk about anything they already knew. It also added: "Shame on you for not believing Mark's giving you permission to talk! Mark is not a liar, and God would not unfairly punish you after Mark took responsibility for your actions. By not trusting what Mark said, you have demonstrated very poor moral judgment." With that encouragement, the first-contact girls were delighted to be able to answer the other girls' questions. They LOVED having special knowledge about my life and God. There were the four art-project girls who had no idea of my search for a new girlfriend. They'd been put in Ava's Grand Tour group because they were bi-phobic and had been kept in the dark ever since. It didn't take them long to question why they didn't know anything about what their project teammates were raving about. That was a delicate issue, so I answered it carefully, "I'm fairly sure I can guess the reason. The angel would have known that I was about to talk to the thirteen of you during the tour of our houses, and it divided you into two groups. I took that as an instruction to talk only to the girls it put into my group. It never explained why it divided you and I don't bother it with questions about such things, but I can take a guess if you want?" They wanted, so I 'guessed', "In the early days of the art project, I noticed that whenever Julia, Ava or Carol showed physical affection for each other, such as by kissing, the four of you always showed discomfort and the other nine never did. In my home we show a lot of affection for each other, so I guess the angel thought you wouldn't fit in. The angel is very moral and wouldn't want to put you in a position where you'd be uncomfortable." Which naturally started a conversation about the - they thought - unnatural act of bisexual sex. My position was, "You're all foolish to focus on sex. That's not the issue at all. It's all about love! When people love each other and truly want to give each other happiness, then it is perfectly moral to express that physically. It can be as simple as a hug or a kiss, or it can be more sexual, but that doesn't change the morality at all." "Even between girls?" "Stop treating sex as something distinct from the rest of life. It's an absolutely fundamental part of life, and even how we have life in the first place. Julia and Carol love each other and they often truly want to give each other happiness. That's all that matters. Sometimes they make each other happy by complimenting their choices of clothes, or by making the effort to do little favors for each other, or sometimes by kissing or by having sex. All of those things are morally the same, as they're perfectly natural parts of life. -- "I was quite open in my interviews after I was resurrected that I've had several lovers. God doesn't have anything against sex. He made it a great deal of fun and a wonderful way to be friends with someone, so obviously there's nothing wrong with it if it's done for the right reasons. Rape is clearly a very bad reason, and love is the very best reason of all. I've never understood why so many people get so twisted up about sex. It's not WHAT you do which determines whether something is moral, but WHY you do it..." You can imagine the rest, including that I downplayed bisexuality because my project just required that I alone - not my girls as well - bedded the school's beauties. The only part of my speech that you might find surprising was: " ... That's why I'm being cautious about having sex with Nevaeh. I like her a great deal, and I'm liking her more every day, but we haven't gone all the way yet. If she wasn't living with us, I probably would have asked her to become one of my lovers already, but because she's living with us I have to be much more careful not to upset our loving household. In addition to having to know that she'd welcome my attentions, I also have to know that Julia, Ava and even Carol wouldn't be upset in any way. I love them, so I am very careful not to hurt their feelings or upset their relationships with me or with Nevaeh. She was Julia's friend first, for example, so maybe Julia might feel I'm intruding too much on their friendship." "{Raspberry}," from Julia. We bullshitted some more, to make sure our audience understood that I was a VERY cautious and moral guy, that bisexual sex had God's approval, and that I knew for a fact - and the angel had even confirmed it - that my having casual lovers was perfectly fine and moral, provided it was done for the right reason. I had no doubt that when I get to having sex with the SCS beauties, they'd think they were doing it for a very good reason, and I'd be quite happy with my reasons too. Two of the four bi-phobic girls stuck to their bi-phobic principles, joined by a few other girls in the group, which didn't matter as none of them were attractive. The other two bi-phobes were sure the angel must have had a different reason for sorting them the way it had because they definitely understood and agreed with my point that it was moral for girls to be 'friendly' together. They were lying but that didn't matter because they weren't attractive enough to matter. Even if any of them had been beautiful, the success of my plan didn't require any bisexual action so I could've easily worked around the issue. It was mentioned now mainly as an excuse to make me seem more moral, although it might be fun to include some girl-on-girl action later, probably just between SCS girls and me as I doubted my girls would want to participate. Lots of bullshit later - which I felt no guilt over because I honestly believed people would live happier lives if they adopted the attitudes I was extolling, even if they didn't adopt them with me - it was time to start wrapping my speech up. I gave them some cautions about talking to other people, warning them, "If you tell other people about this, they'll leap to the conclusions that it's all about sex. That's not the case at all. I am looking for another girlfriend or two, but they have to be girls that get on with everyone in my home. As Nevaeh can tell you, I'm so concerned that all of us build great relationships together that I'm in no hurry to make her and my relationship sexual. Given how beautiful Nevaeh is, I'm probably the only guy on the planet who'd be so cautious. -- "If stories get out about what we've discussed this evening, all that will happen is that your parents will forbid you having anything to do with me and I'll cancel my idea of finding girlfriends at SCS, looking for them at college instead. I won't lose anything, but you'll lose the chance of following Nevaeh, and you'll make all your schoolmates hate you for spoiling their chances. -- "I'm going to be meeting you all again from time to time over the next few months, and you'll see that I CERTAINLY won't be chasing any of you for sex!" That's because I'll get my girls to do the chasing for me. "That would be VERY immoral of me. I've got a sleepless angel looking over my shoulder 24/7, so if EVER there was a boy who will behave himself, it's me." I was in no hurry because the Surveillance Problem was still happening. It wouldn't be a good idea to start inviting lots of girls into my bed as that could rebound in a number of ways that could hurt me and the girls. I was quite happy to wait because I believed I knew how the Surveillance Problem would be resolved. During our recent déjà vu's the Marks had discussed having just a few of us carry out some risky strategies, the results to be spread through the inter-dimensional grapevine to the waiting Marks. We hadn't quite started executing that plan yet, and it'd take several days for it to be acted on, the results to come back, for me to choose which strategy to use, and to do it, but I already felt much better about the Surveillance Problem than I had a week ago. [It was the next morning that I rolled a die to determine whether I'd be one of the risk takers, which I happily wasn't, then nearly three more weeks before I blew the lid off my Problem.] Despite my warning them, I wasn't concerned about the girls talking about this discussion. While some of their parents would get angry, all my girls would stick up for me. They'd loudly proclaim, "Mark IS looking for another girlfriend! The angel confirmed it was moral for him to do so, we're helping him look for her, and where better than in a Christian school. He's a fantastic guy and any girl would be truly blessed to be the girlfriend of a guy that has God's approval as much as Mark has. You MUST be making a mistake if you suspect that Mark would behave immorally. God never would have resurrected him if he was such a person, and he's got an angel keeping watch over him 24/7 so obviously he can't misbehave." Once the parents calmed down, I'd have no trouble motivating their daughters to misbehave with me. I expected so few parents to be adamantly opposed to my meeting with their daughters socially to see if we liked each other, that the chance of it happening with the parents of one of my 8.5 targets wasn't worth worrying about. My caution was mostly to get the girls into the habit of keeping quiet. That would be useful once our activities became sexual. If word of that got out when I'd only slept with some the SCS beauties, they'd get in troublem I might miss out on getting all of them, and many people could end up unhappy. I especially wanted all the beauties to be happy that they'd participated in my project, and that goal would probably be ruined if the sexual activities blew up in their faces. The preceding paragraph's description of how I would sway the doubtful parents probably seems unlikely to work, but that's because I haven't explained the consequences of one of my earlier activities. Let me remind you that there is NO bad press about me anymore. All the "He's Evil and should be sent back to Hell" comments have stopped. People are too scared to make them, and the networks are too money conscious to broadcast or print them. People SHOULD be able to thoughtfully form their own opinions about issues, but the reality is that most people don't actually think about topical issues; they merely absorb the general atmosphere from their environment (their church, the media, workmates, etc.). Because there are essentially no negative public comments about me now and still plenty of positive ones - and those are increasing - most people's thoughtless 'opinions' about me were becoming better and better because people don't form negative opinions about someone when they hear nothing but positive comments about him. I should've gotten into the propaganda business much sooner because it's already clearly proved itself to be marvelously effective. It has provided me with a distressingly convincing lesson about how unthinking the public is, but that human failure is fine when they're the parents of beautiful girls. I didn't expect much difficulty with parents. At worst one or two might dig their heels in, but I could always find ways to work on their daughters individually. If word did get out that I was looking for another girlfriend from SCS, my most likely problem was parents pushing their daughters at me, which would have complicated my management of the project unnecessarily. ------- Chapter 406: Working on My SCS Project Late-September to Mid-November 2007 (Continued) We started having frequent, innocuous meetings with groups of SCS girls. They were simple, ordinary social events, much like any other group of teenagers would have. They were in the open and in public, so clearly innocent. The stated purpose for these dates was so my girls and I could get to know the SCS girls. We did a long nature walk with some girls, spent an evening bowling and eating pizza with some others. It was different than my previous bowling date in that I didn't bowl - "Because I don't want to show off," and also because of the risk from the Surveillers - and there was no hot tub party afterward. There was lots of pizza though, so that was good. With another group we had a horse-riding afternoon then a casual restaurant dinner. There was no sex, and we didn't even allow conversations about it. My girls did, however, make sure to subtly show their approval for any girl that dressed particularly attractively, which quite a few of them did, and more started doing so. One unrelated incident worth mentioning is that the Universe's five-merge Marks had decided to be proactive about our abilities, and to send 1-in-6^12 of us forward. On November 1 I rolled a "5". At first glance its visual similarity to a "6" gave me a momentary panic, but I laughed at my silliness for having even a momentary fear of rolling twelve 6s in a row. The following weekend we had a big picnic in one of Corvallis's parks for all seventy five of the SCS girls. By the end of the picnic it was reasonable for them to believe that we'd spent enough time over this and the previous social events for us to have gotten a feel for who we got along well with. I'd also had the first couple of useful messages from the déjà vu grapevine about how the Risk-Taking Marks' solutions to the Surveillance Problem were working out. The way the mathematics of that worked, after only three or four more déjà vu's the chance of my getting more information should be significant, and after only a few more of them nearly all the Marks should have news, usually of multiple results. Soon after that I would have enough information to act. [Correct, it only took another a week from now, and that long only because I preferred to accumulate a great deal of information]. With those considerations, it was time to ramp up the SCS competition and make the process more efficient. I got all the girls' attentions, then said, "As fun as it is to date so many of you at once," which it wasn't really, but that's the sort of thing you say in these circumstances, "I'm looking for only one or two more girlfriends. I don't think we could practically move all seventy five of you into our home, so we have to reduce the number. We know you well enough by now to be able to make the first cut down to twenty five, and it wouldn't be moral to continue to give false hope or waste the time of any of you that we don't think would fit in well. -- "I'll explain the process. My girls - Nevaeh, Julia, Ava and Carol - and I will have twenty five votes each. Because anyone we finally choose will be living with us, my girls and I get equal says. You'll form a circle shoulder to shoulder facing inward with one hand extended and open. Because Joy and Gail couldn't make it today we'll use plates to represent them in the circle. The five of us will be in the middle. We'll go around and give one vote to the twenty five of you that we each think most suitable for our home. We're using Monopoly money to indicate our votes because there are lots of pieces of it. The denominations don't matter; each piece equals one vote." We have different denominations each to let us easily keep track of who we voted for, to make it easier to spot if any of the girls try some monkey business. I had the $1 denomination just to make me look more self-effacing and moral. -- "Once the five of us have handed out all our votes the twenty five of you that got the most votes will still be in the running and we'll continue to meet you socially so we can get to know you even better. As we've said before, there's no guarantee that we'll end up choosing any of you, or maybe we'll choose more than one. We will only pick someone if we think she'll fit in with all five of us and we don't know you well enough to know how many of you that might apply to. It's still too early to know how many of you have got personalities that suit us as much as Nevaeh's does. -- "It's mathematically possible that there could be a tie on the cutoff point. For example, twenty girls could easily get in, and then there are eight of you who have the same number of next highest votes. We'd only want to choose five of those eight so there'd be a small problem. My girls have put their collective foot down and insisted that I will decide any tie-breaks. In that case, I'd just name the five girls I think most suitable for our lifestyle. -- "To those of you who don't get enough votes to carry on: 'I'm sorry.' There's simply nothing I can do about that. We can't have all of you living with us so some of you have to be eliminated. It's kinder to do that sooner rather than later. Your lives will just carry on as normal so you won't have lost anything. If it's any consolation, what is happening here is so unusual that it's unlikely that it has any relevance to the rest of your lives. My girls and I have a very unusual mixture of things we're looking for, so even I can't guess how many votes each of you will be getting. For example, one of my criteria is a slight preference for athletic girls because Ava is the only one of my girls who is athletic and I would like her to have some company that has similar interests. Most guys prefer girls who aren't good at running away, so you can tell I'm unusual, haha." Our voting would be in favor of girls that were athletic because they had better than average bodies. I was preemptively giving an acceptable reason for our bias so they wouldn't think we'd picked girls based on their figures. They shouldn't because most of the votes that the beautiful girls were about to get will come from my girls rather than me. I passed out the bundles of twenty five pieces of Monopoly money to each of the five voters, Ava got two different colored plates to represent Joy and Gail, and Julia got the girls to form a large circle, while answering their questions: "Why didn't you warn us?", etc., none of which mattered. ^ [The previous evening I'd sat my girls down to allocate our votes. After explaining the procedure I'd use for the voting, the first step had been to ask Nevaeh to decide on who her votes would be, based on how she personally wanted to vote, with as much regard to her friendships as she wanted. I'd explained that I didn't want any of her friends to be angry with her for not voting for them, and that her votes didn't matter because the rest of us would easily outvote her to get the final results I wanted. Nevaeh got the idea and picked her votes. She had fewer than twenty five classmates whose opinions of her votes mattered, so she allocated the rest of her votes on her honest opinion of the girls who would best suit me. The next task had been to determine who the winners of the vote would be. The goal for my SCS project is to sleep with the top 10% by beauty, which with 85 girls (not counting Nevaeh) means 9 of them. So the 25 winners have to include the 9 most beautiful girls. Unsurprisingly, my girls and I had different opinions of who the beauties were. I'll have to decide on who the exact target 9 are before I started sleeping with any of them, but that wasn't necessary now. Our individual opinions of which girls were in the top 10% resulted in a combined list of 13 girls, so they'd all be winners of the voting. We picked 12 more girls to make up the 25, choosing those that were the nicest and most popular because those were believable picks. They'd also make the subsequent dates more enjoyable, which would be a nice side benefit. I was amused by how shallow it was to choose girls for being good company secondary to their sexual attractiveness. According to the challenge I'd set myself it was actually logical to sort them that way, which just meant that my challenge was shallow, but I knew that already. We'd next worked out who to give my votes to. I'd ignored the girls' beauty and breast sizes (I'll continue to prove my shallowness by stating that I'm aware that there's a considerable correlation between those two groupings), choosing those I thought would fit in well with my household. Then we'd allocated Julia's, Ava's and Carol's votes to generate the 25 winners we wanted. It was an easy exercise. A few of the beautiful girls weren't nice on the inside, but any girl that Julia, Ava and Carol voted for was guaranteed to be a winner. We'd favored the first-contact nine (actually eight because Nevaeh wasn't included in this) because they were better trained and could be more useful, so five of them survived the cutoff. We'd even arranged for a few ties at the cutoff point because that was more believable. Because most of the votes were obvious - we knew who the nicest and most beautiful girls were - it'd been easy for the girls to memorize the few extra names each of them needed to vote for. It had been trivially easy for me to memorize my votes, as each of my minds had to remember at most one name. I'd also memorized who my girls would be voting for in case they got confused on the day.] ^ I kept a sight blob on my girls as we did our voting, but none of them had any trouble placing their votes in the way we'd agreed, including a couple under Joy's plate (it was a little windy so the votes had to go under the plate). The time my girls spent thinking about their list looked like they were thinking about who to vote for, which they were, so that was fine. The SCS girls had naturally been keeping very worried counts of their own votes, so when the voting was over it was easy to announce, "Please hold your votes up if you've got four or more of them." The beautiful nice girls did. "Thanks. How many of you are there? Ten. Great. Please move out of the circle and stand over there. -- "Please hold up your hands if you've got three votes." The beautiful or nice girls did. "How many? Thirteen. Please join the other ten, so that makes twenty three of you. Two more to pick, but I bet there's more than two of you with two votes. Put your hand up if you've got two." Julia added, "Joy had two votes after I put my vote under her plate." Ava checked under the plate and confirmed that Julia was right. I said, "Okay, so that makes six of you with two votes. I know I voted for Jan and Gaye so those are the two I pick now. Will you two join the other winners please." The six girls with two votes were all ordinary, so I'd voted for the two of them who didn't look good to make me look good. Not that it mattered much, but we'd allocated the votes so thirty four girls had got one vote each, and only twelve girls had got no votes. There'd been ten girls that we'd not invited to participate in any of these meetings because they were very unacceptable, so we were in effect clearly rejecting only twenty two out of eighty five girls, which was a proportion that was probably being too kind because the bottom quarter of girls were clearly unsuitable girlfriend material for a famous multimillionaire guy like me. Importantly, because the rejects so obviously should have been rejected, very few people would blame or consider us unfair for rejecting them, hopefully including the rejects themselves. With two votes being the cut off, we also hoped that the girls who'd missed out by only one vote wouldn't feel too bad. We had to give some condolences, say some things to try to cheer up the losers, and then arrange future meetings with the winners. One important piece of news for them was: "We'll have to eliminate half of you after another few dates, depending on how fast we can get to know you well enough." And also on how quickly the Surveillance Problem could be dispensed with. We carried on having casual, social outings, the stated purpose being a continuation of our getting to know each other. There was an important change: one of my girls would occasionally approach one of the girls they'd voted for - nearly always one of the beautiful ones who were in my target pool - and quietly give her a little bit of advice for how to improve her chance of surviving the next elimination. For example, Nevaeh told one of her beautiful friends, "I voted for you because I like you and I think you'd be a great girlfriend for Mark, but I'm worried that you're not trying hard enough. I know Mark loves pizza and values girls who are thoughtful and generous, so why don't you make some homemade pizza and quietly give it to me at school to pass on to Mark. I'll tell him you made it for him." Chloe Moon had done one thing right: inspire me to suggest this to Nevaeh. Carol, Julia and Ava knew the SCS girls well enough for it to be believable that they'd offer similar advice to the girls they'd been seen to vote for. For example, Ava could advise a girl, "I know Mark wants to please me by choosing a girlfriend who is athletic. I voted for you because you are, but you're not doing enough to make Mark aware of that. When we have our next date, apologize in advance that you'll be arriving fifteen minutes late because you're in training. Then you run to wherever we are. Make sure you're wearing clothes that make you look sleek and athletic. Don't worry about being sweaty because that'll be an advantage in his eyes." Nearly every girl that I wanted to make the next cut - the beautiful girls - was given a specific, distinct and confidential piece of advice from one of my girls. I suggested the pizza idea to Nevaeh, but my girls had no trouble thinking up their own ways in which the SCS girls could please me, even with the restraint that the ideas shouldn't be sexual. Several of the SCS girls were able to think of that ploy without any prompting, but I sadly had to turn down their various degrees of subtle or blatant invitation as I didn't want my plan to go off half cocked. My girls' work was reduced because a few of the SCS girls did something noteworthy on their own initiative. That was good because it made it less likely for the beautiful girls to compare notes and realize they'd all been steered. To help disguise that, a few of the non-beautiful girls were similarly advised; we just wouldn't use their good actions as justifications for our subsequent picks. In the previous dimension that I'd written about blowing the lid off the CIA's surveillance operation, that Mark (who was the normal "I" of most of this autobiography) had delayed blowing that lid for a few days to make it happen at a time convenient for his going on his Voyage. In this dimension, I decided to delay the lid blowing until the day after my birthday party because I didn't want it upset by all the drama. As previously written, I had a sad eighteenth birthday party in a previous dimension. Here I had a very enjoyable party on the Friday evening, that being the exact date of my birthday. It couldn't be a sex-filled party because there was too much chance that the surveillers' tapes might be made public. Given how wild some of our parties can get, that could get dozens of kids into very big trouble with their parents and it wouldn't do my public reputation any good either. The party's having to be tame, it was ideal to invite the twenty five still-active SCS girls. Nevaeh sent them invitations as most of their parents thought that all the recent socializing had been about Nevaeh. Each of my other girls and Donna invited quite a few guests, and I invited a large number of my own friends and acquaintances, so it was a BIG party. One of the surest ways to get a girl excited about a guy is for her to see him as extremely popular. Julia had taught me that, and I'd seen for myself that teenagers need to have their opinions validated by their peers, and seeing over two hundred people at my birthday party did that very well indeed. The display of wealth and my girls' purchased-especially-for-the-party clothes didn't do any harm either. I was amused that although I had very little time to talk to the SCS girls individually during my party - far less time than I'd had on any of the other occasions that we'd met - my proximity sense showed me that their emotional reactions were greater from this date than any other we'd had. They hadn't been to my home for a while, and especially for the girls who were getting helpful advice from an insider, they were starting to think they had a real shot at living here. I was amused and delighted by the amount of lust for me and greed for everything else that I sensed (reading people's true emotions tends to make me cynical, although there are many wonderful moments too. For some reason they don't tend to last as long though, which is a sad aspect of the human condition. That makes Nevaeh's ongoing joy even more exceptional). Even though these girls hardly knew me, it was amazing how much they truly liked me. By "truly" I mean that they did really feel the emotion of "like" for me, usually quite strongly. The emotion wasn't really an honest one as it was being created through their own self-justifications. One thing my proximity sense has indirectly taught me is that human emotions are the tip of an iceberg, with a great deal going on underneath to decide what emotions the person will feel. Some of those processes are very ego driven. These girls were deceiving themselves even more than I was deceiving them as I wasn't actually promising them anything or telling them that I had strong feelings for any of them, merely telling them that "None, one or two of you might get invited to live with us." As they were self-deluded into liking me so strongly I'd have to be careful about how I let them down when it was over. I would be nice to them anyway because I was aware that I was using them, so I wanted to give them something of value in return. It wouldn't be what they wanted, but I very much wanted for them to look back on their involvement with me and be happy about it. ^ The next morning, a Saturday, I blew the lid off the CIA's illegal operation in almost exactly the same way as previously described for a non-Voyaging Mark: TV news-crews taken to their base of operations, the criminal baddies held rigid, our guards captured the weenies, etc. There was no mention of the Guardian Angel going to Washington DC to explode a thermonuclear bomb over it, as that was done only in the dimension that the Voyaging Mark left from to provide a really nice justification for his sacrifice and leaving. Also as previously described, Washingtonians panicked even without an explicit threat, being sure that the angel must be ABSOLUTELY fed up with the irredeemable Government by now. They URGENTLY evacuated the city yet again. Although my doing this on the weekend meant fewer politicians were caught up in the terror, it also meant that throughout the country people were available to form protests to make their feelings heard by the Government. Some of those protests turned into semi-riots aimed at the Federal Government, and they made for Great TV. There was all the usual subsequent drama: Vice-president Cheney was impeached, resigned, and had to go into hiding; his home was firebombed; the CIA leaked like a sieve in an attempt to prove that it was truly repentant and didn't need to be nuked or otherwise destroyed (the public continued to demand that it be shut down, and there were loud calls for the employees involved to be tried for treason and then executed, if the angel didn't get them first); the media ripped into the Government, especially blaming the very top echelons and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; etc. The public's interest in me had died down greatly over the last couple of months - it hadn't stopped, but it had been far less clamorous - but it rushed back now. That was a nuisance yet again, but one very nice consequence was that the volume of HIGHLY detailed, accurate, and even prescient-seeming information that the Guardian Angel had provided was being widely taken as very convincing proof that it truly was God who was helping me. That greatly convinced and reassured many people, and my families thought it must be improving our safety considerably. I was amused that information obtained from media articles in other dimensions was taken as proof of God's existence in this one, as it's difficult to imagine anything less godly than the media. I didn't mind that I had to put my SCS project on hold until things quieted down, as I had other things to do. The parents and I had to monitor the situation closely because pressuring the Government to behave was what was keeping us alive. We had to know what worked, what didn't work, to look for clues about what they were thinking, try to guess what might happen next, etc. From the moment my resurrection had happened, being passive had never been an option we could choose. One major decision we had to make was about how to punish the Government for its latest illegal operation against us. Ideally the punishments would include the Guardian Angel decapitating every single person named in the information it had released, which was a lot of people. Not only did I wish I could include Bush, I was so pissed off with him that I even wanted to include his entire family tree, although that was unjustifiable and too risky, the latter reason being the stronger influence on me. Disappointingly, we felt it was likely that the important people on that list could be well guarded and under a lot of surveillance, making it impossibly dangerous for me to try to do anything like that. After much discussion, rather than me taking the fight to the enemy, the parents decided on a different strategy: we would ask the Government to punish itself. I called yet another press conference, said, "When I woke up this morning the Guardian Angel floated this page into my hand." I held up the page so the cameras could see that it stated that the punishment for the latest breaking of God's instruction was to have Cheney and the CIA's Director and Deputy Director report to our gates to have their heads removed, and that all of America's CV-designated aircraft carriers were to be scrapped. Those orders caused a shit-storm of controversy, which added to the several other shit storms that were going on: The CIA's, FBI's, DHS's and every other such agency's ability to conduct operations was being ripped apart and redesigned to ENSURE far more accountability, from before an operation could start. The civic disaster that Washington was already becoming, exacerbated by the latest evacuation being the final straw for many thousands of more people who were in the process of leaving permanently. The city was a failure being kept alive only by emergency measures. There was a late-night talkshow joke about DC being a brain-dead patient. There were even howls of condemnation from women's groups over the Government employees' comments on tape about the things they'd like to do to Carol, Donna, Ava and Julia. Even Mom had been included quite often, which I felt even weirder about. Howls from several foreign governments because the US had secretly employed criminals that their national governments had active arrest warrants out for. Those governments were demanding the US come clean on how many other international criminals it was harboring or keeping track of in case they become useful one day, and demanding the files the US had on the contractors it had sent to Corvallis. Those files would be very embarrassing because they'd reveal the US's long-term monitoring and occasional employment of international criminals. I'd thought it was too good an opportunity not to get some very evil people out of circulation so the Guardian Angel appeared during a press conference and ordered the US Government to release the full files on ALL such people that it was tracking. The Government didn't dare break that order, so it had to release those files, although it doubtless did some frantic shredding or editing first. What it did release redoubled this particular shit storm. And a shit storm that wasn't: The FBI's investigation of the CIA's surveillance operation easily discovered the bugs and transmitter dish that I'd used. They identified them as having gone missing from an FBI storeroom at the same times as many other types of bugs and other related equipment. They asked us about that. Dad freely admitted that the angel had placed a large pile of such equipment in one of our storerooms. The FBI asked for it back. Dad answered, "The angel placed them there and I'm not going to touch them. If you want them, you come and take them off the angel. Good luck with that." I would've enjoyed scaring the shit out of any FBI employee sent to recover their gear, but they disappointed me by not even trying. The topic never got raised again. We didn't even get a bill, which was also disappointing because it would have been fun to send it back with a note telling them to send the bill to the Vatican since it was the angel that had taken the equipment. There were some bills being sent though: we sent the Government some very big ones. The settlement contract we'd signed with the Government had a clause that included: "No member of The Family or any part of their bodies is to be subject to The Government's instigated or performed medical experiment." The CIA had obtained hair samples from all of the Andersons for medical and genetic analysis, had analyzed our waste water, had drugged my meal in a restaurant to obtain samples of my vomit and shit, and had carried out other such operations designed to collect medical samples. There were a total of twenty four distinct breaches, so we submitted twenty four bills for $216 billion each, me sending the most. Not that we expected the Government would ever pay them, because it'd hide behind the "Fiscal Responsibility Toward Private Individuals Act" that it had created to weasel out of paying for its previous single breach of the settlement contract. We'd still collect a few hundred million though, which was worth doing some paperwork for. I loved all the drama. I especially enjoyed the vitriol and contempt being directed at Bush, and I was delighted when Cheney was killed by an angry mob and the ex-Director of the CIA ate his own gun. I thought they deserved what they got. The CIA does murder and do other reprehensible things to innocent people, even American citizens (google "Harold Blauer"), so it was very appropriate that its bosses suffered the same or similar fates. I particularly loved those events because they SURELY made it far less likely that any agency would risk sticking its nose into our business ever again. If the frontline agents/contractors and the bosses even up to vice-president level keep losing their lives, sooner or later they're going to lose their arrogance and learn the obvious lesson. The people involved in the latest fiasco were being vilified and hounded to an incredible degree, which should be another very effective disincentive because while people will often take risks for actions they believe will be seen as heroic, they are far less likely to take risks which will ruin their lives and cause everyone in the country to hate them. It's not as if America needs to be protected from me. If I'd been left alone right from the beginning, or been left alone at any later time, I would have got on with my life to likely provide great benefit to the country and the rest of the world given my phenomenal potential as a scientist. Instead the DHS and CIA had killed me repeatedly, as indicated by none of us ever having déjà vu'd with a Mark who was still in DHS or CIA custody, or who had been released by them. Given the variations in very different dimensions - those that I hear about only through a chain of déjà vu stories - some Marks wouldn't have participated in a merging process to breakout, so would have remained in the Fort Dodge lab. The total lack of debate in my CIA file about what to do with me in the long term sinisterly implied that they'd known that I'd had no long term. It also implied that I wasn't the first such experimental prisoner, or they wouldn't have known not to bother debating my future. That there is no public knowledge of such imprisonments is a very good indication that the prisoners never get out. Consequently, I didn't feel any qualms about being happy that Cheney was murdered and that the CIA Director was driven to kill himself. ------- Chapter 407: Setting Up the Consummation of My SCS Project Mid-November 2007 It took a week for things around me to settle down after my lid-blowing revelations. On Friday morning, November 16, I was thinking about having fun on the weekend. Over breakfast I checked what my families thought. They agreed with me, being delightfully sure that there's no chance that anyone in our Government would try to spy on us. More potential baddies may have their suspicions about us, and they may even be absolutely convinced that their suspicions are correct, but it's still impossible to imagine that they will or can do anything about their doubts. The Guardian Angel has established that it can totally penetrate top-secret operations against us, and it has also established a very clear pattern of decapitating those involved regardless of how important he considered himself, and the American public would nuke the White House themselves if the Government did anything new against us. Even if an investigative agency's boss is brave and stupid enough to order such an operation, we all thought that it wouldn't happen because his staff would refuse to carry it out and would blow the whistle on their boss. Our only real threat now, we thought, was from a single person. That's been the case ever since my resurrection, and that risk is probably the lowest it's ever been since then because there are no anti-angel or anti-me comments in the media, and the angel's recent revelations have convinced many people that it truly is from God. Amusingly, none of the major Churches have issued a definitive statement about their belief in my story, and I don't expect them to because it's too politically risky for them. Despite the churches' determination to stay on the fence, the vast majority of the general public is convinced that we're telling the truth, which means they are also convinced that God is real. Church attendance numbers have increased substantially. None of them have sent me a "Thank you" note. In short, we believe we're in the clear now. There is still some crap I have to deal with at some stage. If the CIA's Deputy Director doesn't come to our gates for his beheading or if the aircraft carriers aren't recalled and scrapped, then I'll need to do something, but I have countless options for when and how to react - that's why we chose the punishment strategy that we did. What to do about non-compliance doesn't worry me now; I'll think about it later, if it becomes necessary. One of my long-held worries - that I would accidentally use NP where an outsider would see it - is even fading because I can already attribute it to my Guardian Angel. More NP exposure is the last phase of the "Angel Plan" and I could already feel that phase making me less worried and more happy. For the first time in far too long, there were no threats anywhere on the horizon. It was time to celebrate and have some fun! I could, as an excellent example, once again gather lots of naked girls around our pool and resume frolicking with them (and something else spelled "f ... cking"). No one is spying on us now, which is important because Carol will often be one of my frolicking partners. It would be very nice to no longer have to think about security risks before giving Carol a kiss. The legal consequences of Carol's and my relationship being exposed didn't worry me. In addition to my being able to hide behind the Guardian Angel's skirts, such was its credibility now that I could have it type a message that God considered it very important for me to have such a relationship with Carol, and It had put the compulsion into my mind when It had repaired me. Its saying that our having children together was important for the future of the human race would be widely believed. The Bible has several examples of Good people committing incest, which would be the main religious viewpoint people would hear because internet sites and the media are too scared of the Guardian Angel's retribution to make negative statements about it or me. I wanted to keep our incest hidden mainly because it would be certain to inflame solo nutcases into believing that I was the Devil and in need of killing. Knowing the quality of nutcases' thinking, they'd probably try to kill Carol too. Given how quick Christians are to get inflamed by anything sexual, and how easily they become self-righteous homicidal nutcases, it'd be best to keep Carol's and my relationship secret. It's a pity Christians don't consider self-righteousness one of their Seven Deadly Sins, because I think it absolutely deserves to be included. It can have Gluttony's or Sloth's place. Heck, give it both places, because it's a sin that Christians REALLY need to stop welcoming with open arms. The SCS girls were eager for the next step, and it only required asking Nevaeh to make a couple of phone calls to the two Liaisons we'd got the SCS girls to choose for the two grades. Nevaeh told them, "Mark's angel has told him to carry on looking for a girlfriend. He wants everyone to come here tomorrow at 2pm. It's going to be an important afternoon because we're going to eliminate half of you at the end of it. Make sure you tell everyone that." I know it's a terrible thing, but people have been known to tell lies in sexual seduction situations. Despite that sad fact of life, we knew that the two SCS Liaisons would quickly pass the full message on to every girl in their grade because at one of our very first meetings with them, we'd made a big deal out of how the Guardian Angel can detect when people are lying. "It's from God, so OF COURSE it can do that. Plus its job is to guard me, so God will definitely have given it the ability to understand what people near me are thinking. It's too moral to share that information, but I'm sure it wouldn't want me to have a girlfriend who was dishonest." A few times since then, when I'd been sure a girl was lying - my proximity sense helped a great deal with that as I got to know the girls better - the angel had suddenly flashed red and messaged me that the girl had just told a lie and she therefore shouldn't be considered good a girlfriend prospect for me. It's amazing how much easier it is to manage girls when they have to be honest. Just being able to ask questions that they have to answer truthfully created all sorts of interesting possibilities, not that my project needed most of them. The technique was well worth remembering for possible future use though. In the morning before the SCS girls came over, I got Julia and Nevaeh to ring the two SCS girls who'd been the most obvious in their lust for me. My girls told those girls something along the lines of, "I voted for you last time because I want you to succeed. You need to do something to make sure you survive the next elimination. It's one of our rules at home that people can choose for themselves how much or little they wear around our pool. I'll make sure we spend some time around it so you can impress Mark by stripping and swimming naked. He won't care about your body, even though you have a great one, but he will be impressed by your confidence, trust and maturity. Once you've impressed him, you should stand in front of him and tell him that you want to show him that you're determined to be open and honest in your relationship with him, and that you know he's such a fantastic human being that you will devote yourself to him in every way - just like the rest of us do - and that you'll do anything he wants. You know the sort of stuff guys like to hear, just make sure you say it confidently. Mark knows bodies and sex aren't anything to be ashamed of, and he'll be happy to see that you think the same." So once nearly all of the still-active SCS girls had accumulated around our pool, I emerged from my study to greet them. The two prompted girls quickly followed their instructions, the second one rushing to catch up to the one that had started first, which made it look like a trend. Half of the twenty five SCS girls were beautiful, knew it, and were more than happy to grab at a chance to flaunt their best assets. Most of the less attractive girls hesitated but it didn't matter because at that moment my cellphone rang as a result of my moments before using NP to tap the waiting Donna - who was in the Adults' House - on the head twice. I answered it, listened, and a few seconds later told my guests, "I'm sorry, but I have to go help Donna with something. I'm not sure how long we'll be." The Guardian Angel picked me up and flew me to the Adults' House. I did know how long we'd be because Donna and I were going to a horse show later. It didn't matter where we went, as long as I left my girls in charge of the SCS group. This event was going to be all about sex so it would be much better if I was not there at the time (just in case you can't see that logic, I'll explain it later. I've been spending a lot of time with females over the last couple of years and I'm starting to become comfortable using their logic. It's surprisingly effective on females). Even before I'd fully disappeared from sight, Nevaeh said urgently and excitedly, "Quick! While Mark's away, let me tell you what happened this morning. Every day since I moved here I've been asking Mark to make love to me, and this morning Julia and Ava FINALLY helped me convince him to do it. I'm no longer a virgin! It was the most FANTASTIC time I've EVER had! Mark is an INCREDIBLE lover!" "It was great," agreed Julia. "I counted Nevaeh having TWELVE orgasms! You should see the mess they made out of her bed." I don't like people to lie unnecessarily, so this morning we'd gone to Nevaeh's room and fucked like crazy. Her room was shut up now just in case my girls wanted to let the SCS girls see and smell the result. "I remember when I lost my virginity," contributed Ava. "The guy was pathetic. Nevaeh is so lucky that she gave hers to Mark." "I'll say!" agreed Nevaeh. "I'm sure it's impossible for any guy to be as good at sex as Mark is." My girls talked back and forth about how good I was at sex, then the SCS girls started joining in, especially those that had already lost their cherries. A VERY frank - and highly complimentary to me - sexual discussion was soon in full swing. My girls made sure that: The SCS virgins knew that they could never find anyone better than me to take their virginity, and that they should be incredibly honored if I gave them that favor. The SCS non-virgins received my girls' heartfelt sympathy for the terrible and pathetic - compared to me - experiences they'd gone through. All the girls were greatly aroused by the VERY explicit and complimentary details my girls provided. (I'd been utterly shocked when I'd first discovered how explicit girls were in their private conversations. It'd shattered several of my naïve preconceptions about the gentler sex. When guys are alone they lie about sex to each other, but when girls are alone they divulge EVERYTHING!) It was done in ways that made me seem God's gift to girlkind, in two very important ways: I was physically superb. The girls already knew that. I'd been in a pair of Speedos just before Donna had called me away, and the first-contact nine had already gossiped many times about what I looked liked naked, especially how impressive my cock was. My Speedos and a slightly go-harded cock had made that obvious just minutes ago. I was emotionally wonderful. Nevaeh raved about how cautious I was to take her virginity, how I had NEVER pressured her, how even though we knew we would become lovers I was letting her take as long as she needed, and how I had become her lover only after Julia and Ava had helped Nevaeh convince me it was good for all our relationships. Apparently I had even checked with Carol to make sure that she approved of Nevaeh and me becoming lovers. Nevaeh said, "I know that guys can't resist my body, but until this morning Mark gave NO sign that he even knew I had a body. He always talks to my eyes and never stares at my breasts the way guys do. He truly values me far more as a person than as a lover. No wonder God has such a high opinion of him." It's very useful being able to operate a second visual center with a sight blob because I can easily talk to a gorgeous girl or a whole room full of them, and my eyes will never stray. That's because my sight blob is doing all the visual straying for me, and all the perving too. It gives girls the impression that I'm a sincerely moral guy, so it's a great trick. Twenty minutes after I'd left, when Julia gave my sight blob the hand signal to indicate it was the right time, I sent her a text message saying: "I'll be helping Donna until dinnertime. Please apologize for me. Also, please do the eliminations before they go home. I trust your judgments." Julia read my message out loud, and the SCS girls were very disappointed. Carol told them, "I only have secondhand knowledge of what Mark is like sexually, but I have firsthand knowledge of what it's like to be his sister. He ALWAYS puts Donna and me ahead of other people. He would rather spend the afternoon helping Donna than playing around in a pool with two dozen naked girls. When you see him next, he'll apologize for not being here and you'll be able to see that he's sorry for letting you down, but he won't be sorry for himself the way other guys would be. He would truly prefer to spend time helping Donna than seeing all of you naked." Although disappointed, the SCS girls couldn't go home because they had to wait for my girls to do the eliminations, thus my girls had about three hours to work on them. They spent about half the time talking about sex. Carol had to be careful, and usually introduced her comments with, "Remember the time you told me about...", but otherwise the terribly explicit details poured out. They didn't spend all the time talking about sex because that's not the best way to excite or seduce girls. Julia saved the coup de grâce for near the end: she invited the girls inside to see her, Carol's and Nevaeh's clothes in their recently enlarged walk-in closet. You could buy houses - plural - for the cost of what was hanging in our closet, so I'm sure you can imagine what an orgasmic experience it was for the SCS girls. One very good aspect of it was that by now Nevaeh had a very large collection of clothes, fuelling the SCS girls' fantasies that the same might quickly happen to them. Fortunately none of our visitors were astute enough to spot the problem with Nevaeh's clothes: that they'd been chosen faster and with less discrimination than was ideal because Julia had been concerned about the damage my image was suffering by my having a girlfriend who didn't dress well enough. Now that Nevaeh had quickly acquired a 'reasonable' selection of clothes, Julia and Nevaeh were looking forward to being able to more carefully get exactly the right clothes for her. Honestly, that's what Julia had said; I couldn't make up nonsense like that. What gets me is that Julia actually seems to believe it, rather than just using it as a tongue-in-cheek excuse. Her apparent belief had a practical use for once because over the course of the ensuing clothing discussion, Julia and my other girls several times commented that the girls who were with me HAD to look spectacular for the sake of my image. Their audience took that as justification for spending a fortune on wonderful clothes, but it would also serve as a justification for my girls eliminating all the non-beautiful SCS girls shortly. ^ [[In the interest of fairness, I have to insert an explanation here. I can't resist joking about my girls' 'fondness' for fashion, but I'm not really being fair to them. At this point it's been just over a year since we became seriously rich as a result of settling our lawsuit with the Government for the DHS's and CIA's kidnapping and 'losing' of me and my body. My girls, ably led by Julia, did go insane over clothes shopping for quite a while, but they've calmed down in the last few months. I'm sure they would've outgrown their excesses anyway, but I believe that was hastened by the shame Julia felt when I ambushed her with how she hadn't noticed my body changing into the Archangel Michael's. That didn't instantly cure her, as not long after she got too excited over choosing Donna's party dress when we were preparing to expose the FBI's surveillance van. That wasn't as selfish of Julia because Donna thought it was her first chance to "come out" as a sexy young woman with me and Julia had wanted to help her, but those two events were a lesson to Julia and she did start reducing her level of shopping insanity. In recent months clothes shopping has become something that still needs to be taken seriously, but it's acknowledged as being only an important part of life rather than an all-consuming passion. Thus, during my SCS project, my girls were exaggerating their enthusiasm for clothes shopping as a way of building up the SCS girls' excitement. I'll try to restrain my jokes about it, but I can't make any promises. In many ways clothes shopping is like having sex. For those few of you who can't immediately see the similarity, I'll explain it. Let's start with sex (that'd still be my choice). I've been gaining a lot of experience in that area over the last few years, and it's taught me a few things. One of my surprising lessons is that there is indeed such a thing as "meaningless sex". It's still enjoyable, but not as much as when there is some connection between the girl(s) and me. There's a clear enough trend in my diminishing enjoyment of meaningless sex, that I know that one day I'll find it not worth the bother. I'm already uninterested in the stupid letters I get from girls offering "to do anything you want." I intellectually understand why meaningless sex is a waste of time, yet sometimes still seek and enjoy it when there's plenty of thrill in the chase. I've been wondering why the chase for meaningless sex still has any thrill and emotional appeal. I'm aware that my playing around is not ideal for my inner-core girls, so I'm trying to understand my interest in doing it. Mom and Dad tell me that I'll outgrow it, but I need to be seen doing that before I stop or my girls won't accept my stopping. I've decided that I've been brainwashed by society. Ever since I was old enough to be programmable, society has been teaching me that I must "succeed", and society has been helpfully providing a definition of what that means. There are all sorts of measures like having a fancy car, living in a fancy house, being rich, etc., but there's one measure which is greater than all of those: successful guys get the girls! In movies, the hero ALWAYS gets the girl. The hero's car, house and wealth are secondary; getting the girl is paramount. In this respect movies do accurately reflect society's values. I'm sure you can think of many other examples of the ways in which society stupidly equates having a girl with being happy and successful, and not having one with being a sad failure. Thus, I conclude, my pursuit of many girls is largely motivated by my desire to prove myself successful, and no doubt also partly motivated by sex being such great fun (thank goodness society's definition of success isn't having a large stamp collection). Coming from such a bad place emotionally before my first suicide, I'm apparently in need of a lot of self-convincing that I am succeeding, but I expect that sooner rather than later I'll have absorbed that lesson, and my desire to play around will diminish. I kind of look forward to it. From a female perspective, clothes shopping - more generally, making themselves look as beautiful as possible - is one of the measures of success that they've been programmed to treat as very important. It's not their primary goal, but they measure themselves and each other by it, put a lot of effort into it, and take a great deal of pride in their appearance. I suspect it's probably analogous to a guy wanting to be rich as both are means to an end - although some people lose sight of that - and are important factors in the mating game. My girls did go to excess once they had more money than they knew what to do with. Their attitude to that issue is maturing, as is mine to sex. Theirs is actually maturing quite a lot faster than mine, so I definitely shouldn't insult their attitude to clothes shopping. Here's an important safety tip for my male readers: Do NOT try to explain to your girlfriend that her buying lots of clothes gives you justification for having sex with other girls. I may have explained to you why they are logically similar, but I promise you that there is no way in the world any girl will ever see the logical connection. You'd be incredibly stupid to even try. This warning shouldn't be necessary, but guys do have a history of being incredibly stupid about sex, and even dumber than that when they think they have a chance to arrange a threesome with their girlfriend and some other girl. Despite all this maturing stuff that's going on, I still like to make jokes about my girls' enthusiasm for clothing. From any guy's perspective, my girls' attitudes are still well over the top; just as from any girl's perspective, my enjoying playing around with more girls is immaturely boyish. Our maturing certainly hasn't removed the fun from those activities or from joking about them. My girls will play dress-up at the drop of a hat, and I'll chase a beautiful girl for sex regardless of whether or not she even owns a hat. So what does all this maturing mean for the future? Not a great deal because it's a gradual change and it's still fun to regress occasionally. I mention it mostly because it would be unfair to my girls if you thought that shopping for clothes was something they were still crazy about. They're acting that way with the SCS girls to help my project. I should have been writing more about my girls to keep you informed about their changes, but my Voyage of Discovery dominates my thoughts and it means that I keep leaving my loved ones behind, which discourages me from writing as much about them as I should. I feel guilty about that, hence this ramble. Just be aware that my girls are growing up and changing, especially Julia. The medium-term future is becoming a high priority for her. She starts her Bachelor of Business Administration in a month and she's very eager to get herself well prepared for our yet-to-be-created, world-changing (she's sure), business.]] ^ Fifteen minutes later, the master bedroom was buried in a tornado of clothes, and the SCS girls were trying on stuff left, right and center, and also top and bottom. Between Julia being tiny, Ava slim, and Carol and Nevaeh voluptuous, there were three quite different body shapes, so the SCS girls could often find things to try on. With nearly thirty girls involved, it was absolute CHAOS! The girls were having a fantastic time. At the frenzy's peak - something only a girl could judge as the whole thing would've seemed totally insane to me - Julia mentioned a particular dress to Nevaeh, who exclaimed, "It's in my room. I'll get it." Nevaeh rushed away to get it - an especially lovely and impressive dress. On her return, she said, "Whew, my room STILL smells from all the sex Mark gave me. I still can't get over how fantastic he was at taking my virginity." "That's a GREAT idea!" exclaimed Julia, as if the idea had just struck her. "What?" asked Nevaeh in apparent puzzlement. "We should ask Mark to be the fantastic first lover of the girls here who are still virgins. That way they'd get the absolute best possible experience of becoming a woman." The type of chaos going on in the room changed, especially because some of the sexually active girls didn't see why the virgins should get a leg up in their pursuit of me. They'd already been flirting with me and had hopes that they'd be able to use sex to worm their way into my lifestyle (it's a very common female tactic, I'm happy to say). A few of them had gone as far as announcing their availability any time I wanted them, so my girls and I had felt safe in assuming that they would be noisily positive about being included now. They didn't let us down, loudly demanding the right to be fucked by me too. A few of the virgins were reluctant, but peer pressure and competitiveness quickly resulted in a strong consensus that all the girls should be allowed to have sex with me. A couple of the virgins were still skittish, but my girls ignored that. [Not that it mattered, but Julia had already canvassed the girls for their virginity statuses. She'd told me that two-thirds of them said that they were virgins. Whether or not they were telling the truth had no bearing on my project's goals so we didn't care much. Interestingly, that proportion was true of both the beautiful and not-beautiful girls, which I'm sure reveals some insights into human society. You can think about that if you like, but you'd better be fast because I intend for zero-thirds of the beautiful girls to be virgins very soon.] In her excitement over her clever idea, Julia grabbed her cellphone and called me. "Mark! We're having the BEST time! What a pity you're not here. Nevaeh said how fantastic you were at taking her virginity and I just had the idea that you should do the other girls the favor of taking their virginity. They're REALLY nice girls so they deserve the best and there's no one better than you. I'll put you on speaker so they can hear your answer." The first thing I heard was most of the non-virgins clamoring to remind Julia that they wanted to be allowed to have sex with me, upset that Julia had once again forgotten to include them. She hadn't forgotten; it was just a good opportunity to get them to exert more pressure on their skittish peers. Julia shushed them down so she could explain to me that, "ALL of them want sex with you, not just the virgins. No one wants to miss out." I responded, "Thank you very much for your compliments and trusting me, but I don't believe your request is moral and I won't do it." With important issues it's ALWAYS best to use reverse logic on girls. They can sometimes force themselves to think logically about unimportant issues, but if they're even slightly emotionally worked up you simply can't expect them to behave so unnaturally. -- "Although I could hear lots of enthusiasm, I imagine that some of the girls are reluctant and are being swept along by peer pressure. I won't take advantage of girls under any circumstances, and I certainly don't want anyone to regret it afterward. Have you done the next elimination round yet?" "No, not yet," answered Julia. "Why?" "I didn't think you had, judging by the enormous noise I heard. To be moral, you have to allow girls to freely choose whether or not to ask me for sex. Obviously I wouldn't agree to have it with any girl who I didn't think was ready, but you shouldn't even put her in a situation where she feels pressured to ask me. The reason you're talking with those girls in the first place is to find me a girlfriend or two, and as being my girlfriend will naturally result in our having sex - obviously only when we both know we're ready and everyone else in our home likes and trusts the girl too - then it seems to me that what you should do now is have the elimination round, but let those girls who don't want sex with me to stand down before the votes are cast. That way we know that the girls who survive the round are those who truly want to have sex with me. If half or more of them don't want to be my girlfriend you won't even need to do any eliminations." "Haha Mark. NONE of them are going to stand down! Any girl would KILL for the chance of being your girlfriend. They would have a FANTASTIC life! It would be the most wonderful thing that could ever happen to them! You're the most fantastic human being that GOD has ever seen on all the Earth and for all history, so none of us will ever meet anyone else who's even a tiny fraction of how wonderful you are. If I can put up with your jokes to be with you, they can easily have the best sex of their lives." Julia's last comment didn't make sense - my jokes don't need putting up with - but in the spirit of the occasion I answered, "Haha. Very good, Julia! I'd better get back to Donna soon, before you give me any more backhanded compliments. Just because you, Ava and now Nevaeh are so happy to be my lovers, don't think you know better than the other girls about what is best for them. Please let them make their own decisions." "I will. But are you sure you will let only the survivors of the elimination have a chance to sleep with you? I'm sure they all want to, so that means the ones that are eliminated will miss out." "Stop thinking that sex is so important, Julia. There are many things in life more important than that." This is what guys always say when we want sex. Uttering that lie is programmed into our instincts because any prehistoric guy who didn't know that line never got any sex and was eliminated from the gene pool. "I was focused on giving the reluctant girls a chance to back down safely, and I didn't really think about others. I wasn't intending to promise to have sex with everyone who survives the elimination. I'd prefer to wait until..." "You've GOT to, Mark! They REALLY want you! They know you're the best guy they'll ever meet." "Well, I'd rather you bulldozed me than bulldoze them. I'll agree to be pushed into that PROVIDED you give them EVERY opportunity to withdraw themselves before the votes to decide who gets to the next round. And please make it EXTREMELY clear to them that if they do ask me to take them to bed once, I am not going to assume that means I can keep asking them for sex. This is a one-time situation and only because you've pushed me into it. I bet you're so excited because you've been talking about fashion, right?" "Haha. You know me well." "I certainly know what fashion does to girls. Carol was a perfectly sensible girl all her life until you corrupted her. Anyway, let some girls withdraw, then do any voting you need to so half of them are left for the next round. After that we'll arrange a suitably upmarket, romantic and nice way to do what you want that they'll remember for the rest of their lives. After that I want to concentrate on looking for a girlfriend. I would prefer to sleep with a girl only after I get to know her much better and after we've all decided that she would fit in well with all of us." "They heard that, Mark. Do you have any instructions on who you want us to vote for? Do you want to give us the names of your votes now?" "There's no need. I won't pick any new girlfriend unless she gets along well with the four of you too, so you collectively have more say than I do. The most important decision is when we decide whether to invite anyone to live with us. That's the biggie and I'm sure we'll spend a lot of time discussing that, as we did for Nevaeh. -- "Are you there, Nevaeh?" "Yes." "Knowing what a quiet, modest, well-behaved young woman you are, I'm sure you haven't said anything to anyone, but maybe you should tell the others just a little bit about this morning to give them a more realistic opinion of sex with me." "The TWELVE best orgasms of my life! None of them have even had two from a boy." That was followed by a chaotic mess of sexual jokes, most of which I couldn't make out through the phones' poor sound systems, but the girls seemed to be enjoying themselves judging by all their laughter. When I could be heard, I said, "I'd better go. Have fun. Goodbye." Julia put her phone away and announced, "Let's get the voting over with so we can get back to discussing fashion." Now was also the time when the selling process was at its peak. -- "Mark was being very fussy when he suggested that some of you might want to withdraw because obviously you wouldn't be here now if you didn't want the same things to happen to you as have happened to Nevaeh. Becoming Mark's lover is part of that, as well as everything else that Nevaeh has been telling you about her new life. Hold up that dress you fetched, Nevaeh. Thanks. See, if you become Mark's girlfriend you have to take the good with the good, as well as taking the wonderful with the fantastic, haha. But if any of you hadn't realized that one of the wonderful aspects of being Mark's girlfriend would be making love with him, now is the time to withdraw. Does anyone want to give up on living with us?" This sounds arrogant, but we expected all the beautiful girls to want to have sex with me, even with two-thirds of them claiming to be virgins. Over all the dates we'd had with them, they'd heard lots of stories and seen lots of proof about how fantastic our lifestyle is, and they all wanted it. Some of them might get cold feet about opening their legs, and might choose to opt out now, but I had a reasonably good Plan B for any beauties that declined to participate in my Plan A, so I wasn't too worried if that happened. It would be easier if none did, but between pessimism, prudishness and piety it wouldn't be perplexing if in my perseverant pursuit of pristine pussy there were some party poopers who couldn't be persuaded to be promiscuous by peer pressure or passionate pining for the profligate pleasures we were potentially promising. (I'm periodically preposterous.) In one respect, having some girls withdraw would even be good because we could use it to claim even more of the moral high ground. This is what happened now, when one girl - not a beauty - said that she wanted to remain a virgin and her still-enthusiastic peers started trying to change her mind. Julia immediately LEAPED on them: "You are ABSOLUTELY not allowed to pressure anyone into having sex! Mark would have a fit if he heard any of you misbehaving like that! There's no point anyway because he will easily detect if anyone is reluctant and he'll refuse to do anything with them. This is ONLY for people who truly want the same life as Nevaeh is getting, including being with Mark." After some silly conversation - girls discussing not having sex with me is automatically a silly conversation (although not as silly as my claiming that) - a total of three girls withdrew: one beauty and two non-beauties. We'll have to use Plan B on the beauty, so you'll read about that in due course. For future reference, the beauty's name is "Stubby"; obviously a nickname as it bears no resemblance to her real name. It has no resemblance to her shape either, but when I'd asked what it meant I'd just got lots of giggles and no answer. With Stubby's and the two other withdrawals, that left twenty two SCS girls still in the running for the next elimination vote, so it was time to take care of that. The first thing that happened is that Nevaeh asked, "Umm, Julia. If Mark didn't think it was important that he didn't vote, do you think it would be okay if I didn't vote either?" "Why not?" asked Julia, who knew why not as this was planned. "The last vote was easy because there were quite a few girls that I didn't think were suitable for Mark, but now it's much harder and because I have to think about what's best for Mark rather than girls that I like, so I might have to vote against some of my friends. I wouldn't be comfortable doing that so I'd rather abstain, if that's okay?" This was a true concern of hers. There was no need for Nevaeh to vote and it would be better for her friendships if she didn't. "In this house, it's ALWAYS okay not to do things that make you uncomfortable." At this point, Julia suddenly worried that some of the girls who were going to get eliminated were wearing some of my girls' clothes, and those were too precious to risk if the losers behaved badly, so Julia got the girls to change into their own clothes and move downstairs to the living room. Before the vote, Julia announced, "The competition is getting tighter so I'd like to say a few words about what I think of it. Mark is the greatest human being there has EVER been, so he deserves the best girlfriends. He's so special that he even deserves more than one girlfriend because no one girl could possibly be good enough for him. That's why Ava and I are willing to share him. My idea of what 'best girlfriend' means has several parts: -- "We buy beautiful clothes so we can look good beside Mark, because that makes him happy and it reflects well on him. Therefore beauty is a factor in how we will vote. So is making an effort. Elizabeth cooked Mark some homemade pizza a few days ago and gave it to Nevaeh to bring home to him, which indicates that she's trying hard, and it takes me to the next topic." Elizabeth was beautiful but also the most unpleasant of all the beautiful girls - although not during our group dates because all the girls had been charming then - so using her good behavior example would make her being one of the vote winners seem more reasonable. "Next school year Mark will probably be going to a better university. We'll go with him and in preparation we're putting quite a lot of effort into learning to cook better for him. So the 'best girlfriend' has to be skilled and apply herself too. Beauty, personality and skills will all be factors. Beauty is easy to judge, but as the competition gets tighter, we'll be looking closely at the other factors. By then we'll know you better and we'll be able to judge your personalities more accurately, and we'll arrange some ways to find out how good your household skills are. Those are my thoughts about our criteria, and I'm sure Ava and Carol are thinking similarly." Ava and Carol agreed that they were. "It's time to vote, so please form a circle like you did last time, except for the three of you who have withdrawn." Julia's speech had apparently had a negative effect, as another non-beauty withdrew, which didn't matter to my project. You won't be surprised to learn that at the end of the voting, twelve of the thirteen girls we'd collectively listed as beautiful had been voted in, the thirteenth beauty being Stubby. My girls did some commiserating with the losers, but mostly they were upbeat with the winners. They were especially upbeat about how lucky those girls were to be having sex with me soon. My girls were quite open about their voting based on beauty this round, because it obviously made sense to defer skills and personality judgements to the later rounds. That sounded sensible, which defused some of the negative opinions about the beauty bias. That there wouldn't be any more elimination rounds was something the SCS girls would only find out about after I'd completed my project. After a couple of minutes' raving about that to get the winners into the right mood, Julia suddenly had a bright idea, and suggested it: "How about we grab the family jet tomorrow morning and fly down to San Francisco for the day. All of us can go, not just the lucky winners. We'll book the honeymoon suite in a five-star hotel. Mark can stay in the suite and be visited by one winner at a time while the rest of us can spend the day out and about. It'll take Mark most of the day, but I'll take everyone who's not with Mark out shopping to buy you each a fantastic dress and shoes so we can go to a very fancy restaurant for a celebratory dinner afterward. How does that sound?" There was a wide range of reactions. Most of the girls were enthusiastic. The unlucky losers had no reason not to be very enthusiastic as there was no obligation on them to put out; their only worry being whether their parents would let them fly to San Francisco for a day. Of the winners, about half were enthusiastic, and half were varying degrees of worried. Losing their virginity so quickly was too much of a shock for several girls. Half an hour ago they'd had no plans to lose it at all, and if a beautiful girl hadn't lost it by the time she was in 11th or 12th grade that meant she was planning to keep it. It was all happening so fast, and some of them said as much. "No worries," reassured Julia. "One of the advantages of doing it so quickly is that it's easy to replace you with one of the girls who only got two votes. It'll be just as if she beat you in the elimination round." "Oh. Umm, couldn't I still be counted as winning the vote?" "That wouldn't be fair. We want to pick girls who want to be Mark's girlfriend and that will obviously mean having sex with him before long, even without this trip. If you're not eager, it'd be fairer to let one of the other girls who is eager take your place." "But it's so quick. I'm not even eighteen yet." "Yeah, you're so lucky. If Mark put an ad on TV for girls who wanted to have sex with him, he'd get MILLIONS of them begging him for the chance you've got. He already gets thousands of letters a week from girls wanting to have sex with him." "He does?" "THOUSANDS! Our male security guards and gardeners are very sad that Mark makes the ladies that open our mail burn all the sexy pictures he gets." The quantity is exaggerated, but otherwise what Julia said was true. I read a few of them one day for a laugh, and they certainly are explicit and repetitive. They all get destroyed, including the pictures and other media. -- "Stop worrying about tomorrow. Tell your parents that you're coming here for the day - get here before 9am or we'll leave you behind - and we'll fly to San Francisco. When we're there, no one is going to force you to have sex if you don't want to. Mark would NEVER do that! God wouldn't have resurrected him if he was such a person. It took Nevaeh days to talk him into having sex with her and none of you are as beautiful or have a figure as appealing to a guy as hers. You can totally trust Mark and you've got nothing to worry about. You don't even have to worry about the plane crashing because the Guardian Angel wouldn't allow that. We'll have a great day shopping, have a fantastic dinner in a very upmarket restaurant, and however many of you that want to can have sex with Mark." The hotel suite and plane were already booked of course. It's only an hour's flight each way and our pilots were looking forward to having a day off in San Francisco. One of them had a girlfriend who would also be coming with us. We usually let her fly with her boyfriend if she wants to visit our destination and if there's a spare seat in the plane. There was guaranteed to be a spare seat on this flight, so she was looking forward to a day in SF with her boyfriend. If you've done the math you might not see an empty seat. I'll explain. By no coincidence at all, the previous elimination round reduced the number of SCS girls to twenty five so we could get everyone in the plane. It seats thirty passengers, which is the twenty five SCS girls, my four girls (Carol, Julia, Ava and Nevaeh; Donna wasn't involved in this) and me. The plane figured in my SCS project's plan because I would have a much better chance of fucking my way through all the beauties if I did so quickly, and the best way of doing that was to make them a captive audience for a whole day. Flying them somewhere else would do that very effectively. We won't be holding them captive or otherwise forcing them to have sex with me, but their not being able to leave easily will be psychologically helpful, and could easily tip one or two of them into my bed when they might have otherwise simply gotten in their cars and driven home. FAA regulations required everyone be belted into an approved aviation seat when planes take off and land. Our plane has thirty such seats for passengers, so can take off and land with no more than thirty passengers. FAA regulations do not prohibit people coming and going from planes during flight - skydivers do the latter very often - so if all the SCS girls turn up tomorrow, the pilot's girlfriend can have my seat. I'll take off by myself and fly in formation with our plane until its "Fasten Seatbelt" lights go off, then I'll create an NP-airlock outside the plane's door, will open it and walk in to join the girls. I leave the same way before the plane lands. There's a safety mechanism to stop the door opening in flight, but I worked out how to use NP to disable that on my very first flight in the plane, as it struck me as something that might be very useful to be able to do in an emergency. Before the girls went home, Julia made sure that the lucky winners appreciated that wasting my time was one of the greatest sins they could commit, since that meant that they considered themselves more important than Julia and God think I am. Julia told Ava to give them a couple of stories about her very first days of knowing us, and how she'd very nearly ruined her life by being permanently rejected for that exact mistake. Ava recited her stories with the UTMOST sincerity because she would have HATED to have missed out on the life she is having with us. My girls also made sure they dropped into conversation a few more examples similar to Elizabeth's cooking pizza for me. These were mostly the good deeds that the beautiful girls had done after being secretly prompted to by one of my girls. Mentioning them now helped the eliminated girls see that the voting hadn't been as unfair as it might have seemed to the poor losers. Julia reassured the elimination round's losers, "You don't have to come with us to San Francisco if you don't want to, and I expect that some of you might not want to, even though you're all welcome. You're free to do whatever you wish. However, the winners are in a very different situation. You're in a competition with each other that will result in maybe one, two or no final winners. If you're inconsiderate, or think you're more important than Mark, or seem not interested in Mark, then those will be good reasons to eliminate you in the next round. There are millions of girls who would give everything they have for a single chance to get close to Mark, so I'm not going to let you cruise if you can't make up your mind what you want. I strongly suggest you get back here by 9am tomorrow morning. If you don't then you'll spend the rest of your life hating yourself for screwing up this opportunity. If you do arrive on time, you'll have the best day of your lives so far. All of you can see how happy Nevaeh is. If you want a shot at being that happy and having a life just like ours, I'll see you early tomorrow." With those parting thoughts, the process of getting the girls to leave began. I'd designed the plan for today to achieve several objectives. In roughly chronological order of their being achieved, the main ones were: I'd proved myself not interested in sex by choosing to spend the day with Donna rather than nearly thirty naked girls. The story of my reluctance to take Nevaeh's virginity reinforced this point, as did many other minor comments from my girls, or of my own from the phone call that I quoted when Julia told me of her mass virginity-removing idea. By telling them I didn't want sex, I was more likely to get it. It's that reverse-logic female thing again. [[To be fairer to females, although less humorous, they're much less likely to defend their virtue if they believe it's not being hunted, and they're much more likely to give it to a guy if they believe he values them as a person rather than as just a pussy.]] The afternoon had including many hours of my girls sexually promoting me. That couldn't have been done with me around. To a lesser extent, neither could the other sales tactics Julia employed such as showing off their clothes. Had I been around the whole dynamic would have changed. For example, the eager SCS girls would have dominated the conversation by trying to sell themselves to me, shutting out the quieter girls. It was the latter group that we most needed to encourage. If I'd offered to take their virginities, the lustful girls would have been happy, but the reluctant ones would have been scared off, which would have been harmful to my project's goal. But Julia could offer that on my behalf and in a way that looked like she'd forced me to do it for all of the winners. We could even make it seem moral for me to comply with Julia's wishes, and as if Julia was doing it as a favor for the girls. The voting round had retained all the beautiful girls and had gotten rid of all the non-beautiful ones. That had to be done because there were quite a few of the non-beautiful girls that I wouldn't want to take to bed even with the lights off. I would have come across as terribly immature if I'd voted for beauty, but my girls could easily do that for me. The timing of my virginity-removing sessions was somewhat tricky. One of my objectives for my project, actually a more important one than my scoring with all the girls, is that they feel happy afterward. (Given a conflict between bedding them or making them happy, I wouldn't give up on my original objective; I'd just have to think of a new approach that didn't have that conflict.) That means I'm going to give each of them a reasonable duration, one-on-one session with me, rather than achieve my sexual objective in a massive orgy or in a series of too-fast boinkings. On the other hand, I wanted to process all my target girls quickly to minimize the risk of something going wrong that would upset my achieving my goal. It would be best if the time period from raising the issue of them having sex with me through to completing the consummation of it was very short. I would've ideally liked to have done it all in one event, but it was best to give them a little time for contemplation, and to make the next date one they came to with full knowledge of what was going to happen, to avoid any major upsets later. I was enjoying the thrill of the chase, so didn't really mind if the chase lasted longer because some of the beautiful girls were given time to exercise their reluctance. All the elimination-vote winners did turn up on time the next morning, Julia having long since taught them to be prompt for our dates and it was obviously necessary in order to catch the plane. Four of the eliminated girls did not join us. They had rung Julia or Nevaeh to politely decline, which was fine. Unfortunately one of absentee girls was Stubby. It would have been better if she'd come along, if only to see what a great time my lovers will have. Oh well, I've got to expect beautiful girls to occasionally make it slightly difficult for me to get into their panties. As the girls were accumulating at our home - we met there before going to the airport - I several times conveyed my apologies: "Sorry to leave you yesterday, but Donna needed me more. It's a pity I hadn't stayed around because Julia, Ava and Nevaeh got too carried away about sex. They shouldn't treat it as such a big deal. There are many things in life much more important than that. Don't worry about all the pressure your peers or maybe even Julia put you under. We'll just have a good day playing tourist in San Francisco." "And shopping for clothes," added Julia. "If we go to a restaurant that serves messy seafood, wouldn't it be better for you all to wear old T-shirts?" "No, it wouldn't. Sometimes you don't understand what's important to a girl, like with your letting the lucky winners give you their virginities." One of the eager, experienced girls was about to correct Julia's omission again, prompting Julia to add, "Oh, and the other winners a turn too, to be fair to them. You're going to give them a memory they'll treasure for the rest of their lives. They'll be able to tell their children and grandchildren with pride that the most famous and fantastic man that the world has ever seen was their lover. These girls will be famous themselves, just from being with you. They'll be invited to be on TV and will be pictured in magazines. It's the opportunity of a lifetime for them." "It's just sex, Julia." "It is NOT! That's like saying Donatella Versace just does nice fashion shows or Guy Laroche just makes pretty gowns. You are HONORING these girls with something that women all over the world will envy them for..." You get the idea: my appearing reluctant made me seem moral and non-threatening, while also allowing Julia to be in full-on sales mode without directly pressuring the girls. Julia kept the sales job going, for example, getting Ava to talk about how fantastic it had been to go on Oprah and talk about being Mark's lover, and how many hundreds of times women had come up to her since then and told her how envious they were, especially since I had become the most famous human being alive because of my resurrection. That truly had happened several times. Not "hundreds", but often enough to provide a veneer of truth. Meanwhile Nevaeh was gushing to the girls around her, reassuring the virgins that sex with me was the best thing that had ever happened to her, and Carol was spouting bullshit to the girls around her too. Half of the girls hadn't been in our plane before, and it blew them away even before it flew them away, and the newbies' gushes helped get the other SCS girls more excited. After we took off and the "Fasten Seatbelts" signs were extinguished, I got up from my seat in the conference room area - Julia always makes me sit at the head of the table, with my girls on either side of me. Julia had pretended to be so deep in conversation she failed to notice my departure. I went to the main cabin where I started being a good host: offering our guests snacks and drinks, which the Guardian Angel and I were fetching because that reminded them how impressive I was. Julia came out a few minutes later and asked me, "What are you doing?" "I'm getting drinks and snacks for our guests." "Good grief! ANYONE can do that! We'll get Carol to do it while Nevaeh, you and I go to the bedroom to start teaching the virgins about sex." "What!" "The three of us will strip and start having sex, and any of the virgins can come in to observe and ask questions. Some of them won't know much about sex and we should reassure them. Some of them might be worried about how big your cock is for example, and they'll be much less scared once they see that it can fit inside me just fine. Why are you so reluctant to give these girls the most wonderful times of their lives?" "I don't think it's moral to pressure them into having sex." "You're NOT pressuring them! You NEVER pressure girls. Sometimes you're so caring and considerate I'd think you were gay if I didn't know better." That was just Julia having some fun pulling my leg. "There's NO pressure on them at all. We're just going to have sex and they can come into the room or not, and can ask questions or not, however they wish." "You know I've never been interested in meaningless sex, Julia. I'd rather just get to know the girls. Once we've picked a final girlfriend, and when she's ready, then we can have sex." Julia say, "It's easy for you to turn sex down now because you can wander into OSU and thousands of college girls are available for you to choose from. Or you can put your Speedos on and walk through the Aquatic Center and you'd have dozens of girls and women panting after you. It's not easy for any of these girls though. It's very hard for a girl to find a decent boy, and it's impossible for them to find a guy like you because there are no guys who're worthy of even tying your shoestrings. You're losing nothing, but these girls are losing the opportunity of a lifetime. God RESURRECTED you and sent an angel to look over you, for goodness sake! If God is so impressed by you, an ordinary girl has GOT to know that she's NEVER going to meet anyone better than you. Plus you're rich, gorgeous, the nicest person any of us have ever met, you're world famous, look absolutely stunning naked, and you're the world's most wonderful lover. Carol can fetch the drinks; you're coming to the bedroom." Julia grabbed my hand and dragged me, so I had no choice. Nevaeh came along too. We left the door wide open, my two girls undressed me and themselves, and we started making gentle love on top of the covers. A few of the eager SCS girls quickly followed us to watch, and probably to join in if they saw an opening (well, they'd be supplying the opening, but you know what I mean). More and more SCS girls followed them, crowding into the bedroom to watch us. As it predictably turned out, a couple of the less shy but more horny and/or greedy SCS girls were quickly inspired by the sight of Julia's and Nevaeh's kissing their way around my body, and they begged to be allowed to join in. That prompted some other girls to eagerly volunteer too. Julia agreed, "Okay, but just one of you at a time. Morgan, you go first. That way you'll get Mark's undivided attention and he can give you the best possible time. Nevaeh and I will get up because we can have him whenever we want." Julia had chosen Morgan because she was on my list and some of the other volunteers weren't. Julia's and Nevaeh's getting up not only freed me to concentrate on Morgan, but it let my girls circulate and continue to work on the other girls, especially those who hadn't come to the room to watch us. ------- Chapter 408: Consummating My SCS Project Mid-November 2007 (Continued) I spent the rest of that flight pleasuring just the first volunteer. There were other volunteers, especially given the enthusiastic comments from my bedmate, but I insisted, "No. I insist on only one at a time. Quantity is NOT important! If I'm being made to do this, then it's going to be done the way I want, which is to give each of you my full attention and the best possible time. Anything less would cheapen the experience for you, and I want those of you who do this to have the best possible memories of it." That was actually true, making it a nice change from just about everything else I said for this project. When we'd planned this, Julia had said, "Maybe we shouldn't let any of them have sex with you on the way there? You'll have less than forty five minutes, which may not be long enough to do a really good job." I'd answered, "You seem to be assuming that the moment the plane taxies to a stop, everyone has to rush down the stairs and off to the stores. We can stay in the plane as long as we want; all day if necessary." "Oh yeah. I never thought of that." Then she'd laughed at herself for being so single-minded (I told you she'd matured). Despite not being a virgin, Morgan wasn't very experienced and had been awkward to get started, so forty five minutes of my best attention wasn't long enough. I didn't want her to lose her mood, so when the "Fasten Seatbelt" signs came on for the landing, everyone except the two of us returned to their seats. We kept having sex (please don't tell the FAA). I used a sight blob to monitor the landing to give me warning if it wasn't routine, but it was fine. It took another half an hour and several orgasms for Morgan to finally declare that she couldn't handle any more pleasure. Every girl on the plane except Carol had come into the bedroom to see us in action. Some of them had not done so until after we'd landed, but passionate cries, peer pressure and curiosity had eventually got them all to visit the room. Once in the bedroom, the sight of my clenching-and-unclenching butt had blown away the moral guidelines that had been important to them for so many years. Morgan's many gasped compliments had helped too. By the end of the session, they all knew that I was the best lover they had ever heard of. Those of them that had previous experiences were very emphatic about how their boyfriends totally failed to compare with me. #8: <1 down, 8 to go. Preferably 12 to go, if we can get every target that our girls collectively consider beautiful.> Importantly, a large number of other girls were loudly clamoring for a ride on Mark's Magic Muscle. (Being well brought up Christian girls, they didn't actually word it that way; that's just me amusing myself, if not you.) "Right!" urged Julia. "Let's get to the hotel." "{Groan}. I don't think I can walk." That's from Morgan, not me. I volunteered, "I'll ask the angel to float you down to the limos. I'm sure you'll be fine once it's time to go shopping." Morgan was too tired for more sex, but obviously not so tired that she couldn't go shopping for elegant dresses. Don't be silly! The limos had been patiently waiting beside the plane and our pilots had already gone, so all I had to do was pull the plane's door closed behind us. One of my core girls went in each limo to ensure none of the girls got into a silly conversation in which they gave each other cold feet. We drove in convoy to the hotel. I'd like to think that the staff was impressed by a guy booking into the honeymoon suite with two dozen girls, but they recognized me and that impressed them more than enough already. God knows what their thoughts were, but I didn't care. The suite was absolutely gorgeous. Julia had arranged for the hotel to supply appropriately romantic music, many bouquets of flowers, chilled champagne and fruit drinks, some finger food, and a very large array of candles. Also several discreetly stored spare sheets in case the blood and wet spots got too off-putting for the later girls. [A piece of advice for you: For the sake of the other hotel guests, if you want to impress your girl with your romanticism by having candles around your hotel room, don't do an amateur job yourself. If you stick a candle to a saucer, it can too easily fall over, set fire to something, sounding the smoke alarm and leading to the evacuation of the entire building. Your date, the other guests, the hotel management, and the fire department will all be very unimpressed by you. My girls and I had been among "the other guests" once and we did NOT appreciate having to stand outside in the rain while the firemen doused the burning carpet in Romeo's room. Get the hotel staff to set the candles up for you because they'll do a far safer and prettier job.] There were easily enough interested girls that Julia could suggest, "Mark, you stay here with Lainey now. The rest of us will go shopping. We'll send Ashley to you in one hour and the limo will bring Lainey back to wherever we are. An hour later, we'll send Erica to you and Ashley will return to us. After that we'll stop for lunch. We'll have it in the hotel to save time, and we can decide then which of the remaining girls are lucky enough to get the honor of being with you this afternoon." The three named girls had been begging for a crack at me, so they thanked Julia profusely. The only undiscussed aspect of Julia's plan was that when the limo delivers a girl to the hotel, one of my girls will come with her. Ostensibly to help the returning girl join up with Julia and the mob, but it's really to make sure the new arrival makes it to my hotel room and that the handover goes smoothly. I put my arms around Lainey and shooed everyone else out of the room. ^ With the enthusiasm of the first nominees, the morning's activities went very well. It's great fun being in bed with an enthusiastic lover. Just before lunchtime, #8: <4 down, at least 5 more to go. Nearly halfway there.> #1: The lunchtime conversation was bubbling over with excitement. The girls were having a GREAT time. They particularly loved driving from upmarket boutique to upmarket boutique in a convoy of limos. You can imagine how attentive the staff were when limos pulled up outside. Julia had phoned the main stores yesterday to make sure they'd be open, and in some cases they were open just for Julia, which impressed the girls even more. No one had bought anything yet of course, because they were still just scouting the market. They assured me that with so many girls involved a great deal of scouting was required. Even if they found the perfect dress, they couldn't simply buy it because they had to be sure that they could get suitable shoes for the dinner tonight. Julia informed me that it would be extremely difficult for them to get all the shopping done in one day, but they were doing their best. If you've noticed that my description of the lunchtime conversation doesn't make any reference to the fantastic sex I was doing my best to give each of my visitors, then all I can say is that I noticed that absence too. Toward the end of lunch I queried Julia about it. "What? Oh that, yeah, everyone has said you're great, but we're usually too busy to talk much about it. I don't think you appreciate how difficult it is to find great dresses for so many girls in only one day." Julia was in her full-bore shopping mode. She probably hadn't completely forgotten that the shopping part of today was intended to be an enjoyable distraction and semi-bribe for the girls while they were waiting their turn with me, but that idea would have been swamped by all the fun they were having. Fortunately Julia had improved in recent months so I didn't expect her to suggest I stop having sex with the girls because I was slowing down the shopping trip. I did worry that some of the SCS girls would start thinking that though. I made a mental note to make sure we agreed on a CLEARLY understood schedule for this afternoon's sessions, otherwise they might lose interest or even forget. I said, "I can imagine! I've seen how much work you have to put into buying dresses just for the four of you, so buying them for twenty one girls in just one day must be almost impossible." "Not twenty one; twenty five. It wouldn't be as much fun if we all weren't getting a new dress." "Of course. Silly me." My girls had brought suitable dresses from home and we'd hung them in the closet of my suite, but Julia seemed to have forgotten that. Swept up in the moment, no doubt. Julia was doing more to seduce these girls than I was. That was fine as a good leader delegates and it was mostly my plan that she was following, so I certainly wasn't going to belittle her in any way. She doubtless thought my goal of fucking the top 10% of the beauties in a school was even sillier than I thought her attitude to clothes shopping was. We have a good relationship: we tolerate each other's foibles, Julia provides me with countless beautiful girls to play with, and I provide her with hundreds of millions of dollars to go shopping with. It's a good setup; I can recommend it. I had to word what I said next very carefully. If I just asked who wanted to sleep with me this afternoon, all of the remaining targets might decide that they'd preferred to keep clothes shopping, especially if they were hesitant about sex, which beautiful 17- or 18-year old virgins self-evidently must be. There were only a few hours left before dinner, so the timing was getting critical. I carefully said, "I appreciate that you're all putting so much effort into looking beautiful for when we have dinner, but you don't have to get quite so worked up about it. Whoever I choose as a girlfriend will be able to spend the rest of her life shopping for beautiful clothes. That you enjoy having sex with me is probably an important criterion in my choosing a girlfriend - which gets Morgan, Lainey, Ashley and Erica off to a very good start - but it seems to me that to be fair, I should give the rest of you who are still in the elimination competition the chance to show me you enjoy my company in bed. That's unless any of you want to pull out of the competition?" I was pleased to be informed that none of the surviving eight girls wanted to pull out. They didn't want to miss out on the shopping either, so they were faced with an extremely difficult dilemma. Being the sort of guy I was, I helped them by suggesting, "I know Diana and Hailey are a little nervous and are very good friends. The bed upstairs is super-large so they can lie on either side of it and can be reassured by having their friend with them and can have rests as I alternate. There will be three hours after that, so three more of you can choose your own schedule. The order that you come in, or even if you come at all, doesn't affect my life." My cellphone floated off my belt and up until it was hovering just over our table. It moved to be in front of Diana and Hailey, and a message was typed out as they watched: "Diana and Hailey next." Then it floated to be in front of Rosa. The message appeared: "Then Rosa." I bet you can work out what the messages were when the phone moved in front of Paris and then Sarah. I had been trying to avoid bringing in the big gun as it was too easy, but I'd sensed too little enthusiasm from the rest of my targets for this afternoon's sessions so I'd had to add some pressure. The four conquests I'd already clocked up this morning, plus Diana, Hailey, Rosa and Paris, were eight of the nine girls I considered SCS's most beautiful. The final ninth for me to achieve my goal - who was actually the fourth sorted by beauty - was Stubby, who was back at Corvallis and I'd use Plan B to get her. The just-named Sarah and the three remaining unnamed winners were girls that I personally hadn't placed in my top nine, but one or more of my girls had. Strictly speaking my project didn't require them to be included, but I had nothing against earning myself bonus points. There wasn't enough time for the final three today, so they'd be a lower priority objective for another day. Leaving a few girls un-de-virginized today would be useful for my Plan B, so I was happy with the schedule my Guardian Angel had helpfully provided. "The angel wants me to have sex with you!" exclaimed Rosa, whose Catholic upbringing had unaccountably failed to prepare her for such a thing happening. "I've heard that God works in mysterious ways and I've seen enough of the angel's actions to know that's certainly true. Since I was brought back from being dead, God and His angel have mystified me many times. I'm guessing this is the first time you've ever had an angel tell you to have sex, Rosa?" "{Nervous giggle}." "I'll do my best to make you happy and give you a very good time. I always do that no matter who I'm with, but I'll try even harder because the angel wants you and me be together this afternoon." "But WHY?" asked Rosa. "God doesn't explain His reasons to me, sweetie. It's enough for me to know what He wants and to trust Him. I suggest you don't let it worry you because I don't believe humans can work out God's reasons for what He does. You did put yourself forward in the last voting competition and possibly as my long-term girlfriend, so I suggest you just trust God and accept it. That applies to the rest of you too. If you are picked to live with us you'll see many mysterious things happen. My girls and I have learned it's best to go along with God. We'd be pretty stupid to refuse to do what God wanted, wouldn't we?" The morning's volunteers had been positively eager, but the afternoon's girls were more cautious, especially as their points of no returns approached, but God's instruction - not just approval or even encouragement, but instruction! - helped a great deal. Also helpful were the stories from the earlier girls about how great I'd been, the gushing and congratulations from my girls, and the envy from the girls who'd lost the previous elimination round. The envy was particularly effective because by mid-afternoon it was particularly strong. The eliminated girls had been brought on this trip partly to satisfy my objective that all the participants in my project should have happy memories of it, as I felt a little guilty about using the ones I didn't have sex with for camouflage. I hadn't worried about the girls who'd been eliminated in the first round as I hadn't liked them and they'd been eliminated too early to get emotionally invested in what was happening. But the non-beauties in the last twenty five were all nice girls, had been more worked up about their chances of winning what Nevaeh had, and were being used more blatantly, so I wanted to give them some good memories. Having them along today would be useful for Plan B (explained later), and especially for them providing motivation to anyone getting reluctant today. Winners with cold feet would feel the just-eliminated girls crowding on their cold heels, ready to steal a march at the first sign of a stumble (those clichés just tripped off my tongue). Julia had said that a winner could choose to pull out if she wanted to, and be replaced by one of the others. No threat was voiced - we would never be seen to pressure girls for sex - but the reluctant winners could work out the threat for themselves. As it happened, it was the losers' envy of everything that had happened today that was more motivating than the unspoken threat. Lunch concluded with the girls in good frames of minds, despite another nutcase incident. I don't bother writing about most of these incidents, but often when I'm in public some nutcase will be unable to restrain him- or her-self from getting in my face and yelling their opinions. Unless it suits me to allow them to talk to me, they usually don't get a chance to bother me for more than a few seconds. As soon as the person has clearly established what they are doing, the Guardian Angel takes appropriate steps. This was just a fairly usual incident: there was no threat, just a guy with a big mouth and no ability to resist inflicting it on me. The angel appeared, grabbed him, flew him outside, stripped him naked, then burned everything he possessed, including his wallet. The angel held him naked and ten feet in the air for a couple of minutes so the public could gawk at him. The angel was in attendance so people knew what was happening as there had been several well-reported precedents before this. He hadn't been too bad, so I lowered him a couple of feet before dropping him the rest of the way. He very hurriedly limped and scurried away - a difficult combination. Julia and I refused to let it upset our table's atmosphere, and the angel later blocked the investigating pair of cops from even knocking on the door of my suite. Such events have happened often enough in the past that the cops should have known not to waste their time trying to talk to me. After the Guardian Angel forcefully but gently blocked them, they radioed for instructions and then left. I never heard any more about it. If the cops did try again, our lawyers would have set them right. By 6:30pm, I had successfully and very happily achieved eight-ninths of my project's sexual objective, plus had picked up a bonus point for bedding Sarah, a girl who was in Ava's most-beautiful list. No doubt you'll also be glad to know that despite the almost overwhelming difficulties involved, the girls managed to purchase twenty five new dresses, and where necessary (which also happened to be twenty five times) they also managed to buy new shoes. Everyone was happy, although a few of them were also very envious. We had a great dinner. There was lots of laughter and joking. I enjoyed myself too because now that the stores were closed, I was the center of attention of two dozen beautiful girls dressed to the eights. Only "eights" because San Francisco didn't really have the best quality stores. We'd chosen it because it was only an hour from home to maximize the boinking time. We could've gone to LA for about the same travel time, but the idea made me cringe. Even though Julia would pay for the shopping - we've got so much money there's simply no point in bothering with who pays for what - I cringed at the thought of her picking up the tab for twenty one girls who were spending other people's money on Rodeo Drive. I cringed at the thought of me picking up the tab for that too. San Francisco was good enough. Our guests weren't fashionistas so we'd been confident that they'd be happy, which they certainly were. The girls were so happy that the flight home from San Francisco turned into a bit of an orgy for the sexually active SCS girls and me. Only "a bit" of an orgy unfortunately, since even with nearly two dozen girls it's difficult to have a proper orgy in only forty five minutes (get yourself two dozen highly excited girls and try it; you'll see what I mean). One of the still-virgin winners (Carol and Julia thought she was beautiful, but I had her down as only very pretty) played into my hand by stripping and climbing onto the bed. She tried to join the line waiting for access to my cock - that part of me was in GREAT demand! - but I told her, "Skye, I don't believe any girl should lose her virginity in a free-for-all like this. You and I will have a one-on-one session another day so I can pay you the attention you deserve." "We can do it after we get back? Even though the angel didn't pick me?" "I doubt very much that the angel is brave enough to contradict Julia, and she did push me into promising to provide that service to all of the winners of the last round, so that's what I'll do. The angel just chose who it wanted me to have the honor of deflowering this afternoon. Next weekend will be fine for us." "I have to wait that long?" "I noticed that some of you got quite excited today, and are still excited, so I'd much rather give the remaining virgins time to calm down and think carefully. Losing your virginity is a special event that I wouldn't like you to be pushed into, even by your own excitement. Over the next several days talk to your friends that were with me today, ask them how they feel about it, did they have any regrets, what they wished they'd done differently, etc. We want to make it as special as we can for you. You can tell that to Samantha and Allison when you go back to the main cabin. -- "In fact, for all of you here, I'd very much appreciate your talking with each other and your friends about what happened today and letting me know what you think went well or what could have been done better. I suspect Julia might put me in this situation again and I'd like to give the girls the best possible time." "You want us to talk about it?" A second orgy member added, "And even criticize you afterward?" "I just realized that my asking you to talk about it was COMPLETELY unnecessary! One thing I've learned from living with four girls is that they talk about EVERYTHING! Nothing is sacred or private. Normally I cringe in embarrassment, but this time I truly do want you to talk about it. Even talk to the girls who didn't come today to ask them what their fantasies are for their ideal deflowering and anything else you can think of to ask about that. Julia pushes me into these situations and I'm very aware that I have a responsibility to be the best possible lover I can. I only get a short time to give the best lifelong memories I can." This was my Plan B for Stubby. It starts with my getting many of SCS's girls to talk among themselves about my taking their virginities, some of those conversations will include Stubby because I'll ask Nevaeh to make sure of that. The few winners who are yet to give me their virginities will have a big incentive to be curious about the process, the girls who did have it happen should have much to say, and so will the girls I bedded today who had already lost their virginity to someone less sexually capable than me. Plus today's planeload of girls will be raving about their shopping trip and the dresses they bought which should create a good and envious atmosphere linked to having sex with me. I confidently expect that many good things will be said about me, as I was VERY good to the girls when we were in the honeymoon suite. My proximity sense of their emotions was a great guide for how I should behave, whether lustfully, romantically, reassuringly, etc. It was especially effective because each time I said or did something, I could sense how the girls' emotions responded. In the very narrowly defined situation that we'd been in, and having spent enough time over the preceding weeks in flirting situations with the girls, I could read their proximity displays fairly well. It had been very easy for me to give each girl what she most wanted and appreciated. If general conversation doesn't convince Stubby to seek me out to politely request that I do her the favor of taking her virginity, then I'll have to target her more directly. Stubby isn't in the art class so the outdoor art projects don't give me access to her, but I might be able to get informal access through the networks of friendships among the students. If not, I could invent some formal reason to work with the school itself in some way. More intrusively, I could find out where she lives and snoop her house as I did for Nevaeh. I wouldn't get her to stand naked on the side of the road, but I could use my knowledge of her interests to design something that appealed to her. Most intrusively, and if the nicer ideas don't work, I can always enlist God's help. To put it more crudely, the angel could tell Stubby to give herself to me. Better would be to have it give her the impression that the angel thinks she's important in some way. That would drive her to me to find out what was going on. There are so many things I can do that something is bound to work if I push her hard enough. That last point is an important one because there is a limit on how hard I am willing to push. If Stubby is truly determined to hang on to her virginity, I'm going to respect that and not going to be too forceful or tricky to obtain it from her. My project's goal isn't worth the girls thinking that harm has been done to them. I want them to have proud memories, not angry ones. Time will tell if I need to start pushing slightly, as Plan B is unfortunately a slow one. ^ Or not. It turned out that Stubby had been keeping herself pure for the usual reason that girls who are sent to a Christian school are: her parents and church had convinced her that it was immoral to even think about doing otherwise. It's a very common message and lots of girls have fallen for it. Even some guys have! Nevaeh - who knew for a fact that God had a very different attitude to sex - set Stubby and many other girls right during the huge gossip session that most of the school's older girls had during their school's Monday lunchtime. Nevaeh KNEW what she was talking about, and she was very emphatic, sincere, and most important when it came to Stubby, convincing. With Stubby losing that moral restraint, and after listening to all the wonderful stories and seeing the pictures from Sunday - there'd been some cellphone cameras on the trip, including Nevaeh's - Stubby joined many members of the audience in being deeply envious that they hadn't been on the trip. Stubby moaned particularly loudly, kicking herself for voluntarily withdrawing from the last elimination round. All the girls knew that my girls had voted for the beautiful contestants, so Stubby knew that she would have gotten through. Nevaeh heard Stubby's moans but said nothing at the time. Nevaeh knew that God's test required me to have sex with the top 10% of SCS's beauties and that Stubby was the only one holding out on letting me in. I had instructed Nevaeh what I wanted her to look out for during Plan B, and it was happening already. Nevaeh had put a lot of effort into being as convincing as possible in front of Stubby deliberately to help me with God's test. When Nevaeh got a quiet chance during the afternoon, she told Stubby, "I feel sorry that you eliminated yourself because of the lies our churches have been telling us. I know Julia, Ava and Carol want Mark to have a beautiful girlfriend, so they'd probably approve if I asked for a special favor for you." "REALLY! That's fantastic! What sort of favor?" "That's mostly up to Julia. She knows you're beautiful and that you eliminated yourself because you didn't want to lose your virginity. I'll tell her that you now understand that your reason was invalid because the church fooled you. I made the same mistake for a while so I know Julia is sympathetic about it." -- I had told Nevaeh a particular line to use at this point, and she had no trouble saying it with a straight face, probably believing that it was true: "For goodness sake, don't tell anyone that you might get special treatment. Mark would hate to have every girl at school ringing him up begging him to take their virginity. He prefers to sleep with girls he likes very much or loves." I didn't want to permit all the school's girls thinking that I might be a free for all. I could be deluged with requests, and when I turned them down, one or more of the girls might speak to someone she shouldn't, and what we'd done might be publicly exposed. It'd be best not to have that happen, which would be easier if it was kept small. That could be done by making the ostensible reason that I'd been pushed into it by Julia doing a favor for a few specific girls that she knew reasonably well. Stubby worried, "But he doesn't love me." "He didn't love the others from yesterday either. He did that as a favor for Julia because she asked him to. Like I told everyone at lunchtime, sex is moral if it's done for the right reasons. It's not what you do but why you do it that determines what's moral and immoral. Mark's reason was to be nice to Julia, which is moral, and Julia did it as a kindness to you and the other girls she'd got to know, which is also moral of her. Just keep my offer quiet until I talk to Julia when I get home and I'll give you a call tonight." "Can't you call her now?" "I guess I could." Nevaeh pulled out her phone, called Julia and explained the situation. Julia asked to be put on the speaker, then she told Stubby, "I'm not going to waste Mark's valuable time if you're not sincere, so come home from school with Nevaeh and I'll discuss it with you personally. Okay?" Stubby agreed, and turned up at our home a couple of hours later. Julia was apparently deeply suspicious of Stubby's motives, accusing her of chasing my money after hearing so many stories about what a wonderful lifestyle being rich allows him and his girlfriends to live. Stubby insisted that wasn't it at all, so Julia told her to prove it: "Nevaeh will take you to our bedroom and I'll get Mark out of his study for you." "Do it now? Oh boy, I wasn't expecting it so soon." "Either you're sincere or you're not. If you are, you'll be grinning from ear to ear an hour from now. If you're not, you can go home now. Which is it?" "You're right, I should do this now." With determination in her voice, Stubby insisted, "I can do it, Julia. Thank you for giving me that chance to prove myself." "I'll wait to see if you convince Mark with your sincerity. Come on." An hour later, her ear-to-ear grin convinced me of her sincerity, during which time I'd also found out why she'd got her nickname. I was quite happy with myself because it was a good feeling to achieve the explicit goal of my SCS project while the goal of keeping the girls happy was looking good so far. Not to mention that I was also happy because I enjoyed fucking so many beautiful girls. There are still three more SCS girls that my girls think are beautiful. I should easily be able to give them "the most wonderful experiences of their lives" - to quote Julia - as they're all at least mildly eager, and then my project will be over but for the tidying up. That has a number of aspects and will take quite a while because I want to do it well. If it goes according to plan, it'll be easy, fun and friendly, so we should all enjoy ourselves. The first step is to let the SCS girls down nicely. I'll arrange to have several of them visiting us at home when a couple older and more sophisticated women visit me. I'm still too young to enjoy the company of such women, but they'll make a good smokescreen. There are some women in Ava's running club who've been asking Ava for introductions to me, and I think Ava would enjoy taking the lead on a little interaction like that. I'll get her to make her contacts dress their best, with beauty salon treatment and all the works. The schoolgirls will see their competition, get pessimistic, and convince themselves that they are being stupidly hopeful about their chances of being my girlfriend. I'll sadly have to agree with them and eliminate all the girls. I'll quickly follow that by eliminating the sophisticated women too, which Nevaeh will immediately tell her schoolmates about. I'll let all the SCS girls know that I've discovered that I'm simply not ready for another girlfriend. I'll present it as the classical: "It's not you, it's me" line. They won't take their rejections personally because they'll see and be told that I am rejecting everybody. I'll encourage Nevaeh to invite any of her friends over as much as she likes, and I'll be very upbeat and good company with them. We should be able to enjoy ourselves without the pressure of any boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, once I make it VERY clear that I'm extremely happy with my current number of girlfriends. My proximity sense will help steer me through the process. Now that the ice is well and truly broken - as well as a few hymens - and once they accept that I'm unattainable, some social interaction to help give them good memories of me would be nice. I like some of them - not enough to invite them to join us, unfortunately - so won't mind socializing with them sometimes, possibly including in bed if that's what they want and can accept that it's just for fun. Repeating the "We're JUST good friends" statement and proximity being able to steer me clear of the girls who aren't getting that message should enable me to maintain a friendly, happy atmosphere. My girls and I will make sure the SCS girls understand that as is ALWAYS the case here, there is no pressure on any of you to have sex. They are free to offer it or not however they wish, as are we to accept or decline their offers. I will keep things social, so if several of them are visiting us and one of them wants to have sex with me, I'll turn her down. If enough of them want sex, chances are very good that I will too, but I won't be raising the issue. I've "been there and done that." Most of the SCS girls are nice girls - since we've become incredibly rich most people try to be nice to us, to our faces anyway - and some of them are good company, but Nevaeh is the only one of them I'd go out of my way for. Which takes me to my next topic: Nevaeh. I also have some "tidying up" to do with her, although that's a terribly inappropriate phrase to use. Nevaeh did very well during this project, especially in not experiencing any jealousy. I'll be showing her lots of appreciation for her helpfulness and generosity. Not only will I praise her, but I'll make sure that God joins in and directs some praise at her too. There are two slightly obscure aspects of the project that I especially want Him to mention. Julia and I have already explained to Nevaeh that I don't have to carry out every step of the tests myself since becoming a leader is part of God's plan for me. It's actually Julia's plan for me, but God does what Julia tells Him to. God will praise Nevaeh for how well she worked as a 'middle manager' - between me and the SCS girls - in my leadership training process. Nevaeh gave me many good examples of how a leader can achieve far more by working through very good helpers, which the angel can make specific reference to. Chances are that Nevaeh will 'work' for Julia and me again, so I want her to be happy with the role. The angel will also compliment Nevaeh for her clever lying because those lies not only helped me pass my test, but they also made her schoolmates and my girls happy. They were Good lies. We'd discussed that issue with her earlier, back when we'd asked her to lie, but she'll be happy to read about it on God's borrowed cellphone. As I said at one point in the above paragraph, it's quite reasonable to substitute Julia for God. Julia does want me to learn to manage people and be a leader. She's been known to set me tests before, although these days I'm pretty comfortable facing my own problems head on without needing Julia to create social events for me to learn from. My SCS project wasn't just about fucking pretty girls because that truly would be easy for me - I could get offers in just by putting my Speedos on and strolling through the Aquatic Center - but those approaches don't appeal to me. It's sad to realize, but I'm losing my interest in meaningless sex. The woman who invented maturing - somehow I feel sure that it was a woman - really knew how to be a spoilsport. My project was a test. Not just that I could get into the beauties' panties, but that I could get into ALL of them AND leave them happy afterward. My ego was involved, as were the egos of my 'victims'. Egos aren't necessarily bad, and they're often essential. They just need to be managed carefully, including mine now that I'm developing one. In some ways my ego is probably already too large. Having so many girls chase after me is probably bad for me, but it is reality and it's going to be a part of my life for many more years, so I shouldn't ignore that girls see me as a prime target for THEIR games. I more than suspect that I haven't adopted the right attitude to it yet, but that will come. The parents are quite open about letting me make mistakes for myself; even Mom believing in that approach now. I'll learn. I'll try not to, but if I make a bad mistake and upset some girls, then it's not as if I'm the first guy ever to use a girl for sex. The girls learning to be more cautious about that is a lesson they need too. Back to the much more immediate issue of Nevaeh. The angel will give her its appreciation, and I'll give her a great deal of mine too, including a good chunk of private time. I'll tell her, "We'll go somewhere for the day, just the two of us." Knowing Nevaeh, she's bound to say, "It'll be good if Julia, Carol and Ava come too." And I'll say, "That would be good, but not as good as having you ALL TO MYSELF for a whole day. They can wait their turn! You were great helping me with my test, and I want to spend all day showing you how happy you make me." She'll love it, and I'll enjoy doing my best to maximize her enjoyment. The last thing I'll do for my project, once I've let all the SCS girls know that I've decided I'm not ready for any more girlfriends and things have settled down, is something sentimental and nice for all of my 'victims'. Hopefully none of them will be thinking of themselves in that way, and I'm sure Julia would tell them off for it if she caught them not appreciating how honored they were, but I do partially think of them as victims. No doubt Julia would also tell me off for that. Maybe I can buy them the same piece of jewelry each to commemorate that I deflowered them. Or maybe I should commemorate all the girls that took part in the elimination process. I think I'll ask Nevaeh to manage getting the girls to collectively decide what they would like, where the tone I want is a long-term sentimental keepsake showing my appreciation, not profligate expense. Something they can show their friends and families many years from now while they happily repeat their story. It might be achieved just by getting some very nice photographs taken of each girl and me, for them to keep as mementos. Nevaeh gained confidence during my project, and it'll be good to leave her in charge of this aspect of the tidying up. I'll ask Julia not to give Nevaeh any direct advice because I want to see if Nevaeh comes back with some assertive ideas. I learned a great deal when I was helping Julia with her earlier machinations, and it's nice to see Nevaeh starting to learn from helping me with mine. In conclusion, Christian girls are EASY when you've got God on your side, the help of wonderful wives and girlfriends in a well-practiced team seduction technique, and hundreds of millions of dollars with which to buy beautiful dresses, matching shoes, and other lifestyle benefits. The seduction aspect of my SCS project really was too easy. Possibly I should set myself more challenging seduction objectives, except that with 4.5 girls at home, counting Donna as the half (don't tell her I said that!) I don't have any real need to seduce other girls. Obviously I will continue to do so, if only to keep my 'hand' in. Julia would insist on that because she's seen how much skill and confidence I've gained from it. This was probably the last large-scale sexual project I'll bother doing. It wasn't really directly about sex anyway; more the ego gratification of scoring with every beautiful girl in a school. I don't need to seek more sexual experiences - I'm sure they'll continue to come to me anyway - but I would like to have more relationship experience with young women, probably from OSU initially and then from whatever university I go to. I don't have any close male friendships with non-family members as guys don't really fit into my lifestyle easily although I am deliberately making friends with some of the guys I do Aikido with (I often train with the advanced class now), but I should do more with guys. I want to be ready to successfully deal with the big wide world when Julia finishes her BBA. Julia has got some pretty big intentions and I'm sure we're going to be dealing with some very astute and powerful people, most of whom will be guys. My SCS project started at the beginning of September and achieved its sexual goal on November 19. I gave it a lot of my time - as you can tell by how much I've written about it - because it was a very good distraction from the high-stakes problems I had, especially after the Surveillance Problem started. I'll put as much time into making sure my project winds down well, to achieve all of my goals for it, so all told it'll be over three months well spent for all involved. The sexual activity lasted barely over a day out of those three months, but that didn't matter; it was still a fun project. ------- I'm aware that there are many other topics that I haven't mentioned for quite a while, from how MAF is doing these days, to doing Alexis these nights. In brief: MAF is doing VERY well. Vanessa hit the ground running with it, has employed a large number of very good staff, and has what appears to be every reporter in America highly motivated to uncover government abuses. MAF would be swamped with work except that it has so much money it's been able to expand prodigiously. Much wrong has been righted, and it's a safe bet that the threat that MAF poses is a steadily increasing disincentive for government-employed wrongdoers. Needless to say, it is very successful. It's especially "needless to say" because it isn't needed to explain my ascendancy. Nor are the visits from Alexis and the other girls I know, and much else that is going on in my life. A lot of it is routine and isn't changing me in ways that need be documented herein. This autobiography is so close to the point of my ascendancy, and these matters so unimportant in comparison, that there isn't any real point in mentioning them. Besides, if you're the right sort of guy you can jump on your motorcycle - preferably a hog - and come to Corvallis to meet Alexis for yourself. I'm sure she'll welcome you; she's a friendly girl. Now that Julia is going to OSU, her social circle has changed quite a lot. Many of the people we meet these days have not been mentioned herein at all, and although they're perfectly reasonable people it's not worth introducing them so close to my ascendancy because everything changes then. I intend no slight to those people, but they aren't having any significant affect on my life so my autobiography won't take the time to mention them. There is one type of event that is worth describing in detail, and that's the subject of the next couple of chapters. ------- Chapter 409: Government Issues Wednesday, November 21 to month end, 2007 Three significant government-related activities occurred around this time. The first was to do with our $216 billion lawsuits. To be accurate, they weren't lawsuits yet. It had taken a few days after I blew the lid off the Surveillance Problem for enough of the facts provided by the Guardian Angel to be verified, and then our lawyers sent the Government twenty four bills each of $216 billion, as the settlement contract entitled us to do. The bills would turn into lawsuits only when the Government didn't pay after a reasonable time. Our lawyer had specified ten working days. Rather than sit quietly waiting for the non-payments to not arrive, we added to the huge swell of anti-Government sentiment by making some media statements. They had a few themes: "When the Government had the CIA and other criminals to carry out illegal experiments on the angel, Mark, and the rest of us, it deliberately broke one of God's specific commands, deliberately risked millions of innocent people's deaths in the nuclear destruction of Washington DC, deliberately broke a legal contract that it'd signed and several times promised to abide by, and it deliberately incurred a 5.2 trillion dollar cost; that's nearly $20,000 for every man, woman and child. How can all of you allow your representatives to act so immorally, criminally and stupidly? The White House and the entire political system needs major reform..." followed by a lot of crap about what the reforms needed to be. What they mostly needed to be was something that made it impossible for the Government to make us fear for our lives again. In answer to a question that effectively meant, "Good grief! How rich do you want to be?", Vanessa - who had an EXCELLENT national reputation by now - answered on our behalf, "The Andersons will keep sending the Government huge bills every time it breaks its legal agreement with them, until the taxpayers get sick of their money being wasted and force their Government to abide by the law, or Washington is destroyed and an entirely new set of politicians is elected, or the Government is bankrupted and we gain enough power over it to enforce the reforms it so badly needs. The Government is behaving so immorally and illegally now because it wasn't held accountable in the past. We will continue to make it as accountable as we possibly can because to do otherwise would cause greater problems in the future." Prof added another answer, "I want us to get every dollar we can because in a few years I want Mark to have the biggest and best scientific laboratory in the world. I'm greatly looking forward to the wonderful science he'll be able to do and the good results that will flow from that." I was looking forward to that myself. Dad had a point of his own: "The Government STILL hasn't paid our bills. The President knows he owes us the money, so what is he waiting for? Doesn't he have ANY honor at all? The last two times his Government broke the law against us, he went on TV and gave his personal word that it would never happen again. Of course it did because his promises are worth less than his farts, but he knew that God would catch him so why isn't he paying now? Doesn't he care that God must think that he's a dishonest scumbag?" The Government had passed its "Fiscal Responsibility Toward Private Individuals Act" as a way of getting out of paying just one bill for $216 billion, so it certainly wasn't going to pay twenty four such bills now. Not that it could afford to anyway, as that was more than the federal budget. There was little doubt about what would happen: the Government wouldn't pay, we'd file twenty four different lawsuits, they'd petition the court to get them merged into one lawsuit, we'd win in the end, with the court legally unable to order payments of more than $100 million per lawsuit, however many of them that'd be. To reduce the abuse it was receiving, the Government's lawyers called our lawyers to suggest that we settle for a single payment of $100 million, "Because we believe we can get the court to combine the claims." "We'll let the court decide that," answered our lawyer. We gave some more press conferences in which we said unkind things about the Government. It had to take that far more seriously than it normally took its citizens saying unkind things about it because if we were unhappy, then maybe my Guardian Angel would be unhappy too, and important people could lose their heads. The Government's lawyer suggested to ours that we settle for five payments of $100 million, five being the number of Andersons. We refused and gave some more press conferences. The Government's lawyer suggested to ours that we settle for eight payments of $100 million, that being the number of claimants as Prof, Vanessa and Julia had been the focus of at least one experiment each. We accepted. $800 million was more than we thought we would have got going to court, and there was so much pressure on the Government to reform its agencies and to leave us alone that adding a court action to that wouldn't have made any difference. It was a family tradition by now that whenever we made hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Government, I got a roast chicken dinner out of it, which was about the only difference our getting that money made. Maybe it'll be useful when I build my laboratory. ------- A second development was to do with the punishment the Guardian Angel had inflicted on the Government for its breaking God's commandment. Cheney and the ex-Director of the CIA were already dead, but the CIA's Deputy Director was still alive. His career was over, he was universally hated and condemned, his life was unlivable, and was probably going to be killed by someone sooner or later anyway, so he finally gave in to the pressure being exerted on him and arrived at our gate, where the angel cut his head off. When I'd heard that he was coming, I'd had a thought about being merciful, but then I remembered the sort of people that the CIA had employed against us and thought about what would have happened to us had their surveillance succeeded in uncovering any of my secrets, especially if that particular team had been unleashed on us. My merciful thought hadn't lasted long. We gave some post-execution interviews, along the lines of, "What a pity more people in the Government aren't willing to be held accountable for their illegal and immoral actions. Or better still, what a pity the Government doesn't behave morally and legally in the first place..." I'll spare you the rest of the obvious statement. I was predictably asked about the as yet unscrapped aircraft carriers, to which my answer was, "Don't ask me. I'm a teenager; what do I know about how God thinks! The angel NEVER explains its reasons to me." As Nevaeh can confirm, I do know what God thinks about sex, but during this interview wasn't a good time to bring that up. In case you think that I'm being inconsistent, let me point out that my ignorance about God's plan for the carriers but knowledge of his opinions about sex was maintaining a many-thousand-year tradition of people being sure of their gods' thoughts when the people had a vested interest in the subject. My knowledge of God's opinions was exactly consistent with my own opinions, as is usually the case with people and gods. Prof had a comment for the cameras, "I don't have any special knowledge of God, but I do have a theory. The angel insisted that we let the CIA's illegal operation continue for three months. It never explained why it did that, but I guess that it wanted to let the CIA carry out many illegal acts so there would be no doubt that the public would insist on major changes to the way the Government's secret agencies can commit crimes and avoid accountability for them. To punish the Government for interfering with God's plan for Mark Anderson, the angel ordered the carriers scrapped, but the Government hasn't done so yet. I think the angel is again giving the Government more rope, waiting to make it very clear to everyone that the Government is disobeying God yet again. -- "It's obvious that the angel will eventually do something to punish the Government for breaking its order; the only questions are when and what. I'm sure that whatever the angel does, it will be far worse than the tidy scrapping of a few carriers. Archangel Michael and the Guardian Angel have always increased punishments when that's been deserved. I expect something like every US Navy ship suddenly sinking at the same time as the White House blows up when the President is in a meeting with several Navy admirals. I've noticed that angels nearly always punish the bosses responsible for the misdeed, so I'd be surprised if President Bush lives for much longer. He's either extremely brave or extremely stupid to believe he can stand up to God. I'll leave it up to you to decide which." The network commentators thought Prof's guesses sounded very plausible. Apparently so did the President, judging by what his spokesperson immediately announcing the decommissioning of every aircraft carrier America had. Decommissioning a carrier is a huge job, and decommissioning all of them was many times worse, but the process of disassembling the nation's preeminent warships was immediately announced and started. This was the first time my angels had ever forced the Government to do something significant that it didn't want to. Previous times the Government had mostly been forced not to do something that it wanted to do, which is not the same thing at all, especially because the Government can start the stalled action later, as the successive investigations into us demonstrated. Once the carriers are decommissioned far enough, undoing that act becomes extremely difficult. The Government must have HATED following that order of the angel's, but such was the enormous pressure on it. CVN 77, the USS Homer Simpson, hadn't yet been commissioned so wasn't formally an aircraft carrier, being only about 80% of the way there. There seemed no need to scrap it, and it certainly couldn't be completed as that risked incurring God's wrath, so it was towed out of the way and parked in a remote area of the Hampton Roads in case it might be useful one day. If America is ever able to use aircraft carriers again, Homer Simpson will lead the way, and hopefully be the start of a new naming tradition. ------- The third government activity turned out to be caused by a different government than usual, so it had a certain novelty value. I was at OSU one day about a week and a half after the Surveillance Problem lid-blowing revelations, when I got a proximity reading from someone paying attention to me but with a huge amount of caution. I'm always worried about the possibility of another religious fanatic gunning for me so my attention leaped up, as did the amount of caution in my own proximity reading. I was doubly concerned after a sight blob glance showed that although his attention was centered on me, he was making sure not to look directly at me. A sight blob search revealed no weapons, but he was wearing some covert, hi-tech communications equipment. I abruptly changed the direction I was walking in, and my radio blob picked up the new baddie's use of his equipment, presumably to report my latest direction. Now that I had the exact frequency he was using, I ordered my radio blob to map that frequency to a flashing pink color and I sent it on a wide search. I quickly found several other men and women actively using that frequency. It was definitely a highly capable covert operation, but hopefully not as capable as me. It was child's play to trace one of the sources of transmission back to a nearby SUV, which contained a driver and what seemed likely to be the local boss. I searched the vehicle as best I could without moving anything obvious. I didn't find much, but certainly confirmed that it was all about me as they had my picture displayed on a monitor being relayed live from a camera in a nearby building that I hadn't previously spotted as it used a different frequency. They had a map of the area of OSU that I was in displayed on one of their monitors. The map was so detailed it even showed the locations of exterior doors and windows to all the buildings around me. They had no weapons that I could see. I didn't discover anything that told me what they thought they were doing or why, but I got a good clue about who they were because some of their writing wasn't in the Roman alphabet. It looked like chicken scratches. I didn't recognize the language, but that would be easy later. I memorized the shapes of several of the, what I assumed were, words. I checked myself for strange transmissions and there was nothing. My cellphone was quiet. It would report its location to its telecomm carrier every now and then, but I knew what frequency that was on and how long it should take. They were following me, making sure they swapped off with their teammates often so a normal person would never suspect he was being followed. They had a person in front of me more often than not, who simply kept walking in the wrong direction if I turned. Someone else would quickly come in to replace the 'loser'. I let them follow me to the quad just south of the Math building, where I sat down to read the paperwork I had with me. I used a sight blob to confirm that Prof was in his office. In an unoccupied office near his, a pen started writing out my instructions for him on a piece of paper. When I'd finished the writing, I used NP to pull Prof out of his office and along the hallway. The note flew out of its office under the door and up to meet him. I pushed him into a bathroom, let him read the note, and then left him to carry it out while I wandered away from the area to draw the baddies away before Prof emerged from the building. I wandered across the campus and into the main library. I found a computer that I could use without anyone being able to see what I was doing. I looked for examples of every language in Wikipedia's list of languages, comparing them to what I had memorized until I got a match with Hebrew. There were several baddies walking around the library, but I didn't bother using a sight blob to search inside the male baddies' pants to confirm that they were Jewish. This computer didn't have Excel on it, but an unoccupied office a few levels above had a computer with it. I used a sight blob and NP to get Excel to generate a random number from one to six. It wasn't a "1" so that was the end of that. I closed Excel. I pretended to do research for forty five minutes, until near the time I'd specified to Prof, then I walked off campus to a nearby commercial street. I walked east along it, the baddies following me, leading me, and beside me on the other side of the street. I walked until I saw a moderately fat guy get off a motorbike, pull a package out of his backpack, and walk into a building a few yards ahead of me. He was one of our guards disguised with a few layers of bike leathers and a helmet with a tinted faceplate, whose current job started with showing me which building to go into. I'd left it to Prof to find a cooperative company, which would've been easy given our reputation in this town. A few more steps took me to the doorway. I didn't rush inside because I didn't want the baddies to know I was onto them, but I didn't waste any time either. The receptionist immediately pointed to an open office doorway which I ran into and closed before any of my tails could arrive. Tyler was already holding out a spare set of large leathers and his cellphone. We swapped phones and I put the leathers on as fast as possible, not even doing them up because NP-fingertips could hold them in place. NP-panels inside the leathers made me look somewhat larger. I'd wait until I was leaving the office to push them farther out, so Tyler wouldn't see anything too strange. I put his backpack and helmet on, grabbed the keys, then walked out. The changeover had taken less than twenty seconds. My tail was standing innocently nearby. He looked at me as I left but my disguise seemed to fool him judging by his lack of reaction and not radioing anything. I walked to the bike, got on and rode off. The other nearby baddies ignored me. I was quite proud of myself, as my plan had worked. Years of watching TV and movies had proved useful. I drove around until I spotted the baddies' SUV, then parked a block away from it, where none of them could see me but they were within my radio blob's range. I used Tyler's cellphone to tell Prof that all was well with me, using a fake accent and innocuous words. The baddies had already redeployed to cover the rear of the building. As time passed, they repeatedly swapped observers, which let me see several of them. I was impressed by their caution as they never sent anyone into the building to inquire about me. It was a computer business so my being there should seem reasonable, although I'd never dealt with it before. I was also impressed by the baddies' patience, as they kept their close observation going until after 5pm, when so many businesses had closed and people left that the baddies' presence started seeming obvious. The SUV moved closer and parked where it could observe the front door, and the foot troops headed back toward OSU, presumably where they had their other vehicles. Tyler walked out with the office's last staff at 7pm. He'd left his motorbike gear behind and had borrowed a shirt and tie from someone, so he looked like one of the employees. The baddies watched the dark building for another fifteen minutes, then called it off. I followed the SUV despite their doing several clever things to throw off any potential pursuit - my abilities gave me strange advantages that they had no idea they needed to counter. Radio blobs were worth more than their weight in gold. After some back and forth driving, the SUV eventually drove into a residential house's garage. I snooped the baddies' base and had most of my suspicions confirmed. There was quite a large team of them, they were equipped with computers, and there were all sorts of interesting things around the place, such as multiple identity papers per person. I didn't find any weapons, but didn't take much comfort from that as they could do even more harm with an unsuspected bug than a gun, and I'm sure they could get as many guns as they wanted if they decided to. There was no indication of any visual or audio surveillance of our home or phones. The only visual spying was a camera they had mounted at one end of their property. It was focused on the road my families drove to town, so they'd presumably be able to monitor our comings and goings to know when to send a team out to follow us. They were living not far southeast of our home, on the other side of a small hill. The hill meant they couldn't directly observe my home, but it also meant they were hidden from observation from my home back to theirs. I suspected the latter consideration had been uppermost in their minds when they'd chosen this place. If I was a baddie, I wouldn't want to be living in direct line of sight of the angel either, given its previous history of uncovering baddies. I'd seen enough, and my families would be worried, so I rode home on the bike. I left my car at OSU, not willing to use it until it'd been checked for bombs or other nasty surprises. I hadn't seen anything that indictated violence was likely, but better safe than blown apart. I didn't lift my visor when I got to our gate, just quietly asking our guards to let me in and to ask for Paul to report to the security center but without mentioning my name. Our guards were alerted and expecting me, so they complied without further discussion. I rode into our tunnel and stopped at our security center. It was better to meet Paul here than in my home, because if we were under observation I didn't want my reappearance to coincide with a motorcycle returning. That subterfuge was too useful to ruin. Paul arrived soon after me, with the current shift's manager and a couple of guards. I told them, "The angel says there's a situation similar to when the CIA's contractors were surveilling us, but it appears to be the Israeli Government this time. The angel has sent most of itself to Israel to check the operation from that end." That got some chuckles and expressions of amazement from our guards. I'm sure they get much more strange fun guarding us than from any of their previous jobs. They get plenty of action too, although not as much of that as some of them had in their previous jobs. "It told me it wants us to do nothing visible. It'll set up bugs in the surveillers' base like it did last time and you'll listen to and record them in case they plan something that you need to take immediate action on, otherwise we keep a low profile and just wait for the angel to decide what to do, probably when it gets back from Israel, I guess. You might need to hire a couple of people who speak the language, but wait until the bugs are working first to confirm that they don't speak English all the time." Paul and the shiftie (the generic, irresistible nickname for any shift manager) fired questions at me, some of which I knew the answers to, but not many. Hardly any of them needed to be answered, so I usually said, "I don't know; it didn't tell me." I refused to answer so many questions that I added, "I think the angel is spread a bit thin having to split itself and travel so far, so we should just keep our heads down and do nothing, perhaps for days, if necessary." In some ways this situation was very similar to the Surveillance Problem, but in one critical respect it was very different: this situation followed the almost identical Surveillance Problem. That made this situation far less dangerous, less worrisome, and much easier to fix. The reason we would be doing nothing for days was because I hadn't rolled three 1s on the Excel spreadsheet. Five 1s had been what we'd used for the CIA Surveillance Problem to determine which of the W-Dimension's Marks would take risky strategies while the other Marks waited. Doing much the same thing again now was such an obvious strategy that I hadn't needed to wait for the inter-dimensional grapevine to suggest it. Reducing the number of virtual dice by two was also obvious, and it didn't really matter if other Marks had used more or less than me, although they probably used the same number given that we thought similarly. Last time we'd wanted to get a wide variety of results fairly quickly, but it was more important to minimize the number of Marks who took risks because we expected some of those risks to be very dangerous. This time the risks were much less, so the Waiting Marks and their families might be at greater risk if the waiting took so long that the baddies lost patience. Using two dice less than last time, so thirty six times as many Marks took risks, was a good idea because it would spread the results thirty six times faster. It would mean that we should probably start getting results after three days of their being obtained, and thereafter receive many results almost every déjà vu. In some dimensions - 1-in-216 of them - there'd now be Marks who were already doing things to find out information for the rest of us. I sneaked out to plant bugs, not bothering to get fancy with the transmitter because it wouldn't be transmitting for more than a few days. I didn't have line of sight so I set up an omni-directional transmitter that scrambled its signal so only we could decipher it. The bugs were just in case the baddies decided to do something dramatic and as possible evidence later. Other than to warn us of anything dramatic, I didn't really care what we learned from the bugs because the Risk-Taking Marks were certain to learn a great deal more. Quite a lot of the baddies' speech was in English, but enough was in Hebrew that we hired a couple of Hebrew speakers who were happy to be held incommunicado inside our property for however long it took. At the rate we were paying them, they were probably hoping the job would last months. The last Surveillance Problem had, but I was pretty confident this one wouldn't. Paul was able to ascertain from the bugs and from some simple shadowing of my families' members when they left home that the baddies were only interested in me and the Guardian Angel. Unfortunately for the baddies, I didn't leave home. There was no benefit in exposing myself, so I found things to occupy myself with at home, or I invited some more 'things' to come to my home so I could occupy myself with them, to our mutual enjoyment. In the absence of a direct threat, the other members of my family continued to go about their daily business. They reduced their exposure as much as possible, and when they did go out, they had to have covert guards with them. It was a pain, but a necessary one in case the baddies changed their behavior. They didn't though, ignoring everyone else. The déjà vu's I had over the next few days confirmed that the problem was common and the solution obvious to all of us. We'd all assumed three dice. It took four days after I'd spotted the baddies before I got the first result reported to me. It'd taken the Risk-Taking Mark less than two days to get his information, but two and a half days for it to expand out through the grapevine before I heard it. There was a lot of it, but nothing in it required me to act quickly and I wanted more information and confirmation, so I decided to wait for another couple of results. I had been delighted how the angel's previous godlike knowledge had greatly improved its public reputation and credibility, and was hoping to at least maintain that, if not add to it. My next déjà vu partner knew nothing and was very interested to hear what I had to pass on. My two partners after that both had new information and we swapped what we knew. I now had three independent and almost totally consistent sources, which was enough to act on provided I took a little care with the areas where there was some inconsistency or I had heard it only from one source. I'd stayed on my property for six days now and the baddies were starting to get antsy. I was worried about their suddenly doing something aggressive against my families, or perhaps even more annoying, suddenly leaving, so it was time for me to act. ------- The three Risk-Taking Marks that I'd got news from (one directly, two indirectly through grapevine intermediaries) had randomly determined how risky their approach would be, roughly as had been the case with the first Surveillance Problem. I'll describe what the first Mark to get a result had done, as his experience was the most entertaining. As is usual with me when I have a long section devoted to a Mark, I'm taking his perspective in the following. This is the second branch away from the Mark that was the original focus of this autobiography (I'll call him "Mark1"). The preceding few chapters are about "Mark2", the Mark that was in the dimension that Mark1 merged into for his eighth merge, which happens after this problem is solved. Now I'm about to take the perspective of "Mark3", the Risk-Taking Mark from which Mark2 first learned the explanation of the current surveillance problem. Writing this autobiography presents unusual challenges, especially now that the dimensions are interacting so much. Leaving out those interactions and the explanations for them would do you a disservice, so they're included. Theoretically I could write about the other Marks (Mark2, Mark3, etc.) as if they were third-person characters, but that would be both clumsy and confusing, especially because they're all called "Mark". They are truthfully all "I" and that is how I'll refer to them. ^ After rolling three 1s to get myself appointed to the job of a Risk Taker, I started making a list of the strategies I could use. I had the intent of rolling another Excel-generated die to choose between however many strategies I invented, but as I thought about them, I realized that there really was only the one approach, just with a variable amount of pressure applied by it. I modified the Excel spreadsheet to generate a random number from 1 to 100 to tell me how much pressure to use. I hit F9 and Excel displayed "93". #14: #2: There was no need to decide what risks to start taking yet. Gathering the easily obtained information would come first. I had already gotten Prof to take Paul a note asking for a motorcycle, leathers and a helmet to be delivered to me, specifying how. When enough time had passed for that to be done, I went to get the bike, used it to get outside the ring of surveillers, then I waited until they returned to their base. I snooped around to get a feel for the opposition, taking a couple of hours to make sure I learned everything I needed to before I acted. I needed to act quickly to get the information into the grapevine as soon as possible, so I was really only looking for things which might give me an unpleasant surprise later, such as evidence of a second team somewhere in Corvallis. I didn't learn anything that worried me. When I didn't need both sight blobs, I used one of them to search around the neighborhood until I obtained a dark-colored sheet. I wished people would stop using so many white sheets. When I was ready, I fiercely clamped the twelve baddies - eight men and four women - including clamping their mouths. I simultaneously disabled their communication systems just in case. I floated them to their house's front foyer and held them there. The angel emerged from under the floor in front of them. It split a dozen mini-angels off and each of the mini-angels flew into the forehead of a baddie, accompanied by warm heat blobs to add realism. Admittedly fake realism, but the subjects would never learn that. After about a minute, the mini-angels started returning to the boss angel, emerging first from the heads of the baddies that I judged the least important. The mini-angels continued to emerge at erratic intervals, with the one from the forehead of the guy who'd been coordinating the operation from the SUV taking three and a half minutes to appear. I had dithered over whether to give this example of an apparent angelic mind-reading ability, but my 100-sided die roll meant I should turn the pressure WAY up, so I went with it. Quite frankly, it seemed to me that the only thing that was going to keep various groups of baddies away from bothering me was making them believe that they were certain to be caught and executed. Law and morality sure as hell weren't effective at stopping baddies living down to their name. While that mind-reading light show had been happening, I'd been using another sight blob, or sometimes both of them, to quickly read through as much of the baddies' information as possible, such as by reading through laptop files. That's why I'd carried them all to the foyer: partly to help ensure they didn't get a warning out to anyone else, but mainly so they wouldn't see how the angel obtained the information it was going to be revealing soon. I wasn't trying to learn everything, just collect some random facts that I could drop into the initial conversations to give the convincing impression that the angel had truly read their minds. When the last mini-angel had emerged from the boss's skull and had merged back into the main angel, I bundled up all the baddies and their easily transported stuff: laptops, papers, IDs, etc. I was very careful to leave the laptops open and running in case turning them off made them inaccessible later. I flew everything and everyone toward home, with the sheet blocking the baddies view of me and my bike; that had to come along for the ride to avoid leaving any evidence that I'd been anywhere near the angel's action. The angel was flying near the baddies, its bright light ruining their night vision so they wouldn't see the sheet. Our security was very surprised when the angel, its prisoners and their equipment flew low over the top of our gate. Because of the note that Prof had delivered, our guards knew there was another set of baddies in town. Despite the angel apparently having the situation well in hand, our guards hit the alarm button. I sneaked over the wall far enough from the gate to be unobserved. I gently landed the bike, helmet and leathers behind the Staff Quarters for the guards to put away properly later, and I covertly zipped around the hill and into the Kids' House. Meanwhile the baddies and their stuff had continued to float up toward my home since our property is so large that if I'm inside my home I don't have enough range to do things at the gate - it was a considerable nuisance that my maximum ki-ability range hadn't risen by a factor of eight every merge like my force and energies abilities had. I made sure the baddies saw me walk out of my home accompanied by another angel and one of our laptops that was slowly booting itself so the angel could use it to communicate with Paul. I wasn't going to use the baddies' laptops because I wanted it to look as if the angel needed no ordinary way of acquiring the information it was going to be revealing. Speaking of laptops, the angel was also running an extension cord and power strip down from the Kids' House, to power all the baddies' laptops. I didn't want them powering off while they were still usable in case powering them back on required a password. I was also pressing their shift keys every minute to stop a screen saver kicking in, in case that had a password on it. I met the baddies not far below my home, the two angels merged, and the baddies formed into a tidy hovering line while all their equipment was laid out on the grass below their feet. I waited for the chaos triggered by the alarm to calm down: guards running to their stations, my families running for the panic rooms, etc. It'd be good practice for everyone, and it'd call the police too. Waiting for all that to settle down gave almost enough time for Windows to finish booting the laptop. I located and reassured my families by stroking their cheeks or pinching their nipples, giving Julia something new to explain to Nevaeh. I'd never used NP on Nevaeh for sex because it might flip her mindset about us, but I judged that tweaking nipples to briefly reassure everyone that I was okay was a permissible use and a good little test for her. Nevaeh, being a reasonably intelligent girl, had already astutely noticed my interest in breasts, so the nipple tweak was clearly consistent with my character while not being something the angel had ever done for itself, so she should think the angel was sending a message from Mark and would hopefully not get too freaked out by it. If she reacted well, I would continue to slowly and CAREFULLY ramp up the sexual NP contact. All the rest of us missed my being able to use NP during sex. Our guards were unhappy to see one of their principals - me - not running for the panic room but standing out in the open near the presumed baddies, so I was quickly surrounded by guards and they tried to bustle me away. The angel politely let them know that it wanted me to stay right where I was. More guards arrived and I was surrounded and almost buried by a wall of them, their weapons drawn and facing outward, with a bias in the direction of the line of hovering, clamped, immobile, visibly unhappy strangers. The angel also kept our guards from approaching the laid out equipment. Paul had been only seconds behind the guards who'd surrounded me. He was curious about the recent developments and had some questions for me. I ignored his questions, saying, "I know as little as you. The angel just pulled me away from watching TV to be out here." Paul knew that was a lie as I'd been doing something covert around town. The note I'd given Prof hadn't contained much in the way of information, but it had said that I would be helping the angel investigate another professional surveillance operation directed against us. Paul would have been informed if I'd returned to the property earlier, so I'd have to explain my lie to him later. [I told him that the angel used me as bait but didn't want that publicly known so I was pretending otherwise. That wasn't the sort of thing the guy in charge of my safety would normally appreciate hearing, but Paul had a pretty high opinion of the angel's abilities by now, and he didn't have any choice either.] For the moment, Paul was easily smart enough not to expose my lie. On my laptop, the angel typed a message for Paul: "Last time I revealed everything. This time I want humans to reveal everything. You make it happen as fast and completely as possible." Paul had several questions for the angel and me. The angel said nothing, and I just shrugged and guessed, "Seems to me it wants to see if we - humanity I think it means - have learned any lessons. Or maybe it's got some other purpose. It's damned hard to know what it's thinking, especially because it doesn't have much in the way of facial expressions or body language." "Do you think I should call the Police Chief?" "I think you should call EVERYONE, including the media." Paul looked at the angel, which just looked back at Paul. Or perhaps it was looking elsewhere; it's hard to tell with Guardian Angels. It didn't contradict me, so after a couple of seconds Paul started issuing orders to his staff to get them ready for the chaos that was going to erupt shortly. He also ordered them to secure the situation better, including to collect the equipment. The angel interposed itself between the gear and the guards that moved to obey Paul. The guards stopped. The angel split itself into eight, and they stationed themselves around the evidence. It also floated the baddies into a group about three feet above their equipment and within the ring of angels, which did a pretty good job of convincing Paul to leave well enough alone. The laptop floated toward Paul, on which appeared, "Tell the Police Chief to also investigate [the address of the baddies base]." "Where are they from?" asked Paul. When the lack of a response was obvious, Paul returned to issuing orders to his people, then pulled out his cellphone and started making calls. I said, "Will you please let my families know that they can come out now. I'll go see how the girls are." Paul nodded, so I wandered back inside, leaving the angel(s) to carry on without me. I didn't want to be in sight when all the outsiders started arriving, to make the angel seem independent of me. The police were on the scene within two minutes. When our siren goes off for real (not a drill), so does a much-muted copy of it inside the police station. If the police don't have anything better to do - and they think there's almost nothing better for them to do than protect us - they leap in their cars and come tearing our way. Apart from anything else, none of them have forgotten that the first four cops to arrive at the scene when the CIA had duped the Army into attacking our Peoria Road home had each received a $75,000 bonus. The Chief of Police wasn't far behind his frontline cops. When he approached the angels, one of them - it was hard to tell which - floated our laptop toward him. On it I typed: "You, the FBI and other agencies will carry out the most thorough and fastest investigation possible. The purpose is to provide information to the public. I want disclosure of levels of detail even greater than I provided for the CIA's last surveillance operation against my assignment. You will give the media full access to the investigation and they will report everything. There will be no charges, arrests or trials; I will take care of those. Your sole job is to discover and publicize everything. You are working for God on this." He didn't know what to make of that, but I didn't bother discussing it with him. For a start, I was too far away to hear what he was saying. Second, I'd have to go through the whole thing again with the FBI and who knows what other agencies that might get involved, given that these baddies appeared to be Israeli. The Chief and Paul got into a discussion about something. I carried on talking to my families, who'd gathered around me in the Kids' living room. My sight blob showed me that the cops wanted to look at the evidence. I wanted it kept where it was for the media to be able to film all of it and so the more expert FBI could handle it, so the angel used the laptop to communicate a system to the police. A cop could point to a piece of evidence and the angel would float it out of the ring of angels toward the cop. He could investigate it as much as he wanted, show it to other cops, etc., but it could not be removed and it had to be returned before another piece would be provided. The angel refused to hand over the baddies' laptops because I preferred to wait until the real computer experts arrived. The prisoners were treated as just another piece of evidence. Until I was close enough to hear what they were saying, the clamps would remain on their jaws. One particularly noteworthy event occurred: After having gone through enough of the evidence to see that multiple crimes had been committed, the multiple IDs probably inspired the cops to get the baddies' fingerprints so their real IDs could be determined. Corvallis cops have a very large budget and great toys, which after it was fetched, I saw included a high-tech device which was wirelessly linked to their station's computers. The first baddie they got the angel to float out of the ring to fingerprint was a woman who didn't want her prints taken, keeping her fingers curled into a fist. I could easily have left it for the cops to solve as I'm sure they've had plenty of practice at getting fingerprints from uncooperative people, or I could have used NP to force her hand open. I had a better idea: I chopped the woman's arm off in the middle of the uncooperative forearm and floated the severed limb toward the cop. Needless to say, there was a great deal of reaction. The woman still had her mouth clamped shut so her ability to scream was greatly restricted. I'm sure she still managed to create a fair amount of noise though, judging by the number of cops and our guards that suddenly looked at her. The blood pumping out of her truncated arm and the nearby floating limb was vividly attention getting. My victim passed out, and a couple of the nearby cops nearly did so too, the youngest one managed to make it to some bushes before he threw up. He must have seen much worse at traffic accidents, but this event had several unusual psychological factors. It nearly had another one because I'd debated having the woman's blood spray around in an arc to splash the cops because blood-stained uniforms would look more dramatic for when the media arrived, but I'd decided that seemed too fake because the woman was being held totally immobile by my NP-clamps. A couple of our guards came running with medical supplies and started attending to her stump. Lucky for her we keep an exceptionally good medical inventory, including some very effective painkillers, which she'll appreciate when she wakes up. That partially compensated for the bad luck she'd had when I'd rolled "93" - this wouldn't have happened if I'd rolled "13". My extreme treatment of her extremity would be a very clear and effective lesson in the subsequent news stories, reinforcing that Guardian Angels are deadly and single-minded in pursuit of their mission. A few minutes later, when things had calmed down, the forearm and fingerprinting kit floated up to the cop who'd been about to take everyone's prints. They hovered in front of him in an obvious invitation. He was decidedly unwilling to accept the invitation. One of our guards stepped forward and took hold of the floating half-limb, obviously telling the cop to hold the kit ready. When we'd first employed Paul, he had been given the budget and strongly worded instructions to find the very best people he could. The "hand holder" had been in combat so had probably seen and done worse. He wasn't sure what to do with the forearm afterward, but the angel took it off him and put it among the evidence. Fingerprinting the other baddies proceeded quickly. Other than the erratic arrival of more of the local cops, the local news-people arrived next and they had a wonderful time running around talking to our staff and taking pictures. My families were still inside my home. I had explained my objectives to them, although I'd refused to explain why I had most of those objectives, and we were discussing how best to achieve them. An ambulance was the next arrival, the paramedics running up the path pushing their wheeled stretcher. That was still empty when they pushed it back down, as I didn't let them take the woman away. I only let them treat her on the spot, which didn't require anything other than checking what our guys had already done. My current plan is that the baddies will be leaving here in body bags. Something might happen to change that, but I'm guessing not. We will be much safer when people learn that participating in an operation against us is suicide. The media hadn't been as fast to arrive on the scene as the local cops had been - we'd never felt the urge to provide the media with any financial incentive to rush toward us, although I'd often been tempted to pay them to go jump in the river - but they eventually made up for it by arriving in droves of helicopters. Not relying on Paul to spread the word, Dad had also got on the phone and told the major news organizations what was happening and to get their butts here asap. We've always been a great source of news, so their well- and casually dressed butts (reporters and cameramen respectively) were flying in as fast as they could be gotten airborne. Paul must have helped the Police Chief understand what the angel wanted because the local cops cooperated with the media. A couple of FBI helicopters arrived next. They elected not to set down their passengers on our informal helicopter pad up by the Adults' House, but to land on the empty area outside our front gates. They unloaded, gathered together and approached our gates. They stopped outside the gates to talk to our guards. The guards then radioed Paul, and Paul called Dad to inform him that the FBI agents were reluctant to enter the property, given the recent results from FBI vs. angel encounters. What the Fibbies wanted was for all the evidence and prisoners to be sent down to them. It would've been much more convenient for me if I could have held the prisoners outside the gate, but my maximum range is a stubbornly and inconveniently short 518 feet. Everything had to be done within that distance of where I was, which was out of sight inside my home. Dad relayed the problem to me, and I told him, "Tell him the angel wants the investigation done quickly and wants the FBI involved, but since it hasn't sent the stuff down, it obviously wants them to come up." From what I could tell, the Fibbies were still reluctant, and Dad didn't need my help to answer the next exchange with, "Good grief! You're here on the angel's invitation! You're making fools of yourself by being so distrusting of an angel from God." It's not only me who enjoys claiming that God is on our side. The FBI Agent In Charge agreed to come in by himself first. The Fibbies aren't lacking in courage, just too often morals, respect for the law, and respect for honest citizens. He walked uphill toward the eight angels, Paul and the several of our guards who were still guarding the evidence and hovering prisoners. The next stage would be slightly easier if I could hear what was being said and I didn't need to stay inside because the parents and I had already agreed on the next few stages of my plan and the media had already seen that I had been nowhere to be seen. The phone call to Dad made it seem natural for him to walk out and reasonable for me to accompany him, so that's what I got Dad to do. The Agent In Charge wasn't overjoyed by the sight of eight angels, but he continued his approach. Paul met him, introduced himself, and then introduced Dad and me. Paul gave the Fibbie a summary of the events, including a particularly clear description of the angel's wishes. He's no dummy, is Paul. The Fibbie hadn't liked it that the media were filming Paul's briefing, and his frown got worse during Paul's description of the angel's wishes. He was in for an education shortly. I knew that if I left it to the police's and FBI's normal investigative processes it would likely be several weeks before a useful amount of information emerged, and it could possibly be months of nothing at all if the organization behind the baddies stonewalled totally. That would be a major inconvenience to the other dimensions' Waiting Marks, and quite likely dangerous to them and their families if their baddies initiated any action during the delay. For all I know, the baddies may be intending to carry out assassinations or other violent actions so they've got to be removed as quickly as possible in the other dimensions, which means getting the information about them onto the grapevine asap. That's especially true because I'd rolled "93". My minds had spent several minutes deciding among myself how to convey what I wanted to the world. I used the laptop to display a message: "I have an announcement that I want broadcast live by all the TV networks and to be read by the FBI Agent In Charge and Corvallis Chief Of Police. Arrange yourselves so you and the cameras can see this screen." So newsworthy are the Andersons that the media usually sends well-equipped teams to our place, so most of them had live transmission capabilities. When they were ready I typed the following: PART ONE: HOW The last operation that targeted my assignment had its details obtained and publicly revealed by me. This new operation will have its details obtained and publicly revealed by humans. I will provide no assistance beyond what I have already done. The only purpose of your investigation is to obtain and make those details public. You are not carrying out a criminal investigation. There will be no charges, arrests or trials at the completion of your investigation. Because the operatives were carrying out an operation against my assignment they will be killed, as required by my mission from God. They committed suicide three days ago at 08:24. As they are essentially dead already, you are not constrained by their rights. You are not constrained by having to obtain search warrants or having to carefully document chains of evidence, or any other legal nicety. Your SOLE objective is to obtain and provide information to the public. The investigation will be carried out with the FULL resources of humanity. I command every human being to do his or her utmost to assist this investigation. When I deem the investigation complete, I will punish those I consider failed to comply with my command. In particular, if the organization that launched the operation does not immediately provide the FBI with every detail, then they will be disobeying a command of God's and my punishment will be severe. PART TWO: WHAT The level of detail I want publicly revealed is without limit. You will reveal EVERYTHING you find out. You will set up a website capable of being accessed by anyone in the world who wants to read the thousands of pages that you will be providing. The highest priority is everything on the operation: its objectives, whose idea it first was, who approved it, who the operatives are, their entire chain of command, what their skills are, how they got to Corvallis, their prior operations, their careers, etc. Until I call an end to your investigation, you will continue to dig for and publicize ever-greater details. If unstopped, I want you to dig back through these operatives' and other participants' lives so painstakingly that you will find out and publicize the date, hour and minute when each of them was born, their birth weight, who pulled them out of their mother, and whether that person used their left or right hands to smack the baby's bottom. If you are not sure whether to include something or not, you will always include it. If you are not sure whether something is true or not, you will still include it but will comment on your uncertainty. PART THREE: WHEN As fast as humanly possible. Not weeks, not days, but hours. If there are not hundreds of pages of information accessible within hours, punishment will be severe. If thousands of pages aren't continually and hourly added to the publicly accessible archive, punishment will be severe. PART FOUR: EXAMPLES Small example: The instant you identify these operatives, everything you know about that person is to be put onto the website archive. You will not attempt to censor it in any way. Protecting your sources, methods, or any other such considerations are overridden by my orders. Medium example: This investigation is the most important and urgent one in the history of the USA. If it needs 10,000 investigators, they are to immediately drop whatever they are doing and be assigned to this. Whatever resources it needs are to be immediately provided. Large example: If your investigation leads you to believe with at least a 51% likelihood that another country is responsible for the operation - whether that country's government or another organization within that country - then the USA will immediately declare war on that country and will immediately begin military operations against it. Every bomber in the USAF will be armed and sent to attack that country. Every cruise missile in the US inventory will be launched as soon as it can be moved within range. Etc. There is to be no hesitation. The only restraint is to do your utmost to avoid destroying the information being sought. Only if that country immediately provides you with every shred of information they have on the operation and its operatives will you put your attacks on hold. If that country fails to answer any of your investigators' follow-up questions as fast as humanly possible, then you will resume the attacks. I will instruct the state of war to be canceled only when I deem the amount of information that has been made publicly available is sufficient. I will require a very large amount of it. PART FIVE: AFTERMATH I will declare when the investigation is finished. I will review the participants' compliance with my commands. If I deem their compliance unacceptable I will punish them severely. Small example: If upon a foreign county's identification of the likely origination of the operation, your Congress does not within minutes declare a state of war and the US military prosecute it decisively, then the US Government will have broken a command of God's and will be deemed to be aiding and abetting an enemy of Mark Anderson. The consequences of that will be greater than any you have suffered thus far. Large example: I am out of patience with humanity's repeated threatening intrusions into my assignment's life. If I decide that a country is a threat to my assignment, then it is within the bounds of my order from God to utterly destroy that country. That would not be my first choice, but you have already taken me well past my first choice. You have not seen me use even the tiniest portion of the power that is available to me, but I will use all of it if I deem it necessary. I can surround the borders of a country and rapidly move inward killing every form of life that I encounter. That country would be devoid of life within minutes. I had to use just under 20% of my available force to keep holding the baddies, but that still left me able to create over 800 light blobs, each of which could be as bright as 80 x 60W lightbulbs. 4,800 watts is a BRIGHT light at night! I made the eight 'angels' around the baddies fly up into the nighttime air. In less than two seconds they had risen thirty feet vertically, had separated horizontally by the same distance, and had duplicated themselves. Those 16 angels continued to rise, spread, and duplicate outward, so two seconds later there were 32 angels, and then 64 of them, forming an impressively expanding umbrella over our heads. Proximity told me that everyone within range of me was gobsmacked and fearful to various degrees: the baddies especially fearful, Paul impressed speechless. The umbrella's surface was roughly evenly populated with angels and I wanted to maximize the impressiveness of the display, so I had the angels rise straight up with the angels on the rim being the only ones to duplicate, sending their 'offspring' further out to make a wider rim and then only those duplicated again. That allowed the expansion process to continue for much longer than it would have with more multiples of 2, and it disguised that half the angels wouldn't have participated in the last power of 2 increase. That would have implied a limitation I didn't want people to be aware of. I wanted them to think the angels could duplicate without limit. When I ran out of ability, the 820-strong host of angels was about 300 feet above us and formed an umbrella about 300 feet across. I put all the angels into a hover. The umbrella was about 30 angels across, they were each about 2 feet in diameter and about 10 feet apart measured center-to-center. I started expanding their diameters and increasing their brightness, toward their maximums of 48 feet and 4,800 watts. The umbrella became a solid and VERY bright cover. It was hugely impressive to look at, until we all had to cover our eyes. The glare was still hugely impressive even then. For the benefit of people watching from a distance - the effect was certainly visible from all of Corvallis, and I'm tempted to think from half of Oregon - I kept increasing the sizes and brightnesses until they hit maximum. I held that for a few seconds, then canceled everything except for a lone ordinarily configured Guardian Angel 300 feet above us. I had thought about having it spit out waves of angels that would zip away, getting smaller and dimmer to give the illusion of greater distance being covered. I could cancel them when they were apparently out of sight in the distance, enabling me to create new ones. I could keep it up for several minutes, giving the impression that the angel could create many thousands of itself. As wonderful as that would have been, I had to decide not to do it because I feared that several minutes of tape from different perspectives would allow the illusion to be spotted. The angel's being caught doing something to fool people might ruin its reputation and cause a dangerously negative reaction. I thought I'd done enough already. People had never seen more than a handful of Guardian Angels before, they knew angels were individually unstoppable, and even just one could easily destroy an Air Force base in just a few minutes, so seeing nearly a thousand of them was surely scary enough. I gave people a few seconds to get their vision back, and for the cameramen to get their cameras aimed at the angel again. It didn't do anything as impressive again, merely zipped down to hover over my head. It split off eight copies of itself that resumed guarding the prisoners. The clatter of keys on the laptop alerted the audience. They read: Your time starts now. Reveal everything about this operation, and do so as rapidly as humanly possible, or I will put my capabilities to more use. The angel over my head disappeared. Between its instructions, threats and light show, I thought I'd successfully complied with the "93". Dad told the Fibbie Agent In Charge, "If I was you, I'd get the rest of your team up here and get them busy." I released the clamps on the baddies' mouths and wandered back inside to watch some TV. Actually "watching" was easy, it was listening to it that I had to go inside for. I figured I didn't need to listen to any of the investigation. The media on our property were just about wetting themselves with excitement. Half of the reporters turned to face their cameras and began excitedly telling their audience what they'd already seen for themselves, while the other half were running around trying to interview someone, preferably me or Dad. Out of habit, our guards moved to block the news teams from following us. I guess our guards must have been confused about the angel's orders that everyone was to cooperate with the media, because one of the guards called out to Dad and me, "Should we let them through?" "Good God no," I yelled back, no doubt echoing Dad's sentiment. The angel had ordered the FBI and cops to cooperate with the media, but it hadn't been so cruel as to order my families and me to. Who on Earth would cooperate with the media if they didn't have to? Watching TV inside, I saw and heard that the general consensus of the commentators was: "FUCK!" They worded it more circumspectly, but they were shocked. When one of the commentators recovered, he managed to banter with his co-anchor, "Well, Dave, I guess the angel is running out of patience." "It looks that way, Ted. You have to wonder who would be so foolish as to send more people to spy on Mark Anderson." "Especially after what happened the last time." "And the time before that too, Ted. Someone has made a very big mistake." "None bigger, Dave." ------- Chapter 410: The Mossad Problem Solved Wednesday November 21 to month end, 2007 (Continued) The US Government did not drop everything else and make it their number one priority to carry out the angel's orders, but the investigation did go ahead rapidly. The media wasn't given full access and information wasn't made public as fast as it could have been, but quite a lot of access was given and a good amount of information was reported, with more progress being usefully made behind the scenes. It didn't take long for the FBI to learn that several of my prisoners were Israeli, and in a couple of cases, to positively identify them as members of Israel's security forces. Most usefully, their pictures had been broadcast all over the world and thousands of worried or religiously compliant Israeli citizens were phoning tips in. When the nationalities and affiliations were confirmed, President Bush was informed. He discussed the situation with his top advisors, but had no choice except to call the Israeli Prime Minister, describe the information he'd been given, commiserate briefly, but then state that he [the President] had to ask Congress to declare war on Israel, as ordered by the angel. The current situation following so closely on the heels of the CIA's debacle made it very easy for the President to know what to do, as the American public were still highly emotional and were again screaming for action; other than those of them that weren't busy evacuating Washington DC yet again. The threat wasn't as dire as normal, but for some people evacuation had become a habit. The vice-president had only days previously been forced out of office and then killed by a mob, and the President feared the same would happen to him if he disobeyed the angel's very explicit order, or that it'd decapitate him itself. That wasn't what he told the Israeli Prime Minister. He used the excuse, "One angel totally destroyed five of our air bases in one night and it was holding itself back far more than we ever suspected. We have no choice. If we don't declare war on your country, the angel will consider us to be aiding and abetting you, and who knows what it would do to us then. I have asked the FBI to double-check their findings, which will delay the announcement for a few hours, but then I'll have to let them release news of your country's involvement. In a few hours the whole world will know of it. Congress will vote to declare war on Israel with or without my request, and my advisors predict that some of your neighbors will do so too. Your country won't exist in a few days unless you do what the angel wants." A few hours later, the FBI released the information that the operatives had been working for Mossad, Israel's primary secret service. The Israeli Government did nothing publicly, but a great deal must have been happening behind the scenes. Including, I am sure, some very hurried editing of their files. The political and military situation in the Middle East quickly became even more complex. The Israeli government had to hand over the information. To do otherwise would be to risk the destruction of their entire country. The Israeli information started flowing into the FBI as soon as the first few Congress votes had shown that congressmen were carrying out the angel's instruction. War was declared and America's armed forces were put on alert - especially those stationed in Israel! - but war was on hold while the new information was being analyzed. Only a couple of hours later, the information started being made public. As news-anchor Dave had said, "Someone had made a very big mistake." That someone was initially a Jewish rabbi who had a great deal of secular influence. He'd not believed that my "Angel Plan" was true (silly him) and had pushed the Israeli Government into sending a substantial Mossad team to investigate the angel and me. I guess the Israelis had been worried that the Guardian Angel might have said something anti-Jewish, or done something else to harm their country. The angel had been too busy using its influence over pretty girls' panties to worry about influencing international geopolitics. Mossad's bosses had thought that immediately following the exposure of CIA's operation would give their agents a good opportunity to surveil me because I would have relaxed my vigilance (silly them). According to the documents Israel released, the spying mission was just that, being empty of any active intent. Its purpose was to find out if the angel was real before the Israeli government tried to talk to God through it. The information was silent about any contingencies, such as if they found out that the angel wasn't real. Whether Mossad's intention truly had been so non-violent didn't matter, as it was well and truly shut down now - here and very soon everywhere else, as a great deal of information was beginning to become available for me to spread over our inter-dimensional grapevine. The angel was in no hurry to call the investigation off, so the amount of information kept increasing. A lot of it was VERY good quality information too, judged according to my needs. The FBI had been displeased by the Israelis running an operation inside America, and VERY displeased that the operation might have caused the angel to nuke Washington DC - where the top Fibbies lived - so they took the opportunity to teach the Mossad a lesson. The FBI, no doubt helped by the CIA who had a lot of curiosity about the Mossad's operational procedures and capabilities, adopted the procedure of putting their questions on the website at the same time they asked them of the Israelis. Any questions that weren't fully and quickly answered were noted on the website as being unsatisfactorily answered, which gave the Israelis the shits as those comments might cause the angel to carry out a massive retribution. (The media were already doing very much the same thing in their articles to force the FBI to release information.) The Mossad was forced to reveal a great deal about how it operated. It refused to answer questions that had nothing to do with the case at hand, but that still left thousands of very interesting lines of inquiry. One line of inquiry amused me when it immediately hit a brick wall: the Mossad swore on a stack of Torahs that it had NOT raided the Fort Dodge lab, and that it had no definite lead on who had. That was a subject that the US Government was extremely eager to make progress with, and it used every trick it could think of to learn more of what the Mossad knew about that subject. Mossad had a great deal of inconclusive intelligence as it had been searching the world for the mysterious raiders too, and had collected a very large pile of vague information, most of which had been deliberately planted by America's enemies. Quite a lot of it was previously unknown to the CIA, so they were enjoying their new intelligence gathering method, although a few months from now they won't appreciate its total fruitlessness. The media had been running around like chickens with their heads cut off unable to process the story properly because it was so big, developing so fast, had been a deluge of information right from the start and that was only increasing in rate, and was awkwardly multinational. They did their best to analyze and comment about the information that was being released, but as their main source was the FBI's angel-ordered website, I mostly just read that. That the media was deluged with information didn't make them reluctant to pressure the FBI for more by writing articles that said the FBI was withholding something or other. Individual journalists had particular interests they wanted to pursue, and collectively the media enjoyed being able to force the FBI to respond because it couldn't risk the angel taking the media's complaints seriously. So sometimes interesting new information appeared first in news stories, but it almost immediately thereafter appeared on the website anyway. I had to hang around home because the prisoners were hanging around here too. I'd let the FBI take away all the physical evidence once the media had filmed it sufficiently, but I'd kept the prisoners so I could execute them later. As part of my job to give the Waiting Marks as much information as possible, I took advantage of my inactivity to hire someone who knew Hebrew to come to my home and teach me how to write several dozen Hebrew phrases that I thought the other Waiting Marks may find useful. He also had to teach me how to get a computer to display Hebrew and how to type it on a Qwerty keyboard. He thought my chosen phrases were strange, but that wouldn't matter because I wasn't going to use them in this dimension. Some people speculated that the angel didn't have the ability to take action in Israel itself, as indicated by its using the US military to apply the pressure. There were also many questions about aspects that people couldn't understand, such as: "Why is the angel in such a hurry?", and "What's wrong with people spying on Mark Anderson anyway? It's not polite, but it's not bad enough to threaten to destroy everyone in a country." There are many reasons I am so strongly against being surveilled. One I haven't previously mentioned is because the surveillers wouldn't have started doing so unless they were biased toward disbelieving my story; if they'd believed my story all they'd want to do is kiss my feet. To make surveillance even worse, even if for the rest of our lives everyone in my families is ultra-cautious of everything we say and I never again use any of my special abilities, people are well known for believing what they want to believe, so the baddies might interpret something innocuous as proof of my being the fake they thought I was. I shudder to think what highly capable, government-resourced, law-ignoring, trained agents could do to my families and me if they got it into their heads to take strong action. Just as it had happened with the DHS and CIA when they kidnapped me, I am too fascinating. Once intrigued, they would dig away at me, never wanting to let me go. One dose of truth serum or other inhibition-removing drug, and my big mouth could destroy my families' lives and then human civilization in every w-dimension. It was much better to chop a few heads off and provide other disincentives to discourage anyone from surveilling us. It's terrible how hard it is to teach people, and especially governments, to stop using their powers illegally, but I had no choice but to keep giving them that lesson every time they came too close. I had initially used only threats and small amounts of non-lethal force to discourage people, but the governments' repeated inability to behave properly compelled me into using an amount of lethal force that I would never have believed likely when I'd started down this road. The media did one thing well: they drew attention to my little tidbit tricks. For example, in the major typed speech from the angel I had planted the sentence: "These operatives committed suicide three days ago at 08:24." I haven't quoted all the angel's communication while having cops and media doing their things on our property, but during those messages, I managed to insert several such tidbits. When I'd been reading through the baddies' laptops while doing the mind-reading light show in their base, I'd found a surveillance log that had specified the very first time I was observed by a member of the team: three days earlier at 08:24. I don't know whether or not the FBI spotted that connection, but someone in the media did after the laptops' files were put on the website. It and two other similar seeds were spotted and were publicly commented on with considerable prominence, everyone believing that they proved that the angel had always known what was going on. People now realized that it was obvious that the angel would know everything because it could make thousands of copies of itself and they could move around invisibly. The implications of that amazed everybody. SURELY by now - I YET again hoped - the angel's capabilities would dissuade anyone else from sticking their nose into my business. There was no public mention of the angel having the ability to read minds, although I imagine that the American and Israeli governments would know about it. The Guardian Angel had let my prisoners speak. Once the Israelis started releasing information, the angel told the FBI to let the prisoners have a cellphone to call home with, which was surely bugged. The prisoners knew they were going to be killed soon, and it seemed only reasonable to let them contact their families since they didn't seem to be bad people, unlike the crew the CIA had employed. There was quite a lot of miscellaneous crap that we had to put up with. We had media teams on our property so crap was inescapable. They demanded an explanation for why the angel was doing what it was doing, why it was doing it this way, why couldn't it do something else, etc. The angel's first answer - pretty much regardless of the particular way the question was phrased - was: "God has ordered me to protect Mark Anderson." Inevitably there was a second question, to which the angel replied by crushing the reporter's microphone and the cameraman's camera. That seemed to satisfy that particular news-team's curiosity. Inevitably another news team would repeat the same error a few hours later. I lost track of the number of times someone in my families had to suggest to newspeople that, "Maybe the angel doesn't like you questioning God's judgment." I kept the prisoners suspended, which meant I couldn't go to sleep for the duration. That was easy as I need very little sleep. They were fed, watered and toileted while floating three feet in the air. They were eventually executed, in a way similar to how "Mark2" does it (described below). I've been spreading my findings through the grapevine from when I had findings to spread, so my job being done, it's time to leave this Mark. ------- Welcome back to my - Mark2's - life and dimension. After the third déjà vu from which I'd obtained useful information, I decided it was time to act. My first act was to sit on my ass and apparently do nothing, as I mentally typed up my notes about the Israeli operation. Even at my typing speed, it took quite a while. In preparation for the recent déjà vu's, I had divided the information I had into multiple topics. During our links I had simultaneously transferred #1's chunk of information to the other #1, #2's chunk to the other #2, etc., to get as much information through as possible in the limited time. My link partners, being the very smart guys they are, had also had the same smart idea if they had information for me, so they had done the same back with me when we swapped over at halftime. [We'd actually had that idea months ago and it's a standard routine for us whenever we have a lot of information to convey, but because I'd not bothered to mention it earlier, I described it the way I just did, mainly because I like to find opportunities to call myself smart.] Other than the necessary description of the whole operation, the two kinds of information that we'd prioritized when déjà vu'ing were facts that hurt the Mossad, and minutiae. Revealing the former would make all agencies more hesitant to bother us in the future, and if the angel knew the latter, the implication was that it knew everything. The Risk-Taking dimensions' Fibbies had forced the Mossad to reveal a great deal of the former, and the Mossad had tried to bury the FBI in the latter, so I had plenty of both kinds of material. The implication from my releasing both kinds was: "Stay away from Mark Anderson!" Judging by the volume of information I typed, Angels don't know about executive summaries, so the media were going to have to do a lot of reading. Reading takes time and requires thinking so the media really hates it, which is precisely why I'd not provided a summary. I like doing what I can to abuse the media, because it certainly abuses everyone else in its pursuit of profit. I printed multiple copies of my notes as I'd need them soon. The déjà vu that had given me the third result had occurred in the early evening, which conveniently meant my six days of waiting were nearly over, as at this time of the year it's dark enough for me to fly around after dinner. I gathered my families together in the Adults' living room, passed out a couple sets of the notes (only Dad and Prof were interested), and gave everyone a verbal executive summary. It only took a few minutes as they just needed to know the framework, although I did give them a few tidbits as examples of the sort of things that were in my notes. They were very curious about how I could have learned all that stuff sitting at home twiddling my thumbs - I'd actually been twiddling girls' nipples as I've discovered that they're more fun to twiddle than my own thumbs - but I gave them the same answer as I had to the same question after the first Surveillance Problem, which was to refuse to answer: "Sorry, I have to refuse to tell you." We discussed what to do. There were many possibilities because we had total control over the process, but we all preferred a quick and simple approach. That left the question of how effective to make it. I could, for example, create a thousand angels in front of the media, have them fade into invisibility, then have the angel type on a laptop, "I can be as many as I need. I have many of me inside every human intelligence service, watching and listening for anything relevant to my assignment." We didn't like such ideas because although they would cause people to fear doing anything against me, such an approach might cause people to fear having the angel exist at all, and they might try to make it not exist. God knows how they'd do that, but I know from personal experience that fear can drive people to crazy and violent deeds, and we didn't like that I would probably be at ground zero for all of them. We decided on a simple and understated lid-blowing exercise. It unfortunately required an executive summary, so I started typing that on my study computer. I'd add them to the piles of detailed notes after our discussion ended. Dad asked for Paul to come up to talk to us, while I got on the phone to CNN. They had given the previous Surveillance Problem particularly good coverage - we thought they'd said more nice things about me and the angel than any other network - so they'd get the scoop this time. I invited them to send a live broadcast unit to Corvallis Airport, making sure they understood that I meant to the airport and not to our home because I didn't want to spook the Israeli spooks. In response to my question, they checked then gave me their ETA. Being a news network, they started asking me what it was about, but my hanging up fixed that. When Paul arrived, I told him, "The angel has decided it's time to take down the Israeli operation. It has enough information now. I'll give you a copy of the angel's notes about them later. It wants to do something simpler than what it did with the CIA, and apparently your guys won't need to do anything other than handle any media who get overeager. It should all occur just outside our gates, but the media will doubtless try to make nuisances of themselves. It should happen in about three quarters of an hour." "Do you know what it's going to do?" "You know how the angel operates by now: if it tells me anything at all, it's only what it wants me to do. It did let me read its notes about the Israeli operation though, which was interesting. There are several sets in my study; feel free to help yourself to one on your way back, but keep it under your hat until after the lid's been blown off." When it was time, I dressed in black including a ski mask, grabbed most of the piles of notes, my laptop and two parabolic mics kindly donated to me by the FBI. I put everything except one pile of notes inside plastic bags in case it rained, and I hid them up a tree a couple of hundred feet away from our gate for later use, and then I flew myself to the Corvallis Airport. I hadn't cared whether the CNN crew came by helicopter or van as I had over 8,000 kg (over 9 tons) of force at this time. I spotted a CNN-logoed van in the airport's parking lot. There were three guys standing beside it, presumably a reporter, cameraman and technician. Keeping myself hidden, I had the Guardian Angel emerge from the ground about four feet from them, giving them a hell of a scare. I hoped they reported on it because who in their right mind would ever contemplate doing something to piss off a creature who could do that? The angel helpfully opened their van's doors then gently NP-pushed them toward it. They looked around frantically for any human to question, but there was no one to be seen. The angel pushed them again, noticeably harder. They got the hint and got in. The driver started the van, but the angel turned it and the headlights off, then lifted it a few yards up into the air. The occupants quickly put their seatbelts on. I canceled the angel as bright lights in the sky are too noticeable. Keeping myself 400-odd feet away from the van and above it so their view of me was blocked, I started flying us in a wide circle so we would approach the baddies' house from a direction obscured by other houses. Early in the flight the technician started doing something techniciany, but NP soon stopped that. I didn't want any transmissions going out yet. I stopped them making cellphone calls too, in case CNN announced something that alerted the baddies. It took a few minutes, but it was easy to get the van to the baddies' base unobserved by floating it just above the ground level. I liked to think that the van was 'sneaking up on them', but it was merely floating along just above road level most of the time, with occasional shortcuts over someone's property and 'leaps' over their fences. I maneuvered myself to get within five hundred feet of my targets before the van got near them. I quickly searched the house to make sure all twelve baddies were there and that all was okay, which it was. I did a slightly slower search to make sure no one was on the phone or otherwise communicating to anyone. I found an unoccupied house nearby and hid myself beside its living room window. I turned its TV on and tuned it to CNN, suspecting that there might be something good on soon. I continued to bring the van closer, with a sight blob now constantly monitoring the baddies to see if they suddenly started reacting with panic. They hadn't yet, but they would later. I parked the van nearby, opened its door, and pulled the newsies to get them out and doing their jobs. A dim Guardian Angel approached carrying a stack of paper. The top sheet - the summary - lifted off and sped to the reporter. He glanced at it, and I enjoyed the look of glee on his face. He quickly told his team what it said, and they looked similarly gleeful. I picked up the reporter, cameraman and their gear, and sped them toward the house. Inside of which I clamped all the baddies exactly where they were, disabled their radios and disconnected their computers from their cabled and wireless internet connections. It'd come out from the FBI's examination of the machines that they could have been remotely instructed to wipe themselves. As CNN was about to start broadcasting this live, there was nothing surer than that command being sent very soon. I didn't clamp the baddies' mouths shut because their comments might make for Good TV. The news team was flown into the house's dining room only a few seconds after the clamps were applied. The cameraman already had his camera rolling. I helped illuminate the scene by having the Guardian Angel rise out of one of the baddies' laptops, expanding from a tiny sphere as it did so. I timed it for when it was in the camera's frame, so I hoped everyone would believe that angels can 'bug' computers in an amazingly effective new way. It started chaotically, with the news team freaked out nearly as much as the baddies, but the CNN guys soon got professional, and I started enjoying some very exciting breaking news on the TV that I was watching. For the next several minutes, I let the CNN team wander around the house doing whatever they wanted. If they talked to a baddie, I extracted his rap sheet from the pile of papers that had followed the team into the room, and passed it to the reporter to read. The CNN-watching world could see that the baddies did not appreciate having their histories read out and discussed. At appropriate points, mostly based on what I heard on TV, I extracted other pages and passed them to the reporter. I hadn't received much information through the grapevine about the baddies' computers, but I had been sent the instruction for how to find one interesting file, so I called that up and let the reporter page through it. It was important that the world see confirmation of my typed claims, especially as the baddies had clamped their own mouths shut and weren't confirming nuthin'. There were baddies in other rooms, and some had even been in bed asleep before I clamped them, and I made sure the news team toured the whole house to see everything and everyone. By then I'd got tired of passing out individual notes so had given the whole stack to the reporter. He was floundering somewhat, not sure what to do or how to do it. He couldn't stop to read notes on live TV, even though he knew they contained all sorts of fascinating facts. He hadn't mentioned his location any more precisely than "Corvallis", so we had nearly fifteen undisturbed minutes before I heard cop sirens heading our way fast. It was a good time for me to relocate the show. I picked up everyone and everything, and preceded by the Guardian Angel, they all flew outside and up into the air, joined by CNN's van. We flew home, the cameraman having great fun recording the flight. I made damned sure he didn't get me into his field of view. I very much wanted the world to think that I was at home the whole time. There was a slight hitch in my plan when I got home because there were already cops parked outside our gate. I had thoughtlessly assumed that we'd be able to do some things before they arrived, but I easily adapted my plan. I parked CNN's van and news-crew on the side of the street about fifty yards south of our gates. I formed the baddies into a shoulder-to-shoulder line on the east side of the street just outside our gate, facing them all toward the west. They were hovering three feet above the ground and on display for all to see. I'll hold them there for as long as this takes. I laid their possessions on the grass at their feet. The cops had moved toward the equipment, but a Guardian Angel rose up from the grass between the cops and the baddies' stuff, then it split two copies of itself left and right, which moved to guard the baddies' front and southern side, their northern side being against our wall. The implication was obvious so the cops stayed back. I'd put the baddies to the east of our roadway because the spot I'd picked to hide myself was to the west. It was inside our property about three hundred feet from the gate, and inside a copse of trees so I couldn't be seen. I floated the two parabolic microphones to me and placed them in the tree so they had clear lines of sound to the group. I put the headphones on so I could hear what was being said. Now I had sight (via sight blob) and sound (via a mic and its backup) to the events, while I was nowhere to be seen myself, hopefully avoiding suspicion about how often I had to be around the angel when it was doing things that it should be able to do independent of me. I floated the piles of my notes out of their hiding place, moved them along the wall where they wouldn't be seen, then up and over the gate. I gave a couple of sets of the notes to the cops, and placed the rest on the ground under and slightly in front of the baddies, ready for the later media and law enforcement arrivals. I stripped the baddies naked, putting their clothes and possessions neatly among the piles of everything else I'd taken from their base. I didn't have a strong reason for stripping them, but did have a few minor reasons: they were all fit, healthy people so their top halves would make Good TV; their strength and fitness would make them seem more threatening; their nakedness would convey that the angel disregarded normal human sensibilities; and it would make their final ending more graphic as their blood poured over their pale bodies. Then I basically did nothing for fifteen minutes, mostly to let CNN get the story out and so that everyone who needed to be would be awake. I started my laptop booting, which gave the big bosses in Israel yet more time to contemplate the situation. I flew my laptop along the wall, then it and another angel flew up and over our gate, getting everyone's attention. The laptop moved to a position where its screen could be seen by the CNN cameraman and the local media cameramen. I typed: The leaders of the country of America have proved themselves to be: Stupid, for thinking they could fool God. Evil, for breaking God's commands not to intrude unwelcomely into my assignment's life. Evil, for refusing to take responsibility for their decisions and actions. The leaders of the country of Israel have proved themselves to be: Stupid, for thinking they could fool God. Evil, for breaking God's commands not to intrude unwelcomely into my assignment's life. Will they take responsibility for their decisions and actions? The rest of my message was in Hebrew. I'll helpfully translate it for you: To: [The names of the Prime Minister of Israel, the Director and Deputy Director of the Mossad, and the rabbi who'd championed this operation]: You are responsible for sending your agents to their certain deaths. You are stupid, evil men. I will wait ten minutes for you to take responsibility for your decisions and actions. End your lives within that time. My local audience was confused by the Hebrew, which didn't matter. CNN's studio would eventually provide a translation, which would let people recognize that the message was valid, and would impress them that the angel knew Hebrew. I'd even used a couple of colloquial expressions in the text - for "stupid" and "evil men" - that wouldn't have been suggested by any online translation software, to emphasize that the angel knew Hebrew very well. Importantly, I didn't know Hebrew. Such was my ignorance that until two days ago I'd thought Hebrew and Yiddish were two names for the same language; sort of the opposite of English having several versions all called "English". Using Hebrew would reinforce that I wasn't responsible for the angel. I had certainly impressed my families when I'd told them I'd be using it. It was a pretty safe bet that none of the named four leaders, let alone all of them, would have taken their lives within the ten minutes the angel had given them, but I'd worded the message and the angel's subsequent actions would be such that it didn't matter even if they had. When the ten minutes was up, I cut the head off the least senior Mossad agent, then ten seconds later, the next most senior, etc., working my way up the line every ten seconds. The cameramen missed the first one, but the screams from the rest of the agents alerted them. The cameramen filmed the executions, capturing the screams and prayers. CNN's studio leaped to censor their feed, but a sub-second flash of it got out, enough for the viewers to know what had happened. I used an NP-umbrella over the stuff that I had under the agents to keep it from being drenched in blood. Otherwise I held the agents and heads where they were until the lead agent had been executed, then I laid all the bodies on the ground behind their gear, with their heads placed between their feet, which was a freaky sight. I gathered up my laptop and parabolic mics, then covertly flew back into my home, letting the angels cancel when I got out of range. ^ I did nothing else. The drama unfolded all by itself. More media and the FBI turned up, and several other assorted Government people, such as from the State Department and CIA. The Guardian Angel didn't make any more appearances, didn't issue any more threats, and didn't demand a list of punishments: not the executions of the presumably still-alive named four, or money, or anything else. I wanted the bosses responsible for the operation punished, and preferably executed because I very much wanted no one else to send more agents against me - agency bosses will EVENTUALLY learn to stop doing that if they keep getting executed - but although the angel could say all sorts of things, the truth was that it had no real ability to enforce them. It wasn't quite impossible for me to inflict punishment on Israel, but flying myself around the world was too risky and time consuming. Demanding anything would make the angel look weak if its bluff was called, and I had learned that governments are extraordinarily slow at learning ANYTHING, so my bluff being called was too likely. It was better for the angel to do nothing and hope that either the Israeli people themselves inflict punishment on those responsible, or that the poor bastard who had rolled twelve 6s eventually finds something that I'll be able to use, such as a way to extend my sight blob and NP range to Israel. If I learn something useful like that through the grapevine, even if months from now, I can have the angel declare that it has waited long enough for the Israelis to act morally, but their failure to do so means it's going to punish them itself. What I'd do would depend on my new capabilities, but it would be easy to find something suitable in a whole country. Other than the hundreds of thousands of people who were evacuating the major Israeli cities in fear of a nuclear attack, no one else knew what to do. That's not quite true because most of the Israelis knew what to do, but the trouble was that they didn't agree with each other so there were some VERY loud arguments going on over there. The media was clamoring to interview us, especially the Guardian Angel and me. It never put in an appearance, but as I REALLY wanted to minimize the number of people I killed, I gave some interviews. I planted a few fears, saying for example, "The angel told me about the operation seven days ago, although by the way it worded the warning it obviously knew about them much earlier. Sometimes the angel's phrasing is a little strange, but I got the idea it'd known about them even before their advance team arrived in Corvallis. Archangel Michael said Guardian Angels are very good at protecting their assignments, so I guess it makes sense that they have godlike abilities to know what is going on..." "How does it do that?" interrupted the reporter, who hadn't spoken for thirty seconds so was long overdue to flap her mouth. "I don't know. I didn't ask it and even if I had, it wouldn't tell me. The only time the angel talks to me - via a typed message - is to tell me what to do." When you're giving interviews, you very often have to repeat things you've said several times before. Reporters have VERY small brains and even smaller attention spans. "Can you ask it now?" "You want me to ask my Guardian Angel on nationwide TV how it learns the information it needs to keep me from being killed by illegal spies sent here by a government agency that has an assassination department?" "Yes please?" "{Sigh}. As I was saying, the angel told me about the idiots seven days ago. It wouldn't let me warn them and I really HATE that it kills so many people, so I asked it if I could stay at home for a few days in the hope that the idiots would give up and go home. It agreed, but I'm sure it knew I was being foolish. After six days, it basically asked me if I'd wasted enough of my life yet. You know what happened next." The rest of the interview is even less worth recording here. We could keep most of the crap outside our gates. To the cops and FBI we could just shrug and say, "There's no point in letting you in because we don't know anything. We were sitting at home watching TV." They didn't press us. None of the local cops would dream of hassling us, and the Fibbie agents wouldn't dare incur the angel's ire again, not after what had happened to them the last time they'd been on our property. We did get one request for a visit that was useful: the Israeli ambassador to America wished to come to apologize to me. We consented to his visit, but on the day I would only talk to him through the bars of our gate. As I explained for the benefit of the cameras, all of which were inside our property so the ambassador would be filmed through the bars, giving him an appropriately criminal image, "You're here representing your government. It's evil and I don't want anyone working for it inside my home." -- He was too smooth to show any reaction to my insult, but I carried on as if he had, "From your expression I take it that you don't agree that your government is evil. The angel said it was evil, so are you calling God's angel a liar?" He certainly wasn't going to respond to that either. He launched into his very professionally and impressively delivered apology. I listened to it, then said, "I don't accept your apology. You're only making it for a face-saving PR exercise because your government's illegal operation was exposed. If your agents had assassinated me, you wouldn't feel any need to own up and apologize." "There was never any intention of assassinating you or anyone else. It was purely an observation-only operation." "No one would incur the angel's anger and risk having a nuclear bomb detonated over their capital city unless they had VERY serious plans. There was nothing in writing about those intentions in what your Government sent to the FBI, but that proves nothing. Any government as godless as yours wouldn't hesitate to lie." I'm constantly amazed by religious people believing that their religion is solely responsible for morality. Israel presumably being a religious country, I could use that arrogant belief to put more pressure on its government. "I'm convinced that there was a reason the angel let me walk around freely for the first three days your spies were watching me, and then it felt the need to warn me. Something changed. I note that the four men the angel named as most responsible still haven't taken responsibility for their actions or been punished. Your leaders are clearly not honorable, which makes it even more likely that their intentions toward me were dishonorable." "They are under investigation and it is likely that charges will be brought." As previously mentioned, it wasn't practical for the angel to make demands, and it certainly couldn't be so weak as to make requests, but none of those restraints applied to me (you know that I am the angel, but don't let that distract you). I said, "Let me tell you what my guess is about the angel's recent lack of action. It's clear that it wants those most responsible to be executed. From what it wrote on the laptop, it is letting them personally and Israel nationally decide about their evil. I believe the angel is now judging your country, and it appears that you're failing. We know from both Archangel Michael's and the Guardian Angel's behaviors that they escalate punishment. I doubt that it's treating your spying operation as a first offense, not after all the examples my government so stupidly provided. I'll give you some moral advice because clearly your government needs all the moral advice it can get, even from a teenage boy: -- "First, I strongly suggest that the four named people be executed. -- "Second, the nation itself should be punished for allowing its government to become so anti-God. The CIA's latest foray into evil has cost my government $800 million. A paltry sum compared to what it had previously agreed to pay in the event it broke its legally binding contract, but it'll do for an example. Israel should pay the minimum of $800 million to my family as the direct victim of your illegalities, and a similar amount to the American government in apology for committing crimes on American soil. -- "Third, you need to put measures in place to prevent such evil occurring in the future. My government is promising to overhaul its covert operations' oversight processes, and Israel clearly needs to do something similar. Not doing so is going to look like a very bad decision if your country goes against God's orders again and the angel turns Tel Aviv into a pile of radioactive rubble. -- "I've often wondered why God wanted to resurrect me. I'm beginning to suspect it's because I'm one of the few human beings who understands taking responsibility for my actions..." #14: #11: #4: #8: #12: #29: " ... Right from Archangel Michael's very first appearance, it's been obvious that God DOES hold humanity accountable for its actions. If your government doesn't act on that, you're going to be very unpleasantly surprised when the angel decides to do something. If it does, I bet you'll be wishing you'd acted morally now, provided there'd be anyone left alive from your country to do any wishing." #1: The ambassador returned to wherever he'd come from, and the Knesset started arguing the issue. ^ The solution of the Israeli version of the Surveillance Problem was another excellent example of how wonderfully inter-dimensional cooperation works. I, as well as 99.537% (215/216ths) of all the other five-merge Marks, had a VERY easy time handling this problem. We'd spotted it originally, done a little bit of checking, stayed at home for six days - which had been no hardship, other than when I was deliberately hard - then had made a brief foray to ruin the Mossad agents' evening and blow the lid off the operation. Talk about easy! Plus we'd improved our position in several ways. As a couple of examples: Just having the angel write in Hebrew did wonderful things for its credibility both as an angel and as a separate entity from me. By now, given the phenomenal abilities the angel has demonstrated and pretended to have, I don't think anyone seriously believes anything that resembles the truth about the angel's relationship with me, but it's good to continue to make that belief as unlikely as possible. From when the angel waited exactly ten minutes for the four named people to kill themselves and had then killed the agents, the lessons were: That the angel somehow knew that people on the other side of the world hadn't killed themselves, that when it said something - such as "in ten minutes" - it damned well meant it, and it was also inhuman in expecting people to make a decision like that and act on it so quickly. That the angel required the people to act so decisively about taking responsibility seemed to imply it had a godlike devotion to the truth. The media commentaries were all good as far as my families and I were concerned. The Mossad weren't so impressed by their coverage, as they got ridiculed for trying to sneak up on God, especially after the CIA had so effectively demonstrated that it couldn't be done. It was fun to think about what we Marks could learn that might be helpful across the grapevine. For example, was it worth the bother to have any of us learn Biblical Aramaic. It would be tedious for them, it'd take several days for the information to get to all of us if we needed to use it, and we'd only be able to spread as much information as we could communicate during a déjà vu. We can only spread facts unfortunately, not skills, and most facts can be obtained by googling much quicker than the several days the grapevine might take to spread the information, but it was still something worth thinking about in case a useful subject came up. The Guardian Angel had so much credibility now that it was hard to see the need for any more. From what the public was saying on TV these days, nearly everyone believed our fiction about God and the angel. You'd think that after being lied to about gods for millennia, people would have learned to stop being so gullible, but people are inexplicably slow learners when it comes to religious matters. With the fallout from the CIA's and Mossad's surveillance operations, it is surely impossible to believe that any government is going to try anything. I know I keep saying "Surely no one will try anything again," and then someone does, but SURELY people must eventually decide it's not worth the risk. That's especially because I'm increasing both terms of the risk equation: the perceived chance of being caught and the punishment afterward. Even if someone is convinced that I am a total fake, surely they have to believe that if they try to do anything about it, they'll fail and will be publicly vilified and killed. And it's not as if I'm doing ANYTHING that requires anyone to stick their noses into my life. If boinking so many girls was a crime, Mick Jagger would've spent 80% of his life in jail. As far as I can judge, every government is staying clear of me now. I can't quite say they're behaving themselves because the Knesset is still not taking responsibility for their agency's actions. All the Knesset is doing is a LOT of arguing. [And they kept doing so, for a long time.] ------- My life continued VERY nicely, except that after staying at home for eight days I had a big pile of exams waiting for me at OSU. Inter-dimensional cooperation has proved itself to be so useful and our approach so practical for things that are relevant across the W-Dimension, that as soon as I think of doing something relevant, I'll estimate the risk and urgency factors and use them to decide how many dice to roll, to see if they all come up "1". That's provided the impetus comes from me. Over the inter-dimensional grapevine I learned that the poor bastard that'd gone on what he calls his "Voyage of Discovery" is starting to get a few results. Some Marks tried a Mach 3 flight and confirmed that it worked fine, saving us - all the other Marks, including me - from having to test it. One of us even found a better shape (as previously mentioned). It was the Marks that first heard about supersonic flight from the Voyaging Mark that tried it for the rest of us, that way they could include the news that it worked when they spread the word of the technique. Other than situations like that where it's obvious which Marks should take risks, rolling a few dice to determine who does something active is a very good approach. My multiple Masters degrees are going fantastically well. I haven't talked about them because there's been very little to talk about. 90% of my education time is spent lying in bed with my eyes shut, and the other 10% is spent doing exams, so it's not exactly an exciting topic. Some people are starting to get excited about it now though. It's been over two months since the start of the academic year and I'm passing an extraordinary number of master's exams, including several random exams from the thirteen other unofficial Master's that I'm auditing. I take random exams from those just to prove that I'm learning from all of the courses. The almost-always 100% exam results are, everyone thinks, proving that I'm the world's greatest super-genius. I'm not the slightest bit worried about letting them down because overachieving will be my only problem - our grapevine will make all of us PHENOMENALLY productive scientists. I'll have to dial WAY back on my future accomplishments and restrict them just to the areas close to what I'm personally involved in because they'll be unbelievably huge otherwise. At the start of the academic year I had asked OSU to keep my results quiet until enough of them had accumulated for me to be confident about my ability to do well at the Master's level. I hadn't mentioned it to them, but I had mostly wanted to keep everything low key until the CIA Surveillance Problem had been solved. That problem and the almost immediately following Mossad one had taken far longer than I'd expected to solve, but now the way was clear to start looking into which university I'll go to next year. I took the exams for the courses I'd finished reading while staying at home during the Mossad nuisance, then I gave Prof permission to start having fun negotiating with universities for me. He's in charge of that choice, although Julia is very interested as it will determine where we'll be living next. Pretty much everyone in the world knows who I am, so when the appropriate people in the world's best science-oriented universities got an email from Prof enclosing my transcript and suggesting that I might be interested in doing several simultaneous PhDs at their university, he got their attention BIG TIME. I don't think academicians are used to getting excited because they're having great trouble restraining themselves, including Prof - he's having GREAT fun. The Dean of OSU is also pretty happy, especially about his little marketing investment in me. One concern I'd had has gone now. Such is my and my Guardian Angel's reputation that my being a super-genius is just attributed to God's intervention, or perhaps it is the justification for God's intervention. No one really cares about how or why; they just accept it. I can show far more of my intellectual abilities than I'd previously thought would be safe. There are some interesting stories about me in places like Slashdot, but the general public has less than no interest in my academic progress. It's one of the least freaky and least interesting things about me as the general public thinks that IQ is BORING, when they think of it at all. The last stage of my "Angel Plan" is progressing very nicely too. For example, for her one-on-one time with me as her reward for her role in my SCS project, Nevaeh wanted to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art ("the Met") in New York. I had originally intended to give her a full day with me, but I made it an overnight, two-day trip. We got a ride on one of Vanessa's frequent flights to DC, getting out when our plane was starting its approach into Washington's Dulles Airport. Our pilots were very amused by our midair departure, and I'm sure had a lot of fun talking about it in the Pilots' Lounge after they'd landed. Our luggage, Nevaeh and I flew the two hundred miles to New York, checked into our hotel, and had a very good day in the Met. It's a HUGE place, but it's much easier to see it when a Guardian Angel replaces the long walks with quick, seated flights. Several Guardian Angels were also extremely good at making sure the public and media didn't become a problem. I did give a brief media interview for PR reasons, picking a time when Nevaeh was admiring some art that made me want to scratch my eyes out. I chose to talk to reporters in preference to looking at that artist's work - that's how bad I thought it was. I encouraged Nevaeh to choose where we'd eat that evening. She discussed it with our butler - our hotel suite came with a butler - and together they chose one of the most prestigious restaurants in New York. The butler laughed politely at Nevaeh's concern that we might not be able to get a table. He made the call, letting Nevaeh hear him tell the restaurant who the booking was for. There was no problem whatsoever. We'd been heavily featured in the news all day so the whole world knew we were in New York, and would shortly learn what restaurant we'd chosen to have dinner in. Nevaeh used a beautician the hotel provided to help her get ready for dinner, which left me with a lot of time to kill. The angel offered to take our butler and me for a joyride around city's skies. He was a middle-aged guy but a lot of fun; nothing like what you'd expect a butler to be, although I'm sure he could do that too if the guests looked like they wanted it. He had a blast, including hovering outside his apartment window and nearly giving his wife a heart attack. When she'd recovered, she joined us, and the four of us - the angel was visible the whole time - did some more sightseeing. She wanted to get us in front of a TV camera, which was easily done. We had plenty of time to kill, so the three humans of us even gave a short interview for more good PR for the angel. That's why I had the angel offer the flight rather than my asking: The last thing I want is for everyone I meet to be constantly begging me for rides. I make it clear in all such interviews that it's always the angel's initiative, as it always seems to be. At the designated time we returned to our room's balcony - Mr. and Mrs. Butler thanking me repeatedly during the return trip - to be met by a stunningly beautiful young woman. I complimented Nevaeh heavily, she blushed happily and tried to deflect my praises onto the beautician, but I wasn't going to let her get away with that! I knew where the vast majority of the beauty had come from and it hadn't been out of a bottle. Nevaeh was having a grand time, and a good portion of her beauty was her happiness shining from within, and the package it was shining through was pretty damned gorgeous too. I said as much, in somewhat different words. Nevaeh knew she was gorgeous - how could she not - so I only had to repeat it half a dozen more times before she bashfully accepted my praises. In an airtight box so she wouldn't get mussed, Nevaeh and I flew to our dinner. The owner met us at the front desk and escorted us to our table, bringing the room to a silent standstill as we walked through it, what with Nevaeh's beauty on my left arm and the angel floating to my right. At our table the angel shrank to a tenth of its previous size and luminosity, then rose to hover just below the ceiling above our table. It was unobtrusive but everyone could see that it was there if they looked. We enjoyed a superb meal, uninterrupted by curious people. It's not that New Yorkers are polite, but that the angel provided an extremely good disincentive by imposing itself in front of anyone coming our way, staff excluded. I get enough of fame seekers at home so the novelty of that has long since worn off. Even Nevaeh is getting tired of it. One seeker managed to succeed though, when Nevaeh went to the bathroom. I had a sight blob guarding her so I observed a very attractive woman approach and talk to her. Even without being able to hear what was she was saying, the woman's body language was a clear indication, as she was standing very close to Nevaeh, touching her more often than not, and doing her best to look seductive. After a couple of minutes of conversation, Nevaeh brought the woman back to our table, introduced us, which provided me with a considerable amount of amusement. Seeing my reaction, Sandy explained that her surname was her out-of-town husband's fault. My minds spent the next several minutes inventing jokes about Sandy Beach, none of which we uttered because it was obvious that Sandy didn't want to hear them. Nevaeh explained, "Sandy would like to know if she can come back to our hotel room later. She'd like to sleep with both of us." Proximity confirmed Sandy's considerable interest, but also let me understand that Nevaeh's motivation was almost entirely to please me. Her offer to unselfishly give up some of her time with me was very good of her - that's for sure - but not suitable on a trip that was for me to reward and appreciate her. I declined with, "Sorry Sandy, but I very much want to spend this time focused on Nevaeh. Thank you for your generosity, Nevaeh, but I already can't give you enough appreciation for how nice you are to me. Please give me at least these days to concentrate on showing you how much you mean to me." That made Nevaeh much happier than having sex with Sandy would have, so I knew I'd answered right, not that I'd ever doubted which way to go. Sandy made an effort to convince me to change my mind, but she could see that Nevaeh loved my answer and that I wanted to make Nevaeh happy. Other than posing for a photograph with the owner and head chef, that was the only such event. Otherwise it was simply an exceptionally nice dinner. Nevaeh and I stayed overnight and I did my best to make up for Sandy's absence. I like to think I did that pretty well; Nevaeh certainly seemed happy enough. We did some miscellaneous tourist things the next day, often using the angel to fly us around because the overground is much quicker and easier than the underground. Angelic assistance made the post-9/11 closing of the Statue of Liberty irrelevant to us, and gave us fun views of other attractions, such as Central Park. I let Nevaeh give an interview in the Park. I didn't bother to give her any advice about what to say; just left her to respond any way she wanted. An excited, happy, beautiful girl makes for great PR. Films of her interview and our New York adventure impressed people all around the world. [It consequently increased the workload of our mail handlers too, but people will eventually stop being so stupid as to think the angel will give them flights, cure their illnesses, resurrect their dead loved ones, find their missing dentures, or do the myriad of other favors people ask for. Our staff keep a list of the silliest requests; it's stunning how stupid some people are.] We caught a ride home on Vanessa's jet that afternoon, giving our pilots another new experience as I'd been unable to resist flying us ahead of and to the side of the pilot's window, standing and sticking out our thumbs as if hitchhiking. The public is getting used to the angel flying people around, and soon I'll be able to use it as much as I want, as well as make use of NP in other ways. Things are looking GREAT. Then on December 11 the Voyaging Mark merged into me, which means I'll be dying soon. Fuck! ------- Chapter 411: Eighth Merge to 128 Minds; We Slow Down Tuesday, December 11, 2007 (Continued) to Thursday, January 31, 2008 The point of view is now reverting to the version of me that is the normal focus of this autobiography. He now includes the version of me that the preceding chapters focused on, and is continuing to use the same body. (Those are sentences you're unlikely to read in any other autobiography.) I now had 128 minds, which is 2^7 so a tidy power of two again, not that it seemed to matter beyond making the arithmetic easy. During the initial conversation soon after the Voyager arrived in this new dimension, #119: #13: For the record: Proximity is 96 feet and INCREDIBLY detailed. I could stand in the middle of a soccer field and most of it would be within my proximity range. We are two powers of two more than thirty two minds now, and each power of two had increased proximity's resolution by what seemed like a factor of ten, so it's a hundred times more detailed now. I knew of things going on inside bodies down to bizarre levels. I was also sensing energy easily now, so there were very few electronic devices I couldn't detect. Battery powered wrist watches weren't detectable yet, but most other powered items were, almost certainly including all but the most energy efficient bugs, as bugs use quite a lot of power to transmit their signals through walls and far enough to be picked up by the buggers. I wouldn't even have to look for transmitting bugs now, as they'd simply appear in my proximity sense, a nice contrast to the MANY hours I'd spent searching our Peoria Road home for bugs. There are 128 fingertips per mind, so 16,384 in total. Maximum width is 64 inches (1.6 meters), minimum width the reciprocal of that, and I have a great deal of control over their shape. Not quite enough to make a single fingertip into an "m" shape (not that I wanted to, that's just an example), but slightly simpler shapes such as an "n" or even a recognizable "y" were doable. I could make a perfect halo out of a suitably sized "O". The Blinks Allowed Effect is not a Sleep Allowed Effect yet, at 8.5 minutes. My maximum force is 219,000 kg unconsciously, but I'm gaining 160% through consciously trained tapping and projection, giving a total of 570,000 kg (1,257,000 pounds or 628 tons). A sight blob canceled when it got 590 feet away, and I can still have only two simultaneous sources without suffering the damned superimposition. The amount of heat and light I can radiate is unbelievable. Each mind can produce 768 x 60 W lightbulbs' worth of heat, x 2.6 (with the training bonus) x 128 minds = 15 megawatts. The "768" value was according to the mathematical progression. We'd initially thought the first heat blob maxed out at about 0.75 of a bulb, and it'd increased by a factor of four every doubling of the number of minds, to arrive at 768 bulbs-worth now. It probably wasn't the exact figure, but it'd be in the ballpark. Déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks should now occur an average of 4.25 hours apart and last somewhat over four minutes, so I'd be in a déjà vu link approximately 1/60th of the time, increasing my abilities even further during those times. The amount of force and energy we can produce would be unbelievable if we hadn't observed it firsthand. We did some googling and as a comparison, the most recent nuclear power station to go online in the USA generates 1,167 megawatts, enough to power 250,000 households. I generate 1/78 as much power as a nuclear power station! That was awesome and inexplicable. [[The amount of energy there is in the Universe is an ASTRONOMICALLY larger number (actually, even more than "astronomical"). A large proportion of which can be tapped because it's dark energy (that just means your scientists can't account for it, which is because it's positioned where it can be tapped, only overlapping with the three-dimensional space you're used to). The Universe is made of Consciousness. Consciousness needs energy to operate, which it obtains by tapping Dark Energy. So the Universe has to be, and is, structured to allow that energy to be tapped. Or maybe because the energy can be tapped, Consciousness is possible? It's the usual anthropic mess. Ignoring the how and especially the why - because even at the time I'm writing this I honestly don't know - my minds were tapping into the Universal Dark Energy source. The limit on how much could be tapped was unimaginably more than the miniscule amount I was able to draw at this time.]] Weird things are becoming possible. For example, the Moon is 380,000 km from the Earth. At 1 g acceleration (Earth g's), I could fly halfway to the Moon in just 1.7 hours, so about 7 hours for a round trip. I'd have to go in an airtight box to avoid being exposed to the vacuum of space, and I like to breathe so I would go in a box big enough to hold 7 hours of air, or perhaps 10 hours' worth just in case I'm not very good at celestial navigation. I'd have to line my box with sheets of metal to keep me safe from radiation, but I can carry hundreds of tons of material and still accelerate at 1 g, so it'd be easily doable. Mars varies from 55 to 100 million km away from the Earth. Call it 75 million. Halfway at 1 g would take 24 hours, making 4 days for the round trip, so I'd need to take some good books. I'm almost tempted to rent an amusing Halloween costume, fly to Mars, then walk around in front of the Mars Rover's camera. The hardest part of that trick would be deciding which costume would be the most fun. Both the Moon and Mars figures are using 1 g, which I could easily exceed, especially once I was out of the Earth's gravity well. Sitting comfortably, 2 or 3 g wouldn't be a big deal, reducing the above times significantly (increasing the acceleration by a factor of x divides the trip time by the square root of x). I waited the short time required for another déjà vu. Roughly four hours later the déjà vu arrived, taking me to 160 minds worth of power. Everything else was what I expected, the increase in my abilities matching the mathematical progressions precisely. My link partner was blown away by our new level of abilities compared to his 32- and 64-mind experiences. That the déjà vu worked so well confirmed that my mission still had the green light to proceed further, once I'd achieved my objectives for this plateau. I will settle into my double-life, living 8A's life very much in the way he would have if I hadn't arrived. I'll even enjoy parts of it, as he has good taste in pretty girls. I agreed with his judgment of which were SCS's most beautiful girls, for example, and was happy that some of them were still having casual sexual relationship with me when they visited. We often had sex in small groups too, as a way of stopping the individual girls from getting clingy, that being the excuse 8A used with them, worded more politely. I won't mention anything about my Voyaging situation to anyone but I will show some minor improvements in my abilities, including upgrading my downstairs study's computer system because I have a great deal of reading to do for my courses and I'm going to be here for a while with minds to spare. It's worth increasing my studying rate because I'll take that knowledge with me when I leave. Showing the computer upgrade to the Williamses will make them very happy, for a while, and make my developing into needing to go on a Voyage more believable later. [A few days from now, I upgraded it to sixty four screens. More than that had some technical problems it wasn't worth overcoming as I didn't have wall-space in my downstairs study for many more screens without getting silly. Fitting sixty four screens in it required mounting them in a semicircle that covered two-thirds of the small room's walls, and "getting silly" to fit more screens would have meant mounting them on two-thirds of the room's floor and ceiling, shaped in a rough sphere so they'd all be visible from a central sight blob. Another reason I didn't go beyond sixty four was that I couldn't read even that many. My brain didn't have the necessary visual resolution, but that was a limit I thought my brain would adapt to meet.] I had two items on my To Do list: Get some R&R. 8B were VERY much in need of that, and 8A wouldn't object to getting some more. I was VERY aware of my mission. Having déjà vu's an average of 4.25 hours apart, which always started with the other Mark getting very excited over the new level of proximity sense, made it impossible to forget my mission even though I wished I could. Having quadrupled my number of minds since I'd started my Voyage, I was at a stage where I should put some serious effort into acquiring knowledge about my abilities. ^ You'd think that getting some rest and recreation would be easy, but it turned out not to be. I didn't know how long I'd be here as that depended on when my learning about my abilities leveled off, but I knew it'd be only a few weeks so long-term R&R games like the SCS project weren't worth thinking about. I'd spend more time with my loved ones, but I couldn't spend so much more that they suspected something. Giving them a week's warning of my leaving would be about the right amount of time. I didn't want to tell them before then - as a justification for my becoming so lovey-dovey - because that would be harder on them. Nor did I want them to suspect after I'd left that I'd known for longer. I wanted them to have a very clean dividing line at the "I have to go on a Voyage of Discovery" point. There wasn't much I could do to ease their upset after I'd gone, but I could minimize the things they might worry about. The woman whose fault it was that maturing had been invented was on my shit list again because I had apparently matured past an interest in meaningless sex. Recreation by chasing free sex seemed like a shallow waste of valuable time now. There was no point in my making a pass at a girl, or in my accepting a pass one of them made at me, because new girls' hopefulness would depress me. I knew there was no hope at all. I was too depressed to do things that would make me happy. It was a sad situation. [To illustrate how sad it was, several weeks later we discovered that 8A had never heard of Jessica Alba. We googled her, and in this dimension all she'd appeared in were three movies when she was a young teenager and nothing since. 8B joked that maybe she was a failed wannabe starlet and would be extremely easy and thankful to be picked up by someone as rich and famous as us, but we couldn't be bothered making the effort - that's how depressed we were!] Other than giving my loved ones more attention, I started spending more time with my second-tier girlfriends. I liked them and enjoyed their company, and there were enough of them that none of them would feel I was being clingy. Mostly what I did was my die-appointed job: learning about my abilities. As well as testing the usual ability wish list, I took the time to test things I hadn't bothered testing on my previous two-week stays in each recent dimension. I did so in ways that hid my activity from my families. The following list is partially chronological. There are some overlaps because some of the tests took quite a while, but generally the later-listed items were tested after the earlier items. During the frequent déjà vu's, my proximity sense could detect dense matter. For example, if I was standing near an armed security guard, I could sense his gun. It only picked up very dense matter, but I could see it in fairly good detail. It was clearly the beginning of a new nuance to my proximity ability, which further merges should improve on. It was interesting and potentially useful to me, but probably wouldn't be something I could teach to the five-merge Marks. My ability to sense emotions was very detailed now. The extra resolution meant that the 'colors' of the emotions no longer overlapped with each other, which had previously made them harder to identify. Now I could sense them individually and could discern a greater number of simultaneously felt emotions. I could sense electricity flowing into a lightbulb, so I turned the light switch off and attempted to recreate the same electrical flow in the wire. After a few seconds I got the lightbulb to burst into life, and then it burst into shards. I cleaned up the mess, replaced the bulb, held a plastic bag over the light fitting, then destroyed another bulb. I fetched several more bulbs. The next bulb only blew out rather than blew up, so I was getting better. It took a total of six bulbs to get the knack, the bulb glowing steadily. I couldn't think of a practical use for it, but I could now remotely generate the household's electricity. I learned how to generate DC too, after a trip to town to get some replacement flashlight bulbs. Getting AC power's polarity to alternate at 60 hertz had been difficult for me, but I'd JUST been able to achieve it. Had our power cycled even 50% more often, my brain wouldn't have worked fast enough to be able to induce AC power. That limitation meant I couldn't render bugs ineffective by creating sound waves that cancelled our speech, and couldn't make myself invisible to radar, infrared or visible light. In all those cases I couldn't detect the too-rapid oscillations nor create oscillations of my own to destructively cancel them. Could I change my body shape faster than before? Yes. The rate of change was about quadruple that of when I turned into Ron Fisher, about half of that gain came from my having a more detailed proximity view of my body as that enabled me to guide the processes more effectively. What were my natural and kiatsu-assisted healing rates? I hadn't tested these for a long time, and was amazed that my body healed something like 15 times faster than Ava's - I considered it her turn to be cut - and applying kiatsu increased that by another factor of 5, making it possible for me to heal a combined total of 75 times faster than normal people. A cut that would normally take a week to heal took me about two hours. The girls and I could see my kiatsu-treated cut healing as we watched it. I could sense some of the larger effects of kiatsu now, and it energized the area being projected into in ways that made the organs work better rather than just faster. I suspected the invigoration went all the way down to the cellular level, but that was way beyond my ability to detect. [[There are approximately 1E14 cells in a human body, and my resolution had about 1E7 'pixels' of information, so I was sensing blocks of ten million cells. Ki can be thought of as a "life force". That's not really accurate, but there's enough truth in it to explain why treated areas "work better" rather than just "work more".]] My food needs were 5% of normal, provided it was a well-balanced 5%, "well balanced" according to my current needs. For example, I needed very little carbohydrate but a high proportion of oily food. I tested my food limits by under-eating and soon found out that if I was short of something, then I had specific cravings, like a pregnant woman does (I imagine). The cravings were presumably created by chemical processes too small for me to see how they happened, but they were quite specific, quite demanding, and quickly shut up when they got what they wanted, just like thirst when your body craves water. I didn't know that the cravings were reliable or complete, so after the experiment I made sure to eat and drink well, including way more than the 5% I needed. Excess eating made sure my body got what it wanted, after which it got rid of everything else. My bodily requirements for sleep settled down at thirty minutes again. Sleeping is a time of vulnerability and it could be a big problem in an emergency. Sleeping at the wrong time could have been a fatal mistake in the last days of my stay in the CIA lab, for example, especially if it had made me miss the next déjà vu. I tried to find a way to get rid of the need for it. It took me a couple of weeks, but I managed to achieve a two-step solution: (1) I got my body and nearly all of my minds to fall asleep, while some minds managed to stay awake. They were able to proximity sense what the body was doing while asleep, which was several things different than when awake. From that information, my minds learned how to activate the body's sleeping processes even when it was awake. (2) I trained my minds to be able to sleep while the body and other minds were awake. I couldn't be sure I hadn't missed anything, but I stopped all normal sleeping and didn't suffer any bad effects. I had my minds grab sleep whenever they individually felt mentally tired, and I activated my body's sleeping mechanism when it was relaxed. It was easy for it to nod off for thirty minutes while I kept studying. The prospect of carrying a mirror around to reflect heat if I wanted to fly supersonic for a long period annoyed me, so I turned my attention to NP-points, trying to see if I could color them white or perhaps blue, to block some of the infrared light from radiating into my sled's cabin. My improving subconscious information flows led me to discover a better solution. I didn't understand why or how it worked, but I found a way of creating NP-points so they didn't let any light through. Normally they're totally transparent, but I found a switch that made them totally non-transparent. Having no matter, they have nothing to absorb light with, so not letting light through meant the photons had to bounce off. That meant I'd created perfectly mirrored NP-points. That was considerably better for my flying sled than colored NP-points would have been, especially because all the other NP properties weren't affected. As a learning exercise, I continued trying to develop colored NP-points, but never had any success. Mirrored NP-points was the closest I got to invisibility. In other words, I failed to find a way to get that ability/dream to work. Flying subsonically in a totally enclosed mirror was quite close to invisible. Because the mirrored NP shell of my sled would prohibit heat transfer by radiation, conduction and convection, my body's heat couldn't be detected either, although if I flew supersonically the heat bloom of the sled itself would be easily detected. I thought that I might even be able to fly covertly in daylight now if I was flying high in a sled with a very sharp bottom, like a yacht's keel, so observers on the ground looking up at my sled would just see sky. It wouldn't be perfect, especially if observed from above, but it'd be pretty good on cloudless or uniformly clouded days. SURELY I should be able to get sound blobs working by now, either sending or receiving? Nope, after considerable effort, including a great deal of research on how sound and hearing worked, they continued to be annoyingly and totally unattainable. There were too many problems, the main ones being that I couldn't see the air vibrate at the source and couldn't create the vibrations at the destination (human voices can exceed 1,000 Hz), and NP-plates made terrible mechanical diaphragms as they have too much internal rigidity. What about more sight sources? I could see how my brain worked in enough detail to know that having more than two sources wasn't going to happen without their views superimposing - but I tried anyway. Proximity gave me something like live MRI scans of brains, so I could see which areas of them were busy. It was easy to gain quite a lot of understanding of the sight process, as closing and opening my eyes for each visual center highlighted where they were, then I could 'watch' them function, albeit at a very coarse level. I could do several other MRI-like visual experiments too, prompted by what I read in several medical textbooks. I was putting a lot of effort into trying to find ways to get multiple sight blobs or any sound blobs at all working, but all my ideas were so totally unsuccessful that they were both fruitless and vegetableless (my sense of failure extended through to my sense of humor; sorry about that). I spent quite a long time trying to get my 590-foot maximum range extended. It seemed that I should be able to improve it. Nearly all of my other limits improved by a dramatic multiple, but that just inched upward by an arithmetic increase of 24 feet each merge, assuming the merge is with a 32-minded Mark. It did double if I doubled my number of minds, but it was almost the slowest improving merge-related ability as most of the others increased by a factor of four or eight. Only the duration of déjà vu's increased slower, by about 1.5 times per doubling of minds. Learning how to increase our maximum range would be something that all the other Marks would VERY much appreciate, but doing so remained beyond my reach. My subconsciouses opening up more gave me some insights into the process where adjacent NP-plates merge into each other to become a single, seamless plate. That seemed like it should lead to some potentially very useful fundamental understanding(s), so I worked on it diligently. Fruitlessly again, as no useful gains were achieved. My NP-plates could now stop handgun and rifle bullets. I had to get them all into position before the shot, but the plates were larger now, making them worth hiding behind. It'd only be a useful skill under circumstances where I knew a distant sniper was shooting at us from a specific direction, such as immediately after the first shot that had hit Ava. It was useful against closer shooters too, but I'd defend myself from them in a more effective way than just by blocking their shots. One obvious idea - "obvious" except for my failing to think of it for an embarrassingly long time - was having light blobs radiate more than one frequency of light at the same time. They can see multiple frequencies, so why not radiate them too? [[How they see and how they emit are actually performed very differently, so that question has no practical basis, but it still should have occurred to me earlier.]] I got it to work quite easily. Making white blobs was easier now, but it hadn't been all that difficult previously. I could make a reasonably good still image by getting individual parts of the light blob to give off different colors. It was like using Microsoft's Paint program, so quite crude. The final result couldn't be used to fool anyone as it was transparent. I also tried to make a large light blob function like a TV screen with me creating the show. I did manage to get a stick-figure human to walk up some stairs, but the crudest possible cartoon was the best I could do. I wasn't able to coordinate all the required actions fast enough. I couldn't even split the job across my minds because only the creating mind can control a ki-effect. Theoretically there isn't much difference between having one light blob emitting multiple colors and multiple blobs emitting a single color, and the latter allows multiple minds to be involved, so thinking of getting one blob to radiate more than one color didn't achieve much beyond my embarrassing myself for not thinking of it earlier. [I later realized the reason I hadn't thought to experiment with multi-colored light blobs. It was because I had long since been very fearful of using light blobs for almost anything. There was simply too much chance of someone with a camera and a telephoto lens getting a picture of them in use, and that could easily be very bad. If I was in the habit of using them for communication aids, a fraction of a second's thoughtlessness could have one of my minds creating a life-threatening image in public. Even if I restricted my use of them to inside my home, someone could get a picture through a window. The other 'naughty' things I did, such as committing incest and using NP to float things, took enough time to take effect that I had time to remember to check the drapes; but using a light blob could be done almost instantly and captured on film just as quickly. I had used light blobs to spell out words to Prof when we were in the Casino Kidnappers' basement, and again when my families were sheltering in the tunnel while the Army was attacking our Peoria Road home, but both of those were events I was very conscious of. Using light blobs so often that they risked becoming habitual had been too dangerous. Recent events made it somewhat less so, which might have been why I finally thought of experimenting with them. I wouldn't risk using them to convey pictures when I was talking with my loved ones as most of that communication was too obviously between me and them, so not involving the Guardian Angel, but maybe I might find opportunities to have it communicate to the press using that technique.] [[I later developed a much better method of conveying pictures to my loved ones.]] Discovering things and spreading word of them was my job, so I communicated the above results during the déjà vu's I was having. Some of my discoveries were: Immediately possible for the five-merged Marks, such as mirrored NP-points and multi-colored light blobs. Impossible for them, such as creating AC or DC electricity. Questionable about whether they could be used. I doubted the five-merge Marks would have enough control over their minds and bodies to do without sleep. Maybe they'd be able to learn how if they worked on it during their subsequent déjà vu's, when their proximity senses were enhanced. I could show the Marks that I déjà vu'd with what to do, but that was a miniscule proportion of them and I wouldn't know for a while whether they could get what I showed them to work after they were on their own. [I learned later that they couldn't.] All the Marks were happy that my Voyage of Discovery was achieving its objective. There were a lot of desirable abilities that I hadn't been able to achieve, but I was starting to make progress, and the Voyage was still ongoing so I might learn how to do the more desirable things later. ------- I did more work on ability development and understanding than described above, but most of it was unsuccessful. Quite a lot of it was even silly because I had no idea what might be possible so I tried all sorts of things. None of it is worth commenting on so I'll break off the list to talk about some other things. I didn't try pushing my flying ability to the limit. I was so confident that I could exceed Mach 10 that I didn't need to test it, and it wasn't something that the other Marks would benefit from. I'll be in this dimension for a while, so it might be good not to alert the Government to that capability of mine. My online and Physics Department research taught me that when air has Mach 20 collisions, as it would with the front of my sled if I flew that fast, it behaves in ways that might be dangerous to me unless I was shielded behind a lot of metal, which the Government's radars would get very excited about. I could fly that fast if I was outside the atmosphere, but at that height radiation from space can be as bad as radiation from superheated air molecules, so I'd still have to be shielded behind metal. I decided that I'll restrict myself to a top speed of Mach 15 or so. That was surely good enough for any possible situation. Because of the big flying show at SCS and the "Oops, I've Left My Jacket At My Restaurant Table" plan, 8A would normally have increased his public use of his abilities in ways to make it look like the angel was providing the services. Nearly all of the Marks I was déjà vu'ing with were doing those things to get the public used to NP, not that the public knew it by that name. Only Marks in unusual situations weren't doing that. My situation was especially unusual, and I was backpedaling on openly using NP. I wouldn't be here long enough to get much benefit out of it, so there wasn't much point in rocking that boat (to add a metaphor of yet another transportation method). I did fly myself around sometimes, and the girls or all the families sometimes too, but it was unusual and I preferred to do it when there was a reasonably obvious justification for the angel doing so. It had never been at a supersonic speed, as I'd had no need to reveal that ability in this dimension. An ability that I did deliberately make extensive use of was my proximity sense. I studied my families' bodies and a large amount of medical literature to help me understand what I was seeing. I initially couldn't even name the vast majority of the parts I was sensing let alone know what they did, the latter being an essential step in knowing whether they were doing them right. I particularly wanted to give Prof and Vanessa very careful checkups as even without much study I could see that their much older bodies had many areas that weren't working well. I had over a hundred medical textbooks spread over the floor of my downstairs study, so my study rate was phenomenal. It hadn't started so impressively though. I could easily cover many times more books than that with a large sight blob as they're as wide as my proximity sense which had a 96-foot radius now, but my visual processing centers didn't have enough resolution to let me read the nearly 30,000 square feet of textbooks that could have been under a max-sized blob. I couldn't even read all sixty four of my computer screens, and they would have totaled less than 100 square feet. I had a limit, and I like pushing my limits, so I was pushing that one. In my MRI-like proximity sense of my brain, I could sense that my visual processing centers were slowly getting larger. My proximity sense wasn't detailed enough to see what was happening in those centers, but they were certainly rising to the challenge, which was nice of them. Every few days I was able to add another row and column of books to the previous maximum that I'd been able to read legibly, speeding up my medical research. I kept pushing that limit until I had gained the ability to read all sixty four computer screens, and then I stopped pushing as I feared my brain getting any larger. It needs a gap between it and the skull, and I had significantly reduced the size of that gap over my visual processing centers. ------- A weird thing happened after 4 weeks in this dimension. I did something routine and #16 asked, #16: . We sometimes ask ourselves that when the asker wants to discuss the action with whoever did it. The weird thing was that no one answered. We were surprised and puzzled by that. Several of us offered comments like, #68: , but no one put their hand up for the original action. It was strange. We joked that we had a stowaway and we semi-joked by counting off to make sure there were 128 of us - we knew our individual numbers as they'd assigned logically and each merge had a mathematically simple effect. There was no way of getting our number-names confused, and we never lie to each other except as part of having fun, and this wasn't such a situation. Then we got every one of us to successively say #n: , and none of us would have lied in that circumstance. We were left with a puzzle over who had done the action that #16 had queried. We checked more often over the following days, getting some more occurrences of no one putting their hand up. The first time might have been someone doing it so thoughtlessly they didn't realize they'd done it, but repeats of the same event removed that possibility. The only sensible explanation seemed to be insanity. Can insane people invent sensible explanations? Does fearing you're insane mean you're sensible enough not to be? Or maybe our insanity was obvious, as most people would surely think they were insane if they weren't sure whether they had 128 or maybe more minds in their head. Would having 129 minds when I should have 128 make me schizophrenic? Or maybe there was another explanation, although none of us could think of one. It wasn't causing an immediate problem since the mystery mind's (or minds') actions were always very acceptable to us - the majority of us were in favor of them - but it was still concerning and very puzzling. The normality of our actions reassured us that we weren't insane, so that aspect was good. It didn't 'feel' bad in any way; it just felt like business as normal. If one of us hadn't thought to ask , we'd never have known something strange was happening. We didn't behave any crazier during the frequent déjà vu's either, so linking to another thirty two minds didn't seem to exacerbate the problem. When we discussed our concern with the Marks we déjà vu'd with, they all thought, We very definitely weren't in a hurry, so we happily agreed with that. Over the next several weeks the proportion of times we got no answers to slowly rose. It was still low, about 3%, and it still wasn't causing any problems, but it remained worrying. We noticed that the probability of no one owning up seemed proportional to the popularity of the action. In other words, the more of us that wanted to do something, the higher the chance that Mr. No One did it. ------- I'd been working on identifying all the areas of my loved ones' bodies which were operating at levels below acceptable and which could be improved in practical ways. It took me until week 7 in this w-dimension to acquire enough medical knowledge that I felt confident that I'd identified all the areas that I was going to, most of which had been identified while I was in déjà vu's because the extra resolution helped considerably. It was great that I was having déjà vu's so often and that my proximity range was large enough that I could often study several of my loved ones' bodies at the same time. One breakfast, I told my families, "My proximity sense is good enough for me to get some information on how well people's bodies are working, but I'd not previously done the research I needed to help me understand what I was sensing. That's been a side project of mine for the last few weeks and I've identified a few minor areas that some of us might want to get checked out by a real doctor who does know what he's talking about. No one has anything major, or even middling, but there are some minor areas that could be improved. None of us kids are involved, especially not my fit-as-a-horse younger sister, but I've got a few notes for each of the parents." "Oh dear," said Mom. "It's not even worth an 'oh dear', Mom. You're not eating enough fruit, for example. If you had one or two per day, that'd fix half the things on your list. I'm talking MINOR preventive maintenance stuff." The list wasn't so minor in Prof's case, but there was no need to mention that. Amusingly, if I'd bothered to make a list of what appeared wrong about my body, it would have been much longer than Prof's list. There were a whole heap of things in my body that didn't look right according to medical textbooks that'd been written about normal humans. It amused me, and I wondered about the scientists who are already, or who will be, dissecting the Voyager's donated-to-medical-science bodies. It also made me even more aware of the need to keep scientists away from my body while I was alive, that being a warning that I'll put out on the grapevine. -- "Shall I duck the dishes by retiring to Prof and Vanessa's study after breakfast so you can take turns coming for a consultation? My rates are very reasonable." "You can tell me here. I don't care if anyone else hears," said Dad. "It'll put pressure on the others to be non-private, and they might prefer not to..." Prof said, "We're not pressured, Mark. Vanessa and I will see you privately. I'm quite interested to hear how detailed your information is. You're a constant source of wonder for me." "I was worried that you might think I was invading your privacy by doing this, so I'm happy you're so positive." "You've got nothing but good intentions, unlike most people who invade others' privacy, and if you ever spot anything wrong with this old body then speak up right away. I want to be around as long as possible to see what you achieve in your life. I've got some other good reasons too, but seeing your impact on the world is a big motivation for me." #116: We agreed that I'd use Prof and Vanessa's study as a consulting room. I had two pieces of paper for each parent: Simply a list of under-performing or injured areas to get checked out, with as little explanation as possible, usually none at all. I included areas that I didn't know how to improve because their doctor might know how. This list could be given to a doctor with the patient saying, "The angel said these should be tested as not working as well as they should." A more descriptive list, based on my knowledge. It was quite possible I'd made several mistakes on this list which wouldn't reflect well on the angel if given to a doctor, so this was for background information only. After suitable cautions about my not being a trained doctor, it's this list that I ran my consultation discussions from. When Dad came in I tried to obtain some money from him by asking, "How much will you pay me to tell Mom she should be having more sex?" "Haha. We do pretty good with that, thanks very much. Life's pretty good these days: Fely enjoys working for your foundation much more than she did her previous job. She lives in a gorgeous home and Vanessa or the girls give her time off from the housework, so she's relaxed about that. Everybody's happy, healthy and well-adjusted in the weird ways that happen around here. The only money problem we've got is keeping the spongers away. It's a very good life, thanks to you." A couple of corrections to Dad's comment: First, he didn't mention that we also have some staff who spend a few hours one day per week cleaning the two homes. That happens at a fixed time every week so there's no chance of their catching us doing something we don't want known. It happens in the early afternoon of a weekday so Dad probably doesn't even know about it. Second, despite having my name on the foundation, it was very much Vanessa's rather than mine. Other than those two small mistakes, I agreed with Dad. Unfortunately the "good life" they were enjoying was going to take a tragic nosedive when I tell them I'm going on a Voyage of Discovery, but until then it was great. [I haven't written much about what the parents do, but to use Dad as an example, he often has his friends come over for 'important' sports games (ha-ha) and they have good times. They play poker occasionally too, and even invited me once. I told them "It'll be like taking candy from a baby," which made them even more insistent that I play. They must have misunderstood my meaning. I enjoyed myself, but kept track of how much each of them had put into the pots I won - it was only low stakes fun anyway, mostly with Dad's workmates - and I gave it back after their lesson. I tease them occasionally about joining in again. All the parents are socially active, individually and collectively, so there's plenty going on and they're thoroughly enjoying their lifestyle. It's just not relevant to my ascendancy and much of it occurs in a separate building from mine, so I don't mention it much.] Vanessa and Prof came in together for their consult, as that's the sort of people they are. My lists for them had several items, with Prof's being significantly longer. There was nothing alarming on either list, but definitely some things that should be checked out, improved where possible, and kept an eye on in case they got worse. Although worried, Prof enjoyed being impressed by my ability and knowledge. The parents visited their doctors and had several tests, and within a couple of weeks I got feedback that my diagnoses had been very good. Not perfect, but pretty damned good. That gave rise to the issues of performing a similar service for our staff, and possibly the general public. The parents and I didn't like the idea of going public with that service, with the parents being strongly opposed to that, but we all liked the idea of offering the service to those of our staff who wanted it. I'd already checked our staff and a few of them had issues. They might know about them already, but they might not. So I typed up a description of the service the angel was offering, including how it would be done and explaining that it'd be totally private between them and the angel. Armed with copies of my description, I visited each group of employees (the Office staff, gardeners, security, etc.), explaining, "We are pleased to offer our employees an innovative addition to our medical plan: the angel has volunteered to check your bodies and tell you of any health problems it thinks you should get looked at by a doctor. It asked me to tell you that it isn't an expert about bodies, unlike God, so it can't promise to be perfect, but it'll give you a list of any areas you should ask your doctors about." That was the excuse I was using to explain the angel's possible mistakes. I handed out copies of the page that described the new service in more detail. I set up a laptop and printer in the Kids' living room, and anyone who was interested came during the scheduled visiting hours for each shift. They stood fully dressed in front of the angel, it looked them up and down for a second, then typed up its recommendations, printed the page out, and then the word processing document was blanked ready for the next patient. No one else was in the room so it seemed totally private. Each patient took less than five seconds as I already knew what to say about each of them. There weren't any major concerns, but were several that were best acted on sooner rather than later. One guy had a developing stomach ulcer problem, one of the female security guards had a 'female problem' that needed antibiotics to treat the inflammation, the Office ladies had a few age-related issues, including one with a lump that wasn't active as far as I could tell but it shouldn't be there. There were half a dozen more issues like that, as well as many minor issues, such as dandruff that I'd seen with my eyes. Not all the staff participated, but most of the cautious ones who'd declined initially asked for another opportunity once the first wave returned from their doctors saying that the angel had been accurate and useful. My parents first, and then a couple dozen more patients, had handed over a list of issues to their doctors, saying, "Mark's Guardian Angel says I should get these checked out." The doctors were curious, especially after the test results confirmed the need for some medical interventions, so we got calls from most of the doctors in town. Mom's answer was along the lines of, "The angel volunteered to do it. As usual it didn't explain its thinking, but we presume it was mainly because it wants the people around Mark to be healthy. It hasn't volunteered to provide diagnosing services for you, but we'll certainly let you know if it does." A couple of the doctors tried harder, one of them even bringing a patient to our front gate, but the angel didn't dare turn itself into a public service as that'd lead to thousands of desperate people surrounding our home again. That wasn't practical for all the obvious reasons, plus it hadn't been easy for me to diagnose the people I had. It required a lot of research, comparing different people carefully to understand what normal was for any parts of any person that I thought might be abnormal, waiting to have déjà vu's so my proximity sense was better, more research, etc. I wasn't a trained doctor, and it simply wasn't possible for me to provide such a service to the public. Word did spread outward from the local medical community, and a few days later it came to the attention of a reporter, and from him to the whole world. It kept our guards busy for the next few days, required me to give a couple more media interviews, and was a diminishing ongoing nuisance for quite a few weeks, but the whole event was all so obvious that I won't bother describing it here. I broadcast what we'd learned about my families' and staff's health through the Mark Grapevine. Given how many tens of billions of people that'd benefit, that was a VERY public service. ------- Chapter 412: A Different Kind of Threesome Friday, February 1 to Wednesday, May 7, 2008 In the 9th week of having 128 minds, something totally unexpected happened: we were mid-déjà vu and another one started, creating a three-way déjà vu. It took us to a linkage totaling 192 minds, and our proximity senses - all three of them - immediately jumped in range and level of detail. A check of the number of NP-fingertips a mind could create, their maximum size and forcefulness, and a few other quickly performed tests, confirmed that our abilities had increased to the 192-mind level. Our head didn't explode and there was no sign of any sudden worsening of my possible insanity, which all 192 or 193 of us were relieved about. The reason the three-way déjà vu was so unexpected was that the mathematical possibility of this had occurred to all the Marks years ago. We'd discussed it during links, but none of us had ever heard of it happening. If it'd happened even once, word would definitely have spread because it's exactly the sort of thing that we find interesting. No word of it for years meant we had long since decided that it must be impossible. To put some numbers on it, using just the 21 months one of the several subsets of my minds had spent as a five-merged Mark. During that time déjà vu's occurred an average of every 1,030 minutes and lasted 2.5 minutes. If a three-way déjà vu was possible and had the same probability as a two-way, then the chance of a second déjà vu starting while one is already going was simplistically 2.5/1,030. That assumes déjà vu's are uniformly likely within the 1,030 minutes which we know isn't the case as a second déjà vu follows the first by a number of hours that clusters around the expectation, like a normal distribution curve. Having a déjà vu in the first hour is about five times less likely than the average likelihood (and incidentally, about fifteen times less than the peak time's probability), so the chance of two simultaneous déjà vu's when we had thirty two minds would seem to be 2.5/1,030/5 = 1-in-2,060. In those 21 months we had 21 (months) x 30 (days/month) x 24 (hours/day) x 60 (minutes/hour) / 1030 (minutes/déjà vu) = 880 déjà vu's. We slept through some of them, but you can see that something like one Mark in three should've had a three-way déjà vu, but none of us ever heard of anyone doing so. Across the W-Dimension, we tend to have déjà vu's at the same time, but it's only a tendency. While it would affect the above calculation significantly, it certainly wouldn't affect it enough so that a billion Marks never had a three-way. [[We were overestimating that tendency. Marks in similar dimensions tended to have déjà vu's at similar times, but as they were also the Marks that déjà vu'd together the most often, the impression we got was too strong. A lot of Marks had déjà vu's at other times, we just didn't hear about it nearly so often (statisticians call that sampling bias. If you want to know how much the average person weighs, don't do a survey outside a Weight Watchers meeting). That sadly meant that there were MANY Marks who did not déjà vu just before they died in their bathtub suicide.]] Similar arithmetic could be done for the other periods since our first merge, but there's no need as it's obvious that had it been possible, we would've heard about it many times by now. The fact that we hadn't, meant we'd concluded that there was something operating that stopped three-way déjà vu's from being possible - so we were very surprised to be in one now. [[As a metaphor for the force that brings dimensions into contact with each other, think of two magnets sliding down either side of a "U"-shaped ramp. The magnets have the same pole in the front so they'll repulse each other rather than collide. There was a natural mechanism that activated that repulsion once two dimensions were already linked, not repulsing themselves but repulsing any new links to prevent three-way déjà vu's. When my number of minds got high enough it overcame that 'repulsion', as would happen if one of the two magnets became massive enough but with the same strength magnetic field, forcing a physical collision at the bottom of the ramps.]] The three of us - "A", "B" and "C" for the lack of better names - could all talk together. Initially we were just broadcasting our communication to everyone else, e.g., A to the rest of A as well as to B and C, but as soon as we were over the initial confusion we did tests of: A to just B, A to just C, B to just C, and in the reverse directions too. The six communication directions all worked fine, which strongly implied that we were in a three-way link, rather than two two-way links. On the other hand, we had long been sure that déjà vu's happen between individual minds, with the other minds along for the ride. That's why the frequency of them increase the way it does, and we'd also experimented by getting a certain number individual minds to think aberrantly during a déjà vu, and the link failed in proportion to the fraction of minds that were in the test. If the links were to individual minds, then when C joined the existing link between A and B, C must've linked to either an A or a B mind (because A and B had both noticed C arriving at the exact same time, it wasn't believable that C had linked to each of them independently. We would have heard about many occasions of Cs linking to As and Bs many seconds apart had they been random, independent events). Let's say C linked to B. That means A is linked to B, and B to C, so A is not directly linked to C. But somehow, A, B and C could all communicate together. Either C had linked to both A and B, which seemed unlikely, or the communication was somehow bridged between A and C by B without B being aware of it, which also seemed unlikely. [[Both options were wrong. We didn't know that copies of our minds are created in each other's 'skulls' (I'm using that colloquially, as minds aren't so physically constrained) and that the three-way communications were occurring in three different localities and locally only, so intra- rather than inter-dimensionally.]] After a minute or so of our three-way link, one of my minds thought of something truly AMAZING. It had occurred to me because I would LOVE to be able to minimize the number of merges required for my Voyage since leaving each dimension is fucking horrible! We were thinking whether this three-way link offered any possible way of achieving a reduction in the number of deaths I'd go through. Assuming I'm A, then it's no good B and C dying now to merge into me as they would just add thirty two minds for each death, which is what I'm achieving anyway. The REALLY interesting question is: "What if A dies now?" I saw an AMAZING possibility for that: When I merge normally, I want my minds to cross the link, but I know from my very first merge that wishing my minds across isn't necessary. Simply dying during déjà vu accomplishes the transfer. Not that I was going to do it now - there'll always be another opportunity thanks to the magic of mathematical probabilities - but if I ("A") died now: Would a proportion of A's minds go to B and C, i.e., 50%/50%, 0%/100%, 100%/0%, or a random allocation such as 23%/77% (ignoring rounding errors!)? Would A just die, with his minds extinguishing? Would A's minds go to BOTH B and C? It seemed obvious that minds were pure information, so why couldn't they duplicate to go to both destinations? We thought the middle ("Mind-death") result was the least likely. A is in a link, so the minds should go somewhere, fingers crossed. The only way mind-death seemed possible would be if there was an equal force pushing/pulling A's minds toward B and C, so A's minds got stuck in the middle. We could have B try hard to call A, while C is passive, in case that made a difference. We've NEVER heard of a merge attempt that didn't work, and the Marks from the destination dimensions would have reported that. Obviously a three-way déjà vu hadn't happened either, so not hearing of a failed merge wasn't proof of safety, but it was partially reassuring. It seemed obvious that A's minds would split across B and C in some proportion, but that was only because it seemed sensible compared to the bizarre idea that A's minds might duplicate, effectively creating 128 NEW Marks! It was so bizarre we felt that surely it wouldn't happen, but using feelings was hardly a good decision-making process. Apart from its being bizarre, we didn't know of a reason why the last option wasn't possible. Admittedly we didn't understand this process hardly at all, but what we did know didn't make the last possibility impossible. We certainly couldn't see anything wrong with there being duplicate Marks because there already seemed to be billions of us, and there'd probably been at least a hundred times more than that when we started. The Universe doesn't seem to have anything against duplicates. The REALLY freaky possibility - the one that had me so excited in this - is that if the third option is what happens, then B and C will both have 160 minds, and the NEXT time they déjà vu it might be with their only peer, especially considering how far they would be above the 32-minded alternative candidates. B could then merge into C to give C 320 minds! Admittedly 128 of them would be duplicates, but would that matter? The minds are damned near identical anyway. The benefit would be that I could get from 128 to 320 minds with only 2 deaths, rather than the 6 it'd normally take. And it gets even freakier because I might be able to keep doing it! If the 320-minded Mark has another three-way déjà vu with two more 32-minded Marks, then he can kill himself to create two 352-minded Marks, who can then déjà vu with each other and merge to create a 704 mind version. So I could get from 128 to 704 minds in a total of 4 deaths rather than 18. The next two deaths would get me to 1,472 minds in 6 deaths rather than 42. There were, to put it mildly, some major issues involved in this idea: The risk of the mind-death possibility was definitely a major issue! It was BAD! On the other hand, our body was going to die anyway, and it was worth the possible death of our minds to let all the other Marks know that it was essential to avoid dying in a three-way déjà vu. That was especially true because if a three-way link ever developed with them, chances were that throughout the Universe it would be happening with millions of triples at the same time, so there'd be a huge loss if they all tried to merge then. The chance that a proportion of A's minds might go to B and C didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things as nothing was lost. Unless the allocation of A's minds was very one-sided, B and C would probably déjà vu with each other next time as they'd be each other's best peer, whereupon they could merge and the end result would be boring. If the allocation was very uneven, then the largest Mark (say B) would continue his Voyage not caring whether he merged with C or some other Mark, as they'd have a similar number of minds. Assuming the exciting duplicate scenario happened (for this and the subsequent bullet points), then the first risk was IMMEDIATELY after A died. B and C would necessarily still be in a déjà vu with each other and their having duplicates of A's minds might kill them both, or something else bad. If nothing bad happened, then B could merge across to C immediately, but B's family would get no goodbye and that would be far too cruel. The next issue is that B and C might not déjà vu with each other again, but then B and C could roll a few dice each and spread what they'd/we'd rolled through the grapevine. It wouldn't take long for B and C to learn each other's rolls, and whoever had rolled highest - to be consistent with the Voyage starting with rolling 6s - would continue with the journey merging with random Marks +32 minds at a time. The next scary risk was when B and C next déjà vu'd together, assuming that happened. Their having the same minds might cause a major problem. Following immediately after the point above, if déjà vu'ing didn't cause an obvious problem, then they'd merge, which had to be even more likely to have problems because then the duplicate minds would be in the same brain. There was also the general risk of our head exploding or going insane because it suddenly contained too many minds. It was more dangerous this way because the increments were larger, but either brain explosions or insanity might happen anyway. On the plus side: If it doesn't work, all the other Marks will learn not to try it, potentially saving many millions of lives. If it does work, it'll save a LOT of hurt families. Back when I started merging, I would never have guessed that even 16 minds could fit into a single brain, but here I was with 128 of them [[actually 192 right at this moment, but I didn't yet know that déjà vu did that]]. If the upper limit of the number of minds was a truly large number, in the thousands or more - which seems ridiculous, but so does 128 or even 16 - then getting there +32 minds at a time would probably make me insane from all the grief and anguish. There was a huge benefit in the "+32 Then Double-Up" system, if it worked. Also if it works, it creates more Mark-minds "out of thin air", increasing the number of us in the Universe. I wasn't sure what the benefit of that would be, but it sounded like an amazingly good thing, although I might be biased. The Other Marks: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: I talked about the other things going on, starting with my "Mr. No One" stowaway. I'd call him "Mr. Nobody", except that #2 through to #128 are No Body already, having to use #1's. Because the three-way had started quite a long way into the normal déjà vu, I hadn't finished talking when B (by which I mean the Mark that I'd linked to first) dropped out of the link, leaving just A (me) and C. C had definitely been the last to arrive, and his ability to continue to communicate with me implied he hadn't joined by linking just to B. He'd presumably been four times more likely to link to me because I had four times more minds to link to, but if enough three-way links continue to operate as successful two-way links after their Bs drop out, then we'll have learned something about the process. One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: The link ended without anything else significant being said. I'd been in this dimension two months by now, and I'd started thinking about when I should resume my Voyage. I'd already learned pretty much all that I could from the experiments with my abilities, and I could probably learn more after additional merges, so I really should leave. I hadn't been serious about doing so, out of concern over the Mr. No One situation and because I was simply reluctant to restart hurting my families, but this new development gave me a welcome excuse to delay for much longer. In subsequent déjà vu's, the Marks were very surprised that a three-way déjà vu had happened, and then even more surprised by my mind-duplicating shortcut idea. It excited and appealed to them, but they were very thankful that it wasn't their risk. That sounds selfish of them, but they'd be stupid to think in any other way. I can't say it appealed to me, but going through a large number of goodbyes appealed even less. Plus, the idea was very mathematically interesting, and being able to create more Marks out of thin air might have enormous significance one day. Not that I like to think of it happening, but if ALL the Marks merged another couple of times to get to my current number of minds, then they'd presumably be able to three-way déjà vu, and they could duplicate themselves. They might even be able to three-way after only one merge because I hadn't spent long enough at that level to give that possibility a decent chance of happening. Once three-ways became possible for them, they'd never merge with their original minds as there'd be so many other Marks around to make that mathematically almost impossible, but the number of Marks in the Universe could be doubled with each subsequent merger, as the number of Mark bodies halved. It would be adding a great deal of power to us. I didn't know if we'd ever be forced to merge again, but it was good to know that if we were under enough threat to force it, then there was a way for us to gain more power from fewer merges than the normal process allowed. In the right circumstances, where a threat was patient but still great enough to force us to gain more power, our knowing to wait for three-ways would save a lot of Marks from dying, and save a lot of our families from grieving. In short, it was an experiment I should make. ------- In the 10th week of my time in this dimension, another interesting thing happened, fortunately with no scary aspect. I discovered a way to disconnect my proximity sphere from myself. It effectively became a "Proximity Blob" that I could send anywhere within my 590-foot range, although if I sent it to the edge, any part of it that was more than 590 feet from me didn't register anything. Nor could I send it more than 590 feet away. Not in the way that if I sent NP-fingertips or the usual blobs that far away, they self-canceled; with the proximity blob, once it was at its extreme range, it refused to go any farther. If I walked in the opposite direction, it followed me to stay within range. Another difference is to do with the definition of "590 feet". I haven't bothered making an issue out of it before, but my ki-effects have a size, so am I measuring the 590 from me to their center, their far edge or their near edge? Back when they were small it didn't matter, but they can be so big now it can make a large difference. I lose control of NP-fingertips when their closest edge gets 590 feet away (so their farthest edge can be a few feet beyond 590). After I lose control, they carry on doing what they were doing, and then self-cancel after the Blinks Allowed period. Traditional blobs are different, self-canceling as soon as their center reaches 590 feet. A proximity blob can have its center go far enough beyond the 590-foot range that only about 15% of the blobs volume is still within range, but it wouldn't go any farther. Why these ki-effects all operated differently was a puzzle. Proximity blobs weren't created like any of the traditional blobs. Proximity was something I got the instant I learned to center myself and it was an intrinsic rather than a learned ability that I had to deliberately create. I don't know why that is, but I'm certainly not objecting to it being so easy to acquire and its seemingly improving itself with every merge without any effort or thought required from me. [[There are a number of aspects to the reason, but putting it simply, all minds have an ability to interact with the Universe around them. Proximity sense is what your mind can sense from the Universe's Consciousness within the volume of your sense of self. Proximity is normally crude and undeveloped; imagine your own, which is consciously rarely any more than getting a funny feeling when someone is standing very close to you and is looking at you. The more powerful my collective mind, the more it could extract from the Universe and the larger the volume it could occupy. NP and blobs, on the other hand, are deliberately created effects using energy tapped from elsewhere in the Universe to have an effect where I want them. They required discovery of the techniques and learning how to use them.]] From my subconscious processes being increasingly consciously understandable, I'd seen that my proximity sense was centered on my "Sense of Self", and I was able to visualize that being elsewhere. I'd originally tried to visualize it moving away from me, but that'd failed for an amusingly obvious reason. "Self" wasn't quite the right word as I was also aware of where I physically was. I had to visualize a mental version of myself. It was a very different process than flying blobs around, took a lot more concentration, and often failed, whereupon the proximity sense would instantly revert to being around my body. I preferred it to be around me as I felt naked without it, but it was good to know that I could send it elsewhere if I had a special need. I could, for a very good example, use my ability to proximity sense dense lumps of metal to search a room full of people for guns extremely easily now, without having to get closer than five hundred feet to anyone. I LIKED that example! I also stumbled on the knowledge that taught me how to turn proximity off, as previously the only way of doing that was to uncenter, and I haven't deliberately done that for years. Falling asleep used to do that, but I've always got some minds awake now so that's no longer an issue. I have no desire to ever turn proximity off, so learning how to do so wasn't useful, just being something I picked up along the way. ^ The Mr. No One mystery continued to get progressively worse; although it never caused any problems, so "more common" is a better description than "worse". We were checking or quite often, and finding an erratically increasing proportion of No One answers. We weren't sure what to think. All of the things Mr. No One said or did we probably would've said or done anyway, unless a mind with a strongly held minority opinion had jumped in first. It wasn't causing us any real problems, just the problem of the mystery and the worry it caused, which included making us reluctant to merge again, but we weren't intending to merge for quite a while anyway, waiting for another three-way déjà vu to confirm they would repeat before going out on the one after that. Then it got worse in new way. When we talk internally to each other, we always put our name in front of our communications, for example: #1: #2: But we started getting unnamed thoughts that No One sent, like: Elsewhere in this autobiography I've sometimes dropped the name from the front of our internal conversations when the legibility of the text seemed to suit it, or I've used "One Of Them" or the like when the exact name didn't matter or would've confused you too much because there were two minds of each number in a déjà vu link - that had certainly confused us at the times - but those were writing shortcuts. In reality, once I'd achieved four minds and realized the need to keep track of who had 'spoken', there'd always been a name on the front of all our communications, until just now. It puzzled us, while we were waiting for the pizza place to answer their phone. It also suggested an obvious line of inquiry, #16: #84: #84: After some more internal discussion, we had to admit that we couldn't think of a way of solving that problem, as it's only our memories that defines us as individuals. We were able to gain some more evidence by having each of my minds successively call out his own number-name, at the end of which, Mr. No Name stated, "I didn't speak during the count. Apart from anything else, I have no idea what my number is." We couldn't tell whether that made 'him' a new mind, a weird aberration, some sort of internal reflection of our own thoughts, or something else. Going to see a mental health professional wouldn't have been a good idea, so puzzling about it internally and discussing it during my déjà vu's was about all I could do. ------- Late in the 11th week, we linked with our first déjà vu partner who'd already heard about our three-way déjà vu. How long that'd taken was reasonably consistent with there being between three hundred million and two billion five-merge Marks, counting bodies; not individual minds. We think that most of the other Marks are two-merge or lower, and they déjà vu so infrequently, and even less frequently with five-merge Marks, that they won't have influenced the spread-the-word process much, giving me no clue about how many of them there are. Few of them will have heard about the original "one of us should go ahead" idea yet. They can thank me later, if I survive my Voyage. By this time, the number of our actions and internal communications that were from Mr. No One had accelerated all the way up to 20%. Bear in mind that the rest of us were each contributing an average of 0.6% of the time, so Mr. No One was taking WAY more than his fair share of control. We weren't really moaning though, because we'd decided that Mr. No One must be us. We thought that our brain must be reorganizing in some way. We figured that it'd decided it was silly to have 128 individuals who were nearly identical, and had started its own version of an internal merge. We were apparently going to have a collective consciousness, although no one had asked us, and No One hadn't asked us, about that. (You can have some fun with English sometimes. Obviously not as often as with either mathematics or breasts, but sometimes.) It was very unusual for our mental reorganizations to take so many weeks, but we'd been so concerned about it that we'd probably subconsciously slowed it down a great deal. After many weeks of there never being a problem from the process, it was difficult for us to continue to feel worried so the process was speeding up. We were nonchalant now, presumably after having been chalant for so long, having a lot of faith in our neuroplasticity. It'd done great for us so far, so we were inclined to keep trusting it, not that we seemed to have much choice. I'd be exaggerating to say that our biggest worry was whether we'd have someone to tell our internal jokes too, but that does describe the core issue of our worry. We VERY much enjoy our own company and we didn't want to lose it. So far Mr. No One was participating in our conversations and even cracking jokes, but what would happen when his was the only consciousness left? Who would he talk, joke and laugh with? I'm sure that by now you've got a good appreciation of how sad it'd be for the Universe if we stopped making our jokes. ------- Early in week 15 of having 128 minds, which was the last week of March 2008, I decided that the Mr. No One situation had stabilized or stalled. Unless it changed again, the result of the scary brain reorganization was a kind of non-event. All 128 of us were individually alive and well, able to participate as much as we wanted, talk internally, talk externally, move our body, notice different things with the same eyes because our attention was in different places, crack our laughable jokes, etc. The only difference was that Mr. No One was in here too. If none of the 128 of us did anything, then No One ran the body. We did an experiment where all of us passively did nothing for half an hour during dinner, and our body participated fully and in just the way it would've anyway, including speaking naturally to our families. No one (among our families) detected No One (among us) because it didn't behave differently. It behaved totally Mark-like. We didn't feel panic over having our body being taken for a ride because we were used to that. It happened almost all the time. When there were thirty two of us, any one of us could go hours without issuing a single command to the body. Someone would, and it didn't matter who, so we didn't worry about it. With 128 minds, we were each being taken for a ride more than 99% of the time even without Mr. No One. The new situation of having a Mr. No One felt and seemed pretty much the same as the old situation. We had thought that the Mr. No One development was a major event, only it didn't seem to have any effect at all. I'm tempted to write that the only change was that my sense of humor improved, but you wouldn't believe me. [[Something major had happened. To use software terms: rather than having 128 Marks each with a complete set of all the software routines, now there were just the 128 personality routines (including their personality-dependent conscious and subconscious), with all the common non-personality conscious and subconscious routines merged into a single copy. To make that work it needed a 'person' on top of it because that's what I minds were built like. An obvious possibility was for it to have kept #1 on top as it was his body after all, and merged all the rest of us together, but we had long since stopped thinking of #1 as more powerful or more deserving than any of the rest of us. As we considered ourselves all the same, all of us were merged, and a Mr. No One amalgam created. Removing the redundancies had made my minds and brain much more efficient. Or more accurately, much less inefficient, because 128 of everything had been very wasteful. Mr. No One was a kind of Average-Us. He ran the body if no one else did, but he was a wimp because if anyone else wanted to do something with our body, he always let them. While he had been in the process of being created, we'd worried about losing control to him. We liked to cooperate with each other, so Mr. No One liked to cooperate too - that had been included in his personality. It's lucky my basic personality type wasn't assertive because having a head full of 128 Marks all wanting to control our single life would've been a mess, and an even worse mess when the 129th personality developed because it did have more direct control over our body.]] ^ The second important answer of the week was my having another three-way déjà vu. It was about 1.5 weeks earlier than I'd calculated, but that wasn't significant out of a 7.5 week expectation. It was essentially on time, which was surprising because I'd thought that whatever the process was that had made three-way déjà vu's impossible for the last few years might still be making them difficult now, so they might have needed 15 weeks, or 30 weeks, or even longer. That could still be the case, which would make this déjà vu a very early one, but I thought it most likely that the barrier to three-ways had simply been removed, letting them occur as the normal probabilities determined. That meant I'd probably be leaving this dimension about mid-May, more or less. As had happened last time, I was initially one of the two participants in a perfectly normal, two-way déjà vu. It was indistinguishable from all the other two-way déjà vu's I'd had, until partway through when, without warning, another Mark arrived. When it ended, B left while C and I kept communicating, which was 2 for 2 so far. [[And irrelevant because we had the wrong model for the déjà vu process.]] Even before it ended, we had firmly decided to merge during the next three-way, and we asked C to start spreading the word. There are two very unpleasant aspects to going out on a three-way: They're so far apart that the timing is terribly erratic and is going to be emotionally hard. Telling my families, "I'll be dying in probably 7.5 weeks, but it could be anytime between now and 15 weeks, or maybe much longer if my calculation assumptions are wrong," is going to be much harder than, "On Tuesday evening in ten days." The timing uncertainty is also going to make our being together when it happens much harder too. I won't know in advance how long the déjà vu will last before I have to kill myself, as it depends on how far through the two-way déjà vu that the third participant joins in. Our final goodbyes might have four minutes or only four seconds. I'll know at the time though, so it'll be one of the first things I'll tell whoever is with me. There was no viable alternative to telling them now. Waiting four weeks before I told them would just change it to, "Probably five weeks, but it could be any time from now out to maybe eleven weeks," which wouldn't help much. Waiting longer risks the déjà vu arriving first, which wouldn't be a disaster but it doesn't solve the problem of what to tell my families. [By the way, it used to be relatively common for déjà vu's to seem to take longer than double their expected time, but most of those were because we were asleep so we didn't notice when they did arrive on time. Since I've stopped sleeping, about five hundred déjà vu's ago, there have only been a couple of déjà vu's that have taken more than 8.5 hours (the expectation being 4.25 hours), one taking 8.8, the other 9.0. I don't believe that has any particular significance; I'm just explaining an aspect of the distribution of déjà vu frequencies, and why I used a 15-week maximum a couple of paragraphs above. My sleepless statistics were among the information I provided to the grapevine, which found them interesting.] The next Saturday morning, March 29, over breakfast, I gave my families my "I Have To Go On A Voyage Of Discovery" speech. It was every bit as bad as usual, and the next several weeks were even worse. ------- I have tried to think of things that I could write to let you know about my life over the last fifteen weeks, but I truthfully didn't feel like I had a life over that time, just a waiting-for-death. I did my Voyager's experiments, and other than loving my loved ones, everything else was totally pointless. I went through the motions of living my life to avoid upsetting my families, so did some things that had to be persisted with until my Voyage announcement, such as my studies and Prof's search for a university for next year. Doing those things brought me no satisfaction, and having to put a happy face on deceiving everyone often hurt me. I felt relief when I could finally drop the pretense, but given how bad that made my families feel, I was only swapping one form of pain for another. My hope for R&R in this dimension had been a failure. The wounds inflicted by my previous goodbyes had partly healed because of the passage of time, but that was all, and those scars had just been ripped open again. As much as I hadn't enjoyed my life over the preceding fifteen weeks, I enjoyed it even less after the Voyage announcement. Now I truly was a death waiting to happen. We stopped the university selection and every other activity that had value to the future life I was no longer going to have. Prof put the universities on hold rather than terminating the process, hoping that something would happen to change the situation, but I had no such hope. Even in the unlikely case of a three-way déjà vu never happening again, I'd still go out on a two-way after a long wait. The ONLY redeeming aspect of the wait was that news of my discoveries had been spreading throughout the grapevine and I was getting a great deal of appreciation from the other Marks. That did make me feel slightly less terrible. I knew that they truly did value my repeated sacrifices, and that they would have done the same themselves had they rolled twelve 6s or I'd merged into them since then. I had heard about other Marks who'd rolled a lot of 6s, although I was apparently the only poor bastard who'd rolled twelve of them. That I was the Voyager was simply just bad luck. The five-merged Marks hadn't been able to make their bodies or minds do without sleep, but they thought their new ability to created mirrored NP-points might be extremely important if the right circumstances arose, and they greatly valued the medical advice I'd given out about my families and staff. But more than the detailed benefits already being spread, they also appreciated me at the larger level because they were excited about what else I might learn from my Voyage. I shared their excitement in the discoveries and potential discoveries; I just hated that it had to be me that made them. I tried VERY hard to find ways to make things better for my families for after I'd gone. Crazy ideas I had included making a public announcement that the Guardian Angel would immediately punish any criminal behavior that it saw in Corvallis, and then I'd suggest that all criminals should leave town, to make it a better place after I left. Or paying for some sort of nationwide hunt to find someone who'd be able to partially replace me with my girls. (I did say they were crazy ideas.) It was a terrible time and I was desperate to try to make it less so, but all I could do was give and receive as much love as I could. ^ Wednesday, May 7, at 11pm, I pressed the wireless siren button I'd been carrying around. I told my girls, "It's started. Two minutes to go." The three-way déjà vu had formed not too long after the first link had started, making this slightly less terrible than it could have been. "OH NO!" from Julia, as usual. I started saying my final goodbyes to my girls while I NP-grabbed the awakening parents and Donna and flew them to me. I could do that immediately as my maximum range conveniently includes the Adults' bedrooms now because my expanding proximity range had bumped it outward enough. That would give me a few more seconds in which to say goodbye to them. When the Adult House's group arrived, I told them how much time was left, and we rushed through our mutual goodbyes. Way too soon, I crossed my mental fingers REALLY HARD. If there was ever a time in my life I needed good luck, this particular death was it, otherwise all of my minds might really die. In the grand scheme of things, with all the other Marks there are out there, that wouldn't be as bad as I'd previously thought death to be, and it'd make no difference to this dimension's loved ones, but I much preferred not to die. Apart from anything else, it'd require another Mark to start the Voyage from the beginning again, with all the extra pain that'd cause versions of my loved ones. One Of Us: That was a reminder of something I'd explained in full to B and C just after the C had joined us. I very much wanted my minds to duplicate into both B and C, but I feared that if B and C had equal attitudes to receiving my minds, then I might get stuck in limbo, going to neither destination. Thus, even at the risk of reducing the chance of a duplication, I had decided that B and C would try to have different attitudes toward receiving my minds to help ensure they arrived somewhere. Given that neither B nor C wanted to leave their families shortly, the natural and easiest attitudes for the other Marks to adopt was to resist to different degrees, but that scared me because that might also leave my minds in limbo. Weeks ago I'd decided that my first partner in the déjà vu link would be asked to try to be as eager as he could make himself, and the late-joiner would be asked to be uncaring. One Of MarkB: One Of MarkC: One Of Us: Hoping fervently that B and C stayed linked and that my minds made it through to at least one them, and preferably both, I cried, "I LOVE YOU ALL. GOODBYE" and then killed myself yet again. ------- Chapter 413: Ninth Merge to 160 Minds; in a Three-Way Wednesday, May 7 (Continued) to Saturday, May 17, 2008 One Of MarkB (continuing to use the A, B, C pre-merge naming convention): One Of Us: Meanwhile, in another part of the Universe, One Of MarkB: One Of Us: [[In the dimensions that Mark B and Mark C were based, nothing had happened. Copies of A's minds had already been in both B's and C's heads - and B's and C's minds in each other's heads too - and both sets of three carried on talking among themselves. They thought they were talking across the W-Dimension but they were wrong. Somewhere else in the Universe, Mark A's body had died, and the A, B and C sets of minds in his brain had died along with it, but that had no noticeable effect on anything in B's and C's dimensions. The two conversations quoted above both refer to "One of MarkB": in B's dimension it was an original mind, in C's dimension it was a copy of a B mind. The cross-dimensional synchronization process between minds that now no longer existed had naturally stopped, but that was far too low level to be noticed. Several seconds from now there won't be the echo caused in the B and C dimensions when A's minds would otherwise have had a refreshing copy arrive, but the echoes caused by refreshing copies from the B and C dimensions will disguise A's absence, especially as we're not used to three-way déjà vu's.]] One Of Us: One Of MarkC: <'Fraid so. At least it wasn't the "Mind-death" possibility, so that's good.> One Of Us: Meanwhile, in another part of the Universe, One Of Us: One Of MarkC: <'Fraid so. At least it wasn't the "Mind-death" possibility, so that's good.> One Of Us: As I'd listed the possibilities when I described my first three-way déjà vu, we - all the Marks I'd discussed it with - thought there were three possible outcomes: A's minds would go to B and C in some proportion, e.g., 50/50, 0/100, 100/0, or a random allocation. We called this the "Proportion" possibility. A would just die, with his minds extinguishing. Called "Mind-death". A's minds go to BOTH B and C. Called "Duplication". B and C were still in a déjà vu link and we were all still talking to each other [[in two local conversations rather than the one cross-dimensional conversation we thought we were having]]. Upon A's death, the proximity ranges that the two sets of B and C were experiencing didn't reduce, so we all instantly knew that A's minds must still be contributing to the total, so the Mind-death possibility hadn't occurred. The proximity's ranges hadn't increased as a result of more minds coming into existence either, so the Duplication possibility also hadn't happened. That meant it was immediately apparent that the Proportion possibility must have been what happened. To put some numbers on it to make sure you understand this rather weird situation. As we understood the process, before A had killed himself, there'd been 128 minds in A's head, 32 in B's, 32 in C's, totaling 192 across the two links, which had given all three of us a proximity range of 144 feet. That range not changing now meant that A's minds were still active, otherwise 32-minded B and C would be déjà vu'ing as had happened countless times in déjà vu's between 32-minded Marks, always giving them a proximity range of 48 feet. We were VERY happy that the proximity range hadn't dropped from 144 feet to 48. If all of A's minds had gone to both B and C (i.e., duplicated), then B and C would have 32 + 128 = 160 minds each. As they're in a déjà vu with each other, then proximity should've increased in range and resolution to be consistent with 320 minds being in the link. Proximity hadn't improved, so we knew duplication hadn't happened. To be logically complete, there is a possibility that the Duplication might have happened but our abilities hadn't increased because repeats of the same mind don't increase abilities, but if that was the case then that might as well be considered as the Proportion possibility because it defeats my purpose for dying in a three-way as the "+32 Then Double Up" system wouldn't give me any extra abilities or probably any extra understanding of those abilities. We were sad the proximity range hadn't jumped up, as that meant we'd have to continue our journey at +32 minds each Death-merge - we'd REALLY been hoping to avoid some "Goodbyes." There were obviously still 192 minds apportioned between B and C somehow. We couldn't easily tell the allocation using mental communication because we can't easily distinguish communication across dimensions from local communication [[hardly surprising]]. With our having so many minds, the echo effect is so infrequent that counting off which minds experience it would take far too long [[and would be very confusing too, as it's based on incorrect assumptions]]. We could've gotten B and C to hold up different hands and had the A minds count off who could see the left hand being raised and who the right, but 128 minds to count through were too many to bother with, and we'd easily find out where A's minds had gone after the déjà vu finished. [[Had we done the hand raising experiment, we would've gotten some very confusing results in each dimension when the B or C minds were refreshed from the other dimension. That was the sort of experiment we should have tried years ago, but we'd never tried to falsify our previous assumption about how déjà vu linked our minds across dimensions. We liked to think of ourselves as having a scientific perspective, and we could parrot that books said that good scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable, but were too young and inexperienced to properly apply book-learning to our own life.]] When I'd been A, at the start of the three-way, the time I'd allowed for my families' goodbye speeches had necessarily been reduced to leave a small safety margin because déjà vu durations are somewhat erratic. Now that I was dead as MarkA, the surviving B and C probably still had a small amount of time to keep talking. It wouldn't be long as B would disconnect from the link shortly, presuming that A's death and the arrival of his minds at wherever they'd arrived at didn't change the timing. We (I can write "we" because my minds are still in the link somewhere) spent the last few seconds discussing what to do next under a few obvious scenarios: If A's minds allocated 100/0, 50/50 or some other proportion. If we déjà vu'd with each other again or not. For example, a 50/50 split would leave 96 minds in each body, which was a backward step from the 128 the Voyager had previously attained, but hopefully we'd déjà vu together as that'd permit our merging to 192 minds. That would also be the case if the allocation of A's minds had been something other than 50/50, but if too far to either extreme then B and C might not déjà vu together as the smaller-minded of them would be closer to the huge number of 32-minded Marks. We decided that if we did déjà vu again quickly, we'd not merge immediately but would study how often we déjà vu'd first, before we flipped a coin to decide which way the merge went. If we didn't déjà vu, then the one of us with the most minds would continue the Voyage. If we had the same number of minds then we'd generate a random number and use the inter-dimensional grapevine to find out which of us had the highest number, and he'd carry on with the journey. There were more details and options, and the conversation kept us busy until the connection failed. It lasted longer than we expected, but we didn't have a theory about why. It was unlikely to be important, but we'd include that in our subsequent reports for the grapevine to spread, presuming we do manage to contact the grapevine again. When the link ended, B and C both discovered that their proximity sense had a range consistent with their having 160 minds. #20: Meanwhile, in another part of the Universe, #17: [[We all thought it, but which one said it and precisely how he worded it was a matter of random luck. We were no longer in a synchronizing link, so mental variation across the dimensions was more likely.]] There are two 9As and 9Bs. This being my ninth merge, 9A refers to the minds that were already in the dimension, i.e., were merged into. 9B refers to the minds that came from another dimension. In B's dimension, his minds are 9A. In C's dimension, his minds are 9A. In both those dimensions, the Voyaging Mark's minds are 9B. It's a confusing situation, isn't it? Both 9Bs did confirming counts, and all 128 of them were present, so their allocation had been an all-or-nothing deal, either 100/0 or 0/100. The Mark that'd been MarkB in the link was interested to see that he'd gotten all the extra minds, as that confirmed that his role of wanting to suck all the minds to him had been more powerful than C's role of being neutral. That the receiver's attitude made a difference was another piece of information for the inter-dimensional grapevine. The Mark that'd been MarkC in the link was surprised that he'd got all the extra minds considering he'd been neutral about getting them, while MarkB's role had been to try to suck all the minds to him. That the receiver's attitude made a difference in the opposite direction seemed unlikely, so perhaps it depended on the order in which the minds had entered the three-way link? Which of those two theories applied would be easily determined by reversing who was neutral and who 'sucked' in the next three-way merge. (Both of) I got out of bed and wandered down to the kitchen to do my ability tests without disturbing my four (eight) bedmates: Carol, Julia, Ava, and Nevaeh. It's just as well I can fly out of bed, or I'd have to clamber over two of them these days; not that I'm really complaining. As you can see, my autobiography has hit an unusual problem: there are now two identical versions of the mind that I'm attempting to follow right from the start of my ascendancy. He's now in two different bodies, neither of which is the one he started in so I can't use that to decide where to focus. You don't want to read two of everything, especially as the very occasional differences would add extra confusion and annoyance. I have to choose which Mark to follow - wait a second while I flip a coin. Okay, done. I won't even bother telling you whether it was B or C, because it doesn't matter. 9A was impressed by our new abilities. He'd gone from 32 minds to 160, which is a HUGE jump in ability. Total NP force goes up by the cube of the increase in number of minds. Usually by 2^3 (=8) times, but this time by 5^3 (=125) times. His NP force had risen from 9,000 to 1,125,000 kg! I sat in the living room internally chatting. There was no need to talk about the past as 9A had heard about all my Voyage of Discovery results. For the last few weeks I hadn't discovered anything new and all my earlier discoveries had made it through the five-merged Marks' grapevine by now. Quite a few of the lower-minded Marks should have heard about me by now too. So we talked about 9A's life a little and my ideas about the future, while he got depressed about having to leave his future. I spent time telling him what worked well for saying goodbye to each of the girls and parents. He'd heard about that too, but it had much more meaning now. One thing that surprised us quite a lot was that Mr. No One was alive and well. That was strange because this was a different brain, so presumably un-reorganized. We couldn't think of an explanation for that. ^ [[It wasn't by accident that I used a software metaphor to describe what had happened, as the reorganization wasn't of the hardware of the brain itself. It affected the workload of the brain, and was mostly motivated to reduce that workload, but wasn't actually a reorganization of it. There are effectively three levels that minds operate in: The first level is the "Meat" level of the brain itself. If the brain gets drunk or dead, for example, the mind is affected, terminally in the latter case. The second level is the way the information in the brain interacts. That could be called "Software", but so could the third level, what I call the "Soul". I call it that not for any religious reason but because it's very insubstantial. "Vaporware" would be a good name except that it incorrectly implies that level isn't functioning yet. The "Soul" is the level of the mind that is running on the Universal Consciousness, in the sense that software runs "on" hardware. Brains are mostly needed to perform specific tasks associated with running a physical body, such as receiving input from its senses and sending instructions down its nerves to its muscles, but most of what a mind does is pure software, the higher functions of which are in the soul. That's why I could hold so many minds "in my brain", because they mostly weren't in my brain, especially after the Mr. No One reorganization removed what brain-based, lower-level repetitions there were. That was why the Mr. No One reorganization had been needed: because my multiple minds were duplicating some of their functions in the single brain that I had, and it was getting overloaded. VERY fortunately for me, a part of the way all brains work is to have many supervisory functions that look for ways to improve the brain's and mind's efficiency. I'd created a MUCH bigger job for my mental supervisors than they'd ever had before, but they were man enough for the challenge. When I déjà vu, the "soul" is included in the process because that's what déjà vu is. It is NOT brains being synchronized. Brains can be synchronized, as can rocks (matter contains information; Mr. Heisenberg would like you to know that the position of subatomic particles is information), but clearly rocks don't experience déjà vu. I'd like to write that brains don't either, but they're often within the volume of space that the minds are, so brain synchronizations occur at the same time as the minds are processed, but it's still correct to say that the brains themselves don't experience déjà vu. That's a consciousness effect that happens only with minds. When copies of my mind were created in Marks B and C, that necessarily included all non-Meat parts of my mind, including the already reorganized software, so Mr. No One came along for the ride. It would run in existing parts of my new brain just as easily as my newly arrived merged minds could, so it didn't matter that the brain had never met Mr. No One before. 9A's brain would get some biological changes, but not nearly as many as I thought, and not for the Mr. No One reorganization but for other improvement purposes. 9A's minds would need to be reorganized the Mr. No One way, but that would proceed quickly now that we didn't resist it. We probably wouldn't even notice it happening.]] ^ We'd been surprised by Mr. No One's appearance, but not as surprised as we were forty five minutes after the merge when we unexpectedly had another déjà vu. That was surprisingly early, but the real surprise was that it was with a Mark with a LOT of minds; the expanding range and resolution of our proximity sense making that instantly and glaringly obvious. [[In the following conversation, many of the comments on both sides of it were from the two Mr. No Ones. I won't be so cruel as to confuse you as much as we were at times, so I'll use the "One Of Us: " and "One Of Them: " format as usual. I'll also remove all the back and forths, and the several other types of confusion we had, as well as the very normal problems caused whenever a refreshing copy arrived, which I've been removing from all of the quoted déjà vu conversations ever since the first one several years ago.]] One Of Us: One Of Them: <160. You must have a lot too?> One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: I'll explain that last comment to you: All the Marks have a strong tendency to déjà vu with Marks with similar lives, and that's especially true of the Marks with fewer minds. When we do link with an unusual Mark, he isn't VERY unusual. He reports that he nearly always links with Marks similar to him, but sometimes his peers link to someone unusual. That Mark reports that he links with his peers normally, but sometimes... , etc. It's extremely rare for a Mark to link to someone very different from him, but the stories we get from unusual Mark who've heard about Marks he thinks unusual, who've passed on stories about Marks they've considered unusual, etc., can result in our hearing stories about Marks with VERY different lives from our own. We were now assuming that two - or perhaps even more - of us had rolled twelve 6s, but we'd been sufficiently different from each other that our pools of déjà vu peers hadn't overlapped enough for word to get to each other about there being more than one Voyager. That was surprising because we'd both got word to roll twelve dice, but maybe that idea had been suggested by far more Marks than we'd previously thought, including Marks in very different circumstances. This new information also threw some doubt on our calculations of how many five-merge Marks there were, making the possible value much higher than the billion or so we'd previously thought. We'd pass that concern on through the grapevine, and leave it to the five-merge Marks to reexamine their experimental methodology. One of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: We got a die each and generated our different random numbers. The Monopoly dice in these two dimensions must've been better balanced because they didn't roll nearly so many 6s. We had six or seven minutes to talk in, so we started with our usual ability tests, getting the expected HUGE results. Our total NP was 9 million kg (10,000 tons). Were we EVER strong now! [[I know at the time that I was totally incredulous about the amount of NP force and light/heat energy that I could radiate. The numbers were literally unbelievable even when I was generating them. In case you're as incredulous as I was, I'll repeat that human scientists currently believe that every bit of matter and energy that they can detect, increased by the right factor to account for their seeing only a portion of the Universe, accounts for barely 4% of the total of what actually exists. Your scientists believe 22% of the missing balance is what they call "Dark Matter", and 74% is "Dark Energy" - where "Dark" means "We don't know where." There's nearly twenty times more energy unaccounted for than if humanity's entire Known Universe is turned into energy; and ALL of that 'missing' energy can be tapped. If you've seen or read much science fiction, you will have come across references to how incredibly explosive even tiny anti-matter annihilations can be. Now imagine if ten times the entire Known Universe is dropped into ten anti-matter Universes - that's the amount of energy that's available - tapping is NOT supply constrained! It is limited only by the tapper's mental ability to draw on it, and the universe is exponentially responsive to larger minds; the mental collective that is my mind being VERY large now. The NP force I can exert is utterly incredible by human standards, but it's way less than utterly insignificant by the Universe's standard.]] We chatted about what we'd learned so far, starting with being glad that there was no obvious problem with having 320 minds' worth of abilities, and hoping there'd be no mental troubles after we merged into the same brain. That took us onto Mr. No One and our being surprised he was still active, and from there onto other issues. From our discussion, we discovered that we'd both learned EXACTLY the same stuff, in EXACTLY the same way, for item after item. That's generally true of Marks we link to because our dimensions are usually so similar, but after quite a few "exactlys" a suspicion formed, especially because the only way we wouldn't have heard about a second Voyager would have been if he'd been in a very different life than ours. One Of Us: (From the six dice we rolled for the Population Estimating Clash Test just before we did the twelve 6s rolling.) One Of Them: One Of Us: We - too repetitively to record here - confirmed that to be the case. Another One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: [[I'll explain in case you're as confused as we were. First I'll explain why we were confused: Exactly the same minds exist now as just after A had killed himself at the end of the previous déjà vu: B's minds, C's and a two sets of A's, but our abilities are very much greater now. Why are our abilities greater now than before? We've never had an inconsistency like that before. The reason is that although the same minds exist, more of them exist now. Back then B's and C's skulls each contained one copy each of A's 128 minds, those being the copies that remained alive after the déjà vu link ended because A's death 'orphaned' them. A few seconds ago, before the current déjà vu started, B and C had been walking around with 160 minds in their heads: their previous 32 minds plus the still active copies of A's minds. Ignoring where they'd come from, B and C had 160 minds in their heads. Then the current déjà vu started and their minds were copied into each other's dimensions, resulting in there being 320 minds in each of their skulls. The minds were the same 'individuals', but there were more of them so our abilities increased.]] One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: [[The inter-dimensional synchronization process copies the source minds in both directions, so it's easy to get one of the bodies to roll a die and the result understood on both sides. Normally both sides of a déjà vu are already doing the same things, but getting only one of us to do something by prior agreement is easily doable and the result gets to the other dimension when a refresh copy occurs. Having one Mark behave very differently than the other can break the link, but something as minor as rolling a die wouldn't sever it.]] One Of Us: I rolled, and "Them" lost. One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: We - the "A" subset of minds (in the A, B, C nomenclature) at both ends of the link, both of them also known as 9B (to use that nomenclature) - spent some time comparing our lives with each other (the other "A") just to make sure they were identical, to put a nail in the coffin of the theory that there'd been two Voyagers. Our lives were absolutely identical, and we gave up after a few minutes. We'd been firing questions back and forth on individual channels. There would have been quite a lot of repeated questions, but with 128 channels we would have checked a LOT of facts, easily enough to discover several dimensional differences if the normal rate of them applied. We discovered none so we certainly weren't from very different dimensions, and were almost certainly from the same ones. We chatted about inconsequential issues until the link canceled, when we rolled the die another twelve times then put it away. We sat waiting. Thirty five minutes later a déjà vu started, which was immediately seen to be as powerful as the previous one. We compared the first numbers we'd rolled, and we were either déjà vu'ing with the same partner as last time, or the parallel dimensions were a great deal more parallel than we believed. We told each other our second numbers. Not that we'd expected otherwise, but there was no relationship between any of the four 12-digit numbers; they were just a series of independent, random die rolls. We didn't have much to talk about, and we can talk internally very quickly even with the sporadic echo effect, so we were soon making idle, time-killing conversation. For example, we discussed the details that our greatly improved proximity sense can now discern, such as far more density-related information. We could see the metal plates in all the rooms' ceilings and walls, as well as rocks in the earth around me. We could probably make good livings walking up and down popular beaches and digging up all the lost rings and watches. The déjà vu eventually ended, and then restarted fifty minutes later, a process that continued all day. Every déjà vu was with the same partner, preventing us spreading the word, or more accurately, restricting the spread far tighter than we wanted. After several déjà vu's, we got to the stage where we compared our two sets of random numbers and then mostly ignored each other, as the echo effect made conversation a bit of a pain and there was nothing left of any interest to talk about, other than maybe what we were doing at the time. In other words, talking with our-other-self was very much like talking with our-same-self. ^ Three days later, mid-Saturday, after slightly more than a hundred déjà vu's, the next one was late, and then very late, and then late by an unheard of factor. They were averaging just over every 40 minutes, so after 100 minutes with no déjà vu we knew something unusual was happening, in a non-happening sort of way. We decided to do nothing because there was nothing we could do while the non-happening was busy happening. We crossed our fingers though, because we thought we knew why the non-happening was happening, and we were looking forward to when it stopped non-happening and something else other than nothing happened. The Other Mark had earlier in the day told his family, "I have to go on a 'Voyage of Discovery' next Saturday" (he'd decided to reduce the goodbye time to seven days thinking that it might be easier on his loved ones. I thought it sounded worth trying). We'd had six déjà vu's with him since his announcement to his families, none of which had been unusual in a way that provided a clue as to why we weren't déjà vu'ing now. For example, no one in his families had turned homicidal in their grief so we had no reason to believe he'd been killed recently. We kept our fingers crossed and kept on doing nothing, waiting for the non-happening to come to an end. After doing nothing particularly well for another couple of hours, we déjà vu'd with a 32-minded Mark, confirming our guess and hope. We had a great deal of VERY interesting stuff to tell him, including that we were intending to merge on May 17, unless our partner had called it off when he didn't hear from us. We thought that was very unlikely, and it could be called back on again anyway. We recited our two 12-digit random numbers as well as the numbers for our 160-minded near-duplicate, so all the other Marks will find out whether both me and him made contact with the others. We spent quite a while talking about possible future scenarios, such as our being unable to make contact with any of the 32-minded Marks when I got to 320 minds. That could simply be from our being too far above the other Marks, or because we'd self-destructed from containing too many minds or duplicate minds. I described my ideas for what the five-merge Marks could do. They had the latest information to go on now so they'd make good decisions, although it would take them several weeks to arrive at a decision about what to do and who to do it. I didn't bother suggesting things like they immediately roll dice to determine who the backup Voyager would be so he'd be quickly available if needed, because they were was too obvious. The link ended, and forty five minutes later my usual partner reconnected. He'd had a link with a 32-minded Mark too, although his had been fifteen minutes after mine. He'd been worried by our linkages failing for three hours, but like us had guessed it was because of a downward déjà vu. We knew from prior experiences that they take longer to take effect. We confirmed that we were still on for our merging on the 17th. ^ During the next several days, my mental reorganization for the extra thirty two minds happened quickly, but that was apparent only because the proportion of Mr. No One activities increased for a while compared to when we'd first arrived here, and we had enough proximity sense to notice that our level of brain activity had reduced proportionately and quite quickly. My transition from 128 to 160 minds had been no big deal, except for the new minds of mine that'd jumped from living with 32 to living with 160 minds, but we'd 'held their hand' so they'd managed the transition easily. Neither of those two events distracted me much, so most of my thoughts were on what would happen two steps from now. If the merge to 320 minds worked, and it was looking good for that, then the next stage depended on there being any more déjà vu's. There were three short-term possibilities: No more déjà vu's. This meant we waited for the five-merged Marks to send someone to reestablish contact, which would open up several medium-term possibilities that weren't worth listing here. Déjà vu's were possible, but only two-way links could be made. This meant having to say goodbye to my families again. Doing that hardly seemed worthwhile for a paltry 10% gain in the number of minds, but if it was the only way the Voyage could proceed, then I'd probably have to do it, although I'd spend some time at 320 minds first to do the experimentation and learning my job required of me. If I was really lucky, I might learn enough that the Voyage could be called off, although that seemed unlikely as it'd only happen when it was clear that I couldn't learn anything else that would be helpful to the other Marks, or that going further was too dangerous, and there were no indications of either of those yet. Three-way déjà vu's happened often enough to offer another "+32 And Double-Up" step. Three-way links would take us to 704 minds in only two more goodbyes, which was a no-brainer for my having to do it if the Voyage was still on. I linked with another five-merge Mark four days later, as did my 160-minded partner I learned half an hour later. We did it again another three days later, on the morning of 10B's - as he'd shortly become - final day in his dimension. We were seeding the spread-the-word process very slowly, but they'd be spreading it themselves as they déjà vu'd among themselves every seventeen hours. Then it was only a matter of waiting for the evening. I was naturally nervous, as I'd never merged with my own own minds before, and not to a total of 320 of them. I had no idea whether my head could contain 320 minds. [[As you already know, it could. It had been doing so for 6.5 minutes out of every 40 for the last two weeks.]] Out of all the misery that the soon-to-be-10B was going through, there were two very small good things: Our déjà vu's were so frequent that he could choose a convenient time, soon after a Roast Chicken "farewell" dinner (a name both he and his families thought apt); and they had 5.5 minutes to say their final goodbyes in. Those advantages made for a SLIGHTLY less traumatic departure, not that any of his families were aware of that. It was still horrendously upsetting and grief-ridden. 7:30pm on Saturday May 17, he cried, "I'M VERY SORRY. I LOVE YOU ALL. GOODBYE." They cried their love for the final time, then he killed himself. ------- Chapter 414: Tenth Merge to 320 Minds; With Duplicate Marks Saturday, May 17 (Continued) to Saturday, May 24, 2008 Our head didn't explode from the sudden arrival of 160 new minds, most of whom were duplicates, so that was good. Now that my fingers had done their job so well, I uncrossed them. ^ [[(a) Copies of those minds had spent fifty hours in my head over the last couple of weeks, so there was no "sudden arrival" involved. (b) It's not as if duplicate minds were matter and anti-matter, especially because they're not matter at all. Nor are they anything else that's mutually destructive or incompatible. They're just information, and information doesn't mutually self-destruct. While I think to mention it, nor does information interact unless made to do so, by which I mean that although my proximity range was so large now that it included many other people's minds, we didn't get déjà vu together, nor could we read each other's minds, or anything weird like that. The déjà vu sensation is caused by the Universe's Consciousness actively creating copies, overlapping them, and changing the destination minds to resemble the copies. Just having two people's minds in the same large volume of space doesn't do anything because they aren't similar enough, aren't synchronizing, and there's no interaction between them. 3D space being not quite as real as we think it is, it's even possible to consider brains as overlapping, but there is still no interaction between them. Had telepathy functioned between me and any other minds within my proximity range, then my experiences would have been VERY different indeed, especially if people near me could read my MINDS as easy as I could read theirs! A related digression that I can't resist is that there is one type of information that does destructively interact: religion. Two people can easily hold incompatible non-religious beliefs, and often do. For example, I might think Jessica Alba is sexier than Jessica Biel, and you might hold the opposite view, but other than our beliefs being logically incompatible there is nothing actively destructive about those views. Religion is different. Adherents of one religion believe not only that all other religions and even variations on their own are wrong, but that those religions should be destroyed. Preferably the heathens and heretics should be converted first, but killing them is also a morally virtuous choice. There's nothing in my thinking that Jessica Alba is the sexiest that makes it a virtue for me to kill the fools who believe otherwise, but because religions are a Big Lie they stridently and deliberately call for the destruction of all their 'opponents' - who don't even need to be in "opposition" as uncaring ambivalence also justifies attack and destruction - lest those opponents expose the lie or the lack of need for it. That destructiveness is solely a political necessity. As previously mentioned herein, many American Christians believe in reincarnation without experiencing spiritual difficulty - indeed, they believe as they do because it makes them feel better - so inconsistent spiritual beliefs certainly aren't mutually destructive. But should a religious institution decide for its own political purpose to make an issue out of that heresy, then a considerable amount of destruction could result. Christians who had happily believed in both sets of spiritual comfort would suddenly find themselves in self-destructive internal conflict, and if they spoke up in defense of their beliefs, they'd very quickly find themselves in external conflict too since Christians hate heretics even more than they hate people having sex, as proved by the hundreds of years of the Church knowingly letting priests continue to be active pedophiles, but if any one of those priests had given a sermon supporting reincarnation, they would have had the wrath of the Church descend on them. Imagine what the world would be like if all the politically motivated "Fight Evil" rhetoric had been left out of religions, leaving only "Try to be a Good person." I imagine a far better society would have resulted, and I consider the enormous intolerance, hatred and conflict caused by the world's popular religions proof of the unreality of their claimed gods. The best that could be said about them is, "If the views urged by their holy books are divinely inspired, as they claim, then I want nothing to do with those gods."]] ^ My brain didn't feel physically, intellectually or emotionally pressured; or full, short-circuited, insane, or any other bad things. It just seemed like business as usual, except more than usual. Even when the duplicate minds addressed conversations back and forth directly at each other, it didn't feel unusual, other than we'd expected it to feel unusual in a way we've never expected before, so that was unusual. We're usually pretty accurate in our expectations, so getting this one wrong was unusual too. But other than that unusual number of unusual feelings, nothing felt unusual, as is usual after the déjà vu's we usually have, which are very unusual ones compared to the usual ones everyone else usually has, although even their usual ones feel unusual enough. To summarize: if we hadn't known that the minds were duplicates, we'd never have detected it conversationally. We just seemed like yet another Mark-mind to each other. We confirmed that our abilities were the same as we'd experienced in the déjà vu's. The last time I gave exact values was when I had 128 minds. Having 320 now was an increase of 2.5 times, so my abilities had risen by factors of 2.5, 6.25 or 15.625, depending on the ability: My proximity range is now 240 feet and even more INCREDIBLY detailed. Especially biologically, but I'm getting a great deal of information about energy and matter now too. [Although I wasn't yet consciously aware of it, I was also becoming extremely accurate at estimating distances especially within my proximity range, and was developing a much better sense of time.] My maximum ki-effects range is 734 feet. Every increase is welcome as this limit is often inconveniently short. There are 320 fingertips per mind, so over 100,000 in total now. Maximum width is 160 inches (over 13 feet or 4 meters!). Minimum width 1/160th of an inch, which is VERY sharp, as my thumb can attest. Fortunately I heal very quickly. The Blinks Allowed Effect is 53 minutes. I could create an NP-effect and damn near fly around the world to find it still working when I got back! My maximum force is nearly ten million kilograms (11,000 tons). The amount of heat and light I can radiate is 4800 x 60 W lightbulbs of heat, x 2.85 (with the training bonus) x 320 minds = 263 megawatts. That's 22% of the output of the newest nuclear reactor to go online. Another mental double-up - not that there currently seems to be anyone to double-up with - would increase my total output by a factor of 8, so well past that of the reactor. There are several small countries that use less power than I can output now! Thinking about that was almost enough to give me a meltdown. Déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks should - I hope - occur every two and a bit hours, and have durations of about 5 minutes. We'd learned from the 160-mind to 32-mind déjà vu's that the durations weren't as long as we'd expected mathematically. We guessed that the link was being lost earlier than expected because the 'weak' Marks couldn't hold it open. [[A bad guess.]] #209: #320: #43: About two hours later, more or less on schedule, we entered into a déjà vu with a 32-minded Mark. To put it mildly, he was surprised. One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: <320 at the moment, with our abilities being bumped up by linking to you of course.> One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: [[The déjà vu occurred roughly at the time we'd calculated because the chance of déjà vu'ing with a 'lower' Mark wasn't any less when there were no peers to 'compete' with the process. Peers are highly favored for linking because they are so similar, but if there are no peers, then linking downward is necessary, with them still occurring at the time they should, as the universe 'knows' the next déjà vu is a downward one (it has already made the link's precursor, just not the part of it that we're conscious of because no content is copied across until the times we're used to). Identicality between participants necessarily becomes less important as the number of potential link partners reduces. The Universe balances seeking volumes of consciousness which are as similar as possible with the rates of change between dimensions and the time since their last synchronizations, so sometimes only roughly similar is good enough. In my current case, "as similar as possible" wasn't very similar anymore.]] Déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks continued to occur roughly every two hours, all starting with my partners' minds being blown by the new level of proximity ability, as I've quoted above. We waited to see if a three-way would occur in ten days, more or less. Having to wait ten days, and having far more minds, I put some solid effort into seeing if I could develop new abilities or improve our existing ones even further. My NP-fingertips were now strong and flexibly-shaped enough that I could make machines out of them, such as an NP-wheelbarrow, complete with a wheel and frictionless axle. I had easier ways of carrying stuff than pushing it in an invisible or mirrored wheelbarrow, but I enjoyed that I could make a very good one. I even gave it a 'spring' suspension, just because it was fun to invent two different ways of doing that which didn't require my conscious management to operate (I'll leave imagining how I did that as an exercise for the reader). Proximity let me notice that my body's sleeping mechanisms were operating at low levels continually. With that, and with Mr. No One so capable of running things without my real minds involved, I tried an experiment where for an extended time I didn't order the body to activate its sleeping mechanisms and none of my individual minds put themselves to sleep. There were no apparent effects, ill or otherwise, so my body and minds seemed to have improved enough that sleep was no longer needed. I wasn't sharing these things with my girls. I'd be leaving soon and stability seemed better. It'd be easier on me to live without their excitement now, and after I'd gone they'd have less uncertainty about what had been going on. They weren't strong reasons, but I didn't have a strong reason to show them my ability improvements. As I had been every night since I'd discovered how to rotate my sleeping, I was still going to bed when my girls did. I'd told them that I liked going to bed with them and that I'd do some study before I fell asleep (I didn't tell Nevaeh the latter point), which was true, with "before I fell asleep" meaning much longer than they thought. I enjoyed being in bed with my girls while they dropped off around me, and I was happy to tell them that I enjoyed it. I was hiding my new abilities from everyone, even Sensei. All the five-merge Marks had restarted Aikido in all their w-dimensions after the Surveillance Problem had been solved, so I 'walked into' that after each of my Voyaging merges. In each dimension, once I'd told my families I was leaving, I'd stopped Aikido and all other external activities to spend more time with my loved ones, and I'd stop it here at that time too, but for the present I kept training once a week. I didn't need Aikido in any practical sense, but I did it for the enjoyment. I was still learning new Aikido principles from time to time, and was enjoying being impressed by them. I was hiding nearly all of my ki from Sensei simply by radiating the vast majority of it out of the top of my head, leaving only the amount for techniques that 10A had previously shown Sensei. That was extreme enough. Speaking of flying - which I wasn't but I often think about it - I no longer needed to use my watch to navigate with because I quickly became much better at knowing exactly where I was, including altitude. It wasn't quite the same as having a built-in GPS because it worked by keeping track of my movements with an extraordinarily accurate sense of direction, but it seemed just as precise. I also didn't need my watch to tell the time as my brain started keeping perfect track of that too. There were several other minor improvements in existing human abilities like that, but none of any real significance, and knowledge of how to do them couldn't be passed on through the grapevine. A week later, while I was still waiting for the first three-way déjà vu to occur to confirm that they were possible in my new situation, I was having my usual succession of two-hourly déjà vu's when the next one was late. After three hours I started noticing its tardiness. No big deal as that sometimes happened. After four hours it was very noteworthy as déjà vu's are almost never this far apart (as a multiple of the expected time), but maybe I was going to have a déjà vu with an even lower-minded Mark although I thought that event to be extremely unlikely. After five hours I was becoming worried. The previous déjà vu's had been normal; boringly so because all the Marks had reacted the same excited way. There'd been no hint of any internal or external trouble. It wasn't possible that I was waiting to déjà vu with a four- or three-merge Mark because all five-merge Marks had died. Enough of the five-merge Marks were in lives sufficiently different from each other that there couldn't possibly have been a fatal threat that'd taken them all out. Much more likely was there being a simpler cause, the two obvious ones being something to do with the déjà vu process itself, or with me. As more time passed without a déjà vu, my money was increasingly on me. I studied my proximity sense's image of my brain very carefully, but I couldn't sense anything wrong. My resolution is roughly at the cubic millimeter level (a cube 1/25th of an inch in each direction), which is small - there are a HUGE number of cubic millimeters in a human body - but it's still too large to see what's going on inside a brain. I could see my heart operating in wonderful detail, but brains aren't big lumps of working organic machinery. (If you think proximity sensing at the cubic millimeter level is so mind boggling as to be impossible to manage, ask yourself what resolution your eyes see down to. Most computer panels have 96 dots per inch, so nearly 4 per linear 25th of an inch, making about 15 per square millimeter. You have no trouble managing blocks of 15 pixels, and can manage considerably smaller areas than that. Processing all the square millimeters you see doesn't boggle your mind, and neither does my proximity sense cause any of my minds to do any boggling.) There was more blood flow around my higher-thought centers than normal, but not to a large degree. I created a zero emission light blob while watching my brain carefully. I noticed that the area of my brain involved in creating ki-effects was smaller than normal, which immediately made that area of my brain that registers fear get very busy. With considerable fear that I was losing them, I quickly tested my special abilities. They all worked perfectly, but didn't use as much of my brain as before. #126: The special abilities' area of my brain continued to slowly get smaller while I scratched my head for the next two hours, getting nowhere. The abilities area kept getting smaller, and then the NP-fingertips I was using on the downstairs study's scrolling keyboard self-canceled. I tried to recreate them in the downstairs study and failed. I tried creating them right in front of me and failed again. More minds tried and failed, again and AGAIN! Blobs and other things still worked - I had been studying and could still see the screens - but NP was dead so I couldn't scroll them, which was the least of our worries right now. #142: Ten minutes later, the sight blob canceled and couldn't be restarted. Other than frantically failing at restarting my special effects and swearing a LOT, I ranted at myselves and tried desperately to think of an explanation which might lead to a possible solution. Everything got me precisely nowhere. Fifteen minutes after that, my proximity sense blanked out. Five minutes later the last special ability I had left, my sense of location and direction, failed. I spent the next several minutes being equally successful at thinking of ways to get my abilities back as I'd been at stopping them leaving in the first place. #173: #185: We spent some time trying to convince ourselves that life wouldn't be TOO bad. We'd probably lost our superhuman endurance, so our sex-life was going to take a dive, but we still had go-hards and go-softs (we tested them briefly, without enthusiasm), and our body should retain its great physique. We were rich, healthy, had a high IQ and two wonderful families around us, so it wasn't TOO bad. #89: #55: #89: We started planning the changes we'd have to make, and the conversations with our families that we'd have to have. Fifteen minutes into that, a déjà vu arrived. One Of Them: All Of Us: When this autobiography quotes a déjà vu conversation, for the benefit of my readers I normally write things like "One Of Them" or "One Of Us", but that's not what we think at the time. We just use our number-names, which can get confusing because there are two #1's, etc. In the following conversation, the names of the participants are exactly the way we thought at the time. #32: <320! WOW! That's... > #118: #13: #86: Every one of our many déjà vu's since we got high-minded had started with our 32-minded partner raving over the proximity sense, and we'd got into the habit of tuning that repetitiveness out, so we hadn't actually listened to him when this déjà vu had started. #13: #16: #16: #16: <32. Why?> #16: #16: #16: #16: #All: I'll not quote the rest of the conversation because it was a chaotic mess for a while, until we'd worked out that there were four of each mind from #1 to #32, and two of every higher numbered name. Of the four of each of the low numbered Marks, two of them identified themselves as belonging to the 32-minded Mark, two to the 320-minded Mark. Of the two that belonged to the 32-minded Mark, and the two that belonged to the 320-minded Mark, one of them was as closely connected to his body as always, but the other had to make an effort to connect to it. If the latter opened 'his' eyes, he saw a Mark wearing the clothes worn by the other Mark's body, so he was apparently in that body. For the pairs of minds from #33 on, they both identified themselves as being from the 320-minded Mark (of course), but when they looked out of what seemed like their body's eyes, one of each pair saw the differently dressed Mark. We imposed a new naming convention on ourselves: our usual number - which Mark we came from - whether we were in our normal Mark now, for example, #1-32-Home, or #16-320-Away. There were 352 of us with "Home" in our name, and the same number with "Away". There were also "Home" and "Away" Mr. No Ones, but they weren't saying much now, as normal when the individual personalities were heavily involved in something. Once we could talk without tripping over ourselves, we repeated our warning again and in more detail because it was VERY important to get it out. Then we started discussing what the fuck was going on now. One point that seemed very important was that Mark32 had 352 minds' worth of special abilities, and he thought they were AWESOME; while Mark320 had no abilities at all, and you know what I thought about that fucking disaster. Mark32 tested his level of abilities, and they were consistent with there being 352 minds in the link, not the 704 our new naming convention identified. Another point was there being a lot less echo in our communication than we expected. Talking to each other during déjà vu has always been an awkward business because of the echo effect. (I've always left that out of the déjà vu conversations I've quoted because you would have found verbatim quoting a HUGE pain in the ass.) Although the frequency of that nuisance has diminished since our early merges, and we've long since adopted a certain way of talking to minimize the confusion it causes and to handle what problems we couldn't get rid of, its extra reduction now was still very noticeable and welcome, a nice change from the confusions and worries we had. We decided that the most likely explanation was that my déjà vu ability was half destroyed and it was behaving erratically in its last few minutes. Mark32 prayed that whatever had wiped out my abilities wasn't contagious through the link. We had two obvious theories for the cause of our "disability": either 320 minds were too many, or merging with duplicates was to be avoided at all costs. There were no clues which hypothesis was more likely, for example, we didn't get a pounding headache when duplicates talked to each other. Of the two hypotheses, we guessed the most likely cause was that having 320 minds was too many, but that was only a guess based on the duplicates not seeming to cause problems whereas 320 was a fucking ridiculous number of minds to have in one head. I cautioned the other Mark to spread the word that I'd spent only ten days with 160 minds, so maybe 160 might be too many minds too, although I'd spent five months with 128, and that'd seemed fine. The link ended after the expected time for 352 minds, not the significantly longer duration 704 minds would have given us. I checked and confirmed that I had only one set of 320 minds, proving the mess with the two sets of 352 minds had been some sort of déjà vu glitch. I repeatedly tried to get my abilities back, but they were all totally absent. I kept internally moaning about that, kept thinking about the conversations I was going to have to have with my loved ones and planning the changes I'd have to make to my life. And then I moaned some more. It was a very unpleasant prospect for several reasons, such as the parents had let me kill people because of how important they believed I was, and all that had just flown out the window. Another worry was my complete inability to defend us from any further Governmental or other intrusions. I felt HORRIBLY defenseless. I did a LOT of moaning. An hour later my proximity sense came back on. I thought that was quite nice of it, so I thanked it VERY MUCH! I immediately tried my other abilities, but without any success. Proximity seemed fully back to normal though. It had just as much detail and as it had before I'd lost it. I touched wood, crossed my fingers, said a prayer, and tried to work out if I knew of a virgin I could sacrifice to the gods to get my other abilities back. Fifteen minutes later my location sense returned. Shortly after that so did everything else. I gave a HUGE sigh of relief. It may not have been too bad to lose my abilities, or it may have been, but it was WONDERFUL BEYOND WORDS to have them back again! After dancing for joy - and I wouldn't have cared if anyone had seen me - I tried to work out what the hell that'd been about. I didn't have a clue. Or, more accurately, I had only one clue: the areas of my brain that got busy when I did my special abilities had shrunk significantly. The abilities worked just the same, which I guess meant that the new system, if there was a new system, was more efficient. If anyone had asked me, I would've FAR preferred not to have gone through that scare to reduce the workload on a few million brain cells, especially because the Universe was providing the energy to fuel them anyway. I was still very happily playing with my highly appreciated abilities when the next déjà vu arrived. One Of Them: We quickly found out that the déjà vu glitch of there being two sets of us was STILL messing things up, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't take long to fix itself. My brain is amazingly adaptable, sometimes too much so. After teaching the linked Mark about the new naming convention we had to use, I gave him the good news to spread about losing my abilities then getting them back, One of Us: #3: I continued to have déjà vu's every couple of hours, and they remained annoyingly and confusingly glitched. We couldn't work out what was causing it. It obviously wasn't a simple echo because the claimants to the same number could say and do different things. That half of them thought they were in the other body was a clue about the nature of the glitch, but it didn't help us much. It wasn't as if we could fix it ourselves anyway. About 24 hours after my abilities returned, my subconscious made me aware of something about the way sight blobs sensed light, and from that lead I was able to work out how to see and then create magnetic fields. A VERY strong one too, with a strength consistent with that of my heat and light blobs. I'll call it a "Magnetic Blob" because that's close enough and includes most of the operational considerations. It does need a clarification though: I was creating a magnetic field within the blob rather than making a blob which was a magnet, so I didn't need to bother with technicalities like magnetic poles, let alone needing both a north and south pole. Once I understood how to create magnetic effects, creating electricity in much the same way was easy (magnetism, electricity and light are kind of the same thing, which surprises non-physicists). I'd previously been able to create electricity in wires but that had been using the dumb, cheating method of mimicking what flowing electricity looked like in proximity without understanding what I was doing. I can't say that I now had "greater understanding", but I was able to observe and create at a deeper level. If I wanted to create an electric current in a wire now, I'd completely ignore the first method I'd developed, instead using the much better, new approach. I was able to successfully test it without losing a single lightbulb. Not long after that, I gained even more understanding of how NP-points merged into each other so completely. I could already do it, but it was good to understand how it happened. My increased knowledge of how they worked allowed me to increase their internal "squash resistance" significantly, not that my NP-points had ANY problem with being squashed now (they were STRONG), but the five-merge Marks would benefit from that knowledge because they'd be able to use it too. I also gained more control over their shape, which was useful for me but probably not for five-merge Marks because it required operating at a level of detail that their proximity sense didn't get down to. The next "How To" idea that my subconscious brought to my attention was like a Cold Blob, only MUCH better. I originally called it a "Heat Sink", but I quickly discovered that it worked on more forms of energy than just heat. My traditional blobs radiated energy, while my new "Energy Sink" worked in the other direction: removing energy - I thought, by sending it to wherever I draw energy from. As a crude example of one of its applications, I could create a sphere over the front of my flying sled that 'sent away' all the heat that supersonic travel generated. What I'll do in practice will be even better than that. I'll create a one-inch thick 'layer' around the outside of my flying sled. When I'm flying, energy inside the layer above a certain level will be removed. That "certain level" is something I can dial up or down, just as I can dial how much heat or light those blobs give out. When flying, I'll set it to just above the ambient temperature. Imagine I'm flying very fast and I fly into an air molecule, that being a very common event. The air molecule had just been floating along minding its own business. It would have had a velocity but it wouldn't have been high because atmospheric temperature wasn't high enough to agitate it much. It'll pass into my sled's Energy Sink, and it'll be ignored because it doesn't have much energy. But when my sled's front plate hits it, the poor air molecule gets enormously sped up. Suddenly it's got far more energy than my Energy Sink's threshold, so that energy will be removed. The air molecule will suddenly slow down to a normal speed. There'll be no heat signature or sonic boom because the energy that would have created those has been sent away. As described, there'd be a problem getting the slow moving air away from the front of my sled, causing a large increase in air pressure and resistance. I thought the solution would be to expand the Energy Sink layer farther out, leaving a gap between its inside edge and the NP-plate of my sled, giving the front of my sled a too-large helmet. The size of the gap might be as little as an inch, or maybe even a yard or more; that'll require some experimentation to find out what works best at various high speeds. The air molecules inside the 'helmet' will be able to fly rapidly out of the way of my sled, being slowed to ambient once they're clear of its nose cone. I can also place an Energy Sink plate inside the front of my sled to remove any heat that radiates inside. I should be able to fly much faster than Mach 20 by having nested Energy Sinks, with their thresholds set to the heat generated by multiples of Mach 10. Provided the front of my sled is pointy enough, enough air should be able to fly sideways at Mach 10 to drain away the air resistance. Once the air reaches beyond the side of my sled, it'll hit the final layer that'll slow it to ambient. Back when Mach 10 had been my top speed I'd had 67,000 kg of force. I've got 10 million kg now, 150 times more, making my top speed 12 times faster, so theoretically Mach 120 (91,000 mph). Here to Washington DC in less than two minutes at that speed, with no sonic booms. In reality I'd probably be having trouble with air pressure long before Mach 120, so I doubt my top speed will exceed Mach 30, and that'd probably take some experimentation to get right. Not going above Mach 30 isn't a practical constraint, as using 3 g's to accelerate toward DC reaches Mach 30 about halfway there, just in time to start slowing down again. Total trip time about 13 minutes. At Mach 30, it'd take 1.1 hours to circle the globe, so half an hour or less to wherever I might want to go; 20 minutes to Paris for breakfast croissants and a spot of shopping, for example, plus some extra time for acceleration and deceleration. With my having 10 million kg of force and using no more than 3 g's of acceleration, I could carry 2.5 million kg of passengers. That's 40,000 people, almost the entire population of Corvallis, although half of them being females would mean having to make two return trips because of all the shopping. I'll put a large globe of it around me whenever I fly at any speed, to absorb all the above-ambient infrared radiation that I give out. It'll also absorb radar energy too, so I won't have to worry about that even if I'm carrying metal. When I fly, I'll still be trackable by sight as this doesn't give invisibility. I could dial the energy level it absorbed to a very low setting, in which case it'd appear black, which would still be visually trackable. Or I could use the NP-mirror effect instead. Neither being black or mirrored gives me perfect stealth, but they're both close to it under the right circumstances. The Energy Sink has another wonderful use. A globe of it around me and whomever I'm with, set to a high threshold, will drain the energy from bullets passing into it, or explosions going off nearby. That's going to be tested in our shooting range in a few minutes so I can find the right threshold to use. It's a fantastic new ability. To be silly, if I did want to fly to the Moon I wouldn't need to line my 'spaceship' with metal now, as the Energy Sink would easily protect me from the high-energy particles I'd otherwise be exposed to in space. Alternatively, with the amount of force I can lift I might as well fly to the Moon in an armor-plated, double-wide RV with an Energy Sink around it to absorb any radar beams. Inspired by Prof's several times saying, "Mark might take humanity to the stars," I worked out whether that was possible now. Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light-years away. At 3 g's it'd take only four months to get up to the speed of light, ignoring relativistic effects which I can because they only become an issue very close to that speed. Assuming my trip averaged an easily achieved 0.75 c, then it would take nearly 6 years each way, so 12 years for the round trip plus however long I'd want to play tourist there. I've got better things to do, but it's BIZARRE that such a trip is actually possible, and even more bizarre that I could take a few hundred people and all their food and equipment with me. We could very easily be self-sustaining as I could supply all the light, heat and electricity we'd need. The thought of carrying an exploration team amazed me, and I wondered how practical that would be around our solar system. A quick google told me that our solar system has a radius of about 7 billion kilometers, which at only a 2 g acceleration would result in an "All The Way Out There And Back Again" trip of a doable three weeks. When I'm not too busy making a living looking for rings and watches on beaches, I can run a profitable business undercutting NASA. Launching satellites would be trivially easy and very cheap for me, although not so much for the US Government as I'd try to claw back some of the multiple $215.9 billions they owe us. Energy sinks also allowed me to fly ballistic paths to distant earthly destination, such as Washington, DC. I could get there much quicker and be far less likely to be spotted. Flying in space was just so scary though, and I didn't need to take the risk because I could fly fast enough for my purposes even while saying in the atmosphere. I had one immediate use for the Energy Sink. I found out where the world's three most senior Aikido masters trained and I paid them a flying visit. Corvallis to Japan is 4,900 miles as the hypersonic crow non-ballistically flies. Mach 15 is over 11,000 mph, so it took me only about half an hour to get there, and that long only because I experimented on the best ways to achieve no sonic booms or heat blooms. I didn't intrude on the masters, staying seven hundred feet in the air. I merely sent my proximity blob down so it covered them, to sense how much ki they had and how they used it. They had more than twice as much ki as my Sensei, and the one I saw training was very good at Aikido, but all three of them were obviously single-minded. I hadn't expected otherwise, but it was good to put that question to its final rest. I'll mention it in my next several Spread-The-Word sessions. My subconsciouses continued to produce several more flashes of understanding, although nothing as useful as the Energy Sink. For example, I'd learned how to detect which specific individual minds at each end of a déjà vu link were the anchors of the link. [[As that sentence implies, I wasn't yet getting the full picture of that process, just a glimpse of it.]] Never before had I received so many insights into how several of my abilities worked. My subconsciouses were discovering and reporting new knowledge or ideas thick and fast. Over just a couple of days I made several major additions to the list of practical applications for our abilities, most of which will be usable by the five-merge Marks. They'll be able to use Energy Sinks, as the best example, although it'll require up to six of their minds to power the Sink enough to render the high-energy rifle bullets safe. This was exactly the sort of stuff they wanted me to go forward for, and it was paying dividends now. The Marks I déjà vu'd with were increasingly rapturous, and I should easily become the most popular person in the entire Universe. I'll be very annoyed if I don't win the next "Mark of the Month" award. Three days after I'd temporarily lost my abilities, I had a three-way déjà vu. The "glitch" - the weird communication mind-duplication - was still in effect. After this long I was suspecting that it wasn't a glitch at all. In this déjà vu, it caused there to be THREE sets of the three of us, making a heck of a crowd. The déjà vu wasn't noteworthy in its content, only that it confirmed that three-ways déjà vu's were possible and appeared to arrive about when expected. That meant I could theoretically do another "+32 Then Double Up" cycle to reach 704 minds, but I was NOT going to do that while my déjà vu's were so "glitched", whatever the fuck that was. Plus I was quite happy to remain where I was while my subconsciouses were revealing such wonderful insights. The next day my abilities went AWOL (Absent WithOut Leave) again, in the same way as last time. Banging the side of my head didn't fix them so I had to wait. I waited for as long as they'd been AWOL last time, and they still didn't come back. I hit the side of my head again to hurry them up. Several more hours passed, and still no abilities returned. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that I was starting to get very worried. This was either going to be a VERY bad thing if they never came back, or possibly a VERY good if they come back and I subsequently get even better insights than I'd received after the last blank period. ^ [[It's time for an explanation about what my head was up to. I've previously explained that the Universal Consciousness doesn't have a personality, any intent, motivation, or the other high-level attributes we associate with a person's consciousness. In many respects, it would've been more accurate of me to use the name "Universal Subconsciousness". I didn't do so because it would have been a pointless distinction, just shifting the incorrect impression to whatever it was that the Universal Subconsciousness was sub- to. Regardless of the label I've used, you should understand that the Universe is INTRINSICALLY - that's an important word - intelligent in many ways, other than those volumes of the Universe currently occupied by jocks. For example, the act of observing the Universe causes it to make decisions, such as deciding on the exact location of an electron, as per the Wavefunction Collapse Model discussed in my Introduction. Whereas the act of observing a jock causes him to act in ways even more moronic. (I'm apparently in an anti-jock mood. I'm not sure why; not that any extra reason is needed.) Not only is the Universe intelligent, but its Consciousness is built into the Universe at the most fundamental level possible. The Universe IS Consciousness in the same way that it is Matter-Energy or Space-Time. Minds are, by definition, also intelligent. In short, there's a GREAT deal of "intelligence" going on. Minds interact with the Universe's Consciousness. That is my definition of and test for a mind, so it's certainly true. Minds and the Universe's Consciousness are so intimately intertwined that the interaction is essential: how else would the Universe know what parts of it are being Observed? Humans and other species have evolved a very low level of subconscious interaction with the Universe. It's "very low level" even for human subconsciouses, so I'll say it occurs at the sub-subconscious level. The interaction is such an intrinsic part of being a mind, and such an intrinsic part of the Universe, that the mind is virtually unaware of it - like fish are unaware that they're wet, only far more subtly. As minds go, human minds are quite advanced - with the exception noted three paragraphs above - so our sub-subconsciouses and subconsciouses are particularly effective. Our consciousnesses are much more recently evolved, so aren't so advanced. Human minds are far more fragmented than these labels imply. There are subconscious routines which can put up with performing mind-numbingly repetitive tasks several times a second for an entire lifetime, as well as subconscious routines that can work on a complex problem while you sleep so the answer is ready for you when you wake up the next morning. Those are VERY different types of functions, both within what we lump together as the subconscious. Among the MANY divisions of subconscious labor, there are several supervisory roles. The conscience is a type of supervisor for the conscious level of the mind, and there are several types of supervisors with a variety of different functions for the subconscious and sub-subconscious levels. They're in charge of ensuring that their areas of responsibility are being performed as well as possible. At a few stages of our lives our brains undergo some massive changes, for example, during adolescence the average teenager has 15% of his neurons pruned because the supervisory process deems them not useful enough to retain, as indicated by their being infrequently connected to other neurons. That pruning occurs throughout the entire brain, starting at the rear and finishing several months later at the prefrontal cortex. As another very different example, when you learn a motor skill, such as catching a ball, repetition and your mind's supervisors help entrench the patterns that succeed, eventually making them reflexive. As a third type of example, younger people tend to remember facts while older people prefer to remember impressions, older people's memory supervisors having changed the way memory operates over time. Those are three very different types of supervision, and there are many more of them. Since my first merge, I have been learning more about my special abilities. Partly that was by the usual learning cycle of having an experience, thinking about it and discussing it during my déjà vu's, gaining a possible insight, testing it, which led to new experiences so the cycle repeated and knowledge was accumulated. But mostly it was because as my number of minds increased, so did the mental force or "willpower" I exerted on the Universe. The Universe's Consciousness responds to interactions from minds. The more powerful the mind, the greater the interaction. As you know by now, there's an ENORMOUS amount of energy built into the Universe. There's also an enormous amount of information; we just can't see it because it's not shown to us. As my willpower grew stronger, the Universe's Consciousness responded to it more fully, providing more energy (NP force, for example) and more information. People can successfully recover from massive physical damage to their brains. It takes them a fair while, but their brains can adapt to an amazing degree. My body, including my brain, was far more adaptable than anyone else's. As I gained more minds and my subconscious and sub-subconscious supervisors saw more and learned more from their increasingly powerful interactions with the Universe, they thought of better ways to do things. Mostly they made incremental improvements. There were a LOT of incremental improvements going on in my body and brain that I had no idea about, not consciously anyway. I've mentioned my increased IQ and sense of direction and location. Those were existing functions my brain already had that had been repeatedly incrementally improved. My losing all my special abilities the first time had happened because my subconsciouses had gained an understanding that there was a LOT more information available from the Universe than they'd realized before. It was being sent to them because of my enormous willpower, but they weren't able to receive it, so the volume of my brain that carried out my ki-effects had to be changed. That couldn't be done incrementally so a significant chunk of it was effectively destroyed and quickly rebuilt with greater information-receiving capabilities. Once it was functioning again, new information flowed into my subconsciouses, and new insights and understandings quickly followed. During the days that I was consciously realizing wonderful new insights about my existing abilities and discovering new abilities such as the Energy Sink, I was also achieving insights subconsciously, that only they (my subconscious processes) and their supervisors were aware of. My subconsciouses saw so much more information that they learned that there was an even better way of operating my ki-abilities. The latest new way also couldn't be achieved incrementally, so my subconsciouses started rebuilding that volume of my brain again. That's what's happening now.]] ^ My proximity and location senses came back online a few hours later. I'm so used to being centered that it never occurred to me to be uncentered when I had no abilities, so when my abilities returned, proximity appeared right away. The input I received from my proximity appeared the same, but using it I could sense that part of my brain wasn't the same. The area of it that processed proximity input was larger, which was weird because I was getting the same result so that seemed inefficient. That was FAR better than getting nothing so I didn't complain to anyone. The last time my abilities had come back online they'd arrived piecemeal, but I was understandably eager now so I tried creating a sight blob and was very pleased when it obligingly appeared. What was VERY interesting is that when I'd created it, the act of creation was 'visible' to me. I could somehow tell that I'd sent instructions from my brain's "Ability Center" to the target volume of the Universe, telling it what I wanted, and I'd seen its response, how it'd done it, etc. I was seeing a lot of meta-information for the process that I'd NEVER seen before! (For those that may not be aware of it, "meta" means "one level higher of description", so "meta-information" is a description of the information. I'm considering that my commands to my sight blob is a transfer of information to it, and the sight it provides is information it sends back to me. In this example, "information" is what flows back and forth between the blob and me, and "meta-information" is a description of that information rather than its content, as in the next paragraph.) As the blob became active, several pieces of information appeared in my mind that I somehow knew were about it. One of the pieces felt like it was probably about its color (sight blobs are light blobs with zero luminosity, so have color, usually a constant single color because that's how I nearly always think of them). I couldn't tell whether the meta-information was frequency or wavelength. You shouldn't think that the pieces of information were in written form, and certainly not something like , , etc. It was more like , , etc. But even that's misleading because I wasn't reading written words and it even felt like no language was involved. It was weird and cannot be reproduced here, but it was somehow giving me a sense of magnitude for several values. (The preceding description of the meta-information I was receiving could be called "meta-meta-information", at the risk of my being thought excessively masculine.) I had an interesting time changing one property of the blob, such as its color, then seeing what information changed. For example, when I changed the light blob from yellow to light orange, "Gljsdya" changed from "27523 ihds's" to "27978 ihds's" (it would be just as accurate to write "the top left corner of the light blob's meta-information got noisier by a certain amount." Both are misleading metaphors for what I was experiencing), so that told me what "Gljsdya" was: either frequency or wavelength (it didn't matter which since they're effectively reciprocals of each other) rather than radius, brightness, or the other properties light blobs have. I experimented Gljsdya some more to calibrate the values, until I could command and know in advance what color was going to result. If I made the blob emit different colors from different sub-volumes of it, then I got the meta-information for the definition of those volumes and the Gljsdyas they were outputting. I could now tell exactly what frequencies (or Gljsdyas) a radio blob picked up, which meant the compromise I'd made by mapping a range of frequencies to single color no longer mattered. I could still map them to colors if I wanted, but I was capable of knowing the exact original Gljsdyas too, which was very helpful of the Universe. Blobs have other properties, such as radius, brightness and location. Not speed though, as I'd already learned from my subconsciouses that blobs aren't 'things' that move, even though they look like they are - they just have their current location. I spent a few seconds identifying each of the other pieces of information and getting a rough feel for the values involved. Brightness was very simple, especially as zero brightness did have a meta-information value of zero. It took me a few seconds to discover that one of the pieces of information that the Universe provided was location (made up of three numbers, because it was in an x, y, z format), and that got me very excited. One of my great hopes is to find a way to get my ki-effects to work beyond my current maximum range. As that limit happens where I lose knowledge of the effects' exact locations, having the Universe give me their exact location is WONDERFUL! The thought of being able to create ki-effects in the White House brought a smile to my face, as did many of the other potential uses. I eagerly started working on removing that limit. The moment I recognized what that location data was, and focused on it, its changing values confused me and the blob self-canceled. I created another blob and it almost immediately canceled again. I tried creating one by building the new address information into my initial command, like I could create blobs with a specified Gljsdya, but specifying the location prevented my being able to create blobs at all. After several failures, I had to create them the way I always have. Then whenever I focused on the location information, they self-canceled again. The slightest body movement, such as taking a breath, caused the blob's location information to change very rapidly even if it was stationary, confusing me enough that they canceled. By holding myself as close to perfectly still as I could, I did manage to make blobs persist, but I couldn't move them. If I reassigned the location values, the blob canceled. I kept trying, and did discover that I could control them within my proximity range, but not beyond that. I spent a LONG time getting really, really good at using the new location information within my proximity range, hoping that I'd become so expert that I'd able to use them at all other ranges. No matter how much I practiced within my proximity range, the blobs would self-cancel the moment I ordered them to move beyond that range, and they wouldn't create beyond it at all. The only way I could practically use my ki-effects was by ignoring the location information and using my old process. Rather than dramatically extending my maximum range, all the new information seemed to do was dramatically reduce it! That made no sense so I kept trying. I eventually had to admit defeat and go back to managing my ki-effects in the way I always had. I was greatly disappointed because I would've REALLY loved for it to have worked. [[Sadly for my ego, the Universe didn't define its entire existence centered on me. To get blobs to work at a specific location, I have to communicate with the Universe at that location, but any volume of the Universe outside my proximity range doesn't know about me. I may know that where I'm thinking of is 500 feet in front of me, but no part of the Universe recognizes that I'm 500 feet 'behind' it. I was yelling out: , and the Universe was effectively ignoring me because no part of it recognized it was being commanded, thus I couldn't control my ki-effects using that sort of address reference. Amusingly - from my perspective now - this whole problem was caused by another subconscious assumption: NP-fingertips, my very first ki-effect, had been discovered after my proximity sense, so right from the very first time I'd used a ki-effect they'd been 'displayed' in the middle of a radar-like sense that had me in the middle of it. Thinking of their positions as being relative to me seemed obvious. In reality, when I was commanding a volume of space I was thinking of that volume itself, not thinking about a distance away from me. My subconscious had taken the location information provided by the Universe and had automatically converted it into the relative positioning format that it assumed I wanted. That truly was easier for me to visualize, but it was also useless as a way of communicating back to the Universe. I never consciously or subconsciously realized that; quite the reverse, as the more trouble I had, the more I concentrated intently on those values. After all, I could manipulate the Gljsdya value directly, so I should be able to do that to the location values too if I tried hard enough.]] I experimented with NP-fingertips next. The first good news was that the first one did create, which pleased me immeasurably. It didn't need measuring because one of its pieces of information was its current and maximum forces. Plus there was speed, location, shape and some others that I couldn't identify, which had me intrigued. There was also friction, but that was presented as another ability that was attached to the NP-fingertip rather than being part of it. I was gaining lots of interesting information that I could create experiments for in order to help me understand my abilities and the Universe. I'll skip describing the long time I spent playing around with fingertips, magnetic blobs, energy sinks, and such like. The meta-information was helpful and intriguing for those abilities, and I was having a great time playing around with them, but the next event blew my socks off. When the next déjà vu occurred I could 'read' the creation process starting a few seconds before I felt the déjà vu sensation. I could see what the Universe was doing, including seeing the link appear in a way that implied it was already formed but held at a low level that was beneath my awareness. I didn't understand that yet, but I did 'see' it strengthen and then I got the impression of minds getting copied in both directions to a volume of the other side that felt temporary. That was a big surprise because it was very different than what we thought happened during déjà vu. I couldn't sense the minds themselves, but I was pretty sure that's what was being copied. I could even sense some of the comparison process between the permanent and temporary areas in each dimension, and got a feeling that adjustments were sometimes made to the permanent areas. I also saw the refreshing copies being made and transferred, which was very helpful. I haven't made a big deal out of it, but the echoes in the déjà vu links have always been a real pain in the ass during our - what we'd thought of as - cross-dimensional communication. As we merged more times, the echoes got less frequent and less of a pain, but they've always been there. Now I could see the refreshes taking place, making it much easier for me to make allowances for them in our communication. I thought that was a nice benefit, and I was quite happy with myself, until I blew my socks off by realizing another FAR GREATER benefit. Watching the way the copies were made had given me a sudden idea of why dying during a déjà vu link caused us to "merge" - that word being suspect now because I thought we were already merged in both directions, as an intrinsic part of the déjà vu process. I had an exciting feeling that I had discovered something amazing. I wasn't yet sure that I was right, but I'd get most of the confirmation in a few minutes when the link ended. My déjà vu partner wasn't getting any of this because his brain hadn't undergone my recent reorganizations, so he didn't have the new sense. I'd been telling him about most of it, but I'd keep my latest idea to myself because if I said anything about it to him, he'd excitedly spread the news through the grapevine, which would be a terrible disappointment to millions of Marks if my theory wasn't right. I'd say nothing until my next déjà vu. I moved on to give him my almost-full report: a description of most of my recent changes, what they'd let me learn about my existing abilities, and the new abilities I'd discovered. I taught him how to create an energy sink and magnetism blob, etc. He was gobsmacked because he hadn't heard of any of my recent advances, and they were far more profound, useful and powerful than the previous little discoveries I'd made. We raved back and forth at each other about what it meant. I watched the end of the déjà vu with GREAT interest. I hadn't known what the ending mechanism would be, but it made sense after I saw how the link degraded. It didn't actually cut off as quickly as we'd always thought, but shrunk for a short while first, causing increasingly poor copies. After which there appeared to be a real severing, unlike when I'd become aware of the déjà vu's start, as that had seemed to be a strengthening of an already established connection. The way it ended was consistent with what I'd suspected from seeing the way it operated: there appeared to be NO NEED FOR ANY OF US TO SUFFER A PHYSICAL DEATH TO MERGE! When we were in a déjà vu, we were ALREADY merged, as that's what the déjà vu did. What we had to do was stop the copies being wiped out by the poor copying that happened as the link was going down. Killing ourselves certainly did that, but so would simply making the Universe suddenly severe the link early, between refreshing copies. That'd leave both sets of minds in both brains, and everyone could happily go about their business with more minds than they'd had a few minutes ago. It was FREE MINDS and NO DEATHS FOR MY FAMILIES TO GRIEVE THROUGH! I was incredibly excited, relieved and happy. As far as I could tell, and if my theory was right, then there was no downside. Even if all the other Marks couldn't learn how to cut the links, I could populate the heads of the billion or so five-merge Marks myself. I could do a non-Death merge - an "Upgrading" - of the other Mark during my next déjà vu. Presuming that worked as I thought, it would result in two of us having the knowledge and enough minds to cut links, once his brain had reorganized. He and I would continue upgrading our subsequent déjà vu partners, spreading the word and the ability. Each successive generation would have 32 more minds, and I'd worry about our number of minds getting too high, but I currently had no idea what "too high" might be. If we did hit a limit, another Voyaging Mark might have to start and progress far enough to gain the link-cutting ability, so he could seed another round of upgrades until all those Marks accumulated too many minds. Hopefully we could get many generations of upgrades out of each seeder, if the "too many minds" value was high enough. We already knew that it took less than a month for grapevine news to spread to virtually everyone, but that upgrading process wouldn't go as fast as that since high-minded Marks would much more often link with their peers, so it might take as long a few years to reach every five-merged Mark, and possibly even longer if the "too many minds" value was low. Marks with fewer than five merges would take much longer to upgrade, and I wasn't sure how we could even begin to upgrade the single-minded Marks. There was also the option of two 300-minded Marks déjà vu'ing then cutting the link so they both doubled up, and doing that repeatedly. Never mind having three or four hundred minds each, with déjà vu's occurring every hour, and speeding up by a factor of two or four after each merge, I could be up to thousands or tens of thousands of minds in three or four hours. Christ on a biscuit! I wasn't planning to do any of these things, they were just thoughts that were flying through my minds. Being able to do deathless upgrades opened up possibilities that I'd never thought of before, and it was amazing to think of them now. When my next déjà vu occurred, I waited for him to have his rave over my proximity's resolution, then I gave him my detailed report of everything else because I still wanted that to get out. I saved the best to last, telling him about deathless upgrades. One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: [[The majority of the reorganization was in my minds rather than brain, as it was my minds that interacted with the Universe's Consciousness, so the newly upgraded Mark would receive minds that already had that reorganization done. There'd be a small amount of brain rewiring, and his previous minds would have to change too in order to sense what was happening, but those changes would occur even quicker than I expected.]] One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: One Of Them: One Of Us: For the next several déjà vu's I spread the same news, boggling the minds of my link partners every time. ------- Chapter 415: The Upgrades Sunday, May 25 to Wednesday, June 18, 2008 On my next déjà vu, I gave my link partner an overview of my situation and discoveries, waited for him to calm down, told him I thought I could painlessly upgrade him to 352 minds, waited for him to calm down again, then I explained my "Second-Tier Helpers" idea in detail, including that he'd be letting himself in for some possibly risky work on my Voyage. I couched my description as being an invitation to him that he could refuse, but I knew he wouldn't. That'd only put the onus on another Mark, which was silly. The Voyager's previous merge partners had never had a choice, and nor did this Mark really. One Of Us: One Of Them: He knew it would get better than that: for the upgrades we'd do to everyone (more accurately, "everyme") after we'd proved it risk free, but he was putting a good spin on his acceptance of his role. Before we made the attempt, I withdrew a die that I'd been keeping in my pocket and rolled it several times, telling my link partner that it was his number for future identification purposes. Then I started what I hoped would be my 11th upgrade - actually my first upgrade but I was continuing to count incrementally after my tenth merge as it was still my eleventh increase in number of minds, just with an improved technique. This one should be the best one ever because no one should die. Not dying is a significant improvement to any plan! I couldn't get the Universe to make me invisible because I couldn't control something I had no access to any meta-information about, but the Universe was sending me meta-information about the déjà vu linking process so the Universe should - I hoped - respond to my instructions about it, especially as it seemed a simple process and what I wanted happened at the end of the link anyway. I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, waited until just after a refreshing copy had finished, and then I ordered the Universe to terminate the link. The déjà vu's meta-information disappeared in exactly the same way I'd seen happening at the end of my recent déjà vu's. #1: #14: We counted off our new minds, and all thirty two of them were present. We even counted off #1 to #320 just to make sure nothing weird had happened. We repeated those counts as we waited to find out whether the thirty two new minds would unravel in some way. As the time that the déjà vu would normally have ended came and went, we gained even more confidence. All my abilities testing out to be exactly on the button for what mathematics predicted for them; the upgrade was exactly as effective as all of my previous merges. As more minutes passed and all my minds stayed where they were, I felt VERY good. Now I just had to wait to déjà vu with the same Mark again, to find out whether he had retained all his new minds. Given that he and I had far more minds than anyone else - unless he'd lost his - we should déjà vu pretty quickly. After 9.5 minutes another déjà vu started. I'd started getting a little worried because that was a minute late, but it was close enough to being on schedule. Judging by his knowing to quote a die-rolled number and its being the same as I'd rolled, it was the same guy. He had 352 minds, abilities consistent with that many, had no problems since our last déjà vu, and our special abilities now tested out to be 704 minds' worth. The upgrade had worked perfectly. I patted myself on the back 704 times, as did he. He's allowed to congratulate himself as he is just as much me as I am, the two of us having the same set of minds, although they have different numbers. [[In several respects I can't truthfully call myself "me" now, as it's difficult to identify the "I" that this autobiography started with. Does the seat of identity rest in the body or mind? The body this autobiography started with died during chapter 1, so has long gone, as have several later bodies. The birth-mind of the Mark that was the initial focus of this autobiography has been copied several times, the originals destroyed, and the tenth generation copies have been duplicated and now exist in several different dimensions. I bet if I asked you to list where all the existing copies of the original Mark's mind are now, it'd take you a few minutes to be able to answer that with confidence. Tracking my identity is a mess, but despite the logical imprecision of identity, we knew which Mark was captaining the Voyage of Discovery, and he will be the 'individual' that my autobiography will continue to follow. I'm not even sure that "autobiography" is the right word any more, but I'll continue to use that too. ("Auto" is Greek for "self", so perhaps "autosbiography", except Greek doesn't pluralize by tacking on an "s".) If you think the identity issue is a muddle at this point, wait till you see the moving and often-disappearing target it is at the time I'm writing this.]] We didn't do anything fancy during this link, letting it end naturally. Similarly for all our very frequent subsequent déjà vu's. It was now just a matter of our repeatedly déjà vu'ing together while we waited for one or both of us to déjà vu with a five-merge Mark(s). Our déjà vu's ceased for a few hours on the second day. I waited for a 32-minded Mark to link, but when my delayed next link did arrive, it was with my usual partner. The hiatus had been caused by my mental twin's brain reorganizing. My awaited five-merged Mark déjà vu arrived on May 29. He also agreed to be upgraded massively (an inappropriate word), so I did the 12th upgrade, giving each of us 384 minds. It was so quick and easy that it doesn't come close to deserving its own chapter. I VERY soon learned that while I'd been doing my 12th upgrade, my 11th upgrade partner - either 11A or 11B; that nomenclature wasn't so good anymore - had also déjà vu'd with a five-merged Mark and had upgraded with him, so there were now four of us with 384 minds. The reason I learned that so quickly was because our déjà vu's were now a theoretical average of seven minutes apart and lasting for ten minutes. I have never explicitly stated how the time between déjà vu's was measured: whether from the start of one to the start of the next, or the gap between them. Back when déjà vu's were months or weeks apart and only lasted a few seconds, the difference was indiscernible. Not now though. As it happens, I have always talked about the frequency of déjà vu's, thus the mathematical progression of them predicts that they should last ten minutes but somehow start every seven minutes. We déjà vu'd over and over again. We didn't play any games with them, so they naturally lasted for ten minutes, ended without an upgrade, then the next one started about ten seconds later. There was a tendency for the next déjà vu to be with a different partner than the previous one, but it was only a slight preference. Because the déjà vu's should theoretically overlap we'd expected a lot of three- or four-way déjà vu's, but we didn't have any of them. For some reason, reality couldn't achieve what the mathematical progression predicted (as is often the case in mathematical progressions, see below). The information I was getting from the Universe didn't explain why, but my guess was that a three-way would've left one guy with no link, and a four-way couldn't start unless the three-way did first. [Another mathematical progression that will hopefully be constrained by reality: In 1970 there were 20 people who made their livings by being professional Elvis Presley impersonators. By 1980 there were 200 such people, and by 1990, there were over 2,000. Statisticians predict that by 2055 the entire population of the planet will earn their livings by being professional Elvis Presley impersonators. It could be worse: they could be Tiny Tim impersonators. Mom had nostalgically played one of his songs once and I'd run screaming from the room, to get away from the screaming in the room.] We had our 13th upgrade to 416 minds on June 2nd. We started having plenty of three-way déjà vu's, but no four-ways, which didn't make probabilistic sense. [[The inter-dimensional synchronization process is considerably more sophisticated than simple random chance, with the physical laws that govern it having some constraints and 'preferences' (in the sense that water 'prefers' to run downhill). The preferences constrained the possibilities for multi-way links in this weird situation.]] June 4 was the date by which the three religions were meant to give me a list of questions for God, should I happen to run into Him again. They weren't finding producing the list easy although they were still working apparently amicably on it. A few days ago they'd asked me for an extension. Given what else I had going on in my life, I was happy to say, "Sure. Take your time. A lot of the benefit is in the dialogue you're having." They had each formed a committee, and those committees were doing a lot of talking inter- and intra- their Churches, but I couldn't tell whether any real benefit was or would come out of it. They were essentially debating about fiction which sounds pointless, but their conclusions could change the way the Churches deal with people, so the process might be useful even though the final list of questions would be totally worthless. It did get quite a lot of press, and many people thought it was a big deal, so I was happy to continue to encourage them. It wasn't relevant to my life though, so I'll say no more about it, just as I've said almost nothing else about what was happening in my life during this time. As its title implies, this document is primarily intended to describe my ascendancy, and now that I'm so far into it, diverting to talk about this or that real life issue is of no relevance at all. On June 7 we did the 14th and our last of this block of upgrades, which gave him and me 448 minds, which would make sixteen of us with that number of minds after the seven other 416-minded Mark's had each upgraded one more 32-minded Mark. I had previously been frustrated and upset by being able to increase my mind count by only thirty two at a time, but with no longer having to say goodbye to my families, I couldn't care less how many upgrades I did because none of them involved any grief at all, let alone the horrendous amounts every previous Voyaging merge had caused. Upgrades were WONDERFUL! After a few more hours, all the Second-Tier Helper Marks had been created. I just had three more big upgrades to go and then I'll wait three months to make sure that nothing falls apart, after which I'll declare my Voyage of Discovery to be finished. I'm reasonably confident that's what's going to happen and that there shouldn't be any problems with it. I'm not counting my chickens yet, but I'm definitely counting the eggs. There's never been a single sign of any psychological problem, and the few scares I've had have always been false alarms over what turned out to be welcome developments. In three months I'll give a green light to the W-Dimension-wide rollout to all the five-merged Marks, and I'll put my feet up and relax while the twelve guys still on 448 minds start the process of upgrading the billion or so five-merge Marks out there. I'll be able to take my life out of its holding pattern and put my attention into getting the most out of it with the enormous power I'll have then; FAR more than I will EVER need or be able to use, although having a wider proximity and ki-effects ranges would be good. I won't even have to worry about what to do about the four- and fewer-merged Marks. They'll need to be upgraded too, but I'd decided that doing that is outside the job description of the Voyager. In the several ordinary déjà vu's I'd had before I started the upgrade cycle, I'd told those Marks that my job finished with my giving the green light because Voyaging was only about "discovery", not implementation of my findings. That would be all the other Marks' responsibility, including elevating the small Marks. My déjà vu partners had immediately agreed with me. I could totally read their emotions with my/our proximity sense, and they didn't begrudge me in the slightest. They could VERY easily empathize with my situation and desire to retire from the Voyaging business. For the record: The last time I gave exact values for my abilities was when I had 320 minds. Now I have 448, an increase of 1.4 times, so my abilities had risen by factors of 1.4, 1.96 or 2.744, depending on the ability: Proximity is now 336 feet (102 meters) and even more detailed. My maximum ki-effects range is 830 feet (253 meters). There are 448 fingertips per mind, so just over 200,000 in total now. Maximum width is 224 inches (nearly 19 feet; 5.7 meters). Minimum width is 1/224th of an inch. The Blinks Allowed Effect is 104 minutes. My maximum force is nearly 27 million kilograms (30,000 tons). The amount of heat and light I can radiate is 721 megawatts. The nuclear reactor I mentioned earlier was 1,167 megawatts so it looks like I haven't beaten it yet, although I've actually left it far behind because I'm nearly always in a déjà vu. I won't bother confusing you with descriptions of my abilities with magnetism, electricity, energy sink and others, although I will say, "Look out, Thor!" The sixteen of us - me and my Second-Tier Helpers - are déjà vu'ing almost continuously now, in two- and three-way combinations, so the above list significantly understate what I am capable of. With two or three times more minds in my head, my NP force and energy generation maximums are usually eight or twenty seven times greater than the figures listed above. Apart from the brief intervals between déjà vu's, I can output far more power than the latest nuclear power station, often by a factor of nearly seventeen. The near-constant déjà vu's are another reason I'm counting my end-of-Voyage chickens so optimistically, as I'm already living with 896 or 1,344 minds in my head far more often than not, and that's working perfectly well. It's not even a nuisance, as there's no echo effect. We can sense each other fully, both in our own heads as well as the copies at the other ends of the links, and it's not in the least intrusive. [[It occurs to me that I failed to explain why there's no echo any longer. You can probably see the reason yourself, but in case you can't: My subconsciouses had achieved better access to and control over some of the Universe's Consciousness functions, including the déjà vu process. They didn't have full access, understanding or control, but they did have some. Improving our inter-dimensional communication process had got rid of the problem of the refreshing echoes (unless we directed a message to a mind-copy but not its mind-original), but had created the "glitch" problem, which I now understand and celebrate the cause of.]] I don't even have to write that we're polite to each other, or didn't try to control each other's bodies, or any other 'rules', because we didn't care about any of those issues. We do sometimes control each other's bodies. It was probably a little bit impolite but we didn't care so it often happens, especially if one of us thinks of something funny to do. We ARE each other, especially because all fifteen of my second-tier helpers have almost the same set of minds as I do. We treat each other across the link the same as we treat each other inside our heads. It's almost correct to say, "There's no difference because there's no difference." That we're sharing two bodies and that one of those bodies swaps around semi-randomly every few minutes isn't any real change from sharing one body. The only reason we had for being cautious about remote-controlling someone else's body is that his dimension might have a dimensional difference relevant to the action that made it a poor one. Such differences were so rare that we ignored the risk of them, especially because none of them were relevant to what we were doing over these hours. Should an important difference be discovered, it wouldn't take long to spread the warning about it through the other fourteen of us. [[One of the many Mark-minds that is 'looking over my shoulder' while I am writing this just pointed out that the text's concentration on the Voyage to the exclusion of all else might give readers the erroneous impression that I had indeed gone away on a voyage. All these recently described events occurred inside my head. Outside of my head, life went on as normal: my body was still in bed with my girls when they woke up in the morning, I still brushed my teeth and went through all my other daily functions. With the number of minds I had now, I had NO trouble managing my life while participating in the Voyage. You know enough about my life to be able to imagine its daily routine. Anything particularly interesting I'll make sure to mention later.]] We hadn't spread the word to the five-merge grapevine since before the eleventh upgrade, so having achieved the creation of the Second-Tier Helpers, we paused for the few days it took to have some déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks. They were so excited from the shock of déjà vu temporarily taking them from 32 to 480 minds, and by the news that we told them, that they raved about it so loudly that Marks in dimensions neighboring theirs could probably hear them even without a link. My Voyage of Discovery had failed in a way that made all the other Marks VERY happy, or would when they got the news through the grapevine. The Voyage had been launched for me to help everyone else by finding out things about our abilities that I could tell them how to use. I hadn't found very many. The Energy Sink was a great discovery and possibly a lifesaver, giving NP-points mirrors and greater crush resistance were perhaps useful gains, but otherwise I hadn't found much of any real significance - that I now had 27 million kilograms of NP force, although ridiculously awe inspiring for me, was useless to everyone else. Instead of my finding useful things that the 32- or fewer-minded Marks could add to their abilities, I'd found a way to get all of them painlessly upgraded to having approximately 1,500 minds. That BLEW AWAY any little tricks I could teach them. With luck, once they've all got over a thousand minds they might make useful discoveries of their own, adding to our combined knowledge and making me even more redundant. ^ Now I just had to do my last three large upgrades, then wait three months. My little group of sixteen Marks had spent so much time living with 896 and 1,344 minds in our heads that the idea of upgrading two of our heads from 448 to 896 didn't cause any excitement or concern. All of my second-tier helpers were perfectly happy to be my partner for that upgrade. We would be exposed to the risk that our subsequent déjà vu's would take us to even more minds, and maybe there would be problems then, but we didn't think so. It seemed that our brains could hold an astonishing number of minds, and there wasn't even a hint of there being a limit. There had to be, of course, but it was very unlikely to be something we were just about to bang into. Even if a déjà vu does cause problems, we could cause it to end quickly by getting the minds at the ends to think very differently. Once the link had canceled, and if the problem had been bad enough, we could cancel future déjà vu's just as they were starting and before any minds were copied. With a little practice - and we'd get plenty of it - that would soon become a subconscious habit. That would keep us safe even if out of contact with the rest of the W-Dimension's Marks. That'd be a real shame, but it's not as if I'd feel lonely given how many minds I'd have in my own head. It wasn't even as bad as that, because I could probably find a way of making sure I just had two-way déjà vu's with relatively small-minded Marks, giving me a conduit through to all the rest of us. That was mostly just idle speculation though, as we didn't envisage bad problems - it had just been so easy so far. I finished my yawn, double-checked the current link was still only a two-way déjà vu. We can sense the links forming well before the minds are copied so there was no chance of my making a mistake, and it wouldn't have mattered much if I had. I wanted to upgrade while in a two-way link so fewer of us would be affected if there was a health problem, but that risk was so low I was really only being cautious because there was no reason not to be. I cut the existing link to cause my 15th upgrade, leaving my partner and me with 896 minds each. Everything was good at my end, and it only took a few minutes to get confirmation that it'd worked at his end too. To be cautious - almost certainly unnecessarily - I waited a day. During that time I had plenty of three-ways with the other 896-minded Mark and one of the 448's, making 2,240 minds in our heads, and those déjà vu's didn't cause any problems. The imminent sixteenth upgrade was only slightly more of a worry than the fifteenth. Having the non-upgrading déjà vu's confirm I had the capacity first took a lot of the worry out. During the wait, one of the 448-minded second-tier helpers déjà vu'd with a five-merge Mark, getting the latest little progress report out. I wouldn't have held up the next upgrade if no five-merged Mark had turned up because if anything went wrong the fourteen non-participating Helper Marks would get the word out about it easily. Anyhow, 24 hours after my previous upgrade, when I was linked to only a 448-minded Mark, I canceled the link, and the 16th upgrade went through without a hiccup, giving the two of us 1,344 minds. Just one more upgrade to go and my active involvement in the Voyaging profession will be over. Toward the end of the next 24-hour waiting period, a new part of my brain came online. I thanked it for not taking all my abilities away for a few hours first, then thought about the information it was telling me. I felt rather than knew the following: It was about my and the Mark I was currently déjà vu'ing with's w-dimensions. There was a w-dimension address for each of us. Not in the sense of an absolute address like, "Number 12, 5th Street", but a relative one like, "Just over there {pointing at a spot}." The address seemed precise, but it was relative and more analog than digital. My w-dimension had an address that didn't feel like "here" or "zero". It was close to "here", but not quite, which implied the addresses were relative to something other than me. [[Something analogous to the center of this dimension.]] There was some information that felt like an "age". It looked like a 2D picture with the full spectrum of color included although the vast majority of it was blue, with only a very few spots or areas of yellow or red. The colors were VERY slowly shifting toward red; so slowly that I felt rather than saw it. What it meant was anybody's guess. A lot of my bodiless anybodies did guess, but we weren't able to tell which if any were right. [[The Universe's Consciousness keeping track of how in need of synchronizing each part of this dimension was.]] There were half a dozen scalar values for each of the two dimensions. Again qualitative rather than quantitative, with values like "high", "very low", etc. What they were measuring was anybody's next guess, which were just as successful as their previous guesses. We could test a few of our guesses, but for most of them we couldn't determine their accuracy. [[There's a lot of meta-information stored about each dimension, for example, to define the "themes" that operate within it.]] The Mark that I was linked to was the other 1,344-minded Mark but he didn't have the new sense himself. I thought he probably would within a day or two because my mental adaptability was just a little ahead of his. I'd started my Voyage months before he'd joined it, but what mattered the most is the timing difference between when we got enough minds for something to happen, and a couple of the Second-Tier Helper Marks were close behind me on that. With the current Mark, we tied on getting to 1,344 minds, but I'd beaten him to 896, giving me a slight edge. When we became a three-way déjà vu, the new guy's data also appeared in my new sense. When the current déjà vu completely finished, I tried imagining myself linking to the guy who'd just left. His dimension's data was no longer actively displayed in my head but I remembered his address. I knew what newly forming links felt like, so it might've been easy if my subconscious acted on my obvious intent. Nothing happened, so I tried the next test we'd agreed on: I tried to link my address to his address. The link formed, and a couple of seconds later we were in a perfectly ordinary déjà vu. We chatted for a little while, then I ended the déjà vu in the non-upgrade way. [A method that works well is for the Mark-mind anchoring one end of the link to think of a really sexy image - we can usually think of something - while the other anchoring mind thinks of something offensive such as licking vomit out of a used and unflushed toilet bowl. The emotional dichotomy kills the déjà vu pretty damned fast. I'll call a non-upgrading severing of a déjà vu a "dichotomy cancel" to differentiate it from an "upgrading cancel".] Next I tried linking the two other Marks I knew the addresses of together. I couldn't tell whether they were connected from any of the information I had. I waited fifteen seconds, then linked myself to the theoretically easier of the two: the one with the most minds. I wrote "theoretically" because no effort was required from me, but I chose that guy because I thought my experiment's request was more likely to succeed if I made it easier for the Universe. The Universe has been good to me recently so I like to do what I can to be good to it. The two test-Marks had been in déjà vu for fifteen seconds by the time I'd arrived. I dichotomy-canceled myself out of the déjà vu, waited fifteen seconds then dichotomy-canceled the test Marks' déjà vu. Then I linked myself to one of them, confirming that my severing their link had succeeded. Amusingly, the control I now have over w-dimension links means that I can take two Marks that I know the w-dimension addresses of and repeatedly upgrade them together, whether they want to or not. That was very silly but the process allows it. [[The Universe hadn't been 'designed' to enforce sensible use. It hadn't been designed at all, as far as I know, so there were things that I could do that abused the normal processes. Every time you lift something up, you're "abusing" the "normal process" of gravity, so abusing the Universe's properties isn't a scary thing.]] We ended that déjà vu, then I tried linking my address to a random location. I just 'pointed' somewhere (it wasn't actually "pointing", but it wasn't quantitative so I wasn't simply specifying an address. I had to indicate it in an analog way, so "pointing" is a good-enough description). The link opened but nothing happened, and after a couple of seconds, it closed itself. I imagined my address being blocked off so it couldn't be linked to. I waited ten minutes. That was an unprecedented time for me not to déjà vu in my current situation - ten seconds was about normal for a gap - so it was definitive enough. I removed the block and waited all of twenty seconds for the next déjà vu, and thereafter they occurred with the normal intervals. I didn't want to experiment with blocking someone's address while they were in a déjà vu in case it created an upgrade or even caused damage somehow. I thought an upgrade was the most likely result, but even that was a slight nuisance as it'd slow down the process of upgrading all the other Marks by moving two of the seeders closer to the approximately 1,500-mind ceiling that we were envisaging. So I dichotomy-canceled my current déjà vu and then quickly blocked his address before he could start a new link. I waited ten minutes, dichotomy-canceled the déjà vu I was in, unblocked my test-Mark's address and linked myself to him. He'd been déjà vu-free for the last ten minutes. That's enough of a description to give you the idea of how it worked. What I found more interesting than any other aspect, was its being a fundamental new type of ability because it crossed dimensions! That was a biggie. [[As I explained not long ago, my subconsciouses had already made some cross-dimensional progress in getting rid of the déjà vu echoes while accidentally confusing me with the glitch.]] When we've all got this w-address tracking and linking ability, we'll have enormous communication flexibility. It won't take thirty days to spread the word across the billion or so of us, but something like thirty minutes if we manage it properly. That has some profound consequences for our lives, such as having a billion or so Marks all doing scientific research in a coordinated manner and sharing their results. It also offers the possibility of allowing us to contact fewer-minded Marks, and potentially even the single-minded ones who have no idea what they're missing out on, and their families missing out on too. Improving that ability and gaining understanding of how the w-addresses work are high on my list of research topics. The ability had holes in it, such as if I linked two other people, I couldn't tell if they were linked or not. My wonderfully cooperative brain quickly filled that hole [[helped by the wonderfully cooperative Universe's Consciousness, because of how much willpower I had now]]. Within a couple of hours I had the linking information displayed for every w-address I knew and wanted displayed, even if I wasn't currently déjà vu'ing with them. How I could get that information from other dimensions without linking with any of them was a puzzle, but some easy tests confirmed that it was perfectly accurate. Some more experiments and some more brain adapting solved that puzzle for me. The system opened barely noticeable, non-déjà vu'ing links for the meta-information to flow, which was another unprecedented cross-dimensional ability. Not really knowing what it was, I called it an "Information Pipe". [[It used one of the Universe's existing mechanisms to coordinate dimensions. It wasn't part of the synchronization process itself, but was a precursor to choosing which dimensions would be synchronized and where, being a low-volume way of transferring only meta-information, not the lower-level fundamental information, e.g., it could provide the address of another Mark's mind, but not a copy of his mind.]] The new information also indicated the address of any links each subject had. For the rest of the day I had all fifteen of my second-tier helpers displayed in my awareness, which meant I had fifteen Information Pipes open. I always knew who was linked with whom, and they confirmed my information was accurate when I checked it with them from time to time. I kept the Pipes going to all of my second-tier helpers so I could track their déjà vu's, and especially so I could get the w-addresses of any new Marks they déjà vu'd with, because that would allow me to create an information pipe to those Marks. After about seventeen more hours, I'd get the w-addresses of who they déjà vu'd with, which would most likely be other five-merge Marks. Every seventeen hours thereafter the number of five-merged Marks I had the address of would double. In about a month that would've progressed to put me in contact with EVERY five-merge Mark and some lower-merge Marks too, except that there was no way I could handle or memorize that much data even if I divided the load across all of my minds. I couldn't accumulate the information in a computer either, because it wasn't in a form that I could express to a computer, or even with pen and paper. What I'll do is have each of my minds memorize a hundred w-addresses, which will give me a total of 134,400 addresses, which is easily a large enough number to be very useful. I'd make sure I included a good number of Marks at all the lower levels that I can get contacts in, so I could seed news in their level of the grapevine effectively. They déjà vu with their peers considerably more often than with five-merge Marks, so they can spread the news through their levels faster than the five-merge Marks can. Once our hundred-entry directories have accumulated I'll be able to seed news for the grapevine far faster than we'd previously been able. When I have news to spread, each of my minds - working through his list of a hundred addresses - could independently connect to a different Mark, impart the new information, dichotomy-cancel the link, then move on to the next Mark on his list. That would be an incredibly fast way to get the news out there, but it would result in my having 1,344 simultaneous déjà vu's with 32-minded Marks and I wasn't ready to try having nearly 45,000 minds at one time. In practice we'd pace ourselves, having no more than forty two of my minds working simultaneously (42 because that's 1,344/32, the significance of which will be explained shortly). It wouldn't take them long to dump the information to their hundred addresses if we discouraged conversation. I'd start by spreading the news about my new "High-Speed Information-Dump Seeding Method", letting the grapevine know that I had that capability now, and not to try to converse with me when my minds were contacting them just to dump some information. If I said, "High speed dump" as soon as a déjà vu started, they were to stop talking and just listen. I'd pass on what I wanted to spread and then immediately cut the link in a non-upgrade way to repeat the process with the next address. I'll be able to do that VERY quickly because I can allocate thirty two of my minds to send different information to each of their thirty two different Marks' minds simultaneously (which explains the forty two above). Another experiment I did was to create a four-way déjà vu link between four of the 448-minded Marks, and they later reported that it worked no trouble. For something so radically new, creating a four-way déjà vu link was very easy, but I decided not to push my luck by going for five- or more-ways. I didn't mind pushing the apparent limits of the Universe a little, but not too far about something it seemed to be reluctant about. If I ever have a natural four-way link then I might try a five- and maybe a six-way link, but I'll take my cue from the Universe on how far to take that. [[Creating a multi-way link is the same as creating a succession of two-way links. It's EASY. The Universe creates links VERY often. Billions per second just on and in that little corner of the Universe called Earth by the locals (few of those links involve brains, especially those deep inside the planet). The Universe has no use for more than a two-way link and normally doesn't create them. It had naturally created three-way links with me only because my mind-power was so unusual that it distorted some of the Universe's normal behaviors. Water will "normally" run downhill but it's easy enough to create circumstances in which it flows uphill. Nothing "bad" happens when the usual behavior is changed; it's just unusual. Likewise nothing bad happened when I arbitrarily created multi-way links. The Universe's Consciousness 'averaged' (too simplistic) the consciousness values in the affected volumes in each dimension, and that was fine, as it always has been.]] Not even half an hour later, I learned that I had 1,344 'souls'. I'd been worrying ever since the Voyage of Discovery had been assigned to me by the God of Bad Luck that my brain's capacity might be exceeded. My subconscious knew I was very concerned about that, and with my latest upgrade it now had access to enough information from the Universe to reveal that a very substantial proportion of my minds were effectively out-sourced to the Universe. I was astonished to learn that although many aspects of the mind are rooted to the brain, many of the high-level functions including a substantial amount of the memory processing, although not the raw memory itself, is done outside of the brain. [[That's what minds are: that part of the functionality of a brain that interacts with the Universe. The oft-heard term "Life Force" IS the Universe's Consciousness and the energy it controls. Minded life needs the life force so much that if access to it was cut off, all minded life would die out because it couldn't function with brains that no longer had minds. On the other side of the coin, the Universe is incredibly indeterminate and undetermined. It essentially makes itself up as it goes along, in accordance with natural laws and in response to what minds do. To be somewhat too anthropomorphic, it's a win-win arrangement for both the Universe and minds for them to be so tightly connected. Clearly the Universe came before minds that are now influencing it, but it's interesting that the Universe's fundamental properties are so mind-dependent. That's not a justification for an external creator, given that 99.9999% (with many more 9s after the decimal) of the Universe is unobserved so can obviously get by quite 'happily' without minds.]] Our souls operate somewhere within our proximity range. For single-minded humans that means within a few inches of their owner's body. Their souls are normally located inside their bodies because that's where most of the volume is. Souls, not having a physical presence, can overlap with matter without any problem. They float around inside human bodies, drawing energy from the Universe, doing their thinking, and tunneling information back and forth to appropriate places in the brain, in the same way that a sight blob's vision is sent into my brain. That was why I'd been able to get NP-fingertips and sight blobs to send sensory information to me, because the Universe has a mechanism to send information from one point to another. [[As I learned later, there really isn't such a thing as "one point to another". Essentially all points are at the same place, so it isn't difficult for the information to make the journey. The only really tricky part for my ki-effects is changing the informations' format as the brain's pre-processing is skipped, but the Universe's Consciousness is very good at highly repetitive, dumb tasks, as it has no personality to get bored or distracted. As long as I keep telling it what I want, it will keep doing it.]] I hadn't been able to resist using the word "soul" to differentiate between that part of the mind that operated in the brain (which, after this discovery, I called "mind") with that part of it that operated outside of it (which I called "soul" as it was totally insubstantial). Another alternative was "mind" for the higher-level external stuff and "sub-mind" for the lower level brain-based stuff. That would have been consistent with the "conscious" and "subconscious" nomenclature, but I preferred "soul". Blame my irreverent sense of humor. [Later on I got tired of my "soul" joke and just used "mind", as is clear from what you've already read. It either doesn't matter or is obvious from the context whether I'm referring to the higher or lower mind.] I now knew that I had no danger of running out of room for my minds. Those parts of them that ran in my brain were already optimized to get rid of all the unnecessary duplications - Mr. No One was part of that - so more minds wouldn't noticeably increase the physical load on my brain. The non-physical load was even less of a problem because each merge or upgrade increases my proximity range. It now has a non-déjà vu'd radius of 1,008 feet (307 meters), so provided PLENTY of volume for all my individual minds. I could fit a million more minds into that volume, except that every time I add more minds the volume they can reach increases so I'll never reach that particular limit. That didn't guarantee that there weren't other limits that might bite me in the ass, but it was nice to know running out of room wasn't one of them. Not long after that, I got some insight into the energy tapping process: When I create a blob, NP-fingertip or an Energy Sink, the energy to run it comes from the Universe. It's the Universe I'm interacting with to get it to do the work or send me the information I want, so that made sense. Ki projection, my proximity sense, and the tunneling of information between my minds and brain, are me using energy. The energy may have been tapped from the Universe initially, but I'm directing the energy itself. Those abilities are shorter ranged and very restricted in the power they can apply because I'm not as skillful or as powerful as the Universal Consciousness. There's a minor and unimportant special case with my disconnecting my proximity sense from me and making it into a blob; that requires the Universal Consciousness making up the energy shortfall. It was actually 'unnatural' and could never have been made to work but for my having an extraordinary amount of willpower. I learned quite a lot about how the energy is handled for those things. I spent some time trying to squeeze some benefit out of this information, for example, by sending one of my minds to the very edge of my proximity sense, to hopefully extend my range farther in that direction, but it didn't work. My impression was that it might be possible, but I didn't understand enough yet. My learning process had started, and I thought that understanding more about how the Universe's energy is handled was bound to be useful one day; just not yet. I was still playing around with the above issue when I had another insight that I wasn't sure whether I could get excited about or not. I learned that every part of space has an address that defines its location exactly, and the Universe is easily able to tell it to me for places within my proximity sense, that being the volume in which the Universe's Consciousness directly communicates with my minds. The last time I'd got location information from the Universe it'd been the positions of ki-effects relative to me. I'd gotten very excited about removing my maximum range limit, had spent many hours trying very hard to make it work, and had ended up failing. This was an absolute positioning system though - still in exactly the same x, y, z format but with much BIGGER numbers - so maybe that'd make a difference. After my initial hope had surged and then settled into a depressed reaction - because I had wasted a LOT of effort last time - the first real use of absolute positioning that I thought of was fairly boring: to change how my sense of direction worked. It currently kept track of my movements in the manner of an inertial navigation system. That wasn't ideal because errors could accumulate and I'd be lost if I was moved without being aware of it, such as when I was drugged. An absolute positioning system, such as GPS satellites provide and my new insight offered, would be much better as I'd be able to know exactly where I was regardless of any previous confusion. [I subsequently got my sense of direction to use both 'inertial' and 'GPS-like' systems. The new approach didn't work if I lost track of the time, through being drugged say.] While I was playing around with direction sensing, including trying to overcome the several very real problems (explained shortly), its apparent reliability made me start getting excited over the "no maximum range" possibility, so I changed to work on that. With only a little effort, I was able to get sight blobs to send me their spatial address in the new absolute perspective rather than the previous relative-to-me form. From now on it was going to be REALLY hard, because the absolute positioning values changed extremely rapidly even if I was lying in bed - and by "extremely rapidly" I'm talking about millions of miles per hour (the units weren't in miles, but back when I'd been playing with relative positioning I'd quickly got a good feel for how far "1.0" was). There was no way I could consciously work with numbers that were changing so fast, so I had to find another way. That would clearly take so much effort, and my last positioning attempt had failed so dismally, that I decided to try for a proof of concept first. I entered the x, y, z values for the location of the end of my nose into a spreadsheet every ten seconds for a minute to see if they had a pattern to their change. Unfortunately all three values were changing by amounts too inconsistent to be explained by my timings being a few fractions of a second out. I had a reasonable idea what could be going on and some research confirmed it: The Earth spins at about 1,000 miles per hour on the Equator (less at other latitudes, by very simple trig calculations), the Earth's orbit around the Sun is at 67,000 mph, our solar system orbits the hub of the Milky Way at 560,000 mph, the Milky Way orbits the center of its Local Group of galaxies at just over 1,000,000 miles per hour, and the Universe's expansion rate leaves all those numbers in its intergalactic dust. Astrophysicists would cut off several of their body parts to know the last number as it's extremely important in many scientific debates, so I was amused by it being the easiest one for me to calculate, as it was the largest and in the straightest line. (It's so important because galaxies are not 'really' moving apart; rather the intergalactic space is expanding. If you connected two galaxies with a tape measure and left it in place, their distance apart wouldn't alter. If you later brought the tape measure home and compared it to another measure you'd left in your pocket, the unused one would have its graduation marks closer together. So if you re-measured the intergalactic distance with the unused tape, the two galaxies would be farther apart - which is why my coordinates changed. How fast space itself is 'stretching' has huge implications for astrophysicists.) It amazed me that I could be the first human ever to know that value fairly accurately. I also knew the EXACT distance the Earth was from the center of the Universe (in this dimension), as that was obviously where the x, y, and z values originated. Once I knew the expansion rate, I could easily remove its influence on the spreadsheeted numbers to let me calculate the next largest term, and then the next largest, etc. Spins and orbits are a real bitch, but I ended up with some simple formula that if I typed in my nose's current location REALLY fast (which I can do very quickly, especially as I had most of the leading digits already entered into three adjacent cells so I only need to type in the last few digits for the x, y and z values), then hit F9, the spreadsheet would display where my the program calculated my nose would be in half a second, that being where I'd try to create a sight blob. My calculations were only approximate and the speeds were so great that even a fraction of a second's mistiming would produce a result that was far outside my maximum range, but that's what I wanted. If my procedure had been perfectly accurate, I would've added a 2,000 feet to the result to guarantee I was sending the blob to a location that was out of my range (my current maximum range was 1,500 feet. It's been just over 500 feet for most of this document, but that has recently increased as my proximity range has extended outward). It took me five failures before my ordering a sight blob at the coordinates the spreadsheet was displaying gave me a momentary flash of vision. I would've considered any flash of sight a success, but as it happened the one I got was from a location that was obviously at a very high altitude, judging by the size and curvature of the Earth. I'd just successfully broken my maximum range limit. Now I 'just' had to develop a practical way of using absolute addresses to create ki-effects that persisted for more than a fraction of a second and which I could steer. There was no way my brain could consciously process the rapidly changing absolute addresses fast enough, so I had to find a way of processing it non-consciously. With the encouragement provided by the momentary flash of sight, I set to work. Our subconsciouses can take a stupid number of repetitions to learn a new skill - such as catching a ball - but they do get there in the end. They're also adaptable, managing to make the necessary three-dimensional adjustments required to catch a ball while rolling down a hill on a skateboard. I managed to get my subconsciouses to manage ki-effects in much the same way as they manage flying balls: not by deliberate calculations, but by heuristic familiarity. It took a LOT of practice, initially all of it within my proximity range, but eventually beyond it. Even after a lot of subconscious training, it was by no means a perfect solution: Unless I made the mental effort to change my mindset, I could create ki-effects only within my proximity range. That was a backward step compared to previously because I had been able to create them at locations that I could observe accurately or which had an intensely familiar spatial relationship to me through long association. Once created though, I could move the ki-effects farther and farther away, my previous maximum range being irrelevant. That was the good news; the bad news was that beyond my proximity range I had to move the effects slowly enough that I could stay aware of their spatial relationship to me. That speed was initially very slow, although it improved with practice. Another thing that improved was that once I got a sight blob to a distant location, I was able to create NP-fingertips or other ki-effects there, rather than having to create them all near me. The sight blobs' speed became the limiting factor, so I spent many hours working on increasing that. Pedantically speaking, blobs don't have a speed as such because they're just volumes of the Universe that are cooperating with me: for example, sight blobs cooperate by sending me information about the photons that pass through their volume. Despite not being a "thing", blobs were very much speed constrained. I couldn't create a sight blob in the Oval Office because my knowledge of its spatial relationship to me is impossibly imprecise. To move a sight blob from one location to the next, it first had to look at it long enough for me to be subconsciously familiar with the new location's spatial relationship to me. Moving the sight blob too quickly disoriented my knowledge of its location and it self-canceled. My minds spent MANY hours having sight blob races to build up our speeds! Each of my minds had to learn this, but our subconscious skills leak quite a lot so it was more of a collective effort than a bunch of individual ones. I've got myself able to keep track of the location of a sight blob flying in the open sky if it's zipping along at less than about five hundred feet per second (340 mph; 550 kph). If it flies through an unknown building with lots of corners and doors, then its top speed is less than a tenth of the open-sky maximum. I hope to improve those speeds further, but diminishing returns are already obvious so I'm approaching my maximum. If the President misbehaves again, I can be at home while I'm sending a sight blob to the White House, although it'd take over eight hours to get there at the current speed. Once it finds him, even if he's inside the Oval Office, I can create the Guardian Angel RIGHT UNDER HIS NOSE, and I can use NP to teach him a lesson he won't ever forget. I ALMOST hope he misbehaves! Destroying Air Force bases and the other attacks I made as part of my nuclear almost-war would be a great deal easier and safer for me now. I could leave a sight blob in DC permanently to save travel time. Or better still, have a visible Guardian Angel follow the President EVERYWHERE he goes. He could NEVER escape it because it can see in the dark, move through any intervening matter including any bodyguards that try to block it, and I never need to sleep. I'm sure my 1,344 minds (currently and ignoring déjà vu's), wouldn't mind spending just over one minute a day each tormenting the Prez by keeping the angel looking over his shoulder continuously. I made a mental note that I REALLY, REALLY need to find a way to have more than two sight sources. If I could operate multiple sight sources, not only could I freak the Prez out, but I could make up a story about an angel returning to Earth to pick up where Majestic Countdown left off. It'd be FAR more effective because maybe dozens of it could be permanently active all around the country. Not just snooping computer and paper files, but following decision-makers, watching deals being made, and possibly even listening in on meetings - I've GOT to get sound blobs going too. The new Majestic Countdown could form a good working relationship with MAF, making that organization even more effective, which would please Mom and Vanessa a great deal. Not only is MAF stopping the predations of many Government employees and forcing their punishment, but it's equally helping the innocent victims of those abuses. Helping that many Davids get from under the Goliaths that have been abusing them is VERY Good work and I'd like to help it more. With enough sight blobs, not only could I keep current with every leading university's ongoing work in physics and math, and the other subjects that I'm adding, but also every other research institution too, many of which doubtless have highly restricted access, which wouldn't restrict my sight blobs' accesses at all. Plus there's a one-off thing I want to do: send a sight blob to Israel to hurry the Knesset along because they still haven't achieved anything beyond generating occasional heated rhetoric over the Mossad's operation against me. At the sight blob's current maximum speed it'd take one the best part of 24 hours to get to Israel, presuming I never lost concentration during the journey, which I'm getting pretty good at - I'm training my subconsciouses to do it because they're good at such things. The travel time is annoyingly long, but I'm seriously tempted to send one even though it'd mean I'd be restricted to my own eyesight around me for a day. It has been so long since the Mossad was caught that I'm worried that the angel's not taking action is being seen as a weakness. I'm holding off sending a sight blob to Israel because I'd feel terribly insecure if I didn't have the normal use of a sight blob for 24 hours, and I'm hoping to improve on my existing capabilities soon. A few loose ends are worth a brief mention: Most of the recent insights would probably be too advanced for the five-merge Marks, but hopefully they'll be given a giant hand up starting in three months, so they'll grow into being capable of using my new discoveries. It's amazing to think that I can send and receive information from a sight blob across the country. It seemed so amazing that I had to test it. From the testing I've done so far, distance doesn't seem to be a problem. I sent a sight blob six hundred miles away and it worked fine, including my successfully doing some remote NP and heat blobbing to make sure they worked that far away. The Knesset can expect a visit from a Guardian Angel soon, preferably after I increase my sight blob's flying speed substantially or somehow get multiple sight blobs working without superimposition. The w-dimension addresses I get from my new w-address sense are quite different types of addresses than the physical addresses light blobs are using now. Light blob addresses are a quantitative, xyz-coordinate system, while w-dimension addresses are analog. Speaking of addresses, does anyone know Jessica Alba's? ^ Those aren't the only insights I had, but they're enough to give you an idea of the type of insights they were. In December last year, I reached 128 minds and leveled off for five months because of the discovery of the "+32 And Double-Up System". I'd had a few mildly useful ability gains during that plateau, but nothing to get very excited about. Then I'd jumped to 320 minds over a ten-day period. A week later I'd started having several insights at the technique level. Now I've got just over four times as many minds and I'm suddenly getting more profound and fundamental information from the Universe. [[Not that it matters, but the information is from the Universe's Consciousness. I barely knew of the Consciousness's existence and didn't yet understand its nature.]] Given the importance of what I was learning, I put off the final upgrade for a few days. Six days after the sixteenth upgrade, the insight process seemed to have run its course. I could've learned more by pushing the process with more experiments, but I could do that after the next upgrade and probably better. I made June 18 the day for the seventeenth and final upgrade, as it'd take me to 1,792 minds which will be slightly more than the other Marks will end up with after I unleash the Second-Tier Helper seeds to start the "W-Dimension-Wide, Five-Merge Mark Upgrade" process. I'm unsure what will be done about the lower-merged Marks, but that's not my problem. In about four months there'll be a significant and steadily rising number of Marks with nearly as many minds as I'll have, who will decide and do what needs to be done. I'm looking forward to stopping my Voyage of Discovery so I can give my life my full attention secure in the knowledge that I'm never going to be leaving my dimension again, whether: semi-voluntarily as part of my Voyage, involuntarily because my Voyage caused my head to explode or suffer some other calamitous disaster, or because some baddies do something that forces me to merge to gain more power. I'll have so much power that I can't imagine anyone living long enough to threaten me ever again. I can imagine several ways through my defenses, but no enemy is ever going to learn my abilities well enough to avoid revealing himself. For example, if anyone tries to put poison into my food, it will almost certainly be done while inside my proximity range. That loser won't have an opportunity to learn from his mistake. Amusingly, if a bad person does somehow manage to kill me - by poisoning Corvallis's water supply say, because the usual methods aren't going to have much chance of succeeding - obviously I'd do my best to stop the assassination method from working, but I'd also be VERY tempted to upgrade with another Mark so if my body dies, my minds would carry on. That'd be silly because there are going to be God knows how many millions or billions of copies of most of my minds out there anyway, but the urge to do so would be very strong. The urge for self-preservation isn't affected by how many selves are already out there. There was a test of the new w-dimension address skill that I'd been saving for the upgrade. I don't enjoy imagining licking vomit to cause a dichotomy-cancellation, so I waited until I was linked with one of the 448-minded Marks, then I commanded the déjà vu link to end in the same way it does naturally: a quick "falling apart" sort of sensation. It successfully ended the link without causing an upgrade. It was good to know that I could quickly, easily and pleasantly end déjà vu's with or without performing an upgrade. I should also be easily able to extend déjà vu's beyond their normal duration, although I couldn't think of a use for that. Potentially I could even hold a link permanently open, but that was effectively the same as doing an upgrade so there was no point to it. I re-linked to my previous déjà vu partner, then commanded the link to be cut off abruptly, doing my 17th upgrade. I now had 1,792 minds, as did the second-tier helper I'd just been linked to. One other had 1,344 minds, one 896, and twelve had 448. I had just finished the active part of my Voyage of Discovery. Now I just have to wait three months to make sure nothing goes wrong and then I'll give the nod to my second-tier helpers to start the Universe-wide upgrade rollout. I blocked the w-addresses of myself and the other 1,792-minded Mark. As the rest of my second-tier helpers finished their current déjà vu's, I blocked them too. I preferred to take things a little cautiously now that I'd reached the final level. I counted my fingers and toes and did many other tests; 1,792 minds can think of and do a LOT of tests. Everything seemed to be fine, without the slightest sign of any problem. I hadn't expected there to be, but the confirmation still felt mighty good now that the risks of the unknown were almost over. The only new risk I had ahead of me was from déjà vu'ing with other huge-minded Marks and I'll test that shortly. I was already feeling great relief that I had survived my Voyage, excluding the several times my various bodies had died. When I wasn't linked to anyone else, the basic statistics tested out to be, or calculated to be when I couldn't test them easily: Proximity range is now 1,344 feet (410 meters). It's detailed enough that I can see the process of laying down new toenail material, can see individual muscle filaments working, and can even see the details of houseflies having sex - the improved resolution is a mixed blessing. My maximum ki-effects range is 1,838 feet (560 meters), not that it matters much any more as I can send sight blobs as far away as I want, although they're slower and there's not NEARLY as many of them as I'd like. Having only two is ridiculous and TERRIBLY limiting. There are 1,792 fingertips per mind, so just over 3.2 million in total now. Maximum width is 896 inches (nearly 75 feet; 22.7 meters). Minimum width is 1/896th of an inch. Heck, let's call it a thousandth of an inch, not to split hairs - although I nearly could now, since that's about their width. The Blinks Allowed Effect should be just short of 28 hours! I'm still waiting for this test to finish; I'll get back to you. My maximum force is nearly 1.7 billion kilograms (nearly 1.9 million tons). The amount of heat, light, electricity and magnetism that I can radiate is 46,000 megawatts, about 40 times more than that puny little nuclear power station that I compared myself to earlier. (Each energy form has it's own unit of measure, but watts will do here. I favor them because people understand them the best, and through my mother's side I'm actually a distant descendant of their namesake. I'm amused that James Watt was a major contributor to the Industrial Revolution's starting, and one of his descendants will be responsible for whatever Revolution(s) my scientific discoveries will trigger.) I googled "power consumption per country" and only eight countries annually consume more megawatt-hours of electricity than I can supply. If I déjà vu with just the other big Mark, my output exceeds every country in the world's except for the US's, and I'm only slightly below even that very high figure. In a three-way déjà vu with the next highest Mark, I could easily satisfy even America's total electricity consumption, which is about a fifth of the world's total. It's BIZARRE that I can do that! They're a weird set of values. The proximity range is nice, as it covers our main hilltop reasonably well - just the hilltop, about 13% of our property's total land area - but it's hardly super impressive. Compare that to the maximum NP force which is strong enough to lift 22 million people, or the energy output which is enough to power a large country, those being UNBELIEVABLY beyond "super-impressive" [[Proximity is dependent on the quality and power of my very limited mind, while NP and blobs draw directly from the Universe's energy supply, which it has bucket loads of. REALLY big buckets too!]] God knows what I could possibly do with more than a tiny fraction of 1.7 billion kilograms of NP force or 46,000 megawatts of energy. Perhaps I could be a meteorite defense for the Earth, to deflect any dangerous incoming meteors. Out of curiosity I googled Halley's Comet [for your interest: "comets" are lumps of dust and ice in space, "asteroids" are lumps of stone in space, "meteors" are what comets and asteroids are called when they enter the atmosphere, "meteorites" are meteors that reach the ground.] Halley's Comet has a mass of somewhat over 2E14 kg, so 100,000 times more massive than I could push at 1 g. That meant my "Meteorite Defense" idea was practical because most meteors would be far smaller than Halley's Comet, or I could even deflect something as large as Halley's by pushing against it for several hours if I got enough warning. Putting myself into big déjà vu's would help greatly too. Everything checked out with myself as a solo act - although my having 1,792 minds is stretching the definition of "solo" - so it was time to let some déjà vu's happen. With the number of minds I have now, the Universe can't wait to link me. That's both a facetious and literally true wording. It implies the Universe was eager, but its Consciousness doesn't work that way. Nor does its Consciousness have any sense of "waiting"; it just exists and reacts [[the Universe is not at all proactive, but it is amazingly reactive; the Wavefunction Collapse process being just one of the ways it does that]]. The chance of an individual déjà vu is the same as it's always been. WAY back in the bad old days when I'd had one mind, déjà vu's were about two years apart. Links between the two Big Marks are now 1,792^2 more frequent, so would happen roughly every twenty seconds if the mathematical progression didn't have restraints on its effect. At this level déjà vu's should last about twenty five minutes, so I'm rarely going to be out of déjà vu unless I'm deliberately stopping them, as I am now. As part of my cautious, final tests, I'd already told my Helpers that I'd use one of the smallest of them as a messenger boy - call him "Mark5" because he was the fifth largest of us (equal with eleven others). First I made him déjà vu with me so I could tell him that I was fine and give him my requests, then I ended our link and connected him with the other big Mark ("Mark2"), then back to me to report. He informed me that Mark2 had carried out all his individual tests and was fine too. Then I got Mark5 to sequentially link with Mark3 (1,344 minds) and Mark4 (896 minds), then report back to me. Everyone was fine. Then I repeated the process using Mark4 as the messenger with the bigger Marks, giving them more time to carry out several tests. Everyone was still fine. Then I repeated it again using Mark3 with Mark2 and me in turn. Again fine. Then I linked Mark2 and me together. There were now 3,584 minds in each of our heads, our abilities tested out fine and we weren't having any difficulties that either of us could sense. I gave it several minutes then added Mark3 to make a three-way total 4,928 minds in each of our heads. The Big 3 three-way was going to be happening more often than not once I let control go, so we might as well test it now. There were no problems. Who would ever have dreamed that a person could have nearly 5,000 minds in his head - or that general vicinity - without his brain exploding! I ended my current déjà vu's then formed two-way links with each of the twelve 448-minded Marks in turn, so I could bring them totally up to date, as they were our conduit to get the word out to the five-merge Marks. By the way, the 1,344-minded Helper Mark had recently developed the same w-dimension control ability, but we had agreed that I was the guy in charge so I did the management. If we both 'played' with a setting, such as blocking or unblocking someone from linking, then whichever one of us acted last determined the result. I'd also sent him some of the w-addresses I'd memorized and got him to try them, but they'd failed. I'd thought they would because they'd felt relative to me. He'll memorize his own list. If either of us upgrade out of our current dimensions - which we plan not to happen EVER again - then when our minds are in their new dimension, they'll have to forget their previous w-address lists and memorize new ones. After completing those careful links successfully, I removed the w-dimension controls to let nature take its course while we got on with our lives. It was possible that I might have mental overflow problems of some sort in the future, especially in about four months when I might get into three- or four-way déjà vu's with Marks who had getting up to 1,500 minds each. Maybe having that much heat at my fingertips (to mix my metaphors and abilities) might fry my brain. I didn't expect that to happen, but I'd certainly be wary for a while. The good news was that presuming I wasn't immediately killed by such an event, I'd be safe from it thereafter because I could easily prevent multi-way déjà vu links from forming. We could restrict ourselves to two-way déjà vu's, which would be fine. I'd already spent a lot of time with more than 3,000 minds in my head thanks to the recent multi-ways, so the future was looking pretty safe now. Within seconds of my removing the w-dimension controls, Mark2 and I déjà vu'd. That doubled my proximity range to half a mile, which was nice. I'd like it to be even larger, but half a mile was still pretty good. As I'd so often wished for, I could be in the Kids' House and use my abilities at the front gate, without needing to extend my range with a sight blob journey. Heck, I had the unextended range to be in the Adults' House and do anything I wanted where the FBI's surveillance van had parked. I already had energy sinks over the Main and Kids' Houses, our Office, and the paths between them, as well as mobile protections around myself and my loved ones when I could see them, but detecting a shooter in proximity before he pulled the trigger would be better, if only by reducing the staff's risk. Déjà vu'ing also increased my NP force and megawattage by factors of eight, which I had no conceivable use for as I wasn't intending to supply all of America's electricity. It also invalidated my duration test for the Blinks Allowed Effect, but I didn't lose any sleep over it. ------- Chapter 416: The Upgrades; Meanwhile, on the Home Front Sunday, May 25 to Wednesday, June 18, 2008 (Continued) My Voyage of Discovery had started seven months ago and I've not written much about my life over that time, other than the interlude to describe my SCS project. There was little point in writing about lives I was going to be continually leaving. There was also less reason to write because there was less to write about, as I focused my successive lives on my families instead of the external activities my unlucky hosts had started after their victorious removals of their Surveillance Problems. By coincidence, the Voyage of Discovery had sailed into homeport, dropped anchor and paid off the captain just after the end-of-year exams finished. I'd CREAMED my degrees. That's a more complicated statement than it seems. When I had merged for the eighth time I'd decided to stay put for several months. I'd upgraded my computer system to sixty four screens because I had a great deal of reading to do and spare minds that weren't being utilized well. After the computer upgrade, I'd had 128 minds studying on sixty four screens for five months, so I'd screamed through the huge amount of work that all the courses for fifteen MS degrees entailed. I'd been doing INCREDIBLY well and blowing OSU and the world's other universities away, and then I'd killed myself. The Mark that I merged into in mid-May, just a month before finals, had spent all the year studying with thirty two minds on a 36-screen computer system. On the other hand, the Mark-minds that arrived remembered everything they'd learned, so it didn't matter too much that the host Mark had been cruising along previously, except that the host had already taken most of his exams. By May 17 there had been 320 of us. My discovering upgrades soon thereafter meant I'd had a very rapidly increasing number of minds, so the last few exams couldn't have been easier. Like I said, my education performance was a complicated issue, but I - however you define "I"' - had still creamed the degrees. If I'd had trouble in the recent exams, I could have quickly déjà vu'd repeatedly until I found a Mark that knew the answer - that being a technique which will be very useful in our future science careers. I'd done all the reading and assignments for the fifteen Master of Science degrees that OSU provided, even though I was formally doing only two of them: Physics: Experimental Physics, Computational Physics, Theoretical AMO Physics, Nuclear and Particle Physics, Solid State Physics. Mathematics: Algebra, Analysis, Applied Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Differential Equations, Geometry, Number Theory, Numerical Analysis, Topology, Probability. I'd taken all the exams for the first Physics and Math specialties listed - ExPx and Algebra - plus as many other exams in the other specialties as time permitted, letting OSU randomly choose which custom-written exams to give me as a way of proving I was on top of everything. In the middle of the academic year, Prof had started the bidding war for the universities that wanted me next. The competing universities weren't bidding money, although research funding was one item in their offers, but were 'bidding' how far they'd go to offer me the environment that best suited me. I had strange learning processes, I wasn't willing to be given scut work as a TA (Teachers Assistant), nor willing to work on theses that supported professors' areas of interest. For the next couple of years the plan was for me to continue to take in a huge amount of diverse information, and only when I was at the leading edge in several fields would I turn around and start trying to produce new output, hopefully amazing stuff because of how much synthesis I could do. Despite my strange requirements, the universities had all been FRANTICALLY eager because my exam quantity and quality proved that I was the greatest math and physics genius the world had ever seen. In one sense, I was misleading them as my IQ, although into genius territory, wasn't anything special. So far my studies had been almost entirely book learning, so my lack of extreme genius had yet to matter. That it will matter later doesn't worry me because, as all guys' know, quantity is at least as important as quality: I'll have a billion or more Marks helping me produce a quantity of science that will be able to far exceed everyone's expectations and hopes for me. On May 24 I'd discovered the non-death upgrade method, which had two important implications in addition to the FANTASTICALLY wonderful aspect of leaving me alive. First, my staying in this dimension meant I could make some serious plans. For example, I'd chosen to go to MIT in Boston, was enrolled for 6 PhDs plus several undergraduate and master's degrees, and was now thinking of increasing my workload because I have over a thousand spare minds. An even more amazing implication of the new upgrade method is that ALL of the Marks are in the same boat. Certainly the fifteen Second-Tier Helpers that'd gotten up to at least 448 minds, but every other Mark when we start upgrading them in three months. They might start their education a little slowly with their meager 32-mind setups, but they shouldn't have too much trouble catching up when they jump to having about 1,500 minds. I want the "Universal Mark Upgrade" process to go slowly for safety reasons, so some of them should wait a few months, but the delay would be irrelevant compared to a lifetime of benefits thereafter. I could live a life of physical pleasure - lying around on tropical beaches with dozens of bikini-less babes - while I simultaneously have a sight blob in my downstairs study with 1,000 minds working away diligently. Two things were for sure: I want to have FAR more sight blobs, and then I have to take over part of one of the tunnel's excavated storerooms and turn it into a massively upgraded downstairs study. Even when I'm in a lab or attending a guest lecture at MIT, I want to be studying, and doing that at our hilltop home would be the most secure. Being able to protect myself from bombs and bullets, as well as any of my loved ones near me, made me far less reluctant to stand out - as my MIT educational plan implies - but my reading so many screens at once while my body was miles away is an ability I need to keep quiet. The Government would freak out if they knew I could very remotely operate and read computer screens through walls and solid rock. If I can get even one more sight blob going, then I'll install MIT's entire online database on our intranet at home so my accessing so much of it won't be trackable, and I'll leave a sight blob in my downstairs study permanently (I'll only create a much larger study if I can get multiple sight blobs going, as one or two of them don't have enough resolution to read hundreds of screens). I'd LOVE to have far more sight blobs - having only two sight sources with 1,792 minds is TERRIBLY limiting. If I can get enough sight blobs going, I could have one on permanent overwatch for everyone in my families, which would let me keep them covered by energy sinks. And if I can develop multiple proximity blobs, then those can protect my loved ones as well, as they would let me detect almost anything untoward happening nearby. Not just people feeling worrisome emotions - hatred, anger, extreme caution, righteousness, etc. - but even just the presence of guns or explosives as I can detect different types of matter far better than airport X-ray machines. As hard as it's been to get more than two sight blobs going - i.e., impossible so far - multiple proximity blobs is likely to be even harder as the nature of my proximity sense is quite special, being wrapped up in my sense of self. Even though I have multiple selves mentally, that seems not to help me get past thinking of myself in the singular. I've spent a lot of time trying to make multiple proximity blobs, but it's proved surprisingly impossible. I blame my formative years because they deeply trained me into thinking of myself as a single mind and body. [[The Universe was blaming something else: when it came to my special abilities, it was interacting with my collection of multiple human-sized minds as if it was one huge mind. That was fantastic to me because it made all my special abilities possible, but it also automatically restricted me to having only one proximity sense 'organ'.]] Another major change I think I want to make to my and my girls' lives - if the girls agree when I bring it up with them shortly - is for us to remain in Corvallis. I can put the "Oops, I Left My Jacket At Our Restaurant Table" plan into top gear, so I can fly across-country in minutes, removing the need for us to move away from Corvallis in preparation for my starting at MIT. Carol and Nevaeh can finish school here, Julia can continue to attend OSU for her BBA rather than transferring - although she plans to do an MBA at Harvard after she finishes her BBA here - and I'll commute back and forth to MIT. I can probably get there quicker than Dad can to his work. Staying in Corvallis would mean that we can continue to live with all our loved ones and see our friends. The world will have to get used to the Guardian Angel flying me around. With my massively upgraded abilities and new ones such as my energy sink, I have a great deal more confidence about being able to handle any problems that are likely to come up, and quite a few problems that are unlikely too. My security will be especially assured if I can develop multiple sight and sound blobs because then America's and even the world's leading spy agencies are going to be THOROUGHLY snooped on, if not actually supervised! At the least, once all my 'spies' are in place, including on the President and all his top advisors, I'll do something spectacular in public, and then watch VERY carefully to see how the people in power react. Anyone that tries to make me or my families part of his business will be surprised by a Guardian Angel popping into existence right in front of him, to deliver a very painful, public and quite possibly terminal lesson. It'll be interesting to observe how the others in power react to that. After a few such lessons, I imagine the people in power will have some SERIOUS respect for God's servant on Earth. Overcoming my horrendous input constraint will be my top research priority. If I succeed at that, asking the girls about canceling our proposed move across the country is next, then my beginning to do a great deal of flying in public. Meanwhile I'll enjoy bikini season (a.k.a. summer)! Life is going to be AMAZING. My life's amazingness is not just in the short term either. As Prof has long been, I'm extremely excited about where my scientific career will take me. None of the courses I'm learning are useful yet, but the PhDs I'm going to be doing at MIT during the next academic year are going to have many elements of leading edge material in them, and the work I'll be doing after that will be pushing hard against MANY leading edges of science. With the stupendous amount of new knowledge that I'll be accumulating, the enormous multiplier of my inter-dimensional grapevine, and when I get to having people working for me, my ability to direct hundreds of them through emails, will mean I'm going to be unprecedentedly productive. Shortly after the Mossad Problem was solved, the grapevine of Marks agreed that one of the rewards of my being the Voyager is that I'll get first pick of what university subjects I want. The rest of the Marks will randomly determine their degree specialties from as many subjects as we can summon any enthusiasm at all for, which will be damned near all of the useful ones - so excluding English obviously, but including almost every possible science, engineering and business major. Each Mark can share any dull-but-potentially-useful topics across his many minds so it won't be too onerous for any of them, probably including a few foreign languages in case of more spies and because I see my future impact as global. With a billion 1,500-minded Marks, plus however many of the currently smaller-minded Marks there are to upgrade, doing research in pretty much everything useful, and synergizing internally and externally, our collective discoveries are going to change the worlds in God knows how many different ways. Other than the phenomenal advantage my internal and external networking will give me, my special abilities aren't otherwise directly applicable to my science career. Even with my IQ having been raised because of my merges - and diminishing returns will have limited that increase a long time ago - my abilities don't solve mathematical equations for me or give me insights into string theory. I somehow suspect that Prof will still be happy with my accomplishments though. I'll be VERY happy to prove that the parents' faith in me, and their hard decisions about protecting me, were not only right but understated my value enormously. As you can tell, I'm very excited about my future. ^ Almost immediately after the Voyage of Discover paid off its captain, I pushed Nevaeh to visit her family in the evening to get her out of the way so I could have a frank discussion with all of my families. Unlike as has been the case with Ava, Nevaeh's deeply ingrained Christian upbringing makes her intrinsically untrustworthy. She's too irrational, too unpredictable, and too likely to try to harm us if she suddenly learns we're not 'officially' Good, because Evil would be the only other alternative that she'll see. Christians too easily see Evil in everything they don't agree with, and the truth about me is not Christian, which she'd too easily take as anti-Christian. Encouraging Nevaeh to visit her parents was the best way for the rest of us to have a long conversation about my abilities. [We are trying to SLOWLY edge her closer to the truth, but we're being very cautious. It's not clear that we'll ever get there as the final revelation will be very hard to introduce in acceptable stages. It may be that she leaves us before we get to the truth's point of no return, although there's no sign of her leaving as all of us are very happy with the status quo. It's a strange moral situation: Yes, we are lying to her, but she's EXTREMELY happy, and if we did tell her the truth, she'd be extremely unhappy while she judged us from a very Christian perspective, which is another bunch of lies. It would be great if I could disabuse her of both sets of lies at the same time, but I can't think of a way to do that. Judging by her happiness, two wrongs are currently a wonderful right, and divulging my truth or asking her to leave to avoid the ongoing deception would be more hurtful than anything else.] The parents had a large ongoing worry about more gunmen coming after me or us. I've only written at length about two such sniper attacks and the guy our guards shot running toward the Adults' House just after my resurrection, but there were also two imminent handgun attacks on me that I intercepted myself (one guy the angel shot in his knees, the other in his head), and our security guys and the local cops have also intercepted a couple of would-be shooters. Plus there have been several spontaneous attacks from unarmed people angry at the suddenly sight of me. Some of those could have got nasty as the attackers grabbed whatever improvised weapons were handy. The parents' worry was a very real one and I wanted to ease their concerns about it. I wanted to show them what will happen when someone shoots a gun at me or anyone near me from now on. I gathered them in the living room, warned Mom not to panic, and slowly pulled out a pistol. I let them see me pointing it at the TV, I put an NP box around all of us to prevent the sound getting out and alarming our guards, and an energy sink in front of the TV, then I pulled the trigger. The bullet stopped halfway to its target, then dropped to the floor. [Just as heat blobs had one setting for how much energy they emitted, energy sinks had been invented/discovered with only one setting. It wasn't for how much energy they absorbed as, for an unknown reason, energy sinks were more discriminating, working on a threshold system. The setting effectively meant: "Anything with more energy than the setting has its energy reduced to that of the setting." Unfortunately, if I set it low enough to stop a bullet hurting, then the energy sink interfered with other energies that I wanted to carry on working unimpeded, such as internal combustion engines. I'd had to dial the setting high enough not to interfere with useful energies, in which case if someone did shoot through a shield, the bullet would hurt like a bitch! Chances were that we wouldn't be too badly injured if shot, but the situation had hardly been ideal. I'd been unhappy enough that I'd managed to get the Universe to let me independently control the two 'judgments' that energy sinks made. Now anything with more energy than Control#1's value gets its energy drained down to Control#2's value. Control#1 is set at a high value, and Control#2 at a very low one. We're vulnerable to someone hitting us on the head with a club, but bullets will stop almost dead and then fall to our feet.] I explained, "I call it the 'Ava Shield' because Ava's arm's injury was my inspiration for inventing this. It functions similar to a blob, but it's easiest to think of as a shape made out of thick NP-plates. Anything moving at normal speeds passes straight through the Shield without any effect at all, but anything moving very fast, such as a bullet, will be almost instantly slowed to a crawl and will then fall to the ground normally. The Ava Shield will also block any explosions outside it from affecting anyone inside it, so we're also safe from those. Even something as big as a bomb or cruise missile aimed at our property will be slowed down when it touches the Shield." Something long, such as a cruise missile, won't pancake itself if the front of it suddenly slows down when it enters an Ava Shield. That portion of the object outside the shield will also slow down as it transfers its energy forward through its body to that portion of it inside the shield, where the energy will be removed. -- "I've recently placed an invisible Ava Shield over our ENTIRE property, like a tent from the walls up to a peak about twenty feet over this house. Anyone trying to shoot into our property from anywhere outside it, even from a helicopter, will have their bullets rendered harmless like I just demonstrated. I've left a 'well' directly over our helicopter pad so helicopters can land there. No one can shoot out of that well, and if helicopters try to land anywhere else on our property they'll have major problems when they contact the shield, and will have a hard landing or worse if they were coming in at a bad angle. We'll have to alert our staff to make sure they warn any low-flying helicopters to keep far enough away and only to descend onto and off our pad vertically. I'll make sure that the FAA issues a NOTAM requiring that." (NOTAM is "Notice To Airmen": a warning and advisory system that pilots receive and had better pay attention to.) -- "The Ava Shield over our property has a thickness of a foot. It's only things that are within that thickness that could be affected, so people can shoot guns on our property unhindered. To help protect us from the danger of a shooter on the property and from bombs placed on the property, I've put domes over the two homes and the Office, and I've created two connecting walkways over the outside paths from the Adults' Home down to the other two places. Imagine three igloos connected by two smaller tunnels. Those shields have been in place for a few hours already and none of you noticed them. You can't see them, can't feel them, can walk right through them, etc. They're undetectable unless you're going very fast, in which case you'll suddenly slow down. If you tried to you could go fast enough to trigger a Shield's effect as you entered it, so you'll be reassured that slowing you down won't hurt at all." Kinetic energy = 0.5 x mass x velocity^2, so more massive objects don't have to go as fast as bullets to have the same energy. Bullets weigh about 10 grams, so about 0.0001 the weight of a largish human, therefore a human only has to go 0.01 times as fast to have the same kinetic energy. Bullets travel over 1,000 feet per second, so a human going faster than 10 feet per second (7 mph) in the Shield's volume will be slowed. I won't be surprised if I see Donna having fun running full tilt toward the side of our houses. -- "The Ava Shields are protecting those buildings and our property 24/7 if I'm on the property, and they'll last for twenty seven hours after I leave the area, but then it's likely that they'll turn off. Depending on how far I am away, I can turn them back on if you give me enough prior warning, but it's time consuming, especially if I'm hundreds of miles away. It'll be best to assume they're inactive if I've been away from home for twenty seven hours. I'm trying to develop a way to make them stay active permanently but that's not easy. -- "In addition to protecting the property, I can also protect other things, such as I just did with your TV. There'll always be a Shield around me and whoever is with me from now on. There's one around me and each of you right now, which you're very unlikely to ever feel. I won't scare you by doing so, but I could shoot any of you or myself right now and the bullet would stop just before it reached you. -- "If you walk out of my sight then it's likely that the Shield will cancel immediately. I can keep the ones over our property going for twenty seven hours after I lose sight of them because they never have to move, but I can't keep one going around any of you unless I can see you or know you're going to be stationary. I can use sight blob to see you, but you know I don't usually do that and that my use of sight blobs has several limitations, especially how few of them I have. I've been trying for a long time to find a way to have more of them, but that's been impossible so far." There was quite a lot of subsequent discussion, which I won't bother recording here. My families were amazed, impressed, and very appreciative of my new ability. To distract their overly embarrassing praises, I joked, "Ava's body parts inspire ALL my best abilities. Anybody got any guesses what magical abilities her remaining interesting parts will lead to?" No one was brave enough to guess, not even Ava. Prof had a lot of curiosity so I gave him more details about how the energy sink process worked, "It's a non-discriminate drain of many forms of energy. Not all forms, such as the potential mechanical energy of a compressed spring, but kinetic energy certainly qualifies. Within the width of the Shield it can drain energy at a phenomenal rate, effectively stopping bullets as close to instantly as makes no difference..." That'll give you an idea about my re-engaging with my life, especially with my families. Since the Voyage started I'd mostly done things for the future that were expected of me and even then hadn't engaged myself in them, but now I was eager to hit the ground running with my new type of life. I had some truly amazing abilities and powers now, and a lot less concern about showing them in public. If Julia and ten thousand of her closest friends wanted to go shopping in Paris for the day, they'll soon be able to whistle me up. We'll still pretend it's the Guardian Angel doing it of course, but I'm eager to substantially and rapidly increase how cooperative it is. I JUST this second had an OBVIOUS idea for how to easily have up to 1,792 sight blobs going! I gave myself a very hard kick AND a smack on the forehead! I should've thought of it before but I'd lacked a positive attitude to the future - it's AMAZING what a difference reaching the end of my Voyage makes! Why do sight blobs send their information to my brain? Unless I'm doing something like ducking a baseball bat swung at my head or driving a car - any reflexive or physical skill dependent action - then it's not my brain that wants the information but my minds. So I'll get the sight blobs to send their information directly to the mind(s) that want it! To be fair to myself, I worded the above to make me seem like an idiot because that's how I felt. In reality the solution was a great deal more difficult than it seems, and I couldn't have achieved it much earlier than now. The brain does a HUGE amount of processing of what our eyes see to put it into a form that the rest of the brain and the mind can use. I couldn't just link the sight blob to my mind because very little of that processing would have been done, plus there was the problem that until very recently I didn't know what a mind was or even where it was, so linking the sight blob to it would've been impossible for me. I couldn't have got multiple sight blobs working until I knew as much about minds as I do now, and had the amount of willpower I do to make the Universe provide the information to me in the format I want. But nonetheless, the idea should have occurred to me a long time ago. Now that is has occurred to me, I know even without trying that my current capabilities make each mind having its own sight blob possible! Provided each mind only receives the sight from one blob at a time, there won't be any superimposition even if hundreds of blobs are in use. Sharing one sight blob's information among multiple minds will be trivially easy because we're already highly expert at sharing images with each other. Or the blob could be told to send its information to multiple minds as I'm powerful enough to get them to do that now. They're both easy solutions. I was talking to my families still, so I only had 1,791 minds left to work on my new idea. It took one of them less than a second to get his own personal sight blob working. A second later, we had 1,791 sight blobs working! When Prof finished his current comment, I said, "By the way, I just solved the problem for how to make the Ava Shield permanent. As a bonus, how many of you would like to have your own personal Guardian Angel, because I've got a LOT of spare angels?" One of my minds must have been greedy because I just discovered that individual minds don't have a superimposition problem if they create multiple sight blobs of their own, provided they know that each image is separate and they put a little concentration into remaining conscious of that. Superimposition is almost entirely a meat-level problem rather than a mind one, so taking my brain out of the loop was a damned good idea. Each of my minds can easily have two or three sight blobs going now, and even more if they're willing to put more mental effort into it. Life is looking GOOD, especially because it's going to be doing a LOT of looking! Mark2 (the other 1,792-minded Mark), already knew the new sight blob technique because he was in déjà vu with me, so it took us just seven quick moments each to successively link with the other Marks in my second-tier group to let them know how to run multiple sight blobs. One Of Them: I had to admire his sense of humor. Mark2 and I started contacting the five-merge Marks that we had memorized the w-addresses for, letting them know how to send light blob information to minds. They couldn't see their minds the way I can see mine, but with some luck, work and a lot of trial and error, they might be able to redirect where their sight blob information is sent especially if they can control the location of their mind. If not, they'll pick up that ability when they upgrade in a few months. I was a SURE thing for "Mark of the Month". Even if my Voyage had achieved nothing else, increasing each Mark's sight blob limit from 2-in-total to 4-per-mind would win me that award. [As it happened, the 32-minded Marks couldn't get the technique to work. They were still very happy though, knowing they'd soon be able to operate thousands of sight blobs simultaneously.] The family discussion about personal Guardian Angels took a while and amazed them even further. It included me explaining, "They'll be invisible sight blobs that I'll be running for each of you. I can turn them into a visible Guardian Angel with a thought, and then have them perform all my usual abilities, such as NP to hold a would-be kidnappers immobile until the police arrive. I've been putting a lot of effort into improving my abilities over the last six weeks," that's when I merged into this body; before then it'd behaved normally, "and it's been paying some major dividends. I'm still thinking of new things too." "I thought you'd been distracted recently," agreed Carol. "Yeah. It's been occupying a lot of my attention. I should be more attentive from now on though." Given how much attention I have now, that was a safe bet. My families loved the idea of having their own Guardian Angels. We're all worth a lot of money so having a personal bodyguard of the Guardian Angel's capabilities was very welcome to them, and that was with my families VASTLY underestimating the angels' abilities. Vanessa suggested, "We don't need it when we're on the property. How about you pick us up when we leave the front gate?" "That works fine for me. They'll help with keeping an eye on the property as a whole otherwise. When you drive out the gates, I'll stroke your cheek with NP to indicate that you're now being guarded. If you don't feel that, it means I was distracted and didn't see you leave. Give me a call and tell me where you are and I'll catch up to you and stroke your cheek when I arrive." -- I could sense that Donna had some concerns, probably about being spied on all the time, so I added, "We need a signal for when you want privacy. I'll be watching from above most of the time, so if you rub an ear by placing the opposite arm over the top of your head," I demonstrated, "then I should see that. Unfortunately sight blobs are deaf so you'll need to signal how many minutes you want. Write it on a piece of paper, type it on your phone, or signal with your fingers." I described a simple digital signaling system. -- "I'll stroke your cheek downward just before I leave and upward as I return. If I don't indicate that I'm leaving after you give me the signal, it'll mean I was probably looking around the area rather than at you directly so I missed the signal that you wanted privacy. Either repeat the ear scratch or give me a call and tell me, 'I want five minutes of your private time later please' - or however long you want - and I'll leave. -- "I doubt it'll ever happen, but if I tap you on the head once that means I'm refusing to stop guarding you for some reason. Maybe I think something dangerous could be about to happen to you. You can give me a call to discuss it, if it's important to you. Or I might call you if there's a reason to. -- "Obviously I won't be following you into bathrooms or anything else like that, and when Donna's on a date I'll stay WAY back, like watching the car from a hundred feet above." Donna's discomfort immediately eased. "If you need to get my attention, Donna - if the guy's getting too sexual say - then wave your hand out the window. You'll have to find your own solution if he's not getting sexual enough." [Donna has been dating for most of the last seven months. She's only a few weeks away from her sixteenth birthday and has a very lucky boyfriend who I don't think is good enough for her, but he's not my boyfriend so I keep quiet. Donna's sexual and relationship education is officially back in Mom's court now, although the other girls are the source of her advice more often than Mom. My role is full-time loving brother and part-time lover. Nevaeh knows about both my roles and she and God both approve so there's no problem. When Donna's been socializing with us kids in the evening, she often sleeps with us rather than going to her room; for friendship reasons more than sex, although that's enthusiastically welcomed too. She still loves her horses but we've all noticed that she's too socially busy to have as much time for them these days. The horses still get plenty of attention because most of them are owned by other girls who come and go on their own schedules without needing Donna's presence, and some of our staff or their kids enjoy spending time with them. I imagine that the horses are nearly as happy as Donna's boyfriend.] Once I'd finished talking to Donna, Prof asked me, "Won't you find it very boring to watch over us day after day?" I'd rotate the duties among my minds, but the reason I gave now was, "Yes, but it matters far less than you think. You know I can study on thirty six screens simultaneously." It's been a month since I discovered upgrades and knew I wouldn't be Voyaging out of this dimension, but there'd still been risks and distractions so I hadn't added more screens to my computer system yet. "If one of those subjects is boring for a while - even if it's TOTALLY boring - it has only been affecting one-thirty-sixth of me, so it doesn't really matter. There'll only be nine of you to watch, counting Nevaeh, or eleven if you want to include Andrew and Robert. That's a tiny proportion of my possible attention these days. One of the improvements I've made recently is increasing the number of things I can simultaneously think about. Do you want to take a guess how many I can handle now, Prof? In other words, how many computer screens do you think I could read at one time now?" I truly can read a huge number of screens now because each mind can have its own sight blob and my minds aren't constrained by my brain not having enough cells to hold a large visual field - having multiple sight blobs is WONDERFUL! "Haha. I've a feeling you're going to impress me again. I'll play your game. You went from 2 to 8 to 36, which would make the next step about 150. That's an unbelievable number, but 36 was unbelievable too. You said 11 was a 'tiny proportion', which is a fascinating claim. That sounds like 150 is too few, but that's an unimaginable number already. I'll assume your 'tiny' was a casual comment so stick to my guess of 150. Is that about right?" I hadn't planned it in advance, but the similarity of numbers made it irresistible. To tease him a little, I said, "The answer isn't: one five zero, but: one seven nine..." I paused. "Wow!" exclaimed Julia proudly. "How ON EARTH can you think of that many things at once!" Prof and the others joined in too, amazed at my unbelievable ability, checked that I really could read, think through and remember so many things simultaneously, then they were amazed all over again. Wait until they hear the real number, and I'm not even counting Mark2. I was in a déjà vu with him so copies of his minds were in my head so I could get him to do things for me, although studying wasn't ideal because our subconsciouses and memories aren't as well integrated as that really needs. I wasn't counting him as part of my life because in a few months there'll be many more high-minded Marks who will be coming and going randomly unless there's an unforeseen need for me to control the links, so I won't be allocating them jobs to do for me. After a few seconds' of their gushing, I said, "Before you get too carried away, let me add something: two." "Huh?" "One seven nine two." "What!" exclaimed Prof. "You CAN'T possibly mean EIGHTEEN HUNDRED trains of thought! Surely not?" "If you don't mind my rounding up immodestly, then yeah, I do mean it. I need to find a LOT more stuff to read, and to build an entirely new downstairs study because the existing one doesn't have ANYWHERE near enough wall space to hang all those panels." It didn't have a large enough power supply either, but that wasn't a problem because I can provide the power myself. "I've got capacity going to waste at the moment. I told you the work I'd been doing to improve my abilities had paid dividends, haha." He was speechless. His heart skipped a beat - that's meant metaphorically but I could see that he did react physiologically. The old fellow was totally shocked. His mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish, his brain too overwhelmed to think what to say. Vanessa too. I'd overwhelmed their ability to imagine or comprehend the consequences. Julia was able to respond. She reminded me of the time that I'd sat her down and had stated with complete surety that eight screens was my absolutely top potential number of screens that I'd never exceed, no matter how much faith she had in me. She has teased me about my being so wrong - compared to my current thirty six screens - from time to time. Teasing was the only thing Julia could do now though; like her parents she was unable to imagine the consequences of my ability. Prof and Vanessa emerged from their shock and started trying to discuss it with me. They'd lived through my being able to study on two, eight and thirty-ish screens, so they had some understanding of the process and were theoretically able to accept that it could be scaled up even further, but they hit a brick wall when it came to imagining the consequences of my new level of ability. They'd previously been blown away by the productivity I'd have when managing a scientific laboratory with about thirty streams of consciousness. They had been able to imagine how well that could work, but doing what I could do with nearly eighteen hundred concurrent threads was far beyond unimaginable. Prof couldn't begin to grasp the synergistic benefits of everything I could learn. He couldn't even grasp how synergy could work with the ENORMOUS mass of information that I could accumulate now. The conversation floundered around ineffectually until I changed the subject by proving that I was Julia's perfect boyfriend by saying, "By the way Julia, provided you don't mind 2 g's of acceleration, which will be fine if you're sitting down comfortably, then it'll take me less than thirty minutes to fly us to Paris. We'll have to get the public to accept the idea of us flying around more first, but I'm going to accelerate that process because my new abilities make us much safer, especially the Ava Shield." "Paris whenever I want? London, Rome and Tokyo too? "Provided I've got the time to take you. You'll have to pay me in sex." "DEAL! Haha." Prof asked, "Half an hour to Paris is over 10,000 miles per hour. How many times the speed of sound is that?" "About Mach 13. My top speed is probably something like Mach 20 or 30 now. I haven't tested it, but that's what I think. I'll test that soon." "You're going to make the Guardian Angel's flying you a regular event? Not just a rare public event?" "As of a few minutes ago, we've all got personal Ava Shields and Guardian Angels, so I don't see why not. I'm eager to get flying around working for myself asap because if it's accepted well enough we'll be able to cancel the move to Boston since it'll only take me ten minutes to commute back and forth across the country." "We can stay here?" asked Carol. "I'll start doing a lot of flying around first, to see how people react." I'll have sight blob spies inside the CIA, FBI, DHS, the White House, etc. to see how THOSE people react. And if they react wrong, the Government will need some more employees after the Guardian Angel goes public on what the previous ones tried to do. Such is the credibility of the angel that its word would be accepted as gospel, especially compared to anyone that works for any of those TLA - Total Lying Asshole - organizations. "Once that's settled down, I'll start flying around with you, and if that's fine, then you can start flying around without me." "How can we fly without you?" asked Julia. "You'll have your own Guardian Angels. Just let it know where you want to go, such as by writing it a note or telling me personally, and it'll fly you there. Before you get excited about Paris every day, flying without me currently has a top speed of three hundred miles per hour. I'm trying to increase it, but I doubt it'll ever be fast enough for international travel. It'll be great for local travel though. Vanessa, I've often heard you complain about the DC traffic. You won't need to worry about that soon. Once your plane lands at Dulles, your angel will be able to fly wherever you want to go locally. I'll have a cover over you and a heat blob to keep you warm, so it won't even matter if it's raining or snowing." "Me too?" asked Donna eagerly. She LOVES flying! "Absolutely. You'll love it. You'll be able to 'pick up' your date, and if he gets too fresh, I'll drop him from a thousand feet in the air." "We can take passengers?" asked Julia. "Yes. As many as you want, provided I can discern who you want to take. Remember that I can't hear you so you'll have to make it visually obvious. We're not ready to do this yet, so don't jump the gun. We should ease people into it rather than suddenly have us all start flying around in multiple directions." I also needed time to test it. I wouldn't mention it to them now - because then they'd pointlessly feel fear during all their future flights - but if I lost track of their locations the sight blob I was using to watch them would instantly cancel. Fortunately their NP-points would continue for twenty seven hours so they'd be cushioned from the wind so wouldn't suddenly be cartwheeling through the air, but I'd still have to find them pretty damned fast because gravity would be claiming them. When the time's right, I'll get Ava to put her parachute on and I'll do plenty of testing with her before I risk remote-flying anyone not capable of returning to the ground safely without me. I've never had one of my abilities fail on me when I've used it within its capabilities, so I don't expect any problems, especially because I'll be very cautious when flying them. I'll still very carefully practice with Ava first. (You may think that because I know the address where the sight blob was a moment ago, I can create another one there immediately. Unfortunately it's not as easy as that. You may look up the x-degrees North, y-degrees West coordinates or a place of Earth, so now you know it, but you don't really KNOW IT. I have to know EXACTLY where a location is relative to me to create a ki-effect there. A moment's disorientation and the blob is gone, and if I'm disoriented already, then I can't create something there. It's very tricky, one bad moment and I lose it, and it takes a LOT of practice.) #1200: We invented a signal for my families to use when they wanted a Guardian Angel to appear: they would put their hands on their hips while looking upward. How aggressive the summoner wanted the angel to be was based on whether they were standing with their left foot placed ahead or behind their right, and by how much. I didn't produce any more shocking revelations during this conversation as my families were shocked enough already, except for Donna who was excited. My scientific answers to Prof's questions about how I could get rid of sonic booms did an excellent job of making the conversation unexciting for everyone except Prof. They didn't understand most of the implications of my new levels of ability, but they knew I was EVEN more incredible, and they were looking forward to what the future was going to bring. Those statements apply equally to me too. It's going to be a VERY interesting and fantastic life for all of us! ------- Chapter 417: Multiple Sight Blobs: Good for Me, Expensive for Israel Thursday, June 19 to Monday, June 24, 2008 I had several areas I wanted to work on: I wanted multiple proximity blobs so I could have one around every loved one, to dramatically improve my ability to detect threats to them. I wanted sight blobs able to fly faster than 300 mph when they're in locations remote from me. I could maybe double that speed with practice, but I wanted at least a tenfold improvement and that'd take an insight. If I need to use a sight blob at a remote location, the current fastest way to get it there is to fly there myself, create the sight blob, leaving it there while I fly myself back home - and that's just SILLY! It's also potentially dangerous because of my high profile these days. In the pre-resurrection days when I was flying around and doing Majestic Countdown's snooping, if the Government got a glimpse of something suspicious it would never know to investigate Mark Anderson. Now I'd be the first person the Government would think of. The last thing I wanted was for the Government to think that the Guardian Angel couldn't operate apart from me, because that would too easily suggest that I was operating it. It might make them wonder about Archangel Michael too, especially as he'd worn a silly costume and the Government had seen my body slowly change from Ron into Mark. Not making the Government suspicious about my involvement was very important. I also wanted to be REALLY sure I wouldn't drop anyone I flew remotely. I was already practicing by flying many lumps of water around rapidly. I was often pushing my limits, and sometimes exceeding them so I dropped the water, but that was just part of my practice. I was fine when I stayed within my limits. I had to be a little more careful in areas of poor visibility, such as in a cloud, but that was foolishly psychological of me because the sight blob was still sending me its precise location. I'll do a lot more practice, and then practice with a parachute-wearing Ava as well, just in case the psychology of that causes me any problems. It's a real nuisance that creating a ki-effect in a remote location requires me to be so familiar with it that I need to have a sight blob already looking at it - damn chicken-and-egg situation! Not to mention damn sound blobs! I do have to keep mentioning them because I can never get the damned things to work. I especially want those soon because I'd much prefer to massively upgrade my families' flying activity with the additional assurance I'd get from being able to listen as well as watch the people most likely to try to cause us trouble. Another very useful ability would be ESP. I can read emotions wonderfully well, so why not thoughts? I'd love to be able to make sure the President, CIA bosses, etc., didn't have any bad intentions toward us. If they leave us alone, we should have fantastic lives and I should be of immeasurable benefit to the country and world, but any one of those assholes has got the power to cause us a lot of grief if he gets that idea into his head. They had promised not to act against us, but the fact that it wasn't their first such promise proved that I'd be stupid to let our safety rely on politicians' promises. The above pursuits were all motivated by my personally benefiting from them, although in a few months other Marks would happily enjoy being able to reproduce any of them that I succeeded with. There were also a few items left over from my Voyage that it would be very good to solve: Being able to contact thousands of Marks without having to wait for random links is great, but I've got my eyes open for a way of contacting all - however many that is - of the lower-minded Marks, most especially the single-minded ones as they're effectively cut off because there are so few two-minded Marks left, and those few are steadily decreasing in number. I believe those cut-off Marks are good guys, and I'm sure they'd greatly appreciate getting a call from a high-minded Mark, especially if whichever Marks contacted them gave them "a piece of his minds." Speaking of which, it'd be very convenient if we could transfer a subset of minds, rather than it being an all-or-nothing deal. The above items are all "external", in the sense that they're expressions of ability, but I also have MANY questions about the theory internal to my abilities, déjà vu, merging, minds, etc., and I had even more questions about science in general. For example, as a result of my master's studies I have some questions about electromagnetism. That's an old and even unfashionable area of study, but it appeals to me because it still has many mysteries and my abilities should allow me to carry out some very unusual experiments, hopefully letting me obtain some enlightening results. I'd also really like to know where the MASSIVE power comes from that I can wield with even less than a wave of my hand. My abilities had leaped up so far that I should try almost everything I could think of, and with the number of minds I had, I could think of a LOT of things! I worked on the above list. I enjoy gaining new understandings of science, especially when there are huge benefits in it for me, as there recently has been with this stuff. I'm also extremely intelligent these days, and with 5,824 of us - the largest four Marks in four-way déjà vu links - there are nearly always many different ideas for how to approach every question we could think of. I'd taken the small risk of creating a four-way déjà vu's because I'd seen that the more minds I had, the more responsive and 'helpful' the Universe was. Having 5,824 minds in my head got me a LOT of cooperation [[the Universe's Consciousness responds by an amount that follows a square function, so my increasing my number of minds by a ratio of 5824 (now) /1792 (outside of déjà vu), being 3.25, meant responsiveness improved by more than a factor of 10. I was rarely outside of déjà vu so the real gain was more like a factor of 2.5, but that was still useful]]. I was dominating my little corner of the Universe more strongly than I ever had before, I was compelling it to do more of what I wanted, so I was gaining more information than ever before. As always, I had some successes and some failures. Guess which of those two categories the damned sound blobs stayed immovably in? Despite the failures, useful insights were gained. For example, I learned quite a lot about minds. Not how to contact 'strangers' - Marks in other dimensions, especially the single-minded Marks - but among my learning was that the 'address' I had in the w-dimension wasn't a Spatial x, y, z; but some sort of a Consciousness x, y, z; although I only got a feeling for what that meant. I also got the feeling that the Universe was more interested in consciousness than it was with space (in the spatial sense), although that might have been an incorrect impressed resulting from my interacting with it consciously. I learned enough additional information about how minds work and how they 'fit' in the Universe to no longer fear too many minds being bad for me, and I learned how to control how many and which minds take part in a déjà vu, merge or upgrade. My minds were opening up to me more, allowing me to see far more about how they functioned and how they interacted with the Universe. I was seeing the meta-information about my minds' interactions internally and externally. There was more interaction and types of interactions than I'd ever suspected, especially at the deeper levels of my minds. Controlling which minds took place in an upgrade was quite easy although the trick was crude. All the source minds copied both ways during the déjà vu, but only the two individuals that were linked were essential for the process. If any of the other copies turned themselves off - we had gained enough knowledge about and power over minds to be able to do that - it was a few seconds before they were recopied. They were effectively committing mind-suicide but that was hard to take seriously as they were copies that hadn't existed a few seconds ago. If the link was cut before the suicided minds were recopied, whichever copied minds were still active at the time of the cut were the ones that stayed active in the recipient's dimension. I tested the idea with one of the 448-minded Marks. We linked and I taught him what he needed to know, then all my copies in his brain, except for my anchor's mind, turned themselves off. In my brain, he did the same except leaving two of his minds going. I severed the link, leaving him with 449 minds, and me with 1,794, confirming it worked. That would allow us to fine-tune the merges in the future, not that we really needed to because I no longer feared having too many minds. Any risk from having too many would have to come from something I don't even suspect yet, because everything I know about minds gives having any number of them the green light. After a couple of very interesting days thinking about science issues behind my abilities, I decided that I liked the idea of having even more minds so I could do even more productive science by getting more results from my ability-related experiments. I was 99% sure it was safe, but I waited for half an hour between each of twelve more upgrades from the 448-minded Marks (one had 449 minds, but that's not important). As an extra safety measure, I canceled all of my minds but the one necessary copy in their heads just before the link was cut, so I ended up with 7,171 minds and my helpers with 449 and one 450. I didn't bother telling Prof about the fourfold increase in my number of consciousness streams. The increase led to some very nice discoveries. One I particularly liked was an improvement on my earlier discovery for how to 'see' spatial addresses with either my proximity sense or get them from ki-effects. That had been quite limited as my ki-effects had to already be somewhere to send me its address. It was a chicken-and-egg situation that limited my ability to use remote ki-effects wherever I wanted, so I did a lot of work on it. The main problem was a lack of familiarity with the Universe's location system, as that unfamiliarity caused confusion and the ki-effects to self-cancel, which was especially annoying if they were a long way away. As previously described, the Earth's movement through space made gaining that familiarity a bitch. It took a LOT of practice to get used to, and it was only possible because I now had enough minds to get the Universe to do some of the work for me, and the rest I managed to get my very capable subconsciouses to develop routines to process. They had to continually track all the individual vectors of the Earth's movement for different latitudes, and become so familiar with them that they became second nature to allow for, just like it's second nature to allow for gravity and wind when catching a ball. Once I FINALLY got a handle on that mess well enough to be able to know where a remote coordinate was in relation to me, my sight blobs no longer had a speed limit because I could now jump them to any address I wanted, as I now knew where that address was even more accurately than my looking at it with another sight blob - unless I screwed up the subconscious calculations, which I very often did initially, especially because I was navigating around the outside of a sphere. I already subconsciously knew how the human compass directions and our mile unit of measure related to the coordinate system that sight blobs had been using since I learned how to get them to report the Universe's positions, but I did some trial runs around Corvallis to get a feel for consciously directing sight blobs to 'jump' rather than 'fly'. I had several failures because I was still struggling with the processing required, but once I got my subconsciouses to develop the necessary allowances, I rapidly got better at the remote creation of sight blobs and other ki effects. Once I had a bit of local practice jumping sight blobs, I sent one of them on a much longer jump. I knew Paris was roughly 5,200 miles northeast, measured around the circumpherence of the globe. I created a sight blob at that spot, 7,000 feet up. I got the location I wanted - of course, or the sight blob wouldn't have created - but I'd missed Paris. I could see a town so I lowered the sight blob to read the street signs. I'd found France all right. I jumped the sight blob back to my upstairs study, had it google that town, found out where it was, where Paris was relative to it, did the necessary adjustment, and jumped the sight blob to above Paris. A couple of eyeball-steered jumps and a little bit of flying got my sight blob to sit on top of the Eiffel Tower, that being my goal for this exercise. I patted myself on the back. From Paris I jumped the sight blob to HIGH over the eastern end of the Mediterranean, high enough to give me a view of a lot of the planet. It only took a few seconds to find Israel, jump closer, spot Tel Aviv, then jump there. Some of my minds started planning how best to make use of this new capability to remind Israel and the world that the Guardian Angel shouldn't be ignored. Meanwhile other minds were practicing jumping their sight blobs around to other places, several of them independently deciding that Australian beaches needed to be checked out as it was high summer now. It didn't take those minds long to notice that the southern hemisphere was in the middle of winter - the thought of girls in bikinis really does dramatically reduce guys' IQs! Like any new skill, more practice was a good idea. That was especially effective because each of us had our own sight blobs now so we were getting a LOT of simultaneous practice, which helped all of me because our subconsciouses "leaked" to each other. I thought to try jumping my proximity blob around, and found that I could. I was very happy with that because it improved my loved one's safety considerably: if I saw something happening near them which might be a threat, I could jump the proximity blob there to get a very good read on the emotions of the people involved, and a highly accurate X-ray-like scan of everyone and everything in the area. I failed to get more than one proximity blob going, but even one was great. I had previously done some covert flights to get near enough to different types of explosive material to learn what they looked like in my proximity sense, but now I was able to do a much better job of that, including hunting down and memorizing the look of many different types of radioactive material, just in case. Once I'd done enough practice that I was able to jump sight blobs reliably, one of my minds gave Julia the good news, "I've just worked out how to break the speed limit on anyone flying without me. You'll be able to fly yourself to Paris whenever you want, and get there in about half an hour. Vanessa will be able to fly herself to DC daily too. From our home's doorstep to MAF's doorstep will take maybe twenty minutes if she takes it reasonably easy." "You were working on that even NOW!" "I was just lying here. You were doing everything." "Seeing as how it's for shopping trips, I'll forgive you this time." Julia stopped doing our very enjoyable physical activity to talk about how amazing all of us being able to fly was going to be, thereby proving that my mistake over the southern hemisphere's season wasn't a one-time problem. Maybe the latest increase in my number of minds had decreased my intelligence? In my impatience and confidence about my ability to keep all of us safe, the very next day the Guardian Angel flew all my girls and me to the Aquatic Center, so a large number of people could see it flying us for a routine event. We'd flown to the pools once before in this dimension, but after that flight we'd publicly 'guessed' that the angel's motivation had been to show the world that it was safe, and that it'd presumably done it as an ice-breaking exercise. Now we had the very different objective of being seen to have fun with the angel's convenient help, and have fun we did! It helped me do some AMAZING high-board dives, and you should see me play Toss The Girl now! I still had to manually grope their asses of course, as required by my rules for that game, but the angel also gave visually and tactually noticeable upward boosts to the girls' tosses. There were a couple of troublesome people at the pools, but they very quickly desisted when the angel got in their face - EVERYBODY in the world knew not to mess with a Guardian Angel! Otherwise the public had been fairly well behaved. Much of our flying was caught on cellphone cameras and it was featured heavily in the news, causing somewhat of a frenzy. I gave a TV interview in which I mentioned that the Guardian Angel had given me a message that it'd be more cooperative with flying my friends and me around. Following that interview's broadcast, we were inundated with requests for flights, but I'd covered that in my interview by stressing that the angel's note had said "your friends and you", so I just ignored such requests unless the person got obnoxious, in which case the angel taught them that being obnoxious was a bad idea. I know I said just above the everybody knew not to mess with an angel, but it's amazing how many people can turn off their brains while being obnoxious. Being bulldozed along the street for a hundred feet or so usually reminded them to think. I had several dozen sight blobs in various Federal and State offices before our flight to the pools, and I was pleased to see that the Government didn't react. I kept the sight blobs watching for several days, because we did more flying in the following days. After three such events, it was time to add a new nuance: to finally prove to everyone that Guardian Angels can operate independently of me, so I can't be held responsible for them. The next morning I had the angel fly us and a large bunch of our friends to LA. Our arrival made a huge splash, even though we landed on the sand, judging by the number of reporters who came rushing to the beach to interview us. I told them, "We asked to come here because this is a nicer beach than we have in Oregon." Just as the reporters were finishing up with us, a Guardian Angel appeared at the Norfolk Naval Station, flying around it, around Newport News, and other nearby navy areas, seemingly checking on how the aircraft carrier decommissioning was going. It was apparently unhappy that the USS Homer Simpson wasn't being scrapped - we hadn't cared previously but I wanted the angel to make an impact now - because it picked the carrier up out of the water and flew it to a municipal trash dump and placed it there. The carrier weighed only about 100,000 tons so that was easy. It was going to be a bitch for the navy to process where it was, but that wasn't my problem; I was more than happy with how fantastically bizarre it looked lying on its side several miles inland. Only a couple of minutes after the news-teams interviewing us on the beach had finished, they came rushing back very excited over the incident on the opposite side of the country. They were disappointed when all I said was, "Don't ask me; the angel never tells me what it's intending to do, let alone why." The TV news was very amusing that evening. That the Guardian Angel could be in two locations so far apart, and be so STRONG, blew people away. It did a VERY good job of convincing people that I didn't have to be within 500 feet of the angel, and I doubt that anyone in their right mind would ever dream of thinking that I could lift an aircraft carrier - that'd be INSANE! The Government was worried shitless by the latest development, so I was very pleased with myself. My sight blobs watched several meetings about me and the angel, including one at the presidential level. They'd seriously discussed "doing something", but they'd been completely unable to make up their minds what. Their failure to arrive at a decision meant there were no obituaries in the evening news. I'll continue to keep several close eyes on them just in case they do decide something. Over the next several days I'll have the Guardian Angel be more visible and active. It'll openly visit Washington DC, popping in to eyeball the Prez just because that'd be fun, especially because I'll have the angel fade into nothingness rather than visibly leave, making him fear that it's still near him. I'm tempted to have tiny angels report to the boss angel by having them emerge from the President's phone or even from his forehead, but that's probably excessive. I am getting what I want now, so I shouldn't scare them too much. I will have the angel check all the other carrier decommissioning jobs, several angels will examine MIT carefully (the public knows that I'll be going to MIT soon, so it makes sense for the angel to check it out), hundreds of it will cruise through the CIA's, NSA's and FBI's buildings one day, including into all their computer systems. The main reason I'll do the last trick is to badly mess up any theories the FBI has about Majestic Countdown's methods for creating leaks. I'll try to think of many things that have any sort of "Keeping Mark Safe" justification, and I should be able to come up with many dozens of them. Meanwhile the angel will also be doing fun things with us. I'd like a trip to Hawaii, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if two of my girls suggest a trip to Paris. Maybe I should buy a huge, luxurious RV so the angel can fly us around in comfort? That's quite tempting as I still haven't solved the problem of Magic Flying Sleds being woefully unequipped for passenger comfort. All going well - and it's hard to imagine how anyone could make it go badly - in a few days my loved ones and I can start flying independently. Maybe Sensei would like to fly to Japan with me for some regular Aikido lessons from one of the top masters. I'm sure my girls would like to fly from store to store in Tokyo, openly accompanied by the Guardian-sama, or perhaps Guardian-kohai as I can imagine it being employed as the bag carrier. Perhaps on the same day Vanessa and Mom can pay a flying visit to MAF's offices in DC. The latter is a particularly good idea because Vanessa and Mom spend a lot of time in their plane. They get up VERY early quite a few mornings, sleeping on the plane as it flies them to DC, arriving at the start of the workday there. It's often quite late by the time they get home again, or they sometimes stay in an apartment they have in DC if they've got more work the next day. It would make their trip times far shorter and lives easier if the angel provided their cross-country flights. Getting some comfortable accommodation built for them for the angel to encase in a flying sled for those trips would be a good idea. #6338: There's going to be some interesting times ahead! ^ Another ability I picked up was always knowing the spatial address of my loved ones, and of anyone else I wanted to bother to memorize the individual w-address for. The two addresses - w- and spatial - are actually very different. People don't have a spatial address per se; they are AT a spatial address (more accurately, are at a volume of spatial addresses). If someone moves, there is no information about that person that changes to show their new location. But I could use their w-address to find them (the address of the dimension itself was only a part of each person's w-address, like a telephone area code is only part of everyone's individual phone number. The dimension itself was effectively the prefix with every consciousness within that dimension having its own w-address suffix). I could obtain their spatial address indirectly by creating an "Information Pipe" to their w-address, and then looking at the spatial address for where the pipe emerged. I programmed my subconscious to continually keep an Information Pipe active and focused on each loved one and 'display' its other end's spatial address. It wasn't actually "displayed", but I was permanently aware of it much like you're aware of where your fingers are. It was an easy modification of the w-address sense I had, and could be applied to anybody I met in the traditional way. I just had to get them into my proximity sense initially to get their w-address, but thereafter I could get their spatial address just by thinking about it, and then I could create a sight blob there (usually a few feet higher). Being able to jump sight blobs to any spatial address I wanted and also being able to track where my loved ones were, meant I was now at least 200% safe against dropping anyone when flying them around remote from me. I got many of my sight blobs onto the job of hunting down important people, then jumping my proximity blob to them so I could memorize their w-addresses. If I ever have a sudden need to check on the President, members of various powerful Government committees, armed forces generals, down to the local Chief of Police, then now I can instantly create a sight blob wherever they are. With my having so many sight blobs and minds, many of whom will have nothing better to do, more often than not I'll have some of my minds keeping an eye on these potential troublemakers, just to make sure they don't try to start another operation against me. It took a few of my minds a little while to research the right direction, and several jumps before my sight blob iterated toward its destination, but I'm now the first human being to have personally examined the Alpha Centauri solar system. I can report that it has several smallish planets, none of which are supporting visible life as far as I can tell; I jumped my proximity sense there and have checked out hundreds of possible locations, so I can tell that down to a very small level. None of the planets are habitable by humans without major effort. The most human habitable of them is about the same as Ceres (one of the several dwarf planets in our solar system. It's the next major body out from Mars). I know what Ceres is like because several of my minds are also giving our solar system a good looking over. You might be interested to know that there is non-terrestrial life in our solar system. What I've discovered is very small and has no mind, but it does exist, and it's in a place where I've read articles about the possibility, so the rest of humanity will discover it sooner or later. Maybe I should put up a signpost, haha. Having thousands of sight blobs that can jump wherever I want is a LOT of fun! ------- Now that I can easily take action in Israel, I have the problem of deciding what to do about the Knesset's failure to apologize to me effectively or to punish those responsible for spying on me. Something has to be done in case my letting it slide even further encourages someone to try again. It would be much better to discourage that from starting rather than rely on catching it at the time. My first thought was that some sort of religious punishment seemed very appropriate and deserved. I did some research, which taught me that it was a TERRIBLY thorny issue. I had thought of destroying something important; or if it was small enough, taking it away and giving it to one of their Arab neighbors; or maybe just picking it up and putting it back upside-down to be a constant reminder of God's displeasure with them - but all of the many possible targets had too much religious importance. You know how crazy people can get about religion, and the people in that part of the world seem to be the craziest of all. The religious situation there seems to be so unstable, so likely to explode into violence, and so impossible to understand and predict, that I feared meddling with it. To make it even worse, most of the things that are sacred to the Jews are also sacred to the Muslims and it wouldn't be fair to penalize them for the Mossad's operation. For example, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the holiest site in Judaism, yet the site is controlled by Muslims who apparently don't allow the Jews to do anything religious on it or in its tunnels. The Muslims have even sealed up many of the tunnel entrances with brick walls so no one can get into it, not even Muslims, which doesn't make any kind of sense to me. Parts of the tunnel complex have not been visited for hundreds of years, let alone studied, so there could be God knows what sorts of valuable finds down there. It's almost enough to make me think that religious people are irrational. My wrecking the place was a bad idea not only because it was shared - sort of - but because it's widely believed that its destruction will coincide with the Second Coming of Christ, and God knows what terrible chaos could result from highly religious, heavily armed people believing that was happening. And I've barely begun to describe the myriad of tangled problems associated with the Mount, as there are many other highly emotional, vested interest groups with all sorts of weird agendas and perspectives. It was impossible to predict what would happen if I did anything at all to the place, but it was all too possible to imagine that all sorts of undesirable trouble would be included. I worked my way down the list of important religious sites or artifacts in Israel, eliminating those of them that had such problems, looking for one that I could safely use to punish just the Jews. I still hadn't found one when I gave up. I was so far down the list that it would have seemed petty of the angel to target anything so minor. By the way, I was using a computer in London to do this research. Being able to send my ki-effects anywhere is handy. Non-destructive ideas like having lots of Guardian Angels appear in front of the Wailing Wall and prevent anyone from approaching it would get their attention big time, but because it was an open-ended intervention all it might do is inflame the rhetoric in the Knesset rather than lead them to a decision. I didn't want the tedium of leaving sight blobs at the Wall for the days or even the weeks or months that approach might take to get action out of the Israeli politicians. Nor could I do something that required the Jews' cooperation. I thought of declaring their expulsion from Jerusalem as punishment for their failed spying operation, giving them some sort of bullshit about their no longer being in God's favor, but religiously inspired disobedience seems to be their national norm, so it was inevitable that some Jews would sneak back in. It would be impossible for me to prevent that as they could easily disguise themselves, which would make the Guardian Angel seem too fallible. Whatever I did had to be of immediate effect to avoid some sneaky Jews outwitting me. I also wanted it to be big so it'd get the world's attention and cause everyone to massively upgrade their opinions of what the Guardian Angel was capable of. An especially big operation on the opposite side of the world from me, while I was in front of cameras here in Corvallis, would be an excellent reinforcement of the angel's independence from me. I ended up doing something fairly boring, simply because I didn't understand the situation in Israel well enough to risk doing anything clever. On the conveniently arriving six-month anniversary of the Mossad's operation, I called the major networks, telling them, "The Guardian Angel wants you here in two hours because it wants to announce something." "What will it say?" they all asked, apparently not able to comprehend that wanting to announce something in two hours means not wanting to announce it now. "It hasn't told me. See you in two hours. Bye." I had already gotten the okay from my families and I'd done the necessary research: sending sight blobs all over Israel looking for airfields (I'd chosen to target them because runways are easy to spot from the air regardless of how well protected and camouflaged the hangars are), I'd timed my media meeting in Corvallis so the Knesset would be in session during it, had worked out the straight-line path from Corvallis to Israel, and had researched how much the Israeli Government could afford to be fined. Our guards kept the media outside our gate until I wandered down to join them at the designated time, accompanied by two Guardian Angels and an already booted floating laptop. The reporters started calling out their questions as soon as they saw me, which I ignored until I was close enough to say, "You know as much as me. The Guardian Angel simply told me to call you to come here because it wanted to make an announcement." All the reporters simultaneously asked me what the announcement would be, which I ignored because it's simply not worth the bother of trying to give reporters a logical answer. Regardless of their gender, they're incapable of rational thought. The angels suddenly became twice as bright. That got the reporters' attention, and more impressively, even got them to close their mouths. I hope that gets televised because it proved that the Guardian Angel truly must be from God, because it can perform miracles. The laptop floated forward with its screen facing the cameras. There was the usual invisible clatter of keys as the angel typed: It is now six months since the Mossad operation against my assignment. I have waited patiently for the Israeli people to accept responsibility for their actions but they have failed to do so, therefore I am taking action myself to punish them and as a necessary disincentive for other groups who are contemplating acting against my assignment. As soon as the last word had been typed, one of the Guardian Angels dived into the ground in the direction of Israel. Maybe someone would realize the geometry and publicize it, making the angel seem more impressive. Most of the reporters excitedly demanded of me, "What's it going to do?" because reporters have the attention spans of particularly frivolous gnats. I repeated, "You know as much as me." Some of the reporters directed their excited question at the remaining angel, whose answer was a blank stare. What the other angel was doing was, five seconds after it left Corvallis, simultaneously rising up through the floors of the control rooms of every airfield in Israel that had at least one plane with Israeli Air Force markings. Those angels split off multiple copies of themselves, which zoomed around the fields flattening every IAF aircraft. With over 7,000 minds on the job and as much force as I had now, in less than a minute the Israeli Air Force was virtually wiped out, leaving only whatever planes they had in other countries, without markings, or in the air. In cases where the airfields were purely military, the angels also flattened all the buildings. No fires were set and no one was injured, although the angels were shot several times, to which they turned their other cheek. Back in Corvallis, after several unanswered questions from the reporters, the angel typed a new message: I have destroyed the Israeli Air Force. The reporters yelled questions at the angel and me. I answered, "You know as much as me," continuing my less-than-truthful theme. As each base had been finished with, its angels had merged into one then it had dived into the ground. Seconds after the last angel had done so, they ALL rose up through the floor throughout the huge Knesset building, especially in its main debating chamber, flooding that room with light and fear. Other than inside the main chamber, everybody was seized with NP and evacuated straight out of the building, and I mean "STRAIGHT". People were flown out through doorways if those were handy; the doors smashed off to make that quicker and scarier. If windows were closer, those were smashed and used instead. For those people several yards away from the nearest door or window, the angels punched holes straight through the walls, sometimes having to go through several internal walls to reach the outside. It's a very large building and it had a substantial number of people in it, but it took less than two minutes to evacuate everyone. I put them on the ground five hundred yards away from the building, forming a ring of several hundred Guardian Angels around the entire building to look very intimidating while preventing anyone from getting any closer. Meanwhile inside the debating chamber, the angels flew into position so they were 'standing shoulder to shoulder' around the wall of the entire room, plus there were several hundred angels floating overhead in the room. That barely took a second. I seized everyone tightly, opened the main door and evacuated everyone who wasn't one of the 120 elected "Members of the Knesset" (think of them as equivalent to Senators). Only 108 of them were in attendance today, but that didn't matter. The members were evacuated upward, straight through the ceilings of each level of the building and then out of its roof. I wasn't gentle with the building, smashing a huge hole straight up and using an NP-umbrella to stop the members being hit by the rubble that was flying around. I flew them up to five hundred feet AGL, then I held them stationary at that level while I had hundreds of angels fly in and out of the building's walls, quickly and violently smashing them and the entire edifice into a pile of rubble. Each of my minds had many thousands of tons of force available, so they could really go on a rampage: smashing off huge chunks of concrete, throwing them back into the building (regardless of any other angels in the way), etc. It was very destructive and highly impressive. Other angels were maintaining the perimeter at ground level and yet more angels were flying around the entire area. None were near the members, hopefully making them feel even more insecure as there was no angel they could try to yell questions or pleas at. Three minutes after the previous message, the Corvallis angel typed another one: I have destroyed the Knesset building. I cleverly anticipated the reporters' questions and preemptively answered, "You know as much as me." About an hour earlier I had used an unattended computer in the Knesset Building to type a note - necessarily in English but that wouldn't matter - and had printed 120 copies of it, 108 of which now emerged from the ruin where I'd held them in an NP box to keep them safe. They individually floated to each member. I relaxed my holds on their arms so they could grasp their pages, or their cellphones. I'd seen from the phones' displays that some of them had been ringing. Hopefully included among the calls will be news about the new status of their Air Forceless. I gave the members about fifteen seconds to appreciate the situation and start talking about it, and then I canceled all the NP I was using to hold them up, so they suddenly started falling and screaming (usually in that order). After giving them a good scare, I caught them just above the rubble, then lowered them into it. They were mostly old men and they'd have considerable trouble clambering out of the very large ruin, reinforcing their fear and helplessness. They'd all dropped their notes and/or phones, but I'd caught those too. I returned those items to them now, reinforcing the angel's infallibility, I thought. The angels all dived into the ground, heading back to Corvallis. A couple of seconds later, the "Away Angel" emerged from the ground near us and flew up to the other one, and they merged. The angel typed: I have given the members of the Knesset a note that says: I exposed your nation's intrusive surveillance operation of my assignment against God's will. I waited six months for you to accept responsibility. You failed. I am telling Israel to: Within one week of today, send US$800 million to the US Federal Government in compensation for your illegal operation on its soil. Within one week of today, send US$800 million to Anderson-Williams-West Trust in compensation for your intruding illegally on their lives. Within one week of today, send US$800 million to Mark Anderson in compensation for your spying on him. On the monthly anniversaries of today, until I am satisfied and instruct you to stop, send US$800 million to Mark Anderson as punishment for your failure to accept responsibility for your actions. Your Air Force and this government building were destroyed for this reason also. I will prevent other nations invading Israel while you are abiding by my instructions. The first time funds are not in a destination bank account by the end of the designated day, then one minute later I will destroy your Army's equipment and facilities. The second time cleared funds are not in a destination bank account by the end of the designated day, I will no longer prevent other nations from invading Israel. Should Israel retain its sovereignty long enough to achieve a third failure to deposit cleared funds in a destination bank account by the end of the designated day, then I will destroy Israel. The last paragraph just says "destroy Israel", not "kill everyone". If that government is as stupid as mine has been they might repeatedly fail to do what they've been told, in which case I could end up having to follow through on all my threats. The first two threats are easy to carry out, especially the second one as that just means turning off the swarm of invisible sight blobs I have monitoring activity in all the neighboring countries' military bases, and visible angels along Israel's borders, ready to intervene if an invasion starts. If I get to the third punishment, I'll just create a huge east-west line of angels and march them north through Israel destroying everything human-made but not harming anything that's alive. I'll go fairly slowly and hopefully the Israeli Government will scream for mercy before too much of its country has been turned into a fully populated ruin. I'll get a few more billion dollars out of them as an additional punishment and to boost the funding for my future scientific research. I can't imagine that the Israeli government could be so stupid as to commit three breaches though. They just lost damned near their entire Air Force including most of its facilities, proving that the angel is very, very real and perfectly willing to inflict massive damage on them. They should believe that if they don't do as they're told, their country would be committing national suicide because their neighbors would be all over it. I did my best to answer the reporters' questions, my position summarizing to: "I think you're right that it means I'll get paid every month for as long as the angel wants. Of course I think that's hugely excessive, but God's resurrecting me proves that He thinks I'm exceptionally important and I somehow doubt He cares about human money. I don't think it's about my value anyway, but is meant as a punishment for the Israeli Government and a disincentive for other governments who break God's command to not intrude on me." There were a lot of questions, some of them directed at the angel, such as: "Did you really destroy all of the Israeli Air Force?" The reporters hadn't seen it happen so they had trouble accepting that it had been done so quickly. That reporter's effectively accusing the angel of lying was something it deigned not to respond to. I answered several questions about the angel's capabilities, agreeing that, "It certainly does seem VERY capable! We've all greatly underestimated it. It was obviously holding itself back before, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was still doing that. Not that exactly how much power it has matters because it's clearly got enough to do anything it wants." Another theme that came up was to do with the angel's statement that my monthly payments would continue until the angel was satisfied. The reporters wanted to know how the angel could be satisfied. My answer was, "Search me! You don't expect me to understand how to make God happy, do you? It didn't say what it would take, so I guess it wants the Israeli Government to give that some serious thought." You won't be surprised to read that I actually had a pretty good idea of what would make 'God' happy (or if not God, then at least me). There were two components: money and other benefits. From my research I thought that the Israeli Government could afford a few billion dollars. That much would cause them financial pain, which is appropriate as it's meant to be a punishment, but it wouldn't be financially crippling. Being a government, one of their recourses is to increase their money supply (coarsely: print more money) and accept the inflationary and exchange rate consequences. When I'd talked about the situation with the Israeli ambassador six months ago, I'd arbitrary suggested two $800 million payments - one to the US Government and the other to my family - as a suitable apology. I'd used that value only because it was what we'd settled the previous legal dispute with the US Government for, being eight payments of the maximum about the "Fiscal Responsibility Toward Private Individuals Act" allowed; in other words, for a reason unconnected to Israel. I'd recently learned that $1,600 million was too little punishment for Israel, so the angel had upped it, especially by adding the recurring payments to me, which was very nice of it. Rather than make the fine a one-time payment of a few billion, I'd structured it as I had because it had more meaning to keep the payments going for six months, that being about as much as Israel could afford and was as long as they'd sat on their asses doing nothing after being caught carrying out their operation against me. Paying to re-equip their Air Force would be a major additional cost for them, but I had no doubt the US Government would give them good terms on a loan to buy US equipment. The "other benefits" component of what it will take to satisfy the angel is something that I hope they will act on themselves. Israel may suggest other interesting items that I might enjoy accepting - I'll allow a dialogue with the angel should such a negotiation come up - but the only action I want is the execution of the four named people most responsible for the Mossad's operation. I had mentioned that point during my discussion with their ambassador so I'm sure he will have included it in his report and their Government will be aware of it. I could find and kill those guys myself, but I'm getting fed up with doing that and it'll send a better message if the country has to do it to their own leaders. Powerful people are going to be FAR less likely to order operations against me if that happens to them. After a while the angel must have decided the interview was over, because it picked me up and we flew back inside. That's enough of a description about this little incident. My new abilities enabled me to stop the embarrassment of letting Israel get away with their having spied on me, and also blew the socks off the world with how incredibly powerful the Guardian Angel was. There was a GREAT deal of excited talk about that once details of its simultaneously and rapidly destroying every Israeli airbase had emerged. That scared even more shit out of the US Government and Air Force - I had a LOT of fun watching those meetings - making them VERY glad the angel had acted with such moderation on the night it'd destroyed only five USAF bases. I'll mention just one aspect of the following public discussion that particularly pleased me: While some people thought it was unreasonable and greedy of me to accept monthly payments of $800 million - the usual suggestion was that I should donate them to charity - the majority of commentators and interviewees said they agreed with the angel's punishments. They even said it would have been wrong of me to go against what the angel had instructed because it was moral and from God, so it should be obeyed. That so many people believed that - not so many in Israel, I imagined - indicated that the angel had gained a great deal of credibility. I congratulated myself of my ability to spread bullshit. In a few months - on the one-year anniversary of the Mossad operation would be an appropriate time - hopefully all the other Marks who had the Mossad Problem will be able to do something similar in their dimensions. ------- Another benefit of my new navigation ability is in being able to send my proximity blob on a world cruise. Whenever I have spare time, I have it checking out as much of the world's population as possible, looking for anyone who has more than one mind. The way my proximity sense works now, with the HUGE amount of detail it provides me, I can instantly tell how many minds someone has. The person doesn't have to be moving their body - as used to be required for me to proximity sense them back when I had only a handful of minds - and they don't even have to be awake; they just need to be within my proximity range. I get their number of minds in two ways: from sensing it directly with proximity, and also because the size of a living creatures mind is part of their w-address, as that's a consciousness index. That's another reason why their being asleep is irrelevant. I'm VERY curious to find out if there's anyone else who has merged, so starting with the world's major cities and working my way down, I'm trying to find out. So far I haven't found any such person. I'll never be able to check everyone, but I'll keep doing it in my spare time until I've checked a good proportion of the world's population, especially on its northern and eventually southern hemisphere beaches, as I might as well combine two interests. ------- Chapter 418: Breakthrough Tuesday, June 25 to Thursday, July 24, 2008 Everything was going so great, and I especially loved the gains I was making from understanding my abilities better, so a couple of days later I did another round of upgrades with my Second-Tier Helpers. Last time I'd copied upgrades from the twelve lowest-minded helpers. This time I upgraded with all fifteen of them, leaving them with one of my minds but keeping the copies of all of theirs. That added 9,421 minds, giving me a total of 16,592. I could already pipe information through to me from other dimensions, so why not the information from a sight blob too? I've worded that as if it was no big deal, but it wasn't that simple: what I was getting now was mostly meta-information about other dimensions rather than information about what was inside them. I worked on it. Having 16,592 minds plus whatever I was gaining from the current déjà vu(s), after some experiments, gave me the knowledge and especially the willpower to create and use a sight blob in another w-dimension. I had collected so many w-addresses by now that I understood the addressing system enough to connect to an arbitrarily chosen dimension, not one of a Mark that I had a memorized w-address for. I created the sight blob at the spatial address that corresponded to 1,000 feet above the center of Corvallis. A quick look at the hilltop showed it was still a park. Our Peoria Road address didn't look anything like we'd left it, so if there was a Mark Anderson here, he was probably living in our original address. A quick check showed that another family lived in that house. I expanded the link I had created and sent my sole proximity blob into this dimension. I had deliberately blocked myself from déjà vu'ing now, so my proximity had a radius of 12,444 feet (nearly 2.4 miles; 3.9 km) which covered the vast majority of Corvallis. Another mile or two of range would have been useful, but a déjà vu wouldn't have given it to me as my second-tier helpers didn't have many minds and proximity range is one of the slowest increasing of my abilities. Fortunately the proximity blob was easily moved. Compared to the Andersons I lived with, the Andersons I was seeking now might be fatter, thinner or changed in other ways, and Mark - if he was alive - would certainly be WAY different than I was now, but my previous merges had shown me that people's proximity readings were recognizably the same across dimensions so I was pretty sure that this dimension's versions of my family should be recognizable in proximity. I couldn't find them just by using their w-address despite my earlier writing that those addresses were like telephone numbers with the dimension being the area code; I couldn't just change the area code and use the same suffix to find each person. Likening w-addresses to telephone numbers was a simile rather than the reality, especially as w-addresses are more analog. I need to use simplifications to explain things to you because there's no language for the concepts I'm discovering. I had to find this dimension's versions of my loved ones the 'hard way', which - with my current level of ability - was almost trivially easy. Recognizing people in proximity is surprisingly quick and easy even when there are tens of thousands of people involved. The near ones don't block those farther away because proximity is one big sense organ that can 'see' everything inside itself. If you walk into a room of people, you don't have to consciously consider each person in turn to think about whether you know them or not, nor do you have to think about the list of everyone you know to wonder if each of them might be in the room - your subconscious does all the matching for you. You can glance around the room and your subconscious will let you know who it has recognized. Subconsciouses are amazingly capable! I dropped my proximity sphere over Corvallis and my 16,592 + déjà vu linked subconsciouses quickly letting me know who they recognized and where they were. I recognized many people, but no Andersons. Prof and Vanessa were both in the location I knew their first home (as mentioned herein) was. I zipped the sight blob there. It was a Tuesday evening and they were sitting in the living room in front of the TV. They looked the same visually and in proximity, other than this Prof's health being noticeably better. I checked the house quickly. Julia's room was still Julia's room judging by pink still being a major color element, although it was less so than when I'd first seen the room so many lifetimes ago. To truly confirm it was her room, I checked her closet. It was packed with tiny clothes (meaning they were her size). Not that I expected to see anything, but I checked out the room that'd been converted into my study. It was still a spare bedroom, as were Andrew's and Robert's rooms now. If I wasn't in Julia's life, then my life was badly off the rails. I could have borrowed a computer to do some searching for my family and/or to find out whether I'd suicided several years ago, but it'd be easier and almost certainly more productive to try another w-dimension, as I could search a Corvallis in only a few seconds using proximity, that name being of doubtful appropriateness now. I checked more dimensions. After ten of them, I'd found Mom, Dad, Carol and Donna in eight dimensions, but no Mark. I didn't want to investigate whether he/they was alive elsewhere or dead, as I feared he was almost certainly dead. There are a billion 32-minded Marks, which meant 31 billion dimensions in which Mark had died. The census experiment to find out how many five-merged Marks there were had arrived at its slightly lower than expected answer of one billion by now (we'd expected about double that, given that one of us had rolled twelve 6s). The various levels of lower-minded Marks were still working on getting their census counts, and wouldn't have results for months or even years yet. During my nearly two years as a five-merge Mark I had experienced several déjà vu's with smaller Marks, but I couldn't directly calculate how many of them there were because I couldn't allow for the propensity of déjà vu's to be with peers. We had often discussed how to calculate the propensities and no one had been able to suggest a method of determining them. The long-duration census counts the various levels of Mark were doing now had been our best idea, and that wasn't any good for the three- and two-minded Marks because they were merging upward faster than news of the census could get down to them, and they wouldn't want to put their improvements on hold for the number of years the census would take. What I was doing now was the best and quickest way for us to get reasonably accurate population-of-Marks counts. Once I've built up my sample size I'll have some information that all the Marks will be very interested in. I had already heard a few grapevine stories about Marks that didn't live in Corvallis - most of those moving much closer to Washington DC after MAF was established [[I didn't yet know about any of the Marks living in England, as none of them had suicided in a déjà vu, or had later déjà vu'd with any of my two-minded versions]] - so I knew that my not taking the time to find out what happened to the current dimension's missing Mark would mean that my estimate of the percentage of dimensions that didn't have Marks would be overstated, but dead Marks weren't of any use to any of us. I was mostly interested in finding Marks and in seeing the number of minds they had. By searching quicker I'd get a larger sample size for that. Being zero for ten so far was getting worrisome. I knew that 97% (31/32) of the dimensions that a five-merged Mark had been in were now empty of their Marks. I didn't know how many 16-, 8-, etc.-minded Marks there were, but the chance of a dimension having a dead Mark had to be between 50% (for 2-minded Marks) and 97% (for 32-minded Marks). I had hoped to find Marks in somewhere between 3% and 50% of dimensions, but early indications were that the value was going to be below 10%. Making calculating the proportion of Markless dimensions even harder was my having no idea how many 1-minded Marks there were who were living totally ordinary lives having never participated in merging, or how many dimensions in which a 1-minded Mark had suicided in a bathtub but out of déjà vu. Those two factors could totally distort the percentage of dimensions which had Marks, from nearly 100% if there were kazillions of 1-minded, never-suicided Marks; down to almost 0% if there were kazillions of suicided-outside-of-déjà vu Marks. I had no idea of the size of the W-Dimension - the addressing system unhelpfully not providing any clues for that - so almost anything was possible. From my current searching, I was gaining the feeling that lots of us were dead. It took my checking twenty four dimensions until I found my first Mark, a single-minded version at home with his family. Like most Anderson families, they'd moved houses to a somewhat nicer place than the one I'd grown up in. This Mark had a bigger room, and he needed it for the many hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks he had. I got his personal w-dimension address from my proximity sense, then created a déjà vu link with him. His social-life was about to take a turn for the better, and his sex-life was about to take a turn. From 1 to nearly 17,000 minds would've been excessive for several reasons, so the moment they copied across to him, all but seven of my minds suicided, then I ended the déjà vu before the minds could recopy (easy upgrading was why I'd blocked myself from natural déjà vu's before starting my multi-dimension searches). Eight minds was a good starting number for him. He'd déjà vu with his peers every eleven days, which was often enough to be useful. He'd have a six-foot proximity range and 420 kilograms of force. He'll also be able to use several of the new techniques I'd learned during my Voyage. He'd be able to rapidly improve his body too. He was actually reasonably good looking facially, although without any physique to speak of, but that'd quickly change. He, his cute ass and his to-die-for waist would be a jaw-dropping hit at the Aquatic Center by the end of summer. [When I'd first achieved eight minds about three years ago, my maximum NP force had been 51.2 kg. Eight minds gave 420 kg now not because seven of my minds had spent just over three years training how to increase that at a gain rate of 5% per month, as that would've made a total of less than 150 kg. During the Voyage of Discovery I'd discovered that the whole "+5% per month" gain rate was a particularly stupid limiting assumption, started probably because I'd unconsciously assumed Sensei's ki ability had increased linearly during his years of training. (If nothing else does, that should teach you how unquestioning and literal-minded subconsciouses are, especially when it comes to accepting preconceptions and prejudices. Our subconsciouses want to make us happy so they don't disagree with us, deliberately ignoring contradictory evidence. Take it from our subconsciouses: we prefer believing we are right to having our wrong ideas corrected. Thereby explaining the ongoing successes of religion, Hollywood's dream factory and most politicians. Prejudices are even more 'successful', as they also make us feel superior.) I'd discovered that the maximum the Universe enabled each human mind to consciously tap resulted in just over an eightfold increase over the normal subconscious amount, hence the 420 kg. I'd discovered ways around a few other limitations too, such as over the shape of my NP-fingertips, so the newly eight-minded Mark would be able to vary their size to a greater extent than I'd been able to back when I'd originally had eight minds. The slightly over 500-foot ki-effects range limit still applied to this Mark though, as that was dependent on the structure of human minds.] I carried on scouting more w-dimensions' Corvallises. With the superb help my proximity sense provided it only took me several hundred dimensions to get a good feel for the main places where the Marks, if any, would be found. Once I had a good basis, I put 16,000 of my minds onto the job of simultaneously sight blob searching multiple dimensions for versions of me. When I located a Mark, sadly a much rarer event than I would have liked, I sent my proximity blob to a place about sixty feet above him. That was deliberately beyond his proximity range even if he was up to sixty four minds, as all I wanted to do now was unobtrusively find out how many minds each Mark had and what his w-address was. I'd started my search in a random w-dimension, and had moved in small increments from it to its near neighbors ("near" in this context clearly not referring to the usual x, y and z dimensions of space, but that their w-dimension addresses were similar). There was no discernable pattern across these 'neighboring' dimensions for whether there was a Mark, or his location if there was one. After fifteen minutes of searching one neighborhood of dimensions, I chose a very distant w-dimension and worked its neighborhood. The second group was indistinguishable from the first, producing much the same frequency of results in a random order. If there was any pattern to the variations in dimensions, I couldn't see it [[there are patterns, and often quite strong ones, but the physical laws that make those themes possible operate just as easily among distant w-dimensions as neighboring ones, and they're not restricted to just Earth either, so I saw random situations]]. After checking out several hundred thousand Corvallises, I had accumulated the following statistics. For all the 32-minded Marks I found, I also found: No Marks with more than 32 minds. Sub 1% as many 16-minded Marks. As I knew there are about a billion 32-minded Marks, there'd be a few million 16-minded versions. 30% as many 8-minded Marks, so there'd be about 300 million of them. 30% as many 4-minded Marks. 2% as many 2-minded Marks. 350% as many 1-minded Marks, so about 3.5 billion of these. 10% as many weirdly numbered Marks, with 3, 5, 6 or 7 minds. About 600 times as many Corvallises with no Mark. I was surprised that there were nearly three-quarters as many Marks with 2 to 16 minds as with 32, as the five-merge Marks thought they were several times more common that the other sizes, excluding the single-minded Marks as we'd never been able to get any idea about their frequency. More surprising and upsetting was that just over 99% of Corvallises had no Mark Anderson at all. Adding up the total number of Mark bodies that I'd found, and dividing by the number of Mark minds that I'd found, gave the result that merging had caused 85% of the dimensions to lose their Mark. That 99% of Corvallises seemed to have lost theirs implied that 480 billion dimensions had lost their Mark without him contributing to a merge. That was a freaky large number, but ALL these numbers were freaky - there are a BILLION 32-minded Marks! The Universe is WEIRD! 480 billion dead-and-lost Mark Anderson minds was hopefully overstating the case, as I was only counting Marks I found in Corvallis. Some of those dimensions would have a Mark who was elsewhere. Maybe he'd gone out of town to a Star Wars convention, or perhaps Jessica Alba had lured him to LA to be her sex toy - one of those possibilities being more likely than the other. [[In a significant number of dimensions I was living in England with Mom and her second husband, so VERY hard to find. There were several other reasons why the living Mark Anderson wasn't in Corvallis, although sadly none of them involved my giving sexual pleasure to Jessica Alba. The Universe wasn't big enough for that to have been possible.]] The way the numbers work out, if Mark existed in 5% of dimensions (rather than the 1% result of the figures above), then the number of dead-and-lost Marks would be 'only' 69 billion, the total population of ten Earths. With sixteen thousand searching minds, it didn't take much longer than half an hour for me to collect the above statistics, after which I decided that enough time had passed for me to revisit the first Mark I'd found, to find out how his upgrade was working out. I expected he'd be happy - the copy of his mind that I had in me certainly was - but it was sensible to check first in case going from total ignorance of merging to being in a minority of eight minds so suddenly was causing him problems. He did have one major problem: finding ways to adequately express his gratitude, happiness and excitement. I let him have his gush, then, The seven minds I dropped off would've already told him what he should do when he déjà vu's with other Marks, and that I'd be checking in with him every day to make sure no unexpected problems were arising. His seven new minds were also helping him plan how to turn his life around. It'd be a fun project for them, especially knowing that his abilities were going to get rapidly better when he upgrades further after I give that the green light. I spent the evening and night giving a varied assortment of seven of my minds to a total of 6,000 single-minded Marks. Most of them had been asleep but I figured they wouldn't mind being woken for this. It took me a total of ten hours to locate and upgrade them all, even using a hit-and-run approach. It was a natural consequence of the process that I picked up an additional 6,000 flabbergasted minds, taking my total to 22,592. Especially at the beginning of the evening, I often went back and checked on quite a few of them to make sure the process was fine. It always was. I hadn't expected otherwise, but better safe than sorry. During the following day I briefly re-contacted all of them. I told them I was checking that everything was okay, which was true, but the host mind didn't know what one of my checks was. The seven minds that'd been inserted had a secret mission: whenever I checked in they were to let me know if they thought their Mark was a bad person. I wanted to find out whether there were any Bad Marks before I started giving them awesome powers. It would be best to find that out now, before any of them had a chance to cause any trouble, and while he was so ignorant that I'd be able to do something about it. I didn't expect problems from these Marks because they were already outnumbered 7-to-1 with minds I trusted. What I worried about was that there might be a proportion of Marks that were bad, and if they somehow got enough of their minds together, that could escalate into trouble. The checking I was doing now was basically just random sampling to find out the proportion of Bad Marks. I like to think of myself as a good guy - who doesn't, other than every female - but my worry about Bad Marks had a realistic basis. Way back when my autobiography started, it was my getting my second mind that had opened my eyes to many of the social interactions that I'd been missing with just one mind, and what I had learned then had changed me considerably. The single-minded Marks I was interacting with now had never had such a beneficial experience. They were what they naturally were, without any advantage over anyone else. It was therefore quite possible that some of them could've developed into bad people, perhaps out of bitterness at how much they thought their life sucked. Another source of worry was that I had done quite a few violent things since gaining power, such as cutting people's heads off! Maybe doing violent things like that is part of my basic character. I believe I'd had sufficient justifications at those times, but I imagined that bad people also believed their actions were justified. I was very pleased that my spying minds reported that no single-minded Mark was an asshole. There were some that were excessively bitter about their lives, but their new minds confidentially reported, The not-so-good Marks were outvoted 7-to-1 in their own bodies, and it was hard for them to hang onto any bitterness they had in the face of so many other Marks' experiences and the wonderful things that were going to be happening to them very shortly. I'd been reasonably sure that the seven Marks I injected the hosts with, regardless of which seven they got, would sweep away any bad urges their host might have. Nor did any of the single-minded copies I picked up say anything that made me worry about them, but they were swamped by thousands of other minds and by our bizarre situation so their reactions weren't a good test of their goodness. But, as I said, everything seemed fine. I did 6,000 more upgrades every night for a week, stopping on July 4 after upgrading a total of 42,000 single-minded Marks, leaving me with 58,592 minds. There'd not been a single Mark that needed any remedial action. I had enough knowledge and power to kill individual minds, leaving the other minds in charge of the body. I'd not expected to need to do that, but I was glad I never had to decide whether that counted as a murder, suicide, theft, hijacking or pre-emptive public service. I was faintly amused to be stopping on Independence Day, as I was actively in the process of making the Marks more dependent: eight minds in one body meant they had to depend on each other in a way no one else does. I wasn't attempting to reach all the single-minded Marks. I'd calculated that at my current rate that'd take me a somewhat impractical sixteen centuries, not to mention that it'd leave me with a silly number of minds. The week of 6,000 upgrades per night was just proving the concept, doing a quality check on who we were giving power to, and doing it early enough to allow time for any problems to develop during the three-month trial before I gave the green light to start the massive W-Dimension-wide upgrades. I won't do any more 'dabbling' during the trial period. Presuming no problems develop over that time, then the fifteen second-tier helpers and I will consider that we've proved that extremely high numbers of minds work fine, and that the upgrade from one mind to eight minds works fine too. The process should be pretty simple after that. Starting with the fifteen helpers that I'm déjà vu'ing among almost continuously, but also as new Marks arrive at the level where they get the ability to deliberately access the w-dimensions, we'll tackle the job of finding and upgrading all the low-minded Marks to eight minds. With eight minds, their déjà vu's will be eleven days apart on average. As most of their minds will know how to do upgrades, and presuming they have enough willpower to do so, they'll upgrade themselves quite quickly after getting that green light. With sixteen minds, it'll takes an average of only three days to déjà vu and upgrade again, and thereafter déjà vu's occur less than 24 hours apart. If they don't have enough willpower to get the Universe to cut the déjà vu links, then the higher-minded Marks will have to do one or more rounds of upgrades, until the smaller Marks can manage their own upgrades. It'll be quite easy, especially because I'm no longer worried about how many minds we end up with. The w-address system isn't suitable for working through the W-Dimension in a logical, exhaustively complete fashion as it's too analog and not laid out in any obvious symmetry. We'll set up a signpost system - like a pile of rocks on a particular part of the Moon - to indicate to each other if a dimension has already been searched and if a Mark was found, not found yet after n attempts, or is known to have died. We'll probably search and re-search each "not found yet" dimension several times before we consider it hopeless. Even with those extra checks, it shouldn't take long before every Earth in the entire W-Dimension has been searched, especially because we'll get very good at tracking down Marks after some practice. In between my nightly upgrading sessions, I was in and out of déjà vu's with my Helpers, and had discussed the census information I'd accumulated. Like me, they were surprised how many 2- to 16-minded Marks there were, and were saddened by the number of Markless dimensions. We were also surprised by how few 1-minded Marks there were, they outnumbering 32-minded Marks by a factor of only 3.5. We'd had zero information about their number previously, but there could have been anywhere between none of them if all of us had merged, or millions of times more of them if the chance of our merging the first time had been very low, and the W-Dimension was necessarily huge enough to hold that number of Earths. Given that the factor difference could have been between zero and millions, that it was only 3.5 was surprisingly low. We hoped that number would improve by there being a lot of Marks living outside of Corvallis. We wanted to know how many such Marks there were. Apart from our being curious about them, we'll want to upgrade them in three months, so they did need to be found. Unfortunately the proximity and sight blob search methods I'd used to find the Corvallis Marks weren't practical for an America-wide, or even an Earth-wide, search. However, I could create NP-fingertips in other dimensions if I wanted to, so in each dimension I could: Use a computer to maybe find an old local newspaper story about Mark Anderson's suicide. Snoop Dad's parents in Seattle to find out their email address, create a new email account, and email my grandparents to ask them about Mark and his family. I'd probably pretend to be an old schoolmate of Mark's. Hire a private investigator to do the research for me. Necessarily doing all our correspondence via email, and I could snail-mail him/her cash stolen from drug dealers. There were several other possible methods, but they were all slow and had to be repeated many times. Depending on how many non-Corvallis Marks there were, I might have to do hundreds or even thousands of searches to get a statistically stable result of the proportion of such Marks. That would satisfy our curiosity, but wasn't useful. We had to find ALL the Marks to upgrade them, which would require a massive effort and it wasn't needed unless the W-Dimension-wide Upgrade got the green light, so it could wait until then, so a few million high-minded Marks can do it. ------- At the time of the start of this chapter, I had thought that having 16,592 minds was letting me make some really nice breakthroughs. Before then the insights had mostly been quite narrow, ability-specific ones, but after reaching 16,592 minds I had acquired much more powerful understandings which had enabled me to invent some extremely useful abilities, such as being able to search other w-dimensions. As very happy as I had been with the 16,592 minds' discoveries, I was even happier when I started having insights after acquiring 58,592 minds. That permitted some HUGELY fundamental breakthroughs. Things like: Creating matter rather than heat with my 'heat' blobs. It took about 100 seconds to make a kilogram of matter (pure E=MC^2 at 100% efficiency). Carbon came out as worthless non-diamonds, but the surprisingly small lump of pure gold made me smile. My favorite breakthrough was when I realized how space is structured. [[Actually, I still only had a partial understanding of its structure, but I had penetrated another layer of the Universe's construction, and it was still a fantastic leap forward.]] The latter gave me TWO easy solutions for the ... wait for it ... SOUND BLOB PROBLEM! Yippee! They were: My perceptual resolution and control was fine enough that I could ascertain the movement properties of the air at a particular point (where I wanted to listen, i.e., the 'microphone'), and I could use my willpower to get the Universe to appropriately 'vibrate' the space 'under' the air at another location (beside my ear, i.e., the 'speaker'). The relative vibrations at the speaker propagated to the surrounding air, so this approach worked, but it ain't worth beans compared to the next solution. As I mentioned earlier, every pixel of space has a spatial address. It turns out that the Universe's pixels aren't rigidly structured: their spatial addresses can be changed simply by telling the Universe to do so, and even more amazingly, they can have more than one spatial address. Space can be in more than one place! That created several interesting possibilities, such as the same air molecules that are vibrating where the 'microphone' is, can also be vibrating where I wanted the 'speaker' to be, with the sound propagating from there to my ear. It wasn't a "Sound Blob" at all, but that didn't stop me celebrating the discovery. I was already keeping an eye on the appointment books of the President, CIA Director, FBI Director, and nearly thirty other powerful people, and watching those of their meetings that looked interesting, and now I'd be able to listen to them too. Dual-locating the two spaces also meant sound went in the other direction, so the sound of my speech would travel through the connection. Being able to speak remotely might be useful, but having sound go both ways was a nuisance for eavesdropping - if I was eavesdropping on two or more locations, they could hear each other just as well as I could hear them. If I didn't want the other end to hear noises at my end, I put the speaker inside an airtight NP-box with one side of it pressed against my skull around my ear. I couldn't eavesdrop on more than two conversations at a time that way, but that would still be very useful. If I needed to eavesdrop on more than two places, I could easily redirect their sounds to a bank of tape recorders. It was nice to solve the sound blob problem, but it was even nicer to be able to teleport! I could teleport myself simply by changing the spatial address of the pixels that my body overlapped with. It was easy, once I had the willpower to make the Universe do it. There was the issue of overlapping matter. I wasn't stupid enough to teleport into a wall, but I knew that doctors were very careful to remove air from syringes when injecting someone because air bubbles in veins can cause potentially fatal embolisms, so I didn't want to overlap my body with air. That was easily solved by creating an NP-point at the destination before I jumped there, expanding it to push away all the matter in the volume, which was normally just air molecules. Once the NP-point was slightly larger than the shape I wanted to teleport, I made it hollow, jumped into it, then canceled it. [Later, when I started teleporting some very large objects, the vacuums created were a problem so I used other techniques, such as simultaneously swapping the contents of the source and destination volumes when that was okay to do, or other less direct methods.] Julia was very impressed and happy when I told her the good news about how rapidly she can travel now. Once the word of the teleportation technique spreads among all the other Marks, and they upgrade their number of minds high enough to use it, there are going to be a HUGE number of very happy European clothing stores throughout the Universe. To be fair to Julia, she was mostly impressed and happy because being able to teleport had huge advantages for our safety and even our productivity (Julia is very achievement oriented). I had an addition use in mind: if it was a nice day somewhere on the planet, and I wanted to lie on a beach with my loved ones, I could teleport us there. For some very strange reason, the Universe is reluctant to teleport bikini tops. I'm not sure why that is, but it's not unreasonable of the Universe to be beyond my comprehension sometimes (do you think my girls will fall for that explanation?). If we're lying on a beach - correction: "WHEN we're lying on a beach" - and we get thirsty, I can teleport drinks out of our fridge at home into our hands. I can teleport the empties into the trash afterward. It really is a very convenient ability, despite its incomprehensible limitation, which fortunately won't affect my commuting to MIT. The parents and kids are going to have to have a very serious discussion about how to make the public aware of the Guardian Angel's ability to teleport us around, because it's very easy to imagine that all the world's governments would get VERY paranoid about that: the US Government in case we spied on them (e.g., popping into offices and meeting rooms to plant bugs or steal documents), or other governments in case we spied on them for the US Government. It's also easy to imagine that criminal groups would LOVE to be able to force us to use that ability for them. I'm not so worried about criminals because they'd have to control at least one of us to try to leverage the Guardian Angel, and their attempting to gain that control would give me plenty of opportunity to VERY bloodily and publicly teach them not to try that. As usual, it's the governments that are more of a threat than criminals. Governments would want to stop us being able to teleport, and the only possible way of doing that is by getting rid of the Guardian Angel, presumably by killing me. I'd have to be VERY careful for a while, but fortunately my spying and protective abilities are pretty damned good these days. Not to mention my retributive abilities - if anyone does try something, the Guardian Angel is going to make it VERY clear that it was an extremely stupid and suicidal idea. Such risks can be reduced by carefully managing how teleportation is introduced. That revelation should wait until our being able to fly independently is fully accepted, but then we might be able to ameliorate the security issues by playing up the Guardian Angel's role and hiding the security issues behind the public service ones. For example, if the Government doesn't mistreat us for a few more months, including in their secret meetings that I'm spying on, the Guardian Angel could publicly announce: "Because of the US Government's recent good behavior toward my assignment, God has instructed me to reward humanity by offering you my partial service. The rules for that are as follows: A small notice board is to be mounted on the wall inside the Oval Office. If a one-page request is pinned to it, I will consider granting it, although I won't even read the page if the last such request was less than two months before. I require the description of where and what you want to be clear, for the task to involve rescuing people from imminent peril, it's to be non-political, and the result of non-deliberate action - the last point because God requires humanity to suffer the consequences of its own decisions. Valid requests would include preventing an airliner from crashing if the cause was accidental, removing people from the path of a forest fire, and even evacuating a city should another Hurricane of Katrina's magnitude threaten. I will be more inclined to act on a request if the imminent tragedy was caused by nature, so preferably a forest fire started by lightning rather than an arsonist, but that's not a strict requirement. A plane crashing because of a maintenance mistake would qualify. God will increase my powers if that is necessary for me to carry out my assignment to protect Mark Anderson, but It will not increase them to provide general services to humanity, so if you ask me for something as large as evacuating a city then I will not have time to explain what I am offering to every potential rescuee and ask them whether they want to be rescued or not. I will act as quickly as I can to rescue as many people as I can in the time available. If some rescuees later object then I will consider that to be your responsibility. I will not be responsible for any of the consequences of the rescues, for example, if I removed someone from their home who didn't wish to leave, and it was subsequently looted. I will be acting on the US Government's request, and it will bear responsibility for those requests." That's enough to give you the idea of what my initial plan is, although it's probably months until it gets activated and the parents might modify it greatly. As it is though, it contains several nice aspects: Imminent tragedies will naturally require fast action, thereby providing good opportunities for the angel to teleport people, bringing that capability to everyone's awareness in a Good way. Rescuing people is a very Good act, thereby emphasizing God's involvement, and hopefully diminishing the governments' fears about their security being breached. As has been long clear from Majestic Countdown and the Guardian Angel, God already knows as much as It wants to - exposing the CIA's and Mossad's operations demonstrated that - and the progression in the angel's revealed powers should already have people thinking that God can do anything It wants. Hopefully, even paranoids shouldn't react negatively to the additional threat teleportation introduces. I have so many spare minds and other abilities that I am capable of doing such rescues, which is a good feeling. When the media comes rushing to my door for interviews, I'll be able to say, "I had NO IDEA that the angel could teleport people. It never explains ANYTHING to me! I guess it makes sense that God would give it that ability though, because teleportation would make a fantastic way of keeping someone safe, either sending me to safety, or sending the attacker away, preferably into the Sun." That last comment should be get the media excited and serve as an effective warning to any baddies. After having heard that warning, any future attempted murderers won't be able to complain if I respond to their attack by teleporting them into the Sun. It is VERY clear that this is an offer from God and act of the angel, not of us personally, so when we later start teleporting around it will be obvious that it isn't us doing that. We'll be able to say, "The angel was already flying us when we asked for it, and after we learned that it can teleport people, we asked for that. It sometimes refused to fly us when we asked it before, and it sometimes refuses to teleport us too, but as best I can tell, it doesn't seem to prefer either method. It's hard to know, because it NEVER explains itself." We were already making public comments about the angel often refusing to do what we ask of it, such as: "When we ask it something, it either does it or it doesn't. That sounds obvious, but it's actually weird because that's a complete description. We will ask the air above my head for a favor, and it'll either happen or not. If it doesn't happen, the angel doesn't even appear - there's just empty, silent air. There's never any explanation, so we can't tell whether our request had something wrong with it, or if we angered the angel, or there was some other reason. The only thing we're sure of is that the angel wasn't too busy to hear us, because God would have made the angel clever enough to always know everything that's happening around its assignment. The angel's lack of response makes it quite scary to ask for things because we don't want to risk offending it, but we know so little about it we don't even know whether it can be offended. Even more confusing is that sometimes it'll refuse to do things it's done several times before, and sometimes it'll do quite minor things for us. Obviously it'll do things for safety reasons, but if we ask for a non-essential favor we think that its decisions are partly dependent on whether our request causes anyone else any trouble or harm. There have been a few requests we've made that we learned later would have inconvenienced someone, so we're fairly sure that's a reason, but we can't tell what other reasons might be. One day it'll fly us to the Aquatic Center for a swim, but the next day it won't. How can we know what was wrong with the second time?" Comments like these, which we've repeated many times since the angel started becoming so publicly cooperative, are being made to de-emphasize the control I have over the angel, to discourage random people from asking us for angelic favors, and to help people stop seeing us as a possible threat because the angel won't even inconvenience other people. No doubt we'll be inundated with requests from random people wanting to be teleported and/or to study the angel while it does that, just as we were and are for the angel's flying service. We'll keep ignoring them. The line of communication from the Government to the angel is very specific: a one-page description pinned to a notice board in the Oval Office. If someone from the Government tries to cozy up to any of us to ask for the Guardian Angel to do some sneaky teleporting for national security reasons, or anything else involving teleportation, we'll insist they follow the angel's instruction to pin their request to the notice board. Every time the Government puts a request on that board, that page will teleport around several media offices, giving them time to photograph it. Its method of travel will confirm its authenticity, and its being publicly broadcast will hold the Government accountable. I can easily keep an NP-square over the notice board permanently, which will feel anyone touching it, thereby alerting me to create a sight blob to check what is happening. In effect, acting as a "Call the Angel" button. That the button is unknown will make the Government fear that the angel is permanently watching what is happening in the Oval Office. I like the idea of the President thinking that God is looking over his shoulder, and I have no doubt that he will HATE that! It'll be interesting to see how much the usage of that office changes, and I might even have the angel publicize those changes. That could be done in some very amusing and effective ways, depending on how much I want to tweak the President's tail. The parents might object to that, or perhaps encourage it - parents can be hard to predict. Most of what I've written about recently has just been about the process of making my discoveries. I haven't bothered to write much about their real-world use. Especially with teleportation, the uses are AMAZING. I've given you a small taste of it above, but the possibilities are mind boggling. Scientific trips to Alpha Centauri are a great deal more practical now. Heck, travelling is so easy that I can take people on fantastic sightseeing trips just for the fun of it. As a proof of concept, after some practice I jumped to the moon. I was in my SC430, with the lid up, because I wanted the protection of metal around me, and the car and I were also encased in an airtight NP-box and an Ava Shield with some very safe settings. For extra safety I had arrived at a place that was on the dark side of the Moon and the Dark Side of the Moon (respectively, on the side of the moon away from the Sun to minimize the solar radiation hitting me, and on the side away from the Earth so I couldn't be spotted in a high-powered telescope). I was doubtless overdoing the safety aspect, but there could have been dangers that I was unaware of, so better safe than sorry, especially when so far from home. I wasn't totally controlled by safety issues though, as I couldn't resist removing part of the NP-floor so I could pick up a moon rock with my gloved hands, to bring back to show my families. Teleportation is AMAZING! The other Marks agreed with me. ^ In the second week of July I made another major breakthrough: I discovered what minds truly are. Once I understood that: I no longer needed to merge or upgrade to increase my powers, as I can create as many new minds as I want simply by copying existing ones, including all their subconscious and many other processes. I'd seen that the Universe copies minds as part of its synchronization process, and I'd had the idea of taking control of that function. It'd been surprisingly easy. The minds I copied didn't have to be my minds and it didn't have to be into my head that I copied them, so for example, I could give Julia seven new minds, in any combination of: identical copies of what she already had, copies from Julias in other dimensions, or other people's minds - although I could foresee quite a few problems with the last possibility. I was still rapidly learning about this stuff so it was best not to do anything freaky immediately, but it'll be a VERY interesting discussion if I do decide to upgrade my loved ones. Or perhaps a better description would be "It'll be a mind-boggling discussion." I gained complete control over my proximity sense, and each of my minds was now able to have its own "Proximity Blobs". My proximity range was currently about 8.5 miles in radius, so I normally just had one proximity blob centered on my body. Ever since I first got a proximity sense, its radius has been nine inches times the number of minds I had, and that continued to be the case even when each of my minds created their own proximity blob, so I could now cover 13 million square miles. I only needed a third of my minds to blanket America, or all of my minds could sense a quarter of the planet's land area. That dramatically increased my ability to search for any other multi-minded people (I found none), and to find Marks in dimensions he wasn't in Corvallis (I found some Marks in some strange places. When not in America, most often in England). I didn't do anything about those Marks yet, but I made some curious mental notes to find out how they ended up where they were. It was wonderful that we'd be able to easily find ALL the Marks and upgrade them once that green light was given. Not long after the previous discovery, my ability to locate Marks in any dimension improved even further by my learning how to look for his mind. Not by slowly searching 3D space, but by searching for his recognizable mind through what I called a "Consciousness Map". It's kind of a cross between a radar map and an online telephone directory of all the minds in a dimension, with brighter blips being bigger minds, and each labeled with their w-address. I can locate people visually in the radar aspect of the Map, or by doing a search on their w-address, by filtering on an area and reading through all the entries, or just by 'knowing' who I am looking for, such as "Where's Mark Anderson". The last access method doesn't work off names, but off my 'knowing' the person. Anyone who I've made the effort to memorize the proximity image of is accessible. Accessing the "Consciousness Map" is through my consciousness and the Universe's, so I've only got to think of how I want the Universe to supply the information, and it does. Just like nearly all the other abilities I have developed, it was VERY easy to use once I had the willpower required to get the Universe to cooperate. My previous search for each dimension's Marks had been a physical search, but I could now locate each version of myself quicker than looking myself up in a phonebook. The Consciousness Map also solved my spare-time proximity search for any multi-minded individuals on my Earth. I accessed the list in mind-power order: I was at the top of the list and the next entry down had only one mind. I could tell that directly from the Map, not even needing to send my proximity sense to him or her (I couldn't tell gender from the w-address). I checked the person anyway - a guy as it happened - and confirmed that he did have one mind. I also spot-checked a few other entries on the Map's mind-power list, all the way down to the first jock. Then I created an Information Pipe to another dimension and accessed its Consciousness Map (every dimension has its own), doing the same quick review of it, and discovering that Earth's greatest mind was also a solo entity. I spot-checked several other Earths, taking less than a second for each of them to confirm that none of them contained anyone interesting. Then I suddenly realized that Consciousness Maps made something INCREDIBLE possible, and it immediately grabbed ALL MY ATTENTION. It was instantly and utterly irresistible. Can you guess what it was? Hints: each dimension's Consciousness Map can be accessed in mind-power order, and it shows each mind's w-address, from which I can get the spatial address and can send a sight blob there. The map can be looked at in mind-power order and filtered, or not filtered, in various ways. Having confirmed my belief that several Earths had no one with more than one mind, except me sometimes, I used the Map again - for my dimension and still in mind-power order, but without the filter that I'd thoughtlessly applied last time. I was stunned when my w-address was far above all the others in a HUGE list - MUCH larger than the last list I'd 'looked' at! After I'd recovered from the shock of my being on the top, I got the spatial address of the next most powerful mind, created a sight blob there, then moved it up a few feet to get a good look. I'd been excited even before I'd created the sight blob, and my emotions rocketed from excited to gobsmacked and kept going. I was quickly so far beyond GOBSMACKED that my whole body starting shaking and I had to sit down before I collapsed. I started having the MOST FANTASTIC TIME OF ALL OF MY LIVES, and I've previously had some pretty damned good times so that's saying something! I looked at the locations of more and more of the top minds. With the intellectual power many of them have, it's utterly incredible what so many alien civilizations have achieved. I linked myself successively to my second-tier helpers to reward them for helping me on my Voyage, giving them the best times of their lives too. We spent HOURS looking at the owners of several dimension's greatest minds, no matter which galaxies they were in - it took a very long time for our bodies to stop shaking from the visual excitement. "Visual excitement" only, because I was too scared to teleport to any of the locations, even though teleporting is trivially easy for any distance as it's just a matter of making the Universe change my volume's location values. The Second-Tier Helper Marks and I knew we were going to travel though, just as soon as we can be very confident that a full-body, correctly tuned Ava Shield and NP-suit will keep us safe. That's one of the reasons we were shaking for so long. We had a LOT to think about: How can we be sure of our safety? Where to go? What to take? What to bring back? WHO to bring back? What to do with whatever or whoever I 'cart' back? OH BOY! Those were decisions that would have greater consequences for humanity than ANY decision any human being has EVER made, so we didn't rush them. I'd like to say that we gave the issue a lot of careful thought, but we were too excited for that. Mostly we just reveled in the experience and continued to examine many different alien civilizations. One of Prof's hopes was that I might get humanity to the nearby stars, but I'd overachieved on making that possible: I could effortlessly and instantaneously access the entire Universe, including all its most advanced species - WOW! For the next few days I was HIGHLY distracted, as were my déjà vu partners. My loved ones would have had to be blind not to have noticed. They could see my happiness and excitement so weren't concerned, but they were very curious. I put them off because to explain the current situation would have taken a long time and I had a very strong suspicion that it would have been wasted time because the situation was still changing rapidly and dramatically. I was having another wave of insights because I'd copied my minds many, many more times, and early indications were that these were going to be HUGE insights. The more minds I created, the more power they gave me over the Universe, enabling me to learn MUCH more. The cycle repeated over and over, accelerating as I created yet more minds for myself. First tens of thousands of them, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, and then even more. The Universe opened wider and wider to me. I was glad I hadn't discovered any significantly bad Marks, because just one of them would be able to create any number of copies of himself, and then do great harm. The last thing I wanted was to be on both front lines of a battle between Good and Evil. I was still HIGHLY excited by what I was seeing of aliens from all over my dimension but some of my minds did calm down enough to do some ability experiments. I had a backlog of experimental tasks to do because whether or not I'd been calm, my subconsciouses had still been getting more information from the Universe, so my progress had continued; it'd just been ignored for a while. Over the next several days, more information led to more knowledge led to more breakthroughs, which led to more ideas for experiments to perform, which led to more information, etc. The amount of willpower and the level of abilities I had now were letting me produce more, and more fundamental, results than ever before. Included in my learning about minds was how to read them. I no longer need sound blobs because I can read what people are saying directly from the part of their brains that process speech. It'd taken me years and a LOT of hours of frustration to develop a workable sound blob, and I'd never actually got around to using one usefully before I didn't need them anymore. I'd complain that the Universe was being very unfair, but I don't think you'd believe me. Early July 25 I gained total control of the W-Dimension, including the inter-dimensional synchronization process. I learned that process is considerably more sophisticated than I'd thought, including not being a simple averaging between the volumes of the two ends of a link, but were influenced by their dimensions as a whole, and by the Universe as an even greater whole. It permitted 'themes' in the types of variations that could exist between dimensions to evolve and persist, with those themes having local, dimensional and multi-dimensional layers, which I thought was rather interesting. Most importantly, my control of the W-Dimension processes gave me the ability to connect ALL of my minds - in EVERY dimension - into a Universe-wide, VERY POWERFUL, permanent network. It would allow every one of my minds to share in a continuous mega-déjà vu. I started linking myself to the minds of more and more Marks in other dimensions, adding the most multi-minded Marks first, enabling me to gain even more power and understanding. And whatever I learned, all the minds I was linked to also learned, and there was a rapidly increasing number of them. My ability to create matter became vastly more sophisticated, giving me the capacity to make very complex matter structures, and I don't just mean that I could create elements in various allotropes, such as carbon as diamond. My proximity sense had gained and was still gaining phenomenal resolution, permitting me to see smaller and smaller details, so small that it became possible for me to create fully functioning human bodies. The definition of "I" was REALLY problematic now because I was creating, modifying and destroying bodies and minds for myself; and hundred of millions of my minds were currently linked together so well that we were continuously experiencing each other's lives - which had required a huge amount of modification to my minds to make handling that volume of detail possible. So who was I? Even "What am I?" is a reasonable question now. I/we mentioned modifying my minds. Knowing what they were and how to create them included the ability to modify them. When I'd first gained the ability to 'see' minds, I hadn't understood them well enough to risk changing them directly, but I gained that understanding. I/we could make minor changes like equipping my minds with a software version of a scientific calculator, through to creating a mind modified to be a giant memory repository which stored the constantly accumulating memories of all the Marks it was linked to. We were starting to create and cancel our bodies and minds for various reasons, so having somewhere to keep all our memories seemed like a good idea. I/we learned how to change minds to make them independent of bodies. Previously they'd been tethered to be within the proximity range of my body, but upgrading their ability to tunnel information removed that tether, so my minds could wander or teleport to wherever they wanted - right at the top of that list was visiting a multitude of alien civilizations. My families and I wanted to be in each other's lives, but each of my bodies needed only a single mind to operate it, so any minds that didn't want to hang around started exploring the Universe. I had the Consciousness Map for each dimension of the Universe, and my minds could cross the width of the Universe as easy as you can add 1+1, just by specifying the addresses I wanted to jump to. My minds weren't matter, so they didn't even need to evacuate the jump destination's volume first nor care what the destination's environment was like. Minds can operate inside or outside of matter; yours 'floats' around the volume of your body and can even float into the volume of someone else's body if you are within a few inches of them. As the network expanded, my released minds had the fascinating experience of discovering, observing and learning about an ever increasing myriad of alien species throughout the Universe, every mind on the network sharing in the discoveries as "I" and "we" were becoming the same thing. Another thing some of my minds were eager to learn about was black holes: does much of the science fiction written about them, such as their providing jump gate possibilities, have any basis in reality? Quite a few of my minds floated into, around inside of, and out of, various black holes - I knew my minds were safe because they operate on the Universe at a level below that of black holes; even their effect on time didn't touch my minds because the Universe's fundamental structure has to be immune to what it contains. I sadly learned that black holes are just lumps of very dense matter, without having 'magical' properties outside of the reasonably obvious. There's still a huge amount of VERY interesting science I can learn from them, and I'm looking forward to doing that, but they aren't shortcuts between the galaxies or any other such wishful thinking. That doesn't limit me, or any spaceship (or BBJ) one of my minds is 'piloting', or anyone else that I upgrade to have enough minds (if I ever do that), but I still thought it was sad for all the Universe's other creatures. I've ONLY JUST started my observations, but from what little I've seen so far, no aliens have discovered any form of instantaneous travel. There are some very widespread alien civilizations which have superlight ships and seem to have instantaneous communication, but I know the latter is relatively easy judging by humanity's already starting to get the first glimpses of how to do it. I haven't yet investigated how the theoretically impossible superlight ships are possible, but I've seen that there's more than one solution, and they're on my list. It's bizarre that I'm not concentrating on them now, but there's SO MUCH to see out there! If you'll excuse the understatement, I wanted to start by getting the "big picture". Discoveries of something particularly fascinating in one w-dimension - and my minds made MANY of those - often caused the creation of millions of new minds which were sent to explore the same locations in other dimensions, speeding the growth of the network, which sped the growth of my power and understanding. One of us had the idea of replacing the sight blobs we had watching over our loved ones with new minds which we modified to make them VERY dedicated bodyguards, making them amusingly similar to how Archangel Michael had first described the Guardian Angels (that wasn't the only circularity, as I had so much power now that it wasn't too much of an exaggeration to say that God had just been made in a Man's image). With that thought about protecting my loved ones better, in each of billions of dimensions - even those in which I hadn't contacted my counterparts yet - another dozen minds were created as bodyguards, further feeding our growth in willpower, power and ability to gain understanding from and of the Universe. My network reached and surpassed a trillion minds, with my gaining power, knowledge and understanding the whole time. The innermost workings of the Universe started being revealed to my investigations, becoming an open book. I was learning EVERYTHING - with one deliberate exception: I was leaving closed some of the 'chapter' of that book that dealt with Time. I thought it best not to fiddle around with that because it seemed, and I feared, that its nature meant that piercing it would also break it, which from what I could understand of it, would be a very bad thing. Midday July 25, with over two trillion minds, I finally and truly reached the end of my Voyage of Discovery. There'd been a few previous times when I'd thought my Voyage was over, only to have it restart as a result of a new knowledge, but I knew that wouldn't happen again because I now understood the Universe's core fundamentals. I had previously considered my Voyage ended because I'd wanted to stop, but now it had ended because there were no more metaphorical rooms; I had passed through door after door in my sequence of rooms, and had arrived at the core of the Universe. There were still an astronomical number of smaller things I didn't know and was very much looking forward to learning about - such as getting to know all the Universe's aliens - but with my acquiring all the fundamental knowledge that the Universe had, I also gained the ability to control the Universe. From July 25, there was no doubt about what I was: I was a God! I began reconsidering my contempt for all things religious. ------- Part 19: Godhood ------- Chapter 419: So Many Options; Introduction Friday, July 25, 2008 and on The Universe is a truly AMAZING place. It offers countless sources of beauty, wonder and excitement. It has a depth of ... I'm sorry, but you'll never understand; your minds are WAY too small. But take it from me, you're living in an awesome creation. You'll have to take it from me because I'm not letting you follow me. I've already adjusted the laws of physics so the W-Dimension synchronization process is weaker. Partly because I want the dimensions to be able to diverge more so I can see what happens when the ideas I have are put into action, and partly because I don't want you to follow me. The Universe isn't big enough for two gods, let alone millions of them. My path to godhood is now closed to 'everyone', whether human or any other minded species. Joining me in godhood will be by invitation only. Fictional stories usual end with: " ... and they lived happily ever after." This is my autobiography though. There are a few similarities, but there are mostly differences between this and stories: The "they" is a terribly inaccurate simplification. In most stories, "they" is a guy and a girl. For me, it's not even a guy and several girls. There are trillions of me and hundreds of billions of my loved ones, many of whom don't know it yet as I'm only just starting to contact them. That's a LOT of "they"! The "lived happily" will be accurate because I'll be making sure of that. There will be a lot of living and much happiness for my loved ones and me. The "ever after" is an understatement, as it will be "forever after." By far the most profound difference between this autobiography and fictional stories is that this is my Genesis. We've reached the end of my ascendancy, but only the very beginning of my godhood. This document is ending but my fun is only just beginning. I'm not going to be content to walk off into the sunset. I can make my own planets and suns, and I aren't going to be satisfied by a simple stroll along one of them toward the other - I have FAR bigger plans. The Universe is mine and there are SO many options for what I can do with it. There are a finite number of w-dimension instances, about a trillion of them which contain human life on Earth and quite a few that don't although they don't interest me much at the moment. Each dimension is billions of light-years across, so I have a HUGE playground. With a bit of preparation I can even trigger the Universe to create fresh w-dimensions, initiating what you currently think of as the Big Bang in each of them. They'd take a long time to coalesce enough to be useful. I'll have the time, but I have no use for fresh dimensions yet. Maybe later. My future will consist of activities on four levels, from the very large scale down to the smallest: I am the GOD OF THE UNIVERSE! Its galaxies down to its atoms, and certainly including its creatures, are all in my domain. The Universe contains a huge number of intelligent alien species and far more unintelligent ones. I have power over them all, but I have yet to use that power for anything other than starting to get to know them. I'm choosing to do that slowly simply because it's much more fun that way. One thing I have plenty of is time. There is one tiny volume of the Universe where I already know enough to immediately start intervening. I don't have to study humanity before deciding if anything needs to be done as I've got a list that I've already started acting on, plus I have a large number of ideas that I want to try out. Humanity is in for some surprises. Expressed more elegantly: I am ready to start guiding humanity toward a better future. I'm not sure what "better" actually means, but I intend to start finding out. I've got quite a few opinions about what it isn't, and I'll be acting to get rid of some of those immediately. At this point of my life - the end of my ascendancy and beginning of my godhood - my loved ones are uppermost in my thoughts. ALL that is good in my life was made possible because of them, and I will very much enjoy rewarding them for that. Death can't claim me now, and I will prevent it claiming my loved ones too, for as long as they wish. I will be ensuring that they have very long, very happy and extremely interesting lives. I will also ensure that I have an EXTREMELY interesting life. I now have access to a phenomenal amount of information and can perform an incredible amount of thinking, but I am still young so have much to learn about how to think, how to gain maturity, how to grow into my responsibilities, etc. Having said that, I am also looking forward to having a lot of fun along the way - if a god can't enjoy himself, who can? That's not a facetious comment. A god CAN have fun. Apart from anything else, if my fun causes problems, I have the power to fix them. In terms of the first of the above bullet points, I have very recently been sending hundreds of billions of my minds out into the Universe to begin learning about it. I can jump my minds directly to specific places, such as where alien minds are, but I want to explore physical space too. I've always been interested in science fiction and now I'm living it by boldly sending billions of my minds where no human mind has gone before. They are already providing me with many wondrous experiences, but I am not yet knowledgeable enough to interact with alien species. I'm sure that I'll become an actively involved god as letting nature blindly take its course seems a very poor process, not to mention a boring one. Guiding the Universe intelligently seems much better. Universe-wide unguided evolution will be allowed to have some influence, but I don't think I'll let it dominate the future. I have the advantage of being in control of many dimensions, so if Species A wipes out Species B in one dimension, I can ensure that B survives in others, just in case B later develops into something that makes me proud that I saved them. If they make me proud enough, I can re-seed the dimensions they were earlier wiped out of. However, discussing such activities is getting ahead of myself and they aren't suitable topics for this, my Genesis. The rest of this chapter and the next will mostly be about the second level listed above: your new god's interactions with humanity. As fascinating as the entire Universe is, humanity currently has the greatest meaning to me, so you'll be receiving a great deal of my attention. I can have as much "attention" as I want merely by creating new minds, so I can guarantee that I won't be too busy to make my presence felt on many of your Earths. It'll be fun to see how different ideas of mine play out. Some of them won't please many people, especially because my actions will sometimes be pretty damned unmysterious, but you'll have to get used to whatever changes I make in your dimension. Humanity is under new management and I don't like many of the usual ways of doing things. One thing's for sure, my approach will be very different than that of whatever figment of imagination you last thought was your god, as I'll actually be doing things. After the next chapter, most of the rest of my autobiography will be describing the start of my new interactions with my loved ones, that being the third bullet point above. They're very important to me so I have very many thoughts about them. As you'll read, my ideas for my loved ones will naturally sometimes overlap with our interactions with the rest of humanity, often in unusual ways. The fourth bullet point above is about me. As I'm common to all the other points, you'll pick up plenty about my intentions from the chapters devoted to those discussions, so there are only a few specific comments about me in the final chapter. Before I start listing specific ideas and plans that I have, I'll make clear that there's one major principle that's going to guide my actions more than any other: variety. I've already mentioned that I've weakened the W-Dimension synchronization process in part to permit greater variation across dimensions. Some of those variations will be the result of random chance, but many of them will come from deliberate choices and manipulations of mine; initially just on Earths, but eventually throughout the entire Universe. There are three reasons for that: It'll be a lot more fun for me. I have prodigiously expanded my minds' capacities so we can follow each others activities, even though there are more than two trillion of us so far. I obviously don't want us to do the same thing two trillion times! It is far more fun to do many, many different things simultaneously. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm new to this godhood business and I have a lot to learn. I'd hate to wipe out human civilization or make other calamitous mistakes in every dimension at the same time - those sorts of mistakes are hard to recover from (not impossible, just annoyingly hard). I'm going to create a great deal of variation to make sure that all my eggs aren't in the same basket. I have a suspicion that there is no possibility of knowing what the single "Right" approach is even for a god. Life is too complex, the future too unknown, and judgment too dependent on the perspective of the judge. To give a simple example, it would only take me a second to double the life expectancies of all humans. Would doing that be a Good thing or a Bad thing? At first thought it seems Good. Think about it some more and you'll see that it has some very serious problems and would also cause a great deal of harm, from retirement homes going into bankruptcy, to the risk of massive population explosions in many countries leading to runaway pollution, resource depletion, religious riots, civilization collapse, etc. I will, however, guess that it'd probably do more good than harm, in which case should I wave my hand and make human life expectancy 20 times longer? Or 200 times? Or 2,000,000 times? I don't know the answers to these questions. I have innumerable options open to me, many of which interact with each other, but if I can't tell how much to change a single aspect of human life, how can I possibly tell whether a thousand changes will work together beneficially or not? What I can do is try lots of things in different dimensions, see which ideas or combinations of ideas give poor or good results, and make the necessary adjustments throughout the Universe. I'm going to be a "By the seat of my pants" kind of god, as opposed to the type that thinks He's infallible right from the get go. I will often be authoritative though; you shouldn't forget that. ------- Let me start by saying that what follows are just my initial thoughts. I've only been a god for a few minutes and it's going to take quite a lot longer than that for me to get used to my new status. I will admit that some of my initial ideas are silly and possibly even childish, nonetheless they are my ideas and as the purpose of this autobiography is to help you understand your new god, I'm going to describe them. Feel free to laugh at them or me if you wish - I'm not a god who's going to be offended by that. If I tell you to do something then you'd better do it, but you're free to hold whatever opinion of me you want. Heck, I don't even care if you worship false idols, making me probably the first god in human history to have that attitude. ^ In some w-dimensions, I'll do nothing other than post my autobiography on your internet and wait to see how humanity chooses to react to it. If you're reading this, then the ball's in your court. I'm not even going to tell you what the game is, although it's a safe bet that it's not football. The dimensions in which I do this will mostly be those in which Mark Anderson never achieved anything noteworthy, so mostly where he remained single-minded or zero-minded (dead) until very recently. In accordance to my overarching "Variety Principle", in some dimensions I'll put a kind of low-level fog in people's minds so they'll be unable to notice that any of their reality confirms any of this story, so those humanities will be uninfluenced in their decisions, and belief in me will be a matter of faith, which amuses me. In other dimensions, I'll allow small similarities to be noticed, and in yet other dimensions the only restraint I'll put on people will be to stop them annoying my loved ones. In some of these dimensions I might decide that "Time's up!" and I'll sort the unbelievers from the winners. That'll happen at different times in different dimensions so some of them won't be for hundreds or even thousands of years, if ever, but some will be only weeks from now. ^ One thing I want to do a lot of, in many different ways to maximize my enjoyment, is to pursue a career as a scientist. Julia, Prof and I have talked about this a great deal over the last year or so, and we're all looking forward to it very much. Being left free to pursue many different versions of that career is a large part of the reason why I want us to have low-key lives in so many dimensions. Where "low-key" includes being known as the world's greatest scientist. Compared to be known as the Universe's god, being a hundred times greater than Einstein is low key. I'm going to advance humanity in many different ways across the dimensions. In some the advances will be biological, in others "physical" (as in Physics. I'm not sure why "biology" goes to "biological" easily, but "physics" takes on a new meaning when it becomes "physical". I guess English must have some faults. Maybe I should do something about that). Getting humanity into space is my most eagerly anticipated ambition. As a god I could do that trivially easily - it's as simple as materializing easily used spaceships in parking lots all over the planet - but I want to do it 'normally'; as if I really was a scientist making breakthroughs and developments. Julia, Prof and I will enjoy that. We've got all the time in the world, and even beyond that, so there's no great hurry, except from our impatience to enjoy it. Being a god takes all the challenge out of that, but I'll create some Marks with restricted abilities to understand the Universe - say with the equivalent of thirty two minds - so they'll have to do their own R&D. I'll let them have their own grapevine so they can externally network, as I'd been so looking forward to. All the Full Marks will share the Restricted Marks' emotions, so we'll enjoy their lives. I'll be creating all sorts of different Marks - some of them VERY different - so we can all enjoy a multiplicity of different lives. One thing I will use my godhood for in most of these dimensions is to make sure that the advances those Marks make will be implemented in ways that prevent governmental interference (only in "most dimensions" as my Variety Principle requires me to allow some humanities the opportunities to fuck up if they choose to. Who knows, maybe some of those dimensions will surprise me by excelling). Because I believe that Government interference would be contrary to the best interests of humanity, in most dimensions I'll be restricting or rendering impotent its involvement in Julia's and my companies' successes. In each of these dimensions, we'll have a research and commercialization company that will be very successful, become very rich and powerful, and will develop and control some wonderful technologies. Before too many more years, those technologies will enable our company to get into space and set up self-sufficient operations "out there", despite the Government's interference and desire for control. I'm sure it'll try VERY hard to wrest control of our company's technologies and operations from us, and I'm even more sure that we'll have a lot of fun frustrating its attempts. The Restricted Marks may or may not know it, but they'll have God on their side and actively spying on every one of my enemies, so the goodies are certain to win in the end, and in ways that often show up the Government's immorality. It's going to be a great deal of fun to do an end run around the Government of the magnitude I've got in mind: light-years. Except when I allow otherwise for experimental purposes as part of my Variation Principle, the US's and all the Earth's other governments will be left behind impotently on Earth while humanity expands outward under the management of Julia's and my company. We'll be acquiring and using all the 'astronomical' resources, making all the First Contacts, dealing with all the alien species including acquiring their technologies, introducing them - the new technologies and the aliens themselves - to Earth, all as if the US Government was irrelevant. It'll be many millions of wonderful adventures for us, offering us many millions of possibilities for how we do it in different dimensions. Even just how we govern humanity starting from its expansion through to its creating innumerable settlements throughout our galaxy offers many interesting possibilities. With inspiration and methodologies supplied by all the Universe's many alien species, there are some VERY weird but extremely useful biological advances that I could pretend to invent, taking humanity in directions completely unforeseen. That'd be a lot of fun too, especially because the religious bigots will have their (lack of) feathers very badly ruffled by it. I've never understood why so many people get so rabid at the thought of humans being genetically modified. To me it seems like an excellent idea to make ourselves more physically and mentally capable, and diversification is nearly always beneficial in itself, if only by making life more interesting. Isn't life more interesting because we have two sexes? So wouldn't three or more be even better? How about branching humanity into several species? There are lots of interesting possibilities. One biological advance that I will apparently be quickly discovering or acquiring from aliens in many dimensions, is the secret to immortality. If that is publicly known to exist, then all my loved ones and I can openly live forever. It would be particularly useful to give that to Prof and Vanessa before too many more years, although there are many other ways to keep them alive, as you'll read later. It's extremely easy for me to grant anyone immortality: it just needs me to repair and tune their body properly, memorize it, and from time to time move their mind into a fresh reproduction of the snapshot, disposing of the old body in the usual way: I turn it into energy and send it to the Dark Energy reservoir. [By the way, there is no such thing as Dark Matter in the sense that there's Dark Energy. Your scientists talk about it, and they are failing to find some of the Universe's matter, but they'll either find it eventually or find the errors in their calculations.] Despite immortality being so easy, I don't expect that many people will get it. As will nearly always be the case with everything I'm going to be doing, there will be variations across the dimensions because that's more interesting, will teach me more about how to steward humanity, and it maximizes my chance of finding what works well - so in a few dimensions I'll make more people immortal, and in a few cases, everyone. I once told a reporter off for thoughtlessly using the word "immortal", which is a mistake I've just made myself. Giving it proper thought, I can implement immortality in different ways: bodies truly do become indestructible or are maybe easily replaced, or maybe they'd only be safe from diseases and decay, or maybe bodies remain exactly as they are now but their owners' minds are immortal, such as by having the mind of a just-died body appear in the next baby to be born. I'll try them all and other variations a few times. You don't know enough about how my new level of abilities work to imagine how I'd do what I'm talking about, but how I could stage-manage those things will become clear from later examples of my interactions with humanity. To use our biological development company as an example for how I could introduce immortality, what will happen is that Julia's and my company will accidentally stumble on the immortality formula, will give it to ourselves and our loved ones, and will publicly announce it. Using my godly powers I can easily arrange for the CIA, FBI, or some such agency - I don't really care which of them gets the blame - to raid our lab. Heck, I could have three different agencies launch missions on the same night and have them meet and attack each other, turning their operations into a comedic clusterfuck. During the raid(s), the Government's illegal heavy handedness will result in critical data and samples being destroyed, and it will subsequently prove impossible to reproduce the formula. Meanwhile Prof's and Vanessa's bodies will have become amazingly youthful and all my loved ones will be in superb physical condition, forever. I'll give interviews in which I'll say, "Oh well, what a pity for the rest of humanity that our government acted so illegally. The voters of this country really should do something about reforming the political system so that sort of thing doesn't happen again." Unlike our first lawsuit against the DHS and CIA when my lost immortality was only a possibility, it'll be very interesting to see how the public react when they think they TRULY did miss out on being immortal and the proof of that is walking around in extremely healthy bodies among them. I can even make them so apparently healthy that if I allowed assassins to kill them, they'd heal and come back to life. Or the restricted access to immortality can be achieved by aliens arriving on Earth, publicly appear and inquire who the world's greatest scientist is (that'll be me by then). They'll quickly discover who and where I am, then zip across to my home before the Government has had time to arrange to fuck it up. I'll do this at a time that all my loved ones are at home and with a news team handy. The alien saucer will arrive, an alien will emerge, my whole family will greet it, and it'll offer me a dozen or so vials of immortality elixir to be given to whoever I want, as a no-strings-attached gift to humanity. I'll immediately pass them out to my loved ones and we'll chug them down in front of the camera before anyone can interfere. The alien will wave its tentacles goodbye, leave, and my loved ones and I will live forever. Thus the world will see a justification for our long lives, allowing us to live them openly. Some or all of our descendants would inherit immortality too. I imagine our descendants will gain benefits in proportion to their quality of character, but that remains to be seen; I'm flexible about issues like that, especially as I imagine my descendants' mothers will have strong opinions on the matter. It might be fun to have various numbers of spare vials in some dimensions, just to see what happens. I'd fill them with some very exotic liquids - for which there are many sources throughout the Universe - to disguise their being irrelevant. Or as a third completely different approach, Archangel Michael can return and grant immortality to all my loved ones. Whatever the initial scenario is, I'm sure there'll be all sorts of crap we'll have to put up with. I'll hide the godly interventions I'll have to make to keep us safe, and eventually the public will cool down. Even if we have crap for several years, being able to openly live forever will be worth it. I haven't yet explained how powerful I am. You'll understand more about that later, but for now take it from me that I can EASILY keep us safe. I can even manage the situation so it doesn't spiral out of control, for example, I can prevent another batch of evil CIA scientists kidnapping any of my loved ones to experiment on, and do it in such a way that no one will get suspicious. If necessary, I can simply edit their memories of any suspicious events. That should be enough examples to give you the idea that our lives have a huge number of fascinating, bizarre and even silly - but not without value - options. Living forever, being able to try of all sorts of ideas in different dimensions, our being protected by a god with awesome powers, etc., permit a near-infinity of interesting experiences. ------- I'm generally not an assertive guy. Even with the power and knowledge that I have now, that's still the case. Maybe that'll change in time, but for the foreseeable future my interventions will mostly be by way of creating reasons for people to change, rather than forcing them to change, or directly changing them myself by editing their minds. To illustrate the sort of approach I'm currently preferring, I'll mention something my experiences have made me very bitter about: government immorality. That's high on my list of things that need fixing. There are many ways to encourage governments to behave more morally, and I'm looking forward to trying many of them out on different Earths. One way is for me to provide outsiders that point out problems, so in some w's I'll have aliens arrive on Earth. Sometimes they'll be real aliens, and sometimes fakes: nothing more than recently created weird bodies with my minds installed in them. The following is too childish but it'll give you the idea quickly: I could have a spaceship recognizably similar to Star Trek's Enterprise arrive in orbit around Earth, except it'll be crewed by aliens on a mission to go where no blurgy-thing has gone before. They could judge Earthmen in the highly moral tone used in the TV series, and find humanity sadly lacking. I expect there'd be lots of alien "tut-tutting" and sad shaking of heads (if I give blurgy-things heads and the ability to "tut" with them). It'd be fun to see how humanity reacts to having its appalling morals pointed out, and seeing an amazing opportunity disappear over the horizon at warp speed because humanity didn't measure up. I wouldn't do anything so obviously fake, but there are many ways the same lesson could be imparted in a far more believable manner. Ambassadors of the Galactic Council could, after their fact-finding tour - during which they will have uncovered horrendous examples of massive government immorality in many countries - sadly tell the United Nations that Earth-people are too uncivilized to join the Galactic Federation. They'll suggest, "We'll stop by in another thousand years to check. You can apply again then if you believe you're moral enough, although based on what I've seen I doubt you ever will become civilized." If during their tour, the ambassadors had demonstrated technologies that people salivated for, which they took away when they left, then there'd be a great deal of motivation for change. In some dimensions I'll experiment by providing some coercive motivation, such as by having an Ambassador state, "One of our rules is that when we contact newly space-capable species, they are protected for a period of time equivalent to 143.2 of your years. If you have not proved yourself civilized enough to join the Federation by the expiry of that time, then its protection will be removed. Federation rules will no longer constrain how our member species interact with yours. Some of them are very aggressive and you would probably find yourselves being treated in ways similar to those in which you treat the animals of your planet. I suggest you try hard to civilize yourselves." In some dimensions I'll use a shorter timeframe so that the children who are alive at the time of the Ambassador's visit will still be alive at the deadline, providing their parents with more motivation to force change. It'll be interesting to see how humanity responds, especially if the Ambassador uncovered a large list of very common human immoralities. They could be as wide-ranging as: "It's immoral of your religions to take money from people when there is no such thing as a God" (my tongue will be in my cheek for that one), through to things like, "All countries which are immorally occupying others should stop doing so." Given that all the world's largest countries are currently doing that, I wonder how they'll react, and how they'll handle the countries that fail to react. At another extreme, the Ambassador could comment, "It's immoral for your corporations to have profit as their goal rather than being beneficial to life on your planet." There are LOTS of possibilities to force people to examine humanity's current practices and to change them in positive ways. ------- In some other w's I'll be using a very different approach: I'll be declaring my godhood. That'll be another good way of pointing out people's immorality because that's what priests do most of the time. Sometimes I'll pretend to be another Jesus or even the Father himself. I think my assuming a Christian persona will probably be boring, but it's sort of obligatory, isn't it? Perhaps having some awe-inspiring, flaming angels flying around as my messengers might liven things up sufficiently, especially if they dress as blatantly as Archangel Michael did, regardless of their gender. Speaking of which, I might make myself a Black female in some dimensions, just for the fun of teasing narrow-minded people. Or perhaps even a hermaphrodite, to REALLY twist some panties. I'm more looking forward to making my appearance in other guises. Allah should be enjoyable as I have a lot of respect for many of the Muslim values that were practiced several hundred years ago (I've read a lot of history, and many of the people's attitudes at that time were more praiseworthy than today's norm). Making my entrance by rising up out of the Black Stone of the Kaaba during the Haj, while sitting on a flying carpet, should get people's attention. I'll have to suppress the riot that would inevitably follow, but that'll be easy. I'm also intending, in other dimensions, to arrive as several American-Indian gods. We'll be dismayed at the damage done to "our country". I've got this image of me as an American-Indian, accompanied by a saber toothed tiger and grizzly bear, walking into the Oval Office for an enforced 'chat' with President Bush. I've long wanted to literally give his ass a very hard kicking, and that'd be an appropriate occasion to do so. The tiger and bear might get in a few swats too. In other w's I could arrive as the god(s) of other religions. In some dimensions I could arrive as the gods of ALL the religions. Having a few thousand gods arrive all over the world would liven things up very entertainingly and make it easy for me to impart many lessons to humanity. The gods would NOT war with each other, but would be wonderful exemplars of cooperation. Religious intolerance is merely a symptom, but getting rid of it and the other major expressions of human selfishness is very high on my list. The damage done to the environment is a believable reason for starting to convince humanity to be less individually greedy. Done right, that will be extendable into other areas. Having recently looked into the minds of my nation's leaders, I'm looking forward to holding them to account for the environmental abuses they've willingly condoned, often for utterly contemptible reasons. Having been brought up in a beautiful area of the country, valuing natural beauty is part of my character. I have NOT appreciated President Bush's terrible and irresponsible attitude to the environment. You'd think that his being a devout Christian would mean he'd have reverence for God's creation and would want to look after it, rather than gouge it for all it's worth. It's strange how devout Christians so often pick and choose which beliefs to practice. In the dimensions where I declare my godhood, in whatever form I choose to present it, my followers better behave a damn sight better than Bush and nearly every other Christian that I've ever encountered. In terms of revealing myself as a god, mostly I'm looking to declaring myself as a new type of God: a technologically savvy, scientifically accomplished, rational God. That's going to be FAR more fun than the traditional approach, which is - quite frankly - just a load of ineffectual, wish-fulfillment, mumbo-jumbo crap. A rational, technologically adept God can do so much more, for examples: ^ One simple, very little idea I'll be playing with in some w's is to come across as some sort of advanced Buddhist god, although that's a stretch for that religion. I'll give half a dozen small, HIGHLY advanced spaceships to the Dalai Lama, telling him the rules: "They'll only work if captained by a monk of your choosing, and will only move - no matter where in the Milky Way they are - if you are happy and peaceful." It'll be fun to see what happens and what he does with his power. I expect the nation of Tibet to become a LOT better off! People being what they are, I also expect that I'll have to protect the Dalai Lama. That's sad but oh so predictable. Fortunately it's also very easy. There are many, simple, technological tricks I can play. For another example at a scale opposite to the previous one, I can have a giant wormhole very quickly open up, 'swallow' our entire solar system, and safely transport it to a volume of space that is frequently traveled by several intelligent species. Then I'll just sit back and watch what happens. It's sure to be very amusing for me and very humbling for humanity. If there's one thing humanity is crying out for, it's to be humbled, and I'm just the god to make it happen. ^ I also believe that, "all else being equal" (something I'll explain shortly), that there are too many humans. Having too many has innumerable negative effects, including that large organizations - governments, the media, other large corporations - treat their 'customers' with contempt. Abusing others out of greed is an increasingly accepted part of every level of modern society. This behavior occurred less often in smaller, less anonymous communities, so I'll be playing with two approaches: making communities smaller, and changing the "all else being equal" constraint. Making communities smaller is trivially easy in any number of ways. I could dial-down human fertility at the genetic level, or by increasing the effects of the poisons in the environment that are already doing the same thing. It'll be particularly interesting to see what happens in those w's where I gradually reduce male libidos by a large factor (say, by a hundred). That'll have some very interesting social effects, as will the birthrate dropping to below replacement level. One of the current problems is that growth is considered as an infallible sign of success, even if that growth is entirely due to an increasing population. Quality is being sacrificed to quantity. When populations start a long, consistent, slow reduction, that's going to expose that fallacy and force humanity to redefine many of its goals. It's actually going to be very profound in many economic, societal and even emotional ways. Changing the "all else being equal" constraint will be even more fun. The fundamental problem is accountability. Greed - usually for money and/or power - has dominated all other concerns, including triumphing over moral accountability. There are many ways for me to play with that. One idea I'm going to try is to create a beautiful, virgin, unspoiled twin of Earth. It'll be many light-years from Earth, but I'll place a holographic image of it just south of the original Earth, at a distance even closer than the Moon is. I'll be creating a marvelous, technologically advanced infrastructure on the planet - after seeing what many other alien civilizations are doing, I have some wonderful ideas to copy for that - and peopling it with "Good people" from that dimension's real Earth. It'll be a, "By Invitation Only" Paradise; its image placed so close to the Original Earth that activities on it will be observable with telescopes. Remember that I will have openly declared my technically literate godhood in these dimensions, although more often than not I won't be doing so as Mark Anderson. Whoever I am will be wandering the Earth, giving interviews to explain why I created the new Earth, extending the invitations, etc. Paradise residents will be able to easily visit Original Earth whenever they want, but non-Paradisians on Earth won't be able to go the other way. That should function as a rather interesting 'carrot', especially as Paradisians will enjoy dramatically improved health care and extended life expectancies. I'll try not to let my preference for large-chested girls influence my invitation criteria but I can't make any promises, haha. (I could fix my attitude, but it ain't broke. I have to get my enjoyment from somewhere, especially because I have a VERY long life ahead of me.) In some w's there'll be a stick to go with the carrot: a third Earth, the image of which will be north of the Original (I'm deliberately using the opposite of the 'obvious' north and south assignments as a little mind-game. Northern-hemisphere humans are too arrogant already). The 'stick' Earth will NOT be a nice place, and 'invitations' to live there will be immediately enforced. Maybe residents will be able to earn their way off Hell Earth, or maybe not; I'll do half the Hell Earths each way, just to see what difference that makes. There are many, many humans who choose to act in ways that result in their having a net negative value to humanity - murderers are an obvious example, but so are spammers and computer virus writers because they cause the wastage of more person-hours than the assholes' entire lives could possibly contribute to society. There's merit in the argument that humanity would "pollute its soul" if it eliminated such people itself, but I have no doubt that humanity would be improved if I removed them, especially because I can do so with complete certainty that the person is guilty, evil, or simply too deliberately selfish to be of value to humanity. Sending them to a Hell Earth seems like a fine idea to me, especially as it'd serve as a very good disincentive for future potential assholes. Another accountability approach for supplying motivation for good behavior is to give humans an aura. In some w's, starting right now, all newborn humans will have a very visible, unfakeable, unstoppable, aura-symbol floating over their heads: a ten centimeter wide light blob. In other dimensions, every person on the planet just got one. In some dimensions I'll provide an explanation for what I've done and what it means, but in others I won't do anything beyond creating the auras, leaving it up to humanity to find its own responses to this weird new event. Consciously good acts will make the persons' symbols larger, consciously bad acts will make them smaller. Once the babies are old enough to start acting consciously, and their aura's start changing size, it'll be interesting to watch humanity realize what is happening (in those dimensions that I gave them to babies only and didn't explain what they were) and to develop ways of reacting to it. It could change human society in vastly profound ways. Will people become famous for having large symbols? What will they do with that fame? Altruism should become popular, hopefully so much that the pursuit of a large aura symbol will replace the pursuit of large bank accounts. The obvious question: "Who decides what is good or bad?" has the obvious answer: "Me". It'll be easy. I'll create a little consciousness-watching routine (a very cut-down, mission-specific copy of my mind) in each person. It'll monitor why they do whatever they do, and it'll adjust their symbol's size accordingly, with due allowances for insane and self-deluded people, both of which will be easy for me to take into account. It'll be fun watching humanity learn the rules and adapt. In some w's there'll be no effect from the size shifts, other than the shifts themselves, so they'll be a form of accountability display only. In other w's there'll be real effects, such as small-symboled people needing more sleep, with tiny-symboled people eventually needing 24 hours of sleep per day, to diminish bad people's influence on society. In other w's, fertility and life expectancy - including the lack of those - will be proportional to aura size. ^ There are a phenomenal number of things I can do as a God, and there are many billions of dimensions to do them in, so I'll have a lot of fun thinking up ideas and trying them out. ------- One of my idle little ideas was to sit down with the Pope and have a theological chat with him. I'd thought it might be amusing, especially if I slowly let him become aware of my divinity. I just looked into the minds of a few Popes (different Popes, in widely different w's), and decided it wouldn't be amusing at all. Here's a rule of thumb for you: any guy who has risen to the top of a huge, mega-rich, mega-powerful, highly political organization, is probably not someone you'd like to spend time with. That the Pope's organization believes it's Right (with a capital "R") and has a God-given mandate to carry out its agenda regardless of what billions of 'ordinary' people think or want, does not result in someone I'd consider good company. ------- Some of my other ideas are considerably less playful: ^ There's going to be one change that I'm going to make in half the w's that'll provide an interesting comparison centuries and millennia from now. I don't have a good opinion of males. I'm referring to human males obviously, as other species, even those where the concept of 'maleness' applies, are often different. So human societies in 50% of the w's are going to become increasingly matriarchal at all the top leadership levels, although still with a male God of course - let's not get silly! I'm not so biased against guys as to initially tilt the balance beyond 50% female, but I do expect the female-led Earths to do better. The world is so interconnected and interdependent these days, and will only become more so, so a more cooperative, less testosterone-driven approach should be superior. It'll be interesting to see how the Earths of the two leadership styles will compare centuries from now. It won't happen overnight in those dimensions - as I definitely want human civilizations to be run as meritocracies rather than by tokenism - but that trend will definitely emerge. Females will, over time, take over more and more positions of importance and power. So to my young male readers in 50% of the dimensions reading this: "You'd better brush up on your domestic skills." Minority leadership has some interesting possibilities, so I'll shortly be arranging for representatives of other minorities to be surprisingly successful at acquiring leadership positions in some dimensions, if only to shake things up a bit. There's too much arrogance in the status quo, so some shaking is definitely going to occur. My "let's not get silly" comment prompts me to mention that I could find out what life as a female is like simply by scanning a few thousand of their minds down to the smallest details, but where's the fun in that? Instead I'll be creating countless lives for myself to live through, purely for the experience of doing so, many of whom won't realize they are an avatar of a god. Some of them will be human females, which will be an interesting source of new experiences for me. Even more interesting will be the non-human lives that I'll have. There are a huge number of other intelligent species out there, and living their lives will truly be an eye-opening experience for me, whether or not those versions of me will have eyes. Also human-female related, you can expect science to shortly invent a simple way for females to turn off their fertility, including their menstrual cycle. Their eggs can stay where they are until their owners decide to turn their fertility back on again. Having lived with so many girls, I feel sorry for the nuisance or worse that their fertility intrusively inflicts on their lives. That might be one of the first products that Julia and I discover in those dimensions where we set up a biologically oriented R&D company. ^ I'm not going to micro-manage humanity, but I do want it to improve its behavior and I can't see that happening without my intervention. In fact, I predict humanity's inhumanity to increase as the worlds' resources are consumed. The country of my birth and genesis has more influence on the world than any other country - in almost every way it's possible to measure influence - but that influence isn't being used for the good of humanity. It's not even been used for the good of all Americans. If, during the Cold War, the USSR had imposed its form of government on Iraq using the same deliberately dishonest justifications and military force that my country used for its latest invasion, then America would have screamed with righteous indignation and gone to great lengths to stop the USSR, all the time proclaiming that the Soviet methods were morally reprehensible. And if thirty years ago America had done what it's doing now, then the USSR would have intervened. Both countries knew it, so neither was so blatantly greedy and aggressive. The two nearly equal bullies stood each other off, and many small countries were safer because of that. The USSR doesn't exist now, leaving America as the world's largest bully. America, a country with only 5% of the world's population, spends more on its military than all the rest of the world combined spends on theirs. That would be justifiable if America expected the entire world to attack it, but without that justification, a country's desiring to have that much coercive power over the rest of the world - military power is coercive by definition and America's has almost no domestic use - is a very unhealthy sign. America has a reach and a desire to use it that spans the globe. Russia, China and a few other nations do use their might to dominate their national neighborhoods, and smaller countries can militarily bully their own citizens, but only America uses its militarily to pursue its goals anywhere in the world. Using force to get what you want is human nature. I am not going to fix that in humanity by a massive, bottom-up process because my doing things like that would eventually change what it means to be human by too much. Instead I'm going to apply top-down solutions, starting with biggest bully on the block and working my way down. I REALLY don't like bullies, so I'm looking forward to using my powers to act on my desire. Because America is the biggest bully at the moment, and because of my experiences at the hands of its bullying Government, I am particularly looking forward to putting that particular bully down. I don't mean swapping one set of assholes for another because as far as I can tell - which is easily well enough - both political parties are as bad as each other, which is very bad indeed. The whole process has become corrupted, and that's what I'm going to reform. You may think it's not so bad, but billions of Mark Andersons have been killed by versions of the Government and that sort of thing pisses me off! And yes, I am fully aware that there are regimes in the world that are even more evil. Their turn will come, I just won't feel the same degree of personal satisfaction when teaching them the errors of their ways. As much as I enjoy taking down bullies, my enjoyment is not the primary goal; doing right is. I fully intend to make enjoying myself a fundamental part of my godhood, but it's mostly going to be enjoyment derived from the ways in which I'll choose to pursue goals that I honestly deem worthwhile. I don't consider that I owe my country of birth any loyalty. It killed me many times, illegally hounded my families and me, and where the Risk-Taking Marks had bad trouble with the Cheney's CIA operation, that sometimes led to all of our deaths. But for the good of the world, I will be 'encouraging' America to rehabilitate itself. Right at the top of my list of possible encouragements is the destruction of America's arrogance. Several centuries ago the preeminent civilization on Earth was Arabic. They were the most adventurous explorers - which is an attitude that I particularly want to encourage - were scientifically advanced, prosperous, and tolerant of multiple cultures and religions. Unfortunately their culture stagnated as Islamic clerics gained enough secular power to enforce a rigid status quo. In a historically short time, Islamic culture was eclipsed by the non-stagnant, wealth-seeking Westerners. By no means was early Arabic civilization perfect - it was a LONG way from that: slavery and female genital mutilation; yeech! - but it did have many redeeming features. Perhaps I am overly fond of irony because I can't resist the irony of rubbing America's face in its folly by having the next wave of scientific leaders and explorers emerge out of the resurgence of those early Islamic values that I approve of. It'll be doubly ironic because America's justification for its latest invasion, after all the previous justifications were proved false, was "It's for their own good." I'll make the region do so "good" afterward that they literally leave America behind. Those early Islamic values haven't had a good run in recent centuries - people's selfishness causes all sorts of troubles when a society becomes stagnant - but I confidently predict that's going to change very soon. Islamic scientists are going to achieve phenomenal breakthroughs. I can change many of the laws of physics if I want to, so I can certainly hurry along a few important discoveries. Tolerance will also be encouraged. You don't want to see me when I am being "discouraging", as the criminals who're using Islam and other religions as cover are about to discover; cleaning them up is one of the necessary first steps to help Islam blossom and I want to get rid of bad criminals everywhere anyway. That won't apply to patriotic freedom fighters, that being a distinction I can both easily determine and remove the need for. Descendants of the world's best global adventurers, a generation or three from now, will be exploring space to a degree far beyond today's human capabilities. There are some things that I want humanity to see, including a biggie not too far away, so space travel is going to be especially encouraged. It will help humanity learn to stop being so arrogant, and I'll enjoy bringing it to humanity, especially if the journey to the stars is led by a couple of youngsters hailing from a small town in Oregon, USA. In these dimensions Julia's and my scientific research company will probably be headquartered in and operate out of Islamic countries. As we become wildly successful I'm sure there'll be many accusations of "Traitor!" from Americans. I'll enjoy saying, "The ONLY reason our company operates where it does is because the American Government REPEATEDLY attacked my family and me, driving us out of our homes. If the US Government hadn't attacked us so often, all our development would be taking place at home and it'd be benefiting America and Americans enormously. YOU let your government repeatedly commit crimes against us. That you're now missing out on the benefits of that is not the victims' fault; start taking responsibility for the consequences of your own decisions." I'll enjoy finding lots of ways to show people the costs of their greed and irresponsibility, especially as our company leads an enormous resurgence in Islamic progress. Not only will I be boosting a rival of America's, but I'll sometimes also hold America back. Because I enjoy irony, one of the ways I'll do that to the world's greatest consumer of energy is to cause America to have energy problems. I'll create something deep under the Earth's crust, only under America, that inhibits electrical energy transmission. The influence will slowly become greater, causing energy transmission to become less and less efficient - year after year, for as long as it takes for the changes I want to come about. With a degrading energy efficiency, America will be overhauled and then left behind, and the world will no longer suffer from its arrogance, power and greed. In other dimensions what I'll do will be simpler and less mysterious. I'll simply engineer a series of financial crises so severe and lasting so long that they will drain away much of America's financial clout and ability to fund its military adventures, reducing its importance to the rest of the world and its ability to pursue its self-important agenda outside its own borders. I'm sure I'll think of many other approaches too. I'm positively looking forward to it. The lesson of hubris will be learned in the way it always has to be: the hard way. Maybe when it has lost the power to be able to abuse others, hopefully the American nation will develop moral values that contribute positively to the rest of the world's people. That'd be nice. Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, and he answered, "I think it would be a good idea." I hope it will be. Inevitably, given human nature, whatever nation replaces America as the world's powerhouse will develop its own hubris, so it'll suffer the same fate. As will the next one, and the next one, until the lesson is eventually learned. I have no problem with holding humanity back for as long as it takes to get its act together. Or, if after a few centuries it's apparent that subtlety doesn't work, then I'll do it the other way. In all seriousness, this lesson has to be learned. Competitiveness between nations will cause untold harm and possibly even destroy human civilization if unchecked. It has destroyed MANY civilizations throughout human history, but that eventual certainty is no longer acceptable now that civilization is global. Cooperation will serve humanity FAR better. Every country will have to learn this, and the most powerful countries have the greatest responsibility to live up to. I'll be hard on all of them until they learn the lesson. I know what attitudes and behaviors I want to emerge, so it's only a matter of finding out which lessons and methods to teach them work the best. I'd prefer to do it in ways that amuse me, but it's more important that I find effective ways. With so many w's to experiment with, I'm confident that I'll find those. It almost gives me a sense of déjà vu because even though I'm fairly sure I'm the only god in the Universe, I find myself repeating something said by several of the previous claimants: "Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you." Words to live by. Not a suggestion; a Commandment. I am HUMANITY'S god, and humanity is going to learn to do what is good for all of mankind, rather than being as greedy as possible for each person's little corner of it. Leveling the playing field and making everyone "play nice" will bring me much pleasure. It'll also be very interesting to see how the different Earths are doing several millennia from now: will the ones that I punished hubris on be doing "better" - however that can be measured - than the ones I left to exercise their arrogances? What changes to my approach will that teach me? Prof's image of me sitting in the middle of thirty laboratories and directing their individual developments turns out to be somewhat understated. ^ An even less playful idea of mine is to explore something that I wonder about from time to time: how much harm do superstitions - the most common ones being religions - do to humanity? It seems to me that they encourage people not to think, or to think unrealistically, which surely must be harmful to individual people and humanity as a whole. I'm going to carry out a small-scale trial to start with, involving only fifty Earths: Ten Earths will be my control group that I'll do nothing with. Twenty Earths will have their education systems and mass media redirected a long way, half as the pro-superstitious groups want, and half as the anti-superstitious groups want. On the remaining twenty Earths, I'll create enough minds to read every person's thoughts to find out how superstitious they are. On ten Earths, the 20% of the population who are most superstitious (and on the other ten Earths, the 20% who are least superstitious) will have their ability to conceive dialed way down, so maybe only one-in-ten of them will ever have a single child. I'll repeat that review every few years, adjusting the fertility of anyone who newly qualifies. With fewer children being inculcated with their parents' attitudes, the prevalence of those attitudes should diminish appreciably and steadily. Superstitious beliefs are cultural so are geographically clumped, thus some areas - and perhaps even some countries - will suffer substantial population declines. Then I'll watch for a few hundred years. Should one or more groups prove to be much more successful and happier than the others - and I know what my money's on - then I'll repeat the trial with a thousand Earths in each group. If that trial validates the experiments results, then I'll create a suitable set of effective behavioral incentives and disincentives on most of the other Earths. Or maybe I'll just advance science enough (if it hasn't done so already) so it can prove that religion is a curable defect of our brains. No doubt many people will refuse to take the "Clear Thinking" inoculation (trademark pending, for Julia's and my company), but I'm reasonably confident that in a few hundred years it'll be very bad luck to be superstitious. ------- Chapter 420: So Many Options; Major Themes Friday, July 25, 2008 and on There aren't an infinite number of w's. They are finite, just as the x, y and z dimensions are finite and bounded. The w's tend to have evolved thematic commonalities as a consequence of the properties of the synchronization process, but some random events have caused diversions which no practical amount of synchronization can bring back toward the average. There are w's where Earth is empty of humanity. In some cases Earth is no longer habitable because it was hit by a giant asteroid, or perhaps destroyed by a Vogon construction crew to make way for a hyperspace express bypass (haha). But in other cases the planet itself is fine, being empty for other reasons, the most frequent cause being a full-on World War III a few decades ago between the Soviets, Americans and damned near everyone else; or humankind never evolved - it appears that our evolution required some luck, presumably in the far distant past given that there are none of the higher primates. There are saber-toothed tigers though, and other equally impressive animal life, such as Haast Eagles, so I'm happy. I'm going to research our absence on those Earths, but that's a long-term project that I haven't started yet. Making currently uninhabited Earths habitable (if necessary) and restocking them with life - including human life - will be relatively straightforward for me, so I'm going to use such 'spare' Earths as my little playgrounds. I have already chosen not to meddle with Time, but I can simulate such meddling for my entertainment. On one such empty Earth I will be creating a moderately accurate copy of an Earth of five hundred years ago, and it will have an avatar of myself born as a Native American Indian. He will grow up to become an incredible Warrior Chief, so that by the time the white man arrives there will be a unified nation of tribes led by one of his apparent descendants, another of my avatars. He'll be highly skilled, including with an intuitive understanding of the ways of the white man. Or maybe I'd ignite American Indians' scientific interest, so by the time the little, wooden European sailing ships arrive, they'd be met by the Native American navy with ships equivalent to your dimension's 1940's version of destroyers and frigates. Or maybe rather than science working, a fully functioning magical society might be more fun. I imagine dragon riders casting fireball spells would be rather difficult for wooden ships with cloth sails and non-elevating cannon to combat successfully. My avatars will have personalities similar to mine, exceptional bodies and minds, and - I confidently predict - many large-titted lovers, but won't be aware of their godhood because that would spoil my fun. Alternatively I could have ordinary natives with me playing the roles of a pantheon of their gods. There are a lot of possible games. It'll be interesting to see how the White Man's missionaries react when an American Indian god pops in to request that they stop proselytizing. For the scientific or magical games to work, I'll have to intervene often; very often in the magical scenario: every time a magical spell is cast. Being able to supervise at that level is simple because I can make millions of mini-minds edited to be infinitely patient and focused on specific jobs, such as giving effect to the game's magic. A magical society might be a lot of fun. I can already envisage that the sacrifice of big-titted virgins to their God would summon great magical power. Not "sacrifice" in the bloodletting sense; well, maybe a little bit of blood. I imagine the altars of my churches will need to be longer and wider than normal. About twelve feet by twelve feet, with a soft, bouncy top and satin sheets. Now that I think of it, magic would be a great deal of fun. Maybe I'll introduce magic into some of the real Earths. Just in a little corner seems appropriate; say in an innocuous little country like New Zealand. Next time a Kiwi archaeologist digs somewhere suitable in New Zealand, I'll create a previously unknown ancient city buried an inch under his trowel. It'll be found to contain many books, some of which will be translated as religious books dedicated to a previously unknown God. "Mark" is rather ordinary, so maybe I'd better spell it backward as "Kram" (although "FatSoHog" - short for "Father, Son and Holy Ghost" - has some comic appeal). Someone reading the books, probably an archaeologist or linguist trying to translate them, will pronounce the god's name out loud (I can guarantee that'll happen, even if I have to put the impulse into his or her head), whereupon I'll appear in all my awesome majesty - so not in bright yellow Speedos - and if Mark Anderson exists in these dimensions, with a different face and body shape to avoid being recognized. I'll want my being summoned back to Earth to be a noteworthy event, so I'm thinking of appearing as something like a 500-foot giant, who'll telepathically ask everyone within fifty miles, "Why have you summoned me back to this planet?" That and the ensuing conversation should feature prominently in whatever passes for primetime news in New Zealand, probably screening right after the latest sheep price update. If they didn't fall asleep earlier, the rest of the world's networks should pick it up and rebroadcast it in their countries. There would also be spell books in the city's ruins, whose spells would reliably and repeatedly work. Although, I think, only when cast within the confines of 'my' city. That'd make the world a much more interesting place without disturbing it too much. In addition, the Priests of my faith will be able to cast my spells wherever they are in the world. I shouldn't say "Priests" because given my preferences, my priests would be exact opposite of the usual image of crusty, old men. My priestesses' robes would be opposite those of the Catholic Church too. Unlike every other faith, "faith" would not be required for mine. I would prove my existence by materializing when appropriate, chatting with my followers and ordinary people, answering their questions, discuss theology, etc. "Of course I prefer my priestesses to be pretty, young women rather than crusty, old men. If you were in my fluffy wool slippers, wouldn't you?" My religion would be like others claim to be, in that mine would also encourage good acts. Priestesses might be permitted to start serving my church based on their physical attributes, but their advancement - including their ability to cast increasingly powerful spells - would depend on their performing good acts. Women being generally more empathetic and sympathetic than men, will better recognize the situations that require good acts, truly making them better representatives for me than crusty, old men. (Give me a minute, and I'll think of a justification for their having big tits too.) Oops. I just had a worrying thought that could have derailed part of this plan, but it's okay, there are enough big-titted, pretty girls to satisfy my needs in a little place like New Zealand. Some w's have some weird population distributions, but most w's have about four million people in New Zealand, with an even higher proportion of them being pretty girls than is the case in the Americas I came from because New Zealanders live a healthier lifestyle. I'll restrict priesthood membership to at least third-generation Kiwis to prevent the country being swamped by would-be Krammites. Although on second thought, my priestesses should recruit new acolytes whenever they encounter someone suitable, such as when hanging around outside Jessica Alba's home. It'll be very interesting to see how the world reacts to the manifestation of a real God, with many godly powers, an inexhaustible interest in sex, and priestesses that travel the world using magic spells to perform very many good acts, such as: visiting hospitals to heal the good people, exposing bad people's misdeeds, and killing evil people. Not only don't I have a problem with removing people I know to be evil because I can read their minds, but I think it's a damned good idea. If the Catholic or any other church gets upset and condemns my religious practices or me - somehow I'm guessing that's likely - I'm sure my priestesses will be able to find some dirt on them. I like the idea of casting a "Truth" spell on the badmouthing bishop and having him divulge everything bad he knows about his church, such as its pedophilic practices and cover-ups. I'll make sure my priestess includes, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" into her closing comments because I like the idea of using their own words against them. I'm sure there are some major financial irregularities and other misdeeds within every major church too, whereas the only things 'wrong' in my church will be sex and killing evil people, neither of which I consider wrong. Otherwise we'll be doing a HUGE amount of real-world, practical good. I'll even write up a little Good Book for my religion too ("Kram's Guide for a Good Life"); something very short, totally unambiguous, and with heavy emphasis on taking personal responsibility. I've made a mental note to make sure it includes some positive attitudes about sex. ^ If I'm playing unrealistic games, I could even have a few w's where young guys find: A buried alien spaceship, in return for being rescued the AI of which gives the boy amazing mental powers. A magic lamp, the genie from which gives the boy amazing mental powers. An Egyptian amulet, that when worn gives the boy amazing mental powers. A technological or chemical invention that, as it happens, gives the boy amazing mental powers. Would the boys' subsequent behaviors be consistent with so much of the fiction written about such events? Somehow I think they would. It'd be interesting to give an equal number of girls the same opportunities to see what they do with them. Because girls are involved, that's a GREAT deal harder to predict, even for me. ------- Time is a strange thing - FAR stranger than humanity's best scientists currently think. Leaving most of the nature of Time to one side, because you'd never understand it anyway, I'll mention these aspects: The present is when everything happens, so maybe my breaking the restraints on "present" would stop everything happening. Consciousness is woven into the fabric of the universe, and consciousness needs a flow of time to have meaning. I believe I could break the constraint of Time, but I fear the consequences of doing so. First, I'm not sure whether it would affect the fabric of the Universe, but if it did, I fear the effect could be detrimental on the largest possible scale: all conscious life might no longer be possible, and other bad things like that, some of which could be even worse. Second, I'm fearful of the effect on me of making my consciousness timeless. I can imagine myself being as aware across time as I am across space, but what would that do to me? Would my life have purpose if I could find out the consequences of an action immediately 'after' thinking of it? Or even 'before' I thought of it! How would I have FUN? And, believe me, that's a very, very serious question. Not just for me but for you too. You REALLY don't want a God who has no sense of fun! That'd be far worse than having a figment of your imagination who had no sense of fun. (One of the reasons I disrespect religious people so much, in addition to all their unprovoked attacks on me and everyone else that dares to be different from them, is because they're fucked in the head. They've created figments of their imaginations who are assholes, when they could have invented gods who were sources of fun and joy. The nicest thing I can say about such people is, "What morons!") So for the moment I'm going to retain moments; I'm going to leave Time alone. Not physically interfering with it doesn't stop me looking and listening through it though. I am already non-destructively looking through time. It's easy for me to look at past events that were observed at the time they occurred because there's no uncertainty about them. It's as easy as watching a TV program. I looked at and listened to the past whenever this autobiography needed to quote a conversation that I wasn't a party to, which happened hundreds of times. Thus you, my reader, can be assured of this document's accuracy. [Strictly speaking, I didn't "listen". The end result would have been the same if I had listened, but the process was considerably more complicated. Things don't "happen" in the past because they've already happened. "Happening" can only happen in the present. When I want to listen to something in the past, I have to see the state of the air just outside each person's mouth, then I slip my perspective through the past toward the present, watching the changes to the air's density at that place. That gives me information about the sound waves, which I can translate into sounds, which I can decode into words. It's tedious, which is why I've modified part of my mind so it does it automatically for me, sparing me from having to think about it. I've done the same for sight and even smell too (I'm sure you can work out how). Because my mind is so powerful, I can fast-forward through the past considerably faster than the original 1 second per second rate, very quickly learning what happened.] Harder is looking into a previously unobserved volume, for example, inside a closed box, possibly containing a cat and an atom of radioactive material. The Universe cannot collapse probability fields in the past because the past has passed and the opportunity to do something has been lost. Quantum probability collapses occur only in the present. Everything occurs only in the present; that's what it is! If I look at a previously unobserved volume and it has unresolved probabilities, then I see all the probabilities. That gives me a headache! I'm joking - most of my minds don't bother having a head, let alone permit it to ache - but you get the idea: the previously unobserved past is "fuzzy". Looking at the future gets fuzzier FAR faster! Let's say I look into the past (it doesn't matter how far), into a room that has been sealed shut and unobserved for the 24 hours before the time I'm looking at. Let's say a glass of water was left on a table in that room. How much water it contains will be fuzzy because the evaporation rate - being the location of the water molecules - won't have been decided by the Universe's Consciousness. It should be clear that there will only be a minor amount of fuzziness though. Now consider that I open the door (in the present, of course), look at the room so all its visible probabilities are collapsed, then I look 24 hours into the future. The contents of the room will be VERY fuzzy. There are probabilities of all sorts of people coming into the room over the next 24 hours, there's a probability of an earthquake, a house fire, a 747 crashing into the roof, etc. The future has a huge number of different possibilities, and therefore a great deal of fuzziness. The past - back when it was the present - had already decided that no 747s crashed, etc., so all those probabilities are zero. Looking into the future can very quickly become a pointless exercise, how quickly depending on what I am looking at. Looking twenty four hours ahead into a locked box that has been encased in concrete and buried doesn't have many possibilities, so the view would have very little fuzz. Looking six hours ahead into a busy store has a very large amount of uncertainty. Looking into the same store a year ahead would be a complete waste of effort unless all I wanted was to get a feel for the likelihood that the store still exists then. (Just to make sure you understand, looking in that store a year in the past would be crystal clear if there had been someone in it at that time, as their observing the store would have caused all the probabilities to collapse, so there would be no fuzziness when I look back from now to observe it then.) Fortunately Julia has calmed down about fashion otherwise I could imagine her begging me to travel through time to fetch the next season's fashions for her, even at the risk of destroying all conscious life in the Universe. She's going to be disappointed that I can't even look into the future to see those designs because the fuzziness will increase too quickly. If anything in this Universe is "fuzzy", it has to be the fashion-setting process. If I was limited to having a single body that I couldn't survive without, which is a quaintly amusing idea, then I'd modify my "overwatch" idea into an "aheadwatch", looking a minute or so ahead. With my power, if I got a minute's warning that something bad might happen to my body, then no matter what it was I'd have time to take care of it, write a few chapters about it in my autobiography, and have a cup of coffee afterward. I don't have to worry about my physical safety. If every nuclear weapon on every Earth spontaneously exploded and destroyed all of my human bodies, none of my minds in the blast radius would be harmed, and the ones off Earth obviously wouldn't be either. Any of them could almost instantly recreate a body for me. I could even recreate the Earth if necessary. I don't NEED future-looking bodyguards, but each of my bodies will have one just because it's more convenient. I'll stop myself from being routinely aware of the future my bodyguard is sensing because having to react in the present will normally be more interesting for me. In the event that the bodyguard thinks the options are particularly interesting, it can always tell me about them. I will also keep future-looking eyes on my loved ones to make sure nothing bad could be about to happen to them. That's probably going to be the only important use of my future-viewing ability, although it's not as important as you might think because even if they are killed I can effectively resurrect them (why only "effectively" is discussed later). I still might view the future on other occasions if something happens to cause me to want to look ahead. If in one of the w's a nuclear bomb exploded next to the White House, I could immediately look ahead in all the other w's to see what sort of threat those White Houses are under. It's likely that some would be in immediate peril, while others wouldn't be. I would have time to decide whether to stop the explosions or not. I probably would not, and for once in this autobiography that's not a derogatory dig about politicians. I will, for the most part, let humanity experience the consequences of its decisions. Just because those consequences are very bad for some humans is no reason to stop them. It could even be reasonably argued that it's particularly important to let the bad decisions play out. Plus there's the problem of where would I draw the line because there is a never-ending multitude of bad things happening all the time, many of which are only bad from some perspectives and are good from others. I'd be a schizo God if I tried to manage them all. I will have to stop some VERY bad things. Humanity's despoiling of the environment, for example, is far more destructive than any single bomb could be, especially one that wiped out a large number of politicians! I know I'm very derogatory toward that group, but if you'd lived through what I often failed to live through, and then looked inside their minds, you wouldn't have any semblance of charity toward their motives and morals either. It is said that power corrupts, but the vast majority of our nation's politicians were corrupted even before they'd taken many steps on their path toward that power. It was often their actively seeking more corruption that got them on the path to political power in the first place. I'd be tempted to let even environmental destruction go unchecked. There are plenty of w's so what does losing a few Earths matter? Unfortunately that particular problem exists in nearly all of the w's in which humans populate Earth. I imagine you won't be surprised to learn that despoiling is a common human behavior. I won't clean up the environment for you as that'd encourage even more rapacious behavior. I'll simply make sure science advances far enough in the right fields to give most humanities the information they need to understand enough about what it's doing. The especially badly led human civilizations might collapse totally, but there are plenty of w's and I am in favor of people 'living by' the consequences of their actions, even if it kills large numbers of them. ------- Researching my autobiography has provided me with some enjoyment, such as from one of the Chloe Moons thanking me for fixing her body and mind; and unknown to her, fixing her cross-dimensional twins too. I've also enjoyed scanning through the more interesting conversations that I hadn't been able to hear the first time through. My research has also provided me with a few surprises, such as discovering that many of the Lily Chengs had gotten pregnant by me. February 20, 2006 had been my child's birthday in most of the relevant w's, making my son nearly two and half years old now. I have checked, and was pleased to see that the Chengs are doing very good jobs of raising little "Ma Kè." He's important to them, they have enough money to provide him with everything he needs, and the extended family is very attentive to his upbringing, so all of those boys have good environments. No father figure, but plenty of male cousins, uncles and grandfathers, plus a large collection of women who dote on him. I gave every Ma Kè a simple virus that will improve his genes substantially, making him healthier, smarter and happier (there are short-term variances and some attitude self-determinations, but each person's baseline happiness is largely genetic rather than environmental. It's a brain chemistry thing). He'd sprung from my loins but it'd been done in a way that robbed me of the opportunity to feel responsible for him. He is my son biologically but isn't emotionally, so I'm not going to play a major role in his life. I played one role though. Without warning them, I teleported Ma Kè, Lily and her parents to what appeared to be a beautiful open-sided pavilion/throne-room on top of one of the most well known beautiful mountains in Mainland China. I created a copy of my body and mind to meet them. There had been real teleporting involved, especially to snatch Lily's parents from Corvallis, but the rest of it was a simple illusion as we were still inside Lily's home. I placed Lily between her two parents, with Ma Kè in front of her. I sat facing them on a gold throne, dressed in the richest Chinese regalia I can imagine, and I had two absolutely gorgeous royal concubine illusions kneeling to either side of me, because that's the way my imagination works and it'd help prevent Lily or her parents from getting any hopeful ideas. In perfect Cantonese, the ability to speak I'd copied from the minds of several highly respected Cantonese orators, I said, "You may sit." Appropriate seats - as befitting their lowly status compared to a god - appeared in front of them. They recovered impressively quickly, especially considering that in most of the dimensions involved in this little play Mark Anderson had died from the Casino Kidnappers or the CIA. As they were seating themselves, I said, "I have gifts for Ma Kè and Lily." Appearing in midair in front of them were two exquisite necklaces, the centerpieces of which are glowing stones; one glowing green and the other blue, perfectly matching the outer robes of each of my two concubines. The concubines rose smoothly to their feet and moved forward, morphing into impressively large, strong tigers because that's cool (I have a thing about big cats). They continued to smoothly walk toward the necklaces. After a few steps the cats appeared to be sucked into the stones, as if the stones were black holes and the cats made of smoke. I instructed, "Put the necklaces on." They did so, Ma Kè because I was making him want to. -- "If you are ever in mortal danger, pull hard on the necklace so the chain breaks. That will release the spirits to come to your aid. Use them cautiously because they will work only once. The necklaces will disappear from sight shortly. No one else will ever see them, but they will reappear for the wearer if he or she is feeling frightened. If you fear for your lives, break the chain, but do not do so if the danger is not extreme enough." The necklaces faded from sight. I installed small subsets of my mind, modified to be dedicated and patient, in Lily and her son. The two mini-minds will watch over them, and if they feel frightened for good reason, my minds will project the illusion of a necklace into their visual and tactile senses. I'm playing a little game as my minds will keep them safe with or without any necklace, although if they do break the chain my intervention will be far more dramatic than the subtle protections I'll otherwise be providing. These illusions are just to impress them in ways the family will understand and to make them appreciate that I am far above them. It is also more fun than simply telling them that I'll look after them, and the illusions reinforce the once-only nature of the rescue so the family won't become foolish risk takers. I'd held up my hand and said, "Bless you Ma Kè." Blessing isn't a Buddhist practice, but the Chengs easily worked out what it meant, aided by the lighting effects I'd used. When the lights that had entered Ma Kè had faded, I'd explained something to them, "Ma Kè is fully human - not divine - but now he will be smarter, healthier and happier than he would have been. That and the necklaces are all that I will be doing for him. Lily, he is your and your family's responsibility. Raise Ma Kè well and he will make your family proud." Mr. Cheng asked, "You are a god?" "I am now, yes. I was a very weak god when we last met, but now I am very powerful. I'm also a very busy one, so I'll send you back..." "You're not angry with us for tricking you?" asked Mr. Cheng. "No. If your family had tried to use Ma Kè to get money or other favors from me then I would've been angry, but you never wanted to cost me anything. If you raise Ma Kè to be a good man, you will have done no harm and I will be happy enough. Be careful you don't spoil him or make him too prideful of his parentage." "We won't," assured Lily. "Will we see you again?" "You chose to have Ma Kè apart from me so that's how it will be. From time to time I'll check that you're doing a good job with him, but I'll remain invisible so you won't see me." Which should keep them on their toes. "I have many other tasks to do, so say goodbye to each other." Lily got Ma Kè to say "Goodbye Father," to me. As Lily had intended, that tugged on my heartstrings a little, but only a little. I returned Mr. and Mrs. Cheng to Corvallis, placing them together in their living room rather than the two different locations in the house I'd picked them up from. That would make it more real for them, and no doubt they wanted to talk about it. 'Returning' Lily and Ma Kè was easy; I just canceled the illusion around them, canceling my body and mind at the same time. ------- I've already said that I want lots of variation across the W-Dimension. That's going to be such an important principle that I'll call it Variation. There will be a second long-term, Universal constant - Freewill - plus a couple of short-term constants, which get the name "constant" because they will also be applied across almost the entire W-Dimension, although not for long: Revenge and Making Good. To explain each of those three constants: ^ Virtually every member of every intelligent species will have freewill. I see no point whatsoever in removing that. I did momentarily think of creating an experimental new Earth and populating it with people that I'd edited the minds of to have them behave as close to perfectly as I could imagine, but I realized it was such a silly idea that it wasn't worth carrying out. Speaking of modifying people, modifying my lovers' bodies to make them more beautiful is also silly, but that's a temptation that I might succumb to. Hopefully not so often that it spoils my enjoyment of beauty's variety, although I can easily repair my minds if I start to feel that I've 'suffered' from that surfeit. I will sometimes usurp people's freewill, but very rarely, not for long, and only with very few individuals when I want them to play a specific role for some reason. An already given example of that is the Truth spell that one of Kram's priestesses might throw on a bad-mouthing Catholic priest. My manipulations of freewill will usually be for larger purposes, but will sometimes be just for my own enjoyment, such as the Chloe I'm enjoying now. All the other Chloes' bodies and minds will recover slowly enough not to incur any trouble, but with this Chloe I instantly fixed her body and her mind of the damage that had been done to them, and then had to manipulate her mind into accepting the changes and into accepting me. I didn't make her have sex with me; I merely fixed her, gave her knowledge of what I'd done for her, and stopped her freaking out. Her wanting to thank me appropriately was reasonably predictable, but still her decision. If she'd decided to thank me in some other way - females being hard to predict made that possible - I wouldn't have adjusted her again. It was more moral and is more enjoyable to let her choose. The Christian God never seemed capable of getting morality and enjoyment to coincide, but I have a different approach. When Chloe and I have finished I'll put her in the same situation as her 'sisters', and she should have a good chance of living a happy life. One or other of my minds will check on the Chloes occasionally, just to make sure I haven't accidentally done them any harm. There are enough examples of the other types of freewill overrides I'll do elsewhere in these chapters, so I'll not repeat them here. ^ The second W-Dimension constant is revenge. Right at the top of that list are all the surviving Casino Kidnappers, DHS kidnappers and CIA experimenters. They are going to pay for their crimes against me. I checked, and in a few w's the "Boss" Casino Kidnapper survived by fleeing, usually after I'd blinded him. In some cases he managed to get clean away - he was a smart guy. Those of them that had lost their sight have just had it restored. I have appeared in front of them as I looked when they kidnapped me, and I'm teaching them that kidnapping someone who is on his way to godhood isn't a wise thing to do. They're not going to be in a position to benefit from that lesson for long because they're chained to chairs in the basements of houses that will be set on fire in a few days, that being what they'd intended to do to Prof and me. In most of the dimensions in which the DHS and CIA kidnapped me, I died when I merged out of those dimensions, or when I failed to participate in a merge at all, usually because their fear of my "mind control powers" made them keep me drugged. In quite a few dimensions the DHS findings plus my freaky EEG results had scared the CIA into fearing me so I was drugged almost permanently. In other dimensions they reacted with fear after my first merge, and that caused a battle that those Marks lost because unknown to me, my EEG helmet could give me disabling electrical shocks. I'd stupidly never thought of that and they'd cleverly not revealed it. However those Marks had died, my body was examined, dissected, and its bits tested in many ways, and is still the subject of occasional research. My parents and their lawyers never got close to the truth of what happened to me, and the employees who participated in my being snatched and experimented on escaped ANY punishment for it. Many of them were even later rewarded, as some of their experiments on my body bore useful fruit. Nor have I forgotten the psychologist who was brought in from the outside to spend a day analyzing me, and who then wrote his self-serving, evil report. They all got away free and clear - until now. An appropriate punishment is to put them through the same as they put me through, so in all those dimensions in which I was abused by them - which is only a small proportion of all the Universe's Fort Dodge labs - the three shifts of the lab have been called in for a meeting tomorrow morning, to give the psychologist and DHS people who kidnapped me time to arrive. I had to do some trickery to get the DHS people sent there, but it's easily within my capabilities. During the meeting there will be a VERY impressive military raid by an unknown group; they'll be "unknown" because I'll be creating them at the time. The lab will be raided and looted like it seemed I did in the dimensions I escaped, only there'll be much more evidence this time: bullet casings, explosive residue, abandoned getaway vehicles, etc. It'll be done very noisily and in a way that publicly exposes the Government's illegal research and that it was all stolen by an unknown enemy of America. The entire staff will seem to be killed with all the corpses left lying around. In all of those dimensions, about a hundred of the corpses will be perfect 'clones' of the people who participated in my kidnapping, experimentation and effectively torture. There are billions of such dimensions, therefore billions of sets of those hundred people. All but one set will have their bodies destroyed but minds retained, those minds will then be linked to the remaining single instance of their body, in a way that will make them think that they are the only mind in the body. It'll be done seamlessly and backdated until just before the raid started. I'll create a hundred fake labs somewhere underground. In each fake lab - which will be operating perfectly normally, without any military raid - a different one of the individual perpetrators will be going about their job normally when they'll suddenly be grabbed, locked in the same room I had been kept in, and they'll be experimented on just like I was. I can easy create fake staff clones that'll play their roles, their minds being copies I made of the originals before I killed them in the raids, but with a few suitable changes so they carry out this plan the way I want. Thus, every single one of the billions of criminals who cooperated in my abuse will receive much the same horrific experience as I did. I'll make sure their actor-experimenters point out, "You thought it was okay to experiment on an innocent boy, so you can't have any valid objection to our experimenting on someone who's an accessory to kidnapping and murder." It'll be good for their moral education for them to ponder on that during the two or three months it'll take to experiment them all the way to death. I know that the vast majority of that exercise has little external value. It gets rid of all those assholes, but I could do that as quickly as I blink. I'll be doing it for revenge. If you expected me to turn into a magnanimous, airy-fairy, goody two-shoes god, then you'd be wrong. I am still the same guy I've always been, just with a GREAT deal more power and knowledge, and the willingness to use it in ways that appeal to me. Getting revenge on the evildoers who caused my deaths appeals to me greatly, with their never being able to repeat their evil on anyone else being a very nice bonus. I doubt I'll watch it being done or upload the memories of the minds running the punishments into my collective network, but I will still derive considerable satisfaction from knowing that it's happening. There are a few other revenge activities I'm starting on. For example, the way I was treated by the Fort Dodge staff made me suspect that I wasn't the first involuntary subject the CIA had experimented on. I have a thing against kidnappers so I'm tracking down everyone who has ever used their Federal Government authority to kidnap someone. They're going to get the same treatment as they gave their victims, after which I'll kill them all whether or not their victims survived because Government agents who kidnap others deserve death. I'll arrange for their 'confessions' to be made public, which will cause some nice stinks. I'll have to spread out the apparent suicides because there have been too many kidnappings over the years for it to be reasonable for the criminals to all kill themselves so quickly, but the ongoing and expanding public condemnation of governmental kidnapping will justify more such kidnapper suicides, what with them not being able to live with the shame, their notes will say. ^ The third W-Dimension constant is the opposite of revenge: making good. There are a few minor tasks such as anonymously paying back the people I stole things from during my ascendancy - mostly crash helmets and dark sheets - but "making good" is otherwise a biggie and I'm looking forward to it very much. My body died in the vast majority of w's. The deaths you've read about herein are my bathtub and menswear store suicides, the Casino and CIA kidnapping murders (effectively), and a handful of dimensions in which I went on a "Voyage of Discovery". There are other dimensions in which their Marks died through other causes. Throughout the W-Dimension, MANY of my loved ones suffered pain and grief because of my deaths. My achieving godhood left a GREAT deal of suffering behind, especially after I became as loved as I was after my second merge. I'm going to make VERY, VERY GOOD for all that pain. My loved ones, in EVERY w-dimension, are going to have EXTREMELY good lives! To start with, unpleasant things are going to happen far less frequently to any of them. Their cars aren't going to breakdown, their computers won't get viruses, and neither will they as they'll enjoy better-than-perfect health. MANY good things will happen to them. (I write much more about my interactions with my families starting from the next chapter.) For the sake of my loved ones' quality of life, there's one possible unpleasant action by you (my readers) that you should be cautious about. Whatever w-dimension you're in, there's probably a Corvallis. Therein - unless your dimension is unusual - live versions of people who are important to me. After reading my autobiography you might be curious enough that you intrude on their lives. I could insulate them from that by creating entirely new lives for everyone I care for, and moving them into their new lives. That would work fine. Alternatively, I could ensure that no one bothers them. Ask yourself, "Who would Mark rather mess around with: the people dearest to him, or everyone else?" My advice to my readers - and you should ALWAYS listen to a god's advice - is don't make a nuisance of yourself in Corvallis. Most of you will feel no desire to do so, but I don't want to strongly enforce that lack of motivation because I prefer to leave freewill reasonably alone, especially as many millions of people should realize how important it is to download, read, re-read and study this description of their new god's Genesis. If, despite what should be a lack of interest in the people I've identified in this autobiography, you find yourselves drawn to investigate them, then I suggest that you be VERY discreet. If my loved ones exist in your Corvallis, and your curiosity is invasive, then "I swear to God" that you'll regret your being annoyingly nosey. If too many of my readers make nuisances of themselves - so I run out of places to store the bodies, haha - then I'll simply wipe my autobiography out of your dimension's consciousness. You wouldn't want to be responsible for that, would you? So behave yourself! To return to a more positive note, there are many ways I can improve my loved ones' lives: making Vanessa's garden bloom every year, making Donna's tits grow even larger - two examples to show that I want to bring more beauty into the world - and many other ways. My unwillingness to attempt changing anything in the past has one type of very unfortunate consequence, as I won't be going back in Time to eliminate all the pain my suicides caused. I would love to, for example, reoccupy the body in the bathtub and live my life from that point forward. Not only making my family's pain never happen, but I'd also be much nicer to them thereafter, not to mention how happy having a god in the family could make them, even if I kept that covert. I could be waiting for the Casino Kidnappers when they first entered the Williams' home, whereupon their plan would go horribly wrong and Prof would never be injured, let alone slightly more than half of the Profs killed. I could ensure that none of me would have died in the CIA's 'care' because the DHS's kidnapping of me would blow up in their face in some terribly public way. I could make the plane transporting me from Washington DC to Fort Dodge crash-land near a TV camera crew. The subsequent story would be very embarrassing to the DHS and CIA, especially because I'd add, "I overheard them planning to send me on to the CIA's underground biological weapons development lab in Fort Dodge so they could perform secret medical experiments on me and dispose of my body afterward in the incinerator they use to get rid of the animals they test their deadly diseases on." There'd been no such conversation for me to overhear, but the CIA's denials would never be believed, especially if I named several of the Fort Dodge senior staff. Unfortunately I'm not going to break Time, so I won't be going back to correct those events. Instead, I have to make good for my and other people's actions in the present and future. In some dimensions people died because of me. I don't feel compelled to make good for killing the people who I consider deserved it, such as the Director of the FBI. But I do feel compelled about the people who died undeservedly, such as the five "incidental" deaths that happened because the Guardian Angel destroyed several Air Force bases following the UAV's false-flag assassination attempt on Mom and Dad. I can't undo those deaths, but I can ensure that the people who lost loved ones have lives with an unusual amount of good luck and happiness. The people who "incidentally" suffered injuries from those attacks, can easily undergo some highly accelerated healing, and receive a few compensatory doses of good luck too. ------- Chapter 421: Category #1; Revealing How I Became So Unique Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) In the two chapters above I briefly described some of the things I will be doing with and for humanity now that I'm God. They were just some of my initial thoughts rather than definite plans - apart from the few things I've already started - but they should have given you an idea of the types of things I'm capable of and interested in doing. They're CERTAINLY not a complete list of everything my trillion plus minds have thought of. Even though my minds are reasonably similar, that list is HUGE! I have many tens of thousands of ideas that I want to try, plus degrees and combinations of them. In the majority of those I'm uncertain whether the results will be good or not, so I'll be trying all sorts of things in small-scale experiments involving just a few dozen Earths at a time. I have a lot of experiments to conduct, so it's convenient of the Universe to provide me with so many dimensions to experiment with. I want what is best for humanity, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that I haven't got a clue what "best" means. I don't know what the goal is, how to get there, how to measure humanities' and my progress, how much time I have, what constraints I should put on myself, or pretty much anything else. I don't even know whether it would be best for the Universe if humanity wipes itself out. It's pretty hard to decide on definite plans under these conditions. To make it even more difficult, I'm barely out of my boyhood. I think I'm fairly mature for my age, but I don't think I'm mature and wise enough to be God of the Universe! I'm also sure that even if I already had specific plans for humanity, they will change anyway, as I mature and my perspectives change. The only thing I can state with certainty is that I am going to be conducting a phenomenal range of experiments on humanity, from which I expect to learn a great deal, including about myself. I can, however, be much more specific about how I will be treating my loved ones. I am much clearer about how to make them happy, and more importantly, I'll be letting them tell me what they want to happen in their lives. For several very obvious reasons, I will NOT be letting humanity tell me what it wants. I have a lot of plans for my loved ones and myself, and the plans' implementations can start immediately. Why not? If my families don't like my plans, they can simply ask for changes. I'm sure Julia won't hesitate to make suggestions, and I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Prof's and Vanessa's ideas, initially and over the coming millennia. In many dimensions what I'll be doing with my families will overlap considerably with the first stages of establishing my new relationships with humanity, while in other dimensions how I'm choosing to interact with humanity will considerably influence my families' lives. My families are part of humanity, so obviously there's an interaction there. To make it easy for me to explain them here, I'll initially describe my plans for my loved ones as if they were independent of humanity. Later I'll comment on the interactions. Of necessity I have several different immediate plans for my loved ones because their circumstances vary so much across different Earths. For the purposes of this autobiography, I'll categorize those circumstances as follows: I am alive and well with multiple minds, up to thirty two of them until the very recent results of the Voyage of Discovery made the number of minds in a body irrelevant. The path my autobiography took will make this category seem common, but it is the case in considerably less than 1% of the w-dimensions in which Mark Anderson ever existed. I had been alive and well, but I'd told my families that I was going on a Voyage of Discovery and had then left. There are only five dimensions that this happened in. Five is a truly insignificant number, but this category will be described because of its prior inclusion in my ascendancy, and because of the unusual plans I have already started acting on in these dimensions. My body died in either the Casino Kidnappers' basement or the CIA's underground lab. I suicided as a depressed kid, either in the bathtub or menswear store. I remained alive and single-minded, until very recently completely unaware of the importance of déjà vu's. Also included in this category because their family circumstances are similar enough to that of the single-minded Marks are two more small groups: the few remaining two-minded Marks, and the 42,000 Marks who were very recently upgraded to eight minds. The former additional group hasn't had enough power to change their situation, and the latter hasn't had enough time. Mark Anderson, and often his entire family, never existed. For the sake of completeness, I'll mention that there are dimensions in which Mark had experiences very different than those described herein. For example, dimensions in which Binion's Casino had gone out of business before I had a chance to play roulette there. Those Marks had tried other ways to make the money to buy a home large enough for both families, sometimes causing their lives to deviate considerably from the path you're now familiar with, and requiring different actions from me now. There are other dimensions that are even odder, such as where Mom and Dad's first child - born about the same date as me - was a girl. Or when Donna was substituted with a boy, or where I fell off my bike at the age of eleven and was badly injured by a car whose driver was following too inattentively, or many other variations. Each of the individual variations tends not to occur often, but there are so many different variations that it's impractical to describe them. In some of those dimensions I'll do nothing, in others my actions will be similar to one of the other above listed categories, or maybe my actions will be entirely different. In reality I have no need to categorize my actions as I have enough attention to do whatever I want in every individual dimension. The above categories are autobiographical simplifications required to present you with easily understood descriptions. By the time I've described the six sets of actions, you'll understand my style well enough. ------- The rest of this and the next few chapters are about Category #1, where: "I am alive and well with multiple minds, up to thirty two of them until the very recently." It will be the 32-minded Marks that you'll be most familiarity with, but this category also includes Marks with sixteen down to three minds. Earlier in this document I made a metaphorical comment about the Voyage of Discovery "sailing into homeport, dropping anchor and paying off its captain." That'd been a month ago, just after exams had finished. I'd reached 1,792 minds, the number that I'd thought all the other Marks would stop just short of, whereupon we'd all live happily ever after. I'd honestly thought the Voyage was over, but subsequent gains in understanding the Universe and my abilities had restarted the Voyage. Not only "restarted", but had accelerated it to ever-greater achievements. The last three days had given me an explosion of increased understanding of the Universe, and massively increased ability to control it by using that understanding and my vastly increased willpower. Godhood - where I could see the big picture so clearly that I understood and could manipulate the Universe's fundamental structure - had arrived only a few hours ago. (I paused after writing the previous chapter and before starting the events of this chapter. I took the time to think about my families more carefully before I started affecting their lives, and did a little preparation for it to, as you'll read.) It was barely over a week ago that I'd exceeded a hundred thousand minds, and only a day ago that I'd exceeded a million. The final rush happened so fast and the power gained so incredible that my families' understanding of my abilities has been left far behind. Of the dimensions in this category, that's especially true for the families of Marks that'd had only three to eight minds until all of my minds were connected to my super-network a few hours ago. Even less up to speed with me than my families is the general public. In those dimensions where we'd had thirty two minds and had assumed the identity of Ronald Fisher, we'd nearly always used the "Angel Plan" to bring Mark Anderson back. Part of that plan was having the Guardian Angel (we claimed) fly us around so we could use NP in public. The angel's flying service and our doing very well at OSU are the only ways the publics know of our uniqueness (I like the phrase "our uniqueness", as it's both true and a contradiction). In dimensions in which we had fewer than thirty two minds, the public - other than a few excited academicians - know nothing about our being special, so they're not up to any sort of speed about us. In the following section, I'm going to quote from a conversation representative of what I told my families in the Category #1 dimensions. I've chosen a 32-minded Mark as that representative. He's not an average Mark for this category, but choosing a lower-minded Mark would mean his families were far less prepared for his being so special, so the conversation would include more expressions of disbelief, incredulity, amazement, etc. You'll read about those when I discuss some of the other categories, so I'll save you from them here. Most of the families of 32-minded Marks know he can fly himself and others around, and some of them - in the first few thousand dimensions which had their Mark connected to the super-network, which started with the Second-Tier Helpers - know that he has very recently learned to teleport and multi-task his mind FAR more than previously, but those abilities are the most impressive that they know about. Those Marks hadn't told their families how many threads he could consciously process, because "A trillion", would have been hard for anyone to swallow, and that value is conservative because if a Mark got busy, he could keep creating new minds. There was no practical limit. As usual, in the following conversation I'll take the viewpoint of the Mark involved, calling him "I" and "me"; his mother will be "Mom", etc. It's effectively true now, in a weird way, because we all share everything. All of my minds throughout the Universe are linked, we don't care who controls our bodies, and there's nothing special about any of us. Each body has to have a mind attached to it, and from that mind's perspective that Felicity might or might not be his native mother, but more often than not one of the disembodied minds anywhere else in the Universe is controlling that Mark-body anyway. The super-network is collectively running our bodies, and somewhere in the network will be the Mark that can call each Felicity "Mom". ------- I requested a Family Meeting to start an hour before our usual dinnertime, also telling Mom and Vanessa, "Don't worry about cooking dinner tonight. I'll be providing that as part of the meeting's explanation." Because this was taking place in a dimension of a Mark who has a very similar life to that of the Voyager's before he'd rolled those fateful dice, the definition of "family" now includes Nevaeh, making ten of us. From the Adults' House: Mom, Dad, Vanessa and Prof; and from the Kids' House: Carol, Julia, Ava, Nevaeh, Donna, and last but very definitely not least, me. Speaking of me, as I tend to do in this autobiography (although this section is about a Mark who is representing this category of family circumstance), it will be the mind who was born in this dimension who will be leading the conversation during the family meeting. Our super-network's total sharing makes our previous number-name system irrelevant, but by the old system, it will be #1 who will be speaking. For the first time in any of our external conversations, it was important to get the right perspective - you'll see why soon. By the way, before the super-network invalidated the naming system, do you know what was the last number-name of the mind that is the focus of this autobiography? It wasn't #1 because he'd several times merged into other bodies; his very first merge made him #2, and that number had changed several times since. I find it amusing that for a long time this autobiography hasn't bothered identifying the individual person it's meant to be focused on. I won't give you the answer because it hasn't mattered for years, and totally doesn't matter since godhood was achieved. You've got no idea how many copies of that mind there are, how many of them have bodies, where in the Universe the minds and bodies are, and what they're doing. And even if you did know, many of the answers are constantly changing. Other than your not knowing who I am, where I am, what I'm doing, how many of me there are, and whether it's still me who is writing now, this autobiography is otherwise completely accurate. As you might have noticed in the list of meeting attendees, Donna is part of the Kids' household. She's turning into a nice young woman whose company we enjoy more and more, so we recently made her very happy by offering a Kids' bedroom to her for one of her 16th birthday presents; 16 being the age when it's no longer illegal for her to have sex with me. Her birthday isn't for another week yet but from the above list you can see where she's already living. She unofficially moved in a week ago. She started moving some of her stuff down, telling Mom, "It's to make it easier for me later, Mom." One of the things she moved down was herself, which certainly will make it easier for her later. Donna has her own bedroom in the Kids' House which she is meant to sleep in most nights so she doesn't intrude on the rest of our relationships, that instruction especially coming from Mom, but so far she's slept with all of us twice as often as she's slept in her room, plus the one night she slept in the Adults' house to keep up the pretense with the parents that she hasn't moved in with us yet. There's already so many of us sleeping in our room that one more doesn't intrude. To keep our individual relationships strong my girls and I frequently pair up, in all the possible combinations, and have "Quality Time" nights in one of the other bedrooms. There's no schedule for that, just whenever someone feels it might be a good idea with someone else, but it's become quite a frequent event since Nevaeh moved in because having five people seemed to tip a balance so that we all feel the need to deliberately have pairing-up times. Our relationship with Nevaeh doesn't have the same emotional depth that we have with Ava, and certainly not the depth we have within the two families, but she's living with us and included in almost everything we do. To be candid, she's with us in part because she's pleasant and compliant. She totally believes that I can't do anything morally wrong, so she unquestionably does whatever I want and will swallow any explanation I give her, although it's rare that any is needed. There's one major way in which she's not part of my families: she thinks all 'my' abilities are performed for me by the very cooperative Guardian Angel. There'd been no pressing reason to tell her otherwise, and there'd been a very real risk that her learning that her relationship with us was built on a very big lie would make her angry enough to flip out and blab the secret to everyone. My newly gained godlike abilities include being able to totally control and edit minds of as many people as I want, so that risk has now been eliminated. I included Nevaeh in the invitation for the family meeting, happy that she'll finally learn the truth. I started the family meeting by saying, "Nevaeh, what I'm going to talk about will be completely new to you so many of my comments will seem confusing. 95% of what I'll be saying will be new to everyone else too, and I'll be providing them with so much explanation that it should fill in the gaps for you. If you hear something you don't understand, please just let me carry on because it'll probably come clear to you a few minutes later." "Okay. This sounds like it's going to be even more wonderful than you normally are." Nevaeh was the only member of my audience who was so easily optimistic. She'd missed out on the times when we'd been under serious threat from the Government's several surveillance operations and forceful intrusions, the crackpot snipers, the Mossad's operation, and other assorted threats. My families hadn't forgotten those times so they were more concerned now, despite my saying "Don't worry" when I'd rebuffed their earlier requests for more information about the purpose of this meeting. "It's VERY wonderful, Nevaeh. My next comments won't make sense to you, but sit tight and they will eventually. -- To everyone else I said, "You know that I have refused to talk about the source of what has made me special. I kept it secret because if it'd become public knowledge it would've quickly led to the destruction of human civilization. I've very recently found a way to block that outcome from happening, so it's now safe to tell you how I became so unique." Prof's proximity reading showed GREAT excitement. Because I haven't totally disabled déjà vu's, my publishing the autobiography of my path to godhood in some dimensions might lead some desperate people to commit suicide in an attempt to follow my path. I'm choosing to not stop such attempts because there won't be anywhere near enough of them to damage civilization to any degree, especially because no one in any dimension will be acquiring special abilities to demonstrate that such suicides work. As my autobiography becomes world famous on the millions of Earths where I'll publish it, some attention-seekers might lie about their being more powerful, but a simple EEG will debunk those claims. I continued, "You know that several years ago I was a socially inept, unhappy boy. The following will seem strange to you and it's an unpleasant topic, but it's an essential part of how I became who I am, so I have to tell it to you straight. On November 19, 2003 I committed suicide. You may remember what happened on that date, Mom. I told you I had to take a couple of days off school because I'd fallen and hurt one of my balls and I'd messed my pants with the pain..." "I remember," said Mom, "but what you're saying doesn't make sense." "It will. I hadn't fallen and hurt a ball the way I said. What I'd done is sat in a bath of warm water and slit my wrists. I very nearly bled out and died, and was so weak that I couldn't go to school until I recovered, so I lied about the fall. -- "I gained my first abilities that day. They were small and I hadn't discovered things like NP or blobs yet. Mostly what I gained was what appeared to be a huge increase in my intelligence. My apparent increase in IQ wasn't actually to do with IQ. What it was caused by is something I'll explain shortly. -- "I felt even more cut off from other people after my IQ and observation skills rose, and I committed suicide again on February 22, 2005. I was better prepared that time and used a poison that I'd been carrying while I waited for the right time, which happened to be when I was in a menswear store. I had a fairly quick acting antidote with me too, which allowed me to recover within a few hours. That suicide increased my abilities even further. -- "This sounds illogical, but I truly did commit suicide on both those occasions, and I truly did recover from them too. What I'm saying is true because there was more than one 'I'. The Mark Anderson that walked out of the menswear store was the sole survivor of four near-identical Mark Andersons. Four of me had sat in four bathtubs and slit their wrists. Two had died and two had survived. The two survivors had both obtained the poison and antidote, and at the right time, they'd both taken it in the menswear store. One of the Marks died, the other - me - took the antidote and survived. -- "I can see that Prof is starting to suspect the idea. It's ALL about 'Parallel Dimensions'. I see that everyone else is looking blank so I'll explain what they are..." I went on to do so. It's surprisingly difficult to get people who don't read as widely as they should to grasp that concept, but I eventually managed to convey the idea. It was a tedious segment of our conversation and I'll assume you've managed to grasp that concept by this point in my autobiography, so I'll not record my explanation of it. I continued, "Now you understand that there are billions of parallel dimensions, I'll supply a key piece of information: déjà vu. That's the very weird feeling you get when you think you've already lived something before. It feels like some sort of short-circuit in your brain. Do you all know what I mean?" There were several nodes and comments that showed understanding, so I continued, "Good. Déjà vu isn't you experiencing something that you've done before. It's your mind being linked with the mind of another you in a parallel dimension. It's the confusion caused by having two almost identical but VERY slightly different minds in your head: your own mind plus a temporary copy of the other person's mind. You misinterpret the 'echo' as something you've done before, but it's really just two minds that are very slightly out of sync with each other." Most of the weirdness of the déjà vu experience for one-minded people is caused by the refreshing copies arriving, but I was simplifying the unimportant details. -- "When I committed suicide in the bathtub, out of pure luck I had a déjà vu very near the end, so I was linked to another me who was also committing suicide in a bathtub. He'd cut his wrists a little deeper than I had and he died during our déjà vu. Normally when déjà vu ends, the temporary copies of the minds in each other's heads are erased, but that wasn't the case if the owner died before the déjà vu ended. When the other Mark died, the copy of his mind stayed permanently in my mind. -- "I discovered the second Mark Anderson's mind in me, and our minds started talking together. Out loud initially, and later just by thinking words back and forth. We enjoyed it, so I wrapped clothes around my wrists to stop the bleeding, and I managed to clean up and get myself to bed. I kept it a secret, obviously. I had suicide cuts on my wrists and had a new voice in my head, so I would've been committed to a mental hospital if I'd said anything. -- "Over the next few weeks my apparent increase in IQ was mostly due to my having two of me to work things out. That's a huge help because I could discuss problems back and forth, which often popped up new ideas. The result of my IQ test was mostly because my minds leapfrogged each other down the questions in the test, so I got twice as many of them done in the same time..." I was interrupted by Prof's chuckling, which gave Julia the chance to declare, "That's why you sometimes say 'we' when you're talking about yourself." "Yep. We try not to, but it sometimes slips out." Prof declared, "THAT'S why you could read so many computer screens at a time! There are more than one of you?" "On the money, Prof. One mind per screen. Initially their memories were separate but we managed to overcome that separation, so what one mind learned we all learned." "But you can read a phenomenal number of screens now, and you don't even have to be in the same room." "I'll get to that." "Did the one that died have a family, Mark?" asked Mom, suddenly grasping that aspect of the situation. "Even worse than that, Mom, because it wasn't just one other Mark that suicided, but billions of them. Just over 170 billion, in fact. Déjà vu's occur at very similar times across similar dimensions, and about 68 billion of the suiciding Marks had déjà vu's as one of them died, so 34 billion of them survived with two minds in their heads, 34 billion of them had their bodies die but each of their minds lived on inside another body, and 102 billion of them simply died as people normally do when they suicide. -- "In every respect that matters, all of those suiciding Marks had lives which were virtually identical to mine. They had a mom called Felicity Anderson, and nearly everything else was the same too. Whichever one of their Carols or Donnas used the bathroom first after school that day would have discovered their brother's body in the bathtub..." I'll spare you the next several minutes of the conversation. In my desire to make sure everyone understood the situation, I'd probably been unwise to mention Carols or Donnas finding my bodies. The Anderson family got quite upset and the conversation became very unpleasant for a while, especially after they remembered that I'd committed suicide again in the menswear store. I strongly urged them to get over it, including saying, "It's ANCIENT history as far as our family's situation and my mental health is concerned. I don't have ANY reason to be depressed these days! I fully acknowledge that I've left a lot of pain behind me. The reason for this conversation is so I can start making good on some of that. I especially need Prof's and Vanessa's help with that, and they need to understand what the cost has been so they can make a good decision about something I'll bring up later. I know that it's an extremely unpleasant topic, but there are strong reasons why I have to be totally honest about it. There's a lot more explanation to come yet, so it'd be best if you please withhold your reactions as best you can until you've got the full picture." Mom would've preferred to let her emotions vent, but she managed to restrain herself. "The four minds I had at that point of my life weren't just four consciouses. They came with all their subconsciouses, memories, mental skills, etc. They were all Mark Andersons, but there were slight differences between them, not that those differences mattered much as we were more than 99% the same person. As well as making me seem even more intelligent, they also had a marvelous effect on my physical coordination. My agility and dexterity improved greatly because I could better control my body, so I got very good at sports. -- "You've heard that a positive mental attitude can help keep you healthy, or a negative attitude can lead to sickness. It's true that the subconscious has a large influence over the body, although it's at lower levels than most people claim. I had four subconsciouses and they had enough combined power to force my body to change in many ways. My subconsciouses knew what I wanted, so my pimples cleared up, I got stronger and fitter, my shoulders got wider, my broken arm healed faster, etc. Those changes were all achieved by natural processes, but pushed by so much subconscious mental force that my body had to cooperate. I did get somewhat more intelligent too, because brains are part of a body. My body got more efficient, so my brain got more efficient. It might've been worth something like an extra 10 IQ points. Increased physical coordination, body sculpting, and an apparently higher IQ - mostly from my having four minds capable of doing four times as much thinking in the same time - were the only abilities that I knew I had at that time. -- "A month after my second 'merge' - as I call them - one of the best events in my four lives happened: Annette Neumeyer tried to humiliate me at school, which led directly to Julia learning that my buttons were hers to press. Julia entered my life and pretty much took control of it, which I definitely needed at that time." To Julia, I solemnly said, "You changed my life TOTALLY, darling. I was desperately unhappy until you entered my life. I'll never be able to thank you enough for the help you've given me..." Julia disagreed, "You've given me FAR more than I've EVER given you. I'm honored to be allowed to be part of your life. I'm nothing special, but you're INCREDIBLE..." "And I owe it ALL to you! I'd be..." "You would've done it anyway. You were too smart not to have woken up to your own potential..." You know how it goes. After another back and forth and a mutual hug, I returned to the main thread, "Another MAJOR event occurred in my life a week after the MAJOR event that was Julia's and my first date. It was when I went to my first Aikido lesson. I still had my arm in a cast so I could only watch it, but I learned something incredibly important. There's a type of concentration that aikidoka adopt when they're training. They call it 'being centered', and it's a slightly altered state of consciousness very similar to meditation. When I tried it for the first time, I made an amazing discovery. I didn't understand it until recently, but the Universe is fundamentally conscious. It doesn't have a personality or think for itself, but it is aware and it responds to living creatures' consciousnesses. Prof, have you heard of Schrödinger's Cat?" "Yes, but I can't remember what it was about." "It's about the Universe not deciding on an outcome until it's observed. We'll have a talk about the science behind all of this later. For now I'll just say that the Universe treats consciousness far more importantly than anyone other than me knows. I had four consciousnesses, and when I was 'centered' in the Aikido style, my consciouses were able to interact with the Universe in ways no human mind has ever been powerful enough to do before." ^ Regarding my last statement. I am very interested in whether I am the only person to have developed abilities through the déjà vu merging process. My minds have searched EVERY Earth for any merged person, including those Earths that had no version of me or were even apparently empty of humans. It was a very easy job. I had access to each dimension's Consciousness Map by then, which covers the entire dimension, and my proximity sense had become MUCH larger than the Earth (one proximity blob can now have a radius up to 70,000 times that of the Earth's. Centered on the Sun, I can sense a volume extending three times farther out than the Earth's orbit, the blob's edge is beyond Ceres). Either of those two tools quickly told me what I wanted to know for each Earth. Unfortunately both tools were only quick out to Ceres (that's beyond Mars), and theoretically one or more multi-minded human might be farther away. Searching the Universe for them with proximity was obviously impracticably slow. The Conscious Map was the best tool, and although it can be used with the information filtered in many ways, such as "Show me all the minds in Earth's Solar System, sorted by mind-power, descending", it couldn't be filtered by species because the Universe's Consciousness didn't know that (in some ways it would be more informative to write "it didn't care about that", but the Universe doesn't actually "care" about anything. It's strange that a literally meaningless statement is more informative). Thus, to search for high-minded humans off the Earth, I had to search quite thoroughly through the Conscious Map. Fortunately that was something that I was enjoying doing anyway. I was quickly able to eliminate the possibility of a multi-minded human being outside the Solar System because to achieve that he'd have to have so much mind-power that he would've had a very high place on the Conscious Map. I was satisfied that there was no such person; every single human-inhabited Earth had no one other than me with more than one mind - multiple personality disorders not increasing the number of minds, only the number of personalities within a single mind. If anyone has already achieved godhood then I can't see any sign of him/her/them now. If they did exist then they must be hiding because they aren't appearing in any of the dimension's Consciousness Maps like I was; my presence SCREAMED out of those maps. I could easily get myself excluded from them, but I can't imagine why a god would want to hide so I'm assuming that there is no other god. Having proved to my satisfaction that there was no merged human alive now, was there a merged human in the past? At the beginning of my autobiography I gave you some statistics about déjà vu'ing during death, and the bottom line was that it was so unlikely that it'd take the entire population who've ever lived on 3,000 Earths for it to have ever happened (that result is close enough to let stand). As there are over 150 billion human-populated Earths, that means there should have been a very large number of merged people. There are none; the logic is incorrect. If there was one such merged person, say a Bill Smith, then most of the other dimensions' versions of that Bill Smith should be merged too. It's statistically incorrect to multiply the chance of a merge by the number of Earths because each Earth is not independent of the others. The Earths are so similar that it's roughly correct to say there has so far been only a 1-in-3,000 chance of a human ever merging. Clearly I was very lucky, but it's still possible that someone was even luckier before me. The Consciousness Map and my proximity sense get their information from the Universe's Consciousness rather than directly from the source, e.g., if someone is in my proximity sense, I don't actually sense them directly, but instead sense their presence in the Universe's Consciousness. Because those senses of mine work that way, those two types of information - and many others from the Consciousness - are inaccessible outside of the present. That's because the Consciousness can't DO things in the past, "doing" being an action and therefore only possible in the present. I can look at air pressure in multiple slices of the past to decode speech, but there is nothing to look at to see what the Consciousness used to know, which means I can't learn anything from it about the past. Therefore I can't quickly check for past multi-minded people, making searching for them almost impossibly laborious. I'd have to create enough minds to watch every single person ever born on a target Earth. I couldn't just watch their near-deaths because they might have received minds while only their déjà vu partner was in a deadly situation. That's unlikely, but not impossible. If I saw something that made me suspect a person might have merged, I'd have to investigate that person on every other Earth to see if any of them had just died. And I'd have to repeat that process on millions of different target Earths because a person might have merged on just a subset of them, as I did. Just the idea of doing that much research is too tedious to contemplate doing, especially because I know that there is no such person alive now. If any merged people ever existed, they never achieved godhood, stopping somewhere short of it and eventually dying of old age or some other cause. Such people don't matter in any practical sense. I am merely curious about the possibility, so I'll do no more than keep my eyes open for signs of it. I'm not hopeful. That's humans discussed, but what about alien 'people'? That's a very real question, because although there's only been about a 1-in-3,000 chance of a human merging, there are a great deal more than 3,000 other minded species in the Universe. Which reminds me that there are thousands of non-human minded species on Earth. It's quite possible that one or more of those species accidentally achieved the first merge, although it's difficult to imagine an animal choosing to commit suicide and then changing its mind when it discovered that it had two of them (the deaths have to be abortable, and only suicides give the dying creature much chance of doing that, or they wouldn't have died at all. It'd take a threefold coincidence of a déjà vu, a death in one dimension and a dimensional difference causing a non-death in the other dimension to cause a merge, which is getting freakily unlikely). Whether a first merge occurred isn't important, because even a smart chimpanzee with two minds isn't going to be able to create a successful second merge, let alone a dog, gerbil, etc. They'll die as dual-minded creatures and no more. All non-human Earthly minded species are ignorable - although I did an experiment that confirmed my expectation that such species can merge. I'm only concerned with species advanced enough to deliberately and successfully perform the second and subsequent merges. By a similar process to what I used on the Earths, I was able to search for merged aliens. That was far more complicated than for humans because some alien species have some very weird mental structures. Even within one species, their ranges of mind-power can vary considerably - by gender, by life stage (e.g., caterpillar to butterfly), by age (e.g., if the species' brains continually accrete; I'll give an example of one of these later), by artificial enhancement, or by other causes (almost anything is possible with aliens - some of them are very weird). As was the case with humans, there are no merged aliens alive now. Because there are far more than 3,000 planets full of alien species that I judge sufficiently advanced to deliberately merge, that none of them have merged even once is extremely unlikely. Unbelievably so if the chance of a species having a merged 'person' is 1-in-3,000. One obvious source of error is that it's based on the total number of humans that have ever lived, but it has only been the last generation which have been capable of performing a second merge. That's a factor of 20 correction, but there are still far more than 60,000 sufficiently advanced species, and some of them have been advanced FAR longer than a single Earth generation. Nonetheless, there are no merged aliens alive now. That means that there's either a substantial error in my statistical methodology, or there's some other factor operating. For example, if only humans got déjà vu's, that would explain it. That's not the explanation though, as the entire Universe gets synchronized, from the most intelligent species' minds down to the vacuum of space. I have already confirmed that déjà vu's are Universal. Some species aren't able to recognize that they're in a déjà vu, but most can, and they all get them. One of the early experiments my alien-researching minds did was to deliberately create déjà vu's for every species to see how they reacted (I did it just as for humans, by linking two counterparts' w-addresses). There were a variety of reactions, but nothing relevant to this discussion. Being so interested in merging, my minds have created two identical copies of a representative of most alien species, déjà vu linked the copies to each other, canceled one of their bodies, and observed that the other 'person' remained two-minded for several minutes just as if it had merged, after which I'd canceled that copy too. Thereby proving - as I did for chimps, dogs and gerbils - that aliens can merge. By "cancel" I effectively mean "kill", although it's instantaneous and I only do this experiment when I am able to make the participants unconscious throughout it to avoid them feeling fear, panic, etc. (those are human emotions, but they'll give you the idea). I create and cancel many of my own minds and bodies too, so I don't care about those acts themselves, but I do care about not causing fear and panic to the participants even if they're only temporary copies, because they don't know that. I haven't carried out this experiment with all the intelligent alien species yet because making some of them unconscious is problematic. I need to gain more understanding of their mental processes, so I can suppress their emotions. Why there are no merged aliens alive now is a puzzle (I understand and can manipulate the Universe's fundamental properties, but that doesn't mean I know everything. Thank goodness, because that'd be terribly boring. I am GREATLY looking forward to the HUGE amount of very fascinating learning ahead of me. You may know all the rules for arithmetic, and be able to solve absolutely any arithmetic question, but that doesn't mean you know the answers to all of them right now). For a sufficiently advanced species, they could arrange their own second and subsequent merges, similar to how I did, but my search didn't discover a single alien alive who'd merged once, so that shortage is the obvious core issue. I have some guesses about the puzzle's solution: I have only been a god for a few hours, so I haven't had much time to observe alien suicide practices, but it appears that humans have a greater propensity to suicide than other species, and even more importantly, humans are REALLY bad at it. Of those species that do suicide, when they kill themselves, it's usually irrevocable. The odds of a first merge happening outside of a suicide is dramatically lower, as it requires a dimensional difference simultaneous with dying during a deja vu. Throughout my autobiography I've repeatedly said that any two dimensions are 99% the same. I was being lazy rather than accurate, mainly because the idea of putting a number on that issue is silly. For example, my Lord of the Rings T-shirt with Arwen on it was different between my first two dimensions. How much does that change the percentage by? Should I count the objects in the each dimension's bathroom and see what fraction are different? But if I threw my T-shirts out the windows, the dimensions' percentage difference hasn't changed. What is the percentage difference if both shirts were the same but were folded differently? If I cut one of the shirts into two pieces, how many differences would there be? I could argue for two, three, four, or even billions (count how many molecules are of different types in every specific Cartesian coordinate of both rooms). It's an impossible definitional issue, and therefore silly. However it's defined and measured, the dimensions are a GREAT deal more than 99% the same. If they were even 1% different now, it would only take a few years for the differences would cascade out of control, despite the synchronization process. The bottom line is that requiring a dimensional difference to occur at the point of a déjà vu death, and for that difference to keep one of the participants alive, makes non-suicide first merges EXTREMELY unlikely. That's especially true because the Universe causes déjà vu's between VERY similar dimensions. It was only after I'd merged several times that the similarity requirement relaxed. Its being at its strongest before the first merge made a non-suicide merge even less likely. When I did my alien merging experiments, I rendered the participants unconscious because that seemed more ethical. Maybe by avoiding their emotions I avoided the explanation too. Maybe most alien species self-destruct soon after receiving a second mind. It makes sense that each alien species would have its own vulnerability to that event. Humans might be considerably more staunch than average. Or to put it more humorously, maybe our minds are such a mess already that more mess doesn't worry us much. Maybe a significant proportion of alien species have minds that are so efficient, highly developed, well structured, etc., that they can 'tidy up' if things go awry, including being able to cure mental illnesses so well they can get rid of a second mind. Given that aliens are involved, I'm probably missing the explanation because I'm thinking 'too human'. Time will fix that. To be logically complete, I should also discuss the possibility of aliens achieving multiple merges in the past. As best I can tell - which is a very, very poor "best" without performing the laborious search of the past as described for humans - none of them have. I haven't physically searched more than a tiny fraction of the Universe, but I haven't yet discovered any remnants of godlike powers being used. Nor do any of the aliens I've gotten to know well enough to 'read their literature' (putting it in human terms) have any historic evidence of one of them merging. Some species have some interesting claims that were similar enough to what I was looking for to make me investigate them, but it was relatively easy for me to check the past to confirm the truth behind their 'legends' (another humanism). I'm still getting to know many species, and I'll do far more research yet, but so far the past alien situation is very similar to that of the past human one. It would be very interesting to discover that there are, or have been, multi-merged people of any species, but I suspect that I am the first. I changed the déjà vu process to prevent anyone following my path almost immediately after I reached godhood. I did that because I wanted to control who - and what - joined me. Not knowing why there aren't any merged aliens now, I can't calculate how long it would have taken for a second god to appear, so maybe I didn't have to act as quickly as I did. Because I've now learned that there are no two-minded intelligent creatures anywhere, no one is close to godhood, but some aliens have substantially larger minds than humans, and therefore déjà vu more often, so it could have taken them only a few months to travel my path. In time, I can imagine myself creating demi-gods, including from non-human species (I discuss it briefly later), but I can't imagine that I will ever let go of my power to control that. ^ To continue quoting my speech to my families, "I should've mentioned that I'm positive that there are no other humans alive now who've done what I have, and I'm almost positive that there never have been. They might've lucked into the first death during déjà vu, but I doubt they managed to get any further than one step on the path that I've gotten to the end of. The deaths have to be done during a déjà vu - and you know how rare they are - and they have to be done in a way where one of the two people can recover. When I took the poison in the menswear store, the other Mark and I both had an antidote and we randomly chose which one of us would take it. I won and he died. Nearly always when people have died during déjà vu, that sort of recovery wouldn't have been possible. -- "I was talking about how being 'centered' enabled me to interact with the Universe in amazing ways. That's when I discovered NP. I also discovered that I had an unlimited physical endurance. Julia helped me discover that, in a way that was rather painful for her." "Haha. I remember. That's what forced me to admit how special you were." "I was only just starting to have special abilities. My maximum NP force was fourteen pounds then, only strong enough to influence small objects, like roulette balls." I paused for the chuckles. "Which takes me to the sad episode of Prof and me being kidnapped. Remember that drink of water they gave us halfway through our ordeal, Prof?" "I sure do! That was the most welcome drink I've EVER had." "I mentioned before that there are little random differences between the dimensions. One such random difference was that whether we got that drink or not was about a 50/50 proposition. There were several billion pairs of us chained in basements, Prof. In half of them we got a drink of water, in half of them we did not." "I don't think I would've survived without that drink. The doctors said that several of my organs were very close to failing." "The situation was even grimmer than that. I'd been trying everything I could think of to get us out of there, but fourteen pounds of NP force obviously wasn't enough to break chains, and nothing else I could think of would work either. The cellphones couldn't get reception in the basement and I didn't have the ability to fly them out of the basement back then. NOTHING was working, and we were both slowly dying. Then I had another déjà vu..." "Oh no," said Carol, not really understanding, but not liking where my explanation was heading. "Yeah. By random chance, I déjà vu'd with a Mark whose kidnappers hadn't given him and his Prof a drink, which meant they were much sicker than my Prof and me. Their Prof was VERY sick, was unconscious nearly all the time, and hallucinating when he was awake. He didn't have long left. That Mark had an agonizing decision to make: he could stay where he was and continue trying to find a way out, or because we had a lot of conscious control over our bodies by then, he could stop his heart so he'd die during déjà vu. -- "If he suicided, he'd be abandoning his Prof and guaranteeing that the Anderson and Williams families in his dimension would lose their Prof and Mark, but he'd also be leaving copies of his four minds in my body, permanently giving me eight minds. Having more minds makes me more powerful because the Universe's consciousness responds to me more, so maybe the eight of us combined would have enough power to escape the basement in our dimension, saving one pair of Mark and Prof. -- "Because all of their previous escape attempts had been fruitless, and because he and his Prof were so close to death already, which also meant that escaping would be even less likely than it had been previously, he decided to suicide. In that dimension he died immediately, and his Prof died shortly thereafter. Although that Mark agonized over the decision and he hated being forced to make it, he had made the right decision. I found out from the doctors in Seattle later that his Prof would've already been past the point of no return. Even if a full medical team had rushed into the room, they wouldn't have been able to save that Prof. -- "If they'd arrived that quickly, they would've been able to save that Mark though. His suiciding meant his family lost their son, but he felt sure that would happen anyway because the boss kidnapper had been too careful for there to be an imminent rescue. That Mark suicided, hoping that adding his four minds to my four would help us find a way out of the basement in my dimension, saving me and my Prof. A few minutes after his four minds merged across to me, the eight of us discovered sight blobs and I was able to find the keys and fetch them to unlock us. I had 113 pounds of NP force because of the eight minds..." "It doesn't double?" asked Prof. "Doubling the number of minds does double my abilities, but there are two abilities involved in tapping the energy and converting it to a physical force, making it four times more powerful per mind. There are twice as many minds so it compounds for an eightfold increase." Prof just nodded, to let me continue. -- "Back to our basement escape: I was very weak, but with the 113 pounds of NP helping me I was able to get myself up the stairs to call the cops. It was very close, but we managed to get rescued in time. Another few hours and I would've been too mentally and physically weak to help us, and Prof might have been too damaged to recover." [In the roughly 25% of cases where neither of the two Marks in the déjà vu had been given that wonderful half-glass of water, they had still done a merge, had nearly always discovered sight blobs, and the eight-minded Marks had managed to get upstairs to call for help. They'd passed out before getting back downstairs again, so the cops saw a very different situation when they arrived. That caused some significant differences in those dimensions, including making the DHS and CIA even more suspicious and cautious, which is partly why a significant proportion of the Marks never escaped from the CIA's lab.] -- "The reason I explained that in detail is so you appreciate that Prof and I died in somewhat over half the dimensions we were kidnapped in. Two weeks later the owner of the property came to check on it, discovered the four bodies in the basement and called the cops. In those dimensions, the Williamses and Andersons have been living without Prof and Mark for over two years." "Oh boy," said Nevaeh unintentionally, and there were some other comments from the others too. Now that she had spoken, Nevaeh couldn't resist adding, "Ahh, Mark, how come you keep talking about you getting minds and abilities?" "I need to explain more of the big picture first, Nevaeh, otherwise the answer won't make enough sense to you. I won't forget to answer it though. -- "I'll speed up the story. When Prof and I were carried out of that basement alive, I had eight minds. I'm sure you recall that I subsequently upgraded my computer system to have eight screens." The Williamses all nodded. -- "When I was later being held prisoner by the CIA, its facility was so much more secure than the Casino Kidnappers' basement and the CIA was so much of a threat even if I did get out, that I had to merge twice more to be able to escape and be reasonably sure of staying escaped. I know there were about 4.5 billion Marks that the CIA had in custody across all the dimensions, and that three billion of them died to add their minds to one billion Marks so they could get up to thirty two minds each, which gave us enough power to get out. About half a billion Marks weren't able to escape at all, not even through merging. They were later killed by the CIA and the Government never told those Andersons what happened to their son. The Marks that escaped after being merged into were able to change their bodies into that of Ron Fishers', and all of you except Nevaeh know what followed from that." Prof checked, "So by the time you were Ron, thirty one Marks had died and their minds were in you?" "Yes, and four Profs had died too. This will sound strange, but in some respects I'm more concerned about the hurt caused by the four Profs dying than the thirty one Marks. I'll explain why soon. -- "One thing I haven't mentioned is that each merge made subsequent déjà vu's occur more frequently. They're normally about two years apart for teenagers, and less often for adults because adult minds are more stable so need less synchronizing. Each merge doubled the number of minds in each surviving Mark, making déjà vu's four times more likely. So two years between déjà vu's became six months after one merge. Two merges made déjà vu's occur every 1.5 months. After the five merges that led to Ron, déjà vu's were occurring roughly every seventeen hours. There's some random variation, but that's the average frequency. You'll be pleased to know that many hundreds of déjà vu's came and went without billions of Marks committing suicide again. -- "Every déjà vu I have is with a random other Mark, most often one with the same number of minds as me. There were about a billion of us with thirty two minds throughout the Universe. There were also a large number of other Marks whose lives had gone differently. The most common reason for that was their dimension not having a Binion's Horseshoe Casino, which meant the third, fourth and fifth merges usually never happened for them, or if they did, were for reasons very different than I experienced. -- "But ignoring those Marks for the moment, the billion 32-minded Marks were déjà vu'ing about every seventeen hours. If a single one of us knew something that he told to his next déjà vu partner, and then the two of them told the next two they déjà vu'd with seventeen hours later, who then told the next four, the next eight, etc., then the knowledge spread among all the 32-minded Marks pretty quickly. Two to the power of thirty is just over a billion, so it took about thirty repetitions to spread to every 32-minded Mark. The last two or three would often be to Marks who'd already been told so that delayed everyone getting news a little, and the process was also slightly hindered when a 32-minded Mark déjà vu'd with a smaller-minded Mark, but that didn't happen often enough to matter much. On the other hand, our lives are so similar that if one Mark knew something worth sharing, then probably quite a few of us did, which sped up the start of the process. Depending on how weird the information was, those effects roughly canceled out, so it takes about thirty déjà vu's times seventeen hours which is twenty one days for all the 32-minded Marks to get the news. You were all very curious how I got the highly detailed information that I used to expose Cheney's CIA and the Mossad's operations. It came from other dimensions' Marks who did various risky things and then spread the news of what happened..." I was interrupted by several comments because they had all been VERY curious about those mysterious events. The conversation was a little chaotic for a while so I'll not quote it. I did manage to insert an explanation about how we'd used dice to determine which of us took risks and what risks they took. When I mentioned that I could do something similar for my scientific research, the conversation got even more chaotic. Prof and Vanessa were easily smart enough to see the implications of having billions of Marks doing coordinated research, even if only slowly coordinated. When their initial excitement had abated enough, I continued, "Yeah, inter-dimensional cooperation offers some amazing possibilities, but back to my story: One of us had an idea that none of you have mentioned yet. His idea was that one of us should 'Go Ahead' - as we called it - to merge over and over again to find out how his powers increased and to teach the..." Julia interrupted in sudden panic, grabbing me and pleading, "You're not going to commit suicide again are you?" "I'm talking about the past, Julia. It's all over with already. And I'm NOT going away EVER. No more Marks will EVER be dying, so you can relax." Actually, HUGE numbers of Marks are dying, as we are constantly creating new minds and/or bodies, and then canceling them when they're no longer needed. But none of my families are grieving, which is what Julia was really asking. "Phew. You had me worried." "There's absolutely nothing left to be worried about, so you can relax now. As I was saying, the billion of us collectively decided to send one Mark ahead. We chose the individual Mark randomly, by each of us rolling twelve dice. Whoever rolled twelve 6s would be the unlucky 'winner', and would stop his heart during his next déjà vu's. -- "He's done it already. He told his families that he would kill his body so his mind could go on a mental 'Voyage of Discovery'. He couldn't explain why because if the secret about gaining fantastic powers by dying during déjà vu's got out, millions of people would start committing suicide. Some of the smarter ones would time it right - especially because I expect companies would build helpful suicide machines - and many people would become supermen and superwomen. That would encourage others to kill themselves, and doubtless each other too because people go crazy so easily. Death rates would rise out of control, and human civilization on over a hundred billion parallel worlds would collapse into self-destructive chaos as ever-increasing numbers of people suicided and those with incredible powers in each dimension abused those powers." "Why are you telling us now?" asked Vanessa. "Because it's no longer the end of human civilization if word of it gets out, since it's no longer possible for anyone to gain power that way. Déjà vu's still occur, but they've been weakened so they no longer permit the copy of the mind to last more than a few seconds after its source mind dies. Some overly hopeful or desperate people might try to suicide during a déjà vu, but there'll never be anyone appearing with any special abilities, so hope in the idea will fizzle out. I'll come back to that point later. -- "The twelve-6s Mark said a VERY heartfelt and sorrowful goodbye to his families. They didn't know exactly what he was doing, but he was able to tell them enough to make them proud of his sacrificing himself to help billions of other people, even if they didn't understand how that could be possible. -- "He killed himself in a déjà vu while in a group hug with all his families members, leaving them behind, knowing there was no way back. After he killed his body and his minds left that dimension, there'd be no way of contacting those loved ones again. The metaphor we used was like a sequence of connecting hotel rooms. When a Mark walked into the next room, the door closed behind him and couldn't be opened again. He went from thirty two to sixty four minds, which put him into another Mark's body, so then the 64-minded Mark had to tell his families that he was going on a 'Voyage of Discovery'. After another HIGHLY emotional goodbye, he killed himself during the next déjà vu. The only Marks available to déjà vu with had 32 minds, so he didn't double up this time, only going to 96 minds, then to 128 after the next suicide. -- "During his Voyage, his increased mind-power gave him new abilities and understandings. The Voyaging Mark was taking at least ten days between merges because it took that long to allow his loved ones to say goodbye properly. During those ten days, all the déjà vu's he was having were used to spread the word to the billion very interested and not-suiciding Marks about what he was learning. That's how I learned about the Ava Shield, for example. -- "At 128 minds he discovered a way to get to 320 in only two more deaths instead of the six deaths it would've taken had he done it thirty two minds at a time. It was much slower, taking him five months to get it done, but it saved four families from having to say goodbye to their Mark. Among the several billion families that had Marks with thirty two or fewer minds, saving four of them from grief wasn't a significant number, but that certainly wasn't any consolation for the Mark who had to tell his families over and over again that he was leaving them forever." "I get the impression that you're him?" asked Vanessa. "That's close enough to being true that I'll start referring to the Voyager as 'I'. But who I am is very complicated because I collected my minds at various times, and very recently some of them have gone wandering around to visit other places, or other minds have joined me. I'll ignore that recent change for now, and give you the answer as of a few hours ago. The body you're looking at was born with a mind in it of course, and that mind has never gone anywhere, but one of my minds in here has died nine times. All the other minds have had their bodies die somewhere between none and nine times exclusive." "How many minds do you have?" asked Prof. "Your question stopped having an answer just a few merges after where my story is up to. As the number of minds increased, the frequency of déjà vu's increased even faster, and they lasted longer too because there was more information to compare between the dimensions. The déjà vu's became so frequent that I was in permanent déjà vu with many other Marks, so copies of their minds were always in my head. There's another stage beyond that which supersedes what I just explained, which I'll get to shortly. -- "When I got to 320 minds, I found a VERY welcome way of cutting off the déjà vu halfway through without dying. That had the effect of doing a merge while leaving both bodies and both sets of minds still alive, which meant no more families would ever suffer the loss of their Mark because he merged." "That would mean there'd be two identical copies of each mind still alive?" checked Prof. "Yep. And to make it even stranger, they could later déjà vu together and merge so the same body contained multiple copies of the same original mind. There are lots of Marks around the Universe who have had duplicates in them. Nothing weird happened. Or more accurately, nothing WEIRDER, because the whole thing is rather weird." I got some half-laughing agreements with that. Prof's was the most natural because he was following my explanation better than anyone else. "Once I could merge without dying, I didn't have to spend time saying goodbye to my families in every dimension before I left it. I'd been taking ten days for that because they and their Mark needed time to handle the horribly intense emotions. Without needing to say goodbye, and by then being permanently in déjà vu's, I was able to increase my number of minds over and over again very quickly. -- "I stopped using the word 'merge' and started thinking of them as 'upgrades', not that the terminology matters at all. Every few upgrades I'd pause to see if I could learn more abilities or gain new understandings. The more powerful my mind, the more the Universe responded to me, and the more I could learn. Most importantly, the more minds I had, the more fundamental the facts I could learn about the Universe. I've learned a GREAT deal about how it works. One of the things I learned was how to create minds whenever I want. I've created hundreds of billions of them so far, and they've enabled me to learn even more about the Universe. -- "In fact, I've pretty much learned everything about every fundamental aspect of the Universe, except I'm staying clear of Time because I fear my meddling with that might have very bad effects on my life, or possibly on all life. I can see into the past easily, and into the future fuzzily, but other than looking into it, I'm not going to manipulate Time in any way. -- "When I said that déjà vu's have been weakened so it's safe to tell you my Big Secret, I left out that it was me that very recently weakened them. I've now learned so much and gained so much power that I can manipulate the Universe in amazingly fundamental ways. -- "Which takes me far enough to finally satisfy Nevaeh's curiosity. You've been wonderfully patient, Nevaeh; thanks very much for that." I used NP to float Nevaeh up a few inches, letting her hover while I said, "You believe that God is lifting you up because I want Him to. You're right, but it's even simpler than that. I'm lifting you up, using MY mind and MY abilities, because I'm God." Nevaeh had been brought up all her life to be a strongly faithful Christian, so when I said "I'm God", she would immediately think I meant "The God". That I could be "a god" wouldn't occur to her; she was too conditioned to be a narrow-minded Christian. Her living with me and daily witnessing and talking about God had greatly strengthened her conviction. I was using it to reduce the risk of Nevaeh flipping out. I was omitting references to when I became God, I wasn't saying anything about Christian theology having nothing whatsoever to do with me (or reality), and I was especially not saying that her ingrained theology was a load of crap. Those nuances could come out later if she seemed capable of handling them. For the moment I was happy to let Nevaeh think that I was her version of God, even though I thought He was an asshole, when He wasn't too busy being nothing more than a figment of easily brainwashed imaginations. My families would be astute enough not to get hung up on the Christian crap, but only once they got over the hurdle of understanding my claim. Unsurprisingly, they weren't showing any signs of immediately comprehending it. Vanessa asked, "What do you mean?" "My abilities are so extreme that I can meet every definition of 'God' there is. I'll give you some proof of that shortly, by showing you what I call 'Refuge'. It's a type of vacation home, except with improvements. -- "Remember that we agreed a while ago that I'd have sight blobs looking after each of you when you left the property. I upgraded those a few hours ago so you've now got one of my minds dedicated to looking after each of you. It floats above you invisibly like the sight blob used to, including respecting your privacy as we agreed. Also for privacy reasons, it keeps its observations and memories to itself rather than sharing them with all my other minds, like most of my minds normally do. One of my minds makes an incomparably better bodyguard than a sight blob, as it's far better at detecting danger to you and can immediately take corrective actions that'll amaze you. Your bodyguard is now continually monitoring the state of your health for example, and can cure everything that could happen to a human body. It can even create an entirely new body for you. It's also looking five seconds into your future. If it detects any threat coming, it'll take appropriate action. A drunk driver might have his car suddenly swerve into a tree, for example. If the danger is more serious, like a nuclear bomb exploding nearby, then it'd take you to the refuge I've prepared while thousands more of my minds investigate the bomb situation to decide what to do about it. That's partly how 'Refuge' got its name. I doubt it'll ever be used that way, but the name appeals to me. I'm going to teleport you to see Refuge now, so don't be surprised by the sudden change in location." I was rather proud of Refuge and I was looking forward to my families and I making good use of it in the future. It would be our "home away from home" - a LONG way away. I was taking them there now because they'd find it much easier to understand my power if they could see specific examples of it. Giving them the Grand Tour would give me many opportunities to cover the topics I wanted to, in ways more enjoyable for everyone than my giving them an even longer-winded speech. ^ I teleported them to the paradise planet one of my minds had found. It had a gravity that was 82% of Earth's, fantastic natural scenery, gorgeous sunny days and incredible beaches. Good surf too, because of the lower gravity. The areas I had chosen to use were like the best parts of Oregon, Hawaii and Ko Phi Phi combined. My minds had seen many billions of planets. While many of them were gas giants, or had no atmosphere, or were lifeless or just plain ugly, there were still millions of planets that looked Earthlike. Out of those millions, Refuge had immediately stood out as being a paradise, even before I'd started improving it. Upon discovering this planet, that mind had created a million more minds, and they'd spent several minutes working on it. The idea caught on with other Marks, and it was repeated across nearly the entire W-Dimension - by which I mean that subset of the W-Dimension in which Earth is populated and has an Anderson family. There are a significant number of other dimensions, but they don't interest me so much so I tend to ignore them. I'm sure they'll get plenty of my attention in the long-run, but for now I'm concentrating on my families. On Refuge, my minds built the most fantastic mansion they could imagine (ten thousand of the million minds had been created on Earth to do the necessary research on other mansions, to spur my imagination along or so I could copy ideas). All the materials were better than the best Earth could offer: The chandeliers were made of large diamonds; the house's gold fittings glowed with a faint internal glow; the carpets were fairly firm to walk on but became deeper and softer when the person paused, similar to a non-newtonian fluid; and MANY other improvements. With a million minds on the job - multiplied by the many billions of dimensions that were having a Refuge created in them - we'd thought of some amazing innovations for both its decorating and its furnishing, not to mention the massive scale of its land-scaping and -sculpting. I teleported us into the living room of our new vacation home. I said, "We're about 9.6 million light-years from Earth, but it's still got a high speed connection to the internet and your cellphones will work, haha." Given the size of the Universe, my finding such a paradise planet so close to Earth was rather unlikely - there were only seventy galaxies closer to Earth than this one - but I've noticed that unlikely things do happen sometimes. Prof interrupted to check, with amazement, "We're not on Earth?" "We're a VERY long way from Earth. The fastest human spacecraft would take 200 billion years to get this far, which is about 40 times longer than the Earth has existed." I had known how long the Earth had existed because I'd recently looked that up, but I hadn't known the journey time when I'd started my answer to Prof, but I have a large number of minds plugged directly into the internet's backbone, doing a vastly expanded version of reading all the OSU online lectures. It only took a couple of moments to get the answer after wondering about the "fastest spacecraft". Then it was just a matter of some arithmetic, which is exceptionally easy for me now because I've redesigned my minds to have many built-in tools, including a calculator. I should expand on a couple of points mentioned in the just-given explanation. First, there were millions of other Marks who'd teleported their families to Refuge slightly ahead of when I had. When I wrote about me getting the speed of the fastest spacecraft and doing some arithmetic, it was actually done by the very first of the Marks whose Prof had made the comment that triggered the research. Thereafter all the Marks knew the answer because we all know what each other know. We effectively are each other, so it's okay to refer to any of myself as "I". Second, in regard to my adding a calculator to my minds. Calculators being fairly trivial devices, you might get the wrong impression about my minds. Don't make that mistake. I can create a new human body out of thin air in less time than it takes you to blink. Admittedly I do take some very helpful shortcuts with that job, but I don't need to. Each of my minds can also keep track of what over a trillion other Marks are doing, which may seem impressive until I mentioned that my proximity radius is growing toward the size of the Earth's solar system, and it can sense down to the atomic level. That would be an IMPOSSIBLE amount of detail for me to notice, let alone interpret, except that proximity radius also defines how much of the Universe's Consciousness my mind can interact with - in other words, how big I can make each of my minds. I've expanded my minds phenomenally from the human norm they were until very recently, so they're now a GREAT deal larger than "the size of a planet" (a nod to Marvin from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), and capable of handling an unbelievable amount of detail. In short, my minds are HUGE and INCREDIBLE, plus they have a built-in calculator. By the way, I'm still increasing the number of minds I have, and because they're linked so intimately my special abilities increase by the usual factors. That's because the Voyager hadn't separated his minds from his body, which would've reduced the size of what the Universe perceived as his mind, until he'd already tweaked the Universe's Consciousness so it would recognize our about-to-be-created super-network as an individual mind. That let all of the Mark-minds operate independently while still getting all the benefits of being together. As we continue to create more minds, there could eventually be so many of us that our proximity radius would be the same size as each dimension. If I then sent a mind to every dimension, I'd be proximity sensing the entire Universe, making me omniscient just like the most pretentious priesthoods claim for their gods. If I continued to create even more minds, they'd have to share the existing space. My minds are HUGE but there is as astonishing amount of room in each dimension for them; so much room that it'd take gazillions of times more minds than I have now (i.e., unimaginably more) for me to be mentally constrained, but it amuses me that there will be a limit on my power as a god. It's at an almighty level though. "How far can you teleport?" "I have no distance limits, Prof. I'll finish explaining Refuge to everyone, then you and I can discuss my capabilities as much as you want. -- "You'll feel a bit lighter when you walk than normal because gravity is a little lower here. I've adjusted this planet's axial tilt, daily and annual rotation periods and this location's facing to its sun so they synchronize with those of Earth and Corvallis, so you won't have any disorientation or jet lag problems when you travel back and forth. -- "You might've noticed from having spectacular views in every direction that there are no rooms connected to this one. The only doors this room has take you outside. There are no doors between rooms anywhere in this house because the rooms are built in locations that are usually hundreds of miles apart. They're all in the northern hemisphere and roughly the same time zone, but they're so far apart that hallways aren't practical. To change rooms you just say, 'House, teleport me to my bedroom please, ' or wherever you want to go. BEFORE you start doing that - Donna - I've temporarily suspended that function. You'll be able to teleport around the house as much as you want later." Prof asked me, "What if two people arrive in the same room at the same time?" "They can't overlap. Before teleporting anything I create a volume of space guaranteed to be free of any matter. Only when that's ready does the jump take place. Remember that your bodyguard minds are also looking five seconds ahead for each of you, so accidents like that can't happen. -- "When you move to a new room you can give vague instructions like I just did about going to your bedroom. In that case the house will put you roughly in the middle of the room unless it knows of a reason to choose somewhere else in your room. If you were carrying something, for example, it would probably teleport you beside where it thinks you're likely to place the item. Or you can be more specific by saying you want to appear on the bed, or in a particular corner, or wherever. You can also ask to be sent to wherever someone else is even if you don't know where they are. If that person is doing something the house judges private, you'll either be put somewhere nearby where you can wait, or the house will explain why you're not moving. I could give you other examples, but they all boil down to the house being smart and making intelligent guesses about how best to teleport you around. -- "It'll also send you into any of the elevators in our Corvallis home just by your asking to go to those locations, providing they're empty and the doors are closed. You might have to wait a few seconds for that to happen, but the house will tell you if that's the case. Those elevators will send you here too. Enter an elevator, wait until the doors close, then say, 'House, Refuge's living room please.' Or any other room. You'll appear in that room instantly. You don't need to say 'please' by the way, I've just been so well trained that it seems wrong to leave it off, even when I'm effectively talking to myself. -- "You can ask the house for help at any time, and it'll explain anything to you. It sounds like an upper-class English butler but that's just my sense of humor and you can personalize it with whatever voice you want. The house will help you with that if you ask. I've built the house's minds - it actually has several but it's easier to think of it as a single mind - so it truly enjoys serving you, so feel free to ask it as many questions as you want, to make meals for you, clean dishes, or whatever. It lives to serve you and you'd be making it happy to let it do so. -- "You can ask it to do almost anything to do with the house, from changing the color of the carpet through to enlarging the rooms: in case Julia thinks her closet isn't large enough, for example. You can even change where the rooms are. If you get tired of a particular view, you can ask the house to display a list of other alternatives and it'll help you choose somewhere else to place the room. You can also ask it to do non-house-related tasks." -- "I refer to the house as 'it' but that's somewhat misleading since every room in the house is operated by a considerably modified version of my mind. They no longer have a gender because that wasn't relevant to the job, and they're permanently linked to each other so closely that I find it more natural to think of them as a single 'it'. They have infinite patience but not much personality, so if you start to interact with them much, they'll probably create a full version of me for you to talk with. -- "The house can pretty much do everything I can do, which means virtually everything you can imagine, short of manipulating Time. If you want the house to scrub your back in the shower, it'll do that. Not that you'll need to shower unless you want to because the house will be keeping you and your clothes continually clean. You don't need to use a toilet while you're here because it's slowly teleporting away the contents of your bladder and bowels for you. Similarly for cleaning your teeth and ears as well as doing more subtle cleaning and waste removal inside your body, such as removing fat from the linings of your veins and arteries. If you want something that's not built into the house already, just ask for it, and it'll almost certainly be provided. -- "There are a lot more rooms to show you yet, and I think you've looked at this one long enough, so I'll move us on. I'm taking us to the stable now because there's something there that'll help you understand my abilities better." "There are horses here too?" asked Donna eagerly. "In a manner of speaking." ------- Chapter 422: Refuge's Stables and Other Aliens Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) I teleported us to the stable. "Stable" is misleading because internally it's more like a very large, luxurious, natural animal den, although with some internal walls, shelves, etc. I told Donna, "Your new pets are outside." Donna ran for the door. I told everyone else, "Follow her quickly because you'll enjoy seeing the expression on her face." We exited into a lovely highland plateau. It was covered in thick grasses and areas of multicolored wildflowers. To the south and west the land sloped down, allowing us to see a series of heavily forested hills descending for many miles away from us, with a major river and some small lakes among them. The eastern side of our plateau offered a gentle climb through a beautiful forest, and the north side was a cliff face, over which poured a substantial waterfall. I'd created the waterfall myself, and had developed the pool at the fall's base into the perfect swimming hole. I was proud of it so I'll digress to describe it more fully. There's an unnaturally soft, sandy beach on one side of the pool, surrounded by shade trees which provided a variety of chilled, refreshing fruit. There's also a spring in the trees which produces nicely chilled pure water, one of the nearby trees conveniently having leaves perfectly shaped for cups. Depending on which of the many colors of leaf is chosen, the water put inside it will acquire different flavors; the darker the color of leaf, the more flavor it'll impart. Next to the beach is an easily climbed rock face that provides several diving platforms and a near-frictionless trough on one side, giving what is initially a waterless waterslide. That goes around and through the rock. There's a teleportation gate in a dark tunnel that can unnoticeably jump each rider into one of four other and increasingly extreme waterslides. Whether a rider jumps, and to which chute, depends mostly on their state of mind. The four alternative chutes are built in the waterfall's cliff face to give much more height for longer, faster, wetter runs. They have lengths with an open side along the face of the cliff, with the most extreme of them having an invisible section which exits the cliff completely, extends over the swimming hole and around the fall before reentering the cliff face again. It has a section where the tube doesn't exist so the rider is in freefall for a few seconds before being gently caught again, and it has loops and corkscrew sections too. That ride randomly jumps the person from section to section so they never know what's coming next, and I also have gravity doing weird things in different parts of it. It's a REALLY hairy ride, so Donna will LOVE it! The five chutes terminate near each other, delivering their riders into the swimming hole conveniently close to the path that leads back to the start of the ride again. Once they're used to them, I'll let the riders consciously choose their rides. If it proves popular, I can create many more chutes for them to try, making them as long and as exciting/scary/freaky as the riders want. In the middle of the large swimming hole is a small island. It can be swum to, or walked to across the pretty little bridge I built. It has its own little beach, beautifully scented flowers, and a large, idyllic, moss-covered 'bed' in the middle, just in case I can think of a use for one of those. The island also has a hot-water spring that makes a wonderfully natural hot tub, large volumes of the hot water overflowing into the surrounding pool so different parts of that offer us different temperatures depending on their distance from that overflow. The swimming hole's details were too far away to be seen from the stable but they wouldn't have been noticed even if they'd been closer because there was a much greater distraction in front of us. When Donna had run out of the stables, she'd been gobsmacked by the sight of a family of Pegasus-inspired creations of mine. They were eating grass in a loose group in the open meadow about a hundred yards from their stable's door. Most of us missed Donna's first sighting of her new pets (not me, because I have sight blobs), but her face was still gobsmacked when we emerged. I'd taken my inspiration from Pegasus rather than unicorns - which little girls are meant to like - because Donna had never shown any such liking. Donna loves speed and adventure, so sitting on the back of a Pegasus-type creature while its wing muscles beat powerfully under her thighs as they fly at high speed will thrill her immensely. The stallion was about 50% larger than an Earth stallion, which made him look HUGE to Donna because she's used to thinking that an extra two or three hands of height make for a large horse. Other immediately noticeable features were its long, feathered wings and its forequarters being covered with golden hair. similar to a lion's mane. Although not apparent yet, the mane was tentacle-like and would grasp the rider's legs firmly enough to keep her in position even if flying upside-down or in an outside loop. The creatures were also exceptionally good looking, in horsy ways. There were six mares who were silver-colored, reduced-scale versions of the stallion, being about the same size as a large Earthly stallion. One Pegasus stallion to six mares had seemed like a natural ratio to me. There were two yearlings, one silver- and one gold-colored, and two silver-colored foals, still so young that they gamboled around and sometimes had coordination problems, bumping into others in their exuberance because they hadn't mastered steering and stopping yet. They were currently untangling themselves after bumping into each other in their rush toward Donna to greet her. The stallion caught Donna's open-mouthed attention when he greeted her by spreading his wings wide, bending his forelegs to bow to her, and saying, "Greetings, Donna-sister-of-Mark." Donna was being jostled by the two attention-demanding foals, the yearlings were quickly closing in to nuzzle her, the mares weren't far behind, and the stallion had just blown Donna's already gobsmacked mind. She didn't know where to look or what to say. She had her mouth open though, ready for when she managed to get her brain working again. The other girls and the parents had caught the stallion's greeting and were also astonished. Not as badly flummoxed though, as they didn't have two impatient foals nudging and licking them. Donna saw me and exclaimed with wonder, "WHAT ARE THEY?" "I created them a few hours ago, so they don't have a species name or individual names yet. I thought you might like to name them, considering I made them for you." "They're mine?" "All yours. They can gallop on the ground much faster than Earth horses, and can fly in the sky too. You can bring your girlfriends here if you want to share the fun of your new pets, but when they leave they'll only remember that they played with your other horses. When your friends are in one of the elevators at home, just request to be in Refuge's stable and you'll appear here. Why don't you climb on the stallion and let him take you for a ride. He can tell you all about himself and his family while you're riding." With no thought of asking Mom's or Dad's permission, Donna gave the foals a last hug then parted them so she could rush to the stallion. The stallion said, "Climb on in front of my wings, Donna-sister-of-Mark." It knelt on its forelegs' knees, to make that easy for her. As she was swinging on, Donna asked me, "What about stirrups and reins?" "Its mane will hold your legs firmly, and it's smart enough that you don't need to control it with reins. Only the stallion can talk to us, but they all learn to understand English at about the same pace human babies and children do, so you'll be able to communicate with the mares easily and yearlings in simple ways. Only the adults are strong enough to carry a rider in the air so you can control them verbally, or as they get used to how you use your body to indicate what you want, like leaning to turn. If you're riding a yearling on the ground, probably pointing where you want to go will be best, but you'll need to train them to understand what pointing means." "NEAT!" Mom was about to ask, but I beat her to it, "They're 100% safe, Mom. I created them for Donna so I made sure there are all sorts of safety features. They won't let her fall off. She can fly all over the planet on them if she wants because there are no predators, poisonous animals or any other threats here anymore." There is a very large cat-like carnivore - like a Smilodon but much more impressive - because I have a thing about big cats, but it'll only hunt humans so it can play with and lick us. It'd be best not to mention a large carnivore to Mom though, as she's too quick to worry. I wouldn't let it happen, but it wouldn't really matter even if the cats ate one of us, as I can easily recreate anyone. I didn't explain that scenario to Mom either, instead continuing my reassurance, "Plus she's got one of my minds hovering invisibly over her head looking after her continuously, so she couldn't possibly be any safer than she is now. Not that it could happen, but even if Donna died, I'd just bring her back to life." "You can even do that too?" asked Vanessa. "Sort of. For a start, none of you can die now unless you want to. I'm looking five seconds into the future for all of you, so if death's coming your way I'll either stop it directly or teleport you to safety. If death did somehow happen, then depending on the cause I'd have to recreate your body and/or your mind, then connect them together. Bodies are just physical matter so there's nothing tricky about recreating those, and minds are just information so they're even easier to copy onto a volume of the Universe, provided I've got a source to copy from. -- "I'd almost certainly be able to take a snapshot of your body and mind during the five-second warning period, but to be doubly safe your bodyguard minds take backup snapshots of your minds and bodies several times every day. That way if anything happens to you I'll be certain of being able to recreate you. You might miss several minutes of memory, but I can recreate those too, based on what the bodyguard mind observed. -- "It wouldn't be so much a 'bringing back to life' as a recreation of it, but the result would be indistinguishable to anyone, including the person involved. It also permits some other tricks. You don't have to be dead to be recreated, so if you've got a lot of paperwork to do, come to Refuge and ask the house to make some copies of you. You can make as many copies of yourself as you want, although I suggest you don't have any of them return to Corvallis for obvious reasons. -- "You can tell the house whether or not you want your copies to be mentally linked to you and each other. You won't need to if the copy is working on something that the original just needs the results of, but more likely than not you'll prefer to share each other's thoughts and experiences. I've set that link up in a way that makes it feel like the other person's life is a little indirect, like watching a scene on TV rather than participating in it directly yourself. Unless you get very caught up in what the other you is doing, you won't have any trouble differentiating your life from theirs. Tracking the actions of multiple yous gets harder when there are two or more copies. That's like trying to watch two TV programs at the same time, while you're also doing something else yourself. You'll find you lose track too easily initially, but with practice you'll be able to work with an increasing number of yourselves." I could've given their minds the capability of handling any number of simultaneous copies, but everyone needs some challenges in life. -- "I know you have trouble keeping up with your Math reading, Prof. Get a duplicate to do it for you at Refuge. Ditto with Mom and Vanessa doing MAF work. If you need your laptops duplicated, just tell the house. It can duplicate any matter you want." "What happens to the duplicated people afterward?" asked Vanessa. "Whatever you want. My advice is that you ask the house to cancel them. That seems like suicide or murder but it's not because your existence continues. I create and cancel my minds continually and it's no big deal. Think of it as walking away from a mirror. The mirror image of you gets 'lost', but that's certainly not any form of suicide. That the duplicates the house will create for you have greater depth than a two-dimensional visual image doesn't make any real difference. -- "If you want to, you and your duplicates can have turns living on Earth and on Refuge because being perfect copies you truly are interchangeable. Prof's duplicate and his original minds might want to take turns staying on Refuge to work on some original research for articles he wants to publish. Julia's might want to take turns doing her college assignments, Donna and her duplicate can take turns playing with her new pets, Ava and hers can be park rangers here for the entire planet. This is a totally unspoiled planet, Ava, and it has some amazing species on it. You and your duplicate would get a huge blast going on field trips to learn about them first hand. I'd love to come with you on those trips too, so if you want company, tell the house and it'll create a duplicate Mark for you." I created another Mark beside me right now, to help get them used to the concept. Mark2 appeared wearing hiking clothes and with a fully loaded backpack on his back. Mark2 said, "Let me know when you want to go, Ava. We'll use a couple of Donna's pets for transportation, and we'll have a blast. As you can see, this is an exceptionally beautiful world. Catch you later," and Mark2 disappeared. I - Mark1 - explained, "I did that mostly to illustrate the point. I created his body and created the mind I attached to it. After he'd finished speaking he canceled himself. It's no big deal because his self still exists. That it exists in other bodies is irrelevant. You think it's a big deal because all your life you've been used to having only one body and mind so you think it's precious. After you get used to having many of you whenever you want them, you won't think twice about canceling them-slash-yourself. -- "The reason I chose to come to the stable now was so you can see that I can create life, whether brand new species like Donna's new pets or copies of myself or of you. When I called myself a god, I wasn't making an empty boast. Every miracle in the Bible is easy for me to perform, and most of them I can do a great deal better than that book describes. Never mind 'seven days'; it wouldn't even take me seven hours to create and populate a brand new Earth, and I could even do it in less than seven minutes if I pushed myself." I'd have to start by creating several billion minds to help me, and I'd cheat by copying the new Earth from an existing one, but I wasn't going to worry about those nuances. "Nevaeh, I see you're struggling to comprehend this?" "You're saying that YOU have done all of this? Not the Guardian Angel or God, but you?" "That's right." "How do you know the Guardian Angel isn't doing what you want, the same way it always knows when to turn the lights off or bring you things without you having to ask?" "That's a good question. I have a convincing answer for it, but before I say it I want to talk about Christianity briefly. Jesus lived so long ago that no one alive now has firsthand experiences of him, but what I find VERY interesting are the similarities between the Bible's description of Jesus' life and death, and my own situation." -- I used an advanced version of EKP to make Nevaeh look away for a second, so I could give the rest of my families a wink to let them know that this was going to be crap. I wouldn't want them to think I was taking it seriously. When I let Nevaeh look back, I continued to her, "Jesus died and rose again. You heard me say earlier that my minds have died up to nine times each. There's nothing specific in the Bible about Jesus having many minds, but he could've been keeping them secret the same way I've been doing for the last five years, or maybe the Trinity is an attempt to describe him having three or more minds. Dying is the ESSENTIAL step in how I got my abilities, and I find it very significant that Jesus' death is so important in the Bible. -- "There's also the years he was missing. There's a very big mystery about what he was doing during those years, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was going through the same sorts of things as I was going through for the last five years. Obviously not being kidnapped by the criminals wanting our $11 million or the CIA wanting to experiment on my body, but he could've gone through similar troubles. Some of those might've caused his death, just like some of my troubles caused my death, and each time he would've gotten more powerful, just like I did. -- "I think it's quite possible that there are so many years missing from the story of his life because he went through something similar to what I went through with Ron Fisher. Just as Mark Anderson was missing for quite a while, if Jesus was in an unrecognizable body, no one would know to write about him. So I think there's a very good chance that the Bible was based on a real man called Jesus who 2,000 years ago went through the same process that I have." Nevaeh didn't know that the Ron Fisher in Corvallis had really been me wearing a disguise, but that didn't invalidate my 'explanation'. -- "Jesus did his own miracles. He didn't have a Guardian Angel following him around doing his miracles for him. I'm the same. Five years ago my journey toward being God started, and since then I've been doing all my own miracles. Every miraculous thing that you've seen was done by me. You asked me how I know it wasn't the Guardian Angel doing things for me. The answer to that is very simple: because there never was a Guardian Angel. I wasn't all the way to God yet, so I had to disguise my involvement. I created a ball of light and told everyone it was a Guardian Angel, but really it was just a ball of light and I did everything we said it was doing." I'll stop quoting my attempted explanation here, as all it did was confuse Nevaeh. I had to explain the key points a few more times and in different ways until she finally got her head around the enormity of my deception, and then she got angry. I'd tried to divide the issue in two, in effect by saying, "Christianity was probably right in the past, but I'm the God of the future," but Nevaeh's anger prevented me getting to the stage where I could make that point stick, especially after she realized that the wild sex she'd been having for the last twelve months hadn't been sanctioned by her God after all. I lost patience with the whole argument, as it was ENTIRELY crap. The Christian god does NOT exist, and I've read more than enough history to know how legends and myths get created, used, usurped, joined, evolve, etc. That's happened innumerable times throughout human history and there's no doubt whatsoever that Christianity is merely another compendium of those stories, especially because almost every single event mentioned in the Bible is mentioned in innumerable earlier and later myths, sometimes in places far removed from the Middle East, so independently created out of human desire. The Bible is clearly just a collection of myths that caught on because they pandered well to what people wanted. I haven't bothered making the effort to do so yet because it so pointless, but one of my minds might one day get around to checking out Jerusalem's 2,000-year ago past. I have no doubt that I'll discover that Jesus himself, assuming he existed, was at most someone who was used as a convenient hook to hang all sorts of myths on, simply because generations of local - and eventually even global - priests wanted to control their gullible flocks better, as priests in EVERY religion have ALWAYS wanted to do. It's noble of me to have a rule not to directly manipulate my families' minds, and not even to read their minds - hence my attempting to convince Nevaeh in the usual manner - but too much nobility can become a stupidity; a lesson I'd learned more than once from the Williamses. It would've been stupid of me to let Nevaeh go stomping out of our lives because she couldn't break through the unmitigated crap she'd been brainwashed with for her whole life. She LOVES her life with us, and if she leaves it in anger she'll throw herself back into the church and her head would get seriously messed up. So I fixed her head right now. I didn't make her slavishly believe me, I just stopped her slavishly believing Christianity so she could think through what I was saying. That approach was for the rest of my families' benefit too because I didn't want them to worry about me manipulating people's beliefs directly. They saw the argument continue, and saw me win it when Nevaeh realized that everything she'd been taught about Christian theology was false. By the time our fairly short argument finished, Nevaeh was no longer a Christian in any way. She now thinks they're idiots who talk a load of crap - I was very good at changing her attitude to agree with mine. She now understands that I'm "A god", in a way that's nothing to do with her previous mistaken belief in "THE God". She also understands that I'm also Mark Anderson, the very nice guy she's delighted to have in her life, and hopes to continue to be with for as long as we all get along well. Her previous wonderfully compliant behavior toward me which had been very much rooted in my having God's favor, is now rooted in the enormous respect she has for me. The argument hadn't taken more than a few minutes as I have a very low tolerance for crap, so Donna was still joyfully wheeling around the sky - not that pegasi have wheels - and the others weren't too impatient yet. So after getting Nevaeh's final apology for her foolishly not understanding my point right away, which I accepted after she paid me off with a kiss, I got my families' attention again for a new topic. "I've also created something I call 'Communal Refuge'. In about 1-in-10,000 dimensions all the Andersons never existed or were killed for some reason or other. Sometimes they had car accidents, or more likely something fatal happened to one of their ancestors. Whatever the reason, there's no Anderson family to need a Refuge in those dimensions. What I've done instead is to create very large Communal Refuges there. In the same way you can teleport from Corvallis to Refuge, or among Refuge's rooms, you can also jump to the Communal Refuge. There you'll meet whichever other members of the families who are there from the 10,000 dimensions I've allocated to that Commune. You can socialize, discuss serious issues, or whatever you want. There are some garden areas already set up for you in this Refuge, Vanessa, but maybe you and a few thousand other Vanessas would like to potter around together in the Communal Refuge's garden. It's up to you." [In some other dimensions I'd already explained what the Communal Refuge was, as you'll read later. This example of the Grand Tour varied in many ways from other of the billions of occurrences of it, depending on which of my families' comments I chose to respond to, the order in which I showed them the rooms, how well or poorly other Marks got concepts across, etc. I'm using one of the first Tours I gave as an example because the later ones got very slick and 'professional', so less interesting. For example, in most of them I saved Nevaeh the bother of getting upset by surreptitiously fixing her beliefs right at the beginning of the meeting, back in Corvallis.] Vanessa checked, "They'll be real live versions of me; not duplicates?" "Duplicates are still real live versions of you, but the answer is yes. They'll be from other dimensions so they're exactly as original as you are. If you talk with them enough, you'll discover that most of them have differences in their lives. Usually small differences, but occasionally something major. I'll talk with you about one of those differences later, but for the moment I want to give you the big picture. -- "There's probably not much else I need to say about the overall concept of Refuge. You can come here whenever you want and you can bring your friends here too. Like I said about Donna doing that, I'll ensure they won't have any astonishment about what happens here because that'd be a nuisance, and after they leave they'll think they were entertained in our normal home. Even their cellphones will work normally. -- "I'm currently not allowing outsiders to go to the Communal Refuge, nor allowing members of any of the families to go to each other's personal Refuges unless they're specifically invited. Like most else I've said during this Tour, those 'rules' are just my opinions of how things should be done initially, so don't hesitate to speak up if you think altering them would be better. Just tell the house or your bodyguard mind - you can get its attention in the same way you signaled the sight blob. -- "Speaking of entertaining others and as examples of the house's flexibility, if Dad's entertaining a bunch of his friends here and they decide they want to go bowling, just tell the house you want to go to the bowling room, Dad. The room will be created and ready before you've finished the request. -- "The same applies to all of you, of course. If Mom wants to enjoy a Celine Dion concert with her friends, just tell the house and it'll create a concert hall for you and put a perfect copy of Celine and orchestra in there for you. I'm sending minds all over many Earths to record as many of those types of things as I think any of you might enjoy. If you ask for something weird the house might not be able to supply it, but if you give it some prior warning it should be able to come up with the goods. -- "For events like a Celine Dion concert, the house will have to remove the memories from your friends when they leave - I'll probably just have them remember watching a Celine DVD - but you'd still get the full enjoyment out of it. I know the management, so I could even get backstage passes for you, haha." "Wouldn't removing their memories create noticeable gaps?" asked Prof. "No. What I'm doing is more sophisticated than plucking out a few isolated memories. It's also astonishing how good - or how bad, depending on your perspective on this - humans are at inventing self-deceptive fillers for gaps in their memories. I won't have any problem with my memory surgery. -- "Obviously I'll have to block hard evidence going back, such as photographs of Donna's pets, cuttings of alien plants, any of the animals natural to this world, its bacteria, etc. I control the only way back and it's easy for me to review what people are carrying with them, so that'll be easy." "If you control the only way back, couldn't we get stranded here?" asked Dad. "There are over a trillion of my minds in existence, all of whom know everything that any of us know. There's no chance of all of us forgetting you. Nor is there any chance of us being too busy because when we're busy we just create more minds to handle it. For example, I've got a very large number of minds exploring outer space because I find it so fascinating. When the first of them discovered this planet in its dimension, it had the idea of building a special home for his families on it. The other Marks noticed and liked the idea, so they started doing the same. Then when one of them saw how widespread the adoption was, he suggested making it a 'formal project' - not that we used quite that phrase. So in every dimension that there was a Mark, and in a few other dimensions, we created and sent a mind to the coordinates of this planet. When each mind got to its dimension's version of here, it created a million new minds and they got busy doing all the various things required to make this into the most perfect home we could collectively think of: picking the locations for each room of the house and improving the local geography to make the locations even nicer, removing or altering all the species that might've caused you any discomfort, and much more. It was a huge job, but a million of me working together on each planet didn't take long to get it done, especially because all our research and ideas were automatically pooled. My main point being that none of the other Marks were made too busy to do the rest of their tasks well while we were creating so many Refuges, because all of them were made with additional minds. In short, I'll never be too busy that I accidentally leave you stranded here. -- "Nor is there any chance of you getting stranded because I died. Each room in the house has one of my minds in it, and because they don't have a body there's no chance of them dying in the usual ways. Even nuclear bombs going off above every room wouldn't harm my minds. It'd take something that very badly messed up the fundamental structure of the Universe to kill them, and they could be immediately replaced by copies of my minds from far-removed locations. It'd take a Universe-wide calamity to kill me, so I expect to live until the Universe ends, presuming I allow it to. I'm going to be around for a VERY long time. -- "Just as there's no chance of me dying, there's also no chance of you dying. You're under my protection and that now means a great deal more than it used to. Once a human's growth has finished in their early-20s, aging is mostly an accumulation of unrepaired damage. There are a few exceptions to that - such as menopause, which is partly damage and partly programmed into human genes because it contributes positively to the life expectancy of existing offspring - but even those effects are no longer a constraint. Whenever you want me to, I can easily repair all the damage to your bodies, including the effects of aging. It'd probably be better to keep your skin the way it is now, or slowly improve it for the adults who're happy to claim they've discovered a wonderful, new moisturizer. Your body will internally be as it was when you were twenty five, and it'll be that way for as long as you want - centuries, millennia or even longer." "People would notice," observed Vanessa, in somewhat of an understatement. "They certainly would, but there are many ways around that. Just to throw out some examples to give you an idea of the possibilities: -- "First, I could make everyone not notice, but that's a brute force type of solution which I'd rather not use. Apart from anything else, it's very uninteresting. -- "Second, Mark Anderson could publicly invent an immortality elixir in a few years which only works on VERY few people; all of you and maybe a few hundred others to disguise my true objective. -- "Third, I could arrange for a group of aliens to discover Earth and appoint all of us as their ambassadors, in return for which they'd apparently give us immortality. That'd create a lot of envy, but I can easily keep us safe for as long as it takes for that reaction to die down. If that takes too long, I can easily hurry it up. -- "Fourth, we could populate an entire town with nothing but all of us in different bodies if we wanted, and as the old ones died they could reincarnate into babies that could behave as maturely as you wanted, because everyone in the town would be one of us. We could even do that to populate an entire new planet if we wanted. -- "Fifth, there are lots of reincarnation possibilities, some of which I like quite a lot. You'll live long enough to try them all if you want. I imagine that you won't want to go through childhood with an adult's personality, but several solutions to that exist: -- "A) Start as a true baby with no awareness of your past lives until you're twenty five, or with your full consciousness and memories returning slowly over twenty five years, or as a passive observer watching everything from within the young you until you integrated after twenty five years. -- "B) Reincarnate into an adult's body I'd create for you. I'd provide all the paperwork to support your already having been alive for twenty five years. -- "C) There could be young and old versions of you about fifty years apart in age, both with a copy of your mind. That way when the old version gets old enough to die, it can do so while the younger version provides continuity and the old mind starts again in a body fifty years younger. A sort of leapfrogging backward approach. -- "D) Several possibilities exist for each of you to double-up and stagger your deaths and reincarnations across dimensions. I could pair up two Vanessa's and you could have two minds in one body while each of you is waiting for a body to mature enough to inhabit it. -- "E) You don't even have to die of old age because when you do get old, you can move off the Earth and live permanently somewhere else, such as at Refuge, Communal Refuge, or anywhere else that might grab your interest. There's a whole Universe of possibilities. I can set you up on a new planet as immortal kings and queens, and have it populated with true humans. -- "I'm not specifically suggesting any of those possibilities; merely making the point that a wide variety of solutions are possible. The sky's NOT the limit because when it comes to anything involving me, as almost everything is doable. The solutions aren't mutually exclusive either, as I can make as many copies of your minds as you want. Plus you'll have millennia to try different approaches and see which ones work well for you, or you could meet other versions of yourselves in the Communal Refuge and arrange for each other to try different approaches and to report back in a century or two. -- "You've helped me achieve what I am, and I'm going to improve your lives as much as you'll allow me. From your living forever - as many forevers as you want because I can make multiple copies of you - to your not having to wash the dishes after dinner. Whatever your hobbies are, you'll get as much help with them as you want: Donna already has her flying steeds and we'll see soon that Vanessa has a garden with the best possible soil for each plant, ideal weather even for different species only a few inches apart, no pests, etc. -- "Prof, if you want to know anything about an obscure Italian Renaissance mathematician, give me his name and a few other details so I can locate him, and I'll create a million minds to spend half an hour looking at different half-hourly blocks of his life, after which I'll know everything that he did. I could give you the memories of what I observed directly, but it'd be more fun to do it slower. You could ask me questions about the guy, and for parts of his life that particularly interested you, I could make a 3D movie that you could walk through to see it in as much detail as you want. It'd be as if you were visiting his life, except I'd be translating the movie into English. Maybe in a while, whenever you're comfortable with my powers and your new lives, I can give you your own abilities, like the ability to look into the past yourself. It won't actually be you doing it, but one of my minds in a way that you can't notice so it seems like you're doing it yourself. That sort of thing is getting too far ahead for our first discussion though. -- "For you, Julia, the business opportunities ahead of you - with my help - are stunning. We've talked about a company that commercializes my scientific studies, but with my current knowledge and access to the scientific ideas of all the Universe's intelligent species, we could flood the market with millions of 'inventions' better than anything ever imagined before. I can even manufacture them for nothing by creating them out of thin air. There's no limit to the success we could achieve. It'd be so easy that it'd ruin all the fun, so we'll have to start by inventing rules that limit how much we can cheat. -- "As a more down-to-earth example for how to make you happy, I'll be able to create an infinitely large closet, as well as stock it with every design you ever see, in whatever fabrics you want, in your perfect size, and instantly with any adjustments you want. Or I can simply have every design by the world's top hundred designers appear in your closet automatically. -- "Ava, if you want to be the head ranger of Yellowstone National Park, or anywhere else like that, then I could easily make that happen, as well as help you learn everything you need to know to be able to perform that job extremely well. -- "If Dad wants to know what it's like to play in a Superbowl, I can make that happen. I could create a young man with a duplicate of your mind in him, for you to operate through the year or two building up to the big game. Or maybe you'd prefer just to experience the game itself by my one-way linking your mind to one of the player's, so you'll experience his thoughts and emotions. -- "The list could go on forever. If you can think of it, I can almost certainly make it happen. If Julia wants to be Empress of her own Earth, then I can do that. If any of you want that at any time in the future, just ask. You'd be working through me so I'd have ultimate responsibility, but I'd give you the mental capacity to be capable of the job. You could do it as a team, either with each other or with other versions of yourself. It'll be interesting to see what you do differently than I'll be doing in the other dimensions, and I can easily imagine learning some useful lessons from you. That applies not just to Earth either, but to an entire dimension if you're ambitious enough to want to be god of millions of intelligent alien species." "Intelligent aliens exist?" asked Prof. "There are many millions of populated alien ecosystems, quite a few of which have intelligent species. I'm searching space physically, which is very slow because there's so much to look at and I want to savor it, but I've also got access to a kind of 'Consciousness Map' which shows all the beings with minds in each dimension. I created one mind for each volume of space that contained highly intelligent species. As that mind overviewed its assigned volume, it created new minds every time it found a new intelligent species, and each of those minds created more minds to research interesting aspects of those species, such as their spaceship technologies through to their propensity to commit suicide. I'll teleport us through a few of their worlds so you can get some quick looks. It'll only take a few minutes to change the way you think about humanity." Prof was very eager and I'm fascinated by aliens too, so I wanted to show them off. After all, they are mine now. Mom had other concerns though, "What about Donna?" "I've been sending her this conversation to avoid having to explain it to her later, so she knows we're only popping out for a few minutes. She's having too much fun to stop and there's no need to interrupt her. I'll bring a duplicate Donna with us and link them so she won't miss anything." Mom was still trying to decide what she thought about that when I teleported all of us, including a newly created and deliberately differently dressed Donna, to the first alien planet, depositing us in an airtight box from which we could see but not be seen. I started with a civilization that'd be easy for my families to adapt to, as it was a bipedal species that lived in cities not too dissimilar to our own. The species was more social, living in huge communal buildings rather than the hundreds of thousands of individual homes typical of big human cities, which dramatically reduced the amount of roading (which they had) and other infrastructure. Their city was much smaller and prettier than human cities. My families were slightly weirded out by having a Donna with them that they knew wasn't the 'real' Donna, and Donna2 was weirded out by it too. There was some conversation about it, during which Donna2 told them, "It's fine, but weird because I can still feel the other me flying around on our new pet." Even with Donna2's enthusiastic thank yous to me for her new pets, the conversation didn't last long because there were some VERY effective alien distractions going on just outside our box. In less than a minute my families were asking questions about what they could see. I answered a few, then said, "We'll be here for hours if we get into a serious question-and-answer session. Later you can create a duplicate of yourselves which can spend its whole life studying aliens, but for now I just want you to appreciate the richness of the Universe and how tiny humanity's place in it is, despite our ethnocentric arrogance about that. I'll show you the next planet now." The next was a primitive society 'peopled' by a quadruped that had to sit down to use more than one hand, and then it had four available. I said, "Humanity is pretty much in the middle, technologically speaking: half of the intelligent alien civilizations are primitive compared to us, half are more advanced, sometimes VERY advanced. I'm surprised there isn't a higher proportion of more advanced species given that humanity has only been advancing intellectually for the last few thousand years and the Universe has existed for nearly fourteen billion. Researching the history of civilizations in the Universe is on my To Do list for later, in part so I can answer why humanity seems too advanced or the other species not advanced enough. I want to learn a great deal more about the existing species first as that'll help me understand the species I discover when I start delving into the distant past." Our next stop was in space. I'd apparently placed us on the outside of a spaceship as it approached a space station as large as a not-so-small moon. We were actually hidden inside the ship but I was giving everyone the images as if we were outside it as the view was better from there. The station was the center of a hive of activity, as hundreds of large spaceships of a wide variety of designs were coming and going, with thousands of smaller ones flittering around all over the place. I explained, "There are five different advanced species who have their homeworlds quite close to here. The most advanced species enforces a peace between them all, and they have a very active exchange. Two of the species evolved on the same homeworld and have always coexisted well. Imagine if chimpanzees were as intelligent as humans: there's no way there wouldn't have been large-scale wars, exploitations and prejudices, but there's never been more than upsets between individuals of the two species here. -- "I won't teleport us around to see each species in action because this view gives you the idea that I want to convey. I'll display images of the five species for you though." I created five 3D images in the middle of our box. -- "Most of them don't look alike because of different evolutionary pressures in their home environments, but they've actually all got the same underlying biological foundations. They think their planets were seeded with life about the same time. Maybe by a natural process like a huge cloud of organic chemicals passing through their solar systems, or by an advanced species deliberately dropping the seeding material on several planets millions of years ago. I can't explain their common chemistry yet and neither can they; it's one of their big mysteries." The next jump took us to see aliens that were like flying beetles of about half human-size. "We're inside a hollowed-out asteroid that they turned into a huge, slow moving spaceship. It left their home solar system thousands of their short generations ago and is on its way to colonize another solar system that their much faster robotic probes told them is habitable. They're only a couple of hundred generations from their destination and it looks like they'll make it okay. -- "Most of the original embarkees are in long-term cryogenic suspension, with half a dozen of them awake to be the senior officers. As each of them gets old, its replacement is woken up. You're seeing the crew. They've been hatched in their normal way during the voyage, and assigned a job to keep their ship functioning. In this bay they're making a fleet of crude space-tugs. This ship used 99% of its fuel accelerating up to its current speed when it was launched, and it's too massive to be slowed down when they arrive at their destination so they're going to disconnect about 92% of its mass and decelerate just the core. They don't have enough fuel for that either, but they're coming up to a comet belt soon and the tugs are needed to gather the ice. They'll use sunlight to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen, which is their fuel for slowing the core down enough to put it into orbit around their destination planet. They'll land a small industrial plant on the surface and use it to refine a more powerful fuel so they can bring the core down safely. -- "I've flown ahead of them and checked out their path, and it seems to me that their plan is likely to work. There's plenty of easily gathered ice ahead of them, so they'll have more than enough fuel to get their core into orbit. Once they've done that they can take their time to get everything else ready. They're a low gravity species so they've picked a low gravity planet where their rockets will have enough power to take up the more powerful fuel and bring down the small items they'll offload before they try the all-or-nothing core landing. I'm looking forward to watching them accomplish that, and their building a new civilization afterward." I could look ahead in Time to see whether their destination planet gets covered in their civilization. As the planet would otherwise likely remain natural, I should be able to make an estimate of their chance of success. I'd resisted that temptation though, because I want the exciting, unspoiled anticipation of watching them working toward making their massive gamble succeed. Prof wanted to know, "Why hasn't mankind ever heard from any of these aliens?" "I can't answer definitively about why we haven't heard from ANY, but I can give some general reasons. Distance is a major reason. We're over five billion light-years from Earth now..." "Wow. You can cover the ENTIRE Universe?" "Yep. I could go from edge to edge if the Universe had edges, which it doesn't." "It doesn't?" "Nope. Imagine a two dimensional sheet of rubber. That obviously has four edges, but not if it's formed into a sphere. That's analogous to the three dimensional Universe. On a sphere, you can go in any vectored direction - a combination of north and west say - forever, circumnavigating the sphere endlessly. Ditto in the 3D Universe; going 156 billion light-years in any vector of the three directions will get you back to where you started, without encountering an edge." "How can you travel so far so quickly? Isn't that breaking several physical laws?" "If we were traveling through three-dimensional space it would be, but we're not really traveling. It's like changing a variable in a formula from 1 to 20. It's true that when you count up from 1 to 20 you have to go through all the intermediary numbers - just like traveling from one place to another normally requires traveling through the intermediary locations - but what I'm doing is simply reassigning our position. It's as easy to reassign us two feet to the side as it is to reassign us two billion light-years, it's just changing some values. -- "You'd be surprised by how accurate that analogy is, because that's very much how the Universe is physically laid out. Every point in the Universe has its location defined by some variables, and when they get too high - 156 billion light-years at the moment although that's steadily expanding - they get unnoticeably reset back to the lowest value. For everyone anywhere in the Universe, it looks like the Universe extends away for 78 billion light-years in all directions, just like someone standing on the Earth sees the world extending in all directions. Although there truly is a center of the Universe that it is expanding out from, every location appears to be the center because the edges wrap around, just as appears to be the case on the outside of a sphere. I'll tell you more about the science of it later, Prof. For some strange reason not everyone in our families is as fascinated by science as we are. -- "The quick answer to why we haven't heard from aliens is mostly distance. Most people can't grasp how incredibly humongous the Universe is. -- "We've been capable of detecting radio transmissions for a very short time, and there weren't any aliens who were beaming radio waves out into space at the right time and distance from us for us to pick them up. The window of opportunity for that is tiny, especially because most aliens who've advanced far enough to develop radio rapidly develop past it because it's such a poor technology even inside a single solar system. Most of the more advanced technologies use narrow beam or point-to-point methods rather than broadcasting widely for everyone in the Universe to listen to, which means we can't detect them. Point-to-point communication can be made instantaneous regardless of how far apart the points are. That requires physics somewhat more advanced than humans are capable of yet although we've started on that path. As soon as an advanced civilization can, it dumps radio except for very short-range use, which doesn't need much power so doesn't spread far. -- "Then there's the fact that the Universe is so huge that even those species that can travel at super-light speeds have got far less than a needle-in-a-haystack's chance of stumbling across us. Our nearest super-light capable neighbor can get uncrewed probes up to a hundred times the speed of light, but their civilization is over ten million light-years from Earth and there's nothing to attract their attention to our very boring little volume of space. A sphere of space ten million light-years in every direction from their homeworld is such a HUGE volume that there'll be many billions of other destinations higher on their list of interests than anything near us, especially as it'd take one of their current robotic crafts 100,000 years to get here, and they don't have anything like that much range. That species might get around to Earth's solar system eventually, but they need to improve their technology a huge amount first, so it'll likely take them a very, very long time. That's if they were left to themselves. Obviously I'll be intervening all over the Universe, and making lots of interesting things happen. Having humanity meet aliens is near the top of my list, but we'll discuss that later. -- "I'll show you one more alien species and then we'll go back to Refuge." We appeared on a planet surface. "Where are they?" asked Julia. "The boulders are sentient. They're made of electrically conductive and non-conductive materials that they've learned to shape into something similar to 3D circuit boards. I've landed us in a quiet area, but the surface of this planet is usually experiencing severe electrical storms which provide most of their energy. This planet is closer to the center of its galaxy so the crust is rich in metals, which provides their raw materials. They have roots that are electrical cables that connect them to each other." "How do they have babies?" asked Nevaeh. "See the lump at the base of that one? That's a baby in the making. Once it's about 50% larger, which will take a LONG time because these things have a very slow lifecycle, its parent will fracture it off. There'll be two roots grown like railway tracks leading away from the parent by then, and the parent will send pulses down both wires which will generate magnetic fields to roll the baby along the ground until it reaches the end of the lines, which will be in an area where the crust is rich in the raw materials they need. Both wires will attach to the baby, one for communication with its parent and the other will be disconnected from the parent and slowly absorbed by the baby to help it grow." "What do they DO?" said Ava. "They don't move much, that's for sure. They spend their time thinking. I found them because they're very smart, especially the large ones. They can fill much of themselves with electronic technology of their own design, and I wouldn't be surprised if one day they're capable of space travel using force- or gravity-fields for propulsion. -- "There's nothing else to see here, and I think you've got the idea that there's a great deal happening in the Universe besides mankind's little endeavors, so I'll return us to Refuge." I jumped us to being in orbit over Refuge, low enough to make it seem impressively huge. I'd already created an illusion that it contained far more landmass than it did in practice, and that almost all the land was covered in grass. It was rapidly rotating underneath us, letting everyone see that there was a LOT of grass. "That's Refuge," I explained. I materialized a riding mower in front of Dad, telling him, "You're in charge of mowing our new home's lawn, Dad. That's going to keep you busy for the few millennia." Mowing the grass of our hilltop home was the responsibility of our gardeners, but Dad still enjoyed tinkering with the equipment and occasionally using it, so my little joke had enough currency to work. After the chuckles, I canceled the illusion and let them see Refuge as it really was, zooming us in closer to see the details around our home's rooms. ------- Chapter 423: Refuge's Beaches and Some of the Options With Copies Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) I teleported us to one of the beaches that was part of Refuge. "I must admit that I showed you the aliens mainly because I find them fascinating. I'm having a huge amount of fun learning about them and watching them in action. They've got some very different perspectives on life and have made some amazing scientific breakthroughs in areas no human has ever considered. If you want to, Julia, we could have the largest, most profitable company in the world in a few years, just by my copying useful inventions from around the Universe. Heck, just from the closest hundred or so galaxies. I probably should have shown you one of the very advanced civilizations, but we'll do that some other day." [Other Marks giving their families this Tour but running slightly later corrected that omission.] "I've still got three years left in my BBA. I'm not ready to run a big business yet." "There's no hurry. You can carry on getting ready the way you already are: by doing your BBA assignments with an invention development and commercialization company in mind. Our previous concept is still roughly correct, but the amount of scientific research I'll be doing will be much less than we thought and the range of inventions that are possible is MUCH wider. We've got lots of choice, so it's really just a matter of what we want to do. We can discuss that later, and we can always change our minds anyway. You don't even need to have a company at all, because I can link you with another Julia who has, as often as the two of you want, and you can share in the thrill of her work while you do something else that she'll enjoy as a change from high-pressure business." Mom asked, "Mark, what happened to, umm, the Donna that came with us before?" "At the moment she's getting on one of the pegasi mares to play with the original Donna, but the time will come when one of them gets canceled, Mom." Vanessa queried, "You said, 'one of them.' Doesn't it matter which?" "They've got identical bodies, minds and their memories are so similar there's no meaningful difference. There's no medical, psychological or any other type of test that could tell them apart. It truly doesn't matter which of them goes. -- "It'll stop seeming like a death to you after a while. The morality you've been brought up with equates the loss of a body with death, but that's not true in these cases. It's all about minds, and they're easy to duplicate. There are two Donna's with identical minds, so it doesn't matter which one is considered surplus. You can't tell whether I'm the original mind for this dimension, you don't know how many times I've been copied, and how many times those copies have canceled themselves. It doesn't make any difference to you and it doesn't to me either. I've also got many billions of my minds trotting around doing various things without bodies because it's easier for them that way. And when they finish whatever they're doing, they cancel themselves because the loss of a mind doesn't matter since their memories are retained." Vanessa asked, "Doesn't a person - or 'the mind', if that's a better way of wording it - feel frightened about their imminent cancellation?" "They do until they've made the mental adjustment I've talked about. Being canceled is painless of course - they exist one instant and don't exist the next - but knowing that instant is coming is scary the first few times. It doesn't take long for the person to learn that their identity carries on undisturbed when copies are made and canceled. It soon becomes far less disturbing than falling asleep and you're not the least concerned about the loss of consciousness during that. If you have a file on your computer and you copy it to a new folder and then delete the original, you don't mourn the loss of the original. If it was your last version of it you might, but not when you've got identical copies elsewhere. I'll give you a demonstration." I created four copies of myself, each dressed in different clothes and carrying a sign saying, "Copy #1" through to "Copy #4". Then I (the original) surprised my families by disappearing. [Did you know that the human body contains ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones? I was surprised by many of the things I learned when I became capable of operating at this level. There's a great deal of variation in bacteria types among people and they seem to have quite significant effects on their hosts' lives, so researching them is one of my many projects, with the goal of improving my families' lives by making changes to their bacterial colonies. Included in my research toolkit are some unusual techniques, such as being able to create a body with my mind in it, and populate it with modified bacteria to feel the effects.] Copy#1 said, "The Mark who was talking to you just canceled himself..." Copy#2 said, " ... to prove the point that we don't care about that process..." Copy#3 said, " ... We want you to pick one of us, Vanessa..." Copy #4 said, " ... and the other three will cancel themselves too." "It truly doesn't matter?" checked Vanessa. "Not..." " ... the..." " ... slightest..." " ... bit." Vanessa hesitated for a couple of seconds, then said, "It feels wrong to prefer one of you." Copy#1 answered, "It's not as if we're going to take it personally." Copy#2 added, "You could play Eeny, meeny, miny, moe." Copy#3 suggested, "Or we could ask Julia to pick the snappiest dresser." Copy#4 said, "To make it even more obscure, the four of us just swapped our minds around." "You make a convincing case. Very well, I'll pick #1 then." Copy#1 said, "Good choice, going for the best looking one. Bye guys." Numbers 2, 3 and 4 waved goodbye and disappeared. I asked, "Would you feel comfortable making that choice among four copies of yourself, Vanessa?" "Ahh, no. Not really." "Imagine how useful it'd be to be able to create another Vanessa or two to help with the paperwork and decisions you have to make. The same for the rest of you too. I was able to do so much studying because I had multiple minds on the job. They were all operating out of a single body but that wasn't significant. You could accelerate your productivities by several multiples as soon as you get over your reluctance about canceling the duplicates when they're no longer needed. I'll give you another example of how useful the duplication process is." Beside us on the beach, I created duplicates of the two Donnas, each dressed the way their original is, so they looked to be those girls. They immediately rushed to me, excitedly raving and thanking me for their fantastic new pets. When I got a chance, I said, "Hugs are very nice, but I think the two of you could thank me better by taking me to bed for some wild sex this evening." "Both of us?" x2. One of them adding, "At the same time?" "Absolutely. It'll be INCREDIBLY sexy!" "Touching each other, and everything?" I answered the Donna that asked that question by causally pointing at the other while saying, "She's VERY good at sex. Wait till you try her." "{Giggle}." | "Wow. It's going to be WEIRD!" I bent down and whispered in the ear of the one I was talking to. She giggled again, then told her 'twin', "He says you've got great tits too, {giggle}. I'm game if you are. What do you think?" Donna#2 answered, "I think it'll be great. Can we have more than one Mark, Mark?" "I was afraid you'd think of that. Yes we can but that's going to weird me out. Can we start with just the three of us and see how that goes for a while first please?" "Sure. I think that'll be fun." "It should be a GREAT deal of fun, especially because I can link your minds so you feel everything that the other you feels. You'll both feel whatever I'm doing to both of you, what the other you is doing to you, and what you're doing to the other you. So if you're sucking her nipple, you'll feel that she's sucking yours. You'll not only be getting twice as much sensation, but you'll know exactly what feels best to the other Donna, so you'll be superb at stimulating each other." I created four more Marks, placing them in front of Carol, Julia, Ava and Nevaeh. Each Mark took his girl's hand and simultaneously requested, "May I have the pleasure of a threesome with you and you this evening please?" "Hell yeah!" agreed Ava, to her Mark. | "Yes please!" agreed Nevaeh to hers. | "I want to try it too," said Carol, not overly enthusiastically to hers. | "You're INCREDIBLE, but I don't know which one to hug," puzzled Julia, looking between her Mark and me. Carol added, "What's going to happen to the second me afterward?" I canceled the four Marks, then said, "Julia, all of me know what all of the rest of me are doing, so you can hug any Mark you want. -- "Carol, let me answer your question this way." The two Donna's disappeared, and I explained to Carol, "Those two Donnas I just canceled were duplicates of the two that are still riding their pets, one of which is a duplicate of the original, as you know. I was linking each of the two duplicates that were here back to the two riders, and I'll bring those two Donnas here so you can hear what they think about having their duplicates canceled while linked." Both Donnas and their steeds appeared in the air just above us. The pegasi quickly landed on the sand in front of us and started kneeling. The girls didn't wait, immediately leaping off their rides so they could rush over and thank me again. Amid their repeated thanks and expressions of excitement, were some references like, "We're going to give you the BEST sex tonight! We're so excited and happy. Thank you VERY much, Mark." The other Donna excitedly asked, "You said we can bring our friends here, didn't you?" "Yep. Get into one of the elevators at home and say that you want to come to whatever part of Refuge you want. I'll be making your friends forget that you said anything about Refuge and I'll be dialing their astonishment down a long way when they arrive so they don't freak out or feel they have to take photos or call their friends to tell them about it. -- "You can do anything you want with them here: riding, swimming, having meals or anything else. What I'll be doing is taking a snapshot of their minds when they arrive, and when they leave I'll be changing them back to that snapshot and adding some very creative false memories of their playing around at our Corvallis home in similar ways to what they did here. So if they went for a swim here, they'll remember having a swim in one of our pools at home. If they rode here, they'll remember riding at home. I'll let them keep any memories of innocuous conversations they had while they were here too, but nothing about your pets or anything weird like that. They'll still remember their emotions though, so if they had a great time then they'll want to visit our home again, or if they had an argument, they'll remember that too. It'll be real life, just made to look different. -- "When you're talking to your friends back in Corvallis, don't mention Refuge to them because they won't remember that name or any of the details. If you want them to visit here, just invite them to our home, then bring them here when you get in an elevator. Each time they return here, I'll give them back their full memories of all their earlier visits so you won't have to explain every time. -- "In the future we might be able to be open about having access to another planet, but that requires some preparation first. In the meanwhile, outsiders who come here will have to have their memories tweaked, their cellphone contents adjusted if they take any photos, or other little measures like that." "Can they stay overnight?" "They can stay as long as you want. We can either do it the way I just described, with their parents thinking they're staying at our Corvallis home and the girls getting memories of that when they leave here. Or another way is to kind of kidnap them. I'd duplicate you and your friends, and you could spend as much time here as you want, while the originals would be doing their usual stuff in Corvallis. When the visit is finished, I'd just cancel everyone. The originals of your friends wouldn't know anything about it, but I'd either link your and your duplicate's minds so you'd get both sets of memories, or I'd transfer the memories to you when it was over or from time to time during the visit. -- "There are other options too, although several of them are more intrusive than I like. We can talk about them later. The reason I jumped you here was because Carol and the others are concerned about what it's like to have a duplicate canceled. Would you tell them what that's like please." "Umm, it's not painful or anything. It's strange seeing other things going on at the same time, but I know which is me and which is the others. When you cancel them, it's like I was watching TV and you turned it off in the middle of the program; it just goes blank. That's not quite right because there's no blank left afterward. 'It just goes away, ' is a better description. It's like you quickly take the TV away." I said to Carol, but really to all of them, "I deliberately make it feel like the input from the other you is slightly indirect to avoid your getting confused with what you're doing. So it's like watching TV, which we've all had years of practice at splitting our attention with. Prof asked, "From what I understand of your previous explanation, your mind wasn't anything special to start with; you just had the luck of dying during déjà vu. Right?" "Yep. I was a very average boy initially." "So how can you handle the billions of simultaneous inputs you're getting?" "Only a few hours ago I couldn't have handled live inputs from many more than two Marks either. I managed multiple sight blob inputs only because each of them went to its own consciousness. But since then I've learned a great deal about how minds work, and I've rebuilt mine so it's highly adaptive and expandable. When you do a lot of heavy lifting, your muscles get stronger. In the case of my mind, its capacity instantly adjusts to handle the demands put on it. -- "I offered to repair all the damage to your bodies earlier. That extends to improving you in various ways too. Making it possible for you to network with more than one simultaneous copy of yourself, improve your memory, your concentration, your powers of observation - it's quite remarkable how poor human brains are at noticing things you're already looking at - and whatever else you might want improved. Rather than my immediately giving you enormous mental capabilities, I'm going to increase them slowly as you practice with and get used to them. You'll start by being able to easily link with one of your duplicates at a time, then when you're ready you can try two duplicates, etc. It'll be an incremental process that will depend mostly on which of your new abilities you try to improve and how much effort you put into them. -- "When I say what I will normally be doing or not doing, I'm not laying down hard rules. If you want to change something, just ask me. For example, if you want to bring an outsider to Refuge and have them remember that they were on another planet afterward, then talk with me about it - where "me" is either my body, the Refuge mind, your invisible bodyguard mind, or any other Mark-mind that might be floating around at the time. I'm responsible for the consequences of things like someone knowing that we have an off-planet holiday home, so you'd have to convince me it'd be acceptable, but that's probably easier than you expect because there aren't any consequences which I can't repair if they go bad. -- "I'm similarly flexible about your internal changes. If one of you wants to be able to network with a dozen of your duplicates at once, then that's easily doable. It's really only for your peace of mind and that it's more fun to strive to achieve things that I'm recommending going slowly. We've got all the time in the world, but there's no real reason why patience is required so feel free to ask for whatever you want. -- "I haven't mentioned putting multiple minds into your head, but that's an option too. It's how I got my start, although I've superseded that technique for myself. You can try it if you want, but I think you'll find it better to have roaming minds, which is something I'll teach you how to manage later, once you're experienced at linking with multiple bodies. -- "EVERYTHING is flexible, so feel free to ask about anything you can think of. Here's an idea I'm sure Donna will like. Donna, one of your new pets is pregnant. When her foal is born, how'd you like to be that foal? It'd have your mind, and you'd be able to feel everything it feels..." "WOW! I could fly, and everything?" "It will take about two and half years for a newborn to be strong enough to begin to fly, and another year before they're good at it. They can run fast earlier than that though. If I leave nature alone you'll have quite a lot of family life with them before you're ready for flight, plus however long you want after that. I think you'd enjoy living among them because they're a very nice species..." "I can tell that already. I'd LOVE it! Would I be able to see and feel it just like when you were talking to the other me about having sex with two of us?" "Exactly like that, except your body would feel different because you'd be one of those animals. Have you named their species or them individually yet?" "Not yet. We've been talking about it, but we want to get names that they like. Mostly we've been too busy having fun or listening to what the stallion has been telling us about Refuge. This is an AMAZING place!" "You can add more things to it if you want. If you want a rollercoaster or even an entire copy of Disneyland, just tell the house. -- "The same to the rest of you. There are already several snow-skiing fields and locations for other hobbies, but let's say Dad unexpectedly decides he wants to learn hang gliding. This is a great place to do it because of the reduced gravity and Earth-normal atmospheric pressure. The house can provide an instructor and the equipment, and if Dad screws-up it'll let him crash hard enough to hurt, so he'll try hard not to make that mistake again. The house can help all of you with hobbies ranging from Archery to Zoology. -- "Donna, you should stay with us now so I can show you the other main places and then it'll be dinnertime." "Can we play with them again after dinner?" "Remember they need to eat too, and it takes a lot of grass to keep them healthy because they burn a lot of energy when flying, which raises an important point: These are YOUR pets, which means you're responsible for them. For example, you should bring samples of the feed and supplements your Corvallis horses eat, and let the stallion try them to see if he'd think his family would like any of them. If you find any good foods, the stables will copy as much of it as you want. If you exercise them hard by making them fly you around, then you'll probably have to boost their feed with some high-energy products, just as you'd do if you were exercising one of your horses hard. -- "There are no books about these creatures, so you're going to have to make a deliberate effort to study them to learn how to look after them yourself: their diet and other aspects too. The stallion will help you, but he doesn't have any knowledge beyond what feels natural for him and his family." "Can't you help us?" asked Donna#2. "I could give you some help, but I only created them a few hours ago and there's a great deal about how they'll live that I don't know." I knew FAR more than I was implying, but Donna would get a greater sense of accomplishment and more enjoyment out of being responsible for them herself. I'd seen how much effort she'd put into looking after her horses well, and I was confident she'd do the same here and enjoy it even more. I'd given the creatures complex, individual personalities - from the stallion down to the foals - that Donna would enjoy far more than she did interacting with her uncomplex horses, not to mention that the pegasi were so much more powerful, faster, able to fly, and better looking. -- "It'd be much better if you studied them yourself and worked directly with them to help make their lives better. You and they will enjoy that more, and they'll very much appreciate that you're helping them. If you study them carefully, you should discover all sorts of ways that I don't know about that can make them happier. I know the mares would be especially thankful if you could find a way to make it easier for them to give birth to their foals because that's going to be quite hard on them. Maybe you can find a vet back in Corvallis that'll let you help him deliver horse foals so you can learn about things like that." "Oh boy! I've never done anything like that before. I've seen it on TV but never thought I'd have to do it." "You don't HAVE TO, but it'd be something they'd greatly appreciate. You'd be a wonderful friend to them by trying to make their lives better." "I'll try. I hope I don't do anything wrong though." "You don't need to worry about that because they're easily smart enough to stop you from making bad mistakes." I waved at the two soon-to-be-renamed pegasi. They leaped into the air and I teleported them back to over their home. Then I canceled the spare Donna. The original Donna said, "Oh, I didn't get to say goodbye." "I think your pets already know that you like them very much, and there's no need to say goodbye to yourself. Besides, there are more animal species that I want to tell everyone about yet." "Where?" Donna asked eagerly. "Out to sea here and another species at the other beach. I call this the Adults' Beach because it's so calm. It gets its sunrise and sunsets about two hours earlier than Refuge's main buildings so this is a good place for a morning swim, judging 'morning' from the main buildings' perspective, which is the same as Corvallis'. -- "It's got fantastic coral reefs and several tropical islands of different sizes starting about a mile out. You can't see much of them from here, but they're better than the best Earth has. You won't need flippers, masks, air tanks, wetsuits, weight belts or any of those things to swim around the reefs because your bodyguard mind will take care of all those needs for you. It'll put NP-spheres over your heads so you won't need masks and it'll teleport air into and out of the sphere so there's no limit to how long you'll be able to stay under. Swim in whatever direction you want and it'll use NP to push you faster, which will be much less tiring for you than using flippers. Heat blobs will keep you warm, some instantaneous adjustments to your weight will keep your buoyancy neutral even as you breathe in and out, and it'll create a type of radio link between all your helmets so you can talk with each other underwater, and so you can tell your bodyguard what you want. -- "There's a species like a small whale that lives off the coast here and around the islands. They feed on a long-strand plant similar to kelp that grows mostly on the inshore sides of the reefs." I created a midair image of one of the creatures feeding. "If you're in the water and out far enough so the water's at least twenty feet deep, then they'll come to you if you splash on the surface loudly enough. You can climb onto their flat top and point for them to go in any direction. They're placid and helpful, so good for providing rides, such as out to the islands or sightseeing up and down the coast or out to sea. They'll give you a smooth ride with their backs just above the surface. They won't leave you until you want them to so you don't have to fear being left out at sea, especially because your bodyguard mind will teleport you back to land whenever you ask." I'd thought about having the islands populated by a type of mermaid and mermen species I'd create, with them capable of living in the water and on land. They could be fun to swim with, and serve us on the land: providing drinks, meals and accommodation, just like a tropical island resort. I hadn't created them as the idea had seemed a little trite, but it'd be easy enough if I changed my mind. I'll mention it to my families one day to see what they think of it. I guessed it wouldn't happen because interacting with real aliens would be more interesting. I could set up teleportation gates on the planets of some of the nicer aliens so they could visit Refuge whenever they wished, and my families could visit their homeworlds. Some of the aliens might choose to live here, in regions I could easily make suitable for them. There are ALL SORTS of possibilities, but it's too soon to introduce those to my families - they need to get used to the new mes and the multiple thems first. -- "The other beach is the Kids' Beach. It's two hours to the other side of Refuge, so it's great for swims in what would be the house's afternoon and early evening. It's a fantastic surf beach, with big, regular waves. There are several types of surfboards in its bathing shed, as well as jetskis, towels, drinks and anything else you might want. One thing you don't need is suntan lotion because your bodyguards will shield you from receiving too much UV and repair what little damage it does cause. -- "There's a marine species that lives off that coast which is sort of a half-seal, half-porpoise." I showed an image of half a dozen of them cavorting in the surf. "They're the young of a species that spends the first three years inshore before they move farther out to sea to become deep-sea creatures. The young are quite boisterous and have heaps of individual personality. They love playing games in the surf and they're going to be thrilled when humans join them, especially if you throw balls or large weighted rings around, which there are plenty of in that beach's bathing shed. -- "They can come ashore like seals can, but only for about an hour or so, depending on how hot and windy it is because their skins dry out. They might be a little over-enthusiastic initially, but if you treat them the way you would a rambunctious puppy you'll be fine. A young adult passes through every few days to check on them, and you'll enjoy interacting with them too. The young are very respectful to their elders so it'll be good for you to meet the adults from time to time because that'll make the youngsters easier to control." "Did you create these species too?" "Donna's new pets were created from scratch, Prof, but the two marine species I just mentioned and nearly all of the other ones you'll see are modified native species because that was the easiest way to keep the ecology in balance. The life on this planet has been EXTENSIVELY modified to suit us, but mostly just in their behaviors with respect to humans although there were negatives to be gotten rid of, such as several species of plant life that used thorns or cutting edges as protection, insect equivalents that would've been a pain in the ass or anywhere else they could've bored holes into us, and many of the predators at the top of the food chain would've instinctively hunted humans. All of those are either modified sufficiently or in a few cases removed entirely. The entire planet and every environment in it is safe now. They're no equivalents of sharks, bears, snakes or bees, for examples. You can go anywhere and do anything, and your greatest natural danger will be stubbing your toe. You can even eat anything you see, and the worst that will happen is that it won't taste nice. -- "I also modified many of the species to turn them into positives for us. There are several species of fruit trees that now provide delicious, nourishing fruit. Donna's flying steeds and the two marine species are socially compatible with us, especially the flying steeds because I've made them very intelligent; the marine species are more instinctively programmed than intelligent. I've also made many changes in the soil so Vanessa can garden here successfully. The soil contains everything from earthworms down to nitrogen fixing bacteria. You can grow species as widely different as cacti, mangroves and oak trees here, as well as every type of flower, fruit or vegetable you might want to plant." "It sounds like you went to a great deal of trouble," Vanessa politely commented. "A million of my minds went to a little bit of trouble each. As Mom says, 'Many hands make light work, ' not that I used any hands. It was more of a pleasure than work anyway, because it was a fun project and I'm looking forward to how nice it's going to be to live in this place. -- "Hopefully you'll enjoy it too. You should, because you can make it into whatever you want. If your study isn't big enough, ask the house to expand it. If you want to hang the Mona Lisa on the wall, the house will send a mind to inspect the original and make a molecular-level identical copy. Knowing me as well as I do, it'd leave the copy behind and bring you the original, not that anyone would ever be able to tell. Or on second thought, maybe you'd prefer a copy of how it looked immediately after Leonardo da Vinci finished it, even though that's quite different from how we think of the painting. -- "There's no need to do any housework here either, which reminds me that many of the features of this house can be added to our Corvallis home. I wouldn't recommend changing the Corvallis rooms' sizes and locations, or having us teleport around the place, but the cleaning, laundry, cooking, etc., can all be done automatically if you want. Just ask your bodyguard minds for any of those services. -- "Let me show you the other rooms in our new home-away-from-home, starting with Mom and Dad's bedroom." ------- Chapter 424: Mom and Dad's Bedroom, and a Discussion About Becoming Moms and Dad Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) I teleported us into Mom and Dad's bedroom. It was a combination of two things I knew they enjoyed: their Corvallis bedroom's panoramic view, and the breakfasts we'd had high in the Cascade Range. Their bedroom was built into a high point on the ridge of a mountain range. The range was higher several miles farther north, but this was the most scenic spot. It was low enough to be pleasantly warm outside, and being below the timberline - the ridge itself was too rocky to grow trees - the 360-degree view encompassed plenty of trees and the forested lowlands out to the east and west, including a good-sized mountain lake not far to the west. When everyone had finished exclaiming over the view and how wonderfully I'd decorated the room, I explained, "This is just one room of the three that makes up Mom and Dad's bedroom. As indicated by the bed, this is the fundamental room of the three. It's the middle of three levels built into a roughly dome-shaped rock spire. All the levels can independently revolve to face whatever direction Mom and Dad want, and to keep revolving if that's your wish. The level above is a small living room, with the glass sides extending over the roof so its view is totally unobstructed. The house can darken any part of the glass if you need shade or prefer to have the top seem more solid, or it can just as easily be changed into a normal ceiling and roof, or it can get rid of the sides and roof totally so you'll be sitting in the open air. You can have whatever you prefer, and you can change it as often as you want. Don't worry about overworking the House's minds because you can't, and it enjoys doing things for you. -- "This room contains nothing except the bed and bedside tables. I wasn't sure whether to put a small closet in here, but you can easily make those sorts of decisions yourself. Like the room above, it gets great views of the sunrises and sunsets. The level beneath us contains your en-suite, closets and a storage room, as well as a doorway to the outside. Your closets already contain copies of all the clothes you've got in Corvallis, and the en-suite contains all your lotions, potions, makeup and other mysterious paraphernalia. If you want, you can rearrange the rooms so a different one is on top, or you can get the house to put whatever room you're in on the top. I'll leave it for you to decide what to do if you're both here but in different rooms. There are no staircases going between the levels because you teleport like you do around the entire house. If you want to add staircases, just ask the house to do it for you. -- "There are several paths outside for nature walks around this area, including down to that lake where there's a boathouse with a dinghy in it. It's got fishing gear and everything else you might need for a lazy afternoon on the lake, including fish to catch. You can even cook and eat them afterward." Actually, the 'fish' weren't edible, but if any of us caught one and wanted to eat it, one of my minds would change its biology to make it delicious. That's much easier than making large changes to the living ecosystem which have to be carefully balanced with everything else in the ecosystem. I'm a lazy god; one who believes that some of the Deadly Sins are well worth indulging in. -- "The boathouse's storage room, like the storage room on the level below and every other storage room on Refuge, can make and store whatever you want. I've already placed lots of stuff on those shelves, but if you want something that I didn't think of, just tell the house and it'll make one for you. You can do that even if what you want is in storage. I had thought of doing without storage rooms, but I thought that it'll seem more natural for you to keep stuff somewhere rather than have it pop into and out of existence all the time, and that'll save you having to describe what you want to the house every time you want something. If you ask for a complicated item, the house might need a few seconds to locate one of them on an Earth to copy, or to invent something that works if you've asked for something brand new, but most of the time you'll get what you ask for instantly. It can be as substantial as a spaceship to explore this solar system in, or as simple as a picnic set. I can particularly recommend the picnic sets, because they'll come with a thermos that contains astonishingly good coffee. -- "Everything is top quality here. For Dad, I've got samples of every brand of beer I could find on Earth, including some historic and even prehistoric ones. Some of the historic brews are surprisingly tasty. I've also made a wine cellar that has one of every good bottle of wine I could find. The current era's wines are considerably better than those of the past so I'm only storing contemporary bottles. The contents of the cellar will serve as masters for me to copy whenever you order one of them. They'll age normally, so if there are some that are your particular favorites, ask the house to memorize them so you don't lose them after they age past their best. The mind in charge of the dining room is researching what wines go with what meals, so it should be able to provide good recommendations with each course, especially if you give it feedback about your personal tastes." One thing that had amazed me when we'd got rich was what a difference having wines that matched each course made, which usually required the chef to design the dishes to suit the wines. Get that combination right and the quality of the meal jumped to a whole new level. I'd put the dining room minds in charge of the wine cellar, and those minds - from every dimension with a Refuge - were having a lot of fun researching wines, beers and spirits all over the world, and creating historic copies to try too. They were repeatedly creating new bodies to taste with, sometimes getting drunk when their 'research' including carousing in Bavarian beer halls. Sober minds would stop them getting into trouble, and I'd never been able to get drunk before, so I was finally able to indulge in that teenage rite of passage. -- "I'll let you spend a few minutes looking around. You can say 'House, down please', or 'House, bottom level please, ' to teleport down. That's easier than 'Felicity and Steven's bedroom's living room.' Give it a try." The females quickly conferred and agreed they wanted to go down, being eager to check out the essential facilities: the bathroom and one of the two closets. I interrupted with, "If you all want to go to the same place, what'll work easier is if the host or hostess of the destination room - which is Mom in this case - says, 'House, take us down please.' The house has been watching and listening so it's got a good idea who 'us' means. If it's unsure about someone, it'll leave them where they are so they'll have to issue their own instruction. Try that, Mom." Mom recited, "House, take us down." All the females disappeared. Dad, Prof and I stayed where we were to talk about how amazing I was now. Some of the implications of having a god in the family had started sinking in, and I spent several minutes assuring them that it really was true, and that I could really do these things, etc. I put off discussions about what I would do in the future until everyone was together again. I could tell they'd calmed down when Dad asked, "So how do I get my new bedroom to rotate?" "Just tell the house. It can change orientation instantly, very slowly, or you can have it rotating continuously if you like. You could have it take 24 hours for a complete rotation, or maybe 25 if you want a slightly different perspective each time you're in here, or 2 hours if you want to see the view change quickly. It's entirely up to you. Too fast might make you feel a bit queasy although that's a reflex you could ask the house to suppress. Feel free to experiment as much as you like. -- "Mentioning 'queasy' reminds me that there are a couple of medical matters that might interest you. I can stop your whiskers growing so you won't have to shave every morning, and I can stop your hair growing so you won't have the bother of haircuts either." "That'd be great," enthusiastically agreed Dad. "You can restart them, right?" "Any time you want; just tell the house, me or your bodyguard mind." "In that case stop them now. I'll check with Fely later in case she has an opinion about my hair." "It's done. Do you want me to get rid of the whiskers you've got? It'll feel like the smoothest shave you've ever had." "Sure." I did it by "canceling" - my word for turning to energy which I send back to the Dark Energy store - every millimeter of every whisker Dad had, including the lengths under his skin, then I said, "Rub your chin." "Wow, that IS smooth." "You've got the proverbial baby's bottom permanently now, Dad. -- "Prof, do you want the beauty treatment too?" Prof asked, "There's no reason why not is there?" "I know the girls wouldn't want their hair to stop growing because they like trying different styles, but for us guys stopping it is nothing but a time-saving gain." "Sign me up for the full treatment then." "It's done." I waited for Prof to rub his chin, then I offered, "More importantly, how'd you like the missing part of your leg back?" Prof's face registered shock. "My oh my! That's a major change. I've been without it for so long that I rarely think about what it'd be like to have both feet. It'd certainly make life easier, but some people are going to notice, especially my doctor." "I can suppress their reactions. Just tell them you went to South Korea for some leading-edge stem cell therapy, and I'll make sure they vaguely remember reading something about it a while ago and that they accept it without suspicion and no more than idle curiosity." "How long would it take you to do it?" "So quick that if you blink you'll miss it. I'll just mirror-image copy your other lower-leg, graft it on and connect everything. There'll be a few rearrangements near the join because of things like your blood vessels not being in the same places in both legs, but none of that is hard. I genetically engineered and rebuilt a significant proportion of the animals and plants on this planet, so copying your leg over is a cake walk by comparison." "Do you mind if I discuss it with Vanessa first and get back to you?" "That's perfectly okay. There's no risk involved, either medical or social, and I can't imagine that you'd prefer to keep your prosthetic, but there's certainly no hurry. If you'll excuse the poor pun, I understand it's a big step for you, so take your time before leaping in." "I'm doubtless being foolish not to grab it with both hands." I acknowledged his little joke with a nod and smile, then answered, "Intellectually yes. You saw how quickly and easily I created the bodies for duplicate Donnas, so making your lower-leg is as easy as falling off a log." I expect Julia to ask about changing her body soon. It wouldn't occur to her for a while because she'll be too distracted and thinking mostly about how to use my power to make external things happen, but it'll eventually occur to her. She's annoyed that the way she looks causes people to not take her seriously, which is about a bad a mistake as it's possible to make with Julia. She would prefer to look more intimidating - not scarily, just seriously - so we'll have some fun making that happen for her at some stage. I predict some "South Korean growth hormone treatment" in her future. They're clever people those South Koreans. They're also a good source of the fake treatments because it's difficult for people to check up on our claims. I gave Dad and Prof a quick look at the mini-living room above, then at the bottom level where the womenfolk gushed about bathroom fittings at us until we could escape. I opened the exterior door and we wandered down the path a few yards to give them a sense of the outside of the planet. I told them, "It's 100% pure and pristine, and the animal species don't flee from us. They've never seen us before but most species would naturally flee out of caution, so I've given them instincts to be only slightly wary of us and a little curious too, as that makes them more fun. After we stand still for a little while, some of them will start checking us out." There were many bird-like species, squirrel-analogs, deer-analogs, and several others. My families wouldn't have enjoyed the wildlife if it'd looked too strange, so most of it that we'd see no longer did. The females joined us outside, gushing over how wonderful the three-level bedroom was. I came in for some joking as they couldn't believe a "mere male" was able to design such an amazing bedroom. I might've been a god, but I was still only a male. In this case, a male who'd shamelessly copied other people's good ideas, but I didn't tell them that. To be fair to myself - a highly justifiable practice - I'd added quite a few good ideas of my own, which the house had described to the women during their poking around: Mirrors could show the viewer what they looked like from any point of view, as if an invisible camera was flying around them. The closets contained several advanced features: They expanded horizontally as much as required, making them effectively infinitely sized, which I expected Julia to strain the limits of. If necessary I'll introduce a distance-distortion effect along the length of them so females can walk along them quickly. The closet mirrors can display the finished look of an ensemble before the person had put any of it on, enabling the girls to play dress-up games more efficiently, or not, as they wish. The bath and shower would adjust the temperature to maximize the subject's pleasure from that sensation, could give massages, and provide instant dryness by teleporting the water away when finished. And in response to Mom asking me if I'd forgotten about it, I reminded her that I'd said the house would teleport away the contents of their bladders and bowels, so there was no need for a toilet. Theoretically there was no need for a shower or bath either, but I have a lot of fun in those with my girls so I'd included them. Once the gushing about the décor was over with, Mom asked me, "Are you really as powerful as a god now?" That resulted in me having to spend another few minutes making that point again. When the questions about what I'd do in the future started, I answered, "That's a major topic so let's wait so we can discuss it over dinner. We'll carry on with the Grand Tour for now so you'll have a better idea of my capabilities by dinnertime." Prof used that comment of mine as an opportunity to tell Vanessa, "Mark offered to replace my prosthetic with the real thing." "Show me," asked Vanessa eagerly. "I haven't done it yet. This sounds silly, but I feel like I'd be losing part of me, and I feel scared of something going wrong." Turning to me, Prof said, "I know you've got amazing abilities, but I can't help worrying." "I'll offer you a 'Try Before You Buy' deal." I created two more fully formed Profs, both with two flesh-and-blood legs. They were dressed in shorts so their legs could be seen. Everyone's eyes looked down, with the Williamses looking very intently. -- The new Profs stood motionless while I explained, "I haven't given them conscious minds yet. They both started with exactly the same body as you, Prof, except for having their prosthetics replaced. I've just finished giving the one in brown shorts a complete body overhaul, to make him as healthy as possible without it showing from the outside. I'm going to copy the mind you've got right now into both of them, and you can tell yourself what you think about your new bodies." I did that before anyone could get cold feet about it. (The Marks in dimensions who were just entering the little cliché duel with Prof of a few seconds ago noticed me thinking "cold feet" and decided to use it in their conversations.) What followed was an amusing back and forth among the three Profs and Vanessa, with one theme standing out: the brown-shorted Prof RAVED about how good he felt. His comments summarized to, "You don't realize how far you've deteriorated because the process is so gradual, but getting it back suddenly is a real eye opener. You've GOT to choose this option, and then get Mark to do the same for Vanessa." I invited everyone, "Put up your hands if you DON'T want your body to be made healthier?" There were some quick agreements and some hesitations, which was good enough for me. I canceled the two new Profs and improved everyone's bodies. Prof's needed far more work than anyone else's because of his age and all the damage he'd suffered from being almost terminally dehydrated - much of that organ damage had been permanent, until now - so more of my minds worked on him than anyone else. Most of the changes were too subtle to notice so I hadn't bothered doing them to the brown-shorts version, so this was a much bigger job. It was a BIG job for everyone, even Donna getting dozens of minds created to work on her. I'd considerably understated to my families what I was doing. Human bodies are, quite frankly, appallingly put together. The evolutionary process of designing bodies by trial and error has produced far too many errors, many of which have persisted through the generations. We developed from single-celled organisms into our current form with more and more functions being haphazardly added to the mix. I can't write, "It was like building a house without any plans," because that would be far too generous. In that situation you'd know that you are building a house and what a house is. In the case of our bodies, there'd never been a final goal guiding the process, as evolution is a blind trial-and-error process. It has resulted in systems that do half-assed jobs, which requires other systems to fill the gaps, and yet other systems to counter the areas where the first two systems overlap too much. And then all those systems need a system to coordinate them, but that's often half-assed too, so it requires ... You get the idea: it's a god-awful mess. To call our bodies "inefficient" would be giving them a thoroughly undeserved compliment. Evolution does NOT result in efficient designs; it is FAR too blind and random to be able to do that. What it does is create designs that are slightly less inefficient than their competitors, whereupon they out-breed the others and then rest on their laurels. As a simple example, I earlier mentioned how poorly our bodies handle oxygen. The reason for this is that very early multi-cellular life - not even advanced enough to be called worms - started before the atmosphere had much oxygen in it, but then plants evolved photosynthesis which proved to be immensely successful. One of the major waste products of photosynthesis is oxygen, which quickly polluted the entire planet. That caused massive trouble for animal life because oxygen was terribly toxic to their cells, inflicting several types of very serious damage. As a matter of life or death, animals had to evolve ways to eliminate oxygen radicals. Every modern form of aerobic animal life has oxygen-neutralizing systems that are modifications (i.e., mutations) of systems that the pre-worms had. They had to process hydrocarbons, and those systems proved to be fairly easily modified to handle oxygen. They handled it really badly, but good enough for some of the creatures to survive long enough to create baby worms. Oxygen does a great deal of slowly accumulating damage to our bodies, because our oxygen-fighting systems are only good enough to keep us healthy long enough to have and raise children. If an Intelligent Designer had ever existed at any time since we were pre-worms, and had designed animal cellular biology with an oxygen-rich atmosphere in mind, our bodies would work far better and remain healthier for far longer than they do now. Fortunately for my families' sake, an Intelligent Designer does exist now - me. Even before I had the capabilities I have now, I'd intended to improve my families' health as much as I could. Now I could do that to a godlike degree. I'd done a great deal of research into human and pre-human biology, I'd practiced specific changes on people in hospitals (to their benefit), on my own bodies, and I'd even done some trial runs by creating bodies which were copies of my families' but occupied with my minds so I could check out how they felt. (Ava's felt particularly good, which was interesting. I'm still researching why that is. And yes, Carol's, Donna's and Nevaeh's bodes "felt" - using my hands - very good when I wore them too, but that's a different issue.) I had a very clear idea of what I was doing. It would have been impossible to try to educate them about the proposed changes in order to get their prior permissions, so I just did them and they can tell me what they think after they can feel the results. I wouldn't go so far as saying "I rebuilt them from the ground up," because most of my changes were at the macro level. There were some cell-level changes, such as how they handle oxygen, but most of my work was at the organ and gland level. That was necessary because I didn't yet understand biology well enough to be able to design a working human body from the ground up, so I concentrated on systems that were reasonably independent. Previously, the lack of an Essential Chemical caused Gland A to release a hormone, which Organ B would detect, causing it to secrete a protein, which Gland C would detect, causing it to start producing something which would decrease the ability of Gland D to produce something else. The drop in the concentration of "something else" would trigger yet another organ to produce additional Essential Chemical. That's truly how haphazardly some of the systems in human bodies work. Provided none of those intermediary steps affected anything else, after the changes I made to my families' bodies, a lack of the Essential Chemical was detected by Gland A, which either immediately produced more itself, or if that wasn't possible, it sent a signal directly to the producing organ. I cut out the inefficient middlemen. I did that for several thousand systems, as well as adjusted other systems' sensitivity, responsiveness, increased the number of chemical and chemical combinations they could detect, increased the range and quality of their outputs so they could address a wider range of situations and their outputs matched the needs more accurately, etc. I was particular thorough with the systems involved in repair and replacement. For example, my families would be able to stay fit with 10% of the normal effort human bodies require. Their brains also came in for quite a lot of attention. I didn't supercharge them. I'd do it if they asked, but what I'd done would result in their feeling "sharp", like people do when they're having a particularly good day, except it was permanent. I improved their memories and a few other useful things, but most of my changes to their brains were with low-level software routines or improving their brains' electrochemical systems. I also added a small new part to their brains that would tap energy from the Universe in proportion to how hard they were physically working above their normal daily baseline. Working normally got no assistance, but if they were working very hard indeed, then up to 80% of their energy would come from the Universe. That would increase their physical performance and endurance when it was most needed. For Donna and Ava, I blocked that from happening when they're running, so they could continue to enjoy that sport. If they trained hard, they'd improve at a faster rate than before, but it'd still take them quite a lot of effort. A doctor would get heart palpitations if he saw some of the test results my families would generate now, but I didn't worry about that. None of my families would ever need to visit a doctor again for health reasons, and they'd certainly never need medical examinations for a life insurance policy. It's possible that they might be forced to take medical tests for another reason, say a Government requirement of some sort, but I'd just teleport their samples away and teleport in suitable replacements, or I'd manipulate the tests themselves, or alter the records after they were produced. All of those were trivially easy so my improvements to my loved ones' bodies weren't constrained by that issue. Knowing that they would always have a bodyguard mind looking after them meant I didn't have to worry about not noticing the need to do such things. I didn't have to ask them, "How do you feel?" because they all suddenly started telling each other and me. I came in for some sincere thanks, in proportion to the age of the person thanking me, especially after I told Prof and Vanessa to take their glasses off. When everyone had expressed themselves enough, I said, "I've tuned your bodies up quite a lot. Between that and having a bodyguard looking after your health, you'll never need to go to a doctor or dentist again. Not even a gynecologist when any of you are pregnant because your bodyguard's job includes making sure everything will be perfect during a pregnancy. Your bodyguard is a far better doctor than any team of human doctors will EVER be, let alone by the current medical standard. -- "Speaking of gynecologists, I've made an innovative change to the females' bodies. Your periods have stopped because you no longer drop eggs monthly. They'll stay where they are until you ask your bodyguard to restart your cycles. If any of you prefer to keep having periods, let me know and I'll put that system back to the way it was. -- "Even Donna's and Ava's bodies have been improved quite a lot, even though they were extremely healthy to start with, because most of the changes I made were improving faults in the way all human bodies operate. -- "Prof, all the damage that was done to you when we were dehydrated has been repaired and improved. You're now not only healthier than you used to be, you're healthier than any human of any age back on Earth has ever been, so you can relax about that. You'll easily live many thousands of years yet; millions or billions of them if you want to." "You're not joking about that?" checked Vanessa. I'd mentioned it to them before but my families hadn't taken it to heart. It was an unnatural concept and there were many major distractions going on all around them. This time my comment was listened to much more effectively because the adults were VERY aware of their sudden youthfulness. I confirmed, "No joke, Vanessa. I know the concept takes a while to sink in and it's impossible to imagine what living for millions of years will be like, but all of you can live forever. You won't get forgetful and inflexible like old people normally do because those changes are a consequence of age-related physical deterioration that will no longer happen to you. You'll be youthful physically and mentally for as long as you want. -- "Speaking of being youthful, I've boosted everyone's healing mechanisms, which means the adults here would rapidly become youthful looking as their age-caused damage is repaired, such as wrinkly skin becoming softer and more flexible. That would happen so fast that your bodyguards will have to slow it down substantially to avoid it looking suspicious. Especially in Prof's and Vanessa's cases because your bodies improving so much that you looked like you were twenty again wouldn't be acceptable to anyone. What I'll do is let you get ten or fifteen years younger looking over the next year or two, and after that hold you pretty much unchanging. At any time you can tell me if you want something else. Like if you leave town for two weeks, I could heal you quickly and you could come back and tell everyone you've had face-lifts and whatnot. -- "At the risk of wording this misleadingly, I haven't cured Vanessa's and Dad's inabilities to have children. Dad's vasectomy is trivially easy to reverse, as is your menopause, Vanessa. I can create fresh eggs for you and make all the other changes so there'll be no risk of Downs Syndrome or other age-related problems, and Prof's sperm count will be improving as an automatic result of the tuning I've given his body. I'm not suggesting either set of parents do anything about it quickly; merely pointing out that biologically speaking you can become parents again. You've got millennia ahead of you, so there's no hurry to decide that." That started a conversation about what we could do with our lives over thousands of years. I won't quote from it as it was a fairly silly conversation. They'd only just accepted the reality of living forever, and they were throwing out whatever thoughts first crossed their minds. One thing that did surprise me - I'm never going to claim to be an infallible god - was that Mom and Vanessa were both surprisingly interested in becoming mothers again. My tuning their bodies might have made them feel even more youthful and vigorous than I'd expected, or perhaps the motherhood instinct is more powerful than I'd thought. I'll wait until I've lived a few lives as women before I comment on that because it's doubtless cultural as well as biological. One part of the conversation that surprised me was Dad asking, "Mark, like you talked about duplicating the girls so you can have threesomes with them, can you duplicate me so two of me can have a threesome with Fely?" "STEVEN!" exclaimed Mom, even more surprised than me. I answered, "Ahh, this is something you should ask the house about when you're in your bedroom. Its memories aren't shared with the rest of me." Julia couldn't resist, "You're not embarrassed are you, Mark?" She'd asked specifically because she could see that I was embarrassed and wanted to maximize it. That's what girlfriends do. Nevaeh couldn't resist either - what with her being my girlfriend too - adding, "You're always telling me how wonderful sex is, and how sharing is best. Don't you want your parents to be happy? They should come to you whenever they want help with their kinky sex." Mom saved the day by telling Dad, "We'll talk about that later." Dad lost the day again by talking about it now. "I think it's a great idea. I feel fantastic and I'm sure you do too. What better way to celebrate our new youthfulness and the amazing lives we're going to have? Two of me will make it much easier to get you pregnant when we want to start a new family." Vanessa remembered my earlier talk about reincarnation and diverted the conversation nicely by commenting, "I think it'd be best if Prof and I saved having more children until we started again in younger bodies. I presume you can keep us together when you reincarnate us?" "Absolutely. I can pretty much do everything that doesn't involve changing Time. I'm not going to do things like speeding Time up, slowing it down, going back into the past to try to change something, but creating a couple of 25-year old bodies with your minds in them and with all the paperwork to support their legitimacy is child's play for me, as are all the other reincarnation methods I listed before. I can even give a few people memories of you as kids, to further support your new existences. -- "I was about to comment that I'd never separate you and Prof, but that might not be true. Remember that I can create duplicates of you, so if you wanted I could create two copies of you and place them in different parts of the world to live very different lives. That might be something you want to do some time in the future. The two of you who're together could visit the two soloists, meet their friends, and maybe even meet their spouses. That'd be extra amusing if I made you identical twins with your other self. It's a weird situation, but I can pretty much guarantee that you're going to be having lots of weird situations in your lives." That comment got lots of agreements from everyone, and the baby-making conversation resumed. Mom said, "I'm attracted to the idea of starting another family, but we're very busy with MAF and I can't see that getting any easier for several years." "You've forgotten how broad my abilities are now. You're assuming you can't do two things at once. There are several ways that's possible: you could make use of your Refuge home to house two or three copies of you and do much of your child rearing and MAF work there, or I could pair you up across dimensions and have one of you stay at MAF and the other one become a stay-at-home Mom, with your minds linked so you experience each other's lives. You could swap jobs periodically, but there's actually no point in doing that swap if I make the link intimate enough. There are many possibilities. -- "Second, you and Dad can have a new family in different bodies. I can create duplicates for you as a newly wedded couple who comes to Corvallis to settle. The older Mom and Dad can meet the younger versions and appear to become very good friends. You could even invite the younger couple to come and live with us, and if you're feeling particularly racy, they could share your bedroom too. The new couple will still be you and Dad, just in different bodies. I can give them all of your and Dad's memories up to the point the new bodies were created, and then have each person's memories remain distinct from then on, or have your and your younger selves constantly share memories, however you wish. We'll have to create a fake backstory for them to tell to other people, and I'd probably create memories of it for them to make it easier, but they'd remember this conversation and know they were really you. -- "I could also make MAF ten or even a hundred times more effective. I'd rather not make our lives too easy and I certainly don't want to be so direct as to alter politicians' minds to force them to be squeaky clean, but if you really wanted I could ensure investigative reporters were amazingly lucky at uncovering government misdeeds. MAF would be extremely busy for a year or three dealing with all those revelations, and then even politicians must be smart enough to clean up their act if they're getting caught over and over again. Once the Government cleans house, or maybe just when most of the crooks are gone, your workload will drop and you'll be able to leave MAF. -- "Whenever you think of something you want, you should have the mindset that it's almost certainly possible. I can move Heaven and Earth to make things happen for you. All you have to decide is if you really want it." Carol asked, "I could start having a family with you now, without waiting until I finish school?" "I was hoping you'd raise that issue, darling. I can think of several ways of making that happen. I could easily get the State Government to change the minimum age to seventeen..." Donna leaped in with, "Make it sixteen please, Mark. Just in case I want to have sex in the next year." Donna turns sixteen in a few days. The families chuckled, as we were all getting progress reports from Donna about her already active sex-life. ^ [Donna's sneaky but interrupted attempt to have sex with Chuck had been almost a year ago. I'd excessively scared her off having sex with other guys and had spent several weeks educating Donna on its emotional perils, and then Mom had taken over Donna's sexual education. For the first six months of that, Donna had been sexually grounded in punishment for the Chuck incident, other than her occasional sessions with me. Donna had been a very wise and good girl during all that time, not even pushing to have the time reduced. When it had expired, she'd been given permission to date. Because of the amount of sexual activity at our home, and because Donna had matured well, the permissions she got from Mom and Dad quite rapidly worked their way around the bases, and she'd been allowed to give guys home runs for the last couple of months. She'd lost her outside-the-family virginity a week later, at the tender age of fifteen years and ten months. She'd wanted sex, so had picked an experienced senior who'd had no problem whatsoever with the idea of bedding a 9th grader like Donna. He'd had a fantastic time, but Donna had gotten what she'd expected: much poorer sex than she was used to. Despite his requests, Donna didn't go out with him again, instead duplicating the experience with another senior and then with a 25-year old guy she'd picked up. Her fourth conquest was a guy in her own grade that she liked. He's head over heels in love with her now, because that's what happens when a guy lies on his back and has a girl like Donna show him what she can do. He must be doing something right - or maybe Donna is - because Donna has dated him several times since. My little sister is growing up.] ^ Some of that internal conversation's wording is awkward. That's because "internal conversations" aren't nearly as internal as they used to be. There's usually only one mind 'installed in' each of my bodies now, so internal conversation are with other Mark-minds who want to chat with me. They could be anywhere else in the Universe, including in different dimensions. They tend to be Marks in a similar situation or who are intending to have a similar situation soon, but that's only a loose tendency and often not the case. I wrote "I', "there", "you", "us" and "we" above, as seemed appropriate, even though they all referred to "me", to use the large definition of that. It's further confused because quite often one of the remote Marks will control my body, taking my resident mind for a ride. That used to happen far more often than not when I had multiple minds in my head, and that they're out of my head now makes no difference. If one of them wants to move my body for some reason, that's nearly always fine with me, because he is me. It's a confusing situation and English doesn't really handle it well. Just be thankful that this autobiography isn't reporting all the conversations that "I" can hear, because there are billions of them, quite a few of which aren't in English, or even in Human. As is implied by our guessing about Donna's motives, we're not reading our families' thoughts. With very few exceptions, we don't read anybody's thoughts, human or otherwise. It's simply more interesting not to, and in my families case, more polite too. "Consider it done, Donna. Eighteen is a ridiculous age of consent anyway; sixteen is far more sensible. -- "Carol, I've been thinking about our having babies too, and I'm ready, willing, able and eager to be a father with you whenever you want it. Much more now than previously because I can absolutely guarantee our safety, that the baby will be very healthy, and that we'll never be too busy doing anything else to do a good job because we can be available 24/7 just by creating duplicates of ourselves. How about this as a plan: In four months we'll make love and you'll conceive. I can guarantee that'll happen the first time we want it to, or I can make it as uncertain as it normally is with people, if you prefer that. Assuming it happens immediately, then you'd be due two months after school finishes, but I'll make sure you won't experience much discomfort and that you don't have any trouble at or from the school, so you'll be able to graduate normally. What do you think?" "Oh boy, that's quick." ("Oh boy" is an expression Nevaeh frequently uses whenever something unusual is happening, which seems to be more usual than not in our lives. Carol and Nevaeh spend a lot of time together, so they often use the same expressions now. We're all using it more than we used to.) "I'm not sure I'll be ready that soon." "Putting a date on it does make it seem scarier, but there's no need to worry about being ready. I can duplicate you, Mom and Vanessa so the three of you can be at Refuge and do nothing but talk babies for weeks on end, if you want. You and your duplicate will be linked, so you'll learn everything she learns. She can read books on the subject and do online research too. It's a bit naughty, but I can create duplicates of baby experts without asking them first. They'd never know because the duplicates would be in Refuge with your duplicate and I wouldn't be linking them to their originals. I'd give their duplicates some false memories so they'd be happy to help educate you. I can also provide extremely realistic babies for you and them to use as teaching aids. I can even put your mind in the baby so you can tell yourself what you think about your practice attempts. That's not realistic about the baby's emotional or intellectual reactions, but it might be useful for some physiological issues. -- "I can even copy knowledge and memories from women who've raised children and put them directly into your mind, but as a general rule I don't want to do that because it makes things too easy." You can be damned sure I'm going to be doing that for myself though. I've got a phenomenal number of fields I need to be an expert in so I have to take shortcuts. If Carol agrees to become a mother with me, a few of my minds will 'suck the brains' of everyone who might be useful, to learn all they know about baby and child development. Those Marks won't share that knowledge with the rest of us in the normal way, instead keeping it to themselves and supervising all the Marks that are dads. That will give most of us the pleasure and challenge of being a parent and will also minimize the chance of us doing a poor job raising our billions of children. I will generally prefer to learn things for myself, but there will be many circumstances where reading minds is useful. I'm also happy to cheat when I'm just after knowledge that I'll use as a prerequisite for something else, because that doesn't ruin the challenge or enjoyment of the larger task, such as when I quickly learned Cantonese so I could talk to Lily and her parents. -- "However it's done, you can definitely be ready in terms of the knowledge you'll need. You can be the most well prepared mother there has EVER been. The only issue is whether you'll be emotionally ready to start a baby in four months?" "I think so. What do you think, Mom?" Mom answered, "I think you should think about it for a few days and discuss it some more before you decide. There's too much else to get used to now." "Okay, I'll do that. I think I'll want to do go ahead though. I've wanted to have babies with Mark for a long time." My girls and I, even including Donna sometimes, have discussed our starting a family. It was accepted that Carol would be the first of my girls to get pregnant. Nevaeh and Ava have expressed considerable interest in following closely in Carol's footsteps, depending on their personal circumstances at the time as they might be too involved in something else whenever it is that Carol starts the ball rolling. They'd have to be pretty heavily involved in their something elses though, since both are quite motivated to have babies with me. My godhood changes the timing issues considerably. Now there's no time limit to our lives, which means the girls can delay becoming mothers for as long as they want, even millennia. On the other hand, I can easily solve every problem that hinders them acting immediately. I want Carol and me to become parents soon, but don't have such strong paternal feelings with Nevaeh and Ava. I still want to with them, especially with Ava, and I love the idea of our raising a family collectively regardless of who the mothers are, but I'll leave Ava and Nevaeh to decide when they each want to join in. I figure it won't take them long as they've often talked about how much fun it'd be to bring up babies and kids together. Ava doesn't have much direction in her life, so I think she'll be the most likely to follow Carol into motherhood. Nevaeh has got some ambitions. Two ambitions actually - careers in the art and the textiles/fashion fields - so motherhood was less likely for her. She'd immediately do whatever I want, but I want her to do whatever she wants, so I imagine we've got a circular conversation coming up soon. All things are possible, and I truly am ambivalent because I will be experiencing "all things" across all of my lives, so I will let Nevaeh and Ava choose for themselves. Some of the religious propaganda I've been exposed to all my life seems to have sunk in because I don't want to bring up kids outside of 'matrimony' (talking practically rather than legally). In my future I will probably raise kids under all sorts of weird circumstances - anything and everything will probably happen far enough ahead and on different planets, plus obviously things can be very weird when I'm different species - but for now I want to keep my children and their mothers close. Julia, Carol and I had given Ava her half-red ring three years ago. Since then she has become even more loved by us. I couldn't imagine her leaving us now, especially because if she wants to experience life away from us, she can do that and still stay with us. I imagine all my families' members will diverge via duplication many times during our long futures. Emotionally, I can't imagine Ava ever wanting to be out of our lives. A full blood-red ring is coming her way soon, I think. I'll talk to Carol and Julia about it first, but I have no doubt about how they'll answer. I'm guessing they'll want to wait a few days before we propose to ensure Ava's memories of that day will be distinct from today, or maybe my girls will surprise me, as they've been known to do. The situation with Nevaeh is more complicated. We've known her for a year and we've had highly successful relationships with her over that time. It would be appropriate to give her at least a half-red ring soon- or even a full-red one if my wives want to, which is easy to imagine - but I've created a morally complicated situation because of the mind-games I've subjected her to. I don't have any problem at all with the changes I made to her mind just a few minutes ago. I'm perfectly happy to take responsibility for those because they'll make her life immeasurably happier than if I'd let her flip out because of her nonsensical Christian brainwashing. What worries me is that our relationship with her was built on an initial lie. It was such a powerful lie that it distorted her personality considerably, so we're not living with the 'real' Nevaeh. Living with her day-by-day doesn't cause a moral quandary because each day can be taken as it comes, but getting half-engaged or married is asking her to commit her future to us. Asking her to make such a serious decision seems immoral since she's not the real her and she understands the situation so inaccurately. I'll definitely have to talk this issue over with the rest of my families. I'm sure Julia will quickly dismiss the issue because she's so biased in my favor, but I can imagine Carol being concerned over being fair to Nevaeh, and I can't guess how the parents will react. I can't undo the effects of what I've done because so much time has passed, so I can't create a 'fresh' Nevaeh to make the decision fairly. I'd like to say "I won't do it again because I've learned my lesson," but my future is clearly going to include many more manipulations, so the lesson I'll be learning will be about how to better think through the consequences of them. I imagine that Nevaeh will stay in our lives and will even marry and have children with us, because what I can offer her is unbelievably more wonderful than a normal life could ever be, but the discussion is still necessary - probably in just one of my dimensions initially with several billion Marks listening in carefully to learn the lessons, and to see if it'd be beneficial to repeat it in other dimensions. I suspect it will be worth repeating because one of the things I'm thinking of doing is to offer to let Nevaeh decide whether or not I should 'fix' her sister Grace, and in what ways. I know Nevaeh despairs and worries about Grace, and would love for her to be a good girl, so my girls will soon experience what it's like to have the responsibility for decisions to manipulate people. That's probably such a valuable lesson that it or something similar should be provided to them in every suitable dimension. Neither Julia nor Donna have expressed any interest in becoming mothers in their foreseeable future - and Mom has expressed some interest in Donna not becoming one - so they'll get the fun of being aunts. Several times over I suspected, if Carol, Ava and Nevaeh all becomes mothers for more than one child each. Plus imagine what the big maternal get-togethers in the Communal Refuge will be like! My kids are going to have some VERY weird experiences growing up. I could see that the other girls all thought Carol's idea was a wonderful one for her. They were encouraging Carol, plus Nevaeh and Ava were also showing some personal excitement. Julia was also excited, but she was also getting turned on too, so I suspected it was because she was starting to think of some of the implication of my having godlike powers, power being Julia's aphrodisiac. The next time Julia and I are alone, she'll have a LOT to say! Julia tends to have very big ambitions, so it'll be interesting to see what she thinks up, how well her ideas mesh with mine, and how she handles her disappointments when they don't. I don't know if the girls truly realize that there are very few constraints on their wishes now, and that we can do almost anything we want, such as being full-time parents as well as pursuing full-time lives outside of parenthood. After graduating from school, Nevaeh could do pursue an arts or textiles career path, or both, because she could leave her baby with a duplicate Nevaeh in Refuge during the day or when she was studying in the evening, so she'd be her own babysitter. I could even have two more identical Nevaehs knock on our door one day with a story - backed up with ample evidence - that the hospital had mixed up some babies sixteen years ago. Nevaeh's Mom would even remember that she was surprised about only delivering one baby when the doctor had previously told her that she was probably carrying triplets. The new Nevaehs could get to know us, move in with us, and then one could do an arts career, the other a fashion career, and the third be a mother, while they shared each other's experiences. LOTS of things are possible! Some tweaking of people memories and suspicions would be required, but it wouldn't be a big deal. Or I could just link three different dimensions' Nevaeh's together, each living a different life. Likewise for any of us whenever we want to do more than one thing at a time, whether for a few minutes or for a lifetime, although the latter will be done without too many repeats of the Long-Lost Triplets Tactic because that'd quickly get too silly and it's more fun to find different solutions. Our education, careers, social activities and every other aspect of life wouldn't be the least bit restrained by being a parent of newborn(s). It's very convenient having a god in the family. Speaking of being a god, in some dimensions I want to try bringing up my kids as gods, to see if they can grow into having that much responsibility. A person with a good sense of responsibility almost necessarily has a very good character in other respects too. Those of my children that are brought up this way will have amazing mental powers, with the kids unaware that their powers are provided by their invisible bodyguards. The bodyguard minds will read their charges' minds and do what they wish, provided it's not irresponsible. The kids' abilities will start weak and grow stronger provided they're used well. If the kids misbehave, they'll lose their power entirely for a week, and then have to restart at a reduced level. As it's very likely we'll be bringing up several kids together, and maybe even group many dimensions' kids together into one community, there'll be plenty of peer feedback on their use of, or loss of, abilities. It'll be very interesting to see how their moral growth is affected, and how they integrate into normal human society. This wasn't the time to discuss that idea, and it's probably best not to do it with our first batch of children anyway, as I suspect the mothers will be too intense and nervous to allow their precious babies to be treated so unusually. I am interested in trying out my idea at some time though, as it's possible that children raised that way might make even better gods than me. I don't imagine that I'd ever abdicate my responsibility, but I can imagine appointing them stewards of individual species or specific volumes of the Universe. Thinking of a community of kids makes this a good point to mention that I can easily arrange for my kids to be cross-dimensional twins or not. Carol's and my firstborn, for example, could be identical in every dimension, different in every dimension, or some of each. That's another issue that we'll need to discuss at the appropriate time. Mom's advice to Carol started bringing the motherhood discussion to an end, and I let it tail off rather than mention some of the issues that I'd thought of. A few minutes later I asked, "Is it okay to proceed with the Grand Tour to Vanessa and Prof's bedroom now?" I saw several agreements, so I jumped us there. ------- Chapter 425: Refuge's Williams' Bedroom and Some Unnecessary Apologies Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) The layout of Vanessa and Prof's single-level bedroom was obvious at first glance, so the females immediately set about exploring it. Prof paused to joke, "I used to think you'd already shaken up our lives as much as possible, Mark, but you caught me flatfooted by giving me my leg back and making my becoming a father again possible. The reincarnation possibilities are even stranger." "There are EVEN stranger options, Prof. Donna loves the idea of having one of her minds inside a pegasi foal, but their minds are quite humanlike and their lives are simple and easily comprehended. I could do something much more exotic for you. I could insert a copy of your mind into a technologically advanced but truly alien species, one that has a totally 'alien' perspective on reality. If you think understanding females is hard, you should try experiencing some of the species I'm studying now." "I don't know about going that far, but I'd very much enjoy a much more thorough version of that quick jaunt you took us on." "That's easily provided. I can make a duplicate of your mind keeping the two of you linked, then one of mine can spend as long taking yours around the Universe as you want." "Just my mind; not my body as well?" "Bodies would have to be hidden, protected from the environments, and they wouldn't fit into some of the small places I'd show you. Going without our bodies is far easier. I can make minds independent of bodies and then we can go almost anywhere. All I'll need to do is provide you with your own sight blob and a few other senses, depending on the situation. You'll find the whole experience very distracting so I suggest we wait for a day or two, and do it when there's nothing much going on around your original mind, perhaps while it's lying in bed one night. -- "By the way, one of the improvements I made to all of your bodies was to eliminate the need for sleep. You can fall asleep if you want to, but you no longer need to. Nor will the quality of your thinking diminish at the end of a long day because fatigue no longer accumulates. There are quite a few little changes like that, but it'll be easier to list them once when everyone is back together again, after the females finish their exploration." Prof said, "I'd better join them, seeing as this is my room." Dad asked, "Can you include me in the alien tour, please Mark?" "Sure. I didn't know you were interested in things like that?" "Not as much as you and Prof, but I'm still curious about them. From what you've said, there's no reason not to go, is there? I'll still keep doing whatever else it is that I'm meant to be doing, especially if you take us at night when we'd normally be asleep?" "Yep, although you and Mom might be celebrating your regained youthfulness. You're going to find that you're both much more energetic than you used to be. That's going to pay dividends in the bedroom." "I can already feel that I've got more energy. We're amazingly lucky to be your parents." "There's been a HUGE load of luck involved in all of this. So much for your and Mom's lesson that we get what we deserve out of life. I don't know what someone would have to do to deserve becoming God of the Universe, but it's for damned sure that I didn't do it. That's not gonna stop me from taking full advantage of it though." The females returned, gushing as they came. They were once again impressed by my skillful interior decorating. I may be a god, but I'm a male one, so I sidestepped the risk of a boring discussion about that by saying, "Thank you. It doesn't really matter as I expect you to think of your own changes. You can experiment as much as you like just by asking the house. We should go outside now to see the grounds." I opened the door and led the way. Given my attitudes to both decorating and furnishing - which are just as bad as each other, if not worse - I thought the grounds were the best part of Vanessa and Prof's bedroom. By itself, the bedroom isn't anything particularly unusual, other than it not having any other rooms connected to it. It's roughly square shaped, with three sides of the bed part of the bedroom being mostly glass. The fourth side is behind the headboard, and contains the closet and en-suite. Like every other room in Refuge, it has better-than-top quality building materials, wall coverings, drapes, light fittings, etc., as well as the same sort of 'magical' tricks that Mom and Dad's bedroom has. It has some semi-magical tricks too, such as their bedroom mind's learning their preferences for things like whether the Williamses prefer to wake up to the view or have the drapes still closed. It wouldn't even matter if they have different preferences since their bedroom's mind can send different images to each of them. The Williams' bedroom is built on the southern side of a low, slightly sloped hill, which is now covered with highly fertile topsoil. I've done some landscaping so there are several acres of different styles of garden all around the bedroom, but when they're lying in bed, Vanessa and Prof's primary view will be a large rose garden, roses being a particular love of Vanessa's. The two exterior walls of the en-suite are floor-to-ceiling, super-clear glass, as there's no one else on Refuge to worry about having privacy from. Calling the walls "glass" is an easy description, but not really true as the walls aren't real walls. They're invisible forcefields, not created by me personally the way my NP forcefields are, but by a technological trick I picked up from another civilization. They resemble glass though, so Vanessa and Prof will think they are unless they look very closely. The spa bath and large shower are both built against the external 'walls' so their users will almost be part of the flower garden that's planted around that corner of the building, especially as I've engineered the walls to allow the scent of the flowers to permeate into the en-suite. Outside of Vanessa and Prof's bedroom are many paths meandering through the garden, seats in its nicest spots, little streams, some open picnic areas, etc. I took the families around some of them, while instructing Vanessa on how she could look after several acres of garden. "I took a guess about what you'd like to see in your garden, but I'm sure there are many ways you can think of to make it better suit your taste, whether planting some pansies beside the path or creating a large fountain with Michelangelo's David standing in the middle of it. -- "You can make the house do as much or as little gardening work as you want. If one day you decide you want to move the locations of the ponds, which would be a great deal of very physical work, tell the house and it'll do it for you. As that example implies, you can make any changes you want. You can wipe everything that's here already and start from scratch if you want. The house could create an entirely new planet for you if you asked for one, so no amount of gardening work is going to make it sweat. You can use the house to reshape the hills, to pick up leaves, and everything in between. -- "It's up to you how much time you want to spend working in the garden, and whatever needs to be done beyond what you've managed the house will do for you. You might want to order it to be a little tardy with some of that work, so it provides you with some motivation if catching up on needed gardening would give you some satisfaction. -- "You can also have as many copies of yourself involved as you want. If there's a large project that you'd enjoy doing so you don't want to delegate it to the house, but it needs to be done quickly, then ask the house to create a dozen Vanessas for you. You might only be able to manage links to two or three of them at a time, but in some existential sense you might think it's better to have the Vanessas enjoy themselves on a big job than have the house do it instantly, even if the Vanessas get canceled later in the day. -- "Another thing you might want to do is when you're in DC and you're feeling office bound, ask your bodyguard to create a linked duplicate of yourself in your Refuge garden so you can vicariously enjoy its gardening. Or you can send yourself to Refuge and have the duplicate take over the MAF work from you. It doesn't matter which way around you do it, as the indirect experience you get from your copy - or it gets from you - can be made more real just by concentrating on it more or by asking your bodyguard to make it so. -- "I previously told you that the access to Refuge was through the elevators at our home. It's best for visitors that way as it's discreet, but it's not a required rule. If you want to do something else like create a duplicate of yourself in Refuge from DC, then that'd be perfectly fine. What would not be fine would be asking your bodyguard to do something like create multiple duplicates of yourself in the middle of Corvallis, or any other showing off; that comment being mostly aimed at the younger members of my audience. Your bodyguards will refuse if you ask for anything like that. And when it gets you alone, it'll probably put you over its knee and spank your bottom." "Can we ask it to help someone?" asked Carol. "Because that help might be noticeable." "Helping others is an issue that's worried me too. I'm already giving each of you all the help you need, plus even more benefits, so obviously helping others is possible. My current thinking is that I don't intend to help anyone outside of this group, other than the possible inclusion of The Boys. There might be a few exceptions, such as if Nevaeh got a call from her parents one night saying they were trapped in their house and it was on fire. I'm willing to arrange help for our very close friends if it can be done secretly, but I don't think I should do any more than that because I think it would harm humanity. -- "I've thought about doing experiments on the Earths of three different dimensions. I'd create bodyguards for every person. In one dimension the bodyguards would save them from everything which could physically harm them. In the second dimension it'd save them from accidents or malicious actions of other people, but not from their own deliberate foolhardiness. In the third dimension the bodyguards would be like the second type, but only if they could prevent the problem in a way that looked natural. Then we'd wait several years to see what happened. -- "My guess is that human societies on all three Earths would become total disasters. I also briefly thought about having a fourth experiment in which only a random 10% of the people got a bodyguard, but that'd so obviously lead to jealousy, anger and then violence, that I gave up on the idea immediately." "Why would the first three be disasters?" asked Ava. "Because the vast majority of humans are greedy. Greed isn't always a bad thing because it motivates us to try harder, but you know greed also causes many problems too, especially when people feel safe from retaliation, which they would if they had one of my bodyguards looking after them. -- "If I gave bodyguards to those Earths, too many of those people would want more of whatever they value: money, power, etc. They'd abuse the gift for personal gain, such as by robbing banks knowing they couldn't be shot or injured. There'd be other people who'd try to study and control their bodyguards. There'd be religious leaders who'd try to take credit so they could gain status, power and money. There'd be all sorts of greedy behaviors like those. -- "You should realize that bodyguards are an EXTREME gift. Every time someone shot a gun at someone else, the victim's bodyguard would save them. That would be infallibly repeatable over and over again, and people would get seriously freaked out by it and by all the other ways bodyguards would have effects. There'd be religious riots and wars. I'd be protecting people, so the conflicts would be very strange ones because people wouldn't die, but the attackers would very quickly adapt to that. They'd target infrastructure rather than people as a way of stopping the supply of food and water so people would start to starve to death. The bodyguards would have to respond by doing more than just defending people, such as supplying food and water, and no doubt medical help too when the attackers started using bioweapons or dirty bombs. -- "Before long, passively defending people wouldn't be enough, and I'd be forced to control the attackers. That's much more complex than it seems because people often attack out of necessity, or with moral justifications like self-defense or the belief that pre-emptive self-defense is necessary even if it's not, or with honestly good intentions that have been corrupted because someone has given them false information. Motivations are rarely one-dimensional; greed, revenge, misunderstandings and many others are often mixed in and then complicated by information being so distorted, which would make it extremely difficult for me to judge what to do. Stopping an attack might be a bad thing to do, but letting it go ahead might also be a bad thing because situations are often so messed up that no good can come out of them. I'd be forced to choose though, which would make me responsible for the consequences. I'd be forced to take more and more responsibility, and to exert more and more control to live up to it. After a while, I'd be the unwelcome, unwanted, invisible dictator of those planets, and everyone would hate what had happened to their world. As Dad would say if Mom wasn't listening, it'd be a clusterfuck. -- "Despite that risk, I do sometimes help people. I occasionally visit hospitals invisibly and if I find a VERY good person, then I might adjust their body so they recover from whatever's wrong with them. But that occurs only in secret and very rarely. I can't do it often because it'd be noticed and I'd have to stop it or something like what I described would happen with the bodyguard experiment could develop. -- "So, in answer to your original question, Carol, if any of you asked your bodyguard to help someone else, for the greater good it'd almost certainly have to refuse." Vanessa said, "I agree. If you exercised power to help random people then you'd be taking on a responsibility that could easily become quicksand. You could achieve far more good by inventing a cure for cancer. I assume you could do that?" "I can remove cancer cells with my mind so I've not yet bothered to learn a pharmacological way of doing it. Researching things like that is on my list of things to do in preparation for Julia's finishing her BBA." Ava said sorrowfully, "What a pity you couldn't do that a couple of years ago." "Yeah, it's a VERY big pity. I won't normally help people, but I certainly would've helped your parents the moment I'd seen there was something wrong with them. -- "Your parents are also one of my biggest temptation to manipulate Time. I can't risk it because there's a very real danger that I could break the entire Universe and kill everybody, but I'd love to be able to bring your parents back if I could. I'm sorry, Ava, but there's no hope of that happening." I could look back in the past to see their bodies, so could easily recreate those, but couldn't do that for their minds because my access to information like that only exists in the present. (I mention more about this topic in a later chapter.) "None?" "I'm afraid not, sweetie." "Could I meet them if I died?" "Unfortunately not. That door is closed to you because there's nothing after death. When people die, their minds die. There's nothing left afterward." I know what minds are, and I can effectively 'see' them, as the Universe shows me what it's doing at that level. I've seen what happens to minds when their owners die, and all that happens is that they die too. Carol and Julia gave Ava hugs, while I changed the subject with, "If we walk up this little hill we'll be able to see Prof and Vanessa's study. I've placed your study within walking distance of your bedroom. There's an easy path between them but we've come the wrong way for that so we'll cut over the top of the hill instead. You can teleport to it just like any other room, but I thought you might enjoy having a little walk through the garden to it. If not, or if you'd like it to have a different type of view, you can tell the house to move either room, as I'm sure you understand by now. -- "Vanessa, speaking of moving buildings, I should mention that your garden comes equipped with a very cooperative garden shed. If you want to work in an area of the garden, tell the house and the shed will appear somewhere handy. The house's attention extends outside, so if you're anywhere near a building, the house will hear you. Your bodyguard can always relay messages too. -- "If there's more than one gardener, each of you can have your own shed, and they'll disappear again after you've finished with them. They contain all your tools, gloves, etc. If there's anything missing, just ask for it. There won't be any pesticides because you don't need them on Refuge, and if you instruct the house to optimize the growing environment, you won't need any fertilizers or similar products either. If you want to alter the weather and soil conditions that a plant or area of plants experiences, talk with the house about it. Each species is getting a tailored program at the moment, so you might want to review that with the house at some stage." Julia asked, "Do we talk with our bodyguard out loud the same way we talk with the house?" I was amused at the accuracy of one of my expectation: that Julia would be the first of my families to get into the swing of ordering my minds around. "The short answer is yes. There's another alternative that I'll tell you about after we've checked out your parents' study," as we had just arrived there. ^ Prof and Vanessa's study was just a somewhat bigger and better looking version of their study at home, without having any real functional difference. They'd put everything they wanted into their Corvallis study, so I'd pretty much just copied that functionality. At Corvallis, Prof's and Vanessa's computer systems had their own peripherals to avoid one of them delaying the other, but there was no need for that here. I explained, "There's no need for a printer because when you click the 'Print' button for a document, the stack of pages will appear almost immediately somewhere handy to you. Exactly where depends on how cluttered your desk is. If you print multiple copies, there'll be multiple piles; stapled or bound if you tell the house you want that too. The house will never run out of paper or ink, so that'll save you some inconvenience. -- "There's no scanner either. Just hold up some pages or a book, and tell the house, 'Scan these, ' or 'Scan pages 100 to 200.' A window will popup on your computer's screen asking you for the usual folder and file name information. As soon as you've entered that, the file will be ready for you. -- "If there's one thing my abilities make me very good at, it's duplication, so photocopying is even easier. Just tell the house what you want copied and it'll do it for you instantly. There's no size restriction, and for no extra charge it'll do full-color copying, collating, stapling and binding. It can do better than photocopying, as you might have noticed by all the books in this room being the same books as you've got at Corvallis, even down to having the same notes you've written in the margins. If you want to lend someone a copy of one of your books, tell the house to make an exact duplicate of the book, so you won't have to worry about getting it back. -- "Whenever you encounter any sort of problem, ask the house if it can think of a solution. For example, Prof, your books sometimes have their margins crammed with notes. If you need more room than the margins provide, the house can insert white space into the text, as if the book were a Word document and you inserted some blank lines in it. If it later duplicates that book so you can lend it out, it'll revert the copy to its original form with your notes being placed on loose pages inserted into the appropriate places. -- "Another duplicating function that might be useful is that you can tell the house to duplicate publications that meet criteria that suit you, from PhD theses printed anywhere in the world, through to each month's issue of Playboy, or in Dad's case, The Lawn Care Digest..." "I can get my magazines that way too?" asked Julia eagerly, because she gets a crazy number of fashion magazines, i.e., more than none. "Of course. Tell the house what publications you want, and you'll have each one as the first few of that issue are rolling off the press." All the girls were excited by that prospect. They often complained about how long it takes some issues to get to them: "How can we stay up to date with the latest fashions if the important magazines take two weeks or more to arrive!" The way I'd deliberately described it, my girls would not only be up to date, they'd be ahead of almost everyone else. Here at last was a seriously useful benefit from having a boyfriend who was a god! Being a fairly smart god, I kept that comment unvoiced. I added, "I can provide two additional services for you. I can either translate all your foreign magazines into English, or I can make you fluent in as many languages as you want. I could do that instantly, but I generally prefer to accelerate your normal learning process." I may "generally prefer" the non-instant approach, but the girls were very eager to immediately understand French, Italian and even Japanese. They've repeatedly told me that Tokyo is an important fashion capital. Now that I'm a god, that still makes no sense to me since Japanese girls look so different from European-descended girls, although I must admit that Julia does look surprisingly Japanesey (Japaneseish? Japanic? Sheesh! One of these days I'm going to do something about this stupid language.) Despite the debatable importance of Japanese fashion, and the undebatable importance of French and Italian fashion, I answered my girls request that I immediately give them mastery of those languages with, "When I said 'I generally prefer to accelerate your normal learning process', I meant 'generally' to mean 'unless there's an emergency.' Even though you probably think otherwise, so you can read your fashion magazines isn't an emergency. If you want to learn foreign languages, do what everyone else does and I'll make sure you pick it up several times faster than normal. You still have to make the effort." "But..." butted Julia. "No buts, Julia," I rebutted. "You know that instant gifts wouldn't be good for you for a whole variety of reasons. You've got LONG lives ahead of you and you need challenges. You'll enjoy learning together, including Prof if he wants to learn Modern and Renaissance Italian. If you learn those, Prof, you'll be able to read the original manuscripts of the historical mathematicians you're interested in. I can provide perfect copies of those, and could even translate them for you, but I imagine you'll enjoy reading the originals more. Now you all have as much spare time as you want to pursue your hobbies. -- "Before we get into upgrading you with abilities that other people will notice, let me say a few general things. First, I should apologize that I've done things that I should've asked your permission for first. Changing the sight blobs I had watching you into bodyguard minds gave them more information of a private nature, and even more rudely, I've been making and canceling duplicates of you and I did more than I implied when I improved your bodies..." "No one cares, especially not the way I feel now," said Prof, confidently putting his new foot down. Proximity told me that no one else minded either. If anything, they thought I was being silly; being the only guy living with several girls, I've had quite a lot of experience at identifying that emotion in most of them, Nevaeh being the only one that almost never feels that way about me. She seemed too accepting of everyone else expressing it now though, so maybe the recent changes I'd made to her might not work out as well as I'd first hoped. Perhaps I'd been better off in some ways when hiding behind the Christian God. "I'll continue anyway, because there's some new information I want you to know included in what I'm intending to say. -- "The bodyguard minds don't share anything they learn with any other of my minds, except in the case of an emergency or your requesting they pass a specific message on. They're like highly discreet butlers, so if you have a conversation with your bodyguard and then continue the talk with me later, I'll have no idea what you're talking about." I could easily have the bodyguard send me his memories of the conversation, but I thought it'd reassure my families to see that I didn't follow those conversations. Maybe in a few years it won't be an issue anymore, and then I can make our interactions more efficient. -- "When I started using sight blobs to watch over you, we agreed that they wouldn't observe you inside our home property, but now that bodyguard minds are much more discreet and can do so much more for you, I'd like permission for the bodyguards to watch over you 24/7. You can decide individually..." "You don't have to ask me Mark; do whatever you think best," said Nevaeh. Everyone else agreed, and I came in for some teasing for being so cautious in the way I'd asked them. "Thanks everyone for trusting me. You'll..." "{Raspberry}," from Julia. "Of COURSE we trust you! When have you ever done anything selfish." "I live with four wonderful lovers - five now, counting Donna - which some guys..." "That's not selfish; that's deserved. You should have a LOT more than five! We need to do something about that because five is a ridiculous number for someone as incredible as you are now. What about Alondra in my study group?" "I've already got several hundred billion girlfriends." "What! Oh yeah, but that's just other versions of us and you said there's a trillion of you, so that's a TERRIBLE average. The other Julias and I DEFINITELY have to do something about that." "Except that averaging is the wrong approach. Remember that each of my minds experiences everything all the others are - except for bodyguards and house minds - so I'll often be making love to tens of millions of girls at the same time. I've selfishly got an incredible quantity AND quality already. Not to mention that now we can make as many duplicates of each of us as we want, so I expect some pretty wild sessions to result from that. How'd you like to have half a dozen Marks in bed with you?" "It'd KILL me!" "No problem. I'd take a copy of your mind just before it blew up; then I'd recreate you, give you a minute's rest, and we could do it all over again. It'll be amusing to see how many Julias we could get through in a single night." "Haha. I think I'd go insane before the night was up." "We'll put that plan on a temporary hold then. Back to the serious topic I was talking to you about, which was about the ways I was rudely playing fast and loose with all of you. My final point on the bodyguards being with you at home is that it means you can ask them to do things for you that normally get done at home. Cook meals, make beds, do laundry, or whatever. Changing the sheets on our bed at Corvallis is something we have to do quite often, but that'll no longer be the case. I'll tell my bodyguard to make sure the sheets are always fresh and clean, so we'll never have to change them again." Ava asked, "You have a bodyguard too?" "Nearly all my bodies have a bodyguard each. The bodyguards have had their minds changed so they're very dedicated, don't get distracted or bored, enjoy their job, etc., so it's easier for me to have a bodyguard looking after my body than consciously having any concern about its safety myself." Prof asked, "I'm surprised the fate of your body matters to you. Couldn't you recreate it if it's killed?" "Easily, and you're right that I don't care about my body for its own sake. My only concern is laziness: it's easier to stop an attack from happening than get everyone to accept that I'm still alive after an attack succeeded. That'd be an annoying amount of trouble. I like to be lazy if I can, which is why I'll be giving my bodyguard some standing orders for keeping the Kids' House spic and span. -- "Each of you can talk with your bodyguards about what you want. They're full-service bodyguards so you can ask them for anything. And just in case any young schoolgirls here think they'll be able to get their bodyguards to do their schoolwork for them when school restarts, then I'm not at all sorry to say that you'll have no such luck. The bodyguards are MY minds, and I wouldn't do that for you, so they won't. -- "I'm not against using them to do chores because we've all got plenty of other reasons to develop good work ethics and senses of responsibility. Julia's got truckloads of both of those already. Donna's got her existing horses and her new pets that she needs to learn about and help. It seems that some of Carol, Ava and Nevaeh will have motherhood or aunt-hood coming their way if not very soon, then not long after that. -- "Ava, you'll probably have motherhood coming too, but you might have to rely on Carol and Nevaeh to do most of the preparation for that because I want you to learn about the ecology of this entire planet. I made countless changes to it only a few hours ago, and I almost certainly failed to realize all the consequences of them. I want you to learn about the entire ecology and bring any problems to my attention." "But that's a HUGE job!" "Yes, but there's also a huge number of you. Remember you can go to the Communal Refuge whenever you want to meet ten thousand other Avas. You can ask your bodyguard to send them all a message about helping with the job. I know other Marks are asking their Avas to do the same job already, so you won't be working alone. Plus you can duplicate yourself here and get a great deal of help from your bodyguard too. It is a big job, and an important job, but you've got enough resources to do it well." "Are there any books about any of the animals or plants here?" "None whatsoever. Even worse than that, life on this planet doesn't use DNA the way life on Earth does, so it's VERY alien. Nearly all of it is carbon based and oxygen breathing, the same as on Earth, and many of the same ecological niches have similar functioning species in them, but there are an enormous number of dissimilarities. -- "If it wasn't such an important job I wouldn't ask you, but I've created Refuge in billions of dimensions and our families are going to use it a great deal, so making sure its ecology works affects billions of people." More to the point, it'd give Ava a highly enjoyable and motivating job. She'd spent a couple of years mostly treading water since her parents had died, only slowly getting some momentum going. Admittedly there was very little reason for her to, as she certainly didn't need a job. That just made it more important to find something fun for her to do, such as this project. It would light a rocket under her firm ass and give her a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction, especially because I'll make sure she discovers many ways in which my changes could be improved. I'll undo some of my very high quality work to ensure that. I know she'll love the job and would've started poking around this planet anyway, so I had no compunction about pushing her into doing more of it. -- "While you're doing that job, I want you to think about whether being the Earth's foremost alien biologist appeals to you. I'm not sure when it'll happen, but chances are I'm going to have aliens visit Earth sooner rather than later. When that happens, humanity is going to need all sorts of experts it has never needed before, such as people who can understand alien biologies. I can easily arrange for the aliens to prefer dealing with you." "I'm not smart enough for anything like that. I was just hoping to be a mom with Carol and Nevaeh." "You can do both. I'm just suggesting it as an option you might want to think about, not as something you have to do. If you get a thrill out of learning about this planet's ecology, then there's so much fascinating stuff to learn and so many more alien planets for you to explore, that you might find it better to get some formal education in the subject. -- "You don't have to worry about being smart enough. When I improved everyone's bodies a little while ago, that made everyone sharper. I didn't increase your IQ as such, but now you're capable of doing your best thinking all the time, and I think you'll find that's good enough. -- "You don't have to study the aliens in a way that would make you a boring scientist. You can study them with photography, the way you do with the flora and fauna in your wildlife area at home. Imagine some of the stories you could capture on film of the lives of even just the aliens I've shown you already. You get a lot of fun at home learning more about your wildlife subjects so you can photograph them better and more meaningfully, and I'm sure that'd happen here and with other alien environments too. Remember that you can create as many Avas as you need for any job, so don't be put off by how big they could be." I'd introduced the alien biologist possibility clumsily, but I could see that comparing it to her micro-wildlife park at home worked well. Ava did get a great deal of enjoyment out of studying and photographing the species that lived there. Now her 'park' could be the entire planet of Refuge, and if she wanted it to, the entire Universe. That should keep her busy and happy. If she does get into photographing Refuge's local wildlife (not that it's "wild" to us), I'll tweak the big cat species that lives here to make it incredibly reluctant to be photographed and good at avoiding it. I'll even make it impossible for her to see them for several months but provide her with clues that they exist to excite her curiosity. That'll ignite Ava's competitiveness and give her a fun challenge. -- "And there are several ways you can be both a mother and an exobiologist. One easy way is for me to pair you up with an Ava from a very similar dimension and you can flip a coin for who gets which job. I can link the two of you so you share each other's experiences all the time and can talk with each other about what you're doing. I could also arrange it so you could swap your minds back and forth whenever you wanted, so you could take turns in each role, or the two of you can share the mothering work together when the baby is awake, and then you can go hiking around Refuge together when its asleep or when a third Ava is looking after it at the Communal Refuge. -- "Lots of things are possible from now on, so don't think of reasons why you can't do things; just tell me what you'd enjoy and I'll try to find ways to make them possible for you. Regardless of what you're doing tomorrow, a duplicate you and me can come back here tomorrow morning to start exploring. I'll explain the major food chains and what I understand about the various species' biologies, or you can tell me what you'd like to see, and your duplicate will remember everything we're doing." Julia added, "It doesn't matter how busy you are on Earth, Ava, because Mark will always be able to make a duplicate of you here. You can spend as much time exploring as you want." Ava acknowledged, "It does sound very interesting." I clarified perhaps somewhat colloquially, "Your lecturers would flip their lids, wet their pants, and cut off their right arms just to see what you've seen already, and you've barely seen anything yet. You'll be amazed at how marvelous some of the species on this planet are." "Okay, we'll do it. I'm just scared of how much there is to learn." "We'll start by finding out if you enjoy it. With 10,000 more Avas just from your Commune group, I don't think you have to worry about how much there is to learn. -- "I've finished explaining bodyguards. I should apologize for their invading your privacy, but you understand that they don't really do that, so we'll move to the next thing I should apologize for, which is the duplicates of you that I've created already. It was rude of me to create and cancel duplicates of Donna and Prof without asking their permission first, but it's somewhat of a chicken and egg situation because you'd have had trouble appreciating what a non-event it is without a demonstration of it happening to some of you." "None of us are worried about that, Mark," insisted Julia, not bothering to ask anyone else. "I can already think of several things I want to do with my duplicates. It's a great pity I can't have several duplicates on Earth though." "I don't think the world is ready for a potentially infinite number of Julias, but there are some types of duplication we can safely do: You can have as many Julias in Refuge as you want, which will be very helpful when college resumes. You can duplicate just your minds and send those to do things for you, such as attending a lecture your body has to miss because you're double booked. You can create duplicate minds and put them inside a newly created body that doesn't look anything like you. Later on when you have a business, I'll make your office connect to an office in Refuge so you can make duplicates inside it and get much more work done." "What if I was inside a different body and I got asked for ID?" "Every time any of you ask your bodyguard to create a body, it'll also create a new bodyguard to accompany it. The new bodyguard will make sure you're not asked for ID, or it'll fudge the results of the check, or whatever else seems easiest." With mounting excitement, Julia checked, "Can we create as many of those fake people as we want?" "Yes, but I doubt you'll find practical uses for more than a few at a time, especially because you can link with only one or two other minds without getting too distracted. I can expand that capacity in the future but I want to do that gradually. Please don't get carried away with abilities like that, Julia. Your bodyguard will normally be compliant, but it'll put its foot down if you're being frivolous." "I won't be frivolous." "I'd be more reassured if you promised not to get carried away or excessive, but I'll leave that up to your bodyguard to manage at the time. -- "My last semi-apology is for when I improved your bodies outside of Mom and Dad's new bedroom. I might've gotten somewhat carried away because I improved quite a few things: -- "You don't need sleep now, and you won't get physically or mentally tired at the end of a long day. You can still sleep if you want to, especially as going to bed is a good way of getting some quality time with your loved ones. -- "I've also improved several of what're colloquially called senses. You've now got exceptionally good senses of time, direction, balance, rhythm and also a great head for heights - which, for some reason, the 'sense of' terminology doesn't apply to. Probably the main benefit of those is that you'll be much better drivers now because your judgment of time, distance and speed have all improved substantially, as have your reflexes and coordination. That'll particularly help you, Julia." Julia had (past tense) low physical coordination and had been a poor driver. She'd already had a couple of minor accidents, and preferred not to drive if she could avoid it. -- "Your sense of color is improved too, even for the females. I've increased the number of proteins your eyes can produce and narrowed the color gamut they each apply to, so you've got greater color discrimination than you used to have. I've made the relevant changes to your brains' deciphering of those signals too. You probably haven't noticed that because you're in a totally new environment under a slightly different colored sun, but you'll appreciate the differences when you get back home." There's a vision improvement stage beyond fine-tuning proteins that I'll not offer to my families until they've got used to the more important changes. I'd experimented on my self and the changes worked well, although they took some getting used to. Humans are mostly trichromatic, having three types of color receptors in their eyes, for red, green and blue. Other animals have various numbers of receptors: zero (if the animal is blind), one (totally color blind, e.g. sharks), two (partially color blind, similar to cats and dogs), three (most humans), or four (most birds, reptiles and marsupials, many species of fish, and some spiders. For all those examples, their fourth receptor type usually recognizes ultraviolet light). The functions of the receptor types for humans is carried on our X-chromosome, and about 50% of women are tetrachromatic (having four receptor types) because of differences in the receptor codings on each of their two X-chromosomes. The differences may be small so are more of a logical distinction than anything else, but they can sometimes be large. Guys, only having one X-chromosome, can't become tetrachromatic that way. We aren't being disadvantaged compared to half the women though, because very few women get any benefit from having four types. Their eyes are capable of perceiving color more accurately, but their brains are nearly always unable to process the additional information. What I have done to myself is add three new receptor types to my eyes - in the violet, yellow and infrared frequencies - and have added the new color channels to the optic nerves and subsequent brain hardware. I can consciously turn the extra information off when I wish, if it's confusing me, but it's normally quite helpful. In case you're wondering about my choice of new frequencies, I chose yellow because humans aren't good at resolving shades of it. The common mnemonic for the colors of the spectrum is "Roy-G-Biv", which coincidentally and conveniently capitalizes the color of receptors humans have. Notice that Green and Blue are adjacent, but Red is separated by orange and yellow. Humans judge how yellow something is by the amount of red and green light seen, whereas I now judge it by the amount of yellow light, which is more accurate. Similarly humans are poor at discriminating shades of indigo and violet, but I am better at that now because of my violet receptor. I have no need for ultraviolet as it's mostly used to see blood, urine and to distinguish flower and bird plumage more accurately (flowers and feathers often have pigments that reflect ultraviolet light). I can always create a color-shifted sight blob if I have a specific need to see in the ultraviolet. The usefulness of seeing infrared is obvious, so much so that I'm astonished that it's so rare in the animal kingdom, other than in snakes which actually use a separate "pit organ" rather than their eyes to 'see' it. In summary, what humans see as "RoyGBiv" is now "FRoYGBiV" for me (using "F" for infrared and continuing to use the upper- and lower-case convention), so I see a wider range of colors, and can distinguish them more accurately. This is a good example of the sort of changes I can make to human bodies. I also improved my sight's low-light sensitivity, and also my senses of hearing, touch, smell and taste; and then I undid my taste improvements as they diminished my enjoyment of more foods than they improved. I continued, "The bad news is that Dad and Prof are going to have to learn the names of a whole lot of new colors, but to compensate them for that trouble, a certain part of the male anatomy that's been known to let guys down at frustrating times will no longer do so for them. It's under your conscious control now, Dad and Prof. It might be just as well you don't need to sleep, haha. -- "None of those things are what you expected to get so I probably shouldn't have done them, but I can see you're not angry about my excesses. There's one biggie that I held back from giving you without asking first. How would you like us to have a private type of telepathy with each other?" They weren't in immediate agreement. I could see they didn't really know what I meant. Vanessa asked, "Reading each other's minds?" "Nothing as invasive as that. What I'm planning is more of an internal email system just between us. I'd add two very small parts to your minds that will act like inward and outward email boxes. To send a message, you'll mentally compose and address it, and your minds will send it to your outbox in a way you'll find just as easy as sending a verbal message to your mouth. The outbox will send out a little signal to your bodyguard that there's a message waiting to be sent. Your bodyguard will read your mind but ONLY the outbox area. That's partly what that area is for: so you've got control over what thoughts of yours are read. Your bodyguard will send the message to the bodyguard of the person or persons the message is for, and the receiving bodyguards will put the message plus the name of the sender into the receiver's inbox. The receiving person will become aware of anything in their inbox just as easily as they sense anything else. They'll understand it in much less time than it takes to speak something because it's not limited by mechanical constraints. -- "Like you can send different types of files as email attachments, you'll be able to do that with this version of telepathy. To start with you'll probably find using verbal messages easiest, like you're talking on an internal cellphone. Because Nevaeh is so visually oriented, she'll probably be the first of you to become adept at sending visual images and even little movies. None of you have had any experience at conversing with all your senses, but I'll show you how, and you'll quickly pick it up. For example, if Mom sends me a message asking me what I'd like for dinner, I could send back a movie of her carrying a large serving plate into the dining room with a roast chicken on it. I could even include my memory of the smell and taste in my message, at the risk of confusing her slightly because people experience smell and taste in a surprisingly variable way, especially when one of them loves a particular food that someone else finds distasteful, although that's often by external conditioning. -- "You'll also be able to use this system to communicate with the Refuge house, so you won't need to make your teleportation and other requests out loud anymore. It'll also be very useful for talking with your bodyguard back on Earth, even if you're in a crowd of strangers. Emergencies won't be nearly as worrisome as they used to be because of the capabilities of your bodyguards, but communicating with them will be useful for all sorts of other purposes, such as asking them to do research for you. Any time during the day you need to know something, you can ask your bodyguard and it'll create a copy of itself that'll go away and do the necessary research, putting the information into your mental inbox when it's obtained." "What if I asked for the solution to one of the famous mathematical conundrums that the world is struggling with?" "Your bodyguard might or might not cooperate, depending on the circumstances. Presuming that it knew or could find out the answer - which isn't automatically the case because some of those conundrums are really weird - then if you wanted it just for your own interest, or if we'd previously discussed your becoming a world-famous mathematician, then it'd probably provide the answer or inform you that the problem is insolvable if that was the case. If you were trying to show off to your peers, your bodyguard would probably start a conversation with you to make sure you're ready for the long-term consequences of your action. It'd almost certainly agree if you persisted, unlike if any of the girls asked for answers in the middle of an exam. That'd almost certainly be refused unless there were very strong extenuating circumstances. -- "The 'technology' of this system will also allow multi-way conversations, and once you start a conversation with someone, you won't need to keep specifying the name of the recipient for every message because your bodyguard will be smart enough to work that out for itself. After a little practice, using the group telepathy will become second nature to you, as easy as talking and listening but a great deal more convenient and capable. It'll take me only an instant to give you the capability and I can just as easily take it away again, so who'd like to try it for a few seconds?" Everyone was interested in trying it, with various degrees of eagerness, with the most eager being those who trusted me the most. After some brief instructions we were soon sending each other messages, usually silly things like my sending each of my girls an image of an arrow through a throbbing Hallmark heart, with my and their initials glowing in gold letters on it. A couple of minutes later, Mark to Everyone Here: Julia to Mark: <{Raspberry}.> The others were more polite, but no less insistent that they wanted to keep their telepathy. Me to Everyone: A sometimes inconvenient aspect of telepathy is its silence; in a group, the messages directed to one person aren't heard by the others, so they can't follow along. Julia's raspberry was sent to me, so no one else knew about it. That wasn't a big loss in that case, but in many types of discussions it can be very important that everyone follows along. The easy solution of sending all the messages to everyone in the group often doesn't work because the messages are often responses to specific statements by someone else, or are intended to draw a response out of someone specific. Because there can be a complete absence of body language cues when telepathy is used, it's potentially very confusing. I've had a great deal of experience at it though, and have developed several useful protocols. I'll introduce them once my families are used to the basic process. Because my bodyguard minds are managing the entire system, including knowing the contents of all the messages, they'll easily be able to train my loved ones and intelligently carry out what is intended. Another possible ability I can give my families once they're comfortable with all the current changes, is full telepathy with, and/or mind of, anyone they want. It's actually quite easy. Every consciousness, including non-human ones, has a w-address and I can order the Universe to create a link between any two or more w-addresses, even if they're in different dimensions and are different species. I can easily keep a link open while preventing any synchronization from happening, which automatically aborts if the volumes are too different anyway. To get telepathy working between minds that are not virtually identical, I'll put one of my minds in the middle of the link to handle the translation process. Only my minds are flexible enough to interface with different types of minds, although some of those are SO different that I don't yet understand them well enough to be a translator. I can even set it up so the participants at the ends of the link don't know that one of my minds is between them. As far as they'll be able to tell, they'll be communicating directly back and forth with each other. Like the Refuge and bodyguard minds, my telepathy-enabling mind wouldn't share what it overhears with the rest of me - unless something important came up - and after the conversation was finished, the mind would cancel itself. Mind reading is even easier, as it's just a one-way transfer of what's in one mind. That's how I've learned some of the things I've quickly needed, such as learning Cantonese. I'm not intending to use mind reading much as it's generally more fun to learn things the slow way, but it's good to have it available for when there is a time constraint. It'll be interesting to see how much and with whom my families use it. Will Donna want to read her boyfriend's mind to find out what he really thinks of her, and will Mom let her. As a group, we'll have to develop our own moral rules for things like that, and many other ways we could potentially abuse other people. One expansion of the telepathy system that's easy for me to do is to give it to everyone on Earth, but make it only work when the messages are being sent to me. In other words, they'll truly be able to pray to their new god. I can't imagine anything worse! I mention it only because it's theoretically possible and actually easy. I might do some reduced versions of it under some circumstances, e.g., as Kram's priestesses advance up the hierarchy they'll gain better access to me, and I might give it to some individual people temporarily if they're doing something important for me. Julia: Everyone Here: (Everyone sent a variety of messages, but it'd be too tedious to reproduce them individually so "Everyone Here: " is a summary of their agreements, just as "#All: " used to be for my internal conversations.) Mark: Because of the huge amount of research I'm doing, I'd invented some useful ways of improving computers' display functionality. I'd added it to Prof's and Vanessa's machines, which the house will teach them about later. I'd also improved their computers in other ways, such as their hard disks having effectively infinite capacities and almost instant response times. There weren't as many such improvements as you might imagine. Windows is so inflexibly restrictive in what it can do and how it expects the computer's subsystems to work that when I'd improved one part of it, often several other parts became broken. After beating my head against a brick Window, I'd given up trying, as the existing machines worked well enough for now and I'm not really interested in computer stuff. Building something from the ground up would wait as I was hoping that I'd find an alien species who'd invented a decent computer operating system that I could filch, adapt, and put on a Bit Torrent site. Failing that, when Julia and I start our new company it might come out with some revolutionary hardware and software designs, because many alien species had some interesting versions of computers. I teleported us to Refuge's version of the Kids' House. ------- Chapter 426: Refuge's Temporary Castle and a Dinnertime Conversation Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) In our Peoria Road and hilltop homes, Julia had designed my bedrooms and studies to ensure that any visitors would know how important (Julia thought) I was. They were usually referred to as "Mark's bedroom" because it only took a single glance for anyone to tell that they were primarily the bedroom of a male, although the viewers' opinions would change when they were far enough into the bedrooms to see the contents of the en-suite or closet. It had briefly - VERY briefly - occurred to me to make my bedroom in Refuge a very modest one. After all, visitors would have most of their memories wiped when they left so what was the point of having something fancy? The point was self-preservation because Julia would kill me if I didn't have the most overwhelmingly impressive bedroom imaginable, and then she'd redesign it anyway. To make her happy with my initial efforts, and out of self-preservation, I'd gone over the top in designing my own. Imagination and practicality were the only constraints on my design. Unfortunately my imagination isn't good at thinking of truly original ideas, but I quite enjoy adding nuances to other people's. One idea I'd seen and liked many times in the past, and which I thought would be grandiose enough to keep Julia happy, was the common fantasy image of a castle floating in midair, so that's what I'd done. The castle itself was magnificent: It wasn't made of the old, dark stones that aged castles look like these days, but of white marble that glistened in the sunlight. It even glistened somewhat more than was natural. The top ten feet of the walls and their crenellations, the top ten feet of each tower, and the stone framing for the main gate, were all made of black marble that glistened like obsidian, because that made a dramatic visual contrast. The roofs of the main buildings inside the walls, as well as the caps on the top of the four corner wall towers, were either dark red or burgundy, depending on your gender (the males not yet having learned any new names). It had many colorful flags and banners that flew from the high points. The walls at the rear of the castle and their two towers were much taller than the front wall and towers, permitting the internal buildings - which were built very high - a view over the wall in the front and all but the rearmost sections of the sides. The castle was on a floating 'island' two miles by two miles in size, with the castle in the middle. Facing the front of the castle, down its right side was a cliff that dropped fifty feet to the 'ocean'. That ended less than a mile away so it wasn't much of an ocean, although it acted like one. A deep forest ran across the hilly rear of the castle because I like natural forests. It thinned out and became gardens and open land coming down the left side of the castle and across the front, except where the small river flowed out of the rear forest to form the moat and a lake in front of the castle. And a medieval fantasy castle obviously has to have fantasy creatures, so there were all sorts of them, from four red dragons circling overhead - color coordinated with the roofs to please Julia - two huge griffins guarding the gate, nine-foot tall troll-men patrolling the grounds inside the castle, with elf archers manning (elffing?) the battlements. The staff inside the castle were my versions of pixies - three-and-half-foot tall males and females; aged from teenagers to elderly, depending on the seniority of their positions. The teenage female pixies were VERY cute, friendly, and interestingly dressed. Even the young male pixies were handsome, although more completely dressed. The only non-pixie staff member was the chief cook, a very fat and jolly human woman. None of the creatures were real, their bodies and minds being my creations. I was particularly proud of the cute ones. I'd teleported us to a spot a couple of hundred yards in front of the castle, to give everyone a good view of it. Once they'd had a few seconds to take it in, I said, "I had a feeling that Julia would like my bedroom to be impressively masculine, and I thought this might fit that bill. It's not just a bedroom but a repeat of our Kids' House as every room in the castle is functional, although for most of them it's just for visual effect..." I was interrupted by a fanfare of trumpets as my household troops marched out to provide us with an honor guard back in. All very silly really - certainly over the top as a doorbell - but if my girls didn't like it, it was easy enough to change. I took my families inside and gave them the Grand Tour. I explained that I'd built distance distortion fields into the long hallways and staircases, so they looked normal, and walking near either wall was normal, but the closer to the center a person walked, the more the distance shrunk. Walking in the exact center would require only three or four steps to traverse every hallway or staircase, regardless of its length. The location of a group walking together was deemed to be that of the slowest person. That trick made walking around the very large castle far more convenient than it would've been otherwise. Teleportation still worked if the person commanded it, but some people might prefer walking. The rooms we'd use most of the time were in the top level of the main building, with the master bedroom and my study in two different towers. That way all our rooms got great views of the castle's grounds and of the land it was flying over. I must have overdone the masculinity - what with all the weapons and shields hanging on the walls, the giant bear skins on the floors, etc. - because I could sense that my girls weren't enamored of my creation, so I said, "Obviously there's no way I'd deprive my ladies of the pleasure of designing and decorating our new home on Refuge, so don't take the castle seriously. It's half intended as a joke, and half intended to show you that almost anything you can imagine is possible. We'll use it while you're working on its replacement, after which I'll probably convert it to a mobile lab and use it to store specimens for Ava's research into the ecology of this planet. -- "One of the rooms a couple of levels down is an architects' studio for you." It was now; it hadn't existed a few seconds ago. "It will provide copies of any books and magazines you want, can build 3D models of any ideas you've got, and can help in many other ways too. Remember that if you can picture what you want in your own mind, then you can use telepathy to send it to each other and to the studio's mind. I look forward to seeing what you come up with." "Are you sure you don't mind?" "I'd only mind if you put up with something you weren't happy with. Plus I know what a thrill you'll get being able to create whatever you can imagine." [The Marks in other dimensions made sure to give the "It's a half-joke, half-imagination lesson, it'll do until you've designed our final place" introduction before they showed the castle to their families, to stop the girls being bashful about wanting to change it. I knew it'd take them months to finish my new bedroom, so I'd still get plenty of enjoyment out of my castle. Even when my girls had designed what they wanted, I could still keep the castle for myself and to entertain my male friends in. (Have I mentioned that the young female pixies are VERY cute?)] ^ Leaving my castle behind, I took them to the only other rooms that mattered in the main mansion: Refuge's Kitchen and Dining Room. Having learned my lesson, before showing them the kitchen's facilities I made the point, "As you've probably noticed by now, I'm not a female. Consequently I've never paid much attention to the design of kitchens. Obviously you can change whatever you want to change, no matter how minor or major." The two moms assured me it looked like a fantastic kitchen, which just meant that they hadn't looked closely enough to come up with a long list of changes yet. I explained the kitchen's key feature: "There are several different ways of getting meals in Refuge, ranging from your doing all the work through to your doing none of it: -- "You can cook like you do at home using the ingredients that are already in stock. The normal mode of the house is to replace everything that runs out, whether it's your perfume, fruit in the fruit bowl, or anything you use in your cooking, so grocery shopping is optional. You can also ask the house to provide you with any new ingredients you want for your cooking, such as a new spice, several Maine lobsters, or even a pre-roasted chicken scaled up to the size of a cow. I'm going to add some of that functionality to our Corvallis homes too, so our fruit and vegetables will always be on the point of perfect freshness. You're going to be surprised at the range of food we have available now, because the Universe offers some amazing possibilities. -- "This house can do none, part of, or all of the cooking. Doing none or all of it is self-explanatory. There are a couple of different ways you can take advantage of it doing part of the work. It can simply be a convenience, such as having the house peel the potatoes, make a sauce, or put the roast in the oven if you're not going to be home in time yourself. Or you and it can work together, which is a good feature if you want to learn how to cook a new dish. You can get the house to cook while it provides you with a running commentary and answers your questions. As I did in my floating castle, you can have the house personified as staff to give you someone to talk to, or you can keep it as a disembodied 'ghost' that will fly ingredients, knives and pots around magically. If you embody it, it doesn't have to be the fat, jolly woman I had in my castle's kitchen. It could be copies of yourselves, a host or hosts from TV cooking shows, or even George Clooney and Sean Connery (Mom's and Vanessa's half-joking heartthrobs). I can copy anyone's personality and tweak it so they enjoy and are good at cooking for you. -- "Easiest of all is simply to ask the house to create meals ready to eat. It has sent copies of its minds to thousands of restaurants, caterers' kitchens and private homes all over the world, and now has over a hundred thousand Earthly dishes memorized, from PBJ sandwiches on freshly baked bread through to multiple course banquets. There's a menu system I'll show you when we have dinner, and we can order individually or share the same meal. I'm also compiling a huge list of alien foods which are compatible with our biology and which I'm guessing we might enjoy the taste of. We can try some samples some time, but I suggest we have a less exotic dinner tonight as most of our attention will be on our conversation. Speaking of dinner, isn't it about time for that?" When I said that the fruit and vegetable would always be fresh, that wasn't because I was manipulating Time in any way. I'd simply memorized the look, down to the molecular level, of perfectly ripe food. If it sat in the bowl for a few hours without being eaten, I'd cancel it and recreate a new one from my memory. I was actually lazier than that, only doing the 'work' when one was picked up, but that'll give you the idea. I also improved them in various ways, such as apples not having cores, fruit not having annoying seeds, meat being perfectly marbled with the best tasting fat content, etc., but those are all trivially easy and fairly obvious changes, once a flexible mindset is adopted. I'm also memorizing all the alien foods I discover that are biologically compatible with humans. I haven't got around to it yet, but I'll create copies of each of my loved ones soon but with my minds in them, and then they (or I?) will taste the foods to see which ones are preferred as I haven't yet learned how to predict that. Even taste-testing won't be perfectly accurate because psychological factors can have an influence - I don't care how tasty any of them are, I'm not eating anything's eyeballs! I expect the exercise will find some wonderfully delicious new foods for us, plus others which are enjoyable mainly because they'll have tastes we've never experienced before. The mothers had more questions about the kitchen, and they even got the house to rearrange the contents of a few cupboards, but we were eventually sitting at the dining table where I explained how to use the individual menus. Using the version of telepathy that I'd given them made it very easy for each of them to specify search terms to the kitchen's mind, inspect pictures of the meals, get tiny samples created on a toothpick for a sample taste, choose serving sizes, etc. It was internal and silent so we didn't intrude on each other's awareness and the kitchen's mind easily had enough capacity to talk to all of us simultaneously. Telepathy is quite handy. There was a great deal of dinnertime conversation, mostly about the miracles I could perform and my future plans. As one example, my creating the food for dinner led to the obvious question about my feeding all the people in the world who're starving to death. "I could easily materialize enough food for them - not even needing to start with loaves and fishes - but I have no intention of doing so. Making humanity dependent on me would be very bad for it and wouldn't please me much either. There wouldn't be any stopping point for solving people's problems and the dependency would eventually become total. I favor approaches that encourage humanity to solve its own problems. That's not ideal for the people that need help in the short term, but it's what must happen for medium- and long-term reasons. From my point of view, I don't feel that I owe humanity anything, but I do want to help it help itself. Top-down encouragement is so much better than giving handouts to individuals. Apart from anything else, with infinite power comes not just infinite responsibility but infinite guilt, and I have no wish to accept that burden. -- "I'm prepared to kick humanity's ass over many issues, such as starvation being fixable if greed is managed properly, and rapacious greed shouldn't be allowed at all. I can teach that using visiting aliens, me in the guise of some sort of god, scientific breakthroughs that give insights into the effects of that greed, and several other ways..." I described those methods in more detail to my families, more or less as written about earlier. -- "Once a decent amount of selflessness has been learned, I'm sure humanity will solve many of its own problems. The world can easily produce enough food to feed everyone. That people starve is initially just a distribution problem, which is just a matter of will and money. Selflessness will take care of that, as well as finding ways for those people to create above-subsistence lives. -- "I've been thinking about it quite a lot, and even though some of them must be disadvantaged by it, I intend to have a great deal of variation among the dimensions. Not just in how I teach lessons about selflessness, but even whether I teach them at all. I intend to let humanity's aggressive greed go unchecked in quite a few dimensions. -- "History has countless examples of societies wiping themselves out as a consequence of their non-sustainable practices, from Easter Islanders' destroying their much of their ecology through to the Roman Empire's success depending on the impossibility of never-ending military expansion. Humanity's current actions are non-sustainable in thousands of ways - so many and often so subtly that even I can't count them all - so it's in the same boat as the earlier self-destructive societies, although with the hope that science will somehow save the day, which makes our Government's anti-science stance an even greater folly." That is one of Bush's and America's greatest failures, in my opinion. Never has humanity as a whole needed science more, yet the president of the world's most 'advanced' nation (not intellectually advanced, obviously) advocates teaching 'science' from a 2,000-year old work of fiction, reduces R&D expenditures in all sorts of important areas, and deliberately damages science in a myriad of other ways. To make it far worse, a large proportion of our county's population are so ignorant and incapable of intelligent thought that they agree with him. God knows how people could be so stupid as to allow religion to be so dominant and destructive. -- "Mankind's greed was a beneficial trait back when more effort brought more reward - like Mr. Ug killing another antelope to take back to the cave for Mrs. Ug - but it's a potentially deadly trait now because resources are so limited compared to demand that if one group gets a resource, then other groups and future generations necessarily miss out. It's a rapidly degrading 'Us or Them' situation, which always bring out the absolute worst in mankind. -- "In those dimensions where I don't force humanity to pull up its socks it's predictably going to live down to my low expectations for it. As critical resources continue to be used up, there'll be even more naked aggression to control access to the remaining supplies, and that's bound to escalate disastrously. It'll be interesting to see how many humanities will be able to rise above their greedy, shortsighted nature, but I suspect they'll fail more often than not. In which case, it'll then be interesting to see how bad things get, and how the survivors manage to recover after the Collapse. -- "I'm generally not going to interfere much beyond making sure people have enough information. What they do with it is up to them, including if they choose to deny it and millions or billions of people die as a consequence. In the very long term it will benefit more people to let that happen so subsequent human history will contain a VERY valuable lesson about the dangers of short-term greed. That'll hopefully set them up for a much better medium-term future once they recover, although I'm sure greed and selfish denial will combine to teach its lesson repeatedly in the long-term future, as it did repeatedly in the past. -- "Or if a dimension's humanity does kill itself off, that would probably be better for that dimension's other species. I'm especially not going to take any preventive measures in all the dimensions that don't have any versions of you in them. Those dimensions will be my control group and will be left totally alone to follow their own destinies. -- "If I micro-manage humanity, it'll turn into planets full of greedy, demanding ingrates, which would be a terrible failure. Where I do make changes, they'll nearly always be at the large level, not the look-after-every-person level. I'll point each instance of humanity in a direction, then leave them to sink or swim as they determine for themselves. A rich variety of large-scale sink-or-swim scenarios is definitely the best way for me to deal with people. It guarantees a wide and interesting range of outcomes, and will teach me a lot about what works and what doesn't. I can probably repair very bad failures if I think they're mostly my fault, but I'm willing to let the worst come to the worst if that's what happens. I'm not opposed to individual dimension's humanity wiping itself out, and it's easy enough for me to re-seed those Earths if I want to, just by cloning another dimension's entire Earth surface and everything and everyone on it; the people wouldn't even know they'd been copied." The above speech wasn't given in one monologue; rather it was the summary of what I said over about an hour's conversation. There was quite a lot of debate about some of my opinions and positions, which I've not bothered repeating here. Vanessa was particularly probing - not disagreeing with me; just checking how much thought I'd given to various issues. I also talked about the other things I wanted to do, my two favorites being some sort of alien visit to Earth or a God making a very real and long-lasting appearance. "The reason I want aliens or gods to visit Earths is because I very much want humanity to be cured of its excessive arrogance. Superior beings - whether natural or supernatural - could do that very well. They wouldn't have to threaten humanity to make it draw together, just appear overwhelmingly capable and better behaved. I'll have them hold out some irresistible carrots and make a few comments about the appalling immorality of human behavior. -- "For example, I could have them check out the leaders of every nation and find that only the Dalai Lama was fit to be given command of a few highly advanced spaceships. If he and his fellow exiled Tibetans started zooming around within about fifty or a hundred light-years of Earth, discovering and using the wonderful resources available, and perhaps even colonizing some suitable new worlds I'd make sure were in range, and the rest of the nations of the world were told they wouldn't enjoy access to their own spaceships until they cleaned up their acts, I expect there'd very quickly be a great deal of act cleaning going on. I'd have to assign one of my bodyguard minds to the Dalai Lama but that's trivially easy. I'd extend his life expectancy too, which would REALLY piss off the Chinese government and would be another marvelous carrot." My idea of an aura-symbol floating in front of people's heads amazed and amused my families, but they liked it. I promised them they could access the news media of those dimensions whenever they were curious about how the various versions of that basic idea were progressing. They could visit those dimensions if they wished, to talk to their counterparts or other people. My families were even more amused although less positive about my plans for the god Kram's appearance in New Zealand, and the subsequent Good Works of his magic-wielding and -protected voluptuous priestesses. I had to admit that my sense of fun was dictating most of that plan. Despite my families' lack of enthusiasm I'll still do it. There are MANY billions of Earths, and I only have to do something in one of them for all the rest of my minds to enjoy it. My plan might have been immature - so I was accused - but I'd make sure it contains all the lessons I want to give, and it can mature over time as I do. I like some aspects of that plan so much I hope I don't mature too much for them. I explained, "Like most of my ideas, the intent is to hold up a mirror to mankind so it can look at itself and realize the need to make some major attitude adjustments. The aura-symbol would do that very simply. The priestesses would also be able to function as pins poking mankind in the butt to draw attention to problems that need fixing. They'd have enough power and protection so there'd be virtually no constraints on where they could go and what they could do, from nosing around Darfur to wandering through the White House. They'll be my own version of MAF, only more wide-ranging, amusing and with a MUCH better staff uniform. Not everything I do will have entertainment as one of its objectives - there are plenty of my minds doing interesting things already so I'm not lacking for entertainment - but there's no reason why I shouldn't entertain myself, especially because it's easy for me to repair any mistakes I make. If I get something badly wrong in one dimension, I can simply create a few billion minds and they can remove all the damage and make any other adjustments to every person's mind and the planet itself, so I can then restart with a Plan B. I wouldn't do that if the disaster is mankind's fault, but I will if it's mostly mine." My families gained a reasonable understanding of what I was capable of, and understanding of what sort of things I wanted to achieve with my abilities, so there was a GREAT deal of talk about what I could and should do. There was no hurry to implement any of it, so there was no sense of urgency about any of our discussion. There was one exception to my "no hurry" comment: one particular topic involving Prof and Vanessa that I wanted to act on quickly. I mentioned it, and it was definitely an issue that made them think. After the surprise wore off, they agreed to participate, as I'd been sure they would. (I'll describe it later.) Speaking of Prof, he LOVED the mathematics behind what had happened to me. He was visibly excited about the science aspects, and 'invisibly' - in my proximity sense - even more excited than he showed, but he was too polite to let it dominate the dinner discussion. Julia was in the same boat, although with a VERY different emotion uppermost in her mind. I gave them plenty of time to think of the possibility, but they never did, so when the conversation had a lull I started my teasing with, "Prof, I would've thought you'd be more interested in the science of what happened to me and what I know about the Universe, but you've hardly asked me anything. I'm surprised you find those subjects so dull?" Everyone chuckled, as Prof's excitement was obvious to all of us. Prof responded, "Haha. That's NOT the case, that's for sure! I feel like a giddy schoolboy..." "So why haven't you been asking questions flat out?" "I didn't want to intrude on everyone else's conversation." "All you had to do was ask me to create copies of you and me in another room so we can talk about science non-disruptively there, and have your current mind linked to your new one so you'll know what we're saying." "Gosh! I never thought of that. That ability of yours takes some getting used to." "Yeah. Luckily you'll have plenty of time to adapt to it. Whenever there's more than one thing you want to do that's not in public on Earth, then you can probably do them. Yes, Julia?" Predictably, upon being reminded of that ability of mine, Julia couldn't restrain her excitement and lust. You know how turned on she gets when I NP her body and float her in the air, and I described how extremely excited she got when she realized I could study multiple subjects with a remote sight blob while I talked to people at home. Anything that reinforces Julia's belief that I'm going to be a very powerful man with a world-famous future pushes her buttons, so you can imagine what she thought of me being God Of The Universe! It had only been her habitual assumption that she had to let me be social with everyone else that had stopped her from dragging me off to a bedroom where she could express her opinion of me. That restraint had now been removed, making this an ideal time to tease her. Julia eagerly asked, "Can you and I do that please? RIGHT NOW!" "Oh, what have we got to talk about that's private?" "We have to make plans! There's SO MUCH you can do now..." "Sure, but I thought we'd finished discussing my plans already?" "No! There are HUNDREDS of things we could do." "Wouldn't it be better to discuss them here so our parents can participate?" Despite Julia's claims to the contrary, she didn't need a private planning session with me. What she wanted was privacy to act on her excitement over how WONDERFUL everything is now. She'd be THINKING about her plans, but she'd be DOING something very different. The excitement was getting too much for her, so I cut my teasing short by saying, "Oh, you want SEX! You should've said so before. Don't you know that I quite enjoy having sex with you?" "Stop teasing me! Take us to another room." "Do you want a room with a whiteboard and photocopier so we can ... Ow! Haha." "Argh! You know what I want!" I created a duplicate of her and me standing back from the table where everyone could see us. My duplicate took her duplicate's hand, asking her, "Would you care to come to my room for an in depth 'PLANNING SESSION'?" The last two words accompanied by a very exaggerated wink that everyone saw. "Haha, yes please!" I'm a very obliging sort of guy, so the two duplicates teleported to a bedroom. I only took their bodies, leaving their clothes to fall to floor in the dinning room, which got me some laughs. Because I'm an obliging sort of guy, I assumed the Julia in the dining room would want to experience her twin's sensations, so I created a one-way link to enable that. After all, she hadn't said not to. I tweaked the naked Julia's body and mind so it rocketed the short distance straight to an orgasm, and through the link so did the also very excited Julia in the dining room. Julia's climaxes aren't exactly subtly understated, so everyone around the table was very entertained, even though they were surprised and their ears were hurt. After everyone's surprise had worn off, and even before Julia had recovered, the teasing started. Julia doesn't have a lot of shyness among our families, so we had to get our teases in quickly before she recovered her poise. When she could, Julia laughingly accused me, "You did that deliberately! There's no way the other me got that excited that quickly." "I thought it'd be a good way of illustrating one of the little risks of linking to your duplicates: you can get distracted." "Never mind that! Can you give us orgasms whenever you want?" "Sure. I'm VERY sexy and 'Earth Girls Are Easy'." No one in my families appreciates the same movies as I do, but they laughed at my joke anyway. Then I came in for some VERY appreciative comments from my lovers. They loved the way their lives were turning out. Prof decided to hold off on our private science discussion until after dinner. Despite my telling the females, "You can eat as much as you want because you won't put on weight or even get full," they still ate as much as normal. Habits that have taken on the veneer of virtues are hard to break, but they'll have plenty of time to work on that. Speaking of virtues, we later left them outside of five bedroom doors when a Mark walked into each of those rooms with two each of Carol, Julia, Ava, Nevaeh and Donna. A good time was had by all, especially by me. Also by me, me, me, me and the five pairs of females. If Dad and Mom got up to anything similar in their room, I didn't know about it. Without actually wanting to think about it, I like to think that they did. Sex is a weird thing - among its many wonderful characteristics - because the five versions of me had quite different emotional reactions to their five experiences. Look at the order I listed my girls in the previous paragraph. That's also the ascending order in which I got sexual kicks out of the experiences. Donnas' twinsome was VERY hot! With Nevaehs' and Avas' twinsomes being hot but less than with the Donnas. Julias' and Carols' twinsomes created considerably less sexual excitement. My feelings for my wives are more loving than sexual, so having two of them with each of me was more of a distraction than a sexual thrill. It was still a sexual thrill of course - let's not overstate the point! - but it was reduced to a surprising degree. Like I said, sex is weird. The sex got even weirder when Donna and Ava asked me to copy myself. Fortunately the other girls respected my delicate sensibilities, but I did what Donna and Ava wanted. It's a bummer - speaking metaphorically - to have been brought up to be fair. It was a bit too weird for me to enjoy it directly, but I did enjoy that Donna and Ava loved it. It occurred to me to wonder whether it was homosexuality or masturbation, but I decided it was just "pleasing my girls". Donna and Ava enjoyed it so much that I've got a feeling I'm going to get a lot more practice at having sex with myself. ------- Chapter 427: Options for W-Dimension Category #2 Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) Before I started describing the Grand Tour of Refuge, I categorized my family circumstances across the W-Dimension as follows: I am alive and well, with up to thirty two minds. I had been alive and well, but I'd told my families that I was going on a Voyage of Discovery. My body died in either the Casino Kidnappers' basement or the CIA's underground lab. I suicided as a depressed kid, either in the bathtub or menswear store. I remained alive and single-minded, or in a very few cases, dual-minded or newly eight-minded. Mark Anderson, and often his entire family, never existed. I've already described some of the many ideas that appealed to me enough to make my To Do list for the dimensions in general (visiting aliens, Kram's priestesses, etc.), and how I broke the news of my ascendancy and godhood to those families in Category #1. I'll now move on to describe what happened in the other categories. ------- There are only five dimensions in Category #2 - those in which I told my families, "I'm going on a Voyage of Discovery" - and their situation has a much greater urgency than for the other categories. So much so that I started taking action immediately I saw my loved ones' emotions in my proximity sense, only seconds after I acquired my godhood (thus, this chapter is starting chronologically earlier than for Category #1). I have acted so quickly because those families of mine were suffering because of two causes: First, and not particularly urgent, they were suffering from the pain of my leaving. My departures were recent and the emotional wounds still hurt them, so it was wonderful to suppress the bystanders' noticing when I suddenly appear in front of each of my loved ones. I had planned to announce, "I might have been wrong when I said there wasn't a way back," but in most cases there was too much squealing and kissing for a while. After the first expressions of surprise calmed down, they urgently phoned each other to tell everyone else that I was back, making them surprised again when they learned that I was back several times over. That made them VERY curious, and was my opening to start my explanations to them. I jumped them to our hilltop home (I hadn't discovered the planet of Refuge yet), leaving a mind behind in each location to render innocuous the memories of everyone who'd witnessed my arrivals and my loved ones' departures. Once we were all together in our home, I got them all excited again by showing them that my Voyage of Discovery had discovered how to be a god. I gave them heaps of reassurances that I really could take care of their problems (I already had thousands of minds researching what was causing my families to be so unhappy). The second and main reason I acted quickly is one that makes me very glad that I'm so powerful now: my families in this category are in deep and very worrying shit with the Government. Mom especially was noticeably thinner - and she hadn't been overweight to start with - I suspected from all the recent worry. After the Guardian Angel and I departed, several groups of people got increasingly troublesome. The religious, media and some other groups could be ignored initially, but the lack of divine retribution encouraged the Government to start expressing interest in my families, and the ever-stupid, ever-intrusive, legally powerful Government could not be ignored. Its intrusiveness started cautiously, but by now it has turned into a real threat for my families. Not for any longer though! Because the intrusive assholes didn't ignore my families, they will very shortly be praying for God to ignore them, but that's something they haven't got a snowball's chance in Hell of being granted. The assholes have made my five sets of families' lives a misery, so I'll be making the assholes' lives a misery in return, although the amount of misery they'll experience will be severely limited by the brevity of their remaining lives. The House of Representatives Special Committee on Resurrections was the first Government group to get nosey after I left, probably because they weren't obviously threatening, but the Committee is the least of it now. Several other investigations started: into the angel's attacks on military bases, into the civil disruption caused so many times in Washington DC, into the deaths the Guardian Angel caused, into the nature of the angel itself, and anything else the five Governments could use to persecute my families and as a reason for subpoenas and warrants to search through and seize everything they wanted. Three of the Governments have even started legal proceedings to get back all the money they paid us for their breaching the settlement contracts they willingly signed and repeatedly broke. Archangel Michael and the Guardian Angel greatly embarrassed the Government several times, and that embarrassment has turned into anger. That the Government was caught acting illegally so many times has to be blamed on someone, and who better than the victims. That slimeball Bush is right at the front of the persecutions, desperately eager to turn around the damage to his reputation caused by his previous fuck-ups with the three forms of angel (Majestic Countdown, Archangel Michael, the Guardian Angel), and his agencies' repeated illegal actions against my families and me. Of my five voyaging departures, the first three were seven or eight months ago, with the two most recent being just over two months ago. In the first three cases, the Government's arrogance has returned in full force and is being exercised with open aggression backed by an effective media campaign to get the public to distrust, hate and fear my families. So many branches of the Government are pushing the media bandwagon, with a lot of religious people already jumped onto it, that the general public has become convinced that something terribly underhanded must have been involved. The public's suspicion is deemed confirmed by the several escalating Government investigations. Various very noisy lobby groups are demanding those escalations and no one effective is arguing for restraint. The absence of any comeback from a Guardian Angel or other supposedly divine source has fully emboldened the Government in the first three dimensions, and is doing so in the last two dimensions that I left. If I don't intervene - which I'm damned well going to after I finish reassuring my families - I expect the path the five Governments are on would lead to their criminally prosecuting my families for several major crimes, and their being found guilty in order to make the Government seem innocent. That every one of the angel's attacks on the Government were in response to its repeated illegal actions is something that has been totally buried under political bullshit. As one indication of how bad it'd got, I'd been a shoo in for the Times "Person of the Year" in the dimensions I'd been resurrected in. I had 'won' in the last two dimensions the Voyager had left, but only because those Government's campaigns against my families hadn't got up to full speed soon enough to prevent it. In the first three dimensions I'd Voyaged out of, there'd been howls of protest from pretty much all the religious people in America even though "Person of the Year" isn't actually an award. It goes to whoever is judged the most influential "for better or for worse"; Hitler and Stalin were chosen in appropriate years, for example. Its not being an award had been a distinction too subtle for Christians to grasp, and they'd been howling for my rejection ever since my nomination had been made public. They'd howled so loudly that in first three Voyaging dimensions they'd forced the Times to delete me from the nomination list, even in the dimension in which the public had thought I'd single-handedly saved Washington DC from being nuked by sacrificing myself to God. Speaking of God, He had also been on the Times' nomination shortlist, but the religious people objected to that too because an ever-increasing number of Christians believed that everything I'd done had been the work of the Devil and demons, starting right back with Majestic Countdown's initially secretive leaks (to gain credibility for himself), and Archangel Michael's appearances in his clearly demonic trousers (OBVIOUSLY the Devil would have a big cock; that alone was proof of Evil! In retrospect, I'd been foolish to do that). Millions of idiots now believed I'd never been resurrected, but that Ron Fisher's gang had been taken over by demons for their alley fight and subsequent disappearance. A very common theory was that the gang had been conducting a demonic ritual in the alley, which had gotten out of control to let the demons loose on Earth, starting with a frenzy of bloodletting and then possession of the survivors' bodies. When 'Ron' had resurfaced, he'd really been a demon. Ron's being Black had made that theory's acceptance even easier. The religious theory was that Mark Anderson had never been resurrected, all that had happened was that the Ron-Demon had changed shape "as everyone knows demons can easily do." The mainstream Churches hadn't yet made a definitive statement about this new interpretation of events, but they were clearly much more supportive of it than the opposite possibility. Bush had no doubts, and he was loudly claiming, "Everyone knows I would NEVER have allowed Homeland Security to kidnap an innocent citizen, so those agents must have been demonically possessed. Agent Moran's death was obviously his final battle against a demon; that's why none of his shots hit a physical target and why there was no forensic evidence of an intruder." That Moran's death had occurred a few days before the gang had summoned the demons was a theory-invalidating logical impossibility, so Christians ignored it. There is an increasingly strong belief that everyone in my families is a demon. As quick as politicians are to blame someone else - which is VERY quick indeed - Christians are even quicker. In addition, because Christians are sure God is on their side and they're doing Right, many of them have even less regard for the law than politicians - which is VERY little indeed - so the Christians don't just blame but also condemn and then try to send back to Hell. That had been attempted a few times already, fortunately intercepted by our guards. With the legal, social, religious and other shit that's being thrown at my loved ones, you can imagine how horrible their lives are now. This is why I am acting so rapidly in these dimensions. The Anderson family has had no way of escaping the persecution, and nor do the Williamses in any practical sense, but Ava and Nevaeh could have fled from it. That would have been especially understandable in Nevaeh's case, as she wasn't as emotional or financially attached to us and most of her families' friends were religious and were putting more and more pressure on her parents and her. Both girls had stuck with us though, a decision which had to have seemed dangerously impractical until my reappearance. Generally speaking, and despite the jokes made on the subject throughout this autobiography, I don't want to be the Emperor of the Earth. It's not that I don't want to get bogged down dealing with all the minutiae, because I can create as many minds as I need for that, and could even change them so they enjoyed dealing with minutiae. It's simply that the job is so full of crap that none of my minds want to be exposed to it. I could keep my Emperor minds' experiences out of the super-network, as I do for bodyguards and house minds, but my desire to wall the Emperors off is better interpreted as an indication that I need to think of a better solution. It does need some thought, because I can think of several reasons why I should become Emperor of the Earth, or something like it: To STOP the abuse being directed at my families. I'm with them now to cheer them up and then get their opinions on what I'm intending to do, but unless they object strongly enough to change my mind, I am very shortly going to be giving their persecutors some VERY heavy, unmistakable lessons. I'd been frustrated at my inability to respond properly all the previous times the Government had behaved unacceptably: the DHS's intrusiveness and kidnapping of me, the CIA's torturous experimentation on me, the FBI's surveilling our property with the van, attic camera, UAV, and planting of bugs and gas canisters in our home; the Government's changing the law to steal many multiples of $215.9 billion from us; Cheney's CIA-led and increasingly intrusive "Surveillance Problem"; and the Government's lies about all of the above, especially their very recent lies and disgustingly self-serving (NOT country-serving) public campaign to imperil my loved ones. Many times in the past I had wanted to grab hold of the President and make him rue the several days that he'd repeatedly broken his word or done the dirty on us, but I hadn't had the power to do that safely back then. I can do that with impunity now and I'm very much looking forward to it. Not just out of frustration about the past and anger about the present, but also because I've decided that far too many people are irredeemably nasty and stupid. My actions on these Earth should have left them in a state of wonder and happiness about God's involvement. People should have taken that attitude and used it to make Good changes, but instead, the self-serving politicians had dirtied everything. Before I left on my Voyage, I made a big deal out of telling everyone that God would keep an eye on my families after I left, but people couldn't just carry on nicely; they had to get themselves worked up so much that they started fucking my families over. There was no national merit in their attacking us like that - the nation would have been better off working to fix the types of corruptions Majestic Countdown had so often revealed - but the politicians, and the Christians too, just couldn't stop themselves tearing my families down. I will permanently remove the fuckwits who have angered me so much, and that's such a large proportion of the senior people in Government that I might as well take over. I suspected the Williams family would view my being Emperor of the Earth as an educational experience for me. It doesn't suit my personality, but that's because I'm weak in some ways, which I should learn to overcome. [I could directly edit my personality, but I don't think that's ideal. Life is about the journey rather than the destination - especially because I don't think my life will ever reach a destination - so I want to experience my personal growth and learning. If you think about it, you'll realize that editing my personality for those sort of changes is largely a redundant exercise anyway, because if I'm aware of a personality flaw well enough to risk editing myself to fix it, then I am already most of the way toward overcoming it naturally.] It might be a very good idea for me to closely manage a few Earths to see how well I can do it. Seeing as how I'm shortly going to be eliminating the leadership of one major government in five dimensions, I might as well keep kicking butt until I've taken over these five planets, making these dimension my test cases for my being a hands-on Emperor. My disillusionment with democracy is motivating me to replace it. It has some good points of course, but it's a failing system in America because it's too self-serving for both the voters and the voted. That's been fine for a long time and still is fine in smaller countries because greed is a great motivator, and the "greatest good for the greatest number" has usually been good for a country. But the cost of being greedy is rising too high and neither the public nor the politicians want to admit to those costs. It's the jackasses being led by the jackals. The jackasses are useless with complex, long-term problems and the jackals simply deny such problems exist while they continue to scavenge after their own interests. Even only a few decades ago the costs weren't high enough to matter. Even if the nation had ceased to exist - as countless nations have, quite a few of them in just the last few decades - civilization and life itself carried on, and the recovering countries often bounced back with even more vigor than before. But these days there are things going on which challenge global human civilization and perhaps even human existence. "Bouncing back" isn't possible if either of those "cease to exist". Unfortunately, I have considerable confidence that democracy will screw-up against those challenges. When the screw-ups are obvious enough, the country will eventually be forced to lurch toward a useful reaction, but belated solutions are impossible for many types of problems. Mom and Dad had given me the HARD word about using condoms and had put my sisters on the pill before we started having sex, rather than denying how reality worked until forced to react because someone had become a little bit pregnant. Denying reality for so long that a solution becomes impossible is not only a common human failing, it's the root cause of the collapse of almost every past human society, which should have been a warning to every subsequent society, but somehow never is. Look up "global warming" and half the articles are either denying it exists, or are denying we should do anything about it, or denying that we can do anything about it, or denying that it's our fault, etc. Look up "peak oil" and half the articles are denying that we've reached it yet, or denying that we'll ever reach it, or denying that it matters, or denying that there is any solution, etc. Look up "global terrorism" and you'll find another litany of denial articles. Every global issue is denied because people don't want to even think about them, let alone tackle them. Sooner or later, one of the future challenges is going to be very, very serious, whether it be something as large as global warming, or something that starts very small, such as a bioweapon laboratory that had a little bit of a terrorism problem. Democracy is not a trustworthy steering mechanism when the cost of an accident can be so high, so maybe I can steer humanity better. In short, I have a theory that the vested interest dominated, dishonesty pervaded, popularity contest that is democracy is past its Use By Date. Democracy would be fantastic if it functioned to choose leaders based on their ability to intelligently lead their country, but that's clearly not what's happening. I'll experiment on it in various dimensions, with my experiment being extreme in these five. My urgent reappearances in these dimensions have so far just been to cheer up my families. No one else knows I'm back because I tweaked their minds to not notice my reappearance or think my loved ones' departures were noteworthy. I am still keeping my returns secret so I can make very nice surprises out of them; "very nice" for the surpriser rather than the surprisees. Once my families have had time to appreciate the extent of my godhood and what it means, and I've had time to calm down somewhat, we'll plan what to do about all the people who broke the Guardian Angels' previous command. My research has already discovered that a large number of people ignored that warning after only a few weeks had passed without any divine reinforcement of it. My current angry intention for each of these five Earths is for me to send a few hundred million minds all over the world. I'd write, "especially to Washington DC and the many news providers around the world," but I don't need to do that "especially" as I can easily create enough minds to check everyone. My minds will read everyone's memories and examine the past until I know EVERYBODY who took actions that added to the attacks against my families, either doing it, facilitating it, encouraging it, and perhaps even failing to speak up against it when the person was in a position to do so. The latter group might not be included or punished as hard as the others, or they might - I haven't decided about that yet. I intend to include everyone from the President down to the secretaries who'd typed the subpoenas and a very large number of people in between: all the senators or congressman who'd participated in the persecution, the lawyers that'd acted for the Government, the senior partners of any law firm(s) involved on the baddies' side, everyone from the reporters up to the heads of the news organizations' and networks who fed it and on it, and the religious assholes who had to spew venom because they disagreed with my angels' statements, etc. It'll be a particular pleasure to include the religious assholes because they had a complete absence of good or Good reasons for their attacks; they attacked only because they are weak minded and they feel better about themselves when they viciously attack and literally destroy anyone who has a viewpoint different than their own. Although my plan is mostly about the people who participated in attacking my families, it'll be interesting to find out from my research how many people defended my families or who refused pressure to participate in the attacks. If Mom let me be a gambler, I'd bet there'd be some but very few such people. However many there are, God will soon be providing them with some reward for their correct decisions, especially if it cost them any trouble or loss. Once I've identified EVERYONE who participated for or against making my families' lives a misery, God will intervene, consistent with my departing message that He would be checking up on my families during my absence. I will have Archangel Michael openly arrive on Earth and declare that, "God has reached the limit of his tolerance to how Mark Anderson's extended family is being mistreated and attacked since Mark left." God's tolerance will apparently have inconsistent limits across the five dimensions that this will be done in, but no one will know that. Archangel Michael will be VERY angry. He honestly will be; that won't require any acting whatsoever. I imagine him teleporting to where the President is, heaping condemnation on him and literally kicking him in the ass several times. Not only will I enjoy doing that, but it'll also make the Prez see that he and his Secret Service are powerless against an angel full of righteous anger. I'll probably teleport to the Vatican and do the same to the Pope. I have a low opinion of him, and it'll help dispel that insanely stupid demonic theory if I can appear on sanctified ground (using another insanely stupid belief to counter the first). The email the Guardian Angel had left in central DC when it delivered the W80 there had said, "If Mark Anderson's quality of life is unacceptably degraded, including by deceit, I may kill those I consider even partly responsible." There were several other statements by both Archangel Michael and the Guarding Angel making it explicitly clear that Mark's quality of life included his families' welfare. The Guardian Angel being part of God, and God being an entity that keeps It's word, It will follow through with It's threat. In some suitably dramatic way, Archangel Michael will hand over the list of people guilty of breaking the Guardian Angel's previous instruction from God. The list will be headed up with, "At noon on August 2, the following people will appear on the White House lawn where they will be executed for directly disobeying God's command to leave Mark Anderson's extended family in peace." Every person listed will have a little comment alongside their name specifying in what way they broke God's commandment, e.g. "Jane Smith, secretary, typed subpoena against Andersons." On the list will be the President, his parents and all their descendants, with their note saying that the Bush family tree is included in accordance with the Guardian Angel's statement that they would suffer this fate if President Bush broke God's command again. Archangel Michael will make if VERY clear in a press interview that people are responsible for their actions. Given a choice between obeying God or obeying their selfish ambition and greed, they were terminally stupid to break God's instruction. America didn't let Nazi war criminals use the "I was ordered to" defense at Nuremberg, and neither will I allow it. If there are any people who refused to participate in the attacks on my families, this will be when I'll use them as examples of the behavior that everyone should have chosen. August 2nd is a week away, and I expect all sorts of shit will occur during that week. That's why I want a delay: so everyone will be able to see that Archangel Michael is more than capable of dealing with anything and everything that happens. On the 2nd, Archangel Michael will land on the White House lawn. In the event that there's no media there, he'll teleport some in. Whatever opposition there is - soldiers, Secret Service, or whatever - will be told by a THUNDERING angelic voice, "Oppose my wishes in any way and you will be executed for trying to oppose God's will. Take no action and you will not be harmed." I'll keep my word about that too. People have to learn that given a choice between obeying their immediate boss or obeying me, making the wrong decision will be terminally stupid. A Guardian Angel will appear and will split into however many copies of itself it needs to have one per person on the list. As my proximity range covers a good chunk of the Solar System, I don't expect any of them would've found somewhere to hide from me. The Prez and his family will probably be deep in an underground bunker surrounded by the armed might of the American Army, which will do his family no good whatsoever. Everybody will be fetched to the lawn, flying the most distant of them to DC at a very high speed because adding a few thousand sonic booms will help express my opinion of the situation. And yes, there will be at least thousands of sonic booms, and possibly tens of thousands of them, as the international news media jumped on the "They're all Demons" bandwagon, often printing and broadcasting stories to that effect. When they're all gathered, which won't take long, the executions will start, with Bush's family saved for last, and Bush saved for the very last. It'll be interesting to see how well or badly he handles taking responsibility for his actions. He was told what would happen if he misbehaved, but his desire to blame others for his mistakes made him unable to resist attacking my families - which will be his final mistake. Or if my parents think that's too extreme, I might express my displeasure less aggressively. The mood I'm in now, I hope not; my families will have to argue very hard to convince me otherwise. Plan B (which should be Plan W for "Wimpy") might be picking up every aircraft carrier still in the US fleet - because none of them have been scrapped in these dimensions - teleporting them to Washington DC and dropping them on top of the people I hold most responsible for the attacks on my loved ones. That should give the few surviving politicians a clue that God is unhappy. Archangel Michael will give some sort of speech that'll say that mankind is too stupid and immoral to be left without close supervision, so God will be sending someone to do that soon. He'll leave a Guardian Angel to look after my loved ones then he'll leave. A couple of days later Archangel Mark - that's me folks - will arrive, wearing clothes considerably less peculiar than Archangel Michael's. I'll look exactly like I looked when I left, but with wings, a halo and being seven-foot tall. I'll get the world's attention by simultaneously appearing in front of every person on the planet. From every inhabited compartment in nuclear submarines up to every inhabited compartment in the International Space Station (I might have to reduce my height sometimes), and from the streets of Baghdad to Jessica Alba's bedroom. I'll appear and shovel some bullshit about a very ANGRY God having sent me back to Earth and putting me in charge of the place, has given me enormous powers and some very forceful instructions about what has to be done. I like the idea of using one of the empty Earths as an exile, so I'll tell everybody in these dimensions, "Going against my wishes has only two penalties. For most, I'll be instantly teleporting the miscreant to a currently uninhabited planet for a period of time that depends on the severity of their transgression. If they survive until the end of their sentence, I'll teleport them back. Those people who deliberately break one of my specific commands or who attempt murder, rape or kidnapping - excluding child custody disputes - will be teleported into the Sun." I don't like kidnappers. Having obtained the world's attention, I'll be teleporting the top few leaders from every country - almost certainly a brand new President in America's case - and some live broadcast TV crews to my version of the United Nations: I'll be on a majestic throne, they'll be on their knees, and I'll be telling them what I want. Unlike the current U.N., there won't be a vote, none of them will get a veto, and they'll actually be held personally responsible for ensuring that their countries do what they're meant to. For example, I'll be telling them that I'll be enforcing international peace so their countries will no longer need most of their military. I'll slice 99% of the world's weaponry and other military equipment into small pieces ready to be recycled. I'll leave some of it intact, like Search and Rescue planes, Engineers' construction equipment, and most of the transportation vehicles (trucks, unarmed helicopters, cargo planes, etc.), but pretty much every weapon larger than a single-shot rifle will be chopped into pieces. Weapons of mass destruction, most of which are American, will be teleported into the Sun. The national leaders will be told not to try to subvert my will, and to reduce their taxes accordingly or spend some of the money in more worthwhile areas. That shouldn't be hard as there are few areas less worthwhile than the world's military forces. That'll help the American public a great deal as its military costs an average of $4,500 per taxpayer per year. They'll appreciate being able to keep most of that money. For the first few weeks of my emperorship, I'll have minds covertly monitoring the thoughts and actions of every non-baby person on the planet, so my version of justice will be EXTREMELY swift and accurate. My proximity sense's covering the entire planet will make my supervising it even easier. The moment anyone attempts to commit a serious crime, they'll be teleported away. I'll be taking their body only; not their clothes, shoes, or any equipment they're carrying; not even watches or glasses. All of those things will be left where they'll fall. Plus, for those people who've been sent to the Sun, I'll half-burn their clothes to indicate their destination. I expect the leaders of many nations to go against my instructions. Five North Koreas will very shortly have Dearly Departed Leaders, and I'm sure that'll also be the case in many other countries in these five dimensions. I'd be very surprised if America's new President is not afflicted by the usual arrogance, so his mass will likely be added to the Sun's too, but such is the human desire for power that I'm sure there'll be no shortage of people willing to fill his smoking shoes. The changes won't just be a bunch of national-level changes either; as there'll also be some major international changes. The easiest of those to achieve will be something like the following. The United Nations has permitted the Rwandan Genocide to continue - even though it's been orders of magnitude more heinous than the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein - for the usual reason the West likes conflict in non-Western countries: where the regime would otherwise be uncooperative, conflict makes it easier and cheaper for the West to acquire valuable raw materials. It's pretty much impossible to convince politicians to consider the good of humanity when sizable gifts are being offered to them by the firms who have a vested interest in the genocide continuing, so I won't try to appeal to the politicians' nobler instincts. Instead I'll extract their memories of their meetings, create videos of them, then broadcast them worldwide, after which there'll only be two things left behind: piles of smoldering clothes and a lesson to every other would-be participant in such behavior. I'll do that sort of thing for all political venality. I won't be directly editing people's minds to enforce correct behavior because I much prefer to let people choose for themselves. I want humanity to be itself, but being so fallible it needs VERY clear examples to learn from. That huge numbers of assholes will eliminate themselves providing the examples isn't something I'll shed a tear over. Attempted murderers will simply be disposed of, but people in public office will have their indiscretions broadcast as well, to serve as lessons for their replacements. I expect normal TV programming to be badly disrupted initially, and for there to be a flurry of special elections to fill the sudden vacancies. It'll only take a few days for the world to change dramatically. Probably hundreds of thousands of people will have disappeared by then, from presidents and popes up to peasants. Serious crimes will have been killed off, and the political agenda will have changed dramatically because my items will be at the top of them. They'll stay at the top because I'll keep my minds monitoring all senior politicians forever after. Any that displease me mildly will get a severe kicking up the ass. Those that displease me more or again aren't going to get another chance to. ALL the politicians in the world WILL carry out my orders regardless of how many traditional/venal politicians I have to go through first. They can always resign or refuse nomination if they don't want to play by my rules. I'm going to be Emperor of Earth to whatever extent I wish, ruling through cooperative politicians. The stick will be the first thing those leaders - and however many replacements are needed - will see, but carrots will appear too. I will publicly offer technological advances to nations who are achieving my goals. For example, I want nations to help humanity rather than themselves, so will develop some "Generosity Index". Those nations who reach the required standard will get to use technologies their populations will love. The people from other nations will have to strive to make their countries better before they'll get the goodies. Naturally I'll also be making clear that, "Attempts to acquire a technology that a country hasn't earned will be punished." By then people should be trained into obedience, but if an organization - whether a company or a government - sends engineers or scientists to investigate a carrot technology, then the investigators and the person(s) who sent them will spend a few years on the by-then-not-so-empty Earth, and I'll remove everyone from the headquarters of the organization and then seal it so it can't be accessed for a year or more, even to having a sign on the front door reading, "Closed by Order of Archangel Mark for Breaking God's Orders." It'll be rather amusing if no one can get inside the White House for a year. Another mixed carrot and stick I like is expansion into space. When I return as Archangel Mark, I can make comments like, "I am extremely angry to have to come back here and baby-sit humanity because it's so nasty minded. I was working with several alien civilizations which were peopled by species the opposite of humanity: they were pleasant, caring and intellectually stimulating. To be pulled out of that wonderful job to deal with your selfish greeds and ambitions has removed ALL my tolerance. You will leap to obey my every command or God help you, which It won't because It's just as angry at you as I am. You will develop the capacity to get into space as soon as possible because I don't want to be stuck in this cesspit for any more generations than I have to be, but I will control who is allowed off Earth. Too many of you are too selfish to ever be allowed to have any influence beyond this little rock. Only the best of humanity will be allowed to venture outward, to colonize the local area of this galaxy and interact with its other species. The vast majority of you and your descendants will remain quarantined where you are. I suggest you look after your planet better because it's going to have to sustain you for many tens of thousands of years yet." Another thing I'll find amusing will be all the plots to control or get rid of me. Each of my loved ones will effectively have a god dedicated to looking after them, so everyone trying to get at me through them is going to experience fatal problems with their plans. I might even be tempted to let a few assassination plans appear to succeed so I can prove their futility by immediately resurrecting the victims, and doing the opposite to the perpetrators. I could scan the plotters' minds and make videotapes of their planning sessions, but I'm inclined not to provide that much disincentive; I'll just let all the plotters eliminate themselves. Besides, all five Suns are slowly using up their masses so every little contribution will help. There are a few loose ends I haven't explained - like people who'd prefer to restart their lives on a virgin planet, or what would happen to people who try to commit crimes on that planet - but the answers to those types of questions are pretty obvious. My whole approach for these five Earths will be VERY obvious: I'm going to be as subtle as an ass kicking. One of my minds suggested a good use for the floating castle: using it as my Emperor's base in each of these dimensions. I could create it immediately over the White House, and once the US was sufficiently cowed have it float all over the world. It'll probably need to be much expanded as I imagine visitors would fly to it, land on it, seek audiences with me, my administrative staff could live on it, etc. That could be made rather interesting, and the symbolism of having it float over and dominate every other country would be very appropriate. I intend to be a very active, top-down-solution-imposing, super-powerful Emperor. One of the powers that I'll demonstrate having is the ability to duplicate myself as many times as I want, so I won't have any trouble having time for my girls and perhaps even a few more girls too, like all Emperors deserve. I won't enjoy being Emperor, but I'm enjoying trillions of my other lives so five not-so-good ones is inconsequential, and I should learn quite a few important lessons from them. It's not unlikely that I might end up governing humanity or parts of it in the future - e.g., if Julia's and my company sets up new human colonies on other planets - so it'll be a good idea for me to get some experience at the job. Not that I'd reproduce the ass-kicking style, but useful lessons can still be learned from it. Humanity's defining characteristic is selfishness; that trait is at the root of the majority of our motivations. Humans need opportunities to pursue greedy objectives to progress and be successful, so I have a management problem. Historically, innumerable human communities and civilizations have collapsed when the inhabitants out-consumed their local resources: cutting down every tree within practical distance for cooking fuel, denuding all the grazable land with too much livestock, or more recently, killing off all the marine life within lakes through over-fishing and polluting. In the past a village could often relocate to where there were fresh resources, or at worst, everyone in the community starved but that was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The modern-day problem is that consumption is increasingly global, so when humans do something like destroy the ozone layer, people can't just load up their wagons and relocate a few miles down the road. I also have shivers going up my spines about when humans meet some of the Universe's gentler alien species, because many humans can't resist greedily fucking over everyone they can, especially when the targets are seen as non-human, as Black slaves and American Indians were, for example. People want to be greedy, and that's even enshrined in law - modern companies are legally required to maximize their shareholders' wealth - so near-future humans will try to fuck over some aliens. It'll be a disaster whether or not it succeeds because unlike our continually doing it to ourselves, there are other aliens out there who are far more powerful than humans, and who when they learn what humanity is doing, will STOP it. Whether through a global scale Tragedy of the Commons, or through angering species far more powerful than ourselves, humans are facing risks with consequences we've never faced before. Capitalism has enabled humanity to achieve fantastic progress over the last couple of centuries, but it is too risky now so I'll need to shepherd humanity into a new way of doing business. My managing humanity will be, more than anything else, an exercise in managing human selfishness. It won't be easy, but hopefully I'll be able to strike a practical balance between risk and return. That'll be a lesson that will be potentially useful in almost every dimension, not just these few in which I'll be a Global Emperor. As we'll as a great deal of obvious responsibility and work - the capitalists will HATE some of the changes I'll be making - there'll be personal advantages in my position, as I'll be able to ensure my families have good lives. For a start, we'll be able to be open about many aspects of our lives. We'll be able to go back and forth to Refuge with our friends, I'll retrofit Refuge's functionality into our Earth home, we'll be able to have as many duplicates as we want on Earth, our three- or more-way marriage can be publicly declared, and the four parents can have their bodies regress to whatever ages they want and they can be openly proud of being immortal. All of these can be explained as "blessings from God" and my open power will prevent anyone getting out of line about the blessings. Or maybe my family will prefer for me to ensure their lives are as ordinary as possible, although I suspect Julia will happily be Mrs. Emperor. It's quite possible that my families won't like their lives on the Emperor-dominated Earths, given how much hatred has been directed at them already and the unwillingness of Christians to change away from seeing Evil in every act they don't like, but I can easily arrange many different alternatives for my loved ones, including their emigrating to nicer dimensions. Upon first seeing what was happening in these five dimensions, my first reaction had been so much anger that I was going to pick my loved ones up and take them to a friendly dimension, and simply remove America from these worlds. It and everyone in it would have ceased to exist, and its landmass would have sunk beneath the ocean. I was appalled that the public, after seeing the Government illegally and immorally abuse my family and me for years, not only didn't stand up for us, but leaped on the bandwagon to add its voices to our condemnation. I've calmed down, but I'm sure as shit not going to put up with any crap in these dimensions. The possibility of relocating my loved ones to a more hospitable world and coming down HEAVY on these five is still very much open. ------- It's a digression and it wasn't in one of the dimensions the Voyager had left, but it is Voyager-related so I'll mention the first dimension in which I'd been powerful enough to destroy Israel's Air Force and Knesset building. That raid was just over one month ago, and Israeli's first payments had come through on time. The people I wanted executed had not yet suffered that fate, but it looked like they would. They'd all resigned or been forced out of their jobs as it was clear that the military disaster that had been inflicted on their national Air Force was primarily those four people's fault: for going against the Guardian Angel's orders, and perhaps against God's - the truth of the latter point was much debated in Israel because that's what their execution hinged on. My previous need to give VERY strong disincentives for anyone starting an operation against me was very much unnecessary now. No longer were my loved ones and I under any threat. Even if an operation was brilliant enough to avoid my detection and was successfully carried out, it couldn't actually do us any harm. At the very most, such operations might be tiny nuisances, but they'd far more likely just be entertaining. I had previously thought that all the Marks throughout the Universe who'd had the Mossad spy on them would do something similar to punish Israel, including demanding the death of the four most responsible people in each dimension. But now it didn't seem justifiable to demand the death of people whose worst effect would be to cause me some future entertainment. I'd let the "Punish Israel" scenario play out in the single dimension where I'd started it. I envisage that Israel's payments will last a total of six months, by which time the four perpetrators will have been executed. If they're still alive five months from now, I'll reconsider whether it's desirable for the angel to force the matter. I don't want anybody to think the angel's orders can be ignored as that'd cause more trouble in the long run, but in another five months people might be so impressed by the angel - or Kram or whatever I do in this specific dimension - that Israel is unimportant. In all the other dimensions where the Mossad was silly enough to conduct an operation in Corvallis, the Marks are now easily powerful enough to punish Israel, but also so powerful that they don't need to. I'm sure I'll have fun thinking up thousands of different ways to respond. ------- Chapter 428: Options for W-Dimension Categories #3, #4 and #6 Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) There are several billion dimensions in Category #3, in which my body died in either the Casino Kidnappers' basement or the CIA's underground lab. I need to do some things differently, depending on whether I died in the basement or lab, so I'll describe them separately, starting with the dimensions in which I died in the CIA's care. ^ A few chapters earlier I described how I'd get my revenge on the DHS and CIA people who'd got away with what had been done to me in the Fort Dodge lab. I wrote that I was just intending to exact revenge in those dimensions where I'd been kidnapped, but on further thought I've decided to enlarge the scope of my action: I'll take the Fort Dodge lab down in all the dimensions it exists, such as where I died in a bathtub and never came to the attention of anyone. I won't include the DHS people in the additional dimensions because they haven't necessarily been immoral, but every CIA employee at every instance of the lab is going to have a very bad day tomorrow, and none of them is going to have a day at all the day after tomorrow. The US Government apparently believes that it's morally imperative to use overwhelming military force to attack someone when they might be making WMDs, and I know for a fact that Fort Dodge is making them, so I feel morally impelled to do the same. Plus I'll enjoy it, and getting rid of them will be a worthwhile public service - that I'll make sure the public learns ALL about. These category-specific chapters are not about my acts of revenge, nor my crime-prevention measures or public good works, but about my reconnecting with my loved ones in specific circumstances, so that's what I'll concentrate my writing on. Even though the CIA's scientists have already killed all the Marks in this category of dimensions, it would be easy to arrange for my living body to be found inside a sealed room by the rescuers that will turn up after tomorrow's military assault. A little bit of luck - arranged by yours truly - would result in my rescue becoming public knowledge, enabling me to restart my lives in those dimensions, but I have a better idea. In the dimensions where I got up to thirty two minds, the Government's arrogant illegalities blew up in its face over and over again, often very nearly - it seemed - causing Washington DC to be "blown up" too. Those dimensions' Governments received some very bruising setbacks, although not nearly enough to cure their arrogance, as proved by their actions in the five "Voyage of Discovery" dimensions described above. I know the Governments in the dimensions in which I didn't survive the Casino or DHS/CIA kidnapping are even less restrained in their criminality, not having had any lessons delivered to them by Majestic Countdown, MAF, or the shames caused to the Government by its open pseudo-warfare against God's angel and the Andersons. I will normally be varying my actions across dimensions, but I'll use the same basic plan in most of this category's dimensions to create a VERY nasty lesson for the Government, to make up for lost time. The lesson really being for the public: to teach people to supervise and control their Government better. I'll get rid of all the evidence of my death in the Fort Dodge lab, such as removing my medical samples. I'll also render innocuous all the results of the medical experimentation they did on me, and create records showing that the CIA transferred me to one of their secret overseas labs about the date of my death. By viewing the past to identify everyone involved, finding them in the present, reviewing all their memories to identify any new people to add to my list, etc., I can easily adjust everyone and everything to make reality consistent with my having been transferred out of Fort Dodge at the chosen date. At the same time as the Fort Dodge lab is being raided, several other disgusting CIA facilities in America and around the world are going to suffer similar fates, all of which will leave behind evidence of very expert armed attacks and/or sabotage, as well as notes by the apparent perpetrators saying, "This CIA facility was operating in breach of treaties signed by the United States of America. It was illegal so we've shut it down." The media will get anonymous emails alerting them to every disaster, as well as secret internal Government documents evidencing of the activities of each facility. Mark Anderson will be found barely alive in the ruins of one overseas building, with his body and mind in truly appalling states. I'll have planted evidence throughout the building that it was involved in developing new torture techniques, in response to a presidential memo telling the CIA: "It's inexcusable that we can't quickly break prisoners to get them to tell us everything we want to know. With waterboarding no longer usable, the CIA is instructed to stop at nothing to find a more effective replacement interrogation technique." I'll plant a copy of that memo in the White House's records. For fun, I won't create a memory of it in Bush's mind. He'll know it's a forgery, he'll protest strongly, and very few people will believe him. I like politicians to understand the consequences of their being known to be lying assholes. To dress up the facility I'll be found in, I'll teleport in a few dozen bodies of dead MIA soldiers from all sides of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as some corpses from America and elsewhere. I'll make it look like the DHS was kidnapping American civilians for the CIA, and the CIA was also grabbing American and non-American soldiers and assorted other people, then torturing them to death as part of their research project. There's plenty of torture research material in places like Pyongyang, Moscow and Langley that I can steal ideas from to plant as documentary evidence, and to create the equipment and records necessary to convince everyone of the appalling purpose of the facility. This plan will: Allow me to return to my life as Mark Anderson without having to go through a Ron Fisher-type of charade. It'll cause the DHS and CIA an ENORMOUS amount of trouble. Undeservedly because it's a lie, but deservedly because of what they did to me, and because the CIA historically conducted considerable experimentation on torturing people, especially with psychotropic drugs and often without the victim's knowledge, let alone informed prior consent. (Google "MKULTRA"; it's NOT a conspiracy theory, but was a fully acknowledged, real project. Many of the documents about it make for very scary reading, especially because there's no reason to believe the CIA are any better behaved these days. There's actually quite a lot of evidence that it's worse, such as "extraordinary renditions" and what happened to me when I was in their Fort Dodge lab.) The subsequent lawsuit for my 2.5 years of being kidnapped, tortured and experimented on will get my families' finances off to a very good start. It won't be billions because there won't be any evidence that I'm particularly special. I could easily plant such evidence in the facility, but there are so many ways I can make money now that I'd rather my uniqueness stayed off the radar. The only thing I'll plant are some comments in my file that my IQ increased dramatically several weeks into my torture, just before I was due to be killed. The documents will state that the CIA kept me alive trying to find out which of one of the many combinations of drug and physical abuses kicked my IQ into high gear. I'll plant evidence that they kidnapped dozens of other white, middle-class, teenage American boys to put through the same tortures as me to see if any of them got more intelligent. I'll make it look like they kidnapped a few British boys too, in case my British heritage mattered. That'll amuse me by causing a screaming row between the UK and US. My increasing intelligence ploy will explain why I was still alive after so long, and it'll allow me to be intellectual after I recover from my terrible ordeal. Before I put the plan into action, I'll appear in front of my families. Once they've been through the shock of seeing me appear and I've brought them up to date via the Refuge Grand Tour and related discussion, I'll explain my "Comeback Plan". Given what the DHS and CIA did do to me, and did to my families by deliberately lying to them for so long, I expect my families will be positively delighted to stick a knife into those agencies. I'll put my plan into action almost immediately, as soon as I've finished researching torture from sources all over the world so I can create a very convincing stack of evidence and a believable act as a long-suffering torture victim. Given that I can create bodies in any shape, size and condition I want, and can edit my own minds, it'll be easy for me to create a Mark that looks like and actually is a horrible wreck consistent with years of physical and mental abuse. I've just discovered that there's a suitable research facility in Poland, ostensibly run by the Polish government but the CIA has effectively taken it over and is running it now. There have been several visits to it by US-based brain chemistry experts. The facility isn't exactly torture related, but it's still disgusting and it's entirely believable that part of it might have drifted into torture research. In some dimensions I'll do even more to land the CIA in a pile of shit, because in those dimensions the CIA scientists who'd been so excited with their experiments on me had sought and been given permission to broaden their investigations to include my family after I'd died. Nothing highly illegal had happened, certainly nothing like their kidnapping anyone again, but they had illegally and nastily stuck their noses into my family's lives. They'd got hold of all my family's medical records, and had also concocted a cover story - a toxic spill from a tanker-truck in a road accident near our home - to require all local inhabitants to get medical tests. The CIA had told my family that their tests had been positive (lies, as the tanker hadn't been carrying anything toxic), and they'd 'urgently' got my family to make themselves the willing victims of a considerably battery of follow-up tests, worrying my loved ones greatly. Ever since, every now and then a CIA scientist studying on my body parts has thought of a new test to perform on my family, so they've been repeatedly reminded to feel fear about the tanker spill. Fortunately for my family, their results have all been very boringly normal and the CIA has lost most of its interest in them. I would have appended " ... thank goodness" on the end of the previous sentence, but I don't think goodness has much to do with the CIA. Once my tortured body and mind have recovered, which will take a fair while but my families will wait patiently because other versions of me will be visiting them covertly, I'll openly rejoin their lives and we'll live happily ever after in a variety of interesting ways. There are so many of these dimensions that our lives can have a very rich variety. As just one example, Julia and I can create a phenomenally successful R&D company which will produced different types of products in different dimensions because that's more fun and interesting. There are enough similarities between this and other categories that I won't repeat the description of various things I could do. ^ My and Prof's deaths in the Casino Kidnappers' basement had been made public, so we can't be found in a hidden room somewhere. I'll have to do something else. With my dying there was no longer any reason for the Andersons and Williamses to move into the same home, so that didn't happen in these dimensions. As the families are in separate homes, I'll have to appear in two places. I think I should be able to manage that. As soon as they've gotten over their very large surprises, I'll probably teleport both families to Refuge and give them the usual Refuge Grand Tour and the attendant explanations so they gain an appreciation of my new abilities. As soon as they understand enough, especially about how the W-Dimension is structured, I'll raise an issue that is very important to me: When I was discussing the Category #1 Grand Tour above, I made a reference to an important short-term issue that I discussed with the first category's Profs and Vanessas. I wrote then that I'd tell you about it later, which is now. The issue is that this subcategory's Vanessas are widowed. I'm extremely aware and upset that my entering the Williams' lives had led to billions of Profs dying, with all the agony, grief and loss that had caused their families. I'd asked the Category #1 Profs and Vanessas to agree to their Profs being copied so the widowed Vanessas could get a Prof back. Once these Category #3 Vanessas understand how the W-Dimension works well enough to appreciate that there are near-identical copies of everyone in them, I'll say something like, "Vanessa, there are many dimensions in which Prof and I survived the kidnapping. Those Profs and Vanessas have offered to have their Profs copied and transferred to live with you in this dimension. How'd you like to have a Prof back?" My main points in the ensuing discussion would be: Vanessa wouldn't need to give an immediate decision. Whenever she's in Refuge, she can tell her bodyguard that she'd like to talk with the other Vanessa and/or Prof. A duplicate of whomever she invited will immediately appear in the room, and she can talk as much as she wants and for as long as she wants, because I can duplicate her too. I'll strongly suggest she accepts the offer, "Because I'm sure it'll make you very happy. All the Profs and Vanessas have virtually identical personalities; so much so that I doubt you'll ever be able to tell the difference." (Older people tend to be more similar across dimensions than younger people because their personalities and the contents of their brains and minds are more stable, so they've synchronized closer to each other over the decades. That's why older people déjà vu less often than teenagers.) Ava is certain to ask about my recreating her parents. Explaining that is going to be sadder because I can't see the contents of minds in the past; only the present. I can bring Prof 'back' to the dimensions he died in by a trivially easy copying job. That a source for that copy exists is because there are differences across the dimensions caused by large-scale random chance, such as which way I merged out of the Casino Kidnappers basement as that determined the dimension in which we survived. For Ava's parents, there wasn't anything to cause the dimensions to have differences. Unfortunately for them, their cancers were very easy for the Universe to synchronize because cancer is so independent of prerequisite decisions and invisible for so long (if you think about it, you'll realize the two main reasons why cancers synchronize into existence rather than out). Thus almost every Katie and Carson got the same cancers and died from them. There are some living Katies or Carsons in other dimensions, but they are individuals whose lives were sufficiently different from those of their cancer-bearing counterparts to never synchronize with them. They are usually living in different cities and have often married different people. Even copying from a pair that is married together and living in Corvallis wouldn't help Ava because none of them have ever heard of her. The only fortunate aspect of this is that Ava's parents have been gone long enough by now that she accepts it and is living a happy life without them. She won't feel happy when I explain this to her, and I'm sad about it myself, but such is the pervasive nature of cancer. In time - maybe ten years or so - when my family are seasoned dimension hoppers, I can imagine Ava visiting her not-quite-parents in dimensions where they still live. Meeting them socially there is probably as close to a reuniting as Ava will ever get. I'd be very surprised if the Category #1 Vanessas and Profs can't persuade this subcategory's Vanessas to accept my offer. She's an intelligent woman and easily mentally flexible enough not to get hung up on it not seeming 'proper', especially if the Category #1 Vanessas and Profs are pushing her along. Heck, maybe they'll even have a threesome the way I once suspected, or a foursome with a duplicate Prof. Not to be lascivious about it, but I'm sure their discussions will become very intimate and the Profs and Vanessas were never slow to show affection for each other, so I can easily imagine them getting curious and that happening. I certainly can't imagine the 'owning' Vanessa objecting to lending her Prof out for a trial run; jealousy not really applying. I'll stay out of sight on those Earths until the Vanessas decide. My loved ones can have duplicates staying with me on Refuge until then, but I expect it won't take Vanessa long. Once the widowed Vanessas decide to accept their 'new' Profs I'll have to use a brute force approach to bring Prof and me back in these dimensions. I'll change all the newspaper, hospital, police, OSU's and all other records so they'll all show that Prof and I were discovered alive in the basement, but we were so badly injured that we've had a very long convalescence in a hospital in LA. I'll find everyone that needs to have their memories adjusted. When I do so, I'll also tweak them not to be curious about our absence. The owner of the building the kidnappers used will remember finding us alive, as will the cops and paramedics who were sent to the scene. At the other end, there'll be medical staff in an LA hospital who'll remember looking after Prof and me. It'll be a big job for me, but quite an easy one as it's helped considerably by the interactions being minimal and easily stereotyped - "people in hospital" is almost a cliché event. People in Corvallis will all have much the same memory implanted, and their imaginations can fill in the gaps easily. And the hospital staff have looked after so many thousands of patients that adding a couple more will be easy. After all the memories are in place, Prof and I will be declared healthy enough to be returned to Corvallis, and our lives will resume. ------- There's a HUGE number of dimensions in Category #4, where I'd suicided out of teenage angst, nearly always in the bathtub and occasionally in the menswear store. Before I learned how to duplicate or create new minds, there were about 1 billion 32-minded Marks, as well as 10 million 16-minded Marks, 300 million 8-minded Marks, etc., finally down to 3.5 billion 1-minded Marks still innocently going about their dull lives. Those totaled just over 5 billion dimensions with a living Mark in them, containing a total of almost 40 billion Mark-minds, thus Marks had successfully suicided during a déjà vu in 35 billion dimensions. But the proportion of dimensions without a Mark in them was much higher than 35/40 (87.5%). It was more like 97.5%. (A figure of 99% was given earlier, but that was for the number of Corvallises without a Mark. Many of those dimensions had a Mark elsewhere.) I investigated many thousands of dimensions carefully, discovering that while some of them had never had a Mark, most of them had lost theirs when he'd suicided at the age of fourteen. The numbers calculated out to there having been about 100 billion Marks who'd kicked the bucket without merging. I'd spot checked a few pasts in these dimensions, and it appeared that the bathtub suicides had been fatal as a result of bad timing, irreversible cuts, or they hadn't decided to save themselves in time. The number of Marks that had suicided in the menswear store was consistent with the number of my minds that were still alive who'd done that, so the menswear suicides had worked as intended, without a statistically noticeable failure rate. When these Marks 'return' to life, I don't want to risk upsetting their families in the future by their new Mark making mistakes because of dimensional differences, but that risk is fairly easily avoided. I can't immediately tell which of my minds came from which dimensions originally - for example, each mind's w-address doesn't identify its birth dimension - because the Universe's Consciousness doesn't care about the past. It's purely reactive, so it cares only about the present, and that's only what it has information about. What I'm doing is reviewing a lot of Marks' pasts. Not our memories of those pasts, but reviewed the actual past on every populated Earth, in order to develop of checklist of dimensional differences that will be precise enough to determine every mind's native dimension: when had I first suicided, what genders were my siblings, was Mom still married to my biological Dad, etc. I was looking for points of distinction that were large and unforgettable. Each combination of answers reduced the number of Earths in each group. Unless a group was down to one entry, I kept looking for memorable differences between members of the group. Once every group had only one member in it, any one of my minds went through the tree of questions to arrive at his Home Dimension. Out of so many billions of minds, we didn't have a single failure - either a Mark not finding a home, or multiple Marks claiming the same one - so the research pass had been very well done. Both types of failures would have been quite easy to fix, but it was still a very pleasing demonstration of our capability to give a job as much attention as it needed to be done properly. For this category's Earths, in those dimensions in which the Mark had successfully merged into another dimension, a copy of his mind will be the one that returns to his original loved ones. For most of the dimensions, in which the original mind has been lost, I'll use another dimension's mind for the resurrection, choosing one whose life was similar to make the following easier. The lost Marks' lives had lasted about 7 million minutes, 2 million of which he'd been sleeping and another 2 million he'd been too young to matter; so only about 3 million minutes need to be examined. Each of the Marks that'll be providing a new dimension with its mind will create about 100,000 duplicates of his mind, they'll spend half an hour looking at individual segments of their Mark's past life, and then all but one of them will self-cancel. All the Andersons in these dimensions are going to be incredibly surprised. There's no way to bring their long-dead son back into their lives gradually, so I'll just walk up to their door at dinnertime this evening and introduce myself. If they get too seriously freaked, I'll dampen their emotions, but I'd rather minimize doing that type of manipulation of my loved ones. They're going to be even more surprised when I show them some of my powers and tell them of the ways their lives are going to change. Having a dead son return will be the least of the changes they'll be adapting to. I won't describe those meetings now, as the ways I'll do it had too many similarities to what's already been described and what will be described for another category below. After my shocking reappearance to my family, I'll have to find ways to formally come back to life. I prefer not to brute force my return in these dimensions by editing everyone's minds and all the necessary records to be consistent with my having been alive the whole time. That there are over 100 billion such dimensions isn't the major reason, as that would just need me to create more minds to do the necessary work. It's more that the brute-force approach is such a crude method, and making up the individually customized memories for everyone that interacted with my family, and might have interacted with the fake me, over the five years of my absence (in a very few cases, three and a half years) would be a very boring. The "In an LA Hospital" cover story for the previous subcategory's Prof and me will be easy to implant because so few personal details are needed and they're very routine and even stereotypical, as "people in hospitals" is such a narrow, oft-repeated experience. Whether the new memories are for Corvallis residents imagining my families shuttling back and forth to LA, or for staff in the hospital who remember caring for us, they'll be quick and easy to implant. But if I want to pretend I've been in Corvallis for the last several years, then I'd have to create a shit load of minutiae, especially as my family and I are likely to become reasonably wealthy if not very rich soon, so people are going to research us. The brute-force approach is too tedious so I'll think of other methods to make the public accept my existence. As usual, my favored approaches involve the very open arrival of aliens or gods because either of those can pressure humanity in so many useful ways: morally, militarily, financially, and even politically - threatening to nuke DC was a wonderfully effective political move. However, despite my personally liking those blatant sorts of approaches, it will be best for me to wait for a while to see how those types of highly intrusive events develop in other dimensions. I'll use it in some of these dimensions, with and without me and the Andersons associated with them, but in most of the dimensions of this category I'll take advantage of my unimportance to stay unimportant. I'll enjoy having lots of apparently normal lives. Where I want a low-key approach, I'll do things the easy way, by changing a few memories and records so that my having suicided would morph into my having run away as so many teenagers do. The public will think that I've returned to reunite with my family, and we'll take it from there. None of the world governments will receive the benefits of my overt manipulations, but there are many more subtle things that I can do, such as meet the local Julia, form a company with her, and have my scientific expertise result in our commercializing products that change life on Earth. Cheap and plentiful energy production would be a biggie, as would a machine that used energy to construct atoms of whatever non-radioactive material the user wanted. Those two machines would eliminate all the existing energy generating and extraction industries, which would do much to help mankind. Or maybe I'll get a job as plumber and live an apparently dull life. That will have value to me too. My loved ones can be linked to or even swap with others of their ilk, so they will be able to enjoy a wide variety of experiences. We have a VERY long time ahead of us, and there's much to be said for keeping many of our lives - or our reincarnated-into descendants' lives - under everyone's radar so we can more easily go in whatever directions we want any time in the future. I like the idea of keeping as many options as possible open across Time just as much as I like it across the W-Dimension. I'll presume you don't want to read about my plans for how to have very dull, below-the-radar lives, so I'll mention some on-the-radar scenarios. With 135 billion dimensions to do this in, I'll enjoy myself by using a variety of methods: ^ One of the many alien arrival scenarios I'll use will be having a large and impressively shaped alien craft - saucer-shaped is so passé - land on the White House lawn, protected by an Ava Shield in case the startled guards are trigger happy. Visible through the craft's transparent top will be me and some very strange looking aliens. Probably fakes - my minds in bodies copied from elsewhere in the Universe - rather than real aliens, so I'll have complete control over them in this and all their future visits to Earth. A hatch will open up and a 10 x 10 x 10 meter cube of gold with me sitting on top of it will float out of the craft and come to a rest on the lawn. An alien will 'wave' goodbye from the hatchway, however Blurgs wave, then the ship will take off. [The cube will be worth a few hundred billion, depending on how much it depresses the gold market. All the gold ever refined on Earth is the equivalent of a 20 x 20 x 20 meter cube, so mine will drive the price down significantly.] Knowing the Government, all the decision-makers will scurry for cover, leaving their security forces to fuck the situation up by being macho-aggressive. There'll doubtless be a lot of gun waving and other demonstrations of stupidity, but with my powers I'll have exactly nothing to fear. After the guards have annoyed me enough - which won't be much as I have a very low tolerance for crap these days - I'll teleport them all, without their weapons or communications devices, into a highly restricted Chinese Government building in central Beijing. To get my message out to the American people, I'll teleport some news teams to me. I'll say, "I'm Mark Anderson, formerly of Corvallis, Oregon. I was approached five years ago," or three and a half in a few cases, "by some aliens who wanted me to be trained as their ambassador on Earth. As soon as anyone with authority gets here from the Government, I'll be asking them to formally accept me as an ambassador so I can establish an embassy for the Blurgs." I've made a mental note to make up a more impressive sounding name for the aliens. There'll be lots of crap from the Government because there always is, but I'll teleport the troublemakers - defined as anyone who doesn't say "Yes" fast enough - to central Pyongyang and other interesting places. That won't get me the agreements I want because the Government will simply stop sending anyone to talk with me, but it'll start establishing who's the boss. After the Government wastes a couple of hours failing to agree to what I want - during which I'll be making appropriate comments to the reporters - I'll go ahead with setting up my embassy anyway. I'll teleport us to Corvallis. I'll remove Mom and Dad's house and garden from their property, leaving an empty field. Across most of the width of the property, and fifty feet tall to ensure a great view through it, I'll create a huge teleportation portal to a location on Refuge. It'll show the most technologically and aesthetically impressive embassy building that I can imagine, with a wide variety of intelligent and unintelligent alien lifeforms visible through it, as well as some incredible technologies. Anyone coming up our Corvallis driveway will cross into Refuge, but only if they're one of us, or they have an invitation, or get permission from the mind in the intercom midway from the street to the portal. Anyone trying to use the portal without permission will be teleported somewhere that'll cause them trouble, depending on how rude they were intending to be. If they were intending to be seriously criminal, they'll be teleported into the Sun. I'll be announcing that our Corvallis home is the Blurg embassy on Earth, therefore sovereign Blurg territory and subject to Blurg law, which is very clear that would-be criminals have their masses contributed to the nearest sun. Any unwelcome objects such as weapons pointed toward us, or scientific sensors moved onto, above or below any part of our property, will disappear. In the case of weapons, probably the entire chain of command responsible for their deployment will disappear too, even if that goes all the way to the top. I'm sure the Government will get upset by its citizens being disappeared like that, but I'll explain that deploying weapons threateningly against Blurg ambassadors or those under ambassadorial protection is against Blurg law. I'll easily be able to provide copies of all the weapon deployment orders, whether written or verbal, the latter extracted from the memories of the participants before I disappear them. That'll make the Government even more upset, and will no doubt lead to their trying other power-posturing tactics, which will lead to even more disappearances and Governmental upset. It'll be good for them to eventually learn they're no longer the big kid on the block, regardless of their thinking that they control the block just because it's well inside their national borders. My embassy needs to have a justification for its existence. One of my ideas is to have an online catalog at www. BlurgEmbassy.gov where anyone can order from a list of personally useful technological marvels. Things like: anti-gravity units, household power plants, electric cars, etc. My R&D, production and distributions costs will be zero. I'll probably sell the items for $1,000 each, and the quantity of units sold should easily exceed the hundred millions, and eventually tens of billions, so the Blurg embassy will become very rich. Standard Blurg employment policy is to offer its employees an exceptionally high profit-share and to exempt them from all planetary income taxes, regardless of the opinion of the previous collectors of those income taxes. The Blurgs will be so advanced that there'll be nothing they want to buy from Earth, other than a few Australian bikinis, so it won't be a trading relationship. Instead, my embassy will be very open about using the technological products for a very different purpose: to encourage mankind to become more moral in preparation for its joining the local Galaxy Federation, or some such crap. I'll be VERY clear that the devices' effectiveness will depend on what country they're in, and where it appears in the list of "Countries Ranked by Governmental Morality". I'll be issuing that list every three months. It'll record every Government employee's or contractor's name and two factors which multiply together to give that person's Morality Contribution: their individual morality score - it's an easy psychological evaluation for a mind reader - and how much power they exercise in their government. The average of the individual Morality Contributions will be the government's score, with every country ranked in descending order. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how the public reacts to seeing the individual government employees' morality scores, especially as people in high office nearly always have very low morals. There'll be the usual Government crap, and probably some unusual Government crap too, but the Blurgs will prove to be incredibly good at protecting their employees and their interests from both sorts of crap. There'll doubtless be the usual crap from the public too, but the Blurgs will say they've never heard of Elvis, and they'll laugh and say "How quaint" to any and every religion. I'm not religiously prejudiced so the Blurgs will treat all of them with equal contempt, except for Pastafarianism, which will get the Blurgs' respect for being the best religion ever invented. The Blurgs will redesign their anti-gravity cars to look like Flying Spaghetti Monsters in respect for His Noodliness's fun religion. It might take a few months - a drop in the bucket compared to our life expectancies now - but the insanity of the early responses will fade, and the misbehavers will eliminate themselves or learn their lesson, depending on how bad their mistake was, and life will get back to a type of normal which will be truly extraordinary. My families will - we'll claim - be granted many VERY advanced Blurg technologies, such as teleportation, flying (sometimes that's more fun), and immortality. Prof and Vanessa will be able to drop thirty years off their ages if they want and Prof will get his prosthetic replaced with a real leg. We'll be able to live on Refuge openly, have friends visit without their memories being adjusted afterward, and generally enjoy every perk any of us can imagine. If that, or any of my other plans (below), prove not to work out well, the Blurgs can arrive again, pack up their ambassadors and leave, whereupon I'll make everyone remember the ambassadors as another family entirely different from mine who left with the Blurgs, so we can resume a more normal existence. That's the nice thing about my games: I have the power to fix up any that go wrong. ^ There are also many god-based scenarios to explain my return: I could have an angel arrive on Earth and offer to resurrect someone to prove his divinity. The world will be surprised when an unimportant nobody called Mark Anderson is picked. It won't be a boring repetition of the already written about event because the new angel will be a shit load more powerful than Archangel Michael ever was. I'm REALLY looking forward to teaching the folly of their ways to the first few preachers who go on air to say, "He's Evil and deserves to be killed!" I'm also going to put a great deal of VERY REAL PRESSURE on the major Churches to make some major reforms to their religions, and to their worldly conduct and misconduct. Things like, "MALE priests! Are you insane? Female priests would OBVIOUSLY be far better. What power-hungry, self-serving, nitwits locked women out of helping people in need? I'll give you five years to have an equal number of females as males of bishop rank and below, and twenty five years to have 75% females at every rank, including a female pontiff. God and I will heavily sanction your Church if you fail any of those deadlines." It'll be very interesting to see how the Church and the world react to those changes. I'll try to remember to make some appropriate comments about condoms and the correct attitude to sex too. As stupid as the Catholic Church has been, in my opinion - which is the one that matters - the Muslim attitude to women is at least a thousand times worse, so those clerics are going to get yelled out VERY loudly. There's going to be quite a lot of noise directed at Hindus too. Females are amazingly capable people (incredibly amazing, given how strangely they think), and repressing them is wrong in so many ways, not the least of which is that they are "people". Some time later, assuming Carol agrees in advance, the archangel will publicly instruct me to have babies with Carol. That should be enjoyable, on several levels. Another god option I'll like doing is a modification of my early thought about Kram being discovered in New Zealand. In some of this category's dimensions, I'll relocate Kram to Corvallis, although I'll have to rename him as his name is too obviously "Mark" backward. I'll get my family to go for a walk in Chip Ross Park, where Donna will see the edge of an ancient god's holy artifact sticking out of the dirt. When she pulls it out, a 500-foot tall god will appear and in a telepathic voice which everyone within fifty miles will hear, it'll say, Donna will answer, and that will also be heard by everyone within fifty miles, Donna's script will call for her to be very confused, and those within fifty miles will hear her ask, Being a truthful god, the 500-foot illusion will answer, -- There'll be a short pause, then the god will continue, -- The god will turn a slow circle to look all around him, then he'll continue, This will be happening in dimensions where I died early, so those girls will know nothing about me. I'm sure they'll be more than a little surprised by the new god's telepathic naming of them as the initial priestesses for a new religion, but I know them well enough that I should be able to motivate them into accepting the job. I'll give them several weeks to think about it, during which the perks of the job will be unmistakable and irresistible. Julia should get a good first impression of me when a 500-foot god tells her that I'll be the most important human being ever, and that if she accepts the job, she and her parents will get immortality and the ability to teleport anywhere in the world, including into clothing stores. It'll be rather amusing to see how Julia adapts to that situation. I'm greatly tempted not to warn her in advance that it's all a trick. If I'm brave enough to pull that stunt, it'll definitely be in only ONE dimension, out of self-preservation! Nevaeh will be easily swayed. She's a Christian so is "easily swayed" by definition. I'll just have to be a little careful not to step on her god's toes while I redirect her loyalty toward the god that is five hundred feet taller and noticeably more real than hers, from the toes up. Alexis was included because she's studying Applied Anthropology at OSU. That's amusing appropriate. I included Ava's name in the above list of initial senior priestesses, but that's tricky in a couple of respects. First, in most of these dimensions Ava is in a seriously committed relationship with another guy. When Ava's parents had been sick, they'd urged her to find a good guy to commit to. She had, and in these dimensions she'd overlooked the long-dead and buried Mark Anderson. I'm uncertain whether I should intrude into these Avas' lives, and if I do, whether I should break up their existing relationships. I can include her in the senior priestess list without upsetting her relationship (that's also true under other scenarios, such as visiting aliens). At this stage, I'm thinking that there's no hurry to decide. I have to get the Andersons and Williams families onboard first, and then I'll think about Ava. I'll research her partner thoroughly before deciding, and in the event that I leave them together, I'm inclined to make sure Ava has a blessed life even if she never has any idea why. I'll include the Norris girls in the test run because part of the fun of this scenario is how sexually explicit it can become, which Diana and Claire will contribute to very nicely. The Norris girls and my getting sexual with my sisters will really shake up the 'godless' puritans, hehe. Come to think of it, Chloe Moon would be a wonderful priestess. I've already initiated the repair of the mental and physical damage done to all the Chloes by their unnaturally repressive parents, and one of me (actually, "all of me") is currently enjoying her so much that I think I'll include her name in the list of my initial priestesses. She's certainly going to be the ideal physical type when her breasts regrow, and over the next several weeks she will develop a very healthy and enjoyable attitude to sex. It'd be nice to bring some pleasure to her pleasure-starved lives. The rest of the Kram Plan will be pretty much as I originally thought of it: beautiful priestesses moving around the world performing magic to carry out Good Acts, uncovering Bad Acts, and working on systematically improving mankind's morality. In normal usage, "improving morality" usually means forbidding sex. OBVIOUSLY I don't mean it that way! In my religion, "improving morality" will mean being less 'moral' about sex, and a great deal more moral about treating other people with respect, taking personal responsibility for your actions, and other attitudes and practices which are actually helpful and useful. One inclusion in my Kram Plan will be my making up some crap so my family can openly live in their Refuge home. That'll be so much nicer and more convenient than having to keep Refuge secret. That'll be easy to justify as some sort of reward for the finders of my magic artifact and the senior priesthood. I'll build a Church head office there that will put the Playboy Mansion to shame, and I'm sure Donna will enjoy being able to bring her pegasi through to Earth so she can take them to her riding club. ^ Or maybe my families will prefer to have far less dramatic cover stories for my return from death. My parents could decide to adopt a nine-year old refugee from some remote corner of the world. He'll turn out to be a genius with an impressively large and strangely ribbed cock, and I'm almost looking forward to re-encountering jocks at school. Miraculously, Mom and Dad's newly adopted son will turn out to be a phenomenally gifted engineer, will invent some incredible devices while still a teenager, and the cash and teenage girls will come flooding in, preferably the ones with large D-nominations. There are 135 billion dimensions in this category, so there is no shortage of opportunities to try out different approaches. Maybe I should have an internet-based competition for ideas? The top ten ideas could get a few priestesses of their own and the ability to cast a few minor spells. ------- Category #5 - single-minded Marks - should arithmetically be the next discussed, but I'll briefly jump to Category #6 instead, being those dimensions where Mark Anderson, and often his family, never existed. There are many possible reasons for our non-existence: Short-term issues such as Dad having failed to convince Mom to take him seriously as a boyfriend back in their high-school days. Medium-term issues such as one of my parents doesn't exist, usually because an ancestor of theirs failed to do the descendant-creating deed, perhaps because they'd died earlier. Long-term issues like a catastrophe that prevented or eliminated human life on Earth. The total number of dimensions in which there'd never been a Mark is a significantly large number, but they aren't important dimensions for me and I'm mostly going to ignore them. If some or all of the Julias want to have a go at being a goddess, I'll let her, or groups of her, have some of these dimensions. In the cases where Dad's mojo failed, the man who narrowly missed becoming my dad and the woman who missed becoming my mom nearly always went on to marry other people. They raised substantially different families that I don't identify with. I feel some temptation to contact Steven or Felicity, but "Hi, I'm your son in another dimension" is an awkward conversation starter. They're not going to develop any affection for me regardless of my having that emotion for them. There'd be even less emotional connection between me and their children (my cross-dimensional-stepless-siblings), so it's not worth contacting these families. I'm not going to do anything in any of this category's dimensions, leaving them to take their own paths. I'll keep my eye on them, but only take action if: I need to fix any major threat to humanity's survival in these dimensions, provided the threat isn't humanity's fault, e.g., Earth being in the path of a huge comet or invading aliens. It's possible my interventions in other dimensions might screw-up those humanities, in which case I can use these 'pure' dimensions to re-seed humanity. The Earths that are empty of human life can be used as convenient playing areas for me, as previously mentioned. I have one difficult decision in this category: what to do about the dimensions where Mom did marry Dad, and did have several children together, but not including a version of me. Sometimes their first child was a girl, for example. Although I don't have any personal affection for the 'stranger', many of those families have a Carol and Donna (by name and by personality), plus they obviously have a Mom and Dad too, so I have a great deal of love for them. The trouble is that they have no love whatsoever for me, never having met me before. I know what the Carols and Donnas of this story would immediately tell me to do, and I'm sure Julia, Ava and Nevaeh wouldn't hesitate to express the same opinion - Julia also adding her opinion of me for my having any doubts - but I think this would be a good issue to discuss with my four parents and take most of my guidance from them. They'll have a better appreciation for the bigger picture. There's no hurry over this decision, so I'll raise it with quite a few of my families after they've got used to my godhood. My guess is that we'll make contact, but I'll stay in the background at least initially (despite Julia's opinion about that). To start with, the Carols, Donnas, Moms and Dads can get to know each other (an illogical expression in this context). It might be fun to give them spectacularly interesting lives in their dimension, without my ever being a noticeable presence. For example, Blurgs could arrive and choose the Andersons to represent humanity. I can truly let the Andersons manage that process if I want, giving them control of technology that will let them contact, visit and be visited by several real alien species. Spaceships that can teleport a million light-years per jump that can only be piloted by an Anderson would be an obvious possibility. Obviously I'd be keeping a close eye on things, but it'd be interesting just to act protectively and otherwise let the scenario unfold naturally. My general inclination is to do nothing in the Category #6 dimensions, but there's no reason there can't be a few million exceptions, especially if they're interesting. ------- Chapter 429: Category #5; The 42,000 Marks Turn Over New Leaves Back to Monday, June 30 to Thursday, July 3, 2008 There are about 3.5 billion dimensions in Category #5, in which Mark had single-mindedly and ignorantly remained out of my ascendancy adventure. I wrote at length about the first category of dimensions, those that had 32-minded Marks, and I'll write at length about this, the last category with any of my loved ones in it. In the first category, my families knew more about my uniqueness than my families in any other type of dimension. In this category, their Marks had no uniqueness to know about. It's illuminating to write about both ends of the wide contrast. I defined this category to include the few remaining two-minded Marks because their family circumstances are so similar to those of the single-minded Marks. The two-minded Marks have slightly more knowledge about déjà vu's than the less-minded versions, but they don't have enough power to have made any significant changes to their lives yet, although they did MUCH better at school, are doing very well at OSU, and their bodies have improved noticeably but not extremely. There are so few of them and their families' circumstances are identical to the single-minded Marks', so it wouldn't be interesting to write about them. Just about everything that I say about single-minded Marks hereafter applies almost as much to the two-minded versions. If not, I'll either comment on the difference or it'll be obvious to you. Also included in the definition of this category are 42,000 Marks who were single-minded for most of my ascendancy, but between three and four weeks ago were upgraded to eight minds each. That had happened when I, the Mark who'd captained the Voyage of Discovery, had each night for a week added seven minds to 6,000 single-minded Marks, with me picking up a copy of their mind each time. Because their upgrade from being single-minded is so recent, they're best included in this category and discussed just by backing up the chronology a little. In the vast majority of this category's dimensions, the single-minded Marks were living their dull, depressed, daily existences, then on July 25, 2008 they were contacted by another version of themself and mentally told, "You're part of the God of the Universe now." You can probably imagine their surprise! I'll be writing about their experiences later, but I'm starting with the chronologically earlier subcategory: the 42,000 eight-minded Marks. When I'd stopped doing those upgrades, on July 4, my plan had been to do no more merging or upgrading for the remainder of the already started three-month test period, to reassure myself that it was safe for all the other Marks in the Universe to upgrade to about 1,400 minds. I still laugh at my thinking that there wasn't any real benefit in all the Marks going beyond about a thousand minds since we'd never be able to use that much power. I'd been thinking small! Like many of my plans during my Voyage of Discovery, it hadn't lasted long, being changed as having more minds had enabled me to gain greater understanding of the Universe. Another week into the two-months-to-go "No More Upgrades Reassurance Period" I'd gained an understanding of what minds are, and I no longer needed the relatively poor quality of reassurance provided by waiting two more months because I knew the underlying processes well enough to be certain that no problems would develop. From July 4 to 25, while I (the Voyager) was creating for myself an ever-increasing number of new minds and heading toward godhood, the 42,000 newly created eight-minded Marks stuck to the plan they'd been told to follow: To improve their lives as much as they were able using their new abilities and the advice of their seven new minds. Not to merge until they got word to do so, which would be after the Reassurance Period was over, presuming the Voyaging Mark developed no problems. Then provided they could learn how to cut déjà vu links off prematurely, to upgrade during déjà vu's as often as they felt comfortable. If they couldn't use the necessary technique, wait for one or more rounds of upgrades from larger Marks, and then upgrade themselves thereafter. At the time I'd given them seven minds, I'd envisaged that these Marks would wait about eight weeks for the Reassurance Period to be over, and then another three or four weeks to get the word that upgrading had been given the green light. Given the attraction of having more power and that most of their minds were used to having it, I'd assumed they'd upgrade to about 1,400 minds as rapidly as they could. The final stopping point was uncertain because something would need to be done about lifting the low-minded Marks, but ignoring that issue, I'd thought it'd take the 42,000 Marks about four months from when I last talked to them to reach their likely stopping point. As you know, things turned out somewhat different, but not immediately. I'm backing up nearly four weeks now, to write about the experiences of a just-made-eight-minded Mark that I'll use to represent the experiences of his 41,999 peers. In my autobiography, "I" usually refers to the central character, the specific Mark that this autobiography has been following for the last five years. Of late, "I" has been referring to the captain of the Voyage of Discovery, even though the autobiography's original mind had been duplicated into other bodies. In the text that follows, "I" will be from the point of view of the newly eight-minded, representative Mark. Most autobiographies don't have as much choice about where to focus as I do. ------- On Monday, June 30, having just been upgraded to eight minds, my first activity was a great deal of inactivity. I had a LONG internal dialogue, as my recently acquired minds explained everything they knew to my totally ignorant original mind, especially: Demonstrating the abilities having eight minds made possible, with explanations about how the abilities would improve as more minds got added later. Descriptions of the lives the seven imported mind-copies had lived from their first merge until they'd came to this dimension. With particular emphasis on, and graphic imagery from, the lifestyles they'd enjoyed with the Anderson and Williams families as well as with Ava and Nevaeh. You can probably imagine the enthusiasm with which my ignorant mind responded to the memories that were sent to him! That was interrupted while I changed my shorts; my seven imported minds had forgotten one of the consequences of my (#1) being so inexperienced, and hadn't noticed the surprisingly quick need to demonstrate the go-soft ability. Appropriately, the first special ability to appear when our ascendancy started was the first one I needed here - cock softening is Universally useful. Once I'd calmed down enough for intelligent thought, I started planning how to recreate that lifestyle. I'm starting from scratch and currently have only eight minds, so I can't do anything awesome. [This Mark's using the Grand Tour of a new Refuge home as a way of explaining his godhood to his family wasn't possible, since I'm writing about a period in the first week of July, three weeks before godhood was reached and before the planet of Refuge was discovered.] Intellectually speaking, there's no need for me to hurry to transform my lifestyles, but hormones aren't known for their intellect - somewhat the reverse, actually. #1 was especially eager to start changing his life because he wanted personal experience of those delights. #'s 2 through 8 recommended caution as our family would adapt better if they weren't traumatized by too many shocking revelations too quickly, so I started just by showing my new personality. The seven recently arrived minds were much more self-confident, attentive, knowledgeable about social interactions, and even knew what "menarche" meant so could talk about issues that the original mind would've been very uncomfortable with. Being 7/8ths self-confident now, I had no self-conscious hesitation about tackling the changes to my family's internal dynamics head-on, but a delay was still necessary. It took me a couple of days for all the internal dialogue, replaying of favorite memories, shorts changing, ability demonstrations, initial planning, new skills practicing, some body adaptation, and for #1 to feel comfortable with his radically new situation; where "to feel comfortable with" mostly means "to calm down about", because the rest of us didn't want him to run off at the mouth at the wrong time. In #1's excitement he could have the most control over our mouth, so could easily blurt out something stupidly sexual to Carol. By the third day, I was ready to start changing my family's lives. Toward the end of our Wednesday evening's dinner, I told my family, "I've got a family announcement to make. You may have noticed that I've been even quieter than normal for the last couple of days. I've been going through a process of self-discovery and I want you to know that I've turned over a new leaf. I've picked a REALLY big leaf to turn over, so you're going to find that I've changed a great deal more than you'll believe possible. It's not just a change in attitude: -- "Donna and Dad, you're going to find that I'm much better at sports now. More athletic, better coordinated, etc. -- "Mom, I know you worry about my lack of social contact, but that's going to change a great deal. Especially with girls, I'm happy to say. Over the next month or two my face is going to become considerably more handsome, I'll be growing to six foot three, developing cut muscles, impressively wide shoulders, a waist women will die for, and will have the cutest male ass in Corvallis." I'd specified a month or two because that was my guess about how long it'd take with only eight minds. I wouldn't be able to change my body as rapidly as the three weeks it'd taken a 32-minded version of me to make the radical Mark-to-Ron transformation. I continued still to Mom, "I'm going to be a much better conversationalist, more confident and more likeable with people, and I'm going to start wearing clothes which suit me much better. So you'll be seeing me being far more social than previously. I have no doubt that you'll soon be thinking that I'm 'social' with too many girls. -- "Which takes me - last but very definitely not least - to Carol. The changes I'm going through are going to affect you the most out of my family, starting with my taking you clothes shopping as soon as you've got a whole day free so we can do it properly. It's your birthday in a few days and I'm going to do a much better job this year of not only celebrating it, but also making it beneficial for you. You're not so deep into your shell as you were a couple of years ago, but you're still unnecessarily deep, including your still using studying for college as an excuse to hide yourself away from people. You're not nearly as insecure as I was, but you've got a fantastic potential that needs to be brought out, and that's going to be a major project of ours over the next several months. Plus I know whom I'm going to marry and your help with that is ABSOLUTELY essential. -- "I can see that I've convinced you all that I'm insane, but I'll add even more to that impression by saying that the leaf I turned over also means I'm considerably smarter than I used to be, and that I'm going to find a way to make us stinking rich. That'll take me a few months, but I'm certain it'll happen." ^ I hadn't bothered to check whether Binion's Horseshoe Casino existed and accepted large bets, as that method was too dangerous in its attracting the attention of non-Government and Government criminals. I hadn't decided on how I'd make us stinking rich, but I knew I would achieve it. My current intention is to wait until after I've done several more upgrades, as then I'll have so much power that there'll surely be many easy ways of making huge amounts of money and handling anything bad that might happen afterward. I'll make do with being poor until then. If upgrades get the red light for some very sad reason, I'll still be able to make a fortune. I currently have about 420 kilograms (925 pounds) of maximum force, which opens many doors. Plus I have a 500-foot sight blob range and the ability to operate twenty-odd sight blobs at the same time, which would make me a superb poker player, commercial spy, and doubtless several other financially useful activities. I also have a great deal of education supplied by other dimensions' OSU's that no one would expect and which could possibly be parlayed into something rewarding. None of these moneymaking possibilities were worth worrying about yet. My family will have enough trouble adapting to my new abilities without my dumping a fortune into their laps; that would make their lives even more complicated and slow down their getting used to the 'new' (by 7/8ths) me. After getting my family used to me, I'll then be turning the Williams' worldview upside-down by introducing myself to them and showing them some of my special abilities. A good chunk of the remaining Reassurance Period should have been used up by the time both families have settled down, and that's about when it'd be good to have some more money. I should be able to wait just a few more weeks for me to be contacted and upgraded. [As you know, the green light didn't get activated in three months. In only three weeks the Voyaging Mark achieved godhood and everything changed.] By the way, top of my current list for how to make money if the upgrades don't happen is to control the balls in a very high jackpot lottery barrel to ensure my numbers emerge. That'd be easy, safe, highly profitable (even after tax), it'd give us legally usable money, and wouldn't result in an army of casino investigators and hoodlum kidnappers chasing after me to learn how I'd cheated. It'd be best to make sure no one knew that I'd been 450 feet away from the barrel at the time of the drawing, but a simple disguise and a bit of care would make that easy. One unfortunate aspect is that Mom will be finding out about my NP soon, so she'd know that I cheated at the lottery. That'd probably be worse than having hoodlum gangsters on my ass, hence my preference to wait for the upgrades. [As it happened, in quite a few of these dimensions we didn't become rich, "stinking" or otherwise. That was because when I later became part of the Super Mark-Network (or Super-Mark Network, the ambiguity is correct both ways), we preferred to live a lot of our lives under the radar. But at this time, all the newly eight-minded Marks thought it was up to each of them to make their individual lives as enjoyable as possible, and all of them wanted to be stinking rich.] ^ Meanwhile, around the Andersons' dinner table, my family was worried. I picked up eight peas from my plate and juggled them, three days having been enough time for the power of eight minds to increase my physical coordination and I'd practiced with socks in my room. I said, "A few days ago I was poorly coordinated, now I can juggle eight objects at once. After dinner, I'll take Donna outside and beat the pants off her at any sport she cares to name; although I really should've used a different expression given how strongly Donna wants to have sex these days." I had a pathetically short six-foot proximity range - 7/8ths of my minds had come from the Voyager and he'd learned ways to extend the limits on many of his abilities, but proximity's range was too fundamental to be improved - but since I'd acquired it, I'd deliberately gotten close enough to Donna on a couple of suitable occasions to sense how strong her lust was, finding it to be delightfully strong. In this dimension there'd been a truly grievous paucity of sex. #1 had managed to lose my virginity once (so to speak), but under circumstances not to be proud of. It'd been at a party where I'd had too much booze, and had hit on an ugly girl who'd had even more to drink than me. I hadn't managed to get lucky again ever since, not even with the same girl as she was refusing to take my calls. [The two-minded Marks, because of their improved social observation skills, had done considerably better in that field of masculine endeavor.] Without the inspirational example I'd provided in my successful dimensions, these Anderson kids were sexually inactive, although Donna had developed a strong desire to be the exact opposite. My "Donna wants to have sex these days" comment created the intended ruckus. Most of the ruckus was naturally from Mom, and when she paused, I said, "Your comments are wrong, Mom. Let me demonstrate how big my overturned leaf is by telling you that you're misreading the sexual proclivities of EVERYONE here, not just Donna. Starting with her though: She has a much higher sex-drive than you're aware of because you're expecting her to behave like Carol. Donna has spent several years experimenting with girls in her sports teams and is now very eager to try guys." -- After a pause for more ruckus, with Donna's denials being much louder this time, I quelled both Mom's and Donna's objections by holding up a hand and forcefully calling for silence, surprising them into it. In the lull I said, "Your denials won't convince me, Donna. To save your embarrassment I won't say what you did," to avoid shocking Mom too, not so much that Donna would do such things but that I'd talk about them openly, "but:" I closed my raised hand, extended a finger and I counted off each event in Donna's sexual history, using the format, "At age x, with person y, in room/place z." My reciting just those details would be more than enough to make my point about how much I knew. [After my third merge - into the dimension where the Mark had stupidly not started a loving, sexual relationship with his Carol - I'd realized that it was a very good idea to learn such details as I was reciting now. I'd gotten my favorite dozen girls to tell me their sexual histories in considerable detail, their sexual fantasies, hopes for the future, favorite flowers, best gifts they had ever been given, how they thought they would recognize their ideal boyfriend, and other pieces of knowledge I could make good use of if I ever merged into another badly managed dimension. Although there weren't many dimensions in which Mark and Carol hadn't got together as first described herein, that failure had happened often enough that word of it spread through the early version of the grapevine, as had the idea of learning those useful facts about our favorite girls. Most Marks had repeated the same just-in-case preparation.] By the time I'd finished reciting the three facts for the third finger, Donna had gone silent, which is totally unlike Donna when she's defending herself. It took Mom another two fingers to notice Donna's quietness, and then to glance at her. The expression on Donna's face closed Mom's mouth. Before Mom could regroup, I said, "Having established that I speak with some credibility about Donna's sexual past, and more knowledgeably about it than you, Mom, I hope you'll accept that I have a reasonable shot at predicting her sexual future. Donna DOES have a particularly high sex-drive and she's feeling it very strongly these days. I think it's very doubtful that her virginity will survive the summer, and once she discovers how much fun full-on sex with guys is, she's going to have a great deal of it, probably with at least three or four different guys because she's very curious and isn't focused on any specific boy. You should've had Donna on the pill already and I suggest you do it very soon." -- Mom started saying something, but I couldn't allow that. "NO! Don't interrupt. You need to discuss this with Donna, not argue about it with me. Next on the list is Carol..." #3: #7: " ... Reciting her sexual history is easy because Carol hasn't had one worth speaking of. Carol's been avoiding boys for years, and I suspect that the main purpose of her having a boyfriend now is so she can use Eric as an easy way of deflecting all the other guys that hit on her. It's sad because Carol would be an exceptionally wonderful partner in a committed relationship because she has it in her to be very generous with her love if she truly believed she was valued. But her passively retreating from people - especially boys - is stopping that happening and Eric is incapable of bringing her out of her shell." [In this dimension Carol and I - or anyone and I - didn't have a good relationship, so my saying anything more than casually nice about Carol was very unusual. My saying, "she has it in her to be very generous with her love if she truly believed she was valued," was so far beyond "unusual" as to be downright weird. My comments about Eric were because I'd moved within six feet of Carol when she'd been on the phone to him. I'd been jealous, but that'd quickly turned to happiness when her proximity reading showed only a small amount of liking for Eric and no lust registered at all. I'd concluded that it wasn't a real relationship, and then I'd gone to my room where I'd celebrated all I could without making too much noise.] -- "That sadness won't last for much longer though. I'm going to be taking on many new responsibilities in this family, especially including helping Carol improve some aspects of her life. Other than the mess mine used to be, Carol's life is the one most falling short of its wonderful potential. I know nothing in our history would make you welcome my involvement in your life, Carol, but by the end of our shopping day - I'm thinking next Monday if you've got it free - you'll understand that our history isn't relevant to our future. I'm a VERY different person now, and I'll make sure you understand that before I attempt to influence your life. Which brings me to me..." "Hang on," interrupted Mom, who had to respond to how crazy she thought her son was being. My seven new minds knew better than to let Mom get started, so I loudly overrode her interruption with, "LET ME SPEAK, Mom! I know my change in attitude is confusing you, but you'll get used to that soon. Concentrate on my message. I'm using your misunderstanding of all our sexual situations as a way of demonstrating how much greater my understanding is than any of you would've credited me with. None of you realized how close Donna is to becoming very sexually active. You saw the expression on Donna's face and you know I was on target with her. If anything, you would've thought Carol and Eric would be the first of us to become sexually active, but that isn't going to happen because Carol doesn't have any of those feelings for Eric, and he hasn't got a clue what her buttons are, let alone how to push them. I'm sure you've had sex talks with Carol since she started dating Eric, and that she's told you that she's not intending to have sex with him. I'm also sure that you haven't taken Carol's statement onboard nearly enough, because Carol will NOT be having sex with Eric. He's not Carol's boyfriend despite her pretending that he is. I understand both of those situations better than you do, Mom, so there's no point in your disputing them with me until you've talked to the girls in private. -- "I've still got two more sexual relationships to talk about, after which you can have your turn to speak, although I suspect you'll have other things on your mind by then. To continue chronologically, I'm the next subject of my own conversation. The only sexual relationship I've got is with my right hand, which hardly..." The surprised reactions around the table were amusing. My family didn't talk openly about sex and didn't crack such jokes over dinner. One-on-one sex talks with a parent in the privacy of our bedroom was our family style. Mom wasn't puritanical about sex; she could actually talk about it very well, just in total privacy because Mom was English. Her attitude had to change because it'd get in the way of my plans. Changing Mom's attitude was my main reason for my introducing my new personality in this way. -- I carried on over top of Donna's giggles, " ... which hardly needs much explanation. I do need to establish credibility with you though, and far more effective than any amount of talk will be demonstrating some sexual expertise. At the moment you think I've got none." I had been too ashamed of my sole prior experience, how ugly she was and that she'd refused to talk to me since, so I hadn't mention it to anyone, not even my male classmates. "It's rather awkward to demonstrate sexual expertise within a family so I'll find a girl I like and bring her back to my room one evening soon. Between the noises we'll be making, how long we'll be making them for, and what she'll say at breakfast, I'm sure your image of me will be turned upside down." Now they thought I was even crazier. Donna giggled even louder, Carol didn't try very hard not to show that she thought I was an idiot, Mom momentarily hesitated unsure what to tell me off for first, which let Dad get in with, "You think you're going to get a girl to stay with you overnight?" "Sure. I don't know who she'll be yet though. It'll be whomever I find first that's available one night soon. The girls I have in mind are all sexually active because I'm intending to demonstrate my expertise in that area. Those girls tend to have boyfriends so it's too hard to predict who I'll shake loose for a night first." Now Mom knew what to tell me off for first. She rebuked, "You can't treat girls like that. You..." "I'm going to be treating them with total honesty. I'm going to walk up to them and ask them to stay with me overnight for some no-strings-attached sex. I'll have to do some convincing, but if a girl agrees, then she'll know what she's agreeing to. Please ask her at breakfast whether she feels she was mistreated in any way. You'll find the answer educational." "All you're going to achieve is a lot of annoyed girls. You can't go around asking girls for sex like that without..." "You have NO IDEA what I can and cannot do, Mom. You didn't know I could juggle eight objects at once, you don't know how I understand more about Donna's and Carol's sexual development needs than you do, and you don't know how good I am at talking to girls. In the event that I have to ask more than one girl, I'll give you the names and numbers of the girls who rejected me so you can call them to ask how annoyed they were by my approach. I'll even tell them to expect your call. After you've talked with them, I'll accept whatever punishment you think is justified by their level of annoyance, just so long as it's based on THEIR reaction, not yours. -- "Speaking of 'yours', let me finish my fourth sexual-relationship discussion. Dad, this question is for you. I'd prefer you to answer it right away without looking to Mom for advice first. It's a question you should be able to easily answer right off the top of your head. Okay?" "I'll give it a shot," answered Dad easily. He was the least affected by this discussion so far, as he doesn't take sex seriously, unlike Mom. "Is Mom secure in your sexual relationship with her?" Dad unhesitatingly answered, "Huh! Of course she is. You've slipped a cog, Mark..." Mom added firmly, "Stop talking this nonsense, Mark!" "I will, because it's time for you to take Dad into your bedroom and explain to him why his answer was wrong." "You're talking nonsense!" insisted Mom. "Stop upsetting everyone with..." "TUT TUT for lying, Mom! You and I both know it's not nonsense. Your insecurity over Dad's having affairs has been holding you back from fully committing to him for the entire duration of your relationship, which has been horribly unfair of you, considering Dad has NEVER misbehaved," (based on Dad's proximity-revealed emotional response to my saying, "Dad's having affairs" containing no guilt). "I'm guessing it's a result of something in your family history, but regardless of the cause, I'm not going to let you continue to shortchange Dad, nor let your bias badly affect your reactions to your kids' imminent sexual relationships. Take Dad into your bedroom NOW, or I'll tell him everything I've worked out. You know it should be you that tells him, not me, so jump to it!" Dad and the girls could tell from Mom's expression that some sort of target had been hit, and were looking at her, waiting for her explanation. Mom tried, "How on Earth could you know..." "NO Mom! Satisfying your curiosity isn't the issue. You've got twenty five years of shortchanging Dad to make up for, so get your ass into your bedroom to explain it and to apologize to Dad. If you come out in less than three hours, I'm going to give you a kick on the ass and send you back in there to make up properly. I mean the 'three hours' too; if you come out in less than that I'm going to be very unimpressed by your inability to apologize as much as Dad deserves. You've been very unfair on him for YEARS, so you need to spend a good chunk of quality time explaining and apologizing to him." Everyone was shocked by my assertiveness, but Mom agreed, giving Dad a signal that they needed to do what I'd 'suggested'. As soon as the parents were out of the room, Carol and Donna started firing questions at me, but I didn't provide them with an explanation of Mom and Dad's issue, nor answer their questions about what was up with me. The latter issue needed to be worked on more carefully than excited questions permitted, and I wanted to make sure all of my family were on the same page. What I did do while we finished dinner, was reiterate and expand on the points I'd made that were relevant to them, managing to insert many compliments too. Donna got over her shock at my knowing about her sexual history and demanded to know more about what I knew and how. Over the next few months I'm going to be playing the Moral High Ground card for all it's worth, so I told Donna, "I don't want to discuss your secrets in front of other people - Carol in this case - unless I'm positive that I have your permission. Are you sure it's okay for me to talk about your sexual experiences in front of Carol?" "Carol knows most of them anyway. How come you talk so funny?" "Because I want to be extremely careful that I don't use my understanding of you to cause you any hurt." An answer which convinced my sisters that I'd REALLY changed. I hadn't finished listing all of Donna's sexual activities, but I knew that my knowledge would start going off the rails when I reached 2005 because that's when my other dimensions' sex-lives had started influencing Donna's greatly. So instead of finishing the list, I gave more details about her earlier exploits. "You were SPYING on me!" accused Donna. "You know that can't be the explanation. Most of the times you were playing around were away from home and even away from town, so you know I was nowhere near you. Plus I know about Mom and Dad's problem, and I VERY definitely haven't been spying on their sex-life! That's stuff I never want to know about, plus they'd kill me if they caught me snooping." "So how do you know what I've done?" "Over the next few weeks, you, Carol, Mom and Dad are going to be asking me 'How?' hundreds of times. I have changed HUGELY, in ways none of you will believe even though I'm doing it right in front of you. You'll be dying to know how I could've changed so much. I told you before that I'm going to grow to six foot three, my face is going to become much more handsome and I'm going to have the cutest male ass in Corvallis. I'm not exaggerating or joking; those things are definitely going to happen. They'll probably take a couple of months but you'll see them starting soon. People can't predict exactly the height they'll be growing to and I shouldn't be growing another four inches at my age anyway, but I know those changes to be facts, and I know many other things too. Unfortunately for your curiosity, I can't tell you how I know them. I'm sure Mom's going to put a huge amount of pressure on me to explain myself fully, but I'm not going to tell her or anyone else either. It's going to remain my secret." I thought that human civilization would be destroyed in every dimension if the BIG Secret was revealed. -- "What I can do, and I'll be doing a lot of it, is improving your lives. Especially yours, Carol. There's not nearly enough happiness in your life, and I'm going to make sure your life becomes one that gives you great joy..." "My life's fine. I don't need you interfering with it." "Wouldn't you like to wake up every morning and before you've even opened your eyes, have joy flood into your heart and a smile appear on your face? To have a life so full of happiness that you sometimes feel so overwhelmed that you hug yourself tightly in moments of panic that such a wonderful life can't be real? I'm not going to force you to do anything you don't want to do. I'm just going to invite and encourage you to do things. Initially with me, later with your friends. If you decline some of my invitations that'll be fine. I'll keep helping you for as long as it takes, even if it takes years. I don't think it will though, because it'll only take you a few weeks to gain confidence in my judgment." "Why would you care about me?" "Because you're the most wonderful girl I know - and I know FAR more girls than you think I do - and because I love you. To my shame I've treated you and Donna terribly up until three days ago, but I'm turning that TOTALLY around from this day on. You deserve far better from me, and you're going to get it." You get the idea: I was laying the groundwork, planting seeds, ducking direct questions, making compliments, and more than anything, amazing them with how much I'd changed. The conversation lasted a long time, through the end of dinner, the cleanup, and even for a little while afterward. Carol and Donna weren't yet convinced that I was lovable - I had too many years of unlovable history - but their eyes had been opened to my having changed. Apart from anything else, I couldn't remember the last time we'd sat around and talked together about ourselves for five minutes, let alone for the best part of an hour. I'd ended our conversation with, "Sorry to bring this to an end, but I told Mom and Dad that I'd be demonstrating how much I'd changed by bringing a lover home. I'd better start calling around while it's still early enough to catch people before they go out." Needing the freedom to do that and to compliment my sisters was the main reason I'd insisted that Mom and Dad spend a fair while in their room. Not that Mom would obey me, but by creating the expectation that it'd take a long time, she wouldn't be able to cut it short without risking looking cheap with Dad. In front of my sisters, I pulled out my phone and dialed Alexis' number. "Hi Alexis. My name's Mark. We haven't been introduced, but tell me where you are and I'll come to give you an introduction like you've never had before." "Who're you?" "I'm the best sex you've not had yet. The more time you waste flapping your lips, the more you're going to be kicking yourself later. Where are you?" "At home..." "Is that [I stated the address I knew her and her parents had lived at in the other dimensions]?" With the freedom her parents gave her, Alexis had no reason to move out. "Yeah." "I'll be there in five minutes plus however long it takes me to buy a dozen rubbers." I hung up, without saying "Bye" or anything else. Alexis likes direct, confident guys. Ignoring my sisters' surprised looks, I went to my room, grabbed my wallet and keys, then left. Alexis lives quite close to us, but I had to make a small detour to buy a marathon session's worth of rubbers. It was naughty of me, but I let myself into the Josephs' home. If Alexis had answered the door and remembered me as a wimp from the grade behind her at school, she might've shut the door in my face before I'd had a chance to impress her. It'd be even harder from the other side of a closed door. Once I was inside and walking toward the sound of the TV, I called out, "Where are you, Alexis?" I strolled confidently into the room while Alexis was still getting to her feet. I cheerfully greeted her parents by name while she recognized me. "I know you." said Alexis, luckily not confidently, letting me know that she didn't know the old me very well. | "How'd you get in?" asked Alexis' father. I ignored Alexis to answer her father, "I let myself in, Ben. Sorry to surprise you, but Alexis has been missing out on having sex with me for too long already." "I don't..." started Alexis. I interrupted, "Yes you do," as I reached out with both hands to grasp her waist and easily hoisted her up and over one of my shoulders. A 25 kg NP boost on the underside of each of lifting arms had made the action impressively powerful and smooth. -- I pulled my license out of my pocket with the hand that wasn't holding Alexis in place, some NP-fingertips making that easier than it would otherwise have been, saying, "Here's my license, Ben, so you know who I am and that I'm not abducting your daughter. I'll get it back..." Alexis kicked her legs and called, "Wait! I..." I smacked her on the ass quite hard, telling her, "Quiet in the cheap seats. I'm talking to your father. As I was saying, Ben, I'll get my license back when I return your impolite, sex-starved daughter after breakfast tomorrow. -- "You had something to say, Alexis?" From somewhere down the middle of my back Alexis complained, "I don't know you enough to..." As usual in circumstances like this, such as the long talk I'd just had with my sisters - admittedly that hadn't been exactly like this - I was using my other-dimensional knowledge of the person(s) and feedback from my proximity sense. With my having only eight minds that sense wasn't as detailed as I would've liked, but it was good enough for me to tell that Alexis' proximity reading was okay. She likes assertive guys, and I was doing it in a way that was mostly verbal and not violent. This was happening in front of her parents, I'd given her father my license, and I was still standing in her living room and being polite (in my own way); all those meant her momentary fright at been hoisted over my shoulder had gone, and now she was thinking about my invitation. Proximity showed that she still had quite a lot of caution though, which was why I still had some more work to do before we left. I interrupted her protest to tell her, "Since when has that been an essential requirement for you having sex with someone? You can get to know me when we talk in the car. -- "I can tell you need some reassurance, Alexis, so I'll suspend my macho behavior for a few moments. We're going to my home. My parents and two sisters will be there, so you'll be safe. Plus I'm perfectly happy to have your parents follow us there, or the address is on my license so they can come later. They can even come in to watch us go at it, if you want. Maybe they can give you pointers for how to improve your technique. -- "This isn't a one-time event. We're going to become reasonably frequent lovers, and unusually for your lovers, we're also going to become friends. I want you to be comfortable with me, but you're not going to understand me until we're in the sack, so the sooner we get to that, the sooner you'll stop being uncertain. -- "Say 'Goodbye' to your folks. And say it quickly, or I'll smack your ass again." "I need my phone..." "I can't see it here. Where is it?" "It's in my bedroom." "My macho answer is: 'tough shit then.' I told you I was coming to get you so you should've been ready. You don't need it anyway. You're going to be too busy fucking, and I'm damned well not going to stop that so you can have girly gossip sessions. -- "My reassuring answer is if you need your phone to feel safe, then I'll let you down to get it, but that'd ruin my caveman routine and you'll honestly be too busy because we're going to have sex until you're so worn out you'll want to go to sleep. I'll let you use my phone if you feel the need to call anyone. Perhaps to tell your parents that you're having the time of your life. -- "I can tell you're close enough to being okay with me now, so we're outta here." I waved at Alexis' parents and headed for the door. "How do ya know that?" "Christ! The sooner my cock's pounding you in the ass hard enough to shut you up, the better." Alexis liked the sound of that. I carried her out to my car, where I showed off my apparent strength by flipping her off my shoulder, catching her, then placing her in the passenger's seat. In the car, Alexis asked, "I don't remember you being like this at school. You were at my school, weren't you?" It's DAMNED hard to find the perfect girlfriend. I know what I'm talking about with that statement because across the entire W-Dimension I've had over a trillion lovers, and I still haven't found one that knows when not to talk. I'm beginning to think that girls are overly fond of conversation. "You're right. I've changed since then. Now I'm much more the sort of guy you like, which is handy because I like you. You noticed some things about me at school, but I bet you didn't notice how observant I am. Most guys can't see past your willingness to have sex, but I can. For instance, I saw you..." It was less than five minutes to my home, and I spent it avoiding questions about myself by talking nonstop about examples of Alexis' behavior that I'd observed at other dimensions' schools. I chose examples that enabled me to talk about the qualities about herself that Alexis valued, but that other people usually missed. When I pulled up outside home, Alexis said, "I never realized you liked me so much." "I observe everyone that well, but you're right that I like you." I caught Alexis by surprise by hoisting her over my shoulder again and carrying her inside that way. Carol and Donna had obviously been waiting to see if I managed to bring a girl home. They'd watched Alexis get out of the car by herself and stand waiting for me to walk around the car, but then I'd hoisted her and carried her inside, so my sisters had become somewhat concerned about a possible abduction-in-progress. I flipped and twisted Alexis off my shoulders, catching her to hold her steady as she landed on her feet facing my sisters. I said, "Alexis Joseph, meet my sisters Carol and Donna. Carol's the beautiful girl on our left, Donna's the beautiful girl on our right. Say something nice to Carol, Alexis, because she's going to become your friend soon." "Ahh, hello." "Not good enough. That just earned you some spanking later tonight. Tell my sisters you're here of your own freewill because they're somewhat concerned about the way I carried you inside." "I'm fine. He's..." I cut her off by hoisting her again, saying, "That's enough! Stop flapping your lips in the breeze when we're here to screw your lights out." Leaving my sisters to wonder what'd gotten into their brother - I didn't think they'd guess "Seven more of his own minds" - I carried Alexis to my room where I used my intimate knowledge of her body to have my very expert, wicked way with her. She's got a very honest enjoyment of sex, so it only took a few minutes of my being between her legs before Alexis decided to stop being reluctant and to get fully into the spirit of the occasion. My normal routine for a long session is to get a girl off orally for her first orgasm. That's not really my goal, just a consequence of my head being between her legs because that's where I can best study how to push her buttons, that being where the most effective buttons are (if you think there's only one button down there, you've got a lot to learn about girls). Going down there has become a habit even with girls that have buttons that I already know all about. I didn't want to risk Alexis making a loud noise because Mom and Dad might rush in and abort my session before I'd done the real deed, so I only gave her some good head for a while, not taking her so far that she got noisy. After enough foreplay, I moved Alexis into a doggy fuck and started drilling her as vigorously as I knew she loved, complete with increasingly harder ass smacks as she got more aroused. Alexis' cries, her very graphic language, and probably the sounds of the smacks too, brought Mom and Dad out of their room and into the hallway outside mine, where Dad knocked loudly on the door that I hadn't fully closed, the better to let the sounds teach everyone in the house how much I'd changed. After some thought, I pulled the covers over us then called "Enter." The general plan was to shake up Mom and Dad, and although letting them enter the room while I continued to have sex on top of the covers would've done that very effectively, it was so rude (pun intended) that it would've made Mom angry. As Mom and Dad were still walking in, I said, "Alexis, I'd like you to meet my mother Felicity and father Steven. Mom and Dad, this is Alexis Joseph." As you can tell, I've been brought up to be polite. "Are you all right, Alexis?" asked Mom. Behind Mom, I saw Donna stick her head into the doorway, and see something she never expected to see: a naked girl in bed with me. Donna sidled into the room to get a better look around Mom and Dad. "FUCK YEAH!" answered Alexis enthusiastically. "He's GREAT! I've never had anyone go down on me as good as that, and he was fucking me in my favorite way." #3: "Is there anything else, Mom?" I asked, "Because I sent you and Dad to your room for three hours and it's not up yet. You've got twenty five years of apologies to catch up on and you don't want Dad to think he's not worth some high quality making up. You're not going to achieve that standing here talking to me." I thought that approach was better than kicking her ass as I'd originally threatened. "You might as well leave me to it, Mom, because there's no use in shutting the stable door after the horse has already hit some home runs. Besides, I was right in the middle of Alexis' favorite way and we'd rather finish it here than have to go back to her place." It's not easy to make Mom speechless over a parenting issue, but she had too many choices about how to respond and they all had obvious problems with them. Mom was lost for words while trying to find a clear line of attack. Dad had no such problems, including not minding me having sex. His main concern was, "Your sisters are too young to hear the noises you were making. You didn't even have your door closed." "Deliberately. I told you at dinner that I was doing this to prove to all of you how much I've changed, so doing it silently was never on the cards. Carol and Donna are mature enough to be able to handle the sound of sex. And they need to respect the new me just as much as you and Mom need to, including knowing that if I say I'm going to do something, then I will do it. That's been achieved, so I'm happy for you to close the door behind you on your way out." Said with a smile, to hopefully defuse Mom's anger if she thought I was being a smart-ass to her and Dad. Donna sidled into the room a little too far, and Mom spotted her. Mom rushed to save Donna from being corrupted, pushing her out of the room. Dad followed after them, telling me with a humorous tone, "Try to keep it down. We'll talk later. You've got a lot of explaining to do." "First you take the girl's clothes off. Then you lay her on her back and..." "Haha. Later, Mark." Dad left the room, closing the door behind him. I couldn't decide if Mom would be back shortly to put a stop to this, so I didn't waste any time getting back to business with Alexis. Because Alexis is a female, she wanted to talk, asking, "What was that about?" "Fuck now; full explanation later." You might've noticed that Alexis doesn't have a great deal of shame about sex, so she certainly wasn't worried about my parents returning. More sex sounded like a good idea to her, so we picked up from where we'd left off. We weren't interrupted. You might be surprised by that given what you've previously read about my mother's attitude to sex. I was somewhat surprised too. I guess the main reasons were that I'm eighteen now, Dad probably stood up for me, my threat to continue at Alexis' place if Mom objected had been credible considering Alexis' enthusiasm, and it was somewhat too late as any 'damage' had already been done. Don't let those reasons make you think I knew what I was doing, as I had no precedent to work from in this situation. I only knew that Mom wasn't comfortable with overt sex or parenting surprises, so both at the same time had definitely been pushing my luck. It could easily have gone the other way. If we had been interrupted, I probably could've thought of several reasons to justify that outcome too, but fortunately that didn't happen. Luckily it didn't really matter which way it went, because I'd already achieved most of my objectives for bringing Alexis home. I was more than happy to achieve some more objectives though; #1 was especially happy about that. Probably Mom and Dad had expected me to stop soon, what with their thinking it was my first time, and my having been 'caught' so I should be ashamed to carry on, but Alexis' cries, moans, groans and profane commentary continued for HOURS. Alexis gets off from being fucked in either hole, enabling me to fuck her pussy to a loud orgasm, fuck her ass to another loud orgasm, dump my dirty rubber and put on a new one, give her a loud oral orgasm, then restart the cycle with another pussy fuck. The three-position cycle meant she took longer than most girls would to get sore. Alexis also gets a great deal of practice at sex, and it's usually quite rough sex, so she's developed an impressive amount of endurance. Not as impressive as mine was now thanks mostly to go-softs, but still pretty good for a mere girl. We kept going at it for a LONG time. With the noises Alexis and my bed were making, the listeners were hearing very convincing nonstop evidence of my sexual abilities, especially as the hours clocked up. It was a pity there were only three listeners, as I'd seen with a sight blob that very soon after leaving my room - when it became clear that I wasn't going to stop - Mom had sent Donna and Carol out, presumably to visit their girlfriends. You may think that leaves two listeners, but the third was a delightfully naughty Donna. She'd circled back and was standing outside my open bedroom window, watching and listening to everything. I made sure to position Alexis and myself so Donna got plenty of good looks. Donna wouldn't be spying because she fancied me, as our relationship wasn't ANYWHERE near good enough for that. Most likely Donna was just curious, but I still seized on the opportunity to impress the heck out of her. Donna has a large number of very attractive, athletic girlfriends, most of whom are sixteen, the perfect age for them to be a mutually enjoyable sexual plaything of mine (most of the other ages ending in "-teen" are also the perfect age for that). The more I impressed Donna, the more likely she'd be to tell her girlfriends about it, with the obvious advantages that'd bring, so I made sure Donna was VERY impressed. Alexis' comments helped a great deal because she was VERY clear and graphic about how impressed she was. All good things must come to an end, even the very, very good things. Four multiply orgasmic hours after we'd started, Alexis had to beg me to stop. I was starting to run low on rubbers anyway. We settled under the covers for a cuddle. After a little joking around, I talked more seriously with Alexis, to give our future relationship some non-sexual foundations. I started with giving Alexis the full explanation about what had gone on with my parents, including the "turning over a new leaf" story. Then I built on the car conversation I'd had with her. We - all of the Marks - like Alexis. We know why we like her, why she likes us, and what she likes about our liking her. That knowledge allowed me to talk with confidence about her, my, and our emotional issues. I was very honest, very sincere, and very effective. Alexis and Donna were VERY impressed by my revealing a character and depth of understanding that neither girl had suspected before. When I'd said enough to get Alexis into the right frame of mind, I told her, "I'm sure Mom and Dad have got some questions for me, and they'll probably want to make sure you're okay after that marathon, so do I have your permission to fetch them?" "As long as I don't have to move, and please don't say anything funny." I'd cracked several jokes during my emotional discussion, and Alexis' sore muscles had let her know that they weren't amused. Toward the window I said, "Donna, sweetie, now would be a good time for you to be especially careful not to be noticed." Donna immediately ducked and scuttled away, no doubt intending to deny everything if ever accused. I wouldn't say anything to anybody, thereby proving how much I'd changed and adding to my bond with Donna. I walked naked to the living room where Mom and Dad were partly watching TV, but mostly waiting to talk with me. I invited, "Alexis needed to stop. I know you want to talk with me, but it'd be rude of me to leave her alone for long. She's staying the night, so if you don't want to wait until breakfast to talk with us and check that she's okay, I suggest you grab a second chair and come down to my room. You can talk with us while we're cuddling under the covers." "We never said you could have a girl stay overnight," said Mom, rather predictably I thought. Getting the casual-sex bee out of her bonnet was going to take several more "learning experiences" for Mom, and the next such lesson was starting now. "Over dinner I said I would be inviting a girl to stay overnight and neither you nor Dad demurred in the slightest. Had you refused, I wouldn't have brought her here. Or if you'd spoken up when you were in my room before, I wouldn't have carried on giving her so many orgasms. You had two opportunities to speak up, you chose not to, and it really is too late now. Alexis climaxed over twenty times during some very vigorous sex, and now her muscles are too sore for her to move. It would be unfairly cruel of you to insist she gets out of my bed now, and I don't believe you're that sort of person. -- "I'm aware that the reason you didn't speak up was because you totally failed to believe me and foresee what would happen, and I'm aware that I took advantage of that. I didn't do that to annoy you, but to provide you with a powerful lesson. What's happened tonight has been so far outside of your understanding of me that it has to have considerably changed your opinion of me. I could've talked until I was blue in the face and you wouldn't have accepted a fraction of what four hours of creaking bedsprings and screamed climaxes have taught you about me. Hopefully you'll believe what I say about myself in the future. -- "I appreciate your waiting patiently for us to finish rather than stopping us. That you did that shows your latest negative reaction isn't really to Alexis' staying overnight, but to my driving a truck through the way things have normally been done around here. That's part of my lesson too: that the way things have normally been done around here is going to change, because I've changed so much. I'm hoping that between the physicality of my sexual demonstration, and the non-physicality of my insight into your insecurity about Dad's fidelity, you'll be convinced that I've changed." "You can say that again!" exclaimed Dad, followed by a chuckle. He didn't care about all the crap I'd just said. His opinion of me had been changed by the sounds of me pounding Alexis into orgasm after orgasm for four hours. Mom had a very different perspective though, "We don't approve of your actions..." I'll spare you the rest of this conversation, and later conversations about Alexis and girls in general. I'd insisted Mom and Dad came back to my room to talk with Alexis, which helped because Alexis was so enthusiastically complimentary, while also being carefully stationary. She was very expressive at breakfast too, making Mom wince as Carol and Donna were hanging on every word, especially the words Mom didn't want them to hear. Despite Alexis having thoroughly enjoyed herself, Mom was hard to break out of her emotionally judgmental parenting mode. My being eighteen, Dad's support, and Alexis' eagerness for another session when she'd recovered got me some slack on the Alexis issue, but Mom's judgment was still negative. [Unfortunately for Mom's peace of mind, her delivering her judgment didn't clear the air. She worried that I must've got hooked on drugs. Even before that issue was resolved, I was throwing another wave of new, larger problems at her (described in the next chapters). Mom had a very rough ride transitioning into her new role in my life, especially because I still thought human civilization everywhere depended on my "BIG Secret" being kept so I refused to tell anyone the reason for my sudden and dramatic change.] ------- Chapter 430: 42,000 Marks; We Go Clothes Shopping Tuesday, July 1 to Thursday, July 10, 2008 It was much easier to get the non-Mom members of my family onto my side. I went running with Donna the next afternoon. We had a long conversation about topics that I knew were important to her. Naturally there was a lot of talk about sex, as Donna was very curious about it anyway and had been bursting to ask me about what she'd observed. She already knew enough about sex to know that she'd seen something very unusual. She was also amazed that I'd let her watch, and was even more amazed when I told her that I'd be getting Mom's permission to take a considerable role in her sex education and training [Donna's I mean, not Mom's. Sorting out that one problem between Mom and Dad was the beginning and ending of my involvement in my parents' sex-life]. When Donna was tiring, we popped home to get her bike so she could ride beside me while I blew her mind with my running endurance. I kept my speed below world-record times because it was too early to introduce that level of freakishness, and I probably couldn't have gone much faster than I was anyway as my body hadn't adapted quite enough yet, but what I did still had Donna VERY excited by the time we finished my run. By then the only remaining conversational boundaries between us were on subjects we hadn't had time to get to yet. When we got home, we played a little one-on-one basketball with me slaughtering Donna. I invited Dad to join Donna's team, then I slaughtered them both. That pretty much had both of them solidly respecting me, or at least had Dad respecting the magnitude of my change. Within a couple of days, Donna and I were giving each other quick hugs whenever we saw each other after an absence of a few hours. It became normal for us to be leaning against each other on the sofa when we watched TV, and that progressed to arms around each other, or her lying down with her head in my lap. Carol's attitude toward me was slower to change, but only because Donna was naturally an impulsive person. Donna's raving about me over the weekend helped a great deal in my convincing Carol to let me take her clothes shopping on Monday, even though I could easily tell that Carol was just doing it to humor me, with every intention of doing her own shopping while ignoring my comments. Seven of my minds had lived with a Julia, Carol and Ava for three years, plus even more significantly, quite a few months with Nevaeh. Living with just over three girls on average does not mean being exposed to three times as much clothing information as living with one girl. From my experiences, I estimate it means more than thirty times as much. They talk and talk and talk to each other! That was especially true once Nevaeh joined us because she had the best eye for what worked, a better understanding of why, and the other girls - especially Julia - were determined to learn from her so they talked about fashion at least incessantly, if not more. That means my seven imported minds had been subjected to an extraordinary quantity of fashion discussion. (I can't understand all the controversy over waterboarding, because it seems so non-traumatic in comparison.) Despite my very best efforts, I'd accidentally absorbed a great deal of - I'll charitably call it - "knowledge" about females' clothing choices, including a great deal about what suited Carol's body shape, her coloring, personal styles for different situations - casual, party, special date, etc. - what she was comfortable with, what accessories worked with her (e.g., what shape of earrings best suited her rounded face and the hairstyles she used), and many other factors. It only took three or four serious discussions in clothing stores for Carol to be amazed by the words that were coming out of my mouth. By the time we'd finished our first familiarization pass through all the stores, Carol was STUNNED by me. Even with my having to compensate for this Carol being less self-confident and in a different financial situation than the Carols I'd learned about, she could tell that I was far better at judging what clothes suited her than she was. Being more knowledgeable than Carol wasn't hard, as I'd had the 'educational' (cough, cough) 'benefit' (more coughs) of living with multiple Julias and Nevaehs while this Carol knew even less than ordinary girls. Given how beautiful her face and figure was, that was a sad indication of how much she'd always preferred to stay in the background. Speaking of her financial situation reminds me of mine. I was willing to blow a significant chunk of my savings on Carol, but I didn't have a lot of savings and we weren't shopping at the Kmart end of the market, so I wouldn't be able to buy nearly as much as I wanted. That made me even more cautious in my evaluations, making me appear even less like a male shopper. Carol was so impressed by my recommendations and knowledge that she was very happily talking about spending much more of her own money than she'd originally intended. I don't know whether you know this or not - hopefully for you, you don't - but you can't really take a girl clothes shopping unless you've already memorized everything in her closet, have been studying what other girls are wearing, and - according to Julia and Nevaeh - have diligently studied the latest international fashion magazines. Despite all eight of my minds having failed to read fashion magazines, between what I'd seen this Carol wear and what I'd picked up from my other-dimensional girls, I was able to make several 'intelligent' (cough, cough) comments, further impressing Carol. I also impressed her in other related ways, such as by responding to her suggestions about what store we should visit next by my making comments about that store: "No way. Their major brand gets 80% of their stock from a large CMT factory" (Cut, Make, Trim; basically an assembly operation) "outside of Shanghai which seems to push their workers to go so fast that they don't finish properly. You'll have problems with the hems and seams coming undone, buttons not lining up perfectly with their holes so tops don't hang quite right, and things like that. We won't even look in their window." By the end of the first pass, Carol was so impressed by me, and I'd said enough variations of, " ... depending on what you've already got in your closet," that Carol dragged me home so we could go through her closet. All I had to do, theoretically, was quickly look at every item in her closet, plus the folded up garments in her drawers such as sweaters. My memory had already improved dramatically, so it could've taken less than ten minutes. It didn't quite go that way because Carol held up an outfit to ask me, "What do you think of this?" We were still reviewing and discussion all of her clothes a few hours later when Mom came home from work. Carol heard Mom's arrival and called out, "Come to my room please, Mom." My family had accumulated enough money to move to a slightly better house, so Carol and Donna now had their own bedrooms. Mom walked in to find virtually every item of apparel Carol owned strewn around the room, Carol and me standing in the middle of it, with Carol in her bra and panties. [Take it from an accidental pseudo-expert, there truly is no substitute for seeing the outfit being worn to judge it competently. Getting Carol down to her underwear hadn't been part of my plan. It'd happened simply because after so many hours of nonstop fashion talk, Carol had forgotten that I was a boy and she'd started swapping in and out of outfits unselfconsciously. She'd realized her mistake a few undressings later, by which time my VERY careful lack of reaction - I'd realized the situation the instant she started lifting her first top - had taught her that there was no point in making a big deal about it. She felt self-conscious for the next few changes, but the excitement of the discussion had rapidly dispelled that. By the time Mom arrived home, even my original mind had stopped noticing Carol's semi-nakedness and she was totally uncaring about it herself.] Carol's underwear was decidedly unsexy - seven out of the eight of me thought - but Mom's eyebrows both shot northward at the sight of Carol being undressed with me in her room. Before Mom could get the wrong idea - which would soon be a very understated right idea if my plan went the way I wanted - Carol started raving about my fashion-sense (the prefix "fashion-" has an even more extreme meaning than "non-" when placed ahead of "sense"). Carol looked around for a particular garment, which was no easy task in the disaster site that was her room, spotted its sleeve protruding from under some other garments, swooped down to pick it up, unconcerned by the view she gave me. Carol put it on while commanding me, "Tell Mom what you told me about this." I couldn't think of anything witty to say in response to that opportunity - I'd spent the whole day talking fashion so my intellect was now a gibbering wreck hiding behind my thalamus until it was safe to come out - so I merely followed Carol's order. It took a few minutes because her outfit was wrong for her in several ways. As soon as I finished, Carol exclaimed, "He's been like that ALL day! He's BRILLIANT at fashion! I'm NEVER going to buy anything again unless Mark approves it first. He even knows all about the stores, where their labels are manufactured, which sales assistants to use or avoid, the owners' names, and EVERYTHING! And he won't tell me how!" I said, "Now you understand why the first surprise I gave you was with Alexis, Mom. Otherwise you'd be convinced I was gay by now." "Where did you learn about women's fashion?" asked Mom, in puzzlement and a foolish hope that I'd tell her. "In the same place I learned to run so well and judge the sexual behaviors of everyone in this house." My turning over a leaf explanation had been deemed an unsatisfactory one, so I'd been grilled over my recent changes. Everyone was totally mystified, and the parents very determined to understand their son's dramatic changes. It was one thing for me to see something in my parents' love-life that even Dad hadn't spotted, and it was a COMPLETELY different and mystifying thing for me to be able to outrun Donna and out-basketball Dad and Donna combined. Despite their many repeats of the same few questions, I'd not satisfied my family's curiosity. I'd just told them that the cause of my change was a secret that was my responsibility, and that I was refusing to make it theirs. Carol's enthusiasm bubbled over into a gushing description of her day. I interrupted it to say, "Carol, how about you put some clothes on and help Mom with dinner. We didn't have a big enough lunch and I'm hungry." With only eight minds I couldn't obtain as much energy from the Universe as my vastly increased mentation required, so I was eating about 50% more than I used to. Probably slightly more than that because I was trying to change my body shape as fast as possible. When Mom and Carol left to start dinner, Carol still excitedly describing her day with me, I started tidying up the mess in her room, sorting her clothes into several groups. It took me several hours less than would've been the case if Carol had been helping me. All through dinner Carol gushed about me and fashion. She'd never been so excited about fashion before, but having me explain everything with such clarity and credibility had ignited her genetic weakness for it. Donna caught the disease and asked to join us tomorrow, Carol having already allocated all of the next day for us to hit the stores again. With great enthusiasm, Carol urged, "Get Mark to go through your closet with you first. We'll do that right after dinner." I wasn't the only one that got bad news over dinner, because Carol urgently asked Mom and Dad for more money so she could spend it tomorrow. Donna thought that sounded like an excellent idea too. Mom was doubtful, answering, "Let's see what you come back with first, before we spend much." After dinner, the first thing I did was take Carol back to her room, followed by Donna and Mom. I explained the groupings Carol's clothes were in now, and suggesting a new organizational structure for her closet and some of her drawers (my new minds had shared a walk-in closet with several girls, so I knew FAR more than I wanted to about clothing organizational systems). I was encouraging her to put all her non-rejects away right now, rather to risk me getting sucked into another discussion about all of them. Mom indicated one of Carol's garments and asked, "Why did you reject that? I like how she looks in it." "If I start answering those questions, in five minutes Carol's clothes will be spread all over the bed and floor again, and we'll never get to Donna's room. That'd leave me unprepared for helping with Donna's shopping tomorrow. Carol knows my opinions about all of her clothes so ask her later. Meanwhile let's get these put away as fast as possible so we can get to Donna's room." They fell for it, so it took a miraculously short time before we were recreating the tornado effect in Donna's room. I didn't have nearly as much specific information about what fashion suited Donna, as it'd only been the last year or so that my other-dimensional girls had been helping Donna buy her clothes. Nonetheless, I still remembered quite a few Donna-specific tips, and I'd also been corrupted by far too many general fashion principles that I could apply to anyone. As a result, we didn't have to go through many of Donna's clothes before my commentary had Mom and Donna as amazed by my fashion acumen as Carol was. Dad must've gotten lonely because he wandered in an hour later to see what was going on. Donna shrieked and covered up as she was in her underwear. Dad got very quickly shooed out of the room, chuckling to himself. Dad wouldn't normally have walked into Donna's bedroom without being careful about announcing himself first, but he'd heard my voice from in here so had obviously assumed it was safe for males to enter. He hadn't been aware that by now the females in the family all considered me one of them. No doubt they thought that was a good thing, and it certainly was for gaining their trust. After I'd finished commenting at length about all of Donna's existing clothes, Mom was impressed enough by my fashion sense to talk about my choosing several new outfits for the girls. Implicit in Mom's comments was that she'd be contributing financially, making all the kids very happy. The girls were therefore somewhat surprised, if not dismayed, when I said, "I suggest we don't buy many outfits tomorrow. A few are needed, but not even half as many as I'm removing from their closets. Their personalities and clothing styles are going to be changing quite a lot over the next few months because of my influence on their lives. More than a few new outfits would be a waste because they won't get worn. It'd be better to save our money for when the girls are ready for their new looks." The girls had some very eager questions about their new looks. I certainly wasn't going to explain. What I had already said - telling them in general that I was going to change their styles - was a useful first step in making the changes easier. It got them used to the idea, would make them easier to motivate later, and it even gained me some authority over the process. But it'd be a bad idea for me to be detailed about the changes, especially because the main change I wanted was to make both my sisters dress sexier. That wouldn't go over well with Mom or Carol. It'd go over well with Donna, which would only increase my problems with Mom. I answered by using my hard-won fashion credibility (I'd learned it without trying, but it'd still been hard on me), "I'm sure you understand that your clothing styles will change noticeably after six months of my educating you about fashion. The trouble is that your current style is what you like the most, so if I describe a different style to you, then you obviously won't like it as much and you'll be disappointed. You're going to have to trust that I understand fashion well enough to know what I'm doing, including knowing what you'll like once you're better educated and have learned to be better judges of clothes." They trusted my fashion sense to a degree that amazed me, so I got away with that sidestep. I also sidestepped Mom's asking me for advice about her clothing choices by saying, "I'm a teenage boy, so it's the fashion of teenage girls that I notice the most. There are some general principles that I could apply to your clothes but you should be aware of most of them yourself. Rather than have another marathon closet reviewing session in your room, how about I just comment on whatever I see you wearing each day, presuming I can think of anything useful to say about it?" Mom agreed to that, adding, "Please speak up if you don't think something suits me. I want my boss to think well of me." That was an opening I couldn't resist, "I'll do as you ask, but I suggest that the best way of improving your standing at work isn't with your clothing. When you go to work tomorrow, tell your coworkers that you've recently become aware of how often you say, 'Are you insane' as an accusation. Apologize to them for it, and ask them to point it out to you if you accidentally say it or something similar out of habit." "What are you talking about?" I took Mom through it again slower, until she understood exactly what I was asking her to do. She was convinced that it was unnecessary because she was sure she never spoke to her coworkers that way. "If they've never heard you say it, then there's no harm in asking them whether you have. I strongly suggest you ask them though. And after you've heard your coworkers' responses, you might want to have a talk with your boss about it because it might be coloring his impression of you. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor in your missing out on that promotion you went for a few months ago." There being no MAF in this dimension, Mom hadn't changed jobs to work for it, and she was still at her medical sales support job. ^ The next day's shopping with Carol and Donna was actually fun most of the time, although I could've done without the salesman who assumed I was also a homosexual. Counterbalancing that was an incident in which a refreshingly female assistant was so attracted by my fashion knowledge - after her overhearing a long discussion about a style Donna liked but I didn't - that she started flirting with me. She obviously had a better gaydar than the gay guy, and no compunction about flirting with me in front of the two girls I'd walked in with. When her flirting got so strong that Carol and Donna noticed, I told the assistant, "Thanks for the compliment, but it's not going to happen. I've already got two fantastic and beautiful girlfriends, and my life is perfect." My sisters laughed happily, and accepted my comment in amusement. A week ago they would've indignantly denied that connection, and told me off for embarrassing and annoying them. Things were progressing nicely. After we'd left the store, Donna and Carol started teasing me for being shy with the assistant. I disagreed, "I wasn't the least bit shy. I've got too many other very important things to do over the next few weeks to bother with starting with a new girlfriend." "What about Alexis?" asked Donna. Donna was fascinated by what I'd done with Alexis; not only the sex, but the way I'd done it right in Mom's and Dad's faces and by the emotional depth Donna had overheard me revealing in my post-coital conversation. Donna had already asked me so many questions about Alexis that she didn't need to ask any more, but she couldn't resist. I answered, "I needed to quickly convince everyone that I'd changed a great deal. I chose Alexis because I knew she'd be easy to get into my bed, that it'd be very pleasurable for both of us, and she wouldn't turn into a clingy, time-wasting wannabe girlfriend afterward. I've told her we'll have lunch in a few days, and then another session maybe a week later. That doesn't consume much of my time, and she's cool with that because she enjoys be free to have casual sex with other guys quite often." All of which Donna already knew, but I was happy to have Donna ask me questions about relationships and sex. Carol asked, "If you've got important things to do, why are you spending so much time with Donna and me?" "Because you and Donna are two of the MOST important things." I gave them a one-armed hug each. They accept my hugs, with only Donna giving me half a hug in return. It was early days in our new relationships though. I added, "Until a few days ago our relationships were a terrible waste, but now your first reaction is to smile when you see me. The improvements we're making are very important to me." -- Proximity told me that they were mostly comfortable with that, but did have some concerns, especially Carol. I couldn't tell what their concerns were about, so to be safe I downplayed what I'd just said then changed the subject with, "We'll just spend time doing enjoyable things together like shopping, and we'll see how well we get along." I put on a fake-outraged tone of voice, "Meanwhile I'm APPALLED by your teasing me for being shy! I'll show you how shy I am! The next store we go into that has a suitable girl, I'll stop you EVER being able to tease me for shyness." A couple of stores later, there was suitably aged, attractive and actively shopping 'target', so I made sure to clearly say "my sisters" to the assistant a couple of times. Then when Carol asked me about a dress that she pulled from a rack, I gave her a long, impressive answer, loud enough to be heard by my target. I repeated that tactic again talking to Donna a couple of minutes later. By now the target girl was conscious of me and impressed by the extent of my knowledge about the most important female topic ever. I waited until the target pulled a dress that suited her out of a rack. She paused to consider it, and I spoke out to her, "The style suits you, especially the way it" (I'll omit making you read the reasons, out of consideration for my male readers). "But you should get it in one of your colors. You can probably know that the square neckline doesn't go well with your current hairstyle, but you should get that changed to better complement your face anyway. Who does your hair?" [My extra-dimensional girlfriends had not talked just clothes, but also hairstyles, jewelry, makeup, shoes, fabrics, colors, handbags, etc., ad nauseam. Much of which had seeped into my brain, ears not being capable of being closed or redirected the way eyes can be.] The target responded to my two hooks - "your colors" and "who does your hair?" - and a conversation quickly developed. She crossed the room toward me as we talked. She introduced herself (Gail), I introduced myself and my SISTERS, managing to work in the compliment, "I only recently opened my eyes to how wonderful my sisters are, so I'm making a lot more time for them than I used to." I answered Gail's important questions about my having so much fashion knowledge by saying, "I enjoy the company of beautiful young women - what guy doesn't! - but they never want to talk about the Superbowl playoffs or how to tune high-performance car engines, so I end up having to listen to hours of fashion talk. Finding the perfect girlfriend is IMPOSSIBLE! -- "I don't suppose you can talk about the timing sequence for a restored 67 Mustang, can you, Gail? No? See what I mean. You're beautiful, but you're more interested in fashion than important topics. My search for the perfect girlfriend continues, SIGH." "Haha." To avoid coming across like this was all about a pickup, which would put her on the defensive, I distracted her brilliantly, "Have you considered getting your hair restyled with a square-cut fringe? If you did that, and got your..." The ensuing conversation went on for several minutes, as the four of us wandered around the store, also discussing garments that caught any of our eyes. There was nothing for my sisters here, but Gail had a couple of items to buy, so we said "Goodbye" to her. Gail didn't like the idea of the perfect guy walking out of her life. She humorously offered, "If I read up on the timing thingy for cars, could we have dinner one night soon?" "Sorry Gail. I don't have a girlfriend now, but I know who I want to pursue as soon as I've rebuilt my relationship with my sisters sufficiently." "Can I give you my number in case?" "Thank you, but no. I want to approach her with a clean slate. Thanks though." Outside the store I tried to tease my sisters about their teasing me earlier. They ignored my comments, being too surprised that I'd actually turn down a pretty girl trying to give me her number. I explained, "I said before that I don't have time for a new girlfriend. Partly because I want to spend as much time as possible with you, Mom, and Dad, and partly because it was true when I told Gail about knowing who I want to pursue next. I'm not going to start a relationship with a random girl when I'm going to be starting a much more important relationship in a couple of weeks." "Who is she?" asked Carol eagerly. "Her name's Julia and you don't know her yet. That's all I'll say now, until it's time for you to meet her." I may have thought that was all I was going to say, but Carol and Donna had the opposite idea. It took a few minutes for them to accept that I truly wasn't going to tell them any more about Julia. I didn't want to risk any word of my intention getting to her before I was ready, as that wouldn't help my case at all. By the way, my willingness to show my sisters how good I was at getting pretty girls to like me wasn't so I could avoid my sisters' teasing, but so they could see that other girls fancied me. There is NOTHING that encourages a girl to respect and want a guy more than seeing that other girls approve of him. Not only would seeing that make my sisters aware of and susceptible to my desirability, but my sisters would mention it to their friends too. What I most enjoyed about the day was how totally Carol and Donna accepted my rulings on everything. Their respecting and obeying me in a fashion setting would spill over into other areas, which would be very helpful in a number of ways in the future. Mom came home that evening, and the very first thing she did was seek me out to ask me how I'd known about the harm she was doing to her career by talking to her coworkers the way she sometimes had. Being pretty sure how much trouble Mom's knee-jerk emotional reactions would cause me over the next few months, I didn't just politely wave the issue off. Instead I delayed the discussion about it until later in the evening, so I could rip into her in front of the whole family. It'd be crueler, but it'd make her learn faster and save us both more grief in the long run. Carol and Donna excitedly butted in on Mom's and my conversation to rave about their day's shopping. Mom allowed them to, and we were dragged to Carol's room, while Donna rushed to hers to grab her purchases. Mom and I stood to one side while my sisters repeatedly stripped down to their underwear again to put on and twirl each new garment. That necessitated pulling several already owned items out of their closets, when what we'd bought coordinated with something they already owned. Carol's room soon resembled another tornado site. Early in the fashion show, Mom asked me, "What do you think of your sisters being comfortable changing in front of you?" "I'm AMAZED at how much power fashion has over female minds! I demonstrate a modicum of fashion acumen, and my sisters throw several years of strongly ingrained sibling rivalry and dislike out the window. I'm kicking myself for not using it to get beautiful girls to strip for me years ago. -- "More seriously, I'm very pleased that I've been able to gain their trust so quickly. Trust is a VERY good foundation to a relationship. It's a pity there wasn't as much of that as there should've been in your relationship with Dad. I hope you'll become happier as you manage to get rid of those insecurities. I can tell you with certainty that Dad's never cheated on you, so your fear has needlessly cost you a great deal over the years." "How can you be certain?" "It's another one of my secrets. I know I'm holding a great deal back from you, but I say what I can and it's always the truth. I'm certain Dad's guiltless." The subject had come up enough times by now for me to be certain that there was no guilt in Dad's proximity reading. Some worry, but that was clearly only about Mom's unhappiness and fears. Mom's reminding the girls that they were semi-naked with me didn't even give them pause. I was as good as a girl by now so they didn't care about their exposure. Between Mom's, the girls' and my monies - mine using the excuse of the girls' imminent birthdays - we'd been able to buy several outfits, two of them even being the exact same outfits that the girls had recently bought for themselves in my previous seven dimensions (the Voyaging Mark had deliberately given these Marks minds from a wide spread of dimensions, so all but one of them had been acquired by the Voyager relatively recently). I'd recommended good, practical, attractive choices, all of which got Mom's approval. None of the new clothes were sexy so they didn't really get my approval, but sexy would come soon. More money would have to come soon too, especially because I'd need to replace all my clothes in a couple of months. After dinner, it was time for me to tell Mom off for her "Are you insane!" knee-jerk habit. The telling off was very much the same as for other dimensions so I won't quote it again. I will mention one aspect though: until a few days ago it was almost unheard of for me to stand up to Mom. I'd confidently done so several times recently, such as the several conversations we'd had about Alexis, including after she'd left. The hint offered by my newly displayed confidence didn't prepare my family for the surprise of my so forcefully rebuking Mom now. Mom and Dad protested my surprising forcefulness, and I surprised them again by telling them off for their protest, including, "Until today you had no idea that Mom's knee-jerk reactions were damaging her career. When I first mentioned it to her, Mom even assured me that she never spoke that way to her coworkers. You were clueless about her use of that expression in the past and I'm the only one that understands how often it might occur in the future and the damage it could cause us." To kill two birds with one stone, in the course of my rebuke I worked in a comment about Mom not stopping to think when surprised by a parental issue, then I added, "That's why I'm giving you some small surprises to practice on, Mom. I'll give you a new one now. Starting as soon as Donna trusts me enough, and for the following several months, I'm going to be giving her quite a lot of sex education. I understand Donna's current needs well, and I'll enjoy taking some responsibility for helping her transition successfully into young womanhood. No doubt you think I'm insane, but you're wrong. -- "Part of her Sex-Ed process will be that after every session with me, Donna will explain to you what we discussed and what she learned from it. That's so you'll keep up with what Donna's learning, and so you can judge what I'm teaching her and my trustworthiness. Naturally you can clarify or override as much of my material as you like, but you'll find there's no need because I know what I'll be doing. A few days ago you would've laughed at the idea of Carol and Donna putting their clothing purchases in my hands, so don't laugh at Donna's Sex-Ed being in my hands." Although once Donna's Sex-Ed gets truly hands-on, she'll have to start editing what she tells Mom. -- "When Carol trusts me sufficiently, I'll be doing something similar with her, but not about sex and not in a formal manner. What Donna needs to learn suits one-on-one sessions with me, but Carol's needs don't suit that style. Carol's learning will be more about her attitude to life, and the best way for me to impart my wisdom on that subject is for Carol and me to do things together: go bowling, go to the Aquatic Center, help me make friends with the girl I'm going to be living with soon, and other things like that. I'll be using our common experiences as source material for Carol's lessons about life. You look like you want to say something, Mom. I hope you're not going to accuse me of being insane?" Mom found an alternative wording, "How can you expect to give good advice to the girls about sex and life? You've barely had any experience of either. Just because you had a night with Alexis doesn't make you an expert about sex. There's a great deal more to that subject than the act itself." "You're still so hung up on physical sex that you've forgotten what else I've done recently. Dad spent twenty five years in an intimate relationship with you and he had no idea that you were hiding a big secret from him, but I knew enough about life to see your insecurity almost immediately after I turned over my new leaf. I was also able to predict that you would've fallen into a damaging interpersonal style at work, and the way I've been talking the last few days should've made you aware that I'm a great deal more knowledgeable and mature than you previously thought. I'm as knowledgeable about sex and life as I am about fashion. My capabilities have increased so much it's a big mistake to think they're the same as a week ago or related to my chronological age. -- "You'd better hurry up and adapt because I'll divulge the next round of surprises on Friday evening to give you the weekend to assimilate them. Can everyone arrange to be at home all Friday evening after dinner, please?" Mom, Dad and Donna agreed, but Carol said, "Eric and I have a date." "Cancel it please, Carol. Eric's unimportant already and I imagine you'll be breaking up with him soon anyway, so don't let him get in the way of any of the things I'm going to be doing with you and our family." "I don't want to break up with him." "Not yet you don't, but you will soon. You'll be rapidly outgrowing your need for him. Considering how little he means to you now, it won't take long for you to decide to stop wasting your time on him." "How do you know what I think of Eric?" "Mostly by simple logic. It's obvious you have no spark for him. You're passive and you probably chose him because he's even more passive and compliant. So much passivity makes for a relationship that other people might think is working fine, but the absence of arguments doesn't equal success. It actually equals a relationship failure, as you should have come to understand by now. -- "You know that you're going to break up with Eric sooner or later. You're wasting your time with him and not really being fair by letting him think he's got a girlfriend as gorgeous as you. Your time is going to be in shorter supply than you think because you're going to be fairly busy doing things with me. The last two days' shopping is only the beginning for what we'll be doing together. I know you don't like guys hitting on you, so I suggest you tell Eric that you've found someone else so word won't get around that you're available. I know you're puzzled. The self-important tone that I'm using will make more sense to you after Friday. String Eric along for a few more days if you like, just as long as you'll be with us on Friday evening. That's very important." Carol agreed to cancel her Friday date with Eric, but didn't agree to cancel her relationship with him. Pity, but she would sooner or later. ^ At Wednesday morning's breakfast, Carol mentioned that she and a bunch of her friends were going to the Aquatic Center before lunch. I said, "Can I join you at my lunchtime please?" My lunchtime away from my vacation job. Not having much of a social-life, I'd agreed to work most days during the summer vacation. "I know brothers wouldn't normally be invited, but it's a good opportunity for you to learn some more things about me." "No problem. There'll be as many guys as girls anyway." A few years had made that major change to Carol's social circle. I got permission from my boss to be flexible about when I returned from lunch, provided I made up the lost time. I jogged to the pool rather than taking my car. I had no interest in jogging or other exercise, but I was making sure as many people as possible knew I was doing a great deal of it. In reality I was only doing a little exercise but a great deal of exaggeration. It'd only been five days but I could already see the first changes to my body. They were too small for anyone else to notice yet, but they certainly wouldn't be by the end of summer. By then my body - especially if displayed in bright yellow Speedos - would be extreme. I wasn't worried about my family, but other people might see my body often enough over summer to become suspicious over how fast it was changing, so to diminish that risk I was giving people the impression that I was exercising like crazy. That was the reason I'd told my boss I was going running and swimming at lunchtime, as if all the lifting and carrying I did in the warehouse wasn't physical enough. At the pools I judged that Carol's swimsuit was about 40% of the way down the list from most exciting to most boring, and all the guys are included on that list. A certain Australian mail-order company was going to get some business soon. I used a few tricks: I interacted with Carol's group carefully. I asked Carol to personally introduce me to each person, rather than an "Everyone, this is my brother Mark; Mark, this is everyone." I knew some of them already, but fewer than a third. I memorized all their names and used them forever after. I was very friendly, polite, gentlemanly, and entertaining. Where it was possible for this Mark to have known something about one of the girls, usually because she'd been a friend of Carol's for a long time, I made reference to something personal about her. Things like wishing her "Happy Birthday" if it was coming up soon, or "I remember overhearing Carol talking on the phone, saying you were sweating about the Math final. How did you do?" In the pool I swam VERY fast, using NP to propel me along at an attention-getting pace. I didn't swim complete laps in case anyone in the crowd was timing me and I accidentally broke a world record, but I did swim for enough distance to cause some jaws to drop. Carol expressed stunned amazement at my swimming ability, and repeatedly said, "You've NEVER swum like that before. How'd you get so good so quickly?" I told her, "I've been studying and practicing it recently. It's part of my exercise program." I talked Carol into being my missile for one round of, "Toss The Girl". I shot-put her HIGH into the air, the sight and sound - a very loud and surprised "{SQUEAL!}" - attracted more volunteers. The game was soon full-on, with other guys trying to compete with me the way guys do, especially when their competitor looks weak enough to easily beat. They were pathetic by comparison. I bashfully admitted, "Maybe I have a better technique, or something." (It was probably the "or something": the 420 kg of NP force I had available.) People were visibly impressed by my strength, some of the guys making envious comments like, "You don't look strong; there must be a trick to it." They were right. A few times during the hour, I whispered to Carol things like, "Is Kathy your friend? In that case you'd better warn her about Brian. She likes him, but he actually dislikes her. He's acting like her boyfriend solely because of lust. She's going to get hurt sooner or later, and sooner will hurt a lot less." Another one was, "You've got to get Deanna and Brody together. They're both interested in each other, but Brody's too shy and Deanna is too embarrassed about something whenever Brody does talk to her, but I can't tell what." I was able to make a couple of comments out loud, like during the introductions when one couple had very strong feelings for each other, "Congratulations you two. It's not often I meet a couple who're as emotionally into each other as you two are. If you can avoid making mistakes, I expect Carol to show me her invitation to your wedding one day." They were still young so I doubted they'd marry, but it was still useful for me to say that. Carol and the others would already know how tight the couple were, and be impressed by how quick I'd spotted it. When it was time for me to leave, I made sure several of them heard me say I was running back to work for the exercise. Carol's friends were a group that I'd see several times during summer, so they'd see my body changing. Carol escorted me toward the gate. As soon as we were out of earshot of her group, she whispered to me earnestly, "How on Earth did you know about my friends the way you did?" "I'm EXCEPTIONALLY good at reading people now. It's another of my turning-over-a-leaf changes. Part of it is understanding body language a lot better than I used to, part of it is being much more observant and having a superb memory. I'll give you a memory demonstration. Stand so you're facing me and can see your group over my shoulder. I'll recite the names of everyone in your group, describe what they're wearing and their hairstyles..." I recited it all, something that was very easy to do with a sight blob helping my memory. Carol was very impressed and started gushing at me. She was liking and respecting me more and more, which I thought was wonderful. Both of those emotions are very important in unlocking Carol's heart. I cut her off though, saying, "We can talk at home as much as you want, sweetie, but I've got to get back to work..." "Oh yeah. Sorry." "No worries; I'll just run a little faster. Before I go, I want to make one comment that's very important to me. You're impressed by my ability to read your friends, but in truth I hardly had time to get to know them. Most of the time we were fooling around in the pool, or they were talking with each other rather than me, or I was distracted by something else. You're impressed by what I noticed in a few minutes, so imagine how penetrating my insights into a person's character could be if I spent hours talking to them. -- "There is one person in your group that I've spent a great deal of time with, that I've thought about very carefully, and that I can tell you without any doubt whatsoever is a FANTASTICALLY WONDERFUL person; FAR better than anyone else in your group." I paused to build Carol's puzzlement and curiosity. Before she could work it out, I concluded, "I am VERY, VERY glad that you are my sister, Carol." Emotions rapidly passed through Carol. Curiosity gave way to surprise - an "Oh" came out then - to embarrassment, to confusion, and after some indecision, a fluctuating mixture of happiness and doubt. I told her, "Stop feeling ANY doubt. You should be proud of how wonderful you are..." "I'm not anything special. I'm not..." "If you think you can talk me out of my opinion of you, what you are is crazy! I KNOW what I'm talking about. I shouldn't call it 'my opinion' because your wonderfulness isn't an opinion, it's a fact. The things that I said about your friends are all perfectly true and I have no doubt about them whatsoever, and that's after only a few minutes with them. Since I changed last Friday I've spent more than half my waking hours with you. That's not a coincidence but my deliberate choice. If I know your friends as well as I do after a few minutes' study, imagine how well I know you after all the time we've spent together recently. I INSIST that you are a truly wonderful person! -- "I understand why you have doubts about that. Not enough people have told you that you are wonderful because most people are too wrapped up in themselves to understand other people properly, but I do understand. Second, you aren't comfortable opening yourself to other people, which makes it hard for them to get to know the real, wonderful you. I do understand you, and I'm going to help you gain the skills and confidence you need to be more open with people, so others can learn how wonderful you are, and enjoy having you in their lives as much as I do." Carol's emotions were even more mixed up now than they'd been a minute ago, but they still made me very happy. I'd made Carol feel a little fear, but of opening up I thought, rather than of me. But more than making up for her fear was that her good emotions were significantly stronger than before. Her confusion and doubt were stronger too, but frequent repetitions of my message over the next few weeks would dispel those. I gave Carol a quick kiss on the cheek, using EKP to hinder any flinch she might make, as that would've created a poor memory of the event. She didn't though. I said, "Have a good afternoon, My Wonderful Sister. Bye." I turned and moved away, leaving a somewhat mixed up, but mostly happy, Carol behind me. It was very enjoyable building up yet another Carol. ------- Chapter 431: 42,000 Marks; Special Abilities Friday, July 11, 2008 As I had said I would, I convened a family meeting on Friday evening. Before I begin describing it, I will say that it was interrupted with variations on the same few questions over and over again. To save you from being driven as far up the wall as I was, I'll omit 99% of those interruptions. I will also omit the interrupting phone calls, especially for Carol and Donna. Fortunately they found the discussion exciting enough to let them get in touch with their masculine side, enabling them to unnaturally say, "I'm busy. I'll call you back later. Bye." We gathered in the living room after Friday's dinner. I made sure the drapes were closed perfectly, including clipping the middle joins together and using a few pins around the outside edges. It was excessive as it's standard operating procedure for me to keep a sight blob on overwatch above our home, so I'd know if someone came close enough to see anything through the living room's drapes. My pinning the drapes was just to set the right tone for the rest of the family. I wanted them to take this conversation and security seriously. This dimension's Government would no doubt be as bad as the others that I'd experienced, so it wouldn't hesitate to break whatever laws didn't suit it. I expected to have a couple thousand minds in a few months, but until then caution would be a good idea. Even after then, we might still have to be cautious about a few things. I started with an ability that wouldn't shock my family: my proximity sense. I stood blindfolded in a corner and had them send a random one of them up behind me, with me identifying who the person was every time. They didn't exactly jump up and down in excitement as a result of my demonstration, but that'd come soon. I returned to the center of the room, closed my eyes, and had Dad throw punches at me. As Dad gained confidence in my ability to avoid his punches, his attacks became more real and I had to move much more to avoid them, so it turned into a demonstration of my gracefulness too. Other than explaining roughly how it worked, that was all I did to demonstrate proximity. I deliberately failed to mention my ability to sense emotions. I judged that my family didn't yet trust me enough to be comfortable with my invading their privacy, and it would've been unpleasant to have them worried about being within six feet of me. Plus - not to put too fine a point on it - I wanted to keep invading their privacy so I could judge their emotional reactions to the changes I was introducing to their lives, especially to know if I was going too fast for any of them, and what Carol's evolving feelings for me were. Dad and Donna were impressed by my demonstration, and had some questions about it. I answered them, but with unsatisfactory answers, not being able to tell them how I could do it, and not agreeing to teach it to them either. "Are you SURE you can't teach me?" asked Donna. "It's not that I'm refusing to teach you; it's that I CAN'T teach you. You might as well ask me to teach a horse to play the guitar. It can't be done. I've got more abilities to show you yet and they're much more impressive than my proximity sense and being able to dance around Dad's attacks so gracefully, so we should move on to the next one." I sat down in front of the coffee table. I'd already placed two writing pads on it with a pen on top of each. I said, "Mom and Dad, would you each go and get a book. Any book from anywhere in the house, preferably not out of my room in case you think I might've memorized it." When they returned, I got Mom and Dad to each hold their book open at a random page in front of me, side by side but a couple of feet apart. Using a pen in both hands, I copied the books, while saying, "Notice that I'm now ambidextrous and that I can move each eyeball in different directions." I gave them several seconds to appreciate that both of those statements were true, and that I was copying the books faithfully and legibly. "I'm consciously reading both books at the same time and remembering what I'm reading. That means that I'll be able to do all my college reading and assignment writing in half the normal time because I'll be doing it in stereo." There were a few mundane questions about what I'd shown them. Mom about educational aspects, Dad mostly about sports, Donna wanting to know if I could write her assignments at the same time as I was writing my own. I answered Donna's question with, "I'm planning to give an impressive typing demonstration soon. After that you'll probably prefer that I type your assignments. I'll be happy to do that for you, provided you've already written the draft for me to copy. Naturally I won't actually DO your assignments for you, but I'm CERTAIN you didn't mean that." Donna wasn't so certain that she hadn't meant that, but was certain that it'd been worth a try. My existing demonstration having achieved its purpose, I drew a line under what I'd written on both pages as I said, "I'll shut my eyes now. Would Mom and Dad please turn to another random page somewhere in their books, and I'll write them down again." No one was excited by that idea, as they doubtless assumed I'd be opening my eyes before I started writing. They were quite surprised when I didn't. "I can't copy the book when you're waving it around like that, Mom." "But your eyes are SHUT!" "Do NOT shout! We don't want anyone walking past the house to know that I can read with my eyes shut." There was no one walking past, but that was beside the point. "Are you peeking?" asked Dad. "There's no deception involved. NOTHING that I'm showing you this evening is a trick. I can honestly do what I'm claiming to do, including reading with my eyes shut. My mind is now so powerful that I can suck the images directly into my brain. This demonstration isn't finished yet so please hold your comments until I've finished. Donna and Carol, would you please go to your rooms to get a random book each. Stay in your room, hold your book facing away from you then open it at a random page so you can't see what's on it. I'll call you after a minute. When you hear my call, come back here with the book carefully held open so you don't lose your place, and we'll compare each of your books to what I'll have written." The one thing I did which was deceptive was to make Mom and Dad believe that I had to close my eyes to be able to see at a distance. I wanted my family to believe that this amazing new ability required my eyes to be shut as that'd feel somewhat less threatening to them. Later, when they were more comfortable with my abilities, I'd tell them that I'd gotten better with practice and didn't need to close my eyes anymore. It'd taken me a lot of work after my seven additional minds had arrived in this dimension, but I'd managed to reproduce the trick of having light blobs send their information directly to my minds, so I didn't need to close my eyes to use two sight blobs. A normal eight-minded Mark would never have been able to get that technique going himself if he'd heard about in on the grapevine, but having seven of my minds already experienced in using it made it JUST possible for me to get it going here. I called the girls back and the comparisons were made. Bedlam erupted. "SHUT UP!" I screamed. In shock, they did. -- I enjoyed accusing, "Are you insane! You can't scream out the things you were screaming. This house isn't soundproof so anyone nearby would've heard what you were screaming. For all we know, a couple of joyriders might've just crashed their stolen car and the cops are pursuing them on foot across our property." That'd happened a few months ago. "If cops heard what you were screaming and typed a report into their computer, this family would be in a world of shit. The CIA would stop at nothing to force me to work for them as a super-spy, including kidnapping all of you and threatening to kill you unless I cooperated with them. There are four of you, so they could afford to kill a couple of you to prove they were serious." "They wouldn't do that," stated Mom. "Are you willing to bet our lives on something you know NOTHING about? I've read thousands of pages from top-secret CIA files and that's almost certainly what they would do. In a few weeks I'm going to start causing major leaks from inside the Government, including from within the CIA, and you'll be seeing stories on TV about them doing that sort of thing on many occasions." Actually, there were VERY few documents about crimes as bad as that, but given what had been done to me in other dimensions I considered the exaggeration justified. ^ Vanessa thought the work of the Mark Anderson Foundation was very important, and my many unpleasant experiences certainly confirmed the Government is out of control and that it covers up all sorts of things that should be exposed and prosecuted in full view of the public. [[That's one of the main disadvantages of a democracy: because it's a popularity contest, politicians want to cover up everything the Government does badly that might reflect poorly on them. Consequently there's lots of bad government. Even worse, the secrecy encourages and permits illegal behavior, which is a very bad thing in something as powerful as a government. It's pathetic how many laws the Government has written to enforce good governance in corporate America, compared to how many laws it has written to enforce good governance in Government America.]] In this dimension, I've got a couple of plans that appeal to me for how to provide "checks and balances" on the Government. I'll recreate Majestic Countdown, although I intend to rename him "The Holy Ghost" as that seems more appropriate and I might as well claim the moral high ground right from the beginning. I have a special plan for the CIA's Fort Dodge facility. As soon as I've got enough minds to do it safely, I'm going to conduct an armed raid on that lab using weapons and explosives stolen from a military armory. Mostly guns will float around shooting people, but I'll also use a couple of appropriately dressed manikins to let the lab's security cameras record a few frames of the attackers' backs before the cameras are destroyed. The attack will be during the daytime shift because it's the busiest one and I want as many of those people as possible to die from the firefights and explosions. I'll steal several vials of their toxic chemicals (poisons rather than diseases), and use one of them immediately against the Director of the CIA, and later against other particularly heinous Government criminals. Its use will confirm that items were removed from Fort Dodge by people willing to use them, which will scare the crap out of the Government and the country. Then AGILE ("Against Government Illegality LEague") will publicly release its manifesto and many of the Fort Dodge records. Its manifesto will claim that it's made up of US soldiers and agents who're so disgusted by the Government's repeated criminality that they've decided to punish Government crimes, starting with the Fort Dodge raid and the killing of the Director responsible for illegally risking millions of American lives. AGILE will promise to continue to carry out operations against criminals that cannot be brought to justice in the normal way, as the Government controls the justice system. (Bioweapons research is illegal under US law, yet the Government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on it. Calling the cops to report a crime would be pointless.) AGILE's attacks will continue and the Government will be in a terrible - i.e., wonderful - quandary. The act of having guards at secret operations might be what's destroying their secrecy if one of the guards is a member of AGILE, but you can't risk having secret operations without guards. Similarly, when AGILE ruins illegal CIA operations, every surviving employee will be suspected of being an AGILE double-agent, which will make the Government far less likely to use any of those people in illegal operations again. After I've done that a few dozen times, the Government's ability to carry out illegal operations will be severely curtailed. To make the situation even worse, how can AGILE be investigated when the investigators might be part of that organization? They could not only hide the true AGILE, but redirect suspicion onto non-AGILE members, as will apparently prove to be the case because no AGILE members will ever be discovered. I'll have a great deal of fun with this game, especially with tricks like sending tape recorder type bugs stolen from the CIA into the Oval Office. When they're discovered, there'll be all sorts of shit hitting some very big fans, especially because the tape recorder type of bug will imply that the buggers have regular access to that office. There'll be massive internal insecurity and paranoia, which should dramatically reduce the Government's willingness and ability to perform dirty deeds, without too badly impacting on its ability to perform its legal jobs. There should be some great public backlashes too because I'll be exposing all of those illegal operations. The public and especially the media is going to love AGILE. Whichever political party is in power at the time is going to HATE it. ^ I continued, "I would've thought that my careful pinning of the drapes and my previous request for you to stop shouting would've made you aware that I didn't want you screaming out my secrets at the tops of your voices, but as you seem to have missed drawing that conclusion let me emphasize it again: what you know can get us killed, so be FUCKING careful about mentioning my abilities. -- "Now everyone sit down and I will take questions from you one person at a time. There will be NO yelling, no interrupting, and no loss of self-control. I'm appointing myself the chairman of this meeting, and you will only speak when I give you permission to do so. Because you've been acting like unruly children, put your hand up if you want to speak." They all had a great deal to say. They were freaked out, incredulous and excited, but fortunately they were also few in number so I was able to force them to behave in a ruly manner (or should that be ununruly? Someone should invent a reliably consistent language.) I repeated, "No, there is no trick. There are no hidden cameras or any other sort of trickery. In case it crosses your minds to worry about it, I was not reading anyone's minds. That's why I got Carol and Donna to open the books facing away from them: to prove that I can honestly see things in other rooms. I've got a way of outputting and inputting light anywhere within almost five hundred feet of me. I'll show you what outputting light looks like because that's easier for you to see happening." I demonstrated and described light blobs, first as a single spherical blob, then several differently colored blobs, then - for comic relief - I put on an amusing 'puppet show' similar to what I'd done in other dimensions. I even demonstrated heat blobs to them, but only as warm blobs to be non-threatening. Then I went on to explain that sight blobs were like light blobs working in reverse, and I talked more about them. I gave many demonstrations and explanations, and slowly my family came to accept that they were real with Mom being the most difficult and taking the longest, as usual. Never mind the miracles that I was performing this evening, I thought the greatest miracle EVER performed was Dad's getting Mom to date him when they'd been teenagers. No wonder Dad had told us that it'd taken him a long time to convince Mom; she would have taken "playing hard to get" to an unprecedented level. [[I was asking them to accept something completely unnatural, so of course it wasn't easy for them; an even harder time than teenage-Dad would've had convincing teenage-Mom to do something completely natural with him.] The subject of their questions changed from seeking proof of the ability, to bigger picture issues like: "How?", "Why?", "What does it mean?" They weren't happy with the answers they didn't get. The stakes were much higher now so Mom and Dad pushed quite hard for answers. I upped the forcefulness of my refusal, "You can insist on answers all you want, but you're not going to get any more out of me than I've already told you. I'll give you an analogy: let's say that if my secret got out, a billion people would die. If I tell no one at all, I can guarantee those billion people are safe, but if I tell you my secret then not only am I increasing the number of people who know the secret by a factor of five, but I'm also sending the message that it's okay to tell other people, which would pretty much guarantee that sooner or later a billion people are going to be killed. I don't care how curious or concerned you are, your emotional need to know how I got my abilities pales into total insignificance compared to my desire to prevent the deaths of a billion innocent people. I'm taking this secret to my grave, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. One silver lining for you as parents is that I will NEVER be getting tipsy or taking drugs because I can't afford to risk losing my self-control. That's the only satisfaction you're going to get, so please stop wasting your breath on your repeated questions." A minute later I was explaining what "analogy" meant because they couldn't understand how a billion people's lives could be at risk. Upon learning that those lives weren't really at risk, the "How?" questions restarted. I stood up, asking, "Can I have your large suitcase please, Dad? I'll need it to hold all my stuff now that I'm leaving home." "You're joking?" asked Dad. Carol was showing considerable concern, pleasing me immensely. "What part of, 'I'm taking this secret to my grave' don't you understand? I've refused to answer those questions far too many times now, and still you're persisting with them. I'm not going to answer them and I can't live in an environment like this, so I have to leave." In the other dimensions that my seven imported minds had lived through - not counting Mr. No One even though he was here too, as the above internal comment shows - their families had learned about most of my abilities only after many months or years of seeing me excel at school and OSU, seeing me in highly successful relationships with Julia and Carol, seeing that I'd won $11 million from Binion's, etc. They respected me, so they respected my refusals to answer their questions. In this dimension my parents had no reason to respect me, my recently demonstrated fashion acumen not really cutting it. To be even more honest, these parents had many years of reasons NOT to respect me, so they weren't listening to my refusals. So I tried a different tack, "You're trying to force me to answer your questions because you believe you're the only ones capable of making intelligent decisions about my life. You're treating me with disrespect and even contempt. You've failed to realize that my IQ has risen dramatically. I was able to discover Mom's insecurity over Dad's fidelity by putting it together from my memories of the very few clues Mom had given out. Carol told you about the comments I made to and about her friends at the pool, and you heard me say that I was able to make sight blobs work because my brain was powerful enough to suck the images directly into it. I have a VERY powerful brain now and a VERY high IQ. -- "I've told you that I'm intending to enroll in OSU next academic year. What I haven't told you is that I'm going to be enrolling in five or six undergraduate degrees: two Bachelor of Science degrees in Math and Physics, a Business Administration degree, probably Engineering Science and one or two of their biology oriented degrees. That's over twenty years' worth of degrees, and I will complete all those degrees in ONE year. I'm going to put the world's leading research institutions into an absolute frenzy over my genius. -- "I'm more intelligent than all of you put together, and I do NOT appreciate your believing that I'm incapable of knowing what's best for me. You have virtually no knowledge of the facts or issues relevant to my situation and are arguing only out of an insultingly unquestioned assumption that I'm incapable of running my own life. Mom even argued earlier for trusting the CIA with our lives, which is so dangerously naïve that it scares the crap out of me. There's absolutely no possibility whatsoever of my giving you responsibility for my Big Secret when you understand so little about how the Government operates. Maybe in a year you might've learned enough to make your opinions informed enough to be worth listening to, but until then I'm retaining sole responsibility for all the decisions about my abilities and their place in my life. And - as I've told you too many times already - I will NEVER, EVER be answering your questions about how I got my abilities. " [Except that I told them all about it a couple of weeks later, when I became part of the collective Mark Anderson godhood.] "Are you going to accept my moral, intellectual and legal right to decide my own fate, or am I leaving home?" Mom and Dad apologized and backpedaled very pleasingly. While they were vulnerable, I laid down some more of the law, "Of course you're allowed to ask me questions, but if I answer one with a refusal you are NOT allowed to endlessly repeat it. If you have a good reason to believe that my answer is wrong, then by all means explain your reason. If it's a convincing one I'll reconsider my decision. Endlessly repeating the same questions just because you assume I'm stupid is not acceptable. It's not even polite. You'd never treat any of your coworkers or adult friends that way, so stop treating me like an idiot. On the subject of keeping quiet, I have an interesting way of asking you to stop talking: I can do this..." I firmly NP-pinched everyone's lips together. That surprised the heck out of them. There were grunts of surprise, some of them jerked their heads back, others' hands flew to their faces to feel what was happening. I canceled the effects after only a second, which permitted them to unleash comments and questions. I sat silently until they realized I wasn't going to respond, and their mouth-flapping stumbled to a halt. I said, "It's unintelligent of you to persist in asking me such obvious questions. You already know I'm intending to tell you everything I can risk, so the only effect your questions have is to lower my opinion of your self-control, which will reduce how much I tell you. Carol's the only one who's acting sensibly. She's sitting quietly and letting me run my meeting my way, which proves that she's got more self-control than the rest of you and that she respects me and my judgment more than you do." Carol was being the quietest mostly because she's the most passive, but I'll grab any opportunity to build up Carol's self-confidence, especially if I can use it to train the rest of my family. -- Carol smiled happily at me while I let the muttered apologies die out, then I said, "What I did to your lips is another of my abilities. I call it 'NP' which is short for 'Nipple Power'. That's a misleading name because it's my mind that creates the effect, but we'll be sticking with 'NP' for a reason I'll explain some other day." I wasn't going to explain it now mostly because I was hoping to be able to not only explain it, but demonstrating the light switch toggling properties of squeezed nipples in a private session with Carol one evening not too far away. One of my minds was hoping for that VERY much! -- "Hold one hand out in front of you palm up and I'll create an NP-fingertip on your palm so you can feel it." They were soon playing with an invisible fingertip each. "I called it a fingertip because I usually create them in that shape. It's a convenient shape because it's easy to grip things with fingertips, such as pinching an annoying chatterbox's lips together. It's actually a forcefield that I can create in a variety of shapes and sizes. If you hold the one you're playing with gently, I'll expand it into a small sphere so you can feel it changing shape." -- They played with their NP-tennis balls while I said, "I can make dozens of those things, and have them perform a variety of tasks for me. When I'm lying in bed and I'm too lazy to get up to turn the lights off, I can use an NP-fingertip to flick the switch for me." I turned one of the living room's lights off and back on again. "Or if the TV remote is out of reach, I can use NP to fetch it for me." "Oh my!" Mom exclaimed when the remote floated up off the coffee table and headed toward me. Everyone else's eyes were wide open in shock, as were their mouths. "Are you doing magic?" asked Donna. "There's no such thing as magic so I can't be doing it. You can do more things with your mind than a dog can, such as multiply numbers. And a dog's mind can do more things than a goldfish's, such as understand commands like 'Sit' and 'Fetch'. From goldfish to dog to people, minds can do more. I have an EXTREMELY powerful mind so I can do even more. I'm not doing magic; I'm just doing 'more'. -- "I've shown you all of my three major abilities: my proximity sense; blobs of the sight, light and heat varieties; and my NP ability. I've also got a few minor abilities that don't matter much, like moving my eyeballs independently and flapping my ears," I spasmed the muscles next to my ears, making them twitch rhythmically, getting a little laugh. I didn't mention the best 'minor' ability: Go-softs. It'd done more than any other ability to get my life onto a fantastic track in my other dimensions, and it provided me with the most pleasure, but it was a little difficult to make that point and I didn't want to agitate Mom even more by getting sexual. -- "Despite your not understanding much about the details, you understand enough that we can talk about the big picture. My ability to learn so incredibly quickly is going to make me the most famous genius in the world, even more famous than Einstein. Fortunately being a genius won't look like 'magic'. It'll be very strange that I got so smart so quickly, but people won't get freaked out by it enough that they want to burn me at the stake or dissect me in a secret Government laboratory. -- "The world can know about my genius but not about ANY of my special abilities. Between the enthusiasm religious nutcases have for believing people are devils that must be killed, and the Government's disgusting disregard for morality and legality, if any of us blab about my special abilities then all our lives would be in danger. That means that if Mom or Dad think I've misbehaved at some time in the future, then they keep their mouths firmly shut until we get home to discuss it in quiet privacy - because we CANNOT risk an argument in public, in case someone says too much in the heat of the moment. And as much as I truly do encourage Carol and Donna to boast to their good looking girlfriends about how wonderful I am, please don't try so hard to impress them that you mention any of my special abilities. Just tell them what a wonderful sense of humor I've got and that should be magical enough to impress them straight out of their panties." I got some laughs from Dad, Carol and Donna, which hopefully proved my point. Speaking of getting girls out of their panties, Carol's respect for me was climbing very rapidly, although it'd admittedly started terribly low. Because of my special abilities was the most obvious reason, but it wasn't the main reason. Carol is very aware of her lack of confidence with people, so she particularly respects people who have that confidence. She's also smart enough to detect when confidence is born of real skill rather than shallow arrogance, thus Carol's increasing respect for me was mostly because of my adult-level conversation, control of the meeting, and handling of Mom as if I was at least on an equal footing with her. Carol wouldn't come out of her panties, or more importantly, out of her shell, unless she respects the person she's doing it for. That was another reason Eric had no chance of ever catching sight of any of her bases. Her opinion of me wasn't high yet, but the more she respects me, the easier it'll be for me to get her to follow my requests, which I'll make sure lead to her respecting me even more. She'll respect Julia for the same reason too once she sees Julia in action, and she'll respect me even more for choosing Julia as my girlfriend. Once I have Carol's respect, I'll have her obedience, then I'll have the ability to build her confidence until she respects herself. I've seduced Carol many times by now - six of my minds had each done it once and one of my minds had done it twice - so I knew her hot buttons inside out and the current seduction was going very much according to plan. "Another important safety tip: NEVER mention my special abilities - or even say that I have special abilities - over the phone, in emails, or anything else other than in face to face conversations among ourselves in a very private place. The Government illegally records all sorts of stuff and it's the people who'd review those recordings that I'm most afraid of. There's a senior agent in the Department of Homeland Security in Portland called Robert Moran who has an insane paranoia about people having mind control powers. If one of you mention on the phone that I have unusual mental abilities then there'd be a high chance that he'd be the one assigned to investigate us. He's sent people to their deaths before because of his paranoid insanity, so if any DHS agents turn up and try to talk with me I'm going to assume my life's in danger and I'm going to fight them to the death. If I survive that, I'd be on the run for the rest of my life and you'll never see me again." Or not until I had a few thousand minds and I could fuck the DHS over so badly it was forced to leave me alone, but there was no need for me to mention that now. "In short: do NOT talk about my special abilities." #4: #All: "How do you know so much about the Homeland Security?" asked Dad. "Because their computer department is incompetent and their computer security is weak, so I've been easily able to read many of their files. I'll be doing a lot more of that in a few weeks so it'll be good for you to understand how I do it. Let's pretend my bedroom is the office of the boss of the DHS in Portland and I'm sitting in my car parked 450 feet away. I'll stay here while the rest of you go to my bedroom and look at the computer there please." When they got to my room, I floated a book off a shelf, opened it at a random page and moved it to next to the computer screen. I used NP to move the mouse to start Word, then I started retyping the text. I can NP-type EXTREMELY rapidly, achieving nearly twenty keystrokes per second, which is 240 words per minute if you prefer that measure. [The initial need to be within proximity range of the keyboard had turned out to be too restrictive so I'd learned to type with NP-fingertips anywhere out to just short of my maximum range.] Twenty keystrokes per second is about twice as fast as the world record. I like to think that it sounds like a machinegun. That's an exaggeration in terms of the volume of noise but it still seems a very appropriate simile. I enjoyed seeing the expressions on my family's faces in the second sight blob I was using to keep an eye on them. I stopped after a minute, closed the book, then used NP to pull their hands to lead them out of the room and back to the living room. Once their gushing was finished, including Donna's agreeing to let me type her assignments, I said, "I can see and use computer systems up to five hundred feet away so I can sit in my car parked on the street and watch the DHS boss type his username and password into his computer. After he's gone to lunch or left for the day, I can log in to his computer again and read as many files as I want. The DHS's computer security is so weak it doesn't require the use of a swipe card or care that the owner of the password has left the building, so reading their records is child's play for me. That has let me read some horrific stuff. -- "You've been making derogatory comments about the Government all my life, Dad, but the reality is far worse than what you've said. All the secretive agencies such as the DHS, CIA, FBI and NSA think nothing of breaking the law, up to and including killing inconvenient citizens. We do NOT want to attract their attention. As I said before, in a few months I'll be using the method you just saw to send large numbers of files containing evidence of serious crimes from Government computers to the media. Until you see those news stories you'll have to take my deadly serious word that our Government is incredibly dangerous. -- "If I hear you saying anything that I fear might be heading into dangerous territory, I'll do the lips-squeezing thing." I momentarily did it again to reinforce my point. "If you feel invisible fingertips touch your lips then stop whatever you're saying. Fake a cough if you need an excuse to stop. -- "As well as using NP to tell you when to stop talking, I can also use it to communicate other things. Some of them will be self-explanatory, like when you felt me pull on your hands when it was time for you to come back from my bedroom. Others need explanation in advance, such as what I'll do for 'Yes' and 'No'. Those will be taps on the top of your head, one tap for 'No' because it's the shortest word, two taps for the longer 'Yes'. Like this..." I gave them a demo, then gave them a few more signals I'd used in my previous dimensions. Most were pretty obvious, like how to convey numbers or a time to them. -- "There's one more demonstration I want to give you, but you'll need warm coats as we need to drive to where I'll be doing it. We can talk in my car." It was difficult to get their mouths not moving and feet doing the opposite, but I eventually got them into my car. There they reverted to the motions they were most interested in: stationary feet and rapidly moving mouths. One of the few sensible questions was Dad asking, "Where're we going?" "To a rest stop I know of which is also a trailhead. It won't take long to get there at this time of night." "Are you going to show us your spaceship?" guessed Donna. From time to time they'd all tried to guess how I'd changed so much. This guess was a rather poor attempt from Donna to trick me into revealing that I was an alien. Maybe I was, since 7/8ths of me hadn't been born on this planet. Because of my very large collection of science fiction books, alien-type guesses were a frequent occurrence. Donna's question got the same refusal all their other silly guesses got. Otherwise they mostly asked me about my special abilities, the vast majority of their questions I could not or would not answer. It wasn't satisfactorily from their point of view but they were getting used to that by now. The only significant part of it worth quoting was a speech I made. It was spurred by my worrying that my family might fear that I'd spy on them. They knew sight blobs could roam around invisibly, and that could easily include their bedrooms, so I said, "I'd like to raise the topic of naked female bodies. Being a teenage boy, that's normally a topic of considerable interest, but in this case I need to convince you that a happy, secure family atmosphere is more important to me. What I want to do is assure you that I'll MOST DEFINITELY not be using sight blobs to spy on you in your bedrooms. I'd no more do that than I'd peek through your windows." I had peeked through my sisters' windows in my early puberty years, but I'd never been caught so I could use it as a convenient example now. Carol and Donna were terribly naïve about boys because their reactions cleared showed that they'd not thought of that use for sight blobs. It'd be the VERY first thing any boy would think of, but it hadn't occurred to my sisters in the forty minutes they'd known about sight blobs. Girls really do live on another planet, which would make them the aliens. I spent a couple of minutes describing how I'd use sight blobs around the house, and doing my best to reassure them that I wouldn't use them to invade anyone's privacy. I ended with, "I want to stress that you don't have to worry about me perving on you. I didn't steal glances at Donna's and Carol's bodies the 27,000 times they changed clothes in front of me earlier this week, and I won't steal looks at them in any other way. If I wanted to see naked girls I'd park outside the Aquatic Center and watch all the girls inside the female's changing room, but that doesn't appeal to me either" - now that I'm bored with it. "If that doesn't convince Mom that I'm more mature than she thought, nothing will." Carol asked, "You didn't look in the women's changing room when you were there with me?" In truth I hadn't, not that my answer depended on the truth, "Nope. I must confess that if I'd had sight blobs two weeks ago, I probably would've spent more time perving than paying attention to you and your friends, but my turning over my new leaf came with some rather large changes in maturity and attitudes. Before then I was like every other boy: wanting to take as much sex as I could get. Since then you've seen how important it is to me to build my friendships with you and Donna, even in preference to spending time having sex with Alexis. Friendships are about giving, which is what I'm trying to do a lot more of these days. You saw how I preferred to spend Tuesday shopping with you and Donna than bother with the girls who were trying to pick me up." "You had girls chasing you?" asked Dad. Carol answered, "Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. Mark's VERY good with girls. He could have as many girlfriends as he wanted. He used to be a pain around my friends but he's changed so much some of them were asking about him after the swim." "So how come you're not interested in getting a girlfriend?" asked Dad. "I am VERY interested in getting a girlfriend but it's a matter of timing. The important things have to be done first. Number one on that list is getting the four of you up to speed and reasonably comfortable with how much I've changed because of my special abilities, increased intelligence and maturity. Fortunately for you, my sense of humor remains unchanged so that'll give you a welcome feeling of stability. -- "When you've got enough understanding and calmness, hopefully in about a week, then number two on the important list is Carol and me making contact with another local family. They don't know us yet, but they're going to become a major part of our lives. I'm going to be showing them all my special abilities; that's how important they are." "Who are they?" asked Mom. "I won't say yet. They're too important to risk upsetting my contact plan by their hearing some uncontrollable rumor about me first. Carol and I will approach them in a week or so, and I'll get them to have us over for dinner so the rest of you can meet them." Carol wanted to know, "Why will I be with you the first time?" "Because their family contains Julia, who's going to become the most important non-family person in your life. And you'll become the most important person in her life too, after me." "The Julia who's going to be your girlfriend?" "Yep. Julia's going to become incredibly important to both of us. Her parents too." "Can you see the future?" wondered Mom. Yet another wild guess from one of my family. "No more than anyone else can: by knowing facts and estimating the future affect of them. Donna knows with 100% certainty that she'd be in VERY big trouble if she was caught having sex with a boy. I can predict the future the same way Donna can. -- "Please stop trying to extract more information out of me by using guesses as yet another interrogative technique. I will voluntarily tell you what I can about myself, according to my own best judgment. Beyond that, there's no point in your trying different techniques to find out things I'm not willing to reveal. I know a lot of your motivation for understanding what's happened to me is so you can guide me like good parents do, but that can't happen in this case. You'd never understand the situation, so you'd never be able to give good advice. I'm on my own with this thing. You're not going to be getting off lightly though, as I'm going to be putting this family through so many changes that you're going to be struggling to keep up with them even without having any responsibility for my ability-related decisions." "Like what?" asked Dad. "It'd freak you out if I gave you a list. Most of them will be wonderful changes, but they'll still take some time to get used to. You'll have to wait and see. Besides, I don't want to spoil the pleasure of surprising you with good things." I pulled off the road into the rest area. It had a large parking lot serving as the trailhead for a couple of trails that headed into the forest. At this time of night it should be deserted. I sent a few max-sized radar-, radio- and infrared-sensing sight blobs searching around the area. I parked close to the start of one of the tracks, saying, "We're walking about a hundred yards down the track. Please leave your car keys, coins, wallets, purses and cellphones on the seat or floor." This family wasn't even close to being trained yet because it certainly didn't go as easy as that. Dad asked, "Why?" "You'll enjoy it more if I don't tell you why in advance. Please just do it." "Can I keep my phone in case Michelle calls me?" asked Donna. "No. Leave it behind please." One cellphone wouldn't have mattered, but if I relaxed the rule for Donna, next thing I know they'd be carrying everything they had plus the kitchen sink into the sky, and that'd definitely show up on radar. "But I'm expecting her to call me about what we're doing tomorrow." "You can either stay here with your phone so you can talk with Michelle, or you can leave your phone behind so you can come with us the way I asked. I recommend you come with us, but it's your choice?" If she chose not to come she'd learn a valuable lesson about doing what I said in the future, which was a lesson all sexy girls should learn. Dad saw me dumping my stuff in the glove compartment, and he pointed out, "You'll need your keys." "Thanks for the reminder, but I won't. I'm locking them in the car with everything else because I can use NP to unlock the car from the inside." Donna was still dithering, so I said, "Decision time, Donna. Do you trust my recommendation or not?" "But you won't say what you're doing." "That's right, I won't. I'm recommending you come with me, but if you don't trust my judgment about what you should do then you're free to stay here." "Can I bring it and just text?" "No." After a moment's agonizing thought, Donna made the ultimate teenage-girl sacrifice: she decided to leave her phone behind. She tossed it onto her seat, moaning, "Argh! I'll be annoyed if I miss her call." She slammed her door in loud emphasis. I chose not to respond. I locked the car then said, "Follow me. I'll create some light blobs when we get onto the trail so you can see." I led off, Carol quickly following. Dad shepherded Mom and Donna ahead of him so he could bring up the rear. As each of them entered the trail, I created four-foot wide, dim, yellow light blobs at ground level in front of them. I also had a sight blob above and behind Dad to keep an eye on their progress. We walked single-file down the trail. Carol was walking quite close behind me - which pleased me - and she noticed that I didn't have a light blob in front of me. She asked, "How come you don't have a light, Mark?" "I can see in the dark if I want to. It's one of the many little things I didn't get around to mentioning." "You're AMAZING..." "So amazing I even managed to get a teenage girl - Donna - to put her phone down. How's that for being a miracle worker? Haha." As I'd intended, Carol pointed out, "I put my phone down." "Yes, and you did it because during my talk you've given me your respect and trust. You're the first of my family to do that, which I won't ever forget." My compliment was a manipulation. Mom and Dad never would, nor should, fall into a mode of unquestioning obedience toward me. Apart from anything else, they're too good at being parents to do that. I'd been saving this compliment and several others like it for a time when Carol was more quietly obedient than Donna. Given that it's unusual for Donna to be quiet, and she's not too good at being obedient either, especially not for me, it didn't require much patience for me to wait for a time when she wasn't both of them and then use it as an opportunity to compliment Carol. She was within six feet of me so I could detect the surge of pride and happiness my compliment created in her. It wasn't a large surge but that didn't matter; the fact that my compliment created any positive response was wonderful. She'd believed and accepted what I'd said, which showed that she trusted me and that her personal transformation had started. I felt a surge of happiness too. After we'd gone far enough along the trail that there were tall trees between us and the parking lot, I created a small NP-floor in a dip in the track and walked onto it, stopping at the far edge. "Stand close to me Carol. Donna, Mom, Dad; gather into a fairly tight circle please. Don't stand in the center, Donna; this'll be more enjoyable if everyone is on the outside of a ring. Put your arms around the waists of your neighbors to make a strong ring. Excellent." One of the reasons it was "excellent" was that Carol had immediately put her arm around my waist. It was too early for her to be getting any physical pleasure from me, but I was more than happy that she'd had no hesitation whatsoever. I was also pleased that my arm around her waist caused her no negative emotions. My family's combined weight would be about 75% of my total force and I needed to keep an energy sink blanket over us to hide our infrared radiation from any possible satellite surveillance, so I couldn't afford for our flying platform to have more than the minimum number of NP-plates that weren't contributing to the lift. The floor had to be kept small because plates that no one was standing were limited on how much upward push they could apply) and I couldn't have walls or even a handrail, or I wouldn't have sufficient force to lift us. I pulled Carol and Mom close to me to contract the circle. Donna was between Mom and Dad, probably because I wasn't her favorite at the moment because of my unreasonable meanness over her cellphone. I got Dad and Donna to squeeze in tighter, then I finalized the size of the platform we were standing on. It was now a small square, extending only a few inches out from our shoes. Once we were in the air, anyone who took a step would require me to create another NP-plate. I explained, "There are two important rules for what's about to happen. First, PLEASE do not make any loud noises. You know how easily voices travel at night, so any yahooing or yells could attract attention we very definitely don't need. No doubt you'll want to talk but please do so very quietly. We're standing very close together so there's no need to talk much above a whisper. -- "Second, please do not take any steps. Keep your feet where they are, keep your arms gripping your neighbors' waists, and keep the circle strong and stable. You can turn your heads to look around, but please don't try to turn your whole body or to lean over so much you might cause us to topple. -- "I'll be taking this very slowly so you won't be frightened, and so you can get used to it. And don't be afraid if you feel NP-fingertips gripping your arms and waists like this," I gave them a brief demonstration. "If you feel that happen, don't scream or panic, just let me do whatever I'm doing." If chaos erupted so people started falling off the platform, I'd have to grab each person individually. "Okay, here we go." The platform rose VERY slowly straight up. It had to be slow not to alarm them, and also because I was holding eight fingertips in reserve. Mom, Dad, Carol and Donna all drew sudden breaths. Dad's proximity didn't show nearly as much fright as the females, but to play safe I weakly clamped all their lips shut. I hadn't found anyone in my careful search of the area within five hundred feet of us, hadn't detected any human-sized infrared emissions in my top down view of the wider area, and the night had been quiet other than the sound of an occasional car driving past on the main road, so I was confident we were alone enough for this. Nonetheless, I wanted to make the point that they had to behave themselves, even though we were only about five inches off the ground so still surrounded by trees. Dad and Donna easily aborted whatever their breaths would've done, but Mom and Carol made strangled grunts through their closed mouths. I quietly urged, "Shh!" Their emotions reduced quickly, so I released the lip clamps and resumed the slow upward acceleration. Mom said, "We're flying." "I believe you're right, Mom. Gee, I wonder how that's happening?" Said with a big smile on my face in an attempt to lighten the mood. "You saw me float the TV remote control at home. I can lift heavier things, in fact nearly 50% more than our total weight, even after my eating so much dinner. I want to give you an experience which conveys how awesome my abilities are now, so I'm taking the family for a little trip, straight up." "How high?" asked Dad. "Obviously we're starting low and working our way up, so I can stop if you get worried, but there's no need to. I've been up more than 10,000 feet, but I was just going to lift us a few hundred feet this time so we can get a good view of Corvallis." Mom's proximity reading showed an immediate and strong negative reaction to "few hundred feet". She asked in panic, "What if we fall?" "You're not falling now, Mom, and you won't fall no matter how high we get. I can easily hold us up." "What if you get tired?" "This doesn't make me tired. Listen Mom, I know what I'm doing. You don't seriously think I'd do this if it put my entire family at risk do you?" To cut a long story short(ish), Mom was increasingly upset and insistent on not flying anywhere except down again. She was so against my flying us, that I had to lower us back down to terra firma. We'd achieved a maximum altitude of five feet, which was somewhat less awesome than I'd been hoping for. ------- Chapter 432: 42,000 Marks; Flying Family Friday, July 11 (Continued) to Tuesday, July 15, 2008 My other-dimensional moms had been no more than slightly nervous on their first flights, and had quickly gotten used to them so much that they would suggest going to the Cascades for breakfast if the weather forecast for the next morning was suitable. This Mom being such a wimp was either a dimensional difference or her lack of faith in me was the explanation. My parents' characters could vary across the dimensions - Dad's did when it came to speaking up on a family issue, varying between very quiet and average - but I suspected Mom's wimpishness was caused by her lack of faith in me. I said, "It's no good me flying around overhead to show you it's safe because it's too dark for you to see me, and for obvious reasons I can't risk illuminating myself or doing it in daylight. Is there anyone here with enough trust in me to let me take them up so they can tell the others how much fun it is?" There was certainly no one with any enthusiasm, especially Mom at the thought of anyone participating. I was trying to think of an effective Plan B when Carol found the courage to ask, "Are you SURE it's REALLY safe?" I'd used the phrase "trust in me" in my question to encourage Carol. I didn't care who agreed, but there was no harm in asking in a way that might cause Carol to rise to the occasion by demonstrating the thing I'd praised her for just a few minutes ago. If she signed up for this, she'd be getting a GREAT deal more praise from me soon. I answered, "I'm 100% positive, Carol. I know EXACTLY what I'm doing. There's no equipment to fail, no fuel to run out of or any of those sorts of worries. It's a purely mental technique and as easy for me as doing two times two. I absolutely promise you that you'll have a wonderful birthday tomorrow without a scratch or bruise on you; just a brother who's highly appreciative and impressed by the trust you have in me." I truly was very impressed because Carol was quite scared but she still said, "Okay, I'll do it." "Well done!" I gave her quick hug, lifting her off her feet so I could create a platform underneath her. I lifted each of my feet in turn to extend it under me. Mom and Dad both started expressing concerns, but I cut them off before they could get too worked up (that being the only "up" they were likely to do). I put my foot down, "For goodness sake! You haven't got a SINGLE clue how I fly so there's ABSOLUTELY no way you can judge how safe it is. You've seen me perform miracles this evening and STILL you think you know more about what I can do than I do. No wonder Carol's and my personalities have been so passive; you're so discouraging of anything that you fear might possibly hurt us. I wouldn't DREAM of hurting Carol and this is EASY for me!" They seemed abashed enough, so I said, "We'll be back in a minute or two." With just Carol and me to lift, I could create a platform with a couple of handrails to make Carol feel secure and still have 1 g of upward acceleration. I hugged Carol tightly in a way that'd support her body when we accelerated. I placed the NP-fingertips under my supporting arms and we took off. In three-quarters of a second we were nine feet high and out of reach, not that Mom or Dad tried to physically stop us. I cut the upward acceleration down to 0.5 g. As we cleared the tops of the trees, I reduced the acceleration to 0.2 g, rotated our platform a quarter circle, then said, "Open your eyes and look at the view, my courageous, trusting, sweetie." Carol risked a quick look, seeing the nighttime lights of Corvallis come into view over the intervening hills. "Oh. That's nice." "Not as nice as you, but you're right." I put on a very somber voice to say, "Thank you very much for trusting me." "I was VERY scared! But this is nice. I shouldn't have worried, should I?" "You should ALWAYS trust me, especially when I tell you that I washed the dishes the previous evening so it's your turn next." "Haha." Then Carol made the mistake of looking down, "Oh!" "You can trust me to always look after you. After some practice you'll like that the view is unobstructed in all directions, but for now I suggest you only look sideways. You're safe in my arms." #3: I slowly rotated our platform to give her a 360-degree view as we rose higher in the air. I told her, "You're standing on nothing four hundred feet in the air. Other than me, you're doing something that no one else has EVER done." "Haha. I'm not doing ANYTHING. If you let go of me I'd be in BIG trouble!" "If I let go of you the floor would stay there, but I'm happy to make you feel safer by holding you. We'd better go down to check in with Mom and Dad." On the way down I asked, "I have to stay within five hundred feet of the others so their light blob doesn't go out, because if that happened they might worry that we're in trouble. If you agree I'd like to take you higher so you get a better view, but I'd need to warn them about the light going out first. Do you want to do some more flying?" "Yeah. This is nice." "Good girl." We descended toward the others. When we were still about fifteen feet up and a similar distance to the side, Donna called out eagerly and way too loudly, "What's..." I pinched her lips hard enough to hurt, then released most of the pressure. I said quietly, "I've asked you several times to be careful, Donna. That was VERY bad!" "I'm sorry. I forgot." "Is that the excuse you intend to use after your lack of self-control gets us all killed?" It wasn't a particularly logical question, but I was talking to a female so it didn't matter. Maybe the lack of logic even helped, because Donna looked very sheepish. We'd stopped about five feet up, ten feet away from them. I prompted Carol, "Quietly tell them what you think of it so far." Even quieter than me, Carol declared, "It's AMAZING! It's scary not seeing anything holding me up, but I feel safe with Mark holding me..." They talked back and forth for a couple of minutes, Carol selling the experience, and then moving on to praising me in general. I interrupted, "Carol and I are going to go higher for a better view, which will make the light blob go out when we get five hundred feet away so we've come down to warn you about that. Find yourself somewhere comfortable to sit in the dark, and we'll be back in a few minutes." It seemed that Mom didn't like the idea of "higher" and she was about to start speaking, so I pushed Carol and myself up into the sky. It was a nice summer's night and the view was great; much better than from a plane at the same altitude because standing in midair with openness in every direction is a very different experience. We eventually reached about four thousand feet but then had to descend as it was too cold up there and I didn't have enough NP-squares to make an airtight box to keep us warm, nor did I want to cover us with a big heat blob as that too greatly increased the risk of an infra-red sensing satellite spotting us. Even though I was hugging her tightly, Carol was beside herself with amazement. Her emotions were running strong and she was raving about how wonderful I was, causing me the greatest difficulty I'd had so far in my plan for her: stopping myself from responding too strongly. She'd accept almost anything I said now, but I feared saying so much that it would scare her once she calmed down. I held my tongue - almost literally, as the rest of us were VERY firm with #1 that he wasn't allowed to say anything - and kept my responses on safe ground. I had less trouble keeping my hands on safe territory, as Carol wasn't feeling any sexual attraction for me at all. The idea hadn't occurred to her, and it won't until I plant the seed. I'll not do that until much later, when her non-sexual feelings for me are very strong. Introducing sex too early would throw suspicion on everything else, killing my plan. It'll be much more fun to introduce sex 'too late', when Carol's about ready to burst. #1 would no doubt be bursting too, but the other seven of us would enforce patience on him. One thing that did work very well with #1 was explaining what our proximity sense showed us about Carol's emotions. Before #1 had been multi-minded, every time he'd been with a girl he'd had no clue about what she was thinking, and even less clue about what she was feeling. The several times he'd tried to get sexual with a girl had been after desperately hopeful guesses that she fancied him, and he'd almost invariably been very wrong. His being able to proximity sense that Carol had no sexual feelings at all made it much easier for him to know to behave himself, because he could very easily imagine how badly she'd react to his making what would obviously be a wrong move. Knowing what someone is feeling is a huge help in avoiding mistakes. The need for caution about sex is particularly important with Carol since she's beautiful with a figure MANY guys try anything to get their hands on, and those attempts annoy her considerably. If I was tempted to segue from our current activities to all the Peter Pan movies she's seen, and use that to show that I know her sexual fantasies, she'd be embarrassed in a bad way and suspicious of me in the future. So I controlled myself, being nothing more than a perfectly well-behaved, trustworthy, miracle-performing brother. During our flight Carol's conversation was mostly about me and feelings, rather than questions like "How fast can you go?" She did ask a few like that, but I told her, "I'll answer the technical questions when we're all together to avoid having to repeat them four times. What I want to do now is tell you how impressed I am with you..." then I'd praise her some more. When Carol started losing interest in the view, I asked, "Now that you've experienced the view, would you like a somewhat more adventurous descent?" "Whatever you say." I couldn't make a sled because I currently had only sixty four fingertips in total, and although my control over their maximum width and shape had improved compared to when I'd been eight-minded the first time, it hadn't done so by enough, especially because I needed to keep an energy sink blanket over us to hide our heat emissions. What I could do was be her sled by orientating us so Carol was lying on top of me and my body was uncomfortably supported by only a few NP-points. I'd be very comfortable in the other direction though. After warning her not to yell in excitement, I started us doing some dives and swoops. Nothing too dramatic initially, but I built it up using her proximity reading as a guide. Carol enjoyed it so much and was so trusting, that when we were most of the way down, I introduced her to the idea of our separating and flying independently, reminding her, "I didn't have to hug the TV remote to make it fly. I've enjoyed making you feel safe by hugging you, but by now you should trust me enough to fly solo." Trust is a wonderfully useful emotion. "What do I do?" "You don't even need to flap your arms; I'll do everything. You'll feel lots of fingertips holding you. It won't be particularly comfortable, but it is 100% safe. It feels like this..." I gave her a lot more fingertips than me, to make the experience more comfortable for her. After little more explanation and reassurance, we started doing some formation flying, dog fighting, and general aerobatics. We had a lot of quiet fun for a few minutes, until I started worrying about leaving the rest of our family alone for so long. We descended and I restarted the light blob next to my family when we were within five hundred feet of them, then Carol and I swooped in for cool-looking, independent landings. Donna didn't have to ask what Carol thought of it, as Carol's face was glowing with excitement and happiness. Even before her landing swoop ended, she started quietly raving over how much fun it was and how wonderful I was. I let her rave. There was no need for me to say anything as Carol was doing a perfect job. I waited, and it took only a few seconds before Donna started impassioned begging for her turn. I could've made an issue out of her little cellphone drama or her yelling too loudly earlier, but I resisted. It'd be better to give her a session of the same duration as Carol's and point out the lessons later. There was no possibility of Mom and Dad stopping Donna's turn, so Donna was quickly into my arms, warned not to yell in excitement, and then we were rocketing up into the sky. There was much less sentimentality and much more swooping, giving Donna, "The BEST time!" She was even adventurous enough that after warning her, I accelerated her upward and then cancelled all of her NP support. I flew nearby to keep the energy sink in place and so I could catch her if she looked panicky, but she was so into the experience that she'd stopped worrying about minor things like gravity and death. Near the end of the session, I showed her how to steer herself using the same system I'd used with the LA lifeguards and let her swoop around the treetops. She loved that too. She loved ALL of it. I let her control her own landing and I let her do a poor job of it, which predictably led to her excitedly demanding a LOT more practice. Mom, Dad and Carol had naturally been talking during my absences, so I wasn't surprised when Mom took advantage of Donna's need to take a breath to say, "You've convinced us to give it a try, Mark." "Okay. Gather close. Donna and Carol, I know you're both excited, but please keep your voices down while we're away." That instruction being aimed mostly at Donna. Mom and Dad wanted their session to be a sedate one, which I had no choice about as I didn't have enough force to swoop them around. We did some sightseeing, and after they'd overcome their being overwhelmed, there was too much talking. A lot of it was useful talk though, as this demonstration of my power shook up Mom's and Dad's opinion of me even more than my noisily fucking Alexis for four hours, not that I considered that a waste of time. After I'd made the necessary number of refusals to answer "How?", the conversation boiled down to my telling them in several different ways that they needed to give me a lot more free rein and authority than they had previously, and them semi-agreeing to it. In other words, the big picture hadn't changed: I'd be able to do everything I wanted, as long as they didn't disagree with it at the time. Nonetheless I thought I succeeded in substantially reducing what they'd disagree with. After landing, I asked Dad, "Do you want a quick, aerobatic session with just the two of us?" "Me too!" declared Donna, surprising no one. "Sorry Donna. I don't have enough NP force to take three people up for aerobatics. We'll come back here at the same time next year though..." "Argh! I don't wanna wait THAT LONG!" "I guess it'll depend on how many of my chores you do then." "DEAL! Every time I do one of your chores I get another turn." "Haha. Good try, sweetie. We'll talk about it on the way home because Dad's waiting to do some swooping." Dad was adventurous, getting almost as extreme as Donna had. After returning Dad, Mom said she didn't want another turn. Donna eagerly volunteered to have Mom's turn, which didn't work. We walked back to the car instead. Donna dogged my heels, asking about her next turn, expressing her excitement, asking about her next turn, etc. I couldn't resist commenting, "Now that you know what it's like, there's no need for you to do it again. It'd be better for you to stay on the ground in case Michelle calls." Judging by Donna's reaction, I'd foolishly overestimated how important she considered phone calls from her girlfriends. Rather than apologize for my mistake, I said, "Maybe in the future you'll believe me when I recommend you should do something." "I'LL SAY! I'll never make that mistake again!" During the walk back, I'd been searching around for nocturnal animals. My EKP was stronger than the previous eight-mind amount because I'd seen through that +5% per month silliness, giving me an amount of EKP that was slightly more than the previous sixteen-mind amount, but I didn't want to create a whole zoo now. I just grabbed an owl and a jackrabbit and had placed them on the roof of my car to placidly wait for us. I had NP-boxes around them too, just in case my EKP couldn't suppress their wanting to flee when they saw us. I was leading the way back with Carol and Donna close beside me, with Mom and Dad bringing up the rear. The girls were so focused on their conversations with me that we were only a few feet from the car before Carol noticed our spectators. "Oh, look!" she pointed. I said, "I put them there. I carried them with NP, and one of my minor abilities is to keep little creatures placid. Hopefully they'll remain stationary." They did, even when my family gathered around the car. I said, "I'm just showing off about another minor ability. Very unfortunately it doesn't work on excited sisters, but I can make animals with very small brains behave placidly by swamping their physical intention to run away. Pat them if you want, then I'll let them go." A minute later I floated them into the forest and released them. In the car, I took control of the conversation, starting with, "The first and most important topic is security. That's ALWAYS the most important issue because a few minutes of fun counts for nothing against the possibility of all of us being imprisoned for the rest of our lives or killed. Dial down your excitement and listen! -- "I needed to convince you how much I'd changed and I thought flying you was the best way to do it, even though it risked our being seen. What you don't know is that I carefully searched that area before we did anything, and I was keeping a very close watch on the whole area while we were there. -- "There are radars which can pick up how fast individual birds in a flock are flapping their wings, and one of those radars would've been able to find out all of our shapes, making it easy for the Government to find us." That's not how Doppler radars work, but it sounded plausible and scary so I used it. "Plus they would've sent helicopters full of agents and soldiers straight to us the moment humans appeared in midair. I can see radar beams so I knew none of those radars were operating near us; only radars which bounce off metal, which is why I got you to leave your metal things behind." "You can see RADAR?" checked Dad in amazement. "Yep. Radar is a form of light so I can tune my sight blobs to see it. Same for the radio frequencies used by various cellphone services and the communications frequencies used by the armed forces and law enforcement agencies. I know all those frequencies and I was searching for them around us. I can see infrared too, so I can easily spot bodies in the dark. Had I caught a glimpse of any of those near us, we would've been outta there as fast as possible. -- "My point is that I was FAR more careful than you were aware. Flying around is fun, but it's also very risky, very dangerous and is very definitely NOT a game. Even though you thought it was exciting fun, you do NOT tell ANYONE else about it, you don't mention it to each other over the phone or in emails, you don't talk about it at home, you don't even make jokes about it like saying 'I've gotta fly'. You don't do ANYTHING that could draw attention to us. If you absolutely MUST mention the subject, don't refer to it as flying. I call it 'NP'. Anyone who overhears you say NP isn't going to freak out. And if they ask you what NP stands for, tell them it's none of their business. You do NOT talk about this stuff with other people. Donna, you're the most impulsive one of us, so let me specifically warn you to be careful. You do NOT ask me to give you another flight if we're anywhere other than at home by ourselves and you're using a very quiet voice. If you mention it in public I'll be incredibly angry with you because you'll be risking all of our deaths just because you selfishly want some fun." I could sense that Donna was feeling some caution. Not nearly as much as I would like, but she had the idea. None of them were as scared of the Government as they should be. -- "If I'd told you not to do something two weeks ago you'd have ignored me, but you MUST listen to me now. I know for a fact that if any of you fuck up over this, then our lives will be over. If one of your friends comes up to me and says things which make me suspect you've told her about any of my abilities, then almost certainly the only way I'll be able to keep you safe is to murder her immediately and go on the run for the rest of my life. If any of you open your mouths, you'll be ruining my life, causing the death of your friend, and probably destroying your own lives too if she or you mentioned it to anyone else before I killed her. I am VERY serious about killing people if I have to. If you tell any of your friends about this, you are probably going to force me to kill them. Have I made myself clear?" I couldn't tell them that I'd already had to kill many people to protect myself, and especially couldn't tell them about already killing people to protect my other families, but I did my very best to make sure they understood that I really would kill people, including their friends, to protect us in the future. "Surely you're exaggerating?" asked Mom. "There are only two issues that you need to accept to understand my commitment: First, I've seen so many thousands of pages of evidence of Government crimes that I'm totally convinced that if it learns about any of my abilities, then its agents would kidnap us and our lives would be totally fucked forever. Second, to keep us free I am willing to kill someone to stop the Government hearing about us, because one death is better than five. It would be truly insane of any of you to risk all of our deaths and your friend's deaths because you want someone to have a little bit of fun, so keep your mouths FIRMLY shut about my having abilities. In a few months I'll start leaking the Government's secret crimes, and you'll see that I have very good reason to be scared shitless of them. Until you see what I've seen, don't be so stupid and naïve as to trust them not to ruin all of our lives." There were some muted acceptances of my statements, even though no one believed them fully. I sensed that I'd beaten them up about security as much as I practically could now, so: "We'll discuss security and keeping your mouths shut from time to time, but for now I'll change the subject by answering several of your previous questions about technical aspects of my abilities. I can lift a total of about 925 pounds with NP, but I need some of that to push with... ," etc. They had several more questions, so we talked all the way home and didn't stop even then. The questions ranged from "WHAT are you?" through to, "If you want to keep it such a secret, how come you're going to tell Julia's family?" Or, from Donna after I'd laughed at a joke so was apparently in a good mood, "So when can we go flying again?" The conversation lasted a long time, so it moved to the kitchen as I made myself a snack. I could now explain to Mom, "Now you know why I need to eat so much these days. My mind is doing a great deal more than other people's. An MRI scan or EEG would freak out the doctors because of how much activity there is." There's probably a way to increase the amount of ki my subconscious uses to fuel my body so I wouldn't need to eat so much now, but I didn't have enough minds to solve that problem. By the time I had gained enough minds to do so, I wouldn't need to eat hardly anything, which is why the Voyaging Mark had never bothered to learn how to reduce low-minded Marks' Mom's grocery shopping bills. Once the short-term questions were over with, including "Is there an alien living in your brain?", I started talking about some of the long-term consequences: "Provided none of you destroy our lives by letting my secrets slip, then what I intend to do is make my scientific genius the center of my life. My IQ is much higher than before," it wasn't really, not yet, but they'd respect me more if I said it was, "but the main reason I'll do so well with a science career is because I can absorb so much more knowledge than anyone else. I showed you before that I can read two books at the same time. Using sight blobs rather than my physical eyes, I can actually read from eight different sources, which means I can become an expert in several related fields and then combine my knowledge in ways people haven't thought of before. That should make me an exceptionally productive and world-famous scientist." Not to mention being able to network through the déjà vu grapevine with more than a billion other Mark-scientists. -- "I haven't mentioned this before, but there's a good chance that I'll be able to improve on my abilities. If I can increase my reading ability to twelve, twenty, or even more sources, then I could become an even wider ranging expert..." I talked about the long term for a long time, mainly because I thought it'd help my family be careful. I stressed tidbits like how many books had been written about Einstein, how it was likely that more would be written about me, which meant that our family would receive a great deal of interest and investigation, all our friends would be interviewed many times about us, etc. We could be rich, be known the world over and have fantastic lives, but only if they kept their mouths shut about everything freaky. I kept it up for long enough to sense that all their emotions were very subdued, and then I kept it up some more. It was quite late by the time my family's desire for sleep exceeded their interest in the conversation. Seeing one more yawn, Mom suggested, "It's late and Carol's got her birthday tomorrow so let's call it a night." After tired grumbles from Donna and Carol, I said, "Don't worry if you hear noises coming from my room. I sleep for only two and half hours so I'll be doing some research on my computer." I didn't have enough subconscious control to go without sleep entirely, but I didn't have any active enemies either so I didn't mind being vulnerable while sleeping. After which I could find out if there'd been any interesting developments in this dimension's international bikini manufacturing industry, and maybe research a few other less important things too. "Two hours EVERY night?" checked Mom. "Yep. It's another of my minor changes. There are lots of them, from not needing much sleep through to being REALLY good at sleeping with girls, as Alexis so enthusiastically described. Once I get an eight-screen computer system set up and enrolled at OSU, I'll be able to do about 48 man-hours of reading per night, plus whatever reading I can do during the day. That'll be a major help in my doing so many undergraduate degrees in one year. They're just reading and regurgitation, so with that much reading and my memory being virtually perfect now, they'll be a piece of cake." Especially since seven of my minds have already done most of those degrees. When Donna turned to go to bed, from across the room I used NP to give her a smack on the ass. She spun around to see me hamming up an exaggerated innocence act. She interrupted my whistling to laugh at me. I said, "NP has a thousand and one uses." I gave Carol a loving stroke on her cheek as I said, "Goodnight, sweeties." ^ Mainly because it happened the next day, I'll mention a little about Carol's seventeenth birthday. A group of her friends were putting on a mini-party in a restaurant that evening. I hadn't been included originally, but recent events had made Carol change her mind about me and she'd extended a belated invitation. I'd agreed to come along for the first half of it, and then I was going to leave to pick up Alexis because she wanted to take me out to one of her haunts. I'd done that a few times with her in other dimensions, and it was always an interesting experience. It was no wonder Alexis was so interested in social anthropology. My family gave Carol her presents in the morning, my present to her coming in a pile of boxes. Carol argued weakly, "I thought the clothes you bought for me already were my present?" "Those and what's in front of you. My shopping wouldn't have been complete without your party dress for tonight." I'd bought the whole outfit: dress, shoes, underwear, earrings, and even the lipstick and eye shadow I wanted her to wear because Carol's own makeup selection was poor quality and of a limited range. The dress was one of the proverbial "little black numbers". It wasn't in the same Universe sexiness-wise as the special-occasion dress I'd bought her in other dimensions, but it was somewhat more flattering than Carol was used to. It was short and had a low back. The front was sadly modest, but the low back required the bustier I'd bought her, which did marvelous things to the shape of her breasts, which were pretty damned marvelous to start with. Carol rushed into her room to try it on, Donna and Mom rushing to help. Leaving Dad to joke with me about the weird ways I'd changed. A widely smiling Carol led the females back into the room a few minutes later. I gave her a quiet wolf-whistle and said, "Gimme a twirl. Perfect! All the girls are going to hate you tonight." "Haha. Yeah, it's gorgeous. Even the shoes fit comfortably. How'd you get shoes like that for me?" They fit because the other-dimension Carols had recently bought the same style of shoes and I'd known what size. I answered, "All part of the service. I know they're a little higher in the heel than you're used to, but with a short dress and your body shape, the extra elevation works very well for you." This Carol was a little overweight and her legs a little too thick, but high-heeled shoes slimmed the look of them significantly. -- "When you're putting on your makeup tonight, use the dark blue eye shadow I gave you on the outside of your eyes and blend it into black on the inside. Mom can show you how to do that if you need help. The only other thing you'll have to do is apologize to all other girls for being so beautiful." Everyone in the family agreed with me, even Carol, although she said, "I'm worried about being overdressed." Which sounded like she meant she was worried about dressing better than the other girls, but I didn't think that was the case, especially as it was her party so she had an excuse to dress more glamorously than she ever had before. I interpreted her comment as meaning she was worried about being UNDER-dressed (most of the logic circuits in females' brains are wired backward, but you knew that already if you're a male reader, or if you're a female reader you'll disagree with me because I'm right, in both cases confirming my point). "It's your birthday, sweetie, and you'll be with your friends. It's the one time in the year when you can safely push your boundaries a little. Or in this case, let me push your boundaries. Speaking of boundaries, Dad was just saying he was looking forward to your modeling your new underwear. Are you going to parade those for him next?" I could joke about her underwear because she didn't mind me seeing her in them. I was just establishing some comfort with light sexual banter. Being comfortable with the banter didn't mean Carol was going to parade around in her underwear though, so she just laughed, "Haha. Even that fits me well. You're very good at buying clothes for me. You must've spent too much though?" I was flummoxed! NOTHING in ANY of my previous lives had prepared me for the concept that it was possible to spend too much on a girl's clothes. It'd be a novel idea to discuss with Julia one of these days, but in the meanwhile I answered as best I could, "Not much. I'm not just good at buying clothes for you; wait till you see what Donna's going to get." "What?" asked Donna eagerly. "I misspoke. What I meant to say is ' ... what Donna's going to get ON HER BIRTHDAY.' There are still three weeks to go yet." Donna tried again, and I sidestepped again. Donna's present was going to be a dress sexier than she'd ever owned before. I hadn't bought it yet because how sexy it'd be depended on how the family situation developed over the next couple of weeks. In other words, what I thought I could get Mom to accept. This Donna wasn't as proud of her figure as other Donnas you've read about so she wouldn't have accepted a VERY sexy dress either, but where this Donna would draw the line would be well past where Mom would draw it, so only Mom's point of refusal was the issue. Later that evening, I followed Eric's car to the restaurant and walked with them into the room. As it had been with Eric, Carol's dress was an instant hit with everyone. Carol quickly deflected all the praise onto me, saying "It's nothing to do with me. Mark bought it for my birthday. He bought it WITHOUT me! Even my wonderful shoes and eye shadow." At that point she turned and whispered secretly, "Can I tell them you're good at fashion?" I whispered back, "Anything you've seen me do in public is fine. My fashion sense is just knowledge; not anything special." Carol chose not to make an issue about how my answer had descended into silliness, instead turning to her crowd and exclaiming, "Mark's BRILLIANT at fashion! You wouldn't believe me when I told you before, but it's true. Look at this dress!" Carol carried on rapturously singing my praises. Her friends were skeptical, and the ones that knew me better were openly disbelieving, which motivated Carol to try even harder to convince them how wonderful I was now. She started trying a little too hard so I used NP to lightly hold her lips to give her pause. She hadn't been in danger of revealing anything secret; merely caring too much and her failure to convince her friends was making her unhappy, which I'd rather not happen. I told her, "I appreciate your good intent, but there's no reason to worry about it. I know your opinion of me and that's the only one that matters in the grand scheme of things, isn't it?" Carol understood my point, "Ahh, sorry. I just..." "This evening's about you, not me, so it doesn't matter. Besides, all your friends know the reason you're beautiful now is because you're beautiful always. I'll keep repeating that until you're convinced you don't need to tie up the bathroom for three hours every morning." I stayed for an hour or so, during which Carol continued to praise my fashion sense and my other non-secret, newly acquired, endearing qualities. She'd learned my little lesson and her compliments were made without the excessive worry that she'd felt previously. Several of the girls asked me if I'd really bought the dress, as they had trouble believing Carol's statement that I had. When I confirmed that I had, the girls usually asked who'd helped me. I'd say things like, "Guys don't need help; we can easily buy something quickly," or, "Eric slipped me $100 to buy the dress with the lowest neckline in the store. He never said FRONT neckline and a guy's gotta protect his little sister." I'm sure you won't be the least bit surprised to know that the girls talked about clothes quite a lot. Carol, Donna and I had gone shopping four days ago, so Carol had already told several of her girlfriends how good I was at fashion, but they hadn't believed it until now. Even seeing Carol's dress, their belief in me was only partial, but Carol was very sincerely convincing about how superb I was. Their increasing belief spurred them to ask Carol to repeat the story of our shopping days, and then they started asking me my opinion of the clothes they were wearing. I responded, "If I started critiquing one outfit and discussing what best suited the wearer, you'd all want turns. This is Carol's birthday dinner and she should be the focus of your attention, not me. This isn't the time or place for that type of discussion. Let me stop this conversation about me by delaying it to a time that isn't Carol's birthday. I suggest that Carol and I will come to one of your homes one evening soon, and I'll go through that girl's closet and give her as much fashion advice as I can. As many other girls who want to can be there as well and I'll comment on what they're wearing. It'll be a fun session." You can tell that I REALLY love Carol! Carol was showing great enthusiasm for my idea, which inspired the other girls to get even more excited. I offered, "I'll get a pen and paper from a waitress and all the girls that want to enter can put their names in a cup for me to draw the winner from." I held the cup up over my head while I 'randomly' picked a piece of paper: I used a sight blob looking down from above and NP-fingertips to sort through the pieces until I found the name I wanted, which I then drew out. The girl, Helen, looked quite similar to Ava so I had plenty of knowledge I could use. She was shorter than Ava, but I'd heard enough discussions about the effects of height on clothing selection to be able to adapt to that variation. I told Helen, "Some time this evening, pick an evening next week that suits you and the other girls that want to be there. It'll take me several hours to discuss all your clothes and related topics so I suggest you choose an early start time. Tell Carol the day and time and she'll let me know. -- "By the end of that evening we'll have talked so much fashion that you'll have forgotten that I'm a guy, but I am and we'll be in your bedroom so I prefer to have your mother in attendance or at least popping in and out. The evening will go much smoother if you're able to change clothes in front of me rather than asking me to leave the room every time. I'll leave if you want me to of course, but my suggestion is for you to wear a pair of thin shorts and a modest bra or bikini top that you don't mind me seeing you in and that won't show through your clothes too much. You know what you've got in your closet and what you can wear under it without it showing." The only other point worth mentioning from Carol's party is that I made sure that it was known that I was leaving soon to pick up my date for the night. I wanted them to believe that I had a girlfriend as that made me somewhat more desirable, and it gave me an excuse to keep these girls at arms' length after they get excited about me at Helen's place. Julia had to come first and there's no way I could go to her with multiple girlfriends already attached to me. That'd have to be done afterward. The following Tuesday evening we created another tornado strike. It was in Helen's living room because of the size of the crowd, which included Donna, my mom and Helen's mom. Her father had fled. I was a wild success. It is seriously disturbing how much fashion knowledge seven of my minds had absorbed from my other-dimensional closet-mates. By the end of the very long evening, a great deal of fun had been had by every female and I was a highly sought after hit among all of Carol's girlfriends. Right now just her girlfriends who were here, but it'd be "all of Carol's girlfriends" once the story spreads, assuming that these girls will talk about fashion with their friends. Carol's girlfriends are the perfect age to be my mutually enjoyable sexual playthings, so I was very happy. My major problem was that far too many girls wanted to drag me to their bedroom as soon as possible. My other major problem was their having the wrong motivation for that, but that'll be easily corrected later. I was now a huge and popular blip on all their radars, and I'll easily use that position to make our relationships a great deal more enjoyable than they'd been so far, although hopefully with a similar amount of undressing. Not yet though, as I don't want to have a couple dozen potential girlfriends doing God knows what to attract my attention during the delicate early stages of my relationship with Julia. For now I was enforcing a strict schedule on these girls. I would do this again at another 'randomly' chosen girl's home in a couple of weeks, and I very definitely didn't want to be bothered by them between now and then. I even said, "My girlfriend and I are going through a delicate time and I'll be angry if I start getting calls from girls wanting me to come to their bedrooms so they can take their clothes off. I'm sure you can understand that my girlfriend would hit the roof with me, and then I'd hit the roof with you. I'd totally stop helping any of you because my girlfriend is important to me." They would try to get at me indirectly through Carol, which would do great things for Carol's opinion of my desirability. Maybe two or three such visits from now, I could invite Julia along to one of the sessions. Bowling Julia over with my fashion acumen would be an amusing total reversal of how my earlier relationships had developed with her. ^ The rest of my "Anderson Educating Process" was fairly predictable and it went much as expected, so I'll fast-forward. It took the best part of three weeks from my gaining seven minds to get the Andersons onboard and stabilized, although "stabilized" was more like, "coping reasonably successfully" as it wasn't easy for them to get used to my new personality and being able to do so many unbelievable things. Once they were semi-comfortable, the next important task was getting the Williams family onboard. To briefly divert from my single representative of the recently upgraded 42,000 single-minded Marks, to consider all 42,000 dimensions where the single-minded Mark had been similarly upgraded, I should mention that getting together with Julia is sometimes problematic. In a minority of these dimensions, Julia and sometimes her parents are missing. Not often, but more than is usual for a "missing person" (e.g., the Norris girls were only missing from a handful of these dimensions). I guess that was mainly because there'd been a significant amount of luck involved in Prof and Vanessa's car accident, both their having it and then surviving it. Without the accident, Prof and Vanessa sometimes didn't marry or married much sooner, in both cases there was no Julia (there was often a female child, but she was a different random combination of genes so looked and behaved very unlike Julia). With the accident, there was also no Julia if either Prof, Vanessa or both of them died. The way the Universe synchronizes itself so much during long-term events disguises the amount of luck involved in them, but the quickness of the car accident had randomly eliminated a noticeable number of Julias. The eight-minded Marks in these dimensions are 'disappointed' - that's understating the complexity of their feelings - but they'll have to carry on making their lives as enjoyable as possible anyway. Another problem is that in some dimensions Julia does exist but she and I aren't in the same city. The 42,000 Marks I found were all in Corvallis as that was the only place I'd looked for them, but in some of the dimensions Julia has left the city, the usual reason being her going to a better business college, often with a boyfriend. In the ideal world I'd go to wherever she is, meet her, teleport her to the design workshop of one of the world's best clothing designers, where he'd welcome her with open arms and go to work designing a dress for her. Julia would forget all about me for a couple of hours, but when she finally remembered me she'd be very impressed and our relationship would be off to a very good start. Unfortunately the eight-minded Marks don't have enough mental power to teleport, and not even the financial resources to take plane trips to wherever his dimension's Julia is. It's going to take weeks or months until these Marks have enough power or money, so Julia is best ignored for that time. I'll still start my relationship with Prof and Vanessa though. I will very much value having them in my life even if I somehow fail to add Julia later. [[My subsequent godhood connected every Mark to billions of Julias, Profs and Vanessas, so no Marks were left Williams-less.]] Across the entire W-Dimension there are some single-minded Marks with even more divergent lives, such as some living in England without a Carol or a Donna in their lives [not that I knew about those Marks yet; I'm being a bit loose with the timeframe here], but there are none of the English Marks and few other problematic ones among the 42,000 Marks I'd upgraded a few weeks ago. Among that group, Julia's non-existence, absence or her having a boyfriend were the largest problems. Back to my chosen representative Mark now. ^ I'd never met Julia in this dimension, as I never advanced to her grade. I'd only passed her in hallways and things like that, and that was over a year ago. We had virtually nothing in common, something that would normally be a difficult hurdle for starting a new relationship, but I was going to use a different approach. I waited for two fairly easily achieved prerequisites: Until my home situation was stable enough. Particularly important was that Carol and I had a visibly strong relationship, because I wanted Carol with me when we approached the Williamses. This prerequisite was mostly achieved already, Mom predictably being the slowest to adapt to the new Mark, particularly my assertiveness. Mom has been the undisputed ruler of our home all my life and she found it hard to adapt to the new situation. Getting her ready was important though, because I remembered how critical Mom and Vanessa had been way back when I first started dating Julia. We'd been much younger then and much more in need of parental guidance, but I still wanted this Mom on my side enough that she'd be a help in my 'seduction' of Julia and her parents. I could pick an evening when Prof, Vanessa and Julia were home without anyone else being there. I didn't have to worry about Carol being free because she'd make herself free for me if I asked her to. I was just about ready to make contact with the Williams family when my godhood arrived. The earlier plan for upgrading the 42,000 eight-minded Marks had been to let them upgrade upward at their own pace once the green light to do so was spread through the grapevine. That no longer applied because upgrading was an old 'technology'. Instead, as the 42,000 Marks felt comfortable with their increasing power, the higher-minded Marks linked them to more minds, some of which were newly created copies of minds that had been in the super-network and were able to help get the less experienced Marks used to the increases in power. It only took a few hours to get the 42,000 Marks fully connected to my trillion-mind collective, giving them the astonishing powers that made possible. There's now enough commonality between these Marks' situations and the other single-minded Marks, that I'll expand my scope to that of the entire category. ------- Chapter 433: Single-Minded Marks; Initial Introductions Friday, July 25, 2008 I became a god at midday, and by dinnertime even the never-before-contacted, single-minded Marks had been connected to my network. One second they were living a so-so life, the next second they're told they're a God of the Universe who'll soon be linked with over a trillion other god-minds and they'll have astonishing abilities. It took them a few hours to get used to it - the other minds helped - and to have their links increased all the way to them being full members of the network. At the family dinner table, I said ("I" is yet another Mark; one ignorant of parallel dimensions until a few hours ago), "Now that dinner's finished, I have an interesting announcement to make. It's a biggie so it's going take you a while to grasp it all, but our new vacation home is a good place to start. I recently put some of my close friends to work creating a vacation home for us. I call it our 'Refuge', a name I'll explain later. It's ready for your inspection now and I'd like to show it to you." "Not until we've done the dishes," said Mom automatically. I'd raised the topic before we'd left the table because we'd start to split up then and it'd be too hard to get everyone back together again. "I'll take care of those when we return. We won't be long." We will be long but I'd said that to stop Mom worrying about the dishes. I'll zap them clean and put them away just as we leave. "This joke is too much of a nuisance," said Dad, sure that there was no such vacation home. "If you're unhappy fifteen minutes from now, I'll paint the exterior of this house for you over the summer and even supply the paint myself." That being a job Dad had recently mentioned wanting to do soon. "All you have to do is cooperate for the next few minutes." Carol said, "Tell me about it later. Anthony's coming to get me soon." Anthony was her boyfriend in this representative dimension. Further evidence that Carol didn't care much for her boyfriends and had chosen them somewhat randomly, was that she had different boyfriends in different dimensions. Anthony here, Eric and a couple of other guys being commonly chosen in other dimensions. They were all non-assertive, easily controlled, and I'm sure, highly frustrated guys. "He's not due in the next fifteen minutes, is he?" "No, but I have to get ready." Carol clearly didn't want to waste time on whatever silly thing I was doing. "I don't want to go either," declared Donna, not bothering with an excuse. This was typical in the single-minded Marks' families. They had little respect for me and didn't want to go out of their way for anything I wanted. I could spend the next several minutes trying to cajole them into cooperating, or I could be more direct. I said, "I can't be bothered arguing about it..." "Good," said Donna, standing to leave the room. " ... so I'm taking you all to see it anyway." The next instant we were in their Refuge's living room. Mom and Carol screamed loudly, while Dad and Donna were less noisy about being totally freaked out. I casually leaned against the wall with my arms folded, waiting for them to stop panicking and calm down enough to be rational. I wasn't in a hurry; maybe next time they'd be more cooperative. It took Dad several seconds to collect hits wits enough to angrily demand of me, "What've you done?" "Brought you to your new vacation home. I hope you like it. If not, any part of it can be easily changed." Mom accused, "Did you put drugs in our dinner?" It took some more silliness, but surprisingly little of it before the angry accusations reduced enough for the first expressions of wonder to emerge. For a change it was Mom who calmed down the quickest. The speed of her change in attitude might have had something to do with the room being GORGEOUS. My explanation GREATLY increased my family's confusion, creating the need for a great deal more explaining. I'm only a god so not yet capable of understanding females, but I am smart enough to have learned a trick or two: I quickly started the Grand Tour by teleporting them to a more important room, saying, "Mom and Dad, this is your new bedroom." My being a god, their being teleported to and around a planet 9.6 million light-years from Earth, and other minor issues, were relegated to the background of the females' minds when they saw the new bedroom. And those minor issues were completely forgotten when they saw the wonderful 'new' clothes - copied from the closets of those multi-millionaire Moms that lived in hilltop homes - hanging in Mom's large walk-in closet. Mom had even made it easy for me by having the exact same figure in both dimensions (she's very self-disciplined is my mom). The Refuge Grand Tour and my family's reactions to it and my godhood don't need repeating in full. I'll touch on just a few differences: Many of these Marks had different lives, especially the ones that'd moved to England. Those Moms had usually remarried a couple of years after their Marks had been born, and in most of those dimensions she'd later popped out another son, although sometimes a girl or multiple siblings. It'll be interesting to see what becomes of those Marks' lives given their very different starts. Their lives are so different from those you're familiar with that it's not worth explaining their situations here, especially as this autobiography is getting somewhat long already. Leaving them undescribed doesn't mean their lives are any less important than those you've read about. Those Marks will put just as much care and effort into their families as all the other Marks will. The Felicitys that left Steven because he played around are going to have an interesting adaptation to make when they encounter loving Stevens in their Communal Refuge. The English Moms' new husbands and the Stevens will have to get used to each other too. If anything, the English Marks are closer to their step-dads than the American Marks are to their biological dads. English-Dad was more intellectual than jocky, so I had more in common with him. I explain that so you know that in those dimensions, he'll get as much attention as the Dad you've been reading about, and his membership in the Communal Refuges is very secure. This issue is just one of the strange ones we're going to have to get used to. I can easily imagine that in the future, we're all going to love and marry different people, and perhaps non-people too, so cross-dimensional and cross-Time jealousy will have to be something we learn to let go. Intellectually I can accept it; emotionally I'm not looking forward to it at all. All the still-living single-minded Marks, about 3.5 billion of them, had mostly been loners, that being my basic character, or perhaps lack of character. They generally weren't as bad or as sad as the Marks that'd suicided, plus they'd learned some social skills in the five years since the first suicides had happened, but their acquiring godlike powers and a suddenly assertive and confident personality forced a considerable amount of adjustment on their families, as did the rapid changes in lifestyle. I'll describe some parts of that process below. My personality being what it is, in those dimensions where the single-minded Marks' circumstances closely paralleled that of most of the other Marks, I kept thinking about seducing my sisters. They were staring at me with gobsmacked wonder and were very emotionally open at the moment. I was tempted to make them gob-smacked and god-smooched. They were very different girls from those I'd originally seduced several years ago. The Carols had just turned seventeen, the Donnas being only a few days away from sixteen, and in most of the dimensions I'm talking about they were both very used to getting attention from guys. Carol had more self-confidence than she'd had three years ago when Julia had first seduced her for me. Carol was now less uneasy with guys, although still very conservative with them. She'd had one boyfriend for the best part of a year and he was smart enough to take sex at the speed she wanted - which was glacially slow - because every boy in school would be more than eager to step into his shoes to get a shot at getting their hands into any of Carol's clothing other than her shoes. My trillion-mind proximity sense easily showed me that Carol still had her hymen and I almost felt sorry for her boyfriend. Donna was much more enthusiastic about boys and seemed to have several boyfriends. Her eager attitude to the opposite but highly compatible sex was something that worried Mom and Dad. I wasn't going to invade Donna's privacy by reading her mind, but I strongly suspected that her lack of physical virginity was frequently reinforced. Donna probably had guys lining up around the block, and certainly didn't need for me to join her line. Neither sister would be as receptive to my seduction as they'd been previously. On the other hand, my experience with girls in general, my knowledge of my sisters in particular, and my emotion-reading ability, meant I'd be FAR better at seducing them than I used to be. My self-imposed rule not to directly manipulate my loved ones' minds unless it was an emergency - getting into their panties didn't really qualify - stopped it being trivially easy for me, but I was still sure that I could relatively easily win my sisters' non-sisterly affections. However, my intent is to initially do nothing more than be very nice to them. The 42,000 previously single-minded Marks had started their seductions three or four weeks ago - in a VERY non-seductive, careful-as-you-go, indirect way - and I'll wait to see how those seductions work out before taking any irrevocable steps in all the other single-minded Marks' dimensions. (Not really "irrevocable" as I could remove their memories if I made a mess, but I preferred not to use that type of intervention on my loved ones.) As is nearly always the case with so many billions of dimensions, there are exceptions. For example, in some of these dimensions Carol is very unhappy, so I'll be taking action to reverse that as quickly as possible. It won't be a physical seduction, but it'll still be a seduction because I'll have to get myself into her emotions deep enough to turn her life around. But in the majority of cases, I'll be an apparently pure-minded, loving brother for the next few weeks. It's not as if I'll be missing out on anything as I experience the other Marks' lives and am enjoying MANY sexual relationships with my sisters. For trillions of us to enjoy something, it only requires one of us to do it, which gives us an amazing diversity of experiences to enjoy. For example, one of us suggested we start a project to seduce his dimension's Jessica Alba, specifically so the rest of us can experience it. We thanked him for being so noble on our behalf, and then eagerly discussed how to help him because it wouldn't be fair to make one Mark do all the 'work'. With my loved ones, my decisions about what I should do or not do are almost entirely based on what's best for them, rather than what would make me happy. That's often the same thing because making them happy makes me happy, but my primary intent is how to help them. I can be un-SELF-ish because I have trillions of other selves. There's no need for me to get greedy or impatient with the formerly single-minded Marks' sisters. Having said that, these dimensions' Carols and Donnas have only one life to obtain happiness from (at the moment; I expect they'll decide otherwise in the future). If and when I'm sure that my seducing either of them is to their benefit, then I'll act. There's going to be an interesting wrinkle in that issue because I allocated a deliberately varied cross-section of 10,000 families to each Communal Refuge, thus sooner rather than later the non-lover sisters will meet lover-sisters there. That's going to result in some very interesting conversations! It might take a while, but I'm guessing that Carol will change Carol's attitude. Theoretically there are two ways you could interpret that, but in reality there's only one way it could possibly go. I bet Donna will get Donna to try me MUCH sooner than Carol succeeds with Carol. That'll somewhat depend on the conversations Mom and Dad have with Mom and Dad. If Donna does want to jump me, I'll happily agree because with Donna it'll just be for fun. It'll be a very different situation with Carol. With her, it'll be much more about starting a lifelong partnership relationship. That's going to take much more time and conversation, especially as I won't be pushing her into it. I don't think I'll need to. She'll see hundreds of Marks and Carols loving each other, with hundreds of their parents looking on proudly and happily. It's going to be a weird situation for her, but Carol responds well to emotional situations, and especially well to love. I can't imagine her failing to respond positively to her own self's love. Which brings me to Julia and the Williams family. The decision about whether to contact them wasn't as straightforward as it might seem. The previous subcategory's 42,000 Marks had planned to contact the Williamses, and would have within a couple of days of now if achieving godhood hadn't intervened. Achieving godhood meant that all the Marks that weren't already friends with the Williamses reconsidered bluntly intruding themselves into the Williams' lives. I didn't owe those exact people anything, so had no moral obligation or right to approach them, so I wondered whether I should. Without godhood, the 42,000 Marks would've gone ahead and contacted the 42,000 Williams families (actually fewer, as some weren't available) despite the moral questions because those Marks wanted a Julia, Prof and Vanessa in their lives. Those wants were partly selfish, but they'd known that Julia and her parents would derive a great deal of happiness from their relationships with Mark. Since godhood arrived, I didn't need to contact the Williamses to have them in my life, because "my life" now encompassed billions of them. Nor did I need Julia's and her parents' guidance because I not only had continual access to the guidance of many other Williamses, but I now have the capability to read the minds of the world's best psychologists, business people, or whatever group best suited the advice I needed, although I'll normally learn things for myself. A great deal of the original Williams' enjoyment had come from helping me become all that I could be, but I no longer needed their individual help, and in some respects I was already all that I could be. There was little need for the Profs to give me educational support, for example, although I could already foresee that Vanessas' role in my life was going to expand a great deal. I was reasonably confident that I should go ahead and contact the stranger-Williamses anyway, but as I've just written, I'm not working alone. To be sure I would be doing the right thing, I got some Marks in other dimensions who already were friends with the Williamses to interrupt their Grand Tours to ask their Williamses whether they thought I should contact their unaware counterparts. Those Marks cooperated with my request - I like to help other people, especially when they're not other people - whereupon their Julias hit me on my arm and told me off for being so cautious. Apparently, as Gods go I'm not a very awe-inspiring one. Julia added, "I'd never forgive you if you left another Julia alone." I'd always thought it was God who was in charge of forgiveness, but apparently I'm missing that responsibility along with my awesomeness. I answered, "She's not alone; she's got a boyfriend and they have very good feelings for each other." My proximity sense is VERY large now that I'm connected to over a trillion minds. If Julia wasn't out past the orbit of Ceres then I could read her emotions. Julia had talked to her boyfriend on the phone before dinner and I'd detected their emotions for each other. "{Raspberry}. He's NOWHERE near as wonderful as you." This Julia hadn't bothered asking her counterpart's boyfriend's name, but she never lets anything - such as facts - stand in the way of her pro-me bias. It would've been illogical of me to point out that she was being illogical, so I changed to her parents, saying, "Julia's loyalty having decided her counterpart's fate, what about your counterparts?" They were much more polite than Julia, not making rude noises or hitting my arm when they effectively blew more raspberries at me. They wouldn't have missed being part of my futures for the world - and they could have one if they wanted - and they were sure the unaware versions of themselves would be equally as excited to be part of my lives. "How do you feel about me introducing you to them, and having you explain your perspective to them?" "You can bring us together?" asked Julia with sudden excitement [in the dimensions this was happening, it was before I'd told them about Communal Refuge]. "Yeah. I thought I might pair up families who knew about me with families who didn't..." "GREAT! I'd LOVE to meet other Julias and tell them what they need to know about you." "I was thinking of pairing you up so you'd meet just one other Julia." "If I can meet one of me, I can meet lots of me, right?" "There are billions of you, far more than the population of any one Earth, but in principle you're right. What I've already done is created something I call the 'Communal Refuge' for groups of about ten thousand dimensions..." I went on to describe it. Julia said, "Can you tell the other ten thousand Julias for my Communal Refuge to meet there at 6am tomorrow morning? Are they all on the same times?" "Yes I can tell them, and yes they're on the same time. A significant proportion of them don't know about me or ANY of this stuff yet, so they won't be coming to your meetings until they're ready. -- "I wasn't expecting so many people to be in the building at once," infallibility apparently being another godlike trait I'd missed out on, "but I'll create an auditorium that'll seat ten thousand and that has great audio and visual properties. To jump there from the elevator at home, ask to be taken to Communal Refuge's Auditorium. -- "In many other dimensions, other Marks are having conversations very similar to this one, and quite a few of those Julias have had the same idea you've had. Most of them are allocated to other Communal Refuges, but there'll still be hundreds of other Julias at the meeting tomorrow morning that had the same idea. All the other Julias are very much like you, so you won't be able to order them around or anything like that." "I'm not intending to give them orders. There's just a great deal of organization required, so the sooner we start the better." "What's there to organize?" "EVERYTHING! You can do almost anything now, so we need to get planning." <10,000 Julias brainstorming things for all their Marks to do. I think we've created a monster.> I conceded, but not without a final bit of retaliation, "I'll do what you want, but I'm worried about what you're going to wear." I got hit on my arm again. It was probably my fault for teasing my acolyte about what she holds most sacred. I should've previously inscribed "Thou shall not punch thy God on the arm" on a stone tablet, which I guess means that being all-wise is another of the godly attributes I failed to pick up. We're lucky I have my divine sense of humor. The unanimous consensus across the many dimensions that had Marks who had asked the questions of their respective Williamses, was that the uninformed Williams families should DEFINITELY be contacted and fully informed, and that the already-informed Williams families were very happy to help with that. Just for fun, I used many different ways of contacting new Williamses. I wasn't really worried about scaring them because I could always remove any of their negative emotions if they got too bad, but I had promised myself to do my best to avoid directly manipulating my loved ones' minds and it was more fun to find methods that worked well without that cheating. I'll describe one such approach, what I called the "Leprechaun Strategy": I appeared in front of them as a very small, very un-scary creature. ^ Prof, Vanessa and Julia had just finished their dinner and were about to stand up to clear the table when a small, attention-getting glow suddenly started just above the surface in the middle of the table. It lasted a couple of seconds, then out of it stepped a six-inch tall Mark. I bowed to them as the glow faded and then sat down cross-legged on the table. With a voice they could clearly hear, I said, "Hello Prof, Vanessa and last but not least - not when compared to me - Julia. I'm sorry to intrude on your evening without being invited, but I've been assured by many thousands of other Profs, Vanessas and Julias that you'd love to hear my news. I'm Mark Anderson, a fellow Corvallis resident. I'm nearly fifteen months younger than you are, Julia, and we went to the same school although I was a grade behind you. Maybe you remember me?" They were standing back from the table ready to bolt if need be, although not really frightened. "What are you?" asked Prof. "I'm a local boy made unbelievably good. A large part of the reason I've done so well is because of a number of people called Prof, Vanessa and Julia Williams. Not you obviously, because you don't know me yet. I'm talking about billions of versions of you in parallel dimensions. I know you know what they are Prof, but for Vanessa's and Julia's benefit I'll quickly explain that there are a few hundred billion copies of the Universe, many of which are almost identical, down to having Earths with versions of the four of us on them. There are over 150 billion Julias in the Universe, which is a very scary thought. You've got versions with the same names, very much the same personalities, and having very much the same things happen to them, like Prof's accident when he lost his leg saving your life, Vanessa. -- "In many of those dimensions, five years ago, their Mark Anderson committed the typical teenager angst suicide. By happenstance he had déjà vu just at the moment he was dying. It turns out that déjà vu is caused by a resonance between the minds of two versions of the same person in different parallel dimensions, and when he died in one dimension, the resonance got left permanently active in the Mark Anderson in the other dimension. That gave the second Mark two minds, which he found so interesting that he aborted his suicide because it was running a little slower than the Mark who had died. -- "The two-minded Mark resumed his life. Having two complete minds at the conscious and subconscious levels gave him much improved physical dexterity and intellectual abilities. He became proficient at sports and could work on two different school subjects at the same time, as well as a few other minor benefits. He did an IQ test at school, and his two minds were able to leapfrog through the questions, getting a final IQ score high enough to advance him from 8th to 9th grade. -- "He felt even more cut off from other people and he was interested in the effects of having multiple minds in one brain, so he carried some quick acting poison around with him waiting for the next déjà vu to occur. -- "The next school year started by then, and he was formally in 10th grade, in many of Julia's classes, and he was doing all the 11th grade material too. When the next déjà vu occurred, one of the two Marks in the déjà vu link committed suicide again, leaving the surviving Mark with four minds because he'd also gone through the same doubling up process earlier. -- "Shortly after that, in early April 2005, something happened at school which brought those dimensions' Julias and Marks together. They dated and fell very much in love. -- "I can see you're skeptical, Julia, but it's true. Those versions of you were so head over heels about those versions of me, that for the next couple of weeks those Julias several times woke their mothers up to check that they weren't dreaming about how wonderful they thought their Mark was. There was a great deal of happy crying and romance in those Williams' households, and their Profs enjoyed the overflow benefit of that." The three of them understood what I meant, although only Prof gave a small chuckle. I added, "It wasn't all good news, Prof. Mark would spend a few hours with Julia on a date, then Julia and Vanessa would spend several times as many hours dissecting every nuance of the date, which resulted in those Profs having to cook their own dinners some nights." Prof chuckled again, adding, "What you're saying sounds very likely." Julia had a different perspective though, saying, "I can remember you from school, but there was never anything between us." "Not between you and me, no. In the interest of saving time I'll be a little blunt and say that you're a bit of an elitist, Julia. Somewhat about yourself, but I'm mostly talking about your criteria for a boyfriend. You spent so many years having your romantic dreams, reading so many romance books, and living with your mother's high opinion of Prof's heroism and his other virtues, that your Mr. Right has a very high standard to reach to qualify for your affection. I was never involved in the mind-merging process I described, and without that happening to me I was incapable of getting your attention and certainly not your affection. -- "Don't leap to the conclusion that this is a very strange way for me to flirt with you. I'm here for the three of you equally. You've all been enormously important to me in billions of other dimensions, and those Profs, Vanessas and Julias urged me to make contact with you here, even though we've had no contact previously. -- "I need to continue the Mark Anderson story: In billions of dimensions, Julia and Mark became VERY tight and they started a wonderful relationship. The Vanessas loved seeing how happy their Julias were, and the Profs got very excited about the Marks' academic potential. Math is my best subject, Prof, and with four fully conscious minds in their heads the Marks were able to excel at their studies to a degree that was amazing. -- "What REALLY got everyone excited was that the Marks discovered that having four minds gave them some amazing mental abilities. The most amazing of which was a telekinesis, so he could do things like this..." I used NP to float the salt shaker up from the table and slowly toward Prof. I added, "Catch it, so you know it's real." It was floating so slowly it was more of an "accept" than a "catch", but Prof took possession of it anyway. He was clearly surprised by the salt shaker being real. Before Prof could comment, I said, "I imagine you thought I was some sort of projected image, but I assure you that's not the case. To help make up for the time I'm taking out of your evening, let me give you an even more convincing demonstration by clearing the table for you." Every dish and piece of cutlery on the table floated upward a few inches, causing exclamations of surprise from the three spectators. Then they accelerated through to the kitchen, while I said, "The other Marks have eaten in this house many times and I have their memories so I know where everything goes. I'll clean everything and put it all away for you." By which time it was already done as I'd teleported everything to where I wanted it, including the 'dirt' to 'away'. -- "To speed up my story considerably, let me just say that the Marks that'd learned how to merge their minds across parallel dimensions merged a few more times, then learned how to link to more and more minds, all the time acquiring new and increasingly powerful mental abilities. They then linked to every Mark in existence, even Marks like me who had no idea any of this was going on until just a few hours ago. They also learned how to create as many minds as they wish, so I'm now linked to approaching three trillion other Marks' minds simultaneously. That gives all of us Marks some amazing mental powers. To prove the point, I have some gifts for each of you. -- "First Vanessa. For you some flowers..." On the table in front of Vanessa I created a beautiful crystal vase, copied from one I'd seen during my research into mansions for Refuge, into which appeared a bouquet of a particular species of rose. Vanessa exclaimed, "They're beautiful! I've been trying to grow that hybrid for years." "I know. In the dimensions where Marks were involved in your lives, you've moved house twice, and in both cases I did a lot of landscape gardening for you." Prof asked, "How did you make them appear like that?" "I didn't so much 'make them appear', as just 'make them', Prof. As Vanessa is finding out now, they're totally real, right down to their having the right scent. There are so many Mark Anderson minds linked together now that we have enormous control over the Universe, including being able to create matter." "But the implications of that are mind boggling." "Yes they are, and we'll talk more about that later. -- "Julia, for you I have something I'm sure you'll approve of." On the table in front of this Julia, I placed a rich-Julia's favorite dress. That's a GROSS simplification and I apologize profusely to my female readers for wording that in such a ridiculously masculine way. Obviously it's a stupidly logical thing to say for a number of reasons. For a start, the phrase "Julia's favorite" is impossibly simplified. It depends on: the occasion, who she's going with, who else is going to be there, what other females are going to be wearing, what Julia's and the other girls' goals for the event are, when she last wore the dress in question, and approximately four hundred other criteria. Of all of rich-Julia's many possible "favorites", I'd copied the dress that I thought was the most impressively upmarket. A second gross simplification was my saying that I placed "the dress" on the table. It's no good a female having the perfect dress unless she's got the shoes to go with it. I've been assured on innumerable occasions that "Getting the right shoes is ESSENTIAL!" Judging by how long my girls have spent in shoe stores, they either think so or they're insane - you can make up your own mind about that. So the shoes were placed beside the dress, as was the matching clutch purse, and a new version of the bra and panty set that Julia always wore with it, as required by the dress's unusual cut. Julia wears a variety of different earrings and necklaces sets with this dress, so I created a duplicate of the set that tended to get the most positive comments from other girls. Julia picked up the dress and started raving about it. I could see that she was happy, and that was all that mattered. I nodded and smiled until Julia paused for breath, and then seized the opportunity to say, "Prof, for me to give you your gift, you need to be sitting down, so take the seat please." "What are you thinking of?" "Some of the Profs other Marks have done this meeting with joked about getting a lap-dance, but it's nothing like that. To use an expression of Julia's that she's inflicted on billions of Marks many times, 'You'll enjoy it more if you don't know in advance.' Other Marks have done it for billions of Profs so far, and every one of you has been extremely appreciative." Prof was very aware of his role as family protector, and he wasn't eager to sit down while something so weird was going on. On the other hand, this obviously wasn't a typical home robbery and it's hard to feel physically threatened by a leprechaun. Prof pulled a chair a fair way back from the table to give himself plenty of space, then he sat in the edge of it, ready to leap to his feet again if need be. I just needed Prof to have enough support that he wouldn't fall over, so his current position was good enough. It hadn't been difficult the first time I'd done it, and I'd practiced a few billion times since then, so an instant later his prosthetic foot was lying on the table in front of him and it'd been replaced by the real deal. If he "leaped to his feet" now, it'd be literally true. I'd obviously reconnected all of Prof's nerves, so he immediately got feelings from places he hadn't received any from for forty five years. He made a "What the!" exclamation of surprise, then quickly bent down to pull up the bottom of his trouser leg. Vanessa and Julia were looking at the prosthetic leg on the table with puzzlement. They'd seen it countless times before and it didn't appear to be any sort of special gift. Then they noticed Prof's reaction. They ESPECIALLY noticed the flesh of Prof lower-leg when he pulled his trouser cuff up. Prof poked it, making it look even more real to everyone. Vanessa bent down to have a closer look, asking Prof, "Is it really your leg back?" I answered, "It's not his original leg. It was easier for me just to make an approximately mirror image copy of his left leg." For creation jobs that the Marks were going to be repeating countless times throughout the W-Dimension, such as Prof's leg and all my loved ones' bodies, one of the first Marks to do each job had made the effort to do a cell-by-cell high-quality design which he'd then memorized. Creating a new copy for the rest of us was as easy as "Painting By Numbers". Quite a lot of numbers, but that's no problem for us. -- "Prof, you'll need to use a walking stick for the next couple of hours, until you get used to it." I materialized a classy walking stick on the table in front of him. It would normally have taken him considerably longer than a couple of hours to adapt to his 'new' leg but I'd saved him a lot of time by also mirroring some of his subconscious mechanisms and reflexes; that being a type of mental editing that I had no compunction about doing for my loved ones. -- "It's a permanent gift. In every possible respect it is your leg now, as if you'd never lost it. If you don't go running around on highways again it should stay with you for a very long time." He wasn't able to put his new biology to the test yet because Julia was holding it up while all three of them marveled at it. After several seconds of that, and many expressions of amazement and appreciation, Julia put Prof's foot down and he was encouraged to stand and try it out. Prof's walking stick remained on the table as Julia and Vanessa provided all the support he needed as he tested his weight on his new leg, then walked down the length of the room. Prof was almost immediately able to stop using his family for much support, requiring just a little extra stability from them so he didn't topple over. After walking the length of the room and back, the expressions of appreciation REALLY started. I dismissed them with, "You saw that it only took me a fraction of a second. Many of the Williamses of this Universe have spent countless hours helping me, with the Profs being particularly generous with their time and effort. I know you personally haven't done anything, but without doubt you would've if I'd been one of the Marks who'd caught Julia's attention. There wasn't a single dimension in which Julia's parents didn't leap forward to support and help me once I became Julia's boyfriend." They dismissed my dismissal of their thank yous, giving me some more thank yous for good measure. Vanessa asked, "How can you do something so miraculous?" "It's the same as creating your roses, as it's just a collection of molecules. Admittedly there are a lot of them, but I don't have to create them individually as they're in contiguous groupings. -- "Now that I've got your attention and given you some idea of what I'm capable of, it's time for me to show you your new vacation home. You'll need your walking stick Prof, because it's 9.6 million light-years from here." ------- Chapter 434: Single-Minded Marks; The Williamses at Refuge Friday, July 25, 2008 (Continued) Before they could get worried that I was some sort of alien out to kidnap them, I kidnapped them, teleporting them and Prof's walking stick to their Refuge's living room. I also teleported myself, making me appear standing behind a sofa several feet away from them, at human-normal size and with the face and body shape that I'd used in my 32-minded dimensions, although the fine details of my body were hidden under my clothes. The room's décor and the spectacular views outside - it was after dinner but there was still light because it was summer - distracted everyone initially, then Julia spotted me. She questioned, "Mark?" "Yes. This isn't how you remember me looking, but this is a combination of how I naturally look, my idealized vision of myself, and alterations ordered by many Julias, such as wanting me to be four inches taller than I had naturally been and a number of other changes. I could look like whatever I wanted, from a tiny homunculus to someone the size of a planet, but for everyday use all the Marks have standardized on this appearance. Apart from anything else, their Julias insist on it. -- "To explain where we are now. I recently built this for the three of you and for my family to share and use whenever you and we want. I call it 'Refuge', which isn't a name that has much relevance in this dimension. In other dimensions - where Mark slowly gained his powers - he, his family and your counterparts had some very bad experiences with the Government and other troublemakers, so the name 'Refuge' has more meaning for them. -- "There are a number of aspects to this home which are very unusual, in addition to its being 9.6 million light-years from Earth. It's highly adaptable, highly intelligent, and each room is spread north and south roughly in the same longitude, connected by an instant teleportation service..." I went on the give them the Grand Tour, including the excursion to see aliens but concentrating only on those Refuge rooms which were relevant to this family. One major exception from the Grand Tour described earlier was that I'd not bothered to create the floating castle yet because this Julia had her own bedroom. Although what most caught her attention was her closet full of clothes duplicated from the closets of all the high-spending Julias. This Julia was BLOWN AWAY by the clothes, especially after I assured her that they really were all hers, and that she could come here whenever she wanted to choose an outfit to wear for the day back on Earth. This Julia, if she was anything like the Julia I first got to know, doubtless spent far too much money on clothes. But however much she spent, she was still very financially limited as well as mostly restricted to the range offered in Oregon. Her closet now provided her with thousands of outfits chosen from the best the world had to offer, and without regard to cost. She thought she'd died and gone to Heaven. (To be fair, maybe not "thousands of outfits"; it just seemed like it.) While she was rapturously looking through her outfits, I added, "Whenever any Julia in another dimension buys a new dress and brings it into her Refuge closet, a copy of it will appear on this rack here," I pointed at an empty section "in every other Julia's Refuge closet, including yours. If one of you likes it chances are all of you will, but if you don't just tell the house to dispose of it. Your closet can hold millions of outfits though, so I'll imagine you'll keep nearly all of them. The only clothes I won't be duplicating are those that would cause problems, such as unique creations that someone else in your dimension has bought." I couldn't resist ending with, "Imagine how much shopping time this'll save you!" Julia was confused by my last comment, no doubt because she was already thinking that now she had to spend even more time researching the fashion market, because she had vastly more clothing choices and therefore much more difficult decisions to make. There were some major changes of image possible because of this array of clothing, and as you know, image is very important. Once this Julia is wealthy and used to the "New Clothes Automatically Appear" system, I expect she'll ask for a time delay on it, to give her time to enjoy buying them herself. Prof understood an important implication though, and thought it was well worth double-checking. He asked, "And save money too. I understand that correctly, don't I?" "Yes. You won't have to pay for any of those dresses, and there'll be more than enough of them that Julia won't need to spend anything on clothes in the future. Unfortunately that's predicated on Julia's shopping being from need rather than enjoyment. Knowing Julia the way I do, she'll still do just as much shopping and you won't save a dime. -- "The good news is that you'll have an infinite supply of dimes so it won't matter. You can be as rich as you want to be now. When you get back home, buy the mineral rights to an area of land somewhere and I'll create some incredibly valuable mineral deposits under it. Or go deep-sea fishing and I'll make sure you catch a large shark. In its belly will be several huge uncut diamonds of perfect color and clarity. If you go shopping at someone's garage sale and buy a couple of paintings, I'll make sure there are highly valuable lost masterpieces behind them. You get the idea: if you want more money, let me know and I'll arrange for you to trip over it. It's very easy for me: in some of the first dimension in which a meeting like this is happening, the crystal vase that Vanessa's rose appeared in was made out of diamond, but none of the Vanessas noticed so we stopped bothering with that, just copying an existing vase we'd like the look of. My point being that making diamonds is very easy." -- They had doubts, so I added, "As diamonds are a girl's best friend, and seeing as how there are two girls here..." I created two giant diamonds, with the same height, width and depth as each 'girl', Julia's with a pink and Vanessa's with a blue sheen. That was a LOT of diamond - over half a million carats in each of them! The Williamses were very impressed. -- "It'd probably be more social trouble than it's worth, but to give you an idea of what I can do, I could easily create a spectacular diamond which is beautiful in the usual way diamonds are and more believably sized at something like 100 to 200 carats, but which gives out more light than it should, in proportion to how much in love the person holding it is. I would imagine that one magically unique 'Love Diamond' would keep Julia in dresses for a VERY long time. Possibly even in shoes as well." It'd be extremely easy to create, merely by putting a micro-version of my mind in the diamond, with it reading the amount of love in the mind of the person holding it, and proportionately powering a light blob inside the diamond. "That's a WONDERFUL idea," said Julia, visibly impressed by the romanticism of it. She wasn't romantically swept away by me; only the Love Diamond idea. This Julia had no romantic thoughts toward me yet, and I was making no effort whatsoever to encourage her to have them. I was treating all of her family equally because it was far too early for me to single out Julia for romantic attention. It would have been counterproductive to attempt anything at all until she liked me. One thing I've learned about girls is that while one-night stands can be for purely physical reasons; high quality, long-term relationships have to start with a very solid foundation of mutual liking, respect and then affection. The more time you put into preparing a good foundation before introducing sex, the better the relationship will likely be. Prof asked, "Why would you go out of your way to make us rich?" "Because your family and mine will become extraordinarily good friends. That's happened in every one of billions of dimensions where our families overlapped. That was in the days when I was only slightly unusual so there might be a different dynamic now, but I doubt very much that'll make any difference. With that assumption understood, there are two reasons I'd make you rich: -- "First, billions of your counterparts have been incredibly helpful and supportive for me. I know you personally haven't done anything, but you're the same quality of people so you would've done the same if you'd had the opportunity. -- "Second, because many other Williamses said I should include families like yours. They're very important to me, so what they want, they get; especially when it's so easy and fun for me to provide it. I'm going to enjoy thinking of all sorts of strange ways to make millions or billions of dollars." Vanessa pointed out, "People will get suspicious if more than a couple of those types of unlikely good fortunes occur to us." "I'm sorry. I didn't mean they'd all be used on your family, but on all the other Williams families that are in the same situation that you are now. I've got a terminology problem. When I think 'I', I'm not real thinking about the physical Mark you see standing in front of you. I create and cancel my bodies so often that I no longer identify myself with them..." I created four more Marks, all differently dressed, then removed the original and all but one of the others, who kept on talking. -- " ... Which only leaves identifying myself with my mind. But it's permanently linked to trillions of other minds and we're also constantly creating and canceling individual minds. My minds don't care about canceling themselves when they finish their tasks because they're not invested in themselves at the individual level. It's the trillion-mind collective that I identify with, so when I said, 'I was going to enjoy thinking of strange ways to make billions, ' the 'I' I was referring to was however many of those minds that want to participate in thinking up those strange moneymaking ideas for you and all the other Williams families that other versions of me are having this conversation with. I probably should refer to myself as 'we', but if I said, 'We should do something, ' then you're going to think the 'we' means you and me, which would confuse you even worse. The English language doesn't have the plural form of 'I' or the other things it needs to handle my situation. -- "At the risk of turning this into somewhat of a mini-lecture, let me add a couple of thoughts about my mind cancellations which will give you some extra understanding of my situation. I - or I should say 'we' as that plural will work better in this context - cancel our minds willy-nilly. We're no longer worried about making sure the original mind from each dimensions' Earth stays alive as all of those memories are now stored in the collective. We recently set up a sort of memory repository, so we don't have to keep track of the existence of individual Mark-minds, and we've even more recently added a function so any of us can instantly adopt the knowledge and personality of any other one of us by copying it out of the memory bank. -- "Our personalities were similar to start with and are now averaging into a few dozen of the most common versions depending on which set of memories they most identify with, so there's nothing unique about most of us. With so many dimensions involved, there are usually a few exceptions to my general descriptions, so there are a few unique Marks for special reasons, but none of them apply here. The individual mind that's talking to you right this instant isn't the one that was born in your Corvallis, but I've got access to his memories so it makes no real difference. There are several copies of this dimension's original Mark-mind doing various things. When they're finished their tasks, and finish any subsequent tasks they take on, they'll cancel themselves and there'll be none of the original mind for this dimension left, and it won't matter. With nothing to make any of the Marks individually important, any of them can be canceled without a moment's regret. Or maybe they'll hang around just to participate in this conversation from time to time. All of my minds share all of our bodies, so it's like a very cooperative version of Musical Chairs, it's especially cooperative because my minds don't care whether they have a chair or not. -- "To be complete, quite a few of my minds aren't sharing their memories. Those are minds that are collecting information private to other people. There are mainly two types of minds that have their memories inaccessible to the rest of us: butlers and bodyguards. -- "There's a mind in charge of each of the rooms in this house. For your privacy, the house's minds don't share their observations or memories with any other mind. They've been edited to have zero prurience, certainly don't have any distracting hormones, are totally trustworthy, etc., so they can be thought of as utterly discreet butlers. It's not unreasonable to think of them as computers that run the rooms. -- "In the dimensions where the families have known Mark for some time, every member of those Anderson and Williams families has a Mark-mind floating invisibly overhead of them as a bodyguard. They're VERY good at that job. We've looked through every coroners' report we could find as a double-check, and there isn't a single cause of death I've ever heard of that the bodyguards won't be able to stop in time. Whether a firearms attack, accidental food poisoning, or even if World War III starts with a surprise attack on Corvallis, no cause can kill anyone that my minds are protecting. Even minor problems such as car accidents and bee stings will be guarded against. If your lives and this dimension's Andersons get intertwined, I'll offer bodyguards to you too. Let me show you a few more rooms, and then I'll introduce you to versions of yourselves so they can tell you about their experiences." When their Grand Tour was over and we were back in Refuge's living room, I said, "I'd like to introduce you to some of my best friends." I teleported in a Williams family that'd agreed to help convince an 'ignorant' family. The three pairings were differently dressed so I didn't have to put red armbands or something similar on my helpers to prevent them losing track of each other. I explained, "I don't think the traditional introduction process has much point here, so I'll just say that the new arrivals are copies of a Williams family from another dimension. They fully experienced my life over the last few years. Sometimes too fully, but I'll leave them to talk about that. You should all find this conversation rather interesting, and hopefully it'll be a useful way for the inexperienced-about-me Williamses to learn about me." Imagine if you and your family were suddenly face to face with your identical clones: there was some initial disorientation and confused/amused greetings. Once everyone had accepted the situation, the two pairs of parents settled into facing sofas and the experienced Vanessas ordered coffees and nibbles in preparation for a long chat. The experienced Julia wasted no time grabbing her about-to-be-enlightened counterpart, pulling her to the far end of the living room where she ordered the house to create a two-seater sofa, Experienced-Julia having had no difficulty grasping the concept of her being able to tell my minds what to do. She sat her twin down, opened her satchel to extract her prepared notes and many items of memorabilia - photos, letters, newspaper articles, TV recordings, etc. - and set about the task of educating the Inexperienced-Julia about how wonderful I was. It'd make the conversations go easier if I left, so I announced, "I'll leave you to it. Experienced-Julia, please don't overload Inexperienced-Julia too much. You don't have to turn her world upside-down immediately. The education process can occur over weeks or months." Experienced-Julia replied, "She wouldn't forgive me if I didn't explain what she's missing out on as quickly as possible. She's lost three very important years of her life with you already, and I'm not going to allow that tragedy to continue any longer." "My godhood certainly hasn't changed your loyalty or obedience I see. I'll leave her to your tender mercies then." "Godhood?" queried Inexperienced-Vanessa. I answered, "By any practical definition, Vanessa, because of the extent of my powers. As you heard, my claiming godhood doesn't stop Experienced-Julia telling me how she wants some things to be done, so you don't have to worry about me being a megalomaniacal madman. I'm a teenage boy who has recently acquired godhood and I can't imagine anyone more in need of guidance about life than me. I have some amazing ways of accessing information and learning things, but I'm sure there are ways of thinking about them that have never occurred to me. But for now, I'll leave you to your discussion." Experienced-Julia said, "We'll need you back in about an hour Mark, so you can take us to bed." Inexperienced-Julia hadn't been thinking about me in that way AT ALL - not even a little bit - so hearing that her other self's statement came as a considerable surprise. She stated very firmly, "I DON'T think so! I've got a boyfriend who..." Experienced-Julia interrupted, " ... who isn't as good at ANYTHING as Mark is! Trust me on this: whoever your boyfriend is, you're dumping him as soon as you get home." "You don't even know who he is." "That doesn't matter. It's like I've got a wedding dress being designed for me by the top five designers in the world working together, and they're doing an absolutely incredible job, but you're complaining that I haven't looked at a dress you've seen in the local Kmart's bargain bin. There's NO point in my looking at what you've got, the dress or the boyfriend. -- "From what I understand of the way dimensions work, I probably know your boyfriend, but I don't care who he is. He's irrelevant. The only thing that's going to happen here is my explaining how wonderful Mark is until you understand, and then you're going to give yourself to him for the rest of your life. The only doubt I have is over how long it'll take me to get that across to you. I think that an hour should do it." Inexperienced-Julia wasn't sure how to respond to herself's ridiculously extreme statement, so I seized the momentary gap to tell Experienced-Julia, "First, you don't need to tell me a time you want me back; just tell the house when you want me to come and I will. It doesn't matter if I'm busy because either another of my existing minds will step in, or one of me will create a new mind to do so. -- "Second, the reason I got the two families together was to help bring the inexperienced family up to speed in an interesting and effective way. Go easy with pushing your agenda please, Julia. You can be quite fearsome when you're on a crusade you believe in strongly. I understand you think you're helping your counterpart, but she's already frazzled and you've barely started." -- I turned to Inexperienced-Julia, telling her, "This is your family's Refuge, so you can un-invite your counterpart if she pressures you too much. Just tell the house to send her back to her own Refuge. Either that or ask the house to dump a bucket of cold water on her. Okay?" "I thought the house was run by copies of you. You wouldn't really do those things to your girlfriend would you?" "It's important that your home is YOURS, so the minds here will obey you unless the reason not to is much stronger than another Julia getting wet. -- "It feels strange to warn you about your own personality, but you Julias can get very carried away sometimes. Don't let your enthusiastic twin pressure you more than you're comfortable with." Enthusiastic-Julia said, "I won't be pressuring her; only opening her eyes." With a self-satisfied look on her face, she added, "See you in an hour, Mark." "I'm almost hoping the other Julia washes that smug look off your face." (If you can't work out which Julia I was helping, you need to go back to the start of my autobiography and read it again more carefully.) I waved and left. ^ It's a digression, but I'll tell you what I did after I vanished. The first was continuing the game we were playing with one dimension's Jessica Alba. It would have been child's play to materialize in her bedroom when she was alone, suppress her fear and inhibitions and massively ramp up her lust. Or I could create a body-double of her and given it a copy of Julia's mind. I don't imagine that 'she' would be difficult to seduce. Those and similar tricks would be extremely easy for me, but where would the fun be in them? (That's a rhetorical question, as obviously the fun would be in the next several hours, but I want to enjoy myself during the lead up too.) So we - all the Marks - are playing a little game with the delectable Miss Alba. It's a childish game but I don't care about that, just so long as it's a fun game for all concerned, including: her and a few trillion of me. Every two or three days one of me passes within fifty feet of her. When I do, she suddenly feels very happy. Not excessively so - not enough to unbalance her in any way - but she definitely notices it. She hasn't yet figured out that her brief feelings of happiness correlate with my appearances, but she should put that together after a few more repetitions. The style of my appearance is different every time. The first time was when she was looking out of the window of her on-set RV when I walked past talking to the head of her studio. The next time was when she stopped her car at a stop sign and I drove past in front of her in a $250,000 convertible with three utterly gorgeous identical triplets in the car with me. This time she was waiting for an elevator and when it opened, I walked out dressed in a top-quality business suit and talking fluent French to three very important looking Japanese dignitaries with several bodyguard flunkies scuttling along as escorts. The next time she goes swimming at a beach she'll discover I'm already there in my bright yellow Speedos, doing amazingly impressive surfboard-riding tricks with my pet Golden Retriever on very large waves. I might have a porpoise come to play with my dog and me for a few minutes too. Then she'll go to an art auction that will seem to feature one incredibly expensive and gorgeous piece that will appeal to her tastes greatly but be far outside her price range. I'll walk into the room after bidding for that item starts. I'll observe for a couple of minutes, then make a motion at the auctioneer, who'll immediately declare, "Sold to Number One for $750 million," as he bangs his gavel. I'll nod my thanks to him then walk out of the room. If she asks, no one in the room will know who I am. There won't be any mention of the sale in the news the next day, even though there'd been reporters there. The beach and art auction examples are only possibilities; they won't happen if she doesn't go to a beach or an auction. One of my little rules for my game is not to directly manipulate Jessica in any way other than giving her the happiness feeling, so I can't predict where she'll be for our encounters. I just check on her every few days, creating something suitable for the location. The previous examples were just so you'd understand the sorts of things I'm going to be inventing. If she makes inquiries - because she should be getting curious by this stage - they'll learn nothing because most of these events will be using fake people who'll disappear as soon as they're finished with. About the only information she'll be able to get is that no one else feels the euphoria. I'll arrange for two or three of the people being questioned to tell her or her investigators not to waste time chasing after "someone like him," without specifying what that means. She'll likely remain interested though, because of her curiosity, some of the encounters being so impressive, and the euphoria being too good to be ignored. If she loses interest, some more encounters should revive it. Events will continue. She'll attend a banquet in honor of someone seriously important. Not just Hollywood-important, but truly important. That guy will get a call and will walk out of the room. Shortly after that she'll feel the euphoria again, and when she investigates she'll discover Mr. Important shaking my hand with great enthusiasm and with an expression of intense gratitude toward me on his face. His security guards will usher her away before she can find out more. She'll arrive at a beach just in time to feel the euphoria and to witness a large US Air Force plane complete a swoop only a few hundred feet overhead. In a very Hollywood manner, I'll have put on a harness with a long elasticized rope running from it, up to a helium balloon at the other end. The plane swoops, hooks the line, the bungy cord absorbs the jerk, and the plane reels me up. Melodramatic crap like that will be followed by things like her attending a classical music concert. Toward the end of the program, the conductor will say, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I've just been informed of a change to our program. We're greatly honored to have a surprise guest soloist." With no introduction beyond that, I'll walk onto the stage and play a violin solo that should bring tears to her eyes and amaze the audience, none of whom will know who I am. There'll sometimes be gaps for a couple of weeks to break up the regularity of it, and there'll be dull encounters to make them appear less suspicious. For example, Jessica will be walking down the street one evening and will feel the euphoria. When she investigates, she'll find me having dinner in a restaurant. I'll be sitting with my back to her talking to important people she'll recognize, who'll be hanging on my every word. When Jessica tries to get close, very glamorously dressed patrons will stand to intercept her. They'll flash their Secret Service badges and send her away, her questions unanswered. I'll not notice her, just like I've never noticed her in any of these encounters. It'll be fun to see how far I can build her curiosity. Eventually I'll let her make contact. I haven't decided how that'll play out yet. If she's gullible enough - she aspired to be an actress so she's almost certainly gullible - I might tell her, "I'm an archangel sent to Earth to perform some specific missions. Sorry about the euphoria your soul has been picking up from mine. I've been turning it down as much as I can but it's an unavoidable effect with a few females if they have good souls. I'll be finishing my missions soon so you won't be bothered by the feeling for much longer." Or maybe I'll just be a very suave, very well connected, very important, good-guy spy (à la James Bond). I'll be very surprised and doubtful when she raises the topic of her euphoria, but if she's the romantic sort, I should be able to play that into making her think we're fated to have an adventure together. If she's the truly adventurous sort, I could easily arrange for something dramatic to happen. A baddies-rushing-in-with-guns-drawn sort of thing. A life-or-death shootout in which I gallantly save her life two or three times to give her an emotional rollercoaster. Maybe culminating in the last baddies throwing her off the roof of a high-rise building during our final highly outnumbered fight. I manage to finish them off, then dive off the roof to max-track down to catch up with her flailing body, whereupon I'd do something noble like strap my mini-parachute to her before pulling the ripcord. If that doesn't get me some enthusiastic "Thank You Sex", then I'll have to be less subtle. I've got trillions of eternities ahead of me so I have to find ways to amuse myself. Playing with a Jessica Alba should be an amusing game that lasts for a few months, and my minds will have a lot of fun inventing different silly scenarios to play out in front of her. That'd be far more enjoyable than simply creating a compliant version of her body. If my silliness causes any problems I can easily repair them, so I have no reason not to indulge in my games. So after I vanished from the Inexperienced-Williams' Refuge, I spent a minute giving Jessica Alba her next little encounter with me. If you hadn't realized it before, the above example should tell you that I am still a teenage boy. Or even worse, I'm a pack of teenage boys. I'll mature as I accumulate experience. Several trillion minds can accumulate formative experiences extremely quickly, but I'll be taking it slow. I have forever ahead of me so there's no hurry. I'll also simulate the effects of physiological changes on my body, and especially my brain and mind as they haven't yet reached their full maturity and aren't quite yet capable of some of the types of thought that adults can manage. I could physically rearrange myself so I was capable of those types of abstract thought, but I prefer to let nature progress at its usual rate with me for another decade or so, mainly so my personality develops in sync with those of my wives. After the Jessica Alba Game installment, I had to find something else to do. That's a trickier issue than it might seem because everything worth doing was already being done as much as it needs to be. For example, I want to very thoroughly study the alien species closest to Earth because I might use one of those to make humanity's First Contact. (I meant "species" in the previous sentence to be a plural. What moron invented nouns that are the same for singular and plural?) Because studying those aliens is a worthwhile activity, I already have plenty of minds on the job. Another one wouldn't do any harm, but it wouldn't help much either. All other worthwhile activities are in the same boat. There were still many incomplete activities. Searching all the physical space of the Universe is a LONG way from being complete. I've already checked the volume around the Earths well enough to know there aren't any nasty surprises heading their ways. Otherwise I'm taking my time to search the rest of the Universe because it's too much fun to rush and it should keep me amused for many centuries yet. The word "amused" brings up another issue. Often people do things to keep themselves amused, but that doesn't apply to me. Many of the trillions of minds I'm linked to are doing entertaining things so I don't have to lift a finger to distract myself that way. I could teleport to a nice beach, lay on the sand, close my eyes, and enjoy tuning into such activities. Or I could tune into the same activities while doing something productive. When we don't feel like canceling ourselves there are several types of activities we tend to do: Random acts of kindness. We often teleport to one of the dimensions where Archangel Mark is already publicly declared, or will be declaring soon and we're providing some teasers for it. There we do nice things for good people. Preventing accidents, or openly visiting a hospital and curing half a dozen of the best people, are easy examples. Sometimes we do things like that secretly in other dimensions. One of my favorite activities is a personally meaningful one: I find teenagers who are in danger of committing suicide and I allocate a new mind to look after them for a while. That mind will arrange for a few nice things to happen to its subject, so in that respect it's being a traditional "Guardian Angel". Despite how vulnerable many teenagers are to depression, it's amazing how easy it is to turn them around by giving them hope of acceptance. I usually create a temporary 'agent' who is an attractive member of the sex opposite the subject's, is a year or two older, has the accoutrements that indicate success (e.g., nice clothes, good haircut, speaks well, enviable car), and then I create a meeting circumstance that gives the agent some credibility. During their brief encounter, the agent will deliver a compliment that makes the subject hopeful for his/her future. Often it only requires a single, ten-second scene to turn someone away from suicide, and rarely more than three or four such interventions. Visiting one of the five dimensions in which we're taking over as Emperor of Earth. There's a great deal of 'education' being applied, especially to politicians. That's quite enjoyable. Random acts of anti-cruelty. This is a hobby that we particularly enjoy. We look for people being bad and stop them. Sometimes "stop them dead" if the person deserves it because they were committing a serious and unjustifiable act of violence. Or it could be something as minor as a bully picking on some unfortunate kid at a school, that being a pet hate of ours. The victim "gets a lucky punch in" that ruins the bully's day and jaw. We implant micro-minds to alert us if the wimp is being picked on again or if the bully is attacking someone else. What we don't do is directly edit the bully's personality. Other than in a very few cases that we can easily detect, he's responsible for his own learning or inability to learn. If he misbehaves too often, we do things like make pictures of him having sex with animals fall out of his bag as he walks down his school's corridor. That or something else similar causes the world to come down on him. I'm not a bleeding-heart do-gooder of a god. High-school kids are old enough to know that violence is wrong, so if they persist in it then they get dropped into a pile of shit - boo hoo for them. Acquire knowledge and skills. We don't just study OSU's online courses anymore, but study EVERYTHING. We're particularly enjoying two fields: First, reading history books because we can view the past to check on their veracity or lack thereof. We're learning quite a lot about people just from the types of errors and distortions they make. Second, we have created several of the best scientific labs imaginable, none of which cost a dime so the Governments' stealing that money from us didn't frustrate this dream of ours. Those labs aren't just on Earth, but in inter-galactic space at a location that's as empty as possible and within Ava- and NP- spheres to further shield it from outside influences, there are labs in orbits around different types of black holes, and several other interesting locations (the Universe has some VERY interesting locations). In the labs we are doing as many scientific experiments as we can imagine, including pulling apart and understanding copies of some of the Universe's aliens' best technologies. Although we have access to the Universe's fundamental properties, there are huge areas of science in which we have almost no understanding - but gaining it is a great deal of fun. Plus we're acquiring skills like learning how to play the violin for Miss Alba. That will mean acquiring the theoretical knowledge and skills by copying them out of several of the world's best violinists' consciouses and subconsciouses, plus we'll need some manual practice too so we'll create a few thousand bodies to do that for us. We are acquiring a huge amount of knowledge and an amazing range of skills, especially because we aren't restricting ourselves just to Earths. Acquiring lives. For our long-term entertainment and interest, avatars of ourselves are being born all over the Universe. These newborns ("new hatched", "new metamorphisized", or whatever the species does) will be increasingly interesting and educational to inhabit. Or we could just have some simple fun: Zooming down the slopes of one of the wonderful ski fields we'd created on Refuge, scuba diving off a tropical paradise on some planet or other, or perhaps spending time with some beautiful girls. Or more productively, adding refinements to one of our mega-plans. For example, we have some very large-scale plans for Empty Earths. Some of those plans - such as creating an Earth as of five hundred years ago with a magical American-Indian nation and a historically accurate Europe - need a phenomenal amount of research and thought before they can be implemented. That example alone has a permanent committee of thousands of minds working on it, having endless debates about and giving demonstrations of how the magic system will work, as just one of their many choices. It's fun. Regarding the third bullet point, since we became so powerful we've been pleased to learn that jocks aren't as bad in most schools as they had been in ours. There are, in fact, quite a few nice jocks out there. Similarly, although not as much of a turnaround, a disproportionate number of the first bullet point's "best people" are Christians. The third major group that caused me a great deal of grief and trouble during my life were national-level politicians, and they ARE exactly as bad as my experiences led me to believe. For the particular Mark that just left the two Julias, the thought of having sex with the two of them was actually somewhat scary. Not the physical act itself, but the thought of being 'trapped' in a bedroom with two very intense Julias. Being scared put me in the mood for one of my favorite little hobbies, so I spent the time until the house called me back doing various things to burst the egos of football jocks. My jock-deflating didn't even last a full hour, the living room's mind passed on a message calling me back early, and it wasn't able to resist adding that both Julias were very horny, which offered a LOT more fun than making fools out of jocks. Apparently Julia had underestimated how good she was at convincing Julia to see things her way. When I reappeared, the two Julias eagerly threw themselves at me. The Profs and Vanessas took advantage of my reappearance to start asking me questions. It would have been rude to delay being rude so I duplicated myself, one of me carrying the Julias while our bodies teleported to my bedroom and our clothes to the closet, the other me staying behind to talk to the parents. Without my special senses I would have had trouble telling the two naked Julias apart. Julia had done a surprisingly good job of removing Julia's hesitations and inhibitions. When I thought about it, I realized why it'd been so easy for her. The other boyfriend - whoever he is - may be nice, caring, etc., but he doesn't have POWER! That's Julia's biggest button and she would have pushed it hard, which means it's somewhat dishonest for Inexperienced-Julia to have sex with me because it's for what I represent rather than who I am, but dishonest motivations are VERY common in human seductions: males and females have such different perspectives on life that seductions are almost guaranteed not to be fully informed mutual decisions, and anyone who tries to make a seduction totally honest is usually just going to ruin it. I had let Julia give her virginity to me when she believed my love for her was so strong that I was ruined for other girls, so I can't really complain about mixed motivations now, especially because I was going to use my being so powerful to justify adding Carol soon. (I have no 'need' to add Ava, Nevaeh or others in these dimensions. I'd like to, but that will mostly be up to these dimensions' Julias and Carols. They will meet the counterparts of my other dimensions' core girls in the Communal Refuges, so will probably want to become friends with them locally. I'll wait to see if that happens before worrying about how to improve my as yet uncontacted loved ones' lives.) Despite the two naked Julias' bodies being so similar, including all their other buttons having the same effect on both of them, it wasn't difficult to differentiate the two of them. Inexperienced-Julia was the one with her mind blown by how good at sex I was, and Experienced-Julia was the one crowing to both of us, "I told you so!" ------- Chapter 435: The End of the Beginning Friday, July 25, 2008 and Forever After Thus begins my godhood. If you will excuse this wording: I have literally an astronomical amount to learn, think about and do. To start with, consider the VERY big picture: I haven't yet learned enough about the present Universe, but when I've done so I'll start delving into the past, making myself into an archeologist on the largest possible scale because I want to understand what happened to all the past alien species that should have reached advanced levels of civilization. From what I've already learned from the existing species, some of which are in trouble, it appears that the drives that cause each species to succeed also contain the flaws that lead to their eventual destruction. The most obvious example of that being the aggression that allows one species to triumph over all the others in its environment. When there are no longer any competitors, that aggressive instinct still continues to act, but against its own species. Or if that species does get into space, its aggression will sooner or later lead it to attack a species that it really shouldn't. From what I can see, interstellar wars don't last long because ecosystems - usually planets - are too easily destroyed or rendered uninhabitable when the combatants have advanced technologies. Another obvious psychological driver that can build a species up but also harm it, is greed. Both of those examples are very evident in humans. Some alien species seem to have quite different psychologies, such as being highly cooperative, but I'm beginning to see that they are experiencing the same "Initially good, eventually bad" progression. I definitely want to do more research on this issue. If the seeds for success are inevitably, or even just usually, also fatal flaws, should I interfere with that process? And if so, how? There are MANY possibilities, some of which are strange at first thought but must be considered, such as preventing any species from achieving dominance. As a god I can very easily ensure that every species is exposed to a superior one, even if it's a fake one. But should I? Humanity's arrogance will give me great delight in bursting, but it's not clear that I should do that to every other successful or near-successful species throughout the Universe. If not, then maybe I shouldn't do it to humanity in as many dimensions as I'm currently intending. I think bursting humanity's arrogance will help it considerably, but the long-term effects are unpredictable so maybe I should play safer by leaving more dimensions alone as insurance against my misjudgment. I've already seen that evolution operates throughout the entire Universe, with species coming and going as a result of their successes and failures. Until very recently I had never thought to question whether evolution was a good thing, so my initial thought had been that it'd be best for me to let that natural process continue unhindered, possibly even if humanity eliminates itself. (I don't want to lose my loved ones, not even millennia from now, but there are many ways to ensure their survival including ways that don't depend on humanity's survival. There's no reason why my loved ones can't be transplanted into another species. By then we should be so familiar with many other intelligent species that we will likely know several others we'd prefer to be part of, especially if humanity is so stupid as to destroy itself.) On the other hand, it has recently occurred to me that evolution is literally a stupid system, as there is absolutely no guiding intelligence involved anywhere in the process. Whether or not a species does well is literally a matter of luck, and given that bad luck only needs to strike very badly once to wipe out a species, evolution surely can't be the best way to run the Universe. That's especially true because it is such an incredibly slow process, so it has a dangerously lagged feedback loop to environmental changes. (For those of you who don't understand what a "delayed feedback loop" means, imagine driving your car, but after you turn the steering wheel there's a ten-second delay before the wheels themselves turn.) Evolution is terribly slow, taking many hundreds of generations to have any significant effect on a large population, which renders evolution unable to react fast enough to reinforce successful behaviors, or punish unsuccessful behaviors, in a rapidly changing environment such as humanity has now. Evolution is therefore not selecting the best characteristics, so it's creating humans who are increasingly bad fits for an increasingly complex world. Maybe it's evolution's deficiencies that have been causing civilizations all over the Universe to collapse? Which immediately creates the question: What is the best way to run the Universe? I don't believe the Universe has a purpose. It exists and can be used, and that is all. It's effectively just a big box so has no intrinsic goal of its own. It is now up to me to choose how I will influence what happens inside that box. I could write: "It will be my use of the Universe that will define whether it is used for Good or Evil," but I suspect that even those two concepts don't apply to the Universe as a whole. That seems like a very strange claim, but I believe it could be true. My intending to be a Universal archaeologist is largely motivated by wanting to get some perspective on the Universe, but as interesting as the task will be, I suspect I'll never get enough perspective. That's the fundamental problem. Good and Evil certainly apply within the box. For example, every organized religion has clerics who do good and others who do evil. But there's no perspective from which to apply the concepts of Good and Evil to the box's entire contents as a whole. For example, I could create and spread life throughout the Universe, so there would be FAR more of it than there is now. Or I could identify what I thought was the 'Good-est' species and spread it throughout the entire Universe, removing all the lesser species to make more room for more of the best one. Or I could continue to let species naturally succeed and/or fail according to their own merits or lack thereof. Or I could take the perspective that life is damaging the Universe (certainly humanity is damaging the Earth's surface itself and its natural life), so I should destroy all life, or perhaps just tool-using life, to leave the Universe 'pure'. Or I could remove all of the Universe's existing life and repopulate it with life that I would create from scratch, perhaps solar-powered life. Is any one of those mutually incompatible options more Good or more Evil than the others? I simply can't judge because judgment requires a perspective of some sort; usually a goal or at least a guiding principle. Mom and Dad are good parents because that goal is defined externally to them; a god of the Universe can't be Good because there's no external definition. The god's actions can only be judged from internal perspectives, and just about everything with a brain has different ideas. I certainly don't have a goal and suspect I never will have one that I believe is essential to pursue throughout the entire Universe. Although I can easily think of dozens of possible guiding principles that I could adopt and pursue, such as "Maximize the number of intelligent species in the Universe," choosing one of those would simply be my pleasing myself rather than doing something because it is "The Right Thing To Do". There's simply no way for me to tell what is "Right". That doesn't mean I won't be doing Universe-wide things to please myself. The possible guiding principle of "Keeping the Universe pure by removing all intelligent life," won't even be considered simply because I don't want to do it. In my selfish desire to have a Universe full of interesting creatures, whether that principle is Right or Wrong doesn't matter to me. I would feel easier if I knew what to do, but I don't believe that's ever going to happen. Whatever I choose to do with the Universe, there is no way to get an outside perspective on my actions because there is no outside. I don't see any alternative to my simply doing whatever I like. That, as much as anything else, defines me as a god. If I knew what "The Right Thing To Do" was I'd probably do it in all the dimensions, unless I selfishly didn't want to, but I like to think I wouldn't be that selfish. In the absence of knowledge of "The Right Thing", I'll worry about what I'm doing but I'll have a lot more fun because I'll be able to do many different things all over the Universe, many of which will be done just for the heck of it. All things considered, my families and I are going to have some very interesting times, especially me. As well has having fun, I want to do a good job of being a god, although that's a bit tricky given that I can't tell what "good" means on the largest scale. On the smaller scale, things which make more people happy are probably good (once again putting me in opposition to the Christian God). Because I refuse to risk breaking Time I will be actively running many large- and long-term experiments to help me determine what makes the most people happy. I admire the Scientific Method and it's going to be put to use on a scale never before imagined. It'll be interesting to come up with many possibilities and to test them. I'll make sure I memorize snapshots of various w-dimensions' versions of Earth and humanity every fifty years or so, for possible use as templates if I ever want to recreate my species. I'll probably also do that for other species that I become very interested in. Recreating old copies might be preferable to all the choices contemporary to whenever I'm having a problem with humanity, or it's having a problem with itself. The templates might also be useful if I set up a new w-dimension, or simply want humanity to meet itself in some interesting ways, for example, imagine if the first spaceship Earth sent to Alpha Centauri arrived there to find an Earth IDENTICAL to the real Earth but from fifty years before, including younger versions of people who are still alive on the real Earth. I could have some fun with that, especially if I revealed myself as a god and gave some useful explanation for what I'd done, such as, "I believe your rampant greed and political corruption is about to destroy life on your planet, so I've made an earlier copy just in case." That should cause some potentially useful social upheaval. The several preceding chapters were mostly about ideas I could use on humanity, with this chapter touching on some very large-scale concepts in part to explain why I don't have any strong reason to hesitate in my dealings with humanity. My not knowing what "The Right Thing" is, my suspecting there is no such thing, and wanting to enjoy myself, mean different humanities will be heading in some very different directions. Even with just the single species that is humanity, there are millions of experiments to run over many lifetimes, by which time I'll have thought of innumerable more ideas that I want to test. Then there's whatever I will decide to do with all the Universe's many other species. Evolution has had its uses, but intelligent guidance of life must be a better idea - or will be as soon as I work out what my guiding principles will be. I should give that a lot of thought because guiding the Universe must be a lot of responsibility for an 18-year old boy. Or is it? Responsibility is something I am imposing on myself, and already I can feel myself being casual about it. There are so many dimensions and I can reset any errors so easily that I don't feel that I have to be ultra-careful before influencing them. Perhaps I'm just excited about all the possibilities, or maybe I'm just lazy and prefer to make it up as I go, but I'm already starting to make things happen on many Earths. I might never make any plans for those Earths, just nudge them from time to time in whatever ways appeal to me at the moment. Is that irresponsible? Who's to judge? What criteria are they judging me against? ^ "Guiding the Universe must be a lot of responsibility for an 18-year old boy" is a true statement in respect of my being an 18-year old boy. I AM a teenager. Admittedly a very powerful one, but currently a very inexperienced one who's very happy to have his families to provide him with guidance. I'm looking forward to seeing how my families and I develop over the years, centuries and epochs. I can easily make my families' minds larger, more powerful and network them, possibly all the way up to my level of power. I don't currently intend to take them all the way - although I might change my mind about that in the future - but I do intend for them to develop some of the way. They'll have so much knowledge of the Universe that keeping their lives small will likely be dissatisfying for them. We will make a diverse team: Prof and I are very interested in science, which will clearly be of paramount importance in the future. Ava is interested in nature, which is also of great importance. Julia has a natural affinity for management. We're going to be doing a LOT of that in the future. (Yet again I differ from the Christian God: as gods go, He was a truly pathetic manager.) Carol is very nurturing. At the moment that just applies to her relationships with us, her best friends, and soon to our babies, but as her capabilities increase, so will her horizons. Nevaeh is very interested in art and design. She has described her artistic tastes as "wide", but she ain't seen nuthin' yet! She's going to be amazed at some of the "width" of art that the Universe's creatures create. In terms of her contribution to my pantheon, Nevaeh's perspective is quite different from ours, which will add nicely to the mix (everything she does with us is "nice"). I did momentarily think about excluding her from becoming a demigod on the basis that she hasn't done anything to deserve it, but neither have I. Although Nevaeh's dependency on us would be trivially easy for me to reverse and I could make her happy to return to her family, there's no reason for me to do that. It wouldn't be fair to remove her just because I was more successful than I had expected to be. Besides, my other girls would mutiny, which would make our pantheon all too Greek- and Roman-like. Donna is into sports. I can't see any benefit to our pantheon or to the Universe's creatures in that. My having the perspective of a god hasn't changed my opinion on the near uselessness of sports. [I have a theory that sports developed WAY back in prehistory when mankind wandered around in little tribal or family groups. The groups were so small and survival so perilous that 'warfare' between the groups could result in their failure, even for the winners if one or two of their hunters were injured. So mankind invented sport as a way of showing off prowess to discourage injurious conflict: "Our men can throw their spears better than your men, so you'd better leave us alone!" The instinct of supporting the home team is bred into us so strongly because it truly was suicidal not to do it for most of our history. In short: sport is a VERY out of date, unnecessary adult activity, even if it's still instinctively compelling for the primitive members of today's society.] Donna has yet to develop any adult interests, besides sex, and we can't guess what she'll pursue when pointless competitive entertainment ceases to be her main focus. Despite her 'adult' interest in sex, I can't see her as any sort of Sex Goddess since she's too interested in doing it herself to be interested in other people's behavior. Besides, treating her as such a goddess would be applying the classical meaning of "pantheon" too much to us. I don't mean that to be literally true; it's just a somewhat illuminating comparison. Vanessa's future role needs no explanation, but does need a comment: To date her ethical decisions have been greatly influenced by her and Prof's opinions of my potential and the need to protect it. Now the only thing my potential needs protection from is myself, in case my power goes to my head (that's actually where it comes from, when I bother to have a head, but you know what I mean). I expect my interactions with Vanessa in her ethical judgment role to be significantly more challenging than they have been in the past. That won't be fun, but I have to admit that it will be a good idea given how much harm I could cause. I can see that the up-to-speed Vanessas have already realized that idea of their new role in my life, at least for the next several years. What will happen beyond that is hard to guess because so much is possible. Last but not least, Mom and Dad. It's difficult for me to see how Mom and Dad are unique in their own rights because they've been the sole constant in my entire life. From my perspective, it seems to me that their most outstanding characteristic is their ordinariness - that's why I've unfairly written so little about them herein. There's a lot of merit in "ordinary" though. I'm sure they'll keep the rest of us grounded when we might otherwise totally lose sight of the ground. We're almost a pantheon, in the sense that we'll be able to provide a reasonably balanced perspective on future events, and be able to balance ourselves too. I can't imagine how lonely it'd be for me to be doing this without my families, and I'm positively looking forward to the futures - all of them - because my loved ones are with me. In only a few years there'll be even more loved ones. They'll grow up and some of them will become members of our pantheon too. Exactly how we'll manage the huge number of descendants we'll have over the millennia is unclear, but having them should keep our lives and perspectives fresh. Once I had explained to my families that I wanted them actively involved in my godhood, and had mentioned an informal pantheon idea, they had joked about me being a type of Zeus. It wasn't a good comparison as none of them wanted to have power comparable to mine. None of the adults are interested in the pursuit of power, even after I promised Dad that he wouldn't need a desk and I'd keep the managerial paperwork to a bare minimum. When I'd raised the issue, Julia had gotten a gleam in her eye and had half-opened her mouth, but both her parents had frowned at her. I can easily imagine the conversation they'll have the next time they're in private: it'll be about all of this being my responsibility. Knowing Julia, I have no doubt that she'll seize demigodhood with both hands and will eagerly develop some large-scale ideas. I'll likely implement many of her ideas as I'm sure many of them will be good ones and there'll usually be no real reason why not, but it'll be interesting to see how Julia handles the frustrations on those times when I disagree with her plans' and curtail them. Over dinner we'd briefly discussed Andrew and Robert joining us. Robert would be an amusingly easy fit for Poseidon given his oceanographic interest. That would be a bigger role than it might seem, as humanity's attitude to the Earth's oceans will be changing in response to the environmental science hints I'll be giving them. (Many lakes on Earth have had their ecologies destroyed by pollution, and humanity is repeating that process with the oceans - one of capitalism's major flaws is how it encourages the ravaging of shared resources. In the dimensions that I allow that pollution to proceed unchecked, it will have huge negative effects because the importance of, and harm being done to, the oceans is being underestimated). Vanessa and Prof decided to say nothing to The Boys for the meanwhile, deferring that decision until they've absorbed more of the ramifications of our new situation. That's fine with me, as I'm not really in favor of The Boys being included. Apart from anything else, they'd then want their wives to be included (they're both married in most dimensions), and that's getting too far removed for my liking, and even more so when they want to include their future kids. It's not as if we're going to be lacking in numbers, as we'll have many billions of direct descendants of our own, per dimension, in only a few centuries. Because of how many of my descendants there will be, becoming part of my pantheon will have to be the exception rather than the rule. I'm not so much talking about my direct children, but of their children and subsequent generations. I'd like to imagine that they could live perfectly ordinary lives undisturbed by my immediate loved ones living bizarre lives, but that's tricky. Carol's and my children, for example, are going to have VERY strange childhoods and lives, which means that when they're old enough, so will their spouses and children, and so on down the generations. Making sure my descendants have ordinary lives will probably have to be an exception to my rule about not manipulating my loved one's memories, thoughts and emotions. If some of them develop into exceptional people, maybe they might get a VERY surprising invitation. I'll need to discuss that with my wives and families, but that's an issue for another day. Speaking of wives, in many dimensions I'll properly propose to each or all of them, and offer to arrange for us to have marriages with the other-dimensional non-participants being linked to their counterparts so they can enjoy the event, and probably the preparation for it too. It's difficult to know how females think, so I'm not sure whether they'll agree to "tying me down" in marriage. Even in those dimensions where I'll have enough declared power to force the Government to legally recognize my three- or more-way marriages, I'm not sure the girls will agree. Managing the entire Universe is relatively easy compared to predicting how girls will react to something as emotionally important as marriage. I'll give them the choice though. I can even promise to be totally faithful to them, as I can vicariously leave it to the trillions of unmarried Marks to do the playing around "behind my wives' backs." It'll be so far behind it'll happen in other dimensions. We're going to have an interesting pantheon. It'll change a great deal over the generations, and not only by adding our own descendants. At the scale I now operate at, there's nothing especially significant about human minds, so I can grant subsets of my powers to non-humans if I choose. It's too early to do anything about that yet, but I imagine that alien demigods will be very useful. I can foresee many experiments with that approach, within my guidelines and accountable to me, as I'll be looking over their shoulders whether or not they have them. I can try different options: Each intelligent species having one of their own gods looking after it. Each representative of an intelligent species not looking after its own kind, but after another species. That would be to avoid favoritism and to help generate many ideas that might not otherwise occur to me. Some aliens think WEIRDLY, but still very capably and effectively (much like human females). One of each of the sufficiently intelligent members of each galaxy being put into a committee to collectively manage that galaxy. The number of stars galaxies have ranges from thousands to trillions, with one trillion being about average (the Milky Way is on the small side, with only 400 billion stars). Most stars have planets, often several of them, so there are a LOT of possible ecosystems out there. Galaxies are HUGE and can contain a phenomenal amount of life, so a galaxy-wide committee could be very large indeed, but their jobs would also be very large. By the way, as big as galaxies are, the Universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies within EACH dimension, and hundreds of billions of dimensions! The Universe is a MIGHTY big place! I'm sure that in time there will be aliens who earn themselves places in my core pantheon. I'm only just starting to get to know all the current intelligent species, but it's already obvious that there must be some individual aliens out there who could become highly valued friends and helpers. I and my families are species-centric at the moment, but that will change over time. It's even possible to imagine my interest in humanity dropping so low that they become of little consequence to me, although that'd be sad. Also in time, after I stop identifying myself so much with humanity, I'm sure that the reasons I am making this autobiography available to humanity in some dimensions will apply equally well to other species. In some dimensions, I'll make it available to EVERY species in the Universe at the same time. That should prove to be interesting as they discover how widespread it is. The distant successors to the current Mayor of Corvallis might be surprised by how much tourism the town will receive. ------- I've discussed the very large-scale, down to my existing thoughts and plans for humanity, and further down to what I'm doing with my loved ones. One thing I haven't discussed is the very small scale: the roles of individual humans who are not members of my families. In many dimensions the people will have no clue about me. Their lives will proceed much as they always have, and I'm sure that the Universe's being under new management won't affect the results of their prayers at all. In many other dimensions there will be some hints to humanity that things have changed. The hints might be unexplained, such as all newborns having an aura symbol floating over their head; or the hints might be blatant, like having a 500-foot Kram appearing just north of a little city called Corvallis, who will then start a new religion whose priestesses tell humanity how it should behave. In most of these cases people will have no other guidance about how to react and won't know the reality behind what is happening. Other than the specific interventions that I will be making - and have already started making in some cases - and the hoops those plans of mine require people to jump through, my hand will otherwise be absent from most of the Earths so people won't have any direct, knowledgeable contact with me. Because I like to experiment, some dimensions will be getting copies of this document posted to their internet (why else would I have written it?), so all of their humans will be able to know the truth about me. Obviously you are in one of the dimensions that will have received this document: In some of those dimensions the history of Mark Anderson is an easily verifiable fact. An elderly man did win $11.1 million dollars from Binion's Horseshoe Casino, following which he and his daughter's boyfriend were rescued. In fewer dimensions, Archangel Michael appeared on Earth, an event which led to a Resurrection and to Washington DC nearly being nuked. My readers in those dimensions will have already heard the name "Mark Anderson" on the news MANY times, and even on Oprah. But in most dimensions, nothing noteworthy will have happened. Maybe Mark Anderson has a very ordinary (single-minded) life, or maybe he suicided in his early teens, or maybe ran away from home for a while then returned to get a job as a plumber. Those types of possibilities account for the considerable majority of dimensions, so are probably the type of dimension that you are in. If you see on tomorrow's news that a 1,000-foot tall god has appeared on a hill just north of Corvallis, then you can probably consider this document as verified (the god will only be 500 feet tall, but the difference will be because news organizations round up, not because this document is in any way inaccurate. Why would a god with my powers need to exaggerate?). If you are in a dimension where there is no such sign, then the only way for you to verify this document will be by deliberate investigation. That'll be surprisingly non-productive for you because that'll be getting too close to my home in a dimension where my families and I are choosing to live low-key lives, and I'll have 'fogged' your ability to find us if you're looking for us with this document as the source of your motivation. In short, you - as a reader of this document - may know that it is true, or you may be unsure, or you may disbelieve it. At the same time, my actions on your Earth may be heavy-handed and obvious, or subtle and indirect, or I may do nothing more than post this document and wait and see how people respond. Thus there are quite a few possibilities for how we might interact, if we ever do. There won't be many dimensions in which I do nothing forever. Not only because that wouldn't be fun, but because I believe that there are changes that need to be made. After a few years, some of my experiments will be giving me results that I will start to implement in previously untouched dimensions, so it is very likely that sooner or later I'll be doing things on your Earth. You can go about your daily life completely ignoring the fact that there's a new God of the Universe. Chances are that you can ignore me for your entire life and it won't matter to either of us. However, there is a risk that in your ignorance you might do something that annoys me. If you choose to be ignorant, and choose not to take the hints offered to you by this document, then I'll consider that the cost of ignorance is something you're willing to pay should you blunder into one of my plans. Because it would be best for you to avoid paying that cost, you should be proactive. You should re-read and think about this document to gain a better understanding of me, and if you believe you're the right sort of person, you should seek opportunities to serve your new God. In many dimensions there'll soon be some aliens and their ambassadors, or a God and His priestesses, who you can contact to offer your services to. But there'll be more dimensions where that's not the case. As I've already explained, I want my life to have a rich variety of experiences, so in some dimensions I'll be keeping my life low key, maybe seeming to be nothing more than a guy who posted a long story to an internet site of predominately fictional stories. For your own good if you're living in such a dimension, and if you're the right sort of person - by which I mean you're a large-titted, beautiful, and preferably gullible teenage girl - I strongly recommend that you email me immediately to offer to devote the next several years of your life to serving me. Include pictures (lose the bikini, unless it's Australian). ------- The End ------- Posted: 2008-07-14 Last Modified: 2011-02-26 / 09:13:35 am Version: 1.70 ------- http://storiesonline.net/ -------